An Inconvenient Death Read online

  Rufford had also made use of his observation that his long-standing contact had been ‘looking pale and tired’, words which were hardly likely to improve relations between the two men. The piece then added: ‘Kelly admitted the affair had played heavily on his mind since it broke six weeks ago.’ This arguably suggested guilt or wrongdoing. And Dr Kelly was also alleged to have told Rufford: ‘It has been a very difficult time, as you can imagine.’

  Dr Kelly clearly believed he deserved better from someone he had considered a friend, and was again apparently upset and angry. He was also no doubt worried that his bosses at the MoD would take a dim view of his having spoken to a newspaper reporter without their knowledge.

  Rufford, however, was even-handed in that he did emphasize in his copy the crucial point that Dr Kelly did not believe he was the source of the BBC report which had led to this situation. Rufford’s article quoted Dr Kelly as saying: ‘I know Gilligan. But I did not talk to him about [Alastair] Campbell’s role because I didn’t know anything about it.’

  Dr Kelly left Cornwall late that morning and by 5 p.m. rang his wife to let her know that he had arrived safely at Rachel’s house in Oxford. Rachel had been working that day but returned home at about 7 p.m. to find her father waiting for her. He was visibly tired but, having been driving most of the day, this was perhaps unsurprising.

  While they relaxed in the garden Dr Kelly confided that he felt concerned about appearing in front of TV cameras at the forthcoming FAC meeting. There was also unhappy talk about the MoD and the circumstances in which his name had been leaked, but Dr Kelly said friends and colleagues were showing him support. During their chat he also told Rachel that he was hoping to go out to Baghdad to carry on with his work and would fly there either on Monday, 21 July or Friday, 25 July.

  Supper that evening, at which they were joined by Rachel’s fiancé, David Wilkins, was not perhaps the strained affair Rachel might have feared, with her father apparently having started to unwind. He went to bed at about 10 p.m. after making some further phone calls but it was Rachel, not Dr Kelly, who spoke to Mrs Kelly again that evening.

  PREPARATIONS

  On Monday, 14 July Dr Kelly left his daughter’s house after breakfast and walked the short distance to Oxford Station, where he caught the 9.15 train to Paddington. His business in London that day was focused exclusively on preparing for the two select committee hearings.

  His boss, Bryan Wells, had cancelled an important trip to Washington so that he could see Dr Kelly to discuss the hearings with him. They met in Wells’s office at about 11 a.m., with Dr Kelly appearing composed. Their conversation consisted of Wells advising Dr Kelly which areas he believed the FAC would wish to cover with him the following day. After lunch they met with Martin Howard, Deputy Chief of Defence Intelligence at the MoD. Howard had been asked by Sir Kevin Tebbit, Dr Kelly’s ultimate boss, to talk Dr Kelly through the likely lines of questioning from both the FAC and the ISC and to satisfy himself that Dr Kelly was sufficiently prepared for these meetings. It was certainly ironic that the MoD was helping Dr Kelly to prepare for these two committee appearances given that it was the Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, who had pushed for them to take place.

  Minutes taken that afternoon show that there was no question of the MoD seeking to impose on Dr Kelly the line he should take when he faced MPs. He was advised that he was free to tell his own story. Howard outlined to Dr Kelly the different bases on which the FAC and ISC were constituted, and their interests in the government’s policy towards Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. He then listed the areas on which the two committees might want to question Dr Kelly. These were his role in government and relationship with the media; his role in drawing up the government’s September 2002 dossier; and his meeting with Andrew Gilligan.

  For the ISC meeting he was also told to expect questions on his access to intelligence in general, and specifically to intelligence on the ‘forty-five-minute’ claim. It was explained to him that other general topics might come up, including what Dr Kelly thought of government policy on Iraq; whether he believed he was Gilligan’s source; and what disciplinary action was being taken against Dr Kelly for his contact with the media, which most people incorrectly seemed to think was unauthorized.

  Following this meeting Dr Kelly sought and was granted a conversation with Patrick Lamb, Deputy Head of the Counter-proliferation Department in the Foreign Office, and a man who considered himself a friend and admirer of the weapons inspector. During their chat, which took place by telephone, Dr Kelly was asked whether he thought his pension rights might be in peril. He told Lamb that he understood they were not at risk. Relieved on behalf of Dr Kelly, Lamb tried to reassure him that he believed the worst was already over.

  Dr Kelly then asked Lamb if he would also attend the FAC hearing, but was told that this would be impossible. Although, in the complicated world of Dr Kelly, the MoD paid his salary, he was effectively on loan to that department from the Foreign Office, meaning that the MoD reimbursed its sister department this expense. Dr Kelly would be appearing at the FAC as an MoD official, however. The FAC meeting had been sanctioned by Geoff Hoon, so Lamb had no professional locus in the matter.

  Dr Kelly returned to his daughter Rachel’s house in Oxford late that afternoon, letting himself in with a key she had given him. On her return, Rachel found him to be relaxed, if a little contemplative, and in better form than he had been the previous evening. Nonetheless, she remained concerned for him.

  Supper followed, after which Dr Kelly took several phone calls from friends. He was overheard by his daughter telling one caller that he was ‘depressed’ by the media coverage he had attracted and received and unhappy that he was essentially living in exile. Sadly for him, things were about to become even more disagreeable.

  FALL GUY?

  Tuesday, 15 July was the Kellys’ thirty-sixth wedding anniversary. Dr Kelly caught his usual 9.15 train to Paddington.

  As he journeyed to London, his understanding was that he would be giving evidence that day first to the ISC in a private session, and then to the FAC in what was being talked of in the confines of the Westminster media bubble as a show trial complete with TV cameras. This was an unappetizing prospect for a reserved man like Dr Kelly, but in the event his luck turned from bad to worse.

  It was one of the hottest days of the year, with temperatures in London touching the 90s Fahrenheit. On top of this, Dr Kelly’s expectation of the day’s agenda was about to disintegrate. He was originally advised that he would be seen by the ISC in the Cabinet Office building in Whitehall at midday. The televised FAC hearing was scheduled to follow, down the road in a House of Commons committee room, at 2.30 p.m.

  Dr Kelly, accompanied by his line manager Bryan Wells and Wing Commander John Clark, who was a friend and colleague of Dr Kelly in the MoD, went to the Cabinet Office for the ISC meeting. They sat down and drank coffee while they waited for the committee members to arrive.

  Earlier that morning, however, and unbeknown to Dr Kelly, the clerk to the ISC had informed Geoff Hoon’s office that Dr Kelly’s appearance before the committee had been postponed until the following day. It seems that Dr Kelly and his colleagues were the last to be told about this change of plan. This would have been a small but significant humiliation.

  Having been advised that a car had been arranged to take them the short distance from the Old War Office building to the Commons for the FAC hearing, the trio returned to the MoD to wait. Dr Kelly was understandably anxious about having to give evidence in front of TV cameras anyway, but this extra time spent hanging around no doubt forced him to reflect upon the fact that his ordeal was to be staggered over two days.

  Then, to compound matters, there was a bomb scare in Whitehall as they were walking to the Old War Office building to meet the car. Dr Kelly, Bryan Wells, Wing Commander Clark and Kate Wilson, the Chief Press Officer of the MoD who had joined them, were therefore forced to begin walking up to Trafalgar Square and then down Pall Ma
ll to get to the FAC, a fair distance on a blisteringly hot day when late for an important meeting. The car did eventually manage to pick them up en route, and then dropped them off at the Commons as planned. But on his way into the Commons, Dr Kelly also had to run the gauntlet of the photographers waiting for him outside.

  As he entered the stuffy, carpeted committee room, where electric fans buzzed instead of quiet air conditioning, he would have been forgiven for thinking that some malign force had conspired not only to prolong his humiliation but to force him to hurry to the televised meeting which he had been dreading. Rows of reporters and other observers were waiting for him, not just the group of MPs who had been instructed by Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon to interrogate him.

  And yet, despite all the hurdles which were placed in his way, Dr Kelly appeared composed and performed remarkably well in front of the FAC. A view has gained credibility that this committee hearing was the event which perhaps tipped Dr Kelly over the edge and led directly to his death, but close analysis tells another story.

  The hearing is very well known for one short piece of parliamentary pantomime provided by the then Labour MP Andrew Mackinlay, in which he seemed to accuse Dr Kelly in an aggressive way of being ‘chaff’. The brief exchange between the two men, about five minutes before the end of the fifty-one-minute session, went as follows:

  ANDREW MACKINLAY: ‘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?’

  DR KELLY: ‘That is not a question I can answer.’

  ANDREW MACKINLAY: ‘But you feel that?’

  DR KELLY: ‘No, not at all. I accept the process that is going on.’

  Undoubtedly, Dr Kelly appeared to buckle slightly at this point in the proceedings, wearied no doubt by the heat and the sheer relentlessness of the occasion. After all, Mackinlay’s questions were logged in the official record of the occasion produced by Hansard as numbers 167 and 168 out of a total of 179 points raised, showing just how much information had been discussed with Dr Kelly in a relatively short space of time.

  Ironically, however, anyone who watches a recording of the hearing in full might see things differently. It is true that Mackinlay’s general manner can at times appear abrupt, but those who know him understand that his personality is the very opposite. In a professional sense he cared greatly about what was going on at the time, and was keen to try to help Dr Kelly out of the hole into which he thought he had been thrown by the MoD and the government spin machine. In fact, Mackinlay was trying to sympathize with Dr Kelly by telling him that he believed the scientist had been served up to the FAC on a plate by the government and/or the MoD as a diversion, to prevent them from reaching the truth. Mackinlay thought – and still believes – that Dr Kelly was being used to prevent the FAC from confirming the identity of Gilligan’s principal source, whom Mackinlay did not believe Dr Kelly to be. Mackinlay later felt such remorse over the way his words were interpreted that, after Dr Kelly’s death, he apologized publicly for his remarks. Understandably, Dr Kelly saw things differently at the time.

  On that day, though – and perhaps even still now – Mackinlay’s true intention was lost on the vast majority of people, who will have never watched the hearing in full, nor read the Hansard account of it, but instead will have seen this brief exchange on out-of-context television news clips. Viewers would have watched the tetchy MP raise his voice to a quietly spoken, bespectacled scientist, and assumed the former was haranguing the latter. The impression of Dr Kelly formed by thousands, possibly millions, via the news that evening would have been that he was a pathetic punchbag being bullied by a grandstanding Labour MP. Indeed, Dr Kelly himself told his daughter, Rachel, afterwards that he thought Mackinlay had been an ‘utter bastard’.

  All eleven members of the cross-party committee attended that day’s hearing. They were ranged in the traditional horseshoe formation while Dr Kelly sat alone at a table facing them, with nothing but a large bottle of water and a glass for company. In the row of seats immediately behind him were Bryan Wells, Wing Commander Clark and Kate Wilson. Many of the committee members took off their jackets. Dr Kelly, dressed in a pale suit, did not because, he later told his half-sister, Sarah Pape, he was sweating so much.

  But the session was not the free-for-all in which Dr Kelly was savaged that most people might assume. It was for the most part a good-humoured affair. Within four minutes Dr Kelly was smiling broadly at Labour MP Bill Olner who, when Dr Kelly was asked to speak up because the noise of the electric fans was drowning out his voice, said: ‘I am sure members of the public at the back cannot hear you.’

  The fans were so loud that they were switched off after about ten minutes, allowing Dr Kelly to be heard more easily. It is fair to say that he did not seem like a man who ever spoke in a loud voice or forceful manner, but judging from a recording of his performance that day, and bearing in mind the many difficult circumstances of the hearing, he certainly did not come across as a pushover either. Indeed, in a lengthy TV interview he gave in the privacy of his own home to an Australian broadcaster the month before he was found dead, Dr Kelly spoke in exactly the same quiet and thoughtful manner as he did in front of the FAC.

  During the hearing, there were eight times when Dr Kelly laughed or smiled in genuine amusement. Perhaps his heartiest laugh came when he was asked by the committee Chairman, Donald Anderson, ‘What lessons have you learned from this episode?’ Dr Kelly’s quick-witted reply was: ‘Never to talk to a journalist again, I think.’ He spoke fluently and steadily. He was not struck dumb at any point. He barely stuttered and seemed confident for the most part. He did not fidget too much. This was impressive for someone who was asked so many questions in less than an hour.

  Anybody who watches Peter Kosminsky’s TV drama about Dr Kelly, The Government Inspector, first screened on Channel 4 in 2005, will find that the actor Mark Rylance portrayed him as a rather feeble, submissive man who seemed to live in a world of his own. On the strength of this hearing, held in an excessively hot, packed room in the glare of TV cameras, Rylance’s depiction was not accurate. Dr Kelly was a leader in his chosen field of biological weapons. He had even been on an Iraqi hit list as recently as 1997, according to one of his former UN colleagues, Dick Spertzel, who was also, like Dr Kelly, a biological weapons expert and had met Dr Kelly in Iraq. To do the complicated and pressurized work which Dr Kelly had done, he simply could not have been a shrinking violet, even if he was quietly spoken.

  The trickiest point of the FAC session came when he was questioned about his contact not with Gilligan, but with another BBC journalist, Susan Watts, the science correspondent of the BBC Two programme Newsnight.

  Having established that Dr Kelly had only ever met Watts once, in November 2002, the following long quote, attributed to Dr Kelly, was put to him by committee member David Chidgey, a Liberal Democrat MP. Chidgey claimed that these words were taken from notes made by Watts during or after their meeting:

  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... 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 is unfortunate that it was. That is why there is an argument between the intelligence services and Number 10, because they had picked up on it and once they had picked up on it you cannot pull back from it, so many people will say ‘Well, we are not sure about that’ because the wordsmithing is actually quite important.

  Chidgey asked Dr Kelly if he a
greed with the comments. As Dr Kelly believed that he had said nothing of the sort to Watts during their only meeting the previous November, he was able to deny having said those words ‘on that occasion’. He said he did not recognize the words.

  Tory MP Richard Ottaway then pursued the same line of questioning. He read the same quote from Watts’s notes again, asking Dr Kelly if they were his words, to which Dr Kelly replied: ‘It does not sound like my expression of words. It does not sound like a quote from me.’ Ottaway then asked directly if Dr Kelly denied that those were his words. Committing himself to a position, he said simply: ‘Yes.’

  Why were these two MPs suddenly so interested in what Dr Kelly had – or hadn’t – said to Susan Watts? Her name had never been mentioned in relation to Dr Kelly before, yet these politicians appeared to have done a considerable amount of research into her recent BBC broadcasts. The answer, it later emerged, was that Andrew Gilligan had sent this information to Chidgey. Gilligan did so, apparently, having studied one of Watts’s Newsnight reports from June 2003 and allegedly guessed that Dr Kelly had spoken to her. This was certainly extremely unhelpful to Dr Kelly – whom Gilligan had previously been only too happy to use as a source – given that Dr Kelly’s contact with Watts had never been of concern to anybody up until then. If this was an attempt by Gilligan to take some of the heat off himself by showing that he wasn’t the only BBC journalist who had spoken to Dr Kelly in recent weeks, it gave no thought to the position in which it might put Dr Kelly.