www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
Summer 2018
• The view from the bridge by Robin Ramsay Lobster Updated 17 May 2018 • Deep Kiss: How the Washington Post missed the biggest Watergate story of all by Garrick 75 Alder • Using the UK FOIA, part II by Nick Must • Hugh who? (Hugh Mooney) by Robin Ramsay • Hilda Murrell and the FOIA by Nick Must • South of the Border by Nick Must • Still thinking about Dallas by Robin Ramsay • Back to the future (again) by Simon Matthews • Anna Raccoon and the dawn of Savilisation by Andrew Rosthorn
Book Reviews • The Darkest Sides of Politics, Parts I & II, by Jeffrey M Bale reviewed by Robin Ramsay • What Did You Do During the War? The Last Throes of the British Pro-Nazi Right, 1940-45, by Richard Griffiths reviewed by David Sivier • My Life, Our Times, by Gordon Brown reviewed by John Newsinger • Mad men? Marketing the Third Reich: Persuasion, Packaging and Propaganda, by Nicholas O’Shaughnessy reviewed by Colin Challen • Unwinnable: Britain’s War in Afghanistan, 2001-2014, by Theo Farrell reviewed by John Newsinger • Farming, Fascism and Ecology: A Life of Jorian Jenks, by Philip M. Coupland reviewed by David Sivier • Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation, by Liz Featherstone, reviewed by Colin Challen 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.
* new * The higher bullshit There has been more well-intentioned nonsense written by academics about the assassination of JFK than any other subject I have looked at. A classic of the genre is Nicholas R. Nalli’s recent ‘Gunshot-wound dynamics model for John F. Kennedy assassination’.1 Mr Nalli is a advocate of the thesis that JFK’s head went back and to the left when a bullet, fired from the rear of the motorcade, struck the back of his head. As he states in his abstract: ‘It is therefore found that the observed motions of President Kennedy in the film are physically consistent with a high-speed projectile impact from the rear of the motorcade, these resulting from an instantaneous forward impulse force, followed by delayed rearward recoil and neuromuscular forces.’ Something like this is required by the Oswald-lone-gunman scenario and, in support of his thesis, the author presents 42 screens-worth of maths and physics calculations (which I can’t understand). In the main body of his text he dismisses the considerably less implausible idea that Kennedy was hit by almost simultaneous shots from the rear and front: the shot from the rear producing the tiny forward movement visible just before the shot from the front, which sent his head back and to his left. Why does he reject this? ‘. . . because there was no cratered exit wound on the left and/or rear side
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of the President's skull. . . .’ At one level this is just weird because the author’s citation at that point does not support this.2 In any case, as Garrick Alder pointed out to me, Pierre Finck, one of the doctor’s at JFK’s autopsy, testified that there was a cratered hole in the back of JFK’s head.3 But at another level, my reaction is, really? Come on, really? The author evidently didn’t do anything as banal as check the testimony of the doctors and nurses at Parkland Hospital, who all reported a very large hole in the back of his head which was an obvious exit wound.
This drawing showing JFK’s rear head wound, made by Dr Robert McClelland, who was at Parkland, was echoed by all the other attending staff, as shown in the photographs of some of them below.4
2 The material he cites is at
3 See Clay Shaw Trial Transcript, 24 Feb 1969, testimony of Dr. Finck on the wounds at
4 The montage of Parkland staff is taken from
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And, working in Texas, they had seen many gunshot wounds. Their testimony is the only reliable data on the wounds. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, the autopsy was monkeyed with, to fit the politically determined ‘lone assassin’ verdict.5
Nick Must commented: a) It would seem that Mr Nalli is relying on the Zapruder film to provide timings during the assassination but is unable to provide precise timings from the camera, stating that a single Zapruder frame is roughly 0.055 per second. He can not be more exact because the camera Abraham Zapruder used was a Bell & Howell 8mm intended for home movies, and not manufactured to run within anything like professional tolerances. It would have been very unlikely to have been running at precisely the manufacturers expected speed throughout the entire filming, even for the relatively short 26 seconds of footage.
b) He claims to have discovered that ‘an outward impulse is observed on the jacket lapel of Texas Governor John Connally’ at the time that the bullet was entering his body from the rear. How this can be discerned at 1:1 magnification is unclear. I assume that he had magnified the frames for this examination. In doing so he will have also magnified any inherent errors in the frames
5 Just to start: was it one autopsy or two? See
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themselves – as I have said above, it was film for making a basic home movie. There seems to be no discussion of this aspect of working with amateur footage/analogue film.
* new * How the line changed on Wallace The late Hugh Mooney was an IRD officer who was in Northern Ireland while Colin Wallace was there in the 1970s. I have written about him elsewhere in this issue.6 When Mooney learned that Wallace was being expelled from Northern Ireland (and possibly faced disciplinary action for ‘leaking’) he wrote to a ‘Mr Joy’ in a letter headed ‘Secret and personal’. This is part of what he said: ‘ . . . like the Brigadier, I considered Wallace the most valuable member of Army Information Services, who throughout the time I was there launched many very damaging stories against the IRA and other extremists.’ Here, in contrast, is Mooney in a 1992 letter to the Information Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office – IRD’s successor organisation:
‘. . . a classic Wallace operation involving planted information; deception of the British and authorised personnel; attacks on individuals which do nothing to advance the fight against terrorism.’ 7
* new * Mind control Muckrock is a website devoted to FOIA requests in the USA. It recently had a story headed: ‘Washington State Fusion Centre accidentally releases records on remote control. As part of a request for records on Antifa and white supremicist groups, WSFC inadvertently bundles in “EM effects on human body.zip”.’ 8 The Washington State Fusion Centre is essentially the post-9/11 Washington State internal security police. Its mission statement is this: ‘The mission of the Washington State Fusion Center (WSFC) is to support
6
7 Letters in possession of Colin Wallace.
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the public safety and homeland security missions of state, local, tribal agencies and private sector entities.’9 The file accidentally – or deliberately10 – sent to Muckrock from WSFC contained a number of illustrations – not ‘records’ as per Muckrock – of alleged effects of electromagnetic (em) radiation on the human body. The file is available for downloading at Muckrock. One of the documents has in the right-hand bottom corner ‘www.raven1.net’. The tiniest bit of searching would have shown Muckrock (and the Daily Mail, which republished the material on its website)11 that raven1.net is Eleanor White. She is a well known name within mind control/TI (targeted individuals) circles. Just Google ‘Eleanor White + Raven 1’. The images in the file sent to Muchrock are familiar to me from at least a decade ago. The website Wired.com carried an article by Laura Yan about a recent conference of TIs.12 While sympathetic to their evident misery, Yan didn’t take their claims of being TIs seriously, and assumed they were all deluded. Some may not be. There is what looks like decent filmed evidence of gang-stalking on Youtube and some individuals have been targeted. The Stasi secret police in East Germany even had a term for the stalking and harassing of individuals, zersetzen.13 This story has been running in Lobster since issue 56 when I first noticed that Roderick Russell used the term.
* new * Chomsky’s blind spot Noam Chomsky is a great man with a striking blind spot about JFK. Presumably because he has not read the material, he simply does not recognise that JFK was anything but another identikit US imperialist president. Here he is recently
9
10 My guess would be deliberately, hoping that Muckrock would make fools of themselves, claiming the files proved government mind control activities or some such.
11
12
13 Roderick Russell introduced us to this. See his
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in an interview. ‘. . .if you look at the United States and the kinds of actions that John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson could carry out in Vietnam, they were possible because of almost complete lack of public attention.’ 14 Chomsky merges LBJ and JFK as if they had the same intentions and policies. When I read this I thought, ‘I’ll bet Jim DiEugenio has a go at this.’ And he has; oh boy, has he ever. His ‘Noam Chomsky Needs an Intervention’ begins: ‘Does Noam Chomsky have permanent foot-in-mouth disease? It looks like that. In his latest, he almost outdoes himself. Yet his acolytes still print his nonsensical meanderings.’ 15 And yes, he does stand that up, and in spades.
* new * The anti-semitism furore And so Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn duly met with the reps of the major Jewish bodies in the UK and one of the aims of their campaign was made explicit: they want the Labour Party to adopt the IHRA working definition of anti-semitism ‘in full together with all its examples’.16 Those ‘examples’17 are designed to make much of the criticism of Israel anti-semitism by definition. For the history of the long march of this new definition of anti-semitism through the world’s institutions, see the essay by Alison Weir.18
* new * All our yesterdays A reader asked me if I knew why the BBC had allowed a former employee, Paul Reynolds, to see some of the files generated by the once secret MI5 vetting of
14 Lynn Parramore, ‘Noam Chomsky on the Populist Groundswell, U.S. Elections, the Future of Humanity, and More’ at
15 At
16 See
17 Listed at
18
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BBC staff.19 I have no idea, I replied. The story on the BBC News website is worth reading – if only for the strong whiff of ‘the world gone by’ which emanates from it. Imagine a world in which the CPGB and its Trotskyist opponents, SWP, WRP and IMG, were regarded by as a serious threat to the existence of the British state. Imagine a world in which, because you had a friend at university who was in the CPGB, the BBC would not employ you. (Paul Reynolds quotes one such example in his report.) The same smell also comes from Charlotte Bingham’s MI5 and Me: A Coronet Among the Spooks (Bloomsbury 2018). Bingham’s father was John Bingham (Lord Clanmorris),20 a big cheese in the post-WW2 MI5 (with a revolver and a swordstick – to defend himself against those violent CPGB types, no doubt). Bingham got his daughter a job clerking in the organisation. Charlotte Bingham, a novelist, gives us a striking portrait of the organisation ambling through the 1950s with only the CPGB as a domestic target. At one point, she tells us, MI5 decided it would be quite a wheeze to create its own left-wing party to help splinter the CPGB. This got as far as one founding meeting before it collapsed. Reading this I wondered again if MI5 didn’t have a hand in the creation and/or funding of the SWP, WRP and IMG – organisations which attacked the CPGB. The only evidence – if you can call it that – on this we have is the comment by former BOSS agent, Gordon Winter. Interviewed by Tom Mangold, for the Panorama program in 1981 that was the first BBC TV documentary about the British security and intelligence services, Gordon Winter said: : ‘British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in Britain bigger than a football team our man is the captain or the vice captain, and if not, he is the referee and he can send any man off the field and call our man on at any time he likes.’ 21 Winter’s comment was the only piece of the programme which the spooks insisted be cut before transmission.
IRD and Indonesia A glimpse of one of the UK’s grubbier activities as junior partner of the United States in the cold war era was offered in the Guardian Review of 17 March 2018. In her piece on two recent books about Indonesia, Julia Lovell noted that
19 ‘The vetting files: How the BBC kept out “subversives”’
20
21 This was quoted in Leveller 51, March 1981.
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before the killing of half a million or so people in 1965-6 by the Indonesian Army: ‘. . . the US and British governments . . . . waged a devious campaign of psychological warfare before, during and after the massacres, in the hope of giving the [Indonesian] army a pretext to act against the communists, and to suppress accurate reports of the murders.’22 Credit where credit is due: the British contribution to this atrocity was first exposed by Lashmar and Oliver in their book about IRD,23 an extract from which, detailing the UK role in the Indonesian massacres, was published in the Independent.24 In the same year as the Lashmar/Oliver account, a memoir of sorts by the former Labour Minister, Christopher Mayhew, who helped set up IRD in the 1940s, acknowledged IRD’s role: ‘. . . .it played a key role, under [Peter] Reddaway’s guidance, in a publicity campaign that resulted in the removal of Achmed Sukarno as president of Indonesia, in 1965. . . .’ (p. 46)25
Memories. . . . . That faint clicking sound you can hear is keyboards being worked as people compose articles, books and TV scripts about ‘the Troubles’ whose fiftieth anniversary is approaching. Publishers and commissioning editors do love anniversaries on which to hang their products. Half a century is long enough, apparently, for British academics to take an interest in the security and intelligence issues that were involved there. One such academic is Dr. Tony Craig,26 who has a very interesting sounding essay, ‘From countersubversion to counter-insurgency – comparing MI5’s role in British Guiana, Aden and the Northern Ireland civil rights crisis’, on the Net. Sadly – and stupidly – access to it is £30.27 However its thesis can seen from the abstract:
22
23 Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War 1948-1977 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998)
24
25 Christopher Mayhew, War of Words: a Cold War Witness (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998) p. 46.
26 His essays are listed at
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‘As the imperial security service, MI5 operated throughout the British Empire and in virtually every instance of decolonisation after the Second World War. Using both secondments inside the Colonial Office (Security Intelligence Advisors or SIAs) and representatives within the colonies, dependencies and protectorates (Security Liaison Officers or SLOs), MI5 arguably operated in a more diverse range of political situations than any part of Britain’s armed forces. This article suggests that two main modes of conduct were deployed in the empire’s trouble spots by MI5 – counter- subversion and counter-insurgency – and that investigation of these instances can be used to shed light on MI5’s less documented role in the early years of the Northern Ireland Troubles. The article demonstrates that, unlike in Aden, the Security Service managed to maintain their liaison and supervision role in Northern Ireland without being absorbed within the local Special Branch in the first decade of the Troubles.’ This theme, the politics of British intelligence and security, is also central to an essay of Craig’s which is available to the hoi polloi without payment: ‘’Intelligence Management and the security stovepipe in Northern Ireland, 1968-1974’.28 The author lays out his thesis at the beginning: ‘Right from the beginning of the Northern Ireland Troubles, two different strands of British intelligence were developed in Northern Ireland that failed to effectively cooperate or coordinate their efforts with each other. Though the JIC, the Office of the UK Representative and later the Northern Ireland Office were all aware of (and opposed) the lack of singular control over intelligence in the province, they were unable for much of the 1970s to wrest control of security intelligence from the hands of the Army and Special Branch. This problem, which emerged as a result of both the developing nature of the deployment in the early 1970s and from the fear of alienating RUC Special Branch meant that a Security-Forces-controlled intelligence “stovepipe” 29 emerged that exclusively served the purpose of enforcing law and order rather than aiding in the UK government’s wider political strategies. Records from the National Archives show that at times this stovepipe operated without reference (and at times in opposition) to
28 29 An intelligence ‘stovepipe’ is shorthand for raw intelligence being delivered direct to those making decisions without going through the usual assessment procedures. Seymour Hersh discussed the ‘stovepipe’ through which pro-war intelligence was fed in the run-up to the US/UK invasion of Iraq at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the political initiatives also being tried by the UK government in the province.’ ‘The UK government’s wider political strategies’ is a euphemism for ‘trying to find a peace deal to end the violence’. What this meant in practice was that MI6 and the London-based politicians sought a negotiated peace, while the Army, MI5 and the RUC wanted first to ‘defeat the terrorists’. Craig identifies the first key MI6 officer as being Alan Rowley,30 who took over as Director of Intelligence in 1972, after the failure of the Army’s strategy of treating Northern Ireland as if it was another colonial insurgency and the ensuing problems that were caused by the Military Reaction Force and its associated operations.31 I e-mailed the paper to Colin Wallace, who was there at the time, and he replied: ‘The first Director and Co-ordinator in Northern Ireland was known as Allan Rowley, albeit his first name was “Frederick”, and he was a member of MI6. He took up his appointment in October 1972 and was replaced by Denis Payne from MI5 in October 1973 – that was when ‘Clockwork Orange’ was set up. I believe Alan Rowley went on to become Deputy Chief of MI6 in 1976. Denis Payne’s appointment also coincided with [IRD’s] Hugh Mooney’s departure from Northern Ireland in December that year.32 I feel that MI5 thereafter attempted to take over the IRD disinformation role. Allan Rowley, was highly regarded by the Army. Unfortunately in the years after his departure, many of the Intelligence malpractices that have surfaced in recent years occurred and that is why Mrs Thatcher took Maurice Oldfield out of retirement to bring the Northern Ireland Intelligence community under control. I have no doubt the latter is correct because Tony Cavendish, Sir Maurice Oldfield’s closest friend, told me. In 1974, Craig Smellie MI6, who was the “Assistant Secretary Political” at HQ NI and who was also highly regarded by the Army, was replaced by Ian Cameron of MI5, who accused me of “leaking” information to the press 30 Tom Griffin has him as Fred Rowley. 31 A introduction to the Military Reaction Force (aka MRF) – a brainchild of Brigadier Frank Kitson, the counter-insurgency guru at the time – and operations that the MRF ran (such as the Four Square Laundry and the the Gemini Health Studio ‘massage parlour’) is at 32 On Mooney see ‘Hugh who?’ In this issue at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk about William McGrath and Kincora, despite the fact that my Army superiors instructed me to do so. As the HIA Inquiry33 discovered, the MI5 Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence in 1982 when the Terry Inquiry into Kincora was set up, decreed that no members of MI5 were to be interviewed by the police. So much for the claim that “no one is above the law”!’ The way we were Thanks to a reader who pointed me towards an article in Counterpunch about the late L. Fletcher Prouty and the fate of his 1973 book The Secret Team.34 This very important book, about the role of the CIA in the cold war 1950s and 60s, was almost entirely suppressed by the Agency: copies were bought up and destroyed all over the world and the book disappeared from libraries in America, including the Library of Congress. The CIA missed copies in the UK, however, and I got it via the inter-library loan system. That was the world then. Today it’s available on-line.35 It was Prouty’s book which introduced me to the concept of ‘detailees’, CIA officers who were sent into other areas of the US military-intelligence complex. This may be currently happening in American politics. The World Socialist Website has published three articles showing the striking extent to which ex-CIA and ex-military personnel are becoming Democratic Party candidates in upcoming elections in the US.36 This could just be a result of the Republican Party choosing to be the stupid party and the Democrats having shown themselves to more reliable managers of the American military-intelligence complex. On the other hand, it might be military and spooks contemplating the possibility that, perhaps sooner than electorally scheduled, the next President might be a Democrat who is not enamoured of the American ‘empire’. In which case the tide of ex-service personnel into politics might be operations rather than happenstance and individual careerism.37 33 Historical institutional Abuse Inquiry at 34 35 At 36 Start at 37 See p. 53 at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk MLK Some small kudos to the Washington Post for doing a piece on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death which not only foregrounds the doubts about James Earl Ray’s role but actually discusses the alternative scenario, and features the lawyer William Pepper who has done much of the work showing that Ray was just another patsy.38 It’s only taken 50 years for one of the leading ‘liberal’ newspapers in the US to get to this point. William Pepper discusses his latest research and who-did-what in a conversation to be found on Global Research.39 The most startling claim there is this about James Earl Ray’s escape from prison a year or so before King’s murder. William Pepper: ‘Yes, that was arranged. J Edgar Hoover sent $25,000 into Memphis with Clyde Tolson, his number 2. Tolson was always an intermediary. . .intermediary with the Dixie Mafia people, and government and police people who were involved in the assassination. . . .The head of the Dixie Mafia, Russell Adkins, took the $25,000 to the prison and gave it to the warden to pay him for arranging the escape. James knew nothing about it, but they had profiled him as a candidate, an ideal patsy candidate and then they arranged for this escape and then they kept him on a leash and knew where he was, and kept him under control, moved him around to have him where he needed to be as a patsy. I learned this because the 16-year-old son of the Dixie Mafia leader went along with his father to give the money to the warden, so he was able to confirm that.’ The anti-semitism furore Two things: first, we should acknowledge that the Israeli lobby in this country has run a clever campaign. Second, Jeremy Corbyn is essentially being accused of guilt by association with the wrong people. But he is being accused of this by people who associate with Israel, which is engaged in the slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the original residents of the country. The scale of denial involved in being pro-Israel today is positively heroic. 38 39 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Trust us, it’s safe The title and subhead of the piece summarise the story: ‘How Big Wireless Made Us Think That Cell Phones Are Safe: A Special Investigation The disinformation campaign—and massive radiation increase— behind the 5G rollout.’ The final paragraph of the piece is this: ‘No scientist can say with certainty how many wireless-technology users are likely to contract cancer, but that is precisely the point: We simply don’t know. Nevertheless, we are proceeding as if we do know the risk, and that the risk is vanishingly small. Meanwhile, more and more people around the world, including countless children and adolescents, are getting addicted to cell phones every day, and the shift to radiation-heavy 5G technology is regarded as a fait accompli. Which is just how Big Wireless likes it.’ And this isn’t on some wacky website. This is in The Nation, which has been going since 1865.40 The same river twice There was a joke in the 1980s: Q. What’s the definition of a radical magazine? A. One that doesn’t last very long. Which means Lobster isn’t very radical, I guess. In the 35 years of its existence I have only appealed once to Lobster readers for money – around the time of Lobster 11, the Wilson-MI5 issue. By far the biggest contribution I received was from novelist G. F. Newman, who sent me £80 – which bailed me out of the little financial hole I was in. So I am happy to use this column to inform you that Newman’s ground-breaking novel Law and Order, first published in the 1970s, is being republished as an ebook by No Exit Press (www.noexit.co.uk), to coincide with the rebroadcasting on BBC4 of the four-part drama series written by Newman based on his novel.41 40 41 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The known universe of belief In February Jeffrey S. Kaye published an article about, and accompanied by the text of, the 1952 report of an international committee of inquiry into the alleged use of biological weapons in the Korean War by the United States.42 A quick Google showed that this story had been rumbling away ever since the 1999 publication of Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman’s The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets of the Early Cold War and Korea.43 The reappearance of this topic has coincided with Netflix releasing the series Wormwood, directed by Errol Morris. Wormwood is about the death of Frank Olsen, the biochemist working for the US military who was murdered by the CIA in 1953.44 Michael Ignatieff – Canadian intellectual and leader of the Liberal Party of Canada – wrote about Wormwood in the New York Review of Books:45 ‘. . . the facts, as [Eric] Olsen’s research has established, are that Allen Dulles, Richard Helms and other unnamed persons at the highest levels of the American government ordered the death of [Frank Olsen] because they feared he knew too much about US biological warfare during the Korean War and about the torture and execution of Soviet agents and ex-Nazi “expendables” in black sites in Europe during the early 1950s.’ 46 42 At 43 In Lobster’s archive I found this in issue 44. Korean germ warfare In issue 40 I reported: ‘Issue 11 of the Bulletin of Cold War International History Project contained what appears to be evidence that the allegations by North Korea and the Chinese that the US were using biological warfare during the Korean War were false – were in fact disinformation.’ This has now been challenged. In a paper, ‘Twelve Newly Released Soviet-era Documents and allegations of U.S. germ warfare during the Korean War’ at 44 Olsen’s murder is the subject of H. P. Albarelli Jr.’s A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, reviewed by Anthony Frewin in Lobster 59. 45 46 See also Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Ignatieff wrote of Frank Olsen’s son, Eric, who has been pursuing this case for decades: ‘Eric remains the only friend I have who has entirely left the known universe of belief that the American state remains a government of laws rather than a regime of covert violence.’ ‘The known universe of belief’ is a nice phrase but Mr Ignatieff ought to widen his reading. He means the known universe of respectable, career-compatible belief. But this is not an either/or situation. The American state is both a government of laws and a regime of covert violence. Back to the future (again) It was not surprising to see Guido Fawkes, 47 Staines wrote a pretty crappy book about Nicaragua, In the grip of the Sandinistas, which I once owned but have long since ditched. 48 On British Briefing see 49 ‘Coffee with Corbyn’ in the London Review of Books, 8 March 2018. See ‘Short Cuts' at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk reporting officer, Jack Binns, was a real friend of his. He was a great party guy and would come to all of our parties and talk to all of us. He and Jack were on a first name basis. So Jack became the political counselor when Kinnock got to be the leader of the Labor Party. Literally, Binns could call up and have access to him at any time.’50 Kinnock’s formula for becoming leader of the Labour Party? Sound like a lefty to members and become an informant for the American embassy. Russiagate ‘Two years ago. . . .[f]rom Trump to Bernie Sanders to Brexit to Catalonia, voter repudiation of the status quo was the story of the day. The sense of panic among political elites was palpable. The possibility that voters might decide to break up the EU, or put a Trump, Corbyn, or Sanders into power, led to a spate of “Do we have too much democracy?” essays by prominent think tankers and national press figures. Two years later, the narrative has completely shifted. By an extraordinary coincidence, virtually all the “anti-system” movements and candidates that so terrified the political establishment two years ago have since been identified as covert or overt Russian destabilization initiatives, puppeteered from afar by the diabolical anti-Western dictator, Vladimir von Putin-Evil.’51 This is from a piece by the excellent Matt Taibbi, ‘The New Blacklist’; and what is happening now is indeed reminiscent of that period in the early 1950s. Consortiumnews.com Good news and bad news about consortiumnews.com. The good news is that it has republished Garrick Alder’s essay about Kissinger, the Washington Post and Watergate which is in this issue of Lobster. The bad news is that Robert Parry, founder of consortiumnews.com, has died. Parry was about as good as it got and was one of the few major American journalists who were prepared to step outside Ignatieff’s ‘known universe of belief’.52 50 Carl Edward Dillery interview at 51 52 For the CIA’s collection of Parry’s articles see Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Just like old times On the smears running through the Sun, the Mail, the Telegraph and ‘Ron Hayward, Labour’s general secretary from 1972 to 1982, had secret meetings in the Soviet Embassy with KGB officers to discuss the takeover of the Labour Party by pro-Soviet elements. In one of these, to the background noise of a jamming machine switched on to prevent their conversation from being bugged, Hayward confided his intention of eclipsing the Parliamentary Labour Party and vesting power instead in the National Executive Committee (which he chaired), so that he could become “the first Labour leader in history who is not afraid to come out alongside communists with the same agenda”.’ 53 The author of this piece – more on him below – has, apparently, had access to the product of British intelligence bugging of the Soviet embassy in London. I googled ‘Hayward KGB’ and got Sue Reid’s ‘How the Kremlin hijacked Labour: Diary of a Kremlin insider reveals the hold Soviets had over Labour politicians’ from the Mail on Sunday in 2009.54 This article referred to ‘. . . an extraordinary diary by Anatoly Chernyaev, the Soviet Union’s contact man with the West at the icy height of the Cold War. Meticulously detailed and written by hand on lined notepaper, the diary has come to light in the U.S. National Security Archive.’ Some of Chernyaev’s diary is indeed there. The following long quotation is from 53 54 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk an account by Chernyaev of meeting Ron Hayward who was at the time General Secretary of the Labour Party. ‘Right away he started talking about the conference and their success in pressuring the right and the government. Once again, same as in Moscow, he repeated his credo: as he sees it, the goal of his time as General Secretary is to finally give Great Britain “a real socialist government.” To do this, it is necessary to break the tradition of the Labour government and Parliamentary faction allowing themselves to ignore the decisions of the Labour conference and not recognizing the authority of the Executive Committee. He has already done a great deal to raise the role and authority of the Executive Committee by using the surge on the left in the Labour party, which this time was unusually long-lasting. On these grounds, his conflict with Wilson is growing, though they have been friends since their youth. (During the first session Wilson left the room as soon as Hayward started speaking, and came back as soon as he was finished.) He made a stake to develop relations with the CPSU for the same reason. I don’t think he has any ideological affinity for us. But he is unprejudiced and operates from positions of “common sense.” The Soviet Union is not only a real and lasting factor in world politics, it is a superpower and a clear guarantor of peace. He does not see any threat to England from the Soviet Union, just as he does not see a communist threat in his country in general. In the meantime, good relations with such a country (i.e. if the Soviet Union views him, Hayward, as a major political figure) can provide big dividends in terms of popularity and domestic perspectives. Plus, he is a plebeian by nature and sincerely hates the British aristocratic style and capitalism. And even though he knows the worth of our “plebeians,” it seems he likes us as a people. With us one can be “candid” and behave naturally. . . . . We talked about their relationship with the communists [Communist Party of Great Britain]. He got a little agitated: “I am the first person in the history of the Labour Party who does not hesitate to speak on the same platform with the Communists. There are some activists among them whom I consider to be the best fighters for socialism and the interests of the working class. I would gladly welcome them to the Labour Party.” He named McGehee (member of CPGB Politburo, Vice President of the Union of Mineworkers). “Twice I even spoke at meetings with John Gollan. And at the meeting dedicated to the 50th anniversary of Anglo-Soviet diplomatic relations I gave a better speech than he did!” He pointed to Kubeykin and Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Misha and added, “Isn’t that true?! But in politics and elections they are our opponents.” Then he criticized them for their behavior at the last elections: they put their candidates in the places where every vote mattered for the Labour Party, and as a result Tories and Liberals won some of the seats.’ 55 Hayward says here, more or less, what he apparently said in the Soviet embassy in London. The author of the Telegraph piece quoted above, the man with access to the product of the bugging of the Soviet embassy, is Giles Udy. His publisher’s blurb on him includes this: ‘Giles Udy is a historian who has spent the past fifteen years studying Soviet Communism, with a particular focus on the repression of its citizens and its sponsorship of revolution and subversion abroad. . . . . He is a member of the council of the Keston Institute, Oxford . . . .’ 56 Keston may ring a bell. It’s self-description includes this: ‘Founded originally by the Revd Canon Dr Michael Bourdeaux and Sir John Lawrence with the help of the distinguished academics Professor Leonard Schapiro and Professor Peter Reddaway, Keston Institute has always had an academic emphasis in addition to its public education role. The creation and development of an archive to support the study of religion in Communist and formerly Communist countries has always been a core aim of Keston Institute, whose reputation for reliability was based on careful research and verification of information through primary sources. The archive was composed originally of samizdat and research materials collected by the founder, Canon Michael Bourdeaux, but over the years it has grown extensively and now represents a unique collection. The archive contains information nowhere else available on an important aspect of 20th century history, namely the history of religion during the Communist period. Furthermore, the archive is complemented by a library of over 8,000 books and 200 periodicals, which have also been built up since Keston Institute’s foundation.’57 Schapiro wrote books for, and Reddaway was a member of, the Information 55 The 1974 diary 56 57 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Research Department (IRD) the Foreign Office’s anti-subversion, anti-Soviet organisation about which a great deal has been written, not least in these columns. Schapiro was also a member, and briefly chair of, Brian Crozier’s Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC).58 In other words, the Keston Institute is a product of the Anglo-American anti-Soviet and anti-communist apparatus created during the Cold War. This explains why Mr Udy was given access to surveillance tapes of the Soviet embassy in London. If it isn’t funded by them, Keston liaises with the British security and intelligence services. With the arrival of Jeremy Corby and a left-leaning Labour Party membership, the dust is being blown off a lot of old files all over Whitehall . . . . All the news that fits I went to see The Post, Spielberg’s film about the Pentagon Papers and the Washington Post. It was mildly entertaining, even though it told only a very small part of the story.59 I came out of the cinema thinking how striking it is that the major liberal media in the US – The Post and The Times – responded with enthusiasm to some big political scandals but not to the assassinations of the Kennedys and King. They remain the big no-no.60 Can it simply be politics, that they’re only interested if a scandal embarrasses the Republican Party? The lift stops here On 19 January 2017, the Plasco tower, a 17-storey, steel-framed building in Tehran, built in the 1960s, caught fire, burned and then collapsed in its own footprint. Twenty? Thirty? – reports vary – firefighters who were in the building in the belief that the fire was under control were killed. The 9/11 researchers at AE911Truth, the architects and engineers who are sceptical of the 9/11 official verdict, watched the footage of the Plasco building and saw what looked like 58 On Schapiro and Reddaway see, for example, 59 On which see James DiEugenio’s fine essay at 60 Since I wrote that the Washington Post has done something half decent on King. See above under subhead MLK. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk explosions on some of the floors just before it collapsed. Nothing if not consistent, they put out a press release urging the Tehran authorities to look for evidence of explosives when they inquired into the Plasco collapse.61 This provoked ridicule in some quarters.62 But before joining in the guffaws, have a look at the footage of the collapse63 and read the detailed report by AE9/11Truth on the incident, which includes quotes from firefighters at the scene who reported explosions just before the collapse.64 To this technically ignorant eye there does appear to have been explosions. It does look like a demolition.65 It became obvious quite soon after 9/11 that the event was going to be the Kennedy assassination for this era. This meant that there would be a fake inquiry, like the Warren Commission, which would try to bury the subject. And so it proved: the 9/11 Commission report was received with the same chorus of cat-calls as was Warren. The only difference was the time gap: it took three years for the first Warren doubters to assemble the evidence and decades before it became known that some of the Warren Commission’s own members didn’t believe the Commission’s report. The 9/11 Commission report was being attacked within weeks of its publication and was disowned by its co-chairs within five years.66 61 62 63 64 The AE911Truth report on the incident is at 65 The last sentence of the Wikipedia entry on the event when I accessed it on 30 January 2018 was ‘It collapsed due to a controlled demolition.’ 66 The co-chairs of the Commission wrote a book detailing their criticisms of the inquiry five years after the Report was published. See T. H. Kean, and L. H. Hamilton, with B. Rhodes, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (Knopf: New York, 2006) at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk But many of the 9/11 sceptics failed to grasp one of the key lessons eventually learned by their JFK equivalents: the cover-up and the conspiracy may not be related. After a political event of the size of JFK’s assassination or 9/11, everybody runs for cover and prepares their exculpatory narrative. ‘The truth’ doesn’t make it onto the political agenda. This is normal bureaucratic behaviour. The critical demarcation line in the 9/11 event should be between the planes hitting the towers and the buildings’ collapse. The evidence that al Qaeda did indeed hijack the planes which hit the Twin Towers is undeniable, in my view. But they also look as though they were demolished: the evidence at AE911Truth on this is substantial. But if it is a demolition, the same questions arise with the Plasco tower as it does with the Twin Towers: who put the explosives in and when? Wiring a skyscraper with explosives takes weeks. And was the demolition deliberate or accidental? In 2004 Robert L. Parish Sr. wrote an article in which he said that years before 9/11 he had been told by a senior Otis Elevator engineer that some skyscrapers were constructed with explosives in them, precisely so they could be brought down vertically in an emergency and keep damage to surrounding buildings to a minimum.67 Since the Plasco building had no political, military or intelligence significance that I can discover, and there was no reason for there to be explosives in it, it might be worth considering the thesis of Mr Parish Sr.. As safe as milk Lobster’s archive is big and I have little idea of what’s there. Recently I did a search of it for ‘microwaves’ and discovered all the articles and little snippets on that subject I published after meeting the late Harlan Girard in 1989. Girard claimed to be a mind control victim68 and he gave me a collection of articles showing that microwave technology was dangerous. I was prompted to go back to this by the appearance of another scientific study showing the effects of the 67 This is at 68 He was discussed in the Washington Post. See Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk radiation from the ubiquitous mobile phone networks.69 The authors’ conclusion is: ‘In this study, we found an almost three-fold increased risk of miscarriage if a pregnant woman was exposed to higher MF [magnetic field] levels compared to women with lower MF exposure.’ This report appeared in the same week that the State of California published guidelines on how to use mobile phones with the minimum of risk to health.70 We now have guidelines for using something that has been officially declared safe? If this is new to you, the places to start with this are the interview with epidemiologist and Clinton era White House advisor Devra Davis71 and the internal memo from Motorola in 1995 which discusses ‘wargaming’ the research one of their own scientists who had shown microwaves to be dangerous.72 American friends Prompted by reading the second volume of Jeffrey Bale’s book (reviewed in this issue) which is largely about Islam and jihadi terrorism, I googled ‘US support for jihadis’. Top of the suggested reading list was ‘How America Armed Terrorists in Syria’ by Gareth Porter in that well known extreme left forum The American Conservative.73 As well as the suggested reading, Google offered as related searches: us support al nusra us support al qaeda syria us funding al qaeda in syria 69 De-Kun Li, Hong Chen, Jeannette R. Ferber, Roxana Odouli & Charles Quesenberry , ‘Exposure to Magnetic Field Non-Ionizing Radiation and the Risk of Miscarriage: A Prospective Cohort Study’, Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 17541 (2017). 70 71 72 73 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk us support of al qaeda in afghanistan So you ask: ‘How can the Americans be so dumb – and so often?’ But maybe that’s the wrong question. Things make more sense if we stop assuming the US military and intelligence agencies have any serious interest in geopolitical outcomes. Instead we should assume that they’re interested, firstly, in getting taxes to expand their bureaucratic empires and pay for the salaries of their personnel. Secondly they want the continued flow of contracts to the weapons companies and their Washington lobbyists to which senior US military and intelligence personnel gravitate after leaving their services. Recent history has taught them that so long as the targets are politically and militarily insignificant, it matters little on whom they are dropping bombs or at whom their drones are launching missiles, just so long as there is something to be called ‘a threat’ which can be used to keep those contracts coming.74 It used to be the ‘red menace’ and then, as the Cold War petered out, it became terrorism.75 So since 2000 we have had Iraq, al Qaeda and ISIS – all of which were armed and supported at various points by the USA – and now we have North Korea. Because the US military is so powerful, US foreign policy isn’t conducted seriously (though it is often catastrophic in its consequences for the people on the receiving end). For example, at the height of the war in Vietnam, the US embassy in Saigon had not a single American who could speak the language and the senior military conducting that war routinely faked the casualty figures. Today the best evidence is the privatisation of much of their intelligence- gathering effort. The cold warriors of the CIA in the 50s and 60s may have been misguided – there was no global Soviet threat – but they were working for relatively small salaries, motivated by something other than money. With at least 70% of US intelligence-gathering in the hands of a few 74 A number of new ‘threats’ are currently being generated in Africa. See, for example, ‘Where in the World Is the U.S. Military? Everywhere’ at 75 Former NSA technical director, William Binney, said of the NSA circa 1989: ‘They were basically fat, dumb and happy thinking the Soviet Union would continue and that would be their major threat all along so they could justify the existence of a large organization like NSA. . . .’ Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk private companies, the security risks are enormously increased76 – Edward Snowden comes to mind. Not only that, intelligence agencies have traditionally talked about their intel as ‘the product’. With privatisation, intelligence literally becomes ‘a product’ and its reliability is devalued by the commercial relationships now at its heart. But reliable intelligence is unimportant in the generation of the necessary ‘threats’, as was exemplified by the Iraq affair and the non-existent ‘weapons of mass destruction’. The best fictional account of American foreign policy is the film Wag the Dog,77 in which a ‘threat’ from Albania is manufactured. North Korea is hardly much more of a threat to the United States than Albania used to be. Nonetheless we have people around the White House arguing, with straight faces, that the USA might have to attack North Korea to nullify its ‘threat’.78 We can assume that the US now has plans to attack North Korean nuclear facilities. Question is: how do you attack the nuclear facilities of a country which has nuclear weapons of its own? If the North Korean claims about their nuclear and missile capabilities are true, they may be able to deter US attacks – which is the point of their going nuclear in the first place. Russia and the USA Another salvo against the Trump regime by the Democratic Party is the report written by Democratic congressional staffers, PUTIN’S ASYMMETRIC ASSAULT ON DEMOCRACY IN RUSSIA AND EUROPE: IMPLICATIONS FOR U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY (caps in the original).79 Using public sources,80 this is a prosecutor’s brief on the failings of the current Russian regime: corruption, aggression, suppression of dissent, influence and disinformation operations.81 The point of the exercise is to further implicate Trump and his circle in Russian manipulation of the US political system.82 Though much of this picture of Russia will be 76 77 See 78 79 80 The main text has 860 footnotes for its 150 pages. 81 Coming from representatives of the world’s most aggressive, destructive, militaristic and imperialistic nation, this is comic. 82 There are also hints that the Russians influenced the referendum here about EU. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to the Anglosphere’s media in the last decade or two, pulled together like this it is quite an indictment. Yet its authors cannot resist over-egging the pudding they are making. The opening chapter claims: ‘Putin’s regime appears intent on using almost any means possible to undermine the democratic institutions and transatlantic alliances that have underwritten peace and prosperity in Europe for the past 70-plus years.’ 83 ‘. . .almost any means possible’? Lots of wiggle room in that use of ‘almost’. And there is sleight of hand in the phrase ‘70-plus years’, for much of what is described by the authors has taken place in the countries bordering Russia – the cordon sanitaire created by the USSR after WW2 – which only joined the ‘democratic institutions and transatlantic alliances’ since the fall of the Soviet bloc in 1989/90. On page 13 the authors present the Russian viewpoint on all this: ‘. . . Putin’s regime and most of the Russian people view the history of the late 20th century and early 21st century in a starkly different light than most of the West does. The historical narrative popular in Russia paints this period as one of repeated attempts by the West to undermine and humiliate Russia. In reality, the perceived aggression of the United States and the West against Russia allows Putin to ignore his domestic failures and present himself as the leader of a wartime nation: a ‘‘Fortress Russia.’’ This narrative repeatedly flogs core themes like enemy encirclement, conspiracy, and struggle, and portrays the United States, NATO, and Europe as conspiring to encircle Russia and make it subservient to the West. As part of this supposed conspiracy, the EU goes after former Soviet lands like Ukraine, and Western spies use civil society groups to meddle in and interfere with Russian affairs.’ For a group of staffers in the current Democratic Party this Russian view is nonsensical. But mid-way between Washington and Moscow as I am, it doesn’t look that way.84 Using similar published sources, those staffers could stand up much of the Russian view of the situation. At one or two places in the report they even show the doors which, if opened, would lead into this other conceptual landscape. On pp. 18/19 they write: 83 84 Nor does it look that way to US analysts who are not part of Washington’s group think on this issue, most notably those writing at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘The hostile environment for domestic NGOs also fuelled a blowback against foreign entities who sought to support them. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which for two decades had supported democracy and rule of law promotion in Russia, as well as health and education, announced in October 2012 that it would shut down its mission amidst pressure from the Kremlin. USAID was not alone: by December of that year, the International Republican Institute (IRI) announced it was closing its office on orders from the Russian government, and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) closed its office in Russia and moved its staff out of the country. In January 2015, the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation announced it was closing its Moscow office after the Duma asked the Justice Ministry to investigate whether a select group of organizations, including MacArthur as well as the U.S.-based Open Society Foundations (OSF) and Freedom House, should be declared ‘‘undesirable’’ and banned from the country.’ The report does not mention that the IRI and NDI are funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which essentially took over the CIA’s propaganda operations, or that USAID has often been used as cover by the CIA. It may be that, in this instance, these organisations in Russia were simply what they purported to be, but the Russians’ suspicion is not so irrational. Michael Morell, formerly CIA’s deputy director, almost recognised the validity of the Russian perspective recently. In an interview with politico.com85 he said this: ‘Putin’s view of us is that we want to undermine him, and that we are actively working to do so. Right? He really believes that. And he points to things that are absolutely true. The State Department pushing for democracy in Russia openly. And then he points to things that aren’t true, like the CIA was behind the street protests in Kiev that led to all the problems in Ukraine. Right? That’s his worldview, is that we are trying to undermine him, and that we want him to go away, right? And so, when you think about it in those terms, what he’s doing against us – right? It’s kind of interesting, right? It doesn’t justify what he’s doing, but it certainly puts it in perspective.’86 What neither Morell nor the Democratic staffers mention is the fact that the 85 86 I cannot find Putin saying this. He may have done so. Nic Must pointed out that Forbes has reported he said something very similar (although they don’t detail when or where). See Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk hostility towards the USA from Russian leaders began with the lies told to the Russians by America and its allies about their intentions after German reunification. The National Security Archive headlines its article on some recently declassified documents from this period: ‘NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner’87 Despite the promises of the great and the good in 1990, former Soviet bloc members joined NATO and the Russians now have American weapons on their border. Little wonder that the Russian political class believes that it is America’s aim to overthrow their regime and steal the resources that are there. Huh? On 26 December the Daily Telegraph ran a piece by Kate McCann, its senior political correspondent, which was headed: ‘Project fear was wrong about Brexit, a major new economic report has concluded today, as it revealed the UK will bounce back to overtake the French economy in 2020.’ Four days later the same paper ran a piece by Tim Wallace headed: ‘Is Britain at risk of becoming the sick man of Europe?’. This was headed: ‘A soft patch of economic growth has left Britain’s performance looking weak relative to the eurozone’s for the first time in years.’ The paranoid’s paranoid James Angleton still looms large in the study of the Anglo-American intelligence services. His fantasies about the Soviet threat were fed into this country’s red- hunting apparatus to the extent that a section of MI5 (and other sections of the ruling elites at the time, following them) believed that Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent. Thus the ‘Wilson plots’ of the 1970s and, to some extent, the rise of Mrs Thatcher, who believed the thesis.88 This fantasy about Wilson was based on the claim of the KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn that the KGB had assassinated an (unnamed) Western politician, plus the fact that Wilson’s 87 88 Her acceptance of the Wilson-KGB thesis was discussed in my ‘View from the Bridge’ in Lobster 51. As leader of the Opposition she tried to get the civil service to investigate Wilson. This is not to be found in Charles Moore’s much lauded ‘authorized biography’, Margaret Thatcher (Allen Lane, 2013). Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk predecessor as leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, died of lupus, which was then a very rare disease.89 The American intelligence community has looked at Golitsyn’s role in all this, and some of this material is available.90 But to my knowledge that community has still to come to a (public) conclusion as to Golitsyn’s motives. Since he was inventing much of what he said, was he merely busking it, feeding back into Angleton’s paranoia? Or had he been sent precisely to do this, to cause chaos within the US (and to a much lesser extent UK) intelligence services? To my knowledge this latter delicious thesis has not been seriously considered. Perhaps the new biography of Angleton by Jefferson Morley explores this.91 Brexit On his state visit to Britain in January, French President Macron spelled it out: ‘The choice is up to Britain: it’s not my choice – but they can have no differentiated access to financial services,’ he said. ‘If you want access for financial services, be my guest – but it means you have to contribute to the budget, and accept European jurisdiction. It’s a situation that exists for Norway.’ 92 Since the Conservative Party has always looked to the interests of the City first, and our prime minister is married to a hedge fund manager93 and must understand precisely what the ‘hedgies’ want,94 the shape of the eventual deal 89 Lupus is no longer so rare. I know of three people within walking distance of me with lupus. Is there more of it about or is it being better diagnosed? 90 See the partially redacted account at 91 There is much about this new book at Morley’s site 92 93 The interesting question is: was Mr May’s company of ‘hedgies’ among those who were gambling on Carillion’s future and shorting its shares in the run-up to its failure? 94 On whom the Tories depend for about a fifth of their income. See Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk looks reasonably clear: it will be something akin to the Norway option.95 The UK will remain in the single market and the customs union but this will be glossed in some fashion to be sold as obeying the result of the referendum. It is worth reminding ourselves of the scale of the mess that David Cameron has created. In 2016, when he was prime minister, the British state got a guarantee from the EU that the City of London would be safe from EU regulation.96 It was the threat of such regulation which was fuelling City support for leaving the EU. But for party management reasons, just as Harold Wilson did in 1974, Cameron had already pledged a referendum and his triumph in Brussels was for nought. Who’s zooming who? In this column in Lobster 74 I mentioned a long list of false flag attacks.97 An even longer and more thoroughly documented list has subsequently appeared on the website Washington’s Blog: ‘There Are Now So Many Admissions by Government Officials of False Flag Terror that Only the Wilfully Ignorant Still Doubt the Reality of the Concept’.98 95 The EU negotiator, M. Barnier, said the same thing just before Christmas. 96 97 At 98 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Deep Kiss How the Washington Post missed the biggest Watergate story of all Garrick Alder At the height of the Watergate scandal, in summer 1974, Dr Henry Kissinger tried to tell the world about an act of treason that had been committed by President Richard Nixon over the Vietnam War. The information was passed to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post – but it never appeared in print. Richard Nixon’s flashing of his trademark double V-signs as he fled the White House by helicopter meant exactly what they appeared to suggest: he had got away with it. The secret that Dr Kissinger attempted to make public related to Nixon’s sabotage of the Paris peace talks held in late 1968, while Nixon was running for the presidency against Democratic challenger Senator Hubert Humphrey. Dr Kissinger’s breach of confidence – essentially betraying another traitor – unlocks the dark heart of the entire Watergate scandal. At the centre of the scandal is a botched burglary ordered by President Nixon. And it wasn’t the 19 June 1972 break-in at the Watergate complex. The previous year, on 13 June 1971, the New York Times had published the first batch of the Pentagon Papers, a splash falling six inside pages deep. They cited documents that showed the fabrication, fiction, and falsehoods being fed to the public about the USA’s engagement in Vietnam. The leaker was RAND Corporation employee Daniel Ellsberg, then aged 40, who had returned from a tour of duty in Vietnam disillusioned and disgusted with his nation’s ‘bloody, hopeless, uncompelled, and surely immoral prolongation [of] mass murder.’ Ellsberg declared: ‘I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.’1 Nixon immediately became obsessed with documents relating to the war, which he believed might also be leaked, and with sequestering them for himself. He had originally toyed with the idea soon after taking office in 1969, telling his 1 This quote from Ellsberg has been widely referenced over the years but the original source appears to be the UPI report of Ellsberg’s arrest. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk number one aide, H. R. Haldeman, that he wanted to get hold of records, which he believed the Brookings Institute had, that related to a ‘bombing pause in late 1968 part of a last-minute “peace effort” by Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, intended to derail Nixon’s campaign.’2 Haldeman’s efforts to get the documents fizzled out due (he thought) to bureaucratic obfuscation and he forgot about the document hunt. Nixon, however, did not. The first trace of desperation is recorded on the White House tape of 17 June 1971 (i.e., four days after the first New York Times story about the Pentagon Papers). Nixon is heard telling Haldeman: ‘God damn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get them.’ Nixon’s aides were used to occasionally turning a deaf ear to their boss’s more outrageous orders. Indeed a fortnight later (30 June 1971) Nixon had to hammer home his demands once more: ‘I want Brookings . . . just break in, break in, and take it out. Do you understand? You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in.’ Twenty four hours later, Nixon issued the same demand even more emphatically: ‘Did they get the Brookings Institute raided last night? No? Get it done. I want it done. I want the Brookings Institute safe cleaned out.’ What was in the safe at the Brookings Institute that made the President of the USA demand burglaries, over and over again, to his senior aides? That aspect of the Watergate story didn’t appear to interest Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they pressed ahead with their investigation of the Watergate burglary itself. LBJ knew In office between 1963 and 1968, Lyndon Baines Johnson was the first US president who routinely tape-recorded his meetings and telephone conversations. One tape from the last days of the Johnson administration is far more incriminating than the so-called ‘smoking gun’ tape that led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974. At 9.18 pm on 2 November 1968, Johnson called Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen to discuss the unforeseen failure of the Paris summit (‘peace talks’) that Johnson had so painstakingly set up over the course of that year.3 After proposing a couple of hypothetical reasons for the collapse of the 2 H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (1978) pp. 251-252. With characteristic dishonesty, Nixon later stated in his memoirs that it was Haldeman who had actually suggested the plan, claiming Haldeman suggested the Brookings papers could be used to ‘blackmail’ Johnson. The fact that Haldeman had died the year before Nixon made this startling claim is unlikely to have been coincidental. 3 For the full audio recording and accompanying transcript see Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk summit, Johnson sardonically got to the point and the topic of the conversation was suddenly transformed from the theoretical to the pragmatic. Johnson: ‘Or some of our folks, including some of the old China Lobby, are going to the [South] Vietnamese embassy and saying, “Please notify the [South Vietnamese] President that if he’ll hold out till November the 2nd they could get a better deal. [. . .] And they oughtn’t to be doing this. This is treason.” Dirksen: ‘I know.’ (emphasis added) The ‘China Lobby’ referred to by Johnson was the ad-hoc conglomerate of hard-right Republican politicians and Chinese exiles who had made their cause the demonisation of President Harry Truman as ‘the man who lost China’, seeking thereby to tar the entire Democratic Party by historical association. One of those Republicans was Richard Nixon. Johnson went on to speculate about the identity of the Nixon aide who was acting as go-between with the South Vietnamese president, and then came to the reason he had phoned Dirksen. Johnson: ‘Now, if Nixon keeps the South Vietnamese away from the conference, well, that’s going to be his responsibility. Up to this point, that’s why they’re not there. I had them signed on board until this happened. Dirksen: ‘Yeah.’ [Pause.] ‘OK.’ Johnson: ‘Well, now, what do you think we ought to do about it?’ Dirksen: Well, I better get in touch with him, I think, and tell him about it.’ (emphasis added) In plain language, Nixon had undermined Johnson’s summit by telling the South Vietnamese president that he would get a better deal if he waited until Nixon was in the White House. Johnson knew what Nixon was up to, and he wanted to make Nixon aware that he knew about these destabilising manoeuvres. To date, no record of Dirksen informing Nixon about Johnson’s awareness of the sabotage has surfaced. But, from Haldeman’s January 1969 encounter with Nixon (described above), we know that Nixon entered office with his own subterfuge weighing heavily on his mind. This might have been compounded by the fact that, when he took office, Nixon abandoned any pretence at seeking peace and escalated the Vietnam War instead. What did Johnson think as he watched the Watergate scandal begin to grow in later 1972? No documentary record of any such reactions has yet been released by the Johnson Presidential Library. Johnson himself died of a heart attack on 22 January 1973, just 48 hours after Nixon’s inauguration for his Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk second term as President.4 The Johnson-Dirksen conversation is fairly damning, but is it unfair to have expected Woodward and Bernstein to have uncovered Nixon’s treason decades before that conversation became public? As it happens, the two venerated newsmen cannot be acquitted lightly – if at all. In a 24 July 1974 memorandum,5 quoted here in its original spelling and layout, Bob Woodward set out what he could recall of an interview with Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, in which the Brookings break-in was discussed. ‘At president’s direction E[hrlichman] said he talked to Brookings and about secrecy there; did it several times; right after Pentagon Papers. Also about Brookings a meeting in San Clemente about 12 July 71 ‘undoubtedly discussed it’ (w/ Dean) the discussions were an effort to get the so-called “bombing halt” papers back.’ There were no ‘bombing halt’ papers, this was just another Nixon lie to conceal his true motivations, and Ehrlichman essentially admitted as much to Bob Woodward during the same interview, when describing his attempts to access the Brookings Institute’s Vietnam records via official bureaucratic channels: ‘Buzhardt decided what we not get to see [sic] So it was admittedly a hit and miss process.’ in terms of what he got to see; not the whole story; but the Brookings matter was not necessarily what he was looking for. Wouldn’t elaborate on that.’ (emphasis added)6 Nor was Ehrlichman the sole source nudging Woodward and Bernstein towards the truth about the Brookings break-in plan, or even the strongest source. Filed at the University of Texas, along with the 24 July 1974 Ehrlichman interview notes, is a second typed memorandum from Woodward, addressed to his colleague Carl Bernstein, setting out what a well-placed and unnamed source had told him about the Brookings affair. However, this second document has nothing to do with Ehrlichman and it is unclear why it was filed alongside 4 Johnson compiled a dossier on what he knew of Nixon’s treason, including documents gleaned from the CIA and FBI detailing surveillance of Nixon’s go-betweens. Johnson entrusted his so-called ‘X-Envelope’ to Walt Rostow, his National Security Advisor. On 26 June 1973, with Johnson now dead, Rostow handed this dossier to the director of the LBJ Presidential Library, with a note recommending that it remain secret for another 50 years. It was eventually opened on 22 July 1994. A copy was obtained during the present research. 5 Brookings Institute, Woodward’s typed notes. Ehrlichman (Ref: Series 1, container 75.2) – Bernstein-Woodward collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. 6 See note 5. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the 24 July memo. For convenience, this second memorandum will be referred to as the ‘Carl’ memo, since that is the document’s first word. The second source The memo is undated, but, from part of its contents,7 it can be placed in the first half of 1974. It also contains a reference to ‘our story about the Buchanan memo’, which was a Post story about Nixon aide Patrick Buchanan and his reservations over Nixonian plans to burgle Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.8 The interview that led to the creation of the ‘Carl’ memo, then, can be pinned down to a period of approximately 35 days at the height of the Watergate scandal, between the publication of the Buchanan story and the Supreme Court’s ruling. The ‘Carl’ memo begins with the following sentence: ‘First and most important, my source said that the President personally ordered the break-in at Brookings.’ This was correct, although the tapes of Nixon’s orders at this stage (i.e., pre-25 July 1974) were still in the sole possession of the White House. Woodward’s source knew what he was talking about. After some discussion about how Charles Colson had reacted to the President’s order to burgle the Brookings Institute, when other aides had just ignored what they regarded as another of Nixon’s impetuous outbursts, Woodward got to the point of his source’s information. ‘I quizzed him for a while, and while I don’t remember exactly what he answered in each instance, the impression left was that these papers related to secret U.S. negotiations with Hanoi, Russia and China. The “Other stuff”, my source said, really provided the impetus for the administration’s panic reaction to the Pentagon Papers, not the Pentagon Papers themselves.’ (emphases added) As can be seen, the exact information passed on by Woodward’s source was already a fading memory by the time the ‘Carl’ memo was typed up. Even so, the import is clear. Woodward’s source knew exactly why Nixon wanted a break-in at the Brookings Institute, and which documents Nixon wanted to seize. But no Post story was ever published about this incendiary information. In terms of understanding Woodward and Bernstein’s perplexing failure as reporters, at the height of the Watergate scandal, we have to inquire: how 7 A reference to ‘the tapes that [Watergate special prosecutor Leon] Jaworski is fighting for in the high court’ and the fact that the Supreme Court’s order for Nixon to hand over his White House tapes was issued on 24 July that year. 8 This story, headlined ‘Buchanan objection ignored’, was written by Lawrence Meyer and published on 19 June 1974. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk reliable was Woodward’s source? In other words, did Woodward and Bernstein reject this information out of hand, due to a lack of confidence? We can ascertain this by assessing other information from the same memorandum. Identifying the second source It can be established at once that the filing of the ‘Carl’ memo with the Ehrlichman interview (discussed above) is erroneous. The ‘Carl’ memo’s source was not Ehrlichman. The ‘Carl’ memo is from an earlier date, as it was composed during the legal proceedings leading up to the decision by the Supreme Court ordering Nixon to hand over the White House tapes. Woodward’s typed notes from the Ehrlichman interview are clearly dated 24 July, which was the day in 1974 when that Supreme Court decision was announced.9 In the aforementioned (24 July 1974) interview notes, Woodward states that he ‘told [Ehrlichman] that we had information that his notes specifically said the Pres. Ordered the Brookings break-in’, to which Ehrlichman replied: ‘I don’t recall anything like that.’ (The words ‘break-in’ have been added in pen to Woodward’s typed notes, with the original word – firebombing – crossed out in the same ink; one among many illustrations of Bob Woodward’s tendency to revise his notes after the fact). It’s worth pausing to let this sink in: Woodward was telling Ehrlichman that he and Bernstein already knew what was in Ehrlichman’s private notebooks. This might be construed as a journalistic bluff, designed to loosen Ehrlichman’s tongue – but it was not. The ‘Carl’ memo concludes with a postscript at the bottom of page five, an impressionistic succession of fragments. ‘Ehrlichman taking notes, didn’t know of taping system shortly after buchanan memo – source called after larry’s story on buchanan. Knew being used (source). His opportunity. He stood by vault, (2) came out and told him it was there. During a run. Never had notion previously. Show natl security.’ This passage is intriguing in the extreme, but impossible to untangle with any great confidence. All that can be said for sure is that the first sentence explains Woodward’s claim to know what was in Ehrlichman’s private notes when he 9 Woodward’s notes also contain a reference to Ehrlichman stating that he was ‘glad of sup. ct. [d]ecision’. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk interviewed Ehrlichman on 24 July. Therefore, the source who provided the information in the ‘Carl’ memo cannot have been Ehrlichman.10 Woodward’s source (in the ‘Carl’ memo) said ‘several times that the picture the public had of Ellsberg was still distorted [. . .] all he would hint at was that Ellsberg’s activities were very questionable.’ He also mentioned to Woodward the supposed existence of ‘material that the [Nixon] administration had gathered about Ellsberg’s behavior while in Vietnam.’ This corresponds closely with claims that had been made in the White House soon after Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers had been published. ‘[Henry] Kissinger, who knew Ellsberg, fed the president’s spleen with a torrent of allegations. Ellsberg may have been “the brightest student I ever had,” he told Nixon, but he was “a little unbalanced.” He supposedly “had weird sexual habits, used drugs,” and, in Vietnam, had “enjoyed helicopter flights in which he would take potshots at the Vietnamese below.” Ellsberg had married a millionaire’s daughter and – Kissinger threw in for good measure – had sex with her in front of their children.’11 Other information known to Woodward’s source included the existence of ‘a document – he gave the number as NSSCM 113 on declassification. We did not get further than that.’ It is somewhat surprising that Woodward was able to recall the number of this document so exactly, when his recollection of the nature of the papers Nixon wanted from Brookings was so hazy. The document Woodward’s source was directing him toward was NSSM 113 (just one letter different; NSSM standing for ‘National Security Study Memorandum’). Dated 15 January 1971, NSSM 113 was titled ‘Procedures for Declassification and Release of Official Documents’ and was written by Henry Kissinger.12 Finally, Woodward mentions that ‘My source also confirmed that Kissinger was for a unit to plug security leaks.’ (This means that Kissinger had supported the formation of Nixon’s ‘plumbers’ team). Assessing the reliability of Woodward’s information concerning the Brookings break-in plan, the following factors are known. Woodward’s source repeated rumours about Ellsberg that Kissinger was circulating in the White 10 The look of the last few sentences in the passage are that Woodward’s source stood by the Brookings vault, while someone else (referred to by Woodward as ‘2’) went in and checked what was being held there. Was person ‘2’ Ehrlichman? If so, that would explain why notes taken from two separate sources were filed alongside each other. 11 Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (Victor Gollancz, 2000), p. 386 12 Full memo archived at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk House; like Kissinger, Woodward’s source claimed to have knowledge about Ellsberg’s private life; Woodward’s source knew the document number and nature of a (then undisclosed) memorandum concerning national security that had been written by Kissinger; and the source was able to give solid information about Kissinger’s private attitude toward Nixon’s creation of the ‘plumbers’. There could only be a very small number of White House figures privy to this precise set of information in mid-1974, and perhaps only one. Prima facie, Woodward’s source was Nixon’s Assistant for National Security Affairs, Dr Henry Kissinger. Still alive in 2018, Kissinger has maintained public silence about his knowledge of Nixon’s Vietnam treason for half a century. Kissinger had begun cultivating Washington Post proprietor Katharine Graham soon after he took office in 1969.13 Graham recalled that Kissinger ‘didn’t seem to suffer within the [Nixon] administration even though he went on coming to my house – but not the [offices of the] Post – throughout Watergate.’ 14 (Graham was no-one’s fool and doubtless quite enjoyed the constant strategic games underlying her meetings with Kissinger.) The look here is of a typically Kissinger diplomatic backchannel, and the implication of Nixon’s tolerance (remarkable, in the circumstances) is that this was useful to the president. It also suggests that Kissinger might have spotted that, as the drive to impeach Nixon reached its climax, he had an opportune moment to ‘fill in the blanks’ for Woodward and Bernstein with their investigation of the Brookings plot.15 It is incomprehensible that neither Woodward nor Bernstein appeared to understand the information they were being told by Kissinger: the allegations against Nixon had swirled ever since he won the Presidency. On 12 January 1969, the Washington Post itself had carried a profile of Nixon’s go-between, Anna Chennault, which stated: ‘She reportedly encouraged Saigon to “delay” in joining the Paris peace talks in hopes of getting a better deal if the Republicans won the White House.’ Chennault was reported as making no comment on the 13 Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire, (Sheridan Square Press, 1994), p. 244 14 Davis (see note 12) p. 470 15 Supposedly, Kissinger was first approached by Woodward and Bernstein in October 1974, when the duo were writing The Final Days, concerning the White House’s evolving internal dynamics during Watergate. A letter dating from that month sets out Kissinger’s agreement to speak to the reporters on an ‘on the record’ basis. See Alicia C. Shepherd, Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate (John Wiley and Sons, 2007), p. 126. However, the present research shows that there had already been contact between Kissinger and Woodstein, and that the October 1974 introduction was in fact a red herring laid down to distract from Kissinger’s leaks of that summer. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk allegations, which – as LBJ’s ‘X-Envelope’ (see footnote 4) proves – were entirely accurate. Woodward and Bernstein didn’t have Johnson’s dossier, but by summer 1974 they didn’t need it. Woodward and Bernstein had been handed the skeleton key that would have unlocked the entire Watergate affair. They were on the verge of revealing what Carl Bernstein would later memorably enshrine in his pious maxim as ‘The best obtainable version of the truth’. The reporters had been told – by no less a figure than Nixon’s National Security Advisor, Dr Henry Alfred Kissinger – about the real motive behind Nixon’s plan to burgle the Brookings Institute. It was to destroy the evidence that Nixon had conspired to prolong a war with an official enemy of the United States in order to win the presidency in 1968; after which he deliberately prolonged – even escalated – the Vietnam War. And – for reasons that might never be known – Woodward and Bernstein stayed silent. Bob Woodward and Henry Kissinger were contacted for comment on the specific disclosures made in this article. Neither of them replied. That silence has now been ended on their behalf. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Using the UK FOIA, part II Nick Must Why does the UK government not want me to know the names of attendees at two European intelligence meetings, which were hosted in London and that took place more than 65 years ago? It’s a question that really does need answering, particularly when one considers that everything that was said at the meetings – and the name of the principal UK attendee at both meetings – has been released to me. Even some of the attendees’ military ranks have been released – but all bar one of the names of the people who attended the meetings are ‘secret’. First let me give you little background . . . Two years ago I was conducting research on stay-behind networks in post WWII Europe – the infamous ‘Gladio’ networks. I already knew that the Western Union Clandestine Committee (WUCC) had played an important part in the establishment of those networks and I was intrigued to find some WUCC papers listed at the National Archives website. Those papers were, however, being retained by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) as they were still deemed ‘sensitive’ – even after the expiration of the usual thirty year rule.1 With a spirit of ‘nothing-ventured-nothing-gained’, I sent an email to the relevant department at the FCO seeking access. After a prolonged dithering from the FCO, I was pleasantly surprised when the post brought me a thick manilla envelope: I had been given a copy of the minutes of the first two meetings of the WUCC! It had, surely, been all too easy. Oh, how right I was. In spite of the fact that these papers dated from 1949, all but one of the names of the meeting attendees had been redacted. The name that was not being redacted was ‘Major General Sinclair’ (aka John ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair who was at the time deputy-chief of MI6). If nothing else, this name alone told me I was on the right track. 1 See my article ‘The Western Union Clandestine Committee: Britain and the “Gladio” networks’ in Lobster 72 for the full background: Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Deducing redacted information Both sets of minutes commence with a list of who was in attendance and this is where the redactions have taken place. The names are listed by country represented: the United Kingdom first, then France, the Netherlands, Belgium and lastly the United States of America. Then there are two names for the Secretariat.2 The order of listing is the same for both meetings but there were more participants at the second one. This was, presumably, because it was not clear which contributors from Special Operations would be needed until after the first meeting had taken place. By not redacting Major General Sinclair’s name, nor the military ranks, the FCO have actually given me an excellent tool to use, along with publicly available information, to work out what some of these redacted names are. I am going to reproduce here the layout of the pages with the list of attendees, so that it can be clearly seen that it is easy to work out the number of letters in the redacted names. The list of attendees for the first meeting looks like this: UNITED KINGDOM Major General Sinclair (Chairman) Commander [ ] FRANCE Colonel [ ] Commandant [ ] NETHERLANDS Colonel [ ] BELGIUM M. [ ] U.S.A. Mr. [ ] (as an observer only) SECRETARIAT Mr. [ ] Major [ ] I hope you will immediately understand my point about being able to deduce the length of the redacted names, because everything is so neatly paginated. Even if it weren't, I could still place a tape measure on the printed paper and obtain a physical length for the gaps where the names should be and compare 2 It is detailed elsewhere in the papers that, as the meetings were being hosted in London, the Secretariat would be made up of UK personnel (i.e. staff from MI6) Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk that against the open text. The list of attendees for the second meeting looks like this: UNITED KINGDOM Major General Sinclair (Chairman) Commander [ ] FRANCE Colonel [ ] Commandant [ ] Commandant [ ] (afternoon session only) NETHERLANDS Colonel [ ] (For certain items only) Colonel [ ] [ ] BELGIUM M. [ ] U.S.A. Mr. [ ] Mr [ ] (as observers only) SECRETARIAT Mr. [ ] Major [ ] What you may also note from seeing this list, is that one of the attendees at the second meeting has had their entire name (appellation and surname) redacted. I will come to this later but, for now, I will detail how my deductions progressed. Starting with UK attendees, the surname of the second participant (who attended both meetings) is redacted and all that it says is ‘Commander’. Measuring the length of redaction, which is half an inch long, I’ve been able to compare it to the typeface for ‘Major General Sinclair’. This has enabled me to conclude that the second attendee was Commander Kenneth Cohen, as his surname is five letters long as is the redaction. At the time of the meetings, Commander Cohen held the position within SIS of ‘controller of Europe’ – an absolute shoe-in as an attendee. Kenneth Herman Salaman Cohen joined SIS in 1936 and served until 1953. As well as English, he spoke French, German and Russian and received Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk French, Belgian, American and Czech medals of recognition for his war service. His career at MI6 included the post of Chief Staff Officer Training in 1943 and, then, promotion to Chief Controller Europe in 1945.3 Looking next at the French names, it can be seen that the first French attendee (a Colonel) was at both meetings. Using the same method to compare the redaction to the open text, this surname is seven or maybe eight letters long. The most likely candidate is therefore Colonel Marcel Mercier of the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage. Following the WUCC meetings Colonel Mercier was posted to Berne, Switzerland, in 1952, under cover as Commercial Attaché. Whilst there, he ran operations against Communist North African Nationalists who were seeking asylum in Switzerland. Mercier collaborated with Swiss Federal Police (contrary to Swiss law). In late March 1957 his contact in the Federal police (General Rene Dubois) was found to have shot himself. Mercier was expelled from Bern soon after.4 He continued his war against African Nationals as a handler of La Main Rouge (The Red Hand) in Algerian French North Africa. La Main Rouge were already active before Mercier was posted to Algeria but their campaign of violence definitely intensified after his arrival.5 I mentioned earlier how one of the participants has their full name redacted: this is the third participant from the Netherlands who attended only the second meeting. Both the appellation and the surname are redacted in only this instance. The length of the redaction still reveals the number of letters redacted, which is fifteen. I think it safe to assume one space between the appellation and the surname, thus leaving a total of fourteen letters. I believe the reason that the appellation is redacted here is because the person was not a member of the military, nor exactly a civilian. I believe this person was Prince Bernhard, whose name, as written here, is fourteen letters long. Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld was a naturalized Dutch citizen, who had married into the royal family of the Netherlands in 1937 and became Prince Consort to Queen Juliana of the Netherlands when she ascended to the Dutch throne in 1948. He was originally born Bernhard Leopold Friedrich Eberhard Julius Kurt Karl Gottfried Peter zur Lippe-Biesterfeld at Jena in 3 Information on Commander Cohen is available at 4 See the AP news feed story ‘Lid blows off spy ring in Swiss capital’, The Straits Times (English-language newspaper in Singapore) 16 June 1957 at 5 See Thomas Riegler, ‘The State as a Terrorist: France and the Red Hand’ in Vol 6, No 6 (2012) of Perspectives On Terrorism – available online at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Germany on 29 June 1911. As a student in the mid 1930s he’d been a member of the cavalry based Reiter-SA and Reiter-SS units. The Prince’s obituary in the Daily Telegraph on his death in 2004 includes the following comment about those Nazi affiliations: ‘He had joined, he said, because had he not been a member of such an organisation it would have been made harder for him to pass his law exams; moreover, membership brought with it the free use of a garage. He resigned from the party in 1937 - although his letter, now in the National Archives in Washington, DC, ended with the words “Heil Hitler”.’6 As many Lobster readers will be aware, Prince Bernhard played an important role in the establishment of the Bilderberg Group in the 1950s.7 The first item on the agenda at that initial Bilderberg meeting was ‘The attitude towards communism and the Soviet Union.’ The fourth, and final, item was also relevant: ‘The attitude towards European integration and the European Defence Community.’ This kind of topic continued to be a recurring theme at Bilderberg meeting for much of that first decade of its existence. Items such as ‘Communist infiltration’, ‘The Western approach to Soviet Russia and communism’ and ‘Possible changes in the attitude of the U.S.S.R. to the West’ are to be found on the (now openly available) early Bilderberg agendas.8 I have had no luck divining the other European names (suggestions from readers are most welcome) but the American names have not been much of a challenge. Using the same method of calculating the length of the surnames of the participants, it has been easy to deduce the first listed attendee from the United States (who attended both meetings). The redaction of the surname is 1 inch long and, referring to the typeface as before, I can calculate that 1 inch of type is thirteen letters long. The most likely candidate I can find for a potential American attendee with a surname that long is Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter. It is noted in the list of attendees that the visitors from the United States were there as ‘observers only’. This would likely have meant that the Admiral would not have had his military rank recorded and been noted merely as ‘Mr Hillenkoetter’. At the time of the WUCC meetings, Admiral Hillenkoetter was Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. 6 See 7 It is fairly common knowledge that the first Bilderberg meeting took place at (and the Group itself is named after) The Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, the Netherlands. What is not so well known, perhaps, is that the Bilderberg hotel chain operates eighteen properties in the Netherlands. See 8 The agendas for all Bilderberg meetings are now available on the Group’s own website. The earliest years start at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk According to the CIA biography of Admiral Hillenkoetter, he had previously undertaken ‘Several tours as Assistant Naval Attaché, France: 1933-35, 1938-40, 1940-41 (Vichy regime), and 1946- 47’9 and was highly conversant with European matters. Previously appointed by President Truman as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) in charge of the Central Intelligence Group, when the CIA was formally established in 1947, Admiral Hillenkoetter was its very first Director.10 The second listed U.S. participant from the second meeting did not attend the first meeting but, using the exact same method again, I have been able to deduce that this person had a surname about six letters long. My prime candidate is Frank Wisner – who, at the time of the meeting he attended, was Director of the CIA covert action department ‘Office of Policy Coordination’ (OPC). The OPC was a unique part of the CIA. While the ‘National Security Council Directive on Office of Special Projects’ (NSC 10/2) stated that the OPC would be funded from the CIA’s secret budget, its command structure would be completely independent from the CIA Director. The power would, instead, lie with the State Department appointed Director of OPC – our Mr Wisner. It has been said by his former colleague Thomas Braden that he (Frank Wisner) ‘brought in a whole load of fascists after the war, some really nasty people.’11 With regard to those fascists, the CIA itself has acknowledged (in its own academic journal on intelligence matters, Studies in Intelligence) that some highly questionable people were recruited after WWII. ‘The sometimes brutal war record of many emigre groups became blurred as they became more critical to the CIA. DCI Hillenkoetter, for example, gave the chairman of the Displaced Persons Commission an ambiguous answer when the latter asked for a status report on some of the ethnic groups CIA used. Hillenkoetter did not deny that many emigres had sided- with the Nazis, but did so, he said, less out of “a pro-German or pro- 9 See 10 Admiral Hillenkoetter’s name was one of the ‘great and the good’ who were listed as the dozen supposed members of the Majestic 12 committee in the psy-ops operation run by the US Air Force against the UFO community in the USA. See Mark Pilkington, Mirage Men (London: Constable, 2010). 11 Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (London: New Press, 2015), p. 34 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Fascist orientation, but from a strong anti-Soviet bias.”’12 The CIA itself seems to have spent quite a lot of time at the start of the new millennium examining these past links to ex-Nazis. A number of articles in Studies in Intelligence cover the subject in some detail. Additionally, Kevin Ruffner of the CIA’s History Staff authored a long study titled ‘Eagle and Swastika: CIA and Nazi War Criminals and Collaborators’. Of particular interest is chapter 7, ‘Could He Not Be Brought to This Country and Used?’, which frequently mentions OPC and Frank Wisner’s use of two specific ex-Nazi sympathisers as anti-communist warriors. ‘The fact that the Office of Policy Coordination wanted Nicholas Poppe and Gustav Hilger as consultants and brought them to the United States for permanent residence is a significant step. It indicated that American intelligence had expanded its idea of what constituted insightful perspectives on the Soviet Union. German diplomats and Russian social scientists with Nazi records, in addition to German wartime intelligence officers and agents, were now regarded as valuable assets in the struggle against the Soviet Union. While the use of Poppe and Hilger turned out to be rather benign, OPC had other, more sinister plans to develop “secret armies” by utilizing émigré groups. Inevitably, these plans brought Wisner’s OPC into greater contact with other collaborators of the Third Reich.”13 The remaining name I have been able to work out is for the second person in the Secretariat, a Major with a surname of 12 or 13 letters (quite a long surname). The most likely candidate for this is Major Richard Arnold-Baker – another WUCC participant who was originally from Germany. Born Werner Gaunt von Blumenthal on 26 July 1914 in Munich, he changed his name by deed poll at the age of 24,14 having escaped Nazi Germany to come to Britain. In May 1940 Richard Arnold-Baker was one of three members of the British legation in Berne15 who rode by bicycle all the way to Bordeaux when a 12 See 13 Kevin Conley Ruffner, ‘Eagle and Swastika: CIA and Nazi War Criminals and Collaborators’ (Washington, DC: CIA History Staff, April 2003) available online at 14 See 15 It has been noted in several books on the history of MI6 that these kind of overseas posts often required regular contact with resident MI6 officers. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk German invasion seemed likely. Safely back in Britain, he was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps in November 1940 and then served in MI6 during most of the war.16 He was certainly working for MI6 when, in May of the next year, he had adopted the cover name of Captain Barnes as part of the group of MI6 officers who interrogated Rudolf Hess.17 He was promoted an Honorary Major on 1st January 1949.18 I hope I have shown that the information that the FCO are claiming should stay secret after 65 years can easily be worked out – by exploiting the method that has been used to make the information secret, i.e. the redactions themselves. What has most bemused me has been the poor handling of the case by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). They are the public body who are supposed to act as an impartial arbitrator when members of the public appeal against such denials of access to information. It’s become blatantly clear to me, however, that the ICO have not displayed the slightest independence from the FCO and have, in fact, been guided by the FCO as regards the continued redactions. In August of 2017 I had my original appeal to the ICO denied. They agreed with the FCO that the redacted names should remain secret. One of the arguments put forward to justify the continued redaction was that all of the other information contained in the WUCC minutes had been released to me. It seems logical to me that this actually cuts both ways and actually weakens the argument for continued redaction. I have progressed my case to a higher level and part of my case for that higher appeal has included questioning how, if everything that was said at the two meetings is not now considered secret, how can the names of the people who said those words be secret. At the moment, my appeal is due to be heard by the First Tier Tribunal – the body that considers appeals to a higher level following a decision by the ICO. I will update Lobster with the results of my higher level appeal and - if any of the redacted names are released to me – I will compare them with the ones I have mentioned here in this article. 16 As did his brother Captain Charles Arnold-Baker (née Wolfgang Charles Werner von Blumenthal). 17 Following his crash-landing in Scotland, Hess was first taken to the Tower of London. Meanwhile, Mytchett Place near Aldershot was transformed into Camp Z with guards ferried in from nearby Pirbright Barracks. See chapter 1 of Stephen McGinty, Camp Z: How British Intelligence Broke Hitler’s Deputy (London: Quercus, 2011) 18 See Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk With confidence, I can say that this one is going to run and run. More, indeed, anon. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Hugh who? Robin Ramsay The man in the picture is the late Hugh Mooney, who died in December 2017.1 The announcement of his death2 describes him as ‘Journalist, Diplomat, Barrister, Teacher and Writer’. (caps in the original) The interesting bit is ‘diplomat’. Mooney worked for the Information Research Department (IRD), notably in Northern Ireland in the 1970s; and IRD was formally a section of the Foreign Office – hence ‘diplomat’. Mooney was also part of the British Army’s Information Policy Unit in Northern Ireland, the psy-ops outfit, as was Colin Wallace. The thing about bureaucracies is their procedures. When I was briefly a 1 The picture is from Fred Holroyd with Nick Burbridge, War Without Honour (Hull: Medium, 1989) p. 134. At the time of the book’s publication there was still a slight chance of IRA action against someone like Mooney – hence the attempt to conceal his identity and the description of him as merely ‘a senior member of IRD’. 2 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk very junior civil servant in the late 1960s, one of my duties was to update the procedures. Every so often a packet of changes to the existing procedures would arrive and I had to get the appropriate files out of the cupboard, remove the old pages and insert the new ones. When the British Army ended up in Northern Ireland, they went to their cupboard and took out the file marked ‘insurgency’. Part of the kit was media relations and psy-ops; and the media/ psy-ops experts they had to hand were in IRD, which had spent the previous 20 years doing their best to portray as Soviet stooges much of the domestic British left (and any resistance to British rule in what remained of the empire). This, of course, isn’t quite how IRD would have put it. Here is an extract from Hugh Mooney’s CV. Statement of Hugh Mooney3 I. My name is Hugh Mooney. I am a journalist by profession I have worked as sub-editor on the Irish Times. As Reuter correspondent in the Middle East I spent six months in Aden in 1966 and in 1967 reported the Arab- Israeli war. 2. In 1969, I left the BBC External Services to take a job as a specialist writer in the Information Research Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. IRD had been set up at the onset of the Cold War to counter Soviet Communist Bloc propaganda, by monitoring, conducting research and providing unattributable briefings to journalists and others. 3. By the time I joined, IRD’s terms of reference had widened to include responsibility for monitoring and countering hostile propaganda from any source. For example I spent some weeks in Bermuda advising on countering black-power propaganda and during 1971, I started to visit Northern Ireland, where the Government of the Irish Republic had financed pro-republican propaganda. 4. My first visit (in March/April 1971) was at the request of the United Kingdom Government Representative, Ronnie Burroughs. When my terms of reference were agreed by all departments later that year, the UKREP was Howard Smith. My brief was to assist the Army, the RUC and the Northern Ireland Government Information Service to counter hostile propaganda and improve their public relations activity. I was a member of the UKREP’s staff and was not seconded to the Army. 5. The Army’s Public Relations branch at HQNI was headed by a retired 3 Unless otherwise stated all the documents quoted in this piece are from the collection of Colin Wallace. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk army officer, Tony Staughton and had been beefed up by the appointment of a deputy, Lieutenant-Colonel Tony Yarnold. The public relations disaster of internment in August 1971 had led to the formation of the lnformation Policy Branch, headed by Colonel Maurice Tugwell, whose deputy was Lieutenant-Colonel INQ 1873.4 I shared INQ 1873 office at HQNL. IP’s brief was to fight the propaganda war and it guided and supplemented PR branch’s work.’ As for fighting that ‘propaganda war’, a document headed Organisation of Information Activity for Northern Ireland, dated 30 November 1971, states: ‘The Information Research Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which specialises in the appropriate techniques, has been specifically tasked inter alia to place anti IRA material in the British and foreign press and media.’ Some of this involved planting false stories in the press and fabricating documents.5 In a draft report by Mooney in 1971 he wrote in paragraph 9: ‘Some of the material is in fact playbacks of material that IRD have already printed abroad, sometimes on my briefing, while in London. The article Red Menace is real in Ulster which appeared in the News Letter in September, is the result of such an exercise.’ This is the technique known as ‘surfacing’: get something published abroad then get it picked up – ‘surfaced’ – in the UK media. A paper written by Mooney, ‘American aid for Northern “refugees” goes to the IRA’,6 which accused the SDLP politician John Hume of stealing money raised in the United States by the Northern Ireland Resurgence Committee, ended up as a story in the Christian Science Monitor.7 Another technique was fabricating documents. For example, Mooney acquired a copy of the agenda of the the Sinn Fein conference of 1971, to which he added two resolutions: ‘34. That the Connolly Youth Movement, the Workers League, the Irish 4 The sections in italics, INQ 1873, have been added by hand in the original. 5 In 1987 someone anonymously sent me a collection of anti-Labour forgeries from the mid 1970s period. They were reproduced at end of Paul Foot’s Who framed Colin Wallace?, still available from 6 Quoted in a letter to Mrs Thatcher from Colin Wallace in 1990. 7 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Communist Party or National Liberation Front be admitted to membership ; and that Sinn Fein be permitted to actively associate with the above mentioned groups. 35. That a member of the Communist Party or any radical group be admitted to Sinn Fein or allowed to retain membership.’ This was IRD’s standard theme: all radical movements are run by Communists (and ultimately by Moscow). An IRD paper, ‘Communist strategy in Ulster terrorist campaign’ (undated but circa 1971), begins with this total fictio1n: ‘Carefully calculated Communist strategy is behind the newest phase in the Northern Ireland terror campaign which has cost more than 100 lives and caused damage of several million pounds.’ In a report by Mooney, again in or around 1971, he repeated the idea that the IRA was Communist: ‘I am also in touch with John Rooks, news editor of the Belfast Telegraph, who should publish a piece shortly giving the long-established Communist links of certain key members of the IRA. I also steered Mr Rooks to the head of Special Branch to make inquiries about the increased activity of the Northern Ireland Communist Labour Party. . . .’ 8 Did any of this matter? How significant were some dodgy smear stories against people who were prepared to starve themselves to death for their cause? Colin Wallace thinks it did matter. He commented in a statement given to the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland: ‘The role of the Information Research Department is a significant factor in this story. . . . As a Cold War propaganda organisation, its anti Soviet activities attempted to place the Northern Ireland conflict in the wider global campaign of Soviet subversion. There is no doubt that having the capability to counter real Soviet subversion was important at that time. However, a by-product of the IRD’s activities is that they were seized upon by William McGrath and others during 1973 and 1974 to undermine the more moderate Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries who were then willing to explore some form of political compromise. McGrath, by branding those individuals as “Communists”, undermined their authority within their respective organisations and they were replaced by hardline militants. It is likely that those anti-Communist activities also helped to colour the population’s attitude to the incoming Labour Government, led by Harold Wilson, in February 1974, and hampered that Government’s political initiatives.’ 8 No such party existed. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Hilda Murrell and the FOIA Nick Must Whatdotheyknow.com is a site devoted to Freedom Information requests in this country.1 On it Josh Hastings is recorded as having made some FOIA requests to various bodies for material held on Hilda Murrell.2 The only response that yielded anything was from West Mercia Police, the force that handled the original investigation into the case.3 The document he received is what should be a fairly standard police report into an investigation, along the lines of ‘the crime was reported at such-and-such a time’ and ‘Detective Constable Smith interviewed the witness and obtained the important information that…’ etc. However, about 90% of the first two pages of the document Mr Hastings received are entirely redacted, as are parts of the other seven pages. West Mercia Police stated that the redactions are qualified as being exemptions under FOIA ‘Section 30 – Investigations and Proceedings Conducted by Public Authorities. This relates to investigations in general terms and covers information that has been held by a public authority gathered at any time in relation to a specific investigation, criminal or otherwise, and that has not already been made publicly available’ – and – ‘Section 40 – Personal Information. This relates to any information that relates to an individual, or from which an individual could be identified, and that has not already been made publicly available.’ 1 N.B. that it’s not a site that lists all FOIA requests. That would surely be nigh on impossible; and, anyway, the website is run by volunteers. The main description the site has of itself is that it is ‘A site to help anyone submit a Freedom of Information request. WhatDoTheyKnow also publishes and archives requests and responses, building a massive archive of information.’ 2 For those not familiar with the crime that was the murder of Hilda Murrell, a decent briefing can be obtained from an article, ‘Who really killed Hilda Murrell’, that Michael Mansfield QC wrote for the Guardian: 3 See Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk So it is possible (probable) that some of the first section of that released information could be redacted under those two exemptions; but the blanket redactions at the beginning, and other minor redactions later on, are obviously excessive. This is provable because the document starts with Hilda Murrell’s full address – ‘Ravenscroft, 52 Sutton Road, Shrewsbury’ – but later references to the evidence found at, or searches conducted at, the address are stated as having occurred at ‘XX Sutton Road, Shrewsbury’ (i.e. 52 is needlessly redacted). What is, perhaps, more interesting is that Mr Hastings had a separate request to the Home Office on the same subject denied (10 May 2017) under exemptions 23(5) & 24(2) of the FOIA.4 By using exemption 23(5) ‘The Home Office neither confirms nor denies whether it holds any information which falls within scope of your request.’ However . . . exemption 23(5) can only be used when the information relates to fourteen specified intelligence, security and national policing bodies5 – only five of which were in existence at the time of Hilda Murrell’s murder: those five being MI5, MI6, GCHQ, the special forces and the Security Commission. Considering that ‘As the exemption under section 23(5) is absolute; it is not necessary to consider the public interest arguments affecting its application,’ I find it strange (but possibly even more revelatory) that the Home Office used an additional and unnecessary exemption under section 24(2), which relates to the safeguarding of ‘national security’. As regards this denial by the Home Office, Mr Hastings took the next step and requested an internal review. The reply from the Home Office foolishly showed how unfamiliar they were with the actual case and stated: ‘Hilda Murrell is [my emphasis] an anti nuclear campaigner, so her activities would be of interest to others who share her views.’ Therefore demonstrating they were seemingly unaware that Hilda Murrell had been dead for some 30 plus years.6 Another similar request by Mr Hastings to the Cabinet Office received the 4 5 The full list of fourteen can be found at: 6 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk reply that they held nothing.7 If the Home Office had no information, why did they did not just say the same thing? ‘Refuse to confirm or deny’ has in this case, I think, actually confirmed. 7 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk South of the Border (occasional snippets from) Nick Must * new * Neon and day-glow guns ‘R’ us. Former NSA contractor Reality Winner1 is currently incarcerated pre-trial for alleged leaking to the press of details on American intelligence agencies investigations into foreign interference during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Much of the media coverage has included humorous references to Ms Winner’s claim that she successfully removed the report from her office because she stashed it in her tights.2 Amusing as this old-skool method of smuggling might be, I discovered something even funnier in the FBI transcript of their first encounter with Ms Winner. When a phalanx of FBI agents arrived at Ms Winner’s house to execute a search warrant, they asked her some preliminary questions before actually entering the property. One was about her pets and how aggressive they may be in the perceived situation. Another was whether she possessed any firearms and, indeed, she did. In addition to a ‘traditional’ Glock handgun and a shotgun, there was a pink AR-15.3 Yes, a pink version of the semi-automatic rifle that has been central to the gun control debate recently. It has struck me that, if only all firearms were coloured this way, perhaps some of the ‘machismo’ that goes with the ownership of firearms might be dissipated. This would be a good policy to employ in combination with the half-humorous proposal, from comedian Chris Rock, that the best form of gun control would be for bullets to cost at least $5,000 each.4 1 Although born in 1991, she has surely been bestowed with the most 21st Century of names. 2 See, for example, ‘Angst in her pants: Alleged US govt leaker Reality Winner stashed docs in her pantyhose’ by Shaun Nichols for The Register at 3 See the top of page 7 of the transcript available via Politico at 4 Of course the clip is available on YouTube. See Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk * new * Cambridge vs Oxford – the Analytica battle Cambridge Analytica didn’t just steal data, they even stole the idea for their name! There’s been an Oxford Analytica for over 40 years!5 * new * Failing. . . upwards? If you work in, or are familiar with, technology companies you may already have heard of the term ‘failing upwards’ – particularly used with regard to internet start-ups. It describes the continual career advancement of those who have been responsible for costly failures. There’s even a regular conference – FailCon – dedicated to the theme.6 Don’t get me wrong: I understand the concept that, in order to have the chance to hit the mother lode, one might need to take a dozen or more shots that will have missed the target. In politics and government, however, one might think the concept was anathema. Not so, it would seem. Our current Prime Minister surely owes her position more to the inability of her opponents to definitively stick the boot into each other and fill a power vacuum. This did not require any particular skill from her, apart from the ability to sit on her hands and wait. In the back-rooms of politics, the situation is the same. Lynton Crosby – the Australian election svengali – has worked for the Tories for a number of years now. His ‘dead cat’ strategy7 has regularly proven counter-productive. Yet his firm Crosby Trextor was paid £18.6m for their part in the 2017 Conservative election campaign. Yes . . . £18.6m for that campaign – the one that reduced the government’s majority to a thread. Top of the tree for failing upwards must surely be the current U.S. President, Donald Trump. He’s a serial failure in business8 and his tremendous 5 See ‘The other Analytica’ by Laurens Cerulus for Politico.eu at 6 One of their strap lines is, ‘Stop being afraid of failure and start embracing it.’ See 7 An excellent summary of how this tactic is used was provided by Jess Phillips (Labour MP for Birmingham, Yardley) in the Huffington Post. See 8 Time magazine listed a top 10 of those failures at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk appetite for litigation is a questionable tactic, as it often doesn’t pay off.9 As regards his monetary worth, a 2015 story from Fortune noted that ‘Donald Trump Would Be Richer If He’d Have Invested in Index Funds’.10 The article further stated that the net worth of both Bill Gates and Warren Buffet had ‘beaten the stock market’s growth’ over the previous twenty-seven years, which Trump’s had not.11 In terms of management style, the Trump method has been relentlessly analysed. Most interestingly, The Psychology Of Managerial Incompetence: A Sceptic’s Dictionary Of Modern Organizational Issues12 includes reference to three different managerial styles – the ‘kipper’ (who is two-faced, natch), the ‘seagull’ (who flies in and dumps on everyone before flying away again) and the ‘deranged’. Further details on the ‘deranged’ style closely match Trump. ‘Some managers are not just incompetent, they are pathologically deranged. Style and decisions are based on satisfying neurotic needs. They can easily lead an organisation into disaster.’ Further, in the ‘temper tantrum method’, the deranged style of manager ‘appears insulted or outraged. All of this in intended to distract from the fact that the boss has no idea what to do.’ Finally, in the world of the spooks we come to Gina Haspel, who: ‘. . . personally supervised the torture of a CIA detainee in 2002 leading to at least three waterboard sessions, subsequently drafted the cable that ordered destruction of the videotape evidence of torture, and served as a senior CIA official while the Agency was lying to itself. . . about the effectiveness of torture in eliciting useful intelligence. . . .’ 13 (emphasis added) One could even say she was a real cheerleader for enhanced interrogation 9 See for example ‘Donald Trump Loses Libel Lawsuit Over Being Called A “Millionaire”’ by Eriq Gardner for The Hollywood Reporter, September 2011 at https://tinyurl.com/ybx7uvh3> or 10 11 Gates’ grew by 7,173% and Buffet's by 2,612% whereas, in comparison, Trump’s net wealth grew by 1,336% (see the link in footnote 9). 12 Professor Adrian Furnham, The Psychology Of Managerial Incompetence: A Sceptic’s Dictionary Of Modern Organizational Issues (London: Whurr Publishers Limited, 1998) 13 See ‘Gina Haspel’s CIA Torture File’ by Tom Blanton and John Prados for the National Security Archive at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk methods. Where did that get us? Nowhere.14 But on the failing upwards principle, at time of writing she was Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. * new * JFK news On my mobile smartphone I use the Google Chrome browser which provides suggested news stories. It’s very rare for me to follow any of those links but I did with one recently, a story from the Guardian on the family of one Charles Thomas. He was a CIA officer in the 1960s and was stationed at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. Essentially, the adult children of the late Mr Thomas are hoping that President Trump will release documents produced by the Mexico City CIA station that would shed some light on the suicide of their father. Sad as any suicide is, there was one aspect of the Guardian report that did make me laugh. ‘In internal memos not made public until years after his death, Thomas told supervisors such information from Mexico could undermine the findings of the presidential panel that determined in 1964 that Oswald acted alone.’ 15 The general thrust of the article was that this might finally be an opportunity to debunk the Warren Commission! There was a conspiracy, the Guardian article claimed, based around Oswald and the pro-Castro Cubans with whom Oswald is alleged by some to have associated with during his stay in Mexico City. Quelle surprise . . . the author of the article, I finally noticed, was Philip Shenon – whose thesis about Oswald and the pro-Castro Cubans was solidly debunked in Lobster 74 by William Kelly.16 14 See ‘Report Portrays a Broken C.I.A. Devoted to a Failed Approach’ by Scott Shane for The New York Times at 15 See Philip Shenon, ‘JFK documents could show the truth about a diplomat’s death 47 years ago’, Guardian, 22 April 2018 16 See William Kelly, ‘Phil Shenon – a cruel and shocking twist’, in Lobster 74 at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Fake money matters Sixteen years ago I watched with interest a television news report by the BBC’s John Simpson on the fall of Kabul in Afghanistan. One part of that report has particularly stayed in my mind. For a brief moment in the video, sacks of currency – Simpson called them ‘bales of banknotes’ – were seen on the floor of a helicopter. This money, in the local Afghani currency, was being carried by the U.S. Special Forces (SF)17 and used to ‘encourage’ more local warlords to join the Northern Alliance and the fight against the Taliban. These warlords included General Abdul Rashid Dostum (now the Afghan Vice-President) who had a close working relationship with US SF Operational Detachment Alpha 595.18 The money that John Simpson’s BBC report shows are in the 10,000 Afghani denomination which would, at the time, have had an approximate value of $150 per banknote. A conservative estimate would be that there was the equivalent of one million dollars in that chopper alone. Less than a year later, the LA Times was reporting that ‘CIA payoffs played a critical role in persuading commanders from the Northern Alliance and other opposition groups to provide proxy fighters last fall to help oust the Taliban’.19 It was also later confirmed by former Central Intelligence Agency officer Gary Berntsen that American forces entered the conflict in Afghanistan with several million dollars worth of cash.20 General David H. Petraeus is renowned for a quote from towards the end of his time as commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan. He is reported to have said that, in terms of Counter Insurgency (COIN) operations, ‘Money is 17 The personnel in question would have been either U.S. Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha or C.I.A. Special Activities Division, or a combination of both. The Newsnight report is available on Youtube at 18 See 19 See Rone Tempest and Bob Drogin, ‘Operation Enduring Payouts’, Los Angeles Times, 1 June 2002 20 Gary Berntsen and Ralph Pezzullo, JAWBREAKER: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda - A Personal Account by the CIA’s Key Field Commander (New York: Crown Publishers, 2005) Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk my most important ammunition in this war.’21 Even more tellingly, the U.S. Center for Army Lessons Learned22 published the ‘Commander’s Guide to Money As a Weapons System’ (MAAWS) in April 2009. Therein it is stated that ‘Coalition money is defeating COIN targets without creating collateral damage, by motivating anti-government forces to cease lethal and non-lethal operations….".23 By ‘motivating’ it’s fairly obvious they mean bribing. With regard to the money John Simpson saw in the helicopter, I’ve always wondered how the U.S. military got hold of such a huge amount of a local currency – particularly one as unstable as the Afghani obviously was at that time. In the geopolitical whirlwind that had followed the attacks on the Twin Towers only nine weeks before, sufficient banknotes could not have been accumulated through legitimate means – e.g. via bank institutions and currency exchange houses. The only logical conclusion is that the Afghani notes that were being used by the United States SF were counterfeit. It also can’t be supposed that such a large amount of counterfeit money was sourced from within Afghanistan. They surely had to have been produced by a covert branch of the American Government; and that wasn’t the first time this has happened. According to a May 1987 report in the Washington Post, the CIA had an ‘ultra-secret program to counterfeit millions of dollars in Afghan money’ as part of the funding effort to support the Mujahideen who had been fighting against the Soviet occupiers since 1979. In an earlier article, the same reporters had stated that the covert funding program was riddled with fraud and that only about 30% of the Congressionally approved money was actually reaching the fighters.24 The very opening paragraph of the first chapter of veteran journalist Robert D. Kaplan’s Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan has similar details regarding the CIA counterfeiting operation. It was, he claims, a plan to fund the locals who were fighting the red menace: 21 See, e.g., William R. Polk, 'Will We Learn Anything from Afghanistan?’, The Atlantic, 23 February 2013 at 22 Despite sounding like an oxymoron, such an organisation does exist: it’s at the West Point Military Academy 23 See the introduction on p. 2 of the PDF copy online at 24 See the pair of Washington Post articles by Jack Anderson and Dale van Atta, ‘CIA counterfeiters aid Afghan rebels’ (4 May 1987) and ‘CIA mismanages Afghan rebel aid’ (29 April 1987) Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘. . . millions of counterfeit afghanis had been printed in order to wreck the Kabul regime’s economy and allow the mujahidin to buy weapons and ammunition on the open market on the Northwest Frontier.’25 By the 1980s the CIA had been forging other people’s money for decades. In preparation for the Bay of Pigs, for example, the CIA provided the Cuban exiles with forged copies of the Cuban twenty Peso note.26 Writing in the August 1979 edition of The Atlantic magazine, Thomas Powers’ article ‘Inside the Department of Dirty Tricks’ (which mostly dealt with Richard Helms, the Church Committee and the mid-70s revelations of CIA assassination programmes), mentions how the CIA’s infamous Operation Mongoose partly involved an element of economic warfare, including ‘. . . efforts to disrupt the Cuban economy by contaminating sugar exports, circulating counterfeit money and ration books, and the like.’ (emphasis added)27 Paul Staines and the ‘cheesy quavers’28 In ‘The View from the Bridge’ in this issue, Robin Ramsay mentions the involvement of political blogger Paul Staines in the recent re-circulation of smears against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and also his involvement in the dim and distant past with David Hart and his smear sheet British Briefing.29 I did some research about Mr Staines and came across an aspect of his life that I had not heard of before. It would seem that Paul Staines was involved with the early ‘Acid House’ rave scene in the late 80s after Staines and rave promoter Tony Colston-Hayter met through their shared love of the ‘Asteroids’ video game. For about 18 months between 1988 and 1989 Paul Staines had two jobs. In spite of already being employed to compile British Briefing, Staines also took on running press and publicity for the Sunrise parties that 25 Robert D. Kaplan, Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1990) 26 Doubtless these forgeries would have been used in much the same way as those seen in the US SF chopper in Afghanistan – i.e. to buy help. For more details see 27 See 28 The term ‘cheesy quaver’ is modern Cockney Rhyming Slang for ‘raver’ - i.e. a fan of ‘banging’ electronic dance music and its associated nightclubs. 29 See Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk were being organised by Colston-Hayter.30 Quoted (presumably from an interview) by Matthew Collin in his Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House, Staines said of David Hart: ‘He’s completely charming and can charm senior people like Thatcher for a while. But any proximity to him for a long period of time, you know he’s completely off his fucking head.’ 31 Perhaps it was Staines’ regular intake of MDMA around this time that provoked a particularly unhinged thought regarding police opposition to rave parties: ‘Staines hoped that right-wing Conservative MP Teresa Gorman would come out in support of the rave promoters (‘She’s a fun girl’), but nothing came of it.’32 Following the relaxing of the licensing laws and the hosting of all-night parties moving into the mainstream, many of the original promoters from that period33 disappeared from the scene. This was certainly the case with Tony Colston- Hayter but he re-emerged to public notice in 2014 when he was imprisoned for five and a half years after he admitted ‘masterminding the hi-tech theft of £1.3m from Barclays’.34 The product versus a product It has recently come to my attention that Government departments (not just in the UK) which have previously used the term ‘product’ as a generic descriptor for the output of their endeavours (i.e. to show that they are producing something tangible), are now using the term in a different way (i.e. to describe something that is an actual commercial product). The first time I noticed this was in the intelligence community, where the 30 Initially Paul Staines did both of these jobs from David Hart’s office in Mayfair. 31 Matthew Collin, Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998) p. 104 32 Collin (see note 14) p. 118 33 Who all had very ‘hippy’ names like Raindance, Genesis ‘88 and Biology. If your eyes can stand the strain, check the (somewhat garishly designed) pages at 34 See Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk phrase ‘the product’ for many years has meant intelligence reports or briefings, etc. Now, it seems, reports from private intelligence companies are having a major influence on international events – a prime example being, of course, the ‘Steele Dossier’ on Donald Trump’s dealings with Russians. More recently, I was reading how Sir David Pepper (previously Director at GCHQ) is now Chairman of the Board at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DTSL). Here’s what that organisation says about itself: ‘The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) ensures that innovative science and technology contribute to the defence and security of the UK.’35 I think that’s a very clear statement, from which it can be inferred that the DSTL should be inviolate by outside pressures and able to produce the most effective technological solutions. However, this is not the case because it has become commercially driven. The UK Government web page that profiles Sir David Pepper has it thus: 'The Board’s role is to support and constructively challenge the Dstl executive in the development of business strategies, plans, business cases and targets, and to monitor Dstl’s business performance against the approved corporate plan.’ 36 (emphases added) 35 From the 'What we do’ section at 36 See Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Still thinking about Dallas1 Robin Ramsay On the wonderful Mary Ferrell site2 there is a list of some of the books on the Kennedy assassination that were published in 2017. Among them is a new edition of John Newman’s JFK and Vietnam. I have both his Oswald and the CIA and Where Angels Tread Lightly: the Assassination of President Kennedy, Volume 1. I have read the CIA book but I have barely skimmed the Angels book. The CIA book reworks in extraordinary detail a number of the incidents in Oswald’s career as a CIA agent? asset? – which isn’t clear. The Angels book is about Cuba and the beginnings of the CIA’s attempts to overthrow Fidel Castro. It has no bearing I can see on the Kennedy assassination. Dr. Newman represents one end of the assassination research spectrum. His is academic research, albeit of an extremely rarefied nature. The assassination per se barely figures in what I have read of his work. Newman says on p. 320 of the Angels book that the assassination will be solved by ploughing through official paper in the National Archives.3 But what are the chances of there being anything significant in them? What are the chances of there being anything significant about the assassination on official US paper anywhere? Assuming, for the sake of argument, that somewhere within the US intelligence community there is institutional knowledge of whodunit,4 we may also assume that nothing will be left on paper which points towards the assassination conspiracy (if anything was put there in the first place). Therefore, fascinating though the official paper trail is at some level, it 1 This essay reworks some of the material to be found in the essay of the same name in the previous issue of Lobster at 2 3 All the newly released documents are now available via the Mary Ferrell site. There are, apparently over 200,000 pages on JFK still unreleased. See 4 And there might not be; or it might be very limited. Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti, who was in the Agency in 1963, said in an interview in the mid-1980s: ‘I don’t think anybody was really sure in Washington who was behind the assassination.’ Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk is never going to tell us about who was on Dealey Plaza. And that’s what interests me: whodunit? By the standards of serious researchers such as Dr Newman, I have a barely informed, generalist’s interest in the story. My view of it changes. About 20 years ago I would have said that the Mafia probably did it: how else to explain the role of Jack Ruby? But though there have been a number of reports of mafiosi claiming to have done it, success has a thousand fathers and there is no actual evidence of Mafia involvement in the shooting.5 Despite all the evidence of the CIA’s interest in, and manipulation of, Oswald,6 I could never quite see the CIA qua institution doing the assassination. Had they wanted to rid themselves of Kennedy there were other, less drastic means available to them: Kennedy’s sexual promiscuity left him wide open to a smear campaign. However no such campaign ever materialised at home (where it would have been difficult to do) or abroad (where it would have been easier). And would a CIA conspiracy have been so leaky? In Lobster 2 I wrote this: ‘. . . the assassination seems to have been widely known about in advance. What is striking about this is that for the most part the people who are known to have had such advance knowledge were low level “street people” – a stripper, a waitress, a small-time right-winger, a minor intelligence agent. The assassination conspiracy was leaky. And this suggests very strongly that we are dealing with something other than a professional job by the intelligence services or the Pentagon. It is hard to imagine the pros holding anything more closely than the assassination of a president.’ In the beginning I now can’t remember how I first came across the LBJ-dunit thesis. Perhaps it was the reference to it in Michael Milan’s The Squad: the US Government’s Secret Alliance with Organized Crime.7 The pseudonymous author of that book 5 I discount James Files’ story. That, as Garrick Alder has shown, is an invention. See 6 Leaving aside the problems created by John Armstrong’s ‘two Oswalds’ thesis. 7 Prion/Multimedia, London 1989. Read it at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk claims to have been part of a group of gangsters recruited by J. Edgar Hoover after WW2 to do violence in the national interest at Hoover’s behest. He wrote that, after the Kennedy assassination. Hoover said to him: ‘I’ll just say: Johnson. No doubt. We stand away.’8 Many years later I saw The Men on the 6th Floor website9 which advocates the LBJ-dunit thesis and I borrowed Anthony Frewin’s copy of the book which the site was promoting. I was immediately taken with it, but not because the authors had much evidence. What was striking about the book was how little the authors knew about the extant assassination literature10 and how little their informant, Native American Lawrence ‘Loy’ Factor, knew and told them. All Factor said was that he had been recruited by a man he knew only as ‘Wallace’ and paid in advance to fire his rifle at someone. That someone turned out to be Kennedy. The book centrally describes the authors’ attempts to identify ‘Wallace’. This was Malcolm ‘Mac’ Wallace, they discovered, one of LBJ’s entourage. He was identified for them by LBJ’s former mistress, Madeleine Brown, who lived in Dallas and had independently concluded that Wallace was involved in the dirty deed (although she had no evidence). There was one little detail in the Factor story which resonated with me. On Factor’s account, after leaving the Texas Book Depository, he was dropped at the bus station to get a bus back to where he lived. Of course: a poor Native American wouldn’t have a car. The only people I have seen hitch-hiking in America were Native Americans. Such minor details should have no influence on how one assesses a proposition; but they do. Another little detail looms larger than perhaps it should: the fact that Robert Caro chose to omit Billie Sol Estes entirely from his account of LBJ in the 1960s. Caro’s quartet of books about LBJ are a monument – perhaps the monument – in American political biography. Caro is unflinching in presenting LBJ’s bizarre, obnoxious personality, how he got rich by what used to be called influence-peddling and how, long after his death, some people were still afraid to talk about him. Billie Sol Estes was one of the biggest crooks exposed in sixties America – big enough to be the cover of an issue of Time magazine. He talked repeatedly about funding LBJ and later about LBJ’s role in the assassination, yet he is not mentioned by Caro. 8 pp. 209/210. This page citation refers to the hardback. The pagination of the version on-line is apparently different. I have no idea if the book is an invention and no means of assessing it. 9 10 Ironically, their ignorance of the literature meant they did not dismiss the claims of Loy Factor at the outset. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk For what we might call serious JFK researchers – the kind of people who will be examining the National Archives JFK collections – Loy Factor, Billie Sol Estes and Madeleine Brown are all unreliable sources. But since we are not going to get official paper to explain Dealey Plaza to us, we have to make do with what we have; and the hypothesis with the best evidence to support it at present is that, while the CIA were undoubtedly running Oswald, LBJ’s gang organised the shooting. Agency voices The testimony of two other ignored or discredited figures, Chauncey Holt and E. Howard Hunt, is also relevant. Holt said that after the assassination he realised that the CIA had been setting Oswald up to carry the can for a fake assassination attempt on JFK (for which Holt provided unwitting technical support). Towards the end of his life Hunt identified LBJ and some senior CIA people as behind the assassination proper. You might think that the stories of a CIA contract agent (Holt) and a senior CIA officer (Hunt) would be received with enthusiasm. The CIA is at the top of the list of potential culprits for most researchers and here is what had previously been missing: CIA personnel confessing to knowledge of the event. But they were received with indifference or suspicion. If they were aware of Chauncey Holt at all, most JFK researchers seem to have dismissed him soon after he appeared in the early 1990s. Holt claimed to have been one of the ‘tramps’ photographed on Dealey Plaza. This claim seemed to have been disproven by the release of Dallas Police records of the tramps’ arrests and Holt wasn’t one of them. In actual fact, two sets of ‘tramps’ were arrested, one very soon after the assassination. This is the trio whose police records were released. The second group was apprehended nearly two hours later. Holt was in this second group, who had documentation giving them cover as agents of the ATF.11 They were photographed being escorted to the police station but were not arrested and thus generated no official paper.12 Few seem to have read Holt’s posthumous book.13 Hunt’s confession was almost universally dismissed. This, for example, is the (anonymous) comment on the Mary Ferrell site: 11 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives: ATF Home Page 12 Details at 13 On Holt’s story, start with the long interview with him at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘Hunt’s story has been challenged due to its lack of corroboration, its internal inconsistencies and Hunt’s failure to provide any details from his activities in 1963 which would support it. Some will accept Hunt’s confession as the truth. For others, Hunt’s naming of LBJ at the top of the plot will be seen as a bit of “spin” to present the assassination as a “rogue operation”, deflecting attention from higher-level sponsors within the government. For that matter, Hunt was not necessarily in a position to know the ultimate authors of the conspiracy. For others, the confession will be dismissed, seen as a parting gift to a ne’er-do-well son or perhaps a “last laugh” on America from a man who Kennedy with a passion.’14 What a contrast there is between the reception given to Hunt and the claims of Philip Agee, Frank Snepp and John Stockwell, CIA officers who wrote memoirs in the 1970s. But that trio were writing about the CIA from a critical or left perspective – whence most of the JFK researchers are coming – and Hunt was a right-wing cold warrior. Hunt’s naming of LBJ to his son was prefigured in his 2007 memoir, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond, written before his ‘confession’, which contained this paragraph: ‘Having Kennedy liquidated, thus elevating himself to the presidency without having to work for it himself, could have been a very tempting and logical move on Johnson’s part. . . LBJ had the money and the connections to manipulate the scenario in Dallas and is on record as having convinced JFK to make the appearance in the first place. He further tried unsuccessfully to engineer the passengers of each vehicle, trying to get his good buddy, Gov. (John) Connolly, to ride with him instead of in JFK’s car – where. . . . he would have been out of danger.’15 Hunt gave his son, St John, a written account of his knowledge of the plot. The version reported in Rolling Stone begins: ‘It starts out with LBJ again, connecting him to Cord Meyer, then goes on: “Cord Meyer discusses a plot with [David Atlee] Phillips who brings in Wm. 14 15 I haven’t read this book but this quotation is cited by John Simkin, who is entirely reliable, at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Harvey and Antonio Veciana. He meets with Oswald in Mexico City. . . . Then Veciana meets w/ Frank Sturgis in Miami and enlists David Morales in anticipation of killing JFK there. But LBJ changes itinerary to Dallas, citing personal reasons.” ’16 By the time Hunt’s confession appeared after his death in 2007, Phillips, Veciana, Sturgis and Morales were already being discussed by the Kennedy assassination researchers. They were some of the usual suspects. Described as a CIA hit-man, Morales was the subject of a chapter in Larry Hancock’s excellent Someone Would Have Talked the year before;17 and, while drunk, is reliably reported to have said of Kennedy, ‘We took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?’18 Veciana and Phillips had been identified – initially by Anthony Summers, I think – as being involved in manipulating Oswald; and (the apparently not very reliable) Marita Lorenz said she was in Dallas with Frank Sturgis, some Cubans (including Orlando Bosch) and ‘Ossie’ (Oswald) the day before the shooting.19 In 1978 a magazine article by former CIA officer Victor Marchetti claimed that the CIA were prepared, if necessary, to do a ‘limited hang-out’ on the assassination at hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, then taking place. This process, Marchetti said, would have meant the blame being put on some ‘renegade’ CIA people – including Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt (both of whom were alleged to have been in Dallas on the day of the assassination).20 But Bill Kelly shows with official documents that Sturgis 16 Erik Hedegaard, ‘The Last Confession of E. Howard Hunt’, Rolling Stone (March, 2007) at 17 Southlake, Texas: JFK Lancer Production and publications, 2006. 18 The account of Morales’ drunken outburst is in David Talbot’s account of Morales is at 19 See for example 20 Marchetti’s article can be read at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk was apparently not CIA but military.21 Hunt eventually sued the publisher of the newspaper but he lost (after a retrial and appeal) because he couldn’t prove where he had been on 22 November 1963.22 Was the CIA really prepared to do this? Marchetti heard this from sources of his within the Agency and they might have been misinforming him to mislead the Committee. Nor is it clear what this meant. Were his Agency sources telling Marchetti that Hunt and Sturgis had been involved at Dallas? Or were they merely telling him that the Agency were prepared to use them as sacrificial lambs? The ‘unusual’ suspect was Cord Meyer, about whom there is little on record and nothing at all linking him to Dallas. It is reported that he had an antipathy to JFK originating in 1945 when the priapic Kennedy tried to pull Meyer’s wife, Mary23 If this is true, the fact that the by then divorced Mary Meyer became one of JFK’s sexual partners in the 1960s, may have increased Meyer’s animus.24 Despite having ended WW2 as a liberal internationalist, Meyer became an obsessive, even paranoid anti-communist and may have persuaded himself that JFK was a threat to the Republic.25 In his hand-written sketch of the conspiracy E. Howard Hunt began it with: ‘1962 LBJ recruits Cord Meyer’. (emphasis added)26 The fake assassination attempt Chauncey Holt thought he was part of the plan by Desmond Fitzgerald, the head of the CIA’s anti-Castro operations, to run a fake assassination attempt on JFK and blame the (publicly) pro-Castro Oswald. But, given the virtually unlimited resources available to Fitzgerald, would he have tried to organise merely one such attempt? Surely not: things go wrong; the patsy might not be in the right place on the day. And the patsy is the key, for both a fake or real attempt. Shooting an American president from long range wasn’t that difficult 21 See 22 This is described by Mark Lane, who was lawyer for the publication, in his Plausible Denial (London: Plexus, 1992). Davis Talbot discusses this in the essay cited in note 17. 23 Once again we owe this to the incredibly assiduous John Simkin. See 24 And this may also explain (a) Mary Meyer’s murder and (b) the intense interest of James Angleton in her diary, which he found and suppressed. 25 On Meyer’s anti-communism see 26 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk then. (It would be much more difficult now.) The tricky part was providing an account of the event which would satisfy the inquiry which followed it. It had to be assassination (real or phoney) plus explanation. Therefore let us assume that Fitzgerald had more than one such plan. Paul Bleau is the author of a very interesting essay27 about the various patsies we know about associated with apparent assassination conspiracies. There were five. Oswald, of course, in Dallas. For an attempt in Los Angeles in June 1963, Vaughn Marlowe.28 A Korean war vet, Marlowe was a member of Los Angeles chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) and Congress of Racial Equality, with links to the American Civil Liberties Union and Socialist Workers Party. Marlowe also travelled to Mexico on behalf of the FPCC in 1962, visited the Mexico City Cuban embassy to try and get a visa to travel to Cuba and met with Mexican communists while there.29 This political CV is strikingly similar to Oswald’s. The plot about which most is known was in Chicago, on 2 November, 1963. Here the patsy was apparently going to be Thomas Vallee, like Oswald a former Marine, but with no Cuban connections. But the apparent would-be shooters were detected before the event.30 In Tampa, Florida, on the morning of 18 November, the apparent patsy for an attempt was a Cuban exile named Gilbert Policarpo Lopez, who also had many similarities with Oswald: links with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) and the Soviet Union, and a trip to Mexico City.31 In Miami, later the same day, the designated patsy was Santiago Garriga, who, like Oswald, also had Cuban links and had started a branch of the FPCC. Bleau presents this collection of patsies as being part of assassination plots. But given the striking similarities between the back-stories of Oswald, Lopez, Garriga and Marlowe, it is much more likely they were all part of Fitzgerald’s plan to pin a phoney assassination attempt on the Castro 27 Paul Bleau, ‘The Three Failed Plots to Kill JFK: The Historians’ Guide on how to Research his Assassination – with an addendum’ at 28 See note 25. 29 See note 25. 30 An introduction to the subject is at 31 See William Kelly, ‘The Tampa Plot in Retrospect’ at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk supporters in the US and, by extension, on Cuba. And four patsies and four apparent assassination attempts implies a very large operation indeed. The only one of the known patsies who doesn’t fit this profile is Vallee in Chicago. I think that only the Chicago event was an assassination attempt proper; and from the sketchy details we have of it, like the Dallas shooting, it was not a professional intelligence operation.32 Who needed to know? The shooting in Dallas blew Desmond Fitzgerald’s operation to blame a phoney attempt on Oswald. How well insulated was the plan? On the need-to-know basis, who needed to know? Not the Director of the CIA, apparently, who telephoned the new president Johnson the next day to tell him that the Agency had information linking Oswald to an ‘international conspiracy’.33 This was quickly squashed. The Cuban link to Oswald might have been appropriate for a fake attempt, but was far too dangerous with a dead president, especially with a live patsy who would talk. (Killing Oswald must have been part of the original plan.) To my knowledge there is no information on how ‘the line’ was handed down, and by whom, within the national security establishment. We do know that a CIA media asset, journalist Joe Alsop, was given the task of persuading new president Johnson to abandon his proposed Texas inquiry into the shooting and create a much grander national inquiry to establish the ‘lone assassin’ story.34 Reading the transcript of that conversation it is impossible to work out the subtexts of the two men. But LBJ knew whom Alsop represented and didn’t take a lot of persuading. Oswald alive and in custody was an acute problem for the sections of the CIA which had been monitoring or manipulating him – Angleton’s counter- intelligence people and Fitzgerald’s Cuba section – and for the Johnson gang. Jack Ruby, the only member of the conspiracy who was visible on the ground after the event – at Parkland Hospital35 and at the press conference called by 32 A decent summary is at 33 Discussed in detail by Peter Dale Scott at 34 The transcript of that telephone call can be read at 35 Dallas Police Files, Box 1, Folder 3, item 9, is a report about Wilma Tice who said she saw Ruby at Parkland and subsequently received a threatening phone call warning her not talk about it. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the Dallas District Attorney – was persuaded/instructed by persons unknown to kill Oswald. Whatever happened in Dallas that day, Ruby was part of it. Before his death, in an interview and in a letter, Ruby suggested that LBJ was the culprit.36 It is one of the minor mysteries of the case that Ruby’s steer towards LBJ was never taken seriously by the Kennedy researchers. 36 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Back to the future (again) Simon Matthews Walls Come Tumbling Down Daniel Rachel Picador, 2016, £12.99 The British Underground Press of the Sixties James Birch and Barry Miles Rocket 88 Books, 2017, £35.00 Daniel Rachel’s book is a brilliant oral history of the UK’s anti-racist, pro-left cultural activists from the mid ‘70s through to the early ‘90s. I knew several of these people and it was good, so to speak, to meet them again and to see pictures of them doing their stuff all those years ago. On page 534 – yes, it’s that long – Robert Elms proclaims: ‘Thatcher might have won elections, but culturally we won’; and ‘Look at Britain now: it’s a society where racism is absolutely frowned on; where gay marriage is accepted. It’s totally different from that Little England that Thatcher tried to hold on to.’ I presume these comments were made pre-23 June 2016. The anti-EU vote has much wider ramifications – and not least the politics of those who successfully propelled us to the result. For many who supported the struggle for progressive politics during the bleak Thatcher years the future, once again, now looks far from rosy. We kick off in the 70s, with the National Front polling 25% in London and staging noisy and relatively well attended demonstrations. After utterances from Eric Clapton and David Bowie that seemed to validate such antics,1 Red Saunders, a photographer noted for his contributions to The Sunday Times 1 David Bowie stated on 26 April 1976, ’I believe Britain could benefit from a dictator’ and ‘Hitler was the first rock star’. See Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk magazine, started Rock Against Racism with (amongst others) Carol Grimes and Gered Mankowitz, another photographer and son of Wolf Mankowitz.2 Almost exactly a decade before Rock Against Racism, the campaigning groups Shelter and Release had formed in the late ‘60s. Rock Against Racism was a very much of that mould and that period of time: concerned individuals taking action against something they wished to change. Lower key than either Shelter or Release, there were still plenty of people willing to participate.3 The problems started when you tried to work with rock stars. Great hopes were pinned on the burgeoning punk scene. Alas, Rhoda Dakar (later lead singer in The Bodysnatchers) recalls ‘Joe Strummer talked in slogans’; Paul Weller proclaimed he would vote Conservative at the next election;4 Malcolm McLaren was too obviously a hustler; Ian Dury and John Lydon were, in different ways, unpredictable. This left Tom Robinson (who had already written ‘Glad to be Gay’ for the Campaign for Homosexual Equality), a few reggae acts and Carol Grimes, who had no record deal in 1976.5 The early RAR gigs were small scale and changed nothing. Initially they lacked a political angle. This arrived when the Socialist Workers Party (always on the look-out for campaigns they could take over) launched the Anti-Nazi League in 1977, scooping up RAR in the process. Peter Hain became a prominent supporter at this point,6 and Peter Jenner too, another very obvious overhang from the ‘60s.7 They organized the Carnival Against the Nazis in April 1978,8 which was a great success, particularly the performance by Poly 2 The photographer as radical figure, recording grim reality, was something of a trope in the ‘60s. Of the two, Saunders was fiercely political, whilst Mankowitz was court photographer to the Rolling Stones at one point. 3 Starting a campaign against anything deemed wrong or objectionable was traditional on the left. Wolf Mankowitz was a co-founder of the Partisan Coffee House, with Raphael Samuel, Stuart Hall and Eric Hobsbawn, back in 1958. The Aldermaston marches were planned in its basement. RAR and the Anti-Nazi League could be seen as a continuation of this approach. 4 Paul Weller said this when interviewed by the Sniffin Glue punk fanzine, 12 May 1977. 5 Carol Grimes was launched in 1970 as a UK equivalent of Janis Joplin but never enjoyed comparable success. 6 Peter Hain had, originally, been a very active (and visible) campaigner for the Liberal Party but joined Labour in 1977. 7 Jenner organized a set of festivals in Hyde Park in the late ‘60s and initially managed The Pink Floyd. He also thought Strummer ‘all over the place’. Strummer – a boarding school boy in the 60s whose elder brother joined the National Front – was a problematic figure who struggled to retain ‘credibility’ in certain quarters after signing to CBS. 8 See the original poster, archived by the V&A at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Styrene, correctly recognized in the book as ‘the advance party for the generation that would remake Britain’.9 Poly Styrene may not have lasted but the many ANL/RAR festivals that followed brought back into circulation the Glastonbury Festival kit (triangular tent above the stage, sound system and hippy roadies) after a gap of seven years and led directly to the relaunch of Glastonbury Festival itself in ‘79 with Peter Gabriel headlining. It has run continually ever since, a direct legacy of the activism of this period. For a while things seemed hopeful. In January ‘79 the 2-Tone label was started with the intention that it function as the UK equivalent of Tamla Motown, showcasing a wide array of mixed-race dance bands singing socially relevant pop songs.10 Unlike punk, this wasn’t London-centric and was based around The Specials, a savvy 7-piece act from Coventry. To get this degree of autonomy they turned down a deal with Rolling Stones Records11 – not something Joe Strummer would have done – and signed instead to Chrysalis,12 with the proviso that they had their own subsidiary label and the right to release 10 singles a year. It turned out to all have been in vain. In the political arena Callaghan threw away the chance of Labour continuing in power in the autumn of ‘78 when he decided against a general election. Predictably, like all governments that go full term, Labour went down to defeat in 1979. Nor was white working-class and white suburban racism defeated. Voters of that ilk just moved into the embrace of the Conservative Party after Margaret Thatcher legitimized their concerns with her ‘feeling rather swamped’ comments on Granada TV in January 1978. Both Labour's ‘79 defeat and the Tories assimilation of the extreme right were salutary lessons that cultural campaigns and nice music were no substitute for winning real political battles. 2-Tone faded away quite quickly and had run out of steam by late 1980. Nor did artistic unity prevail. Two of its early signings both quit as soon 9 Poly Styrene was a fantastically memorable character – and not just for her stage name. She died in 2011, aged 53. One of the better obituaries was in the Daily Telegraph - see 10 There had previously been commercially successful mixed-race pop groups in the ‘60s – e.g. Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, Geno Washington and The Ram Jam Band, The Foundations, The Equals – but all had vanished fairly quickly as white youth culture hardened and the mods of an earlier period turned into the skinheads of the mid ‘70s. 11 All now seems to be hunky-dory between The Specials and the Stones, as The Specials are the opening act for the Stones’ Coventry gig later this year (2 June). Ref 12 Chrysalis were the ultimate hippy management agency, handling Jethro Tull for many years. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk as better deals came along: Madness for Stiff Records in September ‘79 and Bad Manners a few weeks later for Magnet.13 The road to 1983, and an election from which the left emerged shell- shocked, began here. In the aftermath things moved up a gear and a serious political alliance finally developed with the Labour Party, which was seeking to hitch itself to the youth vote. Labour hoped to thus counteract a Conservative ascendancy that, by virtue of the UK’s electoral system, looked set to last a couple of decades. Neil Kinnock, Larry Whitty (General Secretary) and Tom Sawyer (NUPE) all recognized this and what emerged was Red Wedge. Based initially in the same offices as CND, it intended to produce high quality cultural support for the Labour Party. A chastened Paul Weller returned to the fold, Peter Jenner was central and with him came his new signing Billy Bragg.14 An awful lot of Red Wedge subsequently revolved around either Bragg or Weller. Not spelt out in the narrative is what Kinnock et al must have really expected. Given the scale of Labour’s defeat in ‘83 they must have known that a Conservative defeat (or even a hung Parliament) was unlikely for at least 8-12 years. Did the various musicians, graphic designers, journalists and fashionistas who assembled behind the Red Wedge banner understand this? For them the Miner’s Strike of ‘84–‘85 was a steep learning curve and the third term that Thatcher duly won in ‘87 (albeit with a reduced majority) a desperate disappointment. After which – in a narrative that again suggests a seamless transition, which was not the case in reality – Red Wedge morphed into the ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ campaign. If there was nothing doing in UK politics, perhaps inveighing against wickedness elsewhere might be better? On the face of it, yes, Mandela walked free. But a useful corrective is provided in the book by Peter Hain who points out that the mass concerts, hit records and condemnation of apartheid in the music press had little to do with Mandela’s release. After the dramatic unravelling of the Eastern bloc in 1989 and the effective end of the Cold War, the US had no further strategic use for South Africa and duly applied pressure. With Labour consistently winning bye-elections and Thatcher gone, great hopes were pinned on the 1992 election. Rachel’s book reaches its conclusion at this point; or, more specifically, concludes with a critique, from all sides, of 13 Both defectors were London-based, rather than rooted in ‘the provinces’ and both were popular with gangs of white skinheads. Bad Manners moved to the record label run by Michael Levy, later Lord Levy. 14 Fast forward to 2018 and Billy Bragg was lecturing the Bank of England on ‘Accountability - the Antidote to Authoritarianism’. See Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Kinnock’s ‘92 rally in Sheffield where he hyper-ventilated like a Disney cartoon character: ‘a disaster’ (Lucy Hooberman), ‘really embarrassing' (Tiny Fennimore), ‘like a fucking geezer down the pub’ (Cathal Smyth) and ‘a real body blow’ (Billy Bragg). But none of these had purchase on the Labour Party. Hooberman was an independent film maker, Fennimore a tour manager and Smyth a musician. None had votes at the Labour Party conference, and none, including Bragg, were the people to whom Kinnock was talking. At the suggestion of Peter Mandelson, from ‘89 Kinnock had been listening closely to pollster Deborah Mattinson. Her view, privately, was that Kinnock would never win in ‘92. He was small, balding, freckly, from a geographically marginal area of the UK and prone to answering simple enquiries with sentences that had so many commas and sub-clauses that he still hadn’t reached a full stop two minutes later. He was deeply – even unreasonably – unpopular among the clusters of the electorate that she sampled in her focus groups.15 True, the opinion polls were 38%–38% on polling day; but in actual votes it went 42% Conservative–35% Labour. The Red Wedge activists clearly think that if Kinnock had reached out slightly more to younger voters . . .been more adventurous . . . Parliament could have at least gone hung in ‘92. Considering that John Major returned to Downing Street with a majority of only 21, this might be a reasonable assumption. The psephology here is interesting. In the early 1970s the under- 35s had been 10.5% less likely to vote than the over-55s. By 1983 this turn- out gap had widened to 11%. By ‘92 it was 11.5%. If turn-out by the young had been 1% more in 1992, then it is conceivable that Major would have ended up leading a minority government and Kinnock would have stayed as Labour Party leader. But, for this to happen, Labour would have had to have targeted young voters with policies that appealed to them. Instead, Mattinson and Mandelson decided to concentrate on re-assuring the (often ill-informed) non-political suburban voters. Kinnock departed smartly after 1992 and his successor John Smith died suddenly in 1994.16 The new broom, Tony Blair, was anxious to avoid either a further spell in opposition or a hung Parliament, and actively sought the youth 15 For a full account of this period see Mattinson’s book, Talking to a Brick Wall (2010), reviewed in Lobster 60 at 16 John Smith, Leader 1992-1994, had attended only one focus group. During the debrief afterwards, a massively disappointed Smith was informed that the participants were ‘recruited as C1C2 swing voters’; to which, Smith was described as ‘Spluttering with rage he could hardly bring himself to voice the ultimate insult: “They were all Tories!”’ See Deborah Mattinson's book, as mentioned in footnote 15. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk vote again. (Though he also wanted the suburban vote, too). By this point Red Wedge, Jenner, Weller, Bragg et al were no longer deemed a viable mechanism for obtaining this. Instead, through his connections to the late John Preston,17 Tony Blair constructed the (short-lived) entity that became known as ‘Cool Britannia’. At the ‘96 Brit Awards Blair made a presentation to David Bowie, now cool again having, according to one’s views, either ‘recanted his earlier statements' or ‘explained them’. Bowie duly said, yes, he would endorse Labour; but it might be tricky as he was a tax exile. Not surprisingly, the endorsement didn’t happen. After Labour’s remarkable electoral triumph a year later a reception took place at 10 Downing Street – musicians, artists, film makers, actors and creative types of every kind being courted and invited to take their place within the New Labour tent. Significantly, virtually all of them declined the request to actually campaign for Blair. No explanations were given, no secrets spilled (though Noel Gallagher joked about taking cocaine in a lavatory at No. 10). For whatever reason people like film-maker Danny Boyle and record company owner Alan McGee, both of whom had struggled through the hard years of the ‘70s and ‘80s, never felt that Blair and his grouping were people they could work with on a long-term basis. To return to Robert Elms. Back in 1980 he was a young columnist at The Face, a magazine that rejected the gritty political realism (and anarchic protest) of earlier writing in favour of a new culture. Sade and Paul Weller’s outfit The Style Council were considered to be ‘jazz’ and Colin MacInnes was proclaimed as the UK equivalent of Kerouac. One thing that marked The Face apart from it’s contemporaries was its glossy appearance, colour spreads, articles on clothing and more attention to a ‘lifestyle’ approach. Compare that with James Birch and Barry Miles’ guide to International Times, Oz, Friends and sundry other counter culture publications of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s recently produced by Rocket 88. Brilliantly illustrated – the book contains every cover of every magazine published between ‘66 and ‘74 – this is all very political stuff compared with the fare pushed by The Face a decade or so later. IT and Oz were definitely not targeted at discriminating young punters with money to spend.18 17 John Preston was managing director of Polydor records in 1984, later moving to a similar role at RCA. His wife, Roz Preston, was a policy adviser to Blair. See his Times obituary 29 November 2017. 18 Birch is a long-standing and influential gallery owner who exhibited many of the magazine covers in his gallery in late 2017. Seen en masse as works of art their impact was considerable. Miles was a seminal figure in the UK counter culture of the ‘60s, present at all of the major events. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk It is hard not to think that the yawning gap in electoral participation by the young (so noticeable post-1997) was due to a combination of youth culture drifting into slick consumerism and political leaders – like Blair and Brown – not being prepared to do very much, unless they have the agreement of (perpetually) undecided voters. Despite repeated electoral endorsements, the Labour years continued with the Thatcher settlement: no investment in housing, huge debt levels for those wanting to go to university, lower than average investment in health care, poor unemployment benefits and no appreciable investment in the arts. And in foreign policy, Iraq. By 2010 the turn-out gap between the under 35s and the over 55s had widened to 20% producing David Cameron and Brexit (in the 2016 EU Referendum the gap was 17%). It follows that – since, say, 1990 at the latest – had UK politics been as concerned with the young as it has been with pensioners and undecided voters, we may not have had either Cameron or Brexit. So, perhaps Red Wedge and its antecedents, stretching back to IT and Oz were right. We need a mass movement of youth-orientated rock stars, celebrities, academics and politicians enthusiastically campaigning for what is in the long-term interests of all of us. In years to come Glastonbury 2017, where Corbyn was greeted with adulation, might be looked back on as the launch pad for this. (Albeit this was a mismatch between a boundlessly optimistic and hopeful audience and a hard-line Eurosceptic.) But one lesson to be drawn by all parties from the Thatcher years and their continuation into Brexit must surely be that economic liberals can also be social liberals. Having a ‘nicer’ more ‘tolerant’ society can turn out to be pretty pointless if you don’t have much money. Living in a country with gay marriage is insignificant if the other political battles are repeatedly lost. Simon Mathews’ Psychedelic Celluloid: British Pop Music in Film and TV 1965-74 is published by Oldcastle Books. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Anna Raccoon and the dawn of Savilisation Andrew Rosthorn Jimmy Savile ‘moral panic’ tracked on computer in Dordogne Social scientists studying mass-media fantasies known as ‘moral panics’ have reported on an archive of internet traffic that reveals the social media origins of the Jimmy Savile scandal. This revelation was in the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy and was provided by Dr Mark Smith (from Edinburgh University) and Dr Ros Burnett (senior research associate at the Oxford University Centre for Criminology). They link the Savile Scandal – ‘the most prominent chapter in recent UK cultural history, in which the former BBC entertainer Jimmy Savile is alleged to have sexually abused hundreds of children over the past fifty years’ – with the satanic ritual abuse scandal ‘which swept the US and the UK over the course of the 1980s and 1990s. . . suggesting that a belief in demonic threats still has traction in the public imagination.’ 1 Thousands of emails copied to an obsolete Apple iMac personal computer in a country house in France, recorded hours of private social media discussions between the first women to come forward and claim they had been sexually abused by the dead disc jockey. Forty years ago the women had been teenagers detained at the Duncroft Approved School, an experimental secure boarding school near London Heathrow, opened by the Home Office to give a second chance of education to girls of above-average intelligence taken into care after breaking the law. The owner of the electronic archive was a retired English lawyer living in the Dordogne, who had herself lived in care at Duncroft in 1965 and 1966. Susanne Cameron-Blackie, blogging daily online from France as Anna Raccoon, had joined two now defunct online communities, Friendsreunited and Care Leavers Reunited. She noticed that former boarders at Duncroft Approved School were exchanging memories using code names. Cameron- Blackie collaborated online with Sally 1 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Stevens, a former pupil living in California, and they worked out the true identities of the women behind the code names. Cameron-Blackie described how she noticed that a woman, who had roomed with her in the Wedgewood Dormitory at Duncroft in 1965, was claiming online to have been assaulted in the dormitory by Jimmy Savile. ‘How could I have been so unobservant as to not notice such a comment worthy event as a major celebrity galloping around the building unescorted? There had to be some mistake in the reporting. Or maybe in my maths? I rechecked all my fingers, yep I was definitely there in 1965. Except for one month at the end of the year – but I was back four months later.’ So began Cameron-Blackie’s three year unofficial investigation into the Duncroft online allegations that sparked the 2012 nationwide Savile Scandal. By 2016 that had cost Savile’s part-time employers at the BBC £10.7 million. The total cost of subsequent investigations by the National Health Service, by various police forces, education authorities and by the ongoing £100 million Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), announced by the British home secretary Theresa May in 2014, will never be known. Cameron-Blackie collated extra information from research into BBC records gathered online by two other blogging investigators known as Moor Larkin2 and Rabbitaway3, and by Sally Stevens herself, at The Rockphiles.4 In November 2012 some of the ‘care leavers’ emerged from the anonymity of social media to give television interviews and instruct lawyers to take legal proceedings against the BBC and the £4 million held in trust by Jimmy Savile’s medical charities. Cameron-Blackie, a former Lord Chancellor’s Visitor for Wales, was able to cross-reference their claims and recover documentary evidence from the Barnardo’s charity which had inherited the Duncroft school records. Surrey Police discovered from a visitor’s book that Savile had not visited the school before 1974. They eventually wrote to a hundred surviving Duncroft pupils and staff to report that a police ‘Operation Outreach’ had found no corroborated evidence that any member of staff had been aware of any wrongdoing at the school. In 2013, fearing that she might not survive a forthcoming cancer 2 3 4 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk operation in France, Cameron-Blackie sent an email to Professor Viviene Cree at the Edinburgh University School of Social and Political Science: ‘I blog on the Internet as “Anna Raccoon” and as such have published several articles on the current “Savile saga”. However, having found myself at the centre of the “Duncroft” furore, I have also been given a mound of information which I have not yet published. I am looking for a good home for it! Is there a possibility that we might collaborate in some way? I am not interested in money, nor credit for my contribution, but I am not in good health [I have had cancer for the past two years, and am now – thank God – several months past my “sell by” date, but I take nothing for granted!] and I am growing concerned that should I kick the proverbial bucket, then the knowledge and the contacts that I hold will be lost forever, and one day academics will want to piece together the origins of this current panic.’ Within weeks of the November 2012 screening of a sensational ITV documentary, Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile, Edinburgh University held the first of a number of ‘moral panic’ seminars, involving Professor Cree, Dr Mark Smith, head of social work, and Dr Gary Clapton, senior lecturer in social work. The Edinburgh team said they ‘. . . shared common interests in how particular subjects, especially those involving children and sex (e.g. satanic ritual abuse, child exploitation and abuse in residential child care settings) could be moralised with disproportionate and sometimes dangerous consequences.’ Their research project, state-funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, was initially described as Revisiting Moral Panics: A Critical Examination of 21st Century Social Issues and Anxieties. It aimed ‘. . . to examine some 21st century social issues and anxieties through the concept of moral panic, first brought to public attention 40 years ago in Stanley Cohen’s influential study Folk Devils and Moral Panics.’ Until he died in 2013, Cohen was Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. He showed in Folk Devils how news media had hyped a social threat from overblown police reports of ‘Mods and Rockers’ fighting on a beach in Brighton in 1963. In a book that has become a classic, he noted in 1972: ‘. . . a pattern of distorted facts and misrepresentation, as well as a distinct, simplistic depiction of the respective images of both groups Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk involved in the disturbance.’5 He found that, like a traditional witch hunt, ‘the depiction of mods and rockers as violent, unruly troublemakers actually led in itself to a rise in “deviant behaviour” by the subcultures.’ At the seminar in Edinburgh, Dr Mark Smith (an expert in residential child care, who had already publicly questioned the reported scale of historic child abuse allegations in British care homes) noted that Cameron-Blackie had discovered that Duncroft complainants were circulating a forged letter about Savile typed on stolen Surrey Police notepaper. Cameron-Blackie had also discovered that the anonymous Duncroft complainants were unaware that the former headmistress, Miss Margaret Jones, was alive at the age of 91 and quite able to challenge the anonymous tales about her school. Confronted without warning on her doorstep by a Daily Mail reporter, Miss Jones warned the newspaper, ‘A lot of these girls at the time were very mentally disturbed.’ 6 Cameron-Blackie described the media frenzy over Savile: ‘Stories were sold to the main stream media concerning the girl who had spent a considerable time sitting up in bed opposite me. She was now claiming that Jimmy Savile had been running round our dormitory sexually abusing us and that “we were terrified” – I had never heard so much nonsense. Another girl was all over social media saying that “Maggie Jones”, as she had the temerity to call her, had been “pimping the girls out to celebrities”. I literally couldn’t believe my ears. I was quickly rewarded with, as I had suspected, a raft of supportive “ex-Duncroft girls” who had been googling these mysterious stories, and who had landed on my site. I shall always be grateful to them – they have kept my spirits high as the story grew legs by the day, and I was in danger of disappearing under a tsunami of vitriol and recrimination.’ 7 In the summer of 2013, when the National Health Service spent a million pounds to investigate Savile’s charity activities in 41 British hospitals, the Economic and Social Research Council activated an ‘urgency grants mechanism’ to form a team for recovery and collation of information from 5 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London: Paladin, 1973), p. 224 . 6 Daily Mail, 2 November 2012. 7 Smith and Burnett: The origins of the Jimmy Savile scandal. See note 1. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the iMac at Cameron-Blackie’s home in the Dordogne and to interview the elderly staff and former residents of Duncroft. ‘The doctors have not given me long to live. Although I am both a writer and a lawyer I could not have embarked on a lengthy project at this stage in my life. I looked for someone who could research the actual truth about what really happened all those years ago and delineate the path by which we arrived at the current situation.’ 8 Still blogging as Anna Raccoon, Susanne Cameron-Blackie returned from France with her husband Graham Nundy to live in a riverbank house he converted for them at Reedham in Norfolk, where she died in her sleep on 18 August 2017.9 Anonymous social media In their 2018 paper, Dr Burnett and Dr Smith, now Professor of Social Work at Dundee University, have named the woman whose patently false allegation prompted Cameron-Blackie’s investigation. In October 2012, Mrs Bebe Roberts, then 62 and living in Cheshire, had waived anonymity to tell the Daily Mail that Savile molested her outside a dormitory in 1965. Burnett and Smith report: ‘Our interview with the former resident who claims to have introduced Savile to Duncroft indicates that he first visited in 1974, a fact subsequently confirmed by Surrey Police’s Operation Outreach [2015]. Bebe Roberts’s account of being assaulted by Savile in Duncroft in the mid 1960s is clearly not borne out by other sources of evidence. We sought to reach out to as broad a range of former staff and residents, including those who had made allegations against Savile but apart from an anonymous email that seemed it might have been from one of these, we did not manage to engage any complainants. In the event we interviewed Anna Raccoon herself, another resident from the 1960s and two former residents from the 1970s, including the girl who introduced Savile to Duncroft. We also interviewed the former deputy head of the school and a former head of education. Inevitably the numbers are small but there is some variety of viewpoints – one of 8 Telephone call the author, 2016. 9 Many pages of her blog, known in its early years on the web as ‘the snug’, have since been recovered by Richard O’Connor of Curratech in Ireland, as a tribute to Susanne’s search for ‘liberty, freedom and most of all, the truth’ and can be read online at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the residents did not enjoy her time at Duncroft and railed against much of what it stood for but, nevertheless, refuted the stories being told about Savile.’ It becomes clear from the Burnett and Smith paper that it was the dangerous anonymity of 21st century social media that triggered a nationwide moral panic after Savile’s death at the age of 84, in 2011. ‘When, more than forty years later, allegations against Savile began to emerge, they did so on social media message boards. The view of the former pupils we spoke to was that the whole situation had mushroomed out of control: “This nonsense about Jimmy Savile started up as like, you know, little kids, give it a wee try to see how far that runs, and if it doesn’t run far enough they ramp it up a bit. And that’s been going on since 2007. . . I think they thought it would be hushed up quietly, money paid. They had no idea that this snowball was going to take off, you know.” [1970s resident]. As other former Duncroft girls began to contribute to the message boards and to question the tales of abuse, the exchanges became ever- more acrimonious. “Basically the nastiness got so intense, I couldn’t tell who was real and who was false, people claiming to be real weren’t.” [1970s resident]. This social media dimension might cast doubts on the police’s assertion that those making allegations were unknown to one another and their accounts could thus be argued to provide independent corroboration of allegations.’ The Burnett and Smith paper describes the standard story of Savile at Duncroft: ‘Reporting of the Savile case evokes a particularly negative image of the culture in Duncroft. One former pupil was quoted as saying that “Jimmy treated Duncroft like a paedophile sweet shop. He used to take his pick of the mix. He would wander around the school in a vest and tracksuit bottoms. . . He stayed in a flat on the top floor . . . Who knows what horrors happened up there?” 10 Another told how Savile assaulted her in his Rolls-Royce after the headmistress, Miss Jones, asked if she wanted to go for a run with him. Former residents claimed that they had reported the abuse to school staff, including Miss Jones, who allegedly replied: “Don’t be stupid.” This dismissive attitude was represented by one of the girls through what 10 Daily Telegraph, 4 October 2012. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk has become the standard story of institutional abuse – that of innocent victims whose pleas for help fell on deaf ears: “The girls at Duncroft had been sent there by the courts for prostitution, drugs and because they tried to kill themselves. Who would have believed us against Saint Jimmy?” ’ 11 A 1970s Duncroft resident interviewed by the Edinburgh research team agreed that Savile had taken girls for a ride in his Rolls-Royce on organised outings. But even on organised outings, the disc jockey sometimes found that the ‘sexual dynamics’ were too risky: ‘So I said, if you take me out for a car ride on my own, I said, as soon as we get down the road the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to try and get your pants off. And, he turned round and said . . . because, I was tempting him, and that, it was sort of in the girls to be provocative like that. So, I was saying that, to see. . . and straight away he turned round and he said, nothing like that is going to happen. I mean, he wasn’t horrid about it, he just said, “I can’t take you.”’ Smith and Burnett judge that ‘. . . wider contextual detail might suggest that he did not have the run of the school in the way that newspaper reports suggest and certainly not access to the dormitories.’ ‘A picture emerges of Miss Jones as a callous individual who presided over Savile’s alleged abuse. She is said to have described those making complaints as delinquents who were looking for money. For her part, Miss Jones denied any knowledge of abuse insisting that if any of her girls had told her what Savile was doing to them, she would have thrown him “out on his ear” and reported him to police. “Nobody ever complained to me. Not one girl complained to me or my staff”. She goes on, in the same interview, to express her personal view of Savile: “I didn't like him. . . I thought he was an odd bod.” 12 The level of public outrage following the initial allegations against Savile led to a number of official reports, perhaps the most influential of which was Giving Victims a Voice,13 which states: “On the whole victims are not known to each-other and taken together their accounts paint a compelling picture of widespread 11 The Sun, 4 October 2012. 12 Daily Mail, 2 November 2012. 13 David Gray and Peter Watt, 2013, a joint publication by NSPCC and Metropolitan Police, page 4. At Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk sexual abuse by a predatory sex offender. We are therefore referring to them as ‘victims’ rather than ‘complainants’ and are not presenting the evidence they have provided as unproven allegations.” ’ Smith and Burnett admit: ‘This paper is based on only a very small sample of interviews. The material is ethically sensitive in that it may be claimed or used to cast doubt on accounts of abuse. The implications of the wider project from which it draws are potentially profound, casting doubt on the origins and detail of the Savile scandal . . . . This article cannot discount the possibility that Savile sexually abused girls at Duncroft but it paints a very different picture of the culture in the school which, it is claimed, allowed such abuse to happen unchecked. It was not a lax or uncaring institution but a pioneering and highly regarded one. The reality of Savile’s time there is far less sinister and more quotidian than reported. In the regime described, he may have been able to take his chance to exploit girls opportunistically [although there is no convincing evidence that he did] but it seems unlikely that he could have behaved in the uncontained manner that press and official reports claim and upon which the wider narrative rests. The version of events set out in our interviews might be thought to convince in its consonance with narrative conventions of plot, setting and characterization . . . .Miss Jones becomes a real person, an image given some substance by the description of the tensions between her and her deputy. Jimmy Savile, too, emerges as a far more nuanced character than police or media accounts allow. One of the former pupils presciently identified some of the flaws in the narrative construction of the dominant Duncroft story: “Well, even back then, I noticed if you were talking about real abuse it was boring, like any real story, it doesn’t have the right beginning, middle and end, it doesn’t have the high points.” [1970s resident] Nevertheless, the Savile story has had massive political and cultural reverberations, provoking a crisis in the British state. As one of our interviewees stated: “But, what bothers me, it did all start at Duncroft and, I mean, the basics of that, what do you call it, emotional contagion and football crowds, the ripples go out, somebody starts it and they send out ... It started with Duncroft and a story, and then that programme [the Exposure documentary], and before you know it the ripples were going out so much that it went out of control. . . .’ [1960s resident] Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Bryn Estyn In their conclusions, Smith and Burnett refer to a famous investigation into the origins of the 1991 North Wales care homes scandal conducted by the late Richard Webster and reported in his book The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt.14 Smith and Burnett follow Webster’s argument that people mounting a moral crusade against child abuse can be blinded by: ‘. . . the cognitive dissonance, which takes over in cases where emotions run high. Moreover, they see themselves as responding to something where the weight of evidence is assumed to be overwhelming and where any rational person would reach the same conclusion and operate to the same moral economy. But, as Webster observes, it is this very assumption of rationality that is at the heart of what goes wrong in major historical instances of panic over child abuse.’ They quote Webster: ‘The widespread belief that, belonging as we do to a rational scientific age we are no longer vulnerable to such fantasies, is itself one of the most dangerous of all our delusions. For it is precisely because of our rationalism, and the difficulty we have in acknowledging our own violence and the full depth and complexity of our sexual imagination, that we are probably more susceptible to dangerous projections than we ever have been.’ 15 Burnett and Smith say: ‘This makes it all the more important that in major cultural episodes such as the Savile case a single story does not dominate and it is opened up to alternative viewpoints. Specifically, it needs to be recognized that the stories told about Savile are likely to be complex and multilayered and may or may not bear much resemblance to actual events. In the current climate it is too easy to accept them uncritically and indeed to canvas more of the same, which has been the modus operandi of the Police and the NSPCC. While it might be argued that the sheer weight of accounts offers compelling evidence of the scale of abuse, it may, equally plausibly, point to the propensity of people, for a 14 Richard Webster, The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt (Halesworth: Orwell Press, 2005) ISBN: 9780951592243 15 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk host of reasons, to write themselves into a particularly powerful cultural narrative when encouraged to do so. The implications of questioning the Savile narrative on the basis of going back to where it all began are profound – they unsettle the direction of recent criminal justice policy in respect of its privileging of victim accounts. This point was not lost on the former residents of Duncroft: “But, yes, I think there’s a lot, because if all this Duncroft stuff could be debunked then the rest of it is going to fall apart.” [1970s resident]’ The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy published the Smith and Burnett paper on 22 April 2018, three weeks after The Times reported that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Cressida Dick, has abandoned a police policy of describing all complainants of sex abuse as ‘victims’ before any investigation has started. Cressida Dick’s decision complied with the 2016 recommendations of Sir Richard Henriques, a retired high court judge, who conducted an independent review of the Met’s handling of ‘non-recent sexual offence investigations’, particularly a two year child sex abuse and murder inquiry, Operation Midland, that closed down in 2016 without any charges or convictions. Alison Levitt, former principal legal advisor to the Director of Public Prosecutions, said in 2017: ‘Sir Richard made it clear in his report that the police must stop using the word victim and start using the word complainant because the police must approach these cases with an open mind. It is their duty to investigate whether or not it leads towards the suspect or indeed away from the suspect.’ 16 The abandoned guidelines referred to the perceived failure by Surrey police to investigate Jimmy Savile’s activities at Duncroft Approved School.17 Burnet and Smith refer to an international study of false and distorted memories edited by Robert Nash and James Ost:18 ‘The realist position adopted by the police and activists on the status of 16 Martin Evans and Robert Mendick, Daily Telegraph, 20 December 2017. 17 Cressida Dick’s decision was challenged by the journalist Joan Smith, co-chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Panel. 18 Robert A. Nash and James Ost (eds) False and Distorted Memories, (London: Routledge 2017) Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk people’s stories extends to their understanding of memory, which is assumed to correspond to actual events (or which, reprising the memory wars of the 1990s. . . might be thought to be repressed and subsequently recovered). This is essentially a videotape understanding of how memory operates, which assumes that it can be accurately played back and that similar accounts might be thought to corroborate one another. Memory, however, does not work like this. Nash and Ost capture the consensus in the field that memory is shaped by social, political and political forces and is thus amenable to manipulation, either active or passive, through therapeutic engagement or through the assimilation of cultural stories. In this sense, it links with the way that people use stories to make sense of their lives. Haaken [1998]19 suggests that when women struggle to speak openly about their experiences they may do so through storytelling, in ways that introduce layers of meaning but which blur the boundaries between ‘true’ and ‘false’. Tavris and Aronson [2007] 20 describe how the lives of unhappy and vulnerable individuals become open to exploitation, by therapists, prosecutors, police officers and personal injury lawyers who profess to offer a solution, often labelled “closure” to vague feelings that something is not right in life. The authors go on to identify how lives can be destroyed by these intractable and sincerely-held, yet false, beliefs.’ Coda: The best evidence As former Lord Chancellor’s Visitor for Wales, retired lawyer Susanne Cameron-Blackie, knew where to look for the best evidence – the ‘best evidence’ as described in 1745 by Lord Hardwicke in Omychund v Barker, where the judge ruled that no evidence was admissible unless it was ‘the best that the nature of the case will allow’. The best evidence about Duncroft Approved School was uncovered by Cameron-Blackie in documents and hand-written letters found by tracing the surviving Duncroft school records to the archives of Barnardo’s, the nationwide children’s charity that took over the school from the Home Office. The evidence led her to a to a truly vital witness, a 57 year-old woman living in the Thames Valley who eventually became known to Dame Janet Smith as witness A22. 19 Janice Haaken, Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998) 20 Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts, (Orland, Fl: Harcourt, 2007) Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk A22 had been a teenager in 1973, sent to Duncroft for drug possession at the age of 14. In November of that year, on a rare visit home, she helped her mother with the catering at a Saturday night police function attended by Jimmy Savile. A22’s mother suggested ‘fixing it’ with Miss Jones for Savile to pay a visit to the girls at the approved school. It was thanks to Cameron-Blackie, that A22 took part in a three-day videoed police interview, during which Surrey Police were able to fix the date of Jimmy Savile’s first visit to the school. That date, 21 January 1974, corresponded with an entry in the school visitors’ book and immediately branded a number of complainants and informants as liars and fantasists. For months the Metropolitan Police Operation Yewtree investigation team objected to A22 being interviewed by the Smith Review on the grounds that it could prejudice their police work. But despite police objections, the interview did take place and Dame Janet Smith reported: ‘A22 told me that Savile was introduced to Duncroft through her after she met him at a social event. Her evidence is that he always behaved impeccably and her account contradicts much of what the other Duncroft witnesses say about Savile. A22 was clearly very close to Savile and thought very highly of him. She had a relationship with him after she left Duncroft. I have no reason to doubt her evidence that, while she was at Duncroft, Savile behaved impeccably in her presence.’ The BBC published Dame Janet’s review in full in February 2016, thereby immediately revealing the lies of at least five women who had claimed to have been assaulted by the disc jockey at Duncroft. The most notable of these was Mrs Bebe Roberts who had told the Daily Mail she had been assaulted by Savile near her dormitory at Duncroft in 1965. A few days after the publication of the Smith Review, A22 told Cameron- Blackie that a bundle of her 1974 letters to her mother and father had been found at her childhood home in Barkham, Berkshire. Each undated letter was tucked in a franked and dated envelope. The letters were discovered in the loft of the family home after A22’s father had died. Cameron-Blackie realised that the discovery of the letters and the survival of a number of A22’s keepsakes, revealed details of life at the special school for ‘troubled intelligent girls’ that had been unknown to Dame Janet Smith, the specialist BBC and ITV reporters working on the Savile story and various Savile police investigations. By 2016 Cameron-Blackie was dying of cancer in Norfolk. Nothing had yet been revealed from forensic examination of the social media exchanges on her old iMac at Edinburgh University. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Disappointed by the aftermath of the Smith Review, the frequently exhausted Cameron-Blackie managed to persuade A22 to reveal her identity as Miss Susan Bunce of Pangbourne in Berkshire. Susan was asked to show her teenage letters to a reporter. She was also persuaded to make herself available as a witness in the forthcoming trial of a slander and libel claim brought by the comedian Freddie Starr. Karin Ward had accused Freddie Starr of groping and insulting her 41 years earlier in Jimmy Savile’s dressing room during a Clunk Click TV show. Starr lost the case.21 I was the reporter despatched by the dying Cameron-Blackie to Pangbourne to examine and photograph the letters in their envelopes. I reported back to Cameron-Blackie as she lay in a bed constructed by her husband Graham to give her a rich view of boats passing by her window on the River Yare at Reedham. In a letter dated 6 February 1974, Susan, 15, wrote home from Duncroft to her mother and father: ‘I’ve been trying to think more what J.S. said, I know one thing, he said he was starving so he piged [sic] most of my chocolate biscuits, then later he plowed through beans on toast. One thing I noticed about him. He was wearing black suede shoes [flat heels]. He says he’s got to dress smartly for the next three weeks or months. I asked him why he never comes to pick me up himself and send Fred in with the taxi. It’s because he can’t exactly [be] sure where I live and after things happening in the past he doesn’t want to. Suppose he has to stop and ask the way, he could never stop the person talking. I don’t think I’ll write to Jimmy, just wait a while and see if I can get that big Valentine card for him, I’ll put it on the shopping list and hope for the best, love Susan.’ On 17 February 1974, writing from a special isolation room at the school: 21 Despite Starr losing the case, Susan Bunce was seen by Mr Justice Nicol as a reliable witness. Indeed her evidence that Starr picked her up in the air that night at the studio at the age of 15 as an indication of Starr’s true attitude to girls under-age appears in his judgment: ‘Susan Bunce was a small 15 year old. He picked her up, held her in the air and gave her a long passionate kiss.’ Although the Starr v Ward case did not involve events at Duncroft, the judge referred to Karin Ward’s memory: ‘The Defendant was being given Lithium at Duncroft at this time. She has accepted that this affected her memory. On peripheral matters her account has varied. Thus she said at some points that the Claimant’s smell included a component of alcohol. She has accepted that she may have been wrong about that. In her BBC interview she said she was 14 at the time. We know that she was in fact 15. But in its core elements, her account has been consistent.' Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘Naturally, Granny Bunce mentioned David [a schoolfriend]. She also mentioned Jimmy and how he may like a swim in our pool during summer.’ 4 March 1974: ‘Apparently we were supposed to go to Clunk Click last Thursday. Miss Jones said Jimmy was expecting us. We are definitely going this Thursday. Whether or not it will be the bean bag thing, I don’t know, I am allowed to go to that one Miss Jones said. I have been told I am going to this one, so I am in a muddle.’ 1 April 1974: ‘I keep forgetting to tell you that Princess Alexandra is coming on May Day, she has been here before. Jimmy rang up again to say that he had to go to Leeds this weekend so he will be down at the beginning of the week.’ ‘Remember for the first time home I’ve got enough money not to care about what I buy or spend because I won’t be buying any drugs. Instead of buying 16 pills for £2 I can buy myself a load of nail varnish or a jumper . . . agreed . . . or even Daddy some pipe tobacco.’ 28 April 1974: ‘Did you see me on television again last night, I got the biggest shock of my life. They were showing excerpts of old shows, the one with F. Starr. Jimmy hasn’t been here yet but I get the feeling it won’t be long, and he will be on Top of the Pops soon so we probably will be. I remember what I was going to say. They brought Jean Rook’s page [article praising Jimmy Savile] to me during Clunk Click. Saint near to heaven my foot! Satan near to prison more like it! But I know this and that which he has told me –– not bad though.’ Page 5: ‘Four girls ran off the other morning all at once, they came back next day.’ 6 May 1974: ‘Have I told you about Princess Alexandra coming on Wednesday? Her mother was here in the war, something like that. I have got to present her with a bouquet, or one for her lady in waiting. All the managers will be there, lots of big wigs and even Jimmy Savile is coming. On the subject of Jimmy, what exactly do you think of him? You had quite a long chat with him on Easter Sunday. He is taking us to the theatre at the end of next week. I don’t know what we are going to see, but I am looking forward to it. Guess what? The needlecraft teacher has to make a doll of Jimmy, it’s got to look as near to him as possible, and we think he will appreciate it.’ June or July 1974 [by Susan Bunce’s estimation] ‘Miss Jones said yesterday that Jimmy rang up and perhaps would come down this week. I am looking forward to seeing him. By the way as I am in 2nd grade now, I Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk have decided to be as good as possible, because I don’t want to be down- graded again. We are trying to be very quiet after lights out and I haven't had a cigarette up the chimney since the time I was caught.’ As soon as Cameron-Blackie read the letters, she told me: ‘You see. No sign of [school head] Miss Margaret Jones pimping out her clever girls to celebrities or of Savile groping girls outside the dorms at bedtime.’ In an email to friends and collaborators she wrote: ‘The tedium, the boiled cabbage, the floors to be polished; interspersed with the kindness, the occasional walk in the sunshine, the cup of coffee in Debenham’s, the extra cigarette handed out when tears threatened to flow – all from a group of unmarried women who did their level best to understand we complicated teenagers. It is their very mundanity that got to me – nothing exciting ever happened – showing a group of magistrates round was a highlight. Only Susan would have cut out the picture of her and Savile – but still kept the disfigured original including Ms Jones. Did that family throw nothing away? You can literally watch her growing up through the course of those letters – even the handwriting changes, becomes more confident – and she kept all the envelopes! Incredible. How Susan meeting Savile on home leave would have roared through that place like a tornado and created unbridled jealousy – and how she has been vindicated by the little asides “Ms Jones said that Savile had phoned and was coming to see me”, the dress maker asking Susan to make a doll of Savile for Princess Alexandra’s visit….. And especially the letter mid February. . . “he hasn’t phoned yet” . . .and yet the media would have us believe that three weeks after that letter, he had not only phoned, but arrived. That the girls she speaks of “running off” at every opportunity were now so trusted that Ms Jones sends them off (er, not including the girl he had actually come to see!) in Savile’s Rolls Royce so that he could force one of them to give him a blow job so that she could go to TV centre on March 9th . . . Yeah, ‘course she did Karin. . . .!’ 22 Dr Ros Burnett, a former reader in criminology at Oxford University and editor of the 2016 Oxford University Press book Wrongful Allegations of Sexual and Child Abuse,23 read the letters and emailed: 22 Email to author. 23 Ros Burnett (ed.) Wrongful Allegations of Sexual and Child Abuse, (Oxford: OUP, 2016) Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘They provide a real insight into the regime at Duncroft from the perspective of residents in the seventies at the time of its transition from “approved school” to “community home”, and into the education and extra-curricular programme for the residents (Hamlet and watching polo at Windsor Park, as well as Clunk-Click and ice-cream picnics on the lawn). I find it touching that Susan borrowed someone’s Queen Velvet stationery in order to write to Jimmy Savile, how she tolerated him eating all her chocolates and biscuits, and how she sought her grandmother’s approval of Jimmy Savile. It is a shame the letters are undated and some of the postmark dates not clear but those which are should help in corroborating timelines or resolving disputed dates. The picture that the letters provide of Duncroft staff and regime, as well as Susanne’s account of the good work done by Duncroft, is important for presenting a more accurate view of residential care homes and their staff. Possibly the greatest value of Susan's archive is that her experience of Jimmy Savile, from the time of meeting him at an event outside Duncroft to the letter of congratulations he sent on her upcoming wedding, shows a more human, restrained and somewhat kinder side to his personality in contrast to the archetypical sex fiend he has come to represent.’ One of the Bunce family keepsakes I examined at Susan’s home was this picture, taken after Susan had served her time at Duncroft, when Savile was still dropping by to see the family at Iona, their house in Barkham, to swim in their pool, to lounge on the lawn and to talk to his old pal Albert Bunce, the local church organist. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk * Thirty-seven years later, in the ten weeks between October and December 2012, 450 people contacted the police to complain they had been sexually abused by Jimmy Savile. By January 2013, a joint police and NSPCC review, ‘Giving Victims a Voice’, suggested that in 54 years Savile had attacked 28 children under ten years old and 63 girls between 13 and 16. The dead disc jockey was being accused of 214 offences, including 34 rapes in 28 different police areas. Andrew Rosthorn is a veteran news reporter based in Lancashire. After reporting The Irish troubles in the early seventies for the Daily Mail, he worked on hard news for the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, The Independent and The Independent on Sunday. He has conducted radio and television investigations into the fate of Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess, CIA sabotage of Leyland exports to Cuba, corruption in ammunition supply at the Ministry of Defence, breaking UN sanctions in Serbia for Marks and Spencer, the Owen Oyston Affair and pre-war Royal Navy espionage in Japan. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The Darkest Sides of Politics, I Postwar fascism, covert operations and terrorism The Darkest Sides of Politics, II State terrorism, “weapons of mass destruction”, religious extremism and organised crime Jeffrey M Bale Routledge: London and New York, £29.99 per volume, p/b Robin Ramsay Where to begin with this enormous publication that has over 900 pages between the two volumes? Jeffrey Bale is now a professor1 in the United States but this collection of his essays begins with material he wrote for the PhD he was awarded in 1994. I published extracts from that in Lobster while it was a work in progress in the late 1980s and, sitting down to write this, I began by searching Lobster’s back copies for references to Bale. I found this in Lobster 37: ‘Some of the best and most original research published in Lobster was the series of essays by Jeffrey Bale in Lobsters 18, 19 and 21. Bale then dropped off the Lobster radar. He reappeared on it recently as the editor of Hit List, a magazine devoted to punk rock whose first issue appeared in March 1999. In his introductory editorial Bale described his recent career. “A PhD in modern European history at the University of California at Berkeley, two year post-doctoral fellowship at Columbia University, visiting professorship at a college in Oregon, then research fellowships at the Library of Congress and the Center for German and European Studies at Berkeley.” ’ Which tells us that Jeffrey Bale is not your run-of-the-mill academic. He began with music, producing a ‘zine, Maximum Rock and Roll,2 in the early 1980s. From there he segued into his PhD, with Peter Dale Scott as one of his supervisors, at Berkeley. And not just any old PhD, either, a parapolitical PhD: 1 His CV is at 2 See Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘The “Black” Terrorist International: Neo-Fascist Paramilitary Networks and the “Strategy of Tension” in Italy, 1968-74’.3 Some of that PhD thesis is the basis for part of the first of these two volumes and it is stunning. This is the Peter Dale Scott school of parapolitical analysis: read widely enough and even the covert world can be understood. But doing European fascism, terrorism and their relationship to covert operations by states means source material in several languages and Bale taught himself to read six languages to do it. It also means massive documentation. For example, the first big essay, ‘Post-war Fascist Internationals Part 1’, has 45 pages of text and 30 pages of endnotes; and chapter 8, ‘The ultranationalist right in Turkey and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II’ – yes, with Turkish-language sources – has 30 pages of text and 24 pages of notes. Those notes contain not just the documentation but also commentary, doubts, questions, debates with other scholars and digressions. It would be difficult to adequately convey just how dense and complex this material is. Happily, I don’t need to: you can see for yourself using ‘Google preview’.4 Anthony Frewin quoted the late Stanley Kubrick as saying that footnotes are where the action is. With these two volumes they are certainly where some of the action is.5 The second volume begins in roughly the same vein as the first, with essays on the use of terrorist proxies by states; the apartheid South African state’s Project Coast, its exploration and use of chemical and biological weapons; and an account of the Unification Church (the ‘Moonies’), the Korean CIA and the World Anti-Communist League – all fine pieces of detailed parapolitical work. And then 9/11 happens and Bale sets out to explain 3 On-line at 4 For volume I go to 5 Volume II has a couple of ‘footnotes’ which are two pages long. I am reminded of a little book – a pamphlet, really – the 1977 Crime and Cover-up, by Peter Dale Scott, which I had many years ago but which fell apart. Its footnotes were so extensive and dense that someone produced and circulated an index to them. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Islamic terrorism.6 Bale describes himself as ‘a classical liberal, a radical individualist, an unabashed secularist, a member of the anti-PC and anti-totalitarian left, and a counter-cultural rebel’.7 What it means in practise is that he can write this of the phrase ‘political correctness’: ‘This is a well-known term that has come to refer not only to the uncritical if not slavish following of political “party lines” but also to insistent displays of rigid moral self-righteousness and puritanism, humourlessness, and an intolerance (if not outright hatred) directed against, as well as an undemocratic impulse to demonise and suppress, the opinions of anyone who does not share one’s own biases and agenda.’ (p. 253). And he heads one chapter with a quotation which includes this: ‘Islamism is a reactionary ideology that kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present . . . . Its victory can only lead to a world of injustice and domination: men over women, fundamentalism over others. . . .’ With these views, in three long essays, totalling 200 pages (if you include the massive footnotes), he discusses: * the distinctions between Islam, Islamism and jihadism * what Islamists have said and meant * what Bin Laden and other Islamist jihadist leaders have said and meant * what Al Qaeda and ISIS have done8 * the responses in the West to Islamism and jihadist violence. He shows in enormous detail that Islamism is a legitimate expression of Islam and jihadism a legitimate expression of Islamism. Islamism and jihad are not deviations from some ‘true path’: Islamic scripture justifies both. The violence 6 In an e-mail to me he wrote: ‘I’d been studying medieval Islamic history for many, many years [when 9/11 happened], and was thus familiar with the sources for that history. As a matter of fact, one cannot understand Islamism and jihadism without being intimately familiar with a) Islamic theological and legal doctrines, and b) the earliest eras of Islamic history, which the Islamists (and most other Muslims) idealize and wish to revive. The Islamists, including the jihadists, are constantly citing passages from the Qur’an and Muhammad’s own behavior (as recorded in the hadith collections and biographies of Muhammad) to justify everything they do.’ 7 Vol II p. 285. I Googled ‘anti-PC left’ and got not a single hit (but got a few on DuckDuckGo). 8 He dismisses the ‘inside job’ theories of 9/11, discussing documentation from Bin Laden and others which shows they did it. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk – the terror – Islamism has used in its pursuit of an Islamic world will continue so long as people believe ‘the book’. To deny this, thinks Bale, is failing to deal with reality. His discussion of liberal–PC apologists for Islam, in ‘Denying the link between Islamist ideology and jihadist terrorism’, is as devastating an intellectual assault as I have read.9 If you hadn’t been paying much attention to the Islamist threat – and I haven’t – these chapters will be a series of discomforting revelations. None of this is easy; you can’t whizz through Bale. It requires work and concentration and if, like me, your attention span has been diminished by the Net, it will be a slow read. But it’s worth the effort. Wonderful stuff. Check it out. 9 This chapter has 20 pages of text and 35 pages of footnotes. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk What Did You Do During the War? The Last Throes of the British Pro-Nazi Right, 1940-45 Richard Griffiths Abingdon: Routledge, 2017, £21.99, p/b David Sivier Richard Griffiths is an Emeritus Professor of King’s College, London and the author of two previous books on the British pro-Nazi Right: Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933-39 and Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British Anti-Semitism 1939-1940. This third volume is part of a series, Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right.1 It’s an in-depth study of a period that is excluded from some histories of British Fascism, such as Martin Pugh’s Hurrah for the Blackshirts! British Fascism Between the Wars, 1919-1939, or else included as part of a general history of Fascism up to the present day, such as Richard Thurlow’s Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985. It is meticulously footnoted and, in addition to the general bibliography at the back of the book, each chapter also has its own bibliography, including documentary sources. Many of the quotations cited in the text also come from official documents, such as MI5 reports and political correspondence between MPs. There is also a ‘rogue’s gallery’ of potted biographies of some of the Fascists and Nazis who are mentioned in the text. The book begins by attacking two myths. The first is another piece of self- serving deception by Oswald Mosley, who claimed that he had definitely not instructed his storm troopers to obstruct the British war effort. This comes from the text of one of the wannabe dictator’s speeches, as printed in Action, the magazine of the British Union of Fascists. In that Mosley ordered his troops to follow orders and cooperate with the war effort. But the text of the speech had been altered before it was printed. In his original speech, Mosley made it 1 The others include Nigel Copsey and John E. Richardson (eds.), Cultures of Post-War British Fascism; Brian Jenkins and Chris Millington, France and Fascism: February 1934 and the dynamics of political crisis; Colin Holmes, Searching for Lord Haw-Haw: The political lives of William Joyce; Philip M. Coupland, Farming, Fascism and Ecology: A life of Jorian Jenks; Francis Beckett, Fascist in the Family: The tragedy of John Beckett MP. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk clear that only members of the armed forces should cooperate with the authorities, and that the rest of the BUF should carry on their pro-Nazi activities. This is another attack on the very sanitised image of Mosley created by Robert Skidelsky’s biography in 1975,2 which Stephen Dorril effectively demolished in his biography of the old Fascist, Blackshirt.3 The other myth attacked is the belief that the British people, as a whole, were sympathetic to the Jews and their suffering under the Nazis. The publication in January 1940 of Arthur Bryant’s paean to Hitler and the Nazis, Unfinished Victory, to largely rave reviews from the press, shows that this was not the case. A writer of popular histories, Bryant was a Baldwinite Conservative, who in 1929 became the educational adviser to the Bonar Law Conservative College at Ashridge. His first book had been The Spirit of Conservatism. From 1933 onwards he became pro-Nazi. In July 1939 he had traveled to Germany to talk to the Nazi leaders on a mission which had received the unofficial approval of Neville Chamberlain, who afterward offered to pay Bryant’s expenses from secret service funds. Unfinished Victory was bitterly anti-Semitic. It blamed the Jews, and specifically Kurt Eisner, the leader of the revolution in Bavaria, for the Council Revolution that swept through Germany between late 1918 and early 1919.4 It declared that the Jews had been gradually seizing power in Germany following the 1929 Wall Street Crash, and that the banks, publishing, the cinema, theatre and ‘a large part’ of the press were ‘virtually controlled’ by them. Following Nazi propaganda, Bryant claimed that the Jews were racially discriminating against Aryans, so that it was becoming progressively more difficult for a gentile German to hold any kind of privileged position. Despite this, the book received glowing reviews from the Times Literary Supplement, Public Opinion, the Illustrated London News, the New English Weekly, the Fortnightly Review, St. Martin’s Review, the Church of England Newspaper, the Catholic Herald, and a series of provincial newspapers. It was, however, criticised by the Spectator, which had an anti-appeasement line, the Jewish Chronicle, New Statesman and the Guardian, where A. J. P. Taylor entitled his review ‘A Nazi Apologist’. Two women writers in Time and Tide, Emily Lorimer, the author of What Hitler Wants, and Rebecca West, also attacked it. West 2 3 See 4 After Germany’s defeat in the First World War, central authority collapsed in many parts of the Reich, and a series of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ councils sprang up to take power, spreading from Kiel in the north right down to Bavaria Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk wrote that it was ‘. . . a paean to Hitler so glowing, so infatuated, that it might better have been entitled “Kiss me, Corporal”.’ The book’s vicious anti-Semitism was largely overlooked by its supporters in the press. Griffiths puts this down to the amount of low-level social anti- Semitism in British culture at the time. Although there wasn’t the same level of visceral hatred of Jews that there was in Germany, this social anti-Semitism meant that Jews were excluded from certain circles and the subjects of various jokes and offensive stereotypes. They were portrayed as fixated on money, and as cowards and profiteers during wars. However, by March 1940 official opinion was turning against Bryant. Harold MacMillan, the future Tory PM, and the contact for Bryant in the publishers, dropped him on his return from an official trip to Finland. MacMillan was strongly anti-appeasement, and had probably been made aware just what his fellow anti-appeasers thought of the book. The demise of Chamberlain, and his replacement by Winston Churchill, also brought a new resolve to the anti-appeasement camp, along with the internment of other Fascists and fellow travellers. Bryant himself narrowly avoided this fate, and wound up his Union and Reconstruction movement. He then concentrated on writing the patriotic popular histories, like English Saga, which made his reputation. In a later edition of the Ashridge Review he described Hitler’s seizure of power as ‘a terrible calamity’. In general, discussions of the Nazi regime from this period tended to overlook the persecution of the Jews. Nazi sympathisers frequently defended the regime by acknowledging Nazi maltreatment, before going on to praise what they saw as its positive achievements. Or else they tried to divert the argument, by pointing to alleged British atrocities against the indigenous Arab population in Palestine. The groups discussed by Griffiths include not only notorious Fascist parties and pro-Nazi groups like the BUF, British Fascists, the Link, the Anglo-German Fellowship, the Constitutional Research Association, the British People’s Party, the Right Club, and English Mistery, but also other, lesser-known groups such as English Array. It also discusses aspects of pre-War and wartime British Fascism, that have previously received little attention, such as Rolf Gardiner and the ‘Back to the Land’ movement. There’s an entire chapter on that subject, with seven pages on Rolf Gardiner, one of its major ideological leaders. Gardiner is only mentioned on one page in Thurlow’s history. Griffiths points out that the Brits who supported Nazi Germany did so for a variety of reasons. Some were convinced Nazis, others were Right-leaning pacifists, who wished to avoid another war. Many sympathised with the Nazis Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk because they genuinely believed that Germany had been unjustly punished by the Treaty of Versailles. Others were impressed with the new German social and political order, and felt that this was what a declining Britain needed in order to regenerate, or simply to combat the economic crisis precipitated by the Crash. Other pro-German sympathisers supported the Nazi regime as they believed it effectively combated the threat of Communism and blocked further Soviet expansion. Unlike other books on Fascism, which study the movement as a whole, Griffiths’ book concentrates on individuals, and how particular British Fascists or fellow-travellers reacted to the war with Germany, surveillance by the state, and the threat of internment. In his conclusion, Griffiths states that the responses to the changed situation after the declaration of war were so varied, that it is impossible to make any generalisations. Nevertheless, the pro-Nazis did react in a number of general ways. Many Fascists, following Ben Greene in the British People’s Party and Admiral Domville’s The Link, joined the Peace Pledge Union, in order to carry on their agitation against the War. Other British Fascists abandoned their political activities in order to keep their heads down and away from the threat of internment on the Isle of Man. Others decided that their patriotism and love of their homeland outweighed their Fascist beliefs, joining the forces to fight against Hitler, while others tried to carry on as before. The period of internment did not last the length of the War, and most of the internees were released by 1942. While internment had a devastating effect on the aristocratic leadership, it had also created a feeling of camaraderie amongst those from lower down the social order, and further cemented them together. On their release, some of the Fascists tried to establish new organisations to carry on their struggle. Thus they founded the British National Party, the Constitutional Research Association, the British League of Ex-Servicemen and Women, and the British People’s Party. In the case of the BNP, its leaders decided on a policy of deliberate camouflage. All mention of Fascism and National Socialism was banned, and while the party would still be anti-Jewish, this too would be carefully hidden. Instead the party would position itself as anti-Communist, rather than pro-Nazi. A few British Nazis travelled to Germany to make propaganda broadcasts on behalf of the Reich. By far the best-known of these is the infamous William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, but there were also a number of others, much less known. These include Henry William Wicks and his daughter, Margaret. Wicks was a weird individual, possibly suffering from a persecution mania, who Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk believed that the Sun Alliance Insurance company of Canada was at the centre of a conspiracy against him. In Wormwood Scrubs following his prosecution by the company for libel, Wicks encountered Arnold Leese, the anti-Semitic vet and founder of the Imperial Fascist League. Leese convinced him that his problems were all the fault of the ‘International Money Power’, i.e the Jews. On his release, Wicks and his daughter moved to Germany to work for the Nazis’ foreign language broadcasting service. Wicks’ daughter, Margaret, was a successful Nazi propagandist. Although she managed to get a job in the service for her father, Wicks’ own broadcasts were so lacklustre, and he was so quarrelsome, that the Nazis grew sick of him. After starting disputes with a number of people in Berlin, the German authorities had him interned as an enemy alien. Following the Allied victory, Wicks was tried and convicted as a collaborator, a fate that his daughter mysteriously escaped. Social Credit British Nazis and pro-Nazis also reacted by violently denying their previous beliefs. They cast the blame for them and their former Fascist activities on their former comrades. Thus the previously pro-Nazi Scots Lord and Unionist MP, John McKie, made a series of attacks on Lord Tavistock, later the 12th Duke of Bedford. McKie, in turn, was attacked and deselected in 1945 by the Earl of Galloway, the head of the local Unionist Association. Tavistock was one of the most active of the aristocratic supporters of Nazism, a Christian pacifist and social activist, who had been steered to Nazism by an interest in Major C.H. Douglas’ Social Credit economic theories. Douglas had concluded that the problem with the present economic system was not that goods were scarce, but that people were unable to afford them. He therefore recommended that the government should issue vouchers to the public to allow them to purchase the goods they needed. Many of the other Fascists discussed in the book under review were also influenced by Douglas and his monetary theories. But Douglas was also an anti-Semite, who regarded the modern international financial system as a creation of the Jews to exploit gentiles. Other studies also note the influence of Douglas and his theories, but this book is striking in the emphasis it gives Social Credit. Tavistock was so important a part of the pre-War and wartime pro-Nazi Right, that he gets an entire chapter of his own. Two aristocrats, Lord Brocket and the Duke of Buccleuch, wrote to Halifax and the British government stating their wish for a negotiated peace between Britain and Germany. They also traveled to Germany and, with others, Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk arranged meetings in Britain with German officials in the hope of achieving that same goal. Lord Sempill, another Scottish Conservative peer, was guilty of passing on secrets to the Japanese. A pioneering aviator, Sempill served in the Royal Air Force, the Royal Naval Air Service, and the Royal Flying Corps, and in the early 1920s led a British delegation to Japan to help them set up a naval airforce. After the collapse of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1921, he started passing on information about new aircraft being developed to the Japanese. Bizarrely, during the War he was given a post in the department for material, where he still kept up his contacts with the Japanese. Burdened with heavy debts, Sempill also dreamed up various money-making schemes that never actually came to anything, travelling to Canada and trying to establish a commercial mission to Romania. Unlike many of the Fascists lower down the social hierarchy, Sempill was never interned, and a number of other prominent aristocrats, such as Lady Grace Pearson and Viscountess Downe, similarly managed to evade this fate. This seems, in part, to have been due to deference to their elevated social position. But the government was also afraid that prosecuting them would give the Germans the wrong impression of how widespread resistance to the War was. They were also reluctant to prosecute Sempill, lest this reveal that Bletchley Park had cracked the Japanese codes. In the case of one of the Fascists discussed, John Coast, the War proved to be a redemptive experience. Coast was a former employee of Rothschild’s bank, before leaving it to join the Right Club, and worked for a time on Henry Williamson’s farm.5 He was also an associate and collaborator with Captain George Pitt-Rivers, the viciously anti-Semitic and pro-eugenics descendant of the Victorian archaeologist General Pitt-Rivers. Coast joined up at the outbreak of War. His regiment, the 4th Norfolk, was posted to Singapore three weeks before the Japanese invasion. Captured, Coast and his surviving comrades were interned first in the Changi prison camp, and then the notorious Thailand- Burma railway. Coast’s book on it, Railroad of Death, is the ultimate source for most other books on the railway, and the film Bridge on the River Kwai.6 Although he initially continued to hold racist views during his imprisonment, his experience of mixing with people of different races led him to reject his earlier beliefs. He had a profound sympathy for the Indonesian people, marrying a Javanese wife and becoming an expert on Javanese and Balinese music and 5 See 6 Coast and a number of other prisoners objected to the film because of its factual inaccuracies. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk dance. He had particular sympathy with the ‘Indische Jongens’, the people of mixed Indonesian and Dutch heritage, who were either sneered at or condescended to by their colonial masters. In the 1950s Coast joined Sukarno and the Indonesia independence movement, becoming one of the Indonesian leader’s PR men. After the War, Coast became a noted musical impresario, putting on displays of Javanese and Balinese gamelan music and dance in Britain and America, as well as representing global musical stars like Pavarotti and Bob Dylan. The former anti-Semite also developed close friendships with a number of Jews. After the War Griffiths also discusses the fate of the various Fascists and their groups after the War. By and large, the leaders of these groups found it difficult to adapt to the changed circumstances after the War. Those who did, by concentrating on Blacks and New Commonwealth Immigrants, were those lower down the ranks in these organisations. Many of them moved away from politics to concentrate on their business, such as Ben Greene and his engineering firm, Kepston, or other interests. Many of the ‘Back to the Land’ Fascists, like Rolf Gardiner, became pioneers of the nascent Green movement, promoting agricultural reform and ecological awareness. Some became involved in pro-Arab, anti- Zionist activism, particularly following the murder of two British sergeants by the Israeli terrorist group, Irgun, in 1947. Others, such as the Earl of Portsmouth, went to Africa after the War to escape the Welfare State, along with other, Conservative county families. These Fascists were convinced of their racial superiority, and the biological inferiority of the indigenous African peoples. Portsmouth, however, appears to have changed his views gradually over time. Portsmouth became active in Kenyan politics, serving as the chairman of the government’s Forestry Advisory Committee and a member of the Legislative Council. Staying on after the country gained its independence, in 1963 he declared his belief in co-operation between races. From that year onwards Portsmouth worked as the vice-chairman of the East African Resources Research Council. Two years later he published his autobiography, in which he stated again his belief in co-operation, and his paternalistic belief that, as an aristocrat, he was contributing more to the country than he got out. Back in Britain, other aristocrats provoked confrontations with their tenants through their high-handed behaviour. In the late 1940s Lord Brocket tried to turn over his 52,000 acre Knoydart estate completely to shooting, evicting many of the crofters and tenants from their homes. This was particularly resented as this was a period of acute land hunger in Scotland, Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk when many would-be crofters were denied the land they needed. Brocket was also personally unpopular because of his pro-Nazi beliefs and lack of National Service during the War. In 1948 he prosecuted seven ex-servicemen, who had invaded and staked out crofts for themselves on the Knoydart estate. They had done so following the spirit behind legislation passed after the First World War which saw a number of farming communities created for ex-servicemen.7 The decision to prosecute made him yet more unpopular. Writing in the National Weekly, the Scots poet and nationalist, Hugh MacDiarmid, commented that the dispute would bring to a head all the subterranean anger at the way large parts of Scotland had been depopulated by absentee landlords. The former soldiers’ cause was also celebrated by the poet and folk musician, Hamish Henderson, in his ‘Ballad of the Men of Knoydart’. Brocket won the case, but the situation on his estate had become so uncomfortable for him that the following year, 1949, Brocket sold the estate and purchased the Carton House Estate in Ireland, which had formerly been the residence of the Dukes of Leinster. In the conclusion, Griffiths discusses the possibility that some of the Fascists, who vehemently denied that they had ever held Nazi or pro-Nazi views, were genuinely misremembering their pasts, rather than consciously lying. He also points out that the activities of British Fascists, and especially the experience of Fascist aristocrats, shows the immense difference between then and now. Theirs was a much more class-based society, in which great deference and power was wielded by the aristocracy simply because of their social status. It was also one where there was considerable social anti- Semitism, which he believes has now largely disappeared. But he also takes the opportunity to correct his optimistic conclusion in one of his previous books on Fascism, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Fascism published in 2000. He then considered that the Britain of the early Fascist movements was so different from that of today, that Fascism no longer presented a threat to modern Britain. This prompted the Marxist writer Ian Birchall to send him a letter, pointing out that this could all change through 7 None of these farms were a success. See, for example, the brief account of one such created at Sunk Island in East Yorkshire in Howard Peach’s Curious Tales of Old East Yorkshire at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk alterations in the fabric of society, created by crises such as climate change or economic hardship, including mass unemployment. Birchall warned that Fascist and Nationalist rhetoric would be particularly appealing, if global warming produces mass movements of populations. Griffiths ends with the statement that ‘Ian’s warning is, in our present situation, a timely one.’ (p. 310). In fact, some climatologists are predicting that, by the middle of this century, global warming will have made the Middle East uninhabitable. The mass influx of refugees and asylum-seekers from Syria, along with the West’s colonial wars in the Middle East, has already produced a far Right reaction in much of the continent. This boosted the Alternative fuer Deutschland in Germany, the Front National in France, and for a brief time, Farage's UKIP here in Britain. The BNP, which a few years ago seemed set to break into mainstream British politics, has declined to insignificance. But in America there has been a populist revival of the Alt-Right, described as ‘the Klan with keyboards’ around Donald Trump. And in eastern Europe there are a number of extreme Right-wing, anti-Semitic parties (like Fidesz and more extreme groups in Hungary) that have declared that their intention, like the AfD, is to preserve their nations from the threat of Islamic immigration. Over here, the Tories’ austerity policy is forcing increasing numbers of working people into poverty, unemployment and job insecurity. Xenophobic Tory papers like the Daily Mail then blame the usual scapegoats – the poor themselves, the disabled and asylum-seekers. The threat of a renewed Fascism in British politics is very real. David Sivier is an historian and archaeologist with a doctorate in the archaeology of the Somerset town of Bridgwater. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The great charlatan My Life, Our Times Gordon Brown The Bodley Head, 2017, £25, h/b John Newsinger There were never any fundamental policy differences between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Both men accepted that the world was completely dominated by the super rich and that government in the modern world had to serve their interests: there was no alternative. Social democratic reformism was abandoned and neo-liberalism was enthusiastically embraced. Instead of rolling back the Thatcherite assault on the working class and the welfare state, they proceeded to consolidate it. This was what New Labour was all about. Certainly Brown made an original contribution to their partnership. It was he who recognised that the super rich could be persuaded to tolerate government spending on schools and hospitals but only if they were allowed to profit handsomely from it. This was his great contribution to ‘Socialist thought’. The collapse of Carillion is, of course, one of Brown’s vultures coming home to roost. Although their most advertised political differences were essentially about who was to be Prime Minister, there was another disagreement. Blair loathed the Labour Party and found it positively demeaning having to mix with and pretend concern for ordinary people, many of whom actually worked for a living and some of whom were even poor. He hoped to liberate the Labour Party from its links with the trade union movement, which he believed had long outlived its usefulness, and to instead make it the party of the liberal super rich. Labour would be turned into a British version of the Clinton-led Democratic Party, funded by the liberal wing of the ruling class. Brown, however, recognised that even in a neo-liberal world it was still necessary to disguise a Labour government wholly dedicated to the service of big business and the banks as at least having some residual connection with traditional Labour values. After all, what did it cost to occasionally call someone ‘comrade’ or mention ‘socialism’? In this he was merely following in the long hallowed tradition of the Labour Right, throwing crumbs to the Labour Party’s members and supporters while handing over whole loaves to the rich and super rich. This different attitude to the Labour Party has left Brown and his Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk supporters much better placed to adapt to the rise of Jeremy Corbyn. Whereas Blair finds it hard to disguise the fact that he would like to see the Labour Party destroyed, Brown has actually set about trying to re-invent himself as some sort of lefty. His recent memoir My Life, Our Times, is a contribution to the process. He does not repudiate New Labour, arguing instead that it was an attempt to restrain and control neo-liberalism rather than an embrace of it. New Labour’s sucking-up to the super rich, according to Brown, was always intended to benefit ordinary people. To put it another way: whereas Blair had embraced Thatcherism in order to help the rich (and to help himself become seriously rich in the process), Brown claims that he embraced it to help the poor. None of which can be taken seriously. It is worth remembering Brown’s positive enthusiasm for the excesses of the financial sector. As late as 20 June 2007, speaking at the Mansion House, he celebrated ‘the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London’, promised a further roll back of regulation and boasted of how he had resisted pressure for increased regulation ‘after Enron and Worldcom’. Even more incredibly, on 26 November 2007, the great charlatan told the Confederation of British Industry that even after Northern Rock, the government was committed to continuing ‘our risk based approach to deregulation . . . from the light touch of the Financial Services Authority right across to reducing inspections by local authorities’. He even promised to further reduce the ‘health and safety burdens’ on business. And after the financial disaster that he had so ably helped make possible actually occurred, on 20 May 2009, Brown once again spoke to the CBI, reaffirming the government’s commitment to ‘open, free trade and flexible globalisation’ and promised that the government was ‘ready to sell off very substantial numbers of assets, and have nominated those assets, sometimes controversially, for these sales to take place’. He promised that there were going to be ‘very substantial efficiency savings in the public services’ – Westminster ‘liespeak’ for cuts. And he apologised for having had to raise the top rate of tax, something the government had not wanted to do. The record speaks for itself. And let us be absolutely clear: if Brown had won the 2010 general election it would have been New Labour who imposed Austerity. It is worth noting one particularly outrageous claim that Brown makes in his memoir: if he had been re-elected he intended to replace student fees with a graduate tax. This is what is today called a ‘Cleggie’, of course. It is starkly contradicted by what his government was actually doing at the time. It had set up the Browne review, headed up by the former head of BP and stuffed with hand-picked stooges, equipped with a McKinsey agenda, to begin the process of privatising British Higher Education. It was not really a review because the outcome was wholly pre-determined. The Browne review spent a derisory Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk £68,000 on research into reforming the finances of Higher Education. In reality, there was no research because the review was appointed specifically to recommend a drastic increase in fees to £9,000. The intention was that only the top universities would charge the full amount and that the rest of the sector would find itself competing with private providers in a relentless drive to the bottom. Some universities would have been unable to compete so they could have been sold off to private equity funds and the like. This was the intention: to expose Higher Education to the global market. What does Brown have to say? He claims that the proposed increase in fees his government would have introduced would have made a graduate tax more urgent. He was going to dramatically increase fees in order to get rid of them! And politicians wonder why they are not trusted. In fact, the Cameron government dropped the ball by allowing the whole sector to raise fees to the highest level. The assault on Higher Education looks set to be renewed today, spearheaded by the Office for Students. Clearly any attempt by Brown to lay claim to left-wing credentials is just so much sophistry and will not be taken seriously by anyone familiar with the events of the last twenty years. One problem, of course, is the number of the Labour Party’s new members who are completely unaware of the Labour Party’s actual history in office; but that is another matter. Which brings us to Blair’s wars. How does Brown deal with British involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting in the service of the American Empire? In his memoir, Brown remembers how on 11 September 2001 he had ‘cried at the carnage inflicted on our closest ally’. There is no reason to doubt this claim because Brown was absolutely devoted to the United States and regarded US interests as indistinguishable from those of Britain. As far as New Labour was concerned, Britain had global interests but no longer had the military strength to protect them and was now dependent on the Americans. From this point of view, the so-called ‘Special Relationship’ was a vital concern of British capitalism and its political servants both Labour and Conservative. This recognition long pre-dated New Labour. The post-war Attlee government had recognised it fifty years earlier, although without any of New Labour’s enthusiasm. In the 1980s Brown had been a beneficiary of the US State Department’s Foreign Leaders programme (as had Blair). They were ‘talent spotted’ and invited to the US so they could be inducted into the benefits to be derived from service to the US Empire. The 9/11 attack was seen by the US government as an opportunity to consolidate American global hegemony. The proof of this proposition is demonstrated quite clearly by the fact that the actual response to the attack, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, was always a side-show. 9/11 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk provided an opportunity for the US, in alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia, to attempt to establish complete domination over the Middle East. First Iraq would be dealt with to be followed by Syria and Iran, without forgetting Hamas and Hizbullah. This was the project that New Labour bought into. The only dispute with the Americans was over how to justify this scheme of unprovoked imperialist aggression. New Labour’s position was made particularly difficult by the Stop the War movement, which mobilised the largest anti-war campaign in British history. What has Brown got to say? His response is pathetic. ‘We were lied to’, he tells his readers. Only after Chilcot in 2010 did he at last realise ‘how we were all misled on the existence of WMDs’. It was all the fault of MI6 who ‘reported chapter and verse the evidence against Saddam and impressed upon me that it was well-founded’. He was actually told the precise location of the various WMD caches. I wonder how this has gone down with MI6. The problem with his version of events is that, if Iraq had actually possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, the United States would never have attacked. The invasion was predicated on the confident knowledge that they did not have WMDs, the Iraqi Army was a ramshackle outfit incapable of putting up a serious fight, and the regime only required a shove for it to topple over. The US failure to make any real effort to find these mythical WMDs is further confirmation – if such were required – that both the US and British governments knew Iraq did not have them. The whole WMD story was a lie, a fabricated pretext for launching an illegal and wholly disastrous war. As for Brown, the reader can decide whether he is lying, or is so naïve and gullible as to defy belief. One other aspect to the Iraq War that he does not acknowledge is that the whole exercise was a humiliating military fiasco for Britain, culminating in British forces being effectively driven out of Basra. While this was mainly a consequence of the American mishandling of the occupation, it was compounded by the fact that, despite its determination to maintain the ‘Special Relationship’, New Labour was not prepared to commit the resources necessary for the British forces to have any serious chance of completing their mission successfully. Troop numbers were wholly inadequate. The resulting fiasco has been largely hidden from public view, not least courtesy of the Murdoch press that celebrated the whole sad affair as a glorious victory. But historians are certain to see the Iraq War as marking the point at which Britain ceased to be a serious military power. Before moving on from the Middle East, it is worth noticing Brown’s support for Zionism. This has been the mainstream Labour Party position since even before the Balfour Declaration but it became one of the defining characteristics of New Labour. Brown acknowledges Benjamin Netanyahu as ‘an Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk old friend and colleague’ although he does regret that his friend does not really support the fake ‘two state’ Bantustan-type solution to the ‘Palestine problem’ that Brown obviously does. Despite the failure in Iraq, New Labour volunteered the British military for a major role in the occupation of Afghanistan once the Taliban began to revive. With attention focussed on establishing domination over the Middle East, the US effectively abandoned Afghanistan, leaving it to become to all intents and purposes a brutal and corrupt narco-state under President Karzai. In these circumstances the Taliban began to increase in strength and rally support. Once again, British forces were committed in completely inadequate numbers without sufficient equipment. On this occasion, however, the Murdoch press refused to play the role of cheerleader. When Blair resigned to be replaced by Brown, Murdoch was persuaded by his son James and Sun editor Rebekah Brooks to shift his support to David Cameron and the Conservatives. Instead of the Sun covering up the military situation, it now set about exposing it, even blaming the death of individual soldiers on Brown personally. Brown complains bitterly about this, portraying himself as an innocent victim of the Murdoch press, relentlessly persecuted. Unfortunately this attempt to align himself with Murdoch’s enemies is undermined by the years he spent courting the man, indeed competing with Blair for his favour. He made no public objection to Murdoch’s malign influence over British politics until it was turned against him. And he is still on good terms with the appalling editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre. Unable to personally attend the celebration of Dacre’s 25th anniversary as Daily Mail editor, Brown sent a video tribute instead. He does not seriously address the humiliating military failure of British forces in Afghanistan and the further decline of Britain as a military power. Along with the Cameron-led Conservatives after him, Brown saw Britain more as a financial and banking power than a military power. The consequences of this for the ‘Special Relationship’, such as it is, are likely to prove fatal. The shrinking of the British military means that Britain can no longer be a partner in any meaningful sense in future US military interventions. On 4 March 2009, Brown was given the honour of addressing the US Congress, one of the proudest moments of his life. Understandably, he does not dwell on the episode in his memoir, such displays of subservience to the US not being politic today. Nevertheless it is worth considering what he had to say because no petty ruler or satrap ever pledged allegiance to a Roman Emperor in more fulsome terms. Washington DC was, he told his audience, looked on by the whole world as ‘a shining city on a hill’. He praised Kennedy for putting a man on the moon and Reagan for winning the Cold War. America was truly ‘the indispensable nation’. After 9/11 the British people had ‘wept for our friends in Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the land of the free and the home of the brave’, and still today, ‘whenever a young American soldier or marine, sailor or airman is killed in conflict anywhere in the world we, the British people, grieve with you. Know that your loss is our loss.’ He went on to proclaim that the ‘partnership’ between Britain and the US is ‘indestructible’, ‘unshakeable’, ‘unbreakable’, and that ‘there is no power on earth that can drive us apart’. Powerful stuff, one of the great ‘I am not Spartacus’ speeches. Would the Trump phenomenon have threatened to ‘drive us apart’ if Brown were still in power? The likelihood is that a Brown government would be doing its best to cultivate Trump; that, however distasteful, a state visit would be in the offing and ways of flattering the man would be being investigated. The reason for this is quite simple: it is in the best interests of British capitalism to maintain Britain’s client relationship with the United States. John Newsinger has a new book, Hope Lies in the Proles: Orwell and the Left (Pluto Press), out in March. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Mad men? Marketing the Third Reich: Persuasion, Packaging and Propaganda Nicholas O’Shaughnessy Routledge, 2017, £29.99 (p/b) Colin Challen The title of this book is both arresting, yet banal. And very chilling. To deal with the last point first: the twenty first century’s highly developed concept and practice of marketing is that you identify your market, then you quantify it and then seek profitable ways of satisfying it (either financially or electorally). So it doesn’t, initially, really seem appropriate to use the word ‘marketing’ in the context of ‘selling’ Nazism. It is difficult to imagine Hitler organising focus groups to see how he might adapt Mein Kampf to the mood of the day. In an age before the supposed innovative and pervasive use of opinion polling, focus groups and spin doctors, surely the Nazis would have used crude propagandising to promote their equally crude ideology? Marketing the Third Reich strips away such illusions. It is not too hard to consider Josef Goebbels as a very modern marketing innovator whose services would be in high demand today. From deranged men to mad men? If there’s a lesson from history about how to sell something, even something as odious as a nasty political creed, why not stoop to learn from it? That thought is arresting, since it’s not commonly acknowledged outside the history of marketing. Today’s political marketeers would not wish to publicly acknowledge that many of the techniques which were used by their Nazi predecessors are still being employed today to package the product and persuade the public to consume it. Superficially the idea that the Nazi propaganda machine was a huge, homogenous and blunt instrument fits with the evidence. Their propaganda material – the millions of leaflets, booklets, films, newsreels and radio broadcasts – had to subscribe to a centrally approved format. All content, even at a parochial level, had to be centrally approved. In today's parlance it to be ‘on message’. But that discipline most definitely embraced another Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘contemporary’ innovation: segmentation. The Nazis well understood that, in some areas, anti-semitism meant little; that rural audiences were different to urban audiences; and that there were different class, age and gender interests to be addressed. They even devised communications specifically targeted at Marxists – not to condemn them but to seek their conversion to Nazism. Different techniques were employed to get the message across, including that old mainstay of recent years, direct mail, some of which was hand-written by local cadres. Had social media existed in the 1930s and 1940s the Nazis would have been the leading proponents of its use. To what end was all this marketing put? While different segments of the population may have been addressed differently, in tone and sometimes content, the overarching desire of the Nazis was to bind the people into a homogenous consciousness, i.e. integral to the state. As O’Shaughnessy says, ‘propaganda was no mere tool but an entire philosophy of governing.’1 It is a matter of debate whether this was successful. Did it, for example, generate enthusiasm for war? A. J. P. Taylor wrote: ‘Germans and Italians applauded their leaders; but war was not popular among them, as it had been in 1914. Then cheering crowds everywhere greeted the outbreak of war. There was intense gloom in Germany during the Czech crisis of 1938; and only helpless resignation the following year when war broke out. The war of 1939, far from being welcome, was less wanted by nearly everybody than almost any war in history.’2 The question arises: how deep did the message sink in? Outside the circles of party zealots, did the population embrace the message or merely acquiesce in it? ‘We were only following orders’, so to speak. Unlike modern marketing, which is all carrot, Nazi marketing also wielded a big totalitarian stick. Also unlike modern marketing, it treated its target audience with didactic disdain, as Hitler made clear in Mein Kampf: ‘We must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public. The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.’3 1 p. 41 2 A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, (London: Folio Society, 2008), p. 116. 3 Quoted in Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion, (London: W.H. Freeman & Co, 1992), p. 250. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Hitler’s analysis still stands as a lesson for today’s marketeers: brand building relies heavily on repetition. The makers of a certain washing powder used to irritate me enormously with their TV commercials – the same thing, over and over again. The Labour Party were guilty of this too, in the 1997 general election, when they introduced the ‘pledge card’ with five key pledges. John Prescott, for example, would whip this out at every opportunity – to the point it seemed of tedium. Or as Peter Mandelson put it more prosaically in relation to ‘22 Tory tax rises’, the message had to be repeated until party staff vomited.4 But if the repetition of the message is delivered crudely, or is seen to be didactic, will it work? Politicians and parties which are understood to be ‘on message’ all the time can be met with ridicule. One example of this is the old joke about Peter Mandelson’s alleged grip on Labour MPs: through their pagers he had even sent them a message telling them to ‘breathe in, breathe out.’ Another example is from the 2017 general election, with Theresa May’s constant repetition of the phrase ‘Strong and stable government’. What initially was seen as a strength soon became self-parody, not least because it rapidly became obvious that no-one believed it. The Nazis’ use of propaganda sought to avoid these pitfalls by conveying their message in a variety of guises, which would restate key themes: strength, harmony, victory. These themes would emerge in portrayals of ordinary life, or the exemplary life of the nation as one family – a unified family with one father, the Führer. Sometimes Nazi propaganda avoided any explicit use of Nazi symbolism, but sought to appear as just another, ordinary facet of public life in the hope that their message would resonate in the public sphere. ‘We know this as the social consensus heuristic – if everyone else agrees, so should I.’5 This method was also developed through ‘whisper’ campaigns, where the hand of the party was intentionally kept invisible. ‘He [Goebbels] organised a countrywide network through which Promi [the propaganda ministry] could spread information – or disinformation – that was considered unsuitable to be mentioned publicly, or when the government did not wish to appear as the originator. This network was, of course, separate from the party organisation that extended control over all citizens. Revelations coming from the secretary of a church group would be more readily believed, for example, than from a party 4 My recollection of Labour Party staff training sessions circa 1996. 5 Pratkanis and Aronson, (see note 3) p. 252 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk official.’6 It is ‘nudge’ theory, of course, that is the modern political equivalent of the ‘whisper’ campaigns. Party political broadcasts (which are now designed to be repeated on social media) are almost a secondary thought in comparison. The alleged Russian-initiated social media campaigns, designed to sway public opinion in Western democracies’ elections, are another indication of new techniques. It should be noted that, although those ‘Russian campaigns’ are still unproven, Western governments are already preparing to respond in kind. The important thing about all these efforts, regardless of the standpoint from which they are delivered, is that they should be believable.nn O’Shaugnessy’s detailed, deeply researched and exhaustive account of Nazi marketing ends with inevitable questions: was Hitler ahead of his time? What comparisons can be made with today’s methods of marketing political brands? What of the similarities between Nazi marketing techniques and the rise of, say, Donald Trump? The core element of political marketing is to recognise the simple truth that manipulating perception matters more than possessing an intellectual understanding of the complexities of the real world. When confronted with a simple binary question, there is no space or time for lengthy expositions of all the pros and cons, only slogans and simplistic appeals to optimism. The election of Trump and the Brexit referendum are often represented as symptoms of a recrudescence of a baseness in political culture which harks back to the methods of Goebbels and thus threatens a rise in populist, right- wing extremism. But the methods of Goebbels never really went out of fashion and have been used equally on all sides. Obama’s rather meaningless ‘Yes we can’ slogan, coupled with the use of Che Guevara-esque poster images is straight out of the Nazi design playbook. This of course doesn’t make Obama a fascist. As O’Shaugnessy remarks, nor does Trump’s colourful use of language – in all its platforms: the rallies, tweets, etc. – make him one. However, in spite of that, we can generally accept that he has authoritarian tendencies and is a demagogue. Comparisons falter, too, when one considers the total grip that Hitler and Goebbels exercised on all the media available to them. Only 6 Stanley Newcourt-Nowodworski, Black Propaganda in the Second World War, (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2005) p. 30 Similar tactics were used by British black propagandists against the Germans. Allied black propaganda leaflets . . . . ‘While appealing to his individual interest and self-preservation instinct, they play at the same time on his herd instinct by suggesting that “all those in the know” are doing a certain thing, e.g. hoarding grain against higher prices next year.’ From official document CAB 21 1071, quoted in Newcourt-Nowodworski, p. 70 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk North Korea today could match this domination. We are a long way short of that nightmare and hopefully close examinations of the Nazi marketing philosophy, such as O’Shaugnessy has delivered, will help to keep that monster at bay. Colin Challen was Member of Parliament for Morley and Rothwell from 2001 until 2010. He blogs at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Unwinnable Britain’s War in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 Theo Farrell The Bodley Head, 2017, £25 (h/b) John Newsinger This is the best account so far of Britain’s fourth Afghan War and it is unlikely to be surpassed any time soon. Farrell has written an unsentimental history, for which students of British counterinsurgency campaigns will be grateful and from which they will continue to learn for many years. Noting that hindsight is a fine thing, he suggests that Britain and the United States should not have fought this war at all. In fact, given the earlier Soviet experience in Afghanistan, good sense should have been enough to avoid this entanglement. What we have to deal with in both Afghanistan and Iraq is American hubris, something into which Tony Blair’s New Labour government wholly and disastrously bought. One criticism of the book is Farrell’s readiness to sometimes accept official sophistries at face value. So, we are seriously told that Blair’s government ‘had a track record of committing Britain and its armed forces to saving strangers’. He takes Blair’s supposed doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’ at face value, rather than seeing it as part of New Labour’s attempted rebranding of the ‘Special Relationship’, of Britain’s readiness to be of service to US Imperialism. Blair’s celebrated Christianity can be misleading in this respect, creating an impression that he actually intended to do good in the world. As early as 1995, the eminent sociologist, A. H. Halsey, a fellow ‘Christian Socialist’, had a conversation with Blair regarding the New Testament and its significance today. They discussed who they considered to be the most interesting man in the New Testament after Jesus. Halsey chose the Good Samaritan, but Blair opted for Pontius Pilate of all people. Halsey remonstrated with him only for Blair to insist that ‘the powerful were also deserving of our political sympathy’. It seems fair to say that while, for purely propaganda reasons, New Labour sometimes tried to dress its interventionism up in the clothes of the Good Samaritan, it was actually playing the part of the governor of a Roman province. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk For the British, the underlying reality of the Afghan war was that it was fought entirely at the behest of the United States. The only British interest at stake was the ‘Special Relationship’. This was why British troops were killing and being killed. Everything else was propaganda. And in pursuit of the ‘Special Relationship’, Britain put itself at the service of the Karzai government, a brutal, wholly corrupt regime, dominated by drug traffickers. Farrell certainly brings out the enormity of this, providing more than enough evidence to substantiate his indictment of the regime as ‘profoundly corrupt’. Hundreds of millions of dollars were being stolen by officials and ministers and smuggled out of the country. And this corruption seriously undermined the counterinsurgency effort. He describes, for example, units of the Afghan local police as late as 2012-2013 being involved ‘in beatings, kidnappings, extortion, extrajudicial killings and illegal taxation of the population’. In Baghlan the police were ‘involved in the kidnapping and raping of teenage boys, and in arbitrary detention and enforced disappearances of local leaders’. When you have British soldiers remarking that the best way to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the local people would be via the removal of the police chief, it is clear that the war on the ground was very different from the war that was being sold to public opinion back in Britain. The role of Pakistan One of the factors making war ‘unwinnable’ was the character of the regime the United States was sustaining in power. The U.S. has successfully supported many gangster regimes during the Cold War, relentlessly beating off insurgent challenges with torture and massacre. So the corruption is surely not enough, on its own, to account for the US failure in Afghanistan. Farrell identifies another crucial factor: the role of Pakistan in providing a (relatively) safe haven for the Taliban. The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan could not be closed and, moreover, elements within the Pakistani state were effectively allied with and providing support for the Taliban. Pakistan not only assisted the Taliban, but also provided sanctuary for Osama bin Laden. Indeed, in retaliation for the US forces killing of bin Laden, the Pakistani secret state, the ISI, sponsored a series of attacks on US and international targets inside Afghanistan by the Haqqani network (a Taliban affiliate known to be close to the ISI). US attempts to whip Pakistan into line failed, partly because public opinion in the country was fiercely anti-American; but also because the Pakistan government was actually in a strong position, capable of making the situation considerably worse for the US. Following the killing of twenty-four Pakistani soldiers in a US air raid in November 2011, Pakistan shut down US Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk supply routes for seven months, ‘plunging ISAF [the International Security Assistance Force] into crisis and costing the United States $700 million’. It was better to put up with Pakistan protracting but containing the war for its own purposes, rather than bearing the consequences of a complete break. In such circumstances the war was, at least in any conventional sense, unwinnable. What of British performance in this unwinnable war? The reputation of British Army as counterinsurgency specialists has been permanently diminished by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. What, though, of shortages of equipment and troops? While these were undoubtedly factors, they affected how the unwinnable war unfolded rather than having any direct effect on the inevitable outcome. The Blair and Brown governments deserve censure for getting involved at all, rather than for somehow losing the war. It is worth briefly noticing here the dramatic falling out between Gordon Brown and General Richard Dannatt over the resourcing of the war. Without wishing to be unfair to Dannatt, I suspect that he thought Brown’s reluctance to finance the conflict derived from his being some sort of pacifist lefty. What he did not realise was that New Labour and the modern Conservatives were as one in regarding the military with scorn, of little account. In the universe inhabited by the likes of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May and Philip Hammond, it is the bankers who call the shots; they are the heroes. A paperback edition will be available in September. . John Newsinger has a new book, ‘Hope Lies in the Proles’: Orwell and the Left, coming out this year from Pluto Press. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Ideas are not responsible for the people who believe them Farming, Fascism and Ecology: A Life of Jorian Jenks Philip M. Coupland London: Routledge, 2016, £30, p/b David Sivier This is a sympathetic study of Jorian Jenks, one of the great pioneers of the modern Green movement and advocate of organic agriculture.1 He was also a member of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and an anti-Semite, who believed that the country’s Jews should be deported to found a new homeland elsewhere.2 Coupland notes in his prologue how Jenks’ Fascism has been used by climate change deniers as well as mainstream commentators like Jenny Diski and Jonathan Meades on the left, and Ross Clark and Geoffrey Hollis on the right, to attack the Green movement. Jonathan Dimbleby is the present head of the Soil Association and he made his feelings about Jenks very clear in his foreword to Philip Conford’s history of the organic movement,3 where he described the beliefs that Jenks had as ‘foolish and foetid’ and Jenks himself as one of a number of ‘fatuous romantics. Coupland states that the negative connotations of the term ‘Fascist’ are now so strong that, to attach it to anyone, is to put them beyond the pale of human sympathy. He therefore hopes that the book will provide some scope for better understanding the links between Fascism and the Green Movement, ‘that many still find unexpected and are poorly equipped to understand’. 1 This available for preview. Press the preview button at 2 The book is published as part of Routledge’s series of books on Fascism and the Far Right, which also includes Richard Griffiths’ What Did You Do During The War? The last throes of the British Pro-Nazi Right, 1940-45, reviewed elsewhere this issue. 3 The Origins of the Organic Movement (2001). This is apparently out of print but copies are available at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Jorian Jenks (1899-1963) was the asthmatic son of the liberal lawyer and academic, Edward Jenks. Educated at Haileybury, one of Britain’s leading public schools, from his early childhood he wanted to be a farmer and in May 1916 enrolled at Harper Adams Agricultural College in Shropshire. The following year he tried to do his bit for the war effort, and join an Officer Cadet Battalion, only to be rejected. Eventually he became a member of an artillery regiment based in Colchester. After leaving Harper Adams in 1920, he took up a career as farm bailiff in Yattenden but lost the job in the agricultural slump which followed the end of the War. Despairing of finding work in England, he moved to New Zealand and became a government farming instructor. A legacy of £3,100 from his grandfather, Sir William Forwood, gave him enough money to return home to England, where he took up a post as District Agricultural Lecturer for East Devon, as well as starting his own farm. He also began a career in journalism and married Sophie Chester, a young Australian woman. Under the influence of Major C. H. Douglas’ Social Credit movement, Jenks became a supporter of currency reform before joining the British Union of Fascists c. 1934. Jenks was so impressed with Mosley that he hailed him as ‘another Cobbett’ and stood in 1936 as the BUF candidate for Horsham and Worthing in West Sussex. From 1937 onwards Jenks published a series of articles, ‘The Land and Countryside’, in the BUF magazine, Action. He was appointed the BUF’s agricultural adviser, and produced a revised version of their agricultural policy, which was published as The Land and the People in 1937. This endorsed the Fascist concept of the corporate state: trade unions and employers’ organisations in each industry were united in a single organisation, known as ‘the corporation’, which also included representatives of the consumers, appointed by the government. Jenks believed that agriculture should become a single corporation in this Fascist utopia, whose members would be guided by national planning. He believed that farmer and farm worker would be united and guided by a common ‘spirit of service to Mother Earth’. He also thought that this corporation would be autonomous, following Mosley’s pronouncement that he wished to empower farmers, not give orders to them. Jenks was intensely interested in reforming and improving agriculture and farming conditions, writing a series of books to promote his views, and corresponded with the American Modernist poet, Ezra Pound. Interned during the War, Jenks returned to agricultural journalism as an early advocate for the then embryonic ecological movement. His first publication on it was an article under the pseudonym, J. J. Zeal in A. R. Orage’s New English Weekly. This was strongly influenced by G. V. Jacks and R. O. Whyte’s The Rape of the Earth: A Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk World Survey of Soil Erosion, published in 1939. Released from internment, in 1942 he joined the Rural Reconstruction Association, founded in 1925 by the Labour Party activist Montague Fordham, remaining a member until his death. From 1942 onwards he was also active in the agricultural section of the Economic Reform Club, founded in 1936 by Edward Holloway. In March 1943 he attended a conference on farming organised by Church Social Action, associated with the Christendom Group, an Anglican organisation dedicated to social reform. This led to the foundation of ‘Church and Countryside’ as an official, Anglican national organisation under the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, and the Archbishop of York, Dr. Cyril Garbett. Jenks was selected as one of the new group’s executive council. In 1944, at the request of T. S. Eliot, he edited Ill Fares the Land by the left-wing American lawyer, Carey McWilliams, the factual counterpart to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. This was a powerful attack on liberal capitalism for its agricultural exploitation and destruction of the environment. From 1943 onwards Jenks had been an advocate of ‘the organic movement’, and in 1945 he was recruited to the Soil Association, which campaigned for the use of natural manure and compost and against the use of artificial fertilisers. The Association was founded that year by Lady Eve Balfour, the niece of the former Tory prime minister, Arthur Balfour. She had become convinced of the necessity for organic farming through reading Famine in England, and made her farm in Haughley a continuing experiment in organic farming. Writer and broadcaster In 1945 the BUF’s leader, Oswald Mosley, was considering setting himself up as a farmer. In August that year Jenks met the Fascist leader and spent a day inspecting his Wiltshire estate. In November that year, he founded the Soil Association’s newsletter, Mother Earth and became its editor. By this time he was also writing and editing the Economic Reform Club’s Agricultural Bulletin, and contributed articles to the Weekly Review, the Distributists’ journal. The following year, 1946, he founded the journal, Rural Economy, for the Rural Reconstruction Association. This limped on, in one form or another, before being absorbed by the Economic Digest, which itself eventually ceased publication at the end of 1959. Shocked by the imposition of bread rationing, in 1947 Jenks authored the pamphlet, The Full Development of Agriculture. This replaced the Rural Reconstruction Association’s 1936 manifesto, The Revival of Agriculture. In Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk June the next year Jenks also became one of Church and Countryside’s vice- presidents. That year also saw the publication of Jenks’ most important book, From the Ground Up: An Outline of Real Economy. This presented his criticisms of ‘the Mechanical Age’ of industrialism, finance capitalism and liberalism. He argued instead for an organic society based on traditional agriculture, which was to replace ‘agri-business’. He was also active fostering links between the Soil Association and similar groups abroad, including the organic movement in Germany, which seems largely to have been founded and composed of former Nazis.4 Jenks also put Rolf Gardiner, another leading figure in the organic movement, in touch with Hermann Reischle, another former Nazi.5 Jenks also published in Mother Earth articles written by Elisabeth von Barsewisch.6 The January 1959 edition of Mother Earth reported on the conference of the Internationalle Gesellschaft fur Nahrungs–und Vitalstoff–Forschung (IVG) in Essen, which had been attended by two of the Association’s members. This was led by Dr. Hans Schweigert, yet another former Nazi, who had been a nutritionist during the Third Reich. Schweigert became a member of the Soil Association, which they reciprocated with several of their members joining the IVG. In the same month the conference was held, the German government banned the use of chemical additives in food. One of those involved in the campaign against chemical additives had been Jenks’ contact in Germany, Elisbeth von Barsewisch. As a leader in the organic movement, Jenks shared this distrust of artificial additives. He wrote in the Easter 1959 edition of Mother Earth that modern food was widely distrusted because of the use of chemicals as fertilizers, sprays and additives. Despite his anti-Semitism, Jenks worked alongside a number of people of Jewish descent to promote Green, organic farming. He hosted J. I. Rodale, the founder of the American Soil Association, who was Jewish, when he visited 4 By 1948 the Association had established friendly relations with Dr. Wolfgang von Schuh’s Arbeitskreis fuer Landswirtschaft and the next year the Association was also linked to Wolfgang von Haller’s Gesellschaft Boden und Gesundheit. Von Haller had served as an agricultural official for the occupied territories in the Nazi regime during the War, and was close to Walther Darre, the Nazi’s Reich Minister for Food and Agriculture and Reich Peasant Leader. Darre was one of those sentenced to imprisonment at Nuremberg, but released in 1951. 5 Reischle and Darre had both been members of the SS, holding senior posts in the SS Rasse und Siedlungsampt before the War, and then working in the Reichsnahrstand. 6 A member of Gesellschaft Boden und Gesundheit, von Barsewisch was the daughter of a Luftwaffe general. She had been a member of the conservative Deutschnationale Volkspartei in the 1920s, before joining various Nazi organisations during the Third Reich, and writing a number of articles on race. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk England in September 1953. He was also in contact with Dove-Myer Robinson, the president of the Soil and Health Association of New Zealand, who was also Jewish. He also worked with the Jewish Socialist, Edward Hyams, to finish the manuscript of the book Hyams had been writing with Jenks’ colleague, H. J. Massingham, the Prophecy of Famine, after Massingham’s death in August 1952. In 1947 he helped to set up the Rural Reconstruction Association’s Research Committee, and was active in the Agricultural Group formed by Saunders and Robert Rowe in Oswald Mosley’s new party, the Union Movement, founded in 1948. He was, however, not a member of the Movement and had stopped speaking at Fascist rallies and conferences. The draft policy met with Mosley’s approval, and it was published in October 1950. Jenks, Saunders and Row were then asked to produce a more detailed work, slanted towards the farmer. This was published as the pamphlet None Need Starve in August 1952. He arranged farm visits for the Rural Reconstruction Association (RRA) through the Provincial Agricultural Economics Service, which was composed of the agricultural economics departments of a number of universities in England and Wales. He was the main author behind the RRA’s report, published in 1955 as Feeding the Fifty Million, after which the RRA’s Research Department was disbanded. Jenks stopped having contact with the Union Movement in 1955. By this time, all his former Fascist comrades had either died, emigrated, or simply left Fascism. The last Union Movement meeting he attended in February, 1955, was called to discuss revisions to None Need Starve. That year he also began work on the book that was eventually to be published four years later in 1959 as The Stuff Man’s Made Of: The Positive Approach to Health through Nutrition In addition to his writing, he also made many appearances on the radio. In 1951 he made two appearances on the programme, Land and Livestock, of the BBC’s General Overseas Service, and was commissioned to write scripts on agriculture for them and the Corporation’s Latin American service. He, along with his colleagues Stuckey and Holloway, were called to give evidence to the Royal Commission on Common Land in April 1956. Personal life In 1947 his marriage to the Australian Sophie Chester collapsed. Sophie had been supported in her new life in England by a relative, Mary Fullerton, but she died in 1946. Sophie also suffered a nervous breakdown, which her Australian relatives attributed to the stress of bombing during the War. However Mabel Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Singleton, with whom Fullerton lived, believed was due instead to her husband’s internment. Jenks then moved out his family house, and after several changes of address ended up lodging with Catherine and Esther Browning, the daughters of a clergyman, in Pangbourne, where he would remain until 1959. Jenks was in some kind of relationship with Esther Browning, and the two went away together in 1950 and 51. He was also in love with Sally Stuckey. His relationship with Esther broke down in 1956, and in November of that year he moved to a guest house, Slaters, in Henley-on-Thames. The following year Jenks suffered particularly badly from asthma, and placed himself under the care of Dr. Latto, a campaigner against vivisection and prominent member of the London Vegetarian Society. He spent several weeks at a private clinic, living on a strict vegetarian diet which demanded that he also abstained from alcohol, tobacco and tea. In the summer of 1959 he moved into Boynes Wood Farm with his mother, Dorothy, and daughter, Patsy, who would later become one of Britain’s first Anglican women priests. He also became engaged to Elizabeth Howard, the ex- wife of a former stockbroker, whom he married the following year. The Rural Reconstruction Association was failing by this time, with an ageing, dwindling membership. Shortly before Jenks’ wedding it was decided to merge it with the Economic Reform Club. Jenks’ second marriage also did not last, and in October 1961 it finally collapsed while Jenks was on holiday at Lake Windermere. Silent Spring The Soil Association benefited considerably from the publicity surrounding the publication of Rachel Carson’s classic environmentalist text, Silent Spring. Jenks had been writing articles against the use of pesticides like DDT since 1950 and, after the publication of a parliamentary report into the use of toxic chemicals in agriculture, the Soil Association lobbied parliament for a public enquiry. Carson’s British publisher, Hamish Hamilton, planned to bring her to Britain, where it was hoped that she would address a meeting of the Soil Association. This fell through, as Carson feared the US Food and Drug Administration had embarked on a McCarthyite reign of terror against doctors and other critics of US policy. By this time, Jenks’ health was failing, and on the 20 August 1963 he died from heart failure during an asthma attack. He was buried on the 24 August at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk a funeral in St. Andrew’s church, Medstead, which was attended not just by members of his family, but also by members of the Soil Association. Jenks and Fascism Jenks support for Fascism was closely linked with his environmentalism and concern for rural reconstruction. Coupland argues that, based on the writing style, an anonymous article, ‘Why I, A Farmer, Have Turned Fascist’, published in Blackshirt, the BUF’s magazine, was probably written by Jenks. The article described how the writer turned to Fascism through disillusionment with the National Government and its failure to support domestic agriculture. Furthermore, Mosley offered plans for the complete reconstruction of British society and economy, not just hatred of the Jews. This included agriculture, as laid out in Mosley’s manifesto The Greater Britain. And in September 1933 the BUF began actively campaigning to gain the support of the farmers. This involved Mosley speaking at significant market towns, beginning with Ashford in Kent. In 1933 and 34 the BUF was also involved in the Tithe War, a campaign to stop farmers having to pay a tithe of their earnings to the established church. Jenks’ own proposed solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ was not extermination, but their forcible removal from Britain. They were to be given a new homeland elsewhere, in one of the underpopulated but fertile areas of the world, in Africa, South America or Asiatic Russia. He argued that by regaining contact with the soil, the Jewish character would be given a broader basis. They would regain racial dignity and, in doing so, triumphantly fulfil their racial destiny. By withdrawing their influence from other nations, they would also be rewarded with peace and good will from them. Regarding Jenks’ antisemitism and support for eugenics, Coupland puts this in context by noting how many other leading writers and politicians outside Fascism held similar views. He notes that William Cobbett was also an anti- Semite, and that in the 1890s both the Independent Labour Party and the Social Democratic Federation had believed that Jewish interests were responsible for the Anglo-South African War. He also observes that pronouncements about the concept of race or eugenics were almost entirely absent in the BUF and British Union movements. The book quotes Mosley himself, who said that because the British Empire was made up of a number of different races, it would be ‘bad [. . .] to stigmatise by law any races within it as inferior or outcast’. The book also notes that while there were anti-Semites in the BUF from the very beginning, antisemitism was absent from Mosley’s Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The Greater Britain, and only became official policy later in the 1930s. He argues that Jenks’ own hatred of Jews was simply a radicalisation of common, mainstream prejudices against Jews as rapacious capitalists, criminals or Communist subversives. Jenks himself had little interest in the issue, and discussed the matter in depth on only one occasion, in his book Spring Comes Again of 1939. He maintained that for Fascists, nationalism was a vital factor in human progress and the natural form of society was the nation. Thus, Fascism viewed with anxiety the existence within the nation of an exotic, race- conscious community with strong international affiliations. Like the other Fascists, he believed the Jews were behind the Communist threat and the Russian Revolution. He was opposed to farmers taking on Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany because, as townsmen and Jews, they were unpromising stock for working the soil. On the occasions when he referred to the Jews at all in his other articles, it was merely as an addition to his original position. But Stephen Dorril’s biography of Mosley, Blackshirt, shows that Mosley had been an anti-Semite from the very beginning. Richard Thurlow, in his Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918–1985, describes how Mosley attempted to merge the BUF with Arnold Leese’s viciously antisemitic Imperial Fascist League in the early 1930s. In 1932, before his turn to Fascism, Mosley chaired a meeting of the New Party, at which Leese and Henry Hamilton Beamish spoke on ‘The Blindness of British Politics under the Jew Power’. Thurlow also notes that, while antisemitism was initially banned at the level of the official leadership, there were double standards and the BUF’s magazines and rhetoric were using antisemitic stereotypes and attacking the ‘alien menace’ long before Mosley officially took up antisemitism. Thurlow also discusses how Mosley was influenced by Oswald Spengler’s belief that different cultures could not mix, with Mosley concluding that the ‘oriental’ Jew was far more alien to the British than the members of other European nations. He therefore recommended that in the new Fascist state there would be Special Commissions, which would judge whether individual Jews were more Jewish or British in their attitudes. Those who were judged to be more Jewish would be expelled from Britain. Coupland also states that Jenks’ proposal for the Jews to be expelled and given a new homeland elsewhere was in line with the BUF’s own policy, as outlined in Mosley’s Tomorrow We Live. This also demanded the compulsory resettlement of the Jews to a country or region other than Palestine. Coupland also states that Jenks’ advocacy of the voluntary sterilisation of the ‘unfit’ was also shared by some in the Labour movement, as exemplified by A. G. Church, a Labour MP, who tried to introduce a bill for it in Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk parliament. The National Conference of Labour Women also supported similar measures. Jenks’ vision More generally, the book also suggests that Jenks may have been influenced by Arthur Penty’s Post-Industrialism of 1922, and the Distributist movement of Penty, G. K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc, which arose after the collapse of Guild Socialism. Jenks was sceptical about the use of machines. He believed that physical labour was a wholesome part of farming, and was prepared to allow only limited mechanisation of agriculture. For example, he consistently argued for the value of horses over tractors. Penty’s Post-Industrialism similarly argued that society should return to handicraft as the basis of production and that mechanisation should only be secondary. Penty was also an opponent of the state, industrialism and large scale capitalism and, like Jenks, joined the BUF in the late 1930s. Jenks came to his distributist beliefs while he was in New Zealand, and there is no evidence of him becoming a part of the movement after his return to England. Nevertheless, he shared their belief in the widest distribution of landed property, the establishment of a new yeoman class as the basis of the society, and a general scepticism towards modern industrial society. His ecological views were influenced not just by his experiences in New Zealand, but by his reading of G. V. Jacks and R. O. Whyte’s The Rape of the Earth: A World Survey of Soil Erosion. This linked the massive loss of agricultural land across the globe to the free trade economy, and made it very clear that there was a growing potential for famine. Jenks formulated his agricultural ideal when he was working at Ecclesden. He envisaged a Britain of family-owned, small and middle sized farms using traditional mixed farming and making intensive use of animal labour. He recognised that such farms could be inefficient compared to the highly mechanised farms specialising in only one crop, but believed that they could be made competitive through a mixture of superior practice in the farm itself, and state intervention in agriculture as a whole. This meant reforming the marketing system. It would also have the additional advantage of maintaining a rural population, which would supply industry and commerce with workers of good physique, balancing the debilitating effect of urban life. In Farming and Money, which Jenks wrote with John Taylor Peddie, published in 1935, Jenks argued that the withdrawal of land from cultivation created hunger and poverty. The solution to this was to stimulate demand by giving consumers higher wages to purchase goods and by increasing economic activity in Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk agriculture. This would also stimulate the economy as a whole, by providing a market for the industries that supplied the farmer with the equipment they needed, and the industries that used the farmer’s products. This would have the benefit of expanding the British diet. He believed that the economic ideal should be autarky – self-sufficiency, and so advocated a tariff system which would favour domestic producers first and those elsewhere in the Empire second over foreign producers. He also wanted to see agricultural banks, and full-time Agricultural Authorities with the task of stimulating the intensification of production, providing agricultural workers with better housing, wages and employment insurance. They would also operate an ‘agricultural ladder’, which would allow them to acquire their own farms. Jenks also recommended the establishment of a Central Land Commission. This would stabilise land values and rents and ensure that owners occupied their properties. He also expressed similar ideas in The Land and the People, in which he identified the causes of Britain’s agricultural decline. He believed that this had occurred as Britain passed under the rule of elites, which made their wealth from international trade. Jenks specifically blamed the interest paid on overseas loans made to the debtor nations which supplied Britain with their agricultural produce. Jenks expanded this view of the origins of agricultural decline into a complete critique of liberal capitalism in his Spring Comes Again. This argued that liberalism had indeed once been a progressive force, but that the free trade and ‘self-regulating’ economy advocated by liberals had allowed power to pass to a wealthy elite. This elite disproportionately benefited from the economic and social system, and dominated political institutions and public discourse to such an extent that democracy and freedom of speech were empty phrases. The public had a vote, but it did not matter what party they elected, as they were all controlled by ‘the unseen, non representative power [. . .] Finance’. The final stage of liberalism’s decline was the emergence of what Jenks called ‘the Plutocratic State’. This was based on the ‘Money standard’, and made the rich the dominant element in the ruling class. Meanwhile the Treasury held a key position in governments, which bowed to the desires of the City. Industry had increasingly fallen under the control of the financial sector, as power had passed from the masters of machinery and organisers of labour to the masters of finance and big business. This had turned society into a great, impersonal machine. Divorced from the soil, and unable to support themselves through craftsmanship, working people had become slaves of the system. They were a docile proletariat, which at election Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk time was mustered and driven by the financial oligarchs, the parties and the press. Jenks elaborated this view in his 1950 From the Ground Up, the first two parts of which discuss the transition from an organic, agrarian society to the ‘Mechanical Age’, whose heyday he dated between 1860 and 1914. The third part of From the Ground Up was devoted to the decline of liberalism after the First World War. Here he argued that the Earth’s fertility was rapidly declining because all the virgin land had been taken into cultivation and agriculture was increasingly exploitative, replacing traditional husbandry with the use of inorganic methods of industrialism and finance capitalism. This resulted in widespread soil erosion, and across the globe the real foundation of human existence was being lost. The human population was set to grow rapidly, which would result in a Malthusian crisis as the population outpaced the ability of the Earth to feed them. In the book’s fourth chapter, Jenks articulated his alternative to the coming crisis. He refused to legislate for the rest of the rest of the world and confined his recommendations to Britain alone, on the grounds that Britain should lead by example. Britain should live self-sufficiently, rather than parasitically. With a return to husbandry instead of agri-industry, a greater proportion of the population would be involved in agriculture. Production would also move out to rural areas and villages would experience a renaissance. The abstract political, social and economic relationships to the state, big business and mass parties in contemporary society would be replaced by the direct, personal connections of organic communities. This would replace the alienation created by liberal modernity with meaningful, creative labour and real, authentic human relationships. Jenks believed very strongly that the current system, in which Britain imported the majority of its foodstuffs, was unfair to and parasitical on the nations that supplied it. He argued that across the world the pressure of low prices and finance capitalism had ‘created millions of acres of new desert’. He claimed that Britain was living at the expense of other nations, as the foodstuffs we imported were subsidised by those providing countries. This came at a large cost to those nations’ peoples in taxes and subsidies, not counting the intangible costs represented by sweated labour and reduced soil fertility. If Britain moved to self-sufficiency, the country would increase the possibility of improving the standard of living in poor nations beset by famine and privation. It would also be a forceful contribution to solving the problem of soil erosion. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk This concern for the wellbeing of the less developed nations in the British Empire brought him into dispute with his comrades in the Fascist movement. He was accused of ‘Little Englanderism’, and of wanting to turn Britain into another Denmark. Furthermore, the type of rural, organic society Jenks championed would value stability rather than the dynamic expansionism extolled and desired by Fascists. Jenks replied by stating that no country should live in isolation, but it must have its roots firmly in its own soil. If it did not, its external contacts would be parasitic rather than constructive. Thus, the European development of Africa should not solely be for European interests, as this would create exploitation and racial friction. Both continents should be developed side by side so that they benefited each other. He also argued against the use of the word ‘Negro’ to describe Black Africans, on the grounds that many of them weren’t Negroes, and the word had ‘slightly disparaging’ overtones. The book is also interesting for its discussion of the religious dimension to these ecological concerns. From the 1960s onwards, the Green movement has been taken up by neo-Pagan groups, to the point where its right-wing Christian opponents level the accusation that it is inherently pagan, and that no Christian should be involved in it. But many of these early ecologists were deeply Christian. The Christendom group of Anglo-Catholic social activists had already formulated a Green theology, based in the Roman Catholic Natural Law tradition. This argued that there was an architecture of nature, which imposed certain duties upon humans, who were natural creatures and could not disregard certain natural laws. Part of humanity’s duty as Christians was to live in harmony with nature. God’s redemption of humanity required humans to repair their broken relationship with the natural world. The Christendom group was not hostile to commerce and industry, but considered them of secondary importance to the preservation and restoration of nature. Jenks himself had strong religious beliefs, although he admitted he rarely attended church. He wrote that the purpose of life at the heart of the Organic movement was exemplified through Christ’s life on Earth, His crucifixion and resurrection. The Christian emphasis on love was manifested in the strong sense of community which the faithful felt for God and their fellows on Earth, and which the farmer felt for the soil. Elsewhere in his writing Jenks argued for the existence of the supernatural and the existence of God as part of the Organic worldview, and contrasted it with the mechanistic, atheistic worldview of industrialism. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The book’s Epilogue notes that Jenks’ death left the Soil Association in a depression, and that it has been suggested by the movement’s historian, Philip Conford, that the Soil Association moved leftward under his successor Robert Waller and his editorial assistant, Michael Allaby. Waller was the producer of radio programmes on agricultural issues for the BBC’s western region and was politically a Liberal, while Allaby was a CND supporter who joined the Labour Party. Coupland states that, although they had very different political views from Jenks, the matter of whether the Association itself moved Left is ‘not amenable to easy conclusion’. He makes it very clear that Jenks was vital to the creation and survival of the Soil Association as an integral part of the ecological movement. He also argues that Jenks’ intellectual contribution to the Green Movement has never properly been appreciated, with the exception of Ulrich Loening (the former director of the Centre for Human Ecology at the University of Edinburgh) who recommended From the Ground Up to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Subcommittee. He states that, while Jenks was not an innovator, he ‘was among the first to synthesise an economic and social critique of liberal modernity that incorporated the ecological dimension as fundamental and central. In this respect, his work still has the power to enlighten.’ Coupland also argues that his contribution to the British Fascist movement has also been barely recognised. On his death, Jenks was given only a brief obituary in Action. This was because ecological politics were (and still are) marginal to Fascism. The BUF was overwhelmingly urban, and the British agricultural sector was too weak socially and economically to allow British Fascists to exploit them for electoral success, as Hitler and Mussolini had done in Germany and Italy. Some of the more modern followers of Mosley have attempted to present Jenks as the first Green, and have republished some of his books, most notably Spring Comes Again. The Mosleyites, however, have little influence in the wider Fascist milieu. Coupland states that the only faction within British Fascism that comes closest to Jenks’ own views were the ‘Third Position’, who were also influenced by Distributivism. Their heroes, however, are not Jenks, but Chesterton and Belloc. In any case, the Third Position was itself never very influential, although Nick Griffin was an important member. Ecology was not a very important issue to the British National Party, whose current policies amount to a denial of climate change regardless of its rhetoric. And the BNP’s own political influence has been wiped out, with their place on the extreme right taken by UKIP. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Coupland also considers that the neglect of Jenks by mainstream historians and Green activists is due to Jenks’ Fascism. He argues that there is a double standard here, as others on the left have served murderously genocidal regimes. He specifically contrasts Jenks with the career of John Strachey, who was also initially attracted to Fascism, but drew back, and instead became a Communist during the 1930s. This was the period of Stalinist terror, characterised by artificial famine, deportations and the imprisonment of millions in the gulags. Despite this, Strachey’s rehabilitation was so successful that he was able to serve as the Minister for Food in the Atlee government. For Coupland, Jenks would have been personally more successful if he had been like Montague Fordham, and tried to reform the system from within. The book ends by speculating on the possible emergence of a form of Green Fascism in the future. British Fascism in its present form may be dying out, but the coming crises brought about by climate change, mass migration and competition over resources will have great potential to disrupt existing political and social structures. The re-emergence of Fascism will also depend on whether the nation survives as a motivating force in an increasingly globalised world. The only certainty is that the agricultural Britain that Jenks and his colleagues felt was eternal, actually vanished in the course of a single lifetime. The book concludes that, while the heart of Jenks’ work, on ecology and his thoughts on the good life are evergreen, any attempt to go beyond today’s anti-natural system and create a sustainable and wholesome way of life would be an unprecedented challenge in negotiating a course between the Scylla of ecological catastrophe and the Charybdis of authoritarianism. Jenks comes across as a rather sympathetic figure: personally affable, hard-working, with a deep and genuine sympathy for the land and the people that worked on it. While he was anti-Socialist, he seems to have been genuinely sympathetic to the farm workers’ union, and his Fascist political views did not stop him working with liberals and socialists in defending and promoting the embryonic ecological movement. And it clearly demonstrates that the Green movement in Britain certainly long predates Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. How is Jenks to be regarded? His party political views and his advocacy of the expulsion of British Jews are abhorrent. But the book argues, very persuasively, that Jenks has been unfairly neglected in the immense contribution he made to the Organic movement and the establishment and survival of the Soil Association. It should be possible to recognise this, while at the same time deploring and rejecting his Fascism, without incurring in return Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk accusations of Fascist sympathies. There are dangers that this would give ammunition to the Far Right in their attempts to claim Green politics as their own through Jenks. But if done carefully, the danger can be minimised. After all, Jenks acquired his ecological views partly from politically respectable sources, like the Rape of the Earth. Similarly, Jenks analysis of the decline of liberalism and the emergence of plutocracy and sham democracy under the influence of finance capitalism is true, regardless of its origins in Jenks’ personal view of Fascism. The Left should be able to use it without accepting Jenks’ antisemitism regardless of the dangers of contamination – i.e. that they themselves will be smeared with allegations of Fascism through guilt by association. As Coupland himself has pointed out, some the great heroes of British democracy, like William Cobbett, were also deeply anti-Semitic. And there is wisdom in the old saying ‘Ideas are not responsible for the people who hold them’. David Sivier is an historian and archaeologist with a doctorate in the archaeology of the Somerset town of Bridgwater. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Divining Desire Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation Liz Featherstone OR Books, 2018, £16.00, p/b Colin Challen I am not sure how important focus groups actually are in politics. Their practitioners, of course, are in no doubt: for them focus groups are an essential part of the election consultants’ playbook along with quantitative opinion polling. Focus groups have been used extensively in US politics since the 1950s and British politics since the 1980s. Bill Clinton said: ‘There is no one more powerful today than the member of a focus group. If you really want to change things and you want to get listened to, that’s the place to be.’ 1 On the other hand, Norman Lamont wrote: ‘Margaret Thatcher certainly knew when to disregard market research. In the 1980s, opinion polls regularly showed that voters preferred public spending to tax cuts. Mrs Thatcher insisted on cutting income tax, and the voters rewarded her.’ 2 This dichotomy bedevils the modern politician: do they show a listening side uppermost (‘If only you would listen to us!’), or are they strong leaders first (‘This country needs a strong leader’)? We expect politicians to be both, of course. Bill Clinton’s use of focus groups underlined the perception that he wasn’t so much a conviction politician, but just liked to be liked. He used his charisma to retain power without a clear purpose, and his triangulation and Third Way politics underscored his policy vacuum. It seemed natural then that, wishing to emulate Clinton’s election success in 1992, New Labour would ramp up the use of heavily US-influenced market research techniques prior to the 1997 UK election. This was ‘the modernisers’ way of doing politics and is most closely associated in the UK with Peter Mandelson and the late Philip Gould. After 1 Quoted by Deborah Mattison, ‘The Power of the Focus Group’ at 2 Norman Lamont, ‘Focus groups? I thought we elected politicians to make big decisions’ at Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Labour was defeated in the 1992 election, the party was repositioned under these guidelines. A ‘thorough examination of the state of mind of Britain’s voters’ was commissioned by Mandelson. The report ‘Labour and Britain in the 1990s’ was stage one: the second was a policy review learning the lessons from stage one. What might have to be addressed in stage two? ‘Among those who had abandoned us, there was a remarkable consistency in the reasons they said had driven them away. “Extremism” came top, followed by the dominance of the trade unions, our defence policy and finally “weak leadership.”’ 3 It could be argued that the abolition of Clause Four of the Party’s constitution had addressed those ‘extremism’ and ‘weak leadership’ issues. Clause Four had, of course, promised a general programme of nationalisation but I doubt anyone actually considered that a serious prospect. Nevertheless, this was newly elected party leader Tony Blair’s moment and one can probably mark it down as a response to focus group input. Ever since then, at least in British politics, new leaders are encouraged to seek their own breakthrough ‘Clause Four’ moment: historic breaks with the past in which they can demonstrate their courageous leadership, while at the same time showing that they are in step with public opinion. For Blair’s successor, that moment never came – even with the aid of focus groups, of whose outpourings he was once an avid consumer: ‘After becoming leader, GB [Gordon Brown] continued to seek the voters’ views at every turn, calling frequently and emailing most mornings to share new thinking for policy ideas, speech-lines or other initiatives. I had checked focus group reactions to his first Cabinet, to the government of all the talents concept, to his healthcare policy . . . and to his education policy.’ 4 Later, Brown would cast his long-term pollster Deborah Mattinson out of his magic circle. She seemed too insistent on telling him things he didn’t want to know, not least about perceptions of his character or the way he presented himself to the public. Perhaps Brown captures the dilemma of leadership. He had sold himself to the Parliamentary Labour Party as a man of vision, of far- sighted and deep intellect and sought publicly to distance himself from the perception of Blair as a lightweight, focus group-driven politician. So as a ‘strong’ leader, should he follow his own instincts, or trust in the views of small groups of individuals with no grasp of intellectual detail? Focus groups seek to 3 Peter Mandelson, The Third Man, (London: HarperPress, 2010), p. 105 4 Deborah Mattinson, Talking to a Brick Wall, (London: Biteback, 2010) p. 214 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk find out how people feel about things, not what constitute the essential ingredients of successful policy making. In Brown’s case his earlier appetite for focus group output ceased when it failed to confirm his own self-image. Nevertheless, as the evidence demonstrates, focus groups do influence policy. Why else seek their input in healthcare or education? Politicians routinely deny that policies are poll or focus group driven; in which case, if they believed that, they could perhaps save their parties a lot of money. Instead, the rationale for using focus groups in politics is often stated as being merely a tool to hone communications. Politicians on the losing side are unable to say they lost because of poor policies. That would be an admission amounting to an existential loss of purpose. Rather, their excellent policies had simply not been communicated well enough. Politicians on the winning side naturally point to their superior understanding of the zeitgeist. In both cases the pollsters have a ready market. Who are the focus groups? Featherstone’s excellent study doesn’t provide a clear picture, except perhaps to show that there appears to be no single standard of selection. Are they chosen randomly? Are they chosen because they represent a particular demographic or consumer type? Or are they people who, for want of a better phrase, are focus group junkies making a little money on the side for their time? Do participants follow the first and loudest speaker? Do they seek to please the facilitator or take positions just to be contrary? Are the right questions asked? How are the responses edited? (One wonders how focus groups lasting two hours, with perhaps eight participants, are accurately reported.) It is precisely because focus groups are subjective that their reliability needs to be questioned – even more so in the political domain where complexity prevails. What we want politicians to deliver is usually going to be markedly different from what we want out of a can of Coca Cola. The underlying assumption of focus group research is that what (sometimes) works for consumer markets must be transferable to the political market place, since casting a vote is a matter of individual choice, like having a preference for a soft drink. Political focus groups are thus an important part of turning politics into a consumerist spectacle. On his own account, Peter Mandelson did not involve Labour Party members (or trade unionists) in his ‘thorough examination of the state of mind of Britain’s voters’. The study drew ‘not only on polling and focus groups, but the work of experts in charting political, economic and social trends.’ 5 5 Mandelson, see note 3. In other words, the fate of a political party could not be trusted in its members’ hands. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk This is consonant with the view Mandelson expressed in 1997: ‘. . . when he told a meeting in a Rhenish schloss that ballot boxes and Parliaments were elitist relics. “Today people want to be more involved in government” via the far superior instruments of plebiscites, focus groups and the Internet, he said. “It may be that the era of pure representative democracy is slowly coming to an end.”’ 6 This is not the place to consider whether ‘the era of pure representative democracy is slowly coming to an end’ except to wonder ‘when was it ever pure?’ But let’s consider the new era of channelled democracy, which by definition has many more approaches than is possible by simply casting a vote every four or five years. This is where Featherstone’s book comes alive to the more ominous use of focus groups. There have been some classic failures of focus group driven marketing, such as the Ford Edsel and New Coke. What this new Mandelson style marketised democracy offers, instead, is a sophisticated massaging exercise of that part of the public who feel alienated by the political elite. ‘Toward the end of the [20th] century, the “average” American’s opinions were avidly sought after, but they mattered very little. Ordinary people were eagerly listened to, but they had no power. Indeed, the focus groups were needed because actual ordinary people were so marginal to the political process; as politics became more controlled by elites, the gap between the political class and the average person grew. Thus the spread of the focus group was a symptom of the estrangement between politicians and the rest. While [a writer in 1992] saw the rise of the focus group as somehow at odds with – perhaps even contradictory to – the narrative of the ordinary person’s declining political power, it was not. The focus group was an elite solution to that problem. Ordinary people had been shut out of meaningful policy-making, but to win their votes, politicians still needed to hear from them.’ 7 There was a kind of thinking in the 1970s and 1980s which suggested that, if there was a ‘crisis of democracy’, it was that there was too much of it. Featherstone identifies a source for that: ‘The Trilateral Commission suggested that the cure for this excess of democracy was a little less democracy, or as they put it, “a greater degree of moderation in democracy.”’ 8 As a sometime 6 Nick Cohen, ‘New Labour in focus, on message, out of control’ at 7 Featherstone p. 156 8 Featherstone p. 154 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Trilateral Commission member, Mandelson’s thoughts are clearly unexceptional. Where does this lead? Carefully controlled exercises in market research will tell you – more than any kind of snapshot ballot can – what people are really thinking or feeling. Market research, in itself, is not about changing governments but allows the elitist’s elision of the words democracy and consultation to deceive. Thanks to technology, we are being led to believe that we are more in control than ever. Using all the tools of the internet at our disposal we are, for example, turning into ‘switchers’ (not between political parties but between energy suppliers, banks, insurance companies, etc.). With the tools the internet provides we are encouraged to believe that we can change our individual lives more than any politician can; not least since the evidence of change will probably be far more immediate, albeit constrained by limits set by the market. Increasingly we are becoming consultees in a massive armchair/consumer/political paradigm which saves us from bothering too much whether our vote once meant very much. Perhaps being a petition signer on 38 Degrees, for example, fulfils some need to act politically. We are heading towards a click democracy. As I write I have received an email from YouGov (the name possibly implies that ‘You Govern’?) telling me of a new ‘digital advertising platform’ which: ‘. . .is a blockchain-based platform and ad network that empowers users to choose which attributes they make available to advertisers. In exchange for sharing their data, consumers earn rewards. Advertisers using the platform gain access to known audience attributes, which enables more effective ad targeting and better campaign performance. Built by YouGov – since 2000 the globally trusted name in online personal data.’ 9 Here the key word is ‘empowers’. The ‘blockchain-based platform’ empowers users to earn ‘rewards’ and to receive information (carefully selected by algorithms, no doubt) all guaranteed by a ‘globally trusted name in online personal data’. (Later in the email YouGov claim your personal data will be anonymised so there’s a red rag to hackers.) I assume that YouGov will sell its information to all-comers including political parties; so it will, like many other platforms, bypass the very need for learning from focus groups. Now the messaging is not aimed at a type of person, but a specific person. Not all individuals have signed up to this service of course but many (most?) have already unwittingly parted with enough information about themselves 9 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk elsewhere to make YouGov’s offering look a bit behind the times. (I stand to be corrected as to YouGov’s reach.) New technology such as this moves us into territory which has led many to question the usefulness of focus groups in the future. ‘By employing algorithms and data science to distil and surface naturally occurring themes and topics [marketers] can make use of the millions of genuine interactions within their categories, products, and brands taking place on platforms like Twitter. Adopting this technique enables researchers and marketers to surface unknown trends, via natural language processing (NLP) models, which can then be used to inform and define the qualitative research programme and identify questions researchers might not have known to ask.’10 Political campaigners have for years been using quantified consumer data to help them target ‘prospects.’ When the number of party activists was in steep decline in the 2000’s, consumer databases helped fill the activists gap by identifying the most likely voter ‘types’ to seek out – the types, that is, who were profiled as likely supporters. The rest could be ignored: the object of electioneering after all is to win by finding supporters not opponents. There has long been a concept that a vote for one of the losing candidates in a ‘safe’ seat is wasted. With data-mining technology this can now be broadened to include anyone whose profile, even in a marginal seat, hasn’t merited a canvasser’s attention. Perhaps your choice of loo roll marks you out as not worth a door- knock. Or maybe something you revealed on Facebook. A notable use of this approach developed with the Labour Party’s exploitation of Mosiac, which is sold as ‘The consumer classification solution for consistent cross-channel marketing’ by the consumer credit reporting company Experian. Their online brochure boasts of their classifying people into 15 groups and 66 types, based on 850+ million source records allowing for ‘450+ input variables for clustering and interpretation’.11 I think I may be a D16, namely an ‘Outlying Senior.’ Featherstone reports that growth in the market research industry continues at a pace, even if focus groups may in the light of this burgeoning technology seem a little analogue. Successful campaigns always give the new methods they use a magical aura of irresistible power: 10 Steve King, ‘The Focus Group is Dead. Long Live the Focus Group’ at 11 Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign was run by his online data analytics team which had an office the size of a football field. Rather than simply using polls, interviews and traditional focus groups to stand in for the electorate, Obama’s nerds were able to track each potential voter as an individual and figure out what was likely to change their behaviour. David Simms, director of opinion research, explaining the importance of data analytics to MIT Technology Review, said “What that gave us was an ability to run a national presidential campaign the way you’d do a local ward campaign. You know the people on your block. People have relationships with one another and you leverage them so you know the way they talk about issues, what they’re discussing in the coffee shop.”’12 It is hard to see the shift to database profiling stopping at the mere provision of information to human campaigners who may then act on it. Human activists can be avoided altogether: ‘. . . political bots are the algorithms that operate over social media, written to learn from and mimic real people so as to manipulate public opinion across a diverse range of social media and device networks. Such bots are a variety of automated computer scripts that interact with other users on social media platforms such as Twitter and community- maintained sites such as Wikipedia. Political bots are deployed, for example, to boost follower numbers and to retweet the content of political candidates on Twitter, to attack political opponents on Facebook, or to drown out activists’ conversations on Reddit.’13 Once we are defined simply as sources of data, then surely it will come as no surprise to find that we will form new relationships with algorithms. The much derided focus group-led politician may one day be but a vague memory from a more kindly time. Focus groups still have a place, but the opinion measuring industry’s failure to predict things correctly in recent elections means their output must be treated with much greater scepticism. That in itself, of course, is an invitation for the industry to push new technological methods into political campaigning. Focus groups will still be used by the media to create stories about what people ‘really think.’ When Jeremy Corbyn was having a rough start to 2017, focus groups were helpful in developing the theme of his uselessness. 12 Featherstone p. 246 13 Samuel C. Woolley & Philip N. Howard, ‘Political Communication, Computational Propaganda and Autonomous Agents’, in International Journal of Communication 10(2016), at < http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/6298/1809>. Lobster 75 Summer 2018 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The Huffington Post ran a focus group story which purported to show how voters in the marginal seat of Slough saw Corbyn as a ‘wet blanket.’ In spite of this, Labour’s share of the vote in Slough rose by 14% in the subsequent general election. That Huffington Post report was enthusiastically echoed by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian with a similar tale about focus groups in Birmingham.14 Again it would seem contrary that the Labour share across the West Midlands then rose in every constituency – including the ones where they didn’t win.15 Perhaps the marketing industry’s ambition to algorithmise politics is meeting its match – not just in the shape of Corbyn, but Trump too. In Corbyn’s case he can look to a huge army of Momentum members who are both social media savvy and also willing to revive the art of door knocking and face–to–face contact. If this is the case, the marketing industry will devise ever more sophisticated data mining and dissemination techniques to fend off the challenge. They won’t let go, now that they have their teeth so firmly hooked into the profitable world of political campaigning. Postscript Most of this essay was written in March 2018 before the revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in the U.S. presidential campaign of 2016 had been reinforced. Despite Cambridge Analytica’s unwanted position in the limelight, there will be a Hydra’s head of similar outfits seeking to climb on the bandwagon. The key question regarding such data-mining/message delivery techniques is to what extent they rely on subterfuge to be successful. In the same way that spin-doctors don’t wish to become the focus of the news, or, in an earlier age, the Nazi propaganda machine sought to camouflage itself, this form of political messaging seeks to avoid public cynicism about politics by trying to conceal itself as ‘normal chatter’. In the same way that successive attempts to bring transparency to political funding have been circumvented, the new age of political communications beckons a new regime of opaqueness, not least because the public generally don’t seem all that bothered about it. Colin Challen was MP for Morley and Rothwell from 2001-2010. He blogs at 14 15 For details of all West Midlands election results, see Lobster 75 Summer 2018