Despite this, Burgess was never challenged or arrested by Britain’s spy-catchers in a decade and a half of espionage; dirty, scruffy, sexually promiscuous, a ‘slob’, conspicuously drunk and constantly drawing attention to himself, his superiors were convinced he was far too much of a liability to have been recruited by Moscow.

Now, with a major new release of hundreds of files into the National Archives, Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert‘s new book Guy Burgess: The Spy Who Knew Everyone reveals just how this charming establishment insider was able to fool his many friends and acquaintances for so long, ruthlessly exploiting them to penetrate major British institutions without suspicion, all the while working for the KGB.

Purvis and Hulbert also detail his final days in Moscow – so often a postscript in his story – as well as the moment the establishment finally turned on him, outmanoeuvring his attempts to return to England after he began to regret his decision to defect.

Guests are encouraged to read the book before the event, although you are also welcome to join if you’ve just started your exploration. This an informal dinner event. We start with drinks from 7pm, following by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM. Menu is £25 per person excluding drinks.

The event will be hosted by Pranvera Smith and Ed Vulliamy, senior correspondent at the Guardian and the Observer.

Investigative journalist Nick Davies treated the Frontline Club to a detailed insight into his new book, and into the saga that dominated seven years of his life – uncovering the hacking scandal at News of the World.

One thing that he makes clear in the book, Hack Attack, is that the investigation uncovered far more than just illegal activity at one of Britain’s top newspapers – it also shed light on the power a media mogul had accumulated. As the subtitle of the book asked: Has the truth caught up with Rupert Murdoch?

Asking this question and many more was City University lecturer and former editor-in-chief and CEO of ITN, Stewart Purvis, who did not let The Guardian journalist off lightly, diving straight into some difficult questions about Davies’ own ethics and background.

In the wake of the revelations, Davies has faced a barrage of often vitriolic criticism. Purvis asked whether, in the face of so much over-whelming hostility, Davies ever thought of calling it a day. “I’ve read you elsewhere saying that underlying all your journalism is some deep-seated need to hit back at all who take power and abuse it”.

Davies agreed that part of his journalistic drive over such a long investigation came from a desire to speak out against abuse, but it also came from the necessity to defend his own credibility:

“Because [News International] kept attacking us, I couldn’t let the story drop. It wasn’t just a question of putting out a story and telling the truth, we had to defend our credibility.”

Purvis also raised the point that it fell to “little old you” to fully expose the hacking scandal when the trial of Goodman and Mulcaire in 2007 clearly pointed back to the paper. Davies‘ role in the story has been held as both an indictment to the failings of the free press and also as a validation of the strengths of the press. Was there a simple explanation?

“First of all you have newspaper failings: they’re owned by Murdoch, they’re up to the crimes themselves, they’re Tory supporters – all really worrying things that are influencing so-called ‘news judgment’. Beyond that, you have the PCC that I would say was, in certain important respects, intellectually corrupt. And beyond that you have the thing that makes this story worth writing about. . . . It’s about power and the way that power works.”

The media mogul of Davies‘ book generates fear in two ways: first by exposing people’s personal lives, hurting and humiliating them, and secondly, through organisational fear:

“If you are trying to get your party elected and you see your campaign being destabilised by hostile newspapers, you can’t run your organisation. What I think is interesting is that like a bully, once they have beaten up a few kids, people will start to tiptoe around the bully and placate him.”

Referring to this later on, Purvis pulled out a comment from The New York Times review of Hack Attack by David Carr, who wrote that “despite the book’s title, the truth never catches up with Rupert Murdoch.”

So has it? Almost. Davies said that during the summer of 2011, there was a chain reaction of disgust building on the emotional impact of the Milly Dowler story, The Telegraph‘s revelations that families of the victims of the London bombings had had their phones hacked, as had families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Suddenly nobody wanted to be Rupert Murdoch’s friend and everyone was changing sides.

“There was a moment when the truth caught up with him. But . . . slowly the power comes back.”

A member of the audience asked, “As in the context of big stories and big exposes, where does this one rank?” to which Davies answered with a story:

“I was at university when the Watergate scandal broke . . . and the idea that these two guys, Woodward and Bernstein, armed only with notebook and pen, could bring down the most powerful politician in the world because he was abusing his power, was just sensationally exciting. So I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll go and be a reporter.’ . . . [Then after the phone hacking scandal exploded] the phone rang one night and I picked it up and a gravelly voice said, ‘This is Carl Bernstein – I just want to say well done,’ and it brought tears to the eyes! It was like God calling!”

Watch and listen back here:

Your wonderful and kind messages mean so much to us, as has your friendship, council and support over so many years. There is no prize in our trade that we could ever value as much as your belief in us.

– Vaughan and Pranvera Smith

 

Thank you to Stewart Purvis, Richard Gizbert, Tina Carr, Emma Beals, Allan Little, Mani, Stuart Hughes, Richard Sambrook, Jon Snow, Marina Litvinenko, Martin Bell, Tom Fenton, Anthony Loyd, Lyse Doucet, Bill Neely, Lindsey Hilsum, Charles Glass, John G Morris, Salim Amin, Liz Palmer Gary Knight, Jon Lee Anderson, Jeremy Bowen, Matt Frei and Jean-Jacques Gonfier.

An event at the Frontline Club on 25 September saw a discussion focused on the recently published book by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert, When Reporters Cross The Line, examining the ethics of reporting in high pressure situations.

L-R Frederick Forsyth, Jeff Hulbert, Martin Bell, Stewart Purvis, Penny Marshall. Photo: Greta Hofmann

Assembled for the discussion were Purvis, professor of television journalism at City University, Hulbert, a media historian, Penny Marshall of ITV News, former journalist and renowned novelist Frederick Forsyth and veteran journalist Martin Bell in the chair.

A wide-ranging talk took in Marshall’s defence of a story on Bosnian war atrocities, Forsyth’s experiences of reporting the Biafra massacres in Nigeria, and a variety of other issues associated with reporting under pressure.

The product of meticulous archive research, Purvis and Hulbert’s book covers a range of situations in which lines might be crossed.

“No one has ever defined what the line is,” said Purvis. “We found that there are lots of lines.”

“We felt that there was a need for certainty in regulations, but found that regulatory precision is unlikely and that there are grey areas all over the place. . . . The subtitle for the book was heroes, villains, hackers and spies. Some of the villains turned out to be heroes and some of the heroes turned out to be villains.”

Touching on the issue of protection of a journalist’s sources, Hulbert suggested that while this is important, there was also a responsibility for a journalist to be held accountable for their reporting:

“It’s a little debatable from the archives whether the stories actually held water. . . . At no point have lawyers said to journalists ‘you made it up mate’. They just allowed the innuendo to percolate.”

In 2000, ITN won a libel case against left-wing magazine Living Marxism that had claimed that Marshall, along with others at ITN, had fabricated a report about a Bosnian detention camp.

“The supposed motives were variously that we were in it to win it, were vain, wanted an award, or worse had an anti-Serb agenda and had gone out to see what we wanted to see and wasn’t there,” she explained. “What ensued some of the bravest defending of our journalism.”

Marshall admitted though that in the heat of a situation the lines are not always clear cut:

“In the field the lines are blurred,” she said. “It’s easy for regulators and for academics who are not in high stress situations. But in these situations you have to rely on the seasoned judgement of journalists. I held hands with a lost child. I showed I cared . . . we’re not robots. If you don’t care, don’t be a journalist.”

A more difficult line, said Marshall, was the extent to which sources of stories should be put at risk:

“I’ve always worried that some of the people who were in our report lost their lives because of our endeavours to show what was happening.”

Forsyth said that he had crossed “three lines” during the course of his career. The first was taking a job as the BBC’s assistant diplomatic correspondent at the age of 28 and realising he had not only “inadvertently joined the establishment”, but was also “expected to serve it”.

The coverage he was expected to produce of the Nigerian-Biafran war in 1967, he said, was “strongly biased”. The second line was his decision to walk out on his post without notice and board a plane to Biafra, where he witnessed what he described as “a deliberately concocted and organised famine.”

“It was the only time our government has assisted a foreign government killing its own citizens,” he said. “Why? Because of the massive vanity of senior civil servants who could not and would not be proved wrong.”

Others on the panel agreed that journalists are often under the pressure of editorial agendas.

“I’ve become more sceptical about impartiality,” said Purvis. “You have to ask whether the coverage of Libya [of the overthrow of the country’s leader, Colonel Gaddafi, in 2011] was really balanced. And yet the only channel that was criticised for bias was Russia Today, and that was for being pro-Gaddafi.”

Forsyth agreed:

“I don’t think there’s any major story where you can avoid bias. There’s almost always two sides to every story. The establishment is not the friend of dispassionate reporting because it wants its version to dominate and that may well be the wrong version.”

The issue of celebrity among broadcast journalists was also a source of concern.

“There are a number of celebrity journalists who have thrived through their celebrity,” says Hulbert. “Some I imagine would be able to gain entry to worlds that mere mortals such as I wouldn’t, so I think it helps. But whether it’s that celebrity emerges from the quality of your work or whether it emerges from a desire to be a celebrity depends on the individual.”

Marshall argued that one advantage of broadcast journalism is that many potential elements of bias are plain for all to see:

“You can see who I am and what I am. . . . You wear your history on your face, but I don’t think you can leave it behind.”

But the confines of the mainstream news agenda remain an issue, Marshall continued:

“The agenda is so narrow now which I regret. My children’s agenda is much wider than the news we’re feeding them. It’s part of a bigger disconnect between Westminster and the public and the media and the public.

The space for independent journalism, meanwhile, is shrinking. As Michela Wrong, a former Financial Times and Reuters journalist commented from the floor:

“It’s about how you see the world. If you go to an Angolan diamond mine with a diamond company, or with Oxfam, or on your own, you’re going to have three completely different experiences. There’s not really any room for independent journalists to cover a story now.”

In the end, says Marshall, it is down to the journalist to hold themselves accountable for their stories, and to be transparent about any lines they may have crossed.

“You want the sort of journalists who cross lines because the best journalists have the will to bring Biafra to account. But they also need to know that when they cross lines they can admit to doing it and are prepared to explain themselves.”

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/when-reporters-cross-the-line

If the role of journalists is to bear witness to history, can they ever justify participating in the events they are reporting? A new publication by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert brings together the stories of 15 journalists caught between covering the story and stepping beyond journalistic conventions.

We will be joined by the authors and some of the journalists featured to debate the boundaries and parameters of journalistic coverage, and when the rules of reporting can be bent and broken.

We will be examining the lengths to which journalists on the front lines are prepared to go. In the extreme situation of war and political conflict rules are broken and ethics abandoned but where do you draw the line?

Chaired by veteran foreign affairs correspondent, Martin Bell.

The panel:

Stewart Purvis is Professor of Television Journalism at City University London.

Penny Marshall is Social Affairs Editor for ITV News. She has previously held positions as International Correspondent, Home/Media Affairs Correspondent, Moscow Reporter and Defence and Diplomatic Correspondent.

Jeff Hulbert is a media historian and an honorary research fellow in the Journalism Department at City University London.

Frederick Forsyth is one of the world’s leading thriller writers and former journalist at Reuters and the BBC.

The past, present and future of British military engagement with the media was the centre of a lively debate at the Frontline Club on 20 February 2013. Chaired by Stewart Purvis, professor of television journalism at City University London and former Editor-in-Chief and CEO of ITN.

Lorna Ward, who has worked on what could be seen as both sides of the argument, as deputy foreign news editor at Sky News and as part of media operations for the TA, started off the discussion with the four points she believes cause the most tension: lack of understanding on both parts, impatience, egos or personalities and lack of communication between the opposing cultures.

Vaughan Smith, founder of the Frontline Club, added that the main contention point is in the treatment of casualties:

“If you go on an embed with the British Army, unless you perhaps are with the BBC or large broadcasting union and you negotiate specific access, you are not allowed to film casualties.”

Vaughan Smith: "I don't think that journalists can be expected to participate in the sanitisation of war" #frontlineclub

— Sally Ashley–Cound (@AllyAsh) February 20, 2013

It wasn’t long into the debate until the MoD’s Green Book was brought up, and that it seems to ignore casualties all together – only referring to them with respect to patient confidentiality, Smith continued:

“In that Green Book it doesn’t really tell you that you can’t film casualties . . . only two [of the 85 paragraphs] deal with casualties. Patient confidentiality is brought up but not explained . . . I believe that the MoD are effectively using this patient confidentiality . . . to prevent us from covering casualties.”

Major General Jonathan Shaw who served in the Falklands, Kosovo and Iraq before being chief of staff of UK Land Forces between 2007 and 2008, added:

“If you respect their perspective you can have a very helpful relationship – sometimes.”

“When you detect as a solider that this guy [a journalist] has come out to a theatre not to report the truth but to find the evidence to substantiate a story that has already been demanded by the editor back in London, that’s when you lose trust.”

Defence correspondent for the Evening Standard, Robert Fox added:

“Working with the military, embedding, being an accredited correspondent is a necessary evil. . . . I use it as an ends to my particular means.”

Fox strongly felt that the debate on whether the military should ‘manage’ the media was quickly becoming out of date:

“I don’t think this is anything like as big a deal as it has been in my life because the nature of news is changing. The nature of the military is changing. The nature of the military role in British public life and common endeavour is diminishing.”

Robert Fox: "The nature of news is changing…it will find a way out. This debate is becoming increasingly irrelevant." #frontlineclub

— Sally Ashley–Cound (@AllyAsh) February 20, 2013

At this point it had become clear that in the audience were other journalists who could add to the discussion. Jonathan Steele, who had just returned from Syria said of the Green Book:

“It is prior censorship, you have to sign it in order to get this embed which gives the MoD the right to read all your copy, look at all your pictures, all your video before you send it out. . . . We go along with this. Why is there no revolt? Why don’t we just refuse?”

Smith added that perhaps it is time to revisit the restrictions of the Green Book.

But what of the future? Is embedding with the military going to be the best way to get a story? Ward answered:

“With competition such that it is across journalists and news outlets there is more and more pressure to get that exclusive. . . . In Afghanistan at the moment, as areas get less volatile, more journalists are starting out on an embed and disembedding half way through and the issue for the MoD is where does our responsibility start and where does our responsibility end?”

Watch the event in full here: