The Blame Game
One senior British official joked that he "liked living in a bunker." There was a grim, defensive mood in Whitehall last week as those who might be implicated in the tangled chain of events that ended in the suicide of David Kelly, the British bioweapons expert found dead in an Oxfordshire field two weeks ago, all jockeyed to prove themselves blameless.
His death was a tragedy, but it's the cascade of potential political damage that has everyone scrambling, from Tony Blair to Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon to Downing Street aides and the BBC. Already, the British public suspects Blair's government manipulated intelligence to boost the case for war against Iraq. A TIME/CNN poll by TNS shows that 42% of Britons believe he intentionally misled the country, 44% believe he didn't — and 45% think the invasion can't be justified if the intelligence was faulty, compared to 42% who think it can.
The verdict on the question of whether the government sold the war honestly will hinge on whether weapons of mass destruction are found. Intelligence officials say the process of compiling information from Iraqi scientists is starting to pick up speed, that early results are promising, and that they "have confidence" the whole picture will emerge and essentially validate Blair's case for war.
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Kelly's death has heightened public suspicions, putting a poignant human face on the idea that the government "sexed up" its dossier on WMD, and suggesting moreover that it contributed to his death by sacrificing his bureaucratic anonymity. Defense Ministry officials, with an assist from Downing Street, helped reporters pinpoint his name. They knew this would inevitably lead to his testifying about what he told BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan, who based his provocative charge that Alastair Campbell, Blair's communications chief, had "sexed up" the dossier at least in part on what Kelly had said.
Hoon first said he had nothing to apologize for, then was awkwardly silent at a news conference when blamed for being complicit in outing Kelly after the weapons expert notified his bosses of a discrepancy between what he had told Gilligan and what Gilligan broadcast. Officials say Kelly was warned his name might become public. Certainly no one expected that putting him forward to contradict Gilligan would induce suicide. Only after his death, when the BBC admitted Kelly was Gilligan's source, did his difficulty in squaring what he had told Gilligan and other BBC reporters with what he told his bosses and the Foreign Affairs Committee become stark. Nevertheless, Blair let Hoon swing in the wind. "I did not authorize the leaking of the name of David Kelly," Blair told reporters. "Emphatically not."
Campbell is the government's other big endangered beast. His fists-first rebuttal of Gilligan may have been justified by the blood libel he thought Gilligan had perpetrated, but it also gave his many critics a weapon to use against him. Campbell told Blair he would quit after senior judge Lord Hutton completes his inquiry into Kelly's death, expected in the fall. On his vacation, starting this week, he will "consider his options," says one Downing Street official. The BBC too may face top-level resignations if Kelly's e-mails and letters and the notes and tapes of other BBC journalists who spoke to him contradict — or at least do not support — the words Gilligan put in Kelly's mouth. Hutton's biggest challenge will not be finding someone to blame for Kelly's death, but apportioning that blame out fairly among many contenders — including, perhaps, Kelly himself.
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