We’ve heard much recently about the Muslim-run child sex-trafficking rings that have plagued Britain and that, for most of the last 15 years, had been covered up by the nation’s authorities. But it appears U.K. officials are old hands at protecting pedophiles, as a shocking story about powerful child molesters embedded deep within the British government reveals.

The story dates back to the 1980s and involves politicians, judges, intelligence officers, staff at royal palaces, and figures from private schools, big business, and the Church of England — and more than 100 government files on the pedophile network that have mysteriously gone missing. Writes the Daily Beast’s Nico Hines:

A newspaper editor was handed startling evidence that Britain’s top law enforcement official knew there was a VIP pedophile network in Westminster, at the heart of the British government. What happened next in the summer of 1984 helps to explain how shocking allegations of rape and murder against some of the country’s most powerful men went unchecked for decades.

Less than 24 hours after starting to inquire about the dossier presented to him by a senior Labour Party politician, the editor was confronted in his office by a furious member of parliament who threatened him and demanded the documents. “He was frothing at the mouth and really shouting and spitting in my face,” Don Hale told The Daily Beast. “He was straight at me like a raging lion; he was ready to knock me through the wall.”

Despite the MP’s explosive intervention, Hale refused to hand over the papers which appeared to show that Leon Brittan, Margaret Thatcher’s Home Secretary, was fully aware of a pedophile network that included top politicians.

The editor’s resistance was futile; the following morning, police officers from the counter-terror and intelligence unit known as Special Branch burst into the newspaper office, seized the material and threatened to have Hale arrested if he ever reported what had been found.

The volcanic politician demanding the papers was Liberal Party MP Cyril Smith. Known as “Big Cyril,” he stood over six feet tall and, tipping the scales at more than 400 pounds, is said to have been the heaviest British parliamentarian in history. And he certainly carried weight. Despite allegedly being a predatory child molester with approximately 140 complaints filed against him, he eluded justice and, in 2010, died a free man of natural causes at age 82.

The same could be said of Smith’s pal Jimmy Savile. After the flamboyant and eccentric BBC television host passed away in 2011 at age 84, it emerged that he was not only a prolific pedophile, he sexually abused older people as well — including the elderly — and even descended into necrophilia.

Then there was Leon Brittan — head of the Home Office, the U.K. department responsible for immigration, security, and law and order — who oversaw the pedophilia investigation in what could have been a prime example of the fox guarding the henhouse. It was revealed early last year that he himself was accused of raping a woman and sexually abusing boys. And, you might have guessed it, he also died early last year a free man, at the age of 75. As is so often the case, justice is not a thing of this world.

It’s not that there weren’t heroes in this story. Late Member of Parliament (MP) Barbara Anne Castle was the figure who collated the smoking-gun documents and handed them to Don Hale, then editor of her local newspaper, the Bury Messenger. Then there was MP Geoffrey Dickens. Referencing him, the Washington Post wrote July 7 of last year that the information about “Big Cyril”

was one of many in a dossier prepared 30 years ago by a crusading member of Parliament who warned of a powerful pedophile ring of “big, big names.” At the time, the man told his family the allegations were “explosive,” according to the BBC. It would, he told his son, “blow the lid off” of the pedophile ring and perhaps take down powerful, famous sex abusers who had infiltrated the highest reaches of British life.

Despite the purported power of the allegations, they weren’t aggressively pursued and no arrests or prosecutions followed. “My father [Geoffrey Dickens] thought that the dossier at the time was the most powerful thing that had ever been produced, with the names that were involved and the power that they had,” son Barry told the BBC late last week after it emerged that the document has since gone missing. “It just seems so suspicious that something so important could just go missing.”

Over the weekend, as its disappearance ballooned into a national scandal, the Guardian reported it may be worse than that. An additional 114 documents relevant to allegations involving the ring are also missing.

Brittan was central to this coverup, it appears. In 1983, Dickens gave the soon-to-disappear dossier to the home secretary to jump-start an investigation; Brittan would later claim he passed it on to underlings tasked with pursuing the matter and that he subsequently heard nothing more about it. But Hale contends Brittan actually played puppeteer in the investigation. Writes the Beast’s Hines, “‘Leon Brittan was mentioned in everything you picked up, his fingerprints were over everything, he was the instigator,’ Hale said. ‘He really had his finger on the pulse, he wanted to know everything about it; all the documents were cc’d back to Leon Brittan or it was an instruction directly from Leon Brittan.’”

Not surprisingly, Barbara Anne Castle never trusted Brittan to conduct the pedophilia investigation, Hale relates, as she implied to the journalist that the home secretary was involved. Thus did she attempt to interest major media; they were afraid to investigate, however, which is why she ultimately brought the story to Hale.

It also appears that a striking number of the rich and powerful were members of a British group tantamount to the United States' North American Man-boy Love Association (NAMbLA). Hines writes of this and of how British law itself might have facilitated the coverup:

Great Britain’s notoriously tough libel laws insured that obviously he [Hale] couldn’t repeat the allegations included in the Home Office papers that about 16 MPs and members of the House of Lords, and 30 high-profile figures from the Church of England, private schools, and big business, were members of, and advocates for, the Paedophile Information Exchange. The shadowy group, which operated partly in the open, campaigned for the age of consent to be abolished and incest to be legalized. It also allowed pedophiles to send each other secure mail and to meet in person.

So, partially handcuffed, Hale decided to simply run a story on how these men were under investigation and cite Castle’s concerns; he then contacted some of them and the Home Office for comment. It was the very next day that he received the unwelcome visit from Cyril Smith. And when the portly politician’s efforts at intimidation failed, Hale’s office was subsequently raided by 15 Special Branch officers, two of whom thrust him against a wall as they displayed a search warrant. As a pretext for seizing his papers, they cited a “D-notice,” which can be used when a news story supposedly threatens national security. Hale was told, reports Hines, “We’re not here to negotiate. Hand them [the documents] over or we’ll arrest you now.” And so the story died.

And now, a generation later and with many if not most of the major players dead, it has been reopened. Among the recent revelations, it has been disclosed that police were prohibited from investigating and charging perennial offender Smith, even when indecent images were discovered in his vehicle. As to this, another politician, MP Tim Fortescue, admitted in a 1995 BBC interview that a quid pro quo standard was operative, with elites rescuing their criminal fellows with the knowledge that the favors would later be returned.

Hines reports that the British security services, MI5 and MI6, were complicit as well. This may be no surprise, as longtime director of MI6 Peter Hayman was himself an accused pedophile who was caught with “explicit” material in 1978 — but escaped being charged (and, yes, Hayman is dead, too). And this scandal went all the way to the top, says Hines, with Prime Minister Thatcher ordering “his depravity to be concealed from the public.”

As to this, a former minister in Thatcher’s government, Norman Tebbit, acknowledged last year that there might have been a cover-up and blamed a prevailing “Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil” attitude in government. Wrote the International Business Times in 2014, “Speaking to Andrew Marr on BBC One's Marr Show, he said: ‘At that time I think most people would have thought that the establishment, the system, was to be protected and if a few things had gone wrong here and there that it was more important to protect the system than to delve too far into it.’”

And so it goes, from pedophilia among the silk-and-satin set decades ago, and beyond, to pedophilia among the Sharia set today — all condoned by immoral authorities.

But there is some good news. The current home secretary, Theresa May, announced earlier this month that an independent, four-person panel headed by an official from outside the British establishment — New Zealand high court judge Justice Lowell Goddard — has been created for the purpose of sifting the pedophilia scandal to the very bottom. It has been given new powers, sufficiently formidable so that Goddard will be able to follow “the evidence wherever it takes her,” wrote May in the Telegraph.

May also said that the “trail will lead into our schools and hospitals, our churches, our youth clubs and many other institutions” and “that what we have seen so far is only the tip of [the] iceberg” of abuse that is “woven, covertly, into the fabric of our society.” And she also vowed, “If perpetrators of child sexual abuse are found, they will be brought to justice.”