The three experienced medical specialists, who had already questioned whether Dr. Kelly had committed suicide, again challenged the conclusion: Dr. David Halpin, a consultant in trauma injuries; Dr. Stephen Frost, a radiologist; and Dr. Martin Birstingi, a vascular surgeon, all said that in their combined clinical experience—numbering some fifty years—they had never come across a case where somebody had died from cutting their ulnar artery. “To die from hemorrhage Dr. Kelly would have had to lose about five pints of blood,” stated Dr. Halpin. Dr. Frost said, “It is unlikely from the stated injury Dr. Kelly would have lost more than a pint of blood.” In Dr. Berstingi’s opinion, “When the ulnar artery is cut, there is a rapid fall in blood pressure and after a few further minutes the artery stops bleeding.” None of these experts were asked to testify at the inquest.
Piece by piece Nathan had collected and analyzed the testimony of those involved in the scientist’s death. He uncovered details of Dr. Kelly’s hitherto unsuspected links to the biowarfare program of South Africa’s apartheid regime—and that in the week before his death the scientist had been told he would be questioned by MI5 over bringing the program’s head, Dr. Wouter Basson, to Porton Down. With all the other pressure he was facing, had the prospect of a grilling by security service interrogators finally been the last straw? Could his death possibly have any connection with the madcap schemes of Basson? Had he been killed to be silenced, another victim of the “dark side of intelligence” that Ari Ben-Menashe had identified? The questions would remain unanswered until Michael Shrimpton, a lawyer who has briefed the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee on national security issues made a bid to end the mystery.
He claimed to the London
In that first week of July 2005, high summer had come to London, filling the city with optimism. A continuing heatwave had clothed the crowds in pretty dresses and open-necked shirts. Cafés had moved tables outside for al fresco dining. The stock market was still on the rise, and the shops were offering discounts on already bargain prices. The television images from Baghdad had faded from the screens.
Mossad had been among foreign intelligence services informed by the Home Office that the threat of a terrorist attack on Britain had been downgraded from “severe general” to the third highest alert, “substantial.” That week Scotland Yard’s commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, had briefed his senior staff that MI5 was “quietly confident” the battle against terrorism was under control.
Nathan had met, and liked, the commissioner. Since he had been appointed the previous January, Blair had started to run London’s police force as a modern corporation based on the latest management techniques. With his calm, measured tones, the stocky uniformed figure, police cap clamped firmly on his head and jaw thrust forward, Blair radiated a bullish certainty. He had set out his stall in much the way Meir Dagan had done when taking over a dispirited Mossad. Blair had told his force of thirty thousand officers and fifteen thousand civilians that he intended to drag them away from what he saw as a sexist, homophobic, and often racist past. He had reminded them that he was a policeman who knew what it was like to extract a corpse from a train crash and had peppered his laying-down-the-rules-first speech to his senior officers with quotations from Voltaire. He raised a smile when he said that on his deathbed the great French thinker, asked to renounce the devil, replied this was not the time to make new enemies. He told the officers he didn’t want them to treat him as their enemy, but he would not tolerate anyone who clung “to the old ways.” From then on he slipped easily into the business jargon of “multitiered policing,” “customer-shaped service,” and “infrastructure connectivity.” He used such unlikely police terms as “encapsulate,”
