Britain: Police Drama At the BBC

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Government raids on newspaper or television offices are usually associated with Latin American dictators or East European police states. But last week one took place in Britain. Scotland Yard agents, using powers under the 1911 Official Secrets Act, showed up at the Glasgow office of the British Broadcasting Corp. looking for information that had been leaked to the network about a supersecret spy satellite known as Zircon. It took Scotland Yard officers 28 hours and three attempts to come up with a valid warrant, but then the police carted off two vanloads of BBC film and documents.

Increasingly at odds with the Thatcher government, BBC executives felt particularly harassed: the government had known about the leak since last summer, and the BBC had already decided not to air the Zircon expose because of possible damage to Britain's national security.