. >> i turn to sir lawrence freedman then. lawrence? >> you have just mentioned your letter that has been declassified and put on our website of march 2002, to john gieve at the home office, and it deals with the possible threat to e uk from iraqi agents in the event of an effort to topple saddam hussein's reme. perhaps you could just give us a gist of the nature of the threat that you saw at the time from the regime itself. >> i think you asked david omand -- were we ked to oduce this? i think i can asre you we were not. the service would regard it as its duty to alert government to threats as they emerge -- this is pre-jtac. as i said to lady prashar, we regarded the threat, the direct threat from iraq as low. we did think -- and it comes in that letter -- that saddam hussein mighresort to terrorism in the theater if he thought his regime was toppled, the capability tdo anything much in the uk. that turned out to be the right judgment. what the letter -- has been redacted from the letter, like i say, in general terms is that is partly

i am going to turn to sir lawrence freedman in a moment. we are in for quite a long afternoon and it would very much help with the transcription if we could take a measured pace. thank you. >> just following up from what has been said, i mean, you have made the point about the americans suggesting that they were upholding the security council resolutions and you noting that the security council as a whole did not seem to go along with that at that time, but, as i recall, part of the american argument was to challenge the security council to uphold its own resolutions. there was a concern that from the late 1990's a number of key security council members had lost interest in pursuing this question and therefore this whole exercise might peter out. do you think that was a reasonable concern? >> well, i think there was at least implied from the us side that if the security council doesn't agree with us and go along with our view, then it sentences itself to irrelevance. i think that's a very presumptuous attitude. i think the us at the time wa

i am going to turn to sir lawrence freedman in a moment. we are in for quite a long afternoon and it would very much help with the transcription if we could take a measured pace. thank you. >> just following up from what has been said, i mean, you have made the point about the americans suggesting that they were upholding the security council resolutions and you noting that the security council as a whole did not seem to go along with that at that time, but, as i recall, part of the american argument was to challenge the security council to uphold its own resolutions. there was a concern that from the late 1990s a number of key security council members had lost interest in pursuing this question and therefore this whole exercise might peter out. do you think that was a reasonable concern? >> well, i think there was at least implied from the us side that if the security council doesn't agree with us and go along with our view, then it sentences itself to irrelevance. i think that's a very presumptuous attitude. i think the us at the time was

. >> i will now turn to sir lawrence freedman again. >> there was a lot of interest in the potential of the smoking gun and you have already given an indication that's certainly not what you found, but you have mentioned a number of other things that you did find which were small in themselves but not without significance. i think you have mentioned the chemical warheads didn't have chemicals in them but they could take them, the missiles, nuclear documents. was there anything else you found in addition to those that were prohibited items or indicated something suspicious? >> well, there were the missile engines. the warheads i think was the most important, i think that was in january that we found them, and i remember i was in london at the time when i was told abo this, and i thought, "well, maybe this is it." maybe this is the tip of the iceberg that we are now seeing and maybe we will find more. as time went by and we really found more fragments, i think -- i concluded that it was an ice -- might well have been an ice that had been broken long ago and tse were e flows that remain