Episode 1 delves into the context around the death of Dr Kelly in the Summer of 2003 as he becomes the assumed source of a story that has the potential to undermine the Labour government's excuse for war against Iraq in 2003.
Episode 1 delves into the context around the death of Dr Kelly in the Summer of 2003 as he becomes the assumed source of a story that has the potential to undermine the Labour government's excuse for war against Iraq in 2003.
SAM - In July 2003, government scientist and weapons inspector Dr David Kelly was found dead in a wood in Oxfordshire.
Just a few months earlier, in March 2003, Prime Minister Tony Blair had taken Britain into an unpopular war against Iraq on the basis of evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed against the West in a mere 45 minutes.
It was a claim that few believed and when it was publicly disputed by the BBC, Dr Kelly found himself at the centre of a huge international scandal.
Kelly had been exposed as the assumed source who told a BBC journalist that the 45 minute claim was, in fact, made up.
Overnight, Dr Kelly’s formerly quiet life that he’d spent serving his country was turned upside down.
What turned out to be the last few weeks of Dr Kelly’s life were tough.
According to the official version of events, dr kelly was hounded from his home by the press.
He was made to endure intense public scrutiny.
And he faced the potential ruin of his thirty year career and even possibly the loss of his pension.
These are some of the key factors offered up by the authorities to explain how this brilliant chemical weapons expert, who’d worked in some of the most dangerous places on the planet, was affected to such a degree by the pressures of the last few weeks of his life that he decided to commit suicide.
But is it really that simple?
It turns out that many people from all walks of life including medical professionals, senior legal figures, politicians and members of the public are not convinced.
Even though successive governments have conducted various inquiries, in the years since Dr Kelly’s death new information has been brought to light that goes completely against the official version of events.
It can now be shown how the circumstances surrounding Dr Kelly’s death have been misleadingly portrayed. How evidence has been ignored and how facts have been cherry-picked to support the official narrative that this supposedly desperate man was driven to commit suicide.
In 2018 a book was published by award winning journalist Miles Goslett that attempted to draw together all the loose ends from the Dr Kelly affair once and for all. A renowned reporter, Miles spent years gathering the facts and re-examining the evidence.
In this podcast, with Miles as our guide, we’re going to take a journey back through the story and explore some of the major and quite incredible inconsistencies in this case.
The podcast, like the book, is called
An Inconvenient Death.
EPISODE 1
SAM - The story begins in Geneva on 27 February 2003, 3 weeks before Iraq was invaded by the West. Dr David Kelly had just stepped off a flight from New York.
SFX – PLANE LANDING. AIRPORT ATMOS.
SAM – So Miles, what’s the significance of this trip Dr Kelly took to Geneva a few months before he died?
MILES - At the airport he rang a man called David Broucher. Broucher was a former British ambassador to Prague and to give him his title at the time - the UK’s Permanent Representative to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva.
SAM – did they know each other?
MILES – strictly speaking, no. Broucher told me this call came out of the blue. They didn’t really know each other. They’d met once before professionally. But they met to discuss about Iraq’s weapons capability because a dossier produced by the British government had just made the terrifying claim that WMD could be deployed against the West in 45 minutes. This was the central claim that took Britain to war in Iraq.
SAM – This was before the scandal erupted around the notorious claim and Dr Kelly's role in it.
MILES – A few months before.
SAM - Here’s Tony Blair, also in feb 2003 presenting the findings of the dossier to the house of commons.
ARCHIVE - Blair’s HoC speech
SAM – So MIles Broucher and Kelly meet in the same month this dossier is being made public and presumably Broucher wanted to know where this 45 minute claim had come from?
MILES – Yes, that’s right. They talked for an hour face to face. Dr Kelly said he was particularly concerned about 45 minute claim. He said he knew this was not true. He also named Tony Blair’s spin doctor Alastair Campbell as the person responsible for it. And anyway very strangely at the end of the meeting Broucher asked Dr K what he thought would happen if iraq was invaded and to this Dr K replied he thought be would be quote ‘found dead in the woods’ if iraq was ever invaded.
ARCHIVE - Blair
SAM – Broucher told you that?
MILES – Yes, he did.
SAM - Just three weeks later, on 20 March 2003, British and American troops did indeed invade Iraq. Sure enough, the ability of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to deploy weapons at 45 minutes’ notice was cited by Tony Blair’s government as the chief reason for the invasion. To this day those weapons have never been found.
Blair archive
SAM - The story of the invasion of Iraq is one that we are sadly all too familiar with. And it was a conflict that developed into an international scandal on both sides of the Atlantic as the legality of the invasion was called into question. quickly became a national scandal as the truth started to emerge. So Miles, how did Dr Kelly get mixed up with it all?
MILES - There is a bit of background to this. A month after the invasion of Iraq, so this is April 2003, a BBC journalist called John Humphrys had just finished a shift on the Radio 4 Today programme when he was rung by an official in the security services and – very unusually – offered lunch with Sir Richard Dearlove. Dearlove was the head of MI6 and the most powerful spy in the UK.
Humphrys took up this invitation. It was agreed his editor, Kevin Marsh, would accompany him. They went along to MI6 headquarters in London and, over lunch, asked Dearlove how high up the list of countries Iraq was in posing a danger to Britain’s security. Dearlove’s answer was very revealing. According to Humphrys, Dearlove said: ‘I’m not sure we would regard them as being at the top of our list.’
SAM - So MI6 were briefing the BBC completely off the record and it’s important to mention that this meeting was kept secret at the time.
MILES - yes
SAM What else did Dearlove have to say?
MILES - He then went further and suggested Iraq was actually very far from the top of the list - certainly below Syria and Iran.
From everything said during the lunch, Humphrys and Marsh concluded that no WMDs had been found in Iraq because they’d never existed.
SAM - And then how did this lead back to dr kelly?
MILES - Shortly after that lunch, another BBC journalist who worked for Kevin Marsh – Andrew Gilligan, the Defence Correspondent for the Today Programme – set to work trying to stand up the story which Dearlove seemed to have been driving at: did Iraq actually possess any WMD? Its not clear why Gilligan was looking into this story and Ive no idea what prompted his research but as part of his research he met Dr Kelly. He was a weapons inspector, one of the experts in his field globally, and he had spent a lot of time in Iraq.
SFX – LONDON TRAFFIC. HOTEL LOBBY ATMOS.
MILES - On 22 May 2003, Gilligan met Dr Kelly for tea at the Charing Cross hotel in london. Gilligan and Dr Kelly had known each other for two years but they weren’t close having met just twice previously.
SAM – So it was just a journalist meeting a source. And am I right in thinking this was part of Dr Kelly’s job, to meet with the press?
MILES – yes absolutely. They spoke on an unattributable basis for about an hour. According to Gilligan, Dr Kelly told him that, in his opinion, Iraq continued to pose a potential threat to the West and might still possess WMD. 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”.
SAM – But no WMD ready to strike in 45 minutes.
MILES - Dr Kelly apparently told Gilligan there was unease in the intelligence services about the accuracy of the 45-minute claim.
So It seems Dr Kelly and Richard Dearlove shared a scepticism of this claim.
SAM – what else did kelly tell Gilligan?
MILES – he said he'd had some involvement in the production of the dossier, writing the sections on the history of UN inspections in Iraq, but he'd had nothing to do with its central 45-minute claim – which was stated four times – about Iraq’s alleged chemical and nuclear weapons capability.
SAM – It's easy to forget years later how powerful and significant that claim actually was.
MILES - Yes, as we said a minute ago, it really helped Blair to persuade MPs to vote for war. And it helped generate some public support for military action.
But here was Dr Kelly, who commanded worldwide respect in biological weapons matters, apparently telling Gilligan that the “45-minute” claim had been included against the wishes of the experts who drew up the dossier.
Kelly had said the same thing to David Broucher in Geneva three months earlier, so it was clearly at the front of his mind – with good reason.
SAM – So Gilligan, at their meeting, got confirmation of what his bosses had been told off the record by the head of MI6. And even though it was what most people suspected, having this expert source confirm things must have seemed to Gilligan like the BBC could now run with this massive scoop.
MILES - I think it was a huge scoop. The idea that Downing Street officials – including Alastair Campbell, who had no military or intelligence background whatsoever – had deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq to justify going to war was devastating.
SAM - And Dr Kelly had inadvertently put himself in the middle of it, having no idea that the BBC had also met off the record with the head of MI6.
MILES – I would say he'd unknowingly just become the source of one of the most politically toxic stories in recent history.
END OF 'HOTEL' SEQUENCE
Today programme archive
SAM - Gilligan was given clearance to run his report on the Today programme on 29 May, exactly a week after his meeting with Dr Kelly. That morning at 6.07, in a live, unscripted preview “teaser” summary, Gilligan unwittingly fired the starting gun on the series of events which culminated ultimately in Dr Kelly’s death.
Today programme archive
Most memorably, Gilligan said on air: (AUDIO)
“…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 45-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 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.”
SAM - So Miles why did this spark so much controversy?
MILES - For some reason, in this live, unscripted broadcast Gilligan changed the story agreed the night before between himself and his editors and producers at Today by inserting that allegation that QUOTE “the government probably knew that that 45-minute figure was wrong even before it decided to put it in.”
This was a significant upgrading from what his BBC bosses expected him to say, which was simply that QUOTE “the intelligence agencies…didn’t necessarily believe the claim.”
Plus, originally Gilligan had been expected to say that the official to whom he had spoken had merely been “involved” in the dossier. In the unscripted broadcast, this was elevated to the official having been one of those QUOTE “in charge of drawing [it] up.”
SAM - So Gilligan didn’t stick to the script, and didn’t he then go on to write an article along the same lines a few days later?
MILES - Yes, he wrote an article in the Mail on Sunday, and this is when the trouble really began because this article differed in one significant respect from the BBC 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”. When Gilligan spoke on the Today programme, he had ‘t mentioned Campbell by name.
SAM – So this is when the story really broke? When Campbell was directly implicated?
MILES - Yes. It suddenly became of major international significance. I suppose you could say it could be career-threatening...even for Tony Blair...if true.
SAM – Just to put it in context, the invasion of Iraq remains to this day hugely unpopular on both sides of the Atlantic. I remember widescale protests against it in the UK, thousands took to the streets to demonstrate, and at the heart of the whole thing was this alarmist claim that the West could be under attack in less than an hour. So when this claim that the public had never really believed was questioned like this just a few months after the invasion, it was a moment when trust in the government was really put on the line.
MILES – It certainly was and Alastair Campbell immediately sent the BBC a letter of complaint. He and the BBC entered into a war of words for the next 10 days.
SAM – and at the same time, because this is now a few months after the invasion of Iraq, an inquiry had been set up to look into the legality of the conflict. And at this point, Campbell was refusing to cooperate with the inquiry, is that right?
MILES - The heat was on Alastair Campbell. Two weeks earlier, on 3 June, he’d been asked to give evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs select committee which was conducting this inquiry you just mentioned. And he had refused to go.
SAM - Why?
MILES - Partly because of another Iraq dossier, which had Campbell’s fingerprints all over it. It had appeared a few months after the notorious dossier containing the dubious 45-minute claim that we’ve already talked about.
SAM – And this one got the nickname the 'dodgy' dossier?
MILES – Yes, this second dossier, was published under the direction of Campbell in February 2003, and as you say, it was nicknamed the dodgy dossier after it transpired 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.
When Channel 4 News broke this story, it was humiliating for Campbell..
SAM – it seems like we're spending a lot of time on the detail surrounding these dossiers but it's important to remember the series of massive setbacks for the government that broke one after another concerning the invasion of Iraq, as this was the political minefield that Dr Kelly found himself having to navigate in the weeks before his death.
Trust in Blair’s government hit an all-time low, this was front page news throughout this period and Miles am I right in thinking that the next big question became who was Gilligan’s source?
MILES - Yeah, in fact Gilligan had already given evidence to this inquiry the week before, and he had been asked by the committee about his source. All he would say was that the person was QUOTE “one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up the dossier.” He also said: “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.”
SAM – And then Campbell finally made an appearance and in typical style went on the attack.
MILES - The FAC asked Campbell a second time to give evidence and having refused the first invitation he was forced to accept the second one, so he agreed to appear on 25 June. During his evidence session, which lasted three hours, Campbell admitted the central charge that February’s “dodgy dossier” was indeed unreliable, but he devoted most of his time to lambasting the BBC for what he saw as its false reporting of the Iraq issue. These were diversionary tactics – and they worked. Campbell calculated that the media would be far more likely to latch on to the confected new row he was pushing – 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’.
And he was right.
SAM - Here’s an excerpt of Campbell in full flow at the Foreign Affairs Committee hearing.
Campbell FAC hearing archive
SAM - On 26 June, the day after the Foreign affairs committee hearing, Campbell stepped up his campaign against the BBC with another long letter to its director of news, Richard Sambrook.
The next day, Friday 27 June, he went uninvited to the studios of Channel 4 News in central London shortly before its evening bulletin began at 7 o’clock to give an unsolicited interview to the programme’s presenter, Jon Snow.
ARCHIVE – C4 NEWS
SAM - So Miles, Campbell there in full denial mode.
MILES - he certainly was and he demanded that the BBC “just accept for once they have got it wrong” about Gilligan’s claim on the today programme. He said the BBC had “not a shred of evidence to substantiate the allegation” [made in Gilligan’s Today broadcast]. Again, he demanded an apology.
SAM – And he stuck to the line that the war was justfied even though nearly 20 years later no weapons have ever been found?
MILES – Yes. This performance on Channel 4 news bore all the hallmarks of a temper tantrum from a man obsessed.
SAM - But because of Campbell there were now two stories moving in parallel here.
MILES - Yes, the BBC wanted to know whether there really were any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Campbell seemed to want to paint the BBC as a broadcaster biased against the government.
Campbell on C4 news archive
SAM – And obviously from this standpoint now it makes it look ridiculous with hindsight this argument but at the time Campbell's angle actually made the headlines and he managed to spin his way out of this situation and some doubt was shed on the BBC's claims, is that right?
MILES - Well pressure surrounding the story was building, Campbell and the government's credibility were on the line and - more serious than that - the question was: had the country been taken to war on a lie? So now the media’s attention was turning to the identity of Gilligan’s source.
MILES – The source became the focus of the story. There was a lot of speculation. Realising this, Dr Kelly volunteered his involvement in this row in a private letter to the Ministry of Defence and this was on the 30th of June.
MILES - Dr Kelly said in his letter that he had met Gilligan in May and discussed the 45-minute claim. His letter also said he had told Gilligan the claim was there for what he called “impact”. But he did not endorse the idea about Campbell’s involvement, saying that Gilligan had mentioned Campbell’s name first, rather than him feeding it to the reporter. Dr Kelly also categorically denied linking Campbell to the 45 minute claim. He said his conversation with Gilligan about Campbell was “essentially an aside.”
Anyway Dr Kelly’s letter was passed up the ranks of the MOD and he was interviewed for two hours by Bryan Wells (his boss) and another man Richard Hatfield, the MoD’s personnel director.
SAM – What did the MoD make of his explanation?
MILES - Well they decided that Kelly was not the source of the most serious allegations advanced by Gilligan relating to Campbell and the 45-minute claim but warned a fuller inquiry could be launched if new information came to light.
SAM – But at this point this all happened behind closed doors, Kelly's name wasn’t yet public.
MILES – Yes. Tony Blair and his defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, were both told that someone had admitted speaking to Gilligan. They were apparently not given Dr Kelly’s name at this stage but John Scarlett, the government’s chief intelligence adviser, was given dr kellys name.
Then the MoD warned Downing Street that Dr Kelly was in danger of being compromised, so on the 7th of July the aforementioned john Scarlett suggested that Dr Kelly should take part in what he called QUOTE “a proper security-style interview” which is a phrase I find rather chilling, and he decided that dr kelly should take part in thsi as it was the only way to find out if he really was Gilligan’s source.
SAM – And do you know if this security style interview ever happen?
MILES - Yes it was agreed at a meeting chaired by Tony Blair that day that this second interview would go ahead. There is no doubt things were getting serious for Dr Kelly. And he was told to be in London for the interview by 4 o’clock on July 7th.
During this interview, Dr Kelly apparently said that he “might have been led on” by Gilligan. So four days after initially clearing him, the MoD then decided that Dr Kelly probably had been Gilligan’s source, and that Gilligan might have exaggerated what he had been told. In effect, Dr Kelly was found half-guilty.
SAM – Sort of found half guilty of doing his job and talking to the press which he admitted to doing anyway. He didn't make anything up and, according to him, didnt even mention Campbell to Gilligan.
SAM - And so this whole exercise is carried out without anybody at the MOD and without Kelly himself being aware that there was a second, protected source in all of this, the head of MI6?
MILES – Right, so the official decision was that no action against Dr Kelly would be taken.
He was also advised the Press would persist in wanting to know who had briefed Gilligan ahead of his BBC broadcast and that his name might come out.
SAM – so we are only a few weeks away from Dr Kelly's death at this point, but as of July the 7th his identity was still a secret.
MILES - Yeah that’s right and on 8 July another story appeared in The Times, revealing more details about Dr Kelly’s identity but still didn’t name him.
That afternoon the Ministry of Defence published a press release, with Dr Kelly’s agreement, confirming that an unnamed individual had admitted to being Gilligan’s source. This press release didn’t name Dr Kelly, and Dr Kelly never sanctioned the release of his name. But shortly afterwards, the MoD press office was instructed by officials to confirm Dr Kelly’s identity to any journalist who guessed it correctly. And this was an order that came from officials.
MILES - The meeting at which the decision was taken for this name game to go ahead was chaired by Tony Blair in Downing Street on 8 July. Dr Kelly had no idea that he was at risk of identification, but the rules of the game allowed journalists an unlimited number of guesses, and a crib sheet with biographical information about him was even prepared for the MoD press office so they could assist any reporter who rang in with a question.
At 5.30pm on 9 July James Blitz, a Financial Times reporter, was the first to guess Dr Kelly’s name. Not long after, The Times also guessed his name.
MILES - it was horribly underhand. All I can say is that the government was helping reporters to find out Dr Kelly’s name in a way that would allow any official involved to say the government had not actively leaked his name to the press. It was all horribly underhand.
SAM – And as this was going on, didn't a journalist turn up at Dr Kelly's house?
MILES - Yes, a Sunday Times reporter called Nick Rufford called on Dr Kelly at home in Oxfordshire. Rufford mainly wrote stories about intelligence. He’d known Dr Kelly for several years and they had a solid professional relationship. But he had begun to wonder if Dr Kelly was Gillian’s source.
And in fact earlier that day Rufford had tried to test his theory by ringing Dr Kelly at home. When he rang, the phone was answered by Dr Kelly’s wife, Janice. She told Rufford that her husband was working in London. So Rufford decided to turn up in person unannounced at Dr Kelly’s house, he did that on the evening of the 9th of July.
SAM - Was Dr Kelly there when he arrived?
MILES – He was there. Rufford arrived at about 7.30 in the evening and there was Dr Kelly standing in his driveway. They began to chat while Janice Kelly was some distance away watering flowers. She played no part in their ensuing conversation and later said she was unable to hear much of it.
MILES - Dr Kelly volunteered to Rufford that he had just been contacted by the MoD and – acting on Downing Street’s orders - told that he would be named as Andrew Gilligan’s source in national newspapers the next day.
Rufford then asked about Dr Kelly’s contact with Gilligan. Dr Kelly confirmed he had met him but when Rufford asked him whether their conversation had been reported accurately up to that point, he replied: “I talked to him about factual stuff, the rest is bullshit.” Dr Kelly then confided in Rufford that the twists and turns of the preceding few weeks meant that he felt he had been QUOTE “through the wringer”.
SAM – Did the journalist comment on how Dr Kelly came across during this meeting?
MILES - Well, having been told just half an hour earlier by the MoD that his name was about to be published, apparently he seemed genuinely shocked. But more positively, he did tell Rufford he was looking forward to returning to Iraq the following week to carry on with his work as a weapons inspector there.
Rufford returned to his car and made detailed notes in his notebook of his conversation with Dr Kelly – everything which he considered had been said to him on or off the record – and included his own observation that the scientist had appeared “pale and tired”.
SAM – and what happened next... this is where the official account begins to stray from a version of events that you have established. It’s kind of from this point on that much of the rest of the story becomes open to debate. Is that fair to say?
MILES - The official story is that immediately after Rufford left the Kellys’ house, Dr Kelly was again rung by the MoD and advised to leave home straight away in order to avoid having to speak to any other reporters.
Mrs Kelly is then said to have told her husband about a friend’s house in the West Country which they could use as a hiding place. Supposedly, they quickly packed a bag each and at about 8 o’clock Dr Kelly went over the road to the pub. There he asked Leigh Potter, a barmaid, to pass on a message to the publican, Graham Atkins, that he was going away for a few days because QUOTE “the Press were going to pounce.” Miss Potter agreed to do so and within 30 seconds Dr Kelly had gone.
MILES - That is the official version and as we shall see there is another version of events which calls into question so much to do with the death of Dr kelly.
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NEXT TIME...
SAM - In the next episode... as Dr Kelly’s identity is revealed he comes under intense public scrutiny. In episode 2 we examine the differing accounts of the weapons inspector’s final few weeks leading up to the last time he is seen alive after going for a walk in the Oxfordshire countryside on July the 17th 2003.