Donald McLachlan
Had not Donald McLachlan been killed in a motoring accident in Scotland last week- end, we would have resumed soon the dis- tinguished commentary on the affairs of the press which he used to contribute to the SPECTATOR. He was a strange man, loved and admired most by those who knew him best. To those who knew him little, he could and often did appear vague, dotty indeed, or even fey. Deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph and subsequently first editor of the Sunday Telegraph, he was due to com- mence work upon a book on the press. He was perhaps better as a writer on the press than an editor of it. Most important was his work during the war in Naval Intelligence, 'The idea of feeding some of our naval intel- ligence into the black propaganda we directed against Germany during the war was Mc- Lachlan's' Tom (Sefton) Delmer tells me. In the war McLachlan sat at an impressively named desk, called NID 17 z. The NID stood for Naval Intelligence Directorate, under the overall rule of Admiral Godfrey. The 17 z bit was an invention of Ian Fleming, who liked giving fancy titles. 'We all did it, Dick Cross- man, Donald and I, and the rest, and we gave Admiral Godfrey the credit for it, but really the whole idea of the harnessing of psychological warfare to naval intelligence was Donald's idea' insists Delmer, who is irritated that Peterborough' in the Telegraph suggests that the idea was only partly McLachlan's. One of McLachlan's last pieces of writing was an introduction he wrote to a book Tom Delmer has recently completed on the subject of Deception.
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