Plagues

We’re all conversant with the device of a flashback by now. You’ve been to the movies even if you haven’t been daft enough to trip out on LSD. So let’s go back to Keitel’s memoirs, written at speed when he knew his days were numbered. I found myself returning again and again to that period – the closing stages of World War Two. A lot of the killing happened near the end. I thought of two friends, Ruaraidh and Aonghas, Roddy and Angus. I did go to visit Angus once, in the sheltered housing. But he’d been moved to that place on the outskirts, just back from Broad Bay. A suburb that used to be one cattle-grid out. I was warned he wouldn’t recognise anyone. He needed total care. Instead of going there to read to myself and to be able to say I’d done it, I kept going round to the library or downloading pdfs.

Hitler’s Field Marshal mentions the plague. Not by name and not in detail but he refers to a conference when the Führer was looking closely at a research programme into biological warfare. Keitel seemed to have found this way of prefixing his orders with a protective introductory phrase, when he was troubled by the suspicion of a moral scruple. ‘With extreme reluctance, the Führer has felt it necessary to…’ sort of thing. As a former civil servant of Her Majesty I recognise a technique which was known as ‘covering your arse’ in the trade.

Flash-forward again and the evidence is overwhelming. Saddam Hussein was using chemical warfare against the troublesome Kurdish minority. That would be his administration’s version of ‘special treatment’. The dates tell us that this was weel kent many years before he became an official tyrant. When an alliance between the USA and UK administrations gelled to the point of mutual support (and indeed admiration), this history seemed to gain a sudden topical relevance. The question of the presentation of evidence that weapons of mass destruction, held in Iraq, amounted to a significant threat to the rest of the world, is outwith the remit of this personal diary. For now.

Strange thing though, that Robin Cook, then Foreign Secretary, could see clearly enough to tender his resignation. Unlike Field Marshal Keitel, who felt that such an act would be dishonourable, at a time of national crisis. Instead, he remained in command and made his weak protestations.

Of course Anthrax Island will be in your own ken. Britain’s wartime experiments in germ warfare were filmed in that early technicolour that’s got its retro atmosphere. A special flock of sheep was taken to Gruinard and observed, as the anthrax bombs were delivered. You can see the beasts fall and the carcasses being burned. So it was a successful experiment.

You can also see an attempt to tidy up. I think researchers were surprised that the spores in the soil were so persistent. Warning signs were kept in place until near the end of the twentieth century. There was a prohibition on landing on the island. It’s remote enough anyway, of course. Yes, from London. It’s under one mile from the nearest point on the west coast of Scotland.

Protesters placed containers with soil from Gruinard in prominent places, in the 1980s. Ministry of Defence personnel were sent to the island with protective clothing and enough formaldehyde to preserve shoals and shoals of sharks.

After further tests, the island was provisionally announced as safe. The Coastguard was informed that restrictions would be lifted. Next time a lobster-boat had machinery failure and it looked like the crew would drift on to Gruinard, I had no official reason, as a Coastguard Officer, to inform the MOD. But I thought I would anyway. This had been the procedure all my years in the Service. There was a bit of a flurry. ‘I thought you guys said it was safe,’ I said on the phone.

‘Yes, safe for sheep,’ a voice said.

But tests for safety to humans were incomplete. Unfortunately, these guys got their engine going again, otherwise the MOD might have got their test results, free of charge. Which is exactly what happened in a more recent British experiment in chemical warfare.

Now I’m taking it you’re with me so far. No challenges on the story of Gruinard Island? But we’re going to leave World War Two history behind and move straight into the Cold War – well I should say we’ll move back in there because we’ve had an encounter or two already. From Melbost to Rügen.

It’s 1952. The pertinent department wishes to conduct an experiment into the feasibility of spreading bubonic plague to an unspecified enemy. But this is clearly going to be a sensitive issue so a remote location is required. As Gruinard was still a prohibited area, due to continuing contamination, it was almost certainly considered. But from a scientific point of view, you clearly need to limit the factors under scrutiny to one at a time. The continuance of anthrax spores could complicate results. It could also pose some nuisance to personnel involved in the new experiment.

So caged monkeys and guinea pigs were set afloat on rafts in Broad Bay. (You may choose which is nearest to the human species, but please choose carefully and be willing to reconsider when you hear the full story.) Yes, that’s the same Bay, to the north of the Eye Peninsula and touching on Stornoway Airport. It was a very productive haddock fishery at the time. Smoke floats were used as a means of letting loose the airborne plague so it would contaminate the rafts.

However, a Fleetwood-registered trawler ignored the warnings that special operations were being conducted in the area and steamed through the whole experiment. In one sense this was disappointing but in another way it was a blessing. Clandestine means were used to keep the vessel and its crew under surveillance. Her radio traffic was closely monitored. Luckily the crew went ashore, home in England, and mixed in general human society before they knew they were at risk of carrying the plague. This was the ideal situation to monitor the effectiveness of the airborne method of disseminating this form of organic warfare.

The crew fared very differently to the flock of sheep on Gruinard. There was no report of ill effects beyond the normal hangovers you might expect from the first night ashore, to wind-down, after a long voyage to the Hebrides. You’ll have to make up your own mind about how far to trust your unreliable narrator, a figure common to the disciplines of both literature and history. Would I tell you any lies?

Anyway, it’s not as simple as that. There’s the matter of presentation. Let’s move forward from the Cold War. Let’s look at Iraq 2. Not the Kuwait reason for attacking a tyrant who was himself attacking that model of democracy. But the time when a logical case had to be made out for ‘finishing the job’ in response to terrible events in the city of New York. But the UK’s involvement could not simply be seen as the inevitable result of a strategic alliance (cf causes of the First World War).

I don’t know why HM Government could not have simply raised the issue of the treatment of the Kurdish minority. Maybe they were a bit too distant. Apart from the contrast in habitat, maybe they were in fact perceived to be a little too close to the Inuit savages dismissed by Charles Dickens as that bit less than equal.

Enormous pressure was brought to bear on certain individuals who had the duty to collate and present objective information on the likelihood of the Iraqi regime’s possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The information was not sufficient unto the needs of certain politicians. They required a proportion of bloody presentation with their pound of flesh. Leverage is applied by different methods. Different individuals have different capacities for resistance. Dr Kelly was the scientific adviser and therefore the key player. He was also a member of a religion which I happen to know holds human life sacred, in a similar way to Roman Catholics. But a member of the Bahá’í Faith appears to have taken his own life, under the enormous forces of conflicting duties, when instructed to put a bit more effort into the dramatic presentation of limited facts.