When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  When he finished dictating Peet told the Reuters office that if they needed to call him back with any messages they could contact him in Eisler’s office.309 His colleague in the Berlin bureau who took down Peet’s despatch could barely believe what he was typing about his own boss.310 When he sent the story back to the Reuters news desk in London the story was ‘sat on’ while executives tried to decide what on earth to do with it.311

  Over at the rival Associated Press (AP) news agency, the Peet story was already old news. While the Reuters man had been up on his feet making news the AP man rushed outside to report it, sending out the first few words of a breaking story that agencies call a ‘snap’.312

  Peet later had to admit, ‘I was scooped on my own story.’ Even more ironic, his own story of what had happened in Berlin that day never appeared anywhere. ‘Reuters in London decided that my nicely rounded “obituary” was not suitable for publication and they spiked it.’313 But Reuters did follow up his suggestion that they call him at Eisner’s office with any questions. The executive who called him had just two questions: ‘Is that John Peet?’ and ‘What have you done with the safe keys?’314

  Peet had already anticipated his employers’ obsession with proper accountancy and had handed the safe keys to one of the Western reporters at the press conference. He had also calculated that Reuters owed him £46 7s. 6d. in salary.315 So before he left the Berlin bureau for the last time he had taken out £40 from the office petty cash. Reuters sent him a cheque covering the remaining amount, plus his pension contributions.316

  ‘What a shock…’

  It was the symbolic end of John Peet’s career as a Reuters foreign correspondent. And it almost brought about the end of his brother Stephen’s career at the BBC. British intelligence, through its connections with the BBC, stopped Stephen, a distinguished film-maker, from getting a staff job at the BBC because of his brother’s defection. But the decision to blacklist Stephen Peet was later overturned and he went on to great career success.317 The same cannot be said of John Peet.

  He later wrote that he had,

  at the age of thirty-four, abandoned the moderate security, the congenial work and the fair prospects as Head of the Reuters Bureau in West Berlin to plunge into the uncertainties of a very different life in the young German Democratic Republic, which was at the time regarded by most of the world as a ramshackle nonentity, likely to disappear at almost any moment.318

  But at the time, John Peet didn’t convey any of this uncertainty in a letter to his parents: ‘As you probably heard chose peace. Writing new address. Love. John Peet.’

  His father, Hubert Peet, sent a postcard from Devon to the Reuters management: ‘What a shock. As I told your Mr Mason, it was a complete surprise. My wife and I would like to express to you our regret for the dis-organisation and trouble our son’s sudden action must have caused Reuters.’ 319

  If John Peet had ever seen this letter, his father’s apologetic attitude might have surprised him because he had modelled his early life on his father’s radical views.

  Hubert Peet was a journalist and a socialist. He worked in Fleet Street on the Daily Sketch and Daily News and is believed to have covered the ‘Siege of Sidney Street’ when Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, took personal command as police with shotguns surrounded anarchists in a tenement in east London.320

  But Hubert Peet was also a Quaker and this was to have a significant effect on his life. In 1916 he was conscripted into the British Army to serve in the First World War. He refused to be a combatant soldier and was court-martialled for refusing to obey an order to parade. As a CO, ‘conscientious objector’, he told the court:

  I am a Quaker and a Socialist, and I believe that the teaching of Jesus means that I must confront violence with gentleness, anger with reason, hatred with goodwill. Though I may be technically a soldier I cannot be one actually and morally, and therefore I cannot recognise any military order.321

  Hubert Peet was sentenced to 112 days’ hard labour and then was court-martialled a second time for refusing to obey orders. In total he spent two and a half years in prison. His son John was just one year old. When Hubert Peet was finally released from jail a Quaker journal, which he had previously helped to edit, reported that ‘the long period of isolation, poor food, cold and confinement has its inevitable effect on his physique’.322

  Just after his release in 1919 came a moment that was to become John Peet’s first memory of his father. Peet junior was three years old as he sat with ‘the total stranger who was said to be my father’ watching him make a cardboard model of his prison cell.323 Hubert Peet was never able to get work on a Fleet Street paper again and instead had to fall back on helping to publicise the work of missionary societies.324

  Testimony to the significance of his father’s imprisonment on his life came when he was asked to introduce himself at the start of an oral history interview.

  ‘My name is John Peet. I’m a Londoner from a fairly normal middle-class family, slightly different from many middle-class families in that my father had been a conscientious objector in World War One, a Christian Socialist.’325

  Of the four themes in his father’s life – journalism, socialism, Christianity and pacifism – Peet embraced the first two and rejected the second.

  He helped to publish a newspaper while still a schoolboy and immediately he left school he joined a local paper in Kent as a cub reporter. Socialism came as easily as journalism. At the age of eight he told friends, ‘I’m Labour.’326 He was brought up in what he called ‘rather a strange ILP sort of an atmosphere’, a reference to the Independent Labour Party, a socialist party which had grown up separately from the main Labour Party but at this time was affiliated to Labour.

  But in his teenage years his socialism became more Marxist. What he called his ‘very Liberal Quaker boarding school’ at Saffron Walden in Essex allowed him to take out a postal subscription to the Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Worker.327 In 1931 he filled in a coupon in the paper which urged readers to enrol in the Communist Party and got back a confirmation that he had been duly enrolled. He heard nothing from the party until nine months later when got another letter saying ‘the first duty of a Communist is to pay party dues’ and demanding three shillings in back contributions.328

  When Peet moved to another Quaker school he came out as what he called a ‘public school Red’ by standing as the Communist candidate in a mock election. He came last but proudly sent the result to the Daily Worker, who printed it.329

  Weapons training

  So Peet became a journalist and a socialist with Marxist sympathies, but he decided that, unlike his father, he was not a Christian. Then, when he left school, he rejected the Quaker belief in pacifism and did it in the most dramatic way possible, by joining the army.

  Feeling myself that anybody who felt that he was a revolutionary ought to have some knowledge of the weapons which at that time seemed necessary to fight a revolution with, I joined the Grenadier Guards, which seems a rather obscure way of preparing to be a revolutionary.330

  Within two years this decision was to prove, in Peet’s words, ‘quite useful’. Having bought himself out of the army as soon as he’d had enough training in handling weapons, and having seen the Nazis at first hand as he travelled in pre-war Germany and Austria, he signed up for the anti-Fascist Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

  As he fought alongside a senior commander in the British battalion, a former IRA man called Paddy O’Daire, Peet was shot in the ankle by Fascist troops. A wounded colleague died alongside him in an ambulance but Peet recovered.

  When the Republican side decided to withdraw non-Spanish troops from the war, Peet and the rest of the British battalion returned to London. He had gone to Spain because he believed ‘that the whole world was heading towards a world war’.331 Now he was even more convinced of the coming conflict but he found the British public uninterested.

  ‘That made people who had come back from Spai
n extremely cross, that people’s minds seemed to be closed totally. And looking back … I would eternally regret it if I had not had the privilege of being able to go to Spain and take part of the struggle.’332

  When Peet’s forecast proved accurate and the Second World War broke out he applied to be an RAF pilot but was rejected. He concluded that Special Branch at Scotland Yard was screening applications and keeping out those who had fought for the Republican side in Spain.333

  Whatever the reason for his rejection it meant that Peet was not among the pilots who fought and won the Battle of Britain, and who, on a statistical basis, were more likely to die than to survive. Instead he spent the war working for the British authorities in Palestine initially as a policeman but then as a journalist on British-controlled Jerusalem Radio and in the Public Information Office there. Peet not only survived the war but added some middle-ranking editorial posts to a CV that helped him get a significant post-war job in Fleet Street.

  It may sound surprising that in August 1945 John Peet walked into the Reuters headquarters in London and walked out with a contract as a sub-editor. And that after a trial period in the role he was made Vienna correspondent without Reuters even testing his fluency in German.334 But the agency was very short of journalists who had the languages and the experience to report from areas of central Europe that were under Allied control.335

  Peet was later transferred to Warsaw and ultimately to Berlin. By 1949 he was bureau chief of one of the world’s most trusted news-suppliers in one of the world’s most important news centres. He was in charge of four full-time British correspondents, three German journalists plus typists, teleprinter-operators and drivers.336 He had a large and comfortable flat where Germans of various political persuasions would welcome the chance to get warm, have a cup of coffee, have something to eat and maybe secretly use the telephone to call abroad, which they weren’t allowed to do by the Allied occupiers. Among the visitors was the playwright Bertolt Brecht, who had left Germany during the rise of Hitler and had only just returned from spending much of the war in America.337

  But outside the Peet home and its informal mix of visitors, Germany was dividing more and more as every month passed. In 1949 the three zones of the country occupied by the Western powers were joined together to formally establish the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), soon followed by the Soviet zone titling itself the German Democratic Republic. It seemed that Germany would never return to being a unified, independent state.

  The Reuters bureau chief in Berlin took stock of the situation:

  Professionally I was doing very nicely, and apparently giving full satisfaction, but I began to anticipate difficult times ahead. Ever since my schooldays I had regarded myself, despite my somewhat erratic course, as a committed Marxist, agreeing in general with the political line of the international Communist movement, though I was reluctant to become a card-carrying Red.338

  Peet said he was ‘faced with a decision’. In various accounts he has mentioned different factors which played a part in this decision – one of them, slightly bizarrely, was something someone told him over cocktails one day.

  The commander of the British Army of the Rhine, General Sir Charles Keightley, went to lunch at the British Press Club in Berlin. Peet had been disturbed by rumours that the Western allies were going to re-establish German armed forces in their sectors. He quoted Keightley as saying over drinks, ‘I recently talked about the whole thing with Monty – Field Marshal Montgomery – and we totally agreed that a German army had to be created as soon as possible. Some stupid politicians are still opposed to any such step, but it won’t take long before we can proceed.’339

  Doubt has been cast on this by the Headquarters of the British Army of the Rhine, who said that General Keightley was at the Press Club that day but ‘did not attend the cocktail party and made no such statement’.340

  Apart from the prospect of German rearmament, Peet also cited as a factor the contrast between the speed with which the East had ‘de-nazified’, eliminating former Nazis from public posts, compared to the West. He believed the Western powers were deliberately slow in trying and sentencing them. Peet always wrote about ‘nazis’ rather than ‘Nazis’, believing that it would be wrong on a point of principle to bestow a capital letter upon them.341

  Decision

  Only Peet knew which of these different factors weighed most heavily in his decision and whether there were other, perhaps personal, reasons that played a part. But in his mind the time for debate was over. ‘It seemed only logical for me to line up with the young German Democratic Republic, which against great odds appeared to be making a good start in constructing a new-style state on a Socialist basis on German soil. So I crossed the dividing line.’342

  The decision having been made in his mind he ‘contacted the proper quarters’ in East Berlin to organise how he would cross that dividing line. They came up with a plan. First he should go to a lot of trouble to give colleagues the impression that he had long-term plans in the West. He should then await a call saying that ‘Primrose has a message for Daffodil’. This would include a coded reference to the time at which he should drive east.343

  The ‘Primrose’ message duly arrived and at 15.00 on Sunday 11 June 1950 he set off in his car through the Brandenburg Gate, and made his way to an address he had been given. Once he got there he drove into a garage, the garage door closed behind him and an East German official was waiting there for him.344 There was no going back now.

  The next day Reuters executives read Peet’s dramatic last despatch reporting his own news and tried to decide what to do next. They drafted a statement which said his action had come as a ‘complete surprise’. ‘None of his British or American colleagues in West Germany had any knowledge of the fact that he had particular political views. His reports were always exact, impartial and irreproachable.’345

  Reuters didn’t offer any public explanation for his decision. But in private they speculated. ‘There can be no doubt that continued ill health and nervous strain’ had played a part, according to one colleague. ‘Bear in mind extraordinary tension Berlin situation and effect this can have upon sensitive and nervous temperaments,’ cabled back another.346

  Peet’s direct boss, Alfred Geiringer, searched for any clues that, in hindsight, should have marked Peet out to them but the best he could come up with was a memory that their Berlin bureau chief ‘liked to wear loud ties and coloured waistcoats and suede shoes’ to be ‘non-conforming’.

  In conversations in nearby bars they wondered if somehow a woman had been involved. Peet had a complicated private life. He was married four times and reading his autobiography it is difficult to keep track of who he was married to at any one time. In later life he opened a suitcase one day and found that his then wife, who he was just about to abandon for another woman, had taken her revenge by slashing to pieces one of his smartest suits.347

  For Reuters the company there were bigger issues. Its authorised history by Donald Read later captured the dilemma:

  The reputation of Reuters was now at risk. One of its leading correspondents had been revealed as a covert left-wing activist. Could Peet be represented as curiously naïve? But, if naïve, why had the agency selected such a man for one of its top postings? And had he been acting alone, or was Reuters widely infiltrated by covert reds?348

  The last question was not some exaggerated fantasy. The Peet affair coincided with another threat to Reuters’ reputation. The agency’s management had discovered that about a dozen of its journalists, Communist Party members and ‘fellow travellers’, had formed what some called a ‘cell’. It seems to have been an informal group who discussed tactics in advance of meetings of the National Union of Journalists.349

  One of the members was Derek Jameson, a newsroom journalist who went on to become a Fleet Street editor and a popular broadcaster. According to Jameson the members of the cell had decided that they would never allow their political views to influence their work.


  At Reuters we had taken a conscious decision that we would not try to doctor the Reuters file. We would stand by their principles of objectivity, fairness, independence and not show any bias at all. So it was all very fair and balanced and worked very well until one of our sympathisers – a young lady – was editing a keynote speech by President Harry Truman and cut out all his references to Stalin, Russia, Communism – these attacks on her beloved Soviet Union.350

  The authorised history of Reuters named the journalist as Frances Wheeler, who was a sub-editor, and said that she was found to have omitted an important long reference to the Cold War in Truman’s speech.351

  Derek Jameson was caught up in the aftermath.

  There was a terrible outcry, one of the clients noticed, she was hauled over the coals, broke down and blew the whistle – she named us and so a great purge began. Nobody actually got the chop, ‘you’re fired’, but a word in their ear, ‘I’m afraid your career won’t go anywhere here, old boy’.352

  Most of the journalists she named were moved on by Reuters in one way or another and some ended up working for the Soviet news agency or other Communist news organisations.353 Jamieson himself survived what he called a ‘blacklist’ by getting himself called up for National Service and later threatening action against Reuters if they failed in their legal duty to re-hire staff after such service.354

  With the discovery of a Communist ‘cell’ in their Fleet Street office and the revelation that a major bureau chief was a Communist sympathiser, the Reuters general manager, Christopher Chancellor, wrote to one of his duty editors, who had been uncovered as ‘the leading spirit’ of the ‘cell’.355

  He told Lawrence Kirwan that working for Reuters involved its staff ‘in a form of self-discipline and self-abnegation. Those of you who feel strongly on political matters must be doubly careful in the position of trust which working for Reuters involves.’356