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Official secrets: The use and abuse of the Act
Hardcover
Published January 1, 1987
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David Hooper
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December 4, 2021
Section 2 of the 1911 Official Secrets Act dealt with the offence of communicating official information without authority and receiving such information knowing or believing it to have been communicated in breach of the Act. The provision supposedly existed to protect national security, but the historical overview presented in Official Secrets builds a case that it more often served to shield government and the intelligence services from accountability by needlessly hampering journalistic investigation and even historical enquiry. Preposterously trivial cases included a 1972 police raid on the Railway Gazette after the magazine reported on a government discussion document recommending cutting the rail network.
Most of the material is derived from secondary sources, but Hooper’s analysis is forensic without being dry and his narratives provide useful reminders of journalistic causes célèbres of decades past: these include the persecution of Compton Mackenzie over a war memoir; the trial of Jonathan Aitken and others over a leaked document about arms supply to Nigeria during the Biafran crisis (all acquitted, although the affair was an early example of Aitken’s duplicitous nature); Clive Ponting (“Profumo without the sex”); Sarah Tisdall; and the farcical “ABC trial” of Crispin Aubrey, John Berry and Duncan Campbell, which ended with trivial convictions even though nearly all of the “secret” information about GCHQ the three had published turned out to have been sourced from open intelligence. This is followed by an essay outlining possibilities for reform – this was in 1987, two years before Section 2 was replaced by more limited restrictions – and the need for freedom of information legislation.
In Chapter 22, however, Hooper himself becomes part of the story, as Peter Wright’s representative during the Spycatcher affair (reviewed here). Although his account makes up only a small proportion of the book – indeed, it is almost an appendix – it was perhaps inevitable that it is foregrounded on the book’s cover in both the hardback and paperback editions. Hooper was writing after Chapman Pincher’s own book about the affair had been published (reviewed here), and he argues that Pincher’s claim that Lord Victor Rothschild had only minimal involvement with his earlier work Their Trade Is Treachery (reviewed here), for which Wright was the principal unnamed source, is at odds with “seventy or so letters that he [i.e. Pincher] wrote to Wright in the period from 1980 to 1983”. He also scoffs at Pincher’s outrage at Wright’s decision to go public when in fact Pincher had previously encouraged Wright to write a book.
Hooper visited Wright at home in Tasmania and was shocked at his reduced circumstances, and via “a friend at the Bar” he received an introduction to Malcolm Turnbull, a young solicitor who was willing to act for Wright and Heinemann Australia. Hooper’s view is that “the high moral position for which the government seemed to be contending was weakened by the fact that it appeared that part of its objection to Wright was that he had, through Pincher, already had his say and the time had now come to shut him up”. Hooper suggests that the British government’s case might have received a more sympathetic hearing in Victoria, but that it chose to bring its action in the more liberal New South Wales after having misidentified Heinemann’s Australia office address.
Towards the end of the chapter, Hooper predicts that “it will not be much before the year 2000 that we discover the truth about the matters that the government has been trying to cover up about the material in Wright's book”. This failed to predict the end of the Cold War, after which Russian sources became available and no evidence was found to support Wright’s central claim that Director General of MI5 Roger Hollis had been a Russian spy. However, as of late 2021 it was reported that the journalist Tim Tate had been denied access to government files relating to how the Thatcher government attempted to suppress Wright’s book remain hidden, despite the fact that they should now be available more than thirty years later.
Most of the material is derived from secondary sources, but Hooper’s analysis is forensic without being dry and his narratives provide useful reminders of journalistic causes célèbres of decades past: these include the persecution of Compton Mackenzie over a war memoir; the trial of Jonathan Aitken and others over a leaked document about arms supply to Nigeria during the Biafran crisis (all acquitted, although the affair was an early example of Aitken’s duplicitous nature); Clive Ponting (“Profumo without the sex”); Sarah Tisdall; and the farcical “ABC trial” of Crispin Aubrey, John Berry and Duncan Campbell, which ended with trivial convictions even though nearly all of the “secret” information about GCHQ the three had published turned out to have been sourced from open intelligence. This is followed by an essay outlining possibilities for reform – this was in 1987, two years before Section 2 was replaced by more limited restrictions – and the need for freedom of information legislation.
In Chapter 22, however, Hooper himself becomes part of the story, as Peter Wright’s representative during the Spycatcher affair (reviewed here). Although his account makes up only a small proportion of the book – indeed, it is almost an appendix – it was perhaps inevitable that it is foregrounded on the book’s cover in both the hardback and paperback editions. Hooper was writing after Chapman Pincher’s own book about the affair had been published (reviewed here), and he argues that Pincher’s claim that Lord Victor Rothschild had only minimal involvement with his earlier work Their Trade Is Treachery (reviewed here), for which Wright was the principal unnamed source, is at odds with “seventy or so letters that he [i.e. Pincher] wrote to Wright in the period from 1980 to 1983”. He also scoffs at Pincher’s outrage at Wright’s decision to go public when in fact Pincher had previously encouraged Wright to write a book.
Hooper visited Wright at home in Tasmania and was shocked at his reduced circumstances, and via “a friend at the Bar” he received an introduction to Malcolm Turnbull, a young solicitor who was willing to act for Wright and Heinemann Australia. Hooper’s view is that “the high moral position for which the government seemed to be contending was weakened by the fact that it appeared that part of its objection to Wright was that he had, through Pincher, already had his say and the time had now come to shut him up”. Hooper suggests that the British government’s case might have received a more sympathetic hearing in Victoria, but that it chose to bring its action in the more liberal New South Wales after having misidentified Heinemann’s Australia office address.
Towards the end of the chapter, Hooper predicts that “it will not be much before the year 2000 that we discover the truth about the matters that the government has been trying to cover up about the material in Wright's book”. This failed to predict the end of the Cold War, after which Russian sources became available and no evidence was found to support Wright’s central claim that Director General of MI5 Roger Hollis had been a Russian spy. However, as of late 2021 it was reported that the journalist Tim Tate had been denied access to government files relating to how the Thatcher government attempted to suppress Wright’s book remain hidden, despite the fact that they should now be available more than thirty years later.
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