Clive Ponting, British defense official who turned whistleblower

During Britain’s 1982 conflict with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, Clive Ponting was a young but highflying Ministry of Defense official in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government.

Two years later, he turned whistleblower, leaking documents that contradicted official explanations of Thatcher’s order to sink an Argentine naval cruiser, the General Belgrano, on May 2, 1982. The death of 323 Belgrano sailors was a turning point in the undeclared war, largely taking the Argentine navy out of the equation.

After the incident, Thatcher told Parliament that the Belgrano had threatened the British Royal Navy by steaming toward a 200-mile naval “exclusion zone” imposed by the British. She had therefore accepted, she said, her naval commanders’ request to sink the 9,575-ton enemy warship, despite its carrying more than 1,000 sailors, many of them young conscripts.

The nuclear-powered submarine HMS Conqueror hit the Belgrano with two torpedoes, causing it to begin sinking within 20 minutes and sending survivors onto lifeboats. The disaster was seared into the psyche of Argentines, who still claim the islands, which they call Las Islas Malvinas, although they have been a British Overseas Territory since 1833.

The loss of the Belgrano — and the Falklands War that June — was a final blow to the brutal Argentine junta, which had hoped to rally nationalist fervor by taking the Falklands by force but was soon out of power.

In 1984, Ponting, still in the defense ministry, uncovered documents suggesting that the Belgrano was, in fact, steaming away from the British exclusion zone and possibly headed back to its port in Argentina when it was torpedoed.

In a secret report that became known in Britain as “the Crown Jewels,” he informed his superiors — ultimately Defense Secretary Michael Heseltine — who opted to keep the report under wraps for the sake of Thatcher’s political future.

Frustrated, and concerned that Thatcher had approved the sinking to end the conflict quickly and boost her domestic popularity, he leaked his report to one of Thatcher’s fiercest opponents, Tam Dalyell, a member of Parliament in the opposition Labour Party, who then revealed it to a parliamentary “select committee” of inquiry into the conflict.

Although Dalyell did not name Ponting, the Defense Ministry quickly identified him as the leaker. They offered him a deal — to confess and resign — that he accepted. But senior Thatcherite politicians still considered him a traitor and pushed successfully for his prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.

In London’s historic Central Criminal Court, popularly known as the Old Bailey, he faced what became a cause celebre trial in February 1985.

The judge, the staunchly pro-Thatcher Anthony McCowan, ensured that all 12 jurors were vetted by Special Branch detectives from London’s Metropolitan Police. During the trial, he made it clear that a guilty verdict was expected.

To defend him, Ponting had hired a feisty civil liberties lawyer, Brian Raymond, who argued that his client should be acquitted because he had leaked documents “in the interests of the state” and to a member of Parliament rather than the public or the media.

Raymond noted that Ponting was the first person ever prosecuted for leaking information to Parliament. The body, he added, should have been given the information by Thatcher’s government in the first place.

McCowan responded that “the public interest is what the government of the day says it is,” and tried but failed to dismiss the jury and convict the defendant himself. He and Ponting were probably the most surprised people in the courtroom when, on Feb. 12, 1985, the jury acquitted the whistleblower.

If convicted, Ponting faced life imprisonment. It is said that he carried a toothbrush and a copy of the sayings of Buddha to the final day of the trial. Four years later, in 1989, the Official Secrets Act was reformed, largely to clarify the gray areas of the Ponting case.

Ponting died on July 28 at his home in Kelso, Scotland, according to family members, who did not provide a cause. He was 74.

In the latter half of his life, he became known as a historian and author — “revisionist,” according to some critics, after he suggested that Britain’s revered wartime leader Winston Churchill was an ingrained racist and white supremacist.

Clive Sheridan Ponting was born April 13, 1946, in Bristol, England, where his father owned a small agricultural-supply company.

His roots in the southwest of the country and his state schooling were said to have instilled in him a certain contempt toward politicians who attended private grade schools and had Oxford and Cambridge pedigrees.