| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Jei" |
| Date: |
30 Jan 2004 01:51:55 PM |
| Object: |
Dr Kelly's Confidante Rejects Suicide Claim |
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jan2004/kell-j30.shtml
Britain: More questions on Dr Kelly's death as a confidante rejects suicide
claim
By Chris Marsden
30 January 2004
The January 25 Mail on Sunday ran an interview with Mai Pederson, a United
States Air Force translator who worked alongside Dr David Kelly in Iraq. In
it she reiterated her earlier claim that the government scientist had
received death threats because of his work in Iraq and her surprise that he
had died apparently as a result of taking 20 painkillers before slashing his
wrist. Pederson reported that Kelly had an aversion to swallowing tablets
and had spoken to her shortly before his death of his plans for the future.
Kelly was a United Nations weapons inspector who was the source of the BBC
report that Britain's Labour government had "sexed-up" its intelligence
dossiers to justify a pre-emptive US-led attack on Iraq. He was found dead
in remote woods near his home on July 18, after being named by the
government as a whistleblower and being forced to give evidence to two
parliamentary inquiries.
Evidence given to the judicial inquiry under Lord Hutton into Kelly's death
generally accepted that Kelly had committed suicide. But Pederson was never
called to give evidence to the Hutton Inquiry and has never accepted that
Kelly killed himself.
The Mail's report makes clear that it is hard to conceive of an innocent
explanation for the failure to call Pederson, given the closeness of her
relationship with Kelly and the controversy that her views would have
fuelled. A right-wing newspaper that is politically hostile to Prime
Minister Tony Blair and his government, the Mail has been almost alone
amongst the generally pro-Blair mainstream media in pursuing the illusive
Ms. Pederson.
Pederson was questioned by Thames Valley Police after Kelly's death, but was
one of five witnesses who refused to allow their statements to be passed on
to Lord Hutton. She was mentioned once at the inquiry on September 1 last
year when Mrs Janice Kelly testified that she was "quite influential" in
converting her husband to the Baha'i faith and "later became a family
friend".
On the morning that Janice Kelly gave evidence, later editions of the
pro-Blair Times newspaper of Rupert Murdoch ran a report noting Mai Pederson
's importance in the life of Dr Kelly. The Mail noted shortly after that the
Times' story was printed only in a few thousand copies and then dropped.
Was Pederson a spy?
Two issues can possibly account for Pederson's disappearance. The first is
the potential embarrassment caused by what she had to say. In her initial
statement to the police she said Dr Kelly had told her he would "never"
commit suicide and that he feared he would be found "dead in the woods"
because of the nature of his work, of which she says more in her interview
with the Mail.
But just as significant may be her own biography. To the extent that
Pederson's existence has even been acknowledged, she has been described
variously as a "spiritual adviser" to Kelly, a translator for the US Air
Force and Janice Kelly's "family friend". But there is a mass of evidence
suggesting that Mai Pederson was and remains a US spy and that her
relationship to Kelly was more intimate than many would like to acknowledge.
Several articles in the Mail and elsewhere piece together some of Pederson's
background. She was born Mai al-Sadat in Kuwait, but became a US citizen and
has been married twice. Her fluency in Arabic, German and French is said to
have impressed her employers at the Pentagon and a US Defence Department
insider states, "She was given a top secret clearance, and one of her first
jobs was translating military documents.... Subsequently, she became a
translator and 'tour guide' escorting other undercover operatives on
assignments in the Middle East."
She struck up a close friendship with Dr Kelly when they were both serving
with a UN weapons inspection team in Iraq in 1998 in her role as an Arabic
inspection USAF sergeant. She converted him to the Baha'i faith in 1999.
Pederson's first husband is Cameron DeHart, a former US Special Forces
combat controller. Her second ex-husband, US Airforce Sergeant James
Pederson, has told friends that she was a 'spook' trained to cultivate
anyone who might be able to help her in her intelligence work.
He is on record as explaining that he was not surprised that she became a
friend of David Kelly. "Part of her military training was to cultivate
anyone who might be able to help her in her intelligence work.
"It may well have been why she zeroed in on Dr Kelly. She undoubtedly viewed
him as a potential intelligence source. The two things that obsessed her
were the military and the Baha'i faith."
James Pederson is reported as telling friends that his ex wife "has always
been a spook of one kind of or another.... The marriage never stood much of
a chance from the start. Mai was always going away for months at a time. She
was proficient with a gun and in basic unarmed combat and worked undercover
for long periods called TDA for Temporary Duty Attachments-in Egypt and I
believe Iran. She was a very complex character."
After the couple separated Mai Pederson became a language instructor at the
Defense Language Institute, a spy school the US Air Force runs in Monterey,
California. She also appears to have worked at the Pentagon's internal staff
directory.
Kelly, Britain's top weapons inspector, would have been a prime target for a
US operative to cultivate-as the Bush administration was anxious to ensure
that UN reports did not counteract its propaganda on Iraq's supposed
possession of weapons of mass destruction and to discredit them if they did.
Not long after they struck up a relationship Kelly began to appear at Baha'i
meetings in Monterey, accompanied by Pederson.
When it appeared that she would be called to give evidence to Hutton the
Mail reported, "Pederson appeared to be in hiding, with US officials at the
Maxwell Gunter US Air Force base in Alabama, where Sgt Pederson was now
stationed, refusing to comment on the inquiry."
The closeness of their relationship and Pederson's intelligence connections
may account for the fact that she was amongst the very first to become aware
of Kelly's death. Marilyn Von Berg, a Monterey resident who was secretary of
the area's Baha'i assembly when Kelly visited the area, said that she had
been contacted by Pederson: "She phoned us and said he had been found,'
insisting that Von Berg and her other friends "shouldn't believe what we
would be reading in the newspapers."
Suicide "doesn't make any sense"
Pederson's interview with the Mail on Sunday raises many questions that
throw doubt on the official explanation of his death as resulting from
suicide. And it also leaves just as many questions unanswered.
She tells the Mail, "I told the police that the fact that he was found dead
in the woods was not surprising. The fact that they said he committed
suicide was. I am a logically-minded person and it doesn't make any sense to
me."
Dr Kelly had told her how his mother had committed suicide: "There is
research to show that suicide runs in families and I asked him if he would
ever do that and he said, 'Good God no, I couldn't imagine ever doing that
.... I would never do it."
She added, "I also told the police about the time he said he had a headache.
I suggested he take Tylenol. He said he had a problem swallowing pills. It
seems a bit strange that someone who can't take one pill for a splitting
headache would be able to take 20."
Pederson also said that during his phone calls at the height of the
controversy over the report on the "sexed up" intelligence dossier, "He didn
't sound depressed. He sounded totally normal."
She also explained again how Kelly's "job was dangerous. He knew it could
cost him his life."
Pederson's evidence concealed at Hutton inquiry
Pederson makes clear how extraordinary it was that she never gave evidence
to the Hutton inquiry. At the end of August last year, two British
detectives had flown to interview her in Montgomery, Alabama because of the
importance attached to what she had to say. And according to her Washington
DC lawyer, Mark Zaid, her refusal to testify was due to the refusal of the
Hutton inquiry to protect her from public scrutiny-as it had British
security personnel:
"They wanted her to testify via video link. I asked them to block her image
and voice because as a military person it was necessary for her safety and
security. They had done it for MI5 or MI6 operatives but they said that they
would be unable to do that for Mai because as a matter of policy there was a
need to be open."
Pederson denied speculation that she had been romantically involved with
Kelly and described her relationship with the 59-year-old married father of
three as more like "brother and sister". The Mail notes, however, that in
publicly available records Kelly's name was listed at three of her known
addresses including her bungalow near Washington DC. The only official
explanation offered for this is that Kelly "used one of her addresses to
obtain credit."
It is clear that Kelly's employers within the Ministry of Defence (MoD)
would not have been happy with his relationship with Pederson and would
consider it a potentially serious breech of security, even if he were only
the naive weapons inspector and civil servant he was portrayed as during the
Hutton Inquiry. But the fact is that Kelly was a spy, who occupied a
position at the very heart of the propaganda operation mounted by the
security forces and the Blair government.
Kelly may have come to endorse certain criticisms within the security
services of the weakest and least substantiated elements of the government's
September 2002 security dossier-particularly the claim that Saddam Hussein
could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. But a revealing
article in the January 25 Sunday Times by Nicholas Rufford, shows just how
high a flyer Kelly was before his fall from grace.
In his article, "Spy, boffin, disgruntled civil servant: this was the David
Kelly I knew," Rufford notes:
"Sometimes he was a consultant to the UN, sometimes a government scientist,
sometimes an oracle on germ weapons to trusted journalists, sometimes an
undercover man for the intelligence services.
"Technically, he was a Ministry of Defence (MoD) official. He worked as
scientific adviser to the arms control directorate. But for many years he
was also on loan to Unscom, the UN Special Commission on Iraq.
"When he went to Iraq, it was under the control of the Foreign Office. He
worked closely with British intelligence, both the defence intelligence
staff (DIS) and MI6."
After he became a weapons inspector in Iraq in 1994, "In London, Kelly
became a key figure in an MoD unit called Operation Rockingham. Set up by
John Morrison, deputy head of the DIS, its aim was to gather intelligence on
Iraq from a multitude of sources and try to make sense of it. Sitting at the
centre of a complex web of British and US intelligence organisations, the
Rockingham cell became pivotal in the efforts to disarm Iraq.
"It guided inspection teams in Iraq to sites suspected of being used to hide
weapons. It also advised the joint intelligence committee (JIC) that, in
turn, reported to ministers."
Rufford cites the damaging criticisms of the Rockingham cell and of Kelly
made by Scott Ritter, a former UN inspector who liaised with the cell.
Essentially he asserts that its members wrote reports for the UN Security
Council and were able to influence decisions on whether sanctions against
Iraq continued. To this end, "Intelligence was selected or ignored depending
on whether it supported the foreign policy of Britain and America, says
Ritter, and Kelly was a key figure in that process."
Ritter states, "Kelly became Rockingham's go-to person for translating the
data that came out of Unscom into concise reporting.... Kelly had a vested
interest in protecting his image, which centred around his exposure of an
Iraqi bio-weapons programme that had to continue to exist for him to
continue to hold centre stage."
Kelly's role as a spy and what Ritter alleges were efforts to exaggerate the
threat from Iraq do not contradict the fact that he later fell into a
conflict with his employers and the government. Pederson notes, for example,
that he was passed over by the UN as head of the bio-weapons investigation
in Iraq in favour of Richard Spertzel, a US biologist. And in 1998, he was
kicked out of Iraq and found himself officially occupying a much more junior
position within the MoD fearing for his pension and facing public
embarrassment as a result of the weakness of the security material on Iraq
on which his own reputation rested.
Certain things can be said as a result of the revelations surrounding Mai
Pederson and her relationship with Dr Kelly.
The Hutton Inquiry was given the narrow remit of investigating the
circumstances surrounding Kelly's death in order to protect the government
from broader and more embarrassing questions as to the lies employed in
order to drag Britain into an illegal war of aggression against Iraq. But
even if this remit is accepted, the investigation conducted into Kelly's
demise was inadequate, acutely sensitive to the danger of revealing the
extent of official intrigues against Iraq and Kelly's role in them-and
heavily slanted in favour of arriving at a verdict of suicide.
See Also:
Britain's Hutton Inquiry: Still no account of how Dr. Kelly died
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/aug2003/kell-a29.shtml
[29 August 2003]
Britain: Was whistleblower Kelly's death suicide?
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jul2003/suic-j25.shtml
[25 July 2003]
.
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
