by John Keegan
It was, however, the headline elements in Dr Kay’s testimony, rather than his careful qualifications in detail, that were seized upon by the anti-war constituency. Its spokesmen were compromised in the United States because of their association with the campaigns of Democratic candidates running against George W. Bush in the current presidential election campaign; their message was also offset by the expert evidence of a few stalwarts in the media, such as Judith Miller of The New York Times, a veteran of weapons inspection on the ground, who continued to demand that attention be paid to the evidence for WMD. On the whole, the anti-war party, though strident, failed to capture control of opinion among the American people who remained in the majority supportive of their President and armed forces. That was not the case in Europe, where the French and Germans, governments and peoples alike, remained hostile. It was equally not the case in Britain. There the moderate majority continued to support Prime Minister Blair’s Iraqi policy, but many professional politicians and much of the media took a different view. Their suspicions, essentially that Britain had gone to war for unsubstantiated reasons, found endorsement in a broadcast by Andrew Gilligan, a BBC reporter specializing in defence affairs, on 29 May 2003. At 6.07 a.m., on the Today programme, the BBC’s flagship morning radio news channel, Gilligan revealed that ‘a British official who was involved in the preparation of the dossier’ – the dossier being an intelligence assessment of the threat presented by Iraq’s WMD, prepared by the Joint Intelligence Committee and submitted in September 2002 to the Prime Minister – had claimed it was ‘transformed in the week before it was published to make it sexier’. As an example he cited the statement that ‘weapons of mass destruction were ready for use in forty-five minutes’. The ‘official’ said, according to Gilligan, that the ‘forty-five minute’ statement was not in the original draft of the dossier, was included ‘against the wishes’ of some involved in the dossier’s preparation and came only from one source, instead of the usual two or more.
The broadcast attracted widespread interest, which grew. Its truth was denied by the Prime Minister’s official spokesman, Alastair Campbell, after he and Gilligan had both given evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) on 19 June and 25 June respectively. During late June the interest of the media, that of the BBC in particular, and of the government focused on identifying Gilligan’s ‘official’. The mystery was partially dissolved on 1 July when a letter, written the previous day, was received at the Ministry of Defence. It came from Dr David Kelly, a scientific civil servant with great experience in the arms control field in general and Iraqi WMD in particular, and revealed that he was the ‘official’ Gilligan had cited. He carefully defined what had been discussed in the Charing Cross Hotel, over a glass of apple juice. He emphasized that he had in no way said anything to undermine government policy, revealed that he supported the war, because he regarded Saddam as a threat to regional peace, and admitted only that he had conceded that the ‘forty-five minute’ claim might have been added to the dossier ‘for impact’. There were no witnesses to their conversation and no evidence of its content, except for Gilligan’s skimpy and barely decipherable notes.
Two consequences followed from the receipt of Dr Kelly’s letter at the Ministry of Defence. One was that he was required to give evidence before the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, in public and on television, on 15 July, and before the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) on 16 July; the other was that, over the course of the next days, Dr Kelly was revealed by the government, in a convoluted and less than frank way, to be Andrew Gilligan’s ‘official’ (it was a complication of the story, wholly unfair to Dr Kelly, that he had somehow been characterized, and would so be described by much of the media, as an ‘intelligence officer’, which he was not). Dr Kelly was roughly handled by several members of the FAC, particularly a Labour member, Andrew Mackinlay, a backbencher who went out of his way to scorn Dr Kelly, a highly distinguished scientist and devoted government servant, as ‘chaff’ and ‘a fall guy’. Many viewers were stunned by Mackinlay’s performance, which many felt was unworthy of a Member of Parliament.
By the time of Dr Kelly’s appearance before the FAC, confirmation of his name as Gilligan’s ‘official’ had been made public, through a curious guessing game devised by the Ministry of Defence, which declined to publish his name but agreed to confirm it if it was put to the Ministry by a newspaper or broadcasting agency. The Financial Times was the first organization to make the correct guess.
As soon as publicly identified, Dr Kelly left his house in Oxfordshire with his wife for the west of England, to take refuge from press attention. He later returned to his daughter’s house in Oxford and it was from her home that he travelled to London on 15 and 16 July to attend the meetings of the Foreign Affairs and Intelligence and Security Committees. He then returned to his own house where he joined his wife. They spent the morning of 17 July together though for most of the time he was working in his study. Colleagues at the Ministry of Defence sent him a number of e-mails about the progress of the inquiry and he sent e-mails himself and made and received telephone calls. He and his wife then had lunch together. She found his state distressed. He was sunk in silence. After lunch he said he would go for a walk and, after returning briefly to his study, he set out. He did not return. As the evening drew out his family became concerned and his daughters searched for him. After midnight they called the police. Early next morning, after the organization of a police search, his body was found in remote woodland. Its state suggested he had committed suicide, by cutting his wrist and taking an overdose of painkillers. The official inquiry later conducted by Lord Hutton into the circumstances of his death confirmed that to be the case.
The death of Dr Kelly provoked a full-blooded political crisis in the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister immediately announced, the day following Dr Kelly’s death, that an inquiry would be held into the circumstances, to be conducted by Lord Hutton, a senior Law Lord. It first met on 11 August and concluded its work on 25 September. It exercised wide powers. Among the witnesses called were the Prime Minister himself, the Secretary of State for Defence, the Chairman of the Governors of the BBC and its Director-General.
Lord Hutton’s report, published on 28 January 2004, caused consternation. Opponents of the war had expected that the judge would find, in his analysis of the documents brought in evidence, grounds for criticizing the government’s decision to go to war; the report included, among much other material, the ‘September dossier’ which Andrew Gilligan, in his broadcast of 29 May, alleged had been ‘sexed up’ to improve the government’s case. Against the expectations of much of the media, the Conservative opposition in Parliament and many members of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Lord Hutton decided, by contrast, to reserve almost all his criticism for the BBC. He found that Gilligan’s allegation, that the government’s warning of Iraq’s ability to deploy weapons of mass destruction within ‘forty-five minutes’ of receiving the order to do so was based on information it knew to be false, was ‘unfounded’, and that it was inserted at a late stage into the dossier not because its veracity was doubted by intelligence officers but because of its late reception. He also dismissed the allegation that the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee had yielded to pressure applied by Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister’s Director of Communications, to insert material that supported the government’s case for war which was not supported by intelligence evidence. He recognized that the JIC Chairman, John Scarlett, had been willing to assist the government but only in so far as the facts did so as well.
Turning to the BBC, he was almost unsparing in his strictures. He found Gilligan’s allegations about the ‘forty-five minute’ claim and the circumstances of its insertion to be unfounded. He found the BBC’s system of exercising editorial control to be ‘defective’, as was its procedure for investigating complaints. He criticized the Governors of the BBC for failing properly to investigate the complaint against the Gillig
an broadcast and so for persisting in a failure to apologize for which a proper investigation would have shown the necessity.
The government did not altogether escape Lord Hutton’s criticisms. Those focused on the pathetic circumstances of Dr David Kelly’s death. David Kelly was a distinguished scientist who had spent a life of duty in the scientific civil service. Scientific civil servants occupy an ill-defined and anomalous position, superior to that of middle-rank penpushers but inferior, and made to feel inferior, to the Whitehall grandees who mingle on terms of equality with ministers, despite the fact that they can be of an intellectual eminence not found elsewhere in government service. Like all government servants they are forbidden to speak in any undirected way to the media. Some, however, and David Kelly was one, are given a loose and undefined permission to brief the media on matters of public interest. They are thus put in an indefensible position, apparently allowed to speak to journalists but liable to disciplinary action if what they say causes embarrassment. Poor David Kelly fell headfirst into that trap.
Lord Hutton conceded that Dr Kelly, when the trouble broke, was given support by a few of his immediate civil service superiors. The hierarchy effectively disowned him. Sir Kevin Tebbits, the most senior civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, described Dr Kelly in a letter to the Secretary of State as ‘a relatively junior official’ and ‘not the Government’s principal adviser on the subject [of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction], nor even a senior one’. Yet Dr Kelly knew more about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction than anyone in Britain. It is testimony to how little real experts are valued within the government hierarchy that he could be discussed so dismissively. Lord Hutton was moved by compassion. At the end of his report he adopted as his conclusion on the circumstances of Dr Kelly’s death the opinion of the Professor of Psychiatry at Oxford University who had examined the evidence. He judged that Dr Kelly had killed himself out of a ‘profound sense of hopelessness’, of his life’s work having been ‘not wasted but … totally undermined’; these feelings were compounded by fear that the civil service intended to take disciplinary action against him, perhaps end his work in Iraq or even dismiss him from government employment.
David Kelly was not the only victim of the ‘September dossier’ affair. The Chairman of the Governors of the BBC, Gavyn Davies, resigned on the day of the Hutton report’s publication. Greg Dyke, the Director-General, resigned a day later. No such indignities had ever before been visited upon an institution which continued to regard itself, with some justification, as ‘the greatest news-gathering institution in the world’. A little later, in the first week of February 2004, the British government announced that it would undertake an inquiry into the workings of the intelligence services over the Iraq crisis. Its announcement followed one similar by the United States government.
Thus the certainties that had inaugurated the brief and brilliant campaign to overthrow the tyranny of Saddam Hussein petered out in recrimination. Objectively the world was undoubtedly a safer place as the result of his downfall, besides being morally purged of one of the most wicked dictators of modern times. Subjectively it was even more divided than it had been when the ‘war on terror’ was undertaken after the atrocity of 11 September 2001. The Muslim world in general, the Arab world in particular was confirmed in its grievances, particularly that the West was prepared to use its overwhelming military superiority to keep Muslims subordinate. ‘Europe’, the Europe of the Franco-German plan to create a federal union strong enough to stand on terms of equality with the United States as a world power, had been humiliated by the failure of its efforts to avert the war. Liberal opinion, dominant throughout the European media and academia, strong also in their American equivalents, was outraged by the spectacle of raw military force supplanting reason and legality as the means by which relations between states are ordered.
Reality is an uncomfortable companion, particularly to people of good will. George H. W. Bush’s proclamation of a new world order had persuaded too many in the West that the world’s future could be managed within a legal framework, by discussion and conciliation. The warnings uttered by his son that the United States was determined to bring other enemies of nuclear and regional stability to book – Iran, North Korea – was found by his political opponents profoundly unsettling. The reality of the Iraq campaign of March–April 2003 is, however, a better guide to what needs to be done to secure the safety of our world than any amount of law-making or treaty-writing can offer.
Appendix 1
Coalition Order of Battle
UK
ROYAL NAVY AND ROYAL MARINES
HMS Ark Royal (aircraft carrier)
HMS Ocean (helicopter carrier)
HMS Liverpool (Type 42 destroyer)
HMS Edinburgh (Type 42 destroyer)
HMS York (Type 42 destroyer)
HMS Marlborough (Type 23 frigate)
HMS Richmond (Type 23 frigate)
HMS Grimsby (minehunter)
HMS Ledbury (minehunter)
HMS Brocklesby (minehunter)
HMS Blyth (minehunter)
HMS Chatham (Type 22 frigate)
HMS Splendid (Swiftsure class submarine)
HMS Turbulent (Trafalgar class submarine)
RFA Argus
RFA (Royal Fleet Auxiliary) Sir Tristram
RFA Sir Galahad
RFA Sir Percivale
RFA Fort Victoria
RFA Fort Rosalie
RFA Fort Austin
RFA Orangeleaf
The amphibious force
Numbered some 4,000 and included:
HQ 3 Commando Brigade
40 Commando Royal Marines
42 Commando Royal Marines
29 Regt, Royal Artillery (105mm Light Gun)
539 Assault Sqn, RM
59 Commando Sqn, RE
Helicopter air groups aboard Ark Royal and Ocean included:
845, 846, 847, 849 Sqns
ARMY
1 (UK) Armoured Division:
Headquarters and 1 Armoured Division Signal Regt
30 Signal Regt (strategic communications)
The Queen’s Dragoon Guards (reconnaissance)
1st Bn The Duke of Wellington’s Regt (additional infantry capability) 28 Engineer Regt
1 General Support Regt, Royal Logistic Corps
2 Close Support Regt, Royal Logistic Corps
2nd Bn, Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers
1 Close Support Medical Regt
5 General Support Medical Regt
1 Regt, Royal Military Police
plus elements from various units including:
33 Explosive Ordnance Disposal Regt
30 Signal Regt
32 Regt Royal Artillery
(Phoenix UAVs)
7th Armoured Brigade
Headquarters and Signal Sqn
Royal Scots Dragoon Guards (Challenger 2 tanks)
2nd Royal Tank Regt (Challenger 2 tanks)
1st Bn The Black Watch (Warrior infantry fighting vehicles)
1st Bn Royal Regt of Fusiliers (Warrior infantry fighting vehicles)
3rd Regt Royal Horse Artillery (AS 90 self-propelled guns)
32 Armoured Engineer Regt
plus elements from various units including:
Queens Royal Lancers (Challenger 2 tanks)
1st Bn Irish Guards (Warrior infantry fighting vehicles)
1st Bn The Light Infantry (Warrior infantry fighting vehicles)
26 Regt Royal Artillery
38 Engineer Regt
16 Air Assault Brigade
Headquarters and Signal Sqn
1st Bn The Royal Irish Regt
1st Bn The Parachute Regt
3rd Bn The Parachute Regt
7 (Para) Regt Royal Horse Artillery (105mm Light Guns)
23 Engineer Regt
D Sqn, Household Cavalry Regt
3 Regt Army Air Corps (Lynx & Gazelle helicopters)
7 Air Assault Bn, Royal Electrical & Mech
anical Engineers
13 Air Assault Support Regt, Royal Logistic Corps
16 Close Support Medical Regt
156 Provost Company RMP
102 Logistics Brigade
Headquarters 2 Signal Regt
36 Engineer Regt
33 and 34 Field Hospitals
202 Field Hospital (Volunteer)
4 General Support Medical Regt
3 Bn, Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers
6 Supply Regt, Royal Logistic Corps
7 Transport Regt, Royal Logistic Corps
17 Port & Maritime Regt, Royal Logistic Corps
23 Pioneer Regt, Royal Logistic Corps
24 Regt, Royal Logistic Corps
5 Regt, Royal Military Police
Specialist Royal Engineer teams
Airfield engineer support units from 12 Engineer Brigade
Elements from 11 Explosive Ordnance Disposal Regt
Elements from additional Royal Logistic Corps Regts
ROYAL AIR FORCE
Composite sqns formed including elements from:
9, 13, 31, 39 (1 PRU) Sqns, RAF Marham
12, 14, 617 Sqns, RAF Lossiemouth
11, 25 Sqns, RAF Leeming
43, 111 Sqns, RAF Leuchars
6, 41, 54 Sqns, RAF Coltishall
1, 3, IV Sqns, RAF Cottesmore
8, 23, 51 Sqns, RAF Waddington
