On May 22, 2003, Kelly met with Andrew Gilligan, a BBC journalist who had spent the war in Baghdad, at the Charing Cross hotel in London. Kelly was anxious to learn what had happened in Iraq, while Gilligan, who had discussed a very early draft of the dossier with Kelly, wished to ask him about it in light of the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction.
They agreed to talk on an unattributable basis, which allowed the BBC to report what was said, but not to identify the source. Kelly told Gilligan of his concerns over the 45-minute claim and ascribed its inclusion in the dossier to Alastair Campbell, the director of communications for Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Gilligan broadcast his report on May 29, in which he said that the 45-minute claim had been placed in the dossier by the government, even though it knew the claim was dubious. In a subsequent article in the Mail on Sunday newspaper, Gilligan directly identified Alastair Campbell as the person responsible. The story caused a political storm, with the government denying any involvement in the intelligence content of the dossier. The government pressed the BBC to reveal the name of the source because it knew that any source who was not a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee would not have known who had a role in the preparation of the dossier.
As the political fight ensued, Kelly knew he had talked to the journalist involved but felt that he had not said exactly what was reported. He also told his friend and work colleague Olivia Bosch that his meeting with Andrew Gilligan had been 'unauthorised' and therefore outside his terms of employment. On June 30, he wrote to his line manager at the Ministry of Defence to report his contact with Gilligan, though he added "I am convinced that I am not his primary source of information".
Kelly was interviewed twice by his employers, who concluded that they could not be sure he was Gilligan's only source. Eventually they took the decision to publicise the fact that someone had come forward who might be the source. The announcement contained sufficient clues for alert journalists to guess Kelly's identity and the Ministry of Defence confirmed the name when it was put to them. This was not a normal procedure (it normally refuses to comment on such matters), and it has been suggested that the Ministry of Defence was implementing a government decision to reveal Kelly's name as part of a strategy to discredit Gilligan.
Kelly was extremely disturbed by the publicity and arranged with a family friend to leave his home and visit Cornwall with his wife. He was asked to appear as a witness before two committees of the House of Commons that were investigating the situation in Iraq, and was further upset by the news that one of the appearances would be in public. He had been given a formal warning by the Ministry of Defence for an unauthorised meeting with a journalist, and had been given to understand that they might take more action if it turned out he had been lying to them.
Appearance before House of Commons committees
When he appeared before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on July 15, Kelly appeared to be under severe stress. He spoke with a voice so soft that the air-conditioning equipment had to be turned off on one of the hottest days of the year. His evidence to the committee was that he had not said the things Gilligan had reported his source as saying, and members of the committee came to the conclusion that he had not been the source. However, some of the questioning was extremely pointed and appeared disrespectful to Kelly.
During the hearing, he was closely tackled about several quotes given to Susan Watts, another BBC journalist working on Newsnight, who had reported a similar story. It later emerged that Gilligan had himself told members of the committee that Watts' source was also Kelly. Kelly unconvincingly denied any knowledge of the quotes, but must have realised that he would have serious problems if the Ministry of Defence believed he had been the source of them.
On the following day, (July 16), Kelly gave evidence to the Intelligence and Security Committee. He told them that he liaised with Operation Rockingham within the Defence Intelligence Staff.
Suicide
On the morning of July 17, Kelly was working as usual at home in Oxfordshire. Publicity given to his public appearance two days before had led many of his friends to send him supportive e-mails, to which he was responding. One of the e-mails he sent that day was to a journalist on the New York Times, to whom Kelly mentioned "many dark actors playing games," <1> (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3080795.stm) <2> (http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/content/com/com_4_0076.pdf) (pdf). He also received an e-mail from his superiors at the Ministry of Defence asking for more details of his contact with journalists.
At about 3:00 p.m., Kelly told his wife that he was going for a walk. He appears to have gone directly to an area of woodlands about a mile away from his home, where he ingested up to 29 tablets of co-proxamol, an analgesic drug. He then allegedly cut his left wrist with a knife he had owned since his youth.
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Pardon me DUmbya and bLIAR, but its a little too late in the game to be re-pretending that there waqs a case for war.
And your little PR campaign to make us think you suddenly care about Africans is about as convincing as the Conservatives sudden compassion for Social Security.
To the dustbin of history you go!
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