Richard Sambrook-internal

From : Andrew Giliican-INTERNET

Sent: 18 July 2003 05 50 PM
To: Richard Sambrook- internal
Subject : My account of meeting with Kelly

Andrew Grlligan Debrief _ S=h July 2003 CORRECTED VERSION

11 30 am- lpm.

Dr David Kelly was a well known contact on 'W%/0 for j outnalists I had 4 face to face meetings with him -
the irst one about 2 years ago .
We spoke on the phone whenever Iraq was in t:~te News - probably about 10-12 times m all.
My second face to face meeting was aboa: '18 months ago, then again in May 2002 ard then 22 y2ay 2003 .

He was ue Governrnent's Chief Scientific Officer and Scrl~or Advisor to the Coum-_: Proliferation and
rms Control Secretariat at the MOD end to the Non-Prol:feration-Dept in the FCO .

. understood him to be the Government's most senior advisor on Biological and Cltemtcal weapons - he has
also ;reen so described in the open literature - and umquely well placed to discuss Laq's yV1vID prograrnlne.
He told :n-_ he w~as go.ng to be the Chief British Inspector in the Iraq Survey Group .

He had been Head of :vticrobiology at Potton Down which is cvhere :re first developed his experrise in
weapons of mass des`auc_ion.

He was described by Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg, the authors of a standard work on the subject of
biological warfare, as "the senior adviser on biological defence to the MoD . . .a v+'orld-recognrsed export in
BW. . .scientifically indomitable and, in teans of the BW knowledge, cannot be overtrumped
. .the West's
leadutg BW inspec'or."

He had been invited by M16 m 1989 to debrief :he Soviet. defector Vladim_r Pasechrnik. Dr Kelly Lad drawn
out of him the previously unknown fact of a major Soviet CBW prograrnn:e In 1991 Kelly also discovered
° Soviets had been weaponismg smallpox

~ made clear to tne he had be°n pnvyto high level intelligence assessments - including faose rela=irng to
Lne 45 minute claim over Iraq's W,_MD capability.

He told me at ca-lier meetings that he assessed and interpreted intelligence on biolo--ical and chemical
weapons for the Govt a.-id the intelligence services. He told _i7e :ntel :ieence services what detailed technical
data actually meant.

In terms of the Sept 2002 dossier, I rang h.im when I retumed ao:n Baghdad and asked to meet to discuss
Vv_vD and why none had been found . We agreed to meet in the Charing Cross Hotel on May 22"s. We
agreed to nleet early because, he said, he was about to lea",,e for Iraq. He was keen to lhear %vhat I ::ad :earned
while in Iraq. I didn't go to the meeting with an agenda, just wen: for a general chat I didn't take notes to
start w=fa. We started talking about Hans Blix. He'd been reading fne LNN'IOVIC repons to the LTi Security
Council and said he thougl_t they'd missed :hings (.at the -ad of our conversation, when I was taking notes,
I asked him to repeat this )

I asked how the absence of WMD scuared with the Sept dossier . He had told me. at our previous meeting
that his view of the dossier was "uneventful" He said it had been, until a week befo-e publicatuon, but that :t
had been transfonned . ? asked if I could sta:-t taking notes and he said yes . I took the notes on my Psion-like
personal organiser (not a Pain Pilot, as has lheen reported- tny organiser has a keyboard
.)

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 He told me he had been involved in drawing up trie dossier He discussed issues relating to the dossier
which made it clear he was privy to the process These included that the 45 minute clais- had cor=e from a
single Iraoi intelligernce source and that it had not entered the dossier until September. He also said Downing
St had asked if anything else could go into the dossier.

(L-Zseri Notes transc:ip'.)

He spoke about Iraqi scientists involved in the weapons programme who had been detained after the war and
said not much was coming fronn them in spite of fi.-taicial incentives He said "we" had 10 to 20 of them in
custody They were being held in quite good conditions, not like Guantanomo Bay, he said, and were "in the
Middle East."

I3e spoke about mteiligence assessments that there was a risk of-proliferation from Iraqt V1?viD pro granur_es
-not "people crossing borders v,tth 20 shells" but professional skills, supply chain inforrr.ation .

spoke about his knowledge that the we_1-known figures of the Iraqi WMD prog:amme; people like
aneral Amr al-Saaadt and Dr Riab Taha ;"Dr Genn") were "taken out of the progra:-trne because they
.erfacedw:th the UN." In other words, they were just i7-ont-people who had no L7volveme_nt « ith the rea1
programnte . This information could only have come nom intelligence

He discussed in detail the alie~aed mocile bio':ogical weapons laboratories dtscovered :n lraq, saying that
there was "real debate as to rt"hether they are cvhat they appear to be. . .it rs an odd piece of lcit."

Fie made clear there had been a yVMD programme, but it was small - 30 per cent likely to have been an
active chemical weapons programme, hkei:er that there had been a BW prograrLune He said that the term
"weapens of nzass destruct~on" v.~as almost a m_snomer even if everything had gone right for Saddara, he
couldn't have killed more than a f`v hundred peonle

We discussed what I oouid say and how it should be at-L.-ibu`.ed. He sad he should be described as "a senior
off-lcial involved m drawing up the dossier"

~' -re were tecliiical details he didn't want used as they could idenafy him.
_ didn't v.-ant his personal views about the war reported. He tnouoint it had been m:shandied. He called it a
na:c Failure of diplomacy. He couldn't understand why no-one from Britain or the US had talked to the
_ qis in the run up to war. He was convinced the war was unnccessary- he did not believe Iraq had posed a
serious threat.

This was consisten: wtth his views previously repor.ed.

In October 2001, dunng the anthrax scare m .krr-etfca,'-ze toid The Independent he thought leakage from
Russia's C3yT~' proa-anune was a bigger threat than Iraq Iraq had "too much to lose" by getting involved in
attacks on US citizens .

e made the same Russ:a-Iraq point, as regards straapox, in an inten~iew wail CBC on October 23 2002.

I said we will never give you away as our source a1d you must not give yourself away,
He reohed "Fine" .

My reports scrupulously matched the words he used in our conversation

I have re-read his evidence to the rAC I !have indicated where his account differs from our conversation . i
assumed this was to protect himself which I believed was legitimate for him to do . I therefore told the FAC
that I had "no problem" with Dr Kelly's evidence. I didn't say it was tiue, or .hat he was not the source .

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