The David Kelly Black Hole

By Alison Broinowski
Source

In July 2003, five months after the US and its allies invaded Iraq, Dr David Kelly CMG was found dead in woods near his Oxfordshire home. The circumstances did not suggest suicide, although some of the British biological weapons expert’s friends and family knew he had differences with his employer, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) over his retirement salary. After his comments to journalists about the Blair government’s use of a ‘dodgy dossier’ to justify invading Iraq were reported by the BBC, Kelly was subjected to aggressive questioning by the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee. In an interview that could have been scripted from Kafka’s The Trial, Kelly (like Josef K) was not told what evidence they had, or what he was charged with. But K’s grilling did not take place in the mother of parliaments, as Kelly’s did.

Lord Hutton was commissioned by Blair to inquire into Kelly’s death and in January 2004 found it was suicide. He did not call the Thames Valley constables to appear, though they had been at the scene, and he sealed the medical evidence for 70 years. That made it impossible for what Kelly knew from his experience as a weapons inspector in Iraq to lead to Blair being indicted for war crimes.  Arrangements were made by the Prime Minister’s friend from university, Charles Falconer, who gave the inquiry no powers to compel witness, and no requirement to take evidence under oath, but complete control over what was made public. Blair later advised another friend Rebekah Brooks, whose News of the World was accused in 2011 of phone hacking, to ‘publish a Hutton-style report’ which the former PM told her would ‘clear you’, and deliver a similarly acceptable result (Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘How the Murdoch gang got away’, New York Review of Books, 8 January 2015: 32-3).

But Tom Mangold, a former BBC journalist, believed it was suicide, arguing that Kelly, when cornered by the Committee, lied about what he had said to two journalists and weakly claimed not to have been the BBC’s Andrew Gilligan’s main source for the story about the ‘sexed-up’ dossier (Rod Barton, The Weapons Detective, Melbourne: Black Inc 2006. Tom Mangold, ‘Shame made David Kelly kill himself’, Independent Online, 22 August 2010).

In 2006 Norman Baker, a Lib-Dem. MP, took up the case, concluding that Kelly’s death was notsuicide. Data was inexplicably wiped from the hard drive of Baker’s computer in July 2006, but he wrote The Strange Death of Dr David Kelly the following year. An ex-Army medical officer, Dr Stephen Frost, also waged a long campaign for a full investigation of Kelly’s death, as did journalist Miles Goslett, who recently published An Inconvenient Death: How the establishment covered up the David Kelly affair (Daily Mail Australia, 14 January 2019). None of them, predictably, has succeeded in getting anyone to open the trapdoor of the black hole where the truth lies.

Dr Kelly went out for his usual mid-afternoon walk on 17 July 2003 and failed to return. Eighteen hours later, volunteers with a search dog succeeded where a heat-seeking helicopter had failed, in finding his body. After their report to local police, it was at least 25 minutes before two Thames Valley Constables came to take charge, with two paramedics. In the meantime, the volunteers met three other policemen, led by Detective Constable Graham Coe, near the scene. Coe later claimed he had only one companion, although five witnesses saw two. The paramedics saw very little blood, much less than would be expected from a severed artery, but a forensic pathologist described seeing scratches and bruises and copious quantities of blood, as did a forensic biologist. The volunteers saw the body propped against a tree, with a cut in the left wrist, and no objects on the ground. When the Thames Valley police arrived they saw the body on its back, a distance from the tree, with a knife (50 years old, and blunt), a watch and a water bottle near it. No fingerprints were found on them.

Evidence from the autopsy showed a knife wound whose direction and location suggested it almost certainly was not self-inflicted. The forensic report found 29 co-proaxamol painkillers in Kelly’s system, but the autopsy revealed only one fifth of one such tablet, which he was prescribed for a heart condition. A letter to The Times from medical specialists argued that it was impossible for Kelly to have died by cutting the ulnar artery and bleeding to death in the way Hutton described (Jim Rarey, ‘The Murder of David Kelly,’ The Journal of History, Winter 2004). Their doubts were shared by a plastic surgeon (a relative of Kelly’s) and a vascular surgeon whom she consulted after the inquiry.

Without inquiring into these or other anomalies, such as the failure to check Kelly’s mobile phone records, the Oxford Coroner obligingly adjourned his inquest when the Hutton inquiry pre-empted it. The Coroner later reviewed the evidence with the Lord Chancellor and concluded in March 2004 there was no need to reopen the inquest (Brian Wheeler, BBC News, ‘MP investigates Dr Kelly’s death’, 19 May 2006).

Some strange events appeared to anticipate Kelly’s death, on which silence later fell or was imposed. In the Thames Valley Police Tactical Support Major Incident Policy Book a ‘not for release’ document for Operation Mason was opened at ‘1430 17.07.03,’ up to an hour before Kelly went out, and closed at ‘930 18.07.03,’ about the time when Coe and his men left the scene. Kelly’s records disappeared from his dentist’s room on 17 July, before his body was officially located. The day before his death, Kelly told his confidante Judith Miller, the New York journalist, about ‘dark actors playing games’. Kelly had earlier expressed fear that he was on a hit-list to David Brouder, a former British Ambassador to Prague, saying he could be ‘found dead in the woods’. He told Brouder in Geneva that the PM’s claim that Iraq could launch WMD within 45 minutes was false, and said Blair’s PR adviser Alistair Campbell wanted a strongly-worded dossier supporting it. A barrister, Michael Shipton, reported a British intelligence contact telling him Kelly had been ‘taken down’ (Marcus Lowth, ‘Maybe the suicide of Dr David Kelly should face more scrutiny,’ 2 April 2018).

Kelly knew about much more than WMD. As a leading biological weapons expert, he transferred in 1984 from the Institute of Virology in Oxford to the Ministry of Defence at its Porton Down facility near Salisbury. After Vladimir Pasechnik defected to the UK in 1989 he revealed to Kelly and others that the USSR maintained a bioweapons program in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (in force 1975), producing ‘microbial agents, bacterial agents and viral agents, particularly, plague and smallpox, which are transmissible from man to man, and could be launched against large civil populations’ (Jim Rarey, ‘The Murder of David Kelly,’ The Journal of History, Winter 2004. Christopher Davis,’ Frontline,’ PBS.). Kelly travelled several times to Russia and Iraq to inspect bioweapons, which in 1997 were banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention. He went earlier to South Africa where the CIA collaborated with an apartheid-era program to develop genetically-altered diseases which would affect only designated groups, such as black people, as well as materials for use in assassinating individuals. Two scientists from Porton Down were transferred to that program.

This suggests there is much more in the black hole about Kelly, and the Skripals too. Some people at Porton Down may know what it is, but if they want to keep their jobs and their lives, they won’t say.

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