by Robert Green
To convince the coroner Scott had been wrong, we were suddenly shown police colour photographs of Hilda’s body lying in the copse. Apart from the shock of seeing it for the first time, what struck me was how obvious her long, thin, starkly white naked legs looked lying on the flattened brown winter undergrowth. Scott had said: ‘I would have seen a dead rabbit, let alone a body, had it been there.’ A fresh wave of horror and revulsion swept over me as I flicked through the rest of the photographs of the body, including some from the autopsy. Seconds later they were retrieved.
As for conspiracy theories, Cole claimed police inquiries had failed to find any evidence. He had come to ‘the inescapable conclusion that this was an offence of burglary and that the offender was, in the main, after cash.’
He had not finished. In a brazen attempt to establish a link between police effort and results, he reeled off a stream of statistics to illustrate the scope of the investigation: ‘4,404 lines of enquiry have been pursued, 1,361 telephone messages received, 2,162 statements taken; 4,800 houses have been visited, 11,900 residents interviewed, 1,570 vehicles checked…’
For me the figures simply begged the question: why, after so much effort, had the police still failed to find a house burglar who was seen by so many witnesses behaving in such a bizarre way?
Why, after so many vehicles were checked, had Cole said nothing about the various sightings of a red Ford Escort car – let alone the episode of the strange, suited man walking from a large dark car to the copse and back soon after the landowner had checked the trees for felling?
What about fingerprints and footprints? I had been told some had been found; but we were still waiting to hear any results. Very few of Hilda’s friends who had often visited Ravenscroft in the previous year or so had been fingerprinted or checked for what shoes they wore.
Why was there no mention of the state of Hilda’s telephones?
Were there any forensic findings from the sexual activity? I had to assume that these were the details being withheld by Cole for cross-examination of any suspect.
One other figure Cole listed was 491: the number of potential suspects who had been interviewed and eliminated. Nearly 20 years later, I would discover that one of them had been 16-year-old Andrew George.
Colonel Crawford-Clarke refused to let the family’s solicitor question Cole. Summing up, he agreed with the police view of events, and concluded: ‘The only verdict that I can record in such a case is that the deceased was killed unlawfully.’ Again, the police made no attempt to meet us.
As I emerged dazed into the winter sunshine, suddenly Paul Foot introduced himself. A celebrated left-wing journalist with a weekly column in the Daily Mirror, he said that as a Shrewsbury School old boy he always enjoyed an excuse to return. He had recently published a bestselling investigation into the mysterious death in Saudi Arabia of Helen Smith that bore the hallmarks of a British diplomatic cover-up – the case cited by Cole for delaying Hilda’s funeral. Foot’s outrage at what he had just experienced was a great comfort to me, and he promised from then on to follow the case closely.
I instructed the family’s solicitor to write to the coroner requesting a copy of both autopsy reports. Crawford-Clarke replied that their release was entirely at his discretion – and refused.
Subsequently, I received independent legal advice that ‘it is not within the coroner’s lawful discretion to withhold the post-mortem report from a person who is entitled to examine witnesses at an inquest.’
Years later, I learned of an extraordinary episode after the inquest. That evening in the Horseshoes public house near Uckington, three miles south of Hunkington, a woman neighbour who had known Hilda overheard six men chatting about seeing ‘our Hilda, and that son of hers that’s in the Navy’ on TV. An older one among them with a Welsh accent warned them to keep their voices down. Another asked if any of them had been questioned by the police. A young man replied he had expected them earlier that evening: ‘They didn’t turn up.’ The questioner advised that, with an alibi, they had nothing to worry about. One admitted he had been questioned twice. Ignoring a more urgent plea to shut up, another bragged: ‘Norman knows who knocked her off.’ The older man commented: ‘I daresay we all know who’s done it.’ Two of them volunteered that they had been to Hilda’s house.
I was looking forward to relaxing over Christmas. Two weeks later, however, in the early hours of 20 December 1984, Labour MP Tam Dalyell stood up in the House of Commons and declared that ‘British intelligence had been involved’ in Hilda’s murder.
CHAPTER 4
DALYELL’S EXPLOSIVE ALLEGATION
‘SECRET SERVICE KILLED NAVY MAN’S AUNT’ screamed the headline across the front page of the London Evening Standard. The Shropshire Star more nervously chose ‘HILDA DEATH PROBE SHOCK’. On 20 December 1984, her murder erupted into one of the biggest-ever British stories of political conspiracy and intrigue. During the final all-night sitting of the House of Commons before the Christmas recess, Opposition backbench Labour MP Tam Dalyell accused ‘men of the British Intelligence’ of being involved in Hilda’s murder. The sensation went worldwide.
I had had just a few hours’ warning of Dalyell’s allegations via the MP for Yeovil, Paddy Ashdown. A former Royal Marine officer, member of Special Forces and MI6 agent, he would become leader of the Liberal Democrat Party from 1988-99 and subsequently a member of the House of Lords. An advance copy of the speech was delivered to me after Dalyell asked Ashdown, whom I knew quite well, to tip me off.
It was a fair summary of events surrounding Hilda’s murder, exposing many of my concerns about the case. However, Dalyell claimed her murder was directly linked with my work during the Falklands War. Worse, he implied that I left the Navy because I was disaffected by the war, and that I was responsible for sending the signalled order to the nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror to attack the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano. Ashdown failed to find Dalyell in time to correct these serious errors.
Sir Thomas ‘Tam’ Dalyell of the Binns, 11th Baronet, was something of a maverick. His education at Eton was in keeping with his aristocratic ancestry. However, when called up for National Service in 1950, he insisted on serving in the ranks of the Royal Scots Greys – founded by one of his forebears. At King’s College, Cambridge he studied history and economics, and ran the students’ Conservative Association.
It was the 1956 Suez crisis, while he was teaching in Edinburgh, which convinced him to join the Labour Party. Six years later he won the West Lothian seat, which he held comfortably for the next 43 years, when he retired from politics. He was highly unusual: a fearless politician who tenaciously pursued the truth no matter how unpopular his stand might be. Furthermore, he took up controversial causes, and developed a formidable network of contacts and knowledge of the Westminster system.
Dalyell was determined to uncover the facts surrounding the sinking of the Belgrano on 2 May 1982 with the loss of 321 lives. For almost two years after the Falklands War, he received a steady trickle of top secret and politically dangerous information about the sinking from several sources. For obvious reasons, he steadfastly refused to identify them. However, one source’s clear access to raw signals intelligence and intimate political knowledge of Thatcher’s reaction to each leak strongly suggested he worked in the Cabinet Office, risking his career to provide these details.
This convinced Dalyell much more was at stake than Thatcher’s need to hold her line that the attack was justified and in accordance with the laws of war. His information implied that a military response to the Argentine invasion was essential if her political career was to survive. In a hiatus following initial skirmishes in South Georgia, therefore, she needed to scupper a US-Peruvian peace initiative and provoke full-scale war. A negotiated settlement would have raised too many questions about her failure to prevent the invasion, and her insistence on the scrapping of HMS Endurance as part of the 1981 Defence Review despite minimal savings. Removal of this symbol of British resolve to p
rotect the islands effectively gave Argentine President Galtieri a green light to invade. I had been so concerned by the Endurance decision that I had written a formal memorandum placing it on record.
Since the end of 1982, Dalyell had asked a series of increasingly probing questions which had forced the Government to admit the Belgrano was not in the exclusion zone imposed by Britain around the Falklands, and therefore should not have been attacked under the prevailing rules of engagement. However, Thatcher was still insisting it was a direct threat to the British Task Force. The source of the top secret leaks had still not been found and stopped.
On 19 March 1984 – two days before Ravenscroft was broken into and searched, and Hilda abducted – Dalyell hand-delivered a letter to Michael Heseltine, the Secretary of State for Defence. In it he asked nine new questions about the Belgrano’s exact position and movements, indicating it was steaming away from the Falklands. These threatened to expose what had really happened in the South Atlantic, and the ensuing cover-up.
Dalyell’s latest letter must have been the last straw. As Heseltine explained to a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee Inquiry on 7 November 1984, just two days before Judith Cook’s New Statesman article about Hilda’s case appeared:
On 19 March Tam Dalyell wrote to me asking nine detailed questions, including changes in the Belgrano’s course … that led me to take a view that the whole question that arose in connection with the Belgrano had got to be subjected to the most detailed scrutiny … So on 22 March, I then began the investigation which led to the documents which are now known as the ‘Crown Jewels’…
Civil servant Clive Ponting, at the extraordinarily young age of 37, had just been appointed Head of DS5, a section in the Ministry of Defence responsible for Naval operations and policy matters. In 1980 he received an OBE for helping to identify dramatic savings in the defence budget, during which he impressed the new Prime Minister in a Cabinet briefing. As part of Ponting’s introduction to the project, he was given the book Your Disobedient Servant, chronicling waste and mismanagement in Whitehall. Seldom could there have been such an example of the law of unintended consequences.
In early March 1984, Ponting was instructed to collude with Government deception in response to questions to the Prime Minister from Labour’s defence spokesman, Denzil Davies. These were prompted by publication of the Gavshon and Rice book, The Sinking of the Belgrano, which finally persuaded the Labour Party leadership to back Dalyell’s lonely campaign.
On 22 March, Heseltine ordered Ponting to write a comprehensive review of the situation, ‘to be quite sure that there is not a Watergate in this somewhere’. Ponting completed the ‘Crown Jewels’ within a week. Heseltine then met his advisers to decide how to reply to both Dalyell and Davies. My former boss Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, by then First Sea Lord, was present.
Heseltine’s reply to Dalyell ignored a draft proposed by Ponting with specific answers to questions, and instead stonewalled. Ponting was appalled by this deliberate attempt to conceal information showing that Ministers had misled Parliament for the previous two years. On 24 April – a week after Hilda’s thanksgiving service – he sent an anonymous note to Dalyell that included the following:
For what I hope will be obvious reasons I cannot give you my name but I can tell you that I have full access to exactly what happened to the Belgrano.
Ponting recommended specific questions to ask. He knew it had reached Dalyell on 2 May 1984, the second anniversary of the Belgrano sinking, when the MP was suspended from Parliament for calling the Prime Minister a liar during question time. Dalyell was not deflected. His next letter to Heseltine in July listed questions exposing the most dangerous issue for the Government: its Ministers were no longer accountable to Parliament.
By then, the Foreign Affairs Committee was inquiring into the future of the Falkland Islands and prospects for a negotiated solution to the conflict. Ponting found what he needed in Your Disobedient Servant. He would not breach the Official Secrets Act if he passed any classified information to the Foreign Affairs Committee.
On 16 July, Ponting sent Dalyell an explanatory memorandum with a copy of the previous reply Heseltine had rejected. Dalyell delivered both documents to the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee – who promptly sent them to Heseltine. Heseltine launched a Ministry of Defence police investigation into the source of the leak. On 10 August Ponting was questioned, confessed, and tendered his resignation. He was charged under the Official Secrets Act a week later. Dalyell immediately released details of the cover-up in The Observer.
Ponting did not know another consequence of the 19 March Dalyell letter. Elsewhere in Whitehall, one of Dalyell’s sources told him it caused a ‘tremendous flap in Downing Street’. A meeting was hastily arranged between Thatcher and Heseltine. Following this, the order was given to find Dalyell’s source at all costs.
I would have come under suspicion soon after Dalyell began his campaign in late 1982, when I was on leave before ending my Naval career. I was one of only two officers at Northwood with access to top secret intelligence signals relating to the Belgrano sinking who had taken redundancy. Six months later, Hilda started distributing the Ecoropa leaflets making sensitive allegations about nuclear weapons being deployed in British warships to the Falklands War and the ‘explosive’ information that the Belgrano was sunk 59 miles outside the exclusion zone. As Dalyell confirmed, this precise figure had never been made public before. ‘The intelligence services would have jumped like scalded cats’, realising this information could only have come from an inside source.
Shortly after Ponting was charged, Dalyell received the following typed note, reproduced here complete with errors and indecipherable words:
Dear Mr Dalyell
I rtust you won’t send this to the Select Committee. Please understand why it is not signed.
You should know that you are getting much closer to the truth. They have been turning overfiles and intelligence desperately to see who has been talking to you and the New Statesman and the Observer.
The Prime Minister is very angry.
Clive Ponting probably didn’t tell you about Heseltines decision to have a full (but secret) internal investigation of the Belgrano affair. The Secretary of State didn’t want to get caught out by it. The study has all the secrets in it, and is inches thick. Very few people have ever seen it. Some call it the crown jewels. [3-4 unreadable words] Heseltine has one. I don’t know who are the others. The documents in the crown jewels are stamped with almost every classification the Ministry has.
Parliament should assert its right to get these things out into the open. Deep throats and journalists can only do so much but will never get the whole story.
You can tell the press about this, but carefully. Paraphrase it. Keep at it.
It was clearly not from Ponting. The indecipherable words in the copy in my possession were caused by the original having been crumpled up. The poor typing strongly indicates someone who had never been without secretarial support. This is reinforced by the typist’s remarkable inside knowledge, including the mood of the Prime Minister.
At 3.50am on 20 December 1984, Dalyell told the House of Commons that an anonymous caller had alerted him to Judith Cook’s New Statesman article. After reading it, he contacted one of his ‘numerous sources’ who confirmed the involvement of the intelligence services looking for Belgrano information I might have left with Hilda. He summarised the case, raising several questions for the West Mercia Police. Although like Judith he repeated several errors and false rumours, he did cover my main concerns.
Reminding MPs of his many dealings with the nuclear industry’s leaders, Dalyell said he could not believe for ‘one mini-second’ that they would ‘authorise minions to search the house of a 78-year-old rose grower who had elegantly expressed, but unoriginal views on reactor choice and nuclear waste disposal.’ Having shown his pro-nuclear bias, he continued: ‘The story I am told is as follows. In the early spring, the Prime
Minister and Ministers close to her were getting very nervy’ about his incessant questions about the Belgrano. Emphasising ‘this was pre-Ponting’, he pressed on: ‘Because Commander Robert Green was known to be unhappy about certain aspects of the Falklands War, and was known to have wanted to leave the Navy, he came under a cloud of suspicion – wrongly, to the best of my knowledge, but certainly under a cloud of suspicion. It was thought that he might have copies of documents and raw signals that incriminated the Prime Minister, some of the originals of which had been destroyed on instructions from a very high level by the intelligence services.
‘Just as those of us who have had certain documents have taken the precaution of keeping them in friends’ or relatives’ houses while we have them, so it was thought that some of Rob Green’s supposed records might be in the home of the aunt to whom he was close … suspicion fell on Rob Green, as he was one of the officers at the very heart of the Falklands operation. He was one of the very few to have left the service, although I understand that he had decided to go before the Falklands crisis blew up…
‘I am also given to understand that – and I quite accept it – there was no premeditated intention of doing away with Miss Murrell; only a search of her house when she was out. Alas, on Wednesday 21 March she returned unexpectedly to change. The intruders either arrived while she was dressing or were disturbed by her…’ Apparently, they had not been after money or nuclear information, but had been checking the house for any Belgrano-related documents. ‘Things went disastrously wrong. They had no intention of injuring, let alone killing, a 78-year-old ex-rose grower. Yet, being the lady she was and in her home, Hilda Murrell fought and was severely injured. She was then killed or left to die from hypothermia, and the cover-up had to begin; because I am informed that the searchers were men of the British intelligence.’