Lobster 55

After Kelly
After Dark, David Kelly and lessons learned

Sebastian Cody
You might remember the red sofas, leather Chesterfields recovered in quieter fabric. You might remember that the talking
didnt end at any specific time, unique in an era when all
television channels closed down at night. You might remember
Oliver Reed getting drunk, although he was hardly the only
disruptive guest. Reading Norman Bakers book on the death of
David Kelly1 has brought back many memories but it might
take a while to explain exactly why and how.
Some 20 years ago I started making a television series called
After Dark for Channel 4. 2 Somewhat to our surprise and that
of Channel 4, this late-night discussion programme with some
unusual features was a bit of a hit for several years, not only with
the press, who gave it resoundingly good reviews,3 but also with
the public.
I discovered the programme on a trip to Vienna. It was the
unlikely meeting of an anarchist and a therapist in the features
department of Austrian state television that led to the invention of
a discussion programme format called CLUB 2. This seemingly
innocent idea, which we imported to the UK under the name After
Dark, depended on strict adherence to a short list of unshakeable
principles. Namely, the number of participants in these intimate
debates (always conducted in agreeable surroundings and without
an audience) was never less than four, never more than eight (like,
as it happens, group therapy); the discussion should be hosted by a
non-expert, whose job rotates, thus eliminating the cult of personality otherwise attaching to presenters; the participants should be a
diverse assortment, all directly involved in the subject under
discussion that week; and, most importantly, the programme was
to be transmitted live and be open-ended. The conversation
finishes when the guests decide, not when TV people make them
stop. This combination still unique in the history of television
produced, as if by magic, chatty grenades, exploding first in
central Europe and then the UK, disturbing the smooth efficiency
of the schedules and the peace of mind of the broadcasters with
happy regularity.
After Dark turned out to be some kind of anti-television
experiment, a programme which, despite the careful plans and
preparations of TV professionals, was actually not in our hands.
Week in and week out the participants took control of the programme and used it for their own ends and in their own way. This
is the special brilliance of the idea, the working method being so
designed as to empower the guests, rather than have them act out
a preordained and inevitably limited agenda designed by others. In
all the ways that matter the control of After Dark passed from the
producer and the broadcaster to the participants. As a result it was

1 Norman Baker, The Strange Death of David Kelly (London: Methuen,

2007)

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dark
3 The Independent wrote (21 November 1988) After Dark has proved
the only way of doing serious subjects justice on television

never our show it always belonged to the guests, which is only

right, proper and as it should be but normally never is.
Despite being transmitted late at night (of necessity, given the
open-endedness of the format) the public as well as the critics
found the programme and took it to their hearts, so much so that
Channel 4 had to commission research to explain how a programme with such seemingly tiny ratings was being watched by
nearly the whole country (a paradox which became obvious when
a pair of popular comedians took to affectionately sending up the
programme every week in their peak-time show.4) It was on
After Dark that I saw for the first time the extraordinary sight of
someone changing their mind on TV, and heard things I had not
only never heard before but could never have imagined being said
in the presence of strangers, let alone on television. And, of
course, After Dark, by virtue of its liveness could not be censored.

Breaking the rules

The reporting of the worlds affairs already, as is well known, a
compromised activity is further distorted by television into a
form of entertainment (this statement would be huffily rejected by
the sanctimonious blind men who administer the news). In
selecting what is newsworthy and deciding on how to treat it, the
media operate with an array of moral and political assumptions,
roughly speaking those of the liberal-individualist ideology of
Western culture with its emotivist ethics and hidden dependence
on existing power structures. After Dark broke all these rules from
the beginning, built as it was by the Viennese to reflect the
polygon of views that is real life, rather than the binary fallacy of
yes/no, pro/contra stylised debates. Somehow we still managed to
make the news, broke many stories of importance, and flourished
like a dock leaf next to the nettle of Thatcherite triumphalism.
The special freedoms guaranteed by the programme were
grabbed by the participants, who often said the apparently unsayable. Intelligent production kept us out of the law courts, if not out
of hot water. The agenda of the programme was as wide as we
could get away with: we gave a voice to the voiceless, shining
light into forgotten and unknown corners, as well as introducing
Bianca Jagger to the Contra she said was destroying her country,
and Edward Teller to his lesbian nemesis, to list just two of our
more famous meetings.
Much to everyones surprise, the programme survived the
novelty of its form and remained a great event for some years,
even to the extent that the head of the network, Jeremy Isaacs,
selected it as one of his all-time favourite programmes when he
left C4 and wrote a book.5 Not everyone was wholly
supportive, however. Although launched by Isaacs, most of the

4 Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, After Closing Time, on Alas Smith
& Jones, BBC TV, 1988 onwards
5 Jeremy Isaacs, Storm Over 4, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson,
1989)

Lobster 55
ninety After Dark programmes were made under the reign of
Michael Grade, who we were never sure actually watched the
show.6 And Grade, always more of an aspiring Establishment
man than his time at C4 suggested, had concerns. Interviewed
some years after he axed After Dark for uncertain reasons,7 Grade
said:
It (After Dark) was an interesting idea and well worth
pursuing. I thought it was very badly produced, editorially.
The subjects that Sebastian 8 picked were so bloody irrelevant. He was obsessed with espionage, so there was an
espionage story every other week. 9
Michael Grade, for whom I retain a certain affection and who, as
the highly-paid chief executive of ITV, is now living out the
saying Beware what you wish for, is not quite accurate in his
recollection. After Dark was built around a discussion of espionage on only two occasions:10 the first broadcast half-way
through the second series,11 the other launching the third
series,12 and timed to coincide with a new Official Secrets Act.
A possibly more reliable guide as to what principles drove our
bad editorial judgement is an internal memo I wrote in 1988 for
the benefit of a newly expanded production team, listing the main
themes of After Dark:
1. Lovelessness: the spaces in our society that for whatever
reason are cold, empty, formulaic, unfeeling, systematised and
filled only with empty rhetoric or silence.
2. Who owns your body? Do you? Does the State? Your
doctor? Your lover? The police? Your parents? This theme
covers a variety of apparently unrelated subjects: imprisonment, health care, capital punishment, mental illness, abortion,
schooling
3. What happens after dark? Sex, crime, astronomy
4. Shining light into the shadows we find not only
Dahrendorfs underclass but also the invisible people. Some
invisible people are so because they choose to be (criminals,
spies, the hidden rich) but others are invisible because we do
not want to see them (the homeless, the dispossessed, the
mentally confused, the dying). Among the invisible there is
a new slave class: some of those were uncovered by Gunther
Wallraff in his documentary The Lowest of the Low (illegal
immigrants who are used for clearing up nuclear accidents
although the work is known to be fatal).13
5. Do you want to know a secret? Guests tell all, or their bit of
it.
6. What is beyond the law? Who is beyond the law?
7. Not knowing is an act of choice. During a discussion on the
Holocaust, an Austrian woman claimed We did not know;
another participant countered by saying that not all knowing

6 Grades editorial comments, such as they were, were usually about the
very beginning of a programme known for never running less than 2
hours.
7 <www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/jan/28/broadcasting.comment>
8 The present writer.
9 Unpublished transcript of a recorded interview by Kate Losowsky, held
at the headquarters of First Leisure on 25 February1999.
10 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_After_Dark_editions
11 British Intelligence, hosted by John Underwood, with guests Gary
Murray, Alastair Mackie, Merlyn Rees, Robin Ramsay, Jock Kane, Robert
Harbinson, H. Montgomery Hyde. Channel 4, 16 July 1988.
12 Out of Bounds, hosted by John Underwood, with guests Tony Benn,
Lord Dacre, James Rusbridger, Miles Copeland, Anthony Cavendish,
Adela Gooch. Channel 4, 13 May 1989.
13 There is an English-language book of this remarkable documentary:
Gunter Wallraff, Lowest of the Low, (Freundlich Books, 1987).

comes from reading newspapers. Looking, listening and

drawing deductions are another way of knowing, so choosing
not to look or listen or draw a deduction can be conscious
not knowing. So: what things in our society are we
choosing to look away from, choosing not to know? What
will our grandchildren accuse us of?
This range of editorial concerns led us to make After Dark
programmes on sex, drugs, rock-and-roll and everything from the
fashion industry to the Grand National, child abuse, psychics and
animal rights (and, yes, one on male violence with Oliver Reed).
Although this Lobster article is indeed necessarily preoccupied
with intelligence matters, and so runs the risk of accidentally
giving the impression that Michael Grades caricature has merit,
the programmes we made tell a different story. After Dark could
not have been more diverse.

Diversity
Diversity was anyway guaranteed by the colourful production
teams who researched the programmes. It was the 1980s so we
employed a member of Militant (at least I think he used to get the
newspaper) but also a member of a Roman Catholic sect, a retired
rent boy and someone who was later splashed across the front
page of The Observer as an SIS agent. We gave a break to a
minicab driver who nonetheless carried on sending us abusive
faxes for years. There was a troublesome former Private Eye man
whose stories led me to discover that Peter Cook was a serious
and professional proprietor (Cooks otherwise incessant comedy
shtick vanished when he discussed the magazines personnel
problems). There was no collective bias: the staff were a motley
crew who fought hard to promote their individual interests. And
with them came a motley range of contacts.
Of course shining light into the shadows we invited some less
than usual guests on to the programme, and some had, um,
connections. The very first edition, recently repeated during C4s
25th anniversary celebrations, was called Secrets (playing out to
The Beatles singing Do you want to know a secret?) and
featured Colin Wallace, then a media pariah, who at one point
waved to the cameras at unseen watchers from the intelligence
community. That he shared After Darks red sofas with, among
others, a psychoanalyst and a hill farmer from Wales seems
somehow not to have stuck in Grades memory.
After Darks ground rules absolutely live broadcasting (no
editing or delay) and open-ended intimate discussion meant that
what the guests said was uncensorable. This led to a serious row
in September 1988 when we considered inviting Gerry Adams on
to the programme. Adams had apparently agreed to what was at
the time quite a coup: he would sit down with sworn political
enemies. One of our team, seeking advice on how best to construct a balanced group of discussants, asked a previous guest, the
terrorism expert Professor Paul Wilkinson of Aberdeen University. All hell broke loose as Wilkinson decided to go public. He
attacked the proposal to have Adams on the programme; Tory
MPs, including Mrs Thatchers parliamentary private secretary,14
joined a chorus of protest; previously confirmed participants
withdrew from the programme; and both C4 and the television
regulator, the IBA, issued press releases within minutes of one
another.
Finally the C4 Director of Programmes Liz Forgan and I
agreed a deal: if a former British prime minister would come on
the programme, Adams could appear. Wilson had Alzheimers;
Callaghan never liked us; and Edward Heath, who later appeared

14 Neil Hamilton, now perhaps a little better known than then.

Lobster 55
twice on After Dark,15 couldnt make it. So that was the end of
it. Except that the heightened feelings of that year (the Gibraltar
shootings followed by killings at two funerals, Death on the
Rock, Lisburn, Ballygawley and other bombs) had led, only a
month previously, to Mrs Thatcher appealing to the British media
to withhold publicity from IRA sympathisers. A spokesman for
the IBA said, The fact that After Dark is a live programme means
there is no editorial control over remarks Mr Adams may make
and I was subsequently told our (unmade) programme was the
straw which broke Downing Streets back. I cannot confirm this,
but the timing is eloquent: our programme with Adams was to be
on 10 September. On 19 October, Douglas Hurd, then Home Secretary,16
introduced
broadcasting
restrictions
(the
broadcasting ban) on organisations proscribed in Northern
Ireland and Britain, including direct statements by members of
Sinn Fin. From November 1988 to September 1994, the voices of
Irish republicans and unionist paramilitaries were barred by the
government from British television and radio.
We never knew exactly how any particular After Dark
participant would handle their freedoms: what they would say was
rarely predictable in advance, and indeed we never made truth
claims on anyones behalf. If a guest chose to make unexpected
assertions which could not be dealt with by the group, that
evenings host always dissociated the programme from the allegation and so saved us a lot of legal bother. Some guests made
disclosures which led to legal or journalistic excitements, or
pursued us afterwards with hints of further exposures.
For every guest who eventually appeared on After Dark our
production team probably spoke to at least ten others, numbering
our final total of journalistic contacts in the thousands. So some of
these potential guests had theories which were conspiratorial in
nature, or claimed to hold evidence of dark and dirty doings; some
said they were disaffected intelligence officers or agents, and
many of these were personally weird but not necessarily liars.
Our resources were limited not unusual in journalism or even
in 1980s Channel 4 so we could not check everyone out completely. However after a number of sticky encounters it seemed
there were loose rules we could rely on:
The rules
Rule A: The documents in the safe. If someone tells you he has a
secret locked in a safe somewhere, and that this will explain
everything from the Bilderberg Group to the career of John
Prescott, ask to see the documents. If somehow this isnt possible
today, but will be possible tomorrow, or next week, or on payment
of a certain sum or the employment of a sister, or when present
difficulties with the Inland Revenue have been resolved, or when
the lodger has gone back to Portugal, you are being strung along:
there is no document and there may well be no safe either. A
recent example might be Paul Burrell, sent off by the coroner in
the Diana inquest to retrieve his secrets, eventually exposed as
not being secrets at all.
Rule B: Unexplained contradictions and other mysteries do not
necessarily mean anything strange is going on. This is almost
certainly the case if the contradiction is simply that The Evening

15 Britain - Out on a Limb?, hosted by Beverly Anderson, with guests

Peter Ustinov, Kenneth Minogue, Shirley Williams, Richard Perle,
Alastair Morton, Josef Joffe, Edward Heath. Channel 4, 10 June 1989 .
and The Gulf: Counting the Cost, hosted by John Plender, with guests
Adnan Albahar, Chris Cowley, Edward Heath, Robert McGeehan, Lord
Weidenfeld, Mona Bauwens, Adnan Khashoggi. Channel 4, 2 March
1991.
16 Hurd later sent a nice note wishing After Dark well.

Standard has a different fact to The Daily Mirror. Anyone who

has ever been written about in the press can identify with the
curious sensation of only partially recognising themselves in what
appears. A newspaper or magazine, even one of record, even
one with fact checkers or a large budget, is not in the truth
business, it is in the publishing business and near enough is
usually good enough.
Rule C: Look and you will find. In a development of B, in a twist
on Heisenberg, the act of investigation seems automatically to
create its own uncertainties. Just by looking into a situation one
will come across unexplained material and the harder you look,
the more you will find. Take the absurd example of a hypothetical investigation into the (entirely innocent) circumstances
behind the writing of this article. If these were to be investigated
thoroughly, any number of awkward inconsistencies and unexplained coincidences would be bound to emerge. For example
what of the appearance of Lobsters editor as a guest on After
Dark in 1988; or a Lobster contributor appearing on a revived
edition 15 years later;17 or our companys (unsuccessful) documentary proposal with the other Lobster founder; or indeed my
few days spent in a castle near Strasbourg with a friend of David
Kellys; and so on. If calls are made to try and clarify matters,
confusions and contradictions will multiply, if only because
human beings tend not to express themselves in ways which bear
much scrutiny, let alone forensic examination by lawyers or
suspicious minded journalists. Suddenly the investigators can use
phrases like this could not really be explained, he was unwilling
to discuss, she would not come to the phone
Before you know it, researching too diligently can slip into a
fuggers fugue of accusation, with all manner of folk supposedly
conspiring to murder someone in a rigged car crash even the dog
in the Fiat Uno.
For those who think these rules are somehow an attack on
investigative journalism (this used just to be called journalism but
given the current low standards of the trade the phrase has some
useful descriptive value), here is a defence which also happens
to be a defence of Andrew Gilligans hurried, exaggerated, but for
all that essentially true report on BBCs Today of the sexing up
of the Blair dossier. Dont let pompous news folk at, say, the
Columbia School of Journalism hear this, but the surprising
corollary of Rule C is that the biggest stories are often supported
by the shakiest facts.
Consider Jonathan Aitken and The Guardian. The subsequent
court case showed that The Guardian went to press without really
having the story locked down. This does not mean they were
wrong to do so but it goes some way towards explaining why
Aitken thought he would win his libel suit. Or, when the
Buckingham Palace press office secretly tipped Andrew Neil to
the tension between the Queen and Mrs Thatcher and he went
ahead and printed this, they themselves were the first to deny the
story. Whisper who dares: more corners are going to be cut when
the editor knows the story is true but cant quote the source.
Another, perhaps overreaching, example of where every word
can be questioned but the truth still somehow comes across: the
four Gospels contradict one another (as well as a sense of what is
beyond reasonable doubt), yet two thousand years later people
still understand them to reflect reality. Gilligan would probably
not want to be seen as a latter-day biblical evangelist but he (and
the BBC) suffered mainly because of what philosophers might
call a category error. Academics and lawyers (including but not

17 Iraq: Truth and Lies?, hosted by John Underwood, with guests Saad
Hattar, Corinne Souza, Gerald James, David Gore-Booth, Jenny Moore,
Haitham Rashid Al-Withaib, Yosri Fouda. BBC4, 29 March 2003

Lobster 55
only Tony Blair and Lord Hutton) examined what he said in that
live radio report only (and deliberately only) from the perspectives of their professions and experience. Meanwhile every
ordinary listener will have understood what Gilligan was getting
at: in all the ways that matter, Gilligan told the truth about what
we now know went on.
Just as one shouldnt automatically dismiss a story simply
because it is inaccurate in points of detail, one cant dismiss
secretive or paranoid whistleblowers just because they seem
weird. They may nonetheless still be telling at least some of the
truth, even if they are also making some things up. This was
brought home to me in dramatic fashion when a new member of
the After Dark production team turned out to be (how can I put
this carefully enough) related to a senior civil servant. So I was
invited to a cocktail party held in the Foreign Office by said senior
civil servant. He took me to one side and asked my opinion of
someone by then notorious in government circles and claiming
compensation for ill-treatment, the file having presumably just
landed on the senior civil servants desk. Finding myself on the
spot, and wanting to do the best by a former After Dark guest but
also not willing to authenticate claims I could not substantiate, I
reached for another of our laws of conspiracy:
Rule D: The journey away from truth. We know the secret world
has biases towards certain personality traits and it is not always
the case that stability is pre-eminent. 18 (Did MI6 make
Richard Tomlinson what he is or was MI6 attracted to Tomlinson
in the first place in part because of those attributes which were
later to cause so much trouble?) So if a loyal servant of the Crown
trips over something unethical, distasteful or somehow
incompatible with decency, it should not be too surprising if this
turns a silent patriot into a whistle-blower.
But at this point things may go wrong for the whistleblower,
and not just in the obvious ways of being harassed by employers:
you discover the pleasures of mixing with a grateful media,
enjoying notoriety, even becoming perhaps financially dependent
on this. In combination this may mean that, like a defector suffering from having told everything he knows, the stories get longer,
more detailed, more wide-ranging and eventually beyond your
competence; indeed beyond what you know to be true, or even
what is true. Journalists will bring you hypotheses, ask your opinion, and you can end up seeking to convince yourself and them
of ever greater conspiracies. However and this is the point I
made at that FCO party (the After Dark guest got compensation,
by the way) all this later behaviour does not mean that the first
inciting incident is not true. But real skill is needed to detect kernels of truth inside what may have grown mouldy with guesses or
lies.
Kelly
Reading The Strange Death of David Kelly needs precisely the
tools of discernment we developed for After Dark all those years
ago. The Liberal Democrat MP for Lewes, Norman Baker, has
written a book of real interest to Lobster readers. Bakers work on
the death of David Kelly in Oxfordshire woods in July 2003 was
promoted by the Associated Newspaper group and so has received
perhaps rather less attention than it deserves from the rest of the
press. Even if much of the material may seem familiar Iraq, the
Gilligan row, uncertainties around Kellys supposed suicide
Bakers book is an enthralling compendium of what we know. But
it is also unexpectedly far more wide-ranging: at least some of it,

18 One After Dark staff member was married to a psychologist who

screened for the security services.

and perhaps rather more than some, will be new to most. Instead
of a predictable rehash it is actually a carefully researched trawl
through much of the US-UK Iraq story, spreading out to include a
number of intriguing other elements.
Originally a bacteriologist, Dr David Kelly CMG joined Porton
Down in 1984, and from the collapse of the Soviet Union onwards
participated in overseas weapons inspections. Kelly briefed DIS
and MI6; worked with the UN monitoring chemical and biological
weapons; and was part of the so-called Rockingham Cell,
described by Scott Ritter as a secretive intelligence activity buried inside the DIS which dealt with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.19 Comfortable consorting with the press (Kelly also
attended an MOD senior officers TV course at Wilton Park) we
are told by Nick Rufford of The Sunday Times that Kelly had
sometimes been an undercover man for the intelligence
services.20 Unsurprising, perhaps, that veteran journalist Tom
Mangold should claim Kellys death was investigated by Special
Branch, MI5; MI6 had a man present and the CIA had a man
present.21
Bakers book details the whole ghastly scandal, from the
disputed reasons behind the invasion of Iraq; the dodgy dossier;
the 45 minute claim; Gilligans sexed-up report;22 the
British Watergate of the mobile labs which werent; the use of
Kelly as a political pawn by Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and
Geoff Hoon; the not-quite-leak of Kellys name following a
meeting held in Downing Street and chaired by the Prime
Minister; the (perhaps coincidental) outing of Valerie Plame by
the White House; and, only four days later, Kellys e-mail to
Judith Miller hinting at many dark actors playing games.
Less than four hours after writing that enigmatic e-mail Kelly
left home for his final walk in the woods. The body was discovered, the news went round the world and not long after Geoff
Hoon was photographed enjoying VIP treatment at Silverstone.23
Tom Kelly (Blairs press spokesman at the time, now shilling
for Terminal 5 at Heathrow) announced in a supposedly unattributable briefing that Kelly was a Walter Mitty character who may
have contributed to his own downfall.24
Baker
Norman Baker was Lib Dem spokesman for Environment, Food
and Rural Affairs at the time. He reads with interest the letters
from concerned medics eventually a fair number of trauma,
diagnostic radiology, anaesthesiology, vascular surgery specialists
and others corralled into the so-called Kelly Investigation Group
by someone called Rowena Thursby, characterised by Baker only
as suffering from a painful, chronic neuro-immune condition.
In a somewhat faut naf manner Baker tells of his gradual
realisation that Kellys death was not all that it seemed and of his
subsequent 18 months of investigation. After the arrival of Ming
Campbell as party leader, Baker turns down the offer to continue
on the front bench for a journey into the unknown, one that

19
20
21
22

The Guardian, 30 January 2004

The Sunday Times, 25 January 2004
GMTV, 2006
The text of No.10s immediate denial of Gilligans 6am report is now
hard to read: Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the
intelligence agencies. Baker also reminds us there was a mysterious first
draft, only discovered in November 2006 (Hutton was not told about it)
and which has still not been released despite a ruling from the Information
Commissioner that it should be.
23 A spokesman tried to rescue this by claiming Hoon was investigating
plans to use motor-racing fuelling systems in military helicopters.
24 The Independent, 4 August 2003

Lobster 55
would take many peculiar turns. He starts this journey in early
2006, publishing an article in The Mail On Sunday that July. This
piece triggers hundreds of letters, e-mails and phone calls, and
Baker seems to have followed all the leads, walking the woodlands around the scene, investigating a list of other scientists
alleged to have died in mysterious circumstances, even tracking a
former Soviet germ warfare official down in the Ukraine.
As he delves deeper the inconsistencies mount up but the
uncertainties seem gradually to clear and attempts at logical
analysis lead Baker in surprising directions. He tries to make
sense of all the players, including some hidden figures in the
shadows. He feels forced to pronounce the case a conspiracy, and
as a result he runs the risk of being politically marginalised, given
the reputation of conspiracy theorists, at least away from readers
of this journal. As he writes: A conspiracy theory must by
definition be absurd...Of course this does not mean that every
event has a sinister explanation, that every wild theory must be
right.25
Bakers case in outline is that given the circumstances of
Kellys death, natural causes or an accident can be ruled out, leaving suicide or murder. Baker considers that suicides after all can
be staged,26 he finds the accepted explanation unsafe; and
spots contradictions in the scenario of Kelly cutting his wrist with
a blunt pruning knife (which though bloody seems oddly to have
had no fingerprints on it) leaving remarkably little blood on the
ground. At the same time Kelly is supposed to have taken an
uncertain number of large tablets (possibly with only a thirtieth of
a fatal dose) which he would apparently have had difficulty in
swallowing. Eventually, after analysing the facts and available
information as carefully and objectively as (possible), Baker
rules out suicide and soberly concludes it was murder.
He then tries to identify every possible motive, and every
possible perpetrator......and seek to eliminate each possibility one
by one.27 He tests all the possible suspects he can think
of, including Israel, South Africa, and Russia and then moves on
to the US, noting that in 2001 President Bush overturned
Americas 25-year ban on state assassinations, giving the CIA
permission to eliminate individuals designated by the President.
He comes across the Grey Ghosts in the Pentagon (a private army
of professional assassins28) and briefly examines the slashed
wrist death of journalist Danny Casolaro. However after due
consideration and talking to individuals well connected to the
CIA who say they know what happened Baker concludes
Kelly (was) murdered but that the US was not part of it.29
Moving to the possibility of a UK-based wet job, Baker
follows leads provided in an anonymous letter and comparatively swiftly arrives at a conjecture which fits his facts and also
his sense of how things work in Britain:
...for there to have been British involvement (in a
conspiracy of police officers and medical specialists)
just supposethe police were warned of a likely
assassination attempt, but were not in time to stop it.
Suppose also that subsequent to this, they were told that
Dr Kelly had been murdered by Iraqi elements, but that in
the interests of Queen and country, it was vital that this
not come out, given the possible destabilisation of both
Britain and Iraq that could result. That it was their
patriotic duty to allow the impression to be formed that Dr

25 Baker p. xvi
26 Baker quotes the KGB assassination squad: Anyone can commit a
murder but it takes an artist to commit a suicide. Baker p. 340
27 Baker p. 213
28 Baker p. 298
29 Baker p. 303

Kelly had killed himself. They might just buy that.30

................It is even possible to surmise that perhaps both
Lord Hutton and Janice Kelly were told, and each asked to
go along with the story for the sake of the country.31
So Baker finally arrives at his favoured suspects: he believes
Kelly was most likely killed by enemies from Iraq, Kelly having
apparently feared this would happen (he told someone a fatwa
had been issued against him following his work in Iraq.32 ). The
deed itself was supposedly executed by a couple of not very wellpaid hired hands.33
Baker discusses various Iraqi exile personalities, including the
fantasising Baghdad taxi-driver who became the disastrously
valued intelligence source known, appropriately enough as things
turned out, as Curveball; David Roses one-time favourite Ahmed
Chalabi (but then this journalist has since outed himself in the
New Statesman as an MI6 patsy); and Chalabis rival for postinvasion power, his second cousin Iyad Allawi. Allawi, known as
Sadaam Lite, is a British-trained neurosurgeon who is believed
to have headed the European division of the Mukhabarat from the
Iraqi embassy in London. Despite being accused of having
tortured and killed, Allawi still ended up as the coalitions interim
Prime Minister of Iraq in the run up to the 2005 elections.
Somewhere away from Baghdad, closer to the Kellys home in
Southmoor in Oxfordshire, Baker believes an Iraqi exile group
organised the death of David Kelly. Of various possible motives
Baker believes the most plausible to be revenge or a move to halt
Kelly further undermining the exiles Western power base:
The key question is whether the actions of the Iraqi group
were self-generated, and subsequently covered up by the
(UK) government, or whether a tiny cabal within the
British establishment commissioned the assassins to
undertake this.34
Discrepancies
Testing Bakers book against our ad hoc After Dark laws from 20
years ago, one can see where he could have been led astray; but
one can also form a more positive judgement of his work and
argument than, say, Richard Norton-Taylor, who wrote a broadly
dismissive review in The Guardian 35 (Norton-Taylor also
appeared on After Dark in 1988 36 but the nostalgia stops now).
Baker finds discrepancies everywhere he looks (see the rules
above). For example, the drive to Cornwall the Kellys take after
his name was made public is supposed to have included an overnight stop in Weston-super-Mare. Yet Baker checks the details
and finds Dr Kelly did not stay overnight in Weston-super-Mare,
(but) Mrs Kelly, perhaps under some external pressure....told
Lord Hutton he did.37 DC Graham Coe, who stayed with
Kellys body for at least 25 minutes before other officers arrived,
strained credibility by telling Hutton he did not go near the body.
(He also gave a private witness statement to the inquiry in
addition to his public comments one can ask why this was
necessary). Kellys dental records disappeared for a couple of

30
31
32
33
34
35
36

Baker p. 308
Baker p. 348
Baker p. 311
Baker p. 345
Baker p. 348
The Guardian, 1 December 2007
Blacklist?, hosted by Professor Ian Kennedy, with guests Harold
Musgrove, Hilary Wainwright, Hugo Cornwall, Richard Norton-Taylor,
George Brumwell, John Macreadie, Michael Noar. Channel 4, 10
September 1988.
37 Baker p. 178

Lobster 55
days just after the death or did they? On the same day a
mystery blonde was discovered in Kellys office in a secure part
of the MOD in possession of confidential documents, including a
tape cassette which is alleged to have been removed.
Confusions between press reports are taken seriously by Baker
(see above); the disagreements between medical experts are
discussed as if Baker has never sought a second opinion from a
doctor and learned that medics use guesswork to fill the gaps even
more often than journalists.
Baker puts it all in
Perhaps still unsure today as to what is germane and what not,
Baker has put it all in and this does not help his case, to put it
politely. For example, early on in the book Baker weakens his
hand by mentioning Dr Kitty Little, and then characterises her
only as a member of the public (rather than, for example, as a
known racist fruitcake). In a Little Chef somewhere off the M11
Baker meets a man who tells him about the ley lines around the
death scene which could point to Kelly having been involved in a
negative ritual. Baker quotes a letter about blood-sacrifice on the
birthday of the Goddess Isis, as well as a man who played cribbage with Kelly at their local pub. He decides the masons are not
involved, but before Kelly died it seems there appeared (oh good)
three men in black near the spot where the body would be found.
Baker seems willing to quote anyone who might have something to say (see above), whether private detective, former army
operative, CIA contact even my one-time colleague Gordon
Thomas, who Channel 4 tried to throw off a joint project on
grounds of unreliability. (Gordon is Bakers sole source for information about Kelly and Mossad, Baker at this point considering
Mossads credentials as possible murderers of Kelly.) Baker
includes some methods for killing Kelly which I seem to remember reading first in Agatha Christie but then she did her research
very well, we were always told. Possibly more credible is his
material on Project Coast, the biological warfare programme run
by the Pretoria government from 1981 onwards, designed to keep
the white supremacist government in power in South Africa.
Baker details the work of the South African Mengele and tracks
him down to a hospital where he now works as a cardiologist.
Mai Pederson
Baker devotes a chapter to Mai Pederson, David Kellys mysterious friend, born Mai al-Sadat in Kuwait, who introduced Kelly to
the Bahai faith, a woman both of whose husbands have said is a
spy. Pederson shared addresses in the US with Kelly: despite
being officially listed only as a US Army master sergeant, she has
been able to retain the services of the expensive and well-known
Washington lawyer Mark Zaid to say the shared addresses did not
mean she and Kelly were lovers. Ms Pederson incidentally also
quoted as saying Kelly did not kill himself gave a statement to
the Thames Valley Police on the express condition that it not be
supplied to Hutton, something it seems 17 other people did as
well.
Some of Bakers sources are hard to assess (see above).
Someone, retired, with connections to both the police and the
security services, takes Baker for a glass of wine in a rather
nondescript club and is warned in a phone call that he could be
bankrupted by a full tax inspection. He is then tipped by a spook
from MI6 that Kellys death was a wet disposal. After meeting
Baker, this contact has his laptop stolen. Another such key source
I cannot publicly reveal his name or give clues that would
enable him to be identified but I have no reason to doubt his

honesty is badly beaten up following contact with Baker and is

unwilling to help further.
Baker cant help but slip into some of the habits of the
conspiracist: the book is full of words like oddly, interestingly, bizarre, strange; even it was my turn to be on the
receiving end of a curious incident. But the burning of the Reichstag is reminder enough that just because something looks like a
conspiracy does not mean it is not a conspiracy. False flag operations have been a standard intelligence tactic for centuries, and
deception planning is part and parcel of the work of the military.
Perhaps the UKs most brilliant living soldier, General Rupert
Smith,38 said, while effortlessly besting me in public debate, I
use a lot of smoke. The declassified list of works on deception
research collected by US intelligence officer and amateur conjuror
J. Barton Bowyer runs to over 200 pages and this is just a
bibliographical list of titles. 39 Conspiracies are part of the
real world but if they are successful we tend not to hear about
them until later and then they are generally given a nicer name
than conspiracy theory. Much of Bakers book is speculation,
but it is always logical speculation and Baker is careful to signal
when he is moving from what he knows to what he is not sure of,
and from there to what he is simply imagining.
Omissions
If he has included rather more in his book than is good for his
case, more surprising are two notable omissions. First, given that
Baker is happy to quote Tom Mangold when it suits him, it seems
a shame that he does not give us any of Mangold on Gilligan. In
particular, Mangold condemned Gilligan when
He decided to break the golden rule of journalism and
emailed the Foreign Affairs Committee betraying Kelly
as the source for a conversation he had with BBC
Newsnight reporter Susan Watts. It was the most
despicable thing I have ever known a fellow journalist
do.40
And overhanging this tirelessly researched book is the mystery of
the witness who Baker does not speak to and makes no attempt to
contact: David Kellys widow Janice. Janice Kelly is on record as
saying her husbands death was suicide, although she appeared to
think otherwise all the time he was missing.41 The family
seems divided: Kellys adopted brother contacted Baker to say
He didnt commit suicide; but after publication Kellys brotherin-law was quoted as saying, I cant speak for the whole family,
but Ive read it all, every word, and I dont believe it.42
Baker makes no attempt to go to the heart of this question. For
reasons, he says, of delicacy, he has chosen not to contact Janice
Kelly or her daughters: They would get in touchif they wanted
to. They have not done so, although other members of the family
have made contact.43 We know that Mrs Kelly was invited
to Chequers by Tony Blair but we dont know anything about that
meeting, apart from her telling friends what a nice man Blair is.44
This is more than sloppy: any journalist who avoided trying to
contact a key witness with the lame excuse They will get in touch

38 Retired and last heard of, rather sadly I think, working for consultants
Deloittes and appearing on Comedy Central.
39 Deception Research Program No. 9, to be found online as a link on
e.g. <www.foia.cia.gov/search.asp?refinedText=guevara&x=0
&y=0&pageNumber=1>
40 The Mail On Sunday, 1 February 2004
41 Baker p. 188
42 Independent on Sunday, 21 October 2007
43 Baker p. x
44 Baker p. 196

Lobster 55
if they want to would be laughed out of the newsroom. Baker is
well aware how his work is likely to upset people (indeed some of
his contacts have apparently suffered serious violence as a result),
so any squeamishness in regard to this central and crucial witness
looks more like the cowardice of an amateur investigator. Janice
Kelly could easily have told a door-stepping Baker to go away.
An indictment
So, in summary, Bakers book tells us a lot which is new about
David Kellys life and death and it is clear that there is much
which stinks to high heaven. But I still dont know whether Kelly
killed himself or not. Nonetheless we can all be grateful for
Bakers research even if his detailed conclusions are not necessarily those of every discerning reader, however open-minded.
In all other ways Bakers book is triumphantly good. The
Strange Death of David Kelly is a magnificent indictment of Lord
Hutton and his negligent inquiry, which Baker calls a travesty
given the large number of important points Lord Hutton had
simply not considered.45
No matter what the police said,
Lord Hutton was going to believe it, 46 abandoning basic
procedures and safeguards essential to ensuring the proper
examination of the facts.47
Baker shows Hutton sympathetic towards government and
unhelpful towards the media from long ago, with a style that
stuck rigidly to a narrow brief: Hutton represented the MOD at
the Bloody Sunday inquests and helped to defend Britain in the
European Court against Irish allegations that internees had been
tortured. (I thought I caught the hint of a hint in Bakers carefully
worded note that Hutton achieved a few surprising acquittals of
suspected IRA terrorists.48) All in all, Lord Hutton was the
ideal appointment for those looking to help the Prime Minister out
of a dangerous spot.49
Equally good is Bakers treatment of why the US and the UK
engaged in what was almost certainly an illegal war and the
aggressive and almost certainly illegal invasion of Iraq. He gives
a little space to the Butler report,50 a document which, if
read carefully, suggests Tony Blair should have resigned, a view
one could see hovering over the disappointed post-report
interview Butler gave to The Spectator.51
And what of Blair himself? Here Baker is if anything even
more powerful than on the seemingly craven and slapdash Hutton.
Baker asks if the UK supported the US because the White House
held information on Blair so incriminating that its release would
have caused his immediate resignation,52 a remark he later
amplifies with the wild report that the Americans were aware of
a deeply personal scandal involving Blair dating from the early
1980s.53 Certainly there is some evidence that every move
around Kellys death was of more importance to Bushs closest
allies than Hoons performance at Silverstone would suggest.
Baker discovers after a fair amount of sleuthing that a 45
foot police mast was put up in the Kelly garden after the body was
found, remarkably high in the circumstances: normal police
communications would not require such a structure. It might,

45
46
47
48
49
50

Baker p. viii
Baker p. 70
Baker p. 81
Baker p. 79
Baker p. 79
Lord Butler, now Master of University College, Oxford, former
Cabinet secretary and perhaps best remembered for his stately breaststroke
in the Brockwell lido on a 1995 television documentary.
51 December 2004
52 Baker p. 150
53 Baker p. 302

however, have been required if it were thought necessary to

contact an aircraft in the sky a very long way away, such as the
one at the time carrying the Prime Minister from Washington to
Tokyo.54
Another hint of what Baker thinks the key players were really
up to is contained in his observation that the appendix to Hutton
contains a document about The Worlds Worst Paedophile Ring,
whose members, some correspondent claims, were present at
Kellys murder. Baker wonders why this particularly wacky document was included when, presumably, many other such communications were not and we may in turn wonder why Baker refers
to it at all. Baker has his reasons and suddenly the shadows of
old stories familiar to Lobster readers fall over the book as Baker
reports he has been told:
a leading figure in the Hutton inquiry process was known
by the government to have had a paedophile past in a part
of the UK well away from London. Was the inclusion of
this particular document a way of reminding him to do
his duty?55
Bakers book is one of shady figures operating in a world led by
truly ghastly men of power. But he does find a few heroes:
Sunday Times political editor Jonathan Oliver, then on The Mail
on Sunday, broke press ranks with the outraged cry Have you got
blood on your hands, Prime Minister? Are you going to resign
over this? More seriously, Dr Jill Dekker, an American biodefence expert based in Belgium, e-mails Baker to say the CIA
are intimidating her for revealing research on Syrian biological
weapons: It look like they have tipped off Syrian agents in
Damascus so they will do the hands-on work the CIA wants to
avoid. Please retain this e-mail. Dr Dekkers work suggested
Iraqi weapons were moved to Syria in 2003 and Baker notes that
less than six months after her e-mails to him, the Israelis launched
a military attack on an unspecified target in Syria.56
But the real hero of the book is Kelly himself, not prepared to
allow the spin emanating from either the White House or
Downing Street to go uncorrected. Bakers final page pays due
tribute: between 1990 and his death in 2003, Dr Kelly probably
did more to make the world a more secure place than anyone else
on the planet.57 Given that the world Baker describes is one
of contingent values, hustle politics and truths only glimpsed in a
glass darkly, this is as good as it gets.

Sebastian Cody is an Associate Fellow at the

University of Oxford.
His company Open Media is at www.openmedia.co.uk

54 Baker p. 52
55 Baker p. 219
56 Unfortunately Bakers book was finished just as authoritative reports
were published showing the Israelis bombed a nuclear installation: see e.g.
www.isis-online.org
57 Baker p. 358

Lobster 55