7th June 2023

Ian Chapman

CEO and Publisher

Simon and Schuster UK

1st Floor

222 Gray’s Inn Road

London WC1X 8HB

Dear Mr Chapman

Agent Twister by Augar and Winstone

I posted my 8 November 2022 letter of complaint to Simon and Schuster on my website and I would not like to be accused of falsely accusing your authors of misrepresentation if, in fact, they are innocent of those charges. However, I cannot take that letter off the web or otherwise change my position because you have not given me any information that counters my charges. 

In your letter of 24 March you say that Simon and Schuster are satisfied there is no misrepresentation in Agent Twister following review with the authors. They have not contested the source StB documents I refer to in my complaint, which is a fundamental issue given that Augar/Winstone have not provided in their book any references to support their assertions in four out of five instances I complained about (the fifth being referenced and reproduced in my letter of 8 November) and so I had to ascertain which documents they were referring to by using my own copy of the StB file. It seems then that we are all in agreement about the actual StB documents they and I refer to.

In your letter of 24 March you said I am entitled to disagree with Augar/Winstone’s conclusions however it must be obvious that we are not discussing here ‘conclusions’ but the misrepresentation of original StB documents. Clearly, a source document either says one thing or another and my complaint is based on the fact that where the StB documents themselves say ‘A’ the authors assert it says ‘B’. That’s not about ‘conclusions’ but about provable misrepresentation. 

I must ask you to look again at my original letter of complaint, a copy of which is attached, and hand it to your legal department. Most books of this nature are put through a legal read-through and had that been done in this case I do not believe Augar/Winstone would have been able to get away with what they have written. Or perhaps Simon and Schuster no longer comply with usual publishing practice in having their books subjected to rigorous legal scrutiny. If you are going to accuse a person of treason then I think it incumbent upon you as publishers to check your facts. 

‘Facts’ are what we are discussing in this correspondence, not ‘conclusions’. If your readers are subjected to factual inaccuracies they are going to be drawn into making inaccurate conclusions and that is a form of publishing abuse in my opinion. 

We need to resolve this issue. Either Augar/Winstone are correct in their representation of the StB source documents or I am. We can’t both be right. If they can support their assertions in the five instances I refer to in my letter of 8 November 2022 with actual documents and verifiable referenced facts then I will take my accusations off-line. But if I am correct in my assertions then your book will need amending to accurately reflect the StB documentation.

Yours sincerely,

Julia Stonehouse

c.c.  Head of Legal and Compliance