Gordon Carrera

We've got him on our bonus episode.

He is far from it.

He's our colleague now.

But he does play a really important role in this story because he's director of communications at Number 10.

And they are thinking, you know, quite explicitly, how are we going to set the scene communications wise to confront Iraq?

And they start thinking about this as far back as April.

And it's in conjunction with this thing called the Joint Intelligence Committee, the JIC.

Yeah, it's a good point because CIA has both collection and analysis.

MI6 is just collection.

Then there is a group underneath the JIC called the assessment staff who do a lot of the analysis and the JIC sits at the top of it.

So it's more like National Intelligence Council.

It's actually quite a small body.

which meets weekly and oversees the final assessments which are presented to government.

And it includes the agencies, often technically the top or very senior people from the agencies, plus the customer department, so the Foreign Office, Ministry of Defence.

Interestingly enough, the CIA London station head

has a seat on the JIC, not for every meeting.

Yeah.

And I don't think it's reciprocated.

No.

Yeah.