John Scarlett

On 26 June 2011, The Guardian reported on a memo from Scarlett to Blair's foreign affairs adviser, released under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, which referred to "the benefit of obscuring the fact that in terms of WMD Iraq is not that exceptional". The memo has been described as one of the most significant documents on the September dossier yet published as it is considered a proposal to mislead the public.

On 28 January 2011, Scarlett was appointed to the board of Times Newspapers Ltd, part of News International, which publishes The Times and The Sunday Times. He has previously been a governor of Epsom College, and is the former Chairman of the Bletchley Park Trust.

On 8 December 2009, Scarlett gave evidence to the Iraq Inquiry. He denied he was under any pressure to "firm up" the September Dossier, and claimed there was "no conscious intention" to mislead about Iraq's weapons but it would have been "better" to have clarified battlefield munitions not missiles were meant.

Scarlett was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George in the 2007 New Year Honours. Scarlett, while Chairman of the JIC, was the principal author of the assessments on which the September Dossier was based, a document partly by which Tony Blair justified to Parliament the invasion of Iraq and which was later found to be "flawed" by the Butler Review.

Scarlett became the head of SIS on 6 May 2004, before publication of the findings of the Butler Review. Although the review highlighted many failings in the intelligence behind the Iraq war and the workings of the Joint Intelligence Committee, it specifically stated that Scarlett should not resign as head of the Committee and SIS.

The normally secretive intelligence services were thrust into the public gaze in the Summer of 2003 after the death of the eminent government weapons expert, Dr David Kelly. Kelly had been found dead in the Oxfordshire countryside near his home, after being exposed as the source of allegations that the government had "sexed-up" intelligence regarding existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The "classic case" was the claim that Iraq could launch Weapons of Mass Destruction "within 45 minutes of an order to do so"—Dr Kelly had privately dismissed this as "risible".

Shortly afterward, in 1971, he was recruited by MI6 and served in Moscow, Nairobi (1973–1976), and Paris. In 1994, after a tit-for-tat row between the British and Russian authorities, Scarlett was expelled from Moscow where he had been MI6's station chief. He later became Director of Security and Public Affairs.

Scarlett was born in Southwark. Fluent in French and Russian, Scarlett was educated at Epsom College and Magdalen College, Oxford, where in 1970 he received a first class degree in history.

In 1968, Scarlett was at Grosvenor Square during a protest against the Vietnam War in front of the United States Embassy and wrote to The Times at the time, criticising the police action.

Sir John McLeod Scarlett KCMG OBE (born 18 August 1948) is a British senior intelligence officer. He was Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) from 2004 to 2009. Prior to this appointment, he had chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC).