Thank you for downloading the briefing room with David Aronovich. It's a new Radio 4 programme

that aims to provide what you need to know about a big story in the news each week.

There was one person that I needed to interview who was absolutely crucial in the intelligence

that led to the war in Iraq.

It took us months and months to track him down.

It was one of the most difficult yet memorable interviews that I've ever done.

He was very evasive.

In the end, I said,

the fact is that we went to war on a lie,

and the person who told that lie was you.

And he looked at me, and I waited.

Then he smiled.

A sly smile I'll never forget.

And he said, yes.

That was veteran BBC reporter Peter Taylor,

talking about a man who was one of the sources

of what Sir John Chilcott yesterday called the flawed intelligence that was used to

justify the invasion of Iraq. Inside the briefing room today, we'll be trying to understand what

happened between the informers, the spooks and the politicians, and whether the flaws were

institutional or temporary. In 2013, Peter Taylor interviewed the man they called Curveball for the Panorama programme.

The story begins in a German refugee camp at Zerndorf at the end of 1999,

four years before the invasion.

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