All civilian employees of UK Government agencies, such Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE), the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE), and the UK’s military forces, were required to achieve Official Secrets Act clearance before being employed in classified work.
Professor William Walters** was given approval by National Trust to use recorded interviews of 44 Veterans* in his research into State Secrecy and Security. IRGON provided fact-checking support to Professor Walters for the factual content of his subsequent conference lectures and published academic work.
This included lectures about Orford Ness and his ‘Everyday Secrecy’ research to conferences at Aalborg University, Denmark, in 2018, in Denmark and at University of Bristol.
William’s latest book ‘State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imagery’ – including a chapter entitled: “On Orford Ness, An Island Full of National Secrets” was published in May 2021
** Professor William Walters
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
https://carleton.ca/socanth/people/william-walters/
William was raised and educated in Suffolk before going to University in London, New York and Toronto. He now lives and works in Canada.
* ‘Veterans’: those who worked on, or for, the military testing of the UK’s nuclear weapons on Orford Ness.