www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
Summer 2019 Lobster • The view from the bridge by Robin Ramsay • Roswell, the CIA and Dr Edgar Mitchell by Garrick Alder
• Has a DNA test solved the Rudolf Hess 77 doppelgänger mystery? by Andrew Rosthorn • South of the border by Nick Must
• A tale of two Islingtons: How Blair opened the door for Corbyn by Simon Matthews
Book Reviews
• Dirty Tricks: Nixon, Watergate, and the The End of the Republican Party: Three CIA, by Shane O’Sullivan reviewed by ‘Never Trump’ Conservatives on the Robin Ramsay Trump Presidency reviews by John Newsinger: • Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the . Everything Trump Touches Dies: Brainwashers, and Themselves, by A Republican Strategist Gets Real Matthew Sweet reviewed by Anthony About the Worst President Ever, by Frewin Rick Wilson . Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the • The Doomsday Machine, by Daniel American Republic, by David Frum Ellsberg reviewed by Alex Cox . The Corrosion of Conservatism: • Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Why I Left the Right, by Max Boot Borderlands, by Richard Sakwa reviewed by Scott Newton Conspiracy Theories reviews by Robin Ramsay: • Reporting on Hitler: Rothay Reynolds . and the British Press in Nazi Germany, Impossible Knowledge: Conspiracy by Will Wainewright reviewed by John Theories, Power, and Truth, by Newsinger Todor Hristov . The Stigmatization of Conspiracy • Democracy in Chains: The Deep History Theory since the 1950s, by of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for Katharina Thalmann America, by Nancy MacLean reviewed by Bartholomew Steer
• Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, by Adam Tooze reviewed by Robin Ramsay
• Manufacturing Terrorism: When Governments Use Fear to Justify Foreign Wars and Control Society, by T. J. Coles reviewed by Robin Ramsay www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
The View from the Bridge
Robin Ramsay
Thanks to Nick Must (in particular) and Garrick Alder for editorial and proof-reading assistance with this issue of Lobster.
*New* JFK I wrote below (‘But not that page’) that only Roger Stone and I seemed to have spotted that Robert Caro had omitted a large chunk of material about Billie Sol Estes and other Texas shenanigans from his celebrated biography of LBJ. Since then JFK researcher Robert Morrow sent out a link to a video of him asking Robert Caro at a recent public meeting why he had done this.1 Morrow might have been better only asking about Estes rather than including him in a list of other people Caro hadn’t talked to. Nonetheless Caro’s (indistinct) answer to the effect that in forty years he never saw anything ‘credible’ linking LBK to Dallas is disingenuous. Morrow’s point was precisely that Caro had deliberately avoided such evidence.
* Meanwhile back at Chauncey Holt and the striking lack of interest in him among the assassination researchers, there’s this from Jim DiEugenio: ‘. . . other researchers have dug into Holt’s story at great length, and have shown great doubt about his claims – for instance, that Holt traveled to New Orleans to deliver pre-printed leaflets to Guy Banister’s office for Oswald to pass out, when in fact there is evidence these were printed in New Orleans and Oswald hand-stamped the leaflets with Banister’s address.’ 2 I don’t know of anyone who has researched Holt ‘at great length’. There was
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some initial interest but, when the Dallas Police records of the arrest of the three ‘tramps’ were released and Holt wasn’t one of them, that interest disappeared. However Holt-sceptic Jim DiEugenio has given us something specific here about the leaflets and an apparent contradiction between Holt’s account and what is known. What can we say? Holt has given us two versions of the leaflets.3 The first was in a profile of Holt by Bill Kelly when he first appeared in the early 90s. ‘Driving to New Orleans, Holt, Belcher and Young delivered Fair Play for Cuba Committee leaflets to Guy Bannister’s Camp Street office. Holt had made the leaflets in California. “These were professionally done, and not the leaflets with the 544 Camp Street address on them,” said Holt, who doesn’t know if his leaflets were ever used.’ 4 In his memoir, written about five years later, Holt merely refers in passing to ‘the leaflets we had printed’.5 So: Holt did not claim to have produced the Camp St. leaflets and DiEugenio’s claim that their existence in some way discredits Holt’s story is mistaken. On the leaflets there is a further complication. Those that were made in New Orleans, with the Camp Street address on them, were apparently not ordered by Oswald. ‘It has been documented that they were printed at the Jones Printing Company of New Orleans. In the National Archives is the crude drawing Oswald did of the leaflet copy. The folks at the print shop recalled doing business with a man identifying himself as “Lee Osborne.” Neither the owner Douglass Jones, nor the secretary Myra Silver, could identify photos of Oswald as being the same man named Lee Osborne that ordered the pamphlets printed. Jones specifically said the man he dealt with had a huskier build, that of a laborer. So who was this guy? Another cog in the operation?’6
*
Looking through old issues of Lobster I noticed this item in Lobster 37.
3 There is nothing on them in the long interview with Holt done by John Craig, Phillip Rogers, and Gary Shaw in 1991. This is at
4 William E. Kelly, ‘Meet Chauncey Holt’ in The Third Decade, Volume 9 Issue 1 at
5 Chauncey Holt, Self-Portrait of a Scoundrel (Waterville, OR: TrineDay, 2013) p. 158
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‘In November 1997 the JFK Assassination Records Review Board released Pentagon documents which, according to the Reuters’ report on this, show that “The Pentagon drew up plans to mount a bloody ‘terror campaign’ in the United States . . . .and planned to blame it on Fidel Castro to justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. . . .’ These are the Operation Northwoods documents which were included in James Bamford’s book Body of Secrets on the NSA a couple of years later and have become a staple of the parapolitical canon. Curious that such a startling revelation had to wait until 9/11 to be taken seriously.
*New* Bower on Corbyn In his devastating review of Tom Bower’s biography of Jeremy Corbyn,7 Peter Oborne commented that he had a longer list of Bower’s errors in the book which he would send on request. So I requested. This is the list compiled by Oborne’s researcher.
Other Bower errors Here are some of the other errors I have established either myself or included from other reviews. I have organized them in order of page number wherever possible. I should say that I have not been able to do a comprehensive fact- check of the entire book. I suspect there are many other errors. – Bower repeatedly refers to Corbyn’s wife, Laura, not by her preferred name of Laura Alvarez, but as ‘Laura Corbyn’. – Bower frequently accuses Corbyn of being a Trotskyite. Elsewhere he states that Corbyn’s ‘personal commitment to Stalinism set him apart from most Labour Party members.’ Trotskyites and Stalinists hate each other, and Stalin ordered Trotsky’s brutal murder. Bower, who, with his knowledge of the far- Left, ought to know you can belong to only one of these two communist factions. – p. 13. Bower accuses Corbyn of being ‘unable to engage in hard work’. On page 32 he describes him as ‘tirelessly active.’ Only one can be true. – p. 40. Bower’s account of the 1978-9 winter of discontent says that union leader Jack Jones was 'leading the militancy', but Jones had already retired – p. 83. Bower asserts that Denis Healey was elected Labour deputy leader under Neil Kinnock when it was actually Roy Hattersley [who became deputy].
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– pp. 117-18. Bower gives an account of Corbyn taking a trip to India. This contains a mass of errors. I have spoken with Talal Karim, who was on the trip and refused to speak to Tom Bower at the time and he has pointed out the following: 1. Corbyn went for just under 10 days not three weeks. 2. They did not travel by steam train from Mumbai to Kolkata (it would have taken 4 days had they done so). They travelled on the Rajdhani Express, an intercity non-stop fast train from New Delhi to Kolkata. This train does not allow anyone to sit on the roof as Bower suggests. 3. Responding to Bower’s claim that Corbyn lacks an interest in reading, Mr Karim told me that during the long train journey to Kolkata, Jeremy read Freedom at Midnight and Mahatma Gandhi’s memoirs. – pp. 133-4, 238: Bower says that Corbyn supported the organisation Deir Yasin [sic] Revisited organised by the Holocaust Denier and Antisemite Paul Eisen. According to Corbyn, his relationship with Paul Eisen was before Eisen outed himself as a holocaust denier. While this has not been confirmed, Bower could have at least included Corbyn’s denial. For Corbyn’s account see here. – p. 149. Bower says the left were ‘playing the diversity card’ when Diane Abbott made her bid for the leadership in 2010, when her candidacy was in part because Harriet Harman and David Lammy, both on the party’s right, wanted to ensure that the field of candidates was not all white men. – p. 211. Bower writes that Corbyn ‘had never publicly expressed any outrage about Emwazi’s crimes’ when in fact Corbyn clearly called Emwazi’s crimes ‘callous and brutal’.8 – pp. 235 and 251. Bower deals with the allegations of anti-Semitism at the Oxford University Labour Club at length. However, he does not once mention that the Royall report found there was ‘at least one case of serious false allegations of antisemitism reported to the police’. – p. 237. Bower contradicts himself here when he says that ‘To Corbyn’s frustration Iain McNichol prevented him exercising any control over the party’s disciplinary processes.’ Bower deals at length with how slow Labour has been to process the antisemitism cases, for the most part ignoring that Corbyn’s political rival McNichol was party secretary for most of them. – p. 276. Bower confuses Jackie Walker’s two suspensions. He says that she 'had been suspended again from the party for saying that Jews were the “chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade in the West Indies”’. This was the origin of the first suspension, which was lifted. – pp. 283-84. Bower confuses the 2nd leadership campaign against Owen Smith
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with the general election campaign of 2017. I have also obtained off the record rebuttals to do with Bower’s treatment of the Shami Chakrabarti report: – p. 270. Bower writes that Chakrabarti ‘incorporated only an anodyne part of Jan Royall’s conclusion of finding “clear” evidence of the “ancient virus of anti- Semitism”.’ (Royall’s report was on the OULC affair.) This doesn’t make sense as the two worked closely together. Indeed, in an article Royall wrote about her report she writes: ‘Some of the most important issues I considered I have left for the Chakrabarti review, of which I am proud to be vice-chair.’ Bower’s suggestion is that the Chakrabarti’s inquiry does 9 mention overt anti-Semitism. This is incorrect. For example, on page 6, Chakrabarti’s report states: ‘according to the testimony received by my Inquiry and published by various contributors online, there have also been incidences of overt antisemitism’ – p. 271. Bower claims that Seumas Milne guided the Inquiry to fit his requirements. This was denied. – Bower claims that ‘unusually for a lawyer’, Chakrabarti refused to define anti- Semitism and avoided the distinction between justified criticism of the Israeli government’s policies and the conflation of Jews, Zionists and Israel. Chakrabarti lays out her clear reasons for not defining anti-Semitism on p.7 of her report. On page 12 of the report, contrary to Bower’s account, Chakrabarti addresses the distinctions between criticism of Israel and Jews. For example, she highlights dictionary definitions of Zionism and compares them with testimony of the word Zionist being used ‘personally, abusively or as a euphemism for “Jew”’. – pp. 270-71 Bower claims that the report recommends that Labour Party members who were found guilty of anti-Semitism should not be disciplined. It is likely that he is referring to this recommendation in the report: ‘Once my Report is disseminated and so as to give members an opportunity to be guided by it, I recommend a moratorium on triggering new investigations into matters of relevant language and conduct arising before publication. This in no way effects investigations and disciplinary proceedings already in train.’ This recommendation was designed to avoid punishing people for breaching the guidance in the report, until the guidance was in effect. It is suggesting that the guidance shouldn’t be retrospective. The Report then goes on to give other detailed disciplinary recommendations, which further renders Bower
9 Obviously, Oborne’s researcher here really meant to say that Bower was claiming there had not been any mention of overt anti-Semitism.
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incorrect. For example, on p. 28 of the report: ‘I recommend consideration of a greater range of NCC sanctions short of suspension and expulsion.’
*New* Assange Caitlin Johnstone’s ‘Debunking all the Assange smears’ 10 is very good. Not a million miles away is the question: did Assange/Wikileaks leak the material from the Democratic National Committee to the Trump campaign? Everyone and their cousin seems to take it or granted that they did. Notable dissenters from this view are Craig Murray and, more significantly, the former Technical Director of the NSA, William Binney, who has written an essay explaining why the material must have been loaded on to a USB thumb drive (or something similarly mechanical) and not downloaded via a hack of the DNC computer.11
But not that page In a recent piece he wrote for the New Yorker, ‘Turn Every Page’, promoting his new book, celebrated biographer of LBJ, Robert Caro, describes how, as a young reporter, he was summoned to see the editor of Newsday, Alan Hathaway. ‘Alan looked at me for what I remember as a very long time. “Just remember,” he said. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddam page.” He turned to some other papers on his desk, and after a while I got up and left.’ 12 But he did not, apparently, turn the page that mentioned Billie Sol Estes and the scandals associating him with LBJ. That part is excluded from the fourth volume of Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson. Estes and his corrupt schemes might have made the front cover of Time in May 1962 but he’s not in Caro’s book. The omission really is a big ‘tell’. As I have noted before, I have twice emailed Caro via his publisher about this and received no response. In the
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12 ‘The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives’
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absence of an explanation from Caro, what we are we to conclude but that he was afraid to get into Estes because that led into Estes’ allegations about LBJ’s role in the assassination of JFK? To my knowledge only Roger Stone – yes, that Roger Stone – and I have noticed Caro’s deception about Estes.13
That post-modernism non-sense Reviewing the two post-modernist social theory books on conspiracy theories for this issue14 reminded me of my first and only encounter with the post- modernists. About 30 years ago one of my subscribers invited me to speak at a conference in Birmingham University at the Centre for Cultural Studies. ‘Sure’, said I. ‘You pay my train fare and I’ll come.’ All I knew about the Centre for Cultural Studies was that Stuart Hall was its director; and I had never heard of post-modernism. I was speaking in the afternoon, so, for the morning, I was part of the audience of about thirty – post-grad students with a sprinkling of their lecturers. Speaker after speaker talked this weird nonsense. I had no idea what they were doing but they used the same vocabulary and the same buzz phrases kept cropping up. After lunch it was my turn. I had been asked to speak about ‘Publishing a radical magazine’. Having heard the morning’s proceedings I knew there would be no interest in what I had to say.15 So I rattled through it, sat down, leaned back, put my feet up on the table in front of me and said something like this: ‘I never heard so much crap as I did this morning.’ So we had a barney. With some barely remembered ordinary language philosophy from my student days about 15 years earlier, I kicked them round the room.16 It was a hoot. There were a number of consequences. I was excluded from the plenary session at which the speakers sat at a table at the front of the room. Of course, first chance I got I put my hand up and asked the chair if he’d care to explain to the audience why I wasn’t at the
13 See
14 Todor Hristov, Impossible Knowledge: Conspiracy Theories, Power, and Truth and Katharina Thalmann, The Stigmatization of Conspiracy Theory since the 1950s.
15 After the event I realised that I had been invited as an example of the old-fashioned concern with facts.
16 I don’t suppose they would agree with that description, of course. The encounter was an almost parodic version of the English language tradition in philosophy versus what it regards as waffy, continental theorising. The proponents of post-modernism were all beginners and I could barely remember the philosophy I used to know.
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top table. When I got home that night I received a phone-call from one of the members of the audience. He was in the department and was thrilled that I had assaulted them. I asked who he was. He had been in prison for murder, done a degree inside and was doing a PhD at the Centre. ‘Why don’t you attack them?’ asked I. No, he dared not do that. Then my train fare didn’t get paid and I had to write and threaten to inform the Dean – administrative head in a university department – if they didn’t cough up. Eventually they did. And the subscriber who had invited me didn’t renew his subscription.
Witchfinder ‘Virginia “Ginny” Keyes has a long history of supporting David Icke – the infamous antisemitic conspiracy theorist who tours the country preaching that the world is run by secret Jewish shape-shifting lizards – “Rothschild Zionists” naturally.’ 17 Thus Rachel Riley, of ITV’s Countdown, in her new role as anti-semite hunter. I haven’t read David Icke for over 20 years,18 and hadn’t grasped from the reports of him that his lizards were Jewish. I thought they were aliens. So I asked the Internet. Wikipedia told me: ‘He believes that an inter-dimensional race of reptilian beings called the Archons (or Anunnaki) have hijacked the earth, and that a genetically modified human/Archon hybrid race of shape-shifting reptilians, also known as the “Babylonian Brotherhood”, the Illuminati, or the "elite", manipulate global events to keep humans in constant fear so the Archons can feed off the “negative energy” this creates.’ So: Icke may be a dingbat but is not an anti-semite. Apparently the Labour Party didn’t bother to check Riley’s statement and, on the basis of her (false) claim about Icke, has prevented Ms Keyes from standing as a Labour councillor in May. A political party being stampeded by a game show host? This is all getting very silly.
Muellered That faint chortling noise you may just hear beneath the raucous jeering from
17 Tony Frewin spotted this.
18 And then managed only a few pages of his turgid rehash of American theories about the global elites.
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the pro-Trump media is coming from the small section of the American left- liberal media who were too smart and/or too spook-savvy to buy Russiagate and have not been embarrassed by the first accounts of the Mueller report. Take a bow the writers at Consortium News, in particular.19 What we might call the military–Democratic Party–media complex’s enthusiasm for anything which might kibosh the Trump group’s attempted rapprochement with Russia was a pretty unedifying spectacle, no matter how corrupt the Russian regime is or how murderous towards its domestic enemies. Also in the ‘told you so’ chorus is Matt Taibbi, who opens his brutal essay on the way the American media (mis)handled the story with this: ‘The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it’.20 In a comment on the event, Jonathan Cook noted that Mueller was ‘a former head of the FBI, the U.S. secret police, for chrissakes!’ 21 To which we might add that as acting Attorney General of the United States he was in charge of the Lockerbie investigation, during which he was either conned by the CIA or took part in the Agency’s conspiracy to blame Libya.22 But since the Mueller report has yet to be published and we don’t really know what is in it, this is a kind of beginning not an end.
The big bad bear In The Atlantic, former US diplomat William Burns reminisced about his time in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.23 He visited Chechnya and saw ‘. . . a glimpse of how far Russia had fallen since the Soviet Union’s collapse; here were the ill-fed and ill-trained remnants of the Red Army, once reputed to be capable of reaching the English Channel in 48 hours, now unable to suppress a local rebellion in an isolated republic.’ Pity he didn’t pursue the thought about the Red Army’s reputation. How good
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23 ‘How the U.S.-Russian Relationship Went Bad’ at
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was the Red Army? It depends upon who you believe. One interesting dissenter from the ‘fearsome Red Army’ narrative was the pseudonymous Victor Suvorov, a former GRU officer, who defected in the late 1970s.24 I wrote about Suvorov in Lobster 6: ‘His first [book], The Liberators (London 1981) was a sardonic inside account of life in the Red Army which he presents as a large, drunken, corrupt, brutal shambles, occasionally putting on charades for the visiting top brass from Moscow. Precisely because this was such a refreshing blast of fresh air on the subject, it seemed “real” to me – I believed it. (Mostly I believed it because it seemed consonant with my view of wider Soviet society – drunken, brutal, charade-mounting.) A year later Suvorov produced Inside The Soviet Army (1982) which tells the opposite story. Here, in great detail, is the super-efficient, super-dangerous Red Army beloved of the Pentagon’s estimators. So striking was the reversal that even mild-mannered “Kremlin watcher” Andrew Crankshaw was moved to ask in his review if “Suvorov has been persuaded by his new American friends that he must not make fun of such a solemn subject.”’(Observer 24 October 1984) The shambolic Russian Army which Burns met in 1994 is the Red Army that Suvorov had written about in 1981.
Bloody Sunday On 3 March, Boris Johnson used his Daily Telegraph column (and the renewed interest in the events of Bloody Sunday) for another of his pitches to be leader of the Conservative Party. ‘What kind of a world is it – you may ask – where we can put former squaddies in the dock, and simultaneously tell IRA killers that they can get away with it? [....] No – if these men are put on trial for murder, it will be an absolute outrage not because they are old, and may die in jail; not because Bloody Sunday took place 47 years ago; not because they were serving soldiers up against bomb throwers.’ 25
Does he really believe that the British Army was facing bomb throwers that day? And if the solitary British lance corporal, who is apparently going to be tried, simply says in court, ‘I was following orders’, and names the person who gave the order, what then? As Eamonn McCann pointed out, in response to the
24 Profile at
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announcement of the charge, the real scandal is that none of the officers involved have ever been prosecuted.26
Lockerbie On 21 March the front page of The Times had a story headlined ‘Former Stasi agents questioned over role in Lockerbie bombing’. It reported that ‘nine officials from the Scottish Crown Office are focusing on the role of the East German intelligence service’ in the event. The piece had three authors, one of them being Magnus Linklater, sometime editor of The Scotsman and much else besides.27 I shared a platform with Mr Linklater last autumn in Edinburgh. We were nominally discussing conspiracy theories and Linklater regaled us with his experiences on the so-called ‘Hitler diaries’ story while at the Sunday Times. He also told us that he believed the official version of Lockerbie, that the Libyans had indeed done the bombing. I asked the audience who among them believed this: no-one else did. By coincidence, on the same day as The Times piece I received a prompt to look at an 8 year-old piece on the Lockerbie plane bombing which is on Cryptome.28 The article, ‘Policing Lockerbie, A Bella Caledonia Special Investigation’, is no longer on the Bella Caldeonia site. Let us take this back a step. In 2005 The Scotsman ran an article, ‘Police chief – Lockerbie evidence was faked’.29 This began:
‘A FORMER Scottish police chief has given lawyers a signed statement claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was fabricated. The retired officer – of assistant chief constable rank or higher – has testified that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people.’30
The police officer was not named by The Scotsman. The Bella Caledonia article, however, did name him and it was a legal threat from his lawyer (also reproduced on Cryptome) which resulted in the article being taken off the Bella Caledonia site.
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27 See
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30 Oddly, The Scotsman has got the year of the Pan Am flight 103 bombing wrong. It was on 21 December in 1988, not 1989.
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That the Libyans did Lockerbie is believed by almost no-one.31 There was little evidence against the unfortunate Al Megrahi who was convicted of it, and what they had was either paid for by the Americans32 or fabricated and planted.33 Former CIA officer Robert Baer told the Daily Telegraph in 2014 that the CIA ‘believed to a man’ that Iran not Libya was behind the attack.34 A tiny fragment of circuit board purportedly found at the Lockerbie site was allegedly made by the Swiss firm MEBO run by Edwin Bollier. At the trial of Al Megrahi, Bollier was questioned and he acknowledged making electronic equipment for the Stasi and Libya.35 More than eighteen years after the original wrong verdict, the Scottish Crown office is now talking to former Stasi officers. This suggests that, so long as the Scottish legal system can say that they are still ‘pursuing leads’, it won’t have to face the fact that it made a dreadful mistake in going along with the Americans’ fabrication.
IRD and fake news The depositing of 2000 Information Research Department (IRD) files in the National Archives prompted a piece by the BBC’s Sanchia Berg – ‘“Fake news” sent out by government department’ – which is on the the BBC News website.36 Berg writes that ‘This is the first time that IRD’s own forgeries have been revealed’.
31 A 2009 piece by the solicitor Gareth Peirce shows why. See
32 The key witness was given $2 million by the U.S.. See
33 See, for example,
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35 Bollier and Mebo were discussed by Simon Matthews towards the end of his ‘The devil has all the best songs: reflections on the life and times of Simon Dee’ in Lobster 58. See
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I’m not sure if that is true or not. A number of forgeries produced for the British state during the war in Northern Ireland have come to light. Who produced them is unclear, as it might have been either IRD or MI5. Some of these were in the possession of Colin Wallace and some were sent to me anonymously circa 1988.37 Most of them seemed to have been aimed at foreign journalists who wouldn’t know enough to question their content; and those we have seen mostly either tried to portray the IRA as a Soviet front – that being the IRD ‘line’ at the time – or tried to show certain Labour MPs as pro-IRA. Below is an example of the latter. It’s a poor copy but the gist should be clear. This is a poster for a genuine event that was doctored with the addition of the names of Labour MPs Merlyn Rees, Stan Orme, David Owen, Tony Benn and Paul Rose.
37 A selection was reproduced in Paul Foot’s Who Framed Colin Wallace? (1989).
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Conspiracy theory-wise In his mailing on 5 February Tony Gosling38 included some material about a short-lived American tv show, The Lone Gunmen, a spin-off from The X-Files. Written by X-Files creator Chris Carter, this had an episode in which a plane was hijacked with the intention of crashing it into the World Trade Centre. The website which ran this commented: ‘Six months before the attacks of 9/11 2001, on primetime television the events of that fateful day were spelled out in excruciating detail. What does this all mean? Mere coincidence? That would be the greatest coincidence in the history of mankind. Is Chris Carter — the creator of X- Files and The Lone Gunmen — somehow clairvoyant? Highly unlikely but if you go back and watch the original show, you’ll find out this wasn’t the first time he apparently knew “what was up”.’ 39 Disappointingly, if you read the transcript of this section of the show or watch the extract,40 ‘excruciating detail’ it isn’t. Crashing a plane into the World Trade Centre is the only thing which corresponds with 9/11. I asked Google for fiction which predicted 9/11 and found John J. Nance’s novel Blackout, published in 2000, which ‘predicted the possibility of a commercial aircraft crashing into the World Trade Center in a terrorist attack’41 and Tom Clancy’s 1994 novel, Debt of Honour, which has terrorists crashing an airliner into Washington.42 There’s even a Youtube video showing all the shows/ cartoons etc which apparently predicted 9/11.43 It’s practically a meme!
* I wrote a column about conspiracy theories for the Fortean Times for ten years. Looking back at those columns I noticed this paragraph from one in 2010. ‘In the 1970s and 80s the cry was for “alternative media”. I began publishing an “alternative magazine” in 1983. The Net and YouTube mean that anyone, saying almost anything, can broadcast globally, with no initial editorial interference. So why does this type of evidence-free rumour-
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40 At
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mongering make me so nervous?’ Nine years later, a piece in the New York Times reported on the issue of conspiracy theories on YouTube, taking as an example one Shane Lee Yaw (who goes as Shane Dawson) who has 20 million subscribers and churns out conspiracy theory videos, one of which has had 35 million hits and rising.44 The author concluded: ‘It’s possible that YouTube can still beat back the flood of conspiracy theories coursing through its servers. But doing it will require acknowledging how deep these problems run and realizing that any successful effort may look less like a simple algorithm tweak, and more like deprogramming a generation.’ 45 (emphasis added) ‘Deprogramming’? Does the fact that 20 million people click on a conspiracy theory video mean that those viewers believe those theories? Or is is just that they find them entertaining? And how many of those who clicked stayed for more than five minutes? * Lyndon LaRouche Jr. died on 12 February. Many years ago a couple of the writers on his Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) used to ring me up and pick my brains. The conversations always went the same way: as soon as I said something which didn’t fit their world view, I would almost hear their minds shutting down and they would end the call soon after. At one time LaRoche propagated the craziest conspiracy theory I had come across: his claim that the British royal family controlled the world drug traffic. But then David Icke appeared and outcrazied him with his lizards story (hardly a ‘theory’ is it?) and LaRouche became an also-ran. There were occasional things of interest in EIR but I couldn’t take them seriously because of all the nonsense surrounding them.
Blog recycling In 2008, thinking that it might help sell copies of the book of mine she was publishing, the late Corinne Souza asked me to write a blog for her publishing company’s website. This disappeared with her death and the demise of the company and I forgot about it. I came across these blog entries recently while looking for something else on my computer. Some still resonate. This one, for example (in which I have tweaked a couple of the original sentences; new material is in square brackets [ ]):
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I was a premature green Writing I was ‘a premature something or other’ refers back to the Soviet Communist Party’s attempts before WW2 to control ‘the line’ of its affiliated parties. Thus, most famously, some people who opposed Hitler and Mussolini before the Soviet CP thought it apposite, were described as ‘premature anti-fascists’. So: I was a premature green. I was around in the late 1960s when the first green-eco wave took place. I cannot remember how it happened that I came across this material but [in 1970/1] I bought an expensive hard-backed copy of Paul [and Anne] Ehrlich’s Population, Resources, Environment and contemplated the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it. What did I do? Apart from spreading gloomy talk through my first year as an undergraduate and clipping British newspapers for the Sierra Club Bulletin, not very much. What could you do? I started a branch of Friends of the Earth, attended the first meeting and never went back: these were not people I wanted to do anything with; nor did campaigning about recycling bottles seem an appropriate response. And then oil was discovered in the North Sea and with that any possibility of another kind of less consumption-oriented society in this country went out the window for a generation [or several]. I was one of a tiny minority of people in this country whose response to a government announcement of future oil from the North Sea was ‘Oh no’. When the 1975 referendum on Britain staying in the then EEC took place I voted ‘Yes’ for staying in. Why? Well, as I told Andy Mullen when he was doing a survey on this subject for his book, The British Left’s ‘Great Debate’ on Europe, it seemed like a good idea to belong to a protein surplus area. (At the time, like almost everyone else in this country, I had no idea of the idiotic Euro-federalist ambitions of the elites running the then EEC.) Yes, the pessimists in the first green-eco wave got the timing wrong – at least as far as the rich Western world is concerned. The environment hasn’t collapsed at the speed they thought it would. But all those issues are back – and we now have about seven million more people on this island than we did in 1970 (and it is really only this island about which I think or care greatly.) For the British political system as it is presently constituted, the situation is impossible. Parties are constructed to compete to persuade the electorate that they, rather than their rivals, will make the electorate better off and more content. For the foreseeable future all the economic and environmental news about the world is going to be bad and getting worse. How can this work with the competitive electoral system we have
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today? A friend of mine, Colin Challen,46 a [now ex] Leeds MP and a serious-minded campaigner on global warming, recognised this in a recent letter to the Guardian in which he called for the creation of a national government to respond to climate change, citing Churchill’s cabinet in WW2 as an exemplar. It says much about the diminished status of MPs that this striking suggestion raised no response that I noticed. Yet he clearly has a point – if we are serious about carbon emission reduction. A party which proposes to reduce society’s carbon emissions is, willy-nilly, proposing to reduce the living standards of the voters and will lose any election to a party which proposes not to do so (or to do less). Added to which British society has had 30 years of propaganda telling us that the state is the central problem in society and the free market is the answer to all questions. We have a government of people who have abandoned their belief in the efficacy of the state as a regulator of the free market just in time to discover that they were right the first time: we need the state. And, as things degrade, we will need more and more of the state. Selling this to a population the majority of whom have now had a generation of easy credit and are accustomed to living now and paying later (to use the late Jack Trevor Storey’s phrase), many of whom think that at least two cars per family and two foreign holidays a year is their minimum due, is only one of the huge items on the agenda which the political system is currently entirely unwilling to deal with.
Dreamers I have been reading William Keegan’s thoughts on economic policy for at least 30 years and generally agree with him. He finished his column in the Observer on 10 February with this: ‘Now, to my mind there is little doubt that after a prolonged period of damaging austerity this country needs an Attlee-style government – and shadow chancellor John McDonnell is well aware of this. But, as [Charles] Enoch points out, every version of Brexit guarantees that the country will be made poorer and the tax base will suffer. In order to carry out its ambitious programme, Labour would need a growing economy. The last thing it needs is Brexit.’47 But to do anything resembling what the Attlee government did, it will need an Attlee-period British economy. Yes, in 1945 the UK was laden down with debts: the war had been financed by debt creation. But the UK had a large
46 He blogs at
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manufacturing base and big chunks of the world had either been cut off from British goods by the war (e.g. the Commonwealth), or were starting to repair the damage caused by the war and wanted British products. In 1948, British industry accounted for 41% of the British economy. By 2013, it was just 14% and falling.48 There is no chance of an Attlee-style economic policy based on that 14%, even if it was all British-owned. Economically this country is in much deeper doo-doo than Keegan or the Labour Party leadership seem willing to acknowledge and looking back to the Attlee government is little more than wishful thinking.
The lobby What we might call the received view of the Labour and anti-semitism story was expressed by Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer on 3 March: ‘The party has only been polluted with anti-Jewish racism since Mr Corbyn and his allies were given the keys to the Labour house and took responsibility for what kind of person is allowed to live there.’49 In the new, vastly expanded Labour Party there will be some anti-Semites among the (estimated) 500,000 members: in a group that size there is going to be almost every conceivable opinion and variety of dingbat. The on-going Labour Party enquiries into the issue may reveal some genuine anti-semites; but thus far little of the anti-semitism being complained of is actually coming from Labour Party members.50 Norman Finkelstein has examined the numbers: ‘1,106 referrals of antisemitism allegations; » 433 of these had nothing to do with party members, leaving 673 to be investigated; » 220 of these were dismissed entirely for lack of evidence; » this left 453 cases; » 453 is 0.08% of the party’s 540,000 members – that’s about 1/12th of 1%; » 96 of these resulted in suspensions – that’s 0.01%, or 1/100th of 1% of
48 The Office of National Statistics quoted in
49
50 The Times magazine on 2 March ran a long profile of Luciana Berger MP, former Labour Friends of Israel chair, who has now joined the Independent group of MPs – in effect, leaving the Labour Party. She described various forms of anti-semitic abuse she had received but the closest this got to the Labour Party was one message from ‘a former member of the Labour Party’.
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members; » there were twelve expulsions – that’s 0.002%, or 1/500th of 1% of members!’51
Among the constituencies in which there have been reports of anti-semitism is Liverpool Riverside, whose MP is Labour Friends of Israel member Louise Ellman. The text of an internal inquiry into Liverpool Riverside has been leaked and reprinted in the Jewish Chronicle.52 The report describes what happens (a) when you allow all members to attend constituency meetings, rather than the previous system of branches sending delegates; and (b) when you allow former members of the Militant Tendency to rejoin the party. As I recall from the 1980s, some of the Millies are aggressive and obnoxious, their tactic being to make meetings so unpleasant that their opponents stop attending.53 Anti- semitism per se barely figures in the inquiry’s report. There is another explanation of the current anti-semitism-in-Labour story. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt are American academics who have written in detail about the role of the Israel lobby in US politics.54 They were interviewed recently and Stephen Walt said this: ‘I want to add something. We’ve said all along that of course this conduct is perfectly legitimate. It’s interest group politics, the way many of these groups operate. There’s one exception to that, which is the tendency to smear anyone who questions Israel’s policy or questions unconditional American support for Israel. And to smear them primarily by accusing them of being anti-Semite.’55 Thus the other – and much more plausible – explanation of the Labour-is- institutionally-anti-semitic claim is that the British branch of the Israel lobby has manufactured it because Jeremy Corbyn, being pro-Palestinian, is
51
52 It can be found at the bottom of the text at
53 I found being verbally abused by the handful of Millies we had in North Hull CLP in those days amusing rather than threatening.
54 They began in March 2006, with an essay in the London Review of Books
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perceived as a threat to Israel.
Line change On the excellent
56
57 See, for example,
58 59 Garrick Alder in an email to me. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Which is true, as a quick search for ‘Deep state and the media’ would show. There is also the fact that WaPo is now owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, by some calculations the world’s wealthiest person, and the newspaper must be a very minor item on his agendum. Because Bezos’ interests do not depend upon the American empire, he has no economic reason to continue the policy of supporting the fictitious account of American politics in the 1960s which the national security state – and the political system – has been defending for the last half century. On the other hand, if the national security state still considers that account of the sixties worth defending, Mr Bezos should start watching his back. There will be a knife in it shortly.60 I emailed WaPo on 4 March about the apparent change in line and will report any response I get. (I’m not holding my breath. . .) Coulda seen Trump coming . . . My brother-in-law used to work in Paris and his flat was available some long weekends when he came back to London. On one trip I went to Shakespeare and Company, the famous bookshop opposite Notre Dame, which has been selling English-language books since James Joyce did some of his writing there. Just before the first wave of tourists had made it to Notre Dame from their hotels, in the boxes of second-hand books on the pavement outside the shop I found two books I wanted: William Domhoff’s The Higher Circles (1971) and David Brock’s Blinded by the Right (2002). These books sort of bookend recent US politics. Domhoff is an American sociologist who analysed the American ruling class (he called it the ‘Upper’ or ‘Governing Class’ and, after C. Wright Mills, the ‘Power Elite’). He also did some of the first academic work on what are now known as the elite policy planning groups: in foreign policy, for example, the Council on Foreign Relations. In so doing he moved into intellectual territory which had hitherto only been of interest to a conspiratorially-minded section of the American Right, centrally the John Birch Society. When Domhoff's earlier book on this subject, Who Rules America?, appeared in 1967 it had been seized upon by the conspiracist American Right as support for their theories about having ‘lost’ America to an elite East Coast conspiracy. In the final section on The Higher Circles Domhoff discusses the conspiracist Right’s use of his earlier material. In 1971 that conspiracist group was a tiny minority to the right of the 60 Nick Must commented on reading this: ‘I think the knives have been out for Mr Bezos already this month. The media stoked “scandal” about his new “sex-text girlfriend” seems completely manufactured, especially considering that he already announced in January that he was divorcing his wife.’ Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Republican Party, and of no political significance. (It had the support of only one Congressman, Larry McDonald.) Thirty years later we have Brock’s Blinded by the Right, his account of being part of what Hilary Clinton described as a ‘vast conspiracy’ by the Republican Party and its allies which was machinating against her husband’s administrations. As well as being an insider’s view of the ‘vast conspiracy’, Brock’s memoir portrays many of the major players on the Republican Right in and around Congress and the Senate in the 1990s as screwed-up, hypocritical, intellectual and moral pygmies. Brock’s account puts new life into the old view of the left that those on the right are either stupid, venal or psychologically damaged. I’d spent nearly thirty years trying to shake off that view of the right only to have it revalidated by Brock. These conspiracist elements, especially the Christian fundamentalists, became a major power in the Republican Party. In a sense, the lunatics have taken over the political asylum. That particular cliché is actually used in a 2011 piece by a Republican staffer, Mike Lofgren, who saw the Republican Party then as: ‘. . . less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.’ 61 The arrival of Trump and Pence should not have been a surprise. JFK 1 In the middle of January a letter was sent to the US Congress and the major media,62 calling for an official reexamination of the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK.63 It was signed by the major researchers and a smattering of celebrities.64 Most significantly, it was also signed by a couple of members of the Kennedy family – thus breaking the family’s tradition of never commenting on the assassinations. The signatories of the letter call themselves the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. In a statement accompany the text, its only British signatory, John 61 62 The only MM source to use this I have seen was the Daily Mail at 63 You can read the text at 64 Signatories are listed at Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Simkin, discussed the background to its creation.65 A couple of sources in the last decade have produced evidence – at any rate have asserted – that the assassination was the work of some anti-Castro Cubans and their American sponsors: the key names involved are Gerald Patrick Hemming, Gene Wheaton, Carl Jenkins and Raphael Quintero.66 Simkin commented: ‘I wrote about Jenkins and Quintero on my website. I was then contacted by an American journalist and historian, David Talbot, who was working on a book on John and Robert Kennedy. He was friends with the Kennedys and they told him that Robert Kennedy had employed several people to investigate the assassination. However, he eventually discovered the truth from Enrique Ruiz- Williams, a Bay of Pigs veteran. Kennedy then told the rest of the family but explained he could not reveal in to the public and would go along with the cover-up. The reason for this was the men used for the killing of JFK were the same men who had been trained by the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro as part of Operation Mongoose. Not only had JFK ordered the operation, RFK had been placed in charge of it. To expose the conspiracy would have revealed details of their role in the attempts to assassinate Castro. Robert feared that this would severely damage the Kennedy image and would make it impossible for him to become president. His solution to the problem was to become president and then manage the information in such a way as to do as little harm as possible to the Kennedy name . . . . The reason that David Talbot contacted me was that the story of the assassination that I had written on my website was very similar to the one told to him by the Kennedy family. Talbot’s book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years came out in 2007. However, Talbot was not allowed to quote the Kennedy family members and the book was ignored as just another speculative conspiracy book.’ This material is discussed in his typically thorough way by Larry Hancock (with David Boylan).67 They describe the central claims as ‘war stories’: X says he heard Y talking about the assassination. This is impossible to evaluate. We don’t know what Enrique Ruiz-Williams told Robert Kennedy, or why Kennedy believed it. Within the faction-ridden, anti-Castro Cuban community in 1968, would Enrique Ruiz-Williams have had access to reliable information on the assassination? By 1968 there must have 65 Simkin created the Education Forum on JFK: see 66 Simkin writes about this background at 67 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk been as many anti-Castro Cubans claiming to have been on Dealey Plaza as there are people who claim to have been present at the first gig by the Sex Pistols. How did Kennedy know that Ruiz-Williams – wittingly or unwittingly – wasn’t feeding him disinformation? The one sure way of stopping Robert Kennedy pursuing the events on Dealey Plaza was to suggest to him that the assassination of his brother was blow-back from the anti-Castro operations of which RFK was head. Nonetheless, the fact that Robert Kennedy was indeed formally head of the plot to assassinate Castro is significant. In their essay referred to above, Hancock and Boylan show that in 1963, as well as trying to kill Castro, the Kennedy administration wanted to move the anti-Castro effort out of the USA to somewhere offshore. They had also begun secret attempts to negotiate some détente with Castro. The attempt to move the anti-Castro Cubans abroad, along with the efforts at negotiation, showed that the administration was actually thinking of ditching the anti-Castro guerrilla efforts. Unsurprisingly, some of the anti-Castro Cubans were wise to this. No wonder so many have suspected the anti-Castro Cubans of doing the dirty deed. But we still have no evidence that they did it. Fingers crossed for the Truth and Reconciliation project; but I suspect it will be ignored until the Democrats control the Senate, House of Reps and the Presidency – and maybe not even then. And I have to confess that my initial reaction to receiving the communication from John Simkin was: why is the JFK research community still ignoring Chauncey Holt? He worked for the CIA and the Mob, was photographed on Dealey Plaza and has talked and written about his supporting role for the CIA in the assassination. Yet he is taken less seriously than ‘war stories’. Go figure! JFK 2 Victor Marchetti died last October.68 He was the first former CIA officer to write about the Agency in the 1970s while living in the USA. (Philip Agee was abroad when his CIA Diary appeared.) Marchetti’s book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, was redacted by the Agency in more than 300 places and the reporting of this brought ‘redacted’ into general use. I was reminded of Marchetti when he cropped up in a long essay69 about the telephone call Oswald tried to make while in custody at the Dallas police station. Oswald was an intelligence asset of some kind, certainly for the CIA, and possibly for other agencies. When arrested he did two things: he maintained his left cover-story, publicly asking for John Abt, the lawyer for the Communist Party USA, to come and help him; and he tried to make a phone 68 69 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk call to a number in North Carolina. What was the North Carolina call about? That’s obvious, said Marchetti: Oswald was calling his cut-out, who would contact his Agency handler for him. That was Agency S.O.P.. Beyond irony In 2018 the Washington Post wrote: ‘[Prime Minister] Orban’s demonization of [George] Soros, to the exclusion of virtually all other issues, reflects just how far Hungary has drifted from the European mainstream since his election in 2010. A fringe obsession in other parts of the West, Soros-bashing in this nation of 10 million has moved to the very center of political debate.’70 Then it turns out that the entire Soros-Jewish-conspiracy-theory campaign in Hungary had been designed by two American ‘political consultants’, George Birnbaum and Arthur Finkelstein, who are themselves Jewish.71 In response to that story it was pointed out that the anti-Soros stuff had begun on Fox News over a decade ago.72 Threat management Spending on weapons systems and related technology is a significant part of the US economy, 3.15% of GDP in 2017.73 (In 1960 it was 8.62% but of a much smaller cake.) Weapons spending can only be passed through Congress if there is a sufficient ‘threat’, so threat management is a central activity of the weapons sector. Post 1945 the threat had been the Soviet Union/Russia. In the 1970s, in the days of detente, the perception of the Soviet ‘threat’ coming from CIA analysts was accused by some of being too soft. CIA Director George H.W. Bush created ‘Team B’, a set of hawkish analysts to challenge the 70 71 72 See 73 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk relatively dovish forecasts. Team B’s version of reality duly triumphed74 – another victory for the military-industrial-congressional complex.75 After the events of the 2000s – the ‘colour revolutions’ in the former Soviet satellites and the near civil war in Ukraine – Russia was safely reestablished as the major ‘threat’. Then along came Donald Trump who apparently wanted to end the confrontation with Russia – and whose team had been talking to the Russians. Cue a frenzy of anti-Trump activity and confusion for some of the American left. For, like Trump, they want to end the confrontation with Russia. Unlike Trump, they want this in order to be able to spend some of that defence budget on other things – healthcare, housing, infrastructure etc. – and thus perhaps ought to be supportive of the man. But which of the claims about Trump are real and which merely ‘threat management’? Purely coincidental Of course, the post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) fallacy has to be borne in mind, nonetheless it is a very striking coincidence that the allegations of sexual assault made against former First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond have surfaced three months after Mr Salmond publicly cast doubt on the official verdict on the Lockerbie bombing.76 Is this a conspiracy theory I see before me? At the Cambridge Conspiracy and Democracy project, researchers are trying to quantify belief in conspiracy theories – apparently without much thinking about what a conspiracy theory actually is. On a recent blog on their site Dr. Hugo Leal wrote: ‘Researchers also looked at a number of other popular conspiracy theories. Both Trump and Brexit voters were more likely to believe that climate 74 How this happened is described in Anne Hessing Cahn, Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). I reviewed this in Lobster 45 where my last sentence was this: ‘In the final paragraph of this exemplary piece of research, Cahn notes that the Team B exercise was crucial to a movement which led to the spending of a trillion and a half dollars on defence, turning America into a debtor nation, “to counter the threat of a nation that was itself collapsing”.’ 75 This is what outgoing President Eisenhower was apparently going to call it before he was persuaded to drop ‘congressional’ from his ‘farewell America’ speech in 1960. 76 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk change is a hoax, vaccines are harmful, and that a group of people “secretly control events and rule the world together”’.77 The numbers who believe that climate change is a hoax, that there is a conspiracy of scientists to promote climate change theories which they know to be false, is declining, even in the Republican Party.78 That it exists at all is explicable: the US coal and oil companies employed people to propagate that it was a hoax, and their views were reported seriously by right-wing US media, such as Fox News. The vaccine story is completely different. Some people believe vaccines are potentially harmful. And in a small number of cases vaccines are harmful. No-one is arguing that they are completely benign. The argument has always been that the risk to a tiny number of individuals is justified by the wider positive effects of vaccination. So where are these vaccine conspiracy theories? I asked Google and top of their list was ‘A brief history of vaccine conspiracy theories’ 79 – in which there is an interesting account of the history of anti- vaccine thinking in the US, but a striking absence of conspiracy theories. In the case of vaccines the use of ‘conspiracy theory’ is inappropriate. What is being described is people who do not accept the consensus view, who are sceptics. Indeed, ‘A brief history of vaccine conspiracy theories’ is subheaded ‘Vaccine skepticism is as old as the idea of inoculation itself’. Although the term ‘conspiracy theory’ has been traced back to the 19th century,80 its contemporary usage probably stems from the notorious 1967 memo from the CIA to all its assets advising them how to combat the critics of the Warren Commission Report by labelling their claims as ‘conspiracy theories’.81 The Conspiracy and Democracy project people are in danger of following the line in that CIA memo: anything which challenges conventional views is a conspiracy theory. Why are conspiracy theories increasingly popular? Some of us were asking this question twenty plus years ago. The answer then seemed obvious: the 77 78 See 79 80 See 81 Full text at Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk immediate cause was the world-wide popularity of the tv programme The X- Files, whose content included many conspiracy theories. The underlying reasons I discussed in a talk I gave in 1997.82 ‘In my view the the proliferation of conspiracy theories [in America] . . . is the result three things: the failing US empire; recent developments in reprographic and communication technologies; and the actual events in US political history since the sixties. First the failing US empire. The American Dream is faltering. At best, real wage rates are no higher than they were twenty years ago for many of the working-class in America. For many they are lower. There are thousands of homeless people on the streets of all the big American cities. The gap between the top strata in the US and the bottom is wider than it has been since the war, and getting wider every year. In my view this is the predictable – and predicted – consequence of the infantile free market economic theories of the Reagan-Bush and Thatcher regimes; but whatever view is taken of the causes of this, things are not going according to plan for many white Americans, and they need to explain this to themselves. You can see the change reflected in the US accounts of encounters with extra-terrestrials. In the 1950s, when the US empire was booming, and the average white American consumer was experiencing increasing material prosperity, the extra-terrestrials reportedly contacting the America citizen, were overwhelmingly benign. Now that the US empire is falling apart and sections of the big American cities are turning into war zones, the skies over America at night are apparently – apparently – bustling with Alien Rapists, beaming down into peoples’ bedrooms to scoop them up and take them away for extended sessions of sexual abuse, forced copulation and experiments. In the 1950s white America had blue skies. Today they have dark skies.83 Surveys regularly report that only around 2% of adult Americans read books of any kind. As you discover when you visit the place, most American newspapers and magazines barely mention the outside world, and the primary source of information for most Americans is television. But most American television simply does not deal with real political and economic issues in enough depth for the average American citizen to understand something as complicated as the economic decline of a great power. The average American knows things are going wrong – but not why. Not only are the information and the concepts they need not readily 82 At the Edinburgh International Science Festival. This was reproduced in Robin Ramsay, Politics and Paranoia (Hove: Picnic Publishing, 2008). 83 Dark Skies was the name of a 1996/7 spin-off from The X-Files. See Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk available, they are handicapped in their ability to understand the world by the power of the American myth. America, after all, is the country of manifest destiny, bearing the shining torch of freedom and democracy, the land of the brave and the home of the free. Most importantly and most damaging, America is a country in which anyone can make it and become rich if they try hard enough. So deeply ingrained is this America myth, most Americans simply find it impossible to believe that there is something wrong with their economic and social system. But if the system is fine, and things are going wrong what is causing the problem? The answer is, of course, that things are going wrong because of the actions of . . . bad people. And not only must there be somebody to blame for their problems, they’re doing it behind everybody’s backs. This must be the case because most people can’t see them doing it! The essence of the standard conspiracy theory is this: somebody’s behind our troubles and behind the scenes. Most conspiracy theories provide a simple explanation: things are going wrong because of X. Of course the X changes. Different groups are scapegoated. Since the 19th century the Freemasons, Catholics, and the Jews have been blamed by significant sections of the American population; and there were great anti-communist witch-hunts after each World War. There are obvious similarities between today’s conspiracy theories portraying America threatened by extraterrestrial aliens, and the post WW1 and WW2 scares that aliens – immigrants from Europe, with socialist beliefs, after WW1; a secret network of communist agents after WW2 – were threatening America. It is also striking that the recent explosion of stories about alien abductions and UFO flaps in America have coincided with the collapse of the great Red Menace. Most conspiracy theories come from white people. There are some distinctively black conspiracy theories: enough for an American academic to write a book about them a couple of years ago. Currently a large section of African Americans appear to believe that the CIA was deliberately selling crack cocaine to them to finance the war against Nicaragua. But American conspiracy theories seem to be primarily a white phenomenon; and primarily a white male phenomenon (though there are some prominent women); and primarily a working-class or blue collar rather than middle- or upper-class male phenomenon. It may be simply that the middle-class is too educated to believe the crazier large-scale conspiracy theories, and the upper-class too close to real power to believe them. The second factor in the rapid spread of conspiracy theories is technology. When I first became aware of US conspiracy theories in the 1970s, the type-generating Apple Mac and the FAX had not been invented, Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk photocopiers were expensive machines which still used rolls of coated paper, and newspapers and magazines were still set in metal type. In those days the amateur publication looked like an amateur publication. It was simply too expensive to make it to look professional. These days about £500, maybe less, will buy second-hand computer kit with which it is possible to make your copy look like The Times, if you want to. And there are fax machines, cheap telephones and, most of all the Internet. Today, for a relatively small outlay, almost anybody can put their theories up on the Internet and wait for people to browse through them, pick them up and pass them on.84 Any old nonsense gets posted on the Net. To some extent the spread of conspiracy theories has been brought about by communication technology. Even I’ve got a Website. The third, and I think most important factor is a shift that has taken place in our perception of the real world; behind conspiracy theories are real events. In 1963 conspiracy theorists as we now think of them were a tiny minority in both Britain and America whose views were rarely if ever reported in the mass media of the day. In 1964 an American journalist came to Britain and surveyed what he called in the title of the subsequent book, The British Political Fringe. On the far right he found the neo-nazis, Oswald Mosley, and the League of Empire Loyalists, a little group semi-detached from the right of the Tory Party. All of these groups believed in variants of the Jewish conspiracy theory; that is that the Jews controlled the world’s financial system. But their combined membership was only a few thousand. In America at the same time there was the US Nazi Party, some racists groups in the southern states such as the States Rights Party, and the John Birch Society. The latter was most famous – or notorious – for the claim by its founder that President Eisenhower was a conscious agent of the communist conspiracy Of these US groups the Birchers, as they were known, were the most significant with two congressmen who were associated with them. The shift began in the 1960s. And no wonder. American history since the 60s has been a long succession of assassinations and conspiracies. The three most important left of centre politicians, the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, were assassinated – none of them by the assassin identified by the authorities. Some of the leadership of the Black Panthers was murdered – and it was revealed a decade later, largely as a result of a conspiracy by the FBI. Then came Watergate and the various revelations trailing in its wake of widespread surveillance and covert operations by the FBI and the CIA. And there was the war in Vietnam. After 1980 began the various intelligence, military, and financial 84 This, obviously, was written before the development of social media and its instant data distribution facility. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk scandals – conspiracies – of the Reagan-Bush era, of which the secret financing of the war against the Nicaraguan government by illegally selling arms to Iran was just the most prominent. In other words, from the assassinations of the 1960’s through to Iran-Contra and the other Reagan- Bush horrors in the 1980s, events have revealed major governmental conspiracies which have made it impossible for the powers-that-be to maintain the line that such things just don’t happen. Fifty years of secrecy, lies, media manipulation and covert operations are coming back to bite the legs of the elite managers of American society and politics. A large number of US citizens no longer believe government statements about anything; and a significant minority believe the federal government capable of any calumny, up to and including planning to brainwash its citizenry, detonating the bomb in Oklahoma to give itself a pretext for pushing draconian anti-terrorism laws through Congress, and even organising a secret conspiracy with extraterrestrial beings begun in the late 1940s.’ Mind control The Black Vault website has recently added at least 1500 pages of declassified documents from the CIA’s MK Ultra program.85 The Daily Mail spotted a document in that collection which described inserting electrodes into dogs’ skulls to manipulate their behaviour.86 It is but a relatively small step from there to trying it out on humans – as was done to Robert Naeslund in Sweden a few years later. Odds must be good that this was MK Ultra outsourced to one of the CIA’s allies. Not even close. No cigar. Reviewing Rory Cormac’s book in the previous issue87 reminded me that I had an earlier book of his (co-authored with Richard Aldrich) that I hadn’t read: The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers.88 This is noteworthy because its academic authors take on the parapolitics of the Wilson and Thatcher years. Of course I turned immediately to their account of 1974-76, the so-called ‘Wilson plots’ episode. While they do a decent job, 85 86 87 88 London: Collins, 2016 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk sketching in the ‘private armies’ events, rumours of coups and machinations by the likes of Brian Crozier, they fail the Colin Wallace test.89 There is no reference to Information Policy, IRD in Northern Ireland, or Paul Foot’s book Who Framed Colin Wallace? They do, however, quote former Northern Ireland Minister, Merlyn Rees, speaking in 1993, on the existence of a ‘dirty tricks campaign in Northern Ireland . . . included a list of politicians of all parties’. I wondered what had been removed from the quote and looked it up. The full quote is below; the deleted words have been italicised: ‘With regard to Northern Ireland, I discovered that the “dirty tricks” campaign in Northern Ireland – I possess the papers now though I did not have them at the time – included a list of politicians in all parties. They are listed under the headings of sex, politics and finance. It is the most illiterate rubbish that I have ever read, even worse than that found in some of our national newspapers. It was quite extraordinary. A psych-ops operation was run against politicians in the south and politicians in Northern Ireland. It is no way to win the battle of Northern Ireland, let alone to get involved in politics here.’ 90 Rees was speaking in the House of Lords in 1993, three years after the government had admitted that Wallace did have a psy-ops role in Northern Ireland. And these ‘papers’ Rees possessed are obviously Colin Wallace’s handwritten notes for Clockwork Orange 2.91 The authors immediately follow the Rees quote with this: ‘Like that of Peter Wright, the evidence from Wallace has been partly discredited. He was forced out of the Ministry of Defence in 1975, and later imprisoned for the manslaughter of a colleague’s husband. Although the conviction was quashed, leading to rumours that Wallace was framed, his reputation never recovered’ (p. 324). (emphasis added) No examples of his evidence being ‘discredited’ are offered and I have no idea to what they are referring. In his 1989 Who Framed Colin Wallace?, the late Paul Foot showed that Wallace had been framed, seven years before his conviction was quashed, not after it. As for his reputation, as soon as the Thatcher government admitted in 1990 that Wallace had been telling the truth about his psy-ops role – hitherto 89 For anyone new to this material, a sense of its complexity can be got from reading just one of the many House of Commons statements on this subject by the late Tam Dalyell MP. Try 90 91 Those hand-written notes and copies of some of the anti-Labour forgeries from this period are reproduced at the end of Paul Foot’s Who Framed Colin Wallace? (London: Macmillan, 1989). Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk officially denied – the sections of the major media which were aware of the Wallace story simply assumed that he had been telling the truth about everything – as did Merlyn Rees, by the sounds of it. For example, the BBC began using part of a film that BBC2’s Newsnight had made about Wallace in 1986, while he was still in prison. This had been pulled just before broadcast by the then Deputy Director of the BBC, Alan Protheroe.92 Prior to 1990 the BBC were denying the film even existed. Nothing of what Wallace has been talking and writing about for almost 40 years has been rebutted and he – and Fred Holroyd – have become go-to sources for the media on Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Having marginalised and misrepresented Wallace’s evidence of an MI5 conspiracy against Wilson, on p. 327 the authors conclude ‘there is certainly no evidence confirming that an organised MI5 conspiracy against Wilson existed.’ (emphasis added) What role does the word ‘organised’ have in that sentence? As opposed to a disorganised, unorganised conspiracy? Perhaps they mean official but, for some reason, don’t want to use the word. The authors refer to the Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtiour book, The Pencourt File, which began with interviews given to them by Harold Wilson just after he resigned as prime minister in 1976. But the authors have missed – or have omitted – the fact that in 2006, during a BBC documentary on ‘the Wilson plots’, Barrie Penrose said that in 1976 Harold Wilson had steered him and Roger Courtiour towards Colin Wallace but they had not contacted him.93 This gives rise to an interesting ‘what if?’ What if Penrose and Courtiour had contacted Wallace in 1976/7 and been told then the things that didn’t begin to emerge until a decade later? It is just possible that we might have avoided Mrs Thatcher. . . . So who told Harold Wilson about Colin Wallace? Probably SIS chief, Maurice Oldfield, whom Wilson was seeing occasionally in this period. Here comes 5G Despite a fair bit of evidence showing that the microwave radiation associated 92 Protheroe was also an information officer with the Territorial Army, specialising in media- military relations, and presumably had a good idea of what Wallace and Information Policy had been doing in Northern Ireland. 93 The documentary concerned was discussed at Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk with mobile phones does produce cancers,94 there was no significant campaign against the introduction of 4G (fourth generation) – just a few Jeremiahs on the sidelines. Now 5G approaches – bigger, and better and faster and more powerful. But it will require bigger and more numerous transmitters, producing more powerful radiation. This time the alarm bells have begun to ring rather early.95 Of course, nothing will stop it. The lobbying power of the big electronics companies will overwhelm whatever medical protests there are. A nice man? Considering his roles in the American military-intelligence system, the outpouring of affection and nostalgia for George H W Bush at the time of his death and funeral was nauseating. Succinct summaries of the Bush horrors can be found at Truthout96 and Consortiumnews.97 So routine is Uncle Sam’s global violence, it can be difficult to hang on to the sense of outrage that it should produce. Every once in a while I stumble across a report which brings me up short again. This is the most recent to do so. ‘Throughout the Second Indochina War (1964-1973) more than 580,000 bombing missions (or a bombing mission every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day, for 9 years) and wide ranging ground battles, led to over 2 million tons of ordnance being dropped on Laos. Over 270 million cluster munitions were used, of which there are an estimated 80 million malfunctioned [sic] and remained live and buried in the Lao landscape after the war’s end.’ 98 80 million unexploded cluster bombs . . . . This is the system to which George H W Bush devoted much of his adult life. Never mind ‘What a decent guy he was (in comparison to Trump)’ which we got from the mainstream media in the Anglosphere. Like all the other senior administrators of the American military-intelligence system, Bush was a mass murderer. 94 See, for example, 95 See 96 97 98 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Annie Machon Regular readers of these pages will have noticed that my focus these days is rarely on the British intelligence and security complex. To try and keep minimally informed of what is going on in those fields, among the sites I look at is that of former MI5 officer Annie Machon.99 She spoke at Hull University a couple of years ago after a showing of the film about the NSA whistle-blower, William Binney, A Good American.100 She was rather impressive: intelligent, confident and articulate. In the predictably stodgy Q and A which followed – the predominantly student audience had almost nothing to say or ask – I lobbed her a question about the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee which allowed her to run a number of well-rehearsed points of her thesis about the spooks and democracy. Machon is still fighting the good fight. Militarising the weather In ‘Weather weapons: the dark world of environmental warfare’ in Lobster 62,101 T. J. Coles described in great detail US military attempts to ‘own the weather’. Now it has been reported that China and Russia are going down the same path in joint operations.102 Given their ostensible military and political rivalry, these joint operations by China and Russia are striking. 99 100 Now on Youtube at 101 102 ‘China And Russia Have Run Controversial Experiments That Modified Earth's Atmosphere’ at Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Roswell, the CIA and Dr Edgar Mitchell Garrick Alder In response to an inquiry made by one of the twelve NASA astronauts to have walked on the Moon, the CIA prevented a future CIA Deputy Director from revealing the truth about the so-called ‘Roswell Incident’. The truth about the supposed crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft was withheld for another 19 years and, as a result, Apollo 14 pilot Dr Edgar Mitchell spent the rest of his life insisting that the US Government was mounting a sustained cover-up about its secret contact with aliens. He was encouraged in that belief by US Government officials who fed him further disinformation. In 1976, US Admiral Bobby Ray Inman approached the CIA on behalf of Dr Mitchell. Today Admiral Inman says that he was told ‘my authority was not sufficient to release the information’. Admiral Inman’s disclosures raise questions about apparent CIA involvement in the ‘Roswell Incident’ – an involvement that has never been made public. The information that Inman wanted to disclose to Dr. Mitchell was the accidental crash of a balloon launched in 1947 as part of ‘Project Mogul’, an exercise to learn more about nuclear weapons tests being conducted in the Soviet Union. The secret monitoring worked by measuring long-distance sound waves originating from nuclear explosions and propagated across the upper atmosphere.1 In the 1970s, the ‘official story’ of Roswell was still that an ordinary weather balloon had crash-landed in 1947. Crucially, the CIA did not instruct Admiral Inman to stick to this well-established cover-story, instead refusing to allow him to say anything at all. This deliberate omission allowed astronaut Edgar Mitchell to believe that an extraterrestrial spacecraft really had crashed near the New Mexico township. In 2008, Dr Mitchell revealed to viewers of CNN’s ‘Larry King Live’ programme that his growing belief in a UFO cover-up at Roswell had driven him to seek an audience at the Pentagon: ‘Well, I eventually went to the Pentagon and asked for a meeting with 1 Or would have worked, had the Soviet Union been conducting nuclear tests prior to August 1949. But by then, the Mogul project had already ended. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff which I got with another naval officer who had had many similar experience and we told our story and this gentleman, a vice admiral, said to us, well, I don’t know about that but I'm going to find out. And called a few weeks later and said he had found the source of the black budget funding for this project and that he was going to subsequently investigate because if it was real he should know about it, as a matter of fact, he should be in charge, those were his words. And so we did get calls from some time later and a report much later than that that he had found the people responsible for the cover- up and for the people who were in the know and were told, I’m sorry, admiral, you do not have need to know here and so, goodbye.’2 The Vice-Admiral referred to by Dr Mitchell was identified as Inman by inquiries made during the research for the current work, which also established that the meeting at the Pentagon took place in 1976. Inman was promoted to Admiral in 1977, and served as Director of the National Security Agency under President Jimmy Carter. He was appointed CIA Deputy Director by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Now 87 years old and leading a very active retirement, Admiral Inman explained 3 what had happened after the 1976 meeting with Dr Mitchell. He said: ‘I got into some difficulties with the CIA, who said that I was unofficially releasing information without their authorisation. . . I have a history of difficulties with these people. It’s not the only time when the CIA has chastised me over the course of my career. For example, after 9/11 I did an op-ed for the New York Times about the need to improve intelligence gathering, and was told I should have put it to the CIA for approval before publishing.’ 4 Admiral Inman explained the 1947 Mogul project that led to the infamous ‘Roswell Incident’: ‘There was enormous interest in what the USSR was producing with 2 Larry King et al. ‘Roswell Truth Debated’: CNN transcript of ‘Larry King Live’, broadcast 4 July 2008. 3 Telephone interview with author, conducted 17 December 2018. Admiral Inman prefaced the conversation with the comment: ‘When we’ve finished this call, you will perhaps understand why I decided I would rather talk by phone than by writing.’ 4 Bobby Ray Inman, ‘Spying for a Long, Hot War, New York Times at Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk their atomic bomb tests. This was before [the] U2 [spyplane] and someone came up with the idea of a high altitude balloon because you can still tell a great deal about nuclear explosions from what’s carried in on the wind. They wanted to test the balloon idea and they did, and it crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. And they scooped it up straight away and took it to Site 515 which was the CIA’s base 6 and the most convenient place to hide it.7 Once the U2 was up and running in the 1950s we were already more successful in finding out what the Russian tests were like. The point of the cover-up was to prevent the USSR from knowing that we were monitoring their nuclear tests.’ Admiral Inman could not be drawn on specifics of the 1976 meeting with Dr Mitchell, but made it very clear that the Roswell information he sought to release belonged to the CIA rather than the US Air Force: ‘I do recall talking about releasing information [after meeting Dr Mitchell] and the CIA were very cross with me. I was told that I had no authority to unilaterally release details of the balloon project.’ Admiral Inman said that Dr Mitchell had misunderstood or misremembered the outcome of that meeting and that, rather than Inman having ‘no need to know’, what he had actually told Dr Mitchell was: ‘My authority was not 5 Sic. There is no record of the facility popularly known as ‘Area 51’ ever having been referred to as ‘Site 51’. Admiral Inman appears to be disclosing the existence of a base that existed in that geographical proximity prior to 1955, when Area 51 was established. The only known candidate for a structure called ‘Site 51’ in 1947 would have been the deserted Indian Springs Auxiliary Air Field. Today thoroughly modernised and known as Creech AFB, Indian Springs had been abandoned in March 1946 and was not re-opened until January 1948. If the CIA occupied this obscure and isolated airfield during that interval, the purpose of their doing so is not known 6 Sic. While the CIA was not put on a statutory footing until the US National Security Act of 1947 was passed (a few weeks after the ‘Roswell Incident’), it existed in pre-statutory form as the Central Intelligence Group (CIG). CIG had been created by President Truman shortly after his 1945 abolition of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The 1947 Act also created the US Air Force and it would be bizarre to suggest that the USA had fought in the Second World War without aerial capabilities. On the very first day of its existence (24 January 1946) the CIG was referred to in writing as ‘the Central Intelligence Agency’, by Fleet Admiral Wiliam D Leahy, who was Truman's chief military advisor. Admiral Inman’s reference to a pre-statutory CIA seems to be an acknowledgement of that continuity. See Warner, Michael, ‘The Creation of the Central Intelligence Group’ in Studies in Intelligence (internal publication of the US Central Intelligence Agency) at 7 The Mogul balloons had been launched from Alamogordo. Admiral Inman is referring to the proximity of the crash site. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk sufficient to release the information.’ Until now, the CIA has never been implicated in the events that took place at Roswell in 1947. Officially, the tightly-compartmentalised Mogul project was carried out by a research team at New York University, a situation that recalls other instances of academics being co-opted by the CIA. University researchers later stated that they recognised in 1947 that they had ‘no need to know’ the purpose of the balloon trials. But two of the key New York University researchers involved in the experiment are now known to have had ties to the CIA. Professor Charles B Moore had active CIA security clearance at the time.8 Balloon Project leader and New York University research director Professor Athelstan Spilhaus went on to work as a CIA analyst during the 1960s.9 Finally, and conclusively, Admiral Inman’s 1976 approach to the CIA about releasing Roswell information demonstrates that he had established some degree of CIA ‘ownership’ relating to Project Mogul. Why this ‘ownership’ has remained secret for more than 70 years (not even revealed in the USAF’s ‘Roswell Report’ of 1995),10 is unknown. From the point of view of the people behind the UFO disinformation, Dr Mitchell would have been an ideal unwitting spokesman. He was brought up in the vicinity of Roswell, New Mexico, during the 1930s. In July 1945, he witnessed an enormous and brilliant flash of light in the middle of the night, and eventually learned that he was one of the few civilians to have witnessed the top-secret Trinity Test at nearby Alamogordo. Aged 16, Edgar Mitchell was one of the thousands of people who read the Roswell Daily Record’s 8 July 1947 report that a flying saucer had crashed nearby. From an early age, he was receptive to claims about government cover-ups and about extraterrestrials. There is a certain twisted poetry in the way that the 1947 ‘Roswell Incident’ was used against the lunar pioneer, decades later. Dr Edgar Mitchell died in February 2016, but was convinced until his dying day that an alien spacecraft had crashed at Roswell. When Wikileaks published the private emails of Democratic Party staffer John Podesta in November 2016, it transpired that Dr Mitchell had been emailing Mr Podesta with some extraordinary ideas. These included claims that extraterrestrials 8 The Roswell Report: Fact Versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert (United States Govt Printing Office, 1995) An interview with Moore is attachment 23 of part 2 of the report at 9 Obituary of Professor Athelstan F Spilhaus at Legacy.com (from the Washington Post) at 10 See note 8. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk from a parallel universe were trying to reveal an unimaginably powerful energy source to the human race and would intervene to prevent the US from putting weapons satellites in orbit: ‘Remember, our nonviolent ETI from the contiguous universe are helping us bring zero point energy to Earth. They will not tolerate any forms of military violence on Earth or in space.’11 Prior to those emails, Dr Mitchell had spoken more than once about his total certainty that the American Government was maintaining a huge cover-up about its contact with extraterrestrials. In his 1996 book The Way of the Explorer, Dr Mitchell wrote: ‘I’ve had no personal encounters with UFOs, though I wish I had, so that I could speak from firsthand experience. I have, however, met with credible professionals within two governments who have testified to their own firsthand experiences with “close encounters” during their official duties. A wealth of classified information on the subject resides in military and intelligence files, which, in my opinion, should be released to the public’.12 During a 1996 interview with NBC journalist Dennis Murphy, broadcast to accompany the publication of The Way of the Explorer, Dr Mitchell explained that oblique description a little further (although he refused to let his exact words be broadcast): ‘Mitchell wouldn’t name names. but he says some of his information comes from former highly classified US government employees, people who say our government picked up sonic engineering secrets from UFOs. The Department of Defense declined to comment on Mitchell’s allegations, but gave us the US Air Forces standard handout on unidentified flying objects, stating: “there has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as ‘unidentified’ are extraterrestrial.” ’13 On other occasions he made even more startling claims. In an interview in 11 Email from Dr Edgar Mitchell to John Podesta, dated 18 August 2015. Subject ‘re Space Treaty’. At 12 Dr Edgar Mitchell, The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut's Journey Through the Material and Mystical Worlds (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996) p. 212. This can be read at 13 Maria Shriver (interviewer) et al. Edgar Mitchell interview, NBC ‘Dateline’, broadcast 19 April 1996. Transcript at Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk 2015 he said: ‘I have spoken to many Air Force officers who worked at these [missile] silos during the Cold War. . . They told me UFOs were frequently seen overhead and often disabled their missiles. Other officers from bases on the Pacific coast told me their [test] missiles were frequently shot down by alien spacecraft.’14 The CIA’s 1976 refusal to allow Admiral Inman to tell Dr Mitchell the truth about the Roswell Incident was, then, just part of a larger operation. The Apollo 14 pilot was effectively turned into an unwitting amplifier for the dissemination of the CIA’s ‘UFO Legend’, giving it a major boost due to Dr Mitchell’s public prominence and historic stature. Dr Mitchell has gone down in UFO lore as a whistleblower, but the truth is that he was duped into repeating lies and nonsense. In 1976, the CIA helped turn an American hero into an international laughing-stock, and did so with the justification that they were protecting national security. The CIA has been approached for comment on this story. All Rights reserved by the author. 14 Jasper Hamill, ‘ “Peace-loving aliens tried to save America from nuclear war,” claims moon 14 mission astronaut Edgar Mitchell’, The Mirror (UK newspaper) at Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Has a DNA test solved the Rudolf Hess doppelgänger mystery? Andrew Rosthorn It is forty years since the publication of The Murder of Rudolf Hess by the former British Army surgeon Hugh Thomas. The introduction to that book was written by Dame Rebecca West, a daring feminist and ally of Orwell in the 1930s anti-communist awkward squad who had a son and a ten-year affair with H.G. Wells. In her introduction, West suggested it was ‘. . . the duty of those who have consciences to take over the task where Mr Thomas leaves it and ascertain by the simple tests this book suggests whether the demented survivor in Spandau is or is not Hess.’ On 11 January 2019, in a 22-page scientific report for the May 2019 edition of the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics, thirteen authors delivered a scientific answer to the question posed by Dame Rebecca. Rebecca West reported the 1946 Nuremberg trials for The Daily Telegraph and The New Yorker, describing the International Military Tribunal trial of the surviving Nazi big shots as ‘a historic peep-show’. Her fastidious editor at The New Yorker, William Shawn, said: ‘No one in this century wrote more dazzling prose, or had more wit, or looked at the intricacies of character and the ways of the world more intelligently.’ For months in a ‘citadel of boredom’ she examined the face of the strange amnesiac produced by the British government as Adolf Hitler’s deputy and delivered for post-war trial in Germany after crash-landing a German fighter- bomber in Scotland on 10 May 1941. She watched the four allied judges convict Hitler’s Stellvertreter of conspiracy to commit war crimes and crimes against peace and saw them send him to West Berlin, to serve a life sentence as Prisoner No. 7 in Spandau Prison. In 1979 Major Hugh Thomas (a British Army bullet wound surgeon fresh from the Musgrave Park army hospital in Northern Ireland) reported that he could not find the scars of Rudolf Hess’s well-known First World War bullet wound on the chest of Prisoner No. 7,1 1 See Robin Ramsay, ‘Hess, “Hess” and the “peace Party”’, a review of Hugh Thomas, A Tale of Two Murders, in Lobster 17, November 1988. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Dame Rebecca declared adamantly: ‘There is no guarantee a historian can accept that the fugitive was Hess; and there is therefore no guarantee a historian can accept that the British Government was right in handing over the fugitive as Hess after the war to the International Court at Nuremberg.’ And: ‘It is the duty of those who have consciences to take over the task where Mr Thomas leaves it and ascertain by the simple tests this book suggests whether the demented survivor in Spandau is or is not Hess. It should be enquired also whether governments themselves have, with intent or through negligence, become parties to a foolish and wicked conspiracy.’ 2 Five years after the book’s publication, came the accidental discovery by the geneticist Dr Alec Jeffreys at the University of Leicester in 1984 that repetitive patterns of DNA are not only present in all human beings but vary in length for each individual. By 1986 British DNA profiling had exonerated an innocent 17- year old man who had confessed to a murder and in January 1988 the British jailed the real murderer, making Colin Pitchfork the world’s first killer trapped by DNA profiling. The implementation of DNA profiling in Britain coincided with the sudden death of Prisoner No. 7 in 1987, the last of the allied war crimes prisoners held in Spandau. The prison lay in the British sector of Berlin and the medical care of the Nuremberg tribunal prisoners had always been the responsibility of doctors at the British military hospital. It was this responsibility that led Major Hugh Thomas, army surgeon for the British sector, to a eureka moment in 1973: ‘With the light in the X-ray room on again, the patient sat up on the edge of the bed, still happy and relaxed. Then someone called out that the films were all right, and that No. 7 could get dressed. At once he slipped off his shift – still sitting on the edge of the table – and began to pull on the warmer dressing gown. As he did so, I again had a clear view of his chest. I stepped forward and pointed at it, saying in a friendly, straightforward voice. “Was ist passiert mit den Kriegunfälle. Nicht hauttief?” [“What happened to your war-wounds? Not even skin-deep?”] The question had a startling effect. The patient’s manner changed instantly. From being in a sunny, cheerful mood he turned chalk-white and began to shake. For an instant he stared at me in what appeared bewilderment or even utter disbelief. Then he looked down and avoided my eyes. After what felt like ages he muttered, “Zu spät, zu spät” [“Too 2 Hugh Thomas, The Murder of Rudolf Hess, (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1979), p. 9 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk late, too late.”]’ 3 The medical care of Prisoner No. 7 remained the special concern of British military doctors in Berlin until the aged prisoner was found dead in a summer house in the prison garden on the afternoon of 17 August 1987. Both Hugh Thomas and the son of Rudolf Hess, Wolf Rüdiger Hess, soon concluded that the prisoner in Spandau had been murdered. They were alerted by suspicious results from a post-mortem examination by Professor Wolfgang Spann at the Forensic Medical Institute in Munich. For Hugh Thomas and Wolf Rüdiger Hess, with their suspicions of murder, the death came conveniently just as President Gorbachev’s Perestroika government was about to lift a Soviet ban on Prisoner No.7’s humanitarian release Four days after the reported suicide of the last war crimes prisoner of Spandau, Professor Wolfgang Spann carried out a second autopsy on the body of Prisoner No. 7 at the Forensic Medicine Institute of Munich University. Professor Spann reported that ‘an almost horizontal course of the strangulation mark could be identified, this finding, as well as the fact that the mark on the throat obviously was not located above the larynx, is more indicative of a case of throttling than of hanging. Under no circumstances can the findings be readily explained by a so-called typical hanging.’ 3 The Murder of Rudolf Hess (see note 2) p. 24 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Following the publication of Thomas’s second book (Hess: a Tale of Two Murders 4) in 1988, the British government, under dogged pressure from the MPs Dale Campbell-Savours and Rhodri Morgan, struggled to handle worldwide doubt about the true identity of the prisoner. Doubts had been voiced as early as 1945 by the US spymaster Allen Dulles, who suspected that one of the three British spy services had bamboozled the world at Nuremberg by handing over a doppelgänger for trial as a war criminal. A US Army doctor, Captain Ben Hurewitz, conducted a minute examination of the prisoner at Nuremberg, noting two very small scars incurred during captivity in Britain but no scars whatsoever from a rifle shot through the lung in Romania in 1917. By 1989 Thomas knew that the British authorities, the world pioneers in DNA profiling, had acquired everything needed for settling the doppelgänger question by using reliable DNA tissue samples in a British laboratory. He knew that the British army’s honorary forensic pathologist, Professor J. M. Cameron of London University, had sent all the samples from his autopsy on the ‘suicided’ Spandau prisoner to London. Rhodri Morgan MP, a former British civil servant and future first minister of Wales, joined Hugh Thomas in persuading Wolf Rüdiger Hess to give evidence to a Scotland Yard murder investigation conducted by Detective Superintendent Howard Jones and to give a DNA sample of his own blood to the Yard’s forensic pathologist, Professor David Bowen. Professor Bowen also compared the Munich autopsy with the ‘suicide conclusion’ reached by four doctors and four prison governors assembled by the Four Allied Powers in Berlin. Bowen agreed with Spann that bruising in the deeper neck tissues and bruising of the top of the head were features not of hanging but of strangulation by throttling and Bowen stated: ‘Doubts must remain on the reliability of the official statement given concerning the death of Rudolf Hess.’ 5 The forensic pathologist Dr Iain West, who had conducted notable post- mortems on Robert Maxwell, Jill Dando and PC Yvonne Fletcher, later warned Hugh Thomas that the British government were unlikely to release the results of any DNA comparison between the tissue from Berlin and the blood sample given by Wolf Rüdiger to Professor Bowen. In January 1989, the British deputy foreign minister Lynda Chalker MP assured the Conservative MP Cyril Townsend: ‘Those who attach any credulity to Mr Thomas’s claims might ask 4 Hugh Thomas, Hess: A Tale of Two Murders (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988) 5 Obituary of Bowen, Daily Telegraph 12 April 2011 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk themselves why an impostor should unnecessarily condemn himself to more than forty years in Spandau Prison. The matter has rightly not caught the public attention in any serious way. Our handling of it has been designed to discourage further fruitless argument.’6 Mrs Chalker spoke too soon. On 28 February 1989, BBC Newsnight screened a 30-minute TV report in which both Professor Spann and the prison nurse Abdallah Melaouhi told the reporter Olenka Frenkiel that they suspected the prisoner had been murdered. Thomas also noted that Spann did not see scars on the prisoner’s chest consistent with the rifle bullet through the lung that had nearly killed the young soldier Hess in a battle in Romania in 1917. Three days later, Chancellor Helmut Kohl complained to 80 journalists that ‘The British have still not released the documents on Rudolf Hess.’ For the British government, sitting on Hess files that were by law closed until 2017, the problem simply would not go away. CBS 60 Minutes confronted the former American Spandau governor Colonel Eugene Bird with the Thomas theory in 1990 and revealed that early in 1987 President Gorbachev had decided to lift the 41-year Russian veto on releasing the last war crimes prisoner in Spandau. Karel Hille of the Dutch Tros channel produced a TV investigation titled De moord op de dubbelganger van Spandau, prompting the retired head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, to arrange for Hille to be given a Foreign Office personal file on Rudolf Hess for safekeeping abroad. Sir Maurice, a historian by training, had worked with Hugh Thomas in Ireland and admitted not only his personal fascination with the case but also that MI6 wartime involvement in the case had never been revealed to their post-war successors. A shelved BBC Scotland TV investigation, later absorbed into a BBC Timewatch production, uncovered a 1917 Bavarian military doctor’s certificate for Lt. Rudolf Hess that described the entry and exit scars: ‘Three fingers above the left armpit, a pea-sized, blueish-coloured, non- reactive scar from an entry wound. On the back, at the height of the fourth dorsal vertebra, two fingers from the spine, a non-reactive exit gunshot wound the size of a cherry stone. No ill effects.’ Hugh Thomas and a number of leading pathologists found it difficult to convince British politicians that ‘bullet wounds never go away’: ‘Two post mortems found no trace of any gunshot wounds, even using multiple soft tissue X-rays, extensive microscopic examination of the lungs, and specialist techniques to look for minute metallic residue. 6 Letter from Lynda Chalker, Minister of State, to Cyril Townsend MP, 11 January 1989. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Neither did extensive body photography, using a Bronica camera, show any break in the minute “Langer’s Lines” of the skin when held directly over the entrance and exit sites.’ 7 When Dr Christopher Andrew, author of the authorised history of MI5, presented the Timewatch report 8 dismissing the doppelgänger theory, the retired MI6 officer Charles Fraser-Smith, the original for Ian Fleming’s ‘Q’, came forward to insist that the prisoner, for whom Fraser-Smith had made a ‘double’ uniform, was widely known in wartime MI6 circles as the ‘phoney Hess’. Despite Conan Doyle’s maxim that ‘When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’,9 Hugh Thomas’s doppelgänger claim remained hard to accept but hard to demolish until Forensic Science International: Genetics, produced by Elsevier in Amsterdam for the International Society for Forensic Genetics, released the paper by thirteen authors, ‘Rudolf Hess – The Doppelgänger Conspiracy Theory Disproved’.10 New Scientist in London announced on January 22, both in print and by Twitter: Exclusive: DNA solves Rudolf Hess doppelgänger conspiracy theory Now the mystery has finally been solved by a piece of DNA detective work by a retired military doctor from the US Army and forensic scientists from Austria. They conclude that the prisoner known as Spandau #7 was indeed the Nazi criminal Rudolf Hess. Hess has continued to generate historical interest. He was one of Hitler’s close friends and a leading Nazi politician, and then there’s the extraordinary manner of his attempted peace deal with the UK. After his death, his grave in the town of Wunsiedel became a Neo-Nazi rallying site, which in 2011 led the German authorities to exhume and cremate Hess’s body, scatter the ashes at sea, and destroy the grave. But not all of Hess’s DNA had been destroyed. During his incarceration in Spandau, Hess was monitored and cared for as was any other prisoner. 7 Hugh Thomas, note to author, 7 February 2019. 8 The BBC Timewatch programme is currently available on YouTube at 9 From the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier’, by Arthur Conan Doyle in his The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (London: John Murray, 1927) 10 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Spandau was run by officials from the UK, France, the United States and the Soviet Union, who rotated duties each month. In 1982, a blood sample was taken from Hess by a US army doctor, Phillip Pittman, as part of a routine health check. A pathologist, Rick Wahl, mounted some of the blood on a microscope slide to perform a cell count. The slide was labelled “Spandau #7” and hermetically sealed, and kept by Wahl for teaching purposes at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC. In the mid-1990s, another US military doctor, Sherman McCall, was resident at the army hospital when he heard about the blood sample. “I first became aware of the existence of the Hess blood smear from a chance remark during my pathology residency at Walter Reed,” McCall told New Scientist. “I only became aware of the historical controversy a few years later.” McCall, who is trained in molecular pathology, immediately realised the slide’s potential for solving the Hess controversy. “Making it happen,” he says, “was another matter entirely.” McCall contacted Jan Cemper-Kiesslich, a molecular biologist in the DNA Unit at the department of legal medicine, University of Salzburg, Austria, and told him about the slide and the dried blood. Working under standard forensic DNA protocols, Cemper-Kiesslich’s team extracted DNA from the dried blood. Now they had to find a living male relative of Rudolf Hess to make a comparison. They got in touch with David Irving, a discredited British historian who has denied the Holocaust took place. Irving provided the phone number of Hess’s son, Wolf Rüdiger Hess. “In the event, this number was disconnected,” says McCall. “Unbeknownst to us, he had recently died.” 11 The involvement of the Nazi apologist David Irving and the participation of unnamed members of the Bavarian Hess family in this scientific project went unremarked by European reporters. But when the Daily Telegraph headlined on 23 January ‘Conspiracy theory that Rudolf Hess was switched for doppelganger in Spandau prison, debunked by DNA’,12 an immediate challenge to the thirteen American and Austrian debunkers arrived by email. It came not from the Spandau army surgeon, but from a 1950 Spandau army dentist. Hans Eirew, a retired Manchester orthodontist who had been born in pre-war Vienna, sent this [unpublished] letter to the Telegraph: 11 12 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘Sir, During 1950/51 I was the British Army dental officer at Berlin military hospital. One of my responsibilities was the dental care of the war criminals at Spandau jail. I had to extract a left upper molar for the very weird prisoner introduced as Rudolf Hess, at his insistence standing up and without pain killing injection. Later I had access to the full official Nazi party medical records for the real Rudolf Hess, going back to his gunshot wounds in WW1. They showed that he had lost his upper left molar teeth early and had an artificial metal bridge where I was deemed to have extracted a tooth. My suspicions were supported by the fact that the other prisoners appeared to have very little contact with No.7 Hess. I am in full support of Dr Hugh Thomas, who was then the most tested army gunshot expert with wide experience in Northern Ireland and who provided medical evidence that the man at Spandau was a “ringer”. Dr H L Eirew’ 13 Thomas replies The thirteen authors of ‘The Doppelgänger Conspiracy Theory Disproved’ have declared that their research was conducted under ‘US military jurisdiction’ and with ethical approval from Salzburg University: ‘The blood sample from prisoner Spandau #7 was taken by one of the authors during regular medical care measures (including the preparation of the slide sample and Coulter Counter® analysis) under US military jurisdiction. Two living male members of the Hess family gave permission to use the slide sample for this study. The Ethics Committee of the Paris Lodron-University of Salzburg approves this study due to the contemporary historical relevance of the outcome, notwithstanding any legal, ethical or privacy concerns either for the Hess family or prisoner Spandau #7.’14 13 Since 1979 the Hess Doppelgänger question has ranked somewhere between the assassination of JFK and the Zinoviev Letter in the catalogue of unsolved conspiracies. Consequently it took less than three days in the online world of revisionist history for Joseph P. Farrell of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a researcher ‘in physics, alternative history and science’ with ‘a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford’, to deliver his folksy reaction to the Austrian DNA claim at 14 See note 11. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk On 1 February this year, Hugh Thomas MD FRCS, now retired as hepato- biliary pancreatic consultant surgeon at the Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil, said the new report lacks information on how, when and why the blood sample was drawn from the Prisoner in the tightly controlled prison at Spandau. ‘What the New Scientist has described as a “piece of DNA detective work by a retired military doctor from the US Army and forensic scientists from Austria” would not satisfy most 21st century coroners. As a former medico-legal adviser to Northern Ireland solicitors I can say that most coroners would today ask for an independent, monitored repeat of the DNA test using material that is readily available. We have not been told the date on which this thirty year old blood sample was drawn from the prisoner. We are not told the identity of the member of the Hess family who supplied a matching sample of DNA. Furthermore, the decision of the Austrian researchers not to reveal either the genotype or haplotype of this DNA and to admit that their sample was for a time in the custody of the Hess family and delivered to the Austrian researchers by an unnamed member of that politically suspect family undermines the provenance of both samples. ‘The Doppelgänger Conspiracy Theory Disproved’ team have limited the information they give on how, where and why the blood sample to one sentence in a 22-page report: ‘In the course of normal clinical care, one of the authors drew a blood sample from prisoner Spandau #7 upon which a Coulter® blood count was performed on December 15th, 1982.’15 Hugh Thomas, formerly senior medical consultant in the British sector of Berlin, continued: ‘Reading between the lines of this report it appears that the Coulter blood count was taken after the blood had been taken 650km from Berlin to an American pathology laboratory at Heidelberg, at least seven hours away from Berlin by air in 1982. Coulter counters were large machines restricted to the laboratory in those days. Coulter counters were readily available at that time in Berlin, both at the British Military Hospital in Dickensweg, or at the American hospital near Wannsee. If a blood count was performed at Heidelberg on December 15th, 1982, then the blood sample cannot have been drawn from the prisoner that day. Recent literature shows that the changes of deformation and degradation that occur in anticoagulated blood taken for the Coulter Counter mean that the accompanying slide should have been 15 See note 11. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk completed within two or three hours. Considerable degradation would have occurred within a day, and 80% degradation would have occurred within four days, making it impossible to complete a differential Coulter count. This slide shows exactly such changes. 16 What is then surprising is that after storage for 30 years in the USA, an Austrian technician was surprised to find that "the DNA from the slide sample appeared remarkably well-preserved.17 The technician thought the blood was remarkably fresh, making for a far easier DNA extraction. He had a good reason for his opinion. I note that he used the Qiagen based HDplex handbook. This work is often slanted towards archaeological investigations, a personal interest of mine. Using his chosen scale, this means that the DNA degeneration of the blood slide he was working was just on, or over 20%: (approx. 0.11 ng/µl for the small Y fragment, 0.017 ng/µl for the long fragment, indicating a degradation index 6.5) In technical terms the slide was relatively very fresh and been completed pretty quickly, within about two hours or so of the blood having been taken. Since the report does not tell us when or exactly where the sample was originally drawn, one is bound to be as equally surprised at the result as the Austrian technician. I am also surprised at the lack of any information about how and why the sample was drawn from the prisoner. In the years between the research for my first book and the death of the prisoner, my Spandau contacts and the prison warders kept me copiously informed of the medical schedules. I can certify that by that stage No. 7 had to be physically supported at all times by his warder, who also had to observe and record visits and procedures. There is no mention of this in what The New Scientist has described as “routine health check”. I notice that the phrase routine health check has not been used by the authors of the scientific report. Routine health checks in Spandau involved the four nations and were anything but routine, as they had to be agreed between their representatives beforehand and attended by a doctor from each of the four powers with the ever-present risk of an international incident. Consultants have pointed out to me that there was no three-point lab identification to enable the identification of the slide in the pathology laboratory and protect the patient identity. The undated, pre-printed 16 Hugh Thomas to author. 17 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk label prepared by the pathologist Rick Wahl “who interpreted the blood smear and maintained it under unbroken custody for teaching purposes” adds to doubts about its authenticity. The only practical importance of the air-dried slide from 1982 was that it happened to permit a DNA identity check, after the invention of DNA identity tests in 1984 and long after their first use in the UK in 1986 and in the USA in 1987. An ex-MI6 officer friend of mine was staggered to hear that despite the historian David Irving having been sent to prison in Austria in 2006 for denying the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz and despite David Irving being permanently expelled from Austria, Jan Cemper-Kiesslich, at Salzburg in Austria, and the retired US Army doctor Sherman McCall in the USA should have used the same David Irving as their adviser in the search for remaining members of the Hess family. They must have known that Irving had personally led a campaign to clear Rudolf Hess’s name, to establish Hess’s decency and uphold him as a martyr for peace. They say that Irving gave them a useless telephone number for Wolf Rüdiger Hess and that they were unaware that Wolf Rüdiger had died. Yet I have seen David Irving’s genuinely moving letter to the family, sent from New Orleans as soon as he heard of the death. Wolf Rüdiger and David Irving shared right-wing nationalistic political views. I have only spoken to David Irving on a couple of occasions, but I know that he spent a huge amount of time with Wolf Rüdiger, cataloguing the very extensive Hess file. Irving’s knowledge of the Hess family is unique. As father figure to Wolf Rüdiger, Irving must have known why the telephone line had ceased. The authors of the report are seemingly unaware that Wolf Rüdiger and I were close friends and working towards the same goal. We had gone together to Scotland Yard, against the advice of Wolf Rüdiger’s Irish solicitor, and Wolf Rüdiger had supplied DNA material for comparison with the huge amount of pathological material sent back by the pathologist Doctor Cameron. I have made innumerable requests through Parliament for the release of that DNA test. I was supported by the Scotland Yard pathologist Professor David Bowen. When Professor Iain West indicated that release of the DNA test result was unlikely, I contacted Wolf Rüdiger to stress that he should give and store a blood sample at his doctor’s. I understand that although the British government long ago ordered that the Cameron specimens be destroyed, some specimens migrated from one London hospital to another, so there remains an opportunity for two separate groups of scientists to carry out testing with absolutely clean provenance and without playing with slides. It is not therefore true to Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk claim that “when the German government cremated Hess’s remains in 2011, it was thought the last chance to pursue DNA analysis of the body had been lost”. There were, and still are, samples of blood from the Hess family available in London and Munich and there is still tissue and blood from Prisoner No. 7 available in London and Munich. Somewhere in Britain there is also the suppressed DNA comparison report conducted under the control of the British government.’18 Prisoner No. 7 walks alone in the garden of Spandau Prison, Berlin, photographed covertly from a watch-tower by a British machine-gunner from the Grenadier Guards. 18 John Harris, author with Richard Wilbourn of Rudolf Hess: Treachery and Deception (Northampton: Jema Publications, 2016), reports that Wolf-Andreas Hess, grandson of Rudolf Hess, told him in 2015 that a DNA sample had been taken by the Hess family from the body in the grave at Wunsiedel in Bavaria before the body was cremated in July 2011. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk South of the border (occasional snippets from) Nick Must The further adventures of Boris Johnson By the time you read this, the thrilling event that was ‘Boris on Brexit, Live’ 1 will have taken place. This Daily Telegraph event was due to happen on 26 March 2019. It is officially described thus: ‘Three days before the UK’s planned departure from the EU, Boris Johnson, in conversation with former Editor and columnist Charles Moore, will deliver his thoughts on Brexit in a unique event presented by The Telegraph’s Editor, Chris Evans.’ Although the European Union has already agreed to Theresa May’s request for a delay in the date for Brexit, the Telegraph site at the time of writing, 25 March 2019, is still stating the event as being ‘Three days before the UK’s planned departure from the EU’. Fingers definitely on the pulse, then, at the Torygraph. In other ‘celebrity’ news. . . . April 5th sees a cheaper (tickets from £28 to £35) but equally pointless event when the National Archives at Kew (NA) hosts ‘An evening with Dame Stella Rimington’.2 It would appear that the NA holds nothing of significance from her time as a spook. As an example, the publicly available files on MI5 monitoring of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) only extends as far as February of 1934.3 This is laughable because, undeniably, this continued well 1 2 3 See records KV2/663 to KV2/667 at Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk into the latter half of the Twentieth Century.4 Of course Stella Rimington’s actions during her time at MI5 still have echoes today. In early March, the BBC’s Dominic Casciani reported on how a ‘Secret document reveals police “blacklisting”'.5 Part of the story detailed how: ‘Blacklisting began with the Economic League in 1919 which shared records on left-wing activists with industry to keep them out of the workplace. It was closed in 1993 after a Parliamentary inquiry. The Consulting Association sprang up to replace it.’ This transition was, therefore, in the middle of Stella Rimington’s tenure as chief of MI5. Given that her path to the top included a significant stretch in MI5’s F2 counter-subversion section, I expect that she would have been fully aware of the situation. The Consulting Association sounds to me like it was an MI5 front anyway, as it was essentially just a one-man operation that, apparently, managed to blacklist ‘more than 3,000 construction workers’.6 The Consulting Association was closed down following a raid by the Information Commissioner’s Office in 2009 but there is an echo that brings this fully up to date and relevant today. Part of the monitoring of workers was carried out by undercover police officers, such as Mark Jenner, from the Special Demonstration Squad, who are now the subject of the Undercover Policing Inquiry.7 4 A team from New Statesman, including Duncan Campbell, was the first to cover this in depth with ‘The MI5 affair: can the spooks be trusted?’, 5 December 1986 (archived online at his site by Campbell at 5 6 See ‘The one-man firm that blacklisted thousands’ in the Financial Times, 9 May 2016, at 7 Jenner’s real identity and cover name have both been in the public domain since at least 2013. (See Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk It’s not all a waste of time Bearing the above cynicism about the National Archives in mind, I should perhaps point out that there is an event at the NA that might be very interesting. Wednesday 1 May is the date for the lunchtime (2pm – 3pm) event ‘UFOs and the Cold War'.8 Tickets are only £4 - £5 and one would hope that there will be a discussion of the tranche of files on UFOs that have previously been released by the National Archives.9 Hess and the Doppleganger Hess Andrew Rosthorn’s piece on Rudolf Hess in the current issue10 makes mention of the BBC Timewatch episode ‘Hess: The Edge of Conspiracy’. The programme was fronted by the eternally smug Professor Christopher Andrew – he who was chosen by MI5 to be the custodian of their officially published history. One segment of that Timewatch had a voice analyst compare the recorded voice of Hess from a speech at a Nazi rally with the recorded voice of ‘Hess’ from the Nuremberg trials. The Timewatch claim was that the two voices matched perfectly because the two voices shared some very unusual characteristics (pitch, vowel/consonant sounds, etc.). What concerns me about this is that there was zero discussion as to whether the two recordings, as presented for analysis, were of a sufficiently similar quality, had been preserved in the same way in the intervening years, or had even been made in sufficiently similar circumstances in the first place. Disregarding the issue of whether the quality of the two voice recordings were actually comparable, would a similarity in voice not be possible because the Hess who spoke at the Nazi rally during the war was already the ‘Doppelgänger’ Hess who testified at Nuremberg? 8 9 For a list of the 208 files, see 10 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk A tale of two Islingtons How Blair opened the door for Corbyn Simon Matthews Tom Bower doesn’t write proper biographies. Over 35 years he has published studies – basically investigative journalism – of Klaus Barbie, Robert Maxwell, Tiny Rowland, Mohamed Al-Fayed, Geoffrey Robinson, Gordon Brown, Conrad Black, Bernie Ecclestone, Simon Cowell, Richard Branson, Tony Blair and Prince Charles. Working for the BBC from 1970, he reported for and then produced Panorama. He hit his stride in 1981 with Blind Eye to Murder: Britain, America and the Purging of Nazi Germany, an account of how, post-1945, various German war criminals were allowed to remain in situ and even flourish with the connivance of the UK and US authorities. After which he went from exposés of billionaire tycoons and major media figures to knocking copy on what were then the UK’s main political players, Brown and Blair. Bower was originally a barrister and his approach would be familiar to anyone who has attended court: slow careful questioning of the subjects’ contemporaries (many of whom portray themselves as victims); a prior position being taken that he is fulfilling a duty to put something bad in the public domain; and an adversarial, one-sided approach that ignores complex factors like intentions, context and general comparisons with whatever other people may or may not have actually done in the same circumstances. Given his monstrous background, this worked with Klaus Barbie. But Simon Cowell? Bower’s books usually lack the footnotes, appendices, access to official documents and reports and wide-ranging interviews that characterize proper biographies. But they are readable. The antics of the ultra-rich in Monaco, Mayfair night clubs, City board rooms and opulent hotels; the hanging–out at international conferences, film premieres, Michelin–starred restaurants; the mistresses, drugs, car crashes, exotic hangers–on, sinister acquaintances . . . there’s an abundant audience for all of this, as reality TV testifies. And, of course, there is the vicarious satisfaction for his readers of being proved right – that their lives are better (morally, if not financially) than the tawdry goings–on of these individuals, none of whom they ever really liked in the first place. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Dangerous Hero: Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power is Bower’s latest offering and comes with an apologetic introduction in which the author reassures readers that this is no hatchet job, but a balanced account. Bower offers as evidence his spell at the LSE (1964-1967) during which, he asserts, he was a revolutionary socialist himself. Apparently, this makes him especially qualified to ruminate on the background of the current Labour Party leader. Even if this is so, early on it becomes clear that this book doesn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know (or couldn’t have guessed) about the subject and not much effort is made to provide a wider context. We get a bit of Corbyn’s life, but not very much of his times. It opens with a functional discussion of Corbyn’s family background: his parents were both Labour Party members from the late ‘30s and he has three older brothers. But there is no account of whether the views and attitudes of his parents might have influenced his own. Did they go to meetings? Did they canvass? Did they have political friends? If so, is there anyone we might have heard of? Likewise, there is no discussion of the lengthy career on the political fringes enjoyed by one of those elder brothers, Piers Corbyn. By the early ‘70s, for instance, both Corbyn brothers were embedded in the politics of what was then called ‘the broad left’ in London. Did they work together? Did Piers ever mentor Jeremy?1 It was a posh middle-class family. Corbyn was brought up in a detached 17th century manor house previously owned by the Duke of Sutherland and went to prep school. After this he attended Adams Grammar School (founded 1656, now fee-paying, selective and with boarders) where, in an early display of non-conformity, he declined to participate in the Combined Cadet Force.2 Disinterested in academic work (or just not very bright) he got two poor grade A Levels, insufficient to follow his brothers to university. Instead, in 1967 he went to Jamaica as a student teacher. His contract was for three years but he dropped out after two. Back in the UK, he returned to his parents and started dabbling in Labour Party activity. In 1972 he went to a Labour Party Young Socialists 1 In which context note that Piers Corbyn stood (against the Labour Party) in the 1974 local elections as a Squatters and Tenants candidate in the City of Westminster. The GLC subsequently funded an Advisory Service for Squatters that for many years operated out of Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency. Prior to emerging as a highly individualistic weather and climate change forecaster, Piers Corbyn sat 1986-1990 as a Labour councillor in Southwark, during which period he was Vice Chair of the Housing Committee. 2 The Combined Cadet Force are based in the schools from which the armed forces traditionally draw their officer class and are separate from the Army Cadet Force, a ‘national youth organization’ that tends to attract and encourage ‘other ranks’. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Annual Conference where he met Keith Veness, a close colleague of Ken Livingstone.3 After which things moved quickly. That autumn he moved to London and signed up for a course in Trade Union Studies at the Polytechnic of North London but dropped out after his first year.4 By 1973 he was working for the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers and had become a founder member of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. In ‘74 he got elected to Haringey Council, and, shortly afterwards, Tony Banks – then Head of Research at the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AEUW) – employed him as a researcher.5 That employment, and his expenses as an elected member, probably no more than £2500 p.a., gave him a relatively low but liveable income. Attending every meeting that he could, his approach was to ingratiate himself with as many of the members as possible, particularly those who were middle-aged/elderly working class. He often gave the impression that he came from Telford New Town, while showing, or appearing to show, great interest in their views. Douglas Eden, a key figure on the Labour right at this time who also lived in Haringey noted, with irritation (and rather uncharitable, if accurate, language): ‘In his carefully self-controlled way, [...] he presented himself to the lower orders of society, the vulnerable and inadequate people who felt indebted to him, as working-class. Once he got power, he dominated the branch and got their votes.’ 6 Early political life 3 See my ‘The once and future king?’ in Lobster 56 and my review of Ken Livingstone’s memoir in Lobster 62 at 4 I wonder if Corbyn had a Mature Students Grant that enabled this. If so, he would actually have been relatively well off at the time. 5 Banks was notably less sectarian than Livingstone and Corbyn and, after starting his political life in the Liberal Party circa 1960, had contested East Grinstead for Labour in the 1970 general election. 6 Douglas Eden and Stephen Haseler ran the Social Democratic Alliance, a group within the Labour Party from 1975. Outside the Labour Party from 1980 they ran candidates in the 1981 GLC elections, splitting the vote and ensuring that Ted Knight was defeated as Labour candidate in Norwood. Had he been elected, it had been agreed that Knight would become Chair of the Finance Committee, allowing him to take over Leadership of the GLC a year or two later when Livingstone quit to concentrate on his Parliamentary objectives. On Haseler and the SDA see Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Bower notes, as have many others, that from the beginning of his political career 45 years ago, Corbyn has barely changed his views on anything and remains one of the most orthodox figures in the UK (specifically English) left. Bower also expends a great deal of his narrative (as have the mainstream media) on a detailed poking about in Corbyn’s support for Palestine, antipathy towards Israel (as presently constituted, at any rate) and alleged difficulties with anti-semitism. This may be what sells books but, by default, it means that wider issues are overlooked. The first such omission is that, while Corbyn can be shown to have been a somewhat impractical activist for many years, what isn’t considered is whether his views and opinions – at that time – weren’t thought to have had a serious prospect of success. After all, in the mid ‘70s (and for possibly up to a decade later) the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) contained a fairly large number of MPs whose views were considered to be ‘left-wing’, albeit they were usually in a minority on most issues. Tony Benn and others thought, therefore, that given some careful de-selections and selections the political balance of PLP could be tilted firmly leftwards allowing them to capture it. Looking now at a number of selections that were made in ‘76 and ‘77 (notably Ken Livingstone in Hampstead and Highgate and Ted Knight in Hornsey and Wood Green, the latter with Corbyn’s help) one has to remember they were engineered on the assumption that Labour would win a general election if one were held in ‘78. Benn fully intended to challenge for the Labour Party leadership as soon as a sufficiently large grouping within the PLP could be rallied to his support. Importantly, this would also be as soon as the National Executive Committee (NEC) had agreed proposals for the selection and re-selection of Parliamentary candidates, as suggested by the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. Even after 1979, with Thatcher markedly unpopular, it was assumed (pre-Falklands War) that Labour would win any general election called in 1982-1983.7 Had Labour won a general election in 1978, then, the centre of gravity within the PLP may well have been further to the left. Thus, the idea of ‘a coup from the left’ was not an unreasonable deduction. Many considered it possible, including Corbyn’s local colleagues Douglas Eden and Stephen Haseler from the other end of the Labour 7 Livingstone subsequently admitted that his initial contact with Brent East CLP (facilitated by Graham Bash of Labour Briefing) occurred in 1980, which does seem to suggest that his primary interest was in becoming an MP rather than Leader of the GLC. Ted Knight failed to get elected in Horsey and Wood Green in 1979 and later failed circa 1985 to win the Labour nomination for Coventry North East. Valerie Veness, partner of Keith, stood unsuccessfully as Labour candidate in Hornsey and Wood Green (1983) and Nuneaton (1987). Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk spectrum. But as Bower doesn’t do counter-factual debate, no analysis is made of how quixotic the antics of the broad left actually were in the ‘70s and ‘80s and at what point circumstances rendered their tactics pointless. Was it the Falklands victory? Or just earlier with the launch of the Social Democratic Party (SDP)? Corbyn himself functioned mainly in the background in the ‘70s, making repeated attempts to deselect Andrew McIntosh, the GLC representative for Tottenham. In 1980 he had Kate Hoey (late of the International Marxist Group) lined up to replace McIntosh, only for Hoey to decide at the last moment that she wished to contest the Dulwich parliamentary seat instead.8 Bower doesn’t draw any conclusions from the anti-McIntosh campaign. In particular there is no explanation of why ending his career was deemed essential by Corbyn, Livingstone, Knight and their allies. Was McIntosh right-wing? There was no evidence he was. Like his wife (Naomi Sargant), he had a background in market research where he had worked alongside the likes of Michael Young. He was a humanist, solidly pro-European and had a father-in-law who campaigned against miscarriages of justice.9 Certainly, by the standards of what came later (particularly Blair and his followers), McIntosh looks pretty left-wing in Labour terms. But, sadly, not as ‘left-wing’ as some people liked circa 1980. McIntosh initially survived due to the vacillations of Kate Hoey and the endorsement he received from Labour leader Michael Foot (which came in curiously weighted language). But he would eventually be politically decapitated by Livingstone immediately after the May ‘81 GLC elections, an action that Foot did not seek to reverse. What was Corbyn’s legacy in Haringey? His energies were expended on constantly attempting to change the council leadership and trying to replace McIntosh. Throughout his time on the authority he was also employed by National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) as the official responsible for the area. This ought to have led to multiple conflicts of interest once he started sitting on and even chairing committees that took decisions that affected NUPE members. (Bower make no comment on this). Corbyn was an astute campaigner, but doesn’t appear to have had any overall effect in terms of Haringey bucking regional and national trends, notably in ’82 when Labour nearly lost control of the council. 8 Hoey unsuccessfully contested Dulwich twice, in 1983 and 1987. In the first contest she failed to take the seat due to the intervention of Dick Taverne as SDP candidate. She was selected, in 1988, to replace Stuart Holland as Labour MP for Vauxhall. 9 Michael Young was Labour Party ‘royalty’ for many years, and founder of the Institute for Community Studies. On which see my ‘Pissing in or pissing out? The “big tent” of Green Alliance’ in Lobster 42. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Between 1980 and 1988 the authority had seven different leaders, two of whom, Toby Harris and Bernie Grant, became quite noted in certain circles. Grant – who began his political life in the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) – was his own man, and respected by many. But Harris was a colourless functionary, an expert trimmer who acquired a reputation as ‘a safe pair of hands’ while keeping in with the extensive local left caucus. Becoming an MP In late ‘81 Corbyn emerged as a surprise contender for the parliamentary nomination in the safe Labour seat of Islington North. The fact that he did so was due to a peculiar sequence of events locally that could not possibly have been foreseen. In short, in becoming an MP, Corbyn was amazingly lucky. In his second major oversight, Bower makes no comment this. Two of Corbyn’s three predecessors for the constituency had died young, precipitating bye-elections. Wilfred Fienburgh (MP 1951-1958) perished in a car crash and, had he not done so, he might have been in situ until 1987. Reckoned to be ‘one of the most talented of the younger MPs’ at the time of his death,10 he also had literary credentials. His novel No Love for Johnnie (a study of how a back–bench left–wing MP is enticed toward the political centre – and moral compromise – by the trappings of power) was published posthumously in ‘59 and subsequently filmed. His replacement, Gerry Reynolds (MP 1958-1969) died of stomach cancer. Had that not been so, Reynolds might have served much longer as an MP – possibly until 1997. Forgotten now, he has been described as having been ‘a rising star . . . a future labour leader’.11 Would Corbyn have dislodged either of these had they lived? It must be doubtful. In 1969 the choice of who replaced Reynolds came down to the Constituency Labour Party (CLP) secretary Michael O’Halloran or Keith Kyle, an Oxford-educated, very well-connected journalist/academic. O’Halloran, backed by many local Irish members, won. This caused a bit of a stink at the time, the notion still being held in certain quarters that a decent education ought to count for something. After all, hadn’t Dick Taverne MP proclaimed Kyle ‘possibly the most naturally talented speaker 10 See 11 Rosa Prince, Comrade Corbyn: A Very Unlikely Coup (London: Biteback, 2016), chapter 6. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk of his generation’?12 But, with the 1970 election looming, O’Halloran remained in situ. Formerly a railway worker, and latterly a site foreman, he ran a tight ship. But by the mid ‘70s he was experiencing difficulties with Keith Veness (at that point, and for some time afterwards, a NUPE shop steward) who had moved into the constituency and begun to assemble an apparatus locally. Fighting back and stating ‘. . . I don’t oppose the government I was elected to support. Perhaps that is really what upsets Mr Veness’,13 O’Halloran initially prevailed and, in a rare example of someone out-heavying Veness, the Islington North CLP expelled Veness in ‘76, only for the National Executive Committee (NEC) to concede his inevitable appeal and reinstate him.14 There things might have rested, an uneasy truce between two organized groupings, had the failure of Prime Minister James Callaghan to hold an autumn ‘78 election not opened the way to a Conservative win in ‘79. After which the failure of Callaghan to immediately resign the leadership of the Labour Party led to the creation of the SDP, to which body O’Halloran eventually defected in ‘81. (As did Kyle and Taverne.) Had this sequence of events not occurred, O’Halloran might have remained Labour MP for Islington North until 2001. When a candidate was eventually chosen to replace O’Halloran,, many of Corbyn’s supporters – legend has it – were bussed to the meeting in vehicles owned by NUPE. As far as we know, Corbyn never considered standing anywhere else and clearly wouldn’t have got the seat without Veness (whose role in securing it, and ‘76 expulsion is ignored by Bower). The seat itself wouldn’t even have been available if two significant predecessors hadn’t died young, and Callaghan’s mishandling of essentially common-sense situations caused the SDP launch and the defection of O’Halloran. On the back-benches After which . . . well not much happens. Corbyn stays a back-bench MP for 32 years, is diligent enough, but is never, absolutely never, not even 12 13 ‘London Letter’ column, by John Torode, in The Guardian 20 January 1976 at 14 They weren’t doing too many expulsions in 1976 – as Reg Prentice, then facing similar events in Newham NE, could testify. John Ross stood as IMG (International Marxist Group) candidate against Prentice in Newham NE in February 1974 and subsequently became a founder member of Socialist Action, the Trotskyist group that supported and furthered the objectives of Ken Livingstone. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk within the diminishing ranks of the left, a leader. Bower’s problem is that, given his lack of context, from the moment Corbyn pitches up in the House of Commons much of this narrative is a really serious plod. All the meetings. All the emergency resolutions. All the campaigns. Virtually all of which fail completely. What is the point being made here? And what of the man? Seemingly he wears clothes from Oxfam shops, has no books in his home, no life outside politics, meetings and campaigning, knows very little about most things and either never debates or avoids situations where he has to debate. On the other hand, he is popular with women (three wives and several girl-friends feature in the account), is terribly polite (a good education does help, after all), supports an enormous array of progressive causes, rarely drinks, doesn’t smoke, is vegetarian, has a dog and later a cat and is a pacifist. Is this about a socially inept, glib political activist, with a carrier-bag full of leaflets, stumbling through the political events of the UK in the late 20th and early 21st centuries until he becomes PM? A bit like Accidental Death of an Anarchist, except the central character ends up running the country? Or Being There, with Corbyn as the simpleton who ascends to power? Bower thinks not; his sub-title is the give away. But if it were a ‘ruthless plot for power’ (shades here of Corbyn as Howard Kirk, the amoral sociology lecturer in Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man) did any of it matter until very late in the day? Becoming leader Given the circumstances of his rise, some consideration surely needs to be given to whether Corbyn’s path to the top was unwittingly prepared by Blair, Brown and Miliband. After all, in 2000, when Ken Livingstone ran against the official Labour Party candidate Frank Dobson for Mayor of London, no action was taken against those Labour MPs (including John McDonnell, Corbyn and Diane Abbott) who openly supported Livingstone and even nominated him for the role. Even at the peak of his powers – this was pre-Iraq War – Blair thought it beneath him, and frankly unnecessary, to waste time (as he would have seen it) on a handful of London-based Trotskyists. Some at the time thought this a careless omission. Had the episode occurred, say, in a borough council Labour group (and such things do), the regional officials would have simply expelled the protagonists, and after an initial kerfuffle, things would have been forgotten. But no such action was taken, and Corbyn again had luck on his side. Even worse, in 2003 Blair re-admitted Livingstone to the Labour Party in a tactical move designed to prevent criticism of his Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (already unravelling) Iraq adventure reaching a level that threatened to engulf the entire New Labour ‘project’. This legitimized the stance Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott had taken earlier re: Dobson. (And equally, their opposition to the Iraq War). One might also point to the trend that Blair himself initiated – perhaps we should call it early retirement fetish – where you ‘do’ politics until you’re about 50 then leave to make serious money elsewhere. Added to that, there’s a sub-text that quitting early is OK if it turns out the game – democracy – isn’t worth the candle. (i.e. none of it is really that important and there will always be sufficient ‘sensible’ people around to maintain the status quo). Where Blair and Brown led, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and the Miliband brothers followed. The exit of Ed Miliband as Labour leader in 2015 after a failure to win a general election was particularly egregious, given that nobody seriously considered it likely that Labour would emerge from that election with an overall majority in the House of Commons. In fact, Miliband did quite well in various marginals in England (winning Hove and Chester for instance) but failed to hold or take seats in Scotland. Unlike the immediate exit of Neil Kinnock in ‘92, and Brown in 2010, Miliband’s seemed premature. Could he not have stayed, presided over a debate about the future policies of the party and then made way for a successor in 2016-2017? Miliband departed having agreed, in 2014, to a one member–one vote process for electing future Labour leaders. The expression ‘member’ here having being stretched to include ‘registered supporters’ and ‘affiliated supporters’ rather than solely individuals holding a Labour Party card.15 The implications of this new system – which was basically an Americanized attempt to boost grass roots’ involvement – were not seen at the time. There was no expectation of the upset to come because the 15 The move to this arrangement began in 2012 when the selection process in Falkirk was deemed to have been engineered by the UNITE union in favour of one of their candidates (an accusation UNITE denied). In 2014 Baron Collins of Highbury, formerly Admin Manager of the TGWU, recommended a system Miliband adopted. Effectively this allowed affiliated unions to develop miniature ‘block votes’ of their affiliated or registered supporters of the party. Collins had helped create UNITE in 2007 via the merger of Amicus and the TGWU and had also bailed-out the Labour Party financially prior to writing his report. On the related issue of the funding of political parties, Blair established the Electoral Commission in 2000 – but that was all he did. This was despite official reports in 2006 and 2008 requesting: (i) caps on donations from either individuals or affiliated bodies, and (ii) greatly enhanced powers for the Electoral Commission itself. Had he or Brown followed through on these, the funding advantage of the Conservative Party would have been ended and the significant monies made available to those campaigning to leave the EU in 2016 would have been impermissible. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk left had failed to run candidates in the leadership elections in 1994 and 2007, and had been trounced in 1992 and 2010 when they did. Once again, Corbyn was extraordinarily lucky. He needed 35 nominations from MPs to take part in the 2015 leadership campaign and, given his low standing in their eyes, seemed unlikely to come anywhere near this figure. Happily, a precedent had been set to accommodate such eventualities. In 2010 Diane Abbott – who was quite widely disliked within the PLP – had been given nominations solely to enable her candidacy on the basis that it was useful to have someone who was black and female on the ballot paper, thus injecting legitimacy into a process that otherwise consisted solely of white men. But, surely, the tactic of nominating people that you seriously can’t abide for important positions on the assumption that nobody will vote for them is both morally dubious and stupid. Particularly the latter, if you are trialling a new selection system. Corbyn benefitted, therefore, from the somewhat patronising attitude that had been test–driven with Abbott. Among those nominating him in 2015 were Michael Meacher (died 2015), Jo Cox (murdered during the 2016 referendum campaign), Huw Irranca-Davies (resigned as MP in 2016 to concentrate on a role in the Welsh Assembly), Andrew Smith (stood down as an MP in 2017, his signature was gained only ten seconds prior to the deadline), Margaret Beckett, Sadiq Khan, Clive Lewis, David Lammy, Chi Onwurah (who later backed Owen Smith’s bid to oust Corbyn in 2016) and Catherine West. Corbyn’s core support came from elderly anti-EU types (Ronnie Campbell, Frank Field, John McDonnell, Dennis Skinner, Grahame Morris) and a few trade union MP’s. Others appeared to have voted for him either because they wanted a quiet life (at the hands of his supporters) or by miscalculating that he couldn’t win anyway. None of this is discussed by Bower. Nor is the result of the election considered in detail. True, Corbyn won a majority (59.5%) of all the votes cast. However, if the ‘registered’ and ‘affiliated’ supporters are set aside and only the votes cast by actual party members taken into account, he failed to obtain a majority, polling 49.6%. Had it been a true one member–one vote system, at that point the lowest candidate (Liz Kendall) would have dropped out and a run-off election would have taken place between Corbyn, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper. Would Corbyn have still won? It’s possible that had things reached that point, Kendall’s votes would have switched to Cooper who would then have slightly overtaken Burnham causing Burnham to drop out at the next stage with the final ballot being between Corbyn and Cooper. Would Corbyn, a white man aged 66, have beaten a much younger candidate aiming to become the Labour Party’s first ever woman leader? We will never know, because Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk history chose not to take this path and Corbyn’s luck held once more. Since then he has beaten off an attempt in 2016 – by Owen Smith MP – to defenestrate him as Leader, and led Labour into the June 2017 general election, which saw it increase its popular vote by 10% and gain 30 seats. Leave or remain? On the great issue of the day – whether the UK should leave the EU and, if it does, on what terms – Corbyn has remained inscrutable. When elected Leader in 2015 he was congratulated by Greece’s Syriza government who hoped he would be part of a ‘pan-European front against austerity’. In the immediate aftermath of the June 2016 EU referendum, Yanis Varoufakis advised him that the UK needed to debate why people voted leave, address the causes of such views, and only trigger Article 50 (which Varoufakis was not in favour of) after deciding clearly what relationship it wanted with the EU. Corbyn ignored this and declared instead for an immediate serving of Article 50 on the EU the day after the referendum. Later (December 2018) he addressed the Congress of the Party of European Socialists, at Lisbon in a speech that proceeded from platitudes that few would contest via non-sequiturs and inaccuracies to Dave Spart–style denunciations.16 The latter included him claiming the EU created and implemented the austerity that led to the Brexit vote (it didn’t: it was George Osborne); and that the EU are responsible for the growing use of food banks in the UK and has embraced the economic legacy of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (both claims are false). It’s hard not to think that his audience, initially heartened by his appearance, would have concluded that he didn’t really know much about the EU, isn’t bothered about its positive work and would be ineffectual in his dealings with it in future years (if he was still around). In summary, a very typical English politician. His attempts to manage this perception, and demonstrate that he is proactively trying to negotiate a way forward have had varied results with The Evening Standard noting (26 March 2019) that Corbyn’s office was stating ‘he had held constructive talks on a deliverable Brexit with the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier’. If so, that is not how EU governments and Brussels officials saw it with the Standard also reporting one of them as saying, ‘We get no sense he wants to avert the crisis. He wants a no-deal Brexit that he can blame on the Tories. He’s 16 Corbyn’s speech in Portugal can be read in full at Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk as bad if not worse than Mrs May.’17 Many find the lurch of UK politics since 2015 into a Corbyn-May contest unfathomable. They wonder how the wave of support that propelled Blair into office in ‘97 and the immense optimism that was visible during 2012 London Olympics could have dissipated so rapidly and so comprehensively. For those looking back to the 2012 games as the last national celebration of anything positive in the UK, the Memorial Service for Tessa Jowell (Minister for the Olympics 2005-2010) which took place at Southwark Cathedral on 18 October 2018 would have seemed a rather sad finale.18 Tributes were led by Michael Sinclair and Tony Blair.19 Among those attending could be found Baroness Jay, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Sadiq Khan, Andy Burnham, Amber Rudd, Jack Straw, Harriet Harman, Lord Puttnam, Lord Garel-Jones, Lord Palumbo, Lord Sainsbury, Alastair Campbell and Rebekah Brooks. A Labour councillor in Camden from ‘71 and MP for Dulwich 1992-2015, Jowell served as a minor government minister under Blair and Brown. She was appointed to co-ordinate the efforts to stage the Olympic games in 2005, after the bid had been successful. (Though, as is the case with many projects of this type, the idea that the event might be staged in the Lee Valley stretched back to the mid ‘90s, predating both her and New Labour). Despite the usual British grumbling about money, she managed to get it organized on time and it was a success. People felt a degree of affection for her. So much has the political landscape changed in such a short space of time, the gathering to celebrate her passing looks now like a sort of final gathering of ‘the old gang’, a who’s who of those ousted by the populism of right and left – a populism which all of them, in their own way, failed to address. The presence of former Sun editor Rebekah Brooks, whose newspaper developed the caustic tone that was later ‘normalized’ and sprayed around during the Brexit debate, is particularly notable. By embracing her, they embraced what would sweep them from power. Blair’s failures As to what they might have done to prevent this, several notable failings 17 18 For full details of those present see The Times 19 October 2018. 19 Michael Sinclair is Executive Director of the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Programme, and was previously Vice President of the Henry J Kaiser Foundation. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk come to mind, for none of which hindsight is a requirement. Leading the way is the lack of action to establish a written constitution for the UK. A demand for this (the UK is unique in nation states in lacking one) had long been advocated by Charter 88 and latterly, from 1995 by the Constitution Unit.20 Despite both having impeccably centrist credentials, no legislation was brought forward, and the Constitution Unit was largely ignored or given minor advisory roles. Because of this, the PM of the UK continues to wield the Royal Prerogative in a way that would land them in contempt of the legislature (and quite possibly imprisonment) in any other country. Such largesse is a privilege zealously guarded by all PMs and the recent use of these powers by Theresa May (and by implication, Corbyn, should he become PM) has renewed calls for the UK to upgrade its constitutional arrangements. Blair and Brown are culpable for failing to address this, as they are for the failure to establish a comprehensive regional government structure across the UK of the type commonplace elsewhere, notably the US (usually their preferred exemplar). What was eventually agreed, in Scotland, Wales and London, had less statutory and financial power than the Metropolitan Counties introduced by Heath in ‘72 and abolished by Thatcher in ‘86. The new bodies did not enjoy the right – statutory in many other countries – to be consulted and their agreement gained prior to the enactment of any major change that could endanger their autonomy. Remarkably, given how uncontroversial the proposals and the lack of any precedent for doing so, Blair (and Brown) insisted on referenda being held in 1997-1998 before even these arrangements were agreed. What emerged in London was an election for a City Mayor – a process copied from the US – which directly encouraged the candidacies of media-savvy populists like Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson. Would Johnson, now regarded as the man who tipped the EU referendum from a narrow remain to a narrow leave vote, have bothered being London Mayor if it had entailed working as leader of a substantial political group and being accountable to them? Blair proclaimed, in 1997, that ‘the era of big centralized government is over’ but then conspicuously failed to achieve any such transformation. Nor is there any sign that Corbyn, as PM, would surrender power to regional authorities. 20 Charter 88 began at a time when many left intellectuals were drawing parallels between the Thatcher government in the UK and the state oppression suffered by intellectuals in eastern Europe. Its key members were Stuart Weir, Hilary Wainwright, and David Marquand. The last named was later active in the Constitution Unit, with Meg Russell, and moved from being an advocate of New Labour (he was previously a close colleague of Roy Jenkins, and like Jenkins was prominent in the SDP) to being strongly critical of Blair. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Close behind the lack of a written constitution would come electoral reform. Prior to ‘97 Blair had entertained the idea of adopting this in the UK – it was a specific recommendation of the Constitution Unit – only for what emerged to be very different. PR (proportional representation) was introduced for elections to the European Parliament (an EU requirement) which in turn produced a noisy quota of UKIP and BNP MEPs. Introduction of it for elections to the Scottish Parliament led to a big wedge of SNP representatives, while its effect within the shrivelled London Assembly was merely to strengthen the celebrity element of the Mayor’s role. Many of those who currently despair of both May and Corbyn do so because they see the ‘main’ parties as having been captured by their fringe elements. This also reflects the reality that UK elections usually produce a legislature that has little connection, in terms of votes cast, with the views of the majority of the public. Again, Blair is largely culpable for this. Between becoming Labour leader in ‘94 and being PM in ‘97, Blair initially expected he might only become PM in a ‘hung’ Parliament. He thus made plans – not very serious plans, as it turned out – that he would come to power by forming a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. After the landslide in ‘97, however, he had a huge Parliamentary majority that would not have been happy to change the voting system. He then belatedly established the Independent Commission on the Voting System under Roy Jenkins. This reported in ‘98 that Westminster elections should be conducted on the same basis as European and regional assembly elections and noted that, as those were both now conducted under PR, such a change would no longer be as significant as it would have been in the past and should not require a referendum prior to it being introduced. Blair and Brown made no effort to implement this. In 2010 the Liberal Democrats extracted a promise from David Cameron, as the price of entering government, that a referendum would be held on changing the Westminster voting system. As with the referenda held by Blair on Scotland, Wales and London, this offered a simple Yes/No binary choice and required no threshold for its implementation. In any event, the vote was lost (32% – 68%) and the UK was left, largely due to Blair’s inaction, with the worst of all possible worlds: a parliamentary electoral system that does not reflect how people vote and a small number of regional assemblies with limited powers that can be overridden. Having failed to reform the voting system, failed to introduce a written constitution, failed to construct a proper regional government framework, failed to take action against those who backed Livingstone when he ran for Mayor of London in 2000, Blair had one final act of Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk neglect. Despite his assertions that the UK would henceforth ‘be at the heart of Europe’, he failed to engage fully with the EU. In office Blair did not align himself with EU foreign policy over Iraq in 2002-2003; the UK did not join the Euro; the City of London remained the world centre for money laundering and tax evasion; and the UK continued to maintain a global network of tax havens. Many commentators taking stock of where the UK finds itself in 2019, may agree with the comments of Times journalist Simon Nixon who noted that ‘the British state and political class have proved alarmingly ill-equipped’ 21 to deal with significant economic and political challenges. Not that these are matters that Blair usually discusses in public. Since the outcome of the 2016 referendum, he has re-appeared in UK political life arguing forcefully for a reversal of the referendum result (which was conducted on the same simplistic basis as the referenda he oversaw). Blair now advocates a second referendum following a wide- ranging public debate about the consequences of leaving the EU after 46 years membership. Most recently22 he admitted that many ‘leave’ voters were swayed by a desire to cut immigration and that the thing to do now was acknowledge this, remain in the EU and ‘reform’ its rules on freedom of movement. This is misleading. The UK is already outside the Schengen area and when free movement issues arose with the 2004 enlargement of Europe, the UK opted voluntarily to have few restrictions on these. Only Sweden and Ireland did likewise. Every other member of the EU imposed constraints, which all were entitled to do. The UK could also have done so, and this would not have constituted ‘reforming’ the organization. A conclusion? To return to Bower’s book: a final failure must be the lack of any explanation of why Corbyn’s economic policies have the appeal they do for so many, and why they appear remarkable. Aside from his generally oppositionist stance, in which most things boil down to a criticism of whatever government he is arguing against, Corbyn espouses full employment, high wages and high benefits, accessible education, health, housing and legal rights. He would want higher taxes on the wealthy, an industrial strategy, public ownership and economic planning for the long term. For anyone born in the UK after, say 1975, this appears to be an amazing alternative. So comprehensively has the discourse on the 21 The Times, 14 November 2018 22 BBC Newsnight, 19 March 2019 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk economy under Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown and Cameron disregarded and avoided this terminology, few now remember such language as being solidly mainstream and commonplace under Wilson and Heath. Nor do many realize that such views remain standard across the EU. Corbyn’s economic policies are not, of course, based on the consensus that prevailed in the UK between 1945 and 1979. They are a modification of those propounded in the 1970s by Tony Benn, which is why – as a long- term disciple of Benn – Corbyn’s speeches on the economy have barely changed in 45 years. As to whether the UK could implement a Benn Strategy outside the EU (Corbyn’s preferred destination) with its manufacturing base and taxation base much smaller than they were in the ‘70s, few economists or serious commentators think this likely.23 But the resonance of his proposals to a younger generation that has little on offer from any other quarter is very telling. The lack of any appreciation of this by Bower is significant, and the intellectual void into which Corbyn and McDonnell (and others) have been allowed to step by Blair and Brown immense. The historians of the future may well conclude that Blair left an open goal for Corbyn, and Blair’s legacy may thus be judged by them to be destruction of the UK political centre via a decade of inertia, neglect and complacency. If, particularly in the UK and US, we are living through a collapse of the political centre, rather than simply a couple of temporary electoral reverses, just how accidental is all of this? Of course, given the circumstances described above, much of Corbyn’s rise appears fortuitous. Bower relies on interviews with Keith Veness, whom he describes as ‘salt of the Earth’, and previous Livingstone biographers Andrew Hosken and John Carvel did likewise. Bower doesn’t appear to have sought out any counter views (particularly within Islington North CLP) and Veness’s style is to explain away how much the left were organized; maintain they were never really sure how significant their actions might be; present their actions as hesitant and semi-accidental; and to suggest that he, and other factions, didn’t even get on with Corbyn at various times. Some might think this dissembling; and if it is, Bower doesn’t seem to realize he is being ‘played’. The evidence is and always has been that the left factions that support Corbyn are a very tightly organized caucus sharing a 23 There are many differences between the UK economies of 1975 and 2019, not least that the manufacturing base has shrunk by 20% during that period with the standard rate of taxation being cut by 35%. Benn envisaged boosting investment with a Sovereign Wealth Fund derived from oil revenues (as in Saudi Arabia and Norway). With fossil fuels no longer desirable, due to concerns about global warming, Corbyn (and McDonnell) may find it difficult to implement ideas formulated over 40 years ago. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk common hatred of centrist (especially centre-left) politicians.24 A similar case is made by David Kogan in Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), an amazingly intricate account of the ebbing and flowing of the left within the Labour Party over the last 40-50 years. He concludes that Jon Lansman is the single most influential figure in the rise of Corbyn and thus, by inference, is someone of great power inside the Labour Party and even, potentially, within the government, should Corbyn become PM.25 Given Lansman’s role with Momentum, he may be right. One way of looking at this is to note that UK commentators are now beginning to study the people in the shadows who rarely hold public office, but who operate nevertheless as major players in how events unfold. By contrast, much more material exists in the US about the machinations of Steve Bannon and the ‘alt-right’, with any number of scholarly studies of obscure non-mainstream figures of both the left and the right. Are we now catching up with this? Will Veness, Lansman and others be considered by the historians of the future to have wielded immense and significant influence?26 In such circumstances, writing accounts of Corbyn’s life (if not life and times) with events changing every few hours is a risky business. There will inevitably be many loose ends, and Bower will surely be revising his book in the years to come. No one knows when or how this will conclude. Will Corbyn win a general election? Will he – somehow, by design or default – become Prime Minister? Will the UK leave the EU? Or remain? Or end up in some kind of semi-detached relationship with the bloc? Will Corbyn or May (or their successors) be attempting to negotiate with the EU from outside for decades to come? Would Corbyn, if PM, transform the UK in the way his supporters hope? Or will he be shown to 24 Carvel, Hosken and Bower are all journalists, not historians, a hopefully more rigorous profession. Corbyn also displays similar traits in seeking to minimize the extent of his involvement in certain issues – a trait typical of many politicians – notably on the wreath laying episode in Tunisia (‘I was present but not involved’) and on his close involvement with Labour Briefing (‘I wrote for the magazine, but was not a member of the Editorial Board’). One wonders, given this type of response to routine questioning, what type of PM he might actually be. 25 Kogan published an earlier edition of his book, written with his uncle Maurice Kogan, in 1981. Lansman, whose father Bernard I knew as a Conservative councillor in Hackney from 1982 to 1990, sat as a Labour councillor in Lewisham 1986-1990. The idea that we may be living in ‘the Jon Lansman era’ is odd, to say the least, to anyone who knew him, or knew of him at that time. 26 The massive German historiography of the period 1919-1933 may be another parallel here, containing as it does a huge amount of detailed work on figures usually overlooked in more popular studies. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk be an ineffectual man of straw? Will the UK break up? Will there be civil unrest under any of these circumstances? Or will it turn out to have been a semi-comic aberration, A Tale of Two Islingtons?27 On the one hand we have Blair conferring and doing deals in smart restaurants in Upper Street in the ‘90s while Corbyn patiently digs his allotment in dungarees and cloth cap, until, one day . . . . Simon Matthews is the author of Psychedelic Celluloid: British Pop Music in Film and TV 1965-74 (Harpenden: Oldcastle Books, 2016). 27 If one includes Mr and Mrs Veness, Dame Margaret Hodge (currently jousting with Corbyn on anti-semitic issues), Baron Collins of Highbury and Lord Simon of Highbury (an oil mogul ennobled by Blair), an awful lot of this seems to come out of a very small part of the UK. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Dirty Tricks Nixon, Watergate, and the CIA Shane O’Sullivan1 New York: Skyhorse Books, 2018; £20.00 h/b; 536 pages, notes, index Robin Ramsay So what can a major reappraisal of Watergate tell us in 2018 that we didn’t know before? Surprisingly little about the major events. But this isn’t the fault of the author, who has done a huge amount of work with the extant literature and many new sources. O’Sullivan begins in 1968 and the election which brought Nixon to power. With Robert Kennedy assassinated and sitting President Johnson having announced he wouldn’t run again, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate was Hubert Humphrey. To bolster Humphrey’s chances, LBJ tried to organise a temporary halt to the Vietnam War before the election. The Nixon team heard about this and set about frustrating it. Through Anna Chennault, a long-time member of the China Lobby on the right of the Republican Party, the Nixon team got word to the South Vietnamese, who were part of the peace talks at the time. ‘Drag your feet’, they were told. This was duly done and Nixon narrowly won the election.2 LBJ knew what Madam Chennault and the Nixon team were doing but decided not to blow the whistle during the election campaign – possibly because the main source on this was NSA intercepts which he didn’t want to reveal. Although we have known about this in outline for a while, Sullivan recounts these events in enormous detail in the first two chapters.3 Nixon believed that papers about those events leading up the 1968 election were held in the Brookings Institute in Washington, a bastion of (relatively) liberal thinking on foreign affairs. Nixon wanted Brookings burgled and the papers stolen. Nixon set the tone for ‘the plumbers’, the off-the-books 1 Author interview at 2 Having helped get Nixon elected and raised a large amount of money for the Republicans, Madame Chennault was swiftly dumped by them. 3 But did we really need 65 pages on this? Half way through them I began to skim . . . . It is nostalgic to read how difficult it was to run such an operation without instant, mobile communications between the parties. Lots of memos written, notes of phone-calls – the paper trail for a historian like the author. What would there be these days? Emails and texts, maybe. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk unit established in the White House ostensibly to investigate and prevent leaks of information: anything goes. There was a pool of ex-CIA, ex-military and ex-FBI people in Washington looking to supplement their pensions. The Nixon team didn’t know much about this world and picked people on the say-so of others. Thus James McCord and Hunt, two senior ex-CIA officers, joined ex-FBI Gordon Liddy in ‘the plumbers’.4 The author can’t quite demonstrate that Hunt, and/or McCord, and/or Eugenio Martinez (a CIA contract agent, also in ‘the plumbers’), told the CIA what they were doing out of the White House basement. But it would be a surprise if none of them of did. This is the ‘CIA trap’ theory, which at its heart says no-one is ever really ‘ex’-CIA and loyalty to the Agency remains paramount. That theory in its simplest form: ‘. . . former CIA officer Miles Copeland published a provocative article in William Buckley’s National Review. . . Under the subheading “A Set-Up?” Copeland asked: “So how did one fine operator like McCord get himself involved in the Watergate mess? Do you know how long it takes for a CIA-trained operator to get into an office like the one in Watergate, install a microphone, and get the hell out? It takes less than one minute, and it requires a team of exactly two persons, the operator and a lookout. But at Watergate, Jim McCord, who had undergone the training and knew the procedure, had entered the Democratic offices with Abbott, Costello, the four Marx brothers, and the Keystone Cops, and had horsed around for almost half an hour without a lookout.” When Copeland asked former colleagues at Langley, “What really happened at Watergate?” their reaction convinced him that “with or without explicit instructions from someone in the Agency, McCord took Hunt and Liddy into a trap.” He argued CIA specialists in “dirty tricks” “had a lot to gain from putting the White House’s clowns out of business.”’ (p. 315) Which again raises the question: what were they doing in the Democratic National Committee office? This is what Richard Nixon asked when he was told of the arrests. For he knew that the DNC was not exactly where the political 4 Did we need the 22 pages the author devotes to Hunt’s biography? In it we learn a great deal about Hunt’s espionage novels and the fact that Hunt took the job with the White House because he needed to pay hospital bills for a daughter with a long-term and expensive medical condition. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk action was.5 The conventional account is that they were trying to bug the phone of DNC chair Larry O’Brien. The author quotes journalist Jack Anderson: ‘. . . on an earlier visit to the November Group6 office in New York to “sweep their telephones for bugs,” McCord “let slip that his next assignment was to bug [Larry] O’Brien’s office.” “We tap them, they tap us, it’s routine,” he said.’ (p. 188) It is surprising that a former senior CIA officer, whose speciality had been security, let something like this ‘slip’. More support for the Copeland thesis quoted above, perhaps. But the author shows that at least one other member of the private spook subculture knew ‘the plumbers’ were going into the DNC. However, since McCord and Hunt are dead and Martinez, though alive, won’t talk, we may never know if the operation was leaky on purpose. But leaky it was. Was O’Brien the target? The author quotes one of the policemen who investigated the incident as saying that there were no bugs in O’Brien’s phones. Probably there were several targets. O’Brien was apparently one – not least because of his connections to Howard Hughes, from whom Nixon had taken money in the past. The author explores in detail but ultimately rejects the theory – associated initially with Jim Hougan7 – that the Republicans were looking for sexual dirt. Instead he returns to one of the secondary questions: why did they tap the phone of Spencer Oliver, an apparently minor Democratic Party official? Was it, as some have suggested, because Oliver’s mostly unused phone was used by Democratic Party officials to book hookers? Probably not, he concludes. On the other hand, Oliver was coordinating an attempt within the Democratic Party organisation to block the nomination of Senator George McGovern as the party’s presidential candidate in 1972: they knew McGovern 5 In his memoirs Nixon wrote: ’Anyone who knew anything about politics would know that a national committee headquarters was a useless place to go for inside information on a presidential campaign. The whole thing was so senseless and bungled that it almost looked like some kind of a setup.’ Quoted at 6 Nixon’s ‘personal advertising agency’. 7 Hougan’s work in Secret Agenda was elaborated a little by Len Colodny and Robert Gettling in their Silent Coup (reviewed in Lobster 26) and a bit more in Phil Stanford’s White House Call Girl (reviewed in Lobster 68 at Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk would lose. For this reason McGovern was the Democratic Party opponent Richard Nixon wanted. So, this theory goes, they tapped Oliver’s phone to try and keep track of the internal machinations against McGovern. ‘This was precisely what Baldwin had told the FBI in his second interview: “all political conversations monitored were related to the policy of getting rid of McGovern.”’ 8 Presidential politics starts with winning the election. The Spencer Oliver- McGovern thesis is extremely plausible but – despite the author’s impressive efforts – we cannot be more certain than that. 8 p. 392 Alfred Baldwin was in a room across from the Watergate building taping/transcribing what the bugs picked up. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Just deserters? Just deserts? Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves Matthew Sweet London: Picador, 2018; 351 pp., illustrations, notes Anthony Frewin There’s a footnote to a footnote in the history of the Vietnam War, and that’s the story of the deserters. It could be said to begin with the arrival in Stockholm in May 1968 of six deserters (Sweet’s starting point) who had fled the fighting and had been ferried from Japan by a fishing vessel to a waiting Russian ship. After which they had been chaperoned and propagandised across the Soviet Union and ended up in Sweden, and were there welcomed by a country that prided itself on its progressive/liberal stance on all matters that counted. Many more soldiers followed. What could go wrong? Well, plenty, as Sweet demonstrates in exhaustive detail (and backed up by some 30 pages of notes that document every heartbeat). The deserters’ interaction with Swedish society seems to have been limited largely to girl-friends. But we should give them a break: there was an emergent Big Agenda that went beyond a mere fracas in south-east Asia. What was now on the table was World Revolution; and Capitalism – and its Power Structures – stood in the way. Several deserters got involved in the politics of the American Deserters Committee that stirred up so much trouble many Swedes figured it was a CIA front. It could have been. Who knows? Even supposing there was no CIA involvement hereabouts, discord was sprouting up all over the place within the community anyway. As the ubiquitous Clancy Sigal said to Sweet: ‘All deserters believed all other deserters were CIA.’ Rather than let the deserters and their confrères squabble amongst themselves as they headed down the one way system to Sheol, the CIA did chip in with ‘Operation Chaos’, its attempt to counter domestic opposition to the Vietnam war. But this seems largely to have been as near a boondoggle as one can imagine. OK, it did produce a mountain Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk of paperwork, but . . . . 1 As the American Deserters Committee’s membership declined, due to internal rifts and the changing climate, one of its co-founders was on the lookout for allies on the far left. This was the limpet-like Michael Vale.2 He found an ally all right – and found one in spades as it were – in a Lyn Marcus, a.k.a. Lyndon La Rouche. Readers of Lobster will be familiar with this world class crazy and will not need a recital of his beliefs. Sweet’s detailed account of the machinations here could have been condensed, but the Devil is in the detail. Sweet has put himself in to the story and his Quest for Corvo approach makes some difficult and lengthy passages much more reader-friendly. This investigative study is a laudable achievement, but the publishers have let it down by not supplying an index. Naughty publishers! 1 Sweet states (p. 95, ex inf. Frank Rafalko, former CIA) that ’Operation Chaos’ was originally run from CIA HQ in rooms near to James Angleton’s office in an area known as the Black Section, though, apparently, Angleton took little interest in it. According to Jefferson Morley, however, ’Chaos’ had 40 employees and ‘utilized’ 130 agent sources – Jefferson Morley, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2017) pp. 218-9. Further, Morley contradicts Rafalko’s claim. 2 The Latin vale in the sense of goodbye, farewell, suits him admirably: always on the move, you never knew where he would pop up next. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The Doomsday Machine Daniel Ellsberg London: Bloomsbury, 2017, £20.00 Alex Cox Until recently I only knew Daniel Ellsberg as the whistleblower who made the Pentagon Papers public, and for his peace campaigning over the years. I had no idea that prior to releasing a trove of documents related to the American War in Vietnam, Ellsberg had been employed by the US Air Force at the RAND corporation, as a nuclear war planner. He had originally intended to reveal his nuclear war materials at the same time as the Pentagon Papers, even though he knew he might face life imprisonment for doing so. A bizarre series of events, recounted in The Doomsday Machine, put them beyond the reach of both the FBI and the author. There is much in Ellsberg’s book that is bizarre, if not amusing, as he recounts what he learned about the workings of the nuclear-military-political complex. It is disconcerting reading. Ellsberg reveals the officially stated policy – that only the President can authorise nuclear weapons use – to be a fiction. Based on what he learned reviewing nuclear armed bases for RAND, there is delegation in the use of nukes at every level. Local base commanders had discretion – or considered they had it – to launch their nuclear bombers rather than risk losing them. As in the film Dr Strangelove, there were envelopes aboard each plane containing secret nuclear go codes (Strategic Air Command [SAC]’s one-size-fits-all nuclear launch code was 00000000), but there were no recall orders. As Ellsburg relates, base commanders and bomber pilots had real autonomy to use their nukes; yet there was no system in place to stop them, in the event (for example) of an error of judgment, or a presidential change of heart. His description of the plans to get nuclear-equipped planes airborne at US bases in Japan is grimly absurd. Smaller bombers were meant to take off in neat rows, with other rows of bombers following seconds afterwards. Ellsberg soon saw the possibility that a single pilot error could cause a catastrophic pile- up, and atomic explosions, on the runway. Pilots who made it out, and other US bases, would see or hear of the explosions and assume that Russian bombs had landed . . . . Not that it mattered where the US forces thought the bombs came from. One of Ellsberg’s assignments was to find areas for flexibility in nuclear weapons use. When he started working for RAND, the US Air Force had one plan – SIOP, the Single Integrated Operating Plan – which involved a massive, Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk concerted nuclear weapons salvo against Russia, China, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and the other ‘Iron Curtain’ states. President Kennedy and his defence chief, Robert McNamara, wanted some other options on the table, besides instantaneous total destruction of all foreign communists and their neighbours. Ellsberg tried hard to separate US nuclear war plans against Russia from US nuclear war plans for China, but it was tough going. The Joint Chiefs preferred one massive nuclear strike (‘general war’ or ‘central war’) to a piecemeal one. All the while, Ellsberg writes, he was morally opposed to the bombing of cities, with the inevitable unnecessary loss of human life. In a brief aside he recounts his friendship with Sam Cohen – another RAND specialist who liked to be thought of as the ‘father of the Neutron Bomb’.1 SIOP also worried Ellsberg since it was a plan for a first strike: all-out first use of thousands of nuclear warheads against the Soviet Union and its allies, at a time when the Russians had merely a handful of working atomic bombs. RAND and Pentagon estimates of damage from nuclear weapons use never included fire or firestorms; nor the spread of radiation into allied states; nor the likely consequences for the climate. The consequences of nuclear weapons use therefore being vastly underestimated, thousands of additional weapons were built. In presidential briefings, the Pentagon was confident of prevailing with a first strike: ‘if worst came to worst . . . a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union would result in less than ten million deaths in the U.S.’ We now know that even a ‘small’ nuclear war – between India and Pakistan, say – could have climate impacts which would cause billions of deaths. ‘General’ or ‘central’ wars would do for just about all of us. Ellsberg was foiled when he proposed changing US targeting policy so that Moscow would not be destroyed in a first strike: at a NATO meeting, he was told that even if SAC agreed to spare Moscow, the French would not. Moscow remained a prime target for French nukes – and presumably for British ones, as well. Over time, Ellsberg writes, the Russians and the Americans built a ‘doomsday machine’ very like the one Terry Southern envisaged in his script for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. To protect them against surprise attack, American and Russian nuclear weapons are numerous, widely dispersed, on hair-trigger alert. In case the civilian or military leadership is killed, or unable to communicate, the duty to launch those weapons has been delegated to pretty much anyone capable of doing so. If the computers say a nuclear first strike is incoming, if seismographs report massive, blast-style earth tremors, if 1 I knew Sam Cohen, too, and he considered his Bomb to be a moral weapon, as it killed fewer people than the Hydrogen Bomb, and left most of the physical infrastructure intact and potentially usable . . . at least once radiation levels dropped. Sam was insane, of course, but most of the people Ellsberg encountered on board the nuclear weapons project appear to have been insane, in the same way. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk contact with the leadership breaks down . . . someone will still be there to push the button/insert the key code/flip the switch. Ellsberg considers the bombing of civilians – whatever the weapons used – to be a terrorist atrocity, not an act of war. He calls the ongoing nuclear standoff between NATO and Russia a ‘moral catastrophe’. If you’re interested in how close our silly species has come to wreaking its own imminent demise, this is a valuable and fascinating book by a committed activist and excellent writer. Alex Cox is a film-maker and writer. He blogs at Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk An ‘Unhelpful’ Contribution? Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands. Richard Sakwa London: I.B. Tauris, 2014, £18.99 h/b, 297 pages, notes, index Scott Newton There is fake history as well as fake news. Fake history exists when a version of some historical episode is created which bears little resemblance to what actually occurred but perpetuates a mythological version of it convenient (usually) to those in power. There are many examples. The so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 is one, venerable case: the story that Parliament overthrew James II, the ‘bad’ Catholic King keen to turn his country into an absolute monarchy similar to Louis XIV's France, and replaced him with the Protestant William III, respectful of the British Constitution and its ancient liberties, in a bloodless coup. In fact the ejection of James was prelude to a savage little civil war (fought out mostly in Ireland and Scotland) followed by the persecution and repression of both Catholics and Protestant Dissenters, and also lead to a long, dark era in Irish history. In the much more recent past we have two glaring studies in fake history: the Venezuelan crisis, where naked US imperialism has been engaged in a long destabilisation campaign against the governments of Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro, and the Ukrainian crisis, which has threatened to spark off a new Cold War. We are very fortunate to have the real picture of what has been happening in Ukraine set out for us in Richard Sakwa’s erudite and very well- informed Frontline Ukraine. The story – as told by the mainstream media, in the USA, the UK and much of the EU – is that the crisis was the outcome of growing tension between Moscow and Kiev. It was caused by Russian opposition to the efforts of Ukrainian nationalists, backed by mass popular mobilisations – as demonstrated both in the ‘Orange’ revolution of 2004 and the Maidan revolution of 2014 – to transform Ukraine from being a corrupt and repressive post-Soviet basket case run by pro-Russian oligarchs into a Western liberal democracy and EU member. This ambition has never been accepted by Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Putin’s Russia which aims to turn its ‘near abroad’, notably Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Georgia – what Sakwa identifies as the ‘borderlands’ between Russia and the West – into satellite states with open doors for a combination of xenophobic politicians, dodgy businesses and Mafia bosses, all propped up by increasingly repressive military and security establishments looking to Moscow rather than Brussels and Washington. Putin, a former KGB officer unwilling and unable (it is said) to escape from the secretive and authoritarian mindset typical of that organisation, has embarked on an attempt to recreate something of the old Soviet bloc, replacing Communist ideology with Greater Russian chauvinism. This campaign has been characterised by determination to reverse what are seen as the humiliations of the Yeltsin era and to restore Russia to the position of geopolitical power it enjoyed during both the Tsarist and Communist eras. The pursuit of this vision has led to armed intervention in Georgia (2008), the seizure and occupation of the Crimea (2014) and active military support for rebels in the south and east of Ukraine fighting to establish breakaway republics sympathetic to Moscow rather than Kiev. Russian expansionism and interference in the Ukrainian civil war has, in turn, led to Western retaliation, in the form of economic sanctions. An international crisis has resulted, fuelled by provocative rhetoric from Russia. Along with differences between Washington and Moscow concerning Syria and events in Venezuela, this stand-off has propelled the world to the verge of a new Cold War. Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, meticulously deconstructs this narrative. He produces a very different story, backed by copious documentation and mastery of a wide range of primary and secondary sources. His work, informed by decades of experience formed by teaching, researching, and writing, displays an understanding of the complexities and deep historical legacies at work in the crisis in Ukraine. In so doing it presents a highly plausible revisionist account which puts the West in a poor light and treats Putin’s Russia as a nation which, for all its faults and problems (Sakwa is under no illusions here), is more sinned against than sinning. Sakwa argues that Ukraine is the epicentre of two crises. One, the Ukrainian crisis, is caused by a fracture within the country between two types of nationalism, one identified as ‘monist’ and the other as ‘pluralist’. Each is the product of historical, geographical, economic and cultural divisions going back many years. Monist nationalism tends to dominate the centre and west of Ukraine. It aims to build a unified nation state, run from a Parliament in Kiev, with limited devolution to the regions and with Ukrainian as the official language. It is suspicious of Russia, seeing Moscow as the enemy of Ukrainian Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk self-determination during both the Tsarist and Soviet years and as responsible for the catastrophe of the 1930s ‘Holodomor', the great famine in which millions died (numbers vary enormously, from 3 to 7 million). Monists wish to see their country closely aligned with the West, in the form of the EU in particular, to escape from Russian influence. Many are political and economic liberals, believing in constitutional democracy, clean government and free markets. However there is another version of this tradition, manifested in the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalist (OUN), led for many years by Stepan Bandera until his assassination by the KGB in 1959, which embraced the politics of the Far Right, racism and xenophobia. Anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalists fought with the Nazi Germans on the Russian front in 1941-45 and to this day some continue to profess National Socialist ideas. The pluralist tradition, on the other hand, is to be found at its strongest in the south and east of the country, especially in the Donbass region, and in the Crimea. Many inhabitants here speak Russian as their first language. Families and businesses have close ties with Russia; the economy of the region is characterised by heavy industry and military-related production and greatly reliant on the Russian market. Pluralists argue that Ukraine should be a non-aligned federal state, on friendly terms with Moscow, with Russian as the joint official language. Both monists and pluralists are committed to Ukrainian independence but believe in two very different versions. The crisis in Ukraine fermented over at least a decade but the catalyst for its eruption was the 2014 Maidan revolution. This started out as a mass protest against the corrupt and incompetent administration of Viktor Yanukovych, who opted to sign a financial agreement with Moscow rather than an Association Agreement with the EU. Thousands descended on the Maidan (the central square in Kiev). The government, after some hesitation, opted for repression. The demonstrators fought back, assisted by armed militias committed to the radical nationalist outlook which had characterised the pro-Nazis of the Bandera years. Yanukovych’s government collapsed and he fled to Russia. A monist administration took over in Kiev, but it, along with new President Petro Poroshenko, was heavily influenced by the Far Right (as was the subsequent administration, elected in the autumn of 2014). Under their influence, Soviet monuments were destroyed, a bill was drawn up to establish Ukrainian as sole official language. Kiev also began to talk about repudiating the agreement with Moscow under which Russia had the right to station its Black Sea Fleet at Sebastopol (the only all year round warm water Russian naval base) in the Crimea until 2042. Protests spread throughout south and east Ukraine. Sometimes the response was ferocious. There was a massacre of anti-Maidan demonstrators in Odessa by militant right-wing nationalists (the official death Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk toll was 48 dead and 247 injured but Sakwa points to local reports which suggest the number of deaths ran into the hundreds).1 These disturbances set off the second crisis, the Ukraine crisis. This interacted with the Ukrainian crisis and led to the most serious confrontation, between Russia on the one side and the USA and the EU on the other, since the end of the Cold War. It started when Russia, determined not to lose the key strategic asset of its Sebastopol naval base, occupied the Crimea, which had been part of Russia until 1954. (Sakwa comments that this was a ‘remarkably smooth and peaceful takeover’.2) Soon afterwards, the mobilisation of popular discontent in south and east Ukraine turned into an insurgency. Breakaway People’s Republics (a deliberate echo of the politics of the Soviet era) were established in Donetsk and Lugansk. Armed forces from Kiev were sent to quell the rebellion. They failed to do so in the face of fierce local resistance backed (to what extent is still not clear) by Moscow. Various cease-fires have followed and broken down; the conflict is frozen but not resolved. Putin’s seizure of Crimea coming after the invasion of Georgia some six years earlier, along with his support for the rebels in Donetsk and Lugansk and a $700 billion Russian rearmament drive,3 led to accusations in the West, especially in Washington, that Russia had abandoned diplomacy for brute force and wished to undermine the post-Cold War international system. These accusations were the prelude to the stationing of NATO forces in the Baltic republics as insurance of support should Moscow’s acquisitive eyes turn on them. Both Washington and Brussels supported the Maidan revolutionaries and their determination to turn Ukraine towards the West and break away from Russia influence. The international climate deteriorated as Europe once again became the site of a stand-off between the great powers, with most of the responsibility being laid at Putin’s door. Sakwa is having none of it. He argues that Putin is reacting to a series of Western measures seen by Moscow as threatening and provocative. These include the establishment of missile defence systems in Eastern Europe to ‘within a rocket’s throw from Moscow’, the expansion of NATO towards Russia’s borders (this was a key feature of the 2008 Georgia crisis) and support for the nationalists in Ukraine. For Moscow all of this amounts to a repudiation of commitments given to Mikhail Gorbachev at the conclusion of the Cold War that NATO would not move east and a rejection of his model for post Cold War 1 Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine, pp. 97-8. 2 Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine, p. 100. 3 Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine, p. 222. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk international co-operation. Gorbachev had liked to speak about ‘our common European home’ and an international security system in which Russia would co-operate with the West, possibly joining NATO. The Soviet leader had envisaged a pluralist global order in which countries from differing politico- economic traditions, including those following varieties of capitalist and socialist developmental paths, would work together for the sake of world peace and prosperity.4 Instead, however, the United States and its allies in NATO and the EU have consistently pushed for what Sakwa calls a ‘monist’ international order characterised not by variety but by the spread of free market capitalism and liberal democracy throughout the globe. (This is a combination highly congenial to international corporate business and finance, whose welfare has been long equated by Washington with the national interest.) Through this ‘monist’ order, political freedom is identified completely with economic liberalism. Taking the line that the Cold War did not end with a negotiated peace between the superpowers but with the defeat of the USSR and the collapse of socialism as a viable alternative to capitalism, the West has regarded governments not prepared to accept its view of how the world should be arranged as undemocratic and subversive and in need of diplomatic, and, if necessary, military restraint. This is a stance that recalls the Cold War strategy of containment. What Sakwa (following Yeltsin) calls the ‘cold peace’ of the era since 1991 therefore has an ideological dimension, although he steers away from describing it in those terms. He prefers to say, reasonably enough, that the Russian actions in the Crimea and eastern Ukraine (and, before those, in Georgia in 2008) are driven by a determination to push back against the triumphalist extension of Western influence, complete with hostile alliance system, to its own border. What is at stake for Moscow is the national security of Russia itself, which would face a profound threat were the Black Sea Fleet forced to move away from Sebastopol and Ukraine became a member of NATO. Indeed even a scenario in which Ukraine participates in the EU but not NATO presents a strategic challenge to Moscow, given the provisions of the 2007 4 Gorbachev has continued to advocate an international settlement of this kind. See his interview by Stephen Sackur on the BBC’s Hardtalk, broadcast on 10 November 2014 ( Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Lisbon Treaty. This requires EU members to align their defence and security policies with those of NATO and to strengthen arrangements designed to facilitate a ‘Common Foreign and Security Policy’.5 The Lisbon Treaty was followed up by the 2017 decision on the part of 25 EU governments to establish a 5 billion euro defence fund promoting weapons development along with military planning and joint operations. Putin’s counter to this, in keeping with Gorbachev's pluralist approach, has been to call for a federal, neutral and non-aligned Ukraine, co-operating economically with both Brussels and Moscow, with its independence and security guaranteed by international agreement. The Western response to Putin’s refusal to play ball with EU and NATO expansion has, throughout, been to ignore his pluralist agenda and to call for Russian acquiescence in the European spread of liberal capitalism. Yet when this was tried, in the Yeltsin era, the results were disastrous: the rouble collapsed, businesses and whole industries failed and living standards plummeted. Indeed, their decline was vertiginous, surpassing ‘anything endured by any country in the great depression of the 1930s’.6 Putin’s long period of dominance in Russian politics is rooted in part in his success in retrieving the country from this disastrous pass. In doing so, he has restored some of the international influence lost in the Yeltsin years and arrested and partially reversed Russia’s rapid 1990s journey to the free market: 51 per cent of the economy is now owned by the State, and other continuities with the Soviet era are still visible in social as well as military policy. This is why it is perhaps a mistake to ignore the existence of a modest ideological dimension to the ongoing confrontation between Russia and the West: in resisting Western encroachment Putin is, by default, also resisting the expansion of its politico-economic system, called by many ‘neoliberalism’. He is challenging it at several points: in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, in the Middle East (the intervention in Syria), and in Latin America (support not only for Cuba but also the beleaguered Bolivarist government in Venezuela). Russia has also established a Eurasian Economic Union in conjunction with the now independent republics of former Soviet Central Asia. Through this organization as well as bilaterally, it has co-operated with China in the new Silk Road 5 Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine, p. 30. 6 Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine, p. 28; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Allen Lane, 2007), ch. 4 shows how in both Poland and Russia the transitional aid needed to sustain the economy following the ending of the Communist regimes was made conditional on the adoption of free market capitalism, notwithstanding that the main political parties in both countries wanted to pursue a social-democratic course. The results were disastrous to economy and society in both countries. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk initiatives and in the creation of the Shanghai Co-operation Organization, dedicated to defence and security co-operation. These groupings cannot, of course, be said to amount to an emerging socialist bloc of nations. All the same, along with its partners in the BRICS group of countries (the acronym standing for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) Russia has built the foundations of a ‘new “Second World” alliance system’ which has ‘started to create its own financial instruments and institutions of international governance.’ 7 Sakwa's argument that the Ukrainian crisis results from the destabilization of the country by forces committed to militantly anti-Russian nationalism, egged on by former Soviet bloc countries and external interference by the United States and the European Union, propelled by a dogmatic and triumphalist liberal universalism, is highly persuasive. His book should be read by anyone keen to understand the roots of this conflict and gain an insight into the world view of decision makers in the USA and the EU (including, for now, the UK, whose support for boosting NATO’s presence in Eastern Europe would ‘only pour fuel on an already raging fire’8). The election of Trump to the US Presidency, with his support for protectionism and greater interest in hemispheric than in European affairs, post-dated publication of Sakwa’s book. It may have put a dampener on US globalism and liberal universalism and on the Ukrainian imbroglio for now. In Ukraine clashes have tended to die down. It is, however, too early to say whether or not the situation there, along with the wider international climate, will return to the fevered and dangerous state of the period after the Maidan revolution of 2014. One final thought. There can be very few academics now operating who possess Richard Sakwa’s expertise in modern Russian (including Soviet and post-Soviet) international history. Why, then, do we not seen more of him in the mainstream media, both broadcasting and print? He has been on RT, discussing the Skripal poisonings amongst other things9 (no doubt leading some to suspect him of being an apologist for Putin, which he certainly is not). 7 Sakwa does point out (on p. 253) that this is as yet a weak grouping, and that ‘The sanctions on Russia have exposed the vulnerability of this putative Second World to the geopolitical pressure of the First World.’ It also remains to be seen whether Brazil remains one of the BRICS group after its Presidential election at the end of 2018 resulted in victory for right-wing candidate Jair Bolsonaro, to rejoicing in Washington. Bolsonaro’s Pinochet-style fusion of free market capitalism with authoritarianism threatens to reverse Brazil’s recent social reforms, its progress towards greater democracy, and its backing on the world scene for international economic justice and environmental protection. 8 Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine, p. 231 9 See Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk But I have never seen him on (for example) BBC or Channel 4 (this does not of course mean he has never been interviewed there but it does suggest that any appearances have been somewhat limited). Why? Is this an accidental oversight, or are his opinions deemed by news and current affairs editors to be ‘unhelpful’? Scott Newton is Emeritus Professor of Modern British and International History at Cardiff University. His most recent book is The Reinvention of Britain 1960-2016: a Political and Economic History (London: Routledge, 2017).10 10 This was reviewed in Lobster 74 by Dan Atkinson at Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk When Freedom Shrieked and the Daily Mail cheered Reporting on Hitler: Rothay Reynolds and the British Press in Nazi Germany Will Wainewright London: Biteback Publishing, 2017, £20.00, h/b John Newsinger In 1939, the leftwing publisher Victor Gollancz issued a powerful indictment of the Nazis, When Freedom Shrieked. It quickly sold out, going into a second edition within two weeks. What is surprising is that the book was written by Rothay Reynolds, the man who had been the Daily Mail’s correspondent in Germany since 1921 and who completely disagreed with the pro-Nazi stand taken throughout the 1930s by the paper’s proprietor, Lord Rothermere. Will Wainewright’s new book explores this remarkable situation and it’s a story made all the more relevant by the revival of the Far Right today. Reynolds had started out covering Tsarist Russia for the Daily News, reporting on the 1905 revolution. He had been sympathetic to Tsar Nicholas, regarding him as a reformer, trying to modernise the country. He left Russia in 1912, working briefly in Berlin for The Standard. During the First World War he worked for British Military Intelligence, MI7 (along with A A Milne!) and he eventually ended up in Berlin working for the Daily Mail. In October 1923 he had the dubious honour of interviewing the virtually unknown leader of the infant Nazi Party, a certain Adolf Hitler. Reynolds regarded this as notable only because it gave him ‘the chance of seeing an odd type of unbalanced fanatic’. (p. 62) It was, he recalled, not really an interview. Hitler subjected him to a ‘diatribe’, speaking ‘almost as if he was addressing a mass meeting’. A month later the Nazis staged their Munich putsch and Hitler was thrown into prison, a hero of the German Far Right. Throughout the rest of the 1920s, the Nazis were of little account; then the onset of the Great Depression provided them with their great opportunity. Cheered on by Lord Rothermere and the Daily Mail, the Nazis began their rise to power. Reynolds interviewed Hitler once again on 26 September 1930. By this time, Hitler’s followers were no longer a small band of Nazi thugs in Munich. He was now the leader of a powerful mass party with over a hundred members in the Reichstag. Rothermere had already declared his support for Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the Nazis in the Daily Mail’s pages. His own article celebrating the Nazi electoral success, ‘A Nation Reborn’, had appeared in the Daily Mail on 24 September and was actually reprinted in the Nazi newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter. Hitler told Reynolds that he was amazed that a foreigner like Rothermere ‘should understand what we have in our hearts’. The two men were to correspond regularly throughout the 1930s, meeting on a number of occasions, and Rothermere actually sent Hitler a photograph of himself in a solid gold frame as a testimony to their friendship. Reynolds, meanwhile, was appalled by the Nazi assault on democracy, on civil liberties, and more particularly by the persecution of the churches and of Germany’s Jewish population. According to Wainewright, the Daily Mail’s coverage of the Jewish Boycott that the Nazis unleashed provided ‘clear evidence of proprietorial interference in London’. (p. 99) He goes on to observe that the ‘easy ride given to Hitler on the Jewish question by the Daily Mail gives away the malign influence of Rothermere’. (p. 101) But what of Reynolds himself? He had to continually ‘walk the tightrope between Rothermere’s overbearing influence and his own journalistic integrity’ and Wainewright concludes, as far as the Jewish Boycott was concerned, ‘this was impossible and he fell short’. This obviously raises the question of whether or not anyone working for the Daily Mail, either then or now, can make any claim to possess journalistic integrity. Rothermere also threw his support behind Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists (BUF), hoping, albeit briefly, that Mosley could do for Britain what Hitler was doing for Germany. For a while, staff at the Daily Mail actually began turning up for work ‘wearing black shirts . . . in solidarity’ with their proprietor. (p. 133) The most infamous Daily Mail pro-fascist headline was, of course, the admirably unambiguous ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ that appeared in the paper on 15 January 1934. The paper urged young people to join the BUF and help change Britain. This alignment with Mosley did not last long and Wainewright repeats the generally accepted view that Rothermere was put off by the BUF’s violence and vicious anti-Semitism. This has never seemed terribly convincing. Much more likely is the fact that it was increasingly clear that the British capitalist class did not need to turn to Fascism to save itself, but could rely on the Conservatives to run the country and keep the lower orders down. One can be absolutely certain that, if there had been any real threat from the Left in Britain, Rothermere would have embraced street violence and anti-Semitism without any hesitation whatsoever. Reynolds was informed of Rothermere’s coming break with the BUF when he received a telegram from London telling him that ‘The blackshirts are in the wash and the colour is running very fast’. (p. 135) He hoped this might signal a Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk break with Hitler as well, but this was not to be. Even though Rothermere turned his back on British Fascism, he remained enamoured with the Nazis. All Reynolds’ efforts to report on the real nature of Nazi rule came up against the fact that ‘his press baron employer was utterly blind to its awful reality’. (p. 136) Indeed, Reynolds was increasingly marginalised and by 1938 there were only ‘a handful of articles carrying Reynolds’ byline’. (p. 208) Reynolds seems to have finally reached breaking point with the Nazis’ anti-Semitic pogrom, ‘Kristallnacht’ and the Munich Agreement. He had had enough and resigned. How did he last so long? Wainewright offers one tantalising tidbit that might help explain this, but it was ‘a relatively late discovery during the research for this book’ (p. 278): Reynolds close friendship with MI6’s head of station in Berlin, Frank Foley. He rejects the idea that Reynolds was some sort of spy, but nevertheless this relationship obviously need further exploration and one can only hope that Wainewright digs further. Reynolds returned to Britain, wrote When Freedom Shrieked, and, once war had broken out, went off to Italy as a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. When Italy joined the conflict, he sought refuge in the British Middle East and died from the effects of malaria in Jerusalem on 20 August 1940. Wainewright has written a very useful book. Although this review has focussed on his account of Reynolds, Wainewright also has a great deal of interest to say about his fellow correspondents in Berlin and the various proprietors they worked for. Certainly, Rothermere seems to have been the worst, although Clement Attlee did apparently describe Lord Beaverbrook as ‘the only evil man I ever met’. (p. 121) John Newsinger is working on a book on the Labour Party's foreign, defence and colonial policies. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America Nancy MacLean Michigan (USA): Scribe Publishing, 2017, £10.99 Bartholomew Steer This book ticks a lot of boxes. First, it does not shrink from acknowledging the existence of a conspiracy working against the interests of the ordinary folk. That it centres on neo-liberal economic theories and the money of – amongst others – the Koch brothers and the Mont Pelerin Society will come as no surprise to readers of this journal. The surprise may be the scope and depth revealed. Second, it respects the evidence and produces chapter and verse collated by an eminent historian who had the sense to fall on the archives of her anti-hero James Buchanan, the Nobel Prize winning neo-liberal economist. Third, it does not fail to identify the smoking guns and culprits responsible for many of the bad things going on in the world. Finally, it is written with verve and plenty of entertaining anecdotes. Other reviews have pointed to weaknesses1 but these are forgivable and do not undermine the gist of the story. Moreover McLean has provided a robust defence.2 The links drawn to the politics of the deep south of the USA and its attachment to slavery provides a persuasive link explaining why certain universities (principally George Mason University, South Carolina) have promoted ideas of elite interests – and damn as unnatural anything that would threaten those interests. It also shows why James Buchanan found a convivial home and sponsors for his ideas. Others have noted the pervasive trail of slavery on our culture3 and McLean’s arguments ring 1 2 3 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk true. The connection to the defender of slavery, Senator John C Calhoun, is clear and the association damning. If you have never heard of him you will learn a lot about where many of the ideas of the Hard Right come from.4 The focus of the book is the long struggle of neo-liberal ideas to develop and reach their current level of ascendancy in the public sphere. From the first it appears that, despite Buchanan’s wishes, there have been plenty of hangers-on and promoters of his ideas who see in neutral sounding concepts (such as public choice theory) the hammers to destroy the New Deal/social democrat/Keynesian thinking that dominated for so long. Buchanan worked with better known figures such as Milton Friedman and advised General Pinochet in Chile; but it has only been since the Koch Brothers became convinced that Buchanan provided the credibility to advance the Kochs’ agenda that his ideas had the financial push required to achieve the dominance they now have in elite thinking. Buchanan wanted to work on the cast-iron theories that would bolster right-wing thinking and inform policy-making. Public choice theory has achieved some success – a success that rests not on theory but on its friends relentlessly pushing it to the gullible. For example, it seizes on the fact that actors in the public sector may be guided by self-interest but seems to ignore the rather larger risk of private interests dominating on the dubious basis that the market cannot be wrong. If it all were at the level of competition between ideas it would not be so bad but fair competition is not what this book shows. What is revealed is the way constitutional blocks are being put in place to prevent governments ever being in a position to challenge elite interests. This means that, as in Chile, there can be changes in government, but no ability for governments to enact changes in laws to put their policies into action. The core Hard Right beliefs or mantras of: taxation and fiscal blocks on wealth and information, trade agreements ruled by corporate interests, education policy promoting ‘free’ or academy schools, voter registration schemes denying votes to poor and black people, the promotion of corporate lobbying directly of politicians and governments – all find their inspiration and funding from the neo-liberal institutions described in the book. Tellingly it describes how young people are disengaging from politics as ‘disgust spreads with a system that is so beholden to corporate power, so impermeable to deep change, and so inimical to majority interests’. (p. 4 His influence continues to this day, as George Mason University recently launched the ‘James Buchanan Fellowship’. See Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk 168) This is no accident and may even be being promoted by the latest generation of right-wing manipulators, as the inquiries into social media involvement in the Trump election and the Brexit referendum suggests. That the gilets jaunes and protesters in Greece, Italy and other countries persist in asking for government to act in their interests only girds right-wingers into resisting the claims being made on their wealth and control. This is the public choice with which the book concludes and readers of the book will be in no doubt as to what is at stake. Some of MacLean’s critics have accused her of peddling a conspiracy theory. She responded to that charge. ‘As a scholar, I understand the problems of conspiracy theories and while I never called this movement a conspiracy in the book, we do face a problem that our language has not caught up to our world. In hindsight, I wish I’d said more about that in my book because we do not yet have a conceptual system adequate to capture what is happening. On the one hand, yes, absolutely, there is a big movement out there on the right that has varied sources and whose many members are openly declaring their intentions. On the other hand, there is also an audacious elite project underway that is not open with even these rank-and-file followers about its endgame. Economic inequality has now advanced to the point that several hundred incredibly wealthy donors, who are hostile to our democracy as it currently operates and are led by a messianic multibillionaire, have contributed vast amounts of dark money to fund dozens upon dozens of ostensibly separate but actually connected organizations that are exploiting what Buchanan’s team taught about “the rules of the game” of modern governance in a cold-eyed bid to bend our institutions and policies to goals they know most voters do not share (such as the repeal of Obamacare without replacement). And they’re operating within the law, informed by some of the best legal talent money can buy, so it’s not a conspiracy, by definition, because that involves illegality. The world has never seen anything like it before; no wonder it’s hard to find the right term to depict it. It’s a vexing challenge to understand, let alone stop, and in hindsight I wish had been more explicit about that conceptual challenge. But so far no criticism has made me question the fundamentals of the research, the narrative, or the interpretation. I stand by those.’ 5 5 See note 2. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk My reaction on reading the book was to see it as showing a vast conspiracy to limit the scope of democracy, and damage the interests of ordinary people. Despite McLean’s own equivocation and the risks associated with calling out a conspiracy, I stick with my gut instinct and McLean’s final judgement, which I think meets the duck criterion in full. In other words if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks . . . it’s probably a duck. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk What just happened Crashed How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World Adam Tooze London: Allen Lane, 2018, h/b, £30.00 Robin Ramsay I once heard a history professor describe another history professor I knew as ‘a very good, old-fashioned narrative historian’. I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant but I got the pejorative message. Well, call me old-fashioned as well, because I like a historian who sets out to tell me what happened. Which is exactly what Professor Tooze does.1 Tooze is new to me but his previous books had great reviews and this one has, too.2 Tooze is a ‘Left-liberal historian’ (p. 21), who understands economic theory, economic history, banking, international finance and what is conventionally called political economy, but which might be better called the politics of economics – as in, for example: why did the German state behave the way it did during the banking crisis of 2007-10? All those elements are woven together in this dense, exhilarating history of much of the world in the last decade. Some sections on international finance I found a bit of a struggle because of unfamiliar concepts,3 but overall, if you can understand – say – William Keegan in the Observer or Larry Elliot in the Guardian, you will understand this. The major elements in this story are the fall and rise of Russia; the rise 1 He writes on his website ‘my métier is narrative history’ 2 See 3 The book contains many acronyms. For example, on p. 60 MBS appears for the first time. I looked for a glossary and found none. On p. 204 FOMC appears. This is not in the index. Of course Google answered my questions (MBS = mortgage-backed securities; FOMC = Federal Reserve Open Market Committee) but a glossary would have helped. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk of China; the attempts by the EU to move towards a more federal system; the growth of global banking and, in particular, the development of securitisation – the creation of financial ‘products’ largely based on US mortgages; and the growth of the American trade deficit and its funding by the creation of government debt, large amounts of which were bought by China. This last created a ‘balance of financial terror’ (p. 35) because China’s dollar holdings were too big for the US economy to be allowed to fail. Into this the banking crisis of 2007-10 erupted, unforeseen by those with ‘the Davos mind-set’ (p. 5): bankers, politicians, financial regulators – or economists. This was also a ‘crisis of macroeconomics’.4 (p. 15) And as the cowboys on the fringes of the banking system in the US got to work selling houses to Americans who couldn’t afford them, bankers bundled these new debts and existing mortgages into ‘products’ and sold them round the world. Securitisation, the creation of these new financial ‘products’, was thought to spread financial risk. It did indeed – but not in the sense of diminishing it. It just spread it, infecting much of the global banking system. This is one of Tooze’s major points. Although initially European political leaders dismissed the failing US and UK banks as an ‘Anglo-American problem’, by 2008 one quarter of all securitised mortgages were owned abroad. (p. 73) This is also a story of what happens when the banks are unregulated. Prior to 2008 the financial system was essentially left to its own devices. The childish nonsense of free market theories5 was accepted by almost everyone who mattered, politicians included. Tooze notes that it was the social democrats in the US and the UK, the ‘new’ Democrats (Clinton) and New Labour (Brown and Blair), who took all this free market nonsense seriously and gave the money men their heads. ‘It was, therefore, no coincidence that it was now Labour in Britain and the Democrats in the United States who were showing such energy in the struggle to fix the banking crisis. It was a monster they had helped to create.’ (p. 192) 4 See also Eshe Nelson, ‘The reinvention of economics after the crash’ at 5 When I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s, in the economics subsid course I did, we were given examples of the free market theorists then associated with the Institute for Economic Affairs to kick around in tutorials. Even us dumb social science students could see they were nonsense. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Even after the initial crash, when efforts were made to create a global regulatory system: ‘The regulators were utterly subservient to the logic of the businesses they were supposed to be regulating. The draft text of what would become the Basel II regulations was prepared for the Basel Committee by the Institute of International Finance, the chief lobby group of the global banking industry.’ (pp. 86/7) This global financial crisis became entangled with the on-going Eurozone problems. Was the EU a federation? Not really. There was still widespread opposition – on both left and right – to the EU’s federal ambitions. The Lisbon Treaty, another step towards a federal structure, was signed in 2007 and promptly rejected by the Irish in a referendum. Critically, while there was a European Central Bank (ECB), it had neither the legal nor financial power of the American Federal Reserve and could not serve as bank-of-last-resort for the Eurozone the way the Fed did in the US. So the Eurozone response to the crisis was patchy and ultimately inadequate. ‘Extend and pretend’ – extend the loans to the failing banks and/or bankrupt states and pretend all will be well eventually – became the initial strategy. In the end, through a variety of stratagems barely discussed in public, the US Federal Reserve became the bank-of-last-resort to many of the failing European banks. The Fed pumped trillions of dollars of loans to banks, ‘overwhelmingly in Europe’. (p. 13) If it began as an American crisis, the immediate solution was also largely American. This was the result of: ‘. . . a remarkable and bitterly ironic inversion. Whereas since the 1970s the incessant mantra of the spokespeople of the financial industry had been free markets and light touch regulation, what they were now demanding was the mobilization of all the resources of the state to save society’s financial infrastructure from a threat of systemic implosion, a threat they likened to a military emergency’. (p. 165) A thread through all this is the rivalry between Russia and the USA. This is the one area in which the author doesn’t do justice to the events concerned. The US rejection of Russia’s desire to end the military rivalry is dismissed in a sentence (p. 131). The so-called ‘colour revolutions’ in the former Soviet satellites are presented as unproblematic with no hint of covert US influence conveyed. The political weight of the military-industrial-intelligence complex in US domestic politics is not mentioned. But these are relatively minor details in the broad sweep of his narrative. In the end, after the trillions have been lent to the failing banks, most of Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the bankers still got their bonuses. And while 47 bankers in all were subsequently sentenced for crimes, only one was American and there was no- one from the City of London.6 The bill for all this got dumped on the ordinary citizens and the politics of ‘austerity’ was imposed a large chunk of the world. At the G20 meeting in Toronto in 2010: ‘After the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, at a time when, according to the OECD, 47 million people were unemployed across the rich world, and the total figure for underemployed and discouraged workers was closer to 80 million, the members of the G20 committed themselves to simultaneously halving their deficits over the next three years. It was the householder fallacy expanded to the global scale. It was a recipe for an agonisingly protracted and incomplete recovery’ (p. 354). The ‘householder fallacy’ is the belief, common among economically ignorant politicians, that a nation’s economy should be viewed in the same way as a householder’s domestic budget.7 Borrowed too much? Time to cut back spending. This ignores what ‘Keynesian’ macroeconomists call the reverse multiplier effect: government cuts mean less economic activity, less tax income and higher unemployment. At best, cuts slow the process of recovery down. Sometimes they make the situation worse. In the EU the problem has been that a version of the ‘householder fallacy’ has been the economic policy of Germany since it recovered from the war. Having had the hyper-inflation of the 1920s, the German policy-making elites are acutely sensitive to the threat of inflation. Not only does Germany have the biggest and most successful manufacturing economy in the EU, they also have an industrial relations system (designed by a delegation from the British trade unions after WW2) which minimises industrial conflict. These two factors have enabled the German elites to produce enough economic growth to enable them to successfully pursue their ‘householder’ policy without the downsides which usually accompany it. And they have imposed it on the rest of the Euro zone, whether or not it actually works for other countries. This is perfectly illustrated by the example of Greece. If you look at the Wikipedia entry for the Greek political party, Syriza, under ‘Government formation’ you will see this: ‘See also Tenth austerity package (Greece), Eleventh austerity package 6 See 7 See, for example, Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Greece), Twelfth austerity package (Greece), Thirteenth austerity package (Greece)’.8 Thirteen austerity packages, applying the same failed policies, repeatedly shrinking the Greek economy and forcing the emigration of about 10% of the population. The analogy with using leeches is apt. Patient not improving after application of leeches? Apply more leeches! In the second last section of the book Tooze surveys the rise of nationalism as European citizens turned away from the EU in response to its austerity policies. Greece and Portugal half turned to the left and were swatted down. When he was Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis put his proposals to reduce Greece’s debt payments to Dr. Wolfgang Schauble, German finance minister and president of the euro zone finance ministers, known as the Eurogroup. ‘After I had recited our government’s plea for a substantial renegotiation of the so-called “Greek economic programme”, which had the troika’s fingerprints all over it, Dr Schäuble astounded me with a reply that should send shivers up the spine of every democrat: “Elections cannot be allowed to change an economic programme of a member state!” he said categorically.’ 9 If there has to a be a villain in this tale, Mr Schauble would do. ‘[Schauble] has overseen a disastrous period in European history where its major step towards political and economic integration in the 1990s has delivered dysfunctional and divergent outcomes for the Member States. Some countries (Greece) has been ruined by the policies he championed while others are in serious trouble. Further, despite him claiming the monetary union has been successful, the fact is that the Eurozone is still together only because the ECB has been effectively violating the no bailout articles of the Treaty of Lisbon via its various quantitative easing programs since May 2010. Should it stayed within the “law” of the union, then several nations would have been forced into insolvency between 2010 and 2012.’10 But he was merely defending German interests as he saw them. 8 9 10 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The UK gets a lot of attention in this section because of the role of the City of London whence much of the financial chaos originated. Tooze recounts in detail Prime Minister Cameron’s attempts to persuade the EU to leave the City off-shore, outside the EU’s regulatory remit. And Cameron got what he wanted, guarantees from the EU about not regulating the City. But three days before this was announced the UK referendum process had started and his triumph in Brussels was swept aside and forgotten.11 This is a great book to which I cannot do justice in a review. There is a particular pleasure to be had engaging with a really big brain and Tooze has one. 11 See Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Into the quagmire MANUFACTURING TERRORISM When Governments Use Fear to Justify Foreign Wars and Control Society T. J. Coles Sussex (UK): Clairview Books, 2018, p/b, £14.99 Robin Ramsay One of the most influential books published in the English-speaking world since the Millennium was James Bamford’s 2001 Body of Secrets about the NSA. Although it attracted little attention initially, a nine page section about Operation Northwoods was noticed by the 9/11 sceptics. Northwoods was a 1962 Pentagon plan to commit a terrorist atrocity and blame it on Cuba, to provide the pretext for another invasion of the island.1 Subsequently, that short section has had a major influence on many of those studying the activities of the contemporary secret state. If the American state was capable of this, what else has it – and others – been doing? Since Bamford revealed Operation Northwoods people look at terrorist atrocities and ask themselves: Who really did this? Who benefits? Is this a false flag operation? Mr Coles2 is one of those people and the suspicion that we might be being conned by states’ secret arms pervades his new book. There is a chapter on ‘false flags’ – for which Northwoods is the exemplar – but which is almost entirely about the post-WW2 Gladio network in Europe and contains nothing about the UK; there is one on proxies, his ‘second step in the manufacture of terrorism’, which discusses US and/or UK sponsorship of 1 Defense Secretary McNamara apparently rejected the plan. The Northwoods documents can be seen at 2 The author has essays in Lobsters 67 and 68; and in issue 72 I reviewed an earlier book of his, Britain’s Secret Wars, at Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk terrorists in Libya and Syria; and one on blowback – the unintended domestic consequences of imperial adventures. There is also a chapter on simulations, faking an event. He discusses the Boston marathon bombing, which killed three people and injured hundreds more. He wonders about the identification of the two alleged bombers and tells us about a previous exercise conducted in Boston to deal with a bombing. Here it gets fuzzy. Even though the first version of the exercise was conducted a year before the actual bombings and the second version was not due until a month after the marathon, Coles reports someone who says that after the actual bombing, a voice on the PA system kept telling people that it wasn’t real, just a drill. Why is this of interest? Because, although Coles doesn’t refer to it, there is a body of conspiratorial research round the Boston bombing which believes the bombings didn’t take place, were faked. He does something similar with the 7/7 bombings, describing anti- terrorism/crisis management exercises conducted in London, which presumed a bombing on the Tube – as happened on 7/7. One such theoretical exercise was being conducted by a former policeman, Peter Power, when the 7/7 bombings took place. In Power’s exercise the three Tube stations he imagined being bombed were those actually being bombed. Coles reports this and the conclusion of the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee that it was just a striking coincidence. It certainly was. How do we know about the Power exercise? Because Power phoned into Radio 5 Live to report it after the bombings took place. I heard his call. He was stunned by the coincidence. So why tell us in detail about these two incidents? Describing the anti- terrorism exercises – in a chapter about faking an event – enables Coles to titillate our suspicions without committing himself to the absurd theories which surround Boston and 7/7. Coles’ central interest is in ‘ . . . terrorism attributed to Muslim extremists (“Islamic terror”). It is also about the incomparably greater violence of the state, both the state in general and its hidden hand in terrorism.’ Yes, the state has used ‘incomparably greater violence’ against Muslim countries than we have experienced in the UK. But has the state’s ‘hidden hand in terrorism’ been greater than Muslim violence in this country? Has state- sponsored or state-manipulated terror in the UK been greater than what we might call spontaneous or authentic Muslim violence? There is no question that some of the Jihadi attacks in this country have been carried out by people with whom the British state was in contact. As Craig Murray has pointed out: Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘. . . the Royal Navy had evacuated the Manchester bomber en route back to the UK after his Western backed terrorist jaunt in Libya; . . . the Manchester, Westminster and London Bridge terrorists all had extensive pre-existing relationships with the British security services. . . .’ 3 And that identifies the central issues: the role of the secret arms of the British state which, while apparently trying to prevent ‘terrorism’ here, use some of the same ‘terrorists’ in foreign policy adventures in the Middle East and elsewhere. But is there evidence of more than that? Not that I can see. What we do have is evidence of conflict within the state. The police’s desire to arrest individuals has been frustrated by MI5’s desire to monitor and recruit them; and occasionally this is complicated further by MI6’s desire to use them in their operations alongside the Americans. The author is much more certain about some things than I would be. For example, this on p. 6: ‘Compare this to the WTC [World Trade Centre] bombing in 1993: there is unanimous agreement that an FBI-produced bomb was used in a sting operation which resulted in an act of terrorism being allowed to take place.’ ‘Unanimous agreement that an FBI-produced bomb was used’ ? That simply is not true. There is wide agreement – from New York Times to the conspiratorial fringes – that the FBI mishandled the situation when they had an informant inside the bomb plot. Beyond that it gets very murky, very quickly.4 And there is this on p. 65: ‘. . . Home Secretary Theresa May’s “open door” policy for jihadis, circa 2011 to 2012, when Britain was facilitating the wars in Libya and Syria.’ An open door? At that point in the text there is footnote 195. This leads to a piece by Nafeez Ahmed,5 which, in turn, cites a report in Middle East Eye, headlined ‘“Sorted” by MI5: How UK government sent British-Libyans to fight Gaddafi’. Its first sentence is: ‘The British government operated an “open door” policy that allowed Libyan exiles and British-Libyan citizens to join the 2011 uprising that 3 4 See, for example, 5 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk toppled Muammar Gaddafi even though some had been subject to counter-terrorism control orders. . . .’ 6 So: the original source, Middle East Eye – which is reliable – reported there was an ‘open door’ policy for British-Libyans to leave the UK to go to Libya, not that there was ‘an “open door” policy for jihadis’. Coles states that Ramadan Abedi – the father of Manchester Arena suicide bomber Salman Abedi – was ‘a paid MI6 operative’ (p. 62) but offers no citation for the claim. Mark Curtis, working the same material, writes: ‘Ramadan Abedi is believed to have been a prominent member of the LIFG, which he joined in 1994. This was two years before MI6 covertly supported the LIFG in an attempt to assassinate Gaddafi, an operation initially revealed by former MI5 officer, David Shayler. At the time MI6 handed over money for the coup attempt, the LIFG was an affiliate of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, and LIFG leaders had various connections to his terror network.’7 Another source, Intel Today,8 quotes David Shayler as believing that Ramadan Abedi was an MI6 asset codenamed Tunworth.9 Since Shayler was on the Libya desk in MI5 at the time, his opinion on this is to be taken seriously10 and it seems very likely that the Manchester bomber’s father had been working with MI6 against Gaddafi. And then there are Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada. On p. 58 we are told that Abu Qatada was an ‘MI5 asset’ and Abu Hamza was an ‘MI6 asset’. Two journalists, David Rose and Richard Norton-Taylor, with access to the British spooks, reported that MI5 initially viewed Abu Qatada as ‘all mouth’ (Norton 6 See 7 ‘What will be the blowback for UK government after Libya revelations?’ 8 Produced by Ludwig De Braeckeleer, who has an entry on Wikispooks 9 10 Shayler’s whistle-blowing partner at the time, Annie Machon, discusses ‘Tunworth’ in her Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers (Sussex: The Book Guild, 2005), chapter 10, but was legally prevented from naming him. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Taylor) 11 and both Kamza and Qatada as ‘harmless rent-a-gobs’ (Rose).12 But, as for Abu Qatada’s connection to MI5, there is one story in The Times, dramatically headlined ‘Al-Qaeda cleric exposed as an MI5 double agent’.13 The text, however, does not justify the headline, saying: ‘Spain, France, Italy, Germany, the United States and Jordan all asked to question Abu Qatada about his links to al-Qaeda but were refused. Instead, MI5 agents held three meetings with the cleric, who bragged of his influence among young Islamic militants and insisted that they were no risk to Britain’s national security. He pledged to MI5 that he would not “bite the hand that fed him”. He also promised to “report anyone damaging the interests of this country”. Instead, he was recruiting for al-Qaeda training camps.’ The claim that Hamza was an ‘MI6 asset’ has footnote 157 next to it. That is a piece in the Daily Mail which does not say that Hamza was an MI6 asset.14 During Abu Hamza’s trial in the United States his lawyer claimed that Hamza ‘secretly worked for MI5’ – not MI6 – to ‘keep streets of London safe’.15 That Hamza also met MI5 is true. ‘Special Branch, the intelligence-gathering arm of Scotland Yard, had been talking to Abu Hamza since early 1997, when he was still preaching in Luton. In the classified records of the meetings he is referred to by the codename “damson berry”. Unknown to the police, MI5 had also begun meeting Abu Hamza at the behest of French intelligence; he was given the MI5 code number 910. . . Confidential memos of meetings between the imam of Finsbury Park and his MI5 and Special Branch contacts reveal a respectful, polite and often cooperative relationship. There were at least seven meetings between Abu Hamza and MI5 officers between 1997 and 11 12 13 Originally at 14 15 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk 2000.’16 So: Hamza and Qatada met MI5 and/or Special Branch, and, by the sounds of it, both men assured the British state that they were not a threat etc. They did so hoping to be left alone – which they were for a time – while they recruited young men for jihadi causes. Richard Barrett, head of counter-terrorism at MI6 during Hamza’s time as imam of Finsbury Park mosque, said of him during his trial in the U.S.: ‘At first, Hamza was regarded as bit of a buffoon, but it was thought that nobody would take him seriously. That viewed [sic] changed over time as his connections with foreign extremists in places like Yemen and Afghanistan became clear and he built up a group of very dedicated followers. He was deliberately trying to skate on the edge of legality and he was very sharp in identifying the limits of the law.’17 A number of British Islamists may have been recruited by MI5 or MI6 but that, in itself, tells us nothing sinister. This is S.O.P.. If some of those ‘assets’ remained Islamists, despite being recruited, this would also tell us nothing. As Coles points out, in Northern Ireland the Republican movement was eventually penetrated from top to bottom and still functioned.18 The question here is: how much more destructive would the Republicans and the Islamists have been had they not been penetrated by the British state? The central issue is to what extent are the British state’s anti-terrorism personnel encouraging or even promoting terrorism. For this is what is happening in the U.S.: state and local authorities, but mostly the FBI, are essentially creating Islamic terrorists – are, in the title of this book, manufacturing terrorism. Trevor Aaronson notes: ‘Of 508 defendants prosecuted in federal terrorism-related cases in the decade after 9/11, 243 were involved with an FBI informant, while 158 were the targets of sting operations.’19 16 17 18 Looking at this penetration of the IRA Coles writes (p. 112): ‘The anti-British IRA ended up as a quasi-proxy of the British state which played a deadly divide and rule game with the people of Ireland and Northern Ireland.’ This, surely, is overstating it. 19 Trevor Aaronson, ‘How the FBI created a terrorist’ at Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Of that kind of operation there is little evidence in the UK.20 The US and UK situations are not comparable. The UK has a significant Muslim population, some of whom support jihad. MI5 is having to monitor substantial numbers of actual or potential jihadis in the UK.21 Proportionally the U.S. has a much smaller Muslim population than the UK.22 Nevertheless, post 9/11 the U.S. created a large structure to detect what essentially is not there – domestic Muslim terrorism. Unable to acknowledge the minuscule nature of the domestic threat, that structure creates something to justify the budget it receives and the careers it is sustaining. Hence all the operations described by Trevor Aaronson and others.23 The book’s title refers to ‘manufacturing’. You don’t manufacture by accident. It requires intention. What Coles doesn’t do is show that intent – at least not in this country. He infers it and presumes it but the evidence isn’t there. Nonetheless, this is an interesting read, even with my reservations. And others think highly of it. The front cover carries this comment from former CIA counterterrorism officer John Kiriakou: ‘This book should be required reading, not just in colleges and universities, but in every organization in the international intelligence and law enforcement communities.’ Coles does show, as others – such as Mark Curtis – have done, that HMG’s policy of tagging along with the Americans has been disastrous in the last 20 years or so. The real authors of the Manchester Arena and 7/7 bombings are Tony Blair and the rest of the Cabinet who allowed Blair to play the role of George W. Bush’s loyal flunky and so generated this ‘blowback’. 20 But see Nick Must’s ‘How viable was the ‘ISIS-inspired Theresa May murder plot?’ at 21 See for example, 22 Muslims are less than 1% of the U.S. population. In the UK they are 5%. 23 See, for example, Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The End of the Republican Party: Three ‘Never Trump’ Conservatives on the Trump Presidency Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever Rick Wilson New York: Simon and Schuster/Free Press, 2018 Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic David Frum New York: HarperCollins, 2018 The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right Max Boot New York: W.W. Norton/Liveright, 2018 John Newsinger The effective takeover of the Republican Party by Trump and his supporters is one of the most important developments since he first announced his intention to seek the Republican nomination. These three books by Republican insiders all provide very useful insights into that process, insights expressed with varying degrees of disgust. Max Boot being so effected as to decide that he can no longer call himself a conservative at all. Coming from the right they are all the more successful in conveying the enormity of the Trump phenomenon and deserve to be read by everyone concerned with US politics today. First, Rick Wilson, very much a veteran Republican hatchet man, indeed, ‘a gleeful hatchet man’, in his own words (p. 6). The Republican nomination of Trump for the Presidency precipitated ‘a kind of political midlife change’ and he does not mince his words (p. 2). As far as he is concerned, Trump is ‘the avatar of our worst instincts and darkest desires as a nation’ (p. 2); ‘crony capitalism in human form’ (p. 36); someone who ‘has monetized the presidency for the direct benefit of himself, his soft-jawed offspring, and his farflung empire of bullshit’ (p. 176); a man with ‘absolutely no interior intellectual life’ (p. 228); ‘a goddamned degenerate pussy-grabber with a lifetime of adultery, venality and dishonesty’ (p. 63); and so on. What he can scarcely credit is the way that the Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Republican Party has bowed down to this monstrous figure, slipping ‘into the sewage tank of nationalist populism with barely a ripple’ (p. 2). His contempt for those leading Republicans, politicians, advisers and officials who have rallied to Trump – ‘Vichy Republicans’, as he calls them – is positively molten. How could Ted Cruz support Trump after he insulted his wife and accused his father of involvement in the assassination of Jack Kennedy? He had never seen any politician perform ‘acts of greater self-abnegation and humiliation’. The only excuse he can think of is that Cruz hopes for a Supreme Court nomination! (p. 26) What Republican politicians and their big money backers collectively wanted from Trump, however, was his promised tax cuts. Trump surrounded himself with ‘Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street alumni who behaved just as they always do: with weapons grade venality [. . . .] They were there for the tax bill. Only the tax bill.’ And it was indeed, ‘a spectacular, budget-busting payday for Wall Street’ (pp. 191, 192). As for Trump’s own personal courtiers, Wilson regards them as the lowest of the low. Paul Manafort is ‘[c]rooked, corrupting, utterly amoral [. . . .] a scumbag lobbyist of the last resort for assorted kleptocrats, third world shitbirds, and international criminals’. This, of course, made him ‘a perfect fit for Trump’ (p. 234). Stephen Miller is ‘the thinking man’s racist on Team Trump’ (p. 239), while Kellyanne Conway, in the history of White House advisors, sets the record in ‘utter mendacity’. Her ‘complete lack of scruples was a perfect fit for the Trump campaign and his administration’ (p. 241). And as for Michael Cohen, he is ‘a deeply revolting specimen even by the low standards of the Petri dish of Trump World scuzz’. ‘Whenever one of Trump’s girl friends phoned him to tell him, “Don, I’m late” [i.e. has missed a period] . . . .Cohen and his people take over’. He is the man charged with ‘working to cover up, pay off, intimidate and silence women’ (pp. 64, 235). Wilson reserves his greatest dislike for Steve Bannon. Once Wilson began opposing Trump, it was Bannon set Breitbart – ‘the Der Sturmer of our time’ – on him, ‘including stories that targeted my children’. Bannon was the ‘brightest, hottest, weirdest, shittiest star in the Trump constellation’. He ‘looks like the spokesmodel for a new line of gout medication’. It was Bannon who ‘discovered immigration was the killer app’. Wilson had his revenge helping defeat the run for Senate by Roy Moore – ‘the wee molester’ – a defeat that seriously damaged Bannon, who was last seen ‘cheering on the neofascist parties in European elections’ (pp. 227–231, 276). Collectively they are, according to Wilson, ‘the Axis of Assholes’ (p. 245). What of the Christian Right? The support that evangelical Christians have given to Trump is particularly astonishing to Wilson. He can scarcely believe the way in which they sold themselves for ‘40 pieces of silver’, knowingly Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk embracing a ‘degenerate, unrepentant man who represents everything evangelicals have railed against for generations’. Trump ‘was a walking, talking, porn-star screwing offence to their every belief’. Nevertheless, they welcomed him as God’s anointed, praying for his success, giving him their blessing and, moreover, damning his opponents and critics. And this was a man who had supported abortion right up until 2016, one of the evangelicals’ cardinal sins, second only to homosexuality (pp. 62, 64). Wilson identifies Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News as another essential factor in Trump’s success. Even though Murdoch privately dismissed Trump as ‘a fucking idiot’, Fox News gave him uncritical support and assailed his opponents with sustained venom. Indeed, Fox has become ‘Trump TV, providing him with instant, fawning coverage’. A key role in all this is played by Sean Hannity, who reported the 2016 election campaign on Fox at the very same time as he was advising the campaign. Hannity speaks for ‘woke workin’ man’, a pose that ‘rings a bit hollow now that he lives in a multimillion-dollar mansion and owns a private jet’ (pp. 31, 207, 206). According to Max Boot, Hannity ‘makes roughly $30 million a year . . . even while railing against “overpaid” media elites’ (Boot p. 182). What Wilson finds most objectionable about Trump, however, is his racism. As someone who spent years defending the Republican Party against accusations of racism from liberals, he has been left ‘almost speechless with rage’ to find that the Party has actually put in power ‘a man racist in deed and word, tolerant of even more vile racists, and a hero to racists white supremacists, and anti-Semites’. He regards the emergence of the alt-right, ‘an overtly racist, overtly anti-Semitic tendency in modern American politics’ as particularly ‘revolting and disturbing’ and calls for a ‘cleansing fire’ to drive them ‘back into the shadows’. For the moment, though, Trump is ‘empowering, elevating and protecting the alt-right’. As he eloquently puts it ‘Trump is the disease vector they felt they needed to infect the nation’s body politic’ (pp. 248, 249, 252). This particular dimension to the Trump Presidency, its role in fostering fascism in the USA, is still unfolding. Just as hostile to the Trump Presidency is David Frum, a former speech writer for George W Bush, credited with inventing the ‘Axis of Evil’ formulation in 2002. He was the author of The Right Man, a staunch defence of the Bush administration, published in 2003. In 2016, he voted for Hillary Clinton! Frum recognises that Trump did not come out of the blue, but was someone who took advantage of the way American politics was ‘veering toward extremism and instability’ (p. xii). Trump and his coterie exploited the deep divisions that had opened up in American society, but they did not create them. As Frum puts it: ‘The United States was living through an epochal shift of economic power and Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk cultural status and Trump’s supporters perceived themselves as the targets and losers in that shift.’ And it wasn’t the working class, unemployed, casually employed and low paid so much as people who were ‘solidly middle class or even rather affluent’, but who ‘felt that their world was turning upside down in the twenty-first century’ (p. 27). For millions of white Americans living standards were falling; indeed for the first time in US history, ‘life expectancy was actually declining’. He writes quite powerfully of suicides and of opioid overdoses, the ‘deaths of despair’ among white men (pp. 201-202). Neither the Democratic nor the Republican establishments concerned themselves with any of this, thereby creating the conditions for someone like Trump to emerge. He claimed to speak for these people, while all the time his main concern was to line his own pockets, enrich himself and his family and celebrate his greatness. According to Frum, ‘Trump tangled government, family, and business in the style of an authoritarian Third World kleptocrat’ (p. 59). He details the damage the 2008 crash did to Trump’s businesses, leaving him with little more than a brand to peddle. Before 2008, Trump did virtually no business outside the USA. This was about to change. The word went out to ‘everywhere dirty money is gained and hidden’, that Trump’s services were available to ‘shine you up’ (p. 61). As Reuters reported in March 2017, no less than 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses had bought $98.4 million worth of property in Trump-branded luxury towers in Florida.1 And far from all this coming to an end once he became President, it accelerated: in the year after Trump won the Republican nomination, ‘70 percent of Trump’s customers made their purchasers through identity-shielding corporations. Trump sold $33 million worth of real estate in this concealed way in the six months after the 2016 election’ (p. 62). Of course, Trump himself has successfully hidden his own finances from the American people, effortlessly rolling back what were considered to be ethical imperatives right up until he took office. According to some estimates Trump owed, in 2017, more than $1 billion dollars ‘to about 150 different financial institutions’, considerably more than he has disclosed (p. 64). Part of the problem is that Trump is the biggest liar in US Presidential history. Frum is clearly incredulous both that such a man could ever become President and that Republican politicians have been prepared to cover for him, indeed to flatter him and sing his praises, positively grovelling before him. He looks at some of the people Trump chooses to surround himself with, people whose loyalty he can rely on, although loyalty is never something he reciprocates. There is Dan Scavino, a former golf caddy, who Trump put in charge of ‘his online presence . . . It was Scavino who oversaw the retweeting from accounts like @WhiteGenocideTM (located in “Jewmerica”)’. Then there is 1 Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk his son, Eric’s former wedding planner, who was put in to ‘oversee federal housing programs in New York City, a post in which loyalty matters even more than usual to Trump, since his company collects millions of dollars of revenue from that program’ (pp. 82, 83). Frum also draws our attention to Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s legal team dealing with the Mueller investigation. One can see the attraction Sekulow had for Trump. He is a born again evangelical Christian, a convert from Judaism in fact, and ‘ran a pair of nonprofit Christian advocacy groups from which he directed some tens of millions of dollars to himself, his family, and their businesses’ (p. 74). Although Frum does not mention it, Sekulow is one of the top evangelical Christian lawyers in the US, heading up the American Centre for Law and Justice, the evangelical rival to the much- hated American Civil Liberties Union. The American Centre for Law and Justice is based at the evangelist Pat Robertson’s Regent University. What the USA has ended up with is a President ‘beholden to Russia’. Frum describes Trump’s election as ‘the most successful foreign espionage attempt against the United States in the nation’s history’ (p. 134). His ‘deference to Putin reverberated through the western alliance’ (p. 155) and more generally, he has ‘empowered dictators worldwide’ (p. 154). The damage has so far been mitigated, in his opinion, by the fact that the White House is ‘a mess of careless slobs’ and this ‘dysfunction’ has sometimes ‘actively advanced the public interest, by unintentionally thwarting the Trump administration’s more sinister instincts’. Another mitigating factor has been the culture of leaks which also ‘thwarted many of the worst impulses of the new Trump administration [ . . . .] Leaks alerted the world that President Trump had blabbed a crucial military secret to the Russian foreign minister. Leaks deterred the Trump administration from lifting sanctions on Russia as soon as it entered office’ (p. 171). As Frum observes, this is hardly a satisfactory state of affairs. He writes of widespread disenchantment with democratic government and growing support for authoritarianism in the US and grimly concludes that ‘we are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered’ (p. 235). His somewhat pathetic answer is a ‘more responsible conservatism’ (p. 207). Considering that he probably considers George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove as exemplars of this ‘more responsible conservatism’, the prospect is not very hopeful. Which brings us to Max Boot’s The Corrosion of Conservatism, by far the best of the three books under review. Boot is a security specialist, the author of a number of books on insurgency and counter-insurgency, most recently a study of Edward Lansdale (The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam), books that are certainly worth reading whether you disagree with him or disagree with him really strongly. He achieved a certain notoriety when he recommended that the United States embrace its Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Imperial destiny and send out enlightened administrators to run Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the same way that the British Empire had been run (p. 49). He had obviously been reading too much Niall Ferguson! For Boot, Trump’s election ‘was one of the most demoralizing days of my life’. The day after the election, he changed his voter registration from Republican to Independent. What was ‘most painful’ was the way that people he knew and respected had rallied to Trump despite what the man was and what he stood for, a man who had ‘few fixed convictions outside of narcissism and nativism, racism and sexism’. Marco Rubio’s turnaround was the ‘most painful of all for me’. His account is all the more powerful because it chronicles how his ‘beliefs are shifting because of the rise of Trumpism’. He asks himself to what extent did his championing of the conservative cause over the years ‘contribute to the rise of this dark force in American life’. His ‘ideology has come into conflict with reality – and reality is winning’ and he has been left hoping that the Republican Party will ‘pay a heavy price for its embrace of white nationalism and know- nothingism’(pp. xv, xvi, xix, xxi). And, of course, his anti-Trump stance has brought the wrath of the President’s followers down on him. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Boot writes that he had never encountered anti-Semitism in the US until he came out in opposition to Trump. Then his Twitter account and email inbox ‘filled up with anti-Semitic, pro-Trump vitriol [. . . .] Some charming Twitter troll posted a picture of me being executed in a gas chamber by a smiling Trump dressed in a Nazi uniform’ (pp. 83-84). Boot looks back on his political trajectory, on his success at building a career as a right-wing ‘journalist, historian, and foreign policy pundit’ (p. 33). In 2007, he actually won the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, an award established by Rupert Murdoch no less. Nowadays, he regards Murdoch’s Fox News as ‘a pernicious influence on American life . . . a threat to this country’s democratic institutions’ (p 41). He inevitably supported, indeed cheered on, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, although he urged the adoption of a protracted counter-insurgency strategy, nation-building – or rather neo-colony building – championing General David Petraeus as the man showing the way forward. Looking back, after having defended it for years, he now acknowledges that the invasion was ‘all a big mistake’, and indeed that ‘the failed policies I advocated in 2003 helped, thirteen years later, to elect a president who stands in opposition to nearly everything that I believe in’ (pp. 54-55). He also blames the consequences of the ‘laissez-faire ideology’ that he advocated for its part in precipitating the 2008 crash and helping create the social conditions for the emergence of Trumpism. As he notes, between 1980 and 2014, ‘the top 1 percent in the country experienced 205 percent growth in personal income; the bottom 50 percent saw only 1 percent growth’ (p. 90). This is, as he recognises, a devastating indictment. It is this catastrophe that Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk has led millions of Americans to rally to Trump, conned into the belief that this narcissistic crook actually cares about their predicament, because they blame it all on immigration. Astonishingly, as Boot reveals, according to one poll, ‘61 percent of Republicans consider Trump a good role model for their children’!(p. 136) As for Trump, he asks himself, ‘who is worse: Trump or his enablers’ (p. 152). Trump does not know any better, but his enablers are another matter. He writes of an unnamed Republican congressman who in private describes Trump as ‘an evil, really fucking stupid Forrest Gump [. . ..] He’s just a fucking idiot’ and then appears on Fox News singing his praises (p. 160). His particular scorn is reserved for the Christian Right. They are ‘theological silly putty . . . twisting their supposed convictions to support whatever political outcome they favored’. Indeed, ‘[o]f all the GOP’s toadies and hypocrites, the fundamentalists were the most egregious: these supposed champions of morality were willing to support a candidate who regarded the sins proscribed in the Ten Commandments as his personal to-do list’ (p. 90). He describes evangelical support as ‘Trump’s “get out of jail free” card, at least when it comes to matters of morality’. Their silence has been deafening. They were, with few exceptions, silent when he refused to condemn the fascists and neo-Nazis on the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville; when the children of asylum seekers were separated from their parents and kept in cages; silent when he began singing the praises of North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un. This last instance is particularly interesting because the Stalinist regime is a ferocious, indeed murderous, persecutor of Christians and Christianity. Trump has professed his love and admiration for a brutal tyrant and mass murderer, who relentlessly persecutes Christians. Yet there has been no condemnation from those evangelicals who have been campaigning against the regime for years. If any previous President had embraced Kim in the way Trump has, the Christian Right would have been very publicly and very noisily outraged. Their silence has even extended to Trump’s exonerating Kim from any responsibility for the death of Otto Warmbler, the American student sentenced to fifteen years hard labour in early 2016. He was charged with removing a propaganda poster while on a guided tour visit to the country. He ‘confessed’ to having both Christian and CIA links (the Christian connection was not that convincing considering he was Jewish!) and was treated with such brutality that he was in a vegetative state when he was returned to the US in June 2017, dying six days later. Boot writes of Trump’s sympathy for authoritarians and dictators. He has ‘a kind word for every strongman he chats with’. Kim Jong-un, for example, ‘loves his people and in turn is loved by them’. And then there is his relationship with Vladimir Putin, a relationship that is ‘so obsequious that former CIA director John Brennan and former director of National Intelligence James Clapper Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk suggested that Trump might have been compromised by the Kremlin’ (p. 145). As he points out in his discussion of the ‘Collusion’ issue, the fact that the Trump campaign spent so much time trying to cover-up their meetings with Russians, certainly points in the direction of guilt (pp. 120-124). The impact of the ‘Collusion’ allegations on Trump’s supporters, however, has been that a growing number of them are becoming sympathetic to Putin themselves! As for Trump, Boot has, on occasion, called him a fascist, but this is not something to take too seriously. While Trump has no problem with fascists and neo-Nazis giving him their support, he certainly has not got the intellectual ability to be able to grasp their ideology. He is, as Boot puts it elsewhere, much more of ‘a garden-variety strongman’ whose Presidency feels ‘more like the reign of a Roman Emperor than a normal American president’ (pp. 99, 111). And he has certainly ‘developed an authoritarian-style cult of the personality with the shameful connivance of those around him’ (p. 53). There can be little doubt that Trump would very much like to be a dictator, a president for life, able to disappear people rather than having to pay them off, and that he is envious of the leaders he meets who do not have to negotiate the checks and balances of the US system. But at the moment his room for manoeuvre is constrained. This is not to say, of course, that a crisis of some kind – economic, political, military, or all three – might not change this situation. What seems to have been decisive in Boot’s break with conservatism is his recognition, prompted by Trump’s open racism, that the Republican Party had been playing the race card since the end of the 1960s. He writes: ‘As I now look back with the clarity of hindsight, I realise that, whatever Republican candidates claimed to stand for, what a lot of their voters heard was: this is someone who will put minorities in their place. [. . . .] I am now convinced that coded racial appeals – those dog whistles – had at least as much, if not more, to do with the electoral success of the modern Republican Party than all of the domestic and foreign policy proposals crafted by well-intentioned analysts like me.’ (p. 169) Like Rick Wilson, he admits to rebutting those liberals who accused ‘the Republican Party of racism’, only to have Trump convince him they had been right all along and that he had, in fact, been ‘in denial’ (p. 169). Under Trump, this racism extends to anti-Semitism. The Trump election campaign’s closing TV commercial ‘flashed photographs of such readily identifiable Jews as financier George Soros, Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’. For all Trump’s embrace of ultra Zionism, his campaign was riddled with ‘covert appeals to anti-Semitism’ (p. 84). As far as Boot is concerned Trump was ‘the most unapologetically racist major-party nominee in many decades – and quite possibly ever’ (p. 85). Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Much of Boot’s account is an admission of what can only be described as astonishing naiveté on his part. This seems to have derived in good part from a tendency towards hero worship. He praises Barry Goldwater (although he admits that, only recently having read what he actually had to say, ‘he really was an extremist’ (p. 168)), and Ronald Reagan (‘How I loved that man’ (p. 19).) And the late John McCain is fulsomely praised. Inevitably he regards Trump’s attacks on McCain as absolutely contemptible: ‘I still cannot believe that Trump, who sat out the Vietnam War with five draft deferments and claimed that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was “my personal Vietnam”, has the temerity to criticise one of America’s greatest war heroes’ (p. 56). Boot actually worked on McCain’s 2008 Presidential campaign as a security adviser. What he does not confront is McCain’s decision to placate the Christian Right by installing Sarah Palin as his running mate. In many ways, she prepared the way for Trump and while Boot quite rightly condemns such remarks of hers as ‘waterboarding is how we’d baptise terrorists’ (p. 178), McCain on occasion sang from the same hymn sheet, indeed actually sang ‘Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran’ to the tune of the Beach Boys ‘Barbara Ann’ to appreciative audiences. McCain certainly repudiated claims that Obama was a Muslim, but his campaign, courtesy of Palin, helped shift the Republican Party in the direction of Trumpism. One last point about Boot’s retreat from conservatism (he hopes for a decent centre right party): he has not yet examined the domination of US politics by Corporate America, confronted the reality of America as a plutocracy. It will be interesting to read his conclusions, if and when he does. And more generally, none of these three books actually devote any serious attention to what one suspects will be seen in the future as the greatest indictment of the Trump Presidency: its denial of global warming, its rolling back of environmental protections in the USA, its lack of concern about the coming catastrophic impact of climate change. To be fair, they are far from alone in this neglect. John Newsinger is working on a book on the Labour Party's foreign, defence and colonial policies. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Impossible Knowledge Conspiracy Theories, Power, and Truth Todor Hristov London and New York: Routledge, 2019, £45 (UK), h/b The Stigmatization of Conspiracy Theory since the 1950s “A Plot to Make us Look Foolish” Katharina Thalmann London and New York: Routledge, 2019, £29.99 (UK), p/b Robin Ramsay Todor Hristov alerted this reader in his short introduction by using the names of Jameson, Foucault and Baudrillard, three of the ‘stars’ of post-modernism. In this ‘discourse’ I have no interest. It is (literally) non-sense. I struggled through to page 12 where I was stopped by these paragraphs. ‘Conspiracy theorists solve or dissolve the paradox of belonging without inclusion by representing the hidden order as a totality (Jameson 2009, 603, 1992, 3, 1991, 38). Indeed, the totality of a multiplicity of elements belongs to the multiplicity without being included in it, just like the totality of a city belongs to the city without being a part of it (Jameson 1988, 353) But if totality is hidden, if it is lacking from the present social order, it cannot be represented, hence it cannot be communicated, even if one believes strongly in it. In fact, if one believes strongly in it, this would amount to a delusion. Therefore, in order to curb the anomia of late capitalism, conspiracy theorists need to represent the unrepresentable. And because of that, the mechanism of their theories can be captured by the concept of sublime.’ The ‘anomia of late capitalism’? Anomia is ‘a form of aphasia in which the patient is unable to recall the names of everyday objects’. From the context, I think he means anomie, a sociological concept dating back to the Émile Durkheim in the late 19th century. But who knows? With post-modernists the usual rules of sense and meaning do not apply. Including the index, there are 99 pages of this crap. Katharina Thalmann tugs her forelock in the direction of this non-sense and in her introduction, for example, gives us this; Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ’Because I do not view conspiracy theory as “a symptom of the discourse that positions it” (Bratich 16; emphasis in the original), but as text, “a narrative of a possible past and present” (Zwierlein 72), defined by the narrative features listed in the beginning, conspiracy theories exist even when they are not labeled as such and represent a meaning-making cultural practice.’ (p. 15) Happily, the post-modernist genuflections are only one thread in her account of the role of ‘conspiracy theory’ in American politics since the 1930s and can be ignored for some of the book. What she does is this: ‘By focusing, above all, on academic writings dealing with conspiracy theory and published from the 1930s to the late 1970s I demonstrate that the conceptual model of conspiracy thinking was stigmatized in academic discourses in three phases. . . .The first phase encompasses the beginnings of conspiracy theory research published between the 1930s and the early 1950s and can be seem as a reaction to the rise in totalitarian regimes in Europe; the second phase follows the height of anti-communism during the Red Scare in the mid-1950s; and the third phase runs from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s when, above all, consensus historians and pluralists denounced conspiracy theorists as members of a paranoid, extremist fringe of society and politics.’ (p. 28) Her account of the first two phases is OK. It is mildly interesting to read the smattering of academic references to conspiracy theories in the 1930s: and I had no idea that Karl Popper had something to say about them. Of Popper the author writes: ‘Popper does not believe that members of modern society are able to comprehend social and political transformations or to identify the structural causes of socio-economic disparities; he suggests that conspiracy theories are quasi-religious belief systems which causally link social and political events to human machinations’. (p. 40) But – duh! – surely some social and political events are linked to human machinations. She tell us: ‘By the mid-to late 1950s . . . .conspiracy theorising was now the practice of pseudoscientists and cranks, the practice of frustrated peusdo- conservatives, the practice of populists who exhibited a paranoid worldview. . . .’ (p. 52) And: ‘pluralist[s]. . . .acted as relentless door guards who controlled the entrance to the marketplace by checking for “political baggage” in the Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk form of conspiracy theory.’ (p. 56) Both of those statements I would say are true. Up to there all is well-ish. Her guided tour through what academics thought about conspiracy theories up to the publication of Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ in 1964 is rather interesting. Things go off the rails when she tries to deal with the world after the assassination of JFK. This happens because, like other academics I have read in this particular field,1 she has no interest in the content of what she sees as conspiracy theories. All that is required is that something be described as a conspiracy theory for it to be fit for her analysis. (A definition of ‘conspiracy theory’ isn’t required, either.) The content doesn’t matter. Post JFK, the material she looks at shifts from being loopy statements from the likes of the John Birch Society to detailed research about events. You might think that the content of that research is thus unavoidable. Not for our author. So we get lists of JFK researchers in the 60s and 70s and book titles, but little about what was being written (and little evidence that she actually read any of them). We get half a dozen pages on the Warren Commission’s Report without any mention of the fact that it has been comprehensively demolished and has been disowned by several of the Commission’s members. But she does feel she has to explain why these new ‘conspiracy theories’ don’t resemble their predecessors. To do this she ignores their content and comes up with this: ‘Because they were (made) aware of their marginal discursive position, I argue, conspiracy theorists began to present their ideas in a way that would still be accepted by a mainstream audience by asking rhetorical questions, by hinting at rather than developing conspiracy scenarios, and by avoiding the semantic field of conspiracy’ (p. 131) Cunning, these new conspiracy theorists, weren’t they? Not only did they not offer a conspiracy theory, they didn’t even use the term! This is baloney, of course. You are unlikely to read a more obvious example of someone ignoring reality to preserve a theory. She has read enough about the early work of JFK researchers to know that were mostly doing basic intellectual ground-clearing – reading, note-taking, assembling and indexing material. However, she cannot bring herself to state the obvious: in the early years after Dallas the serious Kennedy researchers didn’t offer theories because, for the most part, they didn’t have any theories. Conspiracy 1 Notably Peter Knight, who is the editor of the series from Routledge in which these two books appear. Lobster 77 Summer 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk theories without theories? But then this is post-modernism and any old bollocks will do. From Dallas the author moves to Watergate and she has actually read some of the Watergate literature. But the muddle grows. ‘Weissman’s collection2 thereby points towards a trend in conspiracy theories in the 1970s: the rise of superconspiracy theories which weave Watergate and other events in recent U.S. history into a fabric of large- scale, multi-player event and systemic conspiracy theories. Such superconspiracy theories had existed before the 1970s: Robert Welch. . . . spread superconspiracy theories about communists, the Illuminati and the “Insiders” in the 1960s, and in light of the right-wing, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of the 1930s, Leo Lownethal and Norbert Guterman already viewed the belief in superconspiracies as an essentially American tendency. . . .Nevertheless, in the mid-1970s, these superconspiracy theories for the first time appeared en masse.’ (p. 164) Comparing the output of Robert Welch and the Birchers (and the earlier Jewish conspiracy theorists) with the research which followed the sixties’ assassinations and Watergate would seem ridiculous to all but the contemporary social theorist. The Birchers had few facts: like the author, they didn’t need facts. But, by the mid-1970s, the post JFK researchers were drowning in facts: they were uncovering a hitherto largely hidden history of the post-WW2 United States. But this passes the author by because she has no interest in the content of the propositions she is discussing. The mistake she has made is not recognising that post-JFK things changed: as well as there being conspiracy theories there was also research into conspiracies.3 Failing to make this distinction, in her survey of the post Watergate world inter alia she offers as examples of superconspiracy theories/ theorists Mae Brussel4 and the Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File5 – which is correct – but also Peter Dale Scott – which is ridiculous. But then this is post- modernism and any old bollocks will do. 2 The Ramparts Press 1974 anthology Big Brother and the Holding Company. 3 This distinction I first saw formulated by Anthony Summers like this: he said he had no interest in conspiracy theories but was interested in theories about conspiracies. 4 See 5 An account of which is at Lobster 77 Summer 2019