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Andrew Gilligan, Reporter for the BBC LORD HUTTON

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Andrew Gilligan, Reporter for the BBC LORD HUTTON Tuesday August 12 2003, 10.30 am: Andrew Gilligan, Reporter for the BBC LORD HUTTON: Good morning ladies and gentlemen. I have received a message from the members of the press that to aid them in accurate reporting they would like to see copies of the documents which are presented to the Inquiry each day. I fully understand the reasons for this request and I wish to give a little more consideration to just the mechanics of doing that and I will propose to say something about that when we sit again after the luncheon adjournment. I am certainly very well aware of the interests of the press and I will try to facilitate them just as much as I possibly can. Yes Mr Dingemans. MR DINGEMANS: My Lord, Mr Gilligan please. MR ANDREW GILLIGAN (called) Examined by MR DINGEMANS Q. Can you tell his Lordship your full name. A. Yes, it is Andrew Paul Gilligan. Q. What is your occupation? A. I am a journalist. Q. And who do you work for? A. The BBC. Q. In what capacity? A. I am the defence and diplomatic correspondent of the Today Programme on Radio 4. Q. How long have you been employed in that capacity? A. Just under four years now. Q. What did you do before that? A. I was the defence correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph. Q. How long were you working there? A. In that particular job about four years and then an earlier year or so on the foreign desk. Q. That is your journalistic experience, the Daily Telegraph and Today? A. The Sunday Telegraph. Q. Sorry, the Sunday Telegraph. A. I have also freelanced for a number of Fleet Street publications, local newspapers, the Cambridge Evening News, that kind of thing. Q. You met Dr Kelly on a number of occasions? A. Yes. Q. Can you tell us when you first met Dr Kelly? A. Yes, it was in the early months of 2001. I cannot tell you exactly when because I have lost my appointments diary for that year but it was probably in January or February. I was going to Iraq and I wanted to speak to him to discuss, you know, Iraqi related issues with him. Q. How had you come on his name? A. He had been initially recommended to me by a colleague at the BBC, and I had then found his details in fact in our central contacts database. There is a computer database in the BBC system with a variety of contacts in a number of fields. Dr Kelly has been on that since 1988 and all his numbers are in there. His description, he was described as an MoD expert that journalists could call on. Q. Are you talking about the document BBC/7/33? A. That is the one, yes. Q. And that lists his London, New York and Porton Down telephone numbers. A. And his home number and indeed his address. Q. Did you carry out any further research before you met Dr Kelly? A. Yes, I did. I looked him up in a cuttings database called Neon which we have at the BBC. I found his name had been mentioned several times. I looked him up in some of the standard reference works on the subject. In a book called Plague Wars for instance by Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg I found quite a full description of him which described him as the senior adviser to the MoD on biological defence and one of the world's leading experts in biological weapons, and described his track record in some detail, which made me actually very interested indeed in his potential as a contact. Q. Is that a reference to BBC/7/45? A. Yes, that is right. There is a sort of potted biography of him and it starts by saying: "If David Kelly were a tax inspector he would recoup Britain's entire national debt." Q. That is within the book Plague Wars written by Tom Mangold? A. Yes, it is, yes. Q. Did you make any notes of your first meeting with Dr Kelly? A. Yes, I did. Q. Can we look at BBC/7/36? Is this a transcript of those notes? A. Yes, it is. Yes. Q. I think you have supplied the manuscript as well. What was the nature of your discussion with him on that occasion? A. It was an introductory talk really. I wanted to get to know him. I wanted to find out the extent of his expertise. I was quite keen to glean any information he could give to me from his knowledge about Iraq since I was going to travel there in the future. It was a kind of first meeting a journalist has with a contact. You just want to kind of establish a relationship. I was particularly interested in the issue of smuggling of components for weapons of mass destruction, because that was something I covered. Q. Where did that meeting take place? A. I am pretty sure it was in the Charing Cross Hotel. I am pretty sure all my meetings with him were. I certainly know the last two were. Q. Did you make a report of any meeting -- of anything he had said at that meeting? A. Did it lead to a story on the programme? Q. Yes. A. Not directly. It did provide information, some quite useful information actually about smuggling and some further contacts and some quite useful background. But there was no specific story involved. It just helped me to flesh out a project I was already doing. Q. How long did the meeting that took place last? A. I am not quite sure but about maybe three quarters of an hour or thereabouts. It is difficult to remember at this juncture. Q. And did you eat together or drink together? A. We had a drink, yes. I cannot remember exactly what we had. Q. What was his manner to you? A. He was really quite open and helpful and, you know, often with officials they are rather cautious. Dr Kelly struck me really as a sort of -- he wanted to share his knowledge. In a funny way he was a sort of teacher almost. He wanted to share what he knew about the subject and he was interested in people who were interested in it, and he was clearly very well informed. I felt very glad to have begun a relationship with him. I think he was pretty helpful. Q. Did he say whether or not you could report his remarks at that meeting? A. I had said it was off the record. I said it was unattributable because that is the way -- Q. Is there a difference between off the record and unattributable? A. Well, unattributable in strict terms means you can use the words but not attribute them to a particular individual. The terms are to some extent loose and interchangeable. Q. Right. Off the record does not mean you cannot use it at all and unattributable means you can use it but not attribute it; is that a distinction? A. There is no set law of journalistic convention for this. Generally a phrase somebody might use, or a journalist might use to another person if they do not wish them to be reported in any way, their views to be reported in any way, would be deep background or background or something like that. Off the record means that you can report it but not attribute it to that person. Q. But in any event you did not report anything that had occurred that time, that was just a meeting? A. No, I did not. No. Q. When was your next meeting with Dr Kelly? A. It was on the 11th April 2002. Q. And if we look at BBC/7/49, is that your diary entry for that date? A. That is right. It has been redacted. There are some other entries on those days and other days that are not in there, but that is my entry for my meeting with David. Q. I was going to say it seemed a remarkably empty diary but you have taken out the other references? A. Yes. Q. If we turn to BBC/7/53, is this the note you made of your meeting with him? A. Yes, it is. Yes. Sorry, no, that is a transcript of the handwritten note I made. Q. Right. A. There are a couple of mistakes in this transcript actually. Q. Perhaps if there are any material ones you can point them out when we go through that. Who set up this meeting? A. I did. I always initiated our meetings. Q. You initiated all the meetings with Dr Kelly? A. Yes. I would ring him and say, "Can we meet?" Q. What was the reason for this meeting? A. It was really a general sort of wrap up. The issue of Iraq was moving up the agenda a little. Most of 2001 or the latter half of 2001 had been spent on 9/11 and Afghanistan, and a good deal of the first part of 2002, but then in the sort of spring and summer we began to get clearer signals that Iraq was moving up the agenda of both us and the US Government. A dossier had been promised for publication in the spring, for instance, detailing Iraq's WMD threat, so it was a general meeting to talk about that because I regarded him as one of my main expert contacts on Iraq.
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