Winter 2015
Lobster ● A fly’s eye view of the American war against Vietnam: 40 years later: who won which war? by Dr T. P. Wilkinson ● Holding Pattern by Garrick Alder 70 ● Last post for Oswald by Garrick Alder ● Paedo Files: a look at the UK Establishment child abuse network by Tim Wilkinson ● The View from the Bridge by Robin Ramsay
● Is this what failure looks like? Brian Sedgemore 1937–2015 by Simon Matthews ● Tittle-Tattle by Tom Easton ● The Gloucester Horror by Garrick Alder ● Tokyo legend? Lee Harvey Oswald and Japan by Kevin Coogan ● Inside Lee Harvey Oswald’s address book by Anthony Frewin
Book Reviews
● Blair Inc., by Francis Beckett, David Hencke and Nick Kochan, Reviewed by Tom Easton ● Thieves of State, by Sarah Chayes, Reviewed by John Newsinger ● The Henry Jackson Society and the degeneration of British Neoconservatism, by Tom Griffin, Hilary Aked, David Miller and Sarah Marusek, Reviewed by Tom Easton ● Chameleo: A strange but true story of invisible spies, heroin addiction and Homeland Security, by Robert Guffey, Reviewed by Robin Ramsay ● Blacklisted: The Secret War between Big Business and Union Activists, by Dave Smith and Phil Chamberlain, Reviewed by Robin Ramsay ● Nixon’s Nuclear Specter, by William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball, Reviewed by Alex Cox ● Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice, by John A Nagl, Reviewed by John Newsinger ● The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq, by Emma Sky, Reviewed by John Newsinger ● Secret Science: A Century of Poison Warfare and Human Experiments, by Ulf Schmidt, Reviewed by Anthony Frewin ● The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination, by Lamar Waldron, Reviewed by Anthony Frewin ● Without Smoking Gun: Was the Death of Lt. Cmdr. William Pitzer Part of the JFK Assassination Cover-Up Conspiracy?, by Kent Heiner, Reviewed by Garrick Alder ● Thatcher’s Secret War: Subversion, Coercion, Secrecy and Government, 1974-90, by Clive Bloom, Reviewed by Robin Ramsay ● The Oswald Code, by Alan Jules Weberman, Reviewed by Anthony Frewin www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
A fly’s eye view of the American war against Vietnam 40 years later: who won which war?
Dr T. P. Wilkinson
Landing on the table: 1976 After 40 years there remains no easy answer to this question; or better said, there are at least as many answers as there were wars. In 2005 at a US State Department conference held in combination with the publication of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volumes covering the US war, Barry Zorthian said in an exchange with Marvin Kalb, ‘I say to you there is no single Vietnam War.’1 He did not count them or name the others. Nonetheless it may be useful to reformulate the question: who won which war in Vietnam? When I was about 16 years old I wrote a term paper for my English class and asked the question ‘Why did the US lose the war in Vietnam?’ That was in 1976. I had a very simple conclusion after reading the books and whatever elements of the Congressional Record I could find in the county library: the US had no war aims that it was capable of attaining with the means at its disposal. However, growing up as a virtual ‘Navy brat’ I still thought until 1975 that I would graduate and land in a jungle
1 The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), is the official documentary record of US foreign policy published by the US Department of State (Office of the Historian). See
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full of booby traps and snipers like those depicted in John Wayne’s fake film, The Green Berets.2 In other words, as a pubescent young man I unknowingly shared the view of many hard-core policy makers and combatants that this war would not end anywhere in the near future. Yet the scenes of retreat I, too, saw on television in April 1975 did not mean much more to me than that I would not end up dead on some jungle patrol. I confess I never believed that communism was on our doorstep. I had begun to read some military history and nothing could convince me that Russians could march across the Bering Strait or land on the beach of the coastal island where I lived and send us all to gulags. I had read Solzhenitsyn and that all struck me as terribly Russian and very, very far away.3 What we arrogantly call civilisation in the West never seemed to me in imminent danger — except perhaps from people like my school principal and the corrupt teachers that worked for him. Maybe something had gone wrong with my indoctrination, I mean education, since despite years in one of the most reactionary parts of the US I did not acquire the endemic paranoid- schizophrenia that passes for political culture in North America between the St. Lawrence and the Rio Bravo. I had an uncle who was unwittingly abused both physically and mentally after at least three tours in Thailand, before he retired from the Air Force. The rest of the family seemed to have been left largely unscathed, either too old or too young (like me) to have been sucked into the venal vortex of viciousness.4 That — at least in 1976 — was ‘my Vietnam war’.
2 The Green Berets (1968) was a film directed by and starring John Wayne, seen by him as advocacy for the US war effort in Vietnam. Nominally based on a book of the same title by Robin Moore about his experience with the US Special Forces at Fort Bragg and in Vietnam with the 5th Special Forces Group, the film was utterly panned, even in the New York Times (Renata Adler, 20 June 1968). 3 The Gulag Archipelago was published in English in 1974. 4 Pardon my retort to US Vice President Spiro Agnew’s infamous alliteration, calling liberals ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’ in an address delivered to the California state Republican convention held in San Diego in 1970.
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However I do not think that does justice to Mr Zorthian’s remark. If there was more than one Vietnam War, what did he mean? Historical scholarship distinguishes formally between the first and second war in Indochina. The first war was waged against the French and the second against the United States. Despite the chronological convenience that implies, I think it is far more accurate to speak about at least four wars in Vietnam. I will try to describe them briefly and then elaborate possible answers to the questions this framework implies.
War nos. 1-4 The most obvious one is the invasion and occupation of Vietnam by the US regime in violation of its sovereignty and the dignity of its people. This invasion began well before US Marines landed near Da Nang on 8 March 1965. It began with the decision of the country’s white settler elite to use covert and clandestine means to prevent the implementation of the Geneva Accords by which the French had to concede control of Vietnam to the people who had lived there for thousands of years and who had been exploited for the previous century by French and Japanese conquerors.5 Then there was a second Vietnam War. That was the war most people in the US remember, whether from numerous tours as soldiers or as television viewers. This was the daily violence on an unimaginable scale guided by numbing bureaucratic processes that seemed to reduce the mass murder to soporific tedium. It was the war that sent mainly African-Americans and poor whites to kill ‘gooks’ ostensibly to
5 The Geneva Agreements of 1954 ended the First Indochina War. Central provisions were a ceasefire and withdrawal of French troops. French Indochina was split into Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Vietnam was temporarily divided along the 17th parallel until elections could be held. The French ‘shell company’, the Republic of Vietnam, was managed by first by Bao Dai and then Ngo Dinh Diem from Saigon when the US took over. Ho Chi Minh led the Democratic Republic of Vietnam from Hanoi. The US did not sign the agreement and did not consider itself bound by its terms.
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protect rights they scarcely enjoyed at home.6 It was the war that turned a brief period of post-WWII prosperity into an unending autorotation7 from which most of the working population of the US never recovered. The third Vietnam War is the covert war waged against the peoples of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — with ‘collateral damage’ in the US itself. Much more needs to be said about this war since it remains largely hidden in the swamp of deniability. Finally there was the fourth Vietnam War: the unrelenting hostility combined with all the available systemic weapons deployed since 1975 in order to both punish and further exploit the Vietnamese people while expanding the covert terror system developed in the third Vietnam War. This was the continuation of the ‘Big Picture’, the crusade that began as early as 1776 when the ‘white man’s empire’ declared its unilateral independence from Great Britain.8 Having named the wars concerned it might be possible to ask why they were waged, who won – if anyone – and what lessons were learned or not. Without counting how often all sorts of clever folks have repeated the adage about
6 On 28 April 1967, heavyweight boxing champion Mohammed Ali (aka Cassius Clay) refused to accept his draft into the US Army to be sent to Vietnam. He explained: ‘Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?...’ 7 An autorotation is a standard emergency procedure for landing or ‘restarting’ a helicopter in the event of engine failure. The pitch of the blades is adjusted so that the rotor will turn more rapidly in descent, either slowing the descent to a speed which softens the crash or firing the motor again so that the pilot can recover flight control. 8 The Big Picture was a series of US Army propaganda films broadcast by ABC-TV from 1951-1964. The unilateral declaration of independence in 1776 arguably aimed to preserve chattel slavery and free the British colonies in North America to expand beyond the boundaries set by the 1763 Treaty of Paris. See Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (2014). The term ‘white settler-colonial regime’ was popularised in Left criticism of white supremacist states in Southern Africa (especially Rhodesia, Mozambique, South Africa). However the term can be and has been applied to describe the US regime, e.g. in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014).
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‘learning from history’, Tolstoy wrote more than a century ago in War and Peace (1869) that nobody has ever been persuaded by mere words. As long as the ‘lessons’ people talk about do not go beyond talk, nothing at all will be learned. But even this assertion must be qualified because lessons have been learned from the war against Vietnam. Unfortunately these lessons are not for everybody and they are rarely discussed in open. This suggests in itself that despite all the talk, the very people who were supposed to have opposed the war against Vietnam have learned the least from history.
A war of unlimited opportunity (part one) The US invaded Vietnam publicly in the ‘wake’ of the so-called Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964.9 Since then this action by the US regime is customarily dignified by the term ‘intervention’. Although the pretext for the congressional resolution was at least suspicious then and long since discredited as fraudulent, the perception of the war as an ‘intervention’ is still widely shared.10 ‘Intervention’ is itself a term of deception. It implies that the US was an intervener, that it joined a pre-existing dispute lending an air of impartiality or indifference to the substance; or, even worse, that it had no prior role in the dispute or relationship to the parties. The failure (refusal) to seek an explicit constitutionally defined framework, e.g. a declaration of war or other legal status, reinforces the belief that the US invasion was spontaneous, a reaction rather than a planned measure. The absence of any unequivocal legal instrument directing the US president to act also guaranteed what became a virtually unrestricted field of discretion for the executive in the conduct of operations (overt and covert) in
9 Southeast Asia Resolution, 7 August 1964. Adopted unanimously in the House of Representatives, only two US Senators voted against it, Wayne Morse (Oregon) and Ernst Groening (Alaska), both Democrats. 10 The term ‘intervention’ is used throughout the historical literature to refer to US military operations in the absence of a formal declaration of war under the US Constitution, which reserves to the Congress the power to declare war (Article I, section 8, clause 11). The War Powers Resolution of 1973 was adopted over presidential veto to reaffirm explicitly the necessity of congressional authorisation for deployment of US military in armed conflict outside the United States.
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Indochina. This omission imposed a burden upon all opponents of the war to seek specific remedies, e.g. singular prohibitions, denial of funds or rejection of appointments; in other words it pre-shaped the constitutional resistance to the war from the beginning. It also shaped the language and scope of action for the political opposition in the country as a whole. Already the war against Korea and the great purge, commonly associated with Senator McCarthy, had established the new terms of reference for US Asia-Pacific policy.11 By conflating the theatre conflict the US was conducting against the Soviet Union in Europe with all other foreign expeditionary aims, the well-cultivated antagonism toward the Soviet Union was transferred to US foreign policy as a whole. Prior to 1945, the US regime had relied upon the navy and marines to execute foreign policy. Thus most violence was wreaked by volunteer and elite forces with which the general public had minimal contact. Very little attention was paid to Latin America and the Philippines. Only Mexico served as a venue for publicity and promotion of military careers. When the US invaded Korea in 1945 little attention was devoted to the activities of either the US Military Government in Korea (USMGK) or the driving force in Asia — Douglas MacArthur’s viceroyalty in Tokyo with its plans for expansion into China.12
11 Commonly referred to as the ‘McCarthy era’ or the Second Red Scare, the purge began well before Senator McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) attained prominence. The expiration of wage and price controls imposed during WWII led to labour demands for wage increases, which met with violent resistance by employers and hence increased industrial action by unions. Employer organisations combined to advocate strong anti-union legislation, e.g. the 1947 Labor Management Relations (Taft-Hartley) Act that effectively repealed key New Deal legislation like the 1935 National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act. The first ‘red scare’ was an equally repressive period between 1917 and 1920, immediately following the October Revolution in Russia (Soviet Union). 12 Arthur MacArthur, Jr. was the Military Governor of the Philippines (1900-1901). His son Douglas MacArthur was appointed Military Advisor to the Commonwealth Government of the Philippines in 1935, a position he held until the Japanese occupation of the US colony.
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It took the surprise battle between the army of the PDRK13 and the surrogate army of US vassal Syngman Rhee to force the regime into its first major propaganda campaign since Pearl Harbor in 1941. Truman’s officials claimed that communists had invaded the South — implying that they were anything but Koreans — and that the US was obliged to aid its man in Seoul by mobilising US forces to defend South Korea from the communists. The communists had already seized China and forced the Chinese into exile on the island of Formosa. There was imminent danger of all Asia being conquered by foreigners (communists) and the fact that the South had to combat a fully-armed force of regular soldiers meant that this was a threat to world peace, triggering United Nations action. The Koreans living in the North, separated by US fiat from the rest of their country, including families, were decreed en masse to be communist non-persons and white Americans had been urged to fanatical hatred of communists, especially as non-Americans, the extermination of which became a self-evident and holy cause.
Fantasy threat The Tonkin Gulf Resolution pre-empted any need to appeal to international bodies, gave the executive carte blanche to wage war (albeit without calling it that) and served as proof that Americans must support their leaders in the elimination of the communist threat. That threat was a fantasy, a propaganda contrivance, but it remained an effective device for controlling the scope of dissent in the US and its vassal states. It was so effective that most of the debate, in the US at least, focussed not on the US invasion, slaughter and destruction of Vietnam (or Korea before that) but whether the enemy or the opposition was really communist, or whether there was an alternative to annihilating communists, or whether communists could be converted from the errors of their ways. Part of this continuing idiocy, even found among bona fide opponents of the war, is that not even actual regime policy is consistently
13 People’s Democratic Republic of Korea (PDRK), created in the north after the US forced the division of the peninsula.
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anti-communist.14 The propaganda is so effective in stipulating the terms of reference for US foreign policy that ‘communism’ is reified as a true movement challenging Americans when it is nothing of the sort. A basic Cold War tenet — again very widely accepted in the US — was that the emergence of independent countries from the remains of European empires had to be protected from an expanding Soviet Union.15 To render this model plausibility, the emerging states were compared with Eastern Europe, where supposedly the Soviet Union had unilaterally conquered Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Ukraine and the Baltic States. This historical distortion could be sold in part because the US regime had a substantial contingent of refugees from these countries, including Nazi collaborators, who could promote this image from posts in academia and the media.16 No amount of appeals, argument or facts, even from people like Kwame Nkrumah or Ho Chi Minh, who had lived in the US and admired it, could overcome the disinformation used by the US government and US corporations to depict any
14 Philip Agee pointed out that in Latin America the CIA station were passing money to everyone, including the Left. The US/UK supported Pol Pot in Cambodia (against Vietnam). In another words there have always been policy decisions or actions taken which at least appear inconsistent with fundamentalist anti-communism. Hence a public policy of ‘opposing communism’ cannot be taken at face value, nor can this policy in practice be taken as a measure of what strategic objectives were being pursued by the US regime. 15 In 1949 the People’s Army under Mao Zedong defeated the Kuomintang under Chiang-Kai-Shek and it had to evacuate the mainland and move to the island of Formosa where it continued under US protection. The mainland became the People’s Republic of China under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party. The defeat of the right wing of the old Chinese Nationalist Party, founded by Sun Yat- Sen, in the civil war following the defeat of Japan, triggered a massive conflict in the US as to ‘who lost China to the Reds’, a conflict that fuelled the great purge already under way. Both Mao and Chiang had been members of the Kuomintang until the Japanese occupation when the party split. 16 The history of overt and covert recruitment of Nazi and fascist recruits for service to the US starting in 1945 is too extensive to elaborate here. See e.g. Christopher Simpson, Blowback (1988) reissued in Forbidden Bookshelf e-book series.
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nationalist leader not utterly subservient to Washington or New York as a stooge of Moscow and the international communist conspiracy.17 The usual responses of domestic opposition to this form of international redbaiting were either to insist that the country’s leader was not a communist or to advocate more support to insulate the country from Marxist influence. Another option deemed acceptable by liberal opponents of a leader or party on the US regime’s black list is to encourage also official support of alternatives that could dilute the supposed concentration of power and engender a competitive system like that in the US (despite the fact that the US system itself is anything but competitive). Despite the declassification of numerous foreign policy documents (e.g. NSC 68) produced before the US war against Korea, the public debate, whether among academics or lay people, still focuses on such issues as (a) was there a communist threat in fact? (b) was there a risk to other countries and to the region as a whole that had to be prevented or minimised? and (c) did US action actually serve to check (contain), if not rollback (imputed) Soviet and/or Chinese expansionism? Subsidiary justification for ‘intervention’ was found in the need to deter future threats and to demonstrate the will and ability to fulfil obligations (to whom?) as ‘champion or guarantor of the free world’. Walt Rostow’s ‘stages of development’ theory provided an additional argument for US intervention in order to protect new nations in their initial stages so that they would mature into the right kind of political-economic entities.18 To do this the US regime would guarantee the country at whose invitation it came freedom from foreign interference (the US 17 Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), first president of Ghana, the first African colony (formerly Gold Coast) to achieve independence from Great Britain (1960), had earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the United States. Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969) travelled in the US between 1911 and 1917. Both Nkrumah and Ho wrote letters in which they expected that the US would support their independence movements, especially against European colonial powers. Both were seriously disappointed. The US succeeded in having Nkrumah deposed in 1966. Ho died before the Vietnamese people forced the US forces to retreat from their country. 18 W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (1962)
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itself was never foreign) while it developed the capacities to reach its national goals. The fiction of ‘invitation’ could provide the trigger for either unilateral intervention or application of one of the US post-war vassal systems (e.g. NATO, SEATO etc.)19
The language used Any explanation as to how the US regime could wage this war for some thirty years with virtually no domestic opposition must give due weight to the language used to control both private and public responses to the regime’s actions, both in Vietnam and at home. It is not accidental or trivial that the events in Indochina were almost never called a war. It was always an ‘intervention’, a ‘conflict’, or a ‘quagmire’ from which finally the US had to ‘extricate itself’, to ‘withdraw’, to ‘reduce its exposure’, to ‘get out’. Even as the last US Americans20 and their Vietnamese retainers were being ferried out of Saigon forty years ago, there was no talk of surrender. Richard Nixon always spoke of ‘peace with honour’: this is the perfume of a bully applied to the skin of a coward. As far as the White House, the Congress, the military and other government agencies were concerned, the US was never a party to the war, merely an intervener. Hence it had no obligations or responsibilities to either of the principals. The US essentially used a shell company to conduct the war and through fraudulent bankruptcy to escape the duties incumbent upon a vanquished aggressor. Thirty years later this was still the dominant perspective and hence the implicit policy of the
19 US post-war military operations abroad were supposed to be justified either by ‘invitation’ of individual governments or through ‘collective security’ arrangements. The first of these was NATO formed to galvanise Western Europe as an anti-Soviet military alliance. SEATO, the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation, was founded in 1954 to include Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, France and the United Kingdom as a US-led anti-communist block. India was non-aligned. SEATO was dissolved in 1977. The Organisation of American States (OAS) had been founded by the US in 1948 to facilitate a similar policy in Latin America. 20 As opposed to the rest of the Americans – South, Central, Latin etc.
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US regime (e.g. promised reparations never paid) toward the people and government of Vietnam. For US Americans, the war against Vietnam is still seen primarily as a misguided intrusion in a war the Vietnamese should have been able to fight among themselves. When critics of US policy get serious they say the same things about Vietnam and all subsequent US wars — when the US military does not prevail. Namely US ‘hubris’ — meanwhile also a cliché — led the US government to believe it knew best and was capable of imposing a solution to other people’s problems.
The basic pattern of colonial warfare All these arguments however, are beside the point. They only serve to obfuscate, conceal or simply deny the essential facts of the war against Vietnam. First it was an invasion and war against the Vietnamese people as a whole, extending to all of Indochina. Second, it was a unilateral action by the US regime, neither provoked nor unplanned. Thirdly, it was neither a unique nor necessary action. In fact the US war against Vietnam was consistent with the basic pattern of colonial warfare that shaped the white-settler republic when it was founded. As in all US wars against non-whites, the strategy and tactics derive from the fundamental principles of white America: Negro slavery and annihilation of indigenous peoples.21 The arrival of advisors in Vietnam was not an isolated security action. The US regime was simultaneously active throughout Southeast Asia, in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, together with its only real ally in the region, the Chinese gangster fascists of the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek who had been driven to Formosa in 1949. The domino theory, popularised by President Eisenhower, was — as is so often the case with US policy 21 For simplification the term ‘white’ is used in its ideological sense following the argument extensively articulated in Theodore White’s The Invention of the White Race (Vol. 1 1994, Vol. 2 1997). White in this sense refers to both implicit and explicit white supremacy by means of enforced race-based practices as well as direct and indirect benefits accrued usually at the expense of non-whites. It does not mean imputing racism per se to every particular member of the group so identified.
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pronouncements — a deceptive reversal of perspective. US Asia–Pacific policy after the defeat of Japan (from which the Soviet Union was deliberately excluded) was to start from Japan and capture all the countries needed to feed it, while preparing to open the door to China as wide as possible for US corporations. The reversal in Korea was seen as the harbinger of future failures once China had been lost to Mao. At the same time as the US was murdering some three million Koreans and levelling every town and city north of the 38th parallel, MacArthur’s friends on Formosa were hoping they could sufficiently ingratiate Washington to have a sign-off on — if need be even nuclear — restoration to the mainland. This ‘unknown war’ was the template for US policy in Vietnam but since hardly any American has a clue about the US war in Korea, they believe Vietnam was a unique and isolated case — an anomaly and misadventure for US Americans.22 Korea was divided by the US.23 The popular government already in place when US forces invaded was deposed and a fascist, educated by US Christian missionaries, named Sygman Rhee, was installed. Rhee proceeded with US help to wage a major counter-insurgency to destroy peasant resistance to further expropriation of their rice crops to feed the Japanese. When the Korean army in the North under Kim Il Sung marched into Seoul they were greeted as liberators who chased the hated Rhee into the protection of the US military. Truman used subterfuge (as Johnson would later) to get a UN blanket and also avoid a declaration of war before unleashing the most vicious bombing campaign ever waged on a country with no air defence and no air force. The bombing was so
22 Bruce Cumings prefers the term ‘unknown’ as opposed to the more common description ‘forgotten’ since at least in the West, especially in the US, almost total ignorance of the war prevails. For detailed treatment of the war and its origins: see Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War (Vol. 1 1980, Vol. 2 1991). I draw on this extensive work and reading of many of the primary sources he cites for the recount of US Asia-Pacific policy and the Korean War. See also Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea (2010). 23 As had been agreed with the Koreans and the US, the Soviet Union withdrew its forces in 1948, while the USMGK backed Syngman Rhee in the formation of the Republic of Korea with its capital in Seoul. US Forces are still there fifty years after they began their occupation.
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comprehensive that when someone in the National Security Council suggested using an atomic bomb against the North, Dean Rusk said that made no sense since the US Air Force had already destroyed everything in the North that an atomic bomb could hit.24 Despite MacArthur throwing every conceivable conventional weapon into the battle, massive troop deployments, endless saturation bombing and murderous covert action against the civilian population (all to reappear in Vietnam), the North Koreans forced the US Forces out of the North before a ceasefire was declared. The war has yet to end and the US has drawn one lesson from it: South Korea can only be controlled by full-scale military occupation. That occupation continues to this day, with the largest contingent of US military forces outside of the continental US based in South Korea. After this humiliating defeat, only hedged by the presence of a huge standing army on the peninsula, the US regime feared their hopes of absorbing French Indochina would also be dashed. No-one among the US ruling elite wanted to see Indochina go the way of Korea. On the other hand everyone responsible for policy in Korea (and Dean Rusk25 was one of the most important people with Korea experience) knew that they could not hold Vietnam if China intervened. Hence the pretence that at best a limited war would be waged in Indochina to avoid ‘great power confrontation’ was a deceptive statement of policy at best. The US had brokered Japanese colonisation of Korea at the end of the Russo-Japanese War. Koreans became slaves of the Japanese and Theodore Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. (Proof that even making a presidential
24 ‘In North Korea there were no atomic targets. We were bombing with conventional weapons everything that moved in North Korea.’ Interview in Korea: The Unknown War, Thames Television (UK) 1988. 25 David Dean Rusk (1909-1994) was a Rhodes scholar and became a US Army intelligence officer during WWII; later Deputy Under Secretary of State and then Assistant Secretary of State for Far East Affairs, and finally Secretary of State to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson (1961-1969). It was he who proposed the 38th parallel as the demarcation between US-occupied Southern Korea and the North.
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warmonger into a Nobel laureate has its precedent.) Japan used the South as a breadbasket to provide cheap food for its own population and, taking advantage of mineral wealth and water, industrialised the North. When MacArthur arrived in the capital of his expanded Pacific viceroyalty, it became clear that cheap food would have to flow to Japan if the economy was to be rebuilt as planned. The USMGK arrived in Seoul and helped assure that the rice crop in the South was faithfully delivered to Japan. Korean peasants could starve, and did. Essentially the same process occurred in Indochina, except the French had control over the rice export from Vietnam along with exploitation of other sources of wealth. When Japan invaded, Vichy France joined with the Japanese Empire and continued to make money. However when the war ended France was poorly equipped to maintain control of its Asian colony.26 Finally France appealed to the US for support. Although the US financed the restored colonial regime, its Asia-Pacific policy anticipated US displacement of Europeans. The French surrendered, leaving the ‘shell company’, the Republic of Vietnam in Saigon, which the US continued to fund. There were no plans to alter the economic relationships that had made rice exports profitable business. Things had changed in Asia since the ceasefire in Korea. No doubt the regime in Washington, now resigned to the Chinese Revolution — even if the government in Peking was not recognised — hoped to develop an economical means of stabilising a US vassal in the South, as in Korea, but without going to war against China again.
‘Credibility’ Why were so many official and semi-official discussions about the need for US presence in Vietnam focussed on ‘credibility’?
26 Initially British troops were sent to Saigon to help the French suppress Vietnamese nationalists intent on ejecting the French, as colonisers and collaborators under Japanese occupation. Ultimately the first uprisings were defeated by British and French troops — and as in Korea — along with elements of the Japanese constabulary who were released from prison for that purpose. See John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried (2006).
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The answer I believe is simple. The cost of the war in Korea was enormous (and with the occupation remained so). A major political purge was necessary to prevent opposition to the war from destabilising the US regime itself. As exaggerated as this may sound, the classified decisions of the National Security Council acknowledged the need for massive military expenditure to prevent the economy from reverting to its 1930s depression. They also reflected an awareness that without military force (both overt and covert) the US could not continue to control and consume the current disproportionate amount of the world’s resources. The people in Washington — in other words the bureaucratic apparatus of the US corporate state — had to reassure the ruling class for which it works that the state has the ways and means to impose the political, social, and economic priorities of US corporations and the class that dominate them. This obviously meant the capacity to intimidate peoples and countries whose resources are targeted. The great danger for Washington was that having set the target of absorbing Europe’s empires after World War II, it would lack the force needed to maintain that control. Since it is impossible to say this openly in the US — hence also the classification of such NSC documents — it has been necessary to create and maintain another discourse that carefully separates economic, political and social issues. In the US, race plays a very crucial role in upholding these cognitive barriers — in preventing open discussion of class or capitalism or the nature of the plutocracy that rules the US. Race — specifically the constant terror waged against African-Americans — is used to consolidate the fictive ‘white race’ which in turn can identify with the ‘white’ ruling class as opposed to the black descendants of slaves. The complement of race is ethnicity. At the same time as African-Americans are terrorised in order to constitute ‘whiteness’, ethnicity helps constitute patriotism. Prior to the Russian Revolution, Americans were to be separated from anarchists. After 1917 Americans were to be separated from communists. Anarchism and communism were defined as foreign and usually associated with specific ethnic
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groups imported as labourers to the US from Europe. (Asians were subjected to the race code.27 American patriots could license or even abandon their ethnicity by dogmatic compliance with US political orthodoxy, especially abandoning their mother tongue along with any European ideas they had brought with them (unless of course they were monarchist or fascist).
War abroad and a purge at home Hence at the outbreak of peace in 1945, the US corporate elite was acutely aware not only of an impending collapse in the rate and amount of profit the administered wage and price regime had assured during the war, they were also faced with global resurgence of revolutionary and nationalist movements — especially among the inferior coloured races. This could (and did) catalyse radicals and African-Americans and Native Americans in the US. So it was war abroad and the great purge with Senator Joseph McCarthy as its poster child and the Klan as its Southern delivery boys. While the suppression of political radicalism among whites was successful, the defeat of the Black liberation movement in the US required more time and a very nasty covert campaign, including imprisonment, detention, torture and assassination. While CIA advisors were developing what would be called the Phoenix Program in Vietnam — an improvement and systematic organisation of the methods used in Korea — the FBI, together with Army Intelligence and local police forces were waging a counterinsurgency equivalent against Blacks and Indians in the US. Even liberal youth were targeted, e.g. the students killed during the notorious demonstration at Kent State university.
27 E.g. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (only repealed in 1943), the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924. These US immigration laws were specifically ‘race’ based. Racial discrimination and terrorism against Asians, especially Chinese. Executive Order 9066, issued by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942, authorised the deportation and incarceration of US citizens of Japanese origin or descent, without due process. The last internment camp was closed in 1946. Ronald Reagan was said to have made a small fortune dealing in forced sales of real estate forfeited by interned Japanese.
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Until World War II, wars among whites were essentially waged in order to divide or redivide colonies and protectorates. After WWI Germany had been excluded from the international community (of colonial empires). Britain and France eliminated all the other European colonial competitors with the help of the US and by promoting ethnic nationalism among the multiethnic Central powers. This created a new group of national states and they were institutionalised within what became the League of Nations.28 When the German industrial and financial elite decided to recapture its imperial prerogatives — of which it had been unjustly deprived by the Anglo-French armistice terms — the now inconvenient nationalism was brushed aside so that Nazi Germany could exploit Eastern Europe rather than threaten Anglo-French overseas interests. In the Asia-Pacific region (and Africa) it should be noted concessions to nationalism were scarcely considered — this was a white man’s prerogative.
Nationalism is abandoned World War II was another matter entirely. The US emerged richer and unscathed with its long sought after control of Japan and the old empires hopelessly indebted to US bankers. The nationalism in Eastern Europe that had been abandoned to pacify Hitler and encourage his campaign against the Soviet Union was now useful again to attack the temporary ally and revive the US ‘open door policy’ in the dependencies of its biggest debtors. It was almost impossible to avoid extending national self-determination to the non-whites after the war. Britain would be forced to grant its largest, non-white dominion independence in 1947. This was not only a political necessity 28 For a detailed discussion of the role ascribed to British support of nationalist movements in Europe prior to and during WWI, see Markus Osterrieder, Welt im Umbruch (2014). For a detailed argument as to the change in British policy under Neville Chamberlain, usually connected with so-called ‘appeasement’, see Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment (1982). Quigley argues that Chamberlain secretly sacrificed the sovereignty of Czechoslovakia and then Poland to facilitate Germany’s advance against the Soviet Union and to divert it from threatening the British overseas empire.
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but was no doubt catalysed by Britain’s enormous trade deficit with India after the war. Although as Michael Manley once pointed out in an interview, the United Nations system, including the so-called Bretton Woods institutions (IMF/World Bank) were conceived by the colonial empires (or what was left of them) on the assumption that their dependencies would continue to be economically subordinated. In fact this is the way most of the Charter and the Bretton Woods instruments have been implemented. But on its face the language was taken to be a departure from the League of Nations which did not seriously consider de-colonialisation, but mere reapportionment of territory. With Indian independence the white privilege of dominion status or even complete independence could no longer be defended — financially or ideologically. The same process unfolded in the French empire. With very few exceptions, territorial colonialism was doomed. The US accomplished a major ideological innovation during WWI, the fruits of which only became apparent after 1945. Until the end of the 19th century US imperialism was expressed mainly in killing Native Americans, taking their land and working it with slaves or European immigrant labour. In the West, Mexicans and Chinese were used instead of African slaves or European immigrants. Overseas colonial enterprise was undertaken by US corporations or pirates who, when in need of help, called in the US Marine Corps or a few naval ships. This was corporate conquest and was state-subsidised but not state-sponsored or administered. Essentially US colonial enterprise followed the model of the British East India Company, even employing company armies or buying the local government for the same purpose.29 Hence the US regime had almost no colonial bureaucracy to maintain with taxes. This was the model that the US pursued after 1945: after forcing open the doors of its European rivals, it protected its corporations while they invaded and extracted everything they could get out of the target country without any traces of an
29 For a historical examination of ‘the world’s first multinational corporation’ see Nick Robins, The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (2006).
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imperial government. People could learn to hate United Fruit and still love ‘the American way of life’. The ‘American way of life’ was not obviously racist since it was not the same as the British or French lifestyle visible in all their colonies. It had been marketed successfully despite the vicious racism prevailing in the US itself. When linked with the promises of the United Nations Charter it inspired people to imagine independence and prosperity that had previously been reserved only to the white races and nations. More than a few nationalists from Africa and Asia went home believing that the US would champion true independence and progress. Given this impressive marketing accomplishment and the expectations it awakened throughout the world, US Asia– Pacific policy could not be articulated in the terms used by its European predecessors. Another US advantage was that it was formally free of monarchs and emperors. The term ‘empire’ just did not seem to fit.
Control of people not territory US domination after the Creel Committee expressed itself foremost in psychological terms.30 The aim of US imperialism became the control of people not territory. Rather than importing an extension of feudal forms, the regime fosters private property (mainly for its corporations) and the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of the American way of life. The ‘American way of life’ is an integrated discipline including economic and psychological coercion/bribery and backed by covert, largely corporate force. Its principal instruments are private ownership and ‘autistic’ individualism. Thus it is a totalising and totalitarian world view: to see life as American without actually being an American requires a vast array of consumption habits, social rituals, and obsession with personal liberty as opposed to healthy social organisation.31
30 See
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Hence when the ‘enemy’ was conceived in order to give content to the all-encompassing fear of ‘communism’, a caricature emerged: the extreme opposite of this ‘American way of life’. Neither Americans, nor anyone else can actually find a communist or communism that fits the image propagated by the regime. The simple reason is there is no counter-ideology constituted solely by the negation of this marketing product. Communism for the US regime and its praetorian guard around the globe is nothing more than a label for the enemy which, in order to appear convincing, must threaten the subject population with the loss of something they value. Since not everyone values the same elements of the ‘American way of life’ the regime is forced to defend them all at once and punish any and every heresy — like its ideological ancestor the Roman Catholic Church, selling salvation (for money) or torturing and executing those who failed to show adequate enthusiasm for the faith. The first war in Vietnam, the one fought for credibility, to oppose communism, to defend the American way of life or ‘freedom’ — this was a crusade in the most medieval sense of the word. It was a summons to white folks (although disproportionately more coloured folks died) to punish heretics, to bring salvation to Vietnam by subjecting the entire country to an auto de fé. As Michael McClintock called the policy: convert or annihilate.32 Of course in an auto de fé one does both.
In the ointment In 1966, the US anthropologist Jules Henry wrote in The Nation: ‘The establishment throughout Southeast Asia of Footnote 31 continued description of the DuPont companies can be found in Gerald Colby Zilg, Beyond the Nylon Curtain (1974). Reissued in 2014 in the Forbidden Bookshelf series, Colby Zilg not only describes the oldest and richest industrial dynasty in the US and its ubiquitous role in the economy, he shows the extent to which US policies and military operations were influenced, if not driven by corporations of which DuPont was one of the most powerful. 32 Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft (1992)
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industrial complexes backed by American capital is sure to have a salutary effect on the development of our foreign involvement: the vast land’s cheap labour pool will permit competition with the lower production costs of Chinese and Japanese industry, which have immobilised our trading capabilities in Asia for many years...... The destruction of the Vietnamese countryside is the first, and necessary step, to the industrialisation of Vietnam and the nationalisation of its agriculture.’33 Henry’s assessment of US Asia-Pacific policy was quite controversial at the time, certainly not because it was peculiar but because it was open. Social science in America has occasionally been critical but most of its practitioners, seated in well-endowed universities and research institutions, were wittingly and unwittingly complicit in the collection and analysis of data to advance corporate penetration of markets, both at home and abroad.34 Social scientists were first employed on a large scale in the US during the so-called ‘Progressive Era’. They replaced or augmented the work previously done by missionaries in the colonies. That is to say they were on one hand part of the informal intelligence apparatus supplying the data about indigenous cultures and social structures then used by colonial
33 Jules Henry, ‘Capital’s last frontier’, The Nation, 25 April 1966. 34 The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations have not only acted as conduits for covert funding of research, they have often provided cover for CIA operatives. Anthropology has had some notorious intelligence operatives such as Margaret Mead. Foundation-funded social science survey studies were used intensively during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s both to produce intelligence about popular movements in Latin America but to identify structures and personnel that were then targeted by state-sponsored death squads. More innocuously the foundations use their resources on the behalf of corporations and the state to reward ideological conformity or promote it. Not everyone who benefits from this largesse is aware of the source of their funding or the purposes to which it may be used or why it was funded. The fact that links are occasionally disclosed has yet to diminish the deniability these corporate institutions offer. The East-West Centre in Hawaii is one institution that has educated and trained numerous covert operatives in the Asia-Pacific region. See, inter alia, James Petras, ‘The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited’, Monthly Review (November 1999).
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authorities to penetrate local communities either to turn them in favour of the invading forces or to make administrative and military measures against them more effective. Social science as a profession developed as an academic discipline largely through the funding of corporations that recognised its value for training management cadre sensitive to population control issues. Parallel to eugenics, which essentially saw control in terms of depopulation, intensive research was devoted to manipulating indigenous social structures in the same way marketing was elaborated as a system of surveillance and intervention to control the population of industrialised societies. This was fostered by the process of professionalisation, especially in medicine and journalism. The outgrowth of professionalising healthcare and information flows drew directly on the experience of missionaries: the gospel and medical mission both had ostensibly civilian ‘developmental’ agendas. However they were actually techniques for social reengineering. In Vietnam this led to the creation of extensive programmes combining provision of clinics (also used as fronts for covert action) and opinion survey action (in Vietnam the Phoenix component was called ‘census grievance’). Pacification meant everything short of total depopulation of the countryside. Henry’s point-blank analysis of the strategic and tactical operations of capital was certainly a source of embarrassment to those who were determined to keep imperialism cloaked in philanthropic garb. Henry’s honest statement of the US regime’s objectives in Southeast Asia (already a firm component in US Latin America policy) actually describes the creation of ‘surplus population’ that results from Marx’s ‘primitive accumulation’. Traditionally the surplus population filled factories with labour and facilitated the conquest and colonisation of foreign territories. Walt Rostow reduced this process to the euphemistic model called ‘stages of development’. ‘Development’ is simply the strategic implementation of capital accumulation processes, either by conquest or institutional grafting. The division of labour — usually depicted as an element of progress — includes
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‘professionalisation’ which is simply another term for social reorganisation of knowledge to create wealth extraction hierarchies. The consequence of this intellectual development is simply the systematic degradation of human relations. It is no accident that the most sophisticated and differentiated social formations, states, are almost universally genocidal when it comes to the treatment of the ‘countryside’ — especially so-called indigenous peoples who are then relegated to the status of ‘primitive’ — another euphemism meaning worthless or non-persons. The creation of states and their progeny, the multinational corporations, has exhibited what may be called nihilistic tendencies. These can be seen best in the continual destruction which accompanies supposed creativity and stabilisation. Therein lies one of the central contradictions in both imperial crusades and wars of national liberation. In other words, if we take the finite nature of the planet seriously and with it the fact that humans are ultimately terrestrial (as opposed to aquatic or aerial) creatures, the basic struggle can be reduced to how any given portion of the human species establishes its ability to survive on the finite amount of land the planet offers. With the exception of the insignificant quantity of landfill concentrated in coastal and riverine regions, the amount of habitable land has not changed much in the course of human history. The allocation for occupation and exploitation of that land constitutes the underlying dispute at the core of all ‘advanced’ political organisations. Yet this central issue remains one of the most obfuscated. This source of conflict in everyday life within so-called developed countries is obscured both by the high level of urbanisation and the subsequent derivative forms of land occupation and use found there. Suppression of this issue is one of the primary goals, if not the ultimate goal, of political warfare. The legitimacy of any claim to control of land, whether individually or collectively asserted, is still — all industrialisation and digitalisation notwithstanding — the political aim of all social, economic, military or religious violence. Politics in this context means the organisation of the
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means to legitimate, enforce and exploit the claim to land — abstracted as territory and endowed with metaphysical attributes from which the claimant asserts sovereignty.35 Since the war in Vietnam, like the war in Korea, was essentially a war against the peasantry, even the post-war Vietnam government was faced with the fact that the peasantry was fundamentally changed by thirty years of US warfare — and focussed on converting the mainly peasant population in the South into a peri-urban conglomeration. After 1975, the government in Hanoi would be confronted with conditions that could no longer be managed independently of the wider economic and political system, which the US still dominates. In 1953, US President Eisenhower told a conference of state governors: ‘Now, let us assume that we lost Indochina.....the tin and tungsten that we so greatly value from that area would cease coming....So when the United States votes 400 million dollars to help that war, we are not voting a give-away program. We are voting for the cheapest way that we can to prevent the occurrence of something that would be of most terrible significance for the United States of America, our security, our power and ability to get certain things we need from the riches of the Indonesian territory and from Southeast Asia.’ 36 The wars in Indochina, concentrated in Vietnam, can be understood as wars over the control of land. However that, too, is an oversimplification. In fact the major complaint of the European and American forces, and those who led them, was that they often never felt able to control the land. Instead they were barely able to occupy it, albeit briefly, and destroy 35 The title of Thomas More’s classic Utopia bears a certain irony in that the word means ‘nowhere’. One might argue that the search for an irrefutable claim to political order can only end in ‘nowhere’, in the denial of human habitation as a local and natural given, no different from that ascribed to flowers or even birds. 36 Dwight Eisenhower, Speech to the Conference of State Governors in Seattle (4 August 1953) cited in Gerald Colby Zilg, Beyond the Nylon Curtain (1974), reissued as an e-book in the Forbidden Bookshelf, pp. 404-5.
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its utility for the indigenous inhabitants. Unlike the North American continent, Indochina seemed to resist every means to which the US military was accustomed in the seizure of territory. The simplest explanation for this is that the forces of the United States no longer sought — for reasons the explanation of which would exceed the scope of this essay — to replace the native inhabitants with its own population imported as surplus from the US itself. The US ruling elite did not seek (and arguably could not have achieved) a resettlement on the scale necessary to become a dominant presence in Indochina, let alone Asia.
War aims In 1965, Henry Cabot Lodge — who was then Kennedy’s ambassador to South Vietnam — was quoted in the Boston Globe: ‘Geographically, Vietnam stands at the hub of a vast area of the world — Southeast Asia — an area with a population of 249 million persons. He who holds or has influence in Vietnam can affect the future of the Philippines and Formosa to the east, Thailand and Burma with their huge rice surpluses to the west, and Malaysia and Burma with their rubber, ore, and tin in the south.... Vietnam does not exist in a geological vacuum — from it large storehouses of wealth and population can be influenced and undermined.’ 37 Gabriel Kolko distinguishes the initial US war aims: ‘to quickly redress many of the post-war global dilemmas and frustrations of its military power, to confirm its symbolic credibility and the technical efficiency of its arms. The goal was to neutralize the rising potential throughout the Third World for revolutionary nationalist regimes....The primary origin of the Vietnam War was the American intervention and effort to establish and sustain an alternative to the Communist Party, and Washington assumed there was a sufficient indigenous basis to give
37 Colby Zilg (see note 36) p. 413
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it increasing hope for success.’ 38 He goes on to argue that US foreign policy after WWII aimed ‘to create an integrated capitalist world framework out of the chaos of World War II and the remnants of the colonial systems....because it sought a controllable, responsive order elsewhere, one that would permit the political destinies of distant places to evolve in a manner beneficial to American goals and interests far surpassing the immediate interests of its domestic society.’39 However, as Philip Agee so poignantly argued, capitalism cannot survive without the repressive apparatus of its ‘invisible army’.40 Kolko’s staid formulations are like many that can be found throughout political science scholarship.41 How then are such objectives to be judged? What do these statements of Lodge and Kolko tell us about the kind of violence organised and unleashed against the Third World? Why should the US regime — given the admittedly vast 38 Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War (1994) pp. 7-8. 39 Kolko (see note 38) pp. 72-73. 40 The military was subservient to the CIA in Vietnam. However, since the military is the visible war machine this is taken to be the essence of the war against Vietnam. The opposition to ‘military intervention’ of whatever sort is focussed on how to prevent the US regime from deploying its military as an instrument of policy. Agee’s ‘invisible army’ – a pun on CIA – is the organised violence and subversion without which US corporate capitalism cannot be imposed and maintained against the will of an exploited population. 41 I am implying that Kolko – whom I consider to be a representative of the Vietnam War historians who are considered critical and generally accepted on the US Left as authoritative – sees the pacification as a side-show to support the military in its effort to secure the South and stabilise the Saigon regime. My argument is the opposite: the military was brought in to cover the pacification program. I find the formulation ‘permit the political destinies of distant places…’ to be staid because it does not escape the language by which ‘American goals and interests’ are reified. Whose goals and interests are really meant here? Very little of the work I have read disagregates ‘American goals and interests’. I believe it is necessary to say for whom various campaigns of death and destruction were parts of ‘goals and interests’. No one has problems doing this when it comes to Germany under the Nazis. However it always becomes diffuse when the US regime is involved.
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ignorance of its military and foreign policy establishment regarding Indochina — have had any reason to believe that it could determine the nature of legal and accepted political organisations in Vietnam? To come to a reasonable understanding of what the US regime’s aims in the war were, it is essential to know who sets those ‘American goals and interests’? Why should the US population, unscarred by war at home since 1865, be motivated to fight and die as well as submit to privation for the reasons Kolko enumerates? Moreover, why were the war aims for the military ostensibly framed in conventional war doctrine — as if this were a war between Germany and France over Alsace — while the real war was fought in accordance with completely different principles? The answer to this question is not made any easier by noting that the US was (and still is) waging war throughout the world, making Vietnam only one theatre of operations. The US war aims — at least in the terms comprehended by its own military institutions — could not have been achieved by any amount of armed force applied. While this may seem obvious, especially in retrospect, the discrepancy between US military capability and the real as well as perceived success of US forces in Indochina ought to raise the question what the real war aims were and what is the proper understanding of strategic and tactical operations in Indochina between 1946 and 1975. A brief consideration of some ‘highlights’ might help. Here it is important to pay attention as much to what is omitted as what is said, to the assumptions upon which self- deception fundamentally relies. CBS News correspondent Morley Safer established the company’s Saigon bureau in 1965. Shortly thereafter he was witness to a ‘search and destroy’ mission conducted by US Marines in the village of Cam Ne, near Da Nang.42 His field dispatch became famous as he showed US Marines entering a village with no opposition and subsequently destroying it. His film was broadcast into US living rooms showing marines torching thatched cottages with Zippo lighters and flamethrowers, leaving the entire village homeless and
42
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destitute. An apparently astonished Safer can be seen looking into the camera while the marines are at work. The report caused an outrage, especially in William Paley’s ultraconservative (mainstream) corporate headquarters. In reflecting on the report later David Halberstam added that this was certainly an uncommon and surprising scene because Americans had been brought up to think of Indians burning villages and the US military coming to the rescue — while here it was the US military torching the huts. Safer then submitted a report on the Battle of Ia Drang.43 The dispatch was broadcast as a CBS News Special Report, introduced by Walter Cronkite and followed by Safer’s description of the event with the film. Safer explains that the US Army 1st Air Cavalry regiment was being sent to raise the siege against a Special Forces camp in Plei Mi, located in the central highlands near the Laotian border. The viewer is not told what Special Forces (Green Berets) do or why the Vietnamese might want to destroy the camp. The story continues more or less modelled on the reporting everyone has been taught in the newsreels. At the end of the story the US Army wins: the Army takes a hill that had been held by Vietnamese troops. The settlers have been saved from the ‘Indians’. Thirty years later, he recounted the Cam Ne incident with the same bewilderment to an audience meeting at the State Department to discuss the American experience in Southeast Asia.44 He recalled how much trouble he had gotten because of this naïve report. The vicarious shock was magnified by the doubts inserted as to whether this was premeditated arson or merely an extreme reaction to an invisible enemy. Thus a report of what was essentially criminal activity by US troops was coated with dishonesty. By suggesting that the US Marines had assumed the role usually associated by Americans with the ‘Indians’ he was in fact providing the subliminal rationale for the unacknowledged counter-terror campaign, which had been and was to remain the foundation 43
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of US military operations throughout the war. Actually it was the US Army that had historically attacked Indians, burning their homes and destroying their means of subsistence — if they were not killed outright. The burning settler homes enshrined in the penultimate US film and literary genres were misrepresentations of the ultimately futile Indian resistance to invasion of their lands and destruction of everything they needed to survive. Morley Safer and others were shocked to the extent that they could not point to any white settlers that the marines or air cavalry had to defend. The story of the non-human communists in Vietnam, who were actually Vietnamese but could never be called that, had to be repeated daily and nightly in order for this ostensibly occasional violence to be rationalised as some kind of self-defence. The war waged by the US in Vietnam had to be framed in terms of territorial defence. The vast incoherence between the territorial defence rationale for US conventional warfare — actually the pretence of conventional warfare — lies in the fact that aside from the War of 1812, which it nearly lost to the British, the US has never had to defend its territory from a foreign invader. The overall deceit underlying the war against Vietnam was not the concealment of military tactics but the cultivation of the perverse set of fears among US Americans manipulated according to the country’s most primitive but historically well- anchored founding myths and fantasies. Even the landing of marines at Da Nang was not so much a military necessity as a narrative device to touch the hearts of the home front with imagined memories of the D-Day landing during the ‘good war’.45 The purportedly most televised war in US history (at that time) would have made little sense to US viewers had they not been force-fed Hollywood/War Department war films and newsreels for decades. Without the thousands of miles of Westerns exhibited as mass entertainment, the Indian analogy would have been accessible to relatively few viewers. 45 Whether WWII really ought to be called the ‘good war’ is the subject of an interesting book by Jacques Pauwels, The Myth of the Good War (2000).
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Moreover without television and cinema there would probably have been little support for the war at all.46 Eisenhower had been forced to end the Korean War not only because of Chinese intervention to help the North Koreans repel ‘UN’ forces but also by potential domestic disruption as what would be called the civil rights movement escalated.47 In fact although the US corporate state has been voracious in its appetite for foreign wars, it has always taken enormous amount of propaganda and compulsion to persuade the majority of US Americans to fight abroad. At the same time however, the massive violence and displays of overwhelming fire power was certainly not embarrassing to those in the US who had been bred to believe in the virtue of American might and invincibility — real or imagined. The public perception of the war was not only shaped by the reporting during the war but by the approximately two million US Americans who went to Vietnam in the course of the war. Some 55,000 of them died there.48 Although this figure is modest in comparison to the number of Vietnamese dead, conservatively estimated at between 1.5 and 3.8 million (Korean deaths are also estimated at approximately 3 million), it was the perceived magnitude of US deaths that had the greatest, if not the only, decisive impact on American consciousness. What might be called ‘Post-Vietnam Stress Syndrome’ triggers either bouts of self-pity or vindictiveness, sometimes both, in the US. American deaths were not only the major public issue for those opposing the war, while it was 46 See Bruce Cumings, War and Television (1992) for an investigation as to the nature of ‘televised war’. Cumings challenges both the belief that Vietnam was seriously televised and the mistaken idea that the fully televised Gulf War in 1991 was actually shown at all. 47 President Truman issued Executive Order 9981, ordering an end to racial discrimination in the military in 1948. The US Supreme Court rendered its decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, declaring ‘separate but equal’ to be unconstitutional. The struggles that led to that order and the later Supreme Court ruling and conflict between Black Americans and the defenders of Jim Crow continued throughout the Vietnam era. Despite the formal abolition of racial discrimination, the effective implementation in the armed forces took many years. 48 In contrast, 405,399 died in all combat theatres during World War II (1941-1945) and 36,516 died in the US war against Korea (1950- 1953).
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being waged; they fuel the retroactive appreciation of the war against Vietnam.49 The war against Vietnam might be considered the first major war the US fought with a non- segregated military. However the rank and file were disproportionately black and poor. Perhaps it is also no coincidence that segregation ended in the US military once the enemy was no longer mainly ‘white’. The white command structure no longer had to fear unleashing black soldiers on white womanhood since Asians were not considered ‘white’ within the meaning of the act. They too were only ‘gooks’. The desegregated military was by no means purged of racism. Nor could it suppress the racism in its greatest reservoir of white cannon fodder — the South. Returning soldiers rarely had noble and heroic tales to share (if that was ever a significant part of war memory). There is no way to measure the real damage done to the bodies and souls of draftees for whom professional killer had not been the occupation of first choice. Since the war ended ignominiously, the largely working class, poor and non-white veterans had to accept having fought for nothing. There were also those whose perceptions of the war triggered opposition: to the war, to the military or even to the government itself.
The war that was actually fought And yet the war perceived had very little to do with the war that was actually fought, even for those who had been there, been in Vietnam (or elsewhere in Indochina unofficially). Allowing for the distortions in memory over time, it is remarkable how few participant-observers have been able to present a coherent image of the war in which they fought. Frequently statements are made like, ‘We always won, even if
49 It is exceedingly difficult to obtain reliable figures for Vietnamese or Korean deaths because of the nature of US warfare, especially the saturation bombing during both wars. While much has been made of the ‘body count’ policy in Vietnam, there was no way to count the victims of B-52 raids (e.g. 126,615 some sorties for Rolling Thunder, Arc Light, Linebacker etc.) or murders committed by irregular forces and ‘pacification’.
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we don’t know what.’ The PBS documentary, Vietnam: A Television History, seems quite typical at least of the film record.50 Not a single one of the ordinary soldiers interviewed was able to conclude from his experience what the war’s aims were and whether they were even being achieved at the operational level, let alone at the command level. Even allowing for problems of interviewing methodology, the PBS series presented witness testimony at all levels, from ordinary soldiers to cabinet members. Nevertheless the viewer comes no closer to understanding the war as a whole since the story is told in the same way it was told during the war itself. The films and extracts available today in the Internet rely on essentially the same footage, occasionally with different editing. Another problem, reflecting the real prosecution of the war, is the inconsistent, inaccurate or one might think deceptive designation of the participants interviewed. To give a few examples in the PBS production: John Negroponte is identified as a delegate to the Paris peace negotiations. This is accurate to the extent that the only statements used in the film were his descriptions of negotiations with the DRV in Paris. At the same time this obscures the extent to which he was actually involved in actually waging the war. Negroponte and his colleague Richard Holbrooke (who was not interviewed in the film) were both active participants in the rural pacification program, an element of Phoenix.Negroponte went from rural pacification where he reported operations in II Corps, the military region of central Vietnam, to be the director for Vietnam of the National Security Council.51
50 WGBH-Boston (Public Broadcasting System), Vietnam: A Television History (1983) 51 John Negroponte would first gain notoriety among the Left when he served as ambassador to Honduras during the US wars in Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s. He then went on to serve as ambassador to occupied Iraq. These assignments are only surprising to those who do not know that he learned counter-insurgency doctrine and practice as a 27-year-old in Vietnam. The same applied to Richard Holbrooke who ran the political war against Serbia and before his death assumed overall responsibility for political warfare in Central Asia. Continues at the foot of the next page.
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Another example is the interview with William Colby.52 He was identified as the head of the Phoenix Program. The viewer might know that he later became director of the CIA. On one hand Colby is identified as head of Phoenix while on the other hand the film says: Phoenix was run by the South Vietnamese with the help of US ‘advisors’. In fact William Colby was the CIA station chief who is considered to be largely responsible for creation of Phoenix out of a program called ICEX.53 Colby does not say what Phoenix was in the film, only what it supposedly was not. The only descriptions of what Phoenix might have implied are left to Jane Barton, identified as a civilian aid worker. This is also confusing because although Ms Barton is described elsewhere (Internet) as an employee of the American Friends Service Committee, another person, Everett Bumgartner, interviewed in the film, is also identified as a civilian aid worker. Bumgartner was William Colby’s deputy in the pacification (Phoenix) program and definitely CIA.54 The PBS film is a typical example of how an essential part of US strategy and tactics is presented as no more than a side-show. Thus the focus on apparently conventional warfare is magnified to produce and sustain confusion about the war and inadequate analysis at the same time. Today it is very difficult to draw any sensible conclusions about the war in Vietnam because there is almost no discussion about the war that was actually fought. The narrative of American foreign policy and military strategy is still determined on the official level by the myths of World War II. Any attempt to penetrate that screen which hides the unstated policies, strategy and tactics of the US regime ought to begin with the simply question of who specifically wants to control what exactly?
Note 51 continued John Negroponte, ‘Address to the US State Department conference, American Experience in Southeast Asia 1946-1975’ (29-30 November 2005) at
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Ultimately there are only two objects of war: land and people. However humans have shown repeatedly through the centuries — they actually have little control over land itself — no one can live without it. So the central question becomes in reality: who controls what people and how? To show just how easily this issue can be actively concealed one can return to Morley Safer. At the American Experience conference he told the following story about a meeting with William Colby who had just assumed his post in Saigon.55 Colby’s office called Safer and asked him to come meet the next day: (Colby said) ‘Look, can you disappear for three days?’ (Laughter.) And I said, ‘I guess.’ (Laughter.) And he said, ‘Well, be at the airport – be at (inaudible) at the airport tomorrow morning at 5:30.’ ‘No, no. And I showed up and he said, “Okay, here are the rules. You can see that I’m going on a tour of all the stations. You can’t take notes and you can’t report anything you hear.” And I spent three days – made – first of all, down in the delta and they were really, really revealing. There was only one meeting that he would ask me to leave the barracks. And it was fascinating because the stuff that these guys were reporting through whatever filters to you had been so doctored by the time it got to you – I mean, to this day, I still feel constrained in terms of talking about. As Telford Taylor once said to me, he said, “Once you know a secret – one you swear to keep a secret, you keep it to the grave.” Well, I keep most secrets to the grave but – and I so I don’t want to go into detail, but – and I’ve often wondered what his motivation was, being a sceptic, why is he doing this, what’s the real story. And to this day, I don’t know unless he was – wanted an uncommitted witness, some – I just don’t know.’ Marvin Kalb responded in a manner that ought to seem bizarre now.
55 Media Roundtable at
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‘Well, at least Colby did it with you for three days. Think about McChrystal inviting a reporter from the Rolling Stone in for a month.’ Of course the remark is bizarre because Safer is still alive.56 Without knowing who are initiating, managing and conducting what are always called merely ‘operations’, it is impossible to draw any informed conclusions about the relationships between these people, the institutions they represent and the interests vested in those institutions — the progenitors of the war against Vietnam and the wars for the control of land and population that have continued since.
Wear jeans, millions of flies can’t be wrong Colonel, later major general Edward Lansdale began his professional career in advertising. In other words, Lansdale was a corporate propagandist. He is credited with the campaign that made Levi’s Jeans into a ‘national craze’ and converted plain working clothes into what has become the standard clothing item of the American empire.57 Lansdale went to the Philippines in 1950 and where he became infamous for his contributions to the development of US political warfare tactics.58 He introduced tactics applied by the US colonial Commonwealth forcesto suppress popular revolts that began after the defeat of Japan and the restoration of US rule in the archipelago. It was the success attributed to
56 Michael Hastings received the George Polk Award for Journalism as recognition for his 2010 Rolling Stone article ‘The Runaway General’, a profile of General Stanley McChrystal. After the article was published, General McChrystal resigned his command. Hastings died in 2013 in a peculiar automobile accident in which his car apparently exploded into flames. McChrystal was a general out of the special operations stable, from way-back. Hastings certainly was expected to behave like Safer. He didn’t and his car exploded. That was some five years later. However, any of these guys would have known the ‘ground rules’: don’t ask, don’t tell. A reader who surmises Hastings’ fate might imagine that Safer kept his mouth shut for good reason back then – even if it might be unimportant today. 57 Douglas Valentine at
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Lansdale’s guidance and the subsequent suppression of the Huk rebellion that earned him a reputation as the US counter- insurgency expert of the post-war period.59 The US began its advice and support to the French in Indochina in 1945. The first advisors came from the OSS that already had acquired considerable experience in the region through its co-operation with various groups resisting the Japanese occupation. The OSS had even advised the Vietnamese resistance under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh.60 OSS operatives helped train and arm the Vietminh during the war. When the war ended and US policy dictated restoring France to power, OSS operators began working with their French counterparts — to the extent the French trusted them — to suppress the Vietnamese nationalists.61 Thus they were participant-observers from the very beginning of the First Indochina War. Moreover they knew both sides intimately. Today one must ask therefore whether any credibility can be given to claims by those in the US regime that relied on OSS intelligence that they did not understand the nature of the Vietnamese nationalist struggle and the determination of the Vietminh to fight for an independent Vietnam. However there is a more important point to be made here. Namely that the agents and officers of the US secret armies (aka intelligence community) were part of what became the war against Vietnam from the very beginning — years before the US became officially involved, before the invasion was visible and acknowledged. That means not only did the war against Vietnam begin well before the USS Maddox incident that unleashed the bombs against Tonkin (the province of Indochina comprising the bulk of the Democratic 59 The US granted nominal independence to the Philippine Commonwealth prior to actual legal independence later. Puerto Rico is still a Commonwealth, as opposed to a state or independent sovereign entity. Hence the Philippine military deployed after WWII to suppress the Huk were ‘Commonwealth forces’ – the military of the Commonwealth of the Philippines (although heavily advised by US Americans…) 60 For example OSS/CIA officer Lucien Conein came to Indochina around late 1944. 61 Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (1990) (see note 54), p. 22 et seq..
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Republic of Vietnam). Before describing or explaining the significance of this fact, some points need to be made. Every intelligible argument is always an argument against something. Every open argument presumes that those who are arguing know, admit and accept the terms of the argument and feel constrained by them. Elaborate rituals in courts and legislatures are based on the assumption that only what is openly reported, debated and decided is legitimate. If this standard is applied to the fundamental questions about the war against Vietnam one will soon find that much if not most of what constitutes the scholarly or public debate about the US role in the mass murder of over three million people in Indochina does not come close. As I have already argued, the war against Vietnam is treated as an ‘intervention’ which it was not, at the invitation of a ‘friendly government’ that did not exist, under premises of collective security which were fabricated, for opposing ‘communist (Soviet/Chinese) imperialism’ imagined (aka ‘Cold War’) and in a limited form, which it clearly was not. Since the central assertions about the origin and nature of the US invasion of Vietnam and its war against all of Indochina, definitely from the side of the US government and mostly from those who claim to have studied it (even opponents), are demonstrably false, it follows that any argument about the war, its nature and consequences based on these false premises will lead nowhere except to an indirect (by opponents) and direct (by proponents) affirmation of the foregoing assumptions. This leads subsequently to the conclusion — by and large shared by both ‘sides’ of that argument — that the war was a regrettable mistake. From this consensus arise such tedious questions as ‘What should the US have done differently?’ or ‘Could the US have won the war?’ or ‘Couldn’t peace have been achieved sooner?’ The list could continue. To demonstrate the futility of these questions it helps to recall that while a visible if not numerically significant minority of white Americans demonstrated against the war in Vietnam, for both strong and weak reasons, there
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was no comparable mass demonstration to demand that the US government fulfil its treaty obligations, e.g. paying reparations to Vietnam for the poisoning and destruction of enormous parts of the country and the killing and maiming of millions of its inhabitants. It took until 1995, twenty years after the last helicopter lifted off of the roof of the Saigon embassy compound before the ‘loser’ extended full diplomatic recognition to the country that had defeated it. President William Clinton was quoted as saying that the time was at hand ‘to bind up our wounds’.62 Never mind that President Clinton avoided the draft and any personal wounds at the time; it does stretch the imagination to compare some 55,000 deaths with over three million by calling them ‘our wounds’. If scholarly debate or public politics are to say anything meaningful about the war, then they have to explain not only the 22 year hiatus, with almost Cuba-like embargo conditions, but the inability of such scarred and divided US Americans to acknowledge the crimes of their government and compel that government to do justice to a country it did its best to destroy. To place this in its proper perspective one must consider that although the Allies (US, France, Britain, Soviet Union) agreed that Germany must pay reparations for the slaughter and destruction wreaked by the Nazi regime in the Soviet Union (and other countries), it collected its own share of reparations through corporate (not state) ‘investment’ in the German economy, including seizure of intellectual property, which was of course given to US corporations, and deprived the Soviet Union of the reparations agreed by dividing Germany in May 1949.63 The US claimed reparations although it never fought a single battle against the Wehrmacht on its own soil and only actually waged war against Germany starting in 1944. The US 62 Alison Mitchell, ‘Opening to Vietnam...’, New York Times (12 July 1995). 63 By declaring the establishment of the Federal Republic (FRG) in the western occupation zones, the Soviet Union was forced to support the creation of a state in its zone of occupation. The government seated in Bonn and controlled by the US through Konrad Adenauer was not compelled to pay any reparations to the Soviet Union. Before the official creation of the US vassal, much of the industry (concentrated in Saxony) was dismantled and removed to the US sector leaving the Continues at the foot of the next page.
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concluded hostilities with Germany unilaterally in 1951. By 1955 Germany enjoyed full diplomatic recognition — a mere ten years after the war, and Germany started the war! The war against Vietnam was ‘a mistake’ for US Americans: for its proponents, because the US did not win, for its opponents, well, for the same reason.64 If the US had won, Cam Ranh Bay would probably still be a major US naval base and US soldiers on leave or liberty would still be raping the local women like many do in Guam and Okinawa, where no war is being waged.65 Instead of litanies about how traumatic the war was and self-congratulation among those well situated reminiscing about the good old days in Berkeley (but not Watts), discussion would be confined to obtuse base Note 63 continued. Soviet Union with a part of Germany heavily damaged by the war from which to exact the reparations it was due and needed to rebuild what the Nazi armies had demolished in four years of vicious warfare. In fact the creation of the FRG gave the US secure bases in Europe both for its bloated military and its expanding corporations. The German state created by the US in 1949 continues to function as a forward base even since 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Soviet Union. In other words, the US regime recognises even the most flimsy excuse for a government by its vassals, while withholding every dignity from those it cannot immediately dominate. 64 If the war had been won, those ‘opponents’ nothing to protest. It would have been successful policy. Nobody talks about Grenada or Panama and certainly not about the successful counter-insurgency in the Philippines. There is no public discussion about the US involvement in deposing Indonesia. Some people think Chile was a bad idea but colleges and city centres were not closed for a minute when Allende was replaced by Pinochet. Even the US ‘Left’ does not like to lose. If the US had won they would still be filing suits for civil rights in Vietnam 65 For example, Bob Kovach and Chelsea J. Carter, ‘U.S.-Japan deal withdraws 9,000 Marines from Okinawa’ CNN (27 April 2012)
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realignment measures or other niceties of the war department’s budget. Probably the most hypocritical of all apologies for the result in 1975 — also represented throughout the political spectrum — is that the US regime ‘didn’t understand the Vietnamese or underestimated their fierce patriotism’. This excuse betrays a more fundamental quality in the ‘American’ character. US Americans have been raised — or indoctrinated — to believe that behind the face of every person who does not live in the US there is an American yearning to be free (free of everything that is not American that is). Even among themselves, US Americans are notorious for their belief in the natural superiority of their way of life. Even people who have written admiringly about the US have taken note of this quality. Domestically this can be felt in the oppressive conformity demanded in the ‘land of the free’. Tocqueville noted that the conformity of opinion he found was stronger than anything he had experienced under the most tyrannical European monarchy. The German Hermann Graf Keyserling, although he thought the USA was destined to be a great country, said that Americans talk a lot about freedom of opinion but do not think much of it. C L R James, a Trinidadian sports journalist and historian, complained that although his American Civilization was complimentary of the country’s virtues, it was still confiscated by the US customs authorities and he was deported to England.66 The claim to have misunderstood the Vietnamese is cynical when uttered by those privy to the intelligence acquired as early as 1945 by OSS operatives. For the rest of US Americans such a claim only underlines the ethnocentrism or nativism which equates patriotism with loyalty to the United States and denies the possibility, let alone the legitimacy of other peoples’ loyalty to their country.
The ‘American way of life’ as a crusade
66 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835), Hermann Graf Keyserling, America Set Free (1929), C L R James, American Civilisation, written between 1950–1953 and published posthumously (1993).
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To properly understand why the United States of America has been able to terrorise the entire planet, even more than their British cousins did, one has to bear in mind the fanatical religious conviction underlying the ‘American way of life’. Whether one calls it a ‘civil religion’ or focuses on the strength of the weld between patriotism and fundamentalist Christian sects in the US, there can be no doubt that the ‘American way of life’ became a crusade. Arthur Sullivan’s hymn ‘Onward Christian soldiers’ is even more fitting to the US than for the relatively modest British missionary effort. The British, despite their established church, had an ambivalent relationship to missionaries in their colonial possessions. There was business and then there was the church. In the ‘American way of life’, business is the church, just as the church is a business. For example, John D. Rockefeller, the robber elevated to the barony of business through his Standard Oil cartel, became a major benefactor of the mainline Baptist churches throughout the country. His grandson Nelson continued this business to enhance his South American investments.67 Probably the most infamous of the business evangelicals has been Billy Graham, a Southern Baptist minister who could be seen as a kind of ‘spiritual advisor’ to the war against Vietnam. Although Graham, in contrast to other white evangelical crusaders, opposed racial segregation early, he was a staunch supporter of US foreign policy from Eisenhower through to Nixon, counselling each president except Kennedy. On the other side, people like the deceased Steve Jobs of Apple was a classic example of business as religion, promoting all the company’s products like ‘iLife’ in the format of a Christian revival meeting.68 The archetype of this aspect of the ‘American way of life’ was Dale Carnegie, whose book How
67 See Gerald Colby, Thy Will Be Done, the Conquest of the Amazon (1995) which describes the activities of Nelson Rockefeller and his sponsorship of William Cameron Townsend of the Wycliffe Bible Translators, using missionary activity to support his business and political agenda. See also Rubem Alves, Protestantism and Repression (1985) for an examination of missionary complicity in the Brazilian dictatorship (1964-1986). 68 iLife was presented by Jobs at MacWorld in San Francisco (2003)
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to Win Friends and Influence People achieved canonical status in the entrepreneurial communion of faith.69 Capitalism is not a popular ideology or political movement but a term for the critique of the political-economic system. Hence there is little explicit promotion of capitalism as an ideal in itself (except perhaps among the reactionary ‘Austrian school’ which came to dominate economics faculties in the US in the 1980s). Ayn Rand attempted to elevate capitalism to an explicit American ideology articulated in her novels published in the beginning of what would be called the Cold War.70
Islam Today Islam appears to have replaced communism as ‘public enemy number one’. Many well-meaning US Americans, embarrassed by the attacks on Islam in a country which brags about its constitutionally guaranteed religious freedom, still feel compelled to follow the regime’s public arguments against supposed fanatics because they believe the US to be the bearer of Enlightenment humanism, leaving all other countries and creeds somehow less humanist, less enlightened and less 69 Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). Another canonical text of the ‘self-help’ movement is Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). Self-promotion by the authors and substantial corporate support made these books bestsellers. 70 The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) are her two most well known novels. In 1966 she published the essay ‘Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal’. Although she managed to acquire cult status, attracting people like former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan to her circle, her vision of capitalism as a positive ideology never achieved a broad following. However Rand did become a kind of aesthetic galleon figure for the Austrian school economists in their crusade against Keynesianism. The Austrian School is generally associated with Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. In the 1950s the Austrian school was little more than a cult among anti-communist economists, some of whom were close to what became known as the monetarist or Chicago school of which Milton Friedman was the high priest. During the Reagan Ascendancy however, the Austrian school emerged from the cracks and has since infested political-economic policy in the US. Keynesianism — to the extent it recognised the need for state spending to ameliorate the damage done by capitalism — was displaced from public policy and public consciousness.
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tolerant. To place this misconception in proper context consider that one of the great men of early American history, Cotton Mather, a model of religious intolerance in puritan Massachusetts Bay, was born in 1663. On the other hand Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, after whom Wahhabi Islam is named, was born in 1703. Reverend Mather was a good thirty years ahead, burning witches before the Sunni preacher who inspired Saudi kings to beheadings could formulate his teachings. It is true that the US Constitution prohibits the state from establishing a church or forbidding free exercise of religion. This amendment has been interpreted as guaranteeing religious freedom but it was ultimately a Puritan response to the British establishment of the Church of England with the monarch as its head. It was certainly not a testimony to religious tolerance in public life.71 When those English colonists declared their independence from Great Britain, the Southerners among them did so to preserve chattel slavery while the rest wanted the freedom to slaughter the indigenous and steal their land.72 The majority of ‘white’ Americans who came afterwards had to accept this or pay the consequences. The compliant were rewarded with ‘other peoples’ land’. US Americans have learned by and large to accept the annihilation of indigenous 71 Religious restrictions to eligibility to elected office were common in the colonies that became the US. Only in 1961 did the US Supreme Court declare religious qualifications for public officeholders unconstitutional. For example Jews and atheists had been barred from public office in some states. In Torcaso v. Watkins (367 US 488) the Court reaffirmed that both states and the federal government were prohibited from requiring any kind of religious test for public office. The Maryland law in dispute required that even a notary public certify belief in God. A 1997 South Carolina case invalidated a state law requiring the acknowledgement of a supreme being as a condition for public office. Emerson v. Board of Education (1947) extended the separation of church and state doctrine to include public aid to religious organisations whether singularly or severally. While many US Americans like to take religious freedom and tolerance for granted, none of these decisions has remained unchallenged in practice. The laws governing termination of pregnancy and the privatisation of social services since the 1980s has created, through e.g. ‘faith-based initiatives’, problematic circumventions of the Constitution, while the Supreme Court has restrained its hand. 72 Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (2014)
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peoples because without it they would have been forced to fight against their wealthy Anglo-American masters. In other words US patriotism was grounded in bad faith and dishonesty. Only by pretending, like the settler-colonisers in Australia, that they had acquired or inherited a land without people could they continue to build the country into what it became. Brazil was organised under a similar principle (especially in the southern states of Sao Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina), but Brazil was not in Vietnam (Australia was!). That is why it can (and should) be argued that the US invaded Vietnam just as it had invaded Korea (and Mexico as well as Cuba in the 19th century) not by mistake, not because of a misunderstanding, or because of some communist threat, but because ‘invading’ other people’s territory is how the US was created in the first place. It is just natural for the US regime to invade territory when that territory belongs to non- whites. That is what was meant by manifest destiny.
The bomb The atomic bomb was built by the US with the help of a peculiar combination of German and Eastern European scientists. Officially the bomb program was accelerated because of fears that the Nazi regime would build one first. That was clearly Albert Einstein’s motivation for writing President Roosevelt — although he changed his attitude toward the bomb later. People like Einstein definitely feared a fascist regime armed with an atomic bomb. However that was not the primary concern of those who ultimately pushed for its use against Japan. DuPont was keen on the enormous amounts it would earn on this exclusive and very expensive weapons project. The hopes that Hitler would do what the Allied expeditionary forces from 1917–1925 were unable to do, destroy the Soviet Union, were dashed at Stalingrad. The bomb offered the Western powers the potential to blackmail the Soviet Union with overwhelming destructive force and no need for troops on the ground. It also seemed to be an answer to the problem of manpower in the Pacific. Strategic
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planners knew that the US could never field a force with the numerical strength to dominate China. Dropping two atomic bombs on Japan allowed open-air tests on its main targets — non-whites in Asia and, if necessary, the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union understood this, just as they grasped that the Western allies waited until 1944 before attacking Germany, despite official promises to relieve the Soviet Union by threatening Germany’s western front. So when Stalin demanded assurances in Eastern Europe, Roosevelt was compelled to give them. Very few US Americans knew either about the promises to open a second front or the promised reparations and control over the ‘road to Moscow’ to prevent future attacks on the Soviet Union. When he gave his infamous ‘Iron Curtain’ address in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill knew that the Allies had given their full consent to the Soviet occupation. Most US Americans did not. When US forces occupied Korea and installed the fascist Syngman Rhee in the South, Japan had already been defeated. The Koreans and Russians had forced the Japanese out of the North and they had surrendered in the South. Again, what most US Americans appear not to have known or never mention is that prior to 1949 substantial US financial and commercial interests — in other words corporations and crime syndicates — were integrated in the drug and contraband trade that had been based in the Chinese ‘treaty ports’ for nearly a century. The foremost of these was Shanghai which was divided into three extraterritorial settlements for the US, Great Britain and France. Just as US industrial magnates viewed Japanese industrialisation after the Meiji restoration (1868) as a threat to their expansion into the Pacific ‘markets’, the crime syndicates and their interface to legal business activity, the intelligence community together with merchant banks, saw the Japanese as competition in the extremely lucrative opium trade. The British had established the opium monopoly for exporting opium to China — a right they had won by waging
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two wars against China.73 Chiang-Kai-shek had become the local managing director of this Sino-European drug trade until Mao Zedong drove him and his gangsters, together with their OSS supporters, to Formosa. There the Kuomintang (KMT) warlords subjugated the island’s indigenous population and waited until MacArthur or some other great American appeared to lead them across the straits to restored power on the mainland. In the 1950s the so-called China Lobby enjoyed a status not unlike that enjoyed by the Israel lobby today. It is probably no accident that both KMT-ruled Formosa and Israel are substantial hubs for the whole range of offshore illicit traffic, whether drugs, weapons or money itself. Like the KMT, Israel enjoys the more or less unconditional support of the US regime, especially its intelligence community, which maintains close professional links to Israel as well as its other ‘offshores’. In the wake of the Japanese defeat, the British first reinforced the French in southern Vietnam while the KMT was given control of Tonkin. After KMT troops pillaged Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh asked the French to return to displace the Chinese. Given the stakes it is not hard to imagine — if hard to prove — that the French colluded with the KMT to force Ho to abandon his immediate plans for Vietnamese independence. Far-fetched? Only if one knows nothing about the European exploitation of China until the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Douglas MacArthur was a stalwart of the China lobby. He was also the US warlord in the Pacific. The restoration of French rule after 1945 has been defended due to the exigencies of the Cold War. But the ‘Cold War’ was stated policy for common consumption, just like the fairy tales about the US relationship between all belligerents in the European theatre. These fairy tales have been so well
73 Opium Wars: First Opium War (1839-1842) and Second Opium War (1856-1860) also known as the ‘Arrow War’ waged by Britain against China first as retaliation for Chinese destruction of the opium cargo belonging to a British trader. As a result China was induced to lease Hong Kong to the British and to permit them to import opium into China.
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marketed in the US that even respected critical scholars have never questioned them — at least not out loud. If the Cold War is seen for the fraud that it was, then a major premise for the rationalisation of the US war against Vietnam must be seen as equally fraudulent. That does not mean that no-one defending US policy in such terms was aware of this deceit. Given on one hand the intensity of indoctrination to which the recruits to the corporate and imperial bureaucracy are subjected, one can accept that many people in that bureaucracy, both in government employment and in the media genuinely believed in the ‘threat’. On the other hand there is a more elemental factor involved. In 1940, US Attorney General Robert H. Jackson, who led the US prosecution team in Nuremberg and later was appointed to the US Supreme Court wrote: ‘Activities which seem helpful or benevolent to wage earners, persons on relief, or those who are disadvantaged in the struggle for existence, may be regarded as “subversive” by those whose property interests might be affected thereby; those who are in office are apt to regard as “subversive” the activities of any of those who would bring about a change of administration. Some of the soundest constitutional doctrines were once punished as “subversive”.’ 74 Frank Donner notes further: ‘American liberalism has failed to curb the repressive thrust of nativism — and not only because it has chosen to take a stand at the wrong point (the courtroom) in the governmental structure. Its commitment to the libertarian tradition has been deeply flawed (I refer here to its dominant sectors) by anti-communism and by subservience to the corporate sector. And, since the New Deal, liberal standard-bearers — intellectuals, academics, and lawyers outside the political mainstream — have been all too ready to compromise a professional commitment to full freedom of political expression as a demonstration of political realism, the price the idealistic 74 Quoted in Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance (1980) p. xv.
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outsider must pay to enter the corridors of power in an insider’s role. In its retreat, liberalism has historically acquiesced in substantive limitations on political expression in exchange for procedural, “due process” palliatives. In the same spirit, and until recently, it embraced clandestine counter-subversive domestic intelligence sponsored by the executive as a libertarian alternative to such cruder repressive modes as legislation and exposé-style congressional investigation. Like other dubious enterprises, intelligence has resorted to a claimed professionalism — and in particular, a cosmetic vocabulary — as a badge of legitimacy. Language has become an integral part of the subject of intelligence. Not because its terminology is particularly arcane and technical, but rather because it uses what George Steiner has called the “complex energies of language” as a shield against the constitutional, political, and ethical attacks to which it is highly vulnerable. (The same defensive need explains the proliferation of euphemisms and pseudo-professional jargon in the Vietnam War era.)’ (emphasis added)75 Donner’s analysis of the role of so-called intelligence, which he considers itself to be a form of political repression, does not apply only to domestic intelligence operations — notably the Red Scares since the Palmer Raids — but to foreign intelligence operations which became the focus of US foreign policy in the post-war era. This liberal position is the same held by most of those who call themselves ‘progressives’ in the United States. In fact, the term ‘progressive’, easily confused with the ideology of late-19th century middle-class reformism although actually closely related to it, arose out of submission to political repression in the United States under President Theodore Roosevelt. At that time political repression was primarily corporate terror, e.g. the domestic spying and terrorism perpetrated by companies like the Pinkerton Detective Agency
75 Frank Donner (see note 74) p. xiv
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and the various railroad police.76 In the rural South the Ku Klux Klan performed this function. By the time Wilson became president the demands of ‘progressives’ for government regulation of corporations were translated into increasing nationalisation of corporate police and the creation of federal police and intelligence services, foremost of which became J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). By adopting the term ‘progressive’ the liberals distanced themselves from socialists, communists, anarchists, and anyone else who advocated fundamental change in the political and economic system dominated by corporations.
The foundations Having conceded the corporate distinction between acceptable opposition and radical demands for change, a blind eye was turned to America’s particular kind of political repression. The result was a thorough isolation of popular movements such as those that aimed to abolish the racist tyranny in the South or mass unionisation in the industrialised North. At this point government political repression was augmented by the work of tax-exempt foundations like those created by Rockefeller and Carnegie — the predecessors of the National Endowment for Democracy founded during the Reagan administration to intensify political warfare abroad. As already argued, at the end of World War II the liberal establishment and corporate progressives both agreed on the need for an alternative to Marine expeditionary forces as a means of coercing countries targeted for (continued) exploitation by US corporations. This was the main reason why William Donovan proposed the creation of what became the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after the US emerged as the
76 Harry Anslinger, the first and long-lasting director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, began his career as an officer in the Pennsylvania Railroad Police, the goon squad of Mellon’s railroad empire. Interestingly enough, Anslinger — a great rival of J Edgar Hoover — considered his agency an important institution for maintaining white supremacy by policing Blacks who were disproportionately targeted by the drug laws. The FBN cooperated with the CIA in managing the US interest in the international drug trade and hence part of the covert war in Asia. See Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf (2006)
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number one world power in 1945. With the unexpected (and undesired) survival of the Soviet Union the liberal elite saw its failure to directly or indirectly crush a revolutionary regime. George Kennan also saw — and that was the real point of his ‘X’ article in Foreign Affairs — that the US (especially its corporations) would be vulnerable now that there was a major industrialised power capable of defending itself against US attacks, whether overt or covert. This also meant that US corporate liberalism was not the only alternative to classical European colonialism. While it is true that Donovan’s ostensible credentials for proposing a post-war intelligence service derived from his responsibility for wartime intelligence directed against the Axis powers, the real pedigree upon which he built was his work as a ‘white shoe’ lawyer. The ‘white shoe’ firms were corporate law firms mainly located in New York City. The represented their clients in classical legal disputes and transactions but also organised the political repression where US corporations had their overseas operations. The star among these political law firms was Sullivan & Cromwell, where John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen were partners. John McCloy, the Standard Oil lawyer who served as Deputy Secretary of War during WWII, came from similar stock. The methods that became CIA stock and trade were first used by these law firms and the corporations they represented. ‘Intelligence’ is called ‘market research’ in business administration. In fact it involves spying on competitors and consumers/clients. ‘Propaganda’ is what business folks call ‘public relations’ and ‘advertising’. Finally ‘foreign intelligence’, which includes ‘counterintelligence’, is the equivalent of sales and industrial sabotage. Donner adds: ‘In addition to supplying a functional rationale, both military conflict and social science have contributed cosmetic language and images to disguise the realities of investigative purpose and conduct. Thus, for example, sociology contributed the term “data collection” to describe, inter alia, surveillance, wire-tapping and the
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use of informers. The FBI uses “domestic” or “internal security” intelligence to designate what I here call political intelligence. It staunchly rejects “political intelligence” as a suitable usage because that includes mainstream politics. However, the terms “political intelligence” or “domestic political intelligence” accurately describe what the Bureau does: it collects information about the politics of domestic targets....Domestic intelligence is our shield against threats to “internal security”, while foreign intelligence is supposed to provide the same protection for “national security”, the interest threatened by hostile external activity.’ 77 How was the war against Vietnam actually waged? It was not a war against two belligerents meeting on the battlefield to contest territory. When the US regime sent its first ‘advisors’ to Indochina their job was to determine how US (corporate) interests could be secured and furthered in the region. When Eisenhower told state governors what the US needed in Indochina — cheap or free minerals, natural resources and of course captive labour — he was certainly speaking with the knowledge that one of his chief foreign policy advisors, Clark Clifford, was DuPont’s chief lobbyist and that his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles represented powerful banking and merchant interests, both as lawyers and personal beneficiaries of their clients. Although he had worked as a junior officer with corporate bullies like Douglas McArthur,78 Eisenhower was no Smedley Butler, his warnings about the military–industrial complex notwithstanding.79 The war began with an ‘intelligence operation’, partly to
77 Frank Donner (see note 74) p. xv 78 On 28 June 1932, Douglas MacArthur together with George Patton was ordered by Herbert Hoover to suppress the so-called Bonus Army protest in Washington. Cavalry, infantry, tanks, tear gas and all the trimmings were deployed against unarmed veterans. Dwight Eisenhower was an aide to MacArthur during the repressive action taken at the height of the Great Depression. 79 Smedley Butler (1881-1940), US Marine general and two-time Medal of Honor winner, denounced DuPont and other companies before Congress for conspiring to overthrow the US government while Continues at the foot of the next page.
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support the French, partly to undermine them and make way for the US. By 1948 the French were no longer able to protect their troops so they launched counter-intelligence/counter- insurgency operations with the help of the CIA. GCMAs80 were formed (at the same time as US Army First Special Forces), the precursors of the PRUs (Provincial Reconnaissance Units) developed by the CIA in the beginning of what would become Phoenix. In 1954 Edward Lansdale arrived with his kit. By the mid-1950s US soldiers were fighting with the French and the 350-member US Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) was stationed in Saigon to dispense money to the French and anyone else who might serve US interests in Indochina at the time.81 This was the pattern set well before the Southeast Asia Resolution (Gulf of Tonkin). Phoenix is usually presented as a perhaps unpleasant program introduced to help the military perform its conventional warfare role to secure South Vietnam from communist subversion. The reverse is the case. Increasing military deployment was ordered to support CIA’s intelligence/ political warfare assignment. The US did not want war with China after Korea. It also did not want to openly cloak itself in ‘colonialism’ by supporting the French to the end or openly taking their place. Edward Lansdale was brought in because of his reputation in the Philippines (all yellow folks look alike) to develop psychological operations. However Lansdale’s personal forte was marketing through terror. While his critics said that he was just too idiosyncratic and self-important, convinced of his own mastery of the field, they clearly underestimated something Lansdale understood well: selling the war at home and not just promoting political repression with a smile. Lansdale did not have to be an expert, he just Footnote 79 continued. Franklin Roosevelt was president. He also wrote War is a Racket (1935; available as a PDF at < http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/ warisaracket.pdf>) in which he admitted that his career in the Marine Corps consisted of leading expeditionary forces to kick small countries and popular movements so that they would not threaten the wealth and property of US corporations. 80 ‘Groupement de Commandos Mixtes Aéroportés’ (Mixed Airborne Commando Group). 81 Douglas Valentine (1990) (see note 53), pp. 24-25.
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had to appear like one. In helping to expand the covert war for control of Vietnam, he also convinced many at home that this was the way to win against the Vietnamese as well as domestic and international public opinion. At first it seemed like he had the wonder drug to overcome the Vietminh. When he didn’t he became the target of heavy criticism both by civilian and military leadership. Yet by insisting that the great Lansdale came with a counterinsurgency plan — that didn’t work — he also gave an alibi to an enormous escalation in political warfare and the subordination of the conventional military to these objectives and the organisation created to fulfil them. If Lansdale was a ‘failure’ in the field, this ‘failure’ made it possible for people like William Colby to deny that Vietnam was a war waged by the covert corporate forces, capitalism’s invisible army. Even the ultimate failure of the US military to hold ground, to drive the ‘VC’ or the regular Vietnamese army out of the South could be blamed on the military. The scope, strategy and tactics of the primarily political war waged against the Vietnamese civilian population and the systematic political repression for which Phoenix was born remained in the shadows of B-52s, inaudible behind the tremendous blasts. Meanwhile the CIA could blow craters of its own into the population in the hopes of persuading the Vietnamese of the great transcendental value of wearing Levi’s blue jeans and working for the Yankee dollar.
Dr T P Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket in Heinrich Heine’s birthplace, Düsseldorf. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa (Maisonneuve Press, 2003).
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Holding Pattern
Garrick Alder
Mrs Mopp and the ‘wet jobs’ The ‘review’ of the Freedom of Information Act is in the news as I write and I don’t think anyone who cares passionately about the Act can be under any illusions about the result this review is expected to produce. (In his autobiography Tony Blair disowned it as the worst mistake he made as Prime Minister, which is surely both unexpectedly honest and chutzpah on a scale so gobsmacking that it could eclipse a galaxy.) Less discussed is FOI’s little sister, the Environmental Information Regulations (EIR), which are far narrower in scope but much much wider in reach: EIR essentially entitle you to any information you want from just about anyone, so long as it has an environmental connection. Not even the spooks are exempt from EIR and the dear old BBC, whose investigative journalism knows no depths, recently used the regulations to gain information about the energy efficiency of the headquarters of MI5 and MI6, vital information which the public no doubt lapped up hungrily. I decided to use the ‘catchall’ net of the EIR to winkle out some rather more interesting information from MI6. The disposal of human remains is considered an environmental issue by central Government (and what else could it possibly be?) and since MI6 has the ‘class 7’ power to use lethal force,1 I thought I’d find out how MI6 gets rid of those inconvenient stiffs. Accordingly, I submitted an EIR request to MI6 asking how many corpses had been disposed of since the turn of the century. The in-house legal team obviously found my reasoning irrefutable because a short while later I received a reply (on
1 See
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plain A4 paper, signed with a wiggly line with no name beneath it) informing me that the Secret Intelligence Service has not disposed of human remains in the last 15 years. Encouraged, I wrote again, this time asking for the release of the Service’s internal codes/regulations/whatever concerning the disposal of human remains. The Service’s next letter thanked me for my supplemental question and informed me that no such framework exists. No doubt, MI6 was entirely honest and forthright in its responses. I was understandably puzzled by such a glaring omission in such a strictly regulated environmental area of law and so I wrote to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to ask how the Government ensured MI6 wasn’t polluting the planet with lead-overdose patients. There was a pause of a week or two and then the Department’s press office wrote back telling me the whole thing was nothing to do with them and that I should approach the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice instead – neither of which, of course, has the slightest oversight of MI6. I think I recognise a wild goose chase when I’m being led on one, so I left the matter there.
Crozier’s cronies Among the recent revelations from Consortium News concerning Keith Rupert Murdoch’s clandestine relationship with the CIA (see Lobster 69) was the fact that in 1984 Mr Murdoch had funded a European ‘fact finding’ mission by that noted spook-cum-hack the late Brian Crozier. Consortium’s piece did not explore what Crozier did to earn his keep, but a little niggle at the back of my head told me that this news wasn’t entirely a surprise. When I finally got round to buying a second-hand copy of the book to refresh my memory, the answer was indeed staring me in the face from the pages of the first volume of the
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diaries of Woodrow Wyatt, AKA Baron Wyatt of Weeford, AKA ‘The Voice of Reason’.2 Wyatt’s entry for Monday 2 June 1986 begins: ‘To the Stafford Hotel, 11 am. Meeting with conspirators. Brian Crozier,3 Julian Lewis,4 a man from Aims of Industry whose name I’ve forgotten and another man who I never identified.5 How to make the public realise that Labour is still dominated by Militants, Communists and Marxists.’ Wyatt of course was a close friend of Mr Murdoch (until the 1990s, when the tycoon decided that the Vox Rationis was no more use and dumped him, leaving Wyatt to lament into his tape-recorder that Murdoch ‘has behaved like a swine and a pig’) and so to my mind the look of this ‘meeting with conspirators’ is that the whole thing was orchestrated by Mr Murdoch himself. It’s the simplest explanation. It’s clear from this entry that the Stafford Hotel meeting wasn’t the start of a plan but a continuation of something already in motion. Wyatt recorded: ‘A lot of work has been done on bias in the media and there will be a report coming to me soon I hope. It covers BBC and Independent TV.’ At this stage, it’s not clear to me what came of this plotting, if anything. But there is a lovely coda in Wyatt’s entry for 12 November 1987, which records a lunch with David Hart,
2 Of this News of the World editor, Derek Jameson, said in 2008: ‘True, Murdoch did foist Woodrow Wyatt on me at the NoW. I got my own back by putting this subhead under his by-line: The voice of reason. I reckon the whole world with the exception of Wyatt and Murdoch knew I was taking the piss.’
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alumnus of the far-right Murdoch-funded Campaign for a Free Britain, in which Hart tried to cajole Wyatt (a friend of Mrs Thatcher and the Queen Mother) into recommending Crozier to Thatcher for a knighthood. It really is a small world in the British Establishment. Speaking of which.....
Coulson and co Now that the Tommy Sheridan perjury trial has acquitted former Murdoch employee Andy Coulson, there’s no risk of contempt of court and so I am free to explore a matter that has interested me for some time. Throughout the byzantine and years-long unfolding of the News International hacking scandal, there have been a few glimpses of what might have been peripheral involvement by the Security Service, MI5. I have only been keeping half an eye on the entire affair so the one that sticks in my mind is the 2011 revelation that News Int’s semi-detached private investigator Glenn Mulcaire had somehow got access to an MI5 file on a friend of Princes William and Harry.6 Since the friend in question was not suspected of any wrongdoing, the look of this disclosure is that MI5 routinely keep tabs on those close to Royalty – although they seem to have missed Jimmy Savile for some reason. Anyway, the Mulcaire/MI5 connection was never explored or brought before Lord Leveson and died amid the long grass of official silence. Earlier this year it was revealed that former News of the World high-flier (and recently theatre critic for the Surrey Comet) Neville Thurlbeck was an MI5 informant.7 Mr Thurlbeck has stated that the flow of information was ‘strictly one way’ – no doubt, Mr Thurlbeck was motivated purely by patriotic national security concerns – and that moving from journalism to work for MI5 would have
6
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entailed a drastic pay cut (a claim that I find wholly believable). Later, Mr Thurlbeck would find himself the cellmate of Andy Coulson during the thirty seven days Mr Thurlbeck was imprisoned, a situation that it is hard to believe was coincidental, although what might have motivated it remains unclear (there is material for a playwright here, I think). Mr Coulson of course had taken Mr Thurlbeck’s dreaded pay cut in order to become David Cameron’s communications chief, in which position it was later revealed he was not vetted. The emergence of this fact is said to have ‘shocked Whitehall’, and not without reason: allowing someone to get to the centre of government without proper background checks is like handing your bank card and PIN to a stranger on the street. Marcia Faulkender’s supposed ‘non-vetting’ was enough to inspire a smear campaign involving compromised national security during Harold Wilson’s term in office. Number 10 itself argued....well, it’s not entirely clear what Number 10 argued.8 First of all, Coulson was said to have undergone basic vetting and not to have had access to top secret material. Then the line was that Coulson would have been subject to developed vetting9 but it would have been too expensive. Then the claim was that Coulson was being subjected to developed vetting but it was never completed. Finally, Number 10 declared that ‘No information is held that shows Andy Coulson was sent information incorrectly or for which he was not authorised’, a statement that deserves very careful reading indeed. When Coulson finally appeared before Lord Leveson’s inquiry (the second act of which is now well overdue) he cautiously said that he ‘may have’ had unsupervised access to material classified top secret and above. Obviously, he couldn’t be sure about that. It is very, very hard indeed to accept, per Number 10’s protean statements, that there was somehow an absolutely 8
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unprecedented vetting failure in Coulson’s case and that this failure was repeated several times for different reasons and that no-one realised at any stage. In Whitehall terms, this is quite literally unthinkable. It would crease the brow of even the average Daily Star reader. But it would make perfect sense if Coulson had already been thoroughly checked out by MI5 and so – not expecting it ever to come to light – no-one at Number 10 bothered to go through the redundant procedural rigmarole of vetting him again.
Tory Party like it’s 1992 And so the Miliband rocket proved to be a damp squib at the ballot booth and now the brothers (and sisters) are at each other’s throats providing a neat distraction from all that boring post-election analysis that no-one cares about. Which is a pity, because on the face of it 2015’s General Election result was every bit as scepticism-worthy as 1992’s. In 1992 it will be recalled, the Tories won by a margin of 11 seats, involving an average victory margin of 119 votes in each – and four of those seats reported signs of election-rigging. This time round the Tory win was dependent on just six seats, all with wafer-thin margins of victory. * In Wales, the Tories took the historic Labour seat of Gower by a margin of 27 votes and the Vale of Clwyd (also taken from Labour) by 237 votes. * Derby North was taken from Labour by a margin of 41 votes. * The Tories held Croydon Central by 165 votes. * Tories held Bury North by 378. * Thurrock stayed Tory by a margin of 537 votes. All of these margins are well within the capabilities of a team of determined local riggers, fiddlers and fixers. But since all the parties play the game, it’s unlikely that anyone will officially complain, meaning that for the second time in a generation, a ‘squeaker’ of a poll might have been corrupted and invalid..... and with only a year and a day until the ballots are destroyed by incinerator, we may never know the truth.
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Bogles The SNP’s endless denunciation of treacherous spies in their midst, plotting against Scottish nationalism, has generated a lot more heat than light. It was interesting, however, that Baroness Meta Ramsay, who will need no reintroduction, was the key figure in the Lords who allowed Jim Murphy to triumph over the motion of No Confidence tabled against him and thereby quit with honour. What a semi-detached ‘ex’-MI6 officer was doing helping out a key New Labour figure is somewhat obscure but my hunch is that it was a case of ‘my enemy’s enemy’ aimed at depriving the SNP of a symbolic scalp. I’m not going to list all the allegations of spook involvement in the ScotNat political scene that have been made since the referendum campaign period: it would take too long and anyone who’s been following the saga already knows at least some of this. My opinion is that MI5 wouldn’t be doing its job if it wasn’t working, on some levels, to maintain the integrity of the United Kingdom, a position with which I have no small amount of sympathy, the unquestionable romance of the Scottish independence narrative to one side. What has escaped attention so far is the fact that in 2010 a British diplomat cabled a Belfast colleague about Holyrood’s state of mind and reported insights attributed to ‘well-placed sources’ – those sources being clearly, from the context, within the SNP.10 So it appears that the SNP has been comprehensively infiltrated years ago. Perhaps private knowledge of this is why SNP figures have been so jumpy about possible security service interventions. I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the CIA around the time of the referendum, asking them for any and all available material relating to the Scottish independence movement since 1979, figuring that would catch everything in modern times and could be winnowed down to 10
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the releasable few pages by declassification staff. Instead, the CIA declined to confirm or deny that it held any such material concerning a force that threatened the constitutional composition of a key strategic ally nation. Make of that what you will.
The SNP’s ‘oil field cover-up’ When the discovery of the new North Sea oil field referred to as Vorlich/Marconi was announced shortly after the Scottish referendum last year, many immediately cried smelled a rat. It had been a major plank of the SNP’s campaign that major new North Sea discoveries lay ahead and/or were being hushed up in order to promote uncertainty over the SNP’s bold claim that a seceded Scotland could run on oil money.11 I can’t say either way whether the SNP is ‘onto something’ in the most general terms, although it would appear that North Sea extraction has certainly peaked and is on the decline; but in the case of the Vorlich/Marconi oil field I can say that it appears they are barking up the wrong tree. I applied under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain e-mails sent between site discoverers BP and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills concerning the oil field’s discovery. The exchanges captured by my request aren’t interesting enough to bother reproducing here; however while the e-mails don’t absolutely rule out some kind of underhandedness (it being impossible to prove a negative, of course), I can say that it appears that BP caught the Department on the hop with its announcement and that I’m satisfied (any new information notwithstanding) that the SNP’s concerns appear to be groundless. (I’ll be glad to forward the e-mails on to anyone who fancies a brief but boring read).
11 This claim ricocheted back and forth from October to December 2014 and a chronological list of pro- and anti- sources would be boring and confusing. There is a sceptical and closely detailed summary here:
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Not in the Albert Hall 30 April marked the anniversary of the suicide of Adolf Hitler and also – allegedly – that of Eva Braun, his lover. ‘Allegedly’ because Hugh Thomas, in his book Doppelgangers: The Truth About the Bodies in the Berlin Bunker (1996), proved that Eva escaped from the fuhrerbunker and for all intents and purposes disappeared, leaving behind a corpse doctored to look superficially like hers but with completely different teeth. Mr Thomas’s work on Nazi body-doubles of the Second World War has proved contentious over the years but the Eva Braun case is the one in which there is absolutely no room for doubt. Unless one imagines that Thomas invented his book from whole cloth, the evidence he cites makes it absolutely impossible for the female body found at the site of the attempted cremation of Hitler to be Eva’s. This gives me the chance to set out a little theory I have nurtured for many years. It’s well known that when autopsied, Hitler’s charred corpse was found to only have one testicle. The Russian autopsists even examined the abdominal cavity to see if it had ‘ascended’. Nope, it wasn’t there. What’s less well-known is that all Hitler’s medical records from his lifetime recorded no such abnormality. So there are two options: either every medical examination that included details of Hitler’s genitals has been doctored or forged on this one detail, or.....one of his testicles went missing after his death. If you add in certain other details, a strange solution to this little set of mysteries starts to come into focus. Why, for example, did Hitler marry Eva shortly before committing suicide? (She even wrote her surname as ‘Hitler’ on their marriage certificate). Could it be that the last-minute marriage was to ensure that any child borne by Eva would be legitimate? Artificial insemination was not then a new procedure by any means and if Eva escaped and some medically-minded Nazi took one of Hitler’s testicles for the
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sperm it contained.... In this theory, Eva escaped (perhaps to Argentina) where she gave birth to Hitler’s child. Yes, it would have been a cockamamie procedure to attempt; but let’s face it the Nazis had some very odd ideas indeed about science and biology. It’s exactly the sort of thing you can easily imagine them doing. So that explains the lot: Mr and Mrs Hitler’s legitimate child, conceived by artificial insemination, to be born in exile – one day to return. Whether or not it would have worked is another matter altogether. If it was ever tried, no heir to the Reich has ever appeared. Of course, all this is pure speculation (one might even be forgiven for calling it ‘a load of balls’) but I find the possibility beguiling. And even though it’s only a game of ‘what if?’, it explains a lot of things in one go, so it has the virtue of simplicity on its side.
The ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ redux Curious that Monica Lewinsky reappeared in the news earlier this year, as the guest speaker at a TED talk, nearly 20 years after her moment of fame, just as Bill Clinton’s long-suffering wife Hillary was preparing her run for the US presidency. Even more curious, it turns out that TED has been co-operating with the CIA.12 As far as we know TED has been brought in to provide private ‘corporate’ events for the Agency but still.....curious.
12
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Last post for Oswald
Garrick Alder
On the morning of 20 November 1963, something very ordinary happened in Texas. The mailman delivered a standard Postal Service slip to the Irving home of Ruth Paine. It stated that a package with 12 cents postage due was being held at the post office for Lee Oswald, the husband of her temporary lodger Marina Oswald. This form was found on 23 November, the day after the assassination of US President John Kennedy, during the Dallas Police Department’s search of Mrs Paine’s home. On 6 December a parcel was found in the dead letter department of the Irving post office. It had 12 cents postage due and had a gummed label attached on which was the address ‘Lee Oswald, 1602 West Nassaus Street, Dallas, Texas’. Dallas has no West Nassaus Street and the parcel gave no return address. The Dallas post office’s dead letter department was referred to as The Nixie Room, and so this package is referred to here as the Nixie parcel. The address label appears to have been written by Lee Oswald himself, but someone had crossed out the word ‘Dallas’ and written ‘Irving Texas’ below the label in conspicuously different handwriting.1 When the Nixie parcel was eventually opened by investigators, it proved to contain a long handmade paper 1 There appear to be just two websites that address this episode head-on. George Bailey, at
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bag, open at one end, not unlike the paper bag, apparently made from rolls of paper used in the Book Depository, that was later produced as evidence of Oswald disguising his rifle in order to carry it into the building.2 This Nixie parcel and the paper bag were dusted for fingerprints and no prints suitable for identification purposes were found (not quite the same thing as no prints being found at all). The paper was analysed and found not to be identical to the paper used in the construction of the incriminating ‘gun sack’. This is not actually proof of the Nixie parcel and its contents having originated from somewhere other than the Book Depository, since rolls of paper used on the sixth floor lasted an average of about three days, and varied in their composition. This meant that two samples of paper obtained from the same location but on different dates could and did show up under analysis as having two discrete chemical profiles.3 However, this non-match was presented as an investigative dead end. The puzzle of the Nixie parcel was being left deliberately unsolved. Something happened between the discovery of the Nixie parcel and the FBI’s interviews with Ruth Paine and her housemate, Lee’s wife Marina Oswald. On 20 February 1964 Irving postal inspector Roy Armstrong told FBI interviewers that by inquiring in Irving and Dallas, he had somehow ascertained that the delivery slip of 20 November related to a magazine delivered to Mrs Paine’s address on 21 or 22 November. When Marina Oswald was interviewed five days after Mr Armstrong, she obligingly told the FBI that the delivery slip was for one of her husband’s magazines and that she had paid the 12 cents excess
2 According to both Mr Murr and Mr Bailey, Ruth Paine told the Detroit Free Press (07 December 1963) that when she found the delivery form she had telephoned Oswald at his boarding house to tell him about the Nixie parcel held at the post office. An archival copy of the final edition of the paper from that date has been examined and contains no such comments in its three lead pages of assassination reportage, although Mrs Paine is quoted extensively. The claim can therefore be dismissed as spurious or a misunderstanding. 3
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postage and accepted the parcel at Mrs Paine’s home. Mrs Paine herself wasn’t interviewed about the delivery form until 31 July 1964, when she didn’t actually address the matter at all, instead going off at a tangent about the delivery of various magazines to which Oswald subscribed. The FBI does not have appeared to have pressed the matter further.4 If Mrs Paine was avoiding the subject without telling a direct lie, Marina was lying.5 No-one addressed the question of why a magazine for which Oswald had already paid a subscription was suddenly delivered with postage due; or the ‘coincidence’ of the timing and the amount of postage that was due being the same for the parcel as the alleged magazine; or the fact that the overweight Nixie parcel had been put through an unidentified metered posting system (what is known in the UK as ‘mail franking’, a business practice) rather than having standard postage stamps affixed as one might expect for personal mail.6 Quite plainly a lie was being established to separate the witnesses from the Nixie parcel, the Nixie parcel from the delivery slip, and the postal service from the entire episode. This is one of the instances in which it is possible to demonstrate beyond any doubt an outright fiction being created during the Warren Commission’s investigation. How Mrs Paine and Marina Oswald were cajoled into going along with this fake story seems likely to remain a mystery. Perhaps, once they knew Mr Armstrong’s version of events, they simply felt it was easier to go along with the ‘official line’. They may not have understood the significance of
4
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the postal service, in the days before e-mail, the internet and bulk data collection of information. The FBI was operating a constitution-violating domestic mail interception program, and the CIA had its own version called HT/LINGUAL to monitor overseas mail (in which capacity the Agency was already well aware of Lee Oswald’s letters to and from his mother while he was in the Soviet Union). These programs in themselves would have been enough to make the Bureau and Agency want to show a clean pair of hands with regard to the mysterious Nixie parcel. But there was more to it than that. Lee Oswald had always been meticulous about receiving his mail during his previous movements between various rented homes. The Warren Commission received a statement from Dallas Postal Inspector Harry D Holmes detailing the various change of address notifications that Oswald had submitted to the US Postal Service during the months preceding his death. These record Oswald opening a Dallas PO Box in September 1962, shifting from Dallas to New Orleans in May 1963, and a new PO Box in Dallas being opened in his name at the start of November 1963. However, what is conspicuously not shown is Oswald registering his address with the Post Office as Ruth Paine’s, in Irving. This is at least part of the reason for the charade over the Nixie parcel: someone in the Dallas postal system had noticed Oswald’s name on the wrongly-addressed parcel and had redirected it to Irving – and it nearly got delivered to Mrs Paine’s Irving address despite the fact that the parcel did not even have a street address on it. Oswald’s mail was being intercepted and his supposedly unknown address at Ruth Paine’s was known to at least one person in the postal system. A clue as to one reason for the cover-up of the failed delivery lies in Harry Holmes’s affidavit to the FBI, which is at pains to state that Mr Holmes only provided the information about Oswald’s changes of address when Holmes was served with a subpoena. This proves to be the key to understanding a substantial part of this episode. The FBI’s mail interception program had to be kept hidden (in fact it did not come to light
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until the 1970s); and doing so meant that the fact that the mis-addressed Nixie parcel had almost been delivered, to Oswald’s unofficial post-restante at Mrs Paine’s house, had to be avoided at all costs. It was an almighty cock-up. With regard to Oswald himself, the Nixie parcel showed how he had managed to get his paper sack to his home without anyone noticing in order to carry his rifle to work on the day of the assassination: he had made it at the School Book Depository, wrapping it as a parcel and used the company’s metered mail to send it via the postal service. The FBI never sought to ascertain whose metered mail Oswald had used, even though the answer was obvious. But most important of all was the fact that Oswald had sent a duplicate sack to himself through the post with no intention of it being delivered, so that it would be found at a later date. This is shown by his use of a non-existent address, the deliberate underpayment of postage, and then his consequent failure to go to the post office to pick up the Nixie parcel. The implication appears to be is that Oswald was laying a trail pointing to himself, which would eventually fit into a narrative that would show him in the process of preparing to smuggle his rifle into the book depository.7 This explains why the FBI and then the Warren Commission did not seem to want to know how Oswald managed to get paper from the Book Depository to Ruth Paine’s address in order to disguise his rifle as ‘curtain rods’ on the morning of the assassination: by demonstrating premeditation the sudden appearance of the TSBD paper in Oswald’s hands contradicted the Warren story that Oswald was an unpredictable lone nut who decided to do the shooting
7 The US Postal Service informed me that metered first-class mail could be put into public mail collection boxes and that the postmark is consistent with the parcel having been deposited before 8:30 p.m. the previous day, the typical cut-off time of the last daily collection.
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the night before JFK’s arrival.8 This, however, does leave some questions unanswered: why did the post office redirect Oswald’s Nixie parcel in the first place, and at whose behest? And most importantly, why was Oswald deliberately leaving clues that not only incriminated himself but explained how he had prepared for the murder of which he was eventually accused? For the answers to these questions we have to retrace the tracks left by Oswald as he and his mail moved through the US Postal Service.
Delivery in Dallas Between his return to America from the Soviet Union in 1962 and his death in 1963, Lee Oswald left behind him a trail of postal redirections, sending his mail backwards and forwards across the US South. In October 1962 he had rented Dallas PO Box 2915 in his own name.9 This was in order to receive any mail wrongly addressed to him at rented accommodation on Mercedes Street, Fort Worth, after he had moved elsewhere. Section three of his application form – which might have given the names of other people authorised to receive mail at Oswald’s new PO Box – was missing by the time the form was produced before the Warren Commission by Post Office Inspector Harry Holmes on 23 July 1964. US Postal regulation 846.53b states: ‘Part III of the box rental application, identifying persons other than the applicant authorized to receive mail must be retained for two years after the box is closed.’ The Commission ignored this inconvenient fact. Warren Commission exhibit CE 2585 is an FBI report of 3 June 1964. In this, the Bureau stated unequivocally that Oswald did not list the Hidell alias on this PO Box 8 19 November 1963, the day of the Nixie parcel's posting, was the day on which details of Kennedy’s forthcoming Dallas motorcade were published for the first time, in two local newspapers, specifically mentioning the turn onto Elm Street that would take the limousine into the School Book Depository’s shadow. 9
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application.10 Since the Bureau was able to state this without any doubt, it means that part three of the form disappeared between the Bureau’s statement and Harry Holmes’ testimony the following month. This presented a problem for any attempt to link the mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano rifle supposedly sent to the ‘Hidell’ alias at Lee Oswald’s PO Box 2915, because Section 355.111b(4) of the US Postal Manual says: ‘Mail addressed to a person at a post office box, who is not authorized to receive mail, shall be endorsed “addressee unknown”, and returned to the sender where possible.’ The ‘assassination rifle’ could never have reached Oswald under the Hidell alias at Dallas PO Box 2915. Therefore, the non-incriminating part three of Oswald’s PO Box application form had to disappear after his death for the entire ‘lone assassin’ story to work.
From Dallas to New Orleans In May 1963, Oswald filled out a form to redirect his mail from Dallas PO Box 2915 to his new Louisiana home address, given as 4907 Magazine Street, New Orleans.11 This was false. Oswald had moved to 4905 Magazine Street. This form [then, as now, Postal Service Form 3575] was sent to the Dallas postmaster postmarked 9 May in Louisiana, with the change of address effective from the 12th.12 On 3 June 1963, Oswald opened Louisiana PO Box 30016, meaning that he now had two postal addresses in
10 Ironically, the FBI made this disclosure in an attempt to refute the claims of one of the first published JFK conspiracy theorists. See <://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh25/pdf/ wh25_ce_2585.pdf>. 11
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New Orleans. Testifying before the Warren Commission on 23 July 1964, Dallas Postal Inspector Harry Holmes said that part three of Oswald’s application form had survived by fluke (unlike part three of his previous application in Dallas) and that Oswald had falsely given his home address as 657 French Street and identified Marina Oswald and A J Hidell as authorised to receive mail at this new box number. The form itself, supporting those claims, was entered into evidence.13 Holmes then told Commission assistant counsel Wesley Liebeler a flat-out lie, stating that it was lucky this section of Oswald’s Louisiana application form had survived because postal regulations specified that part three of a PO Box application should be discarded once the box itself was closed, which, as we have seen, is the exact opposite of the truth. This lie indirectly explained the disappearance of part three of the vital Dallas form as normal post office procedure. So Oswald provably identified himself with the Hidell alias for the first time as a recipient on his PO Box application in Louisiana. He was associated with the Hidell alias while in New Orleans, giving the name and PO Box number out as contact details on some of his ‘Hands off Cuba!’ recruitment leaflets. But he never gave his own name as Hidell, not even to his landlord on Magazine Street. Coupled with the missing part three of his previous PO Box application in Dallas, there was no evidence connecting the Hidell alias from Texas to Louisiana.
From New Orleans to Irving On 25 September 1963 Oswald filled in a redirection form in Louisiana for PO Box 30016, giving Mrs Paine’s correct address (2545 West Fifth Street, Irving, Texas) as the new destination for his mail. The Dallas post office therefore knew only that Oswald had gone to an address on Magazine Street in New Orleans in May 1963, while the Louisiana post office knew only that mail arriving for the holder of PO Box 30061 was being forwarded to Irving, commencing in September. His given New
13
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Orleans home addresses (4905/4907 Magazine Street and 547 French Street) now become dead ends in the Oswald trail.14 On 3 October Oswald arrived in Irving in person. About a week later a change of redirection form in Oswald’s name was filled in by someone else and posted from Louisiana to the Dallas postmaster (postmarked 11 October in New Orleans and then again on 16 October in Dallas). Despite the official purpose of this form [then, as now, Postal Service Form 3546] being to alter incorrect details on a change of address form, this new form in Oswald’s name simply gave Mrs Paine’s address correctly for the second time. In other words, there was no alteration made to Oswald’s redirection and the form need never have left Louisiana in any event; but the Dallas post office was now informed of Oswald’s new address in Irving. Someone in the postal service in Louisiana had noticed Oswald’s mail redirection and was now making sure that Oswald’s new local post office knew exactly where he was picking up his mail. This is how someone in the Dallas post office miraculously knew where to deliver the Nixie parcel.
Dead end in Dallas On 1 November 1963, Dallas PO Box 6225 was opened in the name ‘Lee H Oswald’, giving his address as the street on which he was indeed living (North Beckley) but the wrong house number (he was boarding at 1026 under the alias ‘O H Lee’, but the scribbled address on the application form definitely begins with a ‘3’.)15 No mail redirections from anywhere at all pointed to this third PO Box and the Hidell alias did not appear on the application form. ‘The Fair Play for Cuba Committee’ was listed as an entitled business recipient, a fact which would of course become significant. The postal aspect of the Hidell alias seems therefore to have been 14 The US Census Bureau informs me that due to lack of record- keeping at the time, there is no way of knowing who lived at the two addresses falsely given by Oswald. 15
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brought into existence purely for Oswald’s pro-Cuba campaigning in New Orleans and then abandoned on his return to Dallas. The forged ‘Hidell’ ID found on Oswald when he was arrested is another matter altogether. According to Dallas Postal Inspector Harry Holmes, he ended up taking part in Oswald’s interrogation on the morning of Sunday 24 November 1963 purely by happenstance. He supposedly changed his mind about going to church at 9.30am and made his way to Dallas Police HQ instead, where Captain Will Fritz unexpectedly invited him into the interrogation room. According to an FBI report, a confidential source within the postal system (‘Informant T-7’) claimed he saw the key to Dallas PO Box 6225 among Oswald’s possessions during his questioning on Friday 22 November 1963.16 In CE 1152 Harry Holmes states that the key was found on Oswald’s person after his arrest.17 Harry Holmes made the following statement before the Commission on 2 April 1964: ‘Well, throughout the entire period [of Oswald’s interrogation] I was feeding change of addresses as bits of information to the FBI and Secret Service, and sort of a co-ordinating deal on it, but then about Sunday morning about 9.20 –’ At this point, the Commission’s assistant counsel David Belin cut him off in mid-sentence. There was an off-the-record discussion and when questioning resumed the subject of Holmes’s role as FBI informant had been dropped. In his subpoenaed statement to the FBI of 27 November 1963, Harry Holmes had listed the evidence available to him in Dallas concerning Oswald’s use of the postal system.18 The anonymous redirection form sent from Louisiana to the Dallas postmaster on 11 October was not mentioned, and nor was the Louisiana box application itself. Testifying before the 16
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Warren Commission in July 1964, Holmes said, untruthfully, that he had confronted Oswald with the original application form for the Louisiana PO Box that gave the Hidell alias. Chapter VI of the Warren Report report states: ‘The single outstanding key [to Dallas PO Box 6225] was recovered from Oswald immediately after he was taken into custody.’ But the items found on Oswald’s person at the time of his arrest are listed on pages 614-7 of the Warren Report19 and the key to PO Box 6225 is not among them; nor does any other witness refer to it, nor does it appear among the Commission’s exhibits. The crucial evidence supposedly linking Oswald to the Dallas PO Box and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee had simply disappeared. It had never existed at all. Harry Holmes, FBI informant T-7, had doctored evidence and lied his head off from start to finish in order to incriminate Oswald. He repeated those lies till the end of his life.20
Postscript Why did the Nixie parcel not come before the Warren Commission? One clue is the ‘West Nassaus St’ address in Oswald’s handwriting. There is no such street in Texas, never mind Dallas. However, there is a West Nassau St in Tampa, Florida, Zip Code 33607, although there is no block numbered 1602. It was in Tampa that an apparent assassination attempt on Kennedy’s life was thwarted on 18 November 1963, just four days before the president was killed in Dallas. The would-be assassin was one Gilberto Policarpo Lopez – like Oswald, a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. On 20 November 1963, Lopez obtained a tourist visa and shortly after the assassination he flew to Cuba from Mexico City.21 A
19
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John Kaylock claimed to have met Oswald in Punta Gorda, Florida, shortly before the assassination.22 A week after the assassination, CIA hand and future Watergate burglar Frank (Fiorini) Sturgis alleged that he had met Oswald in Florida in the days prior to the assassination itself, a claim that is surely a flashing red warning light indicating something highly suspicious being spun. And then there was Chicago. A JFK motorcade there had been called off after the discovery of an apparent assassination plot there on 2 November, a fortnight before Tampa. This time, there appeared to be a ‘lone nut’ set up in advance, in the form of Thomas Arthur Vallee who worked at a printing company whose offices overlooked an awkward left- hand turn (like the Elm Street turn on the Dallas motorcade route) that would have taken Kennedy right past any waiting sniper in that building. But if Vallee was the designated patsy, the plan was a dud because Vallee had a holiday booked on the day of the Chicago motorcade and was not at work. The question then is whether the plan was ever meant to succeed at all, unless one assumes highly incompetent conspirators who couldn’t even get their fall guy into place on the right day.23 Oswald is also connected to Chicago, and not only because of his supposed purchase of a rifle from that city’s Klein’s store. Shortly after the assassination, an FBI memo recorded an allegation that Oswald was connected to a car registered in Vallee’s name.24 And on 25 November, the FBI received information that explicitly linked the ‘Chicago Plot’ to the assassination in Dallas. An informant gave information pre- dating the assassination that linked Cuban-Texan businessman Homer Echevarria to the sale of weapons to an anti-Kennedy Cubans in Chicago and quoted Echevarria as 22
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saying that Kennedy’s murder was imminent.25 By December, an anonymous whisper had reached the FBI alleging that Oswald had actually been arrested and appeared in Court in Chicago on 2 November, the day of the ‘plot’ itself.26 A few days after the rumour of Oswald’s arrest, the Warren Commission received an FBI report concerning Vallee and his time in the US Marine Corps which discussed similarities in Vallee’s and Oswald’s choice of ammunition.27 Lines were being sketched between the Chicago and Tampa ‘plots’ and the eventual murder in Dallas. If these threads had been uncovered by the Warren Commission, they would have given the unmistakable impression of Cuban involvement in a sprawling cross-America assassination plot that got lucky on the third attempt. It would have been curtains for Castro, at the very least. Oswald’s Nixie parcel was one loose end that, when tugged at, would have unraveled an assassination conspiracy on a national scale. However, as Warren Commission counsel J Lee Rankin told frustrated staffers: ‘We’re supposed to be closing doors, not opening them.’
25
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Paedo Files: a look at the UK Establishment child abuse network
Tim Wilkinson
1: Conserving the Conservatives On 24 October 2012, the Labour MP Tom Watson asked Prime Minister David Cameron about a paedophile ring centred on the Prime Minister's office at Number 10 Downing Street. Visibly discomfited, Cameron first affected not to know which former prime minister Watson might be referring to, then issued a bland assurance that the matter would be looked into. The allegations to which Watson referred do not fall in any grey area. They involve coercive, forcible and sadistic sexual abuse of unambiguously underage children trafficked from children's homes around the UK. The accused are not social outsiders or ordinary families who might find themselves railroaded or caught up in some witch-hunt; quite the opposite. Among those under suspicion are judges, civil servants, right-wing politicians, foreign and domestic diplomats, and other official VIPs. Police, judges, politicians, officials and security agencies appear to have been involved in the cover-up. There is little appetite for any rigourous inquisition: working police officers fear for their jobs and the media are complicit, gagged or scared of libel actions. This is no spurious moral panic drummed up by a hostile press on the word of gold-diggers, cranks or fantasists. It is a serious matter, and those seeking to investigate face an uphill struggle. Cameron himself had in 2002 sat on a Parliamentary committee investigating supposedly over-zealous investigations into child abuse. Journalist David Rose,had volunteered to that inquiry: ‘I think one idea which I would like very much to plant in
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the minds of the committee is this: in none of these cases, in no example of these 90-odd investigations has a so-called paedophile ring ever come to light. There were no paedophile rings in care homes and similar institutions in this country.’1 Cameron later took up this point, referring back to Rose. In a line of questioning addressed to senior police officer Terence Grange, he raised the incongruous question: ‘Can you confirm whether or not you have unearthed any evidence of a paedophile ring during these investigations? It was put to us by the Observer journalist [Rose] who did the Panorama programme that no-one had found a paedophile ring in their investigations.’2 Grange responded: ‘I think that is true. The paedophile ring is probably a media hype, if I may say so. The forces were actually investigating allegations of physical or sexual abuse made by individuals, and it spread. No-one has raised the issue with me that they have found a paedophile ring, and I am defining a paedophile ring as a group of people who work in one place or, the suggestion was last year, move from place to place conducting their sexual abuses. I do not think anyone has found that and I doubt that it existed.’ The definition of ‘paedophile ring’ here is an odd one, since most of the outstanding allegations involve children being taken out of children’s homes to be abused elsewhere. Grange, now dead, subsequently resigned his post while under investigation for failing to investigate a judge accused
1
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of child abuse. Cameron then asked the panel of police witnesses another loaded and leading question: ‘Last week we had the solicitors who were involved in one set of compensation cases, and they referred to the Paedophile Information Exchange, and they said they thought there was evidence of a paedophile ring. Do the police experts we have here all share that view that no ring has been uncovered?’ One officer replied: ‘Certainly during our inquiries, which have been going on for over eight years now, we have never actually found evidence to show networking between offenders.’ This and the reply from Grange make it clear that the focus, as with so many other investigations, was on low-level employees, and not on police or senior child protection officials like Peter Righton, who was a prolific child abuser and founding member of the Paedophile Information Exchange. Given that such higher-level involvement was never properly investigated, it is no surprise that 'networking’ between low- level offenders was not discovered. The Home Affairs Committee investigation and report helped to cement the idea that paedophile rings were a matter of ill-informed popular hysteria. This assumption is one of the most powerful deterrents to serious consideration of these matters among influential sections of the public. It both reinforces and appeals to the supercilious anti-populism of the comfortable classes. Slick, cultish, pseudo-left website Spiked exemplifies this attitude.3 The Spiked orthodoxy finds ‘moral panics’, ‘conspiracy theories’ and ‘anti-science attitudes’ wherever criticism of the rich and powerful is voiced. Most of the claque of regular Spiked contributors have no credentials beyond the vicious circle of mutual support they provide one another, amplified by an echo-chamber of proliferating think-tanks, 3 Not to be confused with another ‘Spiked’, the short-lived successor to the scurrilous 1990s UK magazine Scallywag, which first aired some aspects of the current scandal.
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publications and discussion groups. Barbara Hewson is an exception. A member of the Bar, her word carries some independent weight. She has produced a number of Spiked articles on the topic of child abuse. One specimen, ‘Abuse inquiry: built on conspiracy theories?’ will provide a useful foil for discussion.4 There Hewson exemplifies the dismissive attitude Spiked takes to these allegations: ‘The myth of powerful, protected perverts has been around for decades.’
The old ‘old news’ gambit Gossip, and indeed clear evidence of serious child abuse among politicians and the establishment in general has indeed been ‘around for decades’. The former Conservative MP Edwina Currie mentions in her memoirs that Peter Morrison, a fellow Conservative MP and aide to Thatcher, was a ‘noted pederast with a taste for young boys’. She adds that he confessed as much to another senior Conservative MP, Norman Tebbit, and wonders why the Thatcher government would take such a risk. Tebbit, asked whether there was a political cover-up of such matters, replied: ‘I think there may well have been. It was almost unconscious. It was the thing that people did.’ He explained: ‘At that time I think most people would have thought that the establishment, the system, was to be protected and if a few things had gone wrong here and there that it was more important to protect the system.’ Currie has more recently explained in this connection that such matters were met with a ‘culture of sniggering, of giggling and of nudge-nudge, wink-wink’. None of this was discussed in public while Morrison was alive, and he is not necessarily involved in the unambiguous forms of organised child rape that are at the top and centre of this re-emerging scandal. Currie has stated that Morrison’s actions, while certainly illegal at the time, may not have involved children under 16. But who knows? Certainly not the members of the 4 Spiked, 16 July 2014 at
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Conservative Party who were so conspicuously incurious about the exact nature of his activities. It is unlikely that politicians would have spoken so freely about Morrison if he were alive or if it were thought likely that investigators might link his personal life with an organised paedophile ring. Still, in the light of this kind of remark, Hewson’s assumption that nothing of concern happened is clearly unwarranted. That is what the current patchwork of disconnected inquiries and police operations is supposed to be investigating. The fact that investigations thus far have at every turn been hampered, overruled, disbanded, censored, smeared is no argument for continuing to ignore these matters – and in any case that is no longer possible. Mutterings about Jimmy Savile, were around for decades, too. Savile’s hobnobbing with royals and his relationship with Margaret Thatcher during her premiership would undoubtedly have meant he was subjected to scrutiny by the Security Service, and that his activities are likely to have been known to them. To award him a knighthood, Thatcher indeed had to overrule ordinary civil servants who objected, perhaps too delicately, that his lifestyle made him an unsuitable candidate. Liberal MP Cyril Smith has – posthumously, like Savile – been exposed as a prolific and sadistic child abuser; and he too was able to keep a lid on his behaviour for decades. Also ‘around for decades’ are the revelations of Colin Wallace, an impeccable witness who, at very considerable cost to himself, brought to light sexual abuse in the Kincora boy’s home in Northern Ireland, involving politicians and protected by the Security Service. Thanks to Wallace, these events received some limited exposure; but while no-one seriously contests them, their implications are not discussed in polite society. It appears that Knox Cunningham, aide to Conservative ex-PM Harold Macmillan, was among a number of well-connected visitors to the home, and that some children were trafficked as far afield as Brighton in the South of England to be abused. Other homes in Northern Ireland, housing children under the age of 16, and other politicians and senior Establishment
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figures have been implicated. Wallace has offered to tell all if granted legal authority to do so.5 Both he and others state that blackmail was part of the purpose of facilitating the abuse.
Your secret is safe with us This is a key issue: it is clear that security services have been heavily involved in these events, and it is equally clear that child sexual abuse is very useful to those who, like them, are in the blackmail business. One obvious example is that of party whips. In 1995, Tim Fortescue, recalling his career as Conservative MP and whip, reported that a member of his party who faced ‘a scandal involving small boys’ would ask the party whips to help hush it up. As Fortescue put it, ‘we would do everything we can because..…if we could get a chap out of trouble then he will do as we ask forever more.’ Others have reported that the Heath government was more pro-active, keeping a ‘dirt book’ of MPs’ indiscretions which could be used to exert pressure. Another intriguing instance in which child abuse blackmail has been suggested relates to the recent inquiry headed by a senior judge from Northern Ireland, Brian Hutton. The inquiry was supposed to investigate the death of David Kelly, a government scientist who leaked details about the falsification of intelligence relating to Iraqi WMD, but whose death ended up being used instead as a vehicle for the Blair government to attack the BBC, who had reported the leak. Among the documents posted on the inquiry’s website was a bizarre and cryptic document concerning child abuse, the presence of which has never been officially explained or even mentioned. In his book about Kelly’s death, Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker refers to rumours about the document: ‘One, actually repeated to me in all seriousness by a very senior BBC executive, was that a leading figure in the Hutton inquiry process was known by the
5 Wallace has been given permission to talk. See
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government to have had a paedophile past in a part of the United Kingdom well away from London. Was the inclusion of this particular document a way of reminding him to “do his duty”?’
Who's panicking? Evidence from Wallace is not easily dismissed as so-called ‘conspiracy theory’, despite Hewson’s portrayal of the affair as a populist ‘moral panic’. There are other highly credible witnesses and investigators who stand to gain nothing from speaking out. One example, whose case has been raised in Parliament to deafening silence, is Stuart Syvret. Syvret was a long- serving member of the government of the small island of Jersey, the independent ‘Peculiar of the Crown’ and playground for rich tax-dodgers. He attempted to publicise allegations of abuse and surrounding corruption. No libel proceedings were ever brought. Instead Google closed down his blog at the request of the Jersey authorities and Syvret was prosecuted and imprisoned under a bizarre construal of Jersey’s data protection law. Another Jersey Senator was forced to resign when it was revealed that he had advised Syvret to commit suicide. Others report that they have been obstructed by police, prosecutors and other powerful persons, and in some cases explicitly threatened. For example, child protection officer Chris Fay, who attempted to take statements from children in connection with the exclusive Elm Guest House child brothel, reports that his house was shot at in his absence, and that he was threatened at gunpoint by officers of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch – a unit with national reach which liaises with the Security Service. Ten days after he raised the issue in the House, Tom Watson MP himself reported ‘warnings from people who should know that my personal safety is imperilled if I dig any deeper’. It is undoubtedly true that in this kind of situation there is a general risk of false accusations and overzealous police action. But the public response to the Savile revelations, and
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the consequent opening of the floodgates, has not had such a character. If anything, the general public seems numbed and rather baffled by what is going on. Of course, if asked, members of the public will express an entirely appropriate disgust at the abuses described. Some feel strongly enough to type out a tweet on their smartphone. But there is little sign that the madness of crowds is driving anything here. There is certainly an increased level of activity by police investigating sexual crimes among the general public and among showbiz celebrities. Thousands of people have been raided for viewing ‘indecent images of children’ on their computers. A succession of ageing celebrities have been investigated for, and some convicted of, child sex abuse. Attention has returned to child abuse in Rotherham and some gruesome allegations have emerged of street-level sexual abuse there. But none of this is being driven by populist sentiment. If anything it is a topdown process, and ultimately the police, press and government are reacting to the inescapable facts of the situation. The revelations about Savile and Smith, and the willingness of two Labour MPs to say the hitherto unsayable, has generated an imperative for action which has a logic of its own. Some of this may amount to displacement activity; some, even, to deliberate misdirection. Something must be done, but there is considerable flexibility as to exactly what that ‘something’ might be. There is always a danger in such circumstances that the innocent may be falsely convicted, or relatively minor offences exaggerated – especially among those who must rely on the rapidly dwindling resources of the Legal Aid Board. But there is another risk: that all this busy activity, for all that much of it is no doubt necessary and long overdue, distracts us from the most serious and most difficult cases of all. Distinctions are becoming subtly blurred: isolated cases of the rape of adults, or of apparently consensual sex with those close to the age of consent, or involving relatively mild forms of sexual touching are all being lumped together in a way which
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may tend to distract from the core allegations of organised trafficking of young children for the purposes of sexual abuse, including violent and sadistic rape and torture. The Conservative Prime Minister disgracefully warned of a ‘gay witch-hunt’: it seems that conflating homosexuality with child abuse is a price worth paying in the effort to smear investigators as homophobes.
Web of intrigue The genuinely powerful have, unsurprisingly, not been subject to police questioning over child abuse allegations – at least not so far as Britain’s opaque censorship apparatus of D- notices and super-injunctions allows us to discover. Both corporate and citizen media have been reticent following the unbelievably inept failed exposé by the BBC’s Newsnight of an unnamed person who was revealed to be long-suspected abuser, the baron Alistair McAlpine. In a convoluted and never adequately explained mix-up, the key witness appeared to have been mistaken as to the full name of his abuser, and rapidly issued a retraction before going to ground. McAlpine died soon afterwards, but had time to issue a carefully worded and superficially watertight rebuttal, accompanied by numerous threats and claims for libel against Twitter users, one of which he took to trial and won, and a libel claim against the BBC (who had not even named him) which the abject corporation settled for £185,000. This was unexpected, since McAlpine had refrained from suing Scallywag magazine for making similar lurid allegations in 1994, though the magazine was prominent enough to be considered worth suing by Conservative Prime Minister John Major when it alleged he was having an affair (we now know that they were right about an affair, but misinformed about the identity of his paramour). In this case, though, Alistair McAlpine seemed sure of his ground. As a result of this strange affair, a chilling effect was exerted on the Twittersphere, the press and broadcast media, while an increasingly cowed BBC descended into yet another spectacular and abject bout of self-flagellation. It is ironic that
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these events, in their effects at any rate, should mirror so closely the straw-man tactic that McAlpine himself had advocated in his book The New Machiavelli, praised by Margaret Thatcher as a ‘shrewd commentary on Machiavelli’s timeless principles of skulduggery’: ‘First, create a situation where you are wrongly accused. Then, at a convenient moment, arrange for the false accusation to be shown to be false beyond all doubt. Those who have made accusations against both the company and its management become discredited. Further accusations will then be treated with great suspicion.’ 6 It is notable, too, that there seems to have been no investigation into who the mysterious abuser, if not Alistair McAlpine, might have been. The evidence leads almost ineluctably to the late Alfred ‘Jimmy’ McAlpine, a cousin of Alistair. But the Establishment cannot allow this very obvious angle to be pursued in public. The jealously-guarded official line has always been that no powerful persons have ever been involved in abuse of ‘children in care’; such abuse has always been presented as limited to staff members operating in isolation. The bizarre figure of Jimmy Savile is supposedly an anomalous exception, and the right-wing press has sought to blame his decades-long impunity solely on the National Health Service and the BBC – both, conveniently enough, much-loved public sector institutions, and as such prime targets for attack by the Right. Yet the cat remains out of the bag. The available information all points to the existence of a powerful and well- protected paedophile network in the UK which preyed on the most vulnerable children in society. It is clear that some in the Conservative Party are deeply concerned about the allegations. Simon Danczuk, one of the two Labour MPs who have been instrumental in bringing awareness of these matters out of the shadows, reports that the day before he was due to give evidence on the matter he was accosted by a Conservative MP who had never spoken to him before.
6 London: Wiley, new edition, 1999, p. 176.
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‘He warned me to think very carefully about what I was going to say the next day before the Home Affairs Select Committee when I’d be answering questions on child abuse. “I hear you’re about to challenge Lord Brittan about when he knew about child sex abuse,” he said. “It wouldn’t be a wise move”, he advised me. “It was all put to bed a long time ago.” He warned me I could even be responsible for his death. We looked at each other in silence for a second. I knew straight away he wasn’t telling me this out of concern for the man’s welfare. There was no compassion in his voice.’ The question of whether such activities continue remains almost entirely unasked. It is seemingly supposed that the demise of the Conservative government of the 80s and 90s saw an end to them. Nonetheless, thanks to Labour politicians, the current resurgence of interest in a previously slow-burning scandal of organised child abuse at the very top of the British Establishment is finally getting the public and – to some extent – official attention it merits. A bewildering array of inquiries and police operations has been sparked, but the Conservative-led UK government resisted calls for an overarching public inquiry into the affair. Initially it announced a grudgingly-convened inquiry into the general issue of institutional failures to protect children. This was a carefully chosen brief, but if sufficient scrutiny is applied, it could have been forced to address, at least nominally, the central allegations of organised abuse in high places. The first choice as chair was the baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss. She found herself in a conflict of interest (it was clear that the investigation would be called upon to inquire into the actions of her deceased brother), and when the public and press proved persistent in their challenges, she had to go. The inquiry was then to have been chaired by Fiona Woolf, a ranking member of the Establishment by virtue of her position as Lord Mayor of the confusingly-named City of London, the enclave of transnational bankers that lurks, like
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some godless Vatican, in the centre of London. But her friendly relationship with the former Conservative Home Secretary and European Commissioner, the late Leon Brittan, who plays a part of unknown scope in the allegations to be investigated, gave rise to a conflict of interest. Woolf was a neighbour of Brittan and his wife, whom she sponsored for a charity ‘fun run’ with a friendly ‘good luck’ message. She had been a colleague of each of the Brittans in a number of capacities, official and honorary. Pressure on Woolf mounted and eventually the Prime Minister stated that she had his ‘full confidence’. Experience suggested that once it is found necessary to assert this a resignation would not be far behind. So it proved and she duly resigned at the end of October 2014. A third chair was appointed, New Zealand judge Lowell Goddard, and a new inquiry began with these terms of reference: ‘To consider the extent to which State and non-State institutions have failed in their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse and exploitation; to consider the extent to which those failings have since been addressed; to identify further action needed to address any failings identified; and to publish a report with recommendations.’ The new inquiry, ‘will be a statutory inquiry established under the 2005 Inquiries Act. Unlike the previous panel inquiry it will have powers to compel the attendance of witnesses and the production of evidence by institutions and individuals. Justice Goddard and her legal advisers will be able to review open and classified sources. This new inquiry will therefore have all the powers it needs to penetrate deeply into the institutions that have failed children in the past, and to identify those institutions that are reportedly continuing to fail children today.’ 7 The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord 7
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Bates) told the House of Lords: ‘There are, however, good reasons for confining the inquiry’s scope to England and Wales. The Hart inquiry in Northern Ireland8 and the Oldham inquiry in Jersey are already underway, while the Scottish Government have announced their own inquiry into child abuse, but I shall discuss this with the new chairman. In the event that the geographical scope remains the same ...... I wish once more to reassure the House that the Official Secrets Act will not be a bar to giving evidence to this inquiry.’ 9 The mainland UK inquiry led by Lowell Goddard will say Kincora et al is the purview of the Hart inquiry in Northern Ireland inquiry.10 But that inquiry will not have the same powers as that on the mainland UK – its remit to compel the appearance of people and documents extends only to Northern Ireland – and thus the state’s attempt to conceal the Northern Ireland events continues.11 And it remains to be seen if ‘State and non-State institutions’ in the terms of reference will extend to businesses such as the Elm House Guesthouse and informal networks.
2: Conflicts of interest In recent decades commercial influence has seeped into every area of public life, eroding the significance of the crucial concept of conflict of interest. Politicians, civil servants and influential advisors move unimpeded through the ‘revolving door’ between industry and officialdom, or operate on both sides at once. Journalists routinely provide plugs and recommendations in exchange for money or other benefits. The bar for establishing a conflict has, where possible, been raised so as to require proven bias. Since neither the person 8 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk subject to the conflict nor their colleagues are likely explicitly to accept that actual bias is in the offing, we increasingly hear that a conflict of interest is merely ‘apparent’, and thus may be ignored. The great and the good close ranks to salute the unquestionable integrity of such ‘eminent’ characters, while media commentators mostly prefer not to rock the boat. So it was with Butler-Sloss and Woolf. Barrister Barbara Hewson’s article, cited above, refers dismissively to Woolf’s ‘alleged’ conflict of interest. Hewson did not deny that Woolf is on friendly terms with the Brittans. To speak of an ‘alleged’ or ‘apparent’ conflict of interest, then, is absurd. Conflict of interest is a procedural concept: it does not depend on demonstrating any actually operative bias. In fact it is precisely to avoid the difficulty and embarrassment involved in anticipating or proving corruption or subconscious prejudice that the concept has come to play the role it does. The legal maxim that no-one may judge his own case does not amount to the assertion that all judges are corrupt: it recognises that there is always some potential for illicit bias in the exercise of official duties, and simply seeks to avoid situations in which such bias may arise or appear to arise. To identify whether a person is subject to a conflict of interest, we compare two things: the potential influence of their professional decisions and actions, and the range of their interests. If the two overlap, there is a conflict of interest. Interests are defined on an objective basis, informed by a general understanding of human behaviour. Such interests include the possibility of financial gain, and, as in these cases, the avoidance of potential damage to the reputation of a family member or friend. Conflict of opinion While dismissive of Butler-Sloss’s and Woolf’s conflicts of interest, Hewson did suggest that her ideological opponent the National Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), ‘which’, she said, was ‘effectively leading the first investigation’, was far more ‘conflicted’ than Butler Sloss. Because the NSPCC campaigns on issues relating to child Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk welfare, it too – or rather its head, Peter Wanless – is ‘conflicted’ in dealing with one of the many disconnected inquiries into these issues. Even allowing that Wanless is anything more than a careerist ‘safe pair of hands’, this accusation is doubly inapt. When an official inquiry is made into the powerful and well- connected, the primary risk is of a false negative, rather than a false positive. A quietist chairperson can exclude or ignore testimony; an overzealous one is not able to conjure extra evidence out of thin air. An unjustified positive finding would be very hard to put forward. Extraordinary scrutiny would be applied; grounds would have to be given; a heavy burden of proof would be imposed. By contrast, common sense and experience both tell us that a report may exonerate the powerful in spite of the evidence actually heard. No matter how loud and well- justified, cries of ‘whitewash’ do not form part of the official record. More importantly, a normative belief is not an interest. Hewson did not make this clear, but she was not here talking about a conflict of interest, but instead the murkier issue of apparent bias. She did not make clear what stance espoused by Wanless might have tended to disqualify him from chairing the inquiry. Presumably the idea is not just that ‘balance’ requires that we find someone neutral between the interests of vulnerable children and those who seek to dominate and abuse them. The interest of justice The appeal to personal opinion as a disqualifying factor was notably on show in 1999, for example, when a panel in the highest public British court, then known as the Law Lords, adjudged another of their number, Leonard Hoffmann, to be subject to a conflict of interest in finding that Augusto Pinochet, the former president of Chile, should be extradited. The finding was based on Hoffman’s connections to Amnesty International. While the panel accepted that there was no precedent for treating such connections as a disqualifying Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘interest’, they decided, with little substantive argumentation, to treat them as such. The panel was thus able to disqualify Hoffman automatically, without having to make and substantiate an accusation of illicit bias. One of their number, Brian Hutton, nominally joined the unanimous concurrence with the panel’s leading judgement, but was willing to go further. Rather than discreetly nodding in the direction of a fictional objective interest, he preferred to enunciate a more sweeping doctrine: ‘I am of the opinion that there could be cases where the interest of the judge in the subject matter of the proceedings arising from his strong commitment to some cause or belief or his association with a person or body involved in the proceedings could shake public confidence in the administration of justice as much as a shareholding (which might be small) in a public company involved in the litigation.’ The only point of introducing the phrase here italicised is to assert that Hoffman’s opinions about justice and international law could be treated as an automatically disqualifying ‘interest’. Hutton’s statements to this effect did not however form the basis of the panel’s judgement, and are at the very least eccentric by the usual standards of natural justice. This is perhaps even clearer when one recalls that the opinion in question was that, in the words of the Nuremberg tribunal: ‘The principle of international law which, under certain circumstances, protects the representatives of a state cannot be applied to acts condemned as criminal by international law.’ There is another notable case in which conflict of interest principles have been artificially tightened, against the prevailing trend towards laxity. In 1996, the Belgian investigating judge Jean-Marc Connerotte was removed from an investigation into the Marc Dutroux affair. Prejudiced against murder? Dutroux was found to have a well-designed secret dungeon in his basement, in which he had held captive two abducted Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk children whose bodies he buried at another of his properties. An accomplice reported that the girls had been kidnapped to order. The investigation led to a businessman and regular face at sex parties, Jean Michel Nihoul. A witness, Regina Louf, implicated Dutroux and Nihoul in organised sadistic child abuse involving blackmail and large sums of money. She gave detailed and checkable testimony to police describing the involvement of judges, a prominent banker and a top politician. The case featured threats to judges, witnesses dropping like flies, grotesque smear campaigns against witnesses and the removal of investigators. Nihoul openly boasted to journalists that he was ‘the monster of Belgium’ but had impunity because he had information on too many politicians and other prominent figures. Dutroux himself claimed that highly-placed individuals were complicit in his crimes. Connerotte was the only judge who made much progress in investigating the matter. He was removed when he was found to have a conflict of interest on the grounds that he had attended a fund-raising dinner in support of known victims’ families. Sympathising with the families of children known to have died does not, of course, imply any prejudice as to the question of who killed them. Apparently such sympathy was enough to generate a ‘conflict of interest’. With Connerotte gone, the investigation stalled. Two years later, in 1998, a government inquiry announced that Dutroux had no accomplices in high places. The case was paralysed for another six years before Dutroux was eventually brought to trial in the matter, along with three other accused, including Nihoul, who alone escaped conviction when the jury were unable to reach a verdict on the evidence made available. In stark contrast to these instances, Woolf’s and Butler- Sloss’s conflicts of interest were initially indulged by the authorities and supporters such as Hewson. The natural assumption is that the authorities were seeking someone who will be predisposed to find that the allegations are without substance. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Get-out clause There is also a further possibility, which has no doubt occurred to others besides myself. In the Pinochet case, the lead opinion blandly explained: ‘It appears that neither Senator Pinochet nor (save to a very limited extent) his legal advisers were aware of any connection between Lord Hoffmann and AI [Amnesty International] until after the judgment was given on 25 November. Two members of the legal team recalled that they had heard rumours that Lord Hoffmann’s wife was connected with AI in some way. During the Newsnight programme on television on 25 November, an allegation to that effect was made by a speaker in Chile.... On 7 December a man anonymously telephoned Senator Pinochet’s solicitors alleging that Lord Hoffmann was a Director of the Amnesty International Charitable Trust....Senator Pinochet’s solicitors informed the Home Secretary of these allegations. On 8 December they received a letter from the solicitors acting for AI dated 7 December....Mr. Alun Jones Q.C. for the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] does not contend that either Senator Pinochet or his legal advisors had any knowledge of Lord Hoffmann’s position as a Director of AICL until receipt of that letter.’ The conflict of interest in the child abuse case has been widely noted. Simon Danczuk, one of the two Labour MPs responsible for bringing this matter to public attention, was ‘dismayed’ by the discovery of Woolf’s conflict, stating that it rendered her position ‘untenable’. He reluctantly capitulated in the face of government intransigence, unwilling to countenance the further delay involved in waiting for the government to choose yet another candidate – with no guarantee that they would not try the same thing. He remarked: ‘I’m beginning to wonder if [Conservative Home Secretary Theresa May] doesn’t want this inquiry to ever really see the light of day.’ Danczuk was too polite to say so, but quite apart from Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the formal conflict of interest, Woolf was inevitably and incorrigibly biased. This is not a spurious ‘bias’ imputed on the basis of principled beliefs or opinion. Quite the opposite: it is the Establishment sense of merited privilege, shorn of all vestige of responsibility by the Thatcherite right. It is exactly the attitude that has led Conservative politicians to close ranks thus far. It is the same sense of entitlement that ends with high-level child-abusers casually playing power games with the bodies and minds of defenceless children. 3: Nothing to Be Done In part 2 I referred to the arguments of the barrister Barbara Hewson. Hewson has another argument, which would bypass all talk of conflict of interest. The inquiry, even were it properly run, would not matter, since it would have little hope of discovering the facts. This is a counsel not so much of despair as of indifference: Hewson, preoccupied as she is with the Spiked doctrine of ‘moral panic’, has already rejected the allegations, as we will see. Unreliable witnesses Drawing on her background in the document-heavy field of commercial law, Hewson makes the remarkable claim that witness testimony is worthless. If accepted by the criminal courts, this principle would surely reduce the conviction rate to a very low order. The claim is based on a judge’s observation that in commercial disputes, little is to be gained from an attempt to evaluate contested and biased recollections of the fine detail of unminuted negotiations, and that in such circumstances it is preferable to cut the Gordian knot of oral contract and rely on documents (underwritten, of course, by testimony as to their provenance). This kind of consideration does not apply in the criminal field of offences against the person, in which cross- examination is more likely to find inconsistencies, a far wider Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk range of corroborating evidence is generally available, the events being recalled are considerably more memorable and less open to interpretation than some oral representation made in the course of business. Criminal courts do not, except in the case of white-collar offences, generally rely heavily on documents. Hewson is correct to point out that documents in these cases tend to disappear or to be confiscated or shredded. That is certainly a problem so far as some aspects of these cases are concerned. However, dossiers directly relating to sexual abuse are likely to contain written testimony, in some cases at second hand. These can be extremely useful as leads in an investigation, and – notably – as evidence that claims were made at an earlier time rather than recently concocted, as in the case of some of Colin Wallace’s allegations. But they would not normally be admitted as evidence in a criminal trial. The underlying reasons for this are that their provenance may not be clear, and – crucially – their content cannot be subjected to cross-examination. While the degradation of evidence over time is undoubtedly a problem, especially when there is any kind of cover-up, Hewson’s particular argument therefore seems misplaced. Destroyed files Hewson’s general stance, too, is misguided. An inquiry into those who are in a position to destroy evidence must take account of their power. Time and again, we find whistleblowers’ credible testimony officially rejected because relevant records that might corroborate it are missing. To take one obvious example: when the Brazilian Jean-Charles De Menezes was shot by heavily armed specialist officers on a London Underground railway carriage in 2005, the Metropolitan police reported a fortuitous absence of CCTV coverage. There was apparently no proper investigation into this claim and how such a total blackout could have occurred, and as a result the police were able to force though their own version of events. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk In such cases, lack of evidence is often more a pretext for quietism than a genuinely insurmountable impasse. To follow Hewson’s lead in using civil litigation as a model, one might reflect on the legal maxim omnia praesumuntur contra spoliatorem – literally ‘all things are presumed against the destroyer of evidence’. When evidence is missing, we should not simply hand the benefit of the doubt to the person or body who disposed of it. To do so is not only to ignore an important piece of circumstantial evidence, but to follow a policy which rewards cover-ups. Inferences based on apparent motive should not, especially in a fact-seeking inquiry, be ignored: if someone appears to have tried to cover up, that is prima facie evidence that they thought they had something to cover up. Even more obviously, the exact circumstances in which evidence is spoilt must be inquired into thoroughly, rather than disregarded as a fait accompli and an evidential dead end. The issue of spoliation came to the fore in 1996, when Clwyd County Council recalled all publicly held copies of the ‘Jillings report’ into child abuse in North Wales children’s homes. The council’s insurer, then administered by Zurich Mutual, had threatened to void the council’s cover on the grounds that describing the abuse would be a ‘a hostage to fortune’ and tantamount to admitting liability. Reporters saw extracts at the time, one of which disclosed that the same insurer had previously brought similar pressure to bear. As the Independent newspaper reported: ‘...fears by the Municipal Mutual of victims launching legal actions helped to ensure that a full report of an earlier investigation into the abuse was never seen by elected councillors, and was confined to a very small group of senior social services personnel.’ Very soon after, Clwyd Council itself was destroyed, split into three smaller councils. Hewson’s self-fulfilling pessimism about destroyed records does not apply in this case: not all copies of the Jillings Report were in fact destroyed, and a very heavily redacted copy was recently released following a Freedom of Information request. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Dodgy dossier? Hewson is unconcerned about spoliation in the case of the Conservative Leon Brittan. As Home Secretary in 1983, he was handed a file of papers by another Conservative MP, Geoffrey Dickens, an outsider in the party viewed as something of an eccentric. That file, relating to child abuse allegations, is now missing. Stressing the very slightly unconventional aspects of Dickens’s character, Hewson hints that his information may have been pure fantasy. In fact the most eccentric of Dickens’s qualities appears to have been his willingness to violate group norms and blow the whistle, as when he asked in the Commons why former high-ranking diplomat and reputed MI6 officer Peter Hayman, a member of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) who had been found to have been in possession of child porn, had escaped prosecution and publicity. Hewson is dismissive: ‘Dickens unfortunately did not keep back-up copies of his fascinating files. Their disappearance has been given a sinister spin, though it is far from clear why the Home Office should have been expected to copy and archive Dickens’ papers for him.’ In fact, Dickens did keep a copy at his family home. Since he reported that his constituency home and London flat were both broken into by someone not looking for valuables, it is perhaps unsurprising that the file should have been destroyed after Dickens died in 1995, apparently at the behest of his wife who considered it too sensitive to keep in the house. The ‘sinister spin’ Hewson refers to was perhaps exemplified by the ex-Director of Public Prosecutions, Kenneth Macdonald, who described the disappearance as ‘alarming’ and called for an inquiry. Hewson does not relate that on his third attempt at recalling the story, Brittan accepted that he had written to Dickens assuring him that ‘I am now able to tell you that, in Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk general terms, the view of the Director of Public Prosecutions is that two of the letters you forwarded could form the basis for inquiries by the police and they are now being passed to the appropriate authorities.’ No further information about those police inquiries has, to my knowledge, come to light. In view of all this, we may certainly agree that disappearing documents are a problem – especially, as noted previously, where there is a cover-up in place. But a sensible approach to such destruction of evidence is to dig deeper, and to make ‘spoliation inferences’ where the facts justify them. An over-reliance on documentary exhibits as the gold standard of evidence not only tends to produce false negatives when spoliation has occurred – it can also give rise to false positives. Words on paper have an almost mystical authority for those who seek comfortable certainties – historians find them especially convenient – but a piece of paper cannot be cross-examined. Where there are any grounds for doubt, a document’s provenance, integrity and authorship must be subjected to rigourous forensic examination before its content may be relied upon as fact. Hewson suggests that eyewitness testimony is almost worthless by comparison to documentary exhibits, because it is a potentially inaccurate record, subject to falsification and degradation over time. But she then goes on to dismiss the possibility of using documents in this case, because they have ‘disappeared’! She is wrong on both counts. Not only are there many credible witnesses, not limited to supposed victims of abuse, making consistent, long-standing allegations capable of corroboration, but not all documents have disappeared; and of those that have, the circumstances of their disappearance can help to establish a cover-up and thus complicity. Is the ‘myth’ true? Hewson, though, does not countenance even the possibility of a cover-up, since it seems she has already decided that there is nothing to cover up. Her article’s subtitle reads: ‘The myth of powerful, protected perverts has been around for decades’. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk And ‘myth’ here clearly means something entirely untrue. In the text of her article, Hewson asks, rhetorically: ‘All of this sounds shocking, but is it true?’ Rather than address this issue in any direct way, though, she prefers to take a innuendo-laden detour through the cherry orchard of social history: ‘This latest panic rehashes specific aspects of the moral panics that swept Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which Dickens was a major player. As Professor Philip Jenkins shows in Intimate Enemies (1992), exposure of spies like the homosexual Anthony Blunt helped shape a popular image of upper-class perverts [sic] from public schools, where homosexuality was rampant, and whose colleagues concealed their activities. Jenkins called this a powerful weapon in populist rhetoric, used to attack the ruling elite. MPs from Jeremy Thorpe to Harvey Proctor were accused of deviant sexuality [sic] and criminal activity.’ No doubt some people regard anything that might be used to attack the ruling class as ipso facto beyond the pale. The question, though, remains: are they true? Hewson seeks to elicit a blanket, if implicit, ‘no’. But the handful of sneers and smears she offers could deflect only the most incurious and ignorant of readers. Since Hewson brings him up via Jenkins’ plausible-sounding but ultimately irrelevant musings, it is worth noting that it now appears that Anthony Blunt was himself involved in paedophiliac activities connected to the wider network or networks now under investigation, and that he may have been blackmailed on that basis. The ‘latest panic’, as Hewson chooses to frame it, is not, as she suggests, a ‘rehash’. It is unfinished business, which the Conservative Home Secretary has been forced to reopen by the objective facts of the situation, as brought into the open by Labour politicians. The Conservative establishment will try to sweep the central issue under the carpet, but there will be no hiding the elephant-sized lump it makes. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Unknown knowns The internet is awash with relevant material. Predictably, there is a quantity of anti-gay and hyper-conspiratorial ranting. There also appear to be planted smears (for example, a heavily distorted account of a cancelled police investigation into reports of abuse and the discovery of human remains at a children’s home at Haut-de-la-Garenne) and the odd straw- man hoax (a probable instance being certain claims made against Conservative ex-Chancellor Kenneth Clarke), aimed at muddying the waters and discrediting well-founded claims. But none of this can now entirely drown out the trickle of credible accounts of abuse and cover-up, including numerous news stories from mainstream media, notably the Mirror newspaper and Exaro news website, amply supplemented by blogs such as ‘Spotlight On Abuse’, ‘the Needle’ and ‘Desiring Progress’. Still, none of this is enough to bring a full appreciation of the known facts and their clear implications to critical mass among the general public, or to convince those in the chattering class who are too comfortable, too fearful or too corrupt to face the unfolding truth. Will ‘child abuse fatigue’ kick in? Will the cumulative effect of a few high-profile retractions and one or two spectacularly failed investigations combine to slow what at present seems an unstoppable momentum? Will tame inquiries tactfully avert their eyes from members of the elite and from the security and secret services? Quite possibly. If so, though, this will join the list of unknown knowns, facts tacitly and imperfectly understood, which assert themselves as a sense of distrust, sometimes diffuse but always corrosive, in British society. Paedophile panics may well have happened in the past – claims of widespread ritual satanic abuse based on dubiously ‘recovered’ memories would appear to have had this character. But witch-hunts literal or metaphorical tend to arise as the misdirected expression of other anxieties, and are always directed at the relatively powerless. When the officially unarticulated but deeply unsettling facts are real instances of organised child abuse, Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk and the suspected culprits are untouchable, who knows how the resulting societal angst will manifest itself? The British working class is already groaning under the strain of punitive and politically-motivated ‘austerity’ measures. Rioting has flared up across England. The Scots, understandably, have come close to secession from the UK. Mistrust is rife, and multiplied by increasingly desperate infighting between factions of the ruling elite, all seeking to distract from their own misdeeds by exposing those of others. The City of London, under fire as never before, appears to have mounted a diversionary attack on politicians by releasing the shabby details of their expenses claims. The politicians capitalised on the ‘phone hacking’ scandal to attack the press. The Conservative press attempted a stunningly audacious pre-emptive counterattack on Labour politicians by spuriously accusing them of having supported the activities of the Paedophile Information Exchange in the 70s. As a result of all this, the public is beginning to get a sense, albeit hazy and misdirected, of pervasive corruption throughout the ruling institutions of British society. The Conservative government is falling back on the ‘security’ agenda, trying desperately to convince a jaded British public that the civil wars in Iraq and Syria somehow pose a threat to Britain. They hope to rekindle the patriotic fervour of the Falklands war to rescue them, just as in 1983, from the electoral effect of brutal laissez-faire policies. But all they are doing is exacerbating the deep unease in British society. A lid may yet be kept on the establishment child abuse network long enough for attention to wane, but public disquiet will continue to simmer underneath. The ultimate beneficiaries of such pent-up anxiety are, perversely, likely to be the proponents of far-right ideology, in particular the faux- populists of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) whose purposely ill-defined position is tailor-made to capitalise on ill-defined grievances. Amid all this mistrust and doubt, the Conservative Party may yet slip through seemingly unscathed. If so, the stench Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk will linger in the air at Westminster for years to come. Author’s note: This article is a snapshot of a work in progress. The sheer volume of material available means many aspects of the story, in particular recent developments, could not be covered. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The View from the Bridge Robin Ramsay Even Wikipedia..... In August much of the major media, including the BBC, ran a story about the late Cedric Belfrage, claiming he was a Soviet spy, ‘the sixth man’. Christopher Andrew was among those prominently quoted supporting this thesis. The estimable John Simkins published a devastating rebuttal of this, pointing out that Belfrage has been leaking material to the Soviets on instruction from BSC (British Security Co-ordination).1 Simkins included this killer paragraph: ‘If Gordon Corea [of the BBC] and the other journalists working on this story had carried out a simple search for “Cedric Belfrage” on the Net they would have arrived at my fully documented page on Cedric Belfrage and would have found evidence that contradicted the SIS press release. Even the much criticised Wikipedia had a far more accurate account of Belfrage than supplied by Andrew and his media stooges.’ This was punted at various major media outlets but there were no takers. JFK and the unthinkable I finally read David Talbot’s Brothers (2007), about JFK and RFK. Talbot did something interesting: he contacted all the surviving members of the Kennedy network of the sixties – pols of one sort or another, speechwriters, drivers etc., or their wives, ex-wives and children, and asked them: what did you – and what did Robert Kennedy – really think at the time of JFK’s assassination? Almost universally they thought that the Warren Commission was bullshit. 1 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk On whodunit they were uncertain but looked mostly at the anti-Castro Cubans. No-one seems to have thought it might be Johnson behind it, not-a-one. Johnson is entirely missing from this account. Which is odd considering that the Kennedys were trying to destroy Johnson’s career. Intent on generating enough scandal to get Johnson ‘off the ticket’ for the 1964 election, Attorney General Robert had sent a team down to Texas to investigate Billie Sol Estes (one of the Johnson network and a major financial contributor) and his Justice Department was leaking dirt on Johnson’s right-hand man, Bobby Baker, to Life magazine. Yet when JFK was killed in Johnson’s home state and was the obvious beneficiary of the event, not one of them thought that these facts might be connected. My guess would be that Texas was a long way away from Washington in the sixties and while the East Coasters round the Kennedys knew that LBJ was a vulgarian and a boor, definitely not their kind of person – this is the Yankees versus Cowboys thesis in a sense – it just never occurred to anyone that messing with LBJ could have such serious consequences; and it still hadn’t by the time Talbot got round to talking to them in the 2000s.2 The political economy The most surprising thing I have read recently was a talk, ‘Who owns a company?’, given by the Bank of England’s chief economist, Andrew Haldane. In this he compares corporate culture in the Anglo-American world with that of continental Europe and concludes that we should be more like Sweden or Germany where the interests of shareholders are not the only thing of importance. This is his conclusion: ‘Challenges to the shareholder-centric company model are rising, both from within and outside the corporate sector. These criticisms have deep micro-economic roots 2 The one Texan politician who wrote about Johnson in the 1960s, J. Evetts Haley, dropped broad hints that the Johnson network had killed several witnesses in the Billie Sol Estes affair in his A Texan Looks at Lyndon (1964), still available. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk and thick macro-economic branches. Some incremental change is occurring to trim these branches. But it may be time for a more fundamental re-rooting of company law if we are to tackle these problems at source. The stakes – for companies, the economy and wider society – could scarcely be higher.’3 (emphasis added) But none of our major political parties is anywhere near suggesting something as radical as this. The Conservative Party annual conference was noteworthy for a striking piece of nonsense from Prime Minister Cameron claiming that the Conservatives were the now the party of ‘working people’. Many commentators, who really ought to know better by now, took this seriously. The claim is true in one profound but unstated sense: the Conservatives will continue to harass those who are not employed. Thirty years of propaganda against those dependent upon the state has resulted in a public climate hostile to almost all those claiming benefits: the ‘deserving poor’ category has now shrunk enormously. There is a kind of logic behind all this which Cabinet member Jeremy Hunt expressed in his comments during the conference that cuts in tax credits would force the British to work as hard as the Chinese. Or: in a globalised world there is no alternative to the race to the bottom, and the Brits are going to be forced to take shitty, badly paid jobs, just like much of the rest of the world. It remains to be seen how the Conservative government reconciles this with their plans for a minimum ‘living wage’. Keeping on keeping on Jonathan Marshall was first sighted by me in the early 1980s when he published a newsletter called Parapolitics USA.4 A series of books followed, some co-authored with Peter Dale 3 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Scott. He’s still writing. A piece of his, on the barely reported US-sponsored coup in Honduras, appeared recently on the Consortium site.5 Bill Blum has been at it nearly as long and recently he announced in his e-mail bulletin, Anti-Empire Report,6 that he was suspending publication because he was ‘burnt out’. He explained: ‘After more than a dozen years of putting out the report, because US foreign policy keeps repeating itself, with the same lies, I too often find myself repeating the same ideas I’ve expressed before, often in more or less the same words. I also feel the effect of day after day, year after year, intensively reading and seeing images of the human horrors; not just the horrors, but the lies and the stupidity.’ I empathise with some of that. I gave up my column in the Fortean Times precisely because I had begun repeating myself. Occasional contributor to these columns, Bernard Porter, currently has three books out. One is a reissue in the Routledge Revivals series7of his 1989 Plots and Paranoia. The two new ones are British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t and Empire Ways: aspects of British Imperialism, both from I.B. Tauris. The latter is a collection of essays, some of which appeared originally in the London Review of Books. Mike Peters RIP Mike Peters died in June. Mike was a sociologist and a lefty, though of what particular stripe I’m not sure (tendence Groucho, perhaps.) We only met a handful of times.8 He wrote the seminal article about Bilderberg for Lobster 32. Nothing 5 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk better has appeared since. That essay is behind our tiny pay wall (which pays for this site) but a version is on-line at City politics Remember ‘rebalancing the economy’? After the great crash/taxpayer rip-off of 2008 it dawned on some of our politicians that it might be a good thing if the economy’s dependence on the financial sector was reduced; which meant, in effect, expanding the manufacturing sector. Prime minister Cameron talked of this in 2010,9 was still talking about in 2015,10 but nothing happened. Tony Burke, assistant general secretary of Unite, wrote in January 2015 that ‘Osborne and Cameron’s promised rebalancing of the economy in favour of manufacturing has long disappeared in the rear view mirror.’ The appointment of Sajid Javid as Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills in May 2015 tells us all we need to know about the government’s intentions. For Javid was one of the architects of the 2008 crash, one of the clever people creating ‘financial products’ – packaging debt for sale by banks – which caused the problems.11 Given the cconsequences of 2008, you might think that the politics of the City would be front page news. But it’s still regarded as esoteric for the most part, and confined to the business pages. But the game goes on. Martin Wheatley quit as head of the Financial Conduct Authority12 at the beginning of August. The report of this in the Financial Times noted that he resigned 9 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘after being told by George Osborne that he would not renew his contract when it expires in March....The move comes a month after Mr Osborne, the chancellor, unveiled a “new settlement” with the City of London...... [Wheatley] did not always have the confidence of government officials, who have privately urged regulators to take a lighter approach as the economy improves and banker-bashing falls out of favour. Some industry executives, meanwhile, viewed him as remote and unhelpful and complained to senior Conservative politicians about his consumer-champion agenda.’ 13 The FT could hardly be plainer: the financial crisis is over, so its back to business as usual; Wheatley was taking his job too seriously and had to go. But what’s this ‘new settlement’ between the City and the government referred to by Osborne? It comes from his Mansion House speech this year. Each year at the Mansion House Chancellors give a speech in which they tell the City what they’re going to do for them. The key paragraphs from Osborne were these: ‘We have been seeking to resolve that British dilemma of being a host for global finance without exposing our taxpayers again to the calamitous cost of financial firms failing. I believe that in restoring the Bank of England’s role in the heart of supervision, in ring-fencing retail banking and insisting on much better capitalised firms, we have made enormous progress in solving that dilemma...... Yet one of the greatest threats to our international competitiveness comes from ill-designed and misguided European legislation imposed not just on our financial services industry, but many other industries too.’ 14 For which read: regulators from the European Union are a 13 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk threat to the City. Bottom line: to preserve the City as a world centre of money-laundering, gambling and financial fraud the UK may have to leave the Union. Huh? Did someone say the world of politics is getting complicated? This appeared in the Daily Telegraph.15 ‘Iraq...... The most disgusting abuse of power in a generation and a moral quagmire that never ends. America is attacked by terrorists and so, declares war on a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks, while ignoring an oil rich ally which had everything to do with them. The justification for war is based on some witches’ brew of faulty intelligence, concocted intelligence and ignored good intelligence. Decent people are forced to lie on an international stage. All sensible advice is ignored and rabid neo-con draft dodgers hold sway on military matters. The UK joins this fool’s errand for no good reason. Blood is spilled and treasure is spent. The result is a disaster that was predicted only by Middle Eastern experts, post-conflict planners and several million members of the public...... The banking crisis.....A nice financial counterpoint to Iraq. Virtually destroy the western financial system in the name of greed. Get bailed out by the taxpayers who you’ve been ripping off. And then carry on as if nothing whatsoever has happened. No jail, no meaningful extra regulation, the idea of being too big to fail as much of a joke as it was in 2005. Not even an apology...... But actually what we should be thinking is that a lot of this is what happens what you dismantle regulatory frameworks. This is what happens when you 15 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk let money run riot and you allow industries to police themselves. This is what happens when the rich and powerful are endlessly granted special privileges, celebrated and permitted or even encouraged to place themselves above the law. And this is what happens when ordinary people feel bored by and excluded from politics, largely because their voices matter so little for the reasons above. Effectively, we are all living in Italy under Silvio Berlusconi.’ W[h]ither Labour? I wasn’t going to bother adding my 5p’s worth to the discussion about the Labour Party’s future but then I saw the following quote from Ken Livingstone in a ‘what’s on’ free sheet in Hull. ‘[Thatcher] created today’s housing crisis, she produced the banking crisis, she created the benefits crisis. It was her government that started putting people on incapacity benefits rather than register them as unemployed because the Britain she inherited was broadly at full employment. She decided when she wrote off our manufacturing industry that she could live with two or three million unemployed and the legacy of that, the benefits bill that we are still struggling with today. In actual fact, every real problem we face today is the legacy of the fact she was fundamentally wrong.’16 This is true now and was true in 2008 when Ken said it. Ken may have come from the world of the Trot groupescules17 but he understood British political economy.18 16 They had seen it on the Net, of course. See Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk For a political leader, like Mrs Thatcher, acknowledging error and changing minds is a peculiar problem. A leader attracts followers, or builds a coalition of support, based on two things: policies and prospects of winning. Blair’s coalition of support was based on his prospects of winning: the core group of ‘Blairites’, neo-cons within the parliamentary Labour Party, was never very big.19 Mrs Thatcher’s coalition was based very largely on policies defined by the failure of Edward Heath between 1970 and 74. To her supporters Thatcher promised to attack the British labour movement – ‘the enemy within’ – who had defeated Heath, and ‘cure’ inflation, partly caused by Heath’s attempt to generate growth in the UK economy. When she announced at the annual Conservative Party conference in 1980, ‘You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning’ 20 – it was a promise to maintain the ideological coalition which supported her and not imitate Heath’s ‘u-turn’ in 1972. Since her economic policies were having serious unforeseen negative consequences, rationally she should have been changing her mind; politically she could not do so. Of the Thatcherites, the key group around her in the late 1970s, only Nigel Lawson could be said to have had any economic knowledge. His view of the political economy was that of a former City journalist; and the City was doing splendidly under Thatcher: it was their agenda of deregulation which was being implemented under the rhetoric of ‘freedom’.21 In this country our leading politicians are not required to understand economics, let alone political economy. Polly Toynbee made this comment on the current Labour leadership campaign. 19 It was not as big as the left-wing Campaign group, for example. 20 In a speech written for her by playwright Ronald Miller. Thatcher had no interest in nor knowledge of Britain’s literary culture and did not get the reference to the Christopher Fry play, The Lady’s Not For Burning. 21 A member of Thatcher’s inner policy group, John Hoskyns, is scathing about the economic ignorance at the top of the Tory Party in his Just in Time: Inside the Thatcher Revolution (London: Aurum Press, 2000). Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘[Yvette] Cooper is on the up, her every outing leaving audiences thinking better of her. She even impressed the press gallery last week, the toughest gig of all. This question killed Miliband: did Labour overspending leave Britain vulnerable in the crash? Unlike Kendall, Cooper refuses to concede. It’s not true, she won’t say it and she can say why with a punchy economic explanation poor Miliband never learned.’ 22 Two things struck me about this. Firstly, Toynbee is impressed that Yvette Cooper can actually muster a response to the question, ‘Did Labour overspending leave it vulnerable in the crash?’ I don’t know what Cooper’s ‘punchy economic explanation’ was23 but the fact that something as banal as this is praiseworthy speaks volumes. The Greek finance minister until recently, the economist Yanis Varoufakis, commented that it took ‘the mathematical expertise of a smart eight-year-old’ to work out that imposing austerity on Greece, and thus diminishing further its economy and thus government revenues, was not the way to get it to pay its creditors.24 Dealing with the notion that Labour’s borrowing handicapped it when it came to the great bank bail-out is no more intellectually taxing. On the other hand Labour did borrow too much, and borrowed it expensively – just think of the stupid PFI deals: £54 billion borrowed will become £300 billion repaid by the time they are paid off.25 They also spent lots of the borrowing on dumb computer projects which came to nothing (which, with hindsight, look more like frauds by the computer companies26) and cheap and nasty public buildings (notably 22 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk schools) which will only last 20 years, if that. Blair and Brown should have put up taxes but flunked it; and instead of curtailing public spending moved from tax and spend to borrow and spend. But this was small beer compared to the costs of bailing-out the banks. The second point Toynbee made was that journalists are ‘the toughest gig of all’. Labour politicians of an earlier generation – Healey, Jenkins, Crossman, Crossland; or Livingstone and Benn – had no fear of journalists. That being interviewed by an intellectual lightweight like Jeremy Paxman is regarded as some kind of ordeal says much about the decline in the quality of politicians. But it also reflects the difficulty suggested by the title of one of William Goldman’s memoirs about Hollywood, Which lie did I tell?. Today’s mainstream Labour politicians are not just explaining what they believe, they are also trying to remember the line generated by the most recent focus groups. If they look inauthentic it is because they are – deliberately – inauthentic. Labour went down the wrong road when it chose John Smith as leader of the party in 1992. Smith had been on the steering committee of the Bilderberg group, one of the leading promoters of globalisation. From there we got the careerists, Blair, Brown and their initial followers, of whom Yvette Cooper is the last survivor, who were captured by the Americans and who thought the way to get into office was to copy Bill Clinton’s style – New Democrats, New Labour – and his policies: financialisation and immigration. Essentially, give the bankers their heads and get immigrants in to do the shit-work the white working class won’t do. I hear people say ‘Politics is getting so complicated’. Well yes and no. Marine Le Pen, leader of the French Front National, said a while back that the issue today wasn’t left or right but nationalism or globalisation. Of course left or right is still an issue; but is the world safe in the hands of the global corporations and the 1% who own them? Obviously it isn’t: they will destroy the planet. On a smaller scale everything the Labour Party used to believe in is incompatible with globalisation. So politics is simple in the first instance: see Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk what the global corporations want and support the opposite. You may have to hold your nose sometimes while you do so, given the company from the far right on some issues, but nevertheless I’m with Madame Le Pen and la belle France at that first crucial divide. And so should be the Labour Party. Nixon’s treason: still officially unspeakable In 1968, as that year’s presidential election came into view, President Johnson and those around him learned that Richard Nixon was doing his best to frustrate the Vietnam peace talks then underway in Paris. Nixon was afraid that a peace deal would enable the Democrats to win the presidential election. Never mind thousands of people dying a week: his chances of becoming president were at stake, ffs. So he had Anna Chennault, one of the key members of the ‘China lobby’, talking to the South Vietnamese delegation at the peace talks, promising them a better deal if they dragged their feet during the talks until after the election. Which they duly did. Chennault’s role became known in the Johnson White House – presumably the NSA or CIA had the conference wired for sound – but Johnson did nothing, said nothing.27 And these events are still being suppressed on the Democratic side of American politics. In the LBJ library’s oral history section there is an interview with Cartha Deloach, a senior FBI man of the period, who was that agency’s liaison with President Johnson, in which this exchange takes place. Question: ‘There was evidence, though, that Anna Chennault had been urging the South Vietnamese government to balk at coming to the table in Paris. Did you have any insight on that from--?’ Deloach: Well, I did not specifically mention those facts in my previous remarks. You have brought it up and I will say that the President told me, or Walter Jenkins told 27 See Robert Parry’s account at Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk me, I don’t know which one, that Gemstones are forever The first thing I wrote was a critique of an American conspiracy theory called the Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File which was circulating in pamphlet form in the UK in 1976/7.28 Gemstone was the first conspiracy theory I can remember coming across and may mark the beginning of the current age of conspiracy theories. Like all good conspiracy theories, Gemstone is impossible to kill off and interest in Gemstone continues. Shawn Hamilton, for example, has an essay, ‘A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File turns 40’, in which he discusses the background to its appearance.29 Gemstone’s claims were nonsense or uncheckable but exploring them led me into the American studies section of the university library where I began the reading which led eventually to the creation of Lobster. Cold War 3 Russian forces ‘practised invasion of Norway, Finland, Denmark and Sweden’ was the headline in the Telegraph on 26 28 My article is now on-line in the International Times archive at Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk June.30 The Americans are a step ahead: they have been conducting anti-Russian manoeuvres in Poland and Bulgaria and running amphibious landings in the Baltic.31 There have even been reports of American troops in the Ukraine.32 All of which is profoundly depressing but which might just have an upside. If the Cold War – with Russia instead of the Soviet Union – is re-established, the American arms companies, who are driving this, will have less need of the ‘terrorist threat’ their political fronts in America cobbled together in the early 1980s with Israel to justify their huge share of the US tax take; and just maybe the American presence in the Middle East and Africa will diminish. Bin Laden’s bookcase On 20 May the CIA issued what it claims was a list of the books found in the house in which Osama Bin Laden was killed.33 Assuming the list to be genuine, it is a curious collection, with a couple of conspiracy theorist classics – John Coleman and Eustace Mullins – Noam Chomsky, a couple by William Blum and The Taking of America 1-2-3 by Richard Sprague. This last is the weird one, for Sprague’s book, a copy of which I used to own before the last weeding of my shelves, is seriously obscure. Self-published in the late 1970s, this was 30 It might even be true, even though the author of the report on which the headline was based is an old cold warrior named Edward Lucas, now senior vice-president of the Centre for European Policy Analysis. CEPA is part of the current attempt by the Americans to rekindle the Cold War and thus, by amplifying the Russian ‘threat’, sell US weapons to the Central and Eastern European nations which are CEPA’s field of interest. Its website shows that its funding comes mainly from American arms corporations. See Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk $115 on Amazon when I checked recently.34 How did Bin Laden ever come across it? And why that book about the Kennedy assassination? The answer may be that Sprague was one of the few JFK theorists to argue that there was a central body – the power control group he called it – responsible for the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King as well as JFK. As the fundamentalist Islamic mind seems to have difficulty with pluralism, let alone the byzantine complexity of the politics (and parapolitics) of the United States, Bin Laden may have found congenial the thesis that there is a central controlling group beneath the surface chaos. War war Lobster contributor T. J. Coles has put together an anthology of essays about American imperialism and related subjects, Voices for Peace: Leading Scholars and Activists Examine America’s Modern Wars. As well as Messers Chomsky (who is interviewed), Blum and Pilger there are several names I haven’t come across before, several short essays by editor Coles and one by former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney on ‘truth movements’ from JFK’s assassination onwards. Details at Zersetzen Roderick Russell is one of the victims of persecution among the Western ‘democracies’; in his case not by the state but by employees of a company. He calls this persecution/harassment zersetzen, after the Stasi name for it.35 He has now made a video and you can see him and his wife – the faces which go 34 But is free on-line at Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk with the story.36 Also on video, from another point on the same spectrum, is the Swede Robert Naeslund who had the misfortune to be given a brain implant in still officially-denied mind control experiments in the early 1970s.37 A lecture of his – in Swedish with English subtitles – on his experiences and thinking on the subject is now on-line.38 Naeslund has had no more success in persuading the political system and the major media in Sweden to deal with his story than mind control victims (or zersetzen victims) have had here and in the USA. Kincora The Kincora story featured on Channel 4 News on 1 June, Colin Wallace was interviewed at length and a decent selection of photographs from his days in Northern Ireland were shown. Most of the information used and the photographs shown were in Channel 4 News’ office in 1987, when that programme did several pieces on Wallace and his allegations about MI5’s psy-ops projects against British politicians on the centre and left. But in 1987, with Thatcher in her pomp, C4N didn’t feel able to do Wallace’s I-have-told-Mrs Thatcher-all-about-Kincora story at the time. NATO 36 At Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk What is NATO for these days? It has two obvious functions: it provides nice jobs, careers, and perks for a slice of the military of its member states; and it generates weapons sales for (mostly American) weapons corporations. Reuters reported recently that NATO member Poland was about buy the Patriot missiles: ‘Poland strike deals for US Patriot missile systems that could be worth up to $8 billion’ was the subheading to the story.39 To sell weapons, ‘threats’ need to be created and thus the recent and current amplification of the ‘threat from Russia’. Who owes who? John Ward’s blog, The Slog, is consistently interesting and he recently posted a very good short summary of the mire that the British economy is in.40 Inter alia he wrote: ‘When the Conservatives came to power in 2010, the national debt was £900bn. It’s closer to £1.6trillion today...... 80% higher in five years. No matter what any politician tries to tell you, our current woefully negative trading account means that the UK National Debt is as unrepayable as that of Greece. The big difference being that we have far, far more to lose than they do. There is no way further spending cuts can have any effect on that, because the welfare and health bills for government aren’t the real problem. The real problem is an unreformed economy ludicrously over dependent on financial services, and a Conservative administration with almost no commercial experience in its ranks to switch to high-margin manufacturing and retraining of the workforce to make stuff. 39 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The money saved by Osborne was a minute part of even the deficit reduction. In relation to the debt, the best analogy I can offer you is that more expenditure cuts now would be like putting one pipette into the Pacific in an effort to stem rising sea levels. The idea that austerity on the one hand is part of the cure for long- term British commercial and business failure is obscenely infantile.’ Good stuff: but how dependent upon financial services is the British economy? As I have been arguing in these columns since 2008/9, the contribution of the City to the UK economy is difficult to quantify precisely and usually exaggerated. The UK financial sector is apparently (best guesses) 10-12% of the economy; and about half of that is the domestic retail banking/insurance fields. What we think of as ‘the City’, the global financial hub, is about 6% of the GDP. Which is to say about half the size of the British manufacturing sector. It’s less that the UK economy is ‘ludicrously over dependent on financial services’ and more that its politicians have been persuaded that this is true and thus doing something about ‘the City’ is beyond their ambitions. The Green Party, on the other hand, is not intimidated by the gleaming towers of central London and in its manifesto for the 2015 general election offered a selection of proposals, central to which is idea that the creation of money (debt) should become a state function: ‘Move towards creating all national currency through a national monetary authority, answerable to Parliament. The power to create money must be taken out of the hands of private banks.’ 41 As I mentioned in the previous issue, this is being considered by the Icelandic government.42 Debt levels are beginning to worry global capitalism’s 41 The financial journalist Ian Fraser discusses these on his blog at Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk managers. The McKinsey Global Institute recently reported on the rising tide of debt,43 as did one of the arms of Goldman Sachs.44 Many voices warning that we are heading for another great financial crunch. Some banks (and quasi banks such as hedge funds45) with operations in London are becoming apprehensive about the regulations that are being introduced by the European Union; and they are the source of some of the impetus behind the campaign for a British exit from the EU and the talk of London becoming a city-state and detaching itself from the rest of the UK. (Other sections of the City are determined that we should stay in the EU.) The post Snowden world On his website Duncan Campbell tells us something of a big powwow held in May by the Ditchley Foundation on the post- Snowden world: ‘The audience and participants at Ditchley Park, a conference centre near Oxford, included intelligence regulators and human rights specialists from Europe and English speaking countries. They were mixed in with twelve current or past directors or senior staff of Five Eyes intelligence and security agencies, including the German BND, France’s DGSE, Sweden’s sigint agency FRA, Australia’s ASIO and ASIS, Canada’s CSIS and a former Director and a former Director of Intelligence of the CIA, as well as GCHQ and SIS.’46 One of the sessions was co-hosted by Campbell. I wonder how many of those present knew that Duncan Campbell was the Julian Assange and Edward Snowden of the late 1970s and 80s, and that the British state tried (and failed) to convict 43 Debt and (not much) deleveraging at Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk and imprison him.47 An article on The Intercept 48 listed UK attendees: ‘Robert Hannigan, current chief of British surveillance agency GCHQ; Sir David Omand, former GCHQ chief; Sir Malcolm Rifkind, former head of the British parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee; Lord Butler of Brockwell, member of the Intelligence and Security Committee; Dr. Jamie Saunders, director of the National Cybercrime Unit at the National Crime Agency; Sir Mark Waller, Intelligence Services Commissioner; Peter Clarke, former head of Counter Terrorism Command at London’s Metropolitan Police; Baroness Neville-Jones, House of Lords special representative to business on cyber security and member of the joint parliamentary committee on national security strategy; John Spellar, member of parliament; Duncan Campbell, investigative journalist; Gordon Corera, BBC security correspondent; and Professor Timothy Garton Ash, historian and author. Only one MP, and a Labour one at that, John Spellar. But Spellar has always been ‘on-side’ with the Americans, NATO and the British military. Spellar was a member of the Trade Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding which, if it wasn’t one of the CIA’s wedges into the Labour Party, certainly looked like one.49 47 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Is this what failure looks like? Brian Sedgemore 1937–2015 Simon Matthews Brian Sedgemore’s obituaries in the major media were reasonable. The broadsheets were fair-minded and covered his life’s main points without snidery. There were no obvious inaccuracies and, in terms of column inches, they were probably longer than usually accorded to a backbench MP. The accounts were clear that he was independently minded and latterly something of a rogue elephant on the Labour benches. Perhaps they could have paused to reflect on how much he had achieved by the time he was thirty-five: brought up by a single parent on a council estate, he had already served in the RAF, graduated from Oxford, worked in the Civil Service (with Bob Mellish MP at the Ministry of Housing), and been called to the bar and practised as a Criminal Law barrister. He was elected to Wandsworth council when Labour regained control of the authority in 19711 before being selected a year later as Labour prospective parliamentary candidate for the newly created seat of Luton West. How many MPs in 2015 can claim such a background? Rising star Elected MP for Luton West in February 1974, he was quickly seen as a rising left-wing star. He spoke well. He wrote well. Using his experience of working with the mandarins (and watching them slyly undermine Labour ministers), he helped draft the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES), adopted by Tony Benn as a campaigning tool in early 1975. Framed to cast Labour as firmly opposed to the decisions taken by the preceding Conservative government (and of course, by implication, critical of any accommodation with those hinted at 1 Labour won Wandsworth – at that point a pre-Thatcher, pre- gentrified area of London à la Up the Junction – in 1971 and held it until 1978. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk by Wilson, Jenkins, Healey and Callaghan), its central thrust was virulently anti-Heath. Thus the AES recommended that the UK should leave the EEC and also (mistakenly) accused the Conservatives of being the party of increased taxation.2 When the UK voted to stay in EEC in June 1975 the central part of this approach became obsolete. However, the AES remained a prop of left politics, being revived as an alternative by Benn in the summer of 1976 during the negotiations for an IMF loan; and, though defeated again then, alluded to for many years afterwards. Just prior to this, on 14 March 1976, Sedgemore had made his TV debut on the politics show Weekend World, presented by Peter Jay.3 He appeared with Neil Kinnock, whose CV at this point included membership of the Institute of Workers Control and who was regarded by some Labour MPs as ‘the new Nye’.4 Which of the two would get a first footing on the ladder of ministerial office? At this stage (and not alluded to in the obituaries), it was Sedgemore who duly became parliamentary private secretary to Tony Benn at the Department of Energy, an appointment looked at askance by Callaghan who regarded him (but not Kinnock) as trouble; surely an endorsement in reverse if ever there was one. Knowing how the Treasury worked and how the economy functioned on a macro scale was clearly not something regarded as essential in the upper echelons of the Labour Party, certainly post-Wilson. During his time with Benn, and for some while afterwards, Sedgemore wrote an anonymous column for Private Eye on the workings of the City of London. He also looked back at files covering the 1964-70 Labour government, 2 Primarily because of the introduction, by Heath, of VAT. Not because Heath cut the standard rate of income tax. 3 Labour royalty, and married to Jim Callaghan’s daughter. Appointed UK Ambassador to the USA by Callaghan in 1977. His father, Douglas, had been MP for Battersea while Sedgemore was a local councillor in the area and was President of the Board of Trade 1964-1967. 4 Kinnock’s Who’s Who entry for 1975 states that he had published As Nye Said.... Actually the book never appeared and was deleted from subsequent entries after he became Labour Party leader. See London Review of Books 20 September 1984. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk finding clear proof that civil servants had frequently misled ministers. Much of this found its way into his novel Mr Secretary of State (1978), the plot of which revolves around a left-wing Labour politician being comprehensively and covertly undermined by the state. It was readable, up to a point, in the style of George Bernard Shaw, with two-dimensional who spout ideas and theories. Sedgemore, though, was no literary Shavian. Nor did his ministerial career prosper. Callaghan infamously decided against an autumn ’78 election – when he might well have won – and went to the polls in May 1979, duly losing to Margaret Thatcher, and thus ending (although not all saw it like that at the time) an era of high-spending Keynesian interventionism. Sedgemore was one of Callaghan’s casualties, losing his seat in Luton West by 246 votes (despite increasing his own support) to Tory Monday Club member John Carlisle. Financial salvation came via a stint as a researcher at Granada TV while he searched for a new seat. Kinnock, meanwhile, prospered. With trade union connections, friends in the US embassy in London,5 and a safe seat in a ‘traditional Labour heartland’ (features Sedgemore conspicuously lacked throughout his career), Kinnock’s potential was spotted by Callaghan, and, with references to the Institute of Workers Control erased from his CV,6 he became Shadow Spokesman on Education in June 1979, thus commencing his ascent to the parliamentary leadership. Eighteen months later, Sedgemore, helped by his Bennite connection, was selected for Hackney 5 This is in an interview with Carl Dillery, Political/Military Officer, at the U.S. embassy in London, 1973-1976. DILLERY: Take an important case. Thatcher’s current head of loyal opposition, Neil Kinnock, was a junior MP when I was there. Our Labor Party reporting officer, Jack Binns, was a real friend of his. He was a great party guy and would come to all of our parties and talk to all of us. He and Jack were on a first name basis. So Jack became the political counsellor when Kinnock got to be the leader of the Labor (sic) Party. Literally, Binns could call up and have access to him at any time.’ See Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk South and Shoreditch after its sitting Labour MP Ron Brown defected to the Social Democratic Party (SDP).7 With the SDP/Liberal Alliance polling 50% at this point (and leading the polls continuously from October 1981 to April 1982 during which period Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins won by-elections) matters were clearly complicated but most commentators still calculated that Labour would win an election held in 1983-1984. The ‘Broad Left’ in particular were organising to this end, through Ken Livingstone and Ted Knight, in the hope of having the numbers in the Parliamentary Labour Party to allow Benn to oust Labour’s post-1980 leader, Michael Foot. Sedgemore’s selection in Hackney South could be seen in this light.8 Instead of picking up a significant role in a future Labour government, though, he found himself plunged into the whirlpool of London politics, while nationally the war with Argentina rebooted the Conservative vote and saw Thatcher first past the post in June 1983. Opposition Back in the Commons, rather than returning to a ministerial career, Sedgemore found himself in opposition and concentrating on being an exceptionally good constituency MP, while fighting a locally ascendant Liberal Party which had won seven seats on Hackney council a year earlier (an echo of the simultaneous Liberal rise in Tower Hamlets and the election of Simon Hughes in Bermondsey in February 1983). He did his surgeries, responded and instigated correspondence punctiliously, chaired a local housing association committee and knocked out a second novel, Power Failure (1985). At Westminster he was a pragmatic Treasury Select Committee member, but with Labour – arithmetically – out of it for ten to fifteen years, he lost interest in the Tribune Group and developed a strong dislike of Diane Abbott after her election in 7 The Hackney South and Shoreditch CLP had actually decided, in the interests of unity, to reselect Brown, only to be told by Brown at the meeting that he had ‘a little lifeboat’ and was joining the SDP. 8 Anthony Blair was a keen Bennite in Hackney South – a pose he noticeably avoided whilst simultaneously seeking selection in various locations in the North East of England 1980-1983. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Hackney North and Stoke Newington in 1987, considering her to be lazy. Not surprisingly the major media obituaries avoided narrative complications like this. However, it should be noted that although Sedgemore might have set himself apart from the sterilities of the hard left, he was not particularly liked either by the local middle class Labour Party membership (a modest but influential grouping led by Glenys Thornton, Charles Clarke and others), nor by many women members. Matters reached a low point when Power Failure was passed around the constituency General Committee by the Women’s Section with its ‘dirty bits’ underlined (!) Things didn’t improve with time. In the late 80s he was publicly cut and humiliated by Kinnock in the House of Commons and deeply hurt by this. He got reselected in 1985 and 1988 but his early and firm criticisms of well known figures – for example: ‘Gordon Brown is completely mad’ circa 1990 – made to a local membership inclined to loyalty and with no means of judging the comments, puzzled many. In time, though, many turned out to be broadly accurate, particularly his claims made in a local meeting in 1989 that ‘the City of London produces absolutely nothing of value to the wider UK economy’. He was particularly pleased at the progress made locally after 1990 when the leadership of the council ditched the leftist politics of prior years and successfully sought huge inward investment. He was always willing to lobby Michael Heseltine and Sir George Young (among others) and get more money into Hackney. After 1994 the combined attentions of the Livingstone gang and the emerging Blair cult proved trickier to deal with. Roger Warren Evans, a colleague of Glenys Thornton’s, led a serious attempt to deselect him but Sedgemore survived.9 Locally an increasingly nasty battle started between a group of councillors backed by Abbott and Livingstone and the incumbent leadership in Hackney – people who generally had Sedgemore’s support. He backed them again, as did a formal Labour Party enquiry led by Vernon Hince. Facing expulsion in 9 Roger Warren Evans was a colleague of Glenys Thornton at the Institute of Community Studies, and a long time associate of Michael Young Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the summer of 1996, the Abbott/Livingstone–supported faction escalated their media campaign against this by alleging a cover-up of historic child abuse in the borough, claiming, inter alia, that this now involved the General Secretary of the Labour Party Tom Sawyer (due to Sawyer and his officials’ refusal to budge from the findings of their enquiry) and that the failures in the past were due to political correctness toward gay Labour Party members locally; and involved – by implication – many prominent persons who had previously been Labour Party members in the area. The Abbott/ Livingstone–supporting faction were duly expelled and formed their own political grouping, named, at the suggestion of Diane Abbott, Hackney New Labour. The denunciations, and Sedgemore’s noisy defence of himself and his colleagues, continued for the next two years.10 The strange case of Mr Betts Brian Sedgemore was re-elected in May 1997. In the general excitement during and after the Blair landslide the weird goings on in Hackney South and Shoreditch were not accorded any publicity. Perhaps they should have been. Sedgemore was the only official Labour candidate in the UK to have a New Labour candidate run against him. The individual, Terry Betts, described himself in his election address as having been a financial consultant in the City for fifteen years. He was unknown locally and had only moved into the area in October 1995 when he purchased a house in Chart Street N1 with his partner Marcello Manfrini.11 He had no known earlier political affiliations and none subsequently. He had not campaigned on any issues affecting the area prior to announcing his candidacy. He left the UK immediately after polling day to manage – with Manfrini – an upmarket holiday retreat in Tuscany that ‘regularly wins prizes as the best bed and 10 The allegations themselves were that a deceased, gay social worker, Mark Trotter, had been allowed to abuse children because of his local political connections. No proof of this was ever found. 11 Land Registry details and election address statement from Betts. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk breakfast in the world’.12 During the election Betts had an up-to-date Labour Party membership list for the constituency, which he used for a personalised mailing shot explaining his candidacy. Betts also produced an expensively printed eve of poll leaflet, which appeared on the same day as the official Labour Party leaflet in exactly the same style, font and colour (purple); which was odd, given that nobody outside the upper levels of the Labour Party knew about the choice of the colour purple for the final campaign leaflet. Among other things his literature stated that he supported Tony Blair, that ‘we need to maintain our armed forces and our military standing’ and that he was against a federal Europe and a single currency. In short, he was impeccably new Labour, unlike Sedgemore. On polling day Betts polled 2346 votes and saved his deposit. That evening, in the Town Hall assembly rooms where the votes were being counted, he apologised to Sedgemore ‘for what happened today’ – not something a genuine independent candidate would have done. It suggests that Betts didn’t know what he was doing and had probably been asked to run by a third party. Sedgemore denounced Betts and his actions in a House of Commons debate on electoral fraud on 21 May 1997.13 But who asked Betts to run? It looked like an inside job: but was it just another manifestation of chaotic Hackney infighting, or, was there someone high up in the Labour Party who had previously been a member in the area and was desperate to avoid being dragged into a media storm about a gay/political correctness ‘cover-up’ of alleged abuse? 12 See Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The Betts candidacy certainly allowed the Labour Party leadership to adopt a ‘plague on all your houses’ jocularity toward Sedgemore in particular and Hackney generally. Something like: ‘We don’t know who our candidate is in Hackney!’ That is we don’t take Brian Sedgemore seriously – and neither should you. End game Whatever the case, it was pretty clear after May 1997 – if not so beforehand – that Blair and Brown had no use for MP’s like Sedgemore. (Nor even much for centrists like Giles Radice, who, after making some mild suggestions at a Treasury Select Committee that there should be slightly more regulation of the City of London, found himself being phoned up at two am and threatened by Gordon Brown.)14 Times had changed and newly-elected Labour MP’s were now much more conformist than had been the case twenty to thirty years earlier. Sedgemore immediately did himself no favours by deriding the New Labour female intake, referring to them as the Stepford wives. He occupied himself with local struggles and after wide- ranging fraud at the 1998 council elections he reported a number of specimen cases to the police. Two years later the main perpetrators of the fraud were jailed and it was admitted that the 1998 elections in Hackney – where ‘officially’ the council had gone hung – were in fact elections that the Labour Party had won. It was a small victory but one that had the effect of making him valuable to the Labour leadership nationally as a kind of licensed attack dog when the London Mayoralty elections loomed and Ken Livingstone swung into action as an independent candidate. Blair expelled Livingstone from the Labour Party in 2000, but Livingstone won anyway.15 14 This is recorded in the Mullin diaries, and I have had it privately corroborated by a friend. 15 The Livingstone apparatus in 1999-2000 ran almost the same campaign (largely involving the same people) as it had done twenty years earlier when Livingstone was seeking the Brent East CLP nomination and the leadership of the GLC. One of the curiosities of the Kinnock era was that while Kinnock took action against Militant (because they were seen as a threat to Labour in the north) he avoided action against Livingstone. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk A year later Sedgemore announced he had fought his last General Election. His final years in the Commons were largely friendless. He features a couple of times in the diaries of the period (Benn, Mullin), usually in the role of a minor comic commentator.16 After the Iraq war he was increasingly vituperative about Blair and despised the calculations made at the highest level of the Labour Party in 2003-2004 to readmit Livingstone so that opposition to Blair and the New Labour project did not reach a critical threshold. Shortly before polling day in May 2005 he very publicly defected to the Liberal Democrats, being formally welcomed into the party by Charles Kennedy MP. His former colleagues in Hackney, who knew nothing of this beforehand, were stunned. There was no second act, no seat in the Lords, no position on a quango or enquiry; and, curiously, no more writing or journalism. He faded away into retirement. Could he have got further in politics? It is interesting to compare him with Chris Mullin: like Sedgemore, active in the Labour Party as far back as 1970, originally a Bennite and briefly a colleague at Granada. Mullin was offered a minor ministerial position in 1999, surviving in a succession of these until 2005. Reading his account of this now, it seems clear that Mullin was helped by being an MP in the North East, and, by virtue of his well known ‘leftism’, useful perhaps to have around at the lower level of government if only to encourage the troops that Blair and Brown welcomed a broad range of opinion. It’s not clear that Mullin (or others like him) being in government made any difference at all to the political direction taken by Blair and Brown. But Mullin had a bigger dose of loyalty than Sedgemore and could be relied on. Neither Sedgemore nor Mullin were dangerous extremists and today neither look particularly ‘left- wing’. It might be concluded that the loyalty shown by Mullin inhibited him from taking a more critical line earlier, and 16 Example from Benn’s final volume...... Benn: ‘Blair is being perfectly disgraceful. He’s behaving like Mussolini.’ Sedgemore: ‘No he’s not. Mussolini made the trains run on time.’ Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk therefore prevented wider debate.17 Many have said that the left were comprehensively defeated in British electoral politics in 1983 and prior to that in 1979 too. We might argue long and hard about what ‘left’ means in the context of UK politics, but, given what featured in the Labour Party manifestos in 1979 and 1983, this doesn’t seem an unfair conclusion. With Labour now expelled from Scotland and facing ten to fifteen years in opposition, with both Kennedy and Sedgemore dead and the Lib-Dems knocked back from their post-Iraq/Kennedy era peak of sixty- two MPs to a mere eight, are we not seeing something more ominous? The recent decision of the new Conservative government to vigorously pursue allowing only English MPs to vote on laws affecting England (the important stuff) automatically gives Cameron a majority of one hundred and four. It will surely usher in a lengthy era of free market economics, low spending, low taxation and limited public services. London will continue on its path as Europe’s offshore version of Dubai with the rest of the UK resembling Kansas or some other similarly hopeless US midwestern state. For the English Tories all their Christmasses have come – without even the need for legislation to permit this (the new voting arrangements apply once Parliamentary standing orders have been amended by a single majority vote). Should we now say that 2015 saw the centre being comprehensively defeated in UK politics? Is this what failure looks like? 17 Similarly, Ann Clwyd MP, a strong personal friend of Sedgemore’s, held senior Shadow Cabinet positions under Kinnock and Smith from which she was dropped in 1995. Under Blair she proved a useful, loyal and supportive backbencher on the Iraq war (due to her long affinity with the Kurdish people). Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Tittle-Tattle Tom Easton Balls to the wall The Daily Mirror neatly summed up the post-election fate of two of New Labour’s so-called big beasts when its 15 June headline read: ‘Ed Balls has a new job: Ex-shadow chancellor follows David Miliband to America after election defeat’.1 Milband’s job with the International Rescue Committee (see Lobsters passim) earns him a reported annual £300,000 whereas Balls’s one year at Harvard’s Mossavar-Rahmani Business and Government Center is said to be unpaid. But as the defeated former MP for Morley and Outwood received a reported £88,000 golden goodbye from the British taxpayer and then attended the Bilderberg conference in June, it’s safe to assume austerity will not be a worry for the household of he and his MP wife Yvette Cooper, especially after their second-home flipping antics revealed in the expenses scandal.2 Balls and Miliband have returned to their roots in many ways. Both left Oxford to take US scholarships, returning with the neoliberal, neocon attitudes which outfitted them nicely to be spear carriers in the stage army that became New Labour. Miliband went into the think-tank world before No 10 and then the ultra-safe seat of South Shields, deep within New Labour’s North-East redoubt. Balls, with no journalistic background, landed a leader-writer job with the Financial Times before becoming Treasury adviser to Gordon Brown. Then, like Miliband with no experience of electoral politics, he was parachuted into a former mining seat in Yorkshire in 2005 near to the one his wife had similarly been given in 1997. A little due diligence would have revealed that the Normanton constituency was about to be broken up by the Boundary Commission. When it duly was, Balls persuaded his local Wakefield council to seek a 1 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk costly judicial review of the decision, a case supported unsuccessfully by one of his old Oxford dons.3 What came next – and Balls’ subsequent demise – was a classic example of New Labour behaviour and payback, hardly any of it reported in the mainstream media. In a desperate effort to keep Balls in Parliament, the Brown machine forced out Colin Challen, the sitting Labour MP for Morley and Rothwell, to give the favoured son another safe berth, again handily near that of his wife. Challen had lived in the constituency years before becoming its MP in 2001. His solid constituency record, his parliamentary profile on climate change, his previous experience as local councillor and party official, and his Euroscepticism all helped him maintain a healthy five- figure Labour majority in 2005. Balls took some of his former Normanton constituents into the new Morley and Outwood seat, but saw the 2010 majority fall to 1,101. UKIP built its local support strongly in the following years at Labour’s expense and in May 2015 the Conservatives took the seat. It was the first time since before the Second World War that Morley – the core of the constituency – found itself with a Tory MP. Apparently Balls intends to spend part of his latest US sojourn doing some writing. During his first spell at Harvard he did some for Larry Summers, who became President Clinton‘s deregulating Treasury Secretary. Will Balls’ return visit produce an academic analysis of how to switch three second homes and lose two safe seats while only applying a ‘light touch’ to City scams? After Ed: Progress? Balls’ wife Yvette Cooper was quick to launch her leadership campaign following the May Labour defeat, along with Wakefield MP Mary Creagh – two New Labour MPs not forced out of their West Yorkshire seats to provide Brown’s pal with a safe haven in 2010. Creagh has since pulled out of the contest as have Chuka Umanna – in rather farcical circumstances – and Tristram Hunt, who was ubiquitous in the media for weeks after May 7 while never actually being a declared contender. Some good work has been done by Solomon Hughes in the Morning Star on Hunt. He says the protégé of Peter (now Lord) Mandelson is also very close to big New Labour funder David (now 3 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Lord) Sainsbury.4 When Ed Miliband became party leader, Sainsbury stopped funding Labour. But he maintained it for Progress, effectively the party within the party for the remaining New Labour fragment. In so doing the supermarket multimillionaire was repeating his 1988 action when he continued to fund David Owen’s SDP remnant, in which Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee was prominent, after the rest of the Gang of Four followers merged with the Liberal Party. (See Lobsters passim.) Hughes wrote in November 2014: ‘When I went to the Progress rally at the last Labour conference, Tristram Hunt was one of the speakers, where he declared he was “delighted to be with Progress” because “you might be an unaccountable faction dominated by a secretive billionaire, but you are OUR unaccountable faction dominated by a secretive billionaire”. Here were two dozen true words spoken in jest. Hunt’s joke was so close to the bone that the shiny happy people of Progress — this is one of the biggest events on Labour’s fringe — seemed embarrassed into silence. Hunt’s insistence that Progress was “the Praetorian Guard, the Parachute Regiment, the Desert Rats of Labour” also raised few laughs, even though the meeting took place in a Comedy Club at the edge of the Labour conference site. Even joking that Progress is new Labour’s shock troops was a bit too much.’ The Progress strategy board includes Mandelson and Tony Blair’s successor in the Sedgefield constituency, Phil Wilson MP.5 Mandelson’s long-time associate, vice-chair of his Policy Network and frequent Guardian columnist, Patrick Diamond, is a co-opted board member. Former Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) chairman Stephen Twigg MP is president of Progress and the chair, John Woodcock MP, succeeded Blair loyalist John (now Lord) Hutton into the Barrow and Furness seat. Woodcock wrote the foreword to the LFI’s Making the progressive case for Israel.6 Hunt is one of Progress’ vice-chairs along with the post-May 8 figure widely touted as possible leader, the 4 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk neophyte MP for Barnsley, Dan Jarvis.7 That role as bearer of the New Labour torch for leader has apparently now passed to Liz Kendall MP, the former adviser to Patricia Hewitt and inheritor of her Leicester West seat, the one previously held by Greville (now Lord) Janner (see Lobsters passim) who succeeded his father there. The interests of Israel never seem far from Progress’ concerns and Kendall duly received positive coverage in the Jewish Chronicle the week after Labour’s defeat under the headline ‘Labour must now pass the “Israel test”’.8 Dolly and Mandy Two of the founding Progress figures not much mentioned by the organisation these days are Mandelson’s former aide Derek Draper (see Lobsters passim)9 and Liam Byrne. It was Byrne who, as Chief Secretary of the Treasury in 2010, left the ‘no money left’ note to his successor,10 words that have helped Chancellor George Osborne and the Conservative party to frame the assault on Labour’s economic record ever since. Draper’s alma mater, the University of Manchester, was the setting for another electoral defeat for one of those in the neoliberal/neocon network who has dominated much of the politics of the past quarter century. Many of them – from Rupert Murdoch to Paul Wolfowitz – never stood for election, of course. But of those who did, George W Bush needed the help of brother Jeb and the US Supreme Court to get him over the presidential line. And as Christopher Bollyn11 often reminds his audiences, Bush’s Attorney General and author of the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft, actually lost a Senate election to a dead man.12 In this case the loser – third in a field of three for the honorary post of chancellor of the University of Manchester – was Draper’s old friend Mandelson. On 1 April The Guardian’s sister paper, the Manchester Evening News, announced his candidature in glowing terms: 7 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘His appointment would be considered a major coup for the city, with the university at the heart of the strategic vision for Manchester and its position on the science corridor.’13 This was not a view shared by the electorate who put Halle Orchestra music director Sir Mark Elder ahead of Mandelson with poet Lemn Sissay comfortably topping the poll.14 It will be remembered that Mandelson’s previous attempt to obtain popular support – from Labour party activists to secure election to its national executive committee in 1987 – likewise ended in defeat.15 Little wonder then that now Jeremy Corbyn seems to be gathering members’ support for his party leadership bid that the Mandelson/New Labour/Progress rump seem so anxious. Expect more unattributed smear stories in the coming weeks about the non- drinking, non-smoking, allotment-tending, peace campaigning cyclist who is the Labour MP for the non-Granita-dining part of Islington. Sharing a similarly disappointing fate in the general election were two of Mandelson’s younger New Labour Cabinet colleagues of the previous decade. Douglas Alexander was Labour’s 2015 ‘chair of election strategy’ who couldn’t manage in May to defend his 16,000 majority in Paisley and Renfrewshire South. The long-standing member of the British American Project (see Lobsters passim) who was Shadow Foreign Secretary lost to 20-year-old politics student Mhairi Black representing the Scottish National Party (SNP). Alexander, a staunch supporter of Israel,16 shared his fate with former LFI chairman Jim Murphy who had been made leader of Scottish Labour months before in an unsuccessful effort to stem the SNP tide.17 Murphy, a former Defence Secretary, had received £2,000 from an earlier one, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen and himself a BAP founding 13 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk member (see Lobsters passim), for his leadership campaign.18 SNP MP Black graduated from Glasgow University in June with a first-class degree in politics. Unemployed Alexander already has a graduate qualification, earning part of it in the United States where he worked for American politicians. But Murphy, who spent nine years at Strathclyde University laying the foundations of his career through student politics, is yet to graduate. Back to life-long learning perhaps? The boys in blue 1: Cleveland One police force that could do to learn from its past, perhaps, is Cleveland. Its history of corruption has been well documented by many, including former Hartlepool Mail editor Harry Blackwood (Lobsters passim). Since losing his job and journalistic career in 2003 after upsetting his readers’ two local MPs, Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, fitness enthusiast Blackwood has spent more time with his bicycle, regularly making 50-mile excursions from his Co. Durham home. It was on one of these trips last year that he became involved in an incident with a motorist that bizarrely resulted in Blackwood’s prosecution eight months later. His testimony, including that of being assaulted by four Cleveland police officers in Middlesbrough as they forcibly sought to take his DNA sample, proved more convincing to Teesside magistrates court than that of the police. Blackwood was acquitted of assault and threatening behaviour in June, the bench chairman praising Blackwood for his ‘forceful, clear and consistent’ account. He is now considering what steps to take against the Cleveland Police. The case was not widely reported outside the North-East except by Simon Walters, the political editor of The Mail on Sunday.19 Walters had suffered employment difficulties at the hands of New Labour in a previous job and had been supportive of Blackwood when he was getting similar treatment in 2003. Walters jointly authored with Peter Oborne a fine critical biography of Alastair Campbell, an important text for those seeking to rebuild Labour.20 His evidence to the Leveson 18 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Inquiry also makes interesting reading.21 2: South Yorkshire Another force deserving scrutiny is the South Yorkshire Police (SYP) and Home Secretary Theresa May seems to be on their case. Child abuse in Rotherham has marked them out for her special attention as have the revelations from the ongoing Hillsborough inquests at Warrington. Before the summer Parliamentary recess she met members of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign22 after the Independent Police Complaints Commission had a month earlier rejected its call for a public inquiry.23 As David Conn reported in The Guardian,24 May clearly does not see the IPCC decision as closing the door on allegations of police misconduct at the highest level which the commission itself identified as ‘extremely serious’. Of course not all of those should be laid at the door of the SYP as forces from around the country were deployed by the Thatcher government during the 1984-85 miners’ strike. May does not seem unhappy at taking them all on. She has long targeted the Police Federation for criticism25 and her actions in setting up the Pitchford Inquiry26 on police spying and choosing a judge from New Zealand to head the one on child abuse,27 prompt the question ‘why’? Is it that the woman who, as Conservative Chair in 2002, branded hers as being seen as the ‘nasty party’, is on a mission to lead it into purer waters as the next prime minister? Could leadership ambition be one of the reasons for banning the use of water cannons, advocated by potential 21 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk rival Boris Johnson? Or, having reconciled herself to George Osborne winning that contest before 2020, does she now want to go down in history as a reforming Conservative Home Secretary? Grauniadia David Conn is one of The Guardian’s staff who seems to prefer actual reporting on matters outside London to expressing opinions from inside the M25. As well as his excellent work for the paper on Orgreave and Hillsborough, he has a good track record on the sports front, his enthusiasm as a football fan not stopping his regular inspection of the game’s dirty linen.28 In that he differs from many of his London-based colleagues whose efforts to rubbish Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership bid seem to know no bounds. Leading the pack after a YouGov poll put Corbyn ahead of his rivals, was Jonathan Freedland.29 The paper describes him as ‘its executive editor, Opinion, overseeing Comment is Free, editorials and long reads’30 and he is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4, the Jewish Chronicle and The New York Review of Books. At the height of the Charlie Hebdo events in January Freedland wrote in his Guardian column: ‘There were two groups especially shaken by last week’s attacks – journalists and Jews – and I inhabit that small shaded area of the Venn diagram in which the two overlap.’ 31 Can he really believe that? On his own paper ‘that small shaded area’ includes Hadley Freeman, who had already written on Charlie Hebdo, as had Nick Cohen in its sister publication, The Observer. Freedland’s long-time friend and colleague is former deputy editor Ian Katz. Now editing BBC2’s Newsnight, Katz was interviewed for the Guardian editorship earlier this year. Ian Black is the paper’s Middle East editor, having previously been its foreign affairs leader writer and European editor. George Monbiot is one of the paper’s longest-serving columnists following in the earlier footsteps of Melanie Phillips, Alex Brummer and David Aaronovitch. As Professor C E M Joad might have said: ‘It all depends on what you mean by “small shaded area”.’ Monbiot was harsh in 2007 to those raising questions about 28 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk 9/11.32 Among those he criticised as ‘morons’ who believe in ‘magic’ was ‘high priest’ David Ray Griffin, the author of many books on 9/11, all well referenced and, as far as I can tell, posing serious questions to which many, including victims’ families, are still seeking answers. Professor Griffin’s reply33 did not receive quite the same publicity. Matt Campbell’s brother Geoff was one of the Britons who died in the North Tower of the World Trade Centre. Earlier this year Campbell appeared in a Sussex court after refusing to pay his BBC licence fee on the grounds that the broadcaster covered up evidence about 9/11 and so was in violation of antiterrorism legislation.34 Before the hearing, Campbell wrote to Monbiot citing the mounting evidence that the truth about 9/11 has yet to be fully told and asking if the columnist still held to the views he had expressed seven years earlier. Monbiot replied: ‘Hi Matt. Yes I do. I’m sorry that your brother was among the victims. With best wishes, George.’ The Guardian’s long association with Zionism dates back to the early days of both, a story well told in its own 2008 publication of Daphna Baram’s Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel.35 It will be interesting to see if any changes to the paper’s line follow the appointment of new editor-in-chief Katharine Viner.36 With actor Alan Rickman she co-edited for theatre the diaries and writings of Rachel Corrie, the young American peace activist killed by an Israeli Defence Force bulldozer in Gaza in 2003. Interesting, too, to see how much publicity would-be London mayor Tessa Jowell receives now Viner’s predecessor, Alan Rusbridger, has become Principal of Lady Margeret Hall, Oxford. His wife and former Guardian reporter Lindsay Mackie is a great friend of Jowell whose tax lawyer husband and Silvio Berlusconi adviser, David Mills, is reportedly a golfing pal of Rusbridger. 32 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Both couples have nearby Cotswold second homes.37 In the small world that is London metro-politics Mills’s brother, John, is the Labour funder warning of financial and political horrors if Corbyn is elected party leader.38 Blairusconi No longer in Parliament but still with an appetite for public life, the former Prime Minister has resigned from his role as Middle East envoy for the Quartet to land what The Times front-page headlined on 4 June 2015 as ‘Blair lands new role in fight against European extremism’. The Times reported: ‘The former prime minister is to become chairman of the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation (ECTR).....The organisation campaigns for all European countries to adopt laws that criminalise Holocaust denial, to create clearer definitions of constitutes racism and antisemitisim, and to oblige governments to pay for security at synagogues and Jewish schools. Writing in The Times today, Mr Blair and Moshe Kantor, a Russian-born Jewish philanthropist and businessman, say that Europe is at a turning point....According to a recent annual report on global antisemitic incidents by the Kantor Centre at Tel Aviv University, 2014 was one of the worst years in past decade, Mr Blair and Mr Kantor write.’ Mr Kantor, says the report, is chairman of the European Jewish Congress and ‘the main funder of Mr Blair’s new organisation’. ‘Mr Blair replaces a former Polish president, chairing a board that includes José Maria Aznar, the former Spanish prime minister. He will not be paid personally for the role, which involves attending several functions a year, but his faith foundation is to receive an annual donation. His office refused to disclose the amount.’ 37 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Israel lobby news Still in Parliament but no longer in the Cabinet is Tory former chairman Eric Pickles whose last act as Communities Secretary was to appoint additional commissioners to run Tower Hamlets. He has two new jobs: ‘anti-corruption tsar’ and chairman of the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI).39 In his previous post Pickles closed down the anti-corruption unit along with the rest of the Audit Commission. Pickles’s former Liberal Democrat Coalition government partner Nick Clegg has lost not only most of his LibDem MPs but also his former head of communications. According to the Jewish Chronicle, James Sorene ‘will lead BICOM [Britain Israel Communications & Research Centre] after 15 years in senior positions at the Cabinet Office, Home Office and Department of Health....Previously head of public affairs at the Israeli embassy in London, Mr Sorene has experience of working on Middle East issues.’40 Perhaps it’s not too surprising that Baroness Tonge resigned the LibDem whip after speaking out on Palestine.41 Councillors newly elected in May have received invitations to join the Local Government Friends of Israel network from Rachel Kaye who describes herself as ‘Campaign Executive, We Believe in Israel’. She tells the invitees: ‘Local Government Friends of Israel serves to: Combat attempts to boycott and delegitimise Israel in local authorities; educate and inform councillors about Israel; build links between British and Israeli local authorities, and advocate for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict....We attended the Local Government Association Conference last week where we formally launched the Local Government Friends of Israel network. We had already been recruiting supporters to this network, so it starts with 450 councillors from 200 local authorities. At the Conference, we had a stall in the exhibition area and hosted a reception. Our reception was attended by 50 delegates who were addressed by Luke Akehurst director of We Believe in Israel, 39 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Claudia Mendoza head of policy and research at the Jewish Leadership Council, and Marie Van Der Zyl Vice President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.’ Akehurst is a former Hackney councillor,42 and like many of the New Labour praetorian guard, was a student politician before joining Mandelson’s one-time press deputy at the Labour party, Colin Byrne, at Weber Shandwick, the international PR and lobbying firm.43 Spooks and hacks Will the time ever come when a British editor comes clean and tells us of his paper’s association with foreign intelligence services – or even British ones, come to that? Richard Keeble has surveyed some of what is known about such British links44 but nothing has emerged as explicit as the revelations of Udo Ulfkotte. The former editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s most influential papers, was also once an adviser to the government of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.45 Following the publication of his 2014 book Bought Journalists46 (currently available only in German) he said that he accepted news stories written and given to him by the CIA and published them under his own name. Ulfkotte said he gathered the aim of much of the deception was to drive nations toward war; that corruption of journalists and major news outlets by the CIA is routine, accepted, and widespread in the western media; and that journalists who do not comply either cannot get jobs at any news organization, or find their careers cut short. I saw little in the British press about Ulfkotte’s allegations. Is this evidence of similar corruption here or simply the nodding acquiescence of the parochial and none too curious inhabitants of the Westminster Village? 42 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The Gloucester Horror Garrick Alder The importance of a ‘clean’ genetic history in dynastic politics throughout history cannot be overstated. Apart from wealth and power, a viable heir must be healthy and presentable – at least initially. Perhaps this is even truer in the age of mass communication. According to history, Thomas Lyon-Bowes – granduncle to the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother – was born and died on 21 October 1821. According to legend, however, he was born deformed and immediately baptised as Christian but unexpectedly survived the antenatal period. His noble parents are said to have pretended Thomas had died, while keeping him hidden from view in a secret room within the walls of the family seat, Glamis Castle, Scotland. Various versions of the legend describe Thomas as ‘half-man, half-frog’, or barrel- chested, with toy-like arms and legs. These descriptions of ‘the Monster of Glamis’ can be dismissed as inherently implausible. But again, according to history, there really was a secret room in Glamis Castle. In 1968, the 16th Earl Strathmore told royal biographer Michael Thornton that the chamber had been accessible via a hidden door from the castle’s map room but that he had had it bricked-up.1 The Earl did not confirm the existence of the ‘monster’ to Mr Thornton – but perhaps tellingly, he declined to deny it. Also according to history, Thomas’s lifetime of captivity would not have been the only time a genetic abnormality had been concealed for decades by the Strathmore dynasty. Well into the 20th century, the Queen Mother’s family falsely declared two of her nieces dead in Burke’s Peerage. Catherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon were in fact secretly committed to a 1 An admission recorded in Mr Thornton’s exhaustive Royal Feud: The Duchess of Windsor and the Queen Mother (Michael Joseph, 1985) Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk mental institution, on account of their severe learning disabilities, eventually dying for real during the 1980s.2 This terrible deception can only give a degree of plausibility to the legend of the Glamis Monster: the freakish descriptions of ‘Thomas’, who would have been the rightful Earl Strathmore, could be folkloric embellishments on a similar disability or even something as commonplace as Down’s Syndrome – not at all understood in late Hanoverian times and certainly not desirable in the reputation of a dynastic bloodline. To this day a section of the ramparts of Glamis Castle, on which the ‘monster’ is said to have been exercised under cover of night, is known as ‘the Mad Earl's Walk’. At around the same time that Michael Thornton visited Glamis, another member of the Royal Family was becoming very concerned about the health of a family member. In August that year, the Duchess of Gloucester (later Princess Alice, deceased 2004) asked physician Henry Bellringer to examine her son, Prince William of Gloucester, born 1941, who was then seventh in line to the throne.3 The prince had been suffering from an unpleasant skin condition for the preceding five years, the onset of which had itself been preceded by a feverish and nauseous condition over the Christmas and New Year period of 1964-65. Since at the time of this acute affliction the prince had recently arrived in Lagos, Nigeria, to take up a diplomatic position, Malaria was initially suspected. However, after the acute condition had subsided, the prince was plagued with ‘quite large’ blisters that appeared continuously on his hands, chest and face. These sores took a long time to heal and left conspicuous scars. The patient also reported that his urine was sometimes darkly discoloured. Since the prince was about to depart for another diplomatic role in Japan, Dr Bellringer made a tentative diagnosis of porphyria and arranged to see him on 2 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk his return to the UK. In August 1970, Dr Bellringer was finally able to examine Prince William again. In the intervening two years the prince had accumulated many more scars and blemishes and at the time of the appointment also had many active and fluid-filled blisters on his hands and face. A second opinion was sought from a consultant at Addenbrookes later that year and blood tests confirmed the two opinions: Dr Bellringer eventually recorded in his notes that ‘there can be scarcely any doubt that this is a case of porphyria’.4 Porphyria is an umbrella term for a family of conditions known as the porphyrias, the genetic description of which need not detain us, except to say briefly that porphyrins are required by the body to produce heme, the oxygen-binding agent in human blood. Porphyrin abnormalities fall into two types: the acute variety affects the nervous system producing symptoms such as unpredictable mental disturbances, muscular weakness and stomach problems; the cutaneous variety blights the victim with gradual skin and tissue destruction. The porphyrias were only described in the late 19th century, meaning that medical science has in historical terms only recently been able to address them adequately. The telltale sign of all the porphyrias is discoloured urine, classically purple but sometimes tending to either the red or blue components of the shade. Prince William of Gloucester was twice cursed – his diagnosis was variegate porphyria, meaning he suffered both acute and cutaneous varieties. Advanced cutaneous porphyria is a horrific disease. Accelerated by sunlight, exposed areas of the sufferer’s flesh gradually necrotise, leaving the victim resembling an animated but semi-decayed corpse. Digits are reduced to stumps and among other effects, the nose, lips, eyelids and ears gradually disintegrate. In 1985, an academic famously (and persuasively) theorised that cutaneous porphyria is the 4 This summary of Prince William’s condition, treatment and diagnosis is condensed from pages 213-219 of Purple Secret: Genes, 'Madness' and the Royal Houses of Europe, by Rohl, Warren and Hunt (Bantam Press, 1998), which remains the key text for those interested in the historical role of porphyria. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk historical origin of the vampire myth.5 Certainly, the aversion to sunlight and mirrors makes immediate sense. It is impossible to say when porphyria, a strongly heritable condition, entered Britain’s Royal Family. Prince William of Gloucester was a grandson of George V and his consort, Princess Mary of Teck.6 Mary’s ancestors can be traced back to the infamous and all-too-real Vlad III of Transylvania, AKA ‘The Impaler’. Vlad Dracul, to give him his proper name, notably inspired Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, whose filmic portrayal by Bela Lugosi was so hugely influential on the modern version of the vampire myth, upgrading vampires from the shambling blood-drinking animated corpses of European folklore to the now stereotypical articulate but decadent aristocrats and nobles. However, this seems to be nothing more than an ironic coincidence,7 as porphyria appears to have been present in British royalty well before Mary of Teck married George V; and in any case there is no evidence that Vlad III suffered from porphyria to add to his 5 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk unrestrained psychopathy.8 Since porphyria is such a ‘new’ illness, it was only in the 1960s that it was realised that the acute variety of the disease was the probable reason for the then unsolved mystery of the insanity that repeatedly afflicted King George III (1738-1820). The fact that George’s urine was recorded by a physician as being blue-indigo in colour seems to clinch the matter, but the porphyria theory is still contested, as there are few clearly described precedents for George’s supposed porphyria in royal history that occurred before the advent of modern medical science.9 In 1966, Dr Ida Macalpine and colleagues advanced the then unheard of porphyria theory in a paper, ‘The “insanity” of King George III: A classic case of porphyria’.10 The same team followed this up in January 1968 with a study of possible porphyrias in the houses of Stewart, Hanover and Prussia.11 Seven months later, as awareness was spreading among historians concerning the disease’s postulated role in Royal history, Princess Alice called Dr Bellringer to examine her son’s mysterious malady. Two years later, Prince William’s porphyria was clinically established as a fact. Two years after that he was killed in a plane crash, the causes of which are far from clear. The crash On 28 August 1972, Prince William – a keen pilot with his own single-engined Piper Arrow – took part in the Goodyear International Trophy air race, started at Halfpenny Green Airfield, Staffordshire. Thirty seconds after takeoff, witnesses saw the prince’s plane ‘drop out of the sky’ and explode on 8 It is to my mind plausible that the disease itself is the actual origin and ‘calling card’ of European royal houses (royals being jocularly known in Britain as having ‘blue blood’), since the classical sign of purple urine was precisely the colour of the rarest and costliest dye known in ancient times, only extractable from one particular sea mollusc until it was finally synthesised during the mid-19th Century. 9 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk hitting the ground. The crash was watched by 30,000 spectators. It took two hours to bring the fire under control and retrieve the bodies of the prince and his friend and co- pilot Vyrell Mitchell from the wreckage.12 The men were identified by dental records the next day as an Inquest on the pair was opened and adjourned by South Staffordshire Coroner Dennis Cave.13 On the same day, a formal investigation of the crash was opened by the Accident Investigation Branch of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). The Coroner was recorded as saying that ‘it would not be proper to hear evidence on the cause of the crash until the Accident Investigation Branch had reached its findings’. On 29 November the Inquest resumed and the jury heard that the piloting prince had made too sharp a turn at a ‘scatter point’, colliding with a tree before hitting the ground. (A scatter point is a marking point at which aircraft in paired takeoffs part routes.) The Jury were told that DTI examiners had ascertained that the wrecked plane had been in perfect working order and also heard from a Board of Trade investigator who said analysis suggested ‘nothing more than an error of judgement by the pilot’.14 Accordingly, the Jury returned a verdict of Accidental Death. However, when the DTI’s report on the crash was published in September 1973, the report did not blame pilot error, simply recording a ‘narrative finding’ that the prince appeared to have manoeuvred sharply to avoid a wing clipping some houses along the ascent portion of his flight path. Section 2.1 of the report stated: ‘It was at first thought that the accident had resulted from some error in flying technique. However, a frame- by-frame examination of [BBC Television News] film shows that at about 21.5 seconds after starting the takeoff, and whilst very steeply banked, the aircraft was pulled very sharply in a manner indicative of an abrupt 12 Wolverhampton Express and Star, 29 August 1972 13 Wolverhampton Express and Star, 28 August 1972 14 Wolverhampton Express and Star, 7 September 1973 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk application of full stabilator control. This implies some compelling external influence rather than a simple flying error.’ The hypothesised ‘external influence’ was the prince's supposed desire not to collide with any of the houses along the ascent, a verdict concurred with by eyewitness Jessie Bishop, who said: ‘[The prince] could have caused many deaths if he hadn’t taken the action. There were many people right down the road [under his flightpath].’ Two more eyewitnesses agreed: Jean Baron stated her belief that the prince had been trying to avoid hitting the houses, and Catherine Gibson said: ‘I am sure he was trying to avoid the road.’15 The previously suspected ‘scatter points’ were dismissed by the DTI as non-contributory. Conflicts with the Inquest notwithstanding, the DTI accident investigation file was then deposited in the National Archives. The secret file The DTI’s file on Prince William’s crash (AVIA 101/745) was listed in the National Archives catalogue as ‘exempt’ from release, citing regulation 18 of the Civil Aviation Regulations (1996). This gave the Archives a clear 100 years before the file’s release. However, the matter was not as straightforward as the responsible archivist had apparently thought. Civil Aviation Regulation 18 (3) defines ‘relevant records’ (i.e., exempted documents) by reference to a list contained in annex 13 of the Convention on International Civil Aviation. This annex is not a set of absolute exemptions. It quite clearly states that the types of record listed can be released if the impetus for doing so outweighs the potential (n.b.) impact on the investigation in question or on any other. Crucially, annex 13 has an explanatory note appended explicitly stating that the purpose of the exemptions is to ensure that people interviewed during an investigation are not subjected to ‘inappropriate’ civil/criminal/professional proceedings as a result of their evidence being made public, a 15 Wolverhampton Express and Star, 7 September 1972 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk development which could (n.b.) discourage people from speaking openly to future investigations. In other words, the Annex is not absolutely prohibitive but instead identifies varieties of records which could be released after consideration on a case-specific basis.16 Since both the prince and his co-pilot are dead, since it has never been suggested that anyone else was at fault in any way, and since the information was over 40 years old, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the National Archives in March 2015, arguing that that the listed document exemptions in Annex 13 are plainly purpose-specific and certainly could not be automatically presumed applicable in this particular case. After months of tantalising bureaucratic toing and froing, the file was opened without fanfare in June 2015 and I was able to travel to Kew and examine it for myself. As is so often the case with FOI-responsive material, the file is far from straightforward or self-explanatory, consisting of correspondence nearly devoid of context, written references to unrecorded conversations, obscure diagrams, technical jargon and assorted indecipherable or irrelevant pages. There are also some withheld documents, chiefly the autopsy reports and photographs of the dead men. These are being kept back apparently because the prince’s co-pilot ‘may have’ family who would be distressed by their release. This is far from being an ascertained factor and the late prince himself had no family of his own, so the assumption has to be that the habitual secrecy surrounding everything Royal has influenced declassification. Also withheld in its entirety (spuriously, in my view, by reference to the Data Protection Act) is the statement of a single eyewitness to the crash. All these exemptions could be contested, I believe, but there is currently no reason to suspect that the withheld documents would add significantly to our understanding. What is abundantly clear from what has been declassified, however, is that the DTI’s investigation did not do its job properly at all. One document records that, contrary to 16 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the DTI experts heard by the prince’s Inquest, the aircraft's cockpit instruments were completely destroyed by the fire after the crash and could hardly therefore be said to have been in ‘perfect working order’ as the Inquest was assured. A pro-forma document completed by an anonymous investigator lists as its fifth checkpoint: ‘Any evidence of pre- crash failure in aircraft or equipment’, to which the handwritten answer is a single circled question mark. The same cryptic glyph is recorded against the pro-forma’s question of whether the crash was ‘survivable/not survivable’. While these are highly suspicious, the anonymous official’s answer to the form’s point 6 is outright false: ‘Any evidence of medical defects affecting the crew’ has been annotated with the categorical word ‘None’. Prince William’s diagnosis of porphyria – physical symptoms of which include bilious attacks, mental disturbances, general malaise and muscle weakness – had been recorded in his medical notes two years previously and should therefore have been available to the Air Accident Investigation team. It is possible that access to the prince’s medical history was blocked by a force outside the DTI, and also possible that the same force prevented the prince’s diagnosis from being recorded at the Inquest. At whichever stage or stages the information was withheld, there was incontrovertibly a cover-up of the prince’s porphyria. Nor is that all that was being concealed. An internal DTI minute from Training and Licensing Inspector C A Hayley, dated 24 November 1972 – four days before the prince’s Inquest resumed – records that the prince’s Private Pilot's Licence had expired on 11 July 1972, over a month before his death. Mr Hayley recorded: ‘At that date [Prince William] had flown during the 13 preceding months 118 hours 5 minutes as pilot in command of aeroplanes (landplanes). This more than satisfied the requirement of 5 hours of such flying to qualify him for a Certificate of Experience to be signed which would renew the privileges of the licence as pilot in command of Group A aircraft for a further period of 13 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk months. He appears to have failed to obtain the signature to which he was entitled.’ This was never revealed to the Inquest Jury and if there was ever any written response to this minute within the DTI, it is not held by the National Archives. It is actually possible to witness part of the cover-up unfolding, in an exchange between the Accident Investigation Board’s Richard Westlake and William Sargeant, procurement executive of the Ministry of Defence’s RAE (Royal Air Establishment) Bedford. The language is of confidentiality and consistency but the emerging motive is transparent. In a typed and lengthy letter dated 3 January 1973, Mr Westlake wrote concerning Mr Sargeant’s analysis of the above-mentioned BBC film of the crash: ‘George Carley and I have now had time to digest your analysis and as your draft now stands there is liable to be some discrepancy between it and our formal AIB report when both are published.’ A little later, Mr Westlake’s concerns became clearer as he stated: ‘We shall never know whether [Prince William and his co- pilot] were aware of the precise position of the houses relative to the [flight path’s] scatter point but certainly they had made only one previous take-off on this runway and this was not of the low level type employed in this race. The excessive rate of turn may, therefore, have been a desperate attempt to escape from the trap and not just ham-fisted flying. The fact that entry into the trap may have resulted from poor judgement originating in over-enthusiasm to beat a rival is another matter […] You will see from the foregoing that the emphasis in our report is likely to differ from that contained in your conclusions. Whether you feel inclined to change your phrasing is entirely up to you [...]’ Mr Sargeant’s handwritten reply (dated 8 January 1973) acknowledges and assuages DTI concerns: Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘I had modified my conclusions before I sent the report to the vetting officer and I think that has reduced the discrepancy you speak of.’ Here we see the question of possible princely incompetence being shuffled behind a rather nobler narrative suggestion, that of a doomed prince whose last thoughts were to avoid any loss of civilian life rather than to preserve his own in an inescapable crash. And indeed, this is the romanticised version that the DTI’s report eventually adopted, overriding the Inquest’s verdict of ‘Accidental Death’. Neither version, ultimately, definitively identifies what actually caused the prince to crash. However, National Archives file AVIA 101/745 is perhaps most interesting not for what it contains but for its folder. In common with such files of government paperwork, the brown card ‘dust jacket’ bears columns that record to whom the completed file was referred and on what date, allowing a reader to trace its bureaucratic travels. The first entry shows the holder was the DTI’s aforementioned Mr Casley, on 6 December 1972. A decade later, on 16 March 1982, the file was marked as referred to ‘Archives’ and stamped ‘CLOSED – No further action to be taken’. Another stamp (eventually cancelled by my FOI request and crossed out by Archives staff) specified ‘Closed until 2071’. Archival darkness descended for four years, until 16 October 1986, when the file was inexplicably retrieved from storage and referred back to the Accident Investigation Board Registry. Four days after that, on 20 October 1986, the file was marked as being referred to ‘DCIA’. The file stayed with DCIA for another four years before being returned to its archival hibernation and marked PA (‘Put Away’) on 26 June 1990. Shortly after viewing the newly-released DTI file on the prince’s crash, I wrote to ask the National Archives what the initials DCIA recorded on the file’s cover might stand for. National Archives staff were able to offer no solution. D/CIA was of course the official designation of the Director of the USA’s Central Intelligence Agency, who in 1986 would have been William J Casey (died 1987). At the time, the Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk office was designated DCI (Director of Central Intelligence), until finally rationalised to D/CIA in 2005. In the absence of any known alternative, the look of this annotation on the file’s referral list is that a British archivist unfamiliar with the correct abbreviation recorded the file being passed in 1986 to the then Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose successor William H Webster finally returned it four years later. However, if this is the case, the question of why the CIA might have been interested in secret documents on the death of a member of the Royal Family remains unanswered. Afterword Briefly mentioned in contemporary news coverage of the death17 was the fact that a gold signet ring was found on one of the burned bodies recovered from the wreckage, which helped identify the prince’s remains because it bore an engraved ‘W’ surmounted by a crown. This ring was one of a matching pair commissioned by the prince’s lover, Hungarian- born Zsuzsi Starkloff, who is still alive and wears the remaining ring on a chain round her neck. In 2012 she gave an account18 of how she believed the Queen repeatedly attempted to force her and the prince apart over a period of years, and how she believes the prince was going to propose to her had he not been killed. I wrote to Ms Starkloff in April 2015 but received no response. 17 Wolverhampton Express and Star, 30 August 1972 18 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Tokyo legend? Lee Harvey Oswald and Japan Kevin Coogan What do we know about Lee Harvey Oswald’s stay in Japan? Surprisingly, the answer is ‘very little’. From autumn 1957 to late 1958, Lee Harvey Oswald worked at an American military base in Atsugi, Japan, as a member of a military air traffic control unit for Marine Corps planes. Oswald served in MACS-1 (Marine Air Control Squadron) of Marine Air Group 11 as part of the First Marine Aircraft Wing. With other members of his MACS-1 unit, he briefly deployed to the Philippines and Taiwan, redeployed back to America in November 1958 and served in a MACS unit at El Toro, California, until his discharge from the military. Oswald arrived in Japan on 12 September 1957. On 27 October he injured himself in the accidental discharge of a .22 gun and was hospitalized for a bullet wound to his elbow until 15 November. Five days after his discharge, his unit deployed to the Philippines and stayed for some time thanks to a potential international crisis in Indonesia. Oswald’s MACS-1 unit established a base at Cubi Point in Subic Bay. It then sailed back from the Philippines on 7 March 1958 and arrived at Astugi some 11 days later. On 11 April, Oswald was officially court-martialled for the accidental discharge of a gun but the sentence was suspended as long as he kept out of trouble for six months. Two months later, on 20 June 1958, Oswald was arrested for cursing at an officer at the Bluebird Café in Yamoto, Japan; on 27 June, he was sentenced to serve time in the brig until his release on 13 August. One month later, on 14 September, the Warren Commission stated that Oswald and Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk his unit sailed into the South China Sea during a major crisis between Taiwan and Communist China. On 30 September, his unit set up base at P’ing-tung in North Taiwan. The unit then returned to Atsugi on 5 October. Oswald next spent some days being treated for a venereal disease at the Atsugi Station Hospital. He finally left Japan on 2 November and arrived back at San Francisco 13 days later.1 Oswald then was based at Atsugi for his tour of duty except for one MACS-1 assignment to the Philippines from 20 November 1957 to 7 March 1958 and another, much briefer, tour of Taiwan from 14 September 1959 till his return to Atsugi on 5 October 1959. Some critics of the ‘official story’ of Oswald’s time in Japan claim that he managed to penetrate the CIA-Air Force U- 2 program run out of a highly restricted area in the huge Atsugi base on behalf of the Soviet Union’s intelligence services; that as an air-traffic controller, Oswald tracked U-2 flights out of Atsugi and learned just how high the U-2 flew. With this information, the Soviets were able to shoot down Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 flight on 1 May 1960. The claim has even entered otherwise sober studies of the U-2 affair such as historian Michael Beschloss’s well-regarded book Mayday, where he makes a passing reference to Oswald’s possible role in betraying U-2 secrets.2 A deeper understanding of Oswald’s role in Japan, however, has been long distorted by the 1978 publication of Edward Jay Epstein’s book Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald 3 in which Epstein tries to prove that Oswald fell victim to an elaborate Soviet intelligence ‘honey trap’ while in Japan that led him to spy for the KGB. Shortly after Legend appeared in print, however, investigators for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) interviewed some of Epstein’s purported sources. The interviews (many now available on the Mary Ferrell Foundation website) show that Epstein concocted a bogus recreation of Oswald’s time in 1 For Oswald’s itinerary in Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan, see the Warren Commission Report section entitled ‘Marines’, pp. 683-684. 2 Michael Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair (New York: Harper & Row, 1988) p. 236. 3 Edward Jay Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (New York: Reader’s Digest Press/McGraw-Hill, 1978). Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Japan.4 Part one of this study will focus on Legend. I also hope to show just how little we know about Oswald’s activities in Asia in general and Japan in particular. The Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), for example, could not even agree on an issue as basic as whether Oswald did or did not spend any time in Taiwan. Nor do we know, for instance, if there was any U.S. government investigation into Oswald’s activities in Japan following his 1959 defection to Russia. In part two, I will argue that Oswald’s story must be seen at a minimum in the context of an even more striking espionage affair, the defection to Moscow in the summer of 1960 of Bernon Mitchell and William Martin, former National Security Agency (NSA) officials, both of whom had earlier served in different posts in Japan in the mid-1950s and at Atsugi in particular. As I will document, the American security establishment went to great lengths to examine Mitchell and Martin’s past to determine whether the men were first recruited into Soviet intelligence in the early to mid-1950s. Part one Queen Bee Legend was published in the spring of 1978 and extensive excerpts appeared in the March 1978 Reader’s Digest. Legend argues that Oswald most likely had been compromised by a Soviet ‘honey trap’ after he became romantically involved with a Japanese hostess at a posh Tokyo night-club called the Queen Bee. A fellow MACS-1 Marine named Zack Stout was a crucial source for Epstein. From Legend: ‘Zack Stout knew of only one possible piece in the puzzle of Oswald’s absences [when Oswald visited Tokyo]. He seemed to have fallen in love, perhaps for the first time in his life, with a Japanese girl. When Stout asked where she worked, Oswald told him that she was a hostess at the Queen Bee in Tokyo.....one of the three most 4 See The Mary Ferrell Foundation web page at Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk expensive night-clubs in Tokyo. It catered to an elite clientele – field grade officers, pilots (including U-2 pilots) and a few junior officers with private incomes – not impoverished Marine privates. To take a hostess out of a night-club, customers required paying not only the girl, but the night-club as well for the bar business it lost during her absence. The man also had to pay for the accommodations for the evening. For an evening at the Queen Bee, a date could cost anywhere from $60 to $100. Yet Oswald, who was earning less than $85 a month take home pay, went out with this woman from the Queen Bee with surprising regularity, even bringing her back to the base area several times. “He was really crazy about her,” offered Stout, who met the woman with Oswald on several occasions in local bars around the base. Other Marines, less friendly to Oswald, and who saw him with the woman, were astonished that someone of her “class” would go out with Oswald at all...... (According to one source, Navy intelligence was also interested in the possibility that hostesses from the Queen Bee were being used at the time to gather intelligence and that Oswald was receiving money from someone at the Queen Bee.)’ (Epstein pp. 71-72) On 1 June 1978, a few months after Legend’s publication, HSCA investigator Jack Moriarty interviewed Stout, who directly contradicted Epstein. Stout first explained that liberty from the base ‘.....was chiefly “Cinderella” form (required to return by midnight) which effectively limited such free time to Yamoto, near the east camp of Atsugi, or Sagmi Oaksta, near main side. Weekend liberties permitted a wider scope, which included Tokyo some 4-5 hours by train. So the normal pastimes were those bars in Yamoto. It was less expensive in terms of time (Yamoto was a 20- minute bus ride) and money (Tokyo was the location of the affluent bars and other places of entertainment).’ Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The discussion then turned to the Queen Bee(s). ‘Asked about the location of the Queen Bee, he [Stout] asked me “which one”? He advised “Queen Bee” and many such names were popular in nearly all the liberty towns. Those people just seemed to like the title “Queen” and used it in many enterprises in many areas. Most of the MACS-1 [Marine Air Control Squadron] men frequented The Queen Bee in Yamoto. He’s seen Lee Harvey Oswald in there as well as most of MAC[S]-1. He sometimes went with Lee Harvey Oswald and sometimes just saw him in there. He would usually be with the same girl. He never actually met her, but that’s not usually the case, anyway. He advised that in order to really understand the environment, I must realize it’s nothing like society is here in the States. The girls work in bars and when you visited a place for the first time, you got paired off with a bar girl. All subsequent trips provided you with the same girl. The joke around the barracks during those days was that when a Marine – any Marine – visited a particular bar several times, he was in love. So, yes, he saw LHO (like the rest of MACS-1) in the Queen Bee with the same girl, but it was an entirely different connection than the same situation would have been in the States. In the first place, that was [the] rule, not exception and secondly, why would LHO or anyone else, spend four to five hours for a more expensive train ride to go to the Tokyo Queen Bee, which would cost him a month’s pay in one trip. As far as LHO’s money was concerned, he was under the impression he had less, not more, than the rest. Eighty some dollars a month was the norm, but LHO had an allotment sent to his mother (“at least that’s what he said”) which caused a deduction. Nor did his lifestyle indicate anything different....As far as women went, Yamoto girls were the cheapest and he didn’t see LHO with them anywhere else. And this was only a later development.....In any event, the consensus Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk was LHO was anything but affluent. Again, he pointed out the implied inaccuracies of Legend. It states that LHO had a regular girlfriend in the Queen Bee suggesting he had a serious romance going and also had plenty of money due to the high prices in the [Tokyo] Queen Bee.’ [Emphases added.] Stout believed that Oswald staged an ‘accidental’ shooting of himself in the arm to avoid going to the Philippines because he wanted to stay in Japan with his local girlfriend: ‘Stout assumed, as did the rest, LHO was attempting to forego the maneuvers in the Philippines, which was timed to coincide with local unrest. It seems the first “accidental” version didn’t hold up. He was also privy to the “Buck Sergeant” problem LHO was concerned with. Again local mores permit “your regular girl” to have other “regular boy friends” as long as the individual schedules don’t conflict. It seems this buck sergeant (no name) was paying her rent and that bucks have all night liberty. She, like the rest, was utilizing some of her free time before midnight with LHO and whoever. Stout says they used to refer to the more resourceful ones as “business women”.’ Stout’s recollection about Oswald’s dislike of a local unit sergeant might help explain the incident that took place after Oswald returned to Atsugi from the Philippines and led in his being court-martialled for the second time. On 20 June 1958, Oswald was in the Blue Bird Café in Yamato, near the Atsugi base. He spilled a drink on a fellow Marine, a technical sergeant named Miguel Rodriguez.5 Oswald, who later testified he was drunk at the time, tried to engage Rodriguez in some kind of confrontation. Oswald said Rodriguez had assigned him to mess duty back at Atsugi instead of his radar operator post and Oswald took it personally. Daniel Powers, one of Oswald’s Marine comrades, 5 A technical sergeant is a sergeant just above staff sergeant but below master sergeant. Rodriguez was below the rank of master sergeant and hence a ‘buck sergeant’. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk discussed mess duty in the Marines. On 30 November 1963, FBI SA John Schaller interviewed Powers. Powers told Schaller that when he and Oswald were stationed in the Philippines for a few months in 1958, ‘OSWALD was on mess duty’. Warren Commission lawyer Albert Jenner, in his 1 May 1964 questioning of Powers, said that he assumed Oswald was not on mess duty in the Philippines ‘all the time’. Powers replied, ‘No; you’re assigned – privates and privates first class are assigned this duty periodically. I think you’re assigned one week of the year.’ If Rodriguez did assign Oswald mess duty even though Oswald had served mess duty in the Philippines earlier that year, Oswald may have been right to be angry with him. Why would Rodriguez want to humiliate Oswald? If we follow Zack Stout, one possible answer is that Rodriguez moved in on Oswald’s prostitute (the ‘Buck Sergeant’ problem) and in the military caste system, Oswald was simply supposed not to object. In any case, after Rodriguez refused to fight even after Oswald called him a coward, the MPs intervened and arrested Oswald. On 27 June 1958, Oswald was court-martialled for the incident. Although the Court believed he was drunk at the time, it convicted him of using abusive words to a superior. Oswald’s conviction was a disaster. Recall that on 11 April 1958 after his return from the Philippines, Oswald was first court-martialled for the accidental shooting incident and given 20 days hard labor in the brig. The court then suspended the sentence as long as Oswald stayed out of trouble for six months. Following his 27 June conviction, however, Oswald now had to serve 48 days hard labor in the brig with a new sentence of 28 days tacked on to the earlier sentence. The larger point is that Epstein used Zack Stout to say something very different from what Stout told the HSCA. Citing Stout as his ‘source’, Epstein apparently invented a fantasy about Oswald partying on a private’s salary with one of the most expensive bar girls in all Tokyo. All this to suggest the KGB must have paid for Oswald’s high living as part of a Soviet plot to steal U-2 secrets. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk As we shall see later, Stout thought the idea that that Oswald had any ability to steal U-2 secrets was totally absurd. The CIA thought similarly. In a 14 April 1964 letter to J. Edgar Hoover, then CIA Deputy Director of Plans, Richard Helms, stated that it was virtually impossible for Oswald to spy on the CIA’s operations at Atsugi known as the Joint Technical Advisory Group (JTAG): ‘JTAG air activities were conducted from a classified hanger area at one end of the flight line. OSWALD did not have access to this area. Prior to the time in question, JTAG had been publicized by Radio Peking as being a headquarters for American intelligence activity. For this reason, and because JTAG was obviously not a part of the Naval Air Station complement, there were rumors and gossip regarding the unit and its activities. This condition was regarded as normal under such circumstances. Being there at that time, OSWALD could have heard such gossip; however, there is no information to indicate, nor is there reason to believe, that he obtained factual knowledge regarding JTAG and its mission.’ Helms concluded his memo to Hoover (which he also sent to the Warren Commission): ‘There is no evidence or indication that OSWALD had any association with, or access to, the JTAG operation or its program in Japan. This applies also to information regarding the U-2 or its mission. Even if OSWALD had seen a U-2 aircraft at Atsugi or elsewhere, this fact would not have been considered unusual nor have constituted a breach of security. Limited public exposure of the craft itself – but not of its nomenclature or mission – was accepted as a necessary risk. It is most unlikely that OSWALD had the necessary prerequisites to differentiate between the U-2 and other aircraft engaged in classified missions which were similarly visible at Atsugi at the same time.’ Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Iwakuni Legend included another sensational ‘revelation’. For it Epstein turned to Owen Dejanovich, whom he described as ‘a tall, lanky native of Chicago who went on to play professional football’. Dejanovich first met Oswald when they spent May and June 1957 at radar school in Keesler Air Base in Biloxi, Mississipi, as part of the same group that included Daniel Powers. Once in Japan, Oswald and Powers were assigned to Atsugi; Dejanovich went to the Marine Corps Station at Iwakuni. Legend stated that when Oswald reportedly returned from a stint in Taiwan in October 1958, he ‘was assigned to a Marine squadron in Iwakuni, an air base some 480 miles southwest of Tokyo’ for temporary duty. At Iwakuni, Oswald hooked up with his old Biloxi fellow trainee Owen Dejanovich. In Epstein’s telling, Oswald arrived at Iwakuni’s Marine-run Tactical Air Control Center for the northern Pacific area. In the case of a Communist Chinese, North Korean, or Soviet attack, it was the center’s job to co-ordinate air defenses. Epstein continues: ‘On this temporary duty, Oswald again was assigned to the translucent plotting board. Owen Dejanovich..... immediately recognized Oswald in the center as someone he had gone to radar school with at Keesler Air Base and tried to renew the acquaintanceship. He quickly found that Oswald had grown extremely bitter since he had last known him. “He kept referring to the Marines at the center as ‘You Americans,’ as if he were some sort of foreigner simply observing what we were doing,” says Dejanovich. His tone was definitely accusatory. He spoke in slogans about “American imperialism” and “exploitation,” which made Dejanovich think at the time that Oswald – whom he called Bugs – was merely being perverse for the sake of shocking the other Marines at the center. In the evenings, Dejanovich would occasionally see Oswald speaking to an attractive Eurasian woman. “She was much too good-looking for Bugs,” he recalls Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk thinking, and he wondered why such an attractive “round eye”, obviously not a common bar girl, would waste her time with a Marine private. Another Marine in the unit, Dan Powers, had got the impression from Oswald that this Eurasian woman was half-Russian and was teaching Oswald the Russian language. Other Marines speculated that Oswald had simply set up a “ranch”, or living arrangement with the Eurasian at Iwakuni. But whenever Dejanovich would see Oswald with this girl at the Orion bar in Iwakuni, he would just shake his head at what he considered Oswald’s perverse nature. “Who but Oswald would come to Japan and find a round-eyed Russian girlfriend?” he would ask himself.’ (Epstein pp. 82-83). In a 20 November 2003 Frontline program on the JFK assassination that prominently featured Edward Jay Epstein, Dejanovich popped up with an even more telling revelation: ‘There was a small business section [at Iwakuni] across one bridge that was called “Skivvy Bridge”. We were allowed, as Americans, to go into that sector of the residential portion of Iwakuni. The other sector was considered to be communist, Japanese communists, and we were – it was an off-limits area that we were not allowed to go in, as Americans. The first time I saw Oswald with the round-eye – she was a beautiful White Russian – he was walking with her. They were going across the bridge into the section that was off limits to us.’ Dejanovich noticed Oswald walking with the beautiful woman across a bridge into a forbidden area; the MPs apparently did not. This was stunning. Clearly it demanded a new look at Dejanovich’s earliest testimony to the FBI to learn more about the exotic beauty. From FBI SA (Special Agent) Daniel Pelton’s 5 December 1963 interview with Dejanovich: ‘He [Dejanovich] advised that in August 1957, he and OSWALD were part of a 120 man overseas draft and Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk OSWALD went to a Marine Base at Atsugi, Japan, while DEJANOVICH went to a base at Iwakuni, Japan. The next time he saw OSWALD was in December 1958 when they came back to the United States together in a 100-man draft.’ (Emphasis added.) Dejanovich did not see Oswald at Iwakuni because Oswald was never at Iwakuni. In his 2008 book The Missing Chapter: Lee Harvey Oswald in the Far East, former Marine Corps investigator Jack Swike notes that there are no records to suggest that Oswald was ever in Iwakuni. Swike, however, cites the testimony of Dejanovich and another Marine named Sherman Cooley that they both saw Oswald at Iwakuni. Cooley is also interviewed in Legend but he only recalls Oswald’s time in boot camp in California.6 Did Cooley’s later statement really confirm Dejanovich’s claims? A JFK researcher named Bill Weston interviewed Sherman Cooley for an article entitled ‘Pfisterer Dental Laboratory’ that appeared in The Fourth Decade (5/3, March 1998).7 Cooley recalled that he first met Oswald at Marine Corps boot camp in San Diego, California, in October 1956 and went with him in March 1957 to Jacksonville, Florida, where they were in the same class at the Air Frame and Power School. Two months later, in May 1959, both men were assigned to Kessler Air Base, in Biloxi. Weston then writes: ‘They were transferred to Japan but Cooley did not see Oswald there, for they had been assigned to two widely separated bases. The next time he saw him [Oswald] was in the Philippines towards the end of November 1957. In fact, the picture of Oswald sitting among a group of Marines waiting to board an LST was taken by Cooley himself. At the end of December, Cooley was sent back to Japan with a portion of the unit [back to Iwakuni], while Oswald stayed with the rest of the unit at Corregidor. They did not see one another again until the 6 Epstein pp. 62-63. 7 See Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk beginning of January 1959, when they were assigned to a radar unit in El Toro, California. Oswald had mess duty and Cooley used to see him every morning serving coffee to the men.’ (Weston p. 21) (Emphasis added.) Obviously if Cooley had not seen Oswald after the Philippines until they were reunited at El Toro, he could not have met him at Iwakuni after Cooley was reassigned there. Why is there no Oswald paper trail? Why did Dejanovich never mention any of this to the FBI in 1963? Or to the newspapers? The 28 November 1963 issue of The Arizona Republic, for example, carried an interview with Dejanovich that read in part: ‘Dejanovich’s final 10 months with the Marine Corps were served at El Toro, Calif., where Oswald was stationed. “I personally knew him in Biloxi, Miss., where we attended a radar specialist school,” Dejanovich said.....Dejanovich said Oswald studied the Russian language while stationed at the El Toro Marine Base. “We used to encourage him to say something in Russian, but it was strictly for laughs,” Dejanovich said. “I guess you never know who you are talking to.”’ Again, no mention of Iwakuni, Oswald, and the mysterious woman. Legend, however, cannot let Iwakuni alone. Along with Dejanovich, Epstein cites another Marine, Daniel Powers, who supposedly confirmed Dejanovich’s story to Epstein just as Cooley supposedly later confirmed Dejanovich’s story to Swike. Recall that in Legend Epstein cites Dan Powers being at Iwakuni when Oswald was supposedly there in early October 1958 and that Powers ‘had got the impression from Oswald’ that the Eurasian girl ‘was half-Russian’ and was teaching Oswald the Russian language. In Epstein’s telling, while stationed at Iwakuni, Dejanovich spots his old Keesler Air Base fellow trainee Oswald with the ‘round-eyes’ Eurasian temptress in the Orion bar, as well as walking across a bridge at Iwakuni into a restricted area filled with Japanese Communists. Oswald then Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk told Powers (or ‘implied to him’) that the mystery woman was half-Russian and that she was teaching ‘Bugs’ Russian. The news must have filtered back to Dejanovich since he could then claim that the ‘round eyes’ really was a ‘White Russian’. Oswald and Powers were in the same unit, the unit at Atsugi, not Iwakuni. Again, we begin with Powers interview with FBI SA John Schaller on 30 November 1963. From the interview: ‘After their arrival at Atsugi, POWERS played football while the rest of the squadron, including OSWALD, went to the Philippines on maneuvers [on 20 November 1958]. In January 1958, POWERS rejoined the squadron, which included OSWALD, at Cubi Point in the Philippines....POWERS recalled that OSWALD and the squad were then put aboard a Philippine LST en route to Corregidor where they remained for two or three months during which time OSWALD was on mess duty. He recalled that OSWALD, POWERS and the group in March 1958 [7 March] returned to the LST to Cubi Point in the Philippines. POWERS remained at Cubi Point while OSWALD continued on to Japan. In May, 1958, POWERS left by plane from Cubi Point to Atsugi where he rejoined the squad and again saw OSWALD. It was at Atsugi that Oswald shot himself in the leg8...... He informed that the last time he saw OSWALD was in May, 1958, when OSWALD was returned to the United States.’ (It was Powers, not Oswald, who left Japan sometime in late May or early June 1958. Oswald only shipped back to the States in November 1958. This discrepancy most likely was an error by SA Schaller in taking down Power’s statement.) There is no mention of any time Powers and Oswald spent together in ‘Iwakuni’ or any mention of a mysterious Russian woman. Powers did say that Oswald had a girlfriend but she was an Atsugi-based Japanese prostitute: 8 Oswald shot himself in the elbow (not the leg) during the 27 October 1957 incident. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘He believes OSWALD had a Japanese girlfriend while at Atsugi, possibly a Japanese prostitute. He stated that he recalls that liberty was given to the group from 5:00 PM to 6:00 AM each night and that the group was also given liberty two out of every three weekends. He stated that he cannot recall that OSWALD spent his time in the barracks while on duty but he is of the opinion that OSWALD took all the liberty he could get. He stated that he also vaguely recalls that while at Atsugi in Japan, OSWALD was studying RUSSIAN and he vaguely recalled that OSWALD carried with him a dark blue or a black book, which POWERS believed to be a Russian language book.....POWERS concluded by informing that OSWALD was a “loner”. He stated that OSWALD never expressed sympathy toward the Communist Party, Communist principles, or Marxist doctrine.’ Powers’ testimony did not end with the FBI. On 1 May 1964, the Warren Commission’s Albert Jenner further questioned him. Powers said he first met Oswald sometime in early May 1957 when they transferred from Florida for training in Mississippi. Later on, Jenner asked him about Oswald, Atsugi, and women. Once again, Powers fails to mention any exotic ‘White Russian’ woman. Mr. JENNER: Okay. What did Oswald do for entertainment on leave? Mr. POWERS: This seems to me now that he made a statement, and this was after he went out and procured or secured a female companionship and set up housekeeping, or whatever you might want to call it in Japan, and this was common practice..... Mr. JENNER: Did he set up housekeeping, set up some Japanese girl; is that what you mean? Mr. POWERS: Yes. This is – this was the normal procedure over there, the practice with a lot of individuals, and I think that he was one of the ones that did – went for this type of thing. I’m not sure whether Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk he did, but I can attribute this statement to him that he did. Mr. JENNER: In other words, you have a recollection of him having said that somewhere? Mr. POWERS: Yes, he said that, and again looking back, he was finally attaining a male status or image in his own eyes, and this is why he wanted to stay in that particular country.’ Powers’ testimony supports Zack Stout’s statement that Oswald had a ‘girlfriend’ from one of the Atsugi off-base bars/whorehouses. Apparently, once a soldier was ‘assigned’ to a woman by the bar/whorehouse, for a certain price he could rent her for the weekend in an off base flat. Powers did visit Iwakuni, however, as this jumble from his Warren Commission testimony suggests. Powers discussed a group of Marines who came to Japan and with whom he tried to stay in touch. From his testimony: Mr. POWERS: Getting back to your original question....But Oswald and myself, but I think that Bandoni went on the east coast, but Brereton went to Iwakuni, which is another Air Force – rather Marine base, and Camarata went down to a helicopter base somewhere in Japan, down in the harbor somewhere. I used to call him on the phone once in a while and talk to him. And Brereton, I think – no, by gosh, maybe Bandoni was down at – no, that was Mike Cainey. We were flying between the Philippines, and if he would stop in at Iwakuni, I would stop in and see Mike.’ In other words, if Powers was on a plane that made a scheduled stopover at the Iwakuni base, he would use the time to reconnect with his friend. The questioning continued: Mr. JENNER: Where? Mr. POWERS: Iwakuni, this is a base in the lower part of Japan. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Mr. JENNER: I-o-w-c––– Mr. POWERS: I-o-w-a-k-o-n-n-i, I think. Iwakuni – i.e., possibly. I think it’s –I. I don’t know. I’m lost, where was I. It seems to me that Brereton was over there, too, at Iwakuni, but I don’t recall if I possibly saw him over there once or twice; it was either on a football trip or when I was flying down to the Philippines after wrestling season. Far from being assigned to Iwakuni (whose name he could not spell), Powers told the Warren Commission he may have visited it ‘during a football trip’ that would have taken place in the late fall of 1958 when Oswald and his unit was already in the Philippines. Powers flew down from Japan to the Philippines or sometime in mid-January 1958 after he finished up with his wresting team schedule so he may have stopped off at Iwakuni on that flight. In short, Powers either visited Iwakuni once or twice, he couldn’t be sure. As is evident from his testimony, at no time does Powers say he was ever assigned to Iwakuni in a military capacity, that he met Oswald at Iwakuni or that Oswald was in the company of an exotic half-Russian Eurasian woman who was teaching him Russian. Powers further demonstrates that he could not have seen Oswald even during his stopover as Oswald and his unit had deployed to the Philippines well before Powers did. Oswald then returned with his unit to Atsugi well before Powers did: Mr. JENNER: And you were headquartered at the naval air station at Atsugi? Mr. POWERS: Yes, sir. Mr. JENNER: Oswald – what did he serve as? I mean was he a radar operator? Mr. POWERS: I assume he was a radar operator. From here, I lost almost total contact with the individual other than just seeing him. I played football during the fall and during this period of time we would play, we played in the bowl games, and the squadron went down to the Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Philippines and I stayed in Japan. (Emphasis added.) Mr. JENNER: You didn’t go to the Philippines? Mr. POWERS: I did at a later date, but when the rest of the squadron went down to the Philippines, they went down, oh, I don’t know, probably sometime in November, and I stayed down [in Japan] and played football, and then after that, I was wresting – I wrestled for a while, and then out of the blue came orders to go to the Philippines, and from that time, I think this was sometime in the middle of January ––. Nor did Powers return with Oswald’s unit when they sailed back to Japan from the Philippines on 7 March 1958. Instead, he stayed on in the Archipelago because Powers said he had been assigned special guard duty at a U-2 hanger there. Mr. JENNER: Do you recall anything in this connection with respect to guard duty relating to some kind of a special airplane? Mr. POWERS: Yes, we – this happened again, I think, after the rest of the squadron left to go back to the Japanese mainland, and some of us were assigned temporary duty in Cubi Point there. I believe there were two of us, or three of us from the squadron. Mr. JENNER: Who were they? Mr. POWERS: Murphy, I believe, was one of them and Private – Private First Class Murphy, and I don’t recall the other individuals, who the other individuals were, but anyway, we were assigned there, and at this particular time, they were closely guarding a hanger. And as it developed, this was, not knowing what it was, it was a U-2 aircraft, but this was after the rest of the squadron left, which Oswald was included in, for the mainland. Mr. JENNER: Oswald was included in a group that had returned to the mainland? Mr. POWERS: Yes, sir. Asked when he returned from the Philippines to Atsugi, Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Powers replied ‘late April or early May of 1958’. Nor did Powers fly back to Japan. When Jenner asked him if he had ever been to Formosa, Powers relied: ‘Yes, we – this was on our way home. Now, this wasn’t – he [Oswald] was still in Japan, and on our way home, we went to Formosa and no one got off the ship; we just picked up some civilians, I believe there. Mr. JENNER: But Oswald was not there with you? Mr. POWERS: No. And then we just went on across –– Powers told the Warren Commission he returned to America on 4 July 1958 and so he must have been on route back ‘most of June’. This is important because Epstein alleges that Oswald came to Iwakuni sometime in October 1958 after he returned to Japan not from the Philippines but much later from a second assignment in Formosa (Taiwan). Oswald’s unit left for Formosa on 14 September 1958 and Oswald was back at Atsugi by 5 October with the rest of his unit. Given that Powers left Japan permanently either in late May or in early June for America, it is impossible that he could have met Oswald in Iwakuni in early October 1958, the time Epstein claims Oswald received assignment to ‘temporary duty’ at Iwakuni and informed Powers about his exotic Eurasian girlfriend. Jenner then asked Powers a series of questions about Oswald: Mr. JENNER: But you have no impression of Oswald in that particular connection? Mr. POWERS: No, nothing. My actual association with him in Japan was limited to other than just seeing him in the barracks and saying ‘Hi Ozzie’. Jenner continued a bit later: ‘Did he ever express any sympathy toward the Communist Party?’ Mr. POWERS: None that I recall. Mr. JENNER: Toward Communist principles? Mr. POWERS: None that I recall. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Mr. JENNER: Or Marxist doctrine? Mr. POWERS: None that I recall; no, sir. Jenner finally asked him, ‘You don’t think you had enough contact with him in Japan because he was not a member of your platoon?’ Powers replied, ‘That’s correct.’ This then is Daniel Powers, the individual whose testimony Epstein invokes in Legend to confirm Dejanovich’s story about the mysterious Eurasian woman with Oswald in Iwakuni!9 John Donovan’s tale Epstein’s strangest military witness was former Marine First Lieutenant John Donovan, whom Epstein thanks in Legend for serving as ‘a technical advisor on Oswald’s Marine Corps activities’. On 5 May 1964, Donovan extensively testified to the Warren Commission about Oswald, whom he said he first met in El Toro, California, after Oswald returned from Japan.10 On 7 April 1978, HSCA investigator Robert Genzman interviewed Donovan, who was then living in Arlington, Virginia. Donovan first told Genzman that during his initial testimony before the Warren Commission, he had ‘forgotten’ that he had known Oswald both in the Philippines as well as in El Toro. From the interview: ‘When he testified before the Warren Commission, Donovan stated he had contact with Oswald only in California; but he has since refreshed his recollection and he now recalls that he first knew Oswald when they were both stationed in the Philippines. Donovan recalls that before he testified before the Commission he was advised by his superiors only to answer the questions asked and not to go off on tangents.’ 9 More recently, Daniel Powers spoke to the author Peter Savodnik for Savodnik’s book The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union (New York: Basic Books, 2013). Again, Powers makes no mention of a mysterious Eurasian woman at Iwakuni, even though Savodnik interviewed him about his knowledge of Oswald. 10 For Donovan’s testimony, see Warren Commission Hearings vol. 8, pp. 289-304. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk New revelations flowed from Donovan’s now-liberated memory, including the claim that Oswald had a gay fling in Taiwan: ‘According to Donovan, Oswald was very interested in the U-2 airplane while he was stationed in the Philippines. In Formosa, Oswald took photographs of troop deployments, fighter aircraft, ammunition bunkers, and F-86 aircraft with radar attached. In addition, Oswald allegedly had a liaison with an effeminate boy in Formosa.’ (Emphasis added.) Putting the Taiwan tale aside for now, even Epstein had doubts about Donovan’s ‘refreshed recollections’ about the Philippines, where Donovan now claimed to have first met Oswald. From Legend: ‘The officer who recalls Oswald’s interest in the U-2 is John Donovan, a former lieutenant in the Marine Corps. Donovan remembers clearly that Oswald called his attention to radar images of the U-2 and that this incident took place at Cubi Point. However, other officers and enlisted men from Oswald’s unit remember that their unit did not set up radar operations at Cubi Point at that time. One possible explanation for this discrepancy is that a number of different Marine squadrons were temporarily camped in the same vicinity, and Oswald may have come into contact with Donovan while their individual units were together at Cubi Point. (Emphasis added.) Donovan was also Oswald’s officer at the Marine Air Station at El Toro, California, in 1959 where he worked constantly with Oswald in the radar bubble. It is conceivable that after nearly twenty years, Donovan is recalling an incident that took place there. In any case, since there are no other witnesses, it cannot be resolved where, and if, this incident took place.’ (Epstein p. 280) Epstein omits the fact that Donovan says he only remembered his supposedly knowing Oswald in the Philippines years after Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk he testified in detail to the Warren Commission and that no U- 2 ever flew out of El Toro. In his book Oswald and the CIA, author John Newman (who interviewed Donovan on 19 July 1994) is even less critical of Donovan than Epstein. From Oswald and the CIA: ‘[Oswald’s unit] set up their radar bubble at Cubi Point Air Base, next to a special hanger. Inside it, the CIA often stored a U-2 reconnaissance plane. “I saw it take off and land,” recalls Oswald’s commander John Donovan, “and I saw it hand pushed into the hanger.” On this assignment, Oswald’s unit had an additional mission with a direct connection to the U-2: sentry duty to guard the U-2 hanger.’ That task, which Oswald, like the rest of the enlisted men, performed, did not curtail his interest in the U-2 when he was at his favorite place – drawing traces of aircraft trails with his grease pencil on the plotting board inside the radar bubble. Oswald’s unit had not been operational very long before Donovan noticed something interesting. ‘One time we were watching the radar there at Cubi Point and Oswald said, “Look at this thing.” He had a trail in grease mark and he said, “This thing just took off from Clark and it’s moving over China!” And I said, “You can’t be right,” and he agreed. A week later he saw it again, so several of us began looking hard and we saw it. Oswald was right and we saw it so regularly that we started clocking them. I even called the duty officer about them and he said, “Look, fella, there’s no planes flying over China.” We knew better. We saw them all the time, mostly flying out of Cubi Point, but sometimes they flew out of Clark.’11 U-2 flights out of Clark AFB in the Philippines did begin in late March 1958. In his book Eyes in the Sky: Eisenhower, the CIA and Cold War Aerial Espionage, retired CIA analyst Dino Brugioni, a founder of the CIA’s National Photographic 11 John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York, Carroll & Graf, 1995) p. 32. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Interpretation Center, writes: ‘On 28 March 1958, Agency U-2s were deployed to Clark AFB in the Philippines and began to overfly the entire Indonesian Archipelago. Thirty U-2 missions would be flown, the last on June 7, 1958.’12 Oswald’s unit, however, sailed back to Japan from the Philippines on 7 March 1958, weeks before the first U-2 flights out of Clark.13 How then could Oswald have been ‘obsessed’ about U-2 plane flights in the Philippines when the plane was not even there? In The Missing Chapter, Jack Swike states: ‘Several researchers and authors have stated that Oswald became interested in U-2 Spy Planes going over China when his unit was in Corregidor, but my research has confirmed that such theories are absolutely false, with the misinformation being spread in part by a Marine officer [almost certainly a reference to John Donovan] who was not in Oswald’s unit [in Japan] and who had no connection whatsoever to U-2 operations. Furthermore, there were no U-2 Spy Planes in Subic Bay at the time, nor did Marines guard any hangers that contained U-2s. What’s more, the search radar could only reach a height of 40,000 feet at a maximum distance of 40 miles out. The U-2 flew at 70,000 feet and China was approximately 1,000 miles away, beyond the range of scope radar.’ Donovan next ‘remembered’ that he worked closely with Oswald not just in the Philippines but in Taiwan as well. Donovan further claims that while the unit was stationed in Taiwan, Oswald ‘spent many hours drawing traces of the U-2’s 12 Dino Brugioni, Eyes in the Sky: Eisenhower, the CIA and Cold War Aerial Espionage (Naval Institute Press, 2010) p. 281. 13 Brugioni’s testimony further suggests that Dan Powers may have told the truth when he said that he and two other men had been specially selected to guard a hanger, which may have housed a U-2 because he did not go back to Japan with the MACS-1 unit on 7 March 1958. (Powers only went to the Philippines in mid-January 1958 while the regular MACS-1 unit with Oswald first arrived there in mid- November 1957.) In his Warren Commission testimony, Powers said he was assigned to guard a U-2 plane in the Philippines but his assignment took place after Oswald and the rest of his MACS unit had returned to Japan. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk tracks’ over the People’s Republic of China. Again from Oswald and the CIA: ‘Oswald’s unit later deployed (September 14 through October 6) to Ping Tong on the north side of Taiwan, and Donovan was his commander there too. Donovan recalls: “In Formosa [Taiwan] we were near the U-2 as well. There, Oswald spent many hours drawing traces of the U-2’s tracks over the People’s Republic of China.14 (Emphasis added.) Returning to his 7 April 1978 HSCA interview, Donovan next confused the high-priced Tokyo Queen Bee hostess who never existed with the beautiful Eurasian ‘White Russian’ at Iwakuni who also never existed. In the alembic of Donovan’s mind, the Tokyo Queen Bee B-girl now became fluent in Russian: ‘In Japan, Oswald, who was paid only $87 per month, frequented the Queen Bee Bar, a night-club and brothel where an evening cost $50. Oswald was seen in the company of a stunning Eurasian bar girl who was multilingual. According to two sources, she spoke Russian.’ ‘Two sources’ indeed. Donovan next discussed Oswald’s activities in El Toro. Donovan had testified extensively (and as far as I can tell accurately) about his time in El Toro to the Warren Commission. Now well over a decade later he gave HSCA investigator Genzman new revelations. ‘The following suspicious incidents in California. Oswald possessed a sea bag full of photographs and he paid someone two dollars to take the sea bag to the bus station in order to send it to New York. Oswald was seen talking to a wealthy Japanese man, possibly named Hattori, who allegedly travelled to the Soviet Union along the same route Oswald later took. Oswald was seen receiving a package from a suspicious-looking civilian at the base gate. A fellow Marine crewman fixed a date between Oswald and a relative, Rosalyn Quinn, 14 Newman (see note 11) p. 33 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk who spoke Russian and who was allegedly staying at the Hotel Metropole in Moscow when Oswald stayed there.’ As we shall see, one of Epstein’s friends, another early JFK assassination investigator named Jones Harris, also interviewed Donovan about the mysterious Japanese visitor to El Toro and even he decided Donovan’s claims were wrong. U-2 spy? Epstein presents the U-2 spy plane as the holy grail of Soviet intelligence operations in Japan. In Legend he tries to sell the idea that Oswald took U-2 secrets to Russia and that his information may have led to the shoot-down of an American U- 2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers on 1 May 1960. Over the decades, the claim that Oswald somehow uncovered U-2 secrets at Atsugi has taken on almost urban legend status.15 But what did Oswald’s fellow Marines think about the idea of Oswald stealing U-2 secrets? Zack Stout, who worked the MACS-1 station at Atsugi with Oswald, said he did not believe Oswald could have acquired any detailed secret knowledge of the U-2. In his 1 June 1978 HSCA interview, Stout recalled: ‘LHO was run-of-the-mill radar man, which wasn’t bad.... Conversely, there was little, if any, knowledge or interest in the “experimental plane.” All the operators were aware it flew “high and far – beyond our scopes,” but it never registered with the radar crews anyway, so 15 ‘Left’ critics of the Warren Commission argue that the CIA gave Oswald information on the U-2 so that he could pass it to the Soviets who used the knowledge to shoot down Powers’ plane and thus ruin a planned Paris summit meeting between Eisenhower and Khrushchev in Paris in May 1960. In effect, the CIA pulled off a back door sabotage of détente. Of course, Oswald defected to Russia in October 1959. ‘Right’ critics of the Warren Commission like Epstein argue that Oswald gave the Russians key U-2 secrets because Oswald was a Soviet agent. Hence, the ‘Left’ accuses the Warren Commission of covering up Oswald’s CIA ties while the ‘Right’ denounces the Warren Commission for failing to expose Oswald’s KGB pedigree. To make their respective cases, both sides have to have Oswald give the Russians significant information about the U-2. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk no one paid any attention to it.’ Stout explained that all military aircraft did check in and out with them except that one. They didn’t even know how many there were. All he recalls was they only used one at a time. Security was tight. You couldn’t get near the plane. No cameras allowed in that area. They didn’t know any of the pilots. Someone may have said it was an ‘experimental’ or ‘weather’ plane, he didn’t pay that much attention to it at the time. The only recollection he has was it differs in two respects from the conventional aircraft in that the wings were so relatively long, there seemed to be an extra set of wheels under them and it needed much less runway to take off. Stout added that the basic ‘legend’ [a reference to Epstein’s book?] portrayed the U-2 as using ‘Racecar’ as its call and checking in and out with them, neither of which is remotely true. Stout said there’s no way he wouldn’t have been aware of this and he never heard of either situation.’ Stout’s memory corresponds with Jack Swike’s investigation. A former Marine intelligence officer at Atsugi, Swike – who left the base shortly before Oswald arrived – spent some 27 years investigating Oswald’s actions in Japan. Like Stout, he concluded that Oswald had zero access to U-2 secrets at Atsugi. In his 2008 book The Missing Chapter: Lee Harvey Oswald in the Far East, Swike discussed U-2 security at Atsugi with a fellow former Marine officer named Capt. J. E. Dolan, who worked with the CIA on the U-2. In a 23 June 2006 letter to Swike, Dolan recalled, ‘There were two separate clearances for the U-2 – one for operations which had a separate channel, and one for the product which had its channel. I was the CIA alternate control officer for each.’ Dolan told Swike that the Soviets operated their own SIGINT intelligence gathering trawlers in the Sea of Japan that regularly monitored U-2 fights. The Soviets could calculate both the speed and height of the planes and could determine just how high the U-2 could fly. The real Soviet problem with the U-2 was simple; their Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk anti-aircraft missiles still could not quite reach the phenomenal height at which the U-2 flew. The CIA/Air Force unit at Atsugi in charge of the U-2 was dubbed Detachment C and had separate weather and communications officers and operational staff. Swike states Detachment C operated separately as a sub-unit of the CIA’s Atsugi-based Joint Technical Advisory Group (JTAG). In his 14 May 1964 letter to the FBI, then CIA Deputy Director of Plans Richard Helms described JTAG’s operations at Atsugi Station. Helms stated that the JTAG unit: ‘....occupied an area within the Station, consisting of 20 to 25 individual residences, two dormitories, an office area, a power plant, several Butler-type warehouses, and a club building used for recreation and a bachelor officers’ mess. The JTAG area was not closed, but it was located about 400 yards from the main Station area and there was no occasion for the regularly assigned Station personnel to visit the JTAG area. The club was open only to JTAG personnel and their guests. Two of the living quarters were occupied by the Navy commanding officer and his deputy because the quarters at JTAG were of better quality than the housing accommodations provided at the Station.’ The MACS-1 radar unit where Oswald worked had absolutely nothing to do with the U-2 program. Nor would Oswald and his co-workers have heard communication as the U-2 maintained radio silence after it left base. In addition, the MACS-1 radar at the time went no higher than 40,000 feet. When a U-2 launched, it would quickly disappear off their screens. Taiwan Even if Oswald did not steal highly guarded U-2 secrets to pay for his high-class Tokyo geisha girl, as Legend wants the reader to believe, that does not mean that Oswald’s stay in the Far East was completely devoid of mystery. Oswald’s story becomes even more curious when we examine reports of the time he allegedly spent in Taiwan. The word ‘allegedly’ stems Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk from one of the most bizarre aspects of Oswald’s story: the Warren Commission believed that Oswald had been in Taiwan; the HSCA, however, claimed he never left Japan. Reports about Oswald’s activities in Taiwan rest on the Warren Commission’s belief that Oswald had indeed spent time there. Summarizing its research, the Warren Commission wrote: ‘On September 14, Oswald sailed with his unit for the South China Sea area. The unit was at Ping Tung, North Taiwan, on September 30 and returned to Atsugi on October 5. He was transferred out of MACS-1 and put on general duty in anticipation of his return to the United States. He spent several days thereafter in the Atsugi Station hospital.’ 16 The HSCA, however, concluded that Oswald never went to Taiwan and remained at NAS (Naval Air Station) Atsugi as part of the MAG-11 (Marine Aircraft Group) rear echelon unit. From page 220 of the HSCA report: ‘It has been stated that Oswald claimed to have served in Taiwan. The committee’s review of his military records, including unit diaries that were not previously studied by the Warren Commission, indicated, however, that he had not spent substantial time, if any, in Taiwan. These records show that, except for a 3-1/2 month period of service in the Philippines, Oswald served in Japan from September 12, 1957, until November 2, 1958. Although Department of Defense records do indicate that MAG (Marine Air Group) 11, Oswald’s unit, was deployed to Taiwan on September 16, 1958, and remained in that area until April 1959, an examination of the MAG 11 unit diaries indicated that Oswald was assigned at that time to a rear echelon unit. The term rear echelon does not, on its face, preclude service with the main unit in Taiwan, but the Department of Defense has specifically stated that “Oswald did not sail from Yokosuka, Japan, on September 16, 1958. He remained aboard NAS Atsugi 16 See p. 684 at < http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren- commission-report/appendix-13.html>. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk as part of the MAG-11 rear echelon.” [29] Oswald’s records also reflect that on October 6, 1958, he was transferred within MAG 11 to a Headquarters and Maintenance Squadron subunit in Atsugi, Japan. He reportedly spent the next week in the Atsugi Station Hospital. On November 2, 1958, Oswald left Japan for duty in the United States.’ Accordingly, based upon a direct examination of Oswald's unit diaries, as well as his own military records, it does not appear that he had spent any time in Taiwan. This finding is contrary to that of the Warren Commission that Oswald arrived with his unit in Taiwan on September 30, 1958, and remained there somewhat less than a week, but the Commission’s analysis apparently was made without access to the unit diaries of MAG 11. [30] (Emphasis added.) The HSCA report included these footnotes: Footnote [29] ‘This is contrary to statements attributed to Lieutenant Charles R. Rhodes by Edward Epstein in his book, [Legend] The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald. Rhodes maintains, according to Epstein, that Oswald did make the trip with the main unit but was sent back to Japan on October 6, 1958.’ Footnote [30] ‘Similarly, a message sent on November 4, 1959, from the Chief of Naval Operations concerning Oswald, which states that he had “served with Marine Air Control Squadrons in Japan and Taiwan,” may have been issued without checking unit diaries which indicated that Oswald had not been so deployed.’ The HSCA did say that Oswald’s MACS-1 unit left Japan on 14 September 1958 for a week-long voyage to Taiwan on board the USS Skagit. The unit set up base at P’ing-tung in North Taiwan during a period of acute geopolitical tension. On 23 August 1958, PRC military units began shelling the Kinmen (Quemoy) island claimed by Taiwan and triggered the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. In the shelling, an estimated 2,500 Taiwanese soldiers died along with 500 Communist troops. Yet Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the HSCA concluded during the crisis Oswald remained at Atsugi, where he received medical treatment for a case of urethritis reportedly due to gonorrhoea, although the HSCA hedges its bet by saying he did not spend ‘any substantial time, if any’ on Taiwan. Enter Legend, a book based on the Warren Commission belief that Oswald spent some time in Taiwan. Legend’s colorful description of what happened in Taiwan, however, is almost exclusively based on the testimony of a Marine Lieutenant named Charles R. Rhodes, the very individual that the HSCA critiques in its footnote 29, cited above. Before turning to Rhodes’ story as recounted in Legend, a few words about his earlier relationship to Oswald. Although apparently never interviewed by the Warren Commission or the HSCA, Rhodes knew Oswald at Atsugi. Documentation for this emerges out of Oswald’s second court martial for his confrontation with Sergeant Rodriguez, the incident that occurred on 20 June 1958. Oswald’s second trial included statements from Rodriguez, a Marine named Milam who was sitting with Rodriguez in the Blue Bird Café at the time of the confrontation, and Lt. Charles R. Rhodes, who was Rodriguez’s superior officer. In Legend, Epstein mentions Rhodes’ role in this incident this way: ‘Lieutenant Charles Rhodes witnessed the incident: “I walked in right after it happened – before the MPs got there – and there were three or four guys standing around ready to let Oswald have it...... Rodriguez was about to let him have it, but some of his friends convinced him it wasn’t worth getting into a fight over.” Rhodes says that he later told Rodriguez that he believed a sound thrashing would have been just what Oswald needed. Rhodes recalls that Oswald had been complaining to him that Rodriguez had been picking on him. Rhodes, who knew Rodriguez and remembers him as a well-respected sergeant who treated the men evenhandedly, went to Rodriguez to discuss the matter. Rodriguez told him that Oswald was wrong – that he Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk was not being picked on and that Rodriguez was beginning to get tired of his constant carping about it. Rhodes then told Oswald that he was being unreasonable – that he was imagining things if he thought he was being singled out for undesirable assignments. Rodriguez, who today does not claim to understand the incident, recalls a meeting of NCOs shortly before his trouble with Oswald at which they were told there was going to be a crackdown on Marines who persisted in getting into fights in town bars. The NCOs were told that the best place to start was among themselves. Rodriguez believes that he possibly would have been demoted if he had got into a fight with Oswald at the Bluebird.’ (Epstein p. 284) Rhodes stated that he went to Taiwan and served in the same unit with Oswald. He next told Epstein a remarkable story that somehow both the Warren Commission and the HSCA missed. Rhodes recalled that on the evening of 4 October 1958, Oswald was assigned to guard duty at P’ing-tung, where there was a military airport. Around midnight, Rhodes heard shots coming from the area Oswald guarded. Drawing his .45, Rhodes ran over and found Oswald slumped against a tree, shaking, crying, and holding his M-1 rifle across his lap. Oswald claimed that he had seen unknown men in the woods. After he challenged them, he began shooting. Rhodes said that he put his arm around Oswald and walked him back to the tent while Oswald told him he could not bear guard duty. Rhodes then informed his commanding officer about the incident. Oswald flew to Japan two days later on a military plane for medical treatment. Oswald apparently had suffered some kind of nervous breakdown. (Epstein pp. 81-2) Everyone who believes that Oswald went to Taiwan also agrees that Oswald returned to Atsugi on 5 October and entered treatment for either gonorrhoea or some related disease. (Swike says that there was a form of non-venereal urethritis at Atsugi because the Japanese in charge of the laundry often did not wash clothing at a temperature above Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk 160 degrees.) The Warren Commission states that Oswald returned to Japan and received medical treatment for a venereal disease. Did he sail back to Atsugi (presumably with his unit) as the Warren Commission believed? Did Oswald fly back on a military plane as Legend states? Would the military really fly Oswald out of a crisis zone (one that presumably had medical facilities able to treat venereal diseases) simply to treat a case of gonorrhoea? Assuming that Oswald was in Taiwan, what pushed him to his alleged mental meltdown? For Epstein, the answer is obvious: Oswald cracked under the pressure of being a Communist spy. As recounted in Legend, Rhodes told Epstein that the MACS-1 unit on Taiwan discovered that IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) codes had been seriously compromised. Communist Chinese pilots, when challenged, answered using code words that identified them as friendly and were allowed through without any further challenge. Rhodes recalled to Epstein, ‘We really caught hell about that.’ In Legend, the trigger for Oswald’s supposed collapse is clear: he cracked because he feared exposure as a Communist spy who had provided the Chinese with the unit’s IFF codes. In 1994 John Donovan upped the ante with his claim about an Oswald who ‘spent many hours’ while in Taiwan tracing out U- 2 flights to China when not romancing a Taiwanese boy. Twisted trail Were there other witnesses besides Rhodes who placed Oswald in Taiwan? The spotlight now turns to a Marine Second Lieutenant named William K. Trail who said that either Oswald went to Taiwan or that he did not go to Taiwan. His contradictory testimony begins on 5 December 1963 when FBI SAs Kinzer and Waldrup interviewed him. Trail states that Oswald went to Taiwan. From the interview: ‘He [Trail] served in the United States Marine Corps from September 1956 until November 1959, as a second lieutenant and later as a first lieutenant. During late Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk August or early September 1958, while assigned to the Atsugi Naval Air Station in Japan. With the First Marine Air Wing, Marine Air Group 11, Marine Air Control Squadron 1, his group was transferred to Taiwan. At that time, he first became aware of the fact that LEE HARVEY OSWALD was assigned to this same Marine Air Wing. At the time their group was moving to Taiwan, he recalled that OSWALD and another Marine were being held prisoner at Atsugi and had to be picked up by a “chaser” with a gun. He was unable to recall any other circumstances surrounding this event other than he seemed to recall that OSWALD was marched from the Marine jail without shoes which seemed odd to him at the time. During the ensuing months on Taiwan, from September [1958] to January or February 1959, he, TRAIL, saw little of OSWALD [Trail seems unaware that Oswald returned to Japan in early October sailed back to America in early November 1958 – KC] but heard rumors of his being different than the other men in his group. In this regard, he explained that OSWALD did not seem to get along well with the other men and gave the impression that he felt he was smarter than the others and enjoyed showing off his purported superior intelligence. In January or February 1959 Trail returned to the United States and was thereafter assigned to the Marine Corps Naval Facilities at Santa Ana, California. He recalled seeing OSWALD again at this Marine Base during early or mid-1959, at which time OSWALD spoke to him and seemed to be more sociable than he had been while they were in the same group in Japan and Taiwan. Mr. TRAIL concluded by saying that he had very little contact with OSWALD at any time during his military career and his recollection[s] of OSWALD and his activities were very limited. He did recall reading in the paper during the fall of 1959 that OSWALD had defected to Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Russia but heard nothing further of him or about him until November 1963...... (Emphasis added.) One day before the FBI interviewed Trail, Secret Service SA Charles E. Taylor spoke with John Donovan. In 1959 Trail and Donovan shared quarters at El Toro. In his 5 December 1963 interview with the Secret Service, Donovan recalled, ‘William K. Trail had just returned from a tour of duty with the Air Control squadron in Japan and they were discussing personnel who had been transferred from Japan to Squadron 9 in California.’ Donovan continued: ‘Lt. Trail mentioned that Lee Harvey Oswald served under his direction as a radar operator in Japan and was remembered as a very unusual person, argumentative, difficult to get along with, showing a dislike for any authority whatsoever, and an individual who would spend great periods of time alone. Trail furnished information to Donovan that Oswald served under his command for a period of slightly less than two years and Trail recalled that he placed Oswald on report for drunk and disorderly conduct and the use of argumentative and insulting language in conversations with a company sergeant. [Almost certainly a reference to the Blue Bird Café incident.] In addition, Trail recalled Oswald was court-martialled for not reporting the ownership of a pistol.’ Yet just one day earlier, Trail told the FBI that his ‘recollection[s] of OSWALD and his activities were very limited.’ Years later, Jack Swike spoke to Trail about Atsugi in general and Oswald in particular. In a 17 July 1981 letter to Swike, Trail said about Oswald: ‘I do recall that the night before MACS-1 was to embark for Taiwan (during September 1958), I was the duty- officer and I recall that a couple of men were brought from the brig (Oswald was one of them) and spent the night in the duty shack with a brig guard in attendance. I do not recall any further details about Oswald during this time (I flew to Taiwan about a week or two after Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk MACS-1 sailed) and my next recollection of him was in MACS-9 in California. I have no recollection of any significant events in California.’ Even though Swike reprints Trail’s letter where Trail writes, ‘I flew to Taiwan about a week or two after MACS-1 sailed’, Swike – who believes Oswald never went to Taiwan – writes ‘Trail flew out of Atsugi [to Taiwan] the next day.’ It was the USS Skagit bound for Taiwan, however, that left Atsugi the next day. Yet if Trail had no memory of Oswald until California, it seems logical (as Swike assumed) that Oswald never went to Taiwan. Is Trail a reliable witness? Let us examine Trail’s memory of Oswald wearing no shoes. Although there is some debate about just how much time Oswald spent incarcerated, the conventional belief is that Oswald spent 48 days in the brig from 27 June to 13 August 1958. Since the MACS-1 unit sailed for Taiwan on 14 September 1958, Oswald clearly was not in the brig at the time Trail claims he was. In any case, there is no evidence to suggest that Oswald spent any time in the brig after 13 August, or a month before his unit shipped out to Taiwan. Yet if, as Trail says, he did not sail to Taiwan with the unit but flew out of Atsugi to Taiwan a week later, clearly he was not on the boat. Trail seems not even to know why Oswald was brought to the duty shack in the first place. In short, Trail seems not very reliable. Let us, however, assume that Oswald did deploy to Taiwan and that Trail caught up with him and his unit a week later at P’ing-tung. If the shooting incident that Rhodes described in such detail really happened, how could Trail not be aware of it? Rhodes and Trail were Marine lieutenants, they both knew Oswald, and they both were stationed at P’ing- tung at the height of the Second Taiwan Strait crisis. Iwakuni: take two Even if we assume Oswald was in Taiwan and the Warren Commission got it right, Legend’s chronology remains bizarre Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk since Epstein next asserts it was sometime in October 1958 that Oswald arrived in Iwakuni! Epstein states that after returning to Japan on 5 October, Oswald ‘complained of having injured himself doing “heavy lifting” in Formosa, but the only unambiguous symptoms the doctors were able to find were urethral discharges which had persisted from the gonorrhoea.’ We now have three supposed reasons Oswald returned to Japan. They are 1) venereal disease; 2) some kind of mental breakdown most likely induced by the psychological pressure of being a Soviet spy; and 3) Oswald’s supposed claim he had been injured due to ‘heavy lifting’. In any case, Epstein continues: ‘With his unit still overseas [in Taiwan], Oswald was reassigned to the Marine squadron at Iwakuni, an air base some 430 miles southwest of Tokyo, which manned the Tactical Air Control Center for the northern Pacific area.’ (Epstein p. 82) In other words, Oswald – who had risked a nervous breakdown to betray America in Taiwan – now managed to ensconce himself in yet another key American military center. Just as he had fed top-secret ‘IFF codes’ to the Communist Chinese in Taiwan, now he could work similar magic in Iwakuni and dismantle America’s air defense against a Communist attack. Yet the evidence from medical records is overwhelming that Oswald spent most of October receiving treatment for urethral discharges at Atsugi. He was then assigned ‘general duty in anticipation of his return’ to the States before finally shipping out in early November. While the Warren Commission assumed Oswald had been in Taiwan and the HSCA believed he never left Atsugi, both the Warren Commission and the HSCA agreed that he never went to Iwakuni to buy a bowl of rice, much less to work in an air defense center. Based solely on Owen Dejanovich’s statement, Jack Swike tried to figure out when Oswald could have spent time in Iwakuni. Swike argues that Oswald could have only gone to Iwakuni before and not after his April 1958 court martial. ‘Therefore,’ Swike opines, ‘if Oswald went to Iwakuni, it was Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk before the deployment to Taiwan.’ Swike says this ‘seems likely’ because some of the MACS-1 people who went to the Philippines were later assigned to the First Marine Air Wing at Iwakuni where they remained until the end of April 1958.17 Since Oswald’s first court martial for the gun discharge incident took place at Atsugi in late April, Swike believes the only time Oswald could have been at Iwakuni was before his court martial proceedings, even though there are no records to support such a view. Swike clearly is trying to find some timetable where Oswald might have conceivably been at Iwakuni that does not violate common sense. Epstein, alas, has Oswald flown back from Taiwan to Japan in early October and then sent to Iwakuini. According to Legend, sometime between early October and his shipping out of Japan on 2 November 1958, Oswald was assigned ‘temporary duty’ at Iwakuni. While there, Oswald regularly drinks in the Orion bar in the company of a beautiful Eurasian woman who teaches him Russian. He goes with this woman on visits to military-restricted Communist sections of Iwakuni without being stopped by MPs. Oswald even informs Daniel Powers that the exotic woman is in part White Russian. He speaks to Powers in October 1958 although (according to his testimony before the Warren Commission) Powers left Japan earlier that summer. EL Toro spy? Oswald’s mysterious connections to exotic Orientals does not 17 I believe Swike is basing his view on Cooley. Cooley – who was with Oswald in the Philippines – reported that he and some other members of the unit returned to Japan [Iwakuni] while other unit members went back to Atsugi. Recall that in the Weston article in The Fourth Decade, Cooley says part of his unit went to Iwakuni from the Philippines. Cooley says that this group returned to Japan in late December while the full unit only left the Philippines in early March for Atsugi. The duty at Iwakuni, however, was temporary and Cooley eventually returned to his full unit Atsugi, if I am following the chronology correctly. Epstein, however, accepts the Warren Commission narrative that has Oswald and his unit leaving the Philippines in early March. Hence, the one window that Epstein has to stick Oswald in Iwakuni has to be in early October 1958 after Oswald’s return from Taiwan. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk end when he returns to a Marine air control unit at El Toro, California.18 We begin by recalling John Donovan’s claim to the HSCA about his suspicions of Oswald’s activities in El Toro, suspicions he never mentioned to the FBI or the Warren Commission years earlier. In his HSCA interview, Donovan reported: ‘The following suspicious incidents in California. Oswald possessed a sea bag full of photographs and he paid someone two dollars to take the sea bag to the bus station in order to send it to New York. Oswald was seen talking to a wealthy Japanese man, possibly named Hattori, who allegedly travelled to the Soviet Union along the same route Oswald later took. Oswald was seen receiving a package from a suspicious-looking civilian at the base gate. A fellow Marine crewman fixed a date between Oswald and a relative, Rosalyn Quinn, who spoke Russian and who was allegedly staying at the Hotel Metropole in Moscow when Oswald stayed there.’ What are we to make of Donovan’s reference to a mysterious Japanese man ‘possibly named Hattori’? In his book The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell notes the existence of a notorious post-war Japanese spy operation funded by far right American Army intelligence officers and known as the Hattori Organization. Russell claims that this Hattori (Tokushiro Hattori) ‘may have been related’ to the ‘wealthy Hattori family’ that reputedly owned a group of Tokyo night-clubs including the Queen Bee.19 Russell reports that the CIA’s James Angleton told one of his media contacts, Joseph Trento, that the Tokyo Queen Bee was one of the KGB’s most intensive 18 Oswald is often cited as serving at the main Marine facility at Santa Ana, California, but he actually was assigned to a subsidiary Marine unit at El Toro known as the LTA (Lighter than Air) Facility, a few miles away from the main base at Santa Ana. It was called LTA because it formerly was used for housing dirigibles. 19 The blizzard of confusion about Oswald’s role in Japan promoted by a former Army Intelligence agent named Richard Case Nagell, an Alice in Wonderland figure, dominates a good deal of the Japan section of The Man Who Knew Too Much. See Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992). Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk recruiting grounds and that, according to Angleton, various CIA officers and U-2 pilots ‘began relationships’ with girls in that bar. Yet as we have seen, Oswald never went to the highly upscale Tokyo Queen Bee club. [For more on Angleton see the postscript below.] In any case, if Tokushiro Hattori was in fact ‘related’ to the ‘wealthy Hattori family’ and they in turn ran upscale bars that served as recruitment centers for the KGB, are we supposed to believe that the U.S. Army Intelligence-backed Hattori Organization itself was under KGB control? Again, the story sounds absurd. What remains clear is Legend’s need to plant Oswald in the Tokyo Queen Bee at all cost given Angleton’s claim. Dick Russell also reports: ‘When author Edward Jay Epstein was researching his 1978 book about Oswald, Jones Harris, then one of his research assistants set about obtaining the names and addresses of the men who had served overseas with the young Marine. Harris was able to interview, among others, Marine lieutenant John Donovan, once stationed with Oswald in Japan and later at the El Toro Marine Base in California. While at El Toro, Donovan recalled that Oswald had received a visit in 1959 from a member of the Hattori clan. Donovan recognized the visitor as the brother of a Hattori girl he himself had known in Tokyo. The young man, according to Donovan, was Noboru Hattori, son of the president of the Hattori Watch Company in Tokyo. Harris added that Noboru Hattori was located and admitted having visited the El Toro base en route to Chicago, but maintained that his trip was in 1962 (not 1959) and denied ever having met Oswald.’ 20 Jones Harris was yet another early Warren Commission critic like Epstein. In his preface to Legend, Epstein writes: ‘I also benefited enormously from the insights and experiences of Jones Harris, especially as they pertain to Oswald’s service in 20 See Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Japan.’ In that same preface, Epstein says, ‘I would also like to thank John Donovan, one of the officers under whom Oswald served in the Marines. He served as a technical advisor on Oswald’s Marine Corps activities.’ In short, one Epstein researcher interviewed another Epstein researcher. Donovan told Harris that he just happened to recognize Noburu Hattori because he was the brother of a woman he had known in Tokyo, an extraordinary coincidence. Donovan surely would have asked Oswald just how he knew the brother of a woman Donovan knew and why he had decided to visit Oswald of all people. Yet there is no indication that Donovan bothered to question Oswald about his remarkable visitor, an event that Donovan failed to mention to the FBI and the Warren Commission. Harris then told Dick Russell that Noburu Hattori claimed he visited the El Toro base in 1962 for some inexplicable reason. How could Donovan then remember an incident that never happened in the first place? Nor could he have misplaced the dates 1959 and 1962 and simply mis- remembered Hattori visiting El Toro in 1962. By 1962, Donovan was living in Washington; Oswald, of course, left El Toro in 1959. Mercifully, Epstein left this Donovan tale out of Legend. As for Rosalyn Quinn, she was an airline flight attendant and the aunt of a Marine at El Toro who introduced her to Oswald. They went on one or two dates where they practised their Russian. There is no evidence that Quinn was in the Hotel Metropole in Moscow when Oswald stayed there in October 1959. Thankfully, Epstein omitted this story as well. Yet Epstein cannot resist the idea that Oswald had taken suspicious photos as Donovan referenced in his 1978 statement. From Legend: ‘As Oswald’s tour of duty neared completion, [his fellow Marine Nelson] Delgado noticed a stack of “spotter” photographs showing front and profile views of a fighter plane among Oswald’s papers. He realized that they had probably been used as a visual aid in training classes, and wondered why Oswald had them in his possession. Oswald stuffed the photographs into a duffle bag with some other possessions and asked Delgado if he would Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk bring the bag to the bus station in Los Angeles, put it in a locker, and bring him back the key. According to Delgado’s recollection, Oswald gave him two dollars for doing this.’ (Epstein p. 89) It is a curious story. First, when did all this supposedly happen? Delgado was on extended leave when Oswald left the Marines. He already had a falling-out with Oswald over Oswald’s continuing praise of Castro. Before he went on leave, Delgado put in a request to switch huts just so he could get away from Oswald. Epstein looked at Delgado’s testimony before the Warren Commission and he reports that Delgado never mentioned this alleged incident. Epstein includes this endnote about Delgado: ‘Another Marine, James Botelho, also vaguely remembers Oswald having these spotter photographs. Delgado did not mention these photographs to the Warren Commission, and his memory, eighteen years after the event, is vague. In my first interview with him in Germany, he remembered the photographs to me, but indicated that he had shipped them to an address in Brooklyn. In subsequent interviews, however, he recalled that he had merely left the photographs in a locker. In any case, there is no record of these photographs or what happened to them.’ (Epstein pp. 286-87) When Donovan spoke to the HSCA, he went with the first Delgado story about shipping the mysterious sea bag stuffed with photos to a Brooklyn address. Yet in Delgado’s second story, we are down to ‘front and profile views’ of one plane used for instructions that supposedly wind up in a locker in the Los Angeles bus station. These pictures, of course, were not of secret U-2 spy planes since no U-2 planes flew out of El Toro. The image of Oswald snapping suspicious photos, however, preys on Epstein’s mind. In Legend, Epstein claimed that Oswald wandered around Atsugi ‘taking pictures of the various objects that apparently interested him – such as radar Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk height-finding antennas.’ Yet in a world where Minox cameras are easily purchased, Oswald owned a cheap American-made box camera with its primitive lookdown viewfinder. Oswald did take pictures in Japan and some of them were taken at Atsugi. Oswald therefore must have been photographing ‘radar height-finding antennas’ that ‘apparently interested him’. Yaeko Okui: Legend’s false femme fatale Determined to uncover nefarious Japanese contacts with Oswald, Epstein turned a one-time chance meeting Oswald had in Dallas with a Japanese woman named Yaeko Okui into a potentially sinister espionage encounter. On 28 December 1962, Lee and Marina Oswald, along with George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt, attended to a Russian-style Christmas party in Dallas. At the party, Oswald met Yaeko Okui, a Japanese woman then living in Dallas. Born in Japan on 19 January 1933, Yaeko Okui spent three-and-a- half years at Waseda University in Tokyo studying economics and business administration and seven years studying flower arrangements at the Sogetau School of Professional Flower Arrangement in Tokyo, where she received a teacher’s certificate. She further became a highly skilled player of the kato, a thirteen-string instrument often used in Japanese symphony orchestras. In the spring of 1959, Okui met the president of Ozawa & Company which served as the Japanese agent for a Dallas- based corporation called Schwabach Perutz, which was involved in the cotton exchange and eager to do business in Japan. After Okui, a fluent English speaker, expressed a desire to see America, Ozawa arranged for her to work for Gerardo Weinstein, president of Schwabach Perutz. She arrived in Dallas in the summer of 1959 and worked as a governess at Weinstein’s Dallas home. After a period in New York, Okui returned to Dallas in August 1962 as the southwest representative of Nippon Service, the U.S. representative for the famed Takashimaya Department Store. She worked in public relations and maintained regular contact with firms doing business in Japan. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk She frequently lectured before women’s clubs on flower arrangements and Japanese ways of origami paper folding. With her musical background, Okui became friends with Latvian-born, Russian-speaking, Lev Aronson, a cellist and music teacher, whom she met at a Dallas chamber music concert. Okui attended the White Russian-style Christmas party with Aronson. Here is how Legend describes what happened at the party: ‘[Oswald] turned instead to a young and exquisitely beautiful Japanese girl named Yaeko Okui. Yaeko had come to Dallas that year to do public relations work for Nippon Services, Inc., a chain of Japanese departments stores. She was also a certified teacher in ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, and an accompanied musician. Another musician, Lev Aronson, had brought her to the party, but Oswald showed little interest in talking to him. For almost three hours, Yaeko sat with Oswald at the far end of the living room and talked. She seemed able to speak Russian and English with equal ease. (Epstein p. 201) (Emphasis added.) Alas, there is absolutely no evidence that Okui spoke any Russian. Okui’s testimony appears in the Warren Commission as CE 1862 (the FBI summary) and CE 1866 (Okui’s 5 May 1964 FBI interview). From that FBI interview: ‘Miss Okui recalled that, upon arrival at this party, she was introduced to a large number of people in attendance, none of whom she can recall now, but she does recall being introduced to an individual, who she now knows was LEE HARVEY OSWALD, and his wife, MARINA, who were also in attendance at the party. Miss OKUI stated she recalls further having a conversation with MARINA OSWALD, through Mr. ARONSON as interpreter and she received a good deal of attention from the guests at the party, inasmuch as she was the only Oriental in attendance. Miss OKUI recalled she discussed with MARINA OSWALD the fact that she, Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk MARINA, had recently arrived in the United States and had little or no opportunity to see the country and get acquainted with the people.’ (Emphasis added.) The only way Marina Oswald and Yaeko Okui could have any conversation at all, as Okui states, was by having Lev Aronson interpret as Okui did not speak Russian and Marina barely any English, much less Japanese. Nor do witnesses such as George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt mention Okui speaking Russian. Yet Legend states that Oswald and Okui sat alone in a corner for almost three hours conversing in English and Russian. Nor did they sit entirely alone if Okui’s interview with the FBI is to be believed: ‘Miss Okui further stated she does recall having a discussion with MARINA’s husband, whom she now knows to be LEE HARVEY OSWALD, concerning Ikebana, or flower arrangement, and OSWALD, to the best of her recollection, queried her about how she liked the United States in relation to Japan, insofar as the customs of the people were concerned. She stated OSWALD did not, at any time, broach the subject of politics and, if he had, she would have been inadequate in that regard, as she takes little interest in that subject. Miss Okui stated that, if there was some consternation by any of the guests at her discussion with OSWALD, she was not aware of it and, in fact, feels certain Mr. ARONSON was at her side at all times that evening. Miss OKUI stated further that was the first and last time she had ever met or talked to either LEE HARVEY OSWALD or his wife, MARINA OSWALD, and, in fact, did not, at any time, know his name until OSWALD received notoriety as a result of the assassination of President KENNEDY. Miss Okui also stated that, to the best of her recollection, Mr. ARONSON did not, at least not to her, express any displeasure over her discussion with LEE HARVEY OSWALD, and she stated she feels certain he would have mentioned it had that been true.’ Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Yet Legend cannot resist turning Yaeko Okui into a suspected spy: ‘Marina, even when she was singing Russian songs with the rest of the guests, watched her husband and Yaeko with some concern. A number of her friends, including Jean de Mohrenschildt, simply assumed that she was jealous over the attention that Oswald was paying to this Japanese girl. Marina’s real concern, however, as she later explained to her biographer, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, was that Yaeko might be an American intelligence agent. At one point she took her husband aside and warned him that Yaeko “may be a spy. Don’t be too frank with her”. George de Mohrenschildt subsequently testified that he was also impressed with the “extraordinary interest which developed between....Yaeko and Oswald....” He knew that Oswald had served in Japan in the Marine Corps before he defected to the Soviet Union. He also knew that Oswald had made some “contacts with Communists in Japan” and that these “contacts” had induced him to go to the Soviet Union.21 At least this is what Oswald confided to him. Now, as he watched them talk across the room, he wondered whether she might be trying to find out about this earlier period in Oswald’s life. In any case, he didn’t trust her. Yaeko herself never fully divulged the contents of this long conversation with Oswald. She told her friend Lev Aronson, who was showing some signs of impatience over Oswald, that they had talked about “nothing at all”. She would later say when questioned by the FBI in 1964 that she and Oswald discussed 21 This is classic Epstein. The Japanese Communists ‘had induced him to go to the Soviet Union.’ In fact, de Mohrenschildt told the Warren Commission that Oswald had met some Japanese Communists ‘and they – that got him interested to go and see what goes on in the Soviet Union...... [Oswald] said, “I have met some Communists in Japan and they got me excited and interested, and that was one of my inducements in going to Soviet Russia to see what goes on there.”’ Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk “flower arrangements”. At about midnight, De Mohrenschildt suggested to Oswald that they leave. He had arranged a baby sitter for Oswald’s daughter, and she had said that she could not work past midnight. Oswald wrote down a number that Yaeko gave him, as Marina observed, then he followed De Mohrenschildt to the door.’ (Epstein pp. 201-02) George De Mohrenschildt discussed Yaeko Okui during his 23 April 1964 Warren Commission testimony: ‘Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT...... What really impressed me that particular night was an extraordinary interest which developed between this Japanese girl, Yaeko – I don’t remember her last name – but I already had given that impression of mine at the American Embassy so they could check on that. She was a Japanese girl, very good looking, who worked, I think, at Neiman-Marcus in Dallas, and was brought into Dallas from Japan by some people in the cotton business to take care of their babies.’ What De Mohrenschildt means about contacting the American Embassy about Yaeko Okui (whom the de Mohrenschildts seem to have met socially in Dallas even before she moved to New York) is anyone’s guess. The de Mohrenschildts, as we shall see, were highly suspicious of all Japanese people based on Jeanne’s experiences in the Far East. George de Mohrenschildt’s testimony continues: ‘Now, this girl is a much superior girl as to be just a baby caretaker. She eventually left that couple that is all hearsay, you see, and became sort of a girl friend of a Russian musician who lives in Dallas by the name of Lev Aronson. And I do not recall whether he was at the party or not. [In fact, Aronson brought Okui to the party.] But Yaeko was, and they developed an immediate interest in each other – Oswald and Yaeko. They just went on sight and started talking and talking and talking. I thought that was understandable because Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Oswald had been in Japan, you see. But the interest was so overwhelming that Marina objected, and became very jealous. She told us, either that night or later, that Oswald got her telephone number, she noticed that Oswald got this girl’s telephone number. And once or twice later on she told us that she has the impression that Oswald is carrying on something with this girl...... ’ In her 22 April 1964 Warren Commission testimony, Jeanne de Mohrenschildt discussed Okui at some length: Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. There were quite a lot of people from this Russian colony and among them there was a little Japanese girl. Do you know about Yaeko? Mr. JENNER. Y-a-e-k-o? Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. That is right. Mr. JENNER. Did you know Yaeko before? Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. Yes; we knew Yaeko before. Mr. JENNER. What was her last name? Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. I don’t remember her last name because we always called her Yaeko. Mr. JENNER. Where was she working? Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. I don’t know whether she was working at the time or not, but she was imported by some American family. She came with the family. She is supposed to be from a very fine Japanese family. She was wealthy. It was strange she worked almost as a servant in some family. I know she had only one day off, because I remember when we wanted to invite her it was only one day, Thursday, that we could invite her. Then she did some work with Neiman Marcus. Mr. JENNER. Neiman Marcus? Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. Then she was a musician. She played the Japanese special long, long instrument [the kato], and she was playing with the Dallas Symphony, and she was also playing at exhibits, Neiman Marcus gives exhibits, you know, oriental exhibits, whatever it Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk was, that fall, and she was participating in it. That is what we know about Yaeko. But then we heard that she was in New York. To tell you frankly I never trusted Yaeko. I thought there was something fishy, maybe because I was brought up with Japanese, you know, and I knew what treachery it is, you know. I just somehow – she was very pleasant, but was very strange to me the way she was floating around, you know, and everything. There is another strange thing happened, too, with that Yaeko. Mr. JENNER. Involving the Oswalds? Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. Yes. Mr. JENNER. Tell us. Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. That was very funny because they practically spent all evening together at that party, and Marina was furious, of course, about it. And the party that brought Yaeko to the party [Aronson] was furious about it, too, and I don’t blame him for it. And from what I understand, Marina told me that Oswald saw Yaeko after, which was very unusual, because I don’t think Oswald wanted to see anyone, let’s put it that way. He would rather just sit by himself and – locked, in a house, not to see anyone. And, in fact, Marina was jealous of it, from Yaeko. She was the only person we know that Oswald really liked...... Mr. JENNER. How, otherwise, did Oswald act at this Christmas party. He paid a great deal of attention, apparently, to –– Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. Yes; they talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Mr. JENNER. To the Japanese girl? Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. Yes; what did they talk about, I don’t have slightest idea. But everybody remarked and we were laughing about it. We were teasing Marina how he had a little Japanese girl now, you now. That was just as fun, of course, you know. But evidently they not Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk only talked because she [Marina] said he saw her later and he liked her. That is what she told me. He really liked Yaeko. This then is the meeting that Epstein implies had some exotic espionage overture as Oswald and Okui conversed in both English and Russian ‘with equal ease’. Recall that Legend has already given us a beautiful high-class Japanese bar girl operating out of a luxurious KGB-run club in Tokyo, and a mysterious ‘Eurasian’ or half-White Russian beauty that tutored Oswald in Russian in Iwakuni. Epstein now gives us the exotic Miss Okui. Yet as is clear from the testimony of the de Mohrenschildts, at no point do they (or any other witness) mention that Okui spoke any Russian at all, much less fluent Russian. Once again, Epstein has concocted his very own legend. The puzzle of Legend Legend relentlessly promoted the thesis that the KGB had some sinister connection to Oswald that began in Japan. Although Legend’s attempt to show such a link was woefully inept, it does not therefore mean that the KGB had not contacted Oswald. The most telling evidence for a possible KGB link to Oswald comes not from imaginary encounters at the Tokyo Queen Bee but from Oswald’s reported encounters with members of the Japanese Communist Party, as reported by George de Morenschildt, as well as his attempt to learn Russian while still in Japan. If the Soviets saw Oswald as a potential infiltrator into the Marines, his actions in El Toro suggest this was almost certainly not the case. If the KGB had some hook into Oswald, the last thing the Soviets would have wanted would have been for Oswald to openly receive Communist publications and make provocative political remarks favoring Castro. The more exaggerated claims Legend makes for Oswald as a Soviet superspy, the more absurd the book becomes. Let us, however, suspend disbelief and accept Legend’s premise that Oswald managed to steal U-2 secrets (or any vital military secrets) while in the Far East and pass them onto his KGB Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk handler. Oswald’s very public defection to then USSR – not to mention the fact that he told the U.S. Embassy that he intended to give the Soviets military secrets – would have insured that the U.S. would have had to make an assessment of any potential damage Oswald may have inflicted and implement immediate counter-measures. Therefore the more valuable the information Oswald possessed, the more the Soviets would have opposed any public defection. Oswald would have been a far more effective KGB asset if, after leaving the military, he worked in some minor job in America. After a successful Soviet downing of a U-2, he could have gone to the USSR and received a hero’s welcome. Yet none of this happened. Yet another espionage scenario would have Oswald prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies while he was in Japan as a future ‘false defector’ sent into the Soviet Union either to feed the Soviets deceptive information or to carry out some yet unknown task behind the Iron Curtain. As we know now, the Soviets never trusted Oswald; the MVD (the Soviet version of the FBI) kept him under continual surveillance, both in Moscow and Minsk. If Oswald were a ‘controlled defector’, perhaps he did secretly go to either Iwakuni or Tokyo (or Miami Beach for that matter) and was there introduced to a Russian tutor as part of a planned defection. Since Legend is such a hopeless muddle, it is impossible to trust it as a serious examination of Oswald’s actions in Japan either as a KGB recruit or as a controlled defector. Legend could make its claims in large part because there supposedly does not exist any American counter-intelligence investigation of Oswald following his defection. Epstein, unfortunately, only references this critical issue in two endnotes that appear one after the other: ‘The official record of this investigation [of Oswald following his defection] remains missing or at least unavailable. The FBI inquired about it shortly after the assassination but apparently never received it or, in any event, never turned it over to the Warren Commission. In the course of my research, the Marine Corps, which Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk was otherwise extremely co-operative, searched its files but found no trace of the investigation. The Office of Naval Intelligence and the Naval Investigative Services replied to my Freedom of Information request by stating that the report of the investigation was not in their files. The CIA has also denied to me that it conducted such an investigation. Finally, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, which was responsible for base security at Atsugi, also denied partaking in any such investigation.’ In his next endnote on the same page, Epstein writes: ‘The practice of doing net damage reports also persisted immediately after Oswald defected. An Army sergeant defected in July 1960, and an Army private defected in August 1960. Army counterintelligence suspected both had had prior dealings with the KGB while serving in the Army, and both were under military investigation at the time of their defection. The two defectors from the National Security Agency [Mitchell and Martin] in June 1960 were also suspected of having had prior KGB connections. Indeed, in all military cases where defectors had access to classified information – except for the Oswald case – there was some indication of a pre-defection relation with the KGB, though since Soviet records are never available, such contact is never positively established.’ (Epstein p. 293) If there had been an extensive investigation of Oswald’s activities in Japan, why has it never been made public? How can there be no record that American intelligence ever questioned Oswald following his return to America? The CIA’s Domestic Division regularly interviewed business executives, tourists, academics, and other Americans who had spent time in Russia. Yet no one thought to question Lee Harvey Oswald? For all its flaws, Legend finally does raise a vital question directly related to Oswald’s stay in Japan – and then buries it in two endnotes. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Part two The Mitchell/Martin affair Given Legend’s distortions of Oswald’s experiences in Japan, it is almost impossible to offer any serious overview of Oswald’s stay in the Far East. Yet Oswald’s October 1959 defection – if genuine – would almost certainly have raised a host of intelligence red flags. To understand why, we must look at the most famous defector case of this period, the Mitchell-Martin affair. Not long after Oswald defected to Russia, a remarkable spy saga shook America’s espionage establishment when two civilian employees of the military’s ultra-secret National Security Agency (NSA) showed up in Moscow. The scandal and its similarities to the Oswald saga once again suggest how unlikely it is that the American government had no interest in investigating Oswald’s past. In mid-October 1959, Lee Harvey Oswald crossed the border from Finland to Russia. Then on 6 September 1960, two former National Security Agency (NSA) employees named Bernon Mitchell and William Martin held a press conference in Moscow. The two mathematician/cryptographers formally announced their defection.22 As it so happened, the two men had earlier worked at the U.S. military base at Atsugi, Japan. At their Moscow press conference, Mitchell and Martin denounced the U.S. government’s policy of sending military aircraft over the Soviet Union’s borders to gather electronic information on Soviet defenses. They said that while working for the NSA, they learned about ELINT (electronic intelligence) missions where planes deliberately crossed the Soviet border. The planes gathered information to develop new radar- jamming devices that could be deployed from American bases close to the Russian border. Such devices, they argued, would only be used if the United States were planning a possible nuclear first strike attack. As they explained in their press 22 On the defection, see Wayne Barker and Rodney Coffman, The Anatomy of Two Traitors: The Defections of Bernon F. Mitchell and William H. Martin (Laguna Hills, CA: Aegean Park Press, 1981). Unfortunately this short book is amateurish in the extreme. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk conference: ‘It should be clear even to a layman that information about radar defenses has no bearing whatsoever on the problem of ascertaining whether or not the Soviet Union is preparing for a surprise attack. This information can be utilized only for the purpose of determining the defense potential of the Soviet Union.’ 23 Another terrifying prospect was that the USSR would misread an American incursion into Soviet airspace as part of planned U.S. first strike: ‘A single incident or misinterpretation concerning the purpose of planes involved in these flights could be the cause of war,’ they warned. The two men then cited a statement by Thomas Powers, the Commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC). During a discussion of the military budget, Powers told the House Committee on Appropriations about ‘....the tremendous advantages that accrue to the man who starts a war. You always must have a capability to strike first, because obviously if these people thought we never could start a war, why then they could just take this world away from us piece by piece, because they would know that as long as they do not strike us, we could never do anything about it.’ At their press conference, Mitchell and Martin reported that on 2 September 1958 a MIG-17 aircraft shot down an American C- 130 plane out of Turkey crammed with NSA spy gear. The plane crash-landed in Soviet Armenia, killing all 17 crew members. Eleven of the dead were members of the Air Force Security Service, the Air Force wing of the NSA. In a prelude to President Eisenhower’s fateful decision to lie about the true nature of the U-2 after Gary Power’s U-2 was shot down over the Soviet Union on 1 May 1960, the U.S. government claimed the C-130 was on a scientific information gathering flight that accidentally wandered off course when the Soviets shot it down without provocation. Minnesota 23 For the full text of the Moscow press conference, see Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey publicly denounced the Soviet Union for what he claimed was an unprovoked attack. Knowing better, Mitchell and Martin arranged a meeting with Congressman Wayne Hays, an Ohio Democrat, to tell him that the government lied to Congress. They said that during their meeting with Hays: ‘Our conversation was interrupted when the Congressman received a telephone call from the Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Relations, Mr. William Macomber, who requested him to refrain from further public discussion of the C-130 incident. Again, it is clear that if this plane had been engaged solely in gathering scientific information, the State Department would have had no reason to be concerned.’ Prelude to defection: Kamiseya station Mitchell and Martin first met in the Navy and both served from 1951 to 1954. After enlisting, the Navy assigned them to the Naval Security Group (the naval wing of the NSA) as ‘communication technicians’. They recalled that they had ‘served.....at several United States naval radio intercept stations during this period.’ The key station, however, was the Naval Support Station in Kamiseya, Japan, where they were stationed from 1952 to 1954. Kamiseya Station was a detachment from the U.S. Naval Facility at Atsugi, Japan. (The station was located just three miles north of the main base at Atsugi.) Mitchell and Martin described Kamiseya Station this way: ‘The United States Government has recently admitted carrying out intelligence flights around and over the borders of Communist nations only during the last four years. However, we would like to state that these flights were also being conducted in the period 1952-54, when we were serving at a United States naval radio intercept station at Kamiseya, Japan, near Yokohama. In advance of a reconnaissance flight of a United Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk States military plane along the Chinese or Soviet Far Eastern borders, a top-secret message would be sent to Kamiseya and other communications intelligence stations, informing them as to the flight time and course of the plane. At the designated flight time, monitors at these stations would tune in on the frequencies used by radar reporting stations of the target country, i.e., the Soviet Union or Communist China. At the same time, radio direction finders would tune in on these frequencies to seek out the locations of the radar reporting stations. Information gathered in this manner would then be forwarded to the National Security Agency. There, analysts study the communications and code systems used by the radar stations. NSA is then able to estimate the degree of alertness, accuracy and efficiency of the radar defenses of the target nation, and it is also able to collect information about the organization of command within the target nation’s internal defense system.’ Although the two men became good friends, they went their separate ways after the service. While Mitchell returned to America, Martin – enamoured of Japanese culture – stayed on as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army until mid-1955. They then began advanced academic studies in mathematics back in America. Martin also took up Russian. Independently recruited into the NSA in 1957, they quickly resumed their friendship. For their part, NSA recruiters looked very favorably on both men. Besides being gifted mathematicians, they already had served as enlisted men in a top NSA listening post at Kamiseya Station, where they held high security clearances. After joining the NSA, Mitchell and Martin learned of a kind of incursion into Soviet air defenses unlike the flights they monitored in Japan that saw fighter jets cross the borders of both Russia and China. The high-risk ELINT missions, instead, flew ‘in the immediate proximity of radar installations of the Soviet Union and other countries to obtain data about the physical nature of radiations from radar transmitters.’ Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk In December 1959, Mitchell and Martin visited Fidel Castro’s Havana by way of Mexico City. While in Mexico City, Mitchell reportedly contacted the Soviet Embassy and requested political asylum. Although the Soviets tried to persuade him to return to Washington as a ‘mole’ inside the NSA, Mitchell insisted he wanted to defect. Less than a year later, on 25 June 1960, Mitchell and Martin flew from Washington to Mexico City, then to Havana, and from there to the USSR where they were granted asylum on 11 August 1960. Less than a month later, they held their Moscow press conference and made their defection public. Mitchell and Martin defected to the Soviet Union less than a year after Oswald. All of them worked in communications at Atsugi: Oswald in a relatively low security Marine MACS air control unit, Mitchell and Martin in the NSA’s top-secret Naval Security Group at Kamiseya Station. Given the Atsugi link, might not the government at least try to determine if all three men had been compromised by a larger Soviet intelligence operation in Japan? Investigating Mitchell-Martin The Mitchell-Martin defection was a tremendous shock to the NSA, which launched an internal investigation that involved speaking to some 450 witnesses. The FBI, the CIA, and military intelligence all worked the case. The inquiry included a microscopic look of both men’s earlier experiences in Japan. To illustrate the lengths the CIA went to investigate a possible Japan-KGB connection, on 23 December 1960, a top CIA official named William K. Harvey submitted a report on Mitchell-Martin to the FBI. By then the government knew that Martin was a hardcore sexual masochist. One of women he turned to fulfil his needs was a prominent Baltimore stripper named ‘Lady Zorro’ (Shelia Bowater) whom the FBI interrogated.24 Harvey, however, was more interested in another woman friend of Martin’s named Ardelle Gasda (or Kasda), 24 Movie director John Waters has written a portrait of Lady Zorro in his 2011 book Role Models although he had no idea of her connection to the Mitchell-Martin affair. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk who met Martin at the Lord Baltimore Hotel on 28 February and 1 March 1959. Martin told Gasda his sexual preferences included being burnt on his arms with lit cigarettes. When Gasda reportedly protested that such conduct was ‘an Oriental practice’, and American girls ‘were not of that type’, Martin told her that he once had a Japanese girlfriend but that his new girlfriend was an American showgirl who had worked in night-clubs like the Latin Quarter and the Copacabana. This showgirl was the ‘donor’ of ‘the chain-linked manacles’ that Martin showed to Gasda. Gasda assumed that Martin had referred to two famous New York night-clubs when he mentioned the Copacabana and the Latin Quarter. Harvey, however, wanted the FBI to re- interview Gasda because he said that there were two night- clubs in Tokyo also called the Latin Quarter and the Copacabana. Harvey believed both clubs might have Soviet connections via the murky world of organized crime. An ex-OSS man named Al Shattuck ran the Tokyo Latin Quarter. Shattuck, in turn, fronted for another American investor in the club named Ted Lewin, whom Harvey described as ‘the kingpin of vice and crime in the Orient’. Lewin and Shattuck imported American showgirls to work at their clubs in Japan. On 1 July 1960, Shattuck voluntarily left Japan to avoid deportation over a jewel theft. Allegations in the Japanese press (the English-language Asahi Evening News in particular) suggested Shattuck may have been involved in a supposed Soviet spy ring thought linked to a Greek businessman in Japan named ‘George Peris’ (George Peristeropoulos). Whether the jewel thief story had been planted in the press to force Shattuck out of Tokyo remains an open question. As for Shattuck’s partner Ted Lewin, he was born Theodore Lieweraenowski. A former boxer, the mob sent Lewin to the Far East where he served as the syndicate’s Asian Meyer Lansky. Captured by the Japanese after the invasion of the Philippines, Lewin ran gambling operations even in jail. He later became part of a Murder Incorporated- style outfit set up by top McArthur aide named General Charles Willoughby who ran Army Intelligence (G-2) during the U.S. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk occupation of Japan. He worked closely with a far right Japanese criminal named Yoshio Kodama and the ‘Canon Agency’ or ‘Z Unit’ which employed yakuza criminals to attack leftists. Willoughby also maintained close ties to the far right Hattori Organization, which was involved in planning for the military rearmament of Japan as well as spying on the Japanese Communist Party.25 By now a top syndicate figure who travelled the globe, Lewin often operated out of Manila where he was on very close terms with Philippine President Carlos Garcia, A kingpin of crime, he proved very active in the Caribbean as well. In 1958, for example, he worked with a top Washington public relations man and lobbyist named I. (Isaac) Irving Davidson to broker a weapons shipment to Israel that also involved Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. On 9 September 1961, yet another club with suspected Soviet connections, whose Japanese name translates as ‘Tomorrow Is Too Late’, also came into play. William Martin apparently had met a Japanese hostess at that club named Noriko Matsutakaya. A CIA source now suggested: ‘....that MARTIN’s introduction to the fine art of masochistic torture by an unidentified Japanese female, as reported by Mrs. Ardelle GASDA to FBI agents, may have been effected at or through his patronage of the “Tomorrow Is Too Late” Club to which he may well have been taken or introduced by his friend PERIS. This possibility, however, is subject to further investigation.’ What is so revealing for our purpose in the Mitchell/Martin defection is the depth of the CIA’s investigation. The CIA even tried to identify the Japanese woman who may have first initiated Martin into sadomasochism in the mid-1950s. Yet no U.S. intelligence agency investigated Oswald’s defection just months earlier? Oswald’s defection, after all, would be analogous to a Russian military technician who had spent two 25 For an overview of early American intelligence operations in post- war Japan, see Tessa Morris-Suzuki, ‘Democracy’s Porous Borders: Espionage, Smuggling and the Making of Japan’s Transwar Regime’ in The Asia-Pacific Journal, 41/12 at Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk years at one of those radar bases ELINT flights tried to monitor walking into an American Embassy and offering to tell the CIA everything he knew about Russian radar and communication systems. Would not the KGB then try to investigate just why one of their radar operators suddenly chose to defect as well as the secrets he might have betrayed? To ask the question is to answer it. Conclusion: Popov’s ghost? Finally, we must conclude with the Popov affair. In his 1986 book Mayday on the U-2 affair, historian Michael Beschloss devotes a brief discussion to the notion that Lee Harvey Oswald may have given Russia information that led to the shoot down of Francis Gary Powers. Hedging his bets, Beschloss suggests that perhaps Oswald did have some information on the U-2 but he concludes by citing Richard Bissell, the CIA leader who oversaw the U-2 program, as saying ‘I don’t think Oswald could have told them much they didn’t already know.’ However, Beschloss does report something quite extraordinary when he writes: ‘In early 1959, the CIA learned from Pyotr Popov, one of its prize moles in Soviet military intelligence, that the Russians had amassed much information about the U-2. “It brought me right out of my seat,” Richard Helms recalled. “Bissell and I wondered where they could be getting their information from.” Before Popov could tell them, he was captured while passing notes to an American on a Moscow bus and executed.’ (p. 236) In early 1959, Lee Harvey Oswald had just returned from Japan and was stationed at the Marine facility in El Toro. It was also in early 1959 that Oswald began to extravagantly praise Castro and promote himself as some kind of oddball leftist Russophile. At no time did Oswald do anything similar while he was in Japan. In short, Oswald’s career as a radical eccentric really seems to have begun in California and not in Japan. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk If Oswald were a controlled defector on some kind of intelligence mission, it may well be that planning for the mission only got underway in early 1959 in the wake of the Popov revelations. Oswald’s time in Japan, then, may be largely irrelevant to his subsequent adventures in the Soviet Union even if we assume that some government intelligence agency conceived of sending Oswald on a controlled defector mission to the Soviets in the wake of the Popov revelations. Finally, there is always the possibility that while stationed in Japan, Oswald met members of the pro-Moscow wing of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) as George de Mohrenschildt informed the Warren Commission. Oswald had been fascinated by communism via classic Cold War TV shows such as I Led Three Lives, which he regularly watched with his mother in New Orleans. Recall that on 23 April 1964, Lee Harvey Oswald’s Dallas companion George de Mohrenschildt testified before the Warren Commission and briefly mentioned what Oswald told him about his experience in Japan. Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT. A few words I remember now. He said that while he was in Japan he saw tremendous injustice. By that he meant, I think, the poverty of the Japanese working class or the proletariat, as he called them, and the rich people in Japan. He said it was more visible than anywhere else.....And he also told me that he had some contacts with the Japanese Communists in Japan, and they – that got him interested to go and see what goes on in the Soviet Union. Mr. JENNER. Just concentrate on this, please.....You said he had some contacts with the Communists in Japan Now, try and recall what he said or as near...... Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT. That is all I recall – that he said, ‘I have met some Communists in Japan and they got me excited and interested, and that was one of my inducements in going to Soviet Russia, to see what goes on there.’ Oswald could very well have met members of the Japanese Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Communist Party (JCP). Although bitterly divided between supporters of Moscow and Beijing, the JCP was extremely active in major Japanese cities and towns. As an American GI, Oswald was very visible and it would not be surprising if he at least had some conversations with Japanese Communists.26 There were also strong left-wing student protests against the American military presence in Japan that in 1960 culminated in huge street protests against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, demonstrations that forced President Dwight D. Eisenhower to cancel a planned visit to Japan and toppled Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi’s government. If George de Mohrenschildt’s memory is correct (and Oswald wasn’t lying to him), Oswald’s interest in the Soviet Union and his ultimate decision to defect to Moscow may have begun with a seemingly chance encounter in Japan and there is no need to discover an elaborate KGB or CIA plot to explain his actions. Perhaps Oswald’s strange story really began with a casual street corner encounter with a JCP member and had absolutely nothing to do with U-2s, KGB bar girls, ‘controlled defectors’, and the larger and seemingly endless Cold War machinations of both Moscow and Washington. Perhaps the truth, then, is just this simple, so simple in fact that we will never know it. Postscript Angleton, Epstein, and the creation of Legend Some background on how Legend came about is worth noting since Reader’s Digest, a conservative publication known for its sympathetic coverage of the CIA, heavily bankrolled it. In 1974 Reader’s Digest published John Barron’s book KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents, a book that caused the KGB considerable harm when Barron publicly identified numerous 26 By the time Oswald arrived in Japan, the new Soviet government under Khrushchev was actively pursuing a policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the West. Beijing, however, rejected any such overtures. It would make some sense that the pro-Moscow wing of the JCP might be willing to talk with Americans about changing the dynamics of the Cold War. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk KGB agents operating in foreign nations.27 Reader’s Digest next contracted Epstein to write what became Legend at a time when the CIA was under intense scrutiny for a series of illegal activities, most famously a CIA- Mafia plot to kill Fidel Castro. The political climate led to investigations by the Senate Church Committee and the creation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). The CIA was understandably sensitive about claims that the Agency had anything to do with Kennedy’s assassination, claims that the CIA saw as deliberately fuelled in part by KGB disinformation operations against its chief intelligence rival. Showing its intention to cooperate with the new Reader’s Digest project, the CIA gave Epstein access to a controversial former KGB agent in the hope that Epstein would support the CIA’s official view that the KGB had nothing at all to do with Kennedy’s assassination. Yet if that was the CIA’s intent, Epstein sorely disappointed the Agency. In a post-Watergate nation deeply cynical about government cover-ups, Legend offered its own version of a government deception; namely, the CIA’s reliance on a false Soviet ‘defector’ who claimed the KGB never even bothered to interrogate Oswald after his defection. In 1964, a second-tier KGB officer named Yuri Nosenko defected to the United States. Nosenko raised eyebrows when he claimed, among other things, that the KGB did not interview Oswald about any military secrets he might have brought with him to Russia. Nosenko said that he had worked for the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate’s (SCD) American section that tried to recruit U.S. Embassy personnel as well as 27 John Barron, KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents (New York: Readers Digest Press/distributed by E.P. Dutton, 1974). Barron’s book was most likely in part retaliation for the KGB sponsorship of Julius Mader’s book Who’s Who in the CIA (East Berlin, 1968). For the impact the Barron book had inside the KGB, see Oleg Nechiporenko, Passport to Assassination: The Never-Before-Told Story of Lee Harvey Oswald by the KGB Colonel Who Knew Him (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1993). Nechiporenko writes, ‘My personal opinion is that Barron’s work can be called the most successful active measure taken by the CIA against our service in many years. As a result, the KGB suffered a significant loss of morale.’ (p. 299) Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk tourists visiting the USSR. Nosenko further stated that he had access to KGB files on Oswald and that the KGB had no interest in Oswald. After Epstein interviewed Nosenko for some six hours, he recalled: ‘I found several of the assertions he made about the KGB’s treatment of Oswald inconsistent with other evidence furnished the Warren Commission. Even though I was assured by his CIA handlers that he was utterly reliable on the subject, and had full access to KGB records, as he claimed, I was not completely satisfied. His insistence that the KGB had never contacted Oswald during his stay in the Soviet Union seemed implausible since Oswald had loudly advertised on his arrival there that he had some secret information of special interest to the Soviet Union.’ 28 It was just these doubts that led Epstein to James Jesus Angleton, the legendary, long-time head of CIA Counter- Intelligence who was forced to resign from the CIA in early 1975 by the Agency’s new director William Colby. Angleton concluded that Nosenko was a Soviet ‘double agent’, a false defector sent by Moscow to confuse American intelligence about KGB operations in general and Lee Harvey Oswald in particular. Angleton and Epstein met for the first time in February 1976 and the two men remained in close contact until Angleton’s death on 14 May 1987. Nor was Angleton alone in his suspicions. Some high- ranking members of the CIA’s Soviet Division voiced similar doubts. One of Nosenko’s fiercest critics was a Soviet Division officer named Tennent ‘Pete’ Bagley, who had first helped to recruit Nosenko as a CIA asset a few years before Nosenko fled to the West. After Bagley retired from the CIA, Epstein interviewed him at the recommendation of former CIA Director Richard Helms. Bagley also submitted a long statement to the HSCA on 11 October 1978 and he testified before the HSCA on 16 November 1978 to refute the CIA party line that Nosenko 28 For Epstein’s recollections, see his 2013 e-book entitled James Jesus Angleton: Was He Right? (EJE Publications). Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk was a reliable defector. In 2007, Yale published Bagley’s book Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games where Bagley recalls: ‘As we questioned Nosenko about President Kennedy’s assassination, it was becoming even more likely that his story was a message from the Kremlin to reassure the American government that the KGB had not commanded the deed. That message might well be true, but Nosenko was wildly exaggerating the KGB’s indifference to Oswald. He was saying and repeating (with claimed but unlikely authority) that neither the KGB nor GRU had paid the slightest attention to this, their first Marine defector who moreover had been a radar operator at a U-2 spy plane base in Japan and was eager to help the Soviets in any way he could. This tale was so hard to believe that it might cause someone to jump to the conclusion that Nosenko was covering up a contrary truth – that the KGB did form some relationship with Oswald and that the Soviet Politburo really did order JFK’s assassination.’ (Bagley p. 178) How could the KGB and GRU not be interested in what Oswald apparently was willing to volunteer about American radar and air control installations? At the very least, the Soviets would want to determine if Oswald was himself a ‘controlled defector’. Years later, the KGB’s Colonel Nechiporenko admitted that the Soviets did in fact place Oswald in its highest suspect category as a possible American agent. Contrary to Nosenko’s claims about Soviet disinterest in Oswald, they kept him under close surveillance and extensively bugged his Minsk apartment.29 In the Nosenko chapter of his book Passport to 29 Colonel Nechiporenko, for example, writes, ‘It may also seem utter nonsense or an attempt by the KGB to deceive the Central Committee of the Communist Party...... that the KGB has no interest in an individual who was watched closely for suspected espionage ties for more than two years and who was the subject of eight months of correspondence between various internal and foreign agencies.’ (p. 111). On the Soviet extensive surveillance of Oswald in Minsk in particular, see Peter Savodnik, Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald inside the Soviet Union (New York: Basic Books, 2013). Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Assassination, Nechiporenko even obliquely admits that the KGB did question Oswald when he writes, ‘Oswald was never interrogated by the KGB, only debriefed by KGB officers who appeared to him as employees of other organizations. There is a great difference.’ 30 In brief then, there were many reasons to question aspects of Nosenko’s testimony about Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union. In reading Legend today, it is important to understand the broader battle inside the CIA.31 The debate over Nosenko’s credibility, however, has no direct bearing on Epstein’s belief that Oswald began working with the KGB in Japan. Yet if Epstein did find proof of an Oswald connection to the Soviets while in Japan, such a revelation would obviously further discredit Nosenko. Epstein’s desire to debunk Nosenko and prove Angleton right may well explain why Epstein so feverishly tried to argue the case that 30 Nechiporenko (see note 27) p. 247. 31 Angleton’s reputation has come under relentless attack, most recently at a 29 March 2012 conference sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Center and the Georgetown University Center for Security Studies entitled Moles, Defectors and Deceptions: James Angleton and His Influence on US Counterintelligence. At the conference, which was heavily stacked against Angleton, Epstein was one of the few participants who spoke in favor of him. In the ‘small world’ department, Angleton helped oversee the CIA liaison to the Warren Commission that included his close friend and former boss, Allen Dulles. Angleton’s top aide Ray Rocca worked closely with the Warren Commission as well. Either Angleton or Rocca appears in Legend in a disguised way in an endnote when Epstein writes: ‘In May 1975, the former CIA liaison with the Warren Commission prepared a memorandum for the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States headed by Nelson A. Rockefeller on his assessment of what areas involving possible foreign conspiracies in the assassination of President Kennedy the Warren Commission had failed to explore. He noted that “such evidence could exist in Moscow and/or in Havana, whose voluntary inputs to the Warren Commission were minimal in quantity and quality, designed to cover up any admissions of knowledge of, or connection with, Oswald...... ” Therefore, the belief that there was a Soviet and/or Cuban (KGB and/or DGI) connection with Oswald will persist and grow until there has been a full disclosure by these governments of all elements of Oswald’s handling and stay in the Soviet Union and his contacts in Mexico City. The Warren Commission report should have left a wider “window” for this contingency.’ (Epstein p. 286) Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Oswald was spying for the Soviets while he was stationed in Japan. Kevin Coogan is the author of Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (New York: Autonomedia, 1999). He is currently working on a study of Marx, Russia and the 19th ‘Great Game’. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Inside Lee Harvey Oswald’s address book Anthony Frewin In chapter three of Jeffrey H. Caulfield’s monumental work on General Walker1 (yes, that General Walker) and the background to JFK’s assassination he notes that the following was found in Lee Harvey Oswald’s address book by the FBI shortly after his arrest in November 1963 (styling as original): NAT. SEC. DAN BURROS LINCOLN ROCKWELL ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA AMERICAN NAZi PARTY (AMER. NATIONAL PARTY) Hollis sec. oF Queens N.Y. (NEWSPAPER) NAT. Socialist Bulletin. Caulfield writes that ‘the information contained in Oswald’s notation was so obscure that it would have had to come from either Burros or someone close to him’. Well, not necessarily. So, who was Burros? Caulfield says that Burros had left the American Nazi Party in 1961 after a disagreement with George Lincoln Rockwell in order to start a rival group, though two years later they had made up and were friends again. Burros was prominent and active in American Nazi and far right politics, and had served in the US army under General Walker. Burros’ splinter group was actually the American Nationalist [sic] Party and according to Caulfield never 1 Monumental indeed. Almost one thousand pages. Jeffrey H. Caulfield M.D., General Walker and the Murder of President Kennedy (Moreland Hills, Ohio: Moreland Press, 2015). The entry in LHO’s address book is reproduced on p. 75. The work is available from amazon and from the author’s web page: Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk numbered more than six people. It operated from a ‘one-room wooden shanty’ in the Hollins section of the New York borough of Queens. The bulletin noted at the end of the address book entry is the National Socialist Bulletin that was George Lincoln Rockwell’s main serial publication. Caulfield further notes that for Oswald to have this address he ‘would have been close to either Burros or one of his associates’. However, that is not the case. Oswald’s source had been discovered some sixteen years before by Kevin Coogan in his study of Francis Parker Yockey, and it was in the pages of The Worker, the American Communist Party paper, where a front-page story was headlined, ‘American Nazis Establish Their National Headquarters in Queens’ (it got some facts wrong, like claiming it was Rockwell’s party not a breakaway group).2 The agencies charged with investigating the JFK assassination together with the various governmental inquiries have been remarkably uninterested in Oswald’s address book, and the Warren Commission, despite reproducing the address book in the volumes of Hearings and Exhibits (Exhibit 18 in Volume XVI), notably so. Now, why were these details in the address book? Caulfield argues that it was because of Oswald’s involvement in the fascist far right, while Coogan says a photo in The Worker would have been of interest to Oswald as it showed Burros and his Nazi pals on a ‘Hate Bus’ trip to the Deep South opposing desegregation where, according to The Worker, Burros was arrested in New Orleans (he wasn’t), a city where Oswald had spent much of his life and, thus, was nostalgically interested. Coogan goes on to say that when this issue of The Worker appeared Oswald was then living in Minsk and he was given the paper by the Russian Red Cross or ‘the local CP apparat’ or ‘he simply read it in a local library’. This all seems a little unlikely. Neither of these explanations cut the mustard, though, I 2 Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1999), pps. 616-7. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk must add, that I’ve only just started Caulfield’s book and, to be fair to him, he may adduce more convincing arguments further on. Oswald’s address book presents a lifetime’s study for anyone seeking to analyse and understand it. The entire address book (in colour yet, Oswald used different coloured inks) is available here on a site put up by A. J. (Allan) Weberman: 3 A J Weberman and Michael Canfield, Coup d'état in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York: Third Press, 1975). Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Blair Inc. Francis Beckett, David Hencke and Nick Kochan London: John Blake, 2015, £20.00, h/b One of the two reported contributions Tony Blair made to Labour’s 2015 election campaign was a speech in support of the European Union. In April the former leader said: ‘The referendum will, for the first time since we joined Europe after years of trying unsuccessfully to do so, put exit on the agenda.’ Most Britons were not electors in 1975 and so have never had a say on what was then the Common Market and is now the European Union. This perceived illegitimacy was acknowledged by the Conservatives, Greens and UKIP who all offered voters on May 7 the opportunity of a referendum. But not Labour, which hardly mentioned the EU in the campaign, leaving it to Blair to bang the Brussels drum. The former Prime Minister’s other campaign bestowal was £1,000 to candidates in target seats. Some refused Blair’s cash, with Sophie Gardner, Gloucester hopeful and a former RAF officer, saying it would be ‘hypocritical’ for her to accept Mr Blair’s donation because of her decision to criticise the Iraq war. Europe and money are two of the big themes of Blair Inc., a conscientious effort by Francis Beckett, David Hencke and Nick Kochan to uncover the New Labour leader’s activities post No. 10: Europe because the authors claim that Blair still longs for a world role, one the European presidency would provide; and money because they say he has made rather a lot of it since 2007. It was an old American friend who first alerted me to the Blair family’s fondness for the folding stuff. After seeing Cherie being interviewed on US TV soon after Tony became Labour leader, she told me: ‘My mother had a phrase for people like her – “She’ll go grasping into the grave”.’ Twenty years later, the authors of Blair Inc. tell us that the couple now own 36 properties. Their portfolio includes the former Bucks home of Sir John Gielgud that the couple acquired for a reported £4m in 2008 as a sort of personal Chequers. As far as Beckett, Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Hencke and Kochan can establish, given the complexity and secrecy that surrounds his affairs, Blair himself is now worth around £60m. In books and articles written over many years this trio have a good record of illuminating dark places. But despite all their experience and persistence they still found it hard to uncover exactly what the former New Labour prime minister has been up since he left No. 10 in 2007. With few exceptions, those who have worked or currently work for Blair did not respond to their inquiries. Most of his former colleagues follow the same pattern of omerta, former Home Secretary Charles Clarke aggressively so. The Blairs’ financial interests seem to be arranged to defy scrutiny, hidden in part behind the pious façade of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation (TBBF). In its own self-description, ‘TBBF is a “think-do” tank, meaning that all of our entire intellectual content is supported by practical delivery on the ground and that all our practical delivery is supported by a robust and intellectually grounded theory of change.’ All clear? From the golden days when Blair was regarded by many inside and outside Labour as the charismatic shoe-in to follow John Smith as leader, he has become a toxic presence with a legacy his successors still find difficult to live with. His years in charge – control freakery by a small clique with a largely supportive press better describes it – saw falling party membership and morale alongside a wider loss of trust in politicians and the democratic process, all to a background of war and conflict. A Blair premiership many saw founded on hope ended with support for the old Cold War/Neocon gang of the Bushes, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Greenspan and Wolfowitz. It was during those years that many activists in Scotland left Labour to put their energies into the SNP, with results now self-evident. Post-1997 the authors trace a dismal pattern of lucrative speechmaking, advisory posts, property acquisition and Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk endless jetting around the world. Previous prime ministers have made money after No. 10, with Blair’s predecessor John Major adding board membership of the sinister Carlyle Group to his well-endowed portfolio. Labour’s last PM before Blair, Jim Callaghan, didn’t seem short of cash for his Sussex farm and was much involved in the murky affairs of the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, as well as being close to Welsh multimillionaire banker Sir Julian Hodge. Neil Kinnock never made it to No. 10, but he and his wife have not done too badly from their EU earnings, not forgetting their generous tax-funded pension arrangements following retirement from their respective British and European parliaments. Look to the US where Blair, the authors tell us, has based much of his money earning either directly or through Washington’s network of friends and allies, and there’s big money for ex-leaders there, too. George W Bush has always had enormous family sources to draw upon from his father’s post-White House dealings, and Bill Clinton has reaped huge rewards from speechmaking around the world. And not just former presidents: Henry Kissinger is still making piles as a consultant almost 40 years after leaving the State Department. The authors suggest their subject might even have had Kissinger Associates as the model for his own Tony Blair Associates money-spinning. The authors tell us that Blair and his fellow New Labour founder Peter (now Lord) Mandelson are not so close these days, each building their multi-million businesses in a way that suggests some rivalry. Where Blair largely depends on the US network he developed as PM, especially in the Middle East, Mandelson looks largely to the Russian and East European oligarchs with Nat Rothschild and Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP being key figures in helping build the wealth that now affords him an £11m home in Regent’s Park. What both seem still to have in common are close relationships with wealthy Zionists, a continuation of the pattern by which Levy and David Sainsbury, both ennobled by Blair, helped the pair launch and sustain New Labour. A big contributor to Blair’s Faith Foundation is Haim Saban who the Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk authors quote as saying: ‘I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel. I used to be a leftie but am now very much on the right. The reason for the switch is Israel.’ Little known in the UK, Saban is a powerful TV owner in Germany. He has huge media and other interests in the US where Rupert Murdoch has been a business associate. Saban also funds the part of the Brookings Institution known as the Saban Center for Middle East Policy under former US ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk. Saban donated heavily to George Bush’s re-election campaign after the Iraq war and is known to be a strong backer of vocal Israel supporters John McCain and Joe Lieberman.The authors write: ‘Tony Blair is publicly signed up to Saban’s views about Iran and Israel. If that were not the case, it is most unlikely that Saban would be funding his Faith Foundation.... Money comes with strings attached. Tony Blair would have to be very careful even to appear to criticise the government in Tel Aviv, should he ever wish to do so, if he wants his Faith Foundation to keep receiving Saban’s money.’ This mattered for the future of the Middle East – and so for the rest of the world – because one of the many hats Blair had worn since 1997 until his resignation in May 2015 was Quartet Representative (QR). He was found the job, say the authors, by George Bush after the previous QR, John Wolfensohn, concluded that his mandate was inadequate for the scale of the job and because he lacked the support of the Bush administration, especially that of veteran neocon Elliot Abrams in the State Department. (Abrams, it will be remembered, was pardoned by George H W Bush for his role in Iran-Contra.) Blair accepted that limited mandate and by most accounts put only a fraction of Wolfensohn’s time and effort into the job. Rather than engage in the patient, detailed work required to move Israel/Palestine matters forward, the authors suggest that he has been broad brush at best and mixed in his motives between apparently pursuing a peace process and advancing his own commercial interests in the region. The authors say: Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘He has irrevocably contaminated the QR job with his other activities. He often takes his personal staff, not QR staff, to meetings, and his personal staff, not QR staff, often speak for him in his role as QR.....Today as QR he is a passenger at best, a liability at worst.’ Blair Inc. describes the work the ex-PM has done for some seedy regimes, often aided by former No 10 staff – Jonathan Powell, Alastair Campbell, Tim Allan being three of the most prominent. Its authors also also list Blair clients, from Louis Vuitton and Moet Hennessey to JP Morgan, adding in titbits like the £50,000 fee for a speech to the International Sanitary Supply Association. Such information the authors have assiduously gleaned help form a picture of a figure lost in endless money-making, carefully concealed by lawyers, accountants and draconian terms of employment confidentiality that apply even to interns. Blair jets around the world with a self-regarding sense of mission apparently unaware of – or perhaps simply indifferent to – the toxic tag he carries with him. That reputation derives not just from the Iraq war but for the deceit that induced it and which coloured much of his administration. The authors open their final chapter, ‘A gold-plated prison’, with a quote from his former friend, Greg Dyke: ‘I think Blair is now a very sad man. Rich, but [he] betrayed everything the Labour Party was about.’ I’m not happy in general with this ‘betrayal’ approach: it is often applied by those who personalise the gap between unreasonable expectations and real life. Blair has some praiseworthy achievements to record in his time as prime minister after a long period when Labour under Foot and Kinnock looked unlikely to enter government at all. What matters more to me is the legacy of those who have exercised great influence. In Blair’s case the verdict is not good, as we can see clearly after May 7. Many of Blair’s young New Labour praetorian guard are no longer MPs; Scotland is now SNP territory; the Tories have a majority for the first time in nearly 20 years; inequality grows while bankers continue their bad old ways and we remain subservient to Washington and the largely bogus nostrums of Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the ‘war on terror’. The secrecy surrounding Blair encountered by the authors has always been part of his story. His leadership campaign after Smith’s death was managed by ‘Bobby’ for fear that his bid would be tainted by association with Mandelson. His early biographers made no mention of his introduction to the Israelis by his law chambers colleague and president of the Board of Deputies Eldred Tabachnik. Nor is it still widely known that the Israeli embassy introduced Blair to Levy, who then opened the till that freed his tennis pal from party obligations. Much of what happened under the Blair premiership remains under 30-year-rule wraps and we now hear that the Chilcot Inquiry of the Iraq war set up in 2009 will not now report before 2016. In March this year the London Evening Standard reminded us of the sinister dimension that now accompanies this secrecy. Under the headline ‘Secret terror trial ends in farce as student is cleared of targeting Blair’ it reported: ‘Britain’s first secret terror trial descended into farce today as a law student caught with the address of Tony Blair’s house was cleared of plotting terrorist attacks.’ The paper went on: ‘Media lawyers are trying to have more details made public of what was said behind closed doors. MPs and pressure groups have condemned secret trials but prosecutors claimed the secrecy was justified in the interests of national security, and described it as “an exceptional case”.’ Beckett, Hencke and Kochan have done us a service in trying to pierce the barriers Blair has erected around his life and business since 2007. The cost of that concealment does not just burden British citizens – his personal security guards claim £250,000 a year in expenses alone from the taxpayer, they tell us – the secrecy and the cynicism that it helps generate leaves a noxious legacy to whoever again would claim to lead the country in a more decent direction. Will Labour’s next leader be able to assure us that he’s ‘a pretty straight sort of guy’ – and be believed? Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Tom Easton Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The Good Guys? Thieves of State Sarah Chayes London: W. W. Norton, 2015, £16.99, h/b Why were British troops in Afghanistan? Was it to help liberate Afghan women, to establish good governance and prosperity for the Afghan people, or to protect Britain’s streets from terrorist attack? All these pretexts were at various times put forward. None was true. The real reason was, of course, to try and sustain the ‘Special Relationship’ with the United States. In pursuit of this end, the British found themselves supporting one of the most corrupt governments in the world, a government that was dominated by drug traffickers and warlords. This essential truth about the war in Afghanistan is still not generally known so that the politicians responsible have by and large prospered in retirement; unless, that is, like Geoff Hoon and Jack Straw, their personal venality became a public scandal. Sarah Chayes’ new book, Thieves of State, which recounts her part in the fight against corruption in Afghanistan, will go some way towards remedying this, although I suspect that the unholy alliance between the political establishment, the media and the military high command will continue to succeed in portraying Afghanistan as ‘the good war’. The United States overthrew the Taliban by means of a comparative handful of CIA agents and special forces personnel allied with the warlords of the Northern Alliance. With the support of overwhelming US air power, this small army was able to defeat the Taliban, although their leadership escaped capture. Two things stand out about this success: first of all, the Northern Alliance would never have been able to defeat the Taliban without US support, which did rather suggest that they would need continued US support to remain in power. The shift in US attention and resources to Iraq was, from this point of view, a disaster. Second, the Northern Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Alliance was a gangster organisation of warlords and drug traffickers. Putting them in power was like invading Colombia to instal the drug cartels in government. And, once the Taliban were removed, opium production did indeed dramatically increase. These two factors together made the return of the Taliban inevitable. Sarah Chayes arrived in Kandahar at the end of 2001 and remembers that it was not long before people were complaining to her of ‘the presence of notorious criminals in their new government’. She watched ‘warlordism take hold and solidify’ and came to the conclusion that the resulting corruption was what ‘was driving people to violent revolt in Afghanistan’. Eventually she went to work for the International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) where she was one of a number of people arguing that corruption was fuelling the insurgency and that combating it was a military priority. ‘Corruption’, she writes, ‘in army-speak, was a force multiplier for the enemy’. While lip-service was sometimes paid to this insight, in practice the US commitment to the gangster regime they had installed in power was too strong for anything effective to be done about the problem. She describes the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan as ‘best understood not as a government at all but as a vertically integrated criminal organization – or a few such loosely structured organizations, allies but rivals, coexisting uneasily – whose core activity was not in fact exercising the functions of a state but rather extracting resources for personal gain’. Every government post, from top to bottom, was for sale with the purchaser expected to recoup their investment by means of bribery and extortion. Predictably, the most expensive positions were in the Ministry of Counter-Narcotics, where senior posts could cost as much as $200,000 a year. Such an outlay would, of course, be recouped by actual involvement in drug trafficking. The Minister for Counter-Narcotics, Daoud Daoud was, she writes, ‘according to multiple, separate strands of information, one of the biggest drug traffickers in Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the country’. This goes some way towards explaining the failure of the Karzai government to not only curb opium production, but to preside over its dramatic expansion. The people at the top also systematically pillaged the foreign aid budget to the tune of billions of dollars, while lower down police and local officials systematically robbed and oppressed the local population. Afghanistan under Karzai was a ‘kleptocracy’; and it was, she argues, ‘the moral and material depravity’ of the Karzai government that was fuelling a ‘brutal and tenacious insurgency’ as many Afghans were persuaded that the only way to end the government’s depredations was through ‘religious rectitude’. Interrogation of Taliban prisoners showed that they were not primarily motivated by religion or hostility to foreign occupation but by ‘the perception that the Afghan government was “irrevocably corrupt”’. The 2009 Presidential election gave public notice of the extent of the corruption with the electoral fraud ‘so egregious and widespread as to stun even seasoned election monitors’. Subsequently, Karzai pacified international opinion by promising to curb corruption. When he made the public announcement of his intention to ‘clean the government’, however, he had standing either side of him his two vice presidents, Karim Khalili and Muhammad Qasim, ‘two of the most notorious war criminals in all Afghanistan’. They were there in order to make clear to corrupt officials, policemen and soldiers that the promise was empty, meaningless, just something to appease the Americans, but that otherwise it was business as usual. And indeed every effort to actually curb corruption was blocked by Karzai. Attempts to persuade the Americans authorities to do something about this failed. She had high hopes of General Stanley McChrystal when he took over command, but he was not prepared to risk alienating Karzai and co. When General David Petraeus took over, she was confident that he would take action. She ‘had been corresponding with him about corruption and the insurgency in Afghanistan for nearly two years’ and knew that as far as he was concerned the Karzai government was a ‘criminal syndicate’ (his words). Petraeus Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk was the principal advocate of a US turn towards a long-term counterinsurgency strategy and had been instrumental in a dramatic reshaping of military doctrine in the form of Field Manual 3-24. This shift had been celebrated in the media and the Field Manual itself was, unprecedentedly, a best seller. Chayes believed that she had persuaded him that countering corruption and establishing good governance was an essential component of such a successful counterinsurgency strategy: ‘I heard Petraeus murmur something under his breath: “This is the revision of the Field Manual”’. Her hopes that he would tackle the problem were never fulfilled. Looking back, she blames the CIA which was heavily involved with the gangsters, warlords and drug traffickers. Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, for example, ‘stole land, imprisoned people for ransom, appointed key public officials, ran vast drug trafficking networks and private militias’ and was hated by ‘the inhabitants of three provinces’; but he was also a CIA ‘asset’. They paid him undisclosed amounts of money for his ‘services’. Of course, none of this will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the activities of the CIA. She refers to Matthew Rosenberg’s revelation, writing in the New York Times, that President Karzai himself was also on the CIA payroll, the recipient of ‘millions of dollars per year in cash’. The CIA effectively sabotaged any ‘anticorruption agenda’ and to her surprise Petraeus, in the end, went along with this. Indeed, he went on to become Director of the CIA! What she does not take into account is the Obama Administration’s decision not to embrace a long-term counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan or anywhere else for that matter. Instead, the decision was taken to exercise US power through assassination by drone, special force raids and proxy armies. Corruption was an essential component of this strategy. One other important point that Chayes makes concerns the number of regimes that there are that have similar characteristics to the Karzai regime in the sense that they are little more than ‘criminal organizations’, despoiling their own countries. She discusses Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Uzbekistan and Nigeria as variations on this theme. They are all ‘kleptocracies’ facing Islamist challenges. The regime the US put in place in Iraq is another obvious example. These regimes, she argues, are a threat to US security because they provoke rebellion and today this rebellion all too often puts on an Islamist face. There is nothing new about ‘kleptocratic’ regimes or rebellions against them. What is new is that the US is much weaker than it was and is less well placed to intervene in other countries. They can bring governments down but no longer determine their replacement. And second is the impact of globalisation. The bosses of the ‘criminal organizations’ she writes about, the ‘kleptocrats’, today invest their money in Dubai, Switzerland, Britain (or, more properly, London) and elsewhere. If Islamist rebels make life too uncomfortable they can always go and live elsewhere. Indeed, she sees ‘kleptocracy’ as the way that so-called liberal democracies are moving. Altogether a very interesting and thought-provoking book. John Newsinger John Newsinger is a semi-retired academic. A new edition of his British Counterinsurgency is due out later this year. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The Henry Jackson Society and the degeneration of British Neoconservatism: Liberal interventionism, Islamophobia and the ‘war of terror’ Tom Griffin, Hilary Aked, David Miller and Sarah Marusek Spinwatch Public Interest Investigations, 2015 PDF version: http://www.spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/more/item/5777- new-report-on-the-henry-jackson-society Perhaps it’s some mark of the state of British politics that Michael Gove, the British Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, helped found a society in honour of a US politician known in his lifetime as the whore for Boeing. The fact that Gove, in an earlier job as Education Secretary, urged teachers to show a greater appreciation of history, adds a farcical element to a pre-parliamentary career distinguished by his work as a news executive for Rupert Murdoch. In this latest Spinwatch report, the authors trace the line from the long-dead pro-Vietnam war, pro-Israel, pro-arms industry senator from Washington via a Cambridge group at Peterhouse through the ‘war on terror’ to Gove’s ‘Trojan Horse’ campaign against some Birmingham schools. Along the way they tell us lots about the fractious history of Douglas Murray’s Centre for Social Cohesion, the role of William Shawcross as chairman of the Charity Commission and the Henry Jackson Society’s (HJS) sources of funding. They point out that a few New Labour luminaries, including departed Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy and convicted fraudster Denis MacShane, are part of the HJS circle that strongly backed the Iraq war and the repression of civil liberties that followed the example of the United States after 9/11. This well-referenced report tells us that the HJS promotes a strongly pro-Israel agenda; organises anti-Islam activities, particularly against British Muslim students, and advocates a transatlantic military and security regime. The authors conclude: Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘The fact that HJS refuses to publish its list of donors also highlights its own illiberal tendencies. Far from promoting democracy both domestically and abroad, like the original founders intended, the society has joined the ranks of the transatlantic Islamophobia network by relying on the financial support of strident pro-Israel elites and their grant-making foundations.’ What it doesn’t tell us that is that much of this important HJS story goes untold in the media, and not just that large part owned by Murdoch whose organs have provided many HJS figures with work and income. Spinwatch say they intend to launch the report in Parliament after the summer recess. Don't hold your breath for mainstream coverage or Parliamentary debate. Tom Easton Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Chameleo A strange but true story of invisible spies, heroin addiction and Homeland Security Robert Guffey London and New York: O/R Books, 2015, £11.00/$18.00, p/b http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/chameleo/ In 1989 Harlan Girard was going round the London media trying to interest them in his story. He got no takers but someone suggested Lobster – then one of the publications of last resort; too small to be worth suing, perhaps – and he rang me. ‘Sure’, I said, ‘Come to Hull and we can talk.’ It’s what I say to people; and a handful of serious and/or desperate people have got on the train. Harlan arrived and told me this strange story about the CIA, microwaves and mind control; how he was the victim of a CIA experiment. At that time I knew nothing about microwaves but I had read the handful of books on the subject of mind control and knew enough about the CIA’s history of experimenting on unwitting citizens not to reject this out of hand. Harlan was lugging a heavy suitcase full of photocopies of scientific articles about microwaves – both his hands were blistered from carrying it – and the next morning he departed leaving me with the beginning of my collection on the microwave/mind control issue and the distinct impression that there might be something to this. In 2003 the author of Chameleo, a teacher of literature with an interest in conspiracy theories (and also a member of the Scottish Rites Masons), was told a strange tale of mind control and harassment and much more by a friend of his. And there the similarities end. Where Harlan Girard was a polite, prosperous, middle-class American, Guffey’s friend Dion was a working-class multiple drug user, living a chaotic, poverty-stricken life on the margins of American society. Where Harlan Girard talked of voices in his head, Guffey’s informant talked of invisible midgets, rooms that altered size, views from his window which changed, drones that surveilled him and gang-stalking by teams of military Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk personnel. Where my information sources on mind control in 1989 consisted of fragments in libraries, journals and books, and the occasional account from other subjects of these experiments, Guffey had the Internet and began using it to make sense of his friend’s tales; and fairly quickly discovered that, bizarre though some of them were, traces of most of Dion’s experiences could be found in extant US military programs, real technology, or in reports on the Net. Druggie Dion was living in San Diego (a heavily militarised city), running a kind of open house/crash pad through which moved all manner of flotsam and jetsam, including an American soldier AWOL. Said soldier was followed by a team from the military police (NCIS) who believed he had stolen some night vision goggles. It was when Dion denied knowing where the solider had gone or where the goggles were that the US military began playing their games with his head. Months of psychic torture ensued but Dion didn’t crack. It may have been Dion’s wide experience of mind-altering chemicals which enabled him to survive having his reality bent so severely: serious drug users are accustomed to the world shifting around them. The author places his accounts of Dion’s stories and his Internet researches in a personal narrative which includes much (to me irrelevant) information about his life – job- hunting, girl friend troubles etc. There are thirty pages of transcribed phone calls with Dion and, towards the end, fifty pages of transcribed interview with the man (like the author, also a Freemason) who invented the ‘cloaking’ or invisibility technology which enabled the invisible NCIS ‘midgets’, whom Dion glimpsed occasionally, to search his flat while he was present. Whether Dion was an experimental subject or merely one of the first people to experience the full range of the new technology which the US military have in store for dissidents in the near future isn’t clear. Either way this is an important glimpse into our future as ‘democratic’ states gear up for their coming task of defending our ‘freedom’ from threats – some real but mostly imaginary – within. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk This is an interesting, nicely written, occasionally funny tale but the key material – Dion’s account of being on the receiving end of the high-tech military harassment and the author’s research into it – is merely a part of it. Robin Ramsay Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Blacklisted The Secret War between Big Business and Union Activists Dave Smith and Phil Chamberlain One of the co-authors, Phil Chamberlain, wrote an early sketch of this material in Lobster 58 (which is on-line 1) and the subtitle of that piece, ‘How the Economic League lived on’ might have been the subtitle title of this book. When the League formally closed in 1993 (or 1994; reports vary) their monitoring of the left and the unions for companies was taken up by a little organisation called Caprim, with a couple of ex-League employees at the helm,2 and by The Consulting Association (TCA). While Caprim did research into left/environmental campaigns which might impinge on companies, The Consulting Association was focused specifically on the ‘threat’ of union activities in the construction industry and was essentially the League’s unit in that field under a new name. Caprim was exposed in 2000 but TCA remained a secret until 2009 – when Chamberlain began writing about it. This book is that Lobster essay by Chamberlain massively expanded to include: * subsequent parliamentary and legal activities concerning TCA; * accounts of many of those affected by the blacklist which TCA was operating; * the campaign by unions against TCA; * analysis of the files exposed by the legal action against TCA; * historical analysis to place TCA in context; * accounts of the other forms of left/union monitoring conducted by the state, notably the Met’s undercover unit, the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS). The one area which is still fuzzy is the relationship between groups such as TCA and the police and security services. There are fragments suggesting that there was such a relationship but the evidence is thin. 1 Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk There are hints that there are other companies doing this vetting/research for companies – Kroll and Control Risks for example; but for the construction industry TCA did seem to be the place. Why were the building firms so keen on it? This may simply be an aspect of the intense competition for big construction contracts. The TCA files that were exposed – and most were not – showed that the companies were centrally concerned to avoid hiring union members who might try to improve the safety culture on sites. Building work is intrinsically dangerous; many are killed and injured. Improving safety regimes means working more carefully and slowly, and this increases labour costs. The picture that emerges of the construction industry in the UK in recent years is that of ruthless companies, for whom injuries to and deaths of casual, frequently subcontracted staff are merely part of the costs of doing business. Welcome to one of the down sides of competition – the race to the bottom. This is a significant book, nicely produced, thoroughly documented and well written. It is also a good news book – the unions won a partial victory – and there are few good news tales in the fields Lobster covers. Recommended. Robin Ramsay Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Nixon’s Nuclear Specter William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball University Press of Kansas, 2015, h/b, £35 (approximately) ‘Credibility’ is a peculiar concept, of interest mainly to those who fear they lack it. In our daily lives we deal with people on simpler and more profound bases like reliability and trustworthiness. ‘Credibility’ is the concern of an individual, or an institution, which has already demonstrated unreliability and untrustworthiness, yet seeks to retain influence, and exercise power. Nixon's Nuclear Specter, by William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball, deals with President Nixon’s attempts to bring the war in Vietnam to a satisfactory conclusion. According to the authors of this detailed and thoroughly footnoted book, both Nixon and his foreign affairs adviser, Henry Kissinger, had concluded by late 1967 that the war was unwinnable. Nixon had been elected on a promise to bring the war to a quick conclusion. Yet the war dragged on for six more years: the United States expanded it to Laos and Cambodia, and even engaged in a mock nuclear force alert in an attempt to intimidate North Vietnam’s Russian allies. Why? According to Burr and Kimball, ‘credibility’ was the key. One of Nixon’s desires was that the President of South Vietnam, Thieu, remain in office for a ‘decent interval’ after the last US forces withdrew. Nixon and Kissinger knew that Thieu’s regime would collapse: their initial concern was that US ‘credibility’ in foreign affairs would suffer if a US client were speedily dispatched. The North Vietnamese negotiators at the Paris peace talks were not concerned about US credibility; their goal was to see Thieu gone, and their country reunited. Nixon continued to withdraw US troops, but in discussions with his advisers often flirted with his ‘madman’ theory, in which Nixon thought he might overcome powerful adversaries by scaring them that he was capable of an insane act – such as resorting to the first use of nuclear weapons. At some point early in his presidency, Nixon began to conflate himself and the nation, and to consider the ‘credibility’ Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk issue as personal, rather than related to matters of state. Kissinger played Nixon’s confusion to his own political advantage. Believing, like his boss, in ‘threat diplomacy’, Kissinger encouraged the president to adopt increasingly drastic measures: ‘Be prepared to take tough escalatory steps ....(mining Haiphong, bombing Cambodia, etc.).... to fail to do so would be to risk your credibility.’ (p. 118) Kissinger told Russian ambassador Dobrynin that the US would not accept a loss of prestige in the peace settlement. Dobrynin promised to pass the message on to the North Vietnamese, but also advised Kissinger not to escalate a war the US wanted to end. Burr and Kimball write: ‘Believing their threat-making credibility was on the line and putting their faith in the coercive power of military force, Nixon and his adviser began to consider....tougher escalatory steps...’ (p. 137) One of the options advocated by Kissinger was the use of nuclear weapons against North Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs provided Kissinger and Nixon with two sets of nuclear options: ‘clean nuclear interdiction of of three NVN-Laos passes’ and ‘nuclear interdiction of two NVN-CPR railroads’. The authors speculate that a ‘clean’ nuclear weapon might have been ‘an airburst of a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon, so as to minimize fallout effects but kill soldiers, truck drivers, and other logistics personnel in the area through immediate radiation effects.’ (p. 233) Fortunately, Nixon did not initiate a nuclear war, but he did put in motion a nuclear alert designed to support his ‘madman’ theory and pressure the Russians to influence the North Vietnamese. Nixon claimed to be a poker ace, who had won $10,000 playing poker while in the US Navy. Yet in a meeting with Dobrynin prior to the 1969 nuclear alert, Nixon threw his cards face-up on the table, constantly dragged the conversation back to the Vietnam war, and asserted aloud ‘that the Soviet leadership is apparently trying to “break him”.’ Dobrynin concluded that Nixon was not mad, but ‘lacking emotional self- control’. (p. 291) The 1969 alert rang no Russian alarm bells, since it was Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk not accompanied by DEFCON military status. The war in Vietnam continued. In 1973 – with Nixon incapacitated by paranoia and alcohol – Secretary of State Kissinger initiated another, much more provocative nuclear alert, with DEFCON 3 status, to demonstrate US resolve over the Arab-Israeli war. The authors conclude: ‘The most extreme threats – nuclear threats – are unlikely to succeed when the side threatened possesses its own nuclear weapons, when a non-nuclear state.....is presumably under the protection of a nuclear state.....or when the threat is disproportionate because it is aimed at a small country.’ (p. 333) Given those three categories, there are no states anywhere where nuclear threats might have any success at all. Certainly the threats described here made no practical difference to Vietnamese or Russian policy. Russian foreign minister Gromyko remarked that ‘the Americans put forces on alert so often that it is hard to know what it meant.’ Le Duc Tho told Kissinger in 1972: ‘We sometimes think that you would also use atomic weapons, because during the resistance against the French, Vice President Nixon proposed the use of atomic weapons....But....no matter what destruction is brought to our country, we will continue the struggle.’ (p. 256) President Nixon was not the only world leader to threaten the use of nuclear weapons. President Eisenhower threatened to use them in Korea, and offered them to the French in Vietnam. President Kennedy practised nuclear brinksmanship twice: the authors discuss the Cuban missile crisis, but not the equally serious crisis over NATO access to Berlin, for which the Pentagon offered a slate of nuclear options. Lyndon Johnson differentiated himself from his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, over the nuclear issue and issued no nuclear threats during his presidency. President Carter raised the possibility of a nuclear attack on Iran during the hostage crisis. President Reagan presided over a massive nuclear build-up Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk which came close to accidental thermonuclear war during the misinterpreted Able Archer alert. President Clinton discussed using B61-11 tactical nuclear weapons against Libya. The second Bush administration threatened the use of the same nuclear weapons during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; the Obama administration contemplated their use during the 2011 NATO bombings of Libya; Sen. Hilary Clinton has told MSNBC that she would support a nuclear attack on Iran, in defence of Israel. Based on Burr and Kimball’s conclusions, none of these threats had any impact on their recipients in terms of altering their behaviour – not even the alarms triggered by the Able Archer exercise, which a lone Russian intelligence officer decided to ignore.1 Often these nuclear threats and alerts have been described as essential to US credibility. That magic word was also used in 2008, when five NATO commanders drew up a manifesto urging that the West adopt a policy of pre-emptive nuclear attacks against potential enemies who might possess WMD. ‘NATO’s credibility is at stake’, observed General Henk van den Breemen, the former Dutch chief of staff. But credibility and survival are two different things. A nuclear war, started by accident during a period of high-alert tension, initiated to preserve an individual’s or a state’s ‘credibility’, no matter how applauded by the media, is something it would be in our interests to avoid. Alex Cox Alex Cox is a filmmaker and writer. His most recent book, on the Kennedy assassination, 1 There is one possible caveat here. It has been reported that during the Falklands/Malvinas war Mrs Thatcher threatened to use nuclear weapons against Argentina unless the French state gave the British the codes to disable the electronics of the French-manufactured Exocet missiles which were damaging British ships. French president Mitterand, it is said, complied. The source for this story is a psychoanalyst reporting things Mitterand told him. See Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The President and the Provocateur, was reviewed in Lobster 68. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The Owl of Minerva has crashed and died Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice John A Nagl PenguinRandom House, 2014, $27.95 (h/b) The rise and fall of the US doctrine of Counterinsurgency (COIN) took place over such a short time span that some of those intimately involved in originally propagating the doctrine seem still blissfully unaware that its moment has passed. John Nagl, for example, writes that his memoir is ‘about counter- insurgency and its journey from the far periphery of US military doctrine to its center’. The reality is that after the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States is not about to commit large ground forces to a protracted military occupation again any time soon. Even the rise of Islamic State has not changed this. Nagl was a career officer who first saw combat during the 1991 Gulf War. This was more of a massacre than a war. As Nagl puts it: ‘the Iraqi infantry had few weapons that could put a serious dent in an M1A1 Abrams tank’. Such one-sided affairs could be ‘exhilarating and wild and intoxicating, every minute an adventure’. The biggest problem he seems to have faced in this war was his sergeant becoming over-familiar but he dealt with this by ordering him to write a ‘counselling statement’ acknowledging his mistake. The man had ‘tears in his eyes’ when he handed over the statement ‘which I promptly rolled into a ball and told him to eat’. Suddenly ‘fragging’ becomes perfectly understandable! At a time when attention was focussed on the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), the technological advances that had supposedly transformed the nature of warfare and ushered in an age of US military invincibility, Nagl was convinced that guerrilla insurgency was the most likely challenge that the US was going to find itself confronting. While the Gulf War had dramatically put on display America’s overwhelming technological superiority, he was concerned Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk with how ill-equipped the US military was for counterinsurgency; for, as he puts it (borrowing from T E Lawrence) ‘eating soup with a knife’. Nagl’s studies at Oxford, where he went on a Rhodes scholarship to ‘learn the lessons of empire’, resulted in a comparative study of the US experience in Vietnam and the British experience in Malaya that was to be eventually published in 2002 as Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. As he puts it in this memoir: ‘Malaya is famous as the shining example of the “hearts and minds” school of counterinsurgency, the idea that the population must be protected in order to allow them to reveal the identity and location of the insurgents’. This was, of course, not an accurate account of the scale of the repression and of the overwhelming force that the British used in Malaya. Indeed he does acknowledge that Gerald Templer, the supposed architect of British victory in Malay, actually admitted that he had overseen ‘the use of techniques that would be seen today as relying upon excessive force, including resettling entire communities in concentration camps’. His academic studies were to be given relevance by the US invasion of Iraq, America’s perverse response to the 9/11 terrorist attack. Nagl freely acknowledges the scale of the disaster that Donald Rumsfeld inflicted on the US military. He describes Rumsfeld as ‘spectacularly bad’, pretty much a unanimous opinion among the soldiers on the ground. The initial invasion force was ‘just barely big enough to topple Saddam Hussein’, but completely inadequate ‘to secure Iraq’s cities’. He describes the invasion and its aftermath as ‘one of the least successful military operations in American history’. The policies implemented by the Coalition Provisional Authority (disbanding the Iraqi Army and de-Baathisation) played ‘a huge role in incubating the chaos that erupted’ and were ‘a perfect recipe for an insurgency’. When Nagl was himself deployed to Iraq to fight the insurgents, his unit was ‘completely unprepared for the war we were about to fight’. Quite remarkably, the Americans had managed to provoke ‘a general uprising, not just of all Sunnis in Al Anbar, but also of the Shia in the rest of Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Iraq’. A brief digression is necessary here because the subsequent descent of Iraq into sectarian civil war has marginalised this ‘general uprising’. What aborted this development was not any action on the part of the United States, but the launching of a murderous war against the Shia by al-Qaeda in Iraq, very much against the wishes of Osama Bin Laden, who considered the Americans to be the main enemy, but almost certainly at the behest of the Saudis. Al- Qaeda’s atrocities were deliberately intended to provoke sectarian civil war, a methodology that is continued by Islamic State today. This inaugurated the proxy war with Iran that the Saudis have been waging in Iraq and later in Syria ever since. The extent to which the United States has found itself caught in the middle of this proxy war is the largely untold story of the current Middle East conflict. As for Nagl, he describes his tour of duty in Iraq as little more than an exercise in futility: ‘It was like pulling your hand out of a bucket of water and hoping that you’d made a lasting impression’. He goes on: ‘It was hard to argue that we’d won. In fact, in a final insult, the ammunition supply point at Taqquadom Airfield, from which many of us (including me) were scheduled to fly out...... was hit by a mortar round the night before our scheduled departure in what was clearly an inside job. The aim point was so precise that it detonated the entire ammo dump, raining down still-live munitions on the airfield and keeping us in Iraq for a week longer’. There was a widespread belief at this time that the US actually faced military defeat in Iraq, that the insurgents might actually make the US position untenable. Desperate for an answer, the politicians and the high command turned to the advocates of a counterinsurgency strategy. Nagl’s moment had come. Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife was taken up and championed by Newt Gingrich who persuaded the publisher, Praeger, to bring out a paperback edition. Gingrich pressed a copy on the Army Chief of Staff, General Schoomaker, who, in Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk turn, gave a copy to the new US commander in Iraq, General Casey. By 2009, even the then Labour Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth, a man for whom mediocrity was merely an aspiration, admitted that he was reading the book. More importantly, Nagl became one of a group of ‘counterinsurgents’, the so-called ‘COINdinistas’, associated with General David Petraeus. He was involved in writing the new counterinsurgency Field Manual 3-24 that became the bible of those advocating a counterinsurgency strategy. The Manual was published with considerable publicity by the University of Chicago Press in December 2006. Publication of a military manual by a university press was itself unprecedented and the book quickly became a best-seller. As Nagl proudly observes: it ‘was downloaded more than a million times in the first month after it had been published. Ultimately copies were even found in Taliban training camps in Pakistan and it was translated and critiqued on jihadi Web sites’. No greater praise! One of the great ironies of the Iraq War is that just as the Americans were embracing their understanding of the British school of counterinsurgency, the British themselves were suffering a humiliating political and military defeat in Basra. While the scale of the debacle has been successfully kept from the British people, the Americans were well aware of the extent of British failure. This lack of success was to be replicated in Helmand. Without any doubt, fear of a third defeat is one of the factors that make it very unlikely that British ground troops will be committed to fighting Islamic State. How successful was the US turn to counterinsurgency? Nagl himself writes of the outcome in Iraq as being ‘an unsatisfying and untidy sort of victory.....an unsatisfying return on the blood and treasure we poured in’. This was before the spectacular rise of Islamic State brought home the full scale of the US failure in Iraq. What about Afghanistan? Here he identifies Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan as one of the main reasons for failure, the other being ‘the endemic corruption of the Afghan government’. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk He consoles himself with the thought that this is ‘an age of unsatisfying wars’. This is not good enough. The reality is that for all the success that Petraeus had at public relations, the counterinsurgency strategy was never actually implemented. Instead, it served as a sort of smokescreen, disguising what were no more than holding operations intended to allow the United States to escape from the disastrous involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan with as little loss of face as possible. A successful counterinsurgency campaign in either country would have taken years longer and involved a huge open-ended commitment of troops and resources without, moreover, any guarantee of victory. No US government was going to make that sort of commitment. Nagl actually realises this, but refuses to recognise that it amounts to a repudiation of counterinsurgency. On the one hand, he insists that we still live in an ‘age of counter- insurgency’ which will last as long as ‘insurgencies roil the globe’; but on the other hand he argues that the US ‘should intervene in them with ground forces as seldom as possible, only when vital national interests are threatened, and only when she can be confident that the peace that will follow the conflict will be an improvement over the pre-war situation’. Using these criteria, he considers military intervention in Libya and Syria as not being in US interests. Instead, the US should follow ‘a light-footprint policy of sending advisers and equipment in support of people fighting for freedom’. This is pretty much a repudiation of the counterinsurgency strategy whether he likes it or not. With the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, what the US has reverted to is a strategy much more murderous and brutal than anything Nagl is prepared to acknowledge. Today, the US is trying to protect its imperial interests with proxy armies that it trains, equips and supports with CIA and special forces operations, aerial bombardment and drone attack. This is the age of the Dirty Wars, the age of a global Phoenix Programme. John Newsinger Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk A new, revised and expanded edition of Newsinger’s British Counterinsurgency is out in October, published by Palgrave. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Useful idiot The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq Emma Sky Atlantic Books: 2015, £18.99, h/b Defeated armies often console themselves by constructing a ‘stab in the back’ myth. The war was going well, victory was in sight, but the politicians back home let the troops down. Most famously, the German Army responded to its defeat in the First World War with such a myth. More recently we have seen such responses to both the British debacle in Aden and the considerably more momentous US defeat in Vietnam. And today such a myth is already under construction with regard to the Iraq War. So much was only to be expected; what is surprising is that leading the way in the myth-making is Emma Sky, a British woman, who, in this generally acclaimed memoir of the Occupation, goes out of the way to proclaim her opposition to the first Gulf War (she demonstrated against the war and actually offered herself as a human shield!), her impressive humanitarian credentials, and how she considered Bush’s invasion a serious mistake for which she felt obliged to apologise personally to the Iraqi people. How did such an unlikely person go on to become an apologist for and servant of US militarism? She volunteered to serve in occupied Iraq, first of all working for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Kirkuk and later becoming political adviser to the US General Ray Odierno (one of those to whom she dedicates her memoir). Her intention in going down this road was, as she puts it, ‘to apologise to Iraqis for the war and to help them rebuild their country’. She is very much aware of the incongruity of her position and recognises that working for the Occupation changed her. How does she deal with this? The narrative device she Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk employs is to make a joke of it. When Tony Blair visited the country in May 2007, she was invited to meet him at the British Embassy. The Embassy was ‘rocketed....minutes before Blair arrived – he was running ten minutes late. Two vehicles were destroyed’. She was introduced to him by US General Petraeus as ‘a national treasure’ and he was astonished to discover that this trusted adviser to the US military was in fact British. When he asked her how she came to be working for the Americans, she replied ‘Stockholm syndrome’. Unfortunately their conversation was curtailed by a renewal of the insurgent attack with Blair being taken off ‘to the safe room....We heard a thud – the rocket landed close by’. One is tempted to say that she had gone ‘native’; but she had, of course, gone ‘colonialist’. On occasion she was described by the Americans as their ‘Miss Bell’, after Gertrude Bell, who had advised the British during their post-WW1 military occupation of Iraq. She finds this quite flattering and one chapter is actually entitled ‘Our Miss Bell’. She had come to apologise to the Iraqi people for the invasion and now ‘I was sitting like some colonial administrator in the office that before the war had served as the governor of Kirkuk....There were lines of Iraqis waiting to see me’. Inevitably, despite the best will in the world, far from apologising to the Iraqis, in the best colonialist tradition, she finds them annoyingly ungrateful: ‘Iraqis often failed to acknowledge what we had done for them and consistently complained. (I was sometimes reminded of the sketch from Monty Python’s Life of Brian when the People’s Front of Judea asks, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” before acknowledging a litany of accomplishments that would have been familiar to anyone who had been serving in Iraq: “The aqueduct, sanitation, the roads, education.’’)’ Considering the damage done to the country by sanctions, invasion and occupation, this verges on the obscene. Her stance is perhaps best laid bare in another jokey episode where she describes how she advised the British General Graeme Lamb to remove the Union Jack from the Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk cover of a strategy document and a tongue-in-cheek exchange followed. He accused her of ‘having spent too long in the company of Americans’ and reminded her that the Union Jack had flown ‘over an Empire on which the sun never set etc., etc’. She replied: ‘I know it may be hard for you to come to terms with, but Great Britain has lost Her Empire (as well as the Great) some years ago. These days we have to be more skilled and subtle, and rule indirectly through our cousins. We should therefore embrace the Stars and Stripes as our own’. Joking aside, this does indeed seem to the rationale behind her decision to work for the US military. Lamb, one of the very few British senior officers that the Americans had any time for (he was one of the architects of the ‘Sunni Awakening’), duly removed the flag. She insists that in Iraq she was ‘an internationalist, who was dedicated to fighting injustice and promoting peace’. Quite perversely she convinced herself that the US military was the vehicle for the realisation of these objectives. The United States was the most powerful country in the world and so if any progress towards justice and peace was going to be achieved it would have to be through the agency of the United States and its interventionist arm, the US Army. She is not uncritical of the US military, far from it! She was one of the CPA officials who visited Abu Ghraib after ‘the revelations that US forces had been torturing detainees’. She records her astonishment that ‘even interrogation was contracted out’. The place ‘exuded evil’. She describes how US vehicles carried placards that read ‘STAY BACK FIFTY METERS OR YOU WILL BE SHOT’, which could only be read twenty metres away. And on one occasion, she queried a report that five enemy had been killed in Diyala including an ‘IED emplacer’. Who, General Odierno asked, were the others? He was told ‘Four children, sir, who were in the vicinity’. ‘How many more enemies had we created?’, she asks. She is engaged in the most monumental self-delusion, playing the traditional role of the ‘useful idiot’, a decent person defending the indefensible. Nevertheless, the war was being won, she assures us. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The US Surge and the Sunni Awakening had turned the tide. ‘The new religion was Counter Insurgency, which we called COIN’, she tells us. But it was all thrown away by the incoming Obama administration, which was determined to get out of Iraq regardless of the consequences. She singles out Vice President Joe Biden and the new US Ambassador Chris Hill as the men most responsible for pushing this policy, handing the country over to Nuri al-Maliki. Her hostility was reciprocated with one of Hill’s staff describing her as a ‘goddam fucking British spy’. For the US military, ‘the greatest threat to the mission had become the US embassy’. Her identification with the US military was complete. They had success in their grasp, but cowardly politicians snatched it away: ‘Washington....had betrayed the very principles the US military believed it was fighting to uphold’. There is a certain irony in the fact that it is not the Bush administration that bears the brunt of her criticism after all the suffering the war and occupation had inflicted on the Iraqi people, but the Obama administration for bringing it to an end! She has not returned to Britain now that the Occupation is over, keen to resume her humanitarian work, but has instead become a part of the military-industrial-academic complex with the Directorship of the Yale University World Fellows programme and a Senior Fellowship at the University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Other Senior Fellows at the Institute include General Graeme Lamb, the US General Stanley McChrystal and Robert James Woolsey, a former Director of the CIA. John Newsinger A new, revised and expanded edition of Newsinger’s British Counterinsurgency is out in October, published by Palgrave. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk What’s your poison? Secret Science: A Century of Poison Warfare and Human Experiments Ulf Schmidt Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, £25, h/b Schmidt is Professor of Modern History at the University of Kent. He has been Wellcome Trust Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, amongst other positions. His research interests, so we are told on the back flap of the jacket, include ‘the history of modern medical ethics, warfare, and policy in twentieth-century Europe and the United States.’ And he is the author of several books including Medical Films, Ethics and Euthanasia in Germany, 1933-1945 (2002), Justice at Nuremberg (2004), and Karl Brand: The Nazi Doctor: Medicine and Power in the Third Reich (2007). Seemingly the right man for the job. Chemical warfare began late on the afternoon of 22 April 1915 near the Belgium town of Ypres when the German military released 160 tons of pressurized liquid chlorine from 6,000 steel cylinders along a four mile front. Germany had been a signatory of the Hague Declaration Concerning Asphyxiating Gases in 1899, a codicil as it were to the Hague Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War, that was signed in total by some twenty-six countries including Britain, France, and Russia. However, Germany had not violated that Declaration as it stated that signatories must abstain ‘from the use of projectiles, the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases’. So, they didn’t use projectiles. It’s all right then, OK? Germany’s gas attack ‘initiated a Europe-wide chemical arms race on an unprecedented scale’ in which there was ‘no time to worry about ethics’ and on the Western Front the British retaliated with the use of poison gas delivered by the Stokes mortar, the sole purpose of which was the delivery of chemical projectiles; and thus Britain was the first country to Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk contravene the terms of the Hague Declaration, not Germany. It was against this background that the Allies started making up for lost time, and none more so than Britain with the establishing of the research station in Wiltshire known as Porton Down (and still going today). Schmidt is largely concerned with Porton and one wonders why the name wasn’t used in the title or subtitle to give a clearer impression of the book’s contents. Yes, there are ‘walk-on’ parts for the United States and Canada and a few other countries but these are dealt with essentially en passant. Porton is the main concern. Schmidt charts in great detail the research and development at Porton but he is equally concerned with the ‘fluid’ ethical and moral aspects of such research and the use of volunteer human guinea pigs (termed ‘observers’ at Porton!) and the question of consent. Yes, the service personnel were ‘volunteers’ and gave their consent, but was it always informed consent? Schmidt highlights the very moving case of twenty-year-old RAF Leading Aircraftman Ronald Maddison who in 1953 was subjected to exposure to the highly toxic Sarin1 and died shortly after. It took his family fifty years to find out what actually happened. Schmidt’s research has been prodigious and, as an example, the bibliography runs to nearly forty pages; but this is within the fields he has selected (I’ll return to this). He has thrown up much of interest. For instance, the US Army did re- search on the susceptibility of human skin to various agents and this showed that 80 per cent of ‘negroes’ were resistant to mustard gas as compared with only 20 per cent of ‘white men’. The report’s author noted that it should be possible ‘to obtain coloured troops who would all be resistant to mustard gas blistering in concentrations harmful to most white men. Enough resistant whites are available to officer them’. Or the fact that thousands of travellers on the London Underground were unknowingly exposed to a ‘plague-like’ bacteria in 1963 1 Classified as a weapon of mass destruction by UN Resolution 687. It was discovered by German scientists at I G Farben in the late 1930s. This was the substance released on the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo sect in 1995 that resulted in thirteen deaths. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk in a ‘dispersal’ test. There’s much like this throughout the book. There are many leads here that need to be followed up. One that struck me was the case of Major D. C. Evans, British Army, who was the senior military liaison officer at the British Joint Service Mission in Washington DC, and thus responsible for the exchange ‘of top-secret chemical warfare information between the two Allied powers’. In January 1948 he was sent to Nuremberg to assist in the prosecution of the I G Farben chemical conglomerate. His secondary purpose was to seek, on behalf of the Ministry of Supply, technical data about Nazi warfare experiments on humans and ‘mass exterminations’ using hydrogen cyanide (I G Farben trade name Zyklon B). This, in the words of Schmidt, ‘took him right to the heart of Nazi war crimes’. Evans appears to have gathered much information but Schmidt rather trails off as to what exactly the Major did and who he saw, and one wonders whether it resulted in some Operation Paperclip shenanigans with the result of German scientists and others coming over to the Allied side now that hostilities had ceased. A section three-quarters of the way through the book is headed ‘Truth Drugs’ and runs to some eleven pages. Schmidt asserts that Britain’s exploration of ‘truth drugs’ seems to have ‘partly’ come from the United States with a visit to the UK by Henry K. Beecher, a Harvard anaesthetist and former member of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services). Beecher was tasked by his bosses to gather information on drugs and narcotics and asses their potential as weapons. This assignment was part of Operation Artichoke2 set up by the CIA in 1951. Another of Beecher’s objectives was to identify scientists who could be recruited for secret work back in the US. Schmidt then goes on to discuss LSD experiments with service personnel at Porton Down in the 1950s done at the behest of MI6 who were much vexed by questions of mind control, truth drugs and brain washing, and that’s it. End of the discussion of ‘truth drugs’, LSD, mind control experiments, and so on. Our 2 Subsequently known more famously as Project MKULTRA, though this is not noted by Schmidt. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk learned professor cannot be unaware of this vast field and the literature it has produced, but he chooses to ignore it. Now let’s return to the subject of human guinea pigs. Scientists in Britain, chiefly at Porton Down, experimented on some 21,000 service personnel between 1939 and 1989. The cover story to them was that Porton was searching for a cure to the common cold or something similarly innocuous. It was rarely explained in any greater or more accurate detail. These volunteers produced certain difficulties for the authorities: they were service personnel under the government’s ‘duty of care’ and while their treatment was ‘regulated’ with ‘oversight’ things could easily go wrong with bad publicity, not to mention legal cases ensuing (which is what happened). What was needed were ‘subjects’ who were not regulated for the mind control experiments, but where were these to be found? A few years back I reviewed Albarelli’s book on the death of Frank Olson in the pages of this magazine.3 Olson was a US government bacteriologist working on germ warfare projects who was probably pushed to his death out of a tenth floor window of the Hotel Statler in New York in 1953. Reviewing the book led me to do some desultory research on the UK’s forays in to mind control drugs, and while I won’t go through all the details again there are a number of things I’d like to mention from the review. Where were unregulated subjects suitable for mind control experiments to be found? They were all over the country...... in mental hospital wards. The clinicians/ psychiatrists were supreme rulers of these wards, no consent was needed from the patients, there was no oversight, and these rulers could do just as they liked. There were two doctors who piqued my interest. One was Dr William Sargant (1907-1988) of St Thomas’ hospital in London, and the other was Dr Ronald Sandison. The rather creepy Dr Sargant was, according to Nigel West, MI5’s in-house psychiatrist, though West may have meant MI6, and it seems likely he visited Porton Down. 3 The Dr Strangeloves of the Mind’, a review of H. P. Albarelli Jr’s A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, in Lobster 59, Summer 2010. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Further, Sargant’s ward sister recalls him telling tales about ‘cloak-and-dagger exploits’. He was in contact with the notorious Dr Euan Cameron in Montreal, exchanging information, and this was hardly likely had he not been ‘cleared’ by the authorities. When Beecher was visiting the UK in 1951 he was put in touch with Sargant by Sir Henry Dale, President of the Royal Society. Dr Sandison was pursuing LSD ‘therapy’ at the Powick Hospital in Worcestershire in the 1950s through until the early 1970s. In all some 683 patients were dosed in some 13,785 sessions. Sandison’s research was conducted on a small scale to begin with until his friend Professor Joel Elkes, head of the Department of Experimental Psychiatry at the University of Birmingham, stepped in and arranged a £50,000 grant from the regional hospital board to build a dedicated LSD wing at Powick. This was a pretty sizeable sum in the 1950s and the question is, was the hospital board really that enlightened or was it acting merely as a conduit for money from, possibly, security or military agencies? Dr Elkes was advising Porton Down (and thus MI6) at the time on the interrogation possibilities of LSD. He, like Sargant, believed in the ‘physical, neurochemical basis for psychiatric phenomena’. No room here for psychoanalysis. Straight in with the drugs! Elkes went to work in the US in the late 1950s and remained there. What I’m suggesting here is that research needs to be done in this area. To what extent were mental hospitals used in psycho-chemical research? There seems little or no literature on the subject beyond newspaper reports of ex- patients taking hospital authorities to court (eg the Powick case). Finally, on Schmidt’s book. He has done an admirable job on what he does cover, but he falls on what he doesn’t cover. For instance, there isn’t even a mention of anthrax in the nearly seven hundred pages, let alone MKULTRA and what that engendered. And where is the mention of the US Army’s Fort Detrick, the centre of US biological weapons research from 1943 onwards? I could go on. Here we have Hamlet without Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the Prince of Denmark. Anthony Frewin Anthony Frewin works in what is left of the British film industry. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk An offer we can refuse The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination Lamar Waldron Berkeley, California: Counterpoint, 2013, h/b, £20 (approx.) Waldron has some form. This is his third book on JFK and is largely a rehashing and enlargement of the previous two.1 He has earlier argued for a secret Kennedy venture known as C- Day that planned for a coup in Cuba to be carried out by the Pentagon and the CIA which would be synced with the assassination of Castro by an undercover operator on the island. The Soviets would be blamed, the populace would rise up, and an armada of Cuban exiles would invade (with the US military on standby in the wings awaiting a call). The only trouble with this is that there is no evidence that C-Day existed; but this hasn’t prevented Waldron for continuing to argue the case and stating that JFK’s failure to realise the plan resulted in his assassination. The present book is a wet dream for the-Mafia-did-it crowd. According to Waldron the hit was organised and carried out by those two poster boys of organised crime, Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello. Yes, we’ve heard this before, and the theory has been knocked down before, but it keeps coming back like a bad penny.2 Let’s start where our author started, with an individual 1 Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK (New York: Carroll and Graf, 205), Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination (Berkeley, California: Counterpoint, 2008). Jim DiEugenio slices-and-dices the first title at Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk named Jack Van Laningham upon whom Waldron predicates virtually his whole argument. Van Laningham was an FBI informant/snitch who was in prison with Marcello and he, Marcello, is alleged to have said to him, ‘Yeah, I had the son of a bitch killed. I’m glad I did. I’m sorry I couldn’t have done it myself.’ Did Marcello actually say this? We only have Van Laningham’s word for it (he had been promised early release for co-operating on the Marcello investigation). And if he did say it does it really mean anything? Could it not have been simple braggadocio (success has many fathers)? Marcello was then an old man on the foothills of dementia, and his mind was wandering. We’ll probably never know one way or the other, not that this is that important. Working from this starting point Waldron then cherry- picks his evidence to build up his case. He is a diligent researcher but does tend to skew the evidence in the theory’s favour. If Marcello goes in for some self-aggrandising so does Waldron. In his Preface he notes that his previous two books were each more than nine hundred pages with ‘a combined total of almost four thousand endnotes documenting sources’ (wow!). He continues, ‘my work has received more mainstream press coverage that most books documenting a conspiracy in JFK’s murder’.3 And so on, and so on. Now comes something quite remarkable. ‘Though The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination has the same high level of documentation as my earlier works, we [sic] have dispensed with endnotes for this book.’ Oh, what a pity. And here is the clincher: ‘Now, it’s easy to simply Google most quotations to find more information about their source’! What an innovative time-saving suggestion this is for the author; but time-intensive for the reader. It’s bad enough some writers putting their notes on their website rather than in a book, but here we haven’t even got that. There’s much of interest buried away in the book, but 3 Possibly because he takes the spotlight off government agencies and those associated with them. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the work’s prolixity and without sourcing to hand sadly diminishes whatever value it has. Anthony Frewin Anthony Frewin works in what is left of the British film industry. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Without Smoking Gun: Was the Death of Lt. Cmdr. William Pitzer Part of the JFK Assassination Cover-Up Conspiracy? Kent Heiner Trine Day, 2004, p/b, £16 (approximation from current dollar value) A catchy title for a book this is not, although given that Lt. Cmdr. Pitzer is such an obscure figure you can hardly fault the author’s publisher for setting out his wares. It was published in 2004 and hasn’t set the world on fire. This is a shame, because it’s a great book, far removed from the all-too- recognised ‘X knew Y who hated Z who was friends with A’ school of JFK thinking. I picked up Mr Heiner’s book because I was interested in the complex enigma of JFK’s autopsy and recognised Pitzer’s name from one of those ‘mysterious deaths’ lists. Reading it, it became clear that this book deserved a review to alert others. First of all, the ‘pitch’: Pitzer’s death – an apparent suicide by gunshot. Is it suspicious? Well, yes, certainly. Heiner does a good job of picking apart the scene of death, with not too much of the ballistics-wrangling you might expect in connection with JFK’s death. The truly suspicious aspect is that prior to his death, Pitzer – who lived near Walter Reed Hospital where JFK’s body was originally meant to be taken – was seen leaving his home, carrying a movie camera, after receiving a phone call on the day of the assassination; and later actually showed what appeared to be film of JFK’s autopsy to a friend. The film, of course, disappeared. But eyewitness testimony is not unimportant; and Pitzer’s actual death is just one tableau in a positive panorama. Take, for example, the autopsy (singular, in the official version). Mr Heiner deconstructs the official story of the handling and transport of JFK’s corpse very well. It’s a minor triumph in its own right to put the pieces back together again in a way that (a) makes sense and (b) makes things simpler. Mr Heiner’s reconstruction is cohesive and convincing. And, Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk much to my surprise, David Lifton’s ‘bodysnatchers’ theory from his book Best Evidence comes out of it rather well (not the first time this outcome has surprised me. I can see I’m going to have to read Best Evidence again). As for unpicking the riddle of the infamous autopsy photographs, I will not spoil the reader’s enjoyment. I shall however offer this enlightening titbit: the notorious black and white ‘Stare of Death’ photo is from JFK’s first autopsy, not the second. The reason this is clear is that the checkered tiles of the mortuary floor, visible in the frame, belong to a different hospital to the one where the autopsy officially took place. Reflecting on this minor bombshell, it finally dawned on me that something really obvious had always bothered me about the autopsy photographs – JFK’s eyes are open in the ‘stare’ picture but closed or semi-closed in the others, which is sort of circumstantial evidence of ‘stage management’; and since there was obviously never going to be an open-casket viewing there was no innocent excuse for it. This was a clue I only recognised after reading Mr Heiner’s partial solution, and a minor example of how stimulating and rewarding it is. The bulk of the book (it’s not actually bulky, but a slim volume) consists of an exploration of the claim of Lt. Col. Dan Marvin that he was ‘sounded out’ by a CIA officer as Pitzer’s assassin. Lt. Col. Marvin didn’t go through with it, but clearly even a failed attempt to recruit a murderer counts as evidence connected with a disputed death.1 Lt. Col. Marvin’s fascinating story is examined this way and that, and its faults and failings assessed impartially. And it survives this scrutiny more or less intact. There are some military paper-trails unearthed, which go a long way toward helping the reader get his/her bearings and corroborate Lt. Col. Marvin’s recollections; however most of the evidence consists of independent eyewitnesses whose accounts interlock and overlap at critical junctures. The forensically-minded might dismiss this as a ‘spider-webs and 1 Lt. Col. Marvin has submitted his own review of Heiner’s book to amazon.com, which can be read here: Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk sealing-wax’ way to construct a case, but we should remember that eyewitness testimony can overrule forensics in court. The witness has traditionally had primacy (and one day, this primacy might be properly reasserted if digital video, audio and photography remain dominant, with all their possibilities for tampering and doctoring). Mr Heiner weaves a fascinating, convincing and unpredictable tale, told well in a sober and impressive style, and it will not spoil it to reveal that by the end of the book the titular question has not been answered. In that way, it is unlike the book that it reminded me of most in its style and approach, William Pepper’s magisterial solution to the murder of Martin Luther King. However, what is clear from Mr Heiner’s work is that there is definitely a strong case to be made for Pitzer’s death being a murder. No smoking gun, perhaps, but there’s certainly smoke and it’s a fair bet that there were genuine flames behind it. Garrick Alder Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Thatcher’s Secret War Subversion, Coercion, Secrecy and Government, 1974-90 Clive Bloom Stroud: The History Press, 2015, £20 (h/b) I was seriously interested when I got the publisher’s flyer about this book. To my knowledge no-one has tackled this subject in its entirety; and no-one has even re-examined Thatcher’s rise to power, the 1974-79 period, since Stephen Dorril and I wrote Lobster 11 and the expansion of that material in Smear! Wilson and the Secret State; and they were published in 1986 and 1991, before the Internet. What could be done these days with Google and Nexis-Lexis? A little alarm bell rang when I saw the cover. The rear page of the sleeve announces: ‘Everything in this book is true; everything is false. It all depends on which side of the looking glass one is standing’. (And this is repeated on the first page of the text.) As an image this is faulty because on one side of a looking glass you get your own reflection, the other side is non-reflective, and on neither side can you see through.1 As a preface to a purported history book, what does it suggest? Is the author2 merely nodding towards bullshit, pop post- modernism? Or is he telling the reader that the book cannot be trusted? In which case, why write it? In keeping with his warning on the cover, the author writes on page 12: ‘...what is recorded here is the disparate investigations of different people often working in isolation and never quite sure of what was true or false. In a sense, these pages represent speculation of a rather particular research type, half history and half the innuendo that history is made from.’ I have no idea what that ‘half the innuendo that history is made from’ means but I doubt that Tony Bunyan, Duncan Campbell, or the State Research collective, for example, felt they were engaged in ‘half history and half innuendo’. Coming along in their footsteps, I certainly didn’t. None of us are in the author’s index, incidentally, though Bunyan and I make it into 1 Anthony Frewin made this point to me. 2 The author has a website Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the author’s ‘secondary sources’, where he has me as Robin Ramsan. Duncan Campbell is mentioned twice, en passant, but is missed by Bloom’s indexer. The book is in two distinct sections: the 1974-1979 period, before Thatcher took office, and her period at No. 10. The 1974-79 period is the most interesting to me and about which I know most, and it is that section on which I will concentrate; and I am afraid this will be almost entirely a catalogue of the author’s errors. On page 15 we have this: ‘This was politics by other means, which journalists Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsey named “para-politics” in 1983.’ Well my name is Ramsay, not Ramsey; but OK, this error is often made in England. And we didn’t name it ‘para-politics’ (more usually, parapolitics): the term came from Peter Dale Scott in the 1970s, as we repeatedly acknowledged. A couple of lines later there is the following quotation. ‘Brutally summarised...... Mrs Thatcher and Thatcherism grew out of a right-wing network in this country with extensive links to the military-intelligence establishment. Her rise to power was the climax of a long campaign by this network which included a protracted destabilisation campaign against the Labour and Liberal parties – chiefly the Labour Party - during 1974-76.7 ’ I recognised this as a paragraph I wrote in Lobster 11. But what has been excised by Bloom after ‘summarised’? He’s taken out the words ‘our thesis is’. Having removed them he can then cite Paul Foot as the source at note 7. (But Foot, doing this honestly, cited Lobster 11 when he quoted that paragraph.) Immediately below this quotation he lists some of the whistle-blowers and investigative journalists of the period (this is where Duncan Campbell gets a name-check) and then adds: ‘Amateurs such as Peter Green would not let explanations lie...’. Who is Peter Green? Does he mean Rob Green, Hilda Murrell’s nephew? Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd are discussed. ‘Holroyd was apparently confined to a mental hospital after he made public the turf war that raged between MI5 and MI6 over who ran operations in Northern Ireland’. (p. 23) ‘Apparently’? Fred was briefly sent to the Army mental hospital at Netley while he was still serving and long before he began whistle-blowing. This stain on his service record has been one of Holroyd’s biggest complaints for the last 30 plus years and Bloom would know this had he consulted Holroyd’s memoir. A couple of paragraphs later we are told that when Holroyd testified before the Barron Inquiry in the Irish Republic into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings ‘Holroyd was considered a Walter Mitty character’. (p. 24) No, he wasn’t. You can check for yourself: the Barron hearings and comments are on-line.3 After Holroyd, Bloom turns to Wallace and the errors continue. ‘Wallace joined the regular army and quickly rose through the ranks.’ (p. 30). It’s more complex than that. In his media/psy-ops roles he was a civilian employee of the army. But he was also a part-time member of the Ulster Defence Regiment, resigning in 1975 with the rank of Captain. Wallace ‘had been dealing with a Protestant murder group and paedophile operation out of the Kincora Boys’ Home’. (p. 30). There was no ‘murder group’ at Kincora I have ever heard of and Bloom offers no source for this claim. On Wallace, Bloom quotes occasional contributor to these columns, Bernard Porter, thus: ‘[Porter] suggests that Wallace was a man with a “grievance” whose “horse’s tale” was the result of embitterment and “flakiness”. (p. 32). What Porter actually wrote was this: ‘At around the same time [as Peter Wright’s allegations] an army “black” propagandist from Northern Ireland, Colin Wallace, appeared with more horse’s mouth tales of either the same plot, or a parallel one. He also brought documentary evidence with him: mainly his 3 See Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk notes, made at the time. Both these sources were tainted. Wright had his grievance over his pension, and a general air of “flakiness”; and Wallace had just completed a gaol sentence for a manslaughter charge which he claimed was a put-up job.’ 4 Porter used ‘grievance’ and ‘flakiness’ about Peter Wright not Wallace; and it wasn’t a ’horse’s tale’ but ‘horse’s mouth tales’. Is Bloom’s misuse of this paragraph to denigrate Wallace sloppy or malicious? Still in Ireland, Bloom turns to Maurice Oldfield, and mentions the 1987 story in the Sunday Times which said Oldfield had: ‘been a security risk when caught “cottaging” in 1980. It was not exactly true, however, but plausible enough to cause damage.’ What does ‘not exactly true’ mean? Oldfield wasn’t exactly caught cottaging? In fact the story was entirely an invention, an MI5 smear run into the Sunday Times via James Adams.5 Oldfield’s death, and some suspicions about its cause, leads Bloom to Gary Murray who mentions this in his 1993 book Enemies of the State. This, says Bloom, ‘became a bible a both for conspiracy theorists and those whose legitimate investigations suggested an actual series of conspiratorial situations’. (p. 35) It did? News to me. Murray’s book was full of fascinating anecdotes and leads, few of which could be followed because of his unwillingness (or inability) to name names. As we move into the paranoia about the British left in the 1970s we have the ‘Trotskyist Workers’ Party’ (p. 43) which, from the context, should be the Workers’ Revolutionary 4 Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia (London 1989, p. 211). This has recently been republished in the ‘Routledge Revivals’ series. Said conviction was overturned, something Bloom omits in his account. 5 The first thing I did during my brief period at Channel Four News that year was ring up all the people named in that story as sources for it and they all denied saying what was attributed to them. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Party.6 We are told that Frank Kitson ‘became the first head of military intelligence in Ulster’ (p. 44) – he didn’t – and on the next page Bloom gives us both Captain Laurence Nairac instead of Robert Nairac and John ‘Francie’ Green instead of John Francis Green. Into the section on the so-called private armies of the mid-1970s and the author’s wholly inadequate documentation really begins to irritate. He tells us that David Stirling’s GB75 was ‘a strike-breaking force that included all sorts of disgruntled intelligence operatives, former soldiers and arms dealers who were preparing for a coup against what they considered a communist government led by a communist agent – the Prime Minister himself.’ (p. 47) But to my knowledge the personnel of GB75 were never revealed and Bloom offers no source on this. And was it intended to break strikes or run a coup? He tells us that GB75 ‘maintained contacts with Walter Walker’s Unison Committee for Action and an ex-MI6 officer called George Young.’ (p. 48) In fact Unison was run by Young and Walker was initially a member of it but quit to start his own group, Civil Assistance when, as he told me in a letter, he could not work out what Young was really up to. Bloom continues: ‘Later, in 1975, Young organised Tory action alongside Airey Neave and can be seen in that respect to be one of the secret architects of Thatcher’s rise to power.’ It should, of course, be Tory Action; the claim that Neave was involved with Young in this is not sourced by the author;7 and what – if anything – Tory Action actually amounted to has never been clear. 6 There was a Workers’ Party at the time, a split from IS, with a membership of about 50. But this isn’t the party to which Bloom is referring. 7 There is a Wiki entry on Tory Action which says Neave was involved but the source for that claim is given as Paul Larkin’s A Very British Jihad (Belfast, 2004) and that merely asserts, without any sources, that Neave ‘helped’ Young found Tory Action. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Back to the subject of Wallace. He tells us that Airey Neave: ‘certainly knew a great deal about Operation Clockwork Orange. Here all the threads came together: Irish Catholic gunmen supplied by the Soviet Union and the trade unions....’.(p. 53) Did Neave know about Clockwork Orange? I asked Colin Wallace while writing this review and he said that though it was a long time ago, he was pretty sure he would not have discussed Clockwork Orange with Neave. Taken literally, this statement by the author is nonsense: the Soviets and unions did not supply gunmen. Bloom is clumsily compressing a great of deal of disinformation material about Soviet activity in Ireland and the UK: essentially the beliefs that the Soviets were subverting Britain through the CPGB’s role in trade unions and were attempting to turn Ireland into another Cuba. If the CPGB’s role in trade unions was real, there is no evidence that it was being directed by the Soviets – had there been any we would have heard about it – and Ireland-as- Cuba was simply an invention by those creative amplifiers of the ‘red menace’ at IRD. (Bloom does not mention IRD.) Bloom then tells us that Neave met Wallace three times and ‘Wallace was dismissed with £70 for his information.’ (p. 53) Actually the £70 was the fee from the Daily Telegraph for a piece Wallace wrote, anonymously, about the Northern Ireland situation. Further into the ‘Wilson plot’ material the author gives us Brian Crozier and gets the Crozier chronology wrong, with Forum World Features in the 1970s and the Institute for the Study of Conflict in the 1960s, instead of the other way round. (On page 73, he calls the Institute for the Study of Conflict ‘Crozier’s anti-Trotskyist think tank’. Whatever it was, it wasn’t that. Crozier never took the Trot groups seriously: his eye was firmly fixed on the Soviet ‘threat’.) The rest of the book is mostly chapters about specific events in the Thatcher period. Some are familiar – the miners’ strike; nukes civil and military; the deaths of Hilda Murrell and Willie McRae; arms for Iraq. These later chapters are less Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk error-strewn (though no better sourced) than his account of the 1974-79 period, perhaps because the material is less complex. When he strays off familiar territory it goes wrong. He has a short chapter on mind control, for example, which in ten pages, citing only three books, one newspaper article and five websites (none of them serious sites on mind control issues), he skips across the last 35 years from the apparently mysterious death of the Marconi scientists, and part of the late Joe Vialls’ story in the 1980s, to John Allman (who wrote in Lobster 48). En route he conflates gangstalking and Internet trolling (p. 175) while omitting 99.99% of the serious work done in the field. If the book had an editor s/he should have removed this chapter. The author presents these chapters as illustrative of his thesis: ‘that there was an undeclared and internal “cold war” fought throughout the 1980s in which rogue elements in the government, military and secret services seemed to have free rein to distort facts and even kill opposition voices under the camouflage of black propaganda’. (p. 1) Well, yes, something like that, even if that is oddly expressed. But while the author’s thesis is generally correct (we might argue about ‘rogue elements’) and supported by his account of various incidents during those years, the chapters on the 1975-1979 period are so sloppy and the whole thing is so inadequately sourced as to render it useless. Robin Ramsay Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Oswaldology, as it were Anthony Frewin The Oswald Code Alan Jules Weberman New York: Independent Research Associates, 2014, 300 pps. Illustrations, notes, index, $17.00 (amazon) Alan Jules Weberman or, more familiarly, A J Weberman, is widely known as a garbologist, Dylanologist, and as the author of a book on the JFK assassination.1 The main title page has a photograph captioned in caps THE AUTHOR SUMMER 1963 HITCHING TO THE YUCATAN. Just why this photo is positioned so prominently here and its significance are unexplained. Could it be that the author wanted to prove he was actually about in the year that JFK was assassinated, and therefore qualified to write about it? (This is along the lines of Ned Polsky declaring that many writers consider themselves sociologists merely because they are members of society.) Weberman explains in the opening chapter that studying Oswald’s address book ‘confirmed my belief that Oswald was adept at steganography and hid information in it.’ He continues by saying that whereas cryptography is making information unreadable by third parties, steganography is the practice of hiding [italics supplied] information, and he should have added the qualifier in plain sight. Or, to put it another and better way, as the inestimable David Kahn has written: ‘The methods of steganography conceal the very existence of the message.’ 2 So, whereas official investigations have paid only a cursory interest to Oswald’s address book, Weberman will venture forth where angels and dupes fear to tread. 1 See my ‘Inside Lee Harvey Oswald’s address book’ in this issue. 2 David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1967) p. xiii. Still, after all these years, the best book on the subject. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The author jumps about like a pimp with dog shit on his shoes. We have this document, then that document, this illustration, then that illustration, and one hopes they will be tied together and their importance explained. But it never comes. Then Gerry Patrick Hemming appears on the stage, described by Weberman as a ‘fascinating dude’, who confided in him all sorts of Big Secrets; but Weberman doesn’t realise he is being toyed with. Oswald worked for a time in Dallas at Jaggars-Chiles- Stoval, a firm that undertook classified security typesetting for the US government. The address of the company together with their phone number is in the address book and underneath Oswald has written micro dots. Well, big deal. So what? Weberman comments: ‘An FBI document dated October 2, 1964, revealed that the Bureau examined photographs of Oswald in the USSR and his Russian books for microdots, but found none. Among Oswald’s possessions the Dallas Police Department discovered a pair of Russian binoculars. The binoculars could be reversed to blow an image down.’ So, not good honest US binoculars, but sneaky Russian ones. This claim is absurd, as anyone can easily demonstrate whether with Russian or other binoculars. The optics are just not capable of achieving this. There are many reproductions of pages from the address book with Weberman seeing things that are just not there. To take one example, Frank Fiorini Sturgis, one of the Watergate burglars and a familiar face to the JFK critical community, features prominently. Weberman has this: ‘The name FIORINI appeared twice in Oswald’s address book disguised as two words. One was “orinis” the other was “Russ for Forin”. As you can see letters “i-n” were written in a different ink.’ Pretty conclusive proof, eh? This is up there with Ignatius Donnelly and his Great Cryptogram.3 3 Ignatius Donnelly, The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher In The So-Called Shakespeare Plays (1881). The title is self-explanatory. Could well have served as an inspiration to Weberman. Lobster 70 Winter 2015 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk We are not finished with Sturgis yet. There is a photograph of him in his pyjamas and dressing gown holding a saucer and cup of tea sitting on a sofa next to his matronly- looking mother who has one hand on his shoulder while the other points an accusatory finger at him. It’s captioned, again caps throughout, FRANK’S MOM BAWLS HIM OUT FOR KILLING KENNEDY. Anywhere else I would assume this was a lame attempt at humour, but here I suspect it is meant to be taken seriously. Weberman presents further photos of Sturgis and claims he was one of the Three Tramps arrested on 22 November in Dealey Plaza. One of the others was Howard Hunt. The third was David LeMar Christ. Who he? You’ll find his name in Oswald’s address book, but disguised of course. It was only a matter of time before the name of James Jesus Angleton appeared. Weberman writes, ‘Angelton’s name was cleverly encrypted in Oswald’s address book, disguised as “Plug for Radio”.’ Plug for Radio? This is on page 86. The thought of wading through 200 more pages of the book was too much to contemplate. The non sequiturs, the irrelevancies, the tortured decrypting, the Zen-like illogic, and so on were doing my head in big time. Enough already! Lobster 70 Winter 2015