Читать книгу The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years - Graham Stewart - Страница 18

The journalists of the Buenos Aires Siete Dias had a commendable knowledge not only of their government’s intentions but also of how The Times of London liked to lay out its front page. Forty-eight hours before the invasion began Siete Dias’s readers were presented with an imaginary front page of that morning’s edition of The Times. It was good enough to pass off as the real thing. The masthead and typeface were accurate. Even the headline ‘Argentinian Navy invades the Falkland Islands’ was grouped across the two columns’ width of the lead report rather than stretched across the whole front page. That was a particularly observant touch. The accompanying photograph of advancing Argentine troops was also in exactly the place the page designers of Gray’s Inn Road would have put it – top centre right with a single-column news story hemming it back from the paper’s edge. Someone, at least, had done his homework.

The real Times of London for that day had an almost identical front-page layout. The only visual difference was that the lead headline announced ‘Compromise by Labour on abolition of Lords’ – which could have been confidently stated at almost any time in the twenty years either side of 31 March 1982. But the perceptive reader would have noticed something more portentous in the adjacent single column headlined ‘British sub on the move’. The story, ‘By Our Foreign Staff’, claimed that the nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine, HMS Superb ‘was believed to be on its way’ to the Falkland Islands although the Royal Navy ‘refused to confirm or deny these reports’. This was odd. The Times was not in the habit of knowing, let alone announcing, the sudden change of course of a British nuclear submarine. In fact, the story had been planted. It was intended to warn the government in Buenos Aires that their invasion intentions had been discovered. But it was too late. The Argentinian troops had already boarded the vessels. The aircraft carrier Veinticinco de Mayo had put out to sea.

In the aftermath of a war that caused the deaths of 255 Britons and 746 Argentinians, questions were asked about why London failed to perceive the threat to the Falkland Islands until it was too late. The press had not seen it coming. But they could hardly be blamed when Britain’s intelligence community had also failed to pick up on the warning signs. In retrospect, the Government’s dual policy of dashing Argentina’s hopes of a diplomatic solution while announcing a virtual abandonment of the islands’ defence appeared like folly on a grand scale.

Despite talk of there being oil, there had long been little enthusiasm in the Foreign Office for holding onto the barren and remote British dependency, eight thousand miles away and important primarily for the disruption it caused Britain’s relations with Argentina, a bulwark against South American Communism where much British capital was invested. The general impression was given that if Buenos Aires wanted the islands that much, they could have them. But the will of the 1800 islanders, stubborn and staunchly loyal subjects of Her Majesty, complicated the matter. In November 1980, Nicholas Ridley, a Foreign Office minister, thought he had the answer when he suggested transferring the islands’ sovereignty formally to Argentina while leasing back tenure in the short term so that the existing islanders would not be handed over to an alien power effectively overnight. This idea had been broadly supported in a third leader in The Times, written by Peter Strafford, albeit on the condition the Falkland islanders agreed to it.[329] They lost no time in making clear they did not. Their opposition emboldened Margaret Thatcher and the House of Commons, sceptical of the ‘Munich tendency’ within the Foreign Office, to dismiss the proposal out of hand.

Argentina was a right-wing military dictatorship. During the 1970s ‘dirty war’, its ruling junta had murdered thousands of its citizens. If the British Government was determined to close the diplomatic door over the islands’ sovereignty to such a regime it might have been advisable to send clear messages about London’s determination to guard the Falklands militarily. Yet, this is not what happened. The public spending cuts of Margaret Thatcher’s first term did not bypass the armed forces. In 1981, John Nott, the Defence Secretary, proposed stringent economies. Guided by Henry Stanhope, the defence correspondent, The Times had argued that if there had to be cuts it would be better for the greater blow to fall upon the British Army of the Rhine rather than the Royal Navy since the BAOR’s proportionate contribution to the NATO alliance was not as significant as the maritime commitment. Yet, when Nott’s spending review was published in June, he proposed closing the Chatham dockyards and cutting the number of surface ships. One of those vessels was HMS Endurance, which was to be withdrawn from its lonely patrol of the South Atlantic.

Although it was understandably not described as such, the Endurance was Britain’s spy ship in the area – as the Argentinians had long assumed. But for those who did not look beyond its exterior, it appeared too lightly defended to put up much resistance to an Argentine assault. Consequently, scrapping the ship appeared to make sense in every respect other than the psychological signal it transmitted to Buenos Aires. It was a fatal economy. Britain appeared to be dropping its guard over the Falkland Islands. The junta saw its chance. Only a small but prophetic letter, from Lord Shackleton, Peter Scott, Vivian Fuchs and five other members of the Royal Geographical Society, printed in The Times on 4 February 1982, pointed out the strategic short-sightedness of withdrawing the only white ensign in the South Atlantic and Antarctic seas.[330] The paper did not pick up on the point.

To be fair, there were remarkably few early warning signs. General Leopoldo Galtieri’s inaugural speech as Argentina’s President in December 1981 contained no reference to reclaiming ‘Las Malvinas’. The first indication Times readers received that all was not well came on 5 March 1982 when Peter Strafford reported that Buenos Aires was stepping up the pressure over the islands. Strafford speculated that with the Falklands defended by a Royal Marines platoon and local volunteers – a total of less than one hundred men – an invasion was possible ‘as a last resort’. But it seemed far more likely that Buenos Aires would apply pressure through the United Nations or by threatening to sever the only regular air service out of the islands which was operated by the Argentine Air Force.

It was not until 23 March that The Times again focused its attention firmly on developments when it reported the Foreign Office’s confirmation that an illegal detachment of about fifty Argentinians claiming to have a contract to dismantle the whaling station at Leith on South Georgia, a British dependency eight hundred miles south-east of the Falklands, had hoisted their national flag. The Foreign Office was quoted as reacting ‘sceptically to the suggestion that the landing on South Georgia last week was instigated by the Argentine Government’.[331]

Whitehall could not be expected to dispatch the Fleet every time a trespasser waved his national flag on some far-off British territory. In the same month in which the ‘scrap metal merchants’ were posing for photographs on the spectacularly inhospitable and all but uninhabited South Georgia, Thomas Enders, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, had visited President Galtieri and passed on to the British Foreign Office Minister Richard Luce the impression that there was no cause for concern. Nonetheless, Margaret Thatcher asked for contingency plans to be drawn up and for a reassessment of the Joint Intelligence Committee’s existing report on the invasion threat to the Falklands. It was too late. On the evening of 31 March, John Nott passed to the Prime Minister the appalling news: an intelligence report that an Argentine armada was at sea and heading straight for the Falklands. Their estimated date of arrival was 2 April.[332]

The Times had already reported, on the front page for Monday 29 March, ‘five Argentine vessels were last night reported to be in the area of South Georgia’. The second leading article that day, ‘Gunboat or Burglar Alarm?’, warned that the Falklands were probably the real target. It attempted to marry the diplomatic tone taken when the leader column had last addressed the subject in November 1980 that the islanders’ future ‘can only be on the basis of an arrangement with their South American neighbours’ with a belated note of half-warning, ‘Britain should help them get the best arrangement possible, and to do that should be prepared to put a military price on any Argentine smash-and-grab raid’.[333] Tuesday’s front page reported that ‘two other Argentine naval vessels were said to have left port’ but that London was still making no official comment. The following day came the leaked report that a nuclear submarine was on its way to the Falklands. On Thursday 1 April, the paper conveyed accurately the atmosphere in the Gray’s Inn Road newsroom with a headline that ought to have become famous in its field: ‘Impenetrable silence on Falklands crisis’.

Apart from some ‘library pictures’ of the Falkland Islands’ capital, Port Stanley, and rusting hulks in South Georgia’s Grytviken harbour, it was not possible to accompany the unfolding saga with ‘live’ pictures. There was no press cameraman on the islands. However, the Sunday Times had dispatched Simon Winchester to follow up on the South Georgia ‘scrap metal merchants’. Winchester was in Port Stanley when the Argentine forces landed. On 2 April, The Times was able to use his copy, announcing that the invasion was expected any moment and citing the state of emergency alert broadcast to the islanders by their Governor, Rex Hunt. It made for dramatic reading. Ironically, while a paper like The Times, famed for its correspondents in far flung places had not got round to getting a reporter in situ, the Sun – not celebrated for its foreign desk or international postings – did have a man there. Its reporter, David Graves, had set off for South Georgia on his own whim. He too was in Stanley when the shooting started.[334] Unfortunately, neither journalist would be filing from there for much longer. Both Winchester and Graves had to move to the Argentine mainland. There, Winchester, together with Ian Mather and Tony Prime of the Observer were arrested on spying charges. Over the next few weeks, the British media was put in the impossible position of trying to report what was happening on a group of islands where they had no reporters.

If the Government had dithered before the invasion, it was resolute – or at any rate its Prime Minister was – in its response. A Task Force would be dispatched to take the islands back if no diplomatic solution had been reached in the time it would take the Royal Navy to reach the Falklands. All the newspapers recognized the necessity of getting their journalists on board the ships, but the Royal Navy was hostile to carrying any superfluous personnel on board – least of all prying journalists. It took considerable pressure from Downing Street to get the Navy to accept the necessity of any press presence.[335] After much bullying, it was agreed that the newspaper journalists would be corralled upon the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible, travelling with the first batch of the Task Force. There would be only five places available.

It was left to John Le Page, director of the Newspaper Publishers’ Association, to decide which newspapers would make the cut. He opted for the method of Mrs Le Page drawing the winning titles out of a hat. This pot-luck approach produced random results, not least of which was that the Daily Telegraph would be the only representative of the ‘quality press’. Neither The Times, nor the Guardian, nor the country’s major tabloid, the Sun, was selected. This was no way to report a war. Outrage followed with Douglas-Home and his rival disappointed editors demanding representation. Bernard Ingham, the Prime Minister’s press secretary, only managed to cool the heat emanating from his telephone receiver by insisting the three papers were included after all.[336]

The Times only heard that a place had been secured for its nominated reporter, John Witherow, at 10.15 p.m on Sunday 4 April. He had to race to catch the train to Portsmouth – for Invincible was scheduled to set sail at midnight. Almost the only instructions Witherow received from Gray’s Inn Road was to pack a dark suit. There was, after all, the possibility he might be asked to dine with the officers in the wardroom. He at least came better prepared for the rigours of a South Atlantic winter than the Sun’s representative who arrived at Portsmouth docks on a motorbike wearing a pair of shorts.[337]

Robert Fisk was The Times’s star war reporter, but he was in the Middle East. And as it transpired, he would soon have an invasion on his doorstep to cover. John Witherow was a thirty-year-old reporter on the home news desk, who had come to the paper from Reuters as recently as 1980. The son of a South African businessman, he had been brought to England as a child and sent to Bedford School. Before reading history at York University, he had done two years voluntary service in Namibia where he taught and helped establish a library for the inhabitants and was befriended by Bishop Colin Winter, an outspoken critic of Apartheid. He was hardly the obvious choice but, although there was no certainty that the Task Force would see action, his status as a young and unmarried reporter who was not committed anywhere else at that moment weighed in favour of his being sent on an assignment that could take weeks or months – or even take his life.

Only representatives of the British media were allowed to accompany the Task Force, Margaret Thatcher taking the view ‘we certainly didn’t want any foreigners reporting what we were doing down there!’.[338] Witherow and his fellow journalists were soon to discover the limitations imposed upon them, their dispatches monitored by MoD minders and by Royal Naval press officers. The minders occasionally prevented details in dispatches leaving the ship only for the same disclosures to be released by the MoD in London. There was to be considerable friction over this and other scores. When either bureaucratic or technical difficulties prevented Witherow getting his dispatches out, the burden of war reporting fell on Henry Stanhope in London. For his information, Stanhope was reliant upon MoD briefings. But in the first weeks of the Task Force’s long journey, the focus was on how diplomacy might yet avert shots being fired in anger. Julian Haviland, the political editor, reported the mood in Westminster as did Christopher Thomas from Buenos Aires. Nicholas Ashford filed from Washington and from New York Zoriana Pysariwsky followed developments at the UN.

With the hawkish Charles Douglas-Home in charge, there was never any doubt what line the paper would take. The seizure of the islands was, the leading article declared as soon as the invasion was confirmed, ‘as perfect an example of unprovoked aggression and military expansion as the world has had to witness since the end of Adolf Hitler’. Russia would back Argentina and nothing but words could be expected from the UN. If need be, it would be necessary to meet force with force.[339] On Monday 4 April – the day the Task Force left Portsmouth harbour – there was only one leading article, stretching down the page and occupying sixty-eight column inches and more than five and a half feet. It was written by the editor. ‘When British territory is invaded, it is not just an invasion of our land, but of our whole spirit. We are all Falklanders now’ the paper thundered. The Argentine junta had eliminated its opponents – ‘the disappeared ones’ as they were euphemistically known. ‘The disappearance of individuals is the Junta’s recognized method of dealing with opposition. We are now faced with a situation where it intends to make a whole island people – the Falklanders – disappear.’ This could not be tolerated. The words of John Donne were intoned. And it was time for the Defence Secretary, John Nott, and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, to consider their positions.[340]

During the weekend, Margaret Thatcher and her deputy, Willie Whitelaw, had tried to shore up Carrington’s resolve to stay. But, as Thatcher put it in her memoirs, ‘Having seen Monday’s press, in particular the Times leader, he decided that he must go.’[341] Nott, however, was persuaded to hang on. For Douglas-Home, the most important task was to bolster the Prime Minister’s reserve not to back down. On 2 April, the Foreign Office had presented her with a litany of diplomatic pitfalls if she proceeded with her intention to send, and if necessary, use, the Task Force just as the MoD had listed the military impediments. Her decision to disregard such advice filled many in Whitehall with alarm. It was essential to restrict the strategic decisions to an inner core. An inner ‘War Cabinet’ was formed to meet once (sometimes twice) a day to conduct operations. On it sat Mrs Thatcher, her deputy Whitelaw, Nott, Carrington’s successor at the Foreign Office, Francis Pym and Cecil Parkinson (who, although only Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, could be expected to back his leader’s resolve if the Foreign Office tested it).

In New York, Britain’s UN Ambassador, Sir Anthony Parsons, had achieved a notable triumph in securing Resolution 502, which demanded an Argentine withdrawal from the islands. The Security Council presidency was in the hands of Zaire and Spain and Panama sympathized with Argentina. Russia, which could have vetoed the resolution outright, had no reason to back a NATO country and was heavily dependent on Argentine grain. Parsons’s skill (and a telephone lecture from Mrs Thatcher to King Hussein of Jordan) ensured most of the opposition was neutered into abstention. Only Panama voted against Britain. Yet, while the United States had voted favourably, its true position was equivocal. It could not rebuff its most senior NATO ally, but it did not want to undermine the anti-Communist regime in Buenos Aires. The 1947 Rio Treaty allowed for any American country to assist any other that was attacked from outside the American continent. Washington believed this was a shield against Soviet interference. A British strike could fatally crack the edifice. Indeed, the night the Argentinians had invaded, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Walter Stoessel and Thomas Enders (respectively US Ambassador to the UN; Deputy-Secretary of State; Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America) were among a group of senior US officials who had dined at the Argentine Embassy. Kirkpatrick, in particular, was no friend of Britain. On 13 April she went so far as to suggest ‘If the Argentines own the islands, then moving troops into them is not armed aggression.’[342] Could Britain proceed without US endorsement? The lesson of Suez was not encouraging.

The dispatch of the US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, as a peace broker between Buenos Aires and London bought Washington time to avoid taking sides. President Mitterrand proved a staunch supporter of Britain’s claim to take back islands recognized by international law as her own, but not all the European partners were so steadfast. When the EEC embargo on Argentine imports came up for its monthly renewal in mid-May, Italy and Ireland opted out of it. The closer the Task Force got to fighting the more jumpy became the Germans. Beyond the EEC, Britain’s greatest allies proved to be Pinochet’s Chile, Australia and New Zealand. Auckland’s Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, wrote a personal article in The Times making clear ‘New Zealand will back Britain all the way’.[343] He offered one of his country’s frigates to take the place of a Royal Naval vessel called up for South Atlantic operations.

To Conservatives of Douglas-Home’s cobalt hue, reclaiming the Falklands had implications beyond assuring the self-determination of its islanders. It was also about marking an end to the years of continuous national retreat since Suez. It was about proving that Britain was still great and was not, as Margaret Thatcher put it in reply to Foreign Office defeatists, a country ready to accept ‘that a common or garden dictator should rule over the Queen’s subjects and prevail by fraud and violence’.[344] That Tories saw an opportunity to commence a national revival of self-confidence troubled the left and many liberals. They had no love for a right-wing military junta in Buenos Aires but they worried a triumphant feat of British arms would restore militaristic (right-wing, class-ridden) attitudes. It was little wonder they turned to the UN in the hope of a compromise that would fudge such absolutes as ‘ownership’ and ‘nationalism’. Indeed, Britain at large appeared to be apprehensive. During April and early May, opinion polls suggested there was support for sending the Task Force but considerable doubt about whether reclaiming the islands was worth spilling British blood.[345]

Despite his own stalwart position, Douglas-Home was careful to ensure the widest possible spectrum of views should be aired in the paper. Never shy to criticize, Fred Emery told him ‘your leaders have been a sight too romantic, losing sight of the practicalities’.[346] David Watts was in the camp that argued that the islanders had precious little future without Argentine collaboration and that the utility of 1800 Falkland Islanders to the national interest was less than the financial portfolios of the 17,000 British citizens living in Argentina. A full-page pro-Argentine advert was published.[347] The historian and anti-nuclear campaigner E. P. Thompson was given much of the Op-Ed page to explain ‘why neither side is worth backing’. He concluded that Mrs Thatcher’s ‘administration has lost a by-election in Glasgow and it needs to sink the Argentine navy in revenge’.[348] The letters page started to fill. Many disliked Douglas-Home’s editorial line. The former Labour Paymaster-General, Lord (George) Wigg got personal:

I have no confidence in improvised military adventures in pursuit of undefined objectives, and my doubts are further emphasized by the attitude of The Times which, during my lifetime, has been wrong on every major issue, and I have little doubt that the time will come when your current follies will be added to the long list of failures to serve your country with wisdom in her hour of need.[349]

Sackloads of letters abhorred the idea of a resolution through violence in the South Atlantic. The playwright William Douglas-Home (the editor’s uncle) was among those wondering if a referendum could be held to ask the islanders whether they wanted to be evacuated and, if so, to where, ‘otherwise a situation might arise in which the Union Jack flew again on Government House with hardly anybody alive to recognize it’. Four to five hundred letters were arriving at Gray’s Inn Road every day. Leon Pilpel, the letters page editor, considered that in the past thirty years only two other issues had generated comparable levels of correspondence – the 1956 Suez crisis and the paper’s resumption in 1979 after its eleven-month shutdown. In the first three weeks of the crisis the number of letters received suggested that a little over half disagreed with the paper’s editorial line and favoured a negotiated settlement rather than using the Task Force. But there were also sackloads of letters from America supporting the Prime Minister’s resolve.[350] It was hard to gauge to what extent this reflected most Times readers’ views. Doubtless an anti-war editorial policy would have stimulated a greater torrent of pro-war letters.

Among broadsheets, The Times and the Daily Telegraph stood alone in unambiguously supporting the Task Force’s objectives. Not even all the ‘Murdoch Press’ (as the left now chose to call it) supported the war. The Sunday Times’s editor, Frank Giles, believed ‘The Times’s leaders brayed and neighed like an old war horse’.[351] By contrast, the Sunday Times warned its readers that any attempt to retake the islands by force would be ‘a short cut to bloody disaster’. Impressed by no force other than that of the market, the Financial Times opposed sending the Task Force. Britain, it maintained, should not seek to retain control of an ‘anachronism’. Instead it should propose turning the islands over to a UN Trusteeship.[352] The Guardian became the main protest sheet against liberating the islands. The paper’s star columnist, Peter Jenkins, perfectly encapsulating the Guardian mindset by warning, ‘We should have no wish to become the Israelis of Western Europe’. The strident tone adopted by the Sun – derided for turning from ‘bingo to jingo’ – particularly confirmed bien pensant opinion against liberating the Falklands. Accusations of fifth columnists in the fourth estate raised temperatures further. The Guardian’s editor, Peter Preston, denounced the Sun as ‘sad and despicable’ for questioning the patriotism of the Daily Mirror and the BBC’s Peter Snow.[353] There would be worse to come.

The New Statesman, edited by Bruce Page, a noted investigative journalist who had worked with Harold Evans at the Sunday Times, baited The Times for its ‘We Are All Falklanders Now’ editorial. ‘It is not easy to believe,’ the New Statesman pronounced, ‘that even a government as stupid and amateurish as Mrs Thatcher’s can actually be sending some of the Navy’s costliest and most elaborate warships to take part in a game of blind-man’s bluff at the other end of the world.’ The weekly house magazine of the left exploded in a torrent of loathing, which, surprisingly, was directed not against the side led by a right-wing military junta but against ‘the thing we still have to call our government – the United Kingdom state … so long as it has its dominion over us it will betray us – and makes us pay the price of betrayal in our own best blood’. For its 30 April edition, the New Statesman splashed across its cover the most demonic looking photograph of Mrs Thatcher it could tamper with, above the bold capital letter indictment ‘THE WARMONGER’.[354]

The peace lobby tried to talk up every diplomatic initiative to avoid the coming confrontation. In contrast, Buenos Aires’s offers were met with the Sun’s famous headline suggestion to ‘Stick it up your junta!’[355] Al Haig’s shuttle diplomacy stumbled on. But as far as Margaret Thatcher and the editorial policy of The Times was concerned, it was hard to see what offer would be acceptable that fell short of handing the islands back to their British owner. Not everyone in the War Cabinet saw the matter in such absolutes. The new Foreign Secretary, Francis Pym, supported a compromise he negotiated with Haig in Washington. The Task Force would turn back and the Argentine occupation would end. In its place a ‘Special Interim Authority’ would be established in Stanley that would include representatives of the Argentine government and a mysterious as yet unknown entity described as the ‘local Argentine population’. There would be no explicit commitment to self-determination. Mrs Thatcher stated in her memoirs that she believed the deal would have allowed Buenos Aires ‘to swamp the existing population with Argentinians’ and that, had it been approved, she would have resigned.[356] But, rather than be seen to be negative, it was decided to wait and see what the junta made of the scheme. On 29 April, they rejected it. The following day, the United States at last came out formally in support of Britain. By then, South Georgia was back in British hands. With Witherow and the other reporters hundreds of miles away on the Invincible, there were no journalists with the landing force and the only photograph The Times could run with was an old panorama of a peaceful looking Grytviken harbour.

As the prospect of a major confrontation became inevitable, so Douglas-Home spent long periods on the telephone with intelligence officers and assorted defence experts. As Liz Seeber, his secretary, put it, ‘He did seem to be remarkably well informed on some things’.[357] D-notices, a system established in 1912, set out the guidelines for the British news media’s reporting of national security matters. Whitehall had only just reviewed and extended them two days before the Argentines had invaded. Concerned that Julian Haviland’s article citing ‘informed sources’ that there was already an advance party on the Falklands breached D-notice 6 on ‘British Security and Intelligence Services’, Douglas-Home discreetly edited the piece before allowing it onto the front page for 27 April. This was an example of self-censorship, without the Secretary of the D-notice committee even being contacted on the subject.[358]

The censors reviewing John Witherow’s dispatches from HMS Invincible forbade any mention of the Task Force’s strengths, destinations, of the capability of the onboard armoury or even the weather. In London, the Vulcan bombing raid on Stanley’s airfield was portrayed as a success (despite Argentine film footage that showed the airstrip was still useable). Witherow spoke to one of the personnel in the flight control room who told him the raid had been a disastrous flop. Witherow filed his copy to this effect, only to have the censor change it to read that the mission had been a success. This, however, was an extreme and rare example. Generally, as at Gray’s Inn Road, self-censorship helped ensure that little of substance was actually excised from Witherow’s copy.[359] Yet, this did not make relations on board Invincible easy. Unlike the Army, which had learned through long (and occasionally bitter) experience as a consequence of the Troubles in Ulster, the Navy was not used to dealing with the press at such close quarters. There was also the question over whether naval procedures applied to the journalists on board. It did not go down well that during the first ‘Action Stations’ Witherow went onto the bridge of Invincible protesting that ‘as he represented The Times, he could go where he liked’.[360] As the Task Force steamed closer to the Total Exclusion Zone around the Falklands, relations between the press corps and their MoD ‘minder’ broke down completely. Recognizing the problem, the Invincible’s captain, Jeremy Black, did his best to help and assigned his secretary, Richard Aylard (later the Prince of Wales’s private secretary), to smooth things over with the journalists. Nonetheless, Witherow’s copy was vetted four times before it reached Gray’s Inn Road. Once the MoD press officer, Aylard and Black had vetted it on the Invincible, it was transmitted to Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse’s Command HQ at Northwood, Middlesex, where the MoD censors vetted it again. Despite Captain Black’s request that, after they had cleared it, Northwood should release the journalists’ dispatches at the same time as its own statements, this frequently did not happen.[361]

Transmitting copy from ship to shore was a major problem. Understandably, the journalists’ dispatches were the lowest priority of all the information punched out by the Invincible’s messenger centre. It took half an hour for the operator to transfer a journalist’s dispatch onto tape. Further delays took place trying to transmit it by satellite and the copy frequently got lost in the process, requiring it to be sent again. The whole process frequently took two to three hours – just to send one dispatch. And there were five Fleet Street journalists, all sending in their handiwork. It was hardly surprising that Black objected to 30 per cent of his outgoing traffic being taken up by press copy when he had far more important operational detail to convey. At one stage, there was a backlog of one thousand signals waiting to be cleared. Eventually Black demanded that press copy could only be transmitted at night, when there was usually less operational messaging needing to be sent. This ensured that copy was appearing in The Times around two days after it was written. A seven-hundred-word limit was also imposed.[362]

It had been decided that dispatches would be ‘pooled’ so that all the news media would have access to them. In any case, it proved almost impossible for any of the Fleet Street editors to make contact with their journalists on board ship. Witherow managed to get a brief call through to Fred Emery on 18 May, but this was a rare exception.[363] ‘Those of us without experience of war would have done better,’ Witherow later reflected, ‘if we’d had the office saying “give us 2000 words on how the Harrier pilots spend their time” – we didn’t know what they wanted and were just firing into a void all the time.’ By the time newspapers were flown on board ship for the journalists to analyse, they were two to three weeks out of date. Witherow concluded that the failure to provide the embedded reporters with better communication channels ended up harming the Task Force’s own publicity: ‘if they had allowed it, they would have got much better and less spasmodic, coverage’.[364]

Witherow did not find the crew to be particularly pugnacious. ‘They knew the ships were hopelessly defended,’ he recalled; ‘this became apparent when I saw them strapping machine guns to the railings of Invincible to shoot down low flying planes.’[365] On 1 May, the Fleet came under air attack. In London, the War Cabinet was concerned about the strike range of the carrier Veinticinco de Mayo and the cruiser General Belgrano. Although the latter was an aged survivor of Pearl Harbor, it was fitted with anti-ship Exocet missiles and was escorted by two destroyers. The Task Force’s commander, Admiral Woodward, feared the carrier and the cruiser were attempting a pincer movement against his ships. On Sunday 2 May the War Cabinet gave to the submarine HMS Conqueror the order to torpedo the Belgrano. Three hundred and twenty-one members of its crew went down with her.

The Belgrano’s sinking was to be the most controversial action of the conflict. But, at first, it was very difficult to establish much information about it. Such was the paucity of information from the MoD, it did not make the newspapers until Tuesday 4 May editions. Even then, The Times had to rely on its US correspondent, Nicholas Ashford, for the news that ‘authoritative sources in Washington’ had confirmed the cruiser had sunk and that as many as seven hundred of its crew might have drowned. Filing from Buenos Aires, Christopher Thomas backed up Washington’s claims. All the MoD in London could offer was that they were ‘not in a position to confirm or deny Argentine reports’. Witherow, however, did manage to get a dispatch out that concentrated on the Navy’s ‘compassion’ in sparing the Belgrano’s escort ships and in searching for survivors. The best the picture desk could procure was a tiny image with the caption ‘The General Belgrano in a photograph taken 40 years ago’.[366] A further sixteen days would pass before the dramatic photograph of the ship – listing heavily and surrounded by life rafts – would make it into the paper, halfway down page six.

News that the Belgrano had been hit had prompted the infamous ‘Gotcha!’ headline in the Sun. The NUJ had called an eleven day strike and the paper was being brought out by only a handful of editorial staff on whom the excitement and stress were clearly beginning to have a deleterious effect. The paper’s combative editor Kelvin MacKenzie pulled the crude headline after the first edition once news of serious loss of life began to permeate the Bouverie Street newsroom, but by the time ‘Gotcha!’ had been replaced by the more contrite (though less factually accurate) headline ‘Did 1200 Argies drown?’ the damage had been done.[367] Reacting to the anti-war stance of its rival, the Daily Mirror, the Sun’s reporting of the conflict was not only stridently patriotic but also frequently couched in language that suggested the war was some sort of game show. In particular, the ‘Gotcha!’ front page brought the Sun considerable opprobrium, but The Times, while opting for the lower-case headline ‘Cruiser torpedoed by Royal Navy sinks’, was equally certain of the need to send her to the bottom of the ocean. Those who pointed out the ship had been torpedoed outside the Total Exclusion Zone were slapped down, the leader column declaiming, ‘it is fanciful to imagine that any Argentine warship can put to sea – let alone sail some three hundred miles eastward towards the Falkland Islands – without having hostile intentions towards the British task force’.[368]

The press and political recriminations over the Belgrano had only just begun when the news broke that HMS Sheffield had been hit – the first British warship to be lost in battle since the Second World War. Witherow’s dispatch from Invincible led the coverage, describing how the Sheffield ‘was completely blotted out by the smoke which formed a solid column from the sea to the clouds’. The sea was ‘full of warships all manoeuvring at top speed’ with the Invincible’s personnel spreadeagled on a floor that ‘shook with vibrations’ as the carrier dodged the incoming assaults.[369] The war situation was now totally transformed. ‘The cocktails on the quarterdeck in the tropics seem another existence,’ Witherow stated two days later. The quarterdeck ‘is now swept by sleet and spray and piled high with cushions from the officers’ wardroom, ready for ditching overboard to reduce risk of fire’.[370]

‘In military terms, the Falklands war is turning into a worse fiasco than Suez,’ announced Peter Kellner, the New Statesman’s political editor, adding that The Times ‘in superficially more measured tones’ was as guilty as the rest of ‘the jingo press’ in getting Britain’s servicemen into this mess.[371] As news of the Sheffield’s casualties slowly emerged, there was a palpable ‘told you so’ from those who thought going to war ridiculous. The Times published a letter from the acclaimed professor of politics Bernard Crick lambasting ‘the narrowly legal doctrine of sovereignty’ that had produced the ‘atavistic routes of patriotic death when our last shreds of power lie in our reputation for diplomatic and political skill’. Instead of making war, Britain should work ‘in consort’ with the EEC and its friends to put ‘pressure on the USA to control its other allies’.[372]

Conspiracy theorists soon suggested that the Belgrano had been sunk in order to derail a peace plan being proposed by Peru. Thatcher later stated that she knew nothing of the Peruvian proposals (which envisaged handing the islands over to a four-power administration) when the order to sink the cruiser was given and, in any case, Buenos Aires proceeded to reject the proposals. The Times did not think much of the Peruvian plan, sniffing that it promised to turn the Falklands into ‘some latter-day post war Berlin’.[373] But the Belgrano’s sinking created an international outcry. President Reagan begged Mrs Thatcher to hold off further action. The Irish Defence Minister declared Britain ‘the aggressor’. The Austrian Chancellor opined that he could not support Britain’s colonial claims over the islands. At home and abroad, Thatcher’s critics demanded she return to the United Nations for a diplomatic solution. But with the South Atlantic winter setting in, and Galtieri scouring the world’s arms market for more Exocet missiles, prevarication was not what the Task Force wanted.[374] The Times was deeply sceptical of further diplomatic overtures. Nonetheless Pym got to work with Perez de Cuellar, the UN Secretary-General, on a plan to place the islands under the interim (though some concluded indefinite) jurisdiction of the United Nations. Nigel Lawson later wrote that he thought the plan would have commanded a Cabinet majority.[375] Instead, on 19 May, the Argentine junta rejected the proposals. Pym wanted to try again, but his colleagues overruled him. On 21 May, British troops went ashore at San Carlos Bay. The liberation had begun.

The following morning The Times led with ‘Troops gain Falklands bridgehead’ above a photograph of three Royal Marine Commandos running the Union Jack up a flagpole. The image had not quite the vivid urgency of the US Marines planting Old Glory at Iwo Jima, but, compared to the paper’s front-page treatment of the campaign until that moment, it was positively dramatic. The day before the landing, Sir Frank Cooper, the permanent under-secretary at the MoD, had deliberately misinformed a press briefing that British strategy would take the form of a series of smash and grab raids at various locations around the islands rather than a single D-Day-style landing.[376] All the papers, including The Times, advised their readers accordingly. Thus, news that there was a major invasion thrust in San Carlos Bay came as a complete surprise. The intention behind Cooper’s misleading briefing was to throw the Argentinians off the scent. Amphibious landings were precarious at the best of times and if the defending force had guessed the location, the outcome could have been in the balance. Instead, it would take time for the Argentinians to work out that what was going on in San Carlos Bay was something more than one of the smash and grab raids authoritatively traced throughout the British media to a ‘senior Whitehall source’.

Although the landing went unopposed, talk of success was premature. The RAF’s failure to gain commanding air superiority and the bravery of the Argentine pilots made it far from certain that the campaign would succeed. The Times reported an MoD briefing that five – unnamed – warships had been hit together with the Argentine claim that they had sunk a Type 42 destroyer and a Type 22 frigate. Such sketchy detail caused considerable anxiety to all those with loved ones in the Task Force and appeared to be another instance of the press having to deal with a MoD that was self-defeating in its dilatory release of vital information. But on this occasion, it ensured a better initial headline: Fleet Street led with the good news that British troops were ashore, rather than the battering the naval armada was receiving. Only later did it emerge that HMS Ardent and, subsequently, HMS Antelope, had been lost.

Frustrated in his bid to land with the troops, Witherow had got himself transferred to what less intrepid reporters might consider a precarious posting – on board an ammunition ship moored in the ‘bomb alley’ of San Carlos Water. In view of the highly inflammable cargo, he was cheerily assured that if the ship was hit, he wouldn’t need a lifejacket but a parachute. ‘The bombs came within fifty metres. We were feeling a bit nervous,’ he recollected; ‘whenever the planes came in, everybody let loose, bullets, guns, missiles.’ It was a perfect spot to observe the Argentine air force’s finest hour. Night-time offered little relief. Fears that Argentine divers might lay mines necessitated the dropping of depth charges: ‘You would be lying in your bunk at 4 a.m. right next to the waterline,’ Witherow recalled, ‘when suddenly BOOM!’[377]

With the bridgehead on East Falkland secured and the British troops beginning to move inland, Witherow became increasingly frustrated. Having journeyed down with the Navy, he had not had an opportunity to make the now imperative links with the Army that those journalists who had travelled later with the troop ship Canberra had established. Most prominent in this group was Max Hastings of the London Evening Standard. With Hastings and the Army were Michael Nicholson of ITN and the BBC’s Brian Hanrahan who were able to file voice reports (pictures would have to wait) from the beachhead. Eventually, Witherow and the other four journalists on the ammunition ship were helicoptered onto East Falkland. But within hours, they were told they were too inadequately clothed to proceed with the troops and were going to be sent back to the ship. Deciding anything was better than skulking on a floating powder keg, they attempted to hide behind some bales of wool. They were discovered and escorted from the island. Next they were put on board HMS Sir Geraint, a logistical support vessel that promptly sailed back out to sea. For several days Witherow and his companions wondered why their ship appeared to be taking a peculiar course, circling round the aircraft carriers. Eventually they realized the Sir Geraint was trying to draw an Exocet missile attack upon itself so as to save the carriers. Having placed the press corps on, respectively, an ammunition ship and a decoy for air assault, it was clear what the Royal Navy thought of their travelling journalists. The land campaign had been going for two weeks before Witherow was next permitted to step ashore with 5 Brigade.

By then the most famous land battle of the war, Goose Green, had been won. Without air support and with little in the way of artillery, 2 Para had attacked and overcome an entrenched enemy nearly three times their size, taken 1400 prisoners and freed 114 islanders shut up in a guarded community hall. It was an impressive feat and earned a posthumous Victoria Cross for Colonel ‘H’ Jones, the commanding officer who fell with seventeen of his men. But not everyone had played his or her part. With a level of ineptitude far surpassing their usual reticence, the MoD in London had announced the capture of Goose Green eighteen hours before it happened. The BBC’s World Service reported the news that the attack was about to take place. In the meantime, the Argentine troops rearranged their defences to guard against an assault from exactly the direction 2 Para were approaching – supposedly in secrecy.[378] This scandalous lapse was primarily the MoD’s fault, but it generated further animosity between the troops and the reporters. In Gray’s Inn Road, the fall of Goose Green was not the main story. Instead, Fred Emery decided to lead with the Pope’s arrival in Britain because the first steps of a pontiff on British soil were of greater historical significance.[379]

The British Army’s objective was now to yomp across East Falkland, eject the Argentines from the defensive positions in the hills to the west and south of Stanley and liberate the capital. Having finally got himself accredited to 5 Brigade, Witherow proceeded to spend some days with the Gurkhas before attaching himself to the Welsh Guards, a regiment he rightly assumed would be in the thick of any fighting. Despite the cold weather, he spent most nights huddled up in barns or sheds or, occasionally, trying to sleep outdoors. The only way he could now get copy to London was to write it down, persuade a helicopter pilot to carry it on his next trip back to HMS Fearless (where all journalists’ copy was being directed) and then have the ship transmit it to the MoD censors in Northwood from where it would, it was hoped, be passed, unedited, onto Gray’s Inn Road. This chain of action only worked if the pilot remembered to pass the copy to someone who knew what to do with it next. Frequently, the copy got mislaid, put aside or discarded at some point along this convoluted process. One of the reports that got lost in transit was a graphic eyewitness account of the horror on board the stricken landing ships Sir Tristram and Sir Galahad from Mick Seamark of the Daily Star. Some felt its loss was convenient.[380]

Witherow was at Bluff Cove when the disaster struck. His dispatch – which did get through – conveyed the essentials that between five hundred and six hundred men from the Royal Marines and the Welsh Guards had been on the ships, awaiting disembarkation when the air attack came. One survivor was quoted as stating, ‘People were screaming, trapped in their rooms. People were in agony. There was mangled wreckage in the corridor.’[381] The attack had come on Tuesday 8 June yet such was the MoD’s reticence in releasing details that the death toll had still not been confirmed when The Times went to press for its Saturday 12 June edition – four days after the ships had been hit. Henry Stanhope was left to report the rumours of forty-six deaths and 130 wounded but that ‘the Ministry’s refusal to give casualty figures has also prompted wide speculation in Washington where some sources say British casualties in the Tuesday raids are estimated at 300 dead and a large number wounded’.[382] The actual figure was fifty-one fatalities and forty-six injuries.

The MoD’s failure to respond quickly with accurate information was not a cause of media incompetence, as was widely assumed at the time, but of military cunning. The Argentinians believed they had inflicted nine hundred casualties and checked the British advance. Determined to foster this misimpression in their opponents’ minds, the MoD deliberately briefed the press that losses had indeed been very heavy and the assault on Stanley might have to be postponed. Henry Stanhope dutifully reported this misinformation.[383] The true death toll was withheld until the assault on Stanley had commenced on time and at full strength.[384] As Admiral Sir Terence Lewin later put it, ‘The Bluff Cove incident, when we deliberately concealed the casualty figures, was an example of using the press, the media, to further our military operations.’[385]

Witherow moved up with the Welsh Guards as they advanced for the final push. Passing gingerly through a minefield he observed the battle of Mount Tumbledown from ‘quite a way back’. Comprehensively defeated in the hills around the capital, the Argentine garrison was now preparing to surrender. Reaching the outskirts of Stanley, Witherow noted that the road ahead appeared to be open. He decided to advance on the city, hoping to be the first journalist – indeed the first person with the Task Force – into the islands’ capital. Gallingly, he discovered the omnipresent Max Hastings of the Evening Standard had beaten him to it. By the time Witherow’s report made it into The Times it was as the follow-up to Hastings’s celebrated dispatch describing the moment he liberated the Upland Goose Hotel. Taking advantage of the order to 2 Para to halt just outside the city while negotiations were entered into, Hastings had seen his chance and – exchanging his Army-issue camouflaged jacket for an anorak – wandered into the city. Finding an Argentine colonel on the steps of the administration block, Hastings recorded, ‘I introduced myself to him quite untruthfully as the correspondent of The Times newspaper, the only British newspaper that it seemed possible he would have heard of.’[386]

Having innocently printed the MoD’s misinformation about delays to the final assault, The Times was as taken by surprise by the speed of the Argentine surrender as were MPs who had gathered in the Commons chamber expecting a ministerial progress report only to discover that the Argentines were ‘reported to be flying white flags over Port Stanley’. In the preceding hours, the MoD had insisted upon a news blackout from the South Atlantic so that no reporter could get the news of the ceasefire out before the Prime Minister had announced it to Parliament. The Times could feel a sense of vindication for the strong editorial line it had taken from the first, the leader column starting, ‘In war, only what is simple can succeed’ because ‘it was clear that it was the sheer simplicity of Britain’s immediate response to the original invasion which has sustained the operation over all these weeks and made such an historic victory possible.’[387] Having initially supported the 1956 Suez fiasco, The Times had not always made the right call in such matters. Douglas-Home had risked the paper’s reputation in taking an unambiguous stance right from the beginning. Notwithstanding the loss of life, it was natural that there was a sense of relief at Gray’s Inn Road that the gamble had succeeded in its objective.

In The Winter War, the book he co-wrote with Patrick Bishop of the Observer, Witherow pointed out that the Falklands campaign was a nineteenth-century affair in the respect that it was about territory rather than ideology. Moreover, apart from the missiles, ‘the basic tools for fighting were artillery, mortars, machine guns and bayonets’, weapons that ‘would have been familiar to any veteran of World War II’.[388] It thus proved to be markedly different from the British military operations of the following twenty years in which air power and technology would predetermine the outcome on the ground and Britain would be but a junior partner in an American-led coalition. Witherow maintained that Britain’s campaign was never a preordained walkover against a bunch of useless conscripts. Argentine equipment had been generally as good as that possessed by the British. Indeed, with supplies being flown into Stanley airport right up to the eve of the surrender (so much for Britain’s claim to have disabled the runway) the Argentine troops in the area were better fed and supplied than the British. What was more, they had had plenty of time to prepare defences and ‘initially out-numbered their attackers by three to one, a direct inversion of the odds that conventional military wisdom dictates. They had nothing like the logistical problems that beset their attackers.’[389] There had been moments of luck – in particular the failure of so many Argentine missiles to detonate after hitting their target – but it was undeniably a great feat of British arms. Some began to hope that it presaged an end to the long years of managing decline that had inhabited the Whitehall psyche since Suez.

The Franks Report cleared the Thatcher Government of negligence in failing to foresee the invasion but found fault with Whitehall’s capacity for ‘crisis management’. The extent to which the Government and the MoD in particular had manipulated the news coverage of the campaign rumbled on elsewhere. The Commons Defence select committee provided newspaper editors, Douglas-Home among them, with the opportunity to draw attention to the many deficiencies that MoD restrictions and poor communication links had produced. Many journalists were outraged that senior Whitehall figures like Sir Frank Cooper had consciously misled them into writing that there would be no single D-Day-style landing only hours before such an undertaking got underway. This kind of deceit undermined trust in Government information. Doubtless Sir Frank calculated that the exact veracity of a particular briefing was less important than the survival of several hundred soldiers who would be sent to their deaths if the Argentines were ready to meet the landing party. If this was the calculation then only a public servant with a peculiar set of priorities would have done otherwise. But it was a stunt that could not be repeated too often. If journalists began to disbelieve everything Government officials told them, the whole point of briefings would break down. Operational reasons were also used to justify the slow release of information. The MoD’s decision to announce that ships had been hit without naming which and the late release of casualty figures from the Bluff Cove disaster caused distress to anxious relatives and angered all those who believed news involved immediacy of information. Where the balance resided between Whitehall’s obligation to provide a free society with truthful information and its duty not to needlessly endanger servicemen’s lives could not be easily resolved.

In the twenty years following the Falklands’ campaign, the number of commercial satellites proliferated, permitting war correspondents to communicate swiftly and directly to their offices and readers or viewers. Those reporting from the South Atlantic in 1982 did not enjoy such liberty. They had no alternative but to entrust their copy to the British military who alone had the capability to transmit it back to London and, in the first instance, to the MoD censors. If the armed forces did not like the look of the copy they were under no obligation even to send the dispatch. Whitehall had been able to prevent any foreign press from covering the operation by the simple device of refusing them a berth on any of the ships travelling with the Task Force. But subsequent wars were not fought over inaccessible islands close to the Antarctic. And since they involved joint operations with allies, what reporters with one country’s troops could transmit became the effective property of all.

Indeed, the Falklands War would be the last major conflict in which newspaper reports were more immediate than television pictures. The experience of the BBC and ITV crews on the aircraft carrier Hermes was even more frustrating than that of the Fleet Street journalists on Invincible. Because the British military transmitters were at the edge of their South Atlantic coverage, satellite transmission rendered pictures of too poor a quality to show. Using commercial satellites ran supposed security risks if Argentina managed to dial in to them and gain potentially useful information. Instead, all film footage had to be flown from the Falklands to Ascension Island before it could be broadcast. This created monumental delays. The first television pictures of the landings at San Carlos were shown on British television two and a half weeks after the event. Some of the footage took twenty-three days to reach transmission. This was three days longer than it took Times readers to find out the fate of the Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854.[390]

The quality of The Times’s reporting of the Crimean War had been one of the most illustrious episodes in the paper’s history. But besides seeing its editorial line vindicated, The Times’s coverage of the Falklands’ crisis was competent rather than remarkable. It did not, of course, want to compete with the attention-grabbing antics of the tabloids. Nonetheless, its news presentation lacked sharpness. Perhaps it was at its most deficient in its layout. Sometimes the picture selection beggared belief. The front-page headline for 3 June, ‘Argentina lost 250 men at Goose Green’, was accompanied by a photograph entitled ‘Languid lesson: Students basking in Regent’s Park, London yesterday’. The photograph that should have been used – of dejected Argentine soldiers being marched out of Goose Green into captivity – appeared on page three where there was no directly related article. Put simply, Douglas-Home had none of the visual awareness of his ousted predecessor. The magic touch of Harold Evans and his design team was noticeably lacking.

Max Hastings of the Evening Standard had proved to be the most successful reporter of the conflict, a reality that created enmity from some of the other reporters who felt he had been given preferential treatment on account of his being au fait with Army ways. Journalists’ squabbling over who got the best coverage appeared petty to soldiers and sailors whose every thought and action had been directed towards a team effort and a common purpose. Three of the journalists, including the representative from the Guardian, so hated the experience of covering the war that they quit and had to be brought home before the campaign was over. Witherow had stuck it out. Right at the very last moment, he was almost rewarded with the scoop he had been so long seeking. Having surrendered to General Moore, General Menendez, the Argentine commander-in-chief, was being held in a cabin on HMS Fearless. With Patrick Bishop, Witherow managed to sneak into the cabin and began interviewing the defeated general. Unfortunately, the inquisition had not advanced far when a naval officer walked in, discovered what was afoot and bundled the two reporters out.[391]

The strident jingoism of the Sun and the less patriotic ‘even-handedness’ of the BBC generated the two shouting matches within the media. The Times gave little space to the first issue but it refused to join what it termed the ‘shrill chorus of complaint’ heard from the Sun and right-wing Tories who perceived the BBC’s attempts to present both sides of the argument as tantamount to treason. The MoD’s inability to speed the supply of copy from the South Atlantic inevitably ensured news services turned to other sources – including Argentine ones – to find out what was going on. What else could they do but cite ‘Argentine claims’ against ‘British claims’? However, the Panorama presenter Robert Kee had taken the unusual step of writing a letter to The Times criticizing the one-sided anti-war tone of one of the offending reports on his own programme.[392] This ensured the end of Kee’s Panorama career but it was noticeable that The Times did not share the Sun’s view that there were ‘traitors in our midst’, especially in the Corporation.

The boost in national newspaper circulation during the conflict was scarcely perceptible. By the end of hostilities, the increase was below 1 per cent. This tended to support the analysts’ claim that the tabloid market had long been at saturation point. But if people were not buying more newspapers, it did not mean they were not above switching titles. Looked at over a slightly broader period, comparing the same March to September period of the previous year, The Times circulation had risen 13,000 to 303,300. This compared to a 66,000 fall in the Telegraph to 1,313,000 while the war-sceptic Guardian had risen by over 8 per cent (33,500) to 421,700, increasing the margin of its lead over The Times.[393] In sales figures, it was the Guardian that, ironically, had the best war.