Panic in Whitehall - Inside The Bush/Blair Govt. Iraq Leaks

Exclusive - For three months, behind the scenes, senior civil servants have been trying to stem an outbreak of leaks on the Iraq war which are proving highly damaging to Tony Blair. Martin Bright, who has had a ringside seat, reports on a government in disarray

Early in September a flurry of confidential e-mails started to fly around Whitehall between civil servants desperate to identify the sources of a series of high-level leaks that had appeared under my name. On 28 August, I had reported that Michael Jay, the top civil servant at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, had warned the government as early as May 2004 that the issue of Iraq was fuelling Muslim extremism in Britain, contradicting repeated denials from Downing Street that the war had made the UK a target for terrorists. A week later, two further leaks revealed that MI6 was planning to infiltrate Muslim extremist websites posing as Islamic radicals and that Foreign Office officials had recommended approving the visa application of the controversial Qatar-based cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi to avoid a Muslim backlash in Britain.

Andrew Noble, head of the FCO's security strategy unit, and Chris Wright, the Cabinet Office's director of security intelligence, were deeply irritated that such sensitive documents had found their way into the public domain. They launched a leak inquiry immediately. They even considered putting pressure on my editor at the time, the Observer's Roger Alton, to stop me running the stories. They agreed that "stopping any further leaks should be our priority".