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Typical of the parliamentary questions that Campbell-Savours tabled for these journalists during the 1980s include scores of questions about Polaris & Trident missile systems; the Zircon spy satellite; and the Skynet 4B & 4C military satellites (including questions about their orbit position and purpose).
At all times Campbell-Savours submersed his most sensitive inquiries within a sea of other questions calling for named journalists who had written about security issues -- including his collaborator and close friend David Leigh -- to be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. Through such crude camouflage Campbell-Savours escaped detection by maintaining the illusion that his motivation for asking sensitive intelligence questions was borne out of a genuine concern for national security.
As mentioned, Campbell-Savours is also a confidant of Guardian political journalist Andrew Roth, who, most interestingly, has since been unmasked as the former US naval intelligence officer Lieutenant Andrew Roth, who escaped America after WWII after being caught by the FBI passing top-secret documents to a Soviet agent named Philip Jaffe. Even more interestingly, during the late 1990s Campbell-Savours sat on Parliament's Security & Intelligence Committee, which its Conservative chairman Tom King MP described as having "access to the top secret workings of the Intelligence and Security Agencies". During the three years up to June 2001 that he sat in this most sensitive of posts Campbell-Savours had access to classified documents and toured many top secret establishments, including the British General Communications Headquarters eavesdropping complex based at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire (GCHQ); and the top secret US "Echelon" communications surveillance centre at RAF Menwith Hill, Yorkshire.
Campbell-Savours, Leigh, Hollingsworth, and Roth all had leading roles in
The Guardian's 'cash for questions' campaign and in the paper's subsequent conspiracy to pervert Sir Gordon Downey's parliamentary inquiry (see the document in Section Two entitled "The brainwashing of a democratic state").
Campbell-Savours' collaboration with David Leigh had its genesis during the first weeks of 1984, over an Observer story written by Leigh insinuating that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had broken ministerial guidelines to favour the interests of her son, Mark. Though the Speaker of the Commons issued an early statement clearing the Prime Minister of any impropriety, Campbell-Savours' and Leigh's orchestration of the so-called "Cementation affair" resulted in a brouhaha that dogged the Thatcher administration until mid-April.
Their penchant for conspiracy deepened with a brilliant manipulation of the Members' Interests Committee in 1989, in collusion with Mark Hollingsworth and Granada TV's Charles Tremayne, which succeeded in destroying a libel action brought by Conservative MP John Browne over a defamatory article written by Hollingsworth & Leigh published during the 1987 general election (see profile of Hollingsworth for more).
Campbell-Savours' most cynical activity, however, was taken at the behest of Guardian editor Peter Preston in cahoots with Leigh between March 1989 and July 1991. Together they hatched an audacious scheme to compel the Observer's owners, Lonrho, to sell the paper over the head of Lonrho's chief executive Tiny Rowland - whereupon Preston, who for years had tried to persuade Rowland to sell the paper, would snap it up as the Guardian's Sunday broadsheet. However, though Rowland shrugged off Campbell-Savours' parliamentary attacks casting him as a proprietor who 'dictated' stories to his staff, Campbell-Savours and Leigh also smeared the Observer's journalists as 'Rowland's lapdogs' to ensure that the charge would stick. As a result many Observer staff had their reputations ruined, including editor Donald Trelford; political editor Adam Raphael; City editor Melvyn Marckus, and financial journalists Lorana Sullivan & Michael Gillard.
Following the General Election of 2001, after nearly two decades of undetected subversive activities conducted in cahoots with David Leigh, Peter Preston, Hollingsworth, Roth and others, Dale Campbell-Savours moved to the House of Lords with his Guardian-created reputation, as "an assiduous MP", intact.
[To download the documents chronicling The Guardian's campaign to smear Tiny Rowland and the Observer's editor and journalists see Section Eight]
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