The revelation came with the resignation of Andrew Wilkie, a senior analyst at Australia's top intelligence body, the Office of National Assessment (ONA). A former soldier with an open, affable manner, Wilkie used to sit in his Canberra office reading raw intelligence reports from Australian and international spy agencies, weighing them up and then boiling them down into briefings for the prime minister and cabinet.
His military background meant he was given a particularly wide-ranging role in the run-up to the Iraq war, though the government has done its best to downplay his importance among ONA's staff of 30.

Wilkie does not mince his words. Claims of collaboration between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda were \"preposterous\". \"They were clearly concocted. There was no strong intelligence to support it whatsoever,\" he says.

Evidence about that missing stockpile of weapons of mass destruction was similarly unreliable. \"It was clear before the war that some of the evidence on WMD coming out of Britain and America was garbage,\" he says. \"It was being skewed by political information from Iraqis who were trying to encourage a US invasion.\"

Only half-jokingly, he talks about sitting at his desk and rapidly directing Pentagon-originated intelligence reports to the ONA rubbish bin.