Dear Mr. Kinnock,
Thank you for your letter of 28 September in reply to mine of 19 September, in which you raise further questions about the sinking of the General Belgrano, and the prosecution of Mr. Ponting.
On the basis of all the information available, the General Belgrano threatened the safety of our forces and the decision to attack the ship was necessary. I am glad that you accept that information relevant to military dispositions and intelligence should not be made public. In my letter of 19 September to Mr. George Foulkes I gave a detailed account of the events leading up to the decision to sink the General Belgrano, within these security constraints. I do not accept that, apart from this consideration, there has been a refusal to deal with doubts raised about the Government's conduct.
As regards Mr. Ponting, you say that the contents of my letter conflict with information you have received from other sources. Since you do not reveal what those sources are I cannot comment on them but I can assure you that nothing in your letter causes me to withdraw or amend the account I have given you. Your specific questions could be answered only by publishing the contents of confidential exchanges between officials and Ministers, and between the Law Officers and the Director of Public Prosecutions. It would be improper for me to do so and your questions are anyway irrelevant to the question of the propriety of the actions of Defence Ministers or the Law Officers. [end p1]
As regards your other points about the role of the Law Officers, I made clear to you in my previous letter that the Director of Public Prosecutions first consulted the Solicitor General on 13 August 1984 and briefed him on the facts of the case. There was more than adequate time between 13 August and 17 August for the Solicitor General to weigh up the question whether, if the evidence proved sufficient for proceedings, a prosecution under the Official Secrets Act would be in the public interest. On 17 August the Law Officers received a police report together with the available evidence. The Solicitor General discussed this with the Director of Public Prosecutions and also consulted the Attorney General. The Law Officers satisfied themselves that the evidence before them was sufficient and they then decided that a prosecution would indeed be in the public interest. The papers to be considered were very few by the standards of most criminal cases that come before the Law Officers and the suggestion that the Law Officers did not have time to study them thoroughly before reaching their decision is unfounded. It was unnecessary for them to consult Treasury Counsel or any other outside Counsel. There is no practice or convention that they should do either in this type of case or in any other. It is only where there is particular difficulty or complexity about evidence or where the law is uncertain that the Law Officers or the Director of Public Prosecutions sometimes seek advice from outside Counsel. In the Law Officers' view there were no such evidential difficulties or uncertainties here.
You will appreciate that once the Law Officers were satisfied that the evidence was sufficient, the decision whether proceedings would be in the public interest was a matter for their judgement and no one else's. In this context, and given the quite unjustifiable attacks in the media and elsewhere on the role of Ministry of Defence Ministers in this case, I would make the general point that [end p2] cases involving prosecutions under the Official Secrets Acts are entirely for the Law Officers. That is the constitutional position and it is one which Defence Ministers scrupulously respected in the Ponting case as they do in all others concerning their Department.
Mr. Ponting 's case is sub judice and the committal proceedings are now imminent. You will therefore not expect me to go beyond what I have already said about it: it would be wrong for me to do so.
As for the matters raised in the last paragraph of your letter, the information which you asked for is always treated as confidential under every Administration.
Yours sincerely
Margaret Thatcher