www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
Sumer 2017
Lobster • The view from the bridge, by Robin Ramsay • Brexit: an accident waiting to happen, by Simon Matthews • Team mercenary GB Part 2 – This is the 73 modern world, by Nick Must • Blackmail in the Deep State, by Jonathan Marshall • Colin Wallace and the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry, by Robin Ramsay • Blair and Israel, by Robin Ramsay • Sex scandals and sexual blackmail in America’s deep politics, by Jonathan Marshall • The Hess flight: still dangerous for historians – even after 75 years, by Andrew Rosthorn • Deaths in Parliament: a legend re- examined, by Garrick Alder • The Russian Laundromat and Blackpool Football Club, by Andrew Rosthorn • A Jimmy Savile sex scandal concealed during the 1997 General Election, by Garrick Alder
Book Reviews • Faustian Bargains: Lyndon Johnson and Mac Wallace in the robber baron culture of Texas, by Joan Mellen, reviewed by Robin Ramsay • The CIA As Organised Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, by Douglas Valentine, reviewed by Dr. T. P. Wilkinson • The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies, by Lt. General Michael T Flynn and Michael Ledeen, reviewed by John Newsinger • Of G-Men and Eggheads: The FBI and the New York intellectuals, by John Rodden, reviewed by John Newsinger www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
The view from the bridge
Robin Ramsay
My thanks to Nick Must and Garrick Alder for editorial and proof- reading assistance in this edition of Lobster.
The long URL in the footnotes problem There is a problem with long URLs in the footnotes. When a URL runs beyond a single line our computers sometimes read the line-break as being a gap, giving us incomplete URLs which fail. I did try getting round this a while back by using the TinyURL.com program, which produces shortened URLs, but abandoned that after two it created simply didn’t work. The solution – as I am sure you know already – is to copy the footnote URL, create a new tab in your web browser, paste the URL into the destination box and close the gap where the line-break seems to be. However, from now on I will add the TinyURL version of the URL in the footnote to the original long one.
Fake news? Fake something... I have commented before on the lack of quality control – editing – which afflicts the site
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media. Over the last couple of months the Clinton- Podesta connection has been directly tied to a global child sex trafficking ring operating from the “life insurance” laptop of Hillary’s closest, 20-year aide-Saudi operative Huma Abedin’s husband, disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner. But the pedophilia network has more recently expanded to include an infamous block of sinister pizza parlors and front offices in upscale Northwest Washington operating eerily close to the White House (perhaps even closer through DC’s network of underground tunnels). Enter #Pizzagate. And through thousands of internet sleuths working together online 24/7, the crumbling, gaping cracks of this crime cabal wall have been exposed like never before, threatening to bring down the most powerful Luciferian worshipping pedophiles at the top of this planet’s demonic food chain. And this raw naked exposure of the diabolical matrix has the guilty party – the Obamas, Bushes and Clintons panicking and resorting to extreme desperate measures to hide and conceal the filthy truth of who and what they are.’ 1 Did anybody at Global Research even read this before it was posted?
Brexit and all that Most of the groups in this society who have power, the EU itself, of course, and the Euro-establishment here, are opposed to Brexit. Consequently I do not believe it will happen.2 As the ‘negotiations’ proceed, a negative feedback
1
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loop will be created: as more details emerge, criticism will increase; as the negative consequences of Brexit become clearer, public support for it will decline; as support declines, MPs who are fearful of opposing their constituents’ wishes will grow emboldened and political opposition to Brexit will grow; as the political tide begins to turn, opposition from within the British economy will become more vocal. And so on. But this doesn’t make discerning what is going on politically any easier. Do PM May, David Davis et al know what they are doing? The evidence from the leaks after the initial meeting between the British side and the EU at the end of April suggest that they don’t – or didn’t then. The EU side gave their version of the talks to a German newspaper and the Berlin correspondent of the Economist used Twitter to convey them to the Anglosphere.3 At face value, the account is damning in the extreme. May and the EU officials were on entirely different pages, with May living in a kind of fantasy world, apparently unbriefed about the reality of what she was embarking. Worse, she appeared not to have grasped that the EU has nothing to gain by the Brexit negotiations’ success and everything to gain from their failure. (In reaction to the leak Mrs May stamped her expensively-shod foot outside No 10 Downing Street.)4 In this context, why did PM May decide to call an early election? One hypothesis was suggested by Ivan Horrocks: May wants a large majority to have ‘all the power required to take whatever steps necessary to control and contain the many negative outcomes and consequence of a hard (or
Footnote 2 continued For Varoufakis see, for example,
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indeed any kind of) Brexit.’5 Another was from Kevin Ovenden: ‘. . . big business remains of the view it had overwhelmingly this time last year when it campaigned hard for Remain. It would much prefer Brexit to mean not Brexit. That has been politically impossible in the wake of the referendum. With a majority of just 13 MPs in the Commons, the May government has been susceptible to the threat of revolt from two minority wings... May.... is now hoping for a big majority through which to assert some control, not to pursue some hard Brexit, but to bury the referendum and return the Tory Party in government to close alignment with the City of London and big business. That centres upon something she has been trailing for some weeks, to the alarm of the Tory Brexiteers. It is to seek a long transitional arrangement with the EU in which all the strictures of the single market — which is not a trading relationship, but a legal enforcement of big business’s rights — are maintained, possibly renewed every year by vote of Parliament.’ 6 Ovenden’s analysis is the more plausible to me and may explain why ‘fund manager’ Jeremy Hosking is preparing to spend getting on for a £1 million of his money trying to unseat pro-Remain Labour MPs in the election, to prevent ‘backsliding on Brexit’. Hosking said ‘that new Tory MPs from traditionally Labour-held seats would help safeguard a “full, national
5
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Brexit”, rather than a “City of London Brexit”.’7 A City of London Brexit? An interesting phrase that, for most of the City, notably the hedge funds, is deeply unhappy at the idea of Brexit. It will make their current operations in the EU more difficult if not impossible.8 There have been many reports of the large multinational companies in the City making plans to move some, or all of, their operations out of the UK.9 Since the Tory Party has always been the party of the City, can we really envisage a Conservative prime minister doing a deal with the EU which damages it?
The narrative There is the concept of ‘the narrative’ in politics and the media. The best short account I know of this is by the American crime writer Stephen Hunter, who has a character say this:
7 Hosking’s open letter on this is at
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‘The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide “These are the lies we tell today.” No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way that they have chosen to live their lives. It’s a way of arranging things a certain way they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture [. . . ] And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the alter of their church. They don’t even know they’re true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything.’10 A key feature of the British political ‘narrative’, transmitted by most of the major media, is that Labour is extravagant when in government, spending and borrowing too much. This is a subsection of the wider British political narrative. This dates back to the mid-1970s and the great inflation – caused by Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath’s ‘dash for growth’ and the rise in the price of crude oil – which Labour inherited when they took office in 1974. That narrative says that Labour politicians don’t understand the economy and can’t be trusted with it. This narrative had such power over Gordon Brown and Tony Blair that they spent the period in opposition from 1994- 97 endlessly endorsing it and promising not to challenge its perceived prescriptions. When he was finally Prime Minister, Gordon Brown found himself (in keeping with the narrative) portrayed as profligate and economically incompetent for massively expanding public debt to bail out the banks in 2008. There is a neat little graph which shows that UK national
10 From pp. 183/4 of Stephen Hunter’s I, Sniper (London: Pocket Books, 2009). Hunter is a journalist who writes thrillers. And very good some of them are, too, though perhaps not for those of a delicate left/pc disposition.
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debt as a percentage of GDP in 2007 (after 10 years of Labour government) was slightly lower than it was in 1996 under Conservative PM John Major.11 At the Tax Justice site Richard Murphy shows that ‘The Conservatives have out-borrowed Labour for a century’.12 But none of this dents the reinstated ‘narrative’ of Labour economic profligacy. This is mainly because Labour politicians have apparently never thought it a priority to challenge it; or think it impossible to do so. Whether we like it or not, to some extent we are dependent on what is in our politicians’ heads. Which is why I found myself flicking through a long interview with Tony Blair in a November 2016 edition of Esquire that I found in my dentist’s waiting-room. Blair said: ‘... in time people will understand this [radical Islam] is not a problem we have caused, it’s a problem we have got caught up in....The reasons [Western intervention, in 1999, in] Kosovo worked and in Iraq and Afghanistan it was really difficult was because of the intervention of radical Islam....’13 Never mind the Anglo-American support during the last half century for the Saudi regime, which is the major funder of radical Islam; never mind that Al Qaeda was created and funded by the USA (with minor British assistance); and never mind that, as Mark Curtis shows,14 the British encouraged/funded radical Islam whenever their Middle Eastern colonial subjects showed signs of interest in nation and statehood. On the subject of Iraq, Blair said: ‘OK, you completely disagree with what we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, but how does removing a brutal 11 At
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dictatorship that the people of that country most certainly did not support, giving them a United Nations- led process of election and unlimited amounts of development aid, how is that oppressing them?’ Nothing about the war, the half a million casualties,15 the refugee crisis and the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure. Astonishing stuff, really, even for him.
The devil rides out? A couple of correspondents have drawn my attention to a striking interview on Youtube with a retired Dutch banker, Ronald Bernard, which is being widely disseminated on the Net. He describes some of his activities as a currency trader and then tells us that he was invited to take part in Satanic child sacrifice rituals by his elite banking buddies.16 Why don’t I believe this? Because he advises us to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Bernard: Yes. Much later in all those studies and discoveries I found a document, which they are claiming is bullshit of course, the Protocols of Zion. And nowadays I recommend everyone to read the whole of that incredibly boring document. Just work through it, read it through. Interviewer: We are also talking about Zionism. Bernard: Yes, of course. If you read the Protocols of Zion, and really study them and understand, then it is like reading the newspaper of the daily life. How from their position of ultimate power, and ultimate it has literally become, but that is only because the people don’t stand up for themselves. They don’t realize what
15 ‘About half a million people died in Iraq as a result of war-related causes between the US-led invasion in 2003 and mid-2011, an academic study suggests. University researchers from the US, Canada and Iraq based their estimate on randomised surveys of 2,000 households.’ At
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reality is.’ 17 So, forgive me, but I am not going to take seriously tales of Satanic child sacrifice rituals by our financial masters from someone who recommends the Protocols.
Laugh? Another in the long line of recent things you couldn’t make up is the news that Alex Jones of Infowars is getting a White House press pass.18 Who’s next? David Icke?
Spooks ahoy! And there is the delicious if faintly ridiculous story of the Cambridge University Intelligence Seminar, one of whose convenors was Professor Christopher Andrew, the British spooks’ favourite tame academic. One of the commercial sponsors – to the tune of about £1,000 – of said seminar was a new academic publishing outfit, Veruscript, whose founders are Russian.19 Is it a front for Russian intelligence? Not that anyone can demonstrate; but that didn’t prevent people – including former SIS chief Richard Dearlove – resigning from the forum because... well, just in case, I suppose.20 And Professor Andrew resigned from the board of the publishing venture, despite describing the allegations of Russian influence as ridiculous.21 Turns out the money was coming from a Russian 17 Transcript at
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oligarch; and as is well known, they are all agents of Putin, right?
Another beautiful game I’m not a fan of the novel as roman à clef. Unless you already know the material which is being used, or at the very least can identify the characters, the form doesn’t work. And if you know the material, why read a fictional version of it? Nonetheless Edward Wilson’s A Very British Ending (London: Arcadia, 2015) – brought to my attention by John Newsinger – is worth a look. Wilson has written a kind of parapolitical novel about post-war British history, turning parts of the book I co-wrote, Smear! Wilson and the Secret State, into a novel. Harold Wilson’s career from the late 1940s onwards, the American influence on the Gaitskellites, and the attempts by the British and American spooks to manipulate British political life, climaxing in the events between 1972-76, are here. As is one belter of a conspiracy theory which I hadn’t come across before. The author has a character suggest that two of the misfortunes which befell the England football team at the 1970 World Cup were organised by the faction in the CIA which was anti-Labour. The thinking was that England not doing well at the World Cup would affect the General Election of 1970 by encouraging working-class Labour supporters, who were grumbling any way, to disaffect or simply not vote. Thus the food poisoning which prevented England’s goalkeeper, Gordon Banks, from playing in the crucial game against West Germany, and the shoplifting charge laid against England’s captain, Bobby Moore, before the game, were done at the behest of the CIA. A cursory glance at Google produced the following: ‘Declassified documents examined by The Sunday Times Magazine at the National Archives reveal that, with a tricky general election looming, the prime minister, Harold Wilson, had been banking on an impressive World Cup performance from England to provide a “feel-good
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factor” for voters.’22 ‘Banks... is still mystified by the illness which kept him out of the quarterfinal against West Germany, which England lost 3-2 after extra-time. Banks added: “I still wonder how I got food poisoning and missed it. We all sat down to eat at the same time, we all ate the same food. Why was I the only one who ended up with severe food poisoning? I find that all very strange.”’23 And this: ‘Just weeks before England mounted their unsuccessful defence of the World Cup in Mexico, talismanic captain Bobby Moore was arrested and charged in Colombia, accused of stealing an emerald bracelet from a hotel shop. All charges were dropped but files released two years later suggest the incident was a deliberate sting on the part of the Colombian secret services.’24
Trump Well, it’s getting complicated, isn’t it? I saw former MI5 officer, whistle-blower and privacy campaigner Annie Machon speaking just after Donald Trump was sworn in. She was very good, confident and fluent until she was asked a question about Trump. Then she was awkward and said almost nothing, ending with ‘He may surprise us’. And no wonder she said so little. As her website (anniemachon.com) shows, she gets much attention from Russia Today and she had hoped the new president would wind down the new cold war which the American military- intelligence-industrial complex has generated. But, like many on the liberal-left, she is apparently disconcerted to find
22
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herself sharing views with some of her political opponents. One of whom, presumably, would be the Republican congressman Rep. Dana Roharbacher of California, who was quoted as saying: ‘Remember what Dwight Eisenhower told us: There is a military-industrial complex. That complex still exists and has a lot of power,’ he said. ‘It’s everywhere, and it doesn’t like how Trump is handling Russia. Over and over again, in article after article, it rears its head.’25 Roharbacher is describing the deep state whose opposition to some of Trump’s apparent intentions towards America’s role as the global enforcer has produced a striking burst of interest in a concept hitherto only the concern of some of the spook- wise left.26 With Republicans talking about the deep state and the Democrats cheer-leading for the new cold war, we are in uncharted territory. I have nothing to say about Trump that hasn’t been said elsewhere but there are a couple of items you may have missed. Veteran investigative journalist Howard Blum27 has done a very detailed analysis of the origins of the notorious Christopher Steele dossier on Trump in Russia which makes it seem less flaky than it did initially.28 The first of a group of editorials in the LA Times on Trump
25
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was a remarkable event for a mainstream newspaper. It included this: ‘What is most worrisome about Trump is Trump himself. He is a man so unpredictable, so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, so untethered to reality that it is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation. His obsession with his own fame, wealth and success, his determination to vanquish enemies real and imagined, his craving for adulation — these traits were, of course, at the very heart of his scorched-earth outsider campaign; indeed, some of them helped get him elected. But in a real presidency in which he wields unimaginable power, they are nothing short of disastrous.’29 On one hand some of the American media – CNN, MSNBC, Vanity Fair and GQ for example – have become what the GQ columnist Keith Olbermann calls ‘The Resistance’. On the other hand, some of the liberal-left, like Annie Machon, hoping that Trump might end the new cold war, are in danger of sounding like the left during the early years of the Cold War. Then the left was unable to acknowledge the reality of Stalinism. Now some of the left have been trying to denying the reality of the Trump administration in the hope that it might wind down the cold war and/or reduce America’s imperial role. Such hopes were apparently dashed when Trump was ‘bounced’ by the military and the neo-cons after the alleged Sarin gas attack in Syria.30 In power for 100 days and the administration had already bombed two countries: American foreign policy under Trump thus far looks just like it did under anybody else in the last 40 years.
Aaronovitch 29
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I rarely see The Times these days but in the issue of 9 March David Aaronovitch had a column, ’Give thanks that you’ve got spies in your TV’, welcoming the news that GCHQ are monitoring all our electronic devices and that 19th century notions of individual privacy are dead and buried. He concluded with this: ‘It’s based on a hunch that Putinisation will never happen here. Even though I think that’s just what Mr Assange wants.’ Even for Mr Aaronovitch that is ridiculous.
Algorithms are go! A friend of mine posted a link to Robert Parry’s excellent The Consortium on Facebook to be told by that site that this was a ‘fake news’ source. Add that to the US government’s Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act and we can see the totalitarian, information-management future. That act: ‘.... mandates the U.S. Secretary of State to collaborate with the Secretary of Defense, Director of National Intelligence and other federal agencies to create a Global Engagement Center “to lead, synchronize, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests.”’31 The final steps will be to compel Facebook, Google et al to incorporate a US state-determined list of ‘fake news’ sites into their systems and then, using those programmes, to refuse access to sites on that list.
Holt again 31
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My attempt to kindle interest in Chauncey Holt among the JFK buffs has thus far produced no results. I have yet to see an explanation of why the buffs – and ‘buffs’ isn’t derogatory in my book; I’m a JFK buff – have not taken Holt seriously but I would guess it includes the following. 1. Timing. Holt appeared in 1991: there had already been a number of false ‘confessions’, some of the researchers had wasted a lot of time and energy on them and were leery about another confession.32 2. Centrally, he claimed to have been one of the ‘tramps’ arrested on Dealey Plaza; but (a) he didn’t look that much like the ‘tramp’ he claimed to be and (b) shortly after he made his claim the Dallas Police opened their archives and revealed the arrest records of the three ‘tramps’, Doyle, Gender and Abrams. At first glance this seemed conclusive: so Holt was lying.33 3. Doyle’s case has been promoted by Wim Dankbar who is widely disliked and distrusted among the research community. Of those three points only no. 2 should be significant – hence my attempts to make sense of the ‘tramps’ issue.34 But this is probably a dead horse I am flogging. Something more significant than some bloke in the UK writing an essay is going to have to happen to persuade the research community to take the late Mr Holt seriously.35
32 In a ‘REPORT FROM DALLAS: THE ASK SYMPOSIUM, NOVEMBER 14- 16, 1991’ by Martin Shackelford, Holt is mentioned: ‘When the shots were fired, Holt said he was behind the pergola, but declined to identify the shooters. Craig noted that Holt becomes vague about anything on which there is no statute of limitations.’ See
34
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The telling little details In this great soup of information and counter-information, facts and factoids in which we are now swimming (or drowning), sometimes it’s the almost incidental details which ring the bell. Take the late Anthony Verney’s story of being caught in the middle of some kind of electronic military experiment.36 Yes, he had a tape-recording of a peculiar, unpleasant grinding noise which filled his house night after night. But what struck me was something else: in an attempt to get his experiences into court, as a self-employed individual he had refused to pay his taxes, assuming the then Inland Revenue would prosecute him. But the Revenue did nothing. Oh, really? If you are self-employed in the UK, I invite you to try this with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs these days. Which brings me to Kieron Lee Perrin. Perrin is a targeted individual (TI). There are quite a few of them on the Internet and I’ve met some, starting in 1989 with the late Harlan Girard. Some are fantasists; some are not. Perrin is not. He has a blog on which are scans which show some things – let’s just call them foreign bodies – in his head.37 But what rang my bell as much as the scans is the fact that he’s been living on invalidity benefits for eight years. Even though he cannot persuade the medical people to do anything about his implants, the state is apparently not insisting that he seek work. Next time you sign on, try the TI line with the Department for Work and Pensions and see how far that gets
36 Armen Victorian’s account of this is at
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you.38 As evidence of something weird going on this is as convincing as the scans and the letter on his blog from his dentist attesting to the presence of the foreign bodies.39 After Perrin, have a look at Katherine Horton PhD, another apparent TI, who actually got a legal case against MI6, GCHQ et al, to court. She didn’t win but the transcripts of the proceedings are on-line and illustrate the difficulties such cases present, even with what appears to me to be a sympathetic (at least not prejudiced) judge. Horton has a PhD in physics and worked at the CERN facility in Switzerland.40
By their redactions shall ye know them In the 45 page essay on his case and matters relating to Kincora which Colin Wallace submitted to the Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse (HIA) inquiry, only two sections were redacted before the material was placed on the HIA site. They are in itallics below.
Colin Wallace: As the Inquiry is aware, some of the allegations made by [Robin] Bryans, and which the Sussex Police were presumably aware of from the documents Bryans circulated, involved some of the most prominent people in the country at that time. In particular, he claimed that a former British ambassador to the Irish Republic had sexually abused boys from a Dublin school. The ambassador, he claimed, also had a lengthy
38 In an e-mail he wrote to me: ‘the DWP also wrote to my GP explaining that he would never have to present sick notes for me again. They’ve also declined to interview me again even though I’ve requested they do so on a couple more occasions since. I didn’t even have to fill forms in and was asked never to approach them with my case again – they really wanted nothing to do with it. Yet, yes, the medical establishments official line is still that there are no abnormalities showing on my scans!?’ 39 Perrin can be seen giving talk on his experiences at
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homosexual relationship with Peter Montgomery’s brother, and later, as Chairman of the Travellers Club in London, he had introduced Peter Montgomery and his brother, Anthony Blunt and Peter Hayman to the Club. Peter Hayman, is now known to have been a serial paedophile. From this we can see that not only were there links between McGrath, Knox Cunningham and Peter Montgomery, but also that Cunningham and Montgomery were linked with homosexual activities involving prominent people in Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic and London. When Fred Holroyd and I interviewed Robin Bryans he told us about a Belfast artist/painter called Sidney Smith who was allegedly a close friend of Sir Knox Cunningham and who was one of a group of paedophiles who frequented the Ormeau Park area of the city. Bryans had apparently known Mrs Smith’s family for years and she had admitted to him that her husband had sexually abused their daughter when she was a child. According to Bryans, the Smith family moved from Belfast to London where Smith became an active member of a paedophile group made up of very well known personalities. He also said that Mrs Smith had told him about some of the very famous people who visited their home in London prior to the break-up of their marriage. I am not going to refer in this submission to some of the names mentioned to me by Bryans because the Inquiry is already aware of who they are and I have no way of knowing if the allegations made by Bryans are correct. In his book, Let The Petals Fall (published in July 1993) he [Bryans] says: ‘The Jewish artist best-known to Knox Cunningham was Sidney Smith of Belfast who took part for years in a child sex abuse ring on both sides of the Border. John McKeague never faced prosecution for his sexual activities with consenting teenager boys and British Intelligence monitored every devious move made by Knox Cunningham to cover up the criminal tracks of fellow Orangemen. Knox never hesitated to flex his legal muscles for illegal purposes as a Queen’s Counsel. Knox could also cite chapter and verse about Sidney Smith's similar immunity from prosecution over his years of sex with unconsenting
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children as young as three years. Smith’s protection by famous people applied not only on both sides of the Border in Ireland but on both sides of the Atlantic.’ Although the sexual abuse allegations relating to Sidney Smith pre-date the Kincora sexual abuse allegations, the links between McGrath, Knox Cunningham, and Peter Montgomery and others make them relevant to the HIA Inquiry. The second redacted section is on pp. 49/50 and concerns a British agent – i.e. a civilian volunteer, not an intelligence officer – in Northern Ireland, James Miller. Miller gave evidence to the Saville Inquiry but was was identified only as ‘Observer B’. His MI5 handler ‘Julian’ described him as ‘perfectly reliable and truthful’ and ‘an extremely brave fellow’. Julian also reported in that in 1971, when Miller infiltrated Tara, an extract from an intelligence assessment of him described him as ‘very tough, physically and mentally. A most trustworthy and enthusiastic agent, whose enthusiasm sometimes leads to incaution’. ‘Julian’ told the Saville Inquiry that a report on Miller in November 1972 described him as ‘a reliable agent whose reports are essentially detailed, providing, I would think, valuable “op int” [operational intelligence] for the security forces’. The fact that his reports are described as ‘essentially detailed’ is important as the more detail an agent gives the easier it is to check its reliability. So there is the HIA strategy laid bare. Three witnesses, Colin Wallace, James Miller and Roy Garland, said that the security services knew about McGrath’s abuse of the boys in his care and did nothing. The inquiry’s report claims that Wallace fabricated his 1974 memorandum which shows this; Roy Garland is falsely described in the report as a sex partner of McGrath and is thus (sort of) discredited;41 and material showing Miller’s reliability as a British agent in Northern Ireland is redacted. Also suppressed are suggestions that the McGrath trail leads out into the wider homosexual subculture in Northern Ireland among the Protestant social elite.
41 These are discussed in ‘Colin Wallace and the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry’ in this issue.
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Grauniadia Well, the Guardian has run another story about Julian Assange, this time attributing to him things he hasn’t said.42 More grist to the mill for those who suspect the Guardian of being an American asset. Or is it just sloppy work at the type- face?
Israeli influence in British politics The readers of this journal will hardly have been surprised by the revelations by Al Jazeera about Israeli operations within the UK.43 The best summary of the affair I saw was by Daniel Margrain,44 who concluded: ‘Politically, the purpose of the misuse of antisemitism by Zionists is to quash all legitimate criticisms of Israel, its oppression of the Palestinian people and, by extension, Muslim/Arab nationalist aspirations more generally. The media attacks on Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone and others are political and represent a determined effort by the Israel lobby to make Britain’s Labour Party “a safe pair of hands” for Israel and Zionism.’ Thus far two things have struck me. The first is the paucity of comment by the mainstream printed and broadcast media on the story. For most of the media the story seemed – to quote Billy Connolly – to be as welcome as a fart in a space suit.45 The second is the fact that the money for these UK operations comes from the United States: without the billions of dollars of
42
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US subsidies, Israel, in its present from, would not exist.46 American tax dollars are being used to manipulate British political life. The coming inquiry by a Parliamentary committee may be interesting.47
Hacking American politics In the context of the alleged Russian hacking of the presidential election, the American website Politico ran a story about the large operation run in the United States by MI6 during WW2. Under the light cover of British Security Coordination, with the permission of the then President Roosevelt, they attacked the isolationist opposition to American’s entry into the war.48 Pity the article didn’t credit Thomas Mahl, the man who originally researched the story.49 Virtually the last connection to the old isolationist wing of the Republican Party is former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan. In one of his recent columns, about the Putin- hacked-the-election story, he wrote the following:50 ‘The top officials of the CIA and Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, should be called to testify under oath. Were they behind anti-Putin demonstrations during the Russian elections of 2011? Did the CIA or NED have a role in the “color-coded” revolutions to dump over pro-Russian governments in Moscow’s “near abroad”? If Russia did intrude in our election, was it payback
46 Details at
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for our intrusions to bring about regime change in its neighborhood? What role did the CIA, the NED and John McCain play in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014? McCain was seen cheering on the crowds in Independence Square in Kiev.’ The fact that William Blum or John Pilger might have written those paragraphs, and that Pat Buchanan is a Trump fan (so far, any way), is a clue as to the interesting direction American foreign policy may take – if Trump survives in office long enough to have ‘a foreign policy’.
CIA on-line About 12 million pages of CIA files have recently been put on- line.51 The collection can be searched in 8 languages, one of them Russian. This is a both a striking demonstration of openness by the CIA – a complex beast is the Agency – and, I presume, a guarantee that the collection has been very carefully weeded. No doubt over the next few months researchers will be reporting what is there and – more interestingly – what isn’t.
No kidding Let me add my voice to the chorus of guffaws coming from the left at all this talk of ‘post truth politics’.52 When did we have truth politics? Unless it serves some political purpose, politicians generally aren’t interested in the truth. In this country and particularly in America, the truth and politics are only congruous by accident. The recent Republican campaign against Hillary Clinton was just more of the same. Similar – and more serious –
51
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charges were made against Bill Clinton. That Clinton was a communist. In fact there are reasonably good reports that he was recruited by the CIA, while a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford, to report on American students in the UK who opposed the Vietnam War.53 That Clinton was corrupt. The Whitewater scandal: never proven, despite 50 million dollars spent by the Republicans investigating it. That Clinton allowed the cocaine trade with South America to use airports in Arkansas while he was governor of the state. This is unproven; but if he was doing it he might claim to have been doing his patriotic duty; that the drug-running operation had been sanctioned by the US attorney general so long as the traffickers contributed to the war against Nicaragua. And given CIA involvement in this cocaine traffic, Clinton’s earlier connection with the Agency while a student may be relevant. That Clinton’s people killed those who might embarrass them. Clinton death lists were circulated: one I remember ran to more than 20 names. On the Net such lists now go as high as 90.54 These conspiracy theories about Clinton were created and distributed by the Republican right and its media. The creators were professionals, paid to do the job. Their output was then circulated using the print/broadcasting media of the day by credulous believers. We have an insider’s account of these operations by a member of one of them, David Brock.55 These psy-ops were being tracked for the Clinton White House by Sydney Blumenthal.56 Hillary Clinton referred to them when she spoke of a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ against her
53 See, for example,
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husband.57 This was the first occasion in the post-war era when one of the major political parties in the US used conspiracy theories against a sitting president. And it failed: Clinton was re-elected. More or less the same people did the same thing to Obama: Obama is a Muslim; Obama is a communist; Obama is a homosexual; Obama is not an American. And that failed too. The difference with the Obama version was the prominent role of the Net. I Googled ‘Obama is a Muslim’ in 2014 and got 224 million hits. After the recent American presidential election, it is down to 55 million. The anti-Clinton and anti-Obama conspiracy theories reflect a climate on the American Right in which the truth is no longer even a consideration. An anonymous member of George Bush Jnr’s regime – probably Karl Rove – spoke in 2004 about ‘the reality-based community’ and how the world wasn’t like that any more. America was the sole superpower, he said, and could make its own reality. This is what the Republican Right and their corporate backers have been trying to do in domestic politics: create their own version of reality. The Trump campaign was unusual only in having the presidential candidate openly espousing some of the conspiracy theories.
Trump If you are curious about Trump, John K Wilson’s Trump unveiled: exposing the bigoted billionaire is the place to start.58 Wilson has apparently read everything about or by Donald Trump and has produced both a critical biography and a collection of the jaw-dropping nonsense the man has spoken over the years. Wilson shows in great detail that today’s Trump is the same psychopath he was 40, 50 years ago. He
57 In this country the Sunday Telegraph recycled much of this from their then American correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. 58 O/R Books, London and New York, 2016, 245 pages, p/b.
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always was an ignorant, unselfconscious schmuck – but a rich one, with lawyers to intimidate people.59 He is also – the author’s central thesis – the narcissist’s narcissist. Initially Trump’s idiocies are amusing but rapidly become tiresome, like being stuck on a plane next to a garrulous bore. But if you want the details of who he is, his business dealings and his opinions, here they are. How any of this will play out, your guess is as good as mine;60 but the fact that three serving or former senior Goldman Sachs employees are joining the Trump administration might be a clue.61 Matt Taibbi commented: ‘Goldman deserves its villainous reputation. The bank symbolizes all the worst aspects of the modern “financialized” economy. The crash era was the ultimate example. Banks like Goldman mostly didn’t create anything of value during this time. Mostly what they did was engineer new ways to create credit that led to millions of people buying homes they couldn’t afford, creating the mother of all financial bubbles. When it all went bust, as it necessarily had to, they scrambled by hook or crook to dump the damage on other people. Clients ate their losses and they ran weeping to the taxpayer for rescue – Goldman got $12.9 billion alone just from the AIG bailout, which of course was engineered by former Goldman chief Hank Paulson.
59 Some of the details are at
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In the middle of all of this, people like Blankfein and Cohn paid themselves record amounts of compensation. They are scum, and it’s absolutely fitting that so many of them will end up serving the Trump administration.’62
Chilcot Like most people, I haven’t read Sir John Chilcot’s report. My impression from the extensive press accounts of it was that Chilcot told us, in great detail, what we had known almost from the outset. But there was something in his statement to the media on 6 July, introducing the report, which is worthy of note. He said: ‘The UK’s relationship with the US has proved strong enough over time to bear the weight of honest disagreement. It does not require unconditional support where our interests or judgements differ.’63 Chilcot has been around the upper reaches of the British state for over 30 years – a classic mandarin – and had I been at that press conference I would have tried to ask him to name one occasion, in this country’s foreign policy dealings in the past 30 years, when ‘honest disagreement’ was expressed by the UK and tolerated by the US.
An apology...to Joel Whitney. In my review of his book Finks, in the previous issue, I wrote that he had given the wrong page reference in Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes. He hadn’t: he was using the paperback edition and I the hardback, with different pagination. This has now been corrected.
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The boys done well Lobster contributor for many years, Simon Matthews, has a book out: Psychedelic Celluloid: British pop music in film and TV 1965-74 (Oldcastle Books).64 The book’s genesis, he tells us, lies in the two essays he wrote in these columns on so-called pirate radio. Another regular contributor, Anthony Frewin, is the co- author of the script of a new feature film, Anthropoid.65
Oh, really? I watch our politicians and, even though I know that as politicians they’re interested in power first and the truth second (or fifth, or not at all66), and have been conditioned to listen to polls and focus groups for their professed views, I find myself unable to suppress the thought: I wonder what they are really thinking? Take Margaret Thatcher: what did she really think she was doing when she fronted the creation of the grossly unequal society we now have? Frank Field MP gave us a striking insight into her thinking recently. Just after she retired she was asked, ‘“What was your greatest disappointment in government?” Back shot Mrs T: “I cut taxes because I thought we would get a giving society. And we haven’t.”’67
64 See
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If we take this seriously, she apparently thought charitable giving would replace some of the state’s functions. This is consistent with the anti-state prejudices of the group with which she was allied in the 1970s – Keith Joseph, Alfred Sherman, the Institute for Economic Affairs et al. Another interpretation would be that, having decided to cut taxes to win elections, she rationalised the reduction in state spending with the thought. ‘Oh, well, people will give more to charity.’ Either way, it shows that Mrs T had no understanding of the society in which she lived and the great tide of possessive individualism68 she was encouraging. But we knew that already, I guess.
Pathologising the conspirasphere On Google News’ main UK site on 7 December the following two headlines were next to each other for a few hours. ‘HSBC among three banks fined £413m for Euribor rigging’ ‘Pfizer fined record £84.2m for overcharging NHS 2600%’ On 20 December these two were next to each other. ‘Ex-Deutsche Bank Russia Trader Accused of Stock Manipulation’ ‘Italy court acquits four former JPMorgan execs in Parmalat case’ I expect there would be similar stories every week if I kept track. They are further illustrations that, as the aftermath of the crash of 2007-8 has shown in great detail, criminal conspiracy is a normal business method among the world’s corporations. I googled ‘Banks + fined’ and got 22 million hits. There is so much of this it has almost become background noise. Yet nothing has changed in the way the major media perceive ‘conspiracy’. Those who talk or write about it remain ‘conspiracy theorists,’ with all pejorative connotations intact.
68 The term is C. B. Macpherson’s. See
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Another group of psychologists has been studying such ‘conspiracy theorists’. Although the study is behind a paywall, the abstract is available. To wit: ‘Across three studies, we examined the role of self- evaluation in predicting conspiracy beliefs. Previous research linked the endorsement of conspiracy theories to low self-esteem. We propose that conspiracy theories should rather be appealing to individuals with exaggerated feelings of self-love, such as narcissists, due to their paranoid tendencies. In Study 1, general conspiracist beliefs were predicted by high individual narcissism but low self-esteem. Study 2 demonstrated that these effects were differentially mediated by paranoid thoughts, and independent of the effects of collective narcissism. Individual narcissism predicted generalized conspiracist beliefs, regardless of the conspiracy theories implicating in-group or out-group members, while collective narcissism predicted belief in out-group but not in-group conspiracies. Study 3 replicated the effects of individual narcissism and self- esteem on the endorsement of various specific conspiracy theories and demonstrated that the negative effect of self-esteem was largely accounted for by the general negativity toward humans associated with low self-esteem.’69 Puzzled? Me, too.
Notes from the Borderland Dr Larry O’Hara sent me a copy of the latest issue (no. 11) of his magazine, Notes from the Borderland (NFB). This is 80 A-4 pages, with the text in three columns per page. So that’s about 60,000 words, maybe more. The following description is from the NFB Website
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‘Welcome to Britain’s premier parapolitical investigative magazine Notes from the Borderland (NFB). We have been producing the magazine since 1997 but some published material before then. Our political perspective is Left/Green, but we welcome truth-tellers, whatever their affiliation. Research interests include the secret state (MI5/MI6/Special Branch, now SO15) & their assets, including those in the media. We are resolutely anti-fascist, and to that end investigate the far right and state infiltration of various milieus. In a shallow age where many TV programmes and print/internet stories are spoon-fed to servile journalists/bloggers by shadowy interests, NFB stands out as genuine investigative research.’ Although the Website is basically a come-on for the hard copy, you will get a sense there of what NFB is about, as well as a contents list for this current issue. Much of this was interesting to me. For one thing, NFB has continued doing what Lobster used to do: surveying published material on the intelligence and security services and producing synopses of it. There is a long essay about Lockerbie; and, while I am no expert on this subject, I didn’t see anything that surprised me. The best piece is a 15-page account by O’Hara of the assault on Julian Assange by some of the Guardian’s journalists.70 But the material is all worthwhile – even the page in which Robin Whittaker presents Chapman Pincher’s case that Roger Hollis was a Soviet agent. I don’t agree with the thesis but it is interesting to meet it again. On the down side, there’s a jokey tone to some of it I find irritating (not least because the jokes aren’t funny or clever). The front cover, for example, has the famous picture of Obama, Hillary Clinton and assorted military and spooks apparently watching the live feed of the American assault on
70 The way the Guardian and the London Review of Books trashed Assange suggests that both are assets of the United States. In the Guardian’s case, the way it recently handled comments by Craig Murray on the Russia-hacked-the-presidential-election claims is further evidence. See his ‘The CIA’s Absence of Conviction’, 11 December 2016 at
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the compound in which Osama Bin Laden was living. Coming from the mouth of one anonymous figure are the words, ‘ASSANGE HAS EVADED THE DRONE STRIKE MR PRESIDENT. From another, ‘THAT’S DONE IT. WE HAVE TO SEND IN NICK DAVIES.’ (Caps in the original.) In contrast, in their introduction to a piece continuing NFB’s coverage of the politics of anti-fascism (Searchlight et al),71 authors Heidi Svenson and Dr Paul Stott are stern: ‘The current article is not stand alone, we constantly refer to the previous one. If that inconveniences, tough: this magazine is for grown-ups, not people who get facts from You-Tube [sic] and Wikipedia.’ For my taste the magazine needs more rigorous editing to improve the punctuation, reduce or remove the speculation and jokey asides and tighten-up the writing. For example, what does this, from the opening paragraph of the introduction quoted above, actually mean? ‘We have been producing the magazine since 1997 but some published material before then.’ Does the ‘some’ refer to material or does it mean ‘some of us’? There are also a couple of simple technical changes I would make. If you’ve got lots of source notes (and I like notes), make them legible. In the O’Hara piece on Assange, to accommodate two not funny illustrations, the notes are tiny. And why are the footnote numbers in the text in bold? Finally: while keeping this going is an impressive achievement, why produce a hard copy at all? Put on-line with free access, the material would reach infinitely more people than the relative few who are going to spend £4.75 on a hard copy and would save all concerned in the magazine’s production and distribution a deal of work.
Megalomania Thierry Meyssan, of Voltaire Net, has produced some 71 O’Hara has been pursuing this since his essays in Lobster in the early 1990s.
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interesting but never wholly convincing material over the years. I always read what he’s writing when I come across it, but rarely if ever cite it. In a recent piece,72 as well as writing about NATO plans to assassinate him, which drove him into exile – NATO is killing its critics? There’s a long list! – he writes: ‘It so happens that I opened the debate on 9/11 to the world.....Cass Sunstein (husband of US ambassador to the UNO, Samantha Power) wrote a mémoire with Adrian Vermeule for the universities of Chicago and Harvard concerning the struggle against “conspiracy theories” - the name they gave to the movement I had initiated.’ This is nonsense. While Meyssan was a significant figure in the early days of 9/11 theorising,73 he hardly ‘opened the debate on 9/11 to the world’. There was a torrent of sceptical comment on-line immediately after the event.74 The debate was ‘opened to the world’ by the Net. As for him creating a movement called ‘conspiracy theories’....
The big blind spot I like George Monbiot’s writing. His column is one of the few must-reads in the Guardian these days. And I agree with most of it. But he has a big blind spot, one that is common with the British greens and left. This was illustrated in his column of 6 December, ‘No country with a McDonald’s can remain a democracy’.75 ‘....under the onslaught of the placeless, transnational capital that McDonald’s exemplifies, democracy as a living system withers and dies. The old forms and forums still exist – parliaments and congresses remain standing
72 ‘The NATO campaign against freedom of expression’ at
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– but the power they once contained seeps away, re- emerging where we can no longer reach it. The political power that should belong to us has flitted into confidential meetings with the lobbyists and donors who establish the limits of debate and action. It has slipped into the diktats of the IMF and the European Central Bank, which respond not to the people but to the financial sector. It has been transported, under armed guard, into the icy fastness of Davos...’ And so on. Of course, it’s all true. And does Monbiot have a solution? He does. This is his second last paragraph and his answer is the last word in it. ‘One of the answers to Trump, Putin, Orbán, Erdogan, Salvini, Duterte, Le Pen, Farage and the politics they represent is to rescue democracy from transnational corporations. It is to defend the crucial political unit that is under assault by banks, monopolies and chainstores: community.’ Community? Whatever that means! Can you think of anything more vague or more useless? Surely ‘the crucial political unit that is under assault’ is the nation state. That is the only potentially serious opposition to the multinational corporations. The EU won’t do it: it’s been bought by the corporations, as its behaviour towards Greece since 2008 has demonstrated. And yes, an activist nation state will require a change in thinking of the politicians who have all been persuaded that it is outmoded, useless and powerless (or, for some on the libertarian right and the Marxist left, a source of evil and tyranny). This wasn’t how things looked before the Reagan and Thatcher-led counterrevolution. Yes, the world has changed since then. But if it came to a serious conflict between a major multinational and the UK government, who would win? If the UK government – say – banned the import of products for Amazon into the UK until it registered here for taxation purposes, what could Amazon actually do? It could complain to the WTO; and then?
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The nation state is our best, perhaps our only hope. The problem for Monbiot (and many of the greens and left) is that for them the word ‘nation’ is contaminated by its association with the political right and nationalism and is thus unusable.76 Somehow he and they have to find a way round or through this. Because as the chaos created by globalisation grows, we’re going to get nationalism whether we like it or not and a left/green version would be infinitely preferable to that offered by the populist right.
Credit where credit is due ‘For years, violent Islamist groups were allowed to settle in Britain, using the country as a base to carry out attacks abroad. This was tolerated in the belief that they would not bomb the country where they lived and that, as long as they are here, the security service would be able to infiltrate them. At the same time mosque after mosque was taken over through intimidation by the fundamentalists. Police and others in authority refused pleas from moderate Muslims with the excuse that they did not want to interfere.’ Thus the opening paragraph by Kim Sengupta in his review of the Mark Curtis book, Secret Affairs.77 If that sounds familiar, it’s because it was the thesis of Melanie Phillips – ‘Mad Mel’ to many on the left – in many articles in the early 2000s, culminating in her 2006 book Londonistan (London: Gibson Square).
76 I wrote about political contamination in ‘Contamination, the Labour Party, nationalism and the Blairites’ in Lobster 33. 77
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Brexit: an accident waiting to happen
Simon Matthews
In the current British political crisis, caused by the Brexit vote, four factors, often ignored, are crucial:
* electoral legitimacy (and the lack thereof of most Westminster governments since 1970);
* the corrosive consequences of an unregulated media; * the increasingly poor educational standards prevalent in the UK;
* the casual dismissal and degradation of politicians and politics generally.
Electoral legitimacy The British Parliamentary system is designed to reflect the predominance of two adversarial parties: initially Whig/Tory then Liberal/Conservative and latterly Labour/Conservative.1 After the franchise was extended in 1918 to create a true mass electorate, and other possibilities emerged, this was not especially ‘fair’ but as long as the voting affiliations of the masses remained determined by this ‘us and them’ syndrome, and they opted for one of two monolithic parties, a certain rough justice prevailed.2 However, since 1970 (Edward Heath – 46% of the votes cast) neither Labour nor Conservatives have polled above 45% of the votes cast in a general election. Thatcher didn’t get above 44%, Blair peaked at 43% and
1 This adversarial mindset even extends to the architecture of the House of Commons: two narrow rows of benches facing each other. 2 The electorate tripled in 1918 because as well as women (only over 28, at this stage) all men became eligible to vote. Pre-1918 the franchise had been restricted to male freeholders; i.e. primarily middle-class and upper-class men. The UK only achieved a one person one vote system for Parliamentary elections as recently as 1950 when university graduates and company directors (again, the upper classes) lost their right to a second (or multiple) vote.
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Cameron only managed 37% in 2015.3 Turnout, too, has declined. In 1951 Attlee and Churchill took 97% of the votes between them on an 83% turnout. Compared with this, in 2015 on a turnout of 66%, 11.3 million (24.5% of the electorate) voted for the party of government and 19.4 million (42% of the electorate) against, with 15.5 million (33.5% of the electorate, a figure greater than the combined Conservative and UKIP vote) not voting at all. Despite this the UK system delivered Cameron an overall majority. Historically the losers have been the smaller parties: Liberal Democrats, the SNP (until 2015), Plaid Cymru, the Greens, the SDP (1981-87), UKIP, the BNP and Respect. In the general elections of 2010 and 2015 these accounted between them for 31% and 30% of votes respectively. Had the 2015 House of Commons been elected on a proportional basis it would have 195 minor party MPs rather than 69, and David Cameron would either not have been Prime Minister or would have been Prime Minister of a very different government. While the electoral legitimacy of UK governments since 1970 has declined, other factors have come into play. Despite the abolition of most hereditary peerages, the House of Lords has continued to grow. With a membership of 810 it is now, absurdly, the largest unelected legislature in the world. New peers are created by the Monarch or via nominations from the leaders of the main parties in the House of Commons: a system without parallel elsewhere. Coupled with this is an absence of proper regional government. While a limited version of this has existed since 1998-1999 in London, Wales and Scotland, unlike every other major country, the UK has neither a federal system nor properly constituted and resourced local and regional government.4 There is no sign this will be introduced. Finally, the UK lacks a written constitution – again, a unique feature – and no precise role 3 Wilson took 48% of the vote in 1966. A case can be made that Wilson and Heath were the last two successful consensus politicians in the UK, and that the period we have lived through since their demise in 1975-76 should be seen as a period of deliberate non-consensus. 4 Northern Ireland – of course – was different, enjoying fully functioning regional government between 1921 and 1972 and again since 1998.
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exists for the hereditary monarchy and its prerogative powers. As a result of these arrangements, successive UK governments since 1979 have been able to enact drastic changes that were absent from their election manifestos; and, memorably in the case of Thatcher and Blair, proclaimed that their conviction outweighed any need to follow or build a consensus. Ironically, throughout this period there was a noisy and growing clamour about the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’. With this general political background it was hardly surprising that the conduct of the EU referendum was so amateurish. Most referenda (outside the UK) are conducted on simple questions. Should smoking be allowed in public? Should women be allowed to vote? Should it be compulsory to wear a seat-belt in a car? And most countries that hold referenda have conditions for their conduct: requiring a minimum level of turn out; a minimum level of support needed to enact the change; with supervision of opinion polls during the campaign; and strict rules about the funding of the campaign itself. In the UK in June 2016 none of this applied.5 Neither ‘side’ knew what would happen if the vote was to remain in or leave the EU. Neither could predict what life in the UK (or the rest of the world) might be like in the next 10-20 years. (The Leave side were particularly big on the argument that it would all be worthwhile ‘in the long run’.) It was an issue unsuited to a referendum with complexities that couldn’t possibly be put, or answered, in such a format. For example: would an exit from the EU on the World Trade Organisation model destroy manufacturing? Would we all need visas to go on holiday in the future? What would happen to UK people resident in the EU?
The media The UK has an abundance of poor quality, partisan, right-wing newspapers. Only two clear exceptions exist: The Daily Mirror
5 It really is striking that the opposition didn’t put down a simple amendment requiring any of these when the legislation setting up the EU referendum was wending its way through Parliament in 2015.
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and The Guardian.6 Other countries appear to have a greater spread of political preferences across their media and many have rules about whether or not media can be foreign-owned. The UK does not, and has a media that regulates itself with few encumbrances. Those seeking legal redress against any libellous or incorrect statement made about them in the UK media generally find this process ruinously expensive. This has been the case for decades where the newspapers are concerned. What is new is that TV coverage of many political issues now seems to treat some (though rarely left) minority views as deserving equal coverage with mainstream opinion because of a supposed need to provide ‘balance’. Had this logic been followed in the past, the National Front would have been debating on TV in the 70s with the Prime Minister and the clever and adroit Oswald Mosley would have been a regular panellist on the 30s equivalent of Question Time, had there been one. Who knows how UK politics might have turned out then if that had been so? A further noticeable trend is the conducting of political discussion programmes on TV and radio in the manner of parlour games with a genial host (often a Dimbleby) acting as if cricketing rules are in order, despite extreme and uninformed views being bandied about. If this remains ‘the line’ then such programmes will cease to be adequate forums for public discussion and debate. Another feature of most of the UK media is its endless misrepresentation of anything to do with European politics. Most recently this has been evident in the coverage of regional elections in Germany, where the line was that the right-wing AfD party were going to do extremely well (they didn’t, finishing fifth) and that political changes would follow as Germany started to follow our lead (they haven’t and the most likely outcome nationally remains a Christian Democrat-Social
6 Circulation of The Daily Mirror, The Daily Record (its sister paper in Scotland) and The Guardian – in hard copy – is 1.2m, 13% of traditional newspaper sales in the UK. Newspaper readership itself has declined dramatically since the ‘90s, and is now, proportionately, at half the level it reached in the mid ‘50s when papers were much better written.
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Democrat coalition). Similar attention was also given to Hungary where a right-wing government wishes to prevent non-EU migrants entering the country. This is presented as being the same as the UK wishing to bar EU citizens from entering the UK. Attention was duly focused on the Hungarian referendum on whether it should accept a small quota of refugees from the Middle East – the inference being that this was similar to events in the UK. It wasn’t. Hungary was not holding a referendum on leaving the EU, was not against free movement of EU citizens within the EU, and, unlike the UK, its referendum had requirements on turnout. In the event, the non-participation of most of the Hungarian population invalidated it when that threshold was not reached.7 Are we surprised that the UK media provide far less help than they should in clarifying current affairs issues for the public? As well as the long-established bias of most domestic newspapers, UK TV has been trivialized in the last couple of decades. BBC2 now shows cookery programmes; and contemporary drama (of which up to 200 productions a year, across three channels, were once broadcast) has declined to virtual insignificance. A failure to grapple with contemporary issues is now par for the course. And this does matter. Studies suggest that as much as 10% of the public participating in an election are affected by media coverage. In other words, given the 4% difference in the referendum between leaving and remaining in the EU, the media misreporting, exaggeration of irrelevancies and prior position not to report positively on the EU may have been a critical factor in determining the result.8
7 In this context, the conduct of Viktor Orban, ‘a talisman of Europe’s mainstream right’, could be considered to be to the left of Teresa May. The arguments in Hungary and the outcome – 100% acceptance of freedom of movement within Europe – illustrate the extent to which the UK Conservative Party should properly be regarded as an extreme right-wing faction. 8 For a US assessment of this see
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Education, education, education Direct comparisons across the international spectrum are difficult but globally the UK is currently ranked around 20th in terms of educational standards. South Korea and Japan are the highest in the world; Finland, Estonia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Poland are the best in Europe. None of these have ‘free schools’ or ‘academies’ on the UK model. In most of the EU the fees payable for attending higher education are much lower than in the UK – if students are charged at all.9 With literacy and numeracy lower than many other countries and a lack of information about how other similar countries manage their affairs (in part due to media misinformation), a significant percentage of the UK public are not well informed or advised about the decisions they need to take. So, is the 23 June outcome really surprising? And such voters do affect electoral outcomes. One of the characteristics of contemporary politics is the search for the ‘swing’ voters, the people who ‘make a difference’, the people who – if you can somehow get through to them – will cast the votes that mean winning or losing. The media and pollsters are fascinated by this group. Normally referred to as ‘undecided’ voters, examples of these often appear on late night TV news programmes, responding to questions about how they feel about political personalities and issues; and, to a large degree, being coached through their answers – which in turn are conditioned by what the media does and doesn’t report – by supportive moderators. The ruminations of ‘Worcester woman’, ‘Essex man’ et al are now keenly sought by those seeking office. As with Farage being given an equivalent platform to the PM in the EU referendum debates, how would elections in the past have turned out if so much publicity had been concentrated on those with no clear view or a chronic lack of awareness or interest in political issues? As an example of this, the issue of immigration, which dominated the EU referendum, will suffice. The ‘line’ presented to the public (and largely unchallenged) is that the EU is uniquely responsible for the level of migration into the UK,
9 See
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thus causing the displacement of hardworking and qualified UK workers from jobs they could legitimately fill. Actually, the figures are different. The majority of migration into the UK has always been from outside the EU. Leaving the EU will not stop this and the UK work force isn’t adequately educated or trained to work in the jobs currently occupied by EU citizens when the UK leaves the EU.10 Surely a better educated and informed public would be aware of this.
Degradation of politics The business of politics has been degraded in recent years. Once it was expected that politicians would be ‘in advance’ of public opinion. One example of this was the decision to suspend (1965) and then abolish (1969) the death penalty. This position has been upheld ever since, despite public opinion being markedly different. Given this, the cross-party inability today to suggest that the public might have got it wrong with the EU referendum is very striking. It is either dishonest (given that 400 plus MPs favour remaining in the EU) or an ominous indication that the ground rules of political life have changed for the worse; and most MPs today feel unable or unwilling to put across a positive case if it goes against what is perceived to be public opinion. As the membership of political parties has shrunk, so recedes the notion that within them balanced, representative and legitimate policies are framed. The Conservative Party now has no more than 130,000-140,000 members, mainly elderly and mainly in the south east of England. UKIP with less than 40,000 members, has an even more elderly and geographically concentrated membership. If the Conservatives and UKIP had to rely solely on membership subscriptions, neither would be able to function as significant national bodies.11 One way of looking at the impasse the UK now finds
10 See
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itself in must be that drastic changes are being enacted due to strife caused by (and within) two small, elderly, white English organisations. And it is a matter of great regret that the UK lacks robust political structures and processes that can resist crises instigated by unrepresentative minorities.
End game? The position of those regretting recent developments in the UK is a mixture of public hand-wringing and private, desperate, sotto voce soundings-out of possible allies. Nick Clegg makes vague statements about wanting a Government of National Unity. But Clegg, who did a deal with the Conservatives in which very little was put in writing, and who supported Osborne’s fatuous ‘deficit reduction’ tactics, may well be seen by many as being part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. In any case, with only eight MP’s the Liberal Democrats are no longer in a position to do anything very much.12 More serious are the machinations of Lord Mandelson and Tony Blair. The latter is reported to be making an announcement in early 2017 – by which time the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change will be up and running at its new London HQ – designed to rally support for remaining in the EU. To this end, he is reported to have had discussions with George Osborne.13 Although it is impossible to determine in any detail how the UK might ‘remain in the EU’, the overwhelming support for doing so among MPs, UK science, law, politics, education, industry, the City and the arts is such that such an outcome must remain a possibility. Or, if not ‘remaining in the EU’, are we talking of an EU exit on the Norwegian model (outside the EU, but actually inside the EU)? Erstwhile Cabinet Secretary Lord O’Donnell seems to think we might be, writing in The Times that we should seek membership of the European Free
12 See Nick Clegg, Politics: Between the Extremes, (Bodley Head, 2016). This was reviewed in The Sunday Times with the headline ‘Fatally out of his political depth’. 13 See The Sunday Times 21 November 2016 and The Times 22 November 2016. Backing is apparently from Richard Branson and is ‘substantial’.
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Trade Area (EFTA) (again) and the European Economic Area (EEA) and then ‘reform’ both of these to our liking. In other words, having failed to ‘reform’ the EU we join another international body and attempt to ‘reform’ that.14 These desperate – and in the case of O’Donnell, preposterous – suggestions are regarded with derision abroad. The German Social Democrats regard Mr Corbyn with particular incredulity, pointing out that by falling in with an exit from the EU he is neither providing a credible opposition, nor reflecting the views of the 16 million people who want to remain.15 Further, he is ensuring that, should the UK exit the EU, and the results be disastrous, few people will have a motive to support the Labour Party, as Labour will be seen to have clearly allowed such an outcome. But anyone with knowledge of the left in the Labour Party knows that Mr Corbyn (and Mr McDonnell) are both anti-EU on the grounds that it is not ‘socialist’. So: 2017 should be an interesting time in UK domestic politics. With Blair and Mandelson (and Osborne too) heavily damaged goods, one supposes they will find other people through whom to pursue their goals.16 The election of Donald Trump as President of the US
14 For the O’Donnell intervention see The Times 27 and 30 August 2016. 15 See The Times 14 November 2016, ‘German socialist attacks Corbyn over “big mistake”’. 16 The assumptions made about Blair’s objectives are that he – and his supporters (many and wealthy) – will campaign actively for a second referendum, probably on the basis of remaining in the single market (i.e. the Norway option). While May will probably get an unhappy House of Commons to vote to serve Article 50 at some point in early 2017, it is not at all clear the EU would seriously negotiate, at all, if there was any chance of a second referendum. On the issue of being given a free hand to ‘deal’ with the single market and all other issues, May can’t ‘call’ an election either, that action no longer being in the gift of the PM. She could take a vote on the subject to the Commons, lose it, say it was a vote of confidence, and, if it were not reversed within 14 days, go to the country. However, this would be a convoluted process. Are we – possibly – in the early stages of a realignment of UK politics? In the event of an early election will the Branson-Blair organization fund a pro-EU election campaign and fund pro-EU ‘National Unity’ candidates against Brexiteers?
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represents a further blow to the political centre and left still reeling from the referendum result. The figures for the US Presidential election are even more depressing than those for the UK EU referendum. Clinton beat Trump by 65.8 million votes (48.1%) to 63 million (46%). Trump ‘won’ because of the way the US distributes the popular vote among its electoral college. With turnout as low as 55.3% this means that 110.6 million US electors didn’t actually vote and Trump’s support amounts to only 25.5% of the electorate. Those who talk about ‘a new politics’ (a peculiarity of UK and US commentators) might reflect that all this amounts to in terms of actual votes is a referendum being held in the UK without any regulations of its conduct; and a candidate in the US, who finished second by some distance, ending up as President because of that country’s imperfect electoral system. What this may mean for the UK remains unclear. However, the Trump team, many Conservative MP’s and UKIP have at least one thing in common: all have a visceral dislike of the EU, regarding it as a quasi-communist entity with which they will have no truck. In corporate management speak, we are going on a journey, caused by two countries with defective electoral systems; rather, than as some would have us believe, being propelled down a populist route by public demand. A wide coalition against acceptance of this as a fait accompli ought to be possible. For those with a sense of history the comparisons with 1931-1933 in Europe (when the NSDAP rose to power without ever winning a majority) are unnerving, while for those whose support of the traditional political establishment in both the UK and US has been badly rattled in the last year, the words of Edmund Burke, echoed by JFK, remain prescient: 'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing'.
Simon Matthews is the author of Psychedelic Celluloid: British pop music in film and TV 1965-74 (Oldcastle Books, 2016).
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Team mercenary GB Part 2 – This is the modern world
Nick Must
The 21st century UK PMC In my first article on the British influence on the world of Private Military Contractors (PMCs),1 I covered the period from the 1960s to the beginning of the new millennium. I showed that there was a distinct market (either genuine or created) for ex-servicemen to fight proxy wars for the government of the United Kingdom. That there was money to be made in this environment is clear from the fact that, in the 1990s, Executive Outcomes (the PMC established by the infamous Simon Mann) was paid $40 million per year to defeat the UNITA rebels in Angola.2 Such sums are, however, relatively small fry compared to the truly huge sums that are being spent on PMCs that provide services related to the ‘Global War on Terror’ and the effective civil war that followed the second invasion of Iraq in 2003. This is the focus of what follows. In 2006 American author Charlie Cray stated that ‘Industry analysts expect it [the PMC industry] will be a $200 billion-a-year global business by 2010.’3 Indeed, in 2015 Olive Group, which had been founded in 2001 by an ex-Coldstream Guards and Parachute Regiment officer,4 merged with U.S. Operation Constellis Group to ‘create a combined entity with
1
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revenues in the range of $1bn’.5 Contributing to that impressive turnover was the contract of aviation security for all four international Airports in Afghanistan, signed between the Deputy Director General of the Afghanistan Civil Aviation Authority and Guy Johnston of Olive Group.6 The ex- Commanding Officer of the 22nd SAS, Lt. General Cedric Delves DSO7was a director of Olive. 8 On the topic of government spending on PMCs, earlier this year, writing in the Guardian, Richard Norton-Taylor, reported that, ‘Foreign Office spending on contracts with private UK security companies rose from £12.6m in 2003 to £48.9m in 2012, according to official figures.’9 One of the memorable jokes from the 1980s BBC comedy ‘Yes Minister’ is along the lines of, ‘If those are the official figures, then you can imagine just how much it really is!’
British dominance A reflection of the British dominance of the PMC industry is that the website for the United States Embassy in Baghdad provides a list of ten security companies working in country, half of which are UK-based or were established by UK persons.10 At the top of the list is the caveat that ‘The U.S.
5
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government assumes no responsibility for the professional ability or integrity of the persons or firms whose names appear on the list.’ One can safely assume, though, that there is tacit if not legally binding approval for the firms named. Keeping track of PMCs can be challenging, as there are regular mergers and acquisitions. In 2008, for instance, the behemoth that is Group 4 Security (a.k.a. G4S) acquired ArmorGroup,11 which still functions in its own right and is included on the US Baghdad embassy roster.
Ex-UK Special Forces (SF) personnel As will be shown in the remainder of this article, many of the UK based PMCs have connections to, or directly employ, ex-UK Special Forces (SF) personnel. In the case of ArmorGroup, employees also included former senior MI6 officer Andrew Fulton,12 who has also been Chair of the Scottish Conservative Party. The listed contact for ArmorGroup in Iraq is ‘Country Manager’ John Farr MBE, who is ex-Parachute Regiment and possibly UK SF. He received his MBE as part of the Queen’s birthday honours in 199113 and retired with the rank of Major on 19 February 1998.14 Even before it was taken over by G4S, ArmorGroup had itself previously taken over Defence Systems Limited (DSL) in 1997.15 The background of DSL is particularly interesting as it was originally founded by ex-SAS officers Major Alastair
11 See Stanley Pignal, ‘G4S beefs up security side with ArmorGroup purchase’, Financial Times, 22 March 2008, at
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Morrison OBE, MC16 (who will be a recurring figure in this article) and Major Richard Bethell MBE. Morrison was one of the two SAS men who were briefly seconded to the German GSG9 antiterrorist unit at Mogadishu airport in 1977.17 Major Bethell’s time in the 22nd SAS Regiment was in the 1980s. His post Army career within the PMC world was well established before he became 6th Baron Westbury upon the death of his father in 2001. The G4S/ArmorGroup/Defence Systems Limited conglomerate had other links to the Conservative Party and the upper reaches of the Civil Service. When Malcolm Rifkind was Secretary of State for Defence he tasked the then recently retired General Sir David Ramsbotham GCB, CBE with ‘writing a paper on improving the UK contribution to UN Peacekeeping Operations’. Following the publication of his various reports, General Ramsbotham was approached by ‘Defence Systems Limited and asked to become Director of International Affairs’.18 Sir Malcolm Rifkind later became chair of the board at ArmorGroup when it was sold to G4S.19 There was another, separate yet very similar acquisition in 2008 when Rocam International, a PMC run by Richard Mitchelson who is ex-New Zealand Special Air Service,20 acquired AKE Group (the AKE standing for Andrew Kain Enterprises). Once again, the AKE group of companies continue to trade under their own names and AKE Limited is
16 See Thomas Catan, ‘Lunch and Conversation with Alastair Morrison’, Financial Times, 25 March 2005, archived at
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another of the PMCs on the US Baghdad embassy list. Ex-Staff Sergeant Andrew Kain served in 2nd Battalion Parachute Regiment from 1972-78, then with the Special Air Service from 1978-90.21 He was a member of the British special forces team, under the command of Captain Gavin Hamilton MC, that carried out the raid on Pebble Island during the Falkland campaign (where 11 aircraft and a radar installation were destroyed).22 There are a number of companies under the Andrew Kain umbrella, one of which is Andrew Kain Enterprises Limited (AKE). Previous directors of AKE have included former SAS NCOs Ken Connor BEM.23 and Steven Mitchell DCM, MM (a.k.a. Andy McNab).24 Oddly, Andrew Kain himself has resigned his directorship of this specific company. Richard Filon (who has written under the pen name Duncan Falconer25) is the ex-SBS Marine who now runs the Kidnap and Ransom division of AKE Group,26 and (as of June 2016) is also a director of the newly formed A. Kain & Partners LLP.
21 His LinkedIn profile is at
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A third UK PMC on the US Baghdad embassy list is Erinys Iraq Limited. Founded in 2002 by Jonathan Garratt (ex-Royal Regiment of Fusiliers), Erinys and its financial backer/parent company Nour USA Ltd ‘has received contracts worth up to a total of $400 million’.27 Previous to establishing Erinys, Jonathan Garratt left the British army in 1992 and then worked at DSL – the firm where Alastair Morrison worked – for nine years.28 In between working at DSL and industry leader Kroll, Morrison transferred to Erinys to continue his business relationship with Garratt. Sitting on the Erinys board of directors is Major-General John Holmes, the former director of UKSF and head of the SAS. Some of Erinys’ employees in Iraq have carried out highly questionable actions. In 2004 a male Iraqi teenager, who had been accused of stealing some cabling, was held by Erinys contractors in cruel circumstances. Photographs emerged of the petrified youngster having been placed in an improvised restraint of half a dozen car tyres. There were conflicting accounts of what exactly happened, with the family of the child stating that he had been seriously mistreated over a very long period of time. Erinys, by contrast, insisted that it had only been for a couple of minutes. Disregarding whether or not just ‘a couple of minutes’ was even allowable, if the Erinys statement is true I am inclined to ask how there was sufficient time to take any photographs.29 Additionally, Erinys was tangentially involved with ex- KGB/FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned with polonium in November 2006. Litvinenko was producing ‘business intelligence’ reports into high profile Russian figures for Titon International, which was a subsidiary of Erinys.30 27 See footnote 3. 28 See
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The witness statements of both Erinys and Titon staff to the Litvinenko Inquiry make interesting reading.31 The fourth of the five PMCs from the US Baghdad embassy list is named as Global Risk Strategies. Following the mercurial nature of these businesses, this is actually now known as Global Strategies Group (GSG)32 and it was originally founded in 1998 by Damian Perl (ex-Royal Marines) and Charlie Andrews, a former Scots Guards officer.33 In a March 2004 article, The Economist profiled several PMCs and had this comment regarding (the still known as) Global Risk Strategies: ‘Global Risk Strategies was a two-man team until the invasion of Afghanistan. Now it has over 1,000 guards in Iraq — more than many of the countries taking part in the occupation — manning the barricades of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Last year it also won a $27m contract to distribute Iraq’s new dinar.’34 GSG has taken part in its own interesting share of acquisitions. In 2007 they purchased a company that went by the name of SFA Inc. In doing so they also obtained a subsidiary company called The Analysis Corporation. Current CIA Director John Brennan, a long-term CIA veteran, was actually undertaking a stint in the private sector and working
31 Statements from Tim Reilly of Erinys
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for The Analysis Corporation at the time. A former GSG employee, who was interviewed by CNBC in 2013, clearly stated that the acquisition had taken place solely to get hold of The Analysis Corporation and that ‘The Analysis Corporation was the crown jewel of SFA’.35 GSG’s highly lucrative contracts have included those to ‘guard convoys exchanging currencies in Iraq’ and to ‘defend part of the perimeter of Baghdad airport’. GSG relies heavily on Fijians and Gurkhas and that helps the profit margin. A typical going rate for British or US ex-SF soldiers can be over £300 per day but Global pays about £35 per day to its Fijians and Nepalese.36 The last of the UK PMCs on that US Baghdad embassy list is Control Risks Group. I will not go into detail regarding the history of Control Risks here but simply refer the reader to the extensive detail on pages 6 and following of my previous article on PMCs.37 Further to that, in 2006 the ex-editor of the Daily Telegraph, Max Hastings, mentioned Control Risks in an article that was very much a rallying cry for the PMC world. Hastings stated that ‘... Control Risks, saw its turnover soar fifteen fold after 2003 amid the huge demand for bodyguards.’38 Not being on the US Baghdad embassy list of PMCs is hardly a sign of an unsuccessful company. In 2005 a significant PMC merger occurred when Aegis Defence acquired Rubicon
35 See Eamon Javers, ‘In Brennan’s Private Sector Stint, a Chinese Connection’, CNBC, Wednesday, 6 February 2013 at
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International39 – both Aegis and Rubicon having connections to Britain’s SF. Aegis Defence was run by Colonel Tim Spicer – the Sandline and Sierra Leone ‘adventurer’ – who had served in the Territorial 21st SAS at the start of his army career in the mid-70s. Rubicon’s owner and managing director was John Davidson, who is also an ex-SAS officer. Despite having being involved at the end of the 1990s with the troublesome Sandline International mercenary firm, by 2006 Spicer was ‘in charge of the second largest military force in Iraq: the estimated 20,000 private security personnel who outnumber the British army by almost three to one.’40 This was because Aegis, with strong input from Spicer, had won a contract in Iraq worth $293 million from the Pentagon, ‘... to co-ordinate security for reconstruction projects, as well as support for other private military companies, in Iraq.’41 By pure coincidence, at the time that the contract was given, Anthony Hunter-Choat (ex-Commanding Officer of the Territorial 23rd SAS) was head of security for the Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority’s Program Management Office and he had known Spicer for many years. The American PMC Dyncorp had submitted a bid that was $80 million less than the one from Aegis and they were – justifiably – very upset.42 Dyncorp had been around for decades, whereas Aegis had only been founded two years before the contract was awarded. The advantage that Aegis had, presumably, was that Lord Inge (Chief of the Defence Staff between 1994 and 1997) was non- executive chairman43 and Nicholas Soames (former Tory
39 See James Boxell, ‘Aegis Defence adds Rubicon to its portfolio’, Financial Times 4 November 2005 at
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Armed Forces minister) was a nonexecutive director.44 The accounts that UK PMCs register at Companies House reveal how well they have benefited from the post-2003 ‘War on Terror’. The turnover for one of the smaller UK PMCs, Janusian Security Risk Management (which was briefly mentioned in my previous article45), rose by more than 750% between 2003 and 2004.46 The bonanza lasted a relatively short four years for Janusian, with turnover back to previous levels from 2008, and two years later the business was swallowed up by The Risk Advisory Group.47
The recruitment imperative Many of the PMCs that I have already mentioned, which were winning huge contracts in Iraq (and elsewhere), faced a pressing need to recruit hundreds of staff. They had the connections to win the contracts but did not have the necessary number of employees to meet their new commitments. In a rush of recruitment, some PMCs were extremely lax in their pre-employment vetting and later in- country oversight of contractors. Problems began to surface very quickly. As early as 2004 it was obvious to the seasoned professional ex-SF soldiers who were already on the ground in Iraq, that the dozens of new contractors who were being flown into the country were anything but the seasoned operators that they pretended to be. Reporting for the Spectator from Iraq, journalist Sam Kiley (who had previously been ‘captured by Baathists bent on revenge’) recounted how his own personal protection team were highly dismissive of ‘the “outsourcing” of security work’ that was ‘adding to the
44 Sir Nicholas is now the current Chairman, see
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chaos in the country’.48 After detailing the equipment-laden look that had become de rigueur amongst the newcomers, Kiley reported that ‘“Rob”, a genuine former sergeant major from the SAS, is unarmed and looks like an off-the-peg BBC reporter, blue shirt, chinos’. This ‘Rob’ says of the freshmen that, by wearing so much kit ostentatiously, ‘They might as well wear a fucking sign saying shoot me!’ I use the term ‘freshmen’ with little sense of irony. Reports emerged in 2009 that staff working for a division of ArmorGroup (known as ArmorGroup North America) had indulged in antisocial ‘fratboy-style antics’. Following these revelations, the US State Department immediately sent a team to Kabul to undertake a management audit. The outcome of this was that, ‘Alcohol has been banned at Camp Sullivan – the compound where the guards live – and diplomatic security officers have been assigned to keep an eye on the guards.’49 Even worse was to come when a Scottish ex- paratrooper, Danny Fitzsimons, was taken on by G4S. In spite of having previous criminal convictions for possessing ammunition without a licence, and for robbery, he was sent to Iraq in August of 2009. He had already completed four tours with another company but was fired after he had punched the client he was supposed to be protecting. According to an investigation by BBC Scotland, another contractor had emailed an explicit warning about Danny Fitzsimons to G4S,50 but they still employed him. Less than two days after his arrival in Baghdad, he murdered fellow G4S contractors Paul McGuigan and Darren Hoare. Fitzsimons was convicted of the crimes, even though he had been willing to plead guilty to the lesser
48 See the two articles by Sam Kiley, ‘I let go of life’, Spectator, 24 May 2003
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charge of ‘manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility’. In his testimony before the Iraqi court, Fitzsimons claimed that his service with the Parachute Regiment in Kosovo had caused him to suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The coroner’s court in Stockport, that held the inquiry into the death of Paul McGuigan, rejected the claim of PTSD although evidence of some of Fitzsimons’ highly psychotic diary writings was also presented.51 G4S were one of the PMCs that was also involved in a spat with the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai. According to a Washington Post report, ‘An Afghan government probe of private security companies has accused 16 firms of violations that include employing too many guards, failing to pay taxes for up to two years, and keeping unregistered weapons and armored vehicles.’ Another PMC that was named in the report was the British founded (but now U.S. owned) Blue Hackle. It was alleged that this PMC had ‘kept 385 unregistered weapons and “would not reveal the location” of its armory’.52 The current board of directors at Blue Hackle includes two former British army officers (Lachlan Monro, who opaquely describes himself as having ‘specialist skills in key point security, risk analysis and management’, and the former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe, General Sir Jeremy MacKenzie, plus a former Special Branch member whose police career included ‘responsibilities in counter-terrorism, counter-espionage, counter-subversion and counter-proliferation’.53
Attempts at industry regulation In 2001, then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government
51 See Chris Slater, ‘Danny Fitzsimons: Iraq security guard “claimed he was the Anti-Christ before shooting two colleagues dead”’, Daily Mirror, 9 February 2015 at
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introduced the Private Security Industry Act and, thus, established the Security Industry Authority.54 While this act was drafted mostly to deal with the growing problem of ‘cowboy’ wheel clampers and gangster firms of bouncers at clubs and bars, it does also cover the provision of ‘close protection’ – i.e. bodyguarding – which is a service provided by subdivisions of the same firms that I have been profiling here. However, the act only applies to activities within the UK and does not have any authority over the staff of UK firms who are employed overseas. Even prior to this the UK Parliament had acknowledged that there was a problem with UK based, yet overseas operating, PMCs. In 1999 the Foreign Affairs Select Committee had asked the government to produce a Green Paper, ‘... outlining legislative options for the control of private military companies which operate out of the United Kingdom, its dependencies and British Islands.’55 This had been mainly prompted by the ‘Sandline Affair’, which had involved Colonel Tim Spicer and his firm (Sandline International) breaking the arms embargo in place against Sierra Leone. The requested Green Paper was published in February 2002,56 with the Foreign Affairs Select Committee Ninth Report (covering their own scrutiny of the Green Paper) being released in July of that same year.57 Both the Green Paper and the Ninth Report are in agreement that there was an effectively unworkable system of international regulation. Although in December 1989 the United Nations had introduced an ‘International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of
54 For the legislation, see
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Mercenaries’,58 they had defined a mercenary as someone who ‘is neither a national of a party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by a party to the conflict’. As the seemingly ever expanding Global War on Terror effectively makes all countries ‘a party to the conflict’, the much needed regulation of PMCs cannot come via the UN Convention. The International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers (ICOC),59 which is a Swiss non-profit association, was established in 2010. As noted by The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mark Simmonds) on 17 December 2012, the ICOC provides ‘a set of principles to guide companies. The ICOC has now been signed by over 500 PSCs [i.e. PMCs], around a third of them British.’60 Notably, there is only a single figure number from Iraq and none from Afghanistan. Additionally to the ICOC, there is ASIS International,61 ‘a global community of security practitioners’. Their PSC.1, the ‘Management System for Quality of Private Security Company Operations – Requirements with Guidance’ were published in 2012.62 The first UK based PMC to become formally associated with these standards was Olive Group,63 in a move that was trumpeted as a Key Milestone for the Company and the Industry.64 That this did not happen until 2014 suggests that no one was in any particular rush to get on board. In his foreword to the previously mentioned 2002 Green
58 72nd plenary meeting of the UN General Assembly, 4 December 1989 at
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Paper,65 the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw argued that, ‘Today’s world is a far cry from the 1960s when private military activity usually meant mercenaries of the rather unsavoury kind involved in post-colonial and neo-colonial conflicts.’66 I wonder if Mr Straw would stand by this quote today. Could he seriously claim that today’s PMCs are entirely clean, when compared to the ‘old-style’ mercenary companies; what is the ‘War on Terror’ but a post-colonial and/or neo-colonial conflict?
Nick Must is an independent researcher with a particular interest in Special Forces.
65 See footnote 49. 66 See page 9 of the Green Paper at
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Blackmail in the Deep State:
From the Bay of Pigs and JFK Assassination to Watergate
Jonathan Marshall
Note: this article is excerpted from an unpublished book titled Watergate, the American Deep State, and the Legacy of Secret Government by Jonathan Marshall.
The Watergate affair of 1972-74, though widely regarded as one of the the gravest political and constitutional crises in U.S. history, began not with a bang but a whimper – or as President Nixon’s press secretary dismissed it, a ‘third-rate burglary attempt’.1 Despite myriad government probes, lawsuits, news stories, and scholarly analyses, no one knows for sure what motivated the historic break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters during the 1972 presidential campaign.2 Another unresolved puzzle is why President Nixon, who was apparently ignorant of plans for the burglary, did not simply fire those involved and cut his losses. What cost him the presidency was not the original crime, but his illegal attempt to cover it up. I argue in the book from which this article is excerpted that the initial burglary was set in motion by White House insiders to uncover information they could use against the Democratic Party’s chairman, Larry O’Brien. A major goal was to prevent him from releasing politically damaging secrets
1 Quoted in Karlyn Barker and Walter Pincus, ‘Watergate Revisited; 20 Years After the Break-in, the Story Continues to Unfold’, Washington Post, 14 June 1992. 2 There were at least two break-ins; police arrested the burglars on 17 June 1972. Several dozen theories are noted in Edward Epstein and John Berendt, ‘Did There Come a Point in Time When There Were 43 Different Theories of How Watergate Happened?’ Esquire, November 1973.
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about cash payoffs from billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes to Nixon in 1969 and 1970. Exposure of a previous bribe by Hughes in 1956 had helped cost Nixon the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 gubernatorial race in California; Nixon loyalists were committed to preventing another career-ending exposé. What mattered to them was not O’Brien’s knowledge of Democratic campaign plans in 1972, but what he had learned about the Nixon payoffs while he was employed as the Hughes organization’s top Washington representative following the 1968 election.3 Second, I argue that Nixon was forced to cover-up the Watergate burglary because two of its planners had engaged in a previous felony break-in, ordered by the White House, to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers. They were members of a secret ‘Special Investigations Unit’, created at Nixon’s orders to engage in burglaries, forgery and other crimes to discredit his enemies and protect his most sensitive secrets. Perhaps the most explosive of his own hidden misdeeds was his treasonous intervention with South Vietnam during the 1968 campaign to prevent a bombing halt that might have swung the election to Vice President Hubert Humphrey.4 In other words, Nixon could not simply let the investigation of the Watergate burglary run its course lest it expose his other crimes. Both the Watergate burglary and Nixon’s cover-up, then, were broadly motivated by his fear of public exposure – including his determination to blackmail opponents into remaining silent about what they knew. The deed that proved fatal to his career, the so-called ‘smoking gun’, was a taped Oval Office conversation in which Nixon ordered his aides to get the CIA to help quash the Watergate investigation by telling the FBI that it was intruding on a sensitive intelligence operation. To enlist the CIA’s cooperation, Nixon proposed blackmailing the Agency by warning that the FBI probe could
3 For an early argument along these lines, see J. Anthony Lukas, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (New York: Viking, 1976). 4 For the latest revelations about this story, see Peter Baker, ‘Nixon Tried to Spoil Johnson’s Vietnam Peace Talks in ’68, Notes Show’, New York Times, 2 January 2017.
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unravel ‘the whole Bay of Pigs thing’, damaging both the CIA and American foreign policy. Just what the ‘Bay of Pigs’ had to do with Watergate has been a matter of considerable speculation, and is the central focus of this article. I argue that Nixon’s cover-up strategy reflected his knowledge of deep political intrigues dating back to the 1950s and early 1960s – above all a secret the CIA would go to almost any lengths to protect: its involvement with notorious gangsters in plots to assassinate a foreign head of state, Fidel Castro, and its possible indirect involvement in the murder of President Kennedy. This article frames Nixon’s invocation of ‘the Bay of Pigs thing’ in the context of a multi-year cover-up by powerful forces in the U.S. ‘deep state’ of secret crimes committed by senior intelligence officials and organized crime leaders in the name of fighting Communism. Key players included CIA directors Allen Dulles and Richard Helms; Mafia killers Sam Giancana, Santos Trafficante and John Roselli;* Teamsters Union boss and Mafia ally Jimmy Hoffa; billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes; reporters Drew Pearson, Jack Anderson and Hank Greenspun; and super-lawyers Edward Bennett Williams and Edward P. Morgan. Their secret political pressure campaigns and institutional blackmail inspired Nixon’s cover- up. Further, their hidden alliances, forged years earlier, reemerged in the early 1970s to undercut Nixon’s power base, first through leaks of the Hughes payoffs, and later by ensuring a vigorous investigation of Nixon’s role in Watergate.
Robert Maheu and Edward Bennett Williams: denizens of the Deep State Let’s start this survey by tracing the remarkable career of Robert Maheu, who for a decade oversaw most of Howard Hughes’s operations, including Nevada casinos, hotels, airports, ranches, and other businesses.5 He also managed
* Roselli or Rosselli? Both are used. I have gone with Roselli, except in the title of one of the books cited. 5 Robert Maheu and Richard Hack, Next to Hughes: Behind the Power and Tragic Downfall of Howard Hughes by His Closest Adviser (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 3
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Hughes’s political affairs, including the secret delivery of $100,000 in cash to Nixon’s confidante and personal banker, Charles ‘Bebe’ Rebozo, after the 1968 election. It was also Maheu who recruited Democratic Party campaign chief Larry O’Brien as Hughes’s top political adviser in Washington at the same time, giving Nixon cause to fear that O’Brien might destroy his 1972 re-election campaign by exposing the truth about those bribes. Maheu was no ordinary business executive. Hughes didn’t hire a bean counter or a manager to run his empire; in fact, Maheu had no particular business skills or financial acumen.6 He was, instead, an expert in covert operations. Robert Maheu started his career by joining the FBI in 1940 at the age of 23. After hunting Nazi spies during World War II, he tried launching a small business, which failed disastrously. Eventually he earned enough money from a private craps game to open his own investigative and public relations firm in 1954.7 Maheu used his relationship with other former federal agents to land his first regular client: the CIA’s Office of Security. That branch handled many of the Agency’s most sensitive and illegal operations, including drug testing and mind-control experiments; domestic surveillance of antiwar activists; and even covert investigations of national columnist Jack Anderson. Most controversially, as we will soon see, it also oversaw plots to kill foreign heads of state. One of the key Watergate burglars, James McCord, had recently retired from a senior position in the Office of Security.8 For $500 a month, the CIA gave Maheu ‘cut-out’ assignments – ‘jobs in which the agency could not officially be
6 Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele, Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), pp. 435- 436. 7 Maheu and Hack, Next to Hughes, pp. 22-40. Nixon similarly got his first professional stake from playing poker in World War II. 8 Maheu and Hack, Next to Hughes, p. 71; Jim Hougan, Spooks: The Haunting of America – The Private Use of Secret Agents (New York: William Morrow, 1978); James Rosen, ‘Watergate – 40 years later, questions endure about CIA’s role in the break-in’, Fox News, 15 June 2012, at
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involved’, as he put it.9 For his first such job, in 1954, Maheu helped foil a plot by Greek ship-owner Aristotle Onassis to get a lock on the Middle East oil market through an exclusive oil shipping contract with Saudi Arabia. Although Maheu’s paying client was a rival ship-owner, the CIA provided technical assistance and Maheu personally briefed Vice President Nixon and the National Security Council on his progress.10 Maheu also procured prostitutes for the CIA, both to service and to compromise foreign officials. In 1957, at the CIA’s behest, Maheu tried to smear the reputation of the non- aligned leader of Indonesia, President Sukarno, by producing a fake surveillance video that appeared to show him bedding a beautiful blond Soviet spy. Maheu also tried to arrange a tryst between Sukarno and a beautiful woman agent, to no avail.11 Maheu continued doing secret jobs for the CIA until
9 CIA memo for Director of Central Intelligence, 1 January 75, re ‘Robert A. Maheu’, National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter NARA) document 104-10122-10141. Maheu was recruited by Robert H. Cunningham, chief, Special Security Division, who had known Maheu in the FBI. On Maheu’s recruitment and earliest days with the CIA, see also Maheu’s testimony before the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee), 30 July 1975, NARA 157-10011-10048; Washington Post, 6 August 2008; ‘Confidant and Aide to Howard Hughes’, Los Angeles Times, 6 August 2008; ‘Former Howard Hughes Confidant Dies at 90’, Las Vegas Sun, 5 August 1998. 10 Maheu’s testimony before the Church Committee, 30 July 1975, NARA 157-10011-10048; Maheu and Hack, Next to Hughes pp. 42-53; Peter Evans, Ari: The Life and Times of Aristotle Socrates Onassis (New York: Summit Books, 1986), pp. 124-138; Hougan, Spooks pp. 287- 306; Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (New York: Viking, 2000), pp. 153-154, 195-196; Robert Pack, Edward Bennett Williams for the Defense (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), pp. 173-179; Charles Babcock, ‘Maheu Admits ’54 Anti-Onassis Drive’, Washington Post, 2 August 2 1978. For confirmation of the CIA role, see J. S. Earman, CIA Inspector General, ‘Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro’, 23 May 1967, p. 14 (hereafter ‘IG Report’), 72, NARA 1993.06.30.17:15:56:650140. 11 CIA memo for Director of Central Intelligence, 1 January 75, re ‘Robert A. Maheu’, NARA 104-10122-10141, suggests that procuring women was a major role for Maheu during the 1950s. On Sukarno, see Continues at the foot of the next page.
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about 1970.12 But he earned much more by handling investigations for Washington ‘super-lawyer’ Edward Bennett Williams, one of his closest friends from their days on the college debate team at Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.13 In one of their earliest cases, Williams hired Maheu to investigate a politically charged murder case involving U.S. intelligence agents and communist partisans in World War II Italy, involving $100 million in lost Allied gold. The case, which had major political implications in Italy, interested the CIA deeply. Williams and Maheu managed to demonstrate the innocence of an accused American agent while blaming the Communists for absconding with the gold – a small but important victory in Cold War politics.14 Maheu had found the right ally in Williams. The lawyer had powerful connections everywhere in Washington. He was on close terms with the CIA for his entire career.15 He was one of muckraking columnist Drew Pearson’s best sources.16
Note 11 continued also Maheu and Hack, Next to Hughes pp. 71-75; Joseph Burkholder Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1976), pp. 238-240, 248; ‘Intelligence Agencies Held Unchecked’, New York Times, 26 January 1976. 12 Memo from Robert W. Gambino, Director of Security, for CIA General Counsel, 27 August 1976, re ‘Robert Maheu’, NARA 1993.07.21.08:58:07:430620. 13 Maheu and Hack, Next to Hughes p. 19; Dan Moldea, The Hoffa Wars: Teamsters, Rebels, Politicians and the Mob (New York: Paddington Press, 1978) p. 129. 14 Warren Hinckle and William Turner, The Fish is Red: The Story of the Secret War Against Castro (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), p. 273; Evan Thomas, The Man to See: Edward Bennett Williams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), pp. 86-91; Pack, Edward Bennett Williams for the Defense pp. 183-200. 15 Williams would defend CIA Director Richard Helms for lying to Congress about CIA efforts to sabotage the Chilean elections. He was offered the job of CIA Director by both Presidents Ford and Reagan. He also sat on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board during the Ford and Reagan administrations. See Thomas, The Man to See pp. 340, 334, 472; Pack, Edward Bennett Williams for the Defense pp. 29-39; San Francisco Examiner, 14 August 1988; New York Times, 27 February 1987. 16 Thomas, The Man to See p. 86. In the early 1950s, Williams and Pearson were on the opposite sides of at least two libel suits, but soon thereafter they became friends, no doubt for mutual career benefits.
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He would eventually become a key part of the Watergate story – as counsel to both the Democratic National Committee and the Washington Post, two of Nixon’s biggest enemies. In the 1950s, Williams made a name for himself by pulling off remarkable acquittals for New York crime boss Frank Costello and corrupt Teamsters Union leader James Hoffa. Williams managed to spring Hoffa in a 1957 case involving bribery of a Senate staffer working for Robert Kennedy, chief counsel to the labor rackets committee.17 Williams also introduced Maheu to Hoffa, who hired the investigator in 1957 to ‘do electronics work’, a euphemism for sweeping his office of electronic bugs.18 Last but not least, Williams referred the mega- industrialist Howard Hughes to Maheu in the mid-1950s. It was the start of a business marriage that would last through 1970 before exploding in an acrimonious termination, mutual investigations, and lawsuits. Hughes hired Maheu for surveillance jobs on actress Ava Gardner and to discourage a couple of blackmailers.19 In 1956, Hughes engaged Maheu to help Vice President Nixon thwart a Republican rival who wanted to replace Nixon on the presidential ticket.20 In 1957, Hughes asked Maheu to become the public face of most of his business operations. To cement their relationship, Maheu moved his family from the Washington, D. C. suburbs to Los Angeles in 1961.21 Joining the Maheu family for Thanksgiving dinner that year was a dapper Italian-American mobster named John
17 Pack, Edward Bennett Williams for the Defense pp. 203-241. 18 Charles Rappleye and Ed Becker, All American Mafioso: The John Rosselli Story (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 184. 19 Hughes also hired Maheu to surveil a man who was dating Jean Peters, the actress Hughes would later marry. Elaine Davenport and Paul Eddy with Mark Hurwitz, The Hughes Papers (London: Sphere Books, 1977), p. 45; Los Angeles Times, 11 May 1974. 20 Summers, The Arrogance of Power p. 154. 21 Maheu and Hack, Next to Hughes pp. 55-67, 89, 135; Davenport and Eddy, The Hughes Papers p. 56. On Hughes’s behalf, Maheu also conducted employee loyalty investigations and swept company offices for bugs. See Ben Best, ‘Schemers in the Web: A Covert History of the 1960’s Era’ at
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Roselli. Born Filippo Sacco, Roselli was the Chicago mob’s trusted representative in its two biggest Western markets: Los Angeles and Las Vegas. His credentials included a prison record for labor racketeering and extortion of the movie industry. When singer Frank Sinatra wanted to break into the movies with a leading role in the World War II blockbuster From Here to Eternity, Roselli intervened with studio boss Harry Cohn to get him the part.22 Roselli also claimed to have helped make Marilyn Monroe a star.23 In 1957 he pulled together a consortium of major underworld investors from Chicago, New York, and Louisiana to build the luxurious Tropicana hotel and casino on the strip in Vegas. Through Jimmy Hoffa he also arranged Teamster financing for other mob casinos in Las Vegas, and ‘dominated the booking of high-priced entertainment that the hotels used to attract gamblers’, according to his biographers.24
The CIA, the Mob, and Maheu plot to kill Castro Maheu and Roselli were introduced to each other in Las Vegas in the late 1950s by Mafia lawyer Edward Bennett Williams. As their friendship blossomed, Maheu’s children started calling the mobster ‘Uncle Johnny’.25 By 1961, Maheu 22 Gus Russo, The Outfit: The Role of Chicago’s Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2001), p. 282. Sinatra was a client of lawyer Edward Bennett Williams. See Pack, Edward Bennett Williams for the Defense p. viii. 23 Maureen Hughes, The Countess and the Mob (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2010), p. 49. 24 Charles Rappleye and Ed Becker, All American Mafioso: The John Rosselli Story (New York: Doubleday, 1991), pp. 163, 169. The Teamster Central States Pension Fund – whose trustees answered to Hoffa – was the largest source of financing for casino operators in Las Vegas in the late 1950s and 1960s. See Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris, The Green Felt Jungle (New York: Pocket Books, 1963), pp. 83, 91; Gene Blake and Jack Tobin, ‘Gamblers Given Teamster Loans’, Los Angeles Times, 11 May 1962; ‘Teamster Funds Help Spur Vegas’, Los Angeles Times, 13 May 1962. 25 Maheu and Hack, Next to Hughes pp. 109-111; Moldea, The Hoffa Wars p. 129; Rappleye and Becker, All American Mafioso pp. 184-185; memo by FBI SA Edward J. Dunn, Jr., Miami, 22 March 1977, re ‘Roskil’ [Roselli killing], NARA 124-10289-10035. Maheu told the FBI he met Roselli in 1958 or 1959 at the El Rancho Vegas Hotel through an introduction from Williams.
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and Roselli were joined at the hip in what was perhaps the most sensitive operation in the CIA’s history: the plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. After Castro took power in 1959, Vice President Nixon chaired a high-level policy committee that reviewed and recommended covert operations against the new Cuban regime, which Nixon suspected of Communist leanings. In Nixon’s own words, he was ‘the strongest and most persistent advocate for setting up and supporting’ a CIA program to train Cuban exiles to wage war against Castro.26 That program would be implemented by the new Kennedy administration in April 1961 with the disastrous invasion at the Bay of Pigs. A key but hidden part of that plan was ‘the elimination of Fidel Castro’, which the CIA’s Western Hemisphere division chief first officially advocated in December 1959.27 Also proposing assassination was the CIA’s chief political action officer for the Cuba invasion, Howard Hunt.28 CIA Director Allen Dulles almost certainly approved – but never told President Eisenhower or President Kennedy.29 Nor, for that matter, did 26 Lamar Waldron, Watergate: The Hidden History (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012), pp. 76-77, 83-84, 90-96; Richard Nixon, ‘Cuba, Castro, and John F. Kennedy’, Reader’s Digest, November 1964, p. 288. As Waldron points out, the CIA radically ramped up the scale of its invasion plan after the 1960 election; President Kennedy was unaware that the plan presented to him was not the one Eisenhower had approved. Nor was he aware that CIA advisers had told members of the exile army to go ahead and invade Cuba even if Kennedy got cold feet and called the mission off – on the assumption that Kennedy would be forced to come to their rescue. 27 Memo for DCI from J. C. King, 11 December 1959, cited in U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation. Volume III: Evolution of CIA’s Anti-Castro Policies, 1959-January 1961 (1979, released 1998), p. 29. 28 Hunt’s April 1960 memorandum to Richard Bissell declared, ‘first and foremost, all efforts should be made to assassinate Castro before or coincident with the invasion...’ His memorandum has not surfaced in CIA files. E. Howard Hunt, with Greg Aunapu, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate & Beyond (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), p. 117. 29 Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee), interim report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 94/1 (US Government Printing Office, 1975) (hereafter Interim Report), pp. 91- Continues at the foot of the next page.
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Dulles brief his successor at the CIA, John McCone.30 Some matters were simply too sensitive to share. Agency insiders gave their bosses in the White House ‘deniability’, whether they wanted it or not. After several attempts to kill Castro failed in 1959, the CIA’s covert operations chief, Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell, asked the Agency’s Office of Security in August 1960 to recruit Mafia bosses with gambling interests in Cuba to carry out the job. An internal history of the operation years later would speculate that the Agency was being steered by hidden hands, ‘piggybacking on the [national crime] syndicate and . . . supplying an aura of official sanction’ to what was originally a Mafia initiative.31 Mob superstar Meyer Lansky, the king of Las Vegas and Cuban gambling, reputedly put out the first contract on Castro – worth a million dollars – when he booted the Mafia out of Cuba. If ever an assignment called for using a private ‘cut-out’ to prevent implicating the government, this was it. The Office of Security knew just who could put them in contact with the right high-level Mafia bosses: their contract agent Robert Maheu.32 Maheu called up his friend John Roselli to offer him
Note 29 continued 99, 110-115, 117-125. President Eisenhower had rejected the idea of assassinating Castro out of concern that his brother Raul was ‘worse’. See Waldron, Watergate, p. 105. 30 Interim Report, 92, pp. 99-105. 31 IG Report p. 14; 1977 CIA Task Force Report quoted at House of Representatives, Select Committee on Assassinations, staff report, The Evolution and Implications of the CIA-Sponsored Assassination Conspiracies Against Fidel Castro, March 1979 (hereafter ‘HSCA Report’), in v. 10, pp. 157, 172 (piggybacking); Rappleye and Becker, All American Mafioso p. 180; Moldea, Hoffa Wars p. 126; Scott Breckenridge, The CIA and the Cold War: A Memoir (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1973), p. 113. According to one government informant, Hoffa was the original liaison between the CIA and the Mafia. But if so, his participation yielded no lasting results. Moldea, Hoffa Wars p. 131. 32 IG Report p. 15. Actually, the Office of Security first considered using ‘another former FBI man, Guy Banister, the ex-FBI Chief of Chicago, now working as a private investigator in New Orleans’, but Banister was assigned instead to another Cuban operation. Banister had been an office mate of Maheu and Carmine Bellino in 1954. He later became a key figure in the JFK assassination milieu. Waldron, Continues at the foot of the next page.
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an opportunity to serve his country. In September 1960, over a meal in Beverly Hills, Maheu offered Roselli $150,000 to assassinate Castro. Roselli accepted the job but patriotically declined the cash. Flying together to Miami, they stayed at a luxury hotel, went shopping and attended a world heavyweight title fight.33 There Roselli introduced Maheu to two colleagues with deep ties to Cuba who would have to approve the Castro hit. One was Roselli’s powerful boss in Chicago, Sam Giancana, who was also a client of attorney Edward Bennett Williams. The other was Santo Trafficante, the Mafia king of Florida, who that same month was conspiring with several other mobsters and Jimmy Hoffa to deliver $1 million in cash bribes to presidential candidate Richard Nixon.34 As a major owner of casinos in pre-revolutionary Havana, Trafficante had dozens of Cuban exiles on his payroll, active in everything from numbers rackets to narcotics trafficking. Many were being trained by the CIA in commando tactics ahead of the Bay of Pigs invasion.35
Note 32 continued Watergate p. 104. Maheu later told his friend Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s former Hoffa investigator and press secretary, ‘that the CIA had been in touch with Nixon, who had asked them to go forward with this project. . . It was Nixon who had [Maheu] do a deal with the Mafia in Florida to kill Castro.’ However, this remains unproven. See Summers, Arrogance of Power pp. 196-197. 33 Before flying to Miami, Maheu and Roselli met with a senior official from the Office of Security, James O’Connell, at the Hilton Plaza Hotel in New York City. O’Connell was Roselli’s CIA contact until May 1962, when he was replaced by William Harvey. See CIA memo, ‘The Johnny Roselli Matter’, NARA 1993.07.26.17:44:39:000590. Maheu had previously introduced Roselli to several top CIA and Air Force intelligence officers at a party at his home in Virginia, in total violation of good security procedures. See Maheu and Hack, Next to Hughes p. 114. 34 Moldea, The Hoffa Wars pp. 108-109. Note that Trafficante used a Teamster local in Miami as his office. 35 This group’s main contact for arranging the assassination was the Meyer Lansky-funded Cuban politician Manuel Antonio de Varona, whose CIA paymaster was future Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt. However, Hunt testified that he was unaware of Varona’s involvement in the assassination plots. See IG Report pp. 29-30, 64; Summers, Arrogance of Power p. 194; Rappleye and Becker, All American Mafioso pp. 192-193.
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On the downside, both Giancana and Trafficante had been subpoenaed by Chief Counsel Robert Kennedy along with Jimmy Hoffa to testify before the Senate labor rackets committee in the late 1950s. Through its choice of surrogates, the CIA was thus directly flouting the war on organized crime declared by Bobby and Jack Kennedy and increasingly pursued, albeit reluctantly, by J. Edgar Hoover. It was also sustaining the Mafia’s hopes of ‘securing gambling, prostitution, and dope monopolies in Cuba in the event Castro is overthrown’, to quote a memo by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to CIA Director Allen Dulles in December 1960.36 For all their wealth and power, these Mafia bosses proved unable to pierce Castro’s layers of security. They ruled out shooting the Cuban leader as too dangerous. Their repeated attempts to poison him fell victim to bad luck and logistical snafus. In all, Castro would survive more than a hundred assassination attempts by many enemies over more than two decades. But the dark secret of the CIA-Mafia plots was not safe. Roselli and his Mafia partners quickly realized this was a CIA operation. Before long, so did Howard Hughes. For months starting in the fall of 1960, Maheu shuttled between his Los Angeles base and Miami, the headquarters of all CIA operations against Cuba.37 He was gone so much that Hughes, Maheu’s top client, complained of his absence and demanded that he return. Rather than lose his business, Maheu sought – and amazingly received – permission from the CIA to tell Hughes that he was working on a top-secret assignment that ‘included plans to dispose of Mr. Castro in connection with a pending invasion’. As one account notes: ‘It was a piece of information that had not even been given to the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy.’38
36 21 December 1960 memorandum, re ‘Manuel Antonio Varona’, NARA 124-90055-10230; summarized in IG Report pp. 29-30. 37 Maheu found time before the 1960 election to convince a reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to kill a potentially negative breaking story on the 1956 Hughes ‘loan’ to Donald Nixon. Maheu succeeded – but Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson then went public with the full, damaging account. See Summers, Arrogance of Power pp. 215-216. 38 Bartlett and Steele, Empire, p. 284.
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The incident strongly suggests – and other evidence supports – that Hughes already had an extensive covert relationship with the CIA.39 The Agency’s Domestic Contacts Division (DCD) acknowledged in a secret 1974 memo that it ‘had close and continuing relationships with the Hughes Tool Company and the Hughes Aircraft Company since 1948. . . In the case of Hughes Aircraft, DCD has contacted over 250 individuals in the company since the start of our association and about 100 in Hughes Tool over the same period. . . In addition, there is some evidence in DCD files that both companies may have had contractual relationships with the Agency.’40 Indeed, over the years, that relationship would generate billions of dollars’ worth of CIA contracts for Hughes Aircraft alone.41
39 Hughes allowed the CIA to use a Bahamian island that he leased, named Cay Sal, for intelligence operations and raids against Cuba, including the Bay of Pigs invasion. See Hinckle and Turner, The Fish is Red, pp. 279-280; Dick Russell, ‘An Ex-CIA Man’s Stunning Revelations on “The Company”, JFK’s Murder, and the Plot to Kill Richard Nixon’, Argosy, April 1976; ‘Oz Moody: A Florida Treasure Looks Back’, Florida Monthly, December 2001, pp. 36-38. Edward Morgan testified to the Church Committee that Hank Greenspun ‘knew that Hughes was extremely close to the CIA’. See testimony of Edward P. Morgan, March 19, 1975, 34, NARA 157-10011-10040. 40 CIA memorandum by Carroll Delaney, executive officer, Domestic Collection Division, for Inspector General, 24 April 1974, re ‘DCD Response to the Agency-Watergate File Review’, NARA 104-10062- 10072. 41 One published estimate put the value of CIA contracts at $6 billion from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. See ‘The Hughes Legacy: Scramble for Billions’, Time, 19 April 1976, p. 23. In 1966, Albert D. Wheelon resigned as Deputy Director of the CIA in charge of its science and technology division – including development of spy satellites – to become President of Hughes Aircraft Co., where he built its satellite-manufacturing business into the largest in the world. See Stephen Miller, ‘Rocket Scientist Albert Wheelon Led CIA Spy-Satellite Program’, Wall Street Journal, 1 October 2013. Hughes biographers Bartlett and Steele note, ‘The Hughes payroll was studded with former intelligence operatives, government agents, and retired army, navy, and air force officers. The Hughes Aircraft Company was deeply involved in the intelligence community’s spy-satellite program.’ In addition, the CIA chose Hughes Tool Company as its contractor and cover in 1970 for Project Jennifer, a quarter billion dollar scheme to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Continues at the foot of the next page.
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Eventually J. Edgar Hoover got wind of the secret too. It leaked to the FBI when the jealous Chicago boss Giancana, much like Hughes a few years earlier, asked Maheu to spy on one of his lovers, the hit singer Phyllis McGuire. She was consorting with ‘Laugh-In’ comedian Dan Rowan behind Giancana’s back in Las Vegas. As a favor for Giancana’s help in Cuba, Maheu agreed to ‘bug’ Rowan’s Las Vegas hotel room. Remarkably, the CIA gave him $1,000 to do it.42 The operation was worthy of the Keystone Kops – or the Watergate bunglers. Maheu farmed the job out to a Florida private eye, who left all his monitoring equipment in plain view in his hotel room. A maid spotted it and called security. Wiretapping was a federal offense, so police called in the FBI. The detective gave up Maheu’s name. Questioned by the Feds, Maheu offered the implausible-sounding explanation that he had arranged to surveil a TV comedian ‘on behalf of the CIA relative to anti- Castro activities’. The FBI didn’t let go, and after more than a
Note 41 continued: See Bartlett and Steele, Empire, p. 458. They also note that the CIA signed at least 32 contracts totaling $6.6 billion from June 1968 to March 1975, not including the Glomar Explorer vessel used in Project Jennifer, or many other classified contracts (Donald Barlett and James Steele, ‘CIA Has “Many Contracts” with Hughes Organizations’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 14 December 1975). Maheu recalled one phone conversation with Hughes in early 1969 in which the billionaire ‘suggested that I try to work out some kind of arrangement with the CIA whereby either he or the Hughes Tool Company become a front for this intelligence agency. I told Mr. Hughes that I could not understand why he would have such a desire and he pointed out to me that if he ever became involved in any problem with the government, either with a regulatory body or with an investigative arm of the government, that he thought it would be very beneficial to him [if we were] a front of some sort through one of his businesses for the CIA.’ See Davenport and Eddy, The Hughes Papers, pp. 244-245. 42 IG Report, pp. 57-58; Sheffield Edwards (CIA’s Office of Security), memorandum for the record, 14 May 1962, re ‘Arthur James Balletti et al – Unauthorized Publication or Use of Communications’, and Howard Osborn, CIA Office of Security, memorandum for Director of Central Intelligence, June 24, 1966, re ‘Johnny Roselli’, NARA 1993.07.21.08:58:07:430620. The timing was either late 1961 or very early 1962. For intimations of a more complicated back story, including CIA suspicions that Giancana was talking to associates about the assassination plots, see Interim Report, pp. 78-79, and HSCA Report, pp. 174-175.
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year of arm-twisting the head of the CIA’s Office of Security finally gave FBI Director Hoover a classified briefing about the assassination plots. Hoover in turn informed Attorney General Robert Kennedy that the CIA was now secretly protecting two of the nation’s leading criminals, Giancana and Trafficante. As the CIA’s Director of the Office of Security later noted, ‘Both were on the Attorney General’s [list of] ten most-wanted men.’43 Not until 1962, at the FBI’s instigation, did CIA officials finally brief Bobby Kennedy about their assassination plots with the Mafia.44 After hearing the news, the attorney general lamented that his war on organized crime had been fatally subverted: ‘It would be very difficult to initiate any prosecution against Giancana, as Giancana could immediately bring out the fact that the U.S. Government had approached him to arrange for the assassination of Castro.’ One of his CIA briefers later recalled: ‘If you have seen Mr. Kennedy’s eyes get steely and his jaw set and his voice get low and precise, you get a definite feeling of unhappiness.’45 CIA officials reassured the Attorney General that they had cut the Mafia loose. That was a blatant lie; they continued to work with gangsters without his knowledge.46 They also engaged in ongoing assassination plots. Indeed, on November 43 IG Report, pp. 59-62; Rappleye and Becker, All American Mafioso, pp. 213-214; Bartlett and Steele, Empire, pp. 283-284; Maheu and Hack, Next to Hughes, pp. 121-122; Howard Osborn, Director of Security, memorandum for Director of Central Intelligence, re ‘Roselli, Johnny’, 19 November 1970, NARA 1993.07.26.17:44:39:000590. 44 IG Report, p. 62a; HSCA Report, p. 153; Rappleye and Becker, All American Mafioso, pp. 216-217. 45 Interim Report, pp. 132-133; cf. IG Report, pp. 62a. 46 Interim Report, pp. 133-134; IG Report, pp. 64-65. In 1963, following publication of an article in the Chicago Sun-Times revealing that Giancana had worked for the CIA, Richard Helms told CIA Director John McCone that the plots had ended in May 1962. See Waldron Watergate, pp. 247-248. I suspect that the article was an FBI leak. Articles suggesting a CIA link to Giancana appeared in the Chicago Sun- Times on 16 August 1963 (‘CIA Sought Giancana Help for Cuba Spying’) and Chicago Daily News on 20 August 1963 (‘The Truth About Cosa Nostra Chief and the CIA’). See Howard Osborn, CIA Office of Security, memorandum for Director of Central Intelligence, June 24, 1966, re ‘Johnny Roselli’, NARA 1993.07.21.08:58:07:430620; IG Report, pp. 67-69.
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22, 1963, even as President Kennedy was beginning his motorcade through the streets of Dallas, a senior CIA officer was holding a clandestine rendezvous in Paris with an apparently disloyal Cuban official. The CIA officer, masquerading as a personal emissary of Attorney General Kennedy, assured the Cuban that the White House was serious about overthrowing the Castro regime. He handed over a poison injector disguised as a simple pen and promised to smuggle into Cuba a sniper rifle with telescopic sight. But the only leader who got killed that day was President Kennedy. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. noted: ‘The CIA was reviving the assassination plots at the very time President Kennedy was considering the possibility of normalization of relations with Cuba – an extraordinary action. If it was not total incompetence – which in the case of the CIA cannot be excluded – it was a studied attempt to subvert national policy.’47
The most dangerous question: who killed JFK? The CIA could not know in 1963 – and likely still does not know today – whether its murder plots against Castro helped cause the slaying of JFK in Dallas. Some officials suspected that Castro had retaliated against Kennedy, tit for tat. Equally possible was that some of the CIA’s own officers and agents, who hated President Kennedy for failing to back the Bay of Pigs invasion with American air and naval power, had killed the President. The reputed Dallas assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had murky relationships with the CIA, FBI, Naval Intelligence and Cuban exile organizations. Oswald’s killer, Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, reportedly visited Cuba in 1959 to meet Trafficante. Such associations raised questions that must have disturbed CIA insiders. Thorough investigation of any of these leads might uncover a Dallas or New Orleans conspiracy involving CIA assets, which could destroy the agency. At minimum, any serious investigation would uncover the CIA’s
47 Quoted in Anthony Summers, Conspiracy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), p. 426.
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dirty alliance with the Mafia. The Agency, not surprisingly, went into full cover-up mode. It kept its own assassination plots secret from the Warren Commission and offered few details to the FBI. To this day, the CIA withholds from the public thousands of documents potentially relevant to the case. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1979 that Trafficante and another allied Mafia boss ‘had the motive, means, and opportunity to assassinate President Kennedy’. Years later, Trafficante’s attorney claimed that the mob boss admitted on his deathbed being part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, apparently at the behest of Jimmy Hoffa. That admission, like others made in the case, is still highly controversial.48 But a respected Cuban exile leader did testify before Congress under oath about meeting with Trafficante one year before the JFK assassination to discuss a large Teamster pension fund loan. Trafficante told him, ‘It is not right what they are doing to [Jimmy] Hoffa’, who was then the target of a relentless investigation led by the President’s brother. ‘Mark my word, this man Kennedy is in trouble, and he will get what is coming to him.’ When asked how that could be, given polls showing that Kennedy would likely win the next election, Trafficante allegedly replied, ‘You don’t understand me. Kennedy’s not going to make it to the election. He is going to be hit.’49
Blowback and blackmail By its unwise choice of partners and projects, the CIA had left itself wide open to blackmail. If details of the anti-Castro plots came out, the agency could be destroyed. Unfortunately for the CIA, its co-conspirators thought nothing of breaking
48 Frank Ragano with Selwyn Raab, Mob Lawyer (New York: Scribners, 1994), p. 348. G. Robert Blakey, who was chief counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, said of Ragano’s claim, ‘This is the most plausible, most coherent (assassination) theory.’ See Jeffrey Hart, ‘Yes, the Mob Killed Jack Kennedy’, Herald-Journal (Spartanburg, South Carolina), 25 January 1992. For a discussion of confessions by Trafficante, Roselli, Ragano, and Carlos Marcello, see Waldron, Watergate, pp. 206-209. 49 Richard Mahoney, Sons & Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999), pp. 196-197.
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silence if it gave them leverage against the U.S. government. They started turning the screws in 1966, when Giancana’s lawyer Edward Bennett Williams reportedly invoked his client’s history of government service to spring the mob boss from jail in return for him not talking.50 Robert Maheu likewise prevailed on the CIA to block an investigation by the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure into his involvement in illegal wiretapping.51 The subcommittee was chaired by Senator Edward Long of Missouri, who was disturbed by recent revelations of extensive FBI electronic surveillance of the Mob owners of Las Vegas casinos. The illegal wiretaps had been brought to light by Edward Bennett Williams, attorney for several of those mobsters; his client Jimmy Hoffa suspected that he, too, had been a victim of illegal government eavesdropping.52 Ironically, FBI surveillance also showed that Senator Long was a close friend and client of Jimmy Hoffa’s attorney Morris Shenker, who paid Long tens of thousands of dollars for unexplained services, possibly to use his probe of illegal wiretaps to keep Hoffa out of jail.53 To put additional pressure on the federal government on Hoffa’s behalf, Shenker also told Long about Maheu’s role in the illegal wiretapping of Greek ship-owner Aristotle Onassis in 1954 and of Dan Rowen’s Las Vegas hotel room on behalf of Sam Giancana. Learning of this leak, the director of the CIA’s Office of Security warned CIA Director Richard Helms that exposure of Agency involvement with Giancana ‘could be most
50 Waldron, Watergate, p. 351. For a contemporary report on the mystery of Giancana’s release, see Philip Warden, ‘Celler to Ask Report on Giancana from Katzenbach’, Chicago Tribune, 7 June 1966. For accounts questioning whether Giancana actually played the CIA card, see Evan Thomas, The Man to See, p. 198, and Nicholas Gage, ‘2 Mafiosi Linked to CIA Treated Leniently by U.S.’, New York Times, 13 April 1976. 51 IG Report, pp. 72-74; Waldron, Watergate, pp. 352-353. 52 Thomas, The Man to See, pp. 200-202. 53 Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: Norton, 1991), pp. 586-588; William Lambert, ‘Strange Help-Hoffa Campaign of the U.S. Senator from Missouri’, Life, 26 May 1967, p. 28; Walter Sheridan, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972) pp. 414-416.
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embarrassing’. Fortunately for all concerned, Maheu’s attorney, Edward P. Morgan, was a ‘very close friend’ of Shenker. Through Shenker, Morgan convinced Long in the summer of 1966 to drop his investigation of Maheu in the interests of national security.54 As it happens Morgan was also Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa’s Washington attorney, handling his appeal from a 1964 conviction for labor racketeering.55 And Morgan, at the same time, was providing ammunition for Long’s investigation by preparing a multi-million dollar lawsuit on behalf of a ‘Washington lobbyist and Roselli intimate’, charging that the FBI had bugged his apartment.56 Insiders were pulling strings here on multiple levels that not even the CIA could fully fathom (see sidebar below). Morgan was the ultimate ‘deep state’ insider, a ubiquitous player who left little public trace and no published biography. He served as a special agent with the FBI from 1940 to 1947.57 In 1951, he was recruited by the CIA’s clandestine service branch and received a covert security 54 Memorandum in Edward P. Morgan’s CIA file re ‘Inquiry by the Senate Administrative Practices Subcommittee’, no date; Howard Osborn, director of Security, memo to Director of Central Intelligence, re ‘Pros and Cons of the Robert Maheu Case’, 30 June 1966; James P. O’Connell, Assistant Deputy Director of Security, Memorandum for Director of Security, 31 May 1966, re ‘Maheu, Robert A.’, NARA 1993.07.26.17:44:39:000590. In the latter memo, O’Connell wrote, ‘In considering the Sam [Giancana] incident, I feel it is imperative that it not be raised in this or any other Hearing.’ 55 Bartlett and Steele, Empire, pp. 286, 301, 323; Davenport and Eddy, The Hughes Papers, pp. 63-64; Hinckle and Turner, The Fish is Red, p. 267; Bishop to M. A. Jones, 13 May 1971, re ‘Edward Pierpont Morgan’, NARA 124-90133-10235. 56 Morgan’s client was Fred Black. Bishop to M. A. Jones, 13 May 1971, re ‘Edward Pierpont Morgan’, NARA 124-90133-10235; Mahoney, Sons and Brothers, pp. 333-334. Mahoney writes: ‘Senator Edward Long of Missouri, a Hoffa loyalist, seized on the government’s brief in the Black appeal and called for an investigation. . . On December 10, Hoover let loose, charging that Kennedy had directly approved the electronic surveillance. . .The charges and countercharges between Hoover and Kennedy went on for weeks in the press.’ (p. 334) 57 Memo from Callahan to H. N. Bassett, 3 July 1972, re ‘Edward P. Morgan’, NARA 124-90133-10251. In 1950 he became Counsel to a Special Senate Committee Continues at the foot of the next page.
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clearance to handle legal work for a secret Agency contract with Johns Hopkins University.58 In private practice as an attorney, Morgan represented his friend and fellow FBI agent, Robert Maheu, as soon as he opened his private eye office with CIA support.59 Through Maheu, Morgan was one of only a tiny number of non-Agency individuals privy to the CIA-Mafia assassination plots from their earliest days.60 He was also attorney to muckraking columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson and to their mutual friend, Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun.61 In 1973, Morgan would become Watergate counsel to the Democratic National Committee, which previously had been represented by another Hoffa
Note 57 continued investigating charges by Sen. Joseph McCarthy against the State Department. The following year he became Director of Enforcement in Office of Price Stabilization, where he aroused the ire of J. Edgar Hoover by trying to recruit FBI agents for his team. 58 Sidney H. Beman, Acting Chief, WE-4, to Office of Security, ‘Request for operational clearance for Edward P. Morgan’, 21 November 1950, NARA 104-10071-10301. The security clearance was granted by Robert H. Cunningham, an officer in the CIA’s Office of Security, who also arranged Maheu’s employment by the CIA starting in 1953. James P. O’Connell, Assistant Deputy Director of Security, Memorandum for Director of Security, 31 May 1966, re ‘Maheu, Robert A.’, NARA 1993.07.26.17:44:39:000590. 59 See Edward P. Morgan’s closed session testimony to Church Committee, 19 March 1976, NARA 157-10011-10040. Maheu testified that he hired Morgan to represent him in 1964, to prepare a will, but acknowledged being a friend of Morgan since about 1940, Maheu testimony, 23 September 1975, NARA 157-10011-10049. 60 CIA memo, April 1967, ‘Robert A. Maheu’, NARA 1993.07.26.17:44:39:000590; Rappleye and Becker, All American Mafioso, p. 220. 61 Morgan said he got to know Pearson very well over many years as a result of his role as counsel to several high-profile congressional investigations. He also said Greenspun was ‘like a member of my own family.’ See Edward P. Morgan’s closed session testimony to the Church Committee, March 19, 1976, NARA 157-10011-10040. Greenspun told an FBI agent that he had known Morgan since 1954 and had used his legal services several times. See Special Agent in Charge, Las Vegas, to Director, FBI, 17 February 1961, NARA 124- 10279-10181. Among other matters, Morgan defended Greenspun against charges of inciting the murder of Senator Joseph McCarthy (Memo from Callahan to H. N. Bassett, 3 July 1972, re Edward P. Morgan, NARA 124-90133-10251). Greenspun bailed Roselli out of jail Continues at the foot of the next page
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attorney, Edward Bennett Williams. In other words, Morgan connected with just about everyone in this story. Morgan first met Roselli in the 1950s through Greenspun, who was convicted of running guns to Israel before launching his career in newspaper publishing.62 Starting in late 1966, Morgan worked with Maheu, Greenspun, Roselli and Hoffa to persuade the owners of a Teamster-financed Las Vegas hotel- casino – one of whose silent partners was Chicago’s Sam Giancana – to sell out to Howard Hughes.63 Morgan, Roselli and Greenspun would go on to reap large fees from Maheu by doing several more deals for Hughes with mob casino owners in Las Vegas. Through Maheu, Morgan also got a $100,000 annual retainer to handle legal business for the Hughes empire.64 Life should have been good for Roselli, but the FBI was Note 61 continued after an arrest in Las Vegas on December 29, 1966 on misdemeanor charges of not registering as a felon. See Waldron, Watergate, p. 363. Greenspun was also friendly with Hoffa, who financed one of his investments, and Maheu, who bought one of his properties at a handsome price with Hughes’s money. 62 CIA memo, April 1967, ‘Robert A. Maheu’, NARA 1993.07.26.17:44:39:000590. 63 Bartlett and Steele, Empire, ppp. 286-287, 291-295; Davenport and Eddy, The Hughes Papers, p. 67; memo by FBI SA Edward J. Dunn, Jr., Miami, 22 March 1977, re ‘Roskil’ [Roselli killing], NARA 124- 10289-10035; FBI SAC Las Vegas, 14 February 1961. Before the purchase of the Desert Inn hotel and casino from the owners of record, including former Cleveland gambler and bootlegger Morris Dalitz, Hughes had moved into the hotel’s upper floor. Dalitz had opposed the move, until Jimmy Hoffa put the arm on him. Maheu reached Hoffa through Edward Bennett Williams. See Maheu and Hack, Next to Hughes, p. 159. 64 CIA memo, April 1967, ‘Robert A. Maheu’, NARA 1993.07.26.17:44:39:000590; Rappleye and Becker, All American Mafioso, p. 220. As part of his legal representation, Morgan supported Maheu’s campaign to get the Justice Department to drop an antitrust investigation into Hughes’s purchase of hotels and casinos in Las Vegas. See Senate Watergate Report, pp. 986-987. This issue was flagged by the Senate Watergate Committee as one possible motivation for the $100,000 in cash payoffs arranged by Maheu from Hughes to Nixon via Bebe Rebozo. The good times for Morgan ended when Hughes fired Maheu in late 1970, declaring that his long-time manager ‘stole me blind’. See Eddy and Davenport, The Hughes Papers, p. 208.
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following him around the clock by mid-1966. The Justice Department began threatening to deport him to Italy unless he became a federal informant. Not surprisingly, Roselli began drinking heavily.65 Roselli called up his CIA contact in the Office of Security to complain about FBI harassment.66 When his legal problems did not go away, Roselli saw to it that the CIA’s problems didn’t go away, either. Like Maheu, Roselli knew the perfect agent to leverage his knowledge of national security secrets to ward off official investigators: Edward Morgan. In January 1967, on Roselli’s behalf, Morgan leaked to his close friend and client Drew Pearson the explosive story about the Castro assassination plots.67 Morgan knew that Pearson would in turn tell his close friend, Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had led the presidential commission that investigated the JFK assassination in 1964.68 Indeed, Pearson personally briefed President Johnson and 65 Interim Report, p. 85 n4; Roselli testimony before Church Committee, 24 June 1975, NARA 157-10014-10001, pp. 66-71; memorandum from Samuel Papich to Director, FBI, 18 May 1966, ‘Report of Meeting Between Colonel Sheffield Edwards and “Johnny” Roselli’, NARA 104-10133-10090; CIA memo, April 1967, ‘Robert A. Maheu’, NARA 1993.07.26.17:44:39:000590, citing Maheu’s reports on Roselli’s erratic behavior. 66 In December 1966, the CIA resisted a request from the FBI to have Sheffield Edwards testify before a grand jury on his contacts with Roselli. See Waldron, Watergate, pp. 362-363. 67 A detailed study of this episode by the CIA’s Inspector General in 1967 concluded that ‘Roselli is the source, Morgan the channel, and [Jack] Anderson and Pearson the recipients’ of leaks about the CIA- Mafia assassination plots against Castro (IG Report, p. 126). Maheu was also a source for Anderson. Based on Anderson’s help in handling a hostile Senate hearing, ‘Hughes was a friend who owed me a favor. Intermediaries persuaded Maheu to confide in me. He confirmed that the CIA had asked him to sound out the Mafia, strictly off the record, about a contract to hit Fidel Castro.’ See Jack Anderson with Daryl Gibson, Peace, War, and Politics: An Eyewitness Account (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1999), pp. 269 (introduction), 268 (Brewster hearing), 108 (Maheu confirmation). 68 See Edward P. Morgan’s closed session testimony to the Church Committee, March 19, 1976, NARA 157-10011-10040. Roselli first leaked a version of the story to Hank Greenspun – another client of Morgan’s – at the Las Vegas Sun. Greenspun’s story caught the attention of both the FBI and CIA. Note that Jack Anderson already knew Maheu by this point, having been introduced by their mutual friends Greenspun and Morgan.
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Chief Justice Earl Warren at length.69 Morgan distorted key details to maximize Roselli’s blackmail leverage. In his telling, it was the Kennedys, not the CIA, who spearheaded the plots. And to make the story red hot, he maintained that JFK had been murdered by Castro in retaliation.70 As Pearson’s partner, Jack Anderson, wrote on 3 March: ‘President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb, an unconfirmed report that Sen. Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against his late brother.’ Citing a source’s claim that ‘Bobby, eager to avenge the Bay of Pigs fiasco, played a key role in the planning’, Anderson reported rumors that Castro became ‘aware of an American plot upon his life and decided to retaliate against President Kennedy.’71 President Johnson was deeply shaken by the news, even sleepless.72 He had created the Warren Commission in 1964 to prevent just such a story from capturing the public’s
69 Michael Beschloss, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 562; Waldron, Watergate, p. 367. 70 In later Senate testimony, Morgan was unable to identify who told him that Robert Kennedy was behind the plots: ‘All I know is what I was told.’ He named Maheu and Roselli as sources of the Castro retaliation theory, but admitted he had no evidence and added, ‘No one that I recall told me specifically that Castro had hired Oswald to kill Kennedy. . . but in my honest judgment, there is no question but that that’s the answer of how Kennedy happened to be assassinated.’ See Edward P. Morgan’s closed session testimony to the Church Committee, 19 March 1976, NARA 157-10011-10040, pp. 21, 27, 30- 31, 66. 71 Jack Anderson, ‘JFK Assassination Rumored to be Castro Counterplot,’ 3 March 1967, available at
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attention; as he told his close friend and Commission member Senator Richard Russell, ‘We’ve got to take [the assassination of President Kennedy] out of the arena where they’re testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that and kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour.’73 Now, faced with resurgent claims of Communist complicity in the murder of his predecessor, Johnson demanded a CIA briefing. CIA Director Richard Helms ordered his inspector general to prepare a report on agency- sponsored assassination plots, including those against Castro. The ‘Secret Eyes Only’ report, of which Helms destroyed all but one copy, flatly labeled as ‘not true’ the claim advanced in the Anderson columns that ‘Robert Kennedy may have approved’ the plots. The report also highlighted the danger of further revelations damaging the Agency, warning that none of the gangsters involved ‘would have compunctions about dragging in his CIA connection when he was being pushed by law enforcement agencies. . . Roselli appears to be doing it in his conversations with Morgan.’74 The FBI’s liaison to the CIA, Sam Papich, observed bleakly that Roselli and Giancana now had the CIA ‘over a barrel’ and couldn’t be touched by the FBI.75
SIDEBAR: The Jimmy Hoffa Connection Why did Morgan and Pearson/Anderson falsely blame Robert Kennedy for the Castro assassination plots? One reason may be that it served the interests of Jimmy Hoffa, who was desperately fighting 1964 convictions for loan fraud and jury tampering engineered by his mortal enemy, the Attorney General. The leaker of the RFK assassination plot story, Morgan, was Hoffa’s appeals attorney. We have seen that Morgan previously supplied ammunition to Senator Long’s investigation of federal wiretapping to help Hoffa’s case. Even before approaching Pearson, Morgan leaked portions of the
73 Lamar Waldron with Thom Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), p. 772. 74 IG Report, pp. 118, 129. 75 HSCA Report, p. 178.
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story to Hoffa’s friend and pension fund beneficiary, Hank Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun.76 At about the same time, as we have seen, Morgan was teaming up with Hoffa, Greenspun, Maheu and Roselli to swing a hotel-casino deal for Hughes in Las Vegas. Pearson had motives to blame RFK as well.77 He was a staunch political defender of Lyndon Johnson, who despised Bobby as his political rival.78 Pearson published the ‘H-bomb’ column just two days after his confidant, Chief Justice Earl Warren, voted to reconsider Hoffa’s 1964 conviction for jury tampering. (A majority of the Supreme Court turned Hoffa down.)79 Pearson’s partner and the actual author of the assassination column, Jack Anderson, reportedly took large bribes from Hoffa’s Washington fixer, I. Irving Davidson.80 In 1968, Pearson invited Davidson and Allen Dorfman, the
76 Anderson, Peace, War, and Politics, p. 108; John H. Davis, Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York: McGraw Hill, 1989), p. 330. Greenspun received a loan of several million dollars from the Teamster pension fund to build his Paradise Valley Estates and Golf Course in Nevada, at a below-market interest rate (Ralph and Estelle James, Hoffa and the Teamsters: A Study of Union Power [Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1965], p. 235). An FBI informant explained that Hoffa’s support for Israel ‘is what brought [Hoffa lobbyist Irving] Davidson, Greenspun, and Hoffa together’ (FBI report from Robert B. Herrington, to Director FBI, 5 August 1964, NARA 124-10289-10384). Drew Pearson noted in his diary that Greenspun was championing Hoffa’s cause, explaining that ‘Hank met Hoffa when he flew to Israel last fall, and was impressed by him.’ Diary entry of 27 May 1958, in Tyler Abell, ed., Drew Pearson Diaries, 1949-1959 (London, Jonathan Cape, 1974), p. 385. 77 But see note 72 above, which raises questions as to whether Pearson had any responsibility for the contents or timing of the story. Pearson’s diary is suspect on this matter, however, because the first entry pertaining to Morgan’s revelations was dated 13 March 1968 – two months after the two men actually discussed the CIA plots. 78 On this point, Peter Dale Scott notes that the Anderson column appeared one day after Robert Kennedy embarrassed President Johnson ‘with a controversial proposal for the suspension of bombing against North Vietnam’. See Scott, Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013). 79 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, p. 597; Mahoney, Sons and Brothers, p. 334. 80 Mark Feldstein, Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), p. 78.
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Chicago mob’s point man for Teamster pension fund loans, to a private dinner at which Sam Giancana’s friend Frank Sinatra declared that Bobby Kennedy was not ‘qualified to be President of the United States’.81 Even as the Pearson/Anderson columns were running in newspapers across the country in March 1967, Morgan, Roselli and Greenspun were meeting in Las Vegas with Jim Garrison, the controversial District Attorney of New Orleans who had recently opened a major investigation into the JFK assassination. The CIA was naturally worried that its role would come out in his probe.82 But Hoffa’s interests tied into the case as well. In Las Vegas, Garrison’s stay at the Sands hotel-casino was paid for by a trusted lieutenant of one of Hoffa’s top underworld allies, Carlos Marcello, the Mafia boss of Louisiana.83 Just 10 days after Anderson’s column on the CIA plots ran in papers across the country, Hoffa’s fixer Davidson – who had been working angles to win Hoffa a new trial on his 1964 conviction for jury tampering84 – approached the FBI to whisper that ‘Edward G. Partin, who was a witness in the Chattanooga, Tennessee trial of James R. Hoffa, . . . will be subpoenaed by a grand jury in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the near future in connection with his possible involvement in [the Kennedy assassination].’ Davidson said he had ‘heard there is a photograph available of Partin in the presence of Jack Ruby (deceased), convicted of killing Lee Harvey Oswald.’85 Partin, a Louisiana Teamster official and Hoffa confidant, was not simply a witness, but the government’s key witness against the union boss. Of great relevance to the JFK assassination, Partin passed a lie detector test regarding claims about Hoffa’s interest in obtaining plastic explosives to
81 Sheridan, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa, p. 443. 82 IG Report, pp. 120, 127, document 1993.06.30.17:15:56:650140. 83 Sandy Smith, ‘Carlos Marcello, King Thug of Louisiana’, Life, 8 September 1967, pp. 94-95. 84 Sheridan, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa, pp. 190, 404; Gordon Chaplin, ‘Behind the Schemes,’ Washington Post, 2 August 1980. 85 FBI memo, 13 March 1967, ‘Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, November 22, 1963’, FBI 62-109060 JFK HQ file, section 19.
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kill Attorney General Robert Kennedy.86 Hoffa and his personal attorney, Morris Shenker, reportedly amassed huge sums of money to bribe Partin into recanting his testimony.87 When that failed, Garrison turned up the heat, letting a Baton Rouge radio station know that he was investigating Partin’s possible role in the JFK murder. ‘Sensibly, Partin was scared’, writes Dan Moldea. ‘Not only was he being pressured by Jimmy Hoffa and Carlos Marcello; now he was being implicated in the Kennedy assassination.’ Partin himself said: ‘Soon after that, [Hoffa’s attorney] Frank Ragano called me and he said he could get Garrison off my back. In return, he wanted a signed affidavit saying that I lied in Hoffa’s trial. Naturally I didn’t sign. But later it came out that Ragano was in touch with both Trafficante and Marcello during that period.’ 88 Hoffa failed to win his appeals, but was pardoned by President Richard Nixon, a long-time ally of the Teamsters Union, in 1971.
The Nixon White House takes note Despite Morgan’s pressure campaign on his behalf, Roselli’s legal troubles continued to mount. In July 1967, federal agents caught him cheating members of an exclusive private club in Los Angeles of $400,000 in a rigged gin rummy game. In a sinister development for the CIA hierarchy, William Harvey, former head of the CIA’s assassination project, told the FBI’s Papich that Morgan had told Roselli about the CIA’s intervention to block Senator Long’s investigation of Maheu. ‘Johnny [ Roselli] wondered why the “Agency” could not do as much for him as it did for Bob Maheu’, Harvey said pointedly. That December, Harvey warned Papich that if push came to
86 FBI memo from A. Rosen to Mr. DeLoach, 15 March 1967, FBI 62- 109060 JFK HQ file, section 120. The Justice Department took Partin’s assassination story seriously enough to be concerned about a trip to Washington on 1 March 1967 by Hoffa’s enforcer, Puerto Rican Teamster boss Frank Chavez. See Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, p. 597. 87 Sandy Smith, ‘The Fix’, Life, 1 September 1967, p. 22. 88 Moldea, The Hoffa Wars, p. 180; cf. Sheridan, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa, p. 423.
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shove, Roselli’s lawyers would subpoena top CIA officials. ‘Harvey feels the Agency must exert influence to have the indictment “killed”’, Papich reported to the head of the CIA’s Office of Security.89 The threat proved empty, at least for the time being. In December 1968, Roselli was convicted in the card cheating case. Two years later, he lost a petition before the Supreme Court to block his deportation.90 To aid his defense, Morgan referred Roselli to Tom Wadden, a former partner of Edward Bennett Williams, who had defended Sam Giancana. Communicating with the CIA through Maheu, Roselli’s lawyer threatened that ‘if someone did not intercede on [ Roselli]’s behalf, he would make a complete exposé of his activities with the Agency’. CIA Director Helms balked, so Roselli and his new attorney went back to Jack Anderson to turn up the heat.91 After confirming some key details with Maheu, Anderson published two new columns on CIA assassination plots in January 1971, naming Roselli, Maheu, and two senior CIA officers involved in six attempts on Castro’s life.92 His second, more explosive column, suggested that the CIA had operated
89 Howard Osborne, Director of Security, memorandum for the record, re ‘Meeting Between William K. Harvey and Mr. Sam Papich, FBI Liaison’, 8 November 1967; Osborne memorandum for the record, ‘Meetings Between William K. Harvey and John Roselli’, 11 December 1967, NARA 1993.07.26.17:44:39:000590. Harvey replaced Maheu as Roselli’s case officer in April 1962. 90 The decision was rendered on 9 November 1970, weeks before Maheu was fired from the Hughes empire. Roselli was also facing sentencing for his involvement in a card-cheating scandal at the Friar’s Club in Los Angeles. 91 Howard Osborn, Director of Security, memorandum for Director of Central Intelligence, re ‘Roselli, Johnny’, 19 November 1970, NARA 1993.07.26.17:44:39:000590; cf. Rappleye and Becker, All American Mafioso, p. 296; Anderson and Gibson, Peace, War and Politics, p. 107; Ovid Demaris, Captive City: Chicago in Chains (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1969), p. 14. 92 Maheu insisted that he was not the source for Anderson’s 1971 stories, and Anderson told James O’Connell of the CIA’s Office of Security that his sources were in the Justice Department. See James P. O’Connell memorandum for the record, 19 January 1971, re Robert A. Maheu’, and O’Connell memorandum for the record, 18 January 1971, re ‘Johnny Roselli’. NARA 1993.07.21.08:58:07:430620. Continues at the foot of the next page.
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behind President Kennedy’s back. As he put it, the whole story could raise ‘some ugly questions that high officials would rather keep buried’, including whether the plots ‘backfired against President Kennedy’ in 1963.93 Roselli’s ploy worked. The CIA now intervened with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to prevent public disclosure of his past covert operational role with the CIA. The INS halted its deportation proceedings against the gangster, as government lawyers told a court only that Roselli had performed unspecified ‘valuable services to the national security’.94 But Roselli’s blockbuster leak had unintended consequences as well. On the day Anderson’s first column appeared, President Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, asked White House Counsel John Dean to dig up what he could about Maheu, who had just been fired by Nixon’s benefactor, Howard Hughes. The next day, as Anderson published his second column, Attorney General John Mitchell personally contacted Maheu. Nixon biographer Anthony
Note 92 continued However, Anderson writes that Maheu ‘confirmed that the CIA had asked him to sound out the Mafia, strictly off the record, about a contract to hit Fidel Castro.’ See Anderson and Gibson, Peace, War and Politics, p. 108. Other sources were a retired detective with longstanding organized crime associations, Joseph Shimon, and William Harvey, a senior CIA officer who began directing the assassination program in 1962 (HSCA Report, pp. 169, 182). 93 Jack Anderson, ‘Castro Death Plot Charged to CIA’, New Orleans States-Item, 18 January 1971; Jack Anderson, ‘Castro Plot Raises Ugly Questions’, Washington Post, 19 January 1971. For the record, the House Select Committee on Assassinations ‘found no evidence that these operations provoked Premier Castro to assassinate President Kennedy in retaliation.’ See HSCA Report, p. 181. 94 Howard Osborn, Director of Security, memorandum for CIA Executive Director-Comptroller, 15 February 1972 Doc ID 1451843, CIA ‘Family Jewels’ release, 25 June 2007; James P. O’Connell, Deputy Director of Security, Memorandum for the Record, 1 March 1971, re ‘John Roselli’, NARA 1993.07.21.08:58:07:430620; James O’Connell memorandum for the record, 31 January 1972, re ‘John Roselli’, NARA 1993.07.21.08:58:07:430620; Waldron, Watergate, p. 468; Hinckle and Turner, The Fish is Red, p. 286. The latter source incorrectly dates the intervention to 1969.
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Summers notes: ‘At the time Maheu was under pressure to appear before a grand jury in connection with a Las Vegas gambling prosecution. He had so far denied knowledge of the Castro plot story but . . . thought things might “very easily get out of hand” with the grand jury and the press. Maheu came to Washington and, in private, told Mitchell “the entire Castro story”. Mitchell, he remembered, was “shaking” by the time he finished. The attorney general forthwith offered him a deal: instead of going before a grand jury on the Vegas matter, Maheu would merely be interviewed by senior Justice Department officials. In this formal session he did not expound on his work for the CIA. “I assured them”, Maheu recalled, “I intend to keep my word and maintain the secrecy of the mission.” Meanwhile, Assistant Attorney General Will Wilson was quickly assigned to review whatever the Justice Department might hold on the CIA-Mafia contacts. The Nixon White House, he would later tell Watergate investigators, was hoping to turn up proof that the Kennedy brothers had tried to kill Castro, news that could damage the surviving Kennedy brother, Edward, should he run for the presidency in 1972.’95 After discussing ‘the political implications of the information’ with his aide, Attorney General Mitchell showed Nixon the secret Justice Department file on the Castro plots, according to a Senate Watergate Committee staff memorandum first published in 2012.96 Nixon knew that questions might be raised about his own involvement in the CIA plots. After all, as Vice President, he had aggressively pushed the Eisenhower 95 Summers, Arrogance of Power, p. 197; cf. Maheu and Hack, Next to Hughes, pp. 126-127. The gambling case involved hidden ownership at the Frontier hotel and casino, where Roselli had the gift shop lease under Richard Danner’s management. Prior to the sale to Hughes, Roselli had facilitated a secret ownership interest by Anthony Zerilli, a leading Detroit mobster. 96 Memorandum by Terry Lenzner and Marc Lackritz to Senator Ervin, re ‘Relevant to S. Res. 60 of John Roselli’s testimony about his CIA activities’, reprinted in Waldron, Watergate, pp. 701, 731.
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administration to overthrow Castro. Nixon may or may not have known at that time about the assassination plots, but they were planned by officials under his general supervision. As an investigator for White House Counsel John Dean warned, anything that would call attention to ‘Maheu’s controversial activities . . . might well shake loose Republican skeletons from the closet.’97
Watergate: Maheu, Morgan and the Hughes connection Among those skeletons was President Nixon’s secret receipt of $100,000 in cash from Howard Hughes in 1969-70, in return for millions of dollars in government favors. The payoffs had been arranged by Robert Maheu via Nixon’s trusted confidant and personal banker, Charles ‘Bebe’ Rebozo. When Rebozo began negotiating on Nixon’s behalf in 1968 for cash from Hughes, Maheu delegated the matter to none other than Edward Morgan, who was then on a handsome retainer to the Hughes empire. As a condition for approving the payoff, Morgan insisted on handing the money directly to the President, ostensibly so he could assure Hughes that his money got into the right hands.98 Rebozo balked, knowing that Morgan represented the crusading columnist Drew Pearson. In 1960, Pearson had broken the story about a $205,000 Hughes ‘loan’ to the Nixon family, which helped cost Nixon the election against Kennedy, and then his bid to become governor of California in 1962. Rebozo would later testify during the Watergate inquiry that he could recall the Hughes loan controversy ‘vividly’ and ‘just did not want to be responsible, in any way, for anything that might create
97 Caulfield to Dean, 1 February 1972, in U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, Executive Session Hearings, 93/2 (1974), Book 21, 9755ff. Hereafter SWH. I do not share the view of John Davis (Mafia Kingfish, p. 366) and other authors that Nixon feared public exposure of his own involvement in the mob- linked assassination plots, which to this day has never been demonstrated. In particular, Nixon did not support paying hush money to E. Howard Hunt for that reason. Hunt had to be silenced because of his role in the illegal burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in September 1971. 98 Lukas, Nightmare, p. 114.
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embarrassment’ by risking leaks to Pearson through Morgan.99 So the Hughes payoffs were delayed until 1969, when Maheu gave the job to an old friend of Nixon and Rebozo who had just been hired by Maheu to run one of Hughes’s casinos. Unfortunately for the President, however, Maheu turned renegade when Hughes fired him in late 1970. An embittered Maheu began spilling what he knew about Hughes to his friends Jack Anderson and Hank Greenspun. In August 1971, Anderson published a low-key story alleging that Rebozo had received $100,000 from one of Hughes’s casinos on Nixon’s behalf.100 On January 24, 1972, as Nixon’s re-election campaign was heating up, Anderson repeated his allegation about the Rebozo cash.101 ‘This time’, notes Anderson biographer Mark Feldstein, ‘Anderson’s story produced immediate alarm in the White House, where Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman closely guarded a file on Hughes that was marked “Top Secret – CONFIDENTIAL”. Hours after Anderson’s column was published, the President privately cursed “that goddamned Hughes thing”. The next day, John Ehrlichman asked the White House counsel, John Dean, to “very discreetly” look into the matter.’102 Dean learned with alarm that Jack Anderson was continuing to dig relentlessly into Hughes’ connections to Nixon, along with other scandals that could hurt the administration.103
99 SWH, Book 21, 9942-9943, 9986. Rebozo’s political instincts were sound. Remarkably, Morgan would become counsel to the Democratic National Committee in March 1973 for its lawsuit against the Nixon team stemming from Watergate. See Waldron, Watergate, p. 678. 100. Through Maheu, Anderson had access to Hughes’s private papers, which were still under court seal. Jack Anderson, ‘Howard Hughes: Hidden Kingmaker’, Washington Post, 6 August 1971; Anderson, Peace, War, and Politics, p. 272. To protect his source, Anderson included a quote from Maheu, refusing to comment. 101 Jack Anderson, ‘Two Ghosts Haunt Nixon’s Campaign’, Washington Post, 24 January 1972. 102 Feldstein, Poisoning the Press, pp. 222-223. 103 In 1969, Pearson and Anderson had broken a story about Bebe Rebozo and Herbert Klein, Nixon’s communications director, visiting Continues at the foot of the next page.
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Pounded by a steady stream of Anderson’s embarrassing revelations in 1971 and 1972, White House Special Counsel Charles Colson allegedly ordered Hunt and Liddy to incapacitate or even murder the newsman. The two operatives met with a recently retired CIA physician, who in 1960 had supplied botulin-laced cigars to assassinate Castro – the very plots that Anderson had exposed. They discussed various ways to poison the columnist, but were told by superiors to stand down when their focus shifted to breaking into O’Brien’s Watergate office instead.104 Meanwhile, others in the White House sought less dramatic ways to discredit Anderson. To that end they called on investigators from the FBI, IRS and even a high-powered private eye service, Intertel, owned by the gambling firm Resorts International, which at the same time was investigating Maheu on behalf of the Hughes organization.105 Note 103 continued Nevada ‘to smooth the feathers of Howard Hughes, the biggest owner of Nevada real estate, who has protested vigorously against previous underground nuclear tests.’ See 26 June 1969 column at
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The CIA’s Office of Security, which had ordered the Castro death plots, assigned 16 agents to surveil Anderson’s every move, in blatant violation of its charter.106 James McCord – recently retired from CIA’s Office of Security and now the security director for the Nixon re-election campaign – assigned one of his own employees to infiltrate Anderson’s office.107 Among other things, McCord learned about Anderson’s personal and business connections to Larry O’Brien, Hank Greenspun, the attorney Edward Morgan, and even to a Mafia- connected lobbyist for Jimmy Hoffa.108 It was enough to prove that even a paranoid like Nixon really did have enemies. As I noted at the outset, Nixon’s fear that Maheu might have shared more details of the Hughes-Nixon relationship with his close friend Democratic Party Chairman Larry O’Brien, most likely motivated the fateful break-in at O’Brien’s offices on 17 June 1972. Nixon’s team wanted to know what O’Brien knew, and if he had any skeletons of his own that could be used to keep him quiet.109 The crime was radically self-defeating. It delivered the White House into the hands of this anti-Nixon network, starting with attorney Edward Bennett Williams. Besides all of
Note 105 continued 1973; Anderson and Gibson, Peace, War, and Politics, pp. 230-233. For general background on Intertel, see Jim Hougan, Spooks; Tom Zito, ‘Peloquin of Intertel: Intelligence Security, “Targets of Opportunity”’, Washington Post, 20 February 1977. 106 Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda, pp. 85-95; Anderson and Gibson, Peace, War, and Politics, pp. 233-241. 107 Feldstein, Poisoning the Press, p. 280. 108 James McCord, ‘Counter-Espionage Agent for the Republicans: The True Story of the Watergate Case’, in House Armed Services, Special Subcommittee on Intelligence, Inquiry into the Alleged Involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency in the Watergate and Ellsberg Matters, hearings, 94/1 (1975), pp. 838-43. 109 Contrary to Lamar Waldron, I do not believe that a major motive for the break-in was to find a document allegedly sent by the Cuban government outlining the many attempts made against Fidel Castro’s life. That claim originated with Frank Sturgis. The document may have been of interest but most of the information could have been gleaned from Cuban press accounts over the years, and none of the nformation would have been particularly credible to a U.S. audience. Therefore, it could not have been particularly useful to the Democrats, the Nixon campaign, the CIA, or any other relevant group.
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his other associations, Williams represented both the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Washington Post. At 5 a.m. on Saturday, 17 June, one of Williams’s law partners was woken up with the news that five men had been arrested inside the DNC; he then quickly tipped off the managing editor at the Washington Post, a good friend, to get a reporter to cover the story. Williams then encouraged Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee – one of his very closest friends – to continue the newspaper’s hard-hitting coverage of Watergate during the darkest days of the Nixon administration’s counterattacks. A lawsuit filed by Williams’s law firm on behalf of the DNC and O’Brien against the Republicans allowed the Democrats to depose senior administration officials and keep the case alive until Congress took it up.110 Williams was even godfather to a child of federal judge John Sirica, who tried the Watergate burglars and used the threat of lengthy sentences to force them to talk.111 Not surprisingly, Williams ranked high on President Nixon’s list of enemies. In a conversation with two top aides on 15 September 1972, Nixon said, ‘I wouldn’t want to be in Edward Bennett Williams' position after this election. . . . We’re going after him. . . . I think we are going to fix the son of a bitch. Believe me. We are going to. We've got to, because he’s a bad man.’ Haldeman chimed in, ‘That is a guy we’ve got to ruin.’112 Instead, of course, it was Nixon who was ruined, as 110 Thomas, The Man to See, pp. 58, 233-234, 275. On Joseph Califano’s tip to Howard Simons at the Post, see also Ben Bradlee, A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 324-325. In March 1973, Califano had to drop the DNC as a client when Judge Richey ruled he had a conflict of interest with his representation of the Washington Post. His replacement as counsel to the DNC lawsuit was Edward Morgan. See Waldron, Watergate, p. 678. 111 Thomas, The Man to See, pp. 68, 277. Thomas does not claim that Williams influenced Sirica’s approach to the Watergate trial, but Williams did get Sirica to go easy on Woodward and Bernstein after they improperly approached grand jurors on the case. 112 Transcript of Nixon conversation with H. R. Haldeman and John Dean, 15 September 1972, at
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Williams continued flying high.
Nixon’s cover-up and ‘the Bay of Pigs thing’ Nixon didn’t go down without a fight. Borrowing directly from the tactics of Roselli, Williams and Morgan, Nixon used the Watergate burglars’ links to the still-secret Castro assassination plots to blackmail the CIA into enforcing a cover- up of the break-in on national security grounds. He even got away with it – for a short time. The Watergate burglars were no ordinary lot of ruffians. There was the suave Howard Hunt, a globetrotting CIA officer who was among the first Agency officials to recommend assassinating Castro to make way for a new, pro-American regime. His first Watergate recruit, Bernard Barker, had been Hunt’s right-hand man on the Bay of Pigs operation and was a former member of pre-Castro Cuba’s secret police. Barker stayed on the CIA’s payroll until 1966, when the Agency dropped him for being beholden to ‘gambling and criminal elements’, a euphemism for Florida godfather Santos Trafficante’s organization.113 Bay of Pigs veteran Rolando Martinez was still on the CIA’s payroll when he broke into the Watergate offices of the DNC, and was involved in 1963 in a secret Mafia-CIA-backed raid on Cuba aimed at discrediting the Kennedy administration.114 Then there was soldier of fortune Frank Sturgis, who had personally engaged in several
Note 112 continued the intriguing comment, ‘He misbehaved very badly in the Hoffa matter. Our – some pretty bad conduct there, too, but go ahead.’ Later, Nixon targeted Williams for tax audits. See Nixon conversation with Charles Colson, 1 January 1973, in Stanley Kutler, Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (New York: The Free Press, 1997) p. 192. For whatever reason, the IRS audited Williams for three consecutive years during the Nixon administration. Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (NY: W. W. Norton, 1992), p. 105. 113 Waldron, Watergate, pp. 86, 111. 114 David Kaiser, The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 160-165; Anthony Carrozza, William D. Pawley: The Extraordinary Life of the Adventurer, Entrepreneur, and Diplomat Who Co-Founded the Flying Tigers (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2012), pp. 255-265.
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plots to murder Castro as well as the 1963 raid.115 Finally, James McCord, who was in charge of planting bugs in the DNC, had spent his career as a senior member of the CIA’s Office of Security, where the CIA-Mafia plots were hatched. Nixon exploited these associations to coerce the CIA into participating in his cover-up. Less than a week after the break-in, Haldeman told Nixon he thought the key to stopping the investigation was to play on the suspicion of FBI agents working the case that it was some kind of CIA operation. ‘The only way to do that is from White House instructions’, Haldeman said. ‘And it’s got to be to [CIA Director Richard] Helms . . .’ Nixon then jumped in to suggest a script that his aides could use to persuade Helms to shut down the FBI: ‘Of course, this . . . Hunt . . . that will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things and . . . we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further.’ A little later the President elaborated: ‘When you . . . get these people in, say: . . . the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again. And . . . that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, don’t go any further into this case, period!’116 A few hours later, Nixon reiterated to Haldeman, ‘Tell them that if it gets out, it’s going to make the CIA look bad, it’s going to make Hunt look bad, and it’s likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs which we think would be very unfortunate for the CIA.’117 When Haldeman relayed this message to Helms, the CIA Director’s reaction was striking. ‘Turmoil in the room’, Haldeman recalled, ‘Helms gripping the arms of his chair, leaning forward and shouting, “The Bay of Pigs had nothing to do with this. I have no concern about the Bay of Pigs.”’ Yet the seemingly irrelevant historical reference did the job. For the next two weeks, Helms and his deputy asked the FBI to 115 Waldron, Watergate, p. 473. 116 White House conversation with H.R. Haldeman, 23 June 1973, at
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‘desist from expanding this investigation’ lest it ‘run afoul of [CIA] operations.’118 Just what was ‘the Bay of Pigs thing’ that so agitated Helms and prompted the CIA to cover-up? Haldeman later offered a most intriguing explanation: ‘When Nixon said “It’s likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing” he might have been reminding Helms, not so gently, of the cover-up of the CIA assassination attempts on . . . Fidel Castro – a CIA operation that may have triggered the Kennedy tragedy and which Helms desperately wanted to hide.’119 That was the very hypothesis Anderson had planted in his 1971 columns, advancing the blackmail scheme hatched by Roselli and his attorney Edward Morgan. The brief cover-up instigated by the White House proved to be a Pyrrhic victory. Nixon lost a vigorous legal battle to keep the conversation secret. When tapes of his 23 June meetings were made public on 5 August 1974, after a Supreme Court ruling against Nixon’s claims of executive privilege, this so-called ‘smoking gun’ proved that Nixon had directed a cover-up. His remaining political supporters dropped him, making impeachment a foregone conclusion. President Nixon resigned four days later, on 9 August. Thus the scandal we call Watergate was not one single conspiracy by Nixon, nor a simple conspiracy by his opponents to run him from office. Rather, it was the culmination of many smaller plots and pressure campaigns mounted over the years by deep state insiders, drawing on their knowledge of the country’s darkest political and national security secrets. Watergate was like an eruption of pus from a sore on the body politic that had been festering for more than a decade. Although Watergate investigators never pieced the whole story together, they had some glimmerings of how these covert networks played out in the Nixon scandals. Prosecutors secretly called in John Roselli for questioning, a fact only disclosed years later. According to the mobster’s
118 Fred Emery, Watergate (New York: Touchstone, 1994), p. 193. 119 Haldeman, Ends of Power, pp. 35, 38-40. It is important to emphasize that Nixon was manipulating the CIA’s sensitivity over the assassination issue, not his own.
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attorney, prosecutors were checking out a theory that the White House ordered the break-in ‘...because Nixon or somebody in the Republican Party suspected that . . . a document existed showing Nixon was involved with or knew what was going on with the CIA and the assassination of Castro. . . They wanted to try to get this information that Nixon suspected [the Democrats] were going to try to use against him.’120 Evidence for this particular theory is thin.121 But the fact that Watergate investigators took the time to interrogate Roselli shows that his secrets still had power. A couple of years later Roselli would testify again before Congress, this time on the JFK assassination. For his troubles, he ended up being assassinated himself – strangled, stuffed into a 55-gallon drum, and dumped into waters off Florida. Many researchers suspect that the hit was ordered by Santos Trafficante.122 These political intrigues would have been impossible in a truly open society. The wielders of secret information and secret power – billionaires, CIA operatives, mobsters, super- lawyers, journalists, and lobbyists – are only rarely held accountable for their invisible deeds. So long as they continue to operate with no effective public scrutiny, America’s political system will remain highly vulnerable to manipulation at great cost to our democracy. *
120 Rappleye and Becker, All American Mafioso, p. 307. As it happens, Frank Sturgis claimed that he and others on the burglary team were looking for a Cuban dossier on assassination plots against Castro. For a lengthy, but ultimately unpersuasive, treatment of this motive, see Waldron, Watergate. 121 There is little credible evidence implicating Nixon in the plots to murder Castro. See Evan Thomas, ‘Whose Obsession Is It, Anyway? Oliver Stone Can’t Resist Linking Nixon to JFK's Assassination, but He’s Wrong,’ Newsweek, 11 December 1995; Christopher Matthews, ‘New Tapes Debunk Oliver Stone’s “Nixon”’, San Francisco Examiner, 1 January 1998. For a contrary view, see Summers, Arrogance of Power, p. 177ff. 122 Nicholas Gage, ‘ Roselli Called a Victim of Mafia Because of His Senate Testimony’, New York Times, 25 February 1977. Sam Giancana was also the victim of a mob hit.
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Jonathan Marshall is author or co-author of five books, including The Lebanese Connection: Corruption, Civil War, and the International Drug Traffic (Stanford, 2012); Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (University of California, 1998); and The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (South End Press, 1987).
Bibliography Note: This article is based on declassified FBI and CIA documents held in the National Archives (NARA) and mostly available online at
Reports HSCA Report: or House of Representatives, Select Committee on Assassinations, staff report, The Evolution and Implications of the CIA-Sponsored Assassination Conspiracies Against Fidel Castro, March 1979 IG Report: or CIA Inspector General, Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, 23 May 1967 Interim Report: or Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee), interim report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 94/1 (US Government Printing Office, 1975) SWH: or U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, Executive Session Hearings, 93/2 (1974)
Books Abell, Tyler, ed. Drew Pearson Diaries, 1949-1959. London, Jonathan Cape, 1974. Anderson, Jack with Daryl Gibson. Peace, War, and Politics: An Eyewitness Account. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1999. Bartlett, Donald L. and James B. Steele. Empire: The Life,
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Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. Beschloss, Michael. Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Bradlee, Ben. A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Breckenridge, Scott. The CIA and the Cold War: A Memoir. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1973. Carrozza, Anthony. William D. Pawley: The Extraordinary Life of the Adventurer, Entrepreneur, and Diplomat Who Co-Founded the Flying Tigers. Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2012. Davenport, Elaine and Eddy, Paul with Hurwitz, Mark. The Hughes Papers (London: Sphere Books, 1977). Davis, John H. Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. New York: McGraw Hill, 1989. Demaris, Ovid. Captive City: Chicago in Chains. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1969. Emery, Fred. Watergate. New York: Touchstone, 1994. Evans, Peter. Ari: The Life and Times of Aristotle Socrates Onassis. New York: Summit Books, 1986. Feldstein, Mark. Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Gentry, Curt. J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. New York: Norton, 1991. Haldeman, H. R. with Joseph DiMona. The Ends of Power. New York: Times Books, 1978. Hinckle, Warren and William Turner. The Fish is Red: The Story of the Secret War Against Castro. New York: Harper and Row, 1981. Hougan, Jim. Spooks: The Haunting of America—The Private Use of Secret Agents. New York: William Morrow, 1978. Hughes, Maureen. The Countess and the Mob. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2010. Hunt, E. Howard, with Greg Aunapu, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate & Beyond. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007.
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James, Ralph and Estelle. Hoffa and the Teamsters: A Study of Union Power. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1965. Kaiser, David. The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Kutler, Stanley. Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes. New York: The Free Press, 1997. Kutler, Stanley. The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Liddy, G. Gordon, Will. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980. Lukas, J. Anthony. Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years. New York: Viking, 1976. Maheu, Robert and Richard Hack. Next to Hughes: Behind the Power and Tragic Downfall of Howard Hughes by His Closest Adviser. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Mahoney, Richard. Sons & Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999. Moldea, Dan. The Hoffa Wars: Teamsters, Rebels, Politicians and the Mob. New York: Paddington Press, 1978. Oudes, Bruce, ed. From the President: Richard Nixon’s Secret Files. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Pack, Robert. Edward Bennett Williams for the Defense. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. Pearson, Drew. Washington Merry-Go-Round: The Drew Pearson Diaries, 1960-1969. Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2015. Ragano, Frank with Selwyn Raab. Mob Lawyer. New York: Scribners, 1994. Rappleye, Charles and Ed Becker. All American Mafioso: The John Rosselli Story. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Reid, Ed and Ovid Demaris. The Green Felt Jungle. New York: Pocket Books, 1963. Russo, Gus. The Outfit: The Role of Chicago’s Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America. New York: Bloomsbury, 2001. Scott, Peter Dale. Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013. Sheridan, Walter. The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972.
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Smith, Joseph Burkholder. Portrait of a Cold Warrior. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1976. Summers, Anthony. The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon. New York: Viking, 2000. Thomas, Evan. The Man to See: Edward Bennett Williams. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991. Waldron, Lamar with Thom Hartmann. Ultimate Sacrifice. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005. Waldron, Lamar. Watergate: The Hidden History. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012.
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Colin Wallace and the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry
The Kincora cover-up continues
Robin Ramsay
Back story This journal has been reporting on the Colin Wallace story since 1986.1 Among the many striking things Wallace has spoken and written about over the years was the situation in the Kincora boys’ home in Belfast in the early 1970s, where some of the inmates were being sexually abused by the male staff. One of them, the late William McGrath, was a senior figure in the Loyalist movement and ran a strange organisation called Tara.2 The Kincora abuse has been an acutely embarrassing issue for the British state because elements of its secret arms in Northern Ireland, MI5 and the RUC Special Branch, were aware of the abuse of the inmates but chose to ignore it because of MI5’s interest in McGrath. Among the documents Wallace had kept from his days working for the secret state’s psy-ops Information Policy unit in Northern Ireland was a memorandum he had written in 1974 which showed institutional awareness of the abuse at Kincora.3
1 If you are unfamiliar with Wallace, there is a reasonably accurate Wiki summary at
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When the current heightened awareness of institutional sexual abuse led to the creation of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in 2014, rather than include Northern Ireland in IICSA, the British state set up a separate inquiry there, the inquiry into Historical Institutional Abuse in Northern Ireland between 1922 and 1995 (HIA). But while the mainland UK inquiry has the power to compel testimony under oath, the Northern Ireland version did not. When this was announced we knew that another Kincora cover-up was going to be perpetrated and British secret state awareness of the Kincora abuse was going to be denied yet again. Because of this Colin Wallace declined to to be interviewed by HIA.4 However he did supply the inquiry with hundreds of pages of documents and some of his claims are discussed – and dismissed – in the HIA report.5 HIA held 223 days of public hearings between 13 January 2014 and 8 July 2016 and published its report on the day after the American presidential inauguration. This resulted in short pieces in the Guardian on page 14 and in the Independent on p. 22. Job done: report out and no-one paid any attention. The following paragraphs are from chapter 3 of that report.6
para 391 We are satisfied that it was not until 1980 that the RUC Special Branch, MI5, the SIS and Army Intelligence became aware that [William] McGrath had been sexually abusing residents at Kincora, and they learnt of that when it became the 4
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subject of public allegations and a police investigation was launched.
para 405 We do not regard Mr Wallace as truthful in his accounts of what he knew about sexual abuse in Kincora, or of what he did with that knowledge, between 1972 and 1974. In particular, for the reasons we have given, we do not accept that the critical document of 8 November 1974 was created at that date. So there it is: the kernel of what the HIA had to discredit. In Volume 9, Kincora Boys’ Home (Part 2), from para 482 onwards, the report works hard at rubbishing Wallace’s 1974 memorandum which revealed institutional knowledge within the British secret state of McGrath’s activities at Kincora and finally concludes – its only option – that Wallace fabricated it. Colin Wallace issued the following statement to the media after the report’s publication. Although I initially offered to give evidence to the Inquiry, I later decided not to mainly on the grounds that the Government repeatedly refused to give it the same legal powers as the corresponding Inquiry in London. I believe that both the perception and the reality of the Government’s decision is one of unfairness to the victims. Despite my decision, I did, however, provide the Inquiry with 265 pages of comment and supporting documents, drawing attention to false or misleading information contained in the transcripts of the public hearings. My reason for doing so was to enable the Inquiry to investigate and corroborate the accuracy of my past comments about Kincora and related matters, and to provide the Inquiry with the opportunity to correct the relevant errors in the its published transcripts. None of the information I provided to the Inquiry is new. Although some of it has not previously been in the
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public domain, it has been in the possession of the Ministry of Defence and other Government agencies for many years and should have been made available by those authorities to the Inquiry. It should also have been made available by the authorities to previous Inquiries and the Government needs to explain why that did not happen. Even more worrying, is the acknowledged fact that key Army Intelligence files relating to Tara and William McGrath appear to have gone missing after they were handed over by the Army to MI5 in 1989, prior to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s admission to Parliament (30 January 1990) that Ministers had ‘inadvertently misled’ Parliament about my case. There also appears to be no record whatsoever of what became of all the ‘Clockwork Orange’ project files which I handed over to my superiors when I left Army Headquarters in Lisburn in February 1975. Some of those files related to William McGrath. To make matters worse, it is now clear from the Inquiry’s transcripts that a senior MI5 officer, Ian Cameron, falsely accused me of ‘leaking’ information to the press about William McGrath. His claim was that I did so without authority. The MI5 claim is bizarre because, as my Army superior at the time has confirmed in the press, I was officially instructed by my superiors in Psy Ops, at the behest of Major General Peter Leng, to brief the press about McGrath as early as 1973, in a bid to draw media attention to his activities. I have no doubts whatsoever that because General Leng wanted the press to investigate McGrath, he had very good reasons for doing so and deserves credit for what he did. It is also significant that the MI5 officer who accused me of ‘leaking’ information about McGrath to
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the press later refused to be interviewed by the Terry Inquiry investigators about why he ordered Army Intelligence officer, Captain Brain Gemmell, to stop investigating William McGrath. Clearly, the Army and MI5 had very different agendas regarding McGrath and his activities. The astonishing claim by the authorities, including the Intelligence Services, that they knew nothing about the allegations surrounding McGrath’s sexual activities until 1980 is a total travesty. As my documents clearly show, it is simply not credible that I knew more about McGrath and his activities than the combined Intelligence community did in 1973/74. One must conclude, therefore, that the Intelligence Services did not tell the Inquiry all they knew about McGrath during the 1970s. Indeed, most of the information I possessed about McGrath in 1973/74 came from within the Intelligence community and was quite substantial. Moreover, my 1973 press briefing document clearly contains more information about McGrath than the Intelligence Services have claimed to the Inquiry that they possessed at that time! Finally, to suggest that because I gave the press the exact postal address (including the street number of the property) and telephone number of the Kincora home, but did not actually include the name, ‘Kincora’, somehow invalidates my evidence, is an unacceptable attempt to avoid facing up to what I have been saying over the years. That information also shows that the claim made by the Intelligence Services to the Inquiry that they were not aware until 1980 of where McGrath worked is demonstrably false. Overall, I believe the Inquiry has been a wasted opportunity to establish the full facts relating to this
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matter and I feel the victims have been let down yet again, as they were by previous Inquiries.
In addition this press statement, Wallace has written a 45 page analysis and refutation of the sections of the HIA report about him. This is on the HIA site,7 which is in the ridiculous position of offering both its own report and analyses by Wallace and Roy Garland which refute large chunks of if it.
7 At
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This is a chapter in my 2002 The Rise of New Labour, which is still available for virtually nothing on-line from Amazon and Abebooks. It originally appeared in Lobster 43 and seems worth reposting in the context of the Al Jazeera revelations about Israeli operations in British politics.1
Blair and Israel
Robin Ramsay
In January 1994, three months before John Smith’s death, the then shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair, with wife Cherie Booth, went on a trip to Israel at the Israeli government’s expense - a trip, incidentally, neither the Sopel nor Rentoul biographies of Blair mentioned.2 Blair had always been sympathetic to Israel, had shared chambers with Board of Deputies of British Jews President Eldred Tabachnik,3 and had joined the Labour Friends of Israel on becoming an MP. Two months after returning from Israel, Tony Blair was introduced to Michael Levy at a dinner party by Gideon Meir, the number two in the Israeli embassy in London.4Levy was a retired businessman who had made his money creating and then selling a successful record company and had become a major fund-raiser for Jewish charities. Levy was ‘dazzled by Blair’s drive and religious commitment’ and the two men became friends.5 A month later the leader of the Labour Party, John Smith, died, and Blair won the leadership election contest with Gordon Brown – in some accounts with financial 1 See for example
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assistance from Levy.6 All accounts are agreed that Michael Levy then set about raising money – the figure of £7 million is widely quoted – for the personal use of his new ‘friend’, Tony Blair, leader of the Labour Party. The big early contributors to the ‘blind trust’ which funded Blair’s office were: ‘....a group of businessmen involved in Jewish charities whose decisions to give to Labour have been crucially influenced by the party’s strong pro-Israeli stance under both Tony Blair and his predecessor John Smith...... Levy brought the world of North London Jewish business into the Labour Party.....some of the names whom Levy persuaded to donate include Sir Emmanuel Kaye of Kaye Enterprises, Sir Trevor Chinn of Lex Garages, Maurice Hatter of IMO Precision Control and David Goldman of the Sage software group...it is clear, however, that for this group Blair’s (and Smith’s before him) strong support for Israel is an important factor, especially with those such as Kaye, Chinn and Levy himself, who raise large sums for Israeli causes. Nick Cosgrave, director of Labour Friends of Israel, says Blair “brought back Labour Friends of Israel into the Labour Party, in a sense ...... before the majority of supporters of Labour Friends felt uncomfortable with the Labour Party”.’ 7 By 1994 it was clear that, barring a miracle, the Tories would lose the next General Election; Tony Blair was widely recognised as one of Labour’s coming men; and there had already been speculation in the media – notably in The Sunday Times – that he would succeed John Smith as Labour leader. It is hard to read this account of the events from Blair’s trip to Israel to the funding of his private office and not conclude that the Israeli government had spotted Blair as a very pro-Israeli politician and possible leader of the Labour Party and steered
6 In most – e.g. John Rentoul, Tony Blair, (London: Little Brown, 1995), p. 390 – the money came from Barry Cox, Peter Mandelson’s erstwhile boss at London Weekend Television (LWT). On the LWT network see Andy Beckett, ‘A world apart’, in The Guardian (Weekend), 4 September 1999. 7 John Lloyd, New Statesman, 27 February 1998.
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him towards the leading Jewish fund-raiser in London.8 As leader of the party, with the Levy-raised money in his ‘blind trust’, Blair achieved financial independence from the trade unions and the Labour Party. Blair hated the Labour Party and viewed it as his enemy.9 With the Levy money Blair was able to begin expanding his private office and he hired Alastair Campbell, former Political Editor at the Daily Mirror as his press officer in September 1994 and diplomat Jonathan Powell as his chief of staff in January 1995. The Labour Party now had a leader over whom it had no control at all. * Re-reading this after the Al Jazeera revelations, we could add the following quote about Gideon Meir (see note 4 above) from the Jabotinsky Institute of Israel:10 ‘Thus Gideon Meir had the privilege of cultivating two statesmen from Great Britain from the ranks of the Labour Party, familiarizing them with the State of Israel and the issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its influence upon the relationship between Israel and the European nations. In time, these two politicians were 8 It was reported in the Sunday Telegraph 25 July 1999 that Blair tried to make Levy a Minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). This would have been a stunning coup by the Israelis but it was resisted by the Foreign Secretary, at the behest, presumably, of the traditionally pro-Arab FCO. Instead Levy became Blair’s personal envoy to the Middle East – to no great effect thus far. 9 On Blair’s dislike of Labour see Philip Gould, The Unfinished Revolution, (London: Little Brown, 1998), p. 216 where he quotes Blair: ‘I will never compromise. I would rather be beaten and leave politics than bend to the party. I am going to take the party on’; and Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘Peter’s Friend’ in The Observer 4 February 2001 where Wheatcroft quotes Blair’s friend, the novelist Robert Harris: ‘You have to remember that the great passion of Tony's life is his hatred of the Labour Party.’ If he hated the party, why did he join it? One report in an (alas) undated cutting I have, from the Daily Mail circa 1997, I think, has a purported barrister friend saying he asked why Blair, no lefty, had joined Labour. Blair replied that he thought he would rise faster in Labour. Ah, the authentic ringing tone of a pure careerist move! On the other hand, the Daily Mail? The Forger’s Gazette, as Michael Foot called it? Maybe..... 10
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both to become heads of state: Anthony (Tony) Blair (1997-2007) and Gordon Brown (2007-2010).’ And my caution – It is hard to read this account of the events from Blair’s trip to Israel to the funding of his private office and not conclude...... – was unnecessary. Blair joined Labour Friends of Israel and the Israelis helped to get him elected leader. He might have made it on his own – after four general election defeats the Labour Party was ripe for a televisual, middle class, Thatcherite, young careerist – but the money raised by Levy helped and made him independent of the Party.11
11 If it was indeed raised by Levy and not just laundered through Levy by the Israeli state....
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Sex scandals and sexual blackmail in America’s deep politics
Jonathan Marshall
Note: In my ‘Blackmail and the Deep State’, also in this issue of Lobster, I discussed the importance of political blackmail as a force in America’s deep politics from the late 1950s to Watergate. This article, which also addresses Watergate, focuses on the politics of sexual blackmail and sex scandals over many decades.
In 2016, American voters elected as their 45th President a man who privately boasted of groping women, admitted getting his mistress (Marla Maples) pregnant while still married to his first wife (Ivana Trump), and bragged of having ‘three other girlfriends’ while ‘living with Marla’.1 Despite this record, many conservative evangelical leaders and other champions of ‘family values’ supported his candidacy against former Senator Hillary Clinton.2 Trump appears to be surviving even apparently calculated leaks by hostile U.S. intelligence officials of unsubstantiated reports that Russian spies ‘tried to blackmail him with sex tapes’ that showed him cavorting with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room.3 Books cited in the footnotes are listed in the bibliography at the end of the essay. 1 David Fahrenthold, ‘Trump Recorded Having Extremely Lewd Conversation About Women in 2005’, Washington Post, 8 October 2016; Mary Jones, ‘Trump’s Reference to Bill Clinton Affair Underscores His Own History of Infidelity’, Washington Post, 25 September 2016; Chris Cillizza, ‘Donald Trump’s “John Miller” Interview is Even Crazier than You Think’, Washington Post, 16 May 2016; cf. Amber Phillips, ‘GOP Senator Calls Out Donald Trump’s “Many Affairs” in Lengthy Tweetstorm’, Washington Post, 25 January 2016. 2 Sarah Pulliam Bailey, ‘“Still the Best Candidate”: Some Evangelicals Still Back Trump Despite Lewd Video’, Washington Post, 8 October 2016. 3 Scott Shane, ‘What We Know and Don’t Know About the Trump- Russia Dossier’, New York Times, 11 January 2017. No evidence has surfaced to corroborate these widely reported allegations, which appeared in an opposition research memos by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele.
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It remains to be seen whether Trump’s electoral success reflects a sea change in public attitudes or simply his unique ability to flout the conventional rules of American politics. For most of U.S. history, revelations of such personal behavior would have knocked a presidential candidate out of the race. America’s moralizing culture has treated unconventional or unauthorized sex by politicians as shameful and even shocking – even though it is far more common than many people assume.4 As we will see, the media’s willingness to shame politicians through exposure of their personal transgressions has changed markedly over time, but has always been a threat to their careers. One outstanding consequence has been to elevate the importance of sexual blackmail and public exposure as tactics of covert political intrigues, just as they have been in espionage.5 If information is power, then information about adultery, homosexuality, and other private sexual indiscretions by officials is power of a high order indeed. Individuals and organizations that are adept at collecting and controlling such information – such as law enforcement, spies, private eyes, journalists and lawyers – thus play a key role in the hidden campaigns of the deep state. One perverse measure of the importance of sex in America’s ‘deep politics’ is the paucity of systematic attention paid to it by political scientists.6
4 Larry Flynt and David Eisenbach, One Nation Under Sex (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), provides numerous examples of sexual affairs and transgressions by past American presidents. 5 See, for example, Phillip Knightly, ‘The History of the Honey Trap’, ForeignPolicy.com, 12 March 2010 at
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Law professor Mark D. West defines scandal as ‘an event in which the public revelation of an alleged private breach of a law or a norm results in significant social disapproval or debate and, usually, reputational damage’.7 Sex has long been a key driver of public scandals in the United States. America’s Puritan moral heritage creates a perfect environment for scandals driven by displays of outrage, real or feigned, among public officials, celebrities, the media and members of the public.8 In Italy, by contrast, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi continued to enjoy widespread favor despite revelations about his ‘bunga bunga’ parties with young strippers and erotic dancers; as one Italian psychiatrist explained, ‘It’s a Catholic mentality: sin at night and confess in
Note 6 continued Chicago Press, 2006), p. 3. Peter Dale Scott similarly remarks, ‘Scholarly memories, possibly because of denial, tend to be short when it comes to sexual politics.’ Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 235. Angus McLaren, Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) offers a few reflections on the political uses of blackmail. For an historian’s reflections on changing patterns of exposure of sexual transgressions in American politics, see John H. Summers, ‘What Happened to Sex Scandals? Politics and Peccadilloes, Jefferson to Kennedy,’ Journal of American History, vol. 87, no. 3 (December 2000), pp. 825-854. 7 West, Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle, p. 6. Apostolidis and Williams define it as ‘the publicization of a transgression of a social norm’, involving a public disgrace. See Public Affairs: Politics in the Age of Sex Scandals, eds. Paul Apostolidis and Juliet Williams (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 3. 8 Oscar Wilde comments on the relationship between Puritanism and public scandal in his 1893 play An Ideal Husband. The extortionist Mrs. Cheveley tells her victim: ‘Remember to what a point your Puritanism in England has brought you. In old days nobody pretended to be better than his neighbors. In fact, to be a bit better than one’s neighbours was considered excessively vulgar and middle class. Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, everyone has to pose as paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues – and what is the result? You all go over like ninepins – one after the other. Not a year passes in England without someone disappearing. Scandals used to lend charm, or at least interest, to a man – now they crush him’. Available at
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the morning’.9 In Japan, where paid sex with schoolgirls was made explicitly illegal only in 1999, political and celebrity sex scandals are also exceedingly rare.10 France, another traditionally forgiving culture, has become much more critical of sexual transgressions by political leaders in recent years.11
Sex and political scandals in early America In the United States, sex scandals date back to the earliest days of the Republic. In the early 1790s, Founding Father and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton paid hush money to the husband of his 23-year-old mistress to keep his affair with her secret. Eventually Hamilton’s sworn political enemy, Thomas Jefferson, caught wind of the affair and leaked information to a muckraking pamphleteer, James Callender, whose exposé seriously damaged Hamilton’s reputation. The grandson of serial philanderer Benjamin Franklin condemned Hamilton in a newspaper editorial for having ‘violated the sacred sanctuary of his own house, by taking an unprincipled woman . . . to his bed.’ Hamilton survived the scandal, but was later killed in a duel with his mistress’s attorney and Jefferson’s close ally, Aaron Burr. Jefferson, elected President in 1800, got his comeuppance two years later. Callender, disgruntled at not winning a political appointment, publicized Jefferson’s liaison with his slave Sally Heming. Hamilton supporters had a field day distributing rhymes about ‘luscious . . . Monticello Sally’. But voters apparently viewed Jefferson’s relationship as one of the perquisites of being a slave owner, and re-elected him
9 Hada Messia, ‘The Berlusconi Sex Scandal Explained’, CNN, 25 August 2011 at
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by a landslide in 1804.12 Sex was also a major issue in the 1828 Presidential campaign. Backers of incumbent John Quincy Adams accused General Andrew Jackson of living in adulterous sin with his common-law wife. Although Jackson won handily, the accusations helped bring on a heart attack that killed his wife shortly after the election. A few years later, in his classic Democracy in America, the great French social critic Alexis de Tocqueville would decry the scandal mongering tendency of American journalists to ‘assail the character of individuals, to track them into private life, and disclose all their weaknesses and their errors.’13 By the early 20th century, the American media was experiencing a professional transformation. As part of a new focus on ‘responsible’ reporting and objectivity, the American Society of Newspaper Editors ordained in 1923 that ‘a newspaper should not invade private rights or feelings without sure warrant of public right as distinguished from public curiosity’. A heightened sense of threats to U.S. national security protected Presidents in particular from published gossip. Tougher libel laws in many states also discouraged unconfirmed reports of scandal.14
Enter the Federal Bureau of Investigation Nonetheless, the importance of sexual scandal and blackmail in American politics mushroomed in the 20th century for two reasons: the growth of electronic eavesdropping technology (wiretaps and bugs), and the centralization of national intelligence gathering with the creation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1908. It is often forgotten that the Bureau’s
12 Flynt and Eisenbach. One Nation Under Sex, pp. 17-27; McLaren, Sexual Blackmail, pp. 30-31;
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first major order of business was ‘visiting and making surveys of houses of prostitution’ as a prelude to enforcing the ‘White Slave Traffic Act,’ also known as the Mann Act.15 As one historian of the FBI has observed: ‘by exaggerating the danger of organized vice, portraying it as a real menace to the American society, and by broadly interpreting the law, the Bureau in its formative years succeeded in expanding in size and jurisdiction from an obscure and subordinate government bureau, primarily engaged in examining bank frauds and anti-trust violations, to a growing and influential bureaucracy, engaged in sensational and headline-stealing cases’.16 With the Bureau’s leadership, the Mann Act became a powerful legal weapon – and thus blackmail threat – against any unmarried couple who crossed state lines to have sex. In its early years, the Bureau also expanded its power by overseeing wartime political intelligence gathering and enforcement. Collaborating with Army Intelligence during World War I, the Bureau of Investigation created a vast domestic spy network called the American Protective League. With a quarter million citizen operatives in 600 cities, the League reported on German-Americans, labor organizers, anti- war activists and other dissidents. This public/private partnership achieved what one historian has called ‘arguably the world’s most intensive feat of domestic surveillance ever’.17 Many of their targets were arrested or deported during the Red scare of 1919-20 at the direction of Attorney 15
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General A. Mitchell Palmer. During the course of the their investigation of German espionage in the United States, Bureau agents discovered Senator Warren Harding, the Ohio Republican, in the arms of his mistress Carrie Phillips, a suspected German spy. A federal agent reported that Harding was passing secrets from the Navy Department to his lover, who in turn ‘relay[ed] this information to friends in the German Empire’. The discovery would have been politically lethal if made public, but the Justice Department remained mum. Tipped off about the file on his transgressions, Harding switched from critic to supporter of President Wilson’s war policies. Later, while Harding ran for President in 1920, the Republican Party paid tens of thousands of dollars in hush money to his blackmailing mistress.18 As the nation reverted to peace, the FBI shifted its focus to catching notorious criminals. But in 1936, at President Franklin Roosevelt’s request, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover launched a broad program to collect intelligence about subversive activities in the United States. He focused on communism and fascism, two totalitarian ideologies whose popular appeal soared during the Great Depression. His agents began compiling lists of subscribers to radical and foreign language newspapers, and then wiretapping the phones and reading the private cables of antiwar leaders. Before long, the FBI was tapping the phones of key Republican leaders as well.19 Even the President’s passionately liberal wife, Eleanor, came under Hoover’s close scrutiny. FBI informants kept the bureau apprised of her many social and political associates 18 Flynt and Eisenbach, One Nation Under Sex, pp. 88-89, 93-95. In 1927 another of Harding’s mistresses, Nan Britton, published a tell-all book, The President’s Daughter (New York: Elizabeth Ann Guild, Inc., 1927). 19 Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate. 94th Congress, 2nd Session, Book II (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1976), pp. 25-31; Kathryn S. Olmsted, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 69; Victor Lasky, It Didn’t Start With Watergate (New York: Dial Press, 1977), pp. 145-149, 160-161.
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and their activities. Hoover drew the darkest inferences from his growing file on the First Lady. Her progressive views on economic and civil rights persuaded the FBI chief that she was political dangerous; her equally progressive social views persuaded him that she was sexually promiscuous and deviant. ‘Because she numbered among her many friends several lesbians . . . Hoover concluded that Mrs. Roosevelt was one too,’ writes Curt Gentry. ‘However, Hoover was also convinced, at other times, that she had numerous male lovers, including at least one black’. Based on a joke intercepted through a bug in the offices of the National Maritime Union, Hoover concluded that the union’s two top officials were both sexually ‘servicing’ Eleanor Roosevelt, probably to further the aims of the Communist party.20 Hoover was careful not to use any such gossip against her while her husband was alive. In 1953, however, he arranged a briefing for top aides of President-elect Dwight Eisenhower about one of her alleged extramarital affairs with a left-wing activist – misinformation passed to him by Army Intelligence during World War II – to kill her hopes of being reappointed as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations.21
Hunting homosexuals Even if he could not touch Eleanor during the War, Hoover helped destroy one of her political allies, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles. Welles was also one of FDR’s most brilliant and trusted advisers. Hoover would later complain that Eleanor ‘protected’ Welles because ‘his softness toward Russia served the interests of the Communist party’. An investigation by Hoover’s agents in 1941 uncovered evidence that Welles had made homosexual advances to railroad porters while drunk and looked for sex partners in public parks and bathrooms. After a coalition of administration insiders and
20 Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 302; cf. Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993), pp. 142-149. 21 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, p. 404; Summers, Official and Confidential, p. 149.
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Republicans threatened to expose his secret, Welles was forced to resign in 1943, eliminating a major liberal voice in the shaping of Roosevelt’s foreign policy.22 Evidence suggests that the whispering campaign against Welles was orchestrated in part by Hoover, who despised Welles’s politics.23 On the opposite end of the political spectrum, FBI also targeted the pro-fascist Catholic priest, Father Charles Coughlin, who reached nearly thirty million listeners with his national radio show. Peter Dale Scott describes how Hoover used sexual blackmail to quiet this influential Roosevelt-hater and bigot: ‘In January 1940 the FBI raided an office of the Christian Front, a group supported by Coughlin, for plotting to overthrow the government. Two years later Coughlin was silenced and his radio show went off the air. Coughlin’s subsequent silence, which lasted for decades, is usually attributed to an order from his bishop, after a deal negotiated with Attorney General Biddle. But after Coughlin’s death in 1979, his psychiatrist revealed that what silenced the priest had not been “sudden obedience to his bishop, whom he had successfully defied for several years. That cover story was circulated in May 1942 by church authorities. . . Coughlin felt the effects of. . . J. Edgar Hoover [who] had proof of Coughlin’s homosexual activity. That proof, communicated in the verbal exchange between Hoover and Coughlin, was sufficient to silence Coughlin’s public voice until May 24, 1972. . .Hoover had died just three weeks earlier, on May 2, 1972.”’24
Hoover was not the only one who could play this destructive 22 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, pp. 307-310; cf. ‘We Accuse Sumner Welles’, Confidential, March 1956 at
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game in the shadows of American politics. British intelligence agents, who sought to discredit opponents of U.S. entry into the European war, made devastating use of sexual intelligence in 1942 against Senator David Walsh, a progressive Democrat from Massachusetts. A noted anti-war and anti-colonial activist, Walsh was also the powerful chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee. Embellishing facts leaked to its reporters, the strongly interventionist New York Post ran a series of sensational stories accusing Walsh of visiting a homosexual brothel in Brooklyn that was said to be infiltrated by Nazi spies. Walsh was secretly gay, putting him in a precarious position. Nonetheless, he denounced the stories and demanded a full investigation. The FBI actually cleared him of the paper’s most serious charges, but by then Walsh had suffered through what Time magazine called ‘one of the worst scandals that ever affected a member of the Senate’. He left politics when his term ended in 1946. According to the leading chronicler of this affair, the political assassination campaign against Walsh was led by President Roosevelt; his lover, Dorothy Schiff, owner of the New York Post; the British secret service; the head of its U.S. counterpart, the Office of Strategic Services; and the duplicitous general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, Morris Ernst.25 Although he didn’t target Walsh, Hoover made it one of the FBI’s priorities to hunt for ‘sex deviates in government service’. According to his biographer Anthony Summers, ‘He ordered agents to penetrate homosexual rights groups across the country, collect names of members, record speeches and photograph demonstrations. Such surveillance continued for twenty-three years, long after the FBI had concluded that the activists were in no way “subversive.”’26
25 David O’Toole, Outing the Senator: Sex, Spies & Videotape (Worcester, MA: James Street Publishing, 2005);
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Hoover used his files as political hand-grenades when the need arose. In 1952, for example, Hoover secretly spread smear rumors about Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson as part of a right-wing campaign to help defeat the Democratic candidate for President.27 Hoover’s anti-gay crusade may have been driven in part by his own suppressed sexual proclivities – which ironically made him vulnerable to sexual blackmail as well. Hoover, who never married, always had his number two man, Clyde Tolson, at his side, from Christmas vacations in Miami to summer visits to the Del Mar racetrack. Many journalists and Washington insiders assumed they were homosexual partners, but dared not say so publicly. Anthony Summers, in his 1993 biography of Hoover, cited sources in organized crime who claimed that Hoover was compromised by incriminating photos. As a result, Hoover allegedly curbed investigations of leading mobsters to prevent proof of his sexual orientation from becoming public. Some scholars who have scrutinized the evidence find it weak or suspect, so the issue remains open.28 Investigations, leaks and threatened revelations about gay sex became almost an industry in the 1950s, especially in Washington. In 1950, as Senator Joseph McCarthy was making a splash with charges that the State Department was riddled with Communist spies, Deputy Undersecretary of State John Puerifoy defended his department’s security program, which was led by a Hoover-approved ex-FBI agent, noting that it had uncovered and fired 91 homosexuals. The resulting 27 Athan Theoharis, ‘How the F.B.I. Gaybaited Stevenson’, Nation, 7 May 1990, 617ff; Summers, Official and Confidential, pp. 181-182. 28 Summers, Official and Confidential, pp. 241-243, 253-258; Athan Theoharis, J. Edgar Hoover, Sex, and Crime: An Historical Antidote (Ivan R. Dee, 1995); Douglas M. Charles, Hoover’s War on Gays: Exposing the FBI’s ‘Sex Deviates’ Program (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2015), chapter 1, ‘Was J. Edgar Hoover Gay? Does it Matter?’, pp. 1-21; Claire Potter, ‘Queer Hoover: Sex, Lies, and Political History’ (2006), Wesleyan Division II Faculty Publications, paper 21, at
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‘lavender scare’ led to the firing of almost 600 federal employees, in addition to thousands more ‘separated’ by the military for suspected sexual deviancy. As historian David K. Johnson observes, ‘In 1950, many politicians, journalists, and citizens thought that homosexuals posed more of a threat to national security than Communists’.29 In the wake of the homosexual witch-hunt, ‘State Department morale plummeted,’ writes Curt Gentry. ‘One result was a self-censorship which undoubtedly had an effect on American foreign policy, few daring to express their opinions freely for fear they would be held accountable’ to department security officers.30 Using dossiers supplied under the table by the FBI at Hoover’s direction, Senator McCarthy himself chose to focus instead on alleged Reds in government.31 That may be because the bachelor from Wisconsin was himself vulnerable to whispered charges of homosexuality. His mean-spirited chief counsel, Roy Cohn, was certainly gay, as one Army witness intimated during the Army-McCarthy hearings.32 When it came to scoring political points against McCarthy, some liberal critics were almost as ‘McCarthyite’ as the senator in their use of innuendo. Crusading columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson created a dossier of rumors about McCarthy’s sexual leanings. In the words of Anderson’s biographer, they ‘persuaded a friendly attorney to bring up the sordid rumors in a Nevada court trial, creating legal protection for the charges, thus allowing [their column] to safely quote the accusation that McCarthy was “a disreputable pervert”.’33 Anderson’s friend and business partner, Las Vegas 29 David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 1-2. See also Charles, Hoover’s War on Gays; Randolph W Baxter, ‘“Homo-Hunting”’ in the Early Cold War: Senator Kenneth Wherry and the Homophobic Side of McCarthyism’, Nebraska History 84 (2003), pp. 119-132. 30 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, p. 409. 31 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, pp. 378-380. 32
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Sun publisher Hank Greenspun, joined that campaign in 1952 by writing, ‘It is common talk among homosexuals in Milwaukee who rendezvous in the White Horse Inn that Senator Joe McCarthy has often engaged in homosexual activities’. Greenspun kept at it, charging in 1954, ‘The plain unvarnished truth is that McCarthy, by his own admission, is a security risk on the grounds of homosexuality’.34 One potentially genuine security risk was nationally syndicated political columnist and closet homosexual Joseph Alsop, whose highly placed sources regularly leaked him top secret information about U.S. foreign and military policy. In 1957, during a visit to the Soviet Union, the influential pundit was lured by the KGB into a homosexual ‘honey trap’ and photographed in compromising positions at Moscow’s Grand Hotel. At the urging of his friend and neighbor Frank Wisner, former head of covert operations for the CIA, Alsop privately came clean to both the CIA and FBI. Senior Eisenhower administration officials, who resented Alsop’s public derision of the President and his irresponsible scare-mongering about alleged Soviet nuclear superiority (the so-called ‘missile gap’), looked for ways to use the material. In 1959, Attorney General William Rogers and Hoover began briefing senior government
Note 33 continued sex. They set back California Governor Ronald Reagan’s presidential ambitions by reporting in a 1967 column that members of his staff had engaged in a male sex orgy at a cabin in Lake Tahoe. Anderson caused turmoil in the Nixon White House by investigating charges, leaked to him by a disgruntled Murray Chotiner, that Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dwight Chapin ‘engaged in homosexual and perverted activities’. Anderson also put Hoover and his close aide Clyde Tolson themselves under surveillance to check on rumors that they had a homosexual relationship; the worst Anderson could come up with was that Hoover was a regular consumer of heartburn medication. Feldstein pp. 85, 108-111, 137-139. 34 Greenspun, ‘Where I Stand’, Las Vegas Sun, 25 October 1952 and 1 February 1954. See also Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, p. 433; Arthur Herman, Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator (New York: The Free Press, 2000), pp. 235-236. It was the issue of McCarthyism that brought Greenspun together with the Washington lawyer Edward P. Morgan, who, in 1950, had been chief counsel to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigation of Senator McCarthy’s claims about Communist infiltration of the State Department.
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officials about Alsop’s dark secret. Before long, as no doubt intended, word leaked out. A gossip item in the conservative National Review magazine declared, ‘A prominent American journalist is a target of Soviet blackmail for homosexuality. U.S. authorities know it. His syndicate doesn’t – yet. The feverish activities of Washington’s internal security personnel suggest that a major scandal may be under an intelligence Agency’s rug. The complete nervous breakdown of a top intelligence officer sparked the furor.’ But Hoover vetoed an aide’s proposal to plant bugs in Alsop’s house, and the famous columnist was never fully outed. When Eisenhower left office, Alsop could rest easier knowing that the new President, Jack Kennedy, was his Georgetown neighbor and social friend. Alsop’s past finally came back to haunt him in 1970, however, when the Soviets began distributing to prominent Washingtonians photographs of Alsop and ‘Boris’ in the buff, apparently in retaliation for a series of nasty columns Alsop wrote about the Soviet ambassador. CIA Director Richard Helms negotiated a truce, and the two sides cooled off their attacks.35
Kennedy’s women and Hoover’s files Alsop’s predicament was bad enough, but President Kennedy’s was even worse when it came to compromising FBI files and political blackmail. Disclosures of Kennedy’s insatiable appetite for casual sex and his countless flirtations have tarnished the Camelot image over the past few decades. And with good reason: one need not be a moralist to recognize how politically reckless JFK’s behavior was. It derailed his agenda for reforming the FBI, and very nearly brought down
35 Gregg Herken, The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), pp. 208-209, 243-244, 260; Edwin M. Yoder, Jr., Joe Alsop’s Cold War: A Study of Journalistic Influence and Intrigue (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Louis Menand, ‘How the Cold War Made Georgetown Hot’, New Yorker, 10 November 2014. David Auburn’s Broadway play, ‘The Columnist’, dealt with Alsop’s KGB nightmare; see Terry Teachout, ‘A News Columnist With His Own Secret’, Wall Street Journal, 26 April 2012.
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his presidency. His sexual appetite was no secret to Washington insiders, friends and foes alike. As the French ambassador commented in his diary, Kennedy’s ‘desires are difficult to satisfy without raising fears of scandal and its use by his political enemies. This might happen one day, because he does not take sufficient precautions in this Puritan country’.36 Indeed, the Kennedy brothers’ fiercest political enemy, Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa, ‘almost certainly’ had compromising surveillance tapes on Jack’s brief affair with film star Marilyn Monroe.37 Hoffa later claimed to have information on four of Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s mistresses around the country and likely had access to recordings of RFK’s own intimate meetings with Monroe. Hoffa told one reporter that if he were president, ‘I would have the FBI bring in the facts on these women. They’re crossing state boundaries, which is against the law, and it’s about time Bobby was put in his place’.38 The FBI didn’t need Hoffa’s direction to ‘bring in the facts’ on the Kennedy brothers’ women, including Monroe. Every indiscretion was fodder for Hoover’s files. Columnist Drew Pearson recorded in his diary what he dared not print about the FBI director’s ‘blackmail’ of President Kennedy: ‘Hoover has . . . more on Kennedy than he had on any other president. He knew every girl Kennedy had laid’.39
36 Quoted in Michael Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 611. 37 Summers, Official and Confidential, p. 296. 38 Drew Pearson, Washington Merry-Go-Round: The Drew Pearson Diaries, 1960-1969 (Potomac Books, 2015), p. 423 (entry of 17 November 1966). See also p. 564 (entry of 6 April 1968), noting that Hoffa’s appeals attorney, Edward Morgan, warned Bobby Kennedy to stop making such a public display of one affair (‘Ed did him a great favor, which Bobby obviously did not appreciate’). On Monroe, see Jim Hougan, Spooks (New York: William Morrow, 1978), pp. 115-121; Anthony Summers, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe (New York: Macmillan, 1985). 39 Pearson, Washington Merry-Go-Round, pp. 401-402, (entry of 28 May 1966). Pearson also suspected that the Kennedys pulled their punches on Nixon in the 1960 election because ‘they are afraid the Nixon camp may pull something on Jack’s sex life’, p. 44, (entry of 29 October 1960).
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Hoover began tracking the second son of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy as early as World War II. Agents tagged Jack as having an affair with a former Miss Denmark and suspected Nazi spy. (Though married, she proved to be no spy.40) During the 1960 presidential campaign, an FBI official prepared a summary memo on the Democratic candidate, noting that ‘Allegations of immoral activities on Sen. Kennedy’s part have been reported to the FBI over the years’, starting with the World War II fling and including relationships with women in ‘Palm Springs, Las Vegas, and New York City’.41 That summer, Hoover slipped information from his files on Kennedy’s ‘womanizing’ to Senator Lyndon Johnson, giving the Texan political leverage to secure his place as Vice President on the Democratic ticket. Once elected, the new president kept the aging FBI director on against the advice of his aides. ‘John F. Kennedy was afraid not to reappoint him,’ said columnist Jack Anderson years later. ‘I know that because I talked to the President about it. He admitted that he’d appointed Hoover because it would’ve been politically destructive not to’.42 Hoover was often at odds with the new president’s hard-driving Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy. But Hoover obtained a secret ace when the FBI picked up word that President Kennedy was seeing a beautiful young socialite named Judith Campbell. Like many of his sexual conquests, Campbell had been introduced by singer Frank Sinatra. She was a friend of Sinatra’s Mafia associate John Roselli and mistress to Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. In other words, President Kennedy was unwittingly sharing a consort with one of America’s top underworld leaders and a key target of his 40 Beschloss, The Crisis Years, pp. 613-614. 41 Summary memo, FBI Supervisor Milton Jones to FBI Assistant Director Cartha DeLoach, 13 July 1960, in Athan Theoharis, ed. From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover, (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1991), pp. 32-33. 42 Summers, Official and Confidential, pp. 272-275.
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brother’s drive against organized crime. His vulnerability became starkly apparent when the FBI learned that Hoffa’s top wiretap expert had heard that Campbell was ‘shacking up with John Kennedy’.43 Hoover prepared a memo itemizing the various contacts between Campbell and the White House – and her Mafia associations – for Bobby Kennedy and one of the President’s special assistants on 27 February 1962. A month later, President Kennedy and Hoover dined together. ‘There is no record of what transpired,’ writes crime historian Mel Ayton, ‘but, according to White House logs, telephone contact between Campbell and Kennedy occurred a few hours after the luncheon. Historians are in agreement that it is likely Hoover used this meeting to apprise the President of how reckless and dangerous it was to be connected to a woman who was also friendly with members of the Mafia. Hoover was using subtle blackmail.’44 Making matters worse, Hoover also delivered to Bobby Kennedy devastating news that the CIA had teamed up with Mafia leaders – including Giancana – for a top-secret program to assassinate Fidel Castro, in effect immunizing them against federal prosecution.45 The power of this sex-crime-and- intelligence story remained so strong that as late as 1976, a Senate committee investigating CIA abuses and assassination plots avoided mentioning Campbell’s name or true association with the President, referring to her only as a ‘close friend’ of JFK. Hoover again put the Attorney General in his debt a year later, when members of Congress and journalists began
43 Belmont to C. A. Evans, 15 March 1962, re Judith E. Campbell, NARA Record Number: 124-10225-10038. 44 Mel Ayton, ‘The Truth About J. Edgar Hoover’, Crime, 19 July 1995; cf. Charles Rappleye and Ed Becker, All American Mafioso: The John Rosselli Story (New York: Doubleday, 1991) p. 215 and Richard Mahoney, Sons and Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999), pp. 97-100, 156-7, 164, 278 and passim. 45 See Jonathan Marshall, ‘Blackmail in the Deep State’ in Lobster 73, at
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investigating wholesale corruption by Senate Secretary Bobby Baker, who had been Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s closest aide in the Senate. Jack Anderson reported in a nationally syndicated column that one source of Baker’s influence was his Washington club where beautiful ‘party girls’ entertained top legislators. Anderson’s partner Drew Pearson recorded in his diary, just two weeks before JFK’s assassination in Dallas, that ‘Bobby [Baker] was the pimp, apparently, for President Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, [Florida Senator] George Smathers, and various others in procuring girls. . . . Bobby Baker apparently realized that the way to get ahead in Washington was through sex and thereby gained a lot of influence. How much of this is going to come out at the Senate hearings remains to be seen. . . The FBI, as usual, was playing politics. Bobby and Lyndon are on the telephone about thirty minutes a day, and Lyndon is worried over the developments. This, of course, could knock Lyndon off the ticket for 1964.’46 One of the party girls Baker procured was a 27-year-old beauty named Ellen Rometsch.47 Besides delighting certain members of Congress, she also entertained President Kennedy several times in the spring and summer of 1963. Evidently the President vetted only her looks before taking her to bed. Married to a sergeant stationed at the West German embassy, Rometsch had grown up in East Germany and belonged to a Communist youth group before moving to the West with her family in 1955.48 Jack Anderson reported further that she had had an affair with an attaché at 46 Pearson, Washington Merry-Go-Round, p. 203 (entry for 8 November 1963). Pearson’s source was Edward P. Morgan, a friend of Baker’s lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams. 47 Life magazine ran its first photo of Rometsch on 8 November 1963 in a story titled, ‘That High-Living Baker Boy Scandalizes the Capital’, p. 32. It referred to her as ‘the German call girl’. 48 Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston: Little Brown, 1997), pp. 387-390.
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the Soviet embassy.49 To Hoover, this intelligence recalled the sensational Profumo affair then grabbing headlines in Great Britain. The British scandal eventually prompted the resignation of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan after public revelations that his War Minister, John Profumo, frequented the same 19-year-old model and party girl favored by a Soviet naval attaché.50 In June 1963, the FBI opened a thick file on the Profumo matter – code-named Bowtie – and began sharing information on trans-Atlantic sex rings and alleged Soviet espionage with the White House, CIA Director, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State.51 Making matters worse, Hoover learned of allegations that President Kennedy had had sex with two women linked to the British affair. On June 29, 1963, a conservative Hearst newspaper in New York sent a shot across Kennedy’s bow, writing, ‘One of the biggest names in American politics – a man who holds a very high elective office – has been injected into Britain’s vice-security scandal.’ The President’s fixer, Bobby Kennedy, ultimately had to wield his legal authority over newspaper antitrust issues to suppress publication of further details.52
49 Bobby Baker, Wheeling and Dealing: Confessions of a Capitol Hill Operator (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 80. Baker’s comments on the Quorum Club and Rometsch can be found in Todd Purdum, ‘Sex in the Senate: Bobby Baker’s Salacious Secret History of Capitol Hill’, Politico, 19 November 2013 at
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That July, while the Profumo scandal was still unfolding, FBI agents began questioning JFK’s stunning but politically suspect bedroom partner, Ellen Rometsch. Desperate to contain the potential political damage, the Attorney General had Rometsch hustled onto a plane, deported to Germany, and paid to keep quiet. That October, however, a Washington journalist friendly with Hoover reported that ‘the beautiful brunette had been attending parties with congressional leaders and some prominent New Frontiersmen from the executive branch of Government. . . The possibility that her activity might be connected with espionage was of some concern, because of the high rank of her male companions.’ Matters came to a head when the Washington Post reported on plans for a closed-door Senate committee hearing on ‘a spicy tale of political intrigue and high level bedroom antics’ regarding ‘a 27-year-old German woman of alluring physical proportions’. The 27 October story, which appeared just nine days after the resignation of British Prime Minister Macmillan, was headlined ominously, ‘Hill Probe May Take Profumo-Type Twist’. Bobby Kennedy had to plead with Hoover to invoke his secret files to shut down the entire congressional investigation into Baker’s sleazy club. The FBI director complied, sparing the President, Vice President, and leaders of Congress additional embarrassment.53 RFK paid a heavy price to cover up his brother’s sins, however. The attorney general had to give Hoover assurances that he would be retained as FBI director. He also approved Hoover’s wiretaps on Martin Luther King, Jr., a key White
53 A biographer of the lead Senate investigator of the Bobby Baker affair writes, ‘In January 1964 a Republican member of the Rules Committee confided . . . that Senate Majority leader Everett Dirksen had been told by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to ignore Baker’s call girl connections because . . . “a complete investigation would disclose such a large percentage of the Senate as being of such low morals that it could undermine the confidence of the people in the integrity of their government and may even prove disastrous to the country.”’ Carol Hoffecker, Honest John Williams: U.S. Senator from Delaware (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000)
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House ally.54 Had Hoover not cooperated, the results for the administration and the country could have been disastrous, argues presidential historian Michael Beschloss: ‘[W]ere the President forced to resign in 1963 or 1964 in a sex-and-security scandal, the politics of the United States could have been poisoned for a generation. The American Right and others might have explained Kennedy’s failure to exploit the American nuclear advantage at the Bay of Pigs, in Laos and Berlin, and during the Missile Crisis as the result of the President’s compromise by Soviet bloc intelligence. In a climate in which every American decision of the Cold War would be scrutinized for signs that American officials were secretly laboring under the thumb of the Russians, what American leader would have had the courage to bring similar suspicion on himself by pressing ahead for better relations with the Soviet Union?’55
The Johnson Years Lyndon Johnson certainly remembered Hoover’s service in the Bobby Baker sex scandal when he assumed the presidency after the assassination of JFK. Hoover had long been friendly with the Texas Senator and Vice President. Now he continued to win favor with President Johnson by offering up titillating gossip on members of Congress and various celebrities. According to White House aide Joseph Califano (later a law partner of Edward Bennett Williams, and lawyer for the Democratic National Committee), President Johnson once ‘even had one Senator’s mistress contacted to have her persuade her lover to vote to break a filibuster’.56 Hoover also
54 Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot, pp. 398-410; Summers, Official and Confidential, pp. 310-312; Flynt and Eisenbach, One Nation Under Sex, pp. 186-189; Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California, 1993), pp. 230-232; Mel Ayton, ‘The Truth About J. Edgar Hoover’, Crime, 19 July 1995. 55 Beschloss, The Crisis Years, p. 617. 56 Victory Lasky, It Didn’t Start with Watergate, p. 202. On LBJ’s love of gossip from the FBI, see also Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, pp. 577-578.
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made himself indispensable by working to cover up the 1964 arrest of Johnson’s chief of staff on a morals charge at the men’s room of a YMCA two blocks from the White House.57 Hoover, meanwhile, snooped relentlessly into Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s private life as part of his fanatical campaign to discredit and destroy one of America’s greatest civil rights leaders. Bugs installed in King’s hotel rooms picked up evidence of his sexual flings – material Hoover then used to pressure the Kennedys to distance themselves from the reverend.58 In 1964, Hoover circulated smears against King to key cabinet officers, intelligence chiefs, U.S. ambassadors, and reporters; but to his fury, no one leaked the scurrilous material. That November, after King had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a senior FBI official (or officials) sent King a poison pen letter, with a sample surveillance tape enclosed. It threatened to expose him as a ‘colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that’, and invited him to commit suicide ‘before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation’. When King received the letter and the tape – knowing full well that it came from the FBI – he told aides despondently, ‘They are out to break me.’59 He nonetheless kept up his historic organizing efforts until an assassin put him down in 1968. Ultimately, no politician had the courage or independence to curb Hoover’s abuse of compromising sexual secrets. The Director’s legendary confidential files kept legislators and Presidents in line, even without specific threats. When Harry Truman succeeded Roosevelt as President and learned about the extent of FBI surveillance, he
57 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, pp. 567-570; J. R. de Szigethy, ‘Blackmail in America: A Dark History’, August 2004, at
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wrote in his diary, ‘We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail . . . and all congressmen and senators are afraid of [Hoover]’.60 Truman did precisely nothing about it. Years later, President Nixon would observe that ‘Information was one of the primary sources of Edgar Hoover’s power . . . and that knowledge made him as valuable to his friends as it made him dangerous to his enemies’. Former CIA Director Richard Helms told a biographer of Hoover: ‘I learned a lot from fellows who had worked in Hoover’s office before joining us. I used to hear how certain senators and congressmen would get caught in cathouses over in Virginia. When the report came in, Hoover would put it in his personal safe. If there was any problem with that senator, he would say, “Don’t worry, I’ve got those papers right in my safe. You don’t have a thing to worry about.” . . . He played a very skillful game.’61 It was Jack Anderson who first exposed the full extent of the FBI’s snooping into the sex lives of famous Americans. He cited raunchy FBI files on actors Rock Hudson, Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda; novelist James Baldwin; quarterback Joe Namath; boxers Muhammed Ali and Joe Louis; and civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy, among others. Anderson’s first column on the issue ran on 1 May 1972. A day later, Hoover died of a heart attack.62
Was Watergate really a sex scandal? Sexual blackmail reached its apogee during the Nixon years, and may have played a key part in triggering the Watergate scandal. A theory first seriously advanced by investigative reporter Jim Hougan in his 1984 book, Secret Agenda, holds that employees of the Democratic National Committee spent
60 Anthony Summers, ‘The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover’, Guardian, 31 December 2011. 61 Summers, Official and Confidential, pp. 202-203. 62 Feldstein, Poisoning the Press, p. 298; Jay Feldman, Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America (New York: Pantheon, 2011), p. 295.
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time during the 1972 Presidential campaign setting up dates between Democratic officials and classy call girls who operated out of the neighboring Columbia Plaza apartments. He speculates that the CIA was keeping tabs on the many dignitaries and high-level officials who patronized the prostitutes; also monitoring them, in all likelihood, was a private eye employed by James McCord, head of security for the Nixon re-election campaign. Watergate, wrote Hougan, ‘was not so much a partisan political scandal as it was, secretly, a sex scandal, the unpredictable outcome of a CIA operation that, in the simplest terms, tripped on its own shoelaces.’63 His theory was amplified by authors of the best-seller Silent Coup and endorsed on the speaker circuit by Watergate burglar Gordon Liddy.64 They hold that when details of a Columbia Plaza prostitution ring became known to local law enforcement after the chance arrest of one major participant, White House Counsel John Dean sent the burglars into the DNC to learn more – either to blackmail the Democrats, or to discover what they knew about the involvement of his fiancée
63 Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (New York: Random House, 1984), p. xviii. Hougan speculated that during the second break-in the Watergate burglars ‘may have been looking for a kind of calendar, or log’ of call-girl hook-ups arranged through the DNC. As several reviewers noted, Hougan combined significant new revelations with heaps of speculation based on circumstantial evidence. For a respectful but critical review, see J. Anthony Lukas, ‘A New Explanation of Watergate’, New York Times, 11 November 1984. For a longer and more sympathetic review, see Phil Stanford, ‘Watergate Revisited’, Columbia Journalism Review, March/April, 1986. Stanford later contributed to the literature with his own book, White House Call Girl: The Real Watergate Story (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2013). As early as 1975, Jack Anderson broached this theory: ‘The Watergate wiretap transcripts, still sealed by the courts, are full of sex talk. What the White House wanted to know about the Democrats, apparently, was their sex secrets. The Waterbuggers bugged the only telephone that didn’t go through the Democratic headquarters switchboard. The Democrats used this phone, therefore, to make their most intimate calls.’ See Jack Anderson, ‘Ford Used Files Against Douglas’, Nevada Daily Mail, 3 February 1975. 64 Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). See also Stanford, White House Call Girl.
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with one of the prostitutes. Dean then led the entire Watergate cover-up, hoodwinking not only prosecutors but his fellow White House colleagues, who never suspected what he was up to. This wildly revisionist scenario sharply divides Watergate experts. Dean called Silent Coup ‘absolute garbage’ and waged an eight-year legal battle in federal courts to punish his accusers. The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward called the book ‘untrue and pathetic’; his side-kick Carl Bernstein derided it as ‘lunatic’, and Sam Dash, chief counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, termed it ‘a fraud’. On the other hand, Los Angeles Times national correspondent Robert Scheer praised it, as did Watergate historian Joan Hoff, saying the authors ‘destroyed what little plausibility Woodward & Bernstein had’.65 The theory starts with one of several puzzling anomalies that Hougan discovered from declassified FBI case records and interviewing obscure Watergate participants. A Washington D. C. police detective who arrested the burglars in flagrante found a key in the possession of the Cuban burglar Eugenio Martinez. It fit the desk of a secretary named Ida Wells, who was a relative nobody in the DNC.66 The burglars had also affixed a camera to her desk, as if to record documents. Wells,
65 George Lardner, Jr., ‘Watergate Libel Suit Settled’, Washington Post, 23 July 1997; Steve Weinberg, ‘Was Nixon Duped? Did Woodward Lie’, Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 1991; see also review blurbs of Silent Coup on
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as it happened, was secretary to a mid-level Democratic campaign official named Spencer Oliver. For reasons never fully explained, James McCord bugged Oliver’s phone during the first Watergate burglary. It was the only bug that worked.67 Jeb Magruder, Nixon’s deputy campaign manager, said the conversation summaries ‘were not particularly revealing of anything of any importance’.68 According to the Watergate prosecutor, much of what it it picked up was not political but sexual – ‘extremely personal, intimate, and potentially embarrassing’.69 Nixon’s aide John Ehrlichman told the President after the break-in that the bug at the DNC overheard ‘mostly this fellow Oliver phoning his girlfriends all over the country lining up assignations’.70 Apparently, Oliver was out of the office a great deal, so other DNC employees also used his phone for private, intimate calls. Wells said in response to a 1997 lawsuit that she was ‘appalled by a lot of the romantic and sexual behavior I saw going on at the DNC. . . People were just sleeping with each other kind of indiscriminately . . .one-night stands and things like that’. She gossiped about all this on her phone. ‘It was kind of crude at times’, she admitted.71
67 In McCord’s account, at least. Hougan argues that no bug was ever placed in the DNC by the Nixon gang. The only thing we can say for sure is that the FBI and phone company found no bugs after the break-in. A bug was found on Oliver’s phone in September 1972, but it may have been placed there subsequent to the burglary. 68 Magruder comments in Watergate and Afterward: The Legacy of Richard M. Nixon, eds. Leon Friedman and William F. Levantrosser (Greenwood Press, 1992). 69 Quoted in Jim Hougan, ‘On the New Inquisition’,
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One of the first major histories of Watergate noted as an aside, ‘So spicy were some of the conversations on this phone that they have given rise to unconfirmed reports that the telephone was being used for some sort of call girl service catering to congressmen and other prominent Washingtonians’.72 Supporting that speculation, a Washington, D.C. attorney named Phillip Bailley, who represented various prostitutes, said that he had convinced Oliver’s secretary at the DNC to arrange phone dates on behalf of a prostitute he represented, Heidi Riken.73 Long protected by one of DC’s leading mobsters, Riken worked out of the Columbia Plaza apartments. Riken, reportedly, was best friends with John Dean’s fiancée, Maureen. The authors of Silent Coup and, more recently, Phil Stanford in his book The White House Call Girl, argue that John Dean ordered the second break-in at the DNC at least in part to find out what dirt the Democrats might have on Maureen and other Republicans.74 That’s a huge stretch. There definitely were call girls operating out of the Columbia Plaza apartments, who serviced both DNC officials and Republicans.75 The ‘trick book’ obtained by police from one such operation contained the names of ‘movers and shakers of the capital’, including ‘at least one U.S. senator, an astronaut, a Saudi prince, a clutch of U.S. and
72 J. Anthony Lukas, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (New York: Viking, 1976), p. 201. 73 Stanford writes that a federal prosecutor noted in a 1996 deposition that the FBI learned from its investigation of Bailley that ‘employees at the DNC . . . were assisting in getting the Democrats connected with prostitutes at the Columbia Plaza’. But this doesn’t prove anything about Oliver’s phone. Stanford also notes that Bailley was not indicted for any activities related to Riken’s Columbia Plaza operation or the DNC. See Stanford, White House Call Girl, pp. 109, 115. 74 Stanford, White House Call Girl, contains fascinating material on Riken’s connections to various mobsters, including the powerful czar of gambling in the Washington area, Joseph Nesline. 75 Robbyn Swan in ‘Was Sex the Motive for the Watergate Break-In?’ Telegraph, 16 June 2012, cites the confirmation of Barbara Ralabate, a former madam who managed call girls at the Columbia Plaza apartments. According to Swan, however, Ralabate ‘appeared not even to know’ Dean’s fiancée.
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[Korean] CIA intelligence agents and a host of prominent Democrats’.76 Dean did take an interest in finding out whether anyone at the White House might be caught up in police and FBI investigations of call girls in the capital; just a week before the second Watergate break-in, he called into his office a local prosecutor who had obtained lawyer Phil Bailley’s address book, to examine its names. Dean subsequently fired one White House lawyer who was indiscreet enough to let herself be photographed by Bailley with no clothes on. Dean’s own girlfriend Maureen was also in Bailley’s address book, but that didn’t prove she had any ties to the sex trade or anything to be embarrassed about. And none of this provides hard evidence that call girl rings were the target of the break-in. The judge who heard her defamation suit noted that Bailley, the primary source for the prostitution stories, ‘was a disbarred attorney and convicted felon with a long history of substance abuse and mental illness, had changed his story about the prostitution ring several times and was not a reliable source.’77 The Watergate burglary team member who transcribed calls from Oliver’s phone at the DNC said he could ‘categorically state . . . that no such [call girl ring] operation was being conducted, at least from the conversations I was monitoring’.78 He confirmed in a sworn statement that he heard intimate calls but no talk of ‘sex for money’.79 And there are plausible explanations for the bugging of Oliver’s phone that have nothing to do with call
76 Hougan, Secret Agenda, p. 115. The trick book included the names of CIA agent Ed Wilson and KCIA agent Tongsun Park, who allegedly arranged ‘trysts for the politically powerful’ at Park’s George Town Club, which the CIA may in turn have monitored (Hougan, Secret Agenda, pp. 120-121). However, the source for this information is highly suspect, the fugitive CIA officer Frank Terpil. 77 This paraphrase of the District Court opinion is in United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit, Ida Maxwell WELLS, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. G. Gordon LIDDY, Defendant-Appellee, Phillip Mackin Bailley, Movant, No. 98-1962. Decided July 28, 1999. 78 Summers, Abuse of Power, p. 529 n 13. Summers added, ‘More recently he testified that had ordinary members of the public heard the conversations, many might have thought they were prostitution- related’. 79 Andy Thibault, ‘Watergate Figure Says Sex Talk Was Target of Break-In’, Washington Times, 13 September 1966.
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girls.80 Proponents of the sex ring theory also conveniently omit the fact that the burglars were captured in the office of Democratic Chairman Larry O'Brien with a couple of ceiling panels removed – evidence that he was one of their main targets.
Nixon and sexual blackmail All this is titillating, but it’s just a side-show to the bigger story of the Nixon scandals.81 It’s also just one part of a much bigger story about sex and politics during the Nixon years. Nixon was acutely aware of the political dangers posed by sexual rumors. He had dodged a potential scandal after the FBI, CIA and Britain’s MI6 investigated him in 1967 for having an affair in Hong Kong with a suspected Chinese spy.82 J.
80 For example, the Nixon team may simply have wanted to know about his strategic efforts during the Democratic primary to support a more centrist and viable candidate than George McGovern. See Robert Parry, ‘The Enduring Secrets of Watergate’, 23 May 2012, at
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Edgar Hoover later briefed President Nixon personally, telling him solemnly, ‘I know there’s no truth to this . . . I’ll never speak of it to anyone’. As one of Hoover’s assistants observed, ‘It was one of his favorite speeches, one he gave often to politicians’ who joined the ranks of his potential blackmail victims.83 During Nixon’s first term as President, White House Special Counsel Charles Colson learned from a friendly reporter that the administration’s chief of protocol was using ladies from a notorious New York City brothel to entertain visiting dignitaries. Soon thereafter, on November 20, 1971, the New York Times ran a buried but dangerous story headlined, ‘Possible Blackmail of Nixon Officials Checked Here’. It reported that ‘at least two high-ranking officials in the Nixon administration . . . are among the people the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office intends to question about the possibility that they were blackmailed because of their association with an East Side brothel’. The up-scale whorehouse, run by the famous madam Xaviera Hollander, author of The Happy Hooker, had been secretly bugged by a city commission established to investigate police corruption. White House investigator Jack Caulfield, a former New York City police detective, obtained a copy of Hollander’s client list, so he could do damage control. He reported, to the relief of senior administration officials, that the list was unlikely to see the light of day because it put notable figures from both major parties at risk.84 Perhaps for Note 82 continued People, 4 October 1976; Toby Harnden, ‘MI6 took spy snaps of Nixon and Chinese “mistress”’, Sunday Times, 11 January 2015; Summers, Arrogance of Power, pp. 269-270; David Wise, Tiger Trap: America’s Secret Spy War with China (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2011), p. 169. 83 William Sullivan with Sam Sloan, The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI (New York: Ishi Press, 2011), pp. 197-198. 84 ‘Possible Blackmail of Nixon Officials Checked Here’, New York Times, 20 November 1971, p. 15; Summers, Arrogance of Power, pp. 420-421. Emil Mosbacher’s deputy chief of protocol was Nick Ruwe, who had a reputation as a wild bachelor. Ruwe allegedly made frequent use of call girls at the Columbia Plaza, though ‘whether to provide sex for government guests or for personal pleasure, or both, remains uncertain’. See Summers, Arrogance of Power, pp. 422-423. Continues at the foot of the next page
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the same reason, charges were dropped against Hollander. Political operatives in the Nixon White House were deeply interested in who was having sex with whom, what kind of sex it was, and above all, how it could be exploited politically. Nixon himself had been preoccupied with secret homosexual relationships as far back as the 1940s, when his investigation of alleged Soviet spy and suspected homosexual Alger Hiss launched his national political career.85 Years later, when President Nixon wanted to attack his many ‘enemies’ in the media, he directed J. Edgar Hoover to search FBI files for names of ‘the homosexuals known and suspected in the Washington press corps’.86 One of the earliest targets of President Nixon’s interest in sexual indiscretions was Senator Edward Kennedy, the last living threat from the family that had beaten and shamed him in the 1960 election. Nixon assigned to hatchet man Charles Colson ‘his long-dreamed-of-hope of catching Senator Teddy Kennedy in bed with a woman not his wife’, in the words of White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman. Knowing that ‘the one jugular that fascinated [Nixon] even more than Larry O’Brien was Teddy Kennedy’s’, Haldeman himself directed a private eye hired by the White House to ‘catch [Kennedy] in the sack with one of his babes’.87 Colson, meanwhile, tried to Note 84 continued Mosbacher’s brother Robert was a Nixon fundraiser whose cash was used to mount the Watergate break-in; he later became Secretary of Commerce under President George H. W. Bush. 85 Nixon believed that ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers, the main witness against Hiss, had romantic feelings for the State Department officer. Years later, confronted with evidence of a military spy ring in his administration, Nixon requested that the main suspect be questioned with a polygraph about his homosexuality. As he told Ehrlichman and Mitchell, ‘Because we got a couple on Hiss and Chambers, you know. Nobody knows that, but that’s the background on how that one began. They were both that way. And relationships sometimes poison a lot of things. Now if [Jack] Anderson . . . if there’s any possibility of this, John, that could be a key as well. If something, he may be under blackmail.’ From White House conversation, 22 December 1971, in Douglas Brinkley and Luke Nichter, The Nixon Tapes: 1971-1972 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), p. 336. 86 Feldstein, Poisoning the Press, p. 130. 87 H. R. Haldeman with Joseph DiMona, The Ends of Power (NY: Times Books, 1978), pp. 6, 60.
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publicize an alleged affair that Kennedy carried on with socialite Amanda Burden by arranging to station at each of his campaign appearances someone carrying a sign asking, ‘Where’s Amanda, Teddy?’88 Such tactics achieved little, however. Colson was able to get photos of Kennedy dancing with an Italian princess in Paris published in the National Enquirer, but that caused no stir.89 Colson may have gotten more results on other occasions, however; as he told President Nixon on 2 January 1973, ‘I did things out of Boston, we did some blackmail and . . . I’ll go to my grave before I ever disclose it. But we did a hell of a lot of things and never got caught.’90 Sexual blackmail was also at the heart of the first major felony committed by the Nixon White House ‘Special Investigations Unit,’ or ‘Plumbers’ squad. The secret unit had been formed at President Nixon’s directive in the summer of 1971 to uncover and silence unauthorized leakers of administration secrets. Topping their list of targets was Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon official who had helped draft the top-secret Pentagon Papers, a highly critical study of the history of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg had leaked the 7,000- page report to the New York Times and Washington Post, prompting Nixon’s Attorney General to seek an unprecedented injunction against publication and bring a criminal indictment against Ellsberg. Though Ellsberg faced 115 years imprisonment and $120,000 in fines, that wasn’t enough for Nixon, who demanded that his underlings ‘destroy [Ellsberg] in the press’.91 Retired CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, newly recruited to the Plumbers unit, recommended ways to accomplish the ‘neutralization of Ellsberg’ and his supporters by ‘destroy[ing] his public image and credibility’. In particular, Hunt proposed that the Plumbers ‘obtain Ellsberg’s files from his psychiatric
88 Dean, The Nixon Defense, p. 151. Burden became New York’s chief urban planner during the Bloomberg administration. 89 Summers, Arrogance of Power, p. 379. 90 Dean, The Nixon Defense, p. 198. 91 Stanley Kutler, Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (New York: The Free Press, 1997, p. 6 (30 June 1971 to Mitchell).
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analyst’.92 Hunt and his sidekick G. Gordon Liddy, an ex-FBI agent, had heard rumors that the Pentagon Papers leaker engaged in orgies and group sex. They thought exposure of his ‘oedipal conflicts or castration fears’ could destroy Ellsberg’s reputation.93 Because an aging and cautious Hoover no longer cooperated with White House officials to stage illegal ‘black bag jobs’, Hunt recommended mounting a ‘covert operation’ to steal Ellsberg’s file from the office of his Beverly Hills psychiatrist. With White House authorization, and Liddy’s help, Hunt recruited several of his Cuban-American associates from CIA days to stage the burglary over Labor Day weekend in 1971. The team botched the job – they found no files and made a mess of the office – but it set the stage for the later Watergate cover-up by implicating top White House officials in a serious felony. Eventually, exposure of the 1971 burglary set Ellsberg free and sent six Nixon operatives, including one of his closest White House advisers, to jail.94 Nixon’s team also made sex a central part of their ‘dirty tricks’ operations against the Democrats in 1972. For example, they sent a fake mailing from presidential front-runner Senator Ed Muskie to thousands of Florida voters claiming that Hubert Humphrey had been arrested for drunk driving with ‘a well- known call-girl’ and that Senator Henry Jackson had an illegitimate child by a seventeen-year-old girl and had also been arrested for homosexual activities.95 The ultimate White House concept for sexual dirty tricks was encapsulated in a master plan drafted by Gordon Liddy for disrupting the Democrats during the 1972 presidential campaign. One component of his plan envisaged eavesdropping on the 1972 Democratic convention in Miami from an opulent barge equipped with ‘a lush bedroom
92 Fred Emery, Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 60. 93 J. Anthony Lukas, Nightmare, p. 92; Hunt, American Spy, pp. 181- 182. 94 Lukas, Nightmare, p. 101, footnote. 95 Summers, Arrogance of Power, p. 381; Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, Final Report, 93/2 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974) p. 169.
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featuring a large mirror over the big king-sized bed’, from which prostitutes posing as ‘idly rich young women’ would entertain ‘high campaign officials’ while being tape-recorded.96 Quite aside from the women, the boat would have been a much more attractive venue for the Democrats than the convention floor, if Liddy had succeeded in his plan to sabotage the hotel’s air conditioning system that summer. Fortunately for the convention delegates, Liddy’s superiors never approved funding for these exotic plans, and his arrest for involvement in the Watergate burglary ended his advocacy of them. When Sen. George McGovern won the Democratic nomination, the Nixon team turned their investigative microscope on him. Nixon’s long-time political fixer Murray Chotiner hired conservative writer Lucianne Goldberg for $1,000 a week to infiltrate the McGovern campaign as a reporter and dig up harmful gossip. ‘They were looking for really dirty stuff’, she recalled. ‘Who was sleeping with whom . . . that sort of thing’.97 Evidently, she didn’t find much, but her interest in the subject never flagged. Years later Goldberg would ghost-write a draft of the romance novel Washington Wives under the name of John Dean’s wife Maureen; and in the early 1990s she persuaded a friend to illegally tape record the conversations of White House intern Monica Lewinsky about her sexual relations with President Clinton.98
William Jefferson Clinton and ‘womanizing’ Watergate unleashed American journalists to engage in much more aggressive, adversarial standards of reporting. One
96 G. Gordon Liddy, Will (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), p. 274; Summers, Arrogance of Power, pp. 400-401. Liddy claimed that Magruder asked for one change to SAPPHIRE: ‘that the prostitutes . . . be brought up to Washington from Miami and put to work immediately’. He also asked if he could be set up with one of the women. ‘If GEMSTONE were approved, I told him, he’d be paying for them anyway and could take his pick’. (Liddy, Will, pp. 285-286) 97 Lukas, Nightmare, p. 161; ‘Writer Declares She Was GOP Spy in McGovern Camp’, New York Times, 19 August 1973. 98 Judith Miller and Doreen Carvajal, ‘The Book Agent: A Maverick Who is No Friend of Bill’, New York Times, 30 January 1998.
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result was to end the quiet conspiracy of White House correspondents to hold back what they knew about the intimate affairs of Presidents. At the same time, however, public attitudes toward sex were changing fast, reducing the shame experienced by politicians caught in compromising behavior. The media’s post-Watergate aggressiveness was on full display in 1987, when the Miami Herald ignited a press and political firestorm by publishing evidence that Presidential candidate and former Senator Gary Hart was conducting an extramarital affair with a young blonde model, Donna Rice. Hart denied the charges, but soon resigned after reporters produced evidence of his reckless infidelity. Still, more than a few critics questioned the media’s close scrutiny of Hart’s sex life. So did millions of Americans, whose views about sex had liberalized since the 1960s. Two-thirds of adults polled by Time magazine disapproved of the media reporting on a candidate’s sex life and 60 percent agreed that Hart’s relationship with Rice was irrelevant to his candidacy.99 In 1992, a contrite and confessional Bill Clinton survived revelations about his long affair with nightclub singer Gennifer Flowers to become President of the United States. Before long, however, Clinton’s lust for women was fueling the biggest national political scandal since Watergate. ‘Monicagate’ got its name from a young White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, with whom President Bill Clinton had a sporadic but months-long office affair. After firmly denying their sexual liaison, Clinton was finally forced to admit to an ‘improper physical relationship’ with Lewinsky after being hauled before a grand jury by a conservative Republican independent counsel, Kenneth Starr. It was the bizarre culmination of Starr’s failed, multi-year campaign to implicate Bill and Hillary Clinton in fraudulent financial and land deals in Arkansas, known as the Whitewater investigation.100 99 John Dillin, ‘Press Unfair to Hart?’ Christian Science Monitor, 12 May 1987. 100 This inquiry ‘dwarfed all other independent counsel investigations, including Iran-Contra, and exceeded the cost to the government of the failure of the savings and loan ostensibly under Continues at the foot of the next page
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Evidence that Clinton had lied in a civil suit about his relations with Lewinsky led to his impeachment by the House of Representatives – the first in more than a century, and only the second in U.S. history. The story of Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky was uncovered by Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff, who had spent months doggedly investigating rumors about Clinton’s sex life. With no trace of irony, he wrote in his personal account of chasing the story, ‘As a college student, in the early 1970s, I had been inspired by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they uncovered the crimes of Richard Nixon.’ 101 Unlike Woodward and Bernstein, Isikoff spent his time tracking down mere misdemeanors, not high crimes. But like his illustrious predecessors, Isikoff followed a trail blazed by administration opponents and the FBI. The right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife had bankrolled a major investigation of Clinton’s sex life and the private lawsuit that tripped him up in order to destroy his presidency.102 The FBI had no business joining that smear campaign, which had nothing to do with the original Whitewater probe. But Starr vindictively resorted to sex as a weapon after failing to implicate Clinton in corruption. As Isikoff himself wrote in 1997: ‘Looking for evidence that Bill Clinton had lied about his Arkansas business deals, frustrated Whitewater investigators last November came up with a new strategy: FBI interviews with every Arkansas state
Note 100 continued investigation’. See David Kendall, ‘Whitewater Was No Close Call for Prosecutors’, Washington Post, 10 July 2016. Kendall and other critics note that the highly partisan Starr, who had no experience as a prosecutor, was appointed by a panel of right-wing judges who fired the original independent counsel. See also Susan Schmidt, ‘Fiske Removed as Counsel; Fiske Ouster Stuns Congress, Staff’, Washington Post, 6 August 1994. 101 Woody Klein, The Inside Stories of Modern Political Scandals: How Investigative Reporters Have Changed the Course of American History (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010), pp. 73-88. 102 Hedrik Hertzberg, ‘Can You Forgive Him?’ New Yorker, 11 March 2002; Murray Waas, ‘Newsreal: The Men Who Kept Paul Jones Lawsuit Going’, Salon, 2 April 1998 at
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trooper who’d served on Clinton’s detail in the mid- to late 1980s. The agents asked about the then governor’s out-of-the-limelight contacts with a roster of characters, including more than six women with whom Clinton had allegedly had affairs. Starr’s gumshoes say they were looking for loose talk, pillow talk, late-night slip-ups or soulful confessions to an intimate – anything to help make a fraud or perjury case. The . . . project, which ended in February, was apparently a dud. But last week it blew up in Starr's face, raising new questions about his probe at a time when the political world is wondering where – and when – the three-year . . . effort will end.’103 It all ended, $70 million later, with Starr producing an X-rated final report on Clinton’s ‘sleaze factor’. The President survived his impeachment when the Senate failed to convict and the public largely forgave his personal sins. It also ended with the media sinking further in the public’s estimation for its frenzied and salacious reporting.104 As former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste commented at the time, ‘Sadly, a wholesome desire to emulate the world-famous Watergate team of Woodward and Bernstein has, over time, morphed into a desperate competition among some in the media for fame and glory irrespective of the material available. . . . [J]ournalistic effort often is trumped by sensationalism for the sake of its entertainment value. Polls have quantified the slippage in public esteem in which journalist are held. Notable journalists have resigned and now seek to call attention to the changes from outside the profession.’105
103 Michael Isikoff and Howard Fineman, ‘A Starr-Crossed Probe?’ Newsweek, 7 July 1997. 104 For an angry commentary on media malpractice by the former president of the New England Press Association, see Ross Connelly, ‘Clinton Sex Scandal Reeks of Editorial Sanctimony’, Editor & Publisher, 14 March 1998. 105 Richard Ben-Veniste, ‘Facts Don’t Lie: Whitewater Is Not Watergate’, Insight on the News, 23 June 1997.
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The future of sexual scandals and blackmail in America None of that spelled an end to politicians paying a price for sexual indiscretions.106 But as scholars Paul Apostolidis and Juliet Williams observed in a 2004 book on Politics in the Age of Sex Scandals: ‘There is a general sense among politicians, commentators, and the American public at large that at some point during the past fifteen years, a line was crossed. After the exposure of Gary Hart’s infidelity (on the good ship Monkey Business) ended his 1987 presidential primary run, after Anita Hill’s charges of sexual harassment nearly derailed Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, after Bob Packwood’s ignominious exist from the U.S. Senate for just such behavior, and especially after Bill and Monica, Americans from most reaches of the ideological spectrum wonder whether so much fanfare over the sexual lives of political leaders is genuinely necessary to a well- functioning polity.’107 With changing cultural mores, Puritanism has lost its powerful hold on much of the American public – even for self-proclaimed conservative Christians who increasingly forgive sexual transgressions of Republican legislators.108 As a result, shame
106 As one law school professor commented in 2015, ‘the President [Clinton] was impeached for lying about a sexual affair by a House of Representatives led by a man [Newt Gingrich] who was also then hiding a sexual affair, who was supposed to be replaced by another Congressman [Bob Livingston] who stepped down when forced to reveal that he too was having a sexual affair, which led to the election of a new Speaker of the House [Dennis Hastert] who now has been indicted for lying about payments covering up his sexual contact with a boy’. See Orin Kerr, ‘If I Understand the History Correctly’, Washington Post, 29 May 2015. 107 Apostolidis and Williams, Public Affairs, p. 1. 108 Cases in point include Senator David Vitter, the first Republican Senator elected from Louisiana, who received the public’s forgiveness after being exposed as a client of a prostitution service in Washington, D.C.; and Mark Sanford, the South Carolina governor who disappeared or six days in June 2009 to visit his Argentine mistress. Although he was censured for his dereliction of duty, he won election to the House of Representatives in 2013.
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may not be dead, but it’s not what it used to be. As the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik observed in ‘The Changing American Sex Scandal’: ‘American culture – or at least the part of it that gets seen every night on television and read each day on the Internet – has lost its last pretenses of gentility, and of any reticence at all about matters sexual. Blow jobs and bum jobs are both part of the standard currency of the best pop entertainment; how could you embarrass someone out of office now by detailing their sexual antics when there would be nothing there that you hadn’t just seen on “Girls”’?109 Despite the public’s declining trust in the media and greater tolerance of private misbehavior, however, sexual blackmail and destructive public exposés are likely to remain an important force in America’s deep politics. That’s because, in the post-9/11 era, intelligence agencies have nearly unlimited powers to intrude on private lives. A case in point was the zealous use by the Justice Department under President George W. Bush of a provision of the post-9/11 Patriot Act to justify the FBI wiretapping New York Governor Eliot Spitzer as he arranged to meet a prostitute at a Washington hotel. The government’s lurid leaks to the press forced his resignation, although he had committed no significant offense against the public. Spitzer’s fall from power was cheered by Republicans and their friends on Wall Street. Attorney Ellen Brown noted: ‘It may not be a coincidence that the revelation of his indiscretions with a high-priced call girl came less than a month after he published a bold editorial in the Washington Post titled “Predatory Lenders’ Partner in Crime: How the Bush Administration Stopped the States from Stepping in to Help Consumers”. The editorial exposed the collusion between the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and Wall Street in deregulating the banks in the guise of regulating them, by taking regulatory power away from the states. It was an issue
109 Adam Gopnik, ‘The Changing American Sex Scandal’, The New Yorker, 3 June 2015.
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of the federal government versus the states, with the Feds representing the banks and the states representing consumers.’110 Supporting the theory that the investigation was politically motivated, law professor Scott Horton cited evidence that ‘the case was prioritized and lavishly funded because it involved Spitzer. That perfectly matched the interests of Republicans eager to see Spitzer taken down, and it directly contradicted the long-standing guidance given to federal prosecutors that investigations focusing on persons – particularly public persons of the political opposition – rather than crimes are inherently abusive.’111 The risk that the government will collect and abuse information about personal sin has become ever greater in this age of almost ubiquitous digital surveillance. Individuals leave digital traces everywhere they go with a smartphone and with every website they browse. Agencies like the NSA have extraordinary capacities to follow those traces and monitor our communications. The risk is not merely theoretical. The Washington Post reported that many NSA surveillance files leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden had ‘a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes’.112 A 2012 NSA document suggested the agency could attack ‘radicalizers’ by exposing them for, among other things, ‘viewing sexually explicit material online or using sexually explicit permissive language when communicating with
110 Ellen Brown, ‘Not Too Big to Jail: Eliot Spitzer is Wall Street’s Worst Nightmare’, Truthdig, 19 August 2013 at
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inexperienced young girls’.113 Other documents released by Snowden show that the NSA’s partners in Great Britain developed online techniques for luring targets into sexual ‘honeytraps’ so they could be discredited.114 Speaking to the Council of Europe in 2014, the Guardian reported: ‘Snowden said he did not believe the NSA was engaged in “nightmare scenarios”, such as the active compilation of a list of homosexuals “to round them up and send them into camps”. But he said that the infrastructure allowing this to happen had been built. The NSA, its allies, authoritarian governments and even private organizations could all abuse this technology, he said, adding that mass surveillance was a “global problem”. It led to “less liberal and safe societies”, he told the council.’115 In 1975, just one year after President Nixon resigned in disgrace, Idaho Senator Frank Church led the most sweeping investigation of U.S. intelligence agency abuses in history. One prescient focus of his investigation was the highly secretive National Security Agency. He warned that the government’s ability to monitor our every communication leaves us ‘no place to hide’. That warning remains all too relevant today to understanding the power of the deep state, including the issues that raised in this article about scandal, blackmail and political pressure. Let me close with a few of his prophetic words: ‘If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and 113 Ryan Grim, ‘Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied on Porn Habits as Part of Plan to Discredit “Radicalizers”’, HuffingtonPost, 26 November 2013 at
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there would be no way to fight back. . . I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.’116 *
Jonathan Marshall is author or co-author of five books, including The Lebanese Connection: Corruption, Civil War, and the International Drug Traffic (Stanford, 2012); Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (University of California, 1998); and The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (South End Press, 1987).
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How Investigative Reporters Have Changed the Course of American History. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010. Kutler, Stanley. Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes. New York: The Free Press, 1997. Lasky, Victor. It Didn’t Start With Watergate. New York: Dial Press, 1977. Mahoney, Richard. Sons and Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy. Arcade Publishing, 1999. McLaren, Angus. Sexual blackmail: A Modern History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. O’Toole, David. Outing the Senator: Sex, Spies & Videotape. Worcester, MA: James Street Publishing, 2005. Olmsted, Kathryn S. Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pearson, Drew. Washington Merry-Go-Round: The Drew Pearson Diaries, 1960-1969. Potomac Books, 2015. Piley, Jessica R. Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Schmidt, Regin. Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919-1943. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000. Scott, Peter Dale. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Berkeley: University of California, 1993. Stanford, Phil. White House Call Girl: The Real Watergate Story. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2013. Sullivan, William with Sam Sloan. The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI. New York: Ishi Press, 2011. Summers, Anthony. Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. New York: Macmillan, 1985. Summers, Anthony. Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993. Theoharis, Athan, ed. From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1991. ______. J. Edgar Hoover, Sex, and Crime: An Historical Antidote. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995.
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West, Mark. Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle: The Rules of Scandal in Japan and the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Wise, David. Tiger Trap: America’s Secret Spy War with China. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2011. Yoder, Edwin M. Jr. Joe Alsop’s Cold War: A Study of Journalistic Influence and Intrigue. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Lobster 73 Summer 2017 The Hess flight: www.lobster-magazine.co.uk still dangerous for historians – even after 75 years
Rudolf Hess: Treachery and Deception John Harris and Richard Wilbourn Jema Publications, Northampton NN3 7TJ, UK, h/b £25 RRP on sale through Amazon and Ebay. ISBN:978 1 871468 94 6
How did Hitler’s deputy come to be piloting an unarmed fighter-bomber, at high speed in fading light, over Southern Scotland in the middle of a world war? Was he duped by the British into attempting the solo peace mission that landed him in prisons for the rest of his long life? Or was the daring 900-mile flight on Saturday, 10 May 1941,1 part of a failed coup d’état by certain well-known high Tories, attempting a ceasefire with Nazi Germany by removing Churchill as war leader? The facts about May 10, just six weeks before the German invasion of Russia, remain so uncertain that professional historians have tended to give the affair a wide berth. The disastrous peace mission by Rudolf Hess was, apparently, equally unexpected by both sides. In the decades since, it has come to be be seen as an historical elephant trap of the kind that has wrecked the careers of men as respectable as Hugh Trevor Roper and as devious as David Irving. The exposure of the bogus Sunday Times Hitler Diaries, and Irving’s recent humiliation in a London libel court (as recently retold in the film Denial), remind us what happens to a historian when the world learns, beyond all doubt, that the historian has got it wrong. Neither Stalin, nor Churchill, the two leaders most endangered by the Hess mission, seems to have known what was afoot. Stalin’s disastrous misreading of the situation undoubtedly contributed to the deaths of the 23 million Soviet citizens who died in the war that Hitler unleashed on June 22. Churchill was in a desperate jam. On May 7, 1941, just three days before Hess took off for Scotland from the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke airstrip in Bavaria, Churchill faced a dangerous Commons confidence motion. Six days after the confidence motion, and three days after Hess crash landed in Scotland, when someone asked the prime- minister in the Commons why the Minister of Information was not handling, with ‘skill and imagination the news of the flight to this country of this very high and important Nazi leader’, all that the most eloquent of British war leaders could say was:
Lobster 73 Summer 2017 1 The night of May 10-11 May 1941 marked the peak of the Blitz bombing of London. ‘I think this is one of these cases where imagination is somewhat www.lobster-magazine.co.uk baffled by the facts as they present themselves.’ The post-war Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, political commissar at the Battle of Stalingrad, dared to discuss the Hess mission with Stalin by suggesting: ‘The Germans are hiding something. I don’t think Hess’s flight to England is really an escape from Germany at all. I think he must actually be on a secret mission from Hitler to negotiate with the English about cutting short the war in the West to free Hitler’s hands for the push East. Stalin heard me out and then said, “Yes, that’s it. You understand correctly.” He didn’t develop his thoughts on the subject further. He just agreed. We had long since become accustomed to the practice that if you weren’t told something, you didn’t ask.’ 2
Stalin would later taunt Churchill at a 1943 dinner in Moscow, suggesting that the British prime-minister had known about the Hess flight before it happened. Churchill said through his interpreter: ‘When I make a statement of facts within my knowledge I expect it to be accepted.’ Stalin grinned and said, ‘There are lots of things that happen, even here in Russia, which our secret service does not necessarily tell me about.’
Into the archives In the early days of Gorbachev’s perestroika, professional historians criss- crossed the old Iron Curtain mounting reciprocal research expeditions into each other’s archives. For the British, any evidence in their archives of a conspiracy behind the Hess Flight lay like an unexploded bomb. It was as dangerous as the NKVD material on the mass murder of Polish POWs in the Katyn Forest, or the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg. For the FBI and CIA it would be like records of conspiracies leading up to the assassination of JFK. John Costello, backed by a New York budget, was first into the KGB archives, working with former KGB colonel Oleg Tsarev to deliver in 1991 Ten Days That Saved The West, a book in which Costello supported Russian suspicions that the British had plotted to lure Hitler into attacking Russia. The book sold well in the USA with the sub-title, The Secret Story of the Hess Peace Initiative and British Efforts to Strike a Deal With Hitler. Four years later Costello, 52, was found dead in his airline seat as he flew home to Miami from London. Shellfish poisoning was suggested, but the Dade County toxicology tests were inconclusive. In the opposite direction came Professor Oleg Rzheshevsky,
2 Lobster Khrushchev 73 Remembers, by Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, translated by StrobeSummer 2017 Talbott, 1970. president of the Russian Association of World War II Historians. I www.lobster-magazine.co.uk remember seeing the professor in a London hotel. He had asked to meet Hugh Thomas, the former British army surgeon whose daring 1979 book The Murder of Rudolf Hess 3 had ingeniously argued that the last war crimes prisoner of Spandau in Berlin was not in fact Hess, but a double, substituted with the connivance of British intelligence. Rzheshevsky seemed surprised that, unlike the KGB files, the British files on Hess were closed for research until 2017 by an act of Parliament. To be in that international pre-internet group of self-appointed investigators was often exciting. Censored wartime pictures and documents were turning up in newspaper offices. Former fighter pilots were still around, telling stories that didn’t fit the shaky official version. Doug McRoberts, for example, official historian of 602 City of Glasgow fighter squadron, reported that a Spitfire scramble by the RAF fighter ace Al Deere recorded in Deere’s pilot’s log book on May 10 had not been recorded in the squadron operations record book.4 In addition to such publicly accessible historical oddities, MPs frequently accused the Foreign Office minister Lynda Chalker of obsessive secrecy in closing the archives. Between 1973 and 1978 the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service MI6, a man then known usually as ‘C’, was himself a real historian. Maurice Oldfield had studied history under A. J. P. Taylor at Manchester, earned his fellowship in mediaeval history but was diverted into spying at the onset of the Second World War. The former mediaevalist once admitted being a socialist ‘of the Piers Plowman kind’. ‘Brewesters and baksters, bochiers and cokes For thise are men on this molde that moost harm wercheth To the povere people’ When Major Hugh Thomas, a British army bullet wound surgeon, was serving in Northern Ireland, Oldfield took him as his assistant on secret negotiations south of the Irish border. In return, Sir Maurice removed a most secret Foreign Office file on Hess and passed it to Thomas to ‘save it from the weeders for the sake of the historians’. The Dutch film maker Karel Hille, working on a TV documentary entitled The Appalling Truth, took the file abroad for safety.
New research There were many setbacks. The late Roy McHardy of BBC Scotland found a Scottish doctor who had been asked by Churchill to check again for First World War bullet wound scars on the chest of the German pilot. A lorry on
3 Hugh Thomas, The Murder of Rudolf Hess (Hodder & Stoughton, 1979).
4 Lobster Douglas 73 McRoberts, Lions Rampant: Story of 602 Spitfire Squadron, (HarperCollins,Summer 2017 1985). a roundabout killed the old doctor and his wife as they drove into the www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Glasgow studio to record an interview. McHardy battled on, gathering new Scottish eyewitnesses until the BBC ordered a London team from Timewatch to take over the project. They too had their problems. A freelance producer cracked under political pressure and had to be replaced by the Official Historian of the Security Service (MI5).5 Dr Matthias Uhl of the Deutsches Historisches Institut Moskau unveiled in 20116 a chilling document found in the State Archive of the Russian Federation. For 63 years the Russians had been hiding a 28-page notebook said to have been hand-written in captivity by Hess’s adjutant Karlheinz Pintsch (the man ordered to break the news of the Hess Flight to Hitler). A pre-war businessman who had lectured in London in the thirties, Pintsch had been arrested at Berchtesgaden; interrogated in Berlin by ‘Gestapo’ Muller; jailed by the SS; sent to the Russian front in 1944; captured by the Russians and betrayed to the NKVD by a fellow German prisoner. In the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow the NKVD broke all his fingers to make him talk. His words in the 1948 notebook, translated for the attention of Stalin, say ‘Hitler calmly listened to my report and dismissed me without comment.’ The notebook says Hess flew ‘by prior arrangement with the English’ to ‘use all means at his disposal to achieve, if not a German military alliance with England against Russia, at least the neutralization of England.’ But some phrases in the notebook have an ominous ring of the jargon used by Russian torturers: ‘The facts I am reporting confirm that England, by promoting Hitler’s aggression against Soviet Russia, acted in accordance with its old principle of using foreign hands to remove the chestnuts from the fire.’ In 1955 James Leasor, Lord Beaverbrook’s private secretary and Daily Express foreign correspondent, found Pintsch among 600 newly-released POWs at Camp Friedland in West Germany. But during several interviews Pintsch, a man with broken fingers, appears to have said nothing to Leasor about Hitler being involved in the planning of the Hess mission.7 The popular historian Peter Padfield stepped into this minefield in 1991 with Hess: Flight for the Führer and in 2013 with Hess, Hitler and Churchill: the real turning point of the Second World War. Padfield found an unnamed academic who had worked during the war for the BBC in
5 ‘Hess, “Hess”, Timewatch et al’, in Lobster 20 (November 1990).
6
7 Lobster James 73 Leasor, Rudolf Hess: the uninvited envoy (London: George Allen & UnwinSummer, 2017 1962). Portland Place. This man remembered being asked to assess some www.lobster-magazine.co.uk documents found in a Scottish field after Hess crashed the plane near Glasgow. The academic told Padfield there had been a draft peace treaty, typed on Reichskanzlerei paper with numbered clauses and with an attached English translation: ‘This was not a renegade plot. Hitler had sent Hess and he brought over a fully developed peace treaty for Germany to evacuate all the occupied countries in the West.’ But Roger Moorhouse, author of Killing Hitler, concluded rather sadly in History Today: 8 ‘Padfield argues that this approach was ruthlessly covered up, largely for fear of undermining Britain’s moral case and scuppering Churchill’s efforts to bring the US in to the European theatre. This is broadly plausible. However, in building his case, Padfield is forced to rely almost exclusively on circumstantial evidence. Understandably, perhaps, he has the barest scraps of archival sources, but the evidence that he presents is largely a melange of lost letters, missing documents, anonymous informants and unreliable witnesses.’ Padfield also examined fresh evidence gathered by Tony Marczan in post- Communist Prague, where air historian Jirí Rajlich9 discovered from log books and interviews that two Czechoslovak RAF Hurricane pilots, Sgts Leopold Šrom and Václav Bauman (left and centre below), reported
8
9 Rajlich discusses this in his book ‘Stíhací pilot’ (which translates as ‘Fighter Pilot’ from Czechoslovakian), first published 1991. Lobster 73 See also
Enter Harris and Wilbourn Two yeoman historians have been at work in these boggy research fields for at least twenty years. During absences from careers in accountancy and farming, John Harris and Richard Wilbourn have defied the unexploded ordnance and conducted worldwide research, on a scale that would have bankrupted a professional popular historian. Their fourth investigation, Rudolf Hess: Treachery and Deception,11 tracks
the wartime activity of a cunning art historian called Carl Tancred Borenius and is said to have ‘proved that no single spymaster knew the whole story’.
I remembered Tancred Borenius from the spine of a heavy 1938 book that stood unopened for decades in one of my father’s bookcases. John Harris told me: ‘Tancred Borenius was certainly not James Bond. He was not even British. He was a Finn, born in Vyborg on the Karelian isthmus in 1885 and a friend of Queen Mary. He was hired by a ruthless MI6 spymaster for a dangerous wartime mission to Switzerland and silenced after the war in a mental hospital.’ The Borenius mission to Geneva came to light in the diaries of Ulrich von Hassell, the anti-Nazi German diplomat executed in 1944 after the plot to kill Hitler. Most of his diaries were buried in the garden of his house in Ebenhausen, near Munich. Some were hidden in Switzerland. Von Hassell wrote in January 1941 that Carl Burckhardt of the Swiss Red Cross had ‘looked me up in Geneva’. Von Hassell noted in the diary that ‘very recently’ Tancred Borenius
10 'RAF colluded in Hess flight' in Lobster 37 (Summer 1999).
11 Lobster John 73 Harris and Richard Wilbourn, Rudolf Hess: Treachery and Deception Summer 2017 (Northampton: Jema Publications, 2016) had come to Geneva to explain, www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘apparently at the behest of English officials, that a reasonable peace could still be concluded.’ Burckhardt was an old friend of the German geographer and diplomat Albrecht Haushofer, a protégé of Rudolf Hess. At Hess’s request Haushofer had been corresponding, in wartime, with another old friend in Scotland. Haushofer’s old friend ‘Douglo’ was the Duke of Hamilton, a serving squadron leader at RAF Turnhouse, the very man charged with the interception of enemy aircraft in Southern Scotland. Haushofer, the professional diplomat, told his family that he thought it unlikely that Hess would ever land alive in Scotland and even if the perilous flight succeeded, the chances of peace were remote. Hess certainly believed he would be meeting Hamilton in Scotland. And he did. But Harris and Wilbourn claim they have new evidence to suggest that Haushofer was risking his own life in the perilous mission, by acting as a double agent for the British. According to their earlier book Rudolf Hess: A New Technical Analysis of the Hess Flight, May 194112 the three most senior RAF officers in Scotland on May 10 all had German and royal connections: ‘. . .we can say for certain in respect of the RAF command in Scotland that evening is that the commanding officer of No 13 Group was a German expert, the Duke of Hamilton in the Turnhouse sector had some significant links with Germany, and that the base commander at RAF Prestwick/Ayr was an extremely close friend of the Duke of Hamilton and the Duke of Kent, the brother of King George VI.’ Dr Albrecht Haushofer had suspected that British intelligence would intercept his letters in neutral Portugal. And they did. At Hitler’s alpine headquarters on the morning of May 12, 1941, when neither Hitler nor Haushofer yet knew whether Hess had survived the flight, Haushofer was ordered by Hitler to write down a very long list of English Connections and the Possibility of Using Them. Although Haushofer was murdered by the SS a few days before the fall of Berlin, his memorandum has survived. It names dozens of British aristocrats who might have been inclined to strike an understanding with Nazi Germany.’ ‘A leading group of younger Conservatives [many of them Scots]. Among them are the Duke of Hamilton. . . the parliamentary private secretary of Neville Chamberlain, Lord Dunglass. . .
12 Spellmount, Stroud, 2014 Lobster 73 See also
Lobster 73 Summer 2017 13 The Von Hassell Diaries, (London: Frontline, 2011). Borenius would choke on the pill long before the supposed poison www.lobster-magazine.co.uk would take effect . . . He also said that he had been given the book by Claude Dansey, prior to his departure. Claude Dansey was the deputy head of MI6 . . . .’14 After twenty years on the case, Harris and Wilbourn have opened new paths into the epicenter of the minefield. The description of secret meetings in neutral Switzerland is gripping, almost cinematic. The involvement of Ilse von Hassell, elder daughter of Grand- Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, staying with her ‘sick’ son at an alpine hotel in Arosa is particularly intriguing. Ilse tipped off Carl Burckhardt that Dr Haushofer would be coming to see him in Geneva with a ‘double face’. The ‘book’ that Borenius carried to Switzerland was clearly one of the MI6 ‘one-time pads’ that the late Keith Jeffery, official historian of MI6, reported as being in ‘very short supply’ in Switzerland in 1941. Harris and Wilbourn no longer accept Jeffery’s assurance that there were no signs in the archives of MI6 involvement in the Hess Flight. Harris now says: ‘We know that the Borenius mission was organised by MI6 under Dansey. Consequently, one can conclude that either MI6 destroyed the evidence, or Dansey operated outside his authority, or the Hess flight was an unforeseen consequence of the Borenius mission, rather than a direct result of the Borenius mission.’ (correspondence with the author) Ulrich von Hassell’s diary entry shows that Borenius delivered much more than a code book. He carried detailed terms under which a peace might still be possible in 1941, crucially with the restoration of some kind of Polish government in a divided Europe that would leave the British Empire untouched. Borenius returned to London in March 1941 and lunched at the Dorchester with Colonel Victor Cazalet, MP for Chippenham and liaison officer to the exiled Polish Army in Britain, and with the Polish army’s commander-in-chief General Wladyslaw Sikorski, prime-minister of the Polish government in exile. Secret peace talks between the British and Germans, in the absence of a Polish government, would have unnerved the thousands of exiled Poles in Britain. Many of the 40,000 Polish soldiers, airmen and sailors in Britain were stationed in Scotland. Sikorski and Cazalet sailed for the USA soon after their meeting with Borenius. But on May 10, 1941, Sikorski decided to take a serious risk by flying in haste back to Britain from New York, via Gander in Newfoundland. The general huddled aboard one of the very first
Lobster 73 Summer 2017 14 Harris and Wilbourn p. 134 operational B-24 Liberator bombers, tricky planes that went on to acquire www.lobster-magazine.co.uk a bad reputation for crashes.15 Sikorski’s new B-24 left Gander just thirty minutes after Hess took off in the modified Bf110 fighter bomber. Both were bound for Scotland. But by the time Sikorski landed at RAF Prestwick at 11:30 on May 11, Hess had already been captured and interviewed in custody by the Duke of Hamilton. No-one has yet explained why the first man to act as an interpreter for the as-yet unnamed German pilot just happened to be Polish. The recently-appointed Polish consul in Glasgow, Roman Battaglia, turned up at the boy scouts hall in Giffnock, barely an hour after Hess had fallen into the hands of the Glasgow Home Guard. For Borenius the mission to Geneva was dangerous but probably lucrative. Neutral Switzerland, the best gathering ground for intelligence out of Nazi Germany, was becoming increasingly isolated. MI6 historian Keith Jeffery saw from MI6 records that the money paid to couriers prepared to cross Vichy France to reach Switzerland from neutral Portugal and Spain, travelling on neutral or forged passports, was so generous that it was said to be ‘two journeys and retire for life’. Borenius, who carried a Finnish passport but was never interned by the British, acted as guardian to Dolly Wilde, the ‘beautiful but frail’ niece of Oscar Wilde. Dolly’s biographer, Joan Schenkar, described Borenius to Harris and Wilbourn: he was ‘as adroit as a seal and just as slippery.’ Harris and Wilbourn see Borenius as ‘. . .a brilliant man whose story has remained uniquely hidden for over seventy years. It is not overstating his role to say that without it, a 1941 invasion of Britain would have been certainly more likely.’ (correspondence with the author) They have a shot at the vexed question of whether the British were using the slippery Finnish art historian to deceive Hitler, or whether Borenius was himself being used in a very dark British coup against Churchill, aborted only when Hess crashed the Bf110 in the wrong part of Scotland. They argue convincingly that ‘There is now absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Hess was being actively “pulled” to fly to Britain. The British, desperate to buy time so as to prevent invasion, had sent Borenius to Burckhardt in January 1941, under the pretext/cover of a Finnish diplomatic mission.’ (correspondence with the author) John Harris has found some evidence of a Tory coup against Churchill and notes the cruel fate that awaited Borenius in post-war England. In 1945 he lost the editorship of the Burlington Magazine. The mission to Geneva
15 Lobster In 73July 1943 Sikorski and Cazalet were killed in a Liberator that crashed into Summerthe sea 2017 46 seconds after take-off from Gibraltar. could never be acknowledged or honoured, and the Russians had www.lobster-magazine.co.uk permanently occupied his native Karelia. In the hard winter of 1946-7 a doctor, sectioning him under the 1890 Lunacy Act commented: ‘Depressed, gloomy, pessimistic and apprehensive… suspicious of all those around him. I hereby certify that he is still of unsound mind and is a proper person to be detained under care and treatment.’
Reporter Andrew Rosthorn’s previous Lobster contributions have included: ‘RAF colluded in Hess flight’ (Lobster 37, Summer 1999) and ‘Hess,“Hess”, Timewatch et al’ (Lobster 20 November 1990).
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Deaths in Parliament: a legend re-examined
Garrick Alder
The terrorist attack staged by Khalid Masood on 22 March 2017, in which he attempted to enter Parliament, raised some questions. Most interesting, to my mind, was the matter of how he managed to arrive with such precision at the moment when the Carriage Gate to the South of the parliamentary estate was not only wide open but with just its regular unarmed, and low-key, uniformed police presence as a guard. In fact, were it not for the fortuitous presence at the scene of the armed bodyguard of Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, Masood would undoubtedly have got further with his attack than he did. It was widely reported Masood had been using the popular encrypted instant messaging application WhatsApp on his mobile in the immediate lead up to the attack.1 Since it seems improbable that he was chatting casually about nothing in particular as he drove to his certain death, the presence of irretrievable messages suggests some kind of coordination. From that arises almost automatically the hypothesis that Masood had a source in the parliamentary estate, steering him towards the right place and time to penetrate Parliament’s defences. All these puzzles are as yet unanswerable. However, they did prompt me to take a proper look at a historical mystery invoked by Masood’s onslaught. Since he plainly intended to invade the House of Commons, presumably to murder as many people as possible once inside, the question arises of how deaths in Parliament are handled. There has been a rumour for many years that anyone who dies in the Houses of Parliament is officially declared to have died elsewhere, namely at St Thomas’s Hospital, Lambeth, just across Westminster Bridge. This (so the rumour goes) isn’t for any particularly sinister reason. It’s because Parliament is a Royal Palace and recording the death elsewhere is more convenient. There are at least two explanations of why this should be the case. The first is the notion that anyone who dies in a Royal Palace is entitled to a state funeral. To avoid this embarrassing constitutional
1
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mishap, corpses are bundled out of the borough of Westminster, across the Thames, and declared dead in neighbouring Lambeth. In some variants, this is embroidered into a claim that it is actually illegal to die in Parliament. This sounds a bit too good to be true, and in fact it was debunked in 2013 by the Law Commission, which reported: ‘We have not been able to trace any such law, and neither have the House of Commons authorities. Under the Coroners Act 1988, the coroner of the Queen’s household has jurisdiction over an inquest into a death in a royal palace. However, state funerals are not mandatory.’ 2 Although the Commission does highlight four historically documented cases of deaths ‘in the grounds of the Palace of Westminster’, this isn’t the end of the matter. It doesn’t mention the suspicion that deaths in Parliament could be recorded elsewhere. This is tantalising in itself, since we might infer that the Commission was deliberately shying away from mentioning it, perhaps to avoid making an embarrassing revelation about the illegality of the practice. And it would be illegal, tantamount to the Crown subverting the law for the sake of convenience. It has a sort of ‘L'état, c'est moi’ air of grandeur and corruption that appeals to anyone interested in the mystique of the Monarchy. The idea of ‘moving’ the scene of death seems to make a certain sort of prima facie sense. Would the Coroner of the Queen’s Household really want to be called upon to investigate the death of a ‘commoner’, when (as the job title suggests) that isn’t really what he or she is there to do?3 A further consideration is, that for a more complex set of circumstances, the Queen’s Coroner might have to convene a Royal Jury – that is, one consisting of members of the Queen’s household. Outlandish as this situation might seem, it is precisely what arose in 2008 in the case of the long-delayed inquests into the deaths of the Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed. It is easy to imagine, therefore, that some quasi-legal fudge might have been contrived to get round the boring procedural necessity of full-ceremony Royal inquests for non-Royals. Beguiling as the idea is, there appears to be no obvious way of testing it, since the whole point of the supposed set-up is to surreptitiously circumvent normal legalities and non-Royal deaths in palaces are vanishingly rare in any case.
2
3 Or was there for, the position having been abolished under the Coalition Government of 2010-15.
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But, as it happens, there has been a death in the House of Commons during the lifetime of the modern St Thomas’s Hospital in Lambeth. The hospital’s history stretches back around 1,000 years, but it was originally based further south of the Thames, in the borough of Southwark and only moved to its present site in Lambeth during the 1860s. So from this point onward, the hospital is in the frame for any plan to shunt inconvenient parliamentary deaths across Westminster Bridge. And on 9 July 1907 an MP called Sir Alfred Billson was taken ill and died in the House of Commons. There was no immediate cover-up of the circumstances. His death was immediately announced in the House of Commons chamber.4 But what happened behind the scenes? I ordered his death certificate from the General Registry Office to find out (see below). The result appears to put to bed at last the long-standing rumour about St Thomas’s Hospital. Sir Alfred’s death – from coronary heart disease – is recorded as having taken place in the House of Commons, in the district of St George Hanover Square, in the sub-district of St Margaret and St John, on 9 July 1907. Barring the emergence of strong evidence to the contrary, we can consider the myths about deaths in Parliament as debunked.
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That section on the certificate under the heading ‘When and where died’ is this:5
!
Postscript Could the the myth that it is illegal to die in a Royal Palace be a garbled version of some real-world fact? Separately from the above research, I approached the General Register Office to inquire about obtaining the 1936 death certificate of King George V, who was killed with an injection of heroin administered by the Royal Physician, Viscount Dawson of Penn. Although it was kept from the public at the time, this fact is not in dispute and Lord Dawson’s notes, published in 1986, constitute a ‘signed confession’. It transpires that the death of a Monarch is never recorded on a formal death certificate. Is this the origin of the ‘illegal to die in a palace’ factoid? The General Register Office’s reply sets out the reasoning behind this surprising fact and is reproduced here in full.
‘The Marriage Act 1949 does not apply to members of the Royal Family and marriages solemnised other than in accordance with statute are not registered and subsequently indexed in the same way. Marriages of members of the Royal Family are governed by the Royal Marriage Act 1772 which requires all descendants of the Royal Family to obtain the sovereigns consent before marriage. Registration of
5 Image Crown Copyright.
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Royal Marriages takes place in a Royal Marriage Register and because the registration is not made in accordance with the Marriage Act 1949 there is no facility to index and subsequently issue certificates. Customers can however obtain a certificate for Prince Charles & Camilla Parker-Bowles marriage from Windsor Register Office. This is because as the ceremony took place in a register office it is classified as a civil marriage in accordance with the Marriage Act 1949 and therefore the records are kept in the public domain. The death of a sovereign has never been registered under the Registration Acts. The distinction made between the sovereign and other members of the Royal Family takes us right back to the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1836. That Act provided for registration of births and deaths “of His Majesty’s subjects in England” which meant that the sovereign was exempt but other members of the Royal Family were not.’
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The Russian Laundromat and Blackpool Football Club
Andrew Rosthorn
The Laundromat is a 20 billion dollar offshore money laundering racket exposed last month by the Sarajevo-based Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). Its deepest secrets are still hidden in the British Virgin Islands, where fewer than 25,000 residents of fifteen tropical islands host the registered offices of 800,000 offshore companies. Researchers in the multinational OCCRP network have been tracking bankers who act as money launderers when they move the proceeds of both legal and illegal commerce – along with the profits of political corruption and tax evasion – out of Russia and Eastern Europe and into remote tax havens. Between January 2011 and October 2014, the illegal network, known for years to bankers and businessmen in the former Soviet Union as The Laundromat,1 moved 20.8 billion dollars through Latvia and Moldova by false accounting, from nineteen Russian banks, into the accounts of 5,140 companies at 732 banks in 96 countries. In March 2017 OCCRP released details to 32 participating newspapers and news services worldwide. The Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich immediately revealed that Deutsche Bank, the only remaining clearer of Latvian dollars with a US base, had processed 24 million US dollars for firms in the Laundromat scheme. Deutsche Bank’s own analysis in 2015 had suggested that ‘There is strong evidence that a good chunk of the UK’s £133 billion of hidden capital inflows is related to Russia.’ 2 Lucy Fitzgeorge-Parker 3 of Euromoney described the part played by Latvian bankers: ‘. . . fictitious debts between UK shell companies were guaranteed by Russian entities, enforced by rigged Moldovan courts and then
1
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3 < http://tinyurl.com/n5ma9ga> or
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funnelled through the Latvian banking sector. Anti-corruption campaigners estimate that more than $20 billion of stolen money was washed by Russian officials and organized criminals before the scheme was exposed and shut down.’ In presenting its findings, the OCCRP’s opening online statement describes the scheme. ‘Call it the Laundromat. It’s a complex system for laundering more than $20 billion in Russian money stolen from the government by corrupt politicians or earned through organized crime activity. It was designed to not only move money from Russian shell companies into EU banks through Latvia, it had the added feature of getting corrupt or uncaring judges in Moldova to legitimize the funds. The state-of- the-art system provided exceptionally clean money backed by a court ruling at a fraction of the cost of regular laundering schemes. It made up for the low costs by laundering huge volumes.’ 4 Nicholas Shaxson, a consultant at Britain’s Tax Justice Network, has shown how offshore tax havens are now financially starving both the neo-liberal capitalist states and the European social democracies by diverting much needed tax revenue. In his Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, 5 he has this towards the end of the prologue: ‘Offshore connects the criminal underworld with the financial elite, the diplomatic and intelligence establishments with multinational corporations. Offshore drives conflict, shapes our perceptions, creates financial instability and delivers staggering rewards to les grands -- to the people who matter. Offshore is how the world of power now works.’ Then, in his first chapter, Shaxson quotes the economic academic Marshall Langer: ‘. . .the most important tax haven in the world is an island . . .the name of the island is Manhattan. The second most-important tax haven in the world is located on an island. It is a city called London in the United Kingdom.’ 6 Some big users of the Laundromat have been named. One of them is Georgy Gens, a Moscow businessman who owns the Lanit group, the information
4
5 London: Bodley Head, 2011.
6 Shaxson, Treasure Islands, p. 21.
Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk technology product distributor in Russia, for Apple, Samsung, and AsusTek Computer Inc (a Taiwanese multinational computer hardware and electronics company). ‘From 2013 until 2014, a company from the British Virgin Islands (BVI), Comptek International Overseas Ltd., received $27 million in its account at the Swiss bank UBS AG, mostly from paper companies in the UK. All of them are dissolved as of today. Retracing the money trail shows that the funds originated via the Laundromat. Comptek International Overseas Ltd. is [sic] owned another BVI entity, Amerton Commercial Inc. that the Panama Papers revealed is owned by Georgy Gens. The Russian state is a major Lanit client. According to OCCRP calculations, from 2010 until 2016, Lanit companies signed contracts with Russian agencies worth at least 51 billion rubles (about $890 million at today’s rates).’ 7
The predecessor scheme Two weeks before OCCRP published details of the Laundromat, the Paris Appeal Court of the French Republic revealed the workings of a predecessor scheme, an international money transfer system constructed by an inventive Latvian banker, Valeri Belokon (pictured below). His network closed down after a political uprising and the Laundromat kicked into gear just six months later. Money from Russia and Ukraine moved to offshore tax havens through a bank, acquired with political muscle, in the remote and desperately poor central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan. This bank was controlled from Latvia. The bank was seized from its Latvian owner during the Second Kyrgyz Revolution of April 2010.8 In the preceding 32 months, the total value of transactions at the Manas Bank in Bishkek amounted to 5.2 billion US dollars – a sum greater than the annual gross domestic product of the six million people of the Republic of Kyrgyzstan. Of these international transactions, 4.2 billion dollars involved 17 non-resident offshore companies, described by the Paris appeal court as having no commercial or industrial purpose. Valeri Belokon (shown below) is a former tailor and was a conscript soldier during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1993 he founded the Baltic
7
8 Two thousand people died during the Second Kyrgyz Revolution.
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International Bank (BIB) in Riga and by 2006 owned a house in Surrey, between three classic golf courses at Wentworth, near Virginia Water. BIB has branch offices in Moscow, Kiev and Berkeley Square, London. Valeri Belokon has since served as a trustee of The Prince’s Trust, a charity founded by the Prince of Wales to help young people. In October 2006, on the occasion of a royal visit to Riga by the parents of Prince Charles, Prince Phillip expressed surprise when the President of Latvia, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, introduced Valeri Belokon to Queen Elizabeth II as. . . ‘The President of Blackpool FC from Latvia.’ 9 In June that year, the Baltic International Bank in Riga had transferred an initial loan of one million pounds to the HSBC bank account of Blackpool Football Club (Properties) Limited. In July 2006 another £1.8 million landed in a Natwest account in Blackpool, this time from VB Football Assets in Latvia to pay for a 20 per cent shareholding in Blackpool Football Club Limited. Less than four years later, on 22 May 2010, one month after an uprising had ended the rule of the Bakiyev family in Kyrgyzstan, Blackpool FC won the most lucrative match in world football, beating Cardiff 3-2 in the Football League Championship play-off Final at the brand new Wembley stadium, thus winning a place in the English Premier League.10
9
10 The richest match in world football is universally accepted to be the English Championship Playoff Final. Admission to a season in the Premier League and the future revenue that goes with it is worth about £200 million. See
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Belokon versus Oyston The value of Valeri Belokon’s investment in a team that put Blackpool into the Premiership, and in various stadium-building activities in the famous Lancashire seaside resort, is now the subject of a legal battle between the Latvian banker and the Blackpool businessman Owen Oyston, owner of most of the remaining shares in the football club. Blackpool are now back down in League Two, which is actually the fourth tier of English league football. In April 2016, Eric Shannon – barrister for the Oyston family, also representing their holding company, Segesta Limited – appeared at a case management hearing in London and warned registrar Sally Barber that Baltic International Bank JSC had just been fined 1.1 million Euro by the Latvian Financial and Capital Markets Commission for ‘repeated violations’ of money laundering rules. Shannon asked for an adjournment for a month for a possible amendment to his case to allege that funds from Belokon, ‘. . .one way or another were the proceeds of crime, or probably the proceeds of crime.’ 11 Representing Belokon, the barrister Fraser Campbell, a former solicitor and fellow of All Souls College, said: ‘They are making wild and extremely serious allegations, which we have responded to in a detailed letter setting out precisely the source of the funds involved.’ Mrs Registrar Barber felt there had been ‘an element of grandstanding’ by the Oystons and refused an adjournment. The Oystons – father Owen and son Karl, who is the Blackpool FC chairman – were facing two cases brought by the multinational solicitors Clifford Chance that could cost the Oyston family up to £20 million. When the Oystons gave their evidence in the Manchester Mercantile Court in December 2016, they were unaware that Clifford Chance were simultaneously defending Valeri Belokon against money laundering allegations in Paris. Judgement in the Manchester court case, finding in favour of the Baltic International Bank, was delivered on February 21. That decision, given by Her Honour Judge Jane Moulder, could cost the Oystons two million pounds. Discontented football supporters from Blackpool applauded the judge as she
11
Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk left the Manchester Mercantile Court.12 But two days later, on February 23 in Paris, the Cour d’Appel de Paris, au nom du peuple français, ruled that: ‘Manas Bank, was acquired under suspect conditions by Mr Belokon with the sole intention of creating a money laundering platform thanks to his close connections with the son of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, Maksim Bakiyev, who used to his personal gain the extensive powers over the country’s economy that his father conferred on him.’13 In 2014, under the terms of a 2008 bilateral investment treaty between Latvia and Kyrgyzstan, arbitrators in Paris had awarded Belokon just over 15 million US dollars as compensation from Kyrgyzstan for the nationalisation of his Manas Bank after the Second Kyrgyz Revolution of 2010. In his original claim he had sought 100 million dollars. But two years later new evidence from Bishkek, the capital of the Kyrgyz Republic, persuaded the Paris Appeal Court to set aside the fifteen million dollar award to Belokon on grounds that: ‘Recognising or enforcing the judgment of the arbitration tribunal would make Mr Belokon into the beneficiary of unlawful activity, quite obviously violating international public order in a very concrete way. The Republic of Kyrgyzstan produced evidence that the major activity of Manas Bank, from its creation and during the entire time of its activity, was solely the handling of sums of money for laundering and/or tax evasion, so much so that its seventeen principal clients, controlling 3.3 billion Euro, were all offshore companies registered in the British Virgin Islands, Belize or New Zealand, all without any commercial aims or objectives. The evidence was that the executives of Manas Bank, notably its president Sergey Kostyrin and another member of its administrative council Juris Kachnovs, not only tolerated these practices but directly participated; that Manas Bank was conceived and created as an annex of the Baltic International Bank [BIB], the Latvian bank of Mr Belokon, which supplied Manas Bank with two thirds of its principal clients; that the sole objective of Mr Belokon in investing in Manas Bank in 2007 in a rigged bidding process was to undertake money laundering which he could not carry out through BIB alone, since BIB
12 Press Association and see e.g.
13 < http://www.gov.kg/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/DECISION.pdf>
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was more strictly overseen by the Latvian authorities; that BIB has indeed been fined in Latvia 1.1 million Euro for breaking anti-money laundering rules between 2003 and 2015, a period which coincides with the period in which Manas Bank was active, that is 2008 – 2010; that during the course of the arbitration proceedings very little of the evidence of money laundering had been assembled, due to the length and complexity of the investigations, aggravated by subterfuge from Mr Belokon who was very closely associated to the son of the former President Bakiyev and a beneficiary of a notoriously corrupt régime; that the arbitration judgment by which Mr Belokon was to be compensated for the Manas Bank at a value computed to include the proceeds of massive money laundering operations would negate efforts undertaken to combat money laundering and truly legitimise those practices.’14 The judgment of the Paris Court of Appeal quoted replies received from the original Paris arbitrators: ‘156. This Tribunal was aware of financial operations, apparently involving significant money balances, mentioned in the second expert report of East Star Capital. In this context, the Tribunal had in mind the definition and characteristics of money laundering.’ and ‘158. If substantial tests and proof of the activities of Manas Bank in money laundering had been produced before the Tribunal, the claim made under the Bilateral Investment Treaty [TBI] between Latvia and Kyrgyzstan would have been rejected. We do not need to be reminded that the protection of investments is not intended to benefit criminals or investments founded on the proceeds of criminal activity.’ The Paris Court of Appeal declared: ‘In reality Mr Belokon and Mr Maksim Bakiyev were co-founders and executives of the company LLC Maval Aktivi, established in Riga on June, 20, 2006, with the object of supplying financial services. Each owned half of the company. It appears therefore that the relationship between Mr Belokon and Mr Bakiyev was not superficial and could certainly be qualified as “inappropriate” in as far as commercial property, let by Manas Bank
14
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to Mr Bakiyev, was the misappropriation of corporate assets. Furthermore, the Manas Bank enjoyed a particularly favoured relationship with the Kyrgyz public sector. On September 23, 2009, the Kyrgyzstan development fund deposited in the bank 8 million US dollars for three months. This deposit was renewed on December 26, 2009 and on March 26, 2010. The social fund of the Kyrgyz Republic also made important deposits, amounting to 14 million US dolars by May 2009. [Republic of Kyrgyzstan exhibit 27]. Mr Verbickis alleged in his evidence, not challenged, that that this amount represented a small part of the sums deposited by these funds around various banks. Mme Aiylchieva, in a testament conforming to article 202 of the civil procedure code in respect of issues before this court, repeated her written evidence to the arbitration tribunal: “In normal times, I would have been surprised that the Government would have transferred an amount so important from the public funds to a bank that had been in existence less than a year. [exhibit RK 57 page 4].” According to a “report on the inspection of procedures at SPAF Manas Bank” conducted by the administrator of the bank on 2 June 2011, the external auditor of the bank, Mme Ulyana Yurievna Pak, held seven safety deposit boxes at the bank. Four boxes contained cash sums of USD 1.35 million, USD 1,419,800, USD 1,619,000 and USD 1,959,900. The fifth contained the rubber stamps for several commercial firms, one of which was registered in the British Virgin Islands, as well as rubber stamps for regional tax inspectors in Kyrgyzstan [Pervomayskyi District, Octjabrskyi District, Sverdlovskyi District, etc.] The contents of safety deposit boxes registered to Mme Pak were suspicious, suggesting to the Kyrgyz authorities that she was dishonest and that her supervision of the bank was in reality suspect. This same Ulyana Yurievna Pak, general manager of the Kyrgyz company Top- Audit KG, was registered by the central commission of elections and referendums of the Kyrgyz Republic, by a decree of May 3, 2009, as having the power to sign financial documents in the name of the presidential candidate K.S. Bakiyev. [Exhibit RK 28]. On March 10, 2016, the capital and markets commission of Latvia published a decision of its council imposing fines on the Baltic International Bank and its president Mme Ilona Gujcaka, amounting to respectively EUR 1.1m and EUR 25,000.00. [Exhibit RK 36].
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The following facts appearing in the second report from East Star Capital [Belokon Exhibit 68] are not contested. That in two years and eight months the total value of transactions at Manas Bank exceeded USD 5.2 billion, a little more than the entire GDP of the Kyrgyz Republic in 2008. Eighty per cent of the total value of the transactions, USD 4.2 billion, implicated non-resident companies. . . . The volume and the structure of these transactions, effected by a bank that had been in ruins before its rescue by Mr Belokon at the end of the summer of 2007 appeared to have no connections with the actual state of the Kyrgyz economy, a success so stunning, achieved in so little time in such a poor country, cannot be explained by orthodox banking practices. These alarming indices show precisely and simultaneously that the Insan Bank was rescued by Mr Belokon in order to develop a bank in a state where his relationship with the holder of economic power guaranteed no interference with his activities in money laundering, activities that would not have flourished in the less favourable climate of Latvia. Recognising or enforcing the judgment of the arbitration tribunal would make Mr Belokon into the beneficiary of unlawful activity, quite obviously violating international public order in a very concrete way. It is therefore agreed that the annulment requested shall be granted.’
Global Witness The accounts of Maval Aktivi, the Latvian investment company named by the Paris Court and owned by Valeri Belokon and Maksim Bakiyev, were first queried in 2012 by the non-governmental anti-corruption organization Global Witness: ‘. . .in 2008 VB Football Assets, a company owned by Valeri Belokon that holds shares in Blackpool FC, [borrowed] 1.8m Latvian lats (£2 million) from a Latvian company called Maval Aktivi which was co- owned by Belokon and Bakiyev, according to its company filing. The VB Football Assets document shows that it then loaned the same amount to Segesta Ltd. Segesta Ltd owns 76% of Blackpool FC, has a company address that is the same as Blackpool FC’s football ground and has directors who are the same as Blackpool FC’s chairman and director. We assume from all this evidence that the £2 million was
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loaned to Blackpool FC.’ 15 Maksim Bakiyev told associates in Kyrgyzstan about his investment in Blackpool and appeared with his party of 31 guests in directors’ boxes at Blackpool’s first home game of the season, after the announcement of the Belokon investment in 2006. Valeri Belokon registered Maval Aktivi just fourteen days after he signed an agreement with Owen Oyston to subscribe to a 20% shareholding in the club for £1.8 million, payable on or before 3 July 2006. Six days after the registration of Maval Aktivi, the Baltic International Bank in Riga transferred a million pound loan on the order of Valeri Belokon's 18 year-old daughter. This was paid into the HSBC current account of Blackpool Football Club (Properties) Ltd. The published accounts of Maval Aktivi list a 15-year loan of 12.5 million US dollars, at 1% interest, made to a private resident of Latvia and repayable on 22 June 2021. Global Witness calculated that this was loaned just two days after Bakiyev and Belokon formed Maval Aktivi and four days before the million pounds from 18 year-old Vlada Belokon landed in the club bank account at HSBC in Blackpool. Valeri Belokon was questioned about this transaction before HH Judge Moulder during the previously mentioned Manchester Mercantile Court case in 2016. Mr ALAN STEINFELD QC for Segesta Limited. Let me just ask you another matter, which is a curious matter in its way. The original loan agreements were entered into, ostensibly, the name of your daughter Vlada. This is paragraphs 12 and 13 of your witness statement. Can you just tell me: how old was your daughter in 2007? VALERI BELEKON [by interpreter] Nineteen. Q. Seventeen, was it? A. [in person] Nineteen. Q. And what was her occupation at that time? A. Student. Q. A student. And did she have money of her own? A. [by interpreter] No. Q. Nothing? So the money did not come from her?
15
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A. I gave her the money. Q. You gave her the money to lend on, not to freely deal with. You gave her the money to lend on to Blackpool Football Club, did you not? Or to Segesta? A. Because it was discussed with Owen that our daughters should take part in this. Q. Why would your daughter want to take part in a loan to an English football club? A. We were talking about family businesses, jointly working for another thousand years. Q. I do not think this was the… these are before the 2008 agreement? A. We always thought so. Q. At the time these agreements were entered into, the 2008 agreement had not been entered into and had not even been negotiated. JUDGE MOULDER. Mr Steinfeld, I am very conscious of the time and we have a lot more witnesses to get through. ALAN STEINFELD QC. Yes. Back in the Manchester Mercantile Court on 3 March this year, Steinfeld’s junior, Eric Shannon, tried and failed to persuade Judge Nigel Bird that £200,000 paid into court on behalf of the Baltic International Bank might represent the proceeds of money-laundering in Kyrgyzstan. Fraser Campbell again insisted on behalf of Belokon that a ‘lengthy letter’, sent in April last year, ‘. . .repeated the confirmation that no relevant funds had been sourced from Mr Bakiyev. It also set out a detailed explanation of the provenance of the circa two million pound loan from Maval Aktivi to VBFA.’ Judge Bird ruled that he could, and should, rely on the very strong indication that international solicitors would have reported any suspicions about the origins of money received from their clients: ‘…it would be nothing short of remarkable if Clifford Chance had not taken precautions.’ The high court judge found the Oyston application had been ‘…an attempt by the defendants to subvert the order of the court’. Yet the Baltic International Bank has been under continual international money laundering strictures and investigation for the last six years. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project – which is partially funded by aid from the United States government – reported on 20
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November 2011, that bank accounts at the Baltic International Bank in Riga had, indeed, been used for money-laundering. In one single year 680 million dollars were stolen from Moldova and Russia through a phantom company called Tormex. ‘Yet Tormex didn’t really exist. It was a phantom. It had no offices, no employees. Its director was a Russian citizen; an unwitting stand-in with no idea there was such a thing as Tormex. What Tormex did own was a bank account at the Baltic International Bank in Riga, Latvia. Who really runs the operation, no one knows, so carefully have they disguised themselves behind layers of dead-end proxies and offshore companies. But their goal is boldly clear: launder money and hide assets. It insured that crime profits were hidden behind outward-looking legal import-export operations or consultancy and intermediary agreements. Money that flowed through Tormex has been connected to criminal activities or is simply lost in the maze of offshore companies. It is no coincidence that Tormex’s account was in Latvia, a country with one of the least transparent banking systems in the world. It is recognized as a hotbed for international money laundering. OCCRP also found out that Tormex Ltd played a role in laundering the money for a fraudulent scheme that ultimately led to the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, a brave Russian whistleblower. Two companies involved in the Magnitsky case and in the looting of the Russian state budget, Nomirex Ltd and Keronol Ltd, sent almost US$15 million to the Tormex account.’ (emphases added)16 In 2012, HSBC Holdings plc in London closed Valeri Belokon’s personal bank account when US regulatory fines were being imposed on five hundred foreign banks. Valeri Belokon revealed this in comments about the Ukrainian crisis published by Bloomberg in 2015.17 In 2012, the Kyrgyz news service Tazabek announced that Maksim Bakiyev was involved in the investment at Blackpool FC. Tazabek published a photograph of Mr Bakiyev and Mr Belokon on the terraces of the Bloomfield Road stadium in Blackpool and asked questions about a ‘dark situation’ [The following is a translation from Russian.]:
16
17
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‘It is interesting that the chairman of Blackpool Football Club after June events in 2010 announced that M. Bakiyev has no relationship with this football club. It is possible that he [chairman of the football club] did not know that M. Bakiyev was at the game and that Maval Aktivi invested money in the club. But why did not V. Belokon deny that they had both invested in the club? This is a dark situation as we have revealed that Maval Aktivi has given two million US dollars to Blackpool Football Club.’ Tom Mayne, the Global Witness investigator, says Valeri Belokon admitted that Bakiyev had an involvement in the football club, if not a shareholding. Discussing with this author the discovery of emails in Russian, Latvian and English which passed between Riga and a Latvian director at Blackpool called Normunds Malnacs, Tom Mayne said: ‘Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I never received such an email from Belokon or Malnacs. The date is 6 months after we published “Grave Secrecy”. I know that he had written to others to “seek clarifications”, trying to get retractions. I’m not quite sure what he was objecting to. I can't remember speaking directly to an organisation called Tazabek, but the Russian, though badly translated, is a point I would have made. My point was: after it came out that there was a possible link between Bakiyev and Blackpool, Mr Oyston said that as far as he was aware, Maksim had never been to a game and that there was no link. But in actual fact, Maksim had been to a game, and had loaned money to Blackpool via Maval Aktivi. My point was - why didn’t Mr Belokon seek to correct Mr Oyston and the public record? I would not have said that Maksim owned shares in Blackpool as that’s not what the evidence showed, but there was definitely a financial link. I interviewed Mr Belokon before the publication of “Grave Secrecy” where I quizzed him on Maval Aktivi and Bakiev's involvement. He said it was Bakiyev’s only involvement. Going by memory, I think I may well have asked him why he did not inform Mr Oyston as to the actual situation - he just brushed the question away, saying that Oyston wouldn’t have known and he hadn’t thought it necessary to tell him.’18
On 11 May 2017, the Pervomaiski Criminal Court in Kyrgyzstan sentenced Valeri Belokon and three Latvian former executives of Manas Bank to 20 years 'custodial service' in their absence. Belokon was found guilty of organising
18 Email to Andrew Rosthorn, 24 January 2017.
Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk money laundering. The absent Latvian executives, Anita Lase, Yury Kachnov and Sergey Kostyrin, were found guilty of money laundering and ordered to serve sentences in a ‘penal colony with high security regime’.19 The Baltic Course news service in Riga described the Pervomaiski Criminal Court hearing as ‘Kyrgyz Government Exacts Its Revenge on Belokon’.20
Belokon’s defence In a question and answer exchange with latviannews.lv, published online in December 2012, Valeri Belokon said in defence of his activities at the Manas Bank: ‘Our bank appeared in Kyrgyzstan after the revolution of 2005. An interesting place, small country, like Latvia, surrounded by big ones, like Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan... The easiest part would be obtaining of a new license to start operations. Yet in Kyrgyzstan, as in any country, they have their own red tape and their own economy protection methods. We did not get a license to open a new bank, yet were offered an opportunity to acquire one of their banks on the verge of failure. There were enough of them. And I acquired a bank, which had already failed. After purchase of its license I paid out the money to depositors. It was much costlier as compared to a new license. Afterwards I filled it by hundred per cent with a capital required for a bank of such standings.’ Question: ‘Was it a display of your good will?’ ‘You see, it is a business you need to consider many conditions. I was aware of the fact that the faith in banking system was undermined there and it was my task to restore it. And I made a step towards the goal. It was dictated by common sense. Of course, I could complain to our embassy about missing license, refer to the law... ‘21 A Kyrgyz court jailed Maksim Bakiyev in his absence in March 2013 to life imprisonment for complicity in corruption concerning the privatisation of state- owned assets, including the sale of a leading state-owned telecoms company which had been sold to an offshore tax haven. In 2014, when the authorities finally cracked down on the Russian Laundromat, US regulators ordered JPMorgan Chase & Co. to cut all
19
20 21 Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk correspondent banking ties with Latvia. A month later, in February 2014, the international credit rating agency Moody’s, citing business reasons, withdrew Baltic International Bank’s standalone bank financial strength rating, despite its reported assets of 266.41 million Euros. 22 In April 2014, Maksim Bakiyev was sentenced to life imprisonment in his absence for ordering the murder of a British businessman. Sean Daley barely survived the assassination attempt near his residence in Bishkek, during his discussions with the parliamentarians and the prime-ministers office about the second largest asset in Kyrgyzstan.23 Daley is pursuing legal action against Bakiyev in London. In October 2014, Bakiyev was living in £3.5 million house in Surrey (owned by a now liquidated offshore company in Belize) when – yet again – he was sentenced to life imprisonment in his absence in Kyrgyzstan. This time it was for the theft of £35 million in state funds held at the Asia Universal Bank. On the last night of the Bakiyev regime, 7 April 2010, 170 million dollars – that’s ten per cent of Kyrgyzstan’s banking assets – were wired out of the country. The Interfax newswire service had following report on 22 October 2013: ‘Maksim Bakiyev, the son of the second president of Kyrgyzstan, has been sentenced for life in a case of diverting funds from Asia Universal Bank (AUB), the press service of the Supreme Court of Kyrgyzstan reported on Wednesday. ‘Bakiyev was sentenced for life in the case of diverting funds from AUB. The judgment was brought today by Pervomaisky district court in Bishkek chaired by Adylbek Subankulov,’ the press service said. The court concluded that Bakiyev who was also the head of the Central Agency for Development, Innovations and Investments, his financial advisor Yevgeny Gurevich and Chairman of the AUB Managing Board Mikhail Nadel were guilty of corruption in relation to diverting 2 billion som from the Social Fund. Bakiyev’s accomplices were sentenced to 25 years of imprisonment, confiscation of property and a ban to hold state posts for three years. 22 23 The Jerooy gold mine project, which is majority owned by a British plc. Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The court also ruled to recover 3 billion som from the defendants for the benefit of the state, the Supreme Court said.’ 24 Yevgeny Gurevich, a Russian-born US citizen and adviser to AUB, was extradited from Italy to the USA on criminal charges brought by the New York District Attorney. Gurevich was jailed for five years after confessing to wire fraud related to insider trading. He handed to the US authorities over six million dollars which he admitted diverting in 2012 from Bakiyev’s American bank accounts. In reporting his sentencing by the American court, Bloomberg quoted the judge who had described the theft as ‘an egregious breach of trust’ by someone displaying ‘less than genuine remorse’.25 A request to extradite Maksim Bakiyev from Britain to the USA was filed in December 2012 at Westminster Magistrates Court, but later withdrawn without explanation. In 2015, Daniel Glaser, Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing at the United States Treasury warned Ainars Latkovskis, head of the Latvian Parliamentary Defence Committee: ‘Although your country is small, and your administration is small, the amount of dollars going through your financial system is one per cent of all US dollar transactions in the world. That’s hundreds and hundreds of millions. You must be able to control it. How you do it is up to you.’ 26 The International Monetary Fund estimated in 2010 that the balance sheets of small island tax havens alone, (and, therefore, not including the enormous laundered holdings in Manhattan and London), added up to 18 trillion US dollars, equivalent to about one third of the world’s GDP. The US Government Accountability Office found in 2008 that 83 of the 100 largest corporations in the USA ran subsidiaries in tax havens. Tax Justice Network discovered that ninety-nine of Europe’s hundred largest companies were using offshore subsidiaries and in each country, the largest user was an international bank. 24 25 26 See the article on the Latvian investigative news website re:baltica at Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk When the Guardian revealed last month that British banks handled 740 million dollars in 1,920 transactions involving the Laundromat conspirators there was a question in Parliament.27 ‘HSBC was by far the biggest conduit for the payments, of which it handled $545.3m, mostly through its Hong Kong subsidiary. Royal Bank of Scotland handled $113.1m and its Coutts private bank in Switzerland handled $32.8m.’28 In the case of Belokon versus Oystons, however, all attempts to discover the origin of a million pounds wired to HSBC in Blackpool from the bank account of an eighteen year-old Latvian girl have so far failed in the English courts. * Andrew Rosthorn wrote about the political conspiracy against Owen Oyston in ‘Our Friends in the North West’ in Lobster 34. 27 28 Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk A Jimmy Savile sex scandal concealed during the 1997 General Election Garrick Alder The man who now leads the NHS Confederation failed to tell either Parliament or the public of a 1995 sex scandal at Broadmoor hospital, involving ‘a member of staff’ who – it can now be revealed – was Jimmy Savile. The Rt Hon Stephen Dorrell served as Health Secretary in Sir John Major’s Government between 1995 and 1997 and did not disclose the scandal when he learned of it in the final year of Major’s premiership. Mr Dorrell was informed by an official review that ‘a member of Broadmoor’s staff’ had been investigated by police over allegations involving a child. It has not been possible to establish if Mr Dorrell made any attempt to learn the identity of the offender, or if he informed Cabinet colleagues about the incident. The Savile scandal might have come to light during Savile’s lifetime – and the offences he committed after 1997 could have been prevented – if the information had been disclosed in a timely manner. Speaking in Parliament in 2014, after publication of the report of the official investigation into Savile's behaviour at Broadmoor, the current Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt MP, said: ‘… if there is evidence that people have criminally neglected claims that were made at the time or behaved inappropriately—even if it is not a matter for the law and they behaved in a way that could make them subject to disciplinary procedures in NHS organisations—that should be addressed.’1 Continuing to address Parliament about the events that led Savile to take up an official post at Broadmoor, first as part of a task force and then as Chairman of the hospital's Advisory Committee, Mr Hunt said: ‘Everyone must be held accountable for the actions they took.’ The report received by Mr Dorrell in 1997 stated: ‘The review team were specifically requested to assess the handling of a child visitor allegation, investigated in 1995 as a hospital complaint with 1 Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk police involvement. The relevant documentation associated with the allegation was reviewed by the team. This was made more difficult than it should have been because no management report was compiled at the time. From the information available to the review team, it seems that the incident was handled appropriately and effectively, and the police found insufficient evidence to take the matter forward. As a result of the incident the hospital's visitors policy for children was revised.’ Broadmoor’s general manager at the time was Alan Franey, who had enjoyed a professional relationship with Savile since working with him at Leeds General Infirmary. Mr Franey, now retired, says that he has no recollection today of the 1995 incident and no idea who it might have involved. The 1997 report was, itself, examined by the official inquiry into Savile at Broadmoor led by the highly-respected Dr Bill Kirkup CBE, which reported in 2014.2 The Kirkup report does not mention the 1995 incident, despite referring to several other pages in the same NHS document. Dr Kirkup has stated: ‘It would be disappointing if any of the staff we spoke to had not raised this incident, either when interviewed or by responding to the appeal made at the time for anyone who wished to impart information.’ 3 The key witness against Savile, however, told his story on national television the same month that Dr Kirkup’s investigation was being set up. Bob Allen, 65, worked at Broadmoor between 1974 and 2001 and is adamant that he was never approached by Dr Kirkup’s team, despite the fact that Dr Kirkup's inquiry set out to identify and contact important witnesses. In October 2012, Channel 4 News broadcast an interview conducted by reporter Paraic O’Brien, in which Mr Allen recounted how he had witnessed Savile enter Broadmoor premises with a 14-15 year old girl in tow, take her into his private on-site apartment and dim the lights.4 Mr Allen informed a superior, who told Mr Allen the next day: ‘No one appears to be interested.’ The superior was night superintendent Arnold Livesey, now deceased, who Mr Allen remembers as ‘one of the better guys at the hospital’. 2 Jimmy Savile Investigation: Broadmoor Hospital, report to Department of Health and West London Mental Health Trust (June 2014): 3 Email 16 March 2017 4 C4 News, Paraic O’Brien 12 October 2012 (first appearance of Bob Allen’s allegations, background details, and Currie 2012 quote): Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk It is not clear what happened behind the scenes after Mr Livesey was informed about Savile’s conduct and Mr Allen could recall only that the incident happened in the mid-1990s. Mr Allen was never interviewed by police, and he believed that the matter had been dropped, but the 1997 NHS document shows that it was handled in secret.5 Broadmoor’s local police force, Thames Valley Police, now say that today, some 22 years after the incident, they cannot locate any record relating to the original complaint.6 The 1997 NHS report was created at the behest of Mr Dorrell during his time as Health Secretary, following allegations in the national press of ‘drugs finds and a possible child pornography ring at Broadmoor’.7 Mr Dorrell received the ensuing report in April 1997. Mr Dorrell did not mention the report in public again, and left office at the General Election that followed in May 1997. Alan Franey, the previously mentioned chief executive of Broadmoor Hospital, was also gone in the summer of 1997. He claimed, ‘It has always been my intention to retire early….’8 No more was ever heard of the matter until 1999 when a report was put to Parliament which stated that in 1997: ‘Mr Dorrell ordered a review of the hospital to investigate the truth or otherwise of the allegations. The review demonstrated that most of the allegations made so vociferously in the media were unfounded. The Review team demonstrated that most of the allegations made so vociferously in the media were unfounded. ’ 9 By the time the report – originally commissioned by Mr Dorrell for the Conservatives – was published, Labour were in power. That less than two years old Government failed to tell Parliament how the review found ‘a member of Broadmoor’s staff’ had brought a child onto the premises overnight. 5 Telephone interviews 18 February and 16 March 2017 6 Email 28 April 2017 7 See, for example, Independent 17 February 1997: 8 See Independent 3 June 1997: 9 HMSO, Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Personality Disorder Unit, Ashworth Special Hospital, 1999 (details on Dorrell’s review, Franey, general Broadmoor concerns): Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk If Parliament or the public had been told in 1999, when Savile had over a decade left to live, future offences might have been prevented. In 1988 Thatcher Government junior health minister Edwina Currie had appointed Savile to lead a task force to tackle various problems at Broadmoor. The entertainer had cultivated Ms Currie with a series of evening meals at the exclusive Athenaeum Club on London’s Pall Mall,10 which Savile had joined some years earlier with the sponsorship of Cardinal Basil Hume.11 It was at the Athenaeum that Savile met with Ms Currie’s departmental under-secretary Clifford Graham to arrange for the appointment to the Broadmoor task force of Alan Franey,12 who had previously worked with Savile at Leeds General Infirmary.13 In 2012, Ms Currie said: ‘What [Savile] did have, as I know for certain, is information which gave him a hold over staff. That could explain why they said nothing, even with their knowledge or suspicion of his misbehaviour. As a result ministers were never given the information, when we could have barred him from the place.’14 Ms Currie left the Department of Health in December 1988 and left the House of Commons at the 1997 General Election. A spokesman for the Department of Health said: ‘Dr Kirkup’s investigation into allegations of abuse by Jimmy Savile at Broadmoor Hospital reviewed relevant documents, identified people to interview, issued public appeals for information. A record reviewed by Dr Kirkup’s team did discuss an incident in which a child visitor was allowed on the premises with a member of staff. The record in question did not identify the member of staff involved in the incident and Dr Bill Kirkup has advised the Department of Health that he heard no suggestion that it 10 Edwina Currie, Diaries, volume one (1987-92), p. 88 (Athenaeum dinners with Savile). 11 Daily Telegraph 12 October 2012 (Hume as Athenaeum sponsor): 12 Daily Mail 28 October 2013 (more details on Savile and Franey’s Athenaeum meeting): 13 Charles Kaye and Alan Franey, Managing High Security Psychiatric Care, (Jessica Kingsley Publishing, 1998), p. 35 (Franey acknowledges meeting at Athenaeum) 14 See the final paragraph of the report in Guardian 1 November 2012 Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk might have been Savile from anyone interviewed.’15 Stephen Dorrell and the NHS Confederation were both contacted and declined to comment. The 1997 NHS document, which was obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, has now been passed to the ongoing Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse led by Professor Alexis Jay OBE. * All rights reserved by the author. With thanks to Paraic O’Brien. 15 Email, 2 May 2017 Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Faustian Bargains Lyndon Johnson and Mac Wallace in the robber baron culture of Texas Joan Mellen London and New York: Bloomsbury; 2016, h/b, £18.99 Professor Mellen spoke about ‘Mac’ Wallace, who is one of the two subjects of this book, a couple of years ago in a lecture,1 and it was clear when this book was announced that it was going to try and debunk the LBJ-dunnit thesis in the JFK assassination. In Mellen’s view, that thesis has just two planks: the fingerprint of Malcolm ‘Mac’ Wallace apparently found on the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD hereafter) just after the assassination and the allegations of the late Billie Sol Estes. The fingerprint issue is dealt with by an expert hired by Mellen. Working with better copies of the print than those provided to the two earlier experts who found a match almost 20 years ago, Mellen’s man finds that there was no match between the print found in Dallas and that of Wallace on file.2 But as Garrick Alder showed in his essay in Lobster,3 fingerprint identification is not a precise science; and, as I commented before in these columns, if the print found isn’t Wallace’s, we have the extraordinary coincidence that a print close enough to Wallace’s to convince two print experts just happens to turn up on the TSBD’s 6th floor near the so-called sniper’s nest. Mellen gives us nearly 100 pages about ‘Mac’ Wallace, centred on his trial for murder in 1951 in an apparent ‘domestic’, for which he received a suspended sentence even though convicted of first degree murder; and the details of security investigations of him by the Office of Naval 1 Available on her website at Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Intelligence when he was apparently given a managerial job in a Texas-based aerospace company. There are, however, significant questions which remain unanswered. LBJ’s lawyer, John Cofer, worked on Wallace’s defence; and it is clear that Wallace got his security clearance over the objections of the security people. Presumably, though not demonstrably, this influence was coming from (the then) Senator Johnson. Why LBJ was doing all this for Wallace is unexplained. There is little on the Wallace-Johnson relationship: one suggestion from a journalist who was researching LBJ in the sixties that Wallace was some kind of fixer/fund-raiser for Johnson in Texas; and almost nothing on Wallace’s putative career as a manager in the aerospace industry in Texas-based companies which benefited from the patronage of Johnson. We are told he was a ‘labor relations manager’, a ‘personnel manager’ and later ‘control supervisor’; and there are some comments from a contemporary of Wallace’s saying what a good colleague he was. But it has yet to be established that these were real jobs Wallace did and not cover stories for his continuing work for LBJ. In one part of his excellent analysis of the Estes-Wallace material, Larry Hancock notes: ‘We know from Lucianne Cummings Goldberg that Malcolm Wallace had been in Washington D.C. in the summer of 1960 during the Kennedy/Johnson campaign, that he had frequented the campaign headquarters and was seen at least three times at campaign functions accompanied by Cliff Carter.’4 Was he on leave? Mellen offers an alibi for Wallace for the assassination. His son, Michael, says that Wallace was with him at their home in California on the night of 22nd November. ‘Michael does not recall what time Wallace arrived home on the night of November 22, but he feels certain that he was there. “I would bet my paycheque” he told the 4 Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk author.’ Garrick Alder made the point to me that it is entirely possible for Mac Wallace to have been in Dallas at 12.30 and back in California the same evening, especially with California time being two hours behind Texas. Despite Mellen’s tremendous research none of this is clear yet. Billie Sol Estes, who named Wallace as part of the JFK conspiracy, is dismissed after Mellen shows that he was a fraudster and a liar and compares and contrasts the many vague, contradictory and ambiguous things Estes said about the events of 22 November 1963, of which he had no firsthand knowledge any way. But Estes is not the only source on all this. Long before his allegations had been made public, long before Estes had even started dropping hints about this, the late Lawrence ‘Loy’ Factor told Mark Collom that he had been recruited to fire at JFK by a man he knew only as Wallace. Factor’s story was dismissed in Mellen’s lecture as a ‘fantasy’ and here it is disposed of in one short paragraph, which concludes: ‘Some have speculated that Factor learned what he did about the Kennedy assassination while reading books when he was in prison for murder.’5 I don’t know if Factor read books about the case while in prison; but he certainly didn’t learn about ‘Wallace’ from them, because ‘Wallace’ didn’t appear in the JFK literature until the first 1995 edition of the Mark Collom and Glen Sample book about Factor, The Men on the Sixth Floor.6 There are two things in Factor’s comments to Collom and Sample which suggest he was telling the truth. Asked about what happened in the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) that day, he said that, after the shooting, they went out down the stairs at the rear of the building. Question: ‘What did the back look like when you went out...when you went out the back north?’ 5 I suspect Mellen hasn’t read the Sample/Collom book about Factor. 6 Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Factor: ‘It was kind of empty-like. It looked like some kind of dock.’ Q: ‘Dock? Factor: ‘Yeah, dock.’ Q: ‘Like a loading dock?’ Factor: ‘Yeah.’ Q: ‘Was it concrete?’ Factor: ‘No, like a porch, kinda like a porch.’ The authors comment: ‘How did this Indian know that in 1963 the Texas School Book Depository had on it’s north side a loading dock? (It was later removed.)’7 The second occurs when they are discussing what actually happened on the 6th floor of the TSBD. Q: ‘You said Oswald was looking through the scope and then handed the rifle to Wallace, right?’ Q: Factor: ‘Yeah...then he leaned it against...kinda like a table saw; he had it all ready to go.’ (p. 62) The authors tracked down Harold Norman, who was working in the TSBD that day in 1963, and he told them that contractors were laying flooring on the 6th floor of the TSBD. Q: ‘So it was noisy up there you said. What was it that was noisy? Were there any kinds of saw, or machinery or anything like that?’ Norman: ‘Yeah, they had one of those saws, you know, one of those table saws.’ (p. 82) In short, Factor’s claim to have been recruited by ‘Wallace’ has not been refuted and the allegations about Wallace cannot yet be dismissed. Interwoven with the Wallace story is a biography of LBJ, showing his corruption and the network of graft and influence he spread around him. Most of this will be familiar if you have read the Robert Caro volumes on LBJ; but not all. Going beyond the election of LBJ in 1964, where Caro ended his most recent volume, Mellen gives an account of the Israeli 7 Glen Sample and Mark Collom, The Men on the Sixth Floor (1995) p. 33 Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk assault on the USS Liberty during the 1967 Six Days War and shows that LBJ had taken part in a conspiracy with the Israelis. The plan involved the Israelis sinking the Liberty and leaving no survivors, which would be blamed on the Egyptians. This would provide the pretext for an American air assault – with small-scale nuclear weapons – on Egyptian forces. (Operation Northwoods writ large.) US planes were in the air on their way to bomb Egypt before being recalled. This is not new information. Former Sunday Times journalist Peter Hounam presented it first in his book Operation Cyanide;8 but that was not published in the United States and this is the first book-based account published there of this bizarre venture.9 Mellen shows that by mid-1963 LBJ and his backers were facing a major crisis: his network of graft and influence was coming unstuck. Criminal and political investigations were under way into Bobby Baker, Johnson’s bagman, and Billie Sol Estes, one of his major financial backers, whose huge fraud of federal funds had been made possible in part by Johnson’s influence. With the Kennedys keen to remove Johnson from the ticket for the 1964 election, these inquiries were not being discouraged by the White House. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had sent a large team of investigators down to Texas to investigate Estes’ fraud. Not only was Johnson’s political career threatened, he might end up in jail.10 And all of his problems vanished when he became president. Mellen’s account of LBJ and, in particular, of the events while he was Vice President, puts Johnson at the top of the ‘cui bono?’ list after the assassination. To make the most obvious point: what would a man willing to use nukes against one of the Soviet Union’s allies in a false flag operation on behalf of Israel not do to secure his political position? Yet like 8 Which can still be bought on-line; or read at Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk most of the major Kennedy assassination researchers, Mellen does not take this seriously. In her case, this is presumably due to a career-long support for Jim Garrison whose inquiries focused on the CIA. Nonetheless Professor Mellen has written a very good book, thoroughly documented and full of interesting and new bits and pieces.11 If you haven’t read Robert Caro’s books on LBJ, this contains all the big stuff and it will be a revelation. Robin Ramsay 11 There is a good summary of the book’s major points by Jim DiEugenio at Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Journalism and pornography Real crime is always organised Dr. T. P. Wilkinson The CIA As Organised Crime How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World Douglas Valentine Clarity Press, 2016 When I began reading the work of Douglas Valentine about six years ago, I had not read his books, only the articles that the US online journal Counterpunch had published. In fact I only began reading Counterpunch because of the accident of having been introduced to the two original editors of what was then only a printed newsletter. Later I was even able to publish a few pieces in that journal before its more famous founding editor’s demise. Why do I preface a book review with such personal observations? To that question I will return later. After reading numerous articles I went to Douglas Valentine’s website and asked him questions about things he had written. This began a conversation that has continued. Of course I could not hope to conduct a serious conversation with someone about their ideas without having read what they had already committed to paper. Hence I began with his The Phoenix Program (1990). I then read both of his books on the US government’s drug organisations, The Strength of the Wolf (2006) about the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and The Strength of the Pack (2010) about the Drug Enforcement Agency, and was pleased to review them online. When Open Road Media, under the direction of Mark Crispin Miller, republished The Phoenix Program as the first in its e-book Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk series ‘Forbidden Bookshelf’,1 I had the opportunity to review it as well. In other words although I have only known Douglas Valentine for a few years, I believe I am very well acquainted not only with his writing but I also know what makes it unique in the landscape. His latest book, The CIA As Organised Crime, is not new. Nor is it intended to be. This book attempts something very difficult: compressing the essentials of nearly 30 years of intensive research, insight and implicit social theory into a volume accessible to readers with rapidly deteriorating attention spans who have been conditioned to what I would call ‘journalism as pornography’. (I will return to that, too.) Before I explain what I mean, permit me to briefly explain the structure of the book. After introducing the reader to the ‘luck’ he had in gaining access to the sources which made the book possible, Valentine presents revised interviews that explain the core information in The Phoenix Program (part 1) and the two- volume study of US drug law enforcement (part 2).2 Then in part 3 he uses previous interviews and articles to explain the interrelationships between the CIA business and the DEA business and how they led to the Homeland Security business. Part 4 is devoted to the various ways in which everything known from parts 1–3 are ignored, trivialised, distorted or censored so that such knowledge has virtually no impact in public consciousness. Here there might be a certain detectable irony, since Valentine writes a book that concludes by saying that the means for acting on the information presented is already precluded — preempted rather than prohibited. The book’s principal subject is the Central Intelligence Agency. It may be useful to recall that the Central Intelligence Agency is an organisation of the US regime created by the National Security Act of 1947. Most history books will tell an 1 See Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk average US citizen (or someone schooled with US curricular materials) that the act adopted by the US Congress on 29 July of that year was designed to consolidate the several branches of the military under a Department of Defence, for budgetary reasons, to restrain historic inter-service rivalries, and to create a more modern and efficient armed forces. What is not said is that in 1945 the US government had demobilised its military and, having emerged from the Second World War unscathed, was trying to determine how to save its economy from a return to the pre-war depression. The intellectual elite of the US regime has already begun to warn that both domestic stability and US dominance in the world would be jeopardised if the regime did not maintain at least the level of armaments expenditure required during the war that had just ended. However there was no publicly defensible reason for permanent wartime footing. There were no more Native Americans to annihilate; despite the abolition of slavery, Negroes were still well under control. The only country even approaching the US in military strength – the USSR – had been so devastated by the war that it would be decades before it could pose a genuine competitive threat. In other words, having pacified the world with atomic weapons and the blood of 30 million Soviet citizens, the US elite had no honest justification for the policy they were about to undertake. Creating the system The National Security Act of 1947 created the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, and what was first called the ‘National Military Establishment’, later renamed the Department of Defence. As the international criminal court constituted to try war crimes in Nuremberg proclaimed the commencement of a war of aggression to be the ultimate war crime under international law, the permanent state of war thus created in and of itself was an act of aggression in the very form condemned at Nuremberg. That 1947 legislation was tantamount to the establishment of a permanently organised war crimes establishment in the United States of America. Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk It is within this legislatively mandated criminal enterprise that one has to understand the origins, purpose and function of the Central Intelligence Agency. The 1947 legislation chartered the CIA as an instrument of the National Security Council. On the tacit assumption that the US regime is in a permanent state of war – despite occasional suggestions to the contrary – the National Security Council constitutes something like a permanent war cabinet. The war cabinet has its weapons of mass destruction (the armed forces) but because this ‘cabinet’ is composed of bureaucrats, academics, professional politicians, businessmen and assorted charlatans in the train of the reigning president, there is need for an espionage organisation which in theory tells these ministers when, where and how to wage war most advantageously. That is the official reason why the criminal cabinet needs spies. According to the Act 3: ‘(d) For the purpose of coordinating [subordinating4] the intelligence activities [spying] of the several Government departments and agencies in the interest of national security [waging war], it shall be the duty of the Agency, under the direction of the National Security Council [permanent war cabinet] – (1) To advise the National Security Council in matters concerning such intelligence activities [spying] of the Government departments and agencies as relate to national security [waging war]; (2) To make recommendations to the National Security Council for the coordination [subordination] of such intelligence activities [spying] of the departments and agencies of the Government as relate to the national security [waging war];’ The ostensible function described is that of a consultancy, an almost academic organisation. However there are some other duties specified in the Act. ‘(3) To correlate and evaluate intelligence relating to the 3 National Security Act of 1947, Section 102 (d) 1-2 (26 July 1947). 4 In parentheses are this author’s translations of the legislative jargon. Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk national security [waging war], and provide for the appropriate dissemination [helping other government spies] of such intelligence within the Government using where appropriate existing agencies and facilities: PROVIDED, That the Agency shall have no police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers, or internal-security functions5: PROVIDED FURTHER, That the departments and other agencies of the Government shall continue to collect, evaluate, correlate, and disseminate departmental intelligence [no spying monopoly]: AND PROVIDED FURTHER, That the Director of Central Intelligence shall be responsible for protecting intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure [preventing the public or victims of spying from defending themselves]; (4) To perform, for the benefit of the existing intelligence agencies [all the military spies, police spies, and implicitly sanctioned corporate spying organisations], such additional services of common concern as the National Security Council determines can be more efficiently accomplished centrally [any other criminal activity for which the Agency is better equipped or has more benefit]; (5) To perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence [covert action] affecting the national security [waging of war] as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.’ The conspicuous crime for which the Central Intelligence Agency was created was spying, an offence punishable under Title 18 of the United States Code which incorporates the provisions of the 1917 Espionage Act. Of course one could argue that it is not a crime to spy on the enemy when at war. However, officially at least the US has not been at war since 1945 – at least not within the conventional interpretation of the war powers in the US Constitution; i.e. a resolution adopted by the US Congress declaring a state of war between 5 This would be called a non-competition clause in commercial law. It was adopted to protect the right of the FBI and other domestic instruments of state terror from encroachments by the federal agency. Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the US and another country. But even allowing executive liberty with the definition of a ‘state of war’, the Espionage Act also makes it a crime to spy on the ‘friends’ of the United States – which of course has been the CIA’s standard operating procedure since it was founded.6 The CIA’s other history However the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency has another history, its genealogy. The CIA claims two inspirational heroes: Nathan Hale and William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan. Nathan Hale is heralded as the first or at least most famous colonial spy to be hanged by the British Army during the American War of Independence.7 Surely a bit of folklore, he was to have said before the noose did its work that he only regretted ‘that I have but one life to give for my country’. William Donovan was a white shoe lawyer who persuaded US President Franklin Roosevelt to authorise the founding of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) from whose ranks many of 6 Former CIA officers Philip Agee (CIA Diary, 1975) and John Stockwell (In Search of Enemies, 1978) provided copious information to prove this. Allan Frankovich produced a film (On Company Business, 1980) largely based on the information Agee and Stockwell provided. He also produced a film for the BBC about the CIA ‘stay-behind’ fascist networks in Europe, Gladio (1992). In 1997 Frankovich died of a heart attack while clearing US Customs at Houston’s George Bush International Airport, returning from London. He was 56 and released a very controversial film debunking the US regime’s Lockerbie story. However even the official media is full of reports about espionage against ostensible friends and allies of the US regime. There has been no end of debate as to whether the Security Council Resolution which the US delegation forced through the UN to authorise its war in Korea, or the so-called Gulf of Tonkin Resolution used to authorise invasion of Vietnam, were congressional declarations of war in terms of the US Constitution’s reservation of war powers to the Congress. This author argues that these debates are moot since the essential legislative mandate for the so-called Cold War – i.e. the permanent war of the USA against the rest of the world – was adopted in 1947. Several campaigns in that Cold War were formally concluded with the treaties leading to the abolition of the German Democratic Republic and subsequently the demise of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union. However the legal framework for permanent war was neither repealed nor rendered obsolete. 7 Nathan Hale (1755–1776) Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the most renowned CIA executive management came. Nathan Hale’s place in the CIA pantheon is certainly no more than the vanity of its white elite founders. William Donovan is far closer to the true tradition from which the CIA arose. CIA cadres make repeated reference to the OSS as if it were the core of its ‘regimental history’. The myth intended is that the Office of Strategic Services was created in wartime (the last time the US was officially at war) and all those boys who joined the OSS were heroic soldiers fighting more or less covertly in the ‘good war’. Thus the CIA is the descendant of that band of heroic elite soldiers and patriots who quietly served their country under conditions that at least theoretically could lead them to share the fate of Nathan Hale. The truth however is quite different. William Donovan’s qualifications for the OSS were not his Medal of Honor awarded in the Great War but his political connections in New York. Such connections and his success as a lawyer enabled him to overcome the WASP barriers, which an Irish Catholic would generally face until one John Kennedy was elected to the White House. Donovan was not only a lawyer and politician in Roosevelt’s home state, he was part of that community of corporate law firms whose specialities included organising covert action to defend US corporations abroad. Probably the most notorious in this league of private mercenary law firms was Sullivan & Cromwell, the firm in which John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles were partners.8 Prior to the creation of the CIA, there were law firms like Sullivan & Cromwell and the US Marines. After 1945, gentlemen like the Dulles brothers agreed that while it was not always opportune or good marketing to send the Marines, it was also very risky for US corporations and their law firms to intervene in foreign countries as they had done routinely prior to the Second World War. There was a need to protect corporations from the very real risks of decolonisation and economic nationalism, which unfortunately had been given new impetus by colonised peoples who took the UN Charter seriously. Not only was it recognised by this segment of the US 8 In A Law Unto Itself (1988) Nancy Lisagor provides some interesting details about Sullivan & Cromwell and the Dulles brothers. Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk elite that a permanent war economy was essential for continued wealth accumulation and domestic peace, but lip service had to be paid to the ideals of the UN Charter and the United Nations organisations (especially since the admission of non-whites was inevitable). The inspiration for the CIA came from precisely this class of white – mainly Protestant – descendants of the New England theocrats and Yankee slave traders whose entire identity was based on white supremacy and capitalism, both as a religious ideal and an enrichment strategy. It is one of the legacies of the US Civil War that overt violence, i.e. the armed forces, is dominated by the elites of the South while covert violence, i.e. finance and the secret police, is primarily managed by the elites of the North. So while 1945 brought the defeat of Ford’s, Bush’s and Dulles’ friends in Berlin and the disappointment of Soviet victory, there was still potential to exploit racism and domestic fears to create the illusions needed for a permanent war economy with all the trappings of a wartime police state. This could not be done overtly because it could jeopardise markets in countries where US corporations hoped to replace European colonial competitors. There was also a domestic threat to be suppressed. After four years of telling US citizens that they were defending democracy and self-determination (opposing racism was not a part of the WWII myth in the US until the 1970s), it was necessary to teach US corporate vassals (dictators) to at least walk and talk like US politicians. There had to be alternatives to the tried and true method of sending the Marines when the leaders in a foreign capital misbehaved. The people of ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan’s class knew the methodology and understood the problem; but what they now needed was ‘official cover’. Nobody would believe – either in the UN General Assembly or any other public forum – that United Fruit supported or opposed governments based on democratic convictions. On the other hand, no one could (or would dare) challenge the actions of the US government abroad to assist a government it declared to be democratic. Moreover if United Fruit broke the Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk law, the local government could punish it, even by expropriation. But no local government would dare take such action against the United States itself: that could mean even war. A criminal organisation Hence the CIA was invented in the National Security Act not simply as an advisory and coordinating instrument for spying but as a criminal organisation to act as cover for the fundamental criminal activity of US corporations and those who own them. It was invented by those whose primary qualification for ‘government service’ was their experience as mercenaries or mercenary managers for the corporations and wealthy families that own the United States government. Its leadership and cadre were and are drawn from the ‘families’ who historically either own or defend the wealth concentrated in the US upper class. They are the essence of ‘organised crime’. That brings me back to Valentine’s book, The CIA As Organised Crime. The subtitle of the book is How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World. The title is fashioned like those of many typical exposés or what some might call ‘muckraking’ journalism. If this title gets more readers, then the means justifies the end. Yet I think the title is in fact a juxtaposition of two contrary perspectives of his subject. For Valentine’s book to be an exposé it would have to reveal something previously hidden. In fact Valentine concludes his book with the entirely justifiable assertion that what he has described is in fact in plain sight, not hidden at all. A ‘muckraking’ story would take an otherwise tidy state of affairs and show that ‘beneath it all’ it is really very ugly and dirty. However, no later than the Church and Pike Committee investigations of the mid-1970s and the Iran-Contra hearings of the late 1980s, it has been a matter of official record that the Central Intelligence Agency organises and perpetrates crimes as a matter of policy and that it does so with virtual impunity – in the interests of ‘national security’ (waging war). So is Valentine’s book a revelation about the CIA? No. Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Nor do I believe that he intended it to be. The most important part of the book is part 4: Manufacturing Complicity: Shaping the American Worldview. I see it as an act of self-defence that this part is not overtly the central part of the book. With respect for that I would like to point out why this self-defence is by no means trivial and at the same time I would like to take the risk or the liberty of elaborating why I believe self-defence is appropriate. Valentine’s most important observations about the nature and structure of CIA action are: 1 The CIA is a class-based organisation. Its membership and its mission are dedicated to defending the dominance of the predominantly US corporate elite, based on the ideology of capitalism and white supremacy. 2 The CIA limits its scope of action to the extent that such action may be plausibly denied and is of benefit to its clients.9 3 The CIA does not recognise any barriers to action except those imposed by its clients or by the force of its opponents: i.e. it is beyond what most of us call the law. This does not mean that it is omnipotent. 4 The CIA relies for much if not all of its tacit support upon the willing collaboration of the Establishment and the Counter- Establishment in all its forms and factions. The means for maintaining this collaboration are mastery of language and propaganda and an enormous capacity to reward support (witting or unwitting) and punish opposition. 5 All of the above are attainable because of the degree of organisation and organisational discipline: class-based, bureaucratic and military in nature. The CIA As Organised Crime is a compilation of examples drawn from his detailed case studies. It should motivate the reader to go back and read The Phoenix Program, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack. If this happens then the book will have been a success. If the reader is waiting for 9 William Colby gave a revealing but deceptive explanation of ‘plausible deniability’ in his public testimony to the Church Committee at Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk a daring revelation, he may be disappointed. Valentine does not trade in sensationalism. He is not a muckraker, either. That is apparent from careful reading of the first two introductory chapters. On the contrary Douglas Valentine has written books which prove that there are no real secrets for people who bother to ask the right questions and who listen to or read carefully the answers. The CIA As Organized Crime is another such book. Here the reader of this review might object that of course there were secrets: the Phoenix Program was a secret. Without Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) searches and a lucky access to high-ranking CIA officials Valentine would never have discovered the truth, which was hidden from us all. Of course there are secrets. And of course it is the free press and journalists like Seymour Hersh or Glen Greenwald and whistle-blowers like Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden that ensure that no matter how dreadful the people in Langley are, the truth will be discovered. I think here it is important to distinguish between critical research published by a writer in periodical literature (journals) and journalistic pornography. The exposé is not accidentally connotative of striptease. The point of striptease is not the final nudity but the gradual and redundant suggestion of nudity. The original meaning of the word pornography was not the graphic depiction of sexual acts but the graphic depiction of the activity of prostitutes. In this sense while it is conventional to identify prostitutes as those engaged in sex for remuneration, the reluctance to call people whose marriages result in monetary gain prostitutes has shifted the emphasis away from mere sex for money. This has given rise to such neologisms as ‘presstitute’, a journalist who prostitutes him or herself in his profession. The term ‘yellow journalism’ was given to types of writing in the last century considered egregiously biased and aggressive. The tendency is to identify this kind of journalism with the ‘tabloids’ or ‘boulevard press’. The US journalist I. F. Stone, beatified in the US by many who call themselves ‘liberal’ or ‘left’, knew that propaganda Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk and ‘yellow journalism’ was not a market cornered by the tabloids. His Hidden History of the Korean War is full of examples to show how the war in Korea was not reported, ill reported, or falsely reported by the so-called ‘quality press’.10 Douglas McArthur was just as successful at manipulating the press as the generals and admirals that came after him. The collaboration of the media during the war against Korea was so effective that even forty years later a documentary film about the war produced in the UK was censored in the US as a precondition to its being aired at all.11 Those of us old enough to remember Morley Safer reporting from Vietnam on CBS might wonder at the story he told a select gathering of journalist veterans in 2010 about a confidential tour of all the CIA stations in Vietnam that he made with William Colby. He got to see things he agreed never to report and so a major news anchor and bureau chief in Saigon was co-opted by the CIA very early.12 Seymour Hersh is regularly trotted out by S. I. Newhouse’s New Yorker magazine as a critical journalist – also a Vietnam ‘veteran’. Hersh is given credit for bringing the My Lai massacre to the attention of the US public – an event Colin Powell did his best to help conceal while he was stationed in Vietnam. But Hersh did not make a name for reporting about the Phoenix Program (just as Morley Safer did not). The Vietnamese knew about 10 I. F. Stone, Hidden History of the Korean War (1952, 1970), reviewed by this author at Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Phoenix and they knew what kind of operation Lt. Calley was leading. Yet at no time during the trial of Calley was there ever any mention of the CIA or the campaign against the VCI of which Calley was just one tiny part. Instead we were all fed with nightly stories about how bad the war was and under what duress a young lieutenant was serving his country; that regrettable and even condemnable his acts may be, they were mere incidents of war. In fact Calley was acting in compliance with standard operating procedures and official policy of the CIA whose war Vietnam was. The role of the press The purpose of our press corps was and is to serve as part of the combined weapons deployed against the civilian population, especially those in the ‘homeland’ who have to be persuaded of the morality violated every day. On the one hand the population must be constantly reassured that that old disgusting Puritan morality remains the foundation of US society. On the other hand the prurient interest in breaches of that morality must be satisfied. Hence while US Americans relish the hymns of praise for their press that come from invidious comparisons with the media in the rest of the world (especially the Soviet Union/Russia), they need the titillation that comes from being told occasionally that elected officials patronise brothels, judges receive bribes and non-whites in foreign lands are tortured and assassinated. Even the most obscene acts perpetrated by CIA officers or their comrades in other branches of the state apparatus become delectable if served by those whose reporting respects the aesthetic dogma. Bernardo Bertolucci directed a film, Last Tango in Paris, with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider. A number of recent articles about the film focus on the non-consensual use of butter as a lubricant for the illusion of an anal sex rape Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk scene.13 The film was rated as practically pornographic when it was released in the 1972. When I saw the film I was surprised that so much was written about the explicit sex. For me there was only one serious message in the film and it was very clearly articulated, regardless of whatever artistic pretensions Bertolucci may have intended. For the greater part of the film the characters played by Brando and Schneider meet and have unrestricted sex in an otherwise vacant Paris flat. The only rule throughout is that no names are to be asked or given. As the film draws to a close this rule is breached and Schneider’s character is given a name for the man with whom she has had sex for such a long period. Shortly thereafter she borrows a pistol, meets the man in the flat and kills him. The moral of the story is simple: as long as we cannot name something that is bothering us, we have an enormous if not insurmountable impediment to action. The capacity for titillation, for erotic stimulation even with simultaneous pain, is enhanced by suspension of belief or cognition. This is what pornography does and it is also the function of compatible journalism. The compatible Left 14 enjoys journalistic pornography. Like sex pornography there are also different classes or grades of journalistic pornography: sensationalism, voyeurism, exposés, and so-called ‘inside reports’. The quality usually depends on who is funding it and what audience is targeted. 13 Last Tango in Paris (1972) Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The main thing is that it is either exciting or something good for fund-raising, although sometimes it is enough to be good gossip. In other words, plot and character development or accurate dialogue are unimportant in comparison to that orgasm-inducing ‘revelation’ – an erection out of context. ‘Did you see that?’ or ‘Did you hear that?’ ejaculates from the stimulated consumer. To go beyond ejaculations – or even to dispense with them – one has to be willing to concentrate on the whole story, not just what appeared in today’s broadcasts or papers but what happened before that? Where did all that happen? Who are the people involved and with whom are they involved? These are the details of chronology, geography and genealogy. History occurs in a context not of minutes but years, decades, even centuries. When the US embassy in Iran was seized after the overthrow of the Shah, none of the respectable media explained that the Shah had been installed by the CIA after having overthrown the elected Iranian government. Even a media outlet generally assigned to the US Left produced a report on the anniversary of the Iranian revolution that omitted information it had reported at the time of the embassy seizure.15 It is important to follow the timeline in its entirety, not just the segment served in the news bulletin. When people in the US who do not know where the state of West Virginia is located are called ‘geographically challenged’, then it is all the more apparent that checking a map is a good thing to do before believing anything reported about a foreign place (meaning, also, any place one has never visited). The Phoenix Program was developed by people who came from very specific professional backgrounds and biographies. When the program was up and running, the US Foreign Service was training whole classes of its employees to become Phoenix advisers in Vietnam. People like Richard Holbrooke and John Negroponte were working in rural 15 Democracy Now! has become a well-funded ‘gatekeeper’ in the compatible Left media, moderated by celebrity Amy Goodman. See, for example, the comments on it at Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk pacification in Vietnam as 20-year-olds.16 Even if the Phoenix Program was ‘terminated’ when the US withdrew from Vietnam, there is an entire generation of cadre in the Foreign Service and military who began their careers learning how to manage the kidnapping, torture and assassination of unarmed civilians. Are these the people you would expect to run a proper democracy? Given that untold numbers of ex- servicemen join the police forces, one should not be surprised at how comfortable they feel in Ferguson, Los Angeles, Oakland, New York, Chicago, and New Orleans when they get to use military grade equipment. There is nothing titillating about the routines of Homeland Security or the organisation of the US gulag. People like Jeremy Scahill do not need to masturbate in Iraq to find assassinations.17 They are the bread and butter business of the police and drug enforcement offices in every major US city. And torture – well, that is celebrated in the endless hours of cop shows that even people beyond the US borders have to endure as standard TV and cinema fare. Beyond parody I began this review with some personal observations: how I came to read and later to review the work of Douglas Valentine. Over the course of the past six years I have observed what I consider to be a steadily diminishing willingness to see the obvious and draw at least more obvious conclusions from those observations. Instead there has been an unceasing proliferation of opinion and chatter pretending to be debate. The US comedian Stephen Colbert used to parody this condition by portraying a person who always said in 16 Richard Holbrooke was assigned to USAID in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam. John Negroponte was also assigned as a junior Foreign Service officer in Vietnam. Both became prominent advisers/ executive managers of US counterinsurgency campaigns throughout the world. Although this information is available from their official biographies, it is never mentioned in connection with their post- Vietnam assignments. 13 Jeremy Scahill produced a film purporting to be a documentary about the covert action of the US military in Iraq and based on his book Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield (2013). Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk essence ‘truth for me is what I feel is true without any regard for the facts, or even despite them’. Unfortunately by the time the last editions of the Colbert Report were aired on Comedy Central, it was impossible to see the parody any more. There are innumerable examples of distortion in the public sphere: the substitution of spectacle for substance. Colbert never claimed to be a journalist but there are innumerable journalists who are in fact indistinguishable from their comedian imitators. A page from my grade school speller contained the aphorism ‘It is easier to be critical than correct’. It is easier to be a celebrity than a person with conviction. The CIA As Organized Crime is not a book of opinion. Although there are interviews, these were not for talk shows. The interview format – even with critical and informed interviewers – is problematic because of the need to make a dialogue out of material that requires individual intensity and focussed attention. Since Valentine is an experienced interviewer (as anyone can establish by listening to his Phoenix tapes), he makes the best out of a restrictive format.18 In doing so he does not tell us so much about asking questions as how we must learn to work with answers. Valentine’s book is also an exercise in giving critical questions, especially from those who are less knowledgeable or experienced, the serious answers they deserve. That is one very important approach in teaching history, to restoring substance. Valentine is an excellent history teacher and there are simply not enough like him. Dr T P Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa (Maisonneuve Press, 2003). 18 Not only an invaluable resource, this site posts some of the most incisive interview product available today: Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies Lt. General Michael T Flynn and Michael Ledeen New York: St Martin’s Press, 2016 The appointment of General Michael Flynn as Donald Trump’s national security adviser highlights a great contradiction that runs through what we know of the new administration’s foreign policy. On the one hand, Flynn has on many occasions identified Iran as being behind the global jihad that is supposedly being waged against the United States. He has also condemned Putin’s Russia for supporting and encouraging this jihad. On the other hand, Trump himself has repeatedly made clear his admiration for Putin and expressed his willingness to accommodate Russian ambitions in the Middle East, the Ukraine and elsewhere; indeed, to such an extent that he has been described as the real ‘Manchurian candidate’.1 Putin’s ally in the Middle East is Iran. And, just to complicate the situation, Flynn has also been accused of being too close to the Russians. Something will have to give. Either Trump is going to have to disappoint Israel and the US neo- cons by abandoning this hostility to Iran or the rapprochement with Russia is likely to be short-lived. Certainly serious divisions and conflicts within the Trump administration are guaranteed. Who is Michael Flynn? In The Field of Fight, Flynn describes himself as someone who has ‘been fighting for more than thirty-three years, much of the time at the top levels of US military intelligence’. He describes his experiences during the US invasion of Grenada, predictably exaggerating its importance as ‘a turning point in the Cold War’. At the same time, he reveals a somewhat uncertain grasp of Central and South American politics when he writes of how, at this time, the US was ‘fighting the Sandinistas and engaging the Somozans and all manner of other insurgents’. The Somozans were the murderous thugs 1 See for example Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk and gangsters whom the US was supporting in Nicaragua! His rise to prominence began when he went to work with the notorious Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in 2003. Flynn was one of the architects of a transformation in intelligence gathering and utilization, for which he generously gives credit to General Stanley McChrystal. ‘Pattern Analysis’ was the way forward and McChrystal was ‘the principal driver of this revolutionary intelligence system’. To fight the insurgency in Iraq, they had to put together ‘a million-piece puzzle’ with ‘no box top to look at to help us’. Intelligence and the effective use of it were crucial to fighting this war. Moreover, ‘interrogations were enormously important’. He does not condemn the use of torture as such in his discussion, but his account makes it pretty clear that he has little time for its practical efficacy. (He apparently disagrees with Trump, who has often appeared to positively relish torture.) Flynn’s discussion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is actually very interesting and makes a serious contribution to our understanding of them. His work in Iraq and Afghanistan led to his appointment as director of the Defence Intelligence Agency. In retrospect, it seems that Flynn was promoted out of his depth. His strengths as a soldier were tactical rather than strategic. When it came to the strategic situation the US found itself in, he increasingly embraced a variety of neo-con conspiracy theories that were bolstered by what his staff derisively called ‘Flynn facts’; that is ‘facts’ that were not actually true. Conflict with other agencies and with members of his own staff eventually led to his being replaced. With the publication in 2016 of his The Field of Fight (co- authored with Michael Ledeen, to whom we shall return), he made clear his strategic vision and presumably attracted the attention of Donald Trump. More than a hundred of the book’s one hundred and eighty pages of text was devoted to this. What is this vision? As far as Flynn is concerned, the US is involved in ‘a world war’ against ‘an alliance between Radical Islamists and regimes in Havana, Pyongyang, Moscow and Beijing’. On Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk another occasion, he broadens the enemy alliance to include ‘Iran, Syria, Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua’. One thing he is absolutely clear about, however, is that ‘Iran is the lynchpin of the alliance, its centrepiece’. He is, he admits, ‘plenty scared. We could lose. In fact, right now we’re losing’. This targeting of Iran has got Michael Ledeen’s fingerprints all over it. A neo-con ultra-Zionist, Ledeen infamously responded to Brent Scowcroft’s 2002 warning that an invasion of Iraq risked turning ‘the whole region into a cauldron’ with the remark that ‘If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized it is the Middle East’. The problem for Ledeen is the fact that Iranian influence has actually increased since the Middle East was so successfully ‘cauldronized’. He has written books warning of the mortal threat that Iran poses to the United States: in 2007 his The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction and in 2009 his Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War against the West. This is the analysis that informs the strategic ‘thinking’ in The Field of Fight. Iran, we are told, has been waging war against the United States ‘for nearly forty years’, ‘has long supported al Qaeda’ and the 1998 US Embassy bombings in East Africa were ‘in large part Iranian operations’. The anti-American global alliance of which Iran is the lynchpin includes both ‘ISIS and al Qaeda’ and the consequences if the United States were to be defeated would be horrendous. Remember, Flynn has already expressed the opinion that this alliance are winning! Americans would find themselves living ‘the way the unfortunate residents of the “caliphate” or the oppressed citizens of the Islamic Republic of Iran live today, in a totalitarian state under the dictates of the most rigid version of Sharia’. And he has no doubt that the Russians are supporting this assault on the West. Iran and Russia are the ‘two most active and powerful members of the enemy alliance’. They are bound together by a shared hatred for democracy and love for dictatorship. Putin is a ‘secular tyrant’ while the ISIS caliphate resembles ‘the Soviet bloc’. Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk All this has been kept from the American people. Obama, we are told, had ‘an instinctive sympathy, even enthusiasm, for self-proclaimed anti-American “revolutionaries”’. This point is made a number of times. Obama’s administration suppressed information about what was going on, in particular intelligence regarding the war Iran was waging against the United States. He is particularly scathing about the way ‘Obama has tiptoed around open criticism of Vladimir Putin’s many aggressive actions’. And this from a supporter of Donald Trump! Clearly this is all so much neo-con fantasising; but it is not spun out of thin air. While the identification of Iran as the enemy in a new world war is a complete nonsense as far as the United States is concerned, it does very much represent the foreign policy interests of the Netanyahu government in Israel. Iranian support for Hizbollah is seen as a serious obstacle to the achievement of Israeli strategic objectives in Lebanon. The way in which Israel’s supporters have chosen to try and bend US foreign policy to serve their interests is by demonising Iran and inventing a vastly, indeed hilariously overblown threat. Obama never fell for this. As Flynn puts it, one of Obama’s worst mistakes was his ‘open hostility to Israel’, preferring ‘a strategic alliance with Iran to…our traditional embrace of Israel’. This is all that his and Ledeen’s vision really amounts to. It remains to make just a couple more points regarding the threat posed by ‘Radical Islam’. First of all, there is no serious discussion of Saudi Arabia and its part in encouraging, propagating and sponsoring ‘Radical Islam’. Second, the threat posed by ISIS is absolutely minimised in order to emphasise the made-up threat posed by Iran. And third, drawing on his practical experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, while Flynn at some points emphasises the need to get moderate Muslims on board in the fight against the ‘radicals’, elsewhere he attacks Islam per se. What better way to alienate the moderate Muslims whose support he regards as crucial in winning his world war! All this certainly calls into question the book’s intellectual integrity, leaving it open to the allegation of being Lobster 73 Summer 2017 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk knowingly dishonest as well as wrong. Which leaves us with Trump’s election campaign. When its history is written it will be interesting to see whether or not Flynn brought his counterinsurgency expertise of disinformation and dirty tricks to it. Certainly he joined in chants of ‘Lock Her Up’ at Trump rallies, reposted and retweeted anti-Semitic and Islamophobic posts, and in the week before the actual election, gave credence to the story about Hillary Clinton and child sex slaves. Given Trump’s poisonous relations with US intelligence agencies, Flynn, who has very little time for them, is likely to play a crucial role; although for how long is another matter. John Newsinger . John Newsinger is a semi-retired academic. A new edition of his British Counterinsurgency has recently been published and was reviewed in Lobster 72. Lobster 73 Summer 2017 Of G-Men and Eggheads: www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The FBI and the New York intellectuals John Rodden Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017 John Rodden is one of the foremost authorities on both George Orwell and the New York intellectuals, most particularly Irving Howe. He is the author and editor of a number of books on Orwell, and his The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of ‘St George’ Orwell (OUP, 1989) is certainly one of the essential studies of the man, his work and his impact. He has also edited a number of books on Irving Howe and has written widely on East Germany under Communist rule and other subjects. Over the years I have learned a great deal from his writing. Consequently I was looking forward to the publication of Of G-Men and Eggheads with considerable interest. Unfortunately, while certainly worth reading, the book is actually something of a disappointment. It examines FBI surveillance of three New York intellectuals, associated at various times with the journal Partisan Review: Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald and Irving Howe. As Rodden makes clear, none of these men were any sort of threat to US national security and yet the FBI put considerable effort into keeping them under surveillance. Lionel Trilling had an active file from the late 1930s through to the mid-1960s. His file was opened just as he ended ‘his formal adherence to Marxism’ and yet nevertheless he was the subject of active surveillance on a number of occasions. After he had become ‘a leading American professor’ – and any involvement with the Left was a decade behind him – he remained of interest. Even when he was the beneficiary of ‘government-sponsored and –financed junkets to Europe, courtesy of Perspectives USA, a CIA-front publication’, the FBI remained suspicious. As Rodden puts it, as far as US national security was concerned Trilling was as ‘politically safe’ as it was possible to be. But that was not enough for the FBI. What of Irving Howe? FBI agents attended his lectures, opened his mail and reported on his everyday activities over a seven year period. His growing influence as an intellectual excited Bureau interest in the 1950s, his Dissent lectures at one point being viewed with considerable alarm in case they ‘might lead to a socialist mass movement’. When the Vietnam War became a political issue, Howe involved himself in what he characterised as the ‘moderate’ wing – in effect the half-hearted wing of the anti-war movement. He could only see the war from a Cold War perspective. This seems to make him much more acceptable to Rodden than the third of his intellectuals, Dwight Macdonald. Dwight Macdonald was a much more radical figure than either Trilling or Howe. He was a former Trotskyist (as was Howe) who went on toLobster embrace 73 an idiosyncratic brand of anarcho-pacifism. He then lapsedSummer 2017 into a political quietism that lasted until his political fires were rekindled www.lobster-magazine.co.uk by the Vietnam War. Although Rodden does insist, quite correctly, that Macdonald ‘should still exert a claim on our interest and attention today’ and that ‘his best . . . was very good indeed’, Rodden seems distinctly uncomfortable with Macdonald. The Bureau’s investigations showed a degree of ignorance of the politics of the people they had under scrutiny that is positively hilarious and professionally disgraceful. As the Bureau saw it, anyone on the Left, who had been on the Left, or had been in any sort of close proximity to the Left, was a ‘communist’. Even Trotskyists were treated as part of the Soviet Union’s apparatus in the USA. In Macdonald’s case, his file had him down as having been a CP member in Washington DC in the late Thirties, using the name ‘McCarthy’, when he was actually a Trotskyist living in New York. He excited the particular animosity of J Edgar Hoover for publishing an article attacking the FBI in his journal politics (the journal title was always printed lower case). Hoover was incredibly sensitive about criticism and saw it as something requiring retaliation by the Bureau. The author of the article, Clifton Northbridge Bennett, was an anarcho-pacifist. He had recently been released on parole from prison, where he had done time for draft refusal and the Bureau tried (unsuccessfully) to have his parole revoked. (The FBI was particularly put out by Macdonald trying to secure entry into the USA for the veteran of the Russian Revolution, Victor Serge, then living in Mexico.) Rodden criticises Macdonald for what he sees as a lack of consistency and for ‘mercurial political enthusiasms’; but what seems to really excite his animosity is Macdonald’s 1960s radicalism. His attendance at Lyndon Johnson’s White House Festival of the Arts in June 1965 provokes completely disproportionate censure. At a time when the US War in Vietnam was getting underway, this event was always going to be something of an obscenity and many of those invited refused to attend. Macdonald, however, did attend and went round collecting signatures for a petition opposing Johnson’s policy. He had a stand-up row with Charlton Heston. Rodden regards his disruption of this event as the height of bad taste and lack of judgement. Given the enormity of what was unfolding in Vietnam, surely those who refused to sign Macdonald's petition are more deserving of censure. Macdonald, we are told, also had a ‘blithe enthusiasm for the student radicals and counterculture faddists . . . for the student demonstrators who occupied professors’ offices and closed down colleges’. Now how does occupying a professor’s office weigh in the scales with the crimes the US committed in Vietnam or even with the killing of student protestors at Kent State (four shot dead) and at Jackson State (two shot dead)? Moreover we are told that Macdonald’s misjudgement ‘represented a political and moral surrender that has had long-term disastrous Lobster 73 Summer 2017 consequences’, including ‘multiculturalism’ and MTV, ‘postmodernism’ and soft porn; and, more generally, ‘a zombie-like state of shallow thinking www.lobster-magazine.co.uk bereft of introspection’. All this is the fault of the anti-war movement! Rodden makes the point that the FBI’s surveillance of New York intellectuals was clearly an invasion of privacy and even a violation of civil rights; but, as he also points out, it pales in comparison with the excesses of the NKVD. This is certainly true but leaves out both the domestic and international contexts for the activities of the US secret state. There has been a long-standing – and whenever necessary – ferocious domestic hostility towards the Left in the United States. It was this that swept up the likes of Trilling into the FBI’s web of surveillance. Other people were, of course, subjected to more severe measures in the 1950s – blacklisting, imprisonment and, in the case of the Rosenbergs, execution. While critics at home might have been treated mildly compared with how the NKVD would have dealt with them, the same cannot be said for many of the regimes the US supported in the name of the Cold War – a useful cover for the exercise of US Imperial power. Indeed, after Stalin’s death, many of the regimes that the US installed or supported were far more brutal and murderous than the post-Stalin Soviet Union. In his concluding ‘Epilogue: The Orwellian Future?’, Rodden appeals to George Orwell for support of the Cold War policy of containing, rather than rolling back, the Soviet Union. We have no way of knowing how Orwell’s politics would have developed had he not died at forty-six. If we must speculate it is not so much his view of the Soviet Union which would have been of interest, but his attitude towards US Imperialism and US support for military dictatorships and repressive regimes across the world. John Newsinger John Newsinger is a semi-retired academic. A new edition of his British Counterinsurgency has recently been published. Lobster 73 Summer 2017