Why I can’t tell you the full story

I’d love to be able to tell you about my most recent experience reporting on a sensitive national security matter, but if I did I might end up in jail. The story, you see, is the subject of a particularly onerous suppression order.

Suppression orders aren’t strictly speaking the subject of today’s cross-media campaign, although perhaps they should be. Along with Australia’s arcane defamation laws they’re the legal obstacle the jobbing reporter is most likely to encounter as he or she attempts to bring you the day’s news.

According to some excellent reporting by The Daily Telegraph some 855 suppression orders were issued by Australian courts last year. More than half — 443 — were handed down in Victoria, the jurisdiction that tried Cardinal ­George Pell in conditions of the most extraordinary secrecy. In many instances even reporting the existence of these orders is a crime. In other words, even the suppression is suppressed.

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It’s a shame, because the story — the one that I can’t talk about — illustrates perfectly how the media and the government collaborate to report on sensitive matters in a way that satisfies both the public’s right to know and the equally valid desire of security agencies to keep secret information secret.

It shows that far from being a bunch of reckless cowboys (and cowgirls), most journalists tend to be pretty careful when it comes to reporting what the police and the spooks refer darkly to as “operationally sensitive’’ information.

This isn’t just because we’re afraid of going to jail (although we are).

It’s because, and this will shock some, that as well as being rat-bag journos desperate for tomorrow’s yarn, most of us are also ethically decent people as concerned about the common good as you are.

Let me tell you what I can about this story.

About four months ago I got a tip that the Australian government was planning to rescue a handful of vulnerable Australian children from a refugee camp in northern Syria. The children (whose names are suppressed) were orphans of the Islamic State. They had been taken into the Caliphate by their parents, all of whom had been subsequently killed.

Now they were marooned in the al Hawl refugee camp, a hellish place where women and children are subject to the predations of Islamic State operatives who prowled the camp. The tip was just that — a throwaway remark made by a contact I’d called up to ask about something else. But it often happens this way. Reporters are given a germ of information; the work lies in standing it up and furnishing it with other details. In this case it wasn’t too hard.

I put out the feelers to contacts and within a few days I had, more or less, the yarn. I knew how the government planned to get the kids out, the route they were planning to take. I even knew the name of the locally engaged NGO they were talking to to get the job done.

Some of that initial detail would prove to be wrong, although again that’s not unusual. People who talk to reporters about sensitive subjects rarely give you the full picture, usually because they don’t know it themselves.

Reporting in the national security space is a bit like looking at the world through a straw. You see a tiny part of the whole. The challenge is to paint as vivid a picture as you can while frankly acknowledging to your readers the limits of your own knowledge.

When I had enough to publish I put what I knew to an arm of the government, I won’t say which one. What happened next was not surprising. We were asked to hold the story.

It was explained to me, and to the paper’s editor, John Lehmann, that the children might be at risk if details of the extraction were aired while they were still in the camp. They could be targeted by the network IS sympathisers known to be at large in al Hawl or attacked as they travelled overland out of Syria.

There was also a risk that the locally engaged NGO staff could be harmed if they were known to be working with the Australian government.

John and I conferred and agreed to withhold. Really it was the only thing to do, given the stakes. But we had some concerns, the main one being that we could be beaten to an important story by one of our less scrupulous rivals.

We explained this to our government interlocutor who told us that while other media were onto the story they had also agreed to hold off reporting. In the end we struck a deal. We’d hold fast and in exchange the government would tell us when the kids crossed the border at which time we would publish.

We also asked that elements of the story we were fuzzy on, or that might have changed in the interim, be clarified for the sake of accuracy. They agreed and a few weeks later we ran the story.

Over the years I’ve had dozens of conversations like the one I’ve just described.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve agreed to hold off publishing or remove certain details on the grounds that doing so may harm someone or put an important operation at risk.

I’ve had these conversations with police, bureaucrats, politicians and some of the country’s most secretive intelligence agencies. At the heart of them all was trust — trust that journalists would do the right thing, and trust that the government won’t shaft reporters who act responsibly. Laws that allow police to raid the homes of journalists and fail to offer protection for reporters who publish leaked material jeopardise that trust.

More seriously, they narrow the road for hard-hitting public interest journalism, a task that is already difficult enough given the explosion of suppression orders, Australia’s restrictive defamation laws and the absurd culture of secrecy that has penetrated every aspect of our bureaucracy.

And that is very worrisome indeed.