TOBY MELVILLE/REUTERS STILL ANGRY: Antiwar protesters awaited Blair at the court

Posted Sunday, August 31, 2003; 13.05BS
Lord Hutton's official mandate is "to conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr. Kelly," who, in this strange saga, is the closest thing we have to an Everyman. He did his job, and he was good at it. Britain's premier expert on Iraq's weapons, he was a knowledgeable source for the government as well as the media, which frequently turned to him. But when the BBC ran its report (which Kelly later claimed misstated his views), and when Whitehall unleashed its ham-handed strategy of not naming Kelly, but giving hints and then confirming him as the alleged leaker, the scientist was thrown into a hostile arena. The stress of being handled as if he had a giant red S for source emblazoned on his chest apparently killed him. Some who watched this drama unfold couldn't help wondering: Is this what happens to good men who get caught up with the wrong crowd?

Politicians' interest in self-preservation is, of course, understandable, especially if they feel, as Blair told the Hutton Inquiry last week, that "had the [BBC's] allegation been true, it would have merited my resignation." It was, he said, "an absolutely fundamental charge ... [that] we had behaved in the most disgraceful way." But in parrying that charge, he didn't answer for another one: that flawed strategy of outing Kelly, which revealed the lengths to which his government would go to defend its own image. Blair said that Kelly had seemed a person "of a certain robustness," and he and other witnesses argued that Kelly's name was bound to come out anyway. But just how the government went from that conclusion to its plan remains murky, and Lord Hutton will no doubt dig deeper in later sessions.

Testimony so far has revealed that Campbell considered leaking Kelly's name to a friendly newspaper, and talked over options with Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon. According to Campbell's diary, these also included a possible "plea bargain" for Kelly in response to his unauthorized leaks, meaning he could avoid demotion by coming clean about his talks to the press. Ministry of Defence director of news Pam Teare went so far as to draw up an information sheet for her press officers entitled: "Q&A: Who is the official?" It detailed clues to his identity that could be divulged, and noted that his name could be confirmed if provided by a reporter.

Given the doggedness with which the Prime Minister has defended his decisions on Iraq, it is no surprise that Downing Street's p.r. machine reserved its fullest wrath for the BBC. According to Blair, its report changed the whole tenor of the Iraq debate: "The whole thing since then has been not 'Did the Government make the wrong decision?' but 'Did the Government dupe us? Did the Government in a sense defraud people over it?'" Gilligan's main allegation appears discredited. If anything was "sexed up," it seems to have been the charges against Downing Street, not the dossier itself. There were no lies; there was questionable intelligence, but the spies have accepted responsibility for that. The compilation of the dossier was a frenzied search for the strongest possible evidence, but one that seems less sinister than Downing Street's opponents hoped, and than Gilligan suggested. Throughout that process, insisted Joint Intelligence Committee chairman John Scarlett, "I was in charge." But the paper trail shows that Downing Street clearly hardened up the dossier's language in its zeal to make its case. For instance, on Campbell's suggestion, the claim that the Iraqis "may be able to" launch WMD was strengthened to read "are able to." The JIC also took a small step back from the dossier, insisting that it be credited not as "the work of" the jic, but as "based, in large part, on" the JIC's work. The point was fine enough, at least to Blair, that he could still testify: "It was essential that we, hand on heart, could say: this is the assessment of the Joint Intelligence Committee."

Leaders have always used intelligence to serve political ends. But in Britain, the intelligence services have traditionally remained deep in the shadows. Parliament did not have an intelligence committee until 1994. Until the early 1990s, the government never publicly named the heads of MI5 and MI6, and the services were always considered unbreachably apolitical. But the lines that were so clear in the past have been blurred, says Malcolm Rifkind, Defence Secretary and Foreign Secretary under John Major. "All the material could have been used by the Prime Minister and his colleagues in public, but without referring to it as intelligence material."

Blair knew that this would have been less effective. His government, more than any other, has been all about presentation and salesmanship — or in the more ubiquitous and less charitable term, spin. Hoon told the inquiry that intelligence gathering "tends not to be in the form of a large volume of material submitted at any one time. It is a series of individual pieces of information that build up into a picture." The individual pieces of information presented at the inquiry have only confirmed the public perception that, to this Government, image is everything and anyone who threatens the image must be defeated, even destroyed.

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	Hutton [September 1, 2003] Our guide to the goings-on. Collateral Damage [July 28, 2003] An expert at the center of the WMD row kills himself, throwing the Blair government into crisis Letter From Washington[July 28, 2003] Move Over, George, Let Tony Do the Talking Striking Back [July 14, 2003] Tony Blair's master of spin comes out of the shadows Blair's Descent [June 30, 2003] For the PM, it's all downhill from here Search all issues of TIME Magazine