www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
Winter 2019
• The view from the bridge by Robin Ramsay Lobster • South of the border by Nick Must • Peer group pressure by Colin Challen • David Shayler, ‘Tunworth’ and the LIFG by Nick Must 78 • Jimmy Carter’s Roswell investigation by Garrick Alder • England’s forgotten uprising by Anthony Frewin • On getting it wrong and getting it right: Ronald Stark, LSD and the CIA by David Black • Spandau blood by Andrew Rosthorn • Labour: Antisemitism by John Booth • Lee Harvey Oswald’s address book: a follow-up note by Kevin Coogan • Climate hysterics: useful idiots or just idiots by Dr T P Wilkinson
Book Reviews
• The Mossad Spy: It’s not what you’ve • The Killing of Thomas Niedermayer, done it’s who you are . . . the by David Blake Knox reviewed by transgender spy, by Olivia Frank Colin Wallace reviewed by Robin Ramsay • AngloArabia Why Gulf Wealth • The Churchill Factor: How One Man Matters to Britain, by David Wearing reviewed by Scott Newton Made History, by Boris Johnson reviewed by John Newsinger • Making America Great, reviews by John Newsinger: • Burying the Lead: The Media and the o Siege: Trump Under Fire, by JFK Assassination, by Mal Hyman Michael Wolff reviewed by Anthony Frewin
o The Ordinary Presidency of Donald J. Trump, by Jon Herbert, • Yockey: A Fascist Odyssey, by Kerry Trevor McCrisken and Andrew Bolton reviewed by Kevin Coogan Wroe
o Trump, the Alt-Right and Public Pedagogies of Hate and for Fascism: What is To be Done?, by Mike Cole
o Trump Aftershock: The President’s Seismic Impact on Culture and Faith in America, by Stephen E Strang www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
The view from the bridge
Robin Ramsay
Thanks to Nick Must (in particular) and Garrick Alder for editorial and proof-reading assistance with this issue of Lobster.
*new* Huh? Belatedly, I read the Labour Party manifesto. Jeremy Corbyn’s foreword includes this: ‘How can it be right that in the fifth richest country in the world, people’s living standards are going backwards and life expectancy is stalling?’1 Like others have done, I paused there. Britain is the 5th richest country in the world? Really? How about – off the top of my head – the USA, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Middle Eastern oil-rich states? So I did some checking and Britain is not 5th according to this list,2 which has us as 20th; nor this one,3 which has us 29th; nor this one,4 in which Britain is not in the top 25 listed; nor this one,5 in which Britain is 22nd. I finally asked the OECD, which ranks Britain as 16th.6 So where did the idea of Britain being 5th come from? Has such a claim been made? Well, sort of. There was a report 4 years ago which produced the headline on CityAM, ‘World Wealth: Britain crowned fifth richest country in the world behind US, China, Japan and Germany’.7 But that report referred only to
1
2
3 At
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5
6
7
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gross total of wealth in private hands and a lot of that was notional – the result of the massive inflation of property prices in the UK, as the report’s author pointed out. It’s easy to understand why prefacing the manifesto with the claim that Britain is fifth richest seemed like a good idea. Had he written ‘. . . in the 22nd (or 16th) richest country in the world. . . .’ the big schemes in the manifesto would seem much less plausible.
*new* Stoned One version of the thesis that the Russians hacked the Democratic Party’s computer and leaked all those Clinton emails is that Wikileaks got the hacked material from the Russians and passed it to the Republicans. This has now been demolished, in a US court, with the trial of Trump ally Roger Stone who told the Wikileaks story. Stone was found guilty of lying to the House Intelligence Committee. The chief prosecution witness against him was one Randy Credico, who Stone was claiming as his link to Wikileaks. Craig Murray has interviewed Credico at length and has posted the transcript. In the interview Credico asserts and reasserts that he was not a link to Stone and that Stone had no ‘back-channel’ to Wikileaks. Most striking, Credico says Stone wanted him to pretend that he was that link.8 Stone, in effect, has chosen to be found guilty of lying to Congress rather than admit he didn’t have a link to Wikileaks. Which doesn’t mean that the Russians didn’t use social media to try and help Trump in the last presidential election and are still doing similar things.9 This is part of the price the American political system is paying for the unregulated Internet which it allowed to be created.
*new* The dodgy Syrian dossier The Daily Mail website’s headline to a piece by Peter Hitchens on 23 November
8
9 See for example
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said it all, really: ‘New sexed-up dossier furore: Explosive leaked email claims that UN watchdog’s report into alleged poison gas attack by Assad was doctored - so was it to justify British and American missile strikes on Syria?’10 The answer to the question in the headline appears to be ‘Yes’. The email – reproduced in full on the Mail site – begins: ‘I wish to express, as a member of the FFM (Fact Finding Mission) team that conducted the investigation into the alleged chemical attack in Douma on 7 April, my gravest concern at the redacted version of the FFM report, which I understand was at the behest of the ODG. (Office of the Director General). After reading this modified report, which incidentally no other team member who deployed into Douma has had the opportunity to do, I was struck by how much it misrepresents the facts.’ As I noted below under subhead ‘Syria’, the original report was already coming apart at the seams, with photographic evidence emerging which suggested that the ‘bombs’ alleged to have contained the gas had been placed at the scene rather than dropped by helicopter. The email’s publication is one of those events which illuminates the British media world. As far as I can see, the email was not considered worthy of note by either the Daily Telegraph or The Times and was reported by the Guardian under the headline ‘Chemical weapons watchdog defends Syria report after leaks’.11 This now appears to be the Guardian’s way of reporting unpalatable news: place it under a misleading headline. Craig Murray identified an example recently12 and Truepublica has spotted another.13 The site bellingcat.com tried to rebut the Mail article,14 which drew a response in the comments beneath it from author Hitchens. Bellingcat is a puzzle to me. I ought to be in the chorus of liberal Western intelligentsia cheering them on but I’m not. Why? Because the vast majority of
10
11
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13 At
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their reports have had the effect of bolstering Western/NATO policy objectives.15 When Bellingcat begins producing material which also undermines those objectives I will be less sceptical.16 Put it another way: if Bellingcat was producing reports which didn’t support NATO aims would it have received the funding for its reported 16 full-time staff?17
*new* Grauniadia Under subhead ‘Murray less than mint’ below, I chided Craig Murray for claiming that ‘the Guardian has been taken over by the security services’ simply on the basis that a Guardian staffer had joined the D-Notice committee. The author of the piece which Murray quoted was Matt Kennard. Since then, with Mark Curtis, Kennard has written a much longer piece which argues the same thesis. ‘The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state to a platform trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once relatively independent media platform has been largely neutralised by UK security services fearful of being exposed further.’18 I am not a fan of the Guardian: I stopped buying it a couple of years ago. I got tired of the way it editorialises its news reporting, telling you not only what happened but how you should feel about it. But the Guardian was never that keen on stories about the spooks19 and while I think the authors are probably
15 On his blog Craig Murray refers to Bellingcat thus: ‘Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations. . .’
16 One of their reports begins thus: ‘A sophisticated phishing campaign targeting Bellingcat and other Russia-focused journalists. . .’ (emphasis added)
17
18
19 They didn’t exactly rush to embrace Colin Wallace, for example.
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correct, we will have to wait until the next big spook scandal to see if it has actually been ‘neutralised’. Finally, I doubt very much that the UK security services are ‘fearful of being exposed further’. Au contraire, I would guess that having survived the Snowden revelations with zero increase in political accountability and zero decrease in budgets, they must think they can get away with anything.
*new* Covert Action and Garrison The magazine Covert Action, long defunct, continues as a website.20 Last time I looked at it there was an interesting interview with Douglas Valentine headed ‘Inside the Organized Crime Syndicate known as the CIA’.21 Working not dissimilar territory to Covert Action is new magazine – i.e. a paper magazine – Garrison: the Journal of History and Deep Politics.22 William Kelly discusses its first issue on his blog23 where he quotes the magazine’s founder S T Patrick: ‘This journal is an extension of Jonathan Marshall’s Parapolitics, Robin Ramsay’s Lobster, Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease’s Probe Magazine, Kenn Thomas’ Steamshovel Press, Edward Keating’s Ramparts, Paul Krasner’s The Realist, Max Scherr’s Berkeley Barb, Bill Schaap’s CovertAction Quarterly, and Paranoia magazine.’
From the contents listing of the first issue,24 Garrison is very much closer to Parapolitics and Covert Action than it is to Paranoia, The Realist and Steamshovel.
The lobby On 29 October, the day that the general election was announced, the Spectator ran a piece by a Stephen Daisley, ‘A vote for Labour is a vote for
20
21 Valentine’s book on this subject is reviewed in Lobster 73 at
22 See
23
24 At
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anti-Semitism’.25 Daisley describes Labour as ‘the largest and most successful anti-Semitic political party in Western Europe’ and Jeremy Corbyn as ‘a man already plainly drenched in the moral sewage of anti-Semitism’. Yes, it’s in the Spectator, no friend of the left, but this is absurdly OTT. In the Times a couple of days later, regular columnist Philip Collins wrote of Corbyn’s ‘entourage of apologists for antisemites’.26 So it isn’t Corbyn, nor even his entourage, who are anti-Semitic: it’s his entourage who are apologists for other people who are anti-semites. The ‘moral sewage of anti-semiticism’ is now two removes from Corbyn. A couple of days later we were told that some British Jews are preparing to leave the UK in the event of a Labour victory.27 But wait: that came from the Chairman of the Conservative Party and he was referring to people he claims to know. These comments (and there were many similar in the first week of the election campaign) illustrate again the complete failure of the mainstream media to handle the Labour–is–anti-semitic operation run by the Israeli embassy in London and its assets.28 Why has the MSM failed so completely at this? Maybe one day some of those involved at editorial level will explain their thinking; but until then we can only speculate. Among the factors are: * The story is too complex for the rolling 24 hour news culture and there are few journalists left in the MSM with the time to research complex stories. * Anyone pursuing the story is going to be accused of anti-semitism or conspiracy theorising or both. * To acknowledge the existence of the Israeli operations revealed by Al Jazeera’s covert filming, means acknowledging that the version of political reality offered by the MSM is partial at best, and false at worst. This also implies that British political journalists either don’t know what is going on or are too career-minded to stray beyond the carefully delineated boundaries of
25
26 ‘I can’t in all conscience vote for any of them’, 1 November 2019.
27
28 This campaign stampeded Labour’s National Executive Committee into preventing Chris Williamson MP from standing at the 2019 general election. His terrible Offence? Saying that Labour and been too apologetic in face of the anti-semitism operation.
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* ‘serious’ or ‘respectable’ journalism.29 The Al Jazeera films on ‘the lobby’ may eventually be a game-changer in the way that the 1975 showing of the Zapruder film on US TV was: after the Z film the official version that all the shots came from behind Kennedy became an absurdity. After ‘the lobby’ films no-one can seriously deny the existence of the Israel lobby.
The future of Britain’s crisis30 The House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee is a light veneer of accountability for the UK’s spooks to hide behind. A measure of its total lack of independence was the suppression by No. 10 of a report from ISC on alleged Russian influence in UK politics. Bits of the report have been leaked to CNN and they show that the sensitive content of it was not a million miles away from recent revelations of rich Russians who have been given – sorry: bought – UK citizenship and are now contributing large amounts of money to the Conservative Party.31 This is just part of the price the UK pays for tolerating the City of London as one of world’s leading laundries for dirty money.32 The idea that there is a structural conflict between the interests of the manufacturing economy and that of the City has been around since the late
29 On the American operation see
30 The title of a 1979 essay by Tom Nairn in the New Left Review, issue 113 at
31 On the CNN leak see
32 See for example The UK businesses helping the world’s corrupt embed themselves into British establishment, a new report from Transparency International UK, at
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1970s in my experience, and probably much longer.33 The conflict was rarely articulated by public figures beyond the British left but in 1980, with Bank of England base rates lifted to 14% ‘to control inflation’, Sir Terence Beckett, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), told its annual conference that they had to ‘to take the gloves off and have a bare-knuckle fight’ with the Thatcher government.34 But no such fight ensued, Beckett resigned and in the following decade while the City boomed, British manufacturing shrank by about 20%. The focus these days is less on structural conflict than on what is known as ‘over-financialisation’: roughly, that the financial sector gets to be too big for the rest of the economy.35 Recently a trio of economists/econometricians (from the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Sheffield) have tried to quantify the cost of UK over-financialisation and have concluded: ‘Our calculations suggest that the total cost of lost growth potential for the UK caused by “too much finance” between 1995 and 2015 is in the region of £4,500 billion. This total figure amounts to roughly 2.5 years of the average GDP across the period. [. . . .] The data suggests that the UK economy, may have performed much better in overall growth terms if: (a) its financial sector was smaller; (b) if finance was more focused on supporting other areas of the economy, rather than trying to act as a source of wealth generation (extraction) in its own right. This evidence also provides support for the idea that the UK suffers from a form of “finance curse”: a development trajectory of financial overdependence involving a crowding out of other sectors and a skewing of social relations, geography and politics.’ 36 [Emphases in the original.]
33 In these columns I have referred to it as the City versus industry and wrote about it in ‘Mrs Thatcher, North Sea oil and the hegemony of the City’ in Lobster 27.
34
35 See, for example,
36
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On similar lines, Grace Blakeley writes in her On Borrowed Time: Finance and the UK’s current account deficit, that ‘Rebalancing the UK’s international position requires moderating the significance of finance within the UK economy and bringing asset price volatility under control, while nurturing non-financial exporting sectors.’37 Yes, indeed. And good luck selling that to the British political system (never mind the electorate). It is precisely the difficulty of persuading those within the daily travel distance to London that their influence and share of the national cake should be reduced which has helped to fuel the rise of the Nationalists in Scotland and Wales and the less significant Campaign for the North,38 the Yorkshire Party39 and Mebyon Kernow, the party of Cornwall.40
The Intelligence Party
‘The CIA is emerging as a domestic political party. I don’t mean this in a conspiratorial sense (though it has conspiratorial implications), and I don’t mean it literally. Although there are three former CIA employees in Congress (and a fourth is running), the CIA does not resemble the Democratic or Republican parties. But in practice, the U.S. intelligence community, led by former officials, is developing into an organized political faction – call it the Intelligence Party. Like other factions, at home and abroad, this faction is seeking to gain public support and influence the 2020 presidential election to advance its institutional and political interests.’41
Russiagate Some subjects are ridiculously complex. Russiagate is on its way to that status. The following paragraphs are from The Daily Beast.
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41 Jefferson Morley, ‘The “Deep State’ Isn’t a Conspiracy. It’s a Political Faction’
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‘Attorney General William Barr has been looking into the Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud, whose discussion with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos helped set off the FBI investigation of possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016. It was Mifsud who told Papadopoulos about the “dirt” the Russians had on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” a tip Papadopoulos blurted out to an Australian diplomat in an indiscretion that reached the FBI and started the ball rolling. Barr’s interest is all part of a broader effort pushed obsessively by President Donald Trump in an effort to prove, at least in the public mind, that he was the victim of a conspiracy in 2016 rather than the beneficiary of one. [ . . . .] The teams led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI reported that Mifsud, who disappeared from public view in late 2017, received his information about the Clinton emails through highly placed members of the Russian government, and ex-FBI Director James Comey, fired by Trump, even said that Mifsud was a Russian agent. Barr and his boys are operating on a different theory—that Mifsud was part of a setup by the CIA and FBI to smear Trump. Pursuing this theory, Barr even went abroad recently to talk with Italian and British intelligence officials about Mifsud, who taught at universities in both Britain and Italy.’ 42 It’s not just Trump and his allies who think that the President is the victim here. As I have mentioned below, former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson has argued43 that an elaborate scheme was hatched by elements in the Anglo- American intelligence services to link Trump to Russia. The mysterious – and now gone to ground44 – Mr Mifsud was part of that. This view is supported by Elizabeth Vos’ long analysis, ‘All Russiagate Roads Lead To London As Evidence
42
43 ‘How US and Foreign Intel Agencies Interfered in a US Election’ at
44 ‘An Italian Newspaper Has Published An Audio Recording From Someone Claiming To Be Joseph Mifsud’
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Emerges Of Joseph Mifsud’s Links To UK Intelligence’.45 The excellent Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone has never bought any of this Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, either.46 And there is a substantial Australian connection to all this.47 This is starting to make the Kennedy assassination look straightforward.48
Dawning Two issues of the magazine New Dawn plopped onto my doormat recently: no. 177, November-December 2019 and a ‘Special Issue’, vol. 13 no. 3. I hadn’t seen a copy for at least 15 years and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it is still going. I would have guessed that New Dawn and Nexus – which is also still extant in hard copy – were part of the explosion of interest in things paranormal and conspiratorial which was triggered by the TV show The X-Files. But no, both predate it: The X-Files is 1993; New Dawn is 1991 and Nexus 1986. So both Nexus and New Dawn were part of what produced The X-Files, rather than the other way round.49 New Dawn’s appearance was timely because I had been thinking about a set of books on my shelf which now seem to be interesting examples of the antecedents of the conspiracy theory culture which has now taken hold in the United States. They are: Popular Alienation: a Steamshovel Press reader, edited by Kenn Thomas (Lilburn, Georgia: Illuminet Press, 1995);50 Wake Up Down There! The Excluded Middle collection, edited by Gregory Bishop (Kempton, Il.: Adventures Unlimited, 2000);51
45
46 See, for example
47
48 For extraordinary complexity, try Duncan Campbell’s piece at
49 Both are Australian, by the way.
50 Kenn Thomas has a webpage which advertises his various publications from the period.
51 Greg Bishop now has a website called The Excluded Middle on which he carries on what he was doing nearly 20 years ago.
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You Are Being Lied To: the Disinformation guide to media distortion, historical whitewashes and cultural myths, edited by Russ Kick (New York: The Disinformation Company, 2001);52 Everything You Know is Wrong: the Disinformation guide to secrets and lies, edited by Russ Kick (New York, The Disinformation Company, 2002); Popular Paranoia: a Steamshovel Press anthology, edited by Kenn Thomas (Kempton, Il.: Adventures Unlimited, 2002); Abuse Your Illusions: the Disinformation guide to media mirages and Establishment lies, edited by Russ Kick (New York: The Disinformation Company, 2003). What is striking about these books now is their political orientation and the width of their coverage.53 While none of them are explicitly left-wing, many of their contributors were. And between them they published writing on everything from UFOs, through state research, government secrecy, corporate corruption and malfeasance, American imperialism and parapolitics. For example, among the contributors to Abuse Your Illusions were Thomas Szasz, Jim Hougan, William Blum, William Turner, Howard Zinn and Daniel Ellsberg. These anthologies briefly suggested that conspiracy research might survive the contaminating effects of conspiracy theories. But then the American right – Alex Jones, his ilk and worse – and conspiracy anything became the intellectual kiss of death. And what of New Dawn? If these two recent issues are typical, it’s the same mixture as before: reliable, documented parapolitical research, some less reliable and less documented, plus essays about ancient civilisations and various forms of mystical/paranormal experience.54 So issue 177 contains essays on the Five Eyes intelligence network and the CIA’s ‘mad scientist’ Sydney Gottlieb;55 but also Andrew Collins on ‘The Denisovans at the Gates of Dawn’ and former LaRouchie William Engdahl trying to show that the moves towards a green economy are really being funded and controlled by the global corporations who are creating the environmental crisis. New Dawn is at
52 Russ Kick has a site, The Memory Hole 2, which carries on where the anthologies left off.
53 And their size: they are all around A4 page sized. Abuse Your Illusions weighs over 3 lbs.
54 Having clicked the New Dawn’s site I immediately received an email advertising a Himalayan salt lamp. . . .
55 The Gottlieb profile is by Dr T J Coles, who has written for Lobster.
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WWF The last time the World Wildlife Fund was found worthy of notice in these columns was in Lobster 29 where I noted that Kevin Dowling had been exploring the WWF and its machinations in Africa.56 Dowling’s research was used by the LaRouche org57 and he subsequently made a TV documentary on the subject. The subject of conservation and the role of the World Wildlife Fund in the politics of decolonising Africa has been reexamined by Michael Molitch-Hou in his ‘Paramilitary Panda: WWF Land Grabs Rooted in Covert Apartheid History’.58
Hedging Brexit The excellent John Simkin has written a detailed analysis of the thinking and political activities of the prime minister’s chief advisor, Dominic Cummings.59 Simkin has had the patience to plough through Cummings’ rambling blog which basically says: ‘people – and politicians – are thick and should be led by the clever people, like me’. Other than the ‘leave’ vote in the referendum campaign – which would have occurred without him, I suspect – Cummings’ sole political ‘success’ for all his years in Whitehall ‘advising’ Tory politicians, appears to be have been the creation of the academy school system, which has been a fraud- ridden disaster from what I hear locally. Not so far from Simkin’s analysis is the murky area identified by former Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond60 – that of the funding of the Brexit campaign by ‘hedgies’ who have been betting on Brexit. There has been a lot of material on this subject on the Net for a year or so but it rarely made it
56 Dowling had a nose for a good career-damaging story. He was author of the novel Interface Ireland which portrayed Colin Wallace and Information Policy in fiction. I discussed this in Lobster 17.
57 See
58
59
60 See
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into the mainstream media until Hammond’s striking intervention.61 Simkin closes his essay with a quote from Hannah Arendt about Nazi Germany which is chillingly apt for today’s world in which shysters like Trump and Johnson have ascended the greasy pole. ‘In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. . . Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.’
Ambition Lord save us from people who just want to be the big I-am. We had Gordon Brown, who wanted to be the Big Yin. Gordon joined Labour and apparently was a socialist. Then he sniffed the wind and realised that he had to change tack. He went on the State Department freebie to the USA, was inspected at Bilderberg and became a convert to the financialisation revolution (after industrialisation came financialisation . . .). All the while he was telling Labour Party members that he believed in ‘Labour values’. Gordon had grasped that the way to become a Labour prime minister was to sound like a lefty to the Party’s members while cuddling-up to the US and the City. En route to No. 10 he was one of the co-authors of the Big Financial Fuck-up of 2007-9 (anybody for Chancellor Gordon’s ‘light touch regulation’ of the financial sector?). And on leaving No. 10 he bequeathed us the Tory–Lib-Dem government and a decade of ‘austerity’ by refusing to talk to the Lib-Dems about a Labour–Lib-Dem coalition when he lost the election of 2010. We now have Boris Johnson, who also just wanted to be prime minister. Campaign for Brexit or Remain? – whatever gets the job done. The economic
61 Discussed below under subhead ‘Integrity, the City and “leave”’.
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consequences of Brexit? In March this year a joint Joint Trades Union Congress (TUC) and Confederation of British Industry (CBI) statement declared: ‘Our country is facing a national emergency. Decisions of recent days have caused the risk of no deal to soar. Firms and communities across the UK are not ready for this outcome. The shock to our economy would be felt by generations to come.’ 62 ‘Fuck business’, said Boris, expressing the contempt for ‘trade’ at the heart of the British ruling class since the industrial revolution.63
UFOs You don’t need to be paying any attention to the subject to have noticed that UFOs are back on the mainstream agenda. This has been triggered by the 2017 release of film taken by USAF pilots in 2004 of objects doing manoeuvres way beyond anything of which the USAF is capable.64 This is as close to an official ‘Yes, they’re real’ from the USAF as we are likely to get. Thus Bob Lazar, who claimed in 1989 to have worked at Area 51 on reverse engineering alien craft, is now being taken seriously by some. There is a documentary about him on Netflix and an interview of him by Joe Rogan is on YouTube, both of which I watched for a few minutes.65 (Lazar seems beguilingly modest.) Yet Lazar had apparently been comprehensively debunked more than 20 years ago.66 Which leaves us where? Rich Cohen attempted to explain things to us in his column ‘Conspiracy’ in The Paris Review67 – and fell at one of the earliest hurdles, telling readers that Project Blue Book was an ‘FBI task force’. No sir, it was run by the USAF itself.68
62
63
64
65 The Rogan interview is at
66 See for example
67
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One for Alex In his blog Craig Murray described an extraordinary official witch-hunt against Alex Salmond over the last couple of years which climaxed in victory for Salmond and an enormous payment to cover his legal expenses.69 I noted in Lobster 77:
‘Of course, the post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) fallacy has to be borne in mind, nonetheless it is a very striking coincidence that the allegations of sexual assault made against former First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond have surfaced three months after Mr Salmond publicly cast doubt on the official verdict on the Lockerbie bombing.’ 70
The official line on Libya is not the only one from which Salmond has strayed. He has become a loose cannon in British politics71 – albeit, like that other loose cannon, George Galloway, largely confined to RT.72
Old friends David Black is an old friend of this journal. The first edition of his book on the history and politics of LSD, Acid: the secret history of LSD, was reviewed in Lobster 35. He has a new, much revised edition out, published as an e-book.73 A sense of what is in the book is conveyed in a long and interesting interview Black has done.74 The oldest friend of this journal is regular contributor Anthony Frewin, with whom I have been in contact since the mid 1980s. In this issue Frewin
69
70
71 See, for example,
72
73 He said in his email to me that he had chosen that format ‘having got fed up with hawking the manuscript around what is left of independent publishing in the UK.’ This is available for £3.25 at
74
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has ‘England’s forgotten uprising’ about the curious story of the 19th century British armed insurrection which historians have (almost) forgotten. This strange tale is also the subject matter of a novel by Frewin, The Lion of Canterbury, which is available from your usual on-line booksellers.
Electro-magnetic nightmares I noticed this in Lobster 33. It is no less relevant today. Harlan Girard,75 the American who has been sending me material on electro-magnetic weaponry for many years, recently sent me a fascinating snippet. Girard now networks with some of the many US citizens apparently being assaulted by these weapons and he has been contacted by a couple of people reporting that the assaults had begun after attending conferences on the subject of UFOs. What perfect victims! They’ve got crazy ideas to start with. No-one will believe them! Girard has obtained a copy of a document published by the Air Force
75 He died last year. He was quoted at length at
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Scientific Advisory Board called ‘Biological Process Control’.76 This discusses the possibility of ‘physical regulation of biological processes using electromagnetic fields’, and includes this chilling paragraph: ‘One can envision the development of electromagnetic energy sources, the output of which can be pulsed, shaped and focused, that can couple with the human body in a fashion that will allow one to prevent voluntary muscular movements, control emotions (and thus actions), produce sleep, transmit suggestions, interfere with both short-term and long-term memory . . . .’ Next time you read about or hear about someone claiming that the CIA (or whoever) is controlling their mind or body, re-read this paragraph before dismissing them as a nutter.
Not a million miles from which The Times reported on 14 October 201977 that the government is considering compelling local councils in the UK to accept the introduction of 5G technology. There is resistance on the ground in parts of the UK – and elsewhere. (Discussed below under subhead ‘5G’.) A long international survey of that resistance has now been published.78
Trying to make the UAE smell nice We all have an idea how lobbying works in Western democracies. But because assembling the data is a chore, we rarely see the details. So hats off to the Centre for International Policy for researching the (declared) lobbying in Washington by the United Arab Emirates (UAE).79 This is part of that report’s conclusion: ‘• 20 different firms served as registered foreign agents in the U.S. for clients in the UAE; • Over $20 million in payments from UAE clients to these firms;
76 This was not an accurate description of the document. It is a section in one volume of a multivolume US Air Force report. Go to
77 Kate Devlin and Will Humphries, ‘Don’t block 5G, ministers tell councils’
78
79 Report at
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• 3,168 reported political activities done on behalf of the UAE by those firms; • UAE foreign agents contacted more than 200 Congressional offices, 18 think tanks, and most mainstream media outlets; • Considerable interactions between UAE foreign agents and think tanks funded by the UAE; • Nearly $600,000 in campaign contributions from these firms and their registered foreign agents . . . .’
Very Wareing Ah yes, the John Ware film for Panorama in July attacking the Corbyn-led Labour Party as ‘anti-semitic’. I recorded it and eventually watched about half – which was enough to see that the torrent of critical comments it has provoked was entirely justified.80 Ware has form when it comes to doing hatchet jobs on people who are a threat to the powers-that-be. He spent years distorting what Colin Wallace was saying, rehashing the MOD line on him, and ignoring all the evidence – lots of it from me – which showed that what the MOD had been saying was disinformation.81 At the time this puzzled me because one of his former colleagues at World In Action, whose opinion I took seriously, told me that Ware was the best TV investigative journalist of his generation. Looking back on his behaviour towards Wallace – and towards the London Labour left in the same period82 – it is obvious now that Ware was (and still is) simply a journalist. Thus there was no way he was going to challenge the British state over Wallace – or anything else for that matter: too much potential career damage. Listed as Executive Producer at the end of the Ware film was Neil Grant – another faint echo from the late 1980s. When I met him he was working for Ken Livingstone MP as a researcher and it was to Grant that Colin Wallace supplied the material that Livingstone used in the House of Commons and elsewhere. Then we heard that Grant had left his job as a teacher, joined Panorama as a researcher and stopped working for Ken. And when Grant
80 A collection of such comments is at
81 Enter ‘Ware’ into the Lobster site’s search box for all those stories.
82 He did a piece on the ‘hard left’ in London around the time he was smearing Colin Wallace. See Simon Matthews’ ‘Baa Baa, White Sheep’ in Lobster 39 at
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stopped handling the Wallace material, so did Livingstone.83 At the time this seemed to me an example of the subtlety of the British secret state. Got an MP asking awkward questions? Give the researcher devising the questions a better job than he had and Hey presto! the awkward questions stop. There is one other ironic/comic incident in my brief contact with Ken Livingstone. In 1989 Unwin Hyman published his book Livingstone’s Labour in which there is material on the intelligence and security services. Ken sent me that chapter in draft form. It was full of errors. I duly corrected them and returned it. When I received my copy of the book from Ken I discovered that none of my corrections had been used. Nonetheless he wrote in the preface: ‘Robin Ramsey [sic] kindly read and corrected the section on MI5 and MI6’. If any of his readers read the preface and noticed how crappy that section is, I carried the can for it. Thanks Ken!
Spooks and hacks In the late 1970s, when I first got interested in the role of the secret state in British society, one of the major contributors to the little that was then known about the subject was Paul Lashmar, sometimes writing in tandem with David Leigh.84 What a pleasure then to see that Lashmar’s 2015 PhD thesis on the subject of the British press and the spooks, ‘Investigating the Empire of Secrecy’, is now available on-line.85 I have only skimmed through it thus far but I noticed this conclusion: ‘Based on my own experience from 1978, the historic [sic] record and the evidence considered above, I would argue that in the UK the news media became effective, if inconsistently so, in the period 1960 to 2000 in bringing intelligence to account. It was ad hoc, as there was no attempt at a long term strategy of revelation, either across the media, or in individual news organisations.’ (p. 73)
83 The Ware film was the third assault on the Corbyn group that Grant has produced. See
84 With James Oliver, Lashmar was co-author of the first book about IRD: Britain’s Secret Propaganda War 1948-77 (Stroud [UK]: Sutton Publishing, 1998).
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The difficulty lies in the notion of ‘to account’. There is no formal accountability. The House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee remains an under-resourced body with no formal powers. The major media is generally willing to be guided by the Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee86 (informally the D-Notice committee) and most of it is willing to be steered by the British, American and Israeli states and secret states. So, yes, things have improved since the late 1970s when Lashmar began; but I do not believe that the UK news media has become effective in holding the ‘Empire of Secrecy’ to account.
Another Lee A reader alerted me to the death of Harold ‘Lee’ Tracey.87 Tracey appears on the periphery of the ‘Wilson plots’ story as a British intelligence officer to whom BOSS agent Gordon Winter passed his research on the Norman Scott–Jeremy Thorpe affair before any of it had broken in the media.88 Scott Newton reminded me that it was Tracey who told Duncan Campbell that Airey Neave had approached him about taking part in ‘an underground army of resistance’ in the event of a Labour victory in 1979. Campbell published this in the New Statesman, 20 February 1981. A look at what is known of his career shows that Tracey was a rather substantial figure on the technical side of British intelligence.89
Laffer minute So President Trump presented the Presidential Medal of Honour to economist Arthur Laffer,90 who came up with the Laffer Curve.91 (That faint sound you can hear is economists guffawing.) Essentially Laffer said that the way to get
86 See
87
88 See Gordon Winter, Inside BOSS (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981) pp. 411-415
89 See
90
91 See, for example,
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economic growth in a capitalist society was to give the rich tax cuts – a proposition that fails to withstand any examination. That it has been taken seriously by so many on the political right shows that one of the chief functions of free market economists is coming up with reasons why the rich shouldn’t pay taxes. Who are Laffer’s fans in the UK? The Institute for Economic Affairs, of course. The IEA has been the leading proponent of free market fantasy economics since the 1950s. Mark Littlewood, IEA director-general, asked ‘Who has the political courage and skill to sell tax cuts for the rich?’ in the Times on 17 June. The answer to Littlewood’s question is – suitably – our new prime minister, Boris Johnson. He used Laffer’s famous ‘curve’ to justify tax cuts for the rich last year.92 Mind you, that was then. Johnson will have forgotten the article long ago – if he actually wrote it himself.
A new Con? When I was more interested in the British spooks than I am now, I used to buy the Sunday Telegraph to see the latest MI6 disinformation that was being run through Con Coughlin, the Telegraph’s main MI6 contact at that time.93 Looking at a recent piece of his I noticed that, as well as now being the Telegraph’s Defence Editor, he is a ‘Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute’.94 Gatestone is the leading source of intellectually semi- respectable scare stories about Islam in Europe. It is possible that ‘Distinguished Senior Fellow’ means as little as ‘contributing editor’ does in an American media context. Nonetheless this is rather striking.
This is good news? Al Jazeera carried this story on 31 July.95
92
93 It was Coughlin who took part in the MI6 operation to smear Gaddafi’s son. See
94
95
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UK says 2018 was 'best year ever' for its arms exports Britain won defence orders worth 14 billion pounds in 2018, the highest since records began in 1983
Considering that the UK now manufactures so little, and is running a considerable trade deficit with the EU,96 if a Labour government tried to reduce the domestic arms industry, what would happen? The arms people would simply relocate (taking with them most of their engineers and scientists). And the arms industry would be replaced by which export-oriented manufacturing? Answer: no-one has any idea. So the arms industry will continue, regardless of which government is in office.
Paranoid? Moi? There is now a considerable academic industry engaged in analysing the conspiracy theories believed by people (especially in the USA) and the role of social media in creating and/or spreading them. But, as I have asked before in these columns, is there anything new going on? More than twenty years ago, in Lobster 36, before social media, I reported this: ‘November’s Nexus reports a poll conducted in the US last year which found the following: 1. 51% believe it is either very likely or or somewhat likely that federal officials were “directly responsible” for the assassination of JFK. 2. More than 33% suspect that the US Navy, either by accident or design, shot down TWA flight 800. 3. More than 50% believe it is possible that the CIA “intentionally permitted Central American drug dealers to sell cocaine to inner-city black children”. 4. 60% believe that the government is withholding information about Agent Orange and other military abuses in the Vietnam and Gulf wars. 5. Nearly 50% suspect that FBI agents deliberately set the fires that killed 81 Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas. 6. More people believed that US government were covering-up information and technology from aliens after the US Air Force report last year that the “alien bodies” allegedly seen at Roswell were test dummies, than before the report’s release.’97
96 Hence, in part, the falling value of sterling.
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The opinions quoted above expressed a profound distrust of the American state, which was entirely rational, given its post-WW2 history. The report quotes Curtis Gans, the Executive Director for the Washington Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, on this poll: ‘Paranoia is killing this country. It is essentially reducing cohesion in our society and is creating fear in the minds of our citizenry.’ Almost identical things are said regularly these days, twenty plus years later. Social media has changed things somewhat. The word ‘theories’ is hardly justified for some of the stuff that is heard today (we need a new word for it) but ‘theories’ and propositions get circulated much more quickly than they used to. Then they get expanded and amended by everybody and their incompetent cousin. These days we have collective conspiracy theory formation. But the really big change isn’t technology: it’s the input of party politics and religion. Both the big recent US net-based conspiracy theories, Pizzagate and QAnon, contain anti-Democratic Party and Christian or Christian- derived paranoia about the Devil and/or non-Christian religions. In one chapter of his The United States of Paranoia,98 Jesse Walker discusses conspiracy theory in the late 1970s and early 80s – when I first got interested in it – a world of little newsletters. Walker reminded me that, entertaining though the likes of the late Mae Brussel99 and Robert Anton Wilson100 may have been, when measured against their equivalents on the American Christian Right, they were utterly insignificant. Hal Lindsey’s 1970 The Late Great Planet Earth, for example, sold 28 million copies in two decades.
Quigley Bernard Porter wrote this on his blog recently: ‘The “Round Table” group, as it was called, also formed a secret society to further their grand British-American imperial ends. An American historian called Carroll Quigley inferred from this that America’s foreign policy was unduly influenced on the side of Britain by this transatlantic conspiracy. That is nonsense, of course.’101 [emphasis added] Quigley didn’t do a whole lot of ‘inferring’. As he notes on p. 950 of his 1966
98 New York: HarperCollins, 2013
99 See
100 See
101
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magnum opus, Tragedy and Hope: ‘I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records.’ [emphasis added] The public front of this network were the Rhodes Scholars. In the most recent study of the Scholars,102 the authors briefly discuss and dismiss the suspicions on the American Right that the Scholars are some kind of anti-American conspiracy. They do refer to Carroll Quigley, but only as a tutor who had impressed Bill Clinton when he was a student. They must have worked hard not to notice Tragedy and Hope. It is quoted at length in Gary Allen’s None Dare Call It Conspiracy,103 one of the two books they cite as propounding the great conspiracy. The only academic I know of who has taken Quigley on board is Jan Nederveen Pieterse in his Empire and Emancipation, an extract from which, about Quigley, was in Lobster 13.104 Tragedy and Hope used to be very hard to find and expensive to buy. It’s now available on-line for free.105 It is a very odd book from an academic: 1350 pages with no sources. Quigley’s earlier book, The Anglo-American Establishment, written before he was given access to the Round Table’s archives, but published after Tragedy and Hope, does have sources. That is the place to start.106
The sewer not the sewage For 50p I picked up a copy of the autobiography of Chapman Pincher, Dangerous To Know (London: Biteback, 2014). Pincher is largely forgotten now but for 30 years or so he was a very significant figure in the British media, notably as an outlet for information and disinformation from the British military, intelligence and security services. The most significant of Pincher’s books to me was his 1978 Inside Story, a compendium of snippets about British politics and the intelligence and security worlds. I don’t think I have looked at it since the 1980s but I flipped through it and noticed a short chapter called ‘Disinformation and Defamation’, in which, on p. 197, is this:
102 Thomas and Kathleen Schaeper, Cowboys into Gentlemen: Rhodes Scholars, Oxford and the Creation of an American Elite (New York and Oxford: Berghan Books, 1998).
103 Seal Beach [California]: Concord Press, 1971
104
105
106 Or try the site now devoted to him and his work
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‘In the psychological warfare against the IRA, the Army ran an “Information Policy” operation in which false stories were foisted on newspapers to such an extent that an official was forced to leave for overdoing it.’
That, I think, was the first published reference to Information Policy, which was a serious secret at that point; and the ‘official’ who had to leave was Colin Wallace. Pincher omits the fact that he was among those who had false stories foisted on him107 and gets the reason for Wallace’s dismissal wrong. This mixture of revelation and rubbish is about par for the course with with the man.108
BAP Tom Easton steered me towards an April piece on the always interesting truepublica.org.uk about the British American Project (BAP).109 The article – by anonymous author ‘truepublica’ – wonders if the BAP is at the centre of the anti-semitism psy-op being run against Jeremy Corbyn. This thought is provoked by the fact that one of the most prominent of those in the Parliamentary Labour Party claiming that the Corbyn faction of the party is riddled with anti-semitism, is Ruth Smeeth MP, and she is married to Michael Smeeth, a member of the executive body of BAP. Personally, I don’t think BAP is at the centre of the anti-semitism psy-ops and the article offers no evidence other than the Smeeth-BAP link. But it is always useful to remind people, as truepublica does, of Smeeth and her role as an American agent as described in a US cable released by Wikileaks:
107 Two such stories were discussed in Lobster 16 in ‘Wallace clippings planted on Chapman Pincher’.
108 The late E. P. Thompson reviewed Inside Story in the New Statesman in 1978 and this review was reproduced in Thompson’s Writing by Candlelight (London: Merlin, 1980). That review begins: ‘Mr Chapman Pincher has been employed by the Daily Express for over thirty years as a common conduit through which “government ministers, defence chiefs, directors of security and Intelligence, senior civil servants and others” have leaked their official secrets, scandals and innuendos to the readers and to each other.’ I thought it was Thompson who came up with ‘the sewer not the sewage’ to describe Pincher but cannot find the reference if he did.
109
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Tom Easton also reminded me that is is now 22 years since the publication of his ground-breaking study of BAP, ‘The British American Project for the Successor Generation’ in Lobster 33.
A picture is worth a thousand words Ah yes, Iran is threatening the US. Of course it is. That’s why Iran is surrounded by US military bases. Take a look at a map of the area, for example the one at
Bilderberg The annual Bilderberg meeting seems almost quaint these days with vast global corporations wielding the power that they do and the Chinese economy slowly taking over much of the world. Nonetheless Bilderberg still meets and it still creates controversy. One student of Bilderberg is contributor to these columns, Will Banyan. In a recent piece on this year’s meeting,110 Banyan describes in detail the way the American conspiracist Right – the Birchers, for example – are having trouble dealing with the new (relative) openness of Bilderberg. Banyan quotes three of this year’s participants – who all work in
110
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the media and have reported on the meeting’s agenda. That agenda is more or less what you would expect to find: China, the future of the EU (due to the rise of nationalism), climate change, ‘The Weaponisation of Social Media’, etc.111
We’re with Uncle Sam Boy, the world has changed. When Lobster began in 1983 we were collecting fragments from here and there and trying to reassemble them into a (slightly) larger whole. We had almost no access to the overseas media and the most useful tools were Who’s Who and the Times annual index. Now there is too much to read in almost any field you care to name. So things get lost. Even so I am surprised that I missed the report by reprieve.org.uk, BRITAIN’S KILL LIST. This documents UK involvement, going back over a decade, in the compilation of the list of people to be killed by US drone strikes (the UK is not yet, apparently, doing its own killing).112
Ufology Intellectually disreputable though it is to many, there is much of interest in the UFO thing. All manner of fascinating trails run in and out of it – intelligence agencies, media manipulation, disinformation and the big question: what can be known? Can we sort out the shit from the Shinola? The big recent news in the field is the appearance of a 15-page set of notes, apparently of a conversation in 2002 between retired U.S. Admiral Thomas Ray Wilson and Dr Eric Davis, a physicist and UFO-believer.113 The conversation between Wilson and Davis is difficult to follow: lots of military insider talk, short-hand, acronyms, nicknames and initials. In essence Wilson is telling Davis some of
111 112 113 The notes are at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk his experiences while trying to track down those in the US military-industrial complex who have had experience in dealing with crashed UFOs. At one point Wilson describes getting in touch with an ‘aerospace technology contractor . . . the best one of them’: Wilson: I told [sic] I read their program record in the OUSDAT [Office of the Under Secretary for Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Linguistics] special program records group and wanted to know about their crashed UFO program, what their role in that was, what they had etc. Also asked if they heard of MJ-12 or some such organization code relating to crashed/recovered UFO craft.’ Here’s a former head of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) talking about crashed UFOs – hence the excitement among the UFO-believer community. This ‘Wilson conversation’ is being taken very seriously by sections of the UFO community in America.114 Richard Dolan and members of the Disclosure Project are treating the notes as genuine and a really big deal. And, if genuine, they are indeed. First question is, obviously: are the notes genuine? Dr. Michael Salla contacted Davis and reported that Davis said: ‘I have no comment on this.’ Salla added: ‘If the document was a hoax, I see no reason why Dr. Davis would not have said so.’ 115 Indeed. And it isn’t difficult to imagine why Davis doesn’t want to acknowledge the authenticity of the notes: they are far too detailed to have been reconstructed from memory. He must have recorded the conversation with Wilson, presumably without telling him he was doing so. Admiral Wilson, at the time recently retired as head of the DIA, is talking of MJ–12, the putative secret US government committee set up in the 1950s to deal with aliens. But one of the few things we know in the UFO field is that the MJ-12 documents were a fraud. We know this because William Moore, one of the two people who introduced the MJ-12 documents into the UFO world, told the American UFO buffs in 1989 that he had been running disinformation 114 See, for example, 115 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk projects for the US Air Force.116 In any case they have been completely debunked since.117 Which leaves us where? Is it merely that Admiral Wilson, while interested in the UFO question, was unaware that MJ-12 was a psy-op by the Air Force? The alternative is that a recently retired Admiral and former head of the DIA was himself engaged in a psy-op about UFOs. And this seems unlikely to me. If this is what transpired, why is this so important to the US military? At the end of his analysis of the MJ-12 case Brad Sparks asks this question and answers it thus: ‘Why has the AF [Air Force] demonstrated such a long-running pattern of animosity towards UFOlogy? Is it because the AF is protecting a supersecret? Is it the “holy grail” of a recovered alien spaceship and alien bodies? Do UFOlogists pose a threat to the AF’s coverup of this greatest secret of all time by their efforts to penetrate the veil of secrecy? Or was the AF hostility to UFO activists because of Cold War fears that the Soviets could exploit UFO reports? The Soviets, it was feared, could claim UFO’s to be Soviet secret weapons flying over American cities – perhaps carrying Soviet atom bombs they might say – which the American AF was impotent to stop. TOP SECRET Air Force documents tell of AF worries that the US nuclear advantage actually could be wiped out by a clever Soviet propaganda campaign along those lines. There is a policy document trail supporting the existence of such Cold War fears in 1947-1950 and their presentation for action to highly sensitive intelligence and covert operations agencies. If the subject of UFO’s could be discredited in the public mind with the “giggle factor” secretly promoted by AF disinformation agents in laughable crashed saucer and little green men stories, then if and when such Soviet propaganda claims were ever made the American public would laugh it all off. Soviet saucer claims would be dismissed by everyone as silly season stories and shoved under the “ridicule curtain” (just as much of UFOlogy is dismissed today). But UFOlogists would then have to be squelched because they could upset the applecart, piercing through the ridicule 116 This is discussed in some detail in Mark Pilkington’s Mirage Men: a Journey in Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs (London: Constable, 2010). See the interview with Pilkington at 117 See, for example, Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk curtain by crediting UFO’s in the public mind instead of discrediting them.’118 That makes sense for the early 1950s but not for the 1980s when the MJ-12 nonsense was being propagated; and certainly not in 2002 when Admiral Wilson was apparently talking about his trawl through the Pentagon’s filing system looking for whoever was dealing with crashed UFOs. More on this as it develops. Integrity, the City and ‘leave’ And then there’s the Integrity Initiative, the British state’s anti-Russian psy- ops project, which was revealed at the end of last year. I have nothing to add to the published reports and readers of this column will probably be aware of them already. The Initiative’s distant predecessor is the Information Research Department (IRD). If IRD is unfamiliar, you might as well start with its last big operation, in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.119 IRD was closed in 1977 by then Foreign Secretary David Owen, reportedly because someone drew to his attention the list of right-wing, anti-Soviet people in the British media with whom IRD was liaising. (Nothing was then known by either public or politicians about its operations in Northern Ireland.) IRD was the apparent inspiration for the creation of RICU, the Research, Information and Communications Unit. Founded in 2007, RICU was set-up in the Home Office, as part of the counter-radicalisation (that’s mainly Islamic radicalisation) strategy known as Prevent. In the first big piece about it, former Guardian journalist Ian Cobain120 reported that the inspiration for the unit came in part from IRD. Someone in Whitehall saw (then Labour government number two) Gordon Brown carrying a copy of the Frances Stonor Saunders’ book Who Paid the Piper?121 a book, which, though chiefly about the CIA’s anti- Soviet propaganda activities in the post-WW2 era, frequently mentions IRD. Keen to stay abreast of their political masters’ reading, some civil servants read the book and discovered – or rediscovered – IRD. Cobain commented: 118 See Sparks and Greenwood in note 116. 119 A very good account of this is Tom Griffin’s ‘The IRD in Northern Ireland’ at 120 See 121 It was reviewed in Lobster 38. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘Instead of reading Saunders’ book as a warning that propaganda could undermine intellectual and political freedom, some at RICU saw it as a manual for the organisation’s future development.’ 122 And after RICU came the Integrity Initiative, a state-funded combination of psy-ops (propaganda against Russia) and psy-war (attacks on anyone who isn’t toeing anti-Russian line). We’re back to the days of the (first) Cold War. It is depressing but not surprising that something so banal should be created today (let alone that its creators thought it could remain secret). The original enormous information dump about it is still on-line.123 Such state influence operations are futile, even if they remain unpublicised. The way to avoid Islamic terrorism in this country is to stop supporting American attacks on Islamic countries, not to create a semi-secret propaganda campaign against radical Islam. The way to stop Russia actually or potentially meddling with this country’s internet-based political activities is to cease supporting NATO’s expansion eastwards. But the British state is unwilling to do anything without the Americans’ approval, so anti-Russian and anti- Islamic propaganda is what we have instead. Why is the British state is so determined to cling to America’s coat-tails? There is the remnants of the ‘special relationship’, which began as the Anglo- American Round Table network at the turn of the century, survived into the WW2 alliance against Hitler and then out into the post-war alliance against Soviet-style socialism.124 But that has faded into insignificance, not least because the percentage of Americans of British descent has declined markedly.125 In very general terms, the USA replaced the UK as the major regulator of global capitalism since WW2 and the post-war transition from 122 123 For example 124 I wrote about this in Lobster 1, ‘The Anglo-American Establishment From Rhodes To Cliveden’. But try this 125 See Harry Mount, ‘Donald Trump's Anglophilia makes him a dying breed among Americans’, in the Daily Telegraph at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk initial competition with Washington to being America’s sidekick has been the line of least resistance for Britain. And there are career considerations. A former Foreign Secretary, the late Robin Cook, said that the British military clung to America because America controlled NATO and that’s where all the big jobs were. ‘Because of the Ministry of Defence’s fanatical determination to keep close to the Pentagon. They will never do anything that puts that relationship out of line. The truth is that it is the pivot of all military careers and a great deal of decision-making. Any military officer who has ambitions, has to keep close to the Pentagon, because he needs to serve in NATO. The US and the UK have dominated serious appointments in NATO for years, for this reason. It is the driving priority of the MOD to keep it that way. They do not think in terms of national interest, but of both MOD interest and the American interest.’ 126 NATO is essentially a system for selling American weapons to its members, whether the weapons work or not.127 The British state has been persuaded to buy the US Lockheed F-35 fighter to decorate its two new vanity aircraft carriers, despite the fact that the F-35 is a spectacular failure.128 Poland is the latest NATO member to agree to buy the F-35.129 In the 1960s and 70s fourteen countries were persuaded the buy the Lockheed Starfighter, which crashed so often it was known in West Germany as ‘the widowmaker’. Some of the politicians who were persuaded to buy the Starfighter were bribed by Lockheed.130 One day we may learn what kind of shenanigans went on behind the scenes to persuade the UK government to buy the F-35, ‘a trillion dollar mistake’.131 Outside Whitehall is the presence in the City of London of a large number 126 ‘Why are we with Uncle Sam?’ in Lobster 57. 127 Nicely articulated by John Laughland in ‘The Prague Racket’ at 128 See, for example, 129 See 130 131 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk of American banks, hedge funds and other financial organisations. In a recent sharp piece on the prospect of a post-Brexit Anglo-American free trade area, Umair Haque wrote: ‘So the Romeo and Juliet of collapsing countries — what are they doing? Well, they’ve made their choice. Their choice is capitalism. They’ve both rejected social democracy. Britain’s rejected the “democracy” part — it doesn’t want to be part of the EU, and America’s rejected the “social” part — it’s still so backwards it thinks socialism is some kind of horrible curse, not how people get working healthcare and college and retirement in the rest of the world. So Romeo and Juliet have made a kind of suicide pact. They’ve decided to go all in on capitalism.’ 132 But there are different forms of capitalism and the version that is being discussed by the author is finance capitalism, a distinction he doesn’t make. Since the early 1980s the US and UK have been dominated by the interests of finance capital. In this country the City has been the focus of economic attention since the arrival of Mrs Thatcher, Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson at the helm of the Conservative government in 1979. They had all worked in the City before going into politics – Lawson as a financial journalist, Howe and Thatcher as tax lawyers – and pursued policies which benefitted the Square Mile but damaged the domestic manufacturing base. Which brings us to the interesting story of the London-based hedge funds which bankrolled part of the Leave campaign in the referendum on EU membership. The ‘hedgies’ also simultaneously ‘shorted’ UK stocks and shares – gambling on a ‘leave’ verdict they were, in effect, helping to buy.133 The analyses I have cited do not show – perhaps cannot show – that spending by the ‘hedgies’ was critical to the ‘leave’ verdict in the referendum. Nonetheless the fact that it occurred is both a striking illustration of the extraordinary sloppy nature of the rules governing the referendum and a perfect expression of the relationship between finance capital and the rest of the economy. For if we do leave the EU, and the economic consequences are as serious as most analyses suggest, a group of people in the City (and their investors) will have made a lot 132 ‘The Soviet Union of Capitalism’ at < https://eand.co/the-soviet-union-of-capitalism-493788f73612> 133 See, for example, Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk of money by damaging the wider, domestic economy.134 Murray less than mint I am a big fan of Craig Murray but occasionally he overcooks it. For example, he wrote this: ‘Something else. . . which again did not get nearly the media attention it deserves, was Matt Kennard’s stunning revelation of the way the Guardian has been taken over by the security services. I have been explaining for years that the Guardian has become the security services’ news outlet of choice, and it is very helpful to have documentation to prove it.’135 The Guardian ‘taken over’? Hardly. Kennard reported the minutes of the Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice Committee – formerly the D- Notice Committee – of 15 December 2018 which said: ‘The Chairman thanked Paul Johnson for his service to the Committee. Paul had joined the Committee in the wake of the Snowdon affair and had been instrumental in re-establishing links with the Guardian.’136 The committee gives advice which it hopes the media organisations will follow. Or not, as in the Snowden event. Hence the break between the Committee and the Guardian, I presume. Whoever is running their eyes over Murray’s material before he posts it – assuming there is someone – deserves a smack. Dallas again In ‘Still thinking about Dallas’ in Lobster 74 I speculated that the assassination conspiracy on Dealey Plaza was piggy-backed on the CIA operation that the 134 ‘A no-deal Brexit would have far-reaching economic consequences for the UK. According to exclusive analyses carried out by Statista, the Manufactured Goods industry would be hit the hardest by a chaotic Brexit: The gross value of the industry would decrease by 12 percent over the next 15 years. The Agriculture & Foods industry would experience a loss of 11 percent, the Financial Services industry would decrease by 9 percent and the Services industry by 8 percent.’ E-mail from statista.com. 135 136 See also Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk late Chauncey Holt described: viz. a fake assassination attempt on JFK to be blamed on apparently lefty, pro-Castro Lee Harvey Oswald. I have since received an email from Dick Russell,137 author of The Man Who Knew Too Much,138 in which he wrote: ‘I found your article very interesting and am coming to similar conclusions – that what happened in Dallas was “hijacked” by another element that shocked certain people in the CIA like Desmond FitzGerald who was running Oswald in a different operation.’ Googling ‘JFK, piggy-backed’ I found this by Peter Dale Scott: ‘As I indicated earlier, my working hypothesis is not that the killing was a CIA operation, but that the plot was piggy-backed on an authorized CIA covert operation that was not under secure control and may in part have been outsourced.’ 139 According to Chauncey Holt, the aforementioned Desmond Fitzgerald, then head of the anti-Castro operations in the CIA, was running the fake assassination attempt. Conspiracy theories without theories? In my review of two post-modernist accounts of conspiracy theories, I noted that one of them – absurdly – had described the initial post–JFK assassination researchers as conspiracy theorists despite the fact that they then had no theories on the assassination.140 Something analogous to this notion is discussed by two American academics in ‘Conspiracy Without the Theory’. ‘When swirling charges of rigged elections, witch hunts, and a coup plotted by the “deep state” are referred to as “conspiracy theory,” this is not just a misnomer but a misunderstanding, one with consequences. Conspiracy and theory have been decoupled; we face the distinctively malignant phenomenon of conspiracy 137 See 138 A revised edition is available at 139 140 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk without the theory.’ 141 5G The roll-out of 5G in the UK is underway. Elsewhere awareness of 5G’s potential health risks is visible. Céline Fremault, the Minister of the Government of the Brussels-Capital Region in Belgium, announced that 5G would not be permitted in Brussels because of the radiation emitted by the system.142 Over 200 scientists and doctors have urged the EU to halt the 5G roll-out. One of them, Martin Pall, Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry at Washington State University,143 was quoted as saying: ‘We are committing mass suicide. The safety guidelines are bogus. They do not predict biological effects. There are so many health impacts — attacks on the DNA of cells, life-threatening cardiac effects and cancer. I believe we’ll see a crash in brain function in five to seven years. We’ll have a crash in our reproductive function sooner.’ 144 The picture is complicated by the fact that Russian media, including RT America, has joined in the alarm about 5G.145 And in the current political climate, almost anything proposed by Russia will be rejected unchecked as disinformation by large chunks of the Western media. Who’s duping who? I have noted before that, prominent among those in the United States who have not endorsed the ‘Trump-is-a-Russian-agentand/or-dupe’ thesis, are those associated with consortiumnews.com. In those columns one Larry Johnson, a former State Department and CIA official, took this a big step 141 142 143 See 144 145 See ‘Your 5G Phone Won’t Hurt You. But Russia Wants You to Think Otherwise’ at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk further recently. ‘The Mueller investigation of Trump “collusion” with Russia prior to the 2016 Presidential election focused on eight cases: ◦ Proposed Trump Tower Project in Moscow ◦ George Papadopolous ◦ Carter Page ◦ Dimitri Simes ◦ Veselnetskya Meeting at Trump Tower (June 16, 2016) ◦ Events at Republican Convention ◦ Post-Convention Contacts with Russian Ambassador Kislyak ◦ Paul Manafort One simple fact emerges–of the eight cases or incidents of alleged Trump Campaign interaction with the Russians investigated by the Mueller team, the proposals to interact with the Russian Government or with Putin originated with FBI informants, MI-6 assets or people paid by Fusion GPS, and not Trump or his people. There is not a single instance where Donald Trump or any member of his campaign team initiated contact with the Russians for the purpose of gaining derogatory information on Hillary or obtaining support to boost the Trump campaign. Not one. Simply put, Trump and his campaign were the target of an elaborate, wide ranging covert action designed to entrap him and members of his team as an agent of Russia.’ 146 Thus far I have seen no attempted rebuttal of this striking proposition. Syria I have pretty much given up trying to understand what has been going on in Syria. In particular I had abandoned trying to work out which side was telling the truth about various atrocities committed against civilians. But we do seem to have something close to certainty about one particular gas bombing in Douma in 2018, which provided the pretext for Western air attacks there. A 146 Larry C Johnson, 'How US and Foreign Intel Agencies Interfered in a US Election’ at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk leaked report from The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on that gas attack concludes: ‘In summary, observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest that there is a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft.’ 147 Looking at the photographs attached to the report ‘higher probability’ is understating it. The cylinders which carried the gas are virtually undamaged. War planning In his essay ‘Why did Bush go to war in Iraq?’,148 Ahsan Butt argues that the cause of the war ‘. . . had little to do with fear of WMDs – or other purported goals, such as a desire to “spread democracy” or satisfy the oil or Israel lobbies. Rather, the Bush administration invaded Iraq for its demonstration effect.’ He quotes Bush Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld saying on the evening of 9/11, ‘We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kinds of attacks’;149 and the so-called Ledeen doctrine, named after Michael Ledeen: ‘Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.’150 But actually it was worse than that. The US Defense Department were making plans to attack seven countries. General Wesley Clark, one time Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, told us this in 2007: ‘So I came back to see him [a General] a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, 147 148 149 Quoted by Richard Clarke, chief White House counterterrorism adviser, at 150 https://www.nationalreview.com/2002/04/baghdad-delenda-est-part-two-jonah-goldberg/ Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”’151 Fairy dust A very significant study of the creation of money by banks has been done. For our purposes a quote from the abstract will suffice. ‘An empirical test is conducted, whereby money is borrowed from a cooperating bank, while its internal records are being monitored, to establish whether in the process of making the loan available to the borrower, the bank transfers these funds from other accounts within or outside the bank, or whether they are newly created. This study establishes for the first time empirically that banks individually create money out of nothing. The money supply is created as “fairy dust” produced by the banks individually, “out of thin air”.’ (emphasis added)152 This being the case, why should that money creation not be done by the state for its projects? Why borrow ‘fairy dust’ from banks or the public (at interest) when you can create it yourself? This concept is at the back of some of the new thinking in economics going on around the Corbyn/McDonnell-led Labour Party. 151 See 152 Richard A. Werner, ‘Can banks individually create money out of nothing? — The theories and the empirical evidence’ at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk South of the border (occasional snippets from) Nick Must *new* He’s not the Messiah. . . he's a very naughty boy! You’ll have to forgive my twice using a Monty Python reference within this one issue’s ‘South of the Border’, but it’s the only sensible reaction to some recent communication1 from ‘God’s own spy’, David Shayler. I would encourage those who have not read my article ‘David Shayler, “Tunworth” and the LIFG’ in this issue2 to do so before progressing any further with this follow-up, After six months of non-communication, on 14 October @Gods_Spy, a.k.a ‘Dave Shayler Christ’, burst into full foghorn mode to denounce the aforementioned article (that had been published two and a half months previously) as ‘wholly dishonest.3 Further, it was declared that ‘You defend terrorists in the intelligence services and fail to mention that a doc appeared on the internet after the attack was denied.’4 Included in that message, Shayler provided a link to a page on Cryptome.5 That page is in four parts. The second part (about one third of the way down) is a reproduction of the MI6 intelligence report CX 95/53452, which is central to the nexus of MI6, the LIFG and Tunworth. The third part of the page (about two thirds of the way down) is an analysis – written by Shayler himself – of CX 95/53452. Included in that analysis was this comment about the obscuring of Tunworth’s identity: ‘I have seen the original of this report. I can confirm that the deletions cover material which might have helped identify TUNWORTH.’ [Added 1 For which, read ‘throwing of rattle out of pram on Twitter’. 2 3 4 5 ‘David Shayler on MI6 Gaddafi Assassination Plot’ Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk emphasis] So, no clear declaration that Tunworth’s real name was on the report, merely that there had been information that might have identified him. This is reinforced by additional information hosted by Cryptome (Press Release, 16 February 2000 - ‘David Shayler vindicated over existence of Qadhafi Plot’), wherein Shayler states: ‘The name of the agent and the fact that he was involved in the plot were not made clear in the CX report as is usual in such cases.’6 More recently, however, Mr Shayler has been claiming something quite different. In the interview he did for the Richie Allen show of Thursday 22 June 2017, Shayler said: ‘His name’s actually redacted from that document but, if you were to remove the redaction, I can tell you within 99% degree of certainty that that is Ramadan Abedi, basically.’ 7 Later in that same interview, he went even further and claimed: ‘ . . . I put that MI6 document on the internet in 1999. It’s a strange story how I got hold of it, again, but I was the one that redacted it. That’s why I can tell you it's Ramadan Abedi on it, basically.’ 8 If he was the person who redacted the document, why is he only 99% certain? He may well claim, in his defence, that due to the passage of time he can’t be completely certain – but that is my entire argument in a nutshell. On the one hand Shayler claims it’s absolutely, definitely Ramadan Abedi; on the other hand he allows for an amount of uncertainty – even though he says that he has seen the unredacted document and was the one who originally censored it. It simply does not add up.9 I should also point out that, in accusing me of ‘defend[ing] terrorists in the intelligence services’, Shayler is chastising me for something I quite plainly 6 The quote specifically comes from the third section of the press release, which has the subheading ‘How I was briefed on the Qadhafi plot’. See 7 8 See footnote 7. This statement is at 59 minutes and 3 seconds into the recording. 9 Additionally, in a Twitter direct message to me on 9 April 2019, he said: ‘The name of the agent, ramadan abeidi, is obscured by the words “removed to protect tunworth’s identity”.’ That’s yet another statement in complete contradiction to the February 2000 press release, mentioned above. The old mantra, ‘If you stick to the truth you won’t have to remember whatever lie you’ve told’ comes to mind. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk have not done. My disagreement with him is that I don't believe he could possibly now remember an unredacted name on an MI6 intelligence document from over 20 years ago – but that is very different from denying that the plot between MI6 and the LIFG ever existed. His reaction to this disagreement has been an intriguing mix of aggressive, passive aggressive and straight-up hippy – e.g. ‘People who try to cover up murder will be murdered under karma. Judgement Day is 22 August 2021. Love Dave.’10 As a kindly friend mentioned to me, ‘Obviously no-one could possibly have a good-faith disagreement with God’s Anointed, could they?’ Shayler’s explanation for the six-month long lack of communication was: ‘I live in a field and don’t have mu8ch[sic] time for these finer points. There is a document supporting the conspiracy between Mi6 and Tunworth who admits contacts with Islamic terrorists.’11 Now, if you’ve read the original article, you’ll know that the main thrust of it was that Shayler’s claim to be able to identify Tunworth today was complete bunkum. The fact that I also noted that the LIFG, the ‘Islamic terrorist group’ to which Tunworth belonged, was not actually classified as a terrorist group until much later was entirely ancillary to my main point: i.e. that Tunworth can not be Ramadan Abedi. In addition to all of the above, I should point out to David Shayler (who will no doubt get around to noticing this response sometime in the middle of next year) that if, as he claims, he genuinely is the Second Coming of Christ ‘with an ability to see the future’12 then he would have known of the article before its publication – even if he is living in a field with a crap 4G mobile connection.13 More recently, I have been in receipt of messages such as: ‘As I’ve explained I haven’t disappeared from Twitter. Because I risked my life to expose MI6 murder I live in a field and cannot get on Twitter, you inhuman scum.’14 10 11 Twitter direct message from @Gods_Spy, 14 October 2019. 12 See Shayler’s Twitter profile: 13 An examination of Shayler’s Twitter feed reveals that he had posted messages there on 31 different days between 10 April and 14 October, the period when I received no communication from him. 14 Twitter direct message from @Gods_Spy, 25 November 2019. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk This (rather nasty) message thus confirms that he can use a mobile internet connection to send me a message on Twitter . . . telling me that he can’t get on Twitter! The editor has offered David Shayler the opportunity to reply to my original article directly via Lobster. Apart from an initial email, which was in need of clarification (which was requested), the editor has informed me that he has had no communication from Shayler. The offer of a right to reply still stands. *new* Facial Recognition systems, Project Servator and a lack of results. I expect that most members of the public are aware of facial recognition – although that awareness will likely have been driven by fictional, and inaccurate, portrayals of the technology in mainstream films and television programmes. More on that later. I think it’s less likely you will have heard of Project Servator before now, even though it’s been running since February of 2014.15 According to the City of London Police: ‘Project Servator is the name given to unpredictable, highly visible police deployments, designed to disrupt a range of criminal activity, including terrorism. [....] They involve officers, both uniformed and plain clothed, who are specially trained to spot the tell-tale signs that an individual may have criminal intent. They are supported by other resources, such as police dogs, armed officers, CCTV operators, Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) and vehicle checkpoints.’16 In the same year that Servator was launched, ‘the biggest security magazine in the UK’ quoted data from the ‘London terrorism survey’ which showed that, ‘Nearly three quarters (73 per cent) of people who live or work in the City of London are concerned about terrorism.’17 It should be noted that, in this 15 See the City of London Police's ‘Frequently Asked Questions' on Project Servator at < https://tinyurl.com/u8lsdc6> or 16 See 17 See Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk instance at least, the increased visual presence of police officers provided by Project Servator are not being used to actually fight crime but to manage the public's perception of their susceptibility to crime – something which may not be anywhere near accurate. That perception of vulnerability to crime for residents of the City of London might be linked to their average residential property price being nearly 2.75 times the national average.18 Although the prima facie crime statistics show a ratio of 5,901 crimes reported19 for a residential population of about 7,400,20 it is obvious that the huge numbers of people who do not live in the city but commute in daily for work (more than half a million people work in the City21) makes the actual crime ratio per physically present person much, much lower than the national average. That level of reported crime, for a daytime population of 500,000, equals 1 offence for every 84.7 persons. The total number of criminal offences for England and Wales, year to June 2019, was 11,100,000 offences22 per 59,000,000 of population23 or 1 offence for every 5.3 persons. Although it was City of London Police that initially launched Servator, it has progressively been adopted by forces nationwide.24 Two years on from that initial commencement, in 2016, Essex police announced that their use of Servator tactics at the V-Festival in Chelmsford meant that they had ‘arrested 18 At time of writing, the average UK house price is £316,131 19 City of London police crime data 2017/18 20 City of London Resident Population, Census 2011 at 21 See the ‘Number of people employed in the City’ tab at 22 23 24 This includes not only significant regional forces like the Metropolitan Police and Police Scotland but also forces with a national remit and/or centralised command, such as British Transport Police, Counter Terrorism Policing and the Civil Nuclear Constabulary. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk 27 people for drug-related offences’.25 On closer examination, however, this claim would seem to deflate somewhat when it is compared to the figure reported for the same festival four years previously when (without any input from Project Servator) a total of 51 arrests for drug offences had been made.26 Innocent people can be caught up in a Servator operation. One such person was Conor Sullivan of the Financial Times, who was stopped and questioned by an armed police officer when he was seen ‘acting suspiciously’ on Blackfriars Bridge. What had he been doing? Writing down some notes while waiting to meet City of London officials who were due to brief him on Project Servator.27 What of the facial recognition systems that will obviously be playing some part in Project Servator? An informative series of articles have appeared on technology news website The Register – and they paint a very poor picture indeed. On 17 August 2017 they reported how the ‘UK govt steams ahead with £5m facial recog system amid furore over innocents’ mugshots’ – detailing a five year tender of a ‘contract for facial recognition software’ which was priced at £920,000 a year.28 Later that same day a further article stated: ‘London cops urged to scrap use of “biased” facial recognition at Notting Hill Carnival’. The previous year the Met Police had used facial recognition to monitor the crowd at the West London street festival but their system – designed to ‘alert cops to people who are banned from the festival or are wanted by the police’ – had ‘failed to identify anyone’.29 Nine months later, the situation was hardly any better: 25 26 27 28 Over two and a half grand a day for such a system when ‘[b]oth the former and current Biometrics Commissioners have published reports on the Home Office’s approach to facial recognition and biometrics more generally and have pointed to significant problems and flaws.’ 29 See Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘London cops’ facial recognition kit has only correctly identified two people to date – neither of whom were criminals – and the UK capital’s police force has made no arrests using it, figures published today revealed. According to information released under Freedom of Information laws, the Metropolitan Police’s automated facial recognition (AFR) technology has a 98 per cent false positive rate.’ 30 [Added emphasis.] Let’s take a moment to fully absorb that fact: a ninety-eight percent false positive rate. I think it’s quite possible you’d get a better performance by having a human select people at random. Roll on another nine months, though, and an arrest had been made as a result of an AFR test run earlier this year.31 Yes, one arrest. . . after a stint from 10am to 6pm on two consecutive days outside Romford train station.32 Another accidental tourist? Paul Nicholas Whelan is an American citizen currently incarcerated in Moscow, having been arrested in late December 2018 on suspicion of being in possession of classified data (viz. a list of employees at a Soviet security agency). Mr Whelan denies those charges and has appeared multiple times in court. At one of those appearances in May he denounced Russian justice and his treatment in general, saying, ‘I have not had a shower in two weeks.’33 In spite of this claim, he was clean shaven (which he also was at his more recent court appearance) so he must be allowed some form of personal hygiene regimen. As has been established by various news outlets that have enquired into Mr Whelan’s circumstances, he is an ex-Marine reservist and ex-law 30 ‘Zero arrests, 2 correct matches, no criminals: London cops’ facial recog tech slammed’ at 31 32 The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) estimates that Romford station serves over 8.5 million passenger a year and is just within the top 50 busiest stations in Great Britain. (Data from an ORR spreadsheet available for download via the ‘Station usage 2017-18 data’ link at 33 See ‘Paul Whelan: Ex-US marine alleges abuse in Russia spy case’ at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk enforcement employee (although his precise role within law enforcement is uncertain, due to his own obscuring of the facts).34 Having been born to British and Canadian parents on United States soil, he is directly entitled to nationality of all three of those countries and he does have Canadian, UK and US passports. More unusually, he also has a passport from the Irish Republic, which he had obtained via ancestral (grandparent) rights. The benefits of a politically neutral Irish passport would seem obvious. Multiple passports – even if they are in the same name – would also aid in the avoidance of surveillance of flight data and passenger manifests. For instance, if one were to fly from the United States to Paris on a U.S. passport you could then connect to a flight from Paris to Moscow that was booked with an Irish passport and the U.S. passport holder would not seem to have left Paris. Whelan’s current employer is the automotive parts manufacturer, BorgWarner. Following the announcement of his arrest, they released a statement which in part said: ‘BorgWarner has been in contact with the relevant U.S. Government authorities in order to help our employee and the U.S. government. We ask that any further inquiries regarding this issue be directed to the U.S. State Department.’ 35 [emphasis added] Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein During the recent furore over Prince Andrew’s association with Jeffrey Epstein, the Mail on Sunday revealed that they had obtained video footage from 201036 that showed Prince Andrew at the front door of Epstein’s Manhattan mansion, the Herbert N. Straus House at 9 East 71st Street in Manhattan.37 In what was presented as the first segment of the video, Epstein is seen leaving in the company of a young blonde woman (who I would guess is in her twenties). 34 See, for instance, ‘American charged with espionage in Russia has an unlikely background for a spy’ in The Chicago Tribune 3 January 2019 at 35 36 37 For the history of the property, see Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk They walk to a car parked a few metres away; Epstein gets into the car and the woman returns to the house. What is immediately clear from this footage is that the camera was being operated manually, from inside a parked vehicle: the picture moves up and down across the front of the building as people leave and zooms in on the face of the blonde woman who leaves with Epstein. This indicates an interest less in Epstein himself and more in the visitors – and likely the female visitors – to his home. The other part of the Mail on Sunday clip showed Prince Andrew bidding farewell to a brunette woman.38 That undoubtedly confirms that he was at the building at a time when surveillance was taking place – possibly at the same time as the first clip. Regardless of all that, nothing seems to have been discussed in the media about who had been behind the camera. One possibility is that it was the New York police, wary following Epstein's release from the lenient 13 month jail sentence he received in Florida.39 Secondly, it could have been a private investigator, perhaps in the employ of an Epstein victim. A third possibility is that British security were those responsible, aware of the risk of entrapment to Prince Andrew. And it could have been either the Florida police (with the understanding of the NY cops) or the F.B.I. – both of whom might also have had good reason to keep tabs on Epstein following his release. What I can not fathom, however, is how Prince Andrew’s protection detail did not spot the manned video surveillance of Epstein’s home taking place from a static vehicle parked in the street, virtually opposite the building’s front door.40 The huge cost of Betsy DeVos Making a repeat appearance in South of the Border is United States Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. Over the past 12 months, Ms DeVos has been 38 I believe that this was New York based art gallery owner Amalia Dayan, a known associate of Ghislaine Maxwell, who was photographed with her in Miami, Florida, in December 2009. See 39 See, for instance 40 Of course, they would likely have been made aware of the situation if the surveillance were conducted by a U.K. government team. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk under the full-time safeguarding of the United States Marshall service. This is in spite of the fact that, as Politico pointed out, in the past such duties were carried out by the Education Department itself.41 The price for this round the clock armed protection? A mere $6.24 million – actually down from a final cost for the previous year of $6.79 million, a figure that had been deemed a ‘high watermark’ that should not be exceeded. Now, however, the projected cost for fiscal year 2020 has been set at $7.87 million. Bizarrely, considering the gigantic amounts of public money that is being spent, it was stated that, ‘For reasons of operational security, we will not disclose the number of employees providing protection or the nature of threats against the secretary.’ Amazingly, these costings could have been higher but for the fact that Ms DeVos allows her protection detail to travel with her on her private plane. Betsy DeVos is undoubtedly a grifter (© everyone who has ever been a member of Trump’s cabinet) because she could have actually paid for the entire shebang herself – she and her husband ‘Earned At Least $45 Million’ in the last year alone.42 She even has the connections to organise a protection detail herself as she is the sister of the world's most infamous mercenary, Erik ‘Blackwater’ Prince.43 Himmler’s daughter in post-war German spy agency shock As I have previously discussed in Lobster,44 post WWII, ex-Nazis became the new best friend of the Western Alliance – ‘my enemy's enemy is my friend’. It was relatively unshocking, then, to learn that SS-chief Heinrich Himmler's daughter, Gudrun Burwitz (an unrepentant Nazi), had worked for the West German BND (in a relatively minor administrative role) for two years between 1961 and 1963.45 41 42 43 See 44 See the section ‘All is forgiven (pp. 4-5) in my winter 2016 article ‘The Western Union Clandestine Committee: Britain and the “Gladio” networks’ at 45 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Interesting sources Back in the mid 1990s, when the internet was more generally referred to as ‘the world wide web’, Jane Affleck had a column in Lobster that provided a guide to interesting online sources.46 Even then, as she noted, there was a distinct possibility of information overload: ‘Here is a selection of sites on the Internet that I have found interesting. However, it is only a very small selection, and is not intended to be in any way comprehensive, but only to give some indication of the type of information available (with some bias towards those areas that may interest Lobster readers). Other points worth making: using the internet can be very time consuming – and expensive – if you don’t know what you’re looking for . . . .’ Although the obvious difference between the mid-90s and today is that the cost of a connection to the internet has dropped dramatically, much of that quote is still applicable. I would even argue that using the internet is more time consuming today: we’re quite happy to allow ourselves to become completely immersed and lose track of time when surfing the web precisely because of that reduction in cost. Plus there's the fact that pretty much all information is now available online. With that in mind, I thought it might be an idea to share with current Lobster readers a couple of interesting sources I have recently discovered. The first is The Friends of the Intelligence Corps Museum, who produce a regular newsletter aimed at their alumni and associated members.47 Additionally to the newsletter, there are ‘Articles of interest’ – mostly longer pieces that did not make it into the newsletter – and a smattering of book reviews. Second is the Issuu ‘feed’ from Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) Historians.48 The Katyn Massacre: An SOE Perspective details how S.O.E. 46 See, for instance, her ‘Surf’s up! Internet sites of interest’ at 47 All web pages related to the Friends of the Intelligence Corps Museum can be found via the homepage at 48 See Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk probably knew about Soviet responsibility for the war crime49 but, rather than rocking the allied boat, remained silent as propaganda was dispersed that placed the blamed on the Nazis. Even now, more than seventy-five years later, the historians of the FCO continue to make excuses for the allies not correctly placing the blame: ‘Clearly a terrible crime had been committed, but the Second World War was at the height of its brutality, and terrible things happen in wartime. . . .’50 Sure, as long as those ‘terrible things’ were committed by your allies – shades of ‘there’s nothing to see here!’ Also available from the FCO Historians is Origins and Establishment of the Foreign Office Information Research Department, 1946-48. This reveals that, as the Labour government of Clement Attlee was in power at the time: ‘The need to keep the left wing of the Party on side became a factor in the conduct of government policy towards the Soviet Union. Combined with inhibitions over possible allegations of interference in the internal affairs of other countries, this was to contribute to the shift in information tactics towards the cloak of secrecy.’51 In contrast, however, any legitimate Communist hold on power in Western Europe was to be avoided at all costs because: ‘Powerful Communist parties in France and Italy were capable of sharing, and possibly taking, power. Britain’s colonial possessions were vulnerable to Communist influence.’52 I think the biggest revelation is that IRD’s work was not classified as secret for the first couple of years. That changed, however, when: ‘The need to recruit specialist staff, free from the limitations of civil service pay and conditions, was one of the considerations which led Murray [the head of IRD at the time] to suggest, in September 1948, that part of the costs of the unit should be transferred to the secret vote. In addition, the move to the secret vote would enable a more flexible use of money, and 49 For significant detail on the events surrounding the massacre, see 50 ‘The Katyn Massacre: An SOE Perspective' pages 11-12, at 51 Page 2 of ‘Origins and Establishment of the Foreign Office Information Research Department, 1946-48’, at 52 See note 51, p. 3. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk avoid the unwelcome scrutiny of operations which might require covert or semi-covert means of execution.’ 53 That time The Sun tried to cash in on Acid House Crazy as it may seem, Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper The Sun once tried to cash in on the Acid House craze that was – at the time – sweeping the nation. On Wednesday 12 October 1988, the Bizarre column (under the shared byline of Gary Bushell and Rick Sky) offered readers their version of an Acid House t- shirt at the price of £5.50 each: ‘It’s groovy and cool – it’s our Acid House T- shirt!’54 The whole page of that Bizarre was dedicated to variously singing the praises of the music fad - ‘Everyone is talking about ACIEEED, as it is known in the clubs!’ – or generally thrashing the culture – ‘Sharp street kids love Acid music. . . . but they’re saying a resounding NO to the daft drugs that plague the scene.’ Bushell and Sky then proceeded to show exactly how out of touch they were with the phenomenon by providing a guide to ‘The lingo’. This included the confusing claim that the DJ was also known by the moniker of ‘AK (Acid King)’, that ‘Tubing’ apparently meant ‘porking' (whatever that implied) and ‘Hang ten’ was a ‘hand slapping greeting’. Their assessment of the drugs threat was also highly flawed as they were seemingly convinced that, as it was called Acid House, usage of LSD was involved: ‘Acid acts for up to 12 hours. . . . “Flashback” experiences can occur up to six months after taking LSD. . . . LSD users have died while hallucinating.’ Granted those are all potential side effects of dropping acid but use of that drug was not a major part of the Acid House scene – MDMA (a.k.a. Ecstasy) yes, but not LSD.55 53 See note 51, pp. 7-8. 54 Those on a budget would have been relieved to know that the quoted price did include postage and packing. See the scanned image available at 55 The Sun’s resident medical rent-a-gob at the time, Dr. Dr Vernon Coleman, would also weigh in with a shoddy attempt to discredit the use of MDMA: ‘You will hallucinate. For instance, if you don’t like spiders you'll start seeing giant ones.’ See the archived, undated, clipping at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The final joke may be that the cut-out-and-mail-in order form on the bottom right hand corner of the page had a large black box heading that said ‘BIZARRE T-SHRT OFFER’. I’ll gladly kick a man when he’s down...... especially if that man is Boris Johnson. I have previously written of the similarities betwixt himself and the unlamented ‘accident prone’ George Brown, late of the 1960s Labour front bench. I have recently been taking advantage of the Netflix streaming service to work my way through the entire Monty Python television series. I have, thus, been struck by how well Mr Johnson would have succeeded in the Upper Class Twit of the Year Competition.56 With the various elements of the competition including walking along a straight line without failing over, kicking the beggar, waking up the neighbour (which, for Johnson, would be Carrie Symonds’ neighbours in Camberwell, south London, natch) and taking the bra off the debutant from the front, I think it is undeniable that the original competitors – Vivian Smith-Smythe- Smith, Simon-Zinc-Trumpet-Harris, Nigel Incubator-Jones, Gervaise Brook- Hampster and Oliver St John-Mollusc – would have had no chance against the giant Upper Class Twit-ism of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Islington North and the IRD Simon Matthews’ piece in the previous issue, ‘A tale of two Islingtons’,57 mentions Gerry Reynolds as being one of Jeremy Corbyn’s predecessors as MP for that constituency. A BBC news report on the Information Research Department (IRD) and the transfer of thousands of its files to the National Archives mentions that Gerry Reynolds had contacted IRD for help in combating internal constituency opposition (a.k.a. ‘“Trotskyists” in Islington North’). ‘He feared his local Labour party was being taken over by “a well- organised group of extreme left-wing malcontents, probably Trotskyists”, 56 The sketch is currently ‘archived for posterity’ at 57 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk and wanted the IRD to dig up any information on the individuals concerned.’ 58 This was in the early 1960s – when Corbyn was barely out of short trousers. The resulting ‘dirt’ was extremely weak and was dated from ten to fifteen years before. ‘The IRD turned to the security services, which confirmed that Dorothy Hayward had been a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1947; that Sidney Lubin had endorsed a Communist council candidate in 1951; and that Francis Dunne had distributed a Trotskyite newsletter.’59 [Emphasis added] An update on the ‘accidental tourist’ In Lobster 74 I wrote about Danny Gratton, the greetings card salesman from the Midlands who ‘by chance’ shared a room with the late Otto Warmbier when the both of them were part of a group of tourists in North Korea.60 In that article I pointed out that there were several ‘spook-like’ behaviours that Mr Gratton had indulged in during that stay. Now, it would seem, Mr Gratton has abandoned his greetings card business (his LinkedIn page has disappeared61) and he has taken to ‘more dangerous tourism’. The November 2018 newsletter from Central Staffs Crossfit stated how they, ‘. . . wanted to recognise Danny Gratton who took part in the 12k run in Erbil Northern Iraq.’ 62 This brief mention in the fitness club’s newsletter included a couple of snaps of the intrepid Mr Gratton on location. A report from Kurdistan24 explains that the event that he participated 58 See 59 See note 51. 60 61 See footnote 14 of my ‘Accidental Tourist’ piece (Ibid). The LinkedIn page appeared to be the only online business promotion he undertook. 62 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk in is actually a part of the larger Erbil International Marathon,63 which includes races of 42km (i.e. marathon) the 12km section and a 4km.64 A right Royal spook. There was a brief media orgasm at the end of the first week of April when it was announced that Prince William had been ‘working’ at MI6, MI5 and GCHQ respectively for the previous three weeks. The scale of excitement in the reporting ranged from the fairly sober BBC (‘The Duke of Cambridge has spent a “humbling” three weeks on work placements with three of Britain’s security and intelligence agencies’),65 through the forelock tugging Daily Mail (‘The future King insisted on being treated like an ordinary member of staff at all times and that he should simply be called William.’)66 to the predictably bat- shit Sun (‘[he] went on undercover surveillance jobs’).67 To be fair to the Sun, the Mail article also ridiculously claimed that he had ‘even gone out on operations’. Which never happened, of course. Can you imagine the risk assessments that would have been required if it were true?! Espionage podcasts from the National Archives 63 For the marathon's own website see 64 Of course the race is a vast public relations exercise and the U.S. Department of State (Bureau of Diplomatic Security) Iraq 2019 Crime & Safety Report: Erbil advises against travel to the city: ‘[Assessing] Iraq at Level 4, indicating travelers should not travel to the country due to terrorism and armed conflict.’ 65 ‘Prince William works with security agencies on attachment’ at 66 ‘On Granny's secret service!’ at 67 ‘Licence To Will’ at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk A recent series of online audio podcasts from the National Archives have presented some analysis of the records relating to espionage.68 The episodes have included details on three interesting female figures from the history of spying. Firstly, there is Noor Inayat Khan, the ‘pacifist children’s author and musician turned spy’ who served as a wireless operator for SOE in Paris during 1943-44. Second is Gertrude Bell – the precursor of T. E. Lawrence, who was stationed in Arabia two years before him (and who worked with St. John Philby – the father of Kim Philby). The third was, somewhat predictably – but still revelatory in the background detail69 – Margaretha Zelle (a.k.a. Mata Hari).70 Unnecessary punishment through secrecy A report in the Belfast Telegraph of 15 April stated, ‘Northern Ireland mum told file on police killing of child (15) will be sealed for 80 years’.71 The background being that teenager Paul Whitters died after he was hit by a plastic bullet on that same date thirty-eight years before. The very first sentence of of the report said: ‘In the late 1980s the RUC settled a civil action against them in relation to the killing of Paul Whitters but admitted no liability for his death.’ To me that kind of settlement always indicates that the party denying actual responsibility for the death are guilty, but know that the family of the deceased would rather not go through the rigmarole of continually dragging the case through the court system. More recently, in 2007, the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland said that, although 68 For the overview, see 69 This included the tragedy of her early married life, an abusive husband and the death of her child. 70 There is more on hitherto relatively unsung female agents in WW2 in ‘Female Spies and Their Secrets’ at 71 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 1 Suggestion Place the two words 'dangerous tourism' in quotation marks (akin to 'by chance' in the previous paragraph). 2 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Correction This should be “note 4”. 'We have found no new evidence that the police officer who fired the gun intended3 to kill Paul. In my view, the firing of the baton gun on that Suggestion occasion was wrong and unjustifiable.’72 I can see why you have moved this from the main text but it seems a little long for a footnote now. That theI'd governmentsuggest trimming it areso that continuing it reads: to deny the family the information that they clearly“Of course and the morallyrace is a vast deserve, public relations is exercisesurely and unnecessary the U.S. Department punishment of State (Bureau ofthrough Diplomatic Security) Iraq 2019 Crime & Safety Report: Erbil advises against travel to the city: secrecy.‘[Assessing] Iraq at Level 4, indicating travelers should not travel to the country due to terrorism and armed conflict.’ There was also a ‘suspected Islamic State’ attack on the ‘Erbil governorate’ in July of last year. See Stone had an art show during his jail release last summer.73 His oeuvre would seem to mix the modern ‘pop-art’ styles of Damien Hirst and Banksy with the more traditional themes of Loyalist murals, as seen in Belfast. Yes . . . it’s that bad. 72 73 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Peer group pressure Colin Challen Whilst engaging in the topical parlour game ‘Who in the Labour Party is trying to shaft Jeremy Corbyn?’, my mind naturally turned to the master of dark arts, Lord (Peter) Mandelson. I took a look at his entry in the House of Lords Register of Members’ Interests, where I learnt of his consulting business, Global Counsel, and his membership of the Advisory Board of another business which many will not have heard of, the cyber security firm BlueVoyant. More on these later. As I surveyed the Register, I came across an interesting feature which Mandelson’s connection with a cyber security outfit suggested: Labour peers seem to have a far greater predilection for working with cyber security firms than do Conservative peers.1 Judging by the political affiliations of Vice Chairs of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Cyber Security,2 which MPs can join, this is a complete reversal of interest. There is only one Labour MP listed there, whilst there are four Tories (not including peers). In the context of the overall size of the House of Lords membership, the total numbers aren’t great, but even so finding ten Labour peers with current or very recent remunerated cyber security interests and only one Tory suggests the area has a particular appeal. My review of the Register has probably missed a few others, possibly on both sides, since not all entries relating to company directorships etc. have a description of what the company’s specific activity. Perhaps I should make two observations before continuing to take a detailed look at the individuals and businesses involved. Firstly, there is no way of knowing whether these peers were headhunted or whether they actively sought out this type of employment. (It is also true to say that 1 All references to the Lords’ Register relate to 2 Are p. 445 of the document at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk many of the ten Labour peers are former ministers with time on their hands. Perhaps there aren’t yet enough Tory peers of fairly recent vintage who are in the same boat?) Secondly, on a general point about the ennobled contingent of likely Corbyn haters, they will be heavily reinforced by the peers appointed by Blair and Brown – who know that Corbyn doesn’t like the peerage. He’s only appointed a handful himself (including Shami Chakrabarti – and look where that leads us in the great ‘Labour is anti-semitic’ debate) so he has a natural core of privileged opponents with an axe to grind. Most of them are ex-MPs who will have been frustrated with their former colleague’s wayward ways. It is worth noting at this point that another peer, Baroness Kennedy of Cradley, lists being chief of staff to Tom Watson MP, the anti-Corbyn deputy leader of the party, as a remunerated position. Her husband is Baron (Roy) Kennedy, a former director of Finance and Compliance for the party and latterly a whip in the Lords. There appear to be two types of Labour peer with links to cyber security. The first comprises those who have sought to set up their own consulting business, or who do so with others; and for this to happen they are likely to be ‘household names’ - e.g. ex-front bench ministers or similar high profile people. Then there are those who appear to have been recruited into existing businesses but whose turnover is too small for them to be legally required to deposit accounts with Companies House and it is likely that some of these people, in contrast to the first category, will be minnows with bigger ambitions Here, alphabetically, is the list: Blunkett, David The former Home Secretary has a family business called HADAW Productions and Investments Limited involved in ‘publishing, broadcast and print media; advisory services for overseas trade, and cyber and internet security advice’. Four members of the Blunkett clan are listed as directors and company secretary. Oddly, one of these lists his occupation as ‘Environmental Health Officer’ and another as ‘Motor Vehicle Engineer.’ Another, more fittingly, is described as an ‘Information Analyst.’ HADAW is therefore, I imagine, a cyber security minnow if indeed it has anything to do with the subject at all. Trying a web search for HADAW, to find more information than in the Companies House documents, proves fruitless. There seems to be a totally unconnected business selling cameras and an Arabian racing horse that has now been put out to stud. HADAW I guess does nothing more than receive Blunkett’s earnings from other sources. A more serious involvement with cyber security was his role as a non-executive director Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (until 20 February 2019) of Cyber 1 AB, a company registered under Swedish law. Its website3 lists amongst its current directors Lord (Anthony) St. John Bletso, one of only two crossbench peers I found with such an interest. His Lords’ register entry displays a wide range of corporate interests, from uranium mining to sports betting. Sitting together on Cyber 1’s board for nearly two years might have been an interesting experience for Blunkett. Bletso is the 22nd Baron to hold the title. I imagine their conversation at times would have touched upon the terrible threat posed by Corbyn. Brennan, Daniel Brennan is a QC and a senior associate member of Matrix Chambers, perhaps best known for another (erstwhile) member, Cherie Blair. Brennan’s connection with the world of cyber security comes in the form of being an Advisory Board member of the U.S. firm Assured Enterprises, Inc., in which he has shares. As is so often the case with the sales pitch of cyber security companies, their website plays on their government connections: ‘Assured has supported the highest security levels of the US Government and now brings its expertise to commercial enterprises.’ 4 This, I think, gives us a clue why these businesses are so attractive to Labour peers who have lost influence: they project closeness to power, and particularly the thought that knowledge is power. (By way of contrast, many Tory peers are already so well established in the City/ elite circles they are happy where they are.) The ‘Lord on the Board’ syndrome helps make the case. Assured Enterprises, Inc. informs potential customers that Lord Brennan ‘brings integrity, insight and creative thought to the cybersecurity and data protection challenges facing major financial institutions, NATO, military and law enforcement agencies and many others.’ 5 Browne, Des The former Secretary of State for Defence under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown is a paid consultant with the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI). NTI is not a cyber security organisation as such – it says it is a non-partisan, non-profit group supporting multilateral nuclear disarmament – but its inclusion here is justified by its identification of the cyber security threat posed by nuclear catastrophe: ‘The cyber threat has expanded dramatically in recent years, with a series of damaging, high-profile attacks that have made headlines around the world. Nuclear facilities and critical command and control 3 4 5 See note 4. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk systems are not immune to cyber attack — such an attack could facilitate the theft of weapons-usable nuclear materials or a catastrophic act of sabotage. In addition, there is even the possibility that nuclear weapons command and control could be compromised.’6 Who could argue with that? The NTI does specialist work on cyber security and, through e.g. U.S. Admiral (retd.) Mike Mullen, shares personnel with BlueVoyant. Harris, Toby Harris was a member of the London Assembly and a former chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority. He lists his directorship of Cyber Security Challenge UK, a non-profit organisation supported by various government departments and the private sector with the aim of generating cyber security skills particularly amongst young people.7 It runs competitions and education programmes and is no doubt a leading UK marketplace for recruiting new cyber security talent. In that sense it seems like a typical on-the-cheap British variety of inculcating such talent. Contrast this with e.g. Israel’s Unit 8200 which also mainly recruits young people (of conscription age) but is seen as an alternative to military service – even if it is the Israeli Defence Force’s largest unit. Mandelson, Peter Mandelson’s role as an Advisory Board member of Bluevoyant places him in the heart of a highly networked cyber security community, as one can discern from the biographies of its senior personnel: CEO Jim Rosenthal was the chief operating officer of Morgan Stanley and co-chair of Sheltered Harbor (a financial sector initiative to protect banks from an ‘apocalyptic cyber attack’).8 BlueVoyant’s Executive Chair is Thomas Glocer, a former CEO of Reuters and a director of Morgan Stanley,9 a director of K2 Intelligence and the Atlantic Council, amongst other things. Chief Operating Officer of Bluevoyant is Jim Penrose who worked in the National Security Agency (NSA) for 17 years, and with a business called Darktrace (on whose Advisory Board sits crossbench Lord Evans of Weardale, KCB, former head of MI5).10 Mr Penrose’s biography on the BlueVoyant website contains several items that are so secret they have had to be redacted (those being details that relate to his private 6 7 8 9 Since we’re mentioning Morgan Stanley, let’s not forget that former Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling is also a director. 10 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk sector career). Other senior personnel of BlueVoyant include Ron Feler, former Deputy Commander of Israel’s Unit 8200; David Etue, former Vice President of Rapid 7 Inc; Milan Patel, formerly of K2 Intelligence, the FBI’s Cyber Division, the White House National Security Council Joint Requirements Team and the FBI SWAT Team; Austin Berglas, formerly in the FBI and K2 Intelligence; Chris White, of Booz Allen, and Vincent D’Agostino, former Managing Director of K2 Intelligence and 11 years in the FBI. Reading through all these biographies I noticed that Jules Kroll, founder of K2 Intelligence, was also listed as being on Bluevoyant’s board. I therefore wondered if there was anyone left at K2 but, yes, there is because Kroll is still there as well. There’s also Nadav Zafrir of Team 8.11 These biographies of the personnel of just one cyber security company make something abundantly clear: whilst cyber security is not exactly the same thing as intelligence, it is intertwined so closely as to be almost indistinguishable. It is also clear that many who work in cyber security served their apprenticeships in government agencies, which is nothing new.12 Many private detectives, after all, started out as plods. All these biographies paint a picture of an establishment which seems to run quite smoothly just beneath the surface of public recognition.This because – unlike Bilderberg or similar effusions of establishment networking (including Davos) – they don’t appear to bear the imprint of political control or in extremis, ‘conspiracy.’ Having said that, they are very obviously deeply committed to maintaining the fabric of the current social order. However I have not yet completed my list of Labour peers in this this line of work. Mendelsohn, Jonathan. Mendelsohn’s register of interests entry shows he is a director of Cyber Protection Ltd. I didn’t find a website for this company, but it does have a Companies House entry which lists just two directors Mendelsohn and Sir David Garrard.13 Mendelsohn, whose background has largely been in lobbying, has struck out in several directions but let’s not forget that he played a leading part in the original ‘Lobbygate’.14 Sir David also played an important part in a New Labour 11 See < https://www.team8.vc/member/nadav-zafrir/> 12 Blueyoyant biographies sourced from 13 14 The story was originally broken by Greg Palast and it is extensively covered in his The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (London: Pluto Press, 2002) Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk scandal, his one being ‘Cash for Honours.15 The loan he had made to the Labour Party remained after the scandal died down but he apparently asked for it to be repaid specifically in reaction to Jeremy Corbyn's successful victory in the 2015 leadership campaign.16 Cyber Protection Ltd was incorporated in December, 2015 and is shown as ‘dormant’ which is probably just as well. Mendelsohn and Garrard exemplify everything that was wrong about New Labour. Reid, John Tony Blair’s Jack of all Trades cabinet minister registers his position as chair of the advisory board of Shearwater Group plc: ‘digital resilience/cyber security.’ He also has his own company called John Reid Advisory Ltd: ‘risk management; homeland security strategy as well as being chair of the ‘Institute for Strategy, Resilience and Security (formerly Institute for Security and Resilience Studies), University College, London (not-for-profit limited company engaging in academic research)’. The only other member of Shearwater’s Advisory Board is Marcus Willett CB OBE whose biography reads: ‘Marcus joined the Company as a Member of its Advisory Panel in April 2019. Marcus was formerly the Deputy Head of GCHQ, having served 33 years with the organisation. He was also GCHQ’s first Cyber Director and has established and led major UK Cyber Programmes. Marcus also held posts across the wider UK intelligence and security community, and is currently the Senior Advisor for Cyber at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a world- leading authority on global security, political risk and military conflict.’ 17 The revolving doors in the world of cyber security are enough to make one’s head spin, but I suspect we’re barely scratching the surface. Symons, Elizabeth The former General Secretary of the senior civil servants’ trade union, the First Division Association. She lists being a former member, ‘Advisory Board of PGI Protection Group International (executive protection, surveillance and risk consulting) (interest ceased 7 August 2018)’. PGI’s website has a section on Cyber security. As ever, its people come largely from government intelligence and defence 15 See, e.g. 16 See 17 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk backgrounds.18 Symons is another one who has had past ‘issues’, not least in the case of David Mills (the late Tessa Jowell’s ex-husband) and his ‘attempts to clinch a $200 million aircraft deal’ with Iran, which ‘was in danger of falling foul of US sanctions’.19 Taylor, Ann Former Chief Whip Taylor’s register entry tells us that she is a ‘Member of the Board, Thales SA France (information systems for defence and security, aerospace and transportation).’ Thales, a business probably best known for its defence systems and technology manufacturing, is nevertheless a major player in the cyber security market and is part owned by the French state. West, Alan The former First Sea Lord appears to be the most qualified of this bunch to actually have something serious to say about cyber security. His biographical entry at the website of London Speaker Bureau states: 'As Security Minister, West produced the UK’s first ever National Security Strategy and Cyber Security Strategy as well as formulating a series of other strategies such as the counter-terrorism policy; science and technology for countering international terrorism and guidance for local government in enhancing the security of crowded places. He also put in place the basic construct for Olympic security for the London 2012 Olympics.’ 20 As you might expect, West lists a cyber security job, as a non-executive director of MCM Solutions, whose website tells us that they are ‘mission ready’ and informs us: ‘Modern Intelligence Agencies need to be ready to process information from numerous digital devices (computers, USB’s, memory cards, tablets, external hard drives etc.) at a moment’s notice. The Detego® unified platform is a true end-to-end investigation suite for the acquisition, analysis and reporting of any digital assets.’21 It is not clear whether the Detego technology is designed purely for government agencies or for the private sector too, if indeed in this speciality there is a difference to be found. 18 19 See, e.g., 20 See 21 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Lastly, a quick mention of an additional, but no longer Labour name: Lord (Brian) Mackenzie of Framwellgate who lists an interest as ‘President (formerly Non-executive Chairman), Secure Intelligence Ltd (consultancy on cyber penetration prevention and safeguarding company data)’. Mackenzie was a Labour peer from 1998 until 2013, when he was suspended from the House of Lords for six months following a ‘cash for access’ episode.22 Secure Intelligence Ltd tells us ‘We liaise directly with key decision makers, supported by a signed legal waiver. We operate discreetly with minimal awareness of our presence, with our trained operatives working clandestinely to leave little to no trace. In essence, we do not exist before, during or after the event.’23 As two words simply say on their home page: Counter Espionage. Their corporate logo looks remarkably similar to Parliament’s portcullis, which may be considered unfortunate these days. Mackenzie would have been just another Labour peer lurking around the cyber security community, embedding in what is for the rest of them a clear clique with a deeply pro-establishment bent. Those who were in Parliament at the time supported the Iraq war, which doesn’t bode well for their intelligence analysis. Now Brexit has sharpened some of their antipathy to the serial rebel Corbyn. Probably speaking for all of them, Peter Mandelson said: ‘Why do you want to just walk away and pass the title deeds of this great party over to someone Like Jeremy Corbyn? I don’t want to, I resent it, and I work every single day in some small way to bring forward the end of his tenure in office.’24 David Blunkett concluded an article in the Daily Mail (where else?) with ‘A renewed form of moderate New Labour needs to return.’ 25 Lord West, quoted in the Sun said, ‘But more and more I’m beginning to say, I don’t think he’s got the mental capacity to grasp some of these big issues.’26 Nearly all of these Labour peers have openly signalled their opposition to Corbyn one way or the other, e.g. either by voting against 22 23 24 25 26 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the party’s Brexit position, or opposing the reinstatement of Chris Williamson MP who was suspended twice over alleged anti-semitic remarks. The big question might be: will this well-connected cyber- security/intelligence nexus within the Labour Party succeed in their ambition to get rid of Corbyn? And who will help them? Colin Challen was the Member of Parliament for Morley and Rothwell. He blogs at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk David Shayler, ‘Tunworth’ and the LIFG Nick Must In his book Manufacturing Terrorism,1 T. J. Coles mentions that ex-MI5 officer David Shayler has recently claimed that Ramadan Abedi (the father of Manchester Arena suicide bomber, Salman Abedi) was the MI6 asset who had previous been identified solely with the cypher ‘Tunworth’. Shayler first mentioned Tunworth in the late 1990s, when he and Annie Machon (his then partner, who also quit working for MI5) began briefing the media. At that time, much was made by Shayler and Machon of MI6 involvement with an Islamic terrorist organisation, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Via media interviews after he quit MI5, Shayler said the LIFG was the organisation that had, in the mid-1990s, been chosen by MI6 to be the recipients of a financial encouragement to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi. MI5 had become aware of this when Shayler was a desk officer in the section of MI5 known as G9 – G Branch being the section dealing with international terrorist threats to the U.K., G9 specifically working against middle-east terrorism. Shayler regularly attended joint MI5/MI6 meetings on middle-east terrorism and thus became aware of the apparent MI6/LIFG plot. What exactly has Shayler now claimed? The current claim by David Shayler that Ramadan Abedi is Tunworth has only been made on the Richie Allen podcast.2 I had not heard of Richie Allen before researching this article but I have heard of the website that was hosting the podcast in June of 2017, when Shayler first made the allegation re Ramadan Abedi. That is the website of David Icke – yes, he of the ‘secret lizard illuminati’ (as opposed, one supposes, to the ‘open lizard illuminati’). David Shayler has been interviewed multiple times on the Richie Allen show and he has stated his allegation about Ramadan Abedi more than once, most recently on 22 May 2018. During that interview, Richie Allen says he has 1 Reviewed at 2 Available at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk shared Shayler’s allegation that Ramadan Abedi was Tunworth with every major media organisation and nothing has happened ‘. . . even though they must know, now, that this is factual’. A mere statement by Shayler, apparently, making it a fact. Shayler, however, has an explanation for this lack of response: ‘. . . the dark elite are, essentially, trying to airbrush me from history.’ Shayler’s most powerful piece of evidence for this? His articles on The MI6 Islamic terrorist ‘plot’ David Shayler and G9 first had knowledge of the MI6 plot in the summer of 1995 – approximately eight to nine months before the assassination attempt took place. There where subsequently a number of intelligence coordination meetings between MI5 and MI6 where Shayler says mentions were made of progress – e.g. funding being in place. Annie Machon’s book on their experiences working for (and then campaigning against) MI53 has it that, in the early spring of 1996, intelligence reports stated that there had been a failed attempt to kill Gaddafi: ‘ . . . reports [from Morocco and Egypt] indicated that the attackers had tried to assassinate Gaddafi when he was part of a motorcade but failed as they had targeted the wrong car. As a result of the explosion and the ensuing chaos in which shots were fired, civilians and security police were maimed and killed.’4 At the liaison meeting with MI6 after these reports emerged, it was stated that this had been the MI6/LIFG plot in action. Shayler took MI6 at their word and had no basis for this belief (that the LIFG were responsible) other than the fact that it was MI6 officer ‘PT16B’ – now known to be David Watson – who had 3 Annie Machon, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers: MI5, MI6 And the Shayler Affair (East Sussex: The Book Guild, 2005) 4 Machon p. 172. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk told him so. When Panorama broadcast an interview with Shayler in 1998, the BBC’s Mark Urban noted: ‘It is true of course that Shayler’s knowledge of this affair depends entirely on what the SIS man PT16B told him at their meetings.’5 Similarly, in their Defending the Realm: MI5 and the Shayler Affair Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding point out that the Mail on Sunday (which had been serialising Shayler’s revelations) had somewhat similar reservations: ‘The Mail on Sunday editor Jonathan Holborow had baulked at publishing the [MI6/LIFG Ghadaffi assassination plot] story because it had not come directly from Shayler’s own experience. In contrast to other material Shayler had provided, the substance of the allegation was effectively hearsay. Shayler had been told of the plot by his counterpart in MI6, but had no personal knowledge of, or planning role, in the incident.’6 Was the LIFG a terrorist organisation in 1996? This apparent conspiracy by MI6, using an Islamic extremist group to assassinate a foreign leader, was the moral tipping point for Shayler: ‘I joined the service to stop terrorism and prevent the deaths of innocent people, not to get involved in these despicable and cowardly acts.’ 7 Shayler rails against MI6 being in cahoots with an Islamic terrorist organisation. Although certain U.S. government departments had declared the LIFG to be terrorists in December of 20048 (and Ms Machon’s book was published the following April9), the UK government did not proscribe the LIFG until October of 2005.10 So the LIFG were not viewed as terrorists in 1996. Nor is it the analysis of the U.S. 5 See the transcript at 6 Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding, Defending the Realm: Inside MI5 and the War on Terrorism (London: Andre Deutsch, 1999) p. 207. 7 Machon (see note 3) p. 165, giving a direct quote from Shayler. 8 Both the U.S. Department of Treasury and the Department of State listed the LIFG as a terrorist organisation from December 2004 to December 2015. See 9 Specifically 28 April 2005. See 10 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk military’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point today. ‘Although the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) traveled in similar ideological circles as al-Qa`ida, it did not appear to condone the group’s broader strategy of targeting the West. The LIFG’s central leadership never publicly supported Usama bin Ladin’s vision of global jihad. [. . . .] Furthermore, the LIFG never congratulated al-Qa`ida on attacks they conducted such as the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings, the USS Cole bombings, or even the 9/11 attacks. Rather, the LIFG only commented on the U.S. retaliation in Sudan and Afghanistan for the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings. Moreover, LIFG leaders reportedly broke with Bin Ladin in a 2000 meeting in Kandahar, cautioning the latter against staging a large- scale attack [i.e. the plan for 9/11] against the United States.’11 Research carried out at Stanford University has shown that, before 1995, the LIFG were solely an underground group.12 Tunworth’s first contact with MI6 was in the summer of 1995 when they had only just grown strong enough to publicly acknowledged their own existence. Shayler (via Machon) details how, during those early meetings with MI6, Tunworth was keen to tell all about the LIFG: ‘The MI6 agent Tunworth admitted his connections with Islamic extremists and Al Qaeda members during a debrief with his MI6 handler, David Watson, in late 1995….’13 Once again here, I believe that Shayler is being credulous that what MI6 told him was an accurate record of what had been said by Tunworth. Even if Tunworth had said words to that effect, who is to say that they were true anyway? He may well have been simply boasting about his connections and his groups abilities to secure the vital funding – which had been the sole reason he took the huge risk14 to contact MI6 in the first place. Shayler’s knowledge of Tunworth Media interviews with Shayler in the initial period after he first went public do 11 Aaron Y. Zelin and Andrew Lebovich, ‘Assessing Al-Qa`ida’s Presence in the New Libya’, CTC Sentinel (Vol. 5, Issue 3), March 2012 12 See the profile of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in the Mapping Militant Organizations section of the Stanford University website at 13 Machon (see note 3) p. 166. 14 Machon states that Tunworth’s initial contact had been as a ‘walk-in' at the U.K. Embassy in Tunis, where he asked to see the resident MI6 officer! (This is on page 168.) Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk include references to Tunworth and his involvement with the LIFG. However, at no point then did Shayler indicate publicly that he knew the real name of Tunworth. In her book, Machon makes reference to David Shayler both knowing and not knowing the real name. The chronology of these references in the book is back to front, and the second one relates to Shayler’s work at MI5. This comes on page 168: ‘. . . PT16/B told David that the Libyan was codenamed Tunworth. At some point in the following weeks David briefly saw the printout of MI6’s record of him. It contained around two or three separate mentions. They supported his claim to be a senior member of Libyan military intelligence but were not detailed. David checked the Libyan’s name against Durbar and STAR, MI5’s records, but the service had no trace of him. David did not make any effort to remember the name because he believed that the whole thing would come to nothing as other MI6 plots had done.’15 [Emphasis added.] Two pages before this, Machon clarifies that Shayler had current knowledge (at that time in mid-2000s) of Tunworth’s name from a new source: ‘Despite the then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook’s denials in 1998, I have now found out that intelligence officer █████████ [footnote] was MI6’s man Tunworth.’16 The footnote provided for the redaction states, ‘MI5 and MI6 censorship still prevents me from naming Tunworth.’ What one can do, however, is use the length of the redaction to give an approximate indication of the number of letters in the name.17 Doing this we can see that the redaction is between fourteen letters (at minimum) and fifteen letters (at maximum). Thus we can also tell that the name of Ramadan 15 Machon (see note 3) p. 168. I have added the emphasis to raise an interesting point. I am prepared to give Shayler the benefit of the doubt that in the late ‘90s – within a couple of years of resigning his post – he could have remembered specific details (like names and cyphers) from secret papers he had seen whilst still at MI5. What I am not able to be so generous about is the possibility that today – more than twenty years since he first went public – he claims to still have accurate recall of that same information. In the intervening time he can not have had the access to secret material on which these recent claims are founded. Also in that intervening time, much has happened to Mr Shayler that would indicate to me that his detailed memory of random facts from the late ‘90s is not something upon which one can rely very much. 16 Machon (see note 3) p. 166 – this is a direct quote from Shayler. 17 This is the same technique I used to make an educated guess at some of the redacted names on the papers of the Western union Clandestine Committee. See Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Abedi fits into less than the redacted space. This is important because memoirs written by ex-spies are prepared just like all other books. They are fully paginated first and then submitted for approval by government. If (when) the censor wields their redaction marker, the blacked out space has to fit within the other words already presented on the page. The redaction is always, therefore, of a specific length that is in direct relation to the word being censored. I do not know of any instance where such censorship is used to obfuscate the length of the words being redacted by making them seem to be longer than they are. If the name being censored were that of Ramadan Abedi, then the redaction would actually be slightly shorter. Mr Shayler ‘bigs-up’ Mr Shayler I feel I should point out that David Shayler has some form for being mendacious and opaque when discussing his career as a spook with journalists. In a 2001 interview with The Socialist he stated: ‘I can put my hand on my heart and say that I never investigated subversives. Indeed, I did the opposite and closed down the study of the Communist Party of Britain and Class War. Most of the work I did was against terrorism.’18 [Emphasis added] In a brief email discussion about this, Garrick Alder pointed out to me how Shayler here had used the term ‘the study of the Communist Party of Britain and Class War’ (hence the emphasis) and that he would seem to have been careful not to use the term ‘surveillance’. What is also immediately obvious is that any decision to have ‘closed down the study of the Communist Party of Britain and Class War’ would not have been made by Shayler himself. It would have been made at a pay grade much higher than Mr Shayler ever reached during his employment by MI5. He would merely have been following the instructions of one of his superiors.19 18 Inside Britain's Secret State: Interview with David Shayler, The Socialist, 29 June 2001 19 Note, also, how one might think he accidentally missed out the word ‘Great’ when he said ‘Communist Party of Britain’ - i.e. that he really meant ‘Communist Party of Great Britain’ (CPGB ). The Communist Party of Britain (CPB) is a different - and even smaller - entity. Shayler would have been well aware of this and he may have been making a subtle distinction rather than an error. Indeed chapter 4 of Defending the Realm: Inside MI5 and the War on Terrorism (see note 6) states that in late 1991 MI5’s F Branch were targeting the ‘Communist Party of Britain (an offshoot of the original CPGB)’. As regards the CPB, an assessment by The Financial Times scathingly said that it currently has ‘no more than a thousand’ members. See Joshua Chaffin, ‘Communist Party of Britain embraces comrade Corbyn’ in the FT, 10 May 2018. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk What is also obvious is that the monitoring was closed down because those kind of targets had become extremely unimportant. When he was ordered to close down some political spying, such activity was already well on the way out. Machon even states in her book they were told during recruitment that ‘MI5 was no longer obsessed with “reds under the bed”.’20 This indicates that David Shayler was given something of a paper-pushing task, just to keep him busy.21 Perhaps MI5’s counter accusation that he was not that good an intelligence officer might be true? Resurrection Finally, there is one thing that is ultimately most strange – that makes me sincerely doubt Shayler’s claim about Ramadan Abedi. This is that, in her book, Annie Machon stated that Tunworth was dead: ‘Our recent enquiries with Swallow Tail, a former intelligence officer who cannot be named for fear of reprisals, have confirmed that the man caught by the Libyans in the attack was the agent Tunworth. This is further confirmation that an MI6 agent, whom we know was working to Watson in London, was involved in the plot. The officer [i.e. Swallow Tail] also confirmed that █████ was either killed during the attack that February or shortly after. This rather undermines the claims of ministers that they banned the story in order to protect national security, since the agent [i.e. Tunworth] was clearly no longer at risk of reprisal and was not then providing intelligence to the British services.’22 I suppose that if one believes David Shayler’s other major recent claim – that he is the Messiah of the Second Coming – then this feat of resurrection is not that impossible. Epilogue – Contact with Shayler I contacted both David Shayler (by direct message on Twitter) and Annie Machon (via email) for comment. I received no response from Machon but Shayler did, initially, seem keen to engage. In my first message, on 5 April 2019, I put it to him that Machon’s book would seem to indicate that Tunworth 20 Machon (see note 3) p. 20. 21 Jestyn Thirkell-White, who now works for UBS in Zürich, was previously an MI5 desk officer contemporaneous to Shayler and left the service at about the same time (see his LinkedIn page at 22 Machon (see note 3) p. 254. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk died in the spring 1996 attack on Gaddafi. His response was prompt: ‘It is clear from the draft that the source misled Annie. The issue can be decided one way or the other by looking at the name on the CX report.’ He then sent me links to two articles. The first, from Cryptome,23 is mainly written by Shayler himself and rehashes the MI6/LIFG story. The second is an anonymous piece (the translator is credited but not the source) from the Voltaire Network.24 From the date of this (25 May 2017) it would would seem to be the very first time that Ramadan Abedi was linked to the Libyan Intelligence Services and MI6 – but not, N.B., outed in any way as Tunworth. Subsequent to that, he sent me another message, stating: ‘I remembered the name after my memory was jogged by an article.’ The implication being, therefore, that the Voltaire article had prompted his recall that Tunworth’s real name was Ramadan Abedi. His reliance on the Voltaire article to support his thesis is flawed because the article’s timeline for Ramadan Abedi’s involvement with MI6 contradicts that laid out by Machon in her book. There she states that, in 1995, Tunworth had travelled north-west along the African coast from Libya to Tunisia to make his initial contact with MI6 via the resident officer at the UK embassy in Tunis.25 The Voltaire article, would, however, have it that Ramadan Abedi had been an MI6 asset since 1992.26 After a couple of days, I sent him a further message. I queried his statement that it was ‘clear [. . .] that the source misled Annie’ as I could find nothing in the book that would suggest that. I also asked him how ‘The issue can be decided one way or the other by looking at the name on the CX report’. I clarified that I was confused about what he meant by ‘the name on the CX report’ because, regarding that report (CX 95/53452), he had previously been quoted as saying: ‘The name of the agent and the fact that he was involved in the plot were not made clear in the CX report as is usual in such cases.’ 27 Plus, the only two names not censored on the publicly available version of CX 95/53452 are that of Colonel Gaddafi himself and Musa Qadhaf Al-Dam (who was ‘murdered by coup plotters in June’). 23 24 25 See footnote 14. 26 Ramadan Abedi might well be an MI6 asset but, on the basis of what is said in the Voltaire article, he logically can’t be Tunworth. 27 See Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘How, then, [I asked him] can “looking at the name on the CX report” help with establishing either: (i) your claim re Ramadan Abedi or (ii) that the source “Swallow Tail” misled Annie Machon?’ Shayler’s reply: ‘Normally mi6 hide the involvement of their agents making out they are just reporting on coup plots, for example. That was how I remembered it at the time. The CX report however specifically says “in which he was involved” confirming that agent is involved not just reporting on plot. The name of the agent, ramadan abeidi,28 is obscured by the words “removed to protect tunworth’s identity”. Any enquiry can confirm from the original document that Ramadan Abeidi's name is on it Swallow Tail seems to be suggesting that abdullah radwan was the agent tunworth and that he died in the attack to deflect attention from him.’ Seeking clarification, I messaged him again: ‘Hi David. Thank you for yet another quick response. [. . . .] I’m afraid that this might be quite long but I do have a couple more things to run past you. . . . In your latest reply, you say: “Any enquiry can confirm from the original document that Ramadan Abeidi’s name is on it.” As far as I am aware, an unredacted version of CX 95/53452 has never been available in the public domain. To whom, therefore, might a member of the public make such an “enquiry”? Secondly, you said: “Swallow Tail seems to be suggesting that abdullah radwan was the agent tunworth and that he died in the attack to deflect attention from him.” I follow what you are saying here, as the previous page in the book mentions Libyan TV footage of the attack on Colonel Gadaffi and that this footage focused on the principal attacker who was named as being Abdullah Radwan. Earlier in Annie’s book (on page 166) a direct attempt to give the real name of Tunworth is censored with the usual solid block redaction. I have always thought this type of censoring – where just a few words or, even worse, a single word are blacked out – is slightly counter productive. The 28 N.B. that Shayler has misspelt the last name of 'Ramadan Abedi’ as ‘Abeidi'. Similar to the comment I made on Mr Shayler’s mispronunciation of ‘Skripal' as ‘Skirpal' (see earlier in this article) this would seem to indicate that David Shayler is not very good on the detail. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk fact that one can see roughly how many letters are missing can sometimes give an indication as to what the censored information might be. At the beginning of my first message to you, I mentioned that I occasionally write for Robin Ramsay’s Lobster Magazine. I am presuming that you know of it. I have previously had a trio of articles in Lobster that detailed an FOIA request I made to the FCO for papers from 1949-50 that were the minutes of the Western Union Clandestine Committee (which set up the nascent ‘Gladio’ networks in Europe). The only thing that the FCO insisted on redacting from those minutes were the names of the participants . . . but they left their military ranks, etc, unredacted! I was thus able to make an educated guess as to who some of those participants were. Here is the link to the article in question. Reading it will probably give you a much better understanding of what I am trying to explain! https:// www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster75/lob75-uk-foia.pdf . . . With that in mind, I can see from page 166 of Annie’s book that the redaction, censoring the direct attempt to name Tunworth, is about 15 letters long. This prompts me to suggest that, if the name being redacted were “Ramadan Abedi”, then the blacked out space would be slightly shorter but a backed out space of fifteen letters would be a perfect fit for the name “Abdullah Radwan”. I have attempted to contact Annie by email Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Jimmy Carter’s Roswell investigation Garrick Alder This is a sequel to ‘Roswell, the CIA and Dr Edgar Mitchell’ in Lobster 77.1 As a US presidential candidate in 1976, James Earl (Jimmy) Carter Jr. attended a meeting at the Pentagon in Washington D.C., the aim of which was to seek official disclosure of the truth about the 1947 ‘Roswell Incident’. The other participants in the meeting were NASA astronaut Dr Edgar Mitchell and – as revealed in Lobster 77 – Bobby Ray Inman, then a Vice Admiral. Inman was later appointed director of the National Security Agency (NSA) by President Carter himself. Approached for comment on this story, Jimmy Carter initially dodged the issue with an irrelevant response. He subsequently declined to comment when presented with another opportunity. He stated through his staff at the Carter Center, Georgia, that he would neither confirm nor deny his involvement in the matter. During research for this story, Mr Carter was identified as the ‘third man’ at the 1976 meeting by the same source who had correctly identified Admiral Inman. But, when interviewed in 2018, Admiral Inman could not be drawn on specifics of the meeting. However, enough existing information can be assembled to substantiate the same source’s claim about Carter’s involvement in Dr Mitchell’s quest for the truth. The late Dr Mitchell alluded to his companion’s identity in 2008 when he told US viewers of CNN’s Larry King Live show how he had ‘. . . asked for a meeting with the Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff which I got with another naval officer who had had many similar experiences and we told our story and this gentleman, a vice admiral, said to us, well, I don’t know about that but I’m going to find out.’ 2 (emphasis added) 1 2 See Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Like Dr Mitchell, Jimmy Carter had served in the US Navy. Mr Carter enlisted during the Second World War, and eventually retired with the rank of Lieutenant in 1961. However, Dr Mitchell misspoke when he referred to Carter’s ‘many similar [UFO] experiences’. In 1969, while serving as Governor of the state of Georgia, Mr Carter and (he now claims) ‘about 25 others’ were baffled by an incident which Mr Carter subsequently reported to the International UFO Bureau.3 Mr Carter described it as a ball of light, the apparent size of the Moon, moving through the sky before receding rapidly into the distance. As he subsequently recounted on many occasions, he did not believe he had witnessed an unearthly visitor. Carter, a keen amateur stargazer, was also adamant that his sighting did not involve any known astronomical object or atmospheric phenomenon. At the time of the 1976 meeting with Dr Mitchell and Admiral Inman, Mr Carter was exploring the American Deep State as he began his run for the White House. Following his nomination as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in July that year, Carter sought – and, surprisingly, was granted – access to key figures in the US intelligence system, who saw to it that Carter’s understanding of world affairs was greatly enhanced. As a CIA history of Carter’s candidacy summarised it: ‘On several subsequent occasions during the campaign, [Carter] expressed the hope that by being fully informed he could avoid committing himself to positions that might later embarrass him as a candidate or as president.’ 4 This shrewd move was to pay off memorably during the televised presidential debates with Gerald Ford in late 1976. During the second debate on 6 October, President Ford – never noted for his verbal dexterity – inexplicably denied that there was any Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Whether or not this harmed Ford’s prospects, it certainly allowed Carter to look more of a statesman than the incumbent to a TV audience of some 63 million. The briefings served a less obvious secondary purpose for candidate Carter, enabling him to take stock of the personalities in the intelligence community, and to personally assess their efficiency. One of those personalities 3 At the time of the incident, reports had it that Carter had been joined by ‘10 members of the Leary Lions Club’. See 4 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk was CIA Director George H. W. Bush, later to become America's 41st President, with whom Carter met on several occasions. While he was receiving briefings from Bush, Carter was careful to praise him. The CIA noted: ‘The governor [Carter] noted that Bush had previously been involved in Republican politics but added that he had “brought the CIA a good background as former UN ambassador and US representative to China.”’ 5 However, as his campaign developed, Carter pointedly claimed that the Nixon and Ford administrations had used important government positions as though they were a ‘dumping ground for unsuccessful candidates, faithful political partisans, out-of-favor White House aides and representatives of the special interests.’6 A leaked memo identified Bush as one of the loyal has-beens that Carter had in mind.7 An intriguing possibility, then, is that CIA Director Bush personally intervened to thwart Jimmy Carter’s Roswell-related inquiries in 1976. When Admiral Inman sought to release information on the 1947 Mogul balloon project to Carter and Mitchell, someone with considerable authority in the CIA told Inman that he would not be allowed to do so. Bush had abandoned his seat in the House of Representatives on behalf of President Nixon in 1970. He then became Nixon’s one-man defence team as Chairman of the Republican National Committee, before being parachuted into the CIA director’s chair by President Ford. Perhaps feeling which way the wind was blowing, Bush quit as CIA Director after just 357 days in the position, on the day of President Carter’s inauguration. By contrast, Admiral Inman – whom Carter met for the first time in 1976 with Dr Mitchell – evidently impressed Carter. In July 1977 President Carter appointed Inman as Director of the National Security Agency (NSA). The 1976 meeting with Dr Mitchell and Admiral Inman is, then, entirely congruous with candidate Carter’s ongoing exploration of the Washington D.C. intelligence circuit. Furthermore, the apparent consequence of that meeting – Inman’s new job as director of the NSA – is consistent with Carter’s search for dependable intelligence figures upon whom he could rely during his time in the Oval Office. As I have already mentioned, Jimmy Carter was asked for comment on 5 See note 4. 6 7 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk this story via the Carter Center, Georgia. In a handwritten non-sequitur, he replied: ‘In the 1960s, I (and about 25 others) saw an unidentified flying object. I never thought it was extraterrestrial.’ Carter was subsequently asked, therefore, to confirm or deny that he was the third person at the Pentagon in the 1976 meeting with Mitchell and Inman. A Carter Center spokeswoman replied on his behalf: ‘We are unable to comply with your request.’ Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk England’s forgotten uprising Anthony Frewin THE STORY of Sir William Courtenay’s populist rural uprising in Kent in the 1830s has largely been ignored by historians. This is especially remarkable as it was the last armed uprising in England and left in its wake twenty dead and many more injured. The battle between the greatly outnumbered farm labourers under Sir William’s ‘command’ and soldiers of the 45th Regiment of Foot has been described as ‘perhaps the most desperate on English soil since 1795.’1 Yes, remarkable. For instance, in a fact-rich 384-page study of the 1830s rural ‘Swing’ disturbances published in 1969,2 the writers manage to avoid mentioning Courtenay altogether; and if an account of him is not to be found there, where is it to be found? One hundred years earlier Charles Dickens had written briefly about Sir William as a ‘dangerous maniac’ in the periodical he then edited3 and thirty years before that Dickens’ literary model and mentor, William Harrison Ainsworth, had given Sir William a brief cameo appearance in his novel Rookwood.4 There were a couple of pages on Courtenay in one of Charles G Harper’s chatty road books in 18955 and then a gap of forty years before a chapter on him appeared in a volume on English ‘messiahs’ in the 1930s.6 Then silence 1 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 881. 2 E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968). 3 All the Year Round (London), xvii (1867), pp. 441-6. 4 London: Richard Bentley, 1834 (with later revisions). Rookwood is chiefly remembered today, if remembered at all, for Dick Turpin’s ride to York, an invention of Ainsworth’s, an author arguably more popular in his day than Dickens would be in his. 5 The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike (London: Chapman & Hall, 1895). It was this work that first alerted P G Rogers to the story. See further below. 6 Ronald Matthews, English Messiahs: Studies of Six English Religious Pretenders, 1656-1927 (London: Methuen & Co, 1936), Chapter IV, ‘John Nichols Tom, “The Peasants’ Saviour” (1799-1838)’, pp. 127-59. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk until P G Rogers published his account of Sir William in 1961.7 But Rogers, despite his considerable merits as a writer, was not an historian, and he presented his subject as some Victorian oddity who managed to enthrall witless farm hands by religious and political legerdemain.8 However, in 1969 an historian did come along, E. P. Thompson, but he devoted only a few paragraphs to Sir William though he does place him within the context of nineteenth century English rural dissent.9 There are a few paragraphs, too, by other historians, in 197810 and 1979,11 but paragraphs only. A standard reference on Popular Disturbances in England 1700-187012 relegates Sir William to a mere footnote while the Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals13 knows him not at all. Finally, in 1990, more than a century and a half after the events, an historian worthy of the subject came along and wrote what will probably stand as the last word on the affair.14 This was Barry Reay of the University of Auckland (yes, a New Zealander). If Rogers concentrated on Sir William to the exclusion of the labourers, Reay reversed the approach. While more than adequately examining Courtenay he shows that the labourers were not the uninformed and feckless crowd that Rogers presented, and that there were many existing factors that contributed to his messianic message finding such ready acceptance. But if the mainstream of history has passed over Sir William it is not so in the Kentish villages where he lived and died. For many years after his death 7 P. G. Rogers, Battle in Bossenden Wood: The Strange Story of Sir William Courtenay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961) 8 A more serious criticism is that Rogers frequently writes of things he cannot possibly know. That is, supposition is presented as fact. Further, his constant denigration of Sir William’s followers is inaccurate and irritating. He writes continually of, for example, ‘slow working minds’ and ‘simple Kentish yokels’ (a tautology and a double whammy!). 9 Thompson, see note 1, pp. 880-81. 10 George Rudé, Protest and Punishment: The Story of the Social and Political Protesters Transported to Australia, 1788-1868 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 120-22. 11 J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780-1850 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 213-15. 12 John Stevenson, (London: Longman, 1979), p. 244. 13 J. O. Baylen and N. J. Gossman (eds), (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979 and 1984). Two volumes. 14 Barry Reay. The Last Rising of the Agricultural Labourers: Rural Life and Protest in Nineteenth-Century England. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Reprinted (London: Breviary Stuff, 2010). Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk coloured and tinsel-bedecked pictures of him were current. Today there are Courtenay Cottages, a Courtenay Farm, a Courtenay Road, and even a used car lot, Courtenay Cars. There are souvenirs and mementoes of him in private hands. A local pub displays contemporary engravings of the affair. Mementoes are exhibited in a country house. But more than that, his memory is kept alive by the villagers themselves, amongst whom are many actual descendents of Sir William’s followers. Lest the reader think the ‘fray’ (as it was known locally) was some provincial affair without consequence, it can be noted that the national press carried full accounts. Further, there were many heated exchanges in the House of Commons regarding the uprising, including calls for the resignation of the Home Secretary in Lord Melbourne’s Whig administration, Lord John Russell; and, indeed, Select Committees examined the matter and reports were published. Why History has overlooked Sir William is one question. There are many others and not least of these is this: who really was Sir William Percy Honeywood Courtenay if he was not who he claimed to be? Who indeed? And why? He was in actuality John Nichols Tom (born 1799), a wine merchant and maltster from Truro in Cornwall, and while successful in these pursuits he suffered from ‘melancholia’ and ‘mania’ and received treatment (what these contemporary terms actually mean is hard to define), though there is no history recorded of anything delusional as was witnessed in Kent. In 1832 he sailed from Truro to Liverpool with a cargo of malt. His family heard nothing more of him for the next couple of years until he was located in Maidstone Gaol after having been found guilty of perjury. As to the why . . . POSTSCRIPT: And still it continues! Since writing the above I came across A Radical History of Britain by Edward Vallance (London: Abacus, 2010) who is described as a Reader in Early Modern History at Roehampton University, no less. Some 639 pages and, you’ve guessed, nary a mention of Courtenay. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk On getting it wrong and getting it right: Ronald Stark, LSD and the CIA David Black Is History a fiction? In his best-seller of 1991, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, the late John Bossy claimed that Bruno spied for Queen Elizabeth’s enforcer, Sir Francis Walsingham, at the French embassy in London. This was a ‘surprise’. Could the celebrated Italian humanist philosopher, who was to be burned at the stake in Rome in 1600 as a heretic, have really been engaged in such a sordid and deadly enterprise? After Bossy’s findings were strongly contested by other historians, he eventually conceded, ‘I made some claims about facts which have turned out to be unwarranted’. Of his claim that Bruno was the embassy spy, code-named ‘Henry Fagot’, Bossy wrote, ‘I thought so at the time, but have turned out to be mistaken’. Bossy, however, had dragged a lot of fascinating material out of the archives and into the public domain. After all, the embarrassment of having one’s errors pointed out is, or should be, outweighed by the exhilaration of making new discoveries. Bossy held to his conviction that ‘the duty of a historian is to tell true stories about the past’. That’s how you do history. Or is it? In postmodernist theory, historical ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ are seen as merely representing rival claims to power. Whenever history becomes a story – i.e. something contrived by a story-teller – it assumes the same status as a work of fiction, which can make no claim to be the ‘truth’; and the power of story-telling is determined by the audience’s desire to know that what is said is the truth. But, as history has shown all too often, the desires of mass audiences can be deflected and manipulated by powerful interests. Take, for example, the conspiracy theory which holds that the psychedelic counter-culture of the 1960s was engineered by the CIA as part of a plot by a secret, global elite bent on mass mind-control. Variations of it have found favour on both sides of the political spectrum. For the Right, the psychedelic counter-culture undermined ‘traditional values’ such as patriarchy, nationalism and subservience to authority; for Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk elements of the Left, the 1960s hedonism of ‘Sex, Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll’ served as a distraction from political struggle and party discipline. To flesh out the theory, extra villains have been thrown in: Satanists, MI6, shrinks of the Tavistock Institute, the Grateful Dead, and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (whose Marxist musicologist, Theodor Adorno, is said to have secretly tutored the Beatles during their ‘Hamburg period’), etc., etc. My book of 2001, Acid: A New Secret History of LSD, has been referenced and quoted by a number of writers who promote this stuff. Regarding this as a dubious honour, I sought in my first ebook, Acid Outlaws: LSD, Counter-Culture and Counter-Revolution (first edition, August 2019),1 to further distance my research from the conspiracy theories. But, as I will explain, I now know that I need to do more. The CIA and LSD Because the CIA destroyed the operational files of its MK-Ultra ‘mind- control’ project in 1973, the extent of the Agency’s involvement in the psychedelic counter-culture of the 1960s has always been difficult to determine. Nonetheless, leading figures of the counter-culture, notably ‘LSD Guru’ Timothy Leary, can hardly be discussed without reference to the CIA – not least because Leary had so much to say about it himself. In contrast to Leary, who courted publicity throughout his life (1920-96), Ronald Hadley Stark (1938-84), lived by secrecy and deception; he was, after all, running some of world’s most productive underground LSD factories in the late 1960s and early 1970s. My initial primary source for researching Stark was another American, Steve Abrams (1938-2012). When he first met Stark in London in 1969, Abrams had already encountered the CIA when his research at Oxford University into extra-sensory perception turned out to have received funding from a CIA front called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. Abrams’ later research into THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the main psychoactive part of cannabis) attracted the attention of the globe-trotting Ronald Stark. Abrams got to know Stark quite well and began to suspect that he was connected with either the CIA, the Mafia, or both. Stark’s subsequent mis-adventures appeared to confirm Abrams’ suspicions about a CIA connection. The first to voice such suspicions publicly was actually Detective Inspector Richard Lee, head of the Operation Julie squad. On 26 March 1977, Lee mobilised 800 officers in England and Wales to arrest 130 1 Available at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk hippies suspected of LSD manufacture and distribution. Operation Julie’s number one target, the brilliant chemist and psychedelic revolutionary, Richard Kemp, had been employed by Stark to make LSD at Stark’s laboratories in Paris and Orleans. Stark was also chemicals procurer and money-launderer for the Leary-inspired Brotherhood of Eternal Love. After learning that Stark was in prison in Italy, Lee wanted to go and interview him but had been refused permission from ‘on-high’. Lee felt his efforts to follow the international trails of the British LSD underground were being frustrated by an ‘establishment’/security services ‘cover-up’. Lee’s book, Operation Julie: How the Undercover Police Team Smashed the World's Greatest Drugs Ring, was published in 1978. Events the following year seemed to confirm Lee’s suspicions. When Stark was imprisoned in Italy in 1975, he presented himself to fellow inmates of the terrorist Red Brigades as a Palestinian freedom fighter. He also told them he had contacts with armed groups in Lebanon (which was true: armed Shiite groups in Baalbek had supplied plane-loads of hash to Stark and his colleagues in the Brotherhood of Eternal Love). Stark, however, became a jail-yard snitch, passing information about the Red Brigades inmates to the Carabinieri and security services. In March 1979, Stark used a get-out-jail-free card in an Italian appeals court. Judge Giorgio Floridia described documents provided by Stark as ‘an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs’ that Stark ‘had entered the Middle East drug world in order to infiltrate armed organisations operating in that area and to gain contacts and information about European terrorist groups’. Stark couldn’t, of course, say if he was CIA: to admit it would be breaking US law. Released on bail, Stark took flight and disappeared. He was next heard of in 1982, when he was busted for trafficking drugs in Amsterdam. Post-1979 books highlight evidence and/or suspicions that Stark’s involvement in LSD production was either part of a CIA operation, or tolerated by the agency as long as Stark was in a position to supply intelligence. The parapolitical ‘classics’ in this field are: • Stewart Tendler and David May, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love: From Flower Power to Hippie Mafia - The Story of the LSD Counterculture (London: Cyan Communications, 1984; updated edition, updated edition 2007). • Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD, the CIA, the Sixties and Beyond (New York: Grove Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk • Press, 1985).2 • Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (London: Constable, 1991 By the 1980s the Italian media were awash with stories of both real and imagined conspiracies at the heart of the corrupt Italian state. Following the kidnap and assassination of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978, a parliamentary commission set up to investigate the affair asked whether the CIA and agents of the Italian secret state sabotaged the hunt to rescue Moro from the ‘People’s Prison’; or worse, actually had a hand in the deed itself. Also there were suspicions, following Judge Florida’s pronouncement, that Ronald Stark was in some way involved. According to the Moro Commission Report of early 1984: ‘The US authorities have never admitted that Stark was an American agent, and moreover affirmed that they were seeking his arrest. However, no request for his extradition was ever made, while his cordial relations with other American officials are documented, both during his imprisonment and the period before his arrest’. In May 1984, Stark, still a free man, died in the US of a cocaine- induced heart attack. Tim Scully I sent a copy of my Acid Outlaws to Tim Scully, who was a most significant actor in the events unfolded in this story. Not only did he know Ronald Stark but he is also, as it turns out, a very reliable witness. In 1966, aged just 22, Scully was taken on as apprentice by the famous LSD chemist Owsley Stanley (AKA Bear Stanley) at a laboratory in Point Richmond, California. As well as making LSD, Scully and Bear Stanley worked for the Grateful Dead, providing the band with pioneering electronic gear, and participating in the ‘Acid tests’. After LSD production was banned in various US states in 1966 and 1967, Bear Stanley retired; but Scully, who was a true believer in the power of LSD to revolutionise the world, carried on. Based in Windsor, California, Scully and fellow chemist Nick Sand (1941-2017) produced 3.6 million ‘Orange Sunshine’ trips for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. (The Brotherhood have been labelled, somewhat unfairly, by authors Tendler and May as the ‘Hippie Mafia’). In 1970 Scully withdrew from LSD production but he was still 2 Available as a free PDF at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk arrested in the roundup of Brotherhood members by the FBI and DEA that took place in 1973. He was subsequently sentenced to twenty years imprisonment – later reduced to ten. Nick Sand jumped bail, fled to Canada and carried on producing LSD for another 20 years. Scully was paroled in late 1979 and began a new successful career in computers, designing among other things biofeedback and interface systems for people with disabilities. Now retired, he is developing a project on the history of underground LSD manufacturing, and working on his memoirs. In correspondence with me, Scully, pointed to a number of errors in my book regarding Stark and events in the USA. Scully’s observations and the information he provided threw me into a new bout of research and fact-checking. Generously, he has given me permission to quote some of his material. For the second edition of Acid Outlaws I have reworked and extended those sections which deal with Stark and with LSD production in the US from the mid-1960s to the early ‘70s. Crucially, Scully has provided enough of a glimpse of Stark to pose some questions anew, and draw some new conclusions. Who was Ronald Stark? Judge Floridia’s statement about an ‘impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs’ supporting Stark’s claim to have been a spook all along can only be doubted if we allow for the possibility that the judge was corrupt (for which there is no evidence), or that he was fooled. If the evidence on which Floridia made his decision is discounted, then what remains is the following: 1) statements by Stark’s associates about his own claims to have had ‘CIA connections’; 2) suspicions held by the British Operation Julie police, Italian investigative journalists and others about Stark’s US Embassy contacts in London and elsewhere; 3) conjectures concerning Stark’s activities and the people he was associated with: Californian psychedelic revolutionaries, Italian terrorists, English anarchists, Arab revolutionaries, Afghan hash-smugglers, Timothy Leary’s milieu, etc., etc. – precisely the sort of people the CIA would be interested in. But none of this intriguing stuff amounts to solid, corroborated evidence. Tim Scully thinks the judge was fooled; and for that there is evidence. Stark could act the part – he could charm – and, most importantly, was very good at faking documentation. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk So why did Stark, after he was deported from Holland back to the US in 1982, never have to answer outstanding charges relating to LSD, money-laundering and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love? The answer, according to Scully, is that Stark had it planned all along: feed the Italians enough bullshit to get out of prison, and stay incognito and free until the statute of limitations ran out for the charges in the US. Though it is possible – even likely – that Stark had dealings with people connected with the CIA, I suspect that if CIA agents had ever tried to do business with him or recruit him, he would have endeavoured to fool them just like he fooled so many others. As Scully says, ‘Ron Stark was a very charming, playful, very intelligent pathological liar and con artist. He fooled me for many years.’ And, beyond the grave, Stark’s legend has continued to fool people, including me. A more complete picture of the trickster has to be left to Tim Scully, who hopes – after he has completed his memoirs – to eventually write a biography of Stark. Most of the factual content of the first edition of Acid Outlaws generally still stands, but now there are more facts to consider. The new light they shed dissolves the previous ‘bigger picture’ of Stark’s activities as tolerated or driven by CIA. What emerges from the fog of information wars is a new perspective on Stark, no less fascinating or disturbing: Stark as trickster who could fool almost anyone. I say ‘almost’ because Steve Abrams told me about an LSD tripping contest between Stark and the psychiatrist R. D. Laing in 1970, which Stark lost. At the peak of the trip Stark tried to ‘recruit’ the Glaswegian doctor to front his criminal enterprise. Laing told him ‘Get the fuck out of my house’ and threw him out into the street. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Spandau blood Andrew Rosthorn My article in Lobster 77 (February 2019) asked whether a DNA test had really ‘solved the Rudolf Hess doppelgänger mystery’, as was claimed by a group of thirteen American and Austrian researchers.1 In response to my question, the lead author of their research paper, Dr Sherman McCall MD, PhD (Cantab), a retired US Medical Corps colonel, formerly resident at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC and at the US Army Medical Research Center, Fort Detrick, Maryland, emailed the editor on 26 April: ‘It is unfortunate that the authors did not first contact us. They make some objections which a DNA scientist, but not a layman, would recognize as unwarranted. With all due respect to the authors, they also make erroneous assumptions based in part on misstatements in the popular press. This combination of errors produce an impression of uncertainty about the results which does not exist. Would you publish a rebuttal?’ 2 Lobster accepted Dr Sherman’s offer but nothing further has been heard from him or from any of the co-authors of the research paper.3 The highly prominent magazine New Scientist had announced the research by Dr Sherman et al. in an article on 22 January 2019, with the headline: ‘Exclusive: DNA solves Rudolf Hess doppelgänger conspiracy theory’.4 New Scientist stated on 22 January 2019: ‘Adolf Hitler’s deputy flew to Scotland in 1941 and was imprisoned for the rest of his life. But was the man in Spandau really Rudolf 1 2 Email to Lobster. 3 ‘Rudolf Hess – The Doppelgänger conspiracy theory disproved’, in Forensic Science International: Genetics vol. 40 [2019] 4 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Hess? Now a DNA test has revealed the truth.’ The reported match between a ‘routine’ Hess blood sample (which had been taken by US Army doctor inside the prison in Berlin in 1982) with a sample donated thirty years later by an unnamed member of Rudolf Hess’s Bavarian family was soon challenged by two retired doctors. Both doctors drew on their experience as army officers at Spandau, where they had been entrusted by the British Army with the medical care of Allied Prisoner Number Seven – the man who had been tried and convicted of crimes against peace by the Nuremberg Tribunal as Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess. One doctor was the prisoner’s dentist and the other was his consulting surgeon. Dr Hans Eirew, a pioneering orthodontist from Manchester, was dental officer at the Berlin Military Hospital in 1950. The Daily Telegraph chose not to publish his 2019 letter to the editor: ‘Sir, During 1950/51 I was the British Army dental officer at Berlin military hospital. One of my responsibilities was the dental care of the war criminals at Spandau jail. I had to extract a left upper molar for the very weird prisoner introduced as Rudolf Hess, at his insistence standing up and without pain killing injection. Later I had access to the full official Nazi party medical records for the real Rudolf Hess, going back to his gunshot wounds in WW1. They showed that he had lost his upper left molar teeth early and had an artificial metal bridge where I was deemed to have extracted a tooth. My suspicions were supported by the fact that the other prisoners appeared to have very little contact with No.7 Hess. I am in full support of Dr Hugh Thomas, who was then the most tested army gunshot expert with wide experience in Northern Ireland and who provided medical evidence that the man at Spandau was a “ringer”. Dr H L Eirew’ 5 Hugh Thomas, FRCS Ed., FRCSC [C] MD, consultant in general surgery at the Berlin Military Hospital in 1972, has written two books questioning the 5 Email from Eirew to author, 25 January 2019. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk identity of Prisoner Number Seven.6 Although Dr Eirew died in Manchester on 10 October 2019, both he and Mr Thomas had already complained that neither the New Scientist, nor the authors of the research paper, offered any explanation for how a US Army doctor came to be giving routine personal medical care to Prisoner Number Seven in Spandau when the medical care of the prisoners had never been the responsibility of the US Army. I sent their questions to Emily Wilson, editor of New Scientist, in the hope that ‘the world’s leading science and technology weekly magazine’ might undertake the gathering of some answers. Like Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, broadcasting to the nation on 3 September 1939, I have to tell readers of this magazine that no such undertaking has been received. Abdallah Melaouhi was the full-time Tunisian nurse who cared for the prisoner Hess in the five years between 1 August 1982, and 17 August 1987. According to Dr Sherman and his colleagues, a junior American doctor at Spandau Prison had taken a blood sample from Hess in December 1982 – and had done so in the absence of the nurse. I told New Scientist on 14 October that Thomas and Eirew were saying that this could not have happened without Melaouhi being present. Thomas doubted that DNA extracted from a 20th century blood smear taken in the prison in Berlin, degraded during an 8-hour journey to Heidelberg for analysis and later regularly exposed to ultraviolet light during thirty years in use as a teaching aid in an American hospital, could have been examined by 21st century Austrian technicians and found to be remarkably well-preserved. Neither New Scientist nor Forensic Science International: Genetics has explained how, or even why, the blood sample was taken by the ‘US Army doctor, Phillip Pittman, as part of a routine health check’. The Austro-American research paper states: ‘In the course of normal clinical care, one of the authors drew a blood sample from prisoner Spandau #7 upon which a Coulter® blood count was performed on December 15th, 1982.’ 7 In 1982 particles in blood could be counted and sized on American- 6 Hugh Thomas, The Murder of Rudolf Hess, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979) and Hess: A Tale of Two Murders (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988). 7 See footnote 3. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk designed Coulter Counters 8 at both the British and American military hospitals in Berlin. Yet the American doctor chose to use a Coulter Counter at a US Army medical unit 650 kilometres away from Spandau. Hugh Thomas complains that the research paper gives no reason for using such a remote medical facility and does not offer any ethical or medical reason for the taking of a blood sample from the prisoner in 1982. Coulter Counter Model S- Plus Jr Cell Counter, the type available in 1982. Both Thomas and Eirew pointed out that ‘normal clinical care’ of the prisoner was never an American responsibility. Dr Eirew stated: ‘I can confirm that only British medical personnel had access to the prisoners at Spandau for medical care or treatment. I cannot visualise an American doctor obtaining access. Prisoner No 7 did not permit me to give him a pain preventing injection for the traumatic extraction of his molar tooth. He made it absolutely clear to me that nobody at the prison would be permitted to inject him for any purpose as he feared that we were out to kill him. Before the extraction I stressed that it would be most painful, but 8 ‘Based on the Coulter principle, the Coulter Counter quantifies and sizes particles suspended in a fluid, like blood cells, bacteria, and a wide variety of other substances. The instrument works by drawing liquid containing the particles through a channel, where each particle releases an electrical charge that is measured and counted. The Coulter principle was discovered by Wallace H Coulter in the late 1940s and patented in 1953.’ Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk he was prepared to accept this. In these circumstances, I cannot believe that he would permit blood to be taken by anybody.’ 9 Although the task of guarding the Spandau prisoners rotated monthly between the armies of the four allied powers, the medical care of the prisoners remained, at all times, a British responsibility. The prison lay in the British sector of Berlin close to the British Military Hospital. The BMH handled both routine and emergency medical care at Spandau. The prison warders, along with the lonely prisoner’s own personal Tunisian nurse, were not military personnel and the American, French, Soviet Russian and British military guards had no direct role in the medical care. Hugh Thomas has complained that the published research paper gave no description of the taking of the blood sample: ‘I can certify that by that stage No. 7 had to be physically supported at all times by his warder, who also had to observe and record visits and procedures. There is no mention of this in the description of Dr Pittman’s routine health check. Any attempt to take blood would not have passed muster with prison security and the warders. The discovery of any attempt to take No. 7’s blood in such a fashion would have risked both a criminal prosecution and an international incident.’ 10 The unanswered questions posed by the two doctors are: 1. Why does the research paper give no date or time for the taking of the blood sample in Spandau? 2. Who gave Dr Pittman permission to take a blood sample from Prisoner Seven?11 3. Why was the taking of the blood sample not witnessed by the 9 Email: Eirew to author, 16 August 2019. 10 Email to editor of Lobster. 11 ‘All necessary tests and invasive procedures were only carried out by the British and only after agreement had been reached by the Four Powers. No single physician or surgeon from any of the four powers was allowed to examine the prisoner unless agreed under the four powers legislation and witnessed by representatives of the other four powers, accompanied by a commanding officer. Minor ailments were assessed by a nurse.’ Email to author from Hugh Thomas, 4 August 2019. Minutes of the meetings of the physicians of the Spandau Allied Prison 1947-1987 are at the US National Library of Medicine, Bethesda MD 20894 at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk prisoner’s nurse or recorded by the four powers administering the prison in December 1982? The date means that it allegedly took place during the German festive season, at a time when the prisoner is recorded as being particularly frail and disturbed after an earlier fall and described as ‘moaning and screaming' at any attempted physical handling or disturbance? 4. How long did it take the American doctor to get the blood sample from Berlin to the Coulter Counter at the US Army Medical Facility in Heidelberg? This is 650km away from Berlin, eight hours by car through East Germany in 1982. 5. Why did Dr Pittman, a young toxicological researcher without access to the medical notes of Prisoner 7, not make use of Coulter Counters at the British and American military hospitals in Berlin, where expert haematologists and official consultants were available? 6. Why was the analysis of the blood smear, naturally degraded after eight hours in transit to Heidelberg, not aborted on the US Army Coulter Counter at Heidelberg Meddac for lack of the accession code invariably required by the Coulter system to avoid identity fraud?12 7. Why did excessive haemolysis and cell damage of the blood smear at Heidelberg not breach the rules that were posted in all hospitals using Coulter Counters? (Those rules stated that the use of Coulter Counters was prohibited in the testing of bloods samples that were more more than 24 hours old.) 8. Why is there no reference in the report to an accession code, or the numerically sequenced and dated final report that a Coulter Counter would have routinely delivered, thus leaving the provenance of the slide to depend on a faded and undated slip from the American medical facility? 9. Whose name was given as the attending physician under the Coulter 12 ‘The Coulter Counter security system was designed to prevent misuse and criminal identity fraud. The system limited the use of degraded blood specimens to avoid misdiagnosis from excessive haemolysis and cell damage. A dark colour in the supernatant during the very first wash would immediately suggest that the Coulter Counter was likely to abort the test. The system would record reasons for rejection, such as “outside range of haemolysis”, “fragile small WBCs”. “RBC anomalous cell fragments” and “danger of false diagnosis”. The system would then give a warning before aborting and suggesting submission of a fresh blood specimen. A truncated numerical code would indicate that the test had ceased. Since each attempted test was recorded, the record of any failed attempt would have been sent to a laboratory information service and retained for seven years.’ – Information from a British pathologist, 2019. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Counter accession code system?13 10. Does the note in the research paper under the rubric ‘ethical considerations’ (claiming that the Coulter Counter procedure had been carried out under ‘US military jurisdiction’) suggest that the taking and testing of that sample would have been both unethical and irregular under the Berlin four power legislation?14 11. In offering an ethical reason for investigating the blood of Prisoner Seven, why have the authors of the research paper surmised that ‘several legible numbers on the lab slip indicate an anaemia work-up’ when the Coulter Counters available in December 1982, models S Plus II and S Plus III, would not have supported that type of haematological disease investigation?15 12. Since both Dr Eirew and Mr Thomas were on record as having been dentist and consultant surgeon to Prisoner Number Seven, why were they not consulted by the authors of the research paper? 16 13. Why have the Austrian scientists not disclosed the identity of the matching donor or the manner of the taking of that reference sample? 13 The accession code for the Coulter Counters required ‘handwritten entries for the actual date, time of collection, personal identification number or medical record number, with the initials or personal identification number of the person procuring the specimen to be made on the specimen label. Insufficient information on a specimen label would result in the specimen being re-collected [refused]. Without an accession code or a dated final report there is no proof that any test was even attempted at Heidelberg.’ – Information from a British pathologist, 2019. 14 ‘The blood sample from prisoner Spandau #7 was taken by one of the authors during regular medical care measures (including the preparation of the slide sample and Coulter Counter® analysis) under US military jurisdiction.’ Forensic Science International: Genetics, vol. 40, ‘Rudolf Hess – The Doppelgänger conspiracy theory disproved’ at 15 An extended numerical anaemia workup code would not have been recognised until the arrival of the Coulter model VC counter in 1985. The limitations of the S Plus II and S Plus III counters were reported by the Journal of Clinical Pathology and by the manufacturers. The Coulter Corporation introduced Volume Conductivity and Scatter (VCS) to analyse cells in their ‘near-native’ state with the VC model in 1985, thereby delivering ‘integration of flow cytometry into a hematology analyser’ to permit reliable haematological analysis. 16 The British authorities, pioneers of DNA profiling, had access to reliable DNA tissue samples from the prisoner, sent after his death to a British laboratory by the Senior Honorary Consultant in Forensic Medicine to the Armed Forces, Professor J. M. Cameron of London University (who carried out the autopsy on Hess). Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk 14. Why does the printing on the undated label of the blood slide from Heidelberg (below) appear much superior to the quality achieved by printers available in 1982, printers which rarely achieved much more than 76 dots per inch? 15. Why were the Austrian scientists able to describe the blood smear as ‘remarkably fresh’ when modern research has identified extensive morphological and fragility changes in blood retained for laboratory analysis in ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA)?17 The smear that was found in Austria to be ‘remarkably fresh’ was not only thirty years old but had presumably been exposed many times to ultraviolet light when used ‘for teaching purposes’ by the pathologist Rick Wahl at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC. 16. Why was no DNA sample taken from the most obvious living descendant of Rudolf Hess, his grandson Wolf Andreas Hess? 17. Was the DNA reference sample provided by a male member of the Hess family – and claimed to in an unbroken collateral paternal line to Rudolf – actually taken by independent researchers (as stated in the Austrian report) or was the reference sample left in the custody of the 17 Metabolomic Quality Assessment of EDTA Plasma and Serum Samples Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Hess family at any time?18 18 Forensic Science International: Genetics, vol. 40, ‘Rudolf Hess – The Doppelgänger conspiracy theory disproved’ at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Bad News Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief Greg Philo, Mike Berry, Justin Schlosberg, Antony Lerman and David Miller London: Pluto Press, 2019, p/b £14.99, h/b £75.001 John Booth Perhaps it was inevitable that the September launch of this book on Labour Party strife during its annual conference in Brighton should itself become embroiled in controversy. Hoping to hear and question the academic authors when they appeared in the city’s Waterstones store, I purchased my ticket, only to learn the following day that the bookstore’s London HQ had ordered the event’s cancellation. At the hastily arranged alternative gathering the audience, one including several Brighton Waterstones employees, we were told that threats and cancellation of venues had become a regular feature of Brighton political life, especially if events focused on Labour and anti- semitism2 or if the scheduled speaker was the then Derby North MP Chris Williamson.3 There was little media coverage of the cancellation and it will be interesting to see how much review attention is paid to the book itself. The five authors deserve it given the public prominence of ‘Labour anti- semitism’ since Jeremy Corbyn became leader in September 2015. But as their research indicates, fair, full and balanced attention to the subject has been little in evidence these past four years, so I’m not holding my breath. The authors preface their work by describing how they commissioned a national poll and focus groups to measure public perceptions of Labour. ‘The results showed that on average people believed that a third of Labour 1 ISBN 978 0 7453 4065 4 Hardback; ISBN 978 0 7453 4066 1 Paperback; ISBN 978 1 7868 0571 3 PDF eBook; ISBN 978 1 7868 0573 7 Kindle eBook; ISBN 978 1 7868 0572 0 EPUB eBook 2 For consistency in the text I have spelled the word ‘anti-semitism’ using lower case with a hyphen except when quoting headlines and other sources who, like the authors in the book title, have adopted different styles. In some cases it may be necessary to copy and paste web links into your search engine. 3 Chris Williamson was suspended from Labour membership and thus could not stand for re-election as a Party representative in his native Derby. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Party members had been reported for anti-semitism,’ they say. In March 2019 the actual figures published by the Labour Party of cases it investigated related to 0.1 per cent of the membership. Greg Philo and Mike Berry examine how that grossly distorted public perception of the actual situation came about. Justin Schlosberg looks into media coverage of Labour and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition and Antony Lerman describes its history and evaluates the accusation that the party is ‘institutionally anti-semitic’. David Miller briefly describes the political repercussions of speaking about the IHRA definition in a personal case study. The appendix details chronologically the major controversies affecting Labour from the beginning of the party leadership election in 2015 until its referral to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission in May 2019 following submissions made by the Campaign Against Antisemitism and the Jewish Labour Movement. Philo and Berry write: ‘A search of eight national newspapers shows that from 15 June 2015 to 31 March 2019, there had been 5497 stories on the subject of Corbyn, anti-semitism and the Labour Party. The issue was also extensively featured on television and in new and social media. These headlines give a sense of the accusations that were being made: “Labour Party is Anti-Semitic and Racist” (LBC, 18 February 2019) “Jeremy Corbyn, the anti-racist who turned Labour into the party of anti-Semitism” (Sun, 18 July 2018) “Chuka Umunna condemns ‘nasty, bullying and racist’ Labour Party” (Evening Standard, 19 March 2019)”’. They say that in both their national poll conducted by Survation and in focus groups in different parts of the United Kingdom the public perception of this highly exaggerated proportion of ‘anti-semitic’ Labour members was due to the ‘volume of coverage and the persistence of the theme in reporting’. Why didn’t Labour effectively counter the allegation that it wasn’t acting against anti-semitism? Because, say Philo and Berry, the standard public relation response to such a situation was not possible as many of the allegations were coming from within its own party: too many of its leading lights were busily scoring own goals. In addition to the party’s then deputy leader Tom Watson, these Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk included regular Corbyn-critical MPs Margaret Hodge, Ruth Smeeth, Louise Ellman, Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger, Mike Gapes, Wes Streeting, Frank Field, Joan Ryan, Stella Creasy and John Mann; former Labour Party General Secretary Lord Triesman; New Labour figures including Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and their respective funding organisers, Lords Levy and Mendelsohn; as well as fellow peers Mandelson, Hain, Reid, Blunkett, Hughes, Cunningham and Winston. In July 2019 these were among 64 Labour Lords who placed a Guardian advertisement attacking Corbyn over alleged anti-semitism. Included in their number was Lord McNicol, the man who until the previous year had been Labour General Secretary.4 Labour also suffered from stories bearing headlines like this one in the Evening Standard on February 25 2019: ‘Momentum founder and Corbyn ally Jon Lansman: Labour has “major problem” with anti-Semitism’. So when those said to be supporters of Corbyn’s leadership joined his many critics, then no refutation effort was likely to be successful. Schlosberg has important insights into the ways media outlets covered the protracted process by which Labour adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of anti- semitism and its controversial examples. He says: ‘The [consequence] was not just that the coverage leaned in favour of a particular point of view, but that the ascendant narrative was based on a fundamentally false premise.’ He adds: ‘The IHRA definition did not have consensual support by any measure. Prevailing academic and legal opinion had been strongly critical of the definition since its earliest formulation.’ In March 2018 the IHRA itself confirmed that just eight countries had adopted its definition. But this did not prevent Sky News anchors describing the IHRA definition as ‘widely accepted’ while Jonathan Freedland, in his Guardian column, referred to the ‘nearly universally accepted’ definition of anti-semitism. 4 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Schlosberg concludes: ‘But it was BBC television which performed the worst in this respect, its anchors and presenters repeatedly asserting the universal quality of the definition.’ Lerman’s chapter on the history and formulation of the IHRA and his forensic response to the accusation of Labour ‘institutional anti-semitism’ is worth the price of the book in itself. The former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research says the politicisation of anti-semitism is now new. ‘I first started writing about the use and abuse of anti-semitism in Jewish communal politics back in 1985 and was, to say the least, not thanked by official communal bodies for doing so. But even after almost 40 years engagement in studying contemporary anti-semitism, it was clear to me that this level of politicisation, going well beyond the organised Jewish community, was unprecedented in its reach and ferocity.’ He cites Umunna as one example among many of those seeking to gain political advantage by this means. He was a Labour member of the cross- party Commons Home Affairs Committee that found in October 2016 ‘no reliable, empirical evidence to support of the notion that there is a higher prevalence of anti-semitic attitudes within the Labour Party than any other political party’. The same month Umunna told the online site Labour List: ‘Some have suggested that there is institutional anti-semitism across the whole of the Labour Party, this is not a view I share, not least because I have not seen one incident of anti-semitism in almost 20 years of activism within my local Labour party in Lambeth.’ Yet in February 2019 the then South London MP tells Sky News: ‘I’ve been very clear, the Labour Party is institutionally anti-semitic, and you either put your head in the sand and you ignore it or you actually do something about it.’ Over those 28 months Umunna switched from Labour to found Change UK and, at the time of writing, is a LibDem front-bench foreign affairs spokesman seeking election in the Cities and Westminster constituency. In his demolition of the Labour ‘institutionally anti-semitic’ charge Lerman asks whether Jewish Labour Party members experience and suffer discrimination. Clearly not at the top of the party, he says, as in 2010 the two front-runners to succeed Brown as leader were ‘Ed and David Miliband, Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk both self-identifying Jews’. Is there then discrimination in parliamentary representation? Lerman answers: ‘Eleven of the party’s 261 MPs elected in 2017 were Jewish. The UK Jewish population makes up approximately 0.5 per cent of the total population (Board of Deputies, 2014), which means Jewish MPs were overrepresented in the Parliamentary Labour Party by a factor of 4.’ In his concluding remarks Lerman says that ‘. . . very much at the heart of the anti-semitism controversies in the party is a Jew-on-Jew war; a battle between members who identify themselves as Zionists and those who do not. Some of the most controversial cases of alleged anti-semitism involve Jews. Some of the most vociferous opponents of Corbyn’s leadership are Jews; some of his most loyal and ardent supporters are Jews.’ He adds: ‘It’s no secret that the bitter arguments about Jewish factions in the party are, at root, about the rights and wrongs of the Israel-Palestine conflict.’ I don’t think that’s quite the whole story as I shall explain, but coming from someone with Lerman’s expertise it’s a significant statement, one rarely mentioned, even less examined, in the mainstream media. Likewise little attention is paid to events such as the one described by Miller after he addressed a small London meeting of Palestinian students in late 2018. The repercussions, he writes, included denunciation by the Jewish Chronicle (JC) for anti-semitic statements; anonymous emails sent to colleagues at the University of Bristol denouncing him as an anti-semite; being subject to a complaint to the Labour Party for breaching IHRA guidelines by describing the foundation of Israel as a ‘racist endeavour’ and for being ‘part of the reason that the JC denounced the Corbyn-led Labour Party for failing to tackle anti-semitism because I was not expelled from the party’. Anyone paying even limited attention to the ‘Labour anti-semitism’ issue since Corbyn became leader will recognize this pattern of abuse usefully detailed in this book’s appendix in timeline form. Bad News for Labour provokes some wider observations than the academic authors themselves allow. One is to go beyond Lerman’s thorough dissection of the IHRA furore to see it as one of the key elements Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk in the propaganda initiatives of Israel and its supporters in this ‘war on terror’ century. As I touched upon in Lobster 74 5 there is a large network of Israel support in the media, both in its ownership and its personnel. This includes Rupert Murdoch with his News Corp operation, the Barclay brothers with the Telegraph Group and The Spectator, the DMG Media (formerly Associated Newspapers), the Express titles, now owned by Trinity Mirror – all with their influential online outlets. To Lerman’s recognition of the disproportionately high ratio of Labour MPs who are Jewish to the population at large we can add a similar picture when it comes to journalists prominent in the coverage of ‘Labour anti- semitism’. At the BBC we have presenters Nick Robinson, Emily Maitlis, Jo Coburn and Emma Barnett plus the regular slots given to Jonathan Freedland, Melanie Phillips and David Aaronovitch. The last occupied a senior editorial position at the corporation when he moved with John Birt and others, including current director of editorial policy and standards David Jordan, from London Weekend Television in the mid-1980s. Their LWT colleague Peter Mandelson became a BBC consultant on resigning as Labour’s director of communications after being selected as parliamentary candidate in Hartlepool. His subsequent New Labour Cabinet colleague James Purnell, a former chair of Labour Friends of Israel when a New Labour MP, is now the BBC director of radio and education. Former BBC political editor Robert Peston now occupies the same senior position at ITN. In addition to The Guardian/Observer’s long list of staff and freelance columnists critical of Corbyn for his alleged anti-semitism, is former Jewish Chronicle reporter Jessica Elgot, now the paper’s chief political correspondent. Jerusalem-born former Evening Standard journalist Mira Bar-Hillel says her UK-based Jewish colleagues are reluctant to speak out against Israel ‘for fear of retribution’.6 To what she says about Jewish journalists can be added what former Guardian reporter Nick Davies writes of the wider profession in Flat Earth 5 6 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk News.7 ‘Journalists who write stories which offend the politics of the Israel lobby are subjected to a campaign of formal complaints and pressure on their editors; most of all, they are inundated with letters and emails which can be extravagant in their hostility,’ he writes. ‘Robert Fisk of The Independent has been told that his mother was Adolf Eichmann’s daughter, that he belongs in hell with Osama bin Laden, that he is a “hate peddler”, “a leading anti-semite and proto- fascist Islamophile propagandist” and a paedophile.’ Beyond media ownership and the practices and views of individual journalists lie the organisational structures of the media from those who become editors such as James Harding both with the BBC and Murdoch8 to those who handle the copy and material seen by readers and viewers. Here, for example, is what can happen to Fisk’s copy before it reaches his audience. This is an extract from a 1998 ‘Memo to all subs’ from a senior executive at The Independent to those sub-editing the Middle East correspondent’s copy: ‘Fisk wins awards on an annual basis for stories that stand as he has written them, not for stories that are changed in an uninformed way. Can you please check with the desk if you have a query about something he has written. A slightly different point: he recently lost a paragraph in the Alois Bruner [sic] story that said: “Israel has taken no steps to punish the plain-clothes Israeli agents who systematically murdered captured Egyptian soldiers, shooting them in the head after forcing them to dig their own graves during the 1956 Suez war.” The fact that this par was removed raised suspicions of ideological rather than journalistic subbing. Fisk was making a point about murderous agents who have escaped retribution. He gave lots of examples from many countries. It was hard to see why this par was singled out for cutting. Similarly, Israeli assassins were referred to as ‘heroes’ in a recent headline.’ 7 8 James Harding moved from the editorship of The Times in 2012 to become the BBC’s director of news and current affairs. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Fisk had left The Times for The Independent 10 years earlier in part because of the way his copy was changed by executives to suit the wishes of Murdoch over coverage of Israel and the United States.9 An example of the way editors can be pressured was shown to the New Statesman in the heyday of New Labour in January 2002. It published a cover showing the Star of David standing on a Union Jack with the questioning phrase: ‘A kosher conspiracy?’ It introduced articles by Dennis Sewell and John Pilger on Britain’s pro-Israeli lobby. In a subsequent apology for the cover, editor Peter Wilby described not only receiving highly critical letters from, among others, Labour Party General Secretary Triesman but also experienced the following: ‘On 30 January, as we were going to press for last week’s issue, four people claiming to represent a group called Action Against Antisemitism (of which I had not previously heard) arrived unannounced at our offices demanding that we print a comprehensive apology.’ 10 Wilby ended his apology: ‘Readers should be assured that we shall not censor ourselves; but we shall try to present our views with greater sensitivity.’ It was an earlier New Statesman editor, John Lloyd, who gave us an insight into the wider, historical context of the ‘Labour anti-semitism’ controversy that has dogged the Corbyn leadership of the party. Soon after Tony Blair became Prime Minister, Lloyd penned ‘Labour falls for the Big Gift’ for the weekly magazine.11 He opened his article this way: ‘Very rich men are now the key element in the finances – and thus arguably the policies – of both major British political parties. The historic division in party funding, in which the unions supported Labour and big business the Conservatives, has given way to a more mobile universe wherein both parties vie for the favours of entrepreneurs – sometimes the same entrepreneurs.’12 9 10 11 ‘Labour falls for the Big Gift’, New Statesman, 27 February 1998. 12 In the Democracy for Sale chapter of his 2008 Who Runs Britain?, Robert Peston made the same point 10 years later. See Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Lloyd identifies Michael (later Lord) Levy as the key fundraiser for Blair and New Labour after the two were introduced to each other by Gideon Meir, a senior diplomat at the London Israeli embassy in 1994, the year Blair later became leader on the death of John Smith.13 ‘Levy brought the world of North London Jewish business into the Labour party – the same world that had been very supportive of Margaret Thatcher.’ He adds: ‘None were natural Labour supporters.’ Lloyd says that the funds Levy produced – £12m before 1997 is the figure most often mentioned – gave ‘Blair the kind of operational independence enjoyed by none of his predecessors. Levy’s pitch was aimed not at getting support for the Labour Party but for the Labour leader’. That money allowed Blair in opposition to hire Jonathan Powell and Alastair Campbell, both becoming key figures in his government after being elected prime minister. Levy himself became Middle East special envoy with a desk in the Foreign Office and a seat in the House of Lords. When Blair left No 10, Levy’s fundraising function on behalf of his successor Brown was taken over by his friend and colleague Jon (later Lord) Mendelsohn. Another source of finance that reached Labour by unusual means from strong Israel supporter David Abrahams was revealed in 2007.14 Property developer Abrahams, a former vice-chairman of the Jewish Labour Movement, became a vice-president of the Royal United Services Institute in 2010.15 In 2018 he resigned his party membership blaming Corbyn for his alleged failure to deal with ‘Labour anti-semitism’.16 Levy and Mendelsohn have in recent years joined Abrahams in the same attack on Corbyn. Two of those encouraged by Levy to fund New Labour, Sir Trevor Chinn and Sir David Garrard, continued to fund Corbyn’s critical deputy, Watson, until his unexpected resignation as MP in 2019.17 This financial dimension to Labour politics is one that is not explored in 13 14 15 16 17 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Bad News for Labour as it exceeds the remit the authors have set themselves. But it is one important to our understanding of the context in which the ‘Labour anti-semitism’ campaign has been conducted: a party with the much larger and more active membership than New Labour has less need of the deep pockets on which Blair depended, pockets, according to Peston (op cit), that swelled following the 2003 Iraq invasion. One aspect the authors do touch on but is worth adding to is the way celebrities – often the main feature of news reporting, especially in the tabloid press – have been involved in attacking Corbyn. These have ranged from Sir Tony Robinson, a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee in the Blair years,18 to Rachel Riley, a TV show personality with no previous history of political activity but one happy to share her anti- Corbyn views in an interview with fellow critic Alastair Campbell.19 Alongside them in the same attacks are those well known to TV and radio audiences such as Sir Simon Scharma, Howard Jacobson, Simon Sebag- Montefiore, Tracey Ann Oberman and Dame Julia Neuberger.20 The last time Rabbi Neuberger intervened so directly in British politics was when she helped found the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981 and stood as a London parliamentary candidate for it in the general election two years later. Robert Philpot’s21 recollection of those events sparked by the breakaway of senior Labour figures to launch the new party bears quite strong resemblance to the way the current Labour party has been undermined since Corbyn became leader.22 While the SDP project didn’t focus on ‘Labour anti-semitism’ in the same way, it did play on fears of a radical change of political direction under then party leader Michael Foot. 18 19 20 21 22 'How the SDP failed the Jews’, Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk So intent were some of Neuberger’s future SDP colleagues to damage Labour and allow Margaret Thatcher to greatly increase her parliamentary majority in 1983, they did all they could before leaving the party to sabotage it. The story was told by Sunday Telegraph reporter Kate Ironside in 1996 under the headline ‘How we tried to wreck Labour, by SDP rebels’.23 Neville Sandelson, the former Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington, told her that in the 1980 party leadership contest between Denis Healey and Foot ‘myself and my colleagues who voted for Foot were leaving the Labour party and setting up a new party under the leadership of the Gang of Four, and it was important that we finished off the job. It was very important that the Labour party as it had become was destroyed.’ Ironside then writes: ‘Lord Healey last night deplored their decision and accused them of condemning the country to almost an extra decade of Thatcherism. He said: “I always knew they had done this, and they bear the responsibility of giving Thatcher two election victories which she would not have otherwise won, and condemned the country to the misery of her government.”’ In the 1983 general election Sandelson stood in his West London seat for the SDP and took enough votes from Labour to allow the Conservative candidate Terry Dicks to win. Am I alone in thinking that some of the well-publicised events surrounding the splitting of the Labour Party in 1981 bear some current resemblance when, again to media acclaim, Labour MPs attack their leader,24 some of them then set up a new party, in a few cases using that as a stepping stone to joining another one in time for a general election?25 As in 1981 the effect of internal Labour attacks and recrimination followed by defections and party re-alignment can only benefit the governing party especially when all these things receive huge publicity. As 23 ‘How we tried to wreck Labour, by SDP rebels’ Kate Ironside, The Sunday Telegraph 14 January 1996. 24 25 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Bad News for Labour shows, this coverage warps democracy by giving a false picture to voters. This distortion is not just as described by the authors but it also fails by omission to provide a fuller picture of what the campaign against ‘Labour anti-semitism’ actually includes. A short list of events and stories not reaching voters as a result of minimal or non-coverage by the mainstream media includes: When venues for events organised to contest the ‘Labour anti- semitism’ allegations are threatened by scares, including ones about bombs,26 or when party initiatives like the launch of the Chakrabarti report are undermined.27 When cross-party loyalties to Israel with a negative impact on Labour are not reported.28 When little coverage is given to the Al Jazeera investigation series The Lobby confirming Israeli intervention in UK politics, especially in the Corbyn-led Labour party.29 When interests and connections between politicians and journalists are not made transparent.30 When attempts by Jewish supporters of Corbyn to respond to ‘Labour 26 27 28 One example is that of leading Corbyn critic Jeremy Newmark who was chairing the Jewish Labour Movement when he was a parliamentary candidate supported by Yvette Cooper in 2017. 29 30 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk anti-semitism’ charges are denied access to the public prints.31 The picture the authors paint – offences of commission and omission against freedom of expression, fairness and balance as well as personal allegations against those unable to contest them – is a disturbing one. Since Corbyn became leader, the campaign against ‘Labour anti- semitism’ has claimed many victims. Some are professional politicians like Chris Williamson. But most are unpaid citizens who commit their voluntary time and energy to the democratic process and who have become collateral damage in what Lerman calls a ‘Jew-on-Jew war’. Many have been subject to well-publicised smears resulting from detailed trawling of their social media output going back many years, investigations that suggest organized, time-consuming effort. The result since 2015 has been the incubation of an intimidatory environment in which open questioning and discussion of politics have been actively discouraged by those with the power and influence to have ready media access. The decent, trusting goodwill of many in the Labour Party who would not dream of saying or doing anything anti-semitic has been cynically abused as our democracy has been deliberately disfigured. In strongly recommending Bad News for Labour and wishing it a wide readership, I conclude with two thoughts from abroad. One is from American scholar and author Norman Finkelstein who sees the ‘Labour anti-semitism’ campaign as a means to bring down Corbyn for advocating a much bigger agenda than the future of Israel and the fate of the Palestinians. He says: ‘The British elites could not have gotten away with calling Corbyn an anti-semite unless they had the support, the visible support, of all the leading Jewish organisations. . . They are the enablers of this concerted conspiracy by the whole of British elite society to destroy Jeremy Corbyn.’ 32 The other is fellow Jew Avraham Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset and ex-chairman of both the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organisation. He writes in The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise from its 31 32 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Ashes33 about the United States but with implications for the United Kingdom well worth pondering: ‘Jews hold stunningly powerful positions and clout in the United States. The combination of the American state’s power and the Jewish power in the areas of legislation, administration, media, law, culture, and entertainment have made Jews a defining factor of contemporary America. Because Israel is inseparable from the identify of American Jews, Israel is inseparable from the American experience.’ He continues: ‘Too many of my Jewish American brothers and sisters have become the beating heart of neoconservatism. They are part of the white, right-wing, nationalist, and powerful establishment, part of an administration and culture that withdraw [sic] from the global responsibility that defined America’s spirit during World War II.’ One does not have to agree with all that Burg says about the United States to draw from it at least concerned inquiry about the state of the United Kingdom as it goes to the polls under the long, dark shadow of alleged ‘Labour anti-semitism’. John Booth is a freelance journalist and writer 33 Avraham Burg, The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise from its Ashes (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Lee Harvey Oswald’s address book: a follow-up note Kevin Coogan In Anthony Frewin’s 2015 Lobster article ‘Inside Lee Harvey Oswald’s address book’, he discusses an entry in Oswald’s address book about the far right.1 Oswald wrote: NAT. SEC. DAN BURROS LINCOLN ROCKWELL ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA AMERICAN NAZI PARTY (AMER. NATIONAL PARTY) Hollis sec. of Queens N.Y. (NEWSPAPER) NAT. Socialist Bulletin. Frewin cites an appendix in my book Dreamer of the Day showing that Oswald clearly derived his information from a story in the American Communist Party paper The Worker.2 The article in question was penned by ‘Mike Newberry’, who frequently wrote about the far right.3 In June 1961, for example, Newberry issued a pamphlet entitled The Fascist Revival: The Inside Story of the John Birch Society.4 In 1963 he authored The Yahoos, a 1 Anthony Frewin, ‘Inside Lee Harvey Oswald’s address book’, Lobster 70 (Winter 2015). 2 Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (New York: Autonomedia, 1999), pp. 616-17. 3 ‘Mike Newberry’ was a pseudonym for Stanley Steiner, who became a prominent historian of the American West. 4 Available on line at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk book examining the broader far right revival in the United States.5 In this note, I hope to show the context behind Newberry’s story and to highlight an even earlier source than Dreamer that correctly identified The Worker article as Oswald’s source. On 20 March 1962, Newberry published a front-page article in The Worker (Midweek Edition) entitled ‘American Nazis Establish Their National Headquarters in Queens’, the article I cite in Dreamer.6 Announcing an ‘Exclusive’, Newberry begins his piece: ‘Under the thinly disguised name of the “American National Party”, the discredited American Nazi Party is moving its national office and office records to New York City and has established a headquarters in Queens as an operating base for the “Storm Troopers.”’ The article comes with a picture of George Lincoln Rockwell’s ‘Hate Bus’ that in May 1961 drove from Virginia to New Orleans, opposing integration. The image (taken from a photo that appeared in the May 1961 issue of Life magazine) shows a group of Rockwell’s Nazis standing by the small VW bus. There is a circle around the head of one would-be Stormtrooper, Dan Burros. The caption reads: ‘DAN BURROS, “national secretary” of the American Nazi Party (in circle) was one of the leaders of Rockwell’s “Hate Bus”, which toured the South inciting violence against Freedom Riders. Burros is now “vice chairman” of the “American National Party”, which has opened headquarters in Hollis, Queens.’ Newberry also writes that Burros was both the ‘National Secretary and racist “theoretician”’ of the ANP, and that the July 1961 issue of the National Socialist Bulletin ‘lauded the appointment of the baby-faced Burros in announcing this appointment to this post’. Newberry’s article was provoked in part by a ruling from the United States Supreme Court. In November 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a decision by New York City Parks Commissioner Newbold Morris preventing Rockwell from speaking in Union Square, even though Rockwell had submitted a legal request to speak there. Rockwell filed his petition in 5 Mike Newberry, The Yahoos (New York: Marzani & Mansell, 1964). 6 Due to a typo, in Dreamer it reads ‘20 March 1961’ instead of 1962. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk May 1960 in the hope that he could speak in Union Square on the Fourth of July. Although Morris’s decision was upheld by lower courts, the Supreme Court ordered that Rockwell be allowed to speak.7 According to Newberry, Rockwell intended to give a public speech in Union Square on 20 April 1962, Hitler’s birthday. Although I believed I was the first to discover the Oswald address book/ The Worker connection, this is not the case. In the July 1996 issue of the JFK assassination research journal The Fourth Decade (Vol. 3/No. 5) there is a note on page 35 written by the journal’s founder and editor Jerry Rose. Rose reports that in response to article by him entitled ‘Oswald and the Nazis’ in the March 1996 issue, a researcher named J. P. (Jerry) Shinley sent him a document from the FBI (FBI 105-70374-Not Recorded) that was a clipping of Newberry’s The Worker story. Rose writes that ‘every element of Oswald’s entry in his notebook could have been taken from this article’, and that ‘it thus seems nearly certain that the material in The Worker was the source of the Oswald notation’. Rose writes that it remained unclear how Oswald got a hold of the story because he only returned to the United States in June 1962, a few months after the article appeared in print. He notes that even though Marina Oswald testified to the Warren Commission (1H101) that Oswald regularly read The Worker while he was in Russia, ‘how and where did Oswald obtain an English language newspaper in Minsk?’ But The Worker was no ordinary English- language paper; it was the official publication of the Communist Party USA, and it is surely no surprise that Oswald could find the paper in Russia. In any case, Marina made clear that Oswald read the paper while in Russia. Rose, however, postulates that perhaps an unidentified FBI informant gave Oswald a back copy after he returned to America. However, I believe the overwhelming likelihood is that Oswald read Newberry’s story in Minsk and took particular note of it because the ‘Hate Bus’ attracted a great deal of media attention, particularly in Oswald’s sometime home town of New Orleans. On 25 May 1961, the New York Times ran a UPI story entitled ‘10 Nazis 7 See the 14 November 1961 New York Times article entitled ‘Supreme Court Backs Rockwell on Right to Speak in City Parks.’ Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Seized in New Orleans’ reporting that Rockwell and his cohorts had been arrested on 23 May by local police and charged with disturbing the peace ‘as they tried to picket the movie Exodus.’ Rockwell had flown to New Orleans for the demo while the other ANP members drove the ‘Hate Bus’ from the ANP’s Virginia national headquarters to New Orleans. Besides picketing the film, Rockwell’s Nazis wanted confrontations with civil rights organizers and groups such as CORE. Shinley and Rose first linked the entry in Oswald’s address book to The Worker in 1996, some three years before me. Rose and I independently came to the conclusion that Oswald drew his address book entry from The Worker, although I think the evidence clearly points to Oswald’s first reading the story in Russia, while Rose holds out the possibility that Oswald may have been shown it by an unidentified FBI informant sometime after returning to the United States in June 1962. Kevin Coogan is an American investigative journalist and author. His article ‘Tokyo Legend? Lee Harvey Oswald and Japan’ appeared in Lobster 70 (Winter 2015). Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Climate hysterics: useful idiots or just idiots Dr T P Wilkinson In 1973 a dystopian film, Soylent Green, was released, starring the sincerely gun-toting Charlton Heston.1 The scene was New York City, inhabited by 40 million (only twice as many as Beijing, today), with equatorial temperatures and humidity due to the ‘greenhouse effect’. The story was set in 2022! That is three years from now. One obviously fanatical author from Los Angeles2 has also warned us of impending doom – most recently that the world was scheduled to end on or about 2026. No doubt he will keep writing and spreading the current blend of eschatology until we all do die in 2026, or the forces driving the audience for his kind of madness have met their goal – or by the grace of universal (as opposed to human) sanity are reduced to the recognisable sociopaths that they are. So in this brief reaction, spurned by concerns with the life and well- 1 He is infamous for the exclamation ‘from my cold, dead hands’ delivered at the National Rifle Association Convention in 2000. See 2 Robert Hunziker is is the author of numerous articles about climate catastrophe, e.g. at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk being of the majority of humanity for whom ‘climate hysterics’3 are merely potential holiday neighbours, I would like to address just one peculiarity of this endless rant. Leaving aside for a moment the spurious attempts to justify environmental Wahhabism, primarily among the English-speaking peoples, it strikes me – and I am sure many other still thinking people – that the climate hysterics have no substantial response to the overthrow of democratic governments in South America by forces of the petroleum and mining industries. I hate to bore some of those readers of the Climate Apocalypse with the fact that this is largely – though not exclusively – the work of the reconstituted Standard Oil Trust; i.e. Rockefeller, Rockefeller Brothers, and an intricate system of financial and industrial holdings – the infamous David Rockefeller’s recent demise notwithstanding.4 The Standard Oil Trust comprised Esso (ExxonMobil), Chevron, Amoco and now includes Gulf and Texaco. The Trust’s network includes its allied financial enterprises, e.g. JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, along with the Open Society and the 3 Or shall we call them ‘Sharp’s posthumous Climate Rangers’? Gene Sharp, founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, a psychological operations organisation based on exploiting ideas, concepts and programmes developed in US pacification operations, especially during its war in Vietnam. The core concepts upon which what has been called a ‘revolution factory’ are based can be found in Sharp’s book National Security through Civilian-based Defense (Omaha, Nebraska: Association for Transarmament Studies, 1970). Of course to understand Sharp’s exercise in reverse engineering it is helpful to read Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1990). The application of Sharp’s work in augmenting the NATO war against Yugoslavia is the subject of the film The Weight of Chains. There are a number of sources for further information on this documentary, principally from the director’s own website 4 Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon : Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (New York: HarperCollins, 1995) provides a detailed description of how the Rockefeller corporate structure permeated a broad range of governmental and religious institutions throughout the Western hemisphere that could be coordinated in the pursuit of the extended family interests emerging from and maintained by the legacy of Standard Oil. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ubiquitous but rarely mentioned Rothschild bank.5 Further acknowledged help comes from the IMF, World Bank, ECB and other franchises of the banking cartel. In the past few years at least, the heads of the European Central Bank, the Banco d’Italia, Banque du France, Bank of England and Federal Reserve, have come overwhelmingly from Goldman Sachs, with some Rothschild alumni. Yet there is scarcely any suggestion that either bank could thus exercise disproportionate influence or obtain unfair advantage in the creation of US and European monetary and economic policies. The role of the privately owned Bank of International Settlements and the private control over the international funds transfer network SWIFT aggravate or enhance the power accumulated. For those who have never dealt with the concept of monopoly capitalism – the prevailing economic system, euphemistically called ‘free enterprise’ – a trust is a usually secret agreement among big businesses (banking, oil, transportation, utilities etc.) to fix prices and allocate markets so as to guarantee profits and cushion losses; or, in US legal jargon, to ‘restrain competition’. Despite some weak attempts to prohibit such combinations, the absolute primacy of private property and profits in the US (and most of the West) has meant that such prohibitions have been half-hearted at best. In any event since the installation of Ronald Reagan as POTUS, followed by William Jefferson Clinton a few actors later, the few controls – even public condemnation – have been eliminated. To the extent it was ever seriously weakened, the power of this trust has been restored. The acceptance of trusts (secret or obscurely constituted) monopoly and oligarchy agreements has been promoted both in the media and in fact. A worldwide computer system developed to strengthen US capacity to wage atomic warfare is dominated by a handful of software manufacturers who are 5 Rarely mentioned because the family with which it is associated belongs to the class of ‘privileged victims’. It is difficult to point to its covert power without either evoking charges of ‘anti-semitism’ or that one believes in some old-fashioned right-wing conspiracy theory. Yet the facts of relationships, ownership and control can be identified – although admittedly often indirectly: e.g. Rothschild investment in Liberation, Die Tageszeitung (when each was faced with bankruptcy), Soros’ ‘apprenticeship' with a bank in the Rothschild group, Rothschild trusteeships in numerous important funds and corporations, etc. A common argument against asserting such relationships is that they do not constitute ‘ownership’. However, it is a characteristic of modern corporate and trust law that control can be exercised independent of material ownership through often very complex legal mechanisms intended to conceal such control. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk simply part of the national security state – never mind what Mr Snowden says about the NSA. It may not be possible in our lifetimes – or ever – to reorganise human society so as to be freed of these sociopaths and the corporations they have created to outlive themselves and us. However, I think we can reduce our vulnerability to the latest hordes of neo-medieval flagellants and children’s crusaders if we just read our history. If these climate hysterics – such as the author from Los Angeles and the pretender from Sweden – were seriously educated and concerned about ‘carbon’, then why are there no protests against the corporations and the government agencies that represent them who have been in the process of rollback in Latin American countries such as Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil and, of course, Venezuela? If ‘carbon’ were really the issue here, and these folks were not merely fanatical but also ecological, then they would see that any policies and actions designed to enhance control over foreign natural resources – such as oil and gas – can only preserve or strengthen the corporate opposition to their alleged objectives. Why would Chevron need control over Ecuadorian oil if the foundations (in the Rockefeller suite) were supporting an end to carbon footprints? What is the human price hysterics are prepared to pay for the lithium in Bolivia, Afghanistan, or even Portugal, for the high capacity batteries to run their electric cars?6 Instead we see the restoration of what might be called the ‘standard issue carbon boot’ that smashes the faces of Bolivians, Brazilians, Chileans, Ecuadorians, Venezuelans (if the US is ever successful in overthrowing their elected government), not to mention the continued military action in the Middle East and Indonesia. With the exception of BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and the minor league Elf Aquitaine and some Russian companies, all of the super carbon criminals are in the US. Some other aspects of this vile hysteria summon a reaction, which could 6 Afghanistan is not only defended for its supply of the opium market but also for lithium reserves. The Bolivian government of Evo Morales was just overthrown in order to restore Western control over Bolivia’s enormous lithium deposits. See Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk be best called nostalgic. Take the 1972 ‘oil crisis’.7 The US had accumulated massive debt in order to fund the costly wars in Korea and Vietnam – so massive it was becoming a threat to the value of the US dollar and the Nixon administration was faced with the possibility of a devaluation. Since the establishment of the fixed exchange rates in the Bretton Woods agreements – which also created the World Bank and International Monetary Fund – the US dollar had been pegged at a gold price of about $35 per ounce. Following its two far Eastern wars, the US Treasury was convinced that this exchange rate would no longer hold.8 To avoid having to devalue the dollar and still maintain the rate of war spending, OPEC members were persuaded to sell oil solely for US dollars. This meant that the ‘oil crisis’ of the 70s hit the oil- importing economies, both in Europe and the newly independent colonies, forcing them to buy dollars to meet their oil needs. This artificial demand for the dollar stabilised the exchange rate for the US despite the decision to float it. While OPEC was generating billions through oil sales at high dollar prices, this money flowed back into the US as dollar denominated investment. This restored the US to its status as creditor nation and would provoke the 80s debt crisis in the Third World. At about the same time a clique of capitalists convened the so-called Club of Rome and published a book called The Limits to Growth. Full of euphemistic eugenics, like the language of today’s hysterics, it preached essentially that after the decimation of two world wars and the previous destruction of 400 years of slavery and colonialism, white folks were threatened by an explosion in the number of ‘brown people’. Of course the book did not use such explicit language but anyone who read the list of countries could see that what was to be limited was the growth in brown people.9 Meanwhile, Nixon resigned but the petrodollar continued to wreak havoc everywhere except Manhattan and Mayfair. 7 There was in fact no oil shortage, there was just a conspiracy to keep the oil in the ground and let the price rise. You don’t have to take my word for it. Just read John Blair’s The Control of Oil (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976) – based on US Congressional research. 8 A similar short term problem occurred when George Soros forced sterling out of the European Monetary System by placing massive naked shorts on the pound and forcing the UK government to buy pounds to support the exchange rate mechanism. The British government’s efforts failed and it had to withdraw from the EMS – making Soros a packet. 9 I do not know why the capitalist elite always seems to choose Italian cities to name its campaigns against the rest of the world – Rome, Bologna, Pisa. Perhaps it is because Arnold J Toynbee – an affine of the Round Table group – devoted so much attention to the fall of Rome in his A Study of History. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk It seems to me that a confluence has been overlooked, especially by our social media generation for whom history is little more than a subject in which many did poorly at school. Despite their complexity, the fundamental struggles of the 20th century can be seen in the shift between a class society that derived its essential wealth from African slavery and colonialism until about 1886 with the abolition of chattel slavery, and struggles to end colonialism. The economic system in the West that was produced by African slavery and maintained by the ideology of white supremacy is called variously ‘free enterprise’, ‘the free market’, or, if need be, ‘capitalism’.10 It is a nihilistic system as can be seen by the fact that, from 1917 until 1989, no rich white person could actually say what ‘capitalism’ was. They could only say what it wasn’t. Foremost capitalism was not anything approximating environmental health, income equity, political equality, or even religious freedom. The most that could be said was that it was ‘freedom to own things’, like land and people. The minute people could no longer be owned there was suddenly only scarcity – whereas previously the big economic issue was how to allocate surplus. The minute colonies became independent nations there was no such thing as economic autonomy or control of national resources. Is it a coincidence that marginalism11 in economics and progressivism (in civilian and military forms) emerged as management ideologies at the same time slavery was abolished and labour unions were becoming a serious threat to the order of things? Another colloquial abuse is the term ‘Marshall Plan’. Generally this term is loaded with positive connotations. The European Recovery Program in the 10 See on this subject Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), available free at 11 ‘One of the key foundations of marginalism is the concept of marginal utility. The utility of a product or service is its usefulness in satisfying our needs. Marginal utility extends the concept to the additional satisfaction derived from the same product or service. Marginal utility is used to explain the discrepancy between products that should be considered valuable but are not and products that are rare and expensive. For example, water is essential to human existence and, as such, should be considered more precious than a diamond. However, an average human being is willing to pay more for an additional diamond than a glass of water. The theory of marginal utility claims that this is so because we derive more satisfaction from owning an additional diamond than another glass of water.’ From Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk 1948 Foreign Assistance Act was a political and economic assistance plan focussed on the reconstruction of parts of Western Europe damaged during World War II. It was heavily promoted by propaganda on both sides of the Atlantic as American generosity – compared to the acrimony of the post- World War I treatment of the defeated belligerents. Thus the Marshall Plan, named after General, then US Secretary of State, George Marshall, entered common political speech as a term for any kind of global government sponsored and/or funded programmes for economic rescue. However the Marshall Plan was anything but benevolent or altruistic: it was political warfare launched against the Soviet Union in Western Europe.12 Rebuilding the US-occupied part of Germany was part of galvanising the German population (and the rest of Western Europe) against the communists. It was structured to accelerate the rebuilding of the West with surplus resources from the undamaged USA to demonstrate that the Soviet Union could not deliver (after having single-handedly defeated Nazi Germany) the quality of life that the US would offer.13 The Marshall Plan was also economic promotion for US capital which made money, selling to Western Europe, financing reconstruction. It also bought – or, with the benefit of occupation government, absorbed – the industrial, commercial and intellectual assets of Germany, and finally integrating Western European economies into the US corporate control. Much of what people in Germany today would identify as German businesses are in fact subsidiary to US corporations through various holding schemes. There was justifiable resistance to the European Recovery Plan in France, even in Germany, and from the Soviet Union because of the control of the economy and political regime that the plan gave to the US wherever it was introduced. In short, promoted as economic rescue it was in fact a new model of economic and political domination. This power was exerted through the financial instruments, e.g. loans granted and managed through US banking cartels (acting as agents or 12 It must be recalled that in 1947 the secret NSC 68 of 1950 had been drafted and the framework for the US anti-Soviet alliance based on German rearmament – NATO – was already adopted. The European Recovery Programme was an overt operation, the fig-leaf for US economic penetration, to complement the covert operations, and a central element of US regime strategy as formulated by George Kennan and others. 13 The continued malignancy of this policy was reaffirmed recently by a resolution adopted in the European Parliament. See Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk directly) and the political agenda of anti-communism. This meant coupling aid with policies that would suppress democratic movements of the Left (socialists and communists were treated equally as subversive or criminal by the US regime). This was especially true where they enjoyed substantial support, as in France, Italy and the industrialised regions of Germany. As with all ‘aid’ programs based on loans and free trade, more money in fact flowed back to the US than reached Europe as subsidy. Subsequent US control over the greater part of the German economy also ensured that the Soviet Union would be deprived of the reparations it had been promised at Yalta – a critical element of the continued US war against the Soviet Union after 1945. When hysterics start demanding a ‘Marshall Plan’ for the climate, they would do well to recall what the long-dead Mr Marshall’s plan was.14 Perhaps we should also ask whom the true beneficiaries of the Global Environmental Fund and other banking and ‘market-based’ tools are? This kind of ‘Climate’ hysteria is discursively the same as the anti- communism hysteria (and other evangelical movements in the US and its suzerain states). It generates the reaction – I believe deliberately – that anyone who is not a ‘climate defender’ or ‘carbon buster’ automatically holds the opposite position that all carbon emissions are permissible or harmless, that nothing humans do affects the climate, etc. (This might also be deliberately misconstrued as sympathising with Russia or China, too.) This is one of the frequently successful strategies of political marketing (or any other kind of hype). The purpose is not to propose policy interventions – which could be negotiated – but to create a polarisation which a) isolates non-extremists and b) establishes a framework for ideological policing. Such isolation and policing was very successful in the 50s when lots of people were consumed with proving they were not communists. Now anyone who questions the evangelium of Extinction 14 A refresher course in the Bretton Woods agreements and how the World Bank and International Monetary Fund understand ‘rescue’ can be found in the 2001 film Life and Debt. See Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Rebellion, or similar elements of the sect, has to prove that he or she does not want human extinction through global warming . . . . Let us allow that the complexity of historical processes I have described above might not really be intentional or even calculable. Again, if I wax nostalgic, I learned that feminism also meant that sex was not destiny and gender not the essence of human identity. I also learned that environmentalism was fundamentally recognition of indeterminacy. In other words, humans should be cautious and conservative (in the sense of conserving) because it really was impossible to determine the exact vector of any human action. If we were environmentally aware then that meant that every action had not only intended but untold, unintended and unpredictable consequences. Is any of the learning experience that I have just detailed still valid? Perhaps a few of our current hysterics could engage in their own economic and intellectual history research and find out? If they find that it is still valid then how do these folks come to the conclusion that they – or their cultic scientists – know that anything done ostensibly to alter the climate will actually have such intended effect? How do they also know that no unintentional effects will be triggered for which no corrective can yet be anticipated? I am quite sure that they have no answers to these questions. It lies in the very nature of Western apocalyptic eschatology that the end of the world is inevitable. The only issue is to prevent the privileged from suffering more than their brown brothers and sisters. This was true in Avignon in the Middle Ages and it is true now in Fortress America. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The Mossad Spy It’s not what you’ve done it’s who you are . . . the transgender spy Olivia Frank ISBN 978-1-9160963-0-1 £14.99 p/b available from Amazon.co.uk Robin Ramsay Robin Ramsay ! This is what £50,000 in notes looks like. They were left in the boot of Olivia Frank’s car – by someone apparently from MI5 – in the hope that the moolah would persuade her not publish this book. The offer was declined: the money has been stashed, not spent, and the book is now available. This photograph was taken by Andrew Rosthorn, a regular contributor to these columns, who has been working with Olivia. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk This is a big book, 491 pages of it, and it roughly breaks down into four sections. The first is an account of Olivia’s experience of being transgender decades before it had achieved today’s prominence. From the age of three, though born male, Olivia knew she was a girl/woman. This made life very complex and frequently unpleasant until her father, a Jewish officer in the Rifle Brigade at the Second Battle of El Alamein, had a word with someone who was smart enough to see what others hadn’t: Olivia’s life spent concealing the fact that she felt she was a woman might have given her the deception skills to be an intelligence officer. At 18 she joined the Israel Defence Force (IDF) as a woman, in preparation for entering Mossad. There are vivid accounts of military engagements and a couple of her operations penetrating anti-Israel terrorist groups. Of particular note is a portrait of the legendary British Mossad officer David Kimche, who befriended Olivia after her IDF boyfriend – the first man to love her as a woman – was killed. On this account, Kimche was a liberal Israeli, who detested Ariel Sharon and the militaristic Israeli right-wing then on the rise. The second section of the book takes place after Olivia leaves Mossad, returns to the UK and civilian life. And everything turns to shit. In 1986 Mossad was caught in the UK using forged British passports and running an operation here which involved explosives.1 London’s Mossad head was expelled and a couple of MI5 officers came to see Olivia and said, ‘Tell us about Mossad or we’ll ruin your life.’ She declined to tell them and so they arrested her and her father and held them in police cells on fabricated charges.2 Upon her father’s release on bail, aware that MI5 were trying to frame Olivia, he ended his life in a vain attempt to end her persecution. The shock resulted in her mother’s death shortly afterwards. Olivia spent two years in prison, including a spell in the notorious Risley Remand Centre. This section of the book is a difficult read – not for nothing was Risley known as Grisly Risley. But she survived (just), was let out of prison and slowly began rebuilding her life. She began a new career as an accountant and met the second love of her live, Jim. The third section of this extraordinary tale begins in 1993 when she was recruited into an illegal joint MI5/MI6 operation against Asil Nadir. A Turkish- Cypriot businessman, Nadir had built up a large business empire, Polly Peck International, in the UK before being charged with fraud. He fled the UK and in 1 See 2 There have been reports of MI5 using this kind of tactic to try and recruit Muslims in the UK. See Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk 1993 was in the Turkish part of Cyprus which was beyond the reach of formal international law.3 The MI5/6 plan was this: they would frame and imprison Nadir’s banker, Elizabeth Forsyth, and plant Olivia on her in prison to become her confidante. The ultimate aim of all this? Somehow to persuade Nadir to return to the UK, where he could be locked-up and properly silenced. To get into the prison system Olivia would have to commit a crime. The implicit stick being wielded was ‘You know what we can do.’ The explicit carrot was an offer to pay for Olivia’s gender reassignment surgery, as well as deleting her criminal record and paying her a lot of money. Olivia felt she had no choice but is honest enough to note that ‘it gave me a thrill to be working as a spy again’. (p. 193) Olivia and her partner, Jim, were given new identities, issued with new National Insurance numbers and passports, duly committed thefts and were convicted. She was placed in prison alongside Elizabeth Forsyth and befriended her. When she left prison another strand of the story developed. The investigative television series The Cook Report had done a programme suggesting that Nadir might not be guilty despite what the media and the British state were saying. Olivia was tasked by MI5/6 to take part in a plot to discredit the Cook Report, by offering them (false) apparently inside information on Nadir. The idea was that Cook would broadcast Olivia’s version and she would then expose it as a fake. At this point it gets complicated, involving MI5, MI6, the Fraud Squad and the Serious Fraud Office, as well as the tv journalists. There follow 150 pages of endless meetings and calls and toing and froing; lots of spy-tech; attempts by the journalists to film MI5/6; and a trip to visit Asil Nadir with the tv people. It is unclear who knows what in these manoeuvres; but ultimately the Cook Report journalists were not conned, told her they knew she was playing a role, and there the operation ended. By this time she had decided that Nadir wasn’t guilty and was asking herself ‘Why are MI5 and 6 so interested in destroying him?’ And so begins the fourth section of the book. A friend of Elizabeth Forsyth read the Gerald James book In The Public Interest,4 about the destruction of James’ company, Astra, in the arms-to-Iraq scandal. Astra had been Astra Fireworks until James bought it and built it up 3 A quick sketch of Nadir is at 4 Reviewed in these columns at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk into a large arms company.5 Forsyth met James who told her that one of Nadir’s subsidiaries was involved in the Iraqi arms deals. This was news to Forsyth and investigation showed that, unknown to Nadir and his company’s management, the subsidiary had been used as a paper cover for arms exports. But it explained why the British spooks were so keen to destroy Nadir: they were trying to keep the lid on the Iraq arms dealing story. Researching this on the Internet, Olivia came across a heavily redacted report on Project Babylon: the Iraqi Supergun, on the CIA website. Since the content was largely about the Middle East, she suspected that Mossad might have a copy of the original, and she contacted them. They supplied her with the original, unredacted report6 and the whole arms-to-Iraq scandal – at any rate a version of it – was laid out before her. A detailed retelling of that story of apparent British state murders and conspiracy is done by Olivia, using that Mossad-CIA report as the basis. Asil Nadir returned to Britain to face the charges against him, apparently believing he could show that they were false. Alas he and his lawyers underestimated the ruthlessness of the British state which issued 36 public interest immunity certificates, suppressing evidence and witnesses, thus destroying Nadir’s defence.7 He was sentenced to ten years, served four and was released into the custody of the Turkish state which freed him immediately. And that, more or less is that. This is not without flaws: no index, not 5 Nick Must points out that in the Michael Caine film The Ipcress File (but not in the Len Deighton book on which it was based) one of the front companies being run by (the eventually exposed traitor) Major Dalby is ‘Astra Fireworks’. As Harry Palmer arrives to meet Dalby for the first time, there is a shot of the nameplates outside the building and one of them is for ‘Astra Fireworks Limited’. The fireworks business is a cover for the storage of ammunition and explosives because Palmer and Dalby walk through a door marked ‘Astra Fireworks’ into a well stocked armoury. Since Astra had been a fireworks manufacturer since the 1940s, this is just a very striking coincidence. 6 See ‘The Story of Project Babylon, British Spooks, Illegal Arms Deals, Murder And A Judicial State Conspiracy’ at 7 For the details of this see Martin Tancock, ‘Secret Justice:Public Interest Immunity Certificates (PIICs) and their use in the Asil Nadir trials’ at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk enough editing; far too much reported speech (she can recall conversations decades later?). Nonetheless it is the story of an extraordinary life and a striking account of what it was like to be transgender two generations ago. But most of all it is a stunning indictment of the lawless, literally murderous, unaccountable British secret state in the Thatcher years. Olivia’s experience shows that MI5 committed arson, falsely imprisoned people, manipulated the National Insurance system, the passport office, the prison service, the criminal justice system, the judiciary and the police. The STASI could hardly have asked for more.8 All that was done trying to keep the lid on the story of how a still largely unidentified alliance of arms companies, the military, bits of the MoD and the intelligence services murdered a trail of people and wrecked several British companies. Appendix Nick Must commented: A search for ‘Project Babylon’ via the CIA library reading room 8 In his essay on the use of PIIs in the Nadir case, Martin Tancock – see note 6 – commented: ‘ . . . with the rise of Thatcher and the great show trials of the early nineties related to the clandestine Anglo-American arming of Iraq – Euromac, Ordtec, Matrix Churchill, Elizabeth Forsyth, Asil Nadir – the iron fist of political control has been worthy of anything that has come out of Eastern Europe.’ Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Britain goes back to the future: the Gulf, free trade imperialism and Brexit AngloArabia Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain David Wearing (Polity: Cambridge [UK] and Medford, MA, 2018) Scott Newton David Wearing’s fine book provides a very thorough dissection and analysis of Britain’s long relationship with the Gulf states, one which goes back a long way. Well aware of this history, Wearing explains that British influence there went through three phases. The first started in the heyday of Empire, when Britain was the world’s superpower and influence over the Gulf was essential for the protection of the route to India via the Suez Canal. At the start of the twentieth century, Britain’s commitment to the region deepened, thanks to the discovery of extensive oil reserves there. These were vital to the modernisation of the Royal Navy during the era of Anglo-German rivalry prior to the First World War, with ships increasingly powered by oil-fired steam turbines rather than reciprocating steam engines. Encouraged by the government in London, oil corporations established themselves in Persia and Mesopotamia (then part of the Ottoman Empire and now Iraq). The largest of these (with 51 per cent of the shares purchased by the British State), was the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP). The defeat of Turkey and collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 left Britain as the hegemonic power not just in the Gulf but across the Middle East, running a puppet government in Cairo and responsible for ‘mandated territories’ on behalf of the League of Nations such as Mesopotamia, Transjordan and Palestine. The interwar years, however, saw the beginnings of a challenge to British supremacy, as US oil interests – notably ARAMCO – gained concessions in Saudi Arabia. This was a portent of things to come. When the second phase of Britain’s transition began after 1945, its position had been eclipsed by US power and influence. However, thanks to support from Washington, London hung on to its role in the Gulf, where extensive oil reserves had been discovered in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar. The US Government did experience some frustration with Britain, due to commercial rivalries and the need to provide ongoing financial Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk assistance (which was all greatly exacerbated by the 1956 Suez Crisis). In spite of that, the USA found the UK to be a very useful junior partner in the Cold War: its network of bases and interests in the Middle East (oil being the most significant) assisted in the containment of the Soviet Union. Overall though, and US backing notwithstanding, this was a period when Britain gradually wound down its involvement in the Gulf, in the face of radical Arab nationalism and pressures on the foreign exchange reserves (often intensified by political instability in the region). Eventually, by the late 1970s, there were no British bases in the Gulf. A British presence endured, however, thanks to London’s support for the ruling families in states such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar. This was driven by a determination to ensure pro-Western governments remained in power and thus guaranteed security of oil supply and the investment of Arab petrodollars in London banks. British assistance generally took the form of British support, in terms of personnel (many of them seconded from the civil service) and equipment for internal security (i.e. against political opposition). There was also military hardware (tanks, armoured cars, aircraft) and staff (this included contingents from the RAF and the SAS), along with training for the armed services of the Gulf states (both in their home countries and at establishments such as Sandhurst). Notwithstanding the political and military withdrawal from east of Suez during these years, Britain continued to wield considerable influence in the Gulf, though this was certainly a good deal more informal than it had been in the pre- and early post-World War Two era. The third phase started during the 1980s and continues to the present day. It has been characterised by ongoing UK backing for the local regimes in the Gulf and a willingness to continue providing them with the means to secure their position against radical challenge, whether that comes from within or from external powers such as Iran. Britain’s commitment has been driven by concern to guarantee a steady and predictable flow of oil to the West at prices which may vary but which do not threaten to plunge the developed economies into recession as the oil crisis of the mid-1970s did. Wearing shows that British governments regard security of access to the Gulf’s oil (and, increasingly, to its gas reserves) as fundamental: any disruption or price instability resulting from war, political upheaval, deliberate price manipulation or accident is regarded as a ‘tier three’ threat to national security requiring a response from the British government.1 The oil trade is seen not only as a condition of western 1 This is from the Cameron government’s 2010 document on UK National Security Strategy. On p. 63 of his book Wearing provides further details: ‘Tier one’ risks ‘include direct terrorist attacks on the UK’ and ‘tier two’ risks include ‘a civil war overseas which terrorists are able to exploit to their advantage’. Continues at the foot of the next page. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk prosperity in general terms but of particular interest to Britain, given that a large part of the money paid to Arab states for this (and for exports of gas from the region) has then been placed in the British financial system and handled by banks in the City of London. This financial relationship goes back decades: in 1975 both Kuwait and Saudi Arabian held large portions of the revenue they derived from the quadrupling of the oil price after October 1973 in the form of sterling balances held in London. (Saudi assets in the British economy were worth £20 billion in today’s prices.) This connection is ongoing. Surplus funds are used to pay for British exports of educational and financial services; but they also pay for military hardware, building on the relationship which started in the 1960s. British governments since the Thatcher era have actively supported arms exports to the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region which now accounts for 50 per cent of ‘all defence sales by value in the past 10 years’.2 The largest customer in the Gulf for UK arms exports is Saudi Arabia. The relationship centres on the Al Yamamah (ironically meaning ‘the dove’ in English)3 agreement between the governments in London and Riyadh. The major UK beneficiary is BAE systems, one of the UK’s leading corporations and the largest defence contractor in Europe, with a turnover of £16.8 billion in 2018. The contract for this deal was first signed in 1988 (the Memorandum of Understanding having been agreed between the parties in 1985) and has been renewed at intervals ever since. The initial agreement was worth £20 billion and was at the time the largest arms exporting contract in British history, a position it has retained as a result of the subsequent updates. In 2005 Mike Turner, the CEO of BAE Systems, said that the Al Yamamah contracts had been worth £43 billion to the corporation and had the potential to generate another £40 billion.4 Footnote one continued: The National Security Strategy document has it as, ‘civil war overseas which creates an environment that terrorists can exploit to threaten the UK.’ [emphasis added.] A Strong Britain in an Age of Uncertainty: the National Security Strategy (London, the Stationary Office, 2010) at 2 Wearing, AngloArabia, p. 160, quoting the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs 2012 report on British Foreign Policy and the Arab Spring (London: the Stationary Office, 2012). See 3 See Scott Newton, The Reinvention of Britain 1960-2016: A Political and Economic History (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 173. 4 Dominic O’Connell, ‘BAE cashes in on £40 billion jet deal’, Sunday Times, 20 August 2006 at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Under this deal BAE systems has supplied the Saudi Government with Tornado and Typhoon fighter bombers (and bombs for the planes), Hawk trainers, minesweepers and missile systems. These have all been used in recent years by Saudi Arabia during its military intervention in Yemen. This has been characterised above all by a bombing campaign which has led to the deaths of at least 60,000 civilians since 2016, while an estimated 85,000 children have perished from starvation or preventable disease as a result of the damage done to Yemen’s infrastructure and a long-running blockade. Meanwhile, the UN warns that 14 million lives are at risk from the worst famine in the region for a century.5 The British government’s protests about this catastrophe have been rather muted. This is perhaps unsurprising given the highly lucrative nature of the Al Yamamah deal, along with the presence in Saudi Arabia of over 4,000 BAE staff, many of them engineers sent to assist in the servicing of the aircraft, as well as RAF personnel seconded to train the Saudi pilots. There are also reports that British special forces are on the ground there.6 Wearing’s excellent, detailed and highly informed book shows how Britain’s entanglement with the Gulf today has changed from the era when it was the world’s superpower and sought to protect the flow of people, goods and capital to and from India. He argues persuasively that it remains of central strategic importance to the interests of the contemporary British State. First of all, Gulf oil and resources, along with friendly governments committed to providing Western nations with secure access to its resources, are deemed essential to global economic stability. Secondly, the region is a valuable market for British goods and services. Perhaps the leading sector involved is defence, given the scale of the arms trade. This sustains the long production runs essential to economies of scale, generating the profits (worth £1.03 billion in 2018) which finance BAE Systems’ expensive research and development programmes. There is also a (generally) buoyant share price – and associated rewards for the directors – with hundreds of thousands of jobs directly and indirectly linked to the corporation’s work. The sheer volume of business done under arms contracts, not only with Saudi Arabia but also with smaller Gulf nations such as Bahrain, Oman and Qatar, produces two key benefits for the British State. First, it underpins UK influence in the region; secondly and, even more important, it ensures that Britain retains a military-industrial base large enough to justify its status as a ‘tier-one military power’ with the ability to 5 David Wearing, ‘Britain could stop the war in Yemen in days. But it won’t.’ The Guardian, 3 April 2019 at 6 Wearing, see note 5. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk project influence globally and not simply in the European theatre.7 Profound consequences follow from Britain’s relationship with the Gulf States. To begin with, it has led the UK, quite willingly, into supporting the conservative and repressive elites running the Gulf States against internal and external opposition. The Arab Spring of 2011 spread to the Gulf, with the greatest popular uprisings occurring in Bahrain and Yemen. In Bahrain a largely non-sectarian and peaceful protest movement against the ruling Al- Khalifa family called for constitutional government, an ending of human rights violations and free and fair elections. There was a dramatic popular mobilisation which at one point in March 2011 ‘saw up to one-third of the population on the streets demanding their rights . [. ..] ‘the highest per capita involvement in any of the protests during the Arab Spring’.8 This peaceful call for liberal reforms was brutally repressed by the regime, supported by a GCC 9 intervention force dominated by the Saudis. The GCC contingent, many of whom had been trained by the British, used British munitions all the way from assault rifles to armoured vehicles. London’s line has been to regret the extent of the force used against the demonstrations but congratulate the ruling family for facing up to its political problems and establishing a process of political reform. The British government knows very well, however, that these reforms are largely fictitious.10 In Yemen, mass support for steps to reduce unemployment, tackle corruption and embrace liberalisation extended to the predominately Shia 7 Press Association, ‘UK will remain tier-one military power, says Defence Secretary’, The Guardian 7 August 2018 at 8 Wearing, AngloArabia, pp. 203-4. This is from testimony by Dr Kristian Coates Ulrichsen before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, December 2012. See 9 Gulf Cooperation Council is an alliance of Gulf State governments established in May 1981 to promote economic and security co-operation. 10 The Bahraini government set up an independent inquiry to investigate the unrest, a move for which it was praised by many western governments, including the UK and the United States, along with human rights organizations such as Amnesty International. But many of the subsequent report’s recommendations have not been implemented, including permission for human rights organizations to enter the country and observe and report what they find. Censorship continues, freedom of association is restricted and in June 2017 the National Democratic Action Society party was banned (‘terrorist activities’ being the justification). The ban was criticized by Amnesty International and the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, with Amnesty’s Middle East Research Director Lynn Maalouf calling this suspension ‘a flagrant attack on freedom of expression and association’. (See Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Houthi community from the north of the country, whose distaste for the government had sparked off a long-term insurgency as far back as 2004. Attempts at a political compromise collapsed and the nation lurched into civil war. The Sunni Islam Saudi regime feared that victory on the part of the Houthi rebels, who were receiving assistance from the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran, would lead to the extension of Tehran’s influence into the heart of the Gulf. What had started out as a secular protest became part of the Sunni-Shia power struggle within Islam. The Saudis therefore entered the conflict on the side of the Yemeni government. As containment of Iranian expansion in the region has been a major objective of the US and UK governments since the 1979 revolution which overthrew the Shah and brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power, both London and Washington have backed Saudi Arabia’s participation in the Yemen conflict. It has been good business and serves a wider strategic purpose, the resulting suffering and carnage notwithstanding. As with the example of Bahrain, British government protests at Riyadh’s bombing of the Yemeni civilian population do not carry very much conviction. The second major consequence of Britain’s relationship with the Gulf States has been, as Wearing very perceptively notes, to bolster the turn to neoliberalism made by the Thatcher governments after 1979. During this time the UK economy has become increasingly reliant on the wealth generated by its financial and services sector, while manufacturing as a share of the GDP has collapsed from 25 per cent of GDP in 1979 to little over 10 per cent by 2015.11 The Conservatives under Thatcher encouraged this process, using the proceeds of North Sea oil to cushion the British economy and society against the shock of a strategic shift away from industry (although the results, seen most starkly in the rise of unemployment to over 12 per cent of the workforce by 1986, along with social disorder and bitter class conflict, were still traumatic). Thatcherite reforms sought to weaken organised labour but empower the City through the famous ‘Big Bang’ of 1986, which led to the internationalisation the financial sector – in so doing enabling it to take full advantage of the accelerating globalisation of capital flows. Banks and firms based in the City have been able to exploit this process, attracting inflows of foreign money and recycling it to fast-growing economies Note 10 continued: Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk abroad. According to research by Tony Norfield, which Wearing cites, the UK possesses the world’s leading financial sector, measured ‘by the size of international assets and liabilities of banks operating in the UK’ (with the qualifier that many of these ‘are not UK-owned or controlled’).12 The oil exporting nations, which became the biggest source of global savings by 2007, have played a full part in this development. The flow of wealth from them has increased markedly since the turn of the century thanks to the activities of their Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWF: state-owned investment funds).13 London banks have profited from their ability to recycle SWF capital into tax havens and a range of commercial activities, including investment in sport (football being a leading example), property development in the UK and beyond, leisure (the Travelodge chain is owned by Dubai holdings) and infrastructure projects. By 2018 the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region was as important to British capitalism as China and India, ‘and sometimes more so’.14 Thirdly, as Wearing shows, the Anglo-Arabian economic and strategic relationship has sustained the UK as an imperialist power during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The definition of imperialism provided by historians John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in their seminal 1953 article, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’,15 is useful here (though not referred to by Wearing). Gallagher and Robinson argue that the outflow of goods and capital and the size of the domestic market generated by industrialization in the UK during the nineteenth century led to ever widening and deepening development in overseas regions. Imperialism is seen as ‘the sufficient political function of . . . integrating [these] new regions into the expanding economy.’16 In other words, imperialism was the process by which British power was used to integrate other nations into the world market its own economic transformation had created: tariffs and other barriers to trade were to be dismantled and these countries were to be opened up to British industrial exports and British finance. This could have happened peacefully; but if local 12 See Wearing, AngloArabia, p. 112. 13 See Burhan Wazir’s review of Wearing, ‘How the Gulf’s petrodollars lubricate the British economy’, New Statesman, 12 September 2018 at 14 Wearing, AngloArabia, p. 110. 15 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review (2nd Series), vol. VI, no. 1 (1953), pp. 1-15. 16 The text of the Gallagher and Robinson article is at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk elites refused to collaborate with London and there was resistance (as in China over the opium trade between the 1830s and 1850s, Egypt in 1882 and in West Africa and South Africa during the 1880s and 1890s), then the British would use military power. This is how the UK built its global empire and the network of financial entrepôts and military bases which held it together. World War Two and its aftermath saw the retreat from formal Empire by Britain, which accelerated after the Suez fiasco. The twenty years from 1957 to 1977 were the years of decolonization, the end of sterling’s role as a global currency and a strategic turn to Europe.17 The first major steps in this transformation had started in 1949 with the formation of NATO and Britain’s historic commitment to a permanent military presence on the European continent for the first time. But although the decade and a half following this had seen British trade shift decisively to the European market and away from Commonwealth and Empire countries, the economic complement of the military turn to Europe was not formalized until 1973, when Britain entered the EEC (European Economic Community). This was the era of social democratic Britain, one in which governments of both major parties were committed to programmes of industrial modernization and sought to control the activities of the City in order to prevent these from being destabilized by capital outflows. Just as participation in NATO reflected the priority of a continental commitment over maintaining bases in parts of the world which used to be in the Empire, so membership of a fast-growing European market appeared to be an appropriate external economic strategy for a Britain in which the dominant social and political forces tended to be large-scale industry and organized labour, in other words what may loosely be called ‘Producers’ Britain’. The era of neoliberalism and globalisation, starting in the late 1970s, has seen the erosion of this strategic synthesis. The deregulation associated with it has facilitated freedom of capital on a global basis. This, in turn, has dramatically altered the balance of social and political forces in the UK, undermining the power of large-scale industry and of organized labour but enhancing the power of the City of London. In particular this period has seen the rapid growth of private equity funds and hedge funds. Hedge funds make their profits through a series of bets on trends in the financial market, aiming to ‘hedge’ themselves against losses by ‘shorting’ assets. This involves borrowing assets such as shares or currencies, for example, which are expected to lose value and then selling them to investors who pay for them at the current market price, before it falls. When the fall does occur, the fund will 17 1957 saw Ghanaian independence and 1977 the Basle Agreement, with the Bank of International Settlements and Group of Ten leading industrial countries establishing a safety- net of $3 billion fund to manage the rundown of sterling balances held in London. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk re-purchase the assets at the lower price, with the difference between what it sold them for and what it bought them for constituting its profit. The bulk of the world’s hedge funds (some $2.6 trillion) are managed in the USA but the UK is, albeit by some distance, the second most popular choice, with firms in the City of London responsible for hedge funds worth $500 billion (equivalent to almost 20 per cent of the nation’s GDP).18 The sheer size of these funds gives finance a power and influence in the British State it has not enjoyed since 1914. Hedge funds like the new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, whose bid for leadership of the Conservative Party is known to have received backing from hedge fund managers such as David Lilley of RK Capital, Jon Wood of SRM Global, and Johan Christofferson of Christofferson, Robb and Co. They are especially keen on his support for ‘Brexit’, that is UK withdrawal from the EU, apparently at any cost.19 These individuals are characteristic of their colleagues in that they dislike the ongoing financial regulation introduced by the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB) after 2008 and designed to prevent another Crash.20 Due to the very nature of the way they make their money, the ‘Hedgies’ favour markets which are free and prone to volatility. Nor are they keen on the quantitative easing (QE) policies followed by the EU – as well as the USA and the UK – in a bid to sustain economic activity in a period of debt redemption, given its tendency to inflate the price of assets and reduce opportunities for shorting. Their preferences have helped to provoke a shift in British external policy away from Europe and in favour of Brexit. Defence and security strategy has followed the money: the 2010 Conservative-Liberal Democrat document on UK National Security Strategy identified the promotion of the UK national interest with the ability to project power, military if necessary, globally. In 2015 construction was started on a UK naval base in Bahrain, providing the opportunity to deploy sea-based forces against hostile powers in the Gulf, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. (This can only mean countries such as Iran, Russia and even China and their proxies, which are not committed to the western liberal capitalist, free market model.) Before he was sacked as Defence Secretary earlier this year, Gavin Williamson spoke expansively of more new bases, in the South China Seas and the 18 George Kerevan, ‘Boris, Brexit and the Hedge Funds, (Part 1)’, Bella Caledonia, 11 July 2019 at 19 Kerevan, see note 18. 20 Both the USA and the UK also adopted a more regulatory approach to their financial systems, but with rather less stringency than the EU. See for example Howard Davies, ‘Why is Trump easing financial rules when Europe has opposing view?’, The Guardian, 5 April 2019, at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Caribbean.21 Williamson’s comments led to raised eyebrows in many quarters but should not have come as a complete surprise, since the rationale behind them was all of a piece with a ‘new’ Britain seeking to turn the clock back by over a century and once again commit itself to the path of free trade imperialism. Wearing does not go quite as far as to say this, but it becomes evident from a close reading of the book that Britain’s presence in the Gulf has become indicative of a new direction for British capitalism. Albeit this being one that is driven by the old economic and social forces at the core of British imperialism during the nineteenth century. These are the City of London and the public schools.22 As we have seen, Johnson’s campaign to become Tory leader received much City backing. Both he and Cameron are old Etonians, as are some of the leading proponents of Brexit in the Conservative Party, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg (co-founder and co-owner of the hedge fund, Somerset Capital Management) and Kwasi Kwarteng.23 This group has used Brexit to stage a political and economic coup, as a result of which Britain will (so the perpetrators hope) shake off the remains of industrial capitalism and embrace a future supplying ‘business, technology and financial services to emerging markets such as China and India and as the financial manager of the world.’24 If they are successful, only sufficient manufacturing capacity to build and service a military machine capable of protecting the new politico-economic configuration would be retained. This is not a strategy which needs Britain to be – in the words of John Major thirty years ago – ‘at the very heart of Europe’.25 It does, however, need a strong presence in regions such as the Arabian Gulf, whatever the cost to the local populations there, and the continuation of the ‘special relationship’, Britain’s close alliance with the USA, 21 Alec Luhn, ‘Russia warns British plans for military bases in South China Sea and Caribbean could lead to retaliation’, Daily Telegraph, 11 January 2019 at 22 For an analysis of how this conjuncture of social and economic forces worked to promote British imperialism, see P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688-2000, 3rd edition (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 46-65, 664-66. 23 James Wood, ‘Diary’, London Review of Books, vol. 41, no. 13, 4 July 2019 at 24 Paul Mason, ‘Britain’s impossible futures’, Le Monde Diplomatique, February 2019 at 25 Major, of course, being a Tory from a class and tradition very different from Boris Johnson. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the chief guarantor and guardian of the international capitalist order.26 Of course, at the time of writing (July–August 2019) other forces inside the economic establishment continue to contest the issue of Brexit, and the outcome of this conflict is still uncertain. Yet Brexit or no, there has been movement over the past decade in favour of a national economic strategy prioritising the ability to move money around the world without intervention from State actors such as governments or central banks. The roots of this go deep into the history of British imperialism and at least one of them can be traced all the way back to when Britain signed its first Arabian Treaty, with the Sultan of Muscat in 1798. Scott Newton is Emeritus Professor of Modern British and International History at Cardiff University. His most recent book is The Reinvention of Britain 1960-2016 A Political and Economic History (Routledge, 2017). 26 By 2017, with over 1,500 military personnel and seven warships deployed in the Gulf, the UK’s regional presence was second only to that of the USA. In addition, ‘British forces have made good use of their access to Gulf bases. According to the British Ministry of Defence, the RAF has dropped “11 times more bombs than at the height of the Afghanistan conflict” targeting Islamic State positions in Syria and Iraq’. See Antoine Vagneur-Jones, ‘Global Britain in the Gulf: Brexit and relations with the GCC’, Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique, Note de la FRS 13/2017, 19 July 2017 at Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Making America Great Siege: Trump Under Fire Michael Wolff New York: Henry Holt, 2019 The Ordinary Presidency of Donald J. Trump Jon Herbert, Trevor McCrisken and Andrew Wroe London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019 Trump, the Alt-Right and Public Pedagogies of Hate and for Fascism: What is To be Done? Mike Cole London: Routledge, 2018 Trump Aftershock: The President’s Seismic Impact on Culture and Faith in America Stephen E Strang Florida (US): Frontline, 2018 John Newsinger One of the most memorable moments in Michael Wollf’s Siege has our hero whipped up into a ferocious rage, while watching ‘Fox and Friends’ one Friday morning. Sean Hannity and the rest of the Fox line-up were complaining about how Trump had betrayed ‘Trumpism’ at the behest of the Republican leadership in Congress. The President rushed into the Oval Office ‘in a full-on rage so violent that, for a moment, his hair came undone. To the shock of the people with him, there stood an almost entirely bald Donald Trump.’ (p. 28) The Emperor had no hair! This is essentially the message that Wolff’s new book, a sequel to his earlier Fire and Fury, seeks to convey. This might seem merely commonplace at this point in Trump’s Presidency, hardly deserving of yet another book. However Siege is well worth reading – both for what it has to say about Trump and his court and also for the serious misjudgement that it makes about his Presidency. Wolff assumes that Trump is finished. He writes that ‘(t)he wheels of justice are inexorably turning against him [. . . .] even his own White House has begun turning on him. Virtually every power center Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk left of the far-right wing has deemed him unfit’. (p. ix) In the spring of 2018, there was, according to Wolff, a ‘nearly apocalyptic mood [. . . .] in the West Wing’, (p. 101) with Trump’s chances of surviving the multiple investigations into his criminality diminishing by the day and his people increasingly looking to protect themselves. Indeed, the book concludes that while he might have ‘dodged a potential death blow’ with the Mueller report, he was ‘still guilty of being Donald Trump . . . his very nature would continue to repulse a majority of the nation, as well as almost everybody who came into working contact with him’. Wolf was confident that Trump’s ‘escape . . . would be brief’. (p. 315) This misjudgement derives from Wolff’s focus on Trump’s court, on his underestimating of the crucial importance of Trump’s main activity as President: his incessant campaigning for the 2020 election by means of Twitter, MAGA rallies and Fox News, consolidating his so-called base within the Republican Party. While Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, could dismiss Trump as ‘the stupidest person McConnell had ever met in politics – and that was saying something’, (p. 116) Trump’s support among the Republican voters and activists remained strong. Wolff situates Trump as very much a ‘B-level’ capitalist, whose real estate business was from the 1990s ‘designed to appeal to money launderers’, (p. 13) mainly Russians. His ‘primary business strategy’ had always been ‘. . . lying. Trump Tower, Trump Shuttle, Trump Soho, Trump University, the Trump Casinos, Mar-a-Lago – all these enterprises were followed by a trail of claims and litigation that told a consistent story of borderline and often outright fraud’. (p. 78) He was very much a minor player in what Wolff describes as our ‘oligarch-billionaire world’, in which the super rich – men often richer than governments – were confident that they were untouchable and that, in the last resort, ‘anyone could be bribed’. According to Steve Bannon, one of Trump’s great fears was that investigations into his business affairs were going to reveal that he was not the great business success he continually proclaimed himself to be, but just another ‘crooked business guy, and one worth fifty million dollars instead of ten billion’. (p. 299) Far from being one of the major players, he was one of their accessories, laundering other people’s money and never paying his legal bills. This failure to pay his legal bills came back to haunt him when he tried to hire a major law firm to represent him regarding the Mueller and other investigations. The President of the United States, no less, could not find a firm prepared to represent him! He even approached Alan Dershowitz, the man who had defended his one-time friend, Jeffrey Epstein, against accusations of underage sex back Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk in 2004,1 but he demanded ‘a retainer of a million dollars’. (p. 47) Instead, Trump ended up with Rudy Giuliani who agreed to represent him either out of the kindness of his heart or the opportunity to make multiple TV appearances. Even Trump thought that Giuliani’s TV appearances sometimes made the former mayor of New York look ‘like a mental patient’. (p. 71) Much of Wolff’s inside information actually seems to originate with Steve Bannon. Since his exile from Trump’s court, Bannon has been desperately trying to establish himself as both the guru of the international Far Right and as someone who can influence Trump from outside the White House. As Wolff reports, Bannon is in great demand. In October 2018 he spoke at ‘a conference of hedge funders who were brought together every year by Niall Ferguson, the British historian, writer and conservative commentator’. (p. 265) He was also involved in trying to secure alternative funding for Marine Le Pen’s Front National. He proposed they replace their Russian backers – ‘Russian gangsters likely fronting for Putin’, who had loaned the party $13 million – with ‘right-wing Jews and supporters of Israel’. (pp. 162-163) The Russian involvement with the European Far Right is obviously a subject that requires considerable more attention, especially considering that it has, as Wolff puts it, been ‘only loosely hidden’. (p. 162) Bannon has also met with Nigel Farage and with Boris Johnson. (Johnson would have rather this meeting remained secret, but Bannon needs the publicity.) One interesting comment that Wolff makes is that Bannon was always adamant that, whatever else was going on within Trump’s Presidential campaign, he certainly had no contact with Russians. As for the pee-pee tape, Bannon thought that – if it ever came to light – Trump would just dismiss it as ‘fake news’ and deny that it was him no matter how clearly he could be identified. Much more damaging for Trump’s self-esteem would be if the Russians got hold of his college transcripts and revealed ‘his steady semesters of Ds’. (p. 175) According to Wolff, Bannon’s attitude towards Trump ‘ranged from exasperation to fury to disgust to incredulity’; but this man, for better or worse, was the standard bearer of the Nationalist Right in the United States. One way to influence him was through Fox News. Trump has spent much of his Presidency ‘glued to the television’, (p. 55) in particular to ‘Fox and Friends’. Indeed, to a considerable extent Fox News has set the White House agenda. As Wolff puts it: 1 Dershowitz himself has since faced allegations of underage sex courtesy of Epstein. See, for example, Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘. . . the Fox team served as a public channel between the Trump base (the Fox audience) and the Trump White House. Likewise, many of the messages from the Bannon side of the Trump party were delivered through and supported by the Fox prime-time schedule – most consistently and succinctly, the message on immigration.’ This was, as Wolff observes, something ‘new’. (p 147) Sean Hannity, in particular, has become a major influence on Trump, with the two men often speaking ‘six or seven times a day. The calls sometimes lasted more than thirty minutes’. (p. 148) The way to influence Trump was through Hannity, who apparently even nurses his own presidential ambitions! By the winter of 2018, however, even Hannity was confiding to Bannon that Trump seemed ‘totally fucking crazy’. (p. 287) Wolff provides an interesting account of the role of Jared Kushner in the workings of the Presidency, both in the unrelenting battle for influence over the easily distracted Trump and also in the similarly unrelenting pursuit of financial benefit. He writes of how Kushner’s ‘desperate need for cash was turning US foreign policy into an investment banking scheme dedicated to the refinancing of the Kushner family debt’. (pp. 133-134) The Gulf states and Saudi Arabia were desperate to win favour with Kushner as a way of influencing Trump and he consequently found himself ‘positioned . . . as one of the essential players in one of the world’s largest pools of unregulated free cash flows’. (p. 132) There were problems, however. Trump’s daughter Ivanka persuaded him to take the former governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, on board and he appointed her US ambassador to the UN. Haley’s long-standing contempt for Trump was only strengthened when she heard rumours that he was having an affair with her, rumours apparently fuelled by his telling ‘multiple confidants that Haley had given him a blow job – his words’. (p. 259) This was a President who in his seventies boasted that, far from having to use Viagra, he needed ‘a pill to make my erection go down’. (p. 94) Haley resigned at a time calculated to do Trump the most damage in October 2018. But while the administration was in chaos, the Vice President, Mike Pence, went quietly about his business. Trump dismissed him as ‘a religious nut’, (p. 52) but Pence went on performing ‘daily acts of obeisance to Trump and demonstrated an abject and almost excruciating loyalty’ regardless. This was all in readiness for taking over ‘if impeachment and expulsion or resignation came’. (p. 54) The Christian Right, whom Wolff barely mentions, had their man in place. Although Wolff has a great deal of interest and importance to say, he has focused too heavily on Trump’s personal shortcomings. His extensive Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk coverage of the Trump court, and on the contempt that he is held in by most of those who have worked for him in government, has led him to overestimate his vulnerability. While the Republicans in Congress stand by him, he is likely to be the Republican Presidential candidate in 2020 – one is tempted to say that this will happen no matter what he does or what comes to light. His success in maintaining the support of his base has been decisive in this regard. A very different perspective on the Trump Presidency is served up by Jon Herbert, Trevor McCrisken and Andrew Wroe in their The Ordinary Presidency of Donald J. Trump. They argue, that far from Trump being the great disrupter who has captured the Republican Party, the evidence actually points to the Republican Party having ‘coopted him’. As they put it: ‘If one cuts away the outer layers of bluster, populist rhetoric and administrative chaos and instead examines the inner core of substantive policy achievements, this superficially disruptive representative of the American people looks like a pretty ordinary Republican.’ (p. 67) They certainly acknowledge the extent to which Trump himself is ‘extraordinary’. The way he secured the Republican nomination and his campaign for the Presidency violated all the conventions of American electoral politics (‘more outlandish and abnormal than any in American history’. (p. 51) His surviving the Access Hollywood tape – where he boasted of regularly sexually assaulting women – was certainly unprecedented and seems to have convinced him that he can get away with just about any criminality. And once in the White House, the new President spent ‘between four and eight hours’ watching television every day, focussing in particular on the coverage he was getting. Herbert and co. write of the ‘especially close relationships’, Trump has developed ‘with Fox News and its hosts’. Indeed, we are told that there are some in the White House who describe Sean Hannity as his ‘shadow Chief-of Staff’. What we have is a ‘rather surreal presidency’ where ‘the most powerful man in the world spends hours each day watching Fox News covering him’. (pp. 110-111) On top of that, he is ‘spectacularly ignorant on the details of most aspects of public policy’. He claims to be an expert on most things, indeed to be a genius, but can only answer ‘policy questions with rambling, incoherent discussions that reveal only fragments of relevant information’. At the same time, he has shown no ‘willingness to learn about policy’, not even with regard to national security. (p. 139) The Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk greatest influence on his thinking is not official briefings, but ‘Fox News and Sean Hannity’. As they put it: ‘Fox’s fierce ideological angle, its lack of factual fidelity, its sympathy for conspiracy theories and the style in which it covers news and politics combine with Trump’s reluctance to absorb expert advice, meaning the president does not receive a balanced assessment of issues, or even a clear sense of what issues matter.’ (pp. 140-141) Nevertheless, they still insist that his is an ‘ordinary’ Presidency. Herbert and co. argue that when we come to look at the Trump administration’s actual policy achievements, rather than at the bluster that emanates from the man himself, they are very much mainstream Republican. The 2017 tax cuts were ‘the signature domestic policy achievement of Trump’s first two years in office’ (p. 6) and yet, far from being some populist triumph benefiting the ‘little man’, this measure ‘protects the interests of big business and the wealthy at the expense of ordinary Americans’. It demonstrated that ‘Trump is governing as a traditional Republican plutocrat, influenced by the same organized interests and economic ideology as his recent predecessors’. (p. 75) As Trump told his wealthy guests at Mar-a-Lago on the day he signed the tax bill: ‘You all just got a lot richer’. (p 76) He actually commented on Twitter about how those multi-billionaire and major polluters, the Koch brothers ‘love my Tax & Regulation Cuts [. . . . ] I made them richer’. (p. 77) At the same time as preaching right-wing populism at MAGA rallies across the country, he shamelessly courts the super rich in more salubrious venues. In December 2017, Trump made a speech at an event organised by Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group at ‘Schwarzman’s palatial Manhatten triplex’. (p. 86) Schwarzman, it is worth noting, was paid a modest $799 million in 2015. Trump’s super rich audience paid $100,000 a head for a twenty minute speech from the great man. These private audiences with the super rich go unnoticed while his MAGA rallies garner massive media attention, especially from Fox News. Far from ‘draining the Swamp’, Trump has made it deeper, wider, more foul smelling and disease-ridden, with his own family all the better placed to be able to both defecate into it and to drink from it. This is hardly surprising. What would have been astonishing is if the crooked businessman in the White House had proposed tax measures to the detriment of the super rich. Similarly with his administration’s dismantling of the regulatory state, something that will impact on the health and well- being of millions of ordinary Americans, including many who voted for him, all for the benefit of big business. The roll back of regulation also Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk freed up the financial sector from the controls that were imposed to avoid a repeat of the 2008 Crash. As Herbert and co. point out, this is all mainstream Republicanism, implemented under a President who is constantly preaching a right-wing, anti-elite populism. Indeed, as far as anything that challenges ‘Republican orthodoxy’ goes, or that is in line with Trump’s proclaimed ‘populist and nationalist agenda’, such measures remain ‘largely unfulfilled and opposed by elites in his own party’. (p. 7) Trump’s concern for American workers ‘is largely verbal’ and he has ‘no experience of poverty or even a life less than wealthy’. His cabinet reflected the real concerns of his administration: it was ‘the wealthiest cabinet in history’. Far from being a ‘radical populist’, Trump is, Herbert and co insist, ‘an ordinary Republican’. (p. 87) This is true even with regard to his playing the race card and his vicious anti-immigrant stance. Trump is very much in line with traditional Republicanism: what is different is his style and relentless pursuit of these themes, rather than the content. More problematic is his trade policy and his readiness to fight trade wars, most notably with China. Here ‘America First’ does seem to have ‘trumped’ the concerns of the Republican establishment. And the same goes for his readiness to embrace deficit spending, with Republican politicians long committed to cutting the deficit now apparently unconcerned by its growth. There is much to recommend the case put forward by Herbert, McCrisken and Wroe. They provide considerable detail to establish Trump’s ‘ordinariness’, not least in their examination of who voted for him. They insist, for example, that ‘there is no evidence of a large switch to Trump among the left-behind’. (p. 58). Their book is essential reading for anyone concerned with understanding the Trump phenomenon. Nevertheless, a good case can be made that they underestimate the importance of the criminality and corruption of Trump and his people for the future conduct of US government; criminality and corruption colluded in by the Republican establishment and altogether disappeared by Fox News. And, of course, there is the enormity of having a President who was installed in office with the assistance of the Putin regime: historians will undoubtedly see this as of considerable importance. He might not be the first President to be a compulsive liar, incredibly ignorant, semi- literate, incoherent, corrupt, a crook, even a rapist, but he is surely the first to be elected with the help of a hostile foreign power. And there is his impact on US culture made by the nexus of his rallies, Fox News’ coverage of him and his own Twitter presence. Trump, as Herbert and co acknowledge, is engaged in continual campaigning, more concerned with keeping alive a Trumpist movement of adoring followers that flatters his Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ego, than he is with actually governing. This movement is sustained by misogyny, racism, xenophobia and nationalism; by a harsh brutal rhetoric that has already resulted in serious lethal violence, with more to come before the game is finally played out. His ‘America First’ rhetoric has undoubtedly helped create a breeding ground for the Far Right in the USA. It has only been in the aftermath of the El Paso massacre that he has disassociated himself from these forces. Before El Paso he seemed actually quite happy to give them a covert endorsement. Once again, the likelihood is that historians will see this as an important feature of the Trump Presidency. Trump’s relationship with the US Far Right is the subject of Mike Cole’s short book (140 pages for £40) Trump, the Alt-Right and Public Pedagogies of Hate and for Fascism. For Cole, the election of Trump, ‘a ruthless sociopathic, racist, misogynist, disablest’ was ‘a quantum leap in the degeneracy of (especially American) capitalism . . . a massive lurch in the direction of fascism’. (p. 1) He writes of Trump’s ‘racist and fascistic rhetoric’ (p. 5), but in the end concludes that while he ‘cannot be considered a fascist, he is “fascistic”, in the sense of leaning towards fascism, being open to fascist ideas, defending fascists on the ground’. (p. 20). The man practices a ‘public pedagogy of hate’, the notion around which Cole organises his discussion. Cole identifies the Charlottesville episode of August 2017 as being ‘a historical turning point in the development of fascism in the US’, (p. 15) ‘a milestone’. (p. 67) While Trump might not actually be a fascist, he is nevertheless engaged in attempting to normalize and promote fascism. As part of his evidence Cole refers to Trump’s retweeting three anti-Muslim videos from ‘British fascist group Britain First’ (p. 40) and his tweeting of a quote from Mussolini (‘It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep’) – although it is possible that Trump has no idea who Mussolini was. Cole also briefly chronicles the rise of the neo-Nazi alt-right and the support that it has given to Trump, as well as looking at the opposition that ‘the pedagogies of hate’ have provoked. But while his is an extremely useful book, both informative and an important contribution to debate and discussion, how accurate is his diagnosis of a ‘massive lurch towards mainstream fascism’? One mistake that Cole makes is to look at the contemporary US Far Right from the perspective of 1920s and 1930s European fascism. A much better starting point would have been the various fascist organisations and movements that were formed in the USA in the 1930s. What becomes clear is that, while sections of the US capitalist class had no problem with using some of these groups against the labour movement, Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk they never had any intention of subordinating themselves to them. A strong fascist state, indeed a strong domestic state of any description, was never and is not now on the agenda of the US capitalist class. Fascism in the USA has a history distinct from that of European fascism. Secondly, far from Charlottesville being a ‘milestone’ in the rise of American fascism, a good case can be made that from the alt-right’s point of view their taking to the streets was premature. They were not strong enough to conquer the streets and Charlottesville actually demonstrated their weakness and lack of support, as well as giving their enemies plenty of warning of what they intended or hoped to eventually achieve. Trump has certainly had no problem with fascists, neo-Nazis and white supremacists supporting him, but they are definitely in a subordinate, supporting role. And his wholly insincere condemnation of racism, fascism and white supremacy in the aftermath of the 3 August 2019 El Paso massacre shows that even Trump will distance himself from the consequences of his rhetoric when politically necessary. While Trump clearly has a predilection for strong leaders, indeed seems positively envious of them, he is himself very much a comic opera authoritarian. These disagreements aside, Cole’s book certainly deserves, indeed demands to be reprinted in a cheap paperback edition.2 The emergence of a mass Fascist movement in the United States cannot be ruled out if the conditions were right. A new deeper and more damaging economic crash, together with environmental catastrophe and mass migration from Central and South America, would seem to be essential components for such a development. In such circumstances, Trump’s Presidency would certainly be seen as having helped prepare the way. One peculiarity of a mass American fascist movement would be that it would parade behind the Cross and proclaim its Christianity. This brings us to Stephen Strang’s Trump Aftershock, the sequel to his best-selling God and Donald Trump (reviewed in Lobster 76). Indeed the new book actually includes a full-page photograph of Trump proudly waving Strang’s earlier volume, presumably unread. Strang is already promising/ threatening another volume in the New Year, God, Trump and the 2020 Election: Why He Must Win and What’s at Stake for Christians if He Loses. Here we enter an alternative universe, the world as seen by the evangelical Right, a crazed upside down place of demonic conspiracies. In this world, Fox News is ‘the only channel offering a fair and balanced 2 He is also the author of Theresa May, the Hostile Environment and Public Pedagogies of Hate and Threat (Routledge, 2019), and although one is reluctant to wish it on anyone, he seems ideally placed to write a similar volume on Prime Minister Johnson. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk picture of what’s actually happening’. (p. 221) In this world, according to Strang, the Trump Presidency ‘has exceeded all expectations’, and this is despite the powerful demonic forces arrayed against him. (p. xv) The book actually has an Appendix chronicling the Trump Presidency’s ‘500 DAYS OF AMERICAN GREATNESS’. (pp. 229-234) Indeed, so Christian in its achievements has the Trump Presidency been, Strang just cannot understand why the one in five evangelicals who did not vote for him in 2016 have not rallied to him since. They obviously do not know him. He is not the dissolute man he was, but is ‘changed’, has become God’s instrument. And the forces trying to bring him down are terrifying. At their centre is the ‘Hungarian billionaire György Schwartz, better known as George Soros’. (p. 22) He is not alone. There are an army of ‘Far Left billionaires’ that has been at work ‘over the past fifteen years, buying newspapers, funding websites, and creating a phalanx of nonprofit advocacy groups to promote ultraliberal policies’. (p. 112) The people ‘who hate Trump hate him only because he is standing up for the kind of values Christians believe are right’. In this world that Strang has invented, ‘most of the billionaires are leftists, and they are investing their billions to promote ungodly agendas from abortion to LGBT issues to political policies such as open borders and socialism’. Strang thanks God that there are still some few billionaires ‘who are examples of godly values. But they make up only a small fraction of US billionaires’. These people are waging ‘spiritual warfare’ against President Trump and have an ‘insidious agenda that is demonic to its core’. George Soros is, inevitably, ‘the undisputed ringleader of this globalist cabal’. (p. 118). In this universe, Hillary Clinton is inevitably cast as ‘Jezebel’! (p. 132) And, of course, Trump has also taken a stand against the ‘environmental extremists’ with their fake warnings of global warming. (p. 222) Not only has Trump handed over the federal judiciary (including the Supreme Court) to these people, he has also taken a stand against abortion. Even further, his moving of the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem powerfully resonated with their end of times theology. There is a peculiar irony in the evangelical support for Israel because, in their theology, it hastens Armageddon. That means that the great majority of Jews, those who refuse to convert, will soon be condemned to the everlasting torments of Hell along with the rest of us. Strang repeats the evangelical claim that Trump is the new Cyrus the Great, a profane man chosen by God to do his will, a sort of holy sleight of hand that enables them to excuse all of his missteps. One does wonder, of course, what Cyrus’s response would have been if anyone had compared him to someone like Trump in his day. He would have probably Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk given them a painful death. Still the analogy is meant as much to flatter Trump as it is to provide evangelicals with a theological justification for supporting him, no matter what. In Israel, the Mikdash Educational Center has actually minted a memorial coin with images of Trump and Cyrus ‘to honor Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital’, (p. 199) something also Strang celebrates. As for the way forward, Strang advocates the majority of the Palestinian population should be paid to leave the West Bank and that those who choose to remain should be given ‘full rights of citizenship except the vote’. (p. 201) One problem that Strang will have to deal with sometime soon is Trump’s attitude towards North Korea. As he quite correctly points out, the regime there has been a ferocious, indeed murderous, persecutor of Christians. Accordingly, he strongly supported Trump’s confrontation with Kim Jong-un. What, one wonders, does he make of Trump’s more recent bromance with the North Korean dictator, actually praising him as someone he had fallen in love with. Obviously some way will be found to explain this away and evangelical conservative support for Trump will survive. One cannot help thinking that the only thing that would compromise this support is if Trump announced that he was gay, was marrying Steve Bannon and that Melania Trump was having an abortion. John Newsinger is working on a book on the Labour Party's foreign, defence and colonial policies. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk A Troubled Book The Killing of Thomas Niedermayer David Blake Knox Kilorgan, Co. Dublin: New Island Books (https://www.newisland.ie), 2019 Colin Wallace In 2010, former Detective Superintendent Alan Simpson of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) published Duplicity and Deception (Dublin: Brandon), the second of two books about his experiences as an investigating officer in Belfast during the 1970s and 80s.1 They were set during what Simpson called the ‘Twilight Zone of the Troubles’. His books provide a stark account of the conditions under which detectives then had to live and work, not least of which was knowledge of the killing, both on and off duty, of over 300 of their colleagues. One of the most controversial cases Simpson investigated was the dramatic kidnapping by the Provisional IRA of 45 year-old Thomas Niedermayer, a German national, who was the Managing Director of the Grundig electronics factory on the outskirts of Belfast. He had been awarded the OBE and was an honorary West German Consul to Northern Ireland. During the late evening of 27 December 1973 two men, who claimed to have collided with his parked car, lured Mr Niedermayer from his home at Glengoland Gardens in West Belfast. He was then forced into another vehicle and driven away. Three days after he was kidnapped, he was killed in a struggle while attempting to escape from his IRA captors. His remains were secretly buried in an unofficial refuse tip at Colin Glen Road, not far from the family home, on the outskirts of Belfast. Following an intelligence lead, Alan Simpson and his RUC team discovered Niedermayer’s body in 1980. One man was convicted of manslaughter in 1981. One other was convicted of responsibility for Niedermayer’s illegal detention. Niedermayer’s death created an appalling legacy. In June 1990 Niedermayer’s widow Ingeborg returned to Ireland and booked into a hotel at 1 The first was Murder Madness (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1999). Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Greystones in Co Wicklow, in the Irish Republic. It would appear that she then walked into the sea fully clothed and drowned. Her body was found washed up on a beach a few days later. Her daughter Renate, who had answered the door of the family home to two men who kidnapped her father, moved to South Africa to live. Within a year of her mother’s death, she too had taken her own life. Gabrielle, the elder of the Niedermayer children, also died by suicide, and a few years later so too did her husband. Alan Simpson’s account of the investigation that led to the discovery of Thomas Niedermayer’s body and the arrest and conviction of those involved in his abduction and killing, is a tribute not only to his own ingenuity and determination to solve that case, but to the work of his team of detectives. When my attention was drawn to the publication of a new book, The Killing of Thomas Niedermayer, by David Blake Knox, I expected that it would expand significantly on Alan Simpson’s account. Sadly, that is not the case. The core of the Blake Knox version feels like a poorly and minimally rehashed version of what Alan Simpson wrote, but padded out with largely irrelevant material about Irish and German history. To make matters worse, information in the book is largely unsourced. It is littered with mistakes. Blake Knox, who is presented as an accomplished author, film director and journalist, has produced a poor imitation of the book written by the police officer who investigated Mr Niedermayer’s disappearance. Alan Simpson expressed his personal dissatisfaction with Blake Knox’s efforts (Belfast Telegraph, 3 July 2019)2 and a scathing review by Katie Binns in The Sunday Times on 20 July 2019 noted, ‘the reader is left to trawl through a haphazard catalogue of Anglo-Irish events with no detail deemed too irrelevant’.3 To my great surprise I am referred to on a number of pages, though I had no involvement in the Niedermayer case when I worked with the Army in Northern Ireland during the 1970s. To makes matters worse, the author failed to contact me to check if the information he planned to use about me was accurate. Chapter 23, entitled ‘Fake News’, advances numerous demonstrably false allegations in relation to my role as the Senior Information Officer in the Information Policy (PsyOps) unit at British Army HQ in Lisburn during 1973-74. My alleged activities introduce and frame the front and back end of that chapter, on pages 181-4 and 193-4. I am alleged also to be responsible for 2 3 Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk highly discreditable activities outlined between pages 185-192. In addition, I am discussed on pages 207 and 292-3. I address Mr Blake Knox’s untrue assertions in two parts. I indicate first how, using freely available evidence, Mr Blake Knox’s analysis is factually mistaken. In Part II, I explain why such errors are symptomatic of a broader pattern of deliberate and sustained disinformation by Government agencies, designed to conceal wrongdoings of the past Loyalty, a much-misused term during the post-1968 Northern Irish ‘Troubles’, travels in two directions, upwards and downwards. If a government seeks loyalty from the electorate, it must demonstrate that it acts with integrity: for example when members of its own Security Forces speak out about wrongdoing. It should not turn a blind eye when that is the expedient thing to do. The fact that the ‘Troubles’ actually occurred is, in no small measure, due to such expediency. That is also why abuses inflicted on children, such as those that took place at Kincora and other institutions, continued unabated for so long. 50 years on since ‘the Battle of the Bogside’ and the introduction of British troops to the streets of Northern Ireland, it is important that we learn, and relearn, these lessons. On 14 August 1969 I went down to the barricades on the edge of the Bogside with Lt. Colonel Bill Todd, CO of the Prince of Wales’ Own Regiment of Yorkshire, and we had a discussion with Bernadette Devlin about the situation. It was a surreal atmosphere – one I shall never forget. Despite everything that has happened to me and to Northern Ireland since then, I remain and I shall continue to remain, a strong supporter of the work of the Security Forces, as demonstrated by people like Alan Simpson, CID detective Johnston Brown who wrote Into the Dark (Dublin: Gill Publishing, 2006), plus thousands of other Security Force members who served honourably in Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’. I also believe that there is a legitimate role for activities such as Psychological Operations in armed conflicts. That does not mean that I support Parliament being deliberately misled by those in Government service. Psychological Operations are weapons and, like all other weapons, they should be handled with care. Ireland as a whole was, and remains, one of the most hospitable and friendly places on earth. Yet, during the course of the Troubles, it has also been the setting for events that revolt the human conscience. What happened to Thomas Niedermayer and his family is one of those. Blake Knox’s regurgitation of false or misleading information in relation to that tragedy, without any apparent attempt at verification, only makes an appalling situation worse for all those concerned. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Part I The IRA did not announce publicly that they had taken Niedermayer, though they soon afterwards contacted the British government with their demands. Thomas Niedermayer was offered in exchange for transfer to a prison in Northern Ireland of Marion and Dolores Price (plus six others) then in custody in England. The Price sisters were convicted in London, on 15 November 1973, of conspiracy to cause explosions. In pursuit of the transfer, the sisters went on hunger strike and were force-fed. In the absence of official confirmation of the IRA contact, Thomas Niedermayer’s disappearance occasioned extensive speculation. On 29 December, David McKittrick reported in the Irish Times, ‘Totally contradictory theories about the incident are circulating in Belfast . . . including several that cite both the Provisional and Official wings of the IRA, as well as mysterious references to “non political” motivations. The most widely held belief in Belfast is that the Provisional IRA had carried out the kidnapping as a prelude to bargaining for the release of the Price Sisters, currently on hunger strike in British prisons.’ On the following Monday, 31 December, the newspaper followed up with this: ‘... the original popular theory that he had been captured by the IRA as a prelude to political bargaining is beginning to give way to speculation concerning [Niedermayer’s] financial and domestic situation. The RUC are continuing to investigate every possible motive.’ Official sources appear to have promoted detailed misinformation in the days, weeks and months following. It implicated loyalists who opposed and then successfully collapsed the new Sunningdale Agreement power-sharing administration in May 1974. In late January 1974, under pressure from the Reverend Ian Paisley, who appeared to be in possession of leaked information, the British government revealed the original IRA contact. Despite continuing misinformation, IRA responsibility for Niedermayer’s fate also featured in press coverage.4 In attempting to tell this story, Mr Blake Knox embellishes extensive misinformation from official sources about my role at that time. Introducing the ‘Fake News’ chapter, he writes: ‘Among the tactics [British] Military Intelligence employed was to use off- the-record briefings to the press to suggest that Niedermayer’s kidnappers were not IRA members, but loyalist paramilitaries. One of those who was responsible for such briefings was a senior information officer with the Ministry of Defence called Colin Wallace.’ (p. 181) 4 See, for example, ‘RUC believes consul kidnapped by Provisionals’, Irish Times, 26 January 1974. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk According to Mr Blake Knox, I am a ‘professional fantasist’ (p. 182) who originated untrue stories spread about Thomas Niedermayer. On p. 184 the following appears: ‘Following the [Thomas Niedermayer] abduction, journalists were given off the record briefings from [Colin] Wallace and MI5 officers that suggested several alternative reasons for what had happened. In two of these scenarios, loyalists were blamed for the kidnapping. According to Robert Fisk, journalists were told that “a prominent Protestant politician was involved in the murder of the former West German Honorary Consul to Belfast”. The reason given was that the politician’s wife was allegedly having an affair with Niedermayer. The woman in question was Doris Hilgendorff and her husband was William Craig, the anti-Sunningdale unionist politician. In an alternative version of this story, it was Craig who was having the affair with Ingeborg Niedermayer.’ Before making very serious allegations, a responsible author would first attempt to confirm his or her sources of information. Mr Blake Knox never attempted to speak to me. He provided no sources for his assertions with regard to my behaviour. As I shall show, such briefings were not carried out by me, or by the PsyOps unit in which I worked. If anything, we undermined them. For the record, I cannot recall ever giving a press briefing, or causing such a briefing to be given, either on or off the record, on the subject of Thomas Niedermayer. Neither did I spread misinformation about his abduction and subsequent disappearance. Initially, the Army took the view that the kidnapping was entirely a police matter, albeit we were interested in the IRA’s first known use of kidnapping as weapon. The Army did not want to say or do anything that would make Mr Niedermayer’s situation worse. Moreover, we were initially given to believe that it was likely that Thomas Niedermayer would be released unharmed. That may well have been the IRA’s intention, but things went badly wrong. Mr Blake Knox withholds his source information even when citing what appear to be newspaper articles. In the absence of assistance from the book, his unsourced quotation concerning a ‘a prominent Protestant politician’ may be based on a London Times article by Ireland Correspondent Robert Fisk on 25 March 1975 (also Irish Times, same date). If not, he should have no difficulty indicating an alternative. It stated: ‘An officer attached to 39 Infantry Brigade at Lisburn last year toured newspaper offices in Belfast, suggesting that a prominent Protestant politician in Ulster had been in involved in the disappearance of Mr Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Thomas Niedermayer, the West German honorary consul in Belfast, who was kidnapped from his home in Belfast just after Christmas in 1973.’ There are two points to consider. First, that officer is not me. My official designation was Senior Information Officer, HQ NI. I was not part of 39 Brigade. Robert Fisk, an experienced journalist with whom I was in contact, would not have misidentified me. 39 Infantry Brigade’s Public Relations Officer at that time was Major Ronnie Sampson. A letter dated 4 August 1977 from the Civil Adviser at Army HQ in Northern Ireland to the Ministry of Defence’s Directorate of Army Security, stated, ‘Ronnie Sampson used to be the PRO 39 Inf Bde.’ It goes on: ‘He was responsible for spreading rumours about the association of Niedermayer (W German Counsel) and Mrs Craig (wife of William Craig).’ The letter therefore confirms exactly what Fisk wrote. It does not suggest that any other member of the Army, including me, was involved in spreading such rumours about Thomas Niedermayer. I knew Major Sampson well at that time, albeit he had no role in Psychological Operations. I am in no doubt that, had he circulated such rumours without authority, he would have been severely disciplined and, almost certainly, immediately removed from his post. I remember that happening to another public relations officer for a much less serious unauthorised activity. The fact that Sampson remained in post until the end of his tour of duty in Northern Ireland speaks for itself. I am sure Robert Fisk can corroborate the essential facts as they apply to me. I am assuming, as there is no indication to the contrary, that Blake Knox did not attempt to speak to Robert Fisk either. Had he spoken to either or both of us his errors could not have been published. Second, Major Sampson’s newspaper office tour did not, as implied by Mr Blake Knox, take place after the Niedermayer kidnap in late December 1973. It occurred over 9 months later, in October 1974, after the Ulster Workers Council strike collapsed the Sunningdale power-sharing executive. At that time, William Craig’s loyalist Vanguard movement had a semi-fascist image. He had spoken in 1972 of drawing up lists and of ‘liquidating’ enemies. He appeared to be advocating a form of UDI or ‘Ulster independence’. Loyalist paramilitaries, who were in the ascendant post Sunningdale, approved of Craig’s hard-line stance. British Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, on the other hand, was very upset at the defeat of power-sharing. He felt, not without reason, that the security services were partly responsible. That is one reason why Craig became a candidate for a media-based attack. It was of such thoroughgoing ineptitude it had an opposite effect to the one intended. Ronnie Sampson’s activities followed on from an earlier proposal from the Northern Ireland Office to spread the very same rumours in or about September of 1974. The request was made to Peter Broderick, the Chief Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Information Officer at Army HQ NI, just prior to his departure from Northern Ireland. It was then passed on to the PsyOps unit where I worked. PsyOps rejected the request. It was totally at odds with what we had been told about the kidnapping shortly after Mr Niedermayer’s disappearance. Moreover, relationships between the Army and the NIO were rather strained at that time. We suspected that the information supplied to Peter Broderick by the NIO could be part of a ploy to discredit the Army. In any event we decided not to use the information. The ‘rumours’ included suggestions that Craig’s amorous liaison with Mrs Niedermayer took place in Ravensdale Riding School, County Louth, in the Irish Republic. (That was where Judith Ward, who was falsely convicted of the 3 February 1974 ‘M62 Coach bombing’, worked, both before and after her British Army desertion in the early 1970s.) If publicised, this ‘rumour’ might have undermined Craig’s stature generally, in particular with his loyalist paramilitary admirers. It came as a complete surprise when we discovered that Major Sampson was assiduously briefing the press on the Craig allegations. Journalists came to our door, seeking corroboration. All we could say, truthfully, was that we had heard the same rumours but could not substantiate them. Possibly as a result of our response, plus their own inquiries, no journalist in Britain or Ireland touched the story. Major Sampson’s efforts found one outlet, the German Bild am Sonntag newspaper on 27 October 1974. Craig and his wife sued immediately. They were awarded substantial damages and an apology in the London High Court one year later, November 1975 (not December, as Mr Blake Knox writes on page 187). An Irish Times headline on 12 November 1975 read, ‘Craig libel story was spread by Army man’. The ensuing story, by Conor O’Clery, identified him more precisely than Fisk, as follows: ‘A British Army Intelligence Officer helped to spread the allegations for which the Vanguard leader, Mr. William Craig, was yesterday awarded damages amounting to a five-figure sum. [. . .] In October 1974 the British Army Intelligence officer, a major attached to 39th Brigade at Lisburn Army H.Q., approached individual journalists working for The Irish Times, The Times and the Guardian.’ Though Ronnie Sampson was not an Intelligence officer, here is not merely confirmation of the identity of the source, but also the date of the misinformation campaign. In addition to Robert Fisk and myself, Mr Blake Knox could have attempted to confirm his misconceptions with Conor O’Clery. Having carelessly confused me with Major Sampson, Mr Blake Knox made another mistake, this time with regard to timeline. In recounting the story of Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Craig’s libel award, he failed to divulge the Bild article’s October 1974 publication date. He implied that it was published just after Niedermayer’s disappearance. Mr Blake Knox encouraged this impression by conflating it with another story published on 4 February 1974 in Der Spiegel, a more serious German publication. Mr Blake Knox managed to date the Der Spiegel article ‘five weeks’ after Niedermayer’s abduction. His considerable ire was reserved for similar but in fact unrelated stories in two German publications, published seven months apart. Curiously, Mr Blake Knox ignored the fact that essentially the same information appeared in the 3 February London Observer. Kevin Myers’ front-page article there was headlined ‘Arms-smuggling clue to abduction’. Mr Blake Knox obscures this by writing (p. 185), ‘the allegations were given credence by some British newspapers, including the Observer’. Layers of misinformation in the Observer and Der Spiegel on 3 and 4 February contained significant detail, strongly suggestive of an official source. The Der Spiegel journalist was Borries Gallasch, the magazine’s London correspondent from 1976, who died in 1981 from cancer, aged 37. Mr Blake Knox does not name him. In papers of former Taoiseach Dr Garrett Fitzgerald, deposited in University College Dublin, Gallasch is identified as talking to an Irish Department of Foreign Affairs official. Mr Blake Knox cites this discussion (p. 187) without naming the source or Gallasch. The journalist was reported as saying that Niedermayer had liaisons with female members of Grundig staff, that his wife was alcoholic and that Niedermayer knew his abductors, who were not in the IRA. Niedermayer’s numerous alleged affairs were said to be a cause of his disappearance. In the subsequent Der Spiegel and Observer articles, detailed information on alleged loyalist arms smuggling using Grundig containers, about which Niedermayer was said to be uneasy, his alcoholism, mental instability and adultery, plus other factors, were given as the cause of the loyalist abduction and killing of Thomas Niedermayer. A loyalist leader given the name ‘Andrew Carter’ – a thinly disguised William Craig – was alleged to be involved in the arms importation and also with Niedermayer’s wife. Craig was named in the stories as someone with insider knowledge that Niedermayer was dead. In response Craig explained in the Guardian on 4 February, that on 17 January he had passed on to Mrs Niedermayer, through Grundig, the leaked information (referred to earlier) obtained by Ian Paisley. For Myers, in particular, putting two and two together and getting five, Paisley’s knowledge indicated loyalist intimacy with Niedermayer’s fate. ‘Few sources believe’, he concluded, that the IRA contact with the British government ‘was genuine’. Mr Blake Knox may, yet again, care to explain why he did not ask Kevin Myers about his certainty in 1974 with regard to Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Niedermayer’s fate. The misinformation raises some very important questions. Who would have gained from circulating such false information and what was the objective? Where did the journalists’ information, that contained signs of officially inspired accurate and inaccurate information, come from? Since Major Sampson’s efforts to implicate William Craig arrived many months later, the immediate source remains a mystery. In the passage cited above from page 184, Mr Blake Knox mentions MI5. We do not know if that suggestion is as much a product of Mr Blake Knox’s imagination as is his false allegation of my involvement, or if there is substance to it. From the foregoing, I consider it unlikely that Mr Blake Knox can enlighten us further on the point. Had Mr Blake Knox researched and presented information professionally, consulted people who were around at the time, and not confused the timeline, he could have followed up the origin of the untrue, though well-constructed, initial misinformation about Niedermayer that emerged almost immediately after his disappearance. Instead, Mr Blake Knox’s book ranges far and wide over the course of Irish history. The book is remarkably thin on Thomas Niedermayer’s actual abduction. That arrives on page 165. It is thick with Mr Blake Knox’s political perspective and conspiracy theories with regard to my alleged role. It is therefore ironic that the author criticises ‘wild conspiracy theories’ – which he fails to detail – about RUC Special Branch, that ‘would have done credit to Colin Wallace in his heyday’. (p. 207) Again, the reader is expected to take Mr Blake Knox’s word for it that he knows what he is talking about. Special Branch was, asserts Mr. Blake Knox, ‘the target of black propaganda from both republican and loyalist paramilitaries as well as the object of lurid fantasies on the part of some journalists’. (p. 208) On this basis, he gives no more than cursory attention to Special Branch’s controversial role, alongside military intelligence, in colluding with loyalist paramilitary violence. As official investigations by Lord Stevens, Sir Desmond de Silva QC, and Baroness O’Loan have shown, widespread concerns about the Special Branch were anything but ‘wild conspiracy theories’. Mr Blake Knox even ignores Alan Simpson’s powerful critique: ‘It has long been acknowledged that Special Branch were a force within a force, essentially a law unto themselves, with their activities constantly being monitored and guided by MI5. It is a well-voiced tenet of government that no one is above the law, but I am sure I am not the first one to propose that MI5 is. In short, they are untouchable, their principal rule being “Thou shalt not be caught.”’ Accounts of Special Branch and MI5 collusion with loyalist paramilitary violence Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk are, in fact, based on considered and extensive testimony and evidence. After ignoring Simpson’s critique of Special Branch, Mr Blake Knox’s acknowledgements and bibliography section notes, on page 291, though in a gestural fashion, RUC CID detective Johnston Brown’s ‘intense and vivid’ Into the Dark: 30 Years in the RUC (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2006). Like Simpson’s, Brown’s book, based on personal experience, is a comprehensive account of collusion with loyalists, including even the possibility that Brown’s family was set up for assassination. Mr Blake Knox also ignores this critique. The killing of solicitor Pat Finucane by a loyalist British agent is similarly bypassed. Brown described Special Branch’s subversion of his attempt to catch and convict Finucane’s killer. Mr Blake Knox’s prejudice in favour of a view of the world presented by this ‘force-within-a-force’, may account for his hostility to evidence I and others have placed on the public record, plus his errors in writing about my alleged connection to the Niedermayer story. What is all the more surprising about Mr Blake Knox’s extended discussion of Special Branch is that it had little to do with resolving the Niedermayer mystery. That was down to CID Chief Superintendent Alan Simpson, whose efforts receive scant attention from Mr Blake Knox. Part II An understanding of continuing attempts to discredit me, of which Mr Blake Knox’s book is a good example, is in the public interest. Evaluating them demonstrates the substantive charges to be, as with the misinformation in the Niedermayer case, always false. Let me address some more of Mr Blake Knox’s errors and omissions. From 1968 until February 1975 I was on the staff of Army HQ Northern Ireland at Lisburn on the outskirts of Belfast. In 1971, I began working for the Army’s Psychological Operations unit, which then operated under the cover title of ‘Information Policy’ (IP). To cover my activities, the MoD created a fake civil service job description for me under the title ‘Head of Production Services’, within Army Information Services (AIS). I was also a serving officer in the Ulster Defence Regiment, with responsibility for psychological operations on behalf of that Regiment. I had been informed on 24 December 1974 that I was to be moved in February 1975 from my Northern Ireland position to an Army HQ in England. I was told this was because my life was under threat. I found that very hard to credit. My life was in no greater danger than any other member of the security forces. I lived in what was probably one of most heavily protected military bases in Northern Ireland. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Mr Blake Knox writes, on page 193: ‘Colin Wallace resigned from the Ministry of Defence in 1975. [...] Wallace resigned in order to escape disciplinary action for his unauthorised release of classified documents to a journalist. It seems that the documents that he released had been read by the journalist’s cleaning woman: her husband happened to be in the RUC and she passed on the classified papers to him. Wallace later claimed that the real reason for the threat of disciplinary action was because he “knew too much” and was about to reveal details of MI5’s “dirty tricks” operations.’ The unnamed journalist was Robert Fisk. The ‘cleaning woman’ reference is a piece of fiction. I was being followed. The envelope I put under Robert Fisk’s door was seized by the RUC. I was set up by those worried about the misgivings I expressed about tasks assigned to me. I was accused of violating security policy by giving the restricted document mentioned above to Robert Fisk. The accusation was bizarre because, in the PsyOps role for which I was repeatedly commended, I was employed to provide sensitive and classified information to the press. Contrary to what Mr Bake Knox wrote, my resignation was the outcome of disciplinary action. It was my punishment. A civil service appeal board, through which I sought to reverse my dismissal, found against me. That board was deliberately made unaware that the civil service job description, under which I was charged, was a fake one. It was created by the MoD to hide my PsyOps role within the Army Information Services. I was given the option of resignation or the sack. Following the discovery in 1989 of some documents within the Ministry of Defence relating to my case, a confidential internal investigation was initiated by Sir Michael Quinlan, the Permanent Under Secretary at the Ministry. That investigation found that the Ministry had: (a) disciplined me in 1975 under the terms of my fake job specification which was designed to provide me with a cover for my PsyOps role; (b) lied to Parliament, the press and the public about my role in Psychological Operations, in which I had discretion when deciding what information I could provide to the press; and (c) made improper secret contact with the chair of the disciplinary appeal panel, in order to subvert the fair hearing to which I was entitled. The findings led to Mrs Thatcher being forced to admit in Parliament that, as Prime Minister, she and her Ministers had ‘inadvertently’ misled Parliament about my role in Northern Ireland. As a result of the Prime Minister’s admission, Parliament set up an Inquiry by Sir David Calcutt QC to determine what happened. In his report, Sir David concluded: Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘I am satisfied that shortly before the [Appeal Board] hearing took place representatives of the Ministry of Defence were in private communication with the chairman of the hearing with regard to Mr Wallace’s appeal. Such communications should not have happened; and I believe that what occurred probably affected the outcome of the appeal. Secondly, Mr Wallace’s work, as an information officer, was wide-ranging in its nature. I am satisfied that the full range of Mr Wallace’s work was not made plain to the Appeal Board. In my view the Appeal Board needed to know the full range of his work if it was to adjudicate justly on his appeal.’ In Sir David Calcutt’s view I was unfairly forced to resign from the MoD and he recommended that I be awarded compensation. His report into the MoD’s handling of my disciplinary hearing was regarded by the Metropolitan Police as prima facie evidence of a conspiracy to defraud, but the DPP advised the police that the evidence did not merit an investigation! I was, however, compensated by the MoD. I was, therefore, unfairly dismissed. Mr Blake Knox fails to report my exoneration. His is a fantasy official version that, over time, the actual official record discredited. My resignation was arranged for a variety of reasons. Following the success of the Ulster Workers Strike in bringing down the Power Sharing Executive, the incoming Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was annoyed by what he regarded as a failure by the security forces to confront the loyalist paramilitaries. He felt the authorities had also lost the propaganda initiative and he wanted to wrest control of PsyOps from the Army and put it under the control of the Northern Ireland Office (NIO). There is little doubt that I was regarded as a potential ‘threat’ by various, sometimes competing, actors for three reasons. First, because I had refused to spread disinformation supplied to me by the NIO about political figures such as Ian Paisley and William Craig. I have explained in that regard, the origin of the October 1974 Niedermayer smear. I was, however, under instruction from my Army superior, with which I complied, to interest journalists like David McKittrick in the activities of William McGrath, leader of the Loyalist paramilitary organisation Tara, and ‘Housefather’ of the Kincora Boys Hostel. Second, I was, in addition, critical of what appeared to be official collusion with loyalist violence. Third, my solicitor is on public record as saying that, at the time of my disciplinary hearing in 1975, I confirmed to him personally the existence of a campaign, from which I had distanced myself, within the intelligence services Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk against British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and others. The loss of the February 1974 general election by Edward Heath’s Conservatives to Labour was of great concern to right-wing ideologues within the security services. They decided to use the Northern Ireland intelligence apparatus to smear Wilson and others. That was 12 years before the former MI5 officer, Peter Wright, made similar allegations. Mr Blake Knox’s depiction of me as a ‘professional fantasist’ is a contemporary example of disinformation, an attempt to discredit my initial and subsequently accepted revelations about security services gone rogue. Much like dissidents in the old Soviet Union, both myself and Fred Holroyd, who independently revealed official collusion with illegal paramilitary violence, as well as extrajudicial killings, are portrayed as not merely bad, but almost certainly certifiably quite mad. In 1980, a few months after the Kincora sex abuse scandal was exposed in the press, I was arrested and charged with the murder of a friend, Jonathan Lewis. Mr Blake Knox engages in yet more character assassination on this point in the bibliography and acknowledgements section of his book. (pp. 293-4) In an attempt to undermine Paul Foot’s Who Framed Colin Wallace? (London: Macmillan, 1989, 1990), he cites the journalist Duncan Campbell to the effect that I ‘might very well’ have killed Jonathan Lewis in Arundel in 1980. He fails to state that Campbell wrote that in the New Statesman on 21 July 1989, seven years before my conviction for the manslaughter of Jonathan Lewis was overturned. Following Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s admission that ministers had ‘inadvertently’ misled Parliament about my role in Northern Ireland, my case was referred back to the Court of Criminal Appeal. At the appeal hearing, it was demonstrated that not only could I not have carried out the killing as the Prosecution claimed, but also that the forensic evidence had been faked. Prior to my trial in 1980, Home Office pathologist Dr Iain West was asked to perform a second autopsy on Jonathan Lewis, having found no evidence of foul play in his first. He gave evidence in 1981 of how I supposedly killed the victim with ‘an upward blow to the base of the nose’ with ‘the heel of the hand’, causing a ‘piledriver’ effect. During the 1996 appeal hearing three leading medical experts dismissed the claim, not least as this alleged fatal injury failed to dislodge the victim’s nose or even cause bruising. Dr West then admitted that, contrary to his original testimony, he had no previous experience of this supposed injury. A US secret service agent he could not identify told him about it. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Bingham, said of Dr West’s evidence: ‘If the trial jury were allowed to accept the karate chop explanation of the Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk deceased’s skull fracture as a simple and wholly satisfactory explanation of that injury, they were plainly misled.’ Dr West escaped prosecution for perverting the course of justice because, reportedly, he was terminally ill. Like the Birmingham Six, the Maguire Seven, the Guildford Four and Judith Ward, I was falsely convicted. For Mr Blake Knox to insinuate that I am anything other than an innocent victim demonstrates a significant ethical failing. In the same 1989 article, in a passage Mr Blake Knox ignored, Duncan Campbell wrote: ‘The government has assiduously ignored what Wallace says, while critics say he is a “Walter Mitty” fabricator who merits no attention at all. Not so. Wallace does merit attention. [In Who framed Colin Wallace?] Paul Foot has done a careful job of analyzing the documents and information Wallace has provided, in particular notes he made for the work he called Clockwork Orange. Foot has spent a lot of time meticulously analysing the textual and political significance of these manuscript notes. Like Foot, I am quite sure that neither these documents nor the claims Wallace makes about [sexual assaults in] Kincora [Boys Hostel] are fabricated. They are an important part of the secret history of intelligence and Northern Ireland.’ Did Mr Blake Knox deliberately ignore this part of Duncan Campbell’s analysis because it did not suit his thesis? It is another example of his selective reporting of my story. In addition to the examples of wrongdoing listed by Duncan Campbell, I also became uneasy when it became clear in 1973-4 that elements of the security services, in Army intelligence, MI5 and RUC Special Branch, were colluding with loyalist paramilitary organisations. There is good evidence that the May 1974 Dublin-Monaghan bombings, which Mr Blake Knox does not mention in his account of the collapse of Sunningdale, were a product of this arrangement. There are continuing efforts to discredit surviving documentation in which I wrote about these matters, though they have been demonstrated scientifically to originate at that time. However, these are not solely my views. During a debate on The Draft Detention of Terrorist Suspects (Temporary Extension) Bills (published on 14 June 2011) Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington (formerly John Stevens, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police) told Parliament in relation to collusion with loyalists: ‘There was the RUC [plus RUC Special Branch], MI5 and the army doing Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk different things. When you talk about intelligence, of the 210 people we arrested, only three were not agents. Some of them were agents for all four of those particular organisations, fighting against each other, doing things and making a large sum of money, which was all against the public interest and creating mayhem in Northern Ireland. Any system that is created in relation to this country and Northern Ireland has to have a proper controlling mechanism. It has to have a mechanism where someone is accountable for what the actions are and that has to be transparent, especially in the new processes and the new country which, thank the Lord, Northern Ireland is becoming and, God willing, will continue to be.’ In his Ghost Force: the Secret History of the SAS, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), former SAS Warrant Officer Ken Connor, who was involved in the creation of what later became known as ‘14 Int’, noted: ‘MI5 and MI6 had only one thing in common: a shared contempt for the RUC Special Branch, which they regarded as staffed by incompetents.’ He also reported that MI5 and MI6 had diametrically opposed agendas for the conflict. While MI6 pursued a political solution through secret contacts with the Dublin government and the Provisional leadership, MI5 sabotaged their efforts. The judicious spin put by MI5 upon a Provisional IRA document discovered during a raid on their Belfast HQ convinced Harold Wilson’s government that the IRA were about to launch terror attacks on whole Protestant communities. Are we to believe that Lord Stevens and Ken Connor are also ‘fantasists’? While it can be argued that Intelligence played a major part in achieving the relative peace Ireland currently enjoys, the counter activities referred to by Lord Stevens and others exacerbated the situation and prolonged the violence. Mr Blake Knox does not appear to understand that one reason he is in a position to comment (albeit amateurishly and unprofessionally) on misinformation emanating from official sources, is because I revealed what was going on. My intelligence role up to early 1975, under cover as an information officer in Army headquarters in Lisburn, was to use factual information where possible and, where deemed necessary, misinformation about those who encouraged or used illegal violence. I was involved in producing propaganda that was most effective when it was accurate. It was less effective when inaccurate. Some journalists are understandably touchy about the psy-ops role I played as part of my official duties. They imply that lying is habit-forming: I lied then and therefore I continue to lie, they suggest, including about the extent to which the British state lied and continues to lie. The abiding fact is, Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk though, that arguments I confront in opposition to my evidence-based assertions are replete with lies and deception. Those who throw up their hands in despair and argue that all is confusion, that there is no truth, do deceit a service. Belief in the power of lies over all else demoralises a healthy and invigorated public interest. The reader is left with no choice but to evaluate the evidence, to discuss and to debate it, and to form a considered opinion. My view, my experience and my evidence is part of that debate. Declaring it a fantasy is simply a means of obscuring the extant and the means of manipulation. Admittedly, working out what is going on is no easy task. Newspaper reporting, in addition to the content of books, must also be scrutinised. David McKittrick, one-time Irish Times reporter and Northern Editor, later the London Independent’s Ireland correspondent, popped into my life twice since my 1975 departure from Northern Ireland and, once beforehand, late in 1974. I suffered negative consequences on each occasion. In 1980 McKittrick contacted me at a point when I was forging a new life as information officer for Arun District Council. I had not given up all hope of bringing into the open such matters as official involvement with the later convicted paedophile William McGrath. I was considering defeat and leaving behind Northern Ireland and its troubles. Subsequent events, that came very close to defeating me in a catastrophic manner, rendered that course impossible. I was a victim of the powerful forces I once was employed to defend and also to vindicate. McKittrick met me twice in 1980, in Arundel and in London. We engaged in lengthy discussions, after which McKittrick wrote a three-part Irish Times series of articles, published on 22-24 April 1980. In the third article, I am referred to variously as ‘Intelligence sources’ (sic), ‘a high placed source’ and ‘a former intelligence officer’. The article noted MI5’s objections to, and their smear campaign against, Harold Wilson. It mentioned also the use of invented ‘intelligence traces’ against individuals, so as to secure their internment without trial. I was concerned momentarily that it would have been clear to those in the intelligence community that I was McKittrick’s source, a continuing troublemaker. Some months afterwards, August 1980, I was framed for the death of Jonathan Lewis, was convicted of manslaughter and was imprisoned for 10 years. Nevertheless, in April 1980 I was, for McKittrick, a highly creditable source for sensitive and important security information, which he published without personal or any other apparent difficulty. As late as 21 March 1981, he wrote in the Irish Times: Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘It was clear that [Colin Wallace] had access to the highest levels of intelligence data. He had an encyclopaedic memory which he occasionally refreshed with calls made on his personal scrambler telephone to the headquarters intelligence section a few floors above his office. He was astonishingly frank. He would freely give the names, addresses, phone numbers and names of mistresses of paramilitary figures, both Republican and Loyalist. He was also ready to admit mistakes made by the British Army and to acknowledge that the Provisionals or any other group were doing well.’ McKittrick’s opinion of my credibility in addressing the same 1970s period altered after my 1987 release from Lewes Prison. Whilst in prison, as well as writing to the Prime Minister and others, I began to speak openly, to the extent possible, about what had happened in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Investigative journalists like Duncan Campbell visited me. He thoroughly checked out and, if satisfied, published what I had to say. After I was released, I was determined to clear my name and hoped for additional interest from journalists like David McKittrick. All was going well, with significant coverage, until McKittrick and a BBC journalist called John Ware wrote notorious articles on 2 September 1987 for the London Independent, containing proven falsehoods. They reinvigorated a smear, criticised by Duncan Campbell, that I am not to be believed, a ‘Walter Mitty’ character. After a Press Council finding in March 1990, the Independent apologised for publishing these untruths and misrepresentations. A detailed account is in Paul Foot’s Who Framed Colin Wallace? pages 366-88. The ‘Walter Mitty’ smear first appeared after my manslaughter conviction. Some journalists who attended my trial later told me that much of this material was given to them by the Sussex police while the trial was in progress. It is also clear that some of that information must have been fed to the police from security sources in Northern Ireland. Following publication of the Independent story, Paul Foot, who was then writing Who Framed Colin Wallace?, was told independently by two journalists that they had been offered very similar information by a senior RUC officer who had been involved in the Terry Inquiry into sexual abuse at Kincora Boys Hostel. It is important to note that George Terry was Chief Constable of Sussex Police, the force whose investigation led to my wrongful conviction. One of the senior officers involved in that investigation was subsequently involved in the Terry Inquiry. It not only failed to interview key witnesses, the Inquiry also failed to tell Parliament that a senior MI5 officer, who refused to be interviewed by the police, had instructed an Army Intelligence Officer to cease investigating allegations about possible sexual abuses at Kincora. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Of all the police forces in the UK to be chosen as suitable to carry out an ‘independent’ investigation of allegations of an RUC cover-up of the Kincora scandal, the NI Secretary of State chose Sussex. I find that, like a lot else, very curious. A report written by a senior official at the NIO described Sir George Terry’s draft report on Kincora as ‘remarkably inept’ and suggested asking a senior civil servant to rewrite the material into one ‘condensed publishable version’.5 A former Conservative MP told me he had been informed personally that the RUC had also been circulating similar information to deter MPs from demanding an investigation into the allegations that Fred Holroyd and I were making about collusion between the Security Forces and Loyalist paramilitaries. The Independent story by John Ware and David McKittrick was, therefore, not original. It was officially planted. I wrote to the editor on 31 October 1987: ‘As you know, it is highly misleading to portray the story as an investigation by The Independent when in reality a senior RUC officer had made two earlier attempts to have the photographs [The Independent published] and a similar story published in two of the Sunday newspapers. Those newspapers, which had already investigated our allegations and satisfied themselves as to the veracity of what Fred and I were saying, refused to print the RUC account. It was seen as a blatant attempt to stem the growing demand for a judicial enquiry into the whole affair.’ That a senior RUC officer had attempted to plant on other journalists the material eventually used by the Independent is significant. Bernard Sheldon, former Legal Adviser to MI5, recorded in his notes (as disclosed to the HIA Inquiry), a meeting which he attended with Sir George Terry at the Sussex Police HQ at Lewes on 27 January 1983. At it, one Sussex Police officer reported that an identified senior RUC officer involved in the Terry Inquiry had leaked to the Sunday Times sensitive information about how, ‘British intelligence officers in Ulster used homosexual loyalist politicians in the early Seventies to gather information about extreme Protestant groups because they did not trust the integrity of the Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch.’ The Sunday Times story, which the Sussex police believed was based on the leak and published on 5 December 1982, stated: ‘At that time male homosexuality was still a criminal offence in the Province and the politicians were easily compromised. One politician used in this way was William McGrath, founder and leader of an extreme loyalist 5 NIO file: Sp (B) 291/360/01B, disclosed to the HIA Inquiry. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk group called Tara.’ Such an unauthorised leak, by a police officer involved in the Inquiry, was potentially a serious breach of the Official Secret Acts and of police discipline. Yet, there is no record of any disciplinary action being taken against the named officer, nor is there any mention of the incident in Sir George Terry’s report to Parliament. These incidents provide compelling evidence that, unlike Alan Simpson and Johnston Brown, some members of the RUC were less than impartial in their investigations. There is an overwhelming need for an official investigation into these matters, including the Terry Inquiry’s decision to withhold key information from Parliament. The RUC were concerned primarily with revelations about collusion. A key claim of the RUC-sponsored story in the Independent was that, contrary to what Fred Holroyd and I had claimed, ‘No credible first hand evidence of security force complicity, of the type alleged by Mr Wallace and Mr Holroyd has emerged in 18 years of violence. On the contrary, Loyalist paramilitary sources have never, either publicly or privately, claimed to have worked with the security forces in assassinations.’ However writing in the Independent on 23 October 2013, one of the authors, David McKittrick, quoted a member of the Historical Enquiries Team (HET) as saying: ‘It is difficult to believe that such widespread evidence of collusion was not a significant concern at the highest levels of the security forces and government. It may be that there was apprehension about confirming the suspicions of collusion and involvement, particularly of RUC personnel.’ McKittrick went on to cite an internal military document estimating that between 5 and 15 per cent of members of the Ulster Defence Regiment were also members of loyalist groups, some of which were involved in many murders. As he did not claim that his 2013 sources were ‘Walter Mitty’ fantasists, McKittrick’s conversion, 26 years later, to acceptance that collusion did exist, appears greater than that of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. The collusion cover-up continued for the 32 years after the discredited Independent story was first published. On 5 July 2019, Northern Ireland’s Lord Chief Justice, Sir Declan Morgan, ordered the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland to conduct an independent probe into alleged state collusion with Loyalist paramilitaries. The independent Historic Enquiries Team (HET) had partially completed an investigation of the activities of the Loyalist Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk paramilitary groups before police commanders halted its work. In other words, nothing had changed during those 32 years. The Independent’s spurious misinformation almost scuttled the 1989 publication of Who Framed Colin Wallace? If it had not been for the professionalism, dedication, and the tenacity of the late Paul Foot, it is likely that the campaign to clear my name would have expired ignominiously. I am immensely grateful to truly independent journalists like Foot, in particular to him. The Independent reviewer of Who Framed, Godfrey Hodgson, remarked that Foot’s rebuttal of The Independent’s ‘rubbishing’ of myself and Fred Holroyd was ‘wholly devastating’. As Foot remarked in the paperback edition, this was ‘a rare assault by an independent reviewer on the paper he was writing in’.(1990, p. 401) The book was universally praised. Apologists for the system remained silent for a period. They re-emerge occasionally, on this occasion in the naive form presented by Mr Blake Knox. A document disclosed to me in 2016 indicated the enthusiasm with which David McKittrick set about his task in 1987. On 4 August 1987, Brian Blackwell, head of the ‘Law and Order Division’ at the Northern Ireland Office, distributed the following memo: E.R. CONFIDENTIAL Mr Wood cc [MI5 officer] Info Services (b) Mr Marsh - (SIL) DAVID McKITTRICK: ARTICLE ON HOLROYD AND WALLACE 1. You and copy recipients will be interested to know that I had one of my regular meetings yesterday with David McKittrick. He tells me he has written a major piece rubbishing the revelations of Wallace and [Fred] Holroyd. He hopes that it will be published in the [London] Independent on Wednesday 14 August. 2. Brian Blackwell [signature] Law and Order Division 4 August 1987 It is not clear in what professional capacity McKittrick attended the ‘regular meetings’, or how often he divulged what he intended to publish. In a previous session with Blackwell, circulated on that occasion to two MI5 operatives, McKittrick reportedly offered the view that, as ‘a Walter Mitty fantasist’, I was ‘clearly telling lies’. How ironic that the Independent articles repeated lies, smears and fantasies directed at and not from me. It may be worth noting that prior to joining the NIO, Brian Blackwell was a Lt Colonel in the Army and in 1972 had commanded 233 Signal Squadron at Lisburn. In his acknowledgements and bibliography section, Mr Blake Knox, having dismissed Paul Foot, recommends the ‘all-too-prescient . . . arguments’ of the late Paul Wilkinson, from Aberdeen University. (p. 283) In 1988 Channel Four Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk News terminated Wilkinson’s services as a consultant on terrorism. He had to apologise publicly for ‘totally untrue’ allegations about me in a July 1987 letter sent privately, on university notepaper, to Channel Four News. The programme had broadcast five hard-hitting items based largely on my allegations and those of Fred Holroyd. Wilkinson alleged, inter alia, that the ‘charlatan’ Wallace attempted in 1974 to set up for assassination a former supposed ‘love rival’. That bizarre and entirely fictitious story arose from a potentially highly sinister sequence of events, precipitated by McKittrick, that occurred before I left Northern Ireland. In his attempt to substantiate the allegation, Wilkinson offered, though in a private capacity, corroboration from the same David McKittrick. That episode is also detailed in Who Framed Colin Wallace? (1990, pp. 359-62, also pp. 150-8). Soon after the Wilkinson letter was dispatched, McKittrick and Ware published their 2 September 1987 ‘exposé’, that repeated the 1974 love rival smear. It is unfortunate that David Blake Knox, though sufficiently sensible not to rely explicitly on McKittrick and Ware’s views, repeats their fantasist smear. The treatment of me, and of other matters peripheral to the Niedermayer family tragedy, demonstrates that Mr Blake Knox has used the latter as a vehicle for getting numerous political matters, about which he nurtures deep feelings, off his chest. Katie Binns’ 21 July 2019 Sunday Times review captures quite well this aspect of the book. Conclusion On page 193 Mr Blake Knox refers to journalists writing on the Niedermayer kidnap ‘publishing and disseminating what was essentially idle gossip and a series of unsubstantiated rumours’. He refers also to ‘an underlying and disturbing sense of moral judgement in the narrative fashioned by these journalists’. Mr Blake Knox might gaze into a mirror and read those words back to himself. A celebratory Irish Times review on 24 July by Ed O’Loughlin, which endorses the book’s view of ‘the notorious Colin Wallace’, refers to the author as ‘quietly angry’. To which I can only respond, moi aussi. In the Sunday Times Katie Binns suggested that Mr Blake Knox required a good editor. A fact checker and an ethics tutorial would not go amiss, either. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History Boris Johnson London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2014 John Newsinger When this book was first published back in 2014 it did not seem to be worth the trouble reviewing. It was a truly appalling volume that no one except the right-wing press could possibly take seriously; and they only praised it to advance the career of its author. As a supposed biographical study of Winston Churchill it was altogether worthless, even worse than Johnson’s earlier ‘histories’ of the Roman Empire and London and they were pretty dire. And dire books are obviously a reflection of their author. Johnson is a serial liar and casual racist, a homophobe, a sexist and a xenophobe. He is akin to a cross between Benny Hill and Benito Mussolini: completely without principles, wholly irresponsible and unfit for any public office. However, as we know, the incredible has happened and a desperate Conservative Party has actually installed him as Prime Minister! Thus, the book is now worth some critical attention - not for anything it has to say about Churchill but, as I have already indicated, for what it tells us about the author. He is revealed as a delusional fantasist who sees himself as a Great Man walking with Destiny and shaping History. The point has been made by some that, while Donald Trump is genuinely stupid and unbelievably ignorant, Johnson is only pretending. This book suggests that he has been maintaining the pose of the posh buffoon for so long that he has actually internalised a lot of it and now is one. There has been a national obsession with Churchill, particularly on the right in this country, for a good many years now. Embodying the time when Britain supposedly stood alone against the Nazis in May 1940, he has become a potent British myth that has proven very useful in the Brexit battles. No one has been more written about. According to Johnson himself there is still something like ‘a hundred books a year on our hero’. Yet on the previous page, Johnson seriously suggests that one of his motives for writing his book is that Churchill ‘is in danger of being forgotten, or at least imperfectly remembered’. Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk We cannot, he goes on, ‘take his reputation for granted’ and there is a danger of people ‘forgetting the scale of what he did’. (pp. 3-4) This is all nonsense. There is no chance whatsoever of Churchill being forgotten. Johnson did not write this book in order to safeguard Churchill’s memory or reputation. He wrote it as a work of propaganda to advance his own political career by wrapping himself in the Churchill mythology, putting himself forward as the man’s contemporary incarnation. He wants to be seen as ready to step into the breach and save the country from its enemies, just as Churchill did back in 1940. He is putting himself forward as a Churchill mini– me. The whole point of the book was to show just how much of the supposed ‘Churchill Factor’ its author shared with his hero. (Although, sometimes, it has to be said it seems more about how much of the ‘Johnson Factor’ Churchill was fortunate enough to possess). Johnson is perhaps best known for his lack of any political principles and his readiness to take up just about any position in order to advance his personal self-interest. This is not altogether fair. He has an absolutely fixed and determined commitment to inequality, privilege and hierarchy. In many ways he personally embodies this commitment, being the twentieth Old Etonian to hold the office of Prime Minister since the time of Walpole.1 As far as Johnson is concerned, the rich and super rich are the custodians of a civilised society and the first object of government is their protection and the advancement of their interests. From this derives his belief in the Great Man view of History: that it is great men (and the occasional great woman) who have shaped and made history. The mass of the population, in Johnson’s world view, are either onlookers, cheering their betters on; an obstruction – pursuing their own narrow interests through trade unions and such like; or collateral damage in the wars where Great Men really demonstrate their worth. Churchill, he argues, is the greatest Briton, the man who ‘saved our civilisation. And the important point is that only he could have done it’. Churchill, he insists, ‘is the resounding human rebuttal to all Marxist historians who think history is the story of vast impersonal economic forces’. (p. 5) Leaving aside his profound ignorance of Marxism, it is worth considering his earlier history of London, The Spirit of London, as the quickest way of demonstrating the fallacy of the Great Man view. In this he reduces the history of London down to the biographies of nineteen individuals, including, inevitably, Churchill, who was not even a Londoner, who presumably embody ‘the spirit of London’. The whole book is a caricature history, that one can be absolutely confident would never have been published except for the celebrity status of its author. The first edition of the book ended with Keith Richard as 1 There have been only nine Prime ministers who were not privately educated! Lobster 78 Winter 2019 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the culmination of Londonness, presumably in order to demonstrate how cool the author is, while the later 2012 edition ended with Mo Farah. The inclusion of Mo Farah obviously demonstrates that Johnson is no racist. He even manages to avoid mentioning any supposed ‘watermelon smile’. Such casually racist remarks are only really deployed when he feels the need to show his right-wing audience that he privately shares their racist, homophobic and xenophobic prejudices. Johnson has his cake and eats it. For Johnson the key moment of Churchill’s apotheosis was when he became Prime Minister in May 1940. Before then, he was already a Great Man, but, at that point, he becomes the Greatest. Churchill transmogrified (Johnson’s word) ‘himself into the spirit of the nation, the very emblem of defiance’. He goes on to insist that to ‘lead the country in time of war, to keep people together at a moment of profound anxiety, you need to “connect” with them . . . in a deep and emotional way’. To inspire the British people, Churchill ‘needed at some level to identify with them – with those aspects of their character that he, and they, conceived to be elemental to the national psyche’. And he goes on to identify four key attributes of John Bull that Churchill and the British people shared. First there is our great sense of humour, ‘unlike some countries [I] could mention’; second our ability to drink other nationalities ‘under the table’; third our suspicion ‘of people who are inordinately thin’; and fourth the way in which we think of Britain ‘as the natural homeland of the eccentric, the oddball and the individualist’. (p. 136) Really! It is difficult to know what to make of this moronic garbage. The whole discussion is positively embarrassing. One is shocked that the author of this nonsense is a Member of Parliament, let alone the Prime Minister, and can only hope that the book never falls into the hands of someone studying for their History GCSE. More importantly, the idea that only Churchill could have inspired the British to fight on alone in 1940 is a myth. First of all, Britain was not alone: it was at the centre of the largest Empire the world had ever seen, something Johnson celebrates elsewhere in the book; and second because Churchill had nothing whatsoever in common with the overwhelming majority of the British people. He never in his whole life travelled by bus and only once used the London Underground. This was a man who, in Johnson’s words, ‘was never so happy as when a servant was pulling on his socks’. (p. 106) He was transmogrified by a powerful state propaganda machine. This machine was the crucial factor. Similar propaganda efforts in 1941 played an important part in making Stalin the Russian emblem of defiance and Hitler the German emblem of defiance in 1945. In the British instance, the propaganda effort was Lobster 78 Winter 2019 decisive, not the supposed character of the man or his supposed ability to speak ‘to the depths of people’s souls’. (p. 273) Johnson sings Churchill’s praises throughout the whole of his life. We are seriously told that his military exploits on the North-West Frontier in India would, today, have earned him the Victoria Cross and that his heroism at the battle of Omdurman in 1898 was exemplary, bravely shooting down ‘natives’ fighting in defence of their homes and homeland. It is worth remembering that at Omdurman, British casualties were 48 killed while at least 16,000 Sudanese died, many of them butchered while trying to surrender or when lying wounded and helpless. It was more of a massacre than a battle. To be fair, Churchill did protest against the shooting and bayoneting of the Sudanese wounded. He went on to show similar bravery in South Africa during the Boer War. And all this was just so much preparation for the First and Second World Wars. Nevertheless, Johnson argues that Churchill was not a war-monger. Quite how he squares this with his account of how Churchill ‘loved’ – yes, loved – war is difficult to see. On one occasion, Churchill actually told Margot Asquith that war was ‘delicious’ – and this was during the horror that was the First World War. He was ‘excited by war’ and ‘without war he knew there could be no glory – no real chance to emulate Napoleon, Nelson or his ancestor Marlborough’. ‘War sent the adrenalin spurting from his glands’. (pp. 168-169)2 But while he ‘loved’ war, he did not support wars of aggression. Once again, this is so much nonsense. In 1914 Britain was a satisfied Empire intent on holding on to what it had already conquered but, as soon as the war began, the country’s war aims encompassed the dividing up of enemy colonies with its allies. As Johnson himself admits, the British Empire was in control of 9 per cent more of the world after the War than it had been before. This was not just by chance. This was what the war was really all about, what millions had died for – that and the glorification of men like Churchill. What of Churchill’s attitude towards ordinary people? Johnson celebrates his record of support for social reform when he was a member of the Pre-WW1 Liberal government – reforms that were bitterly opposed by the Conservative opposition, of course. When Churchill supported reform then, as far as Johnson is concerned, reform was obviously justified. He even tries to give Churchill credit for the reforms of the Attlee government! He does think Churchill went too far when he lowered the pension age from seventy years to sixty-five though, and as he writes, ‘we have just had to reverse this excessive generosity’. (p. 156) And we can look forward to a Johnson government eventually raising it to seventy-five years if he gets the chance, effectively 2 His repeated use of the word ‘spurt’ in his writings is, of course, of considerable psychological interest. abolishing the old age pension for millions of people. Johnson desperately searches for evidence of Churchill’s generosity towards – and concern for – ordinary people and obviously thinks he has found it with regard to his nanny. Churchill paid for her funeral and tombstone. Only a privileged public schoolboy could see concern for his nanny – his surrogate mother after all – as indicating concern for ordinary people but, for Johnson, it shows his ‘fundamental goodness’ and proves that he was not a ‘selfish tosser’. (pp. 108, 114) In one Chapter, ‘Playing Roulette With History’, Johnson considers Churchill’s errors and mistakes and proceeds to mark them out of ten both for their ‘FIASCO FACTOR’ and their ‘CHURCHILL FACTOR’. This is easily the most stupid part of the book even though, as we have seen, there is plenty of competition. He looks at Antwerp in 1914, the Gallipoli landings, the post-WW1 intervention in Russia, the Chanak Crisis, the return to the Gold Standard, the Abdication Crisis and Churchill’s attitude towards India in the 1930s. The crass stupidity of this manner of proceeding is best demonstrated regarding Gallipoli. This military operation, in which 56,000 allied troops were killed and 123,000 were wounded, is given a mark of 10 for the ‘FIASCO FACTOR’ and 10 for the ‘CHURCHILL FACTOR’, although what that actually means is anyone’s guess. While Johnson is attempting to be witty, what he actually displays is an astonishing degree of callous disregard for the immense suffering and enormous loss of life that the battle cost. In many ways, this sums up his own particular version of the Great Man view of History. Let us look in a bit more detail at his discussion of India in the ‘Playing Roulette with History’ chapter. He sees India as Churchill’s own EU problem. According to Johnson, Churchill was not really that bothered about India and was, in fact, mainly concerned with ‘positioning’ himself so as to be able to succeed Stanley Baldwin as Conservative Party leader. This was the real motive for his opposition to any concessions to the Congress movement. While it is certainly true that Johnson’s support for Brexit is all about ‘positioning’, the same is not true of Churchill’s determined opposition to any weakening of the British position in India. As far as Churchill was concerned, holding on to India was essential if Britain was to remain a great Imperial power. What is even more interesting is that Johnson’s discussion of India does not so much as mention the Bengal Famine of 1943-1944 with its death toll of up to three million men, women and children. This is like writing a biography of Stalin that does not mention the great Ukrainian Famine of the early 1930s. Now Johnson certainly knows about the Bengal Famine because he gives it two whole sentences in his discussion of Churchill in his The Spirit of London – and they are savagely critical sentences it has to be said. His failure to confront the Famine and Churchill’s role in sabotaging relief in The Churchill Factor surely reflects an awareness that Churchill’s conduct seriously compromises his supposed status as a ‘Great Man’ even in Johnson’s terms. Moreover, this completely undermines the argument that the British Empire was a benign Empire, operating for the benefit of the ‘native’ peoples. To be fair, Johnson is not alone among Churchill biographers in his refusal to confront the enormity of this catastrophe and the extent of the Churchill government’s responsibility for the death toll. One is left wondering how Johnson would have scored this particular episode! What will strike any reader of this book who is not altogether captivated by Johnson is the transparency of his effort to associate himself with the Churchill myth, to plant in his reader’s mind the notion that he has the Churchill Factor. Let us look at his discussion of Conservative MPs attitudes towards Churchill in May 1940. They regarded him as ‘an opportunist, a turncoat, a blowhard, an egotist, a rotter, a bounder, a cad’, someone with a bit of a drink problem. (p. 32) Johnson is obviously writing about himself here, about how he is regarded by most of his MP colleagues (except for the drink problem). This is, indeed, how he was and still is regarded. The important difference between him and Churchill was that by 1940 Churchill already had extensive experience in government: the Home Office, the War Office, the Colonial office, and the Exchequer. All Johnson has is a brief moment as the worst Foreign Secretary of recent years. Which brings us to the one particular area of Churchill’s life that does cause Johnson serious concern: his sex life. The fact that ‘he had fewer notches on his bedpost than you might expect for a man whose appetites . . . were generally so titanic’ obviously causes Johnson considerable worry. Can he really be a Great Man? Johnson completely rejects the notion that he was ‘some sort of asexual Edward Heath-like character’ and does his best to identify some extra-marital affairs, but without any real success. It takes an effort to get one’s head around the fact that the man who wrote this is today leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister. It does, of course, tell us very little about Churchill but so much about Johnson. As he once put it, he is positively ‘busting with spunk’.3 One thing that we can be certain of is that, whatever one thinks of Churchill, there is no way he would ever have let someone like Boris Johnson anywhere near the levers of power. 3 ‘Busting with spunk’ is the title of chapter 10 of Sonia Purnell’s biography, Just Boris: The Irresistible Rise of a Political Celebrity (London: Aurum Press 2011). Burying the Lead: The Media and the JFK Assassination Mal Hyman Walterville, Oregon: Trine Day, 2019 561 pp. Sources and Notes, Bibliography, Index; $24.95 Anthony Frewin Hyman ruthlessly and chronologically documents the MSM’s collusion (I can think of no better word) with the Warren Report and Commission in the USA and elsewhere; and seeing it all documented here is a sad indictment of journalism in the last fifty years. Hyman casts his net wide and puts his findings within a wider context. Parallel with this he charts the rise of the ‘critical community’, despite mounting opposition from the MSM and government agencies. This is a useful companion to John Kelin’s 1 earlier volume on the rise of the critics. There’s lots of wonderful and amusing stuff detailed in these pages, and here’s something that caught my eye concerning Merriman Smith, the UPI (United Press International) White House reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the assassination, no less. Smith wrote: ‘The car in which I rode was not far from the presidential vehicle and in clear view of it. We were coming out of the underpass when the first shot was fired. The sound for a split second resembled a big firecracker. As we cleared the underpass, then came the second and third shots. The shots were fired smoothly and evenly. There was not the slightest doubt on the front seat of our car that the shots came from a rifle to the rear.’ Well, where to begin? There’s only one underpass in Dealey Plaza, and the presidential car was proceeding towards it at a distance of some 350 feet when the first shot was fired. It is estimated that when the final shot was fired the vehicle was still 260 feet or so away from the underpass. And not the ‘slightest doubt’ the shots came from the rear! Who needs a presidential commission when there are journalists like this about? 1 John Kelin, Praise from a Future Generation: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy and the First Generation Critics of the Warren Report (San Antonio: Wings Press, 2007). Reviewed in Lobster 55 by the present writer. Lost Imperium? Yockey: 20 years later Yockey: A Fascist Odyssey Kerry Bolton Arktos: London, 2018, £30.50 (UK), p/b Kevin Coogan On 16 June 1960 Francis Parker Yockey, a 43-year-old far right international mystery man and author of the 1948 fascist opus Imperium, committed suicide in his San Francisco jail cell by swallowing a cyanide capsule. Long wanted by the FBI, Yockey had been arrested two few weeks earlier after his luggage was lost at the San Francisco airport. It was then discovered that he was using multiple fake passports. The FBI particularly wanted to investigate Yockey’s alleged ties to the Soviet Union. With Yockey’s mysterious death, however, the case went cold for four decades. In the fall of 1999, my book Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International,1 a close to 700-page critical investigative biography of the American fascist theorist, was released by the Brooklyn-based publishing house Autonomedia.2 In the following two decades, virtually everyone who knew the mystery man, such as the Liberty Lobby leader Willis Carto, has died. The living historical trail has finally gone cold.3 In 2018, however, the New Zealand-based far rightist Kerry Bolton – a long-time Yockey aficionado – issued his own study Yockey: A Fascist Odyssey. A passionate pamphleteer and author, Bolton has penned countless works with titles such as The Holocaust Myth: a Skeptical Inquiry, The 1 This was reviewed in Lobster 39 – ed. 2 Rendered wrongly as ‘Automedia’ by Bolton. 3 It is possible that Carto’s archive might hold a historical nugget or two. However when I interviewed Carto – and in the two decades that followed Dreamer – he had every opportunity to contribute new revelations about Yockey but failed to do so. Psychotic Left, Artists from the Right, Geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific, The Banking Swindle, Stalin: The Enduring Legacy, and Russia and the Fight Against Globalization. Weighing in around 600 pages, Bolton’s opus was issued by the alt-right publishing house Arktos Press. Given that there now exist two extremely detailed biographies of close to a combined 1,300 pages about a man whose name still remains largely unknown, even for many on the right in both the United States and Europe, it seems reasonable to assume that the biographical hunt into Yockey largely has come to an end. Large sections of Yockey: A Fascist Odyssey can even be read as a series of extended footnotes to my Dreamer of the Day. Yet that does not mean that Bolton’s research was for naught. Far from it. As a self-identified Yockey fan with connections to rightist circles around the world, Bolton had access to sources of information not available to me. Nor was Bolton a novice when it came to Yockey. In the 1990s he published a small collection of Yockey’s writings that were found in unpublished manuscripts, as well as a reprint of four issues of Frontfighter, the publication of Yockey’s British-based European Liberation Front (ELF).4 Although many of the FBI reports that he cites originally appeared in Dreamer, Bolton still performs a useful service in citing them again in a different context.5 More importantly, he had fuller access to valuable personal letters and other correspondence from Sir Oswald Mosley and the Canadian fascist Adrien Arcand, both of whom knew Yockey.6 Bolton further pursues in much more detail than I did in Dreamer various references and citations to Yockey from a disparate group of both Yockey fans and critics in a long chapter entitled ‘Resurrection’. This highlights the work of figures such as Revilo P. Oliver and others on the right 4 For background on Bolton and the Yockey manuscripts, see Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (New York: Autonomedia, 1999), pp. 618-19. 5 In the early 1980s, living on opposite coasts of the United States and completely unknown to each other, Keith Stimely and I declassified the FBI files on Yockey. These files are now widely available on the Internet. However there are now also more declassified files from regional FBI offices that Bolton adds to the mix. 6 In the Mosley archive, for example, either Bolton or one of his researchers discovered a valuable 1953 attack on Yockey from one of his harshest far right critics, Wolfgang Sarg, a follow-up addendum on an earlier denunciation of Yockey by Sarg that I detail at length. (See Dreamer pp. 409-16.) Arcand’s files offer more insights into Yockey’s personality, although as a devout Catholic, Arcand saw Yockey from this perspective. involved in the National Youth Alliance (NYA) and its various unruly American offshoots in the 1970s. Douglas Kaye, a denizen of the far corners of the American far right since the 1960s, also played a Virgil of sorts to Bolton’s Dante. Although Kaye and I corresponded during the writing of Dreamer, Bolton has been able to draw on Kaye’s personal knowledge of many of the characters who promoted Yockey in the American right, starting with the New Jersey-based journal Common Sense.7 One of Bolton’s more entertaining revelations is that Louis T. Byers, one of Yockey’s most fervent American advocates in the 1960s and 1970s and closely associated with the launch of the NYA, later made his living as a professional jazz critic. Yockey, a classically-trained pianist, loathed jazz, and opined in Imperium that ‘music is seldom heard in America, having been replaced by the cultureless drum-beating of the Negro.’ Bolton likewise offers a close read of otherwise obscure pamphlets from some of Yockey’s staunchest supporters, in particular Fred Weiss and his sometimes collaborator H. Keith Thompson. With grad student-like zeal, he offers detailed summaries of commentaries on Yockey from different rightists in North America, Europe, and the Antipodes, often from obscure texts in long-forgotten journals.8 In short, Bolton’s study has undeniable value. In what follows, I first wish to highlight Bolton’s contributions in unearthing some valuable information that even a moderately sophisticated reader can easily separate from the stench of Bolton’s ideology displayed most toxically in Yockey by his grotesque indulgence in Holocaust denial.9 Yet at the end of the day Yockey: A Fascist Odyssey too often reads more like a leaden tome than a revelatory biography. In part, this was because Bolton had to structure his book in the wake of Dreamer. Very few people truly interested in Yockey would not have come across Dreamer in the years preceding Bolton’s text. Bolton simply didn’t find all that much new 7 For more on Kaye, see Coogan, Dreamer, pp. 524, 528-29. 8 Unfortunately, they all focus on differing interpretations of Imperium because none of the writers had any knowledge of Yockey’s activity on the right as his past was so shrouded in mystery. 9 ‘This [Allied postwar policy in Germany] was therefore a deliberate policy of mass starvation, quite different from the food situation that the German concentration camps faced during the closing months of the war, when Allied bombing of railroads ensured that supplies could not reach the camps.’ (p. 39.) In other words, Bolton not only claims there was no Holocaust but that the Allied powers – not the Nazis – were to blame for the mass deaths in the camps. that was left to reveal in Yockey’s past. However Bolton’s need to cast Yockey in the best possible light makes his Yockey needlessly dull at times, while avoiding a truly hard examination of just how relevant Imperium’s author remains today even on the far right. Part 1 It is first worth noting that there are no breathtaking surprises in Bolton’s study for readers of Dreamer. Bolton argues, as I did, that Yockey really did commit suicide in jail and was not murdered. His passing claim that somehow Yockey was an eyewitness to the ‘Rudolf Slansky trial’ in Prague, Czechoslovakia in November 1952 is put to rest on page 236 when Bolton correctly reports that Yockey returned to Europe from New York in January 1953. Bolton, in short, arrives at the same conclusions both about Yockey’s death and about the fake Prague story as I did two decades earlier.10 Bolton also remains as mystified as I was at the strange story of the reported death of Bruderschaft leader Alfred Franke-Gricksch at the hands of the Russians. Nor can Bolton make sense of Yockey’s strange Jewish friend Alexander Scharf. On the core issues of Yockey’s past, then, Bolton reaffirms the findings in Dreamer. Best of all, he often supplies valuable background information on the quirky cast of characters around Yockey. Bolton, for example, communicated with the children of Baroness Alice von Pflügl, who financed the publication of Imperium, and obtained from them a much more 10 Bolton was told the Prague story by Douglas Kaye. The claim, as far as I know, first appeared in print in the Tom Francis introduction to The Enemy of Europe, which Francis told me he got from Kaye. Kaye may also be responsible for the zany claim that a mysterious German spy service called ‘Z-16’ confiscated the German edition of Enemy of Europe. If the book was confiscated, which is quite possible, it would almost certainly have been by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, West Germany’s FBI. Kaye said that his source for the notion that Yockey spent time in Prague sitting in balcony of the courtroom watching Slansky’s trial was Fred Weiss, whom Kaye says told him this story long after Yockey’s death. Besides the fact that Yockey didn’t understand a word of Czech, the FBI files show he was living in New York City during this period and only returned to Europe in early 1953. H. Keith Thompson, whom I pressed on this issue, said the idea that Yockey attended the Slansky trial was absurd. Thompson, in fact, worked hard to help get Yockey out of New York and back to Europe all that autumn, a story detailed in Dreamer of the Day. Bolton also suggests (p. 226) that it is ‘plausible’ that Yockey visited Argentina, but there is absolutely no evidence to suggest he actually did so. Still, Bolton’s book is largely free of such unproven claims, and by and large he accurately follows the same historical trail that I did earlier. detailed description of her than I was able to provide in Dreamer. Bolton further offers evidence, in a suggestive if not entirely convincing way, that Yockey’s ideas were more significantly influenced by his Catholic background than I noted in Dreamer. While Yockey took his cues from Spengler, his Catholic upbringing may have disposed him (even subconsciously) to embrace both Spengler and a more ‘spiritual’ style of fascism than the crude biological materialism advanced by the Nazis.11 For these reasons alone, Yockey: A Fascist Odyssey is a welcome historical contribution. Bolton’s target audience, however, is fellow members of the far right, not academics. For this reason, at times he reads more like Yockey’s defense attorney in intra-right squabbles, no more so than over Yockey’s strong rejection of biological determinism, an issue Bolton addresses most directly in a chapter entitled ‘The Race Question’. Bolton advances the argument that Spengler and Yockey both drew from the ‘spiritual’ nature of German Idealism; the Nazis, in contrast, embraced a more British or ‘materialist’ view of race.12 In defending both Spengler and Yockey, Bolton even favorably references the famous Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas, a cardinal sin for most on the racist right.13 Bolton, not surprisingly, embraces Yockey’s notion of the Jew as a ‘cultural distorter’. He simply avoids any deeper examination of Yockey’s convoluted relationship to Spengler, who dismissed Judaism (along with 11 Spengler saw Mussolini as the embodiment of the coming ‘Caesarism’, but he viewed Hitler with disdain. 12 In so doing, Bolton seemingly downplays the possibility that the Italian interpretation of fascism that stressed its ‘spiritual’ side, may have affected Yockey more than German Romanticism and Fichte. Of course, the Italians were also influenced by German thinking so there is no easy answer to this riddle. Some of Yockey’s closest British collaborators such as John Anthony Gannon, however, were devout Catholics; Frontfighter numbered its issues using dates from the fascist era. As Bolton notes (p. 155): ‘The ELF took their date from the practice of Fascist Italy, starting from the assumption to power in the year of the Fascist March on Rome in 1922. Hence 1951, for example, was XXIX E.F. (“Era Fascista”).’ 13 Bolton, pp. 80-84. Bolton tries to justify his nod to geographical determinism by a long quote from Carl Jung. Following a 1909 visit to Buffalo, New York, Jung opined that the ‘American presents a strange picture: A European with Negro behavior and an Indian soul.’ (p. 87.) Of course in citing Jung, Bolton may have been exhibiting a Māori sense of humor. Islam) as a fossilized ‘Magian culture’ that had lost its mojo centuries ago.14 As for Yockey, even in his notion of ‘cultural distortion’ in Imperium – a book dedicated ‘to the hero of the Second World War’, namely Hitler – he argued that the Jews merely aggravated a deeper crisis in the West that began organically developing around the time of the Reformation. As he writes in Imperium: ‘But the soul of the West itself was slowly externalizing. The decisive turning point of 1789 was prepared for by centuries of slow changes. The old inwardness of the West, which gave to the feudal centuries their self-evident spiritual cohesion, gradually was undermined by the new conflicts especially those of town versus country, of trade-nobility versus land-nobility, of materialism against the spirit of religion. The Reformation was a schism in the whole soul of the West. In it appeared as a symbol of the coming triumph of materialism the system of Calvinism. Calvin taught the sanctity of economic activity; he sanctioned usury; he interpreted wealth as a sign of Election to salvation. This spirit was abroad; Henry VIII legalized usury in England in 1545. The old Western doctrine of the sinfulness of usury was rejected. This represented liberation for the Jew, accessibility to power, even if disguised, invisible power. In the Reformation time, the Jew was found everywhere fighting against the Church, and, as between Luther and Calvin, supporting Calvin for Luther also rejected usury. The victory of Puritanism in England, an adaptation of Calvinism, gave the Jew favorable conditions.’15 Part 2 Bolton’s at times defense attorney read of Yockey often glosses over more serious questions that might otherwise mar his encomium. For example: was Oswald Mosley really wrong when he decided that Europe had a better chance to survive intact on the side of America rather than Russia? Was life 14 Spengler criticized Karl Marx’s economic views as being far more distorted by Marx’s embrace of British materialism than by his genetics. In his 1919 essay Prussianism and Socialism, Spengler complains that Marx had imbibed the ‘Viking’ way of thinking of the British. 15 Ulick Varange (Francis Parker Yockey), Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (Costa Mesa, CA: The Noontide Press, 1962), pp. 421-22 in capitalist England not significantly better than, say, life in Communist Hungary? Did West Germany build a wall to keep its people from crossing over to East Germany? Were millions of Germans wrong to flee West at the end of the war? In Yockey: A Fascist Odyssey, Bolton suggests that Peter J. Huxley- Blythe, a one-time leading member of Yockey’s ELF, betrayed Yockey by having the chutzpah to try to find out whether Yockey was a Soviet agent. In 2000, I spent an afternoon with Huxley-Blythe at his office in Chester, England. In the 1950s, Huxley-Blythe developed close ties to many Eastern European émigrés. A navy man, he told me that he had been involved in Cold War adventures that included covert landings on the Baltic coast. Was Huxley-Blythe really betraying the ‘Imperium’ by worrying about Yockey? Or had Yockey sold out his earlier vision? The idea that there could be two sides to this story never seems to occur to Bolton. Bolton’s discussion of Russia is lacking as well. For example, he ignores leading scholarship on Stalin; in particular Steve Kotkin’s massive multi- volume biography of the Soviet leader that underscores Stalin’s undying allegiance not to Genghis Khan and Tamerlane but to Marx and Lenin.16 Far from being a simple creature of peasant Russia, Stalin proved to be its assassin. Nor is there any examination offered of the changes in Russia following Stalin’s death beyond Fred Weiss’s eccentric texts from the mid-1950s so ably summarized by Bolton. While Bolton does make a valuable contribution in calling attention to the varied and often arcane debates and discussions about Imperium on the fascist fringe, he simply avoids taking a hard look at Yockey as a political strategist. Yet in some ways, it is as a political strategist that Yockey remains at his most perplexing. When Yockey burst onto the European right with Imperium, he argued that fascism was merely the first rough outline of a future European Imperium whose contours would stretch from the Galway Coast to the Ural Mountains. This new Imperium would extend its power through the unabashed and unapologetic exercise of imperialism, starting with a massive expansion into Africa, a view that Mosley and Yockey both shared. Yet by the mid-1950s Yockey began identifying with anti-colonial movements; he even spent time in Nasser’s Egypt. When the United 16 See Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1879-1928 (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler: 1929-1941 (New York: Penguin Press, 2017). Kingdom, France, and Israel tried to retake the Suez Canal in 1956, a move opposed by both the United States and the Soviet Union, where was Yockey? When Nasser backed the Algerian FLN against France in the mid-1950s, did Yockey come to the aid of the pro-colonial French right? When A. K. Chesterton’s League of Empire Loyalists (LEL) supported continued British imperial rule in the Middle East and Africa, Yockey was nowhere to be found. In his last posthumously-published essay World in Flames, Yockey unabashedly allies with America’s enemies in the Third World; he even gleefully predicts a Soviet victory against America in a coming nuclear showdown.17 How did Yockey ever hope to reconcile his embrace of decolonization with the views of his mentor Spengler whose last major work, 1933’s The Hour of Decision, specifically warned about the coming clash between ‘the White World-Revolution’ and ‘the Colored World-Revolution’? How then had Yockey gone seemingly so far through the looking glass? And in such a short time? Nor does Bolton explore the failure of the one real attempt by Oswald Mosley (in alliance with Belgium’s Jean-François Thiriart) in the early 1960s to fulfil his ‘Europe–a–Nation’ vision, the closest any right-wing movement has come to realizing a pan-European order somewhat along the lines of Imperium.18 Tellingly, Mosley received no support in England as the British right resisted any serious collaboration with ‘off-color whites’ in Catholic Spain and Italy. 17 Yockey argues that because Russia was a vital barbaric power and America was decadent, in any threatened nuclear exchange America would capitulate to Russian demands because the United States was too weak to accept the threatened losses to the civilian population that a nuclear exchange would insure. Ironically, the Cuban missile crisis occurred not long after World in Flames was published. In that crisis, both powers went to the edge of nuclear war before working out a compromise. World in Flames remains somewhat problematic as it includes later additions to the text by H. Keith Thompson, but the overall thrust of the argument is clearly from Yockey. Bolton (p. 148) says it was jointly written with Thompson, but Thompson told me that he added certain controversial lines to attract more readers and to make the text feel more up to date when he prepared it for publication. 18 Bolton does make an important point in citing the French far rightist and Yockey fan Christian Bouchet, who says that Thiriart read Imperium in the Carto English edition in the early 1960s. (p. 561) When I met Thiriart in 1986, he did not mention Yockey and I could find no citation from Imperium in the texts that Thiriart gave me. However it seems likely that Thiriart did read Imperium as it was also being read by French rightists such as Alain de Benoist around this same time. Conclusion In Yockey, Bolton cites an article by the far rightist Revilo P. Oliver written in June 1966 for the American Mercury and entitled ‘The Shadow of Empire: Francis Parker Yockey after Twenty Years’, by which Oliver referred to the 1948 publication of Imperium. What then do we now make of Yockey some twenty years after Dreamer of the Day and now bookended with the publication of Yockey: A Fascist Odyssey? Despite his best efforts, in my view Bolton fails to make this case for Yockey’s continued political relevance on the right, in part because he fails to ask hard questions of the hero of his political romance. But how much blame can be assigned to Bolton the ideological enthusiast as opposed to Yockey the theorist? In a revealing 21 November 1950 letter to Adrien Arcand, Yockey wrote that he was ‘not first anti-semitic, but an anti-semite only because they are frustrating our Western Destiny, but they are not the only group, and NOT THE MOST POWERFUL GROUP doing that. Our worst enemy is the inner enemy, the liberal-capitalist-democrat, for it is he alone who enables the Jew to enjoy his present power.’19 Yockey’s hatred of ‘liberal-capitalist-democrat’ modernity (embodied for him above all by America) led him to embrace Russia in the late 1940s and then in the 1950s to propagandize for such Third World icons of decolonization as Nasser and Castro. But what of continental Europe? Was it really ever the home of the new Imperium? While Yockey and other postwar fascists celebrated the ‘European spirit’ of the Waffen-SS, the fact remained that the Waffen-SS volunteers were clearly a small minority of the citizens of their respective nations, often nations under German military occupation. Nor were fascists all pro-Nazi. In the 1930s, for example, many French activists who turned to fascism did so because they were terrified of the rise of a revanchist remilitarized Germany, a Germany they correctly viewed as intent on reversing the defeat of World War I. Their disdain for the parliamentary chaos and corruption of the Third Republic stemmed in part from the belief that France had to adopt similar strong-state measures to counter the looming threat from across the Rhine.20 In concluding Yockey: A Fascist Odyssey, Bolton declares that while 19 Cited in Bolton, p. 172. 20 For this same reason, many French fascists in the 1930s felt far more allied with Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain than with Nazi Germany. both America and Western Europe are culturally dead, a new star now rises not over Bethlehem but Moscow. Should Putin falter, will Bolton next declare for Communist China? Or will North Korea now be revealed as the seedbed of the next ‘culture-bearing elite’? While Bolton ponders the future fate of the West, we can still appreciate the contribution he has made to a better understanding of Yockey’s murky past. Kevin Coogan is an American investigative journalist and author. His article ‘Tokyo Legend? Lee Harvey Oswald and Japan’ appeared in Lobster 70 (Winter 2015).