After Kelly: ‘After Dark’, David Kelly and lessons learned

You might remember the red sofas, leather Chesterfields recovered in quieter fabric. You might remember that the talking didn’t end at any specific time, unique in an era when all television channels closed down at night. You might remember Oliver Reed getting drunk, although he was hardly the only disruptive guest. Reading Norman Baker’s book on the death of David Kelly(1) has brought back many memories – but it might take a while to explain exactly why and how.

Some 20 years ago I started making a television series called After Dark for Channel 4. (2) Somewhat to our surprise and that of Channel 4, this late-night discussion programme with some unusual features was a bit of a hit for several years, not only with the press, who gave it resoundingly good reviews,(3) but also with the public.

I discovered the programme on a trip to Vienna. It was the unlikely meeting of an anarchist and a therapist in the features department of Austrian state television that led to the invention of a discussion programme format called CLUB 2. This seemingly innocent idea, which we imported to the UK under the name After Dark, depended on strict adherence to a short list of unshakeable principles. Namely, the number of participants in these intimate debates (always conducted in agreeable surroundings and without an audience) was never less than four, never more than eight (like, as it happens, group therapy); the discussion should be hosted by a non-expert, whose job rotates, thus eliminating the cult of personality otherwise attaching to presenters; the participants should be a diverse assortment, all directly involved in the subject under discussion that week; and, most importantly, the programme was to be transmitted live and be open-ended. The conversation finishes when the guests decide, not when TV people make them stop. This combination – still unique in the history of television – produced, as if by magic, chatty grenades, exploding first in central Europe and then the UK, disturbing the smooth efficiency of the schedules and the peace of mind of the broadcasters with happy regularity.

After Dark turned out to be some kind of anti-television experiment, a programme which, despite the careful plans and preparations of TV professionals, was actually not in our hands. Week in and week out the participants took control of the programme and used it for their own ends and in their own way. This is the special brilliance of the idea, the working method being so designed as to empower the guests, rather than have them act out a preordained and inevitably limited agenda designed by others. In all the ways that matter the control of After Dark passed from the producer and the broadcaster to the participants. As a result it was never our show – it always belonged to the guests, which is only right, proper and as it should be but normally never is.

Despite being transmitted late at night (of necessity, given the open-endedness of the format) the public as well as the critics found the programme and took it to their hearts, so much so that Channel 4 had to commission research to explain how a programme with such seemingly tiny ratings was being watched by nearly the whole country (a paradox which became obvious when a pair of popular comedians took to affectionately sending up the programme every week in their peak-time show.(4) It was on After Dark that I saw for the first time the extraordinary sight of someone changing their mind on TV, and heard things I had not only never heard before but could never have imagined being said in the presence of strangers, let alone on television. And, of course, After Dark, by virtue of its ‘liveness’ could not be censored.

Breaking the rules

The reporting of the world’s affairs – already, as is well known, a compromised activity – is further distorted by television into a form of entertainment (this statement would be huffily rejected by the sanctimonious blind men who administer the news). In selecting what is newsworthy and deciding on how to treat it, the media operate with an array of moral and political assumptions, roughly speaking those of the liberal-individualist ideology of Western culture with its emotivist ethics and hidden dependence on existing power structures. After Dark broke all these rules from the beginning, built as it was by the Viennese to reflect the polygon of views that is real life, rather than the binary fallacy of yes/no, pro/contra stylised debates. Somehow we still managed to make the news, broke many stories of importance, and flourished like a dock leaf next to the nettle of Thatcherite triumphalism.

The special freedoms guaranteed by the programme were grabbed by the participants, who often said the apparently unsayable. Intelligent production kept us out of the law courts, if not out of hot water. The agenda of the programme was as wide as we could get away with: we gave a voice to the voiceless, shining light into forgotten and unknown corners, as well as introducing Bianca Jagger to the Contra she said was destroying her country, and Edward Teller to his lesbian nemesis, to list just two of our more famous meetings.

Much to everyone’s surprise, the programme survived the novelty of its form and remained a great event for some years, even to the extent that the head of the network, Jeremy Isaacs, selected it as one of his all-time favourite programmes when he left C4 and wrote a book.(5) Not everyone was wholly supportive, however. Although launched by Isaacs, most of the ninety After Dark programmes were made under the reign of Michael Grade, who we were never sure actually watched the show.(6) And Grade, always more of an aspiring Establishment man than his time at C4 suggested, had concerns. Interviewed some years after he axed After Dark for uncertain reasons,(7) Grade said:

‘It (After Dark) was an interesting idea and well worth pursuing. I thought it was very badly produced, editorially. The subjects that Sebastian (8) picked were so bloody irrelevant. He was obsessed with espionage, so there was an espionage story every other week.’ (9)

Michael Grade, for whom I retain a certain affection and who, as the highly-paid chief executive of ITV, is now living out the saying ‘Beware what you wish for’, is not quite accurate in his recollection. After Dark was built around a discussion of ‘espionage’ on only two occasions:(10) the first broadcast half-way through the second series,(11) the other launching the third series,(12) and timed to coincide with a new Official Secrets Act.

A possibly more reliable guide as to what principles drove our ‘bad’ editorial judgement is an internal memo I wrote in 1988 for the benefit of a newly expanded production team, listing the main themes of After Dark:

1. Lovelessness: the spaces in our society that for whatever reason are cold, empty, formulaic, unfeeling, systematised and filled only with empty rhetoric or silence.
2. Who owns your body? Do you? Does the State? Your doctor? Your lover? The police? Your parents? This theme covers a variety of apparently unrelated subjects: imprisonment, health care, capital punishment, mental illness, abortion, schooling…
3. What happens ‘after dark’? Sex, crime, astronomy…
4. Shining light into the shadows we find not only Dahrendorf’s underclass but also the invisible people. Some invisible people are so because they choose to be (criminals, spies, the hidden rich) but others are invisible because we do not want to see them (the homeless, the dispossessed, the mentally confused, the dying…). Among the invisible there is a new slave class: some of those were uncovered by Gunther Wallraff in his documentary ‘The Lowest of the Low’(illegal immigrants who are used for clearing up nuclear accidents although the work is known to be fatal).(13)
5. Do you want to know a secret? Guests tell all, or their bit of it.
6. What is beyond the law? Who is beyond the law?
7. Not knowing is an act of choice. During a discussion on the Holocaust, an Austrian woman claimed ‘We did not know’; another participant countered by saying that not all knowing comes from reading newspapers. Looking, listening and drawing deductions are another way of knowing, so choosing not to look or listen or draw a deduction can be conscious ‘not knowing’. So: what things in our society are we choosing to look away from, choosing not to know? What will our grandchildren accuse us of?

This range of editorial concerns led us to make After Dark programmes on sex, drugs, rock-and-roll and everything from the fashion industry to the Grand National, child abuse, psychics and animal rights (and, yes, one on male violence with Oliver Reed). Although this Lobster article is indeed necessarily preoccupied with intelligence matters, and so runs the risk of accidentally giving the impression that Michael Grade’s caricature has merit, the programmes we made tell a different story. After Dark could not have been more diverse.

Diversity

Diversity was anyway guaranteed by the colourful production teams who researched the programmes. It was the 1980s so we employed a member of Militant (at least I think he used to get the newspaper) but also a member of a Roman Catholic sect, a retired rent boy and someone who was later splashed across the front page of The Observer as an SIS agent. We gave a break to a minicab driver who nonetheless carried on sending us abusive faxes for years. There was a troublesome former Private Eye man whose stories led me to discover that Peter Cook was a serious and professional proprietor (Cook’s otherwise incessant comedy shtick vanished when he discussed the magazine’s personnel problems). There was no collective bias: the staff were a motley crew who fought hard to promote their individual interests. And with them came a motley range of contacts.

Of course ‘shining light into the shadows’ we invited some less than usual guests on to the programme, and some had, um, connections. The very first edition, recently repeated during C4’s 25th anniversary celebrations, was called ‘Secrets’ (playing out to The Beatles singing ‘Do you want to know a secret?’) and featured Colin Wallace, then a media pariah, who at one point waved to the cameras at unseen watchers from the intelligence community. That he shared After Dark’s red sofas with, among others, a psychoanalyst and a hill farmer from Wales seems somehow not to have stuck in Grade’s memory.

After Dark’s ground rules – absolutely live broadcasting (no editing or delay) and open-ended intimate discussion – meant that what the guests said was uncensorable. This led to a serious row in September 1988 when we considered inviting Gerry Adams on to the programme. Adams had apparently agreed to what was at the time quite a coup: he would sit down with sworn political enemies. One of our team, seeking advice on how best to construct a balanced group of discussants, asked a previous guest, the ‘terrorism expert’ Professor Paul Wilkinson of Aberdeen University. All hell broke loose as Wilkinson decided to go public. He attacked the proposal to have Adams on the programme; Tory MPs, including Mrs Thatcher’s parliamentary private secretary,(14) joined a chorus of protest; previously confirmed participants withdrew from the programme; and both C4 and the television regulator, the IBA, issued press releases within minutes of one another.

Finally the C4 Director of Programmes Liz Forgan and I agreed a deal: if a former British prime minister would come on the programme, Adams could appear. Wilson had Alzheimers; Callaghan never liked us; and Edward Heath, who later appeared twice on After Dark,(15) couldn’t make it. So that was the end of it. Except that the heightened feelings of that year (the Gibraltar shootings followed by killings at two funerals, ‘Death on the Rock’, Lisburn, Ballygawley and other bombs) had led, only a month previously, to Mrs Thatcher appealing to the British media to withhold publicity from IRA sympathisers. A spokesman for the IBA said, ‘The fact that After Dark is a live programme means there is no editorial control over remarks Mr Adams may make’ and I was subsequently told our (unmade) programme was the straw which broke Downing Street’s back. I cannot confirm this, but the timing is eloquent: our programme with Adams was to be on 10 September. On 19 October, Douglas Hurd, then Home Secretary, (16) introduced broadcasting restrictions (the ‘broadcasting ban’) on organisations proscribed in Northern Ireland and Britain, including direct statements by members of Sinn Féin. From November 1988 to September 1994, the voices of Irish republicans and unionist paramilitaries were barred by the government from British television and radio.

We never knew exactly how any particular After Dark participant would handle their freedoms: what they would say was rarely predictable in advance, and indeed we never made truth claims on anyone’s behalf. If a guest chose to make unexpected assertions which could not be dealt with by the group, that evening’s host always dissociated the programme from the allegation and so saved us a lot of legal bother. Some guests made disclosures which led to legal or journalistic excitements, or pursued us afterwards with hints of further exposures.

For every guest who eventually appeared on After Dark our production team probably spoke to at least ten others, numbering our final total of journalistic contacts in the thousands. So some of these potential guests had theories which were conspiratorial in nature, or claimed to hold evidence of dark and dirty doings; some said they were disaffected intelligence officers or agents, and many of these were personally weird but not necessarily liars.

Our resources were limited – not unusual in journalism or even in 1980s Channel 4 – so we could not check everyone out completely. However after a number of sticky encounters it seemed there were loose rules we could rely on.

The rules

Rule A: The document’s in the safe. If someone tells you he has a secret locked in a safe somewhere, and that this will explain everything from the Bilderberg Group to the career of John Prescott, ask to see the documents. If somehow this isn’t possible today, but will be possible tomorrow, or next week, or on payment of a certain sum or the employment of a sister, or when present difficulties with the Inland Revenue have been resolved, or when the lodger has gone back to Portugal, you are being strung along: there is no document and there may well be no safe either. A recent example might be Paul Burrell, sent off by the coroner in the Diana inquest to retrieve his ‘secrets’, eventually exposed as not being secrets at all.

Rule B: Unexplained contradictions and other mysteries do not necessarily mean anything strange is going on. This is almost certainly the case if the contradiction is simply that The Evening Standard has a different fact to The Daily Mirror. Anyone who has ever been written about in the press can identify with the curious sensation of only partially recognising themselves in what appears. A newspaper or magazine, even one ‘of record’, even one with ‘fact checkers’ or a large budget, is not in the truth business, it is in the publishing business and near enough is usually good enough.

Rule C: Look and you will find. In a development of B, in a twist on Heisenberg, the act of investigation seems automatically to create its own uncertainties. Just by ‘looking into’ a situation one will come across unexplained material – and the harder you look, the more you will find. Take the absurd example of a hypothetical investigation into the (entirely innocent) circumstances behind the writing of this article. If these were to be investigated thoroughly, any number of awkward inconsistencies and unexplained coincidences would be bound to emerge. For example what of the appearance of Lobster’s editor as a guest on After Dark in 1988; or a Lobster contributor appearing on a revived edition 15 years later;(17) or our company’s (unsuccessful) documentary proposal with the other Lobster founder; or indeed my few days spent in a castle near Strasbourg with a friend of David Kelly’s; and so on. If calls are made to try and clarify matters, confusions and contradictions will multiply, if only because human beings tend not to express themselves in ways which bear much scrutiny, let alone forensic examination by lawyers or suspicious-minded journalists. Suddenly the investigators can use phrases like ‘this could not really be explained’, ‘he was unwilling to discuss’, ‘she would not come to the phone…’

Before you know it, researching too diligently can slip into a fuggers’ fugue of accusation, with all manner of folk supposedly conspiring to murder someone in a rigged car crash – even the dog in the Fiat Uno.

For those who think these rules are somehow an attack on investigative journalism (this used just to be called journalism but given the current low standards of the trade the phrase has some useful descriptive value), here is a defence – which also happens to be a defence of Andrew Gilligan’s hurried, exaggerated, but for all that essentially true report on BBC’s ‘Today’ of the ‘sexing up’ of the Blair dossier. Don’t let pompous news folk at, say, the Columbia School of Journalism hear this, but the surprising corollary of Rule C is that the biggest stories are often supported by the shakiest facts.

Consider Jonathan Aitken and The Guardian. The subsequent court case showed that The Guardian went to press without really having the story locked down. This does not mean they were wrong to do so but it goes some way towards explaining why Aitken thought he would win his libel suit. Or, when the Buckingham Palace press office secretly tipped Andrew Neil to the tension between the Queen and Mrs Thatcher and he went ahead and printed this, they themselves were the first to deny the story. Whisper who dares: more corners are going to be cut when the editor ‘knows’ the story is true but can’t quote the source.

Another, perhaps overreaching, example of where every word can be questioned but the truth still somehow comes across: the four gospels contradict one another (as well as a sense of what is beyond reasonable doubt), yet two thousand years later people still understand them to reflect reality. Gilligan would probably not want to be seen as a latter-day biblical evangelist but he (and the BBC) suffered mainly because of what philosophers might call a category error. Academics and lawyers (including but not only Tony Blair and Lord Hutton) examined what he said in that live radio report only, (and deliberately only) from the perspectives of their professions and experience. Meanwhile every ordinary listener will have understood what Gilligan was getting at: in all the ways that matter, Gilligan told the truth about what we now know went on.

Just as one shouldn’t automatically dismiss a story simply because it is inaccurate in points of detail, one can’t dismiss secretive or paranoid whistleblowers just because they seem weird. They may nonetheless still be telling at least some of the truth, even if they are also making some things up. This was brought home to me in dramatic fashion when a new member of the After Dark production team turned out to be (how can I put this carefully enough?) related to a senior civil servant. So I was invited to a cocktail party held in the Foreign Office by said senior civil servant. He took me to one side and asked my opinion of someone by then notorious in government circles and claiming compensation for ill-treatment, the file having presumably just landed on the senior civil servant’s desk. Finding myself on the spot, and wanting to do the best by a former After Dark guest but also not willing to authenticate claims I could not substantiate, I reached for another of our laws of conspiracy:

Rule D: The journey away from truth. We know the secret world has biases towards certain personality traits and it is not always the case that stability is preeminent. (18) (Did MI6 make Richard Tomlinson what he is or was MI6 attracted to Tomlinson in the first place in part because of those attributes which were later to cause so much trouble?) So if a loyal servant of the Crown trips over something unethical, distasteful or somehow incompatible with decency, it should not be too surprising if this turns a silent patriot into a whistle-blower.

But at this point things may go wrong for the whistleblower, and not just in the obvious ways of being harassed by employers: you discover the pleasures of mixing with a grateful media, enjoying notoriety, even becoming perhaps financially dependent on this. In combination this may mean that, like a defector suffering from having told everything he knows, the stories get longer, more detailed, more wide-ranging and eventually beyond your competence; indeed beyond what you know to be true, or even what is true. Journalists will bring you hypotheses, ask your opinion, and you can end up seeking to convince yourself – and them – of ever greater conspiracies. However – and this is the point I made at that FCO party (the After Dark guest got compensation, by the way) – all this later behaviour does not mean that the first inciting incident is not true. But real skill is needed to detect kernels of truth inside what may have grown mouldy with guesses or lies.

Kelly

Reading The Strange Death of David Kelly needs precisely the tools of discernment we developed for After Dark all those years ago. The Liberal Democrat MP for Lewes, Norman Baker, has written a book of real interest to Lobster readers. Baker’s work on the death of David Kelly in Oxfordshire woods in July 2003 was promoted by the Associated Newspaper group and so has received perhaps rather less attention than it deserves from the rest of the press. Even if much of the material may seem familiar – Iraq, the Gilligan row, uncertainties around Kelly’s supposed suicide – Baker’s book is an enthralling compendium of what we know. But it is also unexpectedly far more wide-ranging: at least some of it, and perhaps rather more than some, will be new to most. Instead of a predictable rehash it is actually a carefully researched trawl through much of the US-UK Iraq story, spreading out to include a number of intriguing other elements.

Originally a bacteriologist, Dr David Kelly CMG joined Porton Down in 1984, and from the collapse of the Soviet Union onwards participated in overseas weapons inspections. Kelly briefed DIS and MI6; worked with the UN monitoring chemical and biological weapons; and was part of the so-called ‘Rockingham Cell’, described by Scott Ritter as a ‘secretive intelligence activity buried inside the DIS which dealt with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction’.(19) Comfortable consorting with the press (Kelly also attended an MOD senior officers TV course at Wilton Park), we are told by Nick Rufford of The Sunday Times that Kelly had sometimes been ‘an undercover man for the intelligence services’.(20) Unsurprising, perhaps, that veteran journalist Tom Mangold should claim Kelly’s death was investigated by ‘Special Branch, MI5; MI6 had a man present and the CIA had a man present.’(21)

Baker’s book details the whole ghastly scandal, from the disputed reasons behind the invasion of Iraq; the dodgy dossier; the 45 minute claim; Gilligan’s ‘sexed-up’ report;(22)the ‘British Watergate’ of the mobile labs which didn’t exist; the use of Kelly as a political pawn by Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and Geoff Hoon; the not-quite-leak of Kelly’s name following a meeting held in Downing Street and chaired by the Prime Minister; the (perhaps coincidental) outing of Valerie Plame by the White House; and, only four days later, Kelly’s e-mail to Judith Miller hinting at ‘many dark actors playing games’.

Less than four hours after writing that enigmatic e-mail Kelly left home for his final walk in the woods. The body was discovered, the news went round the world and not long after Geoff Hoon was photographed enjoying VIP treatment at Silverstone.(23) Tom Kelly (Blair’s press spokesman at the time, now shilling for Terminal 5 at Heathrow) announced in a supposedly unattributable briefing that Kelly was a ‘Walter Mitty character who may have contributed to his own downfall.’(24)

Baker

Norman Baker was Lib Dem spokesman for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs at the time. He reads with interest the letters from concerned medics – eventually a fair number of trauma, diagnostic radiology, anaesthesiology, vascular surgery specialists and others corralled into the so-called ‘Kelly Investigation Group’ by someone called Rowena Thursby, characterised by Baker only as suffering from a ‘painful, chronic neuro-immune condition’.

In a somewhat faut naïf manner Baker tells of his gradual realisation that Kelly’s death was not all that it seemed and of his subsequent 18 months of investigation. After the arrival of Ming Campbell as party leader, Baker turns down the offer to continue on the front bench for a ‘journey into the unknown, one that would take many peculiar turns’. He starts this journey in early 2006, publishing an article in The Mail On Sunday that July. This piece triggers hundreds of letters, e-mails and phone calls, and Baker seems to have followed all the leads, walking the woodlands around the ‘scene’, investigating a list of other scientists alleged to have died in mysterious circumstances, even tracking a former Soviet germ warfare official down in the Ukraine.

As he delves deeper the inconsistencies mount up but the uncertainties seem gradually to clear and attempts at logical analysis lead Baker in surprising directions. He tries to make sense of all the players, including some hidden figures in the shadows. He feels forced to pronounce the case a conspiracy, and as a result he runs the risk of being politically marginalised, given the reputation of ‘conspiracy theorists’, at least away from readers of this journal. As he writes: ‘A conspiracy theory must by definition be absurd……Of course this does not mean that every event has a sinister explanation, that every wild theory must be right.’(25)

Baker’s case in outline is that given the circumstances of Kelly’s death, natural causes or an accident can be ruled out, leaving suicide or murder. Baker considers that ‘suicides after all can be staged’,(26) he finds the accepted explanation ‘unsafe’; and spots contradictions in the scenario of Kelly cutting his wrist with a blunt pruning knife (which though bloody seems oddly to have had no fingerprints on it) leaving ‘remarkably little blood’ on the ground. At the same time Kelly is supposed to have taken an uncertain number of large tablets (possibly with only a thirtieth of a fatal dose) which he would apparently have had difficulty in swallowing. Eventually, ‘after analysing the facts and available information as carefully and objectively as (possible)’, Baker rules out suicide and ‘soberly’ concludes it was murder.

He then tries to ‘identify every possible motive, and every possible perpetrator……and seek to eliminate each possibility one by one.’(27) He tests all the possible suspects he can think of, including Israel, South Africa, and Russia – and then moves on to the US, noting that in 2001 President Bush overturned America’s 25-year ban on state assassinations, giving the CIA permission to eliminate individuals designated by the President. He comes across the Grey Ghosts in the Pentagon (‘a private army of professional assassins’(28)) and briefly examines the slashed wrist death of journalist Danny Casolaro. However after due consideration – and talking to individuals ‘well connected to the CIA’ who say they know what happened – Baker concludes ‘Kelly (was) murdered but that the US was not part of it.’(29)

Moving to the possibility of a UK-based ‘wet job’, Baker follows leads provided in an anonymous letter – and comparatively swiftly arrives at a conjecture which fits his facts and also his sense of how things work in Britain:

‘…for there to have been British involvement (in a conspiracy of police officers and medical specialists) …just suppose…the police were warned of a likely assassination attempt, but were not in time to stop it. Suppose also that subsequent to this, they were told that Dr Kelly had been murdered by Iraqi elements, but that in the interestsof Queen and country, it was vital that this not come out, given the possible destabilisation of both Britain and Iraq that could result. That it was their patriotic duty to allow the impression to be formed that Dr Kelly had killed himself. They might just buy that.(30) …………….It is even possible to surmise that perhaps both Lord Hutton and Janice Kelly were told, and each asked to go along with the story for the sake of the country.’(31)

So Baker finally arrives at his favoured suspects: he believes Kelly was most likely killed by enemies from Iraq, Kelly having apparently feared this would happen (he told someone ‘a fatwa had been issued against him following his work in Iraq’).(32) The deed itself was supposedly executed by ‘a couple of not very well-paid hired hands’.(33)

Baker discusses various Iraqi exile personalities, including the fantasising Baghdad taxi-driver who became the disastrously valued intelligence source known, appropriately enough as things turned out, as Curveball; David Rose’s one-time favourite Ahmed Chalabi (but then this journalist has since outed himself in the New Statesman as an MI6 patsy); and Chalabi’s rival for post-invasion power, his second cousin Iyad Allawi. Allawi, known as ‘Sadaam Lite’, is a British-trained neurosurgeon who is believed to have headed the European division of the Mukhabarat from the Iraqi embassy in London. Despite being accused of having tortured and killed, Allawi still ended up as the coalition’s interim Prime Minister of Iraq in the run up to the 2005 elections.

Somewhere away from Baghdad, closer to the Kelly’s home in Southmoor in Oxfordshire, Baker believes an Iraqi exile group organised the death of David Kelly. Of various possible motives Baker believes the most plausible to be revenge or a move to halt Kelly further undermining the exiles’ Western power base:

‘The key question is whether the actions of the Iraqi group were self-generated, and subsequently covered up by the (UK) government, or whether a tiny cabal within the British establishment commissioned the assassins to undertake this.’(34)

Discrepancies

Testing Baker’s book against our ad hoc After Dark laws from 20 years ago, one can see where he could have been led astray; but one can also form a more positive judgement of his work and argument than, say, Richard Norton-Taylor, who wrote a broadly dismissive review in The Guardian (35) (Norton-Taylor also appeared on After Dark in 1988 (36) but the nostalgia stops now).

Baker finds discrepancies everywhere he looks (see the rules above). For example, the drive to Cornwall the Kellys take after his name was made public is supposed to have included an overnight stop in Weston-super-Mare. Yet Baker checks the details and finds ‘Dr Kelly did not stay overnight in Weston-super-Mare, (but) Mrs Kelly, perhaps under some external pressure….…told Lord Hutton he did.’(37) DC Graham Coe, who stayed with Kelly’s body for at least 25 minutes before other officers arrived, strained credibility by telling Hutton he did not go near the body. (He also gave a private witness statement to the inquiry in addition to his public comments – one can ask why this was necessary). Kelly’s dental records disappeared for a couple of days just after the death – or did they? On the same day a ‘mystery blonde’ was discovered in Kelly’s office in a secure part of the MOD in possession of confidential documents, including a tape cassette which is alleged to have been removed.

Confusions between press reports are taken seriously by Baker (see above); the disagreements between medical experts are discussed as if Baker has never sought a second opinion from a doctor and learned that medics use guesswork to fill the gaps even more often than journalists.

Baker puts it all in

Perhaps still unsure today as to what is germane and what not, Baker has put it all in – and this does not help his case, to put it politely. For example, early on in the book Baker weakens his hand by mentioning Dr Kitty Little, and then characterises her only as a ‘member of the public’ (rather than, for example, as a known racist fruitcake). In a Little Chef somewhere off the M11 Baker meets a man who tells him about the ley lines around the death scene which could point to Kelly having been involved in a ‘negative ritual’. Baker quotes a letter about blood-sacrifice on the birthday of the Goddess Isis, as well as a man who played cribbage with Kelly at their local pub. He decides the Masons are not involved, but before Kelly died it seems there appeared (oh good) three men in black near the spot where the body would be found.

Baker seems willing to quote anyone who might have something to say (see above), whether private detective, former army operative, CIA contact – even my one-time colleague Gordon Thomas, who Channel 4 tried to throw off a joint project on grounds of unreliability. (Gordon is Baker’s sole source for information about Kelly and Mossad, Baker at this point considering Mossad’s credentials as possible murderers of Kelly.) Baker includes some methods for killing Kelly which I seem to remember reading first in Agatha Christie – but then she always did her research, we were always told. Possibly more credible is his material on ‘Project Coast’, the biological warfare programme run by the Pretoria government from 1981 onwards, designed to keep the white supremacist government in power in South Africa. Baker details the work of ‘the South African Mengele’ and tracks him down to a hospital where he now works as a cardiologist.

Mai Pederson

Baker devotes a chapter to Mai Pederson, David Kelly’s mysterious friend, born Mai al-Sadat in Kuwait, who introduced Kelly to the Baha’i faith, a woman both of whose husbands have said is a spy. Pederson shared addresses in the US with Kelly: despite being officially listed only as a US Army master sergeant, she has been able to retain the services of the expensive and well-known Washington lawyer Mark Zaid to say the shared addresses did not mean she and Kelly were lovers. Ms Pederson – incidentally also quoted as saying Kelly did not kill himself – gave a statement to the Thames Valley Police on the express condition that it not be supplied to Hutton, something it seems 17 other people did as well.

Some of Baker’s sources are hard to assess (see above). Someone, retired, ‘with connections to both the police and the security services’, takes Baker for a glass of wine in a ‘rather nondescript club’ and is warned in a phone call that he could be bankrupted by a full tax inspection. He is then tipped by a ‘spook’ from MI6 that Kelly’s death was a ‘wet disposal’. After meeting Baker, this contact has his laptop stolen. Another such key source – ‘I cannot publicly reveal his name’ or ‘give clues that would enable him to be identified’ but ‘I have no reason to doubt his honesty’ – is badly beaten up following contact with Baker and is unwilling to help further.

Baker can’t help but slip into some of the habits of the conspiracist: the book is full of words like ‘oddly’, ‘interestingly’, ‘bizarre’, ‘strange’; even ‘it was my turn to be on the receiving end of a curious incident’. But the burning of the Reichstag is reminder enough that just because something looks like a conspiracy does not mean it is not a conspiracy. False flag operations have been a standard intelligence tactic for centuries, and deception planning is part and parcel of the work of the military. Perhaps the UK’s most brilliant living soldier, General Rupert Smith,(38) said, while effortlessly besting me in public debate, ‘I use a lot of smoke’. The declassified list of works on deception research collected by US intelligence officer and amateur conjuror J. Barton Bowyer runs to over 200 pages – and this is just a bibliographical list of titles.(39) Conspiracies are part of the real world but if they are successful we tend not to hear about them until later and then they are generally given a nicer name than ‘conspiracy theory’. Much of Baker’s book is speculation, but it is always logical speculation and Baker is careful to signal when he is moving from what he knows to what he is not sure of, and from there to what he is simply imagining.

Omissions

If he has included rather more in his book than is good for his case, more surprising are two notable omissions. First, given that Baker is happy to quote Tom Mangold when it suits him, it seems a shame that he does not give us any of Mangold on Gilligan. In particular, Mangold condemned Gilligan when

‘He decided to break the golden rule of journalism and emailed the Foreign Affairs Committee betraying Kelly as the source for a conversation he had with BBC Newsnight reporter Susan Watts. It was the most despicable thing I have ever known a fellow journalist do.’(40)

And overhanging this tirelessly researched book is the mystery of the witness whom Baker does not speak to and makes no attempt to contact: David Kelly’s widow Janice. Janice Kelly is on record as saying her husband’s death was suicide, although ‘she appeared to think otherwise all the time he was missing.’(41) The family seems divided: Kelly’s adopted brother contacted Baker to say ‘He didn’t commit suicide’; but after publication Kelly’s brother-in-law was quoted as saying, ‘I can’t speak for the whole family, but I’ve read it all, every word, and I don’t believe it.’(42)

Baker makes no attempt to go to the heart of this question. For reasons, he says, of delicacy, he has chosen not to contact Janice Kelly or her daughters: ‘They would get in touch…if they wanted to. They have not done so, although other members of the family have made contact.’(43) We know that Mrs Kelly was invited to Chequers by Tony Blair but we don’t know anything about that meeting, apart from her telling friends what a nice man Blair is.(44) This is more than sloppy: any journalist who avoided trying to contact a key witness with the lame excuse ‘They will get in touch if they want to’ would be laughed out of the newsroom. Baker is well aware how his work is likely to upset people (indeed some of his contacts have apparently suffered serious violence as a result), so any squeamishness in regard to this central and crucial witness looks more like the cowardice of an amateur investigator. Janice Kelly could easily have told a door-stepping Baker to go away.

An indictment

So, in summary, Baker’s book tells us a lot which is new about David Kelly’s life and death and it is clear that there is much which stinks to high heaven. But I still don’t know whether Kelly killed himself or not. Nonetheless we can all be grateful for Baker’s research even if his detailed conclusions are not necessarily those of every discerning reader, however open-minded.

In all other ways Baker’s book is triumphantly good. The Strange Death of David Kelly is a magnificent indictment of Lord Hutton and his negligent inquiry, which Baker calls a ‘travesty’ given the ‘large number of important points Lord Hutton had simply not considered.’(45) ‘No matter what the police said, Lord Hutton was going to believe it’,(46) abandoning ‘basic procedures and safeguards essential to ensuring the proper examination of the facts’.(47)

Baker shows Hutton sympathetic towards government and unhelpful towards the media from long ago, with ‘a style that stuck rigidly to a narrow brief’: Hutton represented the MOD at the Bloody Sunday inquests and helped to defend Britain in the European Court against Irish allegations that internees had been tortured. (I thought I caught the hint of a hint in Baker’s carefully worded note that Hutton achieved ‘a few surprising acquittals of suspected IRA terrorists’.(48)) All in all, Lord Hutton was ‘the ideal appointment for those looking to help the Prime Minister out of a dangerous spot.’(49)

Equally good is Baker’s treatment of why the US and the UK engaged in ‘what was almost certainly an illegal war’ and the ‘aggressive and almost certainly illegal invasion of Iraq’. He gives a little space to the Butler report,(50) a document which, if read carefully, suggests Tony Blair should have resigned, a view one could see hovering over the disappointed post-report interview Butler gave to The Spectator.(51)

And what of Blair himself? Here Baker is if anything even more powerful than on the seemingly craven and slapdash Hutton. Baker asks if the UK supported the US because ‘the White House held information on Blair so incriminating that its release would have caused his immediate resignation’,(52) a remark he later amplifies with the ‘wild’ report that ‘the Americans were aware of a deeply personal scandal involving Blair dating from the early 1980s’.(53) Certainly there is some evidence that every move around Kelly’s death was of more importance to Bush’s closest allies than Hoon’s performance at Silverstone would suggest.

Baker discovers – after a fair amount of sleuthing – that a 45-foot police mast was put up in the Kelly garden after the body was found, remarkably high in the circumstances: ‘normal police communications would not require such a structure. It might, however, have been required if it were thought necessary to contact an aircraft in the sky a very long way away, such as the one at the time carrying the Prime Minister from Washington to Tokyo.’(54)

Another hint of what Baker thinks the key players were really up to is contained in his observation that the appendix to Hutton contains a document about ‘The World’s Worst Paedophile Ring’, whose members, some correspondent claims, were present at Kelly’s murder. Baker wonders why this particularly wacky document was included when, presumably, many other such communications were not – and we may in turn wonder why Baker refers to it at all. Baker has his reasons – and suddenly the shadows of old stories familiar to Lobster readers fall over the book as Baker reports he has been told:

‘a leading figure in the Hutton inquiry process was known by the government to have had a paedophile past in a part of the UK well away from London. Was the inclusion of this particular document a way of reminding him to “do his duty”?’(55)

Baker’s book is one of shady figures operating in a world led by truly ghastly men of power. But he does find a few heroes: Sunday Times political editor Jonathan Oliver, then on The Mail on Sunday, broke press ranks with the outraged cry ‘Have you got blood on your hands, Prime Minister? Are you going to resign over this?’ More seriously, Dr Jill Dekker, an American bio-defence expert based in Belgium, e-mails Baker to say the CIA are intimidating her for revealing research on Syrian biological weapons: ‘It look like they have tipped off Syrian agents in Damascus so they will do the hands-on work the CIA wants to avoid. Please retain this e-mail.’ Dr Dekker’s work suggested Iraqi weapons were moved to Syria in 2003 and Baker notes that less than six months after her e-mails to him, the Israelis launched a military attack on an unspecified target in Syria.(56)

But the real hero of the book is Kelly himself, ‘not prepared to allow the spin emanating from either the White House or Downing Street to go uncorrected’. Baker’s final page pays due tribute: ‘between 1990 and his death in 2003, Dr Kelly probably did more to make the world a more secure place than anyone else on the planet.’(57) Given that the world Baker describes is one of contingent values, hustle politics and truths only glimpsed in a glass darkly, this is as good as it gets.

Sebastian Cody is an Associate Fellow at the University of Oxford. His company, Open Media, is at <www.openmedia.co.uk.>

Notes

1. Norman Baker, The Strange Death of David Kelly (London: Methuen, 2007)
2. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dark>
3. The Independent wrote (21 November 1988) ‘After Dark has proved the only way of doing serious subjects justice on television.’
4. Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, ‘After Closing Time’, on Alas Smith & Jones, BBC TV, 1988 onwards.
5. Jeremy Isaacs, Storm Over 4, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989)
6. Grade’s editorial comments, such as they were, were usually about the very beginning of a programme known for never running less than 2 hours.
7. <www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/jan/28/broadcasting.comment>
8. The present writer.
9. Unpublished transcript of a recorded interview by Kate Losowsky, held at the headquarters of First Leisure on 25 February 1999.
10. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_After_Dark_editions>
11. ‘British Intelligence’, hosted by John Underwood, with guests Gary Murray, Alastair Mackie, Merlyn Rees, Robin Ramsay, Jock Kane, Robert Harbinson, H. Montgomery Hyde. Channel 4, 16 July 1988.
12. ‘Out of Bounds’, hosted by John Underwood, with guests Tony Benn, Lord Dacre, James Rusbridger, Miles Copeland, Anthony Cavendish, Adela Gooch. Channel 4, 13 May 1989.
13. There is an English-language book of this remarkable documentary: Gunter Wallraff, Lowest of the Low, (Freundlich Books, 1987)
14. Neil Hamilton, now perhaps a little better known than then.
15. ‘Britain – Out on a Limb?’, hosted by Beverly Anderson, with guests Peter Ustinov, Kenneth Minogue, Shirley Williams, Richard Perle, Alastair Morton, Josef Joffe, Edward Heath. Channel 4, 10 June 1989;and ‘The Gulf: Counting the Cost’, hosted by John Plender, with guests Adnan Albahar, Chris Cowley, Edward Heath, Robert McGeehan, Lord Weidenfeld, Mona Bauwens, Adnan Khashoggi. Channel 4, 2 March 1991.
16. Hurd later sent a nice note wishing After Dark well.
17. ‘Iraq: Truth and Lies?’, hosted by John Underwood, with guests Saad Hattar, Corinne Souza, Gerald James, David Gore-Booth, Jenny Moore, Haitham Rashid Al-Withaib, Yosri Fouda. BBC4, 29 March 2003.
18. One After Dark staff member was married to a psychologist who screened for the security services.
19. The Guardian, 30 January 2004
20. The Sunday Times, 25 January 2004
21. GMTV, 2006
22. The text of No.10’s immediate denial of Gilligan’s 6 am report is now hard to read: ‘Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies.’ Baker also reminds us there was a mysterious first draft, only discovered in November 2006 (Hutton was not told about it) and which has still not been released despite a ruling from the Information Commissioner that it should be.
23. A spokesman tried to rescue this by claiming Hoon was investigating plans to use motor-racing fuelling systems in military helicopters.
24. The Independent, 4 August 2003
25. Baker p. xvi
26. Baker quotes ‘the KGB assassination squad’: ‘Anyone can commit a murder but it takes an artist to commit a suicide.’ Baker p. 340
27. Baker p. 213
28. Baker p. 298
29. Baker p. 303
30. Baker p. 308
31. Baker p. 348
32. Baker p. 311
33. Baker p. 345
34. Baker p. 348
35. The Guardian, 1 December 2007
36. ‘Blacklist?’, hosted by Professor Ian Kennedy, with guests Harold Musgrove, Hilary Wainwright, Hugo Cornwall, Richard Norton-Taylor, George Brumwell, John Macreadie, Michael Noar. Channel 4, 10 September 1988.
37. Baker p. 178
38. Retired and last heard of, rather sadly I think, working for consultants Deloittes and appearing on Comedy Central.
39. Deception Research Program No. 9, to be found online as a link on e.g. <www.foia.cia.gov/search.asp?refinedText=guevara&x=0&y=0&pageNumber=1>
40. The Mail On Sunday, 1 February 2004
41. Baker p. 188
42. Independent on Sunday, 21 October 2007
43. Baker p. x
44. Baker p. 196
45. Baker p. viii
46. Baker p. 70
47. Baker p. 81
48. Baker p. 79
49. Baker p. 79
50. Lord Butler, now Master of University College, Oxford, former Cabinet secretary and perhaps best remembered for his stately breaststroke in the Brockwell lido on a 1995 television documentary.
51. 18 December 2004
52. Baker p. 150
53. Baker p. 302
54. Baker p. 52
55. Baker p. 219
56. Unfortunately Baker’s book was finished just as authoritative reports were published showing the Israelis bombed a nuclear installation: see e.g. <www.isis-online.org>
57. Baker p. 358