By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, September 12, 2003; Page A01

LONDON, Sept. 11 -- Britain's intelligence chiefs warned Prime Minister Tony Blair a month before the invasion of Iraq that military action would increase the risk of terrorists obtaining weapons of mass destruction, according to a parliamentary report released today.

The report said a Feb. 10 assessment by the top-secret Joint Intelligence Committee -- a cabinet-level body that includes the chiefs of Britain's main intelligence agencies -- concluded that the collapse of Saddam Hussein's government "would increase the risk of chemical and biological warfare technology or agents finding their way into the hands of terrorists."

As of last February, the report said, the Joint Intelligence Committee had uncovered no evidence that Iraq had provided chemical or biological materials to al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's terror network.

The report did not spell out why intelligence agencies believed military action might allow terrorists to obtain such weapons. But it said that "in the event of imminent regime collapse there would be a risk of transfer of such material, whether or not as a deliberate Iraqi regime policy."

The joint committee also concluded that "al Qaeda and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to Western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq," according to the report issued today by the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee.

Blair, who was President Bush's closest foreign ally in the U.S.-led campaign, has argued repeatedly that disarming Iraq was necessary to prevent terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Both the British and U.S. governments have come under heavy criticism because no such weapons have been found.

In his testimony to the Joint Intelligence Committee, Blair acknowledged that "there was obviously a danger that in attacking Iraq you ended up provoking the very thing you were trying to avoid," said the report. But he insisted that over time the risk of Iraq providing weapons of mass destruction to terrorists would have increased.

"This is my judgment and it remains my judgment," Blair was quoted as saying, "and I suppose time will tell whether it's true or it's not true."

The House of Commons report -- which follows a series of closed-door hearings with four cabinet ministers, intelligence chiefs, government critics and Blair -- also concluded that an intelligence dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that the government published a year ago had been potentially misleading in several key points. But the panel cleared Blair's office of claims it had purposely exaggerated intelligence claims to justify military action.

The report said the dossier was based on legitimate intelligence data. "There was no political interference -- the dossier was not sexed up," the committee chairman, Ann Taylor, told reporters.

But the dossier's claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes had been "unhelpful to an understanding of this issue," the panel concluded. According to the report, the 45-minute claim -- "an arresting detail" that was repeated four times in the dossier -- had referred only to "battlefield chemical and biological munitions and their movement on the battlefield, not to any other form of chemical or biological attack." This fact "should have been highlighted in the dossier," the report said.

The committee said the dossier had failed to make clear that Hussein's government posed no "current or imminent threat" to mainland Britain. In addition, the panel said that the dossier should have acknowledged there was an unresolved debate within the intelligence community over whether Iraq was actually manufacturing weapons of mass destruction.

The dossier "could give the impression that Saddam was actively producing both chemical and biological weapons and significant amounts of agents," said the report, when in fact British intelligence did not know what had been produced or in what quantity.

"This uncertainty should have been highlighted," the report concluded.

The House of Commons intelligence committee -- which consists of nine senior lawmakers from the three main political parties, all of them appointed by the prime minister -- is well-regarded by members of Parliament. It oversees the work of Britain's intelligence agencies in closed-door sessions, and its reports are made public only after they have been vetted by the prime minister's office at 10 Downing St. and by intelligence officials.

Like all of its previous assessments, the panel's report today was unanimously approved. The committee said it had made no attempt to judge whether the decision to invade Iraq was correct, but whether the intelligence the government relied upon was adequate and properly assessed.

It said that Britain's intelligence services were justified in continuing to claim that Iraq had expressed interest in obtaining "yellow cake" uranium from Niger, despite the CIA's assessment that the claim was false. "We have questioned the Secret Intelligence Service about the basis of its judgment and conclude that it is reasonable," the report said.

While it cleared Blair and his former top aide, Alastair Campbell, of exaggerating the intelligence evidence, the report singled out Defense Secretary Geoffrey Hoon for concealing the depth of dissent over the dossier among defense intelligence officials when he testified behind closed doors to the committee earlier this year.

Hoon said there had merely been a dispute about some of the dossier's wording and that it had been resolved, the report said. But the committee later discovered that two intelligence officers had written memos expressing their doubts, and that Hoon had decided not to send a subsequent letter to the committee outlining their concerns.

"We regard the initial failure by the [ministry] to disclose that some staff had put their concerns in writing as unhelpful and potentially misleading," the report said.

Hoon, who today rejected calls for his resignation from opposition lawmakers in Parliament, told the House of Commons he regretted "any misunderstanding that might have arisen" over his testimony. "I want to make it quite clear that I had no intention whatsoever in being other than open and straightforward with the committee," he said.

After he spoke, Hoon received a ringing endorsement from fellow Labor Party lawmakers, including Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who stood on the steps of the prime minister's Downing Street office to say Hoon was doing a wonderful job and had Blair's complete support. But other analysts said Hoon remained vulnerable, pending the results of a separate judicial inquiry into the apparent suicide of weapons expert David Kelly, an employee of the ministry.