BROTHERS IN THE SHADOWS

THIS SERIES of articles started as part of a REBECCA investigation into freemasonry which began more than a decade ago.

Freemasonry has been out of the limelight ever since the late 1990s when the Commons Home Affairs Committee examined allegations of masonic influence in the police and the judiciary.

Is this because masonry has become respectable - or is it because no-one is watching?

Some of the material in these articles emerged from a separate REBECCA investigation into the North Wales Child Abuse Tribunal which took place in the 1990s.

One of the areas the Tribunal was supposed to examine was the extent of masonic influence in the North Wales Police.

A former North Wales Police superintendent, Gordon Anglesea, had won a major libel action against broadcasters and publishers who had wrongly accused him of being a child abuser. Anglesea is a freemason.

REBECCA discovered failings in the way the Tribunal handled the issue of freemasonry - these shortcomings are presented in the article A Mason-Free Zone?

The Tribunal's leading counsel Gerard Elias QC is a mason but he did not reveal the fact at the hearings. Elias is a member of a powerful judicial-political lodge called Dinas Llandaf which REBECCA examines in the story Brothers in Silk.

In 2006 REBECCA noted a press report that a retired detective sergeant had been gaoled for child abuse. He was a mason - and he claimed that another mason introduced him to a group of men who were sexually abusing a young girl.

At the time REBECCA assumed that the mason who introduced him to the ring had also been caught. The story would have made an interesting footnote to the critique of the Child Abuse Tribunal. Nearly a decade after the Tribunal's hearings, here was a story of a retired policeman involved in child abuse who was introduced to the ring by another mason.

But this mason was never caught.

The TV programme Brothers in the Shadows and the associated article The Missing Masonic Child Abuser charts the disturbing way that freemasonry and the police dealt with REBECCA attempts to find out why he hadn't been brought to book.

The reason for making a TV programme about this issue is that "television" is a different animal to conventional "print" journalism.

For one thing, interviews allow the viewer to hear a person give their side of the story directly.

Another is that some elements - like the interview with the provincial secretary of South Wales and the access to the masonic temple - work much better in vision than in words.

But the most important difference is the power and drama of the "doorstep" with Raymond Ketland. This gives the viewer the chance to see a confrontation between REBECCA and the convicted child abuser. In cold text, these few minutes lose much of their force.

The conventional print article, on the other hand, contains far more information than a television programme can cope with.

This is why REBECCA will try to combine the best of these two mediums and forge a new form of online journalism.