Abstract
It is 30 years since TV journalists were condemned by the British government for questioning the killing of an IRA squad
“Thames Television can wriggle like a puff adder.
They can posture like Mick Jagger.
They can hold all the inquiries they wish into the truthfulness of witnesses and the integrity of their journalists.
But they cannot alter basic truths.
Their programme, ‘Death on the Rock’, was an irresponsible, mischievous, deeply shaming episode.
It should NEVER have been made.
It should NEVER have been broadcast.”
That was The Sun's reaction to an independent inquiry into the Death on the Rock programme 30 years ago. The investigative documentary, made by Thames Television's This Week team, investigated the Gibraltar killings in which three IRA members were killed. I was the editor and the programme was my idea.
The Sun's response to programmes connected with the Troubles in Northern Ireland was not unusual, and allegations of treachery were frequent. Years earlier, while editor of the BBC's Panorama programme, I had been one of those targeted by the journalist and historian Paul Johnson. He wrote: “The BBC not only lies, it lies for the left. It not only rapes, it rapes for the revolution.”
I want to reflect on that extraordinary period when some Fleet Street journalists and their editors seemed more intent on attacking television programmes than getting at the truth. Is it any different today? The decision to commission Death on the Rock was not a difficult one. I was aware that it was likely to be controversial, but not that it would drive the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, to a state “beyond fury”, and threaten the existence of Thames Television. When the inquiry into the programme was announced, the former editor of ITN, Nigel Ryan, wrote this in Press Gazette: “If the government has its way, Death on the Rock may go down in history as not so much a programme title, more an epitaph for the ITV system… At risk is the future of the IBA [the Independent Broadcasting Authority, the then regulator of ITV], which sanctioned it, as well as the free operation of public service journalism.”
So why did we make the programme?
When I first heard that three IRA members had been shot in Gibraltar I did not think there was much of a story for a weekly current affairs series. After all, according to official sources, the trio had been in the act of planting a bomb and had been shot in a firefight. The official briefings had been detailed. Joe Paley, the BBC's correspondent in Gibraltar, said the bomb, which had been left in a car, “would have done enormous damage. It was something like five hundred pounds of explosives, packed with bits of metal, shrapnel and so on.” ITN said that “a fierce gun battle broke out” and that “army explosives experts used a robot to defuse the bomb”.
On the Today programme, the minister for the armed forces, Ian Stewart, congratulated the Gibraltar government. He said: “Military personnel were involved. There was a car bomb found, which has been defused.” However, as the foreign secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, made clear in a Commons statement the following afternoon, there was no bomb in the car, the IRA members had been unarmed and the shooting had all been one way.
It did not take a genius to work out that a fierce propaganda battle would follow and that it was important to try to establish the facts, particularly as there was a widely held view in Northern Ireland that the British government was operating a “shoot to kill” policy. As Jonathan Dimbleby put it in his introduction to the programme: “The question, which goes to the heart of the issue, is this: did the SAS men have the law on their side when they shot dead Danny McCann, Sean Savage and Mairead Farrell, who were unarmed at the time?”
Some facts about Gibraltar were clear. The IRA was planning a “spectacular” and the probable target was a military ceremony, attended by members of the public, some of whom would undoubtedly have been killed and injured. There was no bomb in the car, as the trio had been on a trial run and had left another car, with explosive in the boot, in a car park over the border in Spain.
The terrorists were unarmed, and one, Savage, had been killed in what the official pathologist, Professor Alan Watson of Glasgow University, called “a frenzied attack”. He had been shot five times in the back and four or five times in the head – in the pathologist's opinion, by a gunman standing above him. That is, when Savage was lying face upwards on the ground. Evidence was given that the other two IRA members, McCann and Farrell, were also shot several times when they were on, or close to, the ground, and McCann had been shot in the back of the head.
British intelligence had known about the operation for some time and had cooperated with the Spanish. They had followed the IRA members as they went about their planning. Almost everything else was disputed.
Many Awards but the Franchise was Lost
The key to the government case were three assertions. One, they had lost contact with the bombers as they travelled from Spain to Gibraltar and only discovered they were there as they walked back to the border. Two, the security forces thought there was, or might be, a bomb in the car. And three, when challenged, the terrorists made movements that suggested to the soldiers that they were going for their (non-existent) guns or were trying to activate a (non-existent) radio-controlled bomb.
The This Week team, reporter Julian Manyon, producer Chris Oxley and researcher Alison Cahn, spent weeks knocking on every door in the vicinity of the shooting to find witnesses who would support the official version. They failed.
What they did find were Spanish intelligence officials who insisted they did not lose track of the terrorists as they travelled to the border, and who said they handed over surveillance to the British there. The team also found an explosives expert who said it would have been obvious there was no bomb in the car, and witnesses who said the terrorists put their hands up as if to surrender and who heard no warnings given by the SAS soldiers before they started. (At the inquest the SAS soldiers, who insisted they believed the IRA team was armed, said they could not remember if they gave warnings or not, and confirmed that when they started shooting they shot to kill.)
We were unable to reconcile these accounts and so suggested at the end of the programme that a public inquiry was needed. The government refused one. Indeed, it attacked the programme before it had seen it and, according to Thatcher's press secretary, Bernard Ingham, she was almost speechless with anger and “beyond fury”.
From the moment we began working on the documentary the government refused to assist us on or off the record. It was made clear it thought we had no business making such a programme. Nonetheless, I spent a lot of my time trying to get the ministry of defence to cooperate with us. I briefed it on a number of occasions about our research and in particular asked for its help in blowing up a car, to show how lethal the planned explosion would have been. it refused to help in any way and no government minister or defence ministry representative was made available for interview.
So we knew that the government would hate the programme, but why did it become so controversial when it did not claim to have proved there was a “shoot to kill” policy but only that a massive conflict of evidence existed that was best dealt with by a public inquiry? The answer lies partly in the outspoken attacks by ministers and partly in the extraordinarily violent attacks made on This Week by sections of the press.
For example, Andrew Neil, then editor of The Sunday Times, asked his Insight team to scrutinise not what happened in Gibraltar, but Death on the Rock itself. The paper's two-page spread appeared to be damaging to This Week and we were baffled by some of the statements attributed to witnesses who had appeared in our programme. They subsequently told us their views had been misrepresented by the paper. It was only months later that Sunday Times journalists went public with their concerns about their paper's coverage and the way their reporting had been distorted.
The row rumbled on until the inquest in Gibraltar, which resulted in Sun headlines such as “Why the dogs had to die”, “IRA fiend cut down by 16 bullets”, and “a super-smooth awayday mission”. And when one witness appeared to retract evidence he gave us, there was intense pressure on the IBA to set up an independent inquiry, which it did. It was headed by the former Conservative Northern Ireland minister and television executive, Lord Windlesham, and Richard Rampton QC. Much of Fleet Street was triumphant, although Max Hastings, the editor of The Daily Telegraph, in defiance of the views of its owner and probably most of its readership, defended the programme in principle. It was a typically brave action.
The inquiry team travelled to Gibraltar to interview witnesses. It scrutinised transcripts and expenses, interviewed unnamed defence ministry staff and government officials, and sat the Thames TV team down one by one in front of a microphone and questioned us closely. We were not shown any of the alleged evidence against us. I don't think a team of journalists have ever been put under such microscopic scrutiny. Months later, the inquiry reported and, with a few minor criticisms, gave us a clean sheet.
The report concluded: “The programme makers were experienced, painstaking and persistent. They did not bribe, bully or misrepresent those who took part. The programme was trenchant and avoided triviality. Those who made it were acting in good faith and without ulterior motives.”
The government was not amused. Howe said it was a report “about television, by television, for television”. His friend Windlesham was disgusted by that. “Since my independence and integrity have been questioned,” he said, “I should like to make it clear that I do not intend to accept payment for my work on the report during a period of 14 weeks.”
In the aftermath the documentary won several awards, but a couple of years later Thames Television lost its franchise to broadcast and the IBA was abolished.
Would it be made Today?
Thirty years later are we any clearer about what happened in Gibraltar? Not much, although some additional information has surfaced. An official document emerged confirming that Spanish intelligence did not lose contact with the terrorists as they travelled from Spain to Gibraltar. Another document revealed that a policeman present at the scene of the shootings, who told the inquest he was there by accident and knew nothing about Operation Flavius – the plan to stop the bombers – was in fact in charge of one of its firearms teams.
A year later, I talked to the former deputy prime minister, the late Willie Whitelaw, off the record. He told me, “You don't usually send the SAS to arrest people”, and gave me a meaningful stare. In 1995 the European court of human rights decided that the British government had broken the law by using more force than was necessary – that is, three people need not have been killed, and should have been arrested and put on trial. Downing Street said the verdict “defied common sense”.
When Christopher Andrew published the first authorised history of MI5 called The Defence of the Realm in 2009 we hoped to find out more, but in his treatment of the Gibraltar killings he merely repeated the original official account and repeated mistakes the ministry of defence had made at the time – for example, attributing the documentary to Granada Television's World in Action series instead of to Thames’ This Week. Andrew did not bother to contact me to check his account.
In similar circumstances today, would another Death on the Rock be made? And, if it was, would some newspapers and politicians still attack the messenger and try to prevent proper public scrutiny of such controversial events?
I live in hope and believe redemption is possible. After all, Neil eventually left newspapers and became probably the best political interviewer on TV, demonstrating an admirably even-handed approach and a remorseless pursuit of the truth. I am sure that today he would make mincemeat of The Sunday Times's coverage of Death on the Rock.
