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NSA AND THE ZIRCON PROJECT 459
had been at the centre of the 'ABC trial'. For the past ten years
his investigative journalism, mostly for the New Statesman magazine,
had tracked the British secret state, and he was regarded
as a significant problem by the authorities. In November 1985
he had been commissioned by BBC Scotland to make a series
of programmes called Secret Society, and had decided to use this
to reveal Zircon. However, it was only in the summer of 1986
that he uncovered the biggest secret. Speaking to Robert Sheldon,
the Chair of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee,
he discovered that Parliament knew absolutely nothing about
the project. The fact that this very large spending item had been
hidden from Parliament - a reprise of the previous defence
spending scandal over Chevaline - now became the core issue.
Meanwhile, GCHQ had got wind of the planned documentary,
and on 5 December 1986 there was a hurried meeting between
Peter Marychurch and the BBC. In early January 1987 Alasdair
Milne, the Director General of the BBC, announced that he had
banned the programme on grounds of national security.76
On 21 January the High Court granted an injunction against
Duncan Campbell. This restrained him from either showing the
documentary or revealing any details of its contents. The next
day the New Statesman published an article asserting that the
real issue was nothing less than the sovereignty of Parliament
itself, and that a deception had been perpetrated on the Public
Accounts Committee. Campbell tried to have the film shown
to MPs in the House of Commons, but was prevented by the
intransigent Speaker of the House, Bernard Weatherill. 77 Then,
over the weekend of 24-25 January the Special Branch raided
the offices of the BBC and the New Statesman, together with the
homes of Duncan Campbell and several other journalists who
had worked with him. There was high drama as television
cameras filmed a search team breaking down the front door to
Campbell's London flat. 78 The New Statesman's solicitor was soon
contacting everyone mentioned in the programme, including
the GCHQ trade unions at Cheltenham, warning them that they
might also be raided by the local constabulary.79