The Price of Secrets in a Big Tech World
The Price of Secrets in a Big Tech World
The D-Committee, The Daily Express and the Otto John affair
The men in grey suits have been told to shove it, in what is another example of the nation state’s weaning power against globalist technology firms.
The shadowy officials this time around are Britain’s Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee, otherwise known as the D-Committee.
The group, typically made up of media executives and intelligence and military officials, re-launched after World War II (its initial incarnation was formed in 1912) in a bid to keep state secrets out of the press.
Like too many elements of British politics, the system effectively works on a gentleman’s agreement – editors are asked not to report on sensitive matters by what are known as D-notices.
These issues can include military operations, counter-terrorism tactics and anything else that could harm national security.
If journalists fail to spike such stories and break a D-Notice, they could face an injunction or worse. And if the government wants to get really nasty, it could pursue outlets in the courts and accuse them of breaching the Official Secrets Acts.
But probably the most persuasive approach is the threat to cut off government access, effectively nullifying an outlet’s editorial competitiveness.
This is something technology firms don’t have to worry about and therefore the D-Committee has no leverage over them in this respect.
It’s also why defence correspondents like The Daily Express’ Chapman Pincher were the best frenemies of the British state. This is just one small story about that relationship.
The D-Notice Affair
Pincher was cast as a journalistic freedom fighter in the late 1960s when he took on Harold Wilson’s Labour government, which wrongly accused the star reporter and The Express of breaching two D-Notices.
He had revealed in February 1967 that British signals intelligence outfit GCHQ had been regularly intercepting telexes and telegrams sent to the continent. The Express dubbed it the “Cable Vetting Sensation”.
Despite an independent investigation into the matter led by Lord Radcliffe finding against the government, Wilson continued his hard handed tactics against The Express and refused to admit defeat.
Eventually the secretary of the D-Committee, Colonel ‘Sammy’ Lohan, was forced to resign and Wilson’s relationship with the media and, to an extent, the wider British establishment soured.
A Transport Minister at the time, Labour’s Barbara Castle reportedly claimed that the Prime Minister had “gone off his rocker”.
The episode paints Pincher in a positive light, as a defender of journalistic integrity and freedom.
But another historical affair involving the journalist perhaps provides a more realistic account of the relationship between the media and the state.
The Otto John Mystery
In the summer of 1954 the head of West Germany’s internal security services, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), had emerged in East Germany.
The apparent defection of Otto John happened weeks after visiting the CIA’s HQ in the US and, more importantly, just after he commemorated the 10th anniversary of the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler at his ‘Wolf’s Lair’ on 20 July 1944.
The plot was meant to trigger a coup. Instead John’s brother, Hans, was tortured and executed for his involvement with Claus von Stauffenberg’s conspiracy (Operation Valkyrie), which used British explosives and detonators.
By his telling of the story, John only got out of the SS’ and Gestapo’s grasp by exploiting his Lufthansa job by signing on as a mechanic on a flight’s manifest and fleeing to Madrid and then Portugal, where MI6 eventually picked him up.
John had an existing relationship with the agency. They codenamed him ‘Whisky’ after recruiting him in 1942. After finding himself on British soil in November 1944, John soon found himself being interviewed by another Express man, Sefton Delmer.
The Express’ Role
Berlin-born Delmer had risen to fame as Lord Beaverbrook’s leading foreign correspondent. He cosied up to the Nazis in their ascendancy, nabbing an interview with Hitler along the way, and then he reported on the Spanish Civil War.
Too old to be sent to the frontlines, Delmer wanted to contribute to the war effort. He first broadcasted for the BBC and then joined the Political War Executive (PWE), a secret organisation headquartered out of Woburn Abbey, the family seat of the Duke of Bedford situated around 50 miles North West of London.
Amongst other underhand tactics, the PWE broadcast black propaganda into occupied Europe. Delmer’s team, including linguistics and printing specialists, used high quality information, laced with lies – they called them ‘sibs’ – to confuse and disorientate the enemy.
This information came from a range of sources, including prisoner of war camps and notably via one naval intelligence officer called Ian Fleming. The James Bond author acted as a liaison between the PWE, the Special Operations Executive and Number 10.
Fleming and Delmer had also known each other before the war, befriending each other on a press trip to Russia in 1939. They later nearly got blown-up together “at the height of the Blitz” during a dinner party.
Delmer’s most infamous channel was Gustav Siegfried Eins ‘Gustave Siegfried One’, where he starred as ‘Der Chef’, who was effectively right of Hitler.
John joined the enterprise fairly late in the game and during the broadcasting of another clandestine radio channel, Soldatensender Calais (Calais Armed Forces Radio Station).
The operation was run out of the studios of The Rookery in Aspley Guise, Bedfordshire, just six and a half miles from Bletchley Park. The area was referred to as ‘The Country’ during the war.
After the war John helped the prosecutors take on Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg trials. He would later try to work as a lawyer and re-establish himself. Then, aged 41, he was appointed as the chair of the BfV in December 1950.
The British, namely Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, the British High Commissioner in West Germany, pushed for John’s appointment, despite the French and the Americans sponsoring their own candidates for the post.
It wouldn’t be until around 11 months after John’s appointment that the state of war legally came to an end between Germany and the Allies, who, along with the Soviet Union, had carved up Berlin.
The bombed-out city had become an espionage jungle, with all sorts of émigré and black market activities.
The Gehlen Scoop
Such an environment provided rich pickings for Delmer, now back on his foreign affairs beat with The Express.
In March 1952 he bagged a major global exclusive by exposing the existence of the ‘Gehlen Organisation’ and warned of the apparent re-Nazification threat in Germany.
Headed by Reinhard Gehlen, a Wehrmacht Major General who helped oversee Germany’s military intelligence on the Eastern Front during the war, the Gehlen Organisation was initially sponsored by the US government.
The was first by the US Army’s G-2 intelligence unit and then by the CIA, which formed in 1947. The initiative was codenamed ‘Operation Rusty’. But how did Gehlen get to the Americans in the first place?
The forward-thinking Gehlen had hidden all of his documents on the Soviets in the Bavarian Alps . He surrendered to the Allies and handed the files over, which were especially useful on the Soviets’ order of battle.
After being interrogated near Washington at Fort Hunt, Virgina, Gehlen cut a deal with his captors – they would fund his intelligence operation and be furnished with Soviet secrets as the world entered a Cold War.
Gehlen and his foreign-focused intelligence organisation, which would later become the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) in 1956, would vie for power with John and the BfV. Gehlen, a career soldier, despised John’s involvement with the Nuremberg trials.
When John appeared in East Germany, he remarked: “Once a traitor, always a traitor.”
It has long been speculated that John was one of Delmer’s top sources. Delmer even travelled to East Germany when John held a press conference on his ‘defection’, the details of which are still unclear today.
That is because John reappeared in West Germany in December 1955 with the help of Danish journalist Henrik Bonde-Henriksen, then editor of the Copenhagen Berlinske Tidende.
Now, as an escape, John claimed that he was drugged and kidnapped in a plot concocted by the KGB and executed by his friend and playboy gynaecologist Dr Wolfgang Wohlgemuth (nicknamed ‘Wowo’), who drove him to the East in 1954.
It’s a plausible version of events, but there was scepticism about John’s account because, amongst other things, he lived up to his MI6 codename - he liked a drink or two.
John was charged with treason and he would stand trial in 1956. Delmer tried his best to defend his old friend when he took to the stand that November, but it was to no avail when John was found guilty in December 1956 and sentenced to four years’ hard labour.
As John no doubt contemplated the miserable state of his near future, MI6 and MI5 were considering the contents of his past, namely the memoirs that he had penned during his pre-trial imprisonment.
Files held by the National Archives show that Delmer had helpfully translated some of the work and passed it onto Pincher. Pincher in turn liaised with one Rear-Admiral George Thomson, then chair of the D-Notice Committee, over the content.
The security services saw no reason to block the material in the end, but Delmer thought it was hardly worth publishing on literary grounds.
This is how the system used to work before. But, for better or worse, it doesn’t anymore. Big technology is both the publisher and censor now. Get used to it.
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