Contacts with British intelligence

With reference to Charles Oppenheim’s letter [Derek Jameson’s recollections] in which he says Special Branch acted in effect as an intermediary in efforts by Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) to cultivate correspondents, I would like to add that while Reuters was a trust company it was, as far I know, very much off-limits to British intelligence.

The same went for the FT (and that may well still be the case). Probably it all changed when Reuters went public with its first share offering in 1984. I had had contacts with SIS officers over the years prior to my Reuters employment and when in 1983 I told an SIS officer I was thinking of joining Reuters (in Hong Kong), he told me that if I did so, SIS and I would not be able to continue to have conversations. I said that if it was so important to him, he could always offer me a career in the service. His response was as diplomatic as it was accurate. The matter had been discussed, he said, but it was felt that I “would chafe under the bureaucratic restrictions of a peacetime service”.

It wasn’t until the end of the 1980s that an SIS officer made himself known to me as such and we had a chat about matters of common interest.

I knew about the FT because I was once interviewed - successfully - for the role of stringer in south Asia by a very self-important personage at the newspaper’s London offices. The paper did not recruit spies, he said, and it did not allow its own correspondents to become involved in intelligence work and he wanted an assurance that I was not an agent of some kind. 

The notion of Special Branch coppers acting as matchmaker seems implausible; it would widen the circle of people conscious of SIS interest in specific correspondents, leading to just such a revelation as Mr Oppenheim’s letter. It would surely make for better security if SIS officers working under diplomatic cover were to use their own discretion in deciding whether to approach people of interest. But what do I know? As the man said, I’d only chafe under such rules. ■