OK, thank you – spy chief Dearlove's Iraq evidence revealed ... sort of

Never let it be said that Britain's spies do not have a sense of humour. Ninety-three pages of evidence (pdf) given in private to the Iraq inquiry by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, have finally been released. Unfortunately, they have been so heavily redacted by the censors that some are entirely black , save for a lone, enigmatic question mark. Dearlove, known officially as C, for chief, was head of Britain's foreign intelligence service in the runup to the invasion. He has been criticised for helping the Blair government to "sex up" the Iraqi WMD dossier. But it would be hard to glean much evidence of this from pages that, for example, now only contain the phrase "OK, thank you." In another exchange, Sir Lawrence Freedman, the war historian and member of the Chilcot panel, asks: "My final question on this episode of the dossier again [...]" The rest is redacted. Dearlove responds: "We were extremely worried." In the course of some tetchy exchanges, Dearlove says criticism that he had too close a relationship with Blair is "complete rubbish". MI6 "doesn't 'do ministers'," he added. Or transparency, it seems.