Was Taxi Driver Source for Key Saddam WMD Claim?

It sounds like a bad joke but it may be a true story: one of the most sensational claims made by the British government in the run-up to the Iraq War about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction may have come from an Iraqi taxi driver based on a conversation he overheard from passengers in his backseat two years earlier.

That’s what happened, according to Adam Holloway, a conservative member of Parliament reputed to have “close links” to intelligence officials, in a paper published this week. The claim raises new questions about the origins of pre-Iraq war intelligence at a sensitive time for the British government. An official United Kingdom tribunal is currently examining how and why former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government chose to join the invasion of Iraq.

Among the most eye-grabbing of those claims came in an official British government “white paper” released in late September 2002 after Blair had returned from a meeting at Camp David with George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney claiming Saddam had chemical or biological weapons that could be deployed “within 45 minutes of an order to use them.” Blair said this, and other claims in the white paper based on secret intelligence, demonstrated that Saddam was a “current and serious threat to the U.K. national interest.”

“Brits 45 Mins from Doom” screamed the headline in The Sun, Britain’s largest-selling daily newspaper, after the white paper was released.

But according to Holloway, the 45 minute claim should have been regarded as questionable from the outset. According to Holloway’s paper, the claim “had originated from an émigré taxi driver on the Iraqi-Jordanian border, who had remembered an overheard … conversation in the back of his cab a full two years earlier.” According to the MP, in a footnote to the original intelligence report, a U.K. intelligence analyst had “flagged up” that specific portion of the report, which supposedly related to the readiness of Iraqi missiles, as “demonstrably untrue.” It was provably false, Holloway says, because the missiles in question, according to the MP’s information, “did not exist …The footnote said it in black and white ink.” According to Holloway, while “the truth of the matter was that the intelligence services simply did not know whether Saddam Hussein had WMD, it was equally probable that he was bluffing to maintain a credible threat against Iran.” But Holloway says a senior U.K.intelligence official told him: “There was no appetite in government to hear that.”

After the invasion, extensive searches by the U.S. government discovered no significant stockpiles of Iraqi WMD, much less any WMD that could be fired in 45 minutes. U.S. investigators ultimately concluded that Saddam had destroyed his WMD years earlier under international pressure. According to initial reports of testimony given Tuesday at the British Iraq inquiry by Sir John Scarlett, one of the intelligence officials responsible for the September 2002 dossier (and, subsequently, chief of the British foreign spy agency known as MI-6) intelligence officials probably would have been happier if the 45-minute readiness claim in the 2002 U.K. dossier had referred to ”munitions” rather than “weapons.” According to Scarlett, in weeks just before the U.S.-led invasion to oust Saddam, two intelligence reports were received by the British raising serious questions as to whether Saddam had usable chemical or biological weapons. One report, which was received on March 7, 2003, alleged that Iraq had no missiles that could reach Israel and none that could carry chemical or biological warheads.

A report 10 days later claimed that Iraq’s chemical weapons had been taken apart and dispersed and would be difficult to re-assemble. Scarlett indicated that this information was made available to U.K. policymakers on the eve of the invasion. However, a former U.K. official familiar with the overall intelligence picture at the time said that such reports would have probably been discounted because the larger intelligence picture still suggested Saddam did have WMD and that even if some of his weapons had been disassembled, they could be quickly put back together.

Holloway did not respond to an e-mail from NEWSWEEK requesting further comment.