A BBC report challenges Tony Blair's chief propagandist. Both the journalist and the spin doctor survive. The real casualty is the truth behind the Iraq war, reports Mukul Devichand in London Leonidas, the loyal commander who saved Greece from invasion by the Persians, could have learned a thing or two from Tony Blair's top aide, Alistair Campbell. In 480 BC, Leonidas put himself in the path of a charging Persian army, knowing that although he would die, Greece would certainly be saved. Campbell, too, has put himself on the line to save his boss, after BBC reports shed light on the official reasons given for invading Iraq. But unlike poor Leonidas, Campbell has come through very much alive -- and spinning. Blair has been getting a rough ride in the press of late, because although Britain joined America's war on Iraq, the British public has always been sceptical about military action. The latest row started when Campbell attacked a BBC radio report that discredited the government's decision to attack. But against all expectations, the BBC stood up to Campbell. The result was a remarkable pitched battle on a scale never before attempted by Britain's state broadcaster. Things came to a head last Monday, when a parliamentary committee cleared Campbell of "sexing up" the government's case for war. But the whole fiasco has diverted attention from the failed UK and US efforts to date to uncover Saddam Hussein's infamous stash of dangerous weapons. The New Labour government first launched its pro-war public relations campaign -- lorded over by Campbell, who is Blair's private press secretary -- last September, in the first of two "dossiers" detailing the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime. The document immortalised the letters "WMD" (weapons of mass destruction). It claimed that Iraq still had these weapons; that it had tried to buy uranium to make them from "Africa" (not specifically naming any of the continent's 52 countries); and, most crucially, that Hussein could deploy his WMD against Britain or America "in 20-45 minutes" if he wanted. The media hungrily got down to dissecting this evidence, as well as that provided in a second dossier in February this year. That second dossier, now known as the "dodgy dossier" was the first to be discredited, when it emerged that some of its findings were actually taken from an old PhD thesis, by an unknown Californian named Dr Ibrahim Al-Marashi, published in 1991 and posted on the Internet. The government quickly apologised -- the dossier was "a complete Horlicks" said Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, in a bizarre reference to a British bedtime drink. Now the government only had the September dossier to point to when justifying its unpopular war. So the stakes were high when, on 29 May, at around 8am, BBC Radio Four's Andrew Gilligan went on-air. He reported that anonymous intelligence sources had told him the government had "sexed up" some of the claims in the September dossier. Gilligan told listeners about one senior intelligence source in particular. The source had spoken about the claim that Iraq's WMD could be ready in under 45 minutes. "It was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn't reliable," Gilligan quoted the source as saying. "Most things in the dossier were double-sourced but that was single-sourced, and we believe that the source was wrong." It was then that Campbell -- himself a former journalist who started his career writing pornographic fiction before becoming the unelected chief spin doctor of New Labour -- began his clever strategy to save his boss by attacking the BBC. It started with a letter, demanding an apology. "I simply say in relation to the BBC story it is a lie," Campbell told MPs, before writing to the BBC demanding a full retraction of its "allegations" within 24 hours. In so doing Campbell was, in fact, using an old trick. The publicly funded BBC is, and has always been, a soft target for politicians (see box). Despite its deserved reputation for objective reporting and taking politicians to task, the BBC has tended not to get involved in spats with the government. Not this time. In an unprecedented rallying together of the troops, BBC bosses set up a "war room" and went over Gilligan's story. Then Richard Sambrook, head of BBC News, told reporters: "Frankly, I don't think the BBC needs to be taught lessons in the use of sources by a communications department which plagiarised a 12-year-old thesis and distributed it unattributed." That was on 27 June. Then, as the nation watched, the blow- by-blow battle became increasingly intense. Everyone was waiting for Monday, 7 July, when a parliamentary select committee, chaired by independently minded Labour MP Donald Anderson, would report on the case. Had the BBC report been right? Had Campbell "sexed up" the dossier? Despite sticking to its guns, the BBC refused to name the source behind Gilligan's story. Things seemed to be going against the broadcaster, until Saturday, when Richard Dearlove -- the head of security agency MI6 -- revealed he had briefed Gilligan days before the report. Although he was not the actual source Gilligan used, the BBC's reputation seemed redeemed. Tony Blair -- whose signature endorsed the September dossier -- had until then kept away from the heat, using Campbell as his "fall guy". But on Sunday, as things became desperate, the prime minister intervened to save his embattled press secretary. "The issue of what the BBC has done," he told Kamal Ahmed of the Observer newspaper, "I take it as about as serious an attack on my integrity as there could possibly be." It seemed that whatever the parliamentary committee reported on Monday, heads were sure to roll -- either the BBC's or Campbell's itself. But when, at 10am on Monday, the parliamentary select committee released its 54-page report, its findings seemed split straight down the middle. Was the BBC report right? Well, sort of. "The 45-minute claim did not warrant the undue prominence given to it" in the September dossier, the report found. The heads of BBC bosses were saved, and a jubilant Richard Sambrook celebrated the BBC journalism that highlighted the 45-minute claim. So then did the report claim that Campbell lied? Well, not exactly that either. "Alistair Campbell did not exert or seek to exert improper influence on the drafting of the September dossier," said the report. But the dossier was "more assertive" about the case for war than it ought to have been. With this mild criticism, Campbell -- unlike Leonidas in 480 BC -- will be sure to keep his job, and his head. So everything's settled? For the average British reader or viewer, yes -- and this may be exactly what Campbell was hoping for all along. The deeper implications of a falsified intelligence dossier -- the second, February dossier -- will likely have been forgotten as the media circus fixates on the BBC controversy. Now that the BBC has survived, it may shy away from future conflict with the government over the claims of Iraqi WMD. Other media may follow suit. Which would, of course, suit the government just fine -- as no weapons have yet been found. Campbell's gamble is that the dossier row will also end the WMD row. The question remains whether the public will pick up on the rest of the select committee report. In fact, the report calls for more inquiries. When it comes to whether Blair's claims of the huge threat posed by Saddam Hussein, the report says, "the jury is still out." Ongoing war 1939-45: The BBC's reputation for objectivity was forged during World War II, with rounded reporting drowning out the appeal of English-language propaganda radio broadcast from Italy, and George Orwell headlining the BBC's service to India. Nevertheless, there certainly was censorship. "I should be glad to receive some proposals from you for establishing a more effective control over the BBC," wrote Churchill in a memo to the Ministry of Information 1956: The BBC challenged the government openly for the first time during the Suez Crisis, when Britain and France lost a war to Egypt. An enraged Prime Minister Anthony Eden tried to take over the BBC's External Services. 1982: Britain goes to war with Argentina over the Falklands and Margaret Thatcher publicly attacks the BBC's coverage. BBC Director- General Alasdair Milne is admonished in parliament. Nevertheless, current Director-General Greg Dyke and the BBC's governors have yet again stood up to government this time. 1986: Conservative Party Chairman Norman Tebbit claims the BBC misreported the US air- raid on Libya. He justified it this way: "I was not bullying or softening up the BBC but I was asking them to maintain their standards."
