Kay and Kelly, connecting the dots?
On Thursday, Juan Cole had a really interesting post that highlighted an aspect of the David Kelly affair in the U.K. that I had earlier been too dainty to write about in public.
Namely, what seems to have been the late Dr. Kelly's long-time affair with Mai Pederson, an Egyptian-American, a Staff Sergeant in the US Air Force who was assigned to Kelly as his interpreter when he was the chief bio-weapons inspector for UNSCOM in Iraq.
I've been wondering two things:
(1) Are there dots that need to be connected between the David Kelly affair in London and some of the recent words of David Kay in the U.S.?
What Kay was saying was that, in his estimation, one of the reasons the CIA had become so flabby and ineffective--my words, not his-- in its gathering of decent, fresh intel on Iraq by the late 1990s was that earlier in the decade it had become easily addicted to all the pickings it got from UNSCOM.
We all know from Scott Ritter's work and other sources that UNSCOM had been deeply penetrated by the CIA. But was Mai Pederson perhaps part of that operation? Who knows?
(2) It seems that a lot of people in public life and the media world had known about Kelly's relationship with Pederson, whom I have seen described in print somewhere as "a flirty divorcee". (That's a sort of code-word for a "loose woman", and it is probably a terrible libel against her. But many journos use it to tell you, nudge-nudge, that the two people in question have "that" kind of a relationship...)
So here's my second question...
Given that a lot of people in public life in the U.S. did apparently know about this long-time relationship-- which had involved Kelly and Pedersen getting so close that in 1999 it was Pederson, a 20-plus-year adherent of the Baha'i faith, who inducted Kelly into her hometown Baha'i congregation in Monterey, California-- it seems clear that a threat of public exposure in Britain as a controversial public figure could have been seen as particularly upsetting for the still-married Dr. K.
Who knows if his wife, the long-suffering Janice Kelly, knew about his longterm thing with Pederson-- or just thought that those lengthy trips to California and other points in the US were all about "hush-hush weapons-inspecting tasks"? Anyway, whether she didn't know, or sort of half-knew, wouldn't it have been a terrible prospect for him to suddenly have hordes of British investigative journalists crawling all over many aspects of his transatlantic life and revealing them to their readers?
Enough, one might think, to help drive a man to thoughts of suicide.
I imagine his bosses and handlers at the MoD must have known about the affair. If they did, then their decision to "out" his role in the Gilligan case to the press in the cynical way in which they did--and as we now know, with almost no advance warning--looks particularly manipulative and brutal. (Or perhaps, along the way, they might even have engaged in a little bit of blackmail on the issue?)
I remember reading Janice Kelly's painful, painful testimony at the Hutton Inquiry about her last few days with a live husband... He knew the press was about to descend on him in hordes. He and she decided to flee from their Oxfordshire home. They drove to Cornwall, where she tried to "distract" him by taking him to some tourist places and special gardens. According to her testimony he didn't seem easily distractible.
I wonder if during that sad little trip he ever summoned up courage to tell her just why the already mounting tsunami of intense press scrutiny might have been so tortuous for him?
So far as I can tell, the Hutton Inquiry itself was also too dainty to bring up the matter of Dr. K's relationship with Pederson in public. Gosh, how miserable it would be to add yet further to the Widow Kelly's woes...
Sgt. Pederson did, interestingly, make a statement to the Inquiry. However, according to this story in the London Times yesterday, she was one of "at least five" witnesses who refused to let their statements "be seen"--I believe they must mean, "be revealed"--by the Inquiry.
The Times story describes Pederson only as, "the American linguist who introduced Dr Kelly to the Baha'i faith and was a close friend."
It does, however, add that,
- Ms Pederson told a Sunday newspaper last week that she believed that Dr Kelly was murdered, but Lord Hutton was never told. She said: 'His job was dangerous. He knew it could cost him his life. He got death threats.'
I really don't mean to be callous there. I'm sure his suicide was just frightful for her to deal with, as also for the widow Janice and all the rest of his family. Certainly, if suicide it was--as Lord Hutton has concluded, though the Oxfordshire Coroner has yet to confirm--then there are plenty of people who should be thinking long and hard about what they might have done differently...
With the MoD people chief among them.