Protecting sources is a non-negotiable must for journalists. But getting it right is not always easy, even with the best of intentions. Former Guardianeditor Peter Prestonrecalls a painful episode.
There is a personal pain to writing about it even now, almost of a quarter of century later. In many ways the scars still bleed easily when you scratch at them. Don't think journalism is always a flip, cynical business. Sometimes the things you do - or don't do - live on as a permanent reproach.
So here I go again, one more time. It's a dark autumn evening in 1983 and the night news editor of the Guardian, John Hooper, rushes in to talk to the paper's editor (me). John has started his shift by leafing through the bumf in his tray - and look, look at this, a ministry of defence document from Michael Heseltine, marked "secret", and just lying there, almost magically, amid the routine hand-outs. It tells you how and when the cruise missiles will come to Greenham Common, what Hezza will tell the House of Commons, how he'll deal with Greenham's vexatious women. There's no covering note, no clue where the document came from.
But it is, if genuine, a story. Not a massive story: the juice is in the dates and timings, which will surely be changed once they're public. But still a necessary yarn.
I call in my defence editor. He makes some calls, pronounces the document genuine, and we lead on it. Then nothing much happens. The turbulent cruise pool continues choppy, but the government doesn't react. Parliament talks of other things. Correspondents for the paper are asked to scan the text and hunt for a follow-up. Ronald Reagan invades Grenada. The focus shifts. It isn't until well over a week later - on a flat news Sunday - that we come back to the Greenham stuff.
I'm in Bristol on family business. The duty editor, after due consultation, thinks it might be interesting to run the document verbatim, just to show readers how it's couched. He puts it on page two. Again, nothing happens, until - 48 hours on - there's a sudden intervention: the treasury solicitor, all-purpose Whitehall legal enforcer, wants his paperwork back. Worse, at least on the rumour circuit, special branch may be around for an office search.
And there's the immediate rub. We'd copied the document for staff specialists to look at. So there are at least half a dozen copies in other hands, some of them miles away and not answering their phones. The natural instinct is to destroy: the practical conclusion is that this can't be done fast enough. I've been sloppy and distracted, we're in a mess. So we call our own solicitor. He's experienced and upright. Since we can't physically destroy the document, he offers the 1981 Contempt of Court Act instead, with its specific provisions allowing journalists to defend their sources. We stake our case for not handing over the document on that new law. The treasury solicitor agrees - providing, of course, that we solemnly agree to hand it over if we lose. I sign, on behalf of the paper, on the bottom line. Was there any inkling then that fate had already taken over? Not really.
We didn't know who the source was, nor how he'd infiltrated John Hooper's tray. We didn't know who we were defending, or what steps he (or she) had taken to protect himself. We hadn't, in that sense, been trusted. We thought we might be being merely quixotic. Weeks of waiting ticked by. Then, suddenly, we were in the law courts in the Strand, mounting our defence before Mr Justice (Richard) Scott . . . and losing on an agonisingly narrow property point. We appealed. Three judges were miraculously available that afternoon to deliver a similar but different verdict. It wasn't that the document was dangerous, or whose property it was. It was the fact that the "disloyal civil servant" who'd leaked it might go on to leak something about "national security".
At which point, the jaws of the system snapped shut. There were other appeals that could be made (and were) but the government wanted its document back first, and invoked daily escalating fines against the Guardianto make sure it got it. I'd signed my name on behalf of the company promising to hand over those copies. Did I resign, tear them up and face the consequences?
Heads or tails, everybody loses. But wasn't that double-dealing, too? So (after much debate) the document was handed over, in person and in misery. And, more weeks later, a 24-year-old foreign office clerk, Sarah Tisdall, was arrested, pleaded guilty and sentenced to six months in prison.
She had used a foreign office photocopier that could be identified. She'd been horrified by what she saw as the government's ruthless parliamentary tactics over bringing the cruise missiles. She thought the public ought to know. The fact that - to me - the tactics Heseltine outlined were standard issue for any British government with a dodgy decision to implement made it all worse, rather than better.
Tisdall wasn't some hardened politician chucking a spanner in Thatcher's works. She was innocent in the purest sense of the word (and might, like Clive Ponting soon after, have been acquitted if she'd taken her case to a jury).
Are there lessons from all this that linger no matter how much you'd like to forget? Of course. They come winging back the moment any parallel case crops up. Judith Miller of the New York Timesin prison? America's press demands "shield laws", which come automatically to the aid of journalists protecting their sources. And we have certain shields, too - not just in 1981's updated provisions but via the European Convention on Human Rights and the press complaints commission's code (which has some influence on British law).
But is there truly any shield a writer or his editor would be wise to rely on? Alas, I don't think so. Alas, I've seen what happens when the pincers of the state snap shut.
The plain fact, in three interlocking courts, is that the Guardianfailed to protect its sources - but that, in each and every case, the reasons for our loss were different.
The plain fact is that some hugely distinguished judges - Lord Scarman for one - took our side, whilst others barely got to the starting line. The plain fact is that any shield is a potential mockery if "national security", however vestigially involved, can be invoked. And in my mind, too, the plain fact is that an editor's duty to a source applies even when the source has deliberately kept himself anonymous.
Of course we'd have gone to any lengths to protect a known informant, but not knowing made matters altogether muddier. We didn't know who, or what, we were trying to defend. We blundered around in the dark. But the crux, it seemed to me later, was putting the material as supplied in print.
That was the moment a bargain with persons unknown was clinched. Unspoken, unsigned, but still a bargain. Publication was the defining deal. None of this seemed quite so clear at the time, of course. You wandered instead around a moral maze of speculation. But the results were clear enough.
Tisdall went to prison. She, and her wonderful parents, shouldered a great deal of responsibility and showed a great deal of understanding over what had gone wrong. I felt wretched, because I should have been wiser. The paper endured months of pretty facile name-calling and, much worse, a temporary news drought as its sources dried up.
One enduring lesson emerged. Occasionally, under some bit of law in some particular circumstance, a shield law can function. Both sides - politicians and journalists - know that protecting sources is vital, which is why they try to legislate in search of such protection. But when push comes to shove, any shield defence and its chances of success turns frail. Any developed legal system has plenty of ways around a problem. Shields can become flimsy in a trice. Then, because you've started down a legal route, you're stuck with its verdict.
So editors, if they want to be sure, have only one solid recourse if they want leaked information to flow in freedom. They can't dissemble or vacillate or brood. They have to put any potentially incriminating document out of harm's way. Perhaps - as in our case - that's not physically easy at a crunch. Perhaps, from fascination or for future reference, some paperwork is merely stowed away.
But the lesson of the Greenham leak, a lesson bitterly learned, puts all doubts to one side. Read and destroy. You do it, as I did many times after, because that is the only true way, a principle and course of action within your own control.
And if protecting sources is as important as governments themselves say when they sign human rights conventions, who can argue with that?
Peter Preston was editor of theGuardian from 1975 to 1995. He continues to write for it and its sister paper, theObserver . Sarah Tisdall served four months of her six-month sentence