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Avoid Probate. Of all the roadblocks on Fleet Street, the most formidable is the Official Secrets Act, which makes illegal the unauthorized dissemination of any government document, no matter how trivial. Indeed the act was used in 1932 to jail a journalist for two months for publishing details of a will leaked to him by a probate clerk. Since the measure was adopted in 1911, in the heat of an anti-German spy scare, at least seven journalists have been prosecuted and four imprisoned. In 1974 the Labor Party campaigned on a pledge to narrow the most sweeping sections of the act, and the promise was repeated last autumn in the House of Commons by Home Secretary Merlyn Rees.
It is Rees, however, who ordered the deportation of Hosenball and Agee and who, as nominal head of Scotland Yard, is responsible for the arrest of Aubrey, Campbell and Berry. It may be just a coincidence that Rees was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland last spring when the potentially explosive Time Out article about radio bombs was published, and that a number of alleged I.R.A. terrorists have indeed been killed when devices they were carrying exploded prematurely.
A number of British journalists, jurists and Members of Parliament are displeased with the state of press freedom in Britain and with their government's recent round of journalist bashing. "This is extremely worrying," says M.P. Robin Corbett, a member of the Labor Party's civil liberties group. "It stinks." Corbett knows: he and some colleagues tried to debate the subject in Parliament last month, but the speaker of the House of Commons ruled that because Agee was appealing his deportation, the matter was sub judice and could not be discussed.