Secrecy and the Media

The Official History of the United Kingdom's D-Notice System

Nicholas John Wilkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781134052530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Secrecy and the Media is the first book to examine the development of the D-Notice system, which regulates the UK media's publication of British national security secrets. It is based on official documents, many of which have not previously been available to a general audience, as well as on media sources.

From Victorian times, British governments have consistently seen the need, in the public interest, to prevent the media publishing secret information which would endanger national security. The UK media have meanwhile continuously resisted official attempts to impose any form of censorship, arguing that a free press is in the public interest. Both sides have normally seen the pitfalls of attempting to resolve this sometimes acrimonious conflict of interests by litigation, and have together evolved a system of editorial self-regulation, assisted by day-to-day independent expert advice, known colloquially as the D-Notice System.

The book traces the development of this system from nineteenth-century colonial campaigns, through two world wars, to modern operations and counter-terrorism in the post-Cold War era, up to the beginning of the Labour government in 1997. Examples are drawn from media, political and official sources (some not yet open), and cover not only defence issues (including Special Forces), but also the activities of the secret intelligence services MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. These cases relate principally to the UK, but also to American and other allies' interests.

The story of how this sometimes controversial institution now operates in the modern world will be essential reading for those in the media and government departments, and for academics and students in the fields of security, defence and intelligence, as well as being an accessible exposé for the general reader.

Nicholas Wilkinson served in the Royal Navy 1959-98, and from 1999 to 2004 he ran the independent Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee. He was a Press Complaints Commissioner from 2005 to 2008, and is a Cabinet Office Historian.

Section 1
Pre-Formation

The Long Debate, 1880s–1912

It is wise to disclose what cannot be concealed.

JF Schiller, Poet and Dramatist (1759–1805)

1
Victorian National Security and Press Interaction

This is the story of over a century of wrangling between on the one hand politicians and officials, and on the other all forms of the Media. It is sometimes about great principles, more often about deadly detail. The Media have commonly felt under threat from slings and arrows of outrageous government; Governments from those of outrageous reporting. The D-Notice System was not created suddenly, in reaction to some major historical event, nor to meet some new public demand. It evolved slowly, in response to a confluence of trends in the late nineteenth and early twentieth Centuries. These trends included changes in the pattern of rivalry between the major European powers, developments in technologies (particularly those of communications and of warfare), sociological changes within the United Kingdom, the increasing complexity and organisation of British institutions (including the Press), the gradual weakening of Britain’s economic strength relative to that of other countries, and decreasing self-confidence in the country’s predominance as the world’s most powerful nation.

The D-Notice System was not the idea of one individual or of one group. It emerged amorphously, across three decades of increasing concern about Army and Navy operations being compromised by reports in the British (and sometimes foreign) Press, in ways which gave useful intelligence to the enemy of the day. Each time there was a war crisis, governmental minds were exercised by how to censor the Press. But, each time, such thoughts provoked a combination of Press and Parliamentary resistance and of consequent governmental nervousness, in particular about driving anything through which smacked of the erosion of the liberty of Britons. No censorship legislation was therefore introduced before that particular crisis passed. There was, however, de facto censorship in theatres of operations themselves, and there was a limited Official Secrets Act. The institutions directly concerned (including the Press) felt, in their different ways, that how to avoid the publication of matters which would endanger security was a lingering problem, to which no satisfactory solution had been found.

The following chapters trace the slow evolution, from the 1880s onwards, towards the adversarial system of assisted self-regulation eventually agreed, in lieu of the imposition of censorship legislation. The general security and press contexts cover some contemporary parliamentary action, but it is not for this History to detail all the tortuous development of successive Official Secrets (and other restrictive) Acts; while relevant background to the operation of the D-Notice System, they do not directly dictate its modus operandi. This section focuses on internal official discussion, press reaction and interaction, and the lead-up to the establishment of the first joint Committee in 1912.

The Security Context

Those involved with national security have long been vividly conscious of the importance of the Press, whether for perceived benefit to the public weal or for personal enhancement. After the 1797 Battle of St Vincent, the future Vice Admiral Viscount Nelson took care to ensure that his part became known to the Press, by privately sending home information additional to that in his Commander-in-Chief’s official dispatch. After his death in 1805, the Government needed a British superhero for the public, and some good news to balance Napoleon’s continued conquests elsewhere in Europe; it ensured therefore not only that Nelson’s funeral in 1806 was a State occasion, but also that it received lavish coverage in the Press; the first use of illustration in The Times was of the funeral. From the 1870s to the 1890s, the four times Prime Minister William Gladstone assiduously used the Press Association to further his political publicity; he conveyed in his own coach his favourite journalist, the 20-stone Walter Hepburn (known by all as ‘Mr Gladstone’s Fat Reporter’).¹

The War Office subscribed to the major newspapers, and advertised in them.² At the 1895 Newspaper Society Annual Dinner, General Wood³ talked more fondly than he privately thought about the many newspapermen he knew from campaigns. At the same event the following year Captain Beresford⁴ was not shy about publicly thanking the Press for their support of his campaign, when an MP in the 1880s, in persuading the Treasury to agree to ‘£21M for the defences’, and he used his after-dinner speech to push for an increase in naval manpower.⁵ Beresford’s more innovative naval rival, Admiral Fisher⁶ courted the Press assiduously in his long campaigns to gain support for Naval reforms. Field Marshal Roberts⁷, commenting on the pros and cons of ‘telegraphic war reporting’, acknowledged the benefits of articles on the ‘glorious record of heroism and willing sacrifice’.⁸ For the politico-military Establishment, such uses were positive aspects of the Press. Furthermore, until the mid-nineteenth century, news from distant parts travelled slowly, and, where warfare was concerned, governments and naval and military commanders normally had the advantage of faster communication to London than did the Press, and therefore largely of controlling when and how news was announced.

The negative aspects of the Press for governments and for commanders included the publication in newspapers and magazines of operational information useful to the enemy. The Duke of Wellington, from Celorico in August 1810, complained to the War Office about the publication of officers’ ‘private’ letters which gave details of his batteries and fortifications at Cadiz.⁹ This problem became ever more apparent from the time of the Crimean War; improvements in the European transport system, especially railways, and the linked nascent international telegraph network, not only made strategic military communications much swifter, but also enabled the Press to become more independent of official communications. From the Crimea between 1854 and 1856, The Times¹⁰ and other newspapers reported the serious defects in the command and logistic performance there. Although this caused no threat to national security, such journalistic disclosures were not surprisingly unpopular with the Generals and War Office; just before the Peace was signed, the British Commander-in-Chief issued orders forbidding publication of details of value to the enemy, and making provision for expulsion of offending correspondents. The smouldering memory of press criticisms lingered through the remainder of that century, reignited by subsequent frictions (before Omdurman Kitchener addressed waiting journalists as ‘you drunken swabs’). All contributed to habitually jaundiced views of the Press held by the military into the twentieth and twenty-first Centuries.¹¹

Secret Intelligence Gathering

By the 1880s there was still no permanent secret intelligence service, nor a nationwide security service, nor an organisation for intercepting and decoding the secret communications of the enemies of the state. Even though France, then regarded as the principal adversary, had all three, such was the self-perceived superiority of Britain that the threat did not appear to merit such underhand institutions. There had indeed been a Secret Service Fund since the Restoration in the 1660s, and Secret Service funding had been voted annually by Parliament since 1797. The Fund was useful to successive administrations not so much for secret service work, however, as for other more nefarious activities, such as bribery at home and abroad. Lord Aberdeen commented: ‘although there are many charges upon it that ought not to be there, they at least remain secret’.¹² The last newspaper to receive a Secret Service Fund grant was allegedly The Observer in 1840.¹³ The Decyphering Branch, established in 1703 and run part-time and largely from home by successive generations of the Willes family, had meanwhile been abolished in 1844 without replacement.

Intelligence of a political and economic kind was routinely handled by diplomats, but British espionage was conducted, as and when required, by freelance amateurs, and it focused mainly on imperial rivalries in remote parts of the world. In the War Office, the lack of basic intelligence evident at the start of Crimean War in 1854 had caused a small intelligence section to be created, based on cartographers. Its role declined however after that War, and from 1856 the War Office and Admiralty relied for general intelligence on military and naval Attachés in Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg, Turin and Vienna. Subsequently, lack of prior intelligence about the Franco-Prussian War (1870) had caused the War Office’s Topographical and Statistical (T & S) Department to be augmented, and given responsibility for limited semi-covert intelligence-gathering by army (and occasionally naval) officers in the margins of their mainstream duties, for example Robert Baden-Powell on the NW Frontier.¹⁴

The T & S Department had become the Intelligence Branch in 1873, with responsibility also for planning for war; a similar Indian Intelligence Branch was established in Simla in 1878.¹⁵ These Branches were however viewed without enthusiasm by more traditional elements in the higher headquarters, in particular by Field Marshal the Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief of the Army.¹⁶ The Navy too had needed external stimuli to set up an embryo intelligence organisation, in this case the Russo-Turkish conflict of 1877–8, and Captain John Colomb’s¹⁷ lobbying in 1881 about French naval threats to British trade. With the support of politicians such as Lord Salisbury,¹⁸ further progress was then made in formalising the intelligence organisations. The al-Mahdi’s successes in Sudan and the death of General Gordon¹⁹ also led to re-energising the still small intelligence apparatus, and the first Directors of Naval and Military Intelligence were appointed in 1887. The Admiralty and War Office at the end of the nineteenth century were nevertheless still small and simply-organised departments; the principal parts of the War Office were contained within the Horse Guards building (now HQ of the Army’s London District alone), and those of the Admiralty within the Ripley Building (now one small part of the distended Cabinet Office); the politico-military headquarters of the most powerful Navy in the world had only 32 civilian administrators.

Internal Security

The organisation for internal security meanwhile had developed initially in Dublin and the Royal Irish Constabulary to counter the Fenian threat, briefly and separately supplemented in Great Britain after the 1867 bombings in Manchester and London. After the 1882 Phoenix Park assassinations of the Chief Secretary for Ireland and his Permanent Secretary, there was a reinvigoration of the security organisation in Ireland and at the Home Office in London under Robert Anderson.²⁰ The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland²¹ appointed his Private Secretary EG Jenkinson²² as the Dublin head and link with Whitehall. The London organisation was augmented again by the Metropolitan Police’s new but short-lived ‘Special Irish Branch’ in response to the Fenian campaign 1881–5 (including bombs in the House of Commons and Tower of London, and damage to the Special Irish Branch Headquarters itself). Despite the seemingly haphazard nature of these arrangements, the authorities were partially successful in infiltrating the Fenian movement and in suborning its Irish-American links.²³ In 1887, under another ex-Indian Civil Servant, James Monro²⁴, the Metropolitan Police established the Special Branch which survives to this day, then responsible direct to the Home Secretary for political surveillance (not just of Fenians, but also of anarchists and foreign ‘commune-ists’), but the Branch remained very small until World War I.

The Press Context

The Press evolved to a form we would recognise today during the post-Napoleonic period. From the 1830s there was rapid expansion of the railway system; the companies involved were quick to realise that, not only did they need a matching telegraphic system for their own purposes, but that wires laid along their tracks to achieve this would have spare capacity profitably marketable to others, both as the means of transmission and also in the collation of information for transmission.²⁵ Telegraphy was further improved in 1840 by the ABC system, which could achieve 15 words per minute, and by the mid-1840s approximately two thousand miles of railway track/cable had been laid. Similar developments were taking place in Europe, North America and in other parts of the developing world where commercial interests then justified them; the Morse Code²⁶ was first regularly used for telegraphy in 1844.

Primitive fax machines were invented in 1850, and in the same year the first cross-Channel cable was laid, connecting Britain with major European centres, followed by a cable to Ireland two years later. At about the same time, the Newfoundland Electric Telegraph Company was formed to find a way of laying a submarine transatlantic cable, and advances in oceanography in the Atlantic²⁷ and in cable technology enabled a fully operational telegraphic service between London and New York from 1866. By 1870 a submarine cable also connected England via Portugal to Gibraltar, and Hong Kong was connected by 1881. By 1886, the strategic and commercial dependence on the worldwide international telegraphic system was so firmly established that the first Convention on the Protection of Submarine Cables was held.

In 1897, commercial development started of perforated tape (‘tickertape’) machines, soon in use by the Post Office. In late 1901 Guglielmo Marconi²⁸ made the first transatlantic wireless transmission, commercialised a few years later. By 1902, when the British Government set up the Imperial and International Communications Company,²⁹ Britain was linked from Cornwall to the rest of the world by 14 submarine cable systems, and 72% of all the world’s cable systems were British-owned. In 1911 Asquith’s Government approved a deal with Marconi to set up a chain of state-owned wireless stations throughout the Empire. The telephone was also slowly becoming established, Bell’s company having been founded in the USA in 1877, and in Britain a year later, with the first very small British network operational by 1882; the Post Office acquired control of all British trunk lines ten years later. Thus by the early twentieth century, both the Government/military and the Press had access to extensive international communications networks, albeit still relatively slow and limited in their reach beyond major centres of prosperous population.

Within Britain, unlike other major European countries, the inland telegraphic system had no close connection with nor control by the military and security organisations, despite its key strategic role; it was driven by commercial interests. By 1869 there were five major telegraphy companies operating in the United Kingdom, handling between them about six and a half million messages a year. However, these companies operated as a cartel and were widely disliked, especially by Chambers of Commerce and the press, because of their unreliability, the small number of their offices, and their complex charges. The provincial press had a particular complaint, because of the telegraph companies’ poorly carried out contractual secondary role in providing news to regional newspapers, an activity on which they employed few journalists.

In 1865, the cartel r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• SECTION 1 Pre-Formation: The Long Debate, 1880s—1912
• SECTION 2 Formation and Early Modus Operandi of the Committee, 1912-14
• SECTION 3 World War I, 1914-18
• SECTION 4 Between the World Wars, 1918-39
• SECTION 5 World War II: Suspended Animation, 1939-45
• SECTION 6 Early Years of the Cold War, 1945-67
• SECTION 7 The 'Lohan' Affair, 1967
• SECTION 8 Latter Years of the Cold War, and N Ireland, 1967-90
• SECTION 9 Post Cold War, 1990-97
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index