Dr. Kelly worked for the British government. He was a world-ranking expert on biological weapons at Britain’s Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment at Porton Down and head of its Microbiology Department. In the still largely secret world of how to combat the threat from biological weapons, Dr. Kelly became the voice of unchallengeable authority regularly consulted by officers on the counterproliferation desks in the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defense, MI5 and MI6, and Mossad. For over a decade he had confronted the deceits, lies, and trickery of Saddam’s biological weapons program. Into his office, room 2/35 in the Ministry of Defense Proliferation and Arms Control Secretariat in Whitehall, came daily e-mails and phone calls asking for his help.
Nathan had met him after Dr. Kelly had taken part in a joint Canadian /Mossad operation to interdict biological materials being shipped to Iraq from Montreal. Later, Nathan had accompanied the scientist to the Institute of Biological Research in Tel Aviv, one of the few outsiders allowed such a visit. When the second war against Iraq ended in 2003, Dr. Kelly returned to Baghdad. He had been told by the CIA and MI6 there were shells and missiles with warheads capable of delivering huge quantities of germs that had been secretly developed between the wars. He had found no such weapons. He had been urged by his superiors to go and look again. Still he had found nothing. The pressure continued. No one suspected the inner gyroscope that balanced Dr. Kelly’s decision making had begun to slip out of kilter. Nathan had followed every twist and turn in the very public humiliation of Dr. Kelly that had followed his failure to find weapons of mass destruction: his appearance before a House of Commons Intelligence Oversight Committee, the leaking of his name as the source for the
At two thirty on the afternoon of Thursday, July 17, 2003, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Young sat down before his secure computer and began to create a highly restricted file. Across the top of his screen he typed a code name:
Scarlett had played a key part in producing the controversial dossier. In doing so, he had discarded the carefully judged input of Dr. Kelly in the early drafts. The original intelligence had come from MI6 and was approved by its then director general Sir Richard Dearlove before it had electronically made its way through the intelligence community, passing across the desk of the Defence Intelligence staff. None of them had supported Dr. Kelly’s original assertion that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. He had become the lonely voice who had finally decided to speak to the BBC. What else could Kelly do,
Dr. Kelly had received phone calls his wife, Janice Kelly, was certain came from MI6. She remembered her husband taking some calls behind the closed door of his study, fitted out with seven laptops and his high-security computer on his desks installed by MI5 along with his direct high-security line to Porton Down. It later emerged that when he had left the house, he received two more calls on his cell phone as he walked. The identity of the callers would never be traced.
