On CTV's Question Period last Sunday, author William Kaplan had some kind words for several journalists' work on the Schreiber-Mulroney file -- and a notable exception.

Kaplan wrote two books on the case: Presumed Guilty -- Brian Mulroney, the Airbus Affair and the Government of Canada; and A Secret Trial -- Brian Mulroney, Stevie Cameron and the Public Trust. He also wrote a major series for The Globe and Mail in 2003.

From QP: (You can see the full video of the interview on this CTV.ca story)

Craig Oliver: Why did it take so long for the public to click and the media by the way to click onto this?

William Kaplan: Well, you know, Craig, it's a very difficult, complicated story. And I think a whole bunch of factors influenced its reception and the length of time it took to percolate the public consciousness. There would be libel chill, media concentration, ownership of much of the media was in hands that were friendly to Mr. Mulroney, the difficulty and complexities of the story.

A whole bunch of factors I think conspired to make it very difficult.

And, of course, the reporters themselves for many years didn't follow it, with two exceptions. The two exceptions -- Greg McCarthur of the Globe and Harvey Cashore of the CBC diligently kept pursuing the story, kept pursuing it, and since Oct. 31 when the Globe put it on its front page again and the CBC broadcast another show, well, that seemed to be the turning point. And, of course, Craig, too, there was the intervention of the prime minister in calling an inquiry. That certainly extended the news cycle this time.

Oliver: How do you feel about the fact that you had this all nailed down and nobody noticed? I mean, one would have thought that your phone would have been ringing off the wall. Was it?
 
Kaplan: Well, you know, it wasn't, but it is a difficult, complicated story. And don't forget that even before I had it, and published it in the Globe and Mail in November 2003, Philip Mathias had it and had written a story for the National Post. And he got nowhere with the story, and eventually he left the newspaper. So the story has been out there for a while, it's just taken a long time to percolate in the public consciousness.
 
Oliver: So why now? Certainly part of that at least is that people stopped being afraid of being sued by Mr. Mulroney, who is always threatening libel suits every day, it seemed.

Kaplan: Well that's got to be part of it, I assume. But another part of it is, don't forget Karlheinz Schreiber has been planning and plotting this for a long time. He knows that he's been very unsuccessful in the various legal moves he's made over the past eight years to stay in this country, and he could see that he was getting closer and closer to being put on a Lufthansa plane for Frankfurt. And so he's been planning and thinking, and planning and thinking for the last few years about what he was going to do as his removal from Canada became more and more imminent. And we've seen some of the results of that. And of course what he did in his affidavit, attempting to implicate the current prime minister, well, the prime minister responded by calling an inquiry, and here we are today.

Oliver: I guess some of us were surprised that Mr. Mulroney never did sue, as far as I know, any journalists. He sued politicians, he sued governments, but wasn't willing to sue journalists for some reason.

Kaplan: Well I can tell you when I wrote my second book, he certainly indicated to me that if there was anything he didn't like in it, he would have sued me. So he sends letters out all the time. Just ask Harvey Cashore at the CBC or Greg McCarthur at the Globe, or ask me,
there's no shortage of letters being sent to people who are writing about him.

Here's some lengthy excerpts from the Nov. 10, 2003 Globe story by Kaplan:

For years, Cameron tried to establish, in book after book and speech after speech, that Mulroney was, as she almost asserted flat out, "on the take."

But the best she and her famous research binders - crammed with information about Mulroney-government wrongdoing, real and imagined - were able to establish was that some of those around Mulroney had crossed the line. The same has been said of prime ministers before and since.

On Mulroney, Cameron could never prove that he, personally, had done a single improper thing. Even the information she provided to the police, which eventually helped to spark the government's infamous 1995 letter to the Swiss that called the ex-PM a criminal, did not do the trick. ...

On April 22, 2003, the RCMP conceded it had nothing and wrapped up its Airbus investigation. This came as good news to Mulroney, Karlheinz Schreiber and lobbyist and Mulroney associate Frank Moores.

The news for the three was welcome - being told that a criminal investigation is over always is - but many questions remained unanswered. Who knew what in government and when? Was the investigation politically motivated? And where did the all the money go? One thing Cameron did establish was that a lot of money was paid in commissions for various transactions including Airbus and the helicopter sale. We still do not know precisely who got it and for what, and now maybe we never will.

Some loose ends will never be tied up, but others now can, including, most interesting of all, that Mulroney did enter into a commercial relationship with Schreiber after leaving office.

Award-winning National Post reporter Philip Mathias got the story first, nailing it down in late 2000 and early 2001: "Brian Mulroney was paid $300,000 in cash by German businessman Karlheinz Schreiber, the man at the centre of the Airbus affair, over an 18-month period beginning soon after Mulroney stepped down as prime minister in 1993."

The story made it clear that the payments had nothing to do with Airbus, or any of the other wrongdoing asserted in the 1995 letter of request. The story noted that, at the time the payments were made, Mulroney was re-establishing himself in the private sector and there was no reason not to do business with Schreiber, who was not, at the time, embroiled in the various legal proceedings and political scandals that would soon overtake him.

The Post interviewed Schreiber for the story and quoted him as saying that the business relationship between the two was "normal" and it was not up to him "to report on Brian Mulroney to the Canadian public." The story also pointed out that $300,000 was not an unusual sum for providing legal and lobbying assistance on big-ticket items.

Mulroney apparently declined to comment for the story, as did his lawyers. However, Mathias did get to speak to a "Mulroney confidant" who told him that "the former prime minister earned the fee in full" by performing services for Schreiber after the fee was paid. The Post was not told the nature of the work or when it was done. Asked why Mulroney had not made this matter public sooner, the confidant replied that Mulroney was fearful of creating a false impression in the middle of what he described as "a witch hunt over the so-called Airbus affair."

Mathias said the amount involved paled in comparison with the millions Mulroney was alleged by the Canadian government and others to have taken as a payoff for Airbus and the other transactions. Mathias also believed, but could not apparently confirm, that the purpose of the retainer was to assist in kick starting the Bearhead vehicle project, in Cape Breton if possible or, if politics demanded it, in the east end of Montreal.

After working on the story for months, Mathias submitted it in early January, 2001, just weeks before his scheduled retirement. It went for legal vetting, was approved and emerged from editorial fairly edited. Mathias waited and waited and waited. Nothing happened.

He began to ask questions and pester. He finally wrote to the proprietors - at that time there were two of them: Conrad Black and the Asper family. Finally, in a letter near the end of March, he complained. He told the owners that Mulroney received the cash beginning soon after he left office in 1993 to return to the private sector and accepted the last payment in December, 1994 - four months before Airbus started coming to light. Why, he asked, was the story not published? It was, he suggested, clearly newsworthy.

A few days later Mathias was summoned to a meeting with senior editorial staff. The meeting did not go well. Why, he was asked repeatedly, was he pursuing the story? There was, he was told, no story. Why, he was asked, had he gone over his bosses' heads?

Discussion then turned to the merits of what he'd written. Mathias took the position that a story about a former prime minister accepting $300,000 in cash from an international arms merchant was newsworthy. There was further discussion, a line-by-line dissection of the story, more observations on why it wasn't a story, and finally the meeting ended.

That night, Ken Whyte, then the editor-in-chief of the Post, called Mathias at home. He had not been at the meeting but said the views of the editors on the story reflected his own. If there really were something there, it had to be placed in context. Whyte suggested that Mathias contact me, being the author of a book about the whole thing, to do that.

I was contacted and provided a comment, on the condition that it be published in its entirety. It went as follows: "I generally prefer to withhold comment until I have all the facts, but let me make the following observations about what you have told me. First, building a second light armoured vehicle manufacturing facility in Canada - as you know we already had one in London, Ontario - was always predicated on huge infusions of federal cash - hundreds of millions of dollars in either guaranteed orders or infrastructure and other support. It did not matter whether the project was to be located on Cape Breton Island or the east end of Montreal. This fundamental fact - that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars was required to fund the initiative, made it uneconomic when Mr. Mulroney was prime minister and none of the underlying economic, political or other factors leading to the rejection of the proposal by Mulroney had changed when Mr. Chrétien became prime minister. Given all of this, what exactly did Schreiber think he could achieve?

"On this point, you tell me that Mr. Schreiber paid Mr. Mulroney to assist him in this endeavour from some time in the summer of 1993 until December, 1994. While it is conceivable - but for the reasons already given, unlikely - that Mulroney could have helped the project if Kim Campbell was elected prime minister, it is inconceivable that Mr. Chrétien and his Liberals would have been responsive to any initiative spearheaded by Mr. Mulroney and that is why, presumably, Mr. Schreiber retained Marc Lalonde. Why, then, would Mr. Schreiber have paid Mr. Mulroney for anything for services after the fall 1993 election? In other words, how this project could have been advanced with Mr. Mulroney on the payroll after the Liberals got into power is beyond me.

"You tell me that $300,000 was delivered to Mr. Mulroney in cash. Frankly, this is the strangest part of the story and I would like to know a little more about it as it seems, I must say, improbable. I cannot imagine money being delivered in the sense payments of cash connote. So what exactly is meant by cash? Invoices sent for services delivered compensated by wire transfers? Obviously, a lot of questions are raised by this account and until those questions are answered I am not sure what to make of it. The first thing to do would be to ask the former prime minister for an explanation.

"Finally, and this is the most important thing I have to say. On Airbus, Mulroney was presumed guilty. In fact, he was not guilty of anything. You do not have to believe me about this. The CBC's fifth estate said so; Stevie Cameron, Mulroney's nemesis, said so. Judge Alan Gold, who arbitrated the award of legal fees to Mulroney, concluded that he suffered a grievous injustice, and my own study determined that he had nothing to do with Airbus. So whatever implications people might wish to draw from this new account, I would suggest that some caution is in order before jumping to any conclusions."

Mathias continued to press for publication of his story but got nowhere and eventually gave up. The environment for its publication, he reflected years later, was just not right. In fact, the atmosphere was downright hostile, and so a newsworthy story was relegated to electronic purgatory on the Post's hard drive.

Mathias was a veteran reporter with very good sources. He was the journalist who broke the news that the government of Canada had sent the Swiss a letter calling Mulroney a criminal, and he had been working on different angles of the story ever since. Now he had uncovered one of the biggest scoops of his career and, instead of getting the front-page treatment the story deserved, it was suppressed and he was treated as though he had a communicable disease.

A long career in investigative journalism ended in disgust, and The Post continued its campaign of bemoaning the so-called victimization of Mulroney by the RCMP and others on the one hand, while puffing him on the other, particularly when doing so cast the current Prime Minister in a less positive light.

All the while there was time bomb waiting to go off. The story could not die.