There was a case for reasonable doubt either way on both stories so why in the great scheme of things was it so essential to uncover the sources of the stories? Was this a search for truth or a search for leakers and whistle-blowers? Could it also be a way of discrediting those who embarrassed the security services by implying they missed obvious clues?
It is worth remembering that during the time of Radcliffe’s public sessions the Attorney-General, Sir John Hobson, was also wrestling with what he saw as disturbing aspects about the emerging Profumo scandal. Government would have a motive for making an example of the press to keep it in line. Keep it cowed and under control and when the big one happened – in this case Profumo – as everyone knew it would eventually, press coverage would be less cavalier. The press would be careful not to print facts it could not verify. That would help to keep a lid on it and limit the damage. If this was the policy it clearly didn’t work because the press coverage was widespread and unforgiving.
What of the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, ‘Supermac’? His actions in setting up the Radcliffe Inquiry, rather than dampening down the Vassall affair, had the opposite effect. They had inflamed passions and, with a new Leader of the Opposition emerging in the shape of Harold Wilson, he had to face a younger and a more formidable opponent. The stories about Vassall continued and, with two of their own put behind bars, the press turned up the heat on his government. In one of those twists that sometimes happens in politics one miscalculation leads to another. By refusing to do anything to help spring Foster and Mulholland, the government was targeted by several opposition MPs who also happened to be journalists. They forced a debate in the House of Commons on 21 March 1963. During it several members of the opposition tossed verbal hand-grenades into the proceedings. Close to 11 p.m. George Wigg, followed by Barbara Castle, Richard Crossman and others, under the cloak of parliamentary privilege, repeated rumours they had heard about a certain minister and his involvement with a young lady who had disappeared while involved as a witness in a criminal trial. They demanded a statement. The next day they got it, for the girl in question was called Christine Keeler, and the minister was the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo.
The debate about Reg Foster and Brendan Mulholland had, in fact, no longer been solely about their imprisonment – to which government remained deaf. It helped prepare the way for the biggest scandal of Macmillan’s government, one which neither Profumo nor Macmillan would survive. Within seven months, and claiming ill health, Macmillan would resign; and within eighteen months Wilson would be sitting inside No. 10, where he too would soon be fretting about security, spies and journalists.
7
CHARLES WHEELER
At one microphone sat Charles Wheeler, ‘the finest reporter in the BBC’s history’ according to one of its directors-general.466 At another, ready to interview him, was the BBC’s ‘Grand Inquisitor’, Jeremy Paxman. Wheeler and Paxman had worked together for many years on BBC2’s news analysis programme Newsnight, most famously when Berlin celebrated German reunification in 1990. Wheeler interrupted Paxman’s attempt to present the programme live from the Berlin Wall to declare, ‘Jeremy, this is pure Monty Python, having a serious political discussion in the middle of a firework display.’467
In 2003 they met again in the comparative calm of a BBC radio studio in London to record an interview for a programme to mark Wheeler’s forthcoming eightieth birthday.468 Old colleagues they might have been but Paxman wasn’t about to sacrifice his reputation for tough interviewing. He gave Wheeler a vigorous cross-examination, especially about his time as one of the BBC’s Washington correspondents.
Paxman: You know, I’ve heard right-wing Americans describe you as being anti-American … What do you say to the anti-American charge?
Wheeler: I think I was pro-American. What I’ve often felt is that they were so often mis-governed because their system throws up such really awful people.
Paxman: Who are you to say that?
Wheeler: Why should I not say it?
Paxman: Well, he’s the elected President of the United States.
Wheeler: Jeremy, come off it.
Paxman: You were a reporter.
Wheeler: Yeah, sure.
Paxman: That’s all you are.
Wheeler: Yes.
Paxman: Well, what are you doing making those sort of observations about the President?
Wheeler: Because you’re asking me questions and I’m answering them honestly. I think that a reporter should be able to say what he thinks – about his leaders and other people’s leaders.
Paxman: What…
Wheeler: Jeremy, you’re in a weak position here.
Paxman: What he thinks or what he sees? There’s a big difference here. And people say you cross this line.
Wheeler: Which line did I cross? Did I see too much or did I think too much?
That final exchange crystallises the debate about the journalism of Sir Selwyn Charles Cornelius-Wheeler, ‘absolutely the greatest’ according to BBC colleague John Simpson and committed supporter of the underdog over many decades of reporting from around the world.469
Charles Wheeler never toed any Establishment line. In his eighties he was knighted at Buckingham Palace but in his youth he was once declared by royal courtiers to be ‘persona non grata’ there. This happened after an incident when, towards the end of a long overseas tour by the Queen, Wheeler had been overheard in a pub complaining, ‘I wish that bloody woman would go home, I’m bored with this trip.’
About the same time in the 1950s he caused a row by telling British listeners that Ceylon, as it was then called, was being governed ‘by an inexperienced eccentric at the head of a Cabinet of mediocrities’.470
And not a lot had changed five decades later when in a radio interview he said that the trouble with the American political system was that it ‘throws up such really awful people’. For example, Vice-President Dan Quayle had been ‘a featherweight and an unattractive one at that’.471
The more the BBC lionised him in later life the more radical and outspoken he became. In one tribute programme he talked about his coverage of the American urban riots in the 1960s. ‘I don’t think we should have tried to be dispassionate. I came to believe that violence was justified in a riot because it made white America listen.’
No wonder that in one tribute programme another colleague, John Humphrys, said of him: ‘He never sought celebrity but neither did he walk away from controversy or confrontation.’
Opinions
Reporters like Charles Wheeler have always presented a challenge to a system of broadcasting which by law requires ‘due impartiality and due accuracy’ in news from all licensed TV and radio broadcasters in the UK. The statutory requirement for ‘due impartiality’ makes broadcast journalism different from all other kinds of media in the UK. There is no equivalent for newspapers or online news. In the United States the nearest equivalent, the fairness doctrine, ended in 1987. In Britain the BBC and ITV are under an obligation to be impartial whereas the Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Sun and Daily Mirror are not.
To be very precise, when Charles Wheeler joined the BBC in 1947 the due impartiality rule wasn’t yet in place. As a later BBC study of the concept revealed, ‘The strange thing is that the BBC was never told to be impartial. People often assume it was there on its birth certificate – the first Wireless Broadcasting licence of 1923. It was not.’472 Nor did the first Royal Charter of 1926 mention it.
In 1927 a rule was laid down that ‘the BBC must not express in broadcasts its own opinion on current affairs or matters of public policy’.473 But the first requirement to be impartial in reporting other people’s opinions came as late as 1952, after Wheeler joined, when the BBC agreed to broadcast ‘an impartial account day by day prepared by professional reporters of the proceedings in both Houses of the United Kingdom Parliament’. But this seems to relate only to parliamentary reporting, a role which Wheeler sadly never performed.474 In fact it was
as late as 1996 before the BBC had a formal requirement to treat ‘controversial subjects with due accuracy and impartiality’.
However, the bottom line is that for much of Wheeler’s BBC career his employers were either required to be impartial or said they were anyway regardless of any formal obligation. There are three episodes in Wheeler’s long career that illustrate the ethical challenges this created.
The first, appropriately, was in the country where Wheeler was later to enjoy his ‘Monty Python’ night of celebration at German reunification.
Berlin and Budapest
Wheeler was born in Germany in 1923. His father, a former RAF officer, was an agent for a shipping company and was based in Hamburg.475 As an adolescent, young Charles used to take bread to Jewish neighbours hiding from the Nazis in the woods. With the prospect of war he was sent back to Britain to attend Cranbrook School in Kent, where his geography teacher recorded that ‘he has done little but what he has done is fair’ and his general knowledge teacher observed that he needed ‘more intellectual humility’.476 His first job after school was tearing agency copy off teleprinters and handing it out around the Daily Sketch newsroom in London. But then in 1942 he joined a secret naval intelligence unit directed by Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, and took part in the D-Day landings in Normandy. At the end of the Second World War he used his fluent German to break the news of Hitler’s suicide to a group of German prisoners of war, who applauded in relief.477
After the war he hoped to find a job back in newspapers but had to settle for the BBC’s External Services and a post as a sub-editor, not in the German service where his fluency would have been invaluable, but in the Spanish language service to Latin America. Wheeler did not speak Spanish so he wrote news bulletins in English and someone else translated them. He was moved to the main newsroom to help cover the 1948 London Olympic Games. Then in 1950 came a big break in his career when he returned to Germany as the BBC German service’s representative in Berlin to cover the post-war division of the country.478
Wheeler was, according to one colleague,
as English as they come but he was totally at home in Berlin and in Germany. I’m sure the fact that he’d been there when young made this his patch and he carried this enthusiasm, this commitment to what was going on not just to Eastern Germany but Eastern Europe generally for most of his working, journalistic life.479
Three years into his assignment Wheeler witnessed an event which was to symbolise that commitment. Such was the impact it had on him that he later took the trouble to translate into English and adapt a German book by Stefan Brant, with the title The East German Rising: 17 June 1953, which described itself as ‘the first full story of this remarkable and quite unprecedented rising of the working people and peasants of a totalitarian country against their oppressors’.480
It was no exaggeration when the book called the uprising ‘astonishing’. The story began with a strike by building workers in Berlin on 16 June 1953. By the next day it had turned into a widespread uprising across East Germany against the government, which the Russians had installed in the Soviet zones they occupied after the Second World War. Here was the working class rising up against the very people who claimed that they were the vanguard of the proletariat. Clearly from the Russian point of view this was a dangerous development that might infect the working classes of other countries in the Soviet bloc. The demonstrations were promptly suppressed by Soviet tanks.
Much later Wheeler looked back on the uprising with almost calm detachment: ‘There was a lot of talk about free elections, the word spread and the next day every single town in the zone rose up but by evening the Russians had the thing in hand by using tanks and that was the end of the rising.’481
But one of those who worked with him at the BBC remembered rather more passion. Michael Peacock, later to become controller of both BBC One and BBC Two, recalled a Wheeler who was ‘really, really committed to telling the world what was going on in Eastern Berlin and every other minute he seemed to be talking about the workers rising, workers’ revolution’.
In an interview in his later years, Wheeler talked about his coverage of the East German uprising, and what he said raised a different set of ethical issues. His interviewer was Michael Nelson, general manager of the Reuters news agency from 1976 to 1989 and one of the principal architects of its global expansion into financial news. In 1997 he published a book called War of the Black Heavens about the role of Western broadcasters during the Cold War. As part of his research he talked to Wheeler about his time as a correspondent in Berlin in the early 1950s. Specifically, Nelson talked to Wheeler about his relationship with a Foreign Office unit called IRD (Information Research Department) which was secretly funded by the British government, was linked to the British Secret Intelligence Service, SIS or MI6, and was tasked with generating anti-Communist propaganda in the Cold War. It was the same unit as the one W. N. Ewer (see Chapter 2) worked for.
Wheeler told Nelson that on 16 June 1953, as the uprising developed, he was walking along the street in Berlin when a car drew up alongside him. In the car was a man called Peter Seckelmann, who he believed to be from the IRD. ‘Get over to East Berlin,’ Seckelmann told Wheeler. This tip-off allowed Wheeler and the BBC to beat their competitors in the coverage of the workers’ uprising. Wheeler believed Seckelmann got his information because the IRD had access to clandestine British intercepts of domestic East German communications.482
But the connection between the BBC and the IRD in Berlin went deeper than useful tip-offs to reporters. It was a two-way relationship. Michael Nelson discovered that the BBC job to which Wheeler had been appointed had previously been titled not as a ‘correspondent’ for the BBC External Services but ‘BBC European Service liaison officer’. It had been based inside the British military headquarters, at no cost to the BBC. By the time Wheeler took up the job the BBC had moved out of the military HQ but the close relationship with the military and the security services remained.
Wheeler revealed to Nelson that one of the two IRD men in Berlin would visit him in his office armed with sheets of information. According to Nelson, Wheeler told him he ‘was not allowed to look at them but the IRD man paraphrased the contents. They were gossipy news items about East Germany, which Wheeler sent to London for use in German service programmes.’ The IRD’s access to the intercepts of East German communications meant ‘it was not too difficult to find items that put the regime in a bad light or stories that made them look foolish’. In some ways it was the Western equivalent of the propaganda effort which John Peet (Chapter 5) was making for the Soviet side.
In 1954 the BBC–Foreign Office relationship was taken to a new level when the BBC agreed that all the mail that it received from eastern Europe would be passed on to a secret department in the Foreign Office. Any listener in a Communist country who wrote to praise or complain about a BBC programme would have their details passed to British intelligence and into their files. The BBC was under orders that wherever possible the letters should be provided with the original envelopes. Presumably this was to help identify addresses and it is possible that some of the letter-writers were then contacted by British intelligence. In return the BBC – and its External Services at Bush House – was given privileged access to confidential Foreign Office cables, an arrangement that was still going strong in the late 1970s.
Wheeler told Nelson that he received eight or ten visitors a day who would give him information. Sometimes he would persuade them to write to the BBC, effectively getting them into the system. He recalled only one occasion when he had knowingly passed information to MI6, which he had done at the request of the informant.483
In 1997, The Times summarised what was going to be in Nelson’s book: ‘BBC correspondents in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, including the veteran broadcaster Charles Wheeler, were fed classified material gleaned from covert intercepts of Soviet bloc communications in a secret government operation to generate anti-Communist propaganda broadcasts
during the Cold War.’484
Michael Nelson said the article caused great concern at the BBC because nobody had previously admitted that such a relationship existed between the corporation and British intelligence. In a later book he said, ‘It was typical of the honesty of Charles Wheeler that he should acknowledge that such a give-and-take relationship existed as an essential part of the work of a BBC correspondent at the height of the Cold War.’485
Three years after the Berlin workers’ revolt, Wheeler was again an eyewitness when the Soviet Union suppressed another uprising with chilling military efficiency, this time on the streets of the Hungarian capital, Budapest, in 1956. By now he was working as a producer on BBC television’s Panorama, carrying the programme’s only portable camera, which he’d been expressly forbidden to take with him. With typical Wheeler disdain for authority he ignored the instruction and filmed interviews with Hungarians who believed, at that moment in the uprising, that they had succeeded in asserting their national independence. Wheeler asked an English-speaking woman in the street who was now running Budapest. She replied, ‘The revolutionary committee is governing the town, the revolutionary committee was elected by several other committees which were elected in every factory and in every working place and the university.’ He asked her what she expected from the future and what she hoped would happen now. She replied, ‘We hope that our country will be entirely free.’
When Wheeler got back to London and started editing the film for transmission, news came through that Russian tanks had crushed the uprising. Wheeler found the news ‘devastating’. He said, ‘I got as close to weeping as I’d ever got about anything.’486 ‘Most shattering of all was having to listen to the BBC re-broadcast those despairing appeals to the West for help.’487
When Reporters Cross the Line Page 19