Letter to Rt Hon Dr David Owen MP from
Sir Robin Butler KCB CVO, Secretary to the Cabinet and Head of
the Home Civil Service
Thank you for forwarding with your letter of
10 May sections of your forthcoming memoirs which have been read
in accordance with the guidelines in the Radcliffe Report. I also
received today your letter of 23 May with remaining chapters and
I will ensure that any comments on these will reach you before
the end of next week. The Radcliffe guidelines cover three main
areas: national security; confidential relationships within Government
on which our system of government is based; and relations with
other nations. On this basis, I have a number of suggestions to
make. Because of the tightness of your deadline, I have had to
prepare these in some haste.
"MI6—GCHQ and the Falklands"
I should prefer that, as a former Foreign Secretary,
you should not acknowledge the existence of SIS or refer by name
to Cabinet Committees. But I cannot claim that either of these
are damaging to national security, and I must therefore leave
the matter to your judgement.
However, the requirement in Radcliffe that memoirs
should not disclose information affecting national security would
apply to the following instances, which are considered very sensitive
and potentially damaging. [***]
— In relation to the strike at GCHQ,
I am advised that the references on pages 3 and 4 to the release
of sensitive information are not correct and that while the withdrawal
of Trades Union rights at GCHQ brought considerable unwelcome
publicity, it did not result in highly sensitive information being
divulged. In addition, you might want to amend the reference to
the "no strike agreement" in the lower part of the main
paragraph on page 4 since the membership of at least one of the
Unions subsequently rejected such an agreement.
Rhodesia
In this chapter, on pages 2, 4 and 8, there
are a number of comments, mainly unfavourable, on officials. I
think that these do contravene the requirement in Radcliffe that
the ex-Minister "should not make public assessments or criticisms
. . . of those who have served under him" especially since
those concerned could be identified by the references to the positions
they occupied. This could be avoided by:
— on page 2 omitting from "The
Foreign Office officials concerned . . ." to "Edmund
Dell, Denis Healey and Harold Laver . . .". This would also
avoid personalised references to the views of political colleagues;
— on page 5, the direct reference to
Michael Palliser could be amended as follows:
— omit "Michael Palliser,
who . . ." to "at this time". Substitute "I
was warned that George Thomson might be implicated in the Bingham
investigation. It was also believed that, given the sensitive
mood about sanctions in Carter's Administration, for an incoming
British Ambassador to be in any way linked to possible sanction-busting
would have been very embarrassing".
Iran
On page 12 of the Iran chapter where you write
". . . the Shah made what our Ambassador, Sir Anthony Parsons,
felt was a critical mistake." Sir A Parsons' account in his
own book was milder. I suggest that you should delete the words
"what our Ambassador, Sir Anthony Parsons, felt was".
On page 13, I should be grateful if you would
delete the second sentence of the second paragraph describing
the views of Frank Judd and FCO officials on the supply of CS
gas.
There is one reference to the views of Her Majesty
on pages 19-20. I normally ask that references to views of the
Queen should be omitted. While I see no substantial difficulty
about these views, Buckingham Palace, who have been consulted
on this, do not believe that the reference is absolutely accurate,
in that advice had been consistently given to the Palace that
the visit should not be cancelled until it was actually cancelled
by the Iranians. I have no difficulty with the quotation from
Elizabeth Longford's book at the end of the chapter on Rhodesia,
which is secondhand.
Foreign Secretary 1978
While I do not need to ask for any amendments
to the discussion of nuclear or other weapon matters on security
grounds, on page 21 there is an account of the vies and motives
of other Ministers. This falls within the fifteen year period
proposed by Radcliffe for protection of the views of Ministerial
colleagues and I should therefore be grateful if you would remove
the personal attribution of views.
I hope that these comments are helpful: I would
of course be prepared to discuss these or any other points if
that would be helpful.
24 May 1991
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