MI6 boss: dossier was misleading

The boss of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, came out of the shadows this afternoon -to pinpoint a serious flaw in the Government's dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

In a potentially heavy blow for Tony Blair, he said that it had been wrong to include the critical claim that weaponry could be ready in 45 minutes while failing to make clear this referred only to short range battlefield munitions, not long range missiles.

Sir Richard, making an unheralded appearance at the Hutton inquiry, strongly defended the intelligence on which the 45-minute claim had been based.

"I think the intelligence was accurate and it was put to the right use in the drafting process," he said.

But asked whether the warning in the dossier had been widely misinterpreted because it was not made clear it referred only to battlefield weapons, he acknowledged: "This now looks a valid criticism."

Sir Richard cast aside 80 years of secrecy to become the first MI6 chief to give evidence in public. But, unlike other witnesses, he was heard but not seen, giving testimony from the security service headquarters in Vauxhall.

The spy chief 's evidence carried bad news for the BBC as well as for the Government. Sir Richard became the latest in a string of intelligence chiefs and senior officers to declare that all the key work on the dossier had been carried out by the security services, not by Downing Street, as the BBC had alleged. And he revealed that, at the first meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee after publication last September there had been a "spontaneous" vote of thanks to the JIC chairman, John Scarlett, for the "integrity" with which the process had been conducted.

Sir Richard tartly rebuked the inquiry's chief counsel James Dingemans for referring to "the 45-minute claim" in one of his questions. "Can I just say you use the word 'claim'. I think I would prefer to refer to it as a piece of wellsourcedintelligence," the MI6 boss said, to laughter.

He went on to stress that material in a "CX report" the term used for material circulated by MI6 to its "customers" was often based on material from a single source.

Pressed on another charge from the BBC that the 45-minute claim had been "reported as fact whereas the intelligence comes from a single source", Sir Richard said: "CX reports as produced by my Service are essentially single source. Very much high quality intelligence which is factual, or proved to be factual, is single source material. So I don't really understand that comment."

Sir Richard delivered a surprise blow at Dr Kelly. He said that he had been "shocked" to hear Dr Kelly had discussed a CX report with Susan Watts of the BBC's Newsnight, without authorisation.