www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
Summer 2015
The View from the Bridge Lobster by Robin Ramsay Julian Assange and the European Arrest Warrant by Bernard Porter 69 Holding pattern by Garrick Alder The CIA, torture, history and American exceptionalism by Michael Carlson Chauncey Holt and the three ‘tramps’ on Dealey Plaza by Robin Ramsay JFK’s assassination: two stories about fingerprints by Garrick Alder Apocryphilia by Simon Matthews
Book Reviews The Secret War Between the Wars by Kevin Quinlan Reviewed by Robin Ramsay Method and Madness: The hidden story of Israel’s assaults on Gaza by Norman G. Finkelstein Reviewed by Robin Ramsay The News Machine: Hacking,The Untold Story by James Hanning with Glenn Mulcaire Reviewed by Tom Easton The JFK Assassination Diary by Edward Jay Epstein Reviewed by Robin Ramsay Deception in High Places by Nicholas Gilby Reviewed by Robin Ramsay The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy by Graeme MacQueen Reviewed by Tom Easton That option no longer exists: Britain 1974-76 by John Medhurst Reviewed by Robin Ramsay The American deep state: Wall Street, big oil and the attack on U.S. democracy by Peter Dale Scott Reviewed by Robin Ramsay The EU: A Corporatist Racket: How the European Union was created by global corporatism for global corporatism, by David Barnby Reviewed by Robin Ramsay Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba During Slavery and Jim Crow, by Gerald Horne Reviewed by Dr. T. P. Wilkinson Sailing Close To The Wind: Confessions of a Labour Loyalist, by Dennis Skinner and Kevin Maguire Reviewed by John Newsinger www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
The view from the bridge
Robin Ramsay
Kincora, Blunt and...... JFK? Because it is difficult to distinguish the shit from the shinola among the allegations and rumours, thus far I have avoided trying to make sense of the Kincora scandal’s place in the Elm House-Savile-paedos-in-high-places thicket. However one story caught my eye. In the Daily Express (12 April) James Fielding began his story, headlined ‘MI6 covered up historic child sex abuse ring discovered during surveillance operation’, with this: ‘MI6 infiltrated the Kincora boys’ home in east Belfast to spy on William McGrath’.1 He continued: ‘The ex-intelligence officer said MI6 was ordered to watch the Kincora care home in Belfast in the 1970s because one of its housemasters, William McGrath, was the leader of paramilitary group Tara. Spies witnessed terror-related arms deals but also found evidence of an international paedophile gang trafficking victims to Brighton, London, Amsterdam and Vienna. Our source, who was involved in the operation but has asked to remain anonymous, said the intelligence services did not act on the abuse because it could have blown their cover and because they could not afford to “tread on the toes” of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.’ Fielding quotes this ‘ex-intelligence officer’ as saying: ‘ “Certainly there was abuse inside Kincora but most of the boys were sent to various hotels around the province to be abused. Some were taken to Brighton and London and then further afield, as far as Holland and even Vienna.” He said he was visited by MP Humphrey Berkeley 1
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and author Robin Bryans who told him paedophile parties were taking place in the south of England. “Both said exactly the same thing, that boys from Northern Ireland had ended up in Brighton as well as London.” .....The source said: “Blunt used to come to Northern Ireland and at that stage he was under immunity, and I think there was a fear that if action had been taken against McGrath and Tara then the whole thing might have unravelled. I think that’s why the authorities shut down the investigation into Kincora and covered up much of the abuse, because of the links to the Cambridge spy ring and, through them, the connections to the British establishment.”’ Where to begin with this? First, the ‘ex-intelligence officer’ moves from things he claims he knows at the beginning to ‘I think there was a fear....” and ‘I think that’s why the authorities...’. He’s guessing. Colin Wallace was working for the British Army in Northern Ireland at the time in a press officer/psy-ops capacity. About this Fielding story he e-mailed me: ‘Yes, there are several things that are incorrect. We (the Army) knew nothing at all about Blunt – at least by the time I left NI in February 1975. We did know about Peter Montgomery, but I was not allowed to refer to him in my briefing material...... Also, to the best of my knowledge, MI6 did not block investigations in Kincora. Indeed, Craig Smellie supported the press briefings about Tara that I did in 1973.’ Smellie was the chief SIS officer in Northern Ireland and it does seem unlikely (at best) that Smellie would encourage press interest in Tara if SIS had an operational interest in its leader, William McGrath. And did SIS do ‘infiltration’? And what would ‘infiltration’ of Kincora mean? Planting an agent in the home? The two men said to have visited the source for the Express story and told him of paedophile parties in the south of England, former Conservative MP Humphrey Berkeley and
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Robin Bryans, are dead. Robin Bryans used to send me long, barely intelligible letters and did not mention any of this, even though he knew of my connection to Colin Wallace, then at the centre of the Kincora story.2 Wallace met Humphrey Berkeley several times in 1987 when Channel Four News and Berkeley were interested in Wallace’s story and while Berkeley did mention the sex parties with boys from Northern Ireland, he did not link this to Kincora, even though he had read Wallace’s documents, some of which were about it.3 Hitherto the agency linked with Kincora in media stories has been MI5. It is MI5 – who had replaced SIS as lead intelligence agency in Northern Ireland – who refused to take action when informed about McGrath’s activities there by Colin Wallace and a military intelligence officer named Brian Gemmell.4 This piece by Fielding shifts the focus of attention onto SIS (MI6), as well as adding Anthony Blunt and the Cambridge spies to the story. I think that shifting the focus onto SIS was the point of the article. We’re back to the old 5 versus 6 game. Who is James Fielding? In the 430 articles written for the Express by Fielding5 there is only one other with intelligence content: ‘MI5 lead hunt for IRA arms dumps’ in 2011 which began ‘Irish terrorists are feared to be planning an attack on mainland Britain using explosives hidden in Wales and the South-west’, which has no stated sources and may have come from MI5.6 With no apparent interest in intelligence stories Fielding has uncritically reported what he was told. 2 An example of a Bryans letter, rambling and tantalising is at
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Finally, the (notional) JFK connection. In his e-mail to me Colin Wallace wrote: ‘We did know about Peter Montgomery, but I was not allowed to refer to him in my briefing material. There could be several reasons for that. Montgomery also had an interesting link with a guy (Clay?) who was at one time a suspect in the Kennedy assassination.’ Peter Montgomery had been a lover of Anthony Blunt and they remained friends.7 Montgomery’s name was in the address book of Clay Shaw, a gay New Orleans businessman who had been a contact of the CIA,8 who was tried for – and acquitted of – conspiracy to assassinate JFK by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. This is from the essay on Shaw’s address book by Anthony Edward Weeks which appeared in Lobster 20: Peter Montgomery Blessingbourne Fivemiletown, NI Ireland Phone Fivemiletown 221 [T] Captain Peter Stephen Montgomery of Blessingbourne, to use the styling favoured by the subject, was born on 13th August 1909. He was educated at Wellington College School and Trinity College, Cambridge. Montgomery was the son of Major-General Hugh Maude de Fellenberg Montgomery. His uncle became Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and his second cousin was Bernard Montgomery, that is Field Marshall Montgomery of Alamein, the commander of the Eighth Army during the Second World War. From 1931 to 1947 he was employed by the BBC in Northern Ireland in various capacities, including Assistant Musical Director and Conductor of the BBC Northern Ireland Symphony Orchestra (1933-38). 7 See for example
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From 1952-71 he was a member of the BBC Northern Ireland Advisory Council, and from 1963-71 on the BBC General Advisory Council. He was the Honorary ADC to the Governor of Northern Ireland, Lord Wakehurst, from 1954-64, and later Vice-Lieutenant of County Tyrone in Ulster where the family estate, Blessingbourne, was situated. These bare biographical facts on Montgomery do not betray the keen interest he has for students of 20th century intelligence and espionage. While a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, he became the lover of Anthony Blunt, the Soviet spy, aka ‘The Fourth Man’. In the words of Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman, ‘Most of their mutual gay friends assumed that they had begun as lovers and then, in the parlance of the homosexual world, become sisters.’ (Conspiracy of Silence, London, Grafton, 1986 p. 48). At the end of 1940 the lease that Lord Rothschild had on a three-story maisonette in Bentinck Street in London expired: Blunt moved in with Tessa Mayor (then Lord Rothschild’s secretary in MI5, later his wife), Patrician Rawdon-Smith (who later married a friend of Blunt’s) and Guy Burgess. They were soon joined by Jack Hewitt, a sailor boyfriend of Burgess, who very quickly switched his allegiance to Blunt. Hewitt told John Costello that during the time at the flat Blunt had only one visitor come to stay with him: Peter Montgomery. (See Costello’s Mask of Treachery New York, William Morrow, 1988, p. 391) This was a kindness that was reciprocated in 1942 when, after exhausting intelligence duties in London and Germany, Blunt went to recuperate at Montgomery’s estate at Blessingbourne. Robert Harbinson, who knew Montgomery and Blunt well after the war, has said that ‘Anthony had an uncanny hold over Peter. They were in love, at least for a time.’ (Penrose and Freeman, op cit p. 48) The secret of Montgomery’s relationship with Blunt never came out during their lifetime. Had it done so Montgomery would have been ruined in Northern Ireland
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where many of his friends and relatives were in the Protestant Orange Order. Ulster would not have been as tolerant as Cambridge or London. At the beginning of the war Montgomery joined the Intelligence Corps and rose to the rank of Captain. After 1945 he remained in the army and later went to to become ADC to the Viceroy of India, Lord Wavell. Blunt was insistent that Montgomery knew nothing of his espionage activities and he went to great lengths right up until the end of his life to protect his friend. Until his death Blunt had a bedroom reserved for Montgomery in his London apartment. In 1980 the London Sunday Times interviewed Montgomery in connection with the unmasking of Blunt and he said that “I knew Anthony had been interrogated in 1964 by the Security Service and I feared that my name would come up. There were other occasions when I thought it would come out and I would get the chop.” Montgomery died in February 1988. Clay Shaw, in other words, had one-stop access to Blunt, Philby, Burgess and their milieu. Though there is no information that he met any of them, we know from Olwen Janson and others that he spent a considerable time in London during the war . (According to her “he made all his major contacts during those years”.) Montgomery is the one parapolitically significant name in the address book worthy of more research.’
Those career-killing Christmas trees Frances Stonor Saunders, who wrote about the CIA’s cultural operations during the Cold War,9 returned to the subject of the state and anti-communism again in the London Review of Books, after perusing the MI5 files on the historian Eric
9 Who Paid the Piper?, reviewed everywhere and briefly noted in Lobster 38 at
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Hobsbawm.10 She recapped MI5’s subversion-screening operation at the BBC. ‘This programme, whose existence was officially denied until late last year, was co-ordinated by MI5 and the BBC’s chief assistant to the director of personnel, later retitled manager special duties. Working out of Room 105 (the numeral “5” always denotes the mothership) this assistant, in liaison with a designated MI5 handler, arranged for the top jobs and those that involved access to classified material to be given the full sheep dip. All other positions – current staff as well as new applicants – were processed through “normal vetting”, of which the subjects were unaware. Here there was no pass or fail, but if MI5 (cryptically referred to in Room 105 as the College) uncovered anything in the subject’s background to suggest unreliability, a red symbol resembling a Christmas tree was stamped on the subject’s file. Only in exceptional cases was the BBC required to submit to MI5’s veto; generally, the corporation was allowed to use its own discretion, but many employees have testified over the years that their careers were unexpectedly interrupted or impeded by the Christmas tree.’ About this essay occasional Lobster contributor Professor Bernard Porter e-mailed me: ‘I found it extraordinarily interesting. For a short time in the 1960s I worked in Ford Motor Company’s Recruitment Dept. After accepting applicants, but before writing to them, we had to send their forms to a mysterious office for approval. If they weren’t approved, we had to tell the applicant that the position had “already been filled”. The symbol used by the secret office to indicate that was a red stamped Xmas tree, just like here...... Long afterwards, when researching in this area...... I came to think it was the EL [Economic League], whom I hadn’t heard of, of course, at the time.
10
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It’s the Xmas tree that made me think just now of MI5. Funny that they should use the same symbol in all these areas.’ Ford was a Special Branch/MI5 operation. The 2013 BBC documentary True Spies interviewed a former Special Branch officer, Tony Robinson, who spoke of it. This is from the programme’s script:11
Tony Robinson: ‘My senior officer said “One of your responsibilities, Tony, is to make certain that the Ford’s factory is kept clean of subversives.”...... Part of the plan drawn up was to make certain that working would carry on smoothly at Ford’s without the expected Merseyside disease of strikes and layoffs and God knows what, that the workforce would be vetted. The arrangement was thus drawn up, unofficially of course, that the Special Branch would do this.’
Voiceover: ‘Every week, Ford would submit the names of the latest job applicants to the local Special Branch.’
Tony Robinson: ‘...we were expected to check these lists against our known subversives, and if any were seen on the list then strike a line through it, go and see our contact and say “So and so, so and so has been....is a member of the CP or has been a member of the CP, didn’t renew his membership last year” or something like that.’ And Robinson would be liaising with MI5 to access its files. In the same essay, Saunders wrote of the Communist Party of Great Britain: ‘In the international communist movement, the British party was a laughing stock, correctly assumed to be so
11 Script at
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thoroughly penetrated that it was virtually a branch of the Security Service. As [MI5 Director General] Roger Hollis told the home secretary in 1959, “we [have] the British Communist Party pretty well buttoned up.’ It was more than mere containment, says [David] Cornwell, who ran agents into the party. “We kept it afloat. In fact, we owned it.”’ Since MI5 had known about the Soviet subsidies to the CPGB since the 1930s and not exposed them, ‘We kept it afloat’ is literally true. Reading this I was reminded of a comment by the former BOSS agent Gordon Winter, who said in an interview for the first BBC TV documentary about the British security and intelligence services, made by Tom Mangold for Panorama in 1981: ‘British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left- wing movement in Britain bigger than a football team our man is the captain or the vice captain, and if not, he is the referee and he can send any man off the field and call our man on at any time he likes.’ Winter’s comment was the only piece of the programme which the spooks insisted be cut before transmission.12 How seriously should we take this claim attributed to MI5? Is it possible that they had this degree of penetration of the entire British Marxist left? Penetration, yes; but the implied control, I doubt.
Reining in the bankers A brief flip back through this country’s recent economic history – from the so-called secondary banking crisis of 1973/4 onwards – shows that unless the banks are prevented from doing so they will always create too much credit (because it makes them rich); and some people are unable to resist the temptation to borrow too much. Regulation of credit formation
12 Quoted in Leveller 51, March 1981, cited in Lobster 28.
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is necessary if you want financial stability and the prevention of debt slavery. Since self-regulation manifestly isn’t going to work, this leaves the state. But is there an example of successful state regulation of credit-formation anywhere in the so-called free world? As it happens there may soon be one. Iceland, which had its own financial crisis in 2008-10 when three of its banks collapsed, is considering the removal of the power to create ‘money’ – chiefly by making loans – from its commercial banks. A report on this subject, endorsed by Iceland’s prime minister, contains a forward by Adair Turner, former chairman of the UK Financial Services Authority and chair of the policy development committee of the international Financial Stability Board, who says that efforts to make the existing financial system more stable ‘.....have still failed to address the fundamental issue – the ability of banks to create credit, money and purchasing power, and the instability which inevitably follows. As a result, the reforms agreed to date still leave the world dangerously vulnerable to future financial and economic instability.’13 Chances of state regulation of credit creation in the UK? At present, nil. But after the next big crash – bound to happen as the banks are doing more or less what they did before 2007/8 – who knows?
Money talking A study of the influences on American policy-making published in September 2014 found that America is an oligarchy. Or, as the abstract put it: ‘Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government
13
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policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.’14 I noticed a report on this on 30 March, the first official day of the general election campaign here, which was begun by Labour leader Ed Miliband making nice in the City of London, promising not to increase their taxes and, centrally, to keep UK corporation tax the lowest in the G7. It’s been nearly 30 years since the policies of the Labour Party could be said to reflect the views of its members; which explains its lack of members, the rise of the SNP and the Greens on the left, and, to some extent, UKIP on the right.
Fluoridation More cracks are appearing in the pro-fluoridation consensus. A recently published study found that ‘[GP] practices located in the West Midlands (a wholly fluoridated area) are nearly twice as likely to report high hypothyroidism prevalence in comparison to Greater Manchester (non-fluoridated area).’15 At tabloid level the Daily Mail asked: ‘Is your tap water poisoning you? The troubling question on everyone’s lips as scientists warn fluoride put in water to protect teeth could spark depression • Researchers have said the mineral could cause depression and weight gain • Brain impairment, kidney disease, bone disorders
14 Abstract at
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are possible side-effects.’16 Meanwhile in Hull, where I live, the city council is planning to add fluoride to the water to try and improve the teeth of children. As if a quick chemical fix can compensate for poverty, the consequent search for cheap calories, and the ingestion of too much sugar (and fat and salt) which is in cheap food.
It’s that old left-meets-right thing again ‘Though “Bibi” Netanyahu won re-election last week, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will still look into whether the State Department financed a clandestine effort to defeat him. Reportedly, State funnelled $350,000 to an American NGO called OneVoice, which has an Israeli subsidiary, Victory 15, that collaborated with U.S. operatives to bring Bibi down. If we are now secretly pumping cash into the free elections of friendly countries, to dump leaders President Obama dislikes, Americans have a right to know why we are using Cold War tactics against democracies..... Hopefully, after looking into OneVoice and V15, the Senate will expand its investigation into a larger question: Is the U.S. using NGOs to subvert regimes around the world? And, if so, who decides which regimes may be subverted? What gives these questions urgency is the current crisis that has Moscow moving missiles toward Europe and sending submarines and bombers to probe NATO defenses. America contends that Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and backing for pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine is the cause of the gathering storm in Russian-NATO relations. 16 25 February 2015 at
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Yet Putin’s actions in Ukraine were not taken until the overthrow of a democratically elected pro-Russian regime in Kiev, in a coup d’etat in which, Moscow contends, an American hand was clearly visible. Not only was John McCain in Kiev’s Maidan Square egging on the crowds that drove the regime from power, so, too, was U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. In an intercepted phone call with our ambassador in Kiev, Nuland identified the man we preferred when President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted. ‘Yats,’ she called him. And when Yanukovych fled after the Maidan massacre, sure enough, Arseniy Yatsenyuk was in power. Nuland also revealed that the U.S. had spent $5 billion since 1991 to bring about the reorientation of Ukraine toward the West. Now, bringing Ukraine into the EU and NATO may appear to Nuland & Co. a great leap forward for freedom and progress. But to Russia it looks like the subversion of a Slavic nation with which she has had intimate ties for centuries, to bring Ukraine into an economic union and military alliance directed against Moscow. And if NATO stumbles into a military clash with Russia, the roots of that conflict will be traceable to the coup in Kiev that Russians believe was the dirty work of the Americans.’ No, that wasn’t written by William Blum, Chris Floyd or Robert Parry (though they have written something similar), or any of the other commentators on the American left, but by sometime Nixon speechwriter Patrick J. Buchanan, whom I suppose we might describe as bearing the torch of American isolationism.17
Telling it like it is (sort of) 17
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David Davis, the Conservative MP who lost to David Cameron in the contest for leader of the Tory Party, is one of the more interesting mainstream politicians today. He is a prominent defender of civil liberties, a free marketeer, a sometime member of a territorial SAS regiment and – this is what made me take notice – was a close friend of the late Tony Benn. Surprising? Yes, a bit: but both are/were passionate British nationalists. Were he alive, Benn would deny being a nationalist, of course; but you don’t acquire ‘national treasure’ status the way Benn did in his last decade without the ‘national’ bit being rather prominent. Davis made an interesting interjection into the intelligence debate, albeit by stating the very obvious, that the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) isn’t up to much. Davis said that ‘members of the security services had told him privately that they “have never taken the ISC seriously,” saying “well they only know what we tell them”’; that its members had been ‘captured by the agencies they are supposed to be overseeing’; and that ‘to date the [ISC] chairman has acted almost invariably as a spokesman for the spooks rather than as a critical friend.’18 But ISC was set up to be this way. It has not taken evidence from the crop of ex-intelligence whistle-blowers since its creation; none of the MPs who know something about the secret state and have been critical of it have been appointed to the committee; and it was never provided with enough staff to do even a half-assed job of ‘oversight’. At one point its staff consisted of one researcher, John Morrison, a former senior Defence Intelligence officer (it now has three). Morrison gave an interview to the BBC in 2004 in which he said that when he heard Tony Blair claiming in 2002 that Iraq posed a ‘serious and current’ threat, he ‘could almost hear the collective raspberry going up around Whitehall.’ 19 That comment got him fired after the committee was informed
18
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that the intelligence and security services would no longer work with him.20 It would never have occurred to the ISC members to respond to the spooks that Morrison had their support and they would have to lump it. Morrison is one of the authors of a book-length study of the ISC which discusses all the tricky, not to say absurd issues involved in having ‘oversight’ over organisations when the only sources you are allowed to use are the organisations themselves.21
Drawing back the veil Elsewhere in this issue of Lobster I have reviewed Peter Dale Scott’s latest book and I quote his 1970s conception of parapolitics: ‘a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished...... generally, covert politics, the conduct of public affairs not by rational debate and responsible decision-making but by indirection, collusion, and deceit.’ When I encountered Scott’s writing, parapolitics also seemed to me to be a research method: namely, that if we read widely enough and collect the fragments which leak from the covert world into the surface world of politics and history, we can recreate some – maybe only a fraction – of that covert world. And thus – hopefully – by dragging the secret world into the light we can diminish its influence on the surface world of politics. Thirty years later with the collapse of the Labour Party in the UK and the Democrats in the US into neocon vacuity, has anybody got a plan B? The problem with these naive notions of ‘drawing back the veil’, as it were, was how then to persuade the politicians
20 The media’s response to Morrison’s sacking was discussed that year for the BBC by John Ware. See
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to take a peek. Merlyn Rees was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 1974-76 when the spooks and the British Army were pretty much running things themselves there with the barest accountability to, let alone direction by, the politicians. In the late 1980s after the Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd stories were publicised, it must have dawned on him that he hadn’t known what was going on while he had been the Minister. Rees’s papers are now in the London School of Economics and one of the files is ‘Holroyd and Wallace: correspondence and miscellaneous’;22 and listed is some of the Wallace/Holroyd material: articles, pamphlets, letters. He kept it, he may even have read some of it, but to my knowledge he did nothing with it. He never got in touch with any of the people involved to check who they were and if they were reliable.
Pentagonism 23 During the fiscal year that ended on 30 September 2014, U.S. Special Operations forces were in 133 countries.24 It is pretty safe to assume that in all of those countries the Americans will be killing the poor and the dispossessed or helping others do so; and in many, as a result, ‘terrorists’ will emerge to oppose them. Given that the US military-industrial complex needs enemies to justify its existence, we might call this investing in enemies. In early January the House of Commons defence committee commented that the British military lacked ‘a clear military strategy for Iraq or a clear definition of the UK’s role in the operations.’ 25 This is unfair. The British military strategy,
22
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in almost all circumstances, is to do what the Americans tell them to. But this, apparently, is unsayable, even with the rather bright Rory Stewart MP in the chair.
Stoned Roger Stone is a former Republican political strategist cum dirty trickster who has written a book with the same LBJ’s- people-killed-JFK thesis as mine.26 On his Website in January was this: ‘Robert Caro wrote a four-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson but if you check the index there’s no mention of Sol Estes, he’s missing. I went and checked and in terms of coverage the Billie Sol Estes got twice the coverage at the time than the [Bobby] Baker scandal did, but it’s been airbrushed out of history by Caro. Why? I’ll tell you why: because Sol Estes, after he comes out of prison, has nothing to gain and informs the Justice Department of Johnson’s involvement in the death of John F. Kennedy. Therefore, I presume, if Caro introduced the character he would have to tell the whole story, so it’s better just to airbrush Billie Sol out of the picture. Caro lies by omission; he should be stripped of his Pulitzer. He is intellectually dishonest, but he’s more interested in going to the right Upper East Side cocktail party than he is in historical truth.’ 27
Holt and Dallas Elsewhere in this issue 28 I have argued that Chauncey Holt
26 Stone’s book is reviewed in Lobster 66 at
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probably wasn’t the ‘third tramp’ on Dealey Plaza as he claimed. We could then simply dismiss the two chapters on the JFK assassination in his memoir as simply an invention. But when you read them they don’t feel like an invention. Take the section in which Holt recounts how he was overseeing a weapons modification plant in Goleta in California (part of Santa Barbara) as part of the CIA’s anti-Castro activities. In 1963, just after the incident in New Orleans in which Oswald (and Holt, by Holt’s telling) distributed pro- Castro leaflets, which resulted in Oswald being arrested and getting in the local media as a result, Holt says his machine shop was tasked with acquiring and modifying some Mannlicher-Carcano rifles and ammunition for them. They received several hundred rounds which appeared to be: ‘....pristine 163 grains bullets that had never been fired. On closer examination it was apparent that these bullets had been fired, although there has not been the slightest deformation. The master reloader, working for us, theorized that these bullets had been fired in what is called a “cold shot”; that is fired using only a very strong primer, without powder. We then loaded the pristine 6.5 bullets, in Wetherby .263 cases. Furthermore, we machined out the lands and grooves in a Wetherby rifle chambered for the .263 which is equivalent to the 6.5. It was apparent to us that if the pristine 6.5 bullet, which had previously been fired from a Carcano, was fired from a Wetherby .263 rifle, without lands and grooves, the bullet upon examination would appear to have been fired from a Carcano. I can think of no other reason for making these modifications. Of course the Wetherby would not be terribly accurate and the velocity would be reduced considerably.’ (p. 160) Holt speculates that the notorious virtually pristine bullet, CE399, ‘the magic bullet’, which was found at the Parkland Hospital, was fired in this way, causing JFK’s shallow back wound and then simply falling out as the body was
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moved/manipulated.29 But, of course, Holt made all this up, didn’t he? Holt also offers us a theory about the event, with the assassination conspiracy piggybacking on a CIA plan to create an event, a protest of some kind in Dallas against Cuba. The beauty of which is that the CIA is embroiled, whether it was part of the assassination conspiracy or not, and will go into cover-up mode to conceal the stunt it was apparently planning. This rang faint bells of recognition with me and I eventually remembered I had suggested something similar: ‘My hunch – and that’s all it is – is that some creative individual within the intelligence community had the bright idea that one way of sticking it to Castro and aborting Kennedy’s peace feelers, would be to fake an attempt on Kennedy’s life which could be attributed to Cuba. But the scheme involved a large number of people and someone in, or close to, the plan realised that the perfect conditions were going to be created for a real hit to take place. Security would be lax: the existence of the phoney set-up would ensure that no-one would want to examine the mess: and, most of all, there is Oswald, with some minor role in the “phoney”, ripe for the part of patsy.’ 30
The higher strangeness In the course of the last 30+ years of producing Lobster I have had a few strange/striking communications. This, from Francine Kelly, is the best so far.
Dear Robin Ramsay, Please interview me and/or post my story on your
29 The current consensus on CE399 among the JFK researchers would be that the bullet was planted. There is a considerable literature on CE399 and how it came to be found at Parkland. See for example
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website. I am a CIA MK-Ultra Project Monarch Intelligence Asset, alien hybrid and Milab (military alien abductee). I am married to Will P. Wilson, head of CIA Black Operations and a king in the Reptilian Draconian Vampire hierarchy. Please YouTube X Zone Radio and Francine Kelly; operation haystack agentfk; Francine Kelly and Higherside Chats; and Francine Kelly and WoB radio. Look at my forum at http://www.network54.com/forum/535171. Thank you.
It’s all Greek Occasionally we get access to unedited, unspun accounts of how the political economy game works at the highest levels. One example is the leak of comments made by then US Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, at the time of the threatened financial meltdown caused by Greece in 2010, when its state debt was downgraded by ratings agencies to ‘junk’ status. The Greek drama began in 2001 when those then in charge of the Greek state wanted their small economy, heavily reliant on tourism, to join the European single currency. To join, Greece had to meet so-called ‘convergence criteria’, which include the so-called ‘Maastricht rules’ which say that no EU state in the single currency can have a budget deficit more than 3% of GDP and that its total government debt must not exceed 60% of GDP. In 2010, as the Greek economy was sinking beneath the waves of its debt, it was ‘discovered’ that in 2001, to obey the ‘Maastricht rules’, the Greek state had faked its debt figures with statistical lies31 and a bit of derivatives jiggery-pokery by Goldman Sachs.32 At a meeting about the Greek ‘problem’ in 2010, Geithner 31 See
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recalled: ‘..the Europeans came into that meeting basically saying: “We’re going to teach the Greeks a lesson. They are really terrible. They lied to us. They suck and they were profligate and took advantage of the whole basic thing and we’re going to crush them,” was their basic attitude, all of them…..They were lied to by the Greeks. It was embarrassing to them because the Greeks had ended up like borrowing all this money and they were mad and angry and they were like: “Definitely get out the bats.” They just wanted to take a bat to them. But in taking a bat to them, they were feeding a fare [presumably fire] that was in its early stages. There were a lot of dry tinders.’ 33 But this is nonsense. The Greek state’s actions were not a secret;34 and Germany (after reunification) and France had already themselves broken the Maastricht rules. The system knew the Greek debt figures were a fraud and, in pursuit of the political project of ever closer (and expanding) union, turned a blind eye, even while the EU’s own statisticians were dealing with a series of fake figures from the Greek state.35 On the wider revelations from Geithner the Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard commented:
Note 32 continued of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules’. Notice: legally circumvented.....and the text beneath it tells us that Italy did the same thing with a different bank. The derivative bet backfired on the Greek state – or they were conned by Goldman Sachs, depending on intepretation. I would favour the latter. At this level the game is the very smart people persuading the not quite as smart people to sign up to stupid deals. See
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‘So now we know: Europe’s leaders did indeed attempt to smash Greece back into the Stone Age out of vindictive rage; conspired to withhold debt support for Italy unless the elected leader [Berlusconi] was forced out; and mismanaged the EMU crisis for three years with a level of stupidity that makes you want to weep.’ 36
Torture news When the CIA-torture story broke in early December I went to the Telegraph to see what MI6’s man there, Con Coughlin, had to say. There was this: ‘The real problem the CIA and other intelligence agencies face – British intelligence officers have also been accused of complicity in the CIA’s interrogation programme – is dealing with the undisputed evidence that operatives systematically abused their Muslim captives in a manner most civilised people will view as torture.’ No shit, Sherlock! Which was followed by this: ‘The CIA and its allies in the West must now persuade moderate Muslims that these mistakes are firmly confined to history, and to assure critics that their default position will always be to abide by the rule of law, rather than indulging in knee-jerk responses.’37 Good luck with persuading moderate (sic) Muslims that the NATO intelligence people are all really decent chaps, and all that. As for the use of torture being a ‘knee-jerk’ response by the CIA and its allies (such as MI6), it was no such thing. It was a decision, taken by the politicians – Cheney, Rumsfeld, the neo-con gang round Bush – to generate bogus
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‘intelligence’ linking 9/11 to Iraq to provide the pretext for the invasion then being planned.38 How this was experienced by America’s ‘allies’ has been described by Jiri Ruzek, the head of Czech counterintelligence at the time. The CIA was trying to stand up the claim, from one Czech intelligence source, that Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 pilots, had met an Iraqi official in Prague. Ruzek wrote in a memoir: ‘It was becoming more and more clear that we had not met expectations and did not provide the ‘right’ intelligence output .....The Americans showed me that anything can be violated, including the rules that they themselves taught us. Without any regard to us, they used our intelligence information for propaganda press leaks. They wanted to mine certainty from unconfirmed suspicion and use it as an excuse for military action. We were supposed to play the role of useful idiot thanks to whose initiative a war would be started.’ 39 And the striking thing, which no-one seems to have commented on, is that the use of torture failed; no useable ‘intelligence’ linking Iraq to 9/11 was generated and thus they were forced back onto the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ line as the pretext.
From the horse’s mouth One Luke Akehurst has recently become the director of BICOM, the Britain Israel Communications & Research Centre, the leading PR outfit for Israel in the UK, and a profile of him 40 shows how a section of the Israeli lobby works:
38 On this see Senator Carl Levin (Dem.) at
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‘After graduating in politics at Bristol University, Luke worked for two years as the National Union of Students' Bristol convenor and for a year as Labour Students national secretary. His support for Israel became reinforced during the years he was involved in student politics. He said: “I had an extremely good working relationship with Bristol J-Soc when I was a student, then with the Union of Jewish Students at national level. I already had the gut instincts, but my understanding and deepening of support for Israel came through working alongside Jewish students in the NUS.” Luke is full of praise for the work of the UJS which has created a whole generation of non-Jewish pro-Israel political activists, some of whom he is working alongside at BICOM. He said: “The younger MPs who prominently identify with the Labour Friends of Israel disproportionately come from the same background as me in student politics. That is the long-term benefit of all of the work that the UJS does.”’ Akehurst hopes to become a Labour MP.
Fluoridation of water The belief that the fluoridation of water is bad for us seemed so comic in the early 1960s that Stanley Kubrick had the deranged US base commander, Jack D. Ripper, include it in a speech he made in Dr. Strangelove. Half a century later, while the fluoridation lobby is still secure in this country, two significant recent events suggest that the consensus on fluoride’s efficacy may not last much longer. The first was a report which concluded that ‘children in high-fluoride areas had significantly lower IQ scores than those who lived in low-
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fluoride areas’. 41 The second was the news that the fluoridation of water had been banned in Israel – as far as I know the first state to take this step.42 It’s not that I am particularly interested in fluoridation as a subject, but I am interested in the way a false consensus can be created and maintained.43
The men who rule the world The news that Rory Stewart MP had been appointed chair of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, plus Stewart’s invitation to the 2011 Bilderberg meeting, led Tony Gosling, the UK’s leading Bilderberg watcher, to write a piece for Russia Today headlined ‘Bilderberg’s silent takeover of Britain’s £60bn defense budget’.44 More interesting than this, surely, is Stewart’s apparent but not quite acknowledged role as a former MI6 officer and the fact that he is a rather bright and impressive man.45 Gosling and those like him believe that Bilderberg is something like the executive committee of Western capitalism when the evidence – such as it is – from those who have attended the meetings is that it is nothing more than busy executives chewing the fat with their peers, being briefed by experts in particular fields, doing a bit of networking and casting an eye over prospective political leaders. Similar fantasies are held about the Trilateral Commission and its progenitor the Council on Foreign Relations. Recently one Patrick Wood, having noticed that the new head of the US Defense Department, Ashton Carter, is a Trilateralist, claimed that ‘the Trilateral Commission and its 41 See
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members are executing a coup right under our noses and nobody says a word’.46 What people like Wood and Gosling are prone to forget is that people like Ashton Carter wear many hats, of which Trilateral membership or Bilderberg attendance is only one, and maybe not even an important one.
The same river twice On 21 October financial journalist, author and occasional Lobster contributor Dan Atkinson sent out an e-mail: ‘Main story headline in yesterday’s edition of City AM: “The City is back: Number of people working in London’s financial sector soars past its pre-crash peak” So how’s that “re-balanced economy” working out for you all?’ Indeed: it’s the same old same old. The City is booming, so London and the southeast is booming and migrants flock to London to service the people with the money. The global gamblers are still gambling; debt and derivative volumes are still rising. We are heading for another big crash and this time the state will not be able to bail out the UK banks.
Russia I do not pretend to understand what is happening in Russia; and given the current US-driven expansion of NATO right up to Russia’s borders, I am sceptical of all Western MSM reporting on the country. Nonetheless, two striking pieces on the subject have appeared in English that are worth a look. The first is a series of big investigations by Reuters into aspects of Russia’s economy47 and the second is a long review of a new
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book on the rise of Putin and his associates.48 The two articles are complimentary in many ways. Both show, for example, that the current Russian kleptocracy has been created with and is supported by the world’s off-shore banking system. Toby Sculthorp, who referred me to the book review, commented: ‘the thesis [is] that a very small group of KGB officers have been able to rebuild the modern Russian state. So we have a political scientific model that posits that a powerful intelligence cabal – in cahoots with banks (domestic and international) and organised crime as the most influential forces in a “democracy”. Interesting that this is fine when talking about Russia. Any discussion about the above in the west is, of course, a “conspiracy theory”.’
Special Branch In this issue there is a review of a book on MI5 published by Boydell and Brewer. That company is reissuing Bernard Porter’s Origins of the Vigilant State: the London Metropolitan Police Special Branch before the First World War (ISBN 085115283X).
Chomsky and JFK Noam Chomsky is a great writer but he has one blind spot: he has no interest in or knowledge of practical politics. This leads him to make very black and white judgments. Take his view of JFK. In a recent piece of his, ‘The leading terrorist state’, he writes: ‘In Cuba, after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, President John F. Kennedy launched a murderous and destructive campaign to bring “the terrors of the earth” to Cuba – the words of Kennedy’s close associate, the 48
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historian Arthur Schlesinger, in his semiofficial biography of Robert Kennedy, who was assigned responsibility for the terrorist war.’ 49 This ignores – probably because Chomsky is unaware of it – the other things that Kennedy was doing vis-a-vis Cuba; namely, trying to find a diplomatic resolution. This had to be done secretly because the anti-Castro lobby in the US was bureaucratically and politically powerful. I do not believe that the CIA, the military and/or the anti-Castro Cubans did the dirty deed in Dallas but lots of them wanted to kill JFK – and precisely because they saw the Kennedy administration as dragging its feet where Fidel was concerned. Some of this secret diplomacy is discussed in Peter Kornbluth’s very good essay ‘Kennedy’s Last Act: Reaching Out to Cuba’.50
Oor Broon Gordon Brown’s announcement at the beginning of December that he was standing down as an MP evoked a predictable chorus of acclamation from Labour Party supporters and derision from its opponents. None of the comments I read portrayed Brown as an economically illiterate careerist who became leader of the Labour Party by sounding like a leftie to its members while cuddling up to the American embassy and international bankers.51 As for his economic record as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Robert Henderson clearly lays out some of the dismal details.52
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Following trails Roger Stone is a former Republican Party pol who, last year, published a book arguing the LBJ’s-people-killed-JFK case.53 In the Daily Mail recently there was a puff piece for his new book on Nixon, Watergate et al, Nixon’s Secrets.54 In that, this sentence about Gerry Hemming appears, complete with the brackets: (For the conspiracy-minded, ‘Nixon’s Secrets’ also notes that Hemming had been JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s case officer at a naval air station in Japan, a point of origin for top-secret U-2 spy plane flights.) This seemed a new claim to me (not that I have taken much notice of Gerry Hemming) and unlikely to be true. I quickly found that the source of this claim was a 1977 article by Victor Marchetti, the fairly senior CIA officer who blew the whistle in 1974 in his much redacted The Cult of Intelligence.55 With a little more searching I found the original 1977 article.56 In fact Marchetti does not say that Hemming was Oswald’s case officer, merely ‘that Hemming was Oswald’s Marine sergeant when he was stationed at CIA’s U-2 base in Atsugi, Japan’. Stone has – let’s be generous – misreported this.57 But here’s the magic of following these trails. During these searches I came across John Klein’s ‘The Gerry Patrick Hemming Panel’, a transcript of a conversation Hemming had with a quartet of JFK researchers at the 1996 Lancer conference on the assassination.58 This was the bit which stood out among Hemming’s rambling, coded, at times 53
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unintelligible contributions. ‘ “Why was he [Oswald] sent to the Soviet Union?” Hemming asked, in an apparent non-sequiteur. “Did he ever discover that? No. He was sent there to be the fall guy when they dumped the U-2. So they’d get the financing for the satellites...... But he wouldn’t have known that.’ By which Hemming means that Oswald qua radar technician was sent to the Soviet Union to be there as the explanation in Washington of how the Soviets managed to down the U-2 when Soviet air defences were believed to be incapable of it: viz. defector Oswald obviously gave information which enabled them to do it.59 The late Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty claimed that the Gary Powers-piloted U-2 which was apparently shot down by Soviet air defences was sabotaged, to damage President Eisenhower’s attempt to cool the Cold War with the Soviets.60 Hemming’s explanation, that it was sabotaged for domestic political ends, to bolster the case for surveillance satellites replacing the U-2, will ring a big bell with anyone who has read a little about the American military-industrial complex: this is how that game is played. And while there is no evidence to support Hemming’s claim about Oswald’s purpose in ‘defecting’, it is an elegant explanation of why Oswald was sent and perhaps explains why so little interest was shown in him by the CIA when he returned; he was apparently never debriefed on his experiences, for example. His role was over.
Who pays this piper? The London Review of Books is the only magazine I still buy. It never occurred to me wonder if it was what it looked like until
59 This was argued by U2 pilot Gary Powers in a 1970 article. See
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it ran Andrew O’Hagan’s assault on Julian Assange.61 That was so OTT it felt weird. Then I read an article about the LRB which informed me that the magazine had been subsidized by a family trust of the editor’s, thus far to the tune of £27 million.62 Despite losing all this money it is paying its contributors 30p a word – over £1000 for a longish article – at least twice what comparable publications are paying. What was the last cultural/political magazine in this country to pay its writers handsomely, lose a lot of money and survive? Encounter, funded by the CIA. Just saying......
The USS Liberty story The assault on the USS Liberty, an American spy ship in the Mediterranean, during the 1967 Six Days War, is another of the big items which the American political system cannot deal with. Nearly as much effort has been expended keeping that off the agenda as has been spent on obscuring JFK’s death. The British author, documentary maker and producer, Richard Belfield,63 has made a film about the attack for Al Jazeera which has new evidence showing that the Israelis knew the ship was American when it was attacked.64 In the literature on the Liberty incident, one strand has it that US president Johnson authorised the Israeli attack on the Liberty, seeking to create a pretext for a US attack on Egypt. In his 2003 book, Operation Cyanide, Peter Hounam, sometime head of the Sunday Times ‘Insight’ team, argues that a nuclear attack was planned and was within minutes of being carried out before a recall order went out to the planes heading for Cairo. That book is now available free in PDF form.65
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This is what isn’t going to happen ‘To prevent wholesale global ecological collapse we must radically retrench and close down swathes of unsustainable industries in the North, sustainably industrialize the South, and “converge and contract” around a sustainable mode of life within the framework of a global eco-socialist economy.’ 66 And since this isn’t going to happen, why is the eco-left discussing it?
Money talking American academics Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page report in their essay ‘Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens’: ‘The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.’ 67 In other words, to quote one of the congressmen filmed by the FBI during the so-called Abscam affair, in American politics ‘Money talks and bullshit walks’.68 Rarely mentioned these days in the discussions of the new global elite, the oligarchs, or the 1%, is William Domhoff, the American sociologist who, following in the footsteps of C. Wright Mills, was examining their power forty years ago in books such as the 1971 The Higher Circles. Mr Domhoff, I am happy to report, is still at it, with a lot of his material available
66 Richard Smith, ‘Climate Crisis, the Deindustrialization Imperative and the Jobs vs. Environment Dilemma’ at
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on-line.69
Uncle Sam and Broon From somewhere I had acquired the idea that Gordon Brown was a Kennedy assassination buff; but the only source on this appears to be comments made by Sir Alex Ferguson, former manager of Manchester United. Ferguson is a collector of JFK assassination memorabilia. He said: ‘I have a copy of JFK’s autopsy report. I got a letter from the lad who runs the JFK assassination committee and he sent me the report. I also have a brand new copy of the Warren Report signed by the former president, Gerald Ford, which is the only one he signed, so it’s one of a kind.’ ‘The lad who runs the JFK assassination committee’ ??? Ferguson said that he and Brown had ‘communicated’ on the subject and that Brown had sent him ‘35 CDs on it’.70 The only other item of any relevance is the comment of a school friend of Brown’s. ‘...... while most of Gordon's schoolfriends cared little about the assassination of JFK, he was devastated. Kenn McLeod, 57, who followed him from Kirkcaldy High to Edinburgh, said: “Gordon saw him as the future and could not believe the future had been so brutally snuffed out. He was shocked and stunned. He kept saying, ‘I cannot believe that this has happened’.”’ 71 This is interesting to me because if Brown is a JFK buff this means he has read about the CIA etc.; for as soon as you leave the Warren Commission and begin reading the literature, willy-nilly you begin learning about the Cold War and the role of the intelligence agencies. Which means that
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when the young MP Brown was first promoted by the US embassy in London72 he knew what he was getting into. He wasn’t an innocent abroad.
Julian Assange Newsweek’s website ran a long extract from the new book by Julian Assange.73 In it he meets a senior emissary from Google and then, researching him, discovers that he’s also working for the US government’s foreign policy apparatus (one of the original private-public partnerships). Assange comments at one point: ‘The received wisdom in advanced capitalist societies is that there still exists an organic “civil society sector” in which institutions form autonomously and come together to manifest the interests and will of citizens. The fable has it that the boundaries of this sector are respected by actors from government and the “private sector,” leaving a safe space for NGOs and nonprofits to advocate for things like human rights, free speech and accountable government. This sounds like a great idea. But if it was ever true, it has not been for decades. Since at least the 1970s, authentic actors like unions and churches have folded under a sustained assault by free-market statism, transforming “civil society” into a buyer’s market for political factions and corporate interests looking to exert influence at arm’s length. The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy. It is not just obvious neocon front groups like Foreign Policy Initiative. It also includes fatuous Western NGOs like Freedom House, where naïve but well-
72 See the comments of embassy official, Robert Hopper, at
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meaning career nonprofit workers are twisted in knots by political funding streams, denouncing non-Western human rights violations while keeping local abuses firmly in their blind spots. The civil society conference circuit — which flies developing-world activists across the globe hundreds of times a year to bless the unholy union between “government and private stakeholders” at geopoliticized events like the “Stockholm Internet Forum”— simply could not exist if it were not blasted with millions of dollars in political funding annually.’ Which tells us that Assange is smart and well informed; which, in turn, probably explains why he fell out with the Guardian: serious journalists like to think of themselves as the smartest people in the room and with Assange they wouldn’t have been. But why is Newsweek running Assange’s detailed critique of Google’s work for American foreign policy?
Ben Bradlee and the mainstream media And so the famous editor of the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee died, and the Guardian’s current editor, Alan Rusbridger, ran an appreciation of him headed ‘Stamina, bravery, brilliance – the great Ben Bradlee had it all’; with the subhead ‘Bradlee’s editorship of the Washington Post changed American history. The editor of the Guardian remembers a man “committed unshakably to principle”’.74 Rusbridger then ran the standard left-liberal picture of Bradlee – the hero of Watergate, defender of the free press – and I wonder: is Rusbridger a fool or a knave? My guess would be fool, and that he is simply unaware of the research that has been done on Bradlee, his milieu, his work with the CIA, and the other dimensions to
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‘Watergate’ not discussed by the major media.75
In the beginning The death of Sir John Hoskyns was announced in October.76 Hoskyns was an army officer who became a businessman. A clever alpha male, used to a command structure and intolerant of fools, he looked at Britain in the mid 1970s and saw chaos, stupidity and systems failure; and wanted to do something about it. He sold the business he had created and set about ‘saving Britain’. In his memoir 77 he offered this list from 1977 of the problems facing Britain: ‘trade union obstruction, inflationary expectations, the tendency of the best talent to keep away from manufacturing industry, fiscal distortions, high interest rates, an over-valued pound, stop-go economic management, the low status of engineers, poor industrial design, the anti-enterprise culture, illiterate teenagers.’ (p. 11) Most of this list, viz: ‘the tendency of the best talent to keep away from manufacturing industry, high interest rates, an over- valued pound, stop-go economic management, the low status of engineers, poor industrial design’ is a critique of the British economy from the industry side of the City-versus-industry divide, though Hoskyns never puts it like that. Two years later he was the head of Mrs Thatcher’s Policy Unit where he discovered that many of the Conservative politicians for whom he was devising policy were interested in only one item on his list – ‘trade union obstruction’ – and some 75 Bradlee’s ‘other’ biography has recently been pulled together by the excellent John Simkin at
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were economically illiterate. Just after the election in May 1979 which saw the first Thatcher government elected, he writes: ‘I had been convinced since before the election that the pound was too high. Margaret seemed to be convinced that the “higher the pound, the better for the economy”; and that complaints from industry were invariably “just whingeing”. This was to be a continuing and growing disagreement.’ (p. 107) On 18 February 1980 Hoskyns met Anthony Barber, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Heath government, and at that time Chairman of the Standard Chartered Bank and noted in his diary: ‘Barber v. nice indeed but seemed to think that it was the strong Deutschmark that had helped Germany to prosper, rather than the other way round. The more I see of people generally and especially those who run or have run the country, the more amazed I feel. He [Barber] seemed to think that the high pound was going to do the same for us.’ (p. 159) It would be difficult to overstate how striking this is. A prime minister and a former chancellor of the exchequer had simply not understood something almost as basic as increased demand for a good increasing its price. If Mrs Thatcher didn’t understand something as simple as this, what could she understand of the economic advice she was getting? Nothing, in effect. And the result, says Hoskyns, was the Thatcher government’s economic policies of 79-81: essentially very high interest rates which destroyed a chunk of British exporting manufacturers by driving up the value of the pound. Close to the centre of all this, Hoskyns writes in early 1980: ‘We were now almost certain that the Government was getting its monetary policy badly wrong, Only ministers and civil servants devoid of business experience could think that the private sector could adjust to such ham- handed policy without suffering great damage.’ (p. 162) Eventually a leading ‘monetarist’ economist was brought in to
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explain to Mrs Thatcher that they had got it wrong. In his Epilogue Hoskyns writes: ’.....the excessive monetary squeeze of 1979-81 had been an embarrassing error and.....the Government’s most difficult and unpopular action in its first term, the 1981 Budget, had been designed to correct it’. (p. 391) It never seemed to dawn on Hoskyns how curious it was that in British economic history these ‘errors’ always benefited the City side of the City-versus-industry equation.
There are quagmires and there are quagmires Among the many subjects I have not tried to understand is the events in Central Africa in the mid 1990s, which in this country is generally shorthanded as the Rwanda genocide. Thus I didn’t watch the 1 October BBC documentary ‘Rwanda’s Untold Story’, but guessed it challenged the received view that in Rwanda a mass slaughter of one tribe was carried out by members of another. My guess was correct and the programme provoked outrage in some quarters. The programme is defended and the outraged response to it is picked to pieces in Edward Herman and David Petersen’s ‘The Kagame-Power Lobby's Dishonest Attack on the BBC2’s Documentary on Rwanda’.78 Herman and Petersen have a new book on these events, Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System, 20 Years Later (The Real News Books, 2014).79
78 At
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Julian Assange and the European Arrest Warrant
Bernard Porter
The Assange affair rumbles on. Assange is still holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy, at a cost of God knows how much to the taxpayers of Ecuador, and more to those of the UK, to pay for the police stationed around it ready to whisk him away to Sweden if he ventures outside. The situation must be an embarrassment all round; not least to the British and Swedish governments, which have both shown signs recently of realizing how ridiculous the whole situation is. I’ll come on to that at the end of this piece. In the meantime it may be worth recapitulating on events so far. Assange doesn’t any longer surface much in either the British or the Swedish press – I’ll touch on that at the end, too; and I have reason to think – from comments on a piece I posted recently on the London Review of Books site – that many people who ought to know about it don’t, or have forgotten. So here is a run-down of the salient features of his case; the case of his attempted extradition, that is, rather than of Wikileaks more generally.
Assange in Sweden Assange was in Stockholm early in 2010 to talk about Wikileaks, when he lodged with a female admirer, and – consensually (there’s no doubt about that) – had sex with her. He also had sex with another admirer shortly afterwards. The first groupie was annoyed by this, which may (only may) partly explain what followed. Groupie no.1 was worried by the fact that their sex had been unprotected, and by his reluctance to have an AIDS test afterwards. So she went along to the local police in order to ascertain whether he could be forced to have the test. Somehow that mushroomed into an accusation of ‘rape’ against Assange, which groupie no. 1 persuaded groupie no. 2 to go along with. Assange consented to be
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interviewed by the police in connection with that, after which they decided there was no convincing case against him, and let him go to Britain, which was the next place on his schedule. So far so good. Assange is obviously what we oldies used to regard as ‘a bit of a cad’ in his personal life, but probably no more. If we made a habit of extraditing cads, we wouldn’t have many of our young male upper classes left. Alarm over. Then, however, Marianne Ny stepped in. She’s a prosecutor (not a judge) in Gothenburg, over on the other side of Sweden, who is well known for championing ‘women’s causes’, and for recommending that even tentatively suspected sex offenders should be immediately incarcerated: viz.: ‘only when the man is arrested and the woman is left in peace does she have time to get some perspective on her life, and then get a chance to discover how she really has been treated.’ Apparently Ny decided off her own bat that Assange’s case needed to be reopened, and to apply under the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) to get him extradited immediately. Why her mere say-so sufficed to set this in motion is a mystery to many of us, but apparently was enough to persuade the British court that heard his appeal to let it go forward. In the end Ny’s accreditation was the only point at issue; not the flimsiness of the evidence against Assange, which was apparently immaterial at that stage. That’s what the Appeal judge said. He was bound by the EAW.
The EAW I was taken aback by this. It was Assange’s case that first drew my attention to the EAW, which had entirely passed under my radar when it was originally incorporated into British law in 2003, when David Blunkett was Home Secretary. I wasn’t paying attention. I know something of the history of British extradition law before then. It had always been hedged around with certain safeguards: suspects could only be extradited to countries whose legal systems we trusted; if they
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were formally charged with offences that were offences in Britain too, and explicitly not for ‘political’ offences; if a British court thought, from the evidence, that there was a good prima facie case against them; and with the assurance that, once extradited, they could not be charged with or re-extradited for any other offence. That last was very important, and was intended to prevent obvious abuses, like using the original extradition request as a mere pretext. Now all that has gone. The overt motive for this was to facilitate bringing terrorists and mobsters to justice – it was all part of that ‘War on Terror’ nonsense after 9/11; another might have been to cuddle up to Europe, even if it meant sacrificing fundamental ‘British liberties’. Whatever; hundreds of people have been removed from Britain under the terms of the EAW over the last ten years, many of them entirely and indeed obviously innocent. Assange was one of them; or would have been, if he hadn’t sought asylum in Ecuadorian national territory before they could get at him. He wouldn’t have needed to do that if Ny had met two simple conditions: that she question him in London (or by Skype), as is very common in these trans-national cases (there’s a European mechanism for it); and that the Swedish state, or courts, or whoever has the ultimate say in this, promises not to extradite him on to the USA. That of course is why he wasn’t willing to go back to Sweden voluntarily to ‘face the music’. He has always protested his innocence. Sweden – especially the last centre-right coalition government – is more hand-in-glove with the Americans than it likes its people to think. That was something, incidentally, that one of the earliest ‘Wikileaks’ revealed (it was to do with ‘rendition’). The USA certainly wants to extradite him for his Wikileaks ‘offences’, in order to try him on political charges that could land him in an awful American prison for decades. (If he is to go to prison, he’d do much better in a Swedish one; they’re pretty comfortable – which is probably why Sweden has a lower rate of recidivism.) Sweden has so far refused to rule this out. No-one can understand why both these conditions have not been met.
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Which of course makes the whole thing look suspicious. The obvious peculiarities of this case are such that its manipulation by the Americans, in league with the Swedish Moderaten Party (recently advised, for example, by Karl Rove of all people) – in other words, a ‘conspiracy’ – begins to seem the most credible of all possible options. I doubt whether Ny is part of this; she has enough ultra-feminist motivation of her own. Maybe the conspirators were just lucky to have her on hand; and that Assange’s alleged offences were the most likely to prejudice ‘progressive’ Swedes against him, whatever they might think of Wikileaks. The soil was well-tilled for a Swedish-British-American plot against him, if that’s what it was. The idea of his being flown over to the USA, after or even before a Swedish trial on the (mooted) ‘sex’ charges, may be on balance unlikely, but is not out of the question. If I were Assange, even if I were confident of being able to exonerate myself in a Swedish court, I would be afraid, too.
Our legal system and theirs I’m less confident than I used to be (as a Swedophile) of his getting a fair trial in Sweden. This has surprised me, sharing as I do the common view (certainly on the Left) of Sweden as a progressive and liberal-socialist utopia, a model for us all. I still think it’s that in many respects, including most of its laws. But not its legal processes. I’ve learned a lot about those since the Assange case came up. So have many Swedes, who seem generally much more ignorant of their legal system than we are of ours, simply because they don’t participate in it. Sweden doesn’t have juries. Cases are tried by a judge flanked by two political appointees. (I’ve actually witnessed that.) Defendants are locked up pre-trial for months in isolation, and rarely granted bail. There have been cases where this has led to suicide. They often aren’t given full details of the charges against them until the last moment; this is happening to Assange too. I’m not sure that innocence is always presumed. The Swedes have a rather rigid, pedantic view of the law, which means that clearly innocent people can be convicted, and their convictions upheld on appeal, if it can be shown that
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the legal processes have been followed correctly. (This happened in the recent notorious case of Thomas Quick – a convicted serial killer who turned out not to be. Never mind; if the trial was conducted by the book, he must have been.) The Swedish police are pretty dodgy, too; look at the mess they made over the murder of Olof Palme. (Don’t go by Kurt Wallander.) The police, press and politicians seem to be allowed to prejudice trials in advance. Again, Assange is an example: prime minister Fredrick Reinfeldt made a public statement in February 2011 declaring Assange guilty; in Britain couldn’t that have led to Reinfeldt’s being imprisoned for contempt of court? He also claimed that our – British - problem was that we didn’t take rape seriously. That’s not going to help, in any Swedish trial of Assange. I’ve no idea what Assange and his legal team think of all this. Obviously it wouldn’t be a particularly bright idea if, before a possible trial in Sweden, they started trashing its system. For all they and I know that system might have advantages over ours – be more efficient, more consistent, less vulnerable to popular (jury) prejudice. For somebody brought up in the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, however, it must seem unnerving to have to go to trial without the protection of twelve of your ‘peers’, under a system that goes back in Britain for centuries, and indeed formed the historical foundation of our sort of ‘democracy’. A judge flanked by placemen: to us that appears almost to encourage corruption and tyranny. We fought a civil war against this sort of thing. Reasonable or not, this is a cultural matter, a deeply-ingrained distinction between Britain and the Continent. Again, if the Australian Assange felt uncomfortable with the Swedish system, I wouldn’t blame him. I hope I never cross it when I’m there. But of course we can’t say that of a respected fellow- member of the EU. If Assange were returned to Sweden, after being questioned in the Ecuadorian embassy, and with the assurance that the Americans wouldn’t be allowed to get him, one would have thought, from the evidence made public so far, that any case against him would be pretty easily
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countered. The women were not forced into anything. They even boasted of their ‘conquests’. Groupie no. 2 seems to have been a reluctant complainant in any case. The case mainly rests on a condom that Assange is said to have ripped deliberately: but then when the woman ‘produced’ it for the police, neatly cut, it turned out to have no traces of anyone’s DNA. The other charge is that Assange, already in bed with groupie no. 1, and after one bout of sex, asked her for another go while she was ‘half asleep’. I wonder how many of us, women as well as men, have been guilty of that? And remember it’s only their words against his. Could a case for ‘rape’ be made out of this? Clearly not in Britain. But then we don’t take rape seriously, according to the Swedish statsminister, no less. In Sweden they are far more advanced, or crazy, if you like (it’s up to you), and have already assumed Assange is a rapist. That overrides everything: both the Wikileaks and the extradition issues. A pity; because if they could break free from this, they might come to understand more about their own legal shortcomings, and their government’s true relations with America. On this last – the ‘conspiracy theory’ – I’ll leave readers of this journal to judge. Whatever the truth of that may be, it’s pretty much submerged now as a public topic. Swedish newspapers scarcely ever mention anything to do with Assange now; it all seems too indelicate. British papers seem to find him almost as embarrassing. Some of them have done hatchet-jobs on just about everything about him, ranging from his alleged ‘treason’ to his personal hygiene; culminating in Andrew O’Hagan’s long demolition of his character in a recent London Review of Books, after failing to establish a rapport with him as his ghost writer. I had the curious experience recently of being ‘pre-moderated’ (that is, blacklisted) from the Guardian’s website for wanting to mention his name in connection with the European Arrest Warrant. Assange has had his spats with the Guardian, of course. I doubt if there’s anything sinister behind these, but you never know. But it makes it difficult to discuss the Assange extradition case outside the (non- Guardian) blogosphere. In a recent Commons debate on the
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EAW (the one the government at first tried to avoid) no-one brought up his case. Why not? You can understand why governments – any governments – and their stooges might want him buried. But what about the others? Could it be the ‘sex’ thing again? Is it impossible for a cad to be a hero any more? Have we progressed that far from James Bond?
Change is coming? But it could all change soon. During the Commons debate on the EAW, Home Secretary Theresa May made it clear that the criteria for Britain’s abiding by it had changed, so that much stricter criteria would be followed in the future. Formal charges would need to be laid against suspects, for example, not just accusations by prosecutors; and the British courts would expect to be allowed to judge the prima facie quality of the evidence. If these standards had been in place in 2010, there is little doubt that Assange could not have been extradited then; or at least, not under the terms of the EAW. (There are other, slower and more scrupulous extradition procedures available.) On the other side of the North Sea, an appeal court in Sweden recently dismissed a motion to have the EAW withdrawn in Assange’s case, for the usual pedantic reason that it hadn’t been technically wrong; but on the other hand strongly criticised Marianne Ny for refusing to question Assange in England. An under-secretary at the British Foreign Office, Hugo Swire, has stated that he would ‘actively welcome’ and ‘do everything to facilitate’ that. Apparently it’s still up to Ny. (Yes, her alone.) She’s said to be thinking about it.
Bernard Porter is a retired Professor of History and author of Plots and Paranoia A History of Political Espionage in Britain 1790-1988 (1989).
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Holding pattern
Garrick Alder
Coincidence theories With the jury’s declaration of guilt in the trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, we can now move forward to the vital next step, which is to spend the rest of his sorry lifespan (and maybe longer) listening to lunatics claiming he was totally innocent and it was all a false flag operation organised by the New World Order (or whatever). One thing of note that we learned from this trial: using the same legal definition, Tsarnaev had weapons of mass destruction while Saddam Hussein didn’t. The first signs of the inevitable pro-conspiracy deconstruction of the bombing appeared almost before the smoke had cleared. As usual, this was a mixture of the odd, the anomalous and the inexplicable. There was also a truly unpleasant spin-off theory in which maimed civilians caught on video were dismissed as ‘crisis actors’ with pre-existing amputations. The most interesting aspect from my point of view was the claim that – yet again – a drill or rehearsal for a terrorist attack was taking place at the time of the real-life attack. This hair-raising coincidence can be found all over the internet, but ‘patient zero’ appears to have been a piece (no dateline) on ‘alternative news’ site
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references to it into an episode of ‘Family Guy’ aired prior to your attack?) But when you boil the whole thing down and sort the myths from the facts (and doing so is far too tedious to relate here) there do indeed seem to have been several instances in which this phenomenon – rehearsals for emergency response to attacks, shortly before or during real attacks in the same place – has occurred. The classic example was that of the anti-terrorism training exercise taking place in London on the day of the 2005 ‘7/7’ bombings, which was imagining bombs going off at the precise stations where they did in fact go off, leading some participants in the exercise to be initially impressed that the drill extended to live BBC broadcasts of their ‘fictional’ disaster. (Although much has been made of this incident, it should be remembered that it was a ‘paper drill’, i.e. a crisis command simulation, rather than a response deployment exercise.) So, are these phantom attacks significant? Probably not. The average news consumer has no idea of exactly how much time and effort public safety bodies pour into constantly keeping their systems tweaked and running smoothly in case the unimaginable happens. Drills and rehearsals are almost the norm, rather than the exception. In the case of the Boston bombing, it would obviously make sense for local public safety organisers to run a ‘terrorism’ simulation during a large-scale public event almost beyond anyone’s control – and the same thought obviously occurred to the bomber himself, with considerably less philanthropic motivations. As for the unusualness of some coincidences, consider the exhumation of Richard III in Leicestershire and his reburial earlier this year. The team looking for Richard’s body sank their first pit through a capital ‘R’ painted on the tarmac of the car park at the centre of their search – and found the skeleton immediately. An archaeological hole in one, compounded by the fact that Richard had died on that day’s date (22 August) 527 years previously. The odds against all this must be
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stupendous. Yet no-one has so-far suggested that Richard III’s exhumation was a staged event planned by the New World Order for whatever nefarious purpose such things are normally done.
Shadows in the Sunshine State Another decade, another Bush. This time, it’s Jeb, who was governor of Florida when that state’s dodgy balloting put George W. in the White House in 2000, leading many to cry ‘foul!’ As the Financial Times recently observed, the prospect of a Bush/Clinton race in next year’s presidential will mean that two families have effectively run the USA for just under 40 years (including George Bush Snr’s vice-presidency and Hillary Clinton’s tenure at the State Department). But if Jeb runs, he may find some questions reappear concerning the connection between his adoptive state and the 9/11 catastrophe that was the forging of George W.’s presidency. Looked at from a Floridian perspective, the attacks seem to have remarkable coherency. Five of the hijackers trained at the same Venice, Florida, flight school, Huffman Aviation.2 Eleven of them opened bank accounts in Florida, with the same bank, and apparently using genuine Social Security numbers – obtained from where, we do not know – as a form of ID.3 Fifteen of the hijackers somehow obtained Floridian driving licences (the issuing of those licences being handled by Florida’s DMV, overseen at cabinet level in then-Governor Bush’s executive).4 The official investigation of 9/11 was led by two of Jeb’s contemporary fellow Floridians, Representative Porter Goss (Rep.) and Senator Bob Graham (Dem.). Goss represented 2 Huffman Aviation has now closed. There is another flight school called Huffman Aviation in Texas, home state of Jeb’s brother George. The owner of that flight school assures me that this is a coincidence 3
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Florida’s 13th District until redistricting in 1993 shifted him into position in the 14th District, where he stayed until 2004 when he quit to take up position as George W. Bush’s nominated CIA director. This was very much a return to home turf, when you consider his early career. In 1960, Goss was a Yale student, where he was in the same fraternity as William H.T. Bush (George H.W.’s brother and George W’s uncle) and John Negroponte (later appointed an ambassador under both Bush administrations). From Yale, Goss was recruited into the CIA (no doubt the Bush family connection was purely coincidental), and took up office at the Agency’s Miami station, where he played a still unclear role in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Senator Bob Graham, on the other hand, was the brother of former OSS man and later Washington Post editor the late Phil Graham, who helped the CIA by running propaganda as part of Operation Mockingbird and by covering up the Agency’s failure at the Bay of Pigs, whose personal acquaintances included CIA Director Allen Dulles. (Phil Graham had also worked for the OSS in China, alongside E. Howard Hunt and Richard Helms.) So, perhaps it was, shall we say, a sense of common heritage and interests that inspired Floridian Senator Bob Graham to appoint Porter Goss as a Lee County Board Commissioner in 1983, after which Goss’s political career in Florida took off in earnest. By a strange twist of fate, these two eminent and well- connected Floridians were in place at the top of Washington’s intelligence oversight hierarchy when Atta and co. flew into the twin towers: Goss as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee (since 1997) and Graham as Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (a role he had taken up just months before the attack, in July 2001). By an even stranger twist of fate, the two were actually involved with the director of Pakistan’s intelligence service in a breakfast discussion of Osama bin Laden, at the very moment the
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attacks took place.5 Graham and Goss went on to co-lead the 9/11 Commission and oversee its final report, the notorious 28 still secret pages of which have drawn so much suspicion and curiosity. It’s been rumoured for over a decade that the withheld pages at least strongly suggest Saudi complicity in the attacks, although given the absolutely unignorable Floridian dimension to the attacks one might be forgiven for perhaps suspecting that there might be an element of misdirection going on. If Jeb Bush ends up in the White House, the calls to declassify those 28 pages will certainly become louder. Then again, since Jeb is a founder signatory of the Project for the New American Century, we might have other things to worry about.
A paedogate puzzle With the appointment of New Zealand Judge Lowell Goddard to run the on-again-off-again Child Sex Abuse Inquiry (an appointment made just days after Lord Brittan died, by complete coincidence), it would appear that the entire farrago can get under way at last and disappear from the news for a decade or so before concluding that ‘mistakes were made’ and ‘lessons have been learned’ and all the guilty parties are now dead anyway so let’s all put it behind us. Justice Goddard, being from the other side of the planet, can reasonably be believed to have been beyond the reach of the tentacles of the British establishment and thus without any personal conflicts of interest (unlike her unfortunate predecessors). There is one slight concern here, and that is that the ultimate head of New Zealand’s judiciary is of course Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, so perhaps from an Establishment point of view Justice Goddard isn’t quite the long shot she might seem. (There is also the fact that it has now been reported that a member of the Royal Family came to the
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attention of Her Majesty’s Police in the 1980s as a suspected member of a paedophile ring.6 And, of course, the less said about Prince Andrew’s current predicament the better.) In this age of transparency, anyone can look up Justice Goddard’s judicial ‘pedigree’ on the internet, in this case on the website of New Zealand’s Ministry of Justice. Like many others, I did so out of curiosity and found that out of all Judge Goddard’s many cases, one was unavailable to view. The case is: The Sensible Sentencing Group Trust v The Human Rights Review Tribunal [2013] NZHC 2720 [High Court judgment]. Intrigued, I emailed the NZ Ministry of Justice and was told that Judge Goddard had put a non-publication order on the case. When I asked why, I was told: ‘In this case, the unredacted version of this judgment included the names of the victims of sexual offending, as well as the name of the appellant (whose name is allegedly subject to a permanent suppression order made in 1995), and thus was unable to be published without breaching those orders and statutory provisions.’ Wait....what? ‘Allegedly’? When I asked why the case was being withheld due to an anonymity order that might not even exist, I was told: ‘Rather than upholding the alleged name suppression order, the Tribunal granted interim suppression orders, presumably until the substantive matter could be determined.’ From all of which I understand that someone claimed to have a legal right to anonymity but there was no evidence in Ministry of Justice records to support that claim, and no evidence has surfaced in the two years since then, and rather than do the obvious (redact that person’s name just in case and release the transcript of the case as normal) the entire case has been effectively classified a state secret by Justice Goddard herself, somewhat in contravention of the Common Law principle of open justice.
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The entire situation makes no sense whatsoever. Perhaps it’s nothing but a one-off bureaucratic snarl-up. But this opaque episode makes me suspect there is something of real interest here.
Murdoch’s news values then.… March saw an underreported story, in the form of the Cabinet Office’s rejection of an FOIA request for documents relating to the so-called ‘Iraqi Money Affair’, comprising a file created by Harold Wilson himself in 1976. The affair involved Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s attempts to solicit campaign funds from Saddam Hussein’s ruling Ba’ath party, made through a French-Australian publisher go-between who was secretly a KGB agent and who stole the huge sum of money (some $3m by today’s value) that Iraqi intelligence paid into a Hong Kong bank account. The KGB agent then approached Australia’s premier newspaper magnate Keith (Rupert) Murdoch at around the time of Whitlam’s dismissal, and leaked the explosive story of Whitlam’s Iraqi benefactors, spicing it up further with allegations that Whitlam was going to leak information to Iraq about Arab discussions with Henry Kissinger. And of course, in February 1976 with Whitlam back in opposition, Mr Murdoch duly published it. However, he displayed his unmistakable knack for improving on the truth by reporting that Whitlam had actually received the Iraqi money, a misstep that eventually cost him a six-figure sum in damages for defamation. Either Mr Murdoch behaved with a reckless disregard for the truth, or he was playing some bigger game of his own. As were the KGB, whose motivations for smearing Whitlam seem unfathomable (unless it was an attempt to discredit Mr Murdoch, for whatever reason). In any event we won’t find out what was going on for the foreseeable future because the Iraqi Affair papers have been withheld on the grounds that disclosure could seriously harm international relations. With the Soviet Union dissolved and Whitlam long dead, it’s difficult to imagine which
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international relations the Cabinet Office has in mind. There is absolutely no suggestion that Mr Murdoch’s old friend David Cameron is in any way doing him some kind of personal favour by withholding the file.7
…..and now Fast forward to the present day and we learn that US President Obama is facing investigation over his administration’s ties to the omniscient internet behemoth Google Inc. This story was reported in early April by the normally on-the-ball IT site The Register 8 and may yet surface in the general news media; but when you look at what’s actually going on it turns out that the entire ‘scandal’ traces back to a conspiracy theory being floated by.....one Keith (Rupert) Murdoch, who fell out with the search engine giant in 2009 and is now pursuing his grievances through his hydra- headed media mouthpieces, aiming at both the corporation and the Obama administration on the ‘two birds with one stone’ principle. The details of the alleged scandal don’t particularly matter, because they had already been comprehensively debunked long before the Register picked up the scent.9 Worse still, the fearless investigator who is going to expose the sinister Obama-Google cabal is Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee leader Republican Senator Mike Lee,10 a leading ‘Tea Party’ figure and the instigator of the last federal government shutdown, who is an old ally of Mr Murdoch’s notorious Fox News channel.11 The sheer blatancy of all this leads one to wonder: does Mr Murdoch not care about getting caught red-handed, or is he just losing his touch?
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Sadly, with what passes for fact-checking in the mainstream media these days, Mr Murdoch’s little scam will probably be pounced upon by US news media, who are always out for The Big Story but who don’t look twice at the source. But compared to the Operation Mockingbird’s ‘mighty wurlitzer’ run by his old pals in the CIA, with his latest scheme Mr Murdoch is tootling through a plastic trumpet. Must try harder, Keith.
Love of a cold climate I am willing to bet that there is a possibility that virtually the entire scientific community is wrong in accepting that man- made climate change is occurring; but I’m only willing to bet that the possibility is very, very tiny indeed. The fossil fuel giants are however missing a trick in the debate that could swing things decisively in their favour. Officially, the planet is still in an Ice Age, since there are still two not inconsiderable polar ice caps. It just so happens that the entire course of civilisation to date has unfolded in what’s called an Interstadial – a slightly warmer interlude between two of the Ice Age’s periods of glaciation. No-one is quite sure how long this interstadial will last, but since the previous one lasted around 11,000 years and this one has lasted about as long, it’s a reasonable hypothesis that our current window of fair weather hasn’t got long left to run (in geological terms, at least). There doesn’t seem to have been any serious scientific debate on the subject12 but given that the consensus is that we are warming the planet with carbon emissions and that the current interstadial must have almost run its course, then it seems inescapable that our co2 emissions might actually be the saviour of civilisation rather than its nemesis. Of course, I’m referring to the northern hemisphere here.
12 There appears to have been precisely one concerted attempt to model the global warming/glaciation offset: see
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As a European I have entirely selfish motivations for thinking global warming could be a good thing. Which would you, the imagined reader in the northern hemisphere, rather look forward to – a warmer, wetter planet overall but with somewhat worse weather in the south and tropics? Or pretty much all of the planet’s most advanced cultures and all their combined history being crushed into gravel beneath unstoppable valley-deep sheets of ice? Be honest, now. If push came to shove, we could get along fine without polar bears, couldn’t we? And who’d miss the Netherlands anyway? Over to you, Big Oil......
All the news that fits Speaking at an event just before International Women’s Day, Women and Equalities Minister Nicky Morgan MP declared that ‘women fought and died for the vote’. Ms Morgan was talking out of her arse and doing it so blatantly that it’s hard to believe it was accidental. The Suffragettes – she can only be referring to them – were undeniably treated appallingly, but none, zero, zilch, nought per cent of them died as a result. (Emily Davison was famously trampled to death by the King’s horse while invading the track at the 1911 Derby but there is no evidence that this was not exactly what it looked like, an accident.) Nevertheless, the government’s minister for women told an untruth before a crowded all-female assembly, none of whom appears to have even raised an eyebrow and her claim ended up reported as though it were historical truth.13 It’s an interesting example of how absolute whoppers can slip through the journalistic filter because they fit a narrative, and shows again the profession’s notorious vulnerability to propaganda.
Murdoch and Iran-Contra Those who wondered at the ease with which Keith (Rupert) 13
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Murdoch settled himself into his current position as a US citizen and American media giant have had their darker suspicions confirmed by a recent revelation from the ever- excellent Consortium News. It turns out that Mr Murdoch was schmoozed into participating in a CIA ‘perception management’ operation in 1983, the object of which was to provide support for Ronald Reagan’s obsession with ‘protecting’ Central America in general and Nicaragua in particular – ‘America’s backyard’, in the parlance of the day. Messrs Murdoch and Reagan first met on 18 January 1983, just five days after Reagan had been informed by lawyers that (since Congress would quite obviously never approve it) the project would need private funding. It’s not clear how much money Mr Murdoch doled out to his patron’s pet projects, but subsequent developments show clearly how Reagan’s White House manipulated events to reward the president’s new mouthpiece.14 Mr Murdoch snapped up 20th Century Fox and six US TV stations in 1984 (the same year that he apparently supplied cash to fund Brian Crozier on a supposed fact-finding mission in Europe). In 1985, Mr Murdoch became a naturalised US citizen in order to meet a regulatory requirement that TV stations had to be owned by Americans. He was plainly preparing to go big in America. The same year, the Reagan administration increased the number of TV stations that any single entity could own from seven to 12. In October 1986 Mr Murdoch formed the Fox Broadcasting Corporation and in 1987 Reagan abolished the USA’s ‘fairness doctrine’, which demanded political balance from news reporting bodies. The rest, as they say, is history, although one wonders if Mr Murdoch has a slyer sense of humour than we realised, since it was precisely the abolition of the ‘fairness doctrine’ that enabled the growth of the rabidly-conservative self-styled ‘fair and balanced’ Fox News. Murdoch’s covert pas de deux with the Gipper raises interesting questions about news coverage of some of the
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CIA’s dealings in Central America, which were the subject of a recent FOIA disclosure from the Agency. The Agency’s internal history of Gary Webb’s infamous 1996 ‘Dark Alliance’ story that exposed CIA complicity in the Contras’ cocaine smuggling shenanigans was entitled ‘Managing a Nightmare’ – but appears to suggest that CIA did no management at all.15 The CIA’s historian refers to the way in which ‘a ground base of established relations with reporters and the Director of Central Intelligence’s (DCI) Public Affairs Staff (PAS) helped prevent this story [i.e. Webb’s] from becoming an unmitigated public disaster.’ The rest of the document records how the CIA apparently did nothing but watch as other journalists tore into Webb’s work. Of course, this isn’t true, and the document itself hints at what was really going on – almost as if the author couldn’t quite resist crowing over the Agency’s triumph while ostensibly disproving it. What the CIA actually did was deny everything, telling reporters that related allegations had been investigated in the 1980s and came to naught (which was technically true, but hardly disproof), while simultaneously ‘nudging’ those same reporters toward the weakest points of Webb’s investigation. The effectiveness of this is recorded in the tantalising observation: ‘One major news affiliate, after speaking to a CIA spokesman, decided not to run the story.’ Meanwhile, where the story wasn’t kicked into the long grass, it was nibbled away in a sort of journalistic ‘death by a thousand cuts’, egged on by unattributed whispers from CIA spokesmen. The cumulative effect of all this was that one month after his Dark Alliance story appeared, the entire affair had backfired on Webb, who – if he was guilty of anything – appears to have been guilty of no more than going along with his editor’s excitement in overstating his case. For example, when looked at from this distance, it’s clear that by stunts such as prominently reproducing the CIA’s emblem on the page of Webb’s report, the paper’s fatal mistake was to play
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up the very point at which Webb’s story was sketchiest – that is, the actual personal connections between the Agency and the smugglers (though posterity has filled out enough of those details to vindicate him). The CIA’s chronicler observed piously: ‘Public Affairs cannot dictate stories to journalists – and nor would we want to live in a society in which this was possible. What CIA media spokesmen can do, as this case demonstrates, is work productively with journalists who are already disposed to write a more balanced story.’ This is farce at its blackest: Webb’s career was effectively destroyed by the onslaught of criticism, which was anything but ‘balanced’. (‘Fair and balanced’ by Fox standards, perhaps). It’s almost as if the CIA’s historian had never even heard of the CIA’s decades-long Operation Mockingbird propaganda-planting exercise (officially terminated in February 1976 by CIA Director George H.W. Bush). Who, exactly, was meant to be taken in by this baloney? The linkage between Murdoch’s news empire-building and the cover-up of the Contras/cocaine connection is, like Webb’s 1996 exposé itself, not conclusive – but it’s there.
Blunt in Hesse One of the puzzles Peter ‘Spycatcher’ Wright said he never solved in the hundreds of hours during which he interrogated unmasked Soviet double-agent Sir Anthony Blunt was the precise nature of Blunt’s mission to Germany at the end of the Second World War, which he undertook at the direction of King George VI. Wright took a steer from the Palace and supposedly didn’t question Blunt on the matter at all, concluding his recollection of the episode with a cryptic joke about the Palace having been in the scandal-burying business for centuries and MI5 being a comparative beginner. Wright must have known at least part of the purpose of
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Blunt’s mission, because it was reported by the Daily Telegraph back in 1978. Blunt was sent to Schloss Friedrichshof, Hesse, in the very final days of the war in order to retrieve the minutes of the Duke of Windsor’s 1936 meeting with Hitler, which were indeed found to be missing from the relevant documents after they were seized by Allied forces and returned to Britain. Now historian Professor Roland Perry has published an account that adds another dimension to our understanding of Blunt’s escapade.16 In short, Professor Perry says that while in Germany Blunt also sequestered documents and letters dating from the early 1800s concerning the 15-year-old Princess Victoria’s romance with a suitor hitherto unknown to history, Lord Elphinstone, then 12 years her senior. When she became Queen, Victoria was bent on marrying Elphinstone but she was manipulated into an arranged marriage with the impoverished Prince Albert by scheming relatives and courtiers. When Albert expired prematurely, Victoria appointed Elphinstone to an intimate position in her coterie and when he died in 1860 Victoria had a lavish memorial built to him. What is not clear, however, is why the Palace so desperately wanted this historical romance hushed up. According to Professor Perry, before handing the relevant paperwork over to disappear in the archives at Windsor Castle, Blunt microfilmed it and passed it to the Soviet Union. But what happened to it there remains unknown, as does why on earth the USSR would have any interest in the girlhood crushes of a long-dead monarch. The Royal Family has survived far bigger and far messier scandals than disclosure of a future Queen’s youthful infatuations (for example, the spectacular public meltdown of the marriage between George IV and Caroline of Brunswick at around the same time as Victoria’s dalliance) and so it’s difficult to resist the feeling that there’s still more to come about this mysterious episode.
16
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The pre-statutory intelligence services Another recent CIA declassification is more of interest to history buffs than to watchers of contemporary parapolitics, but still casts an interesting light on the present. A newly- released CIA analysis explores the British penetration and sabotage of the 1775 American mission to Paris, during which revolutionary figures canvassed support from the French establishment. Pre-revolutionary France was still Britain’s greatest rival in international affairs and the Americans were working on the principle of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. The CIA’s analysis records how thoroughly and professionally the British skewered the rather naïve American delegates, and posthumously damns Benjamin Franklin himself as a bumbling liability from a security point of view. The entire thing is well worth reading, if only for the light it sheds on a poorly-understood area of pre-‘Special Relationship’ Anglo- American history.17 Tucked away in the text, however, is an intriguing statement by the CIA’s historian that there was no centralised British intelligence organisation at the time and that such operations were carried out by King George III himself, acting through his then Prime Minister. (Presumably this means that the King expressed his thoughts and wishes on operations and the Prime Minister was tasked with putting them into effect.) And the situation appears to have continued until the succession of Queen Victoria in 1837, at which point funding for the Secret Service was transferred out of the Royal household budget.18 So it would appear that the roots of the pre-statutory security and intelligence bodies can be found in a web of intrigue centred upon the throne, a situation essentially unaltered since the days of Elizabeth I and Francis
17
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Walsingham. This explains the continual presence of the present Queen in the background of many narratives concerning MI5 and MI6. It’s more than simply the ultimate loyalty of the two services to the head of state rather than to her government, it’s a matter of living history.
Paedogate predicted As the national scandal of child-molesters in high places continues to simmer away, various names from bygone days are coming to light in a sort of horrid parody of the retro fashion for all things 1980s. The one that caught my attention most recently was that of Mrs Thatcher’s Deputy PM (1979-88) Willie Whitelaw, who is alleged to have quashed a 1980 investigation into child abuse involving 350 separate charges that were then in the process of being pursued against ‘politicians, prominent lawyers and film stars’.19 The claims come from one Jeff Edwards, who wrote a story for the Evening Standard about the investigation at the time it was happening and was then called in by the Met and threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. For some reason, Mr Edwards gave his interrogators the name of his police source, who was duly punished to the extent of being docked six months’ wages. Neither man was prosecuted, which is not so odd when you consider that each of them would have appeared in court where they would have inevitably spilled the beans under absolute privilege, meaning that the media could report their testimony with no fear of legal action whatsoever, thus destroying the entire alleged cover-up. So why didn’t we hear about this at the time? As it turns out, there was a voice on the fringe blowing the whistle for all he was worth.....and that source was none other than noted batshit loon Lyndon LaRouche. In the 13 December 1983 edition of his publication
19
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Executive Intelligence Review (EIR: available online in PDF format), LaRouche writer Scott Thompson listed Whitelaw among members of a massive high-level child abuse ring involving Foreign Office officials, Palace figures and a Paedophile Information Exchange member working out of the Home Office. None of which sounds quite so far-fetched now, does it? Of course, this being a LaRouche mouthpiece, the waters were muddied by linking the entire mess to the proprietor’s fantasy version of the international narcotics trade (CEO: HM Queen Elizabeth II). But reading between the lines, it appears that the article’s ultimate source was nothing less than the famous dossier handed to the Home Secretary by Geoffrey Dickens MP on 24 November that year – a few weeks before EIR’s article appeared – and which subsequently disappeared. The timing is interesting too: as well as being Thatcher’s deputy PM, Whitelaw was her Home Secretary from her 1979 election until the General Election of 9 June 1983. Two days later, he became Thatcher’s first hereditary peer as Viscount Whitelaw (and Lord President of the Privy Council) and was kicked upstairs to the House of Lords, with Leon Brittan taking over at the Home Office. So, yet again, we have an episode in which the ‘cranks’ seem to have been on the right scent at the time, with solid leads, and no-one took the blindest bit of notice because it appeared to be as loony as the Queen-is-a-drugs-kingpin nonsense. Well, we’re not laughing now.
The abuses of ‘conspiracy’ From time to time, self-professed rationalists deign to examine the phenomenon of conspiracy theories, usually denouncing them as products of uneducated minds. The latest example of this to have floated under my nose appeared in the Scientific American in December, in which Michael Shermer performed
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the usual incantations against irrationality and delusion, noting smugly that people educated to degree level are less likely to believe conspiracy theories than are high schoolers.10 While there’s nothing terribly wrong with all that (most conspiracy theories are, let’s face it, undeserving even of the word ‘rubbish’, let alone ‘theory’), the framing of Dr Shermer’s piece is itself problematic if you take a moment to reflect upon it. Put bluntly: what has science got to do with conspiracy theories in the first place? For a start, if you wield Occam’s well-known Razor at purported conspiracies, they always disappear because Occam carves simplicity out of complexity. Occam’s Razor is undoubtedly of use in discriminating between competing hypothesis in a laboratory context – but it would be a foolhardy individual indeed who attempted to account for his or her personal relationships and interactions in terms of simplicity. For a second: people are not in fact the elusive ‘rational actors’ that social theoreticians insist upon. The ‘rational actor’ fallacy has had deep and corrosive social effects, not least in the area of economics where it leads to such absurdities as the Department for Work and Pensions employing drastic ‘stick and carrot’ techniques against Social Security claimants, who can supposedly be manipulated into employment like trains being switched from track to track, and then wondering in all innocence why these techniques just result in widespread chaos and misery for society’s most vulnerable. Science has no place in determining the probability of conspiracy theories whatsoever and it is a staggering product of popular infatuation with science that makes the idea seem feasible without question in the first place. Of course, science can be useful in a supportive role (weighing up various items of evidence, for example), but the correct place to assess a conspiracy theory is in a courtroom, where human testimony and behaviour – in all its maddening complexity and irrationality – can be judged against non- scientific standards called laws. Failing that opportunity, verification falls to historians (who again, may use science to
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assess evidence, which may or may not be conclusive) whose recognition of a conspiracy paradoxically ensures that it won’t be referred to as a conspiracy at all. The interesting aspect of all this (for me, at any rate) is the constant preoccupation with and concern about conspiracy theories coming from people in positions of some authority. It’s tempting to suggest that such debunkers are ‘useful idiots’ for the elite – presumably unconsciously so (to suggest otherwise could itself be construed as a conspiracy theory of sorts). But the sad truth is that picking apart popular suspicions and rumours is just an easy way to bolster one’s own credibility. Stephen Jay Gould famously outlined the idea of Non- Overlapping Magisteria to allow for distinction between the spheres of relevance belonging to science and to religion. It’s a messy, chaotic and above all human world out there and people do not always act in good faith, openly, or rationally. Perhaps it’s about time that Gould’s idea was invoked to stop scientists from pontificating irrelevantly about conspiracies, too.
Paxman and Kitchener The centenary of the Great War gave Jeremy Paxman a chance to revisit some of the rumours and intrigues that circulated after the 1916 death of Lord Kitchener, who (along with many others) died when HMS Hampshire sank after hitting a German mine near Scapa Flow in the Orkeney.20 These rumours last impinged upon public awareness with the 1959 publication of Donald McCormick’s The Mysterious Death of Lord Kitchener, a copy of which I have – and I can tell you that it is a fascinating but very unconvincing read. McCormick’s name will be familiar to aficionados of Jack the Ripper theories, as one of the more notorious hoaxers associated with the case. Indeed, were it not for his work on 20
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the Ripper it is doubtful he would be remembered at all. McCormick is an interesting character (he worked for naval intelligence and the Sunday Times, wrote a biography of Sir Maurice Oldfield and was close to Ian Fleming and Rupert Allason) but Mr Paxman dismisses him as ‘a cheap journalist’ without evincing any further interest. He then rehearses some of these old rumours about Kitchener (none of which are interesting enough to recount here) and details the results of a Freedom of Information Request that he filed to gain access to some still-withheld documents relating to Kitchener’s demise. Surprise, surprise, these documents are almost completely irrelevant and certainly don’t indicate any kind of conspiracy or cover-up. Mr Paxman declares that this demonstrates the implausibility of conspiracy theories – but had his interest in the classified papers found anything of note it would, of course, have been a personal scoop, so it was something of a win-win situation for him. Amusingly his piece for the Financial Times on the Kitchener ‘mystery’ was given the moaning headline: ‘The British war secretary’s demise at sea in June 1916 has spawned endless conspiracy theories. A century on, can the speculation be laid to rest?’ I wonder how many of Mr Paxman’s readers had ever heard of these ‘endless conspiracy theories’ before Mr Paxman disinterred them in order to display them in the Financial Times so readers could see him triumphantly knock them down again.
Heathrow plots It is often said of torture that (quite apart from being illegal and morally repugnant) it produces little of value because the victim ends up telling the torturers ‘what they want to hear’. It appears that this rule of thumb applies to the processing of that information itself. In the CIA’s case it extracted a ‘confession’ concerning a plot to attack Heathrow airport. Their
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victim, once given a respite, then retracted that confession in depressingly predictable fashion. This didn’t stop the Agency from telling President George W Bush ‘what he wanted to hear’, who in turn told the public ‘what they wanted to hear’ by referring to the alleged Heathrow plot in a speech in 2006. Behind the sad irony of this sordid episode lies a considerable mystery, for it appears that there were in fact three ‘Heathrow Plots’ in circulation. In early 2003, Tony Blair’s government famously surrounded Heathrow with tanks and troops, citing ‘quality intelligence’ of an imminent attack. With the Iraq invasion looming in the background and widespread disbelief in the WMD fairy-story, many accused Mr Blair of cooking up a false alarm with regard to Heathrow too. But it seems very unlikely that Mr Blair was behind it: the impetus for the alert appears to have come from MI5 issuing a warning to the Met’s Assistant Commissioner David Veness, who was backed up by his boss Sir John Stevens. They played their hands close to their chests, but a Scotland Yard statement was put out referring to ‘the current strengthening of security’ as being ‘precautionary and […] related to action being taken in other countries.’ 21 Popular assumption at present appears to be that this ‘action in other countries’ was the ‘waterboarding’ of Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), during which he told CIA personnel that an attack on Heathrow was in the offing. But this can’t be correct. The Heathrow alert happened on 11 February 2003, and KSM was officially captured nearly a month later, on 1 March 2003. In fact the US Senate’s ‘Torture Report’ (page 76) identifies another al-Qaeda operative, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, as telling Pakistani interrogators about a Heathrow plot in October 2002. Bin al-Shibh was transferred into CIA custody in February 2003 (the exact date is redacted for some reason, but from the size of the redaction it can be said with confidence that the date was a single figure). On 11 February, bin al-Shibh’s torturers cabled CIA headquarters asking for a list of
21
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questions that al-Shibh would definitely be able to answer, in order to assess any new information they gained from him. Same day, the tanks rolled up at Heathrow. This, then, would appear to be the ‘quality intelligence’ to which the UK was referring – obtained by CIA torture and percolated up to the government from MI5 via the Metropolitan Police Service. Bin al-Shibh’s torture confessions were then apparently used to solicit information from other CIA victims, a recipe almost guaranteed to produce confirmations. Bin al-Shibh’s ‘Heathrow plot’ was then superseded by a second ‘Heathrow plot’ after the torture of KSM, and even though the two plots were quite probably one and the same, KSM’s version of a ‘Heathrow plot’ lingered in a sort of information afterlife and cast a long shadow over subsequent developments.22 The third ‘Heathrow plot’ was foiled in August 2006, when 24 arrests were made across Britain in one of the largest ever such counterterrorism operations. This was a purely British triumph – Mr Blair knew about it for months prior to the arrests and informed Mr Bush by telephone on Sunday 6 August 2006, with the arrests taking place just three days later.23 However, on 6 September 2006, Mr Bush gave a speech in which he referred to the ‘recently foiled plot in London’ and followed it up by asserting a few minutes later that CIA torture had ‘helped stop a plot to hijack passenger planes and fly them into Heathrow or the Canary Wharf in London.’ 24 The impression given was clearly that the two plots were one and the same. Mr Bush also referred to a ‘Heathrow plot’ in a radio address given on 8 March 2008.25
22 There is something of a minor mystery relating to the torture of KSM. An apparently erroneous report in October 2002 stated that he had either been killed or captured in Pakistan. And although he was officially captured in March 2003, the Senate committee saw CIA e- mails referring to ‘Heathrow plot insights from KSM’ dated February 2003 (see page 193). 23
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So, the first two Heathrow plots were apparently the same vague scheme being described by two different torture victims, the latter’s ‘confession’ probably extracted by his torturers’ use of information gained from the former. The third (which has not yet been definitely linked to any external group) took place several years later, was unrelated to the ‘confessions’ of 2002-3 and completely different in nature but was allowed to stand as though it represented the near- fulfilment of the original. Messrs Bush and Blair could have corrected this misleading perception at any stage, but chose to remain quiet. Perhaps this fell under the category of ‘things they don’t want to hear’.
D-notice doubts One of the more extraordinary claims made by Michael Shrimpton during his trial in November (see below) was that he had the authority to issue D-notices on behalf of the government. Given the minor outbreak of bizarre stories about D-notices appearing in relation to the ongoing child abuse inquiry, I am beginning to wonder if he wasn’t telling the truth on that point. In late November, the Guardian trumpeted a story alleging that Hilton Tims – the former news editor of my local newspaper, the Surrey Comet – had been gagged by a D- notice when he tried to report on the notorious Elm Guest House in the 1980s. That’s not what his contemporaries recall. Guardian journalist Laura Marcus, 63, was employed at the Surrey Comet from 1979 until 1984 and does not recall the incident. She said: ‘It’s 50/50 in my mind whether it happened at all.’ Fellow ex-Comet reporter Tim Harrison joined the Comet in 1976, becoming deputy chief reporter by 1980 and chief reporter by 1983. Mr Harrison recalled: ‘Nothing was said at the time – I’d definitely have
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remembered something like that. Had a formal D-notice been issued, it would have been big news in the Comet newsroom. No way could that have been kept quiet.’ Mr Tims, now 82, had told the Guardian: ‘I put someone on to it, the chief reporter I think, to make inquiries. It was the following day that we had a D-notice slapped on us; the reporter came over and told me. It was the only time in my career.’ The chief reporter in question was the aforementioned Tim Harrison and he said that he was ‘surprised and puzzled’ by Mr Tims’ statements. He explained: ‘It would have been the editor’s task to deal with very unusual issues such as D- notices, not the news editor’s.’ He cast further doubt on Mr Tims’ recollection by saying: ‘Hilton was news editor from 1984, not 1980 as has been reported.’ D-notices have been mentioned before in connection with allegations of high-level child abuse. At the time of the Iraq war, Australian media published erroneous stories alleging that a D-notice was being used to protect powerful Britons caught in the online child porn investigation called Operation Ore (this links to the alleged Dunblane cover-up, rumours of which are still rumbling away in some corners of the Internet). D-notice committee secretary Andrew Vallance told me by e-mail: ‘Although the allegations that “D Notices” have been used to shield people allegedly involved in child abuse are widely repeated on the internet, there is absolutely no substance in them.’ This is surely common knowledge among experienced journalists, so why on earth did the Guardian run such an inherently implausible tale without apparently attempting to verify it? No doubt it is merely a coincidence that Hilton Tims’ daughter Anna is a Guardian writer of long standing.
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Doppelgangers The murky history of the deployment of lookalikes for political purposes has always fascinated me, and is an area that I explored a little in ‘LBJ: Doubles and Disinformation’ in Lobster 67. The first week of December saw a startling chance pair of photographs taken by the same snapper, showing two ‘Barack Obamas’ travelling in the same Australian motorcade. The resemblance is pretty good, certainly good enough to throw off a casual observer.26 But who organises such presidential doubles? Since it’s a VIP security matter, we might assume it’s the Secret Service. But no details have ever emerged of such a program. The CIA, on the other hand, has a known history of using doppelgangers and in September it was revealed that the Agency had considered hoaxing a ‘sex tape’ to discredit Saddam Hussein, in which a lookalike was to be filmed having sex with a young man.27 This is almost a carbon copy of the abortive plan that the Agency hatched in order to discredit Indonesian president Sukarno in the 1960s.28 In the case of Hussein, the idea was apparently dropped because it wouldn’t have been shocking enough to its envisioned audience. They then thought of hacking into Iraqi TV with a recording in which a Saddam double (another one?) would announce his resignation. Before the Iraq invasion Hussein was routinely accused of deploying lookalikes to throw off would-be assassins.29 One of these ‘clones’ was even said to have met Austrian politician Jorg Haider for a photo opportunity when Saddam
26 Have a look for yourself at
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himself was otherwise engaged.30 But after the invasion, none of these alleged lookalikes was announced as captured (although the US did test Hussein’s DNA when they caught him, suggesting that there was some uncertainty on the issue). More intriguingly still, the Agency also got as far as filming a hoax video depicting Osama bin Laden drinking alcohol and reminiscing about pederastic exploits in a campfire session with cronies. An ex-CIA man claimed that the actors were simply drawn from ‘dark-skinned’ Agency personnel. Is that really credible? For the video to have any value, it would obviously be necessary for the key actor to pass as bin Laden – and that automatically suggests the use of a double. The alternative is that the CIA produced a complete and utter botch job, which I suppose is not outside the realms of the possible and might explain why it was never used. On the other hand, this little revelation does potentially revive the question of the authenticity of the bin Laden ‘9/11 confession’ video released by the US after the Afghan invasion, in which a remarkably indiscreet Osama appeared to have put on a lot of weight...... and a new nose.31
Expressing an interest Much concern has been voiced in response to Express Newspapers owner and sometime porn baron Richard Desmond considering a £300k donation to UKIP. For those who have been watching, the suggestion that the poundshop Murdoch is partial to the party will not have been a surprise. The Express has carried a regular column by the party’s leader – ‘Farage on Friday’ – for quite some time. In October, it was announced that one of UKIP’s three peers, Lord Stevens, would become deputy chairman of Mr Desmond’s holding company, Northern and Shell.32 30
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We then had an Express ‘exclusive’ in which the Freedom Association – whose membership consists entirely of far-right Tories (such as the loveable Christopher Chope) and UKIP figures – attacked the BBC for ‘plotting a Labour victory’ in order to protect its licence fee arrangements.33 Naturally, this piece was long on rhetoric and short on details of how the Corporation (which towers above Mr Desmond’s own Channel 5) was going to execute its nefarious scheme. And shortly before Mr Desmond reached for his chequebook, we saw the triple-crown spectacle of the Express quoting a UKIP MEP’s outraged comments in order to plug a forthcoming documentary on one of UKIP’s talking points - ‘benefits tourism’ – which was to be screened on Channel 5.34 Could Mr Desmond’s affiliations have been any more obvious? The cumulative feel of these incidents is that Mr Desmond and UKIP are attempting to form a ‘breakaway Establishment’, the cosy relationships of which will supplant to some extent the traditional alliance between a large swathe of the print media and the Conservative party. Fortunately, the Express is an irrelevant comic but nevertheless this intriguing situation is one to watch (unlike Channel 5), and will become more so if UKIP has any success in the general election of May 2015.
The paranoids’ paranoid I’m not sure how the jury in the trial of barrister Michael Shrimpton reached their majority guilty verdict, announced at the end of November. In order to convict him of making a hoax bomb threat, it would seem that they must have decided that he knew his information was false when he relayed it; yet, to judge by the coverage of the trial, Shrimpton remained totally sincere in his belief throughout.
33
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For those who missed the circus, Shrimpton had called in a warning at the time of the London Olympics, telling Defence Secretary Philip Hammond (and Shrimpton’s local Conservative Association) that a stolen Russian nuclear weapon was being smuggled up the Thames by al-Qaeda, with the aim of detonating it in time to take out the Queen (along with most of London, of course). His conviction (sentencing adjourned till early 2015, pending psychiatric reports) must have come as a surprise to his fellow Obama ‘birther’ Lord Monckton, who wrote a piece when Shrimpton was committed for trial, declaring that the prosecution was politically motivated, that Shrimpton would be found innocent and that David Cameron would end up with egg on his face.35 A member of Mrs Thatcher’s Policy Unit in the 1980s, Lord Monckton is now described as a semi-detached UKIP- favouring peer, having previously worked for and stood as an electoral candidate for Nigel Farage’s motley outfit before some kind of falling-out occurred. However, as one of the hereditary peers cast out by the House of Lords Act (1999) he is no longer a member of the upper chamber, which has roundly slapped him down for his claims on this matter in the past but hasn’t been able to prevent him from using a garishly-coloured rip-off of the Lords’ portcullis device as his own personal emblem. Delving further down this particular rabbit-hole, one finds that Lord Monckton has his own odd beliefs, being a climate change disbeliever, holding that gay men can clock up 20,000 partners in a lifetime (which wouldn’t leave time for much else), advocating the quarantine of HIV+ people and declaring that he would abolish 90 per cent of public services in order to move power away from ‘atheistic, humanist’ government. Shrimpton’s beliefs – as Lord Monckton acknowledges – are extraordinary, but unless he is outright delusional he must have had some basis for holding them. Shrimpton claims that the masterminds behind the
35
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alleged Olympics plot were really a German intelligence agency called the Deutsches Verteidigungs Dienst (DVD), which appears to have been behind just about every instance of skulduggery in modern history. But the DVD is so secret that there isn’t any actual evidence of its existence. The DVD did not originate in Shrimpton’s mind. As far as I can tell, it originated in the mind of self-styled former Thatcher advisor, the late Christopher Story, who also (along with one time Joint Intelligence Committee chairman Percy Cradock) believed that the fall of Communism was a hoax perpetrated by the KGB in order to lull the West into a false sense of security.36 Story was encouraged in this belief by the KGB defector, Anatoly Golitsyn,37 who sold the idea of a KGB ‘monster plot’ to CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton in the early 1960s,38 who in turn passed it on to a section of MI5 and IRD personnel, notably the late Brian Crozier. World Net Daily
36 On Cradock’s views on this see the excellent Adam Curtis at
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crowning glory in this remarkable, if exhausting, document is Shrimpton’s belief that Madeleine McCann was kidnapped to order for a high-level paedophile Eurocrat (whom he names) and that this is being covered up by just about every intelligence agency on earth. Curiously, for someone who claims to see high-level paedophilia everywhere, Shrimpton lost an appeal against a child porn conviction at around the same time he was prosecuted for the bomb hoax. He claimed that the child porn (which was found when his house was searched after his arrest for the bomb hoax) was planted by British intelligence in order to discredit him. Given that exactly that scenario had formed the plot of an episode of ITV drama Judge John Deed, broadcast in 2004, one has to wonder exactly why the spooks would see any need to bother to discredit him at all.
Set in stone Did you observe two minutes’ silence at 11 am on 11 November? If so, you were hoodwinked by one of the most successful lies in British history. Like many others erected around the same time, my local war memorial (Kingston Upon Thames) gives the dates of the Great War as ‘1914-1919’. This is not some stonemason’s equivalent of a typographical error. The Kingston memorial’s sculptor Richard Goulden – himself a war veteran – carved out that conspicuously discordant date in the year 1920, before the myth of the war’s 1918 end had become firmly established in the history books. The famous 11/11/11 armistice of 1918 was succeeded by three ‘prolongations’ while French and British troops occupied the (German) Rhineland and these prolongations lasted until after the Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919, the fifth anniversary of the assassination that sparked the conflict. So the war officially ended in June 1919 – but even that’s not the whole truth. After the Russian revolution in 1917, Britain, France and
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America intervened in the ensuing Russian civil war, hoping (in Winston Churchill’s words) to ‘strangle Bolshevism in its cradle’. The British Navy were the last Allied participants and they withdrew from the Baltic in December 1919, after a series of mutinies by war-weary seamen. And there’s more. In strictly legal terms, Britain’s participation in the war stretched on into 1924, when the very last peace treaty was signed with modern Turkey. It’s impossible to know what Richard Goulden had in mind as he painstakingly chiselled that glaring ‘1919’ into the stone of his Kingston memorial – but he certainly wasn’t thinking of the November 1918 armistice. So when did the Great War really end? Who knows? It silently unravels somewhere in the early 20th Century like a wisp of smoke on the breeze. And the fairy story of ‘11 November 1918’ is not the only myth about the war. Many readers will have heard arguments advanced this year that the war was about protecting democracy or protecting freedom or something like that. If you’re like me, you will have been profoundly disquieted by this idea. At the start of the war, Britain was not what we would now recognise as a functioning democracy. Voting was restricted to 60 per cent of the male population only: those voters were all property owners over the age of 21, and some of them had more than one vote. Not only that, but the British monarchy still exercised considerable ‘behind the scenes’ control over the nation’s politics – the First World War itself had been declared by King George V’s Privy Council. The myth of the ‘fight for democracy’ seems to have sprung from US President Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda advisor Edward Bernays, who helped Wilson craft an oft- quoted slogan about ‘making the world safe for democracy’ to encourage the USA’s voters into supporting a war they had hoped to avoid. So the lie of the war being fought in the name of democracy was being told during the war itself. History is being rewritten under our noses – and this time, there are no living witnesses left to protest against it.
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The man who wasn’t there Has Ed Miliband survived a plot to overthrow him, or have we witnessed a bizarre scheme unfold that was actually designed to fail and leave him looking stronger? On 16 October Guardian columnist Owen Jones ran a conspicuously anomalous column that was more or less an Alan Johnson hagiography, which stuck in my mind precisely because it was so odd. Quoting friends and colleagues – but not Mr Johnson himself – the piece appeared to explore, in quite some detail, the question of his possible ambitions to become party leader before delivering as its kiss-off the remark that those wanting to topple Miliband would ‘have to look elsewhere’. I wondered what had prompted this apparent disavowal of Johnsonian ambition; and then the alleged ‘Miliband plot’ exploded across the media. Surprise, surprise, the King Over The Water of the ‘plotters’ was identified as...... Alan Johnson. We all accept that cock-up is at least as likely as conspiracy, but surely Mr Jones’s column could not have escaped the attentions of the alleged twenty or so-strong anti-Miliband cabal? And then, as quickly as it had flared up, it was over, as Mr Johnson appeared on television on the Sunday of the weekend the plot was ‘exposed’ to rule himself out of the running. And that, it appears, was the end of that. Recent Labour leaders have profited from their victories over their famously frangible party: see Kinnock expelling Militant and Blair ditching Clause IV. Is it possible that someone thought a similar trick was worth trying to overcome Ed’s image problem? Since the supposed ‘conspirators’ had disappeared like morning dew, I went straight to Mr Johnson and (on 10 November) asked him whether he had been approached by the Miliband plotters or had any prior knowledge of such a scheme. I chased the inquiry up on 17 November with his
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assistant Tracy Windle, who said she would look into it. The same day, I put an inquiry in to the Guardian’s press office, asking whether Mr Jones’s eerily prescient piece had been ‘prompted’ in any way, and explicitly invited them to poo-poo my little hypothesis. I also emailed Owen Jones’s literary agent. None of them got back to me, so make of that what you will.
Negative proof The case of the alleged ‘Barbara Castle paedophile dossier’ rumbles on, with news that police are to examine the late Mrs Castle’s personal documents, held by the Bodleian Library. They also appear to be looking for the dossier compiled by the late Geoffrey Dickens MP, although how and when it ‘emerged’ that this dossier was also in Mrs Castle’s possession is unclear – as is precisely how anyone found out this ‘fact’, years after she had died without ever apparently mentioning it to anyone. In all, this futile interlude teaches us that the government, major media and police are not necessarily immune from ‘conspiracy thinking’. After all, the complete absence of supporting evidence in any given case is often cited as being proof of a cover-up according to conspiracy theorists, isn’t it? I’m not sure how and when this type of thinking went mainstream, but George W Bush’s demand that Saddam Hussein had to prove that he had no WMDs may be the tipping point. This is the logical fallacy referred to as ‘the appeal to ignorance’: i.e. ‘There is no evidence that X is false, therefore X is true.’ It resurfaced again recently when Iraq’s Prime Minister – in the middle of appealing for international aid – alleged that ISIS was planning to attack New York and Paris. Suspicions that this might be a ploy to garner military intervention were bolstered by his proclamation: ‘I cannot prove 100 per cent that an existential threat is not there.’
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To its credit, Obama’s White House responded that it had no evidence that any kind of threat existed – and did nothing. Quite a different kettle of fish, however, is the Home Office ‘missing child abuse files’ review conducted by Peter Wanless, who announced his findings shortly before the Castle yarn hit the headlines. Mr Wanless stated in his report that he had found no evidence that files were removed or deliberately destroyed. But hold that scorn: immediately after publication Mr Wanless was to be heard on BBC Radio 4 and 5 making it quite clear that he was not ruling out a cover-up at all. Rather ironically, David Cameron used the Wanless review’s conclusions to remark that ‘people seeking conspiracy theories will have to look elsewhere’, which goes to show what a double-edged sword negative proof can be, in the wrong hands.
Neighbours A couple of curious coincidences in the ongoing child abuse inquiry shitstorm leap out of the papers. The first is the gobsmacking fact that the Mail on Sunday was apparently warned off investigating embattled Inquiry chair Fiona Woolf by an individual named James Saville (sic). The second is that Lord Brittan and Fiona Woolf – the social link between the two being under scrutiny – were near neighbours on London’s Alderney Street, with Lord Brittan living at number 79 and Ms Woolf just twelve doors down. But that’s not the coincidence. The coincidence is that at number 36 lived the late GCHQ employee Gareth Williams, whose mysterious demise in 2010, padlocked in his own holdall, has already raced ahead of that of the late Stephen Milligan MP as a byword for skulduggerous death.42 Complete coincidence on both counts, of course.
42
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Satanic Sussex Norman Baker MP has resigned from the Home Office, unleashing the long-restrained mirth of Her Majesty’s Press, with remarks about Roswell, grassy knolls, etc. etc. What they all missed however was the ironic fact that the redoubtable Mr Baker – author of The Strange Death of David Kelly – stars in a murky conspiracy theory dating back to his days on Lewes District Council. Fittingly, it all started with a mysterious death: on 17 April 1996 a local Green Party activist by the name of Nic Gargani was found dead at the foot of the nearby cliffs. Police investigators soon uncovered a bizarre scenario at his home, with occult paraphernalia everywhere, pages from the Bible stuck to the walls and notes detailing alleged persecution at the hands of evil forces – specifically that Gargani believed himself to be ‘targeted’ by a powerful black magician and was in fear of his life. Probing further, police and friends found links to a series of – apparently satanic – church desecrations and animal killings, all of which were synchronised with phases of the moon, which led them to a disturbed young man, a friend of Nic’s who had a secret shrine to Satan in a backyard coal bunker, who was subsequently convicted of threatening behaviour against a 13-year-old whom he forced to kneel and pray. In time-honoured fashion, journalists attending his trial spoke shudderingly of the ‘evil’ they sensed from the young man (whose identity is still protected by a court order). An inquest returned an Open Verdict on Nic Gargani, leaving his friends with many unanswered questions, not least of which was the identity of an unknown man referred to in one of Nic’s notes as ‘some black magician’ who had apparently threatened him. Another mystery is the fact that the notes apparently left by Nic in his flat and elsewhere were not in his handwriting. On 4 July that year, Katrina Taylor – a 19-year-old mother who had herself played a murder victim on BBC television’s ‘Crimewatch UK’ – was found stabbed to death in a graveyard in nearby Brighton. This time, the forces of
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darkness were all-too-earthbound and an investigation uncovered the roots of an organised crime outfit stretching throughout the region. Four people stood trial for the murder and two were convicted; but they subsequently won appeals, leaving Katrina Taylor’s murder officially unsolved. What happened next is still a bit of a mystery itself but the general upshot is that at the time of writing there are several websites promoting a frankly incomprehensible theory in which the two mysterious deaths are linked to corruption within Sussex Police Force, a local businessman who is alleged to be a criminal mastermind with his fingers in child pornography and drugs rings, bribery and cover-ups on the local council, mysterious gunmen uttering threats against witnesses and all sorts of other stuff. Amid all the confusion, there is near-unanimity on two points: Nic Gargani was investigating Norman Baker and Mr Baker was a key player in the entire affair, if not the actual ‘Mr Big’ himself. Since I was unable to make sense of it, I emailed Mr Baker asking for his response to the accusations. Mr Baker replied within minutes: ‘This stuff has been doing the rounds for years. I have no idea what they are talking about and nor does anyone else, as far as I can tell. If you find out, perhaps you can let me know.’ I also asked why Mr Baker hadn’t sought to protect his reputation by initiating defamation proceedings against the site owners. Oddly enough, he didn’t answer that.
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The CIA, torture, history and American exceptionalism
Michael Carlson
Discussing the recently released Senate report on American torture, my friend Michael Goldfarb quoted Senator Frank Church, speaking when his Senate committee’s report was issued in 1975,1 in the wake of the Rockefeller and Pike reports, the latter not released but leaked by Daniel Schorr in the Village Voice newspaper. Lest we forget, Church was marginalized, lost his Senate seat to a well-funded campaign, and, as we know, the domestic surveillance by the CIA and NSA and whoever else continued unchecked, at least until the Snowden revelations. Church’s committee was regularly lied to by its witnesses and obstructed by the Ford administration; this was a committee that included such ‘radicals’ as Barry Goldwater, Richard Schweiker, John Tower, and Howard Baker. At the time Church said: ‘I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over.....’ Remember, the US was coming out of Vietnam, and the protests of the Sixties, and Nixon and Watergate. It was headed into the Tehran Embassy crisis, a revolution the trillions of dollars of US intelligence never saw coming, and the fall of our buddy in democracy, the Shah. Jimmy Carter took the blame for that, and America launched itself into twenty years of living in a fairy tale world narrated by Ronald Reagan, followed by ten years of fear happily stoked by the very people who’d sold America the fairy-tale Kool-Aid in the first place. 1 Officially the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. See
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When people talk about the legacy of the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ which is supposedly a fear of using American power to pursue American ideals (sic), they continue to ignore reality, which is that the US has fought an almost continuous series of undeclared wars. The real Vietnam Syndrome is actually that the government no longer asks its citizens to send their sons to do the fighting. Instead it sends professionals and mercenaries to do its fighting. Back home we stage more and more elaborate ceremonies of fealty to the military during our circuses, designed to entice the jobless young as much as comfort the affluent who will never get near combat, then we retreat into the placidity of entertainment while our heroes kill and torture and steal to enrich their masters on our behalf. This Orwellian (and even Heinleinian) reality was obvious from the first moments 9/11 turned into an invasion of Iraq, but it has been in the cards constantly in my lifetime: the Congressional oversight in the 70s led only to an October Surprise in 1980 and then the Iran-Contra abuses. America’s current permanent War Of Terror has led to its losing the last shreds of its moral standing, pissed away when we had most of the world standing with us after 9/11. Senator Feinstein may have got the report out into the public before Mitch McConnell took over the Senate and buried it, but Senator Feinstein refuses to even call torture by its name. Senator Feinstein has fought for additional powers of surveillance for the intelligence establishment over us, and has fought to protect those already caught with their fingers in the digital cookie jar. This report may seem shocking if your head has been in the sand for the past 13, or 35 years, but it carefully avoids passing the blame upward where it belongs, to those who planned these wars, who sought or prepared the legal briefs for torture, for rendering, for imprisoning without charge. It leaves large swathes of the military and the intelligence establishment outside the CIA untouched: it’s like this entire planet-sized sack of shit is finally going to land only on the slick skull of George Tenet. It may leave a stench, but the smell will be localized and isolated, and its wider impact will
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dissipate quickly. Just as they did after the reports of the 1970s, the intelligence establishment will continue to do as it damn well pleases. But while the torture report may absolve those who should carry the blame, but it can’t absolve the rest of us.
This originally appeared on Michael Carlson’s blog, http://irresistibletargets.blogspot.co.uk/.
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Chauncey Holt and the three ‘tramps’ on Dealey Plaza
Robin Ramsay
The Kennedy assassination is now a vast field of subjects and I recently wandered into one: the three ‘tramps’ photographed being taken into custody on Dealey Plaza after the shooting. This is a classic JFK assassination quagmire:1 disputed photographic IDs; testimony from unreliable or self- interested sources; third-hand reports about second-hand reports, and a great backlog of attempts by other people to sort the shit from the shinola. Why bother? Well, I revisited the ‘tramps’ because I was thinking about Billie Sol Estes, who, in his memoir, stated that Mob bosses Marcello and Trafficante had arranged for some of their people to be in Dallas on the day of the shooting to muddy the investigative waters for the legal authorities. Two other putative fringe participants in the assassination, Roderick Mackenzie and Chauncey Holt, have written or said things supportive of this; and as Holt claimed to have been one of the ‘tramps’ arrested on Dealey Plaza, his credibility as a source hinges on that. So: back to the ‘tramps’. By his own account variously a circus performer, a pilot, a painter, an accountant for the Mob, a fraudster, a supplier and modifier of weapons and a maker of documents for the Mob and the CIA, Chauncey Holt said in 1991: ‘Dallas that day was flooded with all kinds of people who ended up there for some reason. It’s always been my theory that whoever was the architect of this thing – and no one will ever know who was behind it, manipulating all these people – I believe that they flooded this area with so many characters with nefarious reputations
1 Try
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because they thought, “Well, if all these people get scooped up it’ll muddy the waters so much that they’ll never straighten it out.”’ 2 Holt made that statement after announcing that he was the shortest of the three ‘tramps’, the one wearing the hat, and identifying the other two. This did not make great waves among the Kennedy researchers; for not only had there been a number of false confessions in the case, a number of other people had been proposed as candidates for the ‘tramps’, notably the CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, who does look like the ‘tramp’ in the hat in some pictures.3 The next year someone spotted that among some declassified Dallas Police files were reports of the arrest of three ‘tramps’ on 22 November 1963 in Dallas. Journalists traced the two still alive and they confirmed that yes, they had been arrested by the police in Dallas on a train close to Dealey Plaza and taken to the police station. And these ‘tramps’ were real train-riding hoboes. Consequently many people – me included – assumed that the ‘tramps’ mystery had been solved and, if they were aware of Holt’s claim, dismissed it.
Enter Lois Taylor But the photographs of the ‘tramps’ and those of Holt and the other two men he named, were given to a police forensic artist named Lois Taylor and she confirmed Holt’s claims: the ‘tramps’ were Holt and two other criminals he had named, Charles Harrelson and Charles Rogers and definitely not the three hoboes, Doyle, Gedney and Abrams.4 Charles Rogers hasn’t been seen or heard of since 1963 and Harrelson is now dead but while alive did not confirm Holt’s claim about his presence in the photographs, though he did once claim to
2 ‘Bottom Line: How Crazy Is It?’, Newsweek, 23 December 1991 at
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have been one of the shooters – a claim he later withdrew.5 Taylor is a very successful police ID artist6 and her presentation on this subject seems plausible to me; but her work had little impact among the JFK researchers. On the ‘anti’ side: Holt was a crook and a professional deceiver who’d forged documents for the CIA (or so he claimed), he was only forty years-old in 1963 and the ‘tramp’ whom he claimed to be looks older than that. As an example of the ‘antis’ here’s Frank Cassano in a book review on the CTKA site. ‘On November 22, 1963, Chauncey Holt would have been 40 years old and was sporting a prominent pile of very dark hair...... The old tramp in the photos is very clearly and significantly older than that. And Charles Rogers looks nothing whatsoever like either of the tramps! ...... Only Harrelson comes remotely close to
5 Looking for information on Harrelson I found a 2011 story that a Canadian company, Imagis, which produced facial recognition technology, had run a photograph of Harrelson and the ‘tramp’ supposedly him and got a positive. The company spokesman is quoted as saying: ‘We at Imagis scanned photos of both the tramp and Harrelson and the persons in the two photos are 99.99 percent identical. It’s a match. Period.’ But the spokesman quoted is named Dr. Reeder G. Peepers, which sounds like an invention, and he is not on Google. And the company, which did exist, no longer seems to: my e-mails to it bounced and it does not have a Website. The blog on which this story appeared,
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resembling one of the tramps – but again, he would have been a mere 25 years old at the time the photos were taken. The tramps in the photos are clearly Harold Doyle, Gus Abrams, and John Gedney.’ 7 I could reproduce the photographs but they’re all on the Net. Are the ‘tramps’ ‘clearly Harold Doyle, Gus Abrams, and John Gedney’? No, they are not.8 Lois Taylor’s analysis (see note 4) makes a pretty convincing case that ‘Frenchy’, as the leading ‘tramp’ was nicknamed, does closely resemble the pictures of Rogers when he was in his teens; Holt resembles the small ‘tramp’ in some pictures and Harrelson is a dead ringer for the ‘tramp’ in the middle. Further, there are very long shadows in the pictures of the hoboes on Dealey Plaza and relatively few people on the streets, suggesting that the photographs were taken quite some time after the shooting at 12.30. When were the hoboes arrested? Their arrest sheets are on-line and the reports, by officer Chambers, all use the same phrase: the men were arrested ‘right after President Kennedy was shot’.9 To complicate things further, a Dallas police officer David Harkness, involved in the arrest of the hoboes, interviewed by the FBI in 1992, said: ‘On the day of the assassination there were several individuals removed from the train other than the three individuals previously identified’.10 Did the Dallas police arrest two trios of ‘tramps’?11 Against which, the sister of Abrams is reported to have recognised him in the 1963 photographs.12 Could she have been wrong about the 28 year-old picture of her brother? And former neighbours of Harold Doyle – the ‘tramp’ nicknamed
7
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‘Frenchy’ – eventually recognised him in those photographs.13
Holt’s story If Holt is lying about this, the rest of his tale has to be treated with great caution. And it is a striking story. Holt tells us that he was (unwittingly) involved in this conspiracy at four points. He was actually with Lee Harvey Oswald in the incident when Oswald handed out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans; he’d been sent down by his CIA contact to give the reluctant Oswald a hand. He claims he is in one of the photographs of that incident. Some say he is; the picture’s too indistinct for me to tell. (If this is true, the framing of Oswald for something goes back a long way.) Holt claims he made phoney IDs for a large number of people, including some for Oswald and Oswald’s alias, Hiddel, in the months before the assassination; and doctored some ammunition for the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle to enable the bullets to be fired from another rifle without leaving that rifle’s marks on it. Finally, he claims he drove to Dallas to deliver some of these IDs and handguns. In effect, Holt is claiming that unwittingly he was central to the framing of Oswald. Holt is not saying that he or his two companions shot Kennedy. In his memoir14 he says that he believed that some kind of stunt was being staged in Dallas by the CIA, which would embarrass Cuba and nobble JFK’s attempts at détente with Castro. Either he was duped, or it was need-to-know as is usual in such operations and he didn’t need to know. Holt is unclear how far the knowledge of the assassination went. The CIA people he names as involved in this may have also thought they were creating an anti-Cuba incident. In Holt’s version he and his two companions sat in the railway boxcar for a couple of hours after the shooting, listening to events on a radio Holt had, before the police opened the door and arrested them. Holt said that he and the 13 See Ray and Mary La Fontaine, Oswald Talked (Gretna [USA], Pelican Books, 1996) pp. 234-6. At first they didn’t recognise him but then someone recognised his chin..... 14 Chauncey Holt, Self-Portrait of a Scoundrel (Waterville [Oregon]: Trineday, 2013), available in the UK from the Book Depository.
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other two were released when the Dallas Police bought their cover story of working for the Federal government. Lois Taylor was certain that it was Holt, Harrelson and Rogers; and it is possible that the identification of Doyle and Abrams in the photographs by family and friends was unwittingly encouraged or cued by the journalists asking the questions: there is a difference between ‘Do you recognise anyone in these pictures?’ and ‘Is this man your brother?’. We do not know how this was handled. But if it isn’t Doyle and Abrams in the ‘tramps’ photographs, no matter how clumsily it was handled by the journalists, it is a bizarre coincidence that they look like them enough to fool a family member and former neighbours. Common sense, let alone Occam’s razor, says that it is probable that Holt was simply lying, that he used the ‘tramp’ picture to insert himself into the story at a time when, thanks to Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, there was major media interest in it again. But we will never know for sure.
Torbitt resurfaces The second man who claimed to have been an (unwitting) fringe member of the conspiracy is Roderick Mackenzie III in his strange memoir, The Men That Don’t Fit In.15 I wrote about this in Lobster 6116 and after rereading the chapters about the assassination I am no clearer about how much of it is true. My guess is that most of it up to the evening of 21 November 1963 is: specifically, his story of running a safe-house in Dallas for the Mob and the CIA may well be true. But he appears to have incorporated bits and pieces from one of the more obscure pieces of assassination literature. Mackenzie’s tale includes the Defense Industrial Security Command, the American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC) and Permindex – organisations which featured in the so-called Torbitt Memorandum in the early 1970s, which no researchers have taken seriously, because there is no evidence for its central
15 Text at
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propositions.17 If you wanted to make sure that almost all JFK researchers would dismiss your claims, putting Torbitt into the story would do it. Mackenzie wrote on page 59 of the days in Dallas preceding the assassination: ‘It seems that someone somewhere had called a convention other than the Pepsi one and invited every gypsy, tramp[,] mobster and politician available to come.’ Between them Mackenzie and Holt name a couple of dozen figures from crime, the anti-Castro groups and CIA contract agents – many of them familiar to students of the assassination – as being in Dallas that day. Mackenzie’s story is probably partly a fabrication. He says somewhere that originally his memoir was going to be chiefly about his life in circuses and – like Chauncey Holt – as a printer of documents for the Mob and the spooks.18 He then found an old notebook from the sixties and decided to add material from that. Well, maybe. If most of the post 21 November 1963 material is a fake, I cannot see the point of it. Mackenzie isn’t selling anything – there’s no book or DVD attached to his tale; and I can think of no obvious assassination research developments upon which this might impact, unless his advocacy of the LBJ’s people- dunnit thesis is meant to discredit it. He tells us that after the assassination a drunk Malcolm Wallace – LBJ’s personal hitman in the LBJ’s people thesis – named the shooter teams and that he scribbled them down in the toilet of the bar they were in. (Many of the names are new.) Well, maybe. If it is a fabrication it is an odd mixture of gaffes – e.g. naming Roger Craig as a shooter; obviously false assertions –
17 There is still no evidence that the Defense Industrial Security Command (DISC) ever existed and no evidence that the ACCC was, as Torbitt and Mackenzie tell us, a front for a group of assassins based in Mexico, delicious though the idea is. 18 The single most striking element in his story is his account of being asked by his intelligence handlers (he says DIA but I’m sure it was CIA) to run a safe house in the circus he was working in, on the road – a brilliant idea.
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referring throughout to the DIA when from the context it must have been the CIA; and subtlety – e.g. claiming he was paid for some jobs with Permindex vouchers, which makes the organisation feel more real than merely stating its existence. How true the accounts of Holt and Mackenzie are we will never know; there are few assertions within them that are checkable. But if we assume for the moment that only some of their stories are true, the bits prior to the assassination, they show the integration of the Mob and the CIA in domestic operations in America way beyond anything hitherto published.19 As for their stories providing support for Estes’ assertion of Mob figures being in Dallas muddying the waters, which is where I came in, fascinating though both accounts are, all I can say is, ‘Well, maybe’.
19 There is a 1997 interview with Holt, just before his death, at
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JFK’s assassination: two stories about fingerprints
Garrick Alder
Mac Wallace: The FBI print examination Further to my essay ‘Mac Wallace and the finger of guilt’ (Lobster 68), I submitted an FOI request to the US Department of Justice to obtain documents involved in the print examination that resulted in the FBI’s 1999 finding of a non- match between the known prints of LBJ crony Malcolm ‘Mac’ Wallace and the prints listed as ‘unidentified’ obtained by the Bureau from the Texas School Book Depository in 1963. Seven months after receiving my request, the FBI released to me a batch of documentation that is supposedly all they have on the examination. It includes a 17 March 1998 affidavit by J.F. Harrison (a former Dallas police officer who was at the scene of Kennedy’s 1963 assassination), in which he set out the circumstances in which he and his research group procured the Wallace prints themselves and submitted the two sets of prints, known and unknown, to Nathan Darby for examination. Interestingly, Mr Darby’s own affidavit (9 March 1998) states that he identified not one but two matches between Wallace and the TSBD prints, although there is no further information that clarifies this finding. The file also contains, without any explanation, a clipping from the Dallas Morning News (dated 13 May 1984) concerning the disappearance of documents about Wallace from Defense Investigative Service files in Washington DC. The missing DIS documents comprised a standard background check performed on Wallace, who was applying for a job with a defence contractor, which two intelligence officers told The News had been present in his file in 1961 but were apparently removed
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later. The file also contains a letter to the FBI (dated 16 April 1998) from print examiner Harold Hoffmeister, renouncing his own confirmation of Mr Darby’s findings, findings that he himself had made in a blind test and recorded in the form of an affidavit. His letter of retraction to the FBI includes the following remarks concerning his thoughts after the identity of the Wallace print’s source had been revealed to him: ‘[…] I continued to look at the prints and the more I looked the more questioned I became [sic]. Some points matched and then they didn’t. Then ALL points matched, then NO points matched. I then realised that [Mr Darby] and I were having to make mental decisions due to the fact that we were dealing with COPIES of the latent [print] and not the original.’ But Mr Hoffmeister’s retraction, while highly unsatisfactory, at least shows once more exactly how subjective fingerprint analysis really is. The FBI’s record of their own analysis consists of multiple blurry photocopies of all the prints to be compared, before concluding with a typed single-paragraph report (dated 15 March 1999) that states simply: ‘The latent fingerprint […] is not a fingerprint of Malcolm Everett Wallace.’ The actual analytical processes that went into forming this conclusion are unrecorded, as is typical with FBI print examinations, because they all took place in the perception of the analyst. Any external factors that might have influenced the examiner’s work are therefore known only to those involved. However, the Wallace analysis file contains a mystery all of its own. Ten unidentified documents are listed as being withheld under exemptions in the USA’s Freedom of Information Act. The exemptions are on privacy grounds (‘personnel and medical files and similar files’) and on grounds of source confidentiality (‘could reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of confidential source […or] any private institution which furnished information on a confidential basis’).
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Since Wallace died in 1971, and since it is not obvious how any files relating to any confidential source(s), living or dead, could have contributed to a fingerprint examination, an appeal against these exemptions – asking for the ten withheld documents to be released in redacted form – has been lodged with the Department of Justice.
The FBI and Oswald’s phantom fingerprints In the chaos that the Kennedy assassination caused among officialdom, the immediate actions of the FBI and of Dallas police are intertwined and therefore confused by many researchers. One particularly puzzling aspect of these events is the appearance and disappearance (and re-appearance) of several sets of prints that were taken from Lee Oswald’s hands after his arrest. These prints have inspired many to invoke unknown conspirators who interfered with Oswald’s corpse in order to plant his incriminating prints on the alleged assassination weapon;1 but as with so many seemingly intractable problems encountered in the examination of historical events, the key is to establish a coherent chronology. Once this is done, a genuine mystery relating to Oswald’s prints is unexpectedly revealed. Lee Harvey Oswald was first fingerprinted by Dallas Police Department (DPD) as he was booked into custody in Dallas on 22 November 1963. For whatever reason, Oswald refused to sign his freshly-inked ‘ten print’ card, thereby effectively attempting to deny ownership of his own fingerprints. This first set of post-arrest prints became the Warren Commission’s exhibit CE 630. At some stage in the next twelve hours, as Oswald’s interrogation proceeded in fits and starts, prints were also taken from his left and right palms, catalogued as Commission exhibits CE 628 and CE 629 respectively. During the evening of 22 November, DPD’s Lt. John C.
1 Notable examples of such suspicions are to be found in David Lifton’s Best Evidence (pp. 354-356) and Sylvia Meagher’s Accessories After the Fact (pp. 120-127). A brief ‘cutaway’ reflecting this sinister scenario also appears in Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK.
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Day successfully retrieved a few indistinct fingerprints and one distinct palmprint from the alleged assassination rifle found in the Texas School Book Depository. Working alone throughout, he performed a comparison between these lifted prints and Oswald’s inked post-arrest prints. Lt. Day later stated that this comparison was suggestive of a match but not conclusive. The rifle subsequently became CE 139 and the palmprint lifted from it CE 637.2 While all this was unfolding, the FBI descended on Dallas and improperly seized control of the investigation and, at around 11.45pm, Lt. Day reluctantly handed the rifle (CE 139) to FBI agent Vince Drain, who departed with it for a flight to Washington DC and FBI headquarters. Drain left without Day’s accompanying fingerprint materials. Lt. Day declined to provide a written statement to the Warren Commission but a report of his recollections from that night is included in the documents comprising CE 3145. Lt. Day is surprisingly recorded as having said that it was his sole personal and private decision to disobey orders issued by DPD chief Jesse Curry to hand over all the evidence to the FBI. Day said he held back the print evidence for further study to see if it could definitely be matched to Oswald.3 In Washington, early on 23 November, the FBI’s Sebastian Latona (supervisor of the fingerprint identification department) took possession of the rifle (CE 139). As he subsequently testified before the Warren Commission (2 April 1964), his examination found some vague smears produced by contact with human hands on the rifle’s surfaces, but no fingerprints or palmprints complete enough for identification purposes. This near total lack of forensic evidence must have come as something of a surprise to the FBI, but the Bureau
2 This is a fatal blow to the idea that the rifle prints were taken from the dead Oswald’s hands, and it does not seem plausible that Oswald’s arrest prints (consisting of dried ink on flat card) could have been somehow transformed into the life-sized three-dimensional casts that would be required to place incriminating prints (in grease) on a rifle that was being inspected elsewhere, all of this being unnoticed by anyone else. 3
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conspicuously did not address any follow-up inquiries to DPD, instead relinquishing custody of the weapon just 36 hours later without offering any explanation to the DPD. On the same day that the rifle was quietly returned to Dallas (24 November 1963), Oswald was shot while in DPD custody, rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital where he died and his body was put in the hospital’s morgue. Thanks to some exemplary but little-noticed first-hand sleuthing by researcher Gary Savage, we now know that late in the evening of 24 November DPD officers Richard W. Livingston and John B Hicks visited the morgue and took Oswald’s prints again.4 The Livingston/Hicks prints were then matched by DPD to prints from Oswald’s arrest, such a posthumous identity-check apparently being normal DPD procedure after a death in custody. DPD’s posthumously- acquired Oswald prints became CE 630. A few days after the FBI’s unprecedented seizure of DPD evidence, Oswald’s death, and the subsequent return of the confiscated DPD evidence, the Bureau officially began investigating the president’s assassination and performed the redundant procedural charade of formally asking DPD to send its evidence to Washington for examination. On 27 November, DPD therefore duly re-sent the rifle (CE 139) to the Bureau, this time accompanied by Oswald’s inked but unsigned ten-print from his arrest (CE 627), his left and right inked palmprints (CE 628 and CE 629) and the palmprint that Lt. Day had lifted from the rifle (CE 637). Also included were the prints taken from Oswald’s corpse by officers Livingston and Hicks (CE 630). On 29 November, after this strange back-and-forth between Dallas and Washington, the Bureau’s Sebastian Latona positively identified CE 637 as matching CE 629 and both prints as matching CE 630. The FBI was therefore officially able to stitch-up the fingerprint issue in time for J. Edgar Hoover to report the Bureau’s complete findings in the assassination case to the White House on 9 December, thereby exerting his enormous influence on the Warren
4
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Commission created by Kennedy’s successor, president Lyndon Johnson, just ten days previously.5 The popular conspiratorial claim that Oswald’s prints suspiciously appeared on the rifle between Mr Latona’s first examination of CE 139 on 23 November and his second on 29 November is therefore based on a misunderstanding that has been perpetuated for several decades by no-doubt well-meaning researchers.6 By lifting and preserving the prints from the rifle on 22 November, DPD’s Lt. Day had in fact virtually destroyed them, because (as Sebastian Latona later confirmed to the Commission) the prints themselves – which, like all handprints, were thin and superficial greasemarks – were completely transferred onto DPD evidence cards, and Mr Latona did not know that Lt. Day’s lifts of the rifle prints even existed until they arrived during the FBI’s official receipt of DPD’s evidence on November 27. Furthermore, DPD’s supposedly ‘suspicious’ public silence about the fingerprint evidence during the 48 hours between the assassination and Oswald’s murder is easily explained as being caused by the precedence given by Texas state law enforcement to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (a situation that, by coincidence, ended when DPD regained possession of its own evidence from the FBI on the day that Oswald was killed).7 However, even once this post-assassination to and fro is
5 It seems perfectly reasonable to conclude that the rifle’s sequestration by the Bureau was intended to allow J. Edgar Hoover to be seen to crack the assassination case on day one, thereby astonishing the public by pulling off yet another of his investigative coups de theatre. If such personal attention-seeking were the case, the lack of print evidence relating to the rifle obviously thwarted this scheme. 6 If the FBI had really been trying to frame Oswald as the assassin by using phoney forensics then it had a good opportunity that weekend to cook up some evidence, but did not do so. 7 It could also be true that the FBI’s sudden swoop on Dallas was regarded with suspicion by DPD chief Jesse Curry and that he therefore withheld the print evidence temporarily to see what the Bureau would announce (a move which would itself be an intriguing form of cover-up in the case). This would explain his apparent failure to discipline Lt. Day after Day supposedly declined to obey Curry’s order to hand over all his prints to the FBI at the same time as the rifle.
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resolved, there remains a genuine mystery attached to the many prints of Lee Harvey Oswald, and the mystery does indeed arise after his death. In 1963 Paul Groody was employed at the Miller Funeral Home in Fort Worth, where Oswald’s corpse was received from Parkland Hospital in nearby Dallas at around 11 pm on 24 November, to be embalmed and prepared immediately for a hasty viewing and burial the next day. In the early hours of 25 November Mr Groody’s work on Oswald’s corpse was interrupted by the arrival of two ‘agents’. Mr Groody is now dead but he did record statements to the effect that he didn’t know whether the ‘agents’ were from the FBI or the Secret Service.8 We can therefore infer with confidence that the two men were formally attired rather than in any kind of uniform. We can go further than this thanks to Sebastian Latona’s Warren Commission testimony, which included the information that the Secret Service only occasionally dealt with forensic evidence. Since the Secret Service had no investigative role after the assassination (and no access to any of the fingerprint or ballistic evidence anyway), we may conclude with considerable certainty that Mr Groody’s visitors were indeed FBI agents. The two men asked Mr Groody to be left alone with Oswald’s body for a while, and Mr Groody obligingly withdrew. When the two agents departed some time later, Mr Groody recalled, Oswald’s hands needed to be thoroughly cleaned again due to a fresh coating of black ink where his visitors had obviously taken prints from the corpse. This incident at the funeral home was therefore Oswald’s fifth and final post-assassination fingerprinting, the preceding four having been entered sequentially into evidence by the Warren Commission as CE 627 (his arrest prints), CE 628 and CE 629 (his two palmprints, taken in custody) and CE 630 (his post-mortem DPD palmprints and fingerprints taken at the Parkland morgue). However, the final set of Oswald prints taken at the Fort Worth funeral home cannot have been required for the
8
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Bureau’s examination of the rifle, for the same reason that the Bureau did not immediately chase up DPD when it was discovered that DPD had not supplied any print evidence along with the rifle: that is, the FBI already had two sets of Oswald’s fingerprints on file and readily to hand at its Washington headquarters.9 In June 1960 Hoover himself had written an intriguing memo to the State Department concerning the then-unknown Oswald’s activities at the time of his defection from the US (specifically, an attempt to enrol at the Albert Schweitzer school in Switzerland). This memo, which does not appear in the Warren Commission’s evidence, 10 contained Hoover’s statement that ‘there is a possibility that an imposter is using Oswald’s birth certificate’. It therefore appears highly likely that someone in the FBI, perhaps Hoover himself, wanted to personally satisfy themselves that ‘Lee Harvey Oswald’, whose fingerprints the FBI already possessed, was the same Lee Harvey Oswald then lying in a Fort Worth funeral parlour. 11
9 The FBI’s custody of two sets of pre-assassination prints was only discovered during the investigation carried out by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s. See
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Apocryphilia
Simon Matthews
Our Island Story Before the teaching of history to children in this country descended to its current formula of dinosaurs + Romans + Henry VIII + Hitler (with a side helping of slavery) the past was taught in a rather different way. Many who were at primary school pre-1980 will be familiar with it: Our Island Story, the carefully nuanced account of how ‘the British Isles’ produced the greatest and most progressive people in the world. Written in 1905 it was, remarkably (or not?), still a common textbook 70 years later. It’s durability, popularity and influence, over a century later, has been recently cited by prime minister David Cameron and the centre-right think tank Civitas as an example of something they would like to see updated and reintroduced. Why is this? The Our Island Story narrative certainly has its attractions. Stressing national unity, in which Englishness is overwhelmingly predominant, it gives key early roles to Alfred the Great and William the Conqueror – the latter not, of course, English – with the repelling of foreign invasions and conquests (nothing since 1066) a critical factor, highlighted by the dispersal of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and, latterly, the defeat of Napoleon (1815) and Hitler (1940). British/English excursions into Europe are seen as the brilliantly executed ventures of plucky underdogs (Agincourt, Waterloo and Dunkirk are typical here) against overwhelming odds. The literary backdrop, from Shakespeare, Milton, Pepys, Dickens etc., embellishes this. Milton appears more or less in tandem with Cromwell, both as exemplars of grimly moral, upstanding and typically English parliamentarians – refusing to bow down before Rome and ensuring the lasting legitimacy of the House of Commons.....this being portrayed throughout the book as the finest and fairest legislature in the world.
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Peel and Gladstone both feature heavily at this respect as the benign account continues via the Industrial Revolution to the emergence of the biggest Empire ever seen with its accompanying and massive merchant fleet (the dominance and importance of trade being much stressed) leading to the reign of Victoria with much material, medical and social progress being ticked off en route. Our Island Story may have finished in 1905 but there were many other similar picture book accounts of UK history, aimed at 5 to 14 year olds (approximately) that took the story forward. These covered the victory in two world wars; massive improvements in public health and housing, particularly after 1945; talked much about ‘the new Elizabethan Age’ but played down the Empire and concentrated instead on the (supposed) emergence of a happy, united and content Commonwealth; before finally bowing out with the big technical projects of the ‘60s (Concorde, the Post Office Tower etc.) – rather like Tomorrow’s World for kiddies. Historians refer to this as the Whig version of history: an account in which things get better throughout – though occasional villains are allowed (King John being a favourite; James II too) – and the time scale is neatly divided up by dynasty (Tudors, Stuarts etc.) and within that by monarch. The ‘people’ generally benefit as reign by reign the United Kingdom/British Isles/England moves steadily to a majestically improved future. Today much of this appears at best naive, at worst arrogant....but, it would be churlish to deny completely that this approach has its benefits. Irrespective of any suspected Establishment bias, it provides a simple chronological framework, sets out a context and allows for a fuller picture to be built up, should the reader be curious enough to pursue this. But, as Cameron and Civitas have noted with regret, why do we not do this now? Why did this style of narrative fall out of fashion and fade away at some point in the mid ‘70s? Is it a matter of trends in historiography, or does it point to a deeper sense of national failure, a loss of confidence? One clue may be found by considering what has happened to the UK during
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the lengthy and continuing reign of Queen Elizabeth II and, in particular, comparing circumstances when it began with how matters rest today.
Then..... Though people may have forgotten this, in 1952 Britain was governed by a Conservative-National Liberal coalition with 321 MPs. Of these 35 represented constituencies in Scotland and 69 in the north of England.1 Reflecting that this was an administration that had supporters in all parts of the UK, the geographical distribution of seats was replicated at local government level with cities like Cardiff, Leeds and Liverpool being run by Conservative councils. The key political figures in this arrangement, and the first group of ministers from whom HRH took advice, were Sir Winston Churchill (Prime Minister, and a former Liberal), Sir Anthony Eden (Foreign Secretary and, by virtue of his being MP for Leamington Spa, the leading member of the Tory West Midlands group of MPs), RA Butler (Chancellor of the Exchequer, a keen supporter of Chamberlain and appeasement in the ‘30s) and Gwilym Lloyd- George (from 1954 Home Secretary, National Liberal MP for Newcastle-upon-Tyne North, previously Liberal MP for Pembrokeshire and son of David Lloyd-George).2 Government policy then was to intervene and regulate wherever needed to ensure the highest standards of living for
1 A mass electorate, where one person=one vote, only emerged in the UK in 1918, later than in many other countries. The Liberal Party split of 1931 produced a two party system that lasted until 1970 and a faction (the Liberal National Party) that worked in coalition with the Conservatives until 1966 when its surviving members formally joined the Conservative Party. Michael Heseltine was a late adherent of the Liberal National Party, being selected by them as candidate for Gower in the 1959 general election. Encouraged by Edward Heath to do so, he joined the Conservative Party shortly afterwards. 2 An irony, apparent now, was that when HRH ascended the throne her first Prime Minister (Winston Churchill) had served as an officer in the Mohmand Campaign of 1897-1898 on the NW Frontier, while the latter part of her reign featured an extensive UK military expedition to Afghanistan (2001-2013), the end result of which was completely inconclusive. Churchill was not a supporter of incursions into Afghanistan and its surrounding area.
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the 50 million inhabitants of the UK – and its fiscal policy reflected this: inheriting a standard rate of income tax of 9 shillings in the pound (45%) from Labour in 1951, Butler immediately increased this to its highest ever peace time level of 9 shillings and 6 pence (47.5%) a year later, also allowing at the same time for an increase in the National Debt. With the massive funds thereby available the government was able to spend heavily on a variety of projects. Housing was one of these. Minister for Housing Harold Macmillan presided over the construction of 262,000 new council houses in both 1953 and 1954. The Churchill government eventually built 1.1 million local authority properties in total, as well as 400,000 private homes. Its policy was to get people out of dreadful insanitary private rented housing and into high quality affordable municipal housing and to increase home ownership – which it did by 5% during its period of office. Much of the building work took place in the 14 new towns inherited from the Attlee government with a 15th (Cumbernauld, started 1956) being planned.3 In transport the UK had a nationalised and extensive railway network, which, in 1955, became the recipient of the Railway Modernisation Plan, costing then £1.2 billion (about £34 billion in 2015 prices).4 In an echo of the first edition of Our Island Story, when QE2 ascended the throne 20% of the shipping in the world was registered in the UK, giving the
3 Macmillan’s career follows in many ways that of the UK as a country. Originally a left of centre MP for Stockton-on-Tees 1924-1929 and 1929-1945, he dallied with Oswald Mosley circa 1930. With an American mother, and related by marriage to John F Kennedy, he was the US candidate to replace Eden after Suez. He initiated the first significant UK spending cuts (in defence and transport) and oversaw a very rapid ending of Empire (1958-1963) before calling at the end of his career (in 1976) for a Government of National Unity and later lamenting privatisation as ‘the selling of the family silver’. 4 However: the Railway Modernization Plan was only allowed by the Treasury on the basis that it was investment that would result in the railways ‘paying their way’. When this failed to occur (though note: under private ownership the railways had not ‘paid their way’ since the late ‘20s) the programme was halted in 1960 and Beeching installed (1961) to cut the network until it ‘became profitable’. No other country in the world cut so extensively, not even the US, where proportionally more track was retained for freight purposes.
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country easily the largest merchant fleet in the world. Shipbuilding yards had full order books as they completed the many new vessels needed to take British manufacturing exports to their destinations across the globe. Much of this trade occurred within the still extensive domains of the British Empire which was policed by 600,000 UK servicemen and protected by a Royal Navy with no fewer than 18 aircraft carriers. In aviation the huge industrial concerns of Avro, De Havilland, English Electric, Handley Page, Hawker, Hunting, Short Brothers, Supermarine, Vickers and Westland were midway through a massive construction programme that by 1957 would produce 14,000 jet aircraft, among them the De Havilland Comet, the first commercially available airliner in the world. Of equal importance – though providing neither the number of jobs linked to aviation or shipping nor their associated export opportunities – was the successful implementation in 1952 of the decision taken by the Attlee government in 1947 to create a completely independent nuclear deterrent, thus confirming, to those who monitored such matters, the continuance of the UK as a world power. With hindsight, the crowning achievements of this early period of robust, confident and socially inclusive nationalism (some might say Gaullism) might be said to rest on two events: (1) Sir Anthony Eden presiding over the 1954 Geneva Conference that brought to an end the war in Vietnam (with a solution that satisfied France, Vietnam, China and the USSR and which was to be policed by India, Canada and Poland),5
5 The US did not participate in the Geneva Conference, refused to endorse its outcome and promptly backed Ngo Dinh Diem (who had almost no support) against the nationalist Emperor Bao Dai. Diem proclaimed Vietnam a republic after a fraudulent referendum, ousting Bao Dai, and then cancelled the Geneva accords and the 1956 elections which had been arranged to establish a national legislature. Most of what followed in Vietnam flowed from this. When it emerged after 1975 that the Vietnamese were anti-Chinese, pragmatic in economic policy and united by nationalism as much as communism, it appeared that Eden’s diplomacy represented a great lost opportunity. The unravelling of the French position in Vietnam and the role of the US (and CIA) in this formed the basis of the Graham Greene novel The Quiet American (1955).
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and (2) the announcement in July 1955 of the lowest ever unemployment figures (just 185,000) since records began.
.....and now That was the UK when the reign of our current monarch started. How does it compare to how we live 63 years later? Have we seen steady progress? Ironically, in early 2015, we still have a coalition government, between (approximately) the same political partners as in 1952, though it is debatable whether it is more or less formal than the earlier arrangement. But, while it may command a majority in the House of Commons, unlike its earlier predecessor it does not draw its representation evenly from all parts of the UK. Most of its Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs represent areas in the south or midlands of England, while in local government the presence of the Conservative Party has vanished in large areas across Wales, the north and Scotland. The background of MPs is also markedly different. Buttressed by a huge substructure of lobby groups, policy advisors and think tanks that barely existed in the ‘50s, it is now common for individuals to have had no career outside politics (witness Clegg and Miliband) before entering the Palace of Westminster. Economic policy under Churchill and Eden might have been (as it still is across much of the EU) strictly Keynesian, but, ‘official’ policy in the UK since 1979 has been to set the basic rate of personal income tax at the lowest possible level; it is now 20%, less than half of that levied by Mr Butler.6 Unlike 1952 the current UK government – although prone to hand-wringing platitudes and solemn ‘pledges’ – no longer believes in actively providing housing for ordinary people or in ensuring whatever housing is built is genuinely affordable.
6 The largest single source of revenue the Treasury has is the standard rate of income tax. The reduction of this by successive governments to US levels is the dog that never barks in UK political debate.....the cause of virtually all the alarm about a ‘deficit’, spending being ‘out of control’ etc. Depressingly there seems little attempt to educate the wider public that if you want European level services you have to pay European level taxes.
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Shipbuilding and aviation: at best are very marginal in 2015. The armed forces: are curiously enjoying now an almost fetish- like level of sentimental public support, while reduced to 20% of the size at the start of HRH’s reign. The independent management of the UK nuclear deterrent was quickly dropped by Macmillan (in 1958) in favour of co-operation with the US and the last solely UK-built and maintained nuclear weapons, free fall bombs, were scrapped by Blair in 1998. Britain now borrows its nuclear deterrent from the US, and would have to consult it prior to its use, this arrangement being cheaper than paying to build, maintain and deploy an exclusively UK owned deterrent (i.e. it is cheaper than following the procedures used by everybody else).7 Although disputes continue about how they are calculated, official unemployment figures have clearly been in seven figures since 1972. (And how high would they actually be if the workless were counted in the way they were in the ‘50s?) Of course, one cannot consider purely economic and political data and immediately conclude that the last six decades have been a period of decline. Social attitudes show much evidence of change for the better. Consider, for instance ‘50s attitudes to issues such as sex before marriage, single parenthood, gay rights, gender and race, compared to the views held on these subjects by most people today. Some, libertarians and generally those who consider themselves to be ‘on the left’ might point, negatively, to the growth in Police numbers and the prison population in the last 60 years. But, while it may be true that we have more police per capita than 1952, the UK remains lightly policed compared to many other
7 The only explanation that comes to mind for the extraordinary (and unprecedented) arrangements whereby the US and the UK share a nuclear deterrent appears to be that the UK took a view – after Macmillan became PM – that if it couldn’t keep up immediately with the US and the USSR and match these countries every time they produced new nuclear technology it wasn’t worth trying at all. The idea of slowly developing your own deterrent, as and when funds are available (the approach followed by France, China, India, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran(?)) doesn’t appear to have been entertained, with a radical short-termism preferred instead.
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countries, and, the death penalty is no longer in force.8 However, social attitudes are rarely broached in Our Island Story, so why mention them and rely on them as definite evidence of progress now? Taking everything into consideration the long view might be that social liberalism has followed economic liberalism during the reign of Queen Elizabeth – though it is interesting to consider, equally, how convenient the trade-off in a drop in state engagement has been for those on the political right who enjoy the benefits (to them) of the deregulated economy while simultaneously advocating social liberalism. Were the masses ever offered a choice? Could we not have had greater social liberalism and a continuing significant role for the state?9 Today, the benefits of social liberalism (gay marriage, multiculturalism and a more permissive role toward sex outside marriage etc.) are not necessarily apparent to those who struggle with economic liberalism, working longer hours on zero hours contracts, with few employment rights and no occupational pensions. When first published, Our Island Story paid careful attention to the characteristics of each monarch playing-up (alleged) traits like brave, wise and just to demonstrate how much empathy each successive dynasty had with their subjects. However, by the very way its narrative was framed it was clear that every dynasty ends, and whatever succeeds it was not necessarily related to it. Neither the Normans (1066) nor the Tudors (1485) had any real genealogical connection with their immediate predecessors, and both the Stuarts (1603) and the Hanoverians (1714) were installed by
8 Compared with say, Italy or France, the UK appears to have relatively few police – 154,000 against 220,000 + 98,000 gendarmes in France and 277,000 + 109,000 carabinieri in Italy. The UK figure is lower per capita than Sweden. 9 The obvious parallel here would be with Norway, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, where social liberalism is combined with higher taxes and a bigger role for the state.
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Parliament.10 Assuming a rebooting of Our Island Story as wished by Cameron and Civitas, what, retrospectively, would be ‘the line’ on the Windsor-Mountbattens?11 Firstly, given economic circumstances it may turn out that the story of the British people since 1952 proves difficult to package as steady broad-based progress. Assuming Our Island Story was rebooted, the notion of a hereditary monarchy, whose the head of state is also head of the official state religion,12 whose incumbent is unconstrained by any written constitution, under whom there is no proper system of regional government and the upper chamber of the legislature is absurdly unlimited in size with a membership solely in the gift of the Monarch and the Prime Minister, might be considered by some readers to be rather backward by the standards of 2015. Apparently HRH Queen Elizabeth II is wedded to the current arrangements on the basis that she needs to uphold her (holy) Coronation Oath. Does this explain her two interventions in the latter stages of the September 2014 10 In both 1689 and 1714 there were better related claimants (the Stuarts – Roman Catholics) had a strictly genealogical view been taken. There also appears to have been a push pre-1837 to exclude Ernst Augustus (the fifth son of George III) from the throne, thus ensuring that the UK separated from Hanover and continental entanglements. The 1936 abdication provides an example of how Parliament can decide the succession of the Crown. 11 The ‘official’ name of the Royal family. The Saxe-Coburg-Gothas became the Windsors and the von Battenbergs became the Mountbattens in 1916-1917. Between 1948 and 1960 protracted correspondence took place – pursued mainly by Lord Mountbatten – to ensure the survival of the Mountbatten surname, after the marriage of Prince Philip, though it is almost never used. In his Vanished Kingdoms (pp. 571-572) Norman Davies reminds us how unconnected the House of Windsor are to the UK, pointing out that, ultimately, the Windsor- Mounbattens should be correctly referred to by their German surname: Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg. 12 By comparison the Pope leads a religion but only a tiny state. In Saudi Arabia the King is not the head of Islam (the agitation for such a role, a Caliph, being behind the current mayhem in Iraq and Syria). Japan and North Korea appear to be quite similar to the UK model – both have heads of state who are (or can be) worshipped as gods. The role of HRH as Supreme Governor of the Anglican Church – and therefore an intermediary between God and the nation – appears to be a relic of the belief in the Divine Right of Kings.
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Scottish Independence Referendum in which she urged electors to ‘be careful how you vote’ and stated that she was ‘very worried’. Some might consider that in doing this she crossed the narrow line from a position of impartiality to taking a partisan stance....seeing her duty as upholding the status quo rather than being the servant of democratic choice. Why would she do this? Alex Salmond was, after all, a beacon of moderation, favouring the Queen remaining Head of State in an independent Scotland and Scotland remaining within the EU, NATO and the Commonwealth. Her opposition to any change at all might puzzle some, until the nuances of what was being suggested by Salmond and the SNP are considered. Yes, they would have had a monarchy, but one answerable to a written constitution that would define the job of the monarch with, one suspects, much of the pageantry and paraphernalia dropped. A future King or Queen of Scotland would therefore operate like a Scandinavian or Dutch monarch. One wonders if somewhere lurking at the back of this was a consideration of how the mechanics of this, post- Independence, might have worked in Scotland: (1) agree a written constitution; (2) retain the monarch as Head of State; and (3) offer the Scottish Crown to QE2. As a short term solution this would be sufficient. But, given her age (89) and the misgivings many have about Prince Charles given his inability to restrain his views on everyday matters, what might their decision be when a successor needs to be agreed? The notion that the House of Windsor was at risk if Scotland voted for Independence surfaced in the latter stages of the Referendum campaign.13 Suppose, instead, the Scottish
13 The cavalry charge against Prince Charles as successor was led by Stephen Haseler during the Scottish Referendum (The Times 18 August 2014, ‘Independent Scotland could lose Royal Family’ and 11 September 2014). An intriguing figure, Haseler was a founder member of the SDP and for many years Chair of the pressure group Republic. A play, King Charles III ran in London in 2014-2015 with a plot that concludes with Charles abdicating. Close observers may also note the appearance of articles referring to the Monarchy being in a ‘transitional stage’, something casually reported since 2013 – as could only be the case in a country
Continues at the foot the next page.
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Parliament one day looked for a firmly pro-EU candidate with long experience of regional and federal government and a strong understanding of appropriate constitutional behaviour for the throne of Scotland? And ensured that any candidate meeting these requirements was still related, dynastically, to previous Scottish monarchs? Circa 2020, the Duke of Bavaria, as the current head of the Jacobite line of descent from the Stuarts, might be an attractive alternative to Prince Charles if a monarch as head of state were still deemed preferable in Scotland to an elected President, and the Scots opted to repeat what the English Parliament did in 1689, 1714 and 1936: choose their own monarch. Stranger things have happened.14 Secondly, and inevitably, given the extent to which the economic optimism of earlier times has evaporated, it may be noted that HRH Queen Elizabeth remains extremely wealthy, being personally worth £330m. As head of the Crown Estate, which controls an estate valued at £6.6bn, she can also claim, on paper, to be the richest person in the UK.15 It is no exaggeration to conclude that during her reign her personal
Note 13 continued without a written constitution. See ‘The Queen's era is drawing to a close’ (Time, 7 May 2013) and ‘Queen hands over reins to Prince Charles’(Daily Mirror, 20 January 2014). Alarm about Charles III, who has stated that he will continue as monarch to lobby in favour of his personal views and comment publicly on matters he deems of interest, has also been voiced in many mainstream quarters. See ‘Prince of Wales presents a real danger to the monarchy’ (Daily Telegraph, 6 June 2012) and ‘We’ll not stomach a meddling monarch’ (The Guardian 3 January 2015). 14 Such as the abdication of Leopold Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (King of Belgium) in 1951, the ending of the monarchy in Greece (a branch of the Sonderburg-Glucksburg family, related to Prince Philip) in 1967 and the return of Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (formerly Tsar) to Bulgaria, as Prime Minister in 2001-2009. Perhaps the recent funeral of Richard III indicates a UK public interest in Monarchy but with no specific attachment to the House of Windsor. 15 A distinction is usually made that the Queen cannot benefit by selling any Crown Estate assets – the money would pass to the state. If so, the Queen may not be a billionaire, but, she remains wealthy and unaffected by the decline in living standards that has been so significant for so many of her subjects (not citizens) in the last 30 years
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wealth has been undamaged and has risen continually while the prosperity and well-being of many of her subjects has fallen. Either explaining or ignoring this in a future edition of Our Island Story would be tricky and the line might well be that it is better, perhaps, to concentrate on nebulous personal freedoms and relatively minor triumphs instead. So....should the story continue it will no longer be a saga of steady improvement for all, having swerved into a narrow gloomy cul- de-sac since 1979, with a suspicion growing that it may end badly, if not for us, then for the UK as an entity, and certainly for our children. Perhaps we should all be careful whom we vote for.
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The Secret War Between the Wars MI5 in the 1920s and 1930s Kevin Quinlan Woodbridge (Suffolk): The Boydell Press, 2014, £30, h/b
This began as the author’s PhD thesis, based on the MI5 files of the interwar period, and it details some of their successes against the British left who were getting money from Moscow in the decade following the Soviet revolution; their handling of the very significant Tyler Kent/Right Club events which might have had a serious impact on WW2, delaying American entry; and the careful debriefing of Soviet intelligence defector Krivitsky, the first of its kind. Versions of these events, based on the same files, are in Christopher Andrew’s Defence of the Realm and had been written about widely before the files were opened. What Quinlan does is give lots of detail of MI5’s working methods not in the extant versions; and does so with simple, clear writing. The Quinlan thesis is that MI5 were successful against their various domestic left, domestic fascist and Soviet opponents because they were better at it; they had better tradecraft – a word which appears every few pages in the text. In effect they were better at being spies than the amateurs they were facing (and I would include the Soviet state agencies for much of the period in that description) – and, of course, they had the powers of the state, notably the ability to intercept letters. It is a stupid title: there was no war. There is only one death indirectly linked to the ‘war’ in this tale, that of the Soviet defector, Krivitsky, who committed suicide (or maybe didn’t) after being debriefed by MI5. The subtitle should have been the title but I expect the publisher thought it sounded dull. In fact this isn’t a dull book at all, despite most of the contents being more or less familiar, in outline at least, to a casual student of MI5 like me. It should also be noted that the publisher, Boydell Press, produces books that are a pleasure to use: good paper, typesetting and binding.
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Robin Ramsay
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Method and Madness The hidden story of Israel’s assaults on Gaza Norman G. Finkelstein London and New York: O/R books, 2014, £11/$17, p/b
There is little I find more depressing than reading about Israel. Not just the slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians (by a state founded for the victims of ethnic cleansing, FFS) but also the denial and hypocrisy that Israel’s actions evoke in its supporters. Israel needs an internal enemy. Without one its actions would be undeniably simple ethnic cleansing. With one, and with a huge propaganda effort by its supporters, they become ‘self-defence’. Hamas, certainly in part the creation of the Israeli state,1 is the perfect opponent. All Israel has to do is ensure that ‘peace initiatives’ fail (attacks by the Israeli military ensure that), manage the perceptions of the Israeli lobby in the US on whom continuing American financial support depends and keep Hamas busy rebuilding Gaza after military assaults wreck it. All three aspects are dealt with in this latest of Finkelstein’s books on recent events in that little patch of desert in the Middle East. Finkelstein describes in some detail the last three Israeli attacks on Gaza; the piratical assault on the Mavi Marmara, the ship carrying aid to it; and the various rationales (and rationalisations) offered for them by the Israeli government and its supporters elsewhere. The centre piece is chapters on the Goldstone Report, the UN-commissioned study by Richard Goldstone on the Israeli assault in 2008/9. Goldstone, a South African Jew, initially looked reality in the face and reported what he found: Israeli war crimes. Cue enormous hostility to Goldstone; and cue, eventually, Goldstone’s climb-down and disavowal of his own report on a pretext that was vanishingly thin. Goldstone, who had stood up to apartheid in South Africa, was unable to resist the pressure of the Israeli lobby. Finkelstein lays it all out, keeps his cool; some little bit of him must still believe that in the end justice will triumph. I wish 1 See e.g.
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I shared that view. But the actions he is describing are those of a state founded on atrocity, which has now been engaged in atrocity for so long, and got away with it for so long, that I cannot see it how will be able to come to a resolution that is anything but a bloodbath. And it has nukes.
Robin Ramsay
The book is not being sold through Amazon and is available at
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The News Machine: Hacking,The Untold Story James Hanning with Glenn Mulcaire London: Gibson Square, £12.99, p/b
The Conservative Party had already lost the Rochester and Strood by-election in the hours before its former director of communications left prison early on the morning of 21 November. Whether the timing of Andy Coulson’s release was coincidental or evidence that his former boss, Prime Minister David Cameron, was pulling all the strings he could to avoid a UKIP victory, we may never know. But we do know that Coulson’s earlier employer, News International (now News UK), made very little of his return to civvy street five months into his 18-month sentence for conspiracy to hack phones and of the Conservative defeat in what was previously a very safe Tory seat. The linked worlds of criminality, the media, the state and politics are the subject of the latest book by The Independent on Sunday deputy editor James Hanning, viewed through the eyes of Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who worked extensively for Coulson among other News International senior executives. He was jailed for six months in 2007 for his role in phone hacking. Along with News Of The World (NOTW) royal reporter Clive Goodman, Mulcaire pleaded guilty, allowing News International to claim they were two bad apples in a Wapping barrel brimming with decent practitioners of the journalism trade, including Coulson and another NOTW editor, Rebekah Brooks. Hanning tells us the admission by Mulcaire and Goodman also saved lots of embarrassment for some of the Royals, who might have been called as witnesses, and the Metropolitan Police. It was only after Coulson went from Rupert Murdoch to the Conservative Party and then to Her Majesty’s Government as Cameron’s spin chief at No 10, that suspicions began to spread that Goodman and Mulcaire had merely taken the hit for Murdoch’s empire. Nick Davies of The Guardian and a few MPs pointed to widespread abuses of privacy and illegality, a pattern of corruption confirmed by the Leveson Inquiry and
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criminal trials, some of which – one involving Coulson – are still ongoing. Mulcaire came before the courts again in 2013 once his ‘bad apple’ status was shown to be shared by many others in the Murdoch barrel. He was given a six-month suspended sentence. But between his two trials he caught much of the critical flak from those belatedly emboldened to speak out against the practices of Murdoch journalism. One of those was former Home Secretary David Blunkett who wanted Mulcaire ‘to rot in hell’ but who has nonetheless continued to be a regular recipient of News International largesse. Mulcaire, inhibited first by the terms of his settlement with News International at the time of his first conviction and then by the contempt constraints of subsequent trials, has found himself largely in the firing line, particularly after he was identified as the man who hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. The author has done a smart and important thing in getting the vilified Mulcaire to tell at least some of his side of the story. Hanning has not done this in any way to exculpate Mulcaire: rather to help us understand what makes a devout, Roman Catholic father of five, former youth worker and professional footballer blag and hack his way into the private lives of his fellow citizens. Hanning’s journalistic and humane instincts have also allowed us to see a much bigger picture of what was going on in the past twenty years than has emerged from the fine work of Nick Davies, MPs Tom Watson and Chris Bryant, Leveson and the hacking trials themselves. We learn that Mulcaire’s early career was as a ‘tracer’ for John Boyall who, among other things, carried out contract work for the intelligence services. When the NOTW and Boyall fell out, Mulcaire was the beneficiary and became ever more deeply involved with obtaining material by assorted means in support of the paper’s campaigns under the editorship of Brooks. When Coulson became editor, the demands for ever more celebrity tittle-tattle grew, with Mulcaire’s workload earning him six-figures a year.
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Mulcaire seems to have believed – whether this is just deluded self-justification is hard to discern – that the status of a global media empire working closely with agencies of the state, including the Met, conferred legitimacy on his activities. Court verdicts have not supported his beliefs; but have also left lots of questions unanswered about the extent of the trade between the state and the Fourth Estate. Hanning offers us lots of insights into cosiness at the top. When Rebekah Brooks decided she would like to ride a horse retired from the Metropolitan Police, Hanning discloses: ‘The horse was acquired from the police by Brooks partly for David Cameron’s use. It is a story which speaks volumes about both her and Cameron.’ (Author’s italics.) The details need not detain us save to say that a Hanning source confirms that the then head of the Met, Sir Ian Blair, arranged Brooks’ use of the horse and was told that Cameron would also be riding it. There are lots of similar stories of the masked meshing of the mutual interests of the rich and powerful. Old Etonian Hanning, who brought the photograph of the Prime Minister’s Bullingdon Club mates briefly into the public domain with his biography of the Tory leader, has done a good job in teasing this material from Mulcaire and putting it into political context.1 Further, as a widely experienced senior journalist with a commitment to what the trade can be at its best, he also offers important insights into the changing nature of the profession. He illustrates how Mulcaire’s journey from tracing villains to industrial-scale hacking of decent citizens gained momentum under the voracious Murdoch machine. His latest book extends the understanding of those who wish to move beyond simplistic monochrome judgements about the popular press by those who prefer to read the unpopular ones. It is also a story of our times: the top people
1 Hanning gave thoughtful evidence to Leveson which is well worth a look for those seeking to put its better publicised celebrity witnesses in perspective. See
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go free and get richer while smaller fish go to jail and find it ever harder to pay the bills.
Tom Easton
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The JFK Assassination Diary My search for answers to the mystery of the century Edward Jay Epstein New York: EJE Publications, 2014
This is Edward Jay Epstein’s fourth book about the Kennedy assassination. He wrote his first, Inquest, while a graduate student. By a combination of luck and smarts he got access to some of the materials of the Warren Commission staff and showed not that Warren was wrong necessarily, but that it was a rushed job. Inquest appeared more or less simultaneously with Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgement, and helped create early doubts about the Warren Commission’s verdict. In the section here on the events around his writing of Inquest it is very clear indeed that the Warren Commission was a political event, not in any sense an ‘inquiry’. For example, Epstein quotes Commission member John J. McCloy telling him that the Commission had come under enormous pressure to complete the Report before the 1964 election campaign began in September. (Never mind who shot JFK, we’ve got an election to fight!) It was McCloy who made Inquest possible by giving Epstein two boxes of Commission documents, including the FBI reports. Epstein was given McCloy’s view of Warren and the evidence to support it.1 Inquest led to Epstein being asked by the New Yorker to investigate the Garrison inquiry, and that became his second book Counterplot (which I have not read); which led, in turn, to him being asked to write Legend by the Reader’s Digest. I bought this book mainly because I was curious about the background to Legend and in that it’s a disappointment: there is nothing new here. His account of the approach by the Reader’s Digest has been covered in more detail in his Deception (1989). And this account does nothing to clarify what was going on when a CIA officer, Jamieson, offered the Reader’s Digest access to the KGB defector, Nosenko.
1 The definitive account of the workings and failings of the Warren Commission is Gerald D. McKnight, Breach of Trust (University Press of Kansas, 2005).
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When I reviewed Legend in Lobster 2 in 1983, Epstein’s attempted presentation of Oswald-as-KGB looked like another part of the revitalised Cold War then under way. Subsequently we have learned that Legend was part of the internal CIA struggle between those who believed Nosenko and those, like James Angleton – ousted from the Agency a year before the book was commissioned – and his allies who thought Nosenko was a false defector, sent to disinform the CIA.2 While Legend took the anti-Nosenko side of the argument, that, presumably, was not the intention of the Reader’s Digest editors who commissioned it in 1976. For Nosenko claimed to have seen the KGB file on Oswald’s stay in the Soviet Union and said that it showed that the KGB had no interest in and did nothing with Oswald. It looks as though the CIA approached Epstein, via the Reader’s Digest, to launch Nosenko and his story of the KGB’s clean hands in the Kennedy assassination; but the scheme backfired when Epstein was ‘captured’ by the anti-Nosenko faction of former and serving CIA officers and championed their views in Legend (and in another version of this murky affair, Deception.)3 Despite writing four books about JFK’s assassination, Epstein apparently knows nothing of the critical literature which was growing while he wrote them. On his website Epstein offers a portrait of Oswald which could have been written in 1964; in which, like the version in Legend, all the evidence of Oswald’s links to the American intelligence services is omitted.4 And in Legend, after spending hundreds of thousands of Reader’s Digest dollars on researchers in an attempt to show that Oswald was a lone gunman – somehow, vaguely – influenced by the KGB, in an appendix to the main text, Epstein gave an account of the events on Dealey Plaza which (unwittingly) entailed four shots. He tried to dodge the ‘magic bullet’ by having Kennedy hit by two shots and Connally 2 For the Agency’s current view of Legend see
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by a third. But he had apparently forgotten the bullet which missed and struck the pavement. Which means four; which means a second shooter, in a book which assumes that Oswald was the lone assassin; or which means swallowing the ‘magic bullet’ nonsense. Did Epstein and his editors simply not notice this? Or did they not understand that it was the shot which missed that had forced the ‘magic bullet’ onto the Commission if it was claiming only three shots from the Book Depository? Or was this simply intended to deceive the average, uninformed reader? And if this last, why bother with an appendix on the shooting at all? This latest short (107 pages) text contains a smattering of interesting snippets in what we might call the historiography of the Kennedy assassination but nothing of consequence; and appears not to have been proof-read before publication. I cannot remember reading anything quite so error-strewn.
Robin Ramsay
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Deception in High Places a history of bribery in Britain’s arms trade Nicholas Gilby London: Pluto Press, 2015, p/b, £14.00
This is very good: clearly written, massively documented1 and carefully done. Mark Thatcher, for example, some of whose wealth is widely believed to come from BAE’s 1985 Al Yamamah deal with the Saudis, isn’t mentioned. What might be sayable on the Net is not sayable in print.2 What can be safely said is impressive enough. I was surprised by how much could be found out given a tenacious researcher and a couple of dead participants in the trade who left revealing documents.3 Bribery exists because, where weapons are concerned, in most cases the goods are not needed. If the Saudi state is going to buy 175 British tanks and the Kuwaitis another 165 (both discussed here), which neither state really has a use for, the point of the deal from the purchasing end isn’t acquiring the goods, it is the bribe – the ‘commission’; and we’re talking about millions and occasionally tens of millions – built into the price. Gilby quotes Sir Donald Stokes, then head of the Leyland Motor Corporation and studying the British arms trade for the government, acknowledging this in writing in the mid 1960s. From the seller’s end the game becomes finding the bent official with influence. A process which involves ‘commissions’ is no big problem for business – in which ‘commissions’ are commonplace – but it has been for politicians, especially members of the Labour Party whose official ethos before messrs. Blair and Brown was something vaguely along the ‘merchants of death’ line. The Labour government of Harold Wilson solved that problem in 1966 by creating an insulation layer, the Defence Sales
1 Over a hundred source notes to several of the chapters, for example. 2 It’s suggested but not demonstrated in Thatcher’s Wiki entry. In the preface the author thanks the Rowntree Trust for the money to have this read by a libel lawyer. 3 The author can be seen discussing this book at
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Organisation (DSO), about whose activities ministers could be resolutely uninformed. Before the DSO, enterprising freelance fixers had done most of the work. The details of the various deals, mostly with Arab states, is one of the major themes here. The second big thread is the protracted struggle to provide a national and international legal framework against bribery which culminated in national legislation and international agreements. Has the legislation worked? The author shows the British dragging their feet at every opportunity until the Serious Fraud Office began digging into the 1985 BAE–Saudi Al Yamamah deal while Blair was in office.4 The author shows the British state in full obstruction and evasion mode before the SFO inquiry was killed by Blair, citing ‘security’ issues, after he was leaned on by the Saudis. Gilby is rather positive about the American experience. Other estimates are less sanguine and I will need more evidence than he offers here that the anti-bribery legislation is effective. Yes, some American companies have been fined for breaches; but the fines are small compared to the size of the deals. (Fines become business expenses.) The major British casualty of the anti-corruption legislation has been British Aerospace, BAE (or BAe) and the centrepiece of the book is a detailed account of BAE’s activities through Al Yamamah and beyond. For non-Al Yamamah deals BAe has been fined $500 million; but, as the author notes, this is just 1.5% of the company’s income from military sales in 2010. My guess would be that the American state is just putting on a better show of anti-corruption activities than the British. As a campaigner against the arms trade Gilbey is perhaps inclined to hope that such campaigns are effective. But I might be wrong. I hope I am wrong.
Robin Ramsay
4 BAE got the Al Yamamah contract because its US rivals were being obstructed by the Israeli lobby’s hostility to arming Israel’s enemies.
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The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy Graeme MacQueen Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2014, $19.95, £12.99 ISBN 978-0-9860731-2-0
Anyone remember the American anthrax scare of 2001? I’d pretty much forgotten about it until I read author Graeme MacQueen who says that it was a key part of the 9/11 events that took the United States and its allies to war in Afghanistan and then Iraq. He claims much more, but first a reminder of the events themselves. Within days of 9/11 a number of people received letters containing anthrax spores, the attendant publicity greatly swelling the panic following the World Trade Centre/Pentagon attacks.1 Among them were ABC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw and two Democratic senators critical to rapid Congressional approval of a Patriot Bill conferring wide- ranging new powers upon the President in a situation George Bush had quickly defined as war. This trio were not directly harmed but five less prominent figures, including two postal workers, died within days. Many others, across a wide geographical area, were infected. It took months to decontaminate Congressional buildings. Americans never likely to die in collapsing skyscrapers became alarmed about the mail and worried that white powder on the kitchen floor might be deadly spores. The sensationally reported anthrax scare pressed the panic button right across America and was picked up and spread by the media in many other countries, including the UK. 2 In MacQueen’s view this was an intentional strategy of
1 The only member of Congress to vote against the resolution on the Authorisation for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists on September 14 2001 was Democratic Representative Barbara Lee from California: see
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tension to push a frightened public deeper into the arms of the security state at home and into wars abroad.3 The Bush administration was quick to blame al-Qaeda for the attack and then finger Iraq – portrayed as the possessor of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deploy them – as the source of its anthrax. The swift passage of the Patriot Bill through Congress granted extensive new powers to the president as commander in chief in the ‘war on terror’. Many will recall Secretary of State Colin Powell later waving before the United Nations a phial, apparently containing anthrax, when in 2003 he put the US on track for war against the alleged possessor of huge quantities of the bacteria, Saddam Hussein.4 The posted anthrax contained accompanying notes with similar capitalised text in poor English. The one sent to Brokaw read as follows: 09-11-01 THIS IS NEXT TAKE PENACILIN NEXT DEATH TO AMERICA DEATH TO ISRAEL ALLAH IS GREAT But it quickly became clear that the sophistication of the identified Ames strain of anthrax in the letters meant it could only come from within the military and intelligence apparatus of the US itself. So with al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein off the list of suspects, the FBI began the hunt nearer home. MacQueen recounts the exoneration and $5.8m legal victory against the US government of its first suspect, bio- weapons expert Stephen Hatfill. He had been repeatedly named ‘a person of interest’ by Attorney General John Ashcroft. The FBI closed its investigation after the second suspect, Fort Detrick bio-defence lab immunologist Bruce Ivins, apparently committed suicide in 2008. He had passed a polygraph test, wasn’t charged, had suffered long-running 3
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harassment and been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. There was no autopsy and no evidence of his involvement in what work colleagues and many other bio- defence specialists found a highly implausible allegation. MacQueen, a former academic who co-edits the Journal of 9/11 Studies, tells us that his book sets out to prove five key points.5 In his words these are: ‘1: The anthrax attacks were carried out by a group of perpetrators, not by a lone wolf; 2: The group that perpetrated this crime included deep insiders within the US executive branch; 3: This group of perpetrators was linked to or identical with, the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks; 4: The anthrax attacks were the result of a conspiracy meant to help redefine the enemy of the West, revising the global conflict framework from the Cold War to the Global War on Terror; 5: The establishment of the Global War on Terror, to which the anthrax attacks contributed, enabled the US executive branch to reduce the civil liberties of people in the US and to attack other nations. Domestically and externally, these events were also used to weaken the rule of law.’ The idea of a single individual – ‘nutty loner’, ‘madcap scientist’, ‘clean skin’ – being blamed for committing a major crime against state and public is not new: as with Lee Harvey Oswald, a death before prosecution suits those who fear trial revelations. But this ‘lone wolf’ explanation of the anthrax attacks requires us to believe a number of highly unlikely things. One is that the second FBI ‘person of interest’, Dr Ivins, a senior bio-defence scientist at the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick in Maryland, had the motivation, time, expertise and resources to manufacture the bacteria, identify target recipients, pen the
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messages implicating the 9/11 hijackers and then post them from locations as far apart as New Jersey and Florida. His Fort Detrick colleagues and bio-science peers in the field strongly reject these claims on a variety of grounds.6 Senator Patrick Leahy has said that whoever sent him the anthrax letter – and he doubted it was Ivins – could not have acted alone. The angry Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee told FBI Director Robert Mueller: ‘If he is the one who sent the letter, I do not believe in any way, shape or manner that he is the only person involved in this attack on Congress and the American people. I do not believe that at all. I believe there are others involved, either as accessories before or accessories after the fact. I believe that there are others out there, I believe there are others who could be charged with murder. I just want you to know how I feel about it, as one of the people who was aimed at in the attack.’ 7 What the lone nut theory also requires us to believe is that Ivins was able to target Robert Stevens, the first victim of the anthrax attack to die. The US government, amid serious disagreements within the Department of Justice (DOJ), paid Stevens’s widow $2.5m to settle her negligence claim without coming to trial. In doing so, the DOJ itself produced evidence that fundamentally undermined the FBI’s case against Ivins. MacQueen tells us that newspaper picture editor Stevens was a very old friend of the Florida estate agent who found homes for some of the alleged 9/11 plane hijackers. This is one of a large series of coincidences he cites in support of his five-point thesis. A short review cannot begin to list them all, but here are a few. Florida, the location of the first anthrax victim and home to many of the alleged 9/11 hijackers, was also key to the ‘anthrax spread by crop-duster’ stories much in evidence at
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the time. It may be recalled that Bush had grounded all the crop-dusters in the US, linking the potential danger of their use to methods employed by Saddam Hussein. (Later, and ahead of the Iraq invasion, Saddam was to be accused of possessing bacteria in ‘mobile chemical labs’. None were ever found.) MacQueen tells how Mohamed Atta, the alleged 9/11 hijack leader, theatrically attempted to obtain a US Department of Agriculture loan to convert a passenger plane into a giant crop-duster. Florida civil servant Johnelle Bryant told ABC News that shortly before 9/11 Atta spelled out his name to her, told her he was a member of al-Qaeda and how that soon everyone would he hearing of a great man called Osama Bin Laden. He offered to buy from her an office aerial photograph of Washington DC and asked her about security at the World Trade Centre.8 After listing many other incidents in which the cocktail- loving Muslim extremist who lived with a stripper and snorted cocaine attracted attention to himself, MacQueen says: ‘Mohamed Atta was certainly no secretive al-Qaeda leader but a man laying down a trail we were supposed to follow....The man’s task appears to have been to make himself unforgettable.’ Other puzzling questions come to mind. Are we to think that the US government simulation of a domestic bioterror attack in June 2001 that blamed Saddam Hussein for sourcing the toxic bacteria was simply a coincidence? And that war game Dark Winter’s leading participants – ex-CIA chief James Woolsey, New York Times reporter Judith Miller and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s director of emergency management Jerome Hauer9 – just
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happened to become very prominent figures in supporting the Bush Administration’s take on 9/11 later that year? Was it also a coincidence that Miller’s book on germ warfare was published – and much publicised – at the height of the anthrax scare? Why, long before any evidence of an anthrax attack appeared, were Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, prescribed its antibiotic antidote Cipro? Which ‘high government official’ warned Washington Post columnist and Iraq War supporter Richard Cohen to take Cipro ‘soon after Sept 11’? He told Slate magazine in 2008 he immediately acted on the tip: ‘I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it.’ Cohen is one of a whole host of people with apparent foreknowledge of the attacks listed by MacQueen. He is one of many who also had a script to hand that took us from 9/11 via the anthrax attacks and alleged WMD to war on Iraq. What he and lots of other writers seem still not to have recognised is the essential thrust of MacQueen’s argument: that weapons of mass destruction developed at US taxpayers’ expense were actually deployed against them and their elected representatives. The author goes further to conclude: ‘Since the Hijackers [his usage for alleged hijackers] of 9/11 fame were connected to the anthrax attacks, and since the anthrax attacks manifestly had to be planned and carried out by deep insiders in the US, there is no avoiding the implication that the 9/11 attacks were also carried out by insiders. There is, as it happens, a large body of research that supports this thesis.’ From the attacks in 2001 until the FBI closed the ‘anthrax killer’ case in 2008, just two individuals were the focus of suspicion. But MacQueen follows the logic of Senator Leahy to suggest a team of people with access to the highly sophisticated Ames strain being developed by the CIA and US military, and the means to distribute it, had to be involved. He doesn’t name names but says:
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‘Certain groups and organisations, based on both ideology and personal connections, have emerged as what we might call “organisations of interest”. These include now defunct and overlapping associations of neoconservatives with ties to the executive branch such as “the Wolfowitz cabal” and the Project for the New American Century. Their persistent use of deception, over many years, to link Iraq to al-Qaeda and to construct scenarios and fictions to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq, have been well documented. The material presented in this book simply makes visible another possible aspect of their activities that is even darker.’ Who, beyond these groups whose leading lights figure prominently before, during and after the anthrax scare, benefited from it? ‘The attacks were certainly successful in causing an infusion of funds into bioweapons work in the US,’ writes MacQueen. ‘Already in 2008, Scientific American noted that the 2001 attacks “sparked a massive infusion of research funds to counter civilian bio-terrorism, $43bn spread over several federal departments and agencies.” By 2011, the 2002- 2011 expenditures were estimated at $70bn.’ We are left to ask how much of this funding ‘to counter civilian bio-terrorism’ is actually used to produce the weaponised bacteria – of which the Ames anthrax strain was one highly potent example – for offensive, rather than defensive, purposes. Other thoughts occur on reading this well-documented, accessible book. One is the telling role of the media in preparing the public to expect a second assault after 9/11 and then offering ready suspects and motives for the subsequent bio-weapon attacks. The Guardian/Observer titles figure importantly as MacQueen reviews the record of the English language press at the time. Another wider conclusion to which this book adds weight
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is the self-evidently paltry basis of ‘the war on terror’. As a second-rate sequel to the Cold War it would be risible were its consequences not so serious. Between 1945 and 1989 the US and the Soviet Union – despite the self-serving hype and deception on both sides – were real contenders for power and influence around the world, fighting proxy wars in which millions died. In comparison, we have the ‘War on Terror’ first defined by Benjamin Netanyahu at his Jonathan Institute gatherings in the final, failing years of Kremlin rule. (Lobster 47 et seq). In its pursuit we have gone to war on the basis of dodgy dossiers and we have watched the free fall collapse of three New York skyscrapers run by a close associate of the Israeli leader.10 We have been told of an alleged hijacker’s paper passport found in the burning debris and handed to the New York Police Department whose head on 9/11 was subsequently jailed for conspiracy, fraud and lying under oath.11 More recently we have seen film of President Obama and his top team apparently watching the capture of Bin Laden and then being told that his body had been dumped in the sea – all without the alleged terrorism mastermind being questioned on any aspect of his part in the ‘war on terror’. Fourteen years after the 9/11-anthrax events Guantanamo remains, drone assassinations continue, civil rights are curtailed and Muslims are demonised as we inhabit the monochrome world of The West versus the Terrorist Rest in a war without end declared in 2001. The deception detailed here by MacQueen contains tales and coincidences of such threadbare unlikelihood, one is left wondering how they weren’t drowned out by laughter and ridicule at the time. Yet they weren’t. In what MacQueen sees as the induced panic of 9/11, a cowed and childlike citizenry was not listening critically to the fairy tales being told and the skin-deep lies being spread. And in that atmosphere, the Bush administration moved us quickly towards a long planned war 10
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against Iraq. The rest, as they say, is history. Operation Gladio remained a well-kept secret for decades. In the UK, the 30-year rule – 70 years in the case of bio-weapons expert David Kelly – makes it difficult to make democracy accountable and much of our history intelligible. But things are changing, and not just because the internet allows us to see beyond the old blinds and blinkers imposed by opaque bureaucracies and a compliant media. A good part of MacQueen’s story was made possible because lots of Americans were not onside with a deception whose inherent flaws rendered it quickly vulnerable to interrogation and exposure. There were internal disagreements within the Department of Justice and even among Bush administration personnel. Scientists appalled at the treatment of two of their own have risked their careers by speaking out. The dogged activities of 2001 truthers have thrown light on places from which the 9/11 Commission blatantly averted its gaze – an inquiry so flawed that even its joint chairmen have since distanced themselves from its conclusions.12 This short but well-referenced book exposes an important part of the 9/11 deception that helped change many people’s view of the world. It encourages those who reject the basis of that aberration to better equip ourselves to resist its continuing, murderous legacy.
Tom Easton
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That option no longer exists: Britain 1974-76 John Medhurst Winchester: Zero Books, 2014, £11.99, p/b www.zero-books.net Rexamaining the mid-1970s from a Labour left perspective, as the author does, is an interesting idea. Once again we can read about: * the Communist Party’s Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions, which resulted in the CP having ‘an influence within the trade union movement vastly out of proportion to its numbers’ (pp. 13/4); * the Institute for Workers’ Control (chapter 3); * the decision of the Labour Party to abolish the proscription list of organisations to which members of the Labour Party could not belong, ‘letting in and empowering members who were driven by political principles rather than unquestioning party loyalty regardless of policy’ (pp. 31/2), notably members of the Militant Tendency; * and the rise to the leadership of this wider left of Tony Benn. The author’s analysis of the situation agrees with that of MI5 and its allies on the right at the time, with one essential difference: MI5 was aware that the ‘Moscow gold’ from the Soviet Union was mostly going to the Communist Party’s industrial department (which was running the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions). As a result anyone or any organisation which had contact with the CPGB – and that was a large slice of the British left at the time – were deemed by MI5 to be a legitimate target for investigation (because of the ‘trace’ to the Soviets); and MI5 saw (or pretended to see) the rise of this wider Labour left as essentially Soviet subversion: the Soviets control the CPGB; the CPGB control the unions; the unions control the Labour Party; therefore the Soviets control the Labour Party.1 This MI5 theory led the anti-communist right to counter-organise and the author gives us a pretty detailed account of this in 1974-6: the rise of the anti-subversion lobby (he mentions Brian Crozier’s ISC but not IRD); the so-called private armies, GB75 and Unison; the surveillance and bugging of many on the left; the smear campaigns
1 The author does not mention the Soviet money. MI5 had been tracking the Soviet funds in British politics since the 1920s. See Kevin Quinlan’s The Secret War Between the Wars: MI5 in the 1920s and 1930s, reviewed at
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(notably Clockwork Orange) centred round the Army Information Policy unit in Northern Ireland; and the talk about coups and ‘the Chile option’. And then there was Tony Benn ‘an eloquent and effective socialist in a vital ministerial position who had support across the extra-parliamentary left and trade union movement’ (p. 116) with his plans for the industrial regeneration of Britain via a National Enterprise Board, planning agreements and (maybe) state control of the leading British companies. Which would have been hard enough with a large parliamentary majority; but in an administration without an overall majority was an absurdity. It wasn’t going happen: not because the civil service obstructed Benn (which they did) but because there was no support for it within the Cabinet; nor, critically in the British system, from the prime minister (nor, had they been asked, from the electorate). Prime Minister Wilson diverted Benn’s energies into a referendum on membership of the EEC and, having seen that off, retired at 60 (as he had always told his friends he would), before the dementia which was in his family affected him. Through the core political story the author intercuts some of the wider cultural events on the left of the period: the rise of feminism, anti-fascism, squatting, and pop music (reggae and punk). I found this nostalgic but irrelevant. My disagreement with the author’s thesis begins with his version of the Industrial Relations Act of the Heath government which preceded Wilson. He presents it simply as an attack on the unions, which they resisted. But it was part of Heath’s wider ambitions to create something like the German model of industrial relations in this country, with the unions as one of the three legs of the stool with government and industry. This project failed (a) because Heath couldn’t explicitly announce this to his party, many of whom would have rejected it; and (b) there was no way British trade unions, which funded the Labour Party, could be persuaded to embark on this journey – even though most of the senior leadership of the unions would probably have welcomed it – with a Conservative government. (And it is absolutely bizarre that anyone in the Heath government associated with this could ever have thought otherwise.) The author writes: ‘For a brief period in the 1970s there was another option. If
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progressed with vigour and commitment it might have avoided the damage subsequently inflicted on the UK economy by the City and the financial sector, the crippling of domestic industry, ever escalating social inequalities and the creation of a parasitic super-rich elite within the virtual tax haven of central London.’ (p. 134) The author thinks that other option was the socialist project, with the CPGB, Millies and all, fronted by Benn. In my view that is a delusion. The important option was the corporatist project sought first by Labour – the In Place of Strife proposals proposed by Wilson and Barbara Castle2 – and then by Heath. The opposition to In Place of Strife within the Labour Party was led by James Callaghan – for purely careerist motives; he wanted to be prime minister and needed the backing of the unions. It was thus entirely apposite that it should be Callaghan who announced to the Labour Party conference of 1976, in a speech written by his son-in-law Peter Jay, that ‘Keynesian’ economics had to be abandoned as ‘that option no longer exists’ (the title of this book). Callaghan said: ‘We used to think you could spend your way out of recession and increase employment by boosting government spending. I tell you, in all candour, that that option no longer exists. And in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion.....by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step. Higher inflation followed by higher unemployment. We have just escaped from the highest rate of inflation this country has known; we have not yet escaped from the consequences: high unemployment. That is the history of the last 20 years.’ This was just nonsense. In 1956, the beginning of the 20 year period offered by Jay (through Callaghan), inflation was 5% on average over the year; for most of the Labour governments of 1966-70 it was less than that; and it was 5% in January 1970. By contrast, for almost all of the 1980-1997 period of Conservative governments which were ostensibly primarily focused on keeping inflation under control by
2 See
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‘controlling the money supply’, inflation was above 5%.3 On the other hand, to whom was the speech really being addressed? The Labour conference, or the IMF and the international money markets, with both of which Labour had just experienced months of difficulties?4 Monetarism, the version adopted by the Conservatives of ‘controlling the money supply’ (they couldn’t even define it), was simply a light disguise (enough to con the media) for creating a recession – which they did. Recessions reduce inflation. (Creating more poor people, you reduce demand in the economy, which inhibits price increases.) Like Mrs Thatcher, Peter Jay had been persuaded that there was no alternative. It is not difficult to understand why: in 1976 no-one had ever seen ‘Keynesian’ policies deal with inflation at 25%. But inflation was coming down when Callaghan made his speech and was falling when Mrs Thatcher won the election in 1979. There’s an essay to be written on what caused that fall: the remnants of the Labour government’s social programmes and incomes policy – the so- called social contract – or the beginnings of ‘monetarism’ introduced, as per the 1976 IMF agreement? This book has end notes but no index.
Robin Ramsay
3 The quotation and the paragraph following it are from an essay of mine at
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The American deep state Wall Street, big oil and the attack on U.S. democracy Peter Dale Scott Lanham (Boulder) and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015, $35.00 and £21.95, h/b www.rowman.com Peter Dale Scott’s essays in the 1970s on the Kennedy assassination showed me how to write: keep it clear, simple, and have every assertion documented if possible. Scott’s conception then was of parapolitics: ‘a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished...... generally, covert politics, the conduct of public affairs not by rational debate and responsible decision-making but by indirection, collusion, and deceit.’ But Scott became dissatisfied with this and moved away from ‘consciously diminished.... covert politics’ – which is perhaps treading too close to conspiracy theories, or theories about conspiracies – to deep politics: ‘all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged’. As a reader of Scott, the shift to deep politics from parapolitics was seamless: Scott’s writing on ‘deep politics’ is like his writing on parapolitics, only more detailed and more complex – deeper, in fact. And now we have the deep state (and deep events). The term ‘deep state’ comes from the politics of Turkey and means centrally the intelligence/security services and the military’: sectors of the state which in most countries are barely regulated by the formal democratic process which funds them.1 We might say deep events are those which become visible when the activities of the deep state surface; or are surfaced, as sometimes happens in the bureaucratic struggles within the deep state.2
1 In Turkey organised crime is also a part of the ‘deep state’. 2 Think of the activities of Hoover’s no. 2, Mark Felt – whether he was ‘deep throat’ or not – leaking to Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post as the FBI tried to undermine President Nixon whose aspirations to gain control of parts of the deep state threatened both the FBI and CIA. Continues at the foot of the next page.
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The basic problem facing American politics in Scott’s view is this: ‘We have seen the emergence to dominance of what used to the called “the military-industrial complex”...... This is a major change. When Eisenhower warned against the military-industrial complex in 1961, the values, institutions and resources that comprised it were still subordinate elements in American society. Today it not only dominates both parties, but it is also financing threats to both these parties from even further to the right. That change has been achieved partly by money, but partly also with the assistance of deep events: events, such as the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the 1980 October Surprise, Iran-Contra and 9/11, which repeatedly have involved lawbreaking and/or violence, have been mysterious to begin with, and whose mystery has been compounded by systematic falsification in media and internal government records.’ (pp. 102/3)3 Scott looks at the series of linked deep events in American history, beginning in Dallas, through into the post Cold War world which have shaped the visible, formal American politics and shows continuity of methods and some personnel. But this isn’t some ‘secret team’, to use Fletcher Prouty’s term. (And a sense that the concept of parapolitics encouraged ‘secret team’ notions is one of the reasons Scott abandoned it.) There are lots of ‘teams’, or factions – alliances within the deep state and its links to both the formal political system (elections, president, Congress) and capital, the arms and oil companies in particular. Between the deep state and formal politics (or surface politics?) are liaison figures. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, Note 2 continued: On Felt and ‘deep throat’ as the visible tip of the Watergate iceberg, see Jim Hougan at
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who were there from the mid 1970s through 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, are prime examples of this. They also figure in the second of Scott’s themes here, the deep state control mechanism which is free from formal politics, the continuity of government (COG) emergency network, which was activated on 9/11 and remains in place. Scott even finds elements of this network in the events at Dallas and Watergate. That much is relatively straightforward but conveys almost nothing of the book. Scott is dealing with big themes – how America has become the military-dominated purveyor of economic chaos and death to large parts of the globe, while clinging to its sense of itself as the ‘exceptional nation’ – and this is dense stuff; not conceptually difficult, just dense. The text is 182 pages but has 126 pages of notes and index. One of his earlier books on the Kennedy assassination had such detailed notes that someone produced an index to the notes. The index of the volume under review includes the end notes. Take chapter 2, ‘The Deep State, the Wall Street Overworld, and Big Oil’. This is 19 pages long and has the following subheadings within it: ‘The Deep State, the Shadow Government and the Wall Street Overworld’ ‘The Long History of the Wall Street Overworld’ ‘The Deep State and Funds for CIA Covert Operations’ ‘Lockheed Payoffs and CIA Clients: the Netherlands, Japan, Italy, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia’ ‘Iran in 1953: How an Oil Cartel Operation Became a Job for the CIA’ ‘The CIA, Booz Allen Hamilton, and the Wall Street Overworld’ ‘The CIA, Miles Copeland, and Adnan Kashoggi’ ‘Kashoggi, the CIA’s Asset Edward K. Moss, and Political Corruption’ ‘Moss, Kashoggi, the Safari Club, and the International Overworld’ ‘The Deep State, the Safari Club and BCCI’ ‘Big Oil, the Saudis, the Safari Club, and the Defeat of President Carter in 1980’
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‘The Deep State and the BCCI Cover-up’ ‘Conclusion: a Supranational Deep State’. Those subheadings convey the kind of thing Scott does here: he starts with the overworld, moves into the covert and then into the deep state and its role in the surface or overworld political event; in this case President Jimmy Carter’s defeat in 1980. Some of this might sound familiar; but Edward Moss? Carter and the Safari Club? And all of this is documented in the 131 notes which accompany those 19 pages. The Saudi link, which surfaces in the 1970s, is the key thread here. After the revelations of FBI and CIA criminality in the mid 1970s, Jimmy Carter appointed a new DCIA, James Schlesinger, who tried to get a grip on the CIA and fired a lot of people in the covert operations branch. The result was the creation of an inner faction in the CIA, within that covert operations wing. They formed ‘the Safari club’ and resumed their activities entirely off the books with their equivalents from the intelligence services of France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Iran. This was funded by the Saudis; and, Scott thinks, largely by the mechanism of skimming off the enormous American arms sales to the Saudi government. Scott suspects all the major deep events have been funded by this mechanism. The evidence on this is suggestive not conclusive. This group helped remove Jimmy Carter as president in 1980 by arranging that the Iranian state not release the hostages taken from the American embassy until after the presidential election of 1980, which Reagan won. The relationship between America and Saudi Arabia – the real ‘special relationship’ – was cemented with the 1973 Saudi-American deal that the Saudis would only accept dollars as payment for oil, thus creating an oil-backed dollar to replace the gold-backed dollar abandoned in 1971. With all oil trading done in dollars, a world demand for dollars is created and the US can run trade deficits without it much affecting the dollar’s international value. So the Saudis have been, on one hand, the ally of America as its biggest customer for weapons and backer of the dollar, and on the other its enemy as
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America sustains Israel. Add to which the Saudi state’s use of its oil wealth to export its version of Islam world-wide, the CIA’s use of Islamist fighters in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Libya and Syria, and you have the bizarre geopolitical mess detailed by Scott in which the American deep state has funded and run groups regarded by the overworld state – e.g. the State Department and the FBI – as terrorists.4 At the centre of this is Osama Bin Laden, sent into exile but with the covert support of the Saudi regime. Bin Laden’s operations climax in the 9/11 plot in which all these elements come together: Saudi funding for the Saudi hijackers; CIA protection of (at least) two of them and CIA withholding information from the FBI to let-it-happen-on-purpose (LIHOP). Scott suspects, as other have before, that the Bin Laden group conned the Americans into thinking they were going to do something relatively minor – plane hijackings, probably – which the American deep state wanted to use for its own ends: as a casus belli, perhaps. Scott sees 9/11 hijacker al- Mihdhar and Lee Harvey Oswald as serving similar functions – the designated patsy/culprit – in fake operations whose purpose we cannot yet identify. Scott thinks the 28 pages suppressed from the official 9/11 report, which we know are about the Saudi link, ’....indicate a US-sanctioned Saudi joint operation on 9/11 that is clearly different from the piggy-backed plot to bring down the WTC towers and cause thousands of deaths’ (p. 132) And maybe the Bin Laden group had worked out that the way to get protection (and visas) was to become CIA assets, in the same way that the Mob did by joining the anti-Castro plotting in the sixties. If so, having been made fools of, no wonder the CIA’s post 9/11 response has been so savage.
4 It is striking that the two states which tried to organise a system of petroleum payments not based on the dollar, Iraq and Libya, have been attacked by the US. See, for example, on Iraq
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Parallel to the growth of the deep state’s overseas activities, has been the creation, continuous expansion and refinement of the deep state’s defensive shield: the continuity of government (COG) procedures. Scott follows this through from the fifties to the post 9/11 environment, ‘the product of an almost continuous level of secret emergency planning, going back to J. Edgar Hoover’, in which the deep state got presidential approval for open-ended commitments, such as the 1988 Executive Order 12656 which covers ‘any occurrence, including national disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.’ Thus, comments Scott: ‘a totally legitimate program dating back to Eisenhower, of planning extraordinary emergency measures for an America devastated in a nuclear attack, was now converted to confer equivalent secret powers on the White House for anything it considered an emergency.’ (p. 33) In effect, ‘under the guise of Continuity of Government planning the American war machine has been preparing for forty years to neutralize street antiwar protest.’ (p. 180) The deep state watched the anti-war protests of the 1960s and resolved ‘never again’. 9/11 was the green light for the deep state to move into action: warrantless arrests, no fly lists, mass surveillance, data mining, and anti-terrorist ‘fusion centres’ of military and civil organisations. If deep politics is ‘all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged’, as the deep state grows so does the repressed, the unsayable. Almost nothing of substance is now said by American politicians afraid of the right’s attack media, the security lobby, the arms lobby, the Wall Street lobby and the Israeli lobby. Nobody’s political career has prospered by understanding (let alone opposing) the deep
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state which ended the careers of Nixon and Jimmy Carter. As a result, American politicians barely figure in this story. How is this political and intellectual paralysis to be overcome? I don’t know. Scott makes some cautiously positive noises at the end of this terrific book about the possibiities of mass action to affect the changes. I wish I shared his optimism. Empires come and go but none has been as powerful and as well prepared to resist change from within as this one.
Robin Ramsay
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The EU: A Corporatist Racket How the European Union was created by global corporatism for global corporatism David Barnby Available from Amazon.co.uk for £8.99
The author of this self-published book is a member of the Conservative Party in Witney in Oxfordshire (MP David Cameron) and, more importantly, a member of that party’s anti-EU wing. This is centrally about the background to, and the political and state deceptions involved in, getting the UK into the EU. There is an account here of the 1950s CIA-funded American Committee on a United Europe (ACUE) and its relationship with the European Movement. But it’s not a very good version; a better one could be put together from resources on-line. The author is apparently unaware that the left had already covered some of this over 30 years ago.1 There is a chapter on Bilderberg, which began as an issue for the right in the 1970s and was then briefly of interest to the American left.2 But this chapter on Bilderberg tells us nothing not available on the Net and in many other books. The real point of this book are the chapters on events prior to the 1975 referendum on EEC membership. This is the best account I have read of the campaign run by the pro-EEC lobby in this country. The state, including the Information Research Department (IRD), the quasi-independent anti- subversion, anti-communist propaganda organisation, co-
1 The ACUE/European Movement, for example, was first discussed in ‘How the European Movement was launched’ in Hirsch and Fletcher’s 1971 Who were they travelling with? (Nottingham: Spokesman), which is now on-line at
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opted large chunks of the media to run its line.3 How cosy it all was back then: a handful of the significant media figures, regular meetings to get ‘the line’ for the day and a vast, informal propaganda machine was created. This is recounted in some detail from the official files released a few years ago. The author rang me up and in the course of our conversation asked me what I knew about the 1975 referendum campaign. Not a lot, was my reply. Did I know that the votes had all been counted in one place? No I did not: and what possible reason would there be for not using the existing constituency-based electoral organisation? I can think of only one, the one the author suggests: to rig the vote, if necessary. He notes that Cord Meyer was London CIA station chief at this point. Did Meyer bring ballot-rigging expertise from the CIA? This is not that implausible; but there is no evidence that he did this – or that this expertise was needed: the massive pro-EEC campaign in the months preceding the referendum may have affected the change in public opinion it claimed. The author says that he was told the vote was rigged but does not name his source. The author includes long lists of businessmen, mostly American, who supported Bilderberg or attended its meetings and who supported the American Committee on a United Europe. These lists, I suppose, are here as evidence for the thesis in the title: the EU is a corporatist racket. It may be one now (depending on your definition of corporatism) but its origins are more diverse than that and they certainly include the Americans’ search for reliable anti-Soviet bodies during the Cold War and the desire on the part of survivors of the war to ensure that it never happened again.
Robin Ramsay
3 The best account previously was that of Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, ‘How MI6 pushed Britain to join Europe’, Sunday Telegraph, 27 April 1997 at
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If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything (Malcolm X)
Do Americans really want a genuine US policy that respects an independent Cuba?
Dr. T. P. Wilkinson
Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba During Slavery and Jim Crow Gerald Horne New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014
No later than the Wilsonian propaganda campaign to bring ordinary US citizens and the world to support US intervention in World War I, did the inhabitants — at least the ‘white’ ones — become convinced that not only was their nation the new Eden but that merely by virtue of being an American one was loved and/or envied throughout the world. It is crucial to mention this ideological transformation because until 1917, when the US entered the war on the side of the British elite, most inhabitants of the US could be seen as despised. Ex- slaves were despised because of their skin-colour and, despite the 13th amendment, their previous condition of servitude; and of the rest, all but the tiny inbred colonial elite were absorbed from countries whose regimes were glad to be rid of them. America as a holy land and Americans as sanctified people, blessed by democracy and a special way of life, were an invention of the budding advertising and public relations industries that even today control the way Americans and much of the world see themselves and the ‘land of opportunity’. Today it is literally inconceivable for the vast majority of US citizens to imagine that their country is not the supreme gift to civilisation and moreover that the rest of the world shares this delusion. Esteban Montejo, a Cuban of African origin and formerly enslaved, commented on the US invasion of Cuba in 1898:
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‘ “Any fool here knew that the Americans blew up the Maine themselves to get into the war,” he asserted. Their arrival made the Spanish presence seem benign by comparison: “Frankly,” he averred, “I prefer the Spaniards to the Americans, the Spanish in Spain, that is. Everyone should stay in their own country, though the fact is I don’t like the Americans even in their own country...... the whole pack of degenerates who ruined this country!” was his bitter evaluation.’ 1 Only by supposing for a moment that people outside the US, like Esteban Montejo over a century ago, do not share this image of the United States, can one begin to understand the Cuban Revolution. If one wants to grasp the roots of that revolution, it is necessary to reach back not to 1959 when the US-financed regime in Havana (then managed by Fulgencio Batista) collapsed and the 26 July Movement led by Fidel Castro took power — but closer to 1859 when Cuba was the last Caribbean stronghold of the slave trade.
bête noire Following his Negro Comrades of the Crown (2012) and the Counterrevolution of 1776 (2014), both also reviewed by this author,2 Gerald Horne has written a book about the bête noire of US foreign policy for more than 50 years. Professor Horne’s most important contribution to US historical literature has been to explicitly rewrite and thus relocate US history within the history of the African diaspora. In another earlier book, The End of Empires, Horne illustrates that one of the greatest fears of the US ruling class has always been ‘other Africans’. Beginning with the cordon sanitaire erected against Haiti — the precursor to the Cuba embargo — US domestic and foreign policy have been consistently, even fanatically, driven by the imperative to keep its African slave labour force isolated from
1 Horne (2014), p. 170 2 At
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the rest of the world.3 The US regime has pursued a wide range of tactics to prevent its Africans from gaining or maintaining access to the outside world — especially to all the struggles against slavery or for political and economic independence. Race to Revolution examines a central theatre in the white-settler regime’s race wars: Cuba. While many benign treatments of the Cuban Revolution consider it to be a mere reaction to US policy failures — implying that the US regime had/has the capacity to pursue other policies than those it chose — Professor Horne describes the importance of Africans and Afro-Cubans in creating the culture upon which the Cuban independence movement was established. Here it is important to distinguish two ideas of independence that developed in the Spanish colony. One version is comparable to the settler- colonialist ideology that created the United States. After the French were expelled from Hispaniola (Saint Dominique) and the Republic of Haiti was founded, a stream of French slaveholders fled across the strait to Cuba. The abolition of slavery in the British West Indies forced immigration of slaveholders either to the US or to Cuba, the last outpost of plantation slavery and the slave trade in the Caribbean basin. In the course of the Napoleonic Wars, Spain and Portugal became vassals to the British — who had driven Napoleon out of the peninsula. This of course increased the British pressure on Spain to abolish slavery too. While slavery and the slave trade were not suppressed in Cuba before the end of the 19th century, the Ministerio de Ultramar in Madrid knew that US and Spanish slaveholders in Cuba were promoting ‘independence’ from Spain but in favour of North American annexation or suzerainty. To combat this tendency among the plantation elite, concentrated in Western Cuba and Havana, the Spanish crown regularly threatened to abolish slavery — well aware that Cuba’s enormous African population would resist absorption by the mainland slavocracy — and pose no small threat to the island’s plantation class. The other version of Cuban independence was arguably
3 The End of Empires (2009)
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more complex. It was shaped not only by the Haitian Revolution but also by the Bolivar revolution in South America. Moreover Cuba’s independence was influenced by the anti- slavery struggle in the US itself. Prior to its absorption into the Union, Spanish Florida had been a base from which free Africans waged war against the US slave regimes in Georgia and the Carolinas. Florida was closely linked to Cuba while still a Spanish colony and remained so even when it was ceded to Britain. The long tradition of Africans serving under arms — something inconceivable in the US — helped to create not only a military capacity in the Afro-Cuban population but established an early basis by which former slaves enjoyed social mobility in Cuba unheard of in North America. In other words there was not only the capacity to fight for independence but a class of Afro-Cubans who sustained a nationalist vision of that independence. This vision has been captured in the work of José Marti and Nicholas Guillén — both writing long before January 1959.
Importing Jim Crow Until the US slavocracy was ended in 1865, Cuba continued as a staging ground for the North American slave trade, especially smuggling of slaves into Louisiana and Texas after importation had been formally prohibited. Slavery continued on the island after abolition in the US (as it did in Brazil). The ultimate defeat of Spain, when Admiral Dewey in Manila destroyed its Pacific fleet, permitted the US to dictate the terms of Cuban independence. That might have been the perfect moment for annexation had it not been for the importance of race in the US. There was no question of making Cuba a state with its coloured majority. Spaniards were traditionally seen by the US ‘whites’ as tainted by Africa and not really white. So the first thing for the North American regime to do was to import its race regime into the island. As Professor Horne writes: ‘It did not take long for Washington to seek to bring Cuba into line, eroding the differing course of race relations that had characterized the island — and which
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had incited US Negroes rapturously — by straining to impose a rigid Jim Crow...... As early as 1899 signs proclaiming “We Cater to White People Only” were posted at the insistence of US leaders, while the air was filled with alarm by candid remarks of what many considered to be a favourite mainland pastime: “Nigger Lynching.”’ 4 However, despite the attempts by US occupying forces to install Jim Crow, ‘the islanders seemed to attain more success, with more rapidity, in combating Jim Crow than their mainland counterparts.’ Whereas white terrorism of the post-war South had succeeded in destroying the infrastructure created during Reconstruction to end slavery and guarantee Blacks their rights as citizens, the occupying forces lacked the means to suppress the Afro-Cuban population — a lesson even the US Army and Marines had learned when fighting in Oriente.5 In order to diminish the threat Cuba posed to ‘national security’, it was necessary to import more white folks from the mainland. ‘The establishment of what amounted to Euro-American colonial enclaves in Cuba — with 13,000 US nationals having title to land in Cuba by 1905 at a value of USD 50 million — was an essential element of this renewed foundation.....The United States had one of the largest, if not the largest, populations in the world of those who could be viewed as “white” and with more of them moving to the island, this quickened a process already in motion.’ Professor Horne cites historian Alejandro de la Fuente who wrote that the proportion of those not defined as white in Cuba’s population declined throughout the second half of the nineteenth century from 55 or 60 percent to about 33 percent by 1899.6 Whitening Cuba in the late 19th century was complementary to establishing the super-exploitation of the island and Jim Crow as one of the enforcement tools. Nearly a
4 Horne (2014), pp. 173-74 5 Oriente is the easternmost, largely mountainous province in Cuba, including the city of Santiago and Guantanamo. 6 Horne (2014), p. 175
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century after Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed independence from the French, the idea of Haiti still haunted the white elite in the US. Elihu Root, in his capacity as Carnegie attorney and War Secretary, also practically the colonial secretary to Theodore Roosevelt, was told as far as Cuban independence was concerned ‘to go now would be to betray the cause of civilization and to turn this country within three months into a republic, not unlike those of Haiti or Santo Domingo’.7 Today critics of US Latin America policy reiterate that the Washington regime is always afraid of a ‘good example’ — of a country that manages to become independent and survive. However, this idea of the ‘good example’ is usually understood very narrowly, e.g. economic development, mature political institutions, social infrastructure. While these are certainly all qualities that the US regime has historically opposed — both at home and abroad — in the case of Cuba that is not enough. Cuba did not become a ‘problem’ for the mainland because of its economic aspirations alone. Rather Cuba became a problem because after the 1791 Haitian Revolution8 — effectively neutralised through Euro-American economic warfare — an independent Cuba would emerge as the relatively huge independent country in the hemisphere, ruled by Afro-Cubans, across the Florida strait, a mere 90 miles away from the highest lynching rate of any state in the Union — a peninsula terrorised by the DuPont dynasty and the Klan.9
Afro-Cubans and African-Americans Race to Revolution tells another important story beyond the imperial mechanisms in New York City and Washington. That is
7 Horne (2014), p. 174 8 Haiti won its independence from France in 1804. It has been the only successful slave rebellion to depose slaveholders and the colonial apparatus. The success of the Haitian revolution sent a shock wave through the Western hemisphere probably only barely matched by the October Revolution that led to creation of the Soviet Union. 9 See Gerald Colby, Beyond the Nylon Curtain (1974) for details of the DuPont family and the Klan in Florida. Re-released as e-book in the Forbidden Bookshelf series,
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the story of the close relationship between Afro-Cubans and African-Americans. It is the story of José Marti’s inspiration among other places at Howard University, the intensity of cultural and political exchange between Cubans and Black North Americans,10 and the inspiration transmitted through the mainland and Cuban elements of the African diaspora. It is also the story of the contradictions in Black America; the faction to emerge around Booker T. Washington and the other that would be identified with W.E.B. DuBois. This could probably best be seen with the emergence of Fulgencio Batista as the dominant figure in the Cuban state. Batista came to power in 1933 in a revolt against the reigning duopoly then under Gerardo Machado. This was the era of the Great Depression and Batista was not alone in using military-police power to introduce relatively progressive laws in the face of capitalist opposition. However what endeared Batista to many mainland Blacks was the fact that — at least in mainland terms — Batista was coloured.11 While the full force of Jim Crow persisted into the 1960s within the US, Batista’s government (1940–44) had adopted and enforced anti-discrimination laws unthinkable on the mainland. Communists were members of the legislature and held important government offices — also unthinkable in the US. When Batista appeared in the US he did not shy from contact with Black Americans either. In 1952, returning from a sojourn in the US, he stood for President but then seized power in a coup that pre-empted elections. New Dealism was dead in the US and hence opposed by the US throughout the Western Hemisphere. Batista’s return to power meant joining the US war against communism; and whatever politics Batista may have supported until 1944, US support for his regime meant following US policies for corporations on the island. Despite the racial regime applied on the mainland, however, Batista was seriously challenged to satisfy the Jim Crow wishes of the 10 E.g. Langston Hughes and Nicholas Guillén both fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. 11 Here it should not be forgotten that US race law treated anyone with a ‘drop of Negro blood’ as Negro whereas virtually the opposite prevailed in the Caribbean, and a ‘drop of white blood’ made one ‘white’.
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white enclaves. Furthermore the overall economic situation created by restored super-exploitation and corruption inevitably added economic misery to the intensified racism. Professor Horne’s narrative is particularly striking because he details the conflicts over Cuba and especially loyalty to Batista among Blacks on the mainland. It is hard not to see this as an allegory for the determination of many Blacks in the US to remain loyal to Barack Obama — simply because he is Black. There were conflicting editorials throughout the Black press with those calling Batista a dictator to be deposed and those insisting that one of the few Black heads of state should not be attacked at all. Claude Barnett (Associated Negro Press), ‘whose news service was a mainstay of mainland Negro opinion, continued to court Batista, consoling him in 1957 with the idea that press coverage of his misrule was “slanted and bordering on the unfair,” but reminding him that “there is one section of the population which always stands for you. These are the Negro Americans”— “our hearts are with you,” he exhorted.’ 12 Despite the support of the US, Batista was incapable of suppressing the 26 July Movement and the US regime abandoned Batista, who in turn was forced to abandon the island on 1 January 1959. Fidel Castro led his forces into Havana on 8 January. Little more than a year later, 19 October 1960, President Eisenhower ordered an embargo against Cuba and authorised the first covert operations against the new government in Havana. The embargo and the preparations that led to CIA’s aborted Bay of Pigs invasion in the first months of the Kennedy administration, have set the tone of US–Cuba relations since then. Officially the embargo was decreed because the new government of Fidel Castro nationalised assets claimed by US corporations.13 A special CIA focus —
12 Horne (2014), p. 267 13 Both the public ones (oil cartels, utilities, distillers) and the covert ones (e.g. organised crime syndicates who operated casinos, brothels and the contraband markets): the details of the Cuban nationalisation orders are a subject in itself. Suffice it to say that both the overt and covert property owners in Cuba had enormous influence on the course of Cuba policy and still do. Continues above note 14.
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directed largely together with help of both sides of the corporate apparatus in Miami — became covert operations against the Cuban state and economy. Since 1960 the embargo and other measures against the Republic of Cuba have increased in ferocity and mendacity. These policies have enjoyed a wide non-partisan consensus in the US, extending even to toleration by many on the so-called Left. Although the embargo has been condemned for decades in every international forum, the effective opposition to US Cuba policy has been virtually nil. The survival of the Cuban constitution, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, divided the ostensibly pro-Cuba lobby into those who apparently feel that Cuba’s government only survives because it is organised like a Caribbean ‘Albania’ and those who believe that if the embargo is ended, Cuba will finally see reason and join the world according to Washington.
A new policy? Although this is not the explicit subject of Professor Horne’s study, a careful reading of his work ought to lead to some very important criticisms of contemporary US policy and show inter alia how the failure to develop a dialectical understanding of race perpetuates misunderstanding about US policy and inadequate analysis of opposition to it. After years of unsuccessful campaigning for an end to the embargo of Cuba, the first Black US president — albeit only in the middle of his second term — announced on 17 December 2014 a ‘new course’ in Cuba relations. Mr Obama said: ‘The new course is based on the belief that the best way to help bring freedom and opportunity to the Cuban people and to promote our own national security interests, including greater regional stability, and economic opportunities for American business is through this policy.’ But what is this new policy? He said the objectives of negotiations started with the government in Havana are ‘reaccreditation of our diplomats — lifting travel restrictions, to
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trying to lift the caps on the number of our diplomatic personnel, to gain unimpeded shipments for our mission, free access to our mission by Cubans...’ 14 According to Mr Obama the US believes ‘promoting freedom of speech and entrepreneurship and an active civil society will only strengthen Cuban society and help reintegrate Cuba into the international community.’ In another statement on 20 December 2014, US regime spokesmen pointed out that Cuba has ‘an Internet penetration rate of 5%, among the lowest in the world’. Hence another objective is to persuade the Cuban government to ‘permit the sale of technology that will begin to unleash the transformative effects of the Internet on the island.’ Alone the announcement that travel restrictions would be eased for US Americans (Cuba has never forbidden US citizens with valid visa documents to enter the country) sent waves through liberal and leftish America.15 Yet in the ‘fine print’ the State Department also explained ‘there is no plan to change US policy’. Mr Obama no longer talks about retaliation for Cuban nationalisation of US-claimed assets half a century ago. His explanation for the embargo does not mention the tortuous Note 13 continued: I follow a line of argument that has been made elsewhere that so- called ‘Mafia’ or ‘organised crime’ activities are simply the mirror of ‘legal’ corporate operations. Hence one could say that capitalism, especially but not limited to the US corporate state, comprises ‘overt’ corporations and ‘covert’ corporations. Part of CIA is the management of the interfaces between these two parts of corporate America. The institutional definition of ‘crime’ notwithstanding, there is no fundamental ideological difference between the two types of business. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the support sought and readily given by the both corporate sectors in combatting Cuba’s revolution. One of the executive functions of the secret police and ‘invisible armies’ (CIA, DEA, FBI, et al.) is to manage relations between the state and these two competing and yet interlocking corporate blocks. 14 Barack Obama, address of 17 December 2014, quoted in US State Department briefing, 19 January 2015. 15 Philip Agee, author of CIA Diary: Inside the Company, harassed and deprived of his passport for revealing the extent and form of CIA operations throughout the hemisphere, spent the last years of his life organising travel for visitors to Cuba until he died in a Havana hospital in 2010.
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application of the 1917 Trading with Enemy Act, the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, the 1963 Cuba Assets Control Regulations, the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act, the 1996 Helms- Burton Act or the 2000 Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act. Nor does the US President mention the continuous covert war waged against the Republic of Cuba in violation of all generally accepted instruments of international law. The announced change of course is by the State Department’s own admission, not a change of policy. So what is the policy of the US ‘Batista’ in Washington? In his speeches he suggests to the willing listener that the US regime has finally reconciled itself to Cuban independence. He can do that for the same reason many Black leaders were willing to accept the original Cuban Batista — the very appearance of being non-white is deemed evidence of some mysterious Black essence, waiting to free us all. Mr Obama can also raise the naïve hopes of those who generally wish an end to the war against Cuba because they believe that this undeclared war is what has prevented Cuba from becoming just like the USA they love. However, the unstated policy of the US regime should not be ignored or overlooked. The Obama administration knows that the Internet is a critical weapon in the US political warfare arsenal just as the ubiquitous ‘civil society’ NGOs that have been deployed throughout Eastern Europe with deadly effect. Mr Obama also knows that the generation he is addressing knows nothing about the history of Cuba or Cuba-US relations. Worse than all that, however, is that the targets of this stated policy — friendly, youthful, Internet tourists — do not understand the race in the revolution, they are blinded by the colour of the man in the White House. They are distracted by press performance, whether in the White House or State Department briefing rooms. They do not see the failure of the first Black president to reverse Black mass incarceration in the US or the racist covert war waged against Venezuela’s non- white majority. They cannot imagine that Cubans fought, died and lived for more than a century to be Cuban and not US American.
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These are not easy issues to understand or digest but Obama’s December performances have been successful distractions. They rely for their impact on that feeling cultivated since 1917 that to be US American is something so special and unique that anyone wishing to be something else must be insane. This large segment of the US population and many loyal to the US regime see this as the stated policy to help others become the Americans they think they are — colour-blind and Internet-savvy, with Facebook and consumption for all. Race to Revolution is not an easy book to digest because it defies easy linear explanations for complex political and social phenomena. However, Professor Horne’s book is a fascinating depiction of the complexity of hemispheric politics and the crucially but generally and deliberately ignored relevance of the Black diaspora to human liberation in the Americas.
Dr T P Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket in Heinrich Heine’s birthplace, Düsseldorf. He is the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa (Maisonneuve Press, 2003).
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Confessions of a Labour loyalist
Sailing Close To The Wind: Reminiscences Dennis Skinner and Kevin Maguire London: Quercus, £20.00, h/b
In his extremely useful memoir of the Blair government, Adam Boulton notes that the unlikely figure of Dennis Skinner had been ‘recruited into Blair’s big tent’. He goes on to comment on how Skinner ‘had been surprisingly cuddly towards his middle-class leader throughout Blair’s years’.1 Mark Seddon, the former editor of Tribune, also comments in his memoir on Skinner’s ‘good relationship with Blair, who would actually have him round to Downing Street on a regular basis’.2 He was less impressed when he learned that Skinner ‘regularly reported back from the NEC to Alastair Campbell’,3 apparently acting as an informer for the Blairites! How on earth can we account for this fiercely working-class socialist, the veteran of numerous strikes and campaigns, giving his support to Blair and his New Labour government? Indeed, it is all the more surprising when one considers that part of the New Labour project was precisely to ensure that people like Skinner never again became Labour MPs! The likelihood is that when Skinner finally retires, his seat will go to some Labour placeman or woman, a special adviser, a banker or someone in public relations. What light do Skinner’s reminiscences throw on this conundrum? Skinner is a lifelong militant socialist who, in his own words, has over the years ‘backed every left-wing cause going’. Although he has one of the best attendance records of any MP, he emphasises the importance of ‘extra-parliamentary action, particularly through the trade unions’. He has ‘been on more picket lines, marches and demonstrations, and spoken at
1 Adam Boulton, Tony’s Ten Years: Memories of the Blair Administration, (London, 2009) p. 22 2 Mark Seddon, Standing For Something: Life in the Awkward Squad, (London 2011) p. 155 3 Seddon (see note 2) p. 243
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more rallies and meetings than I can count’. He lays into billionaire Mike Ashley. His firm, Sports Direct, is notorious for its use of zero hours contracts and shows us all what a fully- realised neo-liberal Britain would look like with employees from the university to the warehouse reduced to a new servile status. ‘Greedy bosses such as Ashley’, Skinner writes, ‘are why I shall be a socialist as long as I breathe’. What is needed to deal with the likes of Ashley are ‘new employment and trade union rights’. But he doesn’t explain why the Blair and Brown Labour governments did not introduce such legislation between 1997 and 2010. The book’s best chapter is on the 1984-85 miners’ strike, which he describes as ‘the most honourable strike I have ever taken part in’. Men went on strike to save other men’s jobs, enduring immense hardship, the daily abuse of the press and a degree of police repression not seen since the 1930s. As he points out, the union argued that Thatcher ‘had 70 pits on a secret hit list’ and planned the effective destruction of the coal industry, something that was vehemently and categorically denied at the time. Thirty years later, ‘we got to read the proof in black and white. The official documents vindicate the miners, their families and their supporters’. The Tories lied. If the truth had been known, the miners certainly would have won. Even so, as Skinner argues, they still came close to victory. He is scathing about the conduct of the police and the courts: ‘Striking miners were stripped of civil rights, victims of summary justice’. Men were jailed ‘on the uncorroborated testimony of police officers who made it up as they went along’. He spoke at some 200 rallies in the course of the strike and regularly took his place on the picket line where the ‘hostility of the police was frightening.....They were emboldened by immunity’. For the duration of the strike, he gave his MP’s pay to the union. In the end, though, the odds were too great and the miners were starved back to work. The defeat was heartbreaking and Skinner vows that ‘I’ll never forget those who lied and betrayed the miners’. This is not altogether the case, though. While hatred
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and loathing of Thatcher and the Tories is etched into every page, he is much more forgiving when it comes to the leadership of the Labour Party. As he acknowledges, during the strike Kinnock was ‘working against rather than with us’; but this is described merely as ‘an enduring pity’. And this really captures the weakness of Skinner’s politics. He is above all else a Labour loyalist; so that when the leader of the Labour Party refuses to support the miners it is merely a ‘pity’. And what of Tony Blair? Skinner supported his leadership of the party and thought that the Blair governments had many worthwhile achievements to their credit. He must have missed the discussion of Thatcher and the trade unions in Blair’s memoirs, especially the passage where he wrote about how she was absolutely right ‘about the excesses of trade union power’ 4 and made clear that he supported her attacks on the unions. Skinner was on the picket line during the Wapping lockout where once again the police ‘were a law to themselves’. Police brutality was ‘ferocious’, but as he puts it, ‘Murdoch backed Thatcher and Thatcher backed Murdoch’. Absolutely true, but he seems to have completely missed Blair’s relationship with Murdoch, a relationship that was, if anything, closer than Thatcher’s. He was to be godfather to one of Murdoch’s children after all. Indeed, in his memoirs, Blair acknowledges a ‘grudging respect and even liking’ for Murdoch, who did, after all, have ‘balls’. 5 Not only that, but the refusal of the Blair government to introduce the ‘new employment and trade union rights’ that Skinner regards as necessary was, at least in part, so as to avoid alienating Murdoch. Only in part, however, because Blair was strongly anti-union in his own right without any prompting from Murdoch. Blair’s close relationship with Murdoch, the most pernicious force in British politics in the last fifty years, goes unremarked. This brings us to the nub of the problem: as far as Skinner is concerned the Labour Party is ‘on the side of working people’, even when it clearly isn’t. No matter what 4 Tony Blair, A Journey, (London, 2010) p. 42 5 Blair (see note 4) p. 98
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Labour governments do, Skinner supports them, apologises and covers up for them; and all because they are somehow mystically ‘on the side of working people’ – even when they proclaim themselves the ‘party of business’ and wholeheartedly embrace neo-liberalism. Is this unfair? Skinner at one point describes how he supported a picket of Atos which, as he puts it, was ‘given a contract to persecute Britain’s disabled’. This is absolutely admirable and one can only wish more Labour MPs did similar. What he forgets to mention is that Atos were awarded the contract by the Labour government, not the Coalition. He praises the Blair and Brown governments for ‘saving’ the NHS, conveniently forgetting that they began the process of privatising health just as they began the privatisation of schools. He voted against these things, of course, but still supported a Labour leadership that was busy entrenching Thatcherism in place when it had a large enough majority to root it out. When the Tories are in power, Skinner embraces ‘extra- parliamentary action’, but when Labour are in power his opposition seems to be confined to the Commons. While he boasts of how many demonstrations he has been on, he does not even mention the largest demonstration in British history, the Stop the War march of 15 February 2003, presumably because it was against a Labour government. He ferociously condemns Thatcher for her relationship with Ronald Reagan, but is much more relaxed about Blair’s relationship with George W. Bush, a relationship that was sealed in a great deal of blood. The disastrous Iraq war that dominated the Blair years shamefully gets less than a page of text and the lies that were told to inveigle us into the conflict are dealt with extremely shabbily: ‘a convincing case was never made for military action’. And that is it! This is not good enough and only serves to highlight the disabling effects of Skinner’s Labour loyalism. And, of course, in the 2010 Labour leadership elections, he voted for the Blairite and US State Department candidate, David Miliband. Loyalty can only justify so much.
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John Newsinger
John Newsinger is a semi-retired academic. A new edition of his British Counterinsurgency is due out later this year.
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