Nick Rufford reviews Norman Baker’s book The Strange Death of David Kelly and in dismissing Baker so reminds us of the likeliest explanation for Kelly’s death [my italics]:
…Baker is offering an even shakier explanation than suicide. The most likely sequence of events is one Baker himself admits is “plausible”.
On the morning of July 17, Kelly received a number of calls from the Ministry of Defence that unsettled him. At his initial interview with his MoD bosses 10 days previously, he had been told no action would be taken against him over his contact with journalists, but that might change if further information came to light. Since then, Kelly had given evidence in public to the Foreign Affairs Committee, trying to balance honesty with an attempt not to incriminate himself. “It was a juggling act that proved too difficult,” observes Baker. During the hearing, a committee member read part of a transcript of an interview Kelly had given to Susan Watts, a BBC Newsnight journalist. Kelly did not know at that stage that the conversation had been taped. He denied saying the words and, in doing so, misled a parliamentary committee.
Kelly was asked again about his contact with Watts in the July 17 calls from the MoD. Baker describes the following scenario: “Kelly, having thought the worst was over, suddenly realised that his careful attempt to pick his way through the minefield had blown up in his face. He realised that the game was up. Moreover, he would be exposed as having been less than truthful, something that went strongly against his personal ethic.” Baker concludes: “This is certainly a plausible explanation for suicide, if that is what it was. Indeed it is the most plausible.” As a reader you’re forced to agree and then wonder, why look for a more complicated explanation?
Kelly took his own life and he shouldn’t have lied to the committee, but in Rufford’s explanation lies my issue with Andrew Gilligan, setting up his source by sending the committee that transcript.
One of Gilligan’s champions remains John Humphrys. Did Humphrys play any part in prompting Gilligan’s story? Gilligan always maintained that he met with Kelly to compare notes, and that he initiated the meeting. Indeed, both Gilligan and Kelly said the meeting was to discuss Gilligan’s Iraq experiences.
But four days before Gilligan’s broadcast (and three days after his meeting with Kelly at the Charing Cross Hotel), Humphrys began his Sunday Times column like this:
Indulge me, if you will, in a small experiment. Read the four words I am about to put into quotation marks and then glance away from the page for a moment. The words are: “Weapons of mass destruction.”
Now, what came into your mind? Let me guess. It was irritation at my returning to something you are bored with. Surely that brief chapter in our history is behind us. We’ve had a war, for whatever reason, and we have won it with the minimum of casualties.
You may even think I am obsessed with the subject – not just me but my colleagues on Today, too. The cabinet minister John Reid thinks it. He said so when we asked him for the second time in a week about the fact that not a single WMD has yet been found in Iraq. We’d asked the same question in the same week of Jack Straw, the foreign secretary. Proof, indeed, of an obsession.
…Here’s what Blair said in the House of Commons last September about Saddam Hussein’s WMD programme: “It is active, detailed and growing … It is up and running now.” It could, he said, “be activated within 45 minutes.”
Humphrys appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be against the Iraq war. Peter Preston called his opposition “manifest.” Would such opposition have led Humphrys to give an uncritical hearing to a spook looking to deflect criticism by raising an eyebrow in the direction of Downing Street?
He was not called for cross-examination by Hutton (neither, of course, was Kevin Marsh).
In 2003, the Intelligence agencies had come out of the Iraq war with their reputation looking pretty ragged. Richard Norton-Taylor had raised questions about intelligence in the Guardian in April 2003:
…questions should be asked about the information Blair and his ministers were given by the intelligence agencies, including about what military commanders were told to expect when they invaded Iraq. (One said he anticipated the Republican Guard coming over to help British and US forces to keep law and order.)
Yet Norton-Taylor had ended by pointing the finger not at the agencies, but at politicians:
But as important, perhaps more so, is what ministers did with the information. There is sufficient evidence that they and their political advisers doctored it for the consumption of MPs and the public to warrant a parliamentary investigation.
Sir Richard Dearlove is happy now to criticise politicians publicly over the use of intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq, was he as happy to lambast them privately to journalists like Humphrys back in 2004? Someone had obviously told Humphrys something, as he told John Reid:
I myself have spoken to senior people in the intelligence services who have said things, that the government have exaggerated the threat from Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction…
The journalists and politicians have had their secrets pored over publicly. We have to trust chaps like Sir Richard, and now Sir John, to ensure that the Secret Intelligence Service can look after itself in private.
Humphrys ended his column by outlining a position that is hard to disagree with:
If other reasons had been given for the war, we could and would have debated them. That is what happens in a democracy. Some might even have argued that the money spent on the war would have been better spent on schools and hospitals in this country…
But we did not have that debate. It was overwhelmed by the government insisting that we were all threatened by those terrible weapons of mass destruction. Blair told us that we would have to take “elements of this on the good faith of our intelligence services.”
Ah yes, this is what happens in a democracy, but should it happen entirely through the media? And should the Secret Intelligence Service – doubtless an organisation whose own interests are merely reflections of the greater national interest – be free to pursue those interests over lunch with selected journalists?
Remember the words of Andrew McKinley MP: “I want to pursue … the question of the MI6 chief allegedly talking to John Humphrys. I’m delighted he talks to John Humphrys – he doesn’t talk to me or my colleagues.”