An Inconvenient Death Page 2

  Among Dr Kelly’s most significant achievements was his lead role in an inspection mission in Iraq in the mid-1990s which forced the country to admit to having a biological warfare programme. For this, in the Queen’s birthday honours list in 1996, he was awarded the Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George (CMG), which ranks just below a knighthood. The citation referred to his contribution to the UK’s biological warfare defence programme and the success of his inspection duties in Iraq.

  As well as being one of the leading chemical and biological experts in the world, he was also the husband of thirty-five years of Janice, a retired teacher, and father of three grown-up daughters, one of whom, Rachel, was about to get married. Bearded, avuncular, hard-working, with a sense of humour and varied interests, he had many friends and had clearly made a success of his professional life.

  Given the defence brief Gilligan covered, Dr Kelly was certainly a very useful source, but in no way did he ‘belong’ to the reporter exclusively: Dr Kelly was working for the Ministry of Defence and often spoke to journalists from all over the world who were interested in his area of expertise. Indeed, his name and telephone number had been in the BBC’s central database of contacts since 1988 and it was not unusual for him to be quoted in news reports.

  Gilligan had recently returned from Iraq, from where he had filed reports for the BBC about the West’s invasion of the country, and Dr Kelly was curious to hear what he had learned while there.

  If the meeting had a specific purpose as far as Gilligan was concerned, it was to establish from Dr Kelly why he thought no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. The ability of the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, to deploy such an arsenal at forty-five minutes’ notice had for months been cited by Tony Blair’s government as the chief reason for the invasion on 20 March, but no weapons store had ever been found.

  They sat down shortly after 4 p.m. Having ordered a Coca-Cola and an Appletise, the two men spoke on an unattributable basis for about an hour, with Gilligan taking notes on his electronic personal organizer after Dr Kelly agreed that he was happy for him to do so.

  According to Gilligan, as the conversation progressed Dr Kelly told him that, in his opinion, Iraq continued to pose a potential threat to the West and might still possess weapons of mass destruction. Gilligan’s notes recorded that Dr Kelly was even prepared to speculate on this possibility in percentage terms, with the likelihood of the existence of weapons being, apparently, up to ‘30 per cent’.

  However, Dr Kelly allegedly then went on to tell Gilligan that there was considerable unease within the intelligence services about the accuracy of a dossier which had been published by the British government on 24 September 2002. Titled Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Assessment of the British Government, it had been used to sell the case of the need for military action in Iraq. It was in this document that the infamous ‘forty-five-minute’ claim was first made.

  Dr Kelly told Gilligan that he had had some involvement in the production of this dossier, writing the sections on the history of UN inspections and about Iraq’s weapons programmes over the previous three decades, from 1971 to 1998. But he had had nothing to do with the dossier’s central claim – clearly stated four times, including in the Foreword written by the Prime Minister, Tony Blair – that Iraq could deploy chemical and nuclear weapons within ‘forty-five minutes’. This terrifying ‘fact’ had been duly splashed on the front pages of some newspapers. For example, the day after publication, 25 September 2002, The Sun informed its three million readers:

  ‘BRITS 45 MINS FROM DOOM’

  From a public relations perspective, the dossier was a success for the British government. There could not have been a more effective way of ratcheting up the tension and, by extension, increasing the likelihood of gaining public support for military action in Iraq. And yet here was Dr Kelly, a man who commanded worldwide respect in biological weapons matters, apparently suggesting to Gilligan that the ‘forty-five-minute’ claim had been included against the wishes of the experts who drew up the dossier.

  Among Gilligan’s contemporaneous electronic notes from the now-infamous Charing Cross Hotel meeting are the following: ‘[Dossier] transformed week before publication to make it sexier... The classic was the forty-five minutes... Most people in intelligence weren’t happy with it because it didn’t reflect the considered view they were putting forward.’ There is also a reference to ‘Campbell’, and then ‘not in original draft – dull, he asked if anything else could go in’. The ‘Campbell’ referred to was Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s spin doctor. According to Gilligan, Dr Kelly apparently told him that Campbell had been personally involved in the transformation of the September dossier.

  Without question, Dr Kelly had handed Gilligan a potential scoop, and one that had cost just £4.15, the price of the two soft drinks they had ordered. If it was true, it was extraordinary to think that Downing Street officials – including Campbell, a former Daily Mirror journalist with no military or intelligence background whatsoever – had deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq to the West in order to justify going to war.

  It was also a fascinating insight into how Tony Blair’s government operated that fell squarely within the public interest.

  After they parted company, an understandably excited Gilligan immediately carried out some checks in an attempt to corroborate what he had been told. These included analysing the September 2002 dossier itself. Officially, it had been produced by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), the arm of the Cabinet Office which oversees intelligence and security matters. Gilligan knew his way around some of the earlier JIC assessments on weapons of mass destruction and in his view the language used in the September dossier did indeed appear to be far more definite than usual.

  He also spoke to other contacts and went through a series of newspaper cuttings, discovering that references to the much-vaunted forty-five-minute claim had virtually disappeared from government speeches made in the months after publication of the September dossier and before the outbreak of war. Indeed, it had not been mentioned specifically by Blair during his eve-of-war speech to MPs in the House of Commons on 18 March 2003. It looked as though the government might well have had second thoughts about the wisdom of committing itself so firmly to the idea and quietly dropped it.

  Despite encouragement from people who worked in and around intelligence that he was on to something, Gilligan has said he was unable to find a second source to back up exactly what Dr Kelly told him that day. Everything which Gilligan could find out independently indicated that Dr Kelly was right to doubt the forty-five-minute claim, however, and the reporter was able to satisfy his Radio 4 Today programme editor, Kevin Marsh, of this. In fact Marsh himself had heard from two separate sources – Cabinet Minister Clare Short and a senior intelligence contact of his own – opinions which clearly echoed what Dr Kelly had said.

  Also at the front of the BBC journalists’ minds would have been the dramatic resignation of Labour MP Robin Cook, the Leader of the House and former Foreign Secretary. He had quit the government immediately before the Iraq invasion because he did not believe, as the administration of which he had been a member had claimed, that the country had a stock of weapons of mass destruction.

  With Marsh’s backing, Gilligan was given clearance to run his report on the Today programme on 29 May, exactly one week after the Charing Cross Hotel meeting. That morning at 6.07, in a live, unscripted preview ‘teaser’ summary aired eighty minutes before his main Today report, Gilligan unwittingly fired the starting gun on the series of events which ultimately culminated in Dr Kelly’s death. Most memorably, Gilligan said on air:

  What we’ve been told by one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up that [September 2002] dossier was that actually the government probably knew that that 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 do
ssier it was actually rather 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 Downing Street, our source says, ordered it to be sexed up, to be made more exciting, and ordered more facts to be discovered.

  For some reason, in this live, unscripted broadcast Gilligan had changed the story agreed the night before between himself and his team of editors and producers at Today by inserting the allegation that ‘the government probably knew that that forty-five-minute figure was wrong even before it decided to put it in’. This was a significant upgrade from the original assertion he had been expected by his BBC bosses to make, which was simply that ‘the intelligence agencies... didn’t necessarily believe the claim’.

  Furthermore, originally Gilligan had been expected by his bosses to say that the official to whom he had spoken had merely been ‘involved’ in the dossier. In the unscripted broadcast, this assertion was elevated to the official having been one of those ‘in charge of drawing [it] up’.

  Neither of these claims was ever repeated again in any BBC bulletin, either on radio or television, but the damage was done: these words became central to the ensuing scandal and their consequences are likely to be associated with Gilligan for the rest of his life.

  CAMPBELL COUNTERATTACKS

  Perhaps surprisingly, given its content, Gilligan’s 6.07 a.m. broadcast caused little more than a ripple in the first instance. A Downing Street press officer called Anne Shevas made a written complaint to the Today programme on the day of the broadcast, grumbling that it had not reported sufficiently the government’s denial of Gilligan’s allegations. That was the only official reaction it generated at the time.

  Three days later, on 1 June, The Mail on Sunday published an article written by Gilligan which was based on his BBC report. This newspaper piece differed in one significant respect from that report because it claimed that Gilligan’s source had specifically named Alastair Campbell as the person who had ordered the September dossier to be ‘sexed up’. Indeed, the name ‘Campbell’ was written in capital letters in the newspaper’s headline. When Gilligan had spoken on the Today programme, he had not mentioned Campbell by name.

  It was well known among journalists that Campbell did not like the cut of Gilligan’s jib and considered him a trouble-maker. On that basis alone, Campbell was unlikely to let this accusation pass. But what Gilligan had suggested first on the BBC and then in greater detail in The Mail on Sunday was of major international significance. It was career-threatening for all concerned if substantiated.

  On 6 June, eight days after Gilligan’s original broadcast, Campbell sent the BBC a four-page letter complaining that Gilligan had broken the Corporation’s own guidelines by relying on a single source – as opposed to multiple sources – for his 6.07 a.m. broadcast. Campbell also claimed that Gilligan did not understand the role of the JIC. The BBC’s lawyers batted this away in a written response on 11 June, but the next day Campbell returned to the attack, essentially repeating his earlier complaint. Correspondence continued until 16 June, at which point the row seemed to have faded away.

  A few days later things changed for Campbell, however, and the dispute over Gilligan’s broadcast was reignited. This was because two weeks earlier, on 3 June, Campbell had been asked to give evidence to the Foreign Affairs select committee (FAC), which had recently begun an inquiry into the decision to go to war with Iraq. He had refused the invitation.

  Part of the committee’s inquiry concerned a second Iraq dossier, which had appeared a few months after the notorious September dossier containing the dubious forty-five-minute claim. This second dossier, published under the direction of Campbell in February 2003, was seen by some as a further attempt to strengthen the government’s case for going to war.

  But the second dossier quickly became known as the ‘dodgy dossier’ after it emerged that Campbell’s staff had lifted much of the material it contained from the internet – complete with grammatical errors – and presented it as their own careful research and analysis.

  This largely plagiarized piece of work was an adaptation of an essay written by a Dr Ibrahim al-Marashi and had originally been published in the Middle East Review of International Affairs in 2002. Dr al-Marashi was a research associate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California. Without his knowledge, his text was turned into the February dossier overseen by Campbell and titled, somewhat ironically under the circumstances in which it was produced, ‘Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation’.

  Channel 4 News had broken the plagiarism story on 6 February 2003; Campbell was utterly humiliated. Criticism of Campbell was mounting over this incredible blunder, and a second invitation was issued to him by the FAC. Snubbing the FAC twice in the space of a few weeks was considered a serious breach of parliamentary etiquette, and he was forced to accept, agreeing to give evidence on 25 June.

  Gilligan had already given evidence to the FAC the week before, on 19 June. When he had been asked by the committee about his single source, all he would reveal was that the person was ‘one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up the dossier’. He added: ‘I can tell you that he is a source of long standing, well known to me, closely connected with the question of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, easily sufficiently senior and credible to be worth reporting.’

  During his evidence session the following week Campbell put in what was widely seen as a rather hysterical performance. He used the three hours available to him largely for his own ends, admitting the central charge that February’s ‘dodgy dossier’ was indeed unreliable, but devoting most of the session to lambasting the BBC for what he saw as its false reporting of the Iraq issue. Campbell also claimed, on thin evidence, that the BBC had suggested Tony Blair was a liar.

  In his 2004 book Inside Story, ex-BBC Director-General Greg Dyke wrote: ‘It is clear that the whole attack on the BBC from Campbell [at the FAC hearing] was a means of diverting attention away from the “dodgy dossier” and the disgraceful way he and his team had produced it.’ Dyke added that Campbell ‘wanted a public bust-up for political reasons’.

  Campbell had apparently calculated that the reporters watching him give evidence to the FAC would be far more likely to latch onto the distracting new row he was advancing – that the BBC had it in for Downing Street and the Prime Minister – and far less likely to spend time picking over the bones of the older argument relating to the ‘dodgy dossier’. His instinct was right.

  Raising his voice theatrically, Campbell told the FAC: ‘I simply say, in relation to the BBC story, it is a lie... that is continually repeated, and until we get an apology for it I will keep making sure that Parliament and people like yourselves know that it was a lie.’

  Campbell’s private diary entry for that day recorded his satisfaction at what he had said at the FAC hearing. He wrote: ‘I felt a lot better. Flank opened on the BBC.’ Little did he know that the fight for which he was spoiling would end with the death of Dr Kelly only three weeks later.

  THE UNMASKING OF DR KELLY

  On 26 June, the day after the FAC hearing, Campbell stepped up his campaign against the BBC with another long letter to its Director of News, Richard Sambrook, this time demanding immediate answers to twelve questions. Question three was: ‘Does [the BBC] still stand by the allegation made on that day [29 May by Gilligan] that both we and the intelligence agencies knew the forty-five-minute claim to be wrong and inserted it despite knowing that? Yes or no?’

  Provocatively, Campbell shared his letter with the press as a way of forcing the BBC’s hand. The BBC responded rapidly, standing by Gilligan and the story, but Campbell was so aggravated by the BBC’s refusal to apologize for its general coverage of the Iraq issue that he carried on with his war of attrition. His diary entry for 26 June even notes that he wanted to ‘nail Gilligan completely’.

  The next day, Friday, 27 June, Campbell
took his adolescent son Calum, plus a friend of Calum’s, to watch the tennis at Wimbledon, but his mind was clearly on other matters. This explains why in the late afternoon he left them to make their own way home while he went unexpectedly to the studios of Channel 4 News in central London shortly before its evening bulletin began at 7 to give an interview to the programme’s presenter, Jon Snow. Such was Campbell’s status as Blair’s spin doctor at the time, he was able to secure this right of audience at short notice.

  He was in an excitable state, and insisted live on air to Snow that the BBC ‘just accept for once they have got it wrong’ [about Gilligan’s claim on the Today programme]. During the ten-minute interview he also said the BBC had ‘not a shred of evidence to substantiate the allegation’ [made in Gilligan’s Today broadcast]. Again, he demanded an apology.

  This hastily arranged encounter bore all the hallmarks of a man obsessed. Even Campbell’s long-term girlfriend, Fiona Millar, privately criticized his Channel 4 News performance afterwards. But he would still not let the matter drop.

  Parallel arguments were developing: the BBC’s interest was moving in the direction of asking whether there really were any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; Campbell’s interest seemed to lie in painting Gilligan as an unreliable young journalist and the BBC as a partial broadcaster.

  Campbell’s Friday-night showdown with Jon Snow guaranteed further coverage of the row in the weekend papers, and by Monday, 30 June pressure surrounding the story was still intensifying. Now, though, the media’s attention was turning to the identity of Gilligan’s source.