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Lobster 72

Winter 2016

The View from the Bridge by Robin Ramsay

The Western Union Clandestine Committee: Britain and the ‘Gladio’ networks by Nick Must

Facilitating Tyranny? Glenn Greenwald and the creation of the NSA’s ‘Panopticon’ by Citizenseven

Holding Pattern by Garrick Alder

Fifteen Years on from 9/11 by John Booth

A Key for a Clockwork Orange by Garrick Alder

Mexico Missive by Nick Must

Team Mercenary GB: Part 1 – the early years by Nick Must

The ‘Intentional Fallacy’ revisited by Dr. T. P. Wilkinson

Book Reviews

British Counterinsurgency, by John Newsinger, reviewed by Robin Ramsay

The Shadow Man: At the Heart of the Cambridge Spy Circle, by Geoff Andrews, reviewed by John Newsinger

A Very English Scandal: Sex, Lies and a Murder Plot at the Heart of the Establishment, by John Preston, reviewed by Anthony Frewin

Europe Isn’t Working, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, reviewed by Robin Ramsay

The writer with no hands, by Matthew Alford, reviewed by Robin Ramsay

Britain’s Secret Wars: How and Why the United Kingdom sponsors conflict around the world, by T. J. Coles, reviewed by Robin Ramsay

Not the Chilcot Report, by Peter Oborne, reviewed by John Booth

The Army of Afghanistan: A Political History of a Fragile Institution, by Antonio Giustozzi, reviewed by John Newsinger

The Black Door Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers, by Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac, reviewed by John Newsinger

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government, by David Talbot, reviewed by Garrick Alder

The Neoconservative Threat to World Order: Washington’s perilous war for hegemony, by Paul Craig Roberts, reviewed by Robin Ramsay

Finks: How the CIA tricked the World’s Best Writers, by Joel Whitney, reviewed by Robin Ramsay

Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon and the growth of dual use anthropology, by David H. Price, reviewed by Robin Ramsay

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The view from the bridge

Robin Ramsay

Thanks to Nick Must for editing/proof-reading help.

Bernie or bustIf you were wondering why so many of Bernie Sanders’ supporters are hostile to Hilary Clinton (of course the MSM haven’t explained it), you could look at the long report showing how the Clinton campaign stole the nomination from Sanders. Yes, stole.

‘Available evidence from Arizona, New York, and California suggests more than 500,000 registrations were tampered with or improperly handled....hundreds of thousands of voters were denied the right to vote or were forced to vote provisionally. A quarter million or more provisional or affidavit Democratic ballots were not counted. Available evidence also suggests that the vast majority of suppressed voters would have voted or tried to vote for Senator Bernie Sanders.’ 1

The IMF’s mea culpa

Among the casualties of the financial crash of 2007/8 has been the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which got most of it wrong and made things worse. The IMF had an internal post-mortem and the following paragraphs are from the executive summary.2 The italicised bits are my comments.

1 <https://www.facebook.com/notes/election-justice-usa/democracy-lost-a-report-on-the-fatally-flawed-2016-democratic-primaries/ 923891901070837> 2 The report’s executive summary is at <http://www.ieo-imf.org/ieo/ files/completedevaluations/EAC%20-%20Executive%20Summary.pdf>.


Lobster 72 Winter 2016

‘The IMF’s surveillance of the euro area financial regulatory architecture was generally of high quality, but staff, along with most other experts, missed the build-up of banking system risks in some countries.’

‘In May 2010, the IMF Executive Board approved a decision to provide exceptional access financing to Greece without seeking preemptive debt restructuring, even though its sovereign debt was not deemed sustainable with a high probability.’

In other words: we lent them money even though we knew they probably couldn’t pay it back.

‘The IMF’s policy on exceptional access to Fundresources, which mandates early Board involvement, was followed only in a perfunctory manner. The 2002 framework for exceptional access was modified to allow exceptional access financing to go forward, but the modification process departed from the IMF’s usual deliberative process whereby decisions of such import receive careful review. Early and active Board involvement might or might not have led to a different decision, but it would have enhanced the legitimacy ofany decision.’

In other words: a dumb decision was taken behind the back of the Board.

‘....because the European Commission negotiated on behalf of the Eurogroup, the troika arrangement potentially subjected IMF staff’s technical judgements to political pressure from an early stage.’

‘....The IMF-supported programs in Greece and Portugal incorporated overly optimistic growth projections. More realistic projections would have made clear the likely impact of fiscal consolidation on growth and debt dynamics, and allowed the authorities to prepare accordingly or persuaded European partners to consider additional—and more concessional—financing while preserving the IMF’s credibility as an independent, technocratic institution.’



In other words: more accurate projections would have led to less onerous loan conditions, but we were leaned on.

In the Telegraph Jeremy Warner commented:

‘Over the last ten years, the [IMF] has been pretty much wrong about everything of substance. It failed to see the financial crisis coming, and it failed to anticipate the eurozone debt crisis, having essentially become a cheerleader for integrationist ambitions of monetary union.

It then proceeded to become part of one of the biggest economic policy blunders of the modern age, overriding its own rules and conventions to save the euro and bailout the bankers.’

True enough. But does Warner believe that the IMF could ever have not bailed out the bankers and helped to save the euro?3 Not in the world I live in.

Kincora and Wallace

In early July the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIAI) into allegations of child abuse in Northern Ireland reached the stinky core: Kincora.4 The conversations with witnesses, some anonymous, are on-line. There is a lot of this and much of it is impenetrable to me, not least because I haven’t read the preceding inquiries – however inadequate – to which the conversations often refer. Colin Wallace has refused to give evidence to the inquiry because, unlike the mainland UK equivalent, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, it does not have the power to compel testimony; and thus, suspects Wallace, it will be just another layer of cover-up.

It has been many years since the government accepted the veracity of many of Wallace’s claims; indeed, none of his claims have ever been shown to be false. It should also not be

3 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/10/04/the-imf-must-stop-playing-political-games-and-get-back-to-its-ro/>4 See <https://www.hiainquiry.org/sites/hiainquiry/files/media-files/ M15-D220-Trans-Rev-RO.pdf>.



forgotten that Wallace’s conviction for manslaughter was overturned. In spite of all this, one of the Inquiry’s lawyers, Joseph Aiken, smeared Wallace as a liar and disinformer who had not been believed by other, previous inquiries.5 Wallace’s reply to this can be read at the excellent Tom Griffin site.6

Bilderberg

A major collection of Bilderberg internal documents, hundreds of pages of minutes and agendas, going back to the 1950s, is now on-line.7 The collection is prefaced by this:

‘The following documents were obtained from a variety of sources who contributed copies of documents related to the Bilderberg Group from academic institutions. Documents contributed to the collection are sometimes photocopied and in other cases photographed page by page during visits to academic institutions, diplomatic libraries and legal archives including the Presidential Library of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Harvard Law Library, the National Archive and the archive of former State Department official and member of the Bilderberg Steering Committee Robert Murphy held at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.’

I’m not going to read all this: Bilderberg is no longer a mystery; nor is there any evidence that it is, or ever was, the central committee of global capitalism as is believed by some.

9/11

There was a very striking piece on Politico about the attempts by the CIA to warn the Bush administration about the threat posed by Al Qaeda in the months and weeks before 9/11.8

5 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-36725599>6 <http://www.tomgriffin.org/the_green_ribbon/2016/08/colin-wallace-on-the-hia-inquiry.html>7 <https://publicintelligence.net/bilderberg-archive/> 8 <http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/cia-directors-documentary-911-bush-213353#ixzz4MspT64jU>



CIA personnel have made similar comments before but these are the most explicit to date.

‘The drama of failed warnings began when [then CIA Director] Tenet and [then chief CIA of counterterrorism Cofer] Black pitched a plan, in the spring of 2001, called “the Blue Sky paper” to Bush’s new national security team. It called for a covert CIA and military campaign to end the Al Qaeda threat—“getting into the Afghan sanctuary, launching a paramilitary operation, creating a bridge with Uzbekistan.” “And the word back,” says Tenet, “was ‘we’re not quite ready to consider this. We don’t want the clock to start ticking.’ ” (Translation: they did not want a paper trail to show that they’d been warned.)’

‘Tenet vividly recalls the White House meeting with Rice and her team. (George W. Bush was on a trip to Boston.) “Rich [Blee] started by saying, “There will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple. Al Qaeda’s intention is the destruction of the United States.” [Condi Rice said:] “What do you think we need to do?” Black responded by slamming his fist on the table, and saying, “We need to go on a wartime footing now!”

“What happened?” I ask Cofer Black. “Yeah. What did happen?” he replies. “To me it remains incomprehensible still. I mean, how is it that you could warn senior people so many times and nothing actually happened? It’s kind of like The Twilight Zone.”’

The key sentence here is this:

‘(Translation: they did not want a paper trail to show that they’d been warned.)’

This has the true, bell-like ring of the political perspective: fuck national security, how’s it going to look?

The politically important material – the Saudi connection and the Bush regime’s refusal to act on the warnings – has



been obscured and contaminated for 15 years by conspiracy theories, many of which were obvious nonsense.9 I wonder if some smart alecs in the White House, or its allies in the US intelligence community, didn’t help to create or propagate them.

Jonathan Marshall

When Lobster began in 1983 there were only two similar publications: Intelligence and Parapolitics out of Paris and Jonathan Marshall’s Parapolitics USA.10 Marshall went on to co-write a number of books with Peter Dale Scott as well as having a career as a mainstream journalist. Currently he is writing regularly for The Consortium, Robert Parry’s exemplary and pioneering reader-funded website.11 Recommended.

Close but no cigar

As opening paragraphs go, the one which begins the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee report on the UK’s role in the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime in Libya is a belter (the emphasis is mine):

‘In March 2011, the United Kingdom and France, with the

9 For example: the claims that no plane hit the Pentagon; that there were no planes at all, they were holograms; that the buildings were destroyed by nukes in the basements; that the buildings were destroyed by beam weapons.

The 9/11 research community has to make a shift analogous to that made by the JFK researchers when they separated the shooting from the cover-up. There is a mystery about the buildings’ collapse; there may be a mystery about the failure of the US administration to take the warnings seriously; but there is no mystery about Al Qaeda’s role in hi-jacking the planes.10 The first, 1981 issue of which can be read at <https://www.scribd.com/doc/63837535/Parapolitics-USA-no-1>. The complete list can be seen at <https://www.scribd.com/user/79032933/ Jonathan-Marshall>.

A very useful tool for those without a Scribd account is <https://scribdownload.com/>.11 Marshall’s recent articles can be found at <https://consortiumnews.com/tag/jonathan-marshall/>.



support of the United States, led the international community to support an intervention in Libya to protect civilians from attacks by forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi. This policy was not informed by accurate intelligence. In particular, the Government failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element. By the summer of 2011, the limited intervention to protect civilians had drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change. That policy was not underpinned by a strategy to support and shape post-Gaddafi Libya. The result was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa. Through his decision making in the National Security Council, former Prime Minister David Cameron was ultimately responsible for the failure to develop a coherent Libya strategy.’12

‘An opportunist policy of regime change’?

The committee did, however, wonder about the ‘intelligence’ it was all based on.

‘Intelligence on the extent to which extremist militant Islamist elements were involved in the anti-Gaddafi rebellion was inadequate. Former Chief of the Defence Staff Lord Richards of Herstmonceux confirmed that intelligence on the composition of the rebel militias was not “as good as one would wish.” He observed that “We found it quite difficult to get the sort of information you would expect us to get.”61 We asked Lord Richards whether he knew that Abdelhakim Belhadj and other members of the al-Qaeda affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group were participating in the rebellion in March 2011. He replied that that “was a grey area”.62

He added that “a quorum of respectable Libyans were

12 <http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/ cmfaff/119/119.pdf?utm_source=119&utm_medium=module&utm_campaign=modulereports>



assuring the Foreign Office” that militant Islamist militias would not benefit from the rebellion.63 He acknowledged that “with the benefit of hindsight, that was wishful thinking at best.”64’

Lord Richards’ quoted comment on the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group – ‘a grey area’ – is unintelligible. The full response is no better.

Lord Richards: I think it was a grey area. I am not trying to defend us, because I have agreed with you that it was a weakness. What I hope I have tried to get across is that the imperative of the need for speed to prevent Benghazi falling meant that we were committed to conflict in an imperfect world.’13

Richards simply dodges the question and no-one on the committee asks him what he means. And no wonder he evaded it: for it was the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) that MI6 (SIS) had been dickering with since the 1990s and which was the subject of some of the most disgusting real politik in which the British state has been recently engaged.14

The committee’s report is the most recent version of the received story: it was a humanitarian exercise, based on a false alarm about threatened atrocities,15 which drifted into

13 <http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/ committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/foreign-affairs-committee/ libya-examination-of-intervention-and-collapse-and-the-uks-future-policy-options/oral/27184.html>14 The group was first hired to assassinate Gaddafi, then some of its members were allowed to live in the UK. With Blair’s rapprochement with Gaddafi, the line changed and those members were identified to Libyan intelligence. See <http://markcurtis.info/2016/08/30/ overthrowing-qadafi-in-libya-britains-islamist-boots-on-the-ground/>.

On the LIFG role in the Gaddafi assassination plot see <http://anniemachon.ch/spies-lies-and-whistleblowers-the-gaddafi-plot-chapters>. 15 In his comments to the Commons committee Lord Richards said ‘If we were going to stop Benghazi falling – the decision was taken that we should, and that it would be a stain on our conscience forever if we allowed another Srebrenica; I remember a lot of talk about Srebrenica...’ <http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/ committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/foreign-affairs-committee/ libya-examination-of-intervention-and-collapse-and-the-uks-future-policy-options/oral/27184.html>



regime change for which no-one was prepared and which, as in Iraq, ended in chaos. It may be true. It may have had nothing to do with Libyan oil, the Gaddafi proposal to create an Africa-wide, gold-backed currency independent of the dollar, or the fact that Libya was one of the countries which the neo-cons running the Bush government’s foreign policy were determined to clobber.16 But I’m going to need more than a Commons’ committee report to believe that.

Yes, we could have, but we didn’t

You can watch Obama’s last speech to the Washington press corps’ annual dinner on YouTube.17 He’s a great speaker: funny, self-deprecating, charming and sharp when appropriate. He’s not that far from being a good stand-up comedian. But he’s also nominally at the head of a regime which now has thousands of drones patrolling the skies over ‘threats’ (mostly imaginary) to the American world order18 and is engaged in sabre-rattling displays in the Baltic, Poland and the South China Sea.

In Lobster 62 I noted research which showed that Obama’s presidential campaign was funded by Wall Street.19 Using the recent Wikileaks dump of Clinton e-mails, a recent article in the New Republic shows that most of the senior positions in the Obama administration were filled by people chosen by Michael Froman, an executive at the American bank Citigroup.20

16 We know this from no less a source than US General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. See <http://www.globalresearch.ca/we-re-going-to-take-out-7-countries-in-5-years-iraq-syria-lebanon-libya-somalia-sudan-iran/5166>.17 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA5ezR0Kh80>18 ‘There are currently [i.e. 2014] 7,362 Ravens, 990 WASPs, 1,137 Pumas and 306 T-Hawks – all small UAS. By contrast there are only 246 Predators and Gray Eagles, 126 Reapers, 491 Shadows and 33 Global Hawks – to cite a few from the larger categories.’ <http://www.dodbuzz.com/2014/01/02/pentagon-plans-for-cuts-to-drone-budgets/>19 See subhead ‘Bought and paid for’ at <http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster62/lob62-view-bridge.pdf>.20 <https://newrepublic.com/article/137798/important-wikileaks-revelation-isnt-hillary-clinton>



Current Nobel laureate for literature, Bob Dylan, has a line in one of his early songs: ‘Money doesn’t talk, it swears.’ Wrong, Bob: money doesn’t even to need to raise its voice. It just sends a memo.

How the chips fall

Lobster magazine emerged from a subsection of the left – what we might call the paranoid left – which was looking at the American and British secret states in the wake of JFK, Vietnam, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, the Wilson plots and changes in policing and the rise of the ‘strong state’. Yet, looking back at the last 40 years or so, it is quite clear that the most important event in this country since the 1960s had nothing to do with any of that: it was the capture of a handful journalists by the apostles of monetarism. It was this which opened the door to the revival of the ‘free market’ notions which became dominant in the 1980s.

I have arrived back at this after an e-mail from an American economist. He was sent my review of the Elliott and Atkinson book which is in this issue. In that I mention in a footnote that while an undergraduate in the early 1970s, doing economics as a subsidiary element in my degree, our economics lecturer gave us monetarism – then called the quantity theory of money – to critique because it was such simple nonsense that even second year non-specialists could demolish it. My American economics professor commented on his experience:

‘In grad school (1965-70) Friedman was seen as a lunatic.’

Friedman is Milton Friedman, the public face of monetarism in the 1970s, who became prominent in the UK after 1976, the year he won the Nobel Prize for Economics. His belief in the centrality of controlling the economy’s money supply was adopted by the Tory right around Thatcher, who had rejected Keynesian notions of the state managing the economy.

Previous to this, in 1972 when they were faced with rising unemployment, Edward Heath’s government had pulled



all the levers at the state’s disposal to increase demand in the economy. Unfortunately the British bankers had already persuaded the government to change the rules governing bank lending21 and, freed from the constraints of the state, they were creating a big credit bubble. Allied to the Heath government’s attempts to expand the economy, this did help to boost economic growth and job creation but it also generated inflation. Heath might just have got away with this had his home-grown inflation not coincided with the so-called ‘Arab oil price hike’ of 1973. Together they gave us inflation at 25% in 1975; and inflation at 25% is a very serious thing.

The Tory politicians round Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher drew the wrong conclusions from the Heath years: politically – and perhaps psychologically – they were unable to see that the inflation of 1972-5 was in large part the consequence of reduced regulation of the banks and their excessive lending (as well as the Heath government’s over-enthusiastic attempt to generate economic growth).22 Ignoring the 1945-71 period, they concluded instead that the inflation showed how state management of the economy (loosely, Keynesianism) was a mistake and the state’s economic role should be confined to controlling the expansion of the money supply by the use of interest rates.23

The theory went thus: rising interest rates would reduce the demand for credit so enabling the ‘control’ of the money supply; and so prevent inflation. It was the old racket: banks would be allowed to lend as much as they wanted, to but

21 It seems pretty clear that the politicians were conned by the bankers. I have written about this episode in more detail in ‘Well, how did we get here?’ in Lobster 60.22 Ironically, while some of this was generated by concern at rising unemployment, it was also Heath’s belief that the UK economy should be going at full tilt when it entered the EEC and faced competition from other EEC members.23 This took place in an environment in which capital – largely America corporations – was mounting a sustained campaign against the idea of state management of the economy and for a return to the ‘free market’. This is described in Sydney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter Establishment (New York: Times Books, 1986) and Richard Cockett, Thinking the The Unthinkable (London: Fontana, 1995). Friedman gets a chapter in Blumenthal.



when inflation began to rise they would be ‘punished’ for lending too much by being ‘forced’ to raise interest rates. It was a return to the world before the Great Depression and Keynes.

By the late 1970s Milton Friedman’s views on the money supply – monetarism – and its centrality in government economic policy had become adopted by the Thatcher faction of the Conservative Party, apparently by Labour Prime Minister Callaghan24 and by sections of the higher media commentariat. In 1980 Friedman presented a series of hour long films with the umbrella title ‘Free to Chose’ and I remember BBC2 broadcasting one of the episodes.25 A panel of British politicians – of whom I remember only Denis Healey – were in the studio to discuss the film after it was shown and they practically fell over themselves to rubbish Friedman. And no wonder: Friedman used Japan – Japan! – a very long way from being a free market economy, as the exemplar for his homespun homilies. I was aware that Friedman’s ideas were in the air but had neither read nor seen him; and, like the politicians in the BBC studio, I was astonished: why was this idiot being taken seriously?

At this distance the interesting historical question is: how and why did the editors of newspapers and TV programmes come to believe this disastrous rubbish? Who read what and who believed whom?26

24 This is disputed. Callaghan appeared to embrace monetarism in his 1976 speech to the Labour Party conference. His son-in-law, Peter Jay, then writing for The Times, who wrote that section of the speech, later denied that either he or Callaghan had embraced monetarism. Given the disastrous consequences of that embrace, Jay would deny that, wouldn’t he? But Jay was using the columns of the Times to advocate monetarism. See William Keegan at <https://www.theguardian.com/ business/2006/dec/17/politics.economicpolicy> for the Callaghan 25 The series of ten episodes is on YouTube at <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVADSkup9W1RzUSuba-Czng/videos>.26 No doubt Friedman’s 1976 Nobel Prize helped his credibility but that was awarded for technical work in economics, not for his simple-minded views on macroeconomics. See <http://www.nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1976/friedman-facts.html>.



The LBJ-dunnit thesis

The late Billie Sol Estes is at the heart of the LBJ’s-people-dunnit theory of the Kennedy assassination. That most of the Kennedy assassination researchers do not take this theory seriously is due, in large part, to their not taking Estes seriously, because he was a convicted fraudster. Precisely what his fraud was has been difficult to grasp until recently. But Amy Reading has researched it in detail and has published an intelligible account.27

Via Robert Caro’s literary agent, I sent a third e-mail to him wondering why he had omitted Billie Sol Estes from his most recent volume on LBJ. For the third time I got no response.

Thanks to SC for pointing me towards the 1999 autobiography of Eddie Fisher, the American crooner of the 1950s and early 60s. Basically an account of all the women he fucked – most famously Elizabeth Taylor, whom he married, who appears on the front cover with him above the book’s title Been There, Done That – there isn’t much of parapolitical interest: fragments about Sam Giancana, more on JFK as pussy-hound, and we can add Fisher to the list of Judith Exner’s lovers. But on page 257 there is this. Fisher flew back to Washington from Dallas the day after the assassination with Jackie Kennedy’s press secretary, Pam Turnure, his then lover.

‘Pam told me, Jackie Kennedy said to her, “Lyndon Johnson did it.” Words I’ll never forget.’

There is nothing else about the assassination.

It is hard to convey to those not in interested in the story just how striking this is. With the exception of the 1967

27 See <http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-05-16/how-a-texas-paper-brought-down-billie-sol-estes>. Reading is the author of The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge and a Small History of the Big Con (Vintage).



play Macbird28 and an obscure book by Joachim Joesten,29 LBJ, the most obvious suspect of them all, disappeared from the story for 30 years.

Since Jackie Kennedy couldn’t have known that Johnson was responsible – unless Johnson had let her know that he had done it; which was not beyond him – she assumed it; she ‘knew’ it. Other Washington insiders, who knew that the Kennedys were trying to get Johnson off the ticket for the ‘64 election by encouraging the media and Congress to pursue his corruption, probably also made the same assumption when JFK was shot in LBJ’s backyard. And so the word would have spread beyond the Kennedy inner circle pretty quickly. It is possible that the whole of official Washington politics knew in 1963 that LBJ was responsible, making the Warren Commission even more of a farce than it currently appears.

Finally, if Jackie Kennedy believed LBJ’s people were behind it, Robert Kennedy must have been privy to the same ‘information’ and his desolation after the shooting may have been the consequence of his part in the political attack on Johnson which triggered it.30

Plus ça change

The new Cold War is now firmly established: once again

28 The author of which said ten years ago she did not intend to suggest that LBJ was behind the assassination. See <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/ 04/AR2006090400993.html>29 Probably but not provably putting out the Soviet line at the time. The KGB had been informed in 1966 that Johnson did it. See <http://www.indiana.edu/~oah/nl/98feb/jfk.html>. Joesten’s book is still available. See <https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Lyndon-Baines-Johnson-ebook/dp/B00BXIU53A#nav-subnav>.30 It has been widely reported since 2011 that Jackie Kennedy had accused Lyndon Johnson of the assassination in tapes she made with the late Arthur Schlesinger; but this was not mentioned in the extracts from the tapes which were released. See for example <http://www.irishcentral.com/news/jackie-kennedy-blamed-lyndon-b-johnson-for-jfk-murder-127220093-237788131.html> and <https://redice.tv/news/jackie-kennedy-believed-lbj-had-her-husband-killed-new-tape-shows>.



Russia is the ‘threat’ and has to be ‘contained’. The Pentagon and its sales wing in the arms corporations (or is it the arms corporations and their political wing, the Pentagon?) are happy. Never mind that we are not too far from a shooting war in the Baltic....

The illustration above – not very clear, reduced for reproduction: check the original31 – shows the deployment of US/NATO forces around the Russian border. And more are coming: the Canadians are being asked to deploy troops in Poland.32 Hopefully Prime Minister Trudeau will ignore this ridiculous request.

Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove appeared in 1964. I don’t remember when it arrived in Edinburgh where I lived, perhaps a few months later. I do remember that as a member of Youth CND, I joined in leafleting the cinema at which it was being shown. This is the leaflet we handed out.33

31 <http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-14/nato-begins-encirclement-russia>32 <http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-baltics-troops-russia-1.3635139>33 I found it at <http://archives.lse.ac.uk/ Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=CND%2f2008%2f7%2f2%2f2%2f51>



Plus ça change indeed, right down to both leaflets referring to ‘Russia’.

The EU referendum

I voted for ‘leave’ at the referendum. There is something deeply depressing and/or comic about large chunks of the British left and trade union movement voting to remain in a political union, whose central principle is the free movement of capital, when the free of movement capital is the problem. So how do we explain this? In part this is the result of contamination of the position by the right. I was thinking of how to write about this when a correspondent sent me an e-mail reminding me of my essay in Lobster 33 on this subject, which I had forgotten about. When I looked at it I realised a section of it could be reprinted without changes. So here are the opening pages of my essay ‘Contamination, the Labour Party, nationalism and the Blairites’. Twenty years later it is still apposite.



In footnote 6 in his essay on the Bilderberg group in Lobster 32, Mike Peters noted that the US Left had lost interest in the study of the power elite because the subject had become ‘contaminated’ by the interest in it taken by the US Right.34 I had never thought of it as that, but ‘contamination’ is exactly right. Peters’ naming of this issue was very useful, for ideological or political ‘contamination’ is at the heart of several of the areas in which Lobster has been interested in during the last five years, and is one of the central issues of British politics.

Contamination works thus. (This may be self-evident but I think it worth spelling out.) Given the dominant bipolar concept of politics we have in this country – right, left and centre – most people on the centre-left end of the spectrum are concerned not to be associated with certain ideas or people on the right. This process obviously works in reverse, people on the right do not wish to be seen to be associated with people or ideas on the left. But my knowledge of the right is limited and so I refer throughout to this mostly from the left point of view.

To be associated with an idea from, or people belonging to, the ideological opposite is to be contaminated. People, ideas, concepts and movements on the left can all be contaminated by association with the right. The right is

34 That footnote said: ‘It is ironic that while the initial research which discovered the existence of the Bilderberg network and explored its ramifications within the power structure of Atlantic capitalism came entirely from Marxist and left-inclined scholars in the USA, the whole subject has now been virtually taken over by the US far right as the centre piece of its own bizarre world-view. These writers of the far right (Anthony Sutton, Lyndon La Rouche, Spotlight and the Liberty Lobby etc.) have added virtually nothing to our understanding or knowledge of the phenomenon, and accordingly, are not referenced in the bibliography below. They have, however, contaminated the topic with their confusion. Since around the mid-1980s, the American Left has dropped the whole issue like a hot potato. For a singular exception see Brandt 1993, which is essentially a response to Berlet, 1992.’ (emphasis added)

Note 6 of Mike Peters, ‘The Bilderberg Group and the project of European unification’ in Lobster 32.



anathema.35

This rests on a number of assumptions. The left believes (or takes for granted, very often) the following.

1. Anything the right believes is wrong and anything it supports is suspect at best, and must be opposed.

2. The political ideas of the right are expressions not of beliefs about the world but of material interests: and if they profess otherwise they are trying to con people (and possibly themselves). The right has interests not ideas.

3. Many on the right are really much further right than they admit in public. Behind the conservative is the proto-fascist. (The fascist menace.) In the mirror image, behind the social democrat is the revolutionary left. (The communist menace.)36

As well as being a reflexive response, ‘contamination’ or anathematisation is a tactic used by the left (and right) to attack opponents; and, within their internal politics, to exclude or undermine actual or potential opposition in the struggle for power and control of the political agenda. Allied to party or group loyalty and the pressure for unity generated by them, the threat of contamination is a very powerful weapon. On the left, for example, it is a serious thing to be guilty of, or suspected of, sexism or racism.37

Nationalism in the UK

The most potent contamination concept in British mainstream politics today is nationalism, which is currently one of the chief weapons being used by the pro-European Union centre of British politics, against the anti-European Union politicians. Tony Benn commented recently that, in the debate about the

35 Writing this it occurred to me that contamination might also be called anathematization, being made or becoming anathema.6 Labour MP writes for Morning Star, therefore Labour MP is a communist sympathiser; therefore the Labour Party is communist. Geoffrey Stewart-Smith’s big pamphlet in the mid 1970s, The Hidden Face of the Labour Party, was a classic of this kind.37 Obviously I am describing a version of political correctness. The British Right lampoons the Left for being PC while concealing the fact they operate their own kind of PC code, albeit less openly and less rigidly.



European Union,

‘Anyone who doubts the wisdom of accepting an unelected central bank is called [by TV journalists] a nationalist or a trouble-maker, or is assumed to be launching a crude leadership bid.’ 38 (emphasis added)

Opposing the European Union (EU), a section of the British Labour Left is in danger of contamination by a section of the Tory Right, which also opposes the EU. Labour Left opponents of the EU thus have to try to ensure that they are not contaminated by such an association, that they are not perceived as nationalists – ‘little Englanders’ – with its xenophobic and racist overtones. Here is Bill Morris, General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers, preparing to oppose a single European currency:

‘I do not approach this issue from a nationalist position. The flag-waving, tub-thumping tabloid chauvinism of the Tory right is alien to the traditions of the trade union movement.’39

Here is ‘left-wing Eurosceptic’ Walter Cairns welcoming the election defeat of Michael Portillo:

‘Had he won, his chances of obtaining the leadership of the Tory party on an anti-European ticket would have been extremely high. This would have mean that the Eurosceptic cause would have been even more solidly entrenched into the far-right camp - thus smearing by association those who have severe reservations about the EU for reasons other than blind xenophobia.’40

(emphasis added)

And here is Diane Abbott MP, from the Labour Left, in the Observer (Business) on 18 August 1996, underneath a piece by John Redwood, from the Tory Right, both of them opposing European Monetary Union:

‘The debate on economic and monetary union has been 38 The Guardian 18 March 199739 The Guardian 9 September 199640 The Guardian (letters) 3 May 1997 It is sadly typical that Cairns thinks – or professes to think – that right-wing hostility to the European Union is simply motivated by xenophobia.



hi-jacked by the Tory Party right wing. But there is also a socialist case against it. And it has nothing to do with the backward-looking nationalism of the Tory little Englanders. On the contrary, for true internationalists.....’ (emphases added)

The claim that the right has ‘hi-jacked’ the issue is nonsense. There has always been a section of the Tory Right which, like a section of the Labour Left, has opposed the EEC and the European Union. Rather uncomfortably they lined up together in the 1975 referendum campaign on EEC membership; just as some of their political antecedents had opposed the Marshall Aid plan almost thirty years previously.41 The Labour Left has to go through these ritual manoeuvres on this issue in particular, because their opponents in the Labour Party, in the pro-European Union wing, as well as in the predominantly pro-EU media, attempt to contaminate them with nationalism – and thus the right. Here is Prime Minister Tony Blair doing it, in his talk to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Leadership Conference, in Australia:

‘...the Labour government I hope to lead will be outward-looking, internationalist and committed to free and open trade, not an outdated and misguided narrow nationalism.’ (emphasis added)42

Nationalism contaminates on the British Left because of its association with racism, fascism and anti-semitism. But that is not really accurate. For in Wales and Scotland and Ireland 43 it is possible – and intellectually respectable – to be a nationalist and not really risk contamination with the far right. The Scottish National Party, for example, has always been

41 While the right (Tory) and left (Labour) anti-EEC politicians were uncomfortable, people like Ted Heath and Roy Jenkins discovered that they had more in common with each other than they did with the anti-EEC people of their own party. There are hints that in the wake of the referendum the pro-EEC factions of the left of the Tory Party and right of the Labour Party – symbolised by Heath and Jenkins – explored the possibility of ‘breaking the mould’ of British parliamentary politics then. 42 The Times 17 July 199543 Northern Ireland, divided as it is, contains two identities. Or maybe three if you count the Ulster Protestant and British as distinct.



internally divided between the right and left. A ‘left nationalist’ is intelligible in Scotland and Wales but barely so in England. It would be more accurate to write that nationalism contaminates on the English Left because of nationalism’s association with the English far right (and thus with racism, fascism, and anti-semitism.) In Scotland, Wales and even Northern Ireland, the National Front, the British National Party et al have singularly failed to make even the tiny inroads they have in England in part, at least, because in the non-English parts of the United Kingdom nationalism is regarded as legitimate and is embraced by mainstream political parties.

Nationalism contaminates because the Labour Left – and the whole of the British Left – sees itself as internationalist. Nationalism is regarded as one of the sources of all evil in the world: vide World War 2, vide Yugoslavia, vide the history of the world. But the British Left’s hostility to nationalism is flexible. When the British Left helped in the struggle to free the British colonies it was working with nationalists. The Left supports Irish nationalism and supported Vietnamese and South African nationalism. These nationalists did not contaminate the British Left, for nationalism is perceived as legitimate when it is opposing a colonial oppressor, when it can be called national self-determination. Here is the basis of the legitimacy of Welsh, Scots – and Irish – nationalism: their oppressor is England.

In fact this doesn’t quite work, for the oppression of the Scots and Welsh in recent memory is not comparable to that of the Kenyans, say, or the black South Africans. But there is enough of it left, a vestigial memory, to make Scots and Welsh nationalism seem.....acceptable. At any rate, the British Left does not assume that qua nationalists, the Scots and Welsh Nationalists are racists and fascists; and never has, as far as I am aware.44 But it is my experience that this Welsh and Scots nationalism is not even anti-English. Scots and Welsh Nationalists don’t see the people in the North (or Midlands, or East or West) of England as their oppressor. Their oppressor is in London and the Home Counties – the English 44 The discussion of these issues I enjoyed most was Tom Nairn’s The Left Against Europe? (Pelican, Harmondsworth, 1973).



establishment, which at its core is the City of London, and what might be best described as the overseas lobby in Britain – the financial, political, administrative and cultural remnants of the British Empire.

Where this essay is going may now be apparent. For the financial interests of that overseas lobby in London and the Home Counties against which the Welsh and Scots Nats are struggling, have all too frequently taken precedence over the interests of industrial, non-metropolitan England, as well as Scotland and Wales – most recently and most nakedly, in the 1980s........

Right thinking

There’s something called ‘A European Framework National Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance’45 which is moving through the EU, thence to national governments for implementation (or not). Below is an extract. The kicker is in the last four lines.

‘Section 7. Penal Sanctions (a) The following acts will be regarded as criminal offences punishable as aggravated crimes: (i) Hate crimes as defined in Section 1(c). (ii) Incitement to violence against a group as defined in Section 1(a). (iii) Group libel as defined in Section 1(b). (iv) Overt approval of a totalitarian ideology, xenophobia or anti-Semitism. (v) Public approval or denial of the Holocaust. (vi) Public approval or denial of any other act of genocide the existence of which has been determined by an international criminal court or tribunal. Explanatory note:

This Sub-Section defines acts punishable as aggravated crimes. Sub-paragraph (vi) does not affect public (or private) discussions and differences of opinion

45 <http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2009_2014/documents/ libe/dv/11_revframework_statute_/11_revframework_statute_en.pdf>



as to whether other acts – not covered by decisions of international courts or tribunals - also amount, or fail to amount, to genocide.

(b) Juveniles convicted of committing crimes listed in paragraph (a) will be required to undergo a rehabilitation programme designed to instill in them a culture of tolerance.’

What did the government of Vietnam call such programmes in the late 1970s? Ah yes, reeducation camps.

Mobile phones and cancer

My exposure to some of the literature on electro-magnetic radiation was started by the late Harlan Girard whom I met in 1989. I’ve not studied any science since I left school but even I could see that there was a lot of really bad news in the suitcase full of scientific articles he was lugging round the British media.

Consequently I resisted getting a mobile phone. When my partner decided she wanted to get on-line we were in the process of installing a second land-line to avoid wi-fi and its associated signal until a techie showed me that our house was already in the wi-fi fields of four of our neighbours (now its a dozen, at least). Living in a city this stuff cannot be avoided. I have even started occasionally using a mobile phone.

I have been commenting on this subject for a long time, certainly since Lobster 31 in 1996. Until recently the evidence was substantial but not conclusive. Now we have something which the tech companies may not be able to spin away.

‘A link between cellphones and cancer has been found in a major U.S. study, officials said late Thursday. The peer-reviewed $25 million study was conducted over multiple years and found two types of tumors in male rats exposed to the same kind of radio frequencies emitted by the devices. The tumors were found in brain and heart cells. “Even a very small increase in the incidence



of disease resulting from exposure to [radio-frequency radiation] could have broad implications for public health,” the report said, especially “given the widespread global usage of mobile communications among users of all ages.”’46

That this story has taken 20 years to get going is down to two things. Most important is the fact that funding for research has had mostly come from the technology companies which are unwilling to pay for bad news.47 Second, these technology companies have been spending their considerable funds ‘war-gaming’ any research which impeded their highly profitable growth.48 All we need now is some serious research on the health effects of living near mobile phone masts, which, like wi-fi signals, are impossible to avoid in cities and increasingly difficult to avoid in rural areas.

Roughly speaking, we are where the anti-smoking lobby was in the mid-1950s with the idea that tobacco caused cancer.49

Bliar, MI5?

Thanks to SC for pointing out that the extract from former MI5 officer Annie Machon’s book, Spies Lies and Whistleblowers,

46 This quotation is from <http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/ 2016/05/27/major-study-links-cellphones-to-cancer.html>. For more details see <http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/major-cell-phone-radiation-study-reignites-cancer-questions/>.47 Some examples are at <https://www.rfsafe.com/motorola-war-games-scientists-indicating-health-risk-from-cell-phone-radiation/> and <http://thewalrus.ca/cellphone-games/?ref=2008.09-health-cellphone-brain-tumour-melinda-wenner&page=>.48 See <https://www.rfsafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/cell-phone-radiation-war-gaming-memo.pdf> which reproduces the notorious 1994 memo from an executive of Motorola which talks of having ‘war-gamed’ the unwanted results of one of their researchers. Or the interview with Dr. Devra Davis at <www.alternet.org/personal-health/radiation-concerns-aboutcellphones?page=0%2C0> and the article she wrote at <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/devra-davis-phd/cell-phones-brain-cancer_b_3232534.html>.49 Christopher Ketcham wrote about this in 2010 in his essay at <http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/investigations/envirohealth/ 1212/is_your_cell_phone_hazardous_to_your_health/>.



which was redacted by MI5 prior to publication, has been published in Counter Spy by Simon Tomlin.50 In that section Machon reports that a source in MI5 she calls Swallow Tail told her and her then partner David Shayler that Tony Blair was recruited by MI5 to report on the left within the Labour Party, around the time he was selected to stand for the parliamentary seat at Beaconsfield in 1982. This is not terribly surprising is it? A young politician on the make, in a party he despises, is offered a potentially career-boosting hand by the state? Of course he would say ‘Yes’. But this still isn’t quite hard evidence.

Doing Dettol

It has been hard to miss stories in the last few months about the epidemic of opiate addiction in America. One of the causes of this is the creation of people who are addicted to legal painkillers, something that what is now known as Big Pharma has been encouraging, marketing opiod (opiate-immitating) painkillers in the same way that they might market any other product.51 One of the most popular is OxyContin – Oxy – sometimes known as hillbilly heroin. The ‘Oxy’ trade was one of the recurring themes in the US TV crime series Justified which was shown in the UK over the last five years.52 Justified showed ‘prescription mills’ being set-up with corrupt doctors issuing prescriptions for Oxy on demand. Which is what has happened in real life, encouraged by Big Pharma.

Reading these stories I noticed a familiar name, buprenorphine, now being touted in the States as a way of getting people off opiod addiction.53

I was told about bupenorphine – marketed in the UK as temgesic – in the early 1980s by a man in Hull who had been a

50 On-line at <https://books.google.co.uk/>. Enter author and title there. The relevant sections begins at p. 144.51 See <http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/what-big-pharma-does-not-want-you-know-about-opioid-epidemic>.52 See <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1489428/>.53 See for example <http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-87313669/>.



junky. It was being manufactured in Hull by Reckitt and Colman, whose scientists had developed it. At the time it was being written about as ‘non-addictive morphine’.54 One of the night cleaners at the Reckitt’s factory began stealing it, selling the pills for 50p each, and Hull drug-users began crushing, dissolving and injecting it. It was, said my junky acquaintance, ‘better than any £5 bag of smack’ he’d ever bought. Because the pills had the Reckitt and Colman logo of the shield on them, Hull’s temgesic users joked that they were ‘Doing Dettol’.55

But the man stealing the pills got busted, the supply dried up, some dozens? hundreds? of people found that they were addicted and turned to the only available alternative: street heroin. Thus, said my acquaintance, was Hull’s first proper junky community created. And the same thing is happening in the US as people find their supplies of legal, Big Pharma opiods drying-up.

At the centre of this story is the chemists’ perception that addictiveness is the property of particular elements in a product and all they have to do is identify the element and remove it. Thus ‘non-addictive morphine’. As if......

My enemy’s enemy is...?

And then there’s the relationship between the British state, its secret arms and academia. Consider the case of The Rendition Project. Run by a couple of British academics, this

54 From the Wikipedia entry on buprenorphine:

‘In 1969, researchers at Reckitt & Colman (now Reckitt Benckiser) had spent 10 years attempting to synthesize an opioid compound “with structures substantially more complex than morphine [that] could retain the desirable actions whilst shedding the undesirable side effects (addiction).” Reckitt found success when researchers synthesized RX6029 which had showed success in reducing dependence in test animals. RX6029 was named buprenorphine and began trials on humans in 1971.[34][35] By 1978 buprenorphine was first launched in the UK as an injection to treat severe pain, with a sublingual formulation released in 1982.’ (emphasis added)

55 One of Reckitt and Colman’s best known products with the shield prominent on the label.



describes itself thus:

‘Working closely with a number of other organisations, in particular the legal action charity Reprieve and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, this project aims to bring academic expertise to bear in order to research the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation (RDI) programme.’56

This is potentially embarrassing for the CIA and the British state whose intelligence services collaborated with the Agency. Who is funding the Rendition Project? At the bottom of the Project’s home page is this:

‘The Rendition Project has been funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)....’

So: the British state, through the ESRC, is funding research into something it would rather we didn’t know about. Go figure.

The other Mr AtkinsonOccasional contributor to these columns, Dan Atkinson, is writing some witty and informative stuff on the Brexit debate. Try his take on the current relationship between the British trade unions and the EU,57 or his account of the economic rationale for leaving the EU,58 in which he memorably describes economic nationalism as ‘a cause without any rebels’. His new book, with Larry Elliott, Europe Isn’t Working, is reviewed in this issue of Lobster.

The Guardian mystery

Roderick Russell, a victim of private sector persecution, has written for or been written about in these columns several

56 <http://www.therenditionproject.org.uk/>57 <https://thelionandunicorn.wordpress.com/2016/05/08/ everybodyin-trade-unions-and-the-eu-referendum/>58 <https://thelionandunicorn.wordpress.com/2016/02/12/reasons-to-be-leaving-part-1-trade/>



times.59 He got in touch after reading my comments in Lobster 71 about the Guardian and its support for American foreign policy. He wrote:

‘While I am not certain that in dealings with the secret services one will ever get more than circumstantial evidence, I do think there is enough of that to make a very strong case that the security/intelligence agencies see the Guardian as one of their assets.’

Some of that circumstantial evidence is on pp. 39/40 of a report he wrote, ‘Russell: Zersetsen’, documenting the harassment of him and his family.60

Wonga Britain

In the background of the current economic debate is the question: ‘When in government, did Labour borrow too much?’ Academic economists sympathetic to Labour say, ‘No’,61 while the Conservative Party, seeking a rationale for their austerity policies, say, ‘Yes’. In my view the answer is ‘Yes, they did’: afraid to put up taxes, they borrowed to fund current expenditure, just as millions of Brits do (and the Conservatives have continued this policy). But even if the answer is ‘No’, they borrowed lots of it stupidly. In a study of the debts generated by the PFI (private finance initiative) schemes under Labour, Jonathan Owen reported:

‘The system has yielded assets valued at £56.5bn. But Britain will pay more than five times that amount under the terms of the PFIs used to create them, and in some cases be left with nothing to show for it, because the PFI agreed to is effectively a leasing agreement. Some £88bn has already been spent, and even if the projected cost between now and 2049/50 does not change, the

59 See for example Lobsters 57, 65 and 70.60 <https://zersetzen.wikispaces.com/file/view/Russell%20Zersetzen%20%284%29.pdf/513210120/Russell%20Zersetzen%20%284%29.pdf>61 For example Simon Wren-Lewis and Anne Pettifor, both members of Labour’s economics advisory board. See <https://notesbrokensociety.wordpress.com/2016/04/08/notes-on-the-new-economics-john-mcdonnells-tour-comes-to-bristol/>.



total PFI bill will be in excess of £310bn. This is more than four times the budget deficit used to justify austerity cuts to government budgets and local services.’ 62

(emphasis added)

Like many of the government IT projects embarked on with the big computer companies and abandoned after spending billions,63 these are essentially frauds by the companies concerned, taking advantage of economically illiterate politicians and civil servants.

Labour and anti-semitism

As John Newsinger notes in his ‘Livingstone, Zionism and the Nazis’ in Lobster 71, we are going to get a lot more of this nonsense as NuLab remnants and the Israeli lobby use it to attack Corbyn and the Party’s left. On this subject there have been a number of recent analyses, one by occasional contributor to these columns, Michael Carlson.64 A useful complement to these is an account of the Guardian’s role in this at sodiumhaze.65

Thus far I have not seen any Labour spokespeople who have grasped the central fact about such smear campaigns: the only way to resist them is to name the subtext. Everybody around Corbyn – and most of the journalists making this piffle ‘a story’ – know the sources of this one and the reasons for it; and not to name and identify it is inviting it to continue.

62 <http://www.independent.co.uk/money/loans-credit/crippling-pfi-deals-leave-britain-222bn-in-debt-10170214.html>63 A detailed account of the failed NHS IT project is at <https://caltonjock.com/2015/01/20/it-projects-the-last-labour-government-the-failures-the-cost-of-writes-off-to-the-taxpayer-we-must-not-get-stung-again/>. David Craig’s Plundering the Public Sector (Constable, 2006) provides a general account of NuLab’s incompetence and intellectual prostration before the shibboleths of the public/bad, private/good thinking. 64 Carlson is at <http://irresistibletargets.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/ anti-semitism-and-election-politics.html>. The others are <http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/inside-manufactured-anti-semitism-scandals-designed-weaken-uk-labour-leader-jeremy> and <http://www.redpepper.org.uk/antisemitism-and-the-left/>.65 <http://www.sodiumhaze.org/2016/05/16/how-the-guardian-bullies-morality-so-they-can-bully-you/>



Ah, innocent days

In a recent posting of more data from the Snowden documents, Glen Greenwald’s The Intercept included this extract from an NSA document.

‘A Perspective on the NSA/USUN Partnership

SUMMARY

The intelligence SID [Signals Intelligence Directorate] gave to the U.S. United Nations team (USUN) during the wind-up to the Iraq War ‘played a critical role’ in the adoption of U.N. Security Council resolutions. The work with that customer was a resounding success.’

Which means the NSA were intercepting phone calls. Which means the diplomats concerned hadn’t grasped that all electronic communications that aren’t seriously encrypted are, in effect, public.66

Mind control and TIs

It has been a while since I last wrote anything about this field. I haven’t had much material is one reason. Perhaps people stopped including Lobster in their e-mail CC lists as my occasional references to the subject dried up. Perhaps the way I treated the subject displeased people. But also I stopped writing about it because the subject is frustrating. The situation remains as it was in 1989 when I first met the late Harlan Girard, my first putative TI (targeted individual): there is evidence that some of this is technically feasible and, given the history of US government-sponsored experiments on unwitting subjects, it is conceivable that this is happening. But moving beyond those two propositions is not possible. Only one of the apparent victims of these technologies that I have seen – albeit a tiny sample of the whole – has produced any

66 <https://theintercept.com/2016/05/16/the-most-intriguing-spy-stories-from-166-internal-nsa-reports/>



evidence.67 Recently, within the space of three days, I received three

missives, one relayed by Garrick Alder. This is a link a site where TIs report their experiences and their (failed) attempts to get official action.68 On there is a letter from one Dr. John Hall:

‘Over the last decade we have seen a sharp rise in the number of people coming forward with complaints of non-consensual experimentation with electromagnetic weapons designed to target both electronic hardware and the human central nervous system. While this was typically disregarded as mental illness in the past, the total global population voicing these identical complaints has exponentially grown to numbers that can no longer be attributed to delusional disorder, schizophrenia or any other described mental illness.’69

So, they can’t all be deluded? Alas – and this is where the difficulties lie – yes, they can. With the spread of the Internet and thus the spread of stories about TIs and mind control technology, people looking for answers to problems may be reading the same narratives and this may explain why we get, as Dr Hall notes, ‘identical complaints’.70

For example, many of those seeking an explanation for their experiences cite a 1996 document by John St Clair Akwei, who it is claimed, worked for the NSA.71 But his ‘evidence’ has been largely assembled from other people in the field. For example, the most striking list of all the alleged effects of these neural techniques is taken from Eleanor White (‘Raven’),

67 I am referring to the Swede, Robert Naeslund, who had a device implanted in his skull. Photographs of this are at <http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_mindcon29.htm>. 68 <http://www.freedomsos.com/>69 <http://www.freedomsos.com/blog/archives/02-2016>70 About fifteen years I met a group of four putative ‘TIs’ and asked how many of them were being microwaved, ‘beamed at’, while I was talking to them. Three of them said they were. All of them seemed ‘sane’ and ‘normal’.71 See, for example, <http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/scalar_tech/ esp_scalartech12.htm>.



a familiar name to anyone who has tried to research mind control. Akwei is not contactable and no-one has been able to confirm that he worked at NSA.72

The second communication I received was an e-mail from Elizabeth Coady:

‘I am a former newspaper reporter and television producer who sued Oprah Winfrey to challenge the confidentiality agreement she had employees sign (in my case midemployment). Ms. Winfrey is a talented but troubled person who suffers from narcissism. I caused her what is known as ‘narcissistic injury’ – you can investigate how a powerful narcissist responds to such injuries. Ms. Winfrey endorsed Obama and is credited by political scientists with winning him the election. It is my informed belief that this campaign against me is a quid pro quo agreement between Obama and Ms. Winfrey.’

Ms Coady claims to be ‘a nonconsensual DARPA experiment subject who has myriad implants including a biotelemetry wire, biomems, microchip and what must be a neuro chip and or wire.’ The building in which she lives is also involved.

‘The president and his minions took years to lay this revenge plan in place. The conspiracy was so extensive that a former NSA director named Bill Black actually

72 Another name which appears regularly is a man who calls himself Dr Robert Duncan, who says of himself:

‘Call me The Saint. I am the all American – prep school, Harvard College graduating with honors in computer science and a minor in premedical studies, and advanced degrees from Harvard and Dartmouth in business and science. My famous ancestors are President Lincoln, King Duncan of Scotland, and Governor William Bradford, the first governor of Massachusetts. My research interests have been neural networks, virtual reality, and EEG controlled robotics. Before graduate school I worked for the Department of Defense, Navy, NATO, and various intelligence agencies computer science projects. I have done business consulting and computer consulting for the largest companies in the world. I have been a professor, inventor, artist, and writer. I am one of the last Renaissance men.’

But he’s a fraud, as is obvious from these comments. For more details see <http://exposinginfragard.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/dissecting-claims-of-robert-duncan.html>.



bought a unit in my building (from perpetrator Mary Wisniewski who helped implement campaign). I believe Mr. Black bought the unit under the pseudonym Martin Dooley.’

All this because of offence taken by Oprah Winfrey!

Coady has posted a X-ray on the Net73 which she claims shows a device in her body; but I cannot interpret X-rays.

The third recent correspondent sent me a registered parcel containing two letters about an elaborate – if barely intelligible – plot to kill her because she uncovered ‘a network of cameras in my flat and the people behind it, who run a voyeur/porn/rape + snuff movie website/network/ business want to kill me before I tell anyone’. Included with the letters were a smashed-up iPhone, a cigarette, some sexual lubricant (in a sachet labelled ‘Swiss Navy’) and four small capsules containing I know not what. But no explanation of what their significance is (and no return address).

And so it goes....

Cottrell and Banks

The collaboration between Lobster contributor Dr. Roger Cottrell and former British mercenary, John Banks, has resulted initially in a book BlowBack: Narco Terrorism, Deep Politics and The Plot To Bomb The 2010 World Cup.74 However NB that in an author’s note Cottrell writes, ‘this is a work of creative non-fiction founded in fact....’

73 <http://www.washingtonsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/ FullSizeRender.jpg.pdf>74 <http://www.amazon.com/BlowBack-Narco-Terrorism-Politics-CupORLD/dp/1533236488?ie=UTF8&qid=1463565034&ref_=tmm_pap_swatch_0&sr=1-1>



The Western Union Clandestine Committee:Britain and the ‘Gladio’ networks

Nick Must

In a previous article for Lobster,1 I discussed the planning that took place during the Second World War to establish a stay-behind network in case the Axis powers invaded Great Britain. Thus far my coverage of the subject has extended only to the end of WWII but there is an overlap here as, even before the end of hostilities, planning had begun for the post-war stability of Europe. The two prominent Western powers of the time, Great Britain and the United States, believed that the Soviet Union would be their main opposing force.

In the immediate post-war period, networks which were intended as an underground resistance in the event of a Soviet invasion were established throughout mainland Europe. These were the ‘Gladio’2 stay-behind networks. I will not try to detail the circumstances in which these networks eventually came to light. An excellent primer for those to whom this is a new topic would be the books and articles by Professor Daniele Ganser.3

1 <http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster71/lob71-were-doomed.pdf>2 I express the term as ‘Gladio’ (i.e. within quotation marks) because there were similar stay-behind cells all over Europe, but each had a different official name. The only network that was officially called Gladio was that in Italy but, as this was the first one to come to public notice in the early 1990s, the name became synonymous with all such European networks.3 For example <https://www.amazon.com/NATOs-Secret-Armies-Operation-Contemporary/dp/0714685003> or the essay at <http://www.buergerwelle.de/assets/files/secret_warfare_and_natos_stay_behind_armies.htm?cultureKey=&q=pdf/secret_warfare_and_natos_stay_behind_armies.htm>. Ganser’s claims have been met with criticism, not least because he cites the US Army’s the top secret FM 30-31B, which describes ‘internal stabilisation operations’. This is apparently a Soviet forgery. On which see <http://cryptome.info/fm30-31b/FM30-31B.htm>. Whatever the veracity of FM30-31B, Ganser’s reference to it is only a minor part of his work and the general thesis stands.



The beginnings

What I am more interested in examining is the links between the United Kingdom and the establishment of – and the process of sustaining – the original stay-behind networks in that immediate post-war period. From the spring through to the autumn of 1944, post-war plans for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) were instigated. One figure who played a part in the preparations for what would become the ‘Gladio’ networks was British military intelligence officer (and future Conservative MP) officer Airey Neave. From late May of 1942, Neave was an officer in the ‘escape and evasion’ department MI9 and engaged in ‘secret communications with Occupied Europe and the training of agents’.4

Towards the end of WWII Airey Neave transferred to a section of MI9 known as I.S.9(Z)5 and he used this official placement, as the assessor for the granting of awards and medals to MI9 agents (in the Dutch, French and Italian resistances), as a means to also covertly assess potential recruits for stay-behind networks.6

In his biography of Airey Neave, the author Paul Routledge quotes Dr. Stephen Dorril, who had provided research assistance for the book:

‘European accounts of the stay-behind networks are fairly consistent in their claims that, before hostilities had ceased, networks were already tentatively being planned. Central to these activities were personnel from SOE and in particular from IS9. It is interesting to note the postings of senior IS9 officers and the setting up of “fronts” as the war wound down. These fronts acted as intelligence gathering and recruitment centres and provided cover for MI9 and MI6 officers. It has been suggested that it is through these centres that the

4 Paul Routledge, Public Servant, Secret Agent: The Elusive Life and Violent Death of Airey Neave (London: Fourth Estate, 2002) p. 1255 See <http://www.arcre.com/archive/mi9/is9>, which is a transcription of the IS9 Historical Report in the National Archives record TNA WO 208/3242.6 Routledge (see note 4) pp. 12-13



prototype stay-behind nets were recruited.’7

Major-General Sir Colin Gubbins (the head of SOE during the final two years of WWII) was anxious that the sabotage networks which SOE had created should remain beyond the end of the war – and that they should so continue under his control and not that of SIS (MI6), who were attempting to instigate a turf war. Roundell Palmer (the 3rd Earl of Selborne), in his position as Minister for Economic Warfare, was the government Minister responsible for SOE and, like Gubbins, was extremely keen that SOE remain active in what was to become post-war Europe. Roundell Palmer twice drafted papers for the War Cabinet on this subject but was unable to win support. In spite of this – or perhaps precisely because of this – Palmer and Gubbins ensured that production of items for clandestine activities continued at close to the peak wartime rate, even though the war effort was already winding down. In doing this, and then despatching the products to the networks in Europe, I believe that they were attempting to create an economic case for the continuation of SOE. If so much money had been spent on equipment that was in place, there would be a weaker argument for disbanding SOE and replacing it with a purely SIS–staffed version.

Churchill himself may not have been a supporter of the campaign to keep SOE alive but like much of Whitehall, as soon as the eventual defeat of the Axis powers seemed assured his thoughts turned to dealing with the Soviets in the post-war era;8 and Churchill certainly viewed the Soviet empire as the next enemy.9

All is forgiven 7 Routledge (see note 4) p. 2718 For summaries of Whitehall’s wartime anti-Sovietism and preparations for the post-war era, see for example, Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War secret intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001) chapter 2 or Stephen Dorril, MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations, (London: Fourth Estate, 2000) chapter 1.9. Churchill commissioned plans for a Western Allied invasion of Russia. See <http://media.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php/ operation-unthinkable-churchills-plan-world-war-three/>.



Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, in the minds of the entrenched war-fighters who now expected Stalin to push Westwards, the former Nazi adversary transformed into the new friend (i.e. my enemy’s enemy). Much information on the Soviet army would have been gleaned from captured high-ranking Nazi German officers. Many of these men were actually paid by the British to produce written testimonies regarding their service, with a particular emphasis on encounters with and/or knowledge of Soviet forces.10 This was in addition to the many hundreds of Nazis (both military and civilian) who were sequestrated by the Americans under the umbrella of the now infamous Operation Paperclip. Both Klaus Barbie (the infamous ‘Butcher of Lyon’) and Reinhard Gehlen (Hitler’s spy chief) were integral to the founding of several ‘Gladio’ networks through their connections to other ex-Nazis, some of whom were, like Barbie and Gehlen themselves, war criminals.11

One interesting sideline that I have come across during my research for this article, is that a section of SOE known as Military Establishment 4212 (ME42) was, amongst other tasks, instructed to obtain German papers and army uniforms that would be specifically for the use of agents in the post-war period. What is the likelihood that other units would have been formed and tasked with similar duties in other countries that were deemed as ‘weak in the face of the Communist threat’?

The paranoid mindset prevalent in the Foreign Office at 10 Dorril, MI6 (see note 8) p. 100.11 See pp. 63/4 of John L. Bebber, ‘Nazi Allies: The United States Recruitment of Nazis after World War II’ in Security and Intelligence Studies Journal, Vol. 3 No. 1, Spring 2015. Apologist articles for this behaviour are still appearing today. See, for example, <https://www.yahoo.com/news/reinhard-gehlen-friendly-enemy-080000213.html>.12 Some details regarding ME42 are at <http://www.arcre.com/ archive/soe/soeme42>. The commanding officer of ME42 was Major Ernest Henry van Maurik (24 August 1916 – 21 January 2012) and his Daily Telegraph obituary is at <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ obituaries/military-obituaries/special-forces-obituaries/9104908/ Ernest-van-Maurik.html>. The Imperial War Museum list of papers on him at <http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1030012573> shows an interesting career.



the time is perfectly reflected by the contents of the Bastions Paper, which was produced in the summer of 1948. Here it was stated that Greece was seen as the principal ‘weak link’ in the defence against Communism. If Greece were to fall to a Soviet advance, the paper suggested, then the Red Army would quickly spread not only westward and northward through Italy, Austria and Germany, but also eastwards into Turkey. All of those countries were later revealed to have had significant stay-behind networks.

Another development in 1948 was the signing of the Brussels Treaty, which tied Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Great Britain into a protective union. This preceded, and also partly lead to, the NATO pact in 1949. These larger protective organisations necessitated some co-ordination of the stay-behind groups. Thus, in early 1949 the then head of SIS, ‘C’, Sir Stewart Menzies, instigated contact with other heads of European secret services, inviting them to join with Britain (and personnel from the US, who only acted as observers) in forming a Western Union Clandestine Committee.

The Foreign Office papers

During my initial research for this article I discovered a set of Foreign Office papers on the Western Union Clandestine Committee that were listed in the National Archives. These documents, with the reference FO 1093/396,13 were not available as they had been ‘Retained by Department under Section 3.4’ – which is a general catchall retention for documents deemed to still be sensitive after the expiration of the usual thirty year rule. Regardless of this, I made a Freedom of Information request to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for access. This was successful and I have received a copy of the papers, with a few (very minor) details remaining redacted. I have appealed for the release of this additional information and am awaiting the results of that 13 See <http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/ C13430565> At the time of writing, there has been no change to this National Archives web listing. I expect this to be corrected over time, as the papers are properly placed within the archives at Kew.



review.

The released papers reveal that, late in 1949, one Nigel Bicknell (probably Squadron Leader Nigel Bicknell DSO DFC) wrote a memo to Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh (head of the department dealing with Western Europe) to the effect that the first meeting had taken place of the Western Union Clandestine Committee (hereafter WUCC).14 He also detailed how the ‘C’ of MI6 at the time (Sir Stewart Menzies) had exchanged correspondence with Air Chief Marshal Sir William Elliott regarding the subject. At the inaugural meeting ‘C’ had opened the proceedings by welcoming all those who were attending as representatives of their governments. In addition to the British, these nations were France, Holland and Belgium, with observers from the United States.15

Also mentioned in Bicknell’s memo was Sir Gladwyn Jebb (later to serve as the UK’s Ambassador to the UN and to Paris, and already a senior member of the FO’s Russia Committee16). Jebb was keen that Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh be kept abreast of developments regarding the WUCC. With the agreement of ‘C’, Bicknell was to brief Shuckburgh in person, along both the ‘War Planning expert’ from SIS and the secretary of the WUCC. In this briefing, it was made clear that the WUCC was to be ‘kept quite separate from the other Brussels Treaty machinery’. It had also already been decided that the committee would have a central British element in that the secretary would come from SIS (as they were one of ‘C’’s assistants) although the chairmanship rotated through each participating country in turn.

14 Interestingly, the similarly named Western Union (Commanders-in-Chief) Committee a.k.a the WU(C-in-C) was a part of the Western Union Defence Organization and had already been in existence since the autumn of 1948. Perhaps the WU(C-in-C) provided useful cover for the WUCC in that alphabet soup of government committees?15 The American observers would have been from the newly formed CIA but were also, very likely, veterans of the wartime Office ofStrategic Services.16 By the time that the WUCC was set up in late 1949, the Foreign Office Russia Committee had been in existence for three years and was chaired by Sir Gladwyn Jebb. This neatly ensured that there was coherence between the Russia Committee policy and that of the WUCC.



As NATO was still in its nascent days, there was some concern that the very nature of the WUCC’s remit – ‘operational clandestine activities’ – would necessarily require it, for the time being at least, to be separated from the Western European Regional Group of the Atlantic Pact. It was later established that the WUCC would report to, and liaise with, the Western Union Chiefs of Staff, using Sir George Mallaby (who was Secretary General of the Western Union Defence Organisation) as its exclusive link. The Western Union Chiefs of Staff were based in London, so the WUCC was also based there and all meetings took place in London. George Gordon-Lennox (who would later rise to the rank of Lieutenant-General Sir George Gordon-Lennox) also seems to have been involved, as a hand-written note on the reverse of one of the earliest WUCC documents states that ‘Colonel Gordon-Lennox and I will help you explain the objects of the committee to Sir G Jebb, if you think it absolutely necessary’.

As with any other high-level Governmental committee, the ‘Terms of Reference’ for the WUCC had to be clearly defined. This process was undertaken during the summer and autumn of 1949, and the paper records from this are also included in those released from reference FO 1093/396. If there were any remaining doubt as to the nature of the WUCC and its deliberations, and whether these did actually lead to the formation of the ‘Gladio’ networks, here are some direct quotes from those Terms of Reference:

‘... to provide a focus for co-ordination between the Services charged with the conduct of clandestine activities in the five Western Union countries on the broad issues involved in war planning and the conduct of operations in war... to discuss and co-ordinate matters... relating to the preparations in peace and conduct in war of Special Operations and Secret Intelligence... In particular to ensure... the proper clandestine support of the Supreme Commander in Western Europe at the outbreak of war.’

At the first couple of meetings of the WUCC, the Chair was also the head of the British delegation. This was Major General



John Sinclair (later to succeed Menzies as ‘C’ of SIS and to become Sir John Sinclair 17). As it currently stands, the documents released to me by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) have the remaining names of the participants redacted. I am appealing against this redaction and will update if there is any eventual success in this matter. What is known, however, is that there was a ranking Commander from the British contingent; a Colonel and two Commandants from France; two Colonels and a third person of redacted rank from the Netherlands; a non-military participant from Belgium; two observers from the American States; and finally, the secretariat (of British nationality) were one non-military and a Major.

Also included in the papers released to me by the FCO are the minutes of the first and second meetings of the WUCC. In the minutes from the second meeting, it is recorded that:

‘The Committee as he [Major General Sinclair] saw it, was essentially a body of voluntary members formed to discuss how best its member nations could combine such resources as they had available to put into the common pool toward a a joint allied plan for clandestine work in the defence of Western Europe in war.’

I believe that this, along with the ‘Terms of Reference’ for the WUCC mentioned above, confirms the connection between the WUCC and the stay-behind networks in Europe.

There was much effort to keep the Clandestine Committee genuinely clandestine. It is recorded in the minutes of the first meeting that:

‘The CHAIRMAN proposed and IT WAS AGREED that:

(a) Both for reasons of security and in order to avoid

17 As ‘C’ Sinclair presided over some notable ‘events’, including the death while on active duty of Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb. See <http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/9/newsid_4741000/4741060.stm>. It has also more recently been revealed that Sinclair was responsible for a rather ‘old-school colonial’ defence of Kim Philby in 1955, when the yet-to-be-unmasked traitor was already under strong suspicion. See <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ uknews/defence/10552357/MI6-had-blind-faith-in-Kim-Philby-for-years-after-Soviet-agent-fears.html>.



being committed too precisely at this stage, the meeting should recommend that the Western Union Clandestine Committee should not appear on any official chart of the Western Union Organisation.’

They certainly seemed to succeed in their attempts at extreme secrecy as the documented trail of information on British links to the ‘Gladio’ does seem to run dry for a number of years.

Continuing British support

Further details did emerge in the 1990s, including the publication of Michael Smith’s New Cloak, Old Dagger: How Britain’s Spies Came in from the Cold. A revelatory but seemingly widely ignored section of this book states that two ex-Royal Marine officers had attested to how they had been recruited by MI6 in the early fifties to set up arms caches and provide other such similar assistance for stay-behind groups in Europe.18

Former MI6 officer Anthony Cavendish wrote in his account of his years working clandestinely for HMG that, in 1950, he was the SIS War Planning Officer in Berlin, placing caches of radios, weapons and explosives – initially in the Grunewald forest to the west of Berlin. He states that ‘... the stay-behind network I was to manage had to be set up from scratch.’ This Stay-Behind organisation was in the Russian zone in lower Austria.19

In the decades following the post-war years radio technology, in particular, improved and advanced at a

18 Michael Smith, New Cloak, Old Dagger: How Britain’s Spies Came in from the Cold (London: Gollancz, 1996) p. 117. The two ex-Marines also get a mention in an AP sourced news item that appeared in a number of American (but seemingly no UK) newspapers in early July of 1995. See <https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=336&dat= 19950705&id=lKcpAAAAIBAJ&sjid=BuwDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6546,2451885&hl=en>. The relevant part of this article are the two paragraphs starting from the bottom of the second column. Lobster was one of the few publications to spot that Smith had interviewed these British soldiers who worked with the Gladio networks. See the review of New Cloak, Old Dagger in Lobster 33, Summer 1997.19 Anthony Cavendish, Inside Intelligence (London: Harper Collins, 1990) pp. 66 and 74



particularly fast rate. The changes that occurred in such clandestine radio communications equipment is covered by the extremely interesting Crypto Museum website.20 Although most of the Gladio radio equipment was produced by manufacturers from the European mainland (such as Phillips in Holland and AEG Telefunken in Germany), British technicians from Her Majesty’s Government Communications Centre (HMGCC21) developed the PRM-4150 set that was widely used for the decade between the end of the 1970s and the end of the 1980s. It was the first radio used by the Gladio networks that was fully digital and based on the ‘five-figure-grouping’ numbers system of encoding.22

One of the primary ‘on-the-ground’ sources of intelligence on the Order of Battle and movements of Soviet forces, which would have given an early warning of any possible invasion, was the British Commander-in-Chief's Mission to the Soviet Forces in Germany (BRIXMIS).23 Former 22 SAS soldier Ken Connor was a Warrant Officer in BRIXMIS in the mid-1980s, during the final phase of his service with UK Special Forces (UKSF) – although he was badged as Royal Signals whilst with BRIXMIS.24 Copies of the Special Air Service Regimental journal Mars and Minerva that I have read often include accounts of previous military exercises that both the regular and territorial SAS regiments have undertaken in

20 See <http://www.cryptomuseum.com/spy/gladio/index.htm>.21 Spookily (pun intended), HMGCC are currently based at Hanslope Park in Milton Keynes and the FCO documents I had released to me were despatched from the FCO’s ‘Knowledge Management Department’ which is also to be found at – you guessed it – Hanslope Park.22 As good a point to start for anyone who might want to read more about ‘Numbers Stations’ would be <http://www.spynumbers.com/> and the YouTube upload of a BBC Radio 4 programme at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvr6o7fBcTY>.23 An official, and very dry account is at the Intelligence Corps Museum website at <http://www.militaryintelligencemuseum. org/displays/displays-sections/?displayID=1> A more entertaining read can be found at <http://www.brixmis.co.uk/>.24 See note 41 on page 64 of BRIXMIS in the 1980s: the Cold War’s ‘Great Game’ by Major General Peter Williams CMG OBE, downloadable from <http://kms2.isn.ethz.ch/serviceengine/Files/PHP/29544/ ipublicationdocument_singledocument/cfc33b48-d4eb-4ad4-a253- fb9dec50d345/en/BRIXMIS_1980s.pdf>



Europe. It would seem an obvious option to me, that the participation of British Special Forces in these manoeuvres would have been used as a convenient means, when necessary, to service arms and equipment caches in the European countryside.

An article by the Belgium-based Associated Press reporter Raf Casert recounts how, in the early 1990s, some of the weapons that had been placed in the Gladio arms caches had disappeared, although the majority of the items seemingly remained intact.25 Almost every Western European nation is identified in the AP story as having some form of arms dump. More recently Tony Gosling, writing for Russia Today, also recounted a similar tale of highly suspicious stockpiles of guns, etc., that had been found ‘at Greylake nature reserve in the flood plains of the Somerset levels’ by some teenage boys who had been fishing.26

UK Special Forces and ‘Gladio’

The Special Reconnaissance Squadron of the Royal Armoured Corps, which existed between 1962 and 1963 seems to have been an experiment on European stay-behind operations to see if a UKSF element would be useful. That one of the Territorial SAS regiments took over this role from the Special Reconnaissance Squadron when it was disbanded proves, to my mind, that the role was indeed considered vial but that it should be undertaken by more specialist forces.27

Mainstream media coverage about the UKSF aspect of Gladio have been very rare, but Hugh O'Shaughnessy writing in the Observer28 has noted how the networks in Belgium, Switzerland and Italy had all received British Special Forces

25 Raf Casert, ‘Secret Gladio network planted weapons caches in NATO countries’, Associated Press, 13 November 1990 at <https://www.scribd.com/doc/202065045/Casert-Raf-Secret-Gladio-Network-Planted-Weapons-Caches-in-Nato-Countries-AP-Nov-13-1990>.26 See <https://www.rt.com/op-edge/238393-ira-nato-uk-riffles-weapons/>.27 See <https://paradata.org.uk/article/4335/related/10136>.28 Hugh O'Shaughnessy, ‘GLADIO – Europe’s best kept secret’, Observer, 7 June 1992.



training either in their home countries or at bases on the UK mainland. In the BBC Timewatch documentaries on ‘Gladio’,29 produced by American film maker Allan Francovich, the Italian navy captain Decimo Garau (a trainer for Italian Gladio members at Campo Marrargiu on Sardinia) states:

‘I was in England for a week, at Poole, invited by the special forces [SBS]. I was there for a week and did some training with them. I did a parachute jump over the Channel. Did some training with them, I got on well with them. Then I was at Hereford [22 SAS], to plan and carry out an exercise with the SAS.’

Also in the Timewatch programmes, General Gerardo Serravalle, who was the commander of the Italian network from 1971-74, states that he undertook a training course run by British personnel. These were members of the ‘English stay-behind’, but he was not made aware if they were members of the military or intelligence communities. My guess would be that they were military, and members of one of the two Special Air Service Territorial Regiments (either 21 SAS or 23 SAS). Most interestingly, in respect to this TA SAS involvement, Paul Routledge’s biography of Airey Neave, from which I have already quoted, further states that ‘Neave was Officer Commanding Intelligence School 9 (TA) from 1949 to 1951’ and that, ‘IS9 later became 23 SAS Regiment, based in the Midlands, with a role to counter domestic subversion.’30

Both the 21 and 23 regiments of the Special Air Service are Territorial Army volunteer regiments, with a south-north division of responsibilities. 21 SAS cover the southern half of Great Britain and have their Regimental HQ at the Regents

29 Originally broadcast on UK television on BBC2 in three parts (Wednesdays 10, 17, and 24 June) in 1992 (during season 11 of the documentary strand ‘Timewatch’), but available in one amalgamated video online on YouTube at <https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=GGHXjO8wHsA>.30 Routledge (see note 4) pp. 271 and 13-14. See also the very brief history of 23 SAS in the final paragraph of the Birmingham Mail news story (26 December 2008) ‘SAS to march through Birmingham to receive freedom of city.’ at <http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/ news/local-news/sas-to-march-through-birmingham-to-receive-75447>.



Park barracks on Albany Street in London, with additional regional centres in Hampshire and Cambridgeshire in England, and Gwent in Wales. 23 SAS are the northern regiment and their regimental HQ is in Birmingham, with the regional centres being in Dundee and Lanarkshire in Scotland, and West Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and Tyneside in England.31

Although the current tasking of the UKSF reserves for active duties within the United Kingdom will reflect much of that originally given to the Auxiliary Units, the advances in modern computer technology mean that there are new areas of expertise that need to be covered. Computer hacking, the injection of malware into systems and denial-of-service (DoS) and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against an invading – or occupying – force will all be an aspect of any resistance fighting.

Identifying serving members from any of the UKSF regiments can prove difficult. For those troops who die in the service of their country, it is a different matter. In early May 2008 James Thompson, a trooper with the 23 SAS territorial regiment, was killed by a IED explosion in Afghanistan. In his civilian life, he was a computer technician for the firm Corporate Document Services in Leeds.32

Nick Must is an independent researcher with a particular interest in Special Forces.

31 Details for contacting the various area commands for both 21 SAS and 23 SAS (along with those for the 63 UKSF Signals Squadron and the Special Boat Service [Reserve]) can be found on the UKSF recruitment section of the official British Army website at <http://www.army.mod.uk/specialforces/30607.aspx>.32 See: <http://www.specialforcesroh.com/showthread.php?18335-Thompson-James-Christopher> and <http://www.thejournal.co.uk/ news/north-east-news/familys-tribute-hero-son-4494828>. CDS has a large portfolio of Government, Police and Defence contracts, as detailed on its website <http://cds.co.uk/>.



Facilitating Tyranny? Glenn Greenwald and the creation of the NSA’s

‘Panopticon’

Citizenseven

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State

Glenn Greenwald

London: Hamish Hamilton, 2014

Since becoming the conduit for the trove of classified documents from former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, Greenwald’s public profile has increased immeasurably.1 In 2013 he was joint winner of the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting and in 2014 the Guardian received a Pulitzer prize for the reporting he led on the Snowden revelations.2 Curiously, for someone who once wrote a book taking issue with the emergence of a judicial environment that clearly favours the rich, Greenwald has partnered with billionaire Pierre Omidyar, the former founder and chairman of Ebay (and $250 million of his money), to establish First Look Media.

The contention presented by Greenwald in No Place to Hide (2014), at the TED talk he did on ‘Why Privacy Matters’ in

1 Previous to being involved in the Snowden revelations he had a reasonable, though limited, following as a relatively minor news commentator and author, principally covering the civil liberty erosions experienced under the administration of George W Bush.2 Even Hollywood has reached out to Greenwald. In 2014 it was reported that Sony had bought the film rights to No Place to Hide. In a separate production, Greenwald will be played by Zachary Quinto for Oliver Stone's film ‘Snowden’ due out in September this year. And when Laura Poitras’ film about Snowden won the Best Documentary Feature at the 2015 Academy Awards she specifically name checked Greenwald, who appeared alongside her when she accepted her Oscar.



October 2014,3 and in a recent article in The Intercept,4 that the real purpose of NSA mass domestic surveillance is to foster conformity and compliance amongst the citizenry and not to monitor for potential terrorist threats.

Greenwald’s argument includes an analogy to Jeremy Bentham’s prison concept, the Panopticon, at the heart of which was a surveillance tower that enabled prison wardens to watch any prisoner at any time, with the prisoners unable see into the tower to tell if they were being watched. This was intended to enforce obedience and compliance. Greenwald explains in No Place to Hide, that the NSA mass surveillance program operates in a similar fashion, presenting US citizens with an ‘implicit bargain’:

‘......pose no challenge and you have nothing to worry about. Mind your own business, and support or at least tolerate what we do, and you’ll be fine. Put differently, you must refrain from provoking the authority that wields surveillance powers if you wish to be deemed free of wrongdoing. This is a deal that invites passivity, obedience, and conformity. The safest course, the way to ensure being “left alone”, is to remain quiet, unthreatening, and compliant.’ (p. 195, emphases added)

However the examples Greenwald uses to support his case, and his own account of receiving Snowden’s information, show that he has misunderstood the Panopticon concept and misapplied it to the NSA’s mass surveillance program.

Life under the all-seeing eye

Although Greenwald recognises that there is a strong link between a self-censoring effect and people being aware of surveillance, he never actually addresses how that awareness comes about. We can see this in his rather odd treatment of the evidence he cites as proof of the adverse impact mass 3 <https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters/ transcript?language=en>4 Glenn Greenwald, ‘New Study Shows Mass Surveillance Breeds Meekness, Fear and Self Censorship’, The Intercept, 29 April 2016 at <https://theintercept.com/2016/04/28/new-study-shows-mass-surveillance-breeds-meekness-fear-and-self-censorship/>.



surveillance has on society.

Referring to literature, he cites George Orwell’s 1984, and argues that the similarities with Orwell’s fiction are ‘unmistakable’.

‘In 1984, citizens were not necessarily monitored at all times; in fact they had no idea whether they were actually being monitored. But the State had the capability to watch them at any time. It was the uncertainty and possibility of ubiquitous surveillance that served to keep everyone in line… (No Place to Hide, p. 174, emphases added)5

Greenwald also includes quotes from 1984 about the ‘telescreen’ that watches and listens, that cannot be turned off, though one is never sure when the surveillance is occurring.6 The lesson that Greenwald draws is that ‘what makes a surveillance system effective in controlling human behaviour is the knowledge that one’s words and actions are susceptible to monitoring’. (No Place to Hide, p. 175, emphasis added)

He then goes on to illustrate this further with the example of Bentham’s Panopticon concept, a model for prison architecture that makes it possible for all prisoners to be subject to surveillance through the Panopticon tower in the centre of the facility. The Panopticon’s design ensures, however, that prisoners ‘were not able to see into the tower and so could never know whether they were or were not being watched’. (No Place to Hide, p. 175) As Greenwald explained in his TED talk:

‘...what made [Bentham] so excited about this discovery was that that would mean that the prisoners would have to assume that they were being watched at any given moment, which would be the ultimate enforcer for obedience and compliance.’

5 He made a similar claim in the TED talk:‘The warning that [Orwell] was issuing was about a surveillance

state not that monitored everybody at all times, but where people were aware that they could be monitored at any given moment.’6 ‘The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously.......There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.’ (quoted in No Place To Hide, p. 175, emphasis added)



Greenwald also refers to philosopher Michael Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish (1975), which considered the Panopticon, and notes how:

‘[Foucault] explained that ubiquitous surveillance not only empowers authorities and compels compliance but also induces individuals to internalize their watchers. Those who believe they are watched will instinctively choose to do that which is wanted of them without even realizing that they are being controlled — the Panopticon induces “in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power”.’ (No Place To Hide, p. 176, emphasis added)

But none of this is relevant to the ‘NSA surveillance state’ because Greenwald unfortunately does not notice how his examples are fundamentally different from our real-world situation. In the examples he uses:

• the subjects have all been officially informed and are, therefore, aware they are under surveillance; and

• they know how this monitoring will occur, since it is physically obvious.

In 1984 the fact that everyone is under surveillance is openly stated by the Party, mainly through the ubiquitous ‘BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU’ posters. The telescreen’s purpose is also common knowledge. Everyone adjusts their behaviour around the telescreen because they know about its perpetual monitoring function which they are reminded of when the telescreens sometimes issue instructions.7

Bentham’s Panopticon or ‘Inspection House’ also worked from the premise that its targets should both know they are

7 See George Orwell, 1984 (London: Penguin Books, 1949 [1989]), pp. 3-4 (Big Brother poster); 39, 230-231 and 238 (telescreen talking).



under constant surveillance and how it was being done.8 Greenwald attributes to Foucault the view that it is those who ‘believe they are being watched’ who will make the effort to conform. (No Place To Hide, p. 176) Yet Foucault’s exact words were more specific:

‘He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power.... he becomes the principle of his own subjection.’

Foucault recognised that central to Bentham’s Panopticon concept was that the inmates be aware of their surveillance.9

Greenwald conflates what he believes the NSA is doing with the surveillance visions proposed by Orwell, Bentham, and Foucault. Greenwald thinks not knowing you are under surveillance at all is somehow equivalent to knowing you are and will be watched, but not knowing exactly when.

A more appropriate analogy for the Big Brother telescreen would be the ubiquitous surveillance cameras in many cities across the world. These meet Foucault’s criteria of being visible but unverifiable: people can see the cameras but they cannot be certain if the images are being examined in the control room or even if the cameras are on. (Studies have suggested this uncertainty has deterred criminal behaviour, though this has been contested.) The alleged NSA mass surveillance network, in contrast, was both invisible and unverifiable before Greenwald publicised Snowden’s trove.

Ignorance is bliss

Greenwald also discusses how studies have demonstrated the ‘pernicious controlling power of ubiquitous surveillance and 8 ‘It is obvious that, in all these instances, the more constantly the persons to be inspected are under the eyes of the persons who should inspect them, the more perfectly will the purpose X of the establishment have been attained.’ (emphasis added) At <http://www.ics.uci.edu/ ~djp3/classes/2012_01_INF241/papers/PANOPTICON.pdf> p. 4.9 ‘Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.’ At <http://staff.washington.edu/cbehler/glossary/panoptic.html>.



self-censorship that results…’ (No Place To Hide, p. 178). This included a 1975 study that found that the ‘threat or actuality of government surveillance may psychologically inhibit freedom of speech’ (quoted in ibid. p. 180), and a Finnish study where participants were subject to a high level of surveillance in their homes. (quoted in ibid. p. 181) Yet in each of the studies Greenwald summarises, the signs of distress and the attempts at self-censorship only occurred because the subjects were made aware that they were being – or would be – watched by government representatives.

Greenwald knew that awareness is central to the adverse psychological impacts of mass surveillance before he ever met Snowden. At the Socialism 2012 conference in Chicago, in his speech on how the ‘Surveillance State’ creates a ‘climate of fear’,10 Greenwald had given a number of examples: the Occupy protesters fear of being infiltrated by the police and the ‘incredibly pervasive climate of fear’ in some American Muslim communities due to extensive FBI infiltration and surveillance and their knowledge they were being monitored:

‘And the reason is that they know that they are always being watched. They know that they have FBI informants who are attempting to infiltrate their communities, they know that there are people next to them, their neighbors, fellow mosque-goers, who have been manipulated by the FBI to be informants. They know that they are being eavesdropped on when they speak on the telephone, they know that they are having their e-mails read when they speak or communicate to anybody.’ (emphases added)

In his 2014 TED talk, Greenwald also makes much of this fact:

‘There are dozens of psychological studies that prove that when somebody knows that they might be watched, the behavior they engage in is vastly more conformist and compliant.’

A number of these studies were summarised in an article in 10 <http://www.alternet.org/story/156170/glenn_greenwald%3A_how_ america's_surveillance_state_breeds_conformity_and_fear>



The Guardian in 2013 which noted that science had collected a ‘wealth of empirical evidence on the psychological effects of surveillance’. This evidence,

‘leads to a clear conclusion and a warning: indiscriminate intelligence-gathering presents a grave risk to our mental health, productivity, social cohesion, and ultimately our future.’11

But in a striking prelude to Greenwald’s own argument, the author of the article seemed to overlook the key variable noted in most of the studies: the subjects had to know they were being monitored to display these ill-effects. One of the studies cited, for example, found that:

‘....secrecy had a significant main effect on feelings of personal control...Workers had greater feelings of personal control when monitoring was secret...than when monitoring was revealed.’ 12 (emphases added)

Greenwald’s latest Intercept article, relating the findings of academic papers that examined the impact of Snowden’s revelations on Google and Wikipedia searches, also evaded this crucial point. For Greenwald, these articles provided ‘empirical evidence’ that ‘the mere existence of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity and stifles free expression’. But neither article made that argument; instead they were about people’s behaviour changing once they became aware of surveillance.

The first of these two studies, by Jonathon Penney, focuses on how the ‘exogenous shock’ of the publicity about Snowden revelations caused Wikipedia users to modify their

11 <https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2013/ aug/26/nsa-gchq-psychology-government-mass-surveillance>12 This same study, based on the responses from 108 participants, also noted that:

‘....workers who were not aware of exactly when monitoring was happening reported greater feelings of personal control than those with exact knowledge of monitoring... That is, knowledge of the monitoring event may itself be a stressor that workers prefer to avoid if possible.’ (emphases added)



searches.13 The second study by Alex Marthews and Catherine Tucker, examined how Internet use changed in response to the leaking of ‘new information’ about the US Government’s ‘mass electronic surveillance data mining program’ in 2013.14 As they stated in their conclusion: ‘....our results are focused on the effects of revelations about government surveillance as opposed to the direct effects of government surveillance per se.’15 (emphases added)

So the worst effects of surveillance that Greenwald rails against, in particular self-censorship, only occur when we know it is happening. But the question Greenwald fails to answer in the case of the NSA’s mass surveillance program, is how do we know?

What Greenwald didn’t know

The claim is that the US government intended for the NSA’s extensive collection activities to enforce obedience. If this were true, it would have always been public knowledge that the ‘communications of everyone – not terrorists, not violent criminals, not arms dealers, but everyone – is subject to being read, listened to and otherwise monitored by unseen,

13 Jonathon W. Penney, ‘Chilling effects: online surveillance and Wikipedia use’ at <http://btlj.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ Penney_31APR2016.pdf>. Penney found ‘evidence of immediate, substantial and potentially chilling effects due to awareness of government surveillance...’. 14 See Alex Marthews and Catherine Tucker, ‘Government Surveillance and Internet Search Behaviour’, 29 April 2015, at < http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?>.15 The studies by Penney and Marthews and Tucker also found a direct correlation between the Snowden revelations and a ‘chilling effect’ in Internet use. Marthews and Tucker found that following the release in June 2013 of ‘new information about the surveillance activities of the US Government...by Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald’ there was a ‘distinct fall in traffic’, in the region of 10%, for Google searches on topics ‘rated as being more likely to get you in trouble with the US government...’.

Penney also observed a 19.5% drop in views of forty-eight Wikipedia articles that dealt with range of topics related to ‘terrorism’ following the June 2013 revelations. A drop of more than 25% was observed between May 2013 and June 2013 for a group of thirty-one ‘terrorism-related’ Wikipedia articles.



unchecked officials of the national security state.’ 16 But until he obtained access to the information provided by Edward Snowden, Greenwald did not know the full extent of the NSA’s capabilities, nor the wide range of its targets. That such programs were being concealed was a key point Greenwald himself made at the Socialism 2012 conference, when he referred to the ‘government’s one-way mirror’:

‘At exactly the same time...that the government has been massively expanding its ability to know everything that we’re doing it has simultaneously erected a wall of secrecy around it that prevents us from knowing anything that they’re doing.’ (emphasis added)

How then can Greenwald conclude that the purpose of the NSA’s collection activities is to enforce compliance and obedience? The NSA made an enormous effort to conceal its surveillance activities and also denied targeting US citizens en masse. There was a logic to this as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s General Counsel, Robert Litt, explained last year:

‘The public does not know everything that is done in its name – and that has to be so. If we reveal too much about our intelligence activities we will compromise the capability of those activities to protect the nation.’17

This need for concealment explains the intense secrecy which has historically surrounded both the capabilities and activities of signals intelligence agencies because ‘revelations about methods and successes would lead an adversary to change codes and ciphers and deny the codebreaker the ability to read the foe’s secret communications.’ 18

Essentially, while able to cope with targets suspecting they might be under surveillance, the NSA never wants them

16 <http://www.munkdebates.com/MediaStorage/Debates/ StateSurveillance/Docs/Greenwald-Summary.pdf?ext=.pdf>17 <http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/speeches-and-interviews/208-speeches-interviews-2015/1171-odni-general-counsel-robert-litt%E2%80%99s-as-prepared-remarks-on-signals-intelligence-reform-at-the-brookings-institute>18 Jeffrey T. Richelson, ‘Foreword’ to Secret Power by Nicky Hagar, at <http://fas.org/irp/eprint/sp/sp_f2.htm>.



to know for sure. Neither do they want targets to know how their communications may be compromised. This is the difference between overt and covert surveillance. The overt form, such as the secret police who openly shadow foreign journalists in some dictatorships, is designed to intimidate and enforce compliance. The covert form is designed to discover what the subjects of the surveillance are trying to hide, to catch them out when they think no-one is watching and/or listening.

A global chill

In his review of the Laura Poitras’ Academy Award winning documentary ‘Citizenfour’, which documents when she and Greenwald first made contact with Snowden in Hong Kong, National Public Radio reviewer David Edelstein described it as ‘one of the scariest paranoid conspiracy thrillers’ he had ever seen. Edelstein included the text of one of the e-mails Snowden had sent to Poitras, under the name of ‘Citizenfour’, to explain what was at stake:

‘You asked why I picked you. I didn’t; you did. The surveillance you’ve experienced means you’ve been selected, a term which will mean more to you as you learn about how the modern SIGINT system works. For now, know that every border you cross, every purchase you make, every call you dial, every cell phone tower you pass, friend you keep, article you write, site you visit, subject line you type and packet you route is in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited, but whose safeguards are not. Your victimization by the NSA system means that you are well aware of the threat that unrestricted, secret police pose for democracies. This is a story few but you can tell.’19

This depressing message could well be a declaration by Orwell’s Big Brother rather than a warning from a ‘whistle-blower’. Greenwald, though, apparently remains blithely unaware of his own role in this pernicious affair. Interviewed

19 <http://www.npr.org/2014/10/24/358350193/citizenfour-a-paranoid-conspiracy-documentary-about-edward-snowden>



by Salon in January 2014, Greenwald expressed the hope that, in time, people would be ‘in upheaval over the surveillance state’. There has been a change, even ‘upheaval’, but it would seem the main legacy of the Greenwald-Poitras-Snowden trio is the intensification and broadening of the fear of surveillance across society.

In October 2013, for example, PEN America, a human-rights organisation, released its report, Chilling Effects,20 which surveyed some 520 American writers to find out how ‘awareness of far-reaching surveillance programs influences writers’ thinking, research, and writing’. The report found that most US writers were ‘worried about government surveillance’ and were ‘engaging in self-censorship as a result’. PEN America noted how in a short span of time, the United States has shifted from a society in which the right to privacy in personal communications was considered inviolate, to a society in which many writers assume they have already lost the right to privacy and now expect to be spied upon almost constantly.

With more curious myopia, Greenwald claims the PEN America report shows ‘collective coercion and control is both the intent and effect of state surveillance’ (emphasis added) and refers to the report as a survey of the ‘effects of the NSA revelations on its members’, completely overlooking his pivotal role in exposing that information in the first place. (No Place to Hide, p. 178)

That awareness of government surveillance programs would have such an impact had been obvious to a number of observers. In November 2013, for example, Wired reported that World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee had warned that awareness of mass surveillance in the UK and US ‘could potentially leave a trail of paranoia that in turn leads to a trend for self-censorship among citizens of the allegedly “free” West’. In early 2015 a second PEN America survey found that 42 per cent of respondents in countries otherwise ranked as ‘Free’ had ‘curtailed or avoided activities on social media or seriously considered it, due to fear of government

20 <https://pen.org/chilling-effects>



surveillance’.21 A Pew Research Center report, released in late 2014, also found that in the year since the release of the Snowden documents, ‘the cascade of news stories about the revelations continue to register widely among the public’. This included changes in behaviour, with at least 70% of respondents in its survey of Americans expressing concern about the ability of government to secretly access information they had placed on social media sites.22

With Liberty To Monitor All, a joint report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), also documented how Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s ability to ‘scoop up personal information and the content of personal communications on an unprecedented scale’ had impacted journalism. They found, for example, that journalists, felt government sources were more hesitant, partially due to the Obama Administration’s aggressive prosecution of leakers, but also due to fears that all electronic communications could be traced.23

21 This report, Global Chilling, again confirmed that this was driven by the Snowden revelations:

‘The survey results are striking, and confirm that the impact of mass surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency, other U.S. government authorities, and U.S. allies — including those in the “Five Eyes” surveillance alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States — is rippling outward to curtail freedom of expression around the world. Levels of concern about government surveillance in democratic countries are now nearly as high as in non-democratic states with long legacies of pervasive state surveillance.’ (emphases added)22 ‘Americans’ lack of confidence in core communications channels tracks closely with how much they have heard about government surveillance programs. For five out of the six communications channels we asked about, those who have heard “a lot” about government surveillance are significantly more likely than those who have heard just “a little” or “nothing at all” to consider the method to be “not at all secure” for sharing private information with another trusted person or organisation.’23 ‘Large-scale surveillance dramatically exacerbates those concerns by largely cutting away at the ability of government officials to remain anonymous in their interactions with the press, as any interaction — any email, any phone call — risks leaving a digital trace that could subsequently be used against them.’ (emphases added) <https://www.aclu.org/report/liberty-monitor-all-how-large-scale-us-surveillance-harming-journalism-law-and-american>



This fear of mass surveillance was also impacting on journalists who felt that ‘they may be viewed as suspect for doing their jobs’. They were, in turn, being forced to adopt elaborate steps to protect sources and information, and eliminate any digital trail of their investigations — from using high-end encryption and burner (disposable) phones, to abandoning all online communication and trying exclusively to meet sources in person.24

‘Journalists repeatedly told us that surveillance had made sources much more fearful of talking. The Snowden revelations have “brought home a sense of the staggering power of the government”, magnifying the fear created by the increasing number of leak investigations. Accordingly, sources are ‘afraid of the entire weight of the federal government coming down on them.’ 25 (emphasis added)

These studies expose that it was never, as Greenwald contends, the ‘mere existence’ of NSA’s surveillance programs that has apparently caused this widespread paranoia, proliferation of self-censorship and behavioural modifications. In actual fact, the Snowden revelations about those programs were the only cause.

The dilemma of the self-accuser

In a vigorous polemic that appeared in The Intercept in mid-

24 The interviews conducted for the report found that this increasingly paranoid behaviour was in direct response to the Snowden revelations. One ‘national security reporter’, for example, told Human Rights Watch that the Snowden revelations show that ‘[w]hat we’re doing is not good enough. I used to think that the most careful people were not at risk, [that they] could protect sources and keep them from being known. Now we know that isn’t the case.’ He added, ‘That’s what Snowden meant for me. There’s a record of everywhere I’ve walked, everywhere I’ve been.’ (emphasis added)

Peter Maass [now with Greenwald’s The Intercept] voiced a similar concern: ‘[The landscape] got worse significantly after the Snowden documents came into circulation. If you suspected the government had the capability to do mass surveillance, you found out it was certainly true.’ (emphasis added)25 <https://www.aclu.org/report/liberty-monitor-all-how-large-scale-us-surveillance-harming-journalism-law-and-american>



2015, Greenwald took the New York Times to task for using anonymous US government sources to claim that ISIS had ‘studied the revelations from Edward J. Snowden’ on the NSA’s collection efforts against militants and modified their communications plans to avoid detection. Aside from disputing this claim, Greenwald was particularly incensed by what he saw as the New York Times’ hypocrisy given its role in publishing numerous articles drawing on the Snowden files:

‘But when it comes to uncritically publishing claims from anonymous officials that Snowden stories helped ISIS, the New York Times suddenly “forgets” to mention that it actually made many of these documents known to the world and, thus, to ISIS. What the New York Times is actually doing in this article is accusing itself of helping ISIS, but just lacks the honesty to tell its readers that it did this, opting instead to blame its source for it. In the NYT’s blame-its-source formulation: “The Islamic State has studied revelations from Edward J. Snowden.”’

And yet, in exactly the same way, Greenwald’s No Place To Hide fails to mention the agency of its author in disseminating Snowden’s materials, thus contributing to the same ‘Panopticon’ it denounces.26 Greenwald’s cognitive dissonance on this would be amusing, were it not such a serious matter.

26 Cem Paya at the Random Oracle blog <https://randomoracle.wordpress.com/2014/10/02/nsa-panopticon-and-paradox-of-surveillance-exposed/> and Mitchell Blatt at <http://chinatravelwriter.com/blog/2014/06/25/greenwald-wrong-no-place-to-hide-review/> spotted this.



Holding Pattern

Garrick Alder

Doppelgangers

Hillary Clinton’s apparent fainting spell during the 9/11 commemoration in September led to an explosion of theorising. The right-wing, who had been on her case over an alleged ‘secret illness’ for some time, went absolutely bananas.1 This cloud of conspiracy conjecture followed her into the car that rushed her away from the commemoration, across town, up the elevator to the apartment of her daughter Chelsea (where Mrs Clinton went to get herself recomposed) and back out into the street when she re-emerged an hour or two later.

The big thing (for about five minutes) was the claim that Mrs Clinton had been replaced by a body-double during her brief reappearance on the sidewalk, as she appeared to be behaving in a totally normal way. The traditional arsenal of amateur photoanalysis was unleashed, with before-and-after comparisons of Mrs Clinton’s fingers, gait, hair, weight and ears all being relied upon to support this theory of a stand-in.2

The online hordes even thought they had identified the Clinton ‘clone’, in the form of professional lookalike Theresa Barnwell.3 Ms Barnwell formerly worked in banking before quitting to exploit her natural good fortune as a full-time job, which gives some idea of what a lucrative profession this can be. (Ms Barnwell is said to earn upward of $10,000 a month 1 I suspect this orignated with a National Enquirer story in January that claimed she only had six months to live. 2 There’s a decent round-up of this supernova of speculation at <http://heavy.com/news/2016/09/hillary-clinton-body-double-conspiracy-theory-health-death-teresa-barnwell-impersonator-twitter/>.3 <http://hillaryclintonimpersonator.com>



for appearances.) Ms Barnwell herself joined in with the furious online debating, by tweeting a picture of herself taken outside Chelsea Clinton’s apartment some months previously, and then retracting it when most people didn’t see the funny side.4

Since coverage of the US presidential election campaign is currently on a fast spin-cycle at 90 degrees celsius, the body-double story is already receding rapidly into the distance. But before it vanishes over the horizon altogether, the episode has some curious aspects – not more than that – that are worth looking at.

The first is that Mrs Clinton herself had appeared to stoke such rumours way back at the start of the primaries in 2015, when she entered into a light-hearted discussion about her physical inability to sweat and asserted that she was in fact a humanoid robot.5 Ridiculous, of course. But no more ridiculous than the widespread notion that she is a shape-changing space-lizard. She must have known that this yarn would end up in circulation among the more outré elements of the conspiracy world. In fact, she can’t not have known.

And in fact, the Clinton campaign has form for appealing to the conspiratorial fringe. Several times during her campaign, and noticeably whenever there has been some unwelcome news in the media, Mrs Clinton’s campaign has made (or has prompted) announcements about those old disinformational stand-bys, Area 51 and flying saucers. This first happened in a light-hearted way in January 2016,6 then again in March,7 and then the Obama White House discussed the subject with reporters in May.8 Mrs Clinton might personally believe all this stuff, for all I know, but the repeated attempts to inject the topic into news coverage strongly suggest that this is a

4 <https://twitter.com/teresa_barnwell/status/775226918228660224>5 <http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/10/hillary-clinton-robot-sweat>6 <http://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/04/politics/hillary-clinton-area-51-aliens/>7 <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/us/politics/hillary-clinton-aliens.html>8 <http://www.idigitaltimes.com/ufo-news-2016-obama-white-house-responds-hillary-clintons-promise-disclose-area-51-535113>



distraction strategy.

And then just days after the body-double issue arose, Mrs Clinton appeared to disappear for a single video-frame while giving a stump speech, with the backdrop totally unaffected.9 This instantly resurrected the whole subject of impersonation, only this time it was conjectured that the Clinton seen making the speech was a computer-generated simulacrum. This is, alarmingly, not an impossibility. The technology to use video footage as a glove-puppet, making people in prerecorded images move and talk in real time, under the direction of an actor, has existed for years. The level of detail extends to the ability to recreate details of the inside of the ‘puppet’s’ mouth, glimpsed during normal speech, so that the illusion is seamless. I’m not entirely sure how one could detect such replication.10

The official line on this bizarre event is that it was a case of the upper-most display lines in the relayed video-feed image becoming ‘jammed’ and cascading down the screen, overwriting Mrs Clinton’s image for a fraction of a second. The background, fortuitously consisting only of wide vertical stripes in red and white only, would have seemed uninterrupted by such a glitch.

So we have a candidate with a known body-double, who has joked about being a humanoid robot, who has also disappeared and re-appeared in a manner consistent with known face-faking technology. It might be crediting Mrs Clinton’s team with far more sophistication than they actually have, but if so this is a striking sequence of coincidences. The obvious question is: why would they do this? For a possible answer to this, we have to look at events on the other side of the planet.

Vladimir Putin – who is not under the same protective veil of respect in the eyes of Western media – has apparently

9 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM-fUdXcfW4>10 A demonstration of this frightening technology, conducted by Stanford University researchers, can be seen on Youtube. I’m not sure whether or not the example of George W Bush, famous for his verbal ineptitude, was chosen for this video as a deliberate joke. See <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk>.



been using exactly such psychological techniques for some time. This extends to issuing impossible itineraries and deliberately staging photographs in such a way as to cast doubt upon their authenticity.11 A false story that Putin had been murdered and replaced with a ‘twin’ did the rounds of Western media before anyone noticed that the source was a website supposedly run by the Ukranian military.12 Curiously enough, that website has now disappeared. Putin has been reported dead, injured, and ill several times, sometimes vanishing from view for days, only to re-emerge healthy and well. These reports have sometimes originated from Russian state media, which makes them more credible than simple speculation by anonymous YouTubers.13 In 2010 he underwent the plastic surgery that gave him his current, slightly doll-like, face. Around this time, plenty of people noticed that some other aspects of his physical appearance had also changed too, and some of these changes were not immediately explicable.14 If Mr Putin has a double (or more) the impersonation program could conceivably have begun during his time with the KGB during the Cold War. A Putin lookalike was photographed among a Soviet delegation to New Zealand in 1986. The Kremlin claims Putin was elsewhere at the time.15

Whether or not Putin really has a double is almost beside the point. The Russian government has created a media environment in which everything is suspect, nothing is finally trustworthy and in which sense and nonsense are frequently interchangeable. Putin’s new chief of staff, for

11 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/09/ 02/a-japanese-reporter-uncovered-something-strange-about-vladimir-putins-schedule/>12 <http://www.eastonline.eu/en/opinions/riding-the-russian-rollercoaster/putin-s-death>13 <http://www.vox.com/2015/3/12/8205193/putin-death-rumors>14 These stories have a weird way of disappearing from the internet. A video round-up (proposing that Mr Putin is a clone, no less) which shows some of the now-vanished stories can be seen at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVHhF5aeUQE&feature=youtu.be>.15 This story appeared in the now-defunct tabloid newspaper New Zealand Truth in 2007. The only complete reproduction is on the regrettable whale.to website <http://www.whale.to/b/putin9.html>.



example, has to his name a string of incomprehensible publications laying claim to mysterious ‘nooscope scanners’ and an impenetrable redefinition of the space-time continuum.16 All this is deliberate. It is a post-modern system of undermining consensus reality, targeted at domestic observers as well as foreign ones. It was pioneered by Vladislav Surkov over a decade ago, and continues to this day.17 To quote one commentator: ‘This aura of mystery is not happenstance, but a guiding principle. We have a system that believes it can do anything without any explanation.’ 18

And the thing is: it works. Churchill’s famous description of Russia’s strategies as ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’ has never looked so true. And since it works for Putin, it wouldn’t be entirely surprising if such tactics were soon taken up by strategists in the USA. The question raised by the frequent smudging and undermining of Hillary Clinton’s physical identity is: has this in fact already happened?

The FBI’s cook book

As I write, yet another bombing suspect has been apprehended after explosions were caused in the hearts of urban areas in the US. Ahmad Khan Rahami is in custody, charged with murder for having planted the explosive devices in Manhattan and New Jersey (as well as apparently abandoning some more bombs in a New Jersey train). Depressingly, it turns out that Rahami’s father contacted the FBI in 2014 with his concerns about his increasingly erratic and radicalised son. The FBI supposedly decided that Rahami Jr posed no threat – despite the fact that he had attended certain training camps in Pakistan in 2011 and disappeared for

16 <http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-very-strange-writings-of-putins-new-chief-of-staff>17 <http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21577421-what-departure-vladislav-surkov-means-government-ideologues-exit>18 <http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21705361-desk-shuffles-kremlin-signal-something-no-one-knows-what-dancing-dark?cid1=cust/ednew/n/bl/n/20160818n/owned/n/n/nwl/n/n/UK/n>



an unexplained break in Afghanistan in 2013.19 This should be ringing some bells among readers. The clincher on the whole deal is that Rahami used pressure-cookers to construct his bombs.

It’s not yet a proven fact, but every single bit of evidence known at the time of writing indicates that this was yet another FBI entrapment project. In fact, it would be surprising were this not the case. In the last decade or so, the FBI has been involved over and over again in spotting radicalised Muslims who are potential bombers, letting them carry on unmolested, telling them how to make bombs, and setting in motion bombing plans that the FBI can then thwart. In some cases, the FBI even helps the bomber make their bombs – or actually makes them for him. This isn’t some fringe theory, it’s pretty much an accepted fact of life in the US.20 The only controversy left to debate is how many of these projects result in real bombings and whether or not the explosions were deliberately allowed to happen.

There are indications – no, actually considerably more than mere indications – that some of the most infamous terrorist attacks of recent years were guided by a hidden hand with a degree of technical know-how beyond that of the bombers themselves. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, wasn’t actually capable of making the bombs that were used; and nor, apparently, was his brother (whose mouth was sealed for good when he was shot dead in still unclear circumstances). Again, this isn’t controversial. It was established early on, then conveniently forgotten.21

Yes, there might be some sinister terrorist network of specialist bombmakers behind all this. But the only such network that has ever been detected is headquartered at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. And it appears that no-one cares, since they are still at it today.

19 <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/23/ahmad-khan-rahami-pakistan-taliban-new-york-bombing-terrorism>20 <https://theintercept.com/2015/02/26/fbi-manufacture-plots-terrorism-isis-grave-threats/>21 <http://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/05/us/boston-marathon-bombing-trial-help/>



The 28 missing pages

Dumped quietly into the public domain late on the evening of Friday 15 July, the long-fabled withheld pages of the 9/11 report are now available. The same media that had been clamouring for over a decade for the release of those pages then fumbled this unexpected story, dropping it like a hot brick, and it was immediately steamrollered by coverage of the Republican Convention that commenced on Monday 18 July. ‘A good day to bury bad news’, as someone once said during 9/11 itself. Which is a shame, because the contents of those pages (more than 28, as it turned out) are astonishing.22 The long and the short of it is that Deep Throat’s (fictional) advice about following the money reaps handsome dividends, even if it means following a slightly twisty road to get to the pay-off. The US media, tellingly, have not taken this route, instead choosing to pretend that there isn’t the equivalent of a signed confession to wrap things up nicely.

Saudi Prince Bandar bin-Sultan al-Saud, then serving as his Kingdom’s ambassador to the USA, paid thousands of dollars to a pair of US-based employees of the Saudi Ministry of Defence. Those employees then paid large sums to two of the eventual hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. The inescapable (but not documented) conclusion is that the pair then distributed money among the actual men on the ground, the entire hijacking team. This paid for accommodation, flying lessons and – in Mohammed Atta’s case, at least – a lengthy period boozing it up with a regular supply of cocaine, disobedience to strict Islamic commandments that Atta knew he would soon purge in his own martyrdom.

The payments to the hijackers began after they settled in San Diego in 2000 and were made by a former Saudi defence employee called Omar al-Bayoumi, who had arrived in

22 <http://web.archive.org/web/20160715222638/http://intelligence. house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/files/documents/declasspart4.pdf>



the US in 1994. Even before 9/11 the FBI had al-Bayoumi down as a Saudi intelligence officer, noting his ‘extensive ties to the Saudi Government’ and his extravagant personal spending despite being officially unemployed.

Al-Bayoumi had a close personal friend (another Saudi citizen with no visible means of support) who lived near the two hijackers. This was Osama Bassnan, whose wife received money directly from Prince Bandar’s wife. Moreover the money flowed in directions that suggest these US operatives got greedy and were trying to siphon off covert payments for themselves. In doing so they proved their personal connections: al-Bayoumi’s wife attempted to deposit three of Mrs Bassnan’s aforementioned cheques into her own bank account. Perhaps they figured that when the hijackers were all dead, this wouldn’t be traceable. A few of the early payments, dating back to the late 1990s, actually came from Bandar himself, presumably before the 9/11 plot was hatched: ‘According to the FBI, on May 14, 1998, Bassnan cashed a check from Bandar in the amount of $15,000. Bassnan’s wife also received at least one [$10,000] check directly from Bandar.’23

This is interesting enough, but the tightest connection of all comes when we read about Abu Zubaydah. According to the US, who captured him in 2002, Zubaydah was bin Laden’s senior lieutenant and al-Qaeda’s counterintelligence chief. Zubaydah’s telephone records revealed numerous calls to the US-shored business that manages the Colorado residence of Prince Bandar himself.

Yet despite all this, the US news media’s coverage of the release of the withheld pages has been to smother the story by downplaying the proven money routes and pretending the whole thing is inconclusive. A popular catchphrase in media framing of the information was ‘There is no smoking gun’.24

White House press secretary Josh Earnest adopted a line of sophistry that would stun a Jesuit when he told reporters that

23 <https://28pages.org/the-declassified-28-pages/>24 See for example <http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Saudi-Secret-Pages-New-York-City-911-Sept-11-Attacks-Officials-386991701.html>



the newly-released pages ‘don’t shed any new light or change any of the conclusions about responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. This information does not change the assessment of the US government that there’s no evidence that the Saudi government or senior Saudi individuals funded al-Qaida.’ This was soon followed by the Obama White House’s apparently incomprehensible decision to exercise the Presidential veto and prevent families bereaved in the 2001 attacks from suing Saudi Arabia.25

Rather tellingly, no sooner had Mr Obama vetoed the law than Republicans in Congress overturned his veto – and then immediately said that they wanted to re-write the new law to guard against unspecified ‘unintended consequences’.26 But no sooner had the original law been passed than the first lawsuit against Saudi Arabia was filed, which has the potential to wreak all kinds of legal mischief if the suit proceeds normally but the law is revised.27

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that what is deliberately being kept out of the spotlight is George W Bush’s close personal friendship with Prince Bandar, so close that the President would refer to him as ‘Bandar Bush’. Bandar has been a friend of the Bush family ever since working with George HW Bush during the Reagan administration, when Bandar ended up as the middle-man in paying the Nicaraguan contras. Prince Bandar has in fact been in and out of the shadows around various ‘deep events’ ever since, and his covert CV is a lengthy one.28 The fact that the newly-released pages do not shed any light on the glaring Jeb Bush/Florida connection (discussed in this column in Lobster 69 29) overwhelmingly suggests that there was a conscious effort by

25 <http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/23/politics/september-11-bill-saudi-arabia-veto/>26 <http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-09-29/congress-signals-regret-after-overriding-veto-of-saudi-9-11-bill>27 <http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2016/10/01/911-widow-first-to-sue-Saudi-Arabia-under-new-bill/7251475330901/>28 <https://web.archive.org/web/20060614095551/http:// www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030324fa_fact2>29 <http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster69/lob69-holding-pattern.pdf>



the 9/11 Commission to keep the Bush family completely out of the frame.

So to recap: we now know that a top bin Laden henchman was in touch with the US company of a Saudi prince resident in the US and that money went from that prince and his wife to two ‘cut-outs’ in the US (whose wives attempted to embezzle some of it) and that money then went from there to two of the hijackers, where the financial trail dissolves into a long blur of high times and fast living, and ultimately rains down upon an ash-shrouded Manhattan. The question that is now being staved off, smothered, and studiously ignored by the US establishment is how much of all this was known to Prince Bandar’s good friend in the Oval Office, and when.

Smith’s myths

The campaign to elect Owen Smith MP as Labour Party leader has been making claims that do not accord with verifiable facts, but the media are reporting them unquestioningly. Chief among these is the claim that Mr Smith attended an iconic event at the end of the miners’ strike in 1985, a claim to which Mr Smith himself has referred.30 Mr Smith’s claim to have been at the march has served as a key symbol of his deep personal links to traditional Labour Party values. According to the Library of Wales, a photograph of the young Mr Smith,31 said to have been taken at that 1985 event, and circulated by his campaign, was in fact taken the day before the event took place.

The young Owen Smith supposedly took part in the historic march back to work of the steadfast miners of Maerdy, South Wales, on 5 March 1985. Maerdy was the only community that had totally resisted calls to return to work

30 <http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/politics/owen-smith-call-miners-strike-11616822> < http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36834096> 31 A copy of which can be seen at <http://i3.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article8479189.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/SUNDAYMIRROR-PROD-Owen-Smith-on-march.jpg>. Mirror journalist Nigel Nelson has confimed that this photo was supplied by Mr Smith.



throughout the dispute. The Maerdy community formed a procession, led by a brass band, and marched from around 6.30am until dispersing at 11am. Mr Smith – a frequent attender of local demonstrations, along with his family – would have been 14 years old at the time. Tuesday 5 March 1985 was a normal day at Mr Smith’s school, some 20 miles from Maerdy.

Barbara Williams, now 74, was leader and founder of the Womens Support Group for the striking miners of Maerdy. She said: ‘I never saw Owen Smith at that march and he’s not in any of the photographs. I know everyone in those pictures.’

Mrs Williams’s brother Alun Ivor was at the head of Maerdy’s parade that day. He can be seen with his clenched first raised in the air in many photographs. He said: ‘I don’t remember seeing Owen Smith there and I was deeply involved in organising the whole thing. I’ve never seen him in any photographs and don’t recall him being there at all. This is the first I’ve heard of it.’

Approached for comment about Mr Smith’s attendance at the Maerdy march, a campaign spokeswoman said in an e-mail: ‘Owen’s parents took him and his brothers, Aled and Daniel, from their house in Pontypridd to the march back to Maerdy. It was, as you say, first thing in the morning. They were all “truanting”. Attached is a photograph of Owen on the march, which is taken from the official ITV Wales footage of the day.’

The attached photograph in question was the image that has appeared widely online. Archival holdings of ITV Wales are now in a collection at the Library of Wales. Librarian Owain Meredith confirmed that the collection’s records state that the footage from which the picture is taken was recorded on 4 March 1985 – the day before the Maerdy march.

When asked to explain the discrepancy between the date on which the image was recorded and the claims subsequently attached to it, Mr Smith’s campaign press office refused to comment.

Mr Smith’s father, Welsh historian Professor Dai Smith, was approached for comment about the Maerdy march but did



not respond to two e-mails. Kim Howells – Owen Smith’s predecessor as Pontypridd MP and a close friend of the Smith family – did not respond to e-mails either. Mr Howells was definitely present at the Maerdy march and played in the brass band at the head of the parade.32

The mystery of the Maerdy march is not the only dubious claim connected to Mr Smith’s campaign. On 30 July 2016, Mr Smith’s campaign announced a speaking event at the Camp and Furnace venue as part of his scheduled visit to Liverpool.33 On the day of the event, Mr Smith instead spoke on a patch of grass on nearby Bridgewater Street, where a small crowd gathered to hear him.34 Someone in the audience was asked to speak and claimed that the booking at the Camp and Furnace had been cancelled due to ‘pressure on social media’, asking Mr Smith to explain how he would stamp out ‘that sort of thing’. Mr Smith denied knowledge of the change of venue, saying ‘No-one tells me anything’ but did not challenge the claims of ‘social media pressure’ which clearly related to recent allegations of Labour bullying.35 No trace of any such pressure can be found on leading social media sites Twitter or Facebook. The Camp and Furnace venue – which has two halls, each capable of seating around 500 people – was contacted about this allegation and declined to comment.

A week before the Liverpool engagement, Mr Smith had to retract a claim that he had been a director and board member of US pharmaceutical giant Amgen, a U-turn that was relegated to the middle of an unrelated story in The Guardian and received no other coverage. Similar professional embellishment by Andrea Leadsom MP had previously led to headlines that destroyed her Tory leadership bid.36

32 <http://subsaga.com/bbc/documentaries/history/2014/the-miners-strike-a-personal-memoir-by-kim-howells.html>33 <http://www.owen2016.com/owen_in_liverpool>34 <http://indy100.independent.co.uk/article/people-are-laughing-at-how-small-the-crowd-was-for-an-owen-smith-rally-in-liverpool--Z1c7moC5IZ>35 <http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/owen-smith-liverpool-labour-leadership-11683873>36 <http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/22/owen-smith-pledge-equal-representation-of-women-in-labour>



In my opinion, there is no grand conspiracy of silence about Mr Smith’s background. The simplest explanation is that the media, having already thoroughly ‘delegitimized’ Jeremy Corbyn (in the words of the recent LSE report37) are allowing their preconceptions to constantly steer their narratives toward Mr Corbyn’s shortcomings and are therefore neglecting to scrutinise his opponent.

Notes on an untied kingdom

In the chaos wreaked by the result of the EU Referendum, the Guardian has jumped enthusiastically into the saddle of the wrong horse once again. They have done this by championing the scheme proposed by the Constitution Reform Group (CRG), that of replacing the current Union with a federation between England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Perhaps the Guardian editorial team figured that with everyone panicking about what to do with regard to Europe, they could slip this one into the mix, too.

In a June editorial,38 the leader-writer boldly stated: ‘The Guardian has championed these issues for long years. Now their time has come.’ This extravagant claim doesn’t appear to be supported by the contents of the category ‘constitutional reform’ on the Guardian’s website, which indicate that the idea of federalism only wafted to the editor's attention last May. The Guardian’s list of institutions that might be up for sweeping reform reveals where the paper’s priorities lie by commencing thus: ‘The shared purposes might include, subject to agreement, the constitutional monarch as head of state […].’ This core tenet isn’t something mentioned in the CRG report itself. The same editorial states excitedly:

‘An all-party group of present and former members of the House of Lords and others have recently been working on a different approach. [...T]his group, which includes

37 <http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/pdf/JeremyCorbyn/ Cobyn-Report-FINAL.pdf>38 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/10/the-guardian-view-on-the-act-of-union-time-to-reimagine-the-united-kingdom>



crossbench as well as political peers, has drawn up a new draft Act of Union, in the form of a parliamentary bill, which will be published this week.’

The Guardian are here using a very elastic concept of ‘recently’ as the CRG report was issued in September 2015.39 As for the new Bill’s prospects in Parliament, it might be instructive to look at what a far more recent and legitimate Lords Committee (May 2016) had to say about the idea of a British federation.40

The whole section is worth reading, and explains why a federation could not possibly satisfy any nation except the re-emergent England, but the key line is the last one: ‘Federalism does not, therefore, provide a solution to the tensions in the UK’s territorial constitution.’ (emphasis in the original) This is not so much a line in the sand as a Grand Canyon.

So it appears that the Guardian has hitched its republican wagon to the cause of constitutional reform and is now trundling blithely down a Parliamentary cul-de-sac, waving to its adoring readership as it passes by. Her Majesty can therefore sleep easy. The famous words of Lincolnshire’s legendarily reactionary MP Colonel Charles Sibthorp (1783-1855) can still be heard echoing around the Palace of Westminster:

‘On no account would I sanction any attempts to subvert that glorious fabric, our matchless Constitution, which has reached its present perfection by the experience of ages by any new-fangled schemes which interested or deluded parties might bring forward, and those who expect any advantages from such notions will find their visions go like a vapour and vanish into nothing.’41

Royal revelation riddle

To mark the occasion of Her Majesty’s 90th birthday, The

39 <http://www.constitutionreformgroup.co.uk/publications/>40 <http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201516/ldselect/ ldconst/149/14909.htm#_idTextAnchor108>41 <http://www.roguesgalleryonline.com/sibthorp/>



Times ran a story concerning a proposal advanced by Sir Maurice Gwyer at the time of the Abdication crisis of 1936.42 In this, we learned, the Baldwin Cabinet was asked to consider the possibility of Queen Mary (mother of the resigning Edward VIII) as Queen Regent, keeping the throne warm until the fuss had died down and the Duke of Kent could step up and become King.43 This was a possible work-around to bypass the Duke of Kent’s older brother Albert, who was rightfully next in line, but who was thought to be temperamentally unsuited to be King and had only daughters to succeed him. This plan was never executed and Albert became King George VI, with the results that we all know.

The intriguing aspect of this story, however, is the source. The information is attributed to a document held by the National Archives. Wondering why it hadn’t come to light before now, I searched the National Archives online catalogue. No such record is listed. I contacted the National Archives press office. The relevant archivists were unable to locate the document. Since it appears unlikely that The Times has outright invented such an important document, the indication is that it came from somewhere other than the National Archives and The Times has obfuscated its true origin for reasons unknown.

Cameron, Johnson and SIS

I’ve never quite known what to make of David Cameron’s claim that he was ‘groomed’ by the KGB during the mid-1980s. When he was vetted to become special adviser to Norman Lamont in the Treasury in 1990, Cameron supposedly told MI5 about the incident.44 Speaking to students at the University of Moscow in 2011, Mr Cameron said:

42 Sir Maurice was a Parliamentary Counsel, one of those exalted lawyers who actually drafts laws, so he was no rookie.43 The Times’ original is paywalled, but see <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/21/why-queen-might-never-have-taken-the-throne-in-whitehall-plot/>.44 If MI5 was on the look-out for someone who might have undermined the economy, they should have looked closer to home.



‘I first came to Russia as a student on my gap year between school and university in 1985. I took the Trans-Siberian railway from Nakhodka to Moscow and went on to the Black Sea coast. There, two Russians, speaking perfect English, turned up on a beach mostly used by foreigners. They took me out to lunch and dinner and asked me about life in England and what I thought about England.’45

There were some amused comments in Russia, but the Kremlin soon poured water on Mr Cameron’s favourite anecdote, saying that no documentary evidence existed to support his tale, suggesting instead that he had actually been the unwitting target of a gay pick-up. Then came the claim that at the time of the encounter, young master Cameron was suspected of being a trainee MI6 officer.46 Given Russia’s current stance on homosexuality, the insinuation that young Dave was being eyed up by a pair of men looks like something meant to discredit him to Russian audiences. The MI6 allegation might be meant to undermine him at home. The odd thing about Russia’s rebuttal is that it obviously implies the two men who supposedly courted the young Cameron were under KGB watch at the time.47

And this links to Mr Cameron’s friend Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson. Given the role Johnson had played in selling what was, to put it politely, a pile of steaming bullshit to the British electorate during the referendum campaign, jaws hit floors around the nation and indeed in other nations when Theresa

45 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/8757576/ David-Cameron-tells-Russian-hosts-KGB-tried-to-recruit-me-but-I-failed-the-test.html>46 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/8757576/ David-Cameron-tells-Russian-hosts-KGB-tried-to-recruit-me-but-I-failed-the-test.html>47 Another little mystery might be explained by an MI6 link. Fresh out of Oxford University, young Dave’s entrance to Conservative Central Office was smoothed by a phone call from someone at Buckingham Palace, who told the startled recipient: ‘I understand you are to see David Cameron. I am ringing to tell you that you are about to meet a truly remarkable young man.’ See <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ femail/article-462313/Dave-Cameron-says-hes-touch-reality--wealth-blue-blood-wonder.html>.



May installed him as her first Foreign Secretary. How on earth could such a person be trusted with Britain’s reputation abroad, let alone with oversight of GCHQ and MI6?

Johnson’s father, Stanley, was an MI6 officer of long standing48 and we know that MI6 tends to recruit along tried and trusted family lines (since families, particularly among the upper classes, form a sort of pre-vetting system in and of themselves). Johnson is descended from King George II, and Cameron from King William IV, which would presumably help things along.

I’m not saying that Boris Johnson is an MI6 officer – would MI6 really be so reckless as to employ him in the first place?49 – but the connection is intriguing. It raises the possibility of an MI6-inspired plan for Johnson Jnr (as a leader of the official ‘Leave’ campaign) to take a dive and deliver a referendum ‘Remain’ result. (If Nigel Farage had been killed in that near-miss in October last year, as discussed in Lobster 71) that would have helped).

And there can be no doubt that Johnson had no intention whatsoever of procuring a ‘Leave’ victory. If this wasn’t sufficiently illustrated by his ridiculous claims during the campaign, and his utter stage-fright after it, then the photographs of his stunned and ashen face on the morning after the ballot speak several thousand words each. Such an attempt to steer the referendum might also explain why David Cameron’s campaigning for ‘Remain’ was so low-key and understated, giving Johnson centre stage to perform his upper-crust electoral slapstick and discourage the ‘Leave’ vote.

This idea, however, founders on the rock-solid fact that Messrs Cameron and Johnson couldn’t run a sausage-shop between them and, obviously, MI6 would never be so stupid as to make plans of international magnitude that relied on 48 <http://westernindependent.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/cockerells-life-of-johnson.html>49 If MI6 were never interested in Johnson for his own sake, they would certainly have been interested in his rather pally relationship with a known Russian spy. See <https://tompride.wordpress.com/ 2014/03/07/shhh-dont-tell-mi5-but-heres-a-russian-spy-with-his-good-friend-boris-johnson/>



either man.

Chilcot

There is so much to be said about Sir John Chilcot’s Inquiry into the Iraq War. It ironically delivered a political Weapon of Mass Destruction that no-one was expecting and it was a shame that press coverage of the report was lost almost immediately amid the numerous recent upheavals and outrages. It would be unfortunate if the mainstream media got a quick ‘hit’ from the report and then quickly rushed after the next story, leaving meat still on the carcass, as they did with the Panama Papers.

For example, it’s worth looking at Blair frontman Alastair Campbell’s response to the report’s findings concerning the infamous ‘Dodgy Dossier’ of September 2002. On the day Sir John’s report was published, Mr Campbell hit the ground spinning and clattered out several hundred self-exculpatory and passive-aggressive words on his blog, best encapsulated in the following sentences.

‘That is four inquiries now which have cleared me of wrongdoing with regard to the WMD dossier presented to Parliament in 2002, and I hope that the allegations we have faced for years – of lying and deceit to persuade a reluctant Parliament and country to go to war, or of having an underhand strategy regarding the respected weapons expert David Kelly – are laid to rest.

The truth was – and remains, confirmed today – that the so called sexing up of intelligence never happened.’50

Mr Campbell, of course, has never been the subject of an Inquiry himself, so claiming to have been cleared by any of them is a bit over-ambitious; and they were not even prosecutorial proceedings in the first place. The problem all along was that Tony Blair’s unelected PR manager was 50 <http://www.alastaircampbell.org/blog/2016/07/06/many-mistakes-yes-but-no-lies-no-deceit-no-secret-deals-no-sexing-up-and-ultimately-a-matter-of-leadership-and-judgement/>



involved in the creation of what was effectively military propaganda, while the Cabinet was kept in the dark. And what Sir John said about the WMD scare-story was that such claims ‘were presented with a certainty that was not justified’, a strong statement indeed from such an eminent mandarin.

Mr Campbell still maintains that there was ‘no sexing up’ of the September Dossier. While it is true that Sir John did not directly address this long-standing grievance, his report contains an excruciating first-hand account of the Dodgy Dossier’s creation. This comes from Carne Ross, a British diplomat at the UN, who had overview of the Middle East at the time of the 2003 war and for years beforehand. His Chilcot testimony is a painful read, studded with shocking illustrations of deceit, as thickly as a fruitcake is full of raisins, and is explicitly intended as an exoneration of his friend, Dr David Kelly. Mr Ross’s conclusion is no less devastating for the measured tones in which it is delivered:

‘This process of exaggeration was gradual, and proceeded by accretion and editing from document to document, in a way that allowed those participating to convince themselves that they were not engaged in blatant dishonesty. But this process led to highly misleading statements about the UK assessment of the Iraqi threat that were, in their totality, lies.’ 51

If this process sounds like it deserves the description ‘sexing up’ that is because that is exactly what it is.

Bataclan barbarism?

In the immediate aftermath of the truck attack in Nice on 14 July 2016, former Tory MP turned investigative journalist (sic) Louise Mensch published a startling story on her Heat Street website. This claimed that the French authorities had suppressed reports of victims being tortured by terrorists during the siege at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, during the attacks of November 2015. The details make for very grim 51 <http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/96098/2010-07-12-Statement-Ross.pdf>



reading, even in Heat Street’s obviously computer-derived translation.52

Within 24 hours, Heat Street had been denounced, first by the hoax-slayers at Snopes.com, then by would-be Mensch gadfly, blogger Tim Fenton (of ‘Zelo Street’). Citing Snopes, Mr Fenton concludes: ‘Louise Mensch was not only wrong, she was misleading in a malicious and dishonest manner in order to whip up hatred over acts that did not take place.’

The Snopes author says: ‘Nothing […] occurred between the March 2016 inquiry and the July 2016 spate of claims to warrant republication of unvetted rumor in a time of international grief and worry.’ This gives the impression that Ms Mensch had malign motives, but the basis for that suggestion is simply not correct. The report of the French Assemblée National’s Committee of Inquiry – analogous to a House of Commons Select Committee in the UK – on which all these stories hinge,53 was only published on 5 July, so coverage earlier than that date is more or less ruled out; and the only coverage (until Heat Street picked it up) was patchy, to say the least, and in French-language publications only.54

Snopes goes on to state:

‘Contemporaneous reports estimated that 1,000 people were in attendance at the Bataclan on 13 November 2015 with 700 of them were physically unharmed. Had the French government opted to cover up acts of torture and emasculation at the venue, there was nothing stopping the vast majority of surviving witnesses from sharing their stories. None did.’

52 <http://heatst.com/uk/exclusive-france-suppressed-news-of-gruesome-torture-at-bataclan-massacre/> My own French is not even up to the most rudimentary conversational level, and I am myself relying upon Google’s page translation service for the quotes that appear in this section. The cited passages have not been polished or otherwise altered from the Google translations, available to anyone.53 Full text at <http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/14/rap-enq/r3922-t2.asp>.54 See for example the following, published just a day or two before Ms Mensch’s story <http://www.leparisien.fr/attentats-terroristes-paris/attentats-de-paris-le-procureur-dement-les-rumeurs-de-tortures-au-bataclan-12-07-2016-5962675.php>.



Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and as the text of the report makes very clear, there were relevant eyewitnesses, none of whom was called to testify. Both Snopes and Zelo Street cite the following exchange between a police officer acting as witness, a Monsieur ‘TP’ (French practice is to anonymise witnesses wherever possible) and inquiry committee members:

Mr President Fenech: For the information of the inquiry can you tell us how you learned that there had been acts of barbarism within the Bataclan: beheadings, evisceration , enucleations ....?

MTP: After the assault, we were with colleagues at the passage Saint-Pierre Amelot when I saw tears out an investigator who went to vomit. He told us what he had seen. I did not know this colleague, but he was so shocked that it came out naturally.

Alain Marsaud: Acts of torture happened on the second floor?

MTP: I think, as I entered at the ground floor where there was no such thing, only people hit by bullets.

Snopes and Zelo Street interpret this last line as a statement that ‘there was no such thing’ (i.e., there was no evidence of torture seen by MTP). But that’s not what it says at all. It says that when MTP entered on the ground floor, there was no visible evidence of the torture that was allegedly happening on the second floor. Well, there wouldn’t be, would there? Note also that MTP specifies a colleague claiming to have witnessed evidence of torture and mutilation at first-hand, seconds after seeing it, with no chance of the colleague’s memory fading or blurring. This witness goes unidentified in the report and was never called before the Inquiry; and Snopes and Zelo Street deal with this inconvenient fact by ignoring it.

Another section of MTP’s testimony, explicitly claiming that the bereaved have been kept in the dark, reads as follows:

‘Bodies have not been presented to the families because there were people beheaded, slaughtered people,



people who have been eviscerated. There are women who have taken stabs at the genitals.’

This didn’t seem to get the attention it warranted and a few minutes later, MTP repeated:

‘There was decapitated people slaughtered, gutted. There were expressions of sexual acts on women and stabbing at the genitals. If I’m not mistaken, the eyes of some people have been uprooted.’

The panel didn’t explore the matter, turning immediately to another witness on a separate question instead, and it appears that MTP – having got his remarks on the record – threw in the towel at that point.

One bereaved family member – again not called by the Inquiry – provided a copy of a letter he had sent to the investigating magistrate, which included the following:

‘On the causes of the death of my son A., the forensic institute in Paris, I was told, and with reserves given the shock it was for me at that moment, they had cut off his testicles, it’s him had put in his mouth, and he was disembowelled. When I saw it behind glass, lying on a table, a white shroud covering it up to the neck, a psychologist with me. The latter said: “The only presentable part of your son’s left profile.” I found that he had more right eye. I made the remark; I was informed that they had punctured him the eye and down the right side of his face, where very large hematoma that we could all see.’

This account – stark and unambiguous, and furthermore offering a pathologist as a potentially corroborative witness – correlates in many details with the claims presented by MTP, but was simply not explored by the Inquiry. The detail about only one side of the young man’s face being presentable also tends to support the claim that unpresentable bodies were not displayed to some familes – who, thus, could hardly be in a position to speak about torture either way.

The key testimony on which Zelo Street and Snopes.com rely is that of the chief prosecutor of Paris, also the



investigating magistrate in the November attacks, François Molins.55 M. Molins simply denounces all the accounts of torture as a ‘rumour’, based on confused witness accounts of bodies mutilated by explosions and gunfire. If this sounds weak to you, given the above, you are not alone. And even M. Molins cites an eyewitness who claimed he had seen castration taking place (predictably, this witness wasn’t called).56 Add to this the fact that French police, unlike Britain’s, are a state entity under the direct command of the Minister of the Interior and the sweeping dismissal of mere ‘rumours’ suddenly looks decidedly iffy.

Is raking over all this gruesome stuff really worthwhile? My answer would be: not for its own sake, but it is unavoidable if you want to get anywhere near the truth behind the media’s claims and counter-claims. There appears to be a genuine scandal here, and one over-excited blogger hurling abuse at another equally over-excited blogger, like some macabre Punch and Judy show, is not the way to get to the bottom of it.

He dares call it conspiracy

The Guardian's columnist Stephen Thrasher was recently contacted by an editor asking for a piece on ‘Baton Rouge, Black Lives Matter, and the police shootings’. Mr Thrasher declined, citing his mental health as a concern, because he was embarking on a vacation. When he got back a fortnight later, the same editor repeated the request, and this time Mr Thrasher felt up to the challenge. This episode shines a light

55 Readers unfamiliar with the French legal system should know that unlike Britain’s adversarial system of trial, France operates under the Napoleonic code in which criminal investigations are undertaken by a Judge with the police in a supporting role – not unlike the role of a British Coroner.56 M. Molins is a somewhat controversial appointee to the French judiciary, and his political connections and inclinations were being subjected to serious public questioning even at the commencement of his investigation into the Bataclan siege. See <http://www.liberation.fr/ france/2015/12/10/francois-molins-un-procureur-a-reputation-variable_1419883>.



on how the Guardian thinks about the pieces it publishes.

In between Mr Thrasher going away on holiday and coming back, the situation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had developed somewhat. What had been a case of yet another young black man’s death at police hands had become a situation in which a trio of police officers had been shot dead by a young black man, Gavin Long, who had declared a private war on the police and called for others to join him.57 So far, so depressing. What Mr Thrasher then turned in was a column demanding that President Obama condemn police shootings of black civilians.58 Fair enough, journalistic talk is cheap; but you’re on a hiding to nothing if you’re expecting the President to denounce the police in any circumstances, let alone on such a potentially incendiary issue. Regardless, Mr Thrasher went on to state:

‘If we are to end this cycle of violence, we must cease this fiction that somehow the feelings of the oppressed or their protest tactics are the real problem and not that which they are protesting: the systematic killing of black people made manifest by police violence.’

‘Systematic’ of course means ‘according to a plan’, and this choice of word was not accidental. Mr Thrasher concluded his column with the following statement: ‘[I]f we don’t start urgently asking new, bigger questions, we are going to be stuck with the same stories of violence – happening within the same cities – until too few of us are even left alive to read or write about them.’

Is it really the case, as it appears from these extraordinary remarks, that Mr Thrasher believes the police forces of the US have embarked on a deliberate program of extermination against black Americans? The answer is: ‘Yes, yes it is.’

In an April 2015 column, Mr Thrasher referred openly to the infamous cellphone footage of the death-under-restraint of young Eric Harris as ‘the pornography of our genocide’.

57 <http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/18/us/who-is-gavin-long/>58 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/18/barack-obama-condemns-baton-rouge-police-black-violence>



There is no reading of this phrase that will allow the word ‘genocide’ to have anything other than its literal meaning.59

So we’re left in a position in which the Guardian, which is intellectually allergic to the mere word ‘conspiracy’, is prompting a columnist to turn out unchallenged and ludicrous assertions that the USA’s police are carrying out a conscious program of eradicating the black population, and that President Obama is tacitly condoning the slaughter of 13 per cent of his fellow countrymen by his acquiescence.

It is difficult to comprehend the editorial thought processes that allowed this sort of paranoid mega-construction to reach publication. It puts Mr Thrasher in a more extreme position than Louis Farrakhan, who claims merely that the New Orleans levees were allowed to collapse in order to flood black neighbourhoods during Hurricane Katrina. Given the context of a gunman who urged black people to declare war on the police, giving Mr Thrasher’s inflammatory nonsense the perceived status of a valued contribution seems at best unhelpful and at worst a form of incitement. Perhaps we can look forward to Alex Jones joining the team next.

Jo Cox MP

The assassination of Labour’s MP for Batley and Spen in June had some odd aspects, but with a suspect currently awaiting trial it’s best not to talk about them in too much detail. The oddest factor of all is that Ms Cox’s assailant was alleged to have shouted ‘Britain first!’ during the attack.60 Britain First is the name of a minor far-right party formed by breakaway members of the BNP in 2011, and as it happens Clarke Rothwell, the chief eyewitness who claimed the killer shouted

59 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/13/white-supremacy-takes-the-breath-away-from-black-americans>60 <http://news.nationalpost.com/news/british-labour-lawmaker-injured-in-shooting-near-leeds-reports-say>



‘Britain first!’,61 has been named as a member of the BNP.62

There is one other bystander who claims to have heard the words ‘Britain first’. We’ll call that person ‘B’. ‘B’ claims to have witnessed the murder, the arrival of police, and the suspect’s arrest – all in the same location, despite the fact that the suspect fled the scene and was arrested a mile away nearly half-an-hour later. Could the shock and panic immediately following the murder have confused ‘B’’s memory, mixing up things seen personally with things ‘B’ only heard about?

By contrast, only one other witness, ‘C’, has claimed to have any memory of the sounds of the event and ‘C’ has stated definitively and in writing that no-one shouted ‘Britain first’ or anything else.

The foregoing suggests that a single allegation implicating a political party, given during the first flurry of media reports of the murder, led to that supposed connection receiving substantial national coverage that it might not have deserved. This curious set of circumstances has far wider implications, but the Contempt of Court Act means it would be unwise to spell those out right now.

Doppelgangers

Further evidence of the availability of political impersonators came to light in the run-up to this summer’s Democratic Party Convention in Philadelphia. Until recently the Republican Party counted as a member a startlingly good Bernie Sanders lookalike. And he even comes pre-packaged with a political story. Jeff Jones was a Republican Party member until quitting in despair over the rise of Donald Trump and becoming a registered Democrat in order to vote for his ‘face-sake’. NBC Los Angeles had a good deal of fun following Mr Jones around on the streets for a day and filming the excited reactions. If 61 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3646408/Gas-fitter-insists-Jo-Cox-killer-DID-shout-Britain-shot-MP-Testimony-closest-witness-murder-provides-compelling-account-death.html>62 <https://wikileaks.org/wiki/ British_National_Party_membership_and_contacts_list,_reference>



either political party’s campaign team had spotted Mr Jones’ resemblance, rather than a TV station, any amount of mischief and sabotage would have been instantly within reach.

NBC’s video is a truly odd viewing experience, as the ‘fake’ Sanders gradually replaces the real Sanders in the mind’s eye, until by the end the ‘switch’ is complete and it takes some readjustment to snap out of it.63

63 <http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Bernie-Sanders-Lookalike-Doppelganger-Election-California-Primary-382217101.html>



Fifteen years on from 9/11

John Booth

‘The 9/11 terrorists were not just lucky once: they werelucky over and over again.’

9/11 widow Mindy Kleinberg addressing the NationalCommission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States

31 March 2003.

On the morning of September 11 2001, young men said to be followers of Osama Bin Laden reportedly hijacked four planes to attack America as his brother Shafiq was at a business meeting in a Washington hotel with Frank Carlucci, a former Secretary of Defence and deputy director of the CIA.1 Attending that Carlyle Group meeting the day before was former President George H W Bush just as his son, President George W Bush, who had been in business with another Bin Laden brother, Salem, was flying down to Florida to publicise a Sarasota school’s reading programme.2

In another DC hotel on September 11 the director general of Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), General Mahmood Ahmed, was having breakfast with Senator Bob

Splitting some of these long URLs to fit the footnote space may produce problems. If the link fails, copy the URL and paste it into the search engine box and check for gaps caused by line breaks.

1 <https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/CarlyleHead1.html><http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/WAL110A.html>

Former British Prime Minister John Major was chair of Carlyle Europe 2001-4.2 <http://www.globalresearch.ca/george-w-bush-and-the-bin-laden-family-meet-in-new-york-city-one-day-before-911/5332870>



Graham and Congressman Porter Goss, both from Florida.3 General Ahmed was to lose his job the following month having been said to have arranged a $100,000 wire payment to the alleged lead hijacker.4 That man, Mohammed Atta, was reportedly living in the home state of Graham and Goss while preparing to attack the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and whatever was the intended target of the fourth hijacked plane that day.5

Graham, a veteran legislator with a long interest in intelligence matters, was soon to co-chair the Joint Congressional Intelligence Inquiry into what became known as 9/11. Democrat Graham, now 79, is still in the news having successfully campaigned for declassification of 28 pages of his 2002 inquiry report.6 Republican Goss, two years younger, co-chaired that joint inquiry, went on to sponsor the Patriot Act and loudly objected to an independent 9/11 inquiry before becoming Bush’s director of the CIA in 2004.7

Complex, difficult and painful

If the mainstream media pay any attention to this month’s 15th anniversary of 9/11, I doubt there will be much written about the intimacy of the Bin Laden and Bush families or any deep exploration of the related worlds of intelligence, business and international power politics. For it’s hard to be curious about 9/11 without quickly encountering its complexity; and that’s something resource-starved news organisations just can’t handle, even if their owners were so minded. 3 Senator Bob Graham, Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America’s War on Terror (Random House, 2004)4 <http://www.jeremyrhammond.com/2006/03/26/911-and-the-pakistan-connection/>5 <http://edition.cnn.com/2002/US/03/12/inv.flight.school.visas/ index.html>6 <https://28pages.org/><http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/05/the-saudi-role-in-the-911-attacks/>7 <http://www.historycommons.org/ searchResults.jsp?searchtext=Porter+Goss&events=on&entities=on&articles=on&topics=on&timelines=on&projects=on&titles=on&descriptions=on&dosearch=on&search=Go>



Could George W Bush really have been in business with the brother of the man he said after 9/11 he wanted ‘dead or alive’? Isn’t the world really about white hats versus black hats – about the West versus the terrorist rest? In President Bush’s words: ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.’8

There are other reasons many choose not to re-visit 9/11. For some that visually striking and politically shocking story suffices: suicidal Muslim followers of Osama Bin Laden crashed four commercial aircraft, killing themselves, passengers, crews, office workers and their would-be rescuers. Crazed fanatics seeking to destroy the American way of life. What else is there to tell? Nothing to see here. Move on.

For those who doubt that simple narrative, to contemplate anything else is not just hard work but uncomfortable in deeper ways. For some the events taking place on 9/11 – those digits already signifying emergency in American consciousness – were already emotionally scarring. So how then to absorb the reality, for example, that three World Trade Centre skyscrapers came down that day when only two were hit by planes?9 How are we to explain why 2,600 architects and engineers – the professionals whose expertise we trust every time we step into a tall building – are urging an independent inquiry into the Manhattan collapses?10 How are we to see the Bush administration’s reluctance to investigate the greatest mass murder in US history and its refusal to disclose material evidence as anything other than a suspicious, if not guilty, demeanour?11

How, moreover, are we to respond to the challenge posed by 9/11 widow Mindy Kleinberg to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (subsequently referred to here as the 9/11 Commission) at its first public hearing in 2003:

8 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpPABLW6F_A>9 <http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/09 /the-third-building-which-collapsed-on-911-was-not-hit-by-a-plane.html>10 <http://www.ae911truth.org/>11 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePOIhhd9Jr0>



‘It has been said that the intelligence agencies have to be right 100 per cent of the time and the terrorists only have to get lucky once. This explanation for the devastating attacks of September 11th, simple on its face, is wrong in its value. Because the 9/11 terrorists were not just lucky once: they were lucky over and over again.’12

Almost 3,000 people were killed in the United States on 9/11 and many more have died since. Yet more continue to suffer the consequences of inhaling the toxic dust that billowed across New York City that day. Some first responders and others working and living near Ground Zero barely alive now will have died come the 16th anniversary in 2017.13

Across the world the casualties from the state of almost permanent war that followed 11 September 2001 are vastly higher. Most killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and other parts of the Middle East were as innocent as those leaving their East Coast homes that sunny morning only to leap to their deaths from the burning Twin Towers. Or – and this is a lesser-known truth – for over 1,000 of them to be totally vaporized in their destruction shortly afterwards.14

The subsequent ‘war on terror’ has changed the world beyond recognition: Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, pre-emptive military action, waterboarding, extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation, the Patriot Act, drone assassinations, the demonization of Muslims and the violent eruption of large parts of the Middle East with consequent refugee problems there and in Europe.

Challenge to understanding

If what was triggered by 9/11 concerns us, then trying to understand what happened that day must matter, too. How was it, in Kleinberg’s words, that the identified perpetrators

12 <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/01/nyregion/01HEAR.html>13 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3740215/ Number-911-responders-scene-cancer-tripledthree-years.html><http://fealgoodfoundation.com/><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Kazg4ExnQ>14 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk8eJv6-bnE>



were lucky over and over again? How do we begin to try to make some sense of that transformative and far-reaching event?

Let me illustrate the scale of the challenge by describing how I first tried the direct approach. I bought two books that promised much. The Eleventh Day: The Ultimate Account of 9/11 by Anthony Summers and Robyn Swann was published in the year of the 10th anniversary.15 It’s a well-written, extensively footnoted work by respected authors who tell us they devoted more than four years to the task. The other was Solving 9-11: The deception that changed the world by journalist Christopher Bollyn, published in 2012.16 His book came after reporting regularly on 9/11 from the week after it happened. Read these extracts and you will readily see the gulf between just two accounts of the 9/11 events. Bollyn writes:

‘The hypothesis of Solving 9-11 is that the attacks were an elaborate act of false-flag terrorism carried out by Israeli military intelligence with the assistance of highly-placed Zionist agents and supporters in the United States, Britain, and Canada.’

Summers and Swan, on the other hand, write:

‘The authors have seen not a jot of evidence that anything like a false-flag scenario was used on 9/11....There is no good reason to suspect that the collapse of the Twin Towers and nearby buildings, and the resulting deaths, were caused by anything other than the inferno started by the planes’ impact.’

A little wider reading quickly confirmed that The Eleventh Day is no more the ‘ultimate’ account in the sense of telling the whole story than Bollyn can be said to have ‘solved’ 9/11 in his book. Both have important information to impart, but so do many others with more modest titular claims.

Initial inquiries

15 Anthony Summers and Robyn Swann, The Eleventh Day: The Ultimate Account of 9/11 (New York: Doubleday, 2011) 16 Bollyn’s lectures on 9/11 are available online.



So, if we are to increase our understanding without taking a lifetime, how do we proceed? For those completely new to the subject or those whose memories need some jogging, there are short overviews available. (More detailed recommended material is listed below.)

The Wikipedia ‘September 11 attacks’ entry is a useful introduction though further inquiry will challenge some of its contents.17

A quick (112-page) read by Arthur Naiman is 9/11 The Simple Facts: Why the official story can’t possibly be true.18

Tightly written and with glossary, index and web links, it poses some of the main challenges to the conventional version of events.

A moving human perspective is offered in the 2006 online film 9/11 Press for Truth.19 In it families of 9/11 victims tell how they fought the Bush administration to obtain the 9/11 Commission.

A personal odyssey into an awareness of 9/11 events is the more recent film Anatomy of a Great Deception by Dave Hooper.20 In it he documents his many questions, including reports of explosions21 and media reports ahead of the collapse of the New York skyscrapers,22 the molten steel found at Ground Zero23 and the intense fires there only finally extinguished in December 2001.24

All four contain enough references to spark further

17 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks>18 9/11 The Simple Facts: Why the official story can’tpossibly be true (Skull Press, 2011, ISBN 9781593764241)

James Corbett offers a five-minute introduction to 9/11at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgrunnLcG9Q>.19 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOOOApBFeV4>20 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BwZEgZgtT8>21 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D17QP2kna1I><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ4dVo5QgYg>22 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=677i43QfYpQ><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT5Y45_8IVg>23 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C0xztnYJj4><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7P5GelS50c><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uju2he8Rqs4<24 <https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1634-groundzeros-fires-still-burning/>



inquiries and it won’t be long before these lead you to the History Commons Timeline.25 Also available in book form by Paul Thompson, this is an indispensable open source reference tool.26 It cites published news items on the day itself, of what preceded it and what followed. It categorises events and characters from the Soviet-Afghan War to the post-9/11 world. All entries are hyperlinked and the site also carries lengthy articles, including one on President Bush’s movements on 9/11 and another on evidence of two characters with the identity of alleged hijacker Ziad Jarrah.

The 9/11 Commission

Thompson’s indexed assembly of thousands of news items allows us to inform ourselves by setting one report in the context of many others, jigsaw fashion. It can also serve as a measure of the value of official statements, including the report of the 9/11 Commission itself.27 That body was finally set up over a year after 9/11 following public pressure upon a fiercely resistant White House. Henry Kissinger was Bush’s first choice to chair it, but he quickly stepped down after complaints from victims’ families about his suitability and likely conflict of interests. In his place Bush appointed Republican former governor of New Jersey Thomas Kean with Democrat former Congressman Lee Hamilton as his deputy. Hamilton had previously co-chaired the Joint Congressional Inquiry into Iran Contra. The crucial appointment as executive director was Republican academic Philip Zelikow, co-author of a book a few years earlier with his friend and Bush National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. When victims’ families uncovered this and other parts of his history they unsuccessfully sought his resignation. Subsequent to his report’s publication in 2004 Zelikow went to work for the promoted Rice at the State

25 <http://www.historycommons.org/project.jsp?project=911_project>26 Paul Thompson, The Terror Timeline (Harper Collins, New York, 2004)27 <http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/index.htm>Print versions are also widely and cheaply available.



Department.28

The 9/11 Commission Report reads well, but set against the History Commons Timeline is quickly seen to be deficient and misleading. Co-chairmen Kean and Hamilton themselves later said they were ‘set up to fail’.29 Its senior counsel, John Farmer, has been much more severe: ‘I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described.’ 30 New York Times reporter Philip Shenon covered the Commission hearings and went on to reveal much more about what happened behind the scenes in his The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation.31

In 2005 David Ray Griffin’s detailed and challenging critique, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, was published.32

The 9/11 Commission Report drew heavily on evidence obtained by the use of torture and ignored much of what government and military witnesses and whistleblowers had to say. It didn’t answer most of the questions raised by victims’ families and failed to follow the hijackers’ money trail, concluding: ‘To date, the US government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance.’

An end to questioning?

Published just ahead of the 2004 Presidential election, the Bush White House may have thought the report would draw a line under the traumatic events of 9/11 and what followed, but that’s not the way things unfolded. The Afghan and Iraq wars only increased the animosity many already felt for a president whose opinion poll ratings had been very low after his

28 <http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/publication/652/catastrophic_terrorism.html>29 Thomas H Kean and Lee Hamilton, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (Alfred Knopf, 2006)30 John Farmer, The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America UnderAttack on 9/11 (Penguin, 2009)31 Philip Shenon, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation (Little Brown, 2008)32 David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions andDistortions (Arris, 2005)



controversial election in 2000. That atmosphere was very conducive to the questioning of 9/11: if Bush had lied about weapons of mass destruction, perhaps about 9/11 too? None of those carrying official responsibilities on 9/11 had been punished. Indeed many, including Rice, her deputy Stephen Hadley, and key figures in the military and security arms of the US state apparatus had been promoted.

Some of that resulting frustration fuelled controversy over 9/11. Much of it was on the Internet and thus, for many in the established political and journalistic world who seemed to have largely lost interest, was in the easily dismissed land of the shape-shifting, tin-foil-hat wearers. This mainstream dismissal also poses problems for those seeking a better understanding of 9/11: after initial familiarisation, how do we sift the mountain of material by largely unknown authors without knowing its reliability?

One way some try to simplify this has been to categorise explanations. This, at its most basic, reduces to two propositions. One, which has become styled the ‘official account’, is that Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were solely responsible for what happened. The other is that 9/11 was an ‘inside job’ – a false flag, Pearl Harbor-type operation to facilitate policy changes sought by the Bush administration and/or deeper forces within the US, even global, power structure.

A slightly more nuanced formulation is to suggest that Washington knew a terrorist attack was due and then let it happen on purpose (LIHOP) or that it made the whole thing happen on purpose (MIHOP). These two can comprise a variety of instigators – some inside the United States, some foreign actors and some a combination of both. Much of the more readily available 9/11 material fits one of these broad categories. Often the title offers a clue and it’s worth dipping into a few of the more recent online sources of this character to test their usefulness. (Some are listed below in Further material.) So, for example, I learned much about the Saudi Arabian connections to 9/11 in Summers and Swan just as I was the wiser for some of the material on Israel and its



supporters in Bollyn. The former reject both LIHOP and MIHOP, while Bollyn clearly believes that Israel and its American backers very much made 9/11 happen.

A few writers and website publishers refuse to be drawn into these categorised areas, seeing them as false dichotomies. Instead, they dig deeply, often focussing on one area of the controversy. For example, Kevin Fenton’s 2011 Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI officials helped enable 9/11 and evaded government investigation contains a very detailed analysis of why much intelligence information about al-Qaeda was not acted upon.33

Sceptical writers like Fenton will often then simply list their objections to the ‘official’ version and conclude that only a fully independent inquiry with powers to subpoena witnesses and evidence will take us nearer the truth of what happened. This is the position of most US-based 9/11 campaigns. It is also that of the UK Reinvestigate 9/11 campaign in which Ian Henshall is prominent.34 His book 9/11: The New Evidence (reviewed in Lobster 54) remains an informed introduction even though now nine years old.35

As Henshall and many other writers point out, the four official inquiries into 9/11 proved unsatisfactory. The first, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) report into the collapse of the World Trade Centre buildings, was produced on a shoestring budget after the Ground Zero site had been largely cleared of evidence. The Congressional inquiry co-led by Graham and Porter focussed narrowly on intelligence matters and some of its findings. Among many other deficiencies, the 2004 9/11 Commission Report didn’t mention the destruction of the unattacked World Trade Centre Building 7 (WTC 7). The fourth official report which did, by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), had to modify its findings substantially following the exposure of basic methodological errors. Its final report said: ‘This was the first known instance of the total collapse of a tall building primarily

33 Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI officialshelped enable 9/11 and evaded government investigation (TrineDay, 2011)34 <http://www.reinvestigate911.org/>35 Ian Henshall, 9/11: The new evidence (Robinson, 2007)



due to fires.’36

Serious inquirers into 9/11 should look at these official reports and associated documents subsequently released but also question their provenance. The ones by FEMA and the 9/11 Commission were under-resourced and limited in their ability to access material evidence. The Congressional inquiry was co-chaired by Goss, a close Bush ally in both Florida (where Governor Jeb Bush was a fellow Republican) and Washington where George W was soon to appoint him head of the CIA. NIST, whose report leaned heavily on the earlier one by FEMA, is part of the Department of Commerce. Its head at the time was Donald L Evans, Bush’s Republican national finance chairman. The head of FEMA, Joseph Allbaugh, was a close personal friend of the President.

Investigation criticsIt’s important, too, to pay attention to critics of these official investigations. One of the first was Bill Manning, the editor-in-chief of the firefighters’ journal, Fire Engineering. This is part of what he wrote there less than four months after 9/11 on 1 January 2002:

‘For more than three months, structural steel from the World Trade Center has been and continues to be cut up and sold for scrap. Crucial evidence that could answer many questions about high-rise building design practices and performance under fire conditions is on the slow boat to China, perhaps never to be seen again in America until you buy your next car.

Such destruction of evidence shows the astounding ignorance of government officials to the value of a thorough, scientific investigation of the largest fire induced collapse in world history. I have combed through our national standard for fire investigation, NFPA 921, but nowhere in it does one find an exemption allowing the destruction of evidence for buildings over 10 stories tall.

Hoping beyond hope, I have called experts to ask if 36 <http://www.nist.gov/el/wtc7final_112508.cfm>



the towers were the only high-rise buildings in America of lightweight, center-core construction. No such luck. I made other calls asking if these were the only buildings in America with light-density, sprayed-on fireproofing. Again, no luck – they were two of thousands that fit the description.

Comprehensive disaster investigations mean increased safety. They mean positive change. NASA [the National Aeronautics and Space Administration] knows it. The NTSB [the National Transportation Safety Board] knows it.

Does FEMA know it?

No. Fire Engineering has good reason to believe that the “official investigation” blessed by FEMA and run by the American Society of Civil Engineers is a half-baked farce that may already have been commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure. Except for the marginal benefit obtained from a three-day, visual walk-through of evidence sites conducted by ASCE investigation committee members – described by one close source as a “tourist trip” – no one’s checking the evidence for anything......

......Some citizens are taking to the streets to protest the investigation sellout. Sally Regenhard, for one, wants to know why and how the building fell as it did upon her unfortunate son Christian, an FDNY probationary firefighter. And so do we.

Clearly, there are burning questions that need answers. Based on the incident’s magnitude alone, a full throttle, fully resourced, forensic investigation is imperative. More important, from a moral standpoint, for the safety of present and future generations who live and work in tall buildings – and for firefighters, always first in and last out – the lessons about the buildings’ design and behavior in this extraordinary event must be learned and applied in the real world.

To treat the September 11 incident any differently



would be the height of stupidity and ignorance. The destruction and removal of evidence must stop immediately.

The federal government must scrap the current setup and commission a fully resourced blue ribbon panel to conduct a clean and thorough investigation of the fire and collapse, leaving no stones unturned.’ 37

I have quoted Manning at length not only because of his professional expertise and thus direct relevance to the New York events, but because his words can be applied across the whole area of what we call 9/11. The ‘clean and thorough investigation’ of this shocking and profoundly important series of events has just never happened.

At every stage the resistance by the Republican White House to rigorous, independent inquiry was replicated down the line. When Bush finally agreed to be questioned by a select few members of the 9/11 Commission he would only take part in the company of his Vice-President, Dick Cheney. The pair then did so in private, not under oath and no transcript of what took place has ever appeared.

From the tight-lipped White House down to the lack of forensic examination at Ground Zero, those seeking to know what happened to their families, friends and colleagues on 9/11 have been impeded and often, as we shall see, misled and lied to by those responsible for their protection.

Those who have independently researched 9/11 have frequently been vilified. At the United Nations in 2006, Bush attacked ‘outrageous conspiracy theories’.38 This was echoed more recently at the UN by then UK Prime Minister David Cameron.39

The same treatment has come from most of the mainstream media40 and also from ‘progressive’ writers. In 2007, for example, Guardian columnist George Monbiot wrote:

37 <http://www.globalresearch.ca/9-11-analysis-coverup-at-ground-zero-selling-out-the-investigation-destruction-and-removal-of-the-evidence/21006?print=1>38 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K5M0xtxQVQ>39 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeNVoozb0KE>40 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DILMQ_xYhg0>



‘The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a displacement activity’, going on to say ‘these conspiracy idiots are a boon for Bush and Blair as they destroy the movements some of us have spent years building.’41

Monbiot called in aid the Hearst magazine Popular Mechanics that had targeted critics of the ‘official’ 9/11 story first in a special edition42 and then in book form. Those criticised by Popular Mechanics and Monbiot hit back, but without mainstream media coverage their replies went largely unheard.43

But as the years have gone by more and more senior figures in US government service have chosen to speak out and add to our understanding of 9/11 events. As they have done so, many of the more easily challenged ideas of 9/11 campaigners have also been modified or rejected. Now, 15 years on, we can begin to examine the main events we call 9/11 not only with more perspective but with the help of those who in one way or another were close to what happened but whose experiences have to date largely failed to reach a wider audience.

9/11 in context

Before we look at these detailed matters let us briefly set these complex events in context. At the end of the 20th century – a time some claimed as the end of history – a dominant United States sought to confirm its global reach over new challenges to itself and its allies. Some of those challenges to full-spectrum dominance came from people, organisations and even states that not long before had been US allies. In the latter years of the Cold War the United States had a working relationship with Osama Bin Laden and his followers in Afghanistan and then, after the Berlin Wall came down, in the Balkan conflicts. Partly as a result of that alliance al-Qaeda followers of Osama Bin Laden were ushered into the

41 <http://www.monbiot.com/2007/02/12/short-changed/> and <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/20/ comment.september11>42 <http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a49/1227842/>43 <http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17256.htm>



United States for military training.44

In the months before 9/11 there were accounts of Bin Laden maintaining that close US contact. For example, veteran British journalist Anthony Sampson reported in The Guardian that Le Figaro had been told by French intelligence:

‘Two months before September 11 Osama bin Laden flew to Dubai for 10 days for treatment at the American hospital, where he was visited by the local CIA agent....Bin Laden is reported to have arrived in Dubai on July 4 from Quetta in Pakistan with his own personal doctor, nurse and four bodyguards, to be treated in the urology department. While there he was visited by several members of his family and Saudi personalities, and the CIA.’ 45

In all this, the US and its intelligence and military forces worked closely with its counterparts in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. This intimate relationship was exemplified by the 9/11 meetings that began this essay.

The particular closeness of the Bush family to the Saudis was illustrated two days after 9/11 when the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar – ‘Bandar Bush’ as he was known – was photographed in relaxed conversation on the White House Truman Balcony with the President, Vice-President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Rice. That 15 of the 19 alleged hijackers who had been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans were Saudi seems not to have chilled this mutual warmth. Seven months later, Bush invited Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah to his Texas ranch.

The fact that Saudi Arabia practises and propagates a strict and intolerant form of Islam did not appear to inhibit the closeness of the political and personal relationship of its leaders with the Bush administration. Nor did the adherence of Osama Bin Laden to those beliefs, nor the established financial links of some prominent Saudis to his al-Qaeda organisation, seem to jeopardise the friendship of some of his

44 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn61PJQGCUo>45 <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/01/afghanistan.terrorism>



family to that of the President and his father.

While the same close personal and business relationships were not matched by the leaders of Pakistan, the political alliance was strong and as critical to US foreign policy after the end of the Cold War as it had been during it. Head of the CIA Pakistan station turned whistleblower John Kiriakou is just one of many to confirm that the Pakistan ISI not only helped to create the Taliban with Saudi money and helped sustain Bin Laden in Afghanistan, but that many in the Pakistan military were very strongly supportive of al-Qaeda.46

We know, for example, from the work of Peter Lance that at least one double agent, Ali Mohammed, was close to senior figures within al-Qaeda and the US. We also know that British-born Sheikh Saeed, who, according to former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, had been recruited to MI6, became a key figure in al-Qaeda, too, with some saying that he was involved in passing money to the alleged hijackers.47

Foreign policy and democracy

The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) had in 2000 pressed upon President Clinton its ideas for ‘Rebuilding America’s Defences’.48 Some of its leading figures had recommended Israel under Binyamin Netanyahu to make a ‘Clean Break’ which required the remaking of the Middle East.49 Many of those producing these reports became prominent figures in the Bush administration and forceful advocates for war.

Let’s remind ourselves that PNAC, largely funded by conservative foundations and with the backing of senior figures in the weapons and energy industries, had itself recognised that popular opposition to ever bigger arms budgets and foreign wars was great. It apparently shared the

46 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlJO1uL1CsE&list=PLu8LYxOfTTc4D59b0kZ9qbuiFQ6CEWf6t>47 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Lance> and<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNh9BVqNjUY>48 <http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/pdf/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf>49 <http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1438.htm>



view of former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1998 book The Grand Chessboard:

‘America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.’ 50

PNAC put this barrier to change in these words the year before 9/11: ‘The process of transformation [of the military], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.’

On the night of 9/11, according to Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Dan Balz, Bush records in his diary: ‘The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.’ 51

Surprise attack?

Let’s start with the White House story of 9/11 being a surprise attack. When even the inadequate 9/11 Commission Report heads its chapter on warnings of the imminence of an al-Qaeda attack in the summer of 2001 ‘The system was blinking red’, we are right to doubt this Bush administration

story.

The likelihood of an attack was made known in many ways and long before the summer of 2001. By then al-Qaeda’s threat to the United States was well established. In 1993 it

50 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (Basic Books, 1997)51 < http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bush-on-9-11-moment-to-moment/>



had tried to blow up the World Trade Centre and the FBI not only knew about it but was also involved in a controversial way.52 The following year terrorists had attempted to blow up a hijacked plane over the Eifel Tower in Paris, confirming this as a possible method of attack. The year after that an al-Qaeda plan to explode 11 airliners en route to the United States from Asia had been disrupted.53

In 1996 the CIA set up a special unit to monitor Osama Bin Laden, fearing he would seek to acquire nuclear weapons. The first head of the so-called Alec Station, Michael Scheuer, said:

‘Osama Bin Laden has set out the Muslim world’s problems as he sees them; determined that they are caused by the United States; explained why they must be remedied; and outlined how he will try to do so. Seldom in America’s history has an enemy laid out so clearly the basis for the war he is waging against it.’

He claims President Bill Clinton passed up many more opportunities to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden than Bush.54

In 1998 al-Qaeda successfully attacked two US embassies in East Africa and in 2000 it bombed the USS Cole in Aden. US intelligence was also aware of an al-Qaeda summit in Malaysia in January 2000 and that two of the alleged hijackers had been traced from it to California soon afterwards.55

A Defence Intelligence Agency unit called Able Danger had identified Mohammed Atta and three other alleged hijackers operating as an al-Qaeda cell in the US soon after the Malaysia summit. Able Danger was closed down early in

52 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9p1AnhDzWg>53 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot>54 <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/12/hownot-to-catch-a-terrorist/303627/><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTtoHx-ia8A><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHl1JnQoIWQ><https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Michael_Scheuer>55 <http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=911timeline&911timeline_projects_and_programs=911timeline_al_qaeda_malaysia_summit>



2001.56

Years before that Michael Springmann, then head US consular official in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, had refused to grant visas to unqualified applicants but was overruled by the CIA. Fifteen of the 19 alleged hijackers were Saudis and 11 of them received visas through the Jeddah consulate.57

Former National Security Agency senior executive Thomas Drake has confirmed that the agency had monitored al-Qaeda communications through its Yemen hub years before before 9/11.58 The CIA had later made similar arrangements to access the safe house message traffic.59

FBI officers in different parts of the US were reporting to superiors in Washington the activities of watchlisted al-Qaeda members, some of them taking flying lessons.60

In the months before 9/11 with, in the words of ‘hair on fire’ CIA chief George Tenet, ‘the system blinking red’, came repeated warnings. Some were very specific about plane attacks and their targets.61

Lawyer David Schippers, who had successfully brought about the impeachment of Clinton, claimed that he passed on to the office of Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft very specific details of an al-Qaeda attack on Lower Manhattan he

56 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibzcopB2NyM<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8qnd_ADi_s><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbjLPDNb27s>57 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5Fynhuj0Mg><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXatUTUZK0E>58 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mVpMp9QLPE><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZFEHYUJyjY>59 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH_H-tUR5Vs>60 <https://oig.justice.gov/special/s0606/final.pdf><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiVKwCiw6Ko><http://www.coleenrowley.com/blog/index.php><https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Wright,_Jr.><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vALc-oU3Hqg>61 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3318493/Cofer-Black-George-Tenet-say-Bushadministration-ignored-CIA-terrorist-warnings-twomonths-9-11.html>



had been given by members of the FBI.62

The common factor linking all these warnings was that none were taken sufficiently seriously by the Bush administration for precautionary steps to be initiated. Indeed the experience of many from different government agencies was that no one at senior levels was listening. Some on the ground raising concerns experienced active antipathy, obstruction and actual deception. According to Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell, the terrorist threat was not high on the Republican White House agenda before 9/11. Boosting missile defence and getting rid of Saddam Hussein, he said, were the principal concerns of Vice-President Cheney and his old friend Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.63

Ashcroft also appears to have had his focus elsewhere – ‘violent crime and drugs’, according to a witness to a conversation between Ashcroft and FBI director Louis Freeh in the spring of 2001. Nonetheless it was reported in July that the Attorney General was no longer taking commercial flights. No explanation of that was ever given.64

This Bush administration position doesn’t seem to have changed by summer. Bush, still low in the opinion poll ratings, spent August at his Texas ranch while intelligence warnings became ever more urgent. The famous presidential daily briefing of August 6 – one whose full text was kept under wraps until 2004 – was headed: ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US’. Its text referred to ‘patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal

62 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q--dFRom--k><https://truthandshadows.wordpress.com/2010/12/30/clinton-prosecutor-told-by-fbi-about-details-of-911-attacksmonths-in- advance/>63 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRKFbLJDfl4><http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/03/31/republican-regretsiraq-war-brought-chaos-west/>64 <https://www.scribd.com/document/15644704/Letterfrom-Former-FBI-Director-to-9-11-Commission-about-AGAshcroft-s-Non-Interest-in-Terrorism><http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a072601ashcroft>



buildings in New York’.65

Many more warnings, including from foreign intelligence services, came in the final month before the attacks. They were followed in the days immediately before 9/11 by unusual market trading activity, much of it centred on United and American, the two airlines whose planes were to be used in the attacks.66

Whole books, like Fenton’s (see footnote 33), have been written on the warnings and foreknowledge, offering a variety of explanations as to why no action was taken. These range from bureaucratic rivalry, infighting and incompetence to those at the highest levels averting their gaze, or even worse, to permit the attacks to go ahead. The ‘official’ 9/11 story as told by the 9/11 Commission favours the former blaming ‘failure of imagination’. Sceptics ask why, if ineptitude was to blame, were those in responsible positions not then taken to task. Suspicious sceptics point to some of those in senior roles subsequently being promoted, including Rice and Hadley.

We also have to ask why on 9/11 itself some seemed to know the attacks were coming. Among them were a group of young Israelis seen excitedly filming the New York attacks and subsequently arrested. They claimed in police interviews to be there ‘to document the event’. The FBI confirmed two of them to be members of Mossad. Their boss at Urban Moving Systems, Dominik Suter, fled back to Israel shortly after the attacks. The five – some 60 Israelis were detained immediately after the attacks – were held by the FBI for two months before being released to return home where three of

65 <http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB116/>66 <http://cjonline.com/stories/091901/ter_tradingacts.shtml> <http://www.rediff.com/money/2001/sep/20usmkt.htm><http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2004-04-25/business/ 0404240327_1_stock-market-volatility-vix><http://www.scientistsfor911truth.info/docs/Poteshman_Puts.pdf><http://www.globalresearch.ca/9-11-attacks-criminalforeknowledge-and-insider-trading-lead-directly-to-thecia-s-highest-ranks/32323>



them told their story on Israeli TV. 67

Anthrax assassination attemptsDays after 9/11 a number of people received letters containing anthrax spores, the attendant publicity greatly swelling the panic following the World Trade Centre/Pentagon attacks. Among them were two Democratic senators, Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle, critical to rapid Congressional approval of a Patriot Bill conferring wide-ranging new powers upon the President in a situation George Bush had quickly defined as war.

The two prominent legislators were not directly harmed but five less prominent figures, including two postal workers, died within days. Many others, across a wide geographical area, were infected. It took months to decontaminate Congressional buildings. Americans never likely to die in collapsing skyscrapers became alarmed about the mail and worried that white powder on the kitchen floor might be deadly spores. Their nervous Congressional representatives became reluctant to open their missives. In The Anthrax Deception Graeme MacQueen says this was an intentional strategy of tension to push a frightened public deeper into the arms of the security state at home and into US-led wars abroad.68 The Bush administration was quick to blame al-Qaeda for the attack and then finger Iraq – portrayed as the possessor of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deploy them – as the source of its anthrax. But it quickly became clear that the sophistication of the rare and weaponised Ames strain of anthrax posted in the letters

67 <http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/03/07/what-did-israel-know-in-advance-of-the-9-11-attacks/><http://www.todayscatholicworld.com/mossad-agents-911.htm>

A wider view of possible Israeli involvement in 9/11 isgiven in Carl Cameron’s four-part series for Fox News at<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k43_NKYs50>.Christopher Ketcham does something similar in articles at<http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/israeli_ spies_ 911.html http://www.salon.com/2002/05/07/students/>68 Graeme MacQueen, The Anthrax Deception (Clarity Press,2014)



meant it could only come from within the military and intelligence apparatus of the US itself. So with al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein off the list of suspects, the FBI began the hunt nearer home.

MacQueen recounts the exoneration and $5.8m legal victory against the US government of its first suspect, bio-weapons expert Stephen Hatfill. He had been repeatedly named ‘a person of interest’ by Attorney General Ashcroft. The FBI closed its investigation after the second suspect, Fort Detrick bio-defence lab immunologist Dr Bruce Ivins, apparently committed suicide in 2008. He had passed a polygraph test, wasn’t charged, had suffered long-running harassment and been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. There was no autopsy and no evidence of his involvement in what work colleagues and many other bio-defence specialists found a highly implausible allegation.

MacQueen concludes that three things are of direct interest to those seeking to understand 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ that followed. One, the anthrax attacks were carried out by a group of perpetrators, not by a lone wolf; two, the group that perpetrated this crime included deep insiders within the US executive branch; and, three, that this group of perpetrators was linked to, or identical with, the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.

In at least part of this conclusion MacQueen has the support of one of the senators targeted for assassination, Patrick Leahy of Vermont. The Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said that whoever sent him the anthrax letter – and he doubted it was Ivins – could not have acted alone. Senator Leahy told FBI Director Robert Mueller:

‘If he is the one who sent the letter, I do not believe in any way, shape or manner that he is the only person involved in this attack on Congress and the American people. I do not believe that at all. I believe there are others involved, either as accessories before or accessories after the fact. I believe that there are others out there, I believe there are others who could be charged with murder. I just want you to know how I feel



about it, as one of the people who was aimed at in the attack.’

More recently, Richard Lambert, the senior FBI official charged with investigating the anthrax attacks, has spoken out in ways that make the ‘lone nut’ case against the late Dr Ivins hard to sustain.69

Whistleblowers

It is often said in support of the ‘official’ story that it would have been impossible to keep secret any US involvement in what happened. Surely someone would have spilled the beans by now, goes the argument. Two responses can be made to that. One is that many matters of historic significance have been kept secret for a long time. In the UK the success of the Bletchley Park codebreakers in accessing German communications during the Second World War was not revealed until 1974. At its peak, Bletchley had over 9,000 working there; yet discipline, loyalty and compartmentalisation ensured their activities remained long hidden from public view. Operation Gladio’s long Cold War existence was only confirmed in 1990. By then the Soviet Union had collapsed and many citizens in Western Europe, especially in Italy, had died as a result of state organised false-flag operations.70 The Northwoods plan by the US government for a false-flag operation against Cuba was only disclosed to a wider public 35 years after it was drafted.71 Bernie Madoff started targeting the rich and influential with his Ponzi scheme in 1960 but he escaped detection and arrest until his sons blew the

69 <http://video.foxnews.com/v/4184909385001/formeragent-claims-fbi-concealing-evidence-in-anthraxcase/?#sp=show-clips><http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/us/ex-fbi-agentclaims-retaliation-for-dissent-in-anthrax-inquiry.html>70 <https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Operation_Gladio>Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe (Routledge, 2004)71 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE-XcBQVq6k><http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/northwoods.html>



whistle in 2008.72

The second response is to record that 9/11 is actually remarkable for the long list of whistleblowers who have come forward since September 11 2001. Officials from a wide array of government agencies – some very senior – have disclosed important information challenging many aspects of the 9/11 Commission version of events. In addition to FBI investigator Lambert (above), it’s worth looking up the revelations of Colin Powell chief of staff Wilkerson; Bush Transport Secretary Mineta; Thomas Drake and William Binney of the NSA; Coleen Rowley, Sibel Edmonds and Robert Wright of the FBI; Anthony Shaffer of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Michael Scheuer and John Kiriakou of the CIA. All are referenced here73 and more can be found with a simple online search.

A whistleblower who lost her job was Cate Jenkins, a chemist with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who accused her employer of intentionally covering-up the dangers from the toxic dust at 9/11. A federal court reinstated her in 2012, two years after she was sacked, but those first responders who followed the EPA advice rewritten by the White House to state that the ‘air was safe to breathe’ are still suffering and dying.74

If you then add in such critical members of the 9/11

72 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoff_investment_scandal><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8e8Aq3Ss0o>73 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVedVe31CKA><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDfdOwt2v3Y><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wp2BGLMqDM><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgr1olmQ4pI><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg8FiUmBYHA><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiOtBqKyDYg><https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Wright,_Jr.><http://www.kkc.com/assets/site_18/files/int/shaffer-v.-dia.pdf><http://non-intervention.com/about-2/><http://www.johnkiriakou.com/>74 <http://www.asbestos.com/news/2012/05/16/epa-911-whistleblower-asbestos/><http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/center-science-anddemocracy/promoting-scientific-integrity/ground-zeroair-pollution.html#. VzjUUGYTKIY><http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/EPA-misled-public-on-9-11- pollution-White-House-2560252.php>



Commission as Max Cleland,75 John Lehman,76 and Richard Ben Veniste,77 and read the September 2004 open letter by 25 national security specialists critical of the Commission’s report,78 it will become clear just how many challenges there have been to the ‘official’ version of 9/11 from elected and appointed insiders within the US state apparatus.

That most of us have never heard these critical voices is a measure of the limited mainstream media coverage given to 9/11 in the succeeding 15 years.79

Alleged hijackers

Another set of questions follow when we try to establish how the warned-of alleged hijackers were free not only to live in the United States under their own names, but then on 9/11 almost simultaneously take control of four airliners in the most heavily monitored and defended skies in the world and wreak such damage. With many of them officially watch-listed, how did they manage to book their flights, pass through Boston, Newark and Dulles airport security and get on the planes yet not be caught on closed-circuit TV anywhere?

Passenger manifests for the four flights confirming their presence aboard have never been published. And if the 19 really were in transit on 9/11, how then did they manage to enter the plane cockpits and sufficiently subdue the flight crew to prevent any of the eight pilots – four of them ex-military – squawking the 4500 alert code to air traffic control, a standard hijack operating procedure taking seconds?

Fifteen years later we still have no certainty about the identity of the 19 alleged hijackers. A number of those promptly named by the FBI made it clear they were still very

75 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rcq3YFq55n8>76 <http://www.rawstory.com/2016/05/911-commissionerleaks-damning-new-info-saudi-government-officialssupported-the-hijackers/>77 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0RJu7xqjNY>78 <http://antiwar.com/edmonds/?articleid=3574>79 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgbhALwH9DY><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcRAxnsay58><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjEddVpRj7o><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CvnwQZfugk>



much alive and denied any involvement.80 There’s some evidence that passports had been stolen and perhaps identities, too, as Mohammed Atta and Ziad Jarrah were reported being seen in more than one place at the same time. We have no DNA evidence for any of the 19 at the crash sites.

As devout Muslims intent on killing themselves in jihad, some of the 19 had distinctly hedonistic tastes. Author Daniel Hopsicker records Atta having a stripper girlfriend and an appetite for cocaine and alcohol.81 Others of the 19 were reported to be Las Vegas regulars.82

Nor was secrecy apparently important with most of them living under their own names, two in San Diego, California, in the home of an FBI asset.83 According to author Graeme MacQueen, Atta spelled out his name to a Florida public official claiming he was a member of al-Qaeda and telling her that soon everyone would be hearing of a great man called Osama Bin Laden. He offered to buy from her an office aerial photograph of Washington DC and asked her about security at the World Trade Centre, while also seeking cash to convert a commercial plane into a giant crop-duster.84 MacQueen, writes: ‘Mohammed Atta was certainly no secretive al-Qaeda leader but a man laying down a trail we were supposed to follow....The man’s task appears to have been to make himself unforgettable.’

Other facts that have emerged about the alleged hijackers are strange. For example, Hani Hanjour, said to have performed a very difficult high-speed manoeuvre in the American Airlines 757 that hit the Pentagon, had piloting skills so poor that his instructor rated him a ‘weak student’.85

80 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbgjzYYXjqw><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpCrog2Q_ec>81 Daniel Hopsicker, Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta and the 9-11 Cover-Up in Florida (TrineDay, 2005)82 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1358665/Seedysecrets-of-hijackers-who-broke-Muslim-laws.html>83 <http://www.historycommons.org/essay.jsp?article=essaykhalidandnawaf>84 MacQueen, see note 68. 85 <http://www.globalresearch.ca/how-the-fbi-and-9-11-commission-suppressed-key-evidence-about-hani-hanjouralleged-hijack-pilot-of-aal-77/14290>



Missing people

As the dramatic events of the morning of September 11 unfolded we also find many of those charged with securing the country’s safety were not at their desks. The President himself is actually visible – listening to Florida schoolchildren read My Pet Goat.86 But when he hears of the second Twin Towers attack, he just sits there obeying the instructions of PR man Ari Fleischer to ‘don’t say anything yet’. He isn’t bundled out of public view and to safety by the Secret Service, but remains in the schoolroom. Finally, after a brief press statement made in the same school he is flown around the country, reappearing in Washington later in the day. Sceptics ask why the president and his protectors seemed so assured of his safety while the country was under attack.

Contrast that with what happened that morning to the Vice-President. Cheney, interviewed five days after 9/11, said his Secret Service personnel quickly bundled him out of his White House office after the second plane hit the South Tower.87

But exactly what he did during the attacks, even precisely where he was at times, is disputed. According to the 9/11 Commission testimony of Transport Secretary Norman Mineta, for example, Cheney was repeatedly warned of a rapidly approaching plane but took no steps to prevent it hitting the Pentagon.88 Sceptics interpret Mineta’s description to suggest Cheney had given earlier orders not to intercept the approaching aircraft. Mineta’s testimony was not included in the 9/11 Commission Report.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld couldn’t be found by his staff at the critical time, only appearing after being filmed outside the Pentagon helping carry an injured attack victim to an ambulance.89

The Joint Chief of Staff (JCS) General Hugh Shelton was 86 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTjz7rfPjfQ>87 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ibdl2OogFPI>88 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00N9zikO5Ds>89 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izr2QuhHzWQ><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpSBUgbxBU>x



out of the country. His deputy, General Richard Myers, was in meetings and only returned to his Pentagon office after it was attacked.90 Within days of 9/11 Myers was confirmed as the new JCS upon Shelton’s retirement.91 The subsequent testimony of Myers to the 9/11 Commission was heavily criticised by Senator Mark Dayton of Minnesota.92

General Michael Canavan had been appointed hijack coordinator at the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) nine months earlier after being the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which ran the military’s counterterrorism operations and covert missions. On the morning of 9/11 he was reportedly in Puerto Rico and no deputy has been appointed to act in his absence. Canavan left his FAA post a month after 9/11.93

Also ‘missing’ on 9/11 was property billionaire Larry Silverstein who had signed the lease on the newly privatised World Trade Centre complex on July 24 with a clause indemnifying him against terrorist attacks. In interviews he has said that his daily routine was to breakfast in the North Tower’s Windows on the World restaurant before meeting his new tenants. But he claimed his wife saved his life on 9/11 by insisting he keep a dermatologist’s appointment. Members of his family who worked with him in the Twin Towers were likewise not there that morning.94

Also away from his Twin Towers office that September morning was a man who became widely known after 2003 as the first governor of Iraq. At the time of 9/11 L. Paul Bremer was chairman and chief executive of a subsidiary of insurance brokers Marsh & McLennan whose offices occupied the North Tower floors hit by American Airlines Flight 11. Before the 90 <http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=henry_h._shelton><https://truthandshadows.wordpress.com/2011/04/03/out-ofthe-loop-the-absurd-story-of-joint-chiefs-chairmanmyers-on-911/><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RPM4bJv1us>91 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr5np6SD8oo>92 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrD8VbAcB2A>93 <http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=mike_canavan>94 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ScGZCqEyGM><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A9ph-Jz7L4>



March & McLennan job and after government foreign service, Bremer was managing director of Henry Kissinger Associates. On the morning of 9/11 he appeared on television naming Osama Bin Laden as a prime suspect and saying it was ‘a day that will change our lives.95

Missing evidence

In an explicit effort by the Bush White House to get the country moving again after the attacks, material from Ground Zero began to be quickly removed. Disturbing a crime scene prior to investigation is itself a serious offence in most countries, yet evidence from the site where thousands died was not only shifted but most of the steel from the three skyscrapers was promptly shipped to Asia and recycled.96

Many documents about 9/11 remain classified or totally redacted. A tape of air traffic controllers’ experiences made immediately after the attacks was not only destroyed by a supervisor, but its remnants were distributed in different waste bins.97

Bizarrely, in 2003 Sandy Berger, President Clinton’s National Security Advisor, smuggled classified documents out of the National Archives and destroyed them. Ahead of Berger’s 2005 trial The Washington Post reported:

‘Berger’s archives visit occurred as he was reviewing materials as a designated representative of the Clinton administration to the national commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The question of what Clinton knew and did about the emerging al-Qaeda threat before leaving office in January 2001 was acutely sensitive...’ 98

95 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2pW6WZhZrQ>96 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucec1Y9wbR0><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugCIIn6Nexs>97 <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/us/tape-of-airtraffic-controllers-made-on-9-11-was-destroyed.html>98 <http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/01/ sandy_berger_what_did_he_take.html> and <http://townhall.com/ columnists/maggiegallagher/2006/09/13/did_clinton_cause_911_ask_sandy_berger>



An account in the US News and World Report said that the Berger episode

‘.....gnaws at [Archives Inspector General Paul] Brachfeld because the former top official abused his privileges and because Berger’s actions might have robbed the 9/11 Commission of key details related to its probe of the terror plot.

Brachfeld says Berger was given “unique privileges” just “because he was Sandy Berger”. But, he adds, that kind of special treatment will never again be provided. “Those unique privileges were rescinded, in terms of it wasn’t going to happen again,” says Brachfeld.

He notes that the 9/11 Commission report, which also looked at the Clinton administration’s handling of terrorism, could have been compromised. “We all know what 9/11 meant to the country, and his treating those records in such a manner will always leave, in my mind, a cloud over whether or not the 9/11 Commission got full production of the records that they requested, and that to me is extremely serious and an affront to all Americans.”’ 99

The planes

The ‘official’ version of 9/11 was given a positive dimension by its heroic account of what happened to United Flight 73. We are told that after a 100-minute journey the plane disappeared into the ground in rural Pennsylvania after passengers attempted to regain control from the alleged hijackers. Bush made great play of the phrase ‘Let’s roll’, said to have been a passenger’s rallying call to action.100 Hollywood bolstered that impression to the extent that this episode remains clearest in the memory of many, coming second that day only to the images of the disintegrating twin towers. (Very few with whom I discussed 9/11 in the course of

99 <http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2011/ 03/14/berger-thefts-still-weigh-on-archives-agents> 100 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1bnpAlsD1Y>



preparing this article knew of the destruction of WTC7 but many recalled Flight 93 and ‘Let’s roll’.)

But there are major problems with the official account. One is the undeniable evidence that debris was spread far from the spot where the intact Boeing 757 allegedly crashed into the site of a former strip mine. There is also substantial eyewitness testimony that United 93 was being tracked by other aircraft, some saying it was shot down. Eyewitnesses can be unreliable, but the weight of what has been reported by them favours the sighting of ‘military’ aircraft in the vicinity and of explosive noises. While the black box was recovered, its voice recorder contents have only been partly disclosed to the relatives of those who died.101

There is also controversy, as with the other aircraft on 9/11, over how much of the reported phone conversations between passengers and those on the ground would have been technically possible during its long journey west from Newark and then its turn south-east towards its alleged Washington target. In addition to this dispute over the ability of mobile phones in 2001 to communicate with the ground from recorded high altitudes is the unrecorded content of the ‘Let’s roll’ conversation between a passenger and a telephone operator.102

The US government has repeatedly denied a shootdown. Sceptics say the heroic ‘Let’s roll’ story could be used by the government to avoid accusations that US citizens, rather than being killed by the US military, went to their deaths courageously battling Muslim fanatics.

There is less controversy now over the Pentagon strike than in the early post 9/11 years, but there still remain many things unexplained. This is partly because nearly all Pentagon CCTV footage and that from other cameras in the surrounding area has not been made public.

Sceptics, already struggling with the idea that the

101 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWcdSyyppHI><http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/unanswered- questions-the-mystery-of-flight-93-173206.html>102 Elias Davidsson, Hacking America’s on 9/11: Counterfeiting evidence (Algora, 2013)



heavily defended headquarters of the most powerful military force on earth could be attacked at all, found the final high-speed corkscrew approach of a commercial airliner, allegedly piloted by a very weak student of a single-engine trainer, just too much to accept.

Into the vacuum of information were drawn a variety of suspicions, including that of a missile attack and of planted explosives with the Pentagon itself. But it now seems clear to many in the so-called truth moment that the great weight of eye-witness and other evidence confirms the likelihood of Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon.103

We are still left to make sense of the 9/11 Commission testimony of Norman Mineta (see footnote 73) about Cheney’s apparent refusal to defend the highly controlled airspace around Washington from the approaching aircraft.

We are also left wondering if Hani Hanjour, the alleged pilot, was actually in control of the American Airlines aircraft. In the years since 9/11 we have lots of evidence of drones and other remote-controlled aircraft. Many in the aeronautical business say that facility was available decades before. One senior figure on Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon staff, Dov Zakheim, had actually run a company specialising in this remote aircraft technology.104

According to the 9/11 Commission Report, no aircraft black boxes were found at the Twin Towers. The contents of those at the Pentagon and Shanksville have still not been fully disclosed.

There have been very few judicial proceedings in which more evidence might have been revealed through process of discovery. This is because most victims’ families waived that right in order to receive compensation. One 9/11 widow who didn’t, Beverley Eckert, 105 died in a plane crash shortly after

103 <http://911speakout.org/><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9-O6iqJnOA>104 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dov_S._Zakheim><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV0AbuOxbs4>105 <http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-02-13-eckert-opinion_N.htm> and <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_Eckert>



lobbying newly elected President Barack Obama about 9/11.106

The New York buildings

The fate of the World Trade Centre (WTC) has perhaps become the central contentious issue of 9/11. Those who hold to the ‘official’ version believe the impact of the two planes and subsequent fires brought down the Twin Towers and sufficiently damaged WTC7 to bring about its collapse later that day. Sceptics find that account unacceptable, most believing that all three towers were deliberately brought down by other means to which the 19 alleged hijackers were not party. They also raise other questions about what happened to other buildings within the WTC complex that day.107

In the years immediately after 9/11 an assortment of theories challenged the powerful Hollywood-type spectacle of crashing planes, jet fuel fireballs, desperate jumping workers and rapidly disintegrating buildings. As with the Pentagon attack, many of these have been dispelled under closer examination but not before providing defenders of the ‘official’ version with easily denigrated targets.

This well-publicised demolition of fanciful alternatives has served to bolster the beliefs of those holding to the ‘official’ view, permitting those with more coherent alternative explanations to be marginalised to the extent of being virtually invisible in mainstream discourse. But thanks largely to the Internet their efforts have not been completely silenced and there now exists a large literature available to those with the time and inclination to explore it. This includes eye-witness testimony, scientific examination of the rubble contents and post-9/11 statements by many of those involved. The last includes an interview with WTC leaseholder Silverstein in which he says that after speaking to the fire commander about WTC7: ‘I said, you know, we’ve had such terrible loss of

106 <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/nyregion/14eckert.html?_r=0>107 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3xgjxJwedA><https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Sonnenfeld><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjEWLWxtNHg>



life. the smartest thing to do is to pull it.’ Those seeking to learn more of Silverstein can make their own assessment of him by watching his speech in Israel delivered after 9/11.108

The subsequent collapse of the building housing large CIA, Securities and Exchange Commission and other important government offices in what many professionals have described as controlled demolition opens up many questions. This includes the obvious one: how could that operation be achieved so quickly unless the means of demolition were already in place and awaiting activation?

If, as many argue, the speed and nature of the Twin Tower collapses resemble those of WTC7, then we must ask the same question: were they also pre-prepared for demolition?

At one level most of us are quickly lost in the claims and counterclaims of official reports and specialists in the fields of architecture, engineering, firefighting and assorted scientific disciplines including physics and chemistry. Who are we to believe? I list at the end contending sources readers wishing to go further in their inquiries may wish to consult in making their own judgements. By seeking to apply layman logic I have tried to pierce that complexity by weighing the conclusions of the official reports against what seem to be reasoned critiques by those with relevant expertise.

Overall my conclusion is that the sceptics have the best claims. That’s not just because 2,600 architects and engineers have petitioned for an independent inquiry, although that risky stand for those whose reputations and livelihoods depend to some extent on not upsetting politicians and government contractors I do find commendable.109 As far as I can see they have no dog in the fight over what happened almost 15 years ago: professionals with reputations to maintain and businesses to run are unlikely to be obsessives who need to believe ‘outrageous conspiracy theories’. Many seem anxious to restate basic principles of physics and engineering in the face of an ‘official’ version in which the alleged hijackers got

108 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUvLCzk7nh4>109 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xif0jIT_ZM>



remarkably lucky and achieved the unique destruction of three steel-framed high-rise buildings in one day.

The most relevant of many factors to me are: the rapid pulverisation of enormous quantities of material in the structure and contents of the three buildings and the complete disappearance of over 1,000 human beings within them; the presence of molten steel at Ground Zero and continuing high-temperature fires there until three months after the attack despite continuous efforts to extinguish them, and many eyewitness accounts of explosions before and during the buildings’ rapid collapse and disappearance into clouds of what was quickly proven to be highly toxic dust.

Barriers to appraisal

One of the biggest barriers to us having a rational appraisal of 9/11 is the difficulty in believing that anyone in a Western leadership position could be party to the large-scale killing of fellow citizens. Negotiating that requires us accept that those in positions of power not only choose to breach the law and offend human decency but lie to us about that transgression. But the truth is that Western leaders do send their fellow citizens to their deaths. In the case of George W Bush, it happened when he illegally invaded Iraq on the basis of the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Sacrificing the lives of fellow citizens in the name of some greater objective by using what some have called the noble lie is not new. The Bush administration repeatedly lied about many things during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Two examples: the death of sports star Pat Tillman and the ‘rescue’ of Jessica Lynch – come quickly to mind.110 Telling the truth, obeying the law and protecting the lives of others are far from mandatory in the conduct of public affairs.

Further, in the days following 9/11 the Bush White House rewrote Environmental Protection Agency health warnings to assure New Yorkers that their air was ‘safe to breathe’. As a result, large numbers of emergency workers

110 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEN2CUo-O6A\><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fwo_TLz3cg>



and volunteers at Ground Zero and other New Yorkers have died. Many more continue to suffer respiratory illnesses and worse 15 years later.111 So when we know for sure that the US government has sacrificed citizens’ lives in two instances directly related to 9/11, why not a third whether they be passive or active partners in the matter?

Overall observations

The newly released 28 pages of the 2002 Congressional Joint Intelligence Report tell us only a little more than we knew before on the Saudi connection with 9/11. But they serve to confirm yet again the inaccuracy of the ‘official’ version as told by the Bush White House and the 9/11 Commission Report. To make sense of 9/11 we need to know much more specific detail than we have been told about what happened on the day and what led up to it. We need to squeeze out of the official reports and their memoranda what we can after interrogating them for their accuracy, and then seek to inform our judgments by what many others have told us since – the whistleblowers, the researchers, the writers and through accessing and evaluating whatever documentary sources become available.

This article represents little more than a dip into that complex and largely hidden history and has been written to encourage others to pursue their own inquiries. (In Further material I add to the footnotes by including assorted sources on other aspects of 9/11 readers may wish to pursue.)

In the absence of direct evidence we must make the best we can of that which is available, much of it circumstantial. That, as in much criminal investigation, requires us to consider motivation and the capacity of those considered to have such purposes to actually achieve them.

In seeking what are inevitably provisional conclusions I have been guided in part by the sentiments of Senator John D Rockefeller, the chairman of the 2008 Senate Intelligence

111 <http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/center-science-and-democracy/promoting-scientific-integrity/ground-zeroair-pollution.html#. V71OMLUTJE4>



committee in its Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials were substantiated by intelligence information. He said:

‘Unfortunately our committee has concluded that the administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence. In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.

It’s my belief that the Bush administration was fixated on Iraq and used the 9/11 attacks by al-Qaeda as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. To accomplish this, top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al-Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11. Sadly, the Bush administration led the nation into war under false pretences.’ 112

The accumulated evidence strongly suggests that many warnings about an attack on the United States were given by Americans and others and that the Bush White House, for reasons including the one stated by Senator Rockefeller, failed to act upon them.

Whether Washington’s unwillingness to pursue a prompt and rigorous criminal investigation into 9/11 was due to embarrassment or a desire to conceal its origins, purposes and practicalities must be a judgement made by each of us on the balance of available evidence. For my part, I find myself in agreement with widow Mindy Kleinberg that those who apparently perpetrated 9/11 were ‘lucky over and over again’. That and the many coincidences and connections that run through 9/11 like a barium meal leave me wondering if the many victims of the ‘war on terror’ that still result from 9/11 will ever enjoy such astonishing good fortune themselves.

Short of that I hope readers in search of more truth about this transformative event will find this article of some use in that urgent and important task.

112 <http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/05/senate.iraq/ index.html?eref=rss_world>



Further material

From the profusion of material on 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ here are some additional materials I have found useful. As with all sources they come with a ‘user beware’ caution.

I have found setting up a Google 9/11 Alert helpful in trying to keep abreast of current media developments. That system can obviously be tailored to specific areas and persons of interest.

While both mainstream media and the academic community have yet to address many of the 9/11 matters I touch on here, there are always those in both who continue to throw some light in dark places.

Here, for example, is Robert Fisk of the i/Independent <http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18252.htm>and a less well-publicised response to it by Carl Lesnor <http://desip.igc.org/roberfisk911truth.html.> It will be interesting to see if Fisk has any more to say come the 15th anniversary and if he is joined by any more mainstream writers.

The Rupert Murdoch empire, with the odd exception, has done little to challenge 9/11 orthodoxy. It’s worth remembering that one of his oldest Australian friends and business associates is property tycoon Frank Lowy, known to many for his Westfield shopping malls. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lowy> Lowy was in partnership with Larry Silverstein in acquiring the lease for the World Trade Centre complex in July 2001. Christopher Bollyn here speculates on how much Murdoch might have known before 9/11: <http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BOL310A.html>.

RT often turns its attention to 9/11. Here’s an example: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avtvrtTV1vw>.

Some academic sources can be found through the site of 9/11 in the academic community found here: <https://911inacademia.com/>. It includes a film documentary, Academia’s Treatment of Critical Perspectives on 9/11. In its list



of academic papers I found those by Peter Dale Scott, Lance Dehaven-Smith, Kevin Ryan, Steven Jones, Paul Zarembka, Allen M Poteshman, Niels H Harrit, Laurie Manvell and Michael Truscello of value. Most can also be accessed online in interviews/presentations and many have books and websites worth consulting too.

The Journal of 9/11 Studies can be found at <http://www.journalof911studies.com/articles.html>. Its Beginners section is a good place for newcomers to the subject and gives ready access to other sites I found of value, particularly those of the Family Steering Committee and 911SpeakOut. This site also hosts the 9/11 Best Evidence Panel with its useful 9/11 Consensus Points at <http://www.consensus911.org/the-911-consensuspoints/>

James Corbett maintains a close interest in 9/11 matters and his site at <https://www.corbettreport.com/> is always worth a look. His search engine works well and will be especially useful to those who wish to pursue the neocon, insider trading and financial dimensions to 9/11. He maintains a close relationship with FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds who blogs at Boiling Frogs, now associated with Newsbud here <http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/> and here <https://www.youtube.com/user/boilingfrogspost>.

Tom Secker’s site <http://www.spyculture.com often> carries useful material for those with a 9/11 interest. Jon Gold is another who has maintained a close interest in the subject. His We Were Lied To About 9/11 series is at <http://911blogger.com/ topics/jon-gold>.

The 911Blogger.com site <http://911blogger.com/about> is one of several devoted to 9/11 I accessed. Others, in no particular order, include:

<http://www.debunking911.com/> <http://www.911myths.com/indexold.html> <http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/9-11> <http://www.911truth.org/> <http://www.globalresearch.ca/investigating-911-andnaming-suspects-evaluating-evidence/5510749> <http://skepticproject.com/articles/911/>



<http://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/01/18/24-hardfacts-about-911-that-cannot-be-debunked/> <https://truthandshadows.wordpress.com/2015/03/19/ hijackers-did-not-board-planes> <http://patriotsquestion911.com/survivors.html> <https://isgp-studies.com/index>

Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA Alec Station, blogs at <http://non-intervention.com/> and is regularly to be found on US and British broadcasts.

Kevin Ryan maintains a strong interest in 9/11 at his website <https://digwithin.net/>. His book Another Nineteen: Investigating Legitimate 9/11 Suspects has won praise from many of the victim families as well as Peter Dale Scott.

David Ray Griffin’s books on 9/11 – another one is due later this year – have long been the basis of much critical thinking about 9/11. More on him and his books here <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ray_Griffin>.

Paul Craig Roberts, a veteran Reagan Administration Treasury official, economist and writer, has an interesting site at <http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/>. This recent piece on the Saudis and 9/11 gives a flavour of his perspective on events: <http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/07/20/is-the-saudi- 911-story-part-of-the-deception-paul-craig-roberts/>.

In similar vein the website of US presidential candidate Ron Paul <http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/> contains useful 9/11 material of which this is an example <http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/congressalert/ 2014/august/18/rep-walter-jones-and-ron-paul-onthe- saudi-arabia-bush-administration-911-cover-up.aspx >.

One British politician who took an interest in 9/11 was the late Michael Meacher. The Labour MP and former minister wrote this for The Guardian in 2003 <http://www.theguardian. com/politics/2003/sep/06/september11.iraq>.

Footnote

I am grateful to David Chandler of 911SpeakOut.org – <http://911speakout.org/> for alerting me to an article on the



Pentagon attack by Frank Legge and Warren Stutt which draws on material released as a result of FOIA requests. The article appears in the Journal of 911 Studies and can be accessed here: <http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2010/Calibrati on%20of%20altimeter_92.pdf>

Julian Charles of The Mind Renewed – <http://themindrenewed.com/> – has recorded an interview with me which can be found both at his website and on YouTube at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-XcGGWM-_Y>. He has included some useful further material in the accompanying show notes, including an interview with Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell.

John Booth is a freelance journalist

who has worked for news organisations

in Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States



A key for a Clockwork Orange

Garrick Alder

Preamble

Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange became infamous after the 1971 film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick. The director’s withdrawal of the film from UK circulation inspired decades of mythologising about it, adding to its notoriety and aura. Critical arguments about the role of violence in the suppression of the film have never been convincing. Such violence as occurs in the film is confined to the first third, and is heavily orchestrated and balletic. It is hard now to imagine that the violence of Kubrick’s film was more alarming to viewers in the 1970s than that of Sam Peckinpah’s blood-spattered Straw Dogs, released the same year.

Kubrick’s adaptation is usually classified as science-fiction, like its parent novel. But this too has never seemed really plausible. There is nothing in the film that says this is taking place in some future Britain. Quite the opposite. Its plastic miniskirts, thigh-high boots, fly-away collars and above all its gaudy interior chic (right down to the off-the-shelf paintings from Woolworth’s, seen in Alex’s home) all show that this was a contemporary Britain, or at least one not far removed from it. The vision of the future provided by Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey is convincingly coherent by contrast, and very ‘high-tech’.1

1 This brief summary could be greatly expanded. The car stolen by Alex is not some futurist prop, but a real car produced in 1969, and Alex is seen using it to force a VW Beetle off the road; the displays in the record shop scene show albums by Pink Floyd (‘Atom Heart Mother’), Crosby Stills Nash and Young (‘Deja Vu’) and Neil Young (‘After the Gold Rush’), all released in 1970; and, conclusively, a copy of the Daily Telegraph refers to the previous month’s Audited Bureau of Circulations figures as ‘August 1970’.



In the conditioning scene, in which A Clockwork Orange’s anti-hero Alex is being brainwashed into renouncing violence, the head scientist (Dr Brodsky) says the following lines:

‘Very soon now the drug will cause the subject to experience a death-like paralysis together with deep feelings of terror and helplessness. One of our earlier test subjects described it as being like death, a sense of stifling and drowning [...]’

These lines are not from Burgess’s novel, which Kubrick used as the basis of his screenplay (encouraging actors to ad-lib around the book’s dialogue and writing it up afterward). They are plainly related to quoted speech in a newspaper story that appeared while Kubrick was making his film.

‘[The drug produces] sensations of suffocation and drowning. The subject experiences feelings of horror and terror, as though he were on the brink of death.’

The story in question appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on 18 October 1970 (the month after Kubrick began filming), and concerned human conditioning experiments then taking place at California Medical Facility at Vacaville, using violent prisoners as subjects.

The speaker was Dr Arthur Nugent, in charge of the program, and the drug was anectine, a strong muscle relaxant still in use today in some surgical settings. The effect on the human guinea-pigs was to halt all muscular actions, voluntary or involuntary, causing temporary paralysis and preventing them from even breathing, rendering them totally reliant on external assistance in order to survive. While incapacitated and terrified, the prisoners would be scolded harshly by psychologists, with the intent that this would condition the prisoners into renouncing crime due to a learned association with their ordeal. Dr Nugent told the Chronicle: ‘Even the toughest inmates have come to hate and fear the drug. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t have one treatment myself for the world.’

Kubrick’s ‘dystopian future’ wasn’t science-fiction at all. It wasn’t even the future.



The novel

There have been persistent rumours that Anthony Burgess’s novel (published by Heinemann, London, in May 1962) was in some way related to espionage. These rumours were given the proverbial ‘shot in the arm’ with the 2002 publication of Roger Lewis’s scurrilous biography, entitled simply Anthony Burgess (published by Faber and Faber).2 Lewis engages in much speculation but the most substantial material concerns what Lewis was told when he made contact with an intelligence officer:

‘ “You realise,”said the spook, as we sat on a bench in Berkeley Square, opposite Maggs Bros. Ltd, by appointment to Her Majesty the Queen, purveyors of rare books and manuscripts, “that the capitalised lines on page twenty-nine of A Clockwork Orange give the HQ location of the psychotronic warfare technology?”’

The lines in question refer to the words on a pennant in Alex’s bedroom (described in part one, chapter three), a souvenir of his time in correctional school, and they read: ‘SOUTH 4; METRO COR-SKOL BLUE DIVISION; THE BOYS OF ALPHA.’ Lewis remarks: ‘It does sound like an encryption. But of what precisely?’ He goes on:

‘It was patiently explained to me [by the spook] that if you look at a map of America, then Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico are the only states with a right-angled four-corner conjunction (“4...COR”) and that there is a military reservation to the “SOUTH”. It runs north into New Mexico and is based around the metropolitan area called El Paso. It is a training school (“SKOL” – Russian). The Navy (“BLUE DIVISION”) were initially in charge of the technology. Analysing, isolating, and interfering with the “ALPHA” wavelengths of the human collective unconscious was part of the set-up. The name of the establishment is Fort Bliss. The word

2 Blake Morrison, reviewing Lewis’s biography in The Guardian, mentions that he had been told the same thing by a retired security officer. See <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/nov/09/ biography.highereducation>.



bliss appears on page twenty-nine of Burgess’s novel no less than six times.’

Lewis’s reaction to this information is expressed in his description of himself ‘polishing my glasses with the fat end of my tie and looking simultaneously inscrutable and bewildered.’ Mr Lewis can’t really be blamed here. He was, after all, writing a biography of the writer, not researching Cold War espionage. But he had been set a puzzle, if only he had realised it. And a little more examination would have led him toward an unexpected solution.

The message (once ‘decrypted’ – which is an inferential process of word-association and allusion, rather than a true decryption) is really there, but there’s a huge problem. It's all lies and nonsense.

Fort Bliss really is situated at the four-state square conjunction as specified, but it had no role whatsoever in any of the USA’s mind control research. Nor is it connected to the US Navy, being a US Army post. The Navy’s early mind control research, Project CHATTER, was abandoned in 1953 and had no formal relationship with the newer projects being undertaken by the CIA at the time A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962. The only connection between CHATTER and Fort Bliss is that some of the USA’s ‘captured’ Operation Paperclip Nazi scientists were held there, and it was Nazi human experiments, as described by other Paperclip ‘captives’, that led to US mind control projects. But the Nazis kept at Fort Bliss were working on the USA’s fledgling rocket programs, and had nothing whatsoever to do with mind control programs.3

3 The use of the word ‘psychotronic’ itself should have been a big clue, but Lewis doesn’t appear to have even consulted a dictionary. It denotes interference with the brain via electromagnetic fields. No secret research was taking place in this field at the time the novel appeared or before it. The microwave auditory effect (also known as the Frey Effect, and sometimes referred to as ‘synthetic telepathy’) was first noticed by radar operators during WWII. However, it was totally ignored by science until Allan Frey published the first paper on the subject in July 1962 – two months after A Clockwork Orange had appeared in bookshops. See <http://jap.physiology.org/content/17/4/ 689.abstract?sid=7c073ad2-6324-4b47-94e1-124dc0a5f154>.



These ‘coded’ references in A Clockwork Orange seem designed to mislead, to lure their intended readers into a maze of dead-ends and false connections. And what on earth would have been the reason for jumbling all this information together, hidden in the text of a popular novel, rather than relaying it via normal espionage routes? Unless Lewis’s intelligence contact was playing some obscure game for his own amusement, wasting the biographer’s time with pointless riddles, he was obliquely drawing attention to the fact that the information encrypted in Burgess’s novel is actually disinformation; and – in as much as it invited speculation about codes being published ‘in plain sight’ in literature – it was also a psy-op. With this insight, we can examine the text for other instances of similarly-embedded clusters of associations where the text appears to bear closer examination, and see what disinformation they might have been intended to convey.

In the summer of 1961 Burgess was either writing his novel, or had already written it, when he suddenly decided to go on holiday. Where else would one go for a relaxing break, at the height of the Cold War, if not the Soviet Union? Burgess’s literary biographer, Andrew Biswell, remarks: ‘If someone had asked Burgess why he and [his wife] Lynne were proposing to visit Leningrad in the summer of 1961, he would have found it difficult to formulate a straightforward reply.’ 4 Biswell relates that the novelist’s principal motivations were immersing himself in the Russian language (for the purposes of novelistic research and personal learning) and straightforward curiosity. The biographer has little truck with theories concerning Burgess’s purported espionage career, obliquely slighting Lewis’s rival biography by saying: ‘There is no foundation to the rumour, originally put forward by a downmarket London newspaper in 2002, that Burgess went to Russia for reasons of Cold War espionage.’ ‘No foundation’ is not the same as ‘no truth’, and Biswell provides a moment of unintentional comedy in the following passage:

4 Andrew Biswell, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, (London: Picador, 2006) p.236



‘When I asked a former diplomat from the Russian embassy about the possibility that Burgess was secretly employed by British intelligence, he told me that a volubly indiscreet drunk such as Burgess, who also happened to be married to a suicidal alcoholic, would have been solidly at the bottom of the list when it came to recruiting potential secret agents, in spite of his considerable linguistic talents.’5

The diplomat’s irony here is heavy and poisonous. Minus the wife, the diplomat’s dismissal is an exact fit for Burgess’s namesake Guy, the British intelligence officer who had defected to the USSR ten years before Anthony Burgess began writing A Clockwork Orange. This irony was not lost on Heinemann’s chief reader Marie Lindt who remarked to Biswell: ‘It was almost inevitable that having christened him Burgess, we would send him to Russia.’ [emphasis added]

So whose idea was this excursion, exactly? Heinemann subsidised Burgess’s jaunt and a vague promise was made by the author that a novel might result from it, although not necessarily in that order. In later years it irritated Burgess that he was still being identified with his traitorous namesake (Roy Jenkins introduced him to a formal banquet as ‘Guy Burgess’) but although he frequently threatened to sue over this ongoing misidentification, he never did. Perhaps he feared what might happen under cross-examination.6

It must be said at once that concrete evidence of Burgess’s supposed intelligence work has not surfaced, and nor would it be realistic to imagine that such evidence exists outside of currently withheld official documents. Anna 5 Biswell – see note 4 – p. 236

It is a measure of the intellectual gulf that Biswell perceived between his work and that of his rival (to whom he privately referred as ‘the showbiz biographer’) that the ‘downmarket London newspaper’ in question was actually The Independent on Sunday. See <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/cia-mind-control-trials-revealed-as-secret-inspiration-behind-a-clockwork-orange-139895.html>.6 Biswell – see note 4 – p. 236. Ms Lindt’s remark about ‘christening him’ is a reference to the fact that Burgess’s real name was John Anthony Burgess Wilson, and his two middle names became his pen-name as a novelist.



Edwards, archivist at Manchester’s International Anthony Burgess Foundation, confirmed by e-mail: ‘We’ve not yet come across any records within our collection which support the claim that Burgess worked for MI5.’ Note that careful ‘not yet’. And note also the reference is only to MI5 and not MI6.

But by the same token, there is absolutely nothing inherently improbable about a British novelist having a second job in intelligence: think of Graham Greene, Frederick Forsyth, Roald Dahl or (more obviously) the pseudonymous John Le Carré. It might be simply coincidence that Burgess’s publisher (Heinemann) was also Graham Greene’s, and that Burgess’s agent, Peter Janson-Smith, was also Ian Fleming’s.

Burgess in Leningrad

The aspects of Burgess’s Leningrad visit that are of interest here can be related briefly, since we only have his word for them (and he doesn’t tell us much) in the second volume of his autobiography, You’ve Had Your Time, (Heinemann, 1990). Burgess took with him a number of western-manufactured dresses, intent on selling them on the black market, which he began doing (in an underground public toilet) before he and his wife had even checked in to their hotel. A plan better designed to draw KGB attention can hardly be imagined and such attention was duly forthcoming. This was in the form of an officer who Burgess calls simply ‘Oleg’, who materialised alongside the Burgesses while they were eating in a restaurant later that evening. Oleg became a more or less constant presence in the background of the trip. He even located Burgess when the writer later quit his hotel room and dossed down on the floor of a friendly Leningrader referred to as ‘Sasha’. Oleg watched as Burgess held court surrounded by a number of eager Soviet youths, who visited him at Sasha’s apartment, wanting to know more about life on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Later Oleg would personally see Burgess and his wife off from the quayside as they embarked for their return voyage to Britain. He even demonstrated how easy it was to smuggle oneself out of Russia if one so desired – though Oleg declared that he did not.



Andrew Biswell dismisses the espionage rumours with the comment: ‘[T]here is nothing among Burgess’s private diaries or financial papers to suggest that he was paid to spy on the Russians.’ Indeed not but, in any case, that is not what Burgess’s Leningrad adventures appear to suggest. This episode is unmistakably a ‘dangle’: Burgess going to the Soviet Union, deliberately drawing attention to himself, courting a KGB officer, and establishing a personal relationship with that officer before finally returning home to Britain with some shared (or ostensibly shared) purpose in mind. Since this episode took place a third of the way through writing A Clockwork Orange (according to Biswell) or perhaps when it was actually finished (according to Lewis), there is a clear connection between the novel and the voyage. The ‘Russian novel’ anticipated by Heinemann, which in this interpretation was mainly a cover story for this Leningrad operation, was called Honey for the Bears and did not appear until 1963. This was two years after Burgess’s trip and after he had published another two novels (A Clockwork Orange, and The Wanting Seed, both 1962), which might indicate that the Russian novel was treated somewhat perfunctorily.

Honey for the Bears has a curious plotline in which a married man visits Russia and returns having discovered (through various adventures) that he is bisexual, a clear symbol of some kind of ambiguity and all the more striking since the Soviet Union proscribed homosexual activity. Moreover, according to Biswell the novel ‘gives every appearance of having been written up out of a diary (perhaps compiled purely as an aide-memoire and then discarded) that Burgess kept while he was in Russia in 1961.’7 Or as debriefing material for his return to Britain, which would also explain why this document has vanished from among his voluminous personal effects. Whether Honey for the Bears has any greater significance is a matter of conjecture, although given its themes and its title it is worth observing that the novel’s publication occurred against the backdrop of the then recent (September 1962) Vassall spy scandal. John Vassall, a homosexual civil servant, was exposed as a Soviet agent, 7 Biswell – see note 4 – p. 239.



having been blackmailed into the role by the KGB using explicit photographs obtained during a type of sting known as a honeytrap.8

In the light of the above appraisal of the information relayed (unsuccessfully) to Roger Lewis, A Clockwork Orange can be examined as a ‘suspect’ text containing deliberate disinformation intended for Soviet intelligence that would be unnoticed by general readers. Given the central theme of Burgess’s novel – that of behavioral engineering, more simply ‘mind control’ – the only realistic interpretation is that the disinformation project concerned the CIA’s then ongoing Project MKULTRA (hereinafter MKUltra), in which MI6 was also involved.9

An exhaustive analysis of the novel along these lines would be a lengthy work of determined scholarship. What follows is an exploration of a few of the more readily-observed ‘clusters’ that resemble the clusters in the passage to which Lewis’s attention was drawn. Since it is the present thesis that Burgess’s novel was a disinformation project, it must be stressed that the analysis is not an attempt to find precise 8 More speculatively, if Honey for the Bears were intended as some kind of ‘signal’ to the KGB, then it is interesting to note that the last novel Burgess published before going to Russia, One Hand Clapping (1961), concerns the escape of a young woman from a husband who foresees the decline and collapse of Western civilisation. It is seldom remarked upon that the novel was published under a new pseudonym and not linked to Burgess by any publicity, indeed it was barely publicised at all. Burgess remarks (on pages 28-29 of You’ve Had Your Time) that the novel consequently ‘sank like a stone’ at home but sold well in the Soviet bloc where it was taken as ‘a condemnation of money-making, a debased culture, [and] the whole capitalist Western life’. It is a strange sort of publisher that takes a new work by one of their established authors and publishes it under a new name but makes no effort to promote it. The nom de plume chosen for One Hand Clapping, never explained by Burgess, was Joseph Kell, a name whose similarity to that of Major-General Sir Vernon Kell may not, given the present research, be entirely coincidental.9 If the novel was indeed a disinformation project, this suggests a rationale for the title of the 1974-5 MI5 project Clockwork Orange, a campaign of psychological warfare. The usual reasoning – that it was simply named after Kubrick’s 1971 movie – is weak and unsatisfactory. The idea that the title was more of an homage to a successful (and still-secret) psychological operation related to the 1962 novel that inspired the film makes far more sense.



and accurate meanings hidden in the text, but to identify some areas designed to promote misdirection and erroneous speculation.

Drugs and the psychocivilised society

Comment on A Clockwork Orange returns again and again to the theme of violence, that of the hooligan and that of the state. What no-one seems to care to mention is that, at the dawn of the 1960s, an author was predicting a future in which recreational drug use was commonplace – a prediction that was fulfilled before the end of that decade. In fact the novel even looked beyond the Summer of Love and Woodstock, to a time that would be better symbolised by the Tate murders committed by the LSD-raddled Manson Family in 1969. In 1962 there was no sign of this coming to pass, nor was there any idea that the use of psychedelic drugs would be counter-cultural. Most people’s experience of the early 1960s was not dissimilar to that of the 1950s but with better television programmes. What little social concern existed in Britain about drugs revolved around the very limited use of cannabis, a narcotic that doesn’t even merit a reference, let alone a namecheck, in A Clockwork Orange.

The classic vision of psychotopia at the time was Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World, in which the euphoriant Soma (named after the mystical plant of the Vedas) is issued by the world-state’s church-surrogate as a sacrament to a compliant and grateful populace. Burgess’s novel stands this on its head. Alex’s world has an array of drugs available on tap at ‘milk bars’ that are very different establishments from their real-life counterparts of the 1950s and 60s. The novel’s drugs, or at least those identified by Alex, reward closer examination. They aren’t even concealed or buried in the text, making their appearance on the very first page of the novel as ‘synthemesc’, ‘drencrom’ and ‘vellocet’.10

10 The relationship between MKUltra and the psychedelic sixties has been the subject of great speculation. At one extreme, it is theorised that LSD ‘escaped’ the laboratory as a result of careless procedures and poor safeguarding; at the other it is suggested that

Continues at the foot of the next page.



‘Synthemesc’ is obviously ‘synthetic mescaline’, the artificial version of the hallucinogen used for shamanistic purposes for centuries among the indigenous people of what is now central America. It was first produced in a laboratory in 1919 but remained little more than a curiosity until research began in the 1950s into potential psychiatric applications of such drugs. It had previously been used in experiments conducted by Nazi scientists at Dachau and was taken up as a potential ‘truth serum’ by the OSS, before being ‘inherited’ by the CIA.

Less obviously, ‘Drencrom’ is adrenochrome, a substance produced during the metabolism of adrenaline, and identified as a psychoactive in Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954). In the same year, it became a substance that interested researchers Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond in their developing theory that there was a biological basis for schizophrenia.11 The two scientists were involved in early experimental uses of LSD and mescaline in a psychiatric setting, specifically for ‘curing’ alcoholics.12 Osmond had been recruited to MKUltra by Allen Dulles in 1952 and his Footnote 10 continued:the CIA deliberately propagated their pet hallucinogen to the public in order to study it ‘in field’ or perhaps to even subvert the growing US ‘counter-culture’. All that can be said for certain is that in 1960 Timothy Leary, godfather of acid-heads, was encouraged to set up the ground-breaking Harvard Psylocibin Project by CIA-funded psychologist Dr Henry Murray. Both were tenured academics at Harvard’s Social Relations Department, where Murray was its director. Just before Leary began exploring inner space at Harvard, Murray had conducted the MKUltra interrogation experiments that broke the mind of student Theodore Kaczynski, later to become infamous as the Unabomber. In his 1983 autobiography Flashbacks, Leary wrote: ‘[Murray was] the wizard of personality assessment who, as OSS chief psychologist, had monitored military experiments on brainwashing and sodium amytal interrogation. Murray expressed great interest in our drug-research project and offered his support.’11 <http://link.springer.com/article/ 10.1080%2F10298420290015827#page-1>12 On the early use of LSD in mental ilness ‘treatments’ see <http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/sgc-cms/histoires_de_chez_nous-community_memories/pm_v2.php?id=exhibit_home&fl=0&lg=English&e x=00000363&pg=0> On the use of LSD on alcolhol dependents, and the intelligence agency connection, see <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC381240/>



experimental results were fed back to the CIA and to MI6. The publication of Osmond and Hoffer’s peer-reviewed findings concerning adrenochrome and mescaline would have been virtually unnoticed by all but the most specialist researchers, so it is a surprise to see both drugs appear in a mass-marketed novel and identified as popular intoxicants.

However there is a far more extraordinary reference in the name of the third of Alex’s drugs of choice: ‘vellocet’. It appears to have escaped notice until now, perhaps due to the fact that A Clockwork Orange has a cult readership that is generally not familiar with the rest of Burgess’s novels. It gives definite new significance to the references to mescaline and adrenochrome. Four years after A Clockwork Orange, Burgess published Tremor of Intent, which has the subtitle ‘An eschatological spy novel’. This is a parody of Fleming’s James Bond fiction, containing outlandish exaggerations of Bond’s sexual and gastronomic excesses, and dealing with the Cold War as a manichean ‘Good-versus-Evil’ conflict. In chapter six, the protagonist spy Hillier is captured and surreptitiously injected with something. The mastermind-villain of the story, Theodorescu, tells Hillier:

‘It was a special injection, slow-working but efficacious. A substance developed by Dr Pobedonostev of Yuzovo called, I believe, B-type vellocet.’

Theodorescu goes on to explain the effects of vellocet (which indeed ensue for Hillier) as follows:

‘You see, you will not fall into a trance, answering from a dream, as with so many of the so-called truth drugs. You will be thoroughly conscious but possessed of a euphoria which will make concealment of the truth seem a crime against the deep and lasting friendship you will be convinced subsists between us.’

So here we have one of the drugs taken by Alex and his droogs explicitly identified as a truth serum developed for the purposes of espionage. Furthermore, it has been developed for use in interrogations, simplifying the standard process in which the interrogator encourages the subject to trust and



confide in him. It does away with the necessity of the psychological (and probably physical) assault which would normally precede that outcome. The documented schedule of an MKUltra sub-project, initiated in May 1955,13 provides an almost exact fit for this fictional vellocet. It set out a list of criteria that include the following three sequential research ambitions:

‘11. Substances which will produce “pure” euphoria with no subsequent let-down.

12. Substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.

13. A material which will cause mental confusion of such a type that the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.’

A euphoriant, manufactured for intelligence purposes as a ‘truth serum’, is explicitly identified by Burgess himself as one of the recreational drugs in A Clockwork Orange. The description of the drug’s effects tallies with stated priorities of MKUltra pharmaceutical research, unknown to the public at the time and for more than a decade afterward.

The inventor of vellocet

The surname of vellocet’s fictional creator, Pobedonostev, was obviously not chosen at random. Throughout the early-to-mid 20th Century, Constantine Pobedonostev (1827-1907), tutor and advisor to Tsar Alexander III, was of some interest to historians.14 Pobedonostev was an authoritarian and strict censor who viewed the public as children and the state as parent, and he posthumously united the two superpowers in their distrust and dislike of him – an ambiguity that is significant in the context of the present research. 13 See <https://web.archive.org/web/20071128230208/http://www. arts.rpi.edu/~pellr/lansberry/mkultra.pdf> at p. 167.14 It does not seem to be a coincidence that Burgess links the name Pobedonostev to the name ‘Alex(ander)’. Nor does it seem likely to be happenstance that the names of Alex’s droogs – Pete, Georgie and Dim – are respectively those of a Tsar (Pyotr), the patron Saint of Moscow (Yuri is ‘George’ in Russian), and another Tsar ‘Dim(itri)’.



Pobedonostev was seen as an oppressive precursor to the Soviet Union by the west, and as an oppressive cause of the Russian revolution by the USSR. The most prominent academic paper on him was written by Dr Arthur Adams and published in the US and UK in 1952 under the title ‘Pobedonostsev’s Thought Control’ – a correspondence with the purposes of MKUltra that would be discovered immediately by anyone checking on the name’s associations.15 Between 1961 and 1963, overlapping the creation and publication of Burgess’s novel, Dr Adams was policy director of the CIA-funded propaganda station Radio Free Europe, broadcasting to Soviet satellite states.16 So the name of vellocet’s inventor is associated with repression, and the contemporary academic who calledn Pobedonostev a practitioner of ‘thought control’ was involved in a contemporaneous CIA propaganda project aimed at undermining the USSR. This, then, is a significant cluster of associations.

The Ludovico treatment

Another curious cluster of associations can be found in the section describing the conditioning undergone by Alex (in part two, chapters four to five). The usual observation by critics and commentators is that ‘Ludovico’ is the latinate version of the forename ‘Ludwig’ and that this ties in with Alex’s admiration for Ludwig Van Beethoven and his ninth symphony. This two-step association process (from Ludovico to Ludwig to symphony) is almost too pat and Alex doesn’t even remark on it in the novel, even though it would have been as obvious to him as to the reader. The name ‘Ludovico’ sits starkly on the page, unexplained but with a clear importance: who was the Ludovico who invented the fictional brainwashing technique? The name has another cultural association that is far more relevant, and like Beethoven’s ninth symphony it is only two steps removed from the name Ludovico. The diminutive or

15 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 125559?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents> 16 <http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dispatch/ obituary.aspx?pid=92179564>



familiar version of the name Ludovico is ‘Vico’17 and the lone historical figure known simply as Vico is Giambattista Vico (1688-1744) whose most famous work was the 1725 treatise Scienza Nuovo (The New Science).18

Vico was well-regarded in the Soviet Union during the 1960s, having been the subject of great interest ever since he was mentioned with approval a century earlier, in the first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital. Vico was regarded in the USSR as the principal philosopher of history: his belief was that humans evolved alongside their societies, from barbarism to civilisation, which accorded well with Soviet ideas about the malleability of human nature. But there was another side to Vico’s thinking that ran in direct contradiction to Soviet dogma. Vico’s ‘big idea’, to which he returned again and again, was that the mechanistic reductions of René Descartes (1596-1650) had limited application and could not be extended to describe human interactions or learning. (Descartes held that organisms could be considered as automata, reacting to external stimuli in a quasi-mechanical way).

It is instructive to consider the context in which A Clockwork Orange would have been received by Soviet specialists. The work of Ivan Pavlov dominated Soviet psychiatry at the time since (like Vico’s) it fitted well with Soviet notions of human adaptability, rather than with the early genetic theories that had been denounced by Stalin.19 In 1950, the Soviets held the notorious ‘Pavlovian Session’, an attempt to purge Soviet psychiatry of supposed western influences, during which one faction of Pavlov’s pupils was denounced by another faction. The result of the Session was

17 <http://www.behindthename.com/name/ludovico>18 I don’t pretend to have any knowledge about the influence of 18th Century Italian philosophers upon Soviet historians. I’ve taken my lead here from page 179 of Marcel Danesi’s 1995 study ’Giambattista Vico and Anglo-American Science: Philosophy and Writing’, which provided a good framework for understanding. Interestingly, Danesi notes that the USSR suddenly went cool on its former enthusiasm for Vico as soon as a Russian translation appeared (1940) and, although it never disappeared completely, the USSR’s official interest in Vico declined somewhat after 1950, which was the year of the Pavlovian Session. See <http://tinyurl.com/hopd2ec> (Google Books link).19 <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13592304>



that Soviet psychiatry withdrew from meaningful dialogue with the rest of the scientific world until the end of the USSR itself. Pavlov’s epochal work on the conditional reflex has clear relevance to the central theme of A Clockwork Orange, and the entire field of ‘Behaviourism’ in which this relationship is nestled stretches directly back to none other than Rene Descartes and his notions of nervous automatism20 – as derided by Vico and his New Science.

What is the upshot of all these interlinked associations? The repeated references to Vico (as the familiar version of ‘Ludovico’) in the novel’s context of psychiatric innovation draw unwelcome attention to a glaring and inherent contradiction between Soviet historiography and Soviet psychiatry. If we pursue the hypothesis of A Clockwork Orange as a ‘disinformation novel’, the aim of this perceptive ‘needling’ might simply have been to sow confusion and uncertainty among Soviet researchers by exacerbating the ongoing and disruptive consequences of the Pavlovian Session. It might even represent an attempt to delude the Soviets into thinking that the USA had developed a ‘New Science’ of its own.

Alex’s suicide attempt

A third cluster of associations is in the climax of the novel, in part three, chapter five. Young Alex has undergone the conditioning treatment that renders him averse to violence. He then blunders into the hands of political activists whose interests lie in his potential as a propaganda weapon to be used against the government (which they identify as oppressive and dictatorial). They lock Alex in a room in an apartment (well above street level, in a towerblock), and play classical music very loudly through the walls. Since Alex’s conditioning has also inadvertently caused him to react badly to music,21 a fact known to his captors, he is driven to throw himself from the window in an attempt to escape the pain it

20 <http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/naik.html>21 In Pavlovian terms, Alex’s aversion to classical music is a case of ‘second-order conditioning’.



causes him. The (fictional) composer whose music is used to torment him is named as Otto Skadelig, who is identified as a Dane; and the word ‘Skadelig’ means ‘damaging’ in Danish.

Alex is inspired to seek suicidal escape from Skadelig’s music by a political magazine left in the room with a headline that reads ‘Death to the Government’. One of the conspirators who is attempting to drive Alex to his death has the surname ‘da Silva’, and the surname ‘Silva’ was known at the time of the novel’s appearance due to the 1960 launch of a purported therapeutic method called simply ‘Silva Mind Control’ – like the Pobedostonsev reference, a direct allusion to the purpose of MKUltra.22

These flags in the text seem to be drawing attention to something of hidden significance in this section of narrative: but what is it?

Considering Burgess’s novel as a disinformation project, one close parallel is the notorious 1953 death of CIA scientist Frank Olson. Olson fell from above the tenth floor of the Statler Hotel in Manhattan barely a week after being surreptitiously dosed with LSD by scientists working on MKUltra. Olson’s death was widely reported at the time and has fascinated researchers of MKUltra for many years. The consensus has always been that Olson was in some way a non-consenting guinea-pig in an experiment that went badly wrong. This would dovetail neatly with the themes of A Clockwork Orange. But why would a disinformation project in the form of a novel draw attention to Olson’s demise if it were such a sensitive matter?

Here we are in even murkier territory. Olson died in 1953. A Clockwork Orange appeared in 1962. At the time of the novel’s publication, little had been made public about the circumstances of Olson’s death. The fact that he had been covertly dosed with LSD prior to his death only emerged in 1975. But it turns out that the MKUltra connection might itself

22 The founder of the method was José Silva, a parapsychologist by inclination and an electrician by training. Silva conducted research into so-called ‘remote viewing’, a subject that the CIA is known to have examined during the 1970s, but there is no known indication that the Agency was interested in Silva’s work.



have been a cover story. After decades of investigation Olson’s family has become convinced that the MKUltra/LSD connection was concealing the fact that Olson knew too much about MKUltra’s predecessor, Operation ARTICHOKE, and about illegal and secret US bioweapons programs. Olson, they claim, was going to speak out about these activities. Whatever the ethics of Olson’s stance, this would have been seen as a threat to national security and of material use to the USSR, to say nothing of its great propaganda value. So (say the family) he was murdered, by being beaten to death and then thrown from the window. The forensic evidence recorded at a second post-mortem on Olson’s corpse in 1994 appears to support that assertion.23

If the Olson family is correct – and they probably are – then the propagation of the ‘experiment gone wrong’ cover-story would fit very closely with the scenario that is presented in A Clockwork Orange and flagged up by the cluster of hints and nudges found in that section of the text. And there is another allusion here: Peer de Silva was a senior CIA officer at the time, head of the Agency’s Soviet division when Frank Olson was killed.24

Is this a big enough set of hints to encourage readers within Soviet intelligence to believe that Olson had been deliberately driven to kill himself as a result of a successful US mind-control experiment?

23 <http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Statements/ FamilyStatement2002.html>24 <http://apps.westpointaog.org/Memorials/Article/12560/>



Mexico missive

Nick Must

Thoughts on ‘The Don’

As a British citizen with temporary residence rights in Mexico, the rhetoric of Donald Trump regarding the country in which I currently live is a source of much amusement. While I have enjoyed the news coverage of Trump’s golf course adventures in Scotland,1 perhaps the most widely reported of the proposed policies has been the building of a wall to secure the southern border of the United Sates. If – and that’s a gigantic IF – such a wall could ever be built,2 true to his form I very much doubt that Mr Trump has seriously thought through who would really benefit. Here’s a clue: it wouldn’t be the United States.

As Trump is obviously an avowed capitalist, his supporters might well be surprised to learn that the also avowedly capitalist Bloomberg has warned against the negative effects Trump’s immigration policy would have on the US economy.3 In just the service industries, for instance, ‘unauthorized immigrant workers’ account for double those who were US born. Akin to a markedly similar situation in the UK, some of the indigenous population seemingly consider themselves above serving food in restaurants, mopping floors in hospitals and other general manual labour. Providing the

1 Locals who live next to his Aberdeen golf course raised Mexican flags next to their own St Andrew’s Crosses in a spirit of unity. See <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/21/trump-golf-course-scotland-mexican-flag>. Naturally, this made me prouder than ever of my own partly Scottish ancestry.2 See ‘An Engineer Explains Why Trump’s Wall Is So Implausible’ at <http://www.nationalmemo.com/an-engineer-explains-why-trumps-wall -is-so-implausible/>.3 See ‘What Would Happen to the Economy If Trump Got His Way’ at<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-18/here-s-what-the-u-s-economy-would-look-like-if-trump-deported-undocumented-immigrants>



backbone to the US economy, these workers keep it functioning yet remain largely unseen and unacknowledged. Mr Trump and his kind at the top of the tree know very well that without such people their businesses – and thus the US economy – would rapidly grind to a halt. Coming from a country where the official minimum daily wage is approximately $4.25,4 both legal and illegal immigrant Mexican workers are ripe for exploitation.

Additionally, any ‘wall’ that might be raised along the remaining undefended southern border would play into the hands of the most organised and technically able drugs cartels. By this I mean the gangs that already have tunnels that run underneath the border at multiple urban locations all along the frontier.5 In the eventuality that a ‘wall’ is built, the cartels – who are involved in people smuggling as well as drug smuggling – would be able to hike their prices to astronomical levels.

I doubt if Mr Trump has thought about any of that.

Mexico City’s response? They like a laugh!

In possibly the most amusing political counter offensive in history, legislatures in Mexico City voted unanimously earlier this year for an appeal to the Federal Government to ban Donald Trump from entering the country. During the debate of the motion, speakers cited Trump’s ‘repeated anti-Mexican comments.’6 No surprise there then.

Sadly, the vote was largely symbolic and mainly an attempt to pressurise Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto 4 See the report by ‘the largest global employment and labor law practice’ at <https://www.littler.com/publication-press/publication/ mexico-approves-increase-daily-minimum-wage-2016>.

The Mexican minimum wage is equivalent to 69c per hour for a 48 hour week and is one third of the minimum hourly wage in Chile and only 11% of that for Slovenia. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development provides an online comparison table at <https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=RMW>.5 One such tunnel is featured in a video from CCN at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EFsFAoAEMw>.6 See <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mexican-legislators-ask-to-ban-donald-trump-from-theircountry_ us_56d7755ee4b0ffe6f8e825d0>



into taking some action against the slanderous comments of the Republican Presidential candidate. Indeed, today Trump crossed the border to meet President Peña Nieto while on the campaign trail between California and Arizona. During the press conference, I noticed that Mr Trump displayed none of his renowned bluster, which has regularly been on show at his campaign rallies in the US. President Peña Nieto spoke first, while the Republican Presidential hopeful stood by looking for all the world like a naughty schoolboy. Trump spoke second, reading from notes – a unique occurrence to my knowledge – and he was as boring as hell.

As was referenced by both parties at the press conference, commercial trade between Mexico and the United States involves a total of about $4 billion of goods crossing the border every day. At a Washington symposium in July of this year, Jose Eduardo Calzada Rovirosa (the Mexican Minister of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries and Food) stated that ‘You could not comprehend the United States economy without Mexico and you could not comprehend Mexico’s without the U.S.’7 It was also noted that about 6 million U.S. jobs are dependant on Mexican trade. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has played a huge part in developing this bilateral relationship since its introduction in 1994.

The Petroleum Problem

Mexico still has a nationalised petroleum industry and Petroleos Mexicanos or ‘Pemex’ is its name. The only petrol/ gas stations that you will see are Pemex, although a deregulation of the industry is supposed to be coming any year now. This stranglehold unfortunately does lead to some sharp practices at the pump, so you need to be careful where you fill your tank otherwise you may find yourself leaving with the gauge confusingly where it was when you drove in.

Unbelievably Pemex, as a business, has been losing

7 See the Cronkite News (a division of Arizona PBS) report online at<https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2016/07/11/mexican-officials-call-strengthening-trade-relationship-u-s/>.



floods of money for the last three years. A total of 59 billion in pesos in losses. This is in spite of Pemex being ‘Mexico’s largest company by sales and the world’s eighth-largest oil producer’ and the fact that it ‘contributes nearly 20% of the federal budget.’8 Even with an exchange rate which has seen the peso-dollar rate dive from 12 pesos to the dollar to very nearly 19 pesos to the dollar,9 it doesn’t take a degree in mathematics to assess that 59 billion pesos is still an enormous sum of money.

Historically, Pemex has suffered from a highly unusual tax structure (a nearly 100% tax rate) from the government, which has even lead to tax payments exceeding gross income.10 In 2012, the comparable tax rates for other Latin American nationally-owned petroleum companies were 69% for the Venezuelan state-owned oil company PDVSA and 25% for Brazil’s Petrobras. In 2013 Reuters reported that President Peña Nieto

‘... proposed energy reform that would bring in new capital to help exploit Latin America’s third-largest proven oil reserves. The president hopes that by offering profit-sharing contracts with oil companies, crude output will jump, generating additional tax revenues and spurring faster growth. But that revenue will probably only come if companies like Exxon Mobil Corp and BP Plc return to a country that seized foreign-owned oil holdings in 1938.’11

Peña Nieto’s statement also promised a more lenient tax rate, although many industry analysts speculated that what was

8 See The Wall Street Journal online at <http://www.wsj.com/articles/ mexico-government-to-support-pemex-with-4-2-billion-1460563616>.9 The chart at <http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/USDMXN:CUR> is defaulted to the current day’s trading but click the ‘five year’ tab and you will see a truly graphic representation of the peso climbing a mountain of dollar power.10 ‘The Unusual Pemex Tax Burden’ in chapter 3 of John R. Moroney and Flory Dieck-Assad, Energy and Sustainable Development in Mexico (College Station, Texas: The Texas A&M University Press, 2005)11 See the Reuters report ‘Mexico to keep pumping Pemex for tax money despite promised reforms’ at <http://www.reuters.com/ article/mexico-reforms-pemex-idUSL1N0IB0OI20131030>.



proposed would not actually lead to much of a difference financially. Indeed, as former Pemex Chief Executive Officer Jesus Reyes Heroles stated in the Reuters story, ‘Actually, they don’t reduce the tax burden on Pemex. They change the structure.’



Team mercenary GB

Part 1 – the early years

Nick Must

Here are three questions:

1) How do governments cope with the need to covertly interfere in overseas territories?

2) How do governments cope with the shrinkage of armed forces driving niche-trained people onto the jobs market?

3) How do corporations ensure that their vested interests in foreign areas are maintained?

They all have the same answer: Private Military Contractors (PMCs).

Much media coverage in recent years has focused on American PMCs such as Blackwater – now known as ‘Xe Services’. 1 However, in this article, I am going to focus on those companies that are based in the Great Britain because Britain was, once again, a leading instigator in the field. As I see it, the topic can be split into two sections: firstly, the personnel that staffed the mercenary companies and, secondly, the methods these companies used to transfer their expertise overseas.

Mercenary personnel

In the mid 1960s two ex-commanders of the Special Air Service, Sir David Stirling and John Woodhouse, formed a security company which they named Watchguard Interational (aka Watchguard). During their military careers, Stirling and Woodhouse had established extensive connections with the ruling families and governments of the major Middle Eastern and African states. This proved to be a fertile ground for the new venture. In a brief history of Watchguard, within his wider

1 The name change was prompted by the overwhelming critical mass of negative publicity regarding incidents in the Middle East.



review of PMCs, Christopher Kinsey points out that, ‘none of these services were undertaken without the consent of the British government’.2

During most of the 1960s, David Stirling and his associates in the British mercenary field were involved in operations in the Yemen that were, at the very least, covertly approved by the government of the United Kingdom. Stephen Dorril’s book on MI6 has a chapter that details how both SIS and GCHQ provided what was, at times, significantly more than discrete assistance.3 The entire cadre of Stirling’s assistant commanders in Watchguard appear to have been current or ‘recently retired’ members of either the regular 22nd

Special Air Service (SAS) regiment (e.g. Lt-Col. John Woodhouse) or the Territorial 21st (e.g. Col. Jim Johnson4). Many of the regular mercenaries were also ex-UK special forces and, specifically, ex-SAS as well. A large number of Foreign Legionaries were also recruited.

Not everything that Watchguard touched turned to gold. At the very start of the 1970s, Stirling suffered an embarrassing setback with his involvement in what became known as ‘the Hilton Assignment’. In the autumn of the previous year, Colonel Gaddafi had led a bloodless coup against the ruling royal family in Lybia. An essential part of Stirling’s counter-coup plan was the freeing of political prisoners from Tripoli jail – an insalubrious institution which was ironically nicknamed ‘the Hilton’. Over a period of almost two years there were at least three attempts to set the operation into motion. Each time, however, it seemed as if the usual unofficial sanction was not entirely forthcoming. From impounded arms shipments to stern warnings from the Intelligence community, the plot seemed doomed. Indeed,

2 See Christopher Kinsey, Corporate Soldiers and International Security: The Rise of Private Military Companies, (London: Routledge, 2006) pp. 46-49.3 See Stephen Dorril, MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations (London: Fourth Estate, 2000) chapter 31.4 Colonel Johnson’s obituary in the Daily Telegraph (13 August, 2008) has some details on their activities in the Yemen: <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/2553726/Colonel-Jim-Johnson.html>.



Stirling’s own operational security was far from first rate as he, ‘was telling all and sundry at White’s [the London club] about the operation.5

The uprisings, coups and general civil unrest in countries such as the Yemen, Angola, Congo, Oman and the Biafran War in Nigeria all provided work for British mercenaries in the ‘60s and ‘70s. In the post-colonial era into which most of the Middle Eastern and African states had emerged, there were tensions which organisations such as Watchguard could mitigate or – alternatively – instigate. As Abdel-Fatau Musah and J. ‘Kayode Fayemi succinctly put it: ‘The response by the colonialists was to use newly discharged soldiers from the metropolitan states to crush, sabotage, frustrate or delay the aspirations for self-determination.’6

Some of the mercenaries who fought in these conflicts were not even what one might call ‘experienced soldiers’ – i.e. professionals who might be expected to operate under some form of a code of conduct. A prime example was Costas Georgiou (the infamous, and psychotic, ‘Colonel’ Callan) who had served in the British Army but with a career that was far from lengthy, or illustrious. A prime example of Georgiou’s unhinged behaviour was that he and Parachute Regiment comrade Michael Wainhouse robbed a Post Office near Bangor in January of 1972, using their army-issued weapons.7

Duly convicted, they were both sentenced to five years imprisonment. Following their release, they were involved in the Angola mercenary operation of 1975. Georgiou, by then affecting the title and name Colonel Callan, gained notoriety for his ‘leadership’, being overall commander with Wainhouse as his second-in-command or ‘2ic’. When the whole event finally went pear-shaped, Georgiou was captured and tried

5 The quote regarding Stirling’s loose lips is from Dorril, MI6 (see footnote 3) p. 738. See also both Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville, The Hilton Assignments (London: Temple Smith, 1973) and Kinsey (see footnote 2) pp. 48-49.6 Abdel-Fatau Musah and J.‘Kayode Fayemi (eds), Mercenaries: An African Security Dilemma (London: Pluto Press, 2000) p. 207 For more detail see Chapter 6 of David Tomkins, Dirty Combat: Secret Wars and Serious Misadventures (London: Mainstream Publishing, 2008).



along with a dozen other soldiers; he was one of the four that were sentenced to death by firing squad while the other men were all given lengthy prison sentences.8

The man who acted as recruiter for the ‘75 Angolan enterprise was John Banks, another Parachute Regiment veteran – albeit one with a more decent seven years of service. Having apparently met David Stirling in 1970 during the drawn out Lybian build-up, John Banks went on to amusingly name his mercenary recruitment company Security Advisory Services (i.e. S.A.S.). Banks never was capable of any level of subtlety. Interviewed by an Australian newspaper following the trial of Georgiou and his compatriots, Banks spoke from ‘his flat above an insurance office in the Surrey town of Camberly’ to say that – all things considered – it had been a worthwhile venture.9 I suspect it was certainly a financially worthwhile venture for Mr Banks in spite of his claim, documented in the newspaper report, that a ‘former business partner’ had stolen virtually all of the money that was supposed to have paid the fighters on the ground.

Banks is a figure from this murky world about whom it is surprising to learn that he is still alive today. Following his attainment of notoriety from the Angolan recruitment, he authored a (shortish) book which, from its cover image, seems to have been aimed at the pulp readership end of the market.10 Since then he has continued to amuse and bemuse in equal measure with his antics. Convicted of ‘demanding $250,000’ from the Nicaraguan embassy in London in return for information he claimed to hold regarding ‘A contract

8 See the archived UPI report ‘Seven British mercenaries, released unexpectedly after eight years’ at <http://www.upi.com/Archives/ 1984/02/28/Seven-British-mercenaries-released-unexpectedly-after-eight-yearsin/5976446792400/>.9 The Age (Melbourne, Australia) 13 July 1976, archived at <https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1300&dat=19760713&id= 9PFUAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Q5IDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5072,2878222&hl=en>10 John Banks, The wages of war : the life of a modern mercenary, (London: Cooper, 1978). The overly dramatic cover can be seen via the Amazon listing at <https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/ images/I/81yig-6M-SL.jpg>.



to assassinate former President Somoza’,11 Banks subsequently disappeared while on compassionateleave from Coldingley prison in Surrey. He was recaptured in late 1981.12

Ever one to follow a trend, Banks was involved in a Customs and Excise drugs sting in the 1990s.13 Much more recently he has been touting a story that ‘western intelligence agencies actually wanted the bombing to take place’ of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa.14

Not all mercenaries were chancers and blaggers. There are the ‘gentlemen’ professional soldiers, who came to be exemplified by Mike Hoare. Demobbed at the end of WWII with the rank of Major, and an admittedly virulent anti-Communist, he led the mercenary force which fought in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from July ‘64 to December ‘65. In those intense 18 months he had, according to a biography by his son Chris, ‘swept the Congo clean of savages, and made modern mercenary soldiering briefly but confusingly respectable’.15

The career of Mike Hoare was not without controversy, however, as he infamously lead a failed attempt to instigate a coup in the Seychelles in the autumn of 1981. Arrested after hijacking a plane so his team could escape, Hoare became another mercenary that went to jail. Upon his release, aged 68, he vowed never to go to war again.16 This seems to have been a wise choice as he is still alive today and in his late 90s.

The City of London even saw the periods of tension in the 70s as an opportunity for new business. Several Lloyds

11 See <https://theoldbailey.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/r-vs-john-banks-a-face-from-the-angola-civil-war-days/>.12 See the news clipping shown at <http://www.mercenary-wars.net/ angola/john-banks.html>.13 See The Independent, 5 April 1993 at <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/man-cleared-in-customsheroin-sting-operation-to-arrest-businessman-for-drug-smuggling-relied-on-1453561.html>.14 See <http://www.cottrellsdarkworld.com/current.html>.15 See <http://www.mercenary-wars.net/biography/mike-hoare.html>.16 See the archived Chicago Tribune article ‘“Mad Mike” Gives Up His Mercenary Life’ at <http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-05-08/news/8501280609_1_south-africa-hoare-diego-garcia>.



insurance syndicates of the time began to offer kidnap insurance packages, which included both a level of anti-kidnap training and ransom negotiation. Hogg Robinson was a leader

in this and they established a specific subsidiary, Control Risks, to manage the new portfolio.17 Being desk jockeys rather than ‘action men’, Control Risks asked a quartet of ex-SAS officers, which included Major David Walker, to handle the day-to-day operations. A further subsidiary was soon set up by Walker and co. and given the exotic name Keenie Meenie Services (hereafter KMS). All of the senior men in KMS were either ex-SAS and/or had been involved in Stirling/ Watchguard’s 1960s covert campaign in the Yemen.

The business model for KMS, plain and simple, was the acquiring of any government’s security contracts wherever and whenever – as long as the price was right.18 This philosophy lead to some questionable activities, such as the training of

– Special forces for Qaboos bin Said, the Sultan of Oman (who had been advanced to the throne with the help of the SAS);19

– Mujahideen from Afghanistan20 (some were trained in the 17 See: Robert D. Hershey Jr, ‘Where Kidnapping Is Business’, The New York Times, 29 December 1979 available online at <http://www.nytimes.com/1979/12/29/archives/where-kidnapping-is-business-london-firm-takes-on-risk-and-ransom.html> N.B. that the person named in the article as ‘Arish R. Tulle’ is actually Major Arish Richard Turle, a senior figure in the Special Air Service before retiring after a long career in the UK army. Still active in the security business today, Turle has most recently worked for Janusian Security Risk Management (which itself is a part of the much larger Risk Advisory Group). Janusian have been in Iraq since 2003.18 KMS have even been overtly approved as a UK government contractor. For a short period of time their work included the ‘Armed protection for government representatives overseas’, as discussed in the Cabinet papers held in the National Archives at ref. PREM 19/1698 and available for paid download from the National Archives website at<http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C14568615>.19 See ‘Britain, Oman and “Our kind of guy”’ at <https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/oman-our-kind-of-guy/>. Four members of the SAS team sent to Oman to assist in the 1970 coup had defrauded the Sultan of ‘thousands of pounds in a payroll scam’, on which see <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/232271. stm> and <http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/ 1998/dec/09/oman#S6CV0322P0_19981209_CWA_20>.20 See John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (London: Pluto Press, 1999) pp. 76-79.



Scottish highlands) which turned into the ultimate blowback;

– Sri Lankan government officials (both police and military) who were viciously repressing the Tamil people.21

In the late 1980s, KMS had a couple of problems. The first became quite a personal embarrassment for Major Walker, as he was linked to Oliver North’s highly questionable activities in Central America. Walker had allowed KMS to provide arms and general assistance to the Contras, as well as some rather harsh ‘hands-on’ assistance in the Nicaraguan capital, Managua.22 The media attention that this episode received prompted Walker and his colleague Jim Johnson to pass the management responsibility for KMS to two other ex-SAS men, Lieutenant Colonel Keith Farnes and Major Brian Baty.23

Major Baty had previously come to the public’s attention when he had appeared in a Dublin court during the 1976 trial of a group of SAS soldiers who due to a ‘map reading error’ had crossed the border from Northern Ireland.24 One of those hapless map-reading novice squaddies was Corporal Ilisoni Ligairi – a Fijian. Having completed twenty years with both the regular 22nd and the territorial 21st SAS, Ligairi retired from the British Army. His extensive military training was still useful in his home country, however, as he later rose to be Colonel commanding the (rather unimaginatively titled) Counter Revolutionary Warfare Unit of the Fijian Military Forces.25 He was also party to the attempted Fiji coup in 2000.26

With KMS now under their control, Johnson and Baty

21 See <https://www.tamilnet.com/img/publish/2014/07/ britains_dirty_war.pdf> and also ‘Britain allowed ex-SAS officers to train Sri Lankans as Tamil Tigers rebelled’ in The Guardian, 16 January 2014.22 See ‘The assassination business’ in The Scotsman, 26 July 1988 and ‘The Army: The Years 1984 – July 1987’ in The Colombo Telegraph, 9 May 2015 <https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/the-army-the-years-1984-july-1987/>.23 Cooley (see footnote 20) p. 7824 See ‘Army sets up new dirty tricks’ in The New Statesman 12 August, 1983.25 The unit’s name was pinched directly from the Special Air Service’s own Counter Revolutionary Warfare Unit.26 See ‘Fijian coup colonel took part in SAS blunder’ in the Daily Telegraph, 22 June 2000.



were themselves a little bit careless and got caught out when, in April 1989, Ken Livingstone MP asked a question in Parliament about an advertisement KMS had placed in a publication titled ‘Internal Security — Counter Insurgency’.27 This ‘brochure’ as Hon. Tim Sainsbury (the Secretary of State for Defence) referred to it in his official Parliamentary answer, had been produced by International Military Services Limited, which had itself previously been known as Millbank Technical Services Limited.28 Both International Military Services and Millbank Technical Services have had a long history of acting as broker for some of the biggest arms deals. As Duncan Campbell detailed in the New Statesman of 17 October 1980, this role included ‘bribes’ or, in the sanitised language, ‘commission payments’.29

Mercenary operations

I briefly mentioned earlier that KMS trained government forces in Sri Lanka for the repression of the Tamil people. This connection came about following input from MI5’s Jack Morton, who used his extensive counter-insurgency experience from India, Malaya and Northern Ireland to help restructure the intelligence agencies of President Junius Jayewardene. Surveillance of Tamil separatists was carried out not only in Sri Lanka but also on those who were living in exile in the United Kingdom. Regarding the Tamil Coordinating Committee operating from London at the time, Thatcher was to tell the Foreign Minister of Sri Lanka, ‘We keep a close eye on [them] and shall continue to do so.’30

The Sri Lankan government pressed further and an arrangement was made for two senior Sri Lankan police

27 See <http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1989/ apr/04/keenie-meenie-services>.28 See the Companies House online record at <https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/00924462>.29 Campbell’s article is online at <http://www.duncancampbell.org/ menu/journalism/newstatesman/newstatesman-1980/ Arms%20sales.pdf>.30 See the December 1981 briefing paper prepared for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: The National Archives, PREM 19/1395, ‘Sri Lanka: Visit of Foreign Minister’, 21 December 1981.



officers to visit and observe the counter-insurgency policy that was being carried out in Northern Ireland.31 The influence of Morton in this process is unmistakeable, as he had recently been operational in Northern Ireland himself – and his work there for MI5 had been integral to counter-insurgency. The visit duly took place in June of 1983, less than a year after the killings in Northern Ireland that lead to the ‘Stalker Inquiry’. This was a counter-insurgency policy that necessitated police investigation from the UK mainland but which was approved for close observation by visiting foreign police officers.

Having received such an encouraging ‘come-on’ from the British, it is of little surprise that there was a further request for some actual in-country training, on home turf, for the Sri Lankan police. The nexus of conflicting interests was, however, a complex issue for Thatcher’s government. They were in the midst of long negotiations with India over significant arms sales while the Indian government of Indira Gandhi was supportive of the Tamil separatist movement in Sri Lanka. It would be a shame if the arms sales would be lost if, or rather when, the Indian government found out about direct British training. A solution that pleased both sides of the argument was reached when KMS were contracted to run the courses. Confirmation of this fact comes directly from the Special Task Force of the Sri Lankan police. Like all modern institutions, they have a website that includes a bit of background history. This includes the (verbatim) statement:

‘An Institution in the United Kingdom known as the “Kini Mini Service” (K.M.S.) comprising of British ex-SAS officers provided training to the STF officers at the very beginning. Among the subjects taught were tactics adopted by Riot squads, weapon training, firing practices, Counter Terrorism Search, Handling of Explosive, Mapping & Use of Compass equipment and

31 See the section ‘Following in Thatcher’s footsteps’ in the Corporate Watch report ‘FOR SALE: Top UK riot cops. EXPORT: To war zones and dictators’ at <https://corporatewatch.org/news/2013/oct/15/sale-top-uk-riot-cops-export-war-zones-and-dictators> plus the papers on ‘UK assistance to Sri Lankan police force’ held in the National Archives at: <http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C15242720> and <http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C16248223>.



First Aid. Also the introduction of the world renowned American-made M16 Automatic Rifle.’32

Encouraged by the success of KMS, two other ex-SAS officers, Jeremy Trevaskis33 and Peter Le Marchand, wanted a piece of the Sri Lankan pie for their own company Falconstar Limited, which had already secured similar work with the Ugandan police.34 In the autumn of 1984 the private secretary to Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe wrote a letter to the Prime Minister’s Office at 10 Downing Street regarding the issue of KMS and Falconstar being involved in Sri Lanka. In the letter, it was acknowledged that the Indian government were already aware of the situation and, as expected, had expressed some concern. The rather bland assurance was further given that ‘this is purely a commercial matter and that HMG are not involved’.35

The repression of the Tamils was soon very violent, with imprisonment, seemingly random beatings and targeted killings – a perfect copy of the British counter-insurgency campaign in Northern Ireland. The Amnesty International report for 1985 (covering the period January to December 1984) is stark in its criticism of the situation:

‘Amnesty International was concerned about reports of 32 See <http://www.police.lk/index.php/special-task-force->.33 Jeremy Trevaskis is the son of Sir Kennedy Trevaskis, who had been Britain’s High Commissioner for Aden from 1963 to 1965. It would seem that Trevaskis Jnr. is still in the inteligence world, as he was one of the Stratfor subscribers exposed by Wikileaks in 2015. See <https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/57/579228_re-welcome-tostratfor-.html>).34 See ‘Thatcher backed Ugandan crackdown’ by Phil Miller at <https://corporatewatch.org/news/2014/may/29/thatcher-backed-ugandan-crackdown-worse-amin-era>.35 A scan of the letter is at <http://www.jdslanka.org/images/art_ img/news_features/politics_current_affairs/peter_rickerts_letter.jpg>. The letter’s author was Peter Ricketts, later knighted, and chair of the Joint Inteligence Committee 2000-01 and the UK’s first National Security Adviser 2010-12. After a long career in the spook world, his final diplomatic posting was the most agreeable position as Ambassador to Paris (see <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ uknews/10931316/Too-many-cooks-for-Our-Man-in-Paris-Sir-Peter- Ricketts.html>). He is now Visiting Professor at the Department of War Studies, Kings College London (see <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/ departments/warstudies/people/visiting/ricketts.aspx>).



random killings of non-combatant Tamil civilians by members of the security forces. It also remained concerned about the detention of Tamils, members of left-wing opposition parties and students under legislation permitting long-term detention without charge or trial. It continued to receive reports of widespread torture of detainees. Several reports of deaths in custody, allegedly as a result of torture or shooting, were received.’36

Confirmation comes from the autobiography of one of the ex-SAS trainers, Robin Horsfall, who quit after only three months on the job, having reached the conclusion that he was ‘working for the wrong side’.37 Further to this, he has confirmed to journalist Phil Miller that Major Brian Baty38 from the KMS management team was present in country to provide the overall supervision of the training. Of even more interesting note is that Tom Morrell, one of a number of Fijians39 recruited into the British Army who further passed selection for the SAS, ‘was in charge of KMS training at a Sri Lankan army camp for junior officers’.40 I mention this fact, as I believe that Fijian soldiers would have been deliberately selected not only for their counter-insurgency experience, but also because they were not the average Caucasian who would stand out in a Sri Lankan community.

Another instance of British counter-insurgency being exported to an ex-colony came in the form of India’s internal conflict with militant Sikhs and their occupation of the Golden Temple at Amritsar. A set of papers released to the National Archives in 2014 showed that the government of Indira Gandhi

36 See p. 242 of the Amnesty International Report 1985, available at<https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/POL10/002/1985/en/>.37 Robin Horsfall, Fighting Scared (London: Cassell Military Paperbacks, 2002) p. 22138 See footnote 24.39 Morrell was a fellow countryman of Ilisoni Ligairi (of whom, see footnote 26).40 On Baty and Morrell working for KMS, see p. 20 of Phil Miller, ‘Exporting police death squads: From Armagh to Trincomalee’, available online at <http://www.ptsrilanka.org/images/documents/ exporting_police_death_squads_web.pdf>.



requested military advice and/or assistance from the British government early in 1984. True to established form, PM Margaret Thatcher was quick to oblige. A Special Air Service officer was dispatched to India and wrote up a plan for the storming of the Temple; if the Indian government had asked for additional assistance, the SAS would have been willing to provide it. Following media coverage of the papers released under the thirty year rule, a report by Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood revealed that:

‘There does appear to have been some internal UK military consideration, immediately after the UK military adviser’s visit to India, of whether to offer training for the potential operation, if requested by the Indian authorities, and if agreed by UK Ministers.’41

The plan that was eventually carried out by Indian military forces lasted a total of ten days. The BBC’s long-serving India correspondent Mark Tully was present in Amritsar during the four days leading up to the attack. In the Daily Telegraph thirty years later, Tully wrote: ‘Sikhs in India, and in the West, were outraged by what they saw as the defilement of their holiest place. And that anger remains 30 years later....’42

The Cabinet Office report does clarify that the operation, as carried out by the Indian military, was somewhat different from that suggested by the SAS officer. Nonetheless the British government were willing to provide advice from British special forces to a foreign government in relation to the internal suppression of religious-based dissent. Both Downing Street and Foreign Office documents relating to UK approval 41 See page 5 of ‘Cabinet Secretary report to PM on allegations of UK involvement in the Indian operation at Sri Harmandir Sahib, Amritsar 1984’, at <https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/277292/Cabinet_Secretary_report_to_PM_on_allegations_of_UK_involveme....pdf>.42 See ‘Operation Blue Star: How an Indian army raid on the Golden Temple ended in disaster’ at <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ worldnews/asia/india/10881115/Operation-Blue-Star-How-an-Indian-army-raidon-the-Golden-Temple-ended-in-disaster.html>.

Those who have heard any of the general news reports filed by Mark Tully, on either BBC Radio 4 or the World service, will know that he is a measured and peaceful man. In his Telegraph piece, however, one can feel the huge disappointment.



for SAS involvement in the planning can be seen online.43

British mercenary operations continued apace in the 1990s. Simon Mann, co-founder of Executive Outcomes and Sandline International was, true to form, an ex-SAS officer. Executive Outcomes was hired by the Angolan government in 1993 and tasked with the defeat of the UNITA rebels. A civil war had been ongoing within that country since the mid-to-late 1960s and this contract was worth $40 million per year.44 Mann gave an account of Executive Outcome’s work in Angola as part of a Chatham House lecture in 2011.45

‘Brigadier General’ Mann, as he was known in the Angolan army,46 is known in the United Kingdom for his part in the Equatorial Guinea coup attempt of 2004. A spectacular failure, it lead to a 34 year jail term for Mann, a $500,000 fine and four-year suspended jail term for Mark Thatcher47 and the production by the BBC of a rather good satire. Simon Mann first met Mark Thatcher in 1997 soon after he (Mann) had moved to live in Cape Town. It’s in chapter seven of his book Cry Havoc 48 that Mann starts to really lay into Mark Thatcher, and this makes for a most enjoyable read. ‘Scratcher’, as he later came to be known amongst the military men who played a part in the coup, was their final bail-out option if all else had failed. Predictably, everything else did fail... as did Thatcher to 43 See <https://stopdeportations.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/prem-19-1273_binder.pdf>. The Guardian also had two articles of interest in January 2014: ‘Margaret Thatcher gave full support over Golden Temple raid, letter shows’ at <https://www.theguardian.com/world/ 2014/jan/15/margaret-thatcher-golden-temple-raid-support-letter> and ‘Sikhs demand inquiry into claims of British role in 1984 Amritsar attack’ at <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/13/sikh-inquiry-british-1984-amritsar-india-golden-temple>.44 Sean McFate, ‘The Evolution of Private Force’ (chapter 6, p. 72) in Joakim Berndtsson and Christopher Kinsey (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Security Outsourcing, (London: Routledge, 2016).45 Available online at <https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/ chathamhouse/021111mann.pdf>.46 His highest rank in the British Army had been as Captain. Accounts differ as to whether he was ‘given’ the Brigadier General rank or whether he ‘demanded it’ as a part of his package. Either way, he didn’t refuse it.47 See ‘Thatcher fined over “coup plot”’ at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4169557.stm>.48 London: John Blake Publishing, 2011.



honour his position.

Mann was released from prison having served just over a year of his jail sentence. This followed a Damascene conversion and the provision of security advice to Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang Nguema (the target of the 2004 coup attempt). In 2011 Mann was working with Moda Solutions49 (a ‘security company’, naturally) of which Lord Des Browne (a former Defence Secretary) has been a past director and Lord Brennan (a QC at the influential Matrix Chambers) is a current one.

As I hope I have shown in this history of British mercenary operations, there has been significant business for Britain in the exporting of military expertise to foreign regimes who need some help with awkward elements of their indigenous populations. This is as nothing, however, compared to how the ‘war on terror’ has enabled the PMC industry to really take off and start to draw in truly obscene amounts of money... and Britain is represented at the highest level.

In part two I will cover the period following the second invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Nick Must is an independent researcher

with a particular interest in Special Forces.

49 See Simon Mann, ‘My biggest mistake was approaching Mark Thatcher’ in the Independent, 31 October 2011 at <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/simon-mann-my-biggest-mistake-was-approaching-markthatcher-6255035.html>



The ‘Intentional Fallacy’ revisited

(Who cares about motives?)

Dr. T. P. Wilkinson

In the great scheme of things a minor confusion or disturbance in the routine of less mainstream journalism, whether called progressive, left or radical – terms which themselves confuse more than they clarify – has no great consequences. No revolts occur and none are quelled. But a recent controversy, in which certain essays were rejected by what might be called the less- or sub-mainstream establishment, should draw our attention to a constant and serious problem in our analysis of events: the problem of intention.

The controversy concerned comments by Bill Blum in three recent essays, of which only the first was published by the usual outlets. After the first – which, en passant, blamed Islam for the actions of ISIS1 – was criticised by a well-known journalist and editor,2 the second two articles appeared on Blum’s website under ‘essays and speeches’, explicitly challenged that criticism, and applied the rubric ‘political correctness’.3 The statements and arguments in the subsequent two articles were heavily criticised, while at the same time suggestions were made that the articles at issue could not have been written by Blum! The assertions that Blum could not have written the articles in dispute are symptomatic of the Enlightenment ideology which still governs what many people believe to be ‘progressive’ or ‘left’ thought.

1 The relevant paragraph was this: ‘Obama’s declaration that ISIS “has nothing to do with Islam”. This is standard political correctness which ignores the indisputable role played by Islam in inspiring Orlando and Long Beach and Paris and Ankara and many other massacres; it is the religion that teaches the beauty and godliness of jihad and the heavenly rewards of suicide bombings.’2 The criticism was by Kim Petersen at <http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/07/ stop-using-millenary-religions-as-a-scapegoat-for-the-crimes-of-modern-imperialism/>. Blum replied at <https://williamblum.org/ essays/read/ political-correctness-demands-diversity-in-everything-but-thought>. 3 I have already dealt with the issue of ‘political correctness’. See <http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/08/doubts-about-something-to-be-or-not-to-be-correct/>.



The Enlightenment character to which I refer is the secularised belief that there is coherence in the world and human action, conventionally described as, e.g., ‘laws of nature’. According to this, the society in which we live – e.g. the Anglo-American Empire – is corrupt. Nonetheless there is some almost holy element in this society which, were its rulers finally to recognise and conform to it, would expose the redeeming virtue of the US, the supposed pinnacle of Western culture, which would then blossom for all to see and share. This is the Christo-centric ‘West’ that Mr Blum is not alone in defending against faux-Islam. It is also the Christo-centric ‘West’ that, prior to the invention of Islamisticism (as opposed to Islam/Islamism), Mr Blum and most US Americans defended against what they claimed to be the global threat of Communism, both Soviet and Maoist. Begrudgingly the outer party4 accepted that Russia or China might – at best – be permitted to address the deficits and misery inherited from their domestic despots. However but under no circumstances could the ideology attributed to them be applied to abolish Anglo-American despotism (which continues against its non-white population). A consistent exception to this rejection of any international ideology was the black communist in the US and to some extent the black nationalist (e.g. Marcus Garvey et al.) On the whole, however, the US regime holds ideological sway over at least the vast majority of whites on both sides of the Atlantic. This hegemony is not unlike that exercised for centuries by its progenitor and spiritual inspiration, the Roman Catholic Church.

The US regime became the model of the ‘acceptable’ revolution.5 The French Revolution only became legitimate after its first

4 A far more accurate term than middle class. George Orwell used the term ‘outer party’ in 1984 to refer to the broad mass of those who supported ‘Big Brother’ but had no share in actual power. Noam Chomsky has described the most propagandised people in the system as being the academics, middle management and members of the professional classes, to whom the Establishment addresses the bulk of educational and media resources and whose indoctrination is essential for system maintenance. In fact the counter-Establishment draws most of its support from that most heavily propagandised and indoctrinated class, consumers of the New York Times and Washington Post as well as less conspicuous Establishment media. Other countries in Europe have their equivalents, many of which defer to the US media: e.g. in Germany, Der Spiegel, Focus, Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Die TAZ. 5 Although it certainly was not a revolution, as has been argued elsewhere, inter alia by Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776, reviewed by this author in Lobster 68.



revolutionary acts had been repealed: e.g. the restoration of slavery.

With the ultimate defeat of the French Revolution in 1848, the 1789 Revolution was reinterpreted to conform more to the Anglo-American vision.6 The decapitation of Louis XVI and his spouse was nothing more than the end of European dynastic succession and its replacement with national corporate governance. Monarchs from 1848 on enjoyed their thrones by consent of the ‘board of directors’ of the country’s major economic powers.7

A redemptive ideology

The Enlightenment ideology to which the outer party is committed is above all a redemptive ideology. By asserting that the corrupt can be finally healed by the incorporation of the USA; and, furthermore, that the purpose of all sincere political and social action is to purge the corruption in the regime and return it to its primitive innocence (albeit with Coca-Cola, Big Macs, Starbucks, Levis and iPhones), an implicit dogmatism emerges and a complementary need to police those who deviate from the current version of the dogma.

This demand for ideological purity, for coherence, or compliance with the ‘laws of nature’ or the ‘original intent of the Founding Fathers’ is by no means a monopoly of the Establishment.8 It is also rife among the ‘counter-Establishment’, those who constitute the majority of the ‘progressive’ and ‘left’ in the outer party. Progressives and what I have also called the ‘faux gauche’ – analogous to the ‘faux filet’ served in middle-range French restaurants, usually with chips – are not anti-establishment but ‘loyal opposition’. They await the moment when they may redeem the State by becoming the Establishment. (That is the root of Bernie Sanders’ absurdity: he is already Establishment and yet campaigned to be taken for counter-Establishment, so that he could then be ennobled in the Establishment in which he was a mere local notable.)

It is also for this reason that the annoying term ‘political

6 In 1789 France was, to quote de Gaulle, ‘made with the sword’. A plaque in the entrance to the French military museum, Les Invalides, in Paris, bears this quotation by Charles de Gaulle: ‘La France fut faite à coups d'épée.’7 This is the significance – and about the only one – of the provision in the US Constitution that the President must be a native-born citizen.8 The most useful definition of the term ‘Establishment’ is probably found in C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956).



correctness’ can so easily be appropriated throughout the outer party – that is in both the Establishment and the counter-Establishment. The term meant nothing in the black nationalist movement, as can be seen in the clear rejection of measures like ‘affirmative action’ from their very inception. For decades both wings of the Establishment, that in power and that aspiring to power (here I do not mean the Establishment duopoly of Democratic and Republican parties) have fought over how to pacify non-whites that the regime cannot exploit and integrate simultaneously. The counter-Establishment defended ‘affirmative action’ like confession was defended in the Reformation. Of course, the entire Establishment, including the counter-Establishment, in the US remains convinced that non-whites are doomed; Calvinistically (and for Catholics, according to Augustine) predestined to their lot under the regime. The nature of the political dispute among whites is how whites ought to behave toward the damned, not whether they are damned or not. Affirmative action and community policing were reforms designed to protect those non-whites who just might, in the eyes of an omniscient god, really be part of the Elect. (Just as social security is really an insurance policy taken out by the Establishment to cover the risk that it might, accidentally, exploit the Elect among the poor, e.g. deserving whites.)

Within this barely secularised version of Christian dogma, adorned in Enlightenment vestments and insignia, the imperative to impose ideological control in word and deed becomes obvious. The counter-Establishment risks losing its distinguishing characteristics if it cannot enforce the language adopted to express its alternative ambitions. It loses its only defining quality as ‘opposition’ or ‘counter-Establishment’: the language with which it manipulates its followers and the political environment in which it exercises limited, but hopefully expanding, power.

The Establishment enjoys the luxury of the ultimate sanctions: the ability to impose its will through brute force. Whereas the Establishment can just kill its opponents or deprive them of the means to work and earn a living, the counter-Establishment can only deprive dissidents of attention, of access to the channels of philosophy, of the rewards of enticement and seduction. This is the principle cause for the rabid sectarianism that prevails in the counter-Establishment. Unless those who dominate the counter-Establishment are close enough to



Establishment immunity, they can only deprive their opponents of rewards and not have them killed. (Although sometimes they are killed, too. Inter alia the deaths of Trotsky,9 Petra Kelly and Gerd Bastian10 come to mind.)

Intent

To return to the issue of intent: whether one examines the historical debates in the International Workingmen’s Association or even those

9 The exact reasons and actors behind the assassination of Leon Trotsky remain disputed to this day. Strangely enough many prominent neo-conservatives (reactionaries) claim to have been Trotskyists in their youth. This lends even more ambiguity to the circumstances in which Trotsky and (alleged) Trotskyists were persecuted. An interesting but by no means conclusive insight into the Stalin-Trotsky conflict can be found in Mission to Moscow (1941), by the one-time US ambassador to the Soviet Union (1936-38), Joseph E. Davies. This memoir suggests that the anti-Soviet interests exploited real conflicts within the Communist Party and, by linking real pro-Western conspirators with dissidents loyal to an exiled Trotsky, created the impression that Trotsky was the focus of all opposition to Stalin. The sympathy shown for the infamous ‘show trials’ coincides with the author’s view that their propaganda target was not domestic but foreign: namely that Stalin would not tolerate Western subversion, even if it meant sacrificing loyal communist dissidents to make the point. On the other hand Mission to Moscow – which was filmed by Hollywood and released in 1943 – shows how even the US propaganda machine was able to produce pro-Soviet films. By 1945 such films would become impossible in the US. What is nonetheless clear is that tolerance for a counter-Establishment depends on what might be called ‘historical conditions’ and not on systemic purity. If there was no apparent counter-Establishment in the Soviet Union during World War II, one can certainly say that there was (and apparently still is) no alternative to white supremacy in the West.10 Petra Kelly and Gerd Bastian were leaders of the German Green Party found dead in their bed on 19 October 1992. The official story – sanctified by the counter-Establishment in Germany – is that Bastian was depressed, shot Kelly and then shot himself. The fact that the bodies were considerably decomposed by the time of discovery made a precise time of death impossible to determine. The fact that two of the most prominent opposition politicians in Germany at that time were ‘missing’ for nearly five days before being ‘discovered’ in their own home defies the imagination. In fact, between 1989 and 1992 there were numerous assassinations in Germany and elsewhere in the course of consolidation that followed the collapse of the GDR. Shortly after Kelly and Bastian were killed, the Green Party split between so-called ‘fundis’ and ‘realos’ was decided in favour of the ‘realos’ who, under later foreign minister Joschka Fischer, would lead the Greens in their support of Yugoslavia’s destruction and the German humanitarian imperialism (also called ‘humanitarian interventionism’ or R2P, responsibility to protect, in US/UN slang).



within the Jacobin Society,11 the attempts to establish convention and coherence in revolutionary organisations (perhaps itself an oxymoron) have generated enormous levels of violence. It is a central argument of the Enlightenment counter-Establishment that this sectarian violence is proof that European revolutions – as opposed to the unilateral declaration of independence of 4 July 1776 – were not democratic or really governed by the intent to create a ‘free society’. If, it is argued, the Jacobins were genuinely democratic in their intent, they would not have executed so many of their opponents, real or imagined. If what became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had really been driven by democratic intent, it could not have become the party of Stalin.12 It is the same argument – albeit on a trivial scale – which leads people to claim that Bill Blum could not have written the critical essays because these essays are somehow incoherent with the intent imputed to him based on a reading of his previous work.

What is meant by the statement that ‘Bill Blum could not have intended the arguments in his last two essays’? The problem is similar to those who say ‘Marx could not have intended the policies or practices of Stalin as a consequence of his writing’. What is that problem though? A useful essay – among many he wrote – was published by Professor Morse Peckham.13 In ‘The Intentional? Fallacy?’ Peckham argues that statements about the ‘intent’ of an author – his point of departure was literary text – are not information about any real or imagined thought or psychic state of the author – this being inaccessible – granting that such were to exist. Rather these are utterances about how the reader should respond to the text in question. The statement that Blum or Marx could, or could not, have intended something is another way of saying that the statement in question should be treated as coherent or incoherent with the view of this person prevailing. Of course this leads to the question as to what those views or presuppositions of the reader are and how they may otherwise control his/her behaviour. Peckham’s argument is worth examining at length but to retain my focus I refer the reader to the work itself.11 See Jules Michelet, History of the French Revolution (1847) 12 I withhold here any judgement as to whether Stalin is to be viewed as a universal manifestation of evil.13 Morse Peckham, ’The Intentional? Fallacy?’ (1968), in The Triumph of Romanticism (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), particularly pp. 430, 431 and 436.



Blum or the true ‘Blum’?

The discussion around Bill Blum’s articles (and I believe the same should occur regarding the work of Noam Chomsky) illustrates the partial range of responses already elicited. Some have asked whether he was ill when he wrote them. Some have claimed he could not have written the articles. At least one explanation is that Blum’s text shows that he is capable of being fooled into thinking and saying ridiculous things. Another is that Blum has always said some such things that are considered ‘non-Blumian’ by others. The next level of discussion includes: if it is real Blum, what are to we think of Blum now? If Blum has always been this way but only writes this way now, is this the ‘true’ Blum or the ‘old age Blum’ or some other kind of Blum than the one whose work was previously read and welcomed?

In fact there are Establishment members who appear to have joined the counter-Establishment or even abandoned the Establishment as a whole (although these do not appear to publish in sufficient quantities to make even a provisional judgement possible). Paul Craig Roberts is one example. If one reads his work over the entire time span from his days in the Reagan administration until today, he appears to have become about as vehement an anti-capitalist as one can imagine. At the same time, at least in correspondence I had with him, he sees no contradiction between his present writing and his support for Ronald Reagan. Does that mean that we should read Mr Roberts’ texts as an advanced discourse in Reaganomics? (He was once Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy.)14 It could mean nothing other than that, when Mr Roberts reads or writes, he ‘feels’ (or judges) his writing to be coherent with his own understanding of his personal biography and beliefs including some loyalty to Ronald Reagan. In other words there is no immanent reason why Mr Roberts’ perceived coherence should govern another reader’s interpretation: e.g. that Mr Roberts has gone mad, or that it is possible for a Reagan capitalist to convert to an anti-capitalist, or that Mr Roberts is simply insincere. It is entirely possible to respond to Mr Roberts’ text without considering Mr Roberts’ previous

14 But then we should not forget the praise Barack Obama heaped upon Ronald Reagan, and arguably with a more fanatical following. See, for example, <http://www.nytimes.com/ref/us/politics/21seelye-text.html>.



positions or history at all. One can simply respond by agreeing or disagreeing with his writing.

However, the virtue of considering Mr Roberts arguments as ‘epiphanous’ (to borrow another religious metaphor) is again the affirmation that the texts produced by Paul Craig Roberts today exemplify the redemptive rhetoric of the counter-Establishment by showing that even members of the Establishment can be converted. In other words the counter-Establishment also seeks (in fact needs) the Establishment to enhance its legitimacy. Under other historical conditions one could imagine Mr Roberts being burned at the stake and his ashes spilled into the Potomac.

One of the principal arguments by the counter-Establishment against the legitimacy of the Soviet Union was that it produced Stalin and Stalin was a brutal dictator. Leaving aside the appropriateness of the term ‘dictator’ in the Soviet context, certain facts cannot be denied. Stalin led two consecutive massive industrialisation processes in a country which, prior to 1917, had no meaningful industrial infrastructure whatsoever. It is a widely held principle in the West that chief executives of major economic enterprises may exercise powers over their enterprise, which by any measure could be called dictatorial or absolutist. If Stalin were viewed as the CEO of Soviet Union Inc., then the exercise of dictatorial power would be comparable to that of people like Henry Ford or the Du Pont and Rockefeller families. So clearly the term ‘dictator’ is not a reference to the exercise of absolute authority over political, social and economic resources, since this is a common form of business organisation in the West.

It is also argued that Stalin was excessively brutal in the forced industrialisation of Russia and its agriculture. That means that the process by which between 1500 and 1918 untold millions of people were deliberately enslaved and slaughtered, and three continents were subjected to the imperial control of a half-dozen European states plus the USA, has no ‘intentional’ value for appraising the system that predominated in 1918 and finally triumphed over most of the planet in 1945. Alone, the forced industrialisation of manufacturing and agriculture in the US required the enslavement of millions and the annihilation and continued subjugation of the continent’s indigenous inhabitants. Whereas the same process in the largest country on earth within thirty years is judged solely by the ‘intent’ of Stalin, despite the



fact that the second industrialisation was forced by the intentional (planned and executed) destruction of the first industrialisation by the Western financed and supported NAZI invasion and occupation that ended in 1945.15

My argument here is that the condemnation of Stalin, or for that matter Marx(ists), or the Jacobins, is based upon the judgement that the violence and suffering assigned to them was intended – if not explicitly by the orders given and acts committed – then implicitly because those orders and acts could have no other source than the atrocious intentions of the authors. Yet the counter-Establishment, especially in the US, is convinced that the persistence of slavery, genocide, and all the other elements of colonialism/imperialism in the US Empire were ‘unintentional’. The regular murder of Blacks by police in the US is not intentional. Lynching was never intentional. In a country whose official explanation for all economic injustice is the ‘intentional’ failure of its citizens to work productively, there is no theory of intention to cover the regular, institutional violence perpetrated by the military, police, bureaucracy, the clergy, and of course those who control them – business corporations and the families that own them.

‘Intention’ is a fiction

There is no ‘intention’ because ‘intention’ itself is a fiction. It is a term, an element of language, used to control the behaviour of the person(s) using it. In the secularised Enlightenment ideology that controls the behaviour of both the counter-Establishment and the Establishment, ‘intention’ is a word used in place of ‘guilt’ or ‘sin’. It is not a causal term at all – leaving aside whether ‘cause’ is at all useful here. But in the counter-Establishment, rife as it is with scientism,16 ‘intention’ tells the person making the judgement to see that which is being judged as the product caused by one actor, one sinner, rebelling against the ‘laws of nature’ (or the will of God). Intention turns an accident into a

15 I choose the term ‘NAZI’ as opposed to German since the organisation of the National Socialist regime included major components of armed and civilian fascists throughout Europe, managed and deployed by the regime in Berlin. 16 The Merriam-Wester dictionary: ‘A dictionary definition of scientism is: an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities).’



crime. Even when the counter-Establishment proposes policies to alleviate admitted injustice, these are always limited because they are in potential conflict with the intentions of those undeserving among the victims of injustice. Hence the language of intention also serves to rationalise the cynicism of policies like affirmative action or community policing which are then condemned by the Establishment for their ‘unintended consequences’.

Peckham’s final and most challenging theoretical work is called Explanation and Power.17 Peckham shows in lucid and comprehensive argument that the problem of controlling human behaviour is an on-going one and god, nature or society or any other Establishment cannot solve it. It certainly cannot be solved by a ‘counter-Establishment’. Peckham maintained that the challenge, discovered by those Romantics who abandoned the Enlightenment with its secularised Christian world view, is for human beings to learn to sustain a condition of indeterminacy. This is what Sartre tried to say in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, a book generally rejected even on the Left.18 In fact we find in Sartre a particularly good example of a writer and activist who did not constantly comply with either the counter-Establishment or the Establishment. He and de Beauvoir both taught in schools during the German occupation. He became anti-American yet also antagonised the French Communists (PCF). His amorous relationships appear to defy any consistent explanation.

However Sartre made an attempt to show the implications of this indeterminacy. He did so not by resolving it in a redemptive ideology but by showing that redemption is impossible. Like Peckham, Sartre showed that only death is redemptive. Of course this redemption is the medieval position which, in its secularised version, constitutes the deep ideology of the Western empire. That is also why both the counter-Establishment and Establishment are capable of such extreme violence, whether in the exercise of power or the denigration of others. In this regime, the ascription of intention is the act preceding the ultimate sanctions. If someone like Blum intended to violate the counter-Establishment conventions (which I believe he neither did, nor 17 Morse Peckham, Explanation and Power: The Control of Human Behavior (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), p. 65.‘Inexplicability is satisfied by an explanation, and everybody is satisfied by any explanation some of the time.’18 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1960).



intended to do) then silence and exile are his just punishment. On the other hand the Establishment does not bother itself with the literary device of ‘intention’. If someone like Blum sufficiently threatened the exercise of Establishment power, then the wages of his sin would be death. Or to quote Peckham: ’Again, the only way to dispose of an interpretation you object to is to kill everybody who utters it; and again, throughout history, this has been a popular mode of interpretational argument.’ 19

Dr. T. P. Wilkinson is an independent scholar, translator,

and traveller, residing and writing between Heine and Saramago.

19 Morse Peckham, Art and Pornography: An Experiment in Explanation (New York: Basic Books, 1969), p. 145



British CounterinsurgencyJohn Newsinger

London: PalgraveMacmillan, 2015, p/b, £18.99

This is a new edition of British Counterinsurgency, first published in 2002. Here’s what I wrote about the first edition in Lobster 44.

‘To my knowledge this is the first account of Britain’s post-1945 colonial wars written from a radical left standpoint. By which I don’t mean that it is a load of left rhetoric – that is entirely absent; but the assumptions about legitimacy and right are on the side of those who were fighting this country’s state forces. Lefties don’t pussyfoot around; imperialism is imperialism; and they look the facts in the face. Facts like the number of dead. Here’s your reality-checking question: how many people do you think the British state killed in Kenya during the Mau-Mau uprising? 1000, 5000? 10,000? 20,000? The official figure is 11,000 – but who believes official death figures? Newsinger tells us some estimates put it as high as 50,000, with only 593 deaths on the British state’s side, of which only 63 were white. It was less a war than a slaughter; and the RAF dropped napalm.

Presented in chronological order, the procession of wars – Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, South Yemen, Oman, Dofar (Dofar?) and Northern Ireland – nicely illustrates the decline of the British empire. Twenty years after the big wars of the early 1950s, we’re down to SAS skirmishes in minor bits of the Middle East.

It’s a difficult trick, producing a synthesis of subjects as large as, say, the war in Kenya, in 20-30 pages, without it feeling sketchy; but Newsinger pulls it it off. I’m not a specialist in this field and this kind of brisk, assertive account, with lots of documentation if I chose to pursue it, is what I want.’

Since the 2002 edition Newsinger has added a chapter on Iraq, another devastating account of the self-delusion and staggering incompetence of the Americans and futility on the



part of the British Army, which suffered nearly two hundred deaths and three and half thousand injuries in Iraq to no military purpose at all. They were almost literally sacrificed – Tony Blair’s ‘blood price’ – in pursuit of the British state’s fantasies about ‘the special relationship’.1

In the aftermath of that disastrous campaign, we heard a fair bit of comment that the Americans should have listened to the Brits because the British state – its military and intelligence – is good at counterinsurgency.2 Newsinger’s account of British CI campaigns since 1945 shows that this is a delusion. With the exception of a couple of minor events in the Middle East in which handfuls of SAS soldiers helped put down uprisings, British CI had only one post-war success, in Malaya; and there only because they were able to exploit ethnic divisions between the Chinese insurgents and the rest of the population, and were far enough away from Fleet St. for their atrocities to go unreported. All the rest of the campaigns were failures, with the status quo eventually being overthrown in one way or another.

Robin Ramsay

1 See <news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_politics/2239887.stm>.2 This is a variation on the recurring theme during Britain’s post-WW2 military decline that the relationship between the British and the Americans is analogous to that between the Romans and the Greeks: big, powerful but clumsy Yanks and slighter but more sophisticated Brits.



The Shadow Man: At the Heart of the Cambridge Spy Circle

Geoff Andrews

London: I B Tauris, 2016, £20, h/b

This is a revelatory book that, in its own quiet, understated way, is likely to send shock waves through the historiography of British Communism. Geoff Andrews is the author of the disappointing last volume of the ‘official’ history of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), Endgames and New Times. In his new biography of James Klugmann, one of the Party’s leading intellectuals, he shows beyond any shadow of doubt, that the man was an agent of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB.1 Now it can be argued that this is hardly new information. On the Far Left, various Trotskyists and Anarchists have for many years insisted that the CPGB was involved in the work of the NKVD. More recently in 2005, from the right, Nigel West, in his neglected account of MI5 penetration of the CPGB, MASK, wrote of how the NKVD agent Arnold Deutsch recruited Klugmann, ‘codenamed MER.... as a talent-spotter, recommending other suitable candidates from his acquaintances, such as John Cairncross’.2 But whereas these accounts could be dismissed, effectively marginalised, as the work of the Party’s enemies, Andrews’ exploration of Klugmann’s involvement in intelligence work for the Soviets is absolutely conclusive.

Andrews begins his biography with an account of Klugmann’s meeting with a Cambridge friend who was working at the Foreign Office at the time, John Cairncross. They met in Regent’s Park in the spring of 1937, where Klugmann introduced Cairncross to Deutsch, who was charged with his recruitment as a spy, and then walked away, job done. What is particularly interesting is that Klugmann was most unhappy

1 Geoff Andrews, Endgames and New Times: The Final Years of British Communism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2004). Andrews is also the author of the fascinating The Slow Food Story: Politics and Pleasure (London: Pluto Press, 2008). 2 Nigel West, MASK: MI5’s Penetration of the Communist Party of Great Britain (London: Routledge, 2005) p. 204.



in this role and, when first approached by the NKVD, had refused to assist them unless ordered to by the CPGB leadership. His scruples, such as they were, mean that we know beyond any doubt that the party leadership were complicit in Soviet intelligence operations in Britain. Harry Pollitt himself, the Party general secretary, ordered him to comply. Indeed, the Soviets were actually put out by Klugmann’s attitude, with Yuri Modin complaining that to get him to act, ‘Harry Pollitt.... had to be wheeled out. Provided the order came from Pollitt, Klugmann would comply’.

Some years later, in August 1945, Klugmann had a meeting with Bob Stewart, a senior official, at the Party’s King Street headquarters, to discuss his future role in the organisation.3 He complained about his unwilling involvement in espionage, telling Stewart that this was ‘the only time I’ve really been unhappy in the Party’. MI5 had Stewart’s office bugged (‘Operation Table’) and heard all the discussion, something all the more remarkable since the Party had known about the bug since Anthony Blunt informed the NKVD of its existence in 1940. At the time this interview took place, MI5 were tapping Klugmann’s phone, his mother’s phone and was having him tailed. Nothing came of this surveillance however. According to Andrews, it is most likely that ‘Kim Philby, by now head of counter-espionage at MI6.... acted to protect him’. Klugmann remained in fear of exposure as a onetime NKVD agent with the attendant risk of trial, conviction and imprisonment.

Klugmann had first joined the Communist Party in the spring of 1933, while a student at Cambridge, probably in response to the rise of the Nazis. At this time Communist students were expected to actively involve themselves in working-class struggles, supporting strikes and demonstrations. This changed with the turn to the Popular Front when Communist students were expected to put their studies first and get good degrees. The number of Communist students getting firsts at Cambridge rose from 5% to 60%!

3 Bob Stewart was a key figure in maintaining the Party’s covert links with Soviet intelligence and gets a whole chapter to himself in West’s book.



Klugmann himself was seen as being potentially a leading Marxist intellectual, but instead of becoming an academic he threw himself into Party work. By 1936, he was effectively running the Comintern’s student front, the Rassemblement Mondial des Etudiants (RME), based in Paris; and in this capacity he visited the USA, China, India, Yugoslavia and the Middle East. It was at this time that he first met Josip Broz, later Tito, who was organising the despatch of Yugoslav volunteers to fight with the International Brigades in Spain. On an RME trip to China in July 1938, he met Mao Zedong. It was while heading up the RME that he was recruited as a talent-spotter by the NKVD early in 1937, adding ‘espionage to his main RME and research work’.

One problem with Andrews’ account is that at no point does he seriously get to grips with the enormity of Stalinism. We shall return to this point, but it is worth noticing that his discussion of the Great Terror, of the destruction of the POUM in Spain and of the Hitler-Stalin Pact is cursory to say the least. On the one hand there is no real acknowledgement of the Stalin dictatorship and scale of its crimes, and on the other no exploration of how it was that working-class revolutionaries like Pollitt and Marxist intellectuals like Klugmann became apologists and serial liars for it. Having joined the CP in response to Hitler taking power in Germany in 1933, how on earth did Klugmann explain away, justify to himself, Stalin’s alliance with the Nazis in 1939?

According to Andrews, Klugmann was told to volunteer for military service even while the Party line was still one of opposition to the war. The reason for this is not explored, but one is left with the inevitable suspicion that his volunteering must have been at the behest of the NKVD. Even though he had been an open member of the CP, working for a Comintern front, he ended up in Egypt, working for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), ‘in the section dealing with Yugoslavia’. MI5’s reservations regarding this were dismissed by his commanding officer who told them that he was ‘not really interested in Klugmann’s politics.... any Communist tendencies he may have had, he would appear to have grown



out of’. In fact, Klugmann, without any doubt, used his position to advance the interests of the Yugoslav Communists and of the Partisan resistance movement they led. This is still a subject of considerable controversy. Was Klugmann responsible for the British decision to end support for the royalist Chetnik resistance and throw their support behind Tito’s Partisans? Persuading Churchill’s government to help install the Communists in power in Yugoslavia would be one of the greatest achievements of the Cambridge spies, arguably putting the achievements of the likes of Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross in the shade. Certainly, he and others highlighted intelligence that showed the Partisans in the best light and ‘either suppressed other intelligence more sympathetic to the Chetniks or produced intelligence detrimental to their cause’. Klugmann actually admitted all this in his 1945 meeting with Bob Stewart with MI5 listening in. However this was not what determined the British decision to support Tito. Fitzroy Maclean, a staunch Tory, had considerably more influence than the likes of Klugmann.

In the immediate post-war years, as a faithful Party intellectual, Klugmann was called on to justify the Stalinist purges across Eastern Europe and to put the Party line regarding the Tito-Stalin split. As the Party’s Yugoslav expert, he was ‘given the unenviable task of delivering the intellectual justification for the change in line’. He produced a densely argued 200-page tract, From Trotsky to Tito, a classic of British Stalinism, that Andrews somewhat inadequately describes as ‘a very disingenuous work’. It is worth considering this book in some detail. According to Klugmann, the trials in Hungary, Bulgaria and Albania in 1949 revealed the existence of ‘a deliberate, counter-revolutionary, anti-Communist plot carried out by a gang of police-informers, agents provocateurs and intelligence agents, centred around the leading Titoites’. This conspiracy had been put in place at the end of the 1930s, according to Laszlo Rajk, the Hungarian CP leader, who not only admitted his own ‘Trotskyism’ at his trial, but went on to reveal that Trotskyists had been successfully planted in the Yugoslav Communist Party by the Gestapo and other



intelligence agencies. He quotes Rajk to the effect that ‘the Gestapo and US Intelligence were competing as to who would take these traitors over’. These were the men who took over the Yugoslav CP: ‘Tito himself, Rankovic, Kardelj and Djilas’.

Rajk was a lifelong Communist whose supposed confession, quoted by Klugmann, had been written by his torturers. Another victim quoted by Klugmann was Traicho Kostov, the Bulgarian CP leader, who revealed that Tito had been a fellow Trotskyist as long ago as 1934. Once again the confession was written by his torturers.

One of the most interesting parts of Klugmann’s exposé of Tito’s ‘treachery’ is his account of how the British came to abandon the Chetniks and support the Partisans. Initially the British urged the Chetniks to fight the Partisans with the ‘British wireless.... even used to broadcast calls for the assassination of Partisan leaders’. He goes on:

‘At a certain time, and exactly how and when history still has to disclose, the British political and military leadership, on a very high and top-secret level, must have received information, some of which it may have had all along, that there were leading elements inside the Partisan forces, inside the Yugoslav Communist Party, spies and provocateurs, Gestapo elements, Trotskyites, who could be “trusted” (from the point of view of British imperialism) and could be used to betray the Yugoslav People’s Liberation movement.’

The British abandoned the royalists and gave their support to the Partisans because they discovered that Tito and his comrades were nothing more than ‘a group of Trotskyites’, a ‘Trotskyite clique’, and so were able to carry out ‘on a big scale the policy of penetration and corruption of the left from inside’. Whereas once the Trotskyists had collaborated with the Italian Fascists (Klugmann remembered how in 1938 he had been in Milan and had actually seen ‘newly translated works of Trotsky’ in a bookshop window); with the Nazis (‘the writings of Trotsky were widely translated and distributed’ in Germany); with Franco’s secret police (Trotsky’s works ‘were published by the Franco press at Salamanca and Burgos’); and



with the Polish secret police (who were ‘specially educated in Trotskyism’); now they worked for British and US Imperialism. Himmler had handed his ‘fourth international’ over to ‘Hoover of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’, but it was ‘the same “scum”, the same “Nazi germs”’. And just in case some of his readers had not yet caught on, he emphasised that ‘the Titoites of today are the Trotskyites of yesterday’.4

‘Disingenuous’ hardly does From Trotsky to Tito justice.

What we have here is a ‘Marxist intellectual’ making his case by using the forged testimony of men who had been tortured into compliance and were subsequently shot; and moreover providing a case for his British readers for a Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia with all the horrors that would have involved. Without any doubt Klugmann knew he was peddling lies, not everyday lies, but lies drenched in blood and pain. Andrews makes no serious attempt to explain how he ended up in this position.

And there is another interesting dimension to this story. If a Stalinist dictatorship had ever taken power in Britain, and had decided to identify those responsible for British support being given to the traitor Tito, they would have quickly identified a certain James Klugmann as one of those responsible, a Communist working for a British intelligence agency no less, something which could so easily be portrayed as being the other way round. Klugmann’s From Trotsky to Tito would have been his own death warrant. Of course, Klugmann would not have been the only lifelong CPer to fall victim to a British Stalinist regime, headed up by the likes of Bill Rust. Harry Pollitt himself, who had on a number of occasions shown a dangerous degree of independence, would almost certainly have been persuaded to confess to being a secret ‘Trotskyite’ and shot. It is interesting to speculate on the number of British Communists whose survival depended on their party never taking power.

Klugmann remained loyal to the Party through the difficulties of 1956, the Khruschev revelations and the invasion of Hungary, going on to edit Marxism Today until September 4 James Klugmann, From Trotsky to Tito (London, 1951), pp. 32, 39, 43, 82, 85, 113



1977. He died soon after relinquishing the post. And we are left with the problem posed by an intelligent man, who went into politics committed to working-class emancipation and without any concern for personal gain, who prostituted himself in the most outrageous fashion in support of a brutal murderous tyranny.

John Newsinger

John Newsinger is a semi-retired academic. A new edition of his British Counterinsurgency has recently been published and is reviewed

in this issue of Lobster.



Ripping yarns, penetrating tales!

A Very English Scandal

Sex, Lies and a Murder Plot at the Heart of the Establishment

John Preston London: Viking/Penguin, 2016, 340 pages, illustrations, index;

hardback, around £12.

It’s nearly forty years since the Liberal MP Jeremy Thorpe and several unlikely ‘associates’ were on trial at the Old Bailey for conspiring to murder Thorpe’s lover, Norman Scott. To the astonishment of most of the country, at the end of the trial it was acquittals all round. Thorpe, however, never returned to political public life: the combination of attempted murder and homosexuality was terminally toxic.

There were several books on the case published at the time and then in 1996 came Rinkagate,1 written by Simon Freeman and Barrie Penrose (Penrose was one half of the ‘Pencourt’ duo that originally broke the story, the other being Roger Courtiour). Now, twenty years later and nearly forty years after the actual events, we have a further volume to add to the bibliography.

This passage of time must have resulted in considerably more information coming to light and Thorpe’s death in 2014 allows the writer to report much more than he could while the principal was still alive. Here, surely, is the definitive work. Well, uh, not so. There is nothing new in this book and Preston has not even taken advantage of the new and important material in Michael Bloch’s recent 600-page Thorpe biography,2 despite mentioning it in the Acknowledgements. (I’m thinking particularly of Bloch documenting Thorpe’s very active and – remembering this was when homosexuality was a criminal offence – reckless sex life.)

1 Simon Freeman & Barrie Penrose, Rinkagate: The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Thorpe (London: Bloomsbury, 1996)2 Michael Bloch, Jeremy Thorpe (London: Little, Brown, 2014)



There’s also a lot of material that he has left out. Let’s take but one example, that of Jack Straw, former president of the National Union of Students, who at the time was working as a ‘special adviser’ to Barbara Castle, the Social Security minister. Harold Wilson, the PM, wanted to see Norman Scott’s social security file, probably in an attempt to clarify Scott’s relationship with Thorpe, and asked Castle to obtain it. This was a highly irregular request and Castle declined to it herself. Instead, she delegated the task to Straw who willingly obliged.

When they later found out about this ‘Pencourt’ (Penrose and Courtiour) suggested that Castle and Straw had acted improperly in connection with Norman Scott’s social security papers. Alarmed by the exposure of his role, and alarmed, too, by the possibility of further ‘sensitive’ material being uncovered and publicised by the two journalists,3 Straw did what any reasonable professional politician would do and sought government funding for legal action to shut down ‘Pencourt’. It is unclear what happened next but the investigation certainly wasn’t shut down.

Preston isn’t very good on the psychology of Thorpe and the reader gets a rather confusing portrait of the subject. Bloch is far better; but then he is covering the whole of Thorpe’s life – and in great detail.

The decision to murder: Preston presents this as the inevitable result of Scott’s vexing behaviour over many years; almost as if it would be how anyone would react given the same circumstances. Bloch, on the other hand, eschews simple solutions and cheap psychology and presents instead a multi-faceted portrayal of Thorpe’s character and hints that such behaviour was latent. Indeed, it is suggested by Bloch that

3 One of the major worries for the Establishment at the time was Lord Snowdon (Tony Armstrong-Jones) being dragged into the scandal. Norman Scott had mentioned a ‘Tony’ at a pre-trial hearing in Minehead and how Thorpe and he had stopped off at ‘Tony’s house’ in Dulwich on route to Thorpe’s mother.

Snowdon was never far away from gay rumours and jokes at his expense. A popular one told after his engagement to Princess Margaret was this. The Palace informed Tony it was May 1. He didn’t know whether this was the day he was getting married or his new title.



Thorpe may have ‘previous’ here and could have been responsible for the disappearance at sea of one of his lovers, Henry Upton, in 1957 (‘No man has ever taken but one step in to crime’).

Preston does not supply any notes or sources in the book. The nearest we get is the Acknowledgements where he mentions some eighty or so persons by name and over a dozen books. But what came from where we know not.

While reading this I frequently thought I was reading a novel, a ‘popular’ novel, a novelette even. Narrative flow seemed more important to Preston than anything else; but then we read on the back flap of the dust jacket that he is the author of four novels. Perhaps he should have aimed for a roman à clef rather than a straight recounting? Anyone wanting to study the subject should give this work a miss and go straight to Rinkagate and Michael Bloch’s biography.

I forget who this quote is attributed to, but it was said of the eighteenth century antiquarian Richard Warner that while his histories were ‘useful’ it was plain that ‘he had left his subjects as he had found them’. This applies equally to Preston. Thus one wonders why Viking/Penguin thought this work worth publishing as our author has left the subject exactly as he found it.

Anthony Frewin



Europe Isn’t WorkingLarry Elliott and Dan Atkinson

London: Yale University Press, 2016, £14.99, h/b

There are many virtues to the books by Elliott and Atkinson (this is their fifth), chief among which is that as journalists they write simply and they write short. The website which Atkinson shares with the historian Alwyn Turner, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, is named after a George Orwell essay; and Orwell was the master of writing simply and short.

This is the story of the European Union’s single currency: how it happened, the steps on the way; and studies of how it went wrong. It isn’t difficult: if you understood their previous books, Elliott’s writing in the Guardian or Atkinson’s on his site, you will understand this.

Here are two quotations. The first is from Elliott and Atkinson (p. 282) quoting the late Peter Shore, sometime Labour cabinet minister and one of the few Labour MPs to understand political economy.

‘Peter Shore asked how a country was to regain competitiveness once it had [joined the single currency and] surrendered the option of adjusting its exchange rate, interest rate and monetary policy. The answer, to Shore, was only too clear.

The alternatives, he said, were stagnation, rising unemployment and large-scale emigration or, on other other hand, deep cuts in wages and salaries....’

The second is from Boris Johnson, making the same point, in May 2016:

‘On our doorstep we have a vast and developing tragedy – caused by the folly of trying to impose a single currency on an area with different labour markets and different rates of productivity. Take away their ability to devalue – with their own independent currencies – and many parts of the EU have found it impossible to



compete.’1

This book elaborates this central point in great detail and shows that the main reason Europe isn’t working is the single currency.

As so often, the problem is partly the rubbish in people’s heads. If, like me, you were raised on what is loosely known as Keynesian economics – as the authors were – almost everything that has happened in the so-called free market revolution since the mid 1970s has just been nonsense, with about as much connection to reality as the revolutionary left’s ideas. But along with the delusions of the true believers, the ideologists, there has been politics, as usual. Those around Mrs Thatcher and Keith Joseph in the mid 1970s adopted so-called monetarism2 (a) because it gave them a stick with which to beat the (Keynesian) Heathites who had screwed-up the economy between 1970 and 1974 and (b) it provided the alibi for the recession they believed was necessary to reduce inflation but could not openly advocate. Even though they knew it was nonsense, the UK Treasury eventually adopted monetarism in the late 1970s because they saw it as a useful tool to use against ministers who wanted to spend more than the Treasury thought was sensible.

It’s the same combination of fantasies and politics with the path towards the single currency. Another quote from the 1 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/29/the-only-continent-with-weaker-economic-growth-than-europe-is-an/>

Professor Scott Newton commented in an e-mail to me:

‘..the euro might have worked if accompanied by a eurobank with a brief to sustain full employment, and able to do this by providing overdraft facilities to deficit countries (ie those whose internal costs made them relatively uncompetitive within the single market). That, after all was Keynes’s idea for the postwar global economy: his Clearing Union was designed to permit national economic autonomy within an open market system.’

2 I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s and a subsidiary course in economics was part of my degree. Monetarism was then known as the quantity theory of money and so little was thought of it that my economics tutor gave it to us non-specialists in our second year to kick around. Four years or so later this nonsense was adopted by the Conservative Party. It is unclear to me if they believed it or not. My guess would be that Mrs Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe – both tax lawyers at the time and none too bright – may have done so.



book, this time from Anne Pettifor:

‘The plain truth is that the euro is a product of utopian neo-liberal economists and their ambitions for a monetary system governed only by market forces. According to the ideology, market forces must be beyond the reach of any European state.’ (p. 83)

This is true but there is politics here, too; the EU is as much a political as an economic project. One of the ideas behind the (then) EEC was the belief that the (West) German ‘problem’ could be only be solved by enmeshing it deeply with its neighbours. Thus the EEC-EU project. But thanks to the particular nature of (West) German society and its economy,3 (West) Germany became the dominant economic force in Europe and was able to extract a price for its increasing enmeshment: it’s version of economic policy would be the policy of the EEC and then the EU. Everybody had to behave like the Germans and adopt their absolute aversion to anything which smells like inflation. Whereas for ‘normal’ economies a little inflation can be either a useful thing or, at worst, a reasonable trade-off for the attainment of other objectives – reducing unemployment, for example – for the Germans, having experienced hyper-inflation in the 1920s, it was a complete no-no. As the EU moved towards a single currency (the now united) Germany said that to give up the deutschmark the euro had to become another deutschmark.

Thus were born the Maastricht convergence criteria: states wishing to join the euro had to meet targets for inflation, long-term interest rates and government debt as a proportion of GDP which were similar to Germany’s. But the euro was also a political project and a blind eye was turned as countries – Greece, Italy and France that we know of – faked their stats to meet the criteria.

3 Too complex to discuss here but: no overseas empire and low military spending; industrial relations that had resolved the labour v management issues (thanks in part to the British TUC which helped design the system); no significant financial sector and an elite committed to the domestic economy; ‘patriotic’ consumers and a prevailing ‘never again’ attitude among its citizens after two wars and hyper-inflation in the preceding 40 years are in the mix.



And so the euro was launched and produced the familiar problem which was seen with the gold standard (and explains why that was abandoned). Elliott and Atkinson again:

‘If one of the variables in the economic mechanism – the value of money – is not allowed to move, everything else, such as employment, living standards and export sales, must move more violently. Hard money ensures that the burden of “adjustment” to each economic shock falls on those in work and those otherwise dependent on the income from work, rather than sharing the pain across society with some rise in inflation and a depreciation of the currency, thus allowing the internal and external value of the currency to absorb some of the sting’. (p. 85)

Thus the situation post 2008 in which the smaller, weaker EU economies – Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland – unable to reduce the value of their currency, were forced into what is euphemistically called ‘internal devaluation’: higher unemployment and cuts in living standards and state services. Depending on your point of view, this is either returning to the mistakes of the pre-Keynesian era, or returning to the true international capitalist system. For it would only take a minute or two of looking at the statistics of 19th and early 20th century economic history to see that the boom/slump cycle, climaxing in the really big slump of the great depression of the 1930s, is how the ‘free market’ system actually works left to its own devices.

The belief of the free market ideologists was that the abolition of exchange controls within the EU would lead – spontaneously, naturally – to the efficient allocation of capital. Instead we got property booms and the busts in Spain and Ireland, ‘misallocation of capital on an epic scale’. (p. 105)

Elliott and Atkinson:

‘The euro planners’ fundamental mistake was to assume that the creation of a “United States of Europe” would be facilitated by a currency akin to the dollar and a central bank akin to the Federal Reserve Board. This,



though, misunderstood the lessons of the US, namely that the dollar and the Fed emerged only after more than a century of economics and political development, and that the US had the preconditions in place to make a single currency work: a large federal budget, a flexible labour market and – most importantly – a single language..... The attempt to reverse-engineer a political federation was woefully misconceived.’ (p. 58)

It was the late Gore Vidal who described ‘ I told you so’ as the ‘The four most beautiful words in our common language’. In this splendid book, the authors, who knew the euro would fail, give us a resounding chorus of ‘We told you so’.

Robin Ramsay



The writer with no handsMatthew Alford

www.amazon.co.uk/Writer-No-Hands-Matthew-Alford/dp/1530122651

Alford completed a PhD, which became the book Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy (London: Pluto, 2010). His central thesis of that is that large budget, mainstream American movies,

‘....almost always express the notion that in its foreign policy, the endless wars in which it engages, America is always right, well-intentioned and frequently the victim.

That this fantastic lie is in the films owes something (how much isn’t clear) to the Pentagon and CIA liaison operations with the studios. “Wanna borrow a submarine? Talk to the Navy guy.” If Alford isn’t quite describing the corporations and the state running joint psy-ops, it will do until joint psy-ops come along.’1

While trying to finish Reel Power, he came across the strange story of a major Hollywood script writer, Gary Devore, who disappeared and was found a year later, still in his car which was submerged in a river, strapped in his seat belt but minus his hands. Or so it seemed: hands or no hands is among the many elements in the story which is never quite nailed down. Devore, it was reported, had died just after finishing a politically radical script, which had also disappeared. Was he assassinated? The book describes the author’s attempts to find out, while juggling unemployment, job searches and a failing marriage. The following quote is on p. 13, just as he begins to feel the pull of the Devore story, and gives a sense of the book’s style:

‘I didn’t have time for this. I had a book to finish, a child to raise, a marriage to endure, a cat to worm, and work to find.’

This personal material didn’t interest me, though it is quite

1 <http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster60/lobster60.pdf> p. 148. Alford also co-wrote wrote an article in the Guardian, ‘An offer they couldn’t refuse’ on this subject. See <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/nov/14/thriller-ridley-scott>.



well done.

Researching the Devore story he encounters a striking collection of con-men, dodgy internet ‘journalists’, spooks, private eyes, actors and a director – plus the dope-smoking widow of Devore – and creates a vivid portrait of the difficulty of researching a subject with Hollywood, the CIA and the Pentagon among the dramatis personae.

He does not prove that Devore was murdered (after a year under water the autopsy was inconclusive), though it seems possible. If he was murdered it seems possible that it was because the script he was working on, The Big Steal, apparently dealt with the US invasion of Panama – during which a lot of murky stuff is alleged to have taken place: new weapons tested, unreported large-scale slaughter of Panamanians, and a multi-million dollar theft by US personnel. This last item may have been the central subject matter of Devore’s plot – ‘the big steal’ – but the complete script was never found. Devore’s widow claims she was warned off the Panama angle after his death.

This is an entertaining read with many interesting parapolitical leads uncovered, none of which get pursued completely or resolved. He dips his toes into Iran-Contra, Panama and JFK’s assassination. He muses on the difficulties of parapolitical research and then illustrates those difficulties through endless beating of the bushes around his subject. For example: was Panama’s President Noriega hosting and filming orgies for US personnel and then blackmailing the US? Maybe. Did US military personnel steal $45 million from a US slush-fund in Panama? Rumoured. Within this book there is the outline of where a serious reinvestigation of the events in Panama might begin.

But I was reminded of an old joke about the naive Polish actress who went to Hollywood, got a minor part in a movie and fucked the writer. Would a script get you killed? Alford’s earlier book about Hollywood describes an entertainment industry in which the US military and intelligence are thoroughly integrated, a system in which a really radical script simply wouldn’t get made. So who would bother to kill the



writer when a word in the right ear would get the project dropped or modified? The answer to this may be that a criminal conspiracy within the US military would. But of that conspiracy there is no evidence.

Robin Ramsay



Britain’s Secret WarsHow and Why the United Kingdom sponsors conflict

around the world

T. J. Coles

Clairview Books: Russet, West Sussex, £14.99, p/b

Coles has written a couple of essays for this journal and they show what a formidable research tool the Internet is if you have the patience and the skill to use it.1 With this book Coles uses the same techniques to explore.... well, not really secret wars so much as barely reported foreign policy events: military training missions, weapons sales, intelligence operations and attempts to manipulate other (relatively minor) countries in the interests of either – take your pick – multinationals or the global free trade agenda.

Coles’ opening chapter surveys some official and semi-official (e.g. Chatham House) statements of what British foreign policy is or should be: roughly, helping multinationals to get their hands on the world’s resources because it’s good for us, good for the developing world and good for them (but don’t tell the voters, they might not like the grubby details). As globalisation by multinationals is now the only approved form of development, we have the bizarre situation in which the Department for International Development (DfID) is fronting and cheerleading for the companies which are destroying the planet so we can have cheap white goods and a new mobile phone every year.

But this being declining Britain, a lot of this is pretty small beer. He tells us that there are eleven members in the British Military Mission to Saudi Arabia and in 2010 the UK exported £250,000 worth of small-scale munitions to Yemen. By contrast the Americans are training about 200,000 foreign soldiers and police a year2 and:

‘In the first five years of the Obama administration, the US government entered into formal agreements with the

1 <http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster64/lob64-chemtrails.pdf> and <http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/ lobster62/lob62-weather-wars.pdf> 2 <https://theintercept.com/2016/07/13/training/>



GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] to transfer over $64 billion in arms and defense services, with Saudi Arabia receiving at least three-quarters...’ 3

Coles tells us that the Sri Lankan defence budget was some £2 billion a year in 2012 and in the same paragraph that the UK exported ‘nearly £1 million-worth’ of small arms to Sri Lanka in 2010. (p. 103). £1 million is a drop in Sri Lanka’s military budget let alone that of the US.4

Some of the chapters are straightforward and readily intelligible; others are not. As you might expect it is in the Middle East and Libya where things get complicated and I occasionally found the narrative hard to follow (probably because of the difficulty I have with pronouncing and remembering Arabic names).

Some of the story is familiar: SIS helping to create Al Qaeda (trying to use Jihadis) and creating an armed opposition to Gaddafi in Libya (trying to use Jihadis). We can see how well those turned out. Other bits of it are not: did you know the Brits were meddling – alternatively: spreading democracy and development – in Papua New Guinea, Somalia and Bangladesh?

The plain facts are striking enough but Coles can’t occasionally resist bigging them up. Grace Livingstone – a journalist and a good one – becomes ‘scholar Grace Livingstone’. Early Day Motions in the House of Commons, which are expressions of MPs’ opinions and mean little, become ‘the British Parliament’. Scratching around for evidence, a couple of times he cites stories in the Daily Star, which is hardly a reliable source. Neither, in my view is, is former LaRouchie William Engdahl.

The major fault with the book is a kind of certainty of tone. For example, of the civil war in Sri Lanka he writes at one point:

‘It was clear that the [Tamil] Tigers had served their

3 <http://qz.com/677087/the-bloody-consequences-of-us-hypocrisy-are-on-full-display-in-yemen>4 See for example <http://www.salon.com/2013/05/14/ where_does_all_our_military_spending_go_partner/>.



purpose and that the World Bank and the IMF wanted a return on their investments.’ (p. 102)

Which presumes a great deal which he does not really establish.

Nonetheless, even with my caveats this is an interesting survey of what can be discovered about secret and semi-secret British operations abroad. Britain hardly matters in the world except as the host to international banks, and when it does get to play a significant role, such as in Libya, it is only doing so at the behest of the Americans. (The relationship with America is under explored here.) It would have been better with the data, such as it is, presented straight rather than editorialised from a left position. But who else is doing such work? Mark Curtis, I suppose. And it comes with endorsements on the front cover from Noam Chomsky and John Pilger.

Robin Ramsay



Not the Chilcot Report

Peter Oborne

London: Head of Zeus, 2016

ISBN (hb) 9781784977962 £10.00

ISBN (e-book) 9781784977955 £4.99

When I asked for this book in one of London’s radical bookshops, I was told they didn’t stock the work of a Tory columnist. The kindly assistant didn’t know that Peter Oborne had written a fine book on South-African-born cricketer Basil D’Oliveira, confirming with solid evidence the long-held suspicions of anti-apartheid campaigners about the malign roles of business and politicians in Pretoria and London and the conspiracy hatched with the Lord’s cricket establishment. When I then mentioned his critical book on New Labour spin doctor and ‘dodgy dossier’ man Alastair Campbell, his pamphlet and TV documentary on the power of the Israeli lobby, his principled resignation from The Daily Telegraph and then his defence of Jeremy Corbyn against New Labour plotters, I was told the book would be ordered tout de suite.

It’s very good and more likely to be more widely read in full than the Chilcot Report itself, even its executive summary. That’s partly because it’s less than 200 pages, demonstrates great familiarity with the material provided publicly to Chilcot, is well written and burns with hot logic.

His criticism, from careful examination of the material available to Chilcot, is not only directed at Prime Minister Tony Blair. He concludes:

‘I have found no evidence that David Manning, foreign policy adviser inside Downing Street as war loomed, ever tried to correct Tony Blair. Neither have I found protests from Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. Nor from Jonathan Powell, Downing Street chief of staff. Nor Alastair Campbell, Director of Communications.

More importantly still, I have not discovered from either the Joint Intelligence Committee or the Secret Intelligence Service that the prime minister was misrepresenting their intelligence. This failure to



challenge Mr Blair means that the Secret Intelligence Service in effect colluded with the prime minister as he led Britain into a calamitous war. (I show that MI5, the domestic intelligence service, emerges much more creditably.)

All this means that we are entitled to assert without contradiction that the Blair government led Britain into war on the back of a series of lies about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.’

Oborne doesn’t stop there:

‘It has been a chastening experience researching and writing this book. As I studied the events leading up to the war, I felt a growing sense of dismay and ultimately shame and remorse at my own performance as political columnist for The Spectator.

This was because I realised it was perfectly possible for an assiduous journalist at the time [his italics] to have uncovered many of the lies and falsehoods uttered by politicians and officials.

I failed to do so. It is no excuse that I was part of a wider failure. Though there were shining exceptions, the mainstream media as a whole failed to tell truth to power in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. It should always be taken into account that it was not only politicians and officials who failed in their duty.’

Self-criticism usually gives weight to that made of others. It is not the only reason for reading this fine book, but it’s healthy for starters.

John Booth



The Army of Afghanistan

A Political History of a Fragile Institution

Antonio Giustozzi

Hurst: London, £36

At the time of writing it is being widely reported in the British media that most of Helmand province in Afghanistan is in the hands of the Taliban insurgents. With a few exceptions, this has not led to any questioning of whether the years of British military involvement in the province was worthwhile. The reason for this is quite simple: the deployment was never actually about Afghanistan. It was all about sustaining the ‘special relationship’ with the USA. The outcome of the war in Afghanistan was not of any great concern to the British government, as long as fealty to the American Empire was faithfully demonstrated. As Tony Blair once remarked, it was sometimes necessary to cement the ‘special relationship’ in blood – other people’s blood.

But why has the war gone so disastrously wrong? One of the most interesting commentators over recent years has been Antonio Giustozzi, the author of a number of books on Afghan history and politics, on the Taliban, on policing, on war and warlords and most recently on advisory missions to the country. His The Army of Afghanistan provides much of the explanation for US (and British) failure in the country.

The book is not a military history – although a bit of military history would have been useful – but ‘a political history of the Afghan army in the context of state building’. He looks at the history of the Afghan armed forces from 1880 up to 2014, with considerable discussion of the ‘Russian’ period and some brief but enlightening discussion of the Taliban regime’s army. But his main focus is the attempt at building an army capable of sustaining the client regime installed by the Americans.

One of the first problems the Americans encountered was what to do about the proliferation of militia forces in the country. Were these to be incorporated into the new army or



dispensed with, hopefully disbanded? There were, as he points out, ‘thousands of generals in Afghanistan who had never been to the military academy and often could not read or write’. The Americans insisted on starting ‘from scratch’, planning the creation of a professional trained army of between 60,000 and 70,000 soldiers by 2009. This plan was completely overthrown by the resurgence of the Taliban; and not only did the militias survive, they were often incorporated as the local police.

With the return of the Taliban, the decision was taken to dramatically expand the army to more than 200,000 soldiers. Giustozzi provides an interesting discussion of the problems this has entailed. There has been the question of ethnic balance, with the Tajiks initially having a preponderant role, with the largest ethnic group in the country, the Pashtuns, being seriously under-represented. As he points out, attempts to remedy this by means of a quota system have been, at least, partly undermined by the way that officers have often changed ‘their stated ethnic backgrounds depending on what suited their career opportunities’. The problem is compounded by the fact that officer positions are often bought and sold.

The decision to dramatically expand the army led to cutting back the training provided, with officers receiving from 20 to 25 weeks training and soldiers from 8 to 10 weeks. This was completely inadequate, even more so given the prevalent lack of education of the recruits. In early 2005 there was a 71 per cent illiteracy rate in the army, rising to 80 per cent by the end of that year. Indeed, Giustozzi writes that, according to sources, ‘some 90 per cent of the recruits have been illiterate, with the remaining 10 per cent almost entirely not educated beyond primary school’. As he points out, in Afghanistan, ‘a high school diploma is not a guarantee of functional literacy’. And many of the soldiers are regular drug users, with some US estimates claiming that ‘up to 80-85 per cent’ are drug users in some areas, and that ‘even senior officers are sometimes reported to be using drugs’.

Why was the quality of recruits so poor? Only those who could find no other work even contemplated enlisting and,



once they had enlisted, they often deserted. Every year between a quarter and a third of the army’s soldiers deserted. This is not a viable army. The desertion rate is higher than it was when the Soviet client regimes had an army of conscripts. There is also a problem with figures for troop strength in the Afghan Army because of the phenomenon of ‘ghost soldiers’. Commanders inflate the number of soldiers in their units, pocketing their pay and selling their food and equipment, so that as recently as 2013 a force nominally 2,000 strong had only half that number of officers and men. The author was told that there are ‘hundreds of other examples of corruption’. Corruption started right at the top. Every senior officer who had the good fortune to become head of logistics at the Defence Ministry became a millionaire. Inevitably such a corrupt system was not one that many were eager to die defending. Out in the field, collusion with the Taliban was routine, ranging from unofficial ceasefires, to shared extortion rackets and to selling weapons and equipment to them.

When Giustozzi observes that the US and its allies have failed to create a self-sufficient army in Afghanistan, it is clearly something of an understatement. The situation is only likely to get worse.

John Newsinger

John Newsinger is a semi-retired academic. A new edition of his British Counterinsurgency has recently been published and is reviewed

in this issue of Lobster.



The Black Door

Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers

Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac

London: William Collins, £30

This new book by two respected academics has a lot to tell us about how Britain is run. We are told, for example, that at a CBI dinner in December 1971, the Labour Party leader, Harold Wilson, boasted to the assembled businessmen of how, when in office, he had MI5 keep left-wing leaders of the trade union movement under surveillance, ‘tapped or bugged’. Indeed, during the 1966 Seamen’s Strike Wilson had received MI5 briefings on the dispute twice a day. According to Martin Furnival Jones, MI5’s Director, no previous Prime Minister had ever shown ‘such enthusiasm for regular up-to-the-minute reports during an industrial dispute’. Wilson was particularly pleased that the Communist Party headquarters was ‘comprehensively bugged’. And he actively encouraged right-wing union leaders to collaborate with MI5. One of the leading figures in the GMWU, Sir Harry Crane, ‘was deeply involved in this’ and regularly passed information from MI5 onto the Labour Party’s national agent and witch-hunter in chief, Sarah Barker. This relationship ‘between right-wingers in the Labour Party and MI5 was held close, and nothing was written down’.

Wilson was also an enthusiast for covert operations. He continued the Tories’ secret wars in Yemen and Indonesia, told MI6 to assassinate Idi Amin (they refused) and gave the United States considerable covert assistance in Vietnam. That Wilson kept Britain out of the Vietnam War is one of the myths most cherished by Labour supporters. The reality is somewhat different. He wanted to send a token force to fight alongside the US but was effectively prevented from doing this by the scale of extra-parliamentary opposition to his diplomatic support for the Americans and the strength of the Labour Left in the Commons at the time. Nevertheless, the Americans were given every assistance short of ‘boots on the ground’. As Aldrich and Cormac reveal, GCHQ provided the Americans with



‘volumes of signals intelligence’ to help their war effort and the Americans were allowed to operate their ‘largest CIA station in the region’ out of Hong Kong. MI6 agents in the British Embassy in Hanoi provided intelligence reports on the effect of US bombing that were passed on to Washington. All this took place ‘below the radar of British public opinion’.

However, according to Aldrich and Cormac the extent of the British role in the 1965 destruction of the Left in Indonesia that brought Suharto to power and saw over half a million people massacred in circumstances that make ISIS look like humanitarians, remains ‘a mystery’. Some would say a very convenient mystery. And in Yemen, Britain, the Saudis and the Israelis provided military assistance to rebels who were guilty of much the same kind of atrocities as ISIS but conveniently did not post them on-line.

Despite his collaboration with the British secret state, Wilson was himself the victim of various smears, plots and coup proposals in which MI5 officers were intimately involved. Wilson was convinced that the South African secret service, BOSS, was also involved. He was right: they were allowed to operate in Britain without any interference at this time because, as one of their (unnamed) agents later revealed, they had a film of MPs taking part in orgies and ‘a full dossier on a top-level sex scandal that “would make the Christine Keeler business look trivial”’. On one occasion, Labour MPs complained to Callaghan about MI5 spying on the anti-Apartheid movement and were told that it wasn’t the anti-Apartheid movement they were keeping an eye on but BOSS!

What of the Heath government? Heath had the TGWU leader, Jack Jones, made a target with his phones bugged and his mail opened. The leader of the NUM, Joe Gormley, was, we now know, a ‘Special Branch informant’ through the 1970s. The normal procedure at this time, when an employer approached MI5 or Special Branch for help against militants, was to pass them on to the private, business-financed blacklisting organisation, the Economic League. The Ford Motor Company, however, as a condition of opening its Halewood plant, insisted that Special Branch should vet the workforce,



blacklisting union activists. Heath agreed. More firms demanded help from Special Branch and Massey Ferguson, for example, were given ‘a list of people to “watch out for”’. The British government was directly involved in the operation of blacklists. At one point during the class battles of these years, Heath actually insisted to MI5 that some of the more dangerous militants had to be ‘done’. These revelations are dynamite and need to be urgently investigated by the Commons Intelligence Select Committee. Only kidding of course. The Commons Intelligence Select Committee is really just a parliamentary spittoon into which the intelligence agencies occasionally feel obliged to gob.

Under Thatcher there was the dramatic rise of private intelligence agencies run by various of her admirers, Brian Crozier and the like, that operated alongside MI5. CND was apparently a particular target of these ‘privateers’. But what of the war her government waged against the miners? This is not explored at all in The Black Door and yet it involved a greater degree of secret state involvement in breaking a strike than ever before. And alongside this there was the role of her privateers in helping set up the scab Union of Democratic Mineworkers. Perhaps the official material is not available, but not to have any discussion of the great miners’ strike at all is a serious shortcoming. The very absence of material, if this was indeed the case, is tremendously significant and deserved discussion. This was, after all, the decisive engagement that shifted the balance of class forces and made everything that has followed possible.

The Black Door inevitably has considerable discussion of Blair’s Wars. This is comparatively well-trodden ground. Of more interest is the account of Cameron’s war in Libya and attempted war on Syria. Both MI6 and the Defence Chiefs advised against intervention against Gaddafi, but Cameron went ahead anyway. While the pretext for intervention was, as always, humanitarian, the real object was regime change. MI6 and SAS ‘advisers’ helped train the rebels and supplied them with weapons and ‘a thousand sets of body armour’. The British intended to send Gaddafi off into exile in Equatorial



Guinea and had no intention of letting him appear before any international court where he might reveal ‘his links to MI6’. His death solved the problem.

As for Syria, Aldrich and Cormac reveal that many within both the CIA and MI6 did not believe that the sarin attack on Ghoutta was the work of the Assad regime. It had too much to lose by provoking the Americans. The pretext for war was false, something that was still a sensitive issue after Iraq. Instead there was a strong suspicion that it was the work of the Turkish-backed al-Nusra front, intending to fix the blame on Assad and thereby provoke a US attack on his regime. The US had ready ‘a “shock and awe” campaign led by a fleet of B-52s’, to which Britain would have contributed a few planes and some cruise missiles, but ‘a ferocious and unresolved debate’ within the CIA and other US agencies over who was responsible, led to the attack being cancelled. Not the debate and vote in the House of Commons, but disagreements within the US intelligence apparatus.

What of Mossad and British intelligence? We are told in a throwaway sentence that Israel’s ‘unruly secret service’ has ‘periodically kidnapped and murdered people in London’. And that is it.

After reading this book we not only know more than we did, but also how much more we need to know and unfortunately how much we are likely to never know....

John Newsinger

John Newsinger is a semi-retired academic. A new edition of his British Counterinsurgency

has recently been published and is reviewed in this issue of Lobster.



The Devil's Chessboard

Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's

Secret Government

David Talbot

William Collins, London, 2015HB, 686pp., illus., index, bib., refs., £25.00

This truly excellent biography is at least partly a biography of two men, Allen Dulles and his older brother John Foster. I write ‘at least partly’ because the older Dulles brother dies two-thirds of the way through the book. But he gamely calls Allen to his bedside in order to deliver rousing anti-communist words, urging his brother to not only keep up the fight but redouble his soon-to-be-solo efforts. From Allen’s furtive scuttlings around post-war Europe, David Talbot (former editor of the frequently insightful on-line Salon magazine) pursues his subject into the corridors of power, even if Dulles is prone to laying the occasional false trail. The earlier chapters are mainly scene-setters (or at least, will probably be regarded as such by Lobster readers) but they set out in miniature what is later writ very large indeed, and it’s worth resisting the effort to skip ahead to the founding of the CIA where the historical record can be compared with Mr Talbot’s narrative.

The Dulles brothers set out to climb the greasy pole of Washington, and in a series of trapeze-like handovers and catches, they succeeded. Foster ensconced himself at the State Department and Allen ended up head of the CIA when Walter Beddell Smith stepped aside. The two of them then made a formidable double act, even if they didn’t always perform seamlessly (episodes in which Foster issued orders to an infuriated Allen and in which Allen refused to support Foster suggest an unresolved childhood power-struggle that isn’t really examined). And on the way to their eventual offices, the pair accumulated a lot of friends and a lot of wealth. Something that Mr Talbot does very well, for example, is to illustrate the extent to which Allen Dulles’s eagerness to topple Iran’s Mossadegh was motivated by the prospect of turning on the tap to let oil money flow into his own bank



account and those of his pals.

Mr Talbot’s writing will be of interest to researchers because it does not shy away from providing parapolitical context – and a lot of it – while avoiding the trap of becoming buried in its own completeness.1 On the other hand, that wealth of context sometimes proves to be rather simple. Take the U2 shootdown that scuppered Eisenhower’s planned peace talks. There are accumulated decades of speculation about what really happened, some of it lapping at the edges of the career of a young Lee Harvey Oswald; but in Mr Talbot’s telling the episode is surprisingly empty. Dulles informed Eisenhower that the U2’s altitude would be out of reach of Soviet anti-aircraft defences. Dulles was wrong and Eisenhower humiliated; and that is the end of that little mystery, apparently.2

Eisenhower, for what it’s worth, came to realise late in his term of office that he should have booted the Dulleses along Pennsylvania Avenue the moment he had the White House keys in his pocket. His famous valedictory warnings, against the machinations of the Military-Industrial Complex, were as much about the extent to which his military strategies had been warped by the CIA director and Secretary of State as they were about the arms merchant plutocracy emerging after the war. In fact, as Mr Talbot shows, the Dulles brothers had reduced the ‘Chinese Walls’ of government to such an extent that the arms industry and the government had become symbiotic. Eisenhower, incidentally, emerges from this

1 For my money, Stephen Dorril’s 1998 MI6: 50 Years of Special Operations was rendered nearly unreadable by the denseness of its prose and the distraction of all the little sidelines that kept opening and closing to no greater purpose. It’s still a great book, but unlike Mr Talbot’s, it’s not one you could read for pleasure2 Talbot tells us that later, after the death of Stalin, Krushchev met with Eisenhower and observed the president’s reliance on an endless stream of private notes slipped to him by the older Dulles brother, interpreting it as a sign of Eisenhower’s lack of command and credibility. What Krushchev didn’t know was that the Dulles brothers had firmly instructed the normally affable Eisenhower to resist smiling or giving any other appearance of warmth. Deprived of his natural ability to establish social rapport, Eisenhower became an actor being fed lines of script that were improvised for him.



book as a far more interesting character than he originally seemed, at least from a research perspective. I can’t help feeling that his presidency deserves a bit more inspection by parapolitical writers, rather than the usual glossing over of his presidency as the ‘old guard’. The grand warrior seems far more of a ‘cusp’ character than he’s understood to be, more complex and conflicted; and what’s more, in Mr Talbot’s book, Eisenhower himself seems aware of his situation.

The passage from pre-war America to the latter half of the 20th Century is all part of the narrative sweep and one thing Mr Talbot does very neatly is to ‘frame’ a new narrative around the bizarre witch-hunts of the McCarthyite 1950s. For Mr Talbot, the entire episode is a show-trial (or, rather, a series of show-trials,), in which the ‘New Deal’ crew left over from the FDR administration were identified and neutralised, effectively establishing the smear that is still in operation among the livelier elements of today’s right: that FDR was an outright socialist, or even a crypto-communist. If McCarthy could squeeze in some of his personal enmities and paranoid vendettas while he was about it, so much the better. Eisenhower himself stays out of the limelight but Richard Nixon can be observed hovering in the wings throughout this section, clearly taking notes.

There is a delightful vignette in which a military intelligence officer was called before McCarthy’s subcommittee and testified that he had a conversation with a CIA officer who stated (‘flatly’) that it might become necessary to assassinate McCarthy ‘as happened with Huey Long’. This is a bit of a facer and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this was meant to be passed to the suggested ‘victim’. This is not the only instance in which Mr Talbot goes on a detour to take in show-trials. In fact they figure frequently in this work. Just off the top of my head, we are taken to the Nuremberg Tribunals, Stalin’s performances during various purges, and the confessions of US personnel captured during the Korean war. The significance of this recurring motif isn’t immediately apparent.

Related to this show-trial theme, in chronicling the



creation of MKULTRA (‘The Manhattan Project of the mind’, in Dulles’s words), Mr Talbot shows that one of Dulles’s genuine fears about his adversaries was well-founded, or at least comprehensible. The downed airmen who confessed to their Korean captors that they had dispersed biological weapons from their planes (including anthrax and bubonic plague) were telling the truth. Dulles, unable to comprehend the unsealing of the captives’ tongues, appears to have inferred that some evil method to unlock their minds had been created. In fact it had been achieved by those time-honoured banalities of evil: stress-positions, harsh interrogations, and the old ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine. And the secret of the illegal bioweapons program was so weighty that Frank Olsen famously went headfirst through a window to preserve it – this being another episode on which Mr Talbot shines a critical spotlight.

Some glimpse of how involved in all this mind control Dulles became is provided by the episodes in which he committed his own unruly son to a psychiatric institution where MKULTRA research was being conducted; he also thoughtfully arranged for a CIA surgeon to give a Dulles niece a lobotomy. The fact that MKULTRA victims tended to come out of their experiences useful to neither the CIA nor society didn’t crease his brow. Mr Talbot relates how one such unfortunate was returned home to a family that she could no longer recognise, unable to use the toilet. Tellingly, Dulles’s son later took his parents up on their offer to book him into a Swiss sanatorium, from which refuge he refused to discharge himself until he was satisfied that his father was dead. On a lighter note, we learn that Operation ARTICHOKE was so-named because it was Dulles’s favourite, er, vegetable. So there's that.

But the main dish here is, of course, the JFK assassination. Dulles effectively disappears while the book’s narrative follows Oswald to Russia and back, then hovers over Lee Oswald’s associates when he settles in Dallas – de Mohrenschildt, the Paine family, et al. George de Mohrenschildt’s long-standing relationship with George HW Bush barely gets a look-in here, being relegated to the sad



and anguished exchange of letters that preceded de Mohrenschildt’s suicide in 1977, while ‘Poppy’ Bush was in the director’s chair at the CIA. As for the memos that indicate the future president was on the periphery of the assassination when it took place, they are not mentioned at all. Nor is the tantalising fact that Bush Snr’s brief tenure at the Agency overlapped the formative stages of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which is a major blind spot in all relevant research areas. This is frustrating, and the absence of this material can only have been deliberate.

When the narrative returns to 1963 and to Dulles, we learn that he made sure to appear in public (giving a speech in Virginia) on the morning of the shooting and then... he disappeared, from the author’s view at least. But not for good, of course. There’s a great deal of assassination evidence-wrangling, the relevance of which is often questionable, but it will not be spoiling the surprise to reveal that there are no real surprises in this bit of the book. Moreover, there are some assassination factoids that have made the cut (e.g. the paraffin cast of Oswald’s cheek that tested negative for gunshot residue is trotted out, even though it was exposed long ago as an irrelevant distraction). These are certainly bum notes, and produce a wince, but the theme is loud, strong, and clear, and is therefore not spoiled by them.

At this point, the narrative turns inside-out, creating a bizarre sense of disorientation. Rather than seeing Dulles moving through events and participating in them, we get to see Dulles writing the history of an event that remains to this day largely opaque. The Warren Commission’s institutional failings have often been written about, but what Mr Talbot achieves here is extraordinary. We get a lengthy and detailed close-up of Dulles driving the Warren Commission’s sluggish inquiries in directions that suited his own ends, going far down some unprofitable avenues and merely squinting in the direction of some others. When he wasn’t steering the Commission itself, he was subtly manipulating his fellow commissioners, setting them off in directions that would lead them to conclusions Dulles had not only anticipated but had



often arranged, so that they reported back what they believed they had learned for themselves.

Suddenly the whole Warren Commission is seen in the light of the recurring show-trials that appear throughout the whole of the book. The perspective this adds is remarkable – how a pantomime of justice with a preordained outcome was really the only possible conclusion. Talbot is far too subtle a writer to force this realisation on the reader. It’s a long discordant crescendo of legal misconduct that ultimately delivers a deeper underpinning to the inevitable climax of the book.

Similarly, the book’s title (which I had presumed to be a play on Zbigniew Brzezinski’s geopolitics doorstopper The Grand Chessboard) is suddenly fulfilled in an unexpected way. Mr Talbot produces quoted remarks from Dulles about his time on the Commission, made to a former CIA colleague a year after the Kennedy murder:

‘[...] The “ifs” just stand out all over it. And if any of those “ifs” had been changed it [the murder] might have been prevented... it was so tantalizing to go over that record [of events], as we did, trying to find out every fact connected with the assassination, and then to say that if one of those chess pieces that had been entered into the game had been moved differently, at any one time, the whole game might have been different.’

Dulles’s slide from the language of inquiry to that of strategy was presumably an unconscious choice of phrase, and reveals the frame of mind the subject invoked in him. Moreover, if you read it again, you’ll see that he could easily be saying that those crucial evidential ‘ifs’ were fictions of his own construction.

Garrick Alder



The Neoconservative Threat to World Order

Washington’s perilous war for hegemony

Paul Craig Roberts

Atlanta (GA): Clarity Press, 2016, $29.95, p/b

Chances are you already know the author’s writing: if you’re reading Lobster you’re probably also reading other left-leaning sites and Roberts is widely published on them.

Roberts is a very striking figure. A distinguished academic economist to begin with, one time member of the Reagan cabinet, he worked at the free market Cato Institute and the Hoover Institution and wrote for the Wall Street Journal.1 Now he is chiefly known as a critic of American foreign policy, somewhere left of Noam Chomsky. There is no direct British comparison but imagine that Mrs Thatcher’s former Chancellor Nigel Lawson now had views on foreign policy similar to those of John Pilger. Something like that.

This book is around 100 of his columns over the period 2014/15 during which the US tried to detach the Ukraine from the Russian sphere of influence by propaganda and covert operations, while waging various wars in the Middle East. Roberts analyses the events week by week. He doesn’t believe a word the American government or state says: it’s all lies, false flags or disinformation. He portrays post-WW2 America as an evil force in the world, killing millions. Though not without faults and errors – he’s working quickly, doesn’t always source his claims and is occasionally guilty of conspiratorial speculation – his writing is an impressive mixture of analysis and polemic

Through this main narrative are striking by-ways: an essay on Nixon, listing the good things the Nixon regimes did (and it’s quite a list, most of which I had forgotten); and an account of the Reagan administration’s supply-side revolution in economics (in which he played a substantial part). He also devotes twenty pages to a long Q and A session with Vladimir Putin; one of his columns is actually headed ‘Vladimir Putin is the leader of the moral world’. But it is America’s foreign policy,

1 Details from his Wikipedia entry.



its military expansion and aggression, which is the bulk of the book.

There are many striking phrases. On the opening page he refers to the American major media as presstitutes – a nice joke, though he didn’t coin the word. The NSA is the ‘National Stasi Agency’, another nice joke but not really justified: the Stasi were the secret police, more akin to the FBI; the NSA is just a surveillance agency. The following paragraphs are just some of the many I noted and may give a sense of Roberts’ writing if he’s new to you.

‘Washington has destroyed the sovereignty of Great Britain, all of Europe and Japan and permits none of the countries in its empire of captive nations to have a foreign policy independent of Washington.’ (p. 241)

‘Reagan and Gorbachav ended the Cold War and removed the threat of nuclear Armageddon. Now the neocons, the US budget-dependent (taxpayer-dependent) US military/security complex, and the US politicians dependent on campaign funds from the military/security complex have resurrected the nuclear threat’. (p. 231)

‘Where does Obama find morons like Susan Rice [National Security Advisor] and Victoria Nuland [Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the United States Department of State]? These two belong in a kindergarden for mentally handicapped children, not in the government of a superpower where their ignorance and arrogance can start World War III’ (p. 23)

And so on.

But while in small doses – a thousand words, the occasional column – Roberts is a blast, over nearly 400 pages the effect diminishes, mostly because of the (unavoidable) repetition involved in running these columns back to back. Even so this is highly entertaining and informative, even with his errors and biases, notably his naivety about the Russian state. Just don’t try to read it all at once. It’s a book for



dipping in and out of.

Robin Ramsay



FinksHow the CIA tricked the World’s Best Writers

Joel Whitney

London and New York: O/R Books, 2016 1

paperback, 328 pages, bibliography, notes, index

Whitney had the bright idea of exploring some of the activities of the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) in the 1950s and 60s by showing how the CCF used and tried to manipulate people who became famous writers. Some of this will be familiar if you have been following the continuing exposure of the activities of the CCF2 but there is a good deal which was new to me. The Paris Review looms large again, and though there is little of substance about it that hasn’t been discussed before3 there is a good deal of new detail. The CIA’s role in getting Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago published in the West is described; as is the Agency’s encounter in Paris with Richard Wright and James Baldwin. They were both initially promoted by the CIA until they noticed that the Agency’s people were only interested in their criticisms of the Soviet Union and not in their views on racism in American. Ernest Hemingway’s paranoia in later life is shown to be rational: he was being followed and spied on. And there is a very funny account of the manic depressive poet Robert Lowell, off his meds and off his head, on a tour of Argentina.

The (to me) new material concerns CCF operations in India – a relatively short section which includes the British journalist Phillip Knightley unwittingly working for a CIA-funded 1 Available at <http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/finks-by-joel-whitney/?utm_source= Lobster&utm_campaign=Finks&utm_medium =review>.2 Most notably Francis Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid the Piper? (London: Granta, 1999). 3 For example in the two essays in Lobster by Richard Cummings, ‘The CIA and The Paris Review’ in Lobster 47 and ‘The fiction of the state: The Paris Review and the invisible world of American letters’ in Lobster 50, neither of which is cited by Whitney. Both these articles are behind Lobster’s little paywall (which helps pay for this site) but the latter piece, which conveys the social scene within which the CCF existed in America better than any other account, has been reproduced intact – without permission or attribution, of course – at <http://smokesignalsmag.com/3/parisreview.html>.



magazine and later meeting the CIA officer whose operation it was – and a fifty page section on South America. At this point the distinction between psy-ops and covert ops blurs and Whitney intercuts the South American CCF operations – involving, inter alia, the young Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and trying to stop Pablo Neruda winning the Nobel prize – with accounts of the Cuban revolution and its impact in South America, subsequent American actions against Cuba, Che’s death and the American-sponsored coups in Guatemala and Brazil.

The CIA’s people in the literary field believed they were promoting the non-communist left (NCL to use the Agency acronym), and nobbling those deemed to be too comm-symp (such as Neruda), with material aimed at the actual and potentially left-leaning intelligentsia (rather than at those on the right, whose support could be taken for granted). But while George Plimpton – to take the obvious example – was promoting writers he approved of in Europe and America, elsewhere in the world his employers were acting as the global enforcer for American capital and the piles of peasant bodies were growing.

There are only two things which raised my eyebrows. The first is the author’s claim that in the summer of 1962 JFK approved the plan to run the coup in Brazil which actually happened in 1964, under LBJ. Whitney cites Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes (Doubleday, 2007) which shows that JFK was discussing discussing the possibility of allowing a military coup in Brazil and approved spending millions of dollars there to undermine the Brazilian president, Joao Goulart. JFK may indeed have approved the coup plan but the evidence of that final step is not there yet as far as I can see.4

The CCF is the main focus of the book but its reach extends way beyond that into other CIA operations: for example, Operation Chaos against the domestic radical media; and, in the final section, ‘Coda: Afghanistan’, he shows how former CCF personnel were involved in the propaganda around the American support for the mujahideen in 4 The evidence, transcripts of recordings of JFK and brother Bobby discussing this, is at <http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB465/>.



Afghanistan. It is here that the second striking assertion appears. He notes (p. 262) that Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s, Secretary of State, has admitted that secret US aid to the mujahideen preceded the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Whitney thinks this probably triggered that invasion;5 and since that ultimately gave us Al Qaeda, 9/11 and ISIS, if it did, this must count as the most stupid and self-destructive act by the American state.

Whitney’s strategy of hanging an account of CCF operations on that organisation’s dealings with people who became famous writers works rather well. He writes nicely – this is not an academic text – the narrative rattles along and it just is interesting to see famous names doing and writing this or that 50, 60 years ago, before the world knew anything about CIA psy-ops. If you are not familiar with the CCF material, this would be a good way into the subject. If you know some of the CCF literature, the sections here on India and South America may well be as new to you as they were to me.

Robin Ramsay

5 Whitney is probably right. ‘An interview in 1988 given by a former Pakistani military official further corroborates this. According to this Pakistani military official, eight months before the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad had asked Pakistani military officials to “to recommend a rebel organization that would make the best use of U.S. aid.”’ <https://web.stanford.edu/class/e297a/ Afghanistan,%20the%20United%20States.htm>



Cold War Anthropology

The CIA, the Pentagon and the growth of dual use anthropology

David H. Price

Durham (North Carolina) and London, Duke University Press,

2016, paperback, 452 pages, bibliography, notes, index.

<www.dukeupress.edu>

Beginning in 1967, journalists and academics have shown that during the first Cold War with the Soviet Union the CIA tried to use, influence and control swathes of intellectual life across the world and at home. Book publishing, art, psychiatry, academia, student organisations, political parties, newspapers, magazines, charities and motion pictures were all incorporated into this anti-Communist crusade.1 And so was anthropology.2

In the first half of his book Professor Price assembles what is now known of the CIA’s (and the Pentagon’s) activities in anthropology during the period leading up to the initial exposure of the Agency’s network of front organisations in 1967. This is an enormously detailed and impressive piece of research, little of which is surprising now. Seeking to understand parts of the world which were largely terra incognita to Americans, the Agency (and the Pentagon; but mostly the Agency) funded anthropological research in areas of interest to it and tried to control the anthropologists’ professional body. It did these things using its front organisations and its agents within the field, or through friendly third parties, such as the Ford Foundation. The careers of those who co-operated flourished; those of the recalcitrant did not.

If the information thus acquired had much impact on American foreign policy – on counter-insurgency strategy, for 1 In reality it was a world-wide conflict between two models of economic development: the American capitalist model (a.k.a. imperialism) versus that of national economic development. ‘Communism’ was a version of national economic development. 2 An account of the events leading up to the initial 1967 articles in the New York Times can be read by going to <https://books.google.co.uk/> and entering there ‘Sarah Miller Harris + Patman’.



example – little evidence of that is is shown here. What did happen was that the use of anthropology as cover for the Agency’s officers and agents in the field contaminated the discipline: in parts of the developing world ‘American anthropologist’ became synonymous with the CIA.

In the second half Price describes in great detail the politics of the American Anthropological Association (AMA) after the CIA’s role was exposed in 1967, when various radical groups within anthropology tried – and ultimately failed – to detach the AMA from state influence and introduce professional limits on research which could be of use to the American military-intelligence state: the dual-use anthropology in the book’s subtitle.

The final chapter has an elegiac tone to it as Price contemplates the state of US universities today.

‘As the generation of 1960s and 1970s activist retires and dies off, universities increasingly find themselves without a generation of professors who know firsthand the history of CIA and Pentagon intrusions on our campuses and in our disciplines. With the loss of this institutional memory, the remaining generations of scholars need to study this history to understand why these relationships endanger prospects of free inquiry. Those who bother learning this history will struggle against an incoming tide, as three decades of neoliberal programs’ impacts on student loan debt, campus austerity programs and new enticements of military funding converge to transform American universities into even greater extensions of military and intelligence programs, as increasingly the remaining tenured faculty respond with silence.’ (p. 363)

Robin Ramsay

