Brian Jones: The JIC presented a well-defined picture to underpin war. Pity it was so flawed

I welcome Lord Butler's Review of Intelligence, as I did Lord Hutton's inquiry, as providing an invaluable repository of background information on issues that are of great national and international importance. I insist on including a caveat to this article - it represents a preliminary comment on just a few elements of a much bigger report.

An initial overall impression is that the report's pronouncements, if not the report itself, are made by and for the great and the good, displaying, perhaps subconsciously, a polite contempt for the less great, but no less good, who mostly know a duck when they hear it quack.

And although a terrible mistake was made on Iraq, it seems that no one was to blame. The closest the report gets to this is to redefine a couple of job descriptions - the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and the Deputy Chief of Defence Intelligence (DIS). It seems that a new excuse has been added to "I was only taking orders," and that is, "I was the wrong man for the job."

I also think it unfair to describe as "collective" the mistakes that were made which allowed a well-defined intelligence picture to be painted that underpinned a decision to go to war. It may have been a collective failure at the level of the JIC, but the middle-rankers in the intelligence community, particularly the analysts, did not paint that picture. Theirs might not have been a good picture, but the lack of definition was an important part of its construction.

I will not dwell on those comments made in the report about me other than to say that, in my mind at least, "Dr Jones" equates with the expert staff that advised me, just as they had advised directly those who drafted the September dossier during all the stages of its preparation. It should also be related more generally with the Defence Intelligence Staff as a whole which is the only repository of the UK intelligence community's trained and experienced all-source intelligence analysts.

Any intelligence capability is only as good as the weakest of its component parts and it is a reflection of the Cinderella status of "intelligence analysis" that in well over an hour of Lord Butler, the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Liberal Democrat leader, there was scarcely a hint of its importance. Meanwhile MI6, despite all its mistakes, still managed to attract the aura of a dashing James Bond, the Prince Charming of our time. The fact of the matter is that they do their own job, which is mainly about intelligence collection, courageously and as well as anyone in the world, but they are not intelligence analysts and should not try to be.

So you have to dig deep into the report to locate an acknowledgement that there might have been a systemic problem in which the analysts of the DIS were being pushed further and further into the shade as the more independent and powerful collection agencies fought for the rewards that follow the limelight. They even captured the chairmanship of the JIC.

It is a long read before you discover the incredible fact that, "During the lead-up to the Iraq war, neither the Chief of Defence Intelligence nor his deputy were intelligence specialists." That tells you what the Ministry of Defence thinks of intelligence and must lead you to question whether, as Lord Butler recommends, they should continue to be trusted as the custodians of the intelligence community's analytical base.

I have looked several times at the following comment: "We welcome the arrangements now being made to give the Joint Intelligence Committee more leverage through the intelligence requirements process to ensure that the DIS serves wider national priorities as well as it does defence priorities and has the resources which the rest of the intelligence community needs to support its activities. If that involved increasing the secret intelligence account by a sum to be at the security and intelligence co-ordinator's disposal to commission such resources, we would support that."

I think it means that the MoD has starved the DIS of resources and that the central intelligence machinery should be given more money to shore it up. That sounds rather like further complicating the sort of muddle that got us into this fine mess in the first place. It is the sort of recommendation that will all too readily be lost in the detail of Whitehall wrangling. It is hardly likely to prevent the DIS continuing on a downward spiral by being "transported" away from central London as part of the MoD's drive for efficiency. I think it would be much more sensible for the Prime Minister to have an experienced head of intelligence analysis at his elbow to offer considered strategic advice, than the head of a collection agency swash-buckling in to offer up the latest tit-bit of unassessed intelligence that just happens to suit the moment.

The proposal that the assessment staff be increased in size to the point where it might offer an entire career in intelligence analysis appears to be another acknowledgement that analysts have been neglected and their advice overlooked, but it seems to be ducking a much bigger point. Might there not be a case for a much more radical look at how the various parts of the intelligence community are bolted together. The suggestion seems to be that even if it breaks now and then, we should soldier on without fixing it properly.

There is also a hint that in this highly technological age, where nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and their proliferation is a major issue for intelligence, it might be a good idea if the JIC improved its access to scientific and technical advice. Not that they should go so far as actually having one of these strange fellows as a member - on tap if we have to, but not too close to the top.

Brian Jones is a former head of the nuclear, chemical and biological branch of the Ministry of Defence's Defence Intelligence Staff