During the planning of the assault of both Darwin and Goose Green, the battalion headquarters were listening in to the BBC World Service, when the newsreader announced that the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment was poised and ready to assault Darwin and Goose Green
Which is a pretty amazing, even by the standards of embarrassing historical military intelligence failures. Though more amazing to me is apparently no one knows how it happened, what sequence of events led to that happening and who was responsible.
Goose Green might be barely a skirmish in the context of world military history but its a big deal in post-war British history (the failure of the British attack may have led to the fall of the Thatcher government which would have been a big deal historically). The events surrounding it and the rest of the Falklands has been analyzed in in great detail in countless books, TV shows, etc (including an episode of the Crown, and bizarrely the Argentinian sci fi show Eternauts) and all the major (surviving) figures have written first hand accounts.
Given all that, do we really not know who exactly was responsible for the announcement and how it happened? I get no one is falling over themselves to take responsibility for what is obviously a massive f_ck up. But still, we know, in great detail, who was responsible for the other fiascos in the Falklands war like the sinking of the Galahad and the Sheffield. Even the abortive SAS raid on the Argentinian mainland, we know what went wrong and who made what descision that led to its failure. If the SAS can’t keep its failures under wraps for decades, is the BBC really able to?
The Argentinians definitely thought that, and that’s why they didn’t act on it. Except it was in fact an accurate summary of the attack plan that was about to happen. But again if it was we would know, even the most classified aspects of the falklands war, like the SAS operations and the exact sequence of decisions that led to the Belgrano being torpedoed are now publicly known in great detail.
They really don’t though We know the dark dirty intelligence secrets from that era. Who betrayed who, who deposed who, who was bugged, who was suspected etc.
Given how much we know about what went on at the most sensitive parts of the government and intelligence services I find it really hard to believe this is not public knowledge half a century later.
There is no way to know that we know everything. A lot of conversations in that world end with “this never happened”. We only know about the ones where someone spilled the beans.
As noted, we don’t know what we don’t know. Yes, a lot of formerly secret stuff about that war is out. This may simply be a prominent example of something that isn’t. And there are innumerable other things we don’t know that we don’t notice we don’t know.
My own supposition is that because a) it was a screw-up and b) it turned out luckily for the UK to be inconsequential, everyone involved was able to clam up without being hounded by internal investigations desperately wanting a scalp to blame. Which would have occurred if the attack had been thwarted by the leak.
Clearly there are multiple entities that goofed here. Whoever at MoD who leaked. Whoever at BBC authorized the story. And a bunch of underlings along the way who never stopped to consider “Are we doing something dumb here?” Or if they did, were promptly overruled by their low-level supervisor.
In the immediate aftermath of the war as memoirs and histories were being researched and later written, who gains by telling on themselves or their coworkers?
I’d argue thats definitely not the case. That’s a Hollywood myth. IRL intelligence agencies keep meticulous records. The last thing you ever want your agent to do is just say “this never happened”. You say that to the guy he’s recruiting but your agent needs to write that conversation down in its entirety (if they don’t you can assume they are the ones being recruited)
My degrees are in History and the most frustrating thing about that discipline is that records are only kept when it serves an interest, and future historians are never one of those interests.
But that makes it even more unlikely that no one would say anything.
The MOD guy (now long retired with no career on the line) wants to clear his name and make it clear it was the BBC’s fault. The BBC guy wants the same in reverse. That’s how these things work.
Again all the other fiascos in the war we now know exactly all the embarrassing confidential details that reflect poorly on the people involved (e.g. the Sheffield’s radar needed to be turned off to use the satellite phone)
They don’t always end up in the public domain, but they absolutely exist. No one is saying “this conversation never happened” unless they are the one being recruited (in which case you can bank on the fact the other guy is keeping very careful records of that conversation for his superiors)
I’m not buying this at all. Whether or not they could keep it secret for half a century. There is not an intelligence or military organization in history that would willingly leak an exact and perfectly accurate details of military operation to the public in advance. No manner of weird reverse psychology theory would ever convince the higher ups to do this, ever. British, American, Soviet, German, French, Roman, Persian, Assyrian none of them would ever allow that.
I could believe it was meant to be false information, and someone screwed up on either side (either carrying out the operation that was meant to be fake or leaking the real operation instead of the fake one) but no one is doing this on purpose.
You might be looking in the wrong place - this is not a failure by the BBC. They’re a news org who accurately broadcast a timely and relevant report. The failure is in the process by which they got the accurate, timely and relevant info, but “doing good journalism” is not something they need to explain. And journalism as a trade has a very good record at protecting its sources.
(There’s an argument that the first B stands for British and they have a duty not to imperil British war efforts, which I am sympathetic to, but ultimately I think “we don’t let the government tell us what we can and can’t broadcast” is a bright line principle.)
That’s true but it’s not how it was viewed at the time by the powers that be (particularly the military powers that be)
But again that would have been a perfectly reasonable thing for a BBC man to say in his memoir. “I was just accurately reporting the facts that were provided to me by the MOD, as was my duty as an impartial journalist”. The fact no one has is puzzling to me
Obviously there could be thousands of secret intelligence operations every day without our knowledge and managing to leave no evidence they existed (just like there could be a cloud of UFOs hiding wherever there are no humans to see them). But this is not that, here we have a major incident that clearly happened, during an important historical event from the 20th century that has been thoroughly documented. Where are all these other similar events where no one spilled the beans? Again the event itself is well documented and happened, it’s just the explanation that is missing.
A question for the OP. You keep saying there is no way this information wouldn’t have gotten out by now…yet it, apparently, has not. Can you think of likelier explanations than the ones that have been speculated in this thread?
Not really. Maybe an individual military officer who was later killed (a bunch of the senior officers were killed, including famously the CO of 2 Para) said it to a bbc guy, in an unguarded moment, not realizing they were “on the record”. After the fact no one wanted to tarnish the reputation of the dead hero? (And being seen to blame a dead hero who can’t answer back). Seems like grasping at straws IMO.
One thing that definitely didn’t happen is the intelligence agencies deliberately leaking the details and then keeping it secret for half a century, that’s the least plausible explanation IMO
We know the dark dirty intelligence secrets from that era. Who betrayed who, who deposed who, who was bugged, who was suspected etc.