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The Zircon Affair
36 Plays1 year ago
Another M-less episode, as Josh entertains us with the tale of the Zircon Affair, a British controversy involving some very British names. Not to mention Space Shuttles, NASA, the NSA, the GCHQ, the BBC, the PAC and the threat of a D-notice or two.
Also: watch Lifeforce (1985) - it's spectacular.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Filler Episode
00:00:05
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dint.
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison. Unfortunately, Dr. Emdenteth is unable to make it again this week, so I'm going to be recording another wee filler episode for you. And the same as last time I've gone into our little file of weird interesting story ideas that we've never quite turned into an episode because sometimes they don't quite have a full episode in them, but this isn't going to be a full episode, so that's okay.
00:00:44
Speaker
I don't think I have anything else to say at the start other than to point out that again, our next proper episode will be our 400th episode, but this is not that episode.
The Zircon Affair: A British Spy Satellite
00:00:57
Speaker
This episode is going to be about the zircon affair. And before I start talking about the zircon affair, I suppose I should play a little chime so that everybody knows the episode started properly.
00:01:16
Speaker
just feels better just feels better when you have the chime to start talking about the thing we're going to be talking about which is once again the zircon affair that sounds a little bit i guess like a like some sort of a low budget science fiction film and
00:01:31
Speaker
I mean, it kind of is. It's related, I suppose. It's certainly science fictiony, although to be fair, it is anything but low budget, which is part of the problem. Because you see, Zircon, in this context, was the codename for a British spy satellite, or rather a proposed British spy satellite in the 1980s. It was going to have been a signals intelligence satellite, so that's one that is designed to intercept
00:01:57
Speaker
transmissions from other countries. It was going to be listening in to try to intercept radio signals and other various signals from what was then the USSR, as well as the rest of Europe. It was going to be used by Britain's government communications headquarters, the GCHQ,
00:02:14
Speaker
government organization who, it's a spy organization. GCHQ, they're spies who spy on people, that's what they do. And up until this point, they'd mostly been relying on the NSA for the use of their spy satellites when they wanted to do this sort of signals intelligence stuff. So they would just, you know, obviously, Britain and America, close, close allies. So they would just get in touch with the NSA and book some time
00:02:40
Speaker
to use to task their satellites to whoever it was they wanted to listen in on at that time. In the 1980s though they started to find this was becoming more and more difficult because the NSA obviously had their own stuff they were interested in and at the time they were more interested in what was going on in South America.
00:02:57
Speaker
which meant it was getting harder and harder for Britain to get time to point the satellite somewhere else and so not not unreasonably they decided well instead of relying on the Americans for their technology which they're making harder for us to access why don't we just build our own and so that was the plan
00:03:18
Speaker
they were going to build the satellite. Zircon, apparently the codename comes from the Zirconian whatever it is, like cubic Zirconia, that sort of crystal that's kind of a fake diamond. I don't know why it was named after that though. I'm guessing some sort of, you know, self-deprecating British humour where this was the air sort of imitation of the American satellites that they'd been using up until now, I don't know.
00:03:46
Speaker
What I do know is that it was going to be built at the special, special secured building at Portsmouth Airport that was like all super, super high security so they could build their top secret spy satellite without people finding out what was going on and what was going in it and what have you.
00:04:02
Speaker
So the plan was to launch it into space on an American space shuttle. There was going to be a flight in 1988 and they were going to have their satellite on it. Obviously they couldn't use Britain's space shuttle, the Churchill, because that had been severely damaged by fire during the Naked Space Vampire Zombie outbreak of 1985.
00:04:23
Speaker
That is a reference to the movie Life Force, which is an excellent, excellent film that you all need to see. If you haven't seen the film Life Force from 1985, you really need to stop this podcast, go away and watch that film, then come back and listen to the rest of the podcast. It won't actually make the podcast make more sense, but you just need to see that film. It's got Patrick Stewart in it. He kisses a guy. It's excellent. If you only watch one movie,
00:04:52
Speaker
about naked space vampires taking over London with a zombie invasion, it really, really should be life force. But enough movie talk. So the official story for what Zircon was going to be for is that it would have been part of Skynet. I'll just read that again. No, no, it's Skynet. It was going to be part of Skynet, which turns, okay, there's a
00:05:17
Speaker
There is a bunch of military communication satellites called SkyNet, and it's been around since the 1960s, so it actually predates the Terminator, which
00:05:30
Speaker
is kind of less fun. I don't know. You'd think if they'd named their military communications after Terminator we could at least have some sort of what were they thinking kind of thing. Anyway, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Back to Zircon. It was a secret project. Exactly what Zircon did and what it was for was secret. But the fact that Britain was putting equipment into space
00:05:52
Speaker
on an American shuttle launch was public knowledge. This actually gave them quite a PR opportunity because there was going to be British payload on the space shuttle. That meant that a British payload specialist could be included in the flight, which would have been the very first time a British person got to go into space.
00:06:16
Speaker
There was a bunch of British pilots were put forward publicly, like shown to the presses. These are the candidates for Britain's first man in space, unfortunately for them and other people.
Cancellation of the Zircon Project
00:06:30
Speaker
The plug was pulled on the project in 1987 as it was decided it was just going to cost too damn much, and so Zircon itself never happened.
00:06:39
Speaker
Interestingly, Britain's first man in space ended up being a woman. Helen Charmin was the first Briton space and the first woman on the Mir space station, but that was not until 1991.
00:06:53
Speaker
So that's the short story of Zircon, but the Zircon Affair is all about what happened during and afterwards, and it involves reporting and quite a bit of politics, which is a little more dry than talk of cool spy satellites. So to keep things interesting, here's a little game for you to play while I talk about it.
00:07:13
Speaker
As you might imagine this story is going to involve a bunch of British men with very British names. I'm going to give you some names now and I want you to take your guess as to which are the names of actual human beings that feature in this story and which are names that I just made up now. The names are Peter Mary Church
00:07:38
Speaker
Bernard Weatherill, Mama Duke Hussey, Curtis Kiebel, and Rear Admiral Higgins. Those names again, Peter Mary Church, Bernard Weatherill, Mama Duke Hussey, Curtis Kiebel, and Rear Admiral Higgins. Which of those, if any, are actual names that actual human beings have possessed at some stage? Just think about that.
00:08:05
Speaker
as I go through the rest of the story.
Discovery of the Zircon Project
00:08:07
Speaker
Now the story itself concerns journalist Duncan Campbell. In the mid 1980s he was working on a six-part documentary series called Secret Society for the BBC and it was going to be a series about
00:08:20
Speaker
secret stuff that the government got up to. Campbell himself had by the stage already had something of a reputation for uncovering secrets that proved to be embarrassing to the British government and this series looked like it was going to be more of the same.
00:08:37
Speaker
Now while he was researching for this series and interviewing a bunch of people, he interviewed a man called Ronald Mason, who had been the chief scientific advisor to the Ministry of Defense, who I don't believe he was at the time. And it was during this interview that he first found out about Zircon.
00:08:55
Speaker
And at the time it was told it was extremely secret or something like that. But so that was exactly the sort of thing he'd been looking for. So he decided he was going to devote one entire episode of Secret Society to Zircon and started doing more research on it. While he was doing more research on it, one of the people he spoke to was Robert Sheldon.
00:09:15
Speaker
who was the head of the Public Accounts Committee and upon bringing up Zircon he was surprised to find that Robert Sheldon had not heard of Zircon. Now this was surprising because the Public Accounts Committee was a parliamentary select committee that was responsible for overseeing government expenditure and it was supposed to be told about
00:09:35
Speaker
things such as expensive military projects, the likes of Zircon. The stuff I've been reading about this, it sort of says there was a quote unquote agreement between parliament and government departments that they would tell the public accounts committee about such projects. It doesn't sound like it was
00:09:59
Speaker
like it was an actual law like they were they were they were strictly required to but it was understood that they would and the fact that the head of this committee had not heard of zircon showed that they hadn't they had they had violated this agreement
00:10:14
Speaker
It turned out that Zircon, now I said it was canned because it was going to cost too much, the cost was going to be about 500 million pounds in the 1980s. Apparently that's more than one and a half billion dollars in today's money. So a project of that size, that's something kind of a big thing.
00:10:33
Speaker
to have neglected to mention to the people who you're supposed to be mentioning it to. Sheldon himself later said he felt a bit ambushed by Campbell's interview often, but nevertheless it didn't seem very much that he did not know what Campbell was talking about when he brought up the Zircon project, and so this
00:10:50
Speaker
This basically became a bigger issue than Zircon itself. It's one thing for the government to be working on secret spy satellites. I mean, that's the sort of thing you might expect a spy agency to do, and it's the sort of thing you'd expect to be kept secret from the general public. But the fact that the project and its enormous cost had been kept from parliament, that's an even bigger deal. And so that basically was going to, you know, that was real fodder for this Zircon episode.
00:11:18
Speaker
of Campbell's Secret Society documentary series. So Secret Society was made, it was advertised as part of the BBC's programming in late 1986. The government
00:11:32
Speaker
was a bit nervous about it right from the—as soon as they sort of heard about it. Alastair Milne, who at the time was the Director General of the BBC, had received what he called remonstration noises from the Secretary of the D-Notice Committee, a D-Notice
00:11:48
Speaker
something you might have heard of before, I believe now. Apparently, they're now called a DSMA notice, to be a little bit more precise. But what was known as a de-notice at the time was an official request to news editors not to publish or broadcast items on particular subjects for reasons of national security. So a de-notice would be issued if the Ministry of Defence or whoever
00:12:13
Speaker
found out that a newspaper or television producers or whatever had this information that they believed would be a danger to national security if it got out, they would issue a denotice and so say, officially say, you're not allowed to publish this.
00:12:31
Speaker
It suggested that this de-noticed committee, who was making these remonstration noises to Mr Milne, was just worried about the series in general, not about Zircon specifically. The records we have of their time suggest that committee secretary Rare Admiral WA Higgins,
00:12:53
Speaker
hadn't actually heard of Zircon itself at the time he suggested they keep an eye on the show. He basically had seen BBC's advertising, here's the stuff we're going to be putting out later in the year, saw that they were going to be putting out a series on secret stuff the government was up to, and said, oh, that's something we better keep an eye on. We don't want them to be revealing dodgy things.
00:13:17
Speaker
and didn't know that one of these dodgy things was going to be Zircon and wouldn't have been concerned about that immediately because he also didn't know what Zircon was. But people started talking about the show. In November of 1986 there was a meeting of the BBC governors to discuss the series chaired by Mama Duke Hussey, that would be Mama Duke James Hussey, Baron Hussey of North Bradley,
00:13:43
Speaker
And some of the governors of the BBC were quite opposed to the show and quite opposed to Duncan Campbell personally. I think, as I say, he had a reputation for being someone who was a thorn in the side of the government. So one of the BBC governors was a former MI6 operative. She was dead against Campbell and the show.
00:14:03
Speaker
One of the other people who was very much opposed to the show going forward was diplomat Curtis Kiebel. That would be Sir Herbert Ben Curtis Kiebel. And so a bunch of the governors thought that the show probably shouldn't be aired. It might be better for all concerned if the show was shelved. And so the governors and also the current director of the GCHQ won Peter Mary Church.
00:14:32
Speaker
got on Alistair Mills' case about the show and so he arranged a viewing of early cuts of all six episodes of the show and showed them to the governors. After watching all these episodes the governors thought okay this would actually be okay to broadcast
00:14:49
Speaker
the series, except for the Zircon episode. We really don't think the Zircon episode should be showed. That's going to cause too much trouble, too much of a danger to national security to be revealing what we're doing. Remember, this is 1986. The project wasn't officially canned until 1987, so as far as people knew, this was still something that was going ahead and they didn't want people talking
Public Revelation and Legal Fallout
00:15:11
Speaker
about it.
00:15:11
Speaker
Apparently, basically, all of these people made life very difficult for Alistair Mill and kept going on and on about and at him about it. I assume as the head of the BBC, as someone who was involved in the production of the show, he would have been reluctant to shelve any of these episodes. But eventually, apparently, around the end of 1986, start of 1987,
00:15:34
Speaker
um decide yeah okay we won't we won't broadcast the zircon episode now Duncan Campbell wasn't going to take this lying down and in January of 1987 the project became public knowledge the the things i the few things i've read about it didn't say exactly
00:15:52
Speaker
how the product became public knowledge. But essentially, Campbell went public with it. They mentioned various news stories came out at the same time. The one story that shows that sort of gets taken as representative of the whole thing was a story in the Observer headlined BBC gag on 500 million defence secret. And there are a bunch of these other articles going around the newspapers.
00:16:14
Speaker
At this point, the Attorney General obtained an injunction against Duncan Campbell discussing or writing about the contents of the Zircon episode. However, Campbell had already written an article for the New Statesman about all of this. The government tried to stop that with an injunction. This article for the New Statesman had been sourced from some various unnamed defense officials.
00:16:41
Speaker
and the Attorney General was very keen to know exactly who these people were and if any of them had breached the Official Secrets Act and acting as a source for Campbell's article. And before you knew it, Special Branch was raiding Duncan Campbell's house, raiding his researchers' houses, raiding the new statesman's offices, looking for all sorts of documentation to find out everything they could about this reporting and investigation that had been done on Zircon.
00:17:08
Speaker
And so at the time, there was a lot of fuss and bother, a lot of brouhaha, a fine how do you do, and all sorts of stuff started happening. The tapes of the Zircon episode ended up getting leaked. There were screenings to various civil liberties organizations who made a fuss about what's the government doing trying to hide this stuff from us. There's a bunch of stuff about parliamentary privilege, a bunch of sort of technical
00:17:37
Speaker
political stuff went on in that the zircon episode was screened in parliament and so having seen the screening parliament then they wanted to get an injunction but then it was ruled that no you can't get an injunction because anything that happens in parliament is covered by parliamentary privilege and you can't and so you can't do that and there's a bunch of political messing around and then they had to have another screening somewhere else to get around these technical rules there's a whole bunch of stuff like
00:18:06
Speaker
that but basically eventually things just simmer down as these things do it's a big deal at the moment and then as it sort of goes on people slowly slowly lose interest the fuss kind of dies down
00:18:23
Speaker
and people just kind of got on with their lives. So the first four episodes of Secret Society aired in 1987. Eventually the Zircon episode itself was shown in 1988 and they sort of they they they followed that then with a bit of a sort of a discussion show about about the episode and about the controversy around it and the decisions to not screen it and then screen it and what have you. I mean it probably didn't hurt that by that stage Zircon had been cancelled so it was it was
00:18:52
Speaker
It was almost a fuss over nothing. I mean, the fact still remained that this initial problem of hiding a very expensive military project or neglecting to mention a very expensive military project to parliament, that was still a thing that had happened and probably shouldn't have.
00:19:10
Speaker
But, you know, people weren't so interested about
Aftermath: US Satellite Purchase
00:19:14
Speaker
that. As it turned out, in 1989, Duncan Campbell eventually reported on what happened to the project instead. The British government, rather than spending £500 million making their own satellite, they just went and bought a US-made one, which they controlled, launched it on a Titan rocket, not on a space shuttle, so that wasn't nearly as much fun.
00:19:39
Speaker
And that's it for the Zircon Affair Accept. Accept. Now, I said Zircon was episode five of Secret Society, and I said they broadcast the first four episodes of Secret Society, and then eventually episode five, titled Zircon. Episode six of Secret Society was going to have been called Cabinet,
00:20:04
Speaker
and was going to be all about secret cabinet committees. That one was also cancelled, the time apparently because of the the upcoming 1987 general election in the UK, and that one has never been shown. Now in 1991, I mean it's sort of been shown, in 1991 Duncan Campbell was doing a series now for channel four,
00:20:27
Speaker
about banned programs and they went to the BBC and asked if they could buy the Cabinet episode off them to include it in the series about programs that had been cancelled for years 1991. It's a bunch of years on now, but no, no, the BBC was not going to sell it. They weren't going to let go of this episode that they never intended to broadcast. Duncan Campbell, though, still had his original scripts.
00:20:52
Speaker
for the episode, and so Channel 4 ended up basically remaking the entire Cabinet episode from scratch and broadcasting it on that channel. So it was sort of shown, but nevertheless the actual episode, as it was originally made, was never actually shown. And there was a bit of, well, a bit of conspiracy theorizing about that particular fact as well. I mean,
00:21:16
Speaker
I wouldn't be talking about this whole thing if it wasn't conspiratorial, and it kind of was. We've got, you know, municipal government departments conspiring to hide things from parliament, from other things being hidden from the people and all that sort of stuff. But there was another conspiracy theory around this. In 1989, Alistair Darling, who I should have included that in the list of interesting names, shouldn't I? But Alistair Darling was an Opposition MP at the time, and during a debate
00:21:45
Speaker
He started talking about all this dodgy stuff that the government, obviously it was a Conservative government at the time, he was a Labour MP, I assume, talking about all this nasty stuff the Conservative government had been getting up to, such as suppressing this information and ridding Duncan Campbell and his researchers and news statements and what have you.
The Cabinet Episode Controversy
00:22:07
Speaker
And he suggested that all this big fuss about the Zircon episode was really to distract us from the Cabinet episode, because that was the one that the government really didn't want to be shown. And by making a big fuss about Zircon, they made sure that everyone would forget about the other episode, which, surprise, surprise, never actually got shown. In the words of Minister Darling,
00:22:34
Speaker
That program was about the election campaign of 1983 and the fact that the government sought to undermine and spy on the citizens of this country. Their object was to prevent the program from being shown and the Zircon Affair was a blind. So there you have it. The Zircon Affair, a thoroughly conspiratorial set of happenings in Britain in the mid to late 1980s and that's really
00:23:00
Speaker
That's really all I have to say about it. Except, of course, for those of you who are paying attention to our little game will have noticed that the only name in the list that I haven't mentioned was Bernard Weatherill. Did I make him up? No, actually, I didn't make him up either. They were all real.
00:23:16
Speaker
names. Bernard Weatherill was the Speaker of the House of Commons at the time. I just kind of rushed over the bit that he was involved because it was all that political parliamentary privilege bollocks that was all that was a bit sort of technical and not particularly interesting. So he was involved.
00:23:32
Speaker
He was involved, just wasn't worthy of mention in the story as I told it. So there you have it. That is my little filler episode for you this week. A fun little story I'm sure you'll agree and I'm sure you'll agree probably couldn't have been stretched into an entire episode so it's probably for the best that we just talked about it. Now would have would have made for a good bonus episode perhaps
00:23:56
Speaker
if we had nothing else to talk about. By the time we do actually do a proper episode, we'll have a bunch of news to catch up on. There's all this Trump business I was seeing just over the last couple of days. There's been another big leak of classified Defense Department documents or something like that in the States, which seems to be another case, and this is not the first time it's happened, of a person sharing classified documentation basically to win arguments on the internet.
00:24:24
Speaker
I know there was that tank game. There was one of the online tank games. And in order to win arguments about whether or not it was actually authentic and realistic, people ended up posting classified tank specifications publicly online to say, look, see, see, they didn't get this bit right.
00:24:44
Speaker
And this appears to be another case. This guy had quite a following in particular circles online and had been talking about all this classified stuff and basically sharing classified information for the views just to keep his audience interested. So once there's more detail about that, maybe we'll have something interesting to talk about there. But for now,
00:25:04
Speaker
For now I think that will do you. We will tide you over until we can get together to record a full episode properly. So hopefully that will be sooner rather than later but we'll just have to have to see how things progress. Best wishes from me. Best wishes from Em as well I'm sure.
00:25:22
Speaker
Were they able to be here? I'm sure they would be wishing you just as well as I do. But I think that's it. That's all for this week. So until next week, and hopefully until the next time I see you with a proper full-length 400th episode, there really, really is nothing more for me to do than say goodbye. The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, stars Josh Addison and myself.
00:25:52
Speaker
Associate Professor, M.R.X. Stentors. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor.
Audience Engagement and Conclusion
00:26:02
Speaker
You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, nothing is real. Everything is permitted, but conditions apply.