By May 2003, Gilligan was long returned from Iraq. But the war, and the justifications for it, continued to be controversial policy issues in Britain. One of the key unanswered questions was whether Saddam Hussein had in fact possessed an arsenal of biological and chemical weapons, as the US and UK governments had alleged. To try to get answers, Gilligan arranged on Thursday, May 22 to meet with a senior UK weapons inspector, David Kelly. ^[21] They met in the Charing Cross Hotel, near Trafalgar Square and the Thames River. Both men understood that the meeting was off the record. That meant Gilligan could use the information, but not attribute it to Kelly. It was common practice for government officials to use this method to make public information they felt was important—but which was classified or otherwise restricted.

45 Minutes. Kelly told Gilligan that a September 2002 government report on Iraq’s military capabilities had contained information which depended on only a single source, who was most likely misinformed. He alleged that with such thin evidence, some members of the intelligence community had been loath to include that information in the report—known to the public as the “September dossier.” The disputed information, said Kelly, was that Iraq could deploy biological or chemical weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in a very short time—45 minutes. But government officials, stated Kelly, had insisted that the dossier include this information. When Gilligan asked him who in particular had pushed for this, Kelly responded: [Alastair] Campbell.

Gilligan did not have a notebook with him, so when he realized that Kelly was giving him newsworthy information, he took notes on his PDA (personal digital assistant). A PDA was clumsy to write on; the notes were not complete sentences but single words or phrases. When he got home, Gilligan transcribed the PDA notes onto his computer. “Transformed in the week before it was published, to make it sexier,” he wrote. And “Campbell.”

Gilligan spent the following week trying to verify what Kelly had told him: looking again at the September dossier; checking with other sources. The dossier had been produced by the intelligence community under the auspices of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). ^[22] It had prominently included the 45-minute claim. In his foreword to the dossier, Prime Minister Blair had chosen to highlight this information. Blair wrote: “The document discloses that [Saddam’s] military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them.” ^[23] As if to make sure this point was not missed, Blair in spoken remarks September 24 to the House of Commons repeated the 45-minute claim. ^[24] The implication was that the weapons could reach British troops on Cyprus—and British press headlines had certainly promoted that conclusion. The London Evening Standard proclaimed: “45 Minutes from Attack”; the Sun wrote “Brits 45 mins from doom.”

As for other sources, while no one else could substantiate the 45-minute claim, Gilligan did hear about general dissatisfaction within the intelligence community over government use of intelligence reports. Tellingly, a scandal had just broken about a different government intelligence report, published in February 2003, which came to be known as the “dodgy dossier.” The press had reported that the bulk of the dossier was copied, complete with spelling and grammar errors, from a PhD thesis by a student in California. Those changes which the government did make to the text all sharpened the language to make a better case for invading Iraq. ^[25] The embarrassed Blair government had admitted to a shoddy process for publishing the dossier.

“I looked back and saw the government had in fact quite clearly been doing what David Kelly accused it of doing, in respect to other documents,” says Gilligan. ^[26] “So I thought what Kelly was saying about the September one was plausible.” Moreover, Gilligan was inclined to believe Kelly because the arms inspector had, on previous occasions, provided him with information which proved reliable. By Wednesday, May 28, Gilligan felt he had verified the information as far as possible, and that it was time to broadcast the story.