From the South China Morning Post this week in: 1980
The front-page lead was datelined London but the report was about a remote corner of Hong Kong Island, called Little Sai Wan.
On May 23, a Friday, this newspaper reported that the Foreign Office had been duped into denying allegations of 'serious security breaches in Hong Kong', which had been going on for some years at Little Sai Wan, now known as Siu Sai Wan.
Quoting the Daily Mirror, the Post reported that David Ennals, formerly a Labour minister in the Foreign Office, had asked prime minister Margaret Thatcher for a full inquiry into allegations first made in 1975 by Jock Kane, a radio officer who had worked for the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Little Sai Wan. It was then an operations centre for some of the satellite dishes that straddle Hong Kong Island's western peaks to this day.
Kane had written a book, GCHQ: The Negative Asset, detailing sleaze, incompetence, corruption, espionage and security breaches at the facility. The book was never published after MI5 confiscated Kane's manuscript from the publishers, but his allegations did reach the media five years later.
GCHQ had told the Foreign Office that Kane's allegations had been followed up 'and action taken where necessary', but British press reports summarised in the Post claimed that nothing had been done and that in Hong Kong, the GCHQ had become 'an unaccountable state within a state'.