www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
Winter 2018
• The view from the bridge by Robin Ramsay Lobster • Powers, Angleton, Morley and Dallas by William Kelly • South of the Border by Nick Must • German links to the Hammarskjöld case by Torben 76 Gülstorff • Using the UK FOIA, part III by Nick Must • Bilderberg Myths: Were the Bilderbergers behind the 1973 oil shock? by Will Banyan • The Assassination of Martin Luther King: The Paper Trail to Memphis by Garrick Alder
Book Reviews • An Inconvenient Death: How the • The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: Establishment Covered Up the David Kelly Crime, Conspiracy and Cover-Up – A New Affair, by Miles Goslett, reviewed by John Investigation, by Tim Tate and Brad Booth Johnson, reviewed by Robin Ramsay • Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, • Reporter: A Memoir, by Seymour M. Hersh, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign reviewed by John Newsinger Policy, by Rory Cormac, reviewed by Robin • Ramsay Book reviews by John Booth: The Balfour Declaration: Empire, the • We Were Lied to About 9/11: The Interviews o Mandate and Resistance in Palestine, by by Jon Gold, reviewed by John Booth Bernard Regan • Donald Trump and the Christian Right, Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom, by reviewed by John Newsinger: o Norman G Finkelstein God and Donald Trump, by Stephen o • Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine’s Strang Toughest Questions, edited by Jamie Stern- o The Faith of Donald J. Trump: A Spiritual Weiner Biography, by David Brody and Scott • Lamb Creating Chaos: Covert Political Warfare, from Truman to Putin, by Larry Hancock, o Choosing Donald Trump: God, Anger, reviewed by Robin Ramsay Hope, and Why Christian Conservatives • Supported Him, by Stephen Mansfield House of Trump House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian o God’s Chaos Candidate: Donald J. Trump Mafia, by Craig Unger, reviewed by Colin and the American Unravelling, by Dr. Challen Lance Wallnau • Book reviews by John Newsinger: o Why God “Trumped” America, by Robert B. Scott o Fear: Trump in the White House, by Bob Woodward • Tomorrow Belongs to Us: The British Far Right since 1967, edited by Nigel Copsey o Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the and Matthew Worley reviewed by Scott Trump White House, by Omarosa Anthony Manigault Newman o The Shadow President: The Truth about Mike Pence, by Michael D’Antonio and Peter Eisner www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
The View from the Bridge
Robin Ramsay
Thanks to Nick Must (in particular) and Garrick Alder for editorial and proof-reading assistance with this issue of Lobster.
* new * RIP William Blum has died aged 85.1 We walk in the footsteps of this who precede us and Blum’s were big prints. His books2 were landmarks in the study of American imperialism and militarism.
* new * Roderick Russell Russell wrote to tell me that his has had to move the material on Zersetzen (or Zersetzung) – no touch torture – which was on Wikispaces, to a new location.3 Russell has the misfortune to be the best documented example of Zersetzen in action. He added:
‘I am just extraordinarily busy with my application to the (Canadian) Federal Court for a judicial review of the CSIS’s decision not to provide me with the personal information that they have on me.4
1
2 See
3
4 Russell wrote about his dealings with Canada’s CSIS in Lobster 65: ‘Canada’s spy agency gone rogue: Prime Minister Harper couldn’t care less’ at
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We have provided the Court with considerable sworn testimony by affidavit, including detailed testimony on the Zersetzen crimes and their cover up. This sworn testimony also includes considerable 3rd part corroboration as to some of the crimes. There are about 150 sworn pages of testimony. The push was on me to produce detailed sworn testimony, since I suspect the CSIS thought I couldn’t. Now that I have they are trying to ignore all the sworn affidavits and are trying another tack CSIS’s lawyers are trying to persuade the Court to allow anonymous personal testimony (and affidavits) in secret. In other words secret testimony where I wouldn’t know who had testified, or what their testimony was. This is kangaroo court stuff. Apparently I will be allowed to cross examine. How can one cross examine a witness when one will never meet him, don’t know who he is, and don’t know what his testimony was? Its just ridiculous. I am just going to cooperate with the process while it is going on. Hopefully I will be able to persuade the judge not to allow secret evidence since that would be grossly unjust. But if they do introduce anonymous “secret testimony”, I will wait till the end, and then complain like bloody hell in public. I think this secret testimony process, if adopted, is outrageous.’
* new * ‘Aggressively inadequate’ American banker/investor Bill Browder 5 in the Sydney Morning Herald.6 ‘The UK is actually worse than Europe. It is where most of the dirty money ends up, and law enforcement here is aggressively inadequate . . . I don’t know what the motivation is, but I know what the result is – that law enforcement here is laughable in terms of money laundering. The amount of dirty money coming through here compared to the amount of successful prosecutions is a clear message to bad guys around the world that you can get away with your crimes here in the UK. Based on what I know about this country, it’s a major money-laundering centre,
5 For background on Browder, see his own website at
6
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which will be recognised and will end up with a very black mark if they don’t do anything to fix it.’ The phrase ‘aggressively inadequate’ could intelligibly be applied to large swathes of British public life, could it not?
* new * Broon In his book on the financial crises of the last decade,7 Adam Tooze notes on pp. 191/2: ‘Less charitably it might be said that since the 1990s, New Labour, like the Democrats in the United States, had entered into an enthusiastic partnership with the City of London.8 It was, therefore, no coincidence that it was now Labour in Britain and the Democrats in the United States who were showing such energy in the struggle to fix the banking crisis. It was a monster they had helped to create.’ Little sense of culpability for the monster is to be found in Gordon Brown’s book, Beyond The Crash (London: Simon and Schuster, 2010), which I finally picked up off my shelves after ignoring it for years. I looked at Brown to see if he had answered the question: having bailed- out the failed UK banks, adding £136 billion to the national debt in the process,9 why did the British state not acquire (part) ownership of them in return for its beneficence? Discussing Northern Rock, the first of the British financial institutions to go under, Brown answers that question: ‘I was against nationalisation, especially of a failed bank, and at that stage I would not let it be considered. I favoured a private sector buy out of the bank, partly because I believed we could isolate Northern Rock’s problems and partly because, ever since the 1970s, the Labour Party had been losing elections on the question of economic competence. Tony Blair and I had spent twenty years building New Labour on the foundation of market competition, private enterprise, and economic stability as the the path to
7 Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crisis Changed the World (London: Allen Lane, 2018)
8 He means the Dems worked with Wall St. That clunky sentence is a rarity in the Tooze book which, for the most part, is nicely and clearly written.
9
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growth, and I was not prepared to undermine that painstaking work with one instant decision.’ (p. 23) His meaning is unclear to me. Is he saying state ownership was a no-no because of public perception of previous (failed) state ownership? Or is he saying that he didn’t want the stigma of having to buy a failed bank while in office? I was a member of the Labour Party while NuLab was being created and am reasonably certain that Brown did not tell us members that his core values were ‘market competition, private enterprise and economic stability’. NuLab was a con-job on the members of the Labour Party. In economics they really were just Mrs Thatcher in light drag.
* new * The price I remember 9/11. When the second plane hit I said to my partner something like ‘Oh shit, we’re in for it now.’ Because two planes meant an attack and massive American retaliation against somebody. As it turned out, the Israeli/ neo-con plan to smash-up the Arab world along ethnic-religious lines had been handed its pretext.10 In its annual ‘Costs of War’ report, Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs concludes: ‘The United States has spent nearly $6 trillion on wars that directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 people since the 9/11 attacks of 2001.’ 11
10 The best evidence for the existence of this plan is in an interview with General Wesley Clark, one time Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, who said in 2007: ‘So I came back to see him [a General] a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”’ See
11
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These policies, let us not forget, have been supported by all UK governments since then.12 And these policies have created the migration/refugee problem which is transforming the politics of some of the EU countries to which the migrants/refugees have moved, or threaten to move. A minor detail in those wars has been the role in Syria of the White Helmets. Over the past couple of years there has been a debate about the status of the White Helmets: were they humanitarian heroes, or a Western- funded psy-op? This debate seems to me to have been resolved in favour of their being a psy-op,13 a conclusion supported by the fact that they were evacuated from Syria to Israel.
* new * Chips with everything14 In a review in Lobster 52 I wrote this about a then new book15 about the threat of RFID chips: ‘RFIDs are radio frequency identification or identifiers, little chips which can be fixed to, implanted in, built into almost anything from paper money to human beings; and which can then be “read” or decoded to identify the chip. The whole world becomes an inventory for the corporations and the state. That is the fear of the authors; and, looking at the evidence they present, it may not be too far away. RFID applications are so plentiful, the danger is that concerns of privacy are going to be swept aside. There is already a large RFID lobby in the US and the politicians have started taking its money. The big corporations are preparing to introduce them across the board in products; and the military is getting interested on both sides of the Atlantic. The British military are trying RFIDs in their
12 The details of what this has entailed for HMG are in an important piece by Mark Curtis at
13 See ex-UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, at
14 Readers of a certain age may remember the 1962 Arnold Wesker play with this title. Using it as a subtitle is naff but irresistible.
15 The book is Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre, Spychips: How major corporations and government plan to track your every move with RFID (Nashville (US): Thomas Nelson, 2005)
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warehouses. In an article written after the book was published, the authors report tell us that ‘Cincinnati video surveillance company CityWatcher.com now requires employees to use VeriChip human implantable microchips to enter a secure data centre’;16 and the US government has begun producing passports with RFID chips in them. This book documents the authors’ research into this field, the patents, the product trials and the campaigns against RFIDs in the US and Europe. This is important and scary stuff. Orwellian? Orwell wasn’t even close.’
That was 12 years ago. This month it was reported17 that in Sweden people have begun voluntarily having themselves chipped – it saves them carrying other forms of ID. How long will it be before the media digs out the research which shows that a significant percentage of animals with RFID chips develop tumours around the chip site? 18
* new * As others see us ‘Though Lobster was and remains a very small publication, the articles published in its early years provide us with a clear sense of the marginal concerns that preoccupied conspiracy theorists . . . .’ 19 A conspiracy theorist, moi?
* new * It’s all in the mind There’s a new book about Sweden by a Swede living in the US, Kajsa Norman:
16
17 18 See, for example, from 2007 Todd Lewan’s ‘Chip Implants Linked to Animal Tumors’ at 19 Paul S. Lynch, ‘The Development of the British Conspiracy Thriller 1980-1990’, p. 14 at Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Sweden’s Dark Soul. The review in The Times (‘Scandi-noir heart of Sweden’, 17 November) refers to the Swedish state’s use of involuntary sterilisation as late as 1975.20 No wonder that state was willing to embark on mind control experiments. The best documented is the case of Robert Naeslund, who has still not persuaded the Swedish media or state to take him seriously, despite physical evidence: X-rays, photographs and the actual device planted in his skull.21 Naeslund’s descendants, as it were, are a group of people – the most visible of whom are in the United States – who claim to be TIs, targeted individuals. Some of them say they are mind control victims. In the last six months Wired has published two long articles about this group,22 which, though sympathetic to their plight, assume all TIs are deluded. I wonder what it would take to persuade the authors of those pieces to consider that there might just be an element of truth in some of their claims. * new * Mint Murray On Craig Murray’s site there are some very interesting comments on MI6, the use of diplomacy as ‘cover’ and related areas by ‘Mike Williamson’, a serving British diplomat; or so he claims. I am unable to tell if he’s a fake or not. I presume not, and last I looked no-one had offered anything to discredit him.23 Strong stuff from Murray on Assange etc in his entry ‘Assange Never Met Manafort. Luke Harding and the Guardian Publish Still More Blatant MI6 Lies’ which opens thus: ‘The right wing Ecuadorean government of President Moreno continues to churn out its production line of fake documents regarding Julian Assange, and channel them straight to MI6 mouthpiece Luke Harding of the Guardian. 20 See, for example, 21 See 22 23 At Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Amazingly, more Ecuadorean Government documents have just been discovered for the Guardian, this time spy agency reports detailing visits of Paul Manafort and unspecified “Russians” to the Embassy. By a wonderful coincidence of timing, this is the day after Mueller announced that Manafort’s plea deal was over.’ 24 * new * IRD reborn The old adage that ‘A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on’ is generally (but apparently wrongly) attributed to Winston Churchill. It’s contemporary update was offered recently by Carl Miller: ‘It’s far easier to put out lies than convince everyone that they’re lies. Disinformation is cheap; debunking it is expensive and difficult.’ 25 Difficult? Maybe that should be virtually impossible. One of the central beliefs of the media war game is that no-one notices the denial or rebuttal. The governments of many nations are putting out their views and some – notably Russia that we know of – are generating disinformation for political ends. But disinformation isn’t only cheap, it’s profitable. Because hits on a site with advertising generate income for the site owner in proportion to the number of visitors, some people now make a living creating fake news as ‘click bait’.26 Among the governments trying to operate in this chaos is that of the UK which now has the British Army’s 77th Brigade conducting information operations 27 and the Home Office department known as RICU. A recent story by former Guardian journalist Ian Cobain 28 begins with a brief explanation of RICU: 24 25 Carl Miller, ‘Inside the British Army's secret information warfare machine’ 26 See, for example, ‘The Godfather of fake news’ at 27 See note 29. 28 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘Founded in 2007, the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU), which says privately that it aims to “effect attitudinal and behavioural change” through methods including the dissemination of messages on social media, leafleting homes and feeding stories to newspapers, was modelled on a secretive anti-communist body called the Information Research Department (IRD), set up in Britain in 1948.’ 29 According to Cobain, we may have Gordon Brown to thank for this. Cobain was told that Brown was impressed by Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid The Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War; but took it not as a cautionary tale, rather as something that his government should emulate. I think it may be safe to say that Brown knew nothing about the IRD’s activities, especially their role in the British state’s disinformation operations – a.k.a. the ‘Lisburn lie machine’ – in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. This pioneered the business of putting out so much disinformation – fake news – that no-one knows what to believe. What we we to make of all this information activity? Does any of it matter? I remain uncertain about this. For at the centre of it are questions about what ‘believing’ means. Take the so-called pizzagate conspiracy theory of 2016.30 This alleged that there was a satanic child abuse ring, which involved Hilary Clinton and a shifting gallery of others, based at a Washington pizza restaurant – hence pizzagate. Millions of people clicked on this nonsense and one might therefore conclude that it may have had an effect on the presidential election. But how many people believed this theory? The only evidence that anyone did was the actions of one man who turned up at the restaurant at the centre of this, with an assault rifle, to investigate. He alone believed it enough to do something. So: how many other people who read the theory ‘believed’ it? And if there are others, how strongly did they believe it? I would cheerfully bet all the possessions I own on the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow. I also believe that associates of LBJ organised the assassination of JFK; but on that proposition I would bet nothing at all. I might be wrong on this and have believed different theories about JFK’s death before this one. This isn’t the same kind of belief. People don’t ‘believe’ conspiracy theories in the same way that they believe that the sun rises every morning. We have strongly held beliefs and weakly held beliefs; and conspiracy theories are mostly weakly held. For the most part conspiracy theories – or really 29 30 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘theories’, since most them barely deserve the description of theory – function more like entertainment than anything else. If you were an American Clinton- hater in 2016 it would be rewarding and/or amusing to read that she was involved in Satanic child abuse. But would you believe it, really believe it? Probably not. * new * Simon says Regular Lobster contributor Simon Matthews has a very interesting piece on the Lion and the Unicorn site about post-WW2 British art and the social/ political conditions which made it possible.31 * new * What governments know about us There has been a fair bit of comment on the Chinese government’s use of digital ‘social credit’ to manipulate the population.32 But what about the data that is available to the powers-that-be in democratic governments? In 2007 the Guardian published an outline of what the UK government knows about us – or could assemble if it chose to.33 It was pretty extensive then. Open Democracy has been running articles about the current situation for a while.34 The USA is much further down this road, with even fewer restrictions, and the end result – for both public and private data – in a recent study by Privacy.net is chilling.35 The lobby wins The ‘Corbyn-is-anti-Semitic’ trope reached some kind of low water mark in a 31 32 See, for example, 33 34 See, for example, Phil Booth, ‘What does the government know about you - and have they got it right?’ at 35 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Times editorial on 4 September – the day the Labour Party announced they would accept the new IHRA definition and it’s ‘examples’. The anonymous Times author wrote this: ‘In a 2009 column [Corbyn advisor] Seamus Milne described Israel as “built on the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population”. The choice of words seeks to place Israel on the same side of history as Yugoslavian war criminals. There is always a place for historical debate, but this is antisemitic under the definition, and historically indefensible.’ ‘The definition’ to which the author refers is the IHRA definition of anti- semitism, which the Labour Party had accepted two years ago. The author appears to understand neither the definition nor Labour’s response to it. Seamus Milne’s comment was not anti-semitic by that definition – but it will be by one of the new IHRA ‘examples’ embraced by Labour. Which is precisely the point of them. Because they could not be included in any definition of anti- semitism, they have been tagged onto it as a kind of auxiliary definition. (This was not the intention of the definition’s original author.36) According to the ‘examples’ attached to the IHRA definition, calling Israel ‘racist’ and talking of ‘ethnic cleansing’ is anti-semitic. It is, therefore, presumably not a coincidence that the pressure to get those ‘examples’ accepted was happening in the run-up to the Israeli state’s adoption of its new racist self-definition and the continuing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. The decision by the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee to accept the definition and its ‘examples’ is a mistake. It won’t stop the anti-semitism campaign against Jeremy Corby and others, as the reporting around the Labour Party conference showed. On 23 September, the Daily Mail had on its front page a picture of former Labour Friends of Israel Chair, Luciana Berger MP, and her two police escorts37 arriving at a meeting the day before the conference opened.38 Labour’s capitulation is also a stunning victory for the Israeli lobby in the UK. Despite being exposed in action by the Al Jazeera documentaries39 and widely discussed and analysed on the Internet, the lobby was still able to force 36 See 37 Protecting her from what? Nasty tweets? 38 39 The first of the four programmes is at Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Labour to capitulate – mainly because the major British media simply refuses to acknowledge its existence. Still thinking about Dallas and Holt In 1985 Peter Dale Scott visited the UK and I had the pleasure of interviewing him. I had a look at the transcript of that interview recently40 – for the first time in about 25 years – and found this at the end of the exchange. RR ‘Do you actually expect there will be a solution to the case?’ PDS ‘You shouldn’t expect to find who was the gunman on the Grassy Knoll. But on the other hand that would be such a trivial piece of information, not what we really want to know at this stage. The things we do want to know are larger questions, and I think that someday they may be discovered. The small, immediate, Dealey Plaza questions may never be answered, but may also cease to interest the real student of the Kennedy assassination.’ Which is what has happened, more or less. Many of the ‘real students’ of the case have indeed walked away from Dealey Plaza and some of them are ploughing through the torrent of official paper that has been released in the last few years. In 1998 the US Defence Department described the JFK-related documents it was releasing as ‘good faith distraction material’, designed to keep people busy.41 I don’t know if the Agency has the same view of its recent documents but I suspect that nothing they release will lead to an explanation of the events of 22 November 1963. I also saw this in my conversation with Scott. RR ‘Given the role of Johnson as the incoming President, I was wondering what you thought of the recent news of Billy Sol Estes’ remark that LBJ ordered the murder of Henry Marshall. This, added, to the picture painted in Robert Caro’s recent biography of Johnson’s early years, suggests that LBJ was certainly capable of Kennedy’s murder. And the “Cui bono?” list has LBJ at the top, with a great many domestic scandals brewing in late ’63 – TFX, Estes, Baker – all of which disappeared when Johnson became President.’ The vagaries of memory: I had no idea that I was even aware of Billy Sol Estes 40 It’s in Lobster 7. 41 See Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk that long ago. My current interest in the LBJ-dunit story was triggered by The Men on the Sixth Floor website about 20 years later.42 Scott replied to my query about Estes: PDS ‘He [LBJ] was in great trouble, and every time he was in trouble it was never something personal, always the whole power nexus he represented. TFX, Baker, these were scandals about the administration of power and the exercise of power and that involved hundreds of people, not just Johnson personally.’ Yes, they were scandals about the administration of power, but it was also personal for LBJ: his political career was at stake – not to mention going to jail. I returned to this a little later. RR ‘That brings us to the question of whether we are dealing with a great big high-level conspiracy, or a small-time Texas bush-wacking conspiracy; whether it’s Johnson cronies hiring a couple of Texas gunmen to try and solve Johnson’s political problems.’ PDS ‘Well I think it’s certainly more than some kind of Texas bush- league conspiracy. The real answer to that is the cover-up. The people pushing hard on the cover-up from the very beginning are Kennedy people, people Kennedy appointed. The Deputy Attorney General, Katzenbach, who rushes in the next day, who says we need a commission to establish that Oswald was the lone assassin, is a Kennedy appointee. So I think more than personal politics were involved.’ RR ‘Don’t you think that those people would have responded like this whether they knew who had done it, no matter who had done it? To bury a conspiracy per se because that’s not acceptable?’ Reading this 33 years later, I think I was right: the US political system could not handle Kennedy murdered as the result of a conspiracy by anyone; and the fact that Kennedy appointees took part in the cover-up tells us nothing. As someone who is not a ‘real student’ of the case, I remain centrally interested in whodunit. And if we are going to stay on Dealey Plaza then the late Chauncey Holt should be central to our concerns. When he went public, 27 years ago, Holt claimed to have been one of the ‘three tramps’ photographed on Dealey Plaza that day. After initial interest from the research community,43 Holt was abandoned when the records of three ‘tramps’ arrested on Dealey 42 43 See for example Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Plaza that afternoon – messers Doyle, Gedney and Abrams – were released44 by the Dallas Police. But as has been shown,45 two sets of ‘tramps’ were detained that day. The first trio were Doyle, Gedney and Abrams, who were not photographed. Holt was in the second group that was photographed being escorted to the Dallas Police HQ more than an hour later.46 Holt’s claim to have been on Dealey Plaza that day remains unrefuted. Among the mysteries of the Dallas shooting are: a shallow wound on JFK’s back in which there was no bullet; and the notorious Commission Exhibit 399, the so-called ‘magic bullet’, which turned up, virtually undamaged. Holt claims he ran a weapons modification unit for the CIA and, in the months preceding Dallas, the unit had been experimenting with re-using an already fired bullet from a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle – firing it for the second time through a different make of rifle with a larger bore than the Mannlicher-Carcano and with its lands and grooves removed. This leaves the original Mannlicher-Carcano markings on the bullet; but being refired this way makes the round less accurate and under-powered. Holt’s hypothesis is that JFK’s shallow back wound was caused by CE 399, fired from another rifle. Being under-powered, the round didn’t penetrate very far and fell out of his body. Holt speculates that this was a phoney assassination attempt to be pinned on apparent Castro-supporting, lefty defector Oswald, and onto that the real assassination was piggy-backed.47 If a good hypothesis is one that explains a lot, Holt’s is a good hypothesis. Dead men don’t sue And so, thanks to the new book on Gordiefsky by Ben Macintyre, the Murdoch empire got to run its Michael Foot-KGB-agent nonsense a second time.48 When they first ran it Foot sued and won. On the appearance of this second bite at the cherry, Geoffrey Robertson QC wrote to The Times on 6 October. Noting that he had acted for Foot in the libel case, Robertson wrote: 44 It is still unclear to me if the release of these arrest records was done to discredit Holt. 45 46 This is discussed at 47 Which is what I had guessed and speculated about in Lobster 2. 48 The Times, 15 September 2018. There’s a good account of this at Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘I had the heavy duty of advising Mr Foot which I undertook by pressing him (effectively cross-examining him) over several weeks about the allegations. For what it is worth, I was entirely satisfied that he was speaking the truth in his avowals that he never knowingly met KGB agents, let alone took money from them in return for information. That embassy officials attended Tribune fundraisers was well known; this did not make him an “agent” or a “paid informant” of the Soviet Union.’ It doesn’t take genius to see what transpired here. KGB officer under Soviet Embassy cover gives Foot money for Tribune – which was not reflexively pro- American and, so, worth a little funding. KGB officer bigs-up his report to his superiors and claims to have recruited Michael Foot. Maybe Foot should have been sniffy about taking Soviet money but keeping a lefty magazine going is difficult. About 10 years ago a man knocked on my door, asked if I was Robin Ramsay, and then gave me £1,000 in cash. He said something like, ‘I appreciate what you do in Lobster’ and departed. I worried about the source for a few days – was I being set-up in some way? – then put the money in Lobster’s account. Keeping a lefty magazine going was difficult . . . . Among the 5 pages The Times devoted to extracts from the Gordiefsky material was G’s opinion of the trade union leader, the late Jack Jones. Gordiefsky visited Jones’ flat: ‘. . . a typically Philistine environment, with few books, and everything in an exaggerated state of tidiness.’ Philistine? Too tidy? I visited Jack Jones once and sat in the same room that Gordiefsky did. Yes, it was a neat and tidy room. No books? I can’t remember if there were books or not; but if not, I imagine they were in Jones’ study. Evidently this thought didn’t occur to Mr Gordiefsky because, as is well known, philistines don’t have studies. * Macintyre also had a piece in The Times (6 October) in which he stated that everybody and their cousin in the Western intelligence services knew that Adolph Eichmann was in Argentina. But ‘. . . neither the Germans nor the Americans wanted to see Eichmann brought to trial, for fear that it could draw attention to other Nazis recruited to Western intelligence to combat the threat of communism.’ Which reminded me of Bob Hope’s quip when the Soviets got into space with Sputnik before the Americans: Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘Their German rocket scientists are better than our German rocket scientists.’ The AFL–CIA I received an email from Athabasca University Press49 informing me that they were publishing a new book by Anthony Carew, American Labour’s Cold War Abroad: From Deep Freeze to Détente, 1945–1970. Mr Carew is the leading historian of the role of labour unions in the Cold War. This is the description of the book supplied by the publisher: ‘During the Cold War, when trade unions were a substantial force in both American and European politics, the fiercely anti-communist American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO) set a strong example for labour organizations overseas. The AFL–CIO cooperated closely with the US government on foreign policy and enjoyed an intimate, if sometimes strained, relationship with the CIA. The activities of its international staff, and especially the often secretive work of Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown—whose biographies read like characters plucked from a Le Carré novel—exerted a major influence on relationships in Europe and beyond. In impressive detail, Carew maps the international programs of the AFL–CIO during the Cold War and its relations with labour organizations abroad, in addition to providing a summary of the labour situation of a dozen or more countries including Finland, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Greece, and India. American Labour’s Cold War Abroad reveals how the Cold War compelled trade unionists to reflect on the role of unions in a free society. Yet there was to be no meeting of minds on this, and at the end of the 1960s the AFL–CIO broke with the mainstream of the international labour movement to pursue its own crusade against communism.’ You can buy this from the publisher or – remarkably – download the book as a free pdf at the publisher’s website.50 49 See 50 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Thirty-one years later. . . . After the publication of Lobster 11, I tried to persuade the British media that they should take seriously the allegations of Fred Holroyd and Colin Wallace. For months I got nowhere: some guy from Hull?, with a complicated story about covert ops in the UK?. . . . Then copies of Peter Wright’s Spycatcher began filtering into the country and there were two former secret state sources – Wallace and Wright – talking about plots against the Labour government of Harold Wilson; and my phone began to ring. In parallel with my attempts to get the story out, the British state was trying to discredit Holroyd and Wallace. Step forward David McKittrick, the Independent’s Northern Ireland correspondent, and John Ware, then with the BBC’s Panorama. Ware and McKittrick authored a collection of articles, an entire broadsheet51 page’s worth, mostly devoted to attacking Wallace, in the Independent on 2 September 1987.52 Looking back at that now, it is a striking event: two senior journalists put their names to articles in which many of their assertions about Wallace were simply false – and could have been shown to be false by Wallace, had they asked. It was obvious, back in 1987, that Ware and McKittrick had been briefed by state sources. There was no evidence at the time but there is a hint now. Two documents have surfaced, letters from a B. A. (Brian) Blackwell, a sometime member of the Northern Ireland office.53 One is difficult to read and not worth reproducing. In it, having had lunch with McKittrick, Blackwell reports that McKittrick viewed Wallace as ‘a Walter Mitty fantasist’ and Fred Holroyd as ‘almost certainly a clinical paranoiac’. The second document is reproduced here. 51 The broadsheet page was approximately 2 feet (60 cm) long and 18 inches (40 cm) wide. 52 This episode and its aftermath are described in Paul Foot’s Who Framed Colin Wallace? (Macmillan, 1989) pp. 262-70. Despite the efforts of Foot and Wallace himself (and me) to show Ware he had got it wrong, he rehashed his nonsense from the Independent three years later in a piece for The Spectator, ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’ (24 March 1990). See 53 He was Lt-Col Brian Blackwell, some time commander of 11 Signal Regiment. In 1979 he resigned his commission and joined the civil service. See Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk John Ware Writing that piece above I was prompted to go into Lobster’s archives and look for Ware. I found this which appeared in this column in Lobster 48. Ware’s world In the wake of the death of Paul Foot in July, Simon Hoggart commented in his column in The Guardian 24 July that the BBC’s John Ware had never believed Colin Wallace, the subject of Foot’s book Who Framed Colin Wallace? Hoggart quoted Ware as saying: ‘He [Foot] bought into all Wallace’s fantasies.’ I e-mailed Ware and the following exchange took place. RR: I was curious to know what were Colin Wallace's ‘fantasies’ in your view. (Cf Hoggart in Guardian, Saturday). Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk John Ware: Too numerous to mention. RR: Not good enough, John. John Ware: It is for people who understand what evidence is. RR: Ah, yes: that old cop out. Truly, this is pathetic from someone of your status but it will make a nice little feature in the next issue of Lobster. John Ware: I’m quaking! Ever heard of Dave Spart? 54 RR: You keep trying to patronise me and it always misses. The reference to Dave Spart simply tells me you have never read Lobster. Policing dissent Meanwhile, back at the Undercover Policing Inquiry, a list of some of the cover names used by officers from the Metropolitan Police's Special Demonstration Squad has been published.55 A few more cover names will be added as the Inquiry proceeds but a significant number will remain ‘restricted’ or are, bizarrely, ‘unknown’. It remains unclear how many (probably very few) of the real names of these SDS officers will be made public by the inquiry, but it has ruled that there are cases where the SDS officer is now deceased and yet both their cover name and real name will remain secret. This isn’t quite Stasi-like but it was a very large covert operation; and one that was initiated in 1968 under a Labour Home Secretary, James Callaghan. I wonder if it had his approval? Some parts of the Special Demonstration Squad’s Tradecraft Manual – heavily redacted, of course, and hard to read in places – have been reproduced on the site.56 Dag Hammerskjold’s death Torben Gülstorff is too careful a researcher to do anything as rash as draw inferences from his essay on the death of Dag Hammerskjold in this edition of Lobster. But it is hard to read it and not conclude that a plane was smuggled into Katanga, with the aim of killing the UN Secretary General when he arrived 54 A cartoon lefty revolutionary figure in Private Eye, invented by editor Richard Ingrams and inspired by Eye contributor Paul Foot. 55 56 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk and wrecking the proposed peace talks. All the signs are there: the disinformation planted in the Daily Express; the pilot who ‘left’ his employer and went freelance just before the event; the confusing paperwork; the disinformation about the capabilities of the plane; the faulty memories of other Dornier employees about the pilot; and the unusual method of delivery (parts and reassembly). And who planned all this? The government of Katanga? Their Belgian allies? A. n. other? This theory – the first occasion on which a ‘black’ plane was used as an assassination weapon? – will initially stand or fall on how much public notice there was of Hammerskjold’s intention to go to Katanga. 9/11 As I have said before in these columns, while I think the WTC buildings appear to have been demolished, I don’t believe the ‘inside job’ theories of the 9/11 plane-bombings. I don’t believe that any of the US military or intelligence agencies were ambitious enough, or thought themselves good enough, to try and pull off something so complicated. Nor would they have chosen Manhattan and the Pentagon – where friends and colleagues worked – when an attack on other, lesser targets would have achieved the same end. Which leaves us with Bin Laden and fifteen other citizens of Saudi Arabia, the USA’s most important customer for weapons systems. In this context two little items in August were of some interest. The first Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk was the photograph above,57 issued by a Saudi government agency. Apparently threatening another 9/11-style plane-bombing, this was aimed at the Canadian government which had the temerity to criticise Saudi human rights policies. The second was the report that Osama Bin Laden’s son had married the daughter of 9/11 hi-jacker Mohammed Atta.58 The new JFK documents Some of the serious JFK researchers are now ploughing through the great piles of official CIA papers that have been declassified. Reports of what they have found so far make interesting, but not illuminating, reading.59 There is nothing so far about what happened on Dealey Plaza. In his essay in this issue of Lobster 60 William Kelly argues that with all this available official paper the JFK researchers will able to do a counter-intelligence operation – walking back the cat – on the assassination. I doubt this. After all this time there will be zero official CIA paper which says anything about Dealey Plaza (if there ever was any in the first place). The ‘anti-semitism in Labour’ psy-op continues And so the campaign against Jeremy Corbyn by the Israeli lobby in the UK kicked off again in the middle of July. For the government of Israel and its supporters world-wide this is serious stuff. There has never been a prime minister/president of a major Western democracy who was not (publicly) pro- Israel. The prospect of Prime Minister Corbyn – unlikely though that may be – is anathema to Tel Aviv. I suspect the heads of the state of Europe mostly detest their Israeli counterparts but are are afraid of the power of the Israeli lobby. Were one of their number to show it is possible to achieve power 57 Published in the Daily Mail at 58 59 For example Bill Simpwich at 60 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk without kow-towing to the lobby, others might follow. Thus far the Israeli lobby in this country is satisfied with trying to portray Corbyn (and the Labour Party generally) as anti-semitic. But if this proves insufficient who knows what they will do next? Were I Jeremy Corbyn I would be very careful about cycling round London. The Israelis are quite capable of organising ‘an accident’ for him.61 Two contributors to these columns, Colin Challen and Bernard Porter, have responded elsewhere to this latest episode.62 Keyholes I am not a fan of the roman à clef. To ‘get’ one, you have the know the material already. And if I know the material already, why do I want a fictionalised version? A rather well received roman à clef is Edward Wilson’s A Very British Ending.63 In that book the theme is the life of Harold Wilson. It’s rather as if Edmund Wilson wrote a fictionalised version of Smear!64 I lightly skimmed it. It was quite well done, and accurate, but I wondered, What was the point? You, however, may not have this prejudice about the genre and I bring to your attention a new addition to it, Aly Renwick’s Gangrene (Merlin Press, 2017). A sense of it is nicely conveyed by Dave Douglas’ review in Weekly Worker.65 (Dave Douglas is a member of the IWW, a.k.a. ‘the wobblies’.66) 61 The Daily Mail reported in late July that ‘Mossad’s secret agents killed more people than the agents of any other state since World War II, with some 800 operations in the last ten years alone’. See 62 Challen at 63 Reviewed briefly at 64 Still available. See for example 65 66 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk As others see us In Disrupt and Deny (reviewed in this issue) Rory Cormac includes in his final chapter a conventional account of the current Russian ‘threat’: bots, Facebook and fakes news etc. On this account Western Democracy is in danger of being torn to shreds by Russian internet psy-ops projects. This I kind of doubt. But we are in a Cold War again and any stick is a good stick with which to beat the Russians. What people like Cormac rarely if ever do is refer to the Russians’ perception of the threat they face from NATO. I noticed a quotation from Putin in The Spokesman.67 The Kremlin website hosts a transcript of that statement of Putin’s68 and the specific quoted paragraph runs as follows: ‘Despite our numerous protests and pleas, the American machine has been set into motion, the conveyer belt is moving forward. There are new missile defence systems installed in Alaska and California; as a result of NATO’s expansion to the east, two new missile defence areas were created in Western Europe: one has already been created in Romania, while the deployment of the system in Poland is now almost complete. Their range will keep increasing; new launching areas are to be created in Japan and South Korea. The US global missile defence system also includes five cruisers and 30 destroyers, which, as far as we know, have been deployed to regions in close proximity to Russia’s borders.’ Need to know? This striking little piece appears on Bernard Porter’s blog.69 ‘Porkies But he assured us, faithfully, cross-his-heart-and-hope-to-die, that the British Secret Services had no part in or knowledge of American torture of prisoners during the Iraq War. Only “conspiracy theorists” thought otherwise. “He” was the Director-General of MI5, speaking at a meeting of “intelligence” historians in Cambridge a few years ago, held under “Chatham House Rules” (look it up): which means that I shouldn’t really be telling you this. 67 The Spokesman no. 136, p. 62. 68 69 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk And now we learn this, officially: https://www.theguardian.com/uk- news/2018/jun/28/uk-role-torture-kidnap-terror-suspects-after-911- revealed.’ But was the head of MI5 lying or merely out of the loop on these MI6 operations? Forger’s Gazette news The estimable John Simkin reports on his blog that a story about an anti-Nazi German tennis player being banned from Wimbledon in the 1930s was spiked recently by the Daily Mail.70 Simkins’ essay begins: ‘On 13th April, The New European, revealed that that Daily Mail had dropped a story about a German tennis player, Gottfried von Cramm, who was expected to win the 1939 Wimbledon’s male-single championship, but was prevented from competing because of pressure from Adolf Hitler on the All England Lawn Tennis Club. The reason for this is that they discovered that the newspaper's then owner, Harold Harmsworth, the 1st Lord Rothermere, had used his influence to push for von Cramm’s ban.’ Kincora In the Irish magazine Village71 there is an on-going series of articles about child abuse, politicians and ‘the Troubles’, centred round Kincora. Some of it is familiar, some of it isn’t. In one of the articles,72 the author quotes former Kincora resident Richard Kerr’s claim of being trafficked around the UK to be abused by the Great and the Good – including the late Enoch Powell. At time of writing, this rather startling allegation has not been picked up by the major media in this country.73 Kerr has been talking about Kincora since the 80s – we briefly corresponded circa 1988 – and he has only now mentioned Powell. A 2017 article about Kerr in the same magazine by the same author did not 70 71 See 72 73 The most reliable single source on the recent events in the Kincora issue I have seen is the Channel 4 News website. See, for example, Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk mention Powell.74 With whistle–blowers and defectors, the early pressings are generally the most reliable. The problem with these articles is sloppy editing and the author’s mixing of solid, well documented material with speculation. For example Lord Mountbatten is mentioned as a possible visitor to Kincora – without any evidence. Former MI6 chief Maurice Oldfield is described as ‘a notorious abuser of rent boys’ – also without any evidence. And there is this confusing couple of sentences: ‘It is now being reported in the UK media that Heath was responsible for nominating Jimmy Savile for an OBE in 1972. This was just two years after Harold Wilson had a [sic] warned the Queen of England against making such an award; worse still, that Heath attended meeting of the Paedophile Information Network [sic] (PIE).’ 75 Is the author saying that Harold Wilson warned the Queen that Heath attended a PIE meeting? There is no evidence for this claim, if that is what he intended. In any case – and the PIE is the Paedophile Information Exchange, not Network – the attempt to link Heath to it has been thoroughly debunked.76 Trump-wise If you haven’t had your fill of all things Trump, a six-part series of thoroughly documented articles about him, his politics and his relationship to the US establishment has been written by Will Banyan.77 One of Trump’s early backers and allies, Roger Stone, wrote this about himself in his newsletter on 28 June: ‘Life as a highly-prized, ruthlessly-hunted target of a rage-driven leftist 74 75 76 77 The series starts here: Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Democratic/corporate media/deep state lynch mob is no picnic.’ 78 Somehow, despite being ‘hunted’ by this ‘lynch mob’, Mr Stone finds the time and has the sang froid to continue his other duties as an arbiter of world fashion.79 Trilateralism You don’t hear much about the Trilateral Commission these days. For reasons unknown, the conspiracy buffs aren’t greatly interested in it – despite the presence of a stellar cast of globalists, bankers and other black-hatted figures. What it has done, and what its leaders believe or believed (some are dead), is discussed in considerable detail in an on-line set of essays commenting on Dino Knudsen’s The Trilateral Commission and Global Governance: Informal Elite Diplomacy, 1972-82 (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). Knudsen had access to the Trilateral archives.80 With Bilderberg meetings reported by the Daily Mail,81 the Trilateral archives opened to a researcher, and even le Cercle (the Pinay Circle as was) the subject of academic inquiry,82 are there still secret gatherings of the global elite? The Met’s spooks The single most striking claim I read recently was in a report in the Guardian about covert operations by the Metropolitan Police. Since 1968, we were told, the Met had ‘spied on more than 1,000 political groups’.83 This was so startling 78 79 See 80 The essays are at 81 82 It is briefly discussed in Rory Cormac’s Disrupt and Deny: spies, special forces and the secret pursuit of British foreign policy (Oxford: OUP, 2018), which is reviewed in this issue. 83 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk – and the Guardian is so unreliable these days – I went to the site of the Undercover Police Inquiry to check. What it actually said was: ‘Since June 2017 the Inquiry has . . . Referenced that over 1,000 groups or organisations are referred to in Special Demonstration Squad documentation.’ 84 Which isn’t quite the same thing, is it? That a group or organisation was ‘referenced’ might mean it merely received a passing mention in a report from one of the undercover police officers, whose main focus was elsewhere. Even so: 1,000 groups? Let’s think: the CPGB and the Trot groups, plus trade unions, plus far right is what, a hundred max? (And aren’t they the responsibility of MI5?) So who were all the rest worth the Met’s attention? Of course we will never know: the list won’t be released. The Inquiry expects to send its report to the Home Secretary in 2023. Some lawyers are going to make a nice living for the next five years. Straw man Peter Oborne recently reminded his readers at the Daily Mail of then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s comments to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee in 2005. When asked about UK involvement in torture during the ‘War on Terror’, Straw said: ‘Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind this there is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States, and also let me say, we believe that [U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice] is lying, there simply is no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition full stop.’ 85 Fast forward to 2018, and the UK Government has now apologised to Abdul Hakim Belhaj for his being handed over to be tortured by the Libyan government during the brief rapprochement between the Blair government and Colonel Gaddafi. Straw’s claim from 2005 is, therefore, comprehensively proven to have been false. So what did Straw know and when did he know it? In 2011 the story surfaced and: ‘. . . Mr Straw appeared to deny any knowledge of the operation, saying: 84 85 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk “The position of successive foreign secretaries, including me, is that we were opposed to unlawful rendition, opposed to torture or similar methods, and not only did we not agree with it, we were not complicit in it, nor did we turn a blind eye to it.” After his remarks, he was confronted by MI6 officials who showed him documents relating to the case, the Sunday Times reported.’ 86 Mark this one as a briefing by MI6: we had told him. In 2012 the story resurfaced and the Daily Mail reported: ‘Former foreign secretary Jack Straw has admitted he approved the decision to capture a terror suspect and hand him to Colonel Gaddafi, it was reported yesterday. The admission apparently came after Foreign Office officials showed Mr Straw evidence he had “signed off” the operation, in which a leading Libyan opponent of Gaddafi was flown to Tripoli in 2004.’ 87 Mark this one as a briefing by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office: we had told him. But in a statement to the Telegraph at that time Straw had included the significant conditional: ‘No Foreign Secretary can know all the details of what intelligence services are doing at any one time.’ 88 In 2018, the Guardian tells us: ‘Following a Scotland Yard investigation, the Crown Prosecution Service concluded that the main suspect – known to be Sir Mark Allen, then head of counter-terrorism at MI6 – had sought political authority for some but not all of his actions. Friends of Straw say that the authorisation that he gave was subsequently “twisted and expanded” by MI6.’ 89 Mark this one as a briefing by Jack Straw: I was conned by the spooks. 86 87 88 89 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The Queen’s men Reminiscing about 1968 with David Edgar in the London Review of Books, Tariq Ali gave us a significant little snippet about the background to the ‘private armies’ episode in 1973/74. Ali describes how during the miners’ strike – so this is late 1973/early 1974 – at a meeting of the International Marxist Group (IMG), one Mary Furness told the comrades she’d been at a dinner party the previous evening at which were, inter alia, the Queen and Prince Phillip. Furness said (Ali recalled 50 years later): ‘The whole evening was spent – you’re not going to believe this, but you’ll all be quite flattered – discussing the miners’ strike. Philip was abusive, wanting Scargill’s head to roll. But it was the queen who surprised me: “I think things have got really out of control, and this is the end,” she said. “These workers are getting too much power, they’re running the country – they’re holding the country to ransom.” All the tabloid clichés were being repeated. There was a general sense of panic.’ 90 The message that Her Majesty was perturbed must have been rolling out across the Home Counties and, among its recipients, would have been members of the intelligence services and armed forces – who swear allegiance not to democracy or the British state but to the Crown. HRH’s message wasn’t quite ‘Who will rid of me of this troublesome priest?’ but it wasn’t that far off. Hence, perhaps, the willingness of General Sir Walter Walker, George Kennedy Young (ex MI6), Colonel David Stirling and others of their ilk to begin machinating against the unions and the Labour Party. The latter, let us not forget, was then very much the party of the unions. In addition, those same circles were hearing from a section of MI5 (which was getting its information from the CIA’s loopy James Angleton), that Labour PM Harold Wilson was a KGB agent. Something not too dissimilar happened in 1968, events which were revisited in May in the Telegraph in Paul Carter’s ‘Could an Army coup remove Jeremy Corbyn – just as it almost toppled Harold Wilson?’91 Strange brew An interesting brouhaha involving David Aaronovitch, Peter Oborne and Miles Goslett over Goslett’s book about the death of David Kelly has taken place. It 90 91 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk began with Aaronovitch doing his now standard ‘no conspiracy’ shtick on Goslett’s book.92 Peter Oborne replied, pointing out in some detail that Aaronovitch simply hadn’t dealt with Goslett’s arguments.93 Miles Goslett made similar points and noted that Aaronovitch had written in regard to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: ‘If nothing is eventually found, I – as a supporter of the war – will never believe another thing that I am told by our government, or that of the US ever again. And, more to the point, neither will anyone else. Those weapons had better be there somewhere.’ 94 A fine sentiment which seems to have had zero impact on his subsequent thinking and writing. As I noted in a review of his book on conspiracy theories,95 the basic problem is that he simply doesn’t know the material well enough. This may not matter to the readers of The Times, who probably know it even less well, but it means that when he engages with people better informed than he is, he gets his butt kicked – as he has done in this latest instance. The lobby After the Al Jazeera films, the existence of the Israel lobby in this country can no longer be called into question. As the machinations of its Parliamentary Labour Party members against Jeremy Corbyn are almost en clair, I wonder when the British major media are going to acknowledge this fact.96 92 93 94 95 96 The first of the three Al Jazeera films is at Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Powers, Angleton, Morley and Dallas William Kelly Mainstream media journalists seldom take on the delicate subject of the assassination of President Kennedy to discuss it in a serious way. An example of this was Thomas Powers’ recent review of Ghost,1 Jefferson Morley’s biography of James Jesus Angleton: Powers came close but doesn’t know enough about the subject to do more than try – and fail – to discredit Morley and dismiss his work on the assassination as irrelevant. Morley has a careful journalistic approach and has written biographies of two central figures in the assassination. The first was Our Man in Mexico about the CIA station chief in Mexico City, Winston Scott; more recently, as mentioned, he has produced Ghost about Angleton. Those are integral parts of the assassination story. Morley writes from an historical distance and a different perspective than Powers, whose biography of CIA Director Richard Helms2 was written with the cooperation of Helms and subject to his revisions. This is something Morley would not do. Thomas Powers actually met James Angleton and recalls the conversation they had as a basic Angleton tutorial on counter-intelligence (CI) techniques. They talked about the collection of ‘serials’ on subjects and the opening of chronologies on people and events, along with two basic rules of research: no details are left out of a serial file and there’s no quarreling with the evidence. The final product, when analysts writing a report attempt to ‘properly interpret’ the evidence, is where the quarreling comes in. But those ‘counter-intelligence methods’ are just the basic research techniques which assassination researchers have been doing for the last 50 years.3 1 ‘The Monster Plot’ in the London Review of Books 10 May 2018. It is available on-line (to subscribers only) at 2 The Man Who Kept the Secrets (1979). A review of it which appeared in the New Republic is at 3 See for example Ira David Wood’s JFK Assassination Chronology at Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk And we can confidently say that the JFK assassination records, ‘serials’, chronology and the information from the latest documents do not support the allegation that one man alone was responsible for the murder, regardless of the role of the accused assassin. Anyone familiar with the basic evidence understands that Oswald was not the sixth floor sniper and was what he claimed to be – framed as a patsy. Another tool of CI analysts is doing a ‘name trace’ on a suspect. Every intelligence analyst in the world did this with the name Lee Harvey Oswald on 22 November 1963, checking their files for what they had on the guy. If the first ‘serial’ was doing a name trace, the second was creating a chronology on the chief suspect and alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Born in New Orleans, Oswald was a member of the Civil Air Patrol, attended high school in Fort Worth, Texas and New York city, but without graduating and followed his older brother into the US Marine Corps. He served at bases in San Diego, the Philippines and Atsugi, Japan, where he worked in radar and communications at a top secret U2 base. He was trained in the Russian language before being given an early discharge and then defected to the Soviet Union. In the USSR he was interviewed by Priscilla Johnson – who, says Powers, wrote the best book on Oswald. But Powers neglects to tell us that when Johnson interviewed Oswald she was working for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), owned and operated by former OSS officers Ernest Cuneo and Ivar Bryce and former Assistant to the director of British Naval Intelligence, Ian Fleming, of James Bond fame. NANA was a virtual intelligence network run by spies.4 Priscilla Johnson5 was a neighbour and friend of the CIA’s Cord Meyer, Jr.. He encouraged her to apply for a job with the CIA. Which she did; but wasn’t hired. However she was assigned a CIA case officer, whom she frequently reported to. Her contact reports have been released by the CIA under the JFK Act. Powers also neglects to inform the reader that the publishing house of which he is co-founder, Steerforth Press, is keeping Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s book on Oswald, Marina and Lee, in print.6 Returning to Texas with his Soviet wife, Oswald resettled in Dallas among a community of right-wing oil men. At a party arranged for him to meet Michael Paine, Oswald was encouraged to kill General Edwin Walker, a crime he 4 5 She would later marry and become Priscilla Johnson McMillan/Priscilla McMillan. 6 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk has also been accused of committing. After relocating back to New Orleans, he opened a one-man Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) chapter, got into a very public fight with the local anti-Castro Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), before visiting Mexico City where he tried to get a visa to Cuba and the Soviet Union. Oswald then returned to Dallas, obtained a job at the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) through Ruth Paine, and was accused of shooting the President and a Dallas policeman. After requesting legal assistance and calling himself a patsy, he was shot and killed by Jack Ruby while in police custody. Any decent intelligence analyst with access to that basic background information on the accused would have concluded that Oswald was an intelligence operative and that whatever happened at Dealey Plaza was not the work of one man alone, but was a covert intelligence operation. Morley’s charge is that the assassination of JFK was thus a failure of counter- intelligence. Powers asks, if that is so, which intelligence agency was behind it? He only offers two choices – the Cubans and the Soviets – but there are other serious suspect intelligence networks in the loop, especially domestic agencies. There are some 21 US federal intelligence agencies, some well known and others you have never heard of, and the one I am interested in goes by the acronym ACSI – Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, US Army Reserves. Approximately half of the Dallas Police Special Services Unit were ACSI officers in the US Army Reserves. The pilot car in the motorcade, driven by DPD SSU Captain Lumpkin, an ACSI officer, included an ACSI Army Reserve Colonel Whitmeyer in the back seat, who was not approved by the Secret Service. Another ACSI Colonel visited Ruth Paine and Marina Oswald at their Irving home a few days before the assassination, just to ask them questions. Yet another ACSI (488th Army Reserve Intelligence) Colonel, Jack Crichton, ran the Civil Defense Emergency Operations Center within Fair Park, Dallas, that had the ability to monitor the motorcade and Air Force One radio transmissions. It was Crichton who arranged for a Russian language translator to participate in the questioning of Oswald’s wife Marina. ACSI and ‘The Sting’ I had never heard of ACSI before the assassination, but in his 2002 book Intelligence Wars Thomas Powers relates how he met former ACSI and National Security Agency (NSA) commander General William Odom at a party for retired CIA officer Haviland Smith. Over cocktails Powers asked General Odom what brought him together with Haviland Smith, a career CIA case officer and field operative. Odom said he went to Smith for advice, and asked Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk him what makes a good intelligence case officer? After thinking about it Haviland Smith replied, ‘The Sting!’ – referring to the popular Paul Newman/ Robert Redford film that was based on David Maurer’s book The Big Con.7 From that response, it is apparent that, at one time, Smith had been a student of Paul Linebarger at the John Hopkins Center for International Studies, who had his students read Maurer’s The Big Con. Linebarger said it gave good advice on how covert operations are successfully conducted. Another former Linebarger student, Joseph Smith, quotes him as saying: ‘That little book will teach you more about the art of covert operations than anything else I know . . . Maurer’s book will give you a lot of ideas on how to recruit agents, how to handle them and how to get rid of them peacefully when they’re no use to you any longer. Believe me, that last one is the toughest job of all.’ 8 The lexicon Just as academic linguist David Maurer discovered the secrets of the Big Con by interviewing thieves, con-artists and confidence men while studying their language, former Army intelligence officer Dr. John Newman has been figuring out how the covert intelligence ‘sting’ works by learning the intelligence lexicon – the codes, ciphers and dialects of the intelligence officers who are the major players in the assassination story. Powers criticises Jeff Morley and John Newman for taking advantage of Jane Roman (who was chief assistant to James Angleton) by misquoting her and taking her comments out of context.9 Jane Roman signed off on a number of documents and CIA cables on Oswald before the assassination and she recognized, as did Newman and Morley, that those CIA cables and documents on Oswald were significant. The documents were misleading, possibly deliberately deceptive, and indicated - in her words - a keen ‘operational interest’ in Oswald before the assassination. The key word here is ‘operational’ as, according to the intelligence lexicon, that is distinctly different from keeping a standard military 201 file on a subject (which is more akin to the career history of a particular armed forces individual). Regarding Jeff Morley’s article that allegedly (mis)quoted her, Jane Roman did write a letter of complaint to Ben Bradlee, Morley’s editor at the 7 Thomas Powers, Intelligence Wars (New York: New York Review of Books, 2002) p. xix 8 Joseph B Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior (New York: Ballentine Books, 1976) pp. 83-4 9 The interview transcript is at Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Washington Post at the time. However, she said her letter was too long, couldn’t see how to shorten it and didn’t send it. Instead of then going to any of the other of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird assets at the Washington Post,10 she gave a copy of her letter to the Oswald-dunit theorist, Max Holland, who shared it with Powers. And that puts these birds in the same nest.11 Some of those who still say Oswald was the lone assassin – Powers, Seymour Hersh and Max Holland for example – also claim President Kennedy ordered, approved or at least knew about the CIA’s plans to kill Castro. That is now the fall-back position for some of those who still advocate the lone assassin theory: if JFK was killed as a result of a conspiracy, it was a Cuban or Soviet one, in retaliation for JFK’s attempts to kill Castro. In an earlier brush with the assassination in his Intelligence Wars, Powers said there is a bushel of evidence of this, and berates JFK aide Arthur Schlesinger as a ‘Kennedy loyalist’ for denying JFK approved plans to kill Castro. ‘The assassination of John F. Kennedy was one of the great traumatic events in American history, and the possibility that he was guilty of intending what his killer was guilty of doing was more than Kennedy loyalists were willing to admit.’ 12 Powers says that, according to former DCIA Richard Helms, ‘. . . Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro.’13 Jack Anderson also intimated this in his promotion of John Rosselli’s story.14 While Powers hasn’t kept up with the JFK story, he quoted Seymour Hersh and Max Holland, ‘who are still on the case’, and ‘. . . learned recently the name of the CIA intelligence officer named to serve as liaison with the attorney general during the year in which he continually pressed the CIA for results in getting rid of Castro – a career 10 On Mockingbird see the declassified pages linked to 11 Some of Holland’s writing on the assassination has been published by the CIA. See 12 Powers (see note 7) p. xvii. 13 Powers (see note 7) p. xii 14 Anderson’s account of his relationship with Rosselli was described in his book Peace, War and Politics: An Eyewitness Account ((New York: Forge, 1999). The relevant pages, 105-118, can be read at Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk intelligence officer, now dead, named Charles Ford. According to Ford’s office-mate Sam Halpern, a CIA officer also assigned to Task Force W in the agency’s effort to get rid of Castro, Ford traveled hither and yon about the country on Robert Kennedy’s business, but there the public knowledge comes to an end. Hersh’s book The Dark Side of Camelot, published in 1998, includes some additional ancillary detail. Whether still-classified CIA files can fill out the story of Ford’s work for Bobby remains unknown but it’s likely, just as it is likely no one will be given free range of the files until many, many additional years have passed, if then.’ 15 Thanks to the JFK Act we now have Charles Ford’s official congressional testimony that was originally sealed for 50 years and it is telling. But you won’t hear it from Hersh, Holland or Powers, as it doesn’t fit their Castro, Cuban, RFK theories. Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Charles Ford attended Princeton before working for the OSS during WWII. During his OSS service he was sent on a mission to China with J. Walton Moore, who was the CIA’s Domestic Contacts Division officer in Dallas at the time of the assassination. After graduating from Princeton, Ford joined the CIA as a career agent assigned to the office of Training, except for the one year he was assigned to Task Force W to work with RFK on the covert actions against Cuba. He used an Italian alias and did meet with some shady characters, but it wasn’t to plot the murder of Castro. (Ford was also the CIA officer responsible for securing their copy of the Zapruder Film.) But while the Congressional investigators from the Church Committee were interested in Sam Halpern’s allegation that Ford was RFK’s intermediary with the mob on the plots to kill Castro, Ford said that simply was not the case. In his ‘Memorandum for the record’ after the meeting with the investigators, Ford wrote: ‘I said that I had never engaged in plotting with Cubans regarding assassination but that I had many conversations with Cubans regarding their desire to conduct paramilitary activities which, as a by-product, might well result in Castro’s death. I pointed out emphatically that the Agency’s policy prohibits political assassination.’ 16 While JFK ‘disapproved’ CIA plans like Pathfinder to kill Castro, RFK was personally introduced to anti-Castro Cuban JMWAVE personnel and case 15 New York Review of Books, 4 February 1999 at 16 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk officers and was even flown in to an Everglades training camp meet some of the anti-Castro Cubans who were infiltrated to Cuba. When accused of being knowledgeable about and approving CIA plans to kill Castro, RFK replied that he tried to stop such plotting, not instigate it. But the trap had been set. So when JFK was killed, and Oswald and Castro were accused of orchestrating the crime, RFK was said to feel guilty for having perpetrated the plot to kill Castro, which blew back against the President at Dealey Plaza. Writing in 1967, Jack Anderson speculated that Kennedy’s plan ‘backfired against his late brother’, and he was ‘plagued by the terrible thought that he had helped pot [sic] into motion forces that indirectly may have brought about his brother’s martyrdom? Some insiders think so.’ 17 Powers widened the scope of this: ‘. . . behind these suspicions, never resolved, lay a still darker fear in the mind of Robert Kennedy: that he himself, if any of the four had been established as the guilty party, could not have escaped at least some measure of responsibility for arousing and stroking the anger that resulted in his brother’s assassination.’ 18 Who ran and framed the patsy? Because Newman and Morley conclude – from the CIA’s own records – that Oswald was an intelligence operative of some kind, Morley asks the reasonable question: was Oswald ‘run’ by Angleton? At present the answer is ‘we don’t know’. But I say if not Angleton, who did ‘run’ Oswald, as someone clearly did. Even John McVicker, the State Department official in Moscow who encouraged Priscilla Johnson to interview the newly arrived ‘defector’ Oswald, and who is not a silly conspiracy theorist, said he believe Oswald appeared to be ‘guided by others’ who ‘encouraged him in his actions’. One of the basic rules of the intelligence game is that every operative, whether bona fide agent or unwitting asset, is controlled by only one case officer; and if he is ‘run’ by one agency, say the CIA, then the other agencies stay away. As Bill Simpich has extensively detailed in his State Secret,19 Oswald was controlled by a network of people who surrounded him, most of 17 The original typed text is at 18 Powers (see note 7) p. 189. The ‘four’ to which Powers refers to here are his possible suspects in JFK’s assassination: ‘organised crime and crooked labour unions’, ‘Cubans opposed to Fidel Castro’ and ‘Castro himself’. 19 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk whom were intelligence assets of some kind, and that Oswald himself was some kind of intelligence operative or asset, if not a fully fledged agent. John Newman describes Oswald in even more specific intelligence terms as a ‘dangle’ and false defector. When Oswald and his family arrived in Texas from the Soviet Union, George deMohrenschildt took an unlikely interest in them, and then went out of his way for the Oswalds to meet Michael and Ruth Paine before he left for Haiti. After leaving Texas, deMohrenschildt first went to New York where he was to meet with CIA agent John Train and ACSI agent Dorothy Matlock. But when Matlock learned of the CIA’s interest she pulled back and arranged to meet deMohrenschildt in Washington. Did deMohrenschildt tell them his most significant intelligence information: that Oswald had a rifle and may have taken a shot at Walker? With deMohrenschildt out of the picture, the Paines became Oswald’s babysitters. Then who ‘ran’ the Paines? Michael Paine’s mother, Ruth Forbes Paine Young, was a friend of Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles’ paramour. Michael’s wife visited Ruth Forbes Paine Young before picking up Marina and the rifle and taking them to Texas while Oswald went to Mexico. Although many people focus on the CIA, as Newman and Morley have done, there are other relevant intelligence networks in play here, including the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), whose ‘Defector File’ has been illegally kept out of the JFK Collection. Then there are the FBI, ASCI, and Air Force Intelligence. Many said Frank Sturgis was CIA, but the assassination files reveal he was actually run by Air Force Intelligence out of the Havana embassy. Anti-Castro Cuban terrorist Antonio Veciana says he met Oswald in Dallas with his own CIA case officer ‘Maurice Bishop’, (aka David Atlee Phillips). Now we read the newly released assassination records and it turns out that Veciana was run not by the CIA, but Army Intelligence – the ubiquitous ACSI. And the records show that Phillips at the time was running an authorized CIA operation against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), so that piece fits the part of the puzzle that includes Oswald. But what does the big picture show? The big picture Powers tells us that ‘the vast universe of information’ on the assassination prevents us from determining the truth about it. But we have the JFK Act that requires the government to open all of the official records on the assassination; we have a small but strong contingent of independent Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk researchers dedicated to reviewing and deciphering these records; we have the JFK Collection at the National Archives (NARA); we have the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to request even more relevant records; and we have the Mary Ferrell and Black Vault websites to funnel the relevant records to the analysts who can properly interpret them. So we can now investigate the assassination of the President Kennedy by narrowing the research to the relevant records, based on our knowledge of the evidence. What cannot be quarreled over is the determination that the JFK chronology and serials do not support the Warren Commission conclusion that one man alone was responsible for the assassination: the modus operandi of the murder was that of a covert intelligence operation conducted by a domestic intelligence network, and not the Cubans, the Soviets, or the Mafia. While normal criminal investigations attempt to collect evidence that can be used in a court of law, a counter-intelligence investigation, such as we are now conducting, attempts to determine the total truth, something that can be known in our lifetime. Justice however, will never be served. * William Kelly is a New Jersey based freelance journalist and historian. He is the author of two books – 300 Years at the Point and Birth of the Birdie – and is working on The Divine Skein at Dealey Plaza - How JFK Was Killed and How They Got Away With It. He was the recipient of the 2013 Mary Ferrell Award for his work on the 11/22/63 Air Force One Radio transmissions and is the co- chairman of the Research Committee of Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA-US.org). His articles on the assassination of President Kennedy are posted at JFKCountercoup.blogspot.com. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk South of the border (occasional snippets from) Nick Must * new * Naming no names: ‘HN58’ and the Undercover Policing Inquiry As has been referred to by Robin Ramsay in this issue’s View from the Bridge, the inquiry into undercover policing in the United Kingdom continues to produce interesting titbits. One such that I have come across is the case of the ex-Special Demonstration Squad officer who initially served in an undercover role but later left the SDS, rose through the ranks and came back to the SDS to act as its commander. He ‘was the Detective Chief Inspector in charge of the Special Demonstration Squad between 1997 and 2001.’1 All of the police officers who previously served in an undercover role with the SDS have been anonymised and given what are termed ‘Herne Nominals’ (HN numbers) by the inquiry. This particular officer is ‘HN58’. There has been significant debate about whether, due to his latter position as a senior non-undercover officer, the name of HN58 should be made public. Regarding the prospect of his own identity being revealed as a part of the inquiry's process HN58 has declared, ‘his own wish to avoid unwelcome intrusion into his private and family life’.2 Oh, the irony! Additionally, a part of the Special Demonstration Squad’s Tradecraft Manual has been published online by the inquiry. In that, a casual reference is made to ‘wearies’ as a descriptor for some of the target groups. There is, however, no further explanation within that document as to the origin of this phrase and it seemed a little mysterious. A bit of digging, however, reveals a separate Met Police document (related to other aspects of the inquiry) that shows it to be a typically poor quality copper’s joke: ‘As a method of infiltrating these groups officers would invariably change their appearance. They would grow longer hair and a beard and this lead to them being referred to as “hairies”. Over time, subjects of interest became known as “wearies”. This was a slightly derogatory colloquial term for individuals that were viewed as hard work and tiresome. These titles which now seem archaic and inappropriate remained in use by the unit 1 See the start of paragraph 4 on page 2 of the document at 2 See later on in paragraph 4 (at the top of page 3) of the document linked in footnote 1. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk throughout its existence.’3 Note, please, the attempt to make this use of language seem like something from the dim and distant past: ‘titles which now seem archaic and inappropriate’. In light of that, it should be remembered that the SDS existed from 1968 until 2008 and that the word ‘remained in use by the unit throughout its existence’. So they were still using the ‘archaic and inappropriate’ expression well into the 21st Century. * new * Betsy DeVos and her collection of yachts The U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her husband Dick own 10 yachts. They recently suffered the horror of one of their boats (the SeaQuest, worth $40 million) being vandalised (to the tune of only $5,000) while it was moored at the Huron Boat Basin,4 on the south edge of Lake Erie. The unknown perpetrator apparently untied the yacht from its moorings, setting it ‘adrift on Lake Erie with the crew on board’.5 As well as the SeaQuest, Mr and Mrs DeVos also own Legacy which was built on the same style of hull and is, presumably, also valued at roughly the same amount. Fear not though, for the Legacy and their other eight boats are just fine.6 As one would expect from members of the filthy rich, Dick and Betsy also have a fleet of private aircraft at their disposal. These include two Boeing Business Jet 737s (retail value $65-$75 million each), two Gulfstream G550s (retail value $55-$57 million each) and a Bombardier Challenger 300 (retail value $24 million). The DeVos family’s net worth is currently estimated at US$ 5.3 billion. You might wonder how they accumulated such an obscene wealth but you’ll soon stop wondering when you know that Dick DeVos is the heir to the Amway fortune.7 3 See the first full paragraph on page 18 of the document at 4 See ‘DeVos’ $40 million yacht vandalized at Huron dock’ from the Toledo Blade at 5 See the page at 6 Check the amusing end to this URL from Slate: 7 If you are unfamiliar with Amway, then a good place to start would be the article ‘Amway: 5 Realities Of The Multi-Billion-Dollar Scam’ at * new * Not anyone for Dennis? In July, the Thatcher foundation released to the public a huge archive of papers related to its synonymous Prime Minister. What first got my attention was how Dennis Thatcher had taken a very personal interest in filleting the list of guests to a No. 10 reception.8 The names of notable worthies, such as David Attenborough and Paul McCartney, received red marks from Dennis to signify ‘those who, I believe, do not help’. In contrast, positive indications were left for golfing pals, such as Eric Sykes and Ronnie Corbett, along with golfing professionals Tony Jacklin, Nick Faldo and (ex-pro/golfing commentator) Peter Alliss.9 Ancillary to this it transpires that the Chairman of the BBC Board of Governors, Marmaduke Hussey (later Sir Marmaduke), was also removed from the list of guests for a No. 10 reception. In this instance, it was also Mr Thatcher who had the main hand in the decision. A BBC online news report on the events from 30 years ago detailed what had made Dennis so upset. An edition of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme had, apparently, libelled Mrs Thatcher: ‘The offence was caused by one of the runners-up in a competition organised jointly with the Sunday Telegraph to write a “mini-saga” in no more than 50 words, with an extra 15 words allowed for a title. There were 64,000 entries, including one from Vincent Hill of London entitled Note 7 continued scam.html>. Anther good source for the realities of being an Amway distributor are, ‘Tax Court Denies Amway Losses – Again’ at 9 See the correspondence and list at This is Hill’s entry: ‘Ingenious: individual choice must be paramount. With growing confidence she legalised hard drugs. Prices fell sharply. Legitimate outlets replaced bankrupt drug syndicates. Crime figures plunged. Crematorium shares surged. City populations thinned as the weak spirited succumbed. Unemployment vanished. Only the worthiest survived. Nobody could complain. The unfit died of freedom.’11 Dennis Thatcher had even written to ‘Duke’ Hussey himself on this subject. The exchange of letters can be seen via the Thatcher archive12 and reveal Mr Thatcher suffering a complete sense-of-humour-bypass and adopting a true ‘Bufton-Tufton’ style: ‘The extent and depth of political bias in the B.B.C. is a matter of opinion, but this is a disgrace judged by any standard however low. I cannot believe that the management of a public broadcasting system can continue to employ a producer who publishes so foul and deliberate an untruth against anyone on such a subject. Surely such gross professional mis-conduct can neither be excused nor condoned?’ Switching from full fog-horn mode, Thatcher’s handwritten sign off then comically says: ‘Regards to you both. Yours ever, Dennis.’ * new * Those new White House tapes There has been significant coverage recently of the ‘secret’ recordings that Omarosa Manigault Newman made (or, at least, claims to have made) in various parts of the White House, including the supposedly ultra-secure Situation Room. What I have not seen any comment on, though, is the quality of the face-to-face recordings she has produced: e.g. her conversation with Generally John Kelly when she was sacked,13 as opposed to the recorded 10 See 11 See ‘The Diary – John Street’, Tribune, 10 August 2016 12 For some deeply annoying technical reason, a link to this particular PDF hosted on the Thatcher foundation website does not always open properly. To ensure its availability, I have uploaded the document to the Scribd service and the link to access it is 13 ‘Omarosa releases a recording of her own firing’, CNN, 13 August 2018 effectively offering Omarosa $15k per month to keep her mouth shut.14 According to a report from Axios, Mrs Manigault Newman says she used her mobile phone (set to record) as the device that has provided all these juicy morsels.15 The recording of General Kelly firing her was so clear I think it highly possible that the phone was placed in plain sight (a breach of security for the Situation Room, where electronic devices from outside are banned) and that General Kelly might even have been aware that the recording was taking place. * new * How viable was the ‘ISIS-inspired Theresa May murder plot’? In August, 21 year-old Naa’imur Zakariyah Rahman was sentenced to a minimum term of 30 years for plotting to kill British Prime Minister, Theresa May. Initially, ‘Rahman made contact with an FBI agent posing as an IS official online, who introduced him to an MI5 role-player.’16 The jury took thirteen hours to reach their decision and, after he was convicted, ‘. . . a probation report read to the court by the judge revealed that Rahman had admitted in prison he would have carried out the attack had he been able to.’17 (emphasis added ) Let us examine Rahman’s connections and abilities. BBC news reported18 how the ‘plot’ was ‘foiled’ by the security services and stated: ‘Last summer Rahman was homeless in London after falling out with both his mother in the city and close relatives in Walsall, where he grew up.’ In addition to this: ‘Despite his total lack of skills or training, MI5 was concerned that Rahman would press ahead . . . .’ (added emphasis) Further still: ‘As Rahman kept asking for help, the MI5 team introduced him to an undercover police officer in London posing as an Islamic State weapons fixer.’ (added emphasis) Covert video of the meeting, shown to the court, revealed that Rahman had asked for, ‘a truck bomb and firearms – before conceding he could neither drive nor fire a gun.’ (emphasis added) Thus far it would seem clear to me that Rahman, on his own and with no 14 ‘Omarosa Manigault Newman Releases Tape of Lara Trump’s $15,000-a-Month Job Offer’, The New York Times, 16 August 2018 15 See 16 See 17 See 18 See Is Boris Johnson the new George Brown? The position of Foreign Secretary has occasionally been used by Prime Ministers to put trouble-makers in a position of power that keeps them away from home as much as possible. (Remember the Blair cabinet and Robin Cook?) As the Foreign Secretary of Harold Wilson’s first cabinet, George Brown was famous for regularly being the worse for wear following a liquid lunch. Indeed, a biography of Brown is titled Tired and Emotional20 in tribute to the phrase that Private Eye derived from his frequently inebriated state. He is almost equally famous for attending a diplomatic reception in Peru, where – it is said – he espied a vision in purple wafting across the room and accosted her, asking for a dance. ‘“No”, she replied. “For three reasons. Firstly I don’t dance with drunks. Secondly, they are playing the Peruvian national anthem and you should be standing to attention. And thirdly, I am the cardinal archbishop of Lima.”’ 21 19 20 Peter Paterson, Tired and Emotional: The Life of Lord George Brown (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993) 21 This apocryphal anecdote could be taken from any number of sources, one being Jeremy Paxman’s review of Tired and Emotional (see note 1) which was published in the Independent, 15 May 1993. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk From insulting Nikita Khrushchev and coming close to fisticuffs with visiting American movie stars,22 to leaving a copy of ‘Labour’s National Plan for economic development’ in the back of the Mini which had rescued him when his official car broke down,23 George Brown was the premier comic political figure of his time. When Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell suddenly died in 1963, George Brown was widely expected to be his successor. In the end Harold Wilson won the contest when his rivals could not agree upon a single candidate to challenge him and the anti-Wilson vote was split. During the build-up to the 2016 Conservative party leadership election, Boris Johnson was seen as the front runner, with Michael Gove as his ‘dream ticket’ deputy. Johnson was thus the closest he had ever been to achieving his lifetime ambition of becoming Prime Minister. His decision not to even put his name forward was influenced by Michael Gove reneging on the agreement the two of them had so obviously hatched at Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair on the evening of Monday 22 July 2013.24 Boris Johnson feared a split in their supporters and knew, in his heart of hearts, that he could not swing it alone as his entire act is just that: an act. As Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson seemed determined to maintain his reputation as the class clown. In 2015 he lead a trade delegation that visited Erbil in northern Iraq. Part of the tour included time at the Jaguar car dealership in the city. The group were shown the newly minted Jaguar F-Type sports car and Boris promptly got in one and drove it out of the showroom. As Angus McKee, the UK’s Consul General in Erbil was quick to note following media reports of this incident, only swift action on the part of the present prevented Boris from actually driving off in the vehicle. ‘In case anyone gets alarmed by the attached article, while it is true that the Mayor got behind the wheel of a [REDACTED] in the showroom, drove out of the door & onto the driveway, quick action by his PPO and me ensured he did NOT drive off.’25 It is highly unusual that the Foreign Secretary’s PPO (Personal Protection Officer – his bodyguard) had to intervene, as properly trained bodyguards would only do such a thing when the ‘principal’ places themselves (or, 22 See chapters 24 and 25 of Craig Brown, Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (London: Simon and Schuster, 2011). 23 See Matthew Parris, ‘Another Voice’, The Spectator 18 June 2008. 24 25 The story was in the Daily Mail at £25 billion trade surplus with South Korea.’ 26 Which is interesting because the United Kingdom was a member of the European Union when those trade increases occurred and it was not the least bit of a hindrance. The Policy Exchange speech was also the occasion when he made a quip about Brexit being an excellent opportunity for increased sex- tourism to Thailand.27 Recently the Daily Telegraph (his part-time employer who pay him ‘chicken feed’) reported that he said ‘Fuck business’ in reply to concerns regarding the UK's trading future post-Brexit.28 Johnson also twice literally ran out of the House of Commons chamber to avoid answering questions from Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry. The first occasion was in February regarding the Northern Ireland border. More recently, in May, he was faced with the issue of the continuing violence on the Gaza strip.29 In June he further suggested that Donald Trump would handle the Brexit negotiations better than his colleagues.30 When Jeremy Corbyn chided him for this in Parliament, BoJo had a good chuckle.31 In many ways Theresa May is the John Major de nos jours: perceived as weak by many within her own party and continually fighting the Eurosceptics. The difficult balancing act of nudging us towards a soft or non-Brexit, while holding the Tory Party together, must be exhausting. Alas for her, Boris Johnson is unlikely to follow in the footsteps of George Brown and flounce off to the backbenches to be safely ignored for the rest of time. 26 ‘The Secretary of State for Foreign & Commonwealth Affairs, Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, set out his vision for a liberal Brexit in a speech at Policy Exchange.’ 27 From the Policy Exchange speech: ‘As I have just discovered we have more than a million people who go to Thailand every year, where our superb consular services deal with some of the things that they get up to there – on which I make no comment.’ 28 29 Northern Ireland: 30 31 Internet spying company employs ex-spy alert! Palantir Technologies is the data analytics company that was founded by PayPal creator and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Their software uses the same principle as the ‘Five Eyes’ Echelon system of keywords to trigger flags.32 Palantir software looks at, amongst other things, ‘emails and browser histories, GPS locations from company-issued smartphones, printer and download activity, and transcripts of digitally recorded phone conversations’.33 Once a communication is so flagged, a human analyst examines the data and will later, most likely, combine it with the analysis of other such data sets in producing a final report. It’s really just a technologically assisted and advanced version of what used to be the traditional intelligence analyst’s role, where reports from sources (both overt and covert) would be read, assessed and collated. Considering that it uses techniques that are so close to those of state espionage, it should come as no surprise that Palantir Technologies has Sir Mark Allen (the ex-MI6 officer who is a suspect in rendition cases) as ‘a senior adviser’.34 Sir Mark is an honorary fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, specialising in Arabic calligraphy, and his connection to Palantir is mentioned in the College’s sanitised biography of him available online.35 It should also be noted that Palantir’s founder, Mr Thiel, is on the ‘Steering Committee’ of the Bilderberg Group – along with ex-MI6 chief Sir John Sawers.36 Matthew Collins and the National Action trial At the trial (ongoing at time or writing) of six men accused of being members of the banned group National Action, two staff of ‘anti-racism charity Hope not Hate’ were called to testify. One of these two witnesses, Robbie Mullen, had previously been a member of National Action himself. He had, however, recanted his beliefs and became an inside informer on the far-right organisation. The main person at Hope not Hate to whom Mr Mullen reported 32 A couple of early articles on the Echelon keywords come from Wired in 1999 at 33 See ‘Palantir knows everything about you’ by Peter Waldman, Lizette Chapman, and Jordan Robertson for Bloomberg at 34 See ‘Libya rendition case against ex-MI6 officer may be held partly in secret’ in The Guardian 4 May 2017 35 At 36 See the Bilderberg openly published list of the Steering Committee at Searchlight magazine and Special Branch.38 A case of the burned spy becoming a handler. The Mormon Church and U.S. Intelligence agencies. The current American government has made much of their successes in obtaining the release of U.S. prisoners being held abroad. One such event was that of Otto Warmbier, who had been held in North Korea. In a previous Lobster article I detailed the British connection to that young man’s fate.39 In late May of this year Joshua Anthony Holt, a 26 year-old American citizen from Salt Lake City in Utah was released from custody having been held in Venezuela for two years. According to the Miami Herald, ‘Holt [was] the 12th U.S. citizen known to be in Venezuelan custody’ 40 and the circumstances of his arrest are intriguing. Previous to travelling to South America Holt had been, according to the Miami Herald, ‘a Mormon missionary in Washington State where he had learned Spanish’. He had, apparently, met Thamara Belen Caleño Candelo41 online and he had travelled to South America to continue his work as a missionary. They had married in the luxury coastal resort of Miranda state but the ceremony was ‘described as “irregular” [by officials] – presumably because Holt was not in possession of a visa that made him eligible to wed in Venezuela’.42 Following their honeymoon, the couple settled in her apartment in the subsidized housing complex of Ciudad Caribia, which is 30 minutes drive north west of Caracas. Early in the morning on Thursday, 30 June 2016, the area where they lived was subject to a search by Venezuelan security forces. Unrest in the country had been blamed on a paramilitary group that was believed to be based in the building where Holt and Caleño lived. The Venezuelan Minister for Homeland Affairs, Gustavo González López, said: ‘The foreign couple were lodging in this residential complex, in a building 37 See 38 See 39 See 40 See 41 She is a naturalised Venezuelan citizen who had been born in Ecuador. 42 See prestigious FAA Airmen Certification Database’.43 Naturally, Holt and his wife have consistently denied they were involved in any espionage activities. Writing in 2015 about ‘Why Mormons Make Great FBI Recruits’,44 Sarah Laskow commented: ‘. . . there’s at least one place in American society where Mormons have found an unusual degree of acceptance – in agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the CIA, which see Mormons as particularly desirable recruits and have a reputation for hiring a disproportionate number of people who belong to the church. While this comes as a surprise to most people, in Washington and particularly among people who work with or report on intelligence and law enforcement, it’s common knowledge.’ She continued: ‘. . . Mormons end up in these agencies for perfectly logical reasons. The disproportionate number of Mormons is usually chalked up to three factors: Mormon people often have strong foreign language skills, from missions overseas; a relatively easy time getting security clearances, 43 See 44 See included in multiple local newspapers across the U.S. in the autumn of 1981.45 As well as detailing those same skill-sets that appeal to intelligence agencies, it was stated that the CIA had sent one of their recruitment staff to the city of Provo in Utah. Their specific task was to recruit from the Brigham Young University, which is wholly owned by the Mormon church. Even today, the Kennedy Center at Brigham Young has a CIA recruitment page on its website.46 In the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, one of the ‘wild card independent candidates was Evan McMullin, an ex-CIA operative who was recruited while still a student at Brigham Young.47 There is even a Mormon connection to the seven people indicted by the Grand Jury for the Watergate burglary (five of whom had been involved in some way with the CIA). This was the public relations firm (and CIA front) Robert R. Mullen and Company that worked for the Mormon church and who, ‘. . . employed ex-CIA Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt at the time of the notorious Watergate Hotel break-in. [. . . .] In fact, Hunt and the others discussed their plans for the break-in in meetings at the Mullen company offices.’ 48 President Trump is intelligent, but can’t understand complex issues? A New York Post article in June claimed that ‘At least half of Americans believe President Trump is intelligent,49 citing a Gallup opinion poll. Looking at the data sets from the poll some predictable facts emerge. On the issue of whether Trump is ‘intelligent’, the split according to political allegiance was Republicans 90%, Democrats 30%. Digging even deeper one actually finds a striking contradiction. Asked if they believed he ‘understands complex issues’ 77% of Republicans agreed, 45 See, for example, Fort Walton Beach Playground Daily News of Thursday, 1 October 1981. 46 See 47 See ‘Here's what Evan McMullin did as an undercover CIA agent’ by Herb Scribner for The Deseret News at 48 See p. 162 of John Heinerman and Anson D. Shupe, The Mormon Corporate Empire: The Eye-Opening Report on the Church and Its Political and Financial Agenda (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985). 49 See 50 See Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk German links to the Hammarskjöld case Making the case for another possible murder weapon Torben Gülstorff On 18 September 1961, at approximately 00:13, a Douglas DC-6 came down close to the North Rhodesian town of Ndola. Sixteen passengers and crew on board died, among them the United Nations (UN) General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld. The plane was carrying a UN peacekeeping delegation to a meeting with Moise Tshombe, the self-declared prime minister of the secessionist Congolese province of Katanga, to discuss the future state of the province and finally put an end to the crisis that had kept the Republic of the Congo in suspense for more than a year. Background to the crisis On 30 June 1960 Belgian Congo became independent. Centralist parties gained the majority in parliament and elected Patrice Lumumba prime minister. Nevertheless, parties favouring a decentralized Congo still formed a strong opposition and worked for a change of government. When on 5 July riots broke out within Congolese military, decentralists took advantage of the country’s unstable constitution and the government’s weakness to foster their ambitions. On 11 July decentralist Moise Tshombe declared the Congolese province of Katanga to be a free state, with himself as prime minister. Soon the former colonial power, Belgium, which intervened with troops to protect its citizens, became his prime sponsor. The Lumumba government was unable to cope with the escalating crisis. It called in a UN peacekeeping mission. On 15 July the first UN troops entered, and Belgian intervention forces left the Congo, except for Katanga, where they stayed to train and build a Katangese security force strong enough to resist the Congolese military. UN troops took up position in Katanga as well but stayed out of the intra-Congolese conflict. This position remained even into the new year of 1961, when Léopoldville decentralists captured Lumumba and two of his colleagues and deported them to Katanga where their secessionist allies tortured and finally murdered them. In the aftermath of these events, the UN mandate was strengthened, but not to the point that its troops could end the secession. At that time the power Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk structure in the Congo did not permit such attempts. Several months later, this situation changed fundamentally. On 2 August a new Congolese government, led by Prime Minister Cyrille Adoula, uniting centralists and decentralists, was appointed. The UN felt that the time had come to put Tshombe under pressure. On 28 August it began Operation Rum Punch to take control of the secessionist territory and weaken its security forces. The self-declared country became occupied. However, its government was not yet defeated. The UN ordered it to surrender its political hardliners, such as the Minister of the Interior Godefroid Munongo, whom the UN believed to be responsible for ethnic cleansing, the death of Lumumba, attacks on UN troops and, more importantly, the preparation of a counterattack. The Tshombe government refused. On 13 September the UN began Operation Morthor to pre-empt such an attack and finally put an end to the Katangese secession. However, this time Katanga resisted. Its government established a temporary seat at Kipushi, a small town close to the border with Northern Rhodesia, several hours drive from Ndola. All over the province security forces engaged with UN troops, who soon had to pull back and entrench themselves. Nevertheless, Tshombe knew very well that the Katangese resistance was limited and he had to negotiate. Thus he invited the UN General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld, who was in the Congolese capital Léopoldville, to peace talks. They agreed to meet on neutral territory, at Ndola where, on 18 September, just after midnight, Hammarskjöld’s DC-6 crashed during its landing approach. Aftermath Rumours soon spread that the crash had not been an accident but an assassination: by sabotage, or an attack from the ground or from the air. The last soon became the most likely variant. Several official investigations declared the crash an accident. However the rumours continued. In 2011, a book by Susan Williams outlined several serious doubts about the accidental character of the crash.1 Her study led to the formation of the investigative Hammarskjöld Commission in 2012. Three years later this commission’s findings firstly formed the basis of the constitution of a panel of experts, and later the appointment of Eminent Person Mohamed Chande Othman at the UN. I first came into contact with the investigation in 2015, when I read about it in the news. I remembered several documents mentioning the Hammarskjöld 1 Susan Williams, Who killed Hammarskjöld? The UN, the Cold War and white supremacy in Africa (London: Hurst and Company, 2011). Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk case that I had found while working on my PhD thesis,2 and contacted the UN. Soon after I became a voluntary researcher. I also believe in an aerial attack. What follows is the current state of my research. Katanga’s air force and the UN Operations Rum Punch and Morthor When Tshombe declared Katanga’s independence on 11 July 1960, his decision was enforced by the provincial security force Gendarmerie Katangaise. In the following months, the Tshombe government enlarged this force, improved its training and equipment, and added foreign mercenaries to foster its combat strength. A national air force, the Force Aérienne Katangaise (FAK) also known as Aviation Katangaise (Avikat), was also added. The Belgian Victor Volant became its commander. Reports on the number and the types of aircraft owned by Avikat vary. It operated across several airfields in the hinterland and three airports in the major cities of Katanga: Jadotville, Kolwezi, and Elisabethville, the last harbouring its headquarters. Furthermore, landing rights for several airfields in Northern Rhodesia, perhaps also Angola, existed. All this changed on 28 August with the UN Operation Rum Punch. The UN took control of Katanga and seized most of the Avikat planes, which were based at the Elisabethville headquarters at that time. Only a small number of planes (again, numbers tend to vary), which had been based elsewhere, remained under the control of Avikat. These included aircrafts and helicopters of the following types: Aérospatiale-Potez-Fouga CM-170 Magister, De Havilland DH-104 Dove, Piper PA-18 Super Cub, Piper PA-22-150 Caribbean, Douglas C-47A, and Sikorsky S-58C. In the aftermath of Operation Rum Punch, Avikat moved its headquarters to Kolwezi, one of the few cities still under control of the Katangese security forces. Victor Volant was replaced as commander by the Katangese Jean-Marie Ngosa. Ngosa’s former adviser, the Belgian José Delin, became chief of operations.3 On 13 September, when the UN began Operation Morthor, Avikat deployed one fighter jet, a Kolwezi-based CM-170 Magister with the aircraft registration code KAT-93, to support the Katangese ground operations. On 14 September KAT-93 provided close air support to Katangese units attacking UN troops at Jadotville and carried out an airstrike on UN troops at Elisabethville. This occurred again just one day later, when it provided close air support to 2 Torben Gülstorff, Trade follows Hallstein? Deutsche Aktivitäten im zentralafrikanischen Raum des ‘Second Scramble’ (Berlin: Humboldt-Universität, 2016). 3 Christopher Othen, Katanga 1960-63. Mercenaries, Spies and the African Nation that Waged War on the World (Stroud: The History Press, 2015), pp. 139–147. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Katangese units attacking UN troops at Jadotville and Kamina and carried out another airstrike on UN troops at Elisabethville. On 16 September, it provided close air support to Katangese troops attacking UN troops at Jadotville and two UN companies trying to relieve them, chased away a UN helicopter at Jadotville, attacked a parked UN DC-3 at Kamina, and carried out another airstrike on UN troops at Elisabethville. On 17 September, it provided close air support to Katangese troops attacking UN troops at Kamina twice, destroyed a Sabena Douglas DC-4 on the ground and chased away a DC-3. Understandably, soon after the Hammarskjöld crash, KAT-93 became the investigators’ prime target, even though no shoot-down of a UN plane by the CM-170 Magister had been reported and, for technical reasons, its deployment in an air-to-air combat operation on a dark night is highly questionable. Furthermore, as by the end of 1961 Avikat began to use a De Havilland DH-104 Dove to provide close air support to Katangese troops, investigators became interested in this model as well. None of the other aircraft, namely Piper PA-18 Super Cub, Piper PA-22-150 Caribbean, Douglas C-47A, and Sikorsky S-58C, were ever seriously considered. This also applies to another plane that was in operation in Katanga on 18 September 1961. Due to several false reports dating its arrival not earlier than mid-October, it has been overlooked for a long time: a Dornier DO-28A with the aircraft registration code KA-3016. Four plus one (plus four plus one) – selling several Dornier DO-28As to Avikat Altogether, five (or six or even ten) Dornier DO-28As were ordered and received by Avikat in 1961 via the Belgian-Congolese trading company MITRACO. Its owner was the retired Belgian Colonel Jean Cassart, who, in the late 1950s, had become Dornier’s sales agent for Katanga. Negotiations for buying several DO-28As had already started in July 1960. On 24 February 1961 MITRACO placed an order, and on 10 August the first receipt was signed.4 The first DO-28A, with the production number 3016, took off in Germany on 21 August and bypassed Portuguese Angola on 28 August. It would have reached Katanga around 29 August. Four further DO-28As, with the production numbers 3017 to 3020, took off in Germany around 7 October and bypassed Portuguese Angola on 15 October. They would have reached Katanga around 4 ZFST to Federal Agency for Commercial Economy, 21 December 1961, German Federal Archive (BArch), B 102, 139598. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk 16 October.5 According to their production numbers, they received the Katangese aircraft registration codes KA-3016 to KA-3020. These five planes are already known about. However, according to Dornier Representative Otto Wien6 and the West German Ministry of Defence,7 at least one further DO-28A must be added to this list. As the US State Department informed the West German Embassy in Washington on 21 October, this further DO-28A had been disassembled, its components shipped to Portuguese Angola and transported to Kolwezi where they had been put together by a company technician.8 Furthermore, in the same meeting, the US State Department also declared that four DO-28As marked in the colours of Katanga had been seen flying through the airspace of Gabon. These planes could have been KA-3017 to KA-3020 which probably bypassed Gabon on 14 or 15 October. However, in November the British newspaper the Daily Express published an unnamed eyewitness report, stating that five DO-28As had taken off at Munich on 16 October,9 refuelled at Gabon around 20 October, and arrived at Katanga about one day later, fitting chronologically much better into the US State Department’s 21 October report on five DO-28As entering African territory. In the following months, all these DO-28As (whether five, six, or even ten) were used by Avikat for close air support operations all around Katanga. Yet it is only the first one, the plane with the aircraft registration code KA-3016, that is of actual importance for the Hammarskjöld case. Only KA-3016 arrived at Katanga around 29 August 1961, more than two weeks before the crash on 18 September. Could KA-3016 have been used for an attack on Hammarskjöld’s DC-6? Making the case for a German plane: a lonesome Dornier DO-28A Accounts of the events of the night of the attack greatly differ. Some 5 West German Consulate in Portuguese Angola to West German Foreign Office, 19 October 1961, Political Archive of the German Foreign Office (PA AA), Section Foreign Office (AA), B 34, 254. 6 Representative Wien (Dornier) to Chief of the West-East Trade Division Klarenaar (West German Foreign Office), without date, PA AA, AA, B 57, 65. 7 West German Ministry of Defence to West German Foreign Office, 8 December 1961, PA AA, AA, B 130, 8371A. 8 West German Embassy in the USA to West German Foreign Office, 21 October 1961, PA AA, AA, B 34, 254. 9 ‘I Took Planes to Tshombe’, Daily Express, 6 November 1961, PA AA, AA, B 34, 254. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk eyewitnesses claimed to have seen one plane, others two planes. Some said that they heard a jet engine, others a piston engine. There is even uncertainty about what kind of weapon had been utilized. Some said a machine-gun had been used, others that a bomb had been dropped out of a plane. Consensus exists only in so far as a bigger plane, Hammarskjöld’s DC-6, flew at lower altitude, while being attacked by a smaller plane, flying at higher altitude.10 It is hard to gain any evidence out of this information that could help to identify an attacking plane. Yet perhaps a comparison of the operational capabilities of the three most probable planes, namely a CM-170 Magister, a DH-104 Dove, and a DO-28A, can shed some light on the case. After all, the attacking plane did not leave the scene without leaving any clues behind. Firstly, the attacking plane obviously had to be armed. A CM-170 Magister was equipped with two machine guns and brackets to carry bombs and rockets. A DH-104 Dove was a civilian plane but could be armed with machine guns and bomb brackets. A DO-28A was also a civilian plane. In the same way as a DH-104 Dove, it could be armed with machine guns, bomb brackets and even rocket brackets, even though Dornier management11 and the West German Ministry of Defence denied this possibility. In July 1961 the latter made the official claim that Dornier planes had ‘no fighting potential’.12 The West German Foreign Office disagreed, claiming that DO-28As, like their predecessors, the DO-27s, had already been armoured by several buyers for military purposes. The Portuguese army and air force, for example, had used more than a dozen DO-27s in Angola during the indigenous uprisings of autumn 1961. Reports of the West German Foreign Office mention machine guns, bomb brackets,13 and even rocket launchers14 installed on DO-27s and used in combat to ‘burn complete villages’.15 Reports from the Foreign Office also indicate the installation of these features in the Katangese DO-28As. On 24 November 1961, the West German Foreign Office informed Dornier that a 10 Williams 2011 (see note 1), pp. 91–129 11 West German Foreign Office to West German Foreign Office, 12 July 1961, PA AA, AA, B 130, 374a. 12 West German Foreign Office, 12 July 1961 (see note 11). 13 West German Foreign Office to Representative Wien (Dornier), 24 November 1961, PA AA,AA, B 130, 374a 14 West German Consulate in Portuguese Angola to West German Foreign Office, 29 August 1961, PA AA, AA, B 34, 272. 15 West German Foreign Office to West German Foreign Office, 2 June 1962, PA AA, AA, B 68, 65. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk DO-28A had attacked UN and Congolese troops.16 Therefore, armament cannot be used as a clue as all three planes had the same capabilities. Secondly, the attacking plane had to have flight characteristics that were fitting to attack a DC-6: a great manoeuvrability and the ability to fly at a speed of approximately 240 to 290 km/h, to which the DC-6 would have slowed down during its landing approach. A CM-170 Magister is a twin-engine jet, built to train jet pilots but also able to provide close air support. Its maximum speed lies at approximately 740 km/h, its regular speed at approximately 550 km/h, and its slowest flying speed at approximately 144 km/h.17 A DH-104 Dove is a twin-engine propeller aircraft, built to transport people and goods. Its maximum speed is approximately 370 km/h, its regular speed approximately 301 km/h, and its slowest flying speed approximately 120 km/h. A DO-28A is a twin-engine propeller aircraft, also built to transport people and goods. Its maximum speed is approximately 328 km/h,18 its regular speed approximately 250 km/h, and its slowest flying speed approximately 65 km/h.19 Therefore, speed cannot be used as a clue. Manoeuvrability, on the other hand, offers the first hint. All three planes had average to good manoeuvrability. Yet a DO-28A, as it is a Short Take-off and Landing (STOL) plane, is able to fly in very tight and abrupt curves with a speed of less than 100 km/h. It, therefore, is the most manoeuvrable of the three. After all, according to a UN report, not just KAT-93 but also at least one DO-28A was used by Avikat to intercept UN aircraft in 1961.20 Thirdly, the attacking plane had to bring down another plane on a dark night. This requires special technical navigation equipment. KAT-93, according to the 2017 UN report, lacked this technical equipment, even though a CM-170 Magister usually had a Lear radio compass and a Very High Frequency Omnidirectional Range (VOR) on board.21 A DH-104 Dove usually was delivered with an Automatic Direction Finder (ADF).22 The first DO-28A, KA-3016, is 16 West German Foreign Office, 24 November 1961 (see note 13). 17 Email from Laurent Rabier, Responsable des collections d’aéronefs et de toiles d’aéronefs, Musée Air + Espace, 23 May 2018. 18 Bavarian Ministry of State for Economy and Traffic to Federal Ministry of Economics, 10 November 1961, BArch, B 102, 139598. 19 ‘DO 28 im Examen’, in Dornier Post 3/4 (1962), pp. 12–15. 20 UN General Assembly, document A/71/1042, 2017, pp. 32–33. 21 Email from Rabier (see note 17). 22 Email from Curator Alistair Hodgson, De Havilland Aircraft Museum, 16 May 2018. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk reported to have been equipped with the radio compass Lear ADF 14-d-1.23 Therefore, in the case of night flying equipment, a DH-104 Dove and KA-3016 would have been the most probable planes. However not one report of a night attack by a CM-170 Magister or a DH-104 Dove exists. This is in contrast to a DO-28A. Here, and only here, at least one night-time attack is reported.24 Fourthly, on the night of the attack, radio signals of the attacking plane were received by a British intelligence radio station in Cyprus.25 To reach this station, radio signals from Ndola had to cover 5,300 km. Only High-Frequency (HF) radio signals can cover such a distance. Therefore, the attacking plane had to have HF radio equipment installed. A CM-170 Magister usually only had a radio for Very High-Frequency (VHF) and Ultra-High-Frequency (UHF) on board26 and a DH-104 Dove usually was equipped with a VHF Mark VIII radio.27 Both, therefore, would have needed a transmitter to cover the distance.28 The Hammarskjöld Commission tried to solve this problem by declaring another plane, equipped with a transmitter, to be the radio signal’s source. To me, this solution seems highly questionable and unlikely. KA-3016 had such HF radio equipment, namely a Narco Marc V, and the HF transceiver Sunair 5-T-R, specially designed for long-range communications.29 Depending on the frequency used and the plane’s altitude, radio signals sent with this equipment could have been received by a regular HF receiver at a distance of approximately 30 to 800 km by day and up to 4,000 km by night. Considering the advanced reception and amplifying possibilities of an intelligence radio station, it is highly likely that a radio signal from KA-3016, flying above Ndola, would have been perceived and intercepted by the Cyprus station’s radio specialists. Fifthly, and finally, the attacking plane would have had to be based close enough to its target area, Ndola airport. KAT-93 was based at Kolwezi. A CM-170 Magister has a maximum range of 925 km. The distance between Kolwezi and Ndola, there and back, is approximately 851 km. Therefore, an attack, well-timed to the minute, would have been possible. However, the 23 ZFST, 21 December 1961 (see note 4). 24 UN General Assembly 2017 (see note 20), p. 32. 25 UN General Assembly, document A/70/132, 2015, p. 24. 26 Email from Rabier (see note 14). 27 Email from Hodgson (see note 22). 28 UN General Assembly 2015 (see note 25), p. 28. 29 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk chances of running out of fuel during the mission would have been high. Furthermore, such an attack would have created another anomaly as, during Operation Morthor, KAT-93 only operated within a range of 140 to 240 km around Kolwezi. Certainly, the possibility exists that the plane was refuelled at another airport or airfield between Kolwezi and Ndola, even though reports indicate that no Katangese-held airport or airfield suitable for jets existed in that area. One airfield particularly comes to mind, Kipushi, where the Katangese government had raised its temporary headquarters. The distance between Kipushi and Ndola, there and back, is approximately 404 km. Nevertheless, even if KAT-93 could have handled the uneven runway at Kipushi, it would have needed about 1.5 km to land and take off. The Kipushi airfield was only 0.7 km in length. This was also too short for a DH-104 Dove. That plane needs a runway of about 1 km to reach a height of 15 m, but it does have a maximum range of 1.415 km.30 Based at Kolwezi, a DH-104 Dove could have flown to Ndola, circled around for a while, attacked, and returned safely to its base. A DO-28A has a maximum range of 1.220 km. Yet, as a STOL plane, it does not need a long runway. It can take off and land in less than 0.3 km,31 and so could have operated from the Kipushi airfield. Indeed, sources suggest that KA-3016 was not based at Kolwezi but was, rather, at Kipushi at the time of the attack. A report of a Dornier employee, Mr Sohn, to the Foreign Office states that KA-3016 was solely used to transport members of the Katangese cabinet.32 Furthermore, in a meeting with the West German Embassy at Washington, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs at the US State Department Woodruff Wallner mentioned a DO-28A, based at Kipushi.33 KA-3016, therefore, could easily have reached Ndola, prepared, and finalized the attack and returned safely. Moreover, at Kipushi, on 17 and 18 September, KA-3016 would have been in the hands of the Katangese political hardliners, like Munongo. These were men who, fearing accountability for their dark political doings, were willing to make every sacrifice to secure Katanga’s sovereignty and their own political future. For them, KA-3016 would have been an ideal tool to weaken the position of those who were willing to compromise and eliminate the person they saw as central to the UN’s disapproval of Katanga’s independence. This was not without good reason. After Hammarskjöld’s death, the UN soon ended its occupation and the 30 Email from Hodgson (see note 22). ‘DO 28 im Examen’ (see note 19). 31 ‘DO 28 im Examen’ (see note 19). 32 Federal Ministry of Economics to Federal Ministry of Economics, 30 October 1961, BArch, B102, 139598. 33 West German Embassy in the USA, 21 October 1961 (see note 8). Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Tshombe government was back in power. To conclude: all three planes had the capability to attack Hammarskjöld’s DC-6. However, KA-3016’s abilities seem to fit best with the clues that were left behind on 18 September. What is more, a closer look at the transfer of the DO-28As brings some suspicious details to light which support the impression that there was something special about KA-3016. Suspect details of a rather unusual delivery By the summer of 1961, news of a possible deal between Dornier and Katanga had circulated in the international press. In the aftermath, the US State Department and the UN presented the West German Foreign Office intelligence regarding the deliveries and expressed their worries. Understandably, the West German Foreign Office was not amused. With the West German Ministry of Economics, it began an unofficial investigation which revealed some odd details of the delivery process. Dornier employees had serious problems stating the number of planes that Katanga had ordered. Sales agents and employees sometimes stated five,34 other times six.35 When asked how the delivery had taken place, Dornier representative Otto Wien answered that the planes had taken off from the company airport at Oberpfaffenhofen,36 even though the planes had taken off from the international airport of Munich-Riem, approximately 30 km to the east. Usually the pilot of a plane had to write a report regarding the market situation in the delivery area and a copy of this report was sent to the West German Foreign Office. Yet this time, no such copy was sent. Finally, Dornier’s management was not able to name the pilots who had delivered KA-3016 to KA-3020. For several months, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Economics had to investigate. Their focus regarding this issue lay on KA-3016 as it was this plane their investigation had started with. In early October, Dornier Representative Otto Wien mentioned ‘a German pilot, who is 34 Chief of the West-East Trade Division Klarenaar (West German Foreign Office) to West German Foreign Office, 25 October 1961, PA AA, AA, B 57, 65. 35 West German Foreign Office to West German Foreign Office, 5 October 1961, PA AA, AA, B 130, 374a. 36 Representative Wien (Dornier) to Chief of the Aircraft Manufacturing Division Beauvais (West German Ministry of Economics), 4 October 1961, PA AA, AA, B 57, 65. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk not an employee of Dornier’.37 Later, Dornier Export Director Mr Leander38 and Dornier employee Mr Sohn39 mentioned a German pilot who was not known to them. By the end of October, the Dornier sales agent responsible for the Belgian market, Mr Delattre, even identified the Belgian buyer himself, Jean Cassart, as the pilot.40 Fortunately, in November a staff member of the Ministry of Economics contacted the traffic department of the Munich-Riem airport, which Otto Wien had falsely denied as the point of departure. Here, the airport chief of traffic Kurt Bartz was finally able to name the pilot of the first delivery: Heinrich Schäfer who, according to Bartz, was Dornier’s chief test pilot.41 However, this information was only partially accurate. The pilot of KA-3016 had been Heinrich Schäfer but on 1 March 1960 Schäfer had quit his job at Dornier. He continued to work for the company, but as a freelance pilot.42 Bartz also identified the four pilots of KA-3017 to KA-3020 who had taken off at Munich-Riem around 7 October: Mr Boutet, Mr Paire, Mr Fouquet, and Mr Bertaux. All of them were of Belgian nationality.43 Be that as it may, in the context of this paragraph only the German pilot of KA-3016 is of further interest. The fact that a former employee, well-known to the company’s management, had been involved in its delivery raises one serious question: is it probable that all the men involved in the process of selling the first DO-28A to Katanga had not known when they were asked, and were unable to come to know in the following days and weeks, that their former colleague Schäfer had made the delivery? Doubts are justified as clues even indicate the implementation of a staged cover-up story by somebody. As already mentioned, on 6 November, the British tabloid newspaper the Daily Express published a report, written by an unnamed eyewitness.44 According to this witness, five DO-28As took off at Munich on 16 October. He or she claimed that these planes had been flown by 37 Representative Wien (Dornier), 4 October 1961 (see note 36). 38 Chief of the West-East Trade Division Klarenaar (West German Foreign Office), 25 October 1961 (see note 34). 39 Federal Ministry of Economics, 30 October 1961 (see note 32). 40 West German Embassy in Belgium to West German Foreign Office, 31 October 1961, PA AA, AA, B 130, 8371A. 41 Federal Ministry of Economics to Federal Ministry of Economics, 24 November 1961, BArch, B 102, 139598. 42 ‘Chefpilot Heinrich Schäfer jetzt freier Mitarbeiter’, in Dornier Nachrichten, 4 April 1960. 43 Federal Ministry of Economics, 24 November 1961 (see note 41). 44 ‘I Took Planes to Tshombe’ (see note 9). Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk British, Belgian and French pilots, marked with the aircraft registration codes KA-3016 to KA-3020. As a proof, the witness had added a photograph, showing KA-3016 and KA-3020 on an airfield. Was this fake news? Had this statement been published to mislead the still ongoing investigation? Was it trying to prove that no Dornier plane had been in Katanga earlier than late October 1961? Another clue strengthens this assumption. Let us return to the already mentioned US complaint about the four DO-28As flying through Gabon airspace in mid-October for a moment. According to this complaint, a US informant had recognized the aircraft registration codes of two of the four planes: KA-3015 and KA-3017.45 Now, 3015 was the production number of a DO-28A that the West German Ministry of Defence had bought for its special air mission wing in 1961. It was marked with the aircraft registration code CA+041 and decommissioned in the late 1960s.46 It is, therefore, rather unlikely that it had been seen near Gabon, let alone marked with a Katangese aircraft registration code. It is much more plausible that KA-3016 has been misread or falsely reported by the US-American informant as KA-3015. Yet if so, it would have been the second DO-28A, marked KA-3016, crossing Gabon airspace in autumn 1961. Therefore, up to this point, one thing should have become clear: efforts had been made to cover up the delivery of KA-3016 in late August. At least so far, it is the only plane in the Hammarskjöld case for which such a cover-up can be noted. Conclusion This article makes the point that a Dornier DO-28A might be the plane that was used in a night-time air-to-air attack on UN General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld on 18 September 1961. This does not mean that the company Dornier had actively participated in the planning, preparation or execution of such an attack. It is highly likely that the timing of the arrival of KA-3016 in late August, between Operation Rum Punch and Operation Morthor, was pure coincidence. The same applies to freelance pilot Heinrich Schäfer. Nevertheless, the investigation of KA-3016 is still at an early stage and nothing should be ruled out without more research. An analysis of Avikat’s usual combat strategy and tactics shows quite clearly that the attack on Hammarskjöld’s DC-6 was an anomaly. Avikat’s pilots seemed to lack the experience required to bring down 45 West German Embassy in the USA, 21 October 1961 (see note 8). 46 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk another plane. UN planes were intercepted while airborne but were destroyed only while on the ground. The downing, therefore, formed one anomaly; flying in a dark night was another. Something must have been different in September 1961. Schäfer comes to mind. He was an experienced German Luftwaffe fighter pilot, trained for night-time air-to-air combat operations and had participated in more than 60 World War II combat missions over Soviet and North African combat zones.47 Yet, this fact is a clue, not evidence. Currently, there is no concrete evidence for any active involvement of Schäfer in the Hammarskjöld case. Nevertheless, not just for this reason further research on Schäfer might be promising. On 29 August he arrived at Katanga. Usually delivery pilots stayed for some time at their place of destination to instruct local pilots and mechanics. According to Dornier’s representative at Bonn, Otto Wien, the German ‘non-Dornier’ delivery pilot of KA-3016 returned to the company right after the delivery.48 Yet, on 2 October the US Embassy at Bonn informed the Foreign Office that a DO-28A, obviously KA-3016, armed with machine guns and bomb brackets, had been seen at a Katangese airfield accompanied by a ‘Dornier technician’.49 About two weeks later, US intelligence added that the parts of the sixth disassembled DO-28A had been put together in Kolwezi with the help of a ‘Dornier employee’.50 As Otto Wien declared that no Dornier personnel was based at Katanga51 and Schäfer also had been a technical officer at the German Luftwaffe,52 he may very well have been the technician US- American intelligence had falsely identified as a Dornier ‘employee’. Therefore, further research on Schäfer’s stay might deliver new insights into the situation of Katanga’s available planes and pilots, perhaps even into the situation of the exiled government at Kipushi in September 1961. Be that as it may, at least one thing can be said definitely: if the crash of Hammarskjöld’s DC-6 was caused by an air-to-air attack, KA-3016 has to seriously considered as the attacking plane. As the former Katanga Gendarme 47 Schäfer to Central Verification Authority (Federal Archive) and Wehrmacht Information Authority (WASt), 3 November 1965, BArch, Pers6, 190806. 48 Chief of the West-East Trade Division Klarenaar (West German Foreign Office) to West German Foreign Office, 5 October 1961, PA AA, AA, B 57, 65. 49 Representative Wien (Dornier) to Claudius Dornier Junior (Dornier), 2 October 1961, PA AA, AA, B 57, 65. 50 West German Embassy in the USA, 21 October 1961 (see note 9). 51 Chief of the West-East Trade Division Klarenaar (West German Foreign Office), 5 October 1961 (see note 48). 52 Schäfer, 3 November 1965 (see note 47). Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Victor Rosez confirmed to me: ‘About the 5 Dorniers [KA-3016 to KA-3020], I can tell you that the very first was flown by their own pilots and arrived in Katanga by end of August 1961. This aircraft could be modified easily in a light bomber and possibly used in an attack on another plane.’ 53 To definitely prove or rule out this possibility, further research is necessary. Torben Gülstorff is a German freelance historian. In 2016 he earned his PhD in contemporary history. The history of West and East German activities in Africa after 1945 forms one of his special subjects. He supports the ongoing UN investigation into the death of former UN General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld as a voluntary researcher. 53 Email from Victor Rosez (former member of the Katanga Gendarmerie), 25 February 2018. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Using the UK FOIA, part III Nick Must It seems that we will never know for certain who took part in the discussions at two meetings of the Western Union Clandestine Committee (WUCC) over 65 years ago. On 31 July I finally received notification from the First Tier Tribunal (which heard my appeal under the Freedom of Information Act) of the result of their deliberations: it has been denied. I know every minuted word from those meetings but, according to the Tribunal, who said those words is actually more secret. In two previous editions of Lobster I have charted the course of my appeal under the FOIA.1 I included my original Lobster article on the WUCC as a part of that appeal and I take some comfort that the Tribunal have read it. How else would they have been able to state that ‘On 8 March 2016 Nick Must, who describes himself as an independent researcher with a particular interest in Special Forces, made a request for information under FOIA addressed to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office?’ [Emphasis added] That description of myself was only in the WUCC article. In denying the appeal, the Tribunal has allowed the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to use two caveats from the FOIA. The first is Section 27 which, in this case, covers the names of foreign intelligence officers. As the judgement rightly notes, a reliance on Section 27 requires that there be: ‘. . . a real and significant risk that disclosure would make relations between the UK and a foreign country more difficult or call for a particular diplomatic response to contain or limit damage which would not otherwise have been necessary’. How have the FCO established that there is this ‘real and significant risk’? I will quote extensively from the judgement at this point: ‘The main theme of his Notice of Appeal . . . is his suggestion that the FCO ought to consult with the other governments concerned and seek their 1 ‘Using the UK FOIA’ Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk consent to the disclosure of the names of their agents. We note that the FCO has not expressly responded to this point but, on reflection, we are not persuaded it assists him. It is clear that the FCO are not under any kind of duty to take this step and they need only establish that there is a real and significant risk that disclosure would cause relevant damage to the UK’s relationship with the foreign government. Further, we can well see that seeking consent would in any event involve the FCO and the foreign government in expending time, resources and diplomatic goodwill that could be better expended on other diplomatic priorities.’ But the main theme of my appeal was not that the FCO should consult with the foreign governments. A very much larger part of my appeal was showing how the extensive list of intelligence officers’ names that could be gleaned from the official history of SIS by Professor Keith Jeffery2 illustrated that, when it suits them, the FCO are quite happy for names to be in the public domain. I will return to this point shortly. The main question that arises from the statement that the FCO ‘need only establish that there is a real and significant risk that disclosure would cause relevant damage to the UK’s relationship with the foreign government’ is: how do they establish this? It would seem that plain guesswork is an allowable process, as there has been no actual evidence to support this, except the word of the FCO. Further more, I find it quite farcical that the Tribunal judgement additionally states: ‘bearing in mind the FCO’s expertise in the field, we are inclined to accept their position on section 27(1).’ So, if the FCO wish to withhold information, the FCO are the people to provide advice as to whether that’s the right thing to do! In the early part of the lengthy appeal process, I pointed out that the documents I had received had three British names redacted. This seemed to be contrary to the then reliance by the FCO solely on Section 27. In response to this, the Information Commissioner actually agreed with me that, if those three names were indeed of British persons, then those names should be released to me. Suddenly, however, the FCO relied on a new caveat – Section 23, which covers UK intelligence agencies and personnel and has no ‘public interest test’. As the judgement states: ‘When it was rightly pointed out that the FCO had also redacted the names of three British citizens, one of whom was a representative on the Committee and two of whom were members of the Committee’s 2 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk secretariat, the FCO sought to rely on section 23(1) of FOIA. [. . . .] Although this exemption was raised somewhat late in the day, we can see no possible answer to it: it cannot be disputed that the names of SIS members or staff are covered by the exemption and no question of public interest or the age of the information arises; the fact that the exemption is not always relied on in practice is of no relevance.’ Please note the admission that ‘the exemption is not always relied on in practice’, which is indisputable. As I said earlier, a significant part of my appeal was showing how the official history of SIS included many intelligence officer’s names. (I included a list of all of these names in my appeal submission.) The response to this from the FCO has been that there is an ‘established policy’ not to name agents/officers – a denial of the obvious truth: that the FCO will name names when it suits them. I additionally argued that, as everything that was discussed has been released, the names could not be more sensitive than the discussions. In response, the judgement states: ‘. . . there must be special sensitivities involved in the identification of agents which can last for a very long time and that it is not necessarily right to say that the contents of discussions of the Committee in 1949 and 1950 are more sensitive than the identity of those who worked for the various secret intelligence services in those years.’ Which is akin to a non-denial denial. There may be circumstances where the identity of intelligence officers remains sensitive for more than half a century but whether this is one of them or not hasn’t been explicitly stated. As I have shown with my original article on the WUCC, a examination of the minuted discussions at those two meetings clearly indicates a direct connection between the WUCC and the development of the ‘Gladio’ stay-behind networks in Europe. Many of the ‘Gladios’ lacked any form of proper control in the 70s and 80s, ultimately carrying out ‘false flag’ terrorist attacks that were blamed on the political left–wing. As I said in my appeal, there will be material that is sensitive and there will be material that is embarrassing. Those two things are not one and the same. My case was presided over by His Honour Judge Murray Shanks who, about a month before, passed judgement in a similar FOIA appeal. In June it was decided that the journalist Phil Miller should be allowed access to previously secret information related to the involvement of a British SAS officer who, in the summer of 1984, provided advice to the Indian government during the siege of the Golden Temple at Amritsar. The Cabinet Office had opposed Mr Miller’s appeal, claiming a reliance on the same two caveats of the FOIA Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (sections 23 and 27) that the FCO have used in my case.3 In defence of not releasing the information related to Amritsar, Owen Jenkins – the former FCO director for South Asia and Afghanistan – ‘insisted that only a “small sub-section of the file” had not been released’.4 Much the same argument that was used by the FCO in my case: effectively that ‘the vast majority of the information has been released, so there can be little public interest in seeing the rest’. When Counsel for the Government also claimed that, ‘the passage of time does not diminish the significance of this information in this case’, Phil Miller's legal team countered that, ‘Britain’s failure to consult India on the [initial] 2014 disclosures. . . had no negative impact on diplomatic relations.’ Working pro bono on the appeal, the Irish law firm KRW Law, states: ‘Matters of National Security/International Relations/Commerce should not be a barrier when seeking clarity about the moral certainty of a British Government policy and operation leading to massacre of civilians.’5 Reporting on the outcome of the case, a Press Trust of India wire report quoted extensively from the judgement: ‘We recognise that the period we are concerned with was a highly sensitive one in India’s recent history and the strength of feeling it continues to evoke. . . it should also be remembered that the fact that 30 years has gone by is bound to have reduced any prejudice that may have resulted from release of the withheld material.’6 The decision in my case may well be legally binding but, if any part of the appeal in the Golden Temple case can be allowed but mine is completely denied, as many people much greater than myself have noted before: the law is an ass. 3 I should clarify that, in the Phil Miller appeal, it is the use of Section 27 (relations with overseas governments) that has been over-ruled. That part of the information where the Cabinet Office were reliant on Section 23 (UK intelligence agencies) will continue to remain secret. 4 See ‘Operation Blue Star Hearings: The Big Cover-Up?’ by Sajeda Momin for India Legal at 5 See the web page at 6 The story was carried under the headline ‘Make Operation Bluestar files public: UK judge to British govt’ in the Hindustan Times at Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Bilderberg Myths: Were the Bilderbergers behind the 1973 oil shock? Will Banyan According to a small band of contemporary alternative journalists and activists, Bilderberg has long had a ‘direct impact on global policy’;1 ‘behind closed doors’ Bilderberg participants ‘help establish policy’;2 it is a ‘private meeting’ that ‘sets political and economic policies’.3 Of the 2016 Bilderberg meeting held in Dresden, Germany, Charlie Skelton (writing for Transparency International UK) said it was actually a ‘diplomatic summit’ and a ‘hothouse of corporate lobbying’,4 rather than being a place for its participants to ‘take time to listen, reflect and gather insights’ (as the Bilderbergs themselves claim).5 At last year’s conference held in Chantilly in the US, where there were barely any protestors, Bilderberg was again portrayed as a ‘secretive group’ of ‘unelected bankers and corporate masters controlling the fate of humanity' who were ‘behind many of the world’s major conflicts’.6 Numerous researchers claim to have pinpointed instances where Bilderberg’s influence has manifested itself. Long-time Bilderberg observer Tony Gosling, for example, has argued that ‘It was in Bilderberg’s secret conclaves that the European Union and euro were first mooted and where the 1 Steve Watson, ‘Bilderberg 2015 Location Confirmed’, Infowars, 30 January 2015, 2 Mark Anderson, ‘Bilderberg Bared’, American Free Press at 3 Kit Daniels, 'Flashback: Bilderberg Decides World’s Political, Economic Policies, Says NATO Secretary General’, Infowars, 9 June 2015, 4 See Charlie Skelton, ‘Bilderberg 2016: It’s Time to Take Seriously This Diplomatic Summit’ at 5 See ‘About Bilderberg Meetings’ at 6 Kit Daniels, ‘Why Won’t The Left Attack Bilderberg, The Real 1% Dominated By White Males?’, Infowars, 3 June 2017, Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk first whispers were heard of the 1999 Kosovo and 2003 Iraq wars.’7 It is also claimed that Bilderberg instigated the 1973 Arab oil embargo, for the sinister purpose of channelling the industrialised world’s wealth via the Arab countries back into the Anglo-American financial system. This allegation was first made by F. William Engdahl in his book A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. Drawing on the minutes of Bilderberg’s meeting in May 1973 at Saltsjöbaden in Sweden, Engdahl claimed Bilderberg participants were informed of a ‘scenario’ involving a ‘400 per cent increase in OPEC petroleum revenues’. But the purpose of the ‘secret Saltsjöbaden meeting’, was not to prevent the anticipated oil shock, instead it was to ‘plan how to manage the about-to-be-created flood of oil dollars . . . .’ 8 Through reference to the ‘confidential protocol’ of the Saltsjöbaden meeting, Engdahl determined that ‘Bilderberg policy was to trigger a global oil embargo, in order to force a dramatic increase in world oil prices.’9 (emphasis added) Tracking the events leading up to the Arab oil embargo, Engdahl claims the October 1973 Yom Kippur war, when Syria and Egypt launched a pre- emptive attack on Israel, had actually been ‘secretly orchestrated by Washington and London’. Henry Kissinger, then US Secretary of State, allegedly had primary responsibility for implementing the plan, which he achieved by using his diplomatic channels with both the Arabs and Israelis to ‘misrepresent to each party the critical elements of the other, ensuring the war and its subsequent Arab oil embargo’. Engdahl also accused Kissinger of suppressing vital intelligence on the Arab build-up for the war.10 But Kissinger was merely following the Bilderberg plan allegedly devised months earlier in Sweden: ‘The war and its aftermath, Kissinger’s infamous “shuttle diplomacy”, were scripted in Washington along the precise lines of the Bilderberg deliberations in Saltsjöbaden the previous May, some six months before the outbreak of the war.’11 (emphasis added) Engdahl’s claims about a ‘Bilderberg policy’, ‘Bilderberg scheme’ or ‘Bilderberg 7 Tony Gosling, ‘The “too difficult” box: Britain’s pre-election charades sidestep all the key questions’, Russia Today, 15 April 2015, 8 William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, (London: Pluto Press, 2004, revised edition) p. 130. 9 Engdahl p. 135 10 Engdahl pp. 135/6. 11 Engdahl p. 136 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk plan’ to precipitate the Arab oil shock12 have been endorsed by other researchers. For example, William Clark’s Petrodollar Warfare (2005) hailed Engdahl’s book as ‘remarkable’ and supported the claim that Kissinger was following the ‘Bilderberg plan.’13 Daniel Estulin’s The True Story of the Bilderberg Group claims (though without citing Engdahl) that at the 1973 meeting, ‘the Bilderbergers agreed to increase the price of oil to $12 a barrel, a 350% jump meant to create chaos in the United States and Western Europe. . . .’14 In a subsequent book, Transevolution: The Coming Age of Human Deconstruction, Estulin credited Engdahl as the source of the claim.15 In 2015, Kit Daniels, a reporter with Alex Jones’ Infowars, did a podcast which claimed the ‘Bilderberg Group orchestrated the 1973 Oil Crisis.’16 The consensus among some conspiracy researchers is that these allegations should be treated as proven. It is the contention of this paper, however, that Engdahl’s claims about Bilderberg and the 1973 Oil Shock are false. The notion that Bilderberg secretly planned and set in train the events leading to the oil shock does not withstand scrutiny. Despite his recent protestations that his story was not a ‘conspiracy theory’ but actually a ‘conspiracy fact’,17 Engdahl’s core claims are not supported by any of the documents he cites, including the minutes of the Bilderberg meeting. Testing each of his claims in turn reveals a litany of analytical and factual errors that exposes Engdahl’s account as a completely misleading guide to Bilderberg’s role in 1970s oil politics, that obscures rather than reveals Bilderberg’s ability to shape and influence national policy. 1. In search of . . . Dr Kissinger Henry Kissinger has long been the subject of controversy and conspiratorial speculation. In 1976, for example, close to the nadir of his Washington DC 12 Engdahl pp. 135, 137, 139, 268. 13 William Clark, Petrodollar Warfare: Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar, (Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2005) pp. 21, 28-31. 14 Daniel Estulin, The True Story of the Bilderberg Group, (Walterville, Oregon: Trine Day LLC, 2007) p. 46. 15 Daniel Estulin, Transevolution: The Coming Age of Human Deconstruction, (Oregon: Trine Day LLC, 2014), pp. 22-23. 16 Kit Daniels, ‘Did You Know Bilderberg Created The 1973 Oil Crisis?’, Infowars, 11 June 2015, 17 Jay Taylor interview with F. William Engdahl, ‘Why Are Russia and China Buying Gold? Tons of It!', Jay Taylor Media, 20 April 2016, Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk career, Kissinger was pilloried by Gary Allen (co-author of the mega-selling None Dare Call It Conspiracy) as the ‘chief architect and apologist’ of a ‘plot’ or ‘conspiracy’ to ‘paralyze American strength’ in service of the goal of ‘world government’; whose continued position in government ‘presents a clear and present danger to this Republic’.18 Kissinger was also the leading villain in the conspiratorial fantasies of Engdahl’s former employer Lyndon LaRouche, who once memorably ranted about Kissinger’s ‘faggotry' and ‘heathen sexual inclinations’.19 Such peculiar preoccupations are not expressed in A Century of War, but Engdahl does describe Kissinger as ‘all-powerful’ and having held ‘absolute power’ in the Nixon Administration; and that he had been an ‘appendage of the Rockefeller Group’ since the 1950s.20 More importantly, Kissinger is the central figure in his claims about Bilderberg and the 1973 oil shock. It is Kissinger, supposedly following Bilderberg instructions, who suppressed crucial intelligence to bring about the Yom Kippur War and the Arab oil embargo, and who subsequently encouraged the Shah of Iran to raise oil prices again at the start of 1974. Confirming the presence of Kissinger at Saltsjöbaden in 1973, presumably to participate in this plot, is clearly critical to the credibility of Engdahl’s allegations. Yet, on this key issue Engdahl is surprisingly inconsistent and evasive. For example, in A Century of War, at the end of a paragraph listing a number of people who were ‘[p]resent at Saltsjöbaden that May’, Engdahl mysteriously notes that ‘Henry Kissinger was a regular participant at the Bilderberg gatherings’.21 This implies that Kissinger was present, but stops short of asserting that he was there. He also reproduces a memorandum from the Bilderberg’s US Secretariat ‘containing the United States’ proposed list of May 1973 participants, including Henry Kissinger’.22 But in an appendix at the end of the book, in which he lists all the ‘participants’ at the Saltsjöbaden meeting, Kissinger’s name is included.23 Then, in a 2000 article in Executive 18 Gary Allen, Kissinger: The Secret Side of the Secretary of State, (Seal Beach, California: ’76 Press, 1976) pp. 8/9. 19 ‘LaRouche challenges Kissinger to sue him’, Executive Intelligence Review, 17 August 1982. 20 Engdahl (see note 8) pp. 137/8 and p. 109. 21 Engdahl (see note 8) pp. 132-4. 22 Engdahl (see note 8) p. 131. 23 Engdahl (see note 8) p. 287. Engdahl also includes the name of James Akins, Director of fuels and energy at the US State Department, as a participant, even though his name is also missing from the list of participants included in the report on the Saltsjöbaden conference (see ‘Bilderberg Meetings 1973 Conference Report Saltsjöbaden, Sweden’, pp. 5-7 Continues at the foot of the next page. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Intelligence Review, Engdahl seemed more certain, writing that ‘Kissinger was among the selected invited guests’ at the 1973 meeting.24 In recent years Engdahl has alternated between flatly affirming Kissinger’s attendance at Saltsjöbaden or just implying he was there by noting he had been invited. For example, in his 2012 book, Myths, Lies and Oil Wars, Engdahl adopted the more ambiguous wording: ‘Henry Kissinger, a regular participant at the Bilderberg gatherings, was listed by Robert Murphy as an American government representative to the secret Sweden talks.’ 25 But in a 2014 interview with Assistant Professor Wang Zhen from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Engdahl seemed quite certain that Kissinger was there when he mentioned a ‘top level ultra-private secret invitation-only gathering’ in Saltsjöbaden, Sweden, of ‘88 select US and European policy- makers’. As he told Professor Wang: ‘The top-secret gathering in Sweden in May 1973 included the heads of the major US and British oil giants, David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Lord Rothschild and others of that rank.’26 Referring to the events of 1973 in an article about Iran in February 2016, Engdahl made no mention of Kissinger as a meeting participant (although he repeated his erroneous claim that David Rockefeller, among others ‘were also present’).27 However, when interviewed on Jay Taylor’s radio program a few months later, Engdahl adopted a more slippery formulation, telling his host: Note 23 continued 25 F. William Engdahl and Margot L White, Myths, Lies and Oil Wars, (Wiesbaden, Germany: Edition.engdahl, 2012), p. 56. 26 F. William Engdahl & Wang Zhen, ‘The Rise of China and World Order: An Interview with F. William Engdahl’, International Critical Thought, May 2014, p. 134 27 F. William Engdahl, ‘Washington Underestimated the Iranian Mind’, New Eastern Outlook, 10 February 2016, Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘Kissinger was invited to that meeting, by the way.’ 28 Despite the curious inconsistencies in Engdahl’s wording, many readers of A Century of War have come to the conclusion that Kissinger was indeed at Saltsjöbaden. For example, when the first edition of A Century of War was reviewed in 1993 by Executive Intelligence Review (where Engdahl was at the time Economics Editor) the book reviewer was convinced that Kissinger had ‘attended the Bilderberg meeting.’ 29 Writing on the NewsWithViews website in 2007, Deanna Spingola, citing Engdahl as her source, included Kissinger among those attending the Bilderberg meeting.30 In a 2009 essay on the Global Research website, Canadian researcher Andrew Gavin Marshall claimed that Kissinger was ‘among the 1973 participants’ at Saltsjöbaden, citing Engdahal as his only source.31 Similarly, Eric Walberg in his book Postmodern Imperialism (2011) concluded from his reading of Engdahl that the 1973 Bilderberg meeting was ‘attended by Kissinger.’32 As did Abdulhay Zalloum in his book America in Islamistan, again citing Engdahl as source.33 In 2015 Kit Daniels, in an Infowars podcast, claimed that Kissinger was present at the meeting; as did James Corbett in his ‘How Big Oil Conquered The World’ documentary.34 Most recently, the commentator ‘Bankster Slayer’ on the Rogue News website, in his notes on Taylor’s interview with Engdahl, wrote that ‘Kissinger attended this meeting’.35 28 See note 17. 29 Peter Rush, ‘Britain and the geopolitics of oil’, Executive Intelligence Review, 15 January 1993, p. 60. 30 Deanna Spingola, ‘The One World Order: the Bilderberg Plan – Control Oil, Control People, Part 23’, NewsWithViews.com, 18 August 2007, 31 Andrew Gavin Marshall, ‘Controlling the Global Economy: Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and the Federal Reserve (Global Power and Global Government, Part 3)’, Global Research, 30 August 2009, 32 Eric Walberg, Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and Great Games, (Atlanta [GA]: Clarity Press, 2011) p. 93, note 15. 33 Abdulhay Y. Zalloum, America in Islamistan: Trade, Oil and Blood, (Bloomington, Indiana: Trafford Publishing, 2011) p. 118. 34 For Kit Daniels see note 16 and for Corbett see ‘Episode 310 – How Big Oil Conquered The World’, The Corbett Report, 28 December 2015, 35 Bankster Slayer, ‘F.W. Engdahl on China, Gold and the Silk Road’, Rogue News, 21 April 2016, Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Henry Kissinger did not attend the 1973 Bilderberg meeting in Saltsjöbaden. Despite having being invited, as noted in media reports at the time, Kissinger is not listed in the Bilderberg meeting report as a participant.36 ! Above are the participants as recorded in the minutes of the meeting. Kissinger is not listed. Moreover, there is no evidence that Kissinger attended, either overtly or in secret. Why did Kissinger fail to attend? The ostensible reason is a diplomatic spat with Sweden. The Swedish Foreign Minister told the US Chargé d’Affaires in Stockholm that Kissinger’s presence at Bilderberg would potentially inflame US-Swedish relations, which had deteriorated over the US war in Vietnam. The US Chargé maintained that Kissinger would be attending in a purely private capacity and would not discuss Swedish-US relations. However, after Kissinger 36 For example, an Associated Press report in April 1973 noted that ‘Kissinger appears certain to meet Premier Olaf Palme of Sweden . . . at a conference of world leaders in Sweden next month.’ (‘Kissinger, Leader of Sweden to Meet’, The Amarillo Globe-Times, 18 April 1973, p. 54.) Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk learned of the Swedish position, he told his close friend Bilderberg Secretary General, Ernst van der Beugel, that it would be ‘impossible’ for him to attend under these circumstances and, sure enough, Kissinger did not participate. This is confirmed by multiple sources. In a telephone conversation on 1 May, for example, Bilderberg Steering Committee member and former Ambassador Robert D. Murphy (the author of the memo cited by Engdahl) told Kissinger he was ‘so pleased that you have decided not to go under the circumstances.’37 (emphasis added) On 2 May Kissinger told President Nixon that he was able to use the Swedish reaction to his presence as ‘an excuse to cancel my participation’ at Bilderberg.38 By then the US State Department had already instructed its diplomats in Stockholm, in a telegram sent on April 28, to tell the Swedes: ‘IN VIEW OF POSITION OF SWEDISH GOVERNMENT AS SET FORTH BY FOREIGN MINISTER WICKMAN (REFTEL), DR. KISSINGER WILL NOT RPT NOT BE ATTENDING BILDERBERG CONFERENCE.’39 A series of follow-up telegrams from Washington DC reiterated that Kissinger’s decision not to attend ‘remains unchanged’ and the US Embassy informed the Swedish Foreign Ministry and other hosts that Kissinger had ‘made other plans for the period.’40 Following a summit meeting in Moscow, Kissinger spent 9 and 10 May in London for discussions with the British Government, before heading back to Washington DC.41 On the first day of the Saltsjöbaden conference, 11 May, official US Government records show that Kissinger was in the Oval Office 37 ‘TELCON Amb. Robert Murphy/Kissinger, 1 May 1973, 10:40 am’, Yale University Library, Digital Collections, Henry A. Kissinger Papers, Part III, Series IV, Telephone Conversation Transcript Copies, 38 Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Conversation 909-6, 1 May 1973, 9.31-9.50 am, Oval Office, 39 ‘Kissinger Visit to Sweden’, State to Stockholm, 28 April 1973, State 080940_b, (CONFIDENTIAL) 40 ‘Bilderberg Conference’, State to Stockholm, 4 May 1973, State 084474, (CONFIDENTIAL); ‘Bilderberg Conference’, Stockholm to State, 4 May 1973, Stockh 01500, (CONFIDENTIAL); and ‘Invitation to Dr. Kissinger to Visit Stockholm Exhibit’, State to Stockholm, 3 May 1973, State 083482, (UNCLASSIFIED). Declassified US State Department cables are sourced from The National Archives, at 41 ‘Kissinger hint of summit hitch’, The Times, 10 May 10 1973, p. 8; 'Dr. Kissinger leaves London after talks’, The Times, 11 May 1973, p. 10; and Alvin Shuster, ‘Kissinger Returns’, New York Times, 11 May 1973, p. 2. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk meeting with Nixon;42 and on 12 May, as noted in multiple sources, he briefed the press in Washington DC on his trip to the Soviet Union.43 2. The plan that never was Engdahl claims the evidence for the ‘Bilderberg scheme’ to ‘trigger a global oil embargo’ can be found in the ‘confidential protocol’ for the Saltsjöbaden meeting (and that, as a previous Bilderberg participant, Kissinger would have received a copy of those advance papers). This is in spite of the fact that Kissinger was not at Saltsjöbaden and could not participate in the alleged ‘Bilderberg plan’. Focusing on the presentation by an ‘American speaker’, identified as Walter Levy, whose intention was apparently ‘clear enough’, Engdahl then explains: ‘After stating the prospect that future world oil needs would be supplied by a small number of Middle East producing countries, the speaker declared, prophetically: “The cost of these oil imports would rise tremendously, with difficult implications for the balance of payments of consuming countries. Serious problems would be caused by unprecedented foreign exchange accumulations of countries such as Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi.” The speaker added, “A complete change was underway in the political, strategic and power relationships between the oil producing, importing and home countries of international oil companies and national oil companies of producing and importing countries.” He then projected an OPEC Middle East oil revenue rise, which would translate into just over 400 per cent, the same level Kissinger was soon to demand of the Shah.’ 44 Two pages later Engdahl reproduces excerpts from Levy’s presentation plus another snippet from Spaak’s paper. Referring just to these small excerpts, Engdahl infers there was a ‘Bilderberg plan’ to cause the Arab oil embargo. He writes that the Bilderbergers had ‘evidently decided’ to launch a ‘colossal 42 Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Conversation 916-14, 11 May 1973, 10:15 am - 12:03 pm, Oval Office, 43 Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, (London: HarperCollins, 2007) p. 481; and Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography, (New York: Touchstone, 1992) pp. 498, 810 note 5. An Associated Press report on the Washington press conference noted that Kissinger had ‘returned Thursday after a four-day trip to Russia’. See ‘Brezhnev coming to U.S.’, Eugene Register-Guardian, 13 May 1973, p. 1. 44 Engdahl (see note 8) p. 130. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk assault against industrial growth in the world . . . .’45 Yet the Saltsjöbaden minutes show that, on the contrary, the Bilderberg participants were collectively concerned about the growing political and economic power of the Middle Eastern oil exporting countries, and were focused on how they could collaborate to blunt that impact. Below are excerpts from the Bilderberg Meeting minutes for the Saltsjobaden conference, as reproduced in Engdahls’ Century of War (p. 132) 45 Engdahl (see note 8) p. 135. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Even his caption is wrong. The excerpts do not refer to a ‘discussion’ by participants, as he implies, but are the summaries of the two papers. The first excerpt comes from the paper by EC Director-General of Energy, Fernand Spaak, and the second comes from the paper by US oil consultant Walter J. Levy. According to the Saltsjöbaden meeting minutes, the first item on the agenda was ‘The Possibilities of the Development of a European Energy Policy, and the Consequences for European-North American Relations.’46 There were two working papers: the first on ‘Guidelines for a European Energy Policy and its Consequences on Relations between Europe and North America’, was prepared by Fernand Spaak (1923-1981), the Director-General for Energy, Safeguards and Controls of Euratom for the European Community.47 A version of his paper was later published in Energy Policy.48 The second paper, ‘An Atlantic-Japanese Energy Policy’, a response to Spaak, was presented by Walter J. Levy (1911-1997),49 an oil economist and consultant, who was also an advisor to the US State Department.50 An earlier version of Levy’s paper which he had delivered at the Europe-America Conference, held in Amsterdam in March 1973 was published in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s journal Foreign Policy.51 Following the presentation of the two papers, there was a lengthy discussion by the participants about the issues raised.52 Before examining the meeting report, it is important to note the actual intent behind the Bilderberg Steering Committee’s decision to put energy issues on the agenda. Some of the Steering Committee’s papers in the lead up to the 1973 meeting have come to light and they do not support Engdahl’s thesis. On 28 September 1972, in a memorandum sent to other Steering 46 Bilderberg Meetings, Saltsjöbaden Conference, p. 9. 47 Rudd Geven, Transnational Networks and the Common Market: Business Views on European Integration, 1950-1980. Dissertation, University of Maastricht, 2014, pp. 233-234. Spaak is listed as a participant at the meeting (Bilderberg Meetings, Saltsjöbaden Conference, p. 7). 48 See Fernand Spaak, ‘An energy policy for the European Community’, Energy Policy, June 1973, pp. 35-37. 49 Geven (see note 47) pp. 234-235; and Bilderberg Meetings, Saltsjöbaden Conference, p. 22, Levy is listed as a participant on p. 6. 50 Wolfgang Saxon, ‘Walter James Levy, 86, Oil Consultant, Dies’, New York Times, 15 December 1997. 51 See Walter J. Levy, ‘An Atlantic-Japanese Energy Policy’, Foreign Policy, No. 11, Summer 1973, pp. 159-190. 52 Bilderberg Meetings, Saltsjöbaden Conference, pp. 35-70. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Committee members, Bilderberg’s US Secretary General Joseph E. Johnson and his European counterpart, Ernst van der Beugel, proposed that the upcoming Saltsjöbaden meeting could address the following topics: ‘ a) The Middle East. We could take the Middle East as the subject for the whole conference and split it up in a political approach and an economic subject, eventually linking it with the energy situation of the Western world. b) We could also take the energy situation as an economic subject without dealing with the political situation in the Middle East, but in that case we must choose another political subject.’ 53 This was for the ‘consideration’ of the Steering Committee, which later met over 21 and 22 October 1972 at Soestdijk Palace in the Netherlands. It seems the Committee rejected the idea of making the Middle East the focus of the meeting and instead ‘agreed that it would be appropriate and important to discuss the energy situation and its impact on American-European relations . . . .’ But this had to be balanced against the ‘strong desire of some members of the Steering Committee to discuss a subject which was directly related to the present state of relations between North America and Europe.’ A compromise was thus reached with the adoption of the following two agenda items: ‘I. The possibilities of the development of a European energy policy, and the consequences for European-North American relations. II. Conflicting expectations concerning the European Security Conference.’ 54 The Steering Committee agreed that the authors of the working papers ‘should be in close contact with each other and the Secretariat, in order to coordinate their work, and bring out a number of precise discussion points.’ These points included: [T]he different European interests – the role of the oil companies – 53 Memorandum titled ‘Steering Committee meeting October 21st and October 22nd’, from Joseph E. Johnson & Ernst H. van de Beugel to the members of the Steering Committee (memo dated 28 September 1972 and held in the Hoover Institution Archives and reproduced at the Public Intelligence website – see p. 11 of the PDF document at 54 Minutes of the 2 Meetings of the Steering Committee, Soestdijk Palace on 21 and 22 October 1972 (held in the Hoover Institution Archives and reproduced at the Public Intelligence website - see p. 5 of the PDF document at Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk conflicts between energy requirements and ecological priorities – the consequences of developments in the energy situation on European- North American relations, and the balance of payments implications.55 There are signs that Spaak and Levy followed some of these very broad guidelines to produce assessments that differed in some respects, but not on others. The key difference between the papers was on how the Western countries should respond to potential disruptions to supply. Focusing on the need to ‘avert crises’ and noting that Europe, the US and Japan were more dependent on ‘other countries’ for their energy supplies, Spaak’s recommendations still had the oil companies taking the lead in negotiating with the governments of the oil-producing countries – but with the oil-consuming governments coordinating their instructions to the oil companies.56 Levy, in contrast, was blunter in identifying the potential radicalisation of the oil-producing countries as the most likely source of supply disruptions. The US, he warned, ‘could not afford an increasing over-dependence on a handful of foreign, largely unstable, countries’. The oil-producing countries were acquiring ‘immense potential power’; Saudi Arabia, in particular, with its lead in reserves and production, ‘would have a pivotal role in supply within a few years’. Levy was therefore unequivocal in arguing that the oil companies 'were no longer able to handle by themselves the political problems’ they were encountering in the oil producing countries, and would need ‘firm backing’ from Western governments to improve their bargaining stance.57 Yet this difference was perhaps superficial as they both argued for greater collaboration and policy coordination amongst the oil-consuming countries across the developed world, extending to Japan. Levy explicitly called for a ‘united Atlantic-Japanese oil posture’ and for ‘coordination of policies among Western governments’.58 Spaak also advocated ‘energy cooperation’ and increased consultations between the EC, the US and Japan, including ‘harmonization of energy policies.’ 59 Arguably of greater importance, though ignored by Engdahl, were some key common threads in the measures they suggested for mitigating the potential impact of the West’s growing dependence on the OPEC countries: 55 Ibid. p. 6. 56 Bilderberg Meetings, Saltsjöbaden Conference, pp. 17, 19, 20/21. 57 Ibid. pp. 24/25 and 34. 58 Ibid. pp. 34/35. 59 Ibid. pp. 17-21. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk • Emergency stockpiles and rationing: Spaak recommended ‘harmonized compulsory stockpiling policies and concerted arrangements for rationing’, while Levy suggested a new ‘coordinated energy policy’ would have to include ‘stockpiling, rationing and sharing of availabilities in case of emergency.’60 • Energy conservation: Spaak recommended ‘research to achieve more efficient production and use of energy’; Levy advocated ‘research on energy conservation.’61 • Coordination on negotiations to control oil prices: Spaak recommended ‘harmonization’ to prevent the EC, the US and Japan from engaging in ‘unbridled competition and futile outbidding in the scramble for oil’; while Levy proposed coordination as a means of ensuring that oil negotiations in the future would ‘no longer be lopsided in favour of the producing countries.’62 Levy, though, went further than Spaak endorsing the establishment of an ‘International Energy Council’ to administer the coordinated energy policy. This would hopefully lead to an end to the ‘hectic and improvised confrontations’ between the oil companies and the producer countries, and might even ‘erode' OPEC unity.63 Levy’s proposals were presented as the ‘only way to avoid confrontation.’ 64 The issue of an oil crisis being caused by the Arab-Israeli conflict only emerged in the debate that followed. Opening the discussion, Levy noted the 'energy problem’ was compounded by four problems, including: ‘The use of oil for political purposes, as in the Arab-Israeli conflict, where the vital interests of the Western world were subject to a kind of blackmail.’65 (emphasis in original) This was perhaps the first clear mention at Saltsjöbaden of the possibility of OPEC countries blocking oil supplies in response to US support for Israel. In the ensuing discussion a number of speakers, many of them believed to be 60 Ibid. pp. 20, 33. 61 Ibid. pp. 15, 33. 62 Ibid. pp. 20, 32. 63 Ibid. p. 33. 64 Ibid. p. 34. The same words were used in his article in Foreign Policy (‘An Atlantic-Japanese Energy Policy’ [see note 51] p. 190.) 65 Bilderberg Meetings, Saltsjöbaden Conference, p. 35. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk from the international oil industry,66 spoke on how that conflict could generate an oil crisis. A ‘Canadian participant’, for example, warned that the ‘conflict with Israel’ was the one issue that appeared to unite the Middle Eastern countries, and that it ‘posed serious political questions for the US and others in the bargaining for oil.’ 67 Also according to the minutes, an American participant, ‘. . . foresaw that the Arabs, emboldened by their new power, would increase their pressure on Israel over the next two to three years.’ A ‘British speaker’ warned that many Arab leaders apparently ‘could not afford not to go along with the extreme left-wing lunatics against the West in the matter of oil policy.’68 An American ‘observer’, however, made it clear that any change in US support to Israel was ‘not in the political cards.’69 Other participants also recognised that the Arab-Israeli conflict ‘posed a major threat to oil supplies’, and that even resolving it had the potential to ‘aggravate the oil supply problem.’70 None of the participants, including Levy, were proposing to carry out actions that would lead to a confrontation; nor did they suggest an Arab oil embargo against the West was desirable. Much of the discussion actually focused on measures to reduce dependence on the OPEC countries, including: how to improve the West’s negotiating position through better coordination; the development and exploitation of alternative sources of energy, including nuclear power, Canada’s tar sands and American shale; improving energy conservation measures; and reducing demand. They also discussed how the global financial system would manage the large transfers of funds that the OPEC countries would accrue, as their revenues from oil exports increased. Engdahl never pinpoints where in the document the Bilderbergers allegedly decided to ‘trigger a global oil embargo’. He does note that Levy proposed a scenario which included a ‘400 percent increase in OPEC petroleum revenues.’71 This is reflected in the Bilderberg minutes, with Levy projecting that if ‘present US policies and trends were left to take their course’, oil imports 66 Geven notes that the Europeans had invited 54 participants, of whom at least 15 were from the oil, automotive and petrochemical industries. (Geven, [see note 47] pp. 232-234) 67 Bilderberg Meetings, Saltsjöbaden Conference, p. 38. 68 Ibid. p. 38. 69 Ibid. p. 39. 70 Ibid. p. 40. 71 Engdahl, A Century of War (see note 8) p. 130. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk would increase from 4.7 million barrels per day as of 1972, up to 11 million per day in 1980. Revenues accruing to the Middle East due to increased oil imports by the US, Europe and Japan, could ‘amount to $40 billion annually by 1980 – as against $9 billion in 1972 . . . .’72 Engdahl, however, conflates this forecast of an increase in revenues due to the Western countries and Japan increasing their imports, with the ‘400 per cent rise in OPEC oil prices’ caused by the Arab oil embargo.73 But a projected increase in revenues caused by an increase in oil exports and a 400 percent rise in oil prices are not necessarily the same thing. Oil revenues can increase as a consequence of greater volumes sold or an increase in price per barrel, or a combination of both. That oil prices could also increase was actually discussed at Bilderberg, as others who have perused the minutes have realised. Daniel Estulin, for example, referring to the meeting minutes ‘kindly’ provided to him by Engdahl, told the SOTT Radio Network in early 2014 how the Bilderbergers decided to increase oil prices: ‘This document, which [Engdahl] obtained from his Bilderberger sources, they were talking about, I think it’s on page 65, how they say the price of oil is right now is $3.50 a barrel. We want it to go somewhere between $10.00 and $12.50 barrel. So six months later it went to $11.65. I’d say that’s right in the middle.’74 (emphasis added) But Estulin’s recollection of this crucial point is wrong. The relevant excerpt, quoted below, suggests a more benign conversation about estimates on future oil price rises. This, in turn, had been prompted by a brief presentation from an ‘International’ speaker on the balance of payment impacts of the projected massive increase in OPEC oil revenues. It was his assumption that oil would remain at $4 a barrel75 that was being contested: ‘An American speaker pointed out that one official US estimate of the future delivered price had been as high as $5 a barrel – which was now perhaps on the low side – but that certain cost factors would reduce the net return to the producing countries by around $1. Two other American 72 Bilderberg Meetings, Saltsjöbaden Conference, pp. 23/24; see also Levy, ‘An Atlantic- Japanese Energy Policy’ (see note 51) pp. 160/161. 73 Engdahl, A Century of War (see note 8) p. 136. 74 ‘The Bilderberg Group – Interview with Daniel Estulin’, SOTT Radio Network: Behind the Headlines, 1 March 2015, 75 Bilderberg Meetings, Saltsjöbaden Conference, pp. 61-63. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk participants reported that the author of the estimate just referred to – Mr James Akins – had subsequently said that the $5 figure would prove to be too low, and might indeed range up to $10-12.50 per barrel. An American speaker said that his own analysis had confirmed the broad conclusions indicated in the preceding International intervention. Most of our oil price assumptions were probably too conservative, but $12 looked outside the upper limit.’ 76 (emphases added) It is important to note that estimates to which the participants were referring were all in the public domain. The estimate of $5 per barrel by 1980 was originally made by James Akins in his role in the US State Department in 1970. This prediction, Akins recalled in early 1973, had been dismissed at the time as ‘wildly irresponsible’, ‘provocative’ and ‘alarming.’77 By April 1973, however, Akins was arguing in the pages of Council on Foreign Relations’s journal Foreign Affairs that this estimate ‘may now be on the low side’, with OPEC sources already discussing ‘substantial’ increases in the next few years.78 Pointing out that OPEC production was projected to grow slower than demand, Akins assessed that ‘bidding for supplies could get out of hand, and the projected price of $5.00 per barrel in 1980, or even a price of $7.00, could seem conservative.’79 But it was in his address before the American Petroleum Institute on 10 April 1973, that Akins publicised the much higher estimate: ‘In the past three years, I have frequently said that I believed the price of oil in the United States Gulf Coast would rise to 5.00 dollars per barrel in 1980 . . . . Now it seems highly conservative, and the prices of 7.00 dollars in the Persian Gulf are frequently cited. Some Europeans believe the price could reach 12.00 dollars.’80 (emphasis added) The entire discussion at Bilderberg about possible increases in oil prices was solely in the context of these public estimates. Contrary to Estulin’s fabrication, there was no desire that the oil price to rise by 400 percent, it was actually ‘it has been estimated’ oil prices will rise. The impacts on the consuming countries were also briefly considered, with divergent opinions offered on whether the Western economies would suffer, or 76 Ibid. p. 63. 77 James Akins, ‘International Cooperative Efforts in Energy Supply’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, No. 410, November 1973, p. 79; and Akins, ‘The Oil Crisis: This Time the Wolf is Here', Foreign Affairs, April 1973, p. 464. 78 James Akins, ‘The Oil Crisis: This Time the Wolf is Here’, Foreign Affairs, April 1973, p. 479. 79 Ibid. p. 487. 80 Akins, ‘International Cooperative Efforts’, (see note 77) p. 79. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk would adapt and develop alternate energy sources.81 The minutes, as approved by the Bilderberg Steering Committee, sought to cap off the wide-ranging conversation by suggesting that a consensus for some action had emerged, though it involved many undefined steps: ‘The consensus of the discussion could be said to have been summed up an American speaker who had concluded that the only solution to the energy crisis was “a balanced program . . . at least a dozen different things put together.” There was no single panacea, no rabbit to be pulled out of a magician’s hat, so to speak. Our problem, he said, was “to find how to get the flexibility of the private system working within reasonable government frameworks, but not as a public corporation, to do the jobs that have to be done in the short and intermediate future.” ’82 The bottom line is that Engdahl’s interpretation of the Bilderberg meeting minutes is not supported by the document in question. Engdahl is not the only analyst who has misinterpreted the Bilderberg meeting minutes in an attempt to support such theories. Self-styled purveyor of ‘independent critical analysis’, James Corbett, for example, manages to misrepresent a key paragraph in Spaak’s paper to produce the following claim in a recent piece that appeared on The Corbett Report: ‘As leaked documents from the 1973 Bilderberg meeting show, the oiligarchs [sic] decided to use their control over the flow of oil to save the American hegemon. Acknowledging that OPEC “could completely disorganize and undermine the world monetary system”, the Bilderberg attendees prepared for “an energy crisis or an increase in energy costs”, which, they predicted, could mean an oil price between $10 and $12, a staggering 400% increase from the current price of $3.01 per barrel.’ 83 The source of the increased price in oil is, as we have already seen, a public one made by James Akins. The quoted sections come from the following paragraph in Spaak’s paper arguing for increased cooperation (with the sections selected by Corbett in bold): ‘Two other reasons for cooperation were bound up with the world responsibilities of these countries. First, an energy crisis or an 81 Bilderberg Meetings, Saltsjöbaden Conference, pp. 69-70. 82 Ibid. p. 70. 83 James Corbett, ‘How & Why Big Oil Conquered the World', The Corbett Report, 6 October 2017, Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk increase in energy costs could irremediably jeopardize the economic expansion of developing countries which had no resources of their own. Secondly, the misuse or inadequate control of the financial resources of the oil producing countries could completely disorganize and undermine the world monetary system.’ 84 Other researchers who have been able to analyse the document, but who are not tied to a conspiratorial narrative, have failed to see the alleged plot by Bilderberg. These include Rudd Geven from the University of Maastricht, in his recent Transnational Networks and the Common Market.85 In short, had Kissinger read the meeting minutes looking for guidance, he would not have found anything urging him to cause an oil crisis by initiating a war in the Middle East. Kissinger met with Levy in August 1973, some months ahead of the Yom Kippur War. Yet the official transcript of that meeting between Levy and Kissinger shows that the likelihood of an ‘oil cutback’ was discussed only as an Arab tactic in its dispute with Israel. Moreover, the prospect of such an event was attributed to a Standard Oil executive who was not at Saltsjöbaden: ‘Mr. Levy: [. . .] In my view if there is to be a crisis in international oil affairs, the sooner the better. I would rather have a crisis when our imports are limited. We can count on Iran. I have had dealings with the Shah. Dr. Kissinger: Then the oil consuming countries ought to get together. What do you mean by crisis[?] Mr. Levy: [Otto] Miller [Chairman, Standard Oil of California] fears a cutback because of the Arab-Israeli dispute. Dr. Kissinger: If we say that, it will happen. It is insane to tell the Saudis that. What does [J. Kenneth] Jamieson [Chairman, Standard Oil of New Jersey] say? Mr. Levy: Miller’s approach could have the effect that Faisal feels he should support Miller. Dr. Kissinger: We can convince the Saudis that it is suicide to get in the Arab-Israeli dispute. It is absolutely necessary to make sure any peace agreement is signed by the radical Arab countries, not by the conservative ones. It will not be a favorable settlement, if you look at the 84 Bilderberg Meetings, Saltsjöbaden Conference, p. 17. 85 Geven, Transnational Networks and the Common Market, (see note 47) pp. 233-237. In Lobster magazine in 2001, Robin Ramsay concluded that ‘the evidence falls very far short of the claims that the Bilderbergers created the oil price hike’. Lobster, Summer 2001. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Israeli position. Mr. Levy: One thing I believe strongly is that maybe there should be a settlement with the UAR. Dr. Kissinger: That is fine, we have to keep the Saudis out.’ 86 (emphases added) Despite Levy’s opinion that with Iran’s support, the US could ride out a limited oil crisis that would in turn shock the oil-consuming nations into action, Kissinger was keen to avoid any crisis. Although Kissinger initially misunderstood what Levy meant by a crisis, he quickly grasped the need to keep the Saudis quarantined from the Arab-Israeli dispute to prevent an oil embargo. 3. Kissinger and the ‘Bilderberg script’ Engdahl’s claims that Kissinger was following a Bilderberg ‘script’ to instigate a Middle East war, in order to drive up oil prices, are nonsense. There was no Bilderberg plan to bring about such an event; and Engdahl’s account of Kissinger’s alleged perfidy is not supported by the few sources he actually cites.87 Engdahl nevertheless makes a number of specific claims about the Yom Kippur War, which erupted on 6 October 1973, including that Kissinger had suppressed US intelligence reports confirming the Arab build-up, to ensure the war occurred. Engdahl also accused Kissinger of having a decisive influence over both the Israelis and the Arabs: ‘Kissinger effectively controlled the Israeli policy response through his intimate relation with Israel’s Washington ambassador, Simcha Dinitz. In addition, Kissinger cultivated channels to the Egyptian and Syrian side. His method was simply to misrepresent to each party the critical elements of the other, ensuring the war and its subsequent Arab oil embargo.’88 (emphasis added) 86 ‘190. Memorandum of Conversation, Washington, August 8, 1973’, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XXXVI, p. 506. 87 The claim that Kissinger deliberately caused the 1973 oil shock has been around since the 1970s. Gary Allen, for example, in his book on Kissinger referred to ‘suspicious critics’ who believed the ‘Rockefeller-Kissinger’ team were behind a ‘game plan’, to create the oil shock: ‘the Arabs were encouraged to go to war to recover the territories they lost in 1967; in the meantime, the U.S. provided massive support to Israel, which in turn induced the Arabs to cut off oil supplies to the West.’ This lead to weekly increases in oil prices, that enabled the oil companies ‘with interest in both camps . . . made a bundle’. Allen, Kissinger (see note 18) p. 72. 88 Engdahl, A Century of War (see note 8) p. 136. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Engdahl cites just one source for these particular claims – Matti Golan’s The Secret Conversations of Henry Kissinger (1976) – but never actually quotes from the book, let alone referring to reader to the relevant pages or chapters that would presumably support his claims.89 Based on highly classified Israeli documents, publication of the original manuscript had originally been prohibited by the Israeli Government in 1975, after Golan was forced to turn over the book to the Israeli chief censor. He then compiled a new version within a month, which was approved for publication. Golan was sure his account would be ‘embarrassing to Henry Kissinger’, and other diplomats, as it exposed the ‘deliberate obfuscation’ behind the diplomacy since the 1973 war.90 Given that, in the words of one reviewer, Golan’s book clearly gave, ‘additional ammunition’ to his many detractors,91 Kissinger was incensed that it had been published, believing that Israel was out to embarrass him. Referring to the initial controversy over the censoring of the book in May 1975, for example, Kissinger had told President Ford that it was ‘obvious that Israel is after me’. Kissinger believed the Israelis had long been aware of Golan’s manuscript ‘but they never told us’ and he was suspicious, wondering ‘How did the documents leak?’, noting that ‘not even the Soviets have leaked the substance of our discussions’.92 In a subsequent meeting with the Israeli Ambassador, Kissinger demanded to know why the Israelis were ‘always leaking’. He also told the Ambassador he was ‘not all that eager’ to see an English translation of Golan’s book: ‘Tell [Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin to forget it. The more people who see it, the more likely it is to get out.’93 But on closer examination, it is a mystery as to why Engdahl would use Golan’s book. Written by an Israeli journalist who declared his ‘loyalty to the security of the state’ of Israel and even justified the censorship of the first version of his book because of the ‘special situation of Israel’, Secret 89 Ibid. p. 276, note 3. 90 Matti Golan, The Secret Conversations of Henry Kissinger: Step-by-Step Diplomacy in the Middle East, (New York: Bantam Books, 1976) pp. 3-31. 91 Leonard Salter, ‘Review of The Secret Conversations of Henry Kissinger’, American Bar Association Journal, (Vol. 62, No. 9) September 1976, p. 1104. 92 ‘146. Memorandum of Conversation, Washington May 14, 1975’, in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XVI, Soviet Union, August 1974- December 1976, (United States, Department of State, 2012) p. 558. 93 ‘202. Memorandum of Conversation, Virgin Islands, July 1, 1975’, in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XXVI, Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1974-1976, (United States Department of State, 2012), pp. 752, 756. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Conversations denounces Kissinger for ‘double-dealing’, ‘deception’ and ‘perfidy’.94 Golan is highly critical of Kissinger’s conduct during and particularly after the Yom Kippur war, accusing him of deliberately delaying the airlift of US military supplies to Israel, and in manipulating Israel into accepting a peace agreement that threatened its security. However, contrary to Engdahl’s account, Golan does not blame Kissinger for the outbreak of the conflict or the subsequent oil shock. In fact, on both these points, Golan places responsibility for these events elsewhere. The outbreak of the war, Golan’s account suggests, was partly due to the confused messages that Israel sent to Kissinger prior to the start of hostilities, and with Israel’s diplomatic chain-of-command in the US. Golan reports that, on the Israeli side, there was both ‘deep complacency’ and ‘confusion’, over Arab intentions. On 5 October 1973, Israeli army intelligence told the Israeli Cabinet there was ‘no reason to expect a war’, that the Egyptian and Syrian forces they could see were only on ‘maneuvres’, an evaluation apparently shared by US intelligence.95 Later that day Mordechai Shalev, the Israeli Chargé d’Affaires in Washington, was instructed to relay a telegram to Kissinger expressing Israeli Government concerns that Arab ‘military preparations’ could be a sign of their intent to attack Israel. But this message was undermined by a second message in the telegram: the Israeli military intelligence assessment that the Syrians were possibly planning to repel an Israeli pre-emptive attack, while the Egyptians were just conducting an exercise.96 At the time Kissinger was in New York, so Shalev relayed the telegram, as instructed, through Kissinger’s deputy, General Brent Scowcroft. It is at this point Golan clearly exonerates Kissinger of the charge of suppressing intelligence. He claims it was Scowcroft, an ‘army man’, who ‘noticed the discrepancy between the main body of the telegram and the intelligence evaluation’, and instead placed higher value on the latter report ruling out an Arab attack. Scowcroft had ‘no hesitation’ in favouring the military intelligence report, and ‘did not urge the busy secretary of state to deal with the message immediately’. In fact, Kissinger did not see the message until the next morning, ‘when it was too late’.97 Golan speculates, that had Kissinger received a less ambiguous message 94 Golan (see note 90) pp. 17, 22, 257. 95 Ibid. pp. 35-37. 96 Ibid. pp. 37/38. 97 Ibid. pp. 38/39. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk from Israel earlier, the war might have been averted. Kissinger would have been able to inform the Soviets and their Arab allies of Israel’s intent to defend itself in the event of an attack. He also notes that at this crucial time Kissinger and his Israeli counterpart, Foreign Minister Abba Eban were about a mile apart in New York, but failed to consult with each other.98 Whether or not Kissinger had forewarning of the Arab attack on Israel is still disputed. In his memoirs, Kissinger claims he was unaware of the impending Arab attack until the morning of 6 October 1973, when he received an ‘urgent message’ from the US Ambassador to Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir had informed the US Ambassador that Egyptian and Syrian troop movements ‘which both Israel and the United States had assumed to be simply military exercises, had suddenly taken a threatening turn’, with an attack expected that afternoon.99 Reflecting on it further, Kissinger described the Yom Kippur War as a ‘classic of strategic and tactical surprise’, though one where the aggressor ‘boldly all but told what he was going to do and we did not believe him.’ The fault, in Kissinger’s view, was with the assumption of Israeli and American intelligence analysts that ‘Egypt and Syria lacked the military capability to regain their territory by force of arms; hence there would be no war.’100 This assessment, which essentially absolves Kissinger, has been shared by some academics and sympathetic biographers. Alistair Horne’s account in his book Kissinger’s Year: 1973, for example (which was developed in close consultation with its subject) also largely excuses Kissinger, noting that the war erupted ‘contrary to every expectation and intelligence analysis.’101 On the Israeli side, more recent work has taken to blaming Israel’s Director of Military Intelligence, Eli Zeira, claiming that he lied to the Israeli Defense Minister and the IDF’s Chief of Staff about the threat. Zeira apparently suppressed sensitive intelligence confirming the impending Syrian and Egyptian assault, motivated by his own belief that ‘he knew better than his superiors what the Arabs planned to do’.102 98 Golan (see note 90) p. 42. 99 Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, (New York: Little, Brown & Co.) 1982, p. 450. 100 Ibid. p. 459. 101 Alistair Horne, Kissinger’s Year: 1973 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009), p. 228. 102 Uri Bar-Joseph and Jack S. Levy, ‘Conscious Action and Intelligence Failure’, Political Science Quarterly, (Vol. 124), Fall 2009, pp. 485/6. See also Gili Cohen, ‘Israel Had Enough Info to Prepare for 1973 Yom Kippur War, Declassified Doc Shows’, Haaretz, 5 October 2014. See Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Other observers and former officials, however, have accused US intelligence agencies and the Nixon Administration of deliberately withholding from Israel critical intelligence on the impending Araba attack. Andrew Gavin Marshall, for example, quotes the claims made in Loftus and Aarons’ The Secret War Against the Jews,103 that on 4 October the National Security Agency (NSA), which is responsible for signals intelligence collection, ‘knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that an attack on Israel would take place on the afternoon of October 6.’ But the Nixon White House ordered that intelligence be suppressed, not warning Israel until just hours before the Arab assault began.104 Bruce Brill, a former NSA traffic analyst, writing in The Jewish Press, claimed the NSA were aware of Arab intentions 41 hours before the attack began; but this was not provided to Israel, an act which revealed the US intelligence community’s ‘unstated anti-Israel policy’.105 Countering these charges, the NSA, in its recently declassified but still heavily redacted account of the Yom Kippur War, blames the CIA. The NSA confirms that by September 1973 ‘more and more . . . analysts came to believe that hostilities were in the offing’. Prohibited from providing evaluative reports, the NSA attempted to brief its CIA colleagues about the intercepts. However, the CIA’s Middle East experts, for reasons that remain unclear, rejected the NSA’s interpretation. The result of this was a US Intelligence Board Watch Report, issued on 4 October that ‘indicated that war was not expected, a conclusion that was to haunt the intelligence community like no other since Pearl Harbor’.106 As for the claim Kissinger deliberately caused the oil embargo, Golan’s book also appears to exonerate Kissinger, but not in a positive way. At the time of its release in the US, Golan’s book attracted attention because it accused Kissinger of having acted in ‘bad faith’ by ‘slowing down arms replacements to 103 John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews, (Gordonsville, Virginia: St Martins Press, 1994) 104 Quoted in Marshall, ‘Controlling the Global Economy’ (see note 31). Though no credit is given, Kit Daniels podcast for Infowars on Bilderberg and the 1973 oil shock (see note 16) draws extensively on Marshall’s work for its main points. 105 Bruce Brill, ‘Revelations of a Former NSA Insider’, The Jewish Press, 25 December 1992, 106 ‘The Yom Kippur War of 1973, Part One’, Cryptologic Almanac 50th Anniversary Series, Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Israel during the 1973 war’.107 Noting Kissinger’s response to the first Israeli request for 200 tons of military equipment, Golan claimed that Kissinger had ‘no intention of fulfilling those needs’. Left in control because of Nixon’s preoccupation with Watergate, Golan claims that Kissinger fed the Israeli Ambassador with ‘expressions of solidarity and empty promises’, but made no move on any shipments. Golan suggests the delay was prompted in part by Kissinger’s desire to preserve the delicate US relationships with the Soviet Union and the Arab states; but also by his fears of an Arab oil embargo: ‘Kissinger calculated that the military aid to Israel, while not making the crucial difference in the field, could damage the still hoped-for cooperation with Moscow and future relations with the Arab countries. And this was a consideration not merely for the future. The Arab oil- producing countries had already begun threatening an oil embargo against the United States if it provided military aid to Israel.108 (emphases added) Golan alleges that Kissinger mislead Israeli Ambassador Dinitz with claims that the shipments were being ‘sabotaged by the Pentagon’, with Deputy Secretary of Defense, William Clements (a Texan oil magnate), later singled out as the scapegoat.109 And yet, all the while it was Kissinger who was ‘blocking aid to Israel’ in accordance with his ‘strict political calculation’ and contrary to Nixon’s clear direction to resupply Israel.110 In the end, according to Golan’s account, it was Nixon who finally took direct control of the situation, mainly to counter the flood of Soviet military aid to Egypt and Syria – the Soviets had also assumed the US would not risk ‘an oil embargo’ by responding in kind111 – and to respond to a direct appeal from Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Despite receiving two warnings from Saudi King Faisal the Arabs would ‘embargo oil to the United States’ if it resupplied Israel, on 13 October 1973 Nixon ordered ‘an immediate and massive military resupply effort, without any restrictions, using American military transport planes . . . .’ 112 107 Associated Press, ‘Israeli Book Charges Kissinger with Bad Faith’, Hobbs Daily News-Sun, 23 March 1976, p. 12. 108 Golan, Secret Conversations (see note 90) p. 46. 109 Ibid. pp. 47, 53. 110 Ibid. p. 50. 111 Ibid. p. 58. 112 Ibid. p. 61. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk If Engdahl really wants to blame Kissinger for the oil embargo there are far better sources to exploit than Golan’s acerbic account. Kissinger’s own memoirs paint him as a ‘sole dissenter’ who favoured arms shipments to Israel as early as the second day of the war. This put him at odds with the Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger and other US officials, who believed such arms would be too late to help Israel and would come at the cost of America’s image as an ‘honest broker’.113 In Kissinger’s account, he was ordering Schlesinger to have the first shipment of ammunition and other high technology spares to be ready to go, but this was stymied by the ‘middle levels of Defense’ who decided to ‘drag their feet’ and delay it.114 Sympathetic biographers, such as Horne, portray Kissinger as ‘angered with the slow response of the Pentagon to Israel’s pleas’.115 Kissinger continues to make this case in his annotated compendium of carefully selected transcripts, Crisis: An Anatomy of Two Major Foreign Policy Crises (2003). In it Kissinger includes an exchange between himself and his deputy, Brent Scowcroft on October 10, 1973, where he had reiterated that the ‘resupply of Israel was essential’: ‘K: Brent, look, the Defense people are just going to have to stop dragging their feet. First, the Israelis are going wild. They think we are stabbing them in the back.’ 116 Recounting the events of 9-10 October in his memoirs, Kissinger notes how, in response to urgent Israeli requests for more aid, he had concluded that Israel needed ‘tangible evidence of American assistance’ to restore its confidence, and to make a cease-fire possible. It was this argument that Kissinger took to Nixon on the afternoon of 9 October; to which Nixon responded that ‘The Israelis must not be allowed to lose’ and gave a guarantee that the US would replace ‘all [Israeli] aircraft and tank losses’.(emphasis in the original) In an obvious reference to Golan’s book, Kissinger claimed this commitment, which was conveyed to the Israelis, refuted the ‘canard that the Nixon Administration deliberately withheld supplies from Israel . . . .’117 Kissinger also claims his motives were to help Israel; he 'consistently pressed for more urgent 113 Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, (see note 99) p. 478. 114 Ibid. pp. 480, 486. 115 Horne, Kissinger’s Year: 1973, (see note 101) p. 250. 116 Henry Kissinger, Crisis: The Anatomy of Two Major Foreign Policy Crises, (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2003) p. 176. 117 Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (see note 99) pp. 492-496. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk deliveries’ to Israel, primarily to counter the psychological impact of the Soviet airlift to Egypt.118 Walter Isaacson in his biography of Kissinger, however, agrees with Golan that Kissinger had deliberately delayed the arms shipments. The motive, though, was apparently admirable, ‘. . . he had been properly balancing a concern for Israel’s safety with the demands of America’s own national interest’. Kissinger had delayed the shipments, when resupply became critical ‘because he did not want to associate the US too closely with a major resupply effort that could permit Israel to humiliate the Arabs’. Among those blaming Kissinger in Isaacson’s book was arch-neoconservative and current Bilderberg Steering Committee member, Richard Perle, who claimed that Kissinger would not let the Pentagon use its own aircraft for the resupply.119 Another factor behind the decision to resupply was the implicit threat from Israel that without the shipments it ‘might activate its nuclear option’, as William Quandt, one of Kissinger’s staffers later explained. Kissinger had also allegedly confirmed this, telling the US Ambassador to Egypt that Israel had implied that if the military supplies did not arrive, ‘they might go nuclear’.120 However, in contrast to his valiant efforts to take credit for the air-lift, Kissinger pleads some ignorance about the Arab oil embargo, writing that when the war started there was only ‘vague talk’ in the Nixon Administration about an embargo.121 A closer look at the record, however, suggests that Kissinger’s claims cannot be taken seriously. There had in fact been sporadic US intelligence warnings since 1969 that an Arab-Israeli war could lead to an ‘attempt to deny oil to the US’.122 The advice though was heavily caveated and at times conflicting. On 20 April 1973, for example, the CIA Director advised Nixon that the Saudis were ‘raising the prospect of a cutoff in oil supplies’ to try to pressure the US into making a bigger effort to achieve a peace settlement in the Middle East.123 Yet a National Intelligence Analytical Memorandum, issued on 11 May, considered the impact of an ‘Arab-wide 118 Ibid. p. 515. 119 Isaacson, Kissinger (see note 43), p. 523. 120 Ibid. p. 518. 121 Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (see note 99) p. 871. 122 ‘8. Memorandum Prepared in the Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, August 28, 1969’, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1974, Volume XXXVI, p. 30. 123 ‘178. Memorandum From Director of Central Intelligence Schlesinger to President Nixon, Washington, April 20, 1973’, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1974, Volume XXXVI, pp. 454/5. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk embargo of all oil shipments’ to be ‘serious’, though it was an ‘unlikely’ event.124 There was less ambiguity in a 17 May 1973 National Intelligence Estimate that warned that in event of a war between Egypt and Israel, the Arab oil producers ‘probably would move to embargo oil shipments to the US and to hurt US oil companies in other ways’.125 Once the war got underway, however, there was a growing chorus of warnings from US intelligence, from the Arabs and others of an impending oil shock. On the first day of the war, for example, a Special Nation Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) had warned that ‘Some interruption of oil supply to the West is likely’ due to ‘Arab government action’. Indeed, if the fighting was prolonged, as the SNIE accurately forecast: ‘Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are likely to limit oil production and may join in a general oil embargo.’126 Then, on 10 October, Scowcroft received a CIA warning the Arab members of OPEC were planning a ‘war oil policy’. The CIA noted that Saudi King Faisal was ‘very angry’ with US support for Israel and was planning cuts in oil production to force Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.127 Then, on October 12, Kissinger saw a memorandum128 sent to Nixon by the chairmen of the four US oil majors – Exxon, Mobil, Texaco and Standard Oil Company of California – again warning of a Saudi-led plan to ‘impose some cutback in crude oil production’ to punish the US for its pro-Israeli stance. They feared this action could have a ‘snowballing effect’ that could lead to a ‘major petroleum supply crisis’.129 124 ‘185. National Intelligence Analytical Memorandum, International Petroleum Prospects, Washington, May 11, 1973’, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1974, Volume XXXVI, p. 483. 125 ‘59. National Intelligence Estimate, Possible Egyptian-Israeli Hostilities: Determinants and Implications, Washington, May 17, 1973’, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XXV, p. 181. 126 ‘98. Special National Intelligence Estimate, Arab-Israeli Hostilities and Their Implications, Washington, October 6, 1973’, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XXV, p. 286. 127 ‘210. Memorandum from William B. Quandt of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs (Scowcroft), Washington, October 10, 1973’, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1974, Volume XXXVI, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1973, United States Department of State, 2011, p. 575/6. 128 Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger (see note 43) p. 525. 129 ‘212. Memorandum by the Chairmen of Exxon Corporation (Jamieson), Mobil Oil Corporation (Warner), Texaco, Inc. (Granville), and Standard Oil Company of California (Miller), New York, October 12, 1973’, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1974, Volume XXXVI, pp. 580. Andrew Gavin Marshall, drawing on John Loftus and Mark Aarons’ The Continues at the foot of the next page. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Kissinger, however, repeatedly downplayed the seriousness of these warnings. On 14 October, at a meeting of the Washington Special Actions Group (WASG), a special National Security Council team set up to deal with serious crises, Kissinger claimed that none of the Arab diplomats he had spoken to had made any mention of an ‘oil cutoff’; instead all he had received were ‘hysterical calls from oil companies’.130 At the WASG meeting on 15 October, where oil contingency plans were discussed, Kissinger continued to be sceptical, again putting his faith in the lack of official notification: Secretary Kissinger: ‘We have had no indication up to now that they intend a cut-off. They have been extremely circumspect. They have never threatened an oil cut-off in any official channel. Officially, they have taken exactly the opposite tack.’131 Kissinger further disputed the possibility of an embargo by citing his contacts with Saudi Minister for Petroleum Sheikh Ahmad Zaki Yamani – this was despite Yamani’s role in conveying through other channels King Faisal’s intent to impose an embargo.132 For Kissinger, however, there could be no doubt: Secretary Kissinger: I’ve been dealing with the oil guy. We have no indication that there will be a cut-off.133 (emphasis added) The peak of Kissinger’s confidence was at the WASG meeting on 17 October, where he confidently dismissed outright the possibility of an oil embargo, whilst denigrating the Saudi Foreign Minister: ‘Secretary Kissinger: We don’t expect an oil cut-off now in the light of Note 129 continued Secret War Against the Jews (1994), claims the oil executives’ memorandum to Nixon argued that the Arabs ‘should receive some price increases’. But this misquotes and misrepresents the intent of the memorandum which, on the one hand described the increase in oil prices caused by ‘market forces’ to be ‘justified’, but they also rejected as ‘unacceptable’ an OPEC demand to increase oil prices by 100 per cent. 130 ‘214. Memorandum of Conversation of Washington Special Actions Group Meeting, Washington, October 14, 1973’, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XXXVI, p. 585. 131 ‘215. Minutes of Washington Special Actions Group Meeting, Washington, October 15, 1973’, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XXXVI, p. 591. 132 The 10 October update from the CIA specifically cited Yamani as telling an unidentified source that King Faisal was ‘very angry’ with the US position on the ceasefire, and that he had a ‘plan to cut oil production back’ and then to ‘reduce it by 5% each month until Israel withdraws from the occupied territories’. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1974, Volume XXXVI, p. 576. 133 ‘215. Minutes of Washington Special Actions Group Meeting, Washington, October 15, 1973’, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XXXVI, p. 592. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the discussions of the Arab Foreign Ministers this morning. What is the temperature of the oil companies? Did you see the Saudi Foreign Minister come out like a good little boy and say that they had fruitful talks with us? [. . .]we don’t expect a cut-off in the next few days.’134 (emphases added) This proved to be catastrophically wrong; for on that same day the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) decided to cut oil production by 5 percent a month until Israel withdrew from the occupied territories and they threatened a total oil embargo against those countries that supplied arms to Israel. Kissinger’s behaviour on this matter is particularly perplexing, given that he apparently spent the preceding months using the threat of an Arab oil embargo to pressure Israel to restrain itself. Appearing before the Agranat Commission in February 1974 to examine the causes of the Yom Kippur War, Israel’s Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan testified that between May and October 1973: ‘ . . . the energy [oil] issue came up very intensely with regard to America, and Kissinger . . . warned us again and again about it. And I got the impression – an impression that I still have – that he was telling us the truth.’135 (emphasis added) Kissinger had used this tactic in his meeting in Washington DC with Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abba Eban on 12 May 1973 (which was, n.b., the second day of the Bilderberg conference in Saltsjöbaden). Eban had argued that any Arab attack on Israel was sure to fail, leading to the ‘humiliation’ of those Arab leaders who took part. Kissinger, however, warned rather presciently that the Soviets might intervene on the Arab side, and ‘if an oil boycott is organized’, the Arabs would have leverage over the West. Eban remained sceptical, though, arguing that ‘a boycott wouldn’t work, because Iran would not go along’.136 In retrospect it was a classic moment of Kissinger duplicity, where he cynically invoked the strategic threat of an Arab oil embargo to pressure Israel, even though he never took the threat seriously himself in his own dealings with the Arabs. 134 ‘219. Minutes of Washington Special Actions Group Meeting, Washington, October 17, 1973’, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XXXVI, p. 602. 135 Dayan, quoted in Amon Lord, ‘Intelligence Failure or Paralysis?’, Jewish Political Studies Review, May 2013, p. 61. 136 ‘55. Memorandum of Conversation, Washington DC, May 12, 1973’, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XXV, p. 167. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk As for the catalyst for the shock, the arms shipments to Israel, the evidence is also inconclusive. Golan and Isaacson, for different reasons, claim Kissinger actually delayed the arms shipments, creating an impasse that was ultimately broken by Nixon. Kissinger meanwhile, obviously sensitive to the charge of having sold out Israel, claims the opposite: that he was the lone dissenter favouring the shipments, who finally prevailed, but had misread the possibility of an oil shock. The most likely explanation is that Kissinger was vainly trying to control the situation: delaying the arms shipments to try to create the semblance of US impartiality in the region and to keep détente in train; but at same time thinking he had the Arabs measure, ignoring their repeated threats and warnings, even though the hour was late. Yet ultimately, Kissinger was not half as clever as he thought he was: the Arabs showed they were not bluffing, resulting in a new crisis, one that the Bilderbergers had already shown no stomach for at Saltsjöbaden. 4. The Shah and the Sheikh The final piece in the Arab oil embargo puzzle put together by Engdahl concerns Kissinger’s alleged involvement in the second oil price rise that took effect on 1 January 1974. According to Engdahl, at a meeting of OPEC leaders in Tehran in December 1973, agreement was reached to raise oil prices by a further 100 percent. Engdahl claims this decision was made ‘on the surprising demand of the Shah of Iran, who had been secretly put up to it by Henry Kissinger’. Moreover, Kissinger conducted his ‘secret machinations’ with the Shah without informing the State Department.137 Engdahl cites just one source for these revelations, the aforementioned James Akins, the State Department’s Director of Fuels and Energy, who was subsequently posted as US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1973 to 1975.138 Akins’ allegations, tying Kissinger to the Shah’s support for the oil price increase, have long been on the public record. Crucially, the substance of Akins’ claim is that Kissinger failed to convince the Shah not to raise prices, rather than directly encouraging him to do so. An Associated Press report from 1980, for example, noted that Akins told CBS-TV’s ‘60 Minutes’ programme that Kissinger had ‘done nothing to talk the Shah of Iran out of making steep increases in oil prices in 1974’. (emphasis added) He claimed to have been informed of the Shah’s intentions by Saudi Arabia’s Minister for Oil, Sheikh 137 Engdahl, A Century of War (see note 8) p. 138. 138 Ibid. p. 276, notes for chapter 9, note 6. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Yamani.139 Akins had sent a telegram back to Washington DC, quoting Yamani as his source, about how the Shah’s push for a further increase in oil prices, by raising the tax on each barrel, had caused consternation at the meeting. But more significantly was the Shah’s claim: ‘This new tax had been discussed with the United States, Great Britain and other major consumers, the Shah said, and they understood the Iranian rationale and approved it.’140 (emphasis added) A perplexed Akins had approached the British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia for his views on the matter, conveying his own bewilderment: he had ‘no idea’ how the Shah had got the idea the West would ‘approve such enormous price increases’. The British Ambassador had also denied that Britain had supported the Shah’s current proposal: ‘He replied that the British Ambassador [in Teheran] had discussed with the Shah OPEC desires for price increases but the British had always insisted that any increases in taxes should be gradual and over a period of many years.’141 But was the second oil price rise – raising it a further 128 percent on the first oil shock, amounting to a 387 percent increase in the oil price in just two months142 – all part of the alleged Bilderberg plot? It seems unlikely for two reasons. First, as we have seen, there is no evidence from the Bilderberg meeting minutes there was such a plot. The second reason is that Akins’ account received critical public support from former US Under Secretary of State (1961-1966) and Bilderberg Steering Committee member, George W. Ball who was at Saltsjöbaden. Interviewed for the ‘60 Minutes’ programme, Ball had explained that he had reviewed official documents on US-Iran relations and ‘saw no evidence Kissinger tried to persuade the Shah not to raise prices’. (emphasis added) Ball’s assessment was that, with Congress unlikely to approve giving arms to the Shah, there must have been a tacit agreement to allow Iran to raise oil prices to pay for new armaments. Kissinger refused to be interviewed for the program and instead issued a statement accusing Akins of ‘lying’ and pursuing a ‘personal vendetta’; he also dismissed Ball as a ‘partisan 139 ‘Kissinger knew shah wanted oil-price hike, ex-ambassador says’, Lakeland Ledger, 5 May 1980. 140 ‘Possibility of decrease in oil prices’, Jidda to Washington, 27 December 1973, Jidda 05715, SECRET (declassified State Department telegram). 141 ‘Possibility of decrease in oil prices’, Jidda to Washington, 29 December 1973, Jidda 05735, SECRET. 142 Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (see note 99) p. 885. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk political opponent . . . long engaged in a personal campaign to destroy me’.143 Kissinger continued his attack on Akins and Ball in the second volume of his memoirs, Years of Upheaval. Kissinger rejected, as a particularly ‘absurd example’ of ‘demagogic scapegoating’, the claim that ‘we were repeatedly warned of the danger of higher prices and turned it aside because Washington welcomed high oil revenues to finance Iranian rearmament.’144 He insisted: ‘[N]either we nor our industrial allies were informed of the plan for a colossal price increase until it was nearly upon us – to late to effect it – and that we then resisted strenuously. The United States never saw the price rise as anything other than a disaster, and no one welcomed them as a means to finance Iranian military purchases or for any other purpose.’145 To believe otherwise, Kissinger thundered, would be to demonstrate ‘demagogic ignorance’.146 In an endnote Kissinger added that this ‘sophomoric thesis’ had been the subject of a ‘60 Minutes’ episode.147 Kissinger also accused Akins of encouraging the Arabs to use oil to pressure the US to limit its support to Israel: ‘[A]t least twice in 1973 (once during the October war), James E. Akins . . . advised the oil companies to urge Saudi Arabia to link oil policy to a “satisfactory” change of American policy in the Arab-Israeli dispute.’148 A similar accusation had been aired some years earlier in the journal Foreign Policy. At the Eighth Petroleum Congress of the League of Arab States in May- June 1972 Akins had reportedly said that, due to a lack of alternatives to Arab suppliers, oil prices could be ‘expected to go up sharply’, in fact it was an ‘unavoidable trend’.149 Given his role with the US Government, Akins’ forecast was seen in a different light by those assembled: 143 Quoted in ‘Kissinger knew shah wanted oil-price hike, ex-ambassador says’, Lakeland Ledger, 5 May 1980. 144 Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (see note 99) pp. 887-888. 145 Ibid. p. 888. 146 Ibid. p. 888. 147 Ibid. p. 1252, note 8. 148 Ibid. p. 1252, note 6. 149 Quoted in V. H. Oppenheim, ‘Why Oil Prices Go Up (1): The Past: We Pushed Them’, Foreign Policy No. 25 (Winter 1976-77), p. 31. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘One of the few other Western diplomatic “observers” present at the meeting says that Akins’ speech amounted to “advocating that Arabs raise the price of oil to $5 per barrel.” . . . Akins prediction was taken by many as giving U.S. Government blessings in advance to higher oil prices . . . .’150 The purpose of Kissinger’s semantic game is to illustrate how the wrong signals can inadvertently be given, as well as to suggest that Akins himself was perhaps more complicit in the oil price rise than he would have been prepared to admit. It would seem that in much the same way that the discussion about Akins forecasts at Saltsjöbaden has been misinterpreted as a Bilderberg decision to raise oil prices, a number of Arab leaders conveniently saw his predictions as a subtle green light from the US Government to increase oil prices. Of course, despite being inaccurately listed by Engdahl as a participant,151 Akins never made it to Saltsjöbaden or any other Bilderberg meeting.152 At the heart of this dispute between Akins and Kissinger, was the Saudi Oil Minister, Sheikh Yamani, who had first advised Akins of the Shah’s claims to have US support for his actions. Years later, in January 2001, in a lecture at Chatham House on ‘Oil: Past Present and Future’, Yamani took the opportunity to stir the pot again by revisiting the events of 1973 and explicitly endorsing ‘professor’ Engdahl’s version of events in A Century of War: ‘That book is very interesting; it’s “A Century of War”. [Engdahl] mentioned the various activities of the Americans. I mention a meeting in Sweden in an island, where they decided in May 1973, this well before the Arab oil embargo, that the price must be increased 400 times. As a matter of fact, I met with this gentleman and he has the minutes of some of these meetings and this is exactly what happened. We raised the price from $3 to $5 something. That is only 70 percent. The Shah of Iran was against increasing the price of oil in the early 1970s. All of a sudden he changed his position a 180 degrees and he was working to raise the price of oil, which was done in Teheran, January 1974 to 150 Ibid. p. 32. 151 Engdahl, Century of War (see note 8) p. 287. 152 Akins is identified as a ‘proposed’ participant in the memo from Bilderberg official Robert D. Murphy, ‘Names of Americans Proposed For Participation In The Saltsjobaden Conference, May 10-13, 1973’, 8 January 1973 (see Engdahl, A Century of War, p. 131) and in the memo from US Bilderberg Secretary-General Joseph E. Johnson, ‘Bilderberg Steering Committee’, 8 January 1973 (in David Guyatt, The Bilderberg File, downloadable at Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk $11.65, exactly 400 times . . . So this is the American interference in the early days, but it is really very quiet, very confidential, very unknown to the outside world.’153 Interviewed by The Observer around the same time, Yamani was more explicit in blaming Kissinger and Bilderberg for the oil shock, though he again drew on Engdahl to make the Bilderberg link: ‘[Yamani] makes an extraordinary claim: “I am 100 per cent sure that the Americans were behind the increase in the price of oil. The oil companies were in in [sic] real trouble at that time, they had borrowed a lot of money and they needed a high oil price to save them.’ He says he was convinced of this by the attitude of the Shah of Iran, who in one crucial day in 1974 moved from the Saudi view, that a hike would be dangerous to OPEC because it would alienate the US, to advocating higher prices. King Faisal sent me to the Shah of Iran, who said: "Why are you against the increase in the price of oil? That is what they want? Ask Henry Kissinger – he is the one who wants a higher price”.’ Yamani contends that proof of his long-held belief has recently emerged in the minutes of a secret meeting on a Swedish island, where UK and US officials determined to orchestrate a 400 per cent increase in the oil price.’154 (emphases added) But Yamani’s entirely cynical endorsement of Engdahl’s book and Bilderberg claims merely closes the loop that began with him in the first place. It was Yamani who had first informed Akins that the Shah had allegedly received a green light for an oil price increase from the US through Kissinger, and who nearly twenty years later cynically cited Engdahl’s book to bolster his claims. While Engdahl, who had used Akins claims, which were based on Yamani’s advice, looked to Sheikh Yamani to give support to his book’s claims. And yet this approach of mutual backscratching by Yamani and Engdahl not only overlooks Yamani’s leading role in the 1973 oil embargo, it fails to pinpoint who actually advised the Shah. There has been no independent confirmation that Kissinger gave the Shah the green light to increase oil prices. It is noteworthy that Ball had focused on 153 Ahmed Zaki Yamani, ‘Oil: Past, Present and Future’, Address at Chatham House, UK, 11 January 2001. Transcript from Chatham House archives. 154 Quoted in Oliver Morgan & Faisal Islam, ‘Saudi dove in the oil slick’, The Observer, 14 January 2001, Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk documents relating to Nixon and Kissinger’s visit to Iran in May 1972 – which was quite some time before the Bilderberg meeting at Saltsjöbaden – where they had apparently reaffirmed that Iran was the ‘protector of Western interests in the Persian Gulf’. Consequently, according to Akins, Nixon and Kissinger had agreed to the Shah’s request for unlimited access to US arms, and must therefore had tacitly agreed to an Iranian led oil price increase to finance the arms purchases.155 Akins had also charged that in December 1973 the Saudis had tried to get Kissinger to put pressure on Iran to forestall an increase, but he had refused to do so.156 More recent research suggests that the oil price signals had already been given by Nixon well before the Bilderberg meeting. In 1970 Nixon had asked Iran’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ardeshir Zahedi to tell the Shah he could ‘push [us] as much as you want on [oil prices]’.157 It is also seems plausible that this private undertaking may have been discussed further in the one-on- one meeting between Nixon and the Shah during the latter’s visit to Teheran in May 1972.158 There is also reason to suspect that US complacency about Iranian intentions before the next price rise stemmed from both this private undertaking and their misunderstanding of the scale of the Shah’s intended price rise. The US Ambassador to Teheran had apparently advised that Iran sought an increase to $7 not of $7. Kissinger later admitted that he thought the Shah might increase oil by a dollar or two, not a further doubling.159 In any case, the seeds of the Shah’s oil shock had been set in train by Nixon well before the Bilderberg meeting in Saltsjöbaden took place. Kissinger’s inaction in December 1973 is explicable in terms of both his knowledge of Nixon’s earlier promise to the Shah and his misplaced confidence 155 Quoted in ‘Kissinger knew shah wanted oil-price hike, ex-ambassador says’, Lakeland Ledger, 5 May 1980. 156 Isaacson, Kissinger, (see note 43) p. 563. 157 See Andrew Scott Cooper, Fateful Consequences: US-Iran Relations During the Nixon and Ford Administration, 1969-1977, PhD Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2012, pp. 63-64; and Andrew Scott Cooper, The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011) p. 42. 158 There were three meetings between the Nixon and the Shah; Kissinger was present during the first two meetings, but was excluded from the third. (Cooper, Fateful Consequences [see note 157], pp. 70-71). 159 Ibid. pp. 113-115; Cooper, The Oil Kings (see note 157), pp. 144-145; and Isaacson, Kissinger, (see note 43) pp. 562-563. According to Cooper, the US and British ambassadors had misunderstood the Shah, thinking he meant to increase prices from $5 to $7 per barrel, not that he intended the government’s tax would be $7 per a barrel in addition to the existing price. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk that Iran’s increase would be small. In view of the economic damage caused by the oil shocks, this was not a sterling moment for US diplomacy, but there is no evidence Bilderberg was behind it. Measuring our disappointment In a recent interview with Spanish online newspaper El Confidencial, celebrity academic Professor Niall Ferguson casually rejected charges that Bilderberg was powerful.160 Ferguson announced ‘disappointing news’ for readers who believed Bilderberg was a ‘very powerful organization that governs the world’. In fact, he claimed, Bilderberg members ‘don’t control the world at all’ and they spend much of their time ‘lamenting how little influence they have over world events’. While people familiar with the reputations of many Bilderberg participants would dispute Ferguson's self-serving characterization, his argument that Bilderberg is not a de facto world government has been a talking point that Bilderberg’s leading lights have made since the 1950s. It is arguable that this assertion received its first serious challenge when Engdahl’s A Century of War emerged to allege, drawing on Bilderberg documentation, that Bilderberg planned the 1973 Oil Shock. However, a close look at Engdahl’s cited sources and other official documentation from the period in question, fatally undermines his narrative. Indeed, the four main points of Engdahl’s account are easily refuted: 1) Henry Kissinger did not go to Saltsjobaden; 2) there was no Bilderberg plot or plan to bring about an oil shock; 3) Kissinger’s failure to take the Arab threats seriously, rather than a non-existent ‘Bilderberg plan’, lead to the oil shock; and 4) the Shah of Iran’s decision to raise prices was because of an earlier green light from Nixon, that pre-dated the Bilderberg meeting. In short, Engdahl’s claims are entirely without merit and should not be cited as evidence of Bilderberg’s ability to influence policy-making among those nations that make-up its membership. William Banyan is a freelance writer specialising in the political economy of globalisation, parapolitics and conspiracism. He has been published in Nexus and Paranoia, and also publishes regularly on Conspiracy Archive (conspiracyarchive.com). He wrote ‘The “Rothschild connection”: the House of Rothschild and the invasion of Iraq’ in Lobster 63. He can be contacted at [email protected]. 160 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The assassination of Martin Luther King: the paper trail to Memphis Garrick Alder It has already been proven in court that the 1968 assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. was the result of a conspiracy involving elements of the US Federal Government.1 This essay is not going to re-hash the work that went into reaching that historic verdict. What has not been shown before is how that 1968 conspiracy came together. I can now demonstrate at least part of that process. I have been aided by the 2018 publication of David Margolick’s The Promise and the Dream,2 a ‘double biography’ about the evolving relationship between Dr King and Robert F Kennedy. Mr Margolick’s work is significant in its own right; but even though it does not explore the assassination of either man, it is invaluable as a conceptual framework for understanding the evolution of the ‘MLK plot’. Surprisingly, there appears to be a bureaucratic paper-trail to the whole affair. It is not covered in Mr Margolick’s book and has been overlooked until now, despite a minor outbreak of media attention to one of the more interesting documents in the series.3 And more surprisingly still, this paper- trail starts in 1963. That is five years before Dr King was murdered, and while President Kennedy and his brother Robert were still in office. October 15, 1963 On this date, FBI Intelligence Operations chief William C Sullivan disseminated a memo. In it, he announced the completion and imminent circulation of a dossier entitled ‘Communism and the Negro Movement - A Current Analysis’. The contents were described in rather general terms. At first glance, you might think it was just another of those alarmist memos that periodically did the rounds in Washington DC during the Cold War. But this one is worth a closer look. Sullivan was evidently so pleased with what he had created that he planned to circulate it to a pretty exclusive circle of the powerful. 1 2 New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018. 3 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk You might be wondering about Sullivan’s private attitudes toward Dr King. Later, in 1964, W C Sullivan was one those who executed the infamous blackmail-suicide exercise against MLK,4 in which tapes of (married) Dr King with other women were sent to the Kings’ address with poison pen letters telling MLK to kill himself or be exposed. October 17, 1963 Assistant FBI director Alan Belmont 5 wrote to FBI associate-director Clyde Tolson (Hoover’s lifelong companion, and alleged lover). Belmont was apparently concerned by Sullivan’s memo and the accompanying dossier on communism and ‘Negroes’. Rather indiscreetly, Belmont blew Sullivan’s cover- story for the dossier. What Sullivan had actually created was a ‘dirt sheet’, intended to paint Dr King as a communist subversive intent on undermining the USA. In the extract below you can see that Belmont also remarked that Attorney-General Robert F Kennedy was going to be pretty startled. Belmont would soon be proved correct – but not in the way he expected. 4 5 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk It is hard to understand why Belmont (the FBI’s number 3) put this in writing, and even harder to understand why he sent it to Tolson (the FBI’s number 2). It looks like Belmont was using Tolson as a go-between, trusting him to break it to Hoover with the right degree of sensitivity. Sullivan’s dossier was circulated, as intended, and everything went quiet for a week or so. October 25, 1963 Out of the blue, Robert F Kennedy called FBI Director J Edgar Hoover. There was mutual animosity between Hoover and the Kennedys, so this was no friendly catchup. By 1963, wild horses would not have dragged RFK to deal with Hoover unless the subject was of the utmost importance. The extract below is from Hoover’s memorandum of that conversation. There was more than a touch of ‘poker’ to this conversation. RFK told Hoover that Sullivan’s dossier was causing some debate at the Pentagon, and, now that he was aware of that debate, RFK was getting alarmed. RFK didn’t show his hand to the hated Hoover, and didn’t express any opinion about Sullivan’s dossier. Instead RFK carefully used a cover-story of his own, claiming that he was concerned that someone at the Pentagon could leak Sullivan’s memo because ‘the military don’t like the Negroes’. The relationship between RFK and MLK was still in its infancy at this stage, so it would be wrong to suppose that JFK’s Attorney-General was firmly on the side of the civil rights campaigner and therefore horrified by the Sullivan dossier. There was a set of complex and uneasy ties, but not much more than that. Mainly, there was mutual awareness of the other’s usefulness. RFK was his brother’s gatekeeper, and MLK knew he had to cultivate RFK to get the ear of the President. On the other side of the desk, RFK’s calculations were slightly more cynical: King had tacitly endorsed JFK during the knife-edge presidential election of 1960. King’s heavily-qualified praise had helped persuade distrustful black voters in segregated America to cast their votes for a preppy white Catholic, and black votes were going to be needed again in November 1964.6 6 On p. 70 of his book (see footnote 2) Mr Margolick records how, as Eisenhower's Vice- President, Richard Nixon had also courted the black vote in the 1950s, manoeuvres which included joining the NAACP and making ostentatious fact-finding visits to Africa. Dr King, watching Nixon’s careful repositioning, presciently observed: Continues at the foot of the next page. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk It had taken a lot of effort to shift the black vote in favour of the Kennedys. RFK was especially toxic for America’s blacks, having earned his political credibility by working for the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s. It was hardly a deliberate act of self–‘sheepdipping’, because RFK was indeed vehemently opposed to Communism. In any case Senator Joseph McCarthy was a family friend who had given RFK the role as a favour. But while this moment on the political centre-stage of the anxious 1950s helped establish RFK as a safe pair of hands for the establishment, it left a near- indelible stain on his reputation for others. As Harry Belafonte told David Margolick (p. 75): ‘The black cause was the main article of debate for the Communist Party [. . . Robert Kennedy] came from the anti-black, anti-communist side of the equation.’ This suspicion about RFK’s underlying motivations can only have been deepened by the Kennedy administration’s painfully slow progress on civil rights. JFK’s rash promise to abolish housing segregation ‘with a stroke of the pen’ had prompted a steady trickle of sardonic mail to the White House, consisting of parcels that contained biros, inkwells, and the like. RFK’s apparent eagerness to prosecute Mafiosi – another of his scene-stealing performances from the 1950s, when he clashed with Jimmy Hoffa – had also dissipated as soon as he became Attorney-General. The cracks between the promise of a transformative presidency and its failure to deliver were threatening to widen in the run-up to JFK’s longed-for second term.7 Hoover’s memo continued: During their 25 October telephone call, RFK demanded that Hoover issue a recall notice for the Sullivan dossier, to get back every single copy that had been disseminated. RFK wasn’t concerned about just the Pentagon. Putting oneself in RFK’s shoes, it is easy to imagine the panic that a Footnote 6 continued: ‘Nixon has a genius for convincing one that he is sincere. He almost disarms you with his apparent sincerity. If Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.’ 7 It is popularly (and cynically) believed that the reason for the JFK administration’s hands-off approach to the Mafia was the JFK’s affair with Judith Exner, who was bed-hopping between the president and Sam Giancana. But given what we now know about the contemporary CIA’s engagement with the Mafia, it’s equally plausible that National Security concerns were involved. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk potential leak of the Sullivan dossier might inspire in him with the 1964 presidential election looming. If it came to light that RFK himself had been among the recipients and had said nothing, this would wreck his viability as a pro-civil rights Attorney-General and damage his brother’s chances of re- election. The brothers were playing a complex game with MLK. On the one hand, by mid-1963 RFK found himself under constant pressure to tap Dr King’s phone lines – pressure exerted by Hoover himself, who had correctly identified two of Dr King’s close associates, Stanley Levison and Jack O’Dell, as ex- members of the Communist Party. On the other hand, during a conversation that took place in the White House’s Rose Garden during the balmy June of 1963 – where they were safely out of reach of eavesdroppers – JFK let Dr King know that he (King) was being monitored. During this conversation, President Kennedy explained how the three men’s political destinies were by now inextricably linked: ‘If they shoot you down, they’ll shoot us down too.’ It is unclear whether this remark was intended as a metaphor. The following month, RFK suddenly changed tack and authorised the tapping of MLK’s home and office phone lines – behaving so aggressively about the issue that the startled FBI found themselves trying to cool him down. So Hoover got his regular wiretap transcripts, and MLK knew not to let any cats out of their bags for Hoover to see. The Kennedys had pulled off an elaborate Washingtonian double-cross of a sort that now seems almost quaint.8 After RFK called Hoover, Sullivan’s dossier on MLK was snatched back from most of its recipients, and everything went quiet again. Most of its recipients, but not all of them. As you can see from the above excerpt, it was noted at the time that President Kennedy didn’t return the copy intended for him (which had been sent to his advisor Ken O’Donnell); most conspicuously, given his ostensible concerns, nor did Robert Kennedy. What were the Kennedys up to? Were they hanging on to their copies of the dossier as potential ammunition in their ongoing private war with Hoover? 8 Rather less gentlemanly was the double-cross they pulled off against racist Dixiecrat George Wallace, who had endorsed JFK’s candidacy for Vice-President in 1956, and had donated heavily to his presidential campaign in 1960, only to end up with desegregation forced on him for his pains. Mr Margolick’s book contains (pp. 132-135) an uncomfortable account of the 1962 ‘courtesy visit’ by RFK to the Alabama Governor’s office in Montgomery. During this, Wallace glowered from beneath the Confederate flag on the wall behind his desk, an experience that RFK later described as ‘like negotiating with a foreign government’. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk While he had entered his brother’s administration as a Cold War ‘hawk’, RFK’s view of Hoover had evolved significantly over the course of three years. Initially, he had viewed Hoover as the unquestionable master of the FBI’s terrain, to be deferred to and respected on all points. Toward the end of his time as Attorney-General, RFK was privately referring to Hoover as a ‘maniac’ and a ‘psycho’. Mr Margolick’s book does not identify the impetus for this remarkable U-turn, an event that is all the more significant considering RFK’s position as the federal government's chief legal counsel. The suspicion has to be that events described in this essay were critical in flipping RFK’s admiration for Hoover into loathing and distrust. November 7, 1963 It would be equally reasonable to infer that Hoover’s awareness of the Kennedys’ scheming was behind what happened next. RFK and Hoover were both clearly stewing over their telephone conversation because on 7 November, more than a week after calling him, RFK turned up in person at Hoover’s office and there was an ice-cold argument. Afterwards, Hoover sat and drafted a memorandum of RFK’s visit. It looks as though this memo was for Hoover’s own records as much as it was for the memo’s stated recipients (who included W C Sullivan). We have to treat it with a little scepticism, because of the Hoover-Kennedy hatred. But there’s nothing in it that rings immediately false, and quite a lot that sounds very plausible. That certainly includes the following passage, in which Hoover recorded how RFK tried to deny even having seen the dossier. Hoover noted how he politely but firmly squelched RFK’s ‘alibi’ by pointing out that RFK had received a copy at the same time as all the other recipients. It seems RFK didn’t have a good answer to that one. If this sounds like an exaggerated reading of the RFK-Hoover stand-off, chapter four of Mr Margolick’s book shows that Hoover’s files on RFK were more voluminous than those he kept on MLK. Hoover believed that ‘Negroes’ brains are 20 per cent smaller than white peoples’ ’ and consequently that Dr King was more of an irritant than a threat, a view he had cause to revise as time went by. RFK on the other hand had power, and Hoover viewed him as a Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘sneaky little son of a bitch’. Hoover even assigned a Special Agent to watch the Attorney-General’s television appearances.9 The anti-MLK ‘cabal’ The Autumn 1963 dossier episode had allowed the dossier’s author (key FBI man William Sullivan) to create a cabal outside of the FBI who were now aware of the FBI’s reasons for believing Dr King to be a communist. This was a case of ‘light the blue touchpaper and stand well back’. The fact that RFK was alarmed by rumblings from the Pentagon shows that Sullivan had succeeded. What Sullivan had really done was to provide a list of reasons for getting rid of Dr King but left the decisions to people with the capacity to carry it out. In a word, it was incitement. The panicking RFK was keen to distance himself from the document, giving a flimsy excuse for ordering the recall (‘leak prevention’) and then attempting to deny that he had even seen it. But the fact that neither of the Kennedy brothers returned their copies shows that they had read the dossier and had determined its potential for use against Hoover (rather than against the originally intended target, King), and were therefore keeping their ammunition dry. For the moment, it must have seemed like the Kennedys had won this particular battle. The Sullivan dossier on Dr King disappeared from the official record for another three and a half years, but it would reappear in the spring of 1967. Robert Kennedy had demanded that Hoover recall the Sullivan dossier from everyone who had received a copy. On the face of it, this was carried out. But there was a Hitchcockian touch to the final stand-off between Robert Kennedy and Hoover on 7 November 1963. Hoover would have been keenly aware of the fact that neither of the Kennedy brothers had returned their copy of the dossier. The implication was that the Kennedys intended to use this information against Hoover, who they wished to force into retirement. But Hoover did not lose his advantage. By not stating the fact that all the other copies had been retrieved and were already under lock and key, Hoover allowed RFK to remain uncertain about who still had a copy of the dossier This dramatically weakened the perceived strategic value of the copies that the Kennedys had kept. Hoover described how he had pulled the wool over RFK’s eyes, without spelling out the implications, as follows. 9 After one such slot (on ABC’s The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show, in August 1962) the unfortunate agent eventually noted: ‘No discussion whatever of the FBI or the Director’. Since Tennessee Ernie Ford was principally a country and western recording artist, best known for his catchphrase ‘Bless your pea-pickin’ heart!’, it’s hard to imagine why Hoover thought his good name might be mentioned at all, never mind besmirched. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The Collapse of Camelot Fifteen days after Hoover’s memo, President Kennedy was murdered and Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as President. Robert Kennedy lingered on as LBJ’s Attorney-General for another 10 months, suffering abuse and belittlement as Johnson extracted personal revenge for years of humiliation. Eventually, in September 1964 RFK quit. He then stood for election as a New York Senator – and won. Over the next few years, he would consolidate his power-base in the Democratic Party and gather his energies for an eventual bid for the presidency. Famously, Dr King carried on with his civil rights activism, undaunted. To pour cold water upon any romantic interpretations of the ad-hoc Kennedy-King coalition, it should be noted that Dr King's spontaneous reaction to news of JFK’s death was: ‘This is what’s going to happen to me. This is such a sick society.’ After a moment or two of thought Dr King added that, since Kennedy’s progress on civil rights had been so slow, he would be more use as a martyr than he had been as a president. Dr King went so far as to call Kennedy’s death ‘a blessing’. This unguarded mixture of visceral reaction and cynical calculation encapsulates Dr King’s priorities: himself first; the struggle second; and everyone else a very poor third. With John Kennedy’s death, RFK’s usefulness to MLK diminished dramatically, even if Dr King didn’t realise it immediately. However, as a close friend of the incoming President Johnson, FBI Director Hoover knew the wind had changed decisively in favour of his anti-King vendetta. Mr Margolick relates (p. 199) how ‘neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader' was the sole topic of a 23 December 1964 meeting. ‘Participants bashed out twenty-one separate proposals, featuring ministers, “disgruntled” acquaintances, “aggressive” newsmen, [King’s] housekeeper, his wife, or a “good-looking female plant” to be placed in his office. The focus had evolved from King’s Communist ties to his character, the objective was to “take him off his pedestal” and expose him for the “rogue, demagogue and scoundrel” that he really was.’ Intent on sabotaging the RFK-MLK relationship beyond hope of repair, Hoover made sure to pass along tapes of MLK making disparaging remarks about RFK’s murdered brother, including one in which MLK was heard cracking Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk obscene jokes about which part of John’s anatomy the grieving Jacqueline Kennedy was secretly thinking of kissing while she paid her respects at his casket.10 April 10, 1967 Suddenly, the FBI’s dossier on Dr King reappeared on the desks of officialdom, after a three and a half-year absence. In the meantime it had been dusted down and brought up-to-date to reflect developments in Dr King’s career. But the only thing that had been toned down about it was the use of the word ‘Negro’. And this time, the dossier was going straight to the top. In the Bureau’s view, not only was Dr King a communist, but he was agitating against America’s involvement in Vietnam in order to subvert the nation. This was a personal matter for President Johnson himself, who had staked his political future on winning the war. The Attorney-General would be copied in, 10 Interestingly, Mr Margolick (p. 200) observes that the 1976 Church Committee did not exempt RFK from blame when it came to the failure of successive administrations to curtail Hoover’s anti-King crusade. This is a valid criticism, and a real dent in RFK’s historical reputation that might be hard to hammer out. I hope that this essay goes some way to demonstrating that RFK did in fact act to thwart Hoover’s schemes. Further, that Hoover’s furtiveness prevented RFK from being alerted when those same schemes were dusted off, later in the 1960s. In any event, by the stage in RFK’s career criticised by the Church Committee, RFK was more or less frozen out by Lyndon Johnson, who was also seizing JFK’s legacy from his brother by enacting JFK's long-stalled civil rights agenda and accelerating US progress toward the first manned lunar landing (achieved, per JFK’s promise, before the end of the decade). RFK had been robbed of his brother, and now he was being robbed of their shared visions, too. If he had thoughts about building on his brother’s presidency with one of his own, that prospect was now apparently ebbing away for good. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk which indicates that Johnson might be seeking confidential legal advice once he had read the dossier. This was nothing spontaneous about the dossier’s resurrection. Dr King had been a latecomer to the Vietnam issue, but, when he took it to his heart, he did so decisively. Mr Margolick’s book (p. 280) pinpoints this moment as having occurred in January 1967 while Dr King was on holiday in Jamaica. ‘At the airport newsstand, King picked up the latest issue of Ramparts. In it, he found a long spread entitled “The Children of Vietnam.” It consisted principally of horrific pictures of young burn victims, flayed and disfigured by American bombs and napalm. Leafing through it, he lost his appetite and pushed aside the food he had just ordered. “Nothing will ever taste good until I do everything that I can to end that war,” he told his travelling companion Bernard Lee.’ Here (extract below) is the Bureau’s rationale for resurrecting the MLK dossier. As you can see, there is the familiar mixture of paranoia about communist influence, and ‘moral degeneracy’. It is that last accusation that demonstrates how the FBI’s concerns had not essentially changed since the same charge was levelled at Dr King in the Bureau’s blackmail-suicide letter. Perhaps in frustration due to his cherished wire-taps coming up empty (thanks to JFK’s Rose Garden tip-off to MLK), Hoover had latched onto MLK’s sex life with a vengeance. Mr Margolick states (p. 177) that Hoover’s new obsession ‘also provided a wedge for Hoover to drive between his two greatest enemies’. ‘Like Hoover, Robert Kennedy was a bit of a prude – the type who never cursed, or laughed at off-color jokes, or felt comfortable around gay people [. . . .] Already uncomfortable around King – ‘rather formal’ was how [Stanley] Levison described their relationship – any revelations about King’s racy personal life would only disconcert him further.’ This is surely overstating the situation. RFK could not help but be aware of his older brother’s compulsive philandering, and that didn’t appear to give RFK any qualms about providing his unstinting support. Perhaps Dr King’s aura as a preacher provided a decisive splash of the profane and hypocritical to RFK’s perception of him, feeding that uneasiness in ways that were hard to dispel. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Knowledge of Dr King’s extra-marital activities does not appear to have diminished JFK’s admiration. In fact, Dr King’s shamelessness may have actually added to the appeal for John Kennedy. Mr Margolick presents us (p. 180) with a fascinating glimpse of JFK at the White House on 28 August 1963, captivated by the live TV coverage of Dr King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech. While Deputy Attorney-General Nicholas Katzenbach was bending RFK’s ear about the March on Washington descending into an insurrectionary riot, JFK was listening to King’s oratory with a speechmaker’s ear, and murmuring: ‘That guy is really good.’ In Spring of 1964, a few months after JFK’s murder, Hoover shared with the shattered RFK selected recordings from bugs planted in MLK’s hotel rooms, which had at last captured decisive proof of King’s adulterous abandon. On the tape, King could be heard exulting ‘I’m not a Negro tonight!’ and ‘I’m fucking for God!’. Hoover gloated ‘This will destroy the burr-head’ but his satisfaction was premature. When the Sullivan blackmail-suicide exercise was launched later in 1964, the Director’s prized evidence had no effect. Perhaps it would fare better, three years later, now that Dr King was preparing to agitate against the Vietnam War? Dr King’s new-found interest in Vietnam had also caught President Johnson’s attention. He asked Hoover to send him a transcript of a speech delivered by King on 4 April 1967. Dr King had denounced US attempts to bring ‘freedom’ to Vietnam while deploying black soldiers who didn’t even have true freedom in America. Dr King also drew comparisons between America and Nazi Germany – an incendiary proposal and perhaps an unwise one, since it can only have deepened suspicion that Dr King was a crypto-communist. The transcript received by Johnson was accompanied by a report from Hoover entitled ‘Racial Violence Potential in the United States this Summer’, described on p. 285 of Mr Margolick’s book. ‘King, it said, had embraced “the communist tactic” of linking the antiwar and civil rights movements, and his encouragement to draft resistors “could eventually lead to dangerous displays of civil disobedience and near-seditious activities by Negroes and whites alike”.’ The revived 1967 MLK dossier dates from precisely one week after that anti- Vietnam speech. If you look closely, you’ll notice that there’s something odd going on in that last extract on the previous page. The Bureau was now claiming that the original MLK dossier was circulated in November 1964. But as we have already seen, that is not true. The dossier was circulated in October 1963. This was absolutely not an FBI typographical error: the date of the dossier’s creation was recorded in W C Sullivan’s original memo that year, and Sullivan was among those who revised it in 1967. For some reason, the FBI has obscured the dossier’s history. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The purpose of this subterfuge is unclear. However, according to the FBI’s falsified timeline, the creation of the dossier is supposed to have occurred after the departures of the two most important recipients of the original version. President Kennedy had been killed in November 1963 and his brother Robert had quit as Attorney-General in September 1964. There is clearly an element of misdirection in the Bureau’s claims from 1967, and a reasonable inference has to be that it was the revised dossier’s recipients who were being misled. One possibility is that the Bureau was concerned the document’s history might be discovered if LBJ’s Attorney-General Ramsey Clark decided to check back among his predecessor’s files to see what the original dossier said. Clearly, he wouldn’t be able to locate it with the FBI’s falsified date as a reference point. In April 1967 Ramsey Clark had only been Attorney-General for a month, having taken up the post in March of that year. When he received the FBI’s memo he would still have been settling into his new role. This falsification would also forestall any attempt to look up the original dossier among the papers of the Kennedy administration. Another – simpler – possibility is that, by falsifying the date of the document’s creation, its new recipients would not think to contact Robert Kennedy to discuss it with him. Since the document apparently dated from after RFK’s unhappy tenure as Attorney-General, such an approach would be totally pointless as well as procedurally improper. The falsified date, then, would be a form of bureaucratic insulation, keeping RFK in the dark about the resurrection of a plan he believed to have been quashed. This accords well with Mr Margolick’s observations about Hoover’s determination to drive a wedge between Kennedy and King.11 However, there is no trace in the FBI’s files of an April 1967 letter of transmittal accompanying the dossier to the White House. Which means that after all this time, effort, and plotting the FBI didn’t actually send it. But this wasn’t a case of Hoover getting ‘cold feet’ (as though that is conceivable!). It was a case of waiting for the right moment to act. And within 12 months, that moment arrived. March 14, 1968 Finally, with Dr King making public plans to march on Washington, the FBI delivered its dossier to President Johnson. It was accompanied by a letter of 11 This issue is complicated by the fact that a few months earlier, in late 1966, FBI eavesdropping had been exposed during a lobbyist’s conviction for tax evasion. Embarrassingly, for Hoover, this improper wiretapping led to the conviction being overturned. Hoover then passed the buck, and leaked to his favourite newspapermen that RFK was to blame for authorising the wiretaps. By mid-December, the New York Times had somehow got wind of the fact that Dr King was among those wiretapped with RFK’s blessing. Contacted for comment, Dr King was philosophical about the whole matter, and tellingly chose not to draw public scorn upon RFK. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk transmittal addressed to LBJ’s White House assistant Mildred Stegall. As you can see from the extract below, in the year since the dossier was first resurrected, it had been revised again. And it had been given a new title: the pretence of general concern about the ‘Negro movement’ had been dropped and the dossier was now explicitly about Dr King himself. Dr King would be shot to death in Memphis just 11 days after President Johnson received the Bureau’s dossier. There is no record of Johnson ever replying to Hoover’s letter of transmittal. According to Mr Margolick (p. 334) the man who informed RFK that Dr King had been shot, recalled that Kennedy ‘seemed stunned and dropped his head’. RFK himself had just two months left to live. The MLK ‘Cabal’ redux The 1968 version of the dossier only went to President Johnson, because there was no need to send it to any of the bodies who had already received a copy of the first draft in October 1963. The panicking Robert F Kennedy might have successfully ordered that draft to be recalled from all recipients, but by then the cat was already well and truly out of the bag. From the day on which the various recipients received and read the 1963 draft, to the day Dr King died, those bodies were keeping a careful eye on MLK the supposed ‘communist subversive’. We don’t know if President Johnson played an active role in the ensuing plot to murder Dr King. Simply by making LBJ aware of the dossier, perhaps the FBI used LBJ to set the plot in motion. President Johnson could have asked for information from the various agencies that had already received the 1963 dossier, and they would have reported back with their own versions of the FBI’s smears. Another explanation, with some potentially sinister implications, could be that LBJ was well-aware of the dossier’s existence due to President Kennedy discussing it with him in 1963, and that the 1968 transmittal was a ‘red herring’ laid down by Hoover and LBJ, who were coordinating their actions for the historical record. In any event, the FBI’s letter of transmittal on 14 March 1968, is a smoking gun – in the form of a starter’s pistol. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk * David Margolick was contacted for comment on this essay. No response was received. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The David Kelly mystery John Booth An Inconvenient Death: How the Establishment Covered Up the David Kelly Affair Miles Goslett London, Head of Zeus, 2018, £16.99 ISBN-13: 978-1788543095 Did you know that the body of Iraq weapons inspector Dr David Kelly, who died mysteriously in 2003 after being named by 10 Downing Street for criticising its war-promoting dossier, had been exhumed and his remains cremated? Did you know that Prime Minister Tony Blair and his former flat-mate and Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, prevented an inquest – that would have had legal investigatory powers – by setting up the non-statutory Hutton Inquiry into his ‘suspected suicide’ (and that they did that before Dr Kelly’s body had been identified? Did you know that, a week before his death, when his wife said she and Dr Kelly had fled their Oxfordshire home for a West Country retreat to avoid the press, her ‘utterly traumatized’ husband was actually in his local pub that July evening winning a game of cribbage with his regular league teammates? Did you know when she told Lord Hutton that they had resumed their journey to Cornwall after an overnight hotel stop in Weston-Super-Mare, Dr Kelly was actually visiting a fellow weapons inspector in Swindon just 20 miles from their home apparently unaccompanied by his wife? Did you know that when a helicopter equipped with heat-seeking equipment searched the area where Dr Kelly’s body was discovered several hours later, it found no trace of him? Did you know that Dr Kelly’s dental records disappeared on the day he was reported missing, but had been returned with unidentified fingerprints to his dentist’s files 48 hours later? Did you know that much of the material supplied to the Inquiry was quietly sealed at Lord Hutton’s request for 70 years? Did you know that a certificate with the alleged causes of Dr Kelly’s death, Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk but without its location, was issued five weeks before Hutton completed his Inquiry hearings? Did you know that Dr Kelly’s right arm, alleged to have held the penknife with which he fatally slashed his left wrist, was so weak after a riding accident that he couldn’t use it to cut a steak or push open a heavy door? Did you know that there were no fingerprints on that knife – one never produced at the Hutton Inquiry and whose effectiveness for the purpose was never established – or on the spectacles, watch, wallet and water bottle found near Dr Kelly’s body? Did you know that, after allegedly swallowing 29 Coproxamol painkiller tablets, the arms inspector carefully replaced the almost empty blister packs in his coat pocket? Did you know that more than 20 people with important information on Dr Kelly, including police officers and many of their interviewees, were not called as witnesses by Lord Hutton? Did you know that the Conservative Attorney General from 2011, who refused a request by medical experts and his former party leader for a full inquest, is now the chairman of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee? Did you know that Dr Kelly, smeared as a ‘Walter Mitty character’ by No 10 official Tom Kelly in its 2003 Iraq war dispute with the BBC, was one of the world’s leading experts on biological warfare? Did you know that this Downing Street spokesman was promptly promoted? Did you know that at a 2006 Labour Party fundraising evening a copy of the Hutton report, autographed by Cherie Blair and Alastair Campbell, raised £400 for the constituency of Labour Cabinet minister and now senior BBC executive James Purnell? The purpose Miles Goslett’s book, the result of years of answering these questions and many others, has one purpose: to secure a full inquest into the death of one of the many victims of the Bush/Blair 2003 invasion of Iraq and thereby to shed light on this murky chapter of our history. The author methodically sets out the grounds for this request, one that has long been sought by many within and without the medical, scientific and legal professions – including former Conservative leader Michael (now Lord) Howard. In opposition, his party seemed minded to accede to this inquest plea. But the previously sympathetic Dominic Grieve firmly ruled it out when he became David Cameron’s Attorney Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk General after the 2010 election. The only Parliamentarian who has expressed any sustained interest in the fate of Dr Kelly is the former Liberal Democrat MP for Lewes, Norman Baker. His The Strange Death of David Kelly1 was published in 2007. Goslett acknowledges the help of Baker, whose extensive efforts he builds on without trying to identify the possible murderers of Dr Kelly in the way the ex-MP attempts at the end of his book. Goslett impresses precisely because he doesn’t venture into speculation of that kind, though his work stimulates questions and reflections with which I’ll conclude. His book is in two main parts: a summary of the events leading up to the death of Dr Kelly and the setting up of the Hutton Inquiry into them, followed by Goslett’s concerns about that inquiry and its findings as a result of his own researches. He concludes with ‘a calling to account’. The author brings together two contexts: of the events that ended with the discovery of the 59-year-old scientist’s body in a wood near his Oxfordshire home in July 2003; and the rapid institution of an inquiry into ‘the circumstances surrounding’ his death. The man The former head of microbiology at the government biological warfare centre at Porton Down, near Salisbury, Kelly had become a well-respected international figure not only in that field but also in weapons inspection.2 At the time of his death he was working for the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and was about to set off on his 38th visit to Iraq, following many similar missions to Russia. Dr Kelly had become the subject of heated public controversy because he was named as one of the sources – though it was never established that he was the main one – of BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan’s 29 May story that the Blair government had ‘sexed-up’ its dossier claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). His identification, authorised in July 2003 by No 10 Downing Street, was facilitated by Alastair Campbell, Blair’s Director of Communications and Strategy. Campbell was a central figure 1 Norman Baker, The Strange Death of David Kelly (London: Methuen, 2007) 2 For background on Dr Kelly’s eminent career, see Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk in the Government’s promotion of the need for a war that was proving increasingly unpopular months after the invasion. Goslett writes: ‘Campbell’s personal animosity towards Gilligan seemed to have infected his professional judgement to such a degree that he would be happy to use Gilligan’s source in whatever way necessary for victory in his clash with the BBC.’ The flavour of some of Campbell’s behaviour in the month before Dr Kelly died is shown here in his appearance before the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee (FAC)3 and, after walking into the Channel 4 News studio, demanding to be interviewed.4 Goslett writes: ‘The MoD – acting under orders from Downing Street – had taken the very unusual step of throwing Dr Kelly to the wolves by thrusting him into the limelight against his will.’ An apparent warning from the Ministry of Defence to Kelly on Wednesday 9 July, that a hungry press pack was about to descend on his village home, led to what his wife described as a rapid pack-and-flee flight to a quieter locale in Cornwall. When Dr Kelly returned to Oxfordshire the following Sunday it was not to his residence in Southmoor, but to his daughter’s home in nearby Oxford. From there he travelled to London the following week to appear before two Parliamentary committees.5 On Thursday (17 July) of that week he was last seen alive seen by a neighbour as he sent off on an afternoon walk. Nine hours after he left, Dr Kelly’s family reported him missing. Thames Valley Police initiated a search and his body was discovered two miles away on Harrowdown Hill the following morning. The context The second context Goslett details is that of the Blair government facing growing public criticism over the invasion of Iraq: British casualties were mounting and none of the alleged WMD had been found. With Prime Minister Blair’s popularity ratings tumbling, the pressure on No 10 had increased after 3 Alastair Campbell before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee on 25 June 2003 at 4 Alastair Campbell on Channel 4 News, 27 June 2003: 5 Report of the Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly CMG by Lord Hutton (The Hutton Report) 2004 contains transcripts of Dr Kelly’s appearances before the two Parliamentary committees: Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk reports by the BBC’s Gilligan on the ‘sexed-up’ dossier and by identifying Campbell for that effort in his Mail on Sunday follow-up article soon afterwards.6 Goslett synchronises Dr Kelly being questioned by MPs and peers about his role in briefing the press with the Prime Minister being praised in Washington for his war contribution. He then brings together the twin circumstances of Blair flying across the Pacific to visit Japan and the discovery, after many hours of police searching, of a body between Kelly’s home and the River Thames on Friday 18 July. He writes: ‘It remains very difficult to understand why [Lord Chancellor] Falconer – or whichever official in Whitehall was even told that the police were searching for Dr Kelly – was first associated with this matter at this very early stage. True, Dr Kelly had been in the eye of a media storm thanks to Alastair Campbell’s obsessive behaviour towards Andrew Gilligan and the BBC, but that does not explain why a senior political figure was personally involved in the police operation to find Dr Kelly to the extent that he was being briefed by police so soon after the discovery of his body. Who instructed Thames Valley Police to inform Falconer, or one of his colleagues, the minute Dr Kelly was found?’ Falconer and Blair have both recorded that they were in phone contact during Blair’s Pacific crossing and that the Prime Minister quickly instructed his former flat-mate to set up a public inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death. This was a public inquiry, writes Goslett, ‘. . . we are expected to believe, almost certainly established thanks to nothing more than a police officer looking at a dead body that was assumed to be Dr Kelly’s, noticing he had an injured wrist, seeing a knife nearby, and merely joining the dots as he saw them to conclude that he had killed himself.’ As Blair and Falconer talked, Goslett tells us: ‘Two paramedics had seen the body, but their job was to do nothing more than confirm the fact of death . . . Yet, as shall become clear, at no stage did these experienced professionals ever think that Dr Kelly did commit suicide, based on what they saw that morning. If the paramedics weren’t sure how Dr Kelly has died, what made [Foreign Policy Adviser and then British Ambassador to the United States] Sir David Manning and, in turn, Tony Blair so certain that this was a “suspected suicide”’? Without a note or identification with the body, it was being presumed by the 6 The Mail on Sunday 1 June 2003 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Prime Minister from a plane thousands of miles away that the body found was actually Dr Kelly, and that he had taken his own life. Goslett writes: ‘It seems remarkable that so many assumptions were being made at this very early stage, and equally extraordinary that Blair’s immediate instinct was to go to the trouble of setting up a public inquiry into a matter about which nobody had anything approaching a full understanding.’ The author tells us that it was then rapidly decided that Lord Hutton,7 a 72- year-old Law Lord, Privy Counsellor and former Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, ‘was the man to head the public inquiry which Blair decided he wanted’. He asks: ‘How did Blair, Falconer, [Permanent Secretary of the Lord Chancellor’s department Sir Hayden] Phillips and [former Lord Chief Justice] Bingham know that Dr Kelly hadn’t had a heart attack while walking, tripped and accidentally cut his wrist? Come to that, how did they know that Dr Kelly hadn’t been the victim of a random assault by a psychopath? How did they know Dr Kelly hadn’t been murdered in a premeditated attack by someone who knew him – or who didn’t know him? The answer is they didn’t know because they could not possibly have known. Yet the speed of their reaction, and the decision taken to hold a public inquiry, suggests that somebody [author’s italics] had some advance warning before 9.20 am, when the volunteer searchers found his body, that Dr Kelly was dead. . . .Well before midday on 18 July, it seems that the government had determined that Dr Kelly had killed himself, as opposed to having been unlawfully killed or dying of natural causes.’ Goslett concludes: ‘Within twenty-one hours of Dr Kelly slipping out of his front door in Southmoor without saying goodbye to his wife as he left for his 3pm stroll, a public inquiry into his death had been ordered personally by Tony Blair while in transit and Lord Hutton had agreed to chair it – even though, technically, it had not yet even been established as fact that he had died, never mind when, where or how his life had ended.’ Hutton I have quoted Goslett at length on the setting-up of the Hutton Inquiry because it is as near as he gets, in a calmly detailed account, to suggesting 7 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk that the discovery and identification of Dr Kelly’s body was not the first time some functionaries of the state had known about his death. Curiously too, the start time of Operation Mason, the Thames Valley Police investigation into Dr Kelly’s absence, is given as 2:30pm on the day he disappeared. That was half an hour before he left home for his walk and nine hours before his family reported him missing. In between, those attempting to reach Dr Kelly by phone – he was known to be invariably available by mobile – found it either turned off or not answering. Speed in inauguration was not the only characteristic of what became known as the Hutton Inquiry. Its lack of legal constitution – no power to compel witnesses to attend, give evidence under oath or be subject to jury decision – was another, and this too was deliberate. Goslett records that Falconer repeatedly intervened to prevent Oxfordshire coroner Nicholas Gardiner carrying out the inquest required by law in the event of a sudden, violent or unnatural death. By incorporating an ‘inquest’ into Hutton’s Inquiry – not a formal public inquiry under the Tribunal of Enquiries (Evidence) Act 1921 – Goslett says the country was given ‘in essence, a private inquiry which Blair and Falconer established. . . .the only thing that was public about it was the source of funds that would pay for it.’ Into this hastily assembled mechanism, headed by a hand-picked Establishment chairman with no previous coronial or major public inquiry experience, was then inserted the ‘suicide’ framing. This was launched via the London Evening Standard, to be promptly followed, as it often is, by the rest of the mainstream media. It was started by former BBC journalist Tom Mangold with a lunch-time ITV interview and an 870-word article for the London daily paper in which he claimed to be a great friend of Dr Kelly – ‘David is often a guest at my home’. He assumed the role of unofficial spokesman for the Kelly family and ‘advanced the theory that the scientist might have taken his own life’. Mangold wrote that day that Dr Kelly was ‘at his very best one on one, a cup of tea or a pint in hand’, without telling his readers that as a convert to the Baha’i faith the weapons inspector was both teetotal and a principled opponent of suicide. The ex-BBC man did later concede that this ‘close’ friendship was ‘not a frequent relationship’. The Standard article said that Dr Kelly’s wife, Janice, had told Mangold that Friday morning that her husband’s appearance before Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee earlier that week left him ‘very stressed and physically sick’. Mrs Kelly never said anything publicly about her husband being ‘physically sick’, nor has anyone else, writes Goslett, adding that ‘the FAC had exonerated him as Gilligan’s primary source’. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Mangold continued to maintain that Dr Kelly had taken his own life, telling that day’s BBC Radio 4 PM programme: ‘I guess he [Kelly] couldn’t cope with the firestorm that developed after he gave what he regarded as a routine briefing to Gilligan.’ This view happily coincided with that of No 10 and that of Lord Hutton, too, as his report published the following year was to show. Once Hutton opened his inquiry in August 2003, it quickly became apparent that the actual cause of the weapon inspector’s demise was far less important than the ‘circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly’ brief given to him by Falconer. Hutton assumed from the outset that Dr Kelly had committed suicide. In 110 hours of evidence provided by 74 witnesses over 23 days, only a few hours of one day were devoted to the medical basis of Dr Kelly’s alleged suicide. Contrast this, as many doctors, coroners and lawyers have since said, with a formal inquest where medical evidence constitutes an important – often the most important – part of the legal proceedings. Goslett observes: ‘There was no reason why the Hutton Inquiry and the coroner’s inquest into Dr Kelly’s death could not have run in tandem.’ Legally and logically he is right and if No 10 was so sure it was suicide, why set up the elaborate expense of the Hutton Inquiry anyway? Its quick establishment served the Government’s immediate need to be seen to be doing something substantial about the fate of a figure who was front-page news. But while a slow-moving Kelly inquest on its own might not satisfy No 10’s PR needs at a tense time, Falconer’s decision had a second crucial importance. The rigour and transparency the law requires of an inquest were No 10’s enemy when, in the view of Blair and Campbell, it already had one of those in the shape of the BBC and another in the disbelieving court of public opinion. The Inquiry allowed Blair to be seen to be doing something big, but it also served the politically useful purpose for No 10 of heavily focusing public and press attention on the BBC. This had been Campbell’s diversionary tactic when, agreeing to attend the House of Commons FAC at the second time of asking, he was questioned three weeks earlier on the dossiers he had helped produce. When Goslett names in an appendix the very long list of those Hutton did not call to give evidence, including the Thames Valley Police officers who led the search and the subsequent investigation, the inadequacy of Hutton is plainly confirmed. The list of absentees also includes those with medical expertise and evidence; those who spent time with Dr Kelly in the final days of his life; the helicopter crew who fruitlessly searched for the body hours before it was discovered; those cribbage-playing friends and the landlord of their Hinds Head pub who attest that Dr Kelly was with them on Wednesday 9 July; Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk and the two American friends of Dr Kelly, New York Times reporter Judith Miller and US Army sergeant Mai Pedersen. Add to that the failure of Hutton and senior counsel James Dingemans QC (now High Court judge Sir James Dingemans) to seriously cross-examine those who did appear in Court 73 of the High Court, and contrast it with the rigorous interrogation in the formal, legal setting of a coroner’s inquest. And that’s before we come to Hutton’s own conclusions, mysteriously leaked to The Sun the day before publication, in which the BBC became the main focus of his criticisms. The resignation of the chairman of the BBC, Gavyn Davies, and the removal of its Director-General, Greg Dyke, promptly followed. Goslett’s book reveals much more than a review can itemise and readers will draw their own conclusions when they digest its contents. I now offer a few thoughts that came to me on reading it. I will also attempt to put them into the wider context of Dr Kelly’s death, the Iraq war and the handling of both by the New Labour government and its post-2010 successors. One: the Hutton Report was the result of a publicly funded but essentially private inquiry led by a judge who had already concluded that Dr Kelly had taken his own life by the combination of a knife incision, the ingestion of Coproxamol and an underlying heart condition. Goslett’s carefully assembled detail of the setting-up of that inquiry by the Blair government points us towards the strong possibility that Dr Kelly’s demise was not unexpected, something a full inquest would have examined in detail. Goslett says of the consequences: ‘Had any government acted responsibly, and indeed been willing to do the right thing by Dr Kelly, a coroner’s inquest would have been held by now and there would probably be no need to re-examine this case. . . .It is overwhelmingly likely that if the Oxfordshire Coroner, Nicholas Gardiner, had been allowed to continue with his original inquest into the death of Dr Kelly, instead of being instructed by the government to suspend it, he would have been meticulous in investigating every relevant aspect – in sharp contrast to the approach the Hutton Inquiry was able to take as a result of its less stringent terms of reference.’ In plain terms, any continuing doubts about Dr Kelly’s death result directly from the way Blair and Falconer responded to it. In the person of Lord Hutton and in the narrow way he interpreted the brief given him, the Government set itself up for a report that was widely dismissed as a whitewash within hours of its publication. Two: the 26 July visit of Hutton and senior counsel Dingemans to Dr Kelly’s widow and family before the opening of the Inquiry raises questions of Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk procedure and propriety. As there is no written record of what took place, we have no way of knowing what passed between them on that occasion, although Hutton later said he had acquired useful information from the meeting. What that was we do not know any more than we have a clue as to what was contained in the very many witness statements which were submitted to Hutton but not made publicly available. What we do know is that at various times during the inquiry and afterwards, Hutton sought to minimize scrutiny by claiming he was seeking to avoid distress to the family. This included permitting Mrs Kelly and her family to be photographed entering the High Court, but not to have them in Court 73 to give their evidence and be questioned on it. This she did, says Goslett, ‘ . . . from a private room in a different part of the building via an audiolink. A still photograph of her was displayed on a computer screen in Court 73 while she was questioned by James Dingemans . . . This meant that the precious opportunity for those present to see Mrs Kelly’s face, and to view her body language as she spoke, was denied.’ Why would she and her family travel to London when an audiolink could have as readily been set up from their home? Goslett asks: ‘Was her arrival in London a staged event, perhaps to demonstrate that the inquiry had her support?’ Three: the evidence then given by Mrs Kelly itself raises many difficult questions. Why did her account of Dr Kelly meeting Sunday Times reporter Nick Rufford outside their home on Wednesday 9 July differ so radically from that of the journalist himself? She said that her husband had been angered by Rufford in a brief exchange, while the reporter described a much longer and even-tempered discussion with Dr Kelly in which he had provisionally agreed to write an article for Rufford’s newspaper. Why did she tell Hutton of the couple’s rapid departure from Southmoor shortly after meeting Rufford when, as Goslett records, many witnesses say that he couldn’t have made that journey with her? If Dr Kelly, as they confirm, played cribbage at the Kingston Bagpuize Hinds Head pub just up the road from their home that night, why wasn’t he confronted en route by the threatened press pack that Mrs Kelly says had forced them both to flee? If Mrs Kelly was not accompanied by her husband on her overnight stay at an unnamed hotel in Weston-Super-Mare, how did she, as a disabled person, get there that evening? (In Hutton’s report, a detail not included in Goslett’s book, it is simply stated, without corroboration, that the couple stayed in Weston- Super-Mare on Wednesday 9 July and then in Cornwall on 11 and 12 July. He does not say where the Kellys were on 10 July.) Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Why did she not recall for the Inquiry the time she and her husband spent in conversation with John and Pamela Dabbs in Cornwall on the last Saturday afternoon of his life? This couple were interviewed by the police as two of the last people to spend time with Dr Kelly in a non-professional or family capacity, but they were not called by Hutton. In a formal inquest in which suicide is suspected, those with recent contact are routinely questioned by the coroner about the dead person’s state of mind. While it is clearly desirable that the Kelly family be not gratuitously upset, it is also important to remember that public inquiries are set up for the benefit of we citizens who fund them. Inquests routinely raise issues distressing to the bereaved and do so quite properly in the public interest. The search for truth is the ostensible purpose of public inquiry and this did not characterize Hutton’s work. Four: it is worth bearing in mind that Dr Kelly’s suspicious ‘suicide’ was not the first such incidence of a scientist linked to the Ministry of Defence. A few miles from the Kelly home along the Oxford/Bristol A420 road lived Peter Peapell, a senior lecturer in metallurgy at the Royal Military College of Science (RMCS) Shrivenham. At their home early on Sunday 22 February 1987, his wife opened the garage door to find the car engine running and his body lying beneath the exhaust pipe of his car. Nicholas Gardiner, the Oxfordshire coroner who was expecting to conduct a full inquest into Dr Kelly’s death, returned an open verdict on Mr Peapell having been told that the dead scientist had no apparent reason for ending his life and that he could not have squeezed himself into the position where his widow found him.8 I mention this not only as a reminder that death can come in a sudden and apparently inexplicable way to those possessing secret expertise. As Tony Collins writes in Open Verdict: ‘Peter Peapell had returned from a one year appointment at America’s foremost naval establishment. Perhaps he used his exceptional powers of scientific understanding to devise a way nobody had thought of to close his garage door from the inside and end up in a position in which he was found, lying on his back under the car. Perhaps there was no connection in the fact that Peter’s expertise was unparalleled anywhere at the Royal Military College of Science and that he was a simulation expert in an area directly related to stealth and electronic warfare.’ 9 Perhaps, we may then speculate, that Dr Kelly also used ‘his exceptional 8 The strange death of Peter Peapell was reported in The Mail on Sunday 5 April 1987. 9 Tony Collins, Open Verdict: An account of 25 mysterious deaths in the defence industry (London: Sphere Books, 1990) p. 191 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk powers of scientific understanding’ to kill himself by using his weak right arm to sever the ulnar artery, one which rarely permits sufficient bleeding to cause death. Would a scientist with equally ‘unparalleled expertise’, who had survived the dangerous rigours of repeated arms inspections in hostile countries, rapidly become so mentally fragile following questions in Parliament that he would take his own life in a way suicide experts have described as better resembling a teenager’s cry for help? I also mention the Peapell case because it offers a possible insight into why the evidence given by Dr Kelly’s widow may have been so inconsistent with that of many who Hutton failed to call but whom Goslett has interviewed for his book. Mr Peapell’s widow, whom I knew and interviewed at length, initially contested the concerted attempts to persuade her that her husband had taken his own life. Some of those efforts she felt to be very threatening. She told me, for example, that she had spoken to the widow of a former RMCS colleague of her husband who had died shortly before and also of carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. But when Mrs Peapell suggested a meeting, the other widow warned her against it, fearing that one or other of them would not arrive at their rendezvous. Friends say that not long afterwards Mrs Peapell began to deflect all discussion of her husband’s death and did so for the rest of her life. Perhaps Mrs Kelly realized much earlier than Mrs Peapell that acceptance of the suicide verdict was the wisest course of action. Of course, it is perfectly possible, as Mrs Kelly told both Hutton and campaigner Rowena Thursby, that her husband had indeed taken his own life: for anyone to suggest otherwise might be seen to reflect unfairly and insensitively upon her and her family. But the evidence assembled by Goslett forces us to question that view and also to challenge Dominic Grieve, whose 2011 refusal as Attorney General of a full inquest leaves so many questions in the air. One very important one is that of Dr Kelly’s whereabouts on the night he was alleged by his wife to have made a rapid departure with her from their home. Goslett writes: ‘In the dossier Grieve produced in June 2011, he stated: “Dr Kelly was a member of the Hinds Head crib team. He last played for them on 9th July 2003. Every other member of that team was interviewed by officers from the investigation team.”’ This is in clear contradiction of Mrs Kelly’s evidence to Hutton, a conflict that a properly constituted inquiry or an inquest would have been required to examine. It is one that Grieve, subsequently to chair Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, chose to ignore. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Five: Hutton not only failed to thoroughly examine the cause of Dr Kelly’s death, he didn’t even seriously investigate the role of the BBC. This didn’t inhibit him from reaching the very critical judgement of the corporation and its ‘editorial system’ which led to the departure of its chairman and director- general. Given that Gilligan’s early morning (6:07am) two-way piece with John Humphrys on the Today programme was so central, it might be thought that its editor, Kevin Marsh, would have been summoned to appear before Lord Hutton. Marsh tells us in his 2012 book10 that he had intensively prepared for his expected examination in Court 73, but the call from Hutton never came. In his Stumbling over Truth, while critical over some aspects of Andrew Gilligan’s professionalism – ‘good investigative journalism marred by flawed reporting’ – Marsh strongly defends his essential accuracy in that broadcast and others following it. He says of Sir Robin Butler’s 2004 report into the use of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction:11 ‘Taken together his findings couldn’t have been more clear nor a greater condemnation of Hutton’s work. The September dossier was not the carefully judged, carefully written, honest assessment of sound intelligence that Blair, Campbell and [chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee John] Scarlett argued and that Hutton believed it to be.’ Marsh’s boss was Greg Dyke, who responded to the loss of his job as director general with the publication of Inside Story12 less than a year later. Like Marsh he is critical of Gilligan’s early Today piece, but says ‘Campbell tried to discredit an entire story by denying a tiny detail’ and saw his attack as revenge for Gilligan’s Iraq war reports which ‘were not always popular with Campbell’. Both Marsh and Dyke put Campbell’s attack on the BBC into the context of his years of constant complaint that the corporation would not bend to his will in the same way as much of the print media. Marsh, reminding his readers of New Labour’s single-minded public relations onslaught, says it was necessary to be a ‘truth creator’ to survive at the top of New Labour. Dyke, who had been an early financial backer of Blair for the Labour leadership in 1994, concluded: ‘I no longer regard Tony Blair as someone to be trusted’. He saw Campbell as ‘a deranged, vindictive bastard . . . a complete maverick who had been given 10 Kevin Marsh, Stumbling Over Truth: The inside story of the ‘sexed-up’ dossier, Hutton and the BBC (London: Biteback, 2012) 11 Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction: Report of a Committee of Privy Counsellors, Chairman Lord Butler of Brockwell (The Butler Report) 2004 12 Greg Dyke, Inside Story (London: Harper Collins, 2004) Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk unprecedented power by Tony Blair.’ Clare Short, who had resigned from the Blair Cabinet in 2003, says in An Honourable Deception:13 ‘I am afraid that Dr Kelly’s tragedy was that he got tangled up in the war that Alastair Campbell launched against the BBC. It is important to remember that the broadcast on the Today programme by Andrew Gilligan, which later became so notorious, was made on May 29th, long after Baghdad had fallen. And it took Alastair Campbell until the end of June, before he appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee to make a public fuss about it. My conclusion is that Alastair Campbell launched his attack on Gilligan in order to divert attention away from the question of whether the nation had been deceived in the rush to war . . . To use Dr Kelly in this way – to get at the BBC – was I fear a real abuse of power.’ Six: Goslett, after describing the odd circumstances in which Dr Kelly’s body was exhumed from the churchyard of St Mary’s Longworth, concludes with this tantalizing suggestion: ‘As a result of the exhumation, I had a conversation with somebody who told me that they spoke to David Kelly at length during the month he was found dead, a fact I have been able to confirm independently. This person, who wishes to remain anonymous, explained to me that they have carried with them what they call a “burden” ever since. They said that in July 2003 Dr Kelly told them something about his work, rather than his personal life, which had shocked them so profoundly that they believed they should have gone straight to the police to report his claim. They never did so, for reasons best known to themselves, but they remain reluctant to let go of the likelihood that what he told them has some link to his death.’ This, without identifiable sources and corroboration, doesn’t take us very far. But it does raise the broader issues of the fate of Dr Kelly on which Goslett takes a self-denying ordinance. Norman Baker concludes his book with the suggestion that Dr Kelly had made enemies in Iraq and his murder might have been committed by them or people acting on their behalf. For that, to the best of my knowledge, we are also lacking corroborative evidence. So where does that leave us? Is Kelly’s death forever to remain a mystery 13 Clare Short, An Honourable Deception? (London: Free Press, 2004) Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk with only buffs left to pursue answers in much the same way as those intrigued by President Kennedy’s assassination? Goslett confines himself to the demand for an inquest, and his fine book eloquently spells out why all of us, including Dr Kelly’s family, friends and colleagues, deserve one. This, after all, was the sudden death of a highly valued public servant, one caught in a firestorm created to divert attention from a Blair government that – we now know from the Butler and Chilcot reports14 – had sent the country to war on bogus grounds. If the weapons inspector did take his own life under the intolerable pressures to which he had been cynically exposed, then an inquest would enlighten us in a way that Hutton signally failed to do. It could be, as some have suggested, that Dr Kelly, realising he had not been totally frank with the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and that his conversation on the dossier with BBC Newsnight’s Susan Watts might cause problems for him and his family, chose to end his life. If so, and in the face of all we know about Dr Kelly’s character and resilience, we are left to wonder along with Goslett why Mangold, the first person to promote the suicide suggestion, said his death was ‘ . . . investigated by the local police, the county police, Scotland Yard, Special Branch, MI5; MI6 had a man present [at the scene where the body was found] and the CIA had a man present because the Americans were interested in this’. Goslett continues: ‘It is unclear how Mangold was able to make this assertion about these various intelligence agencies and impossible to know how accurate he was being, but as a journalist whose work had often been focused on security matters he would have expected anybody watching to have taken him seriously as he reeled off this list of official inquisitors. However, given that Dr Kelly’s death was regarded so quickly as a simple case of suicide – not least by Mangold himself – it seems extraordinary that so many British and American representatives of the spy world would have shown such an interest in it. As it was, even before the full facts about the manner of Dr Kelly’s death were known, and before his friend’s blood was cold, Mangold maintained publicly that he had taken his own life. The parallel with Tony Blair’s assumption is obvious. But who, or what, made both men so sure?’ If Dr Kelly didn’t die by his own hand – and I find Goslett persuasive on that – 14 The Report of the Iraq Inquiry chaired by Sir John Chilcot, 2016. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk then an inquest would provide the necessary platform for a police investigation into who and what did cause his death. Until that happens we can only guess at what befell Dr Kelly on his final fateful walk. As Baker says, the weapons inspector had enemies in Iraq, including some who might have believed that their country was safe from attack once the inspectors, including Dr Kelly, had assured Washington and London that it possessed no weapons of mass destruction. A determined hit group familiar with his movements could have taken the weapon inspector’s life before his scheduled 38th visit to Iraq. But Dr Kelly had enemies elsewhere too. Here was a respected figure of international stature seen to be challenging the basis of the US/UK invasion of Iraq, which we now know was long planned by those advising President Bush. Dr Kelly was one of many within the defence, intelligence, foreign policy and political establishments not only with doubts about the Bush and Blair strategy but also the detailed knowledge with which to challenge it. It was expertise different to that of Robin Cook, the former Foreign Secretary who resigned from Blair’s Cabinet over Iraq four months before Dr Kelly’s death,15 but taken together their indictment of No 10 was devastating. What if Kelly were to say more or write a book, something Baker says he had begun to consider? What if, as a convert to the Baha’i faith, he were to turn his back on his life as a loyal British civil servant and feel moved to spill the beans on what he knew lay concealed in our national life? After all, Cook was to do that in his Point Of Departure16 and Craig Murray was about to do something similar after a career devoted to the diplomatic service of his country. As I read Goslett’s book I reflected on the fate of Peter Peapell, like Dr Kelly a scientist with much valuable and secret information in his head and, also like Dr Kelly, a principled and disciplined man with a loving family and much else to live for. Peapell met a grim end when some agency decided that he, with whatever he knew, was potentially too dangerous to remain alive. Unlike Kelly, Peapell had not become a much-publicised figure causing serious concern to a government of controlling instincts finding itself in deep trouble. Would a government long committed to sending British troops to their death in a war without just cause shy away from allowing the disposal of a potentially troublesome senior insider? In conclusion, let us step back a little and set Dr Kelly’s death in the wider 15 Robin Cook’s resignation speech 17 March 2003 16 Robin Cook, Point of Departure (London: Simon & Schuster, 2003) Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk context of the world in the shadow of the events of 9/11. When the weapons inspector’s body was found in July 2003, the Commission which President George W Bush had finally agreed to set up under pressure from the families of 9/11 victims was slowly getting under way.17 When it reported six months after Hutton it too was heavily criticised, with its own joint chairmen later admitting that it had been ‘set up to fail’.18 Much like Hutton, the 9/11 Commission had been entrusted into a safe pair of hands in the person of Philip Zelikow, a friend of then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Zelikow was later to join the Bush administration as an advisor to Rice when she was promoted to Secretary of State. Again like Hutton, the 9/11 Commission reported without serious forensic inquiry and without hearing the testimony of many in a position to inform it on important matters of public interest. Among many other deficiencies it failed to examine the anthrax attacks – we now know the deadly material was produced in a US military lab – that quickly followed 9/11. These killed five people, targeted two senior member of Congress who were critics of the Bush administration and added to the public panic following the destruction of the three World Trade Centre towers. In keeping with Bush’s words – ‘You are either with us or you are with the terrorists’ – governments in both the US and the UK drastically curtailed civil liberties. It was into that frenzied, intolerant, monochrome world that Dr Kelly – a senior civil servant with top secret clearance in both the UK and the US – found his life catapulted as a result of the Blair government’s attack on the BBC. While in the United States many insiders and whistleblowers have now come forward to shed light on 9/11, very little has emerged in the UK to tell us more about the death of Dr Kelly. Goslett reminds us that Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary who helped identify the weapons inspector, did threaten to spill a few beans. He records The Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley writing that Hoon, first relegated to Leader of the House of Commons and then removed by Blair in 2006, was so angry he ‘. . . planned to make a speech about the Kelly affair that he told friends could trigger the instant downfall of the Prime Minister’. To the best of my knowledge Hoon has not since uttered a word to that effect. He left Parliament after expenses and lobbying controversies to sell 17 18 John Booth, ‘9/11: Fifteen years on’ in Lobster 72, Winter 2016 at Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk helicopters for AgustaWestland.19 Blair and Campbell continue in the public eye 15 years after Dr Kelly’s death and both have reportedly become multi-millionaires. Their No 10 colleague, Tom Kelly of the infamous ‘Walter Mitty’ smear, remains in public service as ‘strategic director for stakeholder engagement at HS2’.20 Blair’s trusty friend who set up the Hutton Inquiry, Lord Falconer, also remains in the public eye, but refused to be interviewed by Goslett for the book. John Scarlett was promoted from being chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, where he was deeply involved in dossier production, to head MI6. Now as Sir John, he is a director of Times Newspapers21 where Andrew Gilligan, as a journalist with The Sunday Times, reported the exhumation and cremation of Dr Kelly’s remains.22 Lord Hutton has retired. Goslett tells us that his senior counsel, Sir James Dingemans, was once asked by a reporter about the inquiry and his role in it. ‘Dingemans told the journalist that he could only imagine one occasion on which he would ever discuss any aspect of the Hutton Inquiry. He said: “Perhaps on my deathbed.”’ The Chilcot Report shed some critical light on the Blair government’s role over Iraq but, according to Goslett, not as much as it might. He tells of Carne Ross, a former British diplomat and friend of Dr Kelly who was the UK’s Iraq expert at the UN Security Council leading up to the Iraq war. He had lunch with Dr Kelly in New York shortly before his death. Goslett writes: ‘Mr Ross told me that when he gave verbal evidence to the Iraq Inquiry, chaired by Sir John Chilcot, in July 2010 he was warned by a senior civil servant overseeing it that if he mentioned Dr Kelly by name he would be asked to leave. “I was taken into the room where witnesses sat and shortly before I was to testify an official came and said: ‘You are not to speak about Dr Kelly.’ Mr Ross added: “Chilcot was incredibly tense. Clearly he feared I was going to say something.”’ The author concludes: 19 20 21 22 The Sunday Times, 29 October 2017 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk 'Quite why this level of paranoia existed is not clear, but it shows, if nothing else, that Dr Kelly continues to haunt those who patrol the corridors of power.’ Fifteen years after the death of Dr Kelly it might be thought that we will never know how he died, that Blair and Falconer scuppered that opportunity once and for all by denying him a full inquest. But much longer ago, 96 Liverpool fans died in the Hillsborough disaster. Only after persistent campaigners fought hard for more than a quarter of a century did fresh inquests finally conclude that all had been unlawfully killed. One change in British public life may in time, as with Hillsborough, help shed more light on the fate of Dr Kelly. The New Labour party, that in government took the country to war and exercised punitive control over its ministers, MPs and members, has gone. While some of its senior figures are still around, they are not in power and appear to wield diminishing influence when they make public appearances. The new generation of Labour Party members, who in time will become its Parliamentary representatives and perhaps its ministers, are critical of the means and methods employed in the Blair years. Through social media these activists are often much better informed than their forebears. Clare Short describes New Labour in her book as ‘the project of a small group that captured power in the Labour Party and had little respect for democratic and constitutional decision-making’, an operation ‘obsessed with presentation rather than content and willing to be economical with the truth’. She records there her impression of the September 2003 Party gathering following the invasion of Iraq and the death of Dr Kelly: ‘The atmosphere of this conference was very strange. It felt as though the stuffing had been knocked out of the party.’ That is not the state of today’s Labour Party. Its more than half a million members are led by those who opposed the Iraq war and supported Robin Cook when he resigned in protest against it. Perhaps in this new confident condition, and fortified by such fine research as Miles Goslett has published here, we may yet learn more of the fate of Dr David Kelly, one of the early casualties of New Labour’s deadly and dishonest alliance with President George W Bush. John Booth is a freelance journalist Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Disrupt and Deny Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy Rory Cormac Oxford University Press: 2018, £20.00, h/b Robin Ramsay First things first: this is very good and anyone interested in our secret services, post-WW2 British history, or British colonial history, let alone the actual subject matter implied by the title, will find much material of use or interest. The obvious caveat I have to make is that this is not a field I have done much reading in recently. However my opinion of its value is shared by some senior academics who are quoted on the book’s cover. This is big stuff. We have come a long way from the early days of Lobster. This is not a book I ever imagined would get written in my lifetime. The author notes in his Acknowledgements (p. viii): ‘This is a history of things that did not officially happen using primary sources that few realise exist.’ If the subheads are familiar – Iran, Suez, Oman, Yemen, Malaya, Indonesia, British Guyana, Northern Ireland etc. – most of the content is new, thanks to an enormous effort at official file reading by the author. The central theme is Britain, as a declining military power, using other (less costly) methods to engage with the Soviets in Europe (albeit to no effect); and, in the remnants of empire, to fend off nationalism and/or steer it in directions which suited British interests. Having said that, one of the things which is conspicuous by its absence is any evidence of British capital interacting with the British state and secret state. Did the chaps – and it is almost entirely men in this story – not need to do such things? Were they all on the same page without needing to state it? Or is it simply that none of this got put down on paper? The most frequently used techniques were bribery, propaganda and manipulation. Phoney political movements and parties were created. This continued into the 1980s when the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) – allegedly, says the author – began funding one of the Islamic groups in Pakistan to spread Islamic literature among the Soviet republics with large Islamic populations. (p. 225) And there were phoney radio stations, newspapers, pamphlets, faked printed material of every kind, with the Information Research Department (IRD), the propaganda/psy-ops unit which Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk hovered between the Foreign Office and SIS, at the centre of it. ‘Fake news’ is nothing new: IRD generated mountains of it between 1945 and 1977. In IRD’s last big operation, in Northern Ireland, the blizzard of ‘fake news’ stories it generated eventually produced the situation in which journalists trying to cover ‘the Troubles’, as one of them put it: ‘. . . were being overwhelmed by a blizzard of facts and and atrocities, lies and propaganda, from all sides, and it was simply impossible to tell truth from fantasy, fact from fiction.’ (p. 200) On this account, IRD looks more significant that it has done previously. Its communist conspiracy idiocies of the 50s and 60s were not its only activity and the author presents accounts of IRD interfering in the local politics of British colonies, spreading disinformation. (Though how effective any of it was is unknown.) If you wonder why so many of the former British colonies turned out to be corrupt once they were independent, the fact that the departing British did their best to corrupt those countries prior to independence may have something to do with it. In a short section, pp. 145–149, the author recounts attempts to steal or manipulate elections in the Gold Coast, Sudan, Tanganyika, Nigeria, Zambia, and British Guiana (Guyana). Into the 1980s, as the line between state and private sector was blurred by Mrs Thatcher’s infatuation with the men in expensive suits, the author discusses Le Circle (the Pinay Circle as was), Brian Crozier’s Shield Committee and Keenie-Meenie Services and comments: ‘As intelligence mixed with international trade and economics, the 1980s became a conspiracy theorist’s dream and it remains difficult to separate fact from fiction.’ (p. 242) In twenty years time there may be enough official paper available to pick through the British spooks’ role in that ghastly decade (if we’re not all under water by then). This is very largely a history of failure. Operations in Albania, Egypt and Syria (1958) were ‘obvious failures’ and – rather oddly, given how much attention he gives it – ‘covert action in the colonies amounted to little’. He sees apparent successes in Oman (the SAS); Iran (the SIS-CIA coup) – but with disastrous long-term consequences; and Indonesia in 1965 – if involvement in the massacre of half a million people can be regarded as a success. He is uncertain about Northern Ireland and also notes that the failure to topple Colonel Gaddafi ‘created a vacuum for international terrorism’. (He does not discuss UK involvement in funding various Islamist groups in Libya and Syria.) Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘Covert action helped mask decline in other places such as the Middle East. Yet it could only stem the tide of nationalism for so long.’ (p. 281) It also produced lasting distrust of the British in the region. He notes that ‘British covert action is a product of personality, departmental rivalries, and bureaucratic processes, as well as a rational response to a rising threat.’ (p. 278) He depicts a fair bit of the bureaucratic struggles that went on, all of which was new to me. The author writes of ‘international terrorism’ and that ‘Britain successfully punched above its weight during the Cold War’. The use of these clichés tells us that he has an entirely conventional, ‘establishment’ view of world politics and his inquiries have not extended to the history of the first Cold War which forms the backdrop to much of the book. He takes for granted the received picture of them big bad Soviets, threatening to overrun Western Europe and trying to subvert it from within. He writes (p. 23) that circa 1947, ‘Moscow broke a welter of post-war agreements with the West’. Did they? He offers no details. It’s been a long time since I read the Cold War revisionist historians such as Gabriel Kolko, but one of the things they showed was that, au contraire, the Soviets were sticklers for diplomatic agreements. With a second Cold War now established, the debate over the origins and causes of the first one has become relevant again. So: although the author has written an account which supports all the left critiques of imperialism and colonialism since WW2, he is not on the left. He began this book as a post-doc researcher at King’s College, London, whose Defence Studies Department is the only university department I have been to which had armed guards at its doors, thanks to its Ministry of Defence funding. Nonetheless, this is a tremendous piece of research and an essential book. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk We Were Lied to About 9/11: The Interviews Jon Gold, 2018 Free online in pdf format at John Booth Jon Gold was one of the earliest campaigners for truth about the events we call 9/11 and this book is the transcribed text of his audio interviews conducted over several years. His interviewees range from victims’ families to academics, whistle-blowers to journalists and they provide a wealth of valuable material about September 11, 2001 and the ‘war on terror’ that followed. This is how Gold introduced his first show: ‘I look at 9/11 as a crime and not an act of war. As with every crime there are suspects for that crime. I believe that along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, elements within our Government and other Governments have MORE THAN EARNED the title of suspect for the crime of 9/11. That being said, I don’t know what happened that day or who was ultimately responsible. Admitting this, in my opinion, has made me a better advocate for 9/11 justice. Here’s what I DO know: I do know we were lied to about a great many things about that day. I do know that there are many examples of individuals attempting to cover up this or that. I do know that there are many examples of people outright lying about the attacks. I do know that people who should have been held accountable were instead rewarded and promoted. I do know that many polls over the years show that a majority of people question what we were told about that day. I do know that the corporate media has only attacked those who question what we were told about that day. I do know that each investigation we had, had its own version of corruption and compromise, especially the 9/11 Commission. I do know that the families who lost someone that day, and the people of the world, both deserve and require real truth, accountability and justice for what happened that day. The last thing I know is that because of all of the lies of 9/11, there is no justification for all of the evil that we have committed Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk in the name of that day, and in the names of those lost that day.’ Gold concluded the introduction to that first show as follows: 'I don’t want to focus on theories about what happened that day. I want to focus on the fact that we were lied to about 9/11. It’s a simple and true statement, and I'm hoping that it reaches a majority of people. I want to educate people about everything I just said. Learning about 9/11 is a very hard and daunting task. I want to help people with it, and that is why I am having this show.’ Having myself entered the rabbit hole that is 9/11 research to produce my Lobster article for the 15th anniversary,1 I was attracted to Gold’s approach as a means of seeking a way through: yes, of course, attend to the many theories about the deaths, planes and buildings, but try hard, above all, to establish what is indisputable. Gold’s 31 interviews – in two of which he himself is the interviewee – offer such a wealth of information it is difficult to know where to start, but here are a few suggestions. Lorie Van Auken lost her Cantor Fitzgerald broker husband Kenneth without trace in the North Tower of the World Trade Center (WTC) on 9/11. His last words to her she found on her telephone answer machine after the attack: ‘I'm in the World Trade Center. The building was hit by something. I don’t know if I will get out, but I love you very much. I hope I see you later. Bye.’ Along with other 9/11 widows who became known as the Jersey Girls, she pressed long and hard for a very resistant President George W Bush to set up an inquiry. They then prevented Henry Kissinger becoming its chairman, though failed to depose White House placeman Philip Zelikow as its executive director.2 Bob McIlvaine joined her in that effort to find out more, after the remains of his Merrill Lynch employee son were among the first to be recovered the day after the attacks. In his Gold interview, McIlvaine describes how the medical analysis of Bobby Jr’s body parts points to him dying as a result of an explosion in the WTC lobby before the plane impacts.3 Two whistle-blowers, Thomas Drake of the National Security Agency (NSA) and Coleen Rowley of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), offer telling 1 2 The film documentary 9/11: Press for Truth at 3 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk testimony – as does J. Michael Springmann, a State Department employee in Saudi Arabia who was pressured by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) into giving visas to some of the alleged hijackers. Nafeez Ahmed was one of the first academics to question the Bush administration’s version of 9/11 events and Peter Dale Scott draws interesting parallels between them and the JFK assassination. Ray McGovern is a retired senior CIA analyst who prepared Presidential Daily Briefs on intelligence. He was recently arrested for protesting against the appointment of Gina Haskel as CIA director.4 Jenna Orkin’s son was in a nearby school when the towers came down spreading their toxic dust around Lower Manhattan. She went to campaign on the hugely damaging environmental and health consequences of 9/11.5 Philip Shenon is one of a small number of journalists to emerge with much credit from 9/11 with his book on the work of the 9/11 Commission. Another one, impressive in another way, is Paul Thompson. His 9/11 History Commons timeline is the product of enormous labour 6 and his four-part interview appropriately wraps up the Gold compilation. In offering us chapter-by-chapter research links for those wishing to dig deeper, Gold encourages others to continue his own revelatory work. Some of these questioners have been prompted by events nearer home in the UK, and not just because of the consequences of the ‘war on terror’ that followed 9/11. They look at Grenfell Tower and compare its fate to that of World Trade Center 7 (WTC7), the third New York skyscraper to come down on 9/11. Grenfell, completed in 1974, is 24 storeys high with a surface footprint of 484 square metres. It burned for 60 hours, its structure remained intact and is apparently capable of rehabilitation. WTC7, completed 13 years later, was more than twice as high and its surface footprint more than eight times larger. Like Grenfell, WTC7 was not hit by an aircraft. Unlike Grenfell, it suffered small fires for several hours but disintegrated at a little more than freefall speed into rubble and dust. John Booth is a freelance journalist 4 5 6 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘Prayers were more important than votes’ Donald Trump and the Christian Right John Newsinger God and Donald Trump Stephen Strang Frontline Books, 2017 The Faith of Donald J. Trump: A Spiritual Biography David Brody and Scott Lamb HarperCollins, 2018 Choosing Donald Trump: God, Anger, Hope, and Why Christian Conservatives Supported Him Stephen Mansfield BakerBooks, 2017 God’s Chaos Candidate: Donald J. Trump and the American Unravelling Dr. Lance Wallnau Killer Sheep Media, 2016 Why God “Trumped” America Robert B. Scott CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017 When Donald Trump refused to condemn the conduct of the Far Right in Charlottesville, his various business advisory boards collapsed as a succession of corporate CEOs very publicly resigned in protest. This was after a confrontation in which one protestor, Heather Heyer, had been killed when a car driven by a Nazi deliberately ran into a crowd of anti-racist protestors Trump made his infamous quip that there were ‘very fine people’ on both sides of the confrontation. His spiritual advisory board, however, was made of much sterner stuff and stood by their President. As one member, Eric Metaxas, put it: ‘We’re going to stand up for Trump a hundred times more.’1 It tells us something when a country’s leading businessmen have a more developed moral sensibility than its supposed moral guardians. Why did this assembly of evangelical preachers and pastors decide to condone Trump’s racist, white supremacist, neo-fascist and authoritarian 1 Brody and Lamb p. 305 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk sympathies? The short answer is that they had done a deal with him. Trump had promised to deliver their domestic agenda of a cultural counter-revolution in the United States. In return he got for their support in the Presidential election and their silence as he converted the ‘Washington Swamp’ into his personal toilet. The result is the quite remarkable spectacle of America’s supposed moral arbiters endorsing a billionaire conman and crook, the embodiment of greed and dishonesty, a bully and braggart, a man of profound ignorance, someone who is congenitally incapable of telling the truth, a confessed sexual predator, a racist and bigot, an authoritarian demagogue; and, moreover, someone whose actual knowledge of the tenets of Christianity is virtually zero. How did this unholy alliance come about and how does the Christian Right justify it? The five books under review here, all written by stalwarts of the Christian Right, give us some insight into this remarkable phenomenon and its likely consequences. The importance of the Christian Right in the United States is not new. It has been a growing influence within the Republican Party since the 1970s, and played an important role in both the Ronald Reagan and George W Bush Administrations. In order to ensure their support in the 2008 Presidential election, John McCain had to install the appalling Sarah Palin as his running mate. Such is their influence that the Republican candidate in 2016 was inevitably going to have to be someone acceptable to them. What was astonishing was that, while there were a host of candidates for the Republican nomination with evangelical credentials – men who knew their Bible and had served their time as ‘born again’ Christians – they threw their weight behind the positively grotesque candidature of Donald Trump, a man who was considerably more Herod than he was Jesus. For all Trump’s campaigning bombast, what this involved was an old- fashioned political deal whereby Trump agreed to give the Christian Right his support in carrying through their domestic counter-revolution, rolling back the supposed secular humanist threat to America’s position as God’s Chosen Nation. Same-sex marriage, indeed gay rights generally, abortion and birth control, women’s equality, immigration from the Middle East and Central America, state education, environmental protection and big government – excepting the military – all had to be rolled back. As far as they were concerned the free market was God-given and the rich were blessed. Crucial was Trump’s promise to hand the federal judiciary, from the Supreme Court down, over to them. As far as US foreign policy went, the overriding concern of the evangelicals, since the downfall of the Soviet Union, has been that the interests of Israel had to be paramount. Trump managed to convince the leaders of the Christian Right that he could and would deliver on this agenda. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The adoption of Mike Pence, a long-time champion of the Christian Right, a true-believer in every sense of the word, as his running mate was testimony to his good faith. America under Trump would be remade as a Christian Nation. The result was the positively obscene spectacle of evangelical preachers laying hands on Donald Trump of all people, proclaiming him to be chosen by God and praying for his victory both before the election and for his success in office afterwards. The importance of this Alliance has never really been recognised by British commentators, at least partly because the Christian Right is so alien to them that they have found it difficult to take it seriously. The reality, however, as Barack Obama once pointed out, is that ‘substantially more people in America believe in angels than they do in evolution’.2 When it came to covering the 2016 election even so relentlessly superficial an observer as Jon Sopel, the BBC News North American editor, could not help noticing that as far as religion is concerned, ‘America is bucking the trend that can be observed throughout the rest of the developed world’. The American ‘sense of faith is one of the most surprising things I have found about living in the US’ with ‘well over half of all Americans’ describing themselves ‘as seriously religious’, (some of them regarding atheists, for example, as on a par with rapists). ‘This country’, he observes, ‘does a lot of God’.3 How to does the Christian Right justify support for Trump? There are a number of strategies in use. One is to recognise what he was in the past but to argue that he has reformed, that he has actually found Jesus. The key figure here is Paula White, a televangelist and megachurch leader, whom Trump invited to be his spiritual adviser as long ago as 2002. She has been credited by many evangelicals with bringing Trump to God. Predictably, she is an advocate of the ‘Prosperity Gospel’ which teaches that God rewards the faithful by making them rich. One can see the attraction that this scam has for Trump, although it seems clear that the theology behind it is completely beyond him. 2 Stephen Mansfield, The Faith of Barack Obama (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008) p. 87 3 Jon Sopel, If Only They Didn’t Speak English: Notes From Trump’s America (London: Penguin Random House/BBC Books, 2017) pp. 155, 157, 174 There are a growing number of US studies and journalistic accounts, both academic and non- academic that have chronicled and warned about the rise of the Christian Right. For those interested, the volume of essays edited by Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox, God at the Grassroots 2016 (Lanham: Rowmad and Littlefield, 2018) is particularly useful. They co-edited similar volumes examining the 1996, 1998, 2000 and 2004 elections in the United States. Also very valuable is Lee Marsden, For God’s sake: The Christian Right and US Foreign Policy, (London,: Zed Books, 2008). Particularly useful non-academic volumes are Chris Hedges, American Fascists (New York: Free Press, 2006) and Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). There are many more. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk How could a conman like Trump not be impressed by the likes of Jesse Duplantis, another Prosperity Gospeller, the author of that theological classic, Heaven: Close Encounters of the God Kind (1996)? Speaking from his $3 million Louisiana mansion, he recently called on his followers to ‘crowdfund’ the cost of a new private jet – even though he has a personal fortune of $40 million. There is every reason to believe that his appeal will be successful, as were previous such appeals for access to personal air transportation. The best way to regard many of the leading evangelical preachers is as spiritual entrepreneurs who sell salvation for money, lots of money. Clearly these are Trump’s kind of Christians. Not only is Paula White seen as having been instrumental in convincing Trump of the need to reach out to the Christian Right, if his bid for the Republican nomination was to have any chance of success. She also persuaded the leaders of the Christian Right that he was someone they could do business with and usefully embrace in return. She went on to preach at his inauguration and is chairwoman of his Faith Advisory Board. Much more difficult, of course, was the task of convincing the grassroots faithful that this lying, bullying, semi-literate braggart, who lacked even a passing knowledge of the Gospels, was a reformed character who had found Jesus, when his whole public persona shouted the opposite. What does Stephen Strang have to say in his God and Donald Trump? As far as he is concerned Trump has acknowledged that he has ‘been rude and undisciplined for much of his life’, something of an understatement, but over recent years he has come to understand ‘the importance of sincere faith . . . he has made a sincere effort to expand his knowledge of and his fluency with essential Christian beliefs’. (p. 2) This belief requires considerable faith because of the singular lack of any evidence to support it. But Strang’s faith is bolstered by prophecy. As far back as 2007, the charismatic prophet, Kim Clement, had prophesied that ‘Trump shall become a trumpet’ and indeed that God had warned that he ‘will raise up the Trump to become a trumpet’ (p. 69). The following year, another prophet whom Strang regarded as particularly reliable, Chuck Pierce, had a four hour visitation from the Lord who told him that ‘America must learn to play the trump card’. (p. 70). And, of course, God was to impart this prophetic message to more and more people as the 2016 Presidential election approached. As far as most conservative Christians were concerned, Trump presaged ‘a cultural counter-revolution’ and was ‘an answer to prayer’. (p. 15) The result was that Trump received the votes of ‘more than 80 percent of the white born-again Christians’ with the evangelical vote counting ‘for nearly a third of all the votes cast for Trump’ (p. 26). He quotes Pastor Robert Jeffress to the effect that millions of Christian Americans Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk believed that ‘the election of President Trump represented God giving us another chance – perhaps our last chance to truly make America great again[. . .] We thank God every day that He gave us a leader like President Trump’. (p 176) While Strang personally gives credence to the notion of a reformed, born-again Trump – indeed he actually suggests that Trump has himself been exhibiting prophetic abilities – he nevertheless argues that even if Trump turns out not to be a Christian, God is still clearly making use of him. Others have attempted to discover evidence of Trump’s spirituality by inventing stories of his incredible generosity and kindness. According to Lance Wallnau, in his God’s Chaos Candidate, this is a side of the great man that he does not want people to see. Wallnau tells a classic Good Samaritan story about how Trump’s limousine once broke down and the chauffeur was having trouble changing the wheel. A passing motorist stopped and helped out. Trump we are told ‘paid off that man’s mortgage. That’s the side of him you don’t hear about’. (p. 51) Seriously! Of course, the very idea of Trump himself helping his driver change the wheel was just too incredible, too far-fetched. One cannot help feeling that it is only a matter of time before he is credited with curing the sick and raising the dead by some of his more determined evangelical supporters. The reality is, of course, that Trump’s defining characteristics are greed and selfishness. His supposedly charitable Foundation provides concrete evidence of the man’s venality. Everyone who knows anything about Trump recognises that the Trump Foundation is a scam that bears the same relationship to charity as Trump University did to higher education. At the time of writing it is under investigation by the New York authorities, who are demanding it be closed down. What of David Brody and Scott Lamb’s The Faith of Donald Trump? Writing a spiritual biography of someone like Donald Trump was always going to be a considerable challenge but they do their best. Once again we are assured that Trump has ‘a history of unseen kindness’, that he is – despite every appearance to the contrary – a Good Samaritan. (p. 234) We are assured that, when he first approached Paula White for spiritual comfort, the Holy Spirit actually whispered to her that she should ‘Show him who I am’. (p. 134) She was obviously successful because when Trump later got in touch with her about his running for the Presidency in 2015, he told her, ‘I really believe the Lord is speaking to me, that maybe I’m supposed to run for President.’ (p. 135) Of course, the idea that God told Trump to run for President is positively grotesque, but it was a necessary lie for the Christian Right constituency that he knew was going to be crucial to any possible win. And as far as Brody and Lamb are concerned, ‘. . . clearly God is using this man in ways millions of people could never imagine. But God knows and that is good enough.’ (p. 220) Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk On a more mundane worldly level, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (an important part of the Christian Right) met with Trump’s people in order to ensure that the Republican platform ’stayed true to the pro-family agenda’. They found that Trump was, according to Perkins, was prepared to endorse ‘the most pro-life platform the party has ever produced. It was solidly pro-family, pro-traditional marriage, pro-religious liberty. I think that was critical for him.’ (p. 220). He was much more amenable than the likes of Bush, McCain and Romney had been. The man handling these negotiations was Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, the corrupt businessman who, at the time of writing, is in prison for witness tampering. Trump gave them everything they wanted. As Jerry Falwell put it on Fox News: ‘. . . evangelicals have found their dream president’ (p. 300) and the authors wholeheartedly endorse this sentiment. As they point out, there were ‘more prayers read during Donald Trump’s inaugural ceremony than at any other presidential inaugural in American history’ and he has appointed a ‘faith-filled cabinet’. Indeed Trump’s cabinet looked like ‘a Believers in Politics all-star team’. (p. 261) There are some problems of course. They do not shy away from the fact that Trump’s knowledge of the Bible is virtually non-existent. During one television interview, Trump was asked about the Bible, about ‘your favourite book’. Could he tell viewers about his ‘most favourite Bible verses’? Trump was unable to oblige beyond insisting that ‘the Bible means a lot to me . . . the whole Bible is incredible . . . I just think the Bible is something very special’. (p. 158). This lack of even a rudimentary knowledge of the Bible was to prove to be a recurring problem, but no matter: the Christian Right had got what they wanted. Even if Trump was not a genuine Christian, they believed he had been chosen by God to do his work – and they found a Biblical precedent for this in the person of Cyrus the Great. This has become the Christian Right’s great let out as far as Trump is concerned. The early attempts to find Biblical sanction for supporting someone as wholly unChristian as Trump compared him to Baalam’s donkey. (Scott p. 10) If God could speak through a donkey then why could he not speak through Donald Trump? Given Trump’s readiness to take offence, comparing him with a donkey was soon abandoned and instead a comparison with Cyrus the Great was invented. Inevitably, the comparison was first suggested by God himself to Lance Wallnau, something he recounts in his God’s Chaos Candidate. The Lord told him to ‘Read Isaiah 45’ and here he found that God described the pagan Cyrus the Great as ‘his anointed’ and charged him with rebuilding Jerusalem for the Jews. (p. 22) And of course the significance of Isaiah 45 was that the 2016 Presidential race was to elect the 45th President. Clearly God had chosen Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Trump to be the Christian candidate, regardless of his personal character and past history. And this transparent crazed sophistry has become the way that the Christian Right has justified their continued support for Trump, no matter what. Wallnau had the opportunity to tell Trump himself all about his ‘remarkable “Cyrus” discovery’ at one of the many meetings the evangelicals had with their candidate. Trump came into the room carrying a Bible, ‘almost like a steering wheel’. Wallnau told Trump of how he reminded him of George Washington and then ‘shared Isaiah 45, and the word to Cyrus, and how I believed it applied to him’. Trump ‘nodded . . . trying to understand what he could’. (pp. 73, 78) Obviously Trump must have found being compared to a brutal tyrant more flattering and amenable than being compared to a donkey. Wallnau also recognises that Trump is ‘prophetic’, although he actually believes that all ‘great entrepreneurs . . . tend to be prophetic’. He praises ‘Trump’s prophetic foresight’ in predicting the Brexit vote, for example, something which ‘Christians should take note of’. (p. 70) Wallnau identifies Trump as God’s answer to a great historic crisis that confronts America, what he calls ‘the Fourth American Crucible’. America is unravelling, Wallnau claims, because there is a ‘Thunder Road’, a ‘shadow cabinet’ operating behind the scenes, made up of ‘billionaires and millionaires, politicians, consultants, academics and activists’. A hundred of these conspirators met in secret and each contributed a million dollars to a fund with which they could begin to ‘remake America’. (p. 10). They are intent on reviving the ‘lawless spirit . . . of the 1960s’. They want ‘a revolution and they are so close they can taste it’. (p. 13) This great conspiracy has made use of ‘Marxist/Lenin doctrine: lie, divide and conquer’ to bring America down. Wallnau singles out the late historian Howard Zinn (who died in January 2010) as one of the leading ‘false preachers’ aiding this cause. And if Hillary Clinton is elected then all will be lost and America will ‘be forever changed’ (pp. 9, 17). A man of destiny is required to save the country and God has chosen Donald Trump. He has been ‘served up by the hand of Providence’ like ‘Margaret Thatcher, George Patton, Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln’ before. (p. 64) No one should doubt what is at stake. ‘Satan’, he tells his readers, ‘considers taking this nation down to be his number one priority. With us removed, hell can advance against the church globally’. There is ‘a malevolent and demonic agenda aimed to destroy the global force for kingdom expansion that is America’ (pp. 143-144). So much is at stake that no one can seriously suggest that Donald Trump, ‘God’s Chaos Candidate’, should be called to account for who and what he is. The Christian Right has pretty much given Trump permission to behave how he likes, as long as he advances their cultural counter-revolution. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Even more disturbing than Wallnau’s book is Robert B. Scott’s Why God “Trumped” America. Here we have a straightforward attempt to scare the faithful into supporting Trump as the only way to save America from ‘witchcraft control’. The Clintons are ‘this pair of Luciferian witches’. Hillary Clinton is a ‘modern Jezebel’ who ‘not only sponsored the most evil forms of abortion but also, as many elites of the Rothschild-born Illuminati, favoured those government elites who kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered in Satanic sacrifice young children, burning them to Moloch as ancient Baal worshippers had done’. Obama was ‘the political son of these Luciferian witches’. And as for Trump, he is ‘the modern Jehu’ who will bring them down. He looks forward to Hillary Clinton ‘going to jail for her murderous crimes’. (p. 11) As far as Young is concerned, Trump was ‘God’s choice’ and those who oppose him ‘are fighting the God who chose him’. He was elected by the prayers of the faithful because in 2016 ‘prayers were more important than votes’. (p. 14) Indeed, God who is a ‘wow God’, actually ‘rigged’ the election: ‘This was the first vote I’d ever seen rigged by God. Yet many still don’t see it’. (p. 13). Wow indeed! It is tempting to just dismiss all this as the inconsequential ravings of a disturbed mind, but, as an incredulous Jon Sopel observes, the story of Hillary Clinton being involved with a Washington DC paedophile ring, the so-called ‘Pizzagate’ affair, actually got massive traction on social media. It was even retweeted by Trump’s security adviser General Michael Flynn. One man, Edgar Welch, actually drove over 350 miles to the pizzeria that the ring supposedly operated out of, armed with an assault rifle, determined to rescue the children from their underground prison. Fortunately, even though Welch fired his gun inside the restaurant, no-one was killed.4 ‘A vile, idolatrous man chosen by God’ Which brings us to Stephen Mansfield’s Choosing Donald Trump. Mansfield is the author of over a dozen books among them The Faith and Values of Sarah Palin (2010), The Faith of Barack Obama (2008), The Faith of the American Soldier (2005), The Faith of George W. Bush (2004), Lincoln’s Battle with God (2012) and my personal favourites The Search for God and Guinness (2009) and Mansfield’s Book of Manly Men (2013), this last with a Foreword by General William Boykin, the former commander of Delta Force. How does he grapple with the Trump phenomenon? Mansfield acknowledges that during the 2016 election Trump made ‘the worst presentation of religion by a presidential candidate in recent memory’. He ‘either had a faith he could not articulate and knew little about or he was 4 Sopel (see note 3) pp. 289-293 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk faking religion for political gain’. On one occasion when ‘asked about who God is to him, he spoke at length about buying a golf course’ (pp. 30, 31). This was a man who could tell an interviewer that ‘he had never asked forgiveness of God but would as soon as he did something wrong’. (p. 30) Nevertheless, Mansfield seems to accept Paula White’s testimony that when Trump first approached her, he was ‘a man with a keen spiritual hunger’. She found him ‘adrift spiritually’ (pp. 88, 89). He goes on to acknowledge White as ‘the architect of Donald Trump’s influence among religious conservatives’, even that she ‘helped deliver the Oval Office into Donald Trump’s hands’. (pp. 93, 97) There is an interesting paradox here that Mansfield is very much aware of. While Trump has to continually strain in a futile attempt to demonstrate his Christian faith, his great enemy Barack Obama was both a sincere and knowledgeable Christian. For the Christian Right, however, Obama was anathema. His was a liberal Christianity that had declared ‘war on Americans of faith’. (p. 112) For the Christian right, the Obama years had been a period of ‘unrelenting war on religion’. (p. 110) He ‘seemed . . . to never have heard of an abortion he didn’t like’, he was ‘the first US president to speak at a Planned Parenthood convention’ and supported gay rights, even having ‘the White House lit up in the colours of the rainbow flag, symbol of the gay pride movement’. (pp. 112, 113). Trump promised to reverse all this and the pastors gathered round, ‘laid hands on Donald Trump, wrapped him in prayer shawls, called him “anointed”, and compared him to some of the greatest leaders in history’. (p. 147) One over-enthusiastic rabbi even ‘claimed he had found the Hebrew word for “president” (nasi) next to the Hebrew word for “Donald” coded in the book of Deuteronomy’! (p. 147) Still as Mansfield admits, of ‘all the efforts by clergy to repackage Donald Trump, little had equal impact to the claim that he is the modern version of Cyrus the Great’ (p. 148). As he puts it, ‘millions of Americans came to believe that Donald Trump, just like Cyrus the Great was a vile, idolatrous man chosen by God’. (p. 150) What Mansfield does criticise is the Christian Right’s desperation to maintain its Unholy Alliance with Trump. He believes they have foresworn their moral duty to hold him to account when, for example, he has made ‘racially inappropriate if not outright racist statements’. As he puts it, they ‘ought to have been voices from another realm. They ought to have been more than echoes and done more than merely sanction a secular conservative consensus’. (p. 140). There will, one suspects, be a growing number of evangelicals who come to share this sentiment as time goes by and the United States continues to unravel under President Trump, although there is little sign of the Unholy Alliance starting to fracture yet. The Christian Right resolutely stands by Trump for the time being. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk John Newsinger is the author of many books, most recently All Hope Lies in the Proles: Orwell and the Left (Pluto Press). He is currently working on a book about the defence, foreign and colonial policies of past Labour governments. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk That was the world that was Tomorrow Belongs to Us: The British Far Right since 1967 edited by Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017, £24.99 (p/b) ISBN-13: 978-1138675179 Scott Anthony Although the book begins in 1967, Tomorrow Belongs to Us is primarily the story of the post-1968 generation’s influence on the British far right. We begin in a world where the National Front is reassessing the war and its relationship with anti-Semitism, Nazism and the Empire. We end in a world of English Defence League (EDL), ‘EDL Angels’ and social media: where lifestyle issues such as animal rights, feminism and gay rights can be utilised as part of a cultural war against radical Islam. The personal has become the political. It’s an interesting story charted across a number of essays by various academics. Although the authors don’t always share the same analytical prisms, a number of events reoccur: Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, the influx of Asian refugees from Uganda, and 9/11, to name a few. Although the historical markers are familiar, not all of the essays’ subjects will be. Two of the book’s twelve essays deal with the singer Ian Stuart Donaldson and the band Skrewdriver. Donaldson also pops up quite frequently elsewhere. Arguably he’s a little over-represented. Perhaps you can overdo the personal over the political. We get welcome research on emotion and the far right but nothing substantial on religion. To some extent the patchiness of the essays goes with the territory. As with many similar collections, there are some arcane and interesting spokes but there’s less than a non-specialist would want at the hub of the wheel. For instance, fundamental questions about how you define the far right, how you measure its influence and its changing demographic make-up are never tackled head-on. Instead you have to piece together the range of insights offered by individual writers. This lack of definition is a major absence. You want scholars to forensically pick through how you can usefully define the far right and how the definitions and practices of the far right have shifted over time. All the more so because of the recent ways in which labels like ‘alt-right’ have been so cheaply thrown around by the media. Some of the people and organisations featured in the Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk book not only deny being far right they explicitly set themselves against the far right. Contemporary figures like Anne Marie Waters discomfort easy categorisation, while even figures as extreme as David Myatt move from the far right (or at least across it) to Satanism, Islamicism and New Age philosophy. Rather contentiously, the essays dealing with contemporary Britain seem keen to lump UKIP and Brexit into the orbit of the far right. Nevertheless, the lack of an explicit analytical bedrock that is shared by the authors has some thought-provoking consequences. You notice that nearly all of the writers draw their source material from the writings of prominent political leaders such as Colin Jordan, John Tyndall and Nick Griffin. Another major group of sources are magazines like Bulldog, Spearhead and Identity. Some use oral interviews and government records. What you realise then is that, while the book presents itself as part of a ‘social turn’ in studying the far right, it is still (as a social turn) peeking through the windows of the far right’s institutions and administrative machinery. While interesting, this remains a only partial picture of far right activism. The consequence is that the volume is strongest when it’s working in the realm of ideas. Perhaps the book’s stand-out chapter details doomed recent efforts to develop a coherent economic programme. Appropriating ideas from social credit and distributionist thinking takes the far right to some odd places. Attempts to square the circle between opposition to global capitalism and support for private enterprise can drive the far right to idealise somewhere as unexpected as Bali: gift economies where ‘virtually every man and woman [. . .] is an accomplished artist and dancer’. Tomorrow Belongs to Us is also compelling when it is tracking how evolving ideas in the far-right rub against more deep-rooted dilemmas. While the path from A. K. Chesterton to EDL Angels narrated in the book is unpredictable and rather strange, the essays also leave you in no doubt about the issues that they have been unable to move past. Strategically, the far right in Britain appear locked in a cycle that sees them lurch from attempts at ‘electability’ – where they focus on issues like crime, immigration and the safeguarding of children – through to attempts to provoke ‘mass awakenings’ by carrying out acts of revolutionary violence. A recent example of such an attempt at revolutionary violence was when Darren Osborne drove a van into a crowd of people outside of Finsbury Park mosque in June 2017 Among other things, this cycle also appears to map very roughly on to the political cycle: electability seems the preferred strategy of the far right during a Labour government and violence during a Conservative one. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk A fundamental issue in this kind of research is that the distance between the academics and what they write about often appears so huge that closing it would require a large effort of imaginative empathy. For obvious reasons the majority of academics go the other way and view the far right fretfully and at some distance. While you understand the moral reasons for this by treating the far right as a lost tribe, you invariably lose contextual understanding and the result is that it casts some of the analysis into doubt. The emotional, imaginative and cognitive starting points of the investigators and what they investigate couldn’t be more different. To give a minor example, the book is full of descriptions of the machinations of far right organisations. Often these machinations are absurd and the people who contribute to them are by turns delusional, incompetent and pathetic. Super-planetary egotists dominate them. These descriptions sound totally believable, as they will to anyone who has spent time at poorly attended meetings of pretty much any local council, trade union or political party. Here and elsewhere it’s not always clear that the phenomenon described is entirely – or even mostly – down to the far-rightness of the far right. American scholars of the far right seem to have been braver in moving beyond this. The lack of contextual sensitivity especially weakens many of the book’s international comparisons, where the claimed existence of international imaginative communities of the far right is sometimes used in a way that airbrushes enormous geographical, historical and cultural differences. You can make comparisons between the BNP and Golden Dawn without reference to the social life of Mani, Orthodox Christianity and the cultural memory of Metaxas and Papadopoulos. But, if you do so, it’s likely that you are making comparisons of only the most banal and superficial kind. It’s also peculiar how many of the authors appear worried by the prospect of nationalism going international. Despite the self-regarding irony, there is probably something in Yanis Varoufakis’ quip that Europe is under threat from a ‘Nationalist Internationale’ but the comparisons here show the opposite. International connections are what you console yourself with when you don’t matter domestically. Quite obviously the form extreme nationalism takes depends on the local environment. So, on the one hand, the far right in Britain tends to be geographically concentrated in a small number of areas that have high levels of immigration and that have been particularly hard hit by deindustrialisation. This can already make it difficult to ‘nationalise’ what are a set of very local issues. On the other hand, while Islamaphobia has been the far right’s path Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk towards the mainstream in contemporary Britain, in continental Europe radical Islam is more likely to be used to amplify the far right’s anti-semitism. In both cases attempts at internationalism seem to pose the British far right as many problems as it solves. This is a lesson Donald Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon only appears to be learning now. Although the book’s authors continually assert that the period since 1967 has seen a far right revival, you’re also struck by how marginal it has been in British life in comparison to mainland Europe and the United States. For all the media noise and think-tank panic, the far right has been an astonishingly puny political force. It would be interesting to explore the reasons behind this, because one sobering effect of reading the book is the realisation that how anyone growing-up since the start of the war on terror might be able to nod along with aspects of the far right’s analysis. Taken together, someone born in 1990 would have experienced some or all of the following: the demonization of Islam post 9/11; the turn of the century wave of mass immigration; 7/7 and the erosion of civil rights; greater politicisation of the justice system; the hollowing out of the traditional media; and then the Great Financial Crisis, endemic banking fraud and austerity. You couldn’t have designed an environment more amenable to the conspiratorial memes of the far right: the UK’s recent experience could easily be framed from the far right (as well as the far left) as the punishment of national communities by the agents of international finance. Tomorrow Belongs to Us also illustrates that, while the far right in contemporary Britain have been relentlessly opportunistic, whatever minor successes they have secured in the short-term have fallen apart. They haven’t had the competence or organisational ability to distil outrage into something more electorally significant. Although social influence can exist beyond electoral progress, what you learn from this book is that the British far right has become extremely fluid: it absorbs and repurposes ideas from an enormous array of sources. This fluidity arguably makes enduring influence beyond electoral success even more unlikely. This perhaps explains why the first-hand accounts of life in far right organisations detailed in this volume already come drenched in the same queasy nostalgia that you get with the autobiographies of East End gangsters. That was the world that was. One of the fundamental ironies is that although the designation ‘far right’ implies something hard and unyielding, in Britain it has not been a rooted conservative force. To date the far right seems to have been changed far more by British society than British society has been changed by the far right. The closing chapters focus on digital activism and the role the far right plays in churning out propaganda and channelling outrage. Here the British far right Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk becomes something both less and something more: whatever it lacks as an effective political body it retains the potential to popularise new formulations that might alter the political weather. Yet, even when it successfully generates slogans, it does not have the power to direct them. The overall impression that you get is that the use of social media by organisations like the EDL is already over-studied: these new strategies of the far right could just as easily represent the beginnings of a final collapse into irrelevance as a smart way to seed the future. Despite the predictions of doom-mongers, on the evidence presented here, that tomorrow remains a long way off. Scott Anthony is a journalist and historian based at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: Crime, Conspiracy and Cover-Up – A New Investigation Tim Tate and Brad Johnson London: Thistle Publishing, 2018, £11.99 (p/b) Robin Ramsay The assassination of RFK has received infinitely less attention than that of his brother. This isn’t surprising as he wasn’t the president. He was just a politician on the make and was widely disliked, even within his own party. Robert Kennedy may have had some kind of radicalising journey in the years after Dallas, but to many he was still the hatchet man on his older brother’s election campaigns. But more than that, the suggestion that there was a conspiracy – a second shooter – just seemed absurd. Sirhan Sirhan had emptied his Saturday night special at Robert in full view of dozens of people and had been seized with the (literally) smoking gun in his hand. Case closed. This certainty should have crumbled when the autopsy by LA coroner Thomas Noguchi found that the fatal head wound had been fired from a couple of inches behind RFK’s head. But none of the many eye-witnesses saw Sirhan anywhere but in front of him. Instead of reopening the case, Noguchi’s employers tried (but failed) to fire him and the cover-up began. Noguchi’s autopsy also told us where the second shooter would be: behind Kennedy. And only one person had been there: Thane Cesar, a temporary security guard. In effect, the crime was solved by the autopsy: Cesar must have shot RFK.1 This much has been known since the early 1970s. What we don’t know is who employed Cesar. The authors of this new book are British and American authors/ journalists/TV producers2 who have separately produced documentaries on the case showing that there was more than one shooter. The book presents all the extant evidence on the existence of the second shooter, the details of the 1 The last book on the case I read, Dan Moldea’s The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy, was reviewed in Lobster 36 (20 years ago!). In that I noted that after building a very convincing case for a second shooter, Moldea interviewed Thane Cesar, who agreed to be polygraphed – and passed. Solely on the dubious basis of the polygraph result Moldea – absurdly – concluded that, despite all the evidence of conspiracy he had laid out in the first four-fifths of the book, Sirhan Sirhan did do it. 2 Biographical details on the authors and some information about the book are at Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk cover-up by the LAPD and assorted city officials and politicians and the repeated attempts to get the Sirhan case reopened. As for who was behind it, Tate and Johnson have got closer than anyone else to date. One of the central questions has been the identity of the ‘girl in the polka dot dress’ who was with Sirhan Sirhan immediately before the shooting and was seen running away from the scene, shouting ‘We shot Kennedy’. The authors have identified her, they think, after Paul Schrade,3 was contacted by her family after her death. Tate and Johnson conclude the chapter on the story of the woman concerned with the startling information that according to her son, his late father said he had worked for the CIA and had been involved with mind control projects. Which brings us back to where we were circa 1970 with the discovery by various shrinks that Sirhan was susceptible to hypnosis and appeared to have post-hypnotic blocs which prevented him from remembering much of what had happened before and during the shooting. This is a very good book, and massively documented (800 footnotes). Recommended. 3 Schrade had been a union official and had worked with Robert Kennedy. He was present at the shooting, was shot in the head, never believed the Sirhan-dunit story and became a public dissenter. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Reporter: A Memoir Seymour M. Hersh London: Allen Lane, 2018, £20, h/b John Newsinger This is a tremendous book. Hersh is the embodiment of the journalist as public benefactor and we have never had a greater need for his skills. Towards the end of Reporter he laments that, because of developments in the Middle East, he has had to put his book on Dick Cheney on hold. I suspect that the American catastrophe that is Lying Donald will necessitate further postponement. Hersh’s first big story revealed the realities of US Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW) research.1 This ‘listed fifty-two universities and university research centers that were doing work on CBW under military contract [. . . .] The article triggered campus protests and some renewed questions in Congress’. His first book was Chemical and Biological Warfare in 1968 and his revelations of fifty years ago still shock. Alongside the 720,000 animals that were being experimented to death every year, were the often unwitting human ‘volunteers’. Fourteen hundred such ‘volunteers’ were supplied by the Seventh Day Adventist Church in the late seventies, some of whom had ‘no idea what they volunteered for, and consented to’ and would only later learn ‘what they had been exposed to [. . . .] The diseases they were exposed to included tularaemia, yellow fever, Rift Valley fever, and the plague’. And who would have thought that James Watson, who ‘had earlier won fame for his role in discovering the double-helix structure of DNA’, once served ‘on a secret Pentagon CBW advisory panel’. Hersh’s discussion of My Lai – he rightly calls it a ‘National Disgrace’ – is essential reading, although it was merely the tip of the iceberg of Vietnam era atrocities. He discovered that some US helicopter pilots practiced flying low, chasing Vietnamese farmers through their fields, in an effort to decapitate them with their helicopter blades. Such fun! 1 ‘Just a Drop Can Kill’, for The New Republic, 6 May 1967. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk From then on the list of his exposés is long. He reported on the Watergate scandal for the New York Times (had Fox News existed at the time would Nixon have got away with it?); he helped destroy the reputation of the international war criminal, Henry Kissinger; he revealed US involvement in the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile; he broke the story of the CIA’s domestic spying and helped expose the CIA’s so-called ‘Family Jewels’, the list of CIA actions which were outside the Agency’s charter. However, the pressure for reform of the CIA was ‘outmuscled by the new Ford administration, managed by Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, his deputy’. So ‘the CIA is still doing today what it has done in secret around the world since the end of World War II’. Exposing US involvement in Israel’s covert development of nuclear weapons, he discovered that Robert Maxwell, the then owner of the Daily Mirror, and Nick Davies, his foreign affairs editor, had conspired with Mossad ‘to ensnare and capture Mordechai Vanunu’, the whistleblower who had first revealed Israel’s nuclear weapons programme. The Mirror group sued him for libel but in 1995 their suit was dismissed. The libel suit Hersh had filed against them, at the urging of Michael Nussbaum, his attorney, was settled the next year ‘when the newspaper issued a very abject apology and also paid . . . substantial damages’. Hersh covered the War on Terror and remains convinced of the key role played by George W Bush’s Vice President, Dick Cheney, ‘a leader of the neocon pack’. As he sees it, ‘eight or nine neoconservatives . . . had essentially overthrown the government of the United States – with ease. It was stunning to realize how fragile our Constitution was’. (What on earth does he make of the Trump presidency?) The War on Terror was an opportunity to reshape the whole Middle East in the US interest, beginning with the decision to invade Iraq. And then there was the use of torture. He was told ‘. . . again and again in those early days by involved officials who insisted on not being named that there was a widespread understanding that those who died in interrogation were not to be buried – lest the bodies be disinterred later – but had to be destroyed by acid and other means’. He exposed the use of secret prisons around the world – ‘operations without any congressional authorisation and funding’. Alongside the use of torture, the US Special Forces were let off the leash to use ‘assassination as a standard tactic’. The Blair government, and Jack Straw in particular, claim they knew absolutely nothing about any of this and only a complete cynic could possibly think otherwise. From that angle, its particularly regrettable that Hersh hasn’t Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (yet) been able to complete his book on Dick Cheney. What might he have to say about British subservience to the United States in those years? He writes that his ‘career has been all about the importance of telling important and unwanted truths and making America a more knowledgeable place’. Well, he certainly exposed plenty of ‘unwanted truths’. But with Lying Donald installed as President – with Russian assistance no less – it is difficult to see America as in any way a more knowledgeable country. The world of news reporting has changed. ‘For lack of time, money, or skilled staff, we are besieged with “he said, she said” stories in which the reporter is little more than a parrot. I always thought it was a newspaper’s mission to search out the truth and not merely to report on the dispute’. Does one merely report that the Sudan has been taken off Trump’s travel ban list, or does one explore whether this is related to the Sudan government’s decision to send troops to fight alongside the Saudis in the Yemen? In Britain does one merely report – and thus amplify – the fake, manufactured allegations of anti-Semitism and racism made against Jeremy Corbyn, or investigate who and what was behind them? But is it really just lack of time, money and skilled staff? No one can seriously discuss British politics over the past forty odd years without acknowledging the pernicious influence of Rupert Murdoch. His particular brand of journalism has also infected American politics. Think of Lying Donald’s own personal propaganda news station, Fox News, which is provided by Murdoch. Unfortunately, there is no discussion of Murdoch and his influence in the USA in Hersh’s book. Surely the bigger problem than time and resources is that those Hersh has made his name exposing have actually got more powerful since he first started out, more able to conceal the truth. Indeed, they are now able to actually call into question the whole notion of the truth being a meaningful category. Even when caught in the lie they can try to ride it out. What his memoir demonstrates is the continued importance of going after the hidden truth, exposing the public lie, stripping away the cover-up and, moreover, the impact that the truth can still have when it is brought into the light. We live in hope. This account of Hersh’s book does not even scratch the surface as far as the gold that is buried away in its pages, not least how he came to research and to write the stories that made his name and the problems he sometimes encountered getting them into print. Reporter is certainly one of the best Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk books that this reviewer has read so far this year and is essential reading for anyone concerned with understanding the world since the 1960s.2 John Newsinger is the author of many books, most recently All Hope Lies in the Proles: Orwell and the Left (Pluto Press). He is currently working on a book about the defence, foreign and colonial policies of past Labour governments. 2 And if you haven’t already read them, let me recommend two of Hersh’s other books, his account of Jack Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot, and his account of Henry Kissinger’s life and crimes, The Price of Power. Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The Balfour Declaration: Empire, the Mandate and Resistance in Palestine Bernard Regan London and New York: Verso, 2017, £16.99 ISBN 13 9781786632470 Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom Norman G Finkelstein Oakland (California): University of California Press, 2018, £27.95 ISBN 9780520295711 Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine’s Toughest Questions Edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner London and New York: OR Books, 2018, £18.00 ISBN 9781682191149 John Booth In the swirl of controversy over ‘Labour’s anti-Semitism problem’ that has followed Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader in 2015, the complex subject of Israel and Palestine has rarely featured in popular discussion. These three books offer those who wish to move beyond this largely faux confection more understanding of an issue that has dogged international affairs since the foundation of Israel in 1948. Bernard Regan’s book, written on the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, takes us back to the imperial rivalries and the conflicts that led to the First World War from which the British Foreign Secretary’s letter via Lord Rothschild to the Zionist Federation originated. This was a world not only where British imperialism coloured much of the globe red, but one where the Ottoman empire stretched south from the Black Sea to the Red one and from the Mediterranean in the west beyond the River Tigris to the Persian Gulf and not far short of the Caspian Sea. Regan writes: ‘The British had, for several decades before 1917, been a preeminent colonial power in the Near East, demonstrated most vividly by their invasion and occupation of Egypt in 1882. From the 1890s onwards dramatic changes began to take place in the nature of imperialism. Whilst colonisation and colonialism would continue to exist, imperialism metamorphosed as a consequence of the rapid growth of monopoly finance capital. This phase of imperialism characterised by the expansion of finance capital typically resulted in fierce competition for the monopolisation of markets, control over valuable raw materials and domination of the lines of communication.’ Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk This framework is fundamental not just to Regan’s work – a book developed from his doctoral thesis – but to any effort we make to understand all that followed in the subsequent century. While Regan has moved into academic endeavor from political activism on the international committee of the National Union of Teachers (now National Education Union), Norman Finkelstein has largely gone in the opposite direction, valuable as his political contribution is to Israel/Palestine campaigners. One reason for that is the sheer thoroughness of his research and his ready ability to draw upon it and then deploy it. The preface to his new book begins: ‘This book is not about Gaza. It is about what has been done [author’s italics] to Gaza.’ He continues: ‘What has befallen Gaza is a human-made human disaster. In its protractedness and its starkness, in its unfolding not in the fog of war or in the obscurity of remoteness but in broad daylight and in full sight, in the complicity of so many, not just via acts of commission but also, and especially, of omission, it is moreover a distinctly evil crime.’ He then details Israel military operations against the citizens of what in 2010 Prime Minister David Cameron called an ‘open-air prison’. In a section on efforts that year to bring relief to Gaza’s blockaded inhabitants – half of them under the age of 18 – he describes the killing of those on board the flotilla flagship Mavi Marmara by Israeli commandos. Finkelstein is harsh on many of the international human rights organisations in the way they report on Israel’s activities in the territories it occupies. He devotes two chapters to its treatment of Richard Goldstone, who the year before headed the UN Human Rights Council investigation into the Gaza conflict. Anyone surprised by the three-year stream of venom directed at Jeremy Corbyn by Israel Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his British and American allies should read the treatment dished out to Goldstone – himself a Jewish, Zionist, South African jurist – after his critical verdict was published. So personal and hostile were the attacks on him, Goldstone subsequently published what Finkelstein calls a recantation in which he ‘effectively disowned the devastating UN report of Israeli crimes carrying his name’. Dual British-Israeli national Jamie Stern-Weiner includes Finkelstein in his broad-ranging collection of writings and responses on the future of Israel and Palestine. A book with contributions by dozens of specialists on Gaza, the West Bank and the international context in which the conflict has played out since Israel’s foundation is difficult even to summarize in a brief review. His format is to choose one topic, divide it into manageable sub-topics led off by one writer and then followed up with alternative views by way of response. For example, the section of the book on Palestine, Stern-Weiner has one part on the West Bank in three chapters. The first, ‘Can the Current Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Palestinian Leadership and Its Institutions End the Occupation?’ is led off by Nathan J Brown with responses by Diana Buttu and Glenn E Robinson. Subsequent chapters on Gaza follow the same formula, one chapter asking if Hamas can be part of the solution. In the final section on the international dimension of the conflict, Finkelstein seeks to draw lessons from Jimmy Carter’s Middle East diplomacy with one response from another name familiar to those of with only a passing acquaintance with the subject: John J Mearsheimer. This impressive collection offers a rich source of expertise to those who seriously wish to engage with the complexities of the issue. This number has to increase rapidly if we are to move forward from what passes for informed reporting and political argument in the United Kingdom on matters relating to that highly troubled region of the world. These three fine books can help us shift a little more in that direction. John Booth is a freelance journalist Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Creating Chaos Covert Political Warfare, from Truman to Putin Larry Hancock London and New York: OR Books, 2018, £13.00, p/b 1 Robin Ramsay Hancock is an interesting figure. To me he is one of the very good JFK researchers. His Someone Would Have Talked 2 would be be on my list of serious JFK assassination books. On his blog3 he begins his self-description thus: ‘Hancock is a leading historian-researcher in the JFK assassination.’ On the OR books website his interest in JFK is missing and he begins with this: ‘Larry Hancock brings formal training in history and cultural anthropology to his research and writing on Cold War history and national security subjects. Following service in the U.S. Air Force, his career in computer/ communications and technology marketing allowed him to become a consultant on strategic analysis and planning studies.’ 4 Hancock is a man of broad interests and knowledge, as both this new book – his seventh – and his website5 show. Many years ago I acquired the bad habit of folding down the corner of a book’s page if there was something noteworthy on it. I folded down many pages reading this. As the title suggests, this is a survey of American and Soviet/Russian covert operations since WW2. Hancock notes early on: ‘Some readers may be surprised to find that it was the United States, rather than Russia, which most frequently turned to major covert political action projects during the Cold War.’ (p. 3) And the first half of the book is mostly about the CIA’s operations against what the Agency in particular and the America political class generally believed – or 1 2 Roanoke (Texas): JFK Lancer Productions and Publications, 2006 3 4 5 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk pretended to believe – to be the Soviet ‘threat’.6 But, as he puts it: ‘. . . beginning with the Truman administration there was little or no American appreciation of the equal or greater impact of anti-colonialism, nationalism and the simple rejection of Western cultural dominance. The reality was that the rapid collapse of the existing colonial empires was rooted not in an all-powerful world communist ideological expansion but rather in what was a unique opportunity for nationalist and even local ethnic movements.’ (pp. 92/3) Hancock doesn’t discuss how genuine the Americans’ supposed fear of the Soviet ‘threat’ was. Did those smart people in the CIA really believe the Soviets were behind all the anti-American struggles in the Latin American banana republics? I doubt it; but it was a handy pretext for attacking anyone who threatened American corporate interests in the region. Later in the book he writes: ‘American covert political warfare had been conducted as an effort to check the expansion of the Soviet Union’s political and military influence. In terms of ideology and public emotion it was justified as a response to the existential threat of worldwide communism. In retrospect, it appears to have been fundamentally an attempt to maintain the pre-war status quo, which included the political and economic hegemony of the former global imperial powers, including the United States.’ (p. 179) Which is a rather convoluted way of describing American imperialism and dollar diplomacy, and might be said to imply a deal of cynicism. It also omits the fact that the expanding post-WW2 American empire was encroaching on, and sometimes displacing, the existing empires of the UK and France. But I’m being picky: the fact that he omits UK activities in the period (for example those of the Information Research Department [IRD]) is not surprising – even though they sometimes worked with the American efforts, for example in Indonesia in the sixties. In 330 pages Hancock can’t deal with everything and the book is chiefly aimed at an American audience: one not familiar with Philip Agee,7 the magazine he founded, Covert Action Information Bulletin,8 and 6 There is some material on Soviet operations, but what he offers is slight. Most known Soviet psy-ops in NATO countries were feeble. 7 Agee’s CIA Diary: Inside the Company is on-line at 8 Some issues are now available at Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk William Blum,9 who were documenting all this over 40 years ago. The survey of US covert ops he offers will be familiar to anyone who has looked at Agee, Blum et al, but many of the sources won’t be. There is a huge amount of information available now that wasn’t there in the 1970s and I enjoyed revisiting this material, much of which I had forgotten. But it’s the second half of the book, dealing with the post ’89 period, which was of particular interest to me. Hancock has the confidence to describe and explain the behaviour of the post-Soviet Russian state and, in particular, its use of covert operations. He present this in a framework in which the Russian state, especially in the 21st century, did things similar to what the American state had done after WW2. ‘The great irony of the twenty-first century was that, beginning in 2004, the Russian Federation would adopt the same pattern of response in its own foreign relations, pushing back against perceived political and economic threats to its own sphere of influence. The trigger would be a series of open popular elections, mass protests and regime change in adjacent republics known as the colour revolutions – the Rose Revolution in Georgia (2003), the Orange Revolution in Ukraine (2004) and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan (2005). In response Russia turned to the same series of active measures and deniable surrogate warfare that the United States had used during the Cold War. The consequences would be . . . predictable.’ (p. 203) Hancock then asks if, in seeing the ‘colour revolutions’ as American operations, were the Russians making the same mistake about American influence that the Americans made in the 50s and 60s about the Soviet ‘threat’? He seems to me to get the balance about right: yes, the American-funded NGOs operating within the Russian Federation – with or without the alleged covert CIA influence – were a direct threat to the Russian regime. And were so intended. It is simply a fact that the Americans/NATO sought to detach some of the new republics bordering Russia from its sphere of influence. Ukraine was seeking to join the EU; and, eventually, no doubt, would have sought membership of NATO. The messy and still unresolved conflicts in Ukraine and Moldova were the result of the Americans/NATO challenging the Russians’ ‘sphere of influence’. After the ‘colour’ events the Russians decided that they were engaged in a renewed conflict with the Americans/NATO. They began upgrading their nuclear weapons and used the Internet to attack countries close to them: 9 Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Estonia, the Ukraine and Lithuania all received cyber attacks on their Net- dependent infrastructure. They also began the social media activities – fake news and influence operations – which have attracted so much attention since the election of Donald Trump. Although there are sections of the British and American left which remain sceptical of these,10 Hancock seems to me to marshal enough evidence to call the case proven. Russia has a state-controlled Internet and as long as the West does not, and relies on the social media companies to police themselves (which, with with hundreds of millions of users, is an almost impossible job, anyway) – the Russians are going to continue stirring the pot. Hancock states: ‘It is hard to deny the ongoing information warfare campaigns have produced some degree of both social fragmentations and political destabilisation with the United States, Great Britain, Spain, and within the EU nations as a whole.’ (p. 321) ‘Some degree’, yes, a but a long way short of significant just yet. Divisions can only be amplified, not created, by the Russian trolls and bots. There is no evidence yet that Russian operations had any significant effect on the election of Trump, or the ‘leave’ vote during the EU membership referendum in the UK. (Though, having written, that I’m not sure what such evidence would look like . . . .) In my first draft of this I wrote that today’s Russia is a new phenomenon: a nuclear-armed, nationalistic kleptocracy. But that pretty much describes Trump’s vision of America, too, doesn’t it? Which may explain the empathy between some in the Trump and Putin camps. How this issue is going to be managed in today’s globalised world, I have no idea. Sadly, as far as I can see, neither do the people entrusted with managing ‘national security’. There will be many other books about the political problems the virtually unregulated Internet is generating for the Western democracies but few will present the historical background as honestly and fairly as Hancock has done. 10 For example some of those writing at Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/creating-chaos-by-larry-hancock/? utm_source=Lobster&utm_medium=review&utm_campaign=Chaos Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk House of Trump House of Putin The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia Craig Unger London: Bantam Press, 2018, £20 Colin Challen There’s something odd about a 337 page book with 52 pages of footnotes but no index. It suggests to me that it had to be rushed into print before Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged links to Russia finally produces some real killer dirt. That way, its premise of being ‘The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia’ (emphasis added) might still appear eye-catching. Those 52 pages of footnotes are, however, a pointer to the fact that this is a story which has been told before. Unger’s book has received a lukewarm reception since it doesn’t really break new ground; but it does have the merit of placing a lot of otherwise widely disseminated bits of information into one volume. Bringing the jumble of bits together, like reassembling Humpty Trumpty, provides the reader with a clearer understanding of how Trump – or, more precisely, how Trump’s business – got to where it is today. According to Unger, that happened through the accommodation (literally) of Russian loose cash. His Trump Tower condos, not just in New York but in their manifestations elsewhere around the world, were a favoured money- laundering vector for the oligarchs’ wandering millions. This is the single most important feature of Trump’s business success; and, according to Unger, led to the occasional failure such as the non-appearance of a Moscow Trump Tower despite 27 years of effort. According to Unger: ‘. . . hundreds of millions of dollars in financing for various Trump- branded properties – in SoHo, Toronto, Panama and more – had been repeatedly traced to Russians trying to get their money out of their country. And that is precisely what the Trump Moscow project could not offer. Laundering money for the wealthiest Russians meant getting their money out of Russia – not putting more in it.’ (emphasis in the original) It was only this factor that enabled Trump to claim during his presidential campaign that he had not invested in Russia. In fact, reading this book, one gets the impression that he rarely invested any of his own money in anything. Trump has surrounded himself, or simply been surrounded by, dubious Russian oligarchs, most of whom have seriously nefarious connections. What is striking, ploughing through the endless shenanigans of these amoral, Mafia- connected types, is how immune most of them are to imaginary American concepts of accountability. They come and go as they please, although Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk occasionally one or two get caught out – a sufficient number, I suppose to demonstrate that the justice system works sometimes. Their immunity is not absolute, but they do what they can to ensure it is enhanced. Hence, in a brief section Unger does not develop, we find that leading Russian ‘industrialists’ were major funders – mainly through lobbying contracts – of big cheeses in the Republican Party, including Bob Dole, Trent Lott, John Breaux, Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Lindsay Graham, John Kasich and John McCain (the last four received donations to their political action committees). Naturally, the Russians could also afford the best U.S. legal representation. Occasionally Unger goes off into some considerable detail about the back stories of the oligarchs, and I wish the information was better organised. Perhaps in an admission of this there is a section at the back of the book entitled ‘Trump’s Fifty-Nine Russia Connections.’ Ultimately we learn nothing that couldn’t have been gleaned from the multitude of public sources used by Unger, but there are one or two questions which arise from this book which have not yet been answered. The biggest unknown is what dirt have the Russians got on Trump? Perhaps a clue can be found in the infamous meeting between Don Trump Jr. and the Russians who claimed to have compromising material on Hillary Clinton. The Trump team were sent a four-page memo ‘asserting that Democratic donors had allegedly evaded paying US taxes on Russian investments. They had been donors to Obama and it was possible they were donors to Hillary Clinton as well.’ I suspect the Trump team were just as interested in what info the Russians had on their tax affairs, not least in the light of the President’s refusal to reveal his own tax returns. This could be more damaging than the claim Trump spent a night in a Moscow hotel room – the very one used by the Obamas – watching women urinating on the bed. That, given previous evidence, probably wouldn’t offend his base. But his supporters may resent paying their taxes when he doesn’t. With an index, Unger’s book would be invaluable. Absent an index, it is a guide to a maze which feels like it may not actually lead anywhere. Colin Challen is at Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘Crazytown’ John Newsinger Fear: Trump in the White House Bob Woodward New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018 Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House Omarosa Manigault Newman New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018 The Shadow President: The Truth about Mike Pence Michael D’Antonio and Peter Eisner New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2018 Bob Woodward’s Fear was an instant international bestseller, with sales promoted by both his Watergate reputation and by the fascination that the deranged President Trump excites. Could the man who helped bring down the last crook to occupy the White House, help bring down its current crooked occupant? The answer is, unfortunately, a decisive ‘no’. Certainly there is great entertainment to be had in discovering just what a low opinion of Trump his courtiers have. Who, after all, can seriously quibble with General Kelly’s assessment of the 45th President as ‘an idiot [. . . . ] off the rails [. . . .] crazytown’ (p. 286); or with Rex Tillerson’s description of him as ‘a fucking moron’ (p. 225); or Reince Priebus’ belated recognition that Trump has ‘zero psychological ability to recognise empathy or pity’ (p. 235). But how much does all this actually tell us about the Trump administration? Part of the problem is Woodward’s very focus on Trump and his court. The book can only tell us what the people around Trump who have been willing to speak to Woodward have told him. By its very nature this creates some serious problems. The best example of this an account of Derek Harvey, director for the Middle East on the National Security Council staff, and the way he pushed for the administration to recognise the Iranian threat. Woodward sings the man’s praises. Harvey is a ‘driven legend’ who ‘approached intelligence like a homicide detective – sifting through thousands of pages of interrogation reports, communications intercepts, battle reports, enemy documents, raw intelligence data and nontraditional sources such as tribal leaders’. And what does this Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk intelligence paragon tell Jared Kushner? That Hezbollah was ‘an existential threat’ to Israel, and, on top of that, maintained a dangerous terrorist network ‘worldwide’. They gave Trump ‘a Reader’s Digest version of the Hezbollah briefing’ (pp. 108-110). This is so much nonsense, of course. Hezbollah is by no stretch of the imagination an existential threat to Israel, which is the strongest military power by far in the Middle East. Rather, Hezbollah is an obstacle to Israeli domination over Lebanon and to the Israeli Right’s ambitions to annex Lebanese territory. The supposed Hezbollah threat is an Israeli fabrication that the Obama administration resisted but that the Trump administration has wholeheartedly embraced. This ‘Hisbollah threat’ is also part of the demonization of Iran, that is once against Israeli-inspired – with the enthusiastic assistance of Israel’s covert allies, the Saudis. Instead of exploring any of this, what Woodward gives us is a chronicle of the proceedings of the Trump court as told to him by a variety of courtiers, far too often taking what they say at face value. This is not to say that there is nothing of interest. His account of Kushner urging the Saudi regime to increase their arms purchases, as a way of persuading Trump to take on board the urgency of the Iranian threat (pp. 113-114), certainly seems wholly credible. This is a matter of detail though, rather than the big picture. The book presents an overwhelming case for Trump being an ignorant, irrational – indeed stupid – narcissist, whose only concerns are money and self-publicity. Even in the United States, he is wholly unfit to to make the life and death decisions required of high political office. When General Mattis was trying to explain the importance of South Korea to US security and that not everything could be reduced to ‘How much money do we make on the deal?’, he was reduced to warning the President to ‘Stop fucking around with this. We’re doing this because we’ve got to prevent World War III. This isn’t some business gamble where if you happen to go bankrupt or whatever, it’s no big deal’ (p. 306). But as far as Trump was concerned, ‘The generals ‘aren’t sufficiently focussed on getting or making money. They don’t understand what our objectives should be. . . .’ (p. 230). When it comes to the Trump campaign’s collusion with the Putin’s gangster state and its proxies, an act of treason that we can safely assume took place, we see another problem with Woodward’s approach. It seems clear that neither Robert Mueller nor any of his people spoke to Woodward, so his account of the Mueller investigation comes from the Trump court. Once again there are some interesting details, with Trump’s lawyer John Dowd making it clear to Mueller that he will not be allowed close to the President because Trump will come out of it ‘looking like an Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk idiot . . . And I’m not going to . . . . let him look like an idiot.’ According to Woodward, Dowd was aware that this exchange with Mueller indicated that he (Dowd) thought Trump was ‘clearly disabled’ (p. 346). But what the book actually closes with is not Dowd’s disappointment with Mueller’s methods, with his belief that Trump ‘had not colluded with Russia or obstructed justice’, but with his recognition that Trump did have a ‘tragic flaw’: he was such ‘a fucking liar’. Seriously, this racist, bigoted, sexual predator, con man and bully has a ‘tragic flaw’! And this is Woodward’s rather pathetic conclusion to a true crime story that makes Watergate look minor league. Instead of exploring the criminality of the Trump Presidency, the trap that Woodward has fallen into is one of retelling the heroic stories of all the fine men (he does not really deal with any of the women) around Trump who have tried to control him and mitigate his excesses for the good of the country. At least this is the story they have all told him. Fear actually opens with Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, removing a draft letter terminating the US-South Korean Free Trade Agreement from Trump’s desk, confident that the President would soon forget all about it. ‘I stole it off his desk [. . . .] I wouldn’t let him see it. He’s never going to see that document. Got to protect the country.’ (pp. XVIII-XIX). Cohn is nearly pushed over the edge by Trump’s performance after Charlottesville, outraged by his failure to condemn the Far Right and his apparent lack of concern at the open display of neo-Nazi anti- Semitism. He goes to see the President clutching his letter of resignation but Trump deflects the blame, telling Cohn to his face that his decision had been unduly influenced by his wife. Trump also told him with considerable venom that he was committing ‘treason’ by resigning . . . and Cohn backed down (pp. 248-249). He eventually resigned over Trump’s imposition of tariffs, realising – according to Woodward, not for the first time – that the President was ‘a professional liar’ (p. 338). Professional does seem a bit excessive here: ‘irrational, compulsive liar’ seems a more accurate description. Far from containing Trump and mitigating his excesses, his courtiers can best be seen as enablers, as accessories, and this is surely how they will come to be seen in the fullness of time. But this leaves open the question of why it is that someone as unfit for the Presidency as Trump, someone whose actions actually threaten the interests of American Capitalism, has not been removed from office. Woodward’s narrow focus on the Trump court does not really help us here. There seem to be three main factors. One is certainly the support given to Trump by Fox News, systematically lying and distorting on his behalf and denigrating his Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk opponents. The second is the hate-filled nationalist movement his continual campaigning (and Fox News) has sustained – and that has successfully cowed the Republican establishment. And third is his deal with the Christian Right, giving them free rein to curb gay rights, abortion rights and family planning, women’s rights and to roll back state regulation and begin the dismantling of state school provision. He has promised them, and is indeed delivering into their hands, control of the Supreme Court. The custodian of this deal is Vice President Mike Pence. Woodward does not really engage with any of this. What of Omarosa Manigault Newman’s memoir, Unhinged? She is not even mentioned by Woodward and yet her account is nevertheless of interest for an understanding of the Trump court – or cult as she terms it. What has helped to play down her importance is the obvious contradiction between her clear and determined attempt to benefit herself (like all loyal members of the Trump cult) with a claimed interest in benefiting the African-American community. The contradiction has led to the value of her account being underestimated. She is quite open about how ‘being in Trumpworld was lucrative’ and how from her time on the Apprentice onwards they had a relationship that was ‘symbiotic; we exploited each other’ (p. XXIX). Even back then, though, she still claims to have seen herself as representing ‘my community . . . . as a strong black woman’. When she gets involved in the Trump campaign, she acknowledges that her role was to be there so Trump could point to her and say ‘’I’m not a racist misogynist. Look at all I’ve done for Omarosa’ (p. 66). She was there ‘to fix the woman problem’ (p. 78). And, when six former Apprentice contestants came forward to accuse Trump of racism, she ‘knew that it would be up to me to figure out how to combat these accusations’. Her strategy was, as she quite bluntly puts it, to say that ‘He can’t be a racist if he’s been so good to me’ (pp. 107-108). And yet, even after all this, she still purports to be surprised and hurt when the African- American community turns its back on both her and Trump. She is incredulous when the Black Lives Matter campaign rejects her advances and hilariously suggests that, if she could have brought about a meeting between them and Trump, it could have been as momentous as the meeting between Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King was for the cause of Civil Rights. And this is from someone who sees Trump’s ‘greatest character flaw’ as being, not his lying, but the fact that ‘he had no empathy for anyone period . . . . his complete and total lack of empathy’ (p. 114). What we get from Manigault Newman is continual whining about how her efforts to advance the interests of the African- American community within the Trump administration went Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk unacknowledged. Instead she got an immense amount of abuse and many of her friends stopped talking to her. She was particularly put out when Spike Lee laid into her (p. 116). At the same time, she claims to have been becoming increasingly concerned by Trump’s ‘racial agenda’. (p. 127) To begin with she thought he was ‘racial’ rather than ‘racist’ and that he used ‘race and racial relations to manipulate people’, that his racial statements were, in her words, ‘strategically controversial’, intended to mobilise ‘a subset of the American population, the so-called forgotten man’ (pp. 73-74). Over time though, she came to recognise that the distinction that she had made between racial and racist ‘was a deception’. ‘It hurt to see the truth about him’, she writes, but she had gone ‘through the pain of witnessing his racism with my own eyes and hearing it with my own ears’ (pp. 292-293). She recalls her incredulity when trying to ensure that Obama’s intention of putting Harriet Tubman’s face on the twenty dollar bill went forward, only for Trump to respond with ‘You want to put that face on the twenty– dollar bill?’ (p. 295).The problem with all this, of course, is that she did not resign in disgust, but was fired by General Kelly for ‘significant integrity issues’. (p. X) Now the very idea of anyone being fired from Trump’s White House for ‘integrity issues’ is hardly plausible and her own account suggests that suspicions of disloyalty seems much more likely. She claims to be increasingly exercised by the imminent likelihood of a tape emerging from her time on the Apprentice, one where Trump repeatedly uses the ’N-word’, and it was this that prompted her removal (p. XII). Who knows and, given the enormity of what is going on in the United States, who even cares? What she does have to say about Trump would have once been enough to seriously damage, if not destroy a politician. Today it is merely commonplace. Writing as an insider, she tells us that Trump’s Obama birther scam was merely him ‘testing the gullibility of the voting public’ (p. 58); that his feelings towards his daughter Ivanka jump ‘right over’ the line in what is appropriate in a father-daughter relationship: ‘I believe he covets his daughter’ (p. 44); that everyone in the White House was told that they had ‘to back up whatever the president said or tweeted, regardless of its accuracy’ (p. 211); that Trump can barely read (p. 226); and that he is undergoing a process of serious ‘mental decline’ (p. 246). Having seen Trump on the TV news standing in the burned-out ruins of the Californian town of Paradise and consistently referring to it as the town of Pleasure (an interesting Freudian slip!) until some brave soul corrected him, certainly seems to bear out the mental decline thesis. Her revelation that Trump seriously thought he could be Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk sworn in as President using his The Art of the Deal instead of the Bible certainly demonstrates his incredible ignorance and stupidity: ‘Just think how many copies I’d sell’. As she points out, he has ‘no knowledge of the Bible at all. It might as well be a paper brick to him’ (p. 196). Manigault Newman is herself an ordained Baptist minister, although it is worth remembering that in the United States this can well be a business decision rather than a spiritual calling. She takes great exception to Trump’s spiritual adviser, Paula White, making clear in a very nudge- nudge sort of way that she ‘never heard anything that made me wonder about the nature of their relationship’. In which case, why raise it? Indeed, as she admits, despite never hearing anything, she could still not stop herself wondering whether or not ‘her position as his spiritual advisor had ever been missionary’ (p. 196). The author very much gives the impression that she saw herself in the role of his spiritual adviser. Which brings us to Mike Pence: as far as Manigault Newman is concerned ‘As bad as you think Trump is, you should be worried about Pence [. . . .] We would be begging for the days of Trump back if Pence became president’. He is waiting there with his team, ‘biding their time until Trump is impeached or resigns’ (p. 325). And so we turn to Michael D’Antonio and Peter Eisner’s biography of Mike Pence, The Shadow President. Of the three books under review here, The Shadow President has had the lowest sales and has attracted the least attention. This is unfortunate because it is by far the best of the three books and, one suspects, is likely to become essential reading in the not too distant future. The Democrat capture of the House of Representatives makes Trump increasingly vulnerable to investigation into his administration’s criminality and, given his mental decline, his response is bound to be increasingly unstable. An eventual Pence Presidency looks increasingly possible. But who is Mike Pence? Pence was Trump’s guarantee to the Christian Right that they would be given free rein to implement their cultural counter-revolution agenda. They could safely embrace ‘the most profane candidate in modern times’ (p. 8), because he would give them control of the Federal judiciary from the Supreme Court down. They would be able fill his administration with their people, and he would support their ambition of rolling-back women’s rights, gay rights, abortion and birth control, shrinking the state and dismantling state schooling. With Pence occupying the Vice Presidency, the Christian Right were confident their time had come. His record was impeccable. He had been both a successful radio and TV host in Indiana, advocating the politics of the Christian Right, before being elected to the House of Representatives in 2001. Here he forged close Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk links with ‘admired national figures on the hard-core libertarian Right, including the billionaire DeVos and Koch families’ (p. 56). He effortlessly combined Christian morality with advocacy of the interests of the most predatory Capitalism – opposing state regulation, calling for lower taxes for business and the rich and the removal of governmental provision and support for not just the poor but for everyone who was not rich. His religious beliefs involved a rejection of science – evolution obviously – but also any science that interfered with the interests of business. As late as 2000, for example, Pence had denied any link between smoking and cancer: ‘despite the hysteria from the political class and media, smoking doesn’t kill’ (p. 94). Now a cynic might well believe that this particular example of his hostility towards science was somehow informed by the fact that his brother headed up a massive convenience store chain, ‘hundreds of convenience stores, including many named Tobacco Road, where cigarettes, cigars, snuff, and chewing tobacco were big revenue producers’ (p. 95). Similarly, his rejection of climate change science very much reflected the interests of Koch Industries. In April 2009, at the instigation of the Koch brothers, he had declared his opposition to ‘any program that would increase federal revenues in order to combat climate change’. He made it clear that he was opposed to any ‘so-called carbon tax on the pollutants that caused climate change, which Koch-owned facilities spewed at a rate of twenty-four million tons per year’ (p. 123). He was, of course, a staunch supporter of the Tea Party movement. In 2013, Pence was elected Governor of Indiana, leaving the House of Representatives, with his political career completely stalled. Even though he had originally backed Ted Cruz for the Republican nomination, he nevertheless became Trump’s running mate, ‘good cop to his bad – or rather, crazy – cop’ (p. 236). Pence, as D’Antonio and Eisner put it, ‘weaponized’ niceness (p. 142); but this concealed a willingness to do whatever it took to take control of the Federal government. Although he ‘presents himself as a deeply moral man, his record indicates both ruthlessness and a comfort with aggression’ (p. 17). He went along with all of Trump’s lies – never distancing himself from any of Trump’s attempts to whip up fear and hatred. When called upon, he defended Trump; privately confident that whatever Trump’s character, he was going to carry the Christian Right to power. He showed a ‘deft ability to stand with and for a presidential candidate whose life amounted to one long repudiation of the morals Pence promoted’ (p. 185). As far as Pence was concerned, the Bible allowed Christians to tell ‘so-called righteous lies’ (p. 262), something absolutely vital if one was to support Trump. The only time this commitment faltered was when the ‘Pussy’ tape came out and Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk he and Reince Priebus, then Republican Party chairman, ‘considered ways to force Trump to resign as the presidential candidate, leaving Pence to take his place’ (p. 184). This was nothing do with disgust at Trump’s behaviour, but rather with their belief then that no candidate could possibly survive such revelations. Once Trump was elected, Pence came into his own. Trump was totally uninterested in the actual workings of the Federal government. His view of politics was monarchical: he was the King, surrounded by his court, glorying in the exercise of power as spectacle, while the actual mundane tasks of government were left up to others. Pence was left to ‘populate’ (p. 10) the administration with ‘his’ people, either because Trump was not interested or because did not know anyone he could pick. One key appointment was the installation of Nancy DeVos as Education Secretary. Her family were long-time benefactors of both Pence personally and of the Republican Right generally. As an adherent of the Christian Right, she was committed to dismantling state school provision and encouraging the spread of church-controlled schooling. Her performance at her confirmation hearing in the Senate was so bad, she displayed such ignorance of educational issues, that two Republicans actually voted against her. For the first time in the history of the US Senate, the Vice President had to use his casting vote to carry an appointment to the Cabinet. Pence is also close to her brother, Erik Prince – the founder of the notorious Blackwater mercenary company – who is intent on persuading Trump to hand the war in Afghanistan over to a consortium of private military companies. Even given all that Trump is delivering for the Christian Right, their support for his Presidency still takes one by surprise. They have gone along with every revelation, every excess – although the policy of separating children from their parents at the Mexican border and keeping them in cages was a bit of a strain for some. While Pence supported that policy, many evangelical Christians found it too cruel. Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, was not alone when he described the policy as ‘disgraceful’ (p. 269). Most, however, continued their support for the administration. A good example is provided by Ralph Drollinger, the minister who heads up the White House Bible Study Group, regularly attended by Pence and some ten cabinet members, including Nancy DeVos, Ben Carson and Mike Pompeo. Drollinger, who considers himself possessed with prophetic abilities, has a vision for America that has many similarities to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. He has called for the United States to be ruled as a ‘benevolent dictatorship’ (p. 267), a sentiment that apparently really appealed to Trump. But while the Lobster 76 Winter 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Christian Right still supports Trump, if he does fall, is impeached or forced to resign for whatever reason, Pence is there, patiently waiting to take over. Indeed, according to D’Antonio and Eisner, he is just waiting for the right moment. They argue that it is ‘an article of faith’ with Pence and his supporters, that ‘eventually he would be president of the United States’. This, they insist, is not fantasy. It is worth quoting them at length here: ‘As the Christian Right’s favourite son, Pence had made the difference in the 2016 election. Millions had voted for the Republicans, believing that God was sending a signal as He put Pence on the ticket. Pence’s presence had also reassured GOP donors, including the Koch brothers, who had been reluctant to rally behind the erratic Trump. Pence has also brought to Trump a vast network of Christian Right political activists who had been pulling the party in their direction for decades and were more than ready to assume key positions. The Trump administration was filled with Pence people . . . With high places occupied by his friends, Pence had thus functioned for years as a kind of shadow president . . . .’ (p. 261). Indeed, they actually suggest that Pence has more and more been ‘acting as a kind of replacement president’ (p. 263). Whether or not he will succeed in replacing Trump before 2020 remains to be seen. And if Trump survives in office, will Pence challenge him for the Republican nomination? Certainly the mid-term elections have weakened Trump and his mental deterioration is only likely to accelerate, resulting in increasingly erratic behaviour – if that is possible. So far at least, Trump does not seem to have identified Pence as a possible threat. He might well change his mind if someone tells him about this book (he’s hardly going to read it himself). If he does come to see Pence as a potential rival, then it will be interesting to see how political developments unfold and, hopefully, the Republican Party tears itself apart. One suspects the Christian Right will suddenly discover that Trump’s excesses are, in all conscience, no longer tolerable. * John Newsinger is the author of many books, most recently All Hope Lies in the Proles: Orwell and the Left (Pluto Press). He is currently working on a book about the defence, foreign and colonial policies of past Labour governments. 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