LONDON — In a news town that lives and dies by the scoop, this was one of the juiciest stories around: Prince Harry, Queen Elizabeth II's fun-loving, redheaded grandson, was going to war on the front lines of Afghanistan.
But wait, the Ministry of Defense said. Hold off on reporting it for a while -- three long months, to be exact. You can have not only the story, but the works: interviews with the prince in his rough desert troop quarters; video of him peering at Taliban positions and man-handling a machine gun; thoughtful comments from him about how the queen gave him the news he was going to war, what it felt like to go without a royal shower for four days.
From the hallowed BBC to the raucous tabloid Sun, from the liberal Guardian to the conservative Telegraph, the news media agreed. Prince Harry would have his war in secret.
The news blackout lasted 10 weeks.
But secrets, in the end, have a short shelf life in the news business. A hint trickled out on a German website Wednesday, and by Thursday the U.S.-based website Drudge Report was all over it. "Prince Harry Fights on Frontlines in Afghanistan: 3 Month Tour," Drudge proclaimed, sending British editors flying to remake the next day's pages.
On Friday, the Ministry of Defense announced that Harry was coming home -- the flood of news had compromised his safety and that of his fellow troops, it said.
Following the huge splash of stories, with a gritty, camouflage-clad Harry on nearly every front page, a new skirmish broke out. Was the embargo an act of collective censorship in exchange for the right to print military propaganda at the end? Or, as the broad majority of the British public seemed to think, was a press corps former Prime Minister Tony Blair famously described as "feral dogs" exercising rare restraint?
"I was amazed it lasted as long as it did," said Graham Dudman, managing editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sun, which normally would rather chew off its own foot than make a deal along with competitors.
"This is the most fiercely competitive newspaper market in the world, and there's nothing one paper likes more than getting one over on a rival. But in this case the line held," Dudman said. "And that's because you're dealing with soldiers' lives over there. This isn't a story about some two-bit, here-today, gone-tomorrow celebrity. And it's not just about Prince Harry. It's about all the troops out there risking their lives for Britain every minute of every day. Are we to sacrifice their safety for the sake of a newspaper story? The answer was, we weren't."
The Sun led Friday with news of Harry's imminent return -- "Hero Harry's Coming Home" -- alongside a story of a man arrested in New Zealand on suspicion of attempting carnal knowledge of a goat.
Other newspapers had huge spreads, with links to slide shows and video interviews. There were accounts of the interview Harry had secretly given in London before his departure in December; stories on the prince's emotional calls to his girlfriend; detailed accounts of Harry, a junior officer in the Household Cavalry known to his comrades as "Cornet Wales," coordinating airstrikes for American pilots.
"Cornet Wales tells of his pride in serving country," the Telegraph said in its upper-right-hand lead story.
The story was assembled from reports from a small pool of journalists allowed to go to Afghanistan in the wake of the expose billed as a "world exclusive" on Drudge Report.
Finger-pointing
Drudge later credited an Australian women's magazine that had run the story in January, purportedly unaware of the embargo, and Germany's Bild newspaper, which published a brief gossip-style item on its website Wednesday.
The Bild story "was a speculative piece, written in the subjunctive, saying that Harry hadn't been seen for a while. We were speculating that Harry might be in Afghanistan. . . . We didn't know that he actually is in Afghanistan, so we didn't break any embargo," said Katharina Hoeftmann, an editor on the paper's foreign desk.
New Idea magazine of Australia, which published a full, "exclusive" story on the deployment Jan. 7, said in a statement it had not been aware of the embargo. "We take these matters very seriously and would never knowingly break an embargo," the magazine said.
Drudge Report's Matt Drudge did not respond to requests for comment.
By Friday morning, the second-guessing in London had begun.
"Can you think of any country outside China, Russia and other near-totalitarian states that would ever find every single national editor agreeing to simply facilitate the presence of somebody on the front line?" Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow, who had been unaware of the embargo his station had agreed to, asked on his morning broadcast.
