www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
Summer 2016
Apocryphilia Lobster by Simon Matthews The View from the Bridge by Robin Ramsay Holding Pattern
71 by Garrick Alder Oh, Conspiracy! by Robin Ramsay Reading between the lies: Edward Jay Epstein and Lee Harvey Oswald's 'Historic Diary' by Garrick Alder Assange again by Bernard Porter 'We're doomed!' - A brief introduction to British W.W.II stay behind networks by Nick Must Swedish echoes by Nick Must JFK, Chauncey Holt and the three 'tramps' redux by Robin Ramsay Livingstone, Zionism and the Nazis by John Newsinger
Book Reviews My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency, by Doug Henwood reviewed by Robin Ramsay Haters, Baiters and Would-be Dictators: Anti-Semitism and UK Far Right, by Nick Toczek reviewed by Robin Ramsay General Walker and the Murder of President Kennedy, by Jeffrey H. Caufield reviewed by Anthony Frewin Broken Vows: Tony Blair the Tragedy of Power, by Tom Bower reviewed by Colin Challen Chaos and Caliphate: Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East, by Patrick Cockburn reviewed by Robin Ramsay Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror, by David Kilcullen reviewed by John Newsinger Broken Vows: Tony Blair the Tragedy of Power, by Tom Bower reviewed by John Newsinger www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
Apocryphilia
Simon Matthews
Danczuk The first book to appear out of the current maelstrom of historic VIP abuse allegations, Smile for the Camera, was highly praised when published in 2014.1 Co-written by Simon Danczuk, Labour MP for Rochdale, and Matthew Baker (who, one suspects, did much of the actual writing), its jacket claims that: ‘it’s about those who knew that abuse was taking place but looked the other way making the corridors of Westminster a safe haven for paedophiles like Cyril Smith’. (My emphasis). Do Danczuk and Baker get close to proving this? The authors provide Smith’s background – though not in detail. He was Chairman of the Rochdale Liberal Party in 1949, joined Labour and got elected as a local councillor in 1952. Thereafter he became a fairly typical example of the northern ‘boss politician’. It appears that he began assaulting adolescent boys in his thirties and, eventually, a police investigation ensued. This concluded in 1969 with a decision to send a file to the Director of Public Prosecutions who decided the case wasn’t strong enough to take to court. Much speculation follows about why this was considered to be so. At about the same time Smith quit the Labour Party, returned to the Liberals and won the Rochdale bye-election in October 1972. He sat as MP for the area for 20 years, retiring, undefeated in 1992. A bit more could have been sketched in
1 Smile for the Camera – The double life of Cyril Smith (Biteback Publishing, 2014). ‘The best political book I’ve read all year’ – Michael Crick.
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about the political circumstances locally: Rochdale has been a marginal seat for most of the last 70-odd years and this was so throughout Smith’s tenure. The seat went Labour, narrowly, in 1997 and Liberal Democrat, again narrowly, in 2005. In 2010 Danczuk took it for Labour with a majority of only 889. In this context, some might feel it a bit odd that a sitting MP should produce a book trashing the reputation of one of his immediate predecessors. Is this a new genre? The getting even memoir? Perhaps a more measured and independent view of Smith and his alleged misdemeanours should have been taken. Having reached the point where Smith becomes a household name, Danczuk and Baker try very hard to assemble a compelling narrative – and fail. Jimmy Savile appears on p. 101 (Smith was a guest on his show). There are several pages of an ultimately inconclusive account about alleged abuse and cover ups at Knowl View Children's Home and MI5 get name checked on p. 195 as having kept Smith out of trouble (‘but no one is prepared to go on record about it’). Danczuk mentions a dispute he has with the police about how Smith’s offences should be described. They remind him that he cannot, in 2012, accuse Smith of rape (for allegedly forcing a teenage boy to have oral sex with him) because when the offence took place, nearly 50 years earlier, it was classed as indecent assault. Danczuk clearly doesn’t like this, but the police are correct: you can’t retrospectively change the law. Other matters raised in the text include Smith being arrested driving along a motorway with a car full of obscene publications in 1980 before the final part of the book takes us to the Elm Lodge Guest House, and the time (twenty plus years ago) when the Paedophile Liberation Front and the Paedophile Information Exchange were affiliated to the NCCL.2 The problem is that much of this turned out either to be
2 The past (and relatively brief) association of the NCCL with the PLF and PIE was used recently to attack Harriet Harman MP who worked as a legal officer at the NCCL during part of the period in question. Ironically (in this context) Harman is the niece of Lord Longford, an anti-pornography campaigner and noted opponent of equal rights for homosexuals.
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unverifiable, simply untrue, or Smith’s actual involvement with it can’t be established. Why would Smith – as an MP entitled to free first class rail travel – be driving around the UK with a vehicle full of pornography? On 30 July 2015 The Evening Standard reported that despite a lengthy enquiry – involving two former chief constables and sixty police staff – no evidence could be found that Smith had ever been arrested with a car boot full of sex magazines. After Danczuk first outed Smith (in 2012), BBC Newsnight ran a lengthy piece on the case. Careful scrutiny indicated that those making claims against Smith seemed to be alleging physical mistreatment (being knocked around, hit with a slipper etc.) not necessarily sexual abuse. The programme also claimed that Smith had attended gay orgies at a block of flats in the Vauxhall area at some point in the past. The problem was that the block was one of several knocked down circa 1980 (at which point it was derelict). Why would Smith have gone to a block of empty tenements in poor repair to take part in an orgy in the ‘70s? How did he get there? By taxi? Or did he drive himself? It wasn’t convincing. A reasonable conclusion would be that Cyril Smith found an outlet for his sexual urges (possibly caused by his morbid obesity making it impossible for him to have relationships with women) by molesting and abusing teenage boys. His homely man-of-the-people act had a darker, bullying side. But was he part of a broader, overarching paedophile conspiracy? The evidence for that is not clear at all. Casting himself as a vigilante exposing perverts in high places, and with his wife building up an on-line profile of some significance by posting images of her body on Twitter and Facebook (rather like one of the Kardashians), Danczuk was re-elected MP for Rochdale in May 2015 with a majority of 12,442 – the biggest since the constituency was created. He now has a new partner, the exhibitionist wife having been discarded, and has emerged as an opponent of Jeremy Corbyn and a flag-waver for the (self-proclaimed) Labour moderates.
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There’s a good book about this waiting to be written.3
Watson Allegations about Smith had been circulating at a low level for years before Danczuk made his official denunciation in September 2012. On 24 October 2012 Tom Watson MP used parliamentary privilege to announce the existence of ‘a powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and no. 10’ and to call for vigorous action in pursuit of this. The jury is still out on many of the more lurid claims – or more precisely, given the length of time that has elapsed since the alleged offences were committed, the jury may never be coming back – but the public since have been given no shortage of spectacular stories to consider. In no particular order these have included Ken Clark MP assaulting young men, Harvey Proctor being prevented from killing children by Edward Heath and assertions that a VIP sex ring organised orgies at Dolphin Square SW1, a block of thirties flats where many MPs and similar establishment type folk live. At one point the police appealed for ‘victims’ of Edward Heath to come forward. It now appears that Watson has corresponded with Chris Fay, formerly a Labour councillor in Greenwich (1986- 1990) who was eventually expelled from the Labour Party and later jailed for being party to a fraud perpetrated against old age pensioners.4 It also appears to be the case that both 3 The press reported that the brother of Danczuk’s ex-partner – who works as a security guard in the Manchester area – was being charged with historical sex offences dating back twenty-five years. See The Daily Mirror and The Independent 28 October 2015. The parallels with the type of material found in the celebrity magazines at the till in supermarkets are irresistible. 4 See The Times and The Sunday Times 10 and 11 October 2015. Fay is supposed to have briefed Watson about the late Leon Brittan. Fay’s correspondence in the ‘80s about sex abuse can be read on line at
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people making the particular denunciations re: Dolphin Square have done so after receiving discredited ‘recovered memory’ therapies.5 In a further twist it emerged in the press on 22 October 2015 that the theory of an overarching paedophile conspiracy in high places could be traced back to a dossier of material prepared in the ‘70s by Victor Raikes and Anthony Courtney (both of whom are now dead).6 Courtney and Raikes supposedly gave this to Geoffrey Dickens MP (also dead) who raised the matter with Leon Brittan (died January 2015), then Home Secretary. After some confusion about the material being lost (and much speculation about whether this was deliberate) it has now been found: an anonymous intermediary who says he gave it to Dickens in 1981 has now given a copy to John Mann MP. What will it contain? Who is the anonymous intermediary? Do we know that it is the same material given to Dickens? Do we even know if Raikes and Courtney compiled it? In normal circumstances none of this would be admissible as evidence in Court. On 13 September 2015 The Sunday Times reported that the police were dropping enquiries into the VIP sex ring at Dolphin Square because there was ‘no evidence to support the allegations’. Watson now finds himself in some difficulty, primarily because he named the late Leon Brittan as a rapist and as someone who had thwarted adequate investigations 5 The Sunday Times 18 October 2015. See
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into paedophilia in high places in the past. Watson should have read the late Richard Webster’s The Secret of Bryn Estyn, the gold standard for anyone venturing into such murky waters.7 Alternatively, he could have asked any number of people for advice. Perhaps this lack of experience and common sense is because his career……a progression from Hull University Labour Club to President of the Students Union (1992), to a bag-carrying role at Labour HQ, to political officer for a trade union, to MP for West Bromwich East (2001)...... has involved never having a proper job. Given that he appears to welcome unlimited press coverage of sex abuse matters involving public figures, it is ironic that in 2011 he achieved considerable media exposure by campaigning for regulation of the UK press, and, specifically calling for action to be taken against Rupert Murdoch and News International in the aftermath of the phone-hacking scandal. He was supported in this by Max Mosley (whose outrage stemmed from being filmed taking part in an orgy).8 Mosley subsequently made a donation to Watson’s successful campaign for the Labour Party Deputy Leadership in 2015.9 Watson will probably survive. But he looks stupid.
Dickens’ dossier Like Watson and Danczuk today, Geoffrey Dickens also believed in wide-ranging cover-ups of sexual misconduct in high places. Presumably John Mann MP will hand his recently found copy of the dossier to the Goddard Enquiry to assist it with its deliberations. The report that the material was compiled by Victor Raikes and Anthony Courtney will raise eyebrows in some quarters. Both were prominent figures in the ‘40s and ‘50s, fiercely anti-communist and major figures in the Monday Club. Like many on the right they were
7 See Lobster 52. 8 See
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determined to fight and reverse the decline of the UK, a decline that they ascribed to inadequate or even treacherous political leadership. Put at its simplest, they wanted to remove figures they saw as causing the decline (such as Harold Wilson, deemed to be a secret communist, and Edward Heath, deemed to be a closet socialist and also supposedly homosexual) and replace them with a much more satisfactory individual: Margaret Thatcher. If Raikes and Courtney originated the material, and assuming they believed in it at face value, then they were essentially conspiracy theorists: searching for (and finding) a single overarching explanation of their difficulties. Danczuk’s and Watson’s interventions follow the same trajectory though in this case from a different political direction.....the location of a magic formula that would ‘get’ the Tories and reverse Labour’s decline. In this context note that Brittan was Home Secretary during the miners strike and Thatcher gave Savile a knighthood.10 Along the way much mention has been made by Watson, Danczuk and others, of Elm Lodge Guest House. What do we know? It was a gay boarding house in suburban London that functioned for some years when the age of consent for homosexual acts between men was 21. It advertised its services discreetly, in the small ads section of Gay News, in what was then the fashion of the time. It was raided by the Police in 1982 and – officially – 12 boys gave evidence that they had been assaulted by men at the address. The owner was convicted of running a disorderly establishment and Elm Lodge closed shortly afterwards. No further charges were brought. Exactly what happened at Elm Lodge is not clear...... but the Internet is full of it and a wide range of public
10 The role of Brittan in the 1984-1985 miners strike was raised by Jim Hood, Labour MP for Lanark and Hamilton East, when accusing Brittan of molesting children. When challenged, Hood replied ‘I am just repeating what I read in the papers’. Hood was heavily defeated by the SNP in 2015.
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figures have been named as having visited the address.11 Curiously none of those sleuthing misdeeds at Elm Lodge have thought to compare it with the establishment – a brothel, offering various specialist services – run by the late Cynthia Payne in Ambleside Avenue, SW16. This was raided by the police in 1978 and Payne was convicted, in 1980, of ‘keeping a disorderly house'’. Her clients included members of the House of Lords and Commons, against whom no action was taken, because, presumably, it was not clear what offences they were committing. A later attempt to convict Payne of running prostitutes in 1987 ended in her acquittal by the jury with Geoffrey Dickens MP stating (in marked contrast to his opinions about other alleged sexual misconduct issues) ‘It seems astounding that all this public money should be poured into bringing these charges.’ Payne became a minor national treasure and celebrity with two UK feature films being made about her life. Given that the Payne trial and conviction – on very limited charges – occurred before the Elm Lodge case it seems possible that its outcome (and favourable publicity for Ms Payne) may have influenced the CPS in how it approached the Elm Lodge proceedings. A central part of everything alleged by Raikes, Courtney, Dickens, Watson, Danczuk et al is that evidence existed that would have enabled prosecutions of many famous people to take place, but, for various reasons (they would allege a cover-up) this was never actioned. Is this true? It is worth considering that throughout the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s the judicial authorities tried repeatedly to ‘hold a line’ against what was considered a rising tide of permissiveness and sexual
11 Contact add services for gay men was a feature of several counter- culture publications in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The International Times was shut down in 1972 after being convicted of providing such a facility. It is hard to judge now why the police took relatively little action against those involved with Elm Lodge Guest House in 1982. It may have been that the ‘boys’ referred to were under 21, but over 16, and that the activities – though legally classifiable as assault – had been consensual. (And did those over 21 know the age of those under 21?) Alternatively it could also have been that trying to assemble a coherent prosecution case out of such circumstances, where there were a great many participants, some of whom would give contradictory accounts, was judged to be impractical.
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libertarianism. From the Lady Chatterley trial, through to the Oz trial and the Romans in Britain case, juries either failed to convict or the prosecutors found public opinion firmly on the side of those in the dock, even if convictions were duly obtained. In terms of bringing sensational cases against public figures, some of whom could adeptly play the ‘victim’ in Court, the acquittal of Jeremy Thorpe (1979) would scarcely have helped matters.12 A view might have emerged, then, in certain quarters, that any action against VIPs, particularly where sexual matters were concerned, should only have been embarked on where the evidence was substantial, reliable and indicated, incontrovertibly, undeniably perverse and criminal behaviour that a majority of the public would recoil from. Anything short of this, any suggestion that the matter might backfire when brought into the public domain, might have led to the issue being left ‘on file’ and nothing further done. The Goddard Enquiry may well consider all of this. It is not clear how long it will deliberate or when it will report but with so many of the players in this drama now dead it is hard to see what can be proven and harder still to see how evidence against them might be tested.
Hipsters don’t have real jobs either In his latest book, Deep South, Paul Theroux travels into the hinterland of the US, far away from the moderately Europeanized east and west coast cities. He observes that everything now appears to have been hollowed out: huge swathes of agricultural employment have disappeared due to mechanisation, including the remaining small scale cotton enterprises, manufacturing has been outsourced to China, and even cat fish farms have now largely disappeared, apparently undercut by competition from Vietnam. One reviewer found this a bit gloomy – reminding potential readers that there was still much to enjoy in the rural US, such as vinyl record stores
12 Thorpe was cleared of conspiracy to murder a former homosexual lover. No charges for this offence were ever brought against any third party.
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and welcome revival of Southern food.13 Yes: but does this adequately counterbalance the loss of millions of secure jobs? Of course not; and the idea that it could even be raised illustrates a level of economic illiteracy now commonplace. The debate about the death of the old economy with its reliance on hard physical manual work and the birth of the new economy and its alleged benefits is well known. Assessing the winners and losers from these changes usually produces a quick realisation that ordinary working people are the losers. In the UK, for example, a high proportion of the white working class can now be found working in nail bars or call centres or as security guards and white van drivers, and have been demonised for doing so.14 But are the middle classes also benefiting from our post industrial society in which everyone is expected to have a portfolio career? Do pop up cupcake parlours, artisanal breweries, app creators, web site designers and retro boutiques represent a balanced future? In his mildly political book Theroux is one of many who recognize that this is probably not the case.
A funny thing happened on the way to the cold war Books about John Freeman and Jona von Ustinov (aka ‘Klop’, father of Peter Ustinov)15 appeared recently, both making useful contributions to our knowledge of our recent political past.16 Klop had an interesting life – a genuinely cosmopolitan upbringing followed by service in the German military 1914- 1918 and diplomatic work for the Weimar republic in the Soviet Union and the UK. He quit this in 1935 rather than complete a
13 Deep South – Four Seasons on Back Roads (Hamish Hamilton, 2015), reviewed in The Times by David Taylor. 14 See Owen Jones, Chavs – The demonization of the working class (Verso, 2011) 15 Originally Ustinow. Jona retained that spelling. Peter changed it to Ustinov. For simplicity I have used Ustinov here for both. 16 Peter Day, Klop – Britain’s most ingenious secret agent (Biteback, 2014) and Hugh Purcell, A very private celebrity – The nine lives of John Freeman (Robson Press, 2015)
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questionnaire enquiring about his racial background and was promptly recruited by MI5.17 The book gives us further information – in some detail – about how hard many Germans tried to make Chamberlain stand firm over Czechoslovakia in 1938. Klop hosted a number of confidential meetings between German military and diplomatic figures and British FO advisors. However, the British preference for not removing Hitler via a military coup and keeping him as a reliable anti-Communist instead drove them all to despair, with one, Wolfgang zu Putlitz, memorably commenting ‘…..the English think they are wise and strong. They are mistaken. They are stupid and weak.’18 Given the diminishment in the UK’s fortunes caused by what happened after 1939 this seems a not unreasonable conclusion. After the war Klop switched to MI6, dealing frequently with Kim Philby. He worked through to his retirement in 1957 but the account of his life seems to indicate that he did little of note post 1951, and struggled even to get a pension when he retired. Why? Well: ultimately von Ustinov was an urbane, highly cultured pragmatist who would have wanted to do a deal with the USSR over Germany. Once the US seized control of the diplomatic initiative in Europe in 1948-1949, proclaiming the existence of a Cold War, and especially after the decamping of Burgess and McLean in 1951, expansive liberal types like Klop were not in vogue. A strong case can be made for him being the most competent intelligence officer the British had working for them 1935-1950. At first glance it might appear that John Freeman, like Ustinov, was a casualty of the Cold War. He too was cultured, urbane and intelligent. Elected MP for Watford in 1945, he was quickly fancied as a future Labour leader. Instead he quit Parliament in 1955 having risen no higher than Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Supply (1947-1951). He then pursued careers in broadcasting and diplomacy. His 17 In MI5 Klop worked closely with Henry Kerby, later Conservative MP for Arundel and Shoreham 1954-1971. Like Anthony Courtney, Kerby retained close connections with the intelligence world while an MP. 18 Putlitz’s career took him into exile in the US in 1939. He later worked for MI6 and eventually returned to live in East Germany in 1952.
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disappearance from politics when clearly an above average performer always seemed strange. The picture of him that emerges, though, is that of a highly competent, confident, organised but self-centred individual. For instance, Freeman told several people in April 1951, when resigning with Bevan and Wilson over the introduction of NHS charges, that he regarded Wilson as a mere opportunist. But this description could surely be applied to him: he changed his career (and his wife) every decade. He was also at pains to deflect enquiries about himself whilst acting as an inquisitor on Panorama (1958-1960) or Face to Face (1959-1962) and firmly questioning public figures. The latter part of the book covers the infighting at London Weekend TV involving Freeman and Aiden Crawley (like him public school, Oxbridge and a former MP) David Frost and Rupert Murdoch. The descriptions of the board room battles and manoeuvres illustrate rather well the type of people who get to the top of the media industry in the UK: a closed little world of self-selecting, self-important types who are constantly being appointed to lucrative positions without being properly interviewed (and often with no precise qualifications for the job) and who talk a great deal of their significant role in public service. Perhaps the common theme running through Freeman’s life was that he always took care not to fall out with influential people. Despite an interesting career Freeman did not leave any particular legacy and must, in terms of the historical record, be considered a marginal figure. This study of him (the first; Freeman destroyed all his personal papers) is orthodox in its approach and could have more usefully considered his life through the prism of class, rather than concentrating on his progression through a series of events.
Pirate radio In Selling the Sixties Robert Chapman records that Philip Birch, the managing director of Radio London, stayed with President Johnson for a weekend to get ‘approval’ for the project prior
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to it going on the air in December 1964.19 This was nine weeks after Harold Wilson won the October 1964 general election. The launch of Radio London had, though, been planned prior to polling day. It is not clear why Birch and Radio London needed the approval of LBJ to carry out a private commercial activity outside UK territorial waters. Birch was previously an accounts manager at J Walter Thompson, a leading advertising agency that some years later would be shown to have had links to the CIA.20 Radio London itself, of course, had been set up with advice from US commercial radio magnate Gordon McLendon, someone the CIA had turned to when operating similar outfits in central America and the Caribbean in the ‘50s. The combination of McLendon + LBJ + J Walter Thompson does seem to suggest that Radio London was more than just a radio station playing pop music.
19 Robert Chapman, Selling the Sixties (1992) now available on-line at
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The view from the bridge
Robin Ramsay
Thanks to Nick Must for proof-reading help with some of this edition of Lobster.
Grauniadia I received this from a correspondent of mine. A link I sent some of you yesterday morning was to a short Guardian beneath the line (BTL) comment I made in response to a piece by Labour MP Jess Phillips on the Livingstone business. In it I suggested that Ken Livingstone might now choose to spend less time in the studios and more time with his newts. I also suggested that John Mann MP should have better things to do than with cameras present noisily abuse a former London Labour mayor when the current Labour candidate was less than a week away from an election in which the Tories were playing the anti-Muslim card. I added a link to Mann’s Daily Mail piece attacking Jeremy Corbyn < http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3232215/ More-positions-Kama-Sutra-not-job-Comment-JOHN-MANN- Labour-MP-Bassetlaw.html> and also drew attention to the statement by the Jewish Socialists’ Group
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completely disappeared from the Guardian site with this statement entered in its place — ‘This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.’ The Phillips piece < http://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2016/apr/29/ken-livingstone-labour-racism- london> had drawn well over 1,000 BTL comments last night. Overnight culling had greatly reduced them: ‘community standards’ are clearly subject to time variation. In contrast, this earlier opinion piece on the same subject
Pennies dropping Chapeau to Peter Oborne for his piece in the Daily Mail, ‘Corruption, 27 years of lies and why Hillsborough has destroyed my faith in the police’.1 It included these paragraphs: ‘But I had been brought up to support the police...... It was unthinkable to my generation that men and women of such moral stature should lie, cheat and fabricate evidence....
1
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The police were a vital arm of the British state in the Eighties as bloody battles were fought against criminals, football hooligans and trade unionists. Mrs Thatcher needed the police to take on the miners. She was, and is, an icon to Tories like myself. It pains me to write this, but we should ask ourselves whether she awarded the police a measure of impunity in return. It is disturbing, too, to learn that investigators are now examining whether behind-the-scenes influence by Freemasons was a factor in the Hillsborough debacle and the alleged cover-up that followed....Let’s remember, too, that five years before Hillsborough was the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ — when hundreds of officers clashed with protesters during the 1984 miners’ strike. At the time it was natural for middle-of-the-road conservative people to believe the police portrayal of those miners as thugs. Evidence has emerged that the South Yorkshire Police may, in the post-battle investigations, have perverted the course of justice by lying through their teeth about the threat of violence offered to them.’ For acknowledging that he was wrong and confessing his innocence Oborne deserves respect. If he carries on down this road he is going to make that most unusual of political journeys, moving from right in his youth to left in his maturity. This is the second occasion recently on which I have praised Oborne and he must now be on the shit-list of some in what we used to call the establishment and he may find hitherto open doors closing on him.
In or out? Below, under the subheading ‘Party politics’, I quoted some of Jeremy Corbyn’s explanation of why he now says the UK should remain in the EU: essentially, so it can be changed from within. Of course he doesn’t believe this: this is party
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management, the unenviable but necessary task of all leaders of the Labour Party. (And, arguably, the fact that he is willing to do this is a good thing, a sign of real, adult politics emerging.) But the ‘stay in: we’ll move it left from within’ is not a coherent position; for the EU has been constructed precisely to stop that happening. Danny Nicol, Professor of Public Law at the University of Westminster, spelled this out recently. ‘....the EU Treaties not only contain procedural protections for capitalism, as is the case in the US Constitution: they also entrench substantive policies which correspond to the basic tenets of neoliberalism.... Imagine that a national government sought to introduce EU legislation to allow all Member States a free choice over the public or private ownership of their energy, postal, telecommunications and rail sectors. It would have to rely on the Commission – the very architect of EU liberalisation – putting forward a proposal to the Council and Parliament. Furthermore the only legal base which is in any way credible would be Article 352 TFEU which requires the Council to act unanimously. We are back to square one: a single national government can veto socialistic advance..... As it presently stands, these requirements [of unanimity] make substantial socialistic advance virtually impossible to achieve. Unless those who seek such change face up to the constitutional obstacle that confronts them, the only progressive reforms to materialise will be confined to the realms of their own minds.’ 2 (emphases added)
* For the second time Ambrose Evans-Pritchard had an article in the Daily Telegraph pointing out that the CIA was the initial promoter of the European Union. ‘The European Union always was an American project. It was Washington that drove European integration in
2 Danny Nicol, ‘Is Another Europe possible?’ at
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the late 1940s, and funded it covertly under the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.’ 3 And for the second time Evans-Pritchard failed to mention – perhaps he is simply unaware of it – that this has been known on the British left since the publication of Fred Hirsch and Richard Fletcher’s CIA and the Labour Movement (Spokesman Books) in 1977. I sent the Evans-Pritchard article to Professor Scott Newton and he responded: ‘There’s quite a bit of literature on this subject. The argument is an accurate one as far as it goes. But it does ignore the European dimension, that is to say the acceptance by the governments of the six nations who formed the ECSC and then the EEC that political and economic integration was the best way to continue what the fine historian Alan Milward called ‘the European rescue of the nation-state’. This nation-state was the post-war model, committed to full employment, economic growth, modernization and social justice. It was not the liberal version (basically a customs union) favoured by the US Government, which viewed the 1951 Coal and Steel Treaty with a mixture of relief (because it brought together the French and the Germans) and suspicion (because it involved a large degree of planning).’
Kincora Largely ignored by the major media, the British state continues to prevent a serious inquiry into the Kincora affair. This is being done by alloting its investigation not to the Goddard Inquiry, which has the power to compel testimony from witnesses, but to the Historical Institutional Abuse (HIA) 3
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inquiry specific to Northern Ireland, which does not. A challenge to this, via a judicial inquiry, was refused recently in the High Court in Belfast.4 In response to this Colin Wallace issued a statement in which said that ‘the Government has seen fit to provide the HIA with significantly less powers than the Goddard Inquiry – namely it does not have the power to compel disclosure’, 5 and consequently he would not be taking part in it. Wallace also noted ‘new revelations about Dr Maurice Fraser which shows strong links between child abuse in Ireland and England’. Fraser was a child psychiatrist, best known as the author of the 1973 book, Children in Conflict. He was also a paedophile, who was caught and convicted but whose career was not damaged by the conviction.6 The Needleblog said of the new report on Fraser: ‘A remarkable new study, with implications for the UK Goddard Inquiry, has shown that the General Medical Council in Britain, the RUC and the Metropolitan Police withheld from the public important information about Morris Fraser, a doctor who was a serial paedophile. Fraser used his medical status to enable other paedophiles such as Peter Righton and Charles Napier to gain access to vulnerable children.’ 7 I think the British state’s plan is to keep kicking Kincora into the long grass until all the witnesses from the intelligence world are dead.
Grauniadia Off-guardian.org, the site which monitors the Guardian, has a splendid piece on the Guardian’s initial handling of the Panama 4
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offshore accounts story,8 pointing out its absurd anti-Putin bias. I’ve said before in these columns and it is worth restating: given what we know of the way the American state worked in the post-WW2 world, the Guardian is the British newspaper it would have wanted to get control of in the early post-war years. Let’s say the American state does not have its hands on it – and there is no evidence that it does – how else do we explain the way it almost always ends up supporting American interests at critical points?
Party politics The media claims in the past couple of months that the Labour Party has a problem with anti-semitism among its members,9 is obviously essentially a smear from the right (routine party politics). But it is also an illustration of the central tactic in the pro-Israel media playbook: accuse anyone who criticises Israel of being an anti-semite.10 While the Labour Party’s membership has ballooned since Corbyn became leader,11 the Conservative Party is in what may be terminal decline: membership has fallen from 253,000 to 140,00 since Cameron was chosen; 290 of the Party’s 650 associations have fewer than 100 members;12 and the average age of the members is over 60 and may be
8
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as high as 68.13 In short, the Conservative Party is moving towards the American model of a group of professional politicos, funded by sections of the 1% who buy the policies which benefit them. In the case of the Conservatives that group of the 1% is currently American hedge funds based in London.14
The sound of pennies dropping Ah, yes, free trade..... So the Saudis open the taps to bring down the price of oil, to make the US shale industry uneconomic; and the Chinese flood the world with steel, apparently trying to destroy the European steel industry.15 And how many of the major media economic commentators, wedded to the ideology of free trade, describe it this way? None I have noticed. Why are the Saudis doing this? I don’t know of course, but one explanation is that the Saudi regime feels threatened by the notion of US being independent of Saudi oil. It wouldn’t then need to sell Saudi all those weapons to pay for it; and wouldn’t need to be concerned about the survival of the obnoxious regime there which it has been propping-up since the 1960s. (Which would suit the Israeli lobby.) Why is the British government so reluctant to say or do anything about Chinese economic warfare? They’re afraid that any action against the Chinese steel offensive will have repercussions on the City’s ability to attract Chinese wealth here, of course; but also they’re about to get the Chinese to build nuclear power-stations here. We apparently need Chinese money to do this. We can create hundred of billions for the failing banks but we have to mortgage our energy future to the Chinese state? This makes so little sense that I
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wonder if there isn’t another explanation, such as the Chinese bribing the Tory Party. Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail was honest enough to recognise some of what is happening in his column on 1 April, ‘We’ve sold our soul in a desperate dash for foreigners’ cash’.16
‘Yet in the desperate dash to attract foreign cash, we as a nation have abandoned all vestige of decency and principle. Our policy is to prostrate ourselves before anyone with a big enough bank balance, no questions asked.’ And there was Peter Hitchens, also in the Mail, on a related but even more radical tack, two days later, in ‘Privatisation! Free trade! Shares for all! The great con that ruined Britain’.17 ‘Sure, some things have got cheaper, and there are a lot more little treats and luxuries available. The coffee and the restaurants are better – but the essentials of life are harder to find than ever: a good life and an honest place; a solid, modest home big enough to house a small family in a peaceful, orderly landscape; good local schools open to all who need them; reasonably paid secure work for this generation and the next; competent government and wise laws. These have become luxuries, unattainable for millions who once took them for granted.’ And there was Paul Mason, no longer working for mainstream TV, going to back to his radical roots,18 in a piece, ‘Smash the mafia elite: we should treat offshore wealth as terrorist finance’.19 Most strikingly Mason advocated national action to
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achieve this. ‘Acting unilaterally goes against the DNA of the globalised elite. Their “nation” is the global system, and it’s seen as heresy for one country to act without others. “If we do, money will simply move offshore,” is the mantra. “Let it go,” should be the response.’ All three columns are a reflection of the Europe-wide turn against globalisation in general and the EU in particular which are perceived by significant sections of the peoples of Europe to have failed, to be making things worse, to be producing chaos. For most of its life the Labour Party has been the party of the state, the nation and the domestic economy; in effect the British national party. The leadership began moving away from this in the late 1980s when they decided that opposing the forces of globalisation and neo-conservatism meant they would never win a general election.20 Changes begun under Neil Kinnock were continued by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when they became more or less joint party leaders in 1994 and then took office in 1997. Several wars, the banking crisis (and the longest recession since WW2), and about four million immigrants later, the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader apparently marked the end of Labour as a neo-con party. So the current crisis should be an opportunity for Corbyn: the lonely canoe he’s been paddling for thirty years is now sitting on a great wave of opinion. Hasn’t he always been anti-EU? Well, yes, he was – until he became party leader. Now he has changed his tune and is for remaining in it, despite its faults, as he made clear in his speech in a speech on 14 April, in which he said: ‘We also need to make the case for reform in Europe – the reform David Cameron’s government has no interest in, but plenty of others across Europe do. That means democratic reform to make the EU more accountable to its people. Economic reform to end self-defeating austerity and put jobs and sustainable growth at the 20 The details of this are at
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centre of European policy; labour market reform to strengthen and extend workers’ rights in a real social Europe. And new rights for governments and elected authorities to support public enterprise and halt the pressure to privatise services. So the case I’m making is for ‘remain - and reform’ in Europe.’ These remarks are what I think of as the Coates manoeuvre. I attended a meeting circa 1990 addressed by Ken Coates, then a newly-elected Member of the European Parliament. When questions were invited I asked him why he, a radical socialist hitherto (Institute for Workers Control etc.), had joined this big capitalist club. ‘I’m working towards the united socialist states of Europe’, he said. ‘Good luck with that one,’ I replied.
F....F....F....F branch? The Labour Party is now stuffed with decent socialists/ anarchists/Trot entryists/sandal-wearing pacifists/nutters – delete according to taste – many of whom are ‘domestic extremists’ by the criteria used by the Metropolitan Police in recent years. With this in mind is the new gay-friendly MI521 going to reconstitute F branch (the watchers of subversives), which it apparently disbanded to concentrate on jihadis?
The innocents Because it is such a depressing tale of stupidity and incompetence, I am able to read Tom Bower’s new biography of Tony Blair only a few pages at a time. It is the massive hatchet job of which some mainstream media reviewers have complained and others have celebrated. And yet, in the introduction Bower writes: ‘I voted for Tony Blair in 1997 and excitedly watched his drive from Islington to Downing Street. Like the majority of Britons, I did believe this was a new dawn.’ (p. xxiv)
21 See
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Another journalist, Peter Oborne, for whom I have much time, wrote of attending the 1994 Labour Party conference, at which Blair made his first appearance as party leader: ‘Political journalists are supposed to be callous and cynical. We weren’t on this occasion. Like almost everyone else present I felt uplifted and exhilarated.... We believed that we were in the presence of something marvellous, benign and entirely new.’ 22 Neither Bower nor Oborne can have had many friends in the Labour Party. I was in the Party then and I don’t remember anybody who ever believed any of it. As Bower now shows in great detail, beneath Blair’s grinning vacuity was...... vacuity. But we knew that then.
Rough justice In the many pages on the current migration crisis I have read I have not yet noticed any comment in the major media that, as the crisis is chiefly the result of US foreign policy,23 the fact that the migrants are ending up on the doorsteps of countries which have supported/gone along with American foreign policy is a kind of rough justice.
Oswaldiana Caro In Lobster 65 I noted that the American historian Robert Caro had omitted Billie Sol Estes from the fourth volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson; that this omission had to be 22 Peter Oborne, The Rise of Political Lying (London: Free Press, 2005) p. 26 23 And partly the result of drought. NASA reported recently that the drought in the Eastern Med was the worst in 900 years. See
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deliberate (the Estes scandal was really big news at the time and made the cover of Time magazine);24 and that I had e- mailed Mr Caro about this and did not receive a reply. I did so again recently – and again did not receive a reply. Blevins It may not matter greatly, this late in the day, but a man called Leroy Blevins Snr. appears to have found photographic images of three gunmen on Dealey Plaza, two of them in frames of the Zapruder film.25 Holt The world may be going to hell in a hand-cart, but I am still thinking about Chauncey Holt. In Lobster 69 I discussed Holt and his claim to have been one of the three ‘tramps’ photographed under police escort after the shooting.26 I concluded there that Holt probably wasn’t the oldest of the ‘tramps’ and had inserted himself into the story. However, drawing that conclusion was a struggle on my part and I hedged my bets by putting a few paragraphs in ‘View from the bridge’ in that issue based on ‘What if it’s true?’. I recently rewatched the presentation by police artist Lois Taylor in which she claims to demonstrate that the three ‘tramps’ were not the three men whose arrest records were found in the Dallas Police archives and that the oldest of the ‘tramps’ was indeed Holt.27 I have seen nothing which rebuts her analysis. So, once again: what if Holt’s story is true? In the chapters in his memoir on his putative role in the assassination,28 Holt describes being tasked by his CIA contacts to modify a rifle, giving it a smooth-bore barrel, so that it could fire rounds which had already been fired by a Mannlicher-Carcano without adding more rifling marks. He 24
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comments that shots fired from such a rifle would be less accurate and have reduced power. He suggests that this rifle was used to fire the shot which made JFK’s shallow back wound and that the infamous ‘magic bullet’, Commission Exhibit 399, supposed to have inflicted several wounds on the bodies of JFK and Governor Connally without damage to itself, was that round fired from the doctored rifle, which only hit JFK and simply fell out of his body when it was moved. The appeal of this is the way it cuts through a thicket of problems in the assassination, the shallow back wound, the mystery of CE399 and the framing of Oswald, the apparent owner of a Mannlicher-Carcano.29 Exploring this further, this shot was perhaps fired from the Book Depository where the shooter made sure he was seen by poking the rifle out of the window before the motorcade passed by. The Mannlicher-Carcano which could be tied to Oswald and three spent rounds were left for the authorities to find. But framing a live Oswald would have been impossible: he would have talked of his activities with the FBI and CIA and the plan must have included Oswald’s murder. (The fact that Oswald went home after the shooting to pick up his revolver suggests that he had some inkling that he might be in danger.) If Holt’s account is true it could explain the apparent presence in Dallas that day of the Major General Edward Lansdale. It was Colonel Fletcher Prouty who identified Lansdale as being in one of the ‘tramps’ photographs taken after the shooting.30 This identification was confirmed by another retired solider, General Victor Krulak.31 But if that is
29 John Armstrong argues that Oswald didn’t actually buy the rifle. See ‘Oswald Never Purchased a Mail Order Rifle’ at
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Lansdale,32 as Krulak asked in a letter to Prouty: what was he doing there? Holt says he himself was in Dallas delivering handguns and fake IDs for what he believed was some kind of CIA- organised stunt which was intended to kibosh JFK’s desired rapprochement with Castro’s Cuba. Who might organise such a thing? Edward Lansdale is one obvious candidate. In a letter to Jim Garrison, Fletcher Prouty wrote: ‘Through 1962 and 1963, Mongoose and “Camelot” became strong and silent organizations dedicated to countering JFK. Mongoose had access to the CIA’s best “hit men” in the business and a lot of “strike” capability. Lansdale had many old friends in the media business such as Joe Alsop, Henry Luce [publisher of Time, Life and Fortune magazines] among others. With this background and with his poisoned motivation, I am positive that he got collateral orders to manage the Dallas event under the guise of “getting” Castro. It is so simple at that level. A nod from the right place, source immaterial, and the job’s done.’ 33 (emphasis added) Maybe so; but Prouty has no evidence for this. His comments are opinions, albeit those of a highly placed insider. Other possibilities exist: for example that the real assassination conspiracy was piggy-backed on the CIA stunt, a fake assassination attempt to be blamed on apparent Castro-sympathiser Oswald, implicit in Holt’s tale of the smooth-bore rifle firing Mannlicher-Carcano rounds.34 If the LBJ-dunnit thesis is correct, this means either that, at some level CIA personnel co-operated with the Johnson people, or that the Johnson gang heard of the planned CIA operation and exploited it. The latter seems more likely
32 There is a long discussion of ‘Was it Lansdale?’ at
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because, had the CIA and Johnson gang collaborated in a real assassination attempt, what would have been the point of the smooth-bore rifle round? That only makes sense if a fake attempt was being planned.
PS Since this was written I have reexamined the ‘tramps’ question. See ‘JFK, Chauncey Holt and the three ’tramps’ redux’ in this issue.
Dave saves the City The opening sentence in the report on the website cityam.com on David Cameron’s ‘deal’ with the EU was this: ‘The City of London will be safeguarded under a new deal agreed between European leaders, after European Commission president Donald Tusk said there is “unanimous support” for a new settlement over the UK’s position in the EU.’ 35 Cameron was in an odd position: he had actually succeeded where it mattered to his financial backers – saving the City of London from EU regulation – but could not actually say so and had to pretend that the other minor concessions were the big items. The relevant paragraph in the formal deal is this one, I think: ‘The implementation of measures, including the supervision or resolution of financial institutions and markets, and macro-prudential responsibilities, to be taken in view of preserving the financial stability of Member States whose currency is not the euro is, subject to the requirements of group and consolidated supervision and resolution, a matter for their own authorities and own budgetary responsibility, unless such Member States wish to join common mechanisms
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open to their participation.’ 36 Cameron’s pitch was essentially this: leave the City alone or the UK will leave. And it worked.
Weather wars ‘RAF stole our rain, says Cyprus as British military bizarrely accused of interfering with the weather so Tornado and Typhoon aircraft can fly’ was the headline in the Mail on Sunday on 21 February.37 But if you have read T. J. Coles in these columns you will know that this is not such an outlandish claim.38 ‘Owning the weather’ is the ambition of the modern military planner and what the Cypriots are reporting is precisely the kind of thing the US military have been researching for decades.
Cold War 3 The new Cold War is now established. And just as in the previous two there is a complete mismatch between the account of events presented by the opposing sides. And just as in the previous two there are people in the NATO countries trying to create an alternative narrative in which it’s not just good guys (NATO) and bad guys (Russia). Take Ukraine. Introducing an essay on Ukraine by Jonathan Marshall, Robert Parry at the Consortiumnews wrote: ‘Few Americans understand the ugly history behind the Nazi-affiliated movements that have gained substantial power in today’s U.S.–backed Ukrainian regime. Western propaganda has made these right-wing extremists the
36 Section A paragraph 4 of the long document at
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“good guys” versus the Russian “bad guys.”’ 39 None of this is mentioned in Elizabeth Pond’s ‘How Vladimir Putin lost Ukraine’, which appeared in the New Statesman recently. Pond’s essay is a good example of the sophisticated end of the good guys/bad guys position;40 and she makes no reference to the coup run there by the Americans and their local allies.41 One minor difference between Cold War 2 and this one is the attitude of the New Statesman. In the early 1980s, with Bruce Page as editor, the New Statesman would not have opened its columns to so such an openly pro-American version of events. The neo-con delusions are alive and well there.
Telling it like it is Yanis Varoufakis was briefly Greek Finance Minister in 2015. He was recently asked in an interview: ‘From your time as Greek Finance Minister, what did the experience reveal to you about the nature of democracy and power? Were there things that surprised you?’ Varoufakis replied: ‘In the very first Eurogroup meeting that I attended, when I tried to make a point that I didn’t think would be contested – that I was representing a freshly elected government whose mandate should be respected to some extent, that it should feed into a debate on what economic policies should be applied to Greece – I was astonished to hear the German finance minister say to
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me, verbatim, that elections cannot be allowed to change established economic policy. In other words, that democracy is fine as long as it does not threaten to change anything! While I was expecting that to be the overall motif, I was not prepared to have it spelled out so bluntly.’42
Former City of London Police Fraud Squad officer, Rowan Bosworth-Davis:43 ‘Your children cannot buy a house in London because the criminal banks prefer Russian dirty money...... Property prices have escalated way beyond the hopes and ambitions of ordinary men and women, and London has quickly become the stamping ground for an army of foreign criminals, tax evaders, pimps, whores and assorted slimeballs, all of whom have found London to be a very welcoming home of choice. We have sold our once-proud sense of independence and our strong degree of self-reliance to a bunch of Russian and Asian crooks whose money will not pass muster, but as no-one in the British financial Establishment is looking too closely, City practitioners have merely become highly paid prostitutes, working in the financial bordello of EC3.’ He is probably not going to be invited to the annual banquet of the City of London’s Lord Mayor.
More Oswaldiana Trying out the search engine Duckduckgo (as good as Google, I think), I found a 2014 lecture by Professor Joan Mellen on Malcolm Wallace and the LBJ-dunnit theory of the Kennedy assassination.44 (She’s writing a book about this, due in the Autumn.) I haven’t read Mellen’s books on the assassination. 42
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She’s a fan of Jim Garrison, who I have never taken seriously. Mellen met Garrison at the time of his investigation. Her husband, Ralph Schoenman,45 sent Garrison the material about Permindex, published in the Italian left-wing newspaper il Paese Sera, which mentioned the New Orleans resident Clay Shaw.46 Seeing Shaw’s name in an article about an alleged CIA front in Italy helped persuade New Orleans D.A. Garrison that the CIA was involved in the assassination (a claim for which he offered no evidence.) Professor Mellen thinks Jim Garrison did important work and has carried on where he left off, widening and deepening some of the Garrison themes and defending his investigation. Like Anthony Summers (see the ‘Oswaldiana’ section below), she is dismissive of the LBJ-dunnit thesis. In the first paragraph of her lecture she writes this: ‘According to the urban legend that grew up around Mac Wallace, and that was based entirely upon the accusations of Estes, Mac Wallace has come (sic) down in history, if he has, as a hit man in the pay and service of Lyndon Johnson.’ (emphasis added) The assertion I have italicised above simply isn’t true. That 45 At that time Schoenman was the secretary to Bertrand Russell, a member of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, and an international political activist. In a statement during a successful libel action he took against Bryan Magee (who wrote in a book that people suspected Schoenman of being CIA, planted on Russell), Schoenman wrote of himself: ‘The Claimant initiated the Committee of One Hundred which organised civil disobedience against nuclear weapons and US bases in Great Britain. He was founder and director of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and Director of the Who Killed Kennedy Committee.’ (See
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what we might call friends of Lyndon were murdering people in Texas was hinted at in 1964 by Texan politician J. Evetts Haley. He had noticed the potential witnesses in the Estes scandal who all apparently chose what became known as a ‘Texas suicide’ – asphyxiation by carbon monoxide – to end their difficulties.47 Lawrence ‘Loy’ Factor talked of Wallace long before the Estes allegations surfaced but Factor gets short shrift from Mellen. This is her only reference to him: ‘.... that fantasy called The Men On The Sixth Floor which features a Chickasaw Indian named Loy Factor.’ The striking thing about the Factor story to me was how little he claimed: having demonstrated his prowess with a rifle, he had been recruited and paid by a man called Wallace – first name unknown – to fire at someone in the future. That ‘someone’ turned out to be the president. Factor said he met ‘Wallace’ at the funeral of a Texas politician called Sam Rayburn; and there’s a fuzzy picture, said to show Wallace at the funeral.48 The two authors who pursued the Factor story eventually had this ‘Wallace’ identified for them by LBJ’s former mistress, Madeleine Brown. Independently from Factor, she also thought Malcolm Wallace was involved. She does not appear to have had any direct evidence but, like others in Texas politics, believed that Wallace was LBJ’s hit-man. Texas Ranger Clint Peoples believed that Malcolm Wallace (who had a 1951 conviction for murder) had killed the Department of Agriculture official Henry Marshall when he refused to back-off an investigation of Billie Sol Estes’ agricultural fraud. Marshall was partially asphyxiated with carbon monoxide before being shot repeatedly.49 A witness who saw a man close to where Marshall was murdered around the time of the event worked with a police artist and produced
47 In his A Texan Looks at Lyndon (Canyon, Texas: Palo Duro Press, 1964). 48
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a close resemblance to Wallace.50 (In her lecture Professor Mellen doesn’t mention the Marshall killing.) Ranger Peoples’ suspicions aren’t proof, of course, but they are suggestive; as are the suicided Estes witnesses. Who would murder Marshall but someone threatened by his inquiries? Who was most threatened? Estes himself and, if we believe Estes on this, LBJ whom Estes had been paying-off for years. This is the central point of the LBJ-dunnit thesis: JFK’s death was merely one in a series linked to the Estes scandal which threatened to reveal the payoffs to LBJ, and thus threatened his career. But Mellen has no need to consider this: after all Estes was a liar, wasn’t he? He admitted so in court, she tells us; and nothing liars say can be believed. But Mellen does consider the fingerprint of Wallace apparently found in the Book Depository, finds a print expert who tells her the match made in the late 1990s is wrong,51 and thus she can declare: ‘If you don’t have the fingerprint, you can’t place Mac Wallace at Dealey Plaza, and if you can’t place Mac Wallace at the scene of the assassination, your best piece of evidence that Lyndon Johnson was behind the assassination disappears.’ This is true. But as I have commented before, if the print match is mistaken we have the bizarre situation in which a print, close enough to Wallace’s to fool two print examiners, just happened to turn up on the 6th floor of the Book Depository. In the circumstances, this is a preposterous coincidence; and given that print identification is more art than science, as Garrick Alder pointed out in Lobster 69,52 Occam’s
50 That witness sketch can be found part-way down in the biography of Mac Wallace at
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razor tells us that the initial print match was correct.53
Known unknowns Musing on the comparison between the Labour Party of today, with talk of centre-right MPs leaving, and the early 1980s, when the Social Democratic Party (SDP) was formed by centre-right MPs leaving, here’s former SDP parliamentary candidate Polly Toynbee in the Guardian: ‘Despite a meteoric launch, failure was in the stars for the SDP. Did we help pull Labour towards electability, or did the split stop Labour winning? That’s unknowable.’54 This really will not do. The formation of the SDP ensured that Mrs Thatcher won the 1983 election: forming a new centre-left party in 1981 was bound to split the anti-Conservative vote at the general election which followed. The question is: was it formed with that purpose in mind? On this the evidence is mixed. Three of the founders, the so-called Gang of Four – William Rogers, Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins – had been around US interests and personnel since the 1950s. The US would have been routinely working to prevent its leading ally (and most important military base in Europe) being taken over by an anti-American government; and splitting the party was the most effective way of keeping Labour out of office. But there is no evidence of the Americans funding or directing the SDP’s formation. Evidence of other people’s activities is clearer. Neville Sandelson, one of the MPs who left Labour for the SDP, told us that he was one of eight Labour MPs about to make that move who voted for the left’s candidate, Michael Foot, in the 1980 leadership contest with Denis Healey, thus ensuring Foot’s
53 The excellent Larry Hancock wrote a long essay on Wallace in two parts:
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victory. Sandelson wanted to destroy Labour.55 Mrs Thatcher’s private secretary, Ian Gow MP, met Sandelson six months before he joined the SDP when that party went public. Gow’s report includes this paragraph: ‘Sandelson says that his remaining political purpose is to ensure the re-election of the Conservative Party at the next Election, because only by another Conservative victory will there come about that split in the Labour Party, which he considers to be an essential precondition for a real purge of the Labour Left.’ 56 As for the notorious ‘longest suicide note in history’, the 1983 Labour manifesto, this was the result of the right and centre in the party declining to take part in the manifesto-writing process, leaving it to the left. The debacle of the 1983 general election was the work of the Labour centre and right as much as the left; and Mrs Thatcher’s victory that year can be laid squarely at the door of the SDP. This is not unknowable, this is known.
Foot in mouth As border controls are being strengthened all over Europe, Labour’s shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, was recently quoted thus: ‘What I was arguing then – it was a piece of research by Rahila Gupta who was looking at the long-term future of the globe basically – is that inevitably in this century we will have open borders. We’re seeing it in Europe 55 Quoted in Philip Whitehead, The Writing on the Wall (London:Michael Joseph, 1986) p. 359. Sandelson uses the word ‘destroy’ there. In the second round ballot of MPs Michael Foot received 139 votes and Healey 129. The votes of those eight MPs would have made Healey the winner. In the Guardian obituary of Sandelson by Andrew Roth, which tells this tale, the figure is given as seven Labour MPs. See
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already. The movement of peoples across the globe will mean that borders are almost going to become irrelevant by the end of this century, so we should be preparing for that and explaining why people move.’ 57 Even if he believes this, it is astonishing that he thought it was a politically sensible thing to say in the current climate. But as a recent portrait of McDonnell shows, he has never been interested in conventional politics.58
Monetarism? ‘It finally became clear that the monetarists had lost their marbles when – quarter by quarter after 2012 – the Eurogroupe kept insisting that the more one starved the Greek consumer, the more easily a consumption- based economy could be kick-started back to health. Although a huge variation in degree is involved here, in terms of reality failure there is little to choose between the ideas of Wolfgang Schäuble [Federal Minister of Finance] and those of George Osborne: they are twins when it comes to amateur madness.’59 Yes, but are they monetarists? I know what author John Ward means: Osborne and his ilk come from the pre-Keynesian tradition within the Tory Party which was reborn with Thatcher, Joseph, Howe and Lawson in the late 1970s as a response to the inflation of that decade. This group was then called ‘monetarists’. But Chancellor Osborne never talks about the money supply and money supply data is no longer considered newsworthy. With Osborne it has less to do with economics than with
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politics. Looking around for an economic strategy which justified big cuts in government spending (required because they wouldn’t put up taxes), Osborne and Cameron came across one example, in Canada, in the 1990s, which seemed to show that economic cuts lead to growth60 – a bit like pruning a bush, perhaps. Voila! They had a rationale for the cuts they intended.
City first Amidst the chorus of derision which greeted David Cameron’s ‘deal’ with the EU in early February, few commentators noticed that amidst the fudges about immigration was a proposal, ‘Measures, the purpose of which is to further deepen the economic and monetary union, will be voluntary for member states whose currency is not the euro’. This, if adopted, may protect the City of London from EU regulation in the future. Only the Financial Times seemed to notice the significance of this.61 As hedge funds, based in the UK or in UK-administered overseas tax havens, are now major funders of the Conservative Party, I presume that the really important item on the Tories’ EU agendum is protecting the City from EU regulation.62
Oswaldiana In a 2013 piece for the Fortean Times about the lack of interest in the thesis that LBJ’s people killed JFK, I wrote the
60 See for example
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following: ‘The assassination research now resembles an academic subject area, divided up into subsections: Oswald's intelligence links; ballistics; the autopsy; the cover-up; JFK’s Vietnam policy; the role of the Secret Service; the anti-Castro Cubans and so on. Hardly any of the Kennedy researchers have been actually looking at who shot Kennedy: in part because most are working in specialist areas; and in part because they have abandoned any belief that we might find out what happened on Dealey Plaza. (And one or two have persuaded themselves that what happened there isn’t so important anyway compared to the insights the event generates into the behaviour of the American state and secret state.) Among the assassination researchers aware of the LBJ’s-people-dunnit thesis there is general hostility because it doesn’t focus on the secret state, especially the CIA. JFK researchers are like other people: they form theories and find it difficult to digest new information that undermines those theories; they are prone to “confirmation bias”.’63 A good example of this hostility was the comment by Anthony Summers in a talk written for the 2013 COPA conference (which didn’t get delivered in the end). ‘There are the time-wasters and gossip merchants – I’m thinking of the “a-Secret-Service-agent-did-it” notion. Or: “It was LBJ.”’ 64 Mr Summers has done great work in this field but the LBJ- dunnit case is neither gossip nor time-wasting and I wonder how much of the material he has read.65 The most energetic of those pursuing the LBJ-dunnit 63 FT 307, November 2013 64 Intended talk to COPA by Anthony Summers: ‘Where the JFK Case Sits 11/22/2013’, at
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thesis is Robert Morrow and in the last few years he has posted a lot of material on the subject on his website,66 including some FBI documents from the 1960s, reporting the Soviet view of the assassination.67 One of them, in 1965, included this: ‘On September 16, 1965, this same source reported that the KGB Residency in New York City received instructions approximately September 16, 1965, from KGB headquarters in Moscow to develop all possible information concerning President Lyndon B. Johnson's character, background, personal friends, family, and from which quarters he derives his support in his position as President of the United States. Our source added that in the instructions from Moscow, it was indicated that “now” the KGB was in possession of data purporting to indicate President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy.’ 68 (emphasis added) Three years later the British publisher Peter Dawney put out Joachim Joesten’s The Dark Side of LBJ, the initial book to articulate the LBJ-dunnit thesis.69 Joesten’s first book on the subject, Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy?, in 1964, was done by a New York publisher who was being subsidized by the KGB.70 This had another thesis, that JFK was killed by the Right, which was the Soviets’ initial
66
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reaction.71 It may simply be a coincidence that Joesten’s change of thesis mirrors that of the Soviets but perhaps he was being supplied with material by the KGB. If so, if this was a KGB ‘active measure’, like most of them it was strikingly ineffective: Joesten’s book was read by hardly anyone and the LBJ-dunnit thesis disappeared for 30 years.
Deep state USA I am grateful to Toby Sculthorp for bringing to my attention an essay on the United States’ Deep State.72 Regardless of who wrote it, this is a very interesting piece of work; but because the author, Mike Lofgren, was a Congressional staffer for 28 years, it takes on extra significance. In a footnote Lofgren defines the Deep State thus: ‘I use the term to mean a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process.’ In Lofgren’s view it consists of: ‘.....a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department
71 Specifically this piece of vintage 1963 Soviet boilerplate: ‘The assassination of JFK on November 22 of this year in Dallas was organized by a circle of reactionary monopolists in league with pro-fascist groups of the US with the objective of strengthening the reactionary and aggressive aspects of US policy. The aforementioned circle was dissatisfied with the independent features of Kennedy’s foreign and domestic policies, in particular, various measures to normalize US-Soviet relations, the broadening of civil rights of the Negro population, and also a significant limitation of the interests of a part of the American bourgeoisie, above all the oil and metallurgical monopolies.’ At
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of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees.’ Further: ‘What is euphemistically called “private enterprise” is an integral part of its operations.....There are now 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances — a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government...... They are deeply dyed in the hue of the official ideology of the governing class, an ideology that is neither specifically Democrat nor Republican. Domestically, whatever they might privately believe about essentially diversionary social issues such as abortion or gay marriage, they almost invariably believe in the “Washington Consensus”: financialization, outsourcing, privatization, deregulation and the commodifying of labor. Internationally, they espouse 21st-century “American Exceptionalism”: the right and duty of the United States to meddle in every region of
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the world with coercive diplomacy and boots on the ground and to ignore painfully won international norms of civilized behavior. To paraphrase what Sir John Harrington said more than 400 years ago about treason, now that the ideology of the Deep State has prospered, none dare call it ideology..... That the secret and unaccountable Deep State floats freely above the gridlock between both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue is the paradox of American government in the 21st century: drone strikes, data mining, secret prisons and Panopticon-like control on the one hand; and on the other, the ordinary, visible parliamentary institutions of self-government declining to the status of a banana republic amid the gradual collapse of public infrastructure...... The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction.’ This deep state has straightforward aims: control of the tax revenues it consumes. It is now entirely about careers and profits. ‘National security’ and ‘threats’ of one kind or another are the flimsiest of pretexts for the biggest heist in world history. Lofgren makes some relatively optimistic noises at the end of his essay about the formal democratic process regaining control of it which are not remotely justified by the by material he has presented. If you read nothing else mentioned in these columns, read this.
Cruising The report by Sir Richard Henriques, ‘An independent inquiry
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into allegations made against Lord Greville Janner’73 contains a striking portrait of Janner more or less openly cruising children’s homes and then carrying on his normal life with one particular boy attached to it. It’s as if he wanted to get caught (or, as Anthony Frewin suggested to me, was a psychopath, unable to assess risk). Reading this chronology of complaints to the police not acted upon, prosecutions not begun, it is hard not to conclude that the fix was in. If so, why was Janner being protected?
The Atlantic semantic 74 The exchanges between President Clinton and Tony Blair,75 much trumpeted by the major media, contain almost nothing of interest because most of what Blair said has been redacted. But there was a telling moment at the beginning of a meeting with Gordon Brown, Blair and Clinton on 29 May 1997, just after NuLab won the election. ‘Mr. Brown: There is a need for a flexible labor market, which you faced up to in the United States. You have 50 percent more consumption per head than France and Germany because they have not liberalized shopping hours, and 50 percent more computer work. If possible, we should make the G-7 the forum for discussion of flexible labor forces so others can learn from the U.S. experience. The debate needs to go forward in Europe. Prime Minister Blair: It doesn’t mean giving up the social compact but it is a new world. The role of government is not about hostilities with business but to equip people with the skills and technology they need and help families. Mr. Brown: In Great Britain, the long-term unemployed 73
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make up 40 percent of our unemployed, compared with 10 percent in the United States. We have no way to get them back to work. There will have to be huge changes; France is the best example because their public sector is huge. We need to demonstrate that growth and social programs can work together – you do not have to sacrifice one for the other.’ ‘Let’s copy America’, chorus Brown and Blair – flexible labour markets! liberalised shopping hours! – showing Clinton that, like him, they had internalised the neo-con viewpoint and that the Americans state’s interest in, and support for, Blair and Brown had paid off.
Masters of war President Obama spoke well about gun control in his White House speech on 5 January and the tears were a nice touch. Happy as I am to hear a US president encouraging citizens and legislators to defy the NRA, I would have been more impressed if he’d used his freedom from having to face re- election to make a stand about something more important to the rest of the world: the proliferation of US drone bases. Bits of Europe, Asia, the Middle East and, increasingly, Africa are becoming part of the Pentagon’s network of such bases.76 These drones will have little impact on the conflicts into which they are inserted77 but will increase anti-American feeling and thus – and this is the only point of them – will generate new ‘enemies’ for the Pentagon to fight; with expensive ordnance 78 provided by the arms manufacturers; a small fraction of whose profits will be used to bribe Congress. This is the really significant ‘gun lobby’.
Rogue Agents
76 On which see for example Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk There is a new edition – the fourth – of David Teacher’s Rogue Agents: The Cercle and the 6I in the Private Cold War 1951 - 1991. I haven’t read much of this yet and am not going to try and review it. This summary is from the introduction. ‘This study is an attempt at a preliminary transnational investigation of the Paneuropean Right and particularly of the covert forum, the Cercle Pinay and its complex of groups. Amongst Cercle intelligence contacts are former operatives from the American CIA, DIA and INR, Britain’s MI5, MI6 and IRD, France’s SDECE, Germany’s BND, BfV and MAD, Holland’s BVD, Belgium's Sûreté de l’Etat, SDRA and PIO, apartheid South Africa’s BOSS, and the Swiss and Saudi intelligence services. Politically, the Cercle complex has interlocked with the whole panoply of international right-wing groups: the Paneuropean Union, the European Movement, CEDI, the Bilderberg Group, WACL, Opus Dei, the Moonies, Western Goals and the Heritage Foundation. Amongst the prominent politicians associated with the Cercle Pinay were Antoine Pinay, Konrad Adenauer, Archduke Otto von Habsburg, Franz Josef Strauss, Giulio Andreotti, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, Paul Vanden Boeynants, John Vorster, General Antonio de Spínola, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.’ Teacher began this in an essay in Lobster 17 (’Brian Crozier, the Pinay Circle and James Goldsmith’) and he just kept pursuing it, expanding it. This (final?) version is 564 pages, including 603 endnotes, bibliography and appendices. A monumental piece of work. This is a free download at https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Rogue_Agents or https://cryptome.org/2015/12/Rogue-Agents-4th-edition.pdf or http://www.mediafire.com/?4pq91px3iya284d. Another Banksy Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Occasional contributor to these columns, Roger Cottrell, has secured something of a coup by getting John Banks, the British mercenary,to talk at length on camera about his life and activities.79 Part of that footage can be found on Cottrell’s website Worse than you could possibly imagine The sole review of Ian Cutler’s Camera Assassin on Amazon is this: Poorly written (semi illiterate) tabloid trash. About a tenth of the way into the book I gave up and deleted it from my kindle. Poorly written tabloid trash it certainly is. Also barely proof- read. Nonetheless as an exposé of the Murdoch press this is important. For what the author, a former photographer for Murdoch, tells us – and, more importantly, shows us – is that Murdoch’s tabloids, especially the News of the World, were (still are) not only biased against the left and the poor – scroungers and strikers being favourite targets – but that in pursuit of their proprietor’s agenda they simply fabricated stories and faked the photographs which accompanied them. This is a free download at Global Research If you’re reading this there’s a good chance you have also looked at the site Global Research. Lots of good people have essays on that site and I agree with most of its positions. And yet I never quite trust it. There is so much material on it, unless there is an army of people working for it – of which there is no evidence – there is no way most of it can be edited or checked. There’s not enough quality control. Its motto, if it had one, would be something like that of Rolling Stone in its 79 A partial biography is at Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk first incarnation: all the news that fits. I look at it pretty regularly and every once in a while see something really striking. Recently that was a purported interview with the former CIA officer, Robert Baer, ‘Confession of a CIA Agent: They Gave Us Millions to Dismember Yugoslavia’.80 I read only a few lines before becoming suspicious, did a little checking and, of course, it’s a fake; it took just one Google search for the ‘new book’ by Baer upon which the ‘interview’ is based to discover there is no such book. Not only is it a fabrication, it was put out before, by the same author, under a different heading, on a different pretext; and it’s a fake I spotted at the time but had forgotten about.81 Evidently no-one at Global Research thought it surprising that Baer was talking in this startling way, nor thought it worth a Google search before posting it. As I said: not enough quality control. More on the banksters Robert Jenkins was a member of the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee from 2011-13. In a talk recently he gave a ‘partial list’ of the charges, ‘acknowledged and alleged’, made against the banksters.82 It’s quite a list. ‘* Mis-selling of payment protection insurance * Mis-selling interest rate swaps * Mis-selling credit card theft insurance * Mis-selling of mortgage-backed securities 80 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk * Mis-selling of municipal bond investment strategies * Mis-selling of structured deposit investments * Mis-selling of foreign exchange products * Fraud related to the packaging and selling of mortgage-backed securities that institutions knew to be “toxic waste” * Misleading statements to investors involving capital raising rights issue * Misleading investors in the sale of collateralised debt obligations * Abusive small business lending practices * Predatory mortgage practices * Abusive or in inappropriate foreclosure practices * Aiding and abetting tax evasion * Aiding and abetting money laundering for violent drug cartels * Violations of rogue-regime sanctions * Manipulation of Euribor * Manipulation of FX markets * Manipulation of gold fixing (London) * Manipulation of commodity markets via metals warehousing practices * Manipulation of electricity markets (California/JPMorgan) * Manipulation of the swaps market benchmark index (ISDAfix) * Collusion relating to credit default swap market dealing in violation of US anti-trust laws * Filing false statements with the SEC (“London Whale”, JPMorgan) * Keeping false books and records (“London Whale”, JP Morgan and others) * Reporting failures relating to Madoff * Withholding of critical information from Italian regulators * Bribing civil service employees in Japan Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk * Mis-reporting related to Barclays emergency capital raising * Stealing confidential regulatory information by a banker * Collusion with Greek authorities to mislead EU policy makers on meeting Euro criteria (Goldman Sachs) * Financial engineering with the aim of moving Italian debt off-balance sheet * Manipulation of risk models with the aim of minimizing reported RWA/capital requirements * Manipulation of precious metals markets (gold/silver/ platinum/palladium – Switzerland) * Manipulation/collusion of the US Treasury Market auction/client sales * Manipulation of energy markets * Short changing clients a second time in not paying settlements in full * Violations connected with emergency fund raisings * Electronic FX trading related market manipulation (NY DFS investigation) * Falsifying customer data and records (RBS and others) * Misleading clients over dark pools (Barclays and others) * Misleading shareholders ahead of RBS rights issue * Misleading shareholder information with respect to Lloyds takeover of HBOS and RBS’s rights issues * Conspiracy to force small businesses into bankruptcy to the benefit of the lender (RBS, Lloyds and others) * Insertion of illegal rate floors in Spanish mortgage lending * Faking customer files to justify predatory foreclosure practices * Misleading profit and capital statements based on questionable accounting practices.’ A few days after I saw this it was announced in The Times (8 December) and the Guardian that Gordon Brown was joining a Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk large global investment company called Pimco83 as a ‘wealth creation adviser’ (I kid you not). One of Pimco’s Chief Investment Officers is Andrew Balls, brother of Ed, Brown’s long-serving adviser and a minister in Brown’s government. A day later it was reported that Alistair Darling, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer under Brown, was joining the board of the American bank Morgan Stanley. On the day of the announcement a spoof Lord Darling said on Twitter: ‘I saved the banks in 2008, quite frankly.’ 84 Indeed he did: he was one of those who enabled them to become the criminals they are and then bailed them out with public money, with no strings attached, when they got into trouble. More on the banksters: the creation of money The item below (under subhead ‘On the money’) on Barclays Bank provoked an anonymous reader to send me the following: ‘Since banks invent money as fictitious deposits, it can be readily shown that capital adequacy based bank regulation does not have to restrict bank activity: banks can create money and hence can arrange for money to be made available to purchase newly issued shares that increase their bank capital. In other words, banks could simply invent the money that is then used to increase their capital. This is what Barclays Bank did in 2008, in order to avoid the use of tax money to shore up the bank’s capital: Barclays “raised” £5.8 bn in new equity from Gulf sovereign wealth investors — by, it has transpired, lending them the money! As is explained in Werner (2014a), Barclays implemented a standard loan operation, thus inventing the £5.8 bn deposit “lent” to the investor. This deposit was then used to “purchase” the newly issued Barclays shares. Thus in this case the bank liability originating from the bank loan to the Gulf investor transmuted from (1) an accounts payable 83 See Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk liability to (2) a customer deposit liability, to finally end up as (3) equity — another category on the liability side of the bank’s balance sheet. Effectively, Barclays invented its own capital. This certainly was cheaper for the UK tax payer than using tax money. As publicly listed companies in general are not allowed to lend money to firms for the purpose of buying their stocks, it was not in conformity with the Companies Act 2006 (Section 678, Prohibition of assistance for acquisition of shares in public company). But regulators were willing to overlook this.’ 85 (emphases added) Conscious cruelty? The British film director, Ken Loach, was recently on the front page of the Guardian denouncing government policy towards the poor and unemployed as ‘one of conscious cruelty. It bears down on those least able to bear it. The bureaucratic inefficiency is vindictive and hunger is being used as a weapon. People are being forced to look for work that doesn’t exist.’86 Actually it’s worse and more interesting than that. For a believer in the free market such as George Osborne, there are always jobs to he had. In that world view unemployment is caused by labour being too expensive or workers being lazy. Hence the hostility to trade unions – as devices which prevent the proper functioning of the free market by keeping wages artificially high – and welfare payments which enable the unemployed to resist the market’s demands that they lower their wage expectations. These views are rarely if ever articulated by practising 85 Richard A. Werner, ‘How do banks create money, and why can other firms not do the same? An explanation for the coexistence of lending and deposit-taking’, International Review of Financial Analysis Volume 36, December 2014, at Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk politicians87 but they are there among the taken for granted, never examined assumptions which make up the political viewpoint, the ideology if you will, of many Conservatives. But politics is politics and, according to the Telegraph columnist and editor of the Spectator, Fraser Nelson, George Osborne’s election pledge to cut £12 billion from welfare spending ‘...was created by a pile-up of accidents. Its origins were during the election campaign, when Mr Osborne said he’d find £12 billion of welfare cuts and, as a result, run a budget surplus. As an election ploy, it worked perfectly; Ed Miliband could not match it and Labour was portrayed as the party of fiscal recklessness. The Chancellor never said where he would find such extraordinary savings, because he didn’t know. It was a ruse, a figure designed to be bargained down by Liberal Democrats in coalition talks that, then, seemed inevitable.’88 It’s one thing to clobber the poor in pursuit of – let’s be generous – well-intentioned if misguided ideology. It’s another and infinitely worse thing to create widespread misery (not to mention the hundreds of suicides which will follow the cuts)89 simply to avoid political embarrassment. And then there is the case of the Prime Minister’s correspondence with the (Conservative) leader of Oxfordforshire County Council, Ian Hudspeth, which was leaked to the Oxford Mail.90 Prime Minister Cameron, an Oxfordshire MP, complained to Mr Hudspeth about the cuts the 87 Health minister Jeremy Hunt came closest recently when he said that cutting tax credits would force people to work as hard as the Chinese. See Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Council was proposing to make to its services. ‘I was disappointed at the long list of suggestions floated in the briefing note to make significant cuts to frontline services – from elderly day centres, to libraries, to museums. This is in addition to the unwelcome and counter-productive proposals to close children’s centres across the county. I would have hoped that Oxfordshire would instead be following the best practice of Conservative councils from across the country in making back-office savings and protecting the frontline.’ Notice the phrase ‘back-office savings’. This comes from the City where the dealers – gamblers and speculators – are the front office and all the rest of it, handling all the paperwork generated, is the boring but necessary ‘back-office’. Nick Leeson, the dealer/gambler who infamously destroyed Baring’s bank in 1995, began in the ‘back office’. The complete exchange between Cameron and Ian Hudspeth revealed that Cameron simply has no idea of the scale of the cuts the government had imposed, even on Tory- voting shires like Oxford. One of the things people say about politicians is that they don’t know what they’re doing. In this instance that is literally true. Our man in Barnsley? The former MI5 officer and whistle-blower David Shayler went from being a hero to many to a figure of fun when he changed his name, began wearing women’s clothes and talking new age nonsense.91 In a 2014 interview with the Voice of Russia,92 along with his advocacy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, there were these paragraphs: 91 See for example Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘There was a man called Roger Windsor, who worked for the National Union of Mineworkers, who basically to try and avoid sequestrations, just sent money out of the accounts abroad, but that could obviously be easily traced. And he’d actually cut his teeth in an organization, which I can’t quite remember the name of,93 but was known to be a CIA-front organization. Now this man was alleged to be an MI-5 agent and he approached me after I had blown the whistle. He came to me and said “Do you think I am MI-5 agent?” and I said, “No, I don’t, I think your profile was not right to be an MI-5 agent, but let me have a look at your case”. I looked at his case and the conclusion I came to was that he was an MI-6 agent. Well the next time he phoned me up, he says “Do you think I am an MI-5 agent?” – I said no, it’s no good. “But were you are an MI-6 agent?” At which point he went “bu…, bu …, but ” and put the phone down and wouldn’t receive my calls.’ Given the Anglo-American intelligence services’ interest at that time in the Soviet bloc’s international trade union activities, the use made of them as intelligence cover by the KGB, and the NUM’s links with those organisations, Windsor as an MI6 (or CIA) agent or informant makes immediate sense and it is striking that no-one thought of this before. Blog-watching The end is nigh ‘Yes, yes, yes hand-wringers...... but apart from the addiction to credit, reappearance of subprime, collapse in commodities, manipulation of gold prices and slumping trade measures, why are you so pessimistic about the global economy?’ The droll John Ward recently on his excellent blog The Slog.94 93 This was the Public Services International. It, and Windsor’s role within it, are discussed in chapter 4 of Seamus Milne’s The Enemy Within (London: Verso, 1994) 94 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Dodgy dossier 2 Well, here we are in the blood and chaos caused by the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, ‘justified’ by the ‘dodgy dossier’ prepared for Mr Blair by his allies within the UK intelligence agencies, and what has Whitehall done? Created another ‘dodgy dossier’ to justify UK involvement in air attacks on ISIS.95 On his blog, Craig Murray demolishes in a few hundred words the central claim of this ‘dossier’, that there are 70,000 Syrians available to fight ISIS.96 Indeed, this ‘dossier’ is such a stupid move I wonder if Whitehall hasn’t done it on purpose, knowing the ‘dossier’ will be demolished, hoping to sabotage the planned air campaign, while doing the prime minister’s bidding and apparently supporting it. On the money ‘The Financial Conduct Authority says that Barclays bank “cut corners” on financial crime checks and did not properly monitor a £1.9bn transaction carried out on behalf “politically exposed” ultra-rich clients. Well, in the Alice in Wonderland World inhabited by the “Financial Complacency Administration”, they may very well think that this is what happened, and by such a finding, they identify themselves as being part of the bigger problem in the perpetuation of the criminal sink which is the City of London, and proving that they are frankly “captured” by the very bank they are required to supervise and regulate. By adopting this view, they manage to underplay the seriousness of the conduct engaged in by this Organised Criminal bank, relegating its effects to being little more than a series of understandable oversight.’ ‘Criminal sink which is the City of London’? ‘Organised Criminal bank’? Who is this? Some wild lefty? No: a former detective 95 Text at Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk with the City of London police, Rowan Bosworth-Davies, on his blog, where there is a great deal more in the same vein.97 Shrinking ‘invisibles’ Tom Easton spotted a very interesting and depressing piece by senior financial/economics journalist Anthony Hilton98 in the Evening Standard on 3 November, ‘Britain’s trade deficit is a disaster waiting to happen’.99 Essentially: the British economy doesn’t produce enough – goods or services – to sustain current living standards. It hasn’t done so since the early 1980s when the Thatcher-Howe economic policies destroyed about a quarter of manufacturing. Since then the visible trade gap between outgoings and incomings has been filled by overseas investment income returning to UK shareholders, so- called ‘invisibles’. This has now changed. These were Hilton’s concluding paragraphs. ‘The amount of credit generated by our overseas investments fell 31% between 2011 and 2014 to £73 billion. At the same time, the amount sent to overseas owners of British-based assets went exactly the opposite way. It rose 31% to £71 billion. The overall effect of the plunge in money coming in and the surge in money going out was to cut out FDI [foreign direct investment] surplus from £54 billion in 2011 to £2 billion in 2014. (emphasis added) “This is the lowest level on record,” the ONS [Office of National Statistics] reported. Two things seem to be going on. First, we are making less money on our overseas assets while foreign owners here seems to be making more. Second, the total value of our overseas assets has slipped fractionally in the four years to just over £1200 billion while the value of UK assets held by foreigners 97 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk has soared from £1000 billion to very nearly £1400 billion. The surge in the value of assets held here is a direct reflection on the willingness of the UK to sell anything that moves to a foreign buyer with a big chequebook and the ability of foreign buyers to run the assets well after buying them. The UK benefits, of course, from the influx of capital and skills but there is also a downside and we may be about to discover what it is. The value of our assets in the rest of the world is now less than what the world owns here — and that would seem to limit the possibility for net investment income to recover to past levels. But if it is not going to recover, there is nothing to fill the trade gap and finance our current standard of living. So clearly the situation is unsustainable in the long term. We can hold the line for a while by borrowing the money needed to fill the gap and by selling even more of our British businesses but that merely prolongs, rather than halts, the slow slide to disaster. Something more needs to be done, but what?’ Are any of our politicians focused on this? To my knowledge, not one. Do any of our politicians understand this? Maybe a handful on the Conservative side. Among the Corbynistas? No- one, would be my guess. In this situation the City doesn’t have to work too hard to persuade the government that the financial services sector is the one success story in the British economy and the last thing it needs is all this regulation proposed since the crash of 2008. And so it turns out that Chancellor George Osborne’s ‘new settlement’ with the City100 amounts to backtracking on those regulations. The new ‘line’ can seen for example in the comments of the Financial Conduct Authority acting chief executive Tracey McDermott (her predecessor was sacked for 100 See for example Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk being too radical101), who said recently that the pace of new regulations was ‘unsustainable’ and: ‘We are often told that boards are now spending the majority of their time on regulatory matters. This cannot be in anyone’s interests. If that continues indefinitely we will crowd out the creativity, innovation and competition which should present the opportunities for growth in the future.’102 Ms McDermott has evidently forgotten what happened the last time we had lots of ‘creativity, innovation and competition’ in the global banking business. The central plank in the raft of regulations proposed to stop the bankers fucking things up again was to ‘ring-fence’ banks’ traditional banking activities – i.e. their customers’ savings and loans – from their gambling activities so that in the event of another crash (all but guaranteed) the ‘ordinary’ bank would survive if the ‘investment’ (i.e. gambling) bank failed. Barclays, Lloyds, Santander and Royal Bank of Scotland are now seeking exemption from the ring-fencing proposals.103 In the new climate why would these requests be refused?104 The sound of returning chickens Bill Blum issued issue 139 of his Anti-Empire Report in May. He then announced he was burned-out and needed a break. 101 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Happily for us, he is back.105 His latest edition includes a splendid rant by a former German Christian Democrat MP, Jürgen Todenhöfer, who points out that the current migrant crisis in Europe is the direct result of the foreign policies of the United States, supported actively (in the UK case) or passively by the other EU and NATO members. On 5 November I turned on Radio 4 in the morning to hear an urbane Irishman explaining to John Humphrys and the listeners how it was the duty of EU citizens to accommodate the refugees/migrants fleeing the consequences of...... well, since the Irishman was Peter Sutherland, at various times an alumnus of Goldman Sachs, Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission, the European Round Table of Industrialists and the EU Commission,106 fleeing the consequences of the policies he’s been promoting for the last forty years. I didn’t hear the entire interview but I suspect Humphrys didn’t make this point to him. Sutherland was given the columns of The Observer to make the same case. There he was described as ‘migration expert, a former attorney general of Ireland, and chairman of the London School of Economics’.107 Which is akin to describing Adolf Hitler as a ‘minor Austrian painter’. Pentagonism What is it with the American state and Saudi Arabia? Bin Laden is a Saudi, the 9/11 gang were almost all Saudis, the operation was funded by Saudi money and Saudi money is spreading their particular version of fundamentalist Islam around the world.108 And if that wasn’t enough, just when the US was on the way to becoming self-sufficient in oil through 105 Issue 140 is at Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk domestic shale, the Saudis deliberately increased oil production, halving the world price of crude, making many of the American shale operations uneconomic. About half of all the US shale operations are now idle.109 Is the Saudi regime now on the US shit-list for this act of economic warfare? Apparently not. Why? The answer, I have to assume, is arms sales. Saudi Arabia has been the number one purchaser of US arms for the last half century.110 (The thought does occur that since this Saudi connection is the aspect of 9/11 the deep and surface US states have suppressed, all the ‘9-11 truther’ activities will be rather welcome distractions to them.) 109 See for example Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Holding pattern Garrick Alder UKIP and the spooks Further to earlier entries (see below) concerning the mysterious car accident that befell UKIP leader Nigel Farage in October 2015, and the apparent background to the incident, I received a very interesting e-mail from David Challice, party administrator at UKIP head office. Mr Challice wrote: ‘I can assure you that for years we have been aware of the story concerning UKIP having some members of the Security Services in its ranks. The short answer is that the story was probably true and that it would be surprising if SIS (or whoever) had not put some of their people into the Party in order to monitor and report back. Although I cannot prove it, I am reasonably certain that every phone call made from Head Office is subject to “eavesdropping” from GCHQ. Whether they still bother, I couldn’t say. But when this office opened in 2006, we always assumed that this would be the case. It was no great hardship because if the spooks didn’t like [what they heard] then it was their problem, not ours. I also recall once getting an anonymous e-mail with words to the effect: “I work for GCHQ and you'll understand that I’m not giving my name. You probably know already that our office has ways of monitoring your communications but most of my colleagues agree with you so all power to your elbow. You will not be able to reply to this e-mail.” Whether it was a hoax or not I couldn’t say, but it certainly had a smack of authenticity.’ When I checked with Mr Challice that this was on the record, he indicated that he was happy with that and added: Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘When we hear of undercover Police having long-term relationships with animal rights activists (and even Harold Wilson being bugged by MI5 lest he was a Soviet mole) it is quite clear that the State reserves the right to monitor pressure groups or political parties. One could even argue that that is part of the State’s role, of protecting the British People by gathering information so as not to be caught unawares.’ A fortnight after this exchange with Mr Challice, the Green Party’s sole MP, Caroline Lucas, revealed that she and London mayoral candidate Sian Berry had been subject to comprehensive secret surveillance by a police anti-extremism task force, the The National Counter Terrorism Police Operations Centre.1 That stalwart friend of the spooks, Professor Anthony Glees, was on hand to defend such activity but observed: ‘There is no evidence that Caroline Lucas or Sian Berry have been involved in anything that could cause a threat to national security.’ My own conclusion is that Mr Challice’s concerns about state surveillance and penetration of his own party – whose raison d’être is procuring Britain’s exit from the European Union – seem pragmatic and realistic. I wonder if we have heard the last of this? The van load of votes that vanished Just before the General Election of 2015, there was much speculation over a news story about the disappearance of a transit van containing nearly a quarter of a million blank ballot papers.2 This led almost inevitably to a rash of public 1 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk scepticism (given full wind on social media) when post-election stories about anomalous results started to trickle in. The example that is foremost in my mind is the constituency of Bedford Borough, my place of birth and a key Tory-Labour marginal. Here it was reported that a sack containing 5,000 extra votes had appeared, as if out of nowhere, when the count was nearing completion. When this was reported by a local newspaper, it hardly needs adding that scepticism was expressed via social media.3 Were the two incidents connected, or related? This seems unlikely, even at first glance. The ballot papers in the disappearing van were for the Hastings and Eastbourne constituency, and would have carried the names and parties of local candidates, rather than being generic documents that could be used anywhere. A Freedom of Information Act request submitted to the Electoral Commission soon revealed the prosaic facts. The van was recovered abandoned down a country lane shortly after being reported stolen. The cargo had been opened and examined by the thieves and left at the scene (presumably with considerable disappointment on the part of the malefactors). New ballot papers were produced anyway, in an easily distinguishable design, rendering useless any of the ‘tampered’ ballots that might have slipped through the net. This information was obviously not significant enough to be reported by the same media who had made such a drama out of the theft. As for the Bedford Borough story about ‘votes suddenly appearing’, the mystery was similarly solved by the simple expedient of approaching a press officer; and again the outcome does not match up to the sinister imaginings of credulous readers. A Bedford Borough Council spokesperson said: ‘The reporting referred to is not recognised by those managing the count. The safeguards we had in place worked, as it was the count staff themselves that 3 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk realised there were further ballots from their allocated batch still to be counted. The ballots were at all times on the count floor awaiting counting. The media present at the count were immediately briefed, they understood the situation, and did not think it significant to report.’ As shown by the current investigations into Tory expenses fraud during the 2015 election campaign,4 there are legitimate reasons to be sceptical about the results. The stories discussed above, however, are not legitimate reasons for scepticism. But no doubt, that van-full of votes will be trundling along the highways and byways of conspiratorial legend for years to come. Mind games of the rich and famous The recent excursions of US President Obama had some interesting symbolism. On visiting the UK, Mr Obama presented David Cameron with a leather duffel-bag, an eye- wateringly expensive designer watch, and some tennis gear, including a tube of three tennis balls. Why choose these specific items? It’s tempting to see the duffel-bag and watch as jokey references to Mr Cameron’s impending retirement from Number 10 (‘Pack your bags, it’s time to quit’) but the tennis equipment is obviously more personal. Mr Cameron is known to be a player but the three balls, however, seem odd as a gift from a President to a Prime Minister – it’s not like either man would find tennis balls hard to obtain. Lobster Twitter follower Derek Bryant had the answer: it’s a reference to England’s King Henry V, who supposedly felt insulted by the French Dauphin’s gift of tennis balls and eventually fought him at Agincourt.5 The anecdote was immortalised by Shakespeare’s history of Henry: 4 See, for example, Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us; His present and your pains we thank you for: When we have march’d our rackets to these balls, We will, in France, by God’s grace, play a set Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.’6 The overtones of European discord and British triumph are pretty clear, and this appears to be an instance of what the pre-megalomania Christopher Hitchens astutely identified as ‘Anglo-American ironies’. Moreover, after spending private time with the Royal Family and dining with the Queen, Mr Obama’s next destination was a speaking engagement in Hanover, Germany, where he became the first US President to address Hanover’s annual technology trade fair.7 Again, this choice does not seem a coincidence, considering that the Queen has been dragged into the referendum debate by the Murdoch press, and that the current dynasty is descended from King George I who had been Elector of Hanover until fate put him on the British throne. Without words, Obama was underlining his expressed desire to see Britain’s continued membership of the European Union by playing on a vast cultural repertoire of historical symbolism. The march of IDS: onward, Christian soldiers It’s worth considering the nexus around the recently-exited Secretary of State at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the despicable Iain Duncan Smith (‘A Quiet Man, with much to keep quiet about’ to adapt an apocryphal 6 A Henry V ballad published a century or so after the Shakespeare play specifies that the Dauphin’s gift was precisely three tennis balls. See Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Churchillism). A political Walter Mitty, Mr Smith embellished his CV, claimed to be able to live on £52 a week, and leaves behind him a magnificent record of poverty, punishment and suicide among social security claimants – to say nothing of a flagship IT program, optimistically referred to as ‘Universal Credit’, which has passed deadline after deadline with the enthusiasm of a Grand National winner leaping hurdles but with no finishing post in sight. He also leaves behind him an apparent intra- departmental legacy of hard-line Christians who took root within the DWP during his tenure, whose intertwined careers make for interesting reading. In office, Mr Smith was either ignorant of the ‘groupthink’ phenomenon8 or very shrewdly aware of it. A devout Catholic, he got a fellow Catholic, Steve Webb (Lib Dem), as Pensions Minister during the Coalition. In 2013 Mr Webb boldly announced that the Good Lord himself would vote Lib Dem,9 although as it turned out practically no other bugger would. He was supported in this extravagant claim by the party president at the time, who sang: ‘Liberal Democrats stand alone as the defender of the rights of all human beings.’ (This was Tim Farron – where is he now?) Mr Smith was also buttressed in his DWP hatchetman role by ideas from the Centre for Social Justice, the think tank he founded in 2004, which was stuffed with fellow-believers, notable among whom are Philippa Stroud (Protestant, evangelical), Tim Montgomerie (ditto) and the aptly named Christian Guy (a Protestant of the very niche ‘Anglo-Catholic’ variety). Ms Stroud ran as an MP in 2010 and didn’t get elected, but that didn’t stop Mr Smith making her his SpAd for the next five years (she is now back at CSJ). Mr Guy wrote Mr Smith’s DWP speeches for him (and now writes David Cameron’s), and Mr Montgomerie was Mr Smith’s speechwriter for the last two months of his party leadership in 2003. This is plainly quite a cosy little set-up, and was a 8 See, for example, Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk guaranteed feedback loop for ensuring that the ‘right’ ideas percolated through the DWP. You have to wonder, though, what particular part of the Good News Mr Smith felt he was imparting to the world: I can’t recall anything about Jesus causing more suffering to the halt and lame than they already experienced. On the other hand, perhaps it was an unshakeable belief in miracles that inspired Mr Smith to declare that claimants suffering from incurable conditions including Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s Disease, and Cystic Fibrosis would soon be fit to return to work and could have their benefits stopped.10 But perhaps we need look no further than Matthew 25:29 for Mr Smith’s inspiration, and indeed that of the Tory Party at large: ‘For to everyone who has will be given, and he will have more: but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.’ If so, it is to be hoped that Mr Smith’s successor at the DWP, Stephen Crabb, is not quite so literal- minded. Mr Crabb is another devout Christian and has a number of curious links to an evangelical outfit called Christian Action Research and Education (CARE). CARE was originally the Nationwide Festival of Light, founded in 1971 to stem the tide of permissive wickedness and sordid lust supposedly flooding post-60s Britain. Major figures included Mary Whitehouse, Malcolm Muggeridge and Cliff Richard, which tells you everything you need to know. Since then, CARE has managed to carry the torch while at the same time hiding it under a bushel: the body was a major behind-the-scenes force in the introduction of Mrs Thatcher’s infamous ‘Section 28’,11 and in 2014 was caught privately counselling abortion-seeking women that they risk breast cancer or becoming paedophiles 10 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk from such terminations.12 Mr Crabb was an MP’s intern from a CARE scheme during the 1990s and, when his Parliamentary career began, he brought CARE interns into his own office.13 Ironically, during the expenses scandal it emerged that Mr Crabb had saved a bob or two by declaring his main place of residence to be the London flat of a Tory backbencher.14 That backbencher, Daniel Kawczynski, is also a devout Christian and has since come out as bisexual and in a same- sex partnership.15 At the time of this brave step, Mr Kawczynski was PPS to Welsh Secretary David Jones; and in a further ironic twist, his quondam flatmate Stephen Crabb directly succeeded Mr Jones as Welsh Secretary, before being catapulted into the DWP by Iain Duncan Smith’s resignation.16 It will come as no surprise to learn that Mr Jones is also a devout Christian and has made his feelings on LGBT people abundantly clear.17 Is all this happenstance within the ken of mere mortals, or is there some divine plan unfolding? One thing is for sure: there is no suggestion of any impropriety in all of this. More tales from the riverbank On 24 March, Associated Press – the body that provides most of the Anglosphere’s ‘wire’ stories – put out a piece that was picked up by several British newspapers (notably the 12 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Independent and the Mail), quoting a veritable choir of spook panjandrums on the implications of the Brussels bombings. ‘The officials,’ we learned, included ‘European and Iraqi intelligence officials and a French lawmaker’ who variously ‘described [jihadi training] camps in Syria, Iraq and possibly the former Soviet bloc where attackers are trained to target the West.’ 18 ‘And possibly’ seems a very generous way of putting an insinuation that is not backed up anywhere in the remaining text of the piece; and the fingering of ‘the former Soviet bloc’ gives the game away nicely. Scanning through the roll-call of sources cited by AP, the credits come to a screeching halt when we reach mention of ‘a European security official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss briefing material.’ This sounds like MI5 at its usual work, the infinite predictability of which custom cannot make stale. But AP has plainly got this wrong: the officer didn’t speak anonymously because he couldn’t discuss briefing material; he spoke anonymously and he couldn’t discuss briefing material. As it was capably put by someone with long experience of receiving such briefings: ‘By definition, a reporter cannot publicly question information from a deniable briefing. They must swallow it whole, or not at all.’ 19 Any doubt as to the provenance of the briefing is surely dispelled by the officer’s reflections on where the West’s priorities must lie, which are worth quoting in full. ‘The difference is that in 2014, some of these [Islamic State] fighters were only being given a couple weeks of training. Now the strategy has changed. Special units have been set up. The training is longer. And the objective appears to no longer be killing as many people as possible but rather to have as many terror operations as possible, so the enemy is forced to spend more money 18 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk or more in manpower.’ (Emphasis in the original.) Could it merely be coincidence that this was published exactly one week before the start of the new financial year? On the other hand, one might consider that MI5’s strategic use of AP to get its propaganda broadcast into as many newsrooms as possible represents shrewd economic thinking, only having to pay for one journalistic lunch instead of several. More serious than MI5’s rattling of the collection box is the question of AP’s behaviour as a conduit for propaganda. As Nick Davies put it: ‘When the Queen wants to talk to the world, she gives a statement to the Press Association. When the Poet Laureate wants to publish a poem, he files it to the Press Association. Every government department, every major corporation, every police service and health trust and education authority delivers its official announcements to the Press Association. It is the primary conveyor belt along which information reaches national media in Britain.’20 As I was putting this latest batch of Holding Pattern together, The Guardian ran a serendipitous feature on how Nazi Germany hijacked AP’s Berlin offices and stuffed their news desk with Nazi party members in order to exert indirect influence on Allied media sources. This also allowed Hitler’s regime to stifle any actual reporting of the darker side of the National Socialist agenda.21 While it would be outrageous to compare MI5 to the Gestapo, it would be true to observe that if British media have learned nothing since Davies published his book in 2008, they had plainly learned nothing about the use of AP as a propaganda outlet in the 63 preceding years either. 20 Nick Davies, Flat Earth News (London: Chatto and Windus, 2008) p. 74 21 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Farage sabotage II Further to the earlier entry (below) about UKIP leader Nigel Farage’s brush with death on a Dunkirk motorway last autumn, it has since occurred to me that there was a significant amount of context to the accident, which might be considered to shed a rather unpleasant light on events. In 2001 Norman (Lord) Tebbit wrote in The Spectator that he had learned that British spooks had infiltrated UKIP, and called for an official inquiry to establish whether anything untoward had been going on.22 Lord Tebbit explained his reasoning thus: ‘Since Attlee’s Labour government helped to create Nato, all three major parties have agreed that membership of that alliance is in the British national interest. Through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s those opposing membership were regarded as certainly misguided and possibly subversive. It is possible to draw a parallel with the present agreement of the three major parties that Britain should remain within the European Union – in, of course, our national interest. A party whose sole raison d’etre is British withdrawal might be regarded as subversive.’ Lord Tebbit had been drawn to think about this subject by a contact who named what he believed were two spies in UKIP’s midst who had migrated there from another eurosceptic outfit: ‘The conspiracy theory was given a boost when I discovered [...] that during the 1997 election both individuals worked for Jimmy Goldsmith’s Referendum party. The first to be employed promptly recruited the other.’ No names, no pack drill, but Lord Tebbit dropped enough clues for shrewd readers to be able to figure out who he had in mind. Likewise, he was canny enough not to refer to any specific incidents of political plotting, but it is easy to unearth 22 Lord Tebbit’s column was republished online by Spectator blogger Douglas Murray in 2013 at Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk old on-line news stories that might relate to what he was driving at. The other significant detail that adds context to Mr Farage’s unsettling experience is that of timing. The near- calamity in Dunkirk happened on 21 October 2015, which was one week after the European Union Referendum Bill completed its second reading in the House of Lords (13 October) and one week before it moved into the Committee stage (28 October), which is the ‘all over, bar the shouting’ point of a law’s passage through Parliament.23 Lord Tebbit hoped that his suggested inquiry into UKIP- related spookery would find nothing except ‘a string of coincidences and some bad political judgements’. I’m sure we can all agree with that sentiment. Self-debunking debunker debunked Recently, a doctor of physics called David Grimes got his fifteen minutes of fame by providing the more complacent of the mainstream media with another one of those trendy articles poo-pooing the idea of conspiracies actually existing. Dr Grimes claimed to have proved with maths that no conspiracy could possibly be kept quiet for long, because – all together now!– Someone Would Talk.24 He managed this conjectural feat by selecting alleged conspiracies where none has been proven, then calculating how many people would have been in on the secret, then working out how long it would be before a whistleblower broke silence. In effect he takes examples where conspiracies have been suggested – for example moon landings, cancer cures – but not proven, and uses the absence of whistleblowers to ‘prove’ there was no conspiracy. The divines who conducted surveys of angelic populations upon pinheads did not die in vain. However, one of the examples Dr Grimes cited in his 23 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk smug little refutation was the Tuskegee Experiment, in which African-America syphilis patients were left untreated to record the progress of the disease, which he used as an exemplar of how long a real-life conspiracy would take to unravel. What Dr Grimes overlooked is the fact that the Tuskegee Experimenters blew the whistle on themselves, by writing up and publishing their research in medical journals in 1964. Despite national exposure, only one medical researcher who noticed it the following year, seemed to be concerned. He spent the next few years trying to attract attention to the scandal and got nowhere. It wasn’t until 1972 that an insider blew the whistle and the scandal was ‘revealed’ in the Wall Street Journal.25 So, in trying to illustrate the leakiness of conspiracies, Dr Grimes based his arguments on a conspiracy that was actively publicised by the conspirators, and that was noticed and highlighted by a reader almost immediately, but which the media simply refused to touch for nearly a decade. The phrase ‘hoist on your own petard’ is woefully inadequate to describe Dr Grimes’ mathematical ‘triumph’. A question of Trust Out there on the internet, a tale about a massive corruption scandal is gathering. But although it glowers on the horizon, it has yet to make landfall. It consists of a string of interlinked websites, the readership of which can be estimated by the fact that the anonymous author’s Twitter account covering the scandal has over two million followers, broadcasting regular sensational updates on the latest developments. This is the Carroll Foundation Maryland Trust. Or it might be another name similar to that, as it does not appear to remain constant. You can google it for yourself. It is a matter of corruption. Maybe embezzlement. Possibly bribery. In any event, the sum linked to this ever-shifting claim is some five 25 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk billion dollars, allegedly making it ‘the world’s biggest’ case of tax evasion. Maybe fraud. Perhaps something else. I’ve been watching this puzzle grow and grow for over a year, without ever getting close to understanding what it is all about. All we can say with any certainty is that it is a conspiratorial black hole, absorbing new names at a steady rate with an insatiable appetite. Some of those supposedly implicated include high-level politicians, directors of intelligence agencies, top-ranking police officers and an individual called Anthony Clarke, who, to judge by his alleged connections, is the kingpin of a global empire of.....something. One of the few named individuals in all this is Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, who is supposedly suppressing dynamite evidence (again, it’s not clear why). So I went to the Met press office and asked them what they could tell me about the mysterious Carroll Trust case. Back came the response: ‘There is no knowledge of any involvement by the Met in any such investigation.’ That seemed to me an oddly-phrased denial, but when I asked for clarification I got the same response word for word. Another named body is Knight Frank, property assessors of London, who are purportedly conducting an estimation of the assets involved in the phantom scandal. When I approached Knight Frank’s press office with a set of questions, I received the reply: ‘Sorry, but this is a no comment from us.’ So, is this all some weird kind of hoax? Eventually, I contacted Companies House, figuring that if corporate entities in the UK were involved – as one would infer if (stress ‘if’) the police and Knight Frank were involved – the official register of British businesses might be able to shed light on the matter. A search of the Companies House website however returned no results that might relate to a ‘Carroll Trust’ or the enigmatic Anthony Clarke. But when I contacted the Companies House press office, I got a remarkable-looking response from a very helpful officer. ‘I’ve run a register check for you via our Companies House Direct system and can confirm that Anthony Richard Clarke has 174 company appointments, either Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk as a director or secretary – including associations with “Carroll” companies. I’m not sure why these weren’t showing up in your initial search.’ The list she sent comprised dozens of companies including The Carroll Holding Corporation Ltd, Carroll Securities and Investments Ltd, the Carroll Breeding Company Ltd, The Carroll Aircraft Corporation Ltd and The Carroll Art Collection Ltd. The names alone give the impression of what one might call with considerable understatement a ‘diversified portfolio’. Mr Clarke resigned all his positions at ‘Carroll’ companies in 1995 and most of them were dissolved in 1997. Most intriguing in the response from Companies House was the final line in their e-mail: ‘Unfortunately at this time we’re unable to provide an attributable comment in relation to the ongoing investigation.’ Is this, as it appears, an inadvertent confirmation that there is indeed some kind of active investigation into the bewildering Carroll ‘scandal’? Answer came there none. Finally I approached Anthony Clarke himself, and, as expected, received no reply at all. So, to sum up: I started out with the basic objective of finding out whether there was any substance to the online claims of an earth-bestriding criminal enterprise and ended up with the answer ‘Your guess is as good as mine’. Coincidence theories What would you think if it were discovered that one man had been on the scene at the Brussels bombings, the Boston Marathon bombings and the 13 November 2015 attacks in Paris? Surely, he would be a prime suspect. Well, no. Nineteen year-old Mormon missionary Mason Wells is that man and he had nothing to do with any of them. He was taking friends to Brussels airport and was injured in the explosions; his mother was running in the Boston Marathon and he was there to cheer her on; and he just happened to be in Paris (but Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk nowhere near the action) when the city was attacked.26 A startling coincidence, you might think, but it’s not as unusual as all that. On 14 April 1865 Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert, was invited to the Ford Theatre in Washington DC, to attend a performance with his father, but decided to stay nearby at the White House instead. His father was assassinated at the theatre. In 1881, Robert Lincoln was serving as Secretary of War under president James Garfield. While the two men were talking in a public place, Charles Guiteau shot and mortally wounded Garfield, who collapsed into Lincoln’s arms. In 1901, president William McKinley was visiting Buffalo, New York, to see the Pan-American Exposition. He invited Robert Lincoln to attend and Leon Czolgosz shot and killed McKinley, Lincoln was about 100 metres away.27 There is a further delicious little twist to this mind-boggling set of coincidences in that Edwin Booth – the brother of John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin – saved Robert Lincoln’s life in 1864 when Lincoln nearly fell under a moving train.28 You can imagine what the internet would make of all this if it had happened recently rather than a century ago. In terms of sheer misfortune, however, the all-time prize must go to Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who, in 1945, was visiting Hiroshima on the day the atom bomb was dropped, survived and immediately travelled home to Nagasaki, where he was explaining to a disbelieving colleague how one bomb had destroyed the whole of Hiroshima, when at that precise moment....29 With all this in mind, perhaps we ought to be more generous to journalist Hugh Aynesworth, often accused of being a CIA agent involved somehow in the JFK assassination. Mr Aynesworth was a direct eyewitness to Kennedy’s murder; immediately found and interviewed Howard Brennan, who was 26 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the sole eyewitness to any alleged gunman; commandeered a police radio and learned that patrolman J .D. Tippit had been shot; rushed to the scene and eventually ended up outside the downtown cinema where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested, in time to witness him being brought out.30 Mr Aynesworth’s experiences took place within a few square miles over the course of 90 minutes; and, furthermore, it was actually his job to go looking for the action and follow the story. How much less incredible does his experience therefore seem in comparison to the examples cited above? A forgotten chapter in US vote fraud? The US Presidential election is still way over the horizon, but already the speculation and concern about vote-rigging is building. An interesting piece has surfaced on the web, connecting George Bush Snr to a pioneering attempt to fix a presidential election. In 1988 the then Vice-President Bush was running against Bob Dole in the New Hampshire Primary. All the polls said Dole would win, but Bush surged ahead and ultimately took the nomination. The allegation put out by the Columbus Free Press is that this was done deliberately by pro- Bush computer engineering.31 The allegation that Bush Snr. stole the election with rigged computer balloting has spread far and wide across the internet in the month or so since this piece appeared, with each site repeating (and occasionally embellishing) the original claims. What’s the truth of the matter? At this distance it is hard to tell, but New Hampshire definitely did use electronic voting in that election32but 1988 is so long ago that the original rigging claims effectively pre-date the World Wide Web and 30 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk are impossible to trace online. What we can say with certainty is that there are some serious and stupid errors in the new batch of allegations. We are told: ‘[I]n 1984, Bush’s rival President Reagan signed National Security Directive Decision NSDD245. A year later, the New York Times explained the details of Reagan’s secret directive: “A branch of the National Security Agency is investigating whether a computer program that counted more than one-third of all the votes cast in the United States in 1984 is vulnerable to fraudulent manipulation.”’ Casting Reagan as Bush’s rival is a bit of a liberty (although Bush had run against Reagan in the ‘80 election, he was chosen by the victor to be his Vice-President; in the 1984 election, Bush Snr was still on the same ticket, as Reagan’s VP). Further, the claim that the New York Times ‘explained the details of Reagan’s secret directive’ looks decidedly dodgy when you discover that ‘NSDD 245’ was actually a preparatory document created in 1986 and related to the forthcoming Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Rekjavik that October.33 There were more than a dozen National Security Directive Decisions from the Reagan White House in 1984, the year specified in the article, but none of them concerned electronic voting in the USA or anywhere else. Further, none of the Reagan NSDDs mentions anything that appears to relate to electronic voting (although to be charitable, three titles are still classified, so it’s not possible to be 100 per cent certain).34 On the other hand, the report prepared for the National Standards Board by Roy Saltman, referred to in the Columbus Free Press story, definitely exists. However, as it was published in March of 1975 it, therefore, can’t possibly have made any reference to the New Hampshire Primary of 1988. This fact makes it hard to understand why the story in the 33 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Columbus Free Press mentioned it.35 Since the authors of the Columbus Free Press have behaved in such a cavalier fashion with the few facts that are readily checkable, the reliability of their research has to remain in considerable doubt. We are surely due much, much more of the same as the 2016 presidential draws nigh, and on current form it will take time and effort to sort truth from fiction. Fleet Street declares war on the Labour Party ‘In a desperate attempt to prove that the Labour Party has been taken over by militant elements, the press itself has abandoned all pretence to fairness and has itself now been taken over by obsessively McCarthyite manipulators. Fleet Street has abandoned honest analysis and just invent the stuff as they go along. Yes, the Labour Party has been taken over. But not by militants. The Labour Party has been taken over by the charlatans of Fleet Street. Unfortunately the press are winning. Collectively the press have never been so dedicated, so single-minded, so determined to bust-up the Labour Party, so determined to manufacture synthetic justification for the creation of a new political party – the SDP.’ Admit it: till the last few words of that quote, you thought it was published recently and were nodding along. The above is from the late Norman Atkinson MP in an October 1982 pamphlet, whose title forms the heading to this section. Mr Atkinson’s broadside is chiefly concerned concerned with the then ongoing character assassination by media of Tony Benn. Even then, though, it must have been clear that this was a lost battle. The fixation upon the SDP is also quixotic, as Atkinson must have been at least privately semi- aware of the SDP’s use of the media rather than vice-versa in their attempt to bump off an already staggering Labour Party. The pamphlet has a certain lavender-scented charm, 35 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk representing a naïve primer in decoding the propaganda onslaught of the pre-miners’ strike 1980s.36 It includes deconstructions of cartoons by the artistically accomplished but morally rabid Cummings of the Daily Express, and curious titbits about how papers supposedly imply criminality by using full names (such as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, of course) in what Atkinson refers to as ‘courtroom psychology’. Two surprising things, however, leaped out at me after I acquired Atkinson’s obscure booklet from eBay. The first is the following assertion (p. 14): ‘Because Fleet Street expressed pre-Falklands doubts 37 as to whether Margaret Thatcher could deliver a second Tory Government, the possibility of a new pro-European Democratic Alliance was explored immediately following Labour’s defeat in 1979 – indeed talks did in fact take place whilst Callaghan was still Prime Minister.’ Is this new? We know that the SDP began with the formation of the Social Democratic Alliance in 1975. And we know that there were coalition talks in 1976 involving Labour MPs Reg Prentice, Brian Walden and John McIntosh and Conservative MPs Julian Amery and Maurice Macmillan.38 But the extant reports of these talks say that the plan was for a coalition led by Margaret Thatcher. Does Atkinson’s reference to a ‘pro- European Democratic Alliance’ mean that there were other talks? If so, one wonders where Atkinson picked up this information and why it hasn’t received more attention. The second thing that struck me may be mundane but it illuminated a possibility that had never occurred to me. This is the assertion (p. 8) that: ‘Newspapers also reflect the direct influence of the various advertising pressure groups. The motor 36 The cover of the pamphlet depicts a pipe-smoking figure on horseback carrying a flag emblazoned with the name of the Labour Party. This figure stands face to face with the gun barrel of a tank, similarly emblazoned with the mastheads of every Fleet Street daily. 37 This is the only mention of Mrs Thatcher’s South Atlantic victory in the entire pamphlet! 38 Discussed in Stephen Haseler, The Battle for Britain (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989) p. 60. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk manufacturers for instance purchase acres of newspaper space. Motoring correspondents seldom, if ever, report critically on their test-run experience. They will however always report the employer’s side on industrial relations.’ Do we detect here the zygote that would eventually blossom into the inexplicable career of the obnoxious Jeremy Clarkson, close associate of David Cameron in the Chipping Norton Set? Tramp the dirt down A cancer has finally been officially declared free of Cecil Parkinson, darling of Mrs Thatcher. Architect of our wonderful privatised electricity providers, his lasting monument will be the modern London overground station Surrey Quays, a black pun on the name of his unfortunate lover Sarah Keays, that was slipped past him by civil servants during his role as Transport Secretary. He also leaves behind him an adult daughter by Ms Keays, Flora, whose existence he successfully obscured for the first 18 years of her life with the connivance of the judicial system. Parkinson’s untimely demise (in as much as it happened several decades too late) also robs us of the chance to understand a mysterious chain of events on the periphery of the ongoing Paedogate saga. In early December 1983, Ms Keays’s temporary home with her sister was the target of one of those burglaries, where nothing of value is taken but the intruders exhibit a great deal of interest in private documents. Ms Keays told reporters that during the subsequent police investigation, she was told that Number 10 had ordered a news blackout on the break-in and that the Director of Public Prosecutions had been kept abreast of developments.39 Later, Tam Dalyell would raise the matter in Parliament, asking: 39 Daily Mail 3 December 1983. Thanks to Matthew Black for digging out this clipping. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘How come Downing street was informed immediately about what is purported to be an ordinary burglary in Battersea? I suggest to the DPP that this bizarre burglary was an attempt to snatch back some of the papers of the right hon. Member for Hertsmere which incriminated the Prime Minister for her behaviour over the Falklands.’40 The member for Hertsmere was of course Parkinson, and Mr Dalyell obviously had in mind a scenario in which Parkinson, a member of Mrs Thatcher’s 1982 ‘war cabinet’, had communicated to Ms Keays documentation related to another of Dalyell’s bugbears, thus making this (as matters stood) a conspiracy theory about a conspiracy theory.41 But things may not have been that simple, as developments a matter of weeks after the Keays burglary suggest. In March 1984, a 37-year-old called Kenneth O’Dowd was sent down for nine months for assault. He had told the Old Bailey that he had owned pornographic photographs featuring former PM Edward Heath with a woman and a small child and had been framed by the Home Office and maliciously prosecuted as a consequence. The Court dismissed all this as lies, along with his claim that the incriminating photographs had been stolen from a prison safe while he was in custody. The relevance to current events is striking, as is O’Dowd’s suggestion that the police were willing to countenance the disappearance of evidence relating to such events.42 Strikingly, also in view of current events, the Home Secretary implicated in Mr O’Dowd’s allegations of Home Office persecution was none other than Leon Brittan (incumbent 1983-85). The really eerie part, in view of the alleged burglary of the prison safe, is that while Court proceedings were ongoing, 40 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Cecil Parkinson decided to turn up and sit in the public gallery to oversee proceedings.43 Parkinson had no role in events inside or outside the courtroom and as a devout Thatcherite had little or no time for Heath. It’s difficult to resist the inference that some obscure silent signalling was taking place and that the two burglaries (one real, one alleged) were connected. What was going on here, exactly? Told you so January 2016 saw the publication of a scientific paper supporting my hypothesis (floated in Lobster 69) that carbon emissions are staving off the advent of the next ice age (or rather prolonging the current interstadial within an ongoing ice age). This will not have gone unnoticed by Big Oil, and we can confidently expect them to capitalise on it in the not-too- distant future.44 Blissful ignorance Also in Lobster 69 I scornfully commented on a CIA historian’s apparent ignorance of Operation Mockingbird and asked: ‘Who was meant to be taken in by this baloney?’ Now we know. Turns out that the CIA practises something it calls ‘eyewash’, which in plain language is disinformation propagated to its own employees to assist in internal compartmentalisaton. This drives a coach and horses through the notion that any internal CIA documentation should be taken at face value. The apparent answer to my question is that it was wide-eyed and well-intentioned CIA employees of the post-Mockingbird era who were taken in. They were kept in the dark about media manipulation....for the good of themselves, the public and (of course) National 43 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Security.45 The Toynbee Prize ‘By nature, Labour people are optimists, believing in progress, often against the odds, trusting in the human ability to improve our condition and shape society well, and not just for the sharp-elbowed. Optimism is in our DNA. I have always found some political project I can believe will work.’ (Emphasis supplied) Thus wrote Polly Toynbee, Limehouse Declaration signatory and failed SDP parliamentary candidate in the class of ‘83 that sank the Foot incarnation of the Labour Party. She composed these words for a December 2015 column in The Guardian, a paper that has endorsed the Liberals, then SDP, then Liberal Democrats at five of the last 10 General Elections (including both of the 1974 elections and the election in which Ms Toynbee stood). It is a harshly critical column, written with the unmistakable aim of undermining Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party on the occasion of his 100th day in the role. Has there been a more nakedly cynical piece of journalistic misrepresentation at The Guardian during the last decade than that represented by her drawing a veil over trying to scupper the Labour Party by joining the SDP and the calculated juxtaposition of the two sentences italicised in the above quote? L’Assassinat de Farage? The media recently made fun of UKIP leader Nigel Farage, who claimed he had nearly fallen victim to an apparent instance of vehicle sabotage in which a wheel fell off his Volvo while travelling on a road in Dunkirk, France, in October 2015. But all 45 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk was not as it might seem. Mr Farage told the Mail on Sunday (3 January 2016) that a subsequent examination showed that the nuts on all four wheels were loose: ‘The French police and mechanics looked at it but I have made no formal complaint. The mechanics were absolutely certain of [foul play] but I have decided to take no further action.’ Asked who he thought might have done such a thing, he said: ‘I haven’t got a clue. Quite frankly, the way my life’s been over the past two and a half years, nothing surprises me.’ In what appeared to be an instance of poetic irony, the media soon decided that the wheels had fallen off his story when it was noticed that in October 2010 Volvo had issued a recall notice for some of its cars due to a manufacturing fault that meant wheel nuts could become loose.46 Case closed, thought many in the media;47 but within days Volvo announced that the registration of Mr Farage’s car meant it was not in fact one of the models subject to recall.48 This was soon followed by an English-language story in French newspaper Libération, purporting to explode the whole story and accusing Mr Farage of dishonesty.49 Libération spoke to the mechanic who attended Mr Farage’s car, Philipe Marquis, who said he ‘had never seen anything like it [and] found it weird’. M. Marquis speaks no English and Mr Farage speaks no French, meaning the potential for misunderstanding was huge. 46 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk M. Marquis told Libération that he did not call the police and thought the nuts ‘had been wrongly screwed after another repair’. Whether or not that accurately reflected his beliefs at the time, this means that the police were called by Mr Farage himself, a step which one does not make lightly. The gendarmes duly arrived but according to an anonymous source (the French police are not officially allowed to speak to the press) ‘they did not examine the car, because no one was hurt’. Consequently, ‘their intervention report only mentions a repair service: “if they had noticed a sabotage, they would have had to open an investigation”.’ From this Libération concludes: ‘Maybe Nigel Farage suspects he has been the victim of a failed assassination attempt, but he’s clearly dishonest when he says this assumption is based on what the mechanics and the police allegedly told him. Not only did they not say anything, but they did not even suspect a thing.’ This is clearly overstating the case against Mr Farage’s version of events. We’re left with a situation in which Mr Farage sought a mechanic’s attention first of all, then something made him so concerned that he called the police, and when the police arrived they didn’t even examine the vehicle, based on a procedural technicality, and simply filed a brief ‘NFA’ report. What the officers might have said to Mr Farage when they attended is another matter entirely. Allowing for some inevitable blurring of Mr Farage’s memory50 the established facts actually tend to support his account, or at least gel with it, rather than undermine it. I approached Mr Farage via UKIP’s press office to see whether he cared to comment, but evidently he now wishes to move on from his bruising encounter with a sceptical press and no comment was forthcoming. 50 Soon after publication, Mr Farage found himself tangled in a web of contradictions and inaccuracies, and some of those were media- engineered. For example, he was forced to deny that he had told the Mail on Sunday that this was an assassination attempt. This made it look like he was retracting his story, but he was stating quite correctly that he had never told the Mail on Sunday any such thing. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk It could be coincidence, of course, but I cannot help but consider this incident in the light of Mr Farage’s near-fatal crash in a light aircraft in 2010, following which his pilot Justin Adams was convicted of making threats to kill him. Mr Adams, who rejected the findings of the ensuing Air Accident Investigation,51 was found dead at home in 2013. An Inquest was opened and adjourned immediately and to judge by the total absence of coverage on the internet, it appears never to have concluded.52 Meanwhile, the basic fact of the entire situation remains that someone loosened the nuts on the wheels of Mr Farage’s car, and that someone has not been identified. The Prince and the pretenders Following up a hunch sparked by my previous entry on the subject of doppelgangers (below), I contacted a well-known lookalikes agency to ask whether any of their doubles had ever been approached to do stand-in work for a politician or a government official. As I had feared, the agency responded: ‘If any of our lookalikes had been employed in such a way then I am sure that we would have had to sign the Official Secrets Act so couldn’t tell you!’ However, this was followed by a surprising admission: ‘The only time this has happened to our knowledge is when four Prince Harry lookalikes were hired during summer 2014 to attend a music festival which HRH was also going to be at so ostensibly to keep the attention away from him. When the booking was made we were told it was for a “moving art installation”. We didn’t find out until afterwards what the boys were actually there for!’ 51 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk The event in question was the Secret Garden Party, an annual music festival that takes place on private land in Huntingdonshire, where Harry Wales would have mingled with some 20,000 partygoers. The Prince’s attendance at the festival somehow leaked to the press, as one might expect, and photographs were duly snatched showing the playboy Prince having, as the tabloids might have it, a ‘Wales of a time’. But in view of the lookalikes agency’s revelation, one has to wonder whether any of the photographs actually show Harry at all. Sorting through the online coverage of the event, it appears to show the plainclothes Prince wearing three different hats, varying shirts and at least two different pairs of sunglasses.53 It’s hard to believe that this decoying scheme was allowed to go ahead without clearance from Clarence House and the Metropolitan Police’s Royalty Protection Branch, SO14, who have expressed concerns over Harry’s security in the past.54 But the Secret Garden Party’s press agent told me: ‘The reality is no-one liaised with Clarence House regarding the lookalikes. The idea was conceived by the Secret Garden Party art director and the term “moving art installation,” is not how we would describe anything.’ Sensing something of a conflict in the accounts given by the lookalikes agency and the Garden Party organisers, I went to the Prince’s household spokespeople to get clarification. I was told that since the party was not an official engagement, it was part of the Prince’s private life and since it was also a security matter, no comment would be forthcoming. I also approached the Metropolitan Police. At the time of 53 The best way to get these pictures side-by-side for comparison is to do a simple google image search on the words ‘Prince Harry, Secret Garden Party.’ My suspicion falls mainly upon the ‘Harry’ spotted doing a robot dance while wearing a hat emblazoned with a Union Jack. I shall leave analysis of the ‘Prince’s’ physical build and his nose and cheekbones to people with greater credentials than me in the field of forensic anthropology. 54 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk publication, no response had been received. Nevertheless, there it is: it is now a historical fact that a member of the Royal Family has been replaced by doppelgangers in public and no-one noticed. Tales from the riverbank At Daily Mail headquarters editor Paul Dacre’s proud organ has spooks queuing up with tip-offs and leads. And boy, are Dacre’s hacks pleased with themselves about the fact. However, they should remember that – even though it’s all on expenses – supping with the Devil demands the use of a very long spoon. Twice in as many months, an explicitly spook-sourced story has been published with all the evident thrill that workaday reporters get from being in the same room as a genuine spy. Most recently (18 December 2015), a story about the kidnapping of Colonel Gaddafi’s son Hannibal appeared in the online edition with a house-style blue ‘info box’ near the end, in which we learned that a ‘security source’ had informed the Mail that a former Libyan MP had been arrested in connection with the offence.55 But that’s the only comprehensible point in a confusing muddle of information that bears all the marks of a ‘stake’ story, in which the author does not understand their own material but knows it needs to be published now in order to be followed-up and clarified if and when things become clearer. The previous month, a far more alarming story had appeared while Europe was still reeling from the attacks on Paris. On 16 November the Mail breathlessly reported an exclusive concerning a ‘decrypted message from ISIS’ instructing British jihadis to lay low and await orders.56 This is 55 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk odd, because as far as anyone understands them at all, ISIS works on a ‘franchise’ basis similar to al-Qaeda. And in any case, why issue an order to lie low and await orders, if that’s what British jihadis supposedly do every day anyway? Why not just, well, let them wait? And then, halfway through the Mail’s yarn, the following sentence casts doubt upon all previous assertions: ‘The Mail Investigations Unit has been shown messages sent to a radicalised individual in the UK over the past two weeks encouraging would-be fighters to launch terror attacks in Britain.’ ‘Shown’. Not ‘provided with’. Not ‘handed’. ‘Shown’. This is, of course, the standard MO with the dissemination of disinformation: dummy up a document containing the material you want circulated, and show it to an eager reporter – but never let it leave your hands. The Guardian's inestimable Nick Davies warned about British media’s increasing vulnerability to such skulduggery, in the age of ‘churnalism’, in his book Flat Earth News. Mail Online has the greatest market penetration of any British newspaper and is an international phenomenon. It would appear that the paper’s profile and reach is now of use for purposes other than telling readers whether it is coffee or red wine that can cure ‘old knees’ and ‘cankles’ in any given week. Masonic boom Who doesn’t love a conspiracy theory starring the Freemasons? November 2015 saw the release of a large batch of Masonic material, covering two hundred years of British history, to the genealogy website ancestry.com. What it revealed was pretty startling and something that no-one had ever suggested before: what appears to have been a Masonic stitch-up of the inquiry into the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic. Inquiry chairman Lord Mersey exonerated the Board of Trade, which had been blamed for inadequate lifeboat Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk regulations. Lord Mersey was a Freemason, and so was Board of Trade president Sydney Buxton. Furthermore, two of the inquiry’s engineering experts also happened to be on the square. As was Lord Pirrie, who was not only chairman of the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, where Titanic was built and launched, but a director of White Star shipping’s parent company. As the redoubtable Chris Mullin put it when the Masonic archive news emerged: ‘Whatever the truth of the matter, it doesn’t look good.’57 Indeed not. So why have the Masonic dimensions of the JFK assassination cover-up never attracted similar attention? The Warren Commission’s eponymous chief justice (Earl Warren) was a high-ranking Freemason (in charge of all Masonic Lodges in California),58 as was Commission member and future US president Gerald Ford.59 So was junior counsel Arlen Specter, who invented the infamous ‘magic bullet’ theory.60 At the top of the tree were JFK’s successor, Freemason Lyndon Johnson,61 and his good friend and fellow Freemason J. Edgar Hoover,62 who led the FBI’s alleged ‘investigation’ into the killing. Those with esoteric inclinations will be intrigued to learn that Dealey Plaza, the location of JFK’s murder, was previously commemorated as being the site of the first Masonic temple raised in Dallas.63 Coincidence theories 57 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk After the outbreak of attacks in Paris on 13 November, a few suspicious minds were focused on what, with hindsight, appeared to be two ‘omens’. The first was the fact that a video game entitled Battlefield 3 had been released in 2011, the action in which occurs against the backdrop of a terrorist attack on Paris, taking place on 13 November.64 Although the year in which the game is set was 2014, it is nevertheless a really remarkable coincidence. It is alarming to think that there are people out there who really believe the New World Order (or whoever) is leaking its plans in the form of mass-market computer software. The other was perhaps even more remarkable. Two days before the attacks, a twitter account called @PZbooks broadcast the message: ‘BREAKING: Death toll from Paris terror attack rises to at least 120 with 270 others injured.’ It looked incredibly accurate (the final toll was 130 dead and 368 injured) but it was a fluke, in the form of a randomly generated tweet created by a ‘bot’ that mashed together a headline dating from the Charlie Hebdo attack of January 2015 and another relating to an attack on a Nigerian mosque.65 Proof, yet again, of the adage that fiction is at a disadvantage compared to truth, because fiction has to be believable. Monarchical manoeuvres And so to something that definitely isn’t a coincidence. In early December the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life issued its monumental slab of a report.66 Chaired by Baroness Butler-Sloss and set up in 2013, the Commission panel included former Archbishop of Canterbury 64 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Rowan Williams.67 Among the Commission’s conclusions was the recommendation that the Coronation Oath be altered to reflect the religious complexity of modern Britain. At present, the Oath – set out in antiquity by the Coronation Oath Act (1688) and sworn by William and Mary after the Glorious Revolution deposed James II – binds the Monarch to upholding the Church of England as Supreme Governor.68 The Commission’s recommendation will require legislation to be introduced sooner rather than later, and probably under the current administration. Thus it seems that Prince Charles is finally to get his way with a title equivalent to ‘Defender of Faith’ when he succeeds to the throne. (As opposed to ‘Defender of the Faith’ – that is the ‘F.D.’ on British coins, standing for Fidei Defensor.)69 All this is taking place against the backdrop of the Queen, who is nearly 90, ceding some of her public role to the heir apparent. The Establishment is clearing the way for a major constitutional fix, which will be conducted at glacial pace and piecemeal so that no-one really notices. But it has to be done, not least because as a divorced man married to a divorced woman with a still-living former husband, Charles is currently in no fit state to take the Oath (a doctrinal problem which obviously promises that yet another amendment is to appear). And that’s without considering the question of whether his current marriage is legally valid in the first place, which the Cameron administration pledged to address but has not yet done.70 Should we care? That’s almost beside the point. The fact is that the Establishment cares very much and will gently 67 It’s interesting that Lady Butler-Sloss briefly became chair of the ongoing child abuse inquiry while this Commission was still sitting, a potential conflict of interest that no-one even noticed 68 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk rearrange the apples now rather than see the whole cart upset unexpectedly in the future. The Monarchy plays for keeps. They’re baaaaack... By his own account, Tory Action was a network set-up by the late George Kennedy Young in 1974 in Conservative Party constituencies to support Margaret Thatcher’s bid for the leadership of the Party.71 Officially deceased as of the Labour victory in 1997, the group has reappeared under Cameron’s second ministry (the first all-Tory government of the century). They have a thriving little Yahoo! Group, founded in 2005 in apparent readiness for the call to arms, and now vigorously active with (at the time of writing) some 260 new messages posted in just seven days.72 Thing is, the group is invitation only, so it’s impossible to read what they’re saying to each other. Which is a pity as George Kennedy Young is currently in the news in connection with the slowly unfolding Paedogate scandal, albeit in a thoroughly opaque and mysterious manner at present.73 The Prince, the Palace, and Paedogate In early October Peter Ball was sent down for what appears to have been a lifelong career of sexual offending, conducted in his capacity as a Bishop in the Church of England. 71 ‘The final testimony of George Kennedy Young’ in Lobster 19. This is Young’s self-penned obituary. Tory Action was more or less co- terminous with his Unison Group for Action, which was engaged in the anti-Labour ‘private armies’ episode of 1974. 72 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk At his trial it emerged that when he was first nicked in the 1990s a veritable cavalcade of the Great and the Good were willing to act as character witnesses for him, including a senior judge, cabinet ministers and a number of public school headmasters. The result was that despite clear and convincing evidence of repeat sexual offending against young men (some underage even by today’s benchmark), Ball was let off with a caution rather than a conviction. The best summation of the nation’s indignation at this state of affairs was produced by the Guardian (for all its faults, still a world-class paper when it bothers), which boldly called it ‘A true conspiracy of silence’.74 This is, perhaps, slightly unfair. There’s no suggestion (that I’m aware of) that any of those willing to attest to Ball’s saintliness had any inkling of his guilt. Until the very last years of the last century, when the News of the World’s watershed anti-paedophile campaign opened the floodgates to the ongoing torrents of misery and horror, the 1990s were as ignorant of the scale of child abuse as the decades before them. It was all too easy back then – and for some, is still now – to dismiss allegations of sex abuse as frivolous, delusional, or malicious. Ball’s friends acted as your friends or mine might react in a similar situation: they rallied round to speak up for him in good faith. The true scandal here was that the police allowed themselves to be swayed by completely extra-evidential matters in the form of the social standing and prestige of Ball’s supporters. It is another vivid and telling example, if it were needed, of the way in which the police unwittingly function as a tool of class distinction: sordid crimes are for scum, not the High and Mighty. Or were at the time, at any rate. Among Ball’s cheerleaders, the court heard, was a member of the Royal Family. No names, no pack drill, but every scrap of circumstantial evidence indicated that it was Ball’s old 74 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk pal (and sometime landlord) the Prince of Wales.75 Embarrassing. What was clearly needed was something to take the heat off His Royal Highness. And before the week was out, it was forthcoming. Prince Charles’s old friend (and former Equerry) Sir Nicholas Soames rose ponderously in the House of Commons to denounce deputy Labour leader Tom Watson for ‘vilely traducing’ Sir Nicholas's friend the late Lord Brittan (whom Watson had very prominently fingered earlier this year).76 Immediately media attention switched to Mr Watson (‘the beleaguered Tom Watson’, as we should call him) without dropping the Paedogate ‘ball’ for an instant, and he was put through the media mangle for about a fortnight, by which time HRH’s embarrassment was forgotten. As Marcia Faulkender remarked to Barry Penrose and Roger Courtiour, when discussing the (for the Palace) convenient timing of Wilson’s 1976 resignation announcement, the Palace ‘really knows how to operate’. Mr Watson should perhaps start checking over his shoulder. The fate of the last person publicly set upon by Sir Nicholas at the Palace’s apparent bidding does not set a good precedent. In 2008 Princess Diana’s inquest heard a witness testify that in 1997 the Prince of Wales’s ex-wife received a private telephone call from her public critic, Sir Nicholas Soames, warning her darkly that ‘accidents can happen’. No doubt an unfortunate misunderstanding. Profumo performer A recently declassified memo, recording a telephone call made from CIA Director John McCone to Secretary of State Dean Rusk in July 1963, gives us a hitherto unavailable glimpse of the web that surrounded the hapless Stephen Ward as the Profumo affair came to a head.77 75 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk This aspect of their discussion was a prelude to the main business, an extravagant-sounding claim that the CIA had reproductions of Soviet satellite spy photographs. The key word appears to be ‘reproductions’ as opposed to ‘copies’. This is the only reason the memo has attracted any attention in the States. The Profumo remarks begin: ‘[Rusk] said we ought to keep our eyes on the Profumo business – has impression the full story is not available to us. [Rusk] said Fairbanks filed a report on this a while back so [McCone] might want to have his people check on this. Things will come out at the trial that will affect the govt.’ It’s unclear whether the US or UK ‘govt.’ is being referred to here; but either way Rusk clearly underestimated the British capacity for cover-up. The affair’s US dimension was successfully hidden for decades. ‘Fairbanks’ can only be Stephen Ward’s good friend and fellow orgy enthusiast, actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. A former Naval Intelligence officer, Fairbanks had filed a report with the FBI office in London just weeks before, who subsequently reported to FBI director J Edgar Hoover on 19 June 1963:78 ‘Fairbanks Jnr has advised he was patient [of] Dr Ward and met [Keeler] on several occasions. Fairbanks knows Ward as a procurer states Ward will be charged with abortion and blackmail. Profumo is blackmail victim. Fairbanks [said] Ward running sex den and [Keeler] involved. Characterized Ward as Left-wing fellow traveller. According to Fairbanks, [Redacted] has long list of “customers” which involves many members of the House of Lords.’ Navy suspects Fairbanks may be more closely involved with [Redacted] than he had indicated.’ We might reasonably infer that the redacted person with the long list of customers is hooker/madame Mariella Novotny, 78 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk who was a regular sexual partner of Fairbanks and kept another list of ‘customers’ (from the UN) that she claimed in 1978 she would publish in her autobiography, along with details of a ‘plot to discredit Jack Kennedy’. If Novotny is the redacted person, it shows exactly how sensitive the whole business still is, even after 50 years. [Novotny was found dead in her bed in 1983, an apparent drugs overdose.] So, Rusk passed the FBI’s intelligence to the CIA director, who used it to do.....precisely nothing. The memo indicates that McCone’s only reaction was to change the subject of the conversation to the then recently disappeared Kim Philby. The CIA is the ‘dog that didn’t bark’ in the Profumo affair, a scandal which sucked many other intelligence agencies into its festering orbit; but here we have a document showing that the CIA director himself was privy to intelligence from the highest sources and was actively urged to investigate by the Kennedy administration. Patriarchy and its discontents It was good to see that the Guardian continues to peddle the myth of Suffragette martyrs, the complete lack of evidence be damned.79 This time, it was in the form of a headline to a column by Anne Perkins, demanding: ‘Did the Suffragettes die for this?’ 80 This is only a shade away from Tony Hancock’s question about Magna Carta,81 and since it was not a question raised by Ms Perkins’ piece, it was obviously the work of a sub-editor who thought s/he (probably he) knew best. Again, it shows how easily propaganda becomes such accepted wisdom that regurgitating it without thought 79 See this column in Lobster 69. 80 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk becomes almost automatic. The pre-statutory intelligence services A historian from Norfolk appears to have put together an impressive account of the rise of the British Secret Service under William Pitt in the 18th Century. Frustratingly, no footnotes and only a partial bibliography are given, but it appears to be lucid, reasoned and measured, and ‘rings true’. Part one briefly summarises the rise of the service under Elizabeth I, its augmentation and expansion under Cromwell’s Protectorate and its subsequent decline. The narrative then widens greatly to embrace and detail its revival when Britain’s historical rivalry with France began to take shape. (From somewhere the author has even managed to find the text of the Secret Service oath of the time.)82 Part two looks at the state’s clampdown on radicals and sedition, with particular focus on the uneasy period covering the French and American revolutions. It also vindicates the CIA’s in-house historian, cited in this column in Lobster 69, who claimed that George III was an active intriguer at the centre of the web. We can assume that this situation continued after his removal from the throne.83 Part three charts the rise of the Aliens Office, and how it developed a system of turning and exploiting foreign nationals as informers and agents provocateur. It also sheds light on how the ominous republican groundswell at home and the Napoleonic regime abroad were destabilised to differing degrees of effectiveness.84 Aficionados of spook financial finagling will derive grim pleasure from one passage in particular: ‘It was up to ambassadors and other diplomats abroad, and a handful of civil servants at home, to recruit, pay 82 Part 1 is at Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk and supervise such agents as they deemed necessary [...]. Huge sums might pass through their hands, but the accounting for how and where it was spent was rudimentary.’ Plus, as they say, ça change. Let us now praise famous men The death of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi politician, banker and fraudster, prompted thoughts on the much-derided ‘great man’ model of history. Mr Chalabi has gone to that special part of Hell reserved for those whose moral compasses allowed them to tell George W Bush whatever nonsense he wanted to hear, without going through the time-consuming rigmarole of being tortured by the CIA first. The Guardian editorialised: ‘We tend to think of history as the product of impersonal forces and so to suppose a great catastrophe like the invasion of Iraq must have had great causes. But considered through the lens of Chalabi’s career, it seems more like a bitter farce out of Graham Greene.’85 Do we really think that way about history? To maintain this as an absolute and immovable stance when considering Chalabi’s outrageous fantabulising is obviously to imply that some other chancer would have come along and done the same thing in his absence, and that Chalabi himself was merely the lightning conductor for those ‘impersonal forces’. But Chalabi's very success indicates precisely the opposite: the reason the Bush administration used his nonsense is because there was no-one else offering it. Bullshitters weren’t queuing up along Pennsylvania Avenue with anti-Saddam ‘insights’ for sale. If they had been, the US would have chosen a far more credible individual than a 85 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk known fraudster with a personal grudge against Hussein. If the US didn’t need him, why bother using him at all? It’s often remarked that if Hitler hadn’t been born, some other scheming despot would have risen in his place, with much the same results. This notion ignores the plain fact that if there had indeed been other such characters around at the time, we would know about them. ‘Knowledge,’ as someone once said, ‘is information- soluble’ and this historiological phenomenon of knowing more and more but understanding less and less is perhaps best exemplified in A.J.P. Taylor's essay ‘War by Timetable’, in which the First World War is described as starting almost automatically due to scheduled troop deployments by railway. Perhaps there’s an element of truth in it, and perhaps the war couldn’t have been avoided indefinitely;86 but the real cause of the war was definitely a bullet fired by an unknown man into a famous one. It’s hard to think of anything more personal than that. More to the point, if our politicians are (as the ‘impersonal forces’ school of thought requires us to accept) reducible to the status of iron filings dancing to unseen magnets, what ultimate use is democracy to us at all? This is the barren theoretical ground from which the alarming Libertarian movement for a ‘night-watchman state’ – if that – has sprung.87 Doppelgangers A pet subject of mine has been in the news lately, that of identical-looking people. One incident in particular suggests that meeting your reflection is not as unlikely as one might 86 There’s a decent roundup of other incidents that could have sparked the war, but didn’t at Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk imagine. In this case, it was a ginger-bearded and hipsterish gentleman who ended up sitting next to his exact double on a plane journey, purely by chance. One ginger-bearded and hipsterish gentleman looks much like another, some might argue, but I urge you to check out the pictures if you haven't seen them already. ‘Resemblance’ is an inadequate word to describe the match. Even the teeth look identical.88 True, the two men are of different heights but if presented with a portrait photo of either, I would be unable to say which man it was. Artist Alison Jackson has been producing ‘simulacra’ of celebrity photographs using doppelgangers for years, some highly passable. Celebrity lookalikes, however, soon become aware of their resemblance and openly put themselves on the market as such.89 What about the rest of us? The increasingly interconnected world of social media is now letting people find doppelgangers that they might otherwise never meet in the flesh. A project has been launched to enable people to track down their doubles – for a small fee, of course. The site is twinstrangers.net and is run by a pair of women who, yes, met by chance and resemble each other exactly. Human nature being what it is, how long will it be before someone finds their doppelganger, enters into some kind of profitable private criminal agreement with them and successfully thwarts police investigators with irreconcilable witness and/or forensic evidence? My money would be on such 88 For lovers of the uncanny, the two men later found their paths crossed repeatedly after reaching their destination. See Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk schemes being hatched even now.90 The TV drama trope of ‘The Evil Twin’ could even step into the realms of reality. This sort of deception is meat and drink to intelligence agencies (CIA director Allen Dulles is said to have collected reports on identical twins for his own purposes) but despite the obvious uses of doppelgangers, the entire subject of impersonation is still regarded uneasily by historians. The notion that someone has been replaced with an imposter is obviously just too crazy-sounding to address. JFK conspiracy-debunker Professor John McAdams has a long paper on his site dedicated to unravelling the various claims of a Lee Harvey Oswald impersonator’s involvement, denouncing them as mainly dependent upon unreliable eyewitness testimony. Dr McAdams asks: ‘So is there nothing at all to the “two Oswalds” theories?’ And answers: ‘No, nothing at all.’ But this isn’t quite true, even in the ‘orthodox’ history of the murder. There was an utterly real ‘second Oswald’ in the very Book Depository from which Kennedy was supposedly shot. He was Billy Lovelady, who was photographed on the Book Depository steps at the moment of the assassination, and whose presence there sparked a years-long debate over whether the photo depicted Oswald or not; since if Oswald was outside watching the assassination he couldn’t also have been guilty of it. (Oswald himself stoutly maintained that he was eating his lunch elsewhere in the building at the time, so this theory doesn’t even have Oswald's support.) In fact, Lovelady looked so like Oswald that even Oswald’s daughter was deceived into crying ‘There's daddy!’ when Lovelady appeared on TV news broadcasts, post- assassination. What are the odds against two such similar-looking men ending up employed in the same building at the same time? 90 They wouldn’t be anything new, as the Kray twins used to exploit their identical appearances for pleasure and profit in just this way. According to gangland lore, the ruse was used repeatedly to spring one or the other brother from prison by the pair swapping roles during prison visiting time and then gaining release by proving with fingerprints that the wrong brother had been jailed. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk You could hardly hope to plan a more confusing scenario..... Immigration, immigration, immigration Well, now, here’s a thing. Bombing the Middle East into peace and harmony hasn’t worked – again – and now the recipients of the West’s military-industrial free gifts are on our doorstep asking for actual help, rather than the geopolitical variety. In Hungary, where it’s still the early 1970s, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has erected border fences to keep out the hordes and denounced the situation as a plot cooked up by George Soros and a cabal of faceless lefties in order to force the EU into a semi-federal form, with uniform border controls and a single asylum policy.91 Mr Orban’s evidence consists of Mr Soros calling for those things in a recent op-ed, but, billionaire or not, Mr Soros calling for something is not quite the same thing as his actively seeking to bring it about.92 Is Mr Orban sincere, or cynically manipulating the Hungarian electorate? His solution – that European nationals must produce more children in order to preserve their cultures – has worryingly familiar overtones; but again, some blowhard demanding something is a long way from putting it into effect. In Her Majesty’s Britannic realms, there have also been ominous rumblings. If former BNP leader Nick Griffin accomplished anything at all during his farcical reign, it was to get the words ‘indigenous’ and ‘white genocide’ into popular currency in the immigration debate. ‘White genocide’ in particular has pretty much gone mainstream. It occasionally trends on Twitter and there are entire websites devoted to the notion, and evidently not all of them are maintained by knuckle-dragging thugs.93 It sounds too ridiculous to be true. 91 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk And, since we – that is, me and the hypothetical European reader – know all too well the exact character and dimensions of the genocide historically associated with attempts to preserve a ‘white race’, it also sounds grotesquely inappropriate. But hold that revulsion. ‘Genocide’ is precisely the label that the exiled Tibetan government has applied to China’s long-term program to subsume Tibetan culture into its own (politely referred to by diplomats as ‘Sinicization’). So this application of the word has a degree of credibility and precedent. But the absolutely crucial difference is that in the case of China and Tibet, the approach is deliberate, planned, and systematic with a clear outcome in sight. And everyone knows it. This is where the ‘white genocide’ proponents founder and retreat into conspiratorial modes of thought. There is simply no such provable intent on Europe’s part, or indeed on the part of any member state. A big villain in the ‘white genocide’ conspiracy theory, frequently discussed by far-right forums that I’ve snooped upon, is one of Europe’s conceptual founding fathers, a character almost unknown outside a very limited circle of research and study, Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi. Coudenhove-Kalergi, a diplomat who was born in Japan to an Austrian father and a Japanese mother, moved to what was then Austria-Hungary, adopted Czechoslovakian nationality and then became a natural French citizen, is a fascinatingly complex individual, who lived a life that a novelist would blush to invent.94 He founded the Pan-European Movement, suggested Beethoven’s ninth symphony as the European Anthem (as it now indeed is) and moved effortlessly through a milieu of artists, thinkers, financiers, authors and politicians that practically constituted a Who’s Who of the 94 I would not normally refer the reader to Wikipedia for information, but Coudenhove-Kalergi’s biography is so bewildering that on this occasion Wikipedia provides the most accessible synthesis at Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk western world’s elite in the early 20th Century.95 It is even possible that he was the origin of Hitler’s persecution of Freemasons. In 1925, Masonic newspaper The Beacon had described the Pan-European Movement in glowing terms: ‘Brother Coudenhove-Kalergi’s program is a Masonic work of the highest order, and to be able to work on it together is a lofty task for all brother Masons.’ Coudenhove-Kalergi himself was not backward about coming forward, writing in one of his many books: ‘The man of the future will be of mixed race. Today's races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian- Negroid race of the future, similar in its appearance to the Ancient Egyptians,will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals.’96 But, despite far-right photoshop artists depicting Coudenhove- Kalergi with vampire fangs, as befits such a sinister life- sapping figure, all this is a very long way indeed from proving that the European Union, or any part of it, is actively trying to produce ‘mixed race’ populations. Another rallying cry among the race separatists is Andrew Neather’s infamous admission that the New Labour administration more or less threw Britain’s doors open to mass immigration and then stood back and watched.97 This is true, but again the purpose was not to breed ‘whiteness’ out of Britain, or even to undermine British culture. The purpose that Mr Neather inferred, from the discussions he attended, was that the Blair administration wanted to ‘rub the right’s nose in diversity’. Of course, it could be possible that Mr Neather was himself being deceived about the government’s real agenda, and they were just pretending to be idealistic 95 Coudenhove-Kalergi worked with the CIA’s Allen Dulles in the creation of the American Committee for a Free and United Europe in 1948. Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British left and the Cold War (London: Frank Cass, 2003) p. 227. 96 Cited in his Wikipedia entry Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk incompetents, but that way lies madness. There’s also an (apocryphal?) quote from Jack Straw himself, who is alleged to have told a constituent that ‘The English, as a race, are not worth saving.’ Predictably, this quote is impossible to trace to a source (Mr Straw did not respond to an e-mail inquiring whether he said it or not). But really, this is what the claims of ‘white genocide’ amount to. A starry-eyed Panglossian visionary, who is all but forgotten today, and a few rogue contemporary quotes. The rest is a giant cloud of sinister innuendo obscuring nearly a century of complex international evolution. So why does it continue to flourish? Well, people like the UN’s special representative on migration, Peter Sutherland, don’t help. In 2012, Mr Sutherland – Goldman-Sachs non-executive chairman, former BP chairman and frequent Bilderberg attendee – told a committee of the House of Lords: ‘The United States, or Australia and New Zealand, are migrant societies and therefore they accommodate more readily those from other backgrounds than we do ourselves, who still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and difference from others. And that’s precisely what the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine.’98 As the indigenous populations of the countries he mentioned could have told him, had he asked them, their situations developed in a way that was not necessarily to their advantage. 98 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Oh, conspiracy! Robin Ramsay The Guardian has been having an attack of conspiracy theory anxiety. First there was the piece on 18 December by Natalie Nougayrède, the former diplomatic correspondent and later editor of Le Monde, ‘The conspiracy theories of extreme right and far left threaten democracy’.1 The subhead, expressing her thesis, was this: ‘In a complex, changing world both peddle a simple us-and-them narrative. The results are calamitous’. Here’s a sample of her thinking. ‘Part of the appeal of conspiracy theories is their simplicity. In a complex, changing world, it is tempting to reduce multifaceted issues to the us-and-them narrative. It is a vision that meets little contradiction because reasoned facts are sidelined by emotion. It is a binary scheme, with “the people” on one side and “the system” on the other. “The people” are assaulted by plots prepared from inside “the system”, which can be domestic (state institutions, traditional parties) or foreign (the EU, financial markets, the Bilderberg group...... the list is long).’ Nougayrède’s piece was followed on 26 December by David Shariatmadari’s ‘A new theory of conspiracies’.2 This opened with an account of ‘Elliott, now 34, a “recovering” conspiracy theorist...... [who] turned his back on a worldview that always posits some covert, powerful force acting against the interests of ordinary people.’ 1 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Shariatmadari discussed whether or not there are more conspiracy theories than there used to be (maybe); why they are so widespread (the Internet speeds up their circulation – you think?); and how we can combat them (teach people to think better – good luck with that one!). Neither piece considers that there might be ‘some powerful force[s] acting against the interests of ordinary people’ and both offer the canard – always a glowing indicator of ignorance of the subject – that conspiracy theories simplify. Some do: nonsense such as ‘the world’s ill are all caused by the Jews/Illuminati/whatever’, what have been called the mega theories, simplify. But much of what is dismissed as conspiracy theories – parapolitics or deep politics – does not. The work of William Blum, for example,3 in detailing the role of the CIA in the USA’s post-WW2 empire, complicates the study of American foreign policy (or would if academics and journalists could bring themselves to read it); and the work of the JFK researchers has produced almost unmanageable complexity. But then Blum and the better end of the Kennedy buffs aren’t offering conspiracy theories so much as theories about conspiracies.4 Mega conspiracy theories cannot be falsified because believers present an infinite regress of evasion strategies: ‘Yes, but....’. Theories about conspiracies – sometimes called event conspiracies – on the other hand are open to the same empirical investigation as any other proposition. ‘Conspiracy theorist’ as a term of denigration was introduced by the CIA for use against critics of the Warren Commission in 1967 and proved so successful at scaring-off the career-minded and the conventional that its use spread to encompass almost any line of inquiry which strays beyond conventional narratives.5 In the major media the charge of ‘conspiracy theorising’ is being raised these days because the rabble – us – are 3 See Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk beginning to think the wrong things and ‘democracy’ threatens to express that. The perception that is currently giving the American and European elites the vapours is precisely that there is ‘some powerful force [or forces] acting against the interests of ordinary people’. One ‘powerful force’ can be easily shown to be corporate interests within the EU;6 the EU Commission itself is another. Ditto the interests of the bankers. Other obvious candidates are the arms and Israeli lobbies driving American foreign policy and the corporate funding of American and, to a lesser extent, British politics. And so on. In other words the radical agenda of both left and right. Motivated by the same notion that conspiracy theories are a threat to democracy, there is a Leverhulme-funded project at the University of Cambridge which is exploring this.7 One of the project’s directors, Professor David Runciman, sounds quite reasonable: ‘In a world of real conspiracies, you have to sometimes be a conspiracy theorist. Certainly you don’t want to not suspect big organisations of being corrupt. Banks, businesses, drug companies.....That’s what’s interesting about this project: what’s the conspiracy theory that’s OK, and what’s the kind that’s not OK? It turns out it’s really hard to draw the line.’ 8 Runciman doesn’t say so, but the line he is drawing is between conspiracy theories (not OK) and theories about conspiracies (OK); which, in effect, means that parapolitics and deep politics are OK. However, on the evidence of its website, few of those in Runciman’s project appear interested in following him. What does and does not count as a conspiracy theory is mostly unexamined and presumed to be self-evident; and anything so labelled is presumed to be false. Runciman is better than that. Here he is again: ‘Another tempting mistake is to assume that conspiracies 6 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk always point toward an intended outcome rather than simply covering up an existing state of affairs. The intention may simply be not to let people know what has happened i.e. to keep the secret a secret. When the FBI and CIA destroyed their files on Lee Harvey Oswald after the Kennedy assassination, it counted as evidence of a conspiracy but not evidence that there was a conspiracy to assassinate the president. The agencies may simply have not wanted people to know they didn’t know what was going to happen even though Oswald was known to them: it was a cover-up of a cock-up not a cover-up of a conspiracy. But cover-ups of cock-ups produce real conspiracies because those involved have to keep their involvement secret for the scheme to work.’ 9 The point in the final sentence is true, if trivial; but perhaps worth making for the young academics and graduate students on his project. But did the CIA and FBI destroy their files on the Oswald, as he presumes? John Newman, for example, wrote a book about the CIA’s files on Oswald and what the way they were handled and classified told us about Oswald’s status within the Agency.10 John Armstrong’s Harvey and Lee discusses in great detail the FBI files on Oswald.11 Because Runciman hasn’t read the JFK assassination literature, when he works in areas which would inform it he misses important details. For example he wrote a long, admiring review of the The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson.12 Unaware of the JFK literature, he didn’t spot that Caro had entirely omitted the Billie Sol Estes story; and, given that the Estes story had been the front cover of Time magazine, the omission was deliberate. Why skip Estes? I suggested when the book was 9 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk published13 that Caro had to omit Estes because Estes leads to LBJ’s role in the assassination of Kennedy.14 As an academic historian, Runciman isn’t going to take that next step and look at these questions: in his world this would take him into JFK nutter country. But in acknowledging that some conspiracy theories are ‘OK’ he has opened the door to deep politics and parapolitics. We shall see if he and/or his conspiracy and democracy project do anything with this insight. How successful was the CIA’s campaign to attach ‘conspiracy theorist’ to the critics of the Warren Commission? Fifty years after the event, Robert Caro, one of America’s leading historians of the period, is still afraid to approach the subject. This must be the most successful CIA psy-op. 13 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Reading between the lies: Edward Jay Epstein and Lee Harvey Oswald’s ‘Historic Diary’ Garrick Alder Lee Oswald’s ‘Historic Diary’ has always aroused suspicions. Written in Oswald’s distinctive hand, and complete with his dyslexic traits, it ostensibly records his stay behind the Iron Curtain during his defection from the USA between 1959 and 1962. The very text itself is suspect, containing several anachronisms (references to US embassy staff not in situ on the dates of the diary entries in question, for example) and other details that just don’t ring true at all. Perhaps the loudest discordant note is in the entry commencing 4 January 1961, in which Oswald bemoans his (by Soviet standards rather luxurious) circumstances: ‘The work is drap [sic], the money I get has nowhere to be spent. No nightclubs or bowling alleys, no places of recreation except the trade union dances. I have have [sic] had enough.’ All this despite the author being renowned as a solitary introvert and bookworm: it simply reeks of propaganda meant for an American readership. Of particular interest has been the question of when the Historic Diary manuscript was written. In the 1970s the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) set out to test the theory that the diary had been written more or less in one sitting, rather than in a truly episodic diary form. HSCA consulted three document analysts, who each declared that the manuscript – heavily stained with fingerprinting fluids during the FBI’s 1963-64 investigation of Oswald’s background – could not be examined clearly enough to permit a verdict on Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk that question.1 However, one does not need any particular skill to see that the writing – rank after parallel rank of text, all in the same pen and the writing of roughly uniform size – was laid down almost in one pass. Where a slight ‘hump’ creeps into a line of text, it is echoed in subsequent lines, producing an effect not unlike a broad ripple across the page.2 Any doubt as to the time-span of the diary’s production is surely dispelled by just a casual examination of pages six and seven of the manuscript, in which one can clearly see the onset of fatigue in the writing hand. The regular horizontal lines of script begin to droop as each successive line approaches the right-hand edge of the page. Ultimately the effect is as though the text is almost sliding off the paper as the right-handed author gradually loses the will to move his stationary writing wrist across the page and allows the writing to curve around it instead.3 After this apparent exhaustion, the handwriting returns to normal on page eight, indicating that the writer took a break for his hand to recover then set to work again. However the fatigue visibly sets in again within a page or two.4 Since the dates and events recorded in the Historic Diary 1 This analysis was conducted as part of an attempt to discern whether any of Oswald’s writings were written by someone else. Findings and conclusions of Joseph P. McNally, David J. Purtell, and Charles C. Scott, HSCA Report, volume VIII, 1979. See Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk manuscript tally fairly well with Oswald’s known activities during his defection, the prolonged bout of writing that produced the known manuscript must have involved copying an original version of the diary, which is now lost. We shall refer to this lost source as the Q-Diary for convenience.5 Enter Epstein Under what circumstances did the Q-Diary get redrafted into the manuscript we know today? This question exercised the mind of assassination researcher Edward Jay Epstein in the 1970s as he amassed the material that would form the basis for his 1978 Legend:The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, wherein he indicates that Oswald was a KGB agent. Mr Epstein wrote a long piece, ‘Reading Oswald’s Hand’, about his analysis of the Historic Diary manuscript for the magazine Psychology Today in April 1978. It is that article, which gives a wealth of background details not discussed in Legend, that forms the basis of this essay.6 In Psychology Today Mr Epstein records that he took advice from ‘a former CIA research director’ who helpfully ‘mentioned that the agency had on occasion used a graphologist to help crack difficult cases’. Mr Epstein describes feeling ‘startled’ by the notion that the CIA believed in graphology. That feeling can only have been amplified as the CIA man explained how ‘from an analysis of clandestine correspondence, the graphologist was able to determine that an anonymous letter writer was lame, and this quickly led to his identification’. Such a marvellous feat – surely beyond the capacity of even Sherlock Holmes – apparently inspired Mr Epstein to pursue the recommendation, and the next day he 5 With Q coming from the German word ‘Quelle’ meaning ‘source’, by analogy with the lost Q-Gospel manuscript that was evidently recycled into the biblical books of Matthew and Luke. HSCA decided that the Historic Diary manuscript was composed with reference to separate notes and jottings that were compiled into one. However this contradicts the fact that Marina Oswald specifically told HSCA that Oswald began keeping his diary shortly after arriving in the USSR. 6 If anyone would like an electronic scan of this article and/or the Lewinson interview, contact the editor. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk paid a visit to Dr Thea Stein Lewinson.7 One trip to the National Archives later, with microscope in hand, Dr Lewinson’s examination of the Historic Diary manuscript determined that, at the time he was writing, Oswald had been ‘travelling on a large ship [...... ] She said she could detect both wave motions and engine vibrations in the handwriting.’ For Mr Epstein, Dr Lewinson’s ‘amazing deductions [...... ] were partly confirmed by Priscilla Johnson McMillan in her book Marina and Lee, which was based on some 14 years of sporadic interviews with Marina Oswald. Marina Oswald acknowledged that her husband had written these notes aboard the SS Maasdam, when they sailed in June [1962] from Europe to the United States.’ However, Dr Lewinson’s ‘amazing deductions’ look slightly less amazing – and Mr Epstein himself a bit of a mug – when one takes into account the fact that Marina and Lee had been published a year before Mr Epstein’s article appeared, thus giving Dr Lewinson ample time to learn of Marina’s alleged acknowledgement and embroider her analysis accordingly. More to the point, Marina and Lee does not claim that the Historic Diary manuscript was written on board the Maasdam. It records Marina’s recollection that some of Oswald’s notes (including his apparent script for an envisaged press conference upon disembarkation) were written at that time, with the author commenting that it is not possible to say what other documents Oswald might have written while at sea.8 This appears to be the grey area into which Dr Lewinson’s ‘discovery’ was inserted. But the simple question remains: why would Oswald sit down and go through the exhausting slog of writing a dozen pages in longhand more or less at a single sitting, during a transatlantic journey lasting a spacious nine 7 Graphology is generally regarded as a pseudoscience these days, but that is no reason to wholly dismiss it as an art instead. In any case, the usefulness of graphology is not relevant here, what matters is what the pertinent individuals thought about graphology in 1978. 8 Priscilla McMillan, Marina and Lee (Glasgow: Collins, 1978) p. 156 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk days?9 Dr Lewinson’s other revelations gleaned from studying Lee Oswald’s handwriting are similarly unimpressive, although after her ‘success’ with the deduction about Oswald’s seagoing penmanship it appears that Mr Epstein was all agog. Of Oswald’s 15 letters to family, written in Russia between July 1961 and May 1962, Dr Lewinson solemnly declared that the writer was ‘a psychopathological person with a misdirected emotional development which resulted in a precarious, if not deficient, social adjustment.’ This conclusive and unbiased determination was only trumped by Dr Lewinson’s summary of her own findings when the awed Mr Epstein asked her whether Oswald’s handwriting gave any clues as to a possible conspiracy. Dr Lewinson announced: ‘In my opinion, Oswald needed support and guidance from others for carrying out a complex plan, such as his defection to the USSR and his redefection to the USA, or, for that matter, the assassination. Oswald was an easy target for manipulation and control by others. His loyalty could switch, depending on whom or where he could find support. Perhaps this word “support” is the key: it was the dynamic by which he functioned, those who supported him, had him.’ The long and the short of all of which is that the CIA had helpfully pointed Mr Epstein towards a graphologist who – conveniently for Mr Epstein’s burgeoning KGB theories, stoked by his interviews with the artful James Angleton – almost magically detected traces of Soviet espionage in the Historic Diary manuscript. The good doctor At this stage, surely a closer look at Dr Lewinson herself is warranted. Dr Lewinson died on 5 September 2000, at the grand age of 93. She left behind no official biography but 9 Mr Epstein is inclined toward a notion that Pieter Didenko, a Russian waiter aboard the Maasdam, was somehow involved, but this vague suggestion is simply not supported by his source for the information, Marina and Lee. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk issue 56, April 2001, of Graphology (the journal of the British Academy of Graphology) carried, as a memorial tribute, the transcript of a 1997 interview in which she had discussed her life and work, as well as a brief obituary notice. From this, the bare bones of a resumé can be assembled. Having previously lived in the United States as a German immigrant (arriving in 1933) Dr Lewinson, it appears, then headed back across the Atlantic when war broke out and presented herself to Allied command in London. This resulted in her being assigned to the French resistance. When the war ended, she was returned to Germany between 1946 and 1959 in a post decided (in Dr Lewinson’s own words) ‘by the military government’. During this time, she ‘worked in censorship, then in the library, then I did correspondence, etc.’ This is interesting because the Allied occupation of West Germany ended in May 1955, leaving four more years unaccounted for in Dr Lewinson’s intelligence career pre-CIA. (Dr Lewinson remarks that she spent five years in Munich at some time during this 1946-59 period.) The apparent implication is that Dr Lewinson’s relationship with the CIA arose in the late 1950s, which led to a change of employment in 1959, and at some stage a return to the USA. How she came into contact with the CIA is not elaborated upon, but she was far from an independent authority occasionally consulted by the Agency. In response to a direct question asking her to say something about ‘your work for the CIA’, Dr Lewinson replied: ‘I had a staff of 12 graphological technicians [.....] Almost every day I was given another national handwriting to analyse [.....] The so-called CIA-clients called and wanted a handwriting analysis done by Mrs Hall. My boss told them I had too much to do and inquired whether they couldn’t make do with psychological analyses. They said, No, No, they wanted a graphological analysis.’ From this it appears that Dr Lewinson went under the operational alias ‘Mrs Hall’ and was the head of a dozen- strong team of analysts. She was also answerable herself to Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk a superior officer in her team’s department – although it is unclear what department of the CIA that might have been. The ‘so-called CIA-clients’ are therefore officers who occasionally sought the use of Dr Lewinson's team when out ‘in the field’, seeking the supposed psychological insights offered by graphology. Of particular interest is Dr Lewinson’s reply to the question: ‘Wasn’t it also a way of testing to what extent spies would stand up under strain?’ Dr Lewinson responded: ‘Yes, that’s right. I could tell people that, and they usually listened to me when I said: Don’t send this one overseas, he wouldn’t be able to hold up. Once they did send someone despite my warnings who then broke down. The CIA apologised to me afterwards.’ In other words, Dr Lewinson – no espionage rookie – was directly employed to analyse handwriting, including that of officers or agents potentially about to be sent overseas on undercover assignments. This was the situation in the year that Oswald defected to the USSR and, by her own chronology, Dr Lewinson would also have been on hand when he returned to the USA three years later.10 Meanwhile, the central question remained unanswered: why did Oswald rewrite what would be the final version of his Historic Diary at all? As Mr Epstein related,while informing his readers of the background to his meetings with Dr Lewinson: ‘[....T]he graphologist had apparently been able to determine at what points in their documents defectors to the United States from Eastern Europe were showing signs of tension. In fact, because of the usefulness of graphology, the CIA had made a practice out of asking major defectors to write out their autobiographies in longhand.’ (emphasis added) Quite so. Mr Epstein had the obvious answer within his grasp in 1978. What makes immediate sense here is Oswald, under 10 It’s tempting to speculate that the instance of the unheeded warning alluded to by Dr Lewinson was that of Oswald himself, but there can be no confirmation of this tantalising possibility. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk supervision, laboriously transcribing the Q-Diary by hand, entry by entry, at one sitting, perhaps with a break after the tired-looking entries on page seven, mentioned above, and occasionally adding in misremembered details when the thought occurred to him: hence a handful of anachronisms. The impetus behind this minor feat of endurance would obviously have been a CIA attempt to detect if Oswald had been recruited by the KGB while in the Soviet Union. This being the case, the Q-Diary itself would have been used for comparison against the ‘new’ manuscript and then filed – or more likely destroyed – soon after. Epstein was duped I wrote to Edward Jay Epstein to inform him of the new information about Dr Lewinson’s relationship with the CIA, and to ask him whether he felt he had been manipulated by the Agency. Mr Epstein responded: ‘Not true. She admitted her CIA affiliation to me. See my book Legend.’ Dr Lewinson’s name does not appear in the general index to the first edition of Legend. She is referred to precisely twice in the endnotes (note 16, Chapter V; and ‘source notes’, Chapter VIII) and the CIA is not mentioned on either occasion. There are four entries for ‘handwriting analysis’ in the general index, and neither the CIA nor Dr Lewinson is mentioned on any of the specified pages. When I put these facts to Mr Epstein, he did not respond. I also asked Mr Epstein whether he had any comment to make on the possibility that part of Dr Lewinson’s analysis was informed by reading Marina and Lee, or any comment on the fact that HSCA’s document examiners had declared the Historic Diary manuscript ruined for the purposes of analysis. Again, Mr Epstein did not respond. It is worth pausing to appreciate the audacity with which the CIA manoeuvred Mr Epstein into being duped by a CIA employee, who helpfully fed him what appears to be outright disinformation to bolster the author’s emerging theories about Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the KGB. Effectively, Mr Epstein was simply passed from one hand of the Agency to the other. Mr Epstein’s patent trust in the good faith of his contacts was admirable. What appears to be his failure to ask basic questions about their motivations and reliability could be regarded as somewhat less so. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Assange again Bernard Porter Keep a scandal simmering for long enough, and people will get bored with it. That must be most people’s reaction to the latest development in the Assange case: a UN ruling that he has been ‘unlawfully detained’. He’s an odd-looking fellow, and hasn’t he been accused of rape? Why shouldn’t he go and face the music in Sweden for that? Especially if he’s as innocent as he claims. And – the final straw – how could he be said to be ‘unlawfully detained’ when he detained himself? (In the Ecuadorian embassy in London, to avoid extradition.) Well, my longish piece of about a year ago explains pretty clearly, I think, how and why.1 I’ve little to add to that. It still stands. The UN ruling bears me out to the hilt. (He’s ‘unlawfully detained’ because bad legal judgments have restricted his freedom of movement.) But do you think the British and Swedish governments will take any notice? Or will need to, in view of his semen-smeared reputation? I won’t go over the whole issue again. I’m getting bored too, which is a shame, as I’m broadly on his side. To my mind the basic question is quite simple. Assange was perfectly willing to face trial either if he were questioned in the UK, which is a normal practice; or if the Swedish government would promise – which it is in their power to do – that he wouldn’t be extradited from there to the USA on Wikileaks- associated espionage charges. Extradition laws in the past have always contained provisions against ‘re-extradition’, for an obvious reason: to prevent governments from seeking extradition on spurious grounds. It is genuinely puzzling, and may also be suspicious, that those two very fair and straightforward requests weren’t met. But this doesn’t seem to have percolated into the 1 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk current public debate on the Assange case, outside the fringes of the blogosphere, that is. Much of this seems to be almost entirely fuelled by prejudice against him; some of which, as it happens, I might share. I’m not sure that, if I met him, I would like Julian Assange very much. (I may be wrong.) Part of that has to do with what I described in my earlier article as his ‘caddish’ behaviour towards the women who fall for his (undoubted) charm. I’m also not at all convinced that all his Wikileaks revelations were politically justified, even in liberal terms; or that governments should not be allowed some degree of strict confidentiality to pursue delicate negotiations. Enter Marianne Ny None of this, however, bears on the huge doubts I have about the rectitude of his attempted extradition from Britain to Sweden four years ago, on charges that may be flimsy. The point about justice is that it should apply to people you don’t approve of as well as to those you do. Remember that Assange originally gave himself up voluntarily to the Stockholm police, who ruled that no charges should be brought against him – the evidence was too flimsy, and the women involved hadn’t asked for his arrest – before the redoubtable Marianne Ny stepped in – she’s a prosecutor from the other side of Sweden – to order his re-arrest. The extradition request was even more dodgy. It was acceded to on her say-so alone, and without any formal charges being laid. He’s only wanted for questioning – again. Isn’t this odd? Since 2014 Britain has incorporated new safeguards into the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) – for example, that it would require the authority of a judge in the requesting country, not a mere prosecutor – which as a result would certainly have ruled out Assange’s extradition under it today. The EAW was originally passed, of course, to facilitate the extradition of terrorists and mobsters. Only Madame Ny will think that initiating sex with a partner before she’s had her first cup of coffee (I exaggerate, but not by much) ranks on this level. All this is suspicious, and, together with Sweden’s covert closeness to the USA (revealed, as it happens, by Wikileaks), gives some ground for Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Assange’s fear that the Swedes might send him on. I should add that many Swedes of my acquaintance share these doubts and suspicions. I despair that most of the public commentators on the UN declaration that I’ve read, in both the British and the Swedish press, have entirely neglected these considerations, building their arguments on the prejudice against him; the idea – which is false – that he is trying to avoid Swedish justice; and pressure from feminists whose understandable desire to punish sexist bastards seems to conflict, here, with the basic legal requirement of the presumption of innocence. Supporters of Assange are assumed to be pro-rape, or at least to treat it lightly. A previous Swedish prime minister claimed – in this connection – that this was true of Britain generally. This makes it difficult to raise his case at all sympathetically in Sweden – I live there half the year, so I know. (My Swedish partner thinks I’m quite ‘brave’!) Defenders of Assange’s extradition also assume that the Swedish justice system is perfect, like most other things Swedish, which – as I’ve shown in other posts – is very far from the truth.2 (No juries; solitary confinement in prison before trial; defendants left in ignorance of the cases against them; secret trials in rape cases; and more. I wouldn’t like to come up before the beak, and his or her two politically- appointed henchpeople, in Sweden.) There’s also the argument, of course, that ‘well, he’s not as badly off as some’, which of course is true, but also irrelevant, and could be used to excuse almost any injustice. And I’m sure that chauvinistic Tories and crusty old English lawyers simply resent being told off by the UN. Censorship I’m also starting to take some of the ‘conspiracy theories’ surrounding this case seriously. That worries me. I’ve always resisted this way of thinking, possibly naively. (It can be 2 See Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk curtains for an academic.) In connection with the Assange case, however, the signs of collusion between Swedish, British and American governments are too blatant to be ignored entirely. And this is confirmed by the censorship that seems to be going on in the printed media or on ‘respectable’ websites of pieces supportive of Assange. Craig Murray’s website gives some examples of this.3 I think I may have experienced it myself. When last year I tried to post a comment on a Guardian site about the EAW which dared to mention Assange (politely and non-contentiously) I was immediately ‘pre- moderated’ – i.e. banned from all areas of its website – on quite ludicrous grounds (I was being ‘irrelevant’ and ‘commercial’). This ban that lasted six months, until a friendly editor, for whom I sometimes write book reviews for the print version, got it lifted for me. Since then I’ve noticed that when the Guardian carries reports on the Assange case, it never permits comments ‘below the line’. Can you blame me for harbouring suspicions – along now with Assange – of the ‘powers that be’? They certainly have their reasons for getting at him. Or is it just the feministas? Let me add one more thought. Marianne Ny’s refusal to examine Assange outside Sweden has, of course, been the main reason for the stand-off that is keeping him in the Ecuadorian embassy – at a cost of millions for policing borne, I presume, by the British taxpayer. (That’s another reason for attacking him.) She’s still making things difficult for him in this respect. Does she – it has occurred to me, perversely – genuinely want to bring him to trial in Sweden? If he were to stand trial there, it would – insofar as it was conducted in public (and there are doubts about that) – be highly publicised internationally; and if the case against Assange is as weak as some of us suspect, it would show her up, and possibly the whole Swedish judicial system, in a very poor light. She, and it, might be laughed out of court. That’s a huge risk, both for the ‘progressive’ reputation and for the national dignity of Sweden, no less. Better to let him stew. 3 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Bernard Porter is a historian, dividing his time between Sweden and the UK. His latest book is British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t (I. B. Tauris) He now has his own website: PAGE PAGE 1 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ‘We’re doomed!’ A brief introduction to British W.W.II stay behind networks Nick Must The broadcasting by the BBC during the Christmas period 2015 of a comedy drama based around the creation of the Dad’s Army television series, reminded me of how the Home Guard were used during World War II as the cover for a slightly more deadly type of troops.1 These secret soldiers were known as Auxiliary Units, and they were tasked with being part of any immediate British resistance movement that would form in the event of an Axis invasion of mainland Britain. In the very early stages of the war – particularly in the summer that followed the withdrawal from Dunkirk in 1940 – such an invasion was a real possibility. The Axis powers did have plans to invade Britain but Operation Sea Lion, as it was known, was eventually delayed indefinitely. At the time, this was partly due to a tactical error by Luftwaffe commander Herman Goering.2 The RAF were thus able to regain fighting strength. The German high command decided that the time was not right, the moment was missed, and the British border remained uncrossed. This we know with the benefit of hindsight; but until about 1943, and the lead up to the Allied D-Day landings, the situation was not so clear. What if Hitler – already known to be an impetuous leader – had suddenly decided to cross the 1 This is not to belittle the men who did serve in the Home Guard, many of whom had fought with distinction in the First World War and knew exactly what war was really like. The actor Arnold Ridley, who played the mild-mannered Private Charles Godfrey in the Dad’s Army series was himself a wounded veteran of both World Wars. See Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk English Channel? Even before Dunkirk, in the late spring of 1940 as more and more of France fell under German control and following War Cabinet discussion of the proposal, Winston Churchill instructed Colonel Colin Gubbins3 to form a resistance force of civilian volunteers. These were the Auxiliary Units. Malcolm Atkins argues on his website4 and in his books that the role of the Auxiliary Units has been exaggerated by the passage of time. He argues that it was that efforts of MI6 which were most influential in the establishment of a stay- behind network. I disagree – and not just because MI6 had insufficient resources within the UK for what needed to be a substantial operation. There were, indeed, efforts by MI6 to establish networks, but they were somewhat disorganised and hampered by internal departmental secrecy. Two different small-scale networks were instigated by MI6 in 1940. Section D recruited some men for their civilian Home Defence Scheme, and there was an even smaller Section VII. The Auxiliary Units, however, were a much larger scale operation than either Section D or Section VII. Any such large-scale effort within the UK border by one of the security agencies would have more naturally been the responsibility of MI5, but they were already stretched to full capacity in attempting to monitor both German and Communist agents who were already in place.5 Roughly 3,000 men were eventually recruited into the Auxiliary Units. Initially these volunteers were already serving in the Home Guard but they were soon augmented by others 3 Gubbins was later to be a major figure in the Special Operations Executive. More interestingly perhaps, for Lobster readers, in the post- war years he was linked to the Bilderberg Group. On this see the brief description at Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk who were of call-up age but in reserved occupations.6 The Auxiliary Units’ uniforms bore the insignia and number of their fictitious Home Guard battalions – the 201st in Scotland, the 202nd in Northern England and 203rd in Southern England. However, the ‘uniforms’ in question were just denims to cover everyday clothes. It would seem unlikely that, in the event of an invasion, patrol members would have had the time to don these extra items of clothing, just so that they would be following the exact letter of the order from on high. Doing so would also have made them a more noticeable presence and less able to blend into the community during the lead up to any actions. In the event of an invasion, the patrols would operate from small underground bunkers.7 Under the cover of night they would have carried out sabotage and disruption activities against the occupying enemy force. Would the effort involved in creating these units have been expended lightly? Would it have been done just in the hope that the force would be able to briefly hold up an advancing army of occupation, as Atkins argues? At the time, some officials predicted that the life- expectancy of members of these units would be two weeks at most. General Paget, Chief of Staff to the C-in-C of Home Forces, wrote to a Captain Sandys on 30 July 1940 regarding the newly forming Auxiliary Units: ‘The object of these fighting patrols is to provide within the general Home Guard organisation small units of men, specially selected and trained, whose role is to act offensively on the flanks and in the rear of any German 6 Amongst the list of reserved occupations were transport workers, farm hands, doctors and those who had taken Holy Orders. One of the wartime members of the regular SAS regiment was Rev. Fraser Mcluskey, later The Very Rev Fraser Mcluskey and Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. See Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk troops who may obtain a temporary foothold in this country.’8 (emphasis added). But what activities would the Auxiliary Units have got up to if an attempted German invasion had achieved anything more than a ‘temporary foothold’? I think that some indication can be found in the fact that the special training the Auxiliary Units received was extensive. This took place at Coleshill House, a 17th Century Palladian mansion in Oxfordshire. The entire grounds were requisitioned and areas for combat practice were dotted around the large estate.9 Instructors on the training courses for the genuine Home Guard, which took place at Osterley Park in West London, included ex-International Brigade veterans from the Spanish Civil War. These men's experience no doubt also proved invaluable for the training of the Auxiliary Units at Coleshill, just 70 miles further west.’ Malcolm Atkins argues that the Special Duties Branch of the Auxiliary Units, who had rudimentary radio communications, would be easily mopped up by any German invading force. But so too would any SIS-backed units who had also been similarly equipped with broadcasting radios. Indeed, Atkins admits that the TRD radio sets, with which Section VII from MI6 had been equipped, ‘were not terribly effective as a spy set’.10 The advantage, as I see it, that the Auxiliary Units Operational Patrols had, was that they did not possess any radios and were, thus, even more clandestine. If they had been given clearly defined geographical operational boundaries, there should have been a good chance that they would have outlasted all of the other types of units. Following the end of the war the experience and tactics taught to the Auxiliary Units was eventually used to help create the Gladio networks in Europe. In addition, the post- W.W.II territorial army regiments of the SAS were similarly 8 Held within National Archives papers at reference CAB 120/241. 9 In this respect it was something of a precursor to the Pontrilas Army Training Area that is currently used by British Special Forces. The PATA, as it is known, includes various target shooting ranges, an aircraft assault simulator and an advanced driving skid-pan. 10 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk trained for action within the borders of the UK in the event of an invasion, or of massive co-ordinated civil unrest.11 I will return to this topic with an examination of UK connections to the Gladio networks and a summary of current UK special forces tasking for activities within their home borders. Nick Must is an independent researcher with a particular interest in Special Forces. In this respect, he admits that his BSc (hons) in Music Technology from London Guildhall University is completely irrelevant. 11 A not wholly inconceivable situation if one contemplates the activities of recent UK governments. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Swedish echoes Nick Must The recent pieces in Lobster by Bernard Porter on the Swedish criminal justice system as it relates to Julian Assange, struck a chord with me. About ten years ago I read a book by a British soldier who claimed that he had suffered an injustice via the Swedish courts. This was Under Fire: My Own Story (London: W. H. Allen, 1989), an account by Captain Simon Hayward, late of Her Majesty’s Life Guards, of being caught up in a drugs bust in the city of Linköping in southern Sweden. In March of 1987 Captain Hayward was arrested when he was found to be driving a car which contained just over 50kg – value at the time approximately £500k – of cannabis. In his testimony and in his book Captain Hayward claimed it was a set-up. He had been completely unaware of the cannabis. He further said that he had been asked by his brother to drive the car from Ibiza to England but took a detour via Sweden to do some skiing. Hayward’s brother soon disappeared and all of the other people involved in the smuggling were arrested and convicted. Think of that what you will. John Gorst (Conservative MP for Hendon North), who had previously met Captain Hayward in the early 80s, made a statement in the House of Commons regarding the situation.1 In doing so, he laid out much the same kind of things as Bernard Porter has been noting about how the Swedish justice system treats those – both the innocent and the guilty – who are caught up in it. To me, however, the most interesting part of John Gorst's statement was this: ‘Captain Hayward is not a constituent of mine, but, as a serving officer in the Life Guards who has been on 1 Hansard 15 May 1987 vol 116 cc488-99. See Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk classified duty in Northern Ireland for the past two years, I do not think that he is a constituent of any hon. Member.’ (emphasis added) This surprising titbit of information seemed to go unnoticed by The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr. Tim Eggar) who, in replying on behalf of the Government, somehow failed to provide the usual ‘refuse to confirm or deny’ blanket that is usually parroted where there is the potential identification of special forces personnel. The final twist in the tale that really appeals to my warped sense of humour is that, during my research to compile this short note, I came across an archived article from the Glasgow Herald of 14 September 1989,2 which states that Captain Hayward had been scheduled to appear on the Terry Wogan chat show as part of the publicity for his book! This appearance had, however, been cancelled at short notice as it was deemed too serious a topic for the ‘family friendly’ Wogan. Captain Hayward’s book mentioned nothing at all about his service in 14 Intelligence Company. No doubt, rightly or wrongly, he felt abandoned by the British state (which he had protected by sanitising what could have been a much juicier tale). Perhaps this is the motivation behind his (alleged) involvement in leaks to the press regarding the more nefarious activities by HM undercover Forces in Northern Ireland. 2 See Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk JFK, Chauncey Holt and the three ‘tramps’ redux Robin Ramsay The identity of the three ‘tramps’, photographed under police escort in Dallas after the assassination of JFK, is one of the many puzzles in the case. Over the years people have put forward various candidates. For example, the ‘old tramp’ looks rather like the CIA officer Howard Hunt. But only one person ever claimed to have been one of ‘tramps’: the late Chauncey Holt. I got interested in this because it seemed to me, just from reading the material on the Net, that the late Mr Holt is important. Since then I have read his memoir, which contains a number of striking claims, almost none of which can be checked easily and many of which are simply uncheckable because the people concerned are dead. (I discuss his book at the end of this piece.) The one claim he made that seems checkable – perhaps the reason he initially focused on it – is that he was one of the three ‘tramps’. And I did not do enough work, and did not do the subject justice in my first attempt at it.1 So I am back at the ‘tramps’. Looking back at the Holt event, he created some initial interest,2 but that faded. As far as I can tell, he failed to convince a group of JFK researchers when he met them at one of the annual conferences;3 and researchers by then had dealt with other ‘confessions’ which had turned out to be bogus. Then the Dallas police arrest records of three ‘tramps’ 1 The first attempt is at Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk picked up near Dealey Plaza after the assassination were discovered in 1992, and none of the names on those sheets was Holt’s.4 Two of those named were tracked down (the third was dead) and confirmed that they had been tramps, hobos; and had indeed been arrested in Dallas after the assassination. At this point most of the researchers gave up on Holt. So what do we have? Centrally we have the famous photographs, the arrest records, and statements by some of the Dallas policemen who were involved. They were interviewed twice, in 1977 for the House Select Committee on Assassinations and by the FBI when the Dallas arrest records were found in 1992. The result of their combined testimony is a muddle.5 But some things are clear. According to those arrest records, Messrs Doyle, Gedney and Abrams were arrested ‘right after the shooting of President Kennedy’.6 During the 1977 House Select Committee on Assassinations inquiry Harold Rose interviewed Marvin Wise, one of the policemen in the photographs, and wrote this: ‘Wise, in company with Bill Bass, Roy Vaughn and Middleton....took the men off the boxcar. Wise stated the men acted scared and he could smell wine on the breath of one of them....Wise took the men over to the Sheriff’s office....He heard over the police radio that a patrolman had been shot, and a little later heard that it was J D Tippit’.7 Another of the Dallas policemen, Billy Bass, photographed with the ‘tramps’, was also interviewed by the HSCA in 1977 and 4 It is striking that these records were discovered less than a year after Holt’s initial exposure in Newsweek magazine. That may simply be a coincidence but there has been so much hanky-panky (and worse) as the US state has tried to hold the ‘lone assassin’ line on the assassination, it is possible that the records were ‘surfaced’ deliberately to (successfully) discredit Holt. 5 The muddle is described at Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk said the same thing. He described delivering the prisoners to a deputy sheriff: ‘....and shortly thereafter heard a call come over police radio that an officer had been shot in Oak Cliff’.8 So: both the Dallas officers photographed escorting the ‘tramps’ said in 1977 that they had done so before news of the murder of Tippit reached Dallas police HQ at 1.15 pm.9 But the photographs of the ‘tramps’ being marched through the centre of Dallas show very long shadows which, even allowing for it being late November, suggest it was later than 1.15 pm. Have the researchers established when the photographs were taken? Yes, they have. In an essay, ‘Texas Archives’, Gary Mack wrote: ‘Researcher Richard Trask located an original negative strip containing two of the Tramp photos. The strip also included a view of the old Texas School Book Depository building showing its rooftop clock, which read 2.19. Since the Tramp photos appeared next in sequence, that established the earliest time for their arrest. But the exact time had to ascertained another way. Researcher Greg Jaynes...... realized that the sun’s shadows on the building would fall in the same place on 8 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk every anniversary. So on November 22, 1997, he rigged up a video camera and set his clock timer to record the shadows’ travel across the wall of the building. Jaynes’ tape confirmed that the pictures were all made immediately after 2.19 pm – nearly two hours after the assassination....’10 Another researcher, Don Bailey, in Texas, reported: ‘On November 22, 1993 during the afternoon hours, I took photos of myself to test the shadow length at 12:30, 1:30, 2:30 and 3:30. The 2:30 picture is the closest match of shadow length in the 3 Tramps photos.’11 2.19 pm is about an hour after the news about Tippit’s shooting reached Dallas Police HQ. So officers Bass and Wise either both misremembered the event in 1977 or they were lying. I think they were lying on instruction; because A. J. Weberman has worked through the two sets of interviews (1997 and 1992) and other official documentation and shows that there were two train searches that afternoon and two sets of ‘tramps’ were taken into custody.12 But didn’t Doyle and Gedney confirm that it was them in the ‘tramps’ photographs? This is certainly widely reported but the situation appears to be more complex. In the FBI reports of their interviews with Gedney and Doyle neither man is asked ‘Is that you in the photographs?’: the FBI were interested in the arrest reports, not the photographs. With John Gedney all I can find is a report by a researcher called Mark Bridger that he had a letter from Gedney saying he was 10 Heritage, Volume 17, Number 3, Summer 1999 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the ‘tall tramp’.13 In the case of Harold Doyle, who was said to be the ‘tramp’ dubbed ‘Frenchy’, there is apparently no direct confirmation, even though he was interviewed on television when the records turned up (this interview is on Youtube). Ray and Mary La Fontaine traced Doyle but got no closer than a group of people who knew him. One of them agreed that the ‘tramp’ pictures showed Doyle – ‘Look at that chin. That’s Harold all right.’ – and dug out a picture she had of Doyle. The Fontaines commented: ‘It was him! Jowly, thirty years older, but with the same scar on his forehead, the same glowering eyes’.14 Doyle in 1992 left and ‘Frenchy’ right. At first glance this is quite plausible but Jack White pointed out: ‘All Frenchy tramp candidates must pass the vertical wrinkle test. All photos of him show a deep VERTICAL “squint” wrinkle of the supraorbital ridge between the 13 Mark Bridger, ‘A rough guide to Oswald lookalikes’ in Dealey Plaza Echo, vol. 7, no. 1, 2003 at Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk eyebrows. I notice such wrinkles because I have one, caused by “squinting” in bright sunlight.’ 15 Doyle has no such wrinkle, as can be seen in the picture above and the others of him from teenage years through to old age which are on-line;16 and, I would add, nor is that quite the same chin, jaw, nose, mouth (and gap between nose and mouth). But this photographic comparison is done in much greater detail by police artist Lois Taylor.17 Doyle is not ‘Frenchy’. Conclusion: Doyle, Gedney and Abrams were arrested soon after the shooting and taken to Dallas Police HQ where they remained, eventually spending three days in jail. An hour or so later, the search of another train – documented by Weberman – turned up the second trio of ‘tramps’ who were photographed en route to Dallas Police HQ just after 2.19 pm.18 Holt’s claim to be one of this second set of ‘tramps’ has not been refuted; and, if he’s telling the truth about this, his account of his role in the assassination should at least be considered. The memoir Holt’s Self-portrait of a Scoundrel (Waterville, Oregon: Trine Day, 2013) begins with an introduction by Wim Dankbar who has been promoting Holt’s claims (and those of James Files). This is followed by a 37 page section by Holt and one Ted Schwartz, a kind of mini-memoir; after which, 40 pages in, we get a table of contents. This is followed by an anonymous interview with Holt and then the memoir proper of 361 pages, which has been very poorly proof-read. Finally we have the 15 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk script of the film made by Dankbar about Holt, ‘Spooks, Hoods and the Hidden Elite’, followed by photographs and copies of letters. In effect we have a memoir plus three abbreviated versions of the same material. Holt says he went to work for Mob boss Meyer Lanksy after WW2, referred to Lansky by a criminal he met while in prison (there is a hint that Holt shot Ben ‘Bugsy’ Siegel). In 1953 Lanksy arranged for him to work as a kind of bagman for the CIA front, the International Rescue Committee.19 In the 1950s Holt was working for IRC, supporting CIA activities in the Caribbean and Central and South America (and helping himself to the barely supervised funds). A pilot as well as a kind of accountant, with expertise in stock fraud and money- laundering, Holt ended up in California in the early 1960s, running a CIA unit making fake documentation and an engineering shop which produced modified weaponry for the Agency. He names various Californians – lawyers, politicians, businessmen – who were working for the CIA, notably one of the main lawyers on the Warren Commission, Joseph Ball. Holt shows the Mob and the CIA working together in the post-WW2 years, long before their well-documented alliance against Castro. Holt moved in a world of CIA contract agents – all deniable, if necessary – some of them career criminals like him, loosely managed, working within and without the United States, entirely free of political control. It is within this context that he locates the two chapters about his unwitting support role in the JFK assassination which is recounted in ‘The View from the Bridge’ in this issue. For Holt that was just one episode in a life of crime. 19 Whose current head is former Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband. I don’t know if IRC is still a CIA front. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Livingstone, Zionism and the Nazis John Newsinger Ken Livingstone’s remarks about the Nazis and Zionism were, to say the least, ill-chosen and unwise. At a time when accusations of anti-Semitism are being used as a stick with which to beat the Left, he played into the hands of those eager to inflict damage by even the most outrageous smears. With the Blairites, the Labour Friends of Israel – urged on by the Israeli Embassy, where the appalling Mark Regev1 is ambassador – and more or less the entire British media waiting for an opportunity to attack, Livingstone unwittingly but still inexcusably provided them with one. With the exception of his assertion that Hitler’s supposed descent into madness was responsible for the Holocaust, his remarks were true. But the dynamic of the Holocaust had nothing to do with insanity, either collective or individual. Nevertheless he provided the appalling John Mann MP with an opportunity to put the Left on the defensive. The spectacle of a blustering, ignorant bullyboy denouncing a lifelong fighter against racism, fascism and anti-Semitism as a ‘Nazi apologist’ was so grotesque as to almost defy belief. But Livingstone should never have put himself in the position where such an assault could be made – not least because the Holocaust is too important to be treated in this way. If Mann’s performance was not deliberately intended to damage Labour’s chances in the local government elections in order to weaken Jeremy Corbyn, then it was a very good impression of one that was. The fact that it was Livingstone 1 Regev is an Australian who emigrated to Israel in his early twenties. He lectured at the Israeli Defence Forces Staff College, worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and from 2007 until 2015 was the chief spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister, a position that saw him justify every Israeli outrage committed in that period. Soon after taking up his new post, he was interviewed on The Andrew Marr Show (1 May) on ‘the anti-Semitism crisis’ in the Labour Party. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk and not Mann who was suspended from Labour Party membership shows what Corbyn is up against. Not only are there are many Labour MPs who would rather lose the next general election than have a left reformist like Corbyn become Prime Minister, there can also be no doubt that the Israeli government regards preventing the election of a Corbyn government, sympathetic to the Palestinian people, as a foreign policy priority. We can safely assume that Regev is working towards that end. Accusations of anti-Semitism against the Left are not only here to stay, but will increase in volume as and when necessary. The Nazis and the Zionists What of the relationship between the Nazis and the Zionists? As Livingstone pointed out, the seminal work here is Lenni Brenner’s 1983 volume Zionism in the Age of Dictators supplemented by his later 2002 collection 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis. But one does not have to turn to Brenner’s important, path-breaking books for an exploration of the relationship. What is proposed here is to look at how this question is dealt with by one of the leading British historians of the Holocaust, someone embraced by the Establishment, a recipient of the OBE no less, the late David Cesarani, in his massive posthumous volume, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-49. Cesarani was descended from Italian immigrants to Britain and both his grandparents and parents were left-wing. His father, a hairdresser, had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s. As Cesarani puts it: ‘Neither my father nor my mother showed much interest in Israel.... For my father the Soviet Union was the idealised territory’. As late as the early 1970s the family holidayed in Yugoslavia because it was cheap, Communist and his father admired Tito. Until he went to secondary school, as far as he was concerned ‘almost all Jewish men were hairdressers, camp and hated Tories’. What won the young Cesarani over to Zionism was the Yom Kippur War of 1973, while he was still at school. He spent Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk the summer of 1974 on a kibbutz in the Negev where he ‘fell madly in love with Israel’. For the next five years he was ‘a Zionist activist’ and spent a gap year working on a kibbutz before going to university. At university he was on the executive of the Union of Jewish Students but he did have ‘nagging doubts over what I had seen in Israel, notably the disrespectful treatment of local Arabs’. He also remarks on his shock during the Freshers’ Fair in his first week at university when he had a look at the General Union of Palestinian Students stall and discovered that the ruins in the kibbutz fields that he had worked on were not crusader ruins as he had been told, but in fact the ruins of an Arab village, destroyed in 1948. By the time he went to the USA to do postgraduate studies, he had become disillusioned with Zionism and even attended Edward Said’s lectures wearing a keffiah. This was only a brief phase. On his return to Britain, not only was he reconciled to a liberal Zionism, but he was also involved in one of the earliest attempts to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, the 1987 controversy over Jim Allen’s play, Perdition, directed at the Royal Court theatre by Ken Loach. Here we had two absolutely committed anti-fascists and anti- racists, staunch opponents of anti-Semitism, slandered as anti-Semites for the dramatic exploration of the relationship between Zionism and the Nazis.2 Sounds familiar! He returned to this theme in a short book he wrote for the Labour Friends of Israel in 2004, The Left and the Jews/The Jews and the Left, complaining that the ‘Nazi-Zionist connection’ has ‘repeatedly surfaced among left-wing intellectuals and parties’.3 Cesarani was an outstanding historian, the author of a number of fine books, culminating in his great Final Solution. 2 For Cesarani’s own account of his biography see his ‘Autobiographical Reflections on Writing History, the Holocaust and Hairdressing’ in Christopher Browning et al, eds., Holocaust Scholarship: Personal trajectories and Professional Interpretations (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015) pp. 67-83. See also his ‘The Perdition Affair’ in Robert Wistrich ed., Anti-Zionism and Anti-semitism in the Contemporary World (London: Macmillan, London 1991). 3 David Cesarani, The Left and the Jews/The Jews and the Left, (London 2004) p. 75 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Consequently it is worth looking at what he has to say about Nazi-Zionist relations. Inevitably, this is only a partial examination of the topic, which was not his central concern in the book, but it is nevertheless of considerable interest and he can hardly be accused of being either anti-Semitic or anti- Zionist. First of all Hitler and the Nazis. For Cesarani the Nazi Party ‘did not come to power because of anti-Semitism. Of course, it was an anti-Semitic party, but it had few concrete ideas about what to do with the German Jews if it took office’. In its early years in power, the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies were ‘marked by improvisation and muddle’ and were not ‘systematic, consistent or even premeditated’. (pp. xxx-xxxi)4 Certainly Hitler hated Jewish people and made clear on numerous occasions that he regarded them as the ‘enemy’. In the 1930s, though, Nazi policy developed into an attempt to drive German Jews out of the country by means of what has been described as a ‘slow pogrom’. This persecution intensified over time, with German Jews being progressively deprived of their civil rights, excluded from the life of German society, prevented from earning a living, reduced to abject poverty and subjected to humiliation and violence at the whim of the Brownshirts and the like. In the 1930s, German Jews were robbed, beaten, tortured, raped and murdered with complete impunity as part of the attempt to force them out of their country. Cesarani brings home the plight of German Jews most effectively by quoting the African American W. E. B. DuBois’ condemnation of the Nazis after a visit to Germany in 1935. He told his African American audience, who had more than enough experience of discrimination, persecution and the most brutal racist violence, that the campaign against the Jews ‘surpasses in vindictive cruelty and public insult anything I have ever seen; and I have seen much’. He described Julius Streicher’s Der Sturmer newspaper as ‘the most shameless, 4 David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-49, (London: Macmillan, 2016). The page numbers of quotes from this book are included in the text. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk lying advocate of race hate in the world’. (p. 107)5 What transformed this ‘old fashioned’ expulsionist and pogromist anti-Semitism into the mass murder of millions of Jewish men, women and children, into attempted genocide was, as Cesarani argues, the Second World War. The Left critique of Zionism at that time is twofold. First, the Zionist project involved denying self-determination to the Palestinian people and their eventual expulsion from Palestine. Second, instead of fighting anti-Semitism in Germany, Poland and elsewhere, the Zionists saw the Nazis as assisting in and encouraging emigration to Palestine and were on a number of occasions to actually collaborate with the anti-Semites to this end. To point out this historic truth is not anti-Semitic. What it brings home is the fact that the fight against anti-Semitism is an essential and vital part of the fight against Zionism, a point to which we will return. What does Cesarani have to say? From the time of the Ha’avara Agreement of August 1933 that was concluded between the Nazis and the German Zionist Federation, ‘German Zionists took minimal interest in the defence of Jewish rights in the Third Reich. In their eyes, the success of National Socialism vindicated their prognostications about the illusion of emancipation’; (p. 69) and the Zionist movement began to grow in Germany in response to Hitler’s rise to power. There were Jewish organisations arguing a different case, most notably the Centralverein (CV), that campaigned against anti- Semitism and for the rights of Jews, and the Jewish ex- servicemen’s organisation, the Reichsbund judischer Frontsoldaten (RjF), which caused the Nazis considerable problems, not least in their efforts at portraying German Jews as unpatriotic. As far as the RjF was concerned, emigration was ‘a form of surrender’. (p. 90) 5 The SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps actually complained in October 1935 about US hypocrisy, pointing out that there were no lynchings in Germany and that if there were the world would be up in arms, while there was international silence when such episodes routinely took place in the USA. See my Fighting Back: The American working class in the 1930s (London: Bookmarks, 2012) p. 119. See also footnote 382. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk By the winter of 1934, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi intelligence agency, was congratulating itself on the fact that ‘the Zionists had gained the upper hand over the CV and Jewish veterans’. There was still a fear, however, that if the Jews could not be forced to emigrate then ‘We will perhaps have to recognise the Jews as a minority, and then they will be on our hands for the rest of eternity.’ To avoid this, SD policy was, as Cesarani puts it, ‘to weaken the national- German Jews’ and to help achieve this ‘the SD favoured the Zionists and promoted their activity’. Cesarani also quotes Gestapo headquarters on Gestapo policy at this time: ‘The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to further emigration’. The Gestapo boasted that ‘we now have well- regulated emigration whose sole destination is Palestine’. (p. 96) Most astonishingly, although this is not referred to by Cesarani, in September 1935, Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SD and later one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, wrote in the SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, that the regime was ‘in complete agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, the so-called Zionism, with its recognition of the solidarity of Jewry throughout the world, and the rejection of all assimilationist ideas.’6 Nevertheless, as Cesarani points out: ‘The Nazis were not Zionists in any conventional sense of the word’ because in the end ‘they did not care where Jews went when they left Germany, and treated Palestine as merely a dumping ground’. (p. 126) Regardless of Heydrich’s momentary enthusiasm, the Nazis made use of the Zionists as a way of helping them to drive the Jews out of Germany and, when this policy seemed to falter, they were quite content with driving them out regardless of their destination. There were voices raised that warned of the dangers of having the Zionists establish an independent state in the Middle East, but it seems that in the 1930s the main priority remained expelling the Jews from Germany. 6 Francis Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985) p. 57. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Zionism and the German Jews What of the Zionist attitude towards the German Jews as they bore the brunt of this new wave of European anti-Semitism that the Nazis were spearheading? In January 1934, the American, James McDonald, was appalled by the attitude of Chaim Weizmann when he ‘expressed his contempt for German Jews as a whole, his indifference to their fate, and for that matter, his indifference to the fate of millions of Jews elsewhere, just so long as a saving remnant could be preserved in Palestine’. (pp. 132-133) Weizmann was not alone among the Zionist leadership in giving expression to such brutal and callous sentiments. Even more notoriously, after the Kristallnacht pogrom, David Ben Gurion told a closed meeting of the Jewish Agency: ‘If I knew that all the Jewish children of Europe could be saved by settlement in Britain and only half could be saved by settlement in Palestine, I should choose the latter’.7 As Cesarani makes clear, the Zionists were not so much concerned with rescuing Jews from persecution as with building their settlement in Palestine. To this end they gave priority to young emigrants so that elderly Zionists found themselves effectively abandoned to their fate. This had ‘dramatic consequences.... A wave of suicides swept through the ranks of elderly Zionists who realised their dream was thwarted’. (p. 133) The Nazis actually monitored the Jewish suicide rate which was ‘to them.... a benchmark of success’. (p. 225) But how did the Zionists respond to the racist 1935 Nuremberg Laws? According to Cesarani, ‘Zionist and Orthodox Jews.... applauded the recognition of Jews as a minority and the establishment of separate spheres along religious and racial lines’. He notes how Willy Cohn, for example, as a Zionist welcomed ‘racial separation’, while ‘from a Jewish point of view’ he unhesitatingly approved the ban on mixed marriages’. (p. 109) By 1936-37 there were fears that the drive to expel German Jews from the country had stalled. Partly this was because of the great Palestinian Revolt, the First Intifada, but 7 Bernard Avishai, The Tragedy of Zionism (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985) p. 152 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk also, as far as the Nazis were concerned, because life was not yet hard enough. In 1937, the SD produced its ‘Guidelines on the Jewish Question’, which made clear that for the regime the struggle against the Jews was ‘from the outset a basic principle of National Socialism.... The Jew is for the National Socialist simply the enemy’. This necessitated ‘the total deJewification of Germany’ which the Guidelines made clear was ‘thinkable only through the Zionist emigration’. (p. 128) Kristallnacht The persecution of German Jews was intensified and became increasingly violent, culminating in the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 which left ‘around 1,000 synagogues and prayer rooms.... gutted or smashed up’, some ‘7,500 shops, out of about 9,000 remaining in Jewish hands.... wrecked’ and ‘over ninety Jews.... killed and several women raped and abused’. (p. 184) Perhaps as many as 30,000 Jews were arrested and interned in concentration camps where they were systematically brutalised, many of them not surviving the experience (in Dachau 187 died, in Buchenwald 222 died and in Sachsenhausen nearly 100). Even though the pogrom was staged without any SD or Gestapo involvement and ‘provoked the wrath of Goring and Himmler, neither of whom had been included in the planning’ (p. 191), it initiated a dramatic intensification in the persecution of the Jews. Himmler had actually ordered the SS not to get involved (many of them ignored the instruction) and both Heydrich and Eichmann were furious at what they regarded as the return of the old fashioned anti-Semitism of the mob as opposed to their own more modern, bureaucratic methods of achieving the forced emigration of the Jewish population. The two approaches were to be increasingly combined. Meanwhile in 1936, the SD had even established covert contact with the Haganah, the Zionist self-defence force in Palestine, that helped the British crush the Palestinian revolt. Although Cesarani does not mention it, this relationship involved the smuggling of German weapons to the Haganah Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk for use against the Palestinians.8 And in October 1937, two SD officials, Herbert Hagen and Adolf Eichmann, visited Palestine for discussions about ‘increasing Jewish emigration’. (p. 131) They were deported by the British. (Eichmann’s next visit was when he stood trial in 1961.) The SD was also involved with ‘people smuggling’, working with the likes of Berthold Storfer, who smuggled people into Palestine for profit, independent of the Zionists. This was ‘on the basis of their mutual desire to get Jews out of the country by fair means or foul’. Eichmann ‘placed him in charge of organising and financing illegal transports of Jews to Palestine’. (pp. 219, 281) This forced emigration continued up to and beyond the outbreak of the War. Cesarani’s discussion of Nazi anti-Semitism in the 1930s occupies some 200 pages in a book with 796 pages of text. What follows after is a powerful, indeed essential account of the road to mass murder, of the frightful crimes perpetrated by the Nazis and their accomplices, of the terrible fate of European Jews at the hands of their persecutors; but also of their resistance, not only in Warsaw and the ghettos, in the partisan movements across Europe, and even in the death camps themselves, in Treblinka and Sobibor. The book is a fitting monument to the work of a fine historian and deserves to be on the shelves of every library in the country. Justice delayed One last point regarding his achievements as a historian: Cesarani’s first book, Justice Delayed: How Britain became a refuge for Nazi war criminals, needs to be read in conjunction with Final Solution. In Justice Delayed, Cesarani shows how the post-war Labour government knowingly allowed Baltic and Ukrainian SS veterans to resettle in Britain. In April 1947, the entire 14th Waffen-SS Galizien Division, nearly 9,000 Ukrainians, was shipped from Italy to Britain, although for some of them Britain was merely a transit stop on their way to Canada and elsewhere. As Cesarani observes, with 8 Francis Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985) p. 63 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk remarkable restraint, the ‘complicity’ of certain Foreign Office officials ‘extended to concealing possible war criminals.... officials should have known that amongst the men of the Ukrainian Division there were probably Nazi collaborators and mass murderers’. Men who had participated in the murder of Jewish civilians, including women and children, were allowed to settle in Britain. Many of them settled in Yorkshire, where they ‘still held pro-fascist views thirty years later’ and ‘combined perfectly respectable lives with unyielding allegiance to the ideals which had led many of them into the ranks of the Waffen-SS’. One reason for the Labour government welcoming these men into Britain was that they were ‘a fertile recruiting ground for the SIS’. They were also seen as a source of labour in view of the post-war labour shortage, although this caused some problems. Cesarani reports on official discussions regarding the problems likely to be caused if British miners found themselves in the pithead showers alongside men sporting SS tattoos. In the end, the Home Office reluctantly agreed to allow the National Coal Board to ban men with SS tattoos ‘from entering mining work’ although later ‘the policy might be amended’. Instead they would be placed in jobs where ‘they were not obliged to remove their outer clothing’. This was, as Cesarani remarks, quite literally a ‘cover-up’. Even more shocking is the fact that at the very same time as former members of the SS were being allowed to settle in Britain, the Labour government took the decision to keep European Jews, survivors of the Holocaust, out. As Cesarani points out, ‘Jews were consistently excluded from all labour recruitment schemes’. While over 200,000 East Europeans were allowed in to work and settle, the only Jews allowed in were under the Distressed Relatives Scheme, ‘around 2,000, including 743 Jewish children who had lived through the experience of the camps and the ghettos’. ‘Jews, Blacks and Asians’ were not wanted, and this included Black and Asian men who ‘had fought in the British armed forces during the war’ but were quickly repatriated once the fighting was over. It is, he observes, once again with remarkable Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk restraint, ‘all but impossible to avoid the conclusion that racism was at work’.9 What political conclusions can we draw from all this? One seems overwhelmingly obvious: any campaign against Zionism has to have at its centre an uncompromising opposition and hostility to anti-Semitism. In the 1930s, Zionism only prospered when the anti-Semites were in the ascendancy. Indeed one can go so far as to say that without the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany and Eastern Europe, the likelihood is that the Zionist project would have failed because there would not have been enough Jewish men and women wanting to emigrate to Palestine. So much was certainly recognised by Zionists at the time. If the United States, Britain, and other countries had opened their doors to Jews fleeing the Nazis, these countries would almost certainly have been the destiny of choice for the overwhelming majority of European Jews. Instead, the doors were kept closed except for a comparative few. Once again, this was anti-Semitism at work. It was European anti-Semitism, culminating in mass murder and attempted genocide, that made the Zionist project viable at the expense, we have to insist, of the Palestinian people. Consequently the fight against anti-Semitism is a vital part of the fight against Zionism. John Newsinger is a semi-retired academic. A new edition of his British Counterinsurgency has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan. 9 David Cesarani, Justice Delayed: How Britain became a refuge for Nazi war criminals (London: Heinemann, 1992) pp. 79-81, 96, 98-100, 131, 157 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk My Turn Hillary Clinton targets the presidency Doug Henwood OR Books: London and New York, 2015, £10/$15, p/b There cannot be many people perusing these columns who have much interest left in Hillary Clinton. If you think of her as a careerist, corporate hack, your prejudices about her will be confirmed by this account of her life. We could be generous and say that her political career is a depressing if unsurprising illustration of the necessary compromises with the realities of American politics required of anyone aspiring to be a Democratic president in an age when political funding by corporations is unrestricted. But there is no evidence here that she (or husband Bill) ever saw as compromises the neocon/corporate views on the economy and social welfare which they espoused long before they had the White House in sight. The Clintons discovered that attacking the poor and the trade unions was electorally popular way back in their days in Arkansas. For a British reader this tale has resonance, for the Blair/Brown faction within the Labour Party copied the Clintons’ ‘New Democrats’ strategy right down the line,1 the only real difference being that the opposition to the changes within Labour put up more of a fight than the opposition in the Democrats and the American unions.2 As the author documents Clinton’s positions, changes and backtracking, he shows in considerable detail it’s not that she ‘sold out’: she had nothing to sell in the first place. Her ‘journey’ hasn’t been from left to right: neither she nor Bill was even vaguely on the left. The author notes that with the rise of left-leaning Bernie Sanders as a presidential contender, Hillary is – of course! – moving slightly to the left. Yes, she’s a 1 This is glossed over in Tom Bower’s Gordon Brown (2004) which I skimmed through recently. If you wonder why Labour Party members chose Corbyn, this account of Brown’s careerism, strange personality and feuds with Blair shows the kind of thing they were reacting against. 2 Centrally, NuLab and the New Democrats abandoned the urban working class because they presented problems which could not be solved within the conceptual framework created by the dominant ethos of globalisation and the free movement of capital. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk woman and a female president would be a significant step. But that’s all one could say. With people like Clinton, who have maintained a public front for nearly forty years, I find myself wondering: ‘So what does she really think about X? How does she talk with her confidants?’ We may find out one day when her political career is over and her inner circle write their memoirs. I think Henwood would say that the answer is going to be that what the public saw is what there was. This is a short book, only 126 pages of text; but it has 40 pages of footnotes. The author explains that his first writing about Hillary in a piece for Harpers Magazine produced several lengthy attempts at refutation by her supporters. In this expanded version of that article he leaves nothing unsourced. This is nicely written, a pleasure to read and very good indeed. Robin Ramsay Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Haters, Baiters and Would-be Dictators Anti-Semitism and UK Far Right Nick Toczek London: Routledge, 2016; £24.99, p/b This is a very detailed account of the British anti-semites of the first half of the twentieth century, the hard-core handful who believed that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion really was a blueprint for Jewish domination of the world and devoted their lives to propounding this belief. Toczek concentrates on Henry Beamish, the founder of this dismal dynasty, but we also learn about the Protocols British publisher, The Britons, Arnold Leese – Beamish’s successor – and Colin Jordan, the last in the line.1 These used to be just names to me, predecessors of the National Front and British Movement, about whom I knew almost nothing. Now, after decades of research by Toczek, we have their lives, their finances, their beliefs, their disputes, their correspondence and their publications laid before us. And what a strange, unattractive bunch they were! Which is reassuring for my understanding of the unity of personality: for what if one of these anti-semitic obsessives had been interesting, intelligent and good company? On Toczek’s account there isn’t one of them you would have enjoyed talking to. (Listening to is probably more accurate; these people were transmitters not receivers.) There is no real indication from these biographical sketches of why these people ended up with their heads full of this particular rubbish. There is just the occasional glimpse of the conjunction of personal ambition or frustration intersecting with these ideas, offering gratification to the individual concerned, nudging them in that direction, when with slightly different circumstances they might have gone down another route. What is now missing is the context in which these ideas could be taken even half seriously. In the late 19th and early 20th century there was very little data available about this society and its workings, let alone those abroad. The idea of 1 There are also substantial appendices on related figures and groups. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk mysterious secret societies of ‘others’ pulling the strings behind the curtain was less implausible than it is now.2 Even someone as sophisticated and politically connected as Alfred Milner – one of the key figures in the British ‘establishment’ for 30 years – could believe the Russian revolution was the work of a Jewish conspiracy (p. 25). And if Milner could contemplate this, could write of himself as a ‘race patriot’ (p. 26), perhaps the issue isn’t why Beamish et al fell for this tripe, but why so few others in this country did, compared with many other societies in Europe. Did any of this matter? Toczek argues that the fact the Protocols is still around, and is still taken seriously by many, especially in the Arab world, is largely down to the proselytising efforts of Henry Beamish and The Britons group who kept it in print for decades. Maybe so.3 On the other hand, after Mrs Thatcher’s second election victory in 1983, while the British Left (me included) were scrabbling about trying to understand the strange people with the antiquated ideas who had taken over at Westminster, G.C. Webber published his then-groundbreaking The Ideology of the British Right 1918-39.4 In that, the anti-semites, Beamish and Leese, were very marginal figures. Nothing presented by Toczek in this impressive bit of research suggests that they were anything more. Robin Ramsay 2 The Jewish conspiracy theory has been in decline in the West ever since the Internet got established. There are other, sexier theories, perhaps, for those who need such things. 3 Knowing nothing of the Protocols’ history outside the UK, this is the one judgement here that I am unsure of. 4 London: Croom Helm, 1987 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk ALL RIGHT BOYS General Walker and the Murder of President Kennedy Jeffrey H. Caufield, MD. Moreland, Ohio: Moreland Press, 2015. 987 pp., illustrated, notes, index. This is a monumental work based on some twenty-five years of archival research and personal interviews. There is much new information here that fills out the sketchier accounts on many matters in other works. However, despite a valiant effort, Caufield does not prove that the American radical right was behind JFK’s assassination. Nevertheless it is certainly a book worth reading. The critical community has often been dismissive of much of the far right grass roots, and the John Birch Society is particular has often been seen as a bit of a joke, perhaps influenced by Sterling Hayden’s portrayal of General Jack D. Ripper in the film Dr. Strangelove (1963) – fluoridation, ‘precious bodily fluids’, and so on. Caufield offers a corrective view based on detailed research and shows its support was widespread and influential. Promoting a right-wing agenda went hand in hand with rooting out left-wingers and communists who were seen to be everywhere. (Don’t forget, this was the height of the Cold War and Senator Joe, though dead, was still a big hero in many quarters). Indeed, Caufield shows that Guy Banister’s main concern in New Orleans was just that, smokin’ out the commies, and Oswald seems to have played a part in it. The opening forty-seven pages, Chapter 1, details Bannister and Oswald’s relationship in this area. Caufield has visited many areas and done research that should have been done years ago. I’m thinking particularly of his examination of Joseph A. Milteer and Willie Somersett; of Clay Shaw, Kerry Thornley and Gordon Novel; of General Walker’s life and times; and Oswald in Clinton, to mention but several. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Years ago the Hollywood trade paper Variety would describe a brilliant failure as a flop d’estime, and it is a term that could be applied to this book in as much as it does not prove its main argument. But don’t let that put you off. This is essential reading. Caufield has a website: http://jeffreycaufield.com/. The book can be obtained directly from there for $39.00. It is also available via amazon US at various prices. Anthony Frewin Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Broken Vows Tony Blair the Tragedy of Power Tom Bower London: Faber and Faber, 2016, £20, h/b Tony McWalter, a Labour MP and former philosophy lecturer, rose at Prime Minister’s Questions on 28 February 2002 and asked the following question: ‘Since my Right Honourable friend is sometimes subject to rather unflattering or even malevolent descriptions of his motivations would he provide the House with a brief characterisation of the political philosophy which he espouses and which underlies his policies?’ Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, A.N. Wilson described what followed: ‘Mr Blair was, for the moment, uncharacteristically, silenced. Then, he began to waffle in his customary fashion. He spoke of NHS investment plans and the appointment of Sir Magdi Yacoub to head a new scholarship scheme. Most of the sketch-writers who reported the moment saw it as typical of New Labour's desire to “spin”. Ask Blairites a direct question, and they will start force-feeding you with propaganda about their glorious achievements in health, transport and good old education.’1 Wilson’s view is very much Bower’s. Broken Vows tells us that the man once called ‘Bambi’ was perhaps as empty-headed as the epithet suggests. And of course, wrong-headed, too, about so many things. Bowers writes with regret – the regret of a Labour voter in 1997 who, like so many, was suckered in by the promise of that Bambi freshness. Tony broke Tom’s heart. But I am not sure I have learnt what were those broken vows. What exactly was Bower –or indeed any of us – expecting? The received view of New Labour’s rush to the till-death- do-us-part section of those vows has at its core the perpetual 1 Sunday Telegraph 3 March 2002 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk acrimony between Brown and Blair, which paralysed decision- making and split the party, the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the Civil Service. Of course there is ample evidence to support that view – it is incontestable. But Bower identifies other issues: Blair’s lack of policy leadership, his absence of a historical perspective (especially in the context of Labour history) and his ‘dithering’. Let’s look at the historical perspective, since I think it contains one of the dead weights which crush Labour politicians and prevent them from developing a true identity, as opposed to something cooked up along with the late Philip Gould’s breakfast. Bower asserts that Blair had no knowledge of Harold Wilson or Jim Callaghan. He doesn’t really explain what exactly he means by this, but I would bet that Blair’s understanding of his immediate Labour predecessors in No. 10 was shaped by the myth that their economic record was a shambles; that everything should be seen through the prism of the ‘Winter of Discontent’; and that their mismanagement inevitably led to the dawn of Thatcherism and the triumph of individualism over collectivism. I don’t propose here to pore over why I think Labour’s 1970s economic record was nowhere near as bad as the NuLab crowd seem to accept. What is evident to me – and this whole process was repeated during the last election – is that the Labour leadership is scared shitless of defending its economic record when compared to that of the Tories. Saying that doesn’t make past mistakes any better of course, but it does mean that Labour repeatedly fails to defend or, more importantly, does not try to understand the lessons of its record, while always yielding to the Tories’ economic tune. What becomes a political party – a ‘democratic socialist’ party to boot – when it cannot use words like ‘redistribution’ openly? Or when it concedes the argument on austerity in order to clothe itself in some highly contested theory, merely to look as tough as the other side? Gordon Brown’s reputation as a ‘sound chancellor’ was, after all, founded on two years of sticking to Tory spending plans after 1997. But as Tony Blair once told the PLP (if memory serves), if we want to beat the Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Tories we have to occupy their territory. That’s the way to win – let’s not obsess too much with the past, least of all past failures. The New Labour years did see many failures, but Bower’s somewhat monochromatic history of that period barely allows for any successes. Let’s be fair, there were some which get a passing mention – the national minimum wage, some equality legislation, a peace agreement in Northern Ireland – although Bower omits to mention devolution, which now turns out to be a mixed blessing for Labour. One can’t read Broken Vows and not come to the conclusion that Bower’s sources were mainly people who had a bit of an axe to grind, not only against Blair but also, possibly even more worryingly, against each other. All the 180 senior politicians, civil servants and military top brass that Bower claims to have spoken to all attest to one thing: the dysfunctionality of the UK government was at least as much their fault as was the new style ‘sofa’ administration of T. Blair. I wonder if this could be the implicit target of Broken Vows. If it is, then it hits the nail on the head. The UK is run by a class of individuals who collectively couldn’t run a piss-up in a brewery, and no end of cajoling, threats and dismissals (although there weren’t enough of those) by a here-today- gone-tomorrow politician is going to make much difference. As for the politicians, having seen so many close-up I can attest that the lure of a ministerial red box can be overwhelming. It confirms their indispensability. And, to boot, I often wondered whether those red boxes ever contained any evidence which might actually support the latest policy adventure of its keeper. I would like to have seen Bower spend more time on New Labour’s relationship with the City, especially in the light of the recession. That would be a welcome subject for another book; for one thing that Bower does bring to his trade is an ability to extract unwitting confessions from his witnesses. But one wonders whether the public is ready for another volume on what happened in the Brown/Blair years – a thought prompted by the fact that this one has been on sale at half Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk price on the high street almost immediately after publication. What is definitely of current interest is what Blair is up to in his post-Prime Ministerial career as a multimillionaire. Could that tell us more about the man than all his years in office? Could that tell us why we are so cynical about our ruling class, or at least the ‘left of centre’ part of it? Nobody would bat an eyelid at the thought of a Tory seeking financial aggrandisement – we all know that’s what they believe in. But even now it has come as bit of a shock to see Labour grandees falling prey to the lure of bling in quite the same way as Blair, Mandelson et al. The old saw that Tory politicians were more likely to fall victim to sex scandals whilst Labour politicians fell victim to financial scandals (each stereotype, of course, reflecting their different supposed deficiencies) seems to be upheld today. I recall at the 2011 Labour Party conference being upbraided by an irate ex-Chief Whip, Baroness Hilary Armstrong (who succeeded her father into her seat in the Commons), for suggesting in a letter published in The Guardian that senior Labour politicians might desist from raking in the cash after their turn at the helm. That followed the news that Baroness Sally Morgan, once of Blair’s circle, had sat on the board of a care home business that went bust. What, I wonder, was her contribution? And what, I wonder, did she think her contribution would do to enhance the public’s perception that Labour is different from them – the Tories? Blair’s recent admission that he doesn’t understand what’s happened to the Labour Party with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader merely reflects his inability to grasp the idea that not only should Labour not ape Tory policies, it should also not ape Tory behaviour. In Tony-speak (at least according to Bower and there’s little contrary evidence) it’s a kind of duty to demonstrate that we can all become multimillionaires, even if it means mixing it with the world’s dictators. Isn’t this just a more sublime enactment of that precious phrase ‘equality of opportunity’ after all? Blair’s ever present get-out clause is to explain that his real motivation is to civilise these people, rather than Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk develop his bank balance. Pity he didn’t try that on Saddam Hussein rather than clinging onto George W. Bush’s coat tails. He did try it with Gaddafi but that particular failure of ambition floundered on bad timing when Gaddafi was executed crawling out of a drain. While Broken Vows makes little attempt to consider the positives that may have emerged from Labour’s thirteen years in office (and I would cite the albeit flawed Climate Change Act and other climate change initiatives as deserving recognition), I would recommend it as essential reading for any aspiring politician of the left. Bower’s detailed chapters on health, education, energy and immigration provide a very useful primer on how not to go about things. Colin Challen Colin Challen was MP for Morley and Rothwell from 2001-2010. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Malevolent incompetence Chaos and Caliphate Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East Patrick Cockburn London and New York: O/R Books, 2016, £19/$28, p/b The first striking thing about this book is that the author survived long enough to write it. Cockburn has spent nearly 20 years years, mostly in the Middle East, reporting in countries where one of the few things the warring parties agree on is that Western journalists are probably spooks, and are thus worth killing. This book (400 plus large, trade format pages) is constructed from Cockburn’s original dispatches, plus notes and diary entries from the war zones as he followed the consequences of the American foreign policy in the Middle East and Afghanistan. The chapters follow the chronology: the imposition of sanctions on Iraq (and about one millions deaths as a result; a UN-sanctioned atrocity); the invasion of Afghanistan and the initial overthrow of the Taliban; the American-led assault on Iraq in 2003 and the ensuing civil war; the overthrow of Gaddafi and ensuing civil war; the attempt to do the same in Syria and ensuing civil war. Finally Cockburn gets to the rise of ISIS, which he spotted very early on, and the present chaotic situation with Saudi Arabia and Iran funding proxy armies and NATO member Turkey assisting ISIS and attacking the Kurds (who are fighting ISIS). The major theme here is this: as happened in the former Yugoslavia, if your reference group – family, tribe, community – are threatened, it doesn’t take much for mutual mistrust between communities to turn to paranoia and then killing. Cockburn describes it happening again and again as the Americans (with occasional British support) intervened, got it wrong (though what would getting it right look like?) and learned nothing from their previous failure. You don’t need to be familiar with the large cast of characters and groups which come and go through the story to follow Cockburn’s account. Even though I know little about Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk this field other than what I have skimmed in newspapers, it is a fascinating but depressing read, a series of slow-motion horror shows punctuated by the ubiquitous suicide bomber. At the end of which it still isn’t clear to me if the Americans intended to smash-up the Middle East and trigger all these wars (some neo-cons and the Israeli right certainly hoped they would), or if they simply stumbled into it after the initial idiotic ‘liberation’ of Iraq blew up in their faces. In the publisher’s flyer that accompanied the book there are two comments about Cockburn. At a British Journalism Awards ceremony in 2015 someone said that ‘the Government should consider pensioning off the whole of MI6 and hiring Patrick Cockburn instead’. The second is a quote from one of Sydney Blumenthal’s e-mails to Hilary Clinton when she was Secretary of State, that Cockburn ‘was almost always correct on Iraq’. Both quotes point to another of Cockburn’s themes, which is implicit, rather than explicit: the apparent failure of American and British intelligence. I have to write ‘apparent’ because, with the exception of the invasion of Iraq, where we have seen glimpses of the intelligence and may get more when the Chilcot report finally gets published, we haven’t seen what that intelligence said. I have no idea how accurate British intelligence on the region has been (or even if there was any), or what the Joint Intelligence Committee produced for the politicians. Since the fall of the Soviet Union a cadre of pols and military have appeared in the USA who took seriously Karl Rove’s notorious claim that, as the only remaining super power, America could ‘make its own reality’. One of the consequences of this has been the corruption of the intelligence system: careers are now made by telling those in the hierarchy above you what they want to hear. Not that this hasn’t had opposition. Karen Kwiatkofski was a US Air Force officer who saw the intelligence process manipulated by the neo-cons in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and began writing about it anonymously, while still serving, and openly when she quit.1 In 2007 a National Intelligence Estimate on 1 See for example Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Iran was held up for a year while the Bush regime tried to get it changed to fit their policy.2 And last year it was reported that a group of US intelligence officers formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda in Syria were being altered by those above them, to make them fit the White House line that US policy was succeeding in Syria.3 A good intelligence service should be a candid friend, as Sydney Blumenthal was for Hilary Clinton when she was Secretary of State; as the late Maurice Oldfield was for Prime Minister Harold Wilson, warning him of the danger and futility of joining America in Vietnam;4 and as the MOD’s Defence Intelligence Staff was prior to the invasion of Iraq, warning that the evidence on weapons of mass destruction was flimsy at best.5 If the candid friend role has become difficult for the intelligence services of the USA faced with the neo-con Yahoos, it is a different problem for those of a middle-ranking ally like the UK. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, despite knowing better, most of the British intelligence/foreign policy system went along with the prime minister who was, in turn, desperate to cling to the Americans. There is no evidence that there has been any British dissent from the American line since then. So great is the British state’s subservience to the 2 Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Americans, it is almost inconceivable that the prime minister would not support American foreign policy; and so, with an independent British foreign policy largely precluded, what is the point of having British intelligence services? Robin Ramsay Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Blood Year Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror David Kilcullen London: Hurst and Co., 2016, £9.99, p/b David Kilcullen has established a reputation for himself as the ‘thinking person’s counterrevolutionary’. An Australian national, formerly a professional soldier with counterinsurgency expertise. According to his own testimony he served ‘the Bush administration in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia’. Since then he has served the Obama administration ‘in many of the same places as an adviser and consultant to the US government, NATO and allied governments’. Today he heads up Caerus Associates, a private consultancy, and has even been embraced as one of their own by the ubiquitous McKinsey consultancy, the so-called ‘Jesuits of Capitalism’. His reputation has been established by his readiness to publicly criticise Western policy: both the original invasion of Iraq, for example, and more recently the US policy of assassination by drone. His earlier books, The Accidental Guerrilla and Out of the Mountains, established his credentials as an expert in the field of counterinsurgency, and now we have Blood Year, an assessment of what Western strategy has achieved. The picture is pretty grim: ‘In the northern [hemisphere] summer of 2014, in less than 100 days, ISIS launched its blitzkrieg in Iraq, Libya’s government collapsed, civil war engulfed Yemen, a sometime small-town Iraqi preacher named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself caliph, the latest Israel- Palestine peace initiative failed in a welter of violence.... and the United States and its allies, including the United Kingdom and Australia, sent troops and planes back to Iraq.... Thirteen years, thousands of lives and billions of dollars after 9/11, any progress in the war on terrorism had seemingly been swept away in a matter of weeks.’ On top of this Russia had ‘reignited Cold War tensions by formally annexing Crimea.... and armed and sponsored Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Ukrainian rebels’. Arguably, the situation has continued to deteriorate, not least in Afghanistan, affecting millions of ordinary people who are caught in the cross-hairs. Unlike some military commentators, Kilcullen does not single out the Obama administration for blame. He rather argues for continuity between the last years of the Bush administration, the years from 2005 on, and the Obama years. Although for political reasons, ‘both Republicans and Democrats downplay these similarities....they’re striking all the same’, he insists. Beginning in 2005, initially Bush, then his successor Obama were primarily concerned to extricate themselves from the wars Bush had started. The strategy followed with some variations since 2005 has failed and, as he acknowledges, he shares in the responsibility for this failure as he ‘was part of the team that devised it’. As far as Kilcullen is concerned the invasion of Iraq was ‘the greatest strategic screw-up since Hitler’s invasion of Russia’. This is strong stuff. And as for the subsequent insurgency that apparently took the Bush administration completely by surprise, not only was it predictable, but ‘it was in a series of increasingly strident papers, briefings and memos by experts in guerrilla warfare, counterinsurgency and stabilization operations.... I can’t recall one reputable expert in guerrilla warfare who didn’t predict.... some version of the disaster that followed’. Kilcullen’s acceptance of responsibility is part of the forthright persona that he cultivates in his writing. Indeed he often takes the sceptical reader by surprise: for example, observing that British and US criticisms of Assad’s appalling human rights record are somewhat compromised by their readiness to ‘render’ terrorism suspects to Syria for interrogation. In September 2002, the unfortunate Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, was kidnapped during a stopover in New York and flown to Syria where he was ‘allegedly tortured for almost a year but later declared innocent of any terrorist connection’. We can safely remove the word ‘allegedly’ from this quotation; but otherwise Kilcullen’s remarks are not what one expects from a counterinsurgency expert working for the Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk United States. Similarly, his discussion of Iran notes that ‘those of us who served in Iraq always saw Iranian actions as aggressive – understandably, I guess, since they were doing their best to kill us’; but then he goes on to acknowledge ‘....that Tehran’s motivation to acquire nuclear weapons, sponsor terrorists, launch covert operations and expand its influence across the region may partly have been a completely rational defensive reaction to early US moves in the War on Terror’. Not only was Iran put on notice as part of ‘the Axis of Evil’, but Iranians were well aware of ‘a history of Western aggression’ against their country, going back to the CIA-SIS sponsored coup of 1953. He makes the point that the US had no problem with the Shah’s nuclear programme (‘the United States gave Iran its first reactor in 1959’), had shot down an Iranian airliner in 1988 and supported Saddam Hussein in the Iran- Iraq War. Moreover, Iran initially collaborated with the US in the War on Terror, supporting, for example, the US overthrow of the Taliban and only becoming hostile in the face of US threats. One should not get too carried away with such brutal honesty, however, because this is not a radical honesty, but rather a realpolitik honesty. Kilcullen speaks truth to power not to humble the powerful, but to enable them to exercise their power more effectively. US imperial interests are best served by an unblinking engagement with the real nature of affairs, rather than with a propaganda version. But this honesty only stretches so far. There is no unblinking engagement, for example, with the problems that the Saudi regime has caused – and will continue to cause – for the United States in the Middle East. Saudi influence in the US (and in Britain) is so strong that the regime’s part in contributing to the disasters of the Blood Year and after is not explored. We shall return to this question. And much the same goes for the part played by Israel. Similarly, while he quite correctly indicts the corruption of the Maliki government in Iraq, he does not criticise the even more corrupt Karzai government in Afghanistan, a government Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk of warlords and drug traffickers, to anything like the same extent for reasons that are nowhere apparent. On a more mundane level, he does not really acknowledge the part played by the excesses of the US military in provoking the Iraqi insurgency. The Americans tortured prisoners to death in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and it is difficult to believe that Kilcullen was not aware of this conduct. We can be reasonably confident that allegations of torture by the US are true, because they come not from the Left, but from General Ricardo Sanchez, the US military commander in Iraq from June 2003 until June 2004. In his 2008 memoir, Wiser in Battle: a Soldier’s Story, Sanchez writes that by the end of 2002, ‘there is irrefutable evidence that America was torturing and killing prisoners in Afghanistan’. (p. 150) Indeed, ‘every level in the chain of command (from Afghanistan to Washington) either knew or should have known....that deaths as a result of torture had occurred in Afghanistan’. (p. 153) This ‘harsh interrogation’ was then exported to Iraq. It was, according to Sanchez, ‘a colossal mistake’, but the Bush administration ‘created an environment of fear and retribution that made top military leaders hesitant to stand up to the administration’s authoritarianism’. He actually describes the Abu Ghraib scandal as ‘a grotesque blessing for our country’ because ‘it forced America to walk away from the uncontrolled interrogation environment that had been established back in 2002 when the Bush administration suspended the Geneva Conventions’. (p. 456) This is an astonishing indictment to come from the man in charge in Iraq. Sanchez describes the Iraq War as ‘a national nightmare’. (p. 454) The biggest problem with Kilcullen’s approach, however, is that he actually takes the War on Terror or rather the Great War on Terror seriously as a strategic problem. In reality it was always a convenient ideological construct, used to provide a pretext for US military aggression that was intended to reshape the Middle East, remove inconvenient regimes and establish an unchallenged US domination over the region. In practice, US economic and military power did not prove to be Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk up to the task and, instead of US domination, what we have seen is the region gripped by a bloody proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, a very strong case can be made that this war was actually launched by al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) acting on behalf of the Saudis. Far from the Saudis regarding AQI as a threat, their deliberate plunging of Iraq into bitter sectarian war was absolutely congruent with Saudi policy. Kilcullen certainly chronicles the bestial atrocities committed by AQI against both the Sunni and Shia communities, deliberately provoking Shia reprisals by their attacks and, if these were not forthcoming, horrifically torturing to death Sunnis, including children, so that the Shia militia would be blamed. This sectarian warfare was, as Kilcullen points out, condemned by Osama Bin Laden, for whom the United States was the main enemy. One of Bin Laden’s complaints was that a sectarian Sunni-Shia war would actually benefit the Saudi regime by forcing Sunni Arabs throughout the Middle East to look to it for support and protection. While the involvement of the Pakistani secret state in supporting the Taliban is now comparatively well-known and widely acknowledged, the role of the Saudis in sponsoring first AQI and later Islamic State (ISIS) still remains hidden, indeed positively taboo. The best way to regard ISIS is as a monster created, at least in part, by a Saudi Frankenstein: a monster that has escaped its creator’s control and has become a threat to him, as well as everyone else. Moreover, one has to distinguish between the international jihadis who have rallied to the ISIS cause and the Iraqi Sunni leaders who are using ISIS to fight their sectarian war with the Shia, and who have local – rather than global – concerns. In contrast, the degree of collaboration between the Turkish government and Islamic State is more generally recognised. One of the most interesting parts of Kilcullen’s book is his discussion of ISIS’s military performance, in particular the innovative use they make of suicide bombing. In their attack on Ramadi in May 2015, government fortifications were initially attacked by ‘six simultaneous suicide car bombs, including Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk armoured Humvees and an armor-plated truck.... These car bombs, including one driven by a British suicide bomber, devastated the defences with giant explosions which (in at least one case) levelled an entire city block.... Over the next two days, ISIS launched at least another twenty suicide bombs (roughly one every two hours)....’ He makes the very important point that, whatever the weaknesses of the Iraqi Army, ‘almost any troops in the world’ would have been broken by such an attack. As he puts it, ISIS were waging conventional war by unconventional means. They had turned the suicide bomber from a dumb weapon to terrorise a civilian population into a smart bomber for effective use on the battlefield, and he compares them to the Japanese Kamikaze attacks towards the end of the Second World War. Such a tactic depends, of course, on the continued supply of international jihadis. ‘After fourteen years, thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, we’re worse off today than before 9/11, with a stronger, more motivated, more dangerous enemy than ever’, he writes. So what is Kilcullen’s remedy for dealing with what amounts to ‘the collapse of Western counterterrorism strategy as we’ve known it since 2001’? We are, he insists, still engaged in ‘a Long War’ against a growing terrorist threat, complicated by the revival of Russian power, both in Europe and in the Middle East. A defensive stance is not an option and instead he advocates a massive increase in the resources devoted to restoring US power throughout the world, and more particularly ‘a full-scale conventional campaign to destroy ISIS’. (It is worth noting that this seems to be the approach advocated by Donald Trump at the time of writing.) The crippling cost of such a strategy, the military losses that would be inevitably sustained carrying it out and the years that Western troops would have to remain in place in order to give it even a slim chance of success, rule it out. Much more likely is more of the same: the United States will wage war by means of proxy armies which it will support with special forces, airpower and, of course, assassination by drone. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk John Newsinger John Newsinger is a semi-retired academic. A new edition of his British Counterinsurgency has just been published. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk Another View Broken Vows Tony Blair: the tragedy of power Tom Bower London: Faber, 2016, £20, h/b This is a disappointing book. Eagerly awaited, upon delivery it has turned out to be compromised, undone by a failure to put the New Labour governments into their broader social and political context. What made New Labour possible was the massive defeats inflicted on the labour movement during the Thatcher years, in particular the defeat of the miners and then the print workers. These historic victories for the British capitalist class shifted the balance of class forces decisively in their direction, making it possible for the Conservatives to begin the pillage of the state, the dismantling of welfare provision and the aggrandisement of the rich and super rich, both British and foreign oligarchs, in a way that had not been seen since the 1930s. The ascendancy of neo-liberalism was predicated on working-class defeat. Moreover, part of this Thatcherite counterrevolution was what I have described elsewhere as the ‘New Corruption’, a modern version of the ‘Old Corruption’ that had characterised politics in the eighteenth century.1 Under the new dispensation, ‘sleaze’ became routine, the essential lubricant of the British political system. This has produced a breed of politicians in all the major parties whose objective in life is to enrich themselves personally, not so much by taking bribes while in government, but by entering into lucrative employment with the banks and businesses to which they had had been of service while in government. In Britain we have a system of corruption by ‘IOU’, post-dated bribes to be redeemed once the recipient has left office. All perfectly legal, of course, but this practice has helped thoroughly corrupt British politics. It was under New Labour, Thatcher’s heirs, that this ‘New Corruption’ became successfully entrenched. British 1 See the discussion in my The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire, (London: Bookmarks, 2013, pp. 239-240). Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk politicians from all parties see themselves as being there to look after the interests of big business and the rich; and they hope to prosper in the process. Tony Blair has come to personify this development. It is worth remembering that Tony Blair was elected to office back in 1997 in a great electoral rejection of Thatcherism, in the confident expectation that measures would be taken to actually roll back at least some of the Thatcherite counterrevolution. Not socialism – few people other than the remnants of Marxism Today expected that – but after the ‘sleaze’ associated with Thatcher’s successor, John Major, some sort of shift in the balance of class forces that strengthened the labour movement, would allow recovery from the defeats of the 1980s and that would go some way to curtail the power and privileges of the rich and super rich. This was never the intention of New Labour. In his memoir Blair makes absolutely clear, for example, that he wholeheartedly supported Thatcher in her confrontation with the unions. There was going to be no trade union recovery under New Labour, not when Rupert Murdoch’s lawyers were given a veto over any industrial relations legislation.2 New Labour set out from the very beginning to consolidate and extend the Thatcherite counterrevolution, something they were explicitly elected not to do. One necessary consequence of this was that New Labour became a byword for dishonesty, for the brazen lie and the sincere deception. This was necessary because New Labour was itself a lie, a party that was at the service of the rich and super rich, that had been elected on the promise that it wasn’t. Most politicians lie, of course, but under Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and co. dishonesty became positively pathological, routine, a way of life. Their lies cost thousands of people their lives. The first great demonstration of Blair’s subservience to wealth and privilege was his historic 1995 journey to the News Corp annual conference at Hayman Island in Australia, to pledge allegiance to the Rupert Murdoch. Neil Kinnock, at 2 Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, (London: Pluto Press, 2002, p. 41) Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk least, appreciated the significance of this when he accused Blair of having ‘sold out before he’s even got there’. Kinnock himself soon came to embrace the central tenets of New Labourism but at that time he grasped the enormity of the leader of the Labour Party kissing the ring of a right-wing union buster, the proprietor of the Sun, a foul reactionary stain on British journalism (and this is in competition with the Daily Mail and the Daily Express). Murdoch is the most pernicious influence on British politics over the last forty odd years. No Labour leader before Blair, not even Ramsay MacDonald, with whom he has some interesting similarities to which we will return, had ever consorted with, deferred to and positively courted the likes of Murdoch before. Interestingly, Murdoch, a profound influence on New Labour, hardly features in Bower’s book before Blair’s retirement and his affair with Murdoch’s wife, Wendi Deng. Even Murdoch found out in the end that you just can’t trust Tony Blair! Rather than New Labour’s subservience to the rich and powerful and embrace of neo-liberalism being the centrepiece of his critique of New Labour, Bower makes the notion of ‘deliverability’ crucial. New Labour failed to deliver the ‘modernisation’ it had promised because of a mixture of incompetence, infighting and personality defects. I suspect that historians looking back on Blair’s health and education policies will see his government beginning the privatisation of these services as part of his subservience to a neo-liberal agenda. This was expressed in the government’s use of the McKinsey consultancy whose people were bought in to advise across the board. Bower seems oblivious to this. This is very disappointing and, at least for this reviewer, those looking for a good journalistic dissection of New Labour on the home front, will be better served by Simon Jenkin’s Thatcher and Sons (Penguin, 2006). Bower is somewhat better on the war front, chronicling the road to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, a grim, dispiriting tale of incompetence, expediency, self-delusion, lies and duplicity. The government’s commitment of too few troops with inadequate equipment in southern Iraq and the British high Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk command’s acquiescence in this still manage to shock. Even as the British position in Basra deteriorated, Blair was pushing for an expanded commitment in Afghanistan. Bower also brings home the complicity of the generals, admirals and spooks in these bloody fiascos that have cost hundreds of thousands of lives and have left much of the Middle East in ruins. One way that Blair tried to repair the damage his wars did to his reputation was by manufacturing a foreign policy success in Libya. In 2003 Gaddafi was persuaded ‘by MI6 to accept Western aid in exchange for surrendering his WMDs’. (p. 405) Blair flew out to Libya to glory in the deal. As Bower writes: ‘The TV pictures for what was called “the deal in the desert” gave Blair much-needed credibility.’ (p. 405) There was a dark side to all this, of course: ‘As a show of goodwill, just before Blair arrived in Libya MI6 and the CIA organised the kidnap of a Libyan jihadi and his wife, who were living in Thailand, and arranged their transportation to Libya for interrogation. The couple’s evidence was to be used in British courts to obtain the deportation to Tripoli of other Libyan dissidents.... Letters sent by Mark Allen, the head of MI6’s counter-terrorism unit, to Moussa Koussa, the head of Gaddafi’s intelligence, included the warning that their agreement needed to be kept secret and not be “discovered by lawyers or human rights organisations and the media”. Despite Jack Straw’s later denials, the operations would have required his approval and, by implication, Blair’s too, although he would deny “any recollection at all.”’ (p. 405) Once he left office Blair exploited his relationship with Gaddafi for profit. In the two years after his resignation he visited his good friend no less than six times, touting for business for JP Morgan and the like. One thing worth remembering about Gaddafi is that the London School of Economics gave his son, Saif, a PhD in return for a £1.5 million donation; and, in a particularly obscene flourish to this wholly disreputable episode, actually invited him to deliver the annual Ralph Miliband memorial lecture in 2010. All very New Labour. Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk How to sum up the Blair years in terms of the history of the Labour Party? The similarities with Ramsay MacDonald are striking. But whereas when MacDonald defected to the Tories only a handful of Labour MPs accompanied him, when Blair embraced Thatcherism he took the whole Labour Party with him. In MacDonald’s defence, unlike Blair he was not a war criminal, he was not drenched in blood, and had actually risked his political career by refusing to support the First World War. What we have seen with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader is a revolt by rank and file Labour Party members and sympathisers against this embrace of Thatcherism; but both the Labour Party machine and the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party remain absolutely committed to neo-liberalism and all it involves. What of Blair since his resignation? One useful way to regard this is that he did not so much resign as privatise himself, setting himself free from the state to maximise his personal profitability; and his obsession with making money has been positively obscene. Blair gives the impression that he will take money off anyone no matter how unsavoury. Such promiscuous greed would be an embarrassment to the Conservative Party, let alone the Labour Party, but most Labour MPs seem to find his conduct since his privatisation unexceptionable. Indeed, Blair is likely to be allowed to remain a Labour Party member for as long as he chooses. Here are a few of the distasteful stories that Bower recounts: his £41,000 a month plus 2% commission arrangement with PetroSaudi who hired him to broker deals with China; his advising Nursultan Nazarbayez, President of Kazakhstan, on how to spin the fatal shooting of fourteen striking oil workers; his providing strategic and political advice to an Abu Dhabi investment fund, Mubadala, controlled by the crown prince.... the list goes on and on. And as Bower points out, Blair was taken on as a consultant by the Albanian government no less. With his help: ‘Albania was also given candidate status in Brussels to join the EU. Blair shared the income from this with Alastair Campbell, appointed as an adviser to Albania Lobster 71 Summer 2016 www.lobster-magazine.co.uk and with his wife Cherie, who arrived in Tirana on a private plane provided by Rezart Taci, an Albanian oil tycoon’. (p. 585) These people are completely without shame. Without any doubt there is worse to come as Blair continues to rake in the millions by servicing the world’s super rich. John Newsinger John Newsinger is a semi-retired academic. A new edition of his British Counterinsurgency has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan. Lobster 71 Summer 2016