Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (46 page)

Any failed bid can leave the attempted suicide badly wounded: one thinks of people who have managed to shoot their jaws off or put holes in their chests. The point is that they believe they are going to die. Actually, as we have seen, co-proxamol was a good method, and if Kelly took the tablets first, the artery severing might have been an attempt to hurry things along. But one wonders what certain and painless methods Baker thought Kelly should have chosen. One of the most common forms of suicide, hanging, is believed to be one of the most agonizing. Perhaps hemlock was unavailable.

Baker’s demolition of Dr. Kelly’s suicide method is lengthy and detailed, employing cumbersome sarcasm in order to suggest strained credulity. “We are told,” he writes, “that the police found twenty-nine of the tablets had been removed from their trays—doubtless the one that David Kelly thoughtfully left helped the police with their inquiries. Dr. Kelly had apparently also very considerately replaced the empty blister packs inside the pocket of his waxed jacket, found at the scene.”
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As opposed, one imagines, to committing one final caprice and carefully digging a hole and putting the tray in it so as to bamboozle any investigators. Much is made out of an aversion that Dr. Kelly was supposed to have had, according to one source, to swallowing tablets. “If this is right, we are then being asked to believe that Dr. Kelly indulged in a further masochistic act in the attempt to take his life.”
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One hardly needs to point out that suicide is an act of self-destruction. Is it really hard to believe that someone intent on killing themselves and with the means on hand would do so?

Previously, Baker points out, Dr. Kelly’s wife had offered a friend, Mai Pederson, some of her tablets for a headache. “Ms. Pederson accepted, but Dr. Kelly criticized his wife for offering tablets prescribed for her alone. If true, this can only reinforce the doubts that exist that Dr. Kelly would actually have chosen to ingest twenty-nine of these tablets.”
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Actually, of course, it does no such thing. If anything, it reminds us that Kelly knew how dangerous these drugs could be. So did Baker really think that Dr. Kelly—intent on suicide—wouldn’t have taken an overdose of tablets unless they’d been prescribed to him personally?

Almost any argument would do. “Common sense tells us that quite a lot of water would be required to swallow twenty-nine tablets, particularly ones such as these, oval with a long axis of about half an inch. It is frankly unlikely, with only a small water bottle to hand, that any water would have been left undrunk.”
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There seems to be no evidential basis whatsoever, and no authority, for Baker’s claim of what was and wasn’t “frankly unlikely.” However, a reader might like to see if they can wash down twenty-nine jelly beans with rather less than half a liter of water. It’s pretty easy.

“Yet what person, intent on cutting their wrists, or indeed swallowing large numbers of tablets, would do so on their back? The natural position, if such a term can be used, is surely sitting, which in a wood does suggest against a tree.”
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Once again, there is no support for the claim about the “natural position” for a wrist-cutting or tablet-swallowing suicide to adopt. But anyway, there had been no suggestion from the pathologists or the police that Kelly had been lying “on his back” at the point when he took the tablets and cut his wrist. He was found with his head slightly propped up at the base of a tree.

Dark Hints

We have already seen, in the case of Janice Kelly, how Baker’s tactic when dealing with inconvenient evidence is to “vanish” the troublemaker. Like a rather desperate defense counsel whose client has been found standing with a bloodied knife above the body of his victim, a fresh £100,000 life insurance policy in his pocket, Baker sets about the naysayers with impressive vim. First up is Dr. Nicholas Hunt, the pathologist chosen by the Oxfordshire coroner (judge), Nicholas Gardiner, to take on the case. Dr. Hunt was, according to Baker, underqualified. “It is curious therefore that the Oxfordshire coroner should have made this choice,” he writes. “Under the circumstances Mr. Gardiner could have been forgiven for employing the most experienced pathologist he could find from the register, or even employing two such people.”
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There is an insinuation here, but we don’t know of what.

Anyone in the way of Baker’s theory gets this dark-hint treatment. Tom Mangold, one of the most experienced investigative reporters in British journalism, knew and liked Dr. Kelly, who had helped him in the past. Mangold is an abrasive and outspoken man with no time for conspiracy theories about Kelly’s death, and therefore became a prime Baker target. “Tom Mangold’s role overall is a singular one,” he writes. “Even before Dr. Kelly’s body was officially found on the Friday morning, he was on the phone to Mrs. Kelly.” There isn’t anything “singular” about this at all, since the fact of Kelly’s disappearance was known hours before his body was found. But Baker continues: “Indeed, Mr. Mangold seemed strangely keen to declare the death a suicide and to discredit any suggestion to the contrary.”
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“Strangely” is surely used to convey the impression that Mangold was complicit in a cover-up, or else means nothing at all.

Baker then sets about abnormalizing the police operation, beginning with the search. “It is difficult to understand the purpose of sending a dog through the house,” he writes.
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Is it? In fact, it is surprisingly common for initial searches to miss bodies that are actually concealed in that most expected of places, the home. To give a recent famous example, in the 2006 case of Neil Entwistle, the Englishman who murdered his wife and child in Boston, two searches of the family home failed to discover the shot bodies under a duvet on one of the beds. Why then should it be so unexpected for the police to double-check the Kelly home using dogs? “It is surprising, given that the helicopter was equipped with heat-seeking equipment . . . that Dr. Kelly’s body could not be found.”
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Try entering “heat-seeking equipment” and “failed to find” in a search engine and you’ll find out just how surprising this is. Because something is better doesn’t mean it is infallible. “Could army personnel not have been used on this search?”
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In other words, was there something untoward about the usual procedure not being ditched, and the army (which bit?) not being called out at midnight on a police search?

It goes on and on. A sniffer dog did not behave as Norman Baker feels it should have done. “Oddly, although the dog was trained to take his handler toward what he has found, on this occasion he did not do so.”
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Is this odd? Or does it happen quite frequently? And what does it matter? Baker is also unhappy with the policeman who, once the body was found, was left to guard the scene of the crime, and who testified that he applied standard procedure and went no closer than seven or eight feet. “It is difficult to accept that he went no nearer than this. Surely the natural human reaction would have been to approach the body, without touching it, to observe the situation more closely.”
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Once again, Baker is master of the human condition, able to assert that a constable would be far more likely to break procedure than not.

With the scientist missing, a police communications mast was placed in the garden of the Kelly house. An anonymous chief constable subsequently told Baker that such a mast would usually only be fifteen feet tall, but this one was considerably higher. Aha! Clear evidence of a plot here. And yet the Oxfordshire police explained to Baker that the mast needed to be tall because the garden was in a “communications blackspot.” Baker didn’t accept this explanation. “What was the purpose of this very high mast? It seems clear that normal police communications would not require such a structure.” Then he adds this suggestion: “It might, 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 to Washington.”
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There is much to admire in this argument. Having dismissed a perfectly testable explanation for no given reason, Baker reaches instead for a rationalization based on no evidence whatsoever.

Finally, we come to former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Inevitably, Blair gets the insinuation treatment in spades, with Baker pointing out how convenient politically it was for the PM “that Dr. Kelly’s body should have been found less than a day after Parliament broke up for its long summer holiday and a time when Blair himself was out of the country far away.”
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A reader might imagine that a parliamentarian like Baker would be in a good position to judge exactly how convenient it was for the prime minister. In fact, Baker’s assertion was inane. Blair was informed of Kelly’s death on a plane over the Pacific full of lobby journalists all looking for a story. There was nowhere to hide, no question of not immediately facing the press. Reports unanimously agree that Blair looked shaken and pale. On landing in Tokyo, Blair was famously asked on camera, “Have you got blood on your hands, Prime Minister? Are you going to resign over this?” The timing was about as inconvenient politically as it could possibly have been.

Liberty
and Truth

We shall see in a moment who exactly Norman Baker thinks murdered Dr. Kelly, but before we do, let’s look at how he justifies his belief in such a plot. In case one should dismiss his hypothesis as a mere conspiracy theory, Baker devotes considerable time in his preface to previous examples of government deceit. “Does such a concept deserve to be dismissed out of hand?” he asks. “History teaches us otherwise.” And he points to events through history that corroborate his view. One is the setting on fire of the Reichstag in Berlin at the end of January 1933, after which several Communists were put on trial for arson. “In fact the Nazis themselves were responsible for the fire,” writes Baker, “precisely in order to achieve the double objectives of discrediting the Communists and benefiting themselves.”
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There is no footnote to provide support for Baker’s confident assertion. It is certainly true that such a version of events is widely believed, and has been for seventy years. The problem is that there isn’t much evidence to support it. As books like the anti-Nazi Fritz Tobias’s
Der Reichstagbrand
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show, the firm belief of the Berlin detectives who were the first investigators of the fire was that the man they caught red-handed, Dutch revolutionary Marinus van der Lubbe, was solely responsible for the crime. The Nazis, of course, were determined to prove that the fire had been a Communist conspiracy, and the Communists were equally intent on proving that it was a Nazi plot. The former were now in power in Germany and commanded a powerful propaganda machine. The Communists, under the direction of their brilliant clandestine publicist Willi Münzenberg, for their part issued the famous Brown Books, in which the argument against the Nazis was put forward. However, throughout the pretrial, the trial itself, and right up to his execution, one man insisted that Marinus van der Lubbe had committed the deed unaided. That man was Marinus van der Lubbe.

Another of Baker’s examples is asserted at slightly greater length, although, once again, it is unsourced. “In 1967,” he writes, “during the Six Day War, the CIA intelligence ship,
Liberty
, was bombed by unmarked Israeli planes in an apparent case of mistaken identity. It is now widely accepted that the attack was ordered by President Lyndon Johnson himself. Other U.S. ships in the area were prevented from assisting the
Liberty
. The bombing of the
Liberty
, with the loss of 34 crew members and the wounding of 171 others, was designed to look like an Egyptian attack, thus giving the U.S. a pretext to enter the war. This was only averted and the episode ended when a Soviet spy ship appeared on the scene.”
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No one, apart from Mr. Baker, as far I am aware, has claimed that the
Liberty
was a CIA ship. It wasn’t; it was a U.S. Navy ship. But once again, though a series of official investigations in both the United States and Israel found that the attack was essentially a friendly-fire incident, there are many people who, from a mixture of motives, argue that it was no mistake. Foremost among these are a group of survivors of the incident, whose insistence that the Israelis knew that they were firing on a U.S. ship has acted as the springboard for many books and TV documentaries.

Quite apart from some of the factual objections to the no-mistake theory (and there are many),
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the obvious problem has always been one of motive. Why would the embattled Israelis choose to try to sink a ship belonging to the friendlier of the two superpowers? It doesn’t make much sense. So the theories of the no-mistakers have taken on a complex, almost baroque quality. Some have argued, for example, that the Israelis wanted it to be believed that the attack was undertaken by Egyptian planes, and thus bring America into the war more directly. Possibly the most far-fetched of the theories, however, is that expounded by the journalist Peter Hounam in his 2003 book
Operation Cyanide: Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused World War III
. As a
Sunday Times
writer, Hounam played a major part in revealing Israel’s nuclear weapons program in the 1980s, a substantial journalistic achievement, but by the early 2000s he was to be discovered writing books suggesting that Princess Diana might have been the victim of a conspiracy.
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