According to Scott Ritter the unit amassed evidence selectively, with government backing, for political goals: "Operation Rockingham cherry-picked intelligence.
In a letter to the "Guardian" newspaper[5] he stated: "Rockingham was a tiny cell which drew on and coordinated all the resources of the DIS; its only aim was to provide leads for Unscom teams, which it did very successfully despite the problems of sanitising sensitive intelligence.
Inevitably it was most effective in its earliest years, when Iraq's main WMD facilities, nuclear programme and stocks of chemical and biological weapons were destroyed."
After the evidence to the Hutton Inquiry had been published it became clear that senior experts in the DIS assessment staff, including Dr Brian Jones, were unhappy about the wording in the dossier concerning the threat to the UK posed by Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction.
After his time in the DIS, John Morrison worked for the ISC as its investigator until he was sacked for saying in a BBC interview that when the Prime Minister asserted that the threat from Iraq's WMD "is current and serious" that he "could almost hear the collective raspberry going up around Whitehall".
It countered Ritter's claims by stating authoritatively that after its creation in 1991 within the DIS, "Rockingham was responsible for briefing some of the personnel who formed part of UNSCOM and International Atomic Energy Agency inspection teams.
Rockingham also advised FCO and MOD policy branches on the provision of UK experts from government and industry to work with UNSCOM and the IAEA as members of inspection teams.
Rockingham included an officer detached to Bahrain to staff an organisation known as GATEWAY to co-ordinate briefings to, and debriefings of, inspection team members as they deployed to, and returned from, Iraq."
It did, however, continue to provide UNMOVIC and the IAEA with all-source UK intelligence assessments of the extent of Iraq's nuclear, biological, chemical and ballistic missile programmes, and information about sites of potential significance.