MICHAEL SMITH E-MAIL INTERVIEW

From DowningStreetMemo (excerpt)

Interview with Michael Smith
Michael Smith is the UK reporter many are likening to Woodward and Bernstein for his work in uncovering the Downing Street Memo and other leaked UK government documents. DowningStreetMemo.com recently interviewed Smith via email to ask him about how he came into those documents, what they mean, and what he would ask George W. Bush if he had the chance.

Q: There is some confusion as to what exactly was destroyed. RawStory reports that you burned YOUR copies of the original government documents. Other sites, such as Newsmax, are reporting that you burned the ORIGINAL government documents. See story here. Can you clarify? If you destroyed the copies, do you know if the originals you returned to the source are still in existence?

A: I was given the first six documents in September 2004. I have referred to these documents as the originals because they were the first documents that I was given. But these were of course not the "originals" of the actual documents. They were photocopies of the original documents.Such documents have to be registered and the source could not have walked off with them without being found out. Quite apart from that there were a number of different copies of the documents in circulation within government. There was always more than one copy of each of the original documents held by the government. For instance, the Straw letter to Blair was marked strictly personal. But there would still have to have been at least two copies of it, one held by Blair's office and one by Straw's. So the source made photocopies which he gave to me. I was told by the lawyers on the Daily Telegraph where I then worked that I had to copy them all and send the photocopies I had been given back to the source. This was because the photocopy paper used for the copies I was given by the source were made on a government photocopier. The paper they were printed on therefore in law belonged to the government and we could have been accused of theft and had the documents taken off us.So having sent back those copies, we now have several photocopies of each document which are on paper that belongs to us. I worked from one of these. The editor has another, and the third goes to the lawyers, who have a secretary type the text up using a manual typewriter. This is not done in the same format as the original document. It is just a record of what the document actually says which we can keep without putting the source in danger. I did not at any time work from the typed up texts. I always worked from the photocopies.There are any number of ways that the authorities could have tracked down the source using the photocopies of the documents. Photocopiers have their own signature, so the photocopier that was used could have been tracked down. A crease or mark of some on the original document the source copied could appear on the photocopy. Highly classified documents are often typed up again rather than photocopied, with deliberate mistypes inserted so that documents can be tracked down to a particular person. It was essential we destroyed any evidence.At 6pm on the evening before the paper appeared, having finished off the two articles I was writing, I shredded the photocopies which I had made, leaving me with only the typed up versions. I then passed that typed up text version to two political parties, the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru (the Welsh Nationalists). Plaid Cymru gave them to an academic who put them on his own website. That website was taken down immediately by the British Police Special Branch, who also began investigating me for a potential breach of the official secrets act.Under British law, anyone who passes on material which they know to be classified to someone else is guilty of breaching the official secrets act, whether or not they have signed it, and in fact I have signed it anyway while in the army. The typed up texts had also been passed by the academics Plaid Cymru were dealing with to the Cryptome website, which could not be taken down by the British police because it is not based in the UK. That is how they came to be passed into circulation a couple of weeks ago. I had nothing to do with the process whereby they have recently come into the public domain, although I am happy that happened.When I received the latest batch of documents I followed a very similar procedure, typing up the text and shredding the copies I had. At no point was I ever in possession of an original document, only photocopies of those original documents. Everything I did was designed solely to protect the source. That is a responsibility that every journalist has.Long answer but it is a complex issue and simplifying it only led to unscrupulous people deliberately, and rather desperately, misconstruing my motives for destroying leaked documents that could have led the authorities to my source.One thing we did do was to scan in the front pages of three of the documents, clean any identification marks off them and then reproduce them in the paper. Two of these can still be seen on the Telegraph website alongside my original story. Although this does not authenticate the text, it does show that the documents actually existed. This is the url.