Andrew Gilligan takes one more chance to defend himself at CiF:

Although Hutton was, of course, a tactical triumph for [Alastair Campbell], with a knockout victory in the report and three good BBC scalps, it was an unparalleled strategic disaster. If his aim in taking us on was to disprove my story about the sexed-up dossier and restore trust in Tony Blair, it simply could not have been more counter-productive.

Here is Gilligan, who gave David Kelly up to John Maples and Richard Ottaway on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee [PDF here]. Just read the email to them in full if you have any lingering regard for him as a journalist. Here it is:

John and Richard,

We have been doing some research on David Kelly. Aside from the MoD’s red herring of a source-hunt, he is an extremely interesting witness in his own right – probably, if he answers fully, the best you’ll have had.

• He is described in one of the standard reference works (Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg, Plague Wars) as “the senior adviser on biological warfare to the MoD . . the West’s leading biological warfare inspector” with “world recognised expertise in every aspect of biological warfare [whose] knowledge cannot be overtrumped.”
• As has been reported, he was the chief field inspector of UNSCOM, the predecessor to UNMOVIC. He led the first and last BW inspections in Iraq carried out by UNSCOM.
• He was one of three officials who accompanied Jack Straw when Straw gave evidence to the FAC about Iraq’s WMD programmes on September 25 2002, one day after publication of the Blair dossier. He said hardly anything, however, Straw did all the talking.
• We believe he is currently the chief British inspector on the Iraq Survey Group (the No.2 Brit in the Group under Brigadier John Deverell, the British contingent commander)

Questions for Kelly

What is the current state of the Iraq Survey Group’s knowledge about Iraq’s BW programme? Have you found anything?
Did you believe in September 2002 that Iraq was an immediate danger?
Was everyone happy about the inclusion of the 45 minute point in the dossier in the light of what’s been discovered since?
Did you know the 45-minute point was single-source?
Were there any arguments between the intelligence services and No 10 over the dossier?

Above all, he should be asked to say what kind of a threat Iraq was in September 2002 in his opinion. If he is able to answer frankly it should be devastating. Obviously he works for the Government and who pays the piper calls the tune. But if you could put some of these quotes (particularly the Watts) to him I think it would have some impact.

He is on record as saying that Iraq was NOT the greatest WMD threat. Leakage from the Russian programmes, he believed, was a greater threat.

For instance, CBC (Canadian TV), 23 October 2002. “Leakage from Russia is the greatest threat, because Russia had a dedicated programme and a great understanding of how you use smallpox as a volatile weapon.”

On 18 Oct 2001, at the height of the US anthrax scare, Kelly told The Independent that if suspicion fell on any country as the source of the US anthrax “the obvious one is Russia, it’s a league ahead of Iraq.” He also said that Iraq had “too much at stake” to take part in any action against the West.

He also told my colleague Susan Watts, science editor of Newsnight (who described him as “a senior official intimately involved with the process of putting together the dossier”):

“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 Iraq threat in the future, there was less agreement.

“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 point] 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’s unfortunate that it was. That is why there is the argument between the intelligence services and No 10, because they picked up on it and once they’d picked up on it you can’t pull it back from them. So many people were saying ‘well, we’re not sure about that’ … because the word-smithing is actually quite important.”

Does he still agree with this?

Is Kelly our source?

We are not ruling anyone in or out as the source. I had many conversations with people inside and outside the intelligence community about the issue of Iraqi WMD and the dossier. We suspect the MoD of playing games to try to eliminate names.

However – if, as the MoD has said, Kelly’s involvement in the dossier was only tangential, he cannot be our source. Two of my source’s claims which have proved to be true – that the 45-minute point derived from a single informant, and that it came in late – have been shown to be true. Such facts could only have been known to someone closely involved in compiling the dossier until a late stage.

Andrew

As Gilligan told the Hutton Inquiry:

Q. … Is there anything you want to say about that e-mail to this Inquiry?

A. Yes. It was quite wrong to send it and I can only apologise. I did not even know for sure that David Kelly was Susan Watts’ source. I was under an enormous amount of pressure at the time and I simply was not thinking straight, so I really do want to apologise for that

And the conversation that started it all off? Lord Hutton was of this opinion on the matter of Andrew Gilligan’s credibility:

Having heard and considered Mr Gilligan’s evidence about how there came to be two versions of his discussion with Dr Kelly on his personal organiser, and how he lost his manuscript note which he made the next day, and how his memory of his discussion with Dr Kelly is not now entirely clear, I have considerable doubt as to how reliable Mr Gilligan’s evidence is as regards what Dr Kelly said to him…

Gilligan gave up his source, and misrepresented him. He didn’t kill Kelly, he just betrayed him. And instead of atoning for that betrayal, he hides it beneath a continual gush of self-justifying cant.

That’s just my opinion, of course.