LONDON, 18 September 2003 — A British Broadcasting Corp. reporter acknowledged yesterday that he made a series of errors in a report that accused the government of “sexing up” an intelligence dossier on Iraq, setting off a bitter dispute with the government that has dominated British politics.

BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan told a judicial inquiry he was wrong to ascribe particular phrases in the report to his then-unidentified single source and acknowledged that he should have run the story by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office before broadcast. Gilligan also apologized for indirectly identifying his source, biological weapons expert David Kelly, to a member of Parliament. Kelly was found dead, in an apparent suicide, shortly after being publicly identified as a possible source of the report.

In the May 29 broadcast, Gilligan said that one of the officials in charge of drawing up a dossier on Iraqi weapons alleged that Blair’s office inserted a claim that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes’ notice, when it knew the information was wrong.

Gilligan, speaking to the inquiry into Kelly’s death, said yesterday that he had made a slip of the tongue during a live broadcast when he said, referring to the 45-minute claim, that the government “probably knew it was wrong.”

Kelly had suggested that some people in the intelligence services did not want the claim included but had never actually made it clear that the government was informed of their disagreement, Gilligan said.

“My intention was to report what Dr. Kelly had told me and I regret ... that I didn’t report entirely carefully and accurately what he said,” Gilligan said.

“My error was to ascribe that statement to him when it was actually a conclusion of mine,” he added.

The dossier was a key element in winning public support for the war in Iraq and the report set off an intense fight between the BBC and Blair’s government, which vehemently denied overruling intelligence advice in its drafting.

Richard Sambrook, BBC’s director of news, told the inquiry there were “a number of lessons that the BBC will have to take from this.”

Sambrook said the original report should have been scripted to avoid the pitfalls of a live report and acknowledged he should have looked over Gilligan’s notes much earlier in the controversy to check his report was correct.

Sambrook criticized Gilligan’s phrasing and his failure to make notes of a call to the Ministry of Defense during which the reporter said he told officials about the story.

A Defense Ministry press officer previously told the inquiry that Gilligan made no mention of the story during the telephone call, and instead asked about another report.

Gilligan disputed that version but acknowledged he should also have contacted Blair’s office at No. 10 Downing St. about the story.

“My view is that Andrew Gilligan is extremely good at finding out information but there are sometimes questions of nuances and subtlety in how he presents it which are not all that they should be,” Sambrook said. “ ... I described him as a reporter who paints in primary colors rather than something more subtle.”

As the hunt for the source of Gilligan’s story intensified in the days after its broadcast, Gilligan stood firm in protecting Kelly’s identity.

He refused reveal his source to a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, but he did send a note to a committee member saying Kelly was the source of a report by a BBC colleague, and suggested questions the member could put to Kelly when he testified on July 15.

“It was quite wrong to send it (the message) and I can only apologize,” Gilligan said.

“I did not even know for sure that David Kelly was (BBC reporter) Susan Watts’ source,” he said in response to questioning from his lawyer, Heather Rogers. “I was under an enormous amount of pressure at the time, I simply was not thinking straight so I really want to apologize for that.”

However, Gilligan told the inquiry, headed by senior judge Lord Hutton, that his report accurately reflected Kelly’s assessment that some people in the intelligence services were unhappy about the inclusion of the 45-minute claim because they believed it had not been sufficiently corroborated.

Facing questions from lawyer Jeremy Gompertz, acting for the Kelly family, Gilligan denied that he first mentioned the name of Blair’s communications director Alastair Campbell when discussing with Kelly who was responsible for including the 45-minute claim in the intelligence dossier.

In earlier testimony at the inquiry, a friend of Kelly’s, fellow weapons expert Olivia Bosch, said Kelly told her it was Gilligan who introduced Campbell’s name in their discussion.

“There was no name game as she (Bosch) described — only one name was mentioned,” the reporter said. “I did not introduce a number of names or indeed any name.

“Alastair Campbell’s name was mentioned. It was brought up spontaneously by Dr. Kelly,” he said.