Wednesday September 17, 2pm Richard Sambrook, head of BBC News Richard Hatfield, director of personnel, Ministry of Defence

MR RICHARD SAMBROOK called, examined by MR CALDECOTT

Q. Mr Sambrook, you gave evidence to this Inquiry on 13th August. Have you been following the evidence since? A. I have, yes. Q. Are you aware that both Mr Dyke and Mr Davies have given evidence to the effect that there are lessons to be learnt by the BBC? A. I am, yes. Q. Is that a view you share? A. Yes, it is. I think there are a number of lessons that the BBC will have to take from this. Q. Can I just run through some possibilities and get your comments on them? Mr Gilligan referred, this morning, to the fact that the 6.07 broadcast was in fact produced live and not scripted. Have you any comment to make about that? A. I think it is clear that any report which sets out a set of serious allegations should be carefully scripted in advance. Q. Mr Gilligan also referred, in his evidence this morning, to the fact that on Radio 4, on 26th June, you described his source as a senior and credible source in the Intelligence Services. Was it right that there was a conversation between you and Mr Gilligan shortly after that broadcast? A. My recollection is that it was the morning of Friday 27th when Andrew Gilligan told me the identity of his source; and at that point it became clear to me he was not a member of the Intelligence Services. Q. Can you tell us why no correction was broadcast, putting that right? A. I felt myself to be in a dilemma over it. Clearly it would be preferable to be absolutely accurate about it; but equally, again as Mr Gilligan indicated earlier, we had a dilemma because we did not wish to do anything which might lead to the identification of our source; and by narrowing the scope for the search for the source, which was clearly already under way, to those people closely involved in the dossier who were not members of the Intelligence Services, it seemed to me would be likely to help significantly in their identification. So I was uneasy about the fact that we were not correcting something that -- an error I had clearly made. My view was that on balance we owed a greater duty of confidentiality to try to help prevent the identification of Dr Kelly. Q. Can I move on now, please, to the question of notice to a party criticised or to be criticised on a programme? In the context of this particular case, what was your view about no notice being given to Downing Street before the broadcast? A. I indicated in a conversation with the Today Programme team that my view on it was that the allegations were such that they should have been put to Downing Street in advance. The programme team's view was that their experience was that Downing Street refused to comment ever on intelligence matters and that Downing Street were also happy for ministries to take the lead; and that as this was in broad terms a defence issue, and they already had the Defence Minister, Mr Ingram, booked, it was right to try to extend the bid for Mr Ingram. I mean, I noted the sort of custom and practice they referred to, but again my view was that the allegations were such that they should probably have been put to Downing Street in advance and I told them that. Q. We have seen the correspondence in your first round of evidence. There was clearly a live dispute between Kate Wilson of the MoD on the one hand and Mr Gilligan of the BBC on the other as to what took place in a telephone conversation between them on the evening of 28th May. Did you form any view about the procedures which the BBC had followed in relation to that dispute which gave you concern? A. Yes, when it became clear that there was a difference of view over what notice had been given to the Ministry of Defence, on I think it was that Sunday, I asked Miranda Holt, who is one of the Today Programme's day editors, to come in and go through the programme's computer records to see if we could put together exactly what calls had been made, which she did, which formed the basis of the letter to Ben Bradshaw which was showed earlier. It was clear that although they had noted times and some individuals or initials who had made calls, there was no note of the content of those calls. Indeed, in a conversation I had with Andrew Gilligan about what he may or may not have said to Mrs Wilson, although he said this morning that he spoke about cluster bombs but her also extended the bid to WMD and outlined the allegations that have been made, he had no note of that conversation and could not be precise about what he had said. Therefore it seemed to me that actually a better note should have been taken. Q. Can I, please, just move on to some matters involving you rather more closely? The reply to Mr Campbell's substantially long letter of complaint of 26th June was, in part, drafted by you? A. It was, yes. Q. Do you accept that there were some errors in that letter as to what Dr Kelly had in fact said to Mr Gilligan? A. Yes, I do. Q. Had you looked at Mr Gilligan's notes at the time that you drafted that reply? A. No, I had not, no. Q. Do you accept, with hindsight, that you should have done? A. Yes, I think if I had been able to go through Andrew Gilligan's notes in some detail and gone through them with him in some detail, we might have got to a point where we realised these were not comments that were directly attributable to Dr Kelly; and clearly I regret that. Q. Was Mr Gilligan involved in the drafting process of that letter? A. Yes, he was. Q. I do not think we need turn the passages up, but did Mr Gilligan consent to the letter going out in the form that it did? A. Yes he did. Indeed, part of the reason why Mr Gilligan spent most of that day in our offices, as the letter was being drafted, was that he could be consulted on matters such as that. Q. I want to go into a little more detail, to the circumstances in which you received Mr Campbell's letter. Can you, first of all, tell us what time you received it on 26th June? A. My recollection is I received it at about 4 o'clock in the afternoon. Q. When did you become aware that that letter had been leaked by or on behalf of Mr Campbell into the public domain? A. At about the same time, it became clear. We were getting calls from other journalists to the effect they had seen the letter and had it released to them. Q. Had you any forewarning from Mr Campbell that he was going to do that? A. No, I had not. Q. Was there a deadline for reply imposed by Mr Campbell in his letter? A. Yes, he asked for a reply by the end of the day. Q. Do you follow the Lobby briefings at all, Mr Sambrook? A. I had a number of them, at that time, drawn to my attention by BBC staff who attended the Lobbies. And of course they are available on the Internet shortly afterwards. Q. Were you following the Lobby briefings on the morning of 26th June? A. Yes, I was. Q. Can we please have up on the screen BBC/5/101? If we could please scroll down towards the bottom of the first page -- I am not going to go through these in detail because I think it is common ground that the questions with those bullet point marks beside them at the bottom of the page, and indeed over the top of the next page, very closely if not verbatim match the questions asked by Mr Campbell in his letter. A. Yes, that is right. Q. This briefing, we can see, is the 11 am briefing. I just want to ask you about some passages on page 5/102, that is the page we are on. Could you just look, please, at the first long paragraph, in effect the third paragraph, starting: "Asked if we had...". Do you see that? A. Yes. Q. If you go three lines is, halfway through the line: "... the PMOS said that as Alastair Campbell had underlined to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee yesterday, we had repeatedly asked the BBC questions about these matters, but we had not yet had a satisfactory response." Then a couple of lines further on: "... as Mr Campbell had said yesterday, extensive private correspondence unfortunately had not managed to resolve the issue, particularly since the BBC's answers kept changing. Pressed as to why Downing Street would not be sending a letter to the BBC, the PMOS said the questions were based on what had already been broadcast by the BBC. So far, we had failed to obtain any satisfactory answers." Then the next paragraph, please, about four lines in, starting at the end of a line: "We had been in lengthy correspondence with them, as he had set out, to obtain satisfactory responses to our questions." Had any of those questions listed in that briefing ever been put to you before by Mr Campbell in anything like that form? A. No, they had not. The letters -- we had had three letters from Downing Street, one from Ann Shevas and two from Mr Campbell which obviously have been looked at earlier in this Inquiry. They had concentrated on the question of the coverage of denials, on whether the BBC had abided by its own producer guidelines and so on. But they had not had questions set out in that form or in that detail. Indeed some of the issues raised in those questions had not been raised with us before. Q. What decision did you in fact make as to when you should reply by? A. We believed it was wrong to try to rush out a reply within a couple of hours that day. I talked to my deputy, Mark Damazer and also to the Director General, and we agreed that we would have to reply the next day. Q. What was the extent of the media interest in your pending reply? A. There was enormous media interest. We were being called almost relentlessly, wanting to know when the BBC was going to reply and what our response would be. So there was a very high expectation that we would have to meet the deadline set to reply by the end of that day. So I released a brief statement that evening to say we would not be meeting that deadline but we would reply as soon as possible. Q. Looking back at the matter now, do you have any comment to make on the timetable you set for yourself? A. I think, clearly, it would have been better if we had given ourselves more time to respond. It was extremely difficult given the degree of public and media pressure upon us at that time, but with hindsight, and given that new questions were raised in a new way, I think we should have taken longer to consider exactly what was being asked of us. Q. One matter that you addressed in your evidence first time round was the fact that you did not focus specifically as closely on the 6.07 broadcast as you might have done. Could I just ask you to look, please, at CAB/1/352? This is the first page of Mr Campbell's letter of 26th June. If we could scroll down a little way, please. If you just look at the quote there. It is from Mr Humphrys. It is an introduction. It reads as follows: "'Mr Campbell will answer questions about allegations made on this programme by Andrew Gilligan that the case for going to war was exaggerated, specifically that one of the dossiers presented by Mr Blair had been sexed up to make it appear that Saddam was a greater threat to the West than the intelligence justified.' "That is one of many statements on the BBC by reporters and presenters making clear that Mr Gilligan made these allegations..." That summary of what the BBC was saying, do you agree with that as a fair summary of the gist of at least many of the broadcasts, or not? A. Yes, I think I do. Q. Can I just ask you, very briefly, about the e-mail sent by Mr Gilligan to Mr Maples and Mr Ottaway? Did you or anyone else, to your knowledge, at the BBC ever authorise that e-mail or ever be consulted about it? A. Absolutely not. I think it was an improper e-mail to have sent and I do not think it would be right under any circumstances. I appreciate that Mr Gilligan felt himself to be under a great deal of pressure and may have made a misjudgment in those circumstances, but I certainly was not aware of it and I do not believe anybody within the BBC was aware of it or could have authorised it. Q. Could you give us, please, in outline how the editorial process for a story of this kind would work? A. Well, the reporter would come to one of the day editors on the Today Programme to outline the story that they wished to run. The day editor would discuss it with the reporter and, if they thought it was a serious one, refer it up to the programme editor, which is what I believe happened in this case. With a story involving an anonymous source, and clearly involving serious allegations, I would expect a discussion or consideration by the programme editor of a number of issues, such as the credibility of the source, the extent to which the source could genuinely have knowledge of the matters that they were discussing, their reliability, what their motive might be for giving evidence -- giving this information, what steps might be taken to corroborate or verify what they were saying, and so on, and I understand that Kevin Marsh indeed had a detailed conversation with Andrew Gilligan along those lines before transmission; and was satisfied that Dr Kelly's status and reliability and locus on the issues on which he was talking about merited the broadcast. Q. Do you know whether lawyers were involved in this particular story before it was broadcast on 29th May? A. No, I do not believe they were. Q. Mr Gilligan gave some evidence about a distinction between some stories where lawyers would be brought in and some where they would not. Was that a distinction that you recognised, or not? A. Yes, absolutely. I think if we are running a report which we believe there are serious allegations of dishonesty or there may be other legal sensitivities, we would always bring in a lawyer in advance of broadcast to consider the allegations we are making and to agree a script. Q. Can I ask you a hypothetical question? If you had seen, in advance, the 6.07 broadcast, including the "probably knew it was wrong" passage, what would your view have been about whether or not it would have been appropriate to involve lawyers? A. I think if I had seen that allegation being made about the Government in advance, I would have said it was essential to have a lawyer involved. Q. Can I just ask you, lastly, one other matter? I think we heard from Mr Dyke that as a general proposition the BBC are broadcasting 40 hours of material for every hour of time. What would the figure be solely for news? A. About 5 hours of news programming for every hour of realtime. Q. And how many different news programmes are there within the BBC? A. It is about 120. Q. And how many of those are radio news programmes? A. It is about half and half, roughly, radio and television. Q. Are those different programmes under some central editorial control or do they very much have their own teams? A. The programmes have their own programme teams and each programme has its own editor who reports in to departmental heads, so the head of radio news and head of television news, for example, although each editor would be making their own judgments about their programme's content each day. And there would be one or two conversations a day probably with that head of department or senior manager. MR CALDECOTT: Thank you very much Mr Sambrook. Would you stay there, please? LORD HUTTON: Yes Mr Sumption.

Cross-examined by MR SUMPTION

Q. Mr Sambrook, you are on record as saying that the BBC was not making any allegations against the Government, but only reporting allegations made by its anonymous source. A. Yes. Q. You told the Inquiry last time round that it was most unusual for the BBC to broadcast allegations derived from an anonymous source; do you remember that? A. Yes. Q. Would you agree that that is because it is only in special circumstances that that course can be justified? A. It is certainly unusual that -- I mean, there are different sorts of anonymous sources, in one sense anonymous sources are used in journalism every day. But in setting out circumstances of this kind it is unusual. Q. So allegations critical of third parties it would be unusual to rely on an anonymous source and there would have to be some special circumstances? A. Yes. Q. When the BBC broadcasts serious allegations against public figures coming from an anonymous source, presumably the BBC is concerned to some extent at least with the question of whether those allegations are true? A. Whether they are credible. Q. Whether they are true? A. I do not believe we are always in a position to judge the absolute truth of the allegations that are being made. What we have to consider is: are they credible allegations coming from an individual who himself is credible and has some locus on the subject on which they are talking or discussing, if we believe their views are sufficiently weighty to be placed in the public domain. But quite often we are unable to judge for ourselves the absolute truth of what they are saying. Q. You certainly cannot judge beyond reasonable doubt. But the source, at the very minimum, has to be worthy of belief? A. Yes. Q. Presumably, that is because when a reputable news organisation puts into the public domain a serious allegation coming from an anonymous informant, it is presenting those allegations to the world as worthy of belief? A. Yes. Q. When that news organisation is the BBC, that is something that will carry particularly weight, is it not, because of the BBC's worldwide reputation as a broadcaster with the highest standards of journalism? A. Well, I certainly hope we enjoy that reputation. Q. It is a reputation that you have and which you wish to conserve, is it not? A. Indeed. Q. Would you agree that the more serious the allegation, the greater the care which you would expect the BBC to take to ensure that it can be properly supported? A. Yes. Q. These were exceptionally serious allegations, were they not? A. Well, I think one thing I should make clear is that I do not think the programme or indeed the BBC, in those early weeks, ever took the wording of the.07 broadcast or that phrase within the 6.07 broadcast to be the definitive version of the allegations that we were making. I think our view was the definitive version was the scripted version, in the news bulletins at 6 o'clock, 7 o'clock and 8 o'clock and at 7.32. The live two-ways at 6 o'clock are deemed by the programme, although it is certainly true the audience does not necessarily perceive them this way, as a sort of preview for the major reports that are coming up during that day's programme. So I think the mindset on the programme, and I think this continued for some time afterwards, was that the definition of this item, in the BBC's view, were the scripted versions of it and the 6.07 was something that had strayed from what we believed to be the core allegations we were making or that our source was making. Q. Leaving aside the mindset of the programme, you very fairly accept the audience would not necessarily have perceived it the same way? A. Indeed. Q. In practice it is the most dramatic and gravest allegation which will attract the most attention rather than the allegation which is scripted? A. Depending on how often it is repeated and how many people hear it, yes. Q. Yes. But if you make a sufficiently dramatic allegation, other media will catch on to it, will they not? A. They may do, yes. Q. They are professional followers of each other's copy, are they not? A. They are. Q. Now, you have already I think agreed in your earlier evidence, and indeed I think it is implicit in the evidence you have given today, that the 6.07 allegation that the Government probably knew that the minutes point was wrong before putting it into the dossier was, in fact, going to strike people as an exceptionally grave allegation. I think you have accepted that? A. It clearly had that effect. Q. Yes. It was an attack, was it not, on its face, on the integrity of those who had been involved at the highest levels in the production of the dossier? A. In the way it was phrased, it clearly would have had that effect. It is a different question about intent. Q. Yes, I understand that. Even in the 7.32 broadcast, the allegation was, was it not, that the Government had put the 45 minute point into the dossier against the advice of the Intelligence Services, who had told them that they regarded it as questionable? A. Words to that effect, yes. Q. Yes. You were aware, I imagine, when you came to consider this in the course of June, that the dossier had actually said that it reflected the views of the JIC? A. Yes. Q. So, if you accuse the Government of putting information into the dossier which was contrary to the views of the Intelligence Services you are effectively accusing them of presenting the dossier to Parliament on a false basis? A. I would say two things. Firstly, I do not think we were ever specific about who in Government might be, if there was any bad faith indeed to be attributed, who might be guilty of that bad faith. Secondly, when we spoke about it against the wishes of the Intelligence Services I do not believe we ever said or intended or expected people to understand that would necessarily mean the heads of those services or the JIC. Clearly a number of people from the Intelligence Services were involved in assessing and drawing up the information for that dossier and it may well have been a number of them who were still concerned about its presentation. Q. The thrust of your allegation was that the Government had put information into the dossier against the advice they had received, was it not? A. The thrust of the allegation was that material had been put in there against some advice from those involved in compiling or assessing it; but who was responsible for that act we were never specific about. Q. The advice that they had received would have been advice relating to intelligence, would it not? A. It would. Q. And you are aware, presumably, that the advice which the Government receives, the organ which is responsible for giving the Government advice on the effect of intelligence sources is the JIC? A. Indeed. Q. Now, anyone who had seen the dossier and saw the description in the dossier itself about how this system works would have appreciated that what you were saying was that the dossier had been presented to the public on the basis that it reflected the advice received from the JIC, when in fact it did not. A. No, I do not think we were ever clear about where -- whether the JIC were aware of any misgivings there may have been lower down the chain. All we were suggesting was that there were misgivings lower down the chain and at some point in that chain somebody took the decision to include it, against the advice of those below them. We never suggested that had to be the JIC level. Q. What you did suggest was that it was the Government which had overturned the advice. A. Clearly the dossier was compiled by a machinery of Government, yes. Q. You are also, I imagine, aware that Mr Gilligan in fact said in the 7.32 broadcast that such mistakes can be made honestly, however, the Government knew this particular information was, as he put it, questionable? A. Yes. Q. You were aware of that? A. Yes. Q. Do you not regard that as an attack on the good faith of those responsible for publishing the document? A. I took the view that this was what his source had told him. Q. I see. You now know that is in fact not exactly what had been said, do you not? A. Indeed. Q. In the 7.32 broadcast, John Humphrys said, I will certainly show you the transcript if you would find that helpful, but you may remember the graphic phrase he used, that the Today correspondent, this was Andrew Gilligan, had discovered evidence that the dossier was cobbled together at the last minute with some unconfirmed material that had not been approved by the Security Services. A. Yes. Q. That is a statement by the presenter of the BBC's flagship radio news programme, is it not, that that is evidence to that effect that the BBC has discovered? A. Yes. Q. It is clearly an endorsement by the BBC of the allegation, is it not? A. No, I would not say that. Q. You would not? A. No, I would say it is a description of the allegations that the BBC is reporting. Q. So if a BBC presenter says that the BBC has discovered evidence of a fact, you do not regard that as an endorsement by the BBC? A. I think a credible and well placed source expressing their view could, in a general conversational sense, be described as evidence. Q. When you came to investigate this matter in June and early July, what steps did you understand to have been taken by the editorial staff of Today before the broadcast went out, to satisfy itself that the source was authoritative and the allegation was credible? A. I understood that Andrew Gilligan had done a number of things before broadcast; that he had attempted to corroborate the allegations with two other of his contacts, neither of whom had confirmed it but neither had denied it. He had taken a number of steps in terms of researching partly Dr Kelly's background but also the dossier. Q. Forgive me, I do not want to be at cross purposes. What I am getting at is steps taken in exchanges between Mr Gilligan and the editorial staff. A. Sorry, I was trying to go through all the checks that had happened. Q. Forgive me. A. In terms of when Andrew Gilligan had brought the story to the attention of the editorial staff on the programme, as I understand it the day editor, Miranda Holt, realised this was a serious story and said that the editor, Kevin Marsh, needed to take a view on it. Andrew, as I understand it, showed the notes that he showed Miranda Holt to Kevin Marsh and discussed the item with him. Kevin had a specific conversation about who the source was, not their name but the kind of position that they held, what Andrew Gilligan understood to have been his source's role in the compilation of the dossier, track record of his source, how long Andrew Gilligan had known him, whether he had proved reliable in the past and so on. They, I think, also discussed whether or not the source might have some malicious or mischievous motive in making these allegations and concluded that he did not. They also looked at whether there was any other information at the time or in the news at the time that lent some support to the kinds of allegations being made and concluded, for the reasons we have heard earlier in the Inquiry, that there were a number of Intelligence Service briefings to journalists, there were a number of reports in newspapers, there were comments from people like Hans Blix and so on questioning the nature of some of the intelligence in the run up to the war in Iraq and they felt that that was broadly supportive and that therefore the allegations being made here fitted within that context. After having a conversation along those lines and Kevin having considered it on his own to some extent, he took the decision it should be broadcast. Q. Could you please look at BBC/14/31. You have no doubt seen this document several times, it is a transcription of shorthand notes taken at the Governors' meeting of 6th July, most of which you attended. A. Yes. Q. I do not want to take bits out of context, it is quite a long document, but just to give you what I understand to be the context. There is, at this stage in progress, a discussion about whether the matter should have been put to No. 10. A. Yes. Q. That is not what I am going to ask you about at the moment. The discussion appears to take a different turn about three quarters of the way down when Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, who I think was the governor with the strongest reservations about what happened, raised the question of the quality of your reporting, do you see that? A. Yes. Q. That is an introduction to the discussion which goes on for the next page or so. Perhaps you could now look at the next page, if we could go over to that. Halfway down you will see that DG, which is Dermot Gleeson, asked: "Was it vetted properly? If it was vetted?" You reply: "The story has changed. Originally Kevin Marsh said he had vetted it which would have been normal procedure. But since then transpires he did not. Have been on the record saying we will look at it." A. Yes. Q. As I understand it, what you are saying there is that you had originally believed that Kevin Marsh had vetted it, because he had told you he had, but it had turned out, on further investigation, that he had not vetted it? A. No, I am afraid that is completely wrong. What this refers to is the Mail on Sunday article that Andrew Gilligan submitted. It does not refer to the original report. Q. I see. This is not concerned with the report at all? A. No, as you can see -- as it goes on, it is quite clear, we have Gavyn Davies, I think: "I think it is relevant Andrew Gilligan made the allegation in the Mail on Sunday" and so on. This is a conversation about the Mail on Sunday article. Q. The conversation certainly turned to the Mail on Sunday. You say it was all, even earlier, about the Mail on Sunday? A. Absolutely. Q. We have certain observations from Mr Marsh himself which are included in an e-mail on 27th June which you will find at BBC/5/118. When did you first see this e-mail? A. When it was disclosed for the Inquiry. Q. I see. Now, as I understand it, partly from documents and partly from Mr Dyke's evidence, Stephen Mitchell is somebody who, from time to time, looks into matters which one might loosely call regulatory for the senior executives; is that wrong? A. No, Stephen Mitchell is the head of Radio News who reports to me. It is Stephen Whittle who is the controller of editorial policy. Q. You are quite right to correct me on that. If we could look at what Mr Marsh says: "Some thoughts -- clearly I have to talk to Andrew Gilligan early next week. I hope that by then my worst fears -- based on what I'm hearing from the spooks this afternoon -- aren't realised. Assuming not, the guts of what I would say are: "This story was a good piece of investigative journalism, marred by flawed reporting -- our biggest millstone has been his loose use of language and lack of judgment in some of his phraseology. "It was marred also..." that is a point about the Mail on Sunday and the Spectator. "That is in many ways a result of the loose and in some ways distant relationship he's been allowed to have with Today." Have you discussed with Mr Marsh his views as reflected in this document? A. I had discussed, before this document, in broad terms his views of Andrew Gilligan as a reporter and indeed with Stephen Mitchell as well, yes. Q. Can you tell us why it is, what is the loose language which Mr Marsh is drawing attention to as possibly fulfilling his worst fears? A. I am not sure that the loose language is related to the worst fears. I think that is a separate point. Q. Leaving the fears, let us concentrate on the loose language. A. As I said, this was not flagged up to me at the time. I only knew about it after it was disclosed to this Inquiry. My understanding of what Kevin was talking about is we should have had a consistent phrase for capturing the allegations that Dr Kelly was making, both for presenters and for reporters and within the report scripts, and it would have been a lot better if we had been entirely consistent on that. Q. You had not seen this document, as I understand your evidence, by the time you briefed the Governors' meeting on 6th July? A. That is correct. Q. Do you think you should have done? A. I think if Kevin Marsh or Stephen Mitchell had had real concerns about the nature of the reporting or indeed about the nature of the way we were dealing with the Government's complaint, I would have expected them to bring those to my attention. I am not clear that this e-mail necessarily represents serious concerns. LORD HUTTON: You think it does not represent serious concerns? A. My personal view about it is that it is much more saying -- it is entitled "from here"; my personal view about it is that it is an e-mail from a programme editor to his line manager saying that in future we would be better to have a more disciplined use in terms of scripting materials and not doing live two- ways and so on; and it is an attempt to look forward at how things should be managed in the future. Again, this was not flagged up to me at the time. All I can say is that, I mean, I know both Kevin Marsh and Stephen Mitchell extremely well and I believe if they had serious concerns about the quality of the journalism or indeed our response to the Government, they would have raised it directly with me and they did not. MR SUMPTION: Is it not a source of concern if grave allegations are made against public figures on the basis of loose use of language and lack of judgment in the phraseology? Is that not a source of concern? A. If that is their view then it would be, yes. Q. Well, it does seem to have been Mr Marsh's view; and what exactly did the Governors, when they came to consider this, know about the views of the editor of the programme itself, ie Mr Marsh? A. Well, they -- I do not think the Governors were particularly interested in the editor's view; they were interested in my view; and I shared with them the view I had had for a considerable period of time, and which was certainly partly informed by Mr Marsh and by Mr Mitchell, which was that Andrew Gilligan was in some respects a good reporter. There are two aspects to journalism. There is the finding out of the information and there is then how you present it. My view for some time would be that Andrew Gilligan is extremely good at finding out information but there are sometimes questions of nuance and subtlety in how he presents it which are not all that they should be. Indeed, in my evidence to the Inquiry on August 13th we talked a little bit about some of the issues that arose during his reporting of the Iraq War in that context, and I was frank with the Board of Governors about that, my view of Andrew Gilligan in those terms. I think I described him as a reporter who paints in primary colours rather than something more subtle. Q. If you had known that Mr Marsh's views were as reflected in this e-mail at the time of the Governors' meeting, would you have thought it right to draw their attention to the fact? A. I think it is hypothetical because I was not -- I did not see this e-mail. Q. Yes, I know it is hypothetical but I would still like your answer to the question. A. No, I think the Governors would have wanted to know what my view was. Q. Right. They would not have been interested in the views of Mr Marsh, as the editor of the programme that was being complained about? A. Well, only if they significantly differed from mine. Q. I see. Do you share the views expressed here? A. I have already told you what my views of Andrew Gilligan's reporting were. Q. Let us look at Mr Marsh's proposals for change, to ensure this sort of thing does not happen again. I do not want to go through all of them, but do draw my attention to anything else that you think I am leaving out. The third bullet point: "That all his proposed stories are discussed with me, in detail as early as possible in the process -- face to face if possible." Does it look as if he did not discuss this piece in good time face to face with Mr Gilligan? A. No, I do not think you can necessarily draw the conclusion from these proposals that they are all things that failed to happen on this occasion. I think they are simply an encapsulation of what Kevin's view of good practice would be, some of which -- much of which happened on this occasion in advance. Q. This is a statement by Mr Marsh of lessons to be learnt from what had happened in this particular case, is it not? A. Yes, but I would also expect him to outline good practice from the past as well as changes for the future. Q. Well, he is not outlining good practice in the past, he is proposing changes to the future. All these bullet points are proposed changes which represent lessons learnt from what had actually happened over these broadcasts. A. Yes, but I know that Andrew Gilligan did discuss the story with him in advance, face to face. Q. The fourth bullet point is: "That anonymous sources pass an explicit credibility test with me." Does it look as if no explicit credibility tests had been passed at editorial level before the piece was broadcast? A. No, I know that Andrew Gilligan did discuss the credibility of his source and they had an explicit conversation about it in advance of broadcast. Q. The next bullet point but one is that: "That we agree on a script or on core elements of a script that he does not subsequently vary." That clearly was something that did not happen in the case of the 6.07 broadcast? A. That is true. Q. And had particularly serious consequences in the light of what was actually said? A. As it appears now, yes. Q. Yes. Now, when the broadcast had been made and the row had broken out, you, personally, had to look into what had happened and decide for yourself whether proper journalistic standards had been applied? A. Yes. Q. As I understand it, correct me if I am wrong, you had to do that first of all in order to brief yourself to answer Alastair Campbell's complaints and particularly to write your long response of 27th June? A. Yes. Q. And secondly you had to do it in order to brief the Governors on 6th July? A. Yes. Q. As I understand it, from your evidence, you did not read Mr Gilligan's notes of what the source had said to him before writing to Alastair Campbell on 27th June, although you now feel that you should have done; you did, however, read those notes before briefing the Governors? A. Yes, I did. Q. And equally you had known since 27th June both that the informant was Dr Kelly and that Dr Kelly was not a member of the Intelligence Services? A. Yes. Q. Now, as I understand it, it is not something you actually said but it was the impression I gained from your evidence-in-chief just now, as soon as Dr Kelly was identified by name by Mr Gilligan you realised who he was and that he was not a member of the Intelligence Services; is that right? A. Yes. Q. Who did you understand Dr Kelly to be? A. I understood him to be a scientific adviser to the Government on weapons of mass destruction and particularly biological weapons. Q. Which ministry did you understand him to be working in? A. Well, he seemed to me to be advising both the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence. Q. Yes, he had described himself as a chief biological weapons adviser to the Ministry of Defence; is that a description that -- A. Well I looked him up on the Internet and it seemed he had a dual title relating both to the Foreign Office and to the Ministry of Defence. Q. The BBC's own database of contacts refers to him as somebody who: "... works for the MoD, is employed by the Foreign Office but is [this is actually out of date] seconded to the UN at the moment." Did you look up that? A. No, I did not. Q. But if somebody had told you he works for the MoD but is employed by the Foreign Office, you would have assumed he was seconded to the MoD and that he worked there? A. Yes. As I said, what I did at the time was to look him up on the Internet and I think one of the first things that came up was a mention of him from the LSE conference in which he had titles both relating to the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence. Q. Would you agree the public impression created by Mr Gilligan's broadcasts on 29th May, whether or not he intended it, was that his source was a senior member of the Intelligence Services? A. No, I think he gave the impression that he was close to intelligence, but I do not think, other than the handful of occasions which you raised with Andrew Gilligan, that he -- I do not believe Andrew Gilligan set out to give that impression at all that he belonged to the Intelligence Services. Q. I am not asking what his purpose was, I am asking you whether you agree that that was in fact the impression that was created, whether he intended it or not? A. I do not think it was created by Andrew Gilligan. I think when this story happened, quite quickly a number of people -- I would need to check the script but I think even Adam Ingram on that first morning referred to him as "Security Services". It very quickly got into the bloodstream of the way this issue was discussed, both by the BBC, I accept, but also outside of the BBC. Q. It was not actually Adam Ingram, Mr Sambrook, it was John Humphrys who told him that was the position. A. Certainly by the time John Reid was being interviewed he was talking about Intelligence Services. The point I am trying to make is that it was very quickly in the bloodstream of everybody discussing this issue that intelligence was used in a very broad sense in terms of describing the source. Q. If you look at BBC/1/15, you will see that at the fourth entry down this page, this is part of the transcript of John Humphrys' interview with the Minister: "Oh well I'll tell you. Again it isn't a question for me to take any words but if, well hang on a minute er Mr Ingram if I may, you've asked me the question. What we have here is a source, within the Intelligence Service." That was the conclusion presumably Mr Humphrys had drawn from listening to Mr Gilligan's broadcasts that very morning? A. It was an assumption he made, I assume, yes. Q. Do you not accept it was a natural one? A. Well it was clear that the BBC's source dealt with intelligence and was close to intelligence because they had been involved in this dossier, yes. So it was an assumption that I think quite a number of people made. Q. Yes. Now, if you look at BBC/4/247, you will see that in the first chunk of an extract from the transcript of extracts from the World at One on the same day, Nick Clarke says in the third sentence: "The Today Programme this morning reported the views of an anonymous member of the Security Services who cast doubt on the status of the dossier published with a foreword by Tony Blair last September." A. Yes. Q. That is a clear statement that the source was a member of the Security Services, is it not? A. Yes. Q. And the position was that whatever Mr Gilligan may have intended, the result of what he had done is that the BBC itself, on a number of occasions in the course of that day and later, was describing this as a report based on a senior member of the Intelligence Services, was it not? A. I absolutely accept he was described in that way both in the BBC and by a number of other people - - as I said, this association of intelligence got into the bloodstream in the way our source was described. Q. You yourself were under that impression, were you not? A. When I gave my interview to the Today Programme on the morning of the 26th, I did refer to him as Intelligence Services erroneously. As I have said, I did not know Dr Kelly's identity at that stage. Q. You referred to it in that way because that is what you had understood Mr Gilligan to be saying? A. Well, by this time it was not simply Mr Gilligan who was saying this. It was being widely discussed by all broadcasters and in the newspapers, and the association with the Intelligence Services was being widely made by a number of people, obviously including Government Ministers, stemming from the general coverage. Q. By the general coverage you mean the way in which it was covered by the BBC, which was the origin of all this. A. Yes, though by 26th June clearly a lot of other news organisations, besides the BBC, were covering it. Q. Yes. Until Mr Gilligan told you, on the 27th, that his source was Dr Kelly, Mr Gilligan had never sought to correct this impression, had he? A. No. Q. You realised the position on the 27th, as I understand your evidence? A. Yes. Q. Not because Mr Gilligan said it in terms but because the moment that he identified the source as Dr Kelly, you realised he was not a member of the Intelligence Services? A. Yes, I think we may actually have had quite an explicit conversation about that. Whether it was raised by him or me, I do not know. But we explicitly acknowledged in that conversation that he was not a member of the Security Services. Q. Would you accept that if an allegation is made that things have been put into the dossier contrary to the advice that the Government has received from the Intelligence Services, it will lend a great deal of authority to that report to say that the source was himself a senior member of the Intelligence Services? A. Clearly, that we were saying it was a senior source, whether being a member of the Intelligence Services adds additional seniority or additional credence I think is subjective. Q. If the allegation is that the advice of the Intelligence Services has been disregarded, do you not accept that it lends weight to that to say: and we have been told this by a senior member of the Intelligence Services? A. Well, whenever we made the primary story, we were quite careful, other than the Radio 5 example you used, to use the phrase "a senior official involved in drawing up the dossier". Q. You were not actually, Mr Sambrook. You say apart from the 5 Live broadcast, but I have just shown you the World at One on the same day. A. I meant in Andrew Gilligan's reporting. Q. I see. I am looking at the BBC as a whole. Your answer would not be right, would it? A. No. Q. When you were told that it was Dr Kelly onth June, and for whatever reason you realised he was not a member of the Intelligence Services, that must have caused you some considerable concern? A. Yes, I was concerned about it. Q. You would not have wanted to perpetuate that misunderstanding given the currency that it had obtained, would you? A. No. Q. Could you look at CAB/1/360 for a moment, please? I just want to turn to a slightly different matter to get this in chronological sequence. This is part of your letter to Alastair Campbell. I do not wish, you will be relieved to hear, to refight every aspect of this battle in the course of this afternoon, but if you look at the bottom of page 360, you quoted Alastair Campbell's question: "Does it still stand by the allegation made on that day that both we and the intelligence agencies knew the 45 minute claim to be wrong and inserted it despite knowing that." We can read your answer: "Andrew Gilligan accurately reported the source telling him that the Government 'probably knew that the 45 minute figure was wrong' and that the claim was 'questionable'." At this stage the BBC's line was: there is a difference between our reporting what the source had said and our making an allegation for our own part; and that is a point that you make several times in this letter, including under this particular heading? A. Hmm, hmm. Q. Had Andrew Gilligan actually told you: well, this is definitely what my source told me? A. I cannot remember the exact words he used, but certainly we understood that everything he had said was a proper representation of his conversation with Dr Kelly. Q. That is the impression that he accepts that he had given in his original broadcast; but you had Andrew Gilligan available to you I think in a next door room or something when this was being drafted? A. Yes. Q. Presumably, since you were drawing the distinction between what the BBC was saying and what the source had said to the BBC, you must have said to him: is this what your source told you? A. Yes. Q. And he must have said: yes, it is? A. Yes. Q. It was after drafting this letter, about a week after, in fact, that you saw Andrew Gilligan's notes? A. Yes. Q. Just to make sure we are looking at the right document, as I understand it that means the notes that he drew up for Miranda Holt rather than the printed out text from his personal organiser? A. No, I saw the printed out text from his personal organiser. Q. Did you not see the Miranda Holt version? A. Not at that stage, I do not think, no. Q. When did you first see the Miranda Holt version? A. I cannot remember, it was probably some time that week. The first notes I remember seeing were the printout from his personal organiser. I was aware other people had seen the Miranda Holt notes and discussed them with Andrew. Q. The fact is you saw both versions in the first week of July? A. I think I certainly saw the printout of the organiser notes then. I cannot remember if I saw the Miranda Holt notes then or later. Q. Do you remember whether you saw the Miranda Holt notes before you appeared before the Governors on the 6th? A. I do not recall for sure. I cannot remember. Q. Did you find in either set of notes anything that supported Mr Gilligan's broadcast statement that his source had been one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up the dossier? A. No, that was not in the organiser notes, no. Q. Were you troubled that a description of himself which was of some importance was not in fact included in Mr Gilligan's note, in either version? A. No, not particularly, because it was quite clear that Mr Gilligan had not taken a verbatim note. He was also quite clear that he had discussed and agreed this description in advance; and by the end of that week we were also discussing Susan Watts' report where almost exactly the same description had been arrived at independently. Q. Dr Kelly did not describe himself to Susan Watts as one of the people in charge of drawing up the dossier, did he? A. I cannot remember the precise description but it is very close to a senior official I think she says intimately involved in drawing up the dossier, I think that is the phrase. Q. Are you thinking of the transcript of what was said to Susan Watts on the telephone on 30th May? A. No, I am thinking of her report on 2nd June. Q. Yes, I see. So you were not concerned that there was nothing in the note to vouch for the description of the source's precise functions? A. No, I was clear that the note was not going to be a verbatim copy of the conversation that he had had or that necessarily everything he had broadcast was going to be fully represented in that note. That did not strike me as particularly surprising. I clearly had a conversation with Andrew about exactly what had been said and the extent to which his conversation backed up those elements of his reporting which were not in the notes and he assured me that it did. Q. Mr Sambrook, I can quite see that a note is only a summary of the most important matters. But from the BBC's point of view, it was of absolutely critical importance, was it not, to satisfy itself that this was an authoritative and credible source? A. It was, yes. Q. Yes. So the absence of any information which enabled you to take a view about that from Mr Gilligan's note must have been a source of concern? A. Well, in terms of the credibility of the source, once he had told me who David Kelly was and I had had an opportunity to independently research Dr Kelly's background, I took considerable comfort from that in terms of his seniority and credibility. Q. Yes, but what mattered as far as his credibility was concerned was what David Kelly had to do with the preparation of the dossier. That was what mattered, was it not? A. It was, yes. Q. You did not find any information about that on the Internet or elsewhere, did you? A. No. Q. Mr Gilligan was the only source of information you had about that? A. He was, although clearly from the things that had been reported from the conversation, Dr Kelly did have some close contact and close involvement with the dossier because of the things he spoke about. Q. Yes, but there is a world of difference between somebody who reads intelligence material on his special subject and somebody who is actually in charge in a managerial or editorial sense in the preparation of a Government paper, is there not? A. I agree with that. But clearly the process of the compilation of this dossier was not something that I was clear about or ever likely to be. However, I was clear that Dr Kelly was a world renowned expert on the issues he was discussing and he did have some involved with the dossier because of the detail in which he spoke about it and he was a highly credible figure. So in terms of the credibility of the source, I took comfort from that. Q. The suggestion that he was in charge of drawing up the dossier or one of those who was in charge of it, it was a brand new piece of information which you had on Mr Gilligan's authority and was not supported by anything in his note? A. Well, he used two descriptions, "one of those in charge" or "a senior official involved", and it seemed to me highly credible that either of those descriptions might fit. Q. Would you agree that at least as practised by the BBC, it is normal if you make a serious allegation against public figures to give them advance notice? I think you have accepted that in principle? A. Yes. Q. You were shown, a few minutes ago, the letter which you wrote on 28th June -- A. Yes. Q. -- about this. Would you like to see it again? A. By all means, yes. Q. It is BBC/5/153. Directly or indirectly the information that you included in this letter must have come from Mr Gilligan; do you agree? A. Some of it came from Mr Gilligan, some of it came from Miranda Holt and the Today Programme team. Q. She could only have got it from Mr Gilligan. A. Well, I mean, some of the details about the timings of phone calls from members of the Today team came from her and not from Andrew Gilligan, who may not have been aware of those. Q. Let us look at the second bullet point: "At 6.30 pm Andrew Gilligan spoke to Kate O'Connor, the MoD press officer, about the cluster bomb interview and added there would be another story running on WMD." A. Yes. Q. That is something that could only have come from Andrew Gilligan. A. No, it was also the Today Programme's understanding that that phone call took place. Q. Since there was no written record of Mr Gilligan's conversation -- A. Yes, I had spoken to Andrew Gilligan about it. Q. You had spoken to him about it? A. Yes. Q. Had he confirmed the accuracy of this statement? I am not suggesting you showed him the letter. Had he said something to you, to this effect? A. I spoke to him first and then wrote the letter. I did not show him the letter before I sent it. What was said to me was that he had spoken to Kate Wilson, as she now is, he said Kate O'Connor, I think that may have been her maiden name -- Q. Yes. A. -- at about 6.30 in order to expand the bid from cluster bombs to WMD. He told me that he had outlined the allegations to be made but he could not remember exactly what he had said. Q. But was that an exchange which was fairly reflected, as you saw it, in this particular paragraph? A. I suppose so, but I was not trying to be forensic about that particular bullet point, but yes. Q. You were presumably trying to be accurate because you were writing -- A. Indeed. Q. -- in order to correct the record. Mr Whittle told the Governors, on 6th July, in your presence, that Andrew Gilligan had also said that he had told the press office of the Ministry of Defence that the WMD story was not for them? A. Hmm, hmm. Q. Do you remember that? A. I do. Q. Were you, yourself, told that by Mr Gilligan? A. Yes. He did say that it was not an issue that he was expecting them to respond in detail on, but he wanted to expand the bid for Adam Ingram. Q. The point he was saying he had put to the Ministry of Defence press office was that the WMD story was not a matter for the Ministry of Defence and what he meant by that presumably, as you appreciated, was that it was a matter for No. 10? A. Well, my understanding of it, at the time, was that the primary purpose for the call was to expand the bid for Adam Ingram to include WMD, to outline some detail of what the allegations were going to be; and what he said during that conversation, he indicated he was not expecting a detailed response then from the MoD, he was simply trying to expand the bid and give him some sense of what it was they were going to have to respond to. I accepted his explanation of that. Q. Yes. His explanation was in fact not consistent with his suggestion now that he explained the gist of the allegations to the MoD press office, was it? A. No, he was always quite clear that he had outlined -- he was never specific about the terms in which he had done it, which was a problem for us, which is why we then said we need to take better notes of these kind of conversations. But he was always clear he had outlined the nature of the allegations that were going to be put. Q. Would you agree that proper journalistic standards may require the BBC to retract a statement after it has been broadcast if it finds that it cannot be properly supported? A. Yes. Q. So if the BBC were to discover, after broadcasting a serious allegation from an anonymous source, that there was in fact no reliable basis for what that source had said or the way in which the BBC had summarised it, as a matter of general policy would the BBC regard it as right to retract that? A. Yes, if it was clear that we had got something wrong. Q. And that would be so even if you were satisfied that, at the time, proper journalistic standards had been observed? A. Yes. Q. And was that why you made it clear to the Foreign Affairs Committee, on 1st July, that if they were unanimous and had concrete evidence to support that conclusion that the dossier had not been sexed up, you would retract? A. Yes. Q. Who took the decision that that would be the BBC's attitude? A. I think it was a position that we -- I think it was a decision probably taken by myself and my deputy Mark Damazer. But we certainly discussed it at some point with the Director General. Q. What did you mean by "concrete evidence"? A. Documentation. Q. Documentation? A. Hmm. Q. Ie drafts? A. Yes. Q. One of the points that has been made from time to time is that Mr Scarlett did not appear before the Foreign Affairs Committee. A. Yes. Q. Was his evidence what you had in mind by "concrete evidence"? A. Yes, I think it might have been. Q. If Mr Scarlett had given evidence that he had supervised all of the drafts and was entirely happy with the document as laid before Parliament, would you have regarded that as concrete evidence? A. It is difficult to hypothesize when you do not know the terms in which he might have done it. Q. Let us suppose he did it in the most unequivocal possible fashion. A. That would clearly have lent weight to that fact. I think what we said was on the basis of concrete evidence because we could not understand why, given much of this intelligence had been declassified, it was not possible to see some of these drafts and quite quickly settle the point. Q. It was obvious why you could not see the drafts. A. Well, not to us at the time. Q. It was not obvious to you. I see. Well, I am not going to argue that point with you. Would you accept that if Mr Scarlett had, unequivocally, said that he was happy with the document as published, that would have satisfied you? A. I do not think it would have satisfied the point that there may well have been some dissent about the presentation of intelligence in the ranks below Mr Scarlett of which he was unaware. Q. You certainly would have had, at the very least, to retract parts of what had been said, would you not? A. Parts, yes. Q. Was it therefore the BBC's position that they were not prepared to take at face value Mr Scarlett's statement, which was by now known, that he and the JIC were entirely satisfied with the dossier as published unless he appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee and satisfied them of it? Was that their position? A. No, we had reported Mr Scarlett's position to the extent that it had been reported second-hand -- we reported the Warsaw press conference. We had reported the Prime Minister's comments in the House of Commons and so on. But really the point I am making is there may well have been aspects of the story which were correct of which Mr Scarlett was unaware. Q. I am a little puzzled by the fact that you would have attached a great deal of weight to Mr Scarlett's view and it would have caused you to retract at least part of the broadcasts, but only if he not only allowed that statement to be made publicly but said it to the Foreign Affairs Committee and persuaded them. A. Well, all I am really saying is we fully reported Mr Scarlett's support for the Prime Minister. If Mr Scarlett had given evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee, I am sure it would have been very powerful evidence. But without knowing what he said or what documentation may or may not have been brought forward to support it, it is quite difficult for me to hypothesise about any impact it would have given on our position. Q. Mr Dyke has given evidence and you I think have associated yourself this afternoon with that evidence, to virtually quote him, I think, that he wished that he had paused in late June and ordered a full investigation of the whole issue. A. Yes. Q. That is one of the points that Mr Dyke made which you associate yourself with? A. I certainly think we should have paused and considered at greater length the charges that were being levelled against us. Whether that amounts to a full investigation of the whole issue, I am not sure. But I certainly think the letter of the 27th was written under considerable pressure, particularly the deadline imposed on us by Mr Campbell, and if we had not been under that pressure to respond then the errors in that letter of the 27th might not have been made. Q. There was not in fact a careful examination of all the allegations that had been made, how far they could be supported by Mr Gilligan's notes and what conclusions should be drawn from that before the Governors' meeting, was there? A. There was an investigation and examination. What we did not do was go through the personal organiser notes in point by point detail with Andrew. If we had done that, I think it might have pointed up the two errors that we made in that letter. But we certainly went through every point that Mr Campbell raised in his letter. We discussed them in some detail, both with Andrew Gilligan and with Kevin Marsh, and we just discussed them between ourselves as a senior editorial team before coming out with that letter. I would not want anybody to think that the letter was written purely in haste. We spent as much time as we had over it and we went into considerable detail on all the points that Mr Campbell made. Q. The truth is that the investigation that had been carried out by the time the Governors met onth July was no fuller than the investigation that had been made before you wrote that letter, except in this respect: that you had, by now, looked at both versions of Mr Gilligan's notes? A. We had seen Mr Gilligan's notes, that is true. We had also, by that time, identified many similarities in Ms Watts' reports as well with the reports Andrew Gilligan had made, which had taken us some time to get to because I was abroad when her broadcasts originally went out. I think that also lent some support to the broad thrust of the allegations that Mr Gilligan's source was making. Q. In the press release following the meeting of the Governors, it was said that the BBC had never attacked the good faith of the Prime Minister. A. That is also what I said in my Today interview on the 26th. Q. Did anyone draw the Governors' intention to what Mr Gilligan had in fact said at 6.07? A. No, it was not at the forefront of our minds. Indeed, it was not at the forefront of our minds in drafting the response of the 27th because it was raised there by Mr Campbell for the first time, as the third of those 12 questions, and indeed in the previous three letters from the Government the wording of the 6.07 broadcast had never been referred to you and their complaints were much more about whether we had abided by the producer guidelines, the strength given to denials and a number of other issues, such as the description of the JIC. They had never drawn the precise language of the 6.07 as being the core of their complaint. Indeed, even when we got the letter of the 26th where it was raised for the first time in that list of questions, I took the core of their complaint to be that John Humphrys paragraph on the front page. Q. So nobody said, as I understand your evidence, to the Governors at that meeting: there is a problem about the 6.07 broadcast, which was unscripted, and where Mr Gilligan appears to have gone further than he should have done? A. No, because at that time the Government's complaint was all-encompassing. They were not saying: we have a problem, we have a complaint about the.07 broadcast. They said: we have a complaint about the entirety of these allegations. I think Mr Campbell's letter to the Director General on the 26th said "the story is0 per cent wrong". This was an all or nothing complaint, not a complaint about a phrase in one version of 19 broadcasts. Q. It was a number of complaints, one of which related specifically to the 6.07 broadcast. A. I accept that the wording of the 6.07 was raised for the first time in the letter of the 26th, yes. Q. In fact you had at 6.07, whether you intended to or not, attacked the good faith of the Government, had you not? A. On reflection I can see that. At the time, I do not think that was sufficiently recognised, no. Q. Did anyone point out to the Governors that the dossier had said that it reflected the views of the JIC and Mr Gilligan had broadcast, at 7.32, an allegation that the Government had actually inserted things contrary to intelligence advice? Was that point made to the Governors? A. No. As I have explained to you before, we saw the core allegations that were being made about the scripted items rather than 6.07, and again, even in that allegation we did not accept that the reservations of the Intelligence Services necessarily referred to the heads of those services or the JIC; and I believe we always thought of it in terms of people lower down the chain who had been involved in the assessment and production of the dossier, who were concerned, and at some level unspecified in the BBC's broadcast, that stuff had been included against their advice. LORD HUTTON: May I just ask you on that point, Mr Sambrook, if we look at BBC/1/4, which is the first page of the transcript, if we can scroll down that, please. Yes, just there. You see the passage there beginning: "Well, erm, our source says that the dossier, as it was finally published, made the Intelligence Services unhappy..." Then if we go over to the next page which is the commencement of the broadcast at 7.32, about halfway down that passage: "... Andrew Gilligan has found evidence that the Government's dossier on Iraq that was produced last September was cobbled together at the last minute with some unconfirmed material that had not been approved by the Security Services." Now, there is a reference to the Intelligence Services being unhappy and then there is a reference to "had not been approved by the Security Services". A. Hmm. LORD HUTTON: I think later there is a reference at 006 to Mr Gilligan, where he said "most people in intelligence were not happy"; but if one looks at the first two references, that gives the picture, does it not, that it was the entirety of the Intelligence Services, or would it not apply certainly to the heads of the Intelligence Services? A. I accept that reading can be taken from it. LORD HUTTON: You say "can be taken from it". Is that not the only reading if you just look at those passages? Once they were heard by someone listening to the broadcast: "the Intelligence Services". A. I think all I can say, my Lord, is that in the programme's mind, and indeed in ours for some time, that was not what we believed to be the allegation that had been made. LORD HUTTON: Is the important thing not what the listeners take it to mean? A. I agree with that, yes. LORD HUTTON: Yes. MR SUMPTION: You have accepted that there was no basis in Mr Gilligan's notes for the assertion that that point had been made to him by Dr Kelly, the conscious misfeasance point. A. It was not in his notes, yes. Q. Was that point made to the Governors? A. Yes, I said to the Governors that his notes were not verbatim, were not -- not every that he had broadcast was contained in his notes but that Mr Gilligan asserted that what was not there was a proper reflection of his conversation with Dr Kelly. The one point the Governors challenged me on was whether the name "Campbell" was represented in the notes and I told them that it was, next to a phrase about transformation of the dossier. And that was really the only point that they wanted to have more clarification about the notes on. Q. You see, Mr Sambrook, when you wrote the 27th June letter you had not seen Mr Gilligan's notes; and when you subsequently saw them you realised that there might be a problem about the unequivocal way in which you had answered Mr Campbell's question whether the BBC stood by the 6.07 allegation. A. when I saw his notes I had the conversation with Andrew about those elements of his broadcast which were not captured in his notes and he continued to assert that his conversation with Dr Kelly backed up those comments, and I took him at face value. Q. So he continued to tell you that that was what Dr Kelly had actually told him? A. He continued to say it was a proper -- he did not say it was a direct quote at that point but he did say it continued to be a proper reflection and interpretation of what Dr Kelly had told him, which is what I think I said in my evidence on the 13th. Q. You have told us that by this stage the notion that the source was a senior member of the Intelligence Services had got into the bloodstream. But you, by now, knew at the Governors' meeting that the source was not a senior member of the Intelligence Service. A. Yes. Q. Now, was that point made to the Governors? A. No, because the Governors again did not press me on the identity of the source or where the source came from. As I explained earlier, the dilemma I found myself in, and I had some unease over it but nevertheless it was a dilemma I faced, was about clarification of that point against anything which might assist the identification or narrow the scope for identification of our source. Given the climate and the high public attention at that time, I believed our primary responsibility was to continue to try to protect the identity of the source and therefore decided not to proceed with that clarification in public. The Governors did not question me about it specifically in any way. Q. But the Governors had no reason to doubt what the BBC had itself been saying for weeks, namely that this was a senior intelligence source, what you yourself had said in the Today Programme on the 26th. A. That is true, though it is also true that after the 27th, when I was aware of Dr Kelly as the source, I took every step I could to ensure that future communications accurately described him. I am aware that the Governors' statement did not but I was not consulted about that statement before it was released. Q. The problem is that the Governors were under the impression that it was a senior intelligence source. You knew that in fact it was not. A. I do not altogether accept that, I am afraid. I think that the description of the source was not solely an Intelligence Service source, which seems to be the implication of what you are saying. There were many varied descriptions of the source, some of which suggested he came from the Intelligence Services, many of which did not. So my view is that there was a very confused picture of where the source may have sat. Q. Well, you have just yourself confirmed, have you not, that the Governors' press release immediately after this assumed that he was an intelligence source. A. It did. Q. You say you were not consulted about that. But would you not agree that it is a rather serious matter that the Governors of the BBC should have endorsed the journalistic standards of the broadcast on the basis that the source was a senior member of the Intelligence Services, without appreciating that that description was wrong? A. I think it is regrettable that their press release referred to Intelligence Services, yes. Whether -- the extent to which they derived comfort themselves from any idea they may or may not have had that he was an Intelligence Service source I cannot speak to. Q. The only other matters I want to ask you about Mr Sambrook concern a couple of press releases. Could you look, please, at BBC/3/25? This is a press release of 9th July. Were you here when I asked Mr Gilligan about this? A. I was, yes. Q. In that case, we can take it quite shortly. Did you have any involvement at all with the issue of this press release? A. I was aware of it. I do not remember directly drawing it up, no. Q. When were you aware of it? A. On that evening. Q. Were you aware of it before it was actually issued? A. I may have been, I cannot recall exactly. Q. Were you consulted about its terms? A. Not that I recall in detail, no. Q. Do you regard it as satisfactory -- given that you, at this time, knew that the source was Dr Kelly -- that the BBC should put out a public statement saying Mr Gilligan's source does not work in the Ministry of Defence? A. I remember precisely what our view was about it because I remember a mobile telephone conversation I had on the way back into the office that evening, where we were discussing the Ministry of Defence press statement. And our view was that the original Ministry of Defence press statement had two facts in it: 1. That the individual had known Mr Gilligan for a number of months and it appeared to say, quite firmly, words to the effect that it was an MoD official. Our view -- my understanding of Dr Kelly, and indeed that of Andrew Gilligan, was that Dr Kelly had a roving role and was not kind of directly line managed by the MoD, and also that Andrew Gilligan had known him for a number of years. Our view in the first few hours of that evening was that it was quite likely they had actually identified somebody else and not Andrew Gilligan's source. It was not clear until I think the next day that actually Dr Kelly who had been identified. Q. Knowing as you did that Mr Gilligan's source was in fact Dr Kelly, did you regard it as a fair and honest statement, on the part of the BBC, to say that Mr Gilligan's source does not work in the Ministry of Defence? A. Well, I think what we were trying to say is he was not a Ministry of Defence official directly; and I think that the Ministry of Defence statement had indicated that. It is as simple as that. Q. So with no gloss at all you regard it as a perfectly fair statement to make, do you: Mr Gilligan's source does not work in the Ministry of Defence? A. Of course I understand the point you are making, but I have to say at the time I think we regarded it was perfectly fair, yes. Q. It is pure trouble making, is it not? A. No, I do not agree with that. Q. Did you accompany Mr Gilligan when he gave evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee second time round? A. No, I did not. Q. The other press release I want you to look at is at BBC/6/261. This is a press release issued by the BBC's Director of Communications, Sally Osman, on behalf of Andrew Gilligan. Were you consulted about this? A. No, I was not. Q. Can you help us at all on the circumstances in which a decision was made that a press release in these terms should be put out? A. I believe this was the day I had made the announcement that Dr Kelly was our source, which had obviously caused a lot of media and public interest. And I think that part of that interest was suggesting, therefore, that following Dr Kelly's evidence to the FAC that Andrew Gilligan had not properly represented his comments and his reporting of it; and my understanding was that Andrew Gilligan wanted to send out this press statement to, in his view, correct that. But beyond that, those are the circumstances under which it arose but I was not consulted about the terms of it. MR SUMPTION: I see. I will not ask you any more about it. Thank you. LORD HUTTON: We will rise now then for five minutes.

3.22pm short break

3.27pm cross-examined by MR DINGEMANS

Q. Mr Sambrook, first of all can I deal with the letter of 27th June? Can I take you to BBC/5/119 which is page 1 of the letter? You make the point, in your first paragraph, that you did not answer on 26th June because you wanted time to examine fully the questions you asked and to write a considered reply. Do I take the gist of your evidence to be this: that although you had hoped to write a considered reply, this was not it? A. Yes. At the time under the deadline of responding by the end of that day, to take an extra 24 hours in the climate in which we were at this time seemed to be taking a significant extra time. What I have said today is on reflection I think we should have withstood the pressure to reply and have taken longer and considered at greater length. Q. Because if we go on to page 124 there is part of this letter which says at the bottom of the page: "Does it still stand by the allegation made on that day that both we and the intelligence agencies knew the 45 minute claim to be wrong and inserted it despite knowing that." It says this: "Andrew Gilligan accurately reported the source telling him that the Government 'probably knew that the 45 minute figure was wrong' and that the claim was 'questionable'." Both those aspects of the answer are simply wrong and unsupported by the evidence, are they not? A. As I now understand it, that is the case. At the time Mr Gilligan, I think, told me that that was a proper reflection of what his source had told him. Q. Can I then turn to the meeting you had onrd June at The Times. Mr Baldwin told us about this in evidence. He said that you were, as it were, doing the rounds of media; is that right? You were going round to various media outlets? A. Yes, at the time there was a great deal of briefing of newspapers going on, particularly by the Government, to be fair; and I felt it would be useful for me to speak to the editors of a number of newspapers so they could at least try to understand the BBC's position even if they did not sympathise with it. Q. Was there any discussion about the source for Mr Gilligan's story at that meeting? A. Yes. As I said in my evidence on the 13th, I was asked about the source and I used the phrase that Andrew Gilligan used at 7.32 that it was a "senior source involved in the compilation of the dossier", I think I said. I was then asked by Mr Baldwin whether we had attempted to go back to the source and check whether we was happy with the way that his allegations had been reported; and I said that we was unavailable due to the nature of his work. This is a phrase that Andrew Gilligan had used when I had asked the same question of him at some stage in the preceding days. Mr Baldwin then pressed me further to say: does that mean he is abroad? And I did not wish to -- I understood that Dr Kelly might be in Iraq but I did not know for certain and I did not wish to say yes or no, either to mislead or to help direct people towards Dr Kelly if he was in Iraq. So I said "something like that", intending it to cover a range of possibilities. Q. Could I take you to the article written by Mr Baldwin on 5th July? It is BBC/6/5. He says this in the first paragraph: "The source for bitterly contested allegations that Downing Street 'sexed up' its dossier on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction is a military expert who is now based in Iraq, BBC insiders are claiming." Did you tell Mr Baldwin that the source was based in Iraq? A. Absolutely not. Q. Mr Baldwin also appears to know that the person is a weapons of mass destruction military expert. Did you tell him that? A. Absolutely not. Q. Mr Baldwin said that parts of that information had come from BBC insiders. Did you know anything about that? A. I knew nothing about that at all, no. Q. If it had come from BBC insiders, it would have been plainly inappropriate for that information to have been disclosed, would you accept that? A. I think it would have been extremely inappropriate and I would be very surprised if anybody within the BBC had made those sorts of comments to Mr Baldwin at all. Q. On 8th July in his article Mr Baldwin said this: some executives, BBC executives, have hinted that he may be in Iraq searching for weapons of mass destruction. Such loose talk convinced Downing Street that he is a weapons of mass destruction specialist at the Foreign Office, which appears to be picking up the same point. No doubt you would condemn, if BBC executives were the source of that information, anyone leaking that information? A. I would completely condemn it. I have no doubt whatsoever that it was not possible for Tom Baldwin to reach those conclusions from any conversation I had. Q. Anything you had said to him? A. Yes. Q. He did not provide us, beyond saying there were two persons who had spoken with Mr Marsh, any further details of the BBC executives. A. Yes. Q. Have you undertaken any investigations to see whether or not those claims were right? A. We have not. Q. You have not? A. No. I am afraid that the BBC insiders get quoted a great deal in the newspapers. It is not really possible to investigate all of them. Q. Finally, can I turn to the question of editorial concerns and whether those were passed on sufficiently to the Governors? It is right, is it not, that by the time of the Governors' meeting on 6th July there were real concerns about the language that had been used by Mr Gilligan in his broadcast? A. There was certainly concern that there -- we had not been consistent and that the range of interpretations was being drawn from the way we had reported the story, that is certainly true. Q. It was also plain, if you looked at his notes, that there was no full support for the broadcast; that is right, is it not? A. Yes. Q. It is also right if you analysed his evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee on 19th June that it did not support the more serious allegations that had been made on the BBC programmes? A. I do not think I entirely accept that. I think his evidence on the 19th broadly supported most of the allegations that had been made. He did not have "probably know it was wrong", it is true, and he was not directly asked about that phrase, as far as I recall. Q. No, but by the time we come to the Governors you are under pressure to reply on 27th June, you have told us about that. There had been plenty of time between 27th June and the meeting on 6th July to consider these things at more leisure? A. Yes, and when I looked at Andrew Gilligan's notes on I think it was 1st July, I did explicitly have a conversation, going through his notes, about what was contained in them and what he had broadcast that was not contained in them and received assurances from him that what he had broadcast was stood up or was justified by the conversation he had had with Dr Kelly, even if it was not captured on his personal organiser. Q. But we also know that Mr Marsh, head of or editor of the Today Programme, had passed up to the head of radio news serious concerns in the e-mail at BBC/5/118. A. I was not aware of that, no. Q. You were not aware of that? A. No. Q. Do you think you ought to have been made aware of that? A. I think if Kevin Marsh or Stephen Mitchell had had serious concerns about any flaws in the journalism or the way that we were responding to the Government, they should and would have flagged that up to me, and they did not. Q. But the position is this: Be it the fault of the editorial side or the Governors, an error is made on 27th June in the letter for the reasons you have given in -- A. Yes. Q. -- the meeting on 6th July to consider this specific broadcast and these specific complaints, yes? A. Yes. Q. And yet whether it is a failure of the Governors or the failure of the editorial side, no-one has yet picked up the errors that were made? A. No, we were still, and Andrew Gilligan was still standing by all of the reporting that he made of Dr Kelly's remarks, including the phrases he used at 6.07, and saying they were a fair reflection of the conversation he had. LORD HUTTON: But is it appropriate to rely entirely on Mr Gilligan? If serious complaints have been made about a report of his and his notes do not fully support his report, is it enough for the BBC just to rely on what Mr Gilligan tells them? A. Ideally, of course, we would prefer corroboration, my Lord, but the corroboration was not available. We had pressed him on the point. He had been entirely consistent on it. At the time, as I said before, we had looked closely at the Susan Watts reports which I accept not in terms of the "probably knew it was wrong" phrase, but in many other respects supported Andrew Gilligan's reporting. At this time, as I said earlier, the Government's complaint was not about that phrase, it was all encompassing. They were saying the story and all of the whole coverage was 100 per cent wrong; it was an all or nothing complaint and they wanted the full withdrawal of every aspect of the story. So~-- LORD HUTTON: I quite appreciate the point you make -- I beg your pardon, carry on. A. Sorry, I was trying to explain. So the way we were looking at it was not about one particular phrase, particularly. It was about the breadth of the allegations that had been made across our coverage. We had reason to believe significant parts of it had been demonstrated to be right and indeed had been confirmed from the Foreign Affairs Committee. We had a second BBC correspondent who independently appeared to have a similar conversation with -- we did not know at that time it was also with Dr Kelly -- which had supported, again, kind of the broad thrust of many of the allegations. So we did not believe it was right to fully retract every aspect of it, which is what the Government were asking of us. It is true to say that we had not honed in on that phrase "probably knew it was wrong" in a way that, with hindsight, I can accept we should have done. LORD HUTTON: I see. Thank you. MR DINGEMANS: If you do not accept that you knew of editorial concerns, do you accept this proposition: that you ought to have known about editorial concerns? A. If there had been editorial concerns, yes. I am afraid personally I do not fully accept that Kevin Marsh e-mail highlights the level of editorial concerns that have been attached to it. MR DINGEMANS: Thank you very much. LORD HUTTON: Mr Caldecott, any re-examination?

Re-examined by MR CALDECOTT

Q. Mr Sambrook, you were asked about a passage in the shorthand notes of the Governors' meeting, BBC/14/31, please. Could we go just about halfway down? I am not sure I have the right reference here. 14/31. Just go up a bit. I think I must have the wrong reference. I can do this by later submission. LORD HUTTON: Would you like to take a moment Mr Caldecott? MR CALDECOTT: I can actually remember what it says. LORD HUTTON: Would you like to put it then? MR CALDECOTT: Mr Sambrook, it was put to you that this was a reference to Kevin Marsh not having spoken to Mr Gilligan about the programme. Your answer was that it was about The Mail on Sunday article. I think I am right that very shortly higher up in the transcript you will see actually a reference to newspapers/journalists notes. I am very grateful. It is just two-thirds of the way down the screen now, do you just see there between Gavyn Davies and DG, "Journalists and newspapers?" That was a change of subject to The Mail on Sunday, which is what you were talking about in the passage you were asked about? A. That is right, yes. Q. Secondly, you referred to Susan Watts' description of her source. Just for the sake of completeness, could we please look at BBC/1/33? If you could look, please, at Ms Watts' first contribution on that page, we see the initials there, SW, three lines into that: "We've spoken to a senior official intimately involved with the process of pulling together the original September 2002 Blair weapons dossier." Was that the reference you had in mind? A. It was, yes. Q. Lastly, it was put to you that you, in a lunch with Mr Baldwin on 3rd June, may have mentioned Iraq or the fact that Dr Kelly was a weapons inspector and suggestions to that effect. I want to show you, in fact, the article which Mr Baldwin wrote the following day, on 4th June, rather than the article he wrote on 5th June, which is at BBC/5/198 -- July, sorry. BBC/5/198. I would be grateful if you could just quickly read that through to yourself, Mr Sambrook. (Pause). You may find it easier on the hard copy, because this is not as easy as it might be. (Handed)? A. Yes. I am familiar with the article. Q. Do you see a reference at the top right hand of the second column, the top of the second column? A. Yes. Yes. Q. "Unsuccessful because of the nature of his position." Do you see that? A. Yes. Q. Do you see any reference in that article to anyone on behalf of the BBC having said anything about Iraq or weapons inspectors? A. No. Q. And this is an article written by Mr Baldwin on the day following the lunch with you? A. That is right. MR CALDECOTT: My Lord, that is all I have. LORD HUTTON: Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you very much then Mr Sambrook. A. Thank you.

MR RICHARD HATFIELD called, examined by MR LLOYD-JONES

Q. My Lord. Mr Hatfield, is your full name Richard Paul Hatfield? A. It is. Q. Are you the personnel director of the Ministry of Defence? A. I am. Q. Have you previously given evidence to this Inquiry? A. I have. Q. Mr Hatfield, we have heard a great deal of evidence about line management and line management chains. Could you, please, explain to us the essence of how the line management system works? A. The basic proposition is that the line manager is responsible for directing individuals under him or her in the course of their work and for their day-to-day, if I can put it this way, their day-to-day welfare at work. Q. In your capacity as personnel director, do you have responsibility for others in line management chains? A. I have my own line management chain and I am directly responsible for about 3,300 people. Q. Was Dr Kelly one of those persons in a line management chain for which you were responsible? A. He was not. Q. How does the system of line management chains differ from personnel organisation? A. My personnel organisation, and indeed lower level personnel organisations advise the line management chain when they have personnel issues. They also support them when they need it and indeed support individuals when they need it in various ways and the primary responsibility, day-to- day, lies with the line manager to look after their staff. Q. Mr Hatfield, how did it come about that you undertook the first interview with Dr Kelly on 4th July? A. The evening before, at about a quarter to, from memory, I was rung by Sir Kevin Tebbit's office to ask me for some advice on what initially was described as a hypothetical complicated case which involved potential disciplinary issues but also related to matters in the public domain. It fairly quickly became clear that it was related to the ongoing dispute between the Government and the BBC, although not precisely what aspect of it. In the course of the evening, I was made aware of Dr Kelly's letter of 30th June and, again in the course of the evening, in a telephone conversation with Sir Kevin Tebbit, we agreed that unusually, because of the very complicated circumstances, that I should conduct the interview planned for the next day with Dr Kelly which was originally, I think, planned to be conducted by Bryan Wells as his line manager, because as I say of the complicated circumstances. Q. What precisely were you asked to do by Sir Kevin? A. I was asked to interview Dr Kelly and, in particular, in the light of the advice I gave to him about the disciplinary issues that might be involved in this case, to establish, first of all, whether there were serious disciplinary issues and to make a judgment on how that should affect the further handling of, if you like, the substance of the issues raised by Dr Kelly's letter to do with his meeting with Andrew Gilligan. Q. So what was your role in relation to the disciplinary aspect of the matter? A. In this particular case, unusually, because I conducted the interview, I assumed direct responsibility on making the initial judgments about the disciplinary issues and process to be followed. In a more normal case -- LORD HUTTON: Which normally would have been carried out by the direct line manager, would it? A. Yes, in an ordinary case Bryan Wells or perhaps one of his superiors would have conducted the interview after seeking any advice they wanted from me or my staff. LORD HUTTON: Yes. MR LLOYD-JONES: We will return to the disciplinary aspect in a moment. Did you have any wider role in relation to the substantive issues or the handling of the controversy between the Government and the BBC over the September dossier? A. I had absolutely no involvement at all up to that evening. Q. Did you have any responsibility for deciding whether, when or how what Dr Kelly told you should be revealed? A. No, but clearly in relation to one or two aspects of what happened subsequently, because I conducted the interview on the Friday and chaired the meeting on the Monday, I was in a position to advise on some things that were relevant to that; but the substantive issue was never my responsibility. Q. What responsibility did you have for the general welfare of Dr Kelly? A. In this particular case, I think that I had responsibility to give advice in relation to the two meetings I took part in; and subsequently, when the action returned to those dealing with the substance of the problem, for maintaining, if you like, a general supervising role, to see that they were providing the support and assistance that I would expect any member of the department in similar circumstances to get. Q. Did you have any responsibility to advise Dr Kelly in relation to handling the media? A. In relation to handling the media, no. My only role in relation to that was to make sure that he knew who he should go to to get that advice. Q. As the matter then developed, did you keep in touch with what was happening so far as the welfare of Dr Kelly was concerned? A. I kept in broad touch throughout. In particular, I spoke to Bryan Wells, on occasion to Martin Howard, and we kept in regular touch with Sir Kevin Tebbit's office. Q. And what was your view, at the time, as to the level and the nature of the support which was provided to Dr Kelly? A. I thought it was outstanding; and I remain of that view. Q. Did you receive any reports as to how Dr Kelly was coping? A. I did, particularly from Bryan Wells, and in relation to the preparation for the two Committee appearances I think I also spoke to Martin Howard and I spoke, as I say, regularly to the PMOS' office. Q. What did they tell you? A. They told me essentially what Bryan Wells said in evidence, that he was looking tired but he was coping well. I also saw his appearance before the FAC committee myself. Q. So far as Dr Kelly's appearance before the FAC was concerned, did you have any responsibility in respect of the arrangements for his appearance there? A. I had no responsibility but at one stage I did intervene to check whether something was being done, which was to agree or to try to agree with the FAC in advance the scope of the questioning. I found that was already in hand, and I think in fact the Inquiry has had a copy of the letter from the Secretary of State to the Chairman of the FAC which records the understanding that they reached. Q. You have given evidence that when you first came to the matter it appeared to you that there might be a disciplinary aspect to this. How did you approach that disciplinary aspect? A. The thing that was clearest in my mind, from the moment I undertook responsibility for the interview, was that before getting into the issue of whether or not Dr Kelly might be Andrew Gilligan's source, I had to decide how to handle the disciplinary issues that might arise. On the face of Dr Kelly's own letter, he appeared to be admitting quite openly to a number of breaches of Ministry of Defence, indeed wider Civil Service procedures, nonetheless they did not necessarily appear to be particularly serious on the basis of his account. On the other hand, if he was Andrew Gilligan's source, the issue obviously arose, especially if you accepted the portrayal of that source given by Mr Gilligan to the FAC, that there were potentially very serious issues not least because the portrayal suggested that the source was seeking, if you like, to criticise Government policy, although that was precisely denied in Dr Kelly's letter. So I had to reach a view on whether we were in potentially serious disciplinary territory or not, because if we were I had to stop the interview, start formal procedures and take it from there, a very different course of events. Q. At this stage, the first approach to the matter, before the first interview took place, what material was available to you? A. Essentially I had only two sources at that stage: Dr Kelly's letter, and the evidence given by Andrew Gilligan to the Foreign Affairs Committee, which, of course, might or might not relate to the same discussion. So what I did before the meeting with Dr Kelly on 4th July was read those two accounts for the first time, compare them and try to establish how much of that related to disciplinary matters. Very importantly for me I formed the view that even if they were describing the same meeting and that Andrew Gilligan's account was essentially accurate, there was no issue arising about security; neither account suggested there was any breach of the Official Secrets Act or any disclosure of privileged information. Q. On the basis of this preliminary view, before the interview had taken place, have you formed any view, preliminary view, as to whether it would be appropriate or necessary to institute disciplinary proceedings? A. I did not. I did, however, form a view about the sort of question I needed to answer in order to decide not to proceed to disciplinary proceedings. If you like, I had a series of questions which, if I got the correct answer, I thought I could foreclose without going to formal disciplinary procedures. If I got the wrong answer or if I was not satisfied, I would have had no option but to start procedures without necessarily prejudging in any way what the outcome of those procedures would be. Q. In approaching the matter for the first time, did you take account of Dr Kelly's interests? A. Very much so. The first half of the meeting on 4th July, which I would characterise as an interview -- I would not really say the second half was an interview. I based myself essentially on Dr Kelly's account, since it was not even clear that Andrew Gilligan's account was referring to the same meeting. It was also very important to me that Dr Kelly had come forward and volunteered information. If he had not done so, we would have, at that stage, had no inkling that he might have been Andrew Gilligan's source, as far as I was concerned. So I essentially interviewing him on the basis of his letter and only after I got past that point, if I got past that point, was I going to go into a detailed analysis of what Gilligan said that his source had said. Q. At the first meeting, did you say anything to Dr Kelly about how you were intending to handle the matter? A. Yes. The very first thing I did was to spell out to him the procedure, the idea that I had had for a two part meeting, that we might not even get to the second part of the meeting, because if I was not able to rule out formal disciplinary proceedings, I would have to stop at that point. I also very explicitly told him what his rights would be if I decided not to foreclose disciplinary action. Q. Apart from the disciplinary aspect of the meeting, did you discuss with Dr Kelly, at that meeting, the wider implications of the situation in which he then found himself? A. I did. At the very beginning of the meeting, before, if you like, getting into the meat of either the interview about his letter or of comparison with Andrew Gilligan's evidence, I made it clear to him that there were actually two sets of problems here: there was the issue of whether or not he had done something that he should not have done in talking to Andrew Gilligan in the way he described in his letter; and regardless, if you like, of the outcome of that discussion, because he either was advertently or inadvertently the source of Andrew Gilligan's or might be thought to be, which of course is why he had come forward and told us, he was already embroiled necessarily in the controversy between the BBC and the Government; and I made it quite clear to him that in many ways I thought -- I made quite clear to in many ways that was, if you like, the more serious practical problem on the basis of his account. Q. Did you form any view as to Dr Kelly's understanding of the problems as you saw them? A. I did. Before I invited Dr Kelly into my office I had Bryan Wells in briefly, who had come up to attend the interview and had walked up to the interview with Dr Kelly, and I asked Bryan whether he thought that Dr Kelly had fully appreciated the seriousness of the controversy into which he had walked, by talking to Andrew Gilligan, whether or not he was the specific source. Bryan said he did not think, at that stage, it had fully sunk in; and I made it a real point of the way I conducted the meeting to make sure that it did sink in. I think I succeeded. Q. What makes you think you succeeded in that regard? A. There are a number of very specific bits of that conversation, on that day, on 7th July and in my two or three brief telephone conversations with Dr Kelly which fit with that, but much more importantly as far as I am concerned, the whole basis of the conversation does not really make sense without the shared understanding which I think I referred to in my oral evidence on the first day of this Inquiry, that there is a major public controversy out there which is linked to Andrew Gilligan's story in Today and in The Mail on Sunday which may or may not have anything to do with Dr Kelly but people may think it does; and even if he is not the source, things that he said, according to his own account, would at the very least corroborate or appear to corroborate part of that story. So he was undoubtedly caught up in this from the outset, regardless, as I say, of the disciplinary consequences. And I have no doubt that by the end of that meeting he understood. Q. At that stage, at the first interview, did you form any view as to whether Dr Kelly had any understanding as to whether he was likely to be identified or not? A. Yes, I did. The first view I formed on that was from his own letter, which specifically refers to a colleague which I think we now know to be Mrs Bosch, having drawn his attention to apparent similarities between evidence given by Andrew Gilligan to the FAC and things that he would have said. He, himself, again referred to that in the course of his discussion with me on 4th July. He also made it clear, though without going into details, that his general views about, if you like, the technical aspects of weapons of the mass destruction programme were well known to a number of journalists, for example Susan Watts and Jane Corbin. I think he may have mentioned one or two other names as well. Q. Can I ask you, then, about the records of that first interview? We have a number of different contemporary records. You are the author of two of those, I think. A. Yes. Q. We will look at them on the screen in a moment. Can I ask you first: so far as those records of which you are the author are concerned, were those intended to be verbatim records of the meeting? A. No. Q. Could you tell us, please, how it came about that you made the various records following the first meeting? A. Yes. When I began the first meeting, I assumed that the first record I was going to produce in the course of the afternoon was a short note to Sir Kevin Tebbit giving, if you like, the headline outcome of the meeting with Dr Kelly, whatever that was going to be, and I conducted the meeting, as I have said, on two parts. I planned from the outset to write in detail, or as much detail as required, the bit covering the potential disciplinary issues; and I told Bryan Wells in advance that he would not need to take notes on that, but I would want him to take notes, assuming we got to it, on the second part of the meeting when we did the comparison. My intention was essentially to put together a quick note in the afternoon and attach, as soon as I could, a longer record based on those two contributions. Events did not turn out quite that way. I did the first report orally to Sir Kevin Tebbit in the course of the afternoon; and in practice I wrote up my notes for the two records I sent forward over the weekend. There are in fact three parts of that. There is a covering note to Sir Kevin which is still a brief overview of what happened, but a more considered one than if I had done it immediately in the afternoon. There is my formal note of the meeting, which is quite detailed on the first half, the disciplinary side, if you like; and only, I think, largely records the conclusion of the second part because I was still expecting a sort of question by question analysis to be produced separately by Bryan Wells, as he did. I also attached a grid which I prepared as an extra, if you like, which compared, as far as I could, what Dr Kelly had said to me with what Andrew Gilligan said about his single source; and that, I think, has also been made available for the Inquiry, although it may in fact be the slightly updated version after the second meeting which has been published, but they are very, very similar. Q. If we could have on the screen, please MoD/1/28. If I could scroll down a little, please. Mr Hatfield, was that the minute which you prepared from your handwritten note? A. That is. Q. Then if we could have MoD/1/24, please. Is that the formal note of the meeting which you prepared from the note? A. That is correct. Q. What happened to the note? A. My manuscript notes were actually destroyed by me as I wrote this up and this replaced, as it were, my handwritten notes on the Saturday morning at home. Q. What happened to the table which was annexed to the minute? A. Well, the table was actually written straight onto a computer and I still actually have the very first draft which is very similar, I think, to the one you have got but I am not sure whether the one on -- Q. We need not look at it but it is MoD/1/57 is the version which the Inquiry has. So the table which was annexed to the minute was a predecessor of that? A. That is my understanding. Q. That can be made available to the Inquiry should it so wish? A. Indeed. Q. At the time you drafted the notes on 5th July, had you seen Dr Wells' note? A. No I had not, with one exception. I had in my possession, though I did not look at it until the following week, a few draft paragraphs which Dr Wells sent me on the Friday afternoon, but I did not, as I say, even see, for the note I never wrote that afternoon, if you see what I mean. Q. The reference I believe is MoD/5/62. Could I ask you about the records of the second meeting? We have a record produced by Dr Wells which is MoD/1/46. You have produced a typed minute -- LORD HUTTON: Sorry, MoD/1 -- MR LLOYD-JONES: Dr Wells' typed record is MoD/1/46. You also produced a minute for Sir Kevin. A. I did. Q. Could we have MoD/1/54 on the screen, please? If that could scroll down a little please. Thank you. Is that the minute that you prepared for Sir Kevin? A. That is right, yes. Q. When did you draft the minute? A. I drafted it at home on the night of the 7th from memory and I think it was typed up at work first thing the following morning, which is why it is dated theth. Q. Could you scroll up again, please. You see it bears the date the 8th July. A. Yes. Q. When you produced that minute for Sir Kevin, had you seen the record that had been prepared by Dr Wells? A. No, I had not. Q. Thank you. Going back to the first interview, was anything said in the first interview about the methods by which Dr Kelly's identity might become known from an external source, from a source other than the Government? A. There was -- it was not something we focused on, but it kept on coming up, not least because, as I mentioned, we talked about his then unnamed colleague who had drawn his attention to the similarities between -- apparent similarities between his views and what was attributed to Gilligan's single source. We also touched on the speculation that was already going on in the media about the type of person Gilligan's source might be and so on. We were not at that stage talking about precisely what would happen next, because we did not know, with one very big exception which was raised very specifically with Dr Kelly, what I personally thought was a high likelihood that he might, unless we were able to completely separate him from this and, as it were, show what he had to say was completely irrelevant, a high likelihood he might be called to the Foreign Affairs Committee, since it seemed to bear directly on the concerns that had been addressed by that Committee. One of the reasons I did this was because that morning there had been a lot of speculation about what the report of the Foreign Affairs Committee was going to say; and at the time I interviewed Dr Kelly I was under the mistaken impression that the Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry had not actually closed. It was only that afternoon when those more closely involved told me that it had closed and the issue was whether it would, if you like, reopen. So I thought it was even more likely when I spoke to Dr Kelly in the morning, than Sir Kevin Tebbit when I spoke to him in the afternoon. LORD HUTTON: Can I just ask, Mr Hatfield: this concept you had that Dr Kelly might be called before the FAC, had that arisen purely in your own mind or was it because of something Sir Kevin Tebbit or someone else had said to you? A. Purely in my own mind, my Lord. I had hardly spoken to Kevin Tebbit apart from a brief telephone call and I think 30 seconds as I picked up a document from his office. It was because of the probably Today news report that morning about the imminence of the report that had got it in my mind because I had not really been following the detail of the saga. LORD HUTTON: Yes. MR LLOYD-JONES: At that time, at the time of the first interview, did you have any knowledge as to whether it might be possible for an individual to give evidence in private to the FAC? A. I have never known an individual to give evidence to the FAC anonymously. I have myself given evidence to the Defence Committee in closed session, though it was subsequently published. But there was no doubt who was giving evidence. Q. So, when the possibility of an appearance before the FAC was raised in the first interview, what was said about it and what was Dr Kelly's reaction? A. Dr Kelly seemed to accept it, in the sense of recognise that it might well be a consequence. I do not mean that he, like anybody else, was overjoyed at the idea of being brought before a Parliamentary Committee. Q. No. Was anything said at that first interview about the possibility that the Government would need to reveal that Dr Kelly had met Mr Gilligan and what Dr Kelly had told the Government about that? A. Nothing was said explicitly, but the tenor of my comments, especially when we moved into the second part of the meeting to talk about the comparison, as it were, between Dr Kelly's account and the evidence relating to the unknown single source, was that I expected the Government, in one form or another, to have to say something about the evidence he had come forward with, because I could not see how we could regard it as irrelevant to the Foreign Affairs Committee hearing. As I say, even if he was not Gilligan's source the mere fact that he had spoken to Gilligan and some of the things that he had explicitly said he had said to Gilligan were clearly highly relevant to the issue that the FAC had been looking at. I did not expect it to be my call whether the Government made a statement but I offered him my opinion that in some way or the other the Government would have to reveal what he had told us. The some way or the other depended on what happened subsequently, whether his name was revealed from external sources, whether he was recalled to the FAC, whether the BBC commented on developments. There were so many possibilities on 4th July that we did not discuss any specific options other than my reference to the FAC. Q. Was anything said about the manner in which the Government might reveal that? A. Other than my reference to the FAC, which was not specific. Q. Was anything said about the MoD issuing a press statement? A. Not specifically, other than, going back to where we started, we recognised the possibility that we might all be trumped, if you like, by somebody else naming Dr Kelly, rightly or wrongly, as a possible source. Q. At the end of that first interview was anything said about the possibility of a further interview? A. Yes, very specifically. First of all, I made it clear to Dr Kelly that any further interview or discussion would not be about disciplinary matters. Unless something completely new came forward, that was closed. But we all reached the end of that first discussion very unclear about whether there was a serious possibility that Dr Kelly was the single source, if such a single source existed. It was also clear to me that to pursue that I needed to go and try to find some more information about the background to the saga, if you like, the preparation of the dossier, and so on; to particularly have a word with Martin Howard, which is one of the first things I did, because I could not ask follow-up questions in relation to that without knowing more about the background. I made it clear to Dr Kelly that I was certain there would be a follow-up interview, not necessarily by me. I did not know when it was going to take place. He asked me whether he could go to the training which he had planned for the Monday and the Tuesday at RAF Honnington, preparatory for his planned deployment to Iraq. I said that he could, indeed that I wanted him to do so for various reasons. LORD HUTTON: You said he could because? A. He could and I wanted him to do so for various reasons; and I hoped that he could do that without being disturbed, if you like. But if the timetable moved faster than I hoped, it might be necessary to recall him. LORD HUTTON: What were the various reasons why you hoped he would be able to do that? A. Well, the first reason was because I think both Dr Kelly and I were still very much hoping he would go to Iraq and do the job at which he was a tremendous expert. I told him it might be delayed by a few days while we sorted out some of the consequence of this, but that I expected it to happen, therefore I wanted him to do the necessary pre-employment training so that he would go whenever required. LORD HUTTON: Yes. A. Secondly, I was conscious already that the fact that I had called him into interview might, without telling anybody what it was, be attracting attention in the Ministry of Defence. If he did not turn up on the Monday morning for his training, that would certainly attract attention too. So again it seemed in everybody's interest that the training should proceed if at all possible. But we agreed, very explicitly agreed that he could be recalled if necessary, and he would be prepared to do that and that he would prefer to do that rather than, as it were, postpone the training. LORD HUTTON: Yes. MR LLOYD-JONES: Could we move forward then, please, to the second interview on 7th July? Could we have on the screen, please, MoD/1/44? Mr Hatfield, this is a minute dated 8th July from Mr Dominic Wilson, who is the private secretary to Sir Kevin Tebbit. It is addressed to you, with copies to the various other people. Do you know, first of all, when this document was produced? A. My understanding is that the typed version was produced probably late on -- sorry, I am trying to get the dates right because there is confusion about this. Let me start the other way round. Just before I began the interview with Dr Kelly or the meeting with Dr Kelly on 7th July, Dominic Wilson, Sir Kevin Tebbit's secretary, rang me up and read me over the telephone -- this is literally about five or 10 minutes before we began the interview -- a draft of that minute. I received the typed version the following day after the interview had occurred. So I read the content in advance and it was then subsequently typed up, I do not know precisely when. Q. Could we scroll down to paragraph 4(b), please? We see there that the PUS would like to consider in the light of -- I will read the whole paragraph: "Against this background I understand that arrangements have been made for the further interview to be carried out by you and addresses at 1600 today. The PUS would like to consider in the light of this whether to recommend a public announcement. The key issues will be:" We see at (b): "Kelly's readiness to be associated with a public statement that names him and carries a clear and sustainable refutation of the core allegation on the '45 minute' intelligence." A. Yes. Q. When that minute was read to you, what did you understand that passage to mean? A. The honest answer is I did not focus on the precise wording of that paragraph, in as much as I registered it, I read it as confirming what I expected to do, which is go through with Kelly the need, the likelihood by this time that in some way or another -- and by now I think the ISC is in play as well as the FAC -- the Government would need to respond to the continuing controversy by putting into the public domain or possibly, as I say, Kelly himself doing it in a committee appearance, his account of his meeting with Gilligan. Therefore, I expected -- very clearly expected that Kelly should be clear that at some stage, and we still did not know at what stage, he would need to be publicly associated with his account and stand by it, by which I mean that by that stage, his name would be clear. I did not read this, if I registered it, as asking me to clear an early statement which named him and I did not, of course, do so. I cleared a statement -- an early statement which did not name him. Q. So you did not raise with Dr Kelly at that second interview his readiness to be associated with a public statement that named him? A. In the short term. The only statement that I was addressing was a short-term statement. I did address his readiness to be associated in public with his account, but the only statement I discussed was a short-term statement. Had I read that as specifically referring to a short-term statement, I would, of course, have done what my Permanent Secretary was asking me, if that is what he meant, and I am still not clear whether that is what he meant. I would have also advised against putting Dr Kelly's name in a short-term statement, ie the actual statement I discussed with him that afternoon. Q. Why would you have given that advice? A. Because at the stage we were then at, I did not think it was necessary to put his name into an initial statement, I think that is made clear in some of my covering notes, and I said it to him. And I thought there would be every advantage, both for Dr Kelly and the department, in having whatever interval we could have between the initial statement which got the essential facts out and the media managing to get his identity. Q. Did you have any view at that stage as to how long that interval might be? A. Can I put it the other way round? I was astonished that we got 24 hours. Q. Was Dr Kelly told anything at the second interview about whether it would be necessary to name him in a press statement? A. As I say, the specific statement which we focused on, which was a draft which was attached to my minute, did not name him; and I did not expect him to be named in a statement made in the sort of circumstances we were envisaging for that document. However, I did say to him, quite clearly, that it would be, I thought, my judgment, it would probably not be necessary -- and I emphasised the probably because I made it clear to him that I was not ruling out the possibility that we might have to. I do not think there is any doubt that he understood that. Q. Was anything said at the second interview about the possibility of an appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee? A. I think it came up and I think we also referred to the ISC on that occasion, as well. Q. Was anything said about an approach to the BBC? A. Again, I think, although we did not discuss how it might be done, one of the things I said to Dr Kelly at that meeting was that the best way of clearing this up would be if the BBC would be prepared to confirm or deny -- I never expected them to tell us the other source if there was another source -- whether or not he was the source. My understanding was Dr Kelly would be quite happy to have that because he took the view, as he expresses in his letter and to the FAC, that he was not at least the prime source, which is also the view I took. Q. Was anything said about the Ministry of Defence confirming Dr Kelly's name if it was discovered from another source and put to the Ministry of Defence? A. No, it was not discussed explicitly, though I think, again, that Dr Kelly would have had no illusions that if we faced a credible approach from the press identifying Dr Kelly, that we would not be able to deny it. One of the things we did specifically refer to, I think it appears in Bryan Wells' manuscript note, right at the beginning, is indeed the Baldwin article of the Saturday, 5th July, which I pointed out to Kelly right at the start was -- I think I used the term "if stretched", fitted Kelly quite well. As we now know it did indeed refer to him. Q. At this stage, at the time of the second interview, did you ask for Dr Kelly's consent to his name being made public? A. No, I did not. Q. Why not? A. Because in the circumstances in which I was envisaging that the MoD might make it public, I do not believe -- I did not and I do not believe I required his consent. Q. Did Dr Kelly ever do anything to suggest to you that he considered that his consent would be required? A. No, he did not. On the contrary, I think that the fact that we discussed a statement which put in quite a lot of detail about, if you like, our source, Dr Kelly -- LORD HUTTON: Put in what, sorry? A. The statement that I did agree with Dr Kelly which did not include his name gave quite a lot of detail about him, not enough to identify him uniquely but it certainly would help people and Dr Kelly recognised that. LORD HUTTON: Why did you think that you would not need his consent for his name to be made public? A. In the circumstances I was envisaging, for example responding to a credible media claim from outside or because we had just been putting him forward for the Foreign Affairs Committee, there was no way I could not put it forward -- sorry, at least the MoD could not reveal the name, I think, and certainly no reason to give him a veto, if you like. If I can make the point, in a sense it is exactly the same position that I and MoD witnesses are in in relation to this Inquiry and the subject of this Inquiry, I would have had no veto on the MoD revealing my name in relation to the actions I took in the course of my duty. LORD HUTTON: Yes. MR LLOYD-JONES: To what extent was Dr Kelly in fact consulted about the publication of the press statement? A. He was very closely consulted about the statement that actually appeared. He was also consulted about the one I drafted on 7th July which was seen as an emergency statement, essentially something that if we had to respond to a revelation coming from elsewhere, if you like. Both those texts were, in different ways, cleared explicitly with him. The one we actually used, which contained a lot of similar material to the one we discussed on 7th July, was cleared with him by me over the telephone on the afternoon of 8th July. I rang him at, I believe the records show, 2 minutes to 4. He was driving and my memory is he said he would ring me back; and some time in the next half an hour -- I am afraid since he rang from his mobile I cannot tell you the exact time he did ring me back. At that point I read through, paragraph by paragraph, the statement that was ultimately released, got his explicit consent to it. I reported that to the Permanent Secretary -- LORD HUTTON: Did he suggest any amendments or make any comments? A. None whatsoever, my Lord. None whatsoever, my Lord. LORD HUTTON: Yes. A. I reported that to the Permanent Secretary's office; and I do not know exactly what steps they then took, but they, as it were, completed the process of agreeing that the statement should now be released. I was notified that, if you like, the button had been pressed; and I rang him back at, the records show, 5.10, I think, for a brief conversation where I told him not only that I passed back that he had cleared it, but the statement was now being released and, therefore, it could actually hit the news at any moment. I may have said, and I honestly cannot recall this, that I thought it was -- I cannot recall this for certain -- I remember thinking, and I do not know whether I said it to him, that it was unlikely to make the 6 o'clock news, which I think it did just, but would probably make the 7. MR LLOYD-JONES: My Lord I have one eye on the clock. I have a time limit of course. I have 5 to 10 minutes left. LORD HUTTON: Yes, of course. I do not want to rush you. MR LLOYD-JONES: Thank you very much. Mr Hatfield, did you at any time tell Dr Kelly he would be informed before his name was confirmed as the individual who had come forward? A. No I did not. Q. Did you give him any undertaking or assurance in relation to any such confirmation? A. Not in relation to his name because I was not in a position to do so. The only undertaking I gave him in this area was the undertaking which I was able to fulfil that if I could, I would give him advance warning of us putting out any statement, which is precisely what I was able to do, but I also made it clear to him that in some circumstances, especially if he was away on a course or away from home, even that might not be possible, which was of course why we agreed a contingency statement on the Monday afternoon. Q. Did Dr Kelly ever express to you a view that if his name was to become public then he should be referred to, initially, by some description and not immediately named; that it might be done in stages, so to speak? A. No he did not. I should say of course, since I was already suggesting that line to him, he might have been taking that for granted. Q. Did you ever mention that possibility to anybody else? A. No. Q. Did you ever tell Dr Kelly that his participation in the second meeting, the second interview, depended on his agreement? A. I did not, but it just did not arise that way because, as I have already explained, we simply discussed the idea of a follow-on meeting and made explicit arrangements to call him back from RAF Honnington, if that was necessary. So I believe I had his consent, but it was not approached in that manner. If I may say so, part of my problem with some of the questions is they do not really represent the situation as I saw it or, I think, Dr Kelly saw it. We were not talking, after the first disciplinary issue, in a formal way. We were just talking about the circumstances which I think we understood, and nobody was asking people's consent, because it was part of the whole situation. Q. There is one matter I should have asked you in relation to that early stage when the disciplinary issue was still at large, going back to the beginning of the first interview. At that stage, did it ever occur to you that you should offer legal assistance or welfare assistance? A. I did -- Q. Trade union assistance to Dr Kelly? A. I did make clear to Dr Kelly that if I even initiated the first stage of formal disciplinary procedures which would essentially be a fact-finding exercise, a formal one, he would be entitled to seek assistance from a trade union or to bring, if you like, another representative, a friend of court of his own. There were all sorts of other formal procedures which would be followed and he would get advice on those, if it became necessary. Q. But in the events which occurred, did you consider that there was any need to make any further offer in relation to that? A. In relation to those specific forms of assistance, the answer is: no, because disciplinary issues or proceedings were ruled out. I did, however, make clear to him, indeed it was provided, that he would get all the, if I can put it this way, in the unusual situation, all the usual forms of departmental support in relation to appearing before Select Committees, if he did so, and in dealing with the press insofar as it is possible to assist people in dealing with the press. Q. Did Dr Kelly ever request legal assistance or welfare assistance? A. Certainly not from me. LORD HUTTON: When did you tell him? At what interview did you tell him he would get departmental support? A. It came up on both the 4th and the 7th July. Much more clearly in the 7th July meeting because by then we were clearly envisaging the likelihood of at least one committee appearance. And I specifically told him during one or both of my two final telephone conversations with him about the statement that he should now seek support through his line manager, in particular, but also particularly from the press office in relation to any contact with the media or any approaches from the media; and that was, I believe, put in hand. MR LLOYD-JONES: Was the matter of Dr Kelly's pension ever raised by anybody at any time during your discussions with Dr Kelly or any meeting in Dr Kelly's absence? A. Never. Q. Would there have been any reason to raise the question of his pension rights? A. None whatsoever. Q. Were Dr Kelly's pension rights ever at risk? A. Never. Q. If, and I emphasise if, more serious matters had come to light than had been disclosed by Dr Kelly in his letter of 30th June and at the interviews, could his pension then have been at risk? A. In the realm of the real world the answer is "no". I think eight people have had their pension in some way adjusted in the course of the last 30 years. It can only be considered in the case of a major criminal conviction. These include, I think, manslaughter, a million pound embezzlement and somebody convicted of spying. Q. Did you have any reason to reassure Dr Kelly in relation to his pension? A. No, because in my mind under no possible interpretation, and that remains true to this day, could his pension have been put at risk. He never asked about it. It never occurred to me that a civil servant would think his pension could be put at risk in any of the circumstances that might be envisaged. Q. During this time that we are concerned with, from the time Dr Kelly came forwards onwards, was the subject of his security clearance ever raised? A. In the form you have just put the question the answer is "no". It was however effectively dismissed, very quickly, by my taking the view that on both Dr Kelly's own account and on Mr Gilligan's account, assuming that referred to Dr Kelly's discussion, there were no OSA issues, there was not even if you like a release of privilege information issue on the information available to me. Moreover, the fact that I encouraged him to go on his training and at a later stage we explicitly agreed that subject to the practicalities of sorting out the date, he would go to Iraq, confirmed very clearly that there was no security issue, no risk to his clearance at all -- LORD HUTTON: Do I understand the position, Mr Hatfield, that the question of security clearance was never expressed in any way at the interviews with Dr Kelly and that in your own mind you dismissed any issue as to security clearance once you decided that there was not any disciplinary issue? A. That is correct, my Lord; and it was not only in my own mind, I made that explicit to Dr Kelly. LORD HUTTON: I see. Well, it then was mentioned to him? A. Sorry, what was -- LORD HUTTON: It was mentioned expressly or it was made clear by implication by you saying he could go to Honnington and on to Iraq? A. I expressly told him by saying I did not see any security issues involved. Therefore, as it were, I ruled security out. I never suggested security was in any doubt but I wanted him to be quite clear, just in case he was worried, that I did not see any security issues at all. LORD HUTTON: I think just so that I can understand, I am sure it is clear to you and to people in the Ministry of Defence, but I understand security clearance to mean that he had permission or clearance to see secret documents. I understand that to mean security clearance -- A. Yes, my Lord. LORD HUTTON: -- as regards security issues. When you told him no security issues were involved, did you mean by that that as far as you could see, after your first interview, there is no issue of him revealing secret documents? Is that what is meant by security issues? A. I was going further than that. Not only had he not as it were breached security, he had not done anything, on either his account or Andrew Gilligan's account, if it was the same meeting, which suggested anything that might call into question his suitability to see secret documents. If I had concluded, for example, that although he had not revealed a classified document he had breached confidence in relation to security matters, I might have wanted to call into question his security clearance, simply because he might have seen -- I was making quite clear that there was no security issue at all in my mind. LORD HUTTON: By security issue you meant or included in that security clearance? A. Very much so. LORD HUTTON: You said that to him expressly? A. I did not use the word security clearance but he would have understood what I was saying to say that there was no risk to his security clearance on the basis of what I had just told him. LORD HUTTON: I am just trying to understand, and I appreciate it is probably impossible to express, but I am just trying to understand as fully as I can what words you actually said to him on this. A. I think the closest you will get is if you turn to my letter to him after the event of 9th July. LORD HUTTON: Yes. A. Which is as close as I could remember then were the exact words on this point. MR LLOYD-JONES: Would it assist if we put that letter on the screen? MoD/1/69. LORD HUTTON: Thank you very much. Yes. What paragraph? A. I am thinking particularly, here, of the paragraph -- at the end of paragraph 3: "I also concluded on the basis of your account that you had not divulged any classified or otherwise privileged information." The important point with that is it is not just about classified information. If you go to my original record, I made it very clear I did not think there was any OSA issues. LORD HUTTON: I still want to try to understand this a little more fully. Was the position that you said to Dr Kelly, at the end of the first stage of the first interview, that you were satisfied that no security issue arose and he would have taken from that that there was no threat to his security clearance? A. Correct, my Lord. LORD HUTTON: I see. Yes thank you. MR LLOYD-JONES: Mr Hatfield, if Dr Kelly's security clearance had been in jeopardy, would it have been possible for him to go to Iraq as contemplated? A. It might have been but we would have had to have taken a very specific decision to proceed with that in those circumstances. My judgment, and it might well have been my judgment because I am also responsible for the vetting agency, would have been if there was any significant question mark over his security clearance, in the circumstances we were talking about, it would not have been the right thing to do. MR LLOYD-JONES: Thank you very much Mr Hatfield. My Lord, I am most grateful. LORD HUTTON: Thank you very much. Mr Hatfield, we will continue with further examination tomorrow. Thank you. I will rise now and sit again at 10.30 tomorrow.

4.42pm, hearing adjourned until 10.30 am the following day