Secrecy and the Media: The Official History of the United Kingdom's D-Notice System:: The Official History of the D-notice System (Government Official History) Hardcover – 26 May 2009

Retired British Admiral Nick Wilkinson has given us more about the wrangling of government and press in the United Kingdom than any reasonable person would want to know. This is not meant as criticism of this fine book, but is only meant to suggest how detailed it truly is. Wilkinson takes the reader through the origins and development of a unique collaboration between government and news media that might only flourish in the UK. Indeed, any American journalists or military officers with whom I have spoken about the "D-Notice" system in Britain only shake their heads in amazement. Yet, it works, and Admiral Wilkinson has done an extremely thorough job of laying out the reasons why it works. Moreover, this book is much more than simply a history of the D-Notice Committee. It is, rather, an integrated look at spying, intelligence, secrecy, the news media, and government-news media interaction over the course of almost the entirety of the twentieth century.

Wilkinson starts the meat of the book with the Boer Wars, that nasty series of little-understood conflicts between Britain and Afrikaaner settlers that determined the fate of Southern Africa. British generals sought to limit the information that journalists were able to ferret-out and transmit to their newspapers, while newspapermen thought they ought to be free to write and publish as they wished. One of the innovations used by the British army during this conflict was the beginning of what in Vietnam would come to be known as the "Five O'Clock Follies." According to Wilkinson, a military "Staff Officer will fix an hour when correspondents may call upon him daily for information, and he will be authorized to tell them everything that can be published with safety to the Army." Not unsurprisingly, such a deliberate release of information did not cause the press to resolve to live exclusively upon government hand-outs, and the inherent conflict between the citizenry's right to know and the government's duty to protect its true secrets continued.
The lead-up to World War I proved that press and government could cooperate when it came to keeping true secrets from being publicized. In 1911, on several occasions that Wilkinson documents, members of the press demonstrated to the government that they could be trusted to withhold material that might be damaging to national security. It was not such a great leap, then, to establish a formalized way for press and government to come together to discuss what should and should not be published. Thus was born the antecedent of the modern D-Notice Committee.

With fits and starts the arrangement held up reasonably well throughout World War I. Wilkinson quotes a government official as saying that "'practically none of the [D-] Notices had been disregarded except by one or two publications of a certain kind. The Press as a whole had loyally observed the warnings." The Admiralty, War Office, Air Ministry and Press Committee was suspended, the author writes, during WWII. The book does not therefore attempt to cover the D-Notices issued by the Ministry of Information during that period. It does relate the criterion use for war censorship of the press in the UK: censorship was to be based upon "security alone." This meant, writes the author, that elements like harm to public morale (unless of "real gravity") would not provide a basis for withholding information.

The Cold War brought its own problems between government and news media. Various British citizens--Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, George Blake, to name a few--were revealed as spies for the Soviet Union. The D-Notice Committee was soon re-established. Wilkinson does a superb job of recounting the dynamics between members of the press and the government of the UK over the various crises of the day, ranging from the Suez affair to the Kuwait episode. The American journalist Joseph Galloway has described the tension between the two sides--at least in the US--as being one of "anarchists" versus "control freaks," with the news media, of course, playing the role of anarchy. Such did not seem to be the case with respect to British journalists, nor, it should be said as an aside, was it the case with American journalists of the earlier wartime periods.

Wilkinson's book is very fluidly written. The author manages to put the story in front of the reader with great detail, but he does so in such manner that the story moves smartly along. The book contains various appendices, which are themselves quite interesting: examples of WWI D-Notices and secret letters to editors; WWII Defence notices; examples of D-Notices and letters to the editor, 1945-67; examples of parliamentary questions; lists of D-Notice Committee Chairmen, Vice-Chairmen, and Secretaries, and a very nice glossary of terms and acronyms. This is the definitive book on the uniquely British system called the D-Notice Committee. I commend it to you.