Dr David Kelly, the weapons expert who committed suicide and plunged the British government into crisis, believed Iraq did possess banned weapons and posed an immediate threat, the BBC said today.
But in an interview never previously broadcast, Dr Kelly said those weapons could have taken days to deploy, rather than the infamous 45 minutes claimed by Prime Minister Tony Blair before the war.
Dr Kelly slashed his wrist in a deserted copse last July after being outed as the source for a BBC reporter's claim that Mr Blair's team inflated the threat posed by Iraq, to justify war.
BBC reporter Mr Andrew Gilligan said the British government included in a September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons, the claim that some weapons of mass destruction could be let loose within 45 minutes of an order to do so, knowing it to be wrong.
Mr Blair's aides reacted furiously, blowing up a huge row with the public broadcaster which eventually led to Dr Kelly's exposure.
One week before judge Lord Hutton delivers his report on the scientist's suicide the BBC's investigative Panoramaprogramme will broadcast tonight an interview it recorded with Kelly in October 2002, which it has never shown.
"Even if they're not actually filled and deployed today, the capability exists to get them filled and deployed within a matter of days and weeks," the BBC quoted Dr Kelly as saying of Iraq's weaponry.
Nine months after Saddam was toppled, none of the weapons of mass destruction that Blair claimed the Iraqi leader had primed for use, has been discovered.
Dr Kelly said he did not know about delivery mechanisms for those weapons.
Lord Hutton's long inquiry last summer found no evidence that the government knew or suspected its 45-minute claim to be wrong.
But it did establish that the government helped make Dr Kelly's name public.