BRITISH, American and Israeli intelligence agencies passed information around in circles before the Iraq war, reinforcing each others’ exaggerated analyses of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction capability, an Israeli parliamentary investigation concluded yesterday.

In a scathing indictment of its own intelligence services, including Mossad, it said that there was a general failure of intelligence based on mutually reinforcing evaluations based on “speculation” without any hard data.

“The uniform evaluation of the international intelligence bodies was implanted somewhat in a sort of ‘magical circle’ and in a way of reciprocal feedback, which for most cases was harmful rather than useful,” an 81-page report by the Knesset’s all-party Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee concluded.

“This created a structural failure, it led to exaggerated self-confidence and lack of scepticism among the international intelligence communities in the Western world.”

The report is a severe blow to Israel’s much-vaunted and highly secretive intelligence agencies. Yuval Steinitz, the committee chairman, called for changes in intelligence- gathering and analysis and demanded to know why officials had not relied on signals and intelligence technology instead of “speculation.”

The problem, he said, arose after 1998, when the withdrawal of United Nations inspectors from Iraq removed the intelligence community’s best source of hard information.

While other Western services focused on Saddam’s nuclear capability, he said that Israeli intelligence began an “inexplicable escalation” in its estimates of Saddam’s missile arsenal “without the committee finding any data to support this change in estimates”.

Mr Steinitz refused to say what Israeli intelligence received from its Western counterparts before the war, but said that the United States and Britain had big advantages in intelligence-gathering capability because their jets were flying over Iraq, their troops were based in neighbouring Kuwait and they had satellite data.

He described what he called the circular “trap” that Western intelligence agencies appeared to have fallen into.

“The Israeli services give information to the foreign services, who use it for their own purposes and pass it on and it comes back to the Israeli intelligence services,” he said. “That is a circle of feedback that feeds on itself without any substance in the field.”

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