Blair Dancing With Irony

Jul. 27, 2003. 09:26 AM Toronto Star




SANDRO CONTENTA

LONDON—On the day David Kelly apparently committed suicide in the Oxfordshire countryside, Prime Minister Tony Blair delivered a triumphant address in Washington to a joint session of Congress.

It was the stuff of tragic irony.

Much is still unclear in the saga that led to the 59-year-old British government scientist lying near a wooded path he often strolled, his life oozing from a slashed left wrist.

What is known is that Kelly, Britain's leading specialist on biological weapons, was the anonymous source for news stories claiming the government exaggerated Iraq's threat in order to strengthen its case for war.

The stories sparked a high-stakes battle of credibility between the government and the British Broadcasting Corp., and Kelly got caught in the crossfire.

Once "outed" by the government as the likely source for the stories, Kelly's family says, his life became "intolerable."

And yet, on July 17, the day of his lonely death, Blair faced Congress and suggested publicly for the first time that some of the allegations attributed to Kelly might be proven right after all.

"Can we be sure that Terrorism and weapons of mass destruction will join together?" Blair asked, referring to the kind of imminent threat he used as his main argument for war.

"If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that is at its least responsible for human carnage and suffering," Blair said.

"That is something I am confident history will forgive."

In other words, it may turn out that Iraq was not an imminent threat and that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.

But getting rid of this ruthless dictator was reason enough for war.

In the United States, this shift in justifying the war may cause only a manageable level of public discomfort for President George W. Bush.

But in Britain, where a majority of the people and a good chunk of Blair's own Labour party were against the war to begin with, it is potentially far more damaging for the prime minister.

Add to this the death of an eminent government scientist, and Blair faces his biggest political crisis yet.

A YouGov poll published Friday in the Daily Telegraph suggests Blair's reputation for strong and credible leadership has been seriously shaken by the Kelly affair.

It found that 47 per cent of respondents do not believe a word Blair said, and 63 per cent say they disapprove of his government's record.

Overall, the Labour party received less support than the Tory party for the second month in a row — 34 per cent, compared with 37 per cent in June.

Even the killing of Saddam's notorious sons in a shootout with U.S. soldiers last week didn't distract British media attention from the government's role in the Kelly tragedy.

When Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon appeared at a Thursday press conference with visiting members of Iraq's U.S.-appointed governing council, he was bombarded with questions about his role in outing Kelly, who had worked in his ministry.

There is much talk about Hoon and Alastair Campbell, Blair's powerful director of communications, resigning this fall after the report of an independent inquiry into Kelly's death, headed by Justice Lord Hutton.

Blair has himself faced questions about having "blood on his hands" and a respected member of his party, former cabinet minister Glenda Jackson, has called for his resignation.

She accused Blair of having "sacrificed" Kelly as part of a strategy to deflect questions about whether the government misused intelligence on Iraq in the prelude to war.

"This is not something that's going to just blow over," says Alistair Hay, an expert on chemical weapons at Leeds University and a friend of Kelly.

"A number of us who have been working on chemical- and biological-warfare issues for many years were very concerned about the information and the evidence being put out by the government.

"We felt that there was very little evidence that Iraq presented an immediate threat to the U.K. I very much doubted whether it had usable munitions."

Hay received an e-mail message from Kelly hours before his death. In it, Kelly gave no hint of being depressed or troubled.

He wrote that he looked forward to going to Iraq and continuing the hunt for its alleged weapons.

Perhaps the further irony is that top members of Blair's government may have "hung out to dry" the man best placed to find the justification for war that Blair now desperately wants — Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The Oxford-educated Kelly, scientific adviser to the government's proliferation and arms-control secretariat, was a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998.

He played a key role in uncovering Iraq's biological weapons, which, until 1995, Baghdad denied having.

Kelly advised the government on Iraq's weapons and had security clearance to read intelligence information.

He helped put together parts of a government dossier made public last September, which stressed that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction "within 45 minutes of an order to use them."

Kelly was also in the habit of giving off-the-record briefings to journalists.

On May 22, he met Andrew Gilligan, the defence correspondent for BBC radio's Today program, which sets the agenda for much of the day's political debate.

A week later, Gilligan broadcast a story quoting an unnamed British official, involved in the September dossier, alleging that Blair's office "transformed" intelligence to make the dossier "sexier."

Gilligan said his source had this to say about the 45-minute claim: "That information was not in the original draft. It was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn't reliable."

Blair's office went ballistic.


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`This is not something that's going to just blow over'

Alistair Hay, Leeds University chemical weapons expert and friend of David Kelly

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Already steaming at what it considered the BBC's biased, anti-war reporting during the conflict, Campbell and powerful ministers flatly denied the accusation and repeatedly demanded a retraction or apology.

At about the same time, Kelly also spoke to two BBC television reporters, Gavin Hewitt and Susan Watts. Watts is the only one who taped her interview with Kelly and the recording is likely to be presented at the Hutton inquiry.

Watts quotes her source as saying that the 45-minute claim had "got out of all proportion" because Blair's office was "desperate for information" about Saddam's immediate threat.

Once the stories were out, the hunt for the mole was on.

On Tuesday, Blair "emphatically" denied to journalists that he authorized the leak of Kelly's name to the media, calling the accusation "completely untrue."

On July 19, the day after Kelly's body was discovered, Hoon had made a similar denial: "I am not aware that his name was leaked. It was certainly not leaked by me and I assure you that we made great efforts to ensure Dr. Kelly's anonymity."

But the facts seem to tell a different story.

On June 30, apparently after being asked by a colleague whether he was the source, Kelly told his manager at the ministry of defence that he had spoken to Gilligan.

The next week, Hoon wrote to the chairperson of the BBC governors, Gavyn Davies, asking him to confirm whether Kelly was the source.

In his July 10 reply, Davies declines and says the BBC "will not be making any more comments" about the matter.

At the same time, both the ministry and Blair's office were giving reporters clues to the source's identity, describing him, for example, as a former U.N. weapons inspector.

The ministry then told reporters it would confirm or deny the names put to its press officers. The Guardian submitted three names and the last one — Kelly — was confirmed. The Times also received confirmation after submitting 20 names.

By mid-week, the ministry tried to justify the unusual "confirm or deny" policy by what it said was the need to refute BBC assertions that Kelly was a "senior intelligence source."

Few observers believe Hoon or key ministry officials would have made the decision to identify Kelly without the approval of Blair's office or, more specifically, of Campbell.

And if Campbell was involved, did Blair know of the decision?

The manoeuvres to name Kelly came a day after an all-party committee of the legislature concluded that the government "did not mislead parliament" during the push for war.

The Labour-dominated committee criticized the government, however, for overstating key claims about Iraq's weapons, including that Iraq could execute an order to launch biological or chemical weapons within 45 minutes.

It also condemned the government for plagiarizing material lifted from an academic article on the Internet and "misrepresenting" it as intelligence information.

With a tie-breaking vote from the committee's Labour chairperson, it rejected charges — made by Gilligan in a subsequent freelance newspaper article, but not in his radio story — that Campbell was directly responsible for "sexing-up" the September dossier.

Finally, it concluded that "the jury was still out" on the accuracy of Blair's main reason for war — the imminent threat of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

The report allowed both the government and the BBC to claim some sort of vindication and could have been the basis of a truce in the credibility war. But the government upped the ante and named Kelly.

Once Kelly was outed, the legislative committee called him as a witness.

He looked like a hunted man when he faced it on July 15, with two defence ministry police officers sitting behind him.

His voice was often inaudible and his answers were at times evasive.

When he didn't immediately agree to a demand to produce a list of all the journalists he had spoken to during his career, a Labour MP warned him about defying the "high court" of parliament — something the committee is certainly not.

Kelly was reluctant to admit that he had spoken to Watts and denied speaking to Hewitt, which the BBC now says he had.

He then denied having told Gilligan that the government doctored intelligence information and further denied that he was the main source of the story.

Both these statements question whether the BBC embellished what Kelly said, although Gilligan insists he accurately reported the conversation.

The committee members suddenly shifted tactics, calling Kelly "the fall guy" used by the government to divert attention from the real issues.

But when Kelly did speak to the real issue — whether Iraq was an imminent threat before the war — the committee members showed remarkably little interest.

Asked at one point if he believed Iraq could deploy biological or chemical weapons within 45 minutes of an order, Kelly said: "It makes a number of assumptions — that the weapons were all ready to go, in the right place with whatever system was being used, with the right tracking to attack — and that is very unlikely.

"We are talking in terms of Iraq, in terms of what we knew 10 years ago, a country that filled its weapons to use them; it did not maintain a stockpile of filled weapons, with the exception of mustard gas.

"It is actually quite a long and convoluted process to go from having bulk agent and munitions to actually getting them to the bunker for storage and then issue them and subsequently deploy them."

At another point, Kelly said there was only a 30 per cent chance that Iraq possessed chemical weapons before the war.

But that statement — which completely contradicted Blair's intelligence dossier — elicited no reaction or follow-up questions from the committee members.

Three days later, Kelly was found dead after telling his family he was going for a walk near his home in central England.

During a recent lecture, Kelly said that, after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, he had "never realized that Saddam Hussein would dictate the next 10 years of my life."

The fallout from the second war on Saddam seems to have dictated his death.

And now could dictate the future of Blair's government.