Maude Casey (Letters, 31 January) raises the important issue of how the police and intelligence authorities handled the supposed ricin plot in early 2003 before British troops had been committed to invade Iraq. In September 2002, following my review in the London Review of Books of the Downing Street dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, I briefed the late Air Marshal Tim Garden, then a security adviser to the Liberal Democrats, about how Iraqi exiles were exaggerating the WMD threat. On 7 January 2003, just before a statement on Iraq by Geoff Hoon, Garden was at the Commons to give an interview.
He emailed me: "I [was] in the BBC studio to comment on the Hoon speech as this [ricin] news broke. It was an incredible piece of timing. Hoon sat down from his speech and, as [opposition spokesman] Bernard Jenkin started speaking, the press release from Scotland Yard arrived on the BBC news desk. The timing was absolutely synchronised ... Given the bust was on Sunday, it seemed strange the news would be released between the Hoon and Blair statements today" when the media was focused on Iraq. The Blair statement then cited the ricin plot as "powerful evidence of the continued terrorist threat" and the danger posed to the west by Saddam Hussein. Blair's spokesman confirmed the "presence of ricin poison" later that day.
But the London ricin, along with the aluminium tubes for uranium enrichment and the Iraqi import of yellowcake from Niger, never existed. So who synchronised the Hoon speech with the Scotland yard announcement? Perhaps the Chilcot inquiry can answer.
Norman Dombey
Professor emeritus of theoretical physics, University of Sussex, Brighton