Tony Blair failed to properly manage secret intelligence on Iraq, a leading security expert has claimed.

Analysis in a new report released by the independent Social Affairs Unit also concluded there was no evidence to support BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan's controversial claims.

Ahead of Lord Hutton's report publication Professor Anthony Glees gave his own view of the events surrounding the government's controversial Iraq dossier and its reporting.

A leading expert on intelligence and security issues, he reviewed evidence to the inquiry and interviewed a former top Secret Intelligence Service officer.

His focus was on the management and use of secret intelligence and the effect of media-driven politics.

Professor Glees concluded Tony Blair made a series of errors in publishing the intelligence dossier in September 2002 and that the government may have put the lives of British intelligence agents at risk.

He also claimed that the coalition's failure to find Iraq's deadly weapons arsenal is due to a failure of intelligence but not of government.

"John Scarlett, a former senior SIS officer, might, in his role as joint intelligence committee chairman, have inadvertently privileged SIS intelligence over other, non-secret sources of information and the prime minister might, as a consequence, have been encouraged to overestimate the importance of secret intelligence," said Glees.

He also questions the decision to allow Downing Street spindoctor Alastair Campbell to chair a committee that wrote the government's dossiers "making the contamination of intelligence findings, for presentational reasons, easy".

Some of his conclusions are based on comments by former SIS officer Daphne Park, now Baroness Park of Monmouth.

Baroness Park was one of MI6's most senior controllers for more than 30 years. She believed it was a fundamental error to make key intelligence public.

"I am sure the government must now regret its having published intelligence which could put its source at risk. The principle of publishing intelligence as distinct from discussing it within the JIC is a step too far. The integrity of our sources must always be protected," she said.

Professor Glees, who is also director of the Brunel Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, claimed British diplomats were sceptical about the quality of intelligence given to the government.

He concludes that the BBC was wrong to blame the government for its handling of the Iraq intelligence and the BBC's case was based on "ignorance about the intelligence services".

Gilligan's now-infamous story on the BBC's Today programme is challenged on how his source, weapons scientist Dr David Kelly, was described.

"Gilligan knew Kelly was not an intelligence officer. Indeed, his colleague Susan Watts had been told precisely what Kelly's job was and since it is inconceivable that Kelly would have lied to Gilligan about his position, we can assume Gilligan knew it as well," he said.

"Because he [Kelly] was not on the JIC he could have no formal knowledge of how the '45 minute claim' came to be included."