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The Truth Shall Make You
PIE MEMBERSHIP LIST: HOW THE HOME OFFICE AND POLICE FAILED CHILDREN
Few documents have excited as much speculation as the membership list of the Paedophile Information Exchange. Claims about the number of members and their occupations have been made for more than 30 years, but the actual list itself has never been published.
Almost two years ago I learned the whereabouts of a copy of the list. I spent several months tracking down and then interviewing the person who held it. I was able to ascertain how this person came to own it and where it had been kept: a full chain of custody, in other words.
I also confirmed that last summer the list was handed to the Metropolitan Police and – subsequently – to the Goddard Independent Enquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. This ensured that if or when I obtained the document, there could be no suggestion that I had contaminated, amended or in any way interfered with its contents.
Last week, the document itself arrived at my office.
I have spent the past nine days analyzing the list. That process – of which more shortly – indicates that the police and the Home Office failed to assign sufficient importance to membership of PIE, and that children were subsequently sexually abused as a result.
First: the basic details.
The list is dated 1983 – 1984 (though there are handwritten annotations made, evidently by police officers, in 1985). These dates are important: they coincide with the period in which Leon Brittan, the Home Secretary, was under pressure to ban PIE. It is a matter of record that he did not do so.
There are 307 individuals listed as members. Four of the members were women.
Most – though not all – of the 307 have a membership number beside their name.
(It should be noted that this is only one version of what was, originally, a much lengthier record of approximately 1,000 members of PIE. The original full register was, in those pre-computer days, cut up and parceled to several police forces. This remaining list – the only one, to my knowledge, still in existence – is the result of that process.)
The document shows that some effort was made to establish the accuracy of the PIE membership records. 254 of the names were listed as UK residents: of these, addresses were shown and/or confirmed for 213 of them.
Of the remaining 41, just one was found to be an assumed name; 11 addresses were “unknown” and 4 others were shown as no longer in existence. 16 individuals were found to be unknown at the address given for them, with a final 9 showing no street address at all.
Of the 53 foreign members, there was one each in Sweden, Norway, Luxemburg, Canada and Iran; 2 each in the Republic of Ireland and West Germany (as it was then); 5 in Australia, 13 in France and 24 in the United States.
There are no recognizable politicians’ names on the list. And whilst Sir Peter Hayman, the foreign office official-cum spy outed as a PIE member in 1981 is included (his name, without any address, handwritten in pen), there is no mention of convicted spy and rumoured PIE member Geoffrey Prime.
There are two clergymen listed: one was a senior army chaplain. This man appears later to have resigned his commission and also have had a history of involvement with the Christian youth organization, the Boys’ Brigade. There is one other member shown as having a military rank – Major – but his address was a mail holding “BM Box Number” .
There are three University academics, two in the UK: one, Ken Plummer of Essex University, said last year that he had only joined PIE to facilitate his research. The address of the other was shown as an Engineering faculty, which presumably ruled out academic reasons for joining the organization.
Of the UK residents listed, 3 (all men) were recorded as having criminal records: CRO numbers have been written, in pen, beside their names – but with no details of what offences were committed. Additionally, one other member was listed as being in prison – again with no offence details shown.
These men with criminal records were rank and file members. The criminal convictions of PIE’s Executive Committee are not shown.
I do not have access to the Criminal Records Office database (maintained since 2006 by the Association of Chief Police Officers) or the former Criminal Records Bureau (now part of the Home Office Disclosure and Barring Service) . Nor do I have access to the Police National Computer which also maintains a database of criminal records. It is therefore impossible to know how many of the 254 UK-resident PIE members on the 1983-84 list might subsequently have been convicted of child sex offences.
But publicly available records, together with a separate list of British men who obtained child pornography from US dealers, show that several PIE members were subsequently convicted of offences against children- and that both the police and the Home Office failed to grasp the likelihood of this when dealing with either of the lists.
The US list first. In 1987 I was the researcher for a Cook Report documentary investigating child pornography. During the research I worked closely with two American law enforcement departments: US Customs and US Postals. Both maintained dedicated teams which were then the most effective international effort against the trade in child pornography. Both agencies supplied me with lists of British customers of proven American child pornography dealers.
Those lists contained 58 names and addresses: 53 were provided by US Customs, 5 by US Postals. Seven of those names appear on the PIE membership list: among them were three of PIE’s executive committee: Peter Bremner, Charles Napier and Leo Adamson.
Both US Customs and US Postals insisted that their lists had already been provided to the British government. Both were surprised that no action appeared to have been taken to investigate or charge the British men. The specialist agents in charge of both organisations said that their evidence should have been enough to secure convictions: this view was backed up (in a filmed interview) by the Assistant US Attorney who successfully prosecuted some of the American dealers in federal court.
I took the lists to the Metropolitan Police’s Obscene Publications Squad, with whom I was also working closely for the film. TO13 (as it was known) was then the only full-time police unit investigating child pornography. Its senior officer, Superintendent Iain Donaldson, was adamant that he had never been given the lists: he was angry about this and believed that what was plainly vital intelligence had been withheld from him, either by his superiors in the Met or by the Home Office which, under existing procedures, would have received them from the American government.
Donaldson was then fighting a bitter battle with the Met’s bureaucracy to increase the number of officers investigating child pornography and organized paedophilia. Of TO13’s 12 officers, just two were then tasked with tackling material involving children. We agreed that Roger Cook would interview Donaldson and hand the US lists to him on film: the Superintendent hoped that the embarrassment (to the Met) of appearing ignorant on national television would boost his chances of having more officers assigned to child pornography investigations. A clip of that (subsequently broadcast) encounter can be viewed below.
Donaldson and his successors did eventually get more officers. But nothing appears to have been done with the names on the US lists – even though TO13 also held the PIE membership list on which seven of them were identified.
It would be another seven years before the first of those names – Peter Bremner (who had previous convictions in the 1970s) – was charged with contact offences against children: his victims were between five and eight years old. Bremner was jailed for six months.
Charles Napier was not prosecuted until the following year (1995). He was given a nine-month sentence on two counts of sexually assaulting an underage boy.
Leo Adamson was not brought to justice until May 2011 – 24 years after the Met was given the US lists showing him to be a purchaser of child pornography (and 27 years after his name appeared on the PIE list). At his trial, the court heard evidence that he and two other men had amassed 14,500 photographs, films and drawings depicting the rape and sexual abuse of young boys.
All three men were on the PIE membership list. All three men were also on the US Customs list. Had the Home Office or the Metropolitan Police acted on either, the men’s victims could have been spared.
Nor are these three former PIE officials isolated instances: the list I obtained last week shows that Membership Number 419 belonged to one T.J. Waters. It also showed that in 1983-84 his address was that of a private school in Surrey.
“T.J. Waters” is Terence James Waters: in the 1970s and early 1980s he was an art and carpentry teacher. He was also – according to the US Customs list – a proven customer of US child pornography dealers. Like Bremner and Napier he would not be prosecuted until the mid 1990s: in 1994 he was sentenced to 10 years for possessing indecent images of children – and for sexually abusing a 10-year-old boy.
But it would be a further 17 years before the facts about his systematic abuse of young boys at the Surrey school emerged. In 2011 he was charged with (and admitted) seven counts of indecent assault and five of indecency with a child. The court heard evidence that Waters had built a “secret room” in the school loft above his art room: during the 1970s and 1980s he took boys there to abuse them.
These men – Bremner, Napier, Adamson and Waters – are only those for which I have (thus far) been able to locate public records of criminal convictions. (The relatively small percentage of the overall PIE roster should not be taken as a reliable indication of the likely offending rate amongst its members, simply as an indication that without access to the criminal records database it is very difficult to locate convictions.)
There are others on the PIE list (as well as the US Customs/Postals lists) who should be – and should have been – investigated. PIE member No. 132, for example, was a teacher at an independent prep school for boys. He quit teaching unexpectedly early, but continued – according to his obituary – to help young pupils by taking them to sports fixtures in his car and buying them equipment.
The Goddard Enquiry needs to ask searching questions about what (if any) real effort was made by the Metropolitan Police to investigate the men who were identified on the PIE list. It must also seek an explanation for the failure to act on the US Customs and Postals lists. But above all it needs to demand answers from the Home Office. Why did Home Secretary Leon Brittan decide that PIE was not to be banned ? What instructions did he (or any of his successors) give to the Metropolitan Police that PIE members were to be thoroughly investigated and monitored ? At that time, the Met was the only police force to fall under the Home Secretary’s jurisdiction.
Goddard has the PIE list. It also, to my certain knowledge, has the US Customs and Postals lists from my Cook Report film. It needs to act on them.
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AMAZON & DAVID AARONOVITCH – PT. 2
David Aaronovitch has taken issue with my previous blog piece (“Dear Amazon: We Need To Talk About David”). In a series of messages on Twitter today he argued that I had misrepresented the truth about his critical reviews of his 2009 book, Voodoo History, on Amazon.
In the interest of fairness, and as a right of reply, this update sets out Mr. Aaronovitch’s Tweet-based complaints.
Yesterday’s blog was in response to a story that Amazon was seeking to take action against those who post bogus reviews of products on its site. I drew attention to the fact that on April 21, 2014, Mr. Aaronovitch had used his column in The Times to admit that upon publication of his book he had asked “every friend and family member to go onsite PDQ and 5-star [his] baby”, [ “onsite” referring to Amazon]; and that, in his words, such positive reviews were “frauds”.
Mr. Aaronovitch’s column explained that the reason he had suborned such “frauds” was that:
Something like half of all book sales are now made through Amazon, and when you find a book on Amazon it is accompanied by reviews from “readers” who give it a 1 (lowest) to 5 star rating.
So, almost before my book was published, the first 1-star reviews started to appear, from people who had never read it. After a week, even I wouldn’t have bought it.
His solution, he said, was to get equally bogus counterbalancing 5-star reviews submitted by his friends and family.
You get your frauds to balance off their frauds. Ce n’est pas magnifique, mais (grâce à Amazon) c’est la guerre.
Leaving aside, for a moment, the dishonesty involved in this process, my blog piece drew attention to the fact that none of the one-star reviews for his book currently viewable on Amazon were posted until one month after publication. By contrast, the first five-star review currently viewable on the site was posted on the day of publication.
Mr. Aaronovitch first tweeted to say:
You’re Wrong. The simple answer is that Amazon subsequently took down a number of those too-early reviews. You can apologise.
I responded as follows:
If you can provide poof of this I will happily make it clear. Can you justify your willingness to commit fraud ?
To which Mr. Aaronovitch replied:
I don’t feel an obligation either morally or legally to ‘prove’ anything to u. U didn’t check before you made the allegation.
Under the circumstances I would say it was incumbent upon you to check. Both morally and legally. But you didn’t, did you?
Well, no, I didn’t. Because Mr. Aaronovitch’s column gave no indication that he had requested any such removal by Amazon.
There is no way for me, independently, to verify Mr. Aaronovitch’s claims that the near-instantaneous bogus negative reviews to which he referred were removed by Amazon. I therefore simply report his statement as a matter of fairness.
I did, however, ask him whether he had also sought the removal of the similarly bogus instant 5-star reviews of his book – reviews which, lest we forget, he described as “frauds”. Looking at the Twitter feed, I don’t believe he answered that question. He did however state:
None of those reviews were fraudulent but I did request them. Yr account is clearly libellous [sic] but more important, it’s wrong.
On the wider moral question of whether he felt it was right to suborn fraudulent reviews in the first place [“You get your frauds to balance off their frauds”], Mr. Aaronovitch was also silent – despite questions I asked him about this. Instead he accused me of “malice” because he had “shown clearly” that I was “the willing victim of a hoax”.
This relates to two programmes he made for BBC Radio earlier this year on the subject of satanic ritual abuse. I was one of the interviewees. I and five others (both interviewees and those referred to in the programmes) subsequently made complaints to the BBC. Those complaints were rejected at first instance by the BBC Editorial Complaints Unit: at our joint request, as is perfectly normal, they are now being considered by the BBC Trust.
I have explained to Mr. Aaronovitch that despite his attempts at baiting me on this subject, I and the other complainants feel we should not discuss the matter publicly while the BBC Trust is investigating.
I have also explained that I hold absolutely no malice towards Mr. Aaronovitch. This post, which sets out his arguments, in his own words, bears that out.
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DEAR AMAZON, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT DAVID …
The Sunday Times reports today that Amazon, the world’s largest on-line marketplace, is taking action against those who post bogus positive reviews of products on its site. It is to sue these fakes “for the manipulation and deception” of Amazon customers.
Amazon might like to begin this admirable process by pursuing someone who has recently and publicly admitted getting his friends and family to post fraudulent reviews of his work – and doing so in the hope of better sales.
On April 21st 2014, the high profile journalist and commentator David Aaronovitch told the readers of his regular column in The Times:
Sometimes though, even good people (ie: me) have to do questionable things, because the system makes us. Take my last book debunking conspiracy theories …
Something like half of all book sales are now made through Amazon, and when you find a book on Amazon it is accompanied by reviews from “readers” who give it a 1 (lowest) to 5 star rating.
So, almost before my book was published, the first 1-star reviews started to appear, from people who had never read it. After a week, even I wouldn’t have bought it.
There is only one thing you can do in this situation. You ask every friend and family member to go onsite PDQ and 5-star your baby. You get your frauds to balance off their frauds. Ce n’est pas magnifique, mais (grâce à Amazon) c’est la guerre.
This casual admission of “fraud” was – to me, at least – shocking. I have published 13 non-fiction books: I have never once felt tempted to encourage or commission fraudulent reviews intended to persuade potential readers to buy my work.
I am prepared to accept Mr. Aaronovitch’s assertion that other people practice a similar dishonesty. In 2010 the academic historian Orlando Figes admitted using a false name to post favourable reviews of his own work on Amazon (as well as uploading critical reviews of books by his rivals) But following a very public controversy Figes apologised for his actions, describing them as “foolish errors”. Mr Aaronovitch, by contrast, seems cheerfully unrepentant.
But aside from exposing his remarkable lack of integrity (or honesty), when examined in detail Mr. Aaronovitch’s admission of fraud also reveals much about his own lax journalistic standards. The “justification” he claimed for perpetrating his fraud was that “almost before my book was published, the first 1-star reviews started to appear, from people who had never read it”. A careful analysis of Amazon suggests this is untrue.
His book, Voodoo Histories, was published on May 7, 2009. The first 1 star review is dated June 8 – a full month after publication. It was followed by a handful of other 1 star reviews from July onwards.
By contrast, two 5 star reviews are dated May 7 – the very day of publication. A further six 5 star reviews appeared before the first critical 1 star review was posted.
If Mr. Aaronovitch can’t even be accurate when confessing to dishonesty it makes me (as a fellow journalist) wonder how much reliance should be placed on the rest of his writing.
And beyond this, that The Times continues to employ a man who, by his own account in its own pages, has attempted to manipulate and deceive – for personal financial gain – consumers on the world’s largest retail platform, suggests that honesty, accuracy and integrity are no longer deemed important requirements for ‘star’ journalists.
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A HARLOT EXPOSED: EXARO & THE VIP ABUSE ALLEGATIONS
For a self-styled serious journalist, Mark Watts can be remarkably slippery when put on the spot.
He rarely answers questions from other journalists (myself included) about either the stories his website, Exaro, publishes or the rigor with which it might – or might not – have sought any form of corroborative evidence before rushing into print.
I believe strongly that journalists have a duty to be open and transparent. This means being able and willing to back up incendiary claims which will inevitably lead to public money being spent on investigation into their accuracy. Mr Watts evidently disagrees. Last week he was pinned down by Newsnight in the wake of Panorama’s programme about the VIP child sexual abuse (and murder) allegations which Exaro – to use its own word – “exposed”.
Lest we forget, Exaro also claims credit for the enormously expensive police enquiry – Operation Midland – which ensued. Yet Mr. Watts declined to answer a succession of perfectly straightforward and reasonable questions about what due diligence he and his staff had undertaken before promoting the sensational claims of its stable of survivors – “Nick”, “Darren”, “Andrew” and Esther.
But Mr. Watts’ elastic relationship to evidence and openness appears to extend beyond evading the questions from other journalists. Today, the man who has funded Exaro’s activities (to the tune, so far of more than £2 million) published a statement explaining his support for the business. Dr. Jerome Booth, a wealthy financier, explained that he had discussed this week’s criticism of Exaro’s behaviour with Mr Watts. He was, apparently reassured, stating that Mr. Watts and his team were only doing what any other journalist would do: reporting the fact that police are making enquiries.
From my reading of the website, Exaro has always been very clear it is reporting on allegations that are under active investigation by the Metropolitan police.
Sadly, this is untrue. Exaro has, in fact, pronounced that the allegations from its complainants are “undoubtedly an enormous scandal”. In other words, in Exaro’s view they are accurate.
This ringing endorsement of the allegations made by its stable of complainants was contained in an e-mail to me in July last year. I had written, politely, asking Exaro either to provide evidence for a story which I knew to be false, or to withdraw it. Here’s the highlights of the response.
Your e-mail did make us laugh here at Exaro, in light of recent events. We stand by everything that we have published … You are an embarrassment to journalism.
Having had enormous success in forcing the issue of organised, child sex abuse in relation to a range of institutions in the UK onto the national agenda, culminating in a critically important overarching inquiry, we prefer to continue to focus our efforts in exposing – often in conjunction with other media outlets – what is undoubtedly an enormous scandal.
Hubris and self-importance aside, the antics of Exaro over the VIP abuse allegations are the polar opposite of good journalism. They, instead, are that toxic mixture of power without responsibility. And that, as a former Prime Minister (Stanley Baldwin) once noted, has been “the prerogative of the harlot through the ages”.
Quite.
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THE LOUSE & THE FLEA: PANORAMA, EXARO & THE VIP PAEDOPHILE SAGA
In 1812, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published their first volume of fairy tales, Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Tale Number 30 told the story of The Louse and The Flea.
In the tale, a flea and a louse happily share a home until one day the louse dies while brewing beer in an eggshell. What follows is a chain reaction of catastrophe, as the flea and then various household objects get dragged into a downward spiral. This eventually envelops a human child and a stream; finally the water from the stream overflows and drowns the flea, the louse, the child and everything in the little house.
Yesterday, news and social media were swamped by the latest row in the highly politicised saga of investigations into an alleged network of VIP paedophiles. The cause was a much-delayed one-hour Panorama programme which purported to answer the question “What’s The Truth ?”
Panorama sought to examine these allegations – of which more shortly – and, more specifically, how they came to dominate the news, social media and police agendas over the past 18 months. Doing so brought it squarely into conflict with Exaro News – a self-proclaimed online “investigative news service”. Exaro has made most of the running in the VIP paedophile saga and, in happier times, the BBC itself had maintained a working relationship with its journalists.
The BBC programme makers’ decision to investigate the origins of what , lest we forget, is a very expensive police enquiry, produced howls of outrage from Exaro and its supporters. Exaro’s grandly-styled Editor-in-Chief, Mark Watts, took to Twitter to denounce the film (which he had not seen) as a plan “to smear survivors of child sex abuse”; for good measure he accused the Panorama reporter, Daniel Foggo, of having a “conflict of interest” on the extraordinary grounds that as a child he (Foggo) had lived on the same street as Sir Peter Morrison, a deceased Tory MP who unquestionably had a sexual interest in children.
Just as the sequential disaster unleashed by the louse and the flea expanded exponentially, so too did the battle between Exaro and the BBC draw in new players. Exaro reported that the Metropolitan Police has launched an investigation into allegations that one of its officers leaked to Panorama personal information about the key complainants in the VIP paedophile saga; the Met followed this up with an additional statement denouncing the programme for its potential to deter victims of abuse from coming forward. And to cap it all, MPs who had once campaigned for better child abuse investigation found themselves pointing fingers of blame at each other.
Before examining the behaviour of Exaro and the BBC it is worth recalling the key allegations in this tale.
According to a witness known only as “Nick”, he and other under-age boys were abused, tortured and – in three cases – murdered by a group of paedophiles at two addresses in London. Among the men he has named are former Prime Minister Edward Heath, former Home Secretary Leon Brittan, former Conservative MP Harvey Proctor, as well as senior army officers and spies. These allegations are being investigated by Operation Midland. (Mr Proctor, for the record, roundly denounced the allegations at a televised press conference in August).
The broad thrust of “Nick’s” claims is alleged by Exaro to have been supported by a man known only as “Darren”, and a woman (who has waived her right to anonymity) called Esther Baker.
Beyond Midland’s remit is another police enquiry – Operation Fernbridge (formerly Fernbank). This has was set up to examine (primarily) allegations that in the late 1970s or early 1980s children were taken from council-run care homes to be abused at the Elm Guest House in Barnes, South-West London. In or around 2012 what purported to be a “guest list” of clients at EGH was put up on the internet. It contained a number of famous names including Cyril Smith MP (then deceased and recently-outed as an abuser of boys) and Leon Brittan.
Declaration of interest: in 2013 and 2014 I met and interviewed senior detectives from Operation Fairbank/Fernbridge. I was not the only journalist to do so: the officers were – then – remarkably open and honest about the task they had been set. And it was a very difficult task. From the outset, Fairbank/Fernbridge was hampered by two serious problems. The first was one of resources: its team was very small – just seven officers – and struggled to get the financial resources to carry out its enquiries. The second was Exaro News and the group of informants which had coalesced around it.
Two of the key figures in this were a former social worker called Chris Fay and a deeply-damaged man who, after meeting Fay, had first made allegations about abuse by VIPs at EGH in the early 1990s.
Fay had met Carole Kasir, the co-owner of EGH, in or around 1989 – seven years after the guest house was raided and shut down. After Kasir died Fay began campaigning to expose what he claimed she had told him about politicians and celebrities who abused children at the premises. He claimed Kasir had shown him a list of names: he copied this down and, in time, it would become the “guest list” whose posting on the internet led to Fairbank/Fernbridge. He also alleged that Kasir had shown him photographs of her clients, including two showing Leon Brittan in compromising circumstances.
Unfortunately, Fay has never been able produce these photographs. Worse, he has both a conviction for serious dishonesty, and a habit of associating himself with proponents of extraordinarily wild conspiracy theories (notably the bizarre “film-maker”, Bill Maloney).
Fairbank/Fernbridge detectives interviewed Fay. They quickly came to the (correct) view that the so-called EGH “guest list” had no evidential value, since it was hearsay, not created by a first-hand witness to events and had no reliable chain of custody. They also interviewed the man who had taken up with Fay in the early 1990s. This man – then calling himself “Andrew” – had published versions of his stories on-line. He proved to be a voluble – and volatile – witness. When I first met the officers from Fairbank/Fernbridge they were in the middle of conducting a succession of very long interviews with him at a location several hundred miles outside London. The detectives were convinced that “Andrew” had indeed endured sexual abuse as a child, but were concerned at serious inconsistencies in his statements.
They were also deeply worried about the continuing involvement of Fay and Maloney – and, with Fay’s help, of Exaro News. “Andrew” told the officers that these contacts were unwelcome and being forced on him by Fay. They moved Andrew to a safe house and set up surveillance: the senior officer told me that he if Fay and Maloney turned up he planned to arrest them for attempting to pervert the course of justice. But the surveillance revealed something different. It showed that “Andrew” was inviting Fay and Maloney to meet with him. Not unreasonably, this raised further doubts about “Andrew’s” reliability.
That problem was further underlined by a story in Exaro. This claimed that Fairbank/Fernbridge had seized a videotape which showed an ex-Cabinet minister (although he was not named this was clearly Leon Brittan) in compromising circumstances at Elm Guest House.
I spoke with the detectives the day after this story appeared. Not only did they deny it point blank, they explained how it had come about. “Andrew” had told Exaro that a senior Fairbank/Fernbridge detective had told him that the team had seized the video. Exaro did not bother to check this claim with the police. It would not be the last time Exaro published unchecked or downright false stories about the VIP paedophile enquiries.
Exaro’s journalists were contacted by “Nick” in 2014. The news website began running a series of stories based on his claims. At that stage it had no corroboration of any sort for the allegations. I – and others – have repeatedly asked Mark Watts whether it attempted any sort of due diligence investigation before publishing. He has never replied. However, the website’s journalists have dropped hints that there was a corroborative source: the man known as “Andrew”.
Doubts about Exaro’s methods were re-enforced by two separate events. The first was the long strange saga of Leon Brittan and the Customs Officer. A full account of this can be found on this blog, dated August 4: but in essence, Exaro published a story claiming that a retired Customs officer had been recording telling a journalist that in 1982 he had impounded a film and/or video which showed Brittan in sexual circumstances with a child.
The story was simply and pitifully untrue. When the recording surfaced, it showed clearly that the journalist (working for the Express) had tried but failed to get the ex-customs officer to confirm this allegation. He did not do so. Exaro’s reaction to being challenged on this (and on its other ‘scoops’) has been to denounce those who ask questions as “spies” or “useful idiots” for the intelligence services. For good measure it pronounced me to be “a disgrace to journalism”.
The second event was the arrival in the sage of a man known as “Darren”. The stories he told were similar to those of “Nick”, and involved some of the same perpetrators and locations. Exaro duly decided that even though (by “Darren’s own admission) the abuse he endured took place a decade later than “Nick’s”, this provided corroboration of Nick’s claims of abuse, torture and murder.
How much due diligence did Exaro devote to checking “Darren” out ? Mark Watts does not reply to such questions, but had he or his staff done any research they would have discovered that “Darren” has a conviction for a bomb hoax and has previously made false confessions to rape and murder. This does not automatically mean he cannot be believed: it should, however, raise questions about how much reliance can be placed on his evidence. Despite this, Exaro arranged for “Darren” and others in its stable of complainants to take part in an Australian television programme on the VIP paedophile alegations. That film presented their claims as established fact and was the worst piece of reporting on child sexual abuse allegations (a crowded field) that I have ever seen.
If, pace the Grimms, Exaro is the louse in the story, what of the BBC ? Despite the outraged denunciations of the past two days, the Panorama programme was actually something of a damp squib. It provided very little new information, merely repeating the widely-published facts about Mssrs Fay, Watts, “Nick” and “Darren”. And had it confined itself to that tepid ‘once over lightly” it might not have been drawn into the spiral of calamity begun by the lousy efforts of Exaro. Sadly, it did not.
Firstly, it conducted an interview with “Andrew” (now re-christened as “David”) in which he said that he had never intended to name Leon Brittan, but that the name had been suggested to him by Fay and others. In purely procedural terms the Panorama team did everything right: it shot “David/Andrew” in semi-silhouette and used an actor to re-voice his words so that there could no fear of identifying him. It also – rightly – reported at least some of his lamentable history of unreliability and (again righty) wondered aloud whether this invalidated his testimony. And there lies the problem: Panorama relied on what it acknowledged was a highly unreliable witness to demolish the foundations of Exaro’s equally questionable stable of complainants. The flea was dragged into the louse’s spiral.
But Panorama’s worst offence concerned Brittan himself. It wheeled out testimony from former colleagues of the late politician to portray him as a man terribly and wrongly traduced as a paedophile.
Yet as Panorama knows (or should know) there is strong evidence to indicate that Brittan had a sexual interest in children. As I have reported elsewhere, tucked in the files of Operation Fairbank/Fernbridge is a formal 2014 statement from the ex-customs officer. This, of course, denounces Exaro’s bogus story about the 1982 videos and films; but it also contains the startling – and detailed – account of how at a later date the ex-customs officer stopped Brittan as he arrived at Dover. A search of Brittan’s car yielded a child pornography videotape which, even 30 years later, the contents of which the ex-customs officer was able to describe.
In seeking – quite rightly – to hold the Exaro/Chris Fay-generated stories of abuse torture and murder up to the light, Panorama fell into the trap of dismissing all the clear and unequivocal evidence of VIP or politically-protected paedophiles (Cyril Smith, Peter Morrisson, Sir Peter Hayman to name but three).
This, as I and others have warned previously, is precisely the polarisation and entrenched shouting match which will lead to a backlash: a spiral of catastrophe which will engulf all those around the louse and the flea, and drown out the voices of those who have been genuinely abused.
It is a cliché to say that one of the biggest problems of modern Britain is its media. In the particular case of child sexual abuse that cliché is horribly, miserably true. In the feverish atmosphere of claim and counterclaim, patient and forensic sifting of evidence is abandoned. Indeed, those of use who try to do so find themselves denounced by those who see only black and white as “running with the hare, while hunting with the hounds”.
I do not know whether the claims made by “Nick”, “Darren” Esther, or “Andrew/David” have any factual basis. They are – quite properly – being investigated by police. What I do know is that the vicious ideological trench warfare being conducted by my fellow journalists (who likewise do not know what is true and what is not) can only hinder quiet, patient enquiries and ultimately damage the efforts of those whose job it is to protect children.
Flea and louse, louse and flea: tell me – what, really, is the difference ?
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VICTIM OR SURVIVOR ? WHY WORDS MATTER
On December 22 last year, listeners to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme heard the presenter, John Humphrys, take to task a man who had endured child sexual abuse: his ‘offence’ was to call himself a survivor.
In that interview with Peter Saunders, chief executive of the charity NAYPAC (National Association For People Abused in Childhood), Mr. Humphrys grumbled:
I have some difficulty with the word survivor and I think perhaps others do as well. But anyway, let’s call them victims can we? Can we agree on the word victims at any rate ?
As the heated public controversy over historic child sexual abuse has become ever more politicised (note the small ‘p) and polarised, the use of the word “survivor” has become a lightning rod for the anxiety of journalists and commentators uneasy about the ever-growing list of official investigations.
To some, it wrongly appropriates a term previously most associated with victims of the Holocaust. For others, such as the barrister and vocal critic of current child abuse investigations, Barbara Hewson, it exemplifies what she denounces as “the ideology of victimisation”. Writing in Spiked (online) Magazine in December 2013, Ms Hewson complained:
Victims/survivors are praised for their courage, and enjoined to recover. The language of recovery is permeated by the doctrinaire religiosity of the 12-step movement, pioneered by the founders of AA in the US. This may explain why some victim-advocacy groups can sound cult-like, with their own jargon (‘grooming’, ‘trafficking’, ‘mind control’) and their disdain for non-believers.
Ms. Hewson (and those like her) attack from an entrenched position. Historic abuse is – in their view – either a chimera or a dangerous obsession with what Ms Hewson has termed “stale claims”. And the increasing self-identification of victims as “survivors” seems to these critics to embody all that is wrong about a “moral panic” over child sexual abuse. (Ms. Hewson has argued that the age of consent should be reduced to 13).
This weekend, in a small airless room in London’s Inner Temple, I heard the clearest and most compelling enunciation of why Ms. Hewson and Mr. Humphrys have got it wrong. And why the words we use matter a very great deal.
For two days the UK Child Sexual Abuse People’s Tribunal heard testimony from those who had endured rape and molestation in childhood. UKCSAPT is a unique volunteer-based attempt to examine cases of institutional child sex abuse. It runs in parallel (and in some contrast) to the official enquiry led by Justice Lowell Goddard: it has none of that body’s inquisitorial powers, nor its vast budget. But it is nonetheless carefully organised on sound legal principles and has the benefit of expert advice from a reputable firm of solicitors. Its panel of judges include a former UN War Crimes prosecutor and a highly experienced clinical psychologist specialising in child protection. Their findings will, in time, be presented to the Home Secretary.
I was privileged to be asked to film the Tribunal’s proceedings, to make a record for future understanding, of the testimony given by its witnesses. On Saturday afternoon, one of them explained why the word “survivor” matters.
The witness – like all those giving evidence she was guaranteed anonymity – endured many years of sexual abuse as a child. In time, one of her abusers was convicted for at least of the offences he inflicted on her: she was therefore unquestionably victimised. But she told the judges that she is not a “victim”. These are her words.
A victim is someone who won’t let go [of the abuse]. A victim is someone who is still living through it. Survivors are people that fight back and who won’t let the past ruin their future. We have to be able to distinguish between the two.
A lot of people want to be known as victims. But most want to be known as survivors.
This quiet articulation, from a quietly determined middle-aged woman, puts the lie to the hostile denunciation of survivors as members of a self-pitying “cult”. The reality is almost exactly the opposite: by using the word “survivor” they are – very deliberately – renouncing self-pity. To criticise them for this is – at best – lazy; at worst it is ill-motivated.
I was asked to film the Tribunal because I have a long history (as a journalist) of investigating organised child sexual abuse. As I packed up the camera, lights and microphones it dawned on me that the witness’ statement about the importance of choosing the right word to describe those had suffered sexual abuse in childhood has a parallel in the labels used to refer to the adults who commit these offences.
For (too many) years – decades – the visual record made by abusers of their offences was called “child porn”. It was a phrase guaranteed to minimise the brutal truth: “porn” is perceived as naughty or titillating, rather than cruel and vicious, and it was no coincidence that for far too long there was no law prohibiting the possession of what is no ore and no less than a visual record of child sexual abuse. When I made a film about the problem in 1987, followed by a book in 1990, I insisted that it be called Child Pornography – never porn. Today, simple possession is illegal and the material itself is (rightly) termed Indecent Images of Children. Words matter. They have power.
They matter, too, in the way we use them to describe offenders. Too often, too many of my colleagues (and some police) lazily label all those who abuse children as “paedophiles”. But paedophilia is a precise term: it defines those who have a sexual interest in pre-pubescent boys or girls. Those with a sexual preference for post-pubescent adolescents are actually hebephiles. Given that both fixations, if acted on, are illegal why does this distinction matter ? Because the methods for investigating and then (with luck) treating the offenders differ radically between the two. Incorrect labelling can hinder both prosecution and rehabilitation. Words matter.
Exactly this same importance applies to the word used to describe those who have endured child sexual abuse. We ignore or dismiss it at both our peril. And theirs.
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HOW SAFE IS YOUR PLANE ?
On Tuesday next week (September 29) the United States Court of Appeals (Tenth Circuit) will hear a case which has huge importance not only for the safety of anyone who gets on a commercial aircraft, but for consumers of products of all Government-regulated industries. It will determine, just one week after the Volkswagen scandal surfaced, the extent to which consumers of almost any (theoretically) regulated product or service are forced to place their entire trust in those government regulators – even when their actions suggest that trust is not deserved.
The case to be heard in Denver on Tuesday bears an unusual-sounding name: United States of America ex. rel. Taylor Smith, Jeannine Prewitt and James Ailes v. The Boeing Company and Ducommun Inc. Nor is it solely the title which makes this law suit extraordinary.
The hearing will be the culmination of a 10-year battle by three very brave whistleblowers (and their lawyers) to expose potentially “catastrophic” construction flaws which may affect the quallity and safety of more than 1600 of the world’s most commonly-used passenger planes. It has been, from the outset, a David v. Goliath battle. Or rather a David v. two Goliaths. Boeing is a $90-billion p.a. behemoth: it is the world’s second-biggest aircraft manufacturer and for much of its recent history has been the second largest defence equipment supplier to the United States Government.
The three whistleblowers – Taylor Smith, Jeannine (‘Gigi’) Prewitt and Jimmy Ailes all once worked for Boeing in Wichita, Kansas. They are not rich: both Ms. Prewitt and Mr. Ailes no longer have jobs. Their lawyers have worked for a decade without financial support or payment for their time: they do not have the vast resources available to Boeing. What both the whistleblowers and the lawyers should have behind them is the United States government. Unfortunately, it has failed to support them; worse it has actively – and disgracefully – worked to undermine their case.
The story is long and – understandably, since it focuses on highly technical aspects of aircraft production – complex. In 2010 I made a one-hour investigative film about it for Al Jazeera: that film painstakingly examined the whistleblowers’ allegations, and uncovered some extraordinary – and unquestionably improper – behaviour by the US Government regulator, The Federal Aviation Administration. The film can be viewed here.
In essence, however, the underlying story is straightforward. In the late 1990s Boeing assigned Smith, Prewitt and Ailes to carry out an audit at one of its sub-contractors – AHF-Ducommun Inc. – based in the Los Angeles suburb of Gardenia. Ducommun was a key supplier for Boeing’s (then) fairly new range of passenger aircraft: the 737 New Generation (NG). Amongst the parts it supplied were chords and bearstraps.
Chords are the most fundamental part of any aircraft: vast semi-circular ‘ribs’ which lock together to form the plane’s skeleton. Bearstraps are vital re-enforcing panels which bolt on and around the weakest points in the fuselage – the exits and other openings. Both are officially described by Boeing’s own repair manual as Primary Structural Elements; it warns that if these fail it can lead to the “catastrophic failure” of the aircraft.
When it was designed in 1994, the 737NG was to be a highly advanced new type of aircraft. Before it could go into production Boeing was legally required to submit to the US Federal Aviation Administration precise details of exactly how it planned to manufacture the new aircraft’s component parts. Once those plans are submitted to the FAA – the regulatory agency for all new US aircraft manufacture – FAA regulations require that they be followed. To the letter.
Boeing’s detailed plans for the 737NG explicitly required the parts to be cut, shaped, formed and inspected by state of the art computer-controlled machinery. This new technology ensured that parts would be produced to extraordinarily fine “tolerances” – margins of deviation from designed dimensions. These fine tolerances (less than the thickness of two sheets of normal paper) meant that the 737NG was authorised to fly higher and under greater pressure than previous 737 models which had “hand-formed” parts: such “hand-forming” means individual parts are much less accurately made and typically requires the gaps in airframes to be packed with filling material and “shims”.
Based upon these much publicized new design and manufacturing techniques Boeing was able to charge higher prices for the new 737NG airplanes than for its previous models of 737s; it was also able to compete effectively with new airplane designs being marketed by its rival, Airbus.
Boeing ordered the Ducommun audit because parts the LA-based company supplied, including chords and bearstraps delivered to the 737NG assembly plant in Wichita, were frequently found to be badly made: some were too small, some were too large, others had assembly holes drilled in the wrong place. A sample internal Boeing Discrepancy Report confirms this.
The audit team discovered the reason for these discrepancies. Instead of using the planned and contractually required computer-controlled manufacturing process (which was very expensive), Ducommun had instead been “hand-forming” the parts. In some cases this meant workers drawing the outline by hand with a magic marker and then cutting it – again by hand – using an angle grinder. The auditors even produced photographic evidence of this (below).
They also discovered that Ducommun had kept two sets of “books”. One – the official account – purported to show that all the parts were computer-manufactured; the second told the true story – that the parts had been hand-formed.
The auditors reported their findings to Boeing. The first page of the Boeing Internal report – August 21, 2000 shows that it was sent to the company’s most senior managers and officers. But instead of acting on it, Boeing told the auditors to keep quiet. The defective parts – illegal under the FAA’s Type Design Certificate for the 737NG – continued to arrive at Wichita, where they were forced into shape using hammers, shim fillers and by drilling additional holes. These improper manufacturing techniques are dangerous, and can seriously damage the structural integrity of the fuselage.
Smith, Prewitt and Ailes did not keep quiet, and despite threats from Boeing approached the FAA, who promised to investigate, and to keep the whistleblowers’ identities secret. Neither promise was fulfilled. In time all three would lose their jobs.
The lawsuit they then initiated – the one which will (after more than 10 years) reach the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday – is a classic whistleblowers’ suit. It is brought under the US False Claims Act: this legislation, dating back to the American Civil War, means that the plaintiffs (termed ‘Relators’) sue on behalf of the American people. This limits the law suit to the specific 737NG aircraft which were bought by the US government – a small sample of the entire commercial 737NG fleet.
The case began in 2005. The twists and turns it has taken since then are labrynthine and bizarre. For many of those years it was in the hands of a judge who had been appointed by President Kennedy: when he died – still in charge of the case – Judge Wesley Brown was 104 years old.
But it is the behavior of the FAA – the US government agency which is meant to protect consumers and regulate the industry – which has been most disturbing. Most of the half a million internal Boeing documents handed over to the whistleblowers during discovery have been locked away under court seal. But those which are public show that the FAA handed to Boeing “designated authority” to police itself. Boeing then handed this self-regulatory authority on to Ducommun.
What did the FAA do to investigate the whistleblowers’ evidence – evidence which suggests that many 737NG aircraft were built with non-conforming Primary Structural Elements and are therefore illegal (because they breach the design requirements in the engineering drawings) and potentially “catastrophic” ? Almost nothing. Freedom of Information Act documents indicate that in 2003 and 2005 the FAA cursorily looked at submissions Boeing made in response to the whistleblowers’ claims – and pronounced itself satisfied. It never held a formal investigation, much less any public hearing. There is no indication in the public records that the FAA has ever meaningfully investigated this matter; instead, it appears to have handed the investigation off to Boeing – and thus that Boeing may have been allowed to investigate itself.
Worse still, in 2010, when the case was nearing its first full court date, the FAA’s chief scientific and technical advisor, Robert Eastin, gave Boeing an affidavit, essentially giving the company and the 737NG a clean bill of health on the Ducommun parts. (Boeing Exhibit 749). He did so despite having failed even to look at the FAA’s own database of Service Difficulty Reports which clearly showed that serious cracking and corrosion had been observed in the 737NG structural parts produced by Ducommun. (You can view the SDR files here.)
But who had written the Eastin affadavit ? During cross-examination at his pre-trial deposition hearing it emerged that this vital document had been drafted for him by Boeing. On page 56 of the transcript of this deposition 15015EastinRobert727) Mr Eastin admits that Boeing wrote its own exoneration – and theFAA’s most senior safety officer simply accepted that:
As I recall the first draft came from Mr Koh [Boeing’s lead external counsel]. And when I reviewed it I did not change that.
The federal district court heard opening submissions last year: it was presented with overwhelming expert witness testimony from engineering, manufacturing, and quality assurance experts who have unimpeachable credentials, and documentary evidence which supported the whistleblowers’ allegations. To test that evidence against Boeing’s denials, the court should have set the case down for a full trial. It did not. Instead the district court decided that the FAA “investigation” (such as it was), carried out by unknown persons done several years before Boeing was required to disclose the most crucial documents in the court proceedings – an”investigation” quite possibly even done by Boeing itself – was the final word.
Most disturbingly, the judge ruled that courts cannot exercise oversight when a federal agency has regulatory authority – in this case the FAA. Despite the fact that it was unknown what the FAA had done, and there had not been any public hearings, and there was no reviewable record of the FAA investigation, the district court decided that the regulator was, essentially, the court of last resort, and because the regulator chose to do nothing and took no action, the problem simply could not exist.
Bill Skepnek, the whistleblowers’ long-serving and dogged lawyer sums up this Alice in Wonderland view:
The bottom line is that the judge found significant evidence of factual disputes between Boeing and the Relators that are amply supported by Boeing’s own internal documents, but found those disputes are not “material” – of legal significance – because if they were the FAA would have done something.
This makes a dangerous mockery of both all consumer protection by US government regulators – and of the courts as the correct place for important issues of public safety to be judged. According to Bill Skepnek:
If Boeing convinces a jury it told the truth about its manufacturing process then so be it: public trust is then affirmed. But the system needs transparency. Meanwhile this case has been dismissed because unknown persons, reviewed unknown documents and/or performed unknown tests, on unknown parts, in unknown places, at unknown times, to reach their conclusion.
US regulators are calling for transparency about the Volkswagen scandal: yet this case involving Boeing is hopelessly opaque. Why should Boeing be treated differently ? For the FAA, does its role as a cornerstone of US military provision make it a sacred cow ? The old axiom of the integrity of governance is: We do what we say, and we say what we do. For US regulators – and courts – does that principle apply to German companies, but not to American companies – even when the products of those American companies fly millions of passengers around the world every year ?
On Tuesday, the whisleblowers’ will present their argument to the Court of Appeals. If it shuts its ears to them not only will justice have been denied, but vital questions about the safety of the most commonly-used passenger jet in the world will never be properly, or publicly, examined.
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WEST YORKSHIRE POLICE AND THE YORKSHIRE RIPPER
QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES ?
The six-year hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper was marred throughout by systemic and individual failures within West Yorkshire Police. Two official investigations (paid for by the public purse) heavily criticised the force; in 1982, the then Home Secretary, William Whitelaw told the House of Commons that he hoped the police would learn lessons.
Thirty-three years later that hope remains significantly unfulfilled. And the Ripper case remains shrouded in a disturbing official secrecy.
In June this year, my colleague Chris Clark and I published results of a three-year-long investigation into 23 unsolved murders (and numerous attempted murders). Our book – Yorkshire Ripper: The Secret Murders – presented a clear and detailed case that Peter Sutcliffe was the most likely perpetrator. Together with his proven victims, these additional cases would bring his tally to 36 murders and 16 attempted murders, making him Britain’s second worst serial killer, behind Dr. Harold Shipman.
Chris is a former police intelligence officer. He has devoted a substantial part of his retirement to re-investigating cold cases. His patient digging unearthed compelling evidence that the Sutcliffe had the means, motive and opportunity to carry out these attacks. He was able to place Sutcliffe at or near the scene of the crimes around the dates and times when they happened.
Our book also showed how the methodology used in these unsolved killings and attempted killings matched many of the hallmarks of the proven Ripper murders. In each case there was not just one match, but several: too many for them to have been a coincidence.
There were two other remarkable aspects to this disturbing list of long-cold cases. The first was the sheer scope of the attacks: they took place all over England – in London and the Midlands as well as the known Ripper killing grounds of Yorkshire and Manchester); they dated back to the mid-1960s; and two of the victims were men. Put together this presented a radically different version of the conventional Yorkshire Ripper story.
But that conventional story, spun by West Yorkshire Police and Sutcliffe himself back in 1981, has always been distinctly implausible. And in that implausibility lay our second remarkable discovery.
Much – too much – of the Yorkshire Ripper story has been shrouded in secrecy. Much – far too much – of it has taken place behind closed doors and away from public view.
From the outset there was a shabby deal made by the police, the Director of Public Prosecutions and Sutcliffe’s defence lawyers to accept his unsupported claims to have heard voices instructing him to kill prostitutes. Only the intervention of the trial judge ensured that a jury decided whether the Ripper was mad or bad. They decided he was bad.
Three years later the prison service decided to ignore this finding. It transferred him – in secret – to the relative comfort of Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital, where he has remained (at almost ten times the annual cost of keeping him in a regular prison) ever since.
But it was the subsequent actions of the Home Office and the police which have most cynically undermined the concepts of justice being both done and being seen to be done. Three separate official investigations have warned that Sutcliffe almost certainly carried out many more attacks than those for which he was committed.
In October 1981, an internal report by Colin Sampson then Assistant Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police, pointed at Sutcliffe as the likely perpetrator of “a number of similar attacks on women since 1966 in west Yorkshire [which] remain undetected”. The report was suppressed, with only a redacted version eventually emerging. Today it remains secret
By the turn of the year, Lawrence Byford of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary delivered the results of his enquiry to the Home Secretary. It stated baldly:
“It is my firm conclusion that between 1969 and 1980 was probably responsible for many attacks on women, which he has not admitted, not only in West Yorkshire and Manchester but also in other parts of the country.
Byford’s report – paid for by the taxpayer – was kept secret until 2006. Even when this suppression was lifted, the details of these other unsolved Yorkshire Ripper attacks and murders were redacted. They remain under official lock and key.
West Yorkshire Police knows exactly who these victims were. In the 1990s, its then Assistant Chief Constable (later Chief Constable) Keith Hellawell painstakingly investigated 78 unsolved cases from all over the country. He finally decided that 22 of these should be laid at the door of Peter Sutcliffe. Sutcliffe eventually admitted two of them. But the Director of Pubic Prosecutions decided it was “not in the public interest” for any further charges to be brought. The DPP’s office has never explained how it reached this conclusion.
Hellawell’s report, like those which preceded it, was never published. Today, it sits in the filing cabinets of West Yorkshire Police: the Force resolutely refuses to release its details.
Chris devoted three years to uncovering those unsolved crimes. Using surviving public records and dogged detective work he was able to identify the victims. In many cases he spoke with those who had survived and the families of those who were murdered: each said the same thing – they wanted a full and publicly transparent police investigation and for Sutcliffe’s guilt or innocence to be established once and for all.
By contrast, West Yorkshire Police refused every single request submitted under the Freedom of Information Act. It was determined not to release any information.
Our book was serialised in the Daily Mail; we also gave a succession of radio and television interviews detailing its findings. We challenged West Yorkshire Police – which maintains a stranglehold on all Yorkshire Ripper casework and investigation – to dispute our findings: it did not give any interviews.
Instead it issued a press statement, claiming that it was “continuing with an on-going process to review ‘legacy’ (historic) documents including material relating to the Yorkshire Ripper”.
But what exactly does that mean ? In August I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request asking how many officers have been involved in this “on-going process” over the past 12 months; how many new interviews with eye-witnesses, relatives or alleged survivors had been carried out; and how much this had cost.
West Yorkshire Police refused to provide answers to these questions. It claimed that to do so would take more than 18 hours: the Freedom of Information Act allows public bodies to refuse requests on this basis.
It did, however, offer to state how many new interviews had been conducted. But when I re-submitted that request, the Force reversed the previous offer and refused even to confirm whether it held the information. It claimed that:
“To confirm or deny whether we have or haven’t conducted new interviews with eyewitnesses, relatives or alleged survivors could directly jeopardise West Yorkshire police’s ability to sufficiently review a high profile case, which would hinder the prevention and detection of crime.”
Secrecy is, apparently, still the order of the day.
But is West Yorkshire Police genuinely attempting to re-investigate these unsolved cases ? Some of the victims and relatives who have received visits from its detectives say that whilst the Force wrings its hands, apologises for all the mistakes made in the past and accepts that there is evidence pointing to Peter Sutcliffe as the likely perpetrator, it also holds out no hope of ever bringing new charges.
Our book details 23 murders and seven attempted murders. All of them bear the hallmarks of the Yorkshire Ripper. All of them were investigated by Keith Hellawell: his evidence and conclusions are held by West Yorkshire Police. It has all the evidence it needs to prosecute. If it won’t do so, it has no business keeping this information from the public who paid for it, much less denying it to those who suffered at his hands.
There is simply no excuse for the continuing secrecy surrounding the Yorkshire Ripper and these unsolved cold cases. There is no legitimate reason for the Sampson, Byford and Hellawell reports to remain secret.
West Yorkshire Police, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Home Office all have long and tawdry histories of suppressing this evidence. The entire prosecution and trial record, held at the National Archives, is closed until at least 2045. As the law stands there is little or no prospect of forcing them to come clean.
Worse, the politician who put the Freedom of Information Act on the statute book now argues that this was a mistake: In his memoirs Tony Blair called the Act one of his biggest regrets because of its being used not by “the people” but by journalists who use it as a “weapon”.
In July David Cameron’s government announced a review of the Act to decide whether it is too expensive and intrusive. For government and official bodies that is – not for the people who pay for them and in whose name they govern.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ? * Those who rule and those who police us would like the answer to be: no-one.
* Translation: “Who will guard the Guards themselves ?” Satires by Juvenal, 1st Century Roman poet
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OF DEEP THROATS, DEAD POLITICIANS AND DANGEROUS JOURNALISM
There is a moment in Alan J. Pakula’s film adaptation of “All The President’s Men” – the tale of how two dogged newspaper journalists pursued an investigation which would help bring down the President of the United States – when Ben Bradlee, their editor editor at the Washington Post, dismisses one of their early stories with a terse instruction:
“Get some harder information next time.”
One of the most striking aspects of Woodward & Bernstein’s book (on which the movie was based) is just how many off the record interviewees were quoted throughout their Watergate investigation. This was often a story peopled by anonymous informants and exemplified by the ultimate secret source – “Deep Throat”.
But look a little closer. For every damning – but non-attributable – allegation “Woodstein” had at least two sources. Or supporting documentary evidence. Single anonymous sources were conspicuous by their absence.
For journalists of my generation, Watergate set the standards for investigative reporting. Whether in newspapers, radio, television or books, no editor would countenance a serious allegation to be made on the word of a single, anonymous source. And references to “rumour” were banned outright.
Which brings us to the excitable news coverage about Ted Heath.
There is not a journalist in Britain who can prove whether Heath was – or was not – a child abuser. There could be victims of, or eyewitnesses to, such abuse: but if they exist you can take it to the bank that no journalist is amongst them.
And yet over the past week yet there has been an acre of newsprint and hours of broadcast time devoted to allegations that Heath was a paedophile.
“Allegation” is a powerful and important word and journalists need to use it sparingly. Anyone can make an “allegation” about anyone: any professional hack can (and often will) gossip cheerfully about unsourced claims that have washed up on their desks, phones or e-mail accounts about any number of politicians, judges, rock stars and minor celebrities – not to mention other journalists.
The vast majority of this swill of the information age goes no further than the tap room or dinner party. It is disregarded (save for the selfish pleasure of gossiping) and goes utterly uninvestigated. It also never makes it into the public arena for the very good reason that it is no more than rumour which has never been examined for any foundation.
For the past two years the genuine and very important problem of uninvestigated historic child sexual abuse has led journalists to abandon the fundamental tenets of our trade. Newspapers, television and – in particular – tweets on social media have been swamped with allegations about VIP paedophiles in politics. Rarely, if ever, have these claims been sourced to an identified – and therefore checkable – source.
In Heath’s case, the saga originally began in 1998 with David Icke, who published allegations from an unidentified alleged victim. Then sometime-barrister Michael Shrimpton (before his conviction for making false claims about a bomb threat to the Olympics) announced on Bristol Community Radio that Heath had abused and murdered boys on his yacht anchored off Jersey.
I interviewed Shrimpton over several days and asked for his evidence: he regretfully said that he couldn’t disclose his sources.
Anonymous sources would be fine – pace Watergate – if there were more than one for each published specific allegation (ie: not a collective validation of the general tenor of the story) and if these sources were independent of each other. Unfortunately that vital principle has too often been abandoned.
This reached its nadir with the announcement by Exaro News (and republished by the Evening Standard) that Guy Marsden, the nephew of Jimmy Saville, has alleged that a friend of his once told him that Heath had sexually abused him.
For absolute clarity: that is one source (identified) making an allegation about what he had been told (hearsay) by a source (who he did not identify) about an alleged incident he did not witness.
Did Exaro trace the person who had (allegedly) told Marsden about the (alleged) abuse ? I asked Exaro this question. It did not reply: not for the first time, it declined to answer queries about its reporting on historical abuse allegations.
This matters. I have spent a lifetime – almost 30 years – investigating organised paedophilia and campaigning for better child protection. Last year I wrote a heartfelt plea for responsibility in reporting: I warned then – and I repeat here – that there is a backlash growing amongst those who seek to deny the existence of widespread child sexual abuse.
If you doubt this, you have only to read the rabid bile pumped out by Spiked magazine and its supporters in the London “Commentariat”, Barbara Hewson and David Aaronovitch (to name but two). The thrust of this argument is that alleged historic abuse should be consigned to, well, history. More disturbingly, Ms. Hewson – a practicing barrister – advocates a statute of limitations for abuse investigations.
Every piece of careless, sensational or irresponsible reporting empowers this backlash. Brick by brick it will – I guarantee this because I have lived through previous backlashes which did exactly this – dismantle the weak and inadequate defences which have been erected to protect children from sexual abuse.
I repeat: I don’t know if Ted Heath was a paedophile. I don’t know if he sexually abused children on Jersey or anywhere else. I do know that in 2013 I spent several days interviewing – on film – several genuine victims of sexual abuse in its care system, as well as Graham Power, the police chief who supported them (and who was essentially run off the island for his pains). Not one knew anything about Heath other than that he was rumoured to have regularly sailed to Jersey.
But neither does any other journalist know whether Heath had a sexual interest in children. Those who pronounce that they DO know and who thus seek to influence public opinion, on the basis of (at best) a single anonymous source are being grossly irresponsible.
Likewise those who – with nothing more than instinct or prejudice to support them – assert that Heath was unquestionably not a paedophile: it is wrong and playing with fire to denounce the perfectly proper police investigations into allegations against him.
Whichever side of the trenches in this war they fire from, pronouncements of definite guilt or absolute innocence are wild, dangerous and – above all – very bad journalism. Journalists need to recognise that what we publish can – and often does – have an effect on public policy. We do not have the right to dish out unchecked anonymous claims or prejudicial personal opinions and then shrug our shoulders when these cause harm.
As Ben Bradlee (allegedly) told Woodward & Bernstein when rejecting their story. “Get some harder information next time.”
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THE GODDARD INQUIRY AND BARON BRITTAN
“We are not in a position to answer …”
The Independent Public Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse says it is “not in a position” to answer questions about whether it plans to examine evidence into allegations surrounding the former Home Secretary, Leon Brittan.
On Monday I submitted a list of seven questions to the Inquiry’s press office. All related to information given to me in April 2014 by a senior detective in Operation Fernbridge, the Metropolitan Police team investigating allegations of historical “VIP “ child sexual abuse. These were detailed in yesterday’s blog – The Long, Strange Saga of Leon Brittan.
The questions I put to Inquiry press office were:
- Has the Inquiry yet established direct contact with Operation Fernbridge ?
- Will the Inquiry be examining documentary evidence held by Operation Fernbridge concerning its investigations into the late Baron Brittan ?
- Specifically, will the Inquiry secure from Operation Fernbridge copies of all such documents including, but not limited to, formal statements made under caution, officers’ notebooks, internal memoranda and historical documents acquired during its investigation into the late Baron Brittan ?
- Does the Inquiry plan to require public testimony from the current head of Operation Fernbridge, AND its former senior investigating officer, [NAME REDACTED HERE] concerning the late Baron Brittan?
- Does the Inquiry plan to require public testimony from the former Customs and Excise officer Maganlal Solanki who gave evidence to Operation Fernbridge concerning the alleged seizure of child pornography from the late Baron Brittan ?
- Does the Inquiry plan to take evidence from the US Marshall formerly attached to Operation Fernbridge in connection with a visit he made at the request of Operation Fernbridge to a suspected victim of Baron Brittan ?
- Does the Inquiry plan to publish the documents acquired and/or generated by Operation Fernbridge during the course of its investigation into Baron Brittan ?
Inquiry spokesperson Charlotte Phillips replied by e-mail this lunchtime. She declined to answer a single one of the questions. She wrote:
I’m afraid the questions you are asking are ones we are not in a position to answer at the moment. They are very detailed / specific questions about something that could potentially form part of the Inquiry.
Your last one – regarding making documents public – on a general note the Chair made clear in her opening statement that the Inquiry would be conducted in an open and transparent way and that at the appropriate time as much as possible would be published.
It seems odd that an Inquiry which has – in its various incarnations – been in existence for a year cannot yet say whether it plans to examine the key witnesses to widely-reported allegations concerning one of the central figures in this murky saga.
Even discounting the two false starts with Baroness Butler-Sloss and Dame Fiona Woolf Justice Lowell Godard was appointed in February: she has had almost six months to make plans.
The allegations concerning Leon Brittan are both detailed and central to the Inquiry’s remit to investigate (inter alia) the very department – the Home Office – which established it. If there is evidence that a former Home Secretary – the man who (lest we forget) had responsibility for policy towards the Paedophile Information Exchange as well as being the recipient of a missing dossier which allegedly named paedophiles in high office – had a sexual interest in children, then surely the Inquiry’s job is to uncover that evidence ?
And if the transparency which Ms. Phillips promises is to mean anything, surely the Inquiry needs to reassure an increasingly suspicious public (which is footing the substantial bill) that, whatever it shows, this evidence will be thoroughly examined and will be published ?
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