Operation Rockingham - The Counter Claims

The Counter Claims

John Morrison, the founder and manager of the DIS Rockingham cell, comprehensively denied Ritter's allegations as wholly unfounded. In a letter to the "Guardian" newspaper he stated:

"Rockingham was a tiny cell which drew on and coordinated all the resources of the DIS; its only aim was to provide leads for Unscom teams, which it did very successfully despite the problems of sanitising sensitive intelligence. Inevitably it was most effective in its earliest years, when Iraq's main WMD facilities, nuclear programme and stocks of chemical and biological weapons were destroyed."

After the evidence to the Hutton Inquiry had been published it became clear that senior experts in the DIS assessment staff, including Dr Brian Jones, were unhappy about the wording in the dossier concerning the threat to the UK posed by Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Jones and others had complained in writing to the then Deputy Chief of Defence Intelligence (Tony Cragg) that the wording of the dossier was too strong. For instance, they felt claims that Iraq "could" launch Chemical or Biological Weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so should have had caveats attached. Their complaints were overruled by the then Chief of Defence Intelligence Air Marshal Sir Joe French.

It was claimed at the Hutton Inquiry that the 45 minutes claim was based on "compartmentalized" intelligence from MI6 which the Joint Intelligence Committee had seen but that the weapons experts in DIS had not. Writing in the Independent on 4 February 2004, Dr Jones said that it was unlikely that anyone with WMD expertise had seen the "compartmentalized" report prior to its inclusion in the dossier, and if they had, they would have been sceptical.

Contrary to the Ritter allegations that the Rockingham cell DIS "cherry-picked intelligence", the DIS staff had been some of the most sceptical voices with regard to intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities. After his time in the DIS, John Morrison worked for the ISC as its investigator until he was sacked for saying in a BBC interview that when the Prime Minister asserted that the threat from Iraq's WMD "is current and serious" that he "could almost hear the collective raspberry going up around Whitehall".

The report published by the Butler Review in July 2004 dedicated a page to Operation Rockingham (p. 104). It countered Ritter's claims by stating authoritatively that after its creation in 1991 within the DIS, "Rockingham was responsible for briefing some of the personnel who formed part of UNSCOM and International Atomic Energy Agency inspection teams. It processed information received as a result of the inspections,and acted as a central source of advice on continuing inspection activity. Rockingham also advised FCO and MOD policy branches on the provision of UK experts from government and industry to work with UNSCOM and the IAEA as members of inspection teams. Rockingham included an officer detached to Bahrain to staff an organisation known as GATEWAY to co-ordinate briefings to,and debriefings of, inspection team members as they deployed to, and returned from, Iraq." After being reduced to one member of staff in 1998, it was again expanded "provide UK support to UNMOVIC".

"No official feedback from UNMOVIC was offered, nor expected. Rockingham did not brief or debrief individual inspectors. It did, however, continue to provide UNMOVIC and the IAEA with all-source UK intelligence assessments of the extent of Iraq's nuclear,biological, chemical and ballistic missile programmes, and information about sites of potential significance. It acted as the focus for the work tasked by the JIC on the analysis of the Iraqi declaration of 7 December 2002" (i.e. the 12,000-page weapons declaration handed over by Iraq as required by UN resolution).