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| Dr David Kelly, MI6 Officer? |
| Dr David Kelly was a highly proficient microbiologist, he was a paid employee of the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office. For decades working with all the top security and intelligence agencies in Britain. Consulting the many different departments of the Ministry of Defence, Security Services MI5 and Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). He was last located at room 2/35 in the Ministry of Defence Proliferation and Arms Control Secretariat in London. Work closely linked with MI6. Dr Kelly knew about types and strains of microorganisms, numbers of shells and aerial bombs filled with botulinum toxin. He knew the latest figures for the production of bio-weapons material in China, the gallons of growth material in Syria, Pakistan�and which countries had sold the material. He had travelled to Iraq 37 times as a member of the United Nations Special Commission (Unscom) tasked with tracking down and destroying Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological and ballistics weapons programmes. Reporting back to the intelligence services of both the UK and US. In those visits, Dr Kelly built up a reputation for his thoroughness and patience, unfazed by the often aggressive attitude of Iraqi officials, waiting for them to calm down before proceeding with his questioning. Within Unscom and the intelligence community, Dr Kelly became known as a safe pair of hands. This confidence in him led to one of Unscom's biggest breakthroughs. In January 1995, at the home of a Canadian colleague in New York, he met an Israeli military intelligence officer who disclosed that British and German companies had exported 32 tons of bacteria growth medium to Iraq. Following that trail led to important discoveries of hidden biological programmes. Kelly played a key part in helping the FBI try and trace the origins of the Ames-strain of anthrax�the rod-shaped, spore-forming bacterium, which turned up in letters across America mailed anonymously in the wake of 9-11, causing widespread panic. The same confidence in his ability led to Dr Kelly being asked by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) to debrief a Russian defector, Vladimir Pasechinik in 1989. Under Dr Kelly's questioning, Mr Pasechinik, director of the Institute for Ultrapure Biological Preparations in Leningrad, disclosed the full extent of Russia's biological programme. Later Dr Kelly was part of an international team that inspected the Vektor biological plant near Novosibrsk in Siberia in January 1991. It discovered that the Russians were working on a weaponised smallpox programme. His fellow team members recall how Dr Kelly was the only one who picked up a strand during a conversation with a researcher and gradually teased out details of the programme. With the permission of MI6 he had been the only outsider allowed by the CIA to question a top Chinese defector, Col. Xu Junping, head of the People�s Liberation Army Foreign Affairs Office, about China�s bio-warfare program. |