Why is the government persecuting a decent, patriotic man?

Steven Glover

Things grow stranger and stranger in the Tony Geraghty affair, which I wrote about on 6 March and 22 May. Readers may remember that last December Ministry of Defence police raided the Herefordshire home of Mr Geraghty and removed dozens of files. He and Nigel Wylde, a retired lieutenant colonel, were subsequently charged under the Official Secrets Act. The charge against Mr Geraghty relates to a six-page passage in his book The Irish War about computer surveillance in Northern Ireland.

One extraordinary aspect of this affair was the government's decision not to seek an injunction against the book. Before it was published last October, the Ministry of Defence was well aware of its existence: Admiral David Pulvertaft, secretary to the D-Notice Committee, even wrote to HarperCollins, Mr Geraghty's publisher, asking to see the manuscript. The book went on sale and is still freely available in bookshops.

Nonetheless, the Ministry of Defence has successfully put the screws on HarperCollins not to publish the paperback. It was due to come out on 1 September and publication has been postponed sine die. During July and August, senior executives at HarperCollins received three visits from Ministry of Defence police. On one occasion the boys in blue arrived in a van full of dogs which they parked outside, its lights flashing aggressively. The apparent purpose of these visits was to intimidate HarperCollins and in this they seem to have succeeded. One executive agreed to go to a police station to swear a statement.

All this is very odd and slightly scary. On the whole one associates visits by policemen to publishing houses with repressive regimes. A visit to the offices of HarperCollins by officers from Scotland Yard would have been bizarre enough. But it is highly questionable whether the MoD police were acting within their jurisdiction. When the Ministry of Defence Police Bill was debated in January 1987, the relevant minister, Archie Hamilton, gave an assurance that ,all serious crimes [would be] passed to the domestic police department'. The MoD police probably shouldn't have been stomping around the Herefordshire countryside last year and they almost certainly shouldn't have been nosing around the London offices of HarperCollins last month.

Again we come back to the question: if a six-page passage in a book is so objectionable, why didn't, and why doesn't, the Ministry of Defence injunct The Irish War instead of sending its boys around to put the 'frighteners' on HarperCollins? I have no answer. I suppose it is possible that a group within the Ministry of Defence has got carried away by the whole affair without much encouragement from the government. And yet it is plain that the government is involved. No less a figure than the attorney general is prosecuting Mr Geraghty under section 5 of the Official Secrets Act.

My impression is that Mr Geraghty does not live in much fear of a trial, which may take place next spring. He is a well-established author of moderate political views who served in the RAF as recently as 1990. For him to be successfully prosecuted under section 5, the Ministry of Defence would have to show that he had damaged military capacity and put lives at risk. Is this really credible? I have read the passage in The Irish War, and I fail to understand what the fuss is about. Plainly Mr Geraghty has received some inside information. But if the intention is to scare off servicemen from passing information to authors and journalists, this seems an amazingly heavy-handed way of going about it.

Two months ago Lord Williams of Mostyn was appointed attorney general in place of John Morris. Lord Williams is said to be a man of liberal views and earned a reputation as a civil-rights lawyer. If he has any sense he will drop this case, in the public interest. It is also very much in the government's interest for him to do so. So far, the media have scarcely noticed this case, but if it were to come to court it would become a cause celebre. Could the authorities justify their behaviour so far? Does it make any sense to persecute a decent, patriotic man like Mr Geraghty when Soviet spies such as Melita Norwood have been let off scot-free? In a way I rather hope the case does come to trial - it would be a fine spectacle, and it would clarify important issues such as the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defence police. But Lord Williams would be wise to take a different view.