Britain and America's spies believe that they are being politicised: that the intelligence they provide is being selectively applied to lead to the opposite conclusion from the one they have drawn, which is that Iraq is much less of a threat than their political masters claim. Worse, when the intelligence agencies fail to do the job, the politicians will not stop at plagiarism to make their case, even "tweaking" the plagiarised material to ensure a better fit.

"You cannot just cherry-pick evidence that suits your case and ignore the rest. It is a cardinal rule of intelligence," said one aggrieved officer. "Yet that is what the PM is doing." Not since Harold Wilson has a Prime Minister been so unpopular with his top spies.
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How selectively the work of the intelligence agencies is being used on both sides of the Atlantic is shown by a revealing clash between Senator Bob Graham and the Bush administration's top intelligence advisers. Mr Graham, a Democrat, is chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Last July, baffled by the apparently contradictory assessments on Iraq by America's 13 different intelligence agencies, he asked for a report to be drawn up by the CIA that estimated the likelihood of Saddam Hussein using weapons of mass destruction.

The CIA procrastinated, but finally produced a report after Senator Graham threatened to accuse them of obstruction. The conclusions were so significant that he immediately asked for it to be declassified. The CIA concluded that the likelihood of Saddam Hussein using such weapons was "very low" for the "foreseeable future". The only circumstances in which Iraq would be more likely to use chemical weapons or encourage terrorist attacks would be if it was attacked.

After more arguments the CIA partly declassified the report. Senator Graham noted that the parts released were those that made the case for war with Iraq. Those that did not were withheld. He appealed, and the extra material was eventually released. Yet the report has largely been ignored by the US media.

Last week Colin Powell made much of the presence in Iraq of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man he identified as running an al-Qa'ida network from Baghdad. He drew on information from al-Zarqawi's captured deputy, but made no mention of another explosive allegation from the same detainee: that Osama bin Laden's organisation received passports and $1m (£600,000) in cash from a member of the royal family in Qatar. It is well known in US intelligence circles that the CIA director, George Tenet, is angry with the Qatari government's failure to take action. But the Gulf state would be the main US air operations base in any war on Iraq, and Washington does not want to air the inconvenient facts in public.

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