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Summer 2002

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Issue 43

West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
William Blum
New York: Soft Skull Press, 2002, $15

www.softskull.com

The working lives of writers, especially writers of non-fiction like Blum - or me - are rather dull. To produce Lobster and my other bits and pieces I have to stay in one place, read e-mails every day, books, newspapers, visit libraries, go to the post office most days, keep in some kind of order a large collection of fading paper and stare at a computer screen a lot. This is interesting to me but wouldn't be much fun to read about. To write his seminal 1986-published CIA: a forgotten history, (12) took Blum four years of sitting in libraries in London. There's not a lot you can say about that; and Blum doesn't say much. But this event, in a sense the beginning of Blum's life as a major political writer, comes on page 199 of his 229 pages of text. This book is mostly about the bit leading up to it. (13)

What he gives us is an account of a rambling journey from the straight life, working on computers in the US State Department, radicalisation via the Vietnam War, into the role of dissident activist and writer. En route he moves around America, scuffling, doing shitty jobs, encountering the American left of the 1960s and 1970s from earnest Marxist study group in 1965 up to and including a crazy bomb-maker in California; taking acid (one bad trip); radical (i.e. unpaid or barely paid) journalism in Washington and California; and a little petty crime. This is the 'alternative society' of the time - or a version of it - but Blum's obsessions are politics not drugs or rock music. Somehow Blum got a nasty - on the evidence of this book - a terminal dose of the desire to look the reality of American foreign policy in the face.

In 1972 he ditched everything and travelled overland through Central and South America to Chile to see Allende's revolution. The chapter on Chile powerfully conveys a sense of the mixture of hope and paranoia then prevailing in Chile on the left as they waited for the military to crush Allende. Some of the people Blum knew in Chile were murdered after the coup.

Blum quit America and went Europe - Denmark, Germany and then Britain. He didn't like us uptight Europeans very much. More scuffling. In London he was recruited by the Workers Revolutionary Party, surviving their rhetoric and discipline for two months. Then he had the moment which changed his life. All through the anti-Vietnam War activist days Blum's circle was wary of penetration by the American state. Years later, when he got his FBI file via the Freedom of Information Act, he found that there had been 13 agents informing on him in the groups he was in during the anti-Vietnam War days in Washington. In London, a decade later, he picked up a copy of Philip Agee's CIA Diary and found an old friend of his and fellow activist named as a CIA agent. And:

'Instantaneous sucked-in breath, a heart-rending cry of horror, I am literally propelled out of my seat and backwards two full meters......I stand there, staring at the book on the table like a man finding out that the wife he's lived with for 20 years is actually a man......'

He meets a wary Agee to discuss their mutal fink acquaintance and joins the great CIA hunt in London in 1975, identifying CIA personnel working under cover at the US embassy in London. He is drifting towards the CIA - or is it coming towards him? He begins an article on them and, four years of research later, has CIA: a forgotten history, a landmark piece of research.

The last 30 pages dealing with his life since CIA: a forgotten history include an amusing account of being hired - then dumped - by Oliver Stone's production company and an insider's view of the great dispute which shook Covert Action Information Bulletin a few years ago.

Blum's still out there; he didn't cave in - and he has some fun noting his radical contemporaries who did and the ridiculous people and causes to which they turned when they switched their brains off! No, his side hasn't won and isn't likely to win in his lifetime; but he did - and is still doing - his bit. And there isn't much more one can do. In its modest, laid-back way, this is an inspiring read.

Notes

12 Rewritten, expanded and updated as Killing Hope (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995).

13 Portions of the book can be read online at http://members.aol.com/superogue/homepage.htm (and follow the links)

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