Pair found guilty of leaking Bush-Blair memo

A BRITISH civil servant and an MP’s aide were convicted yesterday of leaking a classified memo about a meeting between Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W Bush.

The leak was a breach of the Official Secrets Act.

David Keogh, a cipher expert who was convicted on two counts, had admitted passing on the memo about April 2004 talks in which Mr Bush purportedly referred to bombing Arab broadcaster al-Jazeera. Keogh was accused of passing the memo to his co-defendant, Leo O’Connor, 44, who in turn handed it to his boss, Tony Clarke, then an MP who voted against Britain’s decision to join the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Keogh hoped the document would find its way into the public domain and expose the US President as a “madman”. Keogh, 50, told London’s Central Criminal Court he felt strongly about the memo, which he had to relay to diplomats overseas using secure methods, and hoped it would come to wider attention.

“The main person in my mind was John Kerry, who at the time was American candidate for the US presidential election in 2004,” he had testified. He admitted holding “unfavourable” views on Mr Bush, but said he did not think publishing the document would hurt Britain’s security or international relations.

The Daily Mirror newspaper reported the memo showed Mr Blair arguing against Mr Bush’s suggestion of bombing al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar. The paper said its sources disagreed on whether the suggestion was serious.

The document, marked “secret-personal”, was intended to be restricted to senior officials. The memo’s contents are considered so sensitive that much of the trial was heard behind closed doors. Witnesses and counsel did not refer to the contents in open court.