The man behind 1996 thriller The Rock has expressed his amazement a key detail from the plot was apparently used by an intelligence agent to fabricate evidence which aided the case for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.



Speaking to the Guardian on Friday, David Weisberg, who co-scripted the Sean Connery/Nicolas Cage hit with late writing partner Douglas Cook, said the green glass globes feared to be central to the agent’s evidence were “complete fabrication … pure invention” designed to try and add visual excitement to an dull technology.

The Chilcot report, published on Wednesday, found that Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service was led to understand Saddam Hussein’s regime was continuing to produce weapons of mass destruction based, in part, on the testimony of a source said to have “direct access”.

This information, revealed in September 2002, claimed intensive anthrax production was underway in the country. Chilcot’s findings reported that questions were raised after “[i]t was pointed out that glass containers were not typically used in chemical munitions, and that a popular movie [The Rock] had inaccurately depicted nerve agents being carried in glass beads or spheres”.

However, despite MI6 concluding a month before the invasion that the source had been lying “over a period of time”, they failed to inform Tony Blair “or others” that the veracity of the evidence presented was in any doubt.

The possibly inspirational scene

“What was so amazing,” said Weisberg, “was anybody in the poison gas community would immediately know that this was total bullshit – such obvious bullshit.”



Weisberg said he was unsurprised a desperate agent might resort to movies for inspiration, but dismayed that authorities “didn’t do apparently the most basic fact-checking or vetting of the information. If you’d just asked a chemical weapons expert, it would have been immediately obvious it was ludicrous”.

The screenwriter – also behind thrillers such as Double Jeopardy (1996) and this year’s Criminal – said that research had been conducted into chemical weapons when the film was at script stage. Weisberg’s stepfather, Geoffrey Kemp, worked in national security for the Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr administrations, and had put him and Cook in touch with experts in the field. But their findings led them to realise embellishment was needed for the film.

Nicolas Cage with the balls

“Unfortunately chemical weapons are very boring because essentially they’re a two-chamber cell with two odourless and colourless gases in each chamber. When the shell is detonated, the gases mix and become the [nerve agent] VX.

“There was no way to do that [realistically] on the screen with any kind of excitement. In real life it’s all invisible and boring, as per usual. So we invented this string-of-pearls approach to have these little globes with green gases in them, to give visual interest and to create jeopardy. If one of these globules broke you’d be in real trouble.”

Weisberg said he’d had some “funny emails” after Wednesday’s report, but he felt “it’s not a nice legacy for the film”. “It’s tragic that we went to war,” he concluded.