Twenty years after the invasion of Iraq, the controversy surrounding the existence of the "weapons of mass destruction" that served as justification for Britain's involvement in the war continues.
New details have emerged about the hunt for weapons of mass destruction as part of the BBC series Shock and War: Iraq 20 Years Later, based on conversations with dozens of people who were direct participants.
"God."
That was the one-word reaction of a senior MI6 officer when a colleague told him at the end of 2001 that the Americans were seriously considering starting a war with Iraq.
CIA agents also recall the shock of their British counterparts.
"I thought he was going to have a heart attack right there at the table," recalled Luis Rueda, head of the CIA's Iraq operations group.
"If they weren't suave gentlemen, I think they would have swung across the table and slapped me."
The message soon reached Downing Street (the British Prime Minister).
It was delivered by spies, not diplomats.
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"I was probably the first to say that to the Prime Minister: 'Like it or not, finish everything you've got, because it looks like they're getting ready to invade,'" Sir Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6 and a frequent visitor to Washington, told the BBC in a rare interview. .
MI6 - Britain's intelligence service - was about to become deeply involved in one of the most controversial episodes in its history that had the most far-reaching consequences.
For the US, the issue of weapons of mass destruction was secondary to the much stronger desire to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
"We would have invaded Iraq if Saddam Hussein had a rubber band and a paper clip," says Rueda.
"We'd say, 'Oh, your eye is going to pop out.'"
For the UK, when it came to 'selling' Iraq to a wavering public, the threat posed by Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological and nuclear - was crucial.
Allegations are sometimes made that the British government invented the WMD claims.
But ministers from that time claim that their spies assured them that these weapons existed.
"It's very important to understand that I relied on the intelligence that I was getting and I think I was right to rely on it," Tony Blair, the former prime minister, tells me.
The night before the invasion, he says he sought - and received - assurances from the Joint Intelligence Committee.
He refuses to criticize the intelligence services for making mistakes.
Other ministers say they harbored certain doubts at the time.
"I questioned Richard Dearlove on three occasions about the origin of that intelligence," says Jack Straw, then Foreign Secretary.
"I had a bad feeling about everything. But Dirlav assured me on each of those occasions that these agents are reliable."
However, Straw says that ultimately it is the politicians who must take full responsibility, as they make the final decisions.
Asked if he thinks of Iraq today as an intelligence lapse, Sir Richard's answer is simple: "No."
He still believes that Iraq had some kind of weapons program and that elements of it may have been moved across the border into Syria.
Others disagree.
"It was a colossal failure," says Sir David Omand, then Britain's co-ordinator of security and intelligence.
He says that "confirmation bias" led government experts to accept fragments of information that supported the idea that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and to reject those that said he did not.
Some inside MI6 also claim that they had some suspicions back then.
"At the time, I had a feeling that what we were doing was wrong," said one agent who worked in Iraq, who has not previously come out publicly and asked to remain anonymous.
"There has been no new or credible intelligence or assessment indicating that Iraq has restarted its weapons of mass destruction programs and that they pose an imminent threat," said the former agent, referring to the early 2002 period.
"I think from the government's point of view it was the only thing they could find ... weapons of mass destruction was the only thing they could get their hands on to make their action legal."
The existing intelligence data in the spring of 2002 was incomplete.
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Long-time MI6 agents in Iraq had little or no information on weapons of mass destruction and there was a desperate hunt for fresh intelligence from new sources to bolster that argument, especially given that the dossier was planned for September.
Another insider recalled decoding a message saying there was "no more important role" for the intelligence service than to convince the British public of the need for action.
He says that questions were raised as to whether it was regular, but that message was deleted.
On the twelfth of September, Sir Richard entered Downing Street with news of an important new source.
This man claimed that Saddam's weapons programs had been restarted and promised to provide new details soon.
Although this source did not pass all the necessary checks, and its information was not shared with experts, the details were passed on to the prime minister.
Sir Richard dismisses accusations that he got too close to Downing Street as "ridiculous", but refuses to comment on details of the case or specific sources.
In the following months, however, this new source never kept his promise and was eventually ruled to have made it all up, other intelligence sources say.
Quality control was lax, they claim.
It was very likely that some new sources were fabricating information for money or because they wanted Saddam to be ousted from power.
In January 2003, I met in Jordan with a man who had escaped from Saddam's intelligence service.
He claimed to have participated in the development of mobile laboratories working on biological weapons, away from the eyes of UN inspectors.
His claims ended up in a presentation by US Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations in February 2003, although some within the US government had already put a "label of unreliability" on it, claiming that the information could not be trusted.
Another source, codenamed "Felsh Ball", relied on by both the US and the UK, also fabricated details about the labs.
It must not be forgotten that Saddam once really had weapons of mass destruction.
A few weeks before the 2003 war, I visited the village of Halabja in northern Iraq, and listened to the villagers describe the day in 1988 when Saddam's army dropped chemical weapons on them.
The truth about what happened to those weapons will come to light only after the war.
Saddam ordered the destruction of much of the weapons of mass destruction program in the early XNUMXs after the Gulf War in the hope of getting a clean bill of health from UN weapons inspectors, one of Iraq's top scientists later told me.
The Iraqi leader may have hoped to start the program sometime later.
But he destroyed everything in secret, in part to maintain the bluff that he might still have something he could use against neighboring Iran, with whom he had just been at war.
And that's why when the UN inspectors later asked Iraq to prove that it destroyed everything, it couldn't.
An Iraqi scientist later revealed that they got rid of a deadly compound that Western intelligence claimed had not been found by dumping it in the ground.
But they did it near one of Saddam's palaces, and they feared that admitting the fact would cost them their lives when the Iraqi leader found out.
The result of all this was that Iraq was never really able to prove that it no longer had weapons.
In late 2002, UN inspectors returned to Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction.
Some of these inspectors, speaking to the BBC for the first time, recalled looking for it in locations where Western intelligence had suggested mobile laboratories might be located.
They discovered what one of them called a "swollen ice cream truck," covered in cobwebs.
The public at the time never knew that, as the war drew closer, and sources failed to come up with information and inspectors found nothing, concern began to reign.
"Panic" - as one insider described it.
"My future is in your hands," Blair told Sir Richard, half-jokingly, in January 2003, as pressure mounted to find proof of weapons of mass destruction.
"It was frustrating at the time," Sir Richard recalls today.
He accuses the inspectors of being "incompetent" because they failed to find anything.
Hans Blix, who led the UN's chemical and biological inspections, told the BBC that until early 2003 he believed the weapons existed, but began to doubt their existence after reports turned up nowhere.
He wanted to be given more time to come up with an answer, but they didn't give him any.
The failure to find "definitive proof" did not prevent the outbreak of war in March 2003.
And weapons of mass destruction were not found even after the war.
"It all fell apart," says one former MI6 agent, recalling an internal analysis of sources after the war.
And all this will leave deep and far-reaching consequences for both spies and politicians.
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