Despite her reputation for supporting ‘Victorian values’, the Prime Minister was not noted for taking the moral high ground with those she liked and, in time, Parkinson was allowed back into the Cabinet where he proceeded to set in motion the process that would lead to ‘Big Bang’ – deregulating financial services and opening up the City more widely to global competition. But the ‘love child’ revelations had ruined his chances of succeeding Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street. The episode’s coverage was said – by those with little knowledge of the paper’s history – to be symbolic of the way The Times under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership had departed from its values. It had given supposedly excessive space to a minor scandal, sensationalizing the accusations of a wronged woman. It had also failed to chastise sufficiently the lax moral standards expected of a man in public office who, for some, had committed the additional sin of being a brazen Thatcherite. As the paper approached its bicentenary, questions over its news presentation, priorities and Thatcherite bias threatened to undermine its continuing claim to being a unique national treasure of objectivity and truth. Matters were not helped when the paper announced it had access to the diaries of Adolf Hitler …
* * *
* Fisk thus joined the illustrious Times company of William Howard Russell’s report of the Battle of Balaclava and Charge of the Light Brigade, November 1854; Nandor Ebor’s dispatch on Garibaldi’s liberation of Palermo, June 1860; and James (Jan) Morris on the conquest of Mount Everest, June 1953.
CHAPTER FOUR
ANCIENT AND MODERN
The Hitler Diaries; the Arts; Sport; Portfolio;
The Times’s Bicentenary; Death of an Editor
I
In its one hundred and ninety-eighth year The Times made one of its most embarrassing mistakes: it announced it had bought the rights to sixty volumes of Adolf Hitler’s private diaries. It would prove to be the most expensive fraud in publishing history. With hindsight, the newspaper’s verification procedures appeared astonishingly nonchalant. It helped persuade its parent company, News Corp., to offer $1.2 million for diaries whose contents had been subjected to no more than the most superficial examination. Had the manuscripts been checked, it would have been quickly apparent that they contained little more than bloodless drivel lifted primarily from Max Domarus’s published book Hitler’s Speeches and Proclamations. Some of the entries were positively comic: ‘Must not forget tickets for the Olympic Games for Eva’; ‘on my feet all day long’; and ‘Because of the new pills I have violent flatulence, and – says Eva – bad breath’. Stern magazine, from whom News Corp. bought the rights, refused to reveal its sources or to provide a convincing account of the diaries thirty-eight-year provenance. No comprehensive scientific tests had been done on the ink or the paper. These were basic procedures overlooked in the rush to claim a scoop.
Considering that The Times had been the victim of a serious hoax in the past, it should have been alive to the consequences of repeating the error. On 18 April 1887 – the first time the paper had run a story under a double-column headline – it had published a letter supposedly written by Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish Nationalist leader, applauding the murder of the Chief Secretary of Ireland’s under-secretary. The letter was subsequently found to be a forgery (its real author, Richard Pigott, fled to a Madrid hotel where he shot himself in the head) and The Times was fined £200,000 – a sum so large that it did almost as much financial damage to the paper as the harm incurred to its international reputation. That misfortune was, perhaps, ancient history by 1983, but the Sunday Times had suffered at the hoaxer’s hand well within the memory of many of those at Gray’s Inn Road. In 1968, when Harold Evans was its editor, the Sunday Times’s owners, Thomson, secured for the paper thirty volumes of Mussolini’s diaries with a £100,000 advance payment on a promised £250,000. Thomson’s historical and forensic experts adjudged the diaries plausible. In reality, they were the work of two old Italian women. Thomson failed to get any of the money back.
The Hitler Diaries that came to light in 1983 were the work of Konrad Kujau, a Stuttgart con man with a number of convictions for petty crime. Had The Times been handed the volumes directly by such a shadowy figure at the back door of Gray’s Inn Road, basic steps to ensure their veracity would doubtless have been undertaken. Yet, because the newspaper was offered them by Stern, a current affairs journal with a serious reputation, it took far too much on trust in believing that Germany’s leading magazine was sufficiently professional not to deal in forged goods. The ensuing debacle would descend into an extraordinary and unedifying blame game that pitted The Times against the Sunday Times, everyone at Gray’s Inn Road against the extraordinary misjudgment of the historian Lord Dacre and every rival newspaper into paroxysms of gleeful jeering at the expense of Rupert Murdoch. But the font of woe was Stern magazine. It had paid $4.8 million (£3.5 million) for the diaries through a journalist-researcher of twenty-eight years’ standing on its payroll, Gerd Heidemann (Kujau’s intermediary), and was not afraid to cut corners in order to ensure a return on the investment.
In 1980, Gerd Heidemann had told Anthony Terry, the Sunday Times’s European editor, in confidence that he was trying to track down Adolf Hitler’s private papers which he believed had been lost in a plane crash on 21 April 1945. Little more was heard for some time although in late 1982 the far-right historian David Irving had contacted the Sunday Times with an offer to investigate reports of faked Hitler diaries and assorted memorabilia being traded between a German historian and a man in Stuttgart. Had the paper taken up Irving’s offer, a lot of bother and embarrassment might have been saved. But even though this was long before Irving was found guilty by a High Court judge in April 2000 of falsifying history in his portrayal of the Holocaust, he was already regarded as politically too dangerous to employ. Gitta Sereny was sent to investigate instead. Heidemann showed her round his personal archive in Hamburg but, before she could probe further in Stuttgart, she was ordered back to London as part of a cost-cutting exercise.1 This proved a false economy.
The next Times Newspapers learned of the matter was when Stern’s Peter Wickman and the foreign rights salesman, Wilfried Sorge, came to visit Gray’s Inn Road. Douglas-Home was convalescing in Norfolk at the time so The Times’s two deputy editors, Colin Webb and Charles Wilson, met the Stern team. All were obliged to sign confidentiality contracts. Webb agreed with Brian MacArthur of the Sunday Times a division of spoils: The Times would break the story and the Sunday Times would serialize it. Clearly, though, they would need to be confident that the diaries were genuine and Webb suggested getting Lord Dacre to authenticate them. It was, it seemed, an inspired choice. As an independent director of Times Newspapers since 1974, Dacre could be trusted with what was a commercially sensitive matter while, in his other guise as the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, he was well placed to pass a professional judgment. This agreed, Webb telephoned Douglas-Home with the news. With as much haste as he could muster, Douglas-Home returned to Gray’s Inn Road to take charge of what promised to be one of the paper’s greatest scoops.2
Educated at Charterhouse and Oxford, Hugh Trevor-Roper had been in British Intelligence during the war and was a member of the team that cracked the code of the Abwehr, the German secret service. At the end of the war he had been put in charge of determining the details of the Führer’s demise. This led to his acclaimed 1947 publication, The Last Days of Hitler. Another work, Hitler’s Table Talk, followed and in 1957 he became Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. In 1978 he edited The Goebbels Diaries. The following year he took up a life peerage as Lord Dacre and in 1980 swapped Oxford for the commodious Master’s Lodge of Cambridge’s oldest college, Peterhouse. Given this curriculum vitae and his place on the board of Times Newspapers, it would have been perverse for The Times to have commissioned anyone else to authenticate the diaries. Yet, his work on the Third Reich was but a part – and not the main part – of his broad-ranging interests. His real area of speciality was seventeenth-c
entury cultural and ecclesiastical history. Crucially, Webb and Douglas-Home were unaware of a key failing – Dacre’s post-war researches had been facilitated by Army interpreters. He was not an especially fluent reader of German.
Douglas-Home assured Dacre that his mission to the Zurich bank vault where the diaries were being stored was merely intended to allow him to gauge in general terms the look and feel of the documents and that Times Newspapers would not require him to pronounce definitively until he had read subsequent typed transcripts of the diaries up to 1941. But, at the last moment, just as Dacre was about to catch his flight, Douglas-Home telephoned again and explained that Murdoch had now been informed and wanted to secure the serialization rights quickly. Therefore, it would be necessary for Dacre to convey his interim impressions by telephone as soon as he had visited Zurich. Reluctantly – fatally – Dacre acquiesced.
Amid great secrecy, Dacre descended into the vault of the Handelsbank in Zurich chaperoned by Wilfried Sorge, Jan Hensmann, the financial director of Stern’s parent company, and Stern’s editor, Peter Koch. Dacre had been assured that the paper of the diaries had been definitively tested and dated to the correct period. This was untrue. Furthermore, he was assured that Stern knew the identity of the Wehrmacht officer who had retrieved the diaries from the wreck of the aircraft in April 1945 and in whose possession they had been kept until offered to the magazine. In fact, Stern had merely taken it on trust that their reporter, Gerd Heidemann, knew (but would not disclose) the German officer’s identity. The reality was that no such custodian existed and that Heidemann had been dealing directly with Kujau, the forger. Thus Dacre commenced his investigations on the basis of false premises. He was given an afternoon to inspect what was placed before him. Reading the spidery writing proved difficult but he was impressed by the style of the calligraphy and by its deterioration towards 1945. Besides the dairies shown him, there were also supposed to be supplementary archives (in reality, not yet forged) that included documents on a possible son in France, a manuscript for an unpublished book by Hitler about Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, sketches for an opera entitled Wieland the Blacksmith and about three hundred other drawings and water-colours in Hitler’s hand. This would have been an extraordinary amount for one man to forge. In quantity, it bore comparison only with the medieval trade in splinters of the true cross. Faced with the prospect of so much material, Dacre found it hard to believe it could have been the work of a lone forger (although he appears not to have thought of a more logical problem – how the real and rather busy Adolf Hitler could have found the time).
Since Stern were not planning on going public until 11 May, there was plenty of opportunity for Dacre to withhold a definitive judgment between his first sight of the diaries on the afternoon of 8 April and his chance to visit Heidemann in Hamburg to discuss their provenance and see the rest of the archive in his keeping. Dacre later blamed the turn of events on the pressure he was placed under by Douglas-Home: ‘I allowed myself to be bounced by Charles,’ he later complained, ‘instead of demanding time to check the documents in the normal scholarly way.’3 This was not the recollection of Colin Webb, who believed Douglas-Home did not apply as much pressure as Dacre seemed to imagine. If Dacre really did feel – as he should have felt – that his afternoon’s work in the Handelsbank was not enough to give an informed judgment he did himself and everyone else involved great damage by emerging from the vault and immediately getting on the telephone to urge not a qualified opinion but rather to bellow down the receiver in triumph to Douglas-Home, ‘Come at once! They’re the real McCoy!’4
The editor took Dacre at his word. Within moments of being telephoned with the joyous news, Douglas-Home and Rupert Murdoch were organizing their flight over to Zurich in Murdoch’s private jet, accompanied by Richard Searby and Sir Edward Pickering. Gerald Long (now deputy chairman of News International) arrived separately from Paris. On arrival in the vault, the material was laid out for the distinguished guests. Wilfried Sorge read extracts out in German with Long providing simultaneous translations into English. It all sounded plausible enough. The tour of inspection duly completed, the News International and Stern delegations got down to business at the Baur au Lac Hotel in Zurich. Murdoch offered $2.5 million for the US rights plus $750,000 for Britain and the Commonwealth. This got a provisional acceptance and the Times party boarded Murdoch’s jet bound for London believing the scoop of the decade was in the bag.5
Shortly afterwards, Murdoch was not amused when he learned Stern had welched on the handshake. Instead they offered the US rights to Newsweek and asked News International (or, in its ultimate guise, News Corp.) to increase its offer if it wanted to return to the bidding war. With this tactic, Stern underestimated a man who did not like to be double-crossed. When Murdoch arrived at Stern’s offices in Hamburg to recommence the negotiations, the German management were horrified to find the Newsweek executives walking in with him. Rather than be strung along against each other, the two companies had decided on a joint package that would split the cost between them. The negotiations recommenced. Despite years of participating in tough diplomacy with unions, commercial rivals and worldly shareholders, Murdoch was aghast at the naked effrontery with which Stern attempted to rip him off. During an adjournment, he discussed the situation with his team which had now been augmented by the arrival of Michael Binyon. Now the Times Bonn correspondent, Binyon had been diverted from the West German capital to Hamburg by the deputy editor’s office and told not to tell The Times’s foreign desk where he was going (an instruction that led him to assume he was going to a spy’s debriefing). Murdoch confided to his advisers that he thought Stern were ‘a bunch of cowboys.’ This assessment was borne out when, in the subsequent negotiating session, Stern responded to the repetition of the News Corp. – Newsweek offer price, which they had already agreed, by dramatically raising the hurdle again to $4.25 million. At this Murdoch said, ‘I’m sorry’, got up and walked out of the room. The Newsweek team followed him.
Back in their Hamburg hotel, Murdoch, Binyon and the rest of the News Corp. delegation enjoyed a celebratory evening. The Germans’ arrogance and negotiating antics had been beyond belief. Murdoch appeared jovial and relaxed, seemingly happy that, as he put it, ‘that’s the end of all that rubbish’.6 As soon as they learned that the News Corp. and Newsweek teams had packed their bags and left for home, the Stern management panicked. Their attempts to solicit rival bids had not met with much success and the further afield they made approaches the greater the prospect that the secret would leak out. Swallowing their pride, they flew out to New York to make Murdoch a new, much lower, offer. Now they were coming to him. It was clear who had the whip hand. Having days earlier offered, with Newsweek, to pay $3.75 million, News Corp. now picked up the diaries at the knockdown price of $800,000 for the US and $400,000 (£256,000) for the British and Commonwealth rights.
While Murdoch was gliding his thumb around the Stern begging bowl, Lord Dacre was in Hamburg visiting Gerd Heidemann. He wanted to see Heidemann’s personal collection of Nazi ‘memorabilia’. As he was shown around, Dacre was slowly coming to the conclusion that the custodian of these artefacts was a little peculiar. Besides possessing Hermann Goering’s yacht, Stern’s long-serving reporter was the proud owner of two pairs of Idi Amin’s (extra large) white cotton underpants. He also mentioned that he was in close touch with Martin Bormann who was, apparently, alive and well and living in Switzerland.7 Clearly Heidemann was at the unhealthy end of eccentricity. Nonetheless, Dacre continued to believe that a serious periodical like Stern had gone through the proper processes of authentication. He recorded a piece to camera for the magazine to use when the story was ready to break.
The History of the Times Page 24