3) When?
4) How? (What was the immediate cause of death?)
5) Why? (A verdict is needed, stating by what means the deceased came by his death.)
The Hutton Inquiry didn’t even cover these basics. It didn’t specify where Dr Kelly died and there is certainly room for doubt about how he met his end.
Even the time of death raises some odd questions. Dr Nicholas Hunt, who later carried out the post mortem, first saw the body at the scene at 12.10pm. A key part of his job was to find out when Dr Kelly had died, but he didn’t get round to taking the necessary rectal temperature measurement until 7.15pm, seven hours after first examining the body.
The earlier a temperature reading is taken, the more sure you can be about the time of death. Because of the long delay, the pathologist was only able to say that Dr Kelly had been dead for 18 to 27 hours before the temperature was measured. This meant death had occurred between 4.15pm on the Thursday and 1.15am on the Friday morning.
REASONS TO DOUBT
In January 2010, it emerged that Lord Hutton had taken the unprecedented step of requesting, after his inquiry ended, that all the medical records, post mortem documents and police photographs relating to Dr Kelly’s death should be locked up for 70 years. Despite this, the post mortem report was released by the Ministry of Justice in October 2010. To everyone’s surprise, it seemed to make the official account of Dr Kelly’s suicide more, rather than less, plausible. Many people wondered why it had ever been held back, though Lord Hutton appeared to have thought this would help to protect Dr Kelly’s family.
The pressure that was building up on David Kelly certainly could have driven almost anyone to suicide.
When he died, there was an unopened letter on the desk in his study from a senior personnel man at the Ministry of Defence, Richard Hatfield, making it clear that he was going to have to shut up and stop leaking secrets or airing his opinions in public. If he didn’t, he’d be disciplined or even sacked.
The letter – the text of which is available on the Hutton Inquiry website – had already sat there, unread, for a week, but Dr Kelly had a pretty good idea what was inside. There had already been an interview with Richard Hatfield and various warning phone calls from other MoD people. The dodgy dossier business was bad enough, but the MoD was even more worried about what was to come next. Dr Kelly had written 40,000 words of a detailed book about his career and the powers that be did not want to see that published unvetted.
His attitude to his work was careful and measured, though defence ministry sources made some clumsy attempts to play down his importance or present him as a Walter Mitty character or a loose cannon. In the 1990s, his UN weapons inspectorate boss had nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize. A colleague described him as having ‘a brain that could boil water’.
In June 2003, six weeks before his death, Dr Kelly had made his last trip to Iraq, to examine two trailers that were said to be mobile germ weapon plants. They weren’t, he concluded, though more recent information, mainly from WikiLeaks, showed there were plenty of chemical weapons still to be found. The scale may have been smaller than expected but it turns out that Saddam still had access to weapons of mass destruction right up to the time Iraq was invaded.
To many people’s surprise, America’s secret Iraq war logs, made public by WikiLeaks in September 2010, revealed that more WMDs, including chemical agents, mustard gas shells and ‘neuroparalytic weapons’, were still being discovered in Iraq in 2004, 2007 and right up to 2008 (see discussion at bit.ly/wikileakswired). Small-scale chemical weapons laboratories were also found and there was evidence that AQI (al-Qaeda in Iraq) had used chemical weapons in attacks on coalition soldiers.
REASONS TO BELIEVE
Dr David Kelly had become an embarrassment to the Labour government of Tony Blair. He had been a thorn in the side of the Iraqis for many years and had already been warned by the Russians that he was on an Iraqi secret service hit list. He was also, apparently, someone the Chinese secret intelligence service particularly disliked and had placed on a target list.
We know that he freelanced as an adviser for several other intelligence services, including Mossad, the CIA and the FBI, the French and Germans, the Australians and the Japanese, but we have no way of knowing how well or badly these relationships were going. All we can know for sure is that, because of who he was and what he did, there could easily have been some very serious people who were out to get him.
And there are simply too many unusual and unlikely aspects of David Kelly’s death for the outstanding puzzles to be left unresolved. Unless the British authorities and secret service agencies already know the answers, there could still be national security issues at stake, even now. The loose ends still need to be tied up.
For example, though the searchers on Harrowdown Hill said they’d found Dr Kelly’s body slumped against the base of a tree, it then seems to have moved several feet in the course of the next half-hour or so.
One of the two experienced paramedics who were on the scene before 10am was David Bartlett. He recalled the body as being well away from the tree trunk.
‘He was lying flat out some distance from the tree. He definitely wasn’t leaning against it. I remember saying to the copper, “Are you sure he hasn’t fallen out of the tree?”
‘When I was there, the body was far enough away from the tree for someone to get behind it. I know that, because I stood there when we were using the electrodes to check his heart.
‘Later, I learned that the dog team said they had found him propped up against the tree. He wasn’t when we got there. If the earlier witnesses are saying that, then the body has obviously been moved.’
Bartlett and his crew partner, Vanessa Hunt, checked the body over and confirmed that life was extinct at 10.07am. They were both amazed by how little blood they saw around Dr Kelly’s body (see bit.ly/kellyparamedics).
Like Bartlett, Hunt had attended many slashed-wrist suicide attempts over the years. In all cases, there was arterial blood everywhere. But only one of these attempts had succeeded.
‘That was like a slaughterhouse,’ she said. ‘Just think what it would be like with five or six pints of milk splashed everywhere. If you slit your wrists, that is the equivalent amount of blood you would have to lose.’
In the woods on Harrowdown Hill, the picture was strikingly different.
‘There was no gaping wound,’ she said. ‘There wasn’t a puddle of blood around.’
The elements of the Kelly case – political, military, judicial, medical and highly confidential – were always bound to make it controversial. Anything short of maximum transparency was always going to feed conspiracy theories.
But the handling of this explosive mixture was secretive, careless and provocative. Even now, there are completely unexplained questions about the search, the evidence-gathering, the inquiry procedures and the aftermath.
Why, for example, did policemen and three others (assumed to be officers from MI5’s Technical Assessment Unit) come to the house so early on the Friday morning, well before Dr Kelly was known to be dead? Why were Janice Kelly and her daughters asked to go outside and wait in the garden, while the visitors carried out a search so thorough that it included stripping wallpaper off the sitting-room walls?
Why were colleagues of Dr Kelly apparently ‘warned off’ and told not to go to his funeral?
And why didn’t the man in charge of the police investigation, Chief Inspector Alan Young, give evidence at the public inquiry?
Perhaps the oddest fact of this strange case is a detail that has obsessed conspiracy theorists for years. The search for the missing scientist was codenamed Operation Mason by Thames Valley Police. The date-stamped incident file headed ‘Operation Mason’ appears to have been opened at Thames Valley Police HQ at 2.30pm