Thomson Reuters Special Services is a far cry from the Reuters original

President Donald Trump recently told Thomson Reuters Special Services to return $9 million dollars from a Defence Department contract meant to protect the US government from a cyber threat called social engineering.

The case has caused controversy, among many others generated by Trump in his first month in power, because it is based on a false premise distorted on social media.

Thomson Reuters, responding to accusations by Trump and Elon Musk that it played a role in "large scale social deception” for the government, said its business with the Department of Defence was "inaccurately represented."  

It said Thomson Reuters Special Services was a separate U.S. legal entity from Reuters News, governed by an independent board of directors. The contract was concluded during Trump's first term. 

Trump did not complain about a previous $55.85 million Special Services contract with the Department of Homeland Security which provides data for his  crackdown on illegal immigrants.  That contract aroused much controversy when it was reported in 2018.

The size and nature of these contracts is a far cry from the Reuters Special Services of the 1960s and 1970s. Led by Ray Rumble, who died in 2014, the small unit of three or four people signed up British and foreign newspapers to use Reuters communications around the world for their correspondents to transmit their stories. Clients included the New York Times, Washington Post and the Times of London.

During the Vietnam war, veteran London telegraphist Wally Tuffin was sent to Saigon to handle the flood of copy from foreign correspondents and much of the cost of Reuters coverage was paid by revenue from Special Services.

It was interesting to see some of the traffic.  After the Viet Cong bombed a U.S. military hostel in Saigon on Christmas Eve in 1964, the correspondent of a Fleet Street tabloid filed just one paragraph: “I was sitting at a street café in Saigon when a huge explosion tore through a US military hotel … (Pick up agencies).”

When General Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain for 36 years, died in 1975, Rumble sent me two teleprinter operators from London to Madrid to cope with the surge of special filers.  

Special traffic, believed to have been the idea of Commander John Meadows, communications chief in the 60s, and David Chipp , manager for Southeast Asia, made use of spare capacity on Reuters leased lines and raised income for the struggling General News Division. It also gave London teleprinter operators a chance to travel. “It’s almost like being a foreign correspondent,” one telegraphist told me.

The modern Thomson Reuters Special Services has been awarded more than $120 million in contracts with several US federal agencies dating back to 2010.

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