details of its organisation and mode of operations have
been kept secret. The SRU operates in Northern Ireland
at present under the cover name Northern Ireland
9 The autopsy pictures
are available by Googling ‘JFK + autopsy pictures’.

10 The media converage around the 50th anniversary, predominantly
American, is described in great detail at . . Training and Advisory Teams (Northern Ireland) —
NITAT(NI) — ostensibly the equivalent of genuine NITAT
teams in UKLF [United Kingdom Land Forces] and BAOR
[British Army of the Rhine.”
Almost a quarter of a century before that the MRF was written
about in some detail by Roger Faligot in his Britain’s Military
Strategy in Ireland: the Kitson Experiment (London: Zed Press,
1983) and subsequently in Lobsters 1, 10, 18 and 19.

Important reports
Two important reports have appeared recently. The Britain
Israel Communications and Research Centre: Giving peace a
chance? by Tom Mills, David Miller, Tom Griffin and Hilary Aked is
a study of BICOM, its creation and influence in British politics.

Among its chapters are ‘The second intifada and the
establishment of BICOM’, ‘BICOM and British Zionism’, ‘BICOM
strategy, elite networks and the media’ and ‘The Fox-Werritty
scandal and the decline of democracy’. If you are only going
to read one chapter, make it chapter five, ‘BICOM strategy,
elite networks and the media’, which describes in great detail
BICOM’s (largely successful) campaigns to get the British
media to follow a pro-Israel line. This 96 page report can be
downloaded as a PDF file.11
Nicholas Shaxson wrote Treasure Islands: tax havens and
the men who stole the world (London: 2011). He is the coauthor,
with John Christensen, of The Finance Curse: how
oversized financial centres attack democracy and corrupt
economies. This is a wonderful piece of work which, inter alia,
critiques in great detail the various claims made about the
significance of the financial services sector to the British
economy and examines the negative effects for the rest of us
of having what is essentially an unregulated global casino in
our midst. That this country is now set on a course of absolute
decline is largely down to the City’s dominance of the
economic conversation in this country since the 1970s (and
11 At Giving%20Peace%20a%20Chance%3F-Spinwatch-2013.pdf>. the gullibility of the politicians who believed what they were
told). This is downloadable as a PDF file and should be read.12
Conspiracy theorist bashing
The appointment of Liberal Democrat MP, Norman Baker, to a
position as a junior minister at the Home Office produced
outbursts of conspiracy theorist-bashing from two columnists
at the Daily Telegraph. Here’s Damien Thompson, erstwhile
editor of that bastion of rationality, the Catholic Herald:
‘Here’s a piece of news to set the eyes of every
conspiracy theorist swivelling under their tin-foil trilbies.

The British government has been infiltrated.....

by conspiracy theorists! It happened on Monday
afternoon, in the full glare of the cameras. Norman
Baker, a Liberal Democrat MP who believes that MI5
covered up the murder of Dr David Kelly by Iraqi agents,
has been promoted to Home Office minister in the
reshuffle.’ 13
Another Telegraph columnist Dan Hodges, also had a go at
Baker, concluding with this asinine statement:
‘I’ve never read Baker’s book, and can’t comment on the
veracity of his claims. Except to say they’re clearly
bonkers.’14
GCHQ: looking for a line
Sir Malcolm Rifkind, chair of the House of Commons
Intelligence and Security Committee:
‘In recent months concern has been expressed at the
12 At
13 did-the-freemasons-stage-the-moon-landings-if-so-new-home-officeminister- norman-baker-will-find-out/>
14 conspiracy-theorist-norman-baker-is-new-home-office-minister-this-isbonkers/>
A review I did for the Fortean Times of one of Thompson’s books
appears in Lobster 64 at < http://lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/
lobster64/lob64-misc-reviews.pdf>. suggested extent of the capabilities available to the
intelligence agencies and the impact upon people’s
privacy as the agencies seek to find the needles in the
haystacks that might be crucial to safeguarding national
security.’ 15
Former MI6 officer, Alan Petty, who writes as Alan Judd:
‘Realistically, however, we’ve no alternative but to go on
as before. We have enemies, as Andrew Parker reminds
us, who although relatively few would not hesitate to
obliterate us if they could. If we want to protect
ourselves — and who seriously would argue that we
shouldn’t? — we have to spy on them. In electronic terms
that means looking for needles in haystacks and you can’t
do that without having access to the whole hayfield.’16
GCHQ head Sir Ian Lobban, facing the Intelligence and
Security Committee, 7 November:
‘The internet is “an enormous hayfield” and GCHQ was
trying to access “those parts of the field that we can get
access to and which might be lucrative in terms of
containing the needles or the fragments of the needles we
might be interested in, that might help our mission.”’
The obvious response of state agencies to the news of
GCHQ/NSA’s global trawling operations would be to give up
using the Internet. There have been two reports of this thus
far. In July the Guardian reported that the Russian Federal
Guard service had ordered 20 typewriters17 and the Telegraph
reported on 27 September that the Indian High Commission
had gone back to using typewriters.18
Crisis? What crisis?
15
16 17
18
the Bank of England, gave a speech setting out his view of the
future.19 Its underlying message can be seen in the headline
on the City website Cityam.com: ‘Why the Carney doctrine is
great news for London’s economy’. The accompanying article
by Allister Heath began:
‘BANKER bashing is over — that was the dramatic
message from Mark Carney last night, as he finally
ditched his predecessor Lord King’s hostility to the City,
replacing it instead by a much more sensible approach.’
20
Yes, indeed: all is well in the City and all those anxieties about
banks being too big, and all that gambling being too
dangerous, are exaggerated. On with the show! (And now we
know why the Conservatives wanted Carney as governor.)
Former Guardian and Daily Mail financial journalist, Dan
Atkinson, commented:
‘Actually, you have to hand it to the City. Not only is it
expert at getting out of tight corners, but seems to be
getting better at doing so. After all, post-Depression and
the war, it had to wait a good three decades, up to the
Seventies, before starting to shake off official restraints.

This time round it has taken just over six years, since the
credit crunch.

Gives yourselves a pat on the back, fellas.’ 21
Carney’s speech included this paragraph:
‘Today financial services account for a tenth of UK GDP
and are the source of over 1 million jobs. Two thirds of
those are outside London, including jobs in asset
management in Edinburgh, transaction processing in
Bournemouth and insurance in Norwich. Being at the
19 2013/speech690.pdf>
20 medium=website&utm_term=TD_next_previous_articles&utm_
campaign=TD_next_previous_articles>
21 , 25
October 2013.. heart of the global financial system also broadens the
investment opportunities for the institutions that look
after British savings, and reinforces the ability of UK
manufacturing and creative industries to compete
globally. Not to mention that financial services represent
one of the UK’s largest exports.’
Carney probably didn’t write this and we may take it as a
statement of the Bank of England’s collective view. The 10%
GDP and 1 million job figures are shown to be false by
Shaxson and Christensen in their The Finance Curse, discussed
above.

At a much less sophisticated level we can simply say:
* 10% of UK GDP — but half of that is domestic, the high street
banks, insurance companies and building societies. Therefore
the international sector is about 5%.

* 1 million jobs sounds like a lot but total UK employment is
30 million.

* ‘two thirds of those [jobs] are outside London’ — and we
get nice name checks for bits of provincial England. But
Bournemouth and Norwich are within commuting distance of
London.

* And being a global financial hub is good for the domestic
economy, apparently. (Tell that to the British businesses who
can’t get loans.)
War games
It was striking that the Observer managed to make a fairly big
piece out of some declassified documents about the 1983
NATO exercise Able Archer which the Soviets interpreted as
preparations for a real assault on their territory.22 Such
documentation has been available for a while.23 Missing from
both those cited accounts is the background, the previous
decade’s worth of US strategic theorists trying to make the
nuclear deterrent credible. The problem, as they saw it, was
22
23 See, for example, the National Security Archive at
.. that the US deterrent, threatening all-out retaliation — mutual
assured destruction (MAD) — had ceased to be credible: why
would the Soviets believe the threat to commit suicide? Thus a
group of bright young men — my memory says they were all
men — wrote papers trying to elaborate a doctrine in which the
threat of nuclear war-fighting short of massive retaliation
could be used to make the deterrent ‘credible’. One of the
most important of those was an Englishman called Colin S.

Gray, now a professor at Reading University.24 Not
surprisingly, some of those in the Soviet military interpreted all
this talk of nuclear war-fighting as literally preparation for war,
something no-one in the US ‘strategic community’ seems to
have considered.

The close call the world apparently had in 1983 at the
time of Operation Able Archer must rank as one of greatest
intelligence failures of the Cold War and emphasises the
importance of being able to know your opponents’ intentions,
as well as their capabilities. Trying to assess intentions
explains why the NSA-GCHQ network is listening to the
personal communications of the world’s political leaders.

GCHQ, the NSA and our politicians
On 17 October the chairman of the House of Commons
Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), Sir Malcolm Rifkind
MP, announced in a press release the Committee’s
‘....... intention to do further work on the legislation
which governs the security and intelligence agencies’
access to the content of private communications,
including to determine whether the relevant Acts of
Parliament are still “fit for purpose” given the
developments in information technology since they were
enacted .......

24 You can get a sense of the tone of this debate from the preview of
one of Gray’s papers at the time (and its title), ‘Nuclear strategy: the
case for a theory of victory’ at 2626784?uid=3738032&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=
21102914855671> Alas the paper costs $19 to acquire in full. None of
Gray’s writing from the 1970s and early 1980s appears to be on-line
without a charge.. In recent months concern has been expressed at
the suggested extent of the capabilities available to the
intelligence agencies and the impact upon people’s
privacy as the agencies seek to find the needles in the
haystacks that might be crucial to safeguarding national
security. There is a balance to be found between our
individual right to privacy and our collective right to
security. An informed and responsible debate is
needed.’
This review will take place within the ‘review of the legislative
framework governing the intelligence agencies’ access to
private information’.

On past performance, the Committee will eventually
produce a big report concluding that, on the whole, things are
not so bad, which no-one will read. But until then the prime
minister can reply to all questions about GCHQ and the NSA:
‘An inquiry is being conducted by the ISC’. Giving the prime
minister this kind of cover is one of the committee’s secondary
functions. Its primary function is to offer the appearance of
accountability without its reality.

Michael Meacher MP had it about right on his blog when
he wrote four days before the Rifkind statement: ‘The
Intelligence & Security Committee is a laughing stock and
needs to be replaced by proper scrutiny.’25
Meacher pointed out that uniquely among parliamentary
select committees, the ISC’s members are chosen not by MPs
but by the prime minister (thus by the state itself, advising the
PM), to whom ISC’s reports are submitted.

Two days after Meacher’s comments this motion
appeared on the House of Commons’ order paper:
Intelligence and Security Committee
‘That this House considers that the revelations exposed
in The Guardian that British security services have
examined the internet activities of British citizens without
the consent of Parliament demonstrate that the
25 . Intelligence and Security Committee is not fit for
purpose; believes that the Committee should be chaired
by an hon. Member who has not served in a Department
with responsibility for intelligence and security services
for the purpose of avoiding any potential allegations of
conflict of interest; and calls for an independent review
reporting to Parliament on the appropriate structure and
arrangements to ensure effective Parliamentary
democratic scrutiny of the intelligence and security
services.’
It was signed by just 9 of the House of Commons current 650
members.26
This is not a simple issue to resolve, even if there was
any political will to do so. The motion above calls for ‘effective
Parliamentary democratic scrutiny’. But what does this mean?
MPs literally overseeing the activities of the agencies? Michael
Meacher suggests that an ISC, chosen by MPs,
‘......should be able to undertake its own investigations
as the members may decide. Where the security services
are unwilling to disclose documents on grounds of
national security, the committee would then have a right
to ask the Information Commissioner to review the
relevant documents and decide whether or not their
disclosure would genuinely put national security at risk,
as opposed to its being simply inconvenient to the
spooks, and his decision would be final.’
Which is one solution; but not one which this prime minister or
any foreseeable prime minister would accept, if only because a
part of the prime minister’s power resides in his or her unique
access to the secret state; and, politics being about power, it
is unlikely that a prime minister would relinquish this access.27
Nor would the intelligence and security agencies — let alone
their American ‘allies’ — accept the ultimate decision on what is
secret being taken by an outside party.

26 This was signed by
eight Labour MPs and one Liberal-Democrat.

27 The former MI5 officer Annie Machon writes intelligently about
these issues in ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, dated 11 October, at
.. Any way this particular cake is cut it will come down to
political power and MPs’ willingness to face down the prime
minister, the secret state and the Americans; and even if they
believed it to be necessary — and they don’t — the present
generation of politicians simply do not have that in them.

All our yesterdays
The minutes of the Bonn Economic Summit meeting in July
1978 (and the preparatory work from the US perspective) are
now on-line. There’s an enormous amount of material there
but on the first quick skim of the minutes two things struck me.

The first is US president Jimmy Carter saying:
‘I disagree with the notion that our unemployment
results from the fact that we have, as President Giscard
said, thrown our borders open. Factories are not closing
because of greater world trade...... I do not believe that
our factories are closing because of trade.’
The experience with Chinese imports in the past 20 years has
tested that theory to destruction.

And the second was the comment by Japanese prime
minister Takeo Fukuda that ‘Today the Eastern Bloc is about
as powerful as the Free World.’ This reflects the absurdly
exaggerated estimates made at the time by Western
intelligence — and the CIA in particular — of the military and
economic strength of the Soviet bloc.28
Curious omissions
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones29 was one of the first academic
historians to write about the role of the intelligence agencies
in our history. A quick skim through his latest, In Spies We
Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence (Oxford University
Press, 2013) — 90% of which is about UK and US intelligence
and their relationship — shows three striking gaps in his
28 80v03.pdfs> Dan Atkinson’s selection from these minutes is at
.

29 . account.

1. He writes a good deal early on about the Anglophile elite in
American foreign affairs and intelligence in the early years of
the last century, but never refers to the Round Table network,
which was at the centre of that elite. (For example, he notes,
en passant, that Philip Kerr was prime minister Lloyd George’s
private secretary during WW1, but not that Kerr was one of
the Round Table’s leaders.)
2. The enormous British (mostly MI6) operation against the
American isolationists in the early years of WW2 described by
Thomas Mahl in his PhD and subsequent book, Desperate
Deception (Virginia: Brassey’s, 1989) is missing.

3. As are the destabilisation operations against the Labour
and Liberal parties and the ‘wet’ Conservatives in the mid
1970s. He refers once to Peter Wright, only to dismiss his
claims.

The Atlantic semantic30
I am on the e-mail list of the Atlantic Council31 and received
notification of a meeting of theirs, the first in a ‘Captains of
Industry’ series of events. (‘Captains of Industry’? Jeez, I
thought that expression had died a death in the 1970s.) The
meeting, titled ‘The Business of Defense in an Age of Austerity:
Perspectives from the Mid-Tier’, was touted thus:
‘The business of defense is at an inflection point formed
by the confluence of several factors now in flux. Allied
militaries are receding from more than a decade of
counterinsurgency wars. Fiscal crises are sharply
constraining investment in national defense. Commercial
technologies are transforming the locus and leverage of
antagonists. In turn, the growth story that had inspired
capital markets’ support of the post-cold-war defense
30 A phrase from William Clark. See his excellent Pink Industry at
, full of terrific research.

31 From its Website : ‘The Atlantic Council
promotes constructive leadership and engagement in international
affairs based on the central role of the Atlantic Community in meeting
global challenges.’ I.e. it now promotes the globalisation of NATO. It
was founded in 1961.. industry is in its last chapter, and the sequel yet lacks a
thesis.’
‘Inflection’, ‘confluence’, ‘locus and leverage’ — and God knows
what the last clause means; but here is the voice of the
military industrial complex facing harder times.

On the other side of this debate is a report from
Scientists for Global Responsibility on British military R&D which
shows:
!....military R&D spending is heavily focused on offensive
weapons systems. Of the spending programmes on
which data was available, 76% of the funds were for
technology programmes whose main role was
“offensive”, i.e. aimed to be used to “project force” far
from British shores.

During the three-year period 2008-11, the six
largest areas of military R&D funded by the UK
government were: combat planes; combat helicopters;
long-range submarines; nuclear weapons; nuclear
propulsion (for submarines); and unmanned aerial
vehicles (drones).’32
The UK might be in terminal decline but the ‘great power’
delusion lives on in Whitehall.

More JFK assassination anniversary nonsense
Stephen Hunter is an American thriller writer best known for a
series about a father and son, Earl and Bob Lee Swagger,
both former soldiers and ace snipers. These vary enormously —
Havana and Hot Springs, for example, are pretty poor — but
Hunter is a fine writer (as well as a gun-nut) and in the others
his technique carried this reader through the outbreaks of
weapons fetishism and preposterous plots.

This year, in The Third Bullet, he has Bob Lee Swagger
solve the Kennedy assassination. This isn’t much good as a
novel in the Swagger series and as a view of the
assassination it is hilarious. Hunter has JFK killed by a sniper in
32 %20exec_sum.pdf>. the Dal-Tex building on Dealey Plaza, working for a senior CIA
officer who believed that Kennedy was going to embroil
America deeper and deeper in the quagmire of Vietnam! In an
afterword Hunter tells us that he got his information about the
assassination from the Warren Commission Report and two of
the handful of books which defended it: Gerald Posner’s Case
Closed and Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History. I have not
read those but suspect that, like the Warren Commission
Report, neither discusses JFK’s plans to withdraw US forces
from Vietnam.33
The end of the world as we know it
John Lanchester was given access to the Guardian’s collection
of the Snowden NSA/GCHQ documents in New York and has
produced a really excellent account of them and the dangers
they imply.34 Lanchester made one very striking omission. He
wrote this:
‘We do have enemies, though, enemies who are in
deadly earnest; enemies who wish you reading this
dead, whoever you are, for no other reason than that
you belong to a society like this one.......we have
enemies who want to kill as many of us, the more
innocent the better, as possible, by any means possible,
as a deliberate strategy....’
Lanchester means Islamists; and a week or so later MI5
director Sir Andrew Parker made the same omission, stating
that there were ‘several thousand Islamist extremists [in the
UK] who see the British people as a legitimate target.’ 35
Their omissions, of course, are the reason why they want
33 On which see, for example, James Galbraith (son of JK) at

34 I could barely be bothered to read this because,
as I have commented before on this subject, there is zero chance of
our politicians doing anything about this issue; and this being so, to
bone up on it is merely to measure the dimensions of their cowardice
and our impotence.

35 . to kill us: namely, UK support for American foreign policy. From
Parker the omission is par for the course for serving
intelligence personnel; but Lanchester is usually better than
that.

JFK assassination anniversary news
I grew up in a subculture in which self-promotion — ‘egotripping’
– was considered vulgar and I find it hard to shake
that attitude. However, at the very least I owe it to my
publisher to report that a new edition of my Who Shot JFK? has
been published. It is mostly the previous edition, running the
LBJ’s-network-dunnit thesis but with some tweaking here and
there and two significant additions:
* The section on Billy Sol Estes has been expanded with
recent new information, making the case stronger;36
* and I finally took the plunge and tried to make sense of the
medical/forensic evidence which, hitherto, I had considered
impenetrable. How good a job I have done.......

Beyond hypocrisy
There’s a 1992 book by Edward Herman, Beyond Hypocrisy.37
I haven’t read this and, though it’s subtitled ‘Decoding the
news in an age of propaganda’, the title is an apt shorthand
description of American foreign policy. Thus the state which is
apparently agitated about the use of ‘chemical weapons’ in
Syria used depleted uranium and phosphorous in their assault
on Iraq, drenched much of Vietnam and bits of Laos and
Cambodia in Agent Orange, and — lest we forget — recruited
the Japanese chemical weapons team, Unit 731, at the end of
WW2 and declined to hand them over for prosecution for war
36 I discussed this in the previous Lobster at . Estes’ account of
the assassination is in his memoir at 8b408e6999f8799dfd0a/1/251450825/1960277221/1>.

37 frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false>. crimes.38
Here we go again
On the fifth anniversary of the closure of Lehman Brothers
bank, marking the official beginning of the great financial fuckup,
Labour chancellor of the exchequer at the time, Alistair
Darling, gave us some of his (unexceptional) thoughts on the
event in the Guardian.39 The only really interesting bit in
Darling’s memoir showed the reader how he and prime
minister Brown had perceived things at the time:
‘When I went across to see Gordon in the flat that
evening, I told him that nationalization [of RBS] was
looking increasingly likely.....like me [he] could see the
political watershed we faced. It would hark back to the
wilderness years, when Labour appeared unelectable.’
40
Faced with the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s, not to
mention the collapse of everything he and Brown apparently
believed — ‘light touch’ regulation and all that; worshipping at
the feet of the City — they were not considering the economic
possibilities presented by the Labour government acquiring a
major bank, but alarmed that the voters would be reminded of
the early 1980s.

If you were unclear what the phrase ‘the political
perspective’ means, this should do it for you.

If Darling is aware that the conditions for another great
crash are in place he does not betray this in the interview. The
best short account I have seen of how since-nothingsignificant- has-changed-things-will-fall-apart-again is James
Kwak’s ‘Five Years Later, We’ve Learned Nothing From the
Financial Crisis: Why haven’t we destroyed the idea that
38 I was reminded of this at 2013/09/08/us-covered-up-for-decades-the-largest-use-of-biologicalchemical- weapons-in-history/>.

39
40 Back from the brink, p. 65, reviewed by me at .. destroyed the world?’41 He concludes thus:
‘Fast forward to 2013......and little has changed.

Republicans live in a fantasy world where regulation is
always bad and deregulation is always good. Democrats
scramble to make nice with hedge fund managers and
investment bankers. Everyone wants the housing
market to recover. The long-term money is still in
industry and lobbying. And everyone — especially
Democrats — wants growth and jobs more than ever.

Financial stability has no lobby. It has its advocates
and academics, like Elizabeth Warren and Anat Admati,
but it has no super PAC or 501(c)(4) organization. For a
brief moment in 2009 and early 2010, everyone wanted
to tame the financial sector, but the Obama
administration — led by Summers and by Tim Geithner —
chose not to press for the structural reforms that could
have made a difference. Today, the media and the public
have moved on. Either President Obama truly believes in
the deregulatory rhetoric of the 1990s, or he is picking
up nickels in front of the bulldozer, betting that the next
financial crisis will not occur on his watch....Wall Street’s
greatest and most important accomplishment was
convincing everyone (who mattered) that unregulated
finance was good for the world. Five years later, their
victory endures.’
James Kwak is an academic, one the American economists
who didn’t buy the ‘best financial regulation is no regulation’
line. Another is Paul Krugman. In a recent essay rubbishing
those who believe that austerity is the solution to the current
crisis,42 Krugman shows how since 2008 economists have
written papers apparently demonstrating empirically (a) that
the way to generate economic growth is to cut state spending
and (b) that after the ratio between state debt and gross
41 Kwak is one
of the main writers at .

42 ‘How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled’, The New York Review of
Books, 6 June 2013 how-case-austerity-has-crumbled/?pagination=false> . domestic product reaches a certain figure economic growth
becomes impossible. Neither proposition withstood more than
a moment’s scrutiny but both were seized upon by politicians
of the right, bankers and EU apparatchiks as support for their
inclination to cut the income of the average citizen and the
poor to bail out the banks. For Krugman this is
‘.....deeply worrying for those who like to believe that
knowledge can make a positive difference in the world.

To the extent that policymakers and elite opinion in
general have made use of economic analysis at all, they
have, as the saying goes, done so the way a drunkard
uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination. Papers
and economists who told the elite what it wanted to
hear were celebrated, despite plenty of evidence that
they were wrong; critics were ignored, no matter how
often they got it right.....For now, the broader message
of the past few years remains just how little good
comes from understanding.’
Krugman’s apparent surprise and disappointment at these
developments seems odd to me. Career-minded economists
have always been available to show that protecting the
interests of the wealthy is how it should and must be.

In a short companion piece to his Atlantic essay Kwak
concluded:
‘Looking back....for the most part little has changed —
not just in the financial sector itself, but more importantly
in the political and ideological landscape that shapes
regulatory policy. Of course, this isn’t simply the product
of collective amnesia. It’s the result of the fact that ideas
are shaped by money and political power. And that’s
where little has changed.’43
By a different route Krugman and Kwak have arrived at the
question Lenin famously asked over a hundred years ago:
what is to be done? (Shto delit?)
Dag’s death
43 ‘Non lessons of the financial crisis’ at
com/>. With zero publicity in this country that I noticed, a group of
‘international jurists’, chaired by Sir Stephen Sedley,44 has
been re-examining the death of UN general secretary Dag
Hammarskjöld, ‘to report whether in their view the evidence
now available would justify the United Nations in reopening its
inquiry pursuant to the 1962 resolution of the General
Assembly.’
Their report is on-line;45 and though I haven’t read the
main text, the conclusions suggest to me that they have got
little that Susan Williams didn’t have in her book Who killed Dag
Hammarskjöld? The UN, the Cold War and white supremacy in
Africa (London: Hurst and Company, 2011).46 They conclude
that the best line of further inquiry is to apply through FOIA
requests for information on (presumed) NSA monitoring of the
Hammarskjöld flight’s demise. Such applications have been
made but thus far nothing has been forthcoming; nor, in my
view, is anything likely to be forthcoming. And thus:
‘Commission accordingly neither recommends nor
anticipates the resumption of the UN inquiry at large. It
would respectfully propose a focused and staged
resumption, potentially concluding at the first stage but,
if it continues, restricting itself to what will by then be
identifiable as the key issues. What these may be are
indicated in our report; but we recognise that events
can confound predictions.’
The SAS did Di?
First there was one ‘SAS-killed-Diana’ story. But as that story,
to quote the Mirror,
‘came in a letter to the elite unit’s commanding officer by
the parents-in-law of a special forces sniper, known only
as Soldier N.....[who] boasted the SAS “was behind
44
45
46 Reviewed at misc-reviews.pdf>. Princess Diana’s death..” ’47
there was little to be excited about: a secondhand allegation.

Then there was a second ‘SAS-killed-Diana’ story. In this
one — in the Daily Express, which has run many Di conspiracy
stories — Alan Power, author of The Princess Diana Conspiracy48
writes that a former member of the SAS unit called ‘the
Increment’ claims that Diana was killed by MI6 (SIS) with the
help of the ’the Increment’. 49 But according to the Express
story, Power ‘does not produce overwhelming evidence to
support his theory or name the assassins’.

Asked to comment on Mr Power’s claims, Scotland Yard
said: ‘The Metropolitan Police is scoping recent information
regarding the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed. This
scoping exercise is not complete.’
Is this the first time ‘scope’ has been used in this way by
an official body?
Scott and Marshall
I am writing this before President Obama has got the
approval of Congress for the bombing of Syria. The British
major media has made little of the fact that in effect the US
(and whomever else it finds to support it) will be joining a civil
war on the side of (among others) various Jihadist groups. If
you find this inexplicable, Peter Dale Scott, in his usual
minutely detailed fashion has assembled all the extant
knowledge of previous examples of the US military and
intelligence services working with and/or supporting similar
Jihadists.50
Scott co-authored a series of pioneering parapolitical
books with Jonathan Marshall; and Marshall has a new essay
available on-line, ‘Cooking the Books: The Federal Bureau of
1
48 Power/dp/0957573804>
49
50 . Narcotics, the China Lobby and Cold War Propaganda, 1950-
1962’.51 This examines in great detail (it’s 17,000 words,
including notes) the activities of the notorious Harry Anslinger,
U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics and head of the Federal
Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). Using declassified American and
British Foreign Office files and a vast array of other sources,
Marshall shows that Anslinger was a pioneer in the business
of inventing ‘intelligence’ — in this case claims that ‘Red’ China
was behind the world heroin and opium trade. (In reality it
was American allies in the far East.) Marshall concludes:
‘By serving up a steady supply of lurid claims to feed the
propaganda mills of professional Cold Warriors and
China Lobbyists, Anslinger bought protection against
budget cuts, premature retirement, loss of authority to
rival agencies, and any weakening of the nation’s drug
laws.’
BAP sighting
Thanks to Corinne Souza who pointed this story out to me.

In the Independent on Sunday of 1 September 2013 Yasmin
Alibhai Brown wrote the following in a piece called ‘The special
relationship is over. At long last!’
‘When Thatcher and Reagan were locked in their long
embrace, I was selected to join a network, the British-
American Project, partly funded by the CIA. Politicians,
armed force representatives, CEOs, journalists, artists
and policy wonks from both countries gathered there
and here. I learnt more about this relationship and made
some good friends. But the premise was unnerving as I
listened to generals talking about the expansion of
Israel as if we would all agree that that was necessary.

Or Republicans discussing how to keep Japan in its
place. So my reservations go back a long way. This
marriage of convenience may have the UK and US’s
51 The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 37, No. 1, September 14,
2013, available at 2013/09/17/cooking-the-books-the-federal-bureau-of-narcotics-thechina- lobby-and-cold/>.. security at its heart but, after 60 years, it needs to
break up. Only then will both sides be free to interact
creatively and independently with each other and the
world.’52
Brown is dissembling just a little. In the long account of the
BAP by Andy Beckett in 2004 53 — which, of course, managed
not to mention that Tom Easton had been writing about it in
Lobster since 1997 — Beckett states that Brown had then been
attending the BAP’s gatherings for 15 years. Evidently her
gorge rose slowly. As for the BAP being ‘partially funded by the
CIA’, there is no evidence of this of which I am aware. It might
be true; but these days it is more likely that the National
Endowment for Democracy funds it. 54
A lending strike
If you use the Internet a lot you end up on some strange
address lists. I received an e-mail shot from Will Davies, cofounder
of aspect.co.uk, ‘London’s leading property
maintenance and refurbishment company’. In this Davies
complains that:
‘David Cameron is more suited to public relations than
being prime minister. He’s constantly spinning the facts
and not dealing with the basic problems. Take the total
inability of the Coalition to make government owned
high-street banks lend to small and medium sized
businesses at sensible rates. We have has [sic] a
constant stream of government initiatives to cover up
the problem like the Supply Chain Finance scheme, the
Regional Growth Fund and the Business bank.’
Mr Davies has a point.

In July, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and
Skills, Vince Cable, addressed the wider problem of banks not
lending and said:
52
53
54 There is a Wiki entry on NED but Ron Paul’s take on it is more
interesting. See .. ‘It is clear that the main banks are failing to support
good British companies in key areas like exporting and
innovation.’
But he added:
‘One of the anxieties in the business community is that
the so called “capital Taliban” in the Bank of England are
imposing restrictions which at this delicate stage of
recovery actually make it more difficult for companies to
operate and expand.’55
This is nonsense and Cable must know it. Another Financial
Times columnist explained why:
‘The invalid reason is the claim that the higher the
required equity ratio, [chief among Cable’s ‘restrictions’]
the more of a bank’s capital is ‘tied up’ and cannot be
lent out to borrowers in need of funds. As Anat Admati of
Stanford’s business school has persistently pointed out,
bank capital is not a reserve that is salted away for a
rainy day. Equity is one source of funding for banks; it
does not ‘compete’ with lending, which forms part of
their investments. Equity-funded money can be lent out
just like debt-funded money can.’56
So why are the banks not lending enough to British
businesses? They are responding to the increased regulation
imposed on them. They didn’t want it and ‘lobbied’ hard to
prevent it, spending £93 million pounds in 2011/12.57 Even
the Governor of the Bank of England was moved to complain
publicly about this ‘’lobbying’.58 (Lobbying is clearly a
misnomer here; £93 million pounds isn’t spent on PR and
55
html#axzz2dvPMtXnU>
56 00144feabdc0.html#axzz2dc5hIKty>
57 ‘The British financial services industry spent more than £92m last
year [i.e. 2011/12] lobbying politicians and regulators in an “economic
war of attrition” that has secured a string of policy victories.’

58 See 10141142/Mervyn-King-Banks-lobbying-at-highest-level-againstregulators- demands.html>.. lunches; bribing would be more apt.) But some of it they have
had to accept. And dragging their feet vis-à-vis the British
domestic economy is their revenge. And, as far as I can see,
not a single economic commentator has named it.

Dallas ‘63
We are going to get a torrent of bullshit about the Kennedy
assassination in the next couple of months. BBC Radio 4
contributed a piece called ‘The Reunion’ in which a group of
people who were in Dallas in 1963 when it happened recalled
the events. One of those was Hugh Aynesworth, then with the
Dallas Morning News. I didn’t listen to the programme but I
think we may assume that its host, Sue Macgregor, did not
ask Aynesworth why he became an informant for the FBI on
the subject.59
My only contribution to the great JFK-anniversary-mediabunfight
thus far has been to persuade a TV production
company that staging a debate about the assassination would
not work. It was going to me and, inter alia, David Aaronovitch.

I pointed out to the TV person who rang me that the Warren
Commission’s report had been totally demolished by 1967;
that those who continued to defend it were the intellectual
equivalent of flat earthers; and that, as far as I could tell from
his writing, Aaronovitch knew fuck all about the assassination.

There was a silence, followed by ‘We’ll get back to you.’ Some
days later an e-mail arrived telling me they had abandoned
the idea.

That special relationship
I am an admirer of former ambassador Craig Murray. His
blog60 is always interesting. On 11 June he wrote this about
the NSA/GCHQ revelations:
‘I am astonished that still none of our pusillanimous
media has published the simple fact that NSA and GCHQ
share ALL intelligence reports with each other. Every
12 On which see .

60 . member of the House of Commons who has ever been in
the most junior ministerial position knows this — that
amounts to hundreds. So do at least fifty thousand
current or retired civil service and military personnel. So
do the majority of senior journalists. Yet [British foreign
secretary William] Hague was allowed to talk round the
subject without being challenged about the truth, and
the fiction of official secrecy persists.’
There are several things to be said about this. First, it does
rather depend on what he means by ‘reports’. Second, if you
are agency B, there is no way of knowing if agency A is
sharing all its ‘reports’ with you (let alone its intelligence),
whatever the formal arrangements. And third, all anecdotal
evidence over the last 50 years tells us that America, to quote
Henry Kissinger (quoting someone else), has no friends, only
interests. I will need a lot of persuading that the NSA-GCHQ
relationship is an exception to this.

On the day in August when the Glen Greenwald/David
Miranda-held-at-Heathrow story broke in the British media, the
papers also carried a picture of a British frigate, HMS
Westminster, arriving at Gibraltar in the midst of the latest
fracas between Gibraltar and Spain. All the absurdities of
British foreign policy and Britain’s relationship with the US are
captured there.

I would like to believe that the Miranda drama at
Heathrow was an elaborate ruse while the documents arrived
by other means. (I’d agree several third party addresses and
simply send the stuff by air mail.....) The alternative is that
Greenwald and the Guardian are terminally naive, believing
that Miranda would be allowed to pass unhindered through
Heathrow carrying British and America secrets. Can they be
that dumb?
Amidst all the coverage in the British media no-one that I
read mentioned the simple fact that all this is being done for
the Americans. GCHQ works for the Americans. They must do
because the British state no longer has the power to use the
information GCHQ gathers. The British state can send a
gunboat down to Spain and might, if push came to shove, be . able to defeat the Spanish armed forces. But beyond that level
it is powerless. Being America’s outsourced surveillance
assistant is part of the price the British state pays for being
allowed to sit at the same table as the Americans in
international affairs (UN etc).

The other part of the price is supporting US foreign policy
no matter how stupid, nauseating or self-defeating it is. The
really odd thing about British post-war politics is the absence
of a ‘Gaullist’ faction, concerned with British independence.

Have our foreign policy wallahs no self-respect? Apparently
not. They are still happy to be the school bully’s best friend,
cheerleading in public while badmouthing him in private.

MI5 versus the banksters (not)
Some years ago I met someone who told me that he had met
someone who had been at a meeting at which a former head
of MI5 was present. Said retired MI5 director stated that one
of MI5’s roles was to counter threats to ‘the Anglo-American
form of capitalism’. By which he can only have meant Wall St.

and the City. This meeting took place post 2008 and said
retired director was thus not unaware of the damage that
‘Anglo-American form of capitalism’ had caused (although I
suppose it is possible he believed an explanation of the
events which didn’t blame the banksters). Vaguely
remembering that among MI5’s official tasks was something to
do with economic policy, I looked at its website and found
there that among MI5’s statutory duties, as laid down by the
1989 Security Services Act, is
‘to safeguard the economic well-being of the UK against
threats posed by the actions or intentions of persons
outside the British Isles’.

What does MI5 mean by ‘economic well-being’? Presumably
the health of Anglo-American finance capital. But who knows?
So I sent them an e-mail asking that question. To date I have
had no response; nor do I expect one. . Why has British government spending rocketed?!
Robert Henderson is one of the more interesting and
unclassifiable political commentators in this country who has
taken on the thankless task of pointing out to right and left
that some of what they believe is manifest nonsense.61
Recently he e-mailed this economic comment which deserves
wider distribution.

It is reasonable to put forward as the primary culprit the
mania for privatising everything. The following things have not
been understood by the privatisers:
1. The public service ethos did exist and was most valuable in
maintaining standards, continuity and honesty within public
provision.

2. Multiplying the opportunities for fraud inevitably results in
more fraud.

3. That public services cannot be run on commercial lines
because public provision is normally universal provision. Unlike
a private company losing business, a public service provider
such as the NHS cannot turn round and say we will not treat
these patients because we need to cut costs.

4. For public services to run properly they need need to be
focused not on the bottom line but on the provision of the
service.

5. Once a public service has been contracted out to a private
provider, the private provider has the government over a
barrel because there is no alternative to a private provider
once the public service option has been done away with.

6. That public employment gave those so employed secure
lives and indirectly increased the sense of security in those
employed by outside of public service because having a
substantial proportion in secure jobs in itself made society
more stable and certain.

7. That public money is a recycling of money and however it is
recycled it has a value because its spending supports local
61 The Wiki entry on him is incomplete but conveys something of
this. He contributed ‘Laissez faire as religion’ to Lobster 58. . economies.

8. That public expenditure has increased steadily during the
privatising of public service activities.

Arms–to–Iraq
On the JANCOM site (jancom.org) the most striking document
is the one listed on the left hand side of the second screen as
‘Transcript’. This is said to be a CIA summary of the ‘Supergun’
affair. I remain sceptical of its genesis, though the fact that
HMG felt it necessary to exclude it from the trial of Asil Nadir by
use of a PII (public interest immunity) certificate, speaks for its
authenticity. Some its central claims are strikingly similar to
those in ‘Belgium: Thatcher, Astra, Iraq & murder of Gerald
Bull’ which appeared originally in Intelligence, Number 81, 8
June 1998, p. 1.

Citing an article by Walter De Bock in the Flemish daily,
De Morgen, on 15 April 1998, Intelligence reported that the
Belgian judge who was investigating the murder of Gerald Bull
had received
‘40 pages of raw intelligence data from MI5 and MI6
directly implicating the inner circle of British prime
minister, Margaret Thatcher, in the murder of Gerald
Bull.... Judge De Valkeneer is now focusing his
investigation on a mysterious visit to Brussels of a fourmember
SAS team lead by [Stephan Adolph] Kock..... On
2 March 1990, a fax message, with the heading “Visit of
UK MoD Special Forces Staff to PRB”, announced the
arrival in Brussels of the above four-member team for a
supposed 19-21 March visit to PRB [Poudreries Reunies
de Belgique] facilities.’
This is the group named in the purported CIA report,
discussed in the essay by Andrew Rosthorn in this issue, as
the assassins of Bull and others.62 If they were, it must be the
62 The document may be available on-line at Intelligence/readme/81sum> but when I tried I got a malware warning
and could not get the file to open. However I recognise that URL as
having been the location of Intelligence in the past. Its current URL is
. first time that assassins’ arrival in town was announced by a
press release!
On-line there is the transcript of some of the hearings
held by the House of Commons Trade and Industry Committee
in 1992 on ‘Exports to Iraq’.63 In one session before the
committee some of the personnel involved in the finance of the
arms-to-Iraq operations appeared and some of the MPs did
their under-informed best to make sense of this area. They
were quite close to the heart of it but didn’t know enough to
challenge the emollient bullshit being spread by the bankers
before them.

There is even some quite lengthy questioning on the
subject of the late Stefan Kock. At para 2725 this exchange
takes place between Labour MP Stan Crowther and Mr T.

Robson of the Midland Bank:
Did you ever have any reason to believe that he might
have been connected in any way with the Intelligence
Service?
(Mr Robson) None at all. Stephan Kock made no secret
of his background, the fact that he had been involved
with the SAS and his work in Rhodesia, but with regard
to the security services nothing at all, he never talked to
me about that, I am not aware of it.

Robson neatly doesn’t quite answer the question and
Crowther doesn’t recognise that ‘the security services’ and
‘the Intelligence Service’ are not coterminous.64
There is a wide consensus now that the journalist
Jonathan Moyle was murdered in Chile in 1990, possibly
because he was researching the arms-to-Iraq trade.65 Even
63 At 0086/0086_xi.pdf> This appears to be the only section of the
evidence taken by that committee on this subject which is on-line.

64 In their 2003 ‘How £1bn was lost when Thatcher propped up
Saddam’, David Leigh and Rob Evans discussed the export credit
guarantees given to various arms manufacturers. Conclusion? Yes, the
taxpayer ultimately paid for much of the weaponry ‘sold’ to Iraq.


65 There is no evidence on this that I am aware of and if Moyle was,
as some have suggested, working for SIS under cover as a journalist,
would he be poking around in an area SIS was trying to keep secret?. the inquest eventually found he had been unlawfully killed.66
The Guardian’s David Leigh disagrees. In the British Journalism
Review he wrote:
Nobody murdered Jonathan Moyle at all. As it happens,
World in Action spent a lot of time and money
researching this particular conspiracy theory during the
90s, at a time when I was there as a producer (before
that distinguished investigative series was closed down
by ITV in pursuit of something more lucrative to put on
their screens).

WIA obtained Chilean police photographs of
Moyle’s corpse and traced the Home Office pathologist
who had examined the evidence for the British inquest.

It rapidly transpired that Moyle had in fact been
practising “auto-erotic asphyxiation”— a sexual game
with a high fatality rate. Murderers do not pad their
nooses to make their victims more comfortable while
they kill them. But Moyle had done so. Simple as that.67
And if you were going to murder someone and make it look
like an auto-erotic accident, might you not try to make it look
as plausible as possible?
Aunty’s in a bind
Despite the enormous salaries being paid to far too many of
its employees, I sometimes feel sorry for the BBC. It is hard
being a semi-detached state broadcaster. Everyone attacks it.

The right keep up a constant flow of complaints of left-wing
bias. This is partly genuine and partly intimidation. (New
Labour did the same thing.) The biases are more unthinking
centrist than left-wing: pro-EU, pro-PC, pro-multiculturalism,
pro-free market, pro-globalisation. How many socialist or
anarchist voices, do you hear on the BBC? Apart from the
occasional five second sound bite to illustrate a news story,
none, as far as I am aware. Come to that, how often do you
66 See the BBC News report on this at

67 . hear economic nationalist, anti-multiculturalism, antiglobalisation
voices on the BBC?
And there are other biases. One is allowing the City and
its spokespersons to dominate economic commentary. A study
of the coverage of the economic issues by the Radio 4 Today
programme during 2008 shows that economic commentary
was dominated by City spokespersons and only their views
were treated seriously. Unfortunately the study, ‘The Today
programme and the banking crisis’ costs $25 to purchase but
a detailed summary of its main findings is given by Nick
Shaxson in ‘Is the BBC afraid of the City of London?’ on his
blog.68 Have things changed since 2008? Not that I can
detect.

Along similar lines is a study of the BBC’s treatment of
the government’s privatisation of the NHS which concludes:
In the two years building up to the government’s NHS
reform bill, the BBC appears to have categorically failed
to uphold its remit of impartiality, parroting government
spin as uncontested fact, whilst reporting only a narrow,
shallow view of opposition to the bill. In addition, key
news appears to have been censored.69
Why Barrack is staying off that motel balcony
Why has Obama been such a disappointment? Yes, he was
bought and paid for before his first election. Yes, he’s a
compromiser by nature. And yes, the Republicans control the
Congress and will block anything he tries. But there may be
another reason. Ray McGovern, retired senior intelligence
analyst at the CIA, wrote this recently:
Which leads to the question, why would he do all these
things? Why would he be afraid for example, to take the
drones away from the CIA? Well, I’ve come to the
conclusion that he’s afraid. Number one, he’s afraid of
68
69 . what happened to Martin Luther King Jr. And I know
from a good friend who was there when it happened,
that at a small dinner with progressive supporters, after
these progressive supporters were banging on Obama
before the election, “Why don’t you do the things we
thought you stood for?” Obama turned sharply and said,
“Don’t you remember what happened to Martin Luther
King Jr.?”70
Weather wars
If you were sceptical about the pieces by Tim Coles in issues
62 on (weather weapons) and 64 (on chemtrails) you should
read Rady Anand’s ‘Atmospheric Geoengineering: Weather
Manipulation, Contrails and Chemtrails: A Review of the “Case
Orange” report’ for more of the same (but with some different
sources).71 This isn’t a paranoid fantasy on anyone’s part.

70
71 . Apocryphylia
Simon Matthews
Like father.....like son?
It was amusing to see Lord Cunningham of Felling (formerly
Jack and MP for Copeland 1970-2005) being covertly filmed by
a bogus lobbying company some months back. The assured
way in which he confirmed his fee, a mere £14k per month, for
doing some work for them — basically wire-pulling in the
corridors of power, using contacts built up over 40 odd years —
would have reminded any observers with a decent political
memory of the modus operandi of his late father, Alderman
Cunningham, also of Felling.1
On hearing the report in June, the Labour Party
immediately withdrew the whip from Cunningham, who duly
protested his innocence stating that he had suspicions about
the interview he attended and had been ‘testing’ the veracity
of the would be lobbyists by mentioning the £14k per month
retainer. Cunningham, who organised the 1992 Labour
general election campaign and served as a minister under Blair
1997-1999 (before being reshuffled to the back benches) was
the subject of an enquiry by the House of Lords’ Committee for
Privileges in 2008 about how, precisely, he came to be
employed as a public affairs adviser to the City of London
Corporation for a fee of £36,000.2 Reading it in full,
particularly the unravelling of the entrails setting out how
Cunningham obtained the position — he was working for
Sovereign Strategy, the lobbying company run by Alan
Donnelly, formerly MEP for Tyne and Wear 1989-2000 —
provides an interesting insight into how some people make
their money.

The complaint against Cunningham, from Norman Lamb
1 On Cunningham senior see free/lobster62/lob62-shameless.pdf>
2 See the House of Lords proceedings at
parliament.uk/pa/ld200809/ldselect/ldprivi/154/154.pdf>. . MP — for non-declaration of an interest — was dismissed.

Cunningham remains an unaffiliated member of the House of
Lords.

How is it, towards the East?
For anyone wanting to actively avoid the ludicrous and
delusional media overkill of the Thatcher funeral, the Diamond
Jubilee and the Royal baby earlier this year, the mixed media
exhibition that ran at the Calvert 22 gallery in May-June would
have been a welcome relief. Entitled ‘How is it, towards the
East?’, (an enquiry made, apparently, by William Morris in 1890
about East London), the show covered, among other things:
the slum clearance, the design and construction of the
Boundary Estate by the London County Council in the 1890s;
the contribution to UK political debate by socialist, anarchist
and communist refugees from Tsarist Russia; ‘the validity of
certain socialist/Marxist postulates for contemporary society’;
a re-enactment of a speech from the film WR — Mysteries of
the Organism (a 1971 Yugoslav film about the relationship
between socialism and sexuality, focussing on the work of
Wilhelm Reich); and how women coped with the cramped
domestic circumstances that existed prior to large scale state
provision of good quality housing.

All good stuff, but who are Calvert 22?
Their founder, Nonna Materkova, won both a Yeltsin
scholarship for Young Russian Business Leaders and a British
Council scholarship, and arrived in London in 1999 to study at
the LSE. Prior to this she held a number of posts, one of which
was Head of Major Investment Projects at the Finance
Committee of the City of St Petersburg — in which role it seems
reasonable to assume she would have known and met
Vladimir Putin, then beginning his rise to global significance in
that city. Calvert 22 is sponsored (the exact wording used is
‘strategic partner’) by VTB Capital, an investment bank, 61%
owned by the Russian government. Like any financial
institution, the management board of VTB includes a range of
personalities but in prominent positions are Andrei Kostin,
formerly in ‘diplomatic service’ at the USSR embassy in London . 1985-1990, during which time he presumably knew Alexander
Lebedev the current proprietor of The Evening Standard and
The Independent, Vasily Titor, who ‘worked in the President’s
office’ in the ‘90s and Gennadiy Melikyan, previously Minister of
Labour in the Russian Federation, 1992-1997. According to
Olga Podoinitsya at VTB their role in sponsoring Calvert 22 is
‘putting people in touch with the actual trends in the country
and offering them a new perspective on Russia’.

It looks rather as if the gallery is a Russian equivalent of
the cultural propaganda work carried out abroad by the British
Council. How ironic that it staged an exhibition about the
values of good housing and ‘alternative models of organising
society’ during the funeral of Margaret Thatcher — the most
significant force in the destruction of council housing this
country has yet seen. And curious, too, that Calvert 22 is
located in the centre of a local authority housing estate,
surrounded by blocks of flats housing many immigrant families
– not unlike the type of location where Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky
and other Russian leftist exiles would have been found during
their sojourn in London in 1907.

Finkelstein
Danny Finkelstein, whose personal political journey has taken
him from the Labour Party via the SDP to the Conservative
Party, made the following (fairly obvious) statement in The
Times on 12 June: ‘....Britain wants a US level of taxation with
European levels of spending and this is not sustainable....’3
This is true. It is also true that little to no real debate has ever
been had about this topic and that mainstream conventional
politicians ignore it as an issue. Perhaps, if Finkelstein, an
essentially decent and accessible commentator, can broach
the subject others might follow? We should hope they do for
this is very much the elephant in the room of contemporary UK
politics. If not, then society will carry on fracturing; and the
3 A thought echoed by Chris Mullin (Labour MP 1987-2010) in the
November issue of Progress: ‘The British people have been led to
believe that they can have west European levels of public services at
American rates of taxation’. < www.progressonline.org.uk/magazines/
november-2013/> . transformation of Britain into an offshore Europe equivalent of
Kansas or Minnesota will continue.

Strange days in North Yorks......

The passing of Wilf Proudfoot was reported fairly widely and
he duly got decent sized obits in most of the quality press.

Proudfoot had a respectable political career on the free market
right: elected to Scarborough Town Council in 1950; a couple
of failed tilts at Westminster before securing Cleveland in
Macmillan’s ‘never had it so good’ victory in ’59; losing the seat
in 1964; returning — in a very close result — as MP for
Brighouse and Spenborough in 1970; losing again in ’74 as
Heath went down to the NUM; and failing thereafter to find a
constituency that wanted to select him.

Often overlooked is the fact that, despite not being much
of a household name, he got everything he campaigned for.

He made his money (and name) in the ‘40s setting up a chain
of prototype self-service supermarkets in Yorkshire4 and
advocated thereafter the abolition of retail price maintenance,
the state regulatory device that fixed the price of a wide range
of staples, ensured a level playing field for shoppers and
sustained the massive preponderance of small corner shops
across the UK. Proudfoot was clear that if this could be done
supermarkets would thrive. This was duly enacted in early
1964 by Edward Heath, then President of the Board of Trade
in the brief Douglas-Home government.

Proudfoot also had a pronounced interest in
decimalisation, thinking perhaps, about the ease of customers
checking out from his stores, and the then complicated
arithmetic at the till and pockets full of spare change that
weighed as much as a bag of flour. The march toward this
began in earnest in 1961 when MacMillan set up the Halsbury
Committee to enquire and make recommendations on the
subject. It reported in 1963, recommending a move to
decimalisation, its finding were adopted in 1969 (by the
Decimal Currency Act) and Britain went decimal in 1971.

And he also advocated commercial radio. The back story
4 See . to UK pirate radio in the ‘60s was raked over in Lobster 58 and
59, but without Proudfoot’s involvement being mentioned. In
1965, with two fellow Scarborough business figures, he
promoted a proposal to establish an offshore commercial radio
station and convened a public meeting to ‘attract investors’. At
this he went to some trouble to tell those who attended that
the project was not a typical investment and might not yield a
return. This suggests that (a) he knew that offshore stations
rarely or never made money (b) the purpose of the meeting
was to make it look as if it were a ‘legitimate’ business
venture whilst deflecting actual investors; and leads one to
the conclusion that the actual purpose of the station was not
linked entirely to a personal liking for pop music.

In April 1966 Radio 270, his offshore station, began
broadcasting. It cost £75k to launch (£7.5m today) and was
accommodated in a Dutch former fishing vessel. The smallest
of the UK offshore stations, its operating costs were, like
Radio London and Swinging Radio England, underpinned with
advertising from the US Evangelists, The Radio Church of God,
who paid £300 per week for a nightly slot (£30,000 today).

Just how eclectic its tastes were became apparent in
April 1967 when Radio 270 gave up a significant part of its air
time to political broadcasts — advocating that people vote
Conservative in the May 1967 municipal elections. These
broadcasts were made by Patrick Wall MP — who also spoke
frequently on air in favour of supporting the Ian Smith
government in Rhodesia and the Apartheid regime in South
Africa. Harvey Proctor — then chair of York University
Conservative Society — hosted a regular 30 minute ‘current
affairs’ programme on Radio 270 throughout May-August
1967. In the final weeks before the Wilson government made
offshore broadcasting illegal, Radio 270 carried contributions
from Ronald Bell MP and John Biggs-Davison MP in favour of
the introduction of commercial radio in the UK.

The story of Radio 270, and Proudfoot’s interest in
commercial radio, became especially interesting when it . ceased broadcasting. After its personnel dispersed5 Proudfoot
discussed selling the ship to Radio Caroline’s Ronan O’Rahilly,
after both Caroline vessels were impounded for non-payment
of victualling costs in April 1968. The discussions came to
nothing and it was sold for scrap instead; and on the face of it
Proudfoot was clearly concentrating on rebooting his political
career at this point (having been adopted as Conservative
PPC for Brighouse and Spenborough). But was this the end of
his dealings with O’Rahilly?
In late ’69 two Swiss businessmen purchased and fitted
out the biggest and best pirate station yet: Radio North Sea
International. It began test transmissions on 23 January 1970
– on a frequency allocated by international agreement to the
Czechoslovak government — and from 11 February broadcast
regularly across the UK, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland
and Germany. Responsibility for jamming the transmissions in
the UK fell to John Stonehouse MP, then Postmaster-General,
who duly ordered this to be done on 15 April.6 The jamming
was not particularly effective as RNI changed its frequency
from time to time and the station quickly grew in popularity.

On 18 May 1970 prime minister Harold Wilson —
comfortably ahead in the polls — called a snap general
election. The same day, the owners of Radio North Sea
International contacted Ronan O’Rahilly and offered him the
use of the ship — for free, apparently — to broadcast and
generally orchestrate an anti-Labour campaign. Ronan
O’Rahilly has made few comments in the years that followed
about his work over the following four weeks but it was
extensive: touring marginal seats in a converted double
decker bus and distributing a million leaflets urging young
5 Philip Hayton became BBC correspondent in Washington DC, moved
from there to cover South Africa and Rhodesia in the ‘70s and later
turned up as BBC correspondent in Tehran during the 1979 Islamic
Revolution and in Lebanon during the ‘80s Civil War; Roger Gale
became Conservative MP for Thanet North (1983-); Paul Burnett, who
had joined Radio 270 from the RAF Broadcasting Service in the Persian
Gulf (shades of the late Simon Dee) became a popular DJ on the BBC.

6 Stonehouse was the subject of allegations in 1969 that he was a
Czech spy. Was the selection of the RNI broadcasting frequency a
deliberate attempt to compromise or embarrass him? If so, by whom?. voters to ditch Wilson and go Tory in the name of personal
freedom.

Approximately five million electors were aged between
18 and 24 in 1970, about 14% of all those registered to vote.

The anti-Labour campaign reached a crescendo on the
weekend of Saturday-Sunday 13/14 June 1970 when Radio
North Sea International changed its name to Radio Caroline
International and staged a rally in Hyde Park, attended by
10,000 and broadcast live on RCI, that ended with a march to
Downing Street led by O’Rahilly, Simon Dee and George
Lazenby, the latter then the current James Bond. This went
virtually unreported in the UK media. Incandescent with rage,
Wilson ordered the Post Office to block the RCI signal, this
being finally achieved on 17 June (the day before polling) by
the use of the most powerful counter transmitter in the British
Isles: the Marconi facility at Canewdon, Essex.

Still....with Labour remaining in front in the opinion polls
and with the Conservatives requiring a very large number of
gains to achieve even a small majority, few predicted the
results that trickled in on 18 June 1970 — Heath winning with
an overall majority of 30. Labour casualties included George
Brown (deputy leader), Sir Dingle Foot (Solicitor General),
Anthony Greenwood (Minister of Housing) and a significant
number of less prominent personalities — Woodrow Wyatt,
Stan Newens, Robert Maxwell, Gwyneth Dunwoody, John
Diamond and David Ennals, all of whom were in marginal
seats.

A key beneficiary was Wilf Proudfoot, elected in
Brighouse and Spenborough with a majority of only 59.

Analysis of the 1970 election results shows that the
Conservatives gained 18 seats by margins of less than 1,000
votes and a further 15 by between 1,000 and 1,500 votes. In
other words Heath’s majority was delivered by less than
50,000 electors in 33 constituencies. Another way of looking at
it is to say that if 1% of the youth vote in 1970 were
sufficiently influenced by O’Rahilly and Radio North Sea
International to change their vote from Labour to
Conservative — this was enough to remove Wilson from . Downing Street. One wonders who paid for O’Rahilly’s activity.

Proudfoot’s second spell in Parliament, during which
Christine Holman, later Christine Hamilton, was his secretary,
saw the passing of the Sound Broadcasting Act (1972) and the
setting up of a network of commercial radio stations across
the UK, completing the hat trick of major changes to daily life
for which he could claim responsibility. Defeated in both the
1974 elections, and not selected for a winnable seat in 1979,
he drifted away from politics and embarked on a radically new
career as a hypnotist, studying at the Hypnotism and Training
Institute in Los Angeles and setting up (in Scarborough) the
Proudfoot School of Clinical Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy. He
had considerable standing in this field, founding the UK Guild
of Hypnotist Examiners who posted, at his death: ‘Wilf
believed that the most important thing that a therapist could
do was give people the experience of trance.’
It is interesting to reflect that, like Sir James Goldsmith,
Proudfoot succeeded in achieving carefully defined goals
without ever holding high office or, in his case, even being
particularly well known. Perhaps a political/social history of
Britain might one day be written in which the central narrative
is built around people like this rather than the usual
procession of prime ministers and other major establishment
figures.

Just a few miles along the Yorkshire coast from
Scarborough is Whitby, where one Simon Parkes has been
making waves recently. Occupying elected office at the lowest
rung possible (a town councillor within a district council)
Parkes enjoys considerable notoriety as a result of stating
that he has been regularly abducted and is in a sexual
relationship with an alien with whom he has fathered a child.

He is a Labour councillor, for now, and reminds people that
from 1994 until 2002 he was also a Labour councillor in
Hackney where, he says he used to meet Tony Blair ‘quite a
lot’, and was chauffeured around London in a Rolls Royce
meeting international dignitaries, including the US
Ambassador. Anyone who was a colleague of Parkes’ between . 1994 and 1998 would beg to differ. During this period, which
was marked by particularly unpleasant internal Labour Party
battles, he was most noted by his absence. When he
eventually surfaced, and was asked for an explanation he
apologised and stated that he had been working undercover,
for the security services, in the BNP. Nobody believed him.

Well we wouldn’t, would we? And perhaps that’s the
problem with too many people in UK politics today — so
focussed on day to day pragmatic matters! So obsessed with
logical explanations! My guess would be that Parkes, following
the path trodden by David Icke, will do well on the US
abductee circuit....attending solemn conventions, sympathising
with fellow victims who will nod at his proximity to Tony Blair
and ponder at the involvement of the US Ambassador in his
narrative.

Somewhere in a parallel universe Wilf Proudfoot would
be giving Simon Parkes regression therapy and retrieving his
memories......

My Old Man’s a.....?
Ed Milliband came to Tyneside and addressed the Labour
Party faithful at a gala dinner on the evening of 11 October.

He spoke well: tough, fluent, slightly self-deprecating. After
the usual introductions and name checking of local dignitaries
and MPs he reminded the audience that he had just been
called a Marxist for suggesting that power companies should
have their charges capped and went on to say that if that
made him a Marxist, then most people in Britain must be
Marxists too, because a clear majority supported this policy.

(Huge burst of applause). Running through a list of criticisms of
the government, he concluded with an account of his meeting
Hetty Bower (at 107, the oldest living Labour Party member)
who had regaled him with her recollections of the Battle of
Cable Street, and how she had taken part in blocking the
attempt by the British Union of Fascists to march through east . London.7 Reaching a climax, Milliband told the audience how
he too identified with this, and like Hetty, we should reject
Coalition policies — specifically any cuts to the NHS and the
bedroom tax — proclaiming ‘they shall not pass!’ (Prolonged
cheering and a standing ovation.) It was all very different in
tone, and even possibly content, to Blair’s relentless suburban
centrism and Brown’s calculating use of traditional Labour
language to mask overtly free market policies. Even the use of
the word Marxist seemed to relax the audience — at last
someone speaking in a way that was pleasing and familiar to
(most of) the audience, without the obligatory apologising for
previous Labour governments or the pretence that everything
pre-1994 was an embarrassing aberration.

In keeping with the One Nation-Labour theme Milliband
spoke in front of a back drop decorated with Union Jacks; and
also, in a nod to US culture, an enormous copy of the Andy
Warhol Campbell’s soup tin print (a logo used by the
Technology Services Group, a Newcastle IT company and wine
sponsors for the evening). Publicity for the event noted that
the main sponsor was International Management Partners
Limited, two of whose directors are Alan Donnelly (see above
in connection with Cunningham (J)) and........Max Mosley.

Multiple ironies abound at this turn of events — Ed Milliband
defending his father (‘as any son would’) when Dad was
accused of being a Marxist who hated Britain, and Mosley
defending his father (‘as any son would’) when Dad, normally
accused of being a Fascist who would have betrayed his
country, was set on in the street in Hackney in 1962. But Ed
Milliband proclaiming ‘they shall not pass’ at an event
sponsored by Max Mosley?
Things move on, of course, and children cannot be
blamed for the views and opinions of their parents. What is
curious, though, is the interest shown by Max Mosley for some
7 Mrs Bower has certainly had an eventful political career, not always
as an orthodox Labour supporter (which Milliband jocularly admitted in
his speech). According to a posting at
‘She probably joined the Communist Party in the early 1930s.’ Part of
her working life at this time was spent at Kino Films — an avant garde
documentary company of the period. Presumably she would appreciate
the exhibitions staged at Calvert 22.. years in funding the Labour Party; first the Formula One
donation in 1997, now this.8 One wonders if the future might
bring a scion of the Mosley clan being adopted as a Labour
PPC, with the family ‘returning home’ after Sir Oswald marched
off in 1931.

8 Mosley’s contact with Labour go back to at least the mid ‘90s when
Formula One hired David Ward, previously a ‘spin doctor’ during the
John Smith leadership. It appears that Mosley, today, is acting as
guarantor for a number of individuals in their libel claims/breach of
privacy claims against News International and other sections of the
media relating to phone hacking — including, it is said, John Prescott.

There is some comment on-line to the effect that Mosley is in regular
contact with Tom Watson MP. What do we make of this? Either Mosley
is prepared to spend an awful lot of money to curb the press, or he
seeks political influence of some kind. Perhaps International
Management Partners Ltd are seen by Labour as a source of funding
that is independent of the trade unions — as was the donation of
£1million from Formula One in 1997, subsequently returned when it
became controversial. In a 2011 article in the Daily Mail * Tom Bower
quoted Formula One’s head, Bernie Ecclestone, who donated the £1
million, as saying that in part the donation was made in the hope of
boosting Max Mosley’s chances of becoming a Labour MP. ‘I want Max
to be in a good position to get a Labour seat,’ Ecclestone said.

* Ecclestone-Tony-Blairs-behaviour-rate-played-crooked-hand.html>. Literary Spying
British Writers and MI5 Surveillance 1930-1960
James Smith
Cambridge University Press, 2013, £55.00, h/b
John Newsinger
Smith’s book is an immensely valuable preliminary examination
of the British secret state’s surveillance of ‘the left-wing
writers and artists’ of George Orwell’s generation. As the
author makes clear, the context was very different from the
United States. In Britain surveillance of the arts and artists
was not informed by any US-style Red Scare. In Britain, he
argues, ‘MI5’s activity was much more circumspect and rarely
resulted in direct forms of censorship’, let alone any ‘explosive
arrests’. MI5, unlike the FBI, did not have a Book Review
Section, examining content. There were no British Dashiell
Hammetts or Howard Fasts imprisoned for a political stand.

Nevertheless, despite the absence of any Red Scare,
extensive surveillance still took place. Smith discusses MI5
policy with regard to the Communist Party in the mid-1930s:
‘....all aspects of the policy of the CPGB were being
“carefully followed up”, while routine checks on
correspondence were maintained on selected district
officers, important members and those involved in the
covert organisations of the Party. But attention was also
paid right down to the ground level. While extra
attention was given to Party leaders or those who were
secret members, a blanket of detailed surveillance was
mandated for anyone involved in the Party: “As far as
possible all details, including place of employment, are
being obtained concerning all Party members”…Of
course, the files maintained on actual Party members
were only the tip of the iceberg.’. Inevitably, writers and artists on the left came under scrutiny.

Smith looks in detail at the surveillance of the Auden Circle, at
Ewan MacColl, Joan Littlewood and the Theatre Workshop,
and at Arthur Koestler and George Orwell. He has also written
elsewhere (Literature and History 2010) about the surveillance
of Douglas Jefferies and the left-wing literary magazine, Storm,
a contribution that would have fitted nicely into this volume.

With regard to the Auden Circle, Auden himself seems to have
attracted little attention from the secret state because
although ‘he was widely championed as the poetic leader of
the left’, in practice, he was reluctant to involve himself in ‘the
types of ground-level activism’ that other members of the
Circle embraced. MI5, it seems, did not regard poetry as
particularly threatening and only really noticed poets when
they engaged in more conventional activism! Even Auden’s
visit to Republican Spain seems to have gone unnoticed by
MI5, although as Smith notes there might well be an SIS file.

Interest in Auden did, however, explode into life in June 1951
at the time of the Guy Burgess defection. One of the last
things Burgess did before disappearing was try to contact
Auden, something that excited considerable activity on the
part of MI5.

Smith has a very interesting discussion of another
member of the Auden Circle, Stephen Spender, who attracted
a lot more attention. He examines his post-war involvement
with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Special Branch, who
were in the grip of ‘anti-Communist paranoia’, were actually
investigating the Congress to discover whether or not it was a
Communist front! As for Spender’s involvement, he provides a
convincing argument in favour of Spender knowing that
Encounter was funded by the CIA. He had, after all, worked for
the Political Warfare Executive during the war and was
certainly not the naïve literateur, taken advantage of by Cold
Warriors, that he presented himself as. Spender was, in fact,
‘well integrated with the British Cold War propaganda effort’.

Which brings us to MacColl, Littlewood and the Theatre
Workshop. The released Theatre Workshop file, covering the
years from 1951 to 1960, has some 250 pages. MI5 kept . newspaper reviews of Theatre Workshop productions on file,
indeed the file contains ‘over 100 separate clippings — making
the file now, in its own right, a considerable archive concerning
the reception of Theatre Workshop’. As for MacColl, in the
1930s, Special Branch seem to regard him as a serious threat;
but MI5 were much more relaxed, with Roger Hollis
recommending that he could be ‘left to his plays’.

What of Koestler and Orwell? An MI5 officer assessed
Koestler as ‘one third genius, one third blackguard and one
third lunatic’, which seems pretty fair. His trajectory from
Comintern agent to Cold Warrior is usefully documented, right
up until the time that he became too hawkish for his new
employers. Most controversial, of course, is George Orwell,
whose integrity has been seriously called into question since
revelations concerning his relationship with the covert
Information Research Department. Smith quotes the historian
Christopher Hill on how Orwell was always ‘two-faced’ and
seemed to have ‘something fishy’ about him. He considers the
validity of this judgement. According to Smith, in the 1930s,
surveillance of Orwell ‘was at times paranoid but, from a
security standpoint, sporadic and largely peripheral’. During
the War, Special Branch, ‘inevitably paranoid’ according to
Smith, described him as having ‘advanced communist views’,
as attending ‘communist meetings’ and as dressing ‘in a
bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours’.

MI5 took a more relaxed view, with W. Ogilvie responding to
the Special Branch report with the observation that Orwell
‘has been a bit of an anarchist in his day and in touch
with extremist elements. But he has lately thrown in his
lot with Victor Gollancz who as you probably know has
severed all connection with the Communist Party. Blair
undoubtedly (has) strong Left Wing views but he is a
long way from orthodox Communism’.

As Ogilvie noted, it was evident from Orwell’s recent
writings (this was before Animal Farm was published) ‘that he
does not hold with the Communist Party nor they with him’.

Post-war, of course, Orwell became involved with the
secret state. Smith quite correctly condemns Orwell’s . relationship with the Information Research Department (IRD)
and his handing over of a list of Party members, sympathisers
and fellow travellers as a ‘gross miscalculation’. He is,
however, less successful in explaining this miscalculation.

Obviously, Orwell’s anti-Stalinism was a crucial factor, but in
the post-War period the nature of that anti-Stalinism changed.

Whereas in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Orwell had been
intent on combating Communist influence within the Left, after
the War he became mistakenly convinced that the Soviet
Union was an aggressive great power set on further
conquests and that in these circumstances the West was ‘a
lesser evil’ that he was prepared to help fight the Russians.

This was the same stance that he had taken with regard to
Nazi Germany. Whereas in Animal Farm, the Soviet Union is
shown as being as bad as the West, by Nineteen Eighty Four,
the totalitarian danger has become overwhelming.

This was not the only factor though. Orwell was a strong
supporter of the Labour government right up until his death.

He was very critical of it for not being radical enough, arguing
on one occasion that a United Socialist States of Europe was
the only thing worth fighting for, but he believed it was the
best that was possible at the time. It was this government
that had set up the IRD to counter Communist propaganda
and influence and there seems little doubt that as far as
Orwell was concerned, he was assisting a Labour government
initiative. It is these two interrelated factors that together
explain Orwell’s miscalculation: his acceptance of the Cold War
exaggeration of the ‘Russian threat’ and his illusions in the
Labour government’s foreign policy.

In his defence, it is worth remembering that the same
Christopher Hill who considered Orwell as always having been
‘fishy’ was at this time a public apologist for Stalinism, even
publishing an article in the CP’s Modern Quarterly in 1953,
celebrating the great man’s virtues as a historian! One
suspects that those Russian historians who fell victim to the
purges would have found Orwell’s more forgivable than Hill’s.

Hill only finally turned against Stalin when the Soviet regime
repudiated him in 1956.. Interestingly enough, although this falls outside Smith’s
remit, Orwell was also approached by the International Relief
and Rescue Committee, which in its current incarnation has
kindly provided gainful employment for David Miliband. He was
approached early in 1946 by Francis Henson, a ‘Lovestoneite’,
working for the Committee, who assured him that the
organisation was ‘very definitely a non-Stalinist organisation’,
indeed that it was ‘anti-Stalinist to the extent that the people
they assist are largely Trotskyists etc’. He missed the clue that
the Committee, in his words, seemed to ‘have considerable
funds at their disposal’. This initiative seems to have been
stillborn, but it certainly shows Orwell’s potential vulnerability
to secret state manipulation at this time.

*
John Newsinger’s Orwell’s Politics is published by
Palgrave/Macmillan.

Interestingly, MI5 did, as Smith reveals, work with the British
Board of Film Censors, ‘arranging joint film viewings…allowing
them to judge the content of recent propaganda films and
coordinate with the BBFC ways of managing any films deemed
to pose a particular risk’. Given this interest in the cinema, Ken
Loach’s MI5 file is, one suspects, pretty thick!
Peter Davison, ed, The Complete Works of George Orwell:
Smothered Under Journalism, London 1998, pp 154-155. The
Lovestoneites were, of course, supporters of Nikolai Bukharin . and followers of Jay Lovestone, expelled from the American
Communist Party in 1928. In the post-war period they were to
become US Intelligence assets in the effort to combat
Communist influence in the British and European labour
movements.. Yesterday.......

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s
Alwyn W. Turner
Aurum Press, 2013, £25, h/b
Dan Atkinson
The author once worked in an Army cinema, operating the film
projector. Reading this tremendous book, you wonder if he
may not have been better employed behind the movie camera.

His wide lens misses little and his superb technique gives real
depth to the picture.

Just out of shot, either side of the frame, are the two
landmark events that (to mix metaphors) bookend Mr Turner’s
narrative. By chance, the dates of both events would be
rendered as ‘nine-eleven’ in the continents in which they took
place, respectively November 9 1989, when the Berlin Wall
came down, and September 11 2001, with the attacks on New
York and Washington.

So this is a social history of Britain during not only the
first post-Cold War decade but also (to date) the most
hopeful. There was to be a ‘new world order’, supervised by
technocratic institutions run by experts (independent central
banks, environmental supervisors, competition regulators and
so forth). ‘We know what works,’ the first President Bush
declared in his 1989 inaugural speech. ‘Freedom works. We
know what’s right: Freedom is right. We know how to secure a
more just and prosperous life for man on Earth: through free
markets, free speech, free elections, and the exercise of free
will unhampered by the state.’
This sense of having ‘cracked it’, of having resolved all
the messy arguments of the past, permeated the Nineties,
just one of the ways in which it resembled the Fifties, with besuited
politicians meeting in assorted cities to sign up for new . institutions and initiatives to embed what were believed to be
eternal truths: the Maastricht Treaty (1992), the World Trade
Organisation (1995), the establishment of the International
Criminal Court (1998), the launch of the euro (1999).

Another echo of Fifties could be heard in the sometimes
regretful, sometimes celebratory view that the big political and
social struggles were now behind us. Of the earlier decade,
Neil Ascherson once recalled:
‘When I finished my National Service and went to
Cambridge, the voices around and above me were
saying something like this: "History is over. After a million
years, the human race has arrived at its destination. We
have finally discovered how to run things. There will be
no more revolutions, no more slumps and booms....You
may find this dull. You may hanker after romantic
periods....But all that is over. There is Keynes, there is
the National Health Service, there is Bretton Woods
which has stabilised the world economy for ever. If you
want excitement, concentrate on your personal
relationships.’1
That was the Nineties all over. Passion was for the arts, for
sport, for cooking, for romance, even for interior design or
gardening. For single issues, perhaps: against global warming
and testing on animals, in favour of a fair shake for disabled
people or the release of wrongly convicted prisoners. But not
for politics in general. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the
decade saw a trend for professional politicians habitually to
declare their passion for opera, or football, or indeed both.

This is also the story of the first post-Cold War Prime
Minister, John Major (now Sir John). He took office just a few
days after the signing of the Peace of Paris, which ended the
east-west struggle and ushered in what Philip Bobbitt has
called ‘the market state’.2 Indeed, Major’s predecessor,
Margaret Thatcher, was in the French capital for this event
when she heard she had failed convincingly to see off the
1 ‘The Nostalgia Game’, article first published 1986, republished in his
Games with Shadows (Radius, 1988)
2 The Shield of Achilles (Penguin, 2002). leadership challenge from Michael Heseltine of which Major
proved to be the ultimate beneficiary.

Major himself would have been there, as Foreign
Secretary, had Thatcher not lost her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson,
just over a year earlier, prompting her to move Major to the
Treasury. As Mr Turner notes, Major had been put through
something of ‘a crash course in statesmanship’. He adds:
‘The implausibility of his rise helped create an image of
accidental premiership that he never quite threw off. As
Prime Minister, he served for longer than, say, Clement
Attlee, David Lloyd George or Edward Heath, longer than
James Callaghan and Neville Chamberlain put together
and just a few months shy of Harold Macmillan, yet he
made less impression than any of those figures even at
the time.’
A fair point, although his elevation to the premiership certainly
had Labour rattled, rightly as it turned out on election night
two years later. ‘The Conservatives have found their Attlee,’
said Lord (Douglas) Jay at the time in my hearing, a statement
given some weight by his having served as a Treasury Minister
under Labour’s first post-war premier.

Major enjoyed not one but two periods of extraordinarily
high approval ratings. The first followed his arrival in office, the
second his surprise general election victory in April 1992.

Between the two peaks was a deep valley of unpopularity,
occasioned by the second Tory recession in a dozen years. As
Mr Turner notes: ‘[T]he assumption was that Labour were the
favourites to win.’
Well, indeed. The Tories were fighting on far more hostile
terrain than five years earlier, when tax rates had been falling
and Britain was booming. In fact, the economy in downbeat
1992 was the same size as it had been in go-go 1987; the
trouble was that it had been larger in the interim.

The failure of Labour leader Neil Kinnock to dislodge the
Conservatives has been not so much raked over in the
intervening years as subjected to prairie-style agriculture,
complete with heavy machinery and crop-spraying aircraft. . Wisely, Mr Turner keeps the post-mortem tight. The Sheffield
rally did not help, he suggests, but ultimately, despite
everything that had happened, voters still seemed overall not
to trust Labour with the economy.

I would add a couple of points.

One, with Labour committed to higher taxes and
continued membership of the European Exchange-rate
Mechanism (which was keeping interest rates high) the voter
had a choice between lower taxes and higher borrowing costs
or higher taxes and higher borrowing costs.

Two, plenty of people liked Kinnock not because he was
promising radical change (he wasn’t by 1992) but rather
because he seemed a decent, middle-class man with a nice
family. Unfortunately, exactly same thing could be said about
the new-ish Tory leader. In terms of evoking a relaxed, sportloving,
pub-visiting, drink-before-Sunday-lunch yesteryear — at
which Thatcher would have been hopeless even assuming she
would have tried — the two leaders were evenly matched.

The really intriguing What if? relates to Kinnock’s
successor, John Smith. I was one of his Town neighbours at
the Barbican and recall the television cameras outside Bart’s
hospital the morning he died in May 1994. Smith’s death
catapulted him instantly into the pantheon of ‘greatest prime
ministers we never had’. Perhaps. But had he trounced Major
at the polls (a big supposition, given Smith’s self-satisfied
persona and apparent belief that the English were naturally
more selfish than his fellow Scots), Major may have been welladvised
to put in a tour of duty as leader of the opposition,
with every chance of a return to Downing Street.

Internationally, the statesman Major most closely
resembled was George Bush, US president from 1989 to 1993.

Bush’s patrician background was far removed from Major’s
humble roots, but both succeeded more vivid, charismatic and
‘crunchy’ leaders, both enjoyed early popularity, both suffered
from a feeling among their own supporters that they were
not fully up to the job and both were ousted by younger,
flashier rivals from the centre-left — more centre than left in
both cases — who had realised the game had changed. And . both, in their day, were half-decent phrasemakers — or
employed people who were.

Hence Bush’s bon mots included ‘a kinder, gentler
America’, ‘a thousands points of light’ (a reference to
charitable giving and social involvement), ‘a line in the sand’
(with reference to the 1991 invasion of Kuwait), ‘go the extra
mile for peace’ (ahead of the 1991 Gulf War) and ‘read my lips
– no new taxes’.

From Major we had ‘if it isn’t hurting it isn’t working’ (his
declaration as Chancellor that ERM membership would be
painful but worth it), ‘game, set and match’ (with regard to his
Maastricht negotiations), ‘the United Kingdom is in danger.

Wake up. Wake up now before it’s too late’ (with regard to
Labour plans for Scottish home rule in the 1992 election), ‘a
nation at ease with itself’ and ca va sans dire ‘a classless
society’.

Major’s post-election second honeymoon, in which
television cameras at cricket grounds would swing round to
disclose a relaxed Prime Minister sipping a glass of wine in a
hospitality box, was glorious while it lasted. The month after
they repelled Kinnock’s forces, the Tories inflicted a second
defeat on Labour at the local government elections. Tory
elation was the mirror-image of despair on the left.

As Mr Turner writes:
‘If the Tories couldn’t be defeated in the depths of a
recession caused by their own policies, with all the
concessions made by Kinnock, then it was reasonable to
ask the question put by Giles Radice: “Can Labour ever
win?”
Much the talk in political circles concerned the
question of whether Britain might have become a oneparty
state, along the lines of Japan, where the Liberal
Democratic Party had been in power since 1955.’
There used to be a wisecrack along the lines of there having
doubtless been an international summit to discuss the
enormous problem of the dinosaurs — on the Thursday before
the dinosaurs became extinct. Much the same could be said . about fears of a one-party Conservative quasi-dictatorship.

Before too long, the notion would be laughable.

Maastricht
In early June, the Danes stunned the European political
establishment by voting in a referendum against the
Maastricht Treaty, signed earlier in the year and providing for
both political union (enhanced defence, security and other cooperation)
and monetary union, the creation of a single
currency, unnamed at that time. Giving the lie to the idea that
the European Community was essentially a Cold War
institution, Maastricht was a big step towards the finalité
politique.

Were Major to boycott Lurpak and Carlsberg for the rest
of his life, you could hardly blame him. The Danish ‘No’
wounded his premiership from two directions. One, Maastricht
had been presented as a triumph for the new premier, in
which he had obtained concessions from Brussels that would
have eluded even Thatcher. His patient courtesy (went the
spin) had secured British ‘opt-outs’ (strictly speaking ‘opt-ins’)
from two key developments, the ‘social chapter’ (assorted
workplace and other entitlements) and the single currency.

(Ironically, Major’s Maastricht achievement was genuine. Never
before had the six/nine/ten/twelve member-states failed to
sign up to everything together. Indeed, Major’s opt-outs were
the template for the four subsequent Denmark-specific optouts
that persuaded the Danes to vote ‘Yes’ a second time
round).

Two, the Danish ‘No’ spooked the currency markets,
which smelled weakness in terms of ERM members’
commitment to stick to the policies needed to stay within the
currency grid. Given that the ERM was essentially a
Deutchesmark bloc, the high German interest rates caused by
the reunion with East Germany — which had stoked inflation —
were transmitted, painfully, to the rest of the ERM area.

Throughout the heavy summer of 1992, speculative
attacks against the system increased and on September 13
Italy staged a seven per cent devaluation of the Lira, way . outside the permitted ‘divergences’. Three days later, Sterling
was forced out of the system by an unstoppable wave of
speculation.

This need not have become an albatross round the
government’s neck. The wound could have been cauterised by
the swift departure of Major’s Chancellor, the Shetland
Islander Norman Lamont. In the fashion of the future (David
Blunkett, Peter Mandelson) he could have returned to high
office before too long. Instead he stayed in post until May
1993, when Major fired him. It was the beginning of Major’s
agonies in terms of reaping the consequences of flawed
political management.

Lamont subsequently let it be known that he had never
agreed with the ERM policy. But which ERM policy? Or rather,
which motive for joining the ERM? For every Tory MP who
cheered British membership in autumn 1990 as a sign that the
UK was becoming ‘more positive about Europe’, there were at
least two for whom membership was simply the latest stage in
the Tories’ 20-year battle to ‘discipline’ trade union wage
bargaining, this time via a purgative interest-rate policy
outsourced to the Germans. New Labour, of course, was to
find a different way of doing this, through mass immigration.

Mr Turner writes of the ERM debacle: ‘Even if other
countries got caught up in the near-collapse of the ERM,
however, it was John Major’s bad luck to be the first and most
visible fall guy.’
In parallel, the Danish vote reopened the whole
question of Maastricht, given that, technically, the treaty was
now dead. This was the last thing Major needed, given that
his Maastricht triumph had satisfied both pro and anti camps in
his party and an unravelling of Maastricht would have the
opposite effect.

Europe was to be the British political issue of the
Nineties, just as the surprise economic recovery was to be the
economic issue. Thus the bitter battles about European Union
integration were waged against an incongruous background
of falling unemployment, gently rising living standards and a
population becoming more gregarious, easy-going and . bourgeois.

For the proponents of Britain ‘at the heart of Europe’,
the great hope was that the return to prosperity would quell
doubts about further British involvement, as a more secure
population would ignore the ‘wild men’ whom Britain’s EU
lobby assumed to comprise the opposition. Indeed, for most of
the decade, the ‘pro’ camp seemed to hold most of the cards
and boast the better spokespeople. Major’s Chancellor
Kenneth Clarke could make a united Europe sound as British
as roast beef and brown ale, Major’s deputy Michael Heseltine
gave it the aura of an exciting business enterprise and Tony
Blair bestowed upon the project the glitter of a chic and
fashionable new international club that Britain would be crazy
not to join.

The first task of the pro-Europeans was to get Britain to
sign up for the euro. There seemed an air of inevitability about
their eventual triumph. But three people played a key role in
keeping Britain out of the single currency: Sir James Goldsmith,
William Hague and, after the end of this book, Iain Duncan
Smith. Goldsmith’s Referendum Party forced all the main
parties to promise the people a vote on joining the euro, while
Hague and Duncan Smith blocked the possibility of getting all
the party leaders on the ‘yes’ bandwagon, as had happened
in 1975.

Gordon Brown’s famous ‘tests’ played a subsidiary,
although important, role.

In the end, Blair lacked the nerve to call a vote.

Mr Turner is acute in his observations of the Labour
leader: ‘Unlike Bill Clinton, he was not a charismatic figure, but
had learnt the trick of behaving as if he were.’ As for
comparisons between Blair and Thatcher, there was ‘a critical
difference’:
‘Certainly Blair was prepared to take his party in
unfamiliar and unloved directions, but it was always in
pursuit of a wider popularity, whereas Thatcher had
imposed unwelcome and difficult changes both on her
party and on the country itself.’. Blair’s victory and the public response to the death four
months later of the Princess of Wales marked perhaps the
starting point for two phenomena: the new state ideology and
the new folk religion. The former, as I and my co-author wrote
at the time,3 involved privatising the economy and
nationalising the public, with ever-greater state intrusion into
people’s private lives deemed desirable, nay essential; while
the latter expressed itself in public displays of emotion, the
leaving of flowers by scenes of disasters and ‘showing
respect’, often in quite bizarre ways — every Premier League
fixture held a moment’s silence before the game to remember
victims of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in March
2011. The state ideology and the folk religion sometimes
overlapped subconsciously in the public mind, as in this
splendid vignette from Mr Turner from shortly after the 1997
election :
‘Giles Radice [MP] was surprised to be visited at his
constituency surgery by a woman who “complains that
we haven’t yet managed to ‘change people’s behaviour
towards each other’ and asks what I am going to do
about it.”’
Public life in the late nineties was, in one way, quite
extraordinarily trivial, whether the sex scandals in Britain,
chronicled fairly by Mr Turner, or the ‘burning question’ of
whether or not President Clinton had discharged over a workexperience
trainee’s dress.

Even when matters were serious, the response
managed not to be so. Here is journalist and future Labour MP
Sion Simon writing in The Daily Telegraph on December 21 1998
after joint US-British bombing raids on Iraq. In the course of
this action (the little-remembered engagement was called
Operation Desert Fox), more cruise missiles were fired in four
days than in the entire 1991 Gulf War:
‘That evening, I went to a party at 1 Carlton Gardens,
the Foreign Secretary’s House. He had been expected to
say a few words, but failed to do so because of the war.

And that was the extent of the impact of events in the
3 The Age of Insecurity (Verso, 1998). Persian Gulf. Although British airmen were in combat as
we sipped our champagne, missiles wreaking havoc as
we gulped our canapés, nobody was talking about
Iraq....The only comment I have heard anyone make
about the bombardment is how amusing would be the
conjunction of a Tomahawk cruise missile and Richard
Branson’s balloon.’
In August 1999, a boatload of celebrities was ferried to Liberty
Island for the launch of Tina Brown’s new magazine Talk.

According to the Daily Mail on August 4: ‘Film stars Demi Moore
and Christopher Walken stood together looking across to
Manhattan, and Moore said: “We must look wonderful to all
the people over there.”’ A mere 25 months later, New York
was reeling and the heroes were fire-fighters and rescue
workers rather than screen stars and models.

The ‘new economy’
As the new century approached, the economic and social
trends of the nineties — in particular, the ‘new economy’ of the
internet, a ‘weightless world’ in which value would be
generated by ideas, designs and ‘creativity’ — reached their
apogee in the dot-com boom, during which it seemed any halfplausible
group of young people could raise tens of millions of
pounds or dollars from investors provided their supposed
businesses could boast some connection with the world wide
web. One of many new phrases in the air at that time was
‘burn rate’, meaning the speed at which these bright young
things would spend their way through their backers’ initial
investment before they would require ‘refinancing’.

Tales abounded of funky, inflatable boardrooms, of
corporate HQs jammed full of pinball tables, espresso
machines, bean bags, designer beer and organic nibbles.

‘Think pods’ allowed this new digital elite to engage in ‘blue
skies thinking’.

Some smelled a rat, detecting in all this emphasis on
boozing, munching and horizontal daydreaming nothing very
‘new economy’ at all, rather the time-hallowed behaviour of . the public-school layabout.

The dot.com boom went smash in the early part of 2000.

Absurd valuations collapsed, and a string of (briefly) famous
names disappeared: boo.com, clickmango and others. Wrote
BBC business reporter Jorn Madslien on March 9 2010:
‘How we all laugh as we look back at a time when the
talk was more important than the walk, and when scruffy
entrepreneurs were courted by greedy venture
capitalists, their ties hidden in their pockets.’
The crash was even more severe on Wall Street, and in an
ominous foretaste of what was to come, the Federal Reserve
Board (whose chairman Alan Greenspan was at the peak of
his ‘genius’ status) responded by slashing borrowing costs,
thus rolling the indebtedness problem over from the corporate
sector to the housing market. As we know, it came to rest on
the books of sovereign governments some years down the
road.

But if the dot-com bubble burst, the underlying belief
that the future lay in a ‘creative economy’ merely grew
stronger as Britons were urged to ‘climb the value chain’ and
leave boring, repetitive work to people in ‘the emerging
markets’ (as the Third World had been rebranded). This was a
neat inversion of the Victorian line that westerners were
practical and technical while those in the ‘mysterious orient’
were impractical dreamers who were quite good at making
fancy carpets but not much else. Now, the poorly-paid
foreigners were the dull drones of manufacturing industry
while our work was naturally more imaginative, valuable and
intelligent. Thus the ‘creative economy’ was one example of
supposedly progressive thinking that could be seen in quite a
different light.

Another example arose from changing attitudes to
homosexuality. Mr Turner is very good on the grief that this
caused the Conservative Party. He is also gently amusing, as
in this passage about a vote in Parliament to lower the age of
consent for gay men from 21 to 18:
‘[H]ome Secretary Michael Howard....explained that he . couldn’t go any further because “We need to protect
young men from activities which their lack of maturity
might case them to regret.” As an aspiration for
legislators, that seemed a trifle ambitious.’
The eviction from adults’ bedrooms of policemen and officials is
always welcome. But by the end of the Nineties, the attitude
of a straight person to the gay community had become almost
the acid test of personal decency, and pretty much remains so
today. If I were gay, I think I should find this somewhat
problematic. It comes perilously close to suggesting that any
heterosexual person with the moral grit and determination to
overcome a ‘natural’ revulsion in this area and extend the
hand of friendship is indeed a thoroughly good sort.

Mr Turner has been criticised in some quarters for giving
what is seen as excessive weight to the doings of light
entertainers; one reviewer suggested he ought to have cited
fewer comedians and more sociologists. Not only does the
heart sink at the prospect of latter-day Howard Kirk characters
clogging up Mr Turner’s narrative, but in an age of pointless,
pre-packaged political speeches and the triumph of
government-as-public-relations, the appearance of new,
apolitical comedians such as Jack Dee, a married, churchgoing
self-described ‘middle class binge drinker’ with children at
independent schools is more significant than, for example, a
Tony Blair speech about ‘cracking down on yobs’.

True, Mr Turner’s fascination with the currents and
countercurrents of the last three decades leads him very
occasionally to assume experience on the part of the readers
that they simply may not have. Discussing the ‘new lads’ of
this period, he doubtless correctly traces the phenomenon’s
roots to a reaction against the undergraduate feminism of the
1980s. Those of us who skipped university and went straight
out to work by-passed the ‘gender wars’ of that period (when
I get a moment, I must find out who won) and simply assumed
the ‘new lads’ were suffering from arrested development.

But all authors have a viewpoint and over-strenuous
attempts to see things from all angles would lead to madness.

What has been described as the ‘long weekend’ . between 1989 and 2001 came to an end in flames and falling
masonry three months after Blair was re-elected in June 2001.

The September 11 attacks were rather like the Cuban missile
crisis, the building of the Berlin Wall and the murder of
President Kennedy all rolled into one. While in many ways the
noughties (up until 2008) represented the continuation of the
nineties by other means, the innocent delight in the post-Cold
War era, captured in those floaty Millennial expressions — ‘a
borderless world’, ‘cyberspace’, ‘globalisation’ — had been
replaced by an accommodation with grimmer expressions such
as ‘homeland security’, ‘regime change’ and ‘the war on
terror’. The new decade was to be marked by military
campaigns abroad and a credit binge at home. By 2010, it had
long since become obvious that both had gone disastrously
wrong.

I very much hope, despite hints to the contrary, that Mr
Turner addresses that extraordinary period. Should he decline
the assignment, I may be forced to take it up myself. I tell you
now, it would not be done a quarter as well.

Dan Atkinson’s most recent book (with Larry Elliott) is
Going South (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

He blogs at
.. Understanding Shadows
The Corrupt Use of Intelligence
Michael Quilligan
Atlanta (GA): Clarity Press, 2013, $21.95 (USA), p/b
The author is or was — it isn’t clear which — one of the writers
for Intelligence, the Paris-based fortnightly intelligence
newsletter1 (and this has an introduction by Intelligence’s
founder/editor, Olivier Schmidt.) In the early years of Lobster
we came across Intelligence in its first incarnation as a
newsletter with summaries of stories and their sources. It was
very good, though with much wider sources and more money
than Lobster. In the late 1980s it went professional and
became expensive; more importantly, it ceased to be a kind of
parapolitical cuttings service and began publishing longer
articles without a stated author. At that point I stopped
reading it. Even if I could have afforded it — it was something
like 200 euros a year even then — I do not trust ‘blind’ writing,
which is why you never see Private Eye cited by me in these
columns.

This is a collection of essays on:
* the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians and the slowmotion
ethnic cleansing of Israel;
* the British state’s handling of the domestic Jihadist threat;
* the corruption of the ANC government in South Africa;
* the creation of the Iraqi ‘threat’ prior to the invasion of
2003, ‘dodgy dossier’ et al, and subsequent post-mortems of
the event;
* an examination of a very small part of Lee Harvey Oswald’s
journey back from the USSR and some general thoughts about
the JFK assassination;
* an account of the abuse of children by Catholic priests and
subsequent cover-ups;
* and a very detailed summary of the British state’s activities
in the ‘dirty war’ in Northern Ireland.

Thus the title is misleading: only a couple of the seven
chapters are covered by it. (But, OK, titles are hard.) The
account of the abuse by Catholic priests, the fabrication of the
1 . Iraqi ‘threat’ and the musings on JFK are the least interesting
to me. I don’t care greatly about the Catholic church story
(happy though I am to see it in the mire); the Iraqi field has
been well ploughed already by others and the author brings
little that is original; and the JFK chapter contributes only a
few paragraphs of new (and inconsequential) information
about LHO’s stay in Holland en route to the USA. The other
four chapters, on the other hand, — those on Northern Ireland,
the ANC, ‘Londonistan’ and Israel — are detailed enough to
feel like the outline of books.

The major problems with this book are technical. There
is no documentation. Instead of footnotes the author lists the
sources he has used — books, reports, websites — at the end
of each chapter. This isn’t good enough for me. Without
footnotes we have mere assertion. To give one striking
example, in the chapter on Northern Ireland he states that a
gang of Loyalist killers known as ’the Glenanne Gang’ 2 were
the same people named as ‘the Committee’ in the book The
Committee by Sean McPhilemy.3 This is new to me and I would
like to know the source. But without footnotes I don’t. More
generally, without sources it is impossible to assess the
quality of the information presented.

This is also poorly proof-read and typeset. In Schmidt’s
introduction, for example, he bothers to put the cedilla under
facade — façade — as in the original French but has David
Cameron as David Cameroun; and although it probably
shouldn’t matter, I find it irritating that most pages have at
least one line where the justification programme on the
author’s/typesetter’s computer has given us a double space
between words.

On page 158 the author describes Lobster as ‘defunct’.

Not quite, eh?
Robin Ramsay
2 See .

3 On which see _Central_Co-ordinating_Committee>. The Committee was reviewed in
Lobster 36.. Spinfluence
the Hardcore Propaganda Manual for Controlling the Masses
Nicholas McFarlane
Carpet Bombing Culture, Darlington (UK) 2013, £9.95, h/b
When I was offered this by the publisher I said it sounded a
bit agitprop for Lobster’s readers; and so it is. But it is worth
noting. The author is a New Zealand designer1 and he and his
publisher have a produced a very striking book. It is A5-sized,
and very well bound; a beautiful little book, with about 140
unnumbered pages on thick paper.2 There are very few words
in this: 34 on the first 4 pages and I would guess fewer than
5,000 in the entire thing; but lots of images. Did I mention the
author is a graphic designer? So what we have — it took me a
while to realise this — is the non-fiction equivalent of a graphic
novel. The book’s thesis is about social control, corporations,
the mass media and the techniques used by political and
commercial PR to keep ‘the sheeple’ quiet on behalf of ‘the
hidden elite minority’. Did I say agitprop? Within that,
however, there is a decent guide to the techniques deployed.

But that thesis is no more important, it seems to me, than the
book’s design and layout (did I mention the author is a graphic
designer?); and for me the striking design of the pages make
it more not less difficult to concentrate on the (few) words that
are there. Whoever its target audience is, it isn’t the orthodox
lefty book-buyer.

The book concludes with this claim (spread over 9
pages):
‘Potentially a single person could bring about their
[‘hidden elite minority’s’] downfall. By shattering and
exposing the parasitic nature of the Hidden Elite
Minority.....Revealing that they have methodically
siphoned wealth out of the system, despite knowingly
causing long-term damage to the overall health of
1 Information about him is at .

2 You can see its cover and some sample pages at
In the 10 sample
pages displayed there are about 80 words.. society.....the consequences would be catastrophic as all
of the lies which have supported them crumble....’
This is nonsense. All manner of people have ‘revealed’ the
reality of the elite’s dominance and the techniques used to
herd the ‘sheeple’ — to no effect. I guess this concluding
appeal to personal insight seems more in tune with today’s
individualism than a call for collective action.

Robin Ramsay. The Man Who Killed Kennedy
The Case Against LBJ
Roger Stone with Mike Colapietro
New York: Skyhorse, $24.95 (US), h/b
I was wondering how to review this when I received a press
release from Stone about it, listing what he thought were the
important points in it. Let’s have a look at these.

‘By late November, 1963, the Kennedys were within
days of politically executing and personally destroying
Lyndon Johnson via a two track program: 1) a
devastating RFK-fed LIFE Magazine expose of LBJ’s
astounding corruption and 2) an RFK-nurtured Senate
Rules Committee investigation into LBJ’s habit of taking
large bribes and kickbacks.’
This is true and has been discussed in these pages before.

‘Roger Stone combines his decades of insider political
ken with cutting edge JFK research to let you know what
Richard Nixon, Henry Cabot Lodge, Barry Goldwater and
the KGB all concluded: Lyndon Johnson orchestrated the
assassination of John Kennedy.’
Nixon has not explicitly said this (and doesn’t do so here),
merely hinted at it. Stone doesn’t quote Henry Cabot Lodge:
he quotes Lodge’s brother’s version of Henry’s opinion that
the Mafia, the CIA and LBJ killed Kennedy (which covers just
about all the bases.) The Goldwater story isn’t new. Robert
Morrow posted this para below on John Simkins’ JFK site last
year:1
‘When [Jeffrey] Hoff met Sen. Barry Goldwater, Hoff, who
had a keen interest in the JFK assassination, brought up
that topic. Sen. Barry Goldwater told Hoff in October,
1973, that he (Goldwater) was convinced that Lyndon
Johnson was behind the JFK assassination and that the
Warren Commission was a complete cover up. Hoff got
the impression that Goldwater had told others privately
the same thing. I asked Hoff how confident was
Goldwater when he was making these statements.

1 . Answer: Goldwater was very confident.’
It is this Stone quotes, but without attributing it. The KGB
story is true and well known.2 An FBI source within the KGB
reported that said agency believed Johnson was behind it.

‘Stone ties LBJ to at least seven politically motivated
murders prior to the murder of John F. Kennedy. Stone:
“LBJ would order up a murder just as you or I would
order a ham sandwich.”’
These are the murders listed by Billie (not Billy as Stone has it)
Sol Estes in the letter from Estes’ lawyer to the Justice
Department in 1984. There is, however, a (to me) new snippet
on the 1952 murder of one Sam Smithwick who was
apparently prepared to talk about LBJ’s theft of the Texas
senate seat in the election of 1948 (box 13 and all that).

Smithwick died in prison.

‘Lyndon Johnson’s personal hit man Malcolm Wallace
(also an employee of military contractor and LBJ insider
D.H. Byrd who owned the Texas School Book
Depository) was one of a team of shooters
assassinating JFK. Stone reveals that a fingerprint
matching Wallace and found in the so called sniper’s
nest ties LBJ directly to the murder of JFK.’
Stone can hardly ‘reveal’ the fingerprint as this has been
known of since 1998; and he has no new evidence on
Wallace’s role that day in Dallas. On Wallace in Dallas we still
have only the print and the testimony of Loy Factor and Billie
Sol Estes, both of whom are dead.

‘Stone reveals, in a game changing addition to the
historical record, that Richard Nixon recognized Lee
Harvey Oswald’s assassin, strip club owner Jack Ruby,
as “one of Lyndon Johnson’s boys” who Nixon had
arranged to be placed as a paid informant for the
House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 as a
favor to then Congressman Lyndon Johnson.....Stone
reveals that Nick Ruwe (a former top aide to Nixon) said
that when Nixon saw Jack Ruby on TV after he
2 See . murdered Oswald, Nixon exclaimed, “I know that man!”’
This is new and significant.

‘Stone reveals, in yet another eye-opening addition to
the historical record, that Texas Attorney General
Waggoner Carr told Nixon confidante John Mitchell that
LBJ was behind the JFK assassination.’
I missed this (but I did rather gallop through the book) and
didn’t see it on a second skim when I looked for it; Carr is not
indexed, and the information is not at any of the Mitchell index
references.

‘Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, head of the Genovese
crime family who were close business associates with
LBJ intimate, Texas oil man Clint Murchison, told Roger
Stone, in the presence of Roy Cohn, that Lyndon
Johnson and Carlos Marcello were behind the JFK
assassination. Roy Cohn nodded his head in agreement
as both men laughed.’
This is new, mildly interesting but not significant.

‘Stone lays out the connections between the Bay of
Pigs invasion fiasco, the JFK assassination and the fall
of Richard Nixon in Watergate. Stone outlines how
Nixon manoeuvred furiously to obtain CIA records that
would shed light on CIA-Mob connections to the JFK
assassination as an “insurance policy” against
investigation and impeachment in the Watergate
scandal.’
This is a restatement of the thesis that Nixon’s references to
‘the Bay of Pigs’ in communication with DCIA Richard Helms
during the Watergate events was a code for the events in
Dallas. But since Stone has already claimed that Nixon knew
that LBJ was behind it — not least through his identification of
Ruby as one of LBJ’s people — why would the CIA be afraid of
being linked to Dallas?
‘Roger Stone takes LBJ biographer Robert Caro to task
for “cleaning up the blood and burying the bodies” of
the murders of Lyndon Johnson that Caro will never tell . you about. For 20 years Robert Caro never interviewed
key LBJ mistress Madeleine Brown or Billie Sol Estes
who planned murders with LBJ. Caro never mentions
the revelations of LBJ lawyer Barr McClellan nor will
Caro address the transcendently important issue of
Malcolm Wallace, LBJ’s personal hit man. Caro never
mentions legendary Texas Ranger Clint Peoples who
long suspected LBJ in the JFK assassination and a
string of murders in Texas. Nor does Caro mention
Estes’ 1984 letter to the U.S. Justice Dept detailing
numerous LBJ-related murders. Caro completely omits
the 1984 Texas grand jury, acting on Estes’
blockbuster testimony, that changed the ruling in the
Henry Marshall case from suicide to homicide.’
This is mostly true. (There is no evidence that Estes planned
murders with LBJ.) Stone reports on p. 213 that in 1985 or
1986 he met Caro and said:
‘Do you plan to cover the role of Mac Wallace in your
biography of LBJ?’ Caro looked startled and shaken and
grabbed me by the lapels of my business suit, saying,
‘Who are you? How can I get in touch with you?’ I gave
him my business card, which he examined on the spot
and pocketed. However I never heard anything more
from him.’
As I have pointed out before,3 in the fourth volume of his
immense biography of LBJ, covering his years as vice president
and the transition to president, Caro omits all reference to
Billie Sol Estes and can thus state that he found nothing
linking LBJ to the assassination. He flunked the assassination
material, in short.

The extensive prepublication publicity for this book
suggested to me that Stone was merely going to represent
the extant evidence for the LBJ’s-people-dunnit thesis which a
number of us have already done. And so it proved: there is
nothing new about the actual assassination. What is
significant is the Nixon identification of Ruby as an ‘LBJ man’
3 In ‘View from the bridge’ at free/lobster64/lobster64.pdf>.. from the late 1940s, though what it means and how we
proceed with this is unclear to me.

There is one significant conclusion to be drawn from this
account. For all that Stone was a political insider, a Republican
pol, for the entire period from the late 1960s onwards, he
heard almost nothing of significance about the assassination.

Which suggests either that political Washington knows little
about it — being interested in the assassination is not exactly
career-enhancing — or that it has remained close-mouthed
about the subject.

Robin Ramsay. In Spies We Trust: the story of western intelligence
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
Oxford University Press, 2013, £20, h/b
Bernard Porter
Britain and America came quite late to the spying game, but
by the late 20th century had come to dominate it. It is this, I
suppose, that justifies the subtitle of this book, which scarcely
mentions other Western intelligence agencies except in a
chapter at the end discussing a possible EU alternative to the
current Anglo-American axis. The main title must be meant
ironically. The overwhelming impression left by the book is of
massive untrustworthiness. It’s true, as Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
points out, that ‘an intelligence agency can rarely publicise its
successes, so to dwell on failings can be a distortion of the
true record’; but even so, it’s the negatives that stand out.

Anglo-American intelligence agencies have failed to predict
wars and uprisings, made international situations worse
through their covert interventions (Iran in 1953 is the big
example, but there are many others), abused human rights,
broken everyone’s laws, routinely spied on innocents, been
penetrated by enemies as well as betrayed by their friends,
and misled, even turned against, their own democracies. In
their favour, signals intelligence probably shortened the
Second World War, and covert propaganda may have helped
bring down the Soviet Union (Jeffreys-Jones doesn’t seem
certain about this). The record is mixed, but it is far from
reassuring. Hence the controversies these agencies so often
stir up. (The current Edward Snowden affair — too late to be
included in this book — isn’t of course the first, or even the first
of its kind.)
Another reason is the inherent unsavouriness of the
whole activity, which invariably involves betrayals of trust.

‘Spies have always been detested’, writes Jeffreys-Jones at
the end of this book; which has been generally true,
especially, as it happens, in the cases of Britain and America.

For most of the 19th century Britain based much of its sense of . national identity on the fact that it didn’t need to resort to
these vile French and Russian practices. Of course there were
precedents for them in Britain too — this book takes them back
to William the Conqueror — but precedents can’t be regarded
as a ‘tradition’ unless they are joined up. Anti-spy prejudice
has been much more traditional; and not just, as Jeffreys-
Jones implies, among the upper classes. (In fact, perhaps
least among the upper classes, so long as they weren’t
expected to spy on each other.) That’s partly why, when
British governments have felt the need to spy on others, and
on their own people, they have tried to keep the very fact of
their doing so secret — SIS, MI5 and GCHQ didn’t officially exist
until 1989. By contrast, the CIA was set up by Congress, and
has always been — formally at least — accountable to it. Britain
came round to the same position eventually, but imperfectly,
and only when forced to by the European Court of Human
Rights.

In other ways, however, the British and American
intelligence agencies have been remarkably similar. For
decades they hired the same kinds of people: in Britain’s case,
upper-class public school and Oxbridge types; in America’s,
east coast private school and Ivy League. These social elites
were concerned to protect their countries not only against
foreign threats, but also against, as Jeffreys-Jones puts it,
‘what they regarded as repugnant elements’ — that is,
socialists or black activists — ‘in their own societies.’ It is this
that made them a potential danger to democracy, with the
covert powers at their disposal. The American Ivy Leaguers
also tended to be Anglophile. They got along — though not
without friction — with their British counterparts, and pushed
the case for US entry on the Allied side in the World Wars.

(Some isolationist Americans smelled an ‘Anglo-American
Establishment’ plot to lead them ‘by the nose’ into both wars.)
The co-operation worked pretty well, during the Second World
War in particular, until the Ivy Leaguers began to ‘lose their
grip’ in the 1960s, in line with broad US demographic trends
(WASPs down, Hispanics up), while the British spooks
remained, on the whole, ‘Old Boys’. It was then that the so-. called ‘special’ Anglo-American intelligence relationship started
hitting the rocks — and not only because of ‘class’.

The British Empire was one bone of contention, though
less so in the 1950s and 1960s, when America thought it
made a useful barrier to communism. Communism itself was
another problem. The Americans were more agitated by it than
the British, whose wiser advice was often rejected. In British
Guiana, for example, Britain did not feel that the socialist PMelect
Cheddi Jagan posed much of a threat, but was
persuaded by the Americans to oust him covertly in any case.

There were rows over the exchange of information — Henry
Kissinger once threatened to withdraw all intelligence cooperation
with Britain if Edward Heath didn’t keep him abreast
of his European negotiations (Jeffreys-Jones calls this
‘blackmail’, and claims it has remained in the backs of British
minds ever since) — and over both countries’ trustworthiness
in the light of treacheries like those of the ‘Cambridge Three’
(then Four, then Five), and Aldrich Ames. The relationship
should have reached its nadir during the run-up to the
invasion of Iraq, which revealed, according to your point of
view, either how poor both countries’ intelligence was, or how
it was manipulated by politicians for their own ends. The
surprise is that, according to interviews cited here with leading
– though unnamed — British intelligence personnel, the
‘special’ intelligence relationship still remains ‘the star in their
firmament’; and also, it seems, in that of successive British
governments, who in return for crumbs of intelligence from the
American table allow themselves to be ‘held over a barrel’ -
‘not’, as Jeffreys-Jones slyly puts it, ‘the best posture from
which to conduct a trusting relationship’.

Spying can have its good side. It can reassure.

‘Ignorance breeds fear,’ Jeffreys-Jones points out, ‘and fear
lies at the root of aggression.’ In the 1950s, Eisenhower used
CIA intelligence to quell the alarm that what he called the
‘military-industrial complex’ was whipping up, in its own
interests, about the Soviet threat. Fifty years earlier Theodore
Roosevelt had set his fledgling secret service to prevent
America from ‘falling into the hands of capitalist robber . barons.’ Clearly that did not altogether succeed; and it is
doubtful whether either the FBI or MI5 could be tasked with a
similar duty today. (The last I heard on this from a senior
intelligence officer — ‘Chatham House rules’ prevent me from
naming him — is that the ‘Anglo-American model of capitalism’
is one of the institutions that MI5 exists to protect.) But it’s an
idea. Perhaps a banker-savvy MI5 could have forewarned us
of our latest real national threat. The advantage of interagency
co-operation — the main focus of this book — is that it
allows assessments to be tested independently. In the Anglo-
American relationship, at its best, each ‘kept a watchful eye on
the other, and that helped them to be vigilant’ — and, one
might add, more cautious - ‘about actual and potential
enemies.’ They could also learn from one another, so long as
they thought they had something to learn.

The arrogant British often didn’t. Nor, more recently,
have the Americans. Since the 1970s the US has built a huge
lead in the field of surveillance technology (so that it no longer
needed British ex-imperial listening stations, for example), and
has become impatient of advice from anywhere. Ideology has
also played a part: if you’re a Neo-Con, there is no reason to
double-check whether ‘liberated’ countries really do turn
naturally to ‘democracy’. It seems that in the early 2000s the
British intelligence community raised serious doubts that
Saddam Hussein had WMDs, which were disregarded by Bush
and Blair because they didn’t fit in with their presumptions.

America’s problem after 2001 was not that it had no
loyal intelligence allies, but that they were, as Jeffreys-Jones
puts it, ‘too loyal’. The UN’s Hans Blix, who resisted political
pressures from all sides in order to make his intelligence more
objective, was rubbished. He turned out to be right. The
disasters that ensued should have given America pause for
thought about its intelligence processes; and Britain, too,
about its craven reliance on them.

In his final chapters Jeffreys-Jones explores some of the
directions into which those thoughts might turn. A
transnational intelligence agency is one way: a ‘European
CIA’, for example, or a UN service based on Blix’s. One of the . obstacles to that is the British intelligence community’s
reluctance to give up its powers, and sever or at least
counterbalance its American link. Still, if it were possible, there
are some good ideas in the wind for making a European
system both more efficient, and ‘less toxic’. Europe has
already sent up its own surveillance orbital satellites, with the
object of freeing it from dependence on American — mainly
military — systems, access to which could be revoked at any
time. In 2005 a group of MPs from across Europe called for ‘the
depoliticization of intelligence in EU member states, and for a
European code of intelligence ethics.’
‘Intelligence ethics’: the phrase has a ring about it. It
could refer to the indiscriminate trawling of private
communications which is at the root of the current controversy
over Edward Snowden’s revelations, with the American NSA
and Britain’s GCHQ now notoriously in cahoots. It could also
cover the question of accountability, and the fact that none of
us was told — and few imagined — that this extent of
surveillance was going on. ‘In a democracy,’ Jeffreys-Jones
writes, only ‘intelligence activities that are properly overseen
command the confidence of the people.’ It’s also surely
fundamental to any country’s claiming to be a democracy that
its people should be told roughly — not the details — what is
being done to protect them. If they approve of universal
surveillance, or the bugging of allied leaders’ phones, then OK.

If not, they should bear the democratic consequences. It is
here that Jeffreys-Jones believes the US system holds the
advantage over Britain’s; though whether we can be so
confident of that after the Snowden revelations must be
doubtful.

At least America’s tradition of democratic accountability
has engendered some genuine shock there, with official
enquiries and reforms apparently under way. In Europe and
South America they seem to feel the same. The contrast with
Britain is striking. We need to be reminded of Britain’s history
here. Fifty or a hundred years ago it was regarded as almost
the ultimate social sin to spy on other people, except in
wartime, and then only on enemies. One example, . extraordinary but not untypical of its time, is the London police
sergeant in the 1850s who brought a couple to trial for an
‘indecent offence’ in a park, but was then demoted to
constable for having hidden behind a tree to observe it. Now
we accept surveillance cameras in every street, Google’s
satellite mapping, the use of ATM and shop receipts to track
our movements, Amazon nosing in on our tastes in books and
music. ‘Bloggers’ try to protect themselves by using
pseudonyms: another practice that would have been regarded
as cowardly in more innocent days. Secrecy is respectable.

Snowden’s revelations must have far less impact in this new
cultural environment. After all, as William Hague put it recently:
‘If you are a law-abiding citizen of this country going
about your business and your personal life you have
nothing to fear about the British state or the intelligence
services listening to your phone calls or anything like
that.’
Didn’t Goebbels say something like that? Simon Jenkins calls it
‘the motto of police states down the ages’. It may be OK if you
can trust your government — or future ones — in any situation.

If not, well, ask the Germans, with their recent experience —
Angela Merkel’s, for example — of police states under two
regimes; or, better still, visit the chilling Stasi Museum in
Leipzig to witness how — in an extreme case — this can turn
out. This may be why the most vocal movement in Europe
today to grant Snowden asylum comes from young Germans;
not from Britain, where you would have expected it many
years ago.

The other problem with the Anglo-American intelligence
relationship is ‘covert operations’: grey and black propaganda,
the destabilisation of both other countries and your own,
blackmail, assassinations and coups. These have nothing
really to do with ‘intelligence’, strictly defined; yet as Jeffreys-
Jones complains, they are ‘now as a matter of course lumped
in’ with it. And they are connected. Secret intelligence gives
secret powers, which can be secretly misused. For this, on the
Western side, the CIA must be held mainly responsible. Its
most egregious plots are well-known: Iran, Chile, Guatemala, . Guyana (fairly democratic regimes, all of them), the Bay of
Pigs, the attempt to assassinate Patrice Lumumba in the
Congo by poisoning his toothpaste, many attempts on Castro,
kidnapping (and more recently ‘extraordinary rendition’), the
illegal financing of anti-Communist journals abroad, including
Britain’s moderate-left Encounter — the list goes on. The CIA
has been widely suspected of further plots, against Australia’s
Gough Whitlam and Britain’s Harold Wilson, for example; which
couldn’t easily be dismissed as paranoid when all these other
things were going on, and look even more plausible today. In
the Wilson case it’s possible that American intelligence liaised
with right-wing members of the British secret services (not MI5
as a whole, as Jeffreys-Jones appears to believe was the
renegade Peter Wright’s claim). There can be no doubt that,
real or imagined, and effective or not in their ostensible aims,
these activities ‘weakened the moral appeal of American
democracy.’ As early as 1967 one American journalist
described the CIA as ‘the single greatest cause of America’s
world-wide unpopularity’, no less.

Behind all this lay two things. The first was the idea that
conspiracy was somehow a gentler way to effect political
change than brute force, involving less bloodshed, at least
among your own people. (‘Native’ blood, of course, was a
different matter; for example in Chile, Iran and Indonesia.) The
second was the wish, or need, to effect political change
abroad, for either principled or acquisitive reasons. Whichever
of these two motives predominated, intelligence used in this
way can be seen as an instrument of, firstly, Anglo-American
imperialism — ‘an attempt by Washington and London to stitch
up world politics for years to come’; and, as the relationship
between them cooled, imperialism of a more freewheeling
American kind: though it also enabled America’s politicians to
fool themselves that they were innocents in this regard — ‘we
don’t do empire’. (They meant that they didn’t formally annex
countries any more.) The imperial instinct has also manifested
itself in America’s reactions to its most recent ‘intelligence
apostates’: not only its treatment of the Wikileaks source
Bradley — now Chelsea — Manning, but also its bullying of any . country that even looks like responding positively to Edward
Snowden’s asylum requests. That hasn’t gone down too well
with foreign democrats, either. Hence, probably, Britain’s and
the USA’s recent grudging hints of reform. (These must justify
Snowden’s ‘treason’, surely.)
Jeffreys-Jones’s solution — a tentative one, admittedly —
is for Britain to exchange its ‘special’ intelligence relationship
with America for one with the rest of Europe. That would, he
believes, bring a ‘newer, cleaner form of intelligence that
would be acceptable in hitherto puritanical circles’,
concentrating on ‘intelligence, as distinct from foolish
adventurism’. It would also be more likely to be truly
democratically accountable, at least with respect to its broad
functions and methods, while otherwise independent from
political interference. All that seems fair enough, if the
Europeans really do have as clean hands in this area as their
outraged reactions to Snowden’s NSA revelations implied.

More recent leaks from Snowden suggest that many of them
have been almost as intrusive and extensive in their spying as
Britain and America; though it is always possible — in all these
cases — that much of this has been done by the spooks behind
their political masters’ and mistresses’ backs. Most historians
of intelligence can furnish examples of that. It’s another
reason for the mistrust the system naturally provokes.

One problem with any Europe-wide agency, of course,
would be that it would spread the secrets around in a way
that made them more difficult to keep. Even Anglo-American
intelligence co-operation was thought to have this potential
flaw. You might be able to trust your own chaps — but
Frenchies? Or — for the Americans — the Brits? (And vice-versa,
of course.) Why, on the British side, the intelligence community
clearly doesn’t trust its own compatriots to know even in the
most general terms what it is up to. This probably goes back
to its ‘élite’ origins. The British upper (and upper-ish) classes
have never been really comfortable with democracy. Hence
their resistance to the very (European) idea of ‘intelligence
ethics’. Secrecy also of course allows them to hide their own
incompetences and illegalities, and save their political masters . embarrassment. That may be the reason for the ‘shrillness’
(Tory MP Dominic Raab’s word) of the recent accusations
against Snowden by Andrew Parker, head of MI5. (His
revelations, Parker claimed, were a ‘gift’ to the terrorists.)
Until now they’ve had the American intelligence élite with
them on this. But America has its constitutional safeguards,
which are coming into play; and a different public opinion from
Britain’s, whose once proud popular anti-spy tradition seems
to have evaporated almost entirely. If the US can exercise a
more liberal influence on Britain here, it will be an interesting
twist in the long history of their ‘special’ intelligence
relationship. Otherwise — and this seems an extraordinary
thing to say in the light of our respective histories — I’d trust
the Germans more.

Bernard Porter is Emeritus Professor of History
at the University of Newcastle, the author of two
books about ‘political policing’ and another, Empire and
Superempire, on American and British imperialism.

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