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Shortly after 3 p.m. on Thursday, July 17, 2003, David Kelly, a fifty-nine-year-old scientist employed by the British government, walked out of his house in Southmoor, a small village ten miles southwest of Oxford. Kelly, a slight, wiry man, with thinning gray hair, glasses, and a beard, lived with his wife, Janice, in a handsome stone cottage that sits on about half an acre of land at the western edge of the village, opposite the Wagon & Horses pub. He crossed the road and headed up a bridle path that goes by the pub's car park. It was a warm day, but he was wearing a thick blue jacket, hiking boots, and jeans. The path leads north, past some fields where, a couple of months previously, Kelly and one of his three daughters, Rachel, had spotted a newborn foal. They had arranged to go and see how the foal was doing that evening.
Kelly had a lot on his mind. Two days before, he had been questioned at a televised hearing of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee about an unauthorized interview he had given to a BBC journalist in May. His employer, the Ministry of Defence, had told him that it wouldn't take any disciplinary action, but Kelly, a deeply private man, had found the publicity excruciating. He was also getting ready to join the Iraq Survey Group, a team of American, Australian, and British experts who are searching for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. He was due to depart for Baghdad in eight days.
After crossing the A420, the main road between Oxford and Swindon, Kelly carried on to the neighboring village of Longworth, where he ran into a neighbor, Ruth Absalom, who was walking her dog, Buster. Absalom, an elderly woman with white hair and a thick rural accent, asked Kelly how he was. "Not too bad," he replied. They chatted for a few minutes. Buster was pulling on his leash, and Kelly told Absalom he had to be getting along. "Cheerio, Ruth," he said.
Kelly and his wife were well liked locally, but most of his neighbors weren't fully aware of what he did for a living. For almost twenty years, he had been one of the British government's leading experts in chemical and biological warfare. During the nineteen-nineties, he had served as a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, and in 1996 the Queen had made him a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, an official honor that ranks just below a knighthood.
Kelly kept walking. On the northern side of Longworth, a tree-lined lane runs through a pretty valley to Harrowdown Hill, a local landmark that affords magnificent views of Oxfordshire. Kelly sometimes walked well beyond the hill, but his wife was expecting him home soon. Janice Kelly suffers from arthritis, and when Kelly left she was lying down, because she wasn't feeling well. Reaching a dense wood at the top of the hill, Kelly headed into the trees. After about fifty or sixty yards, the way was blocked by thick bramble bushes and other undergrowth. In a small clearing, he sat down with his back against a tree. In the pocket of his jacket he was carrying a cell phone, some of his wife's painkillers, and a lock knife that he usually kept in his desk drawer. He had almost complete privacy. The area attracts ramblers, but it was a weekday afternoon, and few people were about.
Between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m., two of his colleagues at the Ministry of Defence called his cell phone. Kelly didn't answer. At some point, he removed his spectacles and put them in his pocket. He got out the painkillers, swallowed more than twenty of them, and washed them down with some Evian water he was carrying. After waiting for them to take effect, he held the knife, which had a three- or four-inch-long blade, and slashed at his left wrist. The first incisions were shallow—the kind of cuts that pathologists refer to as "hesitation marks." With blood running down his arm, Kelly took off his watch and laid it on the ground, then cut deeper, severing the ulnar artery, which runs along the left side of the wrist. Within minutes, he was dead.
In early September last year, Prime Minister Tony Blair made a visit to his parliamentary constituency, Sedgefield, a small town in northeast England. During the flight from London, Blair talked with Alastair Campbell, his longtime press secretary and strategist, about the need to persuade a skeptical British public that Saddam Hussein represented a serious danger, and that he had to be confronted. The previous week, Vice-President Dick Cheney had called Saddam a "mortal threat." Blair was scheduled to visit President George Bush at Camp David later in the month, a meeting that the British papers were already billing as a war summit.
Campbell, a talented but controversial former journalist, shared Blair's concerns. For more than ten years, the British government had supported a policy of containing Iraq, but it had recently adopted the Bush doctrine of regime change. In order to help explain its change of policy, Downing Street had previously considered publishing an intelligence dossier detailing the menace from Iraq's chemical-, biological-, and nuclear-weapons programs, but nothing had appeared. Blair told Campbell he wanted to revive the idea. When he reached Sedgefield, he announced publicly that the government would soon release a dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. He charged Campbell with overseeing the production and presentation of the document.
Campbell grew up in Keighley, a gritty town in West Yorkshire. After graduating from Cambridge University and training on provincial papers, he worked at _Today, a tabloid that is now defunct, and the _Daily Mirror, the paper of the northern workingman. In the nineteen-eighties, he drank himself into a nervous breakdown. As he was lying in a hospital bed, a close friend and fellow Fleet Street hack came in and handed him some marbles, saying, "Don't lose them again." Campbell gave up drinking. After he returned to work, he became a close adviser to Neil Kinnock, the leftist Welshman who was then the leader of the Labour Party, which had been out of office since 1979. When Blair took over as Party leader, in 1994, Campbell became his press spokesman and confidant. After the Labour Party won power, in May, 1997, Campbell set up a Downing Street media operation of unprecedented scale and efficiency, which he presided over with a blend of sarcasm, intense work, and belligerence. "Tony needs a hard man, and that's what I am," he told David Yelland, then the editor of the _Sun, Britain's best-selling newspaper. "Alastair was brilliant," Yelland recalled. "He could intimidate anybody."
On Thursday, September 5, 2002, Campbell chaired a meeting about the dossier in his office at 10 Downing Street. Among those attending were three of Britain's top civil servants, nonpartisan public employees who are supposed to avoid political entanglements: Sir David Manning, Blair's senior foreign-policy adviser, who is now Britain's Ambassador to the United States; Julian Miller, the head of the assessment staff at the Cabinet Office, an élite bureaucracy that provides administrative support to the government; and Sir John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, a secretive body that supplies intelligence assessments to the Prime Minister.
Thanks to evidence presented to Lord Hutton, a senior judge who is carrying out an inquiry into David Kelly's death, we know that the officials had in front of them a draft of a dossier on Iraq's W.M.D. that the British intelligence services and the Foreign Office, the British equivalent of the State Department, had produced in the spring and summer of 2002. It said that "Iraq has a capability to produce chemical and biological weapons," but did not say that Saddam had actually produced any such weapons in recent years. It also said, "Iraq has a nuclear weapons program," but added that Iraq "will find it difficult to produce fissile material while sanctions remain in place," and went on to say that even if sanctions were lifted "Iraq would need at least five years to produce a weapon."
Downing Street hadn't given any reason for not publishing this dossier, but inside the government it was widely believed that Blair was disappointed with it. "We all knew why it wasn't put out," one of Kelly's former colleagues told me. "Because it didn't make the case strongly enough." The dossier's ambivalent tone reflected the fact that there had been little reliable intelligence since 1998, when United Nations weapons inspectors left Iraq. "The Americans had incredible aerial reconnaissance, but everything that mattered was hidden under a roof or underground," the former colleague went on. "We were left with human intelligence, especially from defectors. But defectors have an incentive to provide interesting material."
Campbell didn't think much of the existing dossier. Writing in his diary, he expressed the hope that its replacement would be "revelatory," and "part of a bigger case." Scarlett, who took charge of revising the text in coöperation with Miller and his staff in the Cabinet Office, agreed that it did not contain enough "detail and information." After the meeting, Campbell sent an e-mail to Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, which read, "Re dossier, substantial rewrite, with JS and Julian M in charge. . . . Structure as per TB's discussion. Agreement that there has to be real intelligence material in their presentation as such."
A few days later, Campbell and Scarlett met again, along with several others. The _Financial Times and the _Daily Telegraph had reported that some people in the intelligence services were uneasy about revising the dossier. (Britain has four intelligence agencies, all of which are represented on the Joint Intelligence Committee.) Scarlett, a former spy, whom the Russians expelled from Moscow in 1994, asked Campbell to confirm that Scarlett would be in charge of the dossier's contents. Campbell agreed. In a two-page memo, he noted,"It goes without saying that there should be nothing published that you and they"—the intelligence agencies—"are not 100% happy with." However, Campbell did not fully abdicate responsibility for the dossier. In the final paragraph of his memo, he wrote, "I will chair a team that will go through the document from a presentational point of view, and make recommendations to you."
The next day, September 10th, Scarlett circulated a new draft of the dossier, which drew on intelligence that MI6, the spying agency that Ian Fleming and John le Carré immortalized, had picked up the previous month from a confidential source inside Iraq. The Joint Intelligence Committee had incorporated this intelligence in a secret draft assessment on September 5th, which read, "Iraq has probably dispersed its special weapons, including its CBW"—chemical and biological weapons. "Intelligence also indicates that from forward-deployed storage sites, chemical and biological munitions could be with military units and ready for firing within 45 minutes." This statement referred to battlefield weapons, such as mortar rounds and artillery shells, not longer-range weapons, such as ground- and air-launched missiles. But this crucial qualification was not included in the revised dossier, which suggested that Iraq's W.M.D. constituted a regional threat. Iraq "envisages the use of weapons of mass destruction in its current military planning," the dossier said, "and could deploy such weapons within 45 minutes of the order being given for their use."
The new draft also alleged that Iraq "has purchased large quantities of uranium ore" and "has acquired mobile laboratories for military use, corroborating earlier reports about the mobile production of biological warfare agents." Despite the new material, the revision didn't impress some members of the Downing Street press office. "Think we're in a lot of trouble with it as it stands now," Philip Bassett, a former _Financial Times reporter, wrote in an e-mail to his press-office colleagues on September 11th. Another member of the press office, Daniel Pruce, added, "Our aim should also be to convey the impression that things have not been static in Iraq but that over the past decade he"—Saddam—"has been aggressively and relentlessly pursuing WMD while brutally repressing his own people."
It isn't clear if these comments were passed on to Scarlett and Miller—Campbell later claimed that Daniel Pruce was offering suggestions "above his pay grade"—but on the afternoon of September 11th a Cabinet Office official sent an e-mail to the intelligence agencies entitled "Iraqi dossier—Questions from No 10." Among other things, it asked the agencies to supply the exact number, and type, of chemical and biological weapons that Iraq possessed. "I appreciate everyone, us included, has been around at least some of these buoys before," the official wrote. "But No 10 through the Chairman want the document to be as strong as possible within the bounds of available intelligence. This is therefore a last (!) call for any items of intelligence that agencies think can and should be included."
On Monday, September 16th, Scarlett circulated another updated dossier. The text had been reorganized to highlight the most recent intelligence, and some of the language had been strengthened. The dossier now said that Iraq's misbehavior "has included recent production of chemical and biological agents," but it didn't contain any evidence to support the charges.
Campbell remained intimately involved in the dossier's progress. On September 17th, he sent a memo to Scarlett in which he relayed the Prime Minister's reaction to the latest version: "He said he thought you'd done a very good job and it was convincing (though I pointed out he is hardly a 'don't know' on the issue)."
Campbell also offered Scarlett detailed comments of his own. For example:
**{: .break one} ** 8. On page 15, can we list quantities of e.g. shells, sprays, etc. 9. On page 16, bottom line, "might" reads very weakly. 10. On page 17, 2 lines from the bottom, "may" is weaker than in summary. **
These drafting points went well beyond matters of presentation. In No. 9, the word "might" referred to a claim that Iraq "might already have" started producing VX gas. No. 10 referred to the sentence "The Iraq military _may be able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within forty five minutes of an order to do so." (Italics added.) Less than twenty-four hours later, Scarlett replied to Campbell, saying, "We have been able to amend the text in most cases as you proposed." Among other changes Scarlett had made, the sentence referred to in No. 10 now read, "Intelligence indicates that the Iraqi military _are able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within forty five minutes of an order to do so."
Campbell wasn't satisfied yet. "Sorry to bombard on this point," he wrote to Scarlett, "but I do worry that the nuclear section will become the main focus and as currently drafted is not in great shape." An earlier draft had suggested that if Saddam somehow obtained fissile material and other components from abroad he could build a nuclear weapon within a year or two. The September 16th version had left out this claim, and Campbell suggested reinstating it in the next round. Scarlett agreed.
Campbell had also been working on a foreword that Blair was planning to contribute to the published version of the dossier. On September 17th, he sent Scarlett a draft that read:
**{: .break one} ** Alone among leaders, Saddam has used chemical weapons. Intelligence reports make clear that he sees the possession of WMD, and the belief overseas that he would use them, as vital to his strategic interests, and in particular his goal of regional domination. And the document discloses that his military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them.
The dossier was a joint effort. MI6 provided most of the raw intelligence that went into it; the Defence Intelligence Staff, which is part of the Ministry of Defence, reviewed it; the Cabinet Office collated it; and the Joint Intelligence Committee made the final decision about what to include. Some analysts at the Defence Intelligence Staff were uneasy about the new material that had been inserted into the dossier—especially the forty-five-minutes claim, which MI6's source said originated with a senior Iraqi military officer. "The way in which the information was reported did not give us any confidence that the primary source knew very much about the subject," Brian Jones, a former senior official in the Defence Intelligence Staff's assessments section, told Lord Hutton. "And so we were left wondering, Well, did the secondary source know these sorts of things?"**
Jones, who worked for the Ministry of Defence from 1973 until earlier this year, when he retired, was on vacation in the first half of September, 2002. When he got back, he discovered that members of his staff had been trying to qualify some of the language in the dossier. In a note forwarded to the Cabinet Office, one analyst pointed out that the forty-five-minutes claim was "rather strong since it is based on a single source" and proposed amending the dossier to say "intelligence suggests" it was true. Jones's expert on chemical weapons had expressed concern about the assertion that Iraq had continued to produce chemical and biological agents. Jones explained to Lord Hutton, "He did not dismiss that it may have happened, and there was certain evidence that suggested it could have happened, but he did not have good evidence that it had happened."
Jones took these matters up with his supervisor, but he didn't get far. At an interagency meeting, senior officials from MI6 had already reiterated their faith in the intelligence behind the forty-five-minutes claim, saying that it came from an "established and reliable" source, and their assurances had been accepted. Jones wasn't prepared to let things rest. On September 18th, he talked with David Kelly, who sometimes acted as a consultant to the Defence Intelligence Staff.
A biologist by training, Kelly was officially the head of microbiology at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down, a government chemical- and biological-weapons research center, where he had worked since 1984. But his actual duties extended well beyond Porton Down. Between 1991 and 1996, he spent much of his time as a weapons inspector with unscom, the United Nations mission charged with verifying that Iraq destroyed its unconventional-weapons programs. Kelly had proved to be an indefatigable sleuth, and he played a key role in forcing the Iraqi government to admit that it had a biological-weapons program. "The reason he was so effective with the Iraqis is that he was tough, very tough, and they respected that," somebody who knew Kelly well told me. "He was always very polite, but he wouldn't let them get away with anything. He was absolutely relentless." After Kelly returned from Iraq, he was still attached to Porton Down, but he now also acted as a scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office, and MI6. Earlier in 2002, the Foreign Office had asked him to contribute an account of Iraq's biological-weapons program to the historical section of the W.M.D. dossier.
Kelly told Jones he thought that the dossier was a good idea, and he agreed with its over-all thrust. His years in Iraq had convinced him that Saddam did have active W.M.D. programs, which he wouldn't give up unless forced to do so. But Kelly, like many other British experts, also believed that the Iraqi programs were modest, partly because of the U.N. inspections.
The following day, September 19th, Kelly went through the dossier with Jones and some of his analysts. They agreed that some of the new information in the dossier appeared questionable. Kelly suggested a number of specific changes, which were forwarded to the Cabinet Office. For example, the latest draft of the dossier stated, "unscom established that Iraq was planning to conceal from the inspectors the capability to produce biological warfare agents by developing mobile facilities." Kelly proposed amending this to read, "unscom established that in 1987 Iraq considered the use of mobile BW production facilities." He added, "Rationale: unscom did not establish that Iraq was planning to conceal from the inspectors the capability to produce BW agents by developing mobile facilities."
Downing Street wanted to publish the dossier on Tuesday, September 24th, when Parliament was due to convene for a special session. Jones felt as though "the shutters were coming down." On September 20th, Scarlett circulated the final version of the dossier, which didn't include the changes that Jones's staff had suggested. Ignoring bureaucratic protocol, one of them wrote a protest letter to a top official in the Ministry of Defence. It began:
**{: .break one} ** The 20th September draft still includes a number of statements which are not supported by evidence available to me. Prime Minister's Foreword, 5th paragraph states: "What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical (and biological) weapons. . . ." I acknowledge that in this statement the Prime Minister will be expressing his own "belief" about what the assessed intelligence has established. What I wish to record is that based on the intelligence available to me it has NOT established beyond doubt that Saddam has continued to produce chemical (and biological) weapons. **
Turning to the dossier's executive summary, which contained a bald assertion of the forty-five-minutes claim, the analyst went on:
**{: .break one} ** This is based on a single source. It is not clear what is meant by "weapons are deployable within 45 minutes." The judgement is too strong considering the intelligence on which it is based. **
In the Downing Street press office, the dossier's reviews were much more positive. "V good script—particularly page 2 on nukes," Godric Smith, one of the Prime Minister's two official spokesmen, wrote in an e-mail that circulated on September 19th. Tom Kelly, the other spokesman, agreed. "I think the key point in our favour is the systematic nature of what Saddam is up to," Kelly wrote. "The weakness, obviously, is our inability to say that he could pull the nuclear trigger any time soon. But the basic message of by then it would be too late does deal with that I think."
Campbell, ever vigilant, had some final changes. In addition to the foreword and the executive summary, the dossier contained three chapters of text and a conclusion. Campbell didn't see any need for the conclusion, which reiterated many of the points in the foreword and the executive summary. He wrote to Scarlett and suggested dropping it. A couple of hours later, Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff, sent an e-mail to Scarlett and Campbell. "I agree with Alastair you should drop the conclusion," he wrote. Then, referring to the London _Evening Standard, Powell added, "Alastair—what will be the headline in the _Standard on the day of publication? What do we want it to be?"
Once again, Scarlett acceded to Campbell's wishes, omitting the conclusion from the final version of the dossier. In a cover note, he wrote, "I am content that the text now reflects as fully and accurately as possible the intelligence picture on Saddam's mass destruction weapons." On Tuesday, September 24th, Blair stood up in the House of Commons and raised the dossier aloft. "The threat of Saddam and weapons of mass destruction is not American or British propaganda," he declared. "The history and present threat are real."
When the early edition of the _Evening Standard hit the streets, a front-page banner headline answered Powell's question: "45 minutes from attack." The next day, the national newspapers all devoted extensive coverage to the dossier, with the _Sun leading the way. Its front page blared, "he's got 'em . . . let's get him."
The Charing Cross Hotel sits atop the railway station of the same name, just off Trafalgar Square. Here, on the afternoon of Thursday, May 22, 2003, David Kelly met with Andrew Gilligan, a thirty-five-year-old defense and diplomatic correspondent for BBC Radio 4's "Today" program. Gilligan, a stout, pasty-faced fellow, had recently returned from Baghdad, where he had covered the war and its aftermath. He wasn't on close terms with Kelly—they had met a couple of times—but he knew that Kelly was familiar with the September dossier. Kelly later said that he met with Gilligan because he wanted to hear about the reporter's experiences in Baghdad. After leaving Iraq in 1998, Kelly continued to monitor developments there, but he had to rely on secondhand information. He had clearance to talk to the media about the scientific details of chemical and biological warfare, and he had coöperated with many reporters, including Judith Miller, of the New York _Times; Tom Mangold, formerly of the BBC; and James Bone, a New York correspondent of the London _Times, who profiled him at length. "He was sophisticated with the press, but he wasn't slavishly party line," Bone told me. "In my experience, he didn't initiate leaks, but he gave candid answers to honest questions."
What Kelly and Gilligan said to each other remains contentious. Gilligan said that they talked for an hour and a half; Kelly claimed that the conversation lasted forty-five minutes. A receipt Gilligan retained for his expenses shows that they ordered an apple juice and a Coke. Gilligan—a rarity among British journalists—seldom touches alcohol. Kelly used to drink moderately, but after joining the Baha'i faith, in 1999, he took a vow of abstinence.
There is no dispute that Gilligan described his experiences in Baghdad, including his dealings with Iraqi government minders and his impression of the coalition attacks. Eventually, the conversation turned to the September dossier and the failure to find any W.M.D. Gilligan took out a personal organizer and jotted down what Kelly had to say. His notes began:
**{: .break one} ** Transformed week before publication to make it sexier. The classic was the 45 minutes. Most things in dossier were double sourced but that was single sourced. One source said it took 45 minutes to set up a missile assembly. That was misinterpreted. Most people in intelligence weren't happy with it because it didn't reflect the considered view they were putting forward. **
At the _Sunday Telegraph, where Gilligan worked before joining the BBC, he was known as an enterprising story-getter, whose ability to break news persuaded his editors to put up with his nocturnal hours and his frequent absences from the office. "Gilligan was clearly a maverick, but he was highly regarded in his field, and he had very good contacts," Matthew d'Ancona, the deputy editor of the _Sunday Telegraph, says. "He lived for his work, and he spent most of his time pursuing his work. He was, and is, an implacably determined reporter."
Traditionally, the BBC trained its own reporters and took pride in its reputation as a reliable source of information. In recent years, parts of the corporation, including the "Today" program, have adopted a more aggressive approach to newsgathering, a trend reflected in Gilligan's hiring. As Gilligan listened to Kelly, he knew, he said later, that he had the makings of a good story. According to his account, he asked how the dossier had been transformed, and Kelly replied with one word: "Campbell." Gilligan then followed up: "What, Campbell made it up?" Kelly said, "No, it was real information. But it was unreliable, and it was in the dossier against our wishes."
This version of events has been challenged. Olivia Bosch, a friend of Kelly's who works at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said to Lord Hutton that Kelly had told her that Gilligan brought up Campbell's name, saying he wanted to "play a name game" in order to guess who was responsible for inserting information into the dossier. Bosch said that Kelly was taken aback by this attempt to elicit information. He told her that he initially refused to confirm or deny Campbell's involvement, but eventually, under pressure from Gilligan, he said, "Maybe."
In the days after he met Kelly, Gilligan called a couple of his government contacts and put it to them that the dossier had been transformed at Campbell's urging. One refused to comment; the other said, "Keep digging." Gilligan also spoke with an American expert on W.M.D., Gary Samore, who told him that similar charges were being made in Washington about the Bush Administration. These were the only people Gilligan approached. Despite having no independent confirmation for his story, he decided to broadcast it. He didn't check it out with Downing Street, and he didn't call Kelly to confirm what he had said.
The "Today" program is a venerable British institution. It begins at 6 a.m. every weekday and runs for three hours. One of its hosts is John Humphrys, a fractious character whose idea of a good question when interviewing, say, the Health Minister might be: "So, Minister, glossing over the fact that you are having an affair with your secretary and taking her for dirty weekends in Paris at the taxpayers' expense, what have you got to say about the alarming rise in breast cancer?" At 6:07 a.m. on Thursday, May 29th, Humphrys introduced Gilligan by saying that the government was facing more tough questions over its prewar claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, particularly the Prime Minister's statement that they would be ready to go in forty-five minutes. Gilligan was speaking live, and without a script, from his home, in Greenwich:
**{: .break one} ** That's right. That was the central claim in his dossier, which he published in September, the main, erm, case, if you like, against, er, against Iraq, and the main statement of the British government's belief of what it thought Iraq was up to. And what we've been told by one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up that dossier was that, actually, the government probably, erm, knew that the forty-five-minute figure was wrong, even before it decided to put it in. What this person says is that a week before the publication date of the dossier, it was actually rather, erm, a bland production. It didn't, the draft prepared for Mr Blair by the intelligence agencies actually didn't say very much more than was public knowledge already, and, erm, Downing Street, our source says, ordered a week before publication, ordered it to be sexed up, to be made more exciting, and ordered more facts to be, er, to be discovered. **
Humphrys interrupted Gilligan and asked him what he meant by "ordered more facts to be discovered." He didn't seem terribly impressed by the stuttering reporter. "Does any of this matter now, all these months later?" he demanded. "The war's been fought and won." Gilligan seemed to be shocked into coherence. "Well, the forty-five minutes isn't just a detail," he replied. "It did go to the heart of the government's case that Saddam was an imminent threat, and it was repeated four times in the dossier, including by the Prime Minister himself, in the foreword. So I think it probably does matter."
Shortly after seven-thirty, Humphrys reintroduced Gilligan. The Downing Street press office had already issued a strenuous denial of his first report, claiming that the entire dossier was the work of the intelligence services. Humphrys put this denial to Gilligan and asked, "Are you suggesting, let's be very clear about this, that it was not the work of the intelligence agencies?" Gilligan replied, "No. The information which I'm told was dubious did come from the agencies, but they were unhappy about it, because they didn't think it should have been in there. They thought it was—it was not corroborated sufficiently, and they actually thought it was wrong."
Gilligan was hardly the first reporter to question the government's pre-war claims. Ever since President Bush declared Iraq to be part of an "axis of evil," much of the British media, including the BBC, had adopted a critical approach to Blair's pro-U.S. line. Military victory and Saddam's removal hadn't silenced the doubters, liberal or conservative. By late May, hardly a day went by when the left-leaning _Independent, _Guardian, and _Daily Mirror and the right-leaning _Daily Mail and _Daily Telegraph did not devote at least part of their front pages to the missing Iraqi weapons.
Still, Gilligan's story carried the BBC's imprimatur, and it was timed to do maximum damage. On May 29th, Blair and Campbell were in Kuwait on their way to a morale-boosting appearance with British troops in Basra. Somebody in Downing Street called Tom Kelly, the Prime Minister's spokesman, to tell him about the "Today" story. Campbell, who was standing next to Kelly when the call came, divides stories he doesn't like into three categories: "bollocks," "complete bollocks," and "bollocks on stilts." His first reaction was that nobody would take this one seriously, but by the time he reached Basra he realized that he had miscalculated. The travelling press corps was less interested in reporting on Blair's speech than in pursuing Gilligan's allegation that the government had "sexed up" the September dossier. Back in London, the early editions of the _Evening Standard featured the headline "blair flies into growing row over reason for war."
From Iraq, the British party travelled to Poland, for a meeting with Leszek Miller, the Polish prime minister. At a press conference, Blair, visibly angry, insisted, "The idea that we authorized or made our intelligence agencies invent some piece of evidence is completely absurd." Gilligan's story had already been picked up around the world, partly because of its distribution on the BBC World Service. After leaving Poland, Blair went on to St. Petersburg, to attend the city's three-hundredth-anniversary celebrations. There Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, attacked him, saying that if no Iraqi W.M.D. were found Blair should "admit he has misused intelligence reports and misled world opinion."
On Sunday, June 1st, there was still no sign of the story's dying down. "when spies meet spin" was the headline in the _Observer. "lie another day," trumpeted the _Sunday Times. The _Mail on Sunday, one of Campbell's least favorite newspapers, contained two articles guaranteed to give him a headache: an opinion poll showing that two-thirds of the British public believed that Blair had misled them on Iraqi W.M.D., and a full-page piece by none other than Andrew Gilligan, which, for the first time, identified the person who had ordered the dossier to be "sexed up." The headline read, "I asked my intelligence source why Blair misled us all over Saddam's weapons. His reply? One word . . . campbell."
Later that day, Campbell confided to his diary, "It is grim for me, and it is grim for TB. And there is this huge stuff about trust." On Tuesday, June 3rd, he wrote Blair a lengthy memo, advising him on how to respond at his weekly Prime Minister's Question Time. "The current frenzy flows from the fact that apart from the 2 mobile labs nothing new has been found," Campbell noted. "Everything stems from that, so tomorrow is in part about saying as much as you can about the process towards discovery—who is involved, what sort of numbers, where are they searching, who are they interviewing, how are we verifying."
At this stage, nobody in the government knew that Gilligan's source was David Kelly. Gilligan had reported that his information came from an official in charge of drawing up the dossier, which pointed to a very senior person. Campbell spoke to John Scarlett, who insisted that reports about unhappiness within the intelligence agencies weren't coming from the top. Campbell accepted Scarlett's assurances, but others in Blair's circle were not so sure. John Reid, who was then the leader of the House of Commons, suggested that "rogue elements" in the security services might be trying to undermine the government.
The BBC—or the Beeb, as it is often referred to—was founded in 1922 by a group of radio manufacturers, and has since developed into the world's leading public-service media company, employing around twenty-five thousand people and providing news and entertainment through four mediums: television, radio, the Internet, and print. It is an independent organization, but it operates under a state charter and is financed by a mandatory license fee. When Margaret Thatcher and the Tories were in power, serious consideration was given to breaking up, or even privatizing, the BBC, but that threat vanished with Blair's election. One of his historic missions, as he saw it, was to demonstrate that big public-sector organizations, such as the BBC and the National Health Service, could thrive in a market-driven economy. In 2001, Blair appointed Gavyn Davies, a former partner at Goldman Sachs, to the chairmanship of the corporation. Davies's wife works for Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Conservative critics accused Blair of hiring a crony, but fears that the BBC would pander to the government turned out to be misplaced.
In the run-up to the 2001 election, which Labour won easily, many observers thought that the BBC did a better job of criticizing the government than the Conservative Party did. During the war in Afghanistan, Downing Street complained furiously that the BBC exaggerated civilian casualties. An essential component of Alastair Campbell's media-management strategy was to respond immediately to anything he perceived as slanted or inaccurate. One "Today" producer received so many letters of complaint that he used them to decorate his office.
When the invasion of Iraq began, Campbell peppered Richard Sambrook, the head of BBC News, with letters, including several about Andrew Gilligan's reporting from Baghdad. "Can you tell me who told him the Republican Guard hasn't been damaged—the Iraqi Ministry of Information?" Campbell asked in one missive. He mocked a suggestion by Gilligan that Uday Hussein had been "reined in a bit" by the regime, commenting, "Uday _is in large part the regime. Has Mr Gilligan ever met or seen him?"
Undoubtedly, the BBC covered the war more critically than the American networks did. Before the fighting began, BBC reporters repeatedly warned of heavy civilian casualties. When these failed to materialize, they switched their attention to chaos and looting. On April 11th, in a live report that prompted yet another complaint from Campbell, Gilligan said, "People here may be free, but they're passing their first days of freedom in more fear than they've ever known before." He went on, "Fear that their property's going to be invaded, their daughters will be raped, and they'll be killed."
One of the BBC's own defense correspondents complained about its reporting from Iraq, but his comments didn't have much impact. The BBC had a dozen reporters on the ground, and its editors argued that they were merely reporting what they were witnessing. After the war ended, Greg Dyke, the BBC's chief executive, forcefully defended its coverage, comparing the BBC favorably with Fox News, which he accused of "gung-ho patriotism."
Such arguments didn't impress Campbell. On June 6th, he wrote a private letter to Sambrook, in which he demanded to know whether Gilligan's story about the dossier had breached the BBC's producer guidelines, which say that program-makers should be reluctant to rely on only one source. The BBC's coverage of the W.M.D. issue "has been driven for days now by the false claim of a single uncorroborated source that Gilligan claims to be reliable," Campbell asserted. He concluded, "You will, I imagine, seek to defend your reporting, as you always do. In this case, you would be defending the indefensible."
Sambrook's reply to Campbell was somewhat disingenuous. "We have not suggested that the forty-five-minute point was invented by anyone in Downing Street against the wishes of anyone in the intelligence community," he wrote. "We have suggested that there are pertinent and serious questions to be asked about the presentation of the intelligence material." On June 16th, after Campbell had written to Sambrook again and asked whether the BBC was going to launch an internal inquiry into how Gilligan's story got on the air, Sambrook suggested that Campbell should take his grievance to the BBC's Programme Complaints Unit, which deals with complaints from ordinary viewers and listeners. For the moment, Campbell couldn't do much about this snub. Gilligan's source still hadn't emerged. Until he did, there was no way for independent observers to judge who was telling the truth.
David Kelly didn't listen to Gilligan's broadcasts. On May 29th, he was at the United Nations headquarters visiting the offices of unmovic, the United Nations weapons-inspection agency that succeeded unscom. At midmorning, East Coast time, Gavin Hewitt, a correspondent for BBC television's "Ten o'Clock News," called him from London to follow up the "Today" story. Hewitt had no idea that Kelly was Gilligan's source; he had obtained his cell-phone number from a former colleague who recommended him as an expert on Iraq's W.M.D. Kelly showed no sign of being nervous, and, once Hewitt had assured him that the conversation would be on a non-attributable basis, he talked openly. When Hewitt asked for his over-all opinion of the September dossier, Kelly replied, "No. 10 spin came into play." The material that the intelligence services provided was "fundamentally reasonable," he went on, but it had been presented "in a very black-and-white way."
The following day, when Kelly arrived back in England, he received a call from another BBC television journalist, Susan Watts, the science editor of "Newsnight," a current-affairs show that appears five nights a week. Watts had interviewed Kelly many times before, on stories ranging from the training of U.N. inspectors to the anthrax attacks in the United States. As recently as early May, they had been talking about the September dossier and Kelly had mentioned Alastair Campbell in conjunction with the forty-five-minutes claim. Watts didn't report Kelly's remarks at the time—she later described them as a "gossipy aside"—but when she heard about the "Today" story she suspected that Kelly was its source.
This time, Watts recorded her conversation with Kelly. The tape, which didn't emerge until August, when Lord Hutton started holding hearings, begins with Kelly discussing his trip to New York. Watts then brings up the "Today" program, the forty-five-minutes claim, and their previous conversation, saying, "I may have missed a trick on that one"—meaning that she might have missed a story. Kelly laughs. He tells Watts that he has also spoken with Gavin Hewitt, but he doesn't mention Gilligan and he doesn't appear concerned about being identified as the source of any damaging stories. "I mean, they wouldn't think it was me, I don't think," he says. "Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't. I don't know."
Watts asks Kelly whether it is true that the government was advised not to include the forty-five-minutes claim in the September dossier. Kelly replies, "There were lots of people saying that. I mean, it was an interesting week before the dossier was put out because there were so many things in there that people were saying: Well, we're not so sure about that. Or, in fact, they were happy with it being in, but not expressed the way that it was. Because, you know, the wordsmithing is actually quite important; and the intelligence community are a pretty cautious lot, on the whole."
The main problem with the dossier, Kelly goes on, is its implication that Iraq possessed a "vast arsenal," which wasn't what the experts believed. "The real concern that everyone had, it was not so much what they"—the Iraqis—"have now but what they would have in the future," Kelly says. "But that, unfortunately, wasn't expressed strongly in the dossier, because that takes away the case for war, to a certain extent."
Toward the end of the tape, Watts presses Kelly on who transformed the dossier. Referring to their previous conversation, she asks Kelly if he can confirm that Alastair Campbell was responsible for the inclusion of the forty-five-minutes claim. "No, I can't," Kelly says. "All I can say is the No. 10 press office. I've never met Alastair Campbell." Then he goes on, "But I think Alastair Campbell is synonymous with that press office, because he is responsible for it."
It is not clear from Watts's tape whether Kelly knew that he was the source of the "Today" story. As the dispute between the government and the BBC escalated, he visited the Middle East on a reconnaissance mission, which included several days at Baghdad International Airport, where the Iraq Survey Group was establishing a forward base. He bunked down in a vermin-infested bungalow with three walls, half a roof, and no running water. An American officer showed him a couple of mobile laboratories that the coalition forces had discovered, but Kelly quickly dismissed the possibility that these were designed to manufacture biological weapons. He later told his daughter Rachel that he was disappointed not to have spoken to any "real Iraqis."
On Tuesday, June 17th, Martin Howard, the Deputy Chief of Defence Intelligence at the Ministry of Defence, attended a cocktail party at the headquarters of MI5, the domestic security service, where he ran into Patrick Lamb, a friend of Kelly's at the Foreign Office. Lamb remarked that Kelly had told him a couple of weeks previously that he had spoken to Andrew Gilligan and Susan Watts. Hitherto, Kelly's colleagues hadn't suspected him of being involved in the "Today" story, assuming, like most people, that the source was a senior official at one of the intelligence agencies. Howard reported his conversation with Lamb to Sir Kevin Tebbit, the permanent under-secretary at the Ministry of Defence. In normal circumstances, Kelly would probably have been hauled in immediately. However, the ministry was already investigating who in the department had given Gilligan access to a top-secret report casting doubt on the links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Kelly, it turned out, was also a suspect in that investigation. (He was later cleared.) The ministry decided to hold off on any further action in case it prejudiced the ongoing inquiry.
While the government was trying to discover the origin of Gilligan's story, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee was holding televised hearings about the decision to go to war. On June 19th, Gilligan, who had steadfastly defended his reporting, appeared before the committee. He described his source as an official "quite closely connected with the question of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction." A few days later, Olivia Bosch, Kelly's friend at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, told him to look at Gilligan's testimony, because some of it seemed familiar to her. On the evening of June 25th, Kelly and Bosch spoke by telephone, and Kelly agreed that some of the things Gilligan had attributed to his source, such as the fact that Iraq's W.M.D. programs were modest, sounded like things he might have said. At this stage, Kelly either was misleading his friend or still hadn't realized that he was the source of Gilligan's story. He told Bosch that in order to clear his own mind he was thinking of telling his superiors he had met Gilligan.
Kelly's family had started to notice that something was preying on him. Janice Kelly thought that he seemed preoccupied and withdrawn. One evening, he said he was going to the Hind's Head pub, at the other end of the village, where he sometimes played cribbage. About forty minutes later, he returned and said he had gone for a walk instead, "to think something through." Janice thought he might be worrying about her health. "It is not you," Kelly assured her. "It is a professional thing."
At least one of Kelly's former colleagues believes that Kelly knew all along that he was the source of the "Today" story. "He was no fool," the person told me. "He knew this was a politically charged subject. He knew he wasn't supposed to speak to Gilligan in those terms, but he believed the dossier was exaggerated. Then, when Gilligan embellished what he had said, he found himself trapped."
On Monday, June 30th, Kelly sent a letter to his immediate superior at the Ministry of Defence, Bryan Wells, in which he admitted meeting Gilligan "to privately discuss his Iraq experiences and definitely not to discuss the dossier." Kelly went on:
**{: .break one} ** The issue of 45 minutes arose in terms of the threat (aerial versus land launch) and I stated that I did not know what it refers to (which I do not). He asked why it should be in the dossier and I replied probably for impact. He raised the issue of Alastair Campbell and since I was not involved in the process (not stated by me) I was unable to comment. This issue was not discussed at any length and was essentially an aside. I made no allegations or accusations about any issue related to the dossier or the government's case for war. **
Turning to the "Today" story, Kelly continued:
**{: .break one} ** I can only conclude one of three things: Gilligan has considerably embellished my meeting with him; he has met with other individuals who truly were intimately associated with the dossier; or he has assembled comments from both multiple direct and indirect sources for his articles. **
Kelly's letter arrived at the ministry on July 1st. On Friday, July 4th, Wells and Richard Hatfield, the director of personnel at the Ministry of Defence, interviewed Kelly. As Hatfield went through Gilligan's testimony to the Foreign Affairs Committee, Kelly conceded that some of the things the BBC reporter attributed to his source sounded like him, but he strenuously denied being the source of the "sexing up" allegations. He failed to mention that he had also talked to Gilligan's BBC colleagues Gavin Hewitt and Susan Watts. At the end of the interview, Hatfield said that barring further revelations he was satisfied Kelly was not Gilligan's primary source, and he would not pursue any disciplinary action. As far as Wells was concerned, the Gilligan matter had now been dealt with.
Kelly apparently knew better. The following day, he went to Oxford, where his daughter Rachel lives, and met her for lunch. He was so quiet that when Rachel got home she told her fiancé she was worried. Kelly had plenty to be concerned about. Throughout his professional life, he had been known as a rigorous scientist who chose his words carefully and valued the truth above all. As a weapons inspector, he had earned an international reputation by catching the Iraqis out in their lies and deceptions. Now he was the one prevaricating.
One of the notable things about the Kelly saga is how each of its three main characters unwittingly unleashed forces that ultimately proved devastating to them all. When Kelly went to the Charing Cross Hotel, he had no reason to believe that the meeting was anything other than a routine background talk with a reporter. When Gilligan put out his story, he can't have imagined that it would cause such a stir. And when Campbell tore into Gilligan and the BBC he had no conception of how his attack would rebound.
On June 25th, Campbell appeared at a televised hearing of the Foreign Affairs Committee. After delivering a lengthy if not very persuasive defense of the September dossier, he launched an impassioned assault on the BBC's reporting, declaring, "I simply say, in relation to the BBC story: It is a lie, it was a lie. It is a lie that is continually repeated, and until we get a public apology for it I will keep making sure that Parliament, people like yourselves, and the public know that it was a lie."
Even by Campbell's standards, this was an incendiary statement. Some critics suggested that it was intended to divert attention from the fact that still no Iraqi W.M.D. had been found. Perhaps it was, but Campbell was also displaying his obsessive streak. After his appearance, he recorded in his diary that he felt a lot better, because he had "opened a flank on the BBC." A couple of days later, he renewed his offensive, agreeing to a rare television interview, with Jon Snow, the presenter of "Channel 4 News," a competitor of the BBC. When Snow asked about the "sexing up" charges, Campbell reacted furiously, repeatedly jabbing his fingers in the journalist's face. People who had known Campbell for years had rarely seen him so angry. Some of them worried that he might be losing his perspective.
Even Blair, who until now had seemed untroubled by Campbell's aggressive tactics, was concerned. Like Campbell, the Prime Minister believed the only thing that would correct the impression that he had misled the public about Iraq was an unequivocal statement from the BBC that Gilligan's story was wrong. But Blair had now come to the conclusion that the dispute with the BBC was interfering with his efforts to shift the political agenda to home affairs, and that it was time to move on. The day after Campbell's television interview, Blair told him to leave the fight with the BBC for the Foreign Affairs Committee to resolve.
On Thursday, July 3rd, Blair travelled to northwest England, where he had arranged to deliver a major speech setting out his domestic agenda, which included reforming public education and the National Health Service. But he couldn't leave the BBC controversy behind. Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, called from London to inform him of Kelly's letter, which Geoff Hoon, the Minister of Defence, had just learned about. The Prime Minister advised caution, saying that the Ministry of Defence should deal with the matter according to its usual personnel procedures.
Campbell and Hoon displayed a greater sense of urgency. Contrary to Gilligan's report, Kelly was not "one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up that dossier." His involvement with the dossier had been limited. If these discrepancies were made public, the BBC reports would be at least partly discredited. On Friday, July 4th, the same day Kelly was questioned, Campbell and Hoon spoke at length. "GH said that his initial instinct was to throw the book at him"—Kelly—"but in fact there was a case for trying to get some kind of plea bargain," Campbell recorded in his diary. "Says that he'd come forward and he was saying yes to speak to AG, yes he said intel went in late, but he never said the other stuff. It was double-edged, but GH and I agreed it would fuck Gilligan if that was his source." (Hoon later claimed he didn't recall making some of the comments Campbell attributed to him.)
The BBC's governing board, which is supposed to monitor the corporation's activities, was scheduled to meet over the weekend to discuss Gilligan's story, and on the following Monday the Foreign Affairs Committee was due to publish its report about the decision to go to war. Campbell noted in his diary that he and Hoon wanted to approach both of these bodies immediately and let them know about Kelly's letter. On Saturday, July 5th, Campbell called Powell, who was mountain climbing in Wales, and said he was worried that the government would be accused of a coverup if it didn't tell the Foreign Affairs Committee that a possible source had emerged. The following day, Hoon repeated the message.
Powell called the Prime Minister, who was at Chequers, his country retreat. He had already been talking with Sir David Omand, the government's intelligence and security coördinator, who had received a memo about Kelly's interview from the Ministry of Defence, which said it was unclear whether Kelly was Gilligan's main source. The Prime Minister's political instincts are second to none. He didn't want to be accused of a coverup, but he also didn't want to lay himself open to the charge that he had overruled his most senior civil servants and leaked confidential information for political advantage. He decided that nothing further should be done until Kelly had been interviewed a second time and more was known about his dealings with Gilligan.
Campbell was increasingly frustrated. For weeks, he had been firing verbal fusillades at the BBC, to no avail. Now he finally had some live ammunition, but his boss had effectively ordered him not to use it. "GH"—Hoon—"said he was almost as steamed up as I was," he wrote in his diary. "TB said he didn't want to push the system too far. But my worry was that I wanted a clear win not a messy draw and if they presented it as a draw that was not good enough for us."
The BBC was standing by Gilligan and refusing to admit any errors. Its chairman, Gavyn Davies, was determined to assert the Beeb's independence. When the governors met, he kept them focussed on whether proper editorial procedures had been followed, rather than on the substance of Gilligan's allegations. After the meeting, the governors issued a resounding defense of the BBC, claiming that its coverage of the Iraq war had been impartial, and that "Today" had acted in the public interest in running Gilligan's story about the dossier.
It subsequently emerged that the governors' statement masked growing concern within the BBC about Gilligan's reporting. "This story was a good piece of investigative journalism marred by flawed reporting," Kevin Marsh, the editor of "Today," wrote to a colleague on June 27th. "Our biggest millstone has been his"—Gilligan's—"loose use of language and lack of judgement in some of his phraseology. It was also marred by the quantity of writing for other outlets that varied what was said or was loose with the terms of the story."
Blair knew nothing of these internal communications. To Downing Street, the public statement from the BBC governors was just another display of defiance. On Monday, July 7th, the Prime Minister spoke with Davies, who again refused to consider withdrawing Gilligan's allegations. Then he met with his senior advisers in his "den"—a small office at the back of 10 Downing Street. The Foreign Affairs Committee had just issued a report concluding that "ministers did not mislead Parliament" in publishing the September dossier, and that Alastair Campbell did not "exert or seek to exert improper influence" on the dossier. However, the fact that the committee had split along party lines, with the Labour majority insuring a favorable report for the government, meant that the media and the public were unlikely to accept its judgment as final.
One possibility that was discussed at the meeting was to have Kelly testify before a parliamentary committee and contradict Gilligan's report. Blair asked what was known about Kelly's views. Sir Kevin Tebbit, the permanent under-secretary at the Ministry of Defence, said that Kelly supported the war and believed Saddam had concealed some W.M.D., but he might have some discomforting things to say about parts of the dossier. Tebbit also pointed out that Kelly had come forward voluntarily and that there was no suggestion that he had breached the Official Secrets Act. As the meeting ended, Tebbit said he would arrange for Kelly to be re-interviewed at the first opportunity.
What to do about Kelly had somehow turned into the most pressing issue facing the British government. The next morning, Tuesday, July 8th, Blair gave a typically accomplished performance when he appeared before the House of Commons Liaison Committee, a bipartisan body that questions him at length on all aspects of government policy. On returning to Downing Street, he met with Campbell, Powell, Tom Kelly, and three senior civil servants: David Manning, David Omand, and John Scarlett. Once again, the topic was Kelly.
Kelly's second interview, which had taken place the previous afternoon, had proved inconclusive, but Martin Howard, of the Defence Intelligence staff, who was there, received the impression that Kelly probably was Gilligan's source, even if he had been misrepresented. This information was passed along to the Prime Minister. With the agreement of his advisers, Blair decided it was time to announce that an official had come forward. He later defended the decision by saying that the news would almost certainly have leaked anyway, and the government would have been accused of a coverup. This explanation is hardly convincing. Under his leadership, Downing Street has proved remarkably adept at preventing leaks. Blair could have simply accepted Kelly's protestations that he wasn't Gilligan's source and declared the matter closed, but in that case the government would have missed its chance to discredit Gilligan's story, which Blair considered an indefensible attack on his personal integrity.
The Prime Minister and his colleagues didn't appear to know much about Kelly, beyond the fact that he was a government scientist who had contributed to the historical section of the dossier. There was some talk at the meeting about how he would handle the publicity, but, according to Blair's testimony before Lord Hutton, there was "nothing in the discussion that we had that would have alerted us to him being anything other than someone, you know, of a certain robustness, who was used to dealing with the interchange between politics and the media."
Once Blair and his colleagues had made their decision, the question was how to release the news. Campbell favored issuing a statement naming Kelly and explaining that he had contradicted Gilligan's report, but he wasn't in charge. Omand suggested sending an open letter about Kelly to Ann Taylor, the chairman of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, thereby putting the onus on her to deal with the media, but when, during a break in the meeting, this idea was put to Taylor she balked. Blair then authorized the Ministry of Defence, which wasn't even represented at the meeting, to issue a press release.
Powell, Scarlett, and Campbell were among a group of officials who went into another office to draw up a draft. Kevin Tebbit, who was late for the meeting, took the draft back to the Ministry of Defence and worked on it further with officials there. When the statement was released, later that afternoon, it said, "An individual working in the MOD has come forward to volunteer that he met Andrew Gilligan of the BBC on May 22." It didn't name Kelly directly, but it provided enough information for anybody who knew him well to recognize the description: "The individual is an expert on WMD who has advised ministers on WMD and whose contribution to the Dossier of September 2002 was to contribute towards drafts of historical accounts of UN inspections. . . . He is not a member of the Intelligence Services or the Defence Intelligence Staff." The Ministry of Defence press office also told reporters that it would confirm the official's identity if the correct name was put to it. Despite subsequent denials from all concerned, this maneuver appears to have been designed to get Kelly's identity into the public domain without the government officially releasing it.
Kelly was driving from R.A.F. Honington, in East Anglia, where he had been training for his return to Iraq, when Richard Hatfield, the director of personnel at the Ministry of Defence, called to read him the press release. Hatfield told Lord Hutton that Kelly reacted with calm resignation, but Janice Kelly gave a very different story. When Kelly got home, at about 7 p.m., she was interviewing some people for the local historical society. After she finished, she and Kelly ate dinner and switched on the evening news. The fact that a possible source had come forward in the Andrew Gilligan row was one of the top stories. Kelly turned to Janice and said, "It's me."
According to Janice, Kelly said that his name was sure to emerge, as the press would quickly "put two and two together." He was "really, really unhappy about it," she told Lord Hutton. "Totally dismayed. He mentioned he had had a reprimand at that stage from the MOD but they had not been unsupportive, were his words. We talked a little bit generally about it and what it would mean for him in real terms. He was a bit backward in coming forward, may I say, in saying what he meant. I deliberately at that point said, 'Would it mean a pension problem, would it mean you having to leave your job?' He said it could be if it got worse, yes."
The next morning, the newspapers reported the Ministry of Defence statement and set about discovering the anonymous official's name. James Blitz, the political editor of the _Financial Times, went to the daily press briefing at No. 10, where Tom Kelly described the official as a technical expert who worked for one department but was paid by another. (For obscure bureaucratic reasons, the Foreign Office paid Kelly, even though he worked primarily for the Ministry of Defence.) Armed with these clues, Blitz called a Whitehall source, who said that the official was being paid by the Foreign Office. Blitz rang the Foreign Office's press office, but it refused to help him. Eventually, he enlisted a colleague, Christopher Adams, who searched the Internet for government consultants with expertise in unconventional weapons. Among the search results, Adams found a list of participants in an international conference on chemical weapons. One of them was David Kelly, who was identified as a senior adviser to the Ministry of Defence. At about five-thirty, Adams called Pam Teare, the ministry's director of news, and asked if David Kelly was the right name. She said it was.
Kelly spent the afternoon in his vegetable garden. He told Janice he felt let down and betrayed. At three minutes past seven, Kelly's supervisor, Bryan Wells, called him on his cell phone and said the Ministry of Defence had released his name to reporters. Kelly didn't tell Janice immediately. He went to put his garden tools in the tool shed, which was next to the driveway. While he was at the front of the house, Nick Rufford, a reporter from the _Sunday Times, pulled into the car park of the Wagon & Horses and walked across the road to speak to him.
According to Rufford, who had long suspected that Kelly was Gilligan's source, Kelly said he had just received a call alerting him to the fact that his identity had been made public. Kelly added that he was shocked that his name was coming out, saying, "I was told it would all be confidential." Rufford advised him to leave his house before he was besieged by journalists, telling him the _Sunday Times would pick up his hotel bills. He also asked Kelly if he would write a story for the _Sunday Times. Kelly said he would have to check with the Ministry of Defence press office. According to Rufford, the conversation was amicable and lasted about fifteen minutes.
Janice Kelly, however, who witnessed the encounter from the other end of the garden, told Lord Hutton that it lasted four or five minutes, at the end of which an angry Kelly said, "Please leave now." After Rufford departed, Kelly told her, his voice almost breaking, that he was to be named publicly that night. Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the _Sunday Times, was offering to put them up in a hotel in return for his writing an article, he went on, but he had refused the offer, at which point Rufford had told him that the gloves were off.
Right after Rufford left, the Ministry of Defence press office called Kelly. By this time, journalists from the _Guardian and the _Times had obtained his name by a process of trial and error. (The defense correspondent of the _Times put twenty names to the ministry before he got the right one.) After hanging up, Kelly told Janice they would have to leave immediately. They packed quickly, and within ten minutes or so were driving south toward the M4, a highway that goes from London to southwest England. A friend of Janice's owned a vacation home in Cornwall that was empty. During the drive, Kelly took a call from Olivia Bosch. He said to her, "I have cut and run."
After a sleepless night at a hotel in Weston-super-Mare, Kelly got up, ate breakfast, and read a story in the _Times that described him as a middle-ranking official. Strictly speaking, this was true: Kelly had never been admitted to the top grades of the civil service. But he had advised ministers, represented his country abroad, and received the Order of St. Michael and St. George. In a filing cabinet in his study, he had an official letter telling him that he was being considered for another official honor.
The Kellys reached Cornwall around noon, and Kelly got upset again. Janice was unable to comfort him, she later recounted, and she decided that the best she could do was to keep him busy and well fed. Perhaps they could convert their enforced trip into a kind of holiday, she thought. After all, they hadn't been away together in a long time.
The Kellys' marriage, like many others, is hard to fathom. He didn't discuss his work with Janice; he rarely mentioned his conversion to Baha'i to her; and he was away a lot, sometimes in the company of female friends, such as Mai Pederson, an Arab-American military linguist, whom he had met in Iraq. One of Pederson's ex-husbands told a British newspaper that she was a spy working for American military intelligence, a charge she refutes. It was Pederson who introduced Kelly to the Baha'i faith, an offshoot of Islam that preaches the value of spirituality, truth, and universal peace. He spent time in Monterey, California, where she was attached to the Defense Language Institute, and it was there, in 1999, that he became a Baha'i. The _Mail on Sunday uncovered evidence that Kelly had received mail at her homes in Alabama and West Virginia. After Kelly's death, the Thames Valley Police interviewed Pederson, but the conversation added "nothing that was of relevance" to their inquiry, according to Michael Page, the Assistant Chief Constable. Mark Zaid, a Washington lawyer, issued a statement on Pederson's behalf denying that she and Kelly had a romantic attachment.
Kelly kept pieces of his life in different compartments, and, clearly, he was unable to unburden himself to his wife. The next morning, Friday, July 11th, they went to see the Lost Gardens of Heligan, a popular tourist attraction, but, according to Janice, Kelly was so withdrawn that he hardly seemed to notice the plants and flowers. He took several calls, including one from Bryan Wells, who told him that he had been asked to appear the following week before both the Intelligence and Security Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee, with the latter hearing to be televised. According to Wells, Kelly took the news stoically, saying, "If I am asked, I will do it." His wife remembers things differently. She said Kelly went "ballistic" after learning that he would have to appear on television. "He just did not like that idea at all," she told Lord Hutton. "He felt it—he did not say this in so many words, but he felt it would be a continuation of a kind of reprimand in the public domain."
The decision to have Kelly testify before the Foreign Affairs Committee had been taken at the highest levels. On July 10th, Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff, sent an e-mail to Alastair Campbell and other senior officials saying, "Tried PM out on Kelly before FAC and ISC next Tuesday. He thought he probably had to do both but need to be properly prepared beforehand. I passed this on to MOD." Tom Kelly replied, "This is now a game of chicken with the Beeb—the only way they will shift is if they see the screw tightening." The one obstacle to Kelly's appearing before the committees was Sir Kevin Tebbit, who pointed out that the Foreign Affairs Committee had already completed its report. "A further reason for avoiding two hearings, back to back, is to show some regard for the man himself," Tebbit wrote to Geoff Hoon. "He has come forward voluntarily, is not used to being thrust into the public eye, and is not on trial." Tebbit's objections were overruled, and Kelly was dispatched to appear before both committees.
On Sunday, July 13th, Kelly travelled from Cornwall to Oxford, where he had arranged to stay for a few nights with his daughter Rachel, away from the media. When he arrived, his appearance shocked Rachel. "There was a lot of distress and anxiety, perhaps a bit of humiliation," she said at the Hutton inquiry. "He was seeing his daughter for the first time since all this news about his work had broken, and I was just very surprised. He almost—he did not seem quite like a broken man, that is probably too strong a term, but he was certainly very distressed."
Tuesday, July 15th, the date of the Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, was Kelly's thirty-sixth wedding anniversary, but Janice had remained behind in Cornwall. Kelly took the nine-fifteen train to London. A bomb scare in Parliament Square meant that he had to walk part of the way to the House of Commons and fight his way through a media scrum. The hearing room was warm and stuffy, but Kelly kept his jacket on as he sat before the television cameras. The previous day, he had met with Bryan Wells and Martin Howard, of Defence Intelligence, to discuss what he would say. Kelly had said he would stick to the line that the government's over-all Iraq policy was a matter for ministers. He had asked whether he could also say that he didn't believe he was Gilligan's primary source, to which Howard had replied that he should follow his conscience.
Kelly was a highly intelligent man who took pride in his powers of analysis. He must have known that the main reason he had been sent to Westminster was to discredit Gilligan and provide support for an embattled government. But if he criticized Gilligan's reporting too sharply Gavin Hewitt or Susan Watts might well come forward and defend a BBC colleague. Watts, in particular, could have pointed out that Kelly had twice told her that the September dossier was transformed at the behest of the Downing Street press office.
Understandably, Kelly was cautious. In a voice so soft that he was asked three times to speak up, he described the dossier as a fair representation of the available evidence, and said Gilligan's broadcast was "not a factual account of my interactions with him." Asked whether he was the source of the allegation that Alastair Campbell was responsible for "sexing up" the dossier, he replied, "I cannot recall using the name Campbell in that context. It does not sound like a thing that I would say."
Several M.P.s said Kelly's testimony did not convince them that Gilligan's story had originated with him. Kelly agreed, saying, "I do not believe I am the source." This wasn't what Downing Street wanted to hear, but it won Kelly the sympathy of some members of the committee. Sir John Stanley suggested that Kelly had been thrown to the wolves. Andrew Mackinlay said, "I reckon you are chaff. You have been thrown up to divert our probing. Have you ever felt like a fall guy? You have been set up, have you not?" Kelly refused to be drawn by these provocateurs. "I accept the process that is going on," he told Mackinlay.
The first time Kelly appeared unnerved was when David Chidgey, a Liberal Democrat M.P., asked him about his dealings with Susan Watts. Kelly replied that he had met her on one occasion. Chidgey then read out a lengthy quote:
**{: .break one} ** In the run-up to the dossier the government was obsessed with finding intelligence to justify an immediate Iraqi threat. While we were agreed on the potential Iraqi threat in the future there was less agreement about the threat the Iraqis posed at the moment. That was the real concern, not so much what they had now but what they would have in the future, but that unfortunately was not expressed strongly in the dossier, because that takes the case away for war, to a certain extent. **
Chidgey paused, and then read out another quote:
**{: .break one} ** The 45 minutes was a statement that was made and it got out of all proportion. They were desperate for information. They were pushing hard for information that could be released. That was one that popped up and it was seized on and it was unfortunate that it was. **
When Chidgey had finished, he turned to Kelly and said, "I understand from Ms. Watts that this is the record of a meeting you had with her. Do you still agree with those comments?" Kelly hesitated. "I do not recognize those comments, I have to say," he said awkwardly. Later in the hearing, Richard Ottaway, a Conservative M.P., read parts of the same quote, pointing out that Watts had used it in a report on "Newsnight." Again, Kelly seemed taken aback. "It does not sound like my expression of words," he said. Ottaway pressed him further, saying, "You deny that those are your words?" Kelly replied, "Yes."
Some British journalists believe that these exchanges contain the key to Kelly's death. When he heard his own words read back to him, they argue, he must have realized that his double game—the practice of saying one thing to reporters and another to his superiors—was over. Chidgey had stated live on television that Susan Watts had identified Kelly as the source of her "Newsnight" report. Once Kelly's bosses realized that he had misled them about his contacts with Watts, he would be exposed as a leaker and a liar.
It is a plausible theory, but the evidence supporting it isn't overwhelming. When the hearing ended, Bryan Wells, who had escorted Kelly, congratulated him on his performance. Kelly seemed greatly relieved that his public ordeal was over. Although he had to testify the following day before the Intelligence and Security Committee, the hearing would be held in private. That evening, he spoke with Olivia Bosch. He told her that the questions about the Susan Watts quote had thrown him, but his tone seemed curious rather than alarmed. "Is that the kind of thing I could have said all in one long go?" Bosch recalls him asking.
Kelly also mentioned the Susan Watts quote to his sister, Sarah Pape, who called to find out how he was doing. He added that he had been heartened that a number of friends and colleagues had offered their support. Pape, who is a plastic surgeon, often deals with car-crash victims and other injured people who have suicidal thoughts. In the weeks following this conversation with her brother, she anguished over whether she had missed anything. But she doesn't think she did. "He certainly did not convey to me that he was feeling depressed; and absolutely nothing that would have alerted me to the fact that he might have been considering suicide," she told Lord Hutton.
The next day, Kelly answered questions before the Intelligence and Security Committee with no reporters or cameras present. After the session ended, he seemed to have regained some peace of mind. He told a colleague that the pressure associated with the hearings had been worse than his Ph.D. orals. He also spoke with Bryan Wells about his upcoming trip to Iraq, and they agreed to a tentative departure date of Friday, July 25th, which was just nine days away. In the evening, when Rachel met him at Oxford station, he seemed much more talkative than he had been. He said he was eager to return to Southmoor, so he could do some work on his computer. Rachel persuaded him to stay for dinner. Janice Kelly arrived in Oxford from Cornwall at about eight-thirty. After having dinner with Rachel and her fiancé, Kelly and Janice loaded their bags into his car. Rachel promised to visit Kelly the following evening. During the journey to Southmoor, Kelly didn't say much. When he got home, he went into his study and downloaded some e-mails. Then he went to bed.
On Thursday, July 17th, Kelly got up at about eight-thirty, had breakfast, and went into his study. Andrew Mackinlay, from the Foreign Affairs Committee, had asked the Ministry of Defence to list all the journalists Kelly had met during the previous two years, including Andrew Gilligan, and to supply the dates and purposes of these meetings. In addition, the clerk of the committee had asked Kelly to catalogue all his contacts with journalists, not just meetings. At 9:22 a.m., Kelly sent an e-mail to a colleague, Wing Commander John Clark, who had agreed to collate his replies and pass them on to Bryan Wells for approval. In response to Mackinlay, Kelly named five journalists besides Gilligan that he had met: Jane Corbin and Tom Mangold, of the BBC; Nick Rufford, of the _Sunday Times; Alex Nicoll, of the _Financial Times; and Philip Sen, of _The Engineer. In reply to the clerk of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Kelly provided a list of twenty-four reporters, noting it was "essentially a list of those journalists that I have business cards for or have recorded in my electronic contacts list." The names included "Susan Wells, BBC," an apparent typo, but they didn't include Gavin Hewitt.
At about ten o'clock, Kelly spoke with Clark. He said that he was holding up all right, although his wife had taken things badly and was upset. They talked about Kelly's return to Iraq and confirmed the departure date. "Dr Kelly was very keen to get back to Iraq to support the ISG," Clark told Lord Hutton. After the conversation, he booked Kelly a flight. Kelly also spoke with Olivia Bosch, whom he called to ask for a reporter's name. Bosch got the impression that Kelly was considering adding more contacts with journalists to his lists. "I think I am just going to mention all of them," he told her.
Shortly before noon, Janice went into the study to show Kelly some photographs. He hadn't quite finished. Some senior officials at the Ministry of Defence had suggested restructuring his contacts list to distinguish one-on-one interviews from casual encounters and phone calls. Kelly made the changes, and sent them to Clark. He also spent some time replying to friends and colleagues who had sent him supportive e-mails. Judith Miller, of the New York _Times, had written to him the previous evening, "David, I heard from another member of your fan club that things went well for you today. Hope it's true. J." Kelly wrote back, "I will wait until the end of the week before judging. Many dark actors playing games. Thanks for your support. I appreciate your friendship at this time. Best, David."
The phrase "dark actors playing games" has attracted a lot of attention, but there is no way of telling what Kelly was referring to. After his death, some of his friends initially refused to believe that he had committed suicide, but the physical evidence seems incontrovertible. Still, most of the e-mails Kelly sent suggest that he was looking forward to the coming weeks. "Many thanks for your thoughts," he wrote to one colleague. "It has been difficult. Hopefully it will all blow over by the end of the week and I can travel to Baghdad and get on with the real work." In all, Kelly sent eight e-mails, six of which referred to his upcoming departure for Iraq. At the Hutton inquiry, Keith Hawton, a professor of psychiatry at Oxford University who is one of Britain's leading experts on suicide, was asked about Kelly's state of mind when he wrote these messages. "A logical conclusion would be that he was not thinking of suicide at that time," Hawton replied.
Of course, Kelly may have been keeping his innermost thoughts to himself. He must have known that, even if he returned to Iraq, he wouldn't necessarily be able to put the Gilligan affair behind him. Earlier that morning, the Ministry of Defence had forwarded Kelly copies of four more parliamentary questions, in which Bernard Jenkin, who was then the Conservative spokesman on defense, had demanded to know if his dealings with Gilligan had breached government regulations, and if the Ministry of Defence would be taking disciplinary action against him. The deadline for answering these questions was not until September 8th.
At about twelve-thirty, Janice saw Kelly sitting alone in the living room, something he rarely did. She made some sandwiches, but when they sat down to eat Kelly said hardly anything. In Janice's testimony to Lord Hutton, she said that he looked like a man with a broken heart, but added that she had no idea that he might be considering doing himself harm. She wasn't feeling well herself, and she decided to go upstairs and lie down. Kelly said that he would probably go out for his afternoon walk, and returned to his study.
Wells had by then authorized a final version of Kelly's answers to the first set of parliamentary questions. However, shortly after two, Peter Watkins, the private secretary to the Minister of Defence, called Wing Commander Clark and requested some last-minute changes, including more details about Kelly's contacts with Susan Watts. Just before three, Janice came downstairs and saw Kelly talking on the phone. Clark had called him to discuss what to include about Watts. The news that the Minister of Defence's private office had zeroed in on his contacts with Watts can hardly have been reassuring news to Kelly. He and Clark agreed to say, "He met with Susan Watts (BBC) following his presentation at the Foreign Office Open Day on the 5 November 2002. Other than those noted above, Dr Kelly does not have records of contacts with journalists." No mention was made of Kelly's lengthy conversations with Watts in May. Minutes after hanging up with Clark, Kelly put on his jacket and walked out the door. Janice, who had gone back upstairs, didn't hear him leave.
The summer of 2003 in Britain was one of the hottest and driest on record. Hyde Park turned brown, and the temperature at Heathrow Airport reached a hundred degrees for the first time in a century. On Monday, August 11th, in this strangely tropical atmosphere, Lord Hutton started taking evidence about the circumstances surrounding Kelly's death. When Tony Blair's motorcade arrived at the Royal Courts of Justice on the morning of Thursday, August 28th, the protesters were waiting for him with posters—"wanted: Bush and Blair for War Crimes," "Bliar, Bliar, Iraq's on Fire"—and chants: "Tony, Tony, Tony: Out! Out! Out!" Nick Buxton, a thirty-one-year-old Web-site manager, was wearing a Pinocchio nose. "The problem is the Hutton inquiry looks at only part of the picture," he told me. "It's turned into a row between the BBC and the government. That's not the point. The point is, was the war justified and has it led to the things they said it would?"
For more than two hours, Blair answered questions put to him by James Dingemans, Q.C., Lord Hutton's senior counsel, a strapping former rugby player. "I do not think we need an introduction," Dingemans began. "May I start with the dossiers?" After six and a half years in power, Blair, at fifty, has gray hair above his ears and deep lines on his forehead. (In October, he was briefly hospitalized for an irregular heartbeat.) He said that the September dossier described the available evidence "in a way that was perfectly justified," and insisted that he had been unaware of any unhappiness in the intelligence agencies about its contents. He also stressed how seriously he had taken Andrew Gilligan's claim that the government had deliberately misled the public, saying, "Had the allegation been true, it would have merited my resignation." He denied deliberately leaking Kelly's identity, although on this he was uncharacteristically vague, averring, "It was an extremely difficult and unusual set of circumstances."
After the Prime Minister left the witness stand, Andrew Grice, the political editor of the _Independent, commented to me that he had "got off easy." That may be true, but Kelly's death concentrated public anger about the war in Iraq and gave it a human focus. As Blair's motorcade departed, the early edition of the _Evening Standard was reporting, "50th British Soldier Killed in Iraq as Mob Opens Fire with Guns and Grenades." Twenty-four hours later, Alastair Campbell announced his resignation, saying that he had been planning to leave for some time. Downing Street promptly unveiled an overhaul of its media operation, which was clearly designed to project the image that it was putting spin behind it.
More than seventy witnesses testified at the inquiry. They included former colleagues of Kelly's, family members, journalists, police officers, pathologists, medics, intelligence experts, Downing Street officials, Cabinet ministers, and an expert on the Baha'i faith. Every so often, Lord Hutton, who spent twenty years locking up suspected terrorists in Northern Ireland, would interrupt and, in his aristocratic accent, ask a question. If he liked the answer, he would nod. If he didn't, he would stare at the witness over his half-moon spectacles and emit a long and strangulated "Yeeee-es."
Gilligan was among the first witnesses. Under questioning from Dingemans, he conceded that some of the language in his May 29th broadcasts, especially the earlier one, "was not perfect." Gilligan also admitted that it was he, and not Kelly, who first uttered the phrase "sexed up"; Kelly merely repeated back to him the phrase that launched a thousand headlines. The reporter's standing was further tarnished when it emerged that it was also he, and not Susan Watts, who alerted David Chidgey to Watts's "Newsnight" report and suggested that Kelly must be the source. "That's it!" an excited BBC reporter, who doesn't work for "Today," exclaimed to me when this snippet emerged. "Gilligan killed Kelly by shopping him to the Foreign Affairs Committee."
Gavyn Davies, the BBC's chairman, didn't fare much better. Try as he might, the doleful former investment banker couldn't explain why the BBC had failed to retract at least some of Gilligan's claims. However, the BBC's discomfort was small consolation to the government, which suffered one embarrassment after another as it struggled to justify its treatment of Kelly. On the last day of the hearings, in the middle of October, Sir Kevin Tebbit confirmed that the trail led all the way to Blair, pointing out that the Prime Minister had presided over the crucial meeting, in Downing Street on July 8th, where the decision to identify Kelly was made.
Two of the most dramatic moments came when Sir John Scarlett and Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, who is officially known only as "C," emerged from secrecy to answer Dingemans's questions. Both of them insisted that the compilation of the September dossier had been perfectly proper, but they also revealed some damning information. Dingemans asked Dearlove, who gave his testimony from a remote location, with only an audio feed into the courtroom, whether the dossier had given undue prominence to the forty-five-minutes claim:
{: .break one} ** Dearlove: Well, I think given the misinterpretation that was placed on the forty-five-minutes intelligence, with the benefit of hindsight you can say that is a valid criticism. But I am confident that the intelligence was accurate and that the use made of it was entirely consistent with the original report. Lord* Hutton: Would you just elaborate what you mean by the misinterpretation placed on the forty-five-minutes claim? Dearlove: Well, I think the original report referred to chemical and biological munitions, and that was taken to refer to battlefield weapons. I think what subsequently happened in the reporting was that it was taken that the forty-five minutes applied, let us say, to weapons of a longer range. ***
This exchange surely demonstrates that Gilligan was right when he reported that the dossier had been "sexed up," and that Kelly was right when he told Gavin Hewitt, "No. 10 spin came into play." Iraqi battlefield weapons loaded with chemical and biological warheads, even if they did exist—and none have been found—presented no threat to the stability of the Middle East, still less to Britain and the United States. Documentary evidence provided to the inquiry demonstrated that senior people inside Downing Street knew the evidence about Iraqi W.M.D. was weak. Shortly before the dossier was published, Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff, sent an e-mail to John Scarlett saying, "The document does nothing to demonstrate a threat, let alone an imminent threat, from Saddam. . . . We will need to make it clear in launching the document that we do not claim that we have evidence that he is an imminent threat." This warning had been ignored.
Where Gilligan and Kelly went wrong was in asserting that the dossier was transformed against the wishes of the intelligence agencies. In fact, the people in charge of the agencies went along with Downing Street's deception. Kelly, whose intelligence contacts were fairly low-level, had no way of knowing this. Unfortunately, he had to die for the full truth to emerge.
Lord Hutton's report is expected next month. If it blames Blair for Kelly's death, the Prime Minister might well be forced to resign, but such an assignation of responsibility seems unlikely. Ultimately, Kelly took his own life, for reasons that may never be entirely clear. "I still can't understand it, because he was so excited about going back to Iraq," one of his friends told me. "This was the culmination of ten years of hard labor. This was his life's work." Some people who knew Kelly think that the whole story of his death has yet to be told. "This was a man who reduced Dr. Germ, the Iraqi anthrax expert, to tears in an interrogation," James Bone, the London _Times journalist who broke the story of Kelly's friendship with Mai Pederson, told me. "He was not somebody to buckle under media pressure, unless there was something else going on. There must be some other explanation." It recently emerged that Kelly's mother also killed herself, in 1964, following a stroke, a fact that may or may not be significant.
Blair is still trying, without much success, to persuade the British public that he and President Bush, who visited London last month, did the right thing. Despite the unpopularity of his Iraq policy, he isn't in any immediate peril. The next election doesn't have to be held until the spring of 2006, and the opposition Conservative Party, which recently changed its leader, is in poor shape. But the Prime Minister may never regain his reputation as an honest and straightforward man. A man lining up to get into the Hutton inquiry said of Blair, "If he told you the time, you'd check your watch." ♦_