When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  The details match the story of Ramón Mercader, the man who killed Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940.

  Peet told Moor that he had been asking himself a hypothetical question: if he had been asked to do that job, would he have agreed? He concluded, ‘Sometimes, in the middle of the night, the terrible thought comes over me that I would have done it.’384

  6

  REG FOSTER AND BRENDAN MULHOLLAND

  In 1963 two newspaper reporters became legends of Fleet Street for upholding one of the principles of their craft: never reveal the sources of a story. But according to the whispers in Fleet Street the real story was rather different, that the two men couldn’t reveal their sources because they didn’t have any – they had made their stories up. Fifty years later the whispers became public and appeared for the first time on the record, triggering howls of outrage among their former colleagues.

  This became the latest chapter in the legend of ‘Foster and Mulholland’, an already extraordinary saga embracing everything from the arrest of a very British civil servant as a Soviet spy in the heart of Whitehall to the fate of a Prime Minister and the curious connection with a widow and her army officer husband. It was also a trial of Fleet Street and its ways of doing business.

  In the most detailed re-examination of the legend for many years we have tried to find out what happened and why it still matters to some people so much later. We have discovered evidence that was heard in secret and kept secret until now, but also that official files have inexplicably gone missing. Alongside a debate about whether these reporters crossed any ethical lines, there are important questions about whether the state crossed a line in its pursuit of the two men.

  The Foster of ‘Foster and Mulholland’ was Reg Foster, known as ‘Fireman Foster’, an old Fleet Street hand. As a crime reporter he knew the ropes: hang around the smoky press room in Old Scotland Yard, keep close to the telephone just in case a story broke and be first phoning the news of it back to the office. If he knew which detectives were on the case he’d try to talk things over with them in the pub, especially if they were all out of town together on a big murder story.

  He was used to working on his own; he was his own boss. Usually he only went to the office ‘once a week, late at night. And only to pick up my expenses.’385 ‘We ran our own show – we were left alone … The offices of the papers I worked for,’ he said, ‘why, they hadn’t changed since Charles Dickens was around. Desks full of banged-out Royal typewriters with worn ribbons, dim and knee deep in junked copy paper, smoke and noise and sub-editors still wearing eye shades.’

  Foster had followed that routine for much of his working life: looking for scoops and exclusives, following up leads from the police and witnesses. Before the war he’d worked for the Daily Mail, where in 1936 he’d scooped everyone with his story about the Crystal Palace fire. It was said that a relative working for the fire service had tipped him off. By all accounts the relative continued passing fire stories to him. Some colleagues thought his reports revealed his enthusiasm for fire detail. So much so that someone nicknamed him ‘Fireman Foster’ and the name just stuck. Colleagues regarded him as a safe pair of hands, one who would never betray a confidence; 386 ‘it meant the coppers trusted us,’ he said.387

  September 1962 saw 58-year-old Reg Foster still pounding the crime reporter’s beat. After working on the Daily Mail and doing war service (he served in an Army Security Branch and then worked on a service newspaper in India388) he had served on the Daily Herald and then moved to the News Chronicle, where he was its chief crime correspondent. When that paper folded he moved across Fleet Street and became ‘the number two crime man at the Daily Sketch’.

  A tall, grey-haired Londoner – he had gone to Alleyn’s School in Dulwich – he often wore a trilby hat, like many of his generation, and a jacket and tie; and when the weather demanded it a knitted jumper. It was almost a press corps uniform.

  Brendan Mulholland was from a different generation and background. Around half Foster’s age, he hailed from Dublin and was making a name for himself as a general reporter on the Daily Mail, where he regularly got his stories by-lined. He had started as a copy assistant with the London Morning Advertiser and, after working for several other titles, moved to the Daily Herald and then on to the Mail. He was dark haired, tall and muscular, with features that were described as ‘kindly but somewhat lugubrious’. He was gregarious and colleagues and friends liked his company. In the words of one obituary he was ‘one of Fleet Street’s most popular journalists’.389 The cut of his clothes was just that little bit sharper than Foster’s.

  Reg Foster and Brendan Mulholland were not colleagues, although the Mail – then a broadsheet – and the Sketch – a tabloid until its closure in 1971 – were owned by the same group. Yet a story that erupted in late summer 1962 would link them and turn them briefly into causes célèbres.

  A spy story

  On 12 September 1962 William John Christopher Vassall, a junior civil servant, turned up to his office in the Admiralty building in London’s Whitehall and was arrested by two Special Branch detectives. He was a clerical officer in the Civil Lord of the Admiralty’s office, later merged into the Ministry of Defence. He was searched by Superintendent George Smith and Chief Inspector Ferguson Smith and taken to Scotland Yard. Afterwards the detectives searched his flat in fashionable Dolphin Square, Pimlico. Vassall confessed to them that he was a Soviet spy.

  September was usually a month when the country was just getting back into gear after the summer holidays and, from a number of perspectives, Vassall’s arrest probably couldn’t have come at a worse time. The party conference season was in the offing, and there were prospects of impending industrial unrest and economic gloom.

  It was a tense time for Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s government. Throughout the year his government had been doing badly in the public opinion polls and, with a general election no more than two years away, he had acted in spectacular fashion to reverse the trend. In the wake of a particularly disastrous by-election result in Orpington only weeks before, he had sacked one-third of his Cabinet. What he had hoped would be seen as a revitalisation and renewal was instead dubbed ‘the night of the long knives’, an altogether unflattering analogy with Hitler’s vicious 1934 power struggle with the Brownshirts. Liberal MP Jeremy Thorpe famously said, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.’390

  When news about Vassall broke, a day after his arrest, there was intense interest from Fleet Street. Spy stories were big in the British press and had the potential to become epic, often aided by governments’ addiction to official secrecy and their reluctance to reveal or admit anything unless they absolutely had to. This addiction frequently fuelled suspicions that keeping silent was more to protect governments from political embarrassment and incompetent officials from exposure than to keep everyone safe in their beds. Macmillan knew this. The world was living under the shadow of the Bomb and spy stories played on widespread anxieties that the West was becoming increasingly vulnerable, rather than safer.

  Vassall’s arrest followed two major spy exposures just over a year before: the Portland Spy Ring, which had seen several people jailed in March 1961 for passing naval secrets,391 and the arrest and jailing of MI6 spy George Blake two months later.392 From Macmillan’s point of view Vassall just made things a lot worse.

  In August 1961 the Berlin Wall had gone up, then in October there had been a tense stand-off in Berlin between Soviet and Western tanks where, for several hours, the opposing sides waited to see who would fire first – neither did, but it was close.393

  Vassall’s arrest underlined for everyone how security could not be absolute. Security may have been tightened following previous spy exposures, but Macmillan accepted occasional security failure as a necessary price to pay for living in a relatively open society: it would be possible to have a watertight security system, but totalitarian methods would have to be used and he found that ‘distastefu
l to our national sentiment and contrary to our long traditions’.394

  When told about Vassall’s arrest Macmillan was far from pleased.395 He said, ‘You can’t just shoot a spy as you did in the war. You have to try him … better to discover him and control him, but never catch him…’396 He was concerned that there ‘would be a great trial … an enquiry … a terrible row in the press … a debate in the House of Commons and the government will probably fall. Why the devil did you “catch” him?’ he asked the head of MI5.397

  Fleet Street readied its army of reporters for battle with the authorities and with each other. All of the nationals, the Sundays, radio and television news, regional and some local newspapers were on the case. Several dozen reporters are known to have covered the Vassall story. Foster and Mulholland were just two.

  There were minimal facts on the record. The Times reported on 14 September that a 38-year-old Admiralty civil servant had appeared before the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, Sir Robert Blundell, at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, charged with Official Secrets offences and that he had recorded ‘secret information at the Admiralty and elsewhere’. Vassall’s address was given as ‘Hood House, Dolphin Square, Pimlico, SW’. The offences had been committed between 18 August 1962 and 11 September 1962 and the criminal intention had been ‘prejudicial to the safety or interest of the state’. The hearing lasted three minutes.

  Fleet Street mobilises

  Editors wanted to know much more. Who exactly was Vassall? What was his background? What did he do? How long had he been doing it? How did he escape detection? How was he caught?398 What damage did he cause? What did it mean for the country’s security? Who was to blame? What would be done to stop it happening again?

  Vassall’s Whitehall work, his neighbours, his local shops, pubs, restaurants, taxi firms, all became fair game in a feeding frenzy.

  As a crime reporter Reg Foster had many years’ experience of gathering just this sort of background ‘colour’ about criminals. He had covered a number of major cases; some, like ‘The Camden Town Blazing Shed Murder’, were given titles that could easily have been cited by Horace Rumpole, John Mortimer’s fictional crumpled barrister. Reg Foster is said to have become so close to the wife of a murder victim that he even helped her to fill out insurance claim forms. ‘She was later uncovered as a poisoner who had doctored her spouse’s cornflakes.’399

  Foster and Mulholland had to work fast on Vassall. Normally the legal process grinds slowly, which also gives the press time to research the kind of personal details which cannot be revealed during a trial but make for multi-page end-of-trial reports. However, where national security matters were concerned it seems justice could be lightning fast. Vassall was arrested on 12 September and on 22 October he appeared at the Old Bailey, pleaded guilty, and the same day was sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment.400 A total of forty-one days from start to finish.

  The Old Bailey had heard from the Attorney-General, Sir John Hobson QC, how Vassall, while posted to the British embassy in Moscow, had been enticed into taking part in ‘certain compromising sexual actions’ with men; and that Vassall had recalled ‘photographs being taken’. Homosexual acts were illegal in Britain and Russia, and Vassall had been blackmailed, threatened with imprisonment in Moscow, then with exposure in the British embassy and finally, slightly bizarrely, he was told that he would be responsible for a serious international incident if he did not succumb. Vassall had caved in and spied for the Russians for up to seven years. Now his punishment for that was to face eighteen years in a British jail.

  The morning after he was sentenced the newspapers were free to publish the background stories they had worked on. The Daily Sketch proudly announced ‘the whole fantastic Vassall story compiled by Daily Sketch reporting team Peter Duffy, Desmond Clough, Peter Burden, Reg Foster, Liam Regan, and led by Louis Kirby’.401

  One part of the ‘fantastic’ story was printed on the front page of the Sketch’s first edition, but ended up inside the paper in later editions. It was about an inquiry which the Prime Minister had ordered.

  Three major questions will be posed in the inquiry:

  Why did the spy-catchers fail to notice Vassall who sometimes wore women’s clothes on West End trips?

  Just how safe are Whitehall’s morals?

  Are there any more such highly vulnerable men in secret jobs?

  In the Daily Mail, Brendan Mulholland was given the lead by-line in their coverage. It included a story headlined ‘Spy Who Guarded Secrets’ about Vassall’s trips to Scotland taking secret documents to the Ayrshire home of his minister, the Civil Lord of the Admiralty, Thomas ‘Tam’ Galbraith. Much had been written in the press about their relationship with the clear implication that it was a homosexual one. Galbraith later resigned under the pressure of the publicity, although he was eventually cleared of all suspicions and returned to public office within months.

  But immediately after the post-trial surge of Vassall coverage, Fleet Street was almost immediately diverted to other more important stories. The trial had closed just hours before the world first learned from US President John F. Kennedy that the Soviet Union had been installing nuclear missiles in Cuba. Around midnight London time, as Vassall spent his first uneasy night in jail, Kennedy spoke on television live from the White House. He demanded that the sites be removed and threatened to take action if they were not. Worldwide he placed US forces on high alert. And for the next week the world nervously eyed developments in the Caribbean as the superpowers teetered on the brink of all-out nuclear war.

  The Vassall story seemed to be over for Foster, Mulholland and the crime reporters. The spy story became a political one, covered by their colleagues in the Westminster lobby. Harold Macmillan sensed that his political opponents were already preparing their weapons, sharpening their blades. He would later record in his memoirs, ‘Yet even with some experience I could not anticipate the full malignity of some of the attacks which were to be delivered on Ministers and others of the highest reputation. Yet so it was to prove.’402

  Tribunal

  Admiralty security lapses had been at the heart of the Portland spy case eighteen months earlier and a security review carried out by Sir Charles Romer had identified what needed to be done.403 Macmillan had also set up a wide-ranging review of official security under a judge, Lord Radcliffe, who reported in April 1962.404

  Now, after Vassall’s conviction, Macmillan decided to establish a new committee of inquiry under a senior civil servant, Sir Charles Cunningham, to try to prevent a repetition of the previous year’s painful security debate. And this quick, almost knee-jerk decision backfired and rather than decrease the pressures on the Prime Minister it created new ones.

  Over the next two weeks Macmillan faced repeated calls in Parliament for him to look again at the committee’s terms of reference, extend its membership, increase its powers. It was a short but highly effective war of attrition.405

  Cunningham’s committee first met on 25 October 1962. It was charged with looking into Vassall’s career and ‘the general oversight in the Admiralty of his behaviour’.406 However, Macmillan acknowledged in his diary, ‘I had to admit … that a Committee of Civil Servants would not do.’ After some discussions the idea of setting up a tribunal emerged, ‘over which Lord Radcliffe had agreed to preside’.407 Born in 1899, Viscount Radcliffe was a barrister who became a Law Lord in his early fifties without ever having been a judge. During the Second World War he was successively the Assistant Director-General of the Press and Censorship Bureau, the Chief Censor, and Director-General of the Ministry of Information, its chief executive while Brendan Bracken was minister. Radcliffe also chaired two pre-Indian independence boundary commissions (Punjab and Bengal), an inquiry into the future of the film industry and others. His ‘combination of gravitas and imagination’ made him, in Peter Hennessy’s words, ‘formidable in committee’.408 Radcliffe was a Reith lecturer and it was considered he had ‘one of the most distinguished minds of hi
s time’.409

  Meanwhile, Macmillan complained in his memoirs that he had other things on his plate: ‘While these events were boiling up, I had been engaged in what seemed the opening phase of a Third World War…’410 and he was sleeping barely two hours a night.

  So, in the face of the parliamentary clamour, Cunningham’s committee was quickly wound up and Radcliffe’s tribunal immediately set to work.

  It was at this point that the die was cast. For within the terms of reference, which were wider than Cunningham’s, was a sting. The government, taking notice of issues raised during the parliamentary shenanigans, charged Radcliffe with looking into allegations made in the press about security lapses and whether Vassall should have been spotted sooner. In Radcliffe’s own words, the tribunal decided to ‘ascertain and test the truth of certain allegations arising out of the Vassall case’.411 And because Radcliffe was a tribunal it would operate like a court and had powers to subpoena witnesses and to compel them to answer its questions, and punish them if they didn’t.

  Over the next three months Radcliffe would sit for almost thirty complete days – in a mixture of full- and half-day sessions. Around two-thirds of the sittings would be held in camera. Leading counsel would represent several major newspapers, a couple of journalists, Lord Carrington (First Lord of the Admiralty), Peter Tapsell MP and ex-minister Tam Galbraith MP.412

  A browse through the Radcliffe tribunal’s files, held in the National Archives at Kew, is enlightening. There are witness statements and affidavits, details of allegations (including sexual), transcripts, lists of the issues to be probed as well as the usual administrative minutiae.

  Quite simply Radcliffe wanted to know where the details reported in the press – some of which were lurid – had come from, and what evidence there was to substantiate them. In a different context those same questions might well have been asked in dozens of Fleet Street editorial offices, as well as in many journalists’ watering holes after hours.