Were they suicides, or something else?

by ROBERT MATTHEWS 

 
MORE than half a century after his death, one of Britain's greatest war heroes will today be honoured at the site of his greatest exploits, the former Allied code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes, in England

Dr Alan Turing was no gung-ho commando or Spitfire pilot. He was a Cambridge mathematician who masterminded the cracking of Nazi wartime codes. As such, he should by now have become a national hero known to all. But Turing become an embarrassment to his masters - who may well have been relieved when their 'problem' solved itself through his apparent suicide in 1954 at the age of just 41.

If this story sounds familiar, it should, for there are eerie parallels between the fate of Turing and Dr David Kelly, the biological warfare expert found dead near his Oxfordshire home in 2003.

Both were involved in secret work of vital importance to the state. After the war, Turing acted as a consultant to the Government Communications Headquarters, working on Soviet codes that ultimately revealed top Cold War spies. Kelly was also a consultant to the intelligence services, helping to assess the supposed threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Both men fell foul of their masters because of their clandestine meetings with 'inappropriate' persons. In Turing's case, they were gay lovers picked up for casual sex. Kelly's penchant was for technical briefings to journalists sceptical of the official line on Iraq.

Turing was stripped of his consultancy, banned from all secret work and put under constant surveillance. Kelly was cut adrift, then outed by the government and hauled before a Commons select committee to account for his actions in the full glare of the media.

With the icy hand of officialdom clamped around their mouths, both men cracked - Turing eating an apple dipped in cyanide, Kelly slashing his wrist. Yet to this day, mystery surrounds the official reports of their deaths. Neither was suicidal or left an explanatory note. Nor is it certain that their chosen means of suicide were even capable of killing them.

There is no need to look for hired assassins in the shadows. Even taken at face value, the official accounts of these tragic deaths shows that judicious use of pressure by those in authority can turn even the most rational of us into our own assassin.