Fact & Fancy

Six 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.

Clough had called him. said Taylor, to ask "if he would be way off beam in suggesting that the two things--Vassall and the trawlers--might be connected. I said that we honestly did not know, but if he put it like that it was a conceivable possibility--it might be a fair inference to draw, but we really could not say with certainty, or based on facts.'' On this dubious ground, Clough built his story.

Though Clough was now in the clear, the tribunal was already summoning other newsmen to the stand to find out whether their highly flavored coverage of the Vassall case had any basis in fact or came from any reliable source at all. If they too refused to reveal their sources, they too might find themselves, like Clough, facing jail.

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