Deep Throat of Britain

From WaPo and again, related to the Downing Street Memo:

The eight-page document labeled "PERSONAL SECRET UK EYES ONLY," whose authenticity has been confirmed by British government sources, also served as the basis of a Page 1 story in the Sunday Washington Post. Staff writer Walter Pincus emphasized a different passage in the document, which said "the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a " protracted and costly" postwar occupation of Iraq.

The Sunday Times story made headlines from Australia to China to Pakistan. Like the now-famous Downing Street Memo, published by the Sunday Times on May 1, the revelation raises the intriguing question of who is risking jail time by leaking top-secret documents to Smith. Just as students of the Watergate scandal pondered for years the identity of the high-level source who guided Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, students of the Iraq war will wonder about the person (or persons) behind The Sunday Times's reports.

The most plausible candidate(s) come from the ranks of current or former senior British government officials. In the Sunday Times' online text of the briefing paper (entitled "Iraq: Conditions for Military Action" ) the London paper says it omitted one page "in order to protect the identity of its source." That suggests that the source's name appears in or could be inferred from the full document.

The source (or sources) would also seem to be opposed to Prime Minister Blair's support of U.S. policy toward Iraq in the summer of 2002. The leak of the document gives unprecedented publicity to the arguments made by skeptics of U.S. policy in Blair's inner circle. The documents openly question the use of intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and the legal basis for the decision to go to war.

As Smith wrote, "The document said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this would be difficult.