wanted to pick Dr Kelly’s brains because he knew that he was a considerable expert on compliance with the biological weapons convention in relation to Iraq. He had a meeting with Dr Kelly for about an hour.
They talked about the history of Iraq’s biological weapons capability, about Dr Kelly’s activities with UNSCOM, about what he thought might be the current state of affairs, and they also talked about Iraq and the biological weapons convention.
153. Mr Broucher was asked:
Q. Did you then go on to discuss the possible use of force in Iraq?
A. We did.
Q. Can you tell us, in your own words, what was said?
A. I said to Dr Kelly that I could not understand why the Iraqis were courting disaster and why they did not cooperate with the weapons inspectors and give up whatever weapons might remain in their arsenal. He said that he had personally urged—he was still in contact with senior Iraqis and he had urged this point on them. Their response had been that if they revealed too much about their state of readiness this might increase the risk that they would be attacked.
Q. Did Dr Kelly say how he was in contact or not?
A. He did not give any details of names or places or times; and I did not ask him that.
Q. Did he say what he had said to those persons that he had contacted?
A. He said that he had tried to reassure them that if they cooperated with the weapons inspectors then they had nothing to fear.
Q. Which, as I understand it, was the position adopted by the United Nations.
A. So I understand, yes.
Q. And did he disclose how he felt about the situation?
A. My impression was that he felt that he was in some personal difficulty or embarrassment over this, because he believed that the invasion might go ahead anyway and that somehow this put him in a morally ambiguous position.
Q. Did he say anything further to you?
A. I drew some inferences from what he said, but I cannot recall the precise words that he used.
Q. What inferences did you draw?
A. Well, I drew the inference that he might be concerned that he would be thought to have lied to some of his contacts in Iraq.
Q. Did you discuss the dossier at all in this conversation?
A. We did discuss the dossier. I raised it because I had had to—it was part of my duties to sell the dossier, if you like, within the United Nations to senior United Nations officials; and I told Dr Kelly that this had not been easy and that they did not find it convincing. He said to me that there had been a lot of pressure to make the dossier as robust as possible; that every judgment in it had been closely fought over; and that it was the best that the JIC could do. I believe that it may have been in this connection that he then went on to explain the point about the readiness of Iraq’s biological weapons, the fact they could not use them quickly, and that this was relevant to the point about 45 minutes.
Q. Did you discuss Dr Kelly’s position in the Ministry of Defence?
A. He gave me to understand that he—it was only with some reluctance that he was working in the Ministry of Defence. He would have preferred to go back to Porton Down. He felt that when he transferred into the Ministry of Defence they had transferred him at the wrong grade, and so he was concerned that he had been downgraded.
Q. Right. Did you have any other conversation with Dr Kelly that day?
A. As Dr Kelly was leaving I said to him: what will happen if Iraq is invaded? And his reply was, which I took at the time to be a throwaway remark—he said: I will probably be found dead in the woods.
Q. You understood it to be a throwaway remark. Did you report that remark at the time to anyone?
A. I did not report it at the time to anyone because I did not attribute any particular significance to it. I thought he might have meant that he was at risk of being attacked by the Iraqis in some way.
Q. And you, at the time, considered it to be a sort of general comment one might make at the end of a conversation?
A. Indeed.
Q. Where were you in July this year on about 17th/18th July?
A. I was on leave in Geneva.
Q. And did you hear of Dr Kelly’s death at all?
A. I believe I heard about it on the television news.
Q. Right. And did you see a picture of Dr Kelly on the news?
A. Yes.
Q. What was your reaction to that?
A. I recognised him, I realised that I knew him.
Q. And as a result of that what happened?
A. Nothing happened immediately because I was aware that I knew him but it was not until later that I became aware of the circumstances of his death and realised the significance of this remark that he had made to me, seemingly as a throw-away line, when we met in February.
Q. Did you contact anyone about your recollection?
A. Yes, I did, not immediately but when the Inquiry began on 1st August it seemed to me that I needed to make known this fact.
Q. Can I take you to CAB/10/9? How did you make this fact known?
A. I sent an e-mail to my colleague, the press officer for biological weapons in the Foreign Office, Patrick Lamb.
Q. And you say to Patrick Lamb: “Is the FCO preparing evidence for the Hutton Inquiry?” We have heard from Mr Lamb: “If so, I may have something relevant to contribute that I have been straining to recover from a very deep memory hole.” Is that right, that at the time your impression was that it was a throwaway remark, and is it also fair to say that it was deeply buried within your memory?
A. Yes, that is fair to say, and the other facts of the meeting took sometime for me to remember; and it took a long time to establish when the meeting took place because it was not noted in my diary.
154. Mr Broucher was clear in his evidence that he had only met Dr Kelly on one occasion. After he had given evidence Dr Kelly’s daughter, Miss Rachel Kelly, looked at her father’s diary and found that it contained an entry that he had met Mr Broucher in Geneva on 18th February 2002. In her evidence Miss Kelly said:
Q. We have heard from your mother this morning. She has given us some of the background. Can I ask you to look at a diary entry for 2002? Before I ask you to look at that, can you just tell me where you found the diary?
A. Yes. The diary was in my father’s study—
Q. It is FAM/1/1. If we look at the entry for February, what does it tell us?
A. It mentions specifically a meeting with David Broucher on 18th February 2002, and the interesting thing with my father’s diaries is he tended to write entries in them after the event and this would have been a meeting that he actually had because it is in his diary.
Q. It does not look like we have been able to get the diary on the screen, but if I look at the diary that I have in front of me, it says: “Monday 18th February 2002, 9.30, David Broucher, USmis.”
A. Yes, US mission.
Q. It gives details of his flights into Geneva the day before.
A. Yes, the day before.
Q. And out of Geneva on 20th February; is that right?
A. Yes, that is correct, on the 20th.
Q. And that is February 2002?
A. It is a year earlier than the date that David Broucher gave as being this year, the conversation he had with my father.
Q. And I think Mr Broucher told us he had only had one meeting with your father.
A. Yes, that is what made me look at it. I actually thought that was the case.
