The Zircon affair was an incident in 1986 and 1987 caused by the planned broadcast on the BBC of a television programme about the ultimately cancelled Zircon signals intelligence satellite, as part of the six-part Secret Society series. It raised many important issues in the British constitution, particularly concerning parliamentary privilege and "gagging orders".
The Zircon affair
Development of programme
In November 1985 the Scottish investigative journalist Duncan Campbell was commissioned by BBC Scotland to present and research a six part, half-hour documentary series called Secret Society, produced by Brian Barr. GCHQ became aware that a BBC Scotland crew were filming at RAF Menwith Hill, and when Campbell interviewed the former Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence Ronald Mason in August 1986 he mentioned the Zircon Project (regarded as "exceptionally secret").
Campbell had planned to use an episode of Secret Society to reveal the existence of Zircon, but found while researching the programme in mid-1986 that the head of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), Robert Sheldon, knew nothing of the project. The Public Accounts Committee is a select committee of the House of Commons, responsible for overseeing government expenditures. It had been agreed between Parliament and the British government that expensive military projects should be subject to scrutiny by the committee, and Campbell felt that Sheldon's ignorance of the Zircon project was evidence of the violation of this agreement. The concealment of Zircon, which had an estimated cost of £500 million (equivalent to £ billion in ), from the committee mirrored the parliamentary secrecy over a previous defence project, the Chevaline programme to enhance the Polaris nuclear missile. The previous head of the PAC, Lord Barnett, had been recently appointed the BBC Vice-Chairman. Barnett had withdrawn from a planned interview with Campbell for the programme after his BBC appointment, upset at the nature of the questioning that Sheldon had faced, who had accused Campbell of setting him up.
Intervention by BBC management
The Director-General of the BBC, Alasdair Milne, later wrote that the Secretary of the D-Notice Committee made "remonstration noises" after the Secret Society series was announced at the launch of BBC 2's autumn schedule. According to the official history of the D-Notice Committee, the committee's secretary Rear Admiral W. A. Higgins had been prompted solely by the appearance of the series in the BBC's autumn 1986 publicity, and was not himself then aware of the Zircon Project.
A meeting of the BBC governors was held on 13 November 1986, chaired by Marmaduke Hussey. Hussey had been recommended as chairman of the BBC Board of Governors by Conservative government ministers. Opposition to Campbell from governors at the meeting came from Daphne Park, the former MI6 operative, who said that Campbell was a "destroyer" who the BBC should never have employed, and the former diplomat Curtis Keeble. Hussey subsequently expressed the negative views of the governors to Milne after the meeting.
Milne met the Director of the Government Communications Headquarters, Peter Marychurch, on 5 December 1986, on the same day that Alan Protheroe, the Assistant Director-General of the BBC, had written to Milne at his home, saying that the Zircon episode should not be transmitted. Protheroe was responsible for supervising journalism at the BBC, and was the BBC's member on the D-Notice Committee. Protheroe believed that the Zircon episode would damage national security after speaking to the Ministry of Defence.
Initial cuts of all six programmes in the series were then viewed by Milne, who later showed the series to the governors. The governors subsequently felt that, barring a few changes, the series would be suitable for broadcast, except for the Zircon episode. However, not all governors were as opposed to the episode as Protheroe was. The governors held two further meetings before Christmas 1986, at which Milne was "hounded unpleasantly over Secret Society". Milne finally made a decision not to broadcast the Zircon episode during the Christmas holiday.