My (probably wrong) theory is that is was either someone at CBS or someone with very, very close ties to someone else at CBS. The reasoning for this is based on my two favourite historical cases of forgery (I study them for fun, not because I want to emulate).

William-Henry Ireland: To make a very long story short, he tried to pass off some truly ridiculous items as Shakespeare’s love-letters, “undiscovered” plays and so forth. The grammar was all wrong, the spelling, as Samuel Schoenbaum expressed it “belonged to no period,” and experts quickly debunked the whole thing, even while quite a number of people, including Boswell, stopped their ears and signed a “Certificate of Belief.”

Where did these fantastic letters come from? From “Mr. H.” said Ireland. Apparently Mr. H. was shy, lived in the country, and did not wish to be identified and publicized. Every effort to flush out Mr. H. failed miserably.

John Payne Collier: Acquired a Shakespeare folio from a newly-arrived lot at an antiquarian bookstore – the owner had not yet catalogued everything in the box, but let Collier, an old friend, buy the book anyway. A few years later, Collier published his findings – the folio had been crammed with annotations in a seventeenth-century hand, apparently from the son of one of Shakespeare’s players, amending much of the text and adding performance notes. At that point, an attempt was made to trace the original owner. One possibility was found, but he remembered of his book only that it had “a few” notes and that he had sold it. He doubted that Collier’s massively annotated original was his. All efforts to trace the original owner and establish a chain of custody failed, because the shop owner did not know where the book even came from originally and because some years had passed.

Mr. H. and Collier’s Original Owner both had one thing in common with Dickens’ Mrs. Harris. They were made up. The forgers were Ireland and Collier themselves, and their back-stories were purposely established to obscure the chain of custody so much that nobody could prove that they had *not* belonged to a particular person. Ireland, being a dolt, made a very transparent excuse which it did not take long to make look very suspicious. Collier was more intelligent – first, he picked a book out of an uncatalogued jumble, and then waited several years.

CBS, interestingly, is emulating Ireland much more than Collier. Instead of establishing an at least not-entirely-idiotic backstory (say, this particular person *found* the documents, or this staffer received them by fax, and after much verification we decided to go ahead) they have gone for the Mr. H. defense. “It was someone we trust, and you should just believe it.”

The fact that they have (a) established that this person exists and (b) absolutely cannot name him or her means that to name them would break their case so badly that they would rather look like obfuscating fools in the face of the Washington Post, ABC, and other fairly major news carriers. I mean, wherein it would be obvious to most rabid DU’er that something was…off.

Therefore, I surmise that the source was CBS itself, or an approximate equivalent. And there is no way, ever, that CBS would say, “Yes, we got the documents from a trustworthy source who found them in Killian’s personal files many years ago – US!”

I realize this will probably all be blown out of the water twelve hours from now, but I think the historical parallels are rather neat .