LONDON, 5 September 2003 — The weapons adviser at the center of allegations the government exaggerated the threat from Iraq was “taken aback” by questions from a British Broadcasting Corp. journalist, a fellow arms expert said yesterday.
Former UN weapons inspector David Kelly said the BBC reporter played a “name game” asking which official was responsible for including in a government dossier a claim that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes, weapons expert Olivia Bosch testified.
Bosch, also a former UN arms inspector, said Kelly told her that BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan mentioned the name of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s communications chief, Alastair Campbell, and Kelly said he replied “maybe.” Gilligan has reported it was Kelly who mentioned Campbell’s name, without being prompted.
Bosch was testifying before a judicial inquiry into Kelly’s death. The microbiologist apparently committed suicide after being identified by Defense Ministry bosses as a possible source of the BBC report, which had said Blair’s office inserted the 45-minute claim in a September dossier against the wishes of intelligence officials. The government and intelligence chiefs deny that.
Bosch said Kelly, 59, had expressed concern about an unauthorized meeting he had with Gilligan in May and added that he didn’t know the reporter “all that well.”
“He said he was taken aback by the way Andrew Gilligan tried to elicit information from him,” she said. “He said he had never experienced it in the way that Gilligan had tried to do so, by a ‘name game.’
“The first name he (Gilligan) mentioned, and very quickly, was Campbell,” Bosch told the inquiry, which is headed by senior appeals judge Lord Hutton.
Kelly said he felt obliged to give Gilligan some form of answer and so said “maybe,” she testified.
Gilligan told a different story in a piece for the Mail on Sunday on June 6: “I asked him how this transformation happened. They answer was a single word ‘Campbell.”’
Bosch said she met Kelly at a conference last year when she was working as a senior research fellow at a defense think tank. She said they subsequently spoke two or three times a week by phone and corresponded frequently by e-mail. Hutton is investigating events leading up to the death of Kelly, whose body was found July 18 in woodland near his rural home. His left wrist had been slashed, and a government pathologist concluded he died from loss of blood.
Previous testimony at the inquiry has shown that Kelly was skeptical about the government’s evaluation of the threat posed by Iraqi weapons.
On yesterday, Tom Mangold, a friend of Kelly and a journalist, testified that the weapons expert thought the 45-minute claim was “risible.”
He said he had spoken to Kelly about the Gilligan report.
“We occasionally gossiped on the phone and on this occasion we got it about the 45-minute claim because I thought it sounded risible to me and I wondered what he thought about it,” Mangold said. “He thought it was risible too.
“He did not feel that weapons would be deployed or activated within 45 minutes.”
Following the morning hearing, Hutton adjourned the inquiry until Sept. 15 while he analyzed the evidence received over the last few weeks and considered which witnesses to recall.
