It seemed like an enterprising piece of reporting: that the Irish Republican Army might have learned how to detonate terrorist bombs in Northern Ireland by remote radio signal. The story added, helpfully enough, that if British army technicians could learn what radio frequencies the I.R.A. used, the bombs could be detonated prematurely.
The article appeared last May in London's Time Out, a trendy counterculture weekly, and the British government was apparently not amused. Last month Scotland Yard arrested two Time Out reporters, Crispin Aubrey, 31, and Duncan Campbell, 24, as well as a former British army signal corpsman, John Berry, 33, for violating the 66-year-old Official Secrets Act. The arrests might have drawn only the usual left-wing cries of protest if the government had not two weeks earlier completed deportation hearings against another journalist, American-born Mark Hosenball, 25, a former Time Out reporter now on the staff of London's respected Evening Standard, and Philip Agee, 42, a former Central Intelligence Agency operative and one of Hosenball's sources for Time Out stories on her majesty's secret spooks (TIME, Nov. 29). Under British law, the government need not say precisely why Aubrey, Campbell, Berry, Hosenball and Agee are being punished, and the press is effectively prohibited from trying to find out. Says Ron Knowles, an official of Britain's National Union of Journalists: "Journalism is becoming a high-risk occupation in this country."
No Windsorgate. That is nothing new. Though Fleet Street's influential national dailies are freighted with sex, scandal and scholarly dissertations on foreign policy, hard-digging investigative reporting is all but impossible. "Our law and our attitudes have been conditioned to defend free speech rather than free inquiry," observes Editor Harold Evans, whose exceptionally aggressive Sunday Times has repeatedly incurred government wrath in the past decade. "It is all right to utter opinion but not to publish the supporting evidence." Thus probably no British newspaper would have got away with a disclosure similar to the Washington Post's report last month of secret CIA payoffs to Jordan's King Hussein (see Newswatch). Nor is it likely that a British version of the Pentagon papers or the Watergate scandals would ever have seen the light of print.
One problem is that Britain has no equivalent of First Amendment guarantees of press freedom. Instead, British journalists face a daunting obstacle course of legal restrictions: 1) strict libel laws that allow even notorious public figures to win damages for disclosures that in the U.S. would not be considered actionable; 2) stringent contempt-of-court rules under which a journalist can be jailed for any original reporting about a matter that is sub judice, that is, before a court; 3) the principle of "confidence," which protects from disclosure industrial secrets and other private information that would be considered fair game in the U.S.; and 4) the so-called D (for defense) notices, which are issued by the government as advance warnings that stories about certain subjects would be harmful to national defense. Though the notices are not legally binding, editors almost always take them seriously, and they amount to a kind of prior restraint that in the U.S. would probably be ruled unconstitutional.