Secrets, Scandals and Spies

Britain has always had a soft spot for scandals involving national secrets. There was the 1930s Cambridge spy ring, with Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who worked for the British Secret Service but turned out to be longtime spies for the Soviet Union. Even better if the scandals involved sex.

The early 1960s Profumo affair, in which a politician’s young mistress may have had Soviet ties, led to the resignation of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. But the latest intelligence affair, the suicide of Defense Ministry advisor David Kelly, has a different and more somber cast to it.

It has enmeshed Prime Minister Tony Blair, the British Broadcasting Corp. and members of Parliament in an ugly dispute and a flurry of conspiracy theories that may ruin reputations and careers.

Kelly, said to have supplied the BBC with information showing that the Blair government “sexed up,” as the British phrase has it, intelligence on Iraq, has become a proxy bludgeon against the prime minister and the BBC.

That he is judged to have committed suicide under intense media pressure inevitably raised comparisons to Vincent Foster. He was the Clinton friend and colleague enmeshed in the Travelgate scandal, something utterly trivial when compared to a cause for war.

In both cases, political opponents quickly churned up whispers that it might not be suicide, but a government-sponsored act.

Kelly, who reportedly told BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan that the government did not have much of a case in claiming that Iraq could launch biological weapons within 45 minutes, invites another comparison closer to home.

In the 1930s, Ralph Wigham, a member of the Foreign Office, handed Winston Churchill vital documents showing that Nazi Germany was arming itself to the teeth while Tory Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was doing nothing.

Depressed by the pressure of handing over documents and the impending war with Germany, Wigham committed suicide.

Is Kelly a Wigham in reverse, showing that the government was exaggerating? The BBC says Kelly was Gilligan’s main source. But Kelly, before a parliamentary investigative committee, said it wasn’t so. Meanwhile, Blair and the BBC are scrambling.

It’s a spectacle that does nothing to answer questions about why Blair was so insistent that Saddam Hussein was an immediate menace or why Blair continues to insist that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger.

The finger-pointing obscures the larger question, which is whether Iraq posed any external threat sufficient to call for war in the first place.