Scoops and Leaks

On the last page​ of his book about his father, Patrick Cockburn writes that Claud ‘disbelieved strongly in the axiom about “telling truth to power”, knowing that the rulers of the earth have no wish to hear any such thing. Much more effective, he believed, is to tell truth to the powerless so they have a fighting chance in any struggle against the big battalions.’ But the story of Claud Cockburn and the Week, the deadly little newsletter he set up in 1933, shows that power is not always deaf to truth. To the end of his life, Cockburn stuck to two other core beliefs. The first was his instinctive scepticism and cynicism about all who hold authority: the British establishment, all governments and even the leadership of the Comintern and the Communist Party of Great Britain, of which he was for many years a wayward member. But it was his second core belief that really drove his journalism, that ‘decision-makers were weaker, more incompetent, more divided, more self-destructively corrupt than they liked people to understand and hence more vulnerable to journalistic attack and exposure.’

It’s hard now to imagine just how pompous, stuffy, callous and arrogant Britain’s rulers were in the 1930s – and that includes big business and industry. Public information was a controlled trickle-down. Thin-skinned prime ministers and top civil servants exploded with outrage over leaks. They called in MI5 to watch Cockburn, which the spooks did sedulously for some twenty years, tapping his phones, steaming open his mail and squeezing into every London pub he entered. Fuming bigwigs in Whitehall had tasked them to find out who the hell his sources were. But they never did. Instead, they left to the national archives a colossal file (‘26 bulky folders’) of day-to-day surveillance which has provided a basis for Patrick Cockburn’s narrative. In reality, the Week’s best sources for cabinet disputes, private conference sessions or appeasement plotting at the Astors’ mansion were dissident politicians and foreign diplomats, who were often told things concealed from the British public.

Like George Orwell and several other establishment rebels, Claud Cockburn was born overseas, the son of Henry Cockburn, a senior diplomat in Beijing, and his wife, Elizabeth. Two years after his birth in 1904, he was sent back to Britain, soon followed by his parents: Henry had resigned on a complex matter of principle. They settled at Tring in Hertfordshire and Claud was sent to school at Berkhamstead. The headmaster during the First World War was Charles Greene, father of Graham and a high-minded radical, and Cockburn first saw political violence on Armistice Day, when a drunken mob burst into the school accusing Greene (quite wrongly) of having been ‘anti-war’. But the experiences that followed were what shaped his view of the world. His father was appointed to an international ‘clearing house’ supposed to make sense of Hungary’s hopeless finances. The family went to live in Budapest, and Cockburn was plunged into the chaos, misery and brutality of Central Europe, as new nation-states struggled out of the debris of three fallen empires. Hungary had been part of the Habsburg Empire, an enemy power in the war, and Cockburn, hardly out of school, was seized by passionate sympathy for the defeated nations – including Germany. The war, which had cost the lives of 230 Berkhamstead boys, had disillusioned him with patriotism.

At Oxford, he became close friends with his cousin Evelyn Waugh (both were great-grandsons of Lord Henry Cockburn, the brilliant and lovable judge whose memoirs are a late triumph of the Scottish Enlightenment). Their politics were about as far apart as imagination could stretch (Waugh thought his cousin’s obsession with comical foreign countries quite mad), but they made each other laugh. Both joined the Hypocrites club (‘a noisy, alcohol-soaked rat-warren’) where Cockburn fell in love with whisky (‘I got up fairly early … I would then drink a large sherry glass of neat whisky before breakfast and … drink heavily throughout the day’). Astonishingly, his drinking and his later consumption of several packets of Woodbines a day did him little harm.

In 1924, while still a student, he and Graham Greene made a dangerous tour of the Rhineland, eager to help German resistance to the brutality of the French occupation (many of those they encouraged would become ardent Nazis). But his career as a journalist began when he wangled a job as assistant to Norman Ebbutt, the Times correspondent in Berlin. Ebbutt and Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of the Times, soon realised what a talent they had hired: Cockburn had long since read and absorbed almost the entire body of English literature, emerging as a wonderfully fluent and vivid writer. But his salary didn’t come close to paying for his untidy, riotous life in a huge Kurfürstendamm flat, and it wasn’t until 1929 that Dawson offered him a steady job as a subeditor in London, where he claimed to have won a competition for the dullest headline with ‘Small Earthquake in Chile’.

By this time, sex and left-wing politics had invaded Cockburn’s life. A wild Hungarian mistress in Berlin (her enraged boyfriend riddled the piano with revolver bullets) had introduced him to a social set that could only have existed in Weimar Germany: intellectual men and women, often wealthy, often Jewish, energetically Marxist, engaged in all kinds of social and political experiment. This was the Schwarzwald circle, led by Eugenie Schwarzwald, the wife of a Viennese banker; at one of their parties, Cockburn began a long affair with Berta Pölz, a revolutionary communist, and made a lasting friendship with Europe’s most famous left-wing journalist, Egon Erwin Kisch – ‘the raging reporter’.

His own politics were rebellious but not yet definite. The Schwarzwald circle graded people by social class; Cockburn still distinguished them by nationality. He read, at first with some repugnance, works by Lenin and Bukharin, and made a start on Das Kapital. But as Patrick Cockburn points out, it was then still possible to believe that ‘the postwar boom in the United States proved that Marx, Lenin and Bukharin had taken a gigantic wrong turn … No revolution was necessary, as the American version of capitalism would generate prosperity for all.’

In July 1929, Claud was dispatched to support the Times man in New York and report on the ‘great bull market’, the apparently unstoppable uprush of share values. On 24 October, the boom broke, shares fell vertically and the cataclysm that would drive the world into the Depression began its horrible course. ‘Remember,’ Louis Hinrichs, the Times correspondent, murmured to Cockburn, ‘the word “panic” is not to be used.’ The crash made his political choice for him: capitalism was plainly on the skids. At the same time, he was losing patience with the Times’s right-wing slant. He even suppressed his own rare interview with Al Capone (‘All my rackets are run on strictly American lines’) because Capone’s views were so close to those of his employer. The Times would not have been ‘best pleased to find itself seeing eye to eye with the most notorious gangster in Chicago’.

In America, he met the young journalist Hope Hale. Like all the women Cockburn was involved with, she was hotly radical and stubbornly self-reliant. They had to be: he moved with ease from job to job and woman to woman. According to Patrick Cockburn, Hale was fascinated ‘by Claud’s blend of mischievous humour and social warmth, combined with a private determination to change the world for the better’. Knowing that he was ‘at bottom a very serious man’ made him irresistible, she said, and ‘gave our hours in bed a quality beyond comparison’. Cockburn was writing about hunger and desperation as mass unemployment overtook the American working class. But the couple’s life in New York was reckless and fun. Hale recalled fixing a breakfast for friends composed of gin fizzes, kidneys and bacon, scrambled eggs, muffins, strawberries and cream, coffee.

Cockburn knew he should leave the Times, though he still regarded it as the greatest newspaper in the world and kept a surprisingly warm relationship with Dawson. Watching what was developing across the Atlantic, he grew restless, and in July 1932 left for Europe. Hale, now his wife, was pregnant with their daughter, Claudia; her ‘Project Revolutionary Baby’ had been a plan to bring stability to their relationship. It took her a long time to realise that she had been dumped.

In the dying months of the Weimar Republic, Cockburn returned to his old circle of Berlin friends and lovers, or at least to those who hadn’t already fled into exile. Now he watched the darkness of Nazi fascism finally close over Germany. He believed that his own name was on Nazi lists, and the day before Hitler took power on 30 January 1933, he left for Vienna and then London. Two months after arriving there, he launched the Week. Cranked out on a hire-purchased mimeograph from an attic on Victoria Street, it started as a smudgy little newsletter posted to a handful of subscribers for twelve shillings a year. There was no advertising, no money: a policy of ‘open indigence’ made litigation pointless. It was Cockburn’s one-man band, ‘targeting a limited but influential pool of politicians, journalists, diplomats, academics, financiers and businessmen, along with people appalled by the rise of fascism and the near collapse of capitalism’. He challenged the servility of the ‘big press’, then as now suffocated by government lobby systems, and was soon hitting officialdom where it hurt.

The Week was brutally correct about the 1930s. Cockburn saw that war was inevitable and argued that conferences about disarmament were a waste of time. Scoops and leaks rolled in. The Foreign Office was aghast when the Week published a confidential dispatch from Sir Horace Rumbold, its departing Berlin ambassador, describing Hitler as mentally abnormal and intent on European war. ‘A letter from the Foreign Office about the leak to the Week, sent to MI5,’ Patrick Cockburn writes, ‘explains that the Rumbold telegram had been shown “confidentially to certain reputable diplomatic correspondents and editors” on the condition that they did not reveal the full text.’ (How familiar that is, to any journalist who has worked on a Whitehall beat!) Cockburn’s sources included a small number of senior civil servants who saw the European situation clearly and a gang of London-based foreign journalists who met regularly to swap stories which their papers had refused to print. In Germany, several of Cockburn’s contacts dared to smuggle out reports of Nazi atrocities and anti-Jewish purges – news the respectable London papers preferred to play down. Several of those sources were murdered in 1934, in Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives.

At around this point Cockburn became a communist. Harry Pollitt, the British party’s general secretary, persuaded him to write for the Daily Worker under the pen-name Frank Pitcairn for £4 a week – supposedly the wage of a semi-skilled worker. His first contribution was a long, superbly angry report on the Gresford colliery disaster of 1934, blaming the mine-owner’s negligence for the deaths of 266 men. Cockburn wasn’t a theoretical Marxist. He became a communist because he saw no other movement actively fighting fascism in ‘adventurous’ and ‘creative’ ways: he was ‘only surprised that more people did not join the Communist Party as a movement to achieve revolutionary change from a calamitous status quo’. He took part in hunger marches and mass demonstrations, where the police used clubs to batter down what seemed to be the eruption of Bolshevism in Britain. Expert at rallying celebrity intellectuals to his causes, he was a co-founder of the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty).

Jean Ross burst into his life soon after his return from Berlin. He had briefly met her there, a frantic performer in the late Weimar scene. Aged only 21, she had left Germany just before Cockburn did and for the same reason; in London she sought him out and, shoving other lovers aside, started an affair that would become a six-year partnership and produce a daughter, Sarah. Patrick Cockburn is right to give space to Ross. She was the model for Sally Bowles, the unpolitical fuckwit at the centre of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood had shared a flat with her. But in his novel ‘he created an ineradicable image of Jean that obscured the reality,’ an image that survived for decades into plays and films (I Am a Camera and Liza Minnelli’s Sally in Cabaret).

Ross was a wild child, certainly. Expelled from boarding school for announcing (untruthfully) that she was pregnant, she had landed up acting and dancing in Berlin, where she boasted of having several hundred lovers. But she was anything but vacuous. The Nazis’ violence and antisemitism horrified her, and soon after returning to London she joined the Communist Party and helped Cockburn to run the Week. A few years later, she reported on the Spanish Civil War for the Daily Express. Even Hale befriended her, calling her ‘a great young woman’.

Cockburn was living dangerously. Between clandestine missions to Germany, with a passport incompetently faked by the Comintern, he was involved in the one operation the Comintern carried out with supreme skill. This was the anti-fascist propaganda campaign led by Willi Münzenberg, helped among others by Cockburn’s old friends Kisch (Claud called him ‘a revered genius’) and Otto Katz, a Czech Jew and a charming, ruthless manipulator.

Cockburn ‘just happened’ to be in Spain on 17 July 1936, the day of Franco’s putsch. He insisted afterwards that it was a coincidence; he had meant to holiday in the South of France but had taken the wrong train. Now he rushed to Barcelona, and signed up as a war correspondent as the fighting began. Ross came out to join him and – with brief returns to London – he spent the next two years in Spain, writing and eventually fighting. He narrowly escaped being shot as a spy by Durruti’s anarchist column, took part in the defence of Madrid and was lucky to get out of Málaga as Italian forces closed in. Unfit bohemian though he was, he fought in a chaotic night battle in the Guadarrama mountains, and was at Brunete, where his friend the photographer Gerda Taro was crushed by a Republican tank. Watching the XI International Brigade in Madrid, he wrote: ‘Last night, at University City, for the first time in Europe and in the history of Europe, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Bulgarians and Romanians went into action together.’

Patrick Cockburn’s account now reaches an eternally inflamed region: the ethics of journalism. Inevitably, he brings up the bloody communist coup in Barcelona in May 1937, and the way two British writers – Cockburn and Orwell – recorded it. Orwell had been wounded fighting with the vaguely Trotskyite POUM militia and found the crushing of non-Stalinist units and the terror used to hunt down their sympathisers unforgivable. Cockburn took the party line, writing in the Daily Worker that the POUM was full of saboteurs and had been stealing weapons – even tanks – from the Republic. These allegations were lies, and he must have known it. It’s worth adding that both men later modified their views slightly. Orwell recognised, if he did not fully accept, the argument that only a unified army, under strong central command, stood a chance of defeating Franco. Cockburn came to deplore the savagery of Soviet agents in Barcelona: ‘The rooting out of heresy … in 1937 did become an evil preoccupation.’

On a delayed visit to Paris (his ship had hit an Italian mine), Cockburn was welcomed by Otto Katz. ‘What I want now,’ Katz told him, ‘is a tip-top, eyewitness account of the great anti-Franco revolt that occurred yesterday at Tetuan [Spanish Morocco].’ Cockburn replied that he had never heard of it. ‘Not the point,’ Katz replied. ‘Nor have I heard of any such thing.’ So they sat down and merrily concocted in vivid colour ‘a long and detailed story of battle, with the outcome still uncertain’, and wired it out to the world. Afterwards, Cockburn would say that his Tetuan report was ‘one of the soundest, most factual pieces of war correspondence ever published’, and was ‘astonished when many people expressed shock that a professional journalist should not only have fabricated the mutiny but openly admitted to doing so’. Unrepentant, he argued that all wars were information wars, and information was malleable. One of his reports from Spain began: ‘Seek to use this fine assessment of the situation before some Schweinerei committed by God or Hitler or some others I can see in the café across the street proves it utterly mistaken.’ All the same, the ‘Tetuan mutiny’ did his reputation lasting damage.

Back in London, the Week was reaching its peak of notoriety. Improbably, it joined the king’s camp against the government during the 1936 abdication crisis: Cockburn detested Stanley Baldwin and the establishment even more than the monarchy. By printing what the rest of the world was already reading, the Week became indispensable during the idiotic weeks when the British press was gagging itself and pretending it had never heard of Mrs Simpson. Lord Mountbatten, who shared Cockburn’s contempt for Baldwin’s politics, apparently urged the king to use the Week to publish dreadful revelations about his enemies, but nothing came of that.

War was approaching​ – this was plain, except to those who backed Baldwin and then Neville Chamberlain in appeasing Nazi Germany. Many top officials and aristocrats, not only Tories, were still intensely relaxed about Hitler. The Week and its well-placed informants went after them ferociously, breaking news from the secret German opposition and exposing furtive British moves towards a pact with the Third Reich. A special target was Lady Astor, who was antisemitic and violently hostile to both France and Soviet Russia, Britain’s only plausible allies in a war with Germany. She and Lord Astor, owner of the Times, used the paper to call for negotiations with Hitler. In November 1937, Chamberlain sent Lord Halifax on a semi-secret mission, sounding out the Führer on a deal that would respect Britain’s colonial empire in return for Britain accepting Germany’s (‘peaceful’) expansion into Eastern Europe. The Week published the terms of this shocking offer, pointing out that it was Britain, not Germany, which had sought the meeting and alleging (with a bit of exaggeration) that the plan had been thought up at a private gathering at Cliveden.

Cockburn’s first two articles on the story attracted little attention. But the third ‘went off like a rocket’, leaving the Astors banished to ‘pariah status’ and the Cliveden set – a label invented by Cockburn – and the whole appeasement campaign damaged. ‘Lady Astor … had no doubts about the cause of her political eclipse – and, on being introduced to Claud … pursed her lips as if to spit in his face.’

The government stuck with appeasement through 1938 – the Anschluss with Austria was followed by the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich. Cockburn’s polemics now raged at the Chamberlain government’s press control, not that the newspapers put up much resistance. Dawson at the Times noted that ‘I spend my nights in taking out anything that I think may hurt their [the Germans’] susceptibilities.’ But public opinion was turning, and there was a grim acceptance that war with Germany was coming. Cockburn was in Prague when the Munich Agreement was signed, vainly hoping that the Soviet Union would stand by Czechoslovakia as it was abandoned by its French and British allies, and mourning the inevitable collapse of the Spanish Republic. With them in Prague was Mikhail Koltsov, an old Soviet friend from Spain, humorous and wildly indiscreet, who became as close to Cockburn as Kisch and Katz. But the lethal paranoia of Stalinism was still spreading. Koltsov was ordered back to Moscow, where he was tried and shot. Münzenberg was murdered in 1940; Katz was hanged in the Czech show trials of the 1950s, after ‘confessing’ that Cockburn had hired him as a British spy. As for Frank Pitcairn, Moscow merely urged the Daily Worker to fire him for ‘disrespecting’ Stalin’s speeches.

Ross gave birth to Sarah in London in May 1939. She retreated with her sisters to a country cottage, which ‘Claud visited occasionally, then less occasionally, then not at all.’ In remote Carpathian Ruthenia, he had met yet another intrepid young woman reporter, Patricia Byron, who at 24 had already led an expedition to make a language map of the Congo. This liaison turned out to be permanent, a marriage which lasted until Cockburn’s death in 1981.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939 stunned the world, knocking the bottom out of all the Popular Front alliances against fascism for which Cockburn had argued for so long. In his memoirs, he wrote that he was ‘powerfully and instinctively moved to take the opportunity to break with the communists there and then and brigade myself with the “Churchillian Tories”’. But a feeling that he had joined a regiment and ‘had better soldier along with it’ won out.

War began: a totally different context in which the life-and-death pressure for unity against Nazi conquest almost silenced critical journalism. The Week was briefly banned. But as Patrick Cockburn concludes, his father was slow to realise that all-out war and sweeping plans for social reform had made his kind of journalism almost irrelevant. Patricia was Anglo-Irish and in 1947 they moved with their children to the little town of Youghal in County Cork.

It was a total change of lifestyle. Cockburn dropped quietly out of the Communist Party, but his ‘politics remained as radical as ever’. Freelancing from behind a thicket of new pseudonyms (‘Cockburn’ was a dirty word to Cold War editors), he turned away from news to humour and satire. He and Malcolm Muggeridge brought tweedy old Punch briefly back to sharp-fanged life. But his finest achievement was to be a godfather to Private Eye, as satire and exultant disrespect returned to Britain in the 1960s. Richard Ingrams and Peter Cook – three decades younger – let him guest-edit a gorgeous special number on the Profumo scandal in 1963, in which, among other scoops, he drove Whitehall to apoplectic fury by printing the name of Sir Dick White, head of MI6.

It’s too easy, all the same, to think of the Eye as the successor to the Week. Cockburn’s journal concentrated on news, on the inside goings-on of an establishment whose arrogance and utter contempt for public opinion is almost inconceivable today. The grovelling self-censorship of the press was a secondary target. But for Private Eye, the shameless hypocrisy, mendacity and sheer nastiness still rampant in much of the British media today is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s the ‘Street of Shame’ media page, rather than news exposures, which keeps the Eye sharp.

‘I think, looking back, that I was mistaken about Claud’s character,’ Patrick Cockburn writes. ‘His likeability and warmth were certainly not a pose, but he was a far more determined, practical and even ruthless man than he appeared … He seldom quarrelled personally with people, be they wives, friends, political collaborators or even political enemies, but he did sometimes move on from them.’ He moved on from Ross, but she never wanted to settle with another man: ‘Nobody else could be as much fun as Claud.’

He left behind his two daughters – Claudia, a disability campaigner, and Sarah, a barrister and writer of detective fiction – and three formidable journalist sons, all leftish, all sharing their father’s sparkling command of language. Alexander co-edited the radical newsletter CounterPunch and became a scathingly witty columnist in the Village Voice. Andrew uses books and TV documentaries to expose and denounce American policies. Patrick, who inherited Claud’s physical courage as well as his analytic skill, lived in Baghdad through much of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was accounted the most acute of the English-language correspondents there. None of them wasted time ‘telling truth to power’. All of them stole truths from power and laid them before the powerless. Their father would have grinned, for that is exactly what his ‘guerrilla journalism’ was about.