A Journey (79 page)

There could hardly have been a more inflammatory or severe charge. Mistaken intelligence is one thing. Intelligence known to be mistaken but nonetheless still published as accurate is a wholly different matter. That is not a mistake but misconduct. What’s more, directly attributed to Number 10.

In view of five separate inquiries into this and the vast quantities of ink, time and energy expended on it, it would be tedious to go back over every fact, every argument, sub-argument and all the very painful personal grief that it caused. Dr Kelly, a decent and honourable man, took his own life. The two top people at the BBC, Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies, resigned. Alastair and numerous officials went through several months of absolute hell over an allegation that was untrue. Probably my own integrity never recovered from it. Quite a consequence, really. As a result of it, something else happened: the division over the war became not a disagreement but a rather vicious dispute about the honesty of those involved. A difficult situation became and remains an ugly one.

Of course, as I have said, the blunt and inescapable truth is that though Saddam definitely had WMD, since he used them, we never found them. The intelligence turned out to be wrong. But here is where the relationship between politics and the modern media plays such a crucial role.

The intelligence was wrong. We admitted it. We apologised for it. We explained it, even. But it was never enough, in today’s media, for there to have been a mistake. The mistake is serious; but it is an error. Humans make errors. And, given Saddam’s history, it was an understandable error. But it leads to a headline that doesn’t satisfy today’s craving for scandal. A mistake doesn’t hit the register high enough. So the search goes on for a lie, a deception, an act not of error but of malfeasance. And the problem is, if one can’t be found, one is contrived or even invented.

I’m not saying we handled the allegation well. But it was a global firecracker that set blazing a whole series of conspiracy theories that in turn, at the very moment when we needed to unify people, divided them in the sharpest way possible. Before it, we were in error; after, we were ‘liars’.

The basic facts are, actually, straightforward. As each inquiry in turn found – and on the evidence there was no other finding possible – each of the points in the original broadcast was wrong. The forty-five-minutes claim was not put in the dossier by anyone in Downing Street or anyone in government, but by the JIC. We didn’t ‘probably know it was wrong’ and neither did anyone else. We never ordered the dossier to be ‘sexed up’. Dr Kelly was not one of the officials involved in drawing it up.

Worse, Gilligan then went on in an article in the
Mail on Sunday
to allege that Alastair was the author of the whole claim, i.e. invented it, a charge that brought Alastair into the forefront of all the anti-war protest and was just an unbelievable thing to write, unless you were really sure it was true; which, of course, manifestly it wasn’t, and by then both ourselves and the JIC had denied it.

It was never clear if Dr Kelly, who though he admitted talking to Gilligan denied making the allegation, really did brief him in terms that justify the story.

But what followed set the pattern for the interaction between ourselves and the media in the years that followed. Relations between myself and the BBC never really recovered; and parts of the media were pretty off-limits after it.

The problem was that the BBC hierarchy couldn’t see that it wasn’t an allegation we could let pass. Look, if political leaders had to chase up every false or distorted story about their motives, they would be full-time press fact checkers. But this was qualitatively different. People were giving their lives in Iraq. They could forgive an error. They couldn’t forgive a deception. Besides anything else, it meant I had deliberately misled the House of Commons. That in itself, if true, would mean resignation and disgrace.

From the outset, I tried to get Greg and Gavyn to see it. Here’s where my friendship with both was a hindrance not a help. The
Mail
had been running a campaign attacking them as stooges. They wanted to prove their independence. Greg had also been personally anti-war and couldn’t really see that as Director General of the BBC he had to remain neutral.

All I needed was for them to accept that the story was untrue. They could attack the government all they liked, but the allegation of impropriety should be withdrawn. They wouldn’t. Gavyn kept saying it wasn’t the function of the BBC governors to investigate the truth of the allegation – a bizarre position since that was precisely what they should have done. Greg – who could be very obstinate – tried to maintain that the broadcast was accurate because the forty-five-minutes claim was wrong, which, as I constantly said, was not the point.

Anyway, I could bore you to tears with my side of the issue and no doubt they could with theirs. What happened subsequently was more serious and tragic.

The Gilligan allegation led to a rash of others. The Foreign Affairs Committee decided it should investigate, and we were slap bang into what turned into a six-month battle of immensely time-consuming, wearing, dispiriting and draining efforts to clear our collective name.

It became apparent in early July who the source was for the Gilligan story. Dr Kelly offered himself up. He admitted that he had also talked to Susan Watts at
Newsnight
, but her reports had been a lot milder and less inflammatory, though even those had the quite wrong allegation that there had been a dispute over the forty-five-minutes claim between the intelligence services and Downing Street, which was not the case. There had never been a discussion of it, since we never knew of it until the JIC put it in the dossier.

I will never know precisely what made Dr Kelly take his own life. Who can ever know the reason behind these things? It was so sad, unnecessary and terrible. He had given such good and loyal service over so many years. Probably, unused to the intensity of the pressure which the Gilligan broadcast generated, he felt hemmed in and possibly vulnerable to internal discipline if his role emerged. I don’t know and shouldn’t really speculate. I met his family later at Chequers, at my request, and very dignified and sensible people they were. The awful irony was that for all the controversy caused, Dr Kelly himself had long been an advocate of getting rid of Saddam.

How Dr Kelly’s name came out was the subject of a significant part of the Hutton Inquiry. That too was the subject of brutal media allegations, particularly against Alastair. It was suggested that he had leaked the name in breach of instructions from the Ministry of Defence. He hadn’t. It was simply that once we knew it was Dr Kelly, and since the Foreign Affairs Committee was engaged in investigating the forty-five-minutes claim and broadcast, we would have been at risk of a charge of concealment from them had we known the source of the leak and refused to say. In fact, the whole thing was handled by Dr Kelly’s line management, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, Sir Kevin Tebbit, and by Sir David Omand, the Security and Intelligence Coordinator in the Cabinet Office, at my insistence. His name was released on 10 July, and unsurprisingly the Foreign Affairs Committee immediately said they would interview him.

On 15 July he was interviewed. He denied he could have been the source of the Gilligan story since he disputed it. In particular, he said he had never thought or said that Alastair was responsible for inserting stuff into the dossier. The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) was also conducting its own inquiry. He had to give evidence to them as well; and in the course of it said he thought the dossier was ‘a fair reflection of the intelligence that was available and presented in a very sober and factual way’.

I had a rough PMQs on the back of it all on 16 July. The BBC were refusing to say whether Dr Kelly was their source. The Foreign Affairs Committee had decided that he wasn’t and reprimanded the government. I was outraged by the BBC position. It was all very well for them to hold to the traditional journalistic practice of not revealing their source, but this was patently an exceptional case. Here someone was being described as the source. They could confirm or deny his involvement. They didn’t need to name who it was, if it wasn’t Dr Kelly. Just say that there was someone else. But, of course, they didn’t dare, since if they admitted it was only Dr Kelly and since he had denied saying what they alleged, they would have had to have withdrawn the story as originally broadcast. This, they were damned if they were going to do.

That evening I flew to the US. The next day I was due to address both Houses of Congress. It was a big moment. I wrote the speech on the way over and the next morning. It was one of the most important and, in my judgement, best speeches I made.

. . . This is a battle that can’t be fought or won only by armies. We are so much more powerful in all conventional ways than the terrorists, yet even in all our might, we are taught humility. In the end, it is not our power alone that will defeat this evil. Our ultimate weapon is not our guns, but our beliefs.

There is a myth that though we love freedom, others don’t; that our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture; that freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law are American values, or Western values; that Afghan women were content under the lash of the Taliban; that Saddam was somehow beloved by his people; that Milosevic was Serbia’s saviour.

Members of Congress, ours are not Western values, they are the universal values of the human spirit. And anywhere, any time ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.

The spread of freedom is the best security for the free. It is our last line of defence and our first line of attack. And just as the terrorist seeks to divide humanity in hate, so we have to unify it around an idea. And that idea is liberty. We must find the strength to fight for this idea and the compassion to make it universal. Abraham Lincoln said, ‘Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.’ And it is this sense of justice that makes moral the love of liberty.

In some cases where our security is under direct threat, we will have recourse to arms. In others, it will be by force of reason. But in all cases, to the same end: that the liberty we seek is not for some but for all, for that is the only true path to victory in this struggle . . .

And this is not a war of civilisations, because each civilisation has a unique capacity to enrich the stock of human heritage. We are fighting for the inalienable right of humankind – black or white, Christian or not, left, right or a million different – to be free, free to raise a family in love and hope, free to earn a living and be rewarded by your efforts, free not to bend your knee to any man in fear, free to be you so long as being you does not impair the freedom of others. That’s what we’re fighting for. And it’s a battle worth fighting.

And I know it’s hard on America, and in some small corner of this vast country, out in Nevada or Idaho or these places I’ve never been to, but always wanted to go, I know out there there’s a guy getting on with his life, perfectly happily, minding his own business, saying to you, the political leaders of this country, ‘Why me? And why us? And why America?’

And the only answer is, ‘Because destiny put you in this place in history, in this moment in time, and the task is yours to do.’

And our job, my nation that watched you grow, that you fought alongside and now fights alongside you, that takes enormous pride in our alliance and great affection in our common bond, our job is to be there with you. You are not going to be alone. We will be with you in this fight for liberty. And if our spirit is right and our courage firm, the world will be with us.

The reception was ecstatic. They got up and applauded throughout, a total of thirty-five times. But then they have always been generous to their speakers.

In later times, congressmen and senators have frequently mentioned it to me. The thing is: it did have an argument to it, and though the Republicans loved the tough security stuff, the Democrats could agree on the broader agenda in the speech involving climate change, Middle East peace, Africa and social justice. The problem was that this, in a way, describes my political weakness. The right agreed partly; the left, partly. But very few in whole!

After the speech Cherie and I went back for dinner with George and Laura, who were, as ever, gracious and welcoming. I think he was genuinely impressed with the speech and it was a relaxed and generally happy evening. At that point, we had won. Saddam had gone. From George’s perspective, the regime had been changed and with relative ease. From mine, the UN was now back in the mix and there was a prospect of the international community coming together again. It was the last easy evening contemplating Iraq.

We left reasonably early. Alastair had gone back to the UK. I was due to fly to Japan and South Korea for a long-promised visit. Cherie and I drove to the Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. It would be a long flight. We changed into BA sleeper suits and went to sleep. In the middle of the night, Sir David Manning woke me. ‘Very bad news,’ he said.

David was calm, matter-of-fact, and a brilliant adviser, someone of deep integrity, great loyalty and not insignificant courage. He had been a massive support throughout the whole Iraq business. He was due to leave soon and go to Washington as ambassador. ‘David Kelly has been found dead,’ he said, ‘suspected suicide.’ It was a truly ghastly moment.