The journalist Chapman Pincher, who has died aged 100, became famous for his pursuit of traitors and supposed traitors in the British secret service. His motives were apparently those of a firmly self-proclaimed patriot, pathologically attached to the British soil. His reaction to immigration was that he could feel no kinship with "people so different from me and mine". As a Daily Express man often sent abroad on handsome expenses, he always flew home as soon as he could and wangled it so that he spent an average three or four days a week at his home in the countryside.
His hard-edged clarity about where he stood in the British order, politically and socially, sat awkwardly beside the ambiguities of the secret world that became his stock in trade. But Pincher had a unique flair for the big scoop to be gained from top contacts in the worlds of science, defence and espionage. Sometimes these came from lunches at a French restaurant in Jermyn Street, in St James's, and he had a love of field sports – shooting and fishing – that he genuinely shared with those on whom he depended for hints and information.
He was content to milk a far cosier relationship with "the establishment" than would suit many journalists. He found that politicians from Harold Macmillan downwards, and top civil servants, were more inclined to unbutton secrets when eating grouse than when playing their public roles in London, especially if they knew they were talking to a man who would sit on a story if they wanted him to. He knew he would be first in line if they changed their minds.
Henry "Harry" Chapman Pincher was born in Ambala, about 125 miles north of Delhi, the son of Major Richard Chapman Pincher and his wife Helen (nee Foster). His father was in India with the East Surrey Regiment, but the family returned to Britain at the start of the first world war, living in Durham and Yorkshire, where Harry's ancestors had worked the land. As a boy he decided that he wanted to live like a "working squire".
Harry went to Darlington grammar school at a time when his father managed a pub and a theatre and his mother was an actor. His biology teacher interested him in genetics, which led him to take a botany and zoology degree at King's College London – in a capital that he always detested. Leftwing students at KCL explained that, come the revolution, Britain would have to be governed from Moscow at first. "Bugger that!" was his response. Pincher had an unrelenting hatred of communism from then on.
After graduating, he taught at the Liverpool Institute high school for boys from 1936 until 1940. During the second world war he served as a tank gunner in the Royal Armoured Corps and then became involved in rocket research. A friend on the Daily Express asked him about a powerful new explosive called RDX, which Winston Churchill wanted publicised. The Express had by far the best story and Pincher continued to feed it with material about the V-1 flying bomb, the V-2 rocket and the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Demobbed in 1946, the next day he joined the Express as defence, science and health editor. He had just published the first of his more than 30 books, The Breeding of Farm Animals. It caught the eye of Sir Frederick Brundrett, the government's deputy chief scientist, who invited him down to his farm. Over the years Pincher got many scoops from Brundrett and similar people in top places.
Pincher was prepared to pay his dues to the establishment. Before Britain's first H-bomb test on Christmas Island, he wrote a phoney story to fool the Japanese who were preparing to protest in 1,000 obstructive small boats. Knowing it to be untrue, he wrote that the tests were being postponed. They went ahead without trouble. Pincher found that "few endeavours ... gave me more delight".
A major scandal followed from his revelation in 1964 of how the defence manufacturer Ferranti had been overcharging on its contract for Bloodhound missiles. In 1971, Edward Heath expelled 105 members of the Soviet embassy's bloated staff after Pincher had pointed to their engagement in espionage.
Two years after leaving the Express staff in 1979, he published Their Trade Is Treachery, which suggested that the intelligence chief Sir Roger Hollis had been a KGB mole. Pincher had long been an acknowledged master of top-level secret contacts, and he used material provided by Peter Wright, a former assistant director of MI5. The Australian court case in which the British government tried to prevent the publication of Wright's own Spycatcher (1987), covering similar ground, revealed Pincher's secret dealings with Wright, but embarrassed Pincher only fleetingly.
Once called the lone wolf of Fleet Street, Pincher hunted alone, never with the El Vino crowd: "Your rivals aren't going to tell you anything useful." Neither was he overly sentimental about the Express: he simply walked out when it no longer suited him, requesting no goodbye party. He was a cold or at least cool fish who swam a million miles away from the shoals of Fleet Street stereotypes.
He is survived by his third wife, Billee (nee Constance Wolstenholme), whom he married in 1965, and his children, Patricia and Michael, from a previous marriage.
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