Word: clough
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...months in jail faced Reporter Desmond Clough of the London Daily Sketch. But first London's High Court gave him ten days to change his mind about whether to reveal his source for a news story about a British spy, and thus purge himself of contempt of court. The Sketch's man stubbornly kept mum, but last week, and at the last minute, the source himself stepped forward...
dough's savior was Neville Taylor, a public-information officer for the British Admiralty. Taylor told the three-man tribunal investigating Britain's John Vassall spy case that he was the source for the Clough story that had linked Vassall's leaks to Russia with the subsequent appearance of Soviet "trawlers" near a top secret NATO sea exercise in the Atlantic. Taylor's admission was enough to get Clough off the hook, but his testimony also shed a curious light on a Fleet Street reporter's ability to treat the flimsiest of conjectures as fact...
...secrets go, the one that Reporter Desmond Clough confided to 950,000 readers of London's Daily Sketch did not seem like much: Russian trawlers, he wrote, scouted "with uncanny accuracy" top-secret NATO sea exercises. But for refusing to tell a British High Court where he got this information, Newsman Clough earned himself a special distinction last week. He became the first journalist in British history to be sentenced to prison for protecting a source...
Much more was involved in Clough's six-month sentence than a reporter's simple insistence on keeping mum. Clough's story said that the Red trawlers had come snooping because of secrets sold to Russia by John Vassall, a clerk in the British Admiralty and a known homosexual. One of the more scandalous episodes in British officialdom, the Vassall affair did not end with the Admiralty clerk's imprisonment (TIME, Nov. 2). British press stories sparked the official inquiry that nabbed Clough. How could the papers have been so knowing without leaks from the Admiralty...
Astronauts heading for some distant planet may not be quite as ignorant as Clough's seamen. But if a spaceshipload of them were to blast off tomorrow, they could not predict their landing point within thousands of miles. Such uncertainty could be disastrous, and Physicist F. E. Lowther of General Electric Co. hopes to do something about it. He is starting his campaign with an effort to correct that old reliable constant of physics: the speed of light (now calculated at 186,282 m.p.h...