IT WAS a smiling and confident spymaster who could be seen leaving the Cabinet Office last week to be whisked away in a government car.

John McLeod Scarlett, chairman of the joint intelligence committee (JIC), is due to take over the helm of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) next month shortly before his 56th birthday.

Even for a man with a reputation as one of his generation’s most distinguished intelligence officers, the expected criticisms of Lord Butler’s inquiry could prove damaging.

Those familiar with Butler’s conclusions say that although they are critical of Scarlett’s role, he has been shown to have acted in good faith and is likely to use this to fight off the expected demands for him to resign. If he survives, he will prove more fortunate than George Tenet, the CIA’s director, who quit in advance of last week’s severe criticisms of the intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq.

The CIA’s errors — and by implication the errors of MI6 and the JIC — were spelt out in a scathing Senate intelligence committee report. It concluded that the United States and its allies went to war based on “flawed” information.

Butler, a former cabinet secretary, is determined not to have his report labelled a “whitewash” and has conducted a wide-reaching investigation into the use of intelligence in Britain.

Sources say that the inquiry will criticise Downing Street and the JIC for the political misuse of intelligence to make the case for war. This began when No 10 decided to respond to the perceived public clamour for more information about Saddam Hussein’s weapons.

The problems started at the bottom of the intelligence chain, with MI6 having to rely on a small number of Iraqi agents who did not have first-hand knowledge of Saddam’s weapons systems. “It (the inquiry) recommends that in future they are very careful about how they treat their sources and make sure they aren’t taken for a ride — as they were,” the sources said.

Scarlett and the rest of the JIC are taken to task for removing important caveats that MI6 attached to its original agent reports. These warned that the intelligence was not first-hand, that some of the agents might have been trying to influence British policy as well as to inform and that their word could not necessarily be relied upon.

These crucial warnings appear to have been removed by Scarlett, Sir Richard Dearlove, the outgoing MI6 chief, and the rest of the JIC when the original dossier was published. “We’ve said the dossier went too far and left out the warnings. They got it wrong. It was signed off by the JIC and he (Scarlett) was its chairman. To that extent they were responsible and it was overstated,” said a source.

Butler is understood to single out the so-called “45-minute” warning as a particular example. In his foreword Tony Blair claimed that the dossier “discloses that (Saddam’s) military planning allows for some of the weapons of mass destruction to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them”.

Blair’s statement was false in assuming that Saddam actually had the weapons. Butler concludes that the way the warning was described in the dossier and in press reports “spun” by Downing Street did not reflect the truth. “The 45-minute warning could have been better put. It was confusing that the dossier did not make it clear that it referred only to weapons on the battlefield,” said the source.

As reported in The Sunday Times last week, one of the inquiry members, Ann Taylor, who also chairs the intelligence and security committee that reports directly to Blair, has been using her position on the inquiry panel to urge Butler not to “name and shame” those involved in the intelligence fiasco, namely Scarlett, Dearlove and Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general.

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