No conspiracy
Sir: In his article 'Fighting the good fight' (29 August) Murray Sayle goes badly wrong to claiming that newspaper photographs depicting battered RAF pilot John Peters, shot down by the Iraqis during the Gulf War, were 'misused' by the MoD for propa- ganda purposes. Sayle claims that the MoD told John Peters' wife, Helen, that his injuries were the result of ejection from his aircraft but that she was to 'keep silent in the inter- ests of national morale'. This is untrue. The MoD gave no instructions whatsoever to Helen Peters, she was just told the truth: that he could have been injured when eject- ing from the aircraft — or that he could have been tortured. Nobody, at that stage, could say for certain.
The Channel 4 documentary and my book, Tornado Down, will both make clear that John Peters and John Nichol were tor- tured, and pretty horribly at that.
If the MoD were conspiring to propagan- dise, it would have kept very quiet about the possibility of ejection injuries, wouldn't it? Sadly for the purposes of an otherwise very good article, the conspiracy theory does not apply in this case.
William Pearson
Red Earth Productions, p Madeley Road, London W6
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