Chapman Pincher

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Henry Chapman Pincher (born March 29, 1914) is an Indian born British journalist and novelist whose writing mainly focuses on espionage and related matters, after some early books on scientific subjects.

He was educated at Darlington Grammar School and King's College London before joining the Daily Express in 1946 as a science and defence correspondent

Contents 1 Espionage Experience 2 Created subterfuge for government 3 Criticism and satire 4 Bibliography 5 Footnotes

[edit] Espionage Experience

Pincher is probably best known as the author of "Their Trade is Treachery" which alleged that former director-general of MI5 Roger Hollis had been a spy for the Soviet Union.

Pincher is noted for his strong support for the work of the intelligence agencies and for Conservative politics. He was at one point close to Peter Wright who he knew suspected Harold Wilson of having been a Soviet agent, and according to the biography of Wilson written by Ben Pimlott, Pincher was trying to get information from Wright so that he could accuse Wilson in public.

Pincher was convinced that, alongside Wilson, many other members of the Labour party were Soviet agents. Critics claimed that his greatest delusion concerned Tom Driberg. Pincher claimed that Driberg was an active double agent for MI5 and the KGB despite his well-founded reputation for total indiscretion. Lord Brockway characterised Driberg as "utterly indiscreet ... could never keep a secret". In 1999 KGB archives revealed that in fact Driberg was a spy for the Soviet Union, with the codename LePage [1].

[edit] Created subterfuge for government

In late April 1957, Pincher wrote a fake news story, in collaboration with the British Government, reporting that the first British nuclear bomb test in the Pacific Ocean, due over Malden Island the following month, was delayed because of technical problems. [2] The subterfuge was designed to dissuade Japanese "suicide protestors" from sailing into the exclusion zone to forestall the explosion. The story was published in the Daily Express, Pincher's employer, and picked up by other news media. No protest fleet ever approached Malden during the test on May 15, but the Japanese Council for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons later stated that the protest fleet had never intended to sail into the danger zone anyway.

[edit] Criticism and satire

The historian E. P. Thompson described Pincher as "a kind of official urinal in which, side by side, high officials of MI5 and MI6, Sea Lords, Permanent Under-Secretaries, nuclear scientists, Lord Wigg, and others, stand patiently leaking in the public interest".

In his cartoon (comic) strip If..., Steve Bell featured a character named "Doberman Dogwaste", a very thinly disguised reference to Pincher.

[edit] Bibliography

• The Four Horses
• The Skeleton at the Villa Wolkonsky
• Not with a Bang (novel, 1965)
• The Giant Killer (novel, 1967)
• The Penthouse Conspirators (novel; 1970, Michael Joseph, London)
• The Eye of the Tornado (novel; 1976, Michael Joseph, London)
• Dirty Tricks
• Inside Story
• Their Trade is Treachery
• The Private World of St John Terrapin
• Too Secret Too Long (1984)
• The Secret Offensive
• Traitor: The Labyrinths of Treason. ^[1]

[edit] Footnotes