Whistle-blower tipped by Downing St mole

THE collapse of the trial of GCHQ ‘whistle-blower’ Katharine Gun was caused by a tip-off to her defence team from within Tony Blair’s government, it was claimed last night.

A source close to Gun’s lawyers has told Scotland on Sunday that a government insider told them there were serious concerns within Blair’s administration about the legal justification behind the decision to go to war.

Armed with this crucial information, the GCHQ translator’s legal team planned to go into court and demand from the government highly sensitive documents on which the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, based his advice.

The case against Gun, accused of breaking the Official Secrets Act by leaking confidential war-related information to the press, was dropped suddenly without a full explanation at the Old Bailey last week.

The revelation that the case began to unfold after a leak from within Westminster follows claims by former Cabinet minister Clare Short that UK intelligence services had eavesdropped on UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Last night, sources close to Gun’s defence team claimed Goldsmith had been "duped" by inaccurate intelligence information into giving the legal green light for the Iraq conflict.

Despite the growing storm, the government made it clear last night it would not make public the Attorney-General’s advice on the legality of the war.

But a further court challenge is expected from Greenpeace, who said they would demand to see the documents as part of an attempt to clear 14 of their activists of charges relating to anti-war protests.

Gun’s planned defence rested on the argument that she was trying to expose illegal activity on the part of the government. Proving this relied upon showing that the government’s legal case for war was flawed.

Her defence was planning to reveal startling claims that Goldsmith did a U-turn on earlier advice that a conflict would not be justified, after he was shown disturbing intelligence reports claiming Saddam Hussein represented an immediate threat to Britain’s national security.

It is believed that the "evidence" rested on a range of intelligence sources, including controversial claims in the government’s dossiers on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) capabilities, chiefly the allegation that Saddam could launch an attack within 45 minutes.

Goldsmith is understood to have accepted that a pre-emptive strike under such conditions would be legitimate, and would not require the official endorsement of the international community.

"What it rests on is that Lord Goldsmith, like the rest of the nation, was sold a pup," said a senior source close to Gun’s defence. "It looks very much like he wrote the advice that he was asked to write. He did it in such a way that he covered his own back. That is what we were seeking to have disclosed in court."

The case was abandoned the day after Gun’s confidential submission was delivered to the government last Tuesday, serving notice that the defence would demand publication of all Goldsmith’s advice and the intelligence used to back it up.

The government was left facing an ‘ambush’, with Gun’s team - assembled by the civil rights group Liberty - challenging ministers to reveal hugely sensitive documents.

The defence’s successful strategy began with ‘inside information’ about the dubious quality of intelligence passed to Goldsmith.

The source told Scotland on Sunday: "We were sure of the information because it came from a good source." Asked if that meant someone within the government, the source replied: "Yes." When the source was asked whether the informant was Short he laughed and refused to answer.

The submission by Gun’s legal team says: "The defence believes that the advice given by the Foreign Office legal adviser expressed serious concerns about the legality (in international law) of committing British troops in the absence of a second resolution."

It added: "Our understanding is that Goldsmith changed his advice in January last year to say that war would be legal, but only on this basis: it was put to him that British intelligence had credible evidence that there was a serious and imminent threat."

Yesterday Downing Street insisted Goldsmith’s advice would remain under wraps. A spokesman said: "The Attorney-General’s advice remains confidential because of the long-standing convention that advice from government law officers is not disclosed."

In a new development last night, George Foulkes, Short’s former deputy at the Department for International Development, claimed that Short had told him while still a minister that if she was forced out of office, she would bring down the Prime Minister.

"We were having a drink together and I think she had begun to feel there was a possibility she would be out," he said. There were always tensions between her and No 10 - not about specific issues but with the way things were being done. And she said to me, ‘If I go, I am going to bring Tony Blair down with me.’"

It also emerged last night that according to other unpublished documents from the Gun case, Britain’s army chiefs were refusing to go to war in Iraq, amid fears over the conflict’s legality, just a few days before the US and British bombing campaign began.

Senior military leaders were adamant that war could not begin until they were satisfied neither they nor their men could be tried for war crimes, but were persuaded by the government’s legal advice.