Hakluyt, Shell and the Vanishing Wikipedia Article – and a Personal Footnote (Part 2)

This article is Part 2 of a series on Shell, Hakluyt & Company and Wikipedia. Part 1 sets out the basic Hakluyt story – ex-MI6, Shell chairmen, undercover work against Greenpeace. This piece looks at how that story almost vanished from Wikipedia, and ends with a more personal footnote.

Earlier in this series: [Shell and Hakluyt: The Corporate Spy Story Wikipedia Barely Mentions] – the background on Hakluyt, its Shell-linked directors and the Sunday Times exposé on spying against Greenpeace.

Hakluyt, Shell and the Vanishing Wikipedia Article – and a Personal Footnote

For years I have argued that Wikipedia’s handling of Shell is not just incomplete but actively distorted. One of the clearest examples is its treatment of Hakluyt & Company, the private intelligence firm founded by former MI6 officers which Shell and BP hired to spy on Greenpeace and other campaigners.

Another, more personal example is smaller but telling: even after I notified Wikipedia editors that my father Alfred Donovan died in 2013, and supplied a Guardian article confirming that fact, the Wikipedia article about my website continued – for years – to describe the site as being operated by “Alfred Donovan and his son John”.

Taken together, these two threads say a great deal about who and what Wikipedia is prepared to acknowledge when it comes to Shell.

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I have never edited under an alias

 

Let me start with something simple.

From the day I first edited Wikipedia, I did so under my real name. I have never posted anywhere on the internet using an alias, and that includes Wikipedia. I declared my conflict of interest openly:

• I had fought Shell in the High Court, County Court and WIPO,

• I had co-founded Don Marketing, which created Shell promotions,

• and I ran Shell-watch websites such as royaldutchshellplc.com and royaldutchshellgroup.com.

 

I also stopped editing almost a decade ago. Since then I’ve confined myself to writing on my own sites and, occasionally, drawing Wikipedia’s attention to basic factual errors – such as my father being described as alive long after he had died.

By contrast, some of the most influential editing on Shell-related pages has been carried out by people hiding behind usernames, including individuals with close historical ties to Shell. That is a structural problem, not a personal one.

In my view, anonymous postings should not be allowed on a platform whose content is treated by millions as definitive reference material. As this story shows, anonymity allows conflicts of interest and quiet sanitisation to flourish, while even simple, well-sourced corrections from named contributors can be ignored.

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Hakluyt: the private spy firm in Shell’s shadow

 

Hakluyt & Company is a Mayfair-based corporate intelligence firm set up in the mid-1990s by former MI6 officers. Public sources describe its model: a network of ex-spies, diplomats and insiders, deployed as “associates” to gather information for large corporate clients.

The firm’s own Wikipedia article – unlike Shell’s – is quite frank about two key points:

• Shell’s leadership were embedded in Hakluyt’s oversight structure. Peter Holmes, former chairman of Shell Transport and Trading, served as president of the Hakluyt Foundation, and another Shell Transport director, Sir William Purves, chaired Hakluyt & Company Ltd.

• Shell and BP hired Hakluyt to collect intelligence on Greenpeace, as exposed by The Sunday Times in a front-page investigation in June 2001.

 

The Sunday Times story, “MI6 ‘firm’ spied on green groups”, reported that:

• Hakluyt had employed a German agent, Manfred Schlickenrieder, who posed as a left-wing film-maker to infiltrate Greenpeace and other environmental organisations.

• His targets included Greenpeace campaigns against North Atlantic oil operations and activists aligned with The Body Shop over Shell’s activities in Nigeria.

• Both BP and Shell admitted using Hakluyt, while claiming they had not known the details of the undercover operation.

 

That alone ought to qualify as a major controversy in any honest, encyclopedic treatment of Shell’s history.

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The missing controversy on Shell’s own page

 

Yet when you look at the current Shell plc article on Wikipedia, there is no mention at all of Hakluyt. The word simply does not appear. The “Controversies” section covers climate change, court rulings and various disputes, and even contains a detailed subsection about my own website as a “gripe site” and leak platform – but nothing about Shell’s relationship with a private spy firm.

By contrast, the Hakluyt article openly names Shell as a client of its Greenpeace operation, and notes the presence of Shell’s former chairman at the top of Hakluyt’s oversight structure.

In other words:

• The spy firm admits Shell; the Shell page does not admit the spy firm.

 

This is not a trivial omission. It changes how readers understand Shell’s methods for dealing with civil-society opposition.

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The deleted “Controversies” article

 

It is not true that Wikipedia has never hosted this material. For years, there was a separate article titled “Controversies surrounding Royal Dutch Shell”. I know this article well for three reasons:

1. I contributed to it under my real name.

2. Shell’s own internal memos, later disclosed, discussed the article and my involvement.

3. When it became clear that it might be deleted, I preserved the text and republished it on my own sites.

 

That “Controversies” article contained a detailed section on Hakluyt and Shell, including:

• the Sunday Times revelations about espionage against Greenpeace and other campaigners,

• the role of Shell–linked directors such as Holmes and Purves in Hakluyt,

• and Shell’s admission that it had used the firm while disclaiming knowledge of its methods.

 

Eventually, after a contested deletion discussion (Articles for Deletion, or AfD), the page disappeared from Wikipedia. Internal Shell documents about that AfD, now published on my sites, note that the result was “no consensus” at one stage, and explicitly identify me – “or at least someone using that name” – as the main contributor to the discussions.

The end result for ordinary readers is simple:

• The detailed Hakluyt material once existed on Wikipedia in a Shell-focused controversies article.

• That article was removed “in its entirety”.

• The main Shell page does not replicate the Hakluyt section, and today carries no trace of it.

 

What survives is:

• a frank Hakluyt page admitting Shell as a client of corporate espionage, and

• a Shell page that talks at length about my website but is silent on Shell’s use of a private spy firm against NGOs.

 

That asymmetry is not accidental; it reflects editorial choices made over time, often by people whose identities and interests are not transparent.

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A smaller but painful omission: my father’s death

 

Against all that, my father’s death may seem like a small footnote. For me, it is not.

My father, Alfred Donovan, died in July 2013 at the age of 96. I wrote about it at the time, and there is ample public confirmation on my own sites and elsewhere.

For many years, the Wikipedia article “Royaldutchshellplc.com” described the site as:

“a Royal Dutch Shell gripe site and blog operated by Alfred and John Donovan…”

Even eight years later, a June 2021 snapshot of that article still carried essentially the same wording: the site “is operated by Alfred and John Donovan…”, with no mention that Alfred had died in 2013.

This was not a case of Wikipedia editors being unaware. On my own site I recorded that:

• I explicitly notified Wikipedia editors that my father had passed away,

• I provided a Guardian article about Shell that mentioned his death as supporting evidence,

• and I asked for the information to be updated, because there were numerous references to him in the article.

 

Nothing changed.

As of 2016, and even as late as 2021, the article still treated my father as a living co-operator of the site. I find that profoundly upsetting – not only on a personal level, but as a reflection of how little weight is given to corrections from openly identified subjects of an article.

Here too, the contrast is striking:

• Shell’s repeated attempts to shape Wikipedia content – sometimes via insiders editing under aliases – were taken seriously enough that whole articles, including the “Controversies” page, ended up deleted or heavily sanitised.

• A simple, factual correction from a named, primary source – the death of one of the two people the article is about – was ignored for years despite proper evidence being supplied.

 

It is a small example, but it speaks volumes about the hierarchy of voices on Wikipedia.

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Real names versus anonymity

 

My experience with Shell, Hakluyt and Wikipedia has left me with a clear view:

• Wikipedia’s anonymity model and its obsession with internal “consensus” allow determined, well-organised actors to game the system.

• Those same features make it far too easy to brush aside real-name contributors who declare their conflicts honestly and supply verifiable sources.

 

In the Shell–Hakluyt case, the result is a public record in which:

• Shell’s use of a private spy firm against Greenpeace and others is almost invisible on the main Shell page;

• a carefully referenced “Controversies” article that did record it has been erased;

• and a critic who edited openly, under his own name, is treated as a side-story, while the real machinery of corporate influence stays largely off the page.

 

Add in the personal hurt of seeing my father mis-described as alive for years, despite my best efforts to correct the record, and it becomes hard to have much faith in the idea that “the Wikipedia community will sort things out”.

I do not claim that everything I have ever written is flawless. But I do claim this:

When a system consistently amplifies anonymous, unaccountable voices and marginalises named, accountable ones, you should be wary of taking its version of history at face value.

That is why I continue to document these matters on my own sites – where at least it is clear who is speaking, and why.

Earlier in this series: [Shell and Hakluyt: The Corporate Spy Story Wikipedia Barely Mentions] – the background on Hakluyt, its Shell-linked directors and the Sunday Times exposé on spying against Greenpeace.

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