- In Court 78, at the Royal Courts of Justice in London's
Strand at 11am next Wednesday (January 28), Lord Hutton will deliver his
report into the death of Dr David Kelly, Britain's weapons expert.
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- "The Hutton Report must clearly show both President
Bush and Tony Blair were seriously misleading in the way they used original
raw intelligence for their own political ends to go to war with Iraq."
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- That is the stark conclusion of a detailed evaluation
prepared by analysts of Britain's security services.
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- Their conclusions are based on the same review of evidence
Lord Hutton conducted to produce his own report.
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- The analysts also had the input of security service psychologists.
They evaluated the body language of witnesses and their choice of words
in giving evidence before Hutton.
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- They judged Blair's appearance before Hutton as "cold
about Dr Kelly's death and imbued with a lawyer's cockiness".
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- Britain's Secretary of Defence, Geoff Hoon, is described
as "shifty".
- John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee
- the bridge between the intelligence services and Downing Street - is
likened to "an intelligence officer who has acquired the evasive technique
of a politician".
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- The analysts report is now in the hands of Sir Richard
Dearlove, director-general of MI6, and Eliza Manningham-Buller of MI5.
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- Dearlove, predict the analysts, can expect to be "mildly
criticised" by the Hutton report for failure to prevent raw intelligence
from becoming politicised.
- But Hutton's most damaging judgement could leave Britain's
Secretary of Defence, Geoff Hoon, resigning and Prime Minister, Tony Blair,
fighting for his political life.
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- A senior MI5 officer, who has seen a copy of the intelligence
service report, said: "it predicts no one involved in the death of
Dr Kelly will escape. The BBC and its reporter, Andrew Gilligan, will be
severely censured for its lack of news-gathering controls over the way
it handled Gilligan's story about Kelly. In the political arena, Alastair
Campbell, Downing Street's former communications director, will be severely
censured".
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- The MI6 analysts reserve praise for Dr Kelly's widow,
Janice - "a courageous woman who knew very little of her husband's
work". They predict she will "be a shining light in the otherwise
dark pages of Hutton".
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- The MI5 officer predicted the Hutton Report will stun
both London and Washington for its "ice cold ferocity".
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- He said: "the analysts concluded Blair and Bush
spoon-fed each other intelligence they knew had been spun to make a case
for war with Iraq. Hutton will destroy what credibility they have left.
Blair is a man standing at the edge of the gallows trapdoor. He could hang
himself by his evasions and half-truths".
- Hutton, Britain's most distinguished Law Lord, will undoubtedly
lay bare many of the so far unresolved machinations behind the claim of
the president and prime minister of why they had to go to war with Iraq.
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- For Blair, already deeply embattled in a quagmire of
evasions and, at times, untruths, it could finally mark the end of his
premiership. He may not even survive to see George Bush achieve his dream
of being re-elected in November.
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- And, for the president, Hutton's findings could be equally
uncomfortable - finally exposing the fact there were no weapons of mass
destruction.
- Hutton could also be the spectre that will shadow all
Bush says and does in the coming months on the stump.
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- "But both prime minister and president will undoubtedly
look for scapegoats. One will be George Tenet, director of the CIA",
said the MI5 officer.
- Dearlove has already said he is resigning soon after
the Hutton Report is published.
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- "Tenet may finally decide that he, too, has had
enough of increasingly politicised intelligence work. He has told friends
he does not plan to serve in any future Bush Administration", confirmed
a CIA officer in Washington.
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- For the intelligence chiefs, the Hutton Report will make
bitter-sweet reading.
- On the evidence given before him, Lord Hutton will have
to pronounce on such key issues as how far politicians in London and Washington
spun raw intelligence to promote the need to go to war.
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- He will also have to pronounce on the relationship between
the CIA and MI6.
- "When he gave evidence by audio link from his office,
Dearlove maintained his service's traditional stiff upper lip. But behind
the scenes, we had no doubt about his concern at the way pressure had come
from Washington and Downing Street", said the officer.
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- Hutton will also reveal embarrassing details about the
secret life of the central figure in the report: Dr David Kelly.
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- Kelly had close links with MI6, the CIA, and MI5. He
had also worked with Mossad, providing advice on Iraq's capability to launch
biological and chemical weapons.
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- Those links could be exposed in explosive detail in the
Hutton Report. Kelly was more than a £63,000 a year scientist. Lord
Hutton may conclude Kelly had informed Dearlove the weapons did not exist.
Dearlove told Tenet and John Scarlett. He told Tony Blair. Blair told Bush.
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- Hutton will likely pronounce on why Kelly, who had been
a key member of the team preparing what became known as the "sexed
up dossier", had suddenly found himself out of the Downing Street
loop.
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- More than any scientist, Kelly knew about types and strains
of micro-organisms, numbers of shells and aerial bombs filled with botulinum
toxin. He knew the latest figures for the production of bio-weapons material
in China, the gallons of growth material in Syria, Pakistan - and which
countries had sold the material. He knew what Saddam did not have - and
had not possessed for some time: biological and chemical weapons.
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- Almost uniquely, Kelly kept a large amount of his secret
data in his study at home. There, on his desktop computer, were tens of
thousands of secret documents and photographs.
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- Colleagues concerned about this were reassured by Kelly
that his bosses in the Ministry of Defence or the Foreign Office were happy
with his unorthodox methods. Hutton is also likely to criticise this laxness.
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- "In reality, Kelly was an academic who had escaped
the dull confines of academia to live in the ever-dangerous world of secret
intelligence and the hunt for weapons of mass destruction", said the
MI5 officer, quoting from the intelligence analysts' report.
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- It predicts Hutton will have to consider such issues:
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- Why Dr Kelly's involvement in intelligence work had placed
him on the hit list of Saddam's Hussein's notorious death squads.
- Why Scotland Yard's Special Branch and the Thames Valley
police, who had day-to-day responsibility to protect Kelly's home in the
picture postcard village in Oxfordshire where he lived, did not provide
Dr Kelly with protection at the outset of the Iraq War.
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- The intelligence analysts also predict Hutton will closely
focus on:
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- Why did Dr. Kelly arrive home so upset the night before
his death that his wife, Janice, was visibly shocked at his manner and
appearance?
- Why did Kelly leave his home suddenly on that Friday
afternoon of his death.
- Why, after his body was discovered, did MI5 officers
and forensic scientists from Porton Down, Britain's bio-chemical research
establishment, search the Kelly home? They left with a number of items
sealed in bags. The police would not say what the items had to do with
Kelly's death. Hutton may well reveal them.
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- Such issues will ensure that Kelly's death will be increasingly
linked to his secret work for spy agencies, including Mossad.
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- Kelly's involvement with Mossad dated from April 1995.
He travelled with two MI6 officers from London to New York. At the city's
Israeli consulate they met two Mossad officers. Present, were officers
of the Canadian Secret Intelligence Services and agents from the FBI.
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- The purpose of the meeting was to track how 32 tonnes
of bacterial growth medium - essential for manufacturing lethal germs -
was being illegally exported to Iraq from Montreal.
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- Dr Kelly - already a world-ranking expert on biological
weapons - had played a "crucial role" in identifying the growth
medium.
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- While many of the details to this day remain secret,
Shabtai Shavit, who had been Mossad director-general at the time of the
operation, would later pay tribute to Dr. Kelly's "great skills".
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- The scientist was first choice when the United Nations
came to appoint a senior advisor to supervise the break-up of Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction programme after the first Gulf War.
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- Kelly's ability to do so placed him on Saddam's hit list.
But in the end Saddam turned out to be too frightened of the repercussions
to have assassinated a senior UN official at the time Iraq was rebuilding
itself after the 1991 war.
- In between working in Iraq, Dr Kelly was also in charge
of the programme to dismantle Russia's biological warfare weapons programme
under the trilateral agreement brokered between Russia, the United States
and Britain.
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- In Moscow, Kelly met Russia's top microbiologist Vladimir
Pasechnik. He was then a 53-year-old chemist who was director of the Ultra
Pure Biopreperations Institute in St Petersburg.
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- The two men had become friends to the point where Pasechnik
told Kelly - according to an MI5 document - he was "part of the Biopreparat,
a large secret programme, which is developing biological weapons like plague
and smallpox".
- Kelly knew that plague, or Yersinia pestis, had brought
the Black Death that wiped out a third of the population of Europe in 1348.
It was air-transmitted, propelled by pneumonia like coughing.
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- Kelly reported what he had been told to Christopher Davis,
then an MI6 officer.
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- "Davis was a close friend of Dr Kelly's. He could
have thrown considerable light on Kelly's mindset. But curiously, Davis
was not called by Hutton to give evidence", said the MI5 officer.
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- But others who did stand before the Law Lord cannot be
looking forward to how he judges them when he speaks in Law Court 78 next
Wednesday.
- Ironically, it is only a short distance from the hotel
lobby where Dr Kelly met BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan to set in motion
the "sexed up dossier" story that Gilligan broadcast. The news
report ultimately led to Dr Kelly's suicide.
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- "Unlike the on-going saga of Princess Diana's death,
you can be certain that Lord Hutton will show conclusively that Dr Kelly
did kill himself. But what Hutton will also show is the role played by
all those who combined to drive him to do so", concludes the evaluation
of the intelligence analysts.
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- The MI5 officer said he understood that details in the
intelligence analysis had been fed to a Tory politician with long-time
contacts to the intelligence world.
- Those details may have helped Conservative Party leader,
Michael Howard, to focus in the House of Commons Prime Minister's Questions
for two weeks running on the same question to Blair about lying in his
role about naming Dr Kelly.
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- The prime minister has already said he would resign if
Hutton judged that he had named the scientist.
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