Bogus Iraqi defectors may have duped Allied spies

Intelligence agencies in the US and its allies, including Britain, are carrying out a major review to determine whether they were duped by false information from Iraq before the war, including the possible use of bogus defectors. The outcome could undermine key British claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

The review began after the US was forced to admit that a passage in President Bush's State of the Union speech in January, saying Iraq had sought uranium from Africa for its nuclear weapons programme, was based on forged documents. Mr Bush said the information came from Britain, but the Government has refused to withdraw the claim, saying it has other evidence. It also sticks by its assertion that Iraq was capable of deploying WMD within 45 minutes, despite further doubts raised by evidence at the Hutton inquiry into Dr David Kelly's death.

A senior US intelligence official told the Los Angeles Times that the aim of the review "is to see if false information was put out there and got into legitimate channels and we were totally duped on it". He added: "We're re-interviewing all our sources of information on this. This is the entire intelligence community, not just the US."

Former Iraqi intelligence officials are said to have confirmed that Saddam sent double agents abroad to spread fabricated intelligence on WMD and that some genuine defectors were fed misleading information. His apparent aim was to deter his enemies and boost his prestige at home and in the Arab world, which would help to explain why the West has failed to find WMD in Iraq so far, despite the conviction that it existed.

"We were prisoners of our own beliefs," the LA Times quotes a senior US weapons expert who recently returned from Iraq as saying.

An anonymous article now known to have been written by Dr Kelly will form part of the evidence to the Hutton inquiry this week. Written as part of a report on pre-war Iraq, the article said that the threat from Saddam's regime was "modest" but conceded that military intervention was the only way to "conclusively disarm" the country.