Gordon Carrera

And so one of the ways Saddam is trying to say, I haven't got this stuff.

So he's done the declaration to the UN.

He's also got these back channels.

So there's a really interesting one, which MI6 have with the Iraqis.

So early 2003, the MI6 controller for the Middle East goes to the Middle East and meets a senior Iraqi intelligence official.

This is a kind of secret meeting.

I mean, it's a back channel rather than an agent meeting.

And they're going to meet a number of times as war approaches.

The CIA is aware of these contacts and it's kind of been briefed about them.

And the Iraqi intelligence officer tells the MI6 guy, we don't have any weapons.

Now, some people later write this up as like a lost opportunity to avoid war and more evidence that the kind of spies were lying because they'd been told there were no weapons and yet they still press on with war.

But I think this misunderstands it because the Iraqi is saying in private exactly what Saddam is saying in public.

Which is, we don't have the stuff.

And everyone goes, well, they're just saying what we expect them to say.

Of course they're saying they don't have the stuff.

But we know that they've got it.

That's the problem all along.

There's nothing that Saddam can say or do at this point which is going to convince people that he doesn't have something that they think he has.

Yeah, they're not hiding secret documents.

And this is also, I think, interesting because having covered it at the time, I've spoken to a lot of these inspectors since.