THE row over the government’s handling of its dossier on Iraq deepened this weekend when top civil servants and senior Labour MPs accused Downing Street of engaging in a “cheap piece of spin” by “ramping up” the dossier’s contents.

The comments came after it emerged that key sections of the dossier had been copied from an old academic paper written by an American PhD student and were assembled hastily by Alastair Campbell’s propaganda unit.

One Whitehall security source accused Campbell, Tony Blair’s communications director, of “changing facts for presentational reasons”.

The matter is likely to be examined by a committee of senior MPs, which is considering looking into the way the government handles the media.

Some senior intelligence officials were keen to distance themselves from the fiasco this weekend, saying it was a matter for the government’s information service, which is headed by Campbell.

One source said: “Campbell was in charge of putting the dossier together and it was compiled under pressure. What intelligence services are not happy about is that he chose to ramp up the information.”

In the dossier, the academic work’s phrase “aiding opposition groups” was changed to “supporting terrorist organisations” and “monitoring foreign embassies” became “spying on foreign embassies”. The source said: “Facts were changed for presentational reasons. Once you do this with academic work it is devalued. How does the public know if intelligence hasn’t been changed as well? . . . This is a cheap piece of spin.”

Others were less critical. Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, is understood to be relaxed about the affair. But it was emphasised his officials had nothing to do with the dossier.

The fiasco has caused astonishment in America, particularly because the dossier was singled out for high praise by Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, in his speech on the Iraqi threat to the UN Security Council last week.

The affair made headline news in Washington yesterday, with critics and supporters of President George W Bush’s war on terror horrified at Downing Street’s bumbling attempt to pass off material from “magazines and academic journals” as intelligence information.

The dossier was drawn up last month by four government information officers. Two were from Downing Street and two were from the Coalition Information Centre (CIC).

Little is known about the CIC, which appears to have been set up by Campbell as an international “rapid rebuttal unit” to co-ordinate Britain’s and America’s media handling of the war on terror.

Critics have suggested the centre is little more than a propaganda machine designed to generate support for a war against Iraq.

Peter Kilfoyle, MP for Liverpool Walton and a former Labour minister, said he was “shocked” by the dossier.

“How can you allow middle-ranking PR people to compose what is presented as a serious intelligence analysis? We have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous,” he said.

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