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Blair: I have secret proof of weapons
Gaby Hinsliff, Nick Paton Walsh in St Petersburg and Peter Beaumont in
London
Sunday June 1, 2003
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,968164,00.html
Prime Minister Tony Blair last night insisted he had secret proof that
weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq in his strongest signal
yet that coalition forces believe they may have begun to uncover leads to
Iraq's alleged deadly arms cache.

Stung by claims that the Government exaggerated the threat from Saddam,
Blair said he was waiting to publish a 'complete picture' of both
intelligence gained before the war and 'what we've actually found'.

Asked if he knew things he could not yet reveal, he said: 'I certainly do
know some of the stuff that has been already accumulated as a result of
interviews and others... which is not yet public, but what we are going to
do is assemble that evidence and present it properly.'

His words, in an interview with Sky TV, came as Downing Street moved to halt
damaging leaks over its handling of the evidence by heaping praise on the
intelligence services. 'The Prime Minister hugely values the work of the
intelligence agencies,' his spokesman said in St Petersburg, where heads of
state were celebrating the Russian city's tercententary, yesterday.

The pointed comment followed a week of furious rows over whether the
intelligence dossier on Iraq published by the Government last September was
'sexed up' to convince a sceptical public that they were in danger from
Saddam.

It will fuel speculation that private assurances have been given to the
intelligence community that they will not be left to carry the can over the
failure to find WMD after a week of briefing against senior Blair officials
by intelligence officials over the alleged ramping up of intelligence.

Labour backbenchers, increasingly convinced they were misled, are unlikely
to be impressed by Blair's argument that they must trust in proof they
cannot see. According to intelligence sources the new leads have been
provided by Iraqi scientists and a member of the State Security Organisation
who are currently being debriefed by MI6 and the CIA. This follows a week in
which Government and intelligence sources appear to have changed their story
on the likelihood of finding WMD on an almost daily basis.

One source claimed mid-week that British intelligence suggested Saddam had
destroyed his WMD even before UN inspectors visited Iraq, a version of
events that had changed by yesterday morning to the claim that chemical
weapons may actually have been deployed in the field and then destroyed as
American troops advanced.

Yesterday the US announced that another 1,400 experts will join the hunt for
banned weapons - a signal that Washington has accepted the political
significance of the issue.

In Britain it is thought that Ministers want eventually to publish a
checklist of claims made before the war alongside subsequent discoveries
which they believe vindicate the warnings. So far the only publicly
announced discovery has been that of two trailers thought to have been part
of a mobile laboratory system.

Blair said in his interview that claims that the existence of WMD was 'a
great big fib got out by the security services' would be proved wrong. He
said he had 'absolutely no knowledge' of an alleged meeting between the
Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw and his US counterpart Colin Powell, in a New
York hotel to discuss concerns over whether the evidence on WMD would be
strong enough. Leaked transcripts suggested Straw had warned the issue could
'explode in our faces'.

The Foreign Office insisted the two men had not met on the date given in
February.

Downing Street has been hampered in its argument by repeated suggestions
from the Bush administration that WMD may never be found. Paul Wolfowitz,
deputy to the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, suggested last week that
WMD were a bureaucratic pretext to start a war.

Blair told Sky that WMD were the basis in law for taking military action -
but 'that's not the same as saying it's a bureaucratic pretext'.

The Prime Minister was due to leave Russia early this morning for the G8
summit in Evian, France, which is expected to agree new measures to stop WMD
falling into the hands of terrorists.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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