HER MAJESTY'S CENSORS

...A lengthy report on the Harper's/Granta controversy written by the New York bureau chief of The Times of London was reduced to a squib in the paper...

...We are not convinced that open government is ipso facto good government," commented The Daily Telegraph, adding, "As for the intelligence services, it is inconceivable to us that they should operate in a goldfish bowl...

...there was no retaliation from abroad...

...Thatcher's first swipe at making the Act leaner but meaner foundered in 1979 amid protests that her reform bill would have prevented the disclosure of the cover-up of Anthony Blunt's longtime perfidy as a Soviet spy—a story that had just been broken by an investigative journalist...

...At the heart of all this darkness is the Official Secrets Act...

...The 1942 Civil Service Rulebook and its 1985 gloss, the so-called Armstrong memorandum, prohibit any public employee, "serving or retired," from disclosing any information about his or her work without prior clearance...

...Now the editor of The Times will have to consider what he thinks is right...

...ABC broadcast the clip anyway...

...The jury demurred, accepting Ponting's plea and acquitting him of all charges...

...Dirty linen has no political coloration...

...Nine months later, when the government learned that Spycatcher was about to be published in Australia, where Peter Wright had taken up residence, it invoked the "law of confidence" rather than the Official Secrets Act to thwart publication...

...The order was "not a restriction on reporting," he asserted, but rather "a restriction on direct appearances by those who use or support violence...

...On August 2,1987, Tony Benn, a Labor Party member of Parliament, mounted a small wooden podium at Speakers' Corner to test the limits of that right...

...In January 1987, after the Attorney General obtained a court order restraining Campbell from discussing the documentary, Campbell popped up in Parliament (where members may not be denied free speech) and showed the film to a wide-eyed audience of MPs...

...The Thatcher government has replaced a number of high-ranking BBC officials it considered unreliable and has established an Orwellian unit whose sole mission is to pre-screen programs for political sensitivity...

...Last fall, British viewers finally got a chance to see a mildly censored version of the spy satellite program...

...The government can do anything it wants at the moment," says Sheila Gunn, a political reporter for The Times of London...

...Just days before, Britain's highest Court, the Law Lords, had upheld a ban on any disclosure of the contents of Peter Wright's explosive spy memoir, Spycatcher...

...The staid Times was not alone in its Mel Friedman is a free-lance journalist in New York City...

...Some of his other revelations, especially a purported MI5 plot to topple Harold Wilson's Labor government, should have sparked a Watergate-style inquiry...

...Early on, the government indicated it intended to take the most expansive view of its prerogatives...

...Like the Church, it has its rituals, sacred texts, and prescribed sanctions for apostasy...

...Relieved that the bill was not as draconian as had initially been feared, some British newspapers welcomed it like grateful hostages who have begun to identify with their captors...

...Three days later, the police raided and ransacked Campbell's home and the offices of the New Statesman magazine, which had published an article about the furor...

...Every newly appointed cabinet minister is obliged to appear before the Queen and swear, on bended knee, a 700-year-old Oath of Confidentiality...

...he was merely making a bit of its rubble bounce...

...Its task, nowhere authorized by law, is to notify the media of the changing list of taboo subjects the government wants reporters to shun for national-security reasons...

...Aubrey and Campbell were found guilty but given only wrist-slappings by the judge...

...Both the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Independent Broadcasting Authority, which governs commercial radio and television operations, said they would comply with the decree...

...When a new group calling itself Charter 88, after the "Charter 77" human-rights group in Czechoslovakia, launched a campaign last December for a written Bill of Rights in Britain, that event became a non-story...

...In the name of national security, antiterrorism, and administrative convenience, the Thatcher government has launched an Inglorious Counterrevolution against British liberty...

...It is not automatically the case that information disclosed for a second time does not add to the damage done by the first disclosure," editorialized The Times...

...Cases against the media became harder to win as juries balked at Crown arguments that the state owned all its information and had the sole right to say when publication was warranted...

...When Harper's magazine published an un-bowdlerized version of the text as its December 1988 cover story, distribution of the issue was banned in Britain...

...In its second confrontation with the Crown—over whether Granta's U.S...

...dictated how British broadcasters may cover the news...

...liberty is a creature of democratic habit, sustained by the good will of Parliament...

...Although the press eventually won its grueling two-and-a-half-year battle to permit Spycatcher to be published in Britain, it lost important ground in the protracted war to preserve its freedom...

...Thatcher's agenda is a catalog of prior restraints and civil-liberties abuses worthy of King George III...

...Wright was not launching a first-strike against MI5...

...The article was based entirely upon unclassified sources, some as pedestrian as telephone directories...

...Its selection of a civil statute ordinarily used to protect commercial trade secrets had two virtues: First, a civil suit obviated a pesky jury trial, and second, because the Crown was alleging grave harm from publication, the statute allowed the government to petition the courts for open-ended injunctions against the media while its plea for a prior restraint in Australia was pending...

...At least a dozen new books by former British spies are reportedly in the offing...

...edition should carry unex-purgated excerpts from Anthony Cavendish's suppressed memoir, Inside Intelligence—the company backed down...

...The infamous Section 2, which was not even mentioned once in the 1911 debates, criminalizes all other unauthorized disclosures and makes the media liable for reporting them...

...At the same time, the court had imposed a news blackout on coverage of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's worldwide crusade to ban Spy-catcher—in Australia and Hong Kong, among other places—even though the manuscript had slipped through her dragnet into the United States, where it had been published by Viking Penguin and was rapidly becoming a best-seller...

...And in November 1987, when it learned that ABC-TV intended to broadcast a purloined snippet from the "Zircon" program on its evening newscast, World News Tonight, its lawyers threatened to sue the network for international copyright infringement...

...Scolding Wright for his "treachery," the court affirmed, in passing, two of the government's basic claims: that members of the intelligence community owed a lifelong duty of silence, and that exposure of information about their work in no way relieved them of their duty to remain silent...

...In such cases, the government would not have to prove that a disclosure caused harm...

...I've done what I think is right," he told a reporter for The Times of London after he had finished...

...The battle ended last October when the Law Lords ruled that Spycatcher could no longer be banned in Britain because, as one judge put it, "all possible damage to the interest of the Crown had already been done" by the book's publication in the United States and elsewhere...

...Labor as well as Conservative governments have rushed to invoke Section 2— and other measures—when they had something they wanted to hide from the public...

...To let him know, his accusers had said, would have compromised official secrets...

...American editors do sometimes get calls from senior government officials saying, 'Please don't publish this,' " observes Stewart Fleming, Washington bureau chief ofThe Financial Times of London...

...Benn had proved a point, of sorts: He was not prosecuted for defying the injunction, but the chill in the media was palpable...

...But fickle juries were beginning to carve out a public-interest exception to the Act that threatened its utility...

...publishing history: With brazen extraterritorial reach, the British government last summer compelled Granta, an American magazine edited in England, to delete eighteen pages from an article in its U.S...

...Each now runs the risk of being declared contraband...

...The proposed legislation would also exclude the type of public-interest defense that saved Clive Ponting...

...This internal secrecy regime, aimed at deterring would-be leakers and whistle-blowers, is buttressed by an unofficial self-censorship apparatus in which the press has been a witting accomplice since 1912...

...The last journalists convicted under the Act were Duncan Campbell and Crispin Aubrey in a carnival trial that ended shortly before the election of 1979, which ushered in the Thatcher era...

...A blue-ribbon panel set up a year later to review it termed it "a mess...

...For more than fifteen minutes, Benn read out forbidden excerpts from Spy-catcher to a crowd of several hundred, including journalists, tourists, and curious onlookers...

...harm would automatically be assumed...

...confidential communications from other governments or international organizations...

...The same company, also through Viking Penguin, distributes Granta in the United States...

...So are chances of incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, a point made clear recently when Margaret Thatcher announced her government's intention to withdraw from whatever provisions of the Convention it opposes...

...Duncan Campbell, an investigative journalist with a knack for teasing dark secrets from unclassified information, prepared a six-part series of programs for the BBC, entitled "The Secret Society...

...The coup de grace was delivered in February 1985, when Clive Ponting, a former defense-ministry official, was acquitted of charges of illegally leaking secret documents on the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Bel-grano in the Falklands War...

...It immediately spiked plans for a second "Secret Society" series...

...Ponting argued that he was serving the public interest by exposing evidence of government deceit...

...The court convicted him nonetheless on the ground that Section 2 proscribed any improper communication of government information, no matter how trivial...

...By the late 1970s, Section 2 had fallen into general disrepute for its vague language, broad sweep, and selective application...

...Mark Hosenball, an American journalist working in London, was deported in 1977 by the Labor government for—he believes—co-authoring an article with Duncan Campbell on the then-hush-hush Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham, Britain's analogue to the U.S...

...Once the bill passes Parliament, as it is expected to do early this year, Spycatcher could conceivably be banned again...

...It would also be assumed in prosecutions for unauthorized disclosures of information relating to electronic surveillance...

...It has even accomplished a disquieting first in U.S...

...editorial timidity...

...Praised by Home Secretary Hurd as an "essay in openness," the reform bill would narrow Section 2's scope to ban unauthorized disclosures of information in six areas: defense...

...The judgment was hardly a resounding victory for freedom of the press...

...Since then, matters have gotten worse...

...Hopes for enacting an organic charter of liberties in the birthplace of natural rights are slim...

...In all other instances, the government would have to persuade a jury that a leak or revelation was damaging before it could send, say, a whistle-blower or an editor to jail...

...It could make us all stand on our heads, and the government would still be safe" from falling...

...In Britain, official secrecy rivals Anglicanism as the state religion...

...But the anemic copy below the head bore the unmistakable mark of a journalist straining in an editorial strait-jacket...

...Benn, the reporter wrote, "read out ten extracts from the book, beginning with page 31 and finishing with page 369, all of which contained allegations about the conduct of MI5 [British counter-intelligence] in the 1960s and 1970s...

...The first program, scheduled for airing in November 1986, detailed how the Conservative government had hidden from Parliament the expenditure of $800 million on a new spy satellite, code-named Zircon...

...National Security Agency...

...All of the material, the reporter added, "the Law Lords have ruled must not be referred to or published...

...Three Thatcher-appointed BBC governors, including one recently revealed to have been a former intelligence agent, successfully pressured BBC Director-General Alas-daire Milne to kill the program...

...Last October, following a long series of bombings and shootings in Northern Ireland that left scores dead, Home Secretary Douglas Hurd issued an order barring British broadcasters from carrying interviews with members of Northern Ireland's terrorist groups or their lawful political wings...

...In 1919, a clerk who leaked details about Army clothing contracts to a tailor was charged under Section 2. He objected that his peccadillo had not compromised any state secrets...

...Another detailed story, filed last November by a Reuters correspondent based in New York, was spiked in London...

...The government's proposed revision of the Official Secrets Act, submitted to Parliament in November, seeks to codify these doctrines and close the legal loopholes that have rendered Section 2 unreliable...

...Terrorists "draw support and sustenance" from radio and television exposure, Hurd told Parliament in explaining the action...

...Her government went on to prosecute twenty-two cases under Section 2, obtaining seventeen convictions...

...In a letter dated May 8, 1987, to the chairman of Pearson, the British company that owns Viking Penguin, Assistant Treasury Solicitor David Hogg politely suggested that Pearson exercise its power "to remove the directors" of its U.S...

...subsidiary if they proceed with plans to publish Spycatcher...

...No similar program could have been carried out in the United States without provoking a major constitutional crisis...

...From the government's standpoint, the Official Secrets Act had lost credibility and needed retooling...

...But Britain lacks a written constitution and has no Bill of Rights designed to keep government off the backs of the people...

...Thatcher holds an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons and an iron grip over the broadcast media via their licensing agreements, so she is able to act with impunity to define the limits of press freedoms...

...In fact, many of the charges made in Spycatcher—that MI5 had "bugged and burgled" its way across Britain for twenty years and that Roger Hollis, its head from 1956 to 1965, had been a Soviet intelligence mole—had already been widely reported...

...The "time has now come to deny this easy platform to those who use it to propagate terrorism...

...The magnitude of her attack makes her unique in Twentieth Century English history...

...The Guardian, a liberal newspaper that had been gagged by the courts a year earlier for reporting a mere summary of Wright's claims, was not about to risk a criminal contempt citation...

...international relations...

...Section I outlaws classic espionage—the betrayal of damaging secrets to a foreign power...

...All government employees, from a defense-ministry cook to Margaret Thatcher's most senior adviser, must sign an intimidating but legally weightless form certifying that they have read and understood the provisions of the Official Secrets Act...

...The "D Notice Committee," whose very existence was concealed until 1961, consists of fifteen representatives from the newspaper and broadcasting establishment and the defense ministry...

...Ponting's trial was the last under the Official Secrets Act...

...In a celebrated 1971 case, a trial judge held that Section 2 should be "pensioned off...

...And as the Spycatcher and Granta affairs proved, we may be entering a new era in which the information the American media can publish may be limited by a censor's hand abroad...

...Mrs...

...BBC radio, which also reported the event, edited out Benn's public reading...

...Perhaps the clearest example of the Thatcher government's assault on the media was the so-called Zircon affair...

...It is the only spot in Britain where British subjects enjoy a statutory right to free speech...

...During a Kafkaesque deportation proceeding lasting several months, Hosenball was never told what he had written that had got him into hot water...

...The new BBC junta functioned well...

...The following week, another police team barged into the BBC's Glasgow offices, where the film had been produced, and occupied the building for two days while detectives searched for—and seized— the master tapes for all six programs in the "Secret Society" series...

...To deter future Peter Wrights, the measure would make it an absolute offense for active or former members of the security services to make any public statements about their work...

...Thatcher may well be remembered for her assault on freedom of expression and civil liberties," says Floyd Abrams, the noted American First Amendment lawyer...

...Her Majesty's CENSORS Margaatet Thatcher leads an Inglorious Counterrevolution BY MEL FRIEDMAN Speakers' Corner in London's Hyde Park stands on the site of the old Tyburn gallows, where condemned prisoners were customarily allowed a parting word before they were hanged...

...The next day, The Times covered the event on its front page under a bold headline: Benn flouts ruling to read from Spycatcher...

...The press is not required to abide by the Index of "D notices," but it faces the threat of prosecution under the Official Secrets Act if it doesn't...

...Not only did the Harper's experiment in guerrilla journalism fail, but the British press once again exhibited the symptoms of editorial paralysis it had shown when Tony Benn dared it to be free...

...suppressed politically embarrassing radio and television programs, and harassed investigative journalists...

...What they don't get are instructions from government officials" telling them what not to print...

...But, as Campbell writes in the September 1988 issue of Index on Censorship (devoted entirely to the civil-liberties crisis in Britain), Whitehall's disaster-control efforts paid off, because what he believes was "the most damaging program [in the series] from the government's point of view"—a segment called "Cabinet"—never reached the air...

...Instead, they triggered an estimated $5 million legal battle to muzzle Wright throughout the English-speaking world...

...It gave Benn's remarks a few judicious paragraphs purged of any questionable material...

...edition because the material—the innocuous reminiscences of another ex-spy—had been banned in Britain...

...Passed by Parliament in 1911 during a war scare, the Act creates, by one count, 2,324 separate offenses for unauthorized disclosure of official information...

...The judge dismissed this defense and directed the jury to return a guilty verdict...

...security and intelligence...

...In the guise of reforming the doddering Official Secrets Act so that more information can be released, the government is, in fact, honing the law into a more cunning instrument of censorship...

...police leads about criminals or terrorists, and lawful electronic surveillance...

...It has repealed, by fiat, the right of criminal suspects in Northern Ireland to remain silent without prejudicing their trials...

...In that "Simon-says" world, broadcasters have had to perform the worst contortions...

...And it would allow the government to bar publication of official information that is already in the public domain or that has been disclosed outside Britain...