ONE of the highest-ranking officials in the British Ministry of Defence has launched a devastating attack on the Blair government over lies told publicly about Iraq, the UK’s subservient relationship to America and the disastrous results of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The assault on Blair’s military, foreign and security policies has been made by an MoD official at the heart of war planning, intelligence, operational decision-making and policy. The defence chief – who has demanded anonymity – is one of the most senior members of staff in the ministry.

One of the most sensational revelations by the source is that Iranian intelligence helped manipulate Britain and America into removing Saddam Hussein – the sworn enemy of the Iranian regime. The claim has been supported on both sides of the Atlantic by former US and UK intelligence officials.

It has been made clear, however, that the Iranian disinformation operation in no way allows Britain and America off the hook for massaging intelligence and lying to the UK and US public about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The Sunday Herald has previously revealed the existence of two secret “spin units” operating within British and American intelligence and designed to concoct a false premise for war.

In Britain, Operation Rockingham collated questionable information supporting misleading claims about Saddam’s active WMD arsenal to back up the case for war. The British spies gathering the information – mainly from untrustworthy Iraqi defectors – knew the claims were either bogus or out of date. The information was used by the Blair government to persuade the British parliament and people that war with Iraq was a necessity.

In America, the Office of Special Plans (OSP) was set up to bypass legitimate intelligence agencies, such as the CIA, which were not providing evidence of Iraq being a clear and present danger. The OSP also provided US politicians with the detail they needed to convince Congress and the American public that Saddam should be toppled. Again, much of this information came from dubious Iraqi sources.

The MoD initially hoped that an attack on Iraq would also destabilise Iran. Officials now know that this was misguided. Instead of destabilising Tehran, the MoD now believes it was the Iranians who were pulling the strings behind the scenes and covertly providing the bogus intelligence that Britain and America needed to help convince the public Saddam had to go.

According to the MoD chief, the Iraqi National Congress (INC) was used by Iranian intelligence to pass false claims about Saddam’s WMD capability to the West. The INC was led by Ahmed Chalabi, a convicted embezzler who was very close to Washington in the run-up to war because of his exiled organisation’s desire to have Saddam “regime-changed”. Chalabi’s organisation is known to have passed discredited intelligence to Britain and America which helped Bush and Blair exaggerate the threat from Saddam.

Chalabi was later accused by the US of giving American secrets to Iran after the invasion of Iraq, and his Baghdad HQ was raided by Iraqi and US forces in May 2004. He denied the allegations, but his relationship with the US was permanently soured by the spying claim.

The MoD now believes that Chalabi’s organisation was also feeding Iranian-inspired disinformation on Iraqi WMD back to the intelligence services in London and Washington. “We have come to see that Iran carried out one of the biggest intelligence coups of the century,” the MoD source said. “It got the US and UK to go to war against Iraq by infiltrating our intelligence services in the most subtle of ways. The operation was quite brilliant.”

The chain of false intelligence went from Tehran via the INC to Britain and America. Once in the hands of Western intelligence services, it was used by politicians to help convince the public of the case for war. Whether the information was fact or fiction would have been unimportant to those pushing for war in London and Washington.

Lieutenant-Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, a Pentagon and National Security Agency analyst and intelligence expert on Iraq who resigned her post on the eve of the invasion, said that Chalabi was “interfacing frequently with the OSP” during her time in the Pentagon, and “assisting in the development and promotion of WMD-in-Iraq propaganda”. She now believes he may well have been “an Iranian puppet”.

“If there was an Iranian operation, it seems to have been successful,” she says. I think the raid by the US on Chalabi’s office in May 2004 was a sign that these comments [by the MoD official] are both true and damning.”

Garry Hindle, head of terrorism and international homeland security and resilience at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) for Defence and Security Studies, said he had been aware of claims that the INC was feeding disinformation to the US as part of an Iranian intelligence operation for “a couple of years”.

“It is certainly significant for a senior MoD official to comment on this,” he added. “I would tentatively suggest that, given the close ties that existed between the Pentagon, the US administration and the INC, and the sidelining of the CIA and the State Department, that it may not necessarily be that ‘duping’ is the key, but rather a wilful acceptance of information that supported objectives or validated beliefs.”

Crispin Black – who worked for the Joint Intelligence Committee, was an army lieutenant colonel, a military intelligence officer, a member of the Defence Intelligence Staff and a Cabinet Office intelligence analyst who briefed No 10 on terrorism – said: “There may have been some kind of attempt by Iranian intelligence to lure the Americans into Iraq.

“This would have been a very high-risk strategy for an unpopular theocratic regime. American entry into Iraq completed the strategic encirclement of Iran and they could have never been sure that president Bush would not then decide to apply direct military pressure on Tehran.

“Maybe, however, the Iranian spymasters were and are that astute – their low opinion of the US and UK intelligence machinery has certainly turned out to be well-placed. One of the principal effects of the botched Iraq occupation has been the massive enhancement of Iran’s strategic position.”

The MoD is worried that the manipulation of intelligence designed to get the UK into the Iraq war will have a detrimental effect on British national security. The source is clear that there can be no more wars fought by the UK for some considerable time.

Overstretch in the armed forces means the UK could not handle another conflict, and the scepticism of parliament and the public towards government means there would be no support for further wars. The MoD now favours diplomacy as a route to global stability.

“From the point of view of the Foreign Office and the MoD, [that is why] Israel and Palestine must be dealt with,”the MoD source said. “This situation is still the biggest threat to world peace.”

Hindle added: “Any successes that the armed forces may have had in removing al-Qaeda ‘affiliates’ are not so much overshadowed as relatively insignificant when compared to how the war has positioned the UK vis-à-vis Islamist terrorism globally.

“The UK is now threatened by innumerably more new domestic and international groups and individuals than before the war.”