lobster #65 (summer 2013) - lobster magazine
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Lobster 65
Summer 2013
Tittle Tattle
by Tom Easton
The View from the Bridge
by Robin Ramsay
The political significance of the new Pope'?
by Corinne Souza
The SIS and London-based foreign dissidents:
some patterns of espionage
by Corinne Souza
Estes, LBJ and Dallas
by Robin Ramsay
Iraq and Intelligence
by Robin Ramsay
Canada's spy agency gone rogue
by Roderick Russell
David Miliband: working for the man
by John Newsinger
Book Reviews
The secret library of Georges Armoulian
by Anthony Frewin
Destiny Betrayed
by James DiEugenio
Classified: Secrecy and the state in modern
Britain
by Christopher Moran
Going South
by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson
Six Moments of Crisis: inside British foreign
policy
by Gill Bennett
Conspiracy theory in America
by Lance deHaven-Smith
Gangsterismo: The United States, Cuba and the
Mafia: 1933 to 1966
by Jack Colhoun
Tittle-tattle
Tom Easton
Conspiracies and cover-ups
The past year has not been an easy one for those who view
history as just one bumbling cock-up after another.
The Hillsborough inquiry1 revealed a co-ordinated effort
by a large number of public servants not only to deny justice
to the families and friends of those who died in 1989, but one
that blamed those deaths on the victims themselves. The
newly launched Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign2 is
seeking a public inquiry into a systematic effort by police and
prosecutors to pervert the course of justice a few years earlier
in the same part of the world.
The apparent scale of stitch-up required to produce the
LIBOR rate-rigging ‘scandal’ – the Prime Minister’s word – led
him to set up a parliamentary inquiry headed by Andrew Tyrie,
the chairman of the Treasury Select Committee.3 Though Sir
Desmond de Silva’s review into the murder of Belfast solicitor
Pat Finucane4 found no evidence of an ‘overarching state
conspiracy’, he did find plenty of evidence of ‘shocking state
collusion’. Quite where ‘collusion’ shades into ‘overarching
conspiracy’ was not specified, but enough was revealed about
the dirty war to cause the Prime Minister to offer a ‘complete,
absolute and unconditional’ apology to the Finucane family.
We’ve not had quite the same mea culpa from Her
Majesty’s Government over the Mau Mau massacre cover-up
revealed in all its ugly details in the High Court last year.5 But
1 <http://hillsborough.independent.gov.uk>
2 <www.facebook.com/OrgreaveTruthAndJusticeCampaign>
3 <www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18677356>
4 <www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-20662412>
5 <www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/30/maumau-massacre-secret-
files>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
contrast the approach of the late Barbara Castle, who long
campaigned against British treatment of the Kenyans, with
that of her protégé and successor as Blackburn MP, Jack
Straw. He records nothing in his memoirs about Mau Mau
treatment or the documented concoctions and cover-up of his
Foreign Office officials.6
Lord Justice Leveson could have gone much deeper and
wider in his inquiries, but his report showed plenty of
nefarious results of the corrupt networks of influence in the
worlds of press, police and politics extending over many years.
Criminal trials may reveal yet more about Murdoch, the Met
and the Chipping Norton set. Then perhaps Murdoch, the
South Yorkshire Police and the Margaret Thatcher set followed
by Murdoch, the ‘war on terror’ warriors and the Tony Blair
set?
The Birtists
The demise of BBC director general, George Entwistle, was
hastened by a lacklustre performance before the Commons
Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.7 He was
accompanied there by David Jordan, the BBC’s director of
editorial standards and policy, who continued to defend the
Newsnight decision not to run the Savile exposé with a
version of events long shown to be untrue.8
Apart from gossipy little tales about Jordan’s relationship
with Tory MP Tracey Crouch, the mainstream media offered
little background on this important figure at the BBC for more
than 20 years. In his broadcasting youth, Jordan, along with
Peter Mandelson and David Aaronovitch, was part of the
London Weekend Television team recruited by John Birt for his
Weekend World current affairs show. This, according to Birt,
was going to display a different kind of broadcast journalism,
one he famously explained with its initial presenter, Peter Jay,
the son-in-law of former prime minister Jim Callaghan, as
6 Jack Straw, Last Man Standing: memoirs of a political survivor (London:
MacMillan 2011)
7 <www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20039602>
8 <www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/oct/27/jimmy-savile-bbc-policy-
newsnight>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
driven by a ‘mission to explain’.
When Birt, now Lord Birt of Liverpool, became deputy
director-general of the BBC in 1987, Jordan and Aaronovitch
crossed the Thames with him, leaving their old friend Peter
Mandelson, now Lord Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool, in
south London as the Labour Party’s director of
communications. Aaronovitch, after executive positions at the
BBC, left to become a columnist in turn for The Independent,
The Guardian and now The Times and the Jewish Chronicle.
Jordan, meanwhile, rose in the BBC first with Birt, who became
director-general in 1992, and then his successors.
In part the BBC ineptitude revealed by the Savile fiasco
was a legacy of the Birt era, and the ‘Birtspeak’ language of
shuffled responsibility and tick-box leadership was much in
evidence as the saga unfolded.
The huge payoff to Entwistle and the £670,000 the BBC
gave to Caroline Thomson for not landing his job a few months
earlier followed the pattern set by Birt when he became the
first ‘self-employed consultant’ to head the BBC.9 In his train
came huge earnings and tax-convenient forms of payment,
layers of ‘managers’ and with many of the top dogs at the
corporation enjoying private healthcare paid for by the licence
fee of viewers and listeners.10
The Thomson network
Thomson has been part of a cosy establishment network
since working for Lord Jenkins of Hillhead in the early 1980s.
She is already Lady Liddle on account of her husband, Roger
Liddle, an old ally of Lord Mandelson, being Lord Liddle of
Carlisle. (Lobsters passim) The former lobbyist, who survived
exposure by The Observer while a Tony Blair adviser at No 10,
enjoyed a spell as a Brussels eurocrat with Mandelson before
both took ermine and Rothschild cash to fund the launch of
their Policy Network ‘think tank’. Ms Thomson’s father was
Knight of the Thistle Lord Thomson of Monifeith, a Lib Dem
9 <www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2236793/Parade-BBC-chiefs-hit-
pay-jackpot-MPs-fury-executive-gets-670-000--wanted-quit.html>
10 <www.taxpayersalliance.com/home/2011/05/>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
spokesman in the Lords. Her brother-in-law is the Captain of
the Yeoman of the Guard and Deputy Government Chief Whip
in the Upper House, Lord [Richard] Newby of Rothwell, former
chief executive of the Liberal-Democrat party. Oh, where is W.
S. Gilbert when his country needs a new Iolanthe?
Transparency?
The spouse of another peer is Peter Kellner, who enjoyed a
long relationship with the BBC long before he made lots of
money from his polling organisation YouGov. Shouldn’t Radio 4
Today programme listeners have been told at least two things
when Kellner was interviewed last autumn about the fortunes
of UKIP by John Humphrys? One is that YouGov president
Kellner is married to Baroness Ashton of Upholland, the vice-
president of the European Commission, an organisation with a
close interest in the electoral success or failure of Nigel
Farage’s party. The other is that Humphrys helped Kellner
found YouGov, writes for the YouGov website and is reportedly
a company shareholder.11
BAP
Unlike two of his regular co-presenters, Jim Naughtie and
Evan Davis, Humphrys is not part of the British American
Project (BAP) network whose members occupy a fair few
Today programme slots most weeks – Damian Green, Douglas
Alexander, Matthew Taylor, Bob Stewart, Lords Mandelson,
Adebowale, and Turner, Baronesses Amos and Scotland,
Charles Moore, Geoff Mulgan, Olly Grender, Margaret Hodge,
Julia Hobsbawm and Ed Miliband, to name but fifteen.
Rarely in the public limelight during the Newsnight fun
and games was the deputy chair of the BBC Trust, Diane
Coyle, husband of BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones. Coyle –
perhaps a future BBC chair? – was admitted to the BAP in the
‘Class of 1995’, along with the acting editor of The Sunday
Times, Martin Ivens, son of Freedom Association and Aims of
11 <www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/06/yougov-denies-
management-buyout-profits-crash>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
Industry man Michael Ivens.12
The BAP fraternity does not guarantee all its ‘fellows’
total immunity from critical attention. In October, Ivens’ paper
exposed a fellow Project member, former head of the Army
Lord Dannatt, as one of the retired military top brass ‘willing to
cash in on their contacts’ for private companies bidding for
Ministry of Defence contracts.13 Living just around the corner
from Wapping and guarded by beefeaters, ‘Lord Dannatt told
reporters at his Tower of London home that a fee of £100,000
a year would be reasonable’. Didn’t Gilbert and Sullivan once
write something about this?
The BBC’s woeful performance in recent months has
made it hard to defend public service broadcasting, especially
when its public face has been that of pukka establishment
figure Lord Patten. The Independent has managed to offer a
little of that by getting the occasional column from a former
chairman of the corporation, Sir Christopher Bland.14 The
chairman of London Weekend Television when Birt ran
Weekend World, he was on the BBC board when the man who
became Tony Blair’s blue-skies thinker was director general.
But why on earth should 76-year-old Sir Christopher, whose
recreations according to Who’s Who are vintage aircraft,
vintage sports cars and ‘tinkering with water mills’, bother to
write for the loss-making Independent? Could it be because his
28-year-old son, James Franklin Archibald Bland (Winchester,
Cambridge and Fulbright scholar at Columbia) is deputy
editor?
Did we need to know this?
Immediately after Labour MP Denis MacShane resigned from
Parliament for being caught forging expense claims, in young
Archie’s paper appeared a rather bizarre piece from its
veteran political commentator and former Jerusalem
12 <www.brandrepublic.com/news/469491/Radio-4s-John-Humphrys-
set-money-YouGov-float/>
13 <www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/9607480/Cash-for-
access-former-generals-broke-rules-says-Philip-Hammond.html>
14 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Bland>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
correspondent Donald Macintyre.15 Headlined ‘I was Denis
MacShane’s landlord’, Macintyre described how he’d been
friends with MacShane since Oxford days and described the
former Foreign Office minister as ‘a model tenant’.
He went on:
‘The £1,450 a month (the same as for my previous
tenant) rental agreement was fully approved by the
Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, created
in 2009 to make a “clean break” after Westminster was
finally galvanised by the MPs’ expenses scandal, and
which I knew was reimbursing him for the rent. Nor was
there any secret about the fact that for at least part of
the period he was also renting out his London home — it
is a published fact in the Declaration of MPs’ Interests.
‘But in the aftermath of public outrage over MPs’
expenses I knew that it was impossible to defend the
arrangement — however legal — by which MPs could not
claim expenses for mortgage interest but could claim for
renting a property while letting out their own. And to the
extent that I was abetting such an arrangement I was
open to justified criticism as well.
‘Back in July, unaware that the Parliamentary
Commissioner had decided to resume the investigation
after the police decision not to proceed, I warned him
[MacShane] that I would be returning in the autumn and
needed the flat back.’16
Readers may ponder why Macintyre felt the need to volunteer
all this. What might usefully be added by way of context is
that Macintyre wrote a friendly biography of a close political
associate of MacShane and himself an Oxford man, Peter
Mandelson. Its first edition was pulped by Rupert Murdoch’s
Harper Collins imprint after a successful defamation action.
Macintyre later had as editor at The Independent from 2008 to
2010 another Oxford friend of MacShane and Mandelson,
Roger Alton, now a senior Murdoch executive on The Times. As
15 <www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/i-was-denis-macshanes-
landlord-8277922.html>
16 <www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/i-was-denis-macshanes-
landlord-8277922.html>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
editor of The Observer in 2002, Alton vigourously supported
the invasion of Iraq which was strongly backed by Mandelson
and MacShane.
When Alastair met Lance
A Cambridge man himself, but grateful for their Iraq war
support, was Alastair Campbell, who left his No 10 duties for
Tony Blair and New Labour in 2003. One of his early freelance
engagements – his first was to speak at a Friends of Israel
gathering organised by Lord Levy – was to interview big
sporting celebrities for Rupert Murdoch’s Times. One of his
most impressive interviewees, he told us on his blog later,
was the ‘open, funny and engaging’ American cyclist Lance
Armstrong.
Campbell’s glowing account of the man who had fought
his way back to Tour of France success from cancer appeared
in June 2004, exactly when a book taking a rather different
view of Armstrong’s activities had been printed and distributed
secretly in France because of the publisher's fear of the ‘open,
funny and engaging’ cyclist's threat of an injunction.
The book’s author, David Walsh,17was a writer who
knew just a tad more about cycling and Armstrong than the
newly retired spin doctor. Walsh was able to prove then what
was last year confirmed by the US authorities and more
recently by the disgraced and now much-sued cyclist himself,
namely that Armstrong was a regular drugs user who cheated
his way to the seven Tour titles of which he has now been
stripped.
According to Walsh, now chief sports writer at The
Sunday Times, the ‘open, funny and engaging’ man was not
above threatening anyone who blew the whistle on his drug-
taking. That included Armstrong’s British former physical
therapist, Emma O’Reilly, who had provided damning evidence
long before Campbell’s 2004 admiring interview – and was
rewarded by the ‘open, funny and engaging’ American by him
17 <www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/dec/05/david-walsh-british-
journalist-awards>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
calling her an alcoholic and a prostitute.
Since doing his best to polish the reputation of
Armstrong after that of Blair and writing a few books,
Campbell has moved into full-time commercial PR by joining his
old No 10 spin doctor colleagues Tim Allan and David
Bradshaw at Portland.18 A graphic accompanying The
Independent’s coverage of the BAE/EADS merger controversy in
October19 showed Campbell among many New Labour pals.
Those linked to bid backer Morgan Stanley included current
Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, ex-head of MI6 John
Scarlett and ex-Blair chief of staff Jonathan Powell. Portland
figures in addition to Campbell and Allan were Powell’s brother
Chris; Martin Sheehan, a Gordon Brown PR man and Steve
Morris, a one-time Blair adviser. The third Powell, Baron Powell
of Bayswater, who was special envoy to Blair after long
service to Margaret Thatcher, was shown as a former adviser
to BAE.
Exaro
One of the few journalistic thorns in the side of New Labour
governments and those of Tory ones before it was The
Guardian’s veteran digger of dirt David Hencke. Squeezed out
by unappreciative editor Alan Rusbridger in 2009, he has
enjoyed a fresh lease of life working for Exaro News, the
investigative online site,20 scooping the Press Gazette Political
Journalist of the Year award in December.21 Recent Exaro
revelations have led the Metropolitan Police to set up
Operation Fairbank into an alleged paedophile network of
prominent political figures using a guest house in Barnes,
south-west London. Hencke is the loss-making Guardian’s loss
– and that of its shrinking readership too.
18 <www.prweek.com/uk/news/1133230/alastair-campbell-returns-pr-
tim-allans-portland/>
19 <www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/two-days-to-save-
28bn-bae-and-eads-merger-8201367.html>
20 <www.exaronews.com/>
21 <www.exaronews.com/articles/4752/exaro-s-david-hencke-scoops-
political-award>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
Atlantic Bridge
The decision of the Crown Prosecution Service not to
prosecute Adam Werritty,22 the one-time adviser to Liam Fox,
not only afforded relief to the former Secretary of State for
Defence and his long-time friend and flatmate, but also to No
10 – and not just because David Cameron seems to have
plenty of other difficulties on his hands at the moment. The
reason is that the Prime Minister’s vivacious press secretary,
Gabby Bertin – currently on maternity leave – used to work
closely with Mr Werritty and Dr Fox as the researcher and sole
employee of Atlantic Bridge. The controversial Atlanticist
defence ‘think tank’ was shut down after the Charity
Commissioners said in 2010 that its primary objective
appeared to be ‘promoting a political policy [that] is closely
associated with the Conservative party’.
Ms Bertin, a former banker, had her £25,000 salary at
Atlantic Bridge paid by Pfizer, the giant US pharmaceutical
company.
Founded in 1997 by North Somerset MP Dr Fox with
Margaret Thatcher as its president, Atlantic Bridge had current
Cabinet ministers Michael Gove, George Osborne, William
Hague and Chris Grayling on its advisory panel.
Dr Fox resigned in 2011 after being found guilty of
breaching the ministerial code over his relationship with Mr
Werritty, whom he met 40 times in the Ministry of Defence and
on trips abroad. He left office prior to the publication of a
report from the then Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell,
which exposed his mistakes. The report revealed that Fox had
blocked civil servants from attending key meetings alongside
Werritty, had failed to tell his permanent secretary that he had
solicited funds to bankroll Werritty, and had ignored private
office requests to distance himself from him.
Speaking in an interview with BBC Radio Bristol after his
resignation, Dr Fox said: ‘My mistake there was to effectively
22 <www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/adam-werritty-wont-face-
charges-8269993.html>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
allow someone to function as an independent adviser and that
is not allowed under the Ministerial Code. I should have kept a
better separation there – with hindsight, it seems easy.’
Perhaps Ms Bertin, and even Mr Cameron, might have
been called to offer their own view of Dr Fox’s judgement had
the CPS decided to prosecute Mr Werrity.
Alex and Rupert do a deal
There can be little surprise that the SNP, heavily reliant on the
editorial support of Rupert Murdoch, has been steered by
leader Alex Salmond through a U-turn over nuclear weapons
and NATO membership.23 The idea that News Corp would
tolerate a governing party wobbly on close relations with the
United States and its NATO establishment is about as remote
as believing that even one of Murdoch’s hundreds of titles and
channels world-wide would fairly report opposition to the Iraq
War.
Two MSPs resigned from the SNP after the policy change.
One of them, John Finnie, who joined the party 40 years ago,
said: ‘I understand that there are those who wish to stay
within the SNP and to continue to fight our corner in this
essential debate, and I accept their reasons for doing so.
However, I cannot continue to belong to a party that quite
rightly does not wish to hold nuclear weapons on its soil, but
wants to join a first strike nuclear alliance.’
His colleague, Jean Urquhart, added: ‘The issue of
nuclear disarmament and removing Trident from Scotland’s
waters is a red line issue for me. We believe in an
independent Scotland, not a NATO-dependent Scotland.’
First Minister Alex Salmond was reported by STV as being
‘saddened’ by the announcement.
Former NATO general secretary, former UK defence
secretary, and founder member of the British American Project,
Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, reacted by telling a special
edition of Scottish Review: ‘The SNP and its leadership are
23 <http://news.stv.tv/highlands-islands/196279-two-snp-msps-step-
down-as-result-of-partys-u-turn-on-nato/>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
taking us for fools.’24 So no surprises there then from the
man who a year after the Iraq invasion received from George
Bush at the White House the Presidential Medal of Freedom.25
The then US ambassador to Nato, Nicholas Burns, said
that his country’s highest decoration was rarely bestowed on
foreigners: ‘In this case it’s being given to Lord Robertson for
his brilliant and very decisive leadership of Nato and for his
great friendship with the United States.’
The same Nicholas Burns now works alongside Lord
Robertson and former US Defence Secretary William Cohen for
the Cohen Group ‘strategic advice’ company based in
Washington DC.26 Perhaps a future opening there for Mr
Salmond if the referendum doesn’t go well?
Nick Butler
Lord Robertson’s very old friend and fellow founder of the
British American Project way back in 1984 was Nick Butler,
who, according to official BAP history, was the young Chathem
House research fellow on secondment from BP who managed
to find the $425,000 launch money to get the BAP off the
ground. He is still busy in retirement from his day job as right-
hand man to Lord Browne, who resigned as chief executive of
BP in 2007 after being found to have lied repeatedly to the
High Court about his private life.27 Browne, in a continuing
influential public life, subsequently wrote the report ushering
in higher student fees.28
According to the 2013 Who’s Who, Butler still retains the
treasureship of the Fabian Society he has held for over 30
years, and serves as vice-president of the Hay Festival and is
on Yale University’s international advisory board. He is now
24 <www.scottishreview.net/GeorgeRobertson28.shtml>
25 <www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1446366/
Bush-freedom-medal-for-Lord-Robertson.html>
26 <http://cohengroup.net/>
27 <www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1550172/Lord-Browne-resigns-
after-revelations-he-lied-in-court-about-gay-lover.html>
28 <www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/7985953/
Tuition-fees-to-rise-as-Lord-Browne-set-to-reject-graduate-tax.html>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
recorded as being chairman of the policy institute of King’s
College London.29 There is no reference in Who’s Who to his
first marriage – not unusual in its self-censoring entries – but
more surprisingly, perhaps, no mention of his important role in
helping set up the British American Project.
A BAP coda
Two small concluding footnotes on the BAP. The 1998 official
history of the BAP, published soon after Lobster’s disclosure of
the Project’s existence,30 paid tribute to the important role of
banker and former British Steel chairman Sir Charles Villiers31
in easing its birth. His daughter, Diana, has served on the
BAP’s US advisory board under her married name of
Negroponte. Husband John ‘had a distinguished career in
diplomacy and national security’, according to Yale University, 32 with which, like his wife’s old BAP friend Butler, he has a
continuing connection. In 2004 when he was appointed US
ambassador to post-invasion Iraq, his role in Honduras at the
time of the BAP’s foundation was described by Counterpunch
as that of ‘ambassador to death squads’.33
An early recruit to the BAP in 1991, Brendan Barber rose
to be general secretary the TUC and talked a lot of Britain’s
‘stratospheric inequality’.34 After 37 years as Congress House
bureaucrat Barber retired on New Year’s Eve with a £100,000
pay-off in addition to his pension.35 This is not likely to match
the earnings of two of Barber’s other 1991 BAP ‘fellows’,
Damon Buffini and Jonathan Powell. Multimillionaire Buffini, as
chairman of Permira, became the apparently reluctant public
29 <www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/kpi/index.aspx>
30 <www.britishamericanproject.org/howwebegan.asp>
31 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hyde_Villiers>
32 <http://jackson.yale.edu/negroponte>
33 <www.counterpunch.org/2004/06/04/who-is-john-negroponte/>
Noam Chomsky on the appointment of Villiers’s son-in-law to Baghdad
can be read at <www.democracynow.org/2004/6/24/noam_chomsky_
on_john_negropontes_career>.
34 <www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19584508>
35 <www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2202367/Brendan-Barber-TUC-
chief-receive-100-000-golden-goodbye-retires-later-year.html>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
face of private equity.36 Powell is now a senior managing
director with Morgan Stanley37and one of the New Labour
senior network doing quite nicely in Barber’s Britain of
‘stratospheric inequality’.38
Tom Easton is a freelance writer.
36 <www.reuters.com/article/2009/06/12/columns-us-column-buffini-
idUSTRE55B2O820090612>
37 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Powell_%28Labour_adviser
%29>
38 <www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2002302/How-onetime-Labour-
bigwigs-raking-private-sector.html>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
The View from the Bridge
(a kind of blog)
Robin Ramsay
Big stuff or disinformation?
The most interesting and important collection of new
information that I have seen this year is at <http://www.
jancom.org/>. The jancom bit of the URL refers to the Justice
for Asil Nadir Committee and there is pretty convincing
evidence there that he got screwed. But I was most struck by
a document which claims to be pages from a CIA analysis of
the so-called Supergun affair – that bizarre project to build for
Iraq a ‘gun’ with a 750 kilometre range, which ended with the
murder of the ‘gun’s’ designer, Gerald Bull. A declassified but
redacted version of this report is on the Web.1 At jancom.org
is what is said to be three pages of the redacted material from
that report. And this is explosive stuff. In recounting the US-UK
(but apparently mostly UK in this account) covert operations to
arm Iraq and the subsequent events, it describes four
assassinations – Bull, journalist Jonathan Moyle, Belgian
politician André Cools, and one Lionel Jones2 – commissioned
by the late Stephan Kock, allegedly of MI6, and carried out by
British (SAS) personnel.3 This was followed by a vast judicial-
state conspiracy to cover it up.
But is the document genuine? We will probably never
know: the CIA certainly won’t confirm it. My guess is that it
isn’t, that it is disinformation; that someone spotted the
redacted section in the original report and realised they could
1 At <http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_
conversions/ 89801/DOC_0001469609.pdf>
2 His death is discussed by journalist David Hellier at
<https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?3063-
Stephan-Adolphus-Koch>. Hellier’s account there of researching some
of this conveys a sense of the anxiety it generated.
3 They are named in the document but I have no idea if the IDs are
correct and won’t publish the names here.
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
use it.
This is what makes me doubt it.
* Would a CIA report name UK assassins? How would the CIA
know who had done the killings?
* The jancom sites says ‘All the expert evidence indicates that
the CIA report is genuine. It matches the highly redacted copy
released under the US Freedom of Information Act. (FOIA)’.
But the front covers of the two documents, the official
declassified version on the Web (see note 1) and the version
offered by the jancom site are different. And even if they were
identical, things can be copied.
* In the opening paragraph the author – purportedly a CIA
officer of some stripe, writing for other CIA officers – refers to
the ‘Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)’. Would s/he need to put
MI6 in brackets for a CIA audience?
* Brian Crozier is described as a ‘UK Security Service (MI5)
agent’. Not according to Crozier’s memoir, Free Agent, he
wasn’t; and Crozier wasn’t shy about boasting of his
connections to the intelligence world.
On the Web4 is a 2012 account of these pages, in an
English-language Turkish paper, which says the document was
then in the hands of ‘an experienced intelligence expert
[presumably Turkish], who spoke to Cumhuriyet and did not
deny the fact that he/she had worked closely with the CIA for
20 years.’
So: in so far as we can trace the document’s origins at
this stage, it goes back to someone in Turkish intelligence. Asil
Nadir was a Turkish-Cypriot.
But read it for yourself. Some of it will be familiar if you
have read Gerald James’ 1995 In The Public Interest, and
James is quoted on the site. Andrew Rosthorn has pointed out
that some of it appeared in ‘Thatcher, Astra, Iraq & murder of
Gerald Bull’ in Intelligence 81, 8 June 1998, p. 1.
Bilderberg comes to Watford
Watford? Strange choice of venue: close enough to London to
4 <http://en.cumhuriyet.com/?hn=312960>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
invite the demonstrators and the major media to turn up.
Peter Mandelson – now a senior adviser to the bank Lazard;
long way from Hartlepool, Peter! – said the abuse he received
passing the demo was ‘terrible’. He should get out more. So
hats off to those – in the UK notably Tony Gosling
(Bilderberg.org) – who have been working for years to expose
the Bilderbergers.
Two recent events have encouraged Gosling in his belief
that Bilderberg is some kind of central committee of
globalisation. The first was reports in Italy about a book by
Honorary President of the Supreme Court of Italy, Judge
Ferdinando Imposimato. He was quoted thus:
‘In this document, which I have quoted literally, it is
mentioned that the Bilderberg Group is one of the
biggest promoters of the strategy of tension, and
therefore also behind the massacres. Here’s what
Bilderberg does: It rules the world and democracies in
an invisible way, influencing the democratic development
of these countries.’
The document, though not yet available in English, was
written in 1967 by an Italian magistrate, Emilio Alessandrini,
who was later murdered while investigating the Calvi affair.
But since the ‘strategy of tension’ did not occur until the
1970s, whatever Alessandrini wrote in 1967 can hardly show
that Bilderberg was ‘one of the biggest promoters of the
strategy of tension’.
The second event encouraging Gosling was information
he received from HM Treasury when it refused his FOI request
for material the Treasury holds on Bilderberg. The Treasury
stated:
‘Some of the information in the readout from the
Chancellor’s discussions also contains elements which
are intended to inform future Government policy.......’
And in response to Gosling’s appeal against the refusal, the
Information Commissioner:
‘.....has recognized that policy development needs a
degree of freedom to enable the process to work
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
effectively, and that there is public interest in protecting
information where release would be likely to have a
detrimental impact on the ongoing formulation of policy.’
Gosling comments: ‘Hold on a second. Doesn’t the Bilderberg
official website (www.bilderbergmeetings.org) state: ‘…no
detailed agenda, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are
taken, and no policy statements are issued’?
Gosling has interpreted the references to ‘future
Government policy’ and ‘policy development’ as an admission
that Bilderberg makes policy, when it is UK government policy-
making which the Treasury official is invoking to refuse the
information.
The NSA/GCHQ flap
Welcome though all the information was, I found it hard to get
excited about it, mainly because we know in advance that
there is zero chance of the politicians on either side of the
Atlantic actually doing something about it. Personally, I have
assumed for about twenty-five years that all electronic
communications are, in effect, public.
There were, however, two interesting little snippets in
Foreign Secretary William Hague’s speech to the House of
Commons. He didn’t actually deny the central allegations: he
said they were ‘baseless’, which, to the legal mind – and
clever lawyers will have been over his text – is not the same
thing as ‘false’. It was a classic non-denial denial. Secondly,
he said, ‘There is no danger of a deep state out of control in
some way.’ Which must be the first time a British minister has
used the expression ‘deep state’ in the House of Commons.
War is peace
Douglas Valentine5 e-mailed a long list of quotations from
some of America’s senior spooks, generals, diplomats and
policy-makers, all pointing out that the US policy of
assassination by drones from the air and on the ground by
secret military operations, was strengthening not weakening
5 <www.douglasvalentine.com>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
its Jihadist opponents in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and
Somalia. His final rhetorical question was this:
‘Consider in particular the final statement: “A decade of
disastrous US policy, which had strengthened the very
threat it was intended to crush.” And ask, is that really
so? Is it really intended to crush it?’
The answer, obviously, is ‘No, it isn’t.’ William Blum put this as
succinctly as I could in a piece of his, ‘Another Peace Scare’:
‘We have to keep this in mind – America, like Israel,
cherishes its enemies. Without enemies, the United
States appears to be a nation without moral purpose
and direction. The various managers of the National
Security State need enemies to protect their jobs, to
justify their swollen budgets, to aggrandize their work,
to give themselves a mission, to send truckloads of
taxpayer money to the corporations for whom the
managers will go to work after leaving government
service.’ 6
Surprised?
Peter Doggett’s There’s A Riot Going On: revolutionaries, rock
stars and the rise and fall of ‘60s counter-culture (Edinburgh:
Cannongate, 2007/8) recounts how the Black Panthers
received their first guns from a student radical, Richard Aoki. A
few days after reading that I noticed in a review of Seth
Rosenfeld’s Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and
Reagan’s Rise to Power7 that Aoki had been working for the FBI
at the time. What would the American left have looked like
without the federal government’s involvement?
Brain waves
Three significant pieces warning us about the dangers of
electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobile phones, their
towers and wi-fi systems. ‘What the Cellphone Industry
6 <http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18879.htm>
7 <www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/may/23/berkeley-what-
we-didnt-know/?pagination=false>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
Doesn’t Want You to Know About Radiation Concerns: A
leading expert on health effects from cellphone radiation goes
to battle against a multi-trillion-dollar industry’,8 is an
interview with Dr. Devra Davis,9 and contains some fascinating
and alarming material about the cellphone industry’s campaign
to, as they put it in a memo, ‘game the science’. And they
have a budget of $250 million with which to do it. (If there was
no problem, they wouldn’t need the budget, would they?) As
well as describing the science, Davis talks about the fate of
various scientists who dared to question the mobile phone
industry’s assurances about the safety of its products. In an
earlier article Davis goes into more detail about the science.10
The third piece is Marko Markov and Yuri G. Grigoriev, ‘Wi-Fi
technology – an uncontrolled global experiment on the health
of mankind’, 11 whose content you can infer from the title.
Plus ça change?
Looking at Lobster’s website recently it struck me how far from
the original conception of Lobster it has travelled. Yes, some
themes remain from the early years: the interest in the elites,
conspiracy theories and JFK’s assassination. But what has
diminished enormously is the attention paid to the intelligence
and security services; and what is relatively recent is the
coverage of political economy.
I have stopped reporting much on the spooks simply
because it no longer interests me greatly (and, apart from
Corinne Souza, no-one else has offered me any material on
the subject). When this venture began in 1983 there was
hardly any reporting on the British secret state and it seemed
worthwhile to collect what fragments we could. Three things
have changed. There are now mountains of information in the
major media; there is no point in pushing this material at the
Labour Party in the hope of getting political action because
8 <www.alternet.org/personal-health/radiation-concerns-about-
cellphones?page=0%2C0>
9 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devra_Davis>
10 <www.huffingtonpost.com/devra-davis-phd/cell-phones-brain-
cancer_b_3232534.html>
11 <http://www.viewdocsonline.com/document/6kn1ey>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
they will do nothing;12 and the secret state no longer seems
as important as it did in the 1980s.
As for the recent interest in political economy, I was
always interested in this but before 2008 didn’t feel it
appropriate to use Lobster for it.13 But with the big crash my
perception changed. The Labour left’s critique in the early
1980s of the malign influence on the British economy of the
City, with which I agreed, suddenly became extremely relevant
and I was glad that I still had, inter alia, my copy of the Labour
Party’s 1982 publication, The City: A Socialist Approach.14
And so, on with the political economy.
What do Osborne and Cameron think they are
doing?
When Cameron and Osborne took office I used to speculate
with a couple of correspondents about what they thought
they were doing. It was obvious that they had one eye on the
first Thatcher government which raised interest rates (and so
reduced demand in the economy) in 1981 while in a recession
of their own making. This was the incident which provoked the
letter signed by 364 economists, who wrote, inter alia:
‘There is no basis in economic theory or supporting
evidence for the Government’s belief that by deflating
demand they will bring inflation permanently under
control and thereby induce an automatic recovery in
output and employment … [P]resent politics will deepen
the depression, erode the industrial base of our
economy and threaten its social and political stability.’
It doesn’t take a whole lot of knowledge to recognise that the
12 In 1989 or 1990 a resolution of mine on making the intelligence
and security services accountable went to the Labour Party conference
and was passed without opposition. Formally, the absence of
opposition meant that my resolution automatically became Labour
Party policy. It has never been mentioned since.
13 It was present in my book Prawn Cocktail Party and booklet The Rise
of New Labour.
14 The key article for me had been Frank Longstreth, ‘The City,
Industry and the State’ in Colin Crouch (ed.) State and Economy in
Contemporary Capitalism (London: Croom Helm, 1979)
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
economists were right. Yes, inflation fell from a monthly
average of 12% in 1981 to a monthly low of 3.7% in May
1983.15 But any fool can bring down inflation by causing mass
unemployment. The free marketeers who are impressed by
this fall in inflation ignore the fact that it rose again in the later
1980s and was averaging about 8% in 1989; and they ignore
the fact that the Thatcher government’s economic policies did
precisely ‘erode the industrial base of our economy and
threaten its social and political stability’.
Osborne and Cameron had also been much impressed
by the experience of Canada where large cuts in state
expenditure had been followed by economic revival. In 2010
The Telegraph ran a report, ‘Coalition government: the
Canadian cuts model that the Tories wish to emulate’ on the
Canadian government’s experience in the early 1990s of
cutting state spending by 20% more or less across the board
in response to a large state deficit.16
In his Mais Lecture in 2010 Osborne referred to Canada -
and also to the experience of Sweden and said:
‘As Goran Persson, the Social Democrat Prime Minister of
Sweden who eliminated a huge budget deficit following a
financial crisis and a deep recession in the early 1990s,
used to say, “a country in debt is not free”.’
He also gave prominence to the research by Rogoff and
Reinhart and said of them:
‘The[ir] latest research suggests that once debt reaches
more than about 90% of GDP the risks of a large
negative impact on long term growth become highly
significant.’
So in 2010 Osborne and Cameron believed the Rogoff and
Reinhart research was true; and that Sweden and Canada in
the 1990s showed that large scale government cuts were
followed by economic growth in the wider economy. So no
15 Inflation figures from < http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/
datablog/2009/mar/09/inflation-economics >
16 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/
canada/7807047/Coalition-government-the-Canadian-cuts-model-
that-the-Tories-wish-to-emulate.html>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
wonder they are in deep shit! First, Rogoff and Reinhart’s
conclusions have been shown to be false, based on errors by
the authors.17 (And are, in any case, refuted by the
experience of – for example – the UK economy after WW2,
which, with debts of over 200% of GDP at war’s end,
experienced low inflation and decent economic growth for the
next 25 years.) And second, the Swedish and Canadian
economies in the 1990s were not in a global recession and
thus their experience then is not relevant now.18 What no-
one on the austerity side of the argument has offered is an
example of an economy growing after large public sector cuts
while in a global recession.
Citythink
I like many of Simon Jenkins’ columns in the Guardian and
often agree with him. On 7 May 2013, he wrote this:
‘Meanwhile, Britain’s one world-class industry, financial
services, is in the sights of every jealous EU regulator.’ 19
Is the City the UK’s only ‘world-class industry’? No, it’s not.
And even if it was, at what cost to the rest of the British
economy did it achieve this prominence? This is the bit of the
story the City’s boosters never think about.20 One of those is
Dan McCurry, author of ‘The case for the City’ in Labour
Uncut.21 McCurry wrote:
‘The towers that I see when I look from my kitchen
17 See Paul Krugman on the failure of austerity < http://www.
nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/06/how-case-austerity-has-
crumbled/?pagination=false> and <www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/
johncassidy/2013/05/austerity-an-irreverent-and-timely-history.html>.
18 The free marketeer Centre for Policy Studies published a pamphlet
in January 2012, How to Cut Government Spending: lessons from Canada
and even they noted that ‘Canada’s economic crisis happened when
the gobal economy was reasonably healthy.’ <http://www.cps.org.uk/
files/reports/original/120111114741-2012Howtocutgovernment
spending.pdf>
19 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/07/david-
cameron-eu-referendum-now>
20 For a short introduction to this see Longstreth in note 14 above.
21 <http://labour-uncut.co.uk/2013/05/15/the-case-for-the-
city/#more-16374>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
windows contain the industry that pays for our schools
and hospitals. We should appreciate that industry not
run it down. If we are to have an industrial policy then it
should include financial services.....
Although we do need to create space for other
sectors to flourish, it doesn’t follow that we have to
destroy finance in order to achieve that......’
Two obvious points: first, no-one is talking about ‘destroying
finance’. Regulating it, yes; reducing its influence, yes.
Second, while it is true that being highly paid the financial
sector contributed significantly to the state’s tax income, at its
peak that contribution was only 12%; and some of that,
perhaps half, is the domestic financial sector, located on
Britain’s high streets, not in the gleaming towers of Canary
Wharf. That 12% didn’t ‘pay for our schools and hospitals’: it
paid for some of them. And some of those paying that 12%
also organised the tax evasion and avoidance of the global
companies trading here which, I would guess, was significantly
more than they paid in taxes.
Eurobollocks?
For Simon Jenkins, ‘financial services, is in the sights of every
jealous EU regulator.’ Whatever the motivation of the EU’s
regulators, it is clear that as the present UK government and
any foreseeable future UK government is not going to get to
grips with the City and its global gambling, the best bet for
nailing the banksters’ feet to the floor lies with the EU. Which
creates a curious dilemma for me. I think the EU is absurd, a
menace in many ways, and I would vote for UK withdrawal –
were it not for the fact that the threat posed by the banksters
is greater than that posed by the Eurocrats’ delusory dreams.
So, come on, Brussels! Bring on the regulations!
It is perhaps not a coincidence that opposition to EU
membership in this country appears to be rising in step with
the threat to the City’s independence.
Let me recommend Neil Barofsky’s Bailout: How
Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street
(London: Simon and Shuster/Free Press, 2012). Barofsky was
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
a prosecutor who was recruited to oversee the financial bail-
out in the TARP funds; and, as the subtitle suggests,
discovered that while it was sold to Congress as a means of
preventing mass defaulting on domestic mortgages, it was
mostly grabbed by the banks. This is an entertaining and
illuminating ‘outsider-joins-Washington’ tale. Barofsky, on the
inside, shows the reader that it was just as bad as it looked
from the outside.
Two pieces of mine, on politicians’ ignorance of
economics and Labour’s capitulation to the City of London –
largely recycled from material in recent Lobsters – are at
<http://taxjustice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/tax-justice-focus-
volume-8-number-1.html> and <http://www.newleftproject.
org/index.php/site/article_comments/how_labour_embraced_
the_city>.
Clean hands?
When Lobster began, back in the early 1980s, co-founder
Steve Dorril and I we spent a lot of time collecting little
snippets of information, especially about the intelligence and
security services (little snippets was all there was then). One
such snippet has appeared in a letter to the London Review of
Books. In a response to a review by Bernard Porter of Calder
Walton’s Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and
the Twilight of Empire 22 David Lea, former TUC official, now in
the House of Lords, wrote in the next issue:
‘Referring to the controversy surrounding the death of
Patrice Lumumba in 1960, Bernard Porter quotes Calder
Walton’s conclusion: “The question remains whether
British plots to assassinate Lumumba … ever amounted
to anything. At present, we do not know” (LRB, 21
March). Actually, in this particular case, I can report that
we do. It so happens that I was having a cup of tea with
Daphne Park – we were colleagues from opposite sides
of the Lords – a few months before she died in March
2010. She had been consul and first secretary in
Leopoldville, now Kinshasa, from 1959 to 1961, which in
22 Vol. 35, No. 6, 21 March 2013.
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
practice (this was subsequently acknowledged) meant
head of MI6 there. I mentioned the uproar surrounding
Lumumba’s abduction and murder, and recalled the
theory that MI6 might have had something to do with it.
“We did,” she replied, “I organised it.”’
The sources on my shelves and on the Net do not stand this
up. Nonetheless, it is a noteworthy comment because if there
has been a single theme running through commentary from
MI6 and its media assets in the past 30 years it is that MI6
does not do assassination. Now, apparently, it is OK to boast
that it certainly used to do so.
DiEugenio on Parry
Jim DiEugenio took slight umbrage at my review of his book on
the Kennedy assassination in this issue. In that review I said
that he was very good indeed; and if further evidence is
needed to support that claim, it is supplied by his long review
essay on Robert Parry’s new book, America’s Stolen
Narrative.23 Parry’s book looks important. I will review it
further down the road.
Pass the tinfoil
In 1989 I met Harlan Girard who gave me a pile of
photocopied articles, among which were accounts of the
dangers of electromagnetic radiation (EMR). He also told me a
strange story about being monitored and directed by the CIA
using microwaves. I now have an entire filing cabinet drawer
of material on these subjects, which we might loosely call EMR
and its uses. Which explains why I still do not have a mobile
phone. (I should put an EMR-emitting device next to my
brain?) The evidence is pretty clear that they are bad for us.
But I do have a router. When I had a techie round to
install a second Internet connection for my partner, I was
talking about putting in a second landline to avoid the EMR
from a router. My techie showed me that I was already in the
23 <http://consortiumnews.com/2013/03/30/dieugenio-on-parrys-
new-book/>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
EMR fields of four of my immediate neighbours’ computers. In
an urban environment it is impossible to avoid this stuff. So I
went for a router. And the slow demise of the public landline
system means that I will have to get a mobile phone any
minute now.
Happily I am not electrosensitive and do not have to go
to the lengths of some of those described in Nicholas Blincoe’s
sympathetic account of electrosensitives and the hazards of
EMR in the Guardian Weekend at the end of March.24
Killing Olof Palme
At <www.oledammegard.com/StatskuppISlowmotion.pdf> you
can download a 1000 plus PDF pages on the assassination of
Olof Palme. I have only lightly skimmed through this so far and
as far as I can see there is a lot of interesting information here
– for example about the Swedish Masons – as well as a lot of
speculation. His analysis of the shooting and its immediate
aftermath is hard to follow and it made me realise how difficult
the JFK assassination material must be for those coming to it
for the first time.
Another Met spook outed
Mark Metcalf has written an interesting piece on his
identification of the Metropolitan Police agent who infiltrated
the Colin Roach Centre (CRC) in Hackney when Metcalf was
working there.25 This is of particular significance to Lobster
because this agent, Mark Jenner of the Met’s Special
Demonstration Squad, was there while the CRC was helping
Malcolm Kennedy, who was framed for murder by members of
the Met, about whose case Jane Affleck has written at length
24 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/29/
electrosensitivity-is-technology-killing-us> A recent interesting and
intelligible account of the physiology of electrosensitivity is at
<http://www.electrosmogprevention.org/public-health-alert/wifi-
dangers/wifi-emfs-electrosensitivity-es-ehs-physiologically-explained-
at-last/>.
25 <http://www.bigissueinthenorth.com/2013/03/there-is-no-way-of-
knowing-how-much-damage-jenner-caused/7622>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
in these columns.26
Undermining Chavez
In issue 115 of his Anti-Empire Report, William Blum has a
detailed account, from official documentation published by
Wikileaks, of one of the American campaigns to destabilise the
regime of the late Hugo Chavez.27 When Chavez died there
was a deal of discussion of the proposition that maybe the US
had induced Chavez’s cancer. Much derision was pored on the
idea. Of course it is possible, not using chemicals or drugs,
which were discussed, but electromagnetic radiation (EMR).
(Was anyone monitoring EMR around Chavez?) The US
embassy in Moscow was irradiated in the 1960s by the Soviet
regime, resulting in the death of at least one member of the
staff, and kicking-off the US military’s intensive study of the
military applications of EMR.28
Stoned again
The new 12 part revisionist history of America by Oliver Stone
and Peter Kuznik is being broadcast in the UK by Murdoch’s
Sky Atlantic – a further demonstration (if one were needed)
that Murdoch generally puts profit before ideology. The New
York Review of Books got the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz
to review it and he devoted almost all of his three page review
to the Stone-Kuznik account of why vice president Henry
Wallace was dumped by Roosevelt during WW2 – obviously
the most important part of the series, right? For what it’s
worth, I think Wilentz makes a pretty good case against
Stone-Kuznik on this issue, but that hardly matters. The irony
(to which he and his editors are oblivious) is that Wilentz
accuses Stone-Kuznik of ‘cherry-picking’ ........29 26 In issues 39, 41 and 51, for example. An introduction to the
Kennedy case is at <www.red-star-research.org.uk/>.
27 <www.killinghope.org/bblum6/aer115.html>
28 See <http://www.emfacts.com/2012/06/john-goldsmith-on-
scientific-misconduct-and-the-lilienfeld-study-an-oldie-but-still-
relevant-today/>.
29 <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/21/oliver-
stone-cherry-picking-our-history/?pagination=false>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
Inside Wall St
Nick Chirls was a young Yale graduate who, like 40% of his
Yale year (his figure), went into finance. He joined Lehman
Brothers just before the crash – and hated it. Chirls has
written a very interesting, short account of life at Lehman
Brothers before it went down the pan.30 It contains a number
of quotable sections. Here’s the most striking.
‘Unfortunately, what I eventually came to learn, and this
took time, was that what was really happening was a
simple transfer of wealth, more often than not from the
less intelligent and informed to the more so. I worked in
a highly opaque market. There was no price ticker
scrolling across our screens telling us what these bonds
and derivatives we traded were worth. In fact, no one
really knew what any of this stuff was worth. Which, it
turns out, is a trader’s field day. What this meant, in its
simplest form, is that these traders (or salespeople)
could buy bonds at the “market” price from intelligent
hedge fund managers in NYC and sell this same crap at
much higher levels to unsophisticated (but legally
considered “sophisticated”) pension funds and insurance
companies in middle America. What I discovered, quite
starkly, is that the part of Wall Street that I worked in
was simply transferring wealth from the less
sophisticated investors, often teachers’ pension funds
and factory workers’ retirement accounts, to the more
sophisticated investors that call themselves proprietary
trading desks and hedge funds. Of course, the traders
had all sorts of excuses and jargon to deal with this
truth. “Oh no,” they would say, “We are important
providers of liquidity that create stable financial markets.
We’re a crucial part of a system. And besides, if we don’t
do it, someone else will.” These are the lies that people
tell themselves so that they can buy larger homes.’
Iraq invasion: tenth anniversary30 <http://nickchirls.com/my-time-at-lehman>
www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
Summer 2013 Lobster 65
Monday 18 March was quite a day for those of us against the
invasion of Iraq. On the BBC News Website, Peter Taylor
conveyed the central gist of his programme later that night on
Panorama about the intelligence failures which led the
leadership of the US and UK to believe – or pretend to believe
– that the Iraq regime had WMDs. Essentially: US politicians
chose to believe fabricators and ignored intelligence which
said there were no WMDs. In the case of the Americans, this is
hardly surprising: they were bent on the invasion and nothing
short of Saddam Hussein’s dismantling of his regime – and
maybe not even that – would have prevented the assault.
Apparently unable just to say publicly that ‘We have to to
support the Americans’, it was Tony Blair who needed to
persuade himself that the cause was justified by the
‘intelligence’ on WMDs.
The 18th also saw striking quotations in an article in the
Guardian31 from the heads of British armed forces at the time,
condemning the invasion as incompetent, ill-thought out etc.
Good to read, chaps, but I remember that nobody said
anything when it might have mattered. And nobody resigned.
Careers apparently come before the national interest – and
the interests of the armed forces.
Also reflecting on Iraq ten years on was erstwhile MI6
officer and now Conservative MP Rory Stewart, who took part
in the invasion/occupation. Stewart concluded:
‘The question for Britain is what aspect of our culture,
our government, and our national psychology, allowed
us to get mired in such catastrophe? Everyone –
including Cumbrians – should try to understand what
happened. We need to reform the army, the Foreign
Office, our intelligence agency, and the way parliament
debates war, to make us more knowledgeable, more
prudent, and more willing to speak truth to power. We
must expose not only the politicians but also the
generals and civil servants who failed to challenge the
31 Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Iraq war planning wholly irresponsible, say
senior UK military figures’, <www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/17/
iraq-war-planning-wholly-irresponsible>.
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
system, emphasise the disaster, or press hard enough
for withdrawal. We must recognise how easily we
exaggerate our fears (‘terrorism’ and ‘weapons of mass
destruction’) and how easily we hypnotise ourselves
with theories (‘state-building’ and ‘counter-insurgency’).
We must acknowledge the limits of our knowledge,
power, and legitimacy.’32
Cold War origins
In the previous issue of Lobster I referred to the US ‘faking’
the Cold War. That was glib and overstated. The US pursuit of
armed confrontation with the Soviet Union arose from the
interaction of several factors in a very complicated period in
world history.
The first was the plans of America’s ruling elite. Shoup
and Minter’s study of US wartime planning for the post-WW2
world,33 shows that the dominant role in that planning was
played by the Council on Foreign Relations, the CFR of a
thousand conspiracy theories. Those plans were that, led by
the East Coast internationalist elite – bankers and their banks’
lawyers for the most part – America would dominate much of
the world when WW2 ended and open it up to American
capital. Parallel to this the US government would lend dollars
to the world – especially war-ravaged Europe – with which
those countries could buy American goods. One of the key
figures in the process wrote in 1942 that the problem for the
US economy was:
‘how to create purchasing power outside of our country
which could be converted into domestic purchasing
power through exportation. In practical terms, this
matter comes down to the problem of devising
appropriate institutions to perform after the war the
function that Lend-Lease is now performing.’ 34
The CFR people thought this could be achieved by economic
32 <www.rorystewart.co.uk/looking-back-on-iraq/>
33 Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1977)
34 Shoup and Minter p. 165.
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
muscle but underestimated the resistance the US would meet
from other nation states (who recognised American
imperialism when they saw it) and the resistance their faction
would meet within domestic politics. Although the isolationists
had been defeated during the early years of the war,
isolationist sentiment had not been extinguished; the mass
demobilisation of US forces at war’s end supplied millions of
men and women who had no sympathy for continued foreign
adventures; and there was a considerable body of fiscal
conservatives in Congress who wanted to see the state
shrunk back to its pre-war size.
The second factor was the fear of a return to pre-war
economic depression which was felt by everyone.
The third factor was pork barrel politics: by war’s end
there were many members of congress with military plant and
bases or military-linked manufacturing in their districts, who
made common cause with local business in seeking to
maintain spending (and thus employment) in their areas. We
might say that the war economy had created the military-
industrial complex and it was keen to ensure its survival. For
example, during the war the US aircraft industry had been
transformed by the production of 300,000 military aircraft. At
war’s end most of those orders stopped. Lockheed’s
President, Robert Goss, was testifying before Congress a
couple of months after the war finished that the aircraft
industry had answered the nation’s call during the war and it
now needed the state to provide it with new orders.35 A
couple of years later the aircraft industry persuaded President
Truman to create a commission to look at the problem. Which
commission, after taking testimony from the aircraft industry
and the US Air Force, duly recommended increased military
spending to prepare the US for the next world war.36
All these interests needed a new ‘threat’ to continue
with military spending; and all found it congenial to interpret
35 William D Hartung, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the making
of the military-industrial complex (New York: Nation Books, 2011) pp.
36 See Hartung (note 35) pp. 55/6. On the commission’s chief,
Thomas Finletter, see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_K._Finletter>.
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Soviet diplomatic behaviour after the war as threatening.37 A
crusade against communism could be sold more easily than
reshaping the world to benefit American capital. It was a
familiar theme: at the end of the first World War the US had a
domestic crusade against communism. Happily for all
concerned, the US had a president, Harry Truman, who, as
vice president had been excluded from the major war decision-
making, and was a believer in the threat posed by
international communism.
The crusade against the communist threat was
irresistible and those who opposed it were ignored or crushed
as com-symps, fellow-travellers, naifs. George Kennan, deputy
head of the U.S. mission in Moscow until April 1946, the author
of the famous ‘long telegram’ from Moscow, had the galling
experience of seeing his advice about ‘containing’ the Soviet
Union by political and economic means, presented as advocacy
of military confrontation. And so the Cold War began, driven by
the domestic economic needs of America.
Wag the dog 2
The basic mechanism of the American military-industrial
complex is simple: find or create a threat then provide a
defence against it. In the 1997 film satire Wag the Dog, a
‘threat’ from Albania is created. In the satire-proof America of
2013 the threat is North Korea. The Washington Post reported
on 15 March:
‘The Pentagon announced Friday that it would
strengthen the country’s defenses against a possible
attack by nuclear-equipped North Korea, fielding
additional missile systems to protect the West Coast at
a time of growing concern about the Stalinist regime.’ 38
Even though North Korea does not have a missile which can
37 A recent interpretation of Soviet post-war behaviour as not
threatening, and the Cold War as essentially bogus, is Andrew
Alexander, America and the imperialism of ignorance (London: Biteback,
2011). Alexander is a columnist for the Daily Mail.
38 <www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-to-
strengthen-missile-defense-system-on-west-
coast/2013/03/15/c5b70170-8d9a-11e2->
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reach America, or a warhead to mount on it, it is a ‘threat’
nonetheless. Or, a more accurately, a potential threat. The
article reported Under-secretary of Defense James Miller as
saying:
‘Our policy is to stay ahead of the threat — and to
continue to ensure that we are ahead of any potential
future Iranian or North Korean ICBM capability.’
Tam and Cav
There is a very interesting obituary by Tam Dalyell of Anthony
Cavendish, the MI6 officer turned banker, friend of MI6 chief
Maurice Oldfield.39 Dalyell reports in his usual guileless fashion
that he and Cavendish were chums and Cavendish would give
him material with which to ask parliamentary questions. He
also tells us that Cavendish, though formally not with MI6 in
the last 40 years, informally was. Would it be overstating it to
say that Cavendish was running Dalyell? I’ll bet Cavendish
saw it that way.
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make
words mean so many different things.’
Mickey Huff, Andy Lee Roth and Project Censored’s Censored
2013: dispatches from the media revolution (New York: Seven
Stories, 2012) contains an anthology of stories the American
major media ‘censored’ in 2011/12. Except, not really: the
stories written about here have all been reported by the
American media somewhere. The book should have been
called Neglected 2013, or Underreported 2013. But ‘neglected’
and ‘underreported’ don’t quite have the drama of ‘censored’,
do they? No matter: our editors have found a way round this:
they have changed the meaning of censored. They are using a
39 <www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/anthony-cavendish-
intrepid-intelligence-officer-who-fought-terrorism-in-the-middle-east-
8531488.html> I met Dalyell a couple of times. At our first meeting,
in the House of Commons, I think, Dalyell put his hand in his jacket
pocket and took out some rather tired-looking lettuce and offered it to
me. As you do.... Politely, I hope, I declined.
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‘broader definition of censorship’:
‘...censorship includes stories that were never
published, but also those that get such restricted
distribution that few in the public are likely to know
about them. In sum, censorship [is].....anything that
interferes with the free flow of information in a society
that purports to have a free press system.’ (p. 30)
This strikes me as nonsense. We know what censored means:
it means suppressed, deliberately spiked (these days,
deleted). You can’t seriously claim that ‘censorship
[is].....anything that interferes with the free flow of information
in a society’, if only because it is impossible to define ‘the free
flow of information in a society’.
However it is not the first time those on the left have
tried to modify the term ‘censored’ for their own ends. This
item below appeared in ‘View from the Bridge’ in Lobster 36.
Lost plot
After Lobster 35 I received a long letter from John Pilger,
followed by a revised version of it, complaining about my
review of his recent book, Hidden Agendas in 35. With
the second version came a note asking me to publish his
letter without comment. I replied that I was happy to
publish his 1500 word letter but not without comment.
Back came the reply that my review ‘was not merely
mean-minded in the extreme, it was a gross
misrepresentation, and with an agenda’ (I confess that I
am still in the dark about this ‘agenda’); that by refusing
to publish his letter without comment ‘I was imposing a
form of censorship’; and I was now forbidden to publish
his letter.
By agreeing to publish his letter uncut I am
censoring him?
Action this day (not)
Boy, the headline was sexy: ‘Tax avoidance firms will be
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banned from major government contracts’. Danny Alexander,
chief secretary to the Treasury, described the changes as
‘another significant tool which will provide a framework to
enable government departments to say no to firms bidding for
government contracts where they have been involved in failed
tax avoidance’. 40
Was something serious actually being done by the
coalition? Alas, no. The next day Professor Prem Sikka
noted:41
‘The proposed policy only applies to bidders for central
government contracts. Thus tax avoiders can continue to
make profits from local government, government
agencies and other government-funded organisations –
including universities, hospitals, schools and public
bodies. Banks, railway companies, gas, electricity, water,
steel, biotechnology, motor vehicle and arms companies
receive taxpayer-funded loans, guarantees and
subsidies, but their addiction to tax avoidance will not be
touched by the proposed policy.
The policy will apply to one bidder, or a company,
at a time and not to all members of a group of
companies even though they will share the profits. Thus,
one subsidiary in a group can secure a government
contract by claiming to be clean, while other affiliates
and subsidiaries can continue to rob the public purse
through tax avoidance. There is nothing to prevent a
company from forming another subsidiary for the sole
purpose of bidding for a contract while continuing with
nefarious practices elsewhere....
The policy will not apply to the tax avoidance
industry, consisting of accountants, lawyers and finance
experts devising new dodges......
The proposed government policy will not work. It
expects corporations who can construct opaque
corporate structures and sham transactions to come
40 <www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/feb/14/tax-avoidance-firms-
banned-contracts>
41 <www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/15/uk-tax-
avoiders-wont-stop-new-policy?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
clean. That will not happen. In addition, a government
loth to invest in public regulation will not have the
sufficient manpower to police any self-certifications by
big business.’
The old lady’s best guess
Since NuLab began worshipping at the feet of the City of
London in the mid 1990s, I have been collecting and
publishing information on the City’s contribution to the UK
economy. Except ‘information’ would be overstating it: I have
been collecting guesses or estimates; there is no ‘information’.
In the Bank of England Quarterly Review, Q3, 2011, there is an
essay ‘Measuring of financial sector output and its contribution
to UK GDP’, the first table of which gives us the Bank’s best
guess: that at its peak the financial sector was about 9% of
UK GDP.42 It is widely assumed that of the financial sector
about half is domestic – our banks, building societies etc. –
and thus that the international, ‘world financial hub’ financial
sector was about 4.5% of GDP, at its peak. Which is not
insignificant but does not compensate for the loss of about
15% of GDP which was manufacturing, which successive
governments, starting in 1980, destroyed by pursuing the
economic agenda of the financial sector – the single biggest
mistake made by governments since WW2 and the major
cause of our current economic predicament.
The murder of Pat Finucane
I wonder if anyone outside the state has actually read all 800
pages of The Report of the Patrick Finucane Review by the Rt
Hon Sir Desmond de Silva QC.43 So far I have only read the
summary, in which these seemed to me to be the key
sections.
‘In my view, the running of effective agents in Northern 42 <www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/
quarterlybulletin/qb110304.pdf>
43 <www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/hc1213/hc08/0802/
0802.pdf>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
Ireland was such a fraught and difficult task that it
manifestly required the support of a clear legal and
policy framework. I have established, though, that there
was no adequate framework in Northern Ireland in the
late 1980s. Accordingly, each of the three agencies
running agents – the RUC SB, the Army’s Force Research
Unit (FRU) and the Security Service – operated under
their own separate regimes. The result was that: the
RUC SB had no workable guidelines; the FRU were
subject to Directives and Instructions that were
contradictory; and the Security Service received no
effective external guidance to make clear the extent to
which their agents could be permitted to engage in
criminality in order to gather intelligence.
It was apparent that successive Governments
knew that agents were being run by the intelligence
agencies in Northern Ireland without recourse to any
effective guidance or a proper legal framework. (p. 11)
In 1985 the Security Service assessed that 85% of the
UDA’s “intelligence” originated from sources within the
security forces. (p. 16)
My Review of the evidence relating to Patrick Finucane’s
case has left me in no doubt that agents of the State
were involved in carrying out serious violations of
human rights up to and including murder. However,
despite the different strands of involvement by
elements of the State, I am satisfied that they were not
linked to an over-arching State conspiracy to murder
Patrick Finucane. Nevertheless, each of the facets of the
collusion that were manifest in his case – the passage
of information from members of the security forces to
the UDA, the failure to act on threat intelligence, the
participation of State agents in the murder and the
subsequent failure to investigate and arrest key
members of the West Belfast UDA – can each be
explained by the wider thematic issues which I have
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
examined.’ (pp. 23/4)
It was this summary which gave the major media the phrase
‘no over-arching State conspiracy’ used in most mainstream
reporting. On the other hand, even those quotes I chose from
his summary show that this was not a case of state ‘collusion’
with the Loyalist terrorists. If 85% of the UDA’s ‘intelligence’
came from the British state’s agencies, with a British agent
(Brian Nelson) using it to target Republicans, the UDA was
being run by the state.
What is to be done?
There is a very acute analysis of the Newsnight special ‘Iraq -
10 years on’ by Nafeez Ahmed44 which concluded thus:
‘Ten years on, we need to be thinking about how British
democratic institutions were hijacked for a self-serving
geopolitical strategy invented by a tiny group of
American neoconservative politicians; and how,
therefore, we might ensure that appropriate reforms of
our political, parliamentary and intelligence processes
can prevent such a situation from re-occurring.’
Ahmed has misread this, I think. It isn’t that our democratic
institutions were ‘hi-jacked’. The House of Commons could
have stopped the Blair government’s move to war; there were
no structural obstacles. But doing so would have involved
middle of the road Labour and Conservative MPs opposing the
leadership of their parties (which is bad for careers); which
would have led the Labour Party – the government – to be
portrayed as ‘split’ by the major media and the Conservative
opposition (which is universally believed to be electoral
poison).
To prevent this sort of thing happening again would
involve two main things: electing MPs who are not afraid to
challenge the defence-intelligence establishment in this
country, and who are less concerned about their careers and
their party’s fortunes than they are about the national interest
(and good luck with that project!). Most importantly it would
44 <http://nafeez.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/seven-myths-about-iraq-
war-how-bbc.html>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
involve changing the automatic support for America embedded
in this country’s political system and major media. This would
mean educating said system and media about the nature of
American foreign policy since WW2, which thus far the Anglo-
American left have failed to do.
How difficult this would be is suggested by the
comments of then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in 2005 when
responding to the charge that the UK was involved in
extraordinary rendition.45
‘Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and
that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind
this is some kind of secret state which is in league with
some dark forces in the United States, and also, let me
say, we believe that Secretary Rice is lying, there is
simply no truth that the United Kingdom has been
involved in rendition, full stop.’
Is Straw a fool or a knave? I can’t tell. The ‘conspiracy
theories’ in this instance – ‘some kind of secret state which is
in league with some dark forces in the United States’, and
‘officials are lying’ – are true, of course. Is it possible that after
a life in politics, in which Uncle Sam must have loomed large on
many occasions, Straw simply doesn’t know this? Or, curiosity
about those areas not being good for political careers, did he
chose mostly to avert his eyes?
Dealing with the bog-wogs46
On the Spinwatch site47 there is an interesting study of the
British Army’s use of undercover military units in Northern
Ireland in the first half of the 1970s: essentially Brigadier
Frank Kitson’s attempt to use the methods developed in
Kenya and Malaya – pseudogangs, assassination and false
flag attacks – against the IRA. What comes through most
45 Straw’s comment was exhumed by Peter Oborne in a splendid
attack on the ‘secret justice’ proposals. See <www.telegraph.co.uk/
news/uknews/defence/9837251/We-must-shine-a-light-into-the-dark-
corners-of-our-secret-state.html>
46 ‘Bog-wogs’ was the term used by one of Colin Wallace’s English
CO’s in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.
47 <www.spinwatch.org/images/Countergangs1971-76.pdf>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
strikingly in this account are: the sheer incompetence of it all –
again and again these units shot the wrong people and the
rest of the state had to cover-up the mess they’d made; and
the almost complete absence of curiosity about these events
shown by the major media in Britain at the time.
Money, money, money
It was always clear that the government/Bank of England’s
policies since the great crash of 2008 in part entailed those
who were not in debt (savers) paying the bills of those who
were (borrowers). At its most obvious, interest rates paid on
savers’ deposits being less than inflation means the effective
devaluation of those deposits. As far as I can see this was
done to prevent widespread mortgage defaults. In testimony
to a committee of MPs, the director general of Saga48 –
described the policies as a ‘monumental mistake’:
‘Quantitative easing and ultra-low interest rates have
hampered the spending power of those in the economy
who were not over-indebted and who would otherwise
have spent money.’
What I had not grasped is that these policies have forced
‘companies to divert cash into pension funds rather than
investing’. It works like this. Under Quantitative Easing (QE)
the Bank of England has ‘bought’ £375bn of UK government
bonds, or gilts, with newly created electronic money. It now
owns almost a third of all gilts in the market. This huge
expansion of demand has driven gilt prices higher but has
enabled the government to reduce the interest rate paid on
them to record low levels.
‘That has the unintended consequence of pummelling
pension funds, which use gilt yields to calculate their
future liabilities. When gilt yields plummet, pension fund
deficits effectively balloon. The National Association of
Pension Funds (NAPF) estimated last year that QE had
increased pension deficits by at least £90bn over the
past three years. Current regulations mean companies 48 Social Amenities for the Golden Age, SAGA is a British company
catering to those aged 50 and over (who have money).
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
must plug those holes. Mark Hyde Harrison, the
chairman of NAPF, said businesses are now having to
contribute to their pension schemes instead of investing
for the future, which negates any positive impact of
QE.’49
Fluoridation
Given that a section of the population in Western societies is
concerned enough about what they are eating to support the
‘health food’ and organic sectors, it is curious that so little
attention has been paid to the case against fluoride. That
case is restated in a shortish but thoroughly documented
account on the interesting Washington’s Blog.50 As
Christopher Bryson did in his book The Fluoride Deception (New
York: Seven Stories, 2004) the author there shows that a
false consensus about the efficacy of fluoride has been
created which survives because the evidence which refutes is
never looked at by the public health officials and the dentistry
industry which promote the use of fluoride.
Compassionate Conservatism
The always interesting William Clark has an analysis of so-
called ‘progressive Conservatism’ on his site.51
‘Progressive Conservatism, as a propaganda project,
has two strands: the first is to capture the language of
other parties to make the party seem progressive (this
functions almost solely through repetition); secondly it
seeks the obliteration of the distinction between elite
direction and democratic initiative — to continue
business as usual....The Progressive Conservatives (a
very small group) have taken this on as some kind of
further emulation of ‘New Labour’, using Demos and
49 <www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/jan/29/qe-monumental-
mistake-pensions-experts>
50 <www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/02/government-and-top-
university-studies-fluoride-lowers-iq-and-causes-other-health-
problems.html>
51 < http://pinkindustry.wordpress.com/max-wind-cowie-progressive-
conservatism/>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
other think tanks to fill the media with various vested-
interest-funded psychological adjustments.’
Clark’s site, Pink Industry, subtitled ‘’The Atlantic Semantic’, is
a treasure trove of information on the political and
parapolitical world we live in. He has done so much research,
he makes me feel lazy.
The banking crisis
The splendid Matt Taibbi has another piece on the financial
crisis, ‘Secrets and Lies of the Bailout’ in Rolling Stone 17
January 2013.
Taibbi concludes:
‘So what exactly did the bailout accomplish? It built a
banking system that discriminates against community
banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to
Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business
lending and punishes savings by making it even easier
and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than
to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also
made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt
banks the official policy of the United States government.
And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another
financial crisis, meaning we’re essentially wedded to that
policy for the rest of eternity – or at least until the
markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute
now.
Other than that, the bailout was a smashing
success.
Although stated in quite different language, the Bank of
England’s Andrew Haldane, Executive Director, Financial
Stability, came to similar conclusions in a speech given in early
2013.52
Armen Victorian
Victorian wrote a number of very good essays for Lobster; his
first appeared in number 23 and the final one in 36. I lost
52 <www.voxeu.org/article/have-we-solved-too-big-fail>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
touch with him and have had no contact for well over a
decade. I recently noticed a 1996 essay of his I hadn’t seen
before, ‘United States, Canada, Britain: partners in mind
control operations’,53 which reminded me of what good work
he had done.
Uncle Sam talent-spotting
An interesting straw in the wind which I missed when it first
appeared was Jon Kelly’s ‘How do you spot a future world
leader’? on the BBC website in March 2011, in which Kelly
discussed the International Visitor Leader Program (IVLP), the
latest name for the sponsor of freebie trips to America for
people identified as potential political allies of Uncle Sam. The
article quotes Giles Scott-Smith, the leading researcher in this
field (whose book on this subject was reviewed in Lobster 43),
and me (though I am dubious about the words attributed to
me: they don’t sound like mine). But no matter.54 The fact that
this appeared anywhere on the BBC is, like the Charlie Skelton
blogs on Bilderberg,55 a striking change of emphasis for the
Corporation.
Hail to The Slog
The most consistently interesting blog I look at is The Slog
(http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/). Tom Easton pointed me at
this recent item on it.
Who is Cristine Lagarde really working for?
‘Over many months during 2011-12, The Slog
painstakingly put together a massive body of evidence
pointing clearly to the fact that the US weren’t
comfortable with Dominique Strauss-Kahn either as head
of the IMF, or potential President of France. Equally, I
spent many hours talking to those involved, and tracing
career progressions, in a bid to establish that Christine
53 <http://valtinsblog.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/following-is-reprint-of-
famous-article.html>
54 <www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12880901> On Giles Scott-Smith
see <www.hum.leiden.edu/history/staff/scott-smith.html>.
55 <www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/charlie-skeltons-bilderberg-
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Lagarde was being groomed as the head of the IMF to
replace DSK once he’d been framed.......and that she
herself was probably fully aware of this.
She was the perfect choice for the US Fed and
State because she looked and sounded French, but was
emotionally wedded to America. She was and is (as Tim
Geithner remarked in private) “Our gal”.
Unknown to many of those involved, while former
lawyer Cristine Lagarde became the Foreign Trade
Minister of the government of Dominique de Villepin, a
few years previously she’d been defending the interests
of US multinationals to the detriment of French
companies. She was, in fact, a member of the CSIS – the
think tank of the oil lobby in the United States….the
Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS). She
co-presided over the Action USA/UE/Poland commission
of this think tank along with Zbigniew Brzezinski and
was in charge of the USA-Poland Defense Industries
working group (1995-2002).’
But if this can be detected by a British outsider (albeit one
with some interesting contacts within the EU) all this – and
more – was known by the French state and its secret
agencies. So why was it allowed to take place?56
Keeping on keeping on (all we can do)
Kees van der Pijl is the author of The Making of a Transatlantic
56 CSIS has featured in Lobster before. In the late 1970s it became a
kind of refuge for CIA officers who had lost their jobs in the detente-
era pruning of the Agency. Fred Landis’ 1979 article on CSIS,
‘Georgetown’s Ivory Tower for Old Spooks’, is on the Net at
<www.unz.org/Pub/Inquiry-1979sep30-00007>. For more recent
accounts see <www.voltairenet.org/article30064.html>and
<www.powerbase.info/index.php/Center_for_Strategic_and_
International_Studies>.
Tom Easton reminded me that Michael Ledeen edited its journal
for a while and former Gaitskell era US labor attaché in the UK, Joe
Godson, operated from there with his European Working Group – Peter
Shore MP, Eric Hammond, Peter Robinson (of the NUT), Ray Whitney
MP et al.
There is no obvious evidence that CSIS is, as The Slog has it,
the think tank of the oil lobby.
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Ruling Class (London: Verso, 1984), written while he was at
the University of Amsterdam. Over twenty five years later a
distinctive piece of his, ‘State Capture and the Democratic
Movement’, on the economic crisis, has appeared on the
newleftproject website.57 Verso published a new edition of
The Making of a Transatlantic Ruling Class in 2012.
57 <www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/
state_capture_and_the_democratic_movement>. I also have a piece
on that site – who could resist being asked to write for something
called New Left? – <www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/
article_comments/how_labour_embraced_the_city>.
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The latest global ‘celeb’: Pope Francis
Corinne Souza
I am always puzzled as to why UK/US journalists fail to cover
global religions in terms of their actual or potential political
impact, when religion is a huge political force. All clerics,
Christian, Jewish, Muslim and so on, can and do influence their
publics, many are politically active and some at the very top of
their societies: e.g. bishops and the Chief Rabbi in Parliament;
the Vatican’s one time refusal to recognise the state of Israel;
the Ayatollahs of Iran; or allegations that Pope Francis may
have had a nodding acquaintance with Argentina’s Junta.
Whatever the truth of the last of these, it will have done Pope
Francis’ reputation no harm in authoritarian nations such as
China where he has Chinese Christians and bishops to
protect.
In particular, I am astonished by what appears to be an
absence of coverage on the impact a South American pope
could have on US politics. The Republicans are unlikely to
welcome him: like the pope they are anti-gay and anti-
abortion. However, they are also anti-immigrant: Pope Francis
empathises with immigrants. Republicans they deny climate
change when the Vatican does not, its priests having seen it
decimate parts of Africa. In addition, Pope Francis is a
respecter of all faiths, a huge challenge to US neo-cons and
Israel which depends on favouritism; and in a wonderful turn
of tables, gives South America the ability to meddle in US
politics because of Pope Francis’ ability to mobilise Hispanics.
Surely a candidate for political assassination if ever there was
one?
Of course, if you listen to the Vatican’s spin machine, you
would think that Pope Francis will do no more than
concentrate on matters spiritual, pastoral, reputational,
corrupt and administrative. This is true. But it is also a
wonderful piece of Vatican Omission PR. It ignores the fact
that the pope-as-figurehead has political significance in
international relations terms and the Vatican has centuries
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experience of this; that Francis is a Jesuit, when the Jesuit
Order is an organised global educator and therefore a highly
politically active force world-wide. For example, it is very active
in Africa, especially, as I say above, on climate change; is the
only faith challenger to Islam in Africa; and by virtue of its
influence as educators, a significant economic challenger to
China which is heavily involved and invested in Africa.
In addition, a South American pope strengthens South
American prestige in global and economic politics – it's a brand
thing. Overnight South America has gained a unifying global
figurehead – Hugo Chavez was a figurehead who divided
nations, Pope Francis does not – who is a ‘celeb’ as big as
President Obama or, if you prefer, Tom Cruise, creating a
viable economic and political challenger to India and the Far
East who have no unifying global figureheads or celebrities:
i.e. no recognisable brand. As importantly, backed by the rise
of South America, it gives global Christianity an economic and
political power base that challenges murder emanating from
minute pockets of some Muslim communities – while
accelerating and embracing dialogue with Islam in general
whose only figureheads in the West happen to be terrorists or
suspected terrorists......
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The SIS and London-based foreign dissidents:
some patterns of espionage
Corinne Souza
Over forty years separates the arrival of the Iraqi community
in London and today’s Russian one. Some of the Iraqis making
their home in the UK in the 1970s had substantial wealth,
others were averagely well-to-do, and some had little more
than the clothes in which they stood. For the most part they
were fleeing for their lives and as a community, made up of
many communities, kept a low profile. This holds true today.
The low profile strategy, for all its divisions and tensions
– now under more stress following the arrival of post invasion
Iraqis – allowed the community, and its children in particular,
to evolve quietly as more Iraqis rolled in. It was only in the
intelligence sphere – which the majority of 1970s Iraqis were
seeking to avoid – that it had high visibility. Some Iraqis were
sought out by the SIS; but for the most part the spies
interested in the community were not Brits but fellow Iraqis.1
In due course there were unexplained deaths, suicides,
obvious murders and hellish other incidents. These came as
one-offs or in waves. They stopped as quickly as they started,
only to kick off again just as a semblance of peace of mind was
being restored. Although largely invisible to mainstream
Britain, the fear and hysteria this engendered within the Iraqi
community and those associated with it was beyond belief.
The children, desperate to fit in with their British schoolmates,
absorbed it with insouciance. The Iraqi minority who were
politically active and/or dissidents in contact with the SIS or
other western intelligence agencies grew smaller and more
hard core.
1 Espionage has always been selective and never a numbers game –
the Brits were only interested in a small minority. Mass espionage,
which is what the Iraqis were playing at, is designed to create fear.
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Protection
Security became the norm. My Baghdad-born father was an
agent with the SIS and my family was lucky in that when I was
a schoolgirl and we were under actual Iraqi threat in London,
we had the support of a beloved SIS case officer who moved
in with us until full protection could be put in place. By the time
he left, we had armed Special Branch officers inside our house
and uniformed police outside.
Many prominent Iraqis had the same level of cover.
Those who did not, but had the means to pay for it, arranged
it for themselves: when terrorising an entire community, one
goal is to deplete its financial reserves, and forcing security
provision upon it is one way of doing so. Inevitably a
protection market developed – mostly stocked by moonlighters
from Special Branch and the police – with Iraqi families
complaining that their price could be one thing one moment
and another the next. ‘Ordinary’ Iraqi families, meaning
poorer ones, to begin with had the support of bewildered
‘bobbies-on-the-beat’. As costs escalated, they were
withdrawn. Iraqi students, some of whom were politically
active, had no protection at all; some relying on their British
peers who organised rotas to sleep in their houses.
In due course, the Iraqi community separated, the
majority pursuing apolitical and deliberately invisible lives. A
minority remained politically active; an even smaller number
continuing to work with the SIS and/or other countries’
agencies in the hope of toppling Saddam Hussein. The very
few wealthy enough to consult the major PR companies of the
day in the hope of keeping their cause alive did so for a time.
Courtship of Saddam Hussein
The entire community coped as best it could when Britain and
the West started courting Saddam Hussein – one of the UK’s
provisos being that his henchmen leave London and do his
dirty work in some other European capital. The London-based
Iraqi community’s children, by now well integrated, grew to
maturity with a sophisticated knowledge of government-to-
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
government betrayal, many of them despising and eschewing
politics to this day. Meantime, and in accordance with the
British government’s new policy of courting Saddam Hussein,
the SIS’s interest in Iraq was scaled down. Holistic knowledge
of the country, at one time second to none, plummeted: what
is taught in a dictator’s secondary schools defines the
capabilities of his next generation, knowledge of which is as
important as knowing his current crop of officials. The minimal
British intelligence product that emerged was skewed towards
commerce and military intelligence.
When the wheel turned against Saddam Hussein once
more, the SIS and other western intelligence agencies dusted
off the shelf the original dissidents, no matter that after long
years of exile they were decades out of date. Some of them
threw their weight behind the illegal and immoral invasion. For
all the reemployed PR companies’ efforts, the ‘nu-Iraq’ does
not seem to have favoured them.
London’s Russian community
Flash forward forty years and look at London’s newly-arrived
wealthy Russian community. There are three big differences
between it and the 1970s Iraqis. First, for the most part those
Russians who have made London their home have not done
so because they fear for their lives. Second, the Russians are
highly visible, not least because of the quite exceptional riches
of some of them. Third, Russian children attending British
schools are under the fierce spotlight of reputational
disadvantage: Iraqi children attending British schools forty
years ago were there as a result of circumstance, often tragic;
Russian children, so the narrative goes, are there because
their parents are money-launderers and tax evaders, their
countrymen back home no more than criminal cyber-warriors
intent on stealing our bank details.
Two decades after the collapse of Soviet Communism
some Russian money is likely to be innocent: the Russian
people have an honourable history and criminals are not the
preserve of one nation or another. Whatever the truth, the
ferocity with which this Russian criminal story line has run in
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
the media is suspicious. Singularity always is. For example,
the astronomical wealth of the newly arriving Chinese
community is not under similar media scrutiny when its money
is likely to have been acquired in much the same way as the
Russian. The increasing numbers of Chinese state-inspired
cyber attacks against the UK are in the news – I assume this
is not one way traffic – but this does not criminalise them.
Russian cyber warriors are ‘criminals’; their Chinese
equivalents are working for their country. The murder of a
British businessman who worked in China and was associated
with the now disgraced Bo Xilai, the former Communist Party
chief of Chongqing who was once tipped for high office, was
characterised by systematic British media undermining of the
dead man’s character (presumably because it was the British
state’s interest to do so.) As a result, Chinese children
attending British schools are able to evolve quietly, their
country and community not subject to the same reputational
onslaught.
Double standards: Russian wealth v Chinese
One reason for the double standard is that, unlike China,
Russia has not proven adept at creating alternative PR
opportunities with which the Western media will run. For
example, China was embarrassed in Britain by Ai Weiwei’s
seeds exhibition at Tate Modern in 2010; and further
embarrassed when Elton John dedicated a concert in Beijing to
Ai Weiwei in 2012. Within months, 18 months in the planning,
it loaned two pandas to Edinburgh Zoo, a knockout feel-good
PR story dominating the headlines and still commanding
attention.2
Another reason for the double standard is that unlike
the Chinese, the overseas Russian community was not initially
2 China’s Panda PR: a foreign relations commercial juggernaut and
state metaphor, the subliminal messaging being that like the peaceful
bamboo-eating giant that is under threat, the Chinese people are also
peaceful but similarly under threat. As Alexander Chancellor pointed
out in The Spectator, 9 March 2013, many years ago Mao Tse-tung
gave Edward Heath two pandas for London Zoo; and similarly to
Richard Nixon.
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under instructions from its government to maintain a low
profile. Both nations are empire-building but doing it in
different ways: Russia originally going for high visibility ‘bling’
and, say, purchase of football clubs; China for massive but
quiet investment, a quiet that it has maintained despite the
astonishing wealth of some of its overseas or visiting
nationals.3 As a result, the migratory habits of the Russian
super rich, but not the Chinese, attracted the attention of the
popular press. Those who move in a gaggle of private jets
between Gstaad, New York, Paris and London have always
been fair game and the exuberance of the Russians merely
added further copy. Their lifestyle and the extent of their
wealth was what made them remarkable, the origin of their
riches not the issue (in the popular press) any more than is,
say, the origin of Chinese riches. After all, much of these
riches are invested in London, one of the safest money-
laundering capitals in the world, so Britain has benefited, the
investment routinely celebrated in its financial pages. Which is
to say: it is not in the British state’s commercial interests for
its media to draw attention to investment/investors from
overseas or the origins of their wealth.
However unlike the Chinese, the Russian overseas
community drew attention to itself. In the UK, this played into
the hands of PR guru Lord Bell at a time when it was
commercially – and therefore politically – expedient for Britain
to favour Russian dissidents whether in Russia (and/or in
Russian jails) or London-based. As a result, Lord Bell was able
to build on an existing Russian community story and merge it
with that of the London-based anti-Putin dissident campaign
3 See Lobster 52, Winter 2006/7, page 33: China’s Harmony PR
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
bankrolled by his client, the late Boris Berezofksy.4 No matter
how much Moscow by then wanted its overseas community to
lower its profile, Lord Bell ensured this did not happen. ‘Good’
PR can hijack an existing story diverting attention elsewhere
by adding to the narrative. Without a PR rebuttal, the new
legend becomes impossible to throw off.
Similarities between the Iraqi and Russian
dissidents
If there are differences between the majority of the London-
based Russian community and the 1970s Iraqi one, there are
also similarities. Like the Iraqis, all that many of the Russians
want is for their family to evolve in situ and out of the
spotlight; most are doing their best to stay away from politics;
all know the whole community is being spied upon by its own.
As with the Iraqis forty years ago, the London-based Russian
dissident community has been terrorised and among it or its
associates there have been questionable deaths, including
those of some Britons, murder and suicide.
However, and because of Lord Bell’s successful PR
campaign, media attention has not been concentrated on
those Russians who just want to get on with their lives and
are living here by choice when not flitting backwards and
forwards to Moscow. Instead, it has focussed on the minority
unable to nip back to Russia because they are opposed to
President-Prime Minister-President Putin. As with the 1970s
Iraqis, the London-based anti-Putin dissidents were originally
wildly courted and puffed up by Britain, their sentiments
4 For the best account of Lord Bell’s work, see Mark Hollingsworth,
‘Lord Bell: The PR consultants who campaign against Putin’, 20
January 2012 at <http://russianmind.com/content/lord-bell-pr-
consultants-who-campaign-against-putin>.
‘Last month Vladimir Putin accused British and American public
relations consultants and lobbyists of undermining the Russian
state and disrupting the elections. In this issue we profile Lord
Bell, the PR advisor who has been most active in campaigning
against Putin....’
Declaration of interest: I worked closely with Mark Hollingsworth on
lobbying issues in the 1980s/1990s; he edited my book Baghdad’s Spy
in 2003.
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
dovetailing with those of remaining Cold War warriors and, far
more importantly, Britain’s then commercial interests.
The latter, perhaps temporarily, ceased to be the case a
while ago. In addition, foreign policy needs now demand that
fences be mended. Which is to say: as with the SIS’s shelving
of Iraqi dissidents once courtship of Saddam Hussein became
the goal, promoting London-based Russian dissidents
opposing the status quo in Moscow has been ‘out’ for some
time; and until they become fashionable again, the SIS will be
more interested in getting to know those who support it.
Meantime diplomacy is once more a matter of preference and if
the patterns of yesterday are repeated (which they usually
are) Moscow-originated dubious deaths or outright murder on
the streets of London are likely to subside.
Britain’s policy change leaves the London-based anti-
Putin dissidents high and dry – as it did the Iraqi ones all
those years ago, the similarities in their treatment striking.
The last remnants of media interest are due to coverage of
the current inquest into the death of Alexander Litvinenko
murdered in London in 2006 (see endnote); in the same way
that the last remnants of media interest in the 1970s Iraqis
followed the ‘sensational’ death of the owner of a London
restaurant frequented almost exclusively by Arabs and
especially Iraqis. (He was found dead with his mistress in the
back of his Rolls Royce. At the time, it was said that every
table in his restaurant was bugged.) Once the Litvinenko
inquest completes, and unless another Berezofsky-type
financial backer can be found, the London-based anti-Putin
dissident PR campaign is likely to be over and media interest
will evaporate.5 If it resurrects, as did the anti-Saddam
5 A significant difference between the 1970s London-based Iraqi
dissidents and the London-based Russian ones is that the Iraqis were
younger. This could make the Russian ones feel even more
desperate: they will be aware that age alone could limit their political
longevity. This mattered less when they could maintain their high
media profile. It is of consequence now because Boris Berezovsky is
no longer around to pay for it. If Boris Berezoksky is mentioned again,
it will be because his heirs continue to be pursued by the Russian
government for money Berezoksky owes the Russian state: pots and
kettles come to mind, government is often selective in whom it
chases.
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
Hussein rhetoric, it will point to another British policy change –
and changes, real or anticipated, in Russia too.
Meantime, events in Russia, including the actions of its
various opposition parties will continue to be followed closely
in the media. It has a middle class which is leaving its exiles
behind and ‘ridicules the division between a Kremlin-licensed
opposition and an unlicensed one; craves fair elections,
independent courts and public accountability – that craves, in
short, civil society.’ 6 The London-based anti-Putin dissidents
are outside this development if only because they are not in
Russia.
Further heartbreak awaits them when, as seems likely,
in place of Lord Bell’s anti-Putin PR campaign, another takes its
place: Russians living overseas through choice, no matter how
distanced by privilege they and their children are from events
on the ground back home, are sick of the stereotyping –
dissidents ‘good’, non-dissidents ‘bad’. In due course, they
will recruit a PR company to lead a rebuttal: whichever wins
the Reputation PR account will make a lot of money indeed.
President Putin, for all the good it will do him in the longer
term, is likely to throw substantial funds its way too.
As for the SIS’s now discarded London-based anti-Putin
dissidents, with exceptions, long years of exile are no way to
remain relevant. Even if meeting Muscovites passing through
London, it is impossible to follow every nuance of Russian
affairs from a distance. In addition, exiled dissidents date
quickly when a dissident generation matures internally.
Nevertheless, the London-based anti-Putin dissidents will
hope that one day they will become the SIS’s flavour of the
month again. Some of the London-based Iraqi dissidents
certainly did. It did them and their country no good. If you are
a dissident, exile and the patterns of espionage seldom
change.
Endnote: Litvinenko Inquest
The inquest has allowed the public to catch a glimpse of the
relatively modest payments made by the SIS to a contact:
6 ‘Putin’s Personal Vendetta’, Guardian, 2 April 2013.
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
according to testimony given by Litvinenko’s widow and
reported in the Sunday Times, the SIS made a lump sum
payment of £18,000 into the couple’s bank account in late
2003 or early 2004.7 Mrs Litvinenko says she asked her
husband about its tax status which could imply it was tax-free.
From 2004 onwards the SIS paid a monthly retainer of £2000.
The payments continued until March 2007, four months after
Litvinenko’s death.8
The SIS is unlikely to be pleased that these amounts are
now in the public domain. It gives others a baseline figure by
which they may measure their own worth and whether they
should be getting more; to note whether or not there is a
gender, racial or regional bias to the SIS pay-rate; and, were
they to die ‘in the field’, how long their family might expect the
SIS payments to continue. Unless things have changed, some
families are protected for life.
7 Sunday Times, 17 March 2013
8 Sunday Times, 17 March 2013
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Estes, LBJ and Dallas
Robin Ramsay
Among the Kennedy assassination buffs there is little public
interest in the thesis that the network of vice president
Lyndon Baines Johnson did the dirty deed. Of the major
researchers only Larry Hancock has done any work on it.1
The only critique I have seen so far is Vasilios Vazakas with
Seamus Coogan and Phil Dragoo, ‘Evaluating the Case against
Lyndon Johnson’.2 They point out that the handful books
proposing the thesis are not very good (I’ve read two of them
and I agree about one but not the other) and that the
evidence in the shape of testimony comes mostly from
unreliable witnesses: Loy Factor, Billie Sol Estes, Barr
McClennan and Howard Hunt. And that’s true up to a point.
Loy Factor was brain damaged during military service; Estes
was a convicted fraudster; Hunt’s claims were those a dying
CIA officer whose role within the CIA had included
disinformation; and McClellan’s ‘evidence’ was merely the
statement of a third party buried in a book mixing fact with
faction. But many of the witnesses in other versions of the
story can be portrayed as unreliable: intelligence officers of
one stripe or another, for example, or the anti-Castro Cubans,
and assorted military and right-wing activists, all of whom
have axes to grind. If we are to wait for the people with white
hats on to testify we will wait forever.
The most important of these witnesses is Billie Sol Estes.
The problem with Estes is that he has talked for years about
tape recordings he made with some of the people he claims
were in the plot, notably Cliff Carter, LBJ’s right-hand man, but
has never let anyone hear them. We only have Estes’ word for
the contents (or for the tapes’ existence; they may not exist
at all). But even without the tapes, considering the
1 <http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=2380>
and <http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=2379>
Careful, methodical, excellent bits of research.
2 <www.ctka.net/2012/Evaluating_the_Case_against_Lyndon_Johnson.
html>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
significance of his role in the politics of this period, both Texan
and national (he made the cover of Time in 1962), it is odd
that Estes’ claims are so widely dismissed because of his fraud
conviction. Does this mean we should dismiss all statements
made by people with criminal convictions? Gordon Liddy, for
example? In this country, former Cabinet ministers Jonathan
Aitken and Chris Huhne? Is a ‘disgraced politician’ per se
unreliable? In practice, of course, we don’t do this. A criminal
conviction is merely one factor in our assessment of a person’s
reliability. Aitken was guilty of lying in court – yet his accounts
of his political life will not be dismissed out of hand because of
that. Estes seems to be treated harshly: because he has a
conviction, nothing he says can be believed. Well, let’s not
believe it; in practice there isn’t enough evidence to believe or
disbelieve much of it; but let us consider it.
The most complete account in English by Estes of the
assassination conspiracy is in his 2005 book, Billie Sol Estes: a
Texas Legend.3 This book appeared after a French book about
Estes, Le Dernier Temoin (The Last Witness) and that book’s
author, French journalist William Reymond, says of the Estes
book:
‘The book is a first draft that Tom Bowden and myself
wrote back in 2000. This draft was used by the publisher
to shop the project around. It was a failure and one
reason was that lot of BSE’s claims were not backed by
fact and some of them were in direct conflict with other
evidences.’4
In other words: Estes’ claims had no back-up evidence and his
thesis differs from that of others. OK; but even so this is Estes’
version of events.
Estes says that Kennedy was killed by Texas conspiracy,
run by the senior member of LBJ’s network, Cliff Carter, who
gave the job of organising the actual shooting to the
network’s assassin, Malcolm Wallace. Estes knows this
because Cliff Carter told him about it. It was believed by some
3 This can be read at <https://www.box.com/s/
8b408e6999f8799dfd0a/1/251450825/1960277221/1>.
4 <http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=2379>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
in Texas at the time that the same network had been killing
people in Texas since 1951 (when Wallace received a five year
suspended sentence for a first degree murder). In Estes’
version the JFK killing is merely one element in the wider
scandal, the core of which were his secret payments to
politicians, notably vice president Johnson. This is a story
about American politics and business and what happens when
the hidden business funding is threatened with exposure.
When the story of Estes’ business dealings began to
surface nationally in 1962 after reports in a local Texas paper,
two things happened. In Texas a cover-up took place and
potential witnesses began dying, ‘committing suicide’.
Although there was apparently little medical or police interest
in these deaths in rural Texas, and there is nothing more than
reports of their existence, it has been presumed, initially by
some people in Texas, that these ‘suicides’ were murders
done to cover-up the Johnson-Estes connection.5 The first of
them, that of Department of Agriculture official Henry Marshall,
certainly was a murder covered-up as ‘suicide’; and it is
difficult to see a motive for the killing and the subsequent
cover-up beyond stopping Marshall’s inquiry into Estes’
business.6 Estes says the murder was done at LBJ’s behest
after Marshall refused to be bribed.7
Secondly, in Washington, Robert Kennedy, Attorney
General and head of the US Justice Department, used the
Department’s resources to investigate Estes.8
LBJ had become vice president by accident. The
Kennedys offered it to him as a kind of courtesy, assuming he
would turn it down. (Why would he give up being the boss of
the Senate for a useless, ceremonial post?) But he accepted 5 This is heavily implied in J. Evetts Haley’s A Texan Looks At Lyndon
(Canyon, Texas: Palo Duro Press, 1964).
6 Estes testified at a 1984 grand jury hearing on the death of
Marshall. Texas Ranger Clint Peoples had not accepted the ‘suicide’
verdict on Marshall and persuaded Estes to testify when he came out
of prison for the second time. These events are discussed on Estes’
own site at <http://billiesolestes.com/billie>.
7 Estes says in his memoir that had he not taken the precaution of
taping his calls, and letting the Johnson network know he had done
so, he would have joined that list of the dead.
8 See < http://billiesolestes.com/houston_chronicle_july_23_1996>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
and they were stuck.9 Robert Kennedy and LBJ hated each
other; and Robert Kennedy was collecting dirt on Johnson
hoping to produce a scandal big enough to get him off the
Democratic ‘ticket’ for the 1964 presidential elections. Estes in
his memoir says, ‘Attorney General Robert Kennedy [was]
doing everything in his power to tie Lyndon to me’ (p. 142);
which seems undeniable: had Kennedy not wanted dirt on
Estes and Johnson why dispatch a large Justice Department
task force to Texas?
The Justice Department was also leaking information on
another Johnson-linked scandal, that involving LBJ’s former
Senate aide Bobby Baker, to Life magazine. The Kennedys
were using the power of the state in an attempt to destroy
the political career of their own vice president. Life was about
to publish a feature on LBJ and Baker when Kennedy was
shot. The LBJ feature was replaced by Life’s account of the
assassination.10
In Estes’ account the assassination was ‘just a country
turkey shoot with some country boys doing the shooting’. He
claims he was told about the details by Cliff Carter and it is as
the buffs always presumed: frame Oswald, kill Oswald while
arresting him, use local law enforcement – interestingly the
Sheriff’s Department, not the Dallas Police Department – to
control things.
‘The plan was to make the murder easy but surround it
with illusions and false leads.....[Carlos] Marcello
arranged for some of his people to be in Dallas and
[Santos] Trafficante contributed some of his contacts in
the French drug connection.’ (p. 147)
Estes tells us:
* Malcolm Wallace knew George de Mohrenschildt and through
him Wallace met Oswald and his wife Marina. (p. 151).
* Cliff Carter and Wallace knew Jack Ruby. Estes saw Wallace
and Ruby together at the Carousel Club. (p. 151)
* Malcolm Wallace knew Ruth and Michael Paine. (Estes adds
9 The best account of this is in Robert Caro’ s 2012 The Years of
Lyndon Johnson:The Passage of Power, chapter 4.
10 <www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKwagenvoord.htm>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
that he doesn’t know what this means.)
* The boarding house at Oak Cliff at which Lee Oswald lived
for a while was a CIA safe-house.
Most interesting of all, he claims that Carter arranged for
a mortician, John Ligget,11 to obtain another body, one
resembling JFK, which was then fixed so that it had wounds
resembling the wounds being reported from Parkland Hospital
to which the dying JFK had been taken. Estes says: ‘Cliff was
very proud of this solution. He spent considerable time
describing the operation to me.’ (p. 155) He also comments:
‘I do not know all the details except I know there were
two bodies at Bethesda and at least ten pictures were
taken of each body. The pictures were then mixed,
creating the effect of a third body. The grand conspiracy
theory of controlling the autopsy and making changes
[to the body] at Bethesda Naval Hospital was not
necessary. You simply needed the right mix of autopsy
photographs.’ (p. 156)
But the plan to get the second body to Bethesda almost came
unstuck because of the Secret Service’s rush to get out of
Dallas with JFK’s body. Hence, says Estes, the strange affair of
LBJ insisting on being sworn-in as president, and by a
particular local judge, before take-off for Washington: it was
simply a stalling tactic.
Some of this explains features in the assassination. The
use of mafia and French drug network personnel as decoys
may explain the presence of Jim Braden on Dealey Plaza, the
accounts of a French criminal, Jean René Souêtre, being
present; and the apparently widespread knowledge among
the Mob that the assassination was going to happen in Dallas.
The two bodies may explain the contradictions in the autopsy
photographs and the second autopsy.
There are other fragments of evidence supporting this
thesis: Barr McClellan knew Wallace and confirms that he was
11 On Estes’ account a serial killer!
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
part of the Johnson network.12 Loy Factor’s fragmented
stories support the thesis of Wallace as one of the assassins
in Dallas;13 the fact that Robert Caro has omitted Estes
entirely from his most recent volume of LBJ’s biography which
covers this period suggests that, for whatever reason, the
subject is too hot for him to handle.14
And there is Wallace’s fingerprint apparently found on
the 6th floor of the Book Depository on the day of the
shooting. Two fingerprint analysts found a match between
Wallace’s print and the previously unidentified print found on
the 6th floor that day. But in a bulletin for fingerprint experts it
has been argued that there is no match.15 If this bulletin is
correct, we have a bizarre, even preposterous coincidence: a
print, which isn’t Wallace’s, but is close enough to fool two
print analysts, just happens to turn up on the 6th floor.
But we need those Estes tapes. Without them this will
12 Larry Hancock has assembled other evidence documenting
Wallace’s presence in LBJ’s circle. See <http://educationforum.
ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=2321>.
13 The Loy Factor story, in The Men on the 6th Floor (<http://home.
earthlink.net/~sixthfloor/>) is the more convincing to me because
Factor remembered Wallace only as ‘Wallace’ – didn’t know his first
name or who he was. The book, for which the Website is a come-on, is
an account of the authors – who knew little about the case – finding
out who ‘Wallace’ was and educating themselves en route. Vasilios
Coogan and Dragoo (see note 2) disparage the Factor story, not least
because it seems absurd to them that after the assassination, on
Factor’s account, Wallace dropped Factor at a bus stop to make his
way home.
‘The getaway is even more questionable: Factor was left at a
bus stop to get out of town. But then Ruth Ann and Wallace
thought better of it and picked him up. But yet, it was not
exactly a great commando team escape. The car broke down in
Oklahoma due to a bad clutch. And Factor, get this, had to
hitchhike home.’
To me, however, this is one of those little details which rings true. In
1963 a poor Indian would take the bus. On my trips round America the
only people I ever saw hitchhiking were Indians. Incidentally, few in
the States seem to use ‘Native American’. The best Website on their
affairs is <http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/>.
14 I discussed this in issue 64 at <http://lobster-magazine.co.uk/
free/lobster64/lob64-view-from-the-bridge.pdf>
15 See <http://www.clpex.com/images/Darby-Wallace-Analysis/
Erroneous-Match.htm>.
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
remain an interesting, pretty plausible theory, by some
distance the best we have, but a theory nonetheless.
PS
Since I wrote this Billie Sol Estes died in Texas.16
16 There is a very good obituary by Michael Carlson at
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/17/billie-sol-estes>
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Iraq and intelligence
Robin Ramsay
I found this on my computer. It was obviously written around
2004 and, as far as I can see, was never used.
Michael Moore’s film ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ is great propaganda
but, like all propaganda, it isn’t about the truth. In a section
mocking the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’ which supported
the US invasion of Iraq, Moore listed several very small
countries – but omitted Australia and the UK. For Australia
and the UK the political decision to support the USA caused
major ructions within their intelligence systems. As is now
admitted, and was known by most independent analysts
before the invasion, there was no threat from Iraq and they
had no WMDs. As we now know, most of the intelligence
analysts of those countries also knew that; and they, along
with sections of their countries’ foreign and diplomatic
services, resisted the drive to invasion and their political
masters’ desire for ‘intelligence’ with which to justify it. This
resistance manifested itself in an unprecedented series of
leaks of official information, anonymous briefings to journalists,
and public protest by retired diplomats and intelligence
personnel.
In the United States, the reluctance of the CIA to
produce the required ‘intelligence’ led the neo-conservatives
who were leading the push to attack Iraq to create the Office
of Special Plans (OSP), a little unit within the Pentagon, which
was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of
Defense. OSP’s role was to find or manufacture intelligence
which would provide the pretext for invasion. The OSP’s
existence is a testimony to the resistance of the CIA’s
intelligence analysts.
In the UK the estimates from the two main agencies, the
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) and MI6 (or SIS) are fed into
the Joint Intelligence Committee which produces the final
version. That, at least, is the theory. In practice, in this
instance, the cautious, heavily conditional estimates produced
by the Joint Intelligence Committee were strengthened by the
Prime Minister’s assistants in the Cabinet Office, Alastair
Campbell and Jonathan Powell, who had the final editing
rights on the notorious ‘dodgy dossier’. Hence the great row
about ‘sexing-up’ which led to the upheaval at the BBC and
the big fight with the government – a fight in which, as Lord
Hutton showed us, the claim that the estimates had been
‘sexed-up’ was true.
Above the intelligence analysts in the UK intelligence
bureaucracy were the senior officers of the DIS and MI6, who
had to take political factors into consideration: in this instance,
were they willing to oppose the Prime Minister in his desire to
support the Americans?
In the USA, UK and Australia the senior intelligence
personnel ultimately capitulated to the political pressure in
different ways. The British and American systems’ senior
intelligence personnel used last-minute information which
purported to show that Iraq was a threat. In Britain, at the
eleventh hour MI6 and the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS)
used a human source who claimed – falsely, of course – that
Iraq had been developing chemical and biological warfare
capacities. But to use this new ‘source’s’ intelligence in this
way, the expert in the field, the late Dr Brian Jones, of the
Defence Intelligence Staff, was simply not told about the
source or his ‘intelligence’.1 As Lord Butler commented dryly in
his report :
‘It would have been more appropriate for senior
managers in the DIS and SIS [MI6] to have made
arrangements for the intelligence to be shown to DIS
experts rather than making their own judgements on its
significance’.2
1 On the late Brian Jones, see <www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
articles/A36903-2004Aug26.html>.
2 Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, HC 898, July
2004, p. 137
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In the USA the Director of the CIA and Secretary of State Colin
Powell, used the now notorious ‘uranium from Niger’ scam –
based on forged documents which had come via MI6 – to get
support for the war from the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee and thus ensure that the President got a mandate
from Congress for the attack on Iraq.
In Australia a different system produced the same result.
The Australians have two units producing intelligence
estimates, one civilian, one military. It was the civilian version,
the Office of National Assessments (ONA), which finally buckled
under American pressure to come up with the goods: the
military analysts in the Defence Intelligence Organisation,
never did. The Australian ONA, attached to the Prime Minister’s
office, changed its estimates of ‘the threat’ posed by Iraq
shortly after President Bush, in an address to the United
Nations, said that the UN could support the invasion or be
‘irrelevant’.
In short, the USA was going to invade Iraq and, as it has
done many times in its history, fabricated a pretext to justify
the attack. The price of joining the ‘coalition of the willing’ was
to swallow the pretext, eat shit and swear it was ice-cream.
Intelligence analysts in Australia and the UK baulked at this;
but the politicians and the senior intelligence bureaucrats,
those who had the contact with the political system, managed
to force it down. One of the Australian analysts said of his
period:
‘We had strong reservations about the evidence that
was being provided to us, but that was never carried
forward because the deputy director at the time thought
that the intelligence relationship [with the US] was more
important.’ 3 (emphasis added)
Our intelligence bureaucrats would say the same; and they
always will.
The unimaginable
‘If they could not find a case for war that would win a
3 <www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2004/s1046367.htm>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
majority in the House of Commons, and be (just about)
acceptable in international law, Britain would face the
unimaginable: leaving America in the lurch.’ 4
Thus Timothy Garton-Ash, a man never far from the line of the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office, showing the level of
delusion still operating among some of our foreign policy
intellectuals. They think the US cares about HMG’s views. You
might have thought that the US invading Grenada, a member
of the Commonwealth, against the wishes of HMG, would have
been enough of a lesson. Apparently not. The reality is that
Britain could leave the US ‘in the lurch’ the way a flea might
leave an elephant in the lurch. And why is it ‘unimaginable’ not
to support the US? It used not to be ‘unimaginable’. Edward
Heath declined to support the US in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
Harold Wilson refused to send troops to fight with the US in
Vietnam.
There are two major conclusions to be drawn from these
events. The first is that the senior intelligence personnel of
America’s junior allies, in this case most notably Australia and
the UK (but also Spain) showed, yet again, that they are
unwilling to oppose the US because of the threat of being cut-
off from US intelligence sources. (Though what these countries
can do with that intelligence is unclear to me.)
The second conclusion, for students of the British political
system, is that real political power in the UK rests with the
Prime Minister. When I became interested in the relationship
between the intelligence and security services and the British
political system in the late 1970s, it was believed on the
Labour left that the intelligence and security services were all-
powerful and unaccountable. They are still unaccountable in
any real sense (their accountability to Parliament is notional)
but the events of the past two years show that it is ‘The Prime
Minister wishes....’ which still commands absolute authority.
4 Timothy Garton-Ash, ‘We were duped’, the Guardian, 4 March 2004
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/mar/04/iraq.iraq>
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Canada’s spy agency gone rogue:
Prime Minister Harper couldn’t care less
Roderick Russell
Dr. Arthur Porter, the former chair of Canada’s spy watchdog,
the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), is in prison
in Panama awaiting extradition to Canada where he faces
multiple charges that include allegations of bribe taking,
money laundering and conspiracy.
Two years ago I formally complained to the SIRC, which
was then chaired by Dr. Porter. My complaint was about
Canada’s spy agency’s (CSIS) illegal campaign of threats,
intimidation, and harassment against my wife and I. I provided
a significant body of evidence, yet Dr. Porter’s SIRC dismissed
my complaint without any investigation.
Dr. Porter and foreign aid money
At that time, Dr. Porter was also operating as Ambassador
Plenipotentiary for Sierra Leone – famed for blood diamonds,
nasty civil wars and child soldiers. But this is not why Porter
resigned from the SIRC just a few weeks after my complaint
was so unjustly dismissed. There were also disclosures coming
about foreign aid money that Porter was trying to get the
Russians to provide for Sierra Leone. Then the story gets even
more complicated. In November 2011 several Canadian papers
reported that one of Porter’s confreres, a Mr. Ari Ben-
Menashe,1 stated that the deal had been nixed after he
became concerned that ‘the money would end up in private
hands’.2 This was totally denied by Porter.
CSIS has said that they did not vet Dr. Porter prior to his
appointments to the SIRC and Privy Council – this is not
credible. A strong-minded SIRC chair could be a check on CSIS.
1 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ari_Ben-Menashe>
2 <www2.canada.com/windsorstar/news/story.html?id=4c91afa5-bbd4-
4eed-8405-e73172695b55>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
Is it possible that CSIS wanted someone who wouldn’t rock
the boat? CSIS’s occasional abuse of innocent citizens with
Stasi-style tactics is not a new story in Canada. Nor,
regrettably, is the SIRC’s propensity to whitewash CSIS.
CSIS and its terror tactics
Years ago a former CSIS officer, W. J. Baltruweit, wrote, ‘CSIS
management willingly and deliberately coerced by intimidation
(hence “terrorize”), and gained submission by inducing fear
(hence “terrorism”).’3
Mr. Baltruweit is not the only former Canadian spook to
refer to CSIS’s well-known illegal use of ‘counter intelligence
tactics used for surveillance, intimidation and harassment’. In
an article in Lobster 61, ‘CSIS and the Canadian Stasi’,4
Gareth Llewellyn, another former senior Canadian intelligence
officer, describes his own persecution by CSIS. Indeed
Wikileaks unearthed a US diplomatic cable which stated that
the former CSIS Chief, Mr. Judd, admitted to a US State
Department Official that CSIS has been (illegally) ‘vigorously
harassing’ people in Canada.
Vigorous harassment: that’s just the sort of Stasi-style
behaviour that I and others have complained about? Call it
what you want – Zersetzen,5 Cointelpro – it is all the same
beast. CSIS even have their own name (‘D & D’) for the
persecution programme that they and their tame review body,
the SIRC, pretend doesn’t exist. It’s hard to believe that Dr.
Porter and the SIRC Committee were not aware of this. But
then the Canadian Prime Minister’s Office also seems to be
subservient to CSIS, so perhaps it is not surprising that
Porter’s SIRC was such a joke.
Oversight of CSIS – a joke
So, true to form, Dr. Porter’s SIRC dismissed my complaint
without any investigation, on grounds that the types of
3 William Baltruweit, Down and Out In Canada's Intelligence Service ,
Commoners Publishing, Kindle edition (Kindle Locations 3832-3834).
4 <http://lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster61/lobster61.pdf>
5 <http://zersetzen.wikispaces.com/>
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
activities I have complained about are not carried out by CSIS.
Indeed Porter told CBC radio in an interview that CSIS
wouldn’t do such things. Whether you credit my complaint or
not, this absurd denial is contradicted not only by former
intelligence operatives, but also by the Canadian press. For
example, in May, 2006 the Globe and Mail published an article
headlined ‘Lacking a case CSIS disrupted suspect’s life’ – the
headline says it all.
The SIRC made no attempt to investigate my case – it
was a straight cover-up. Indeed the CSIS was so
contemptuous of Porter’s SIRC that we were being intimidated
to try and stop us from complaining to the SIRC about CSIS.
This SIRC/CSIS related intimidation included: being gang
stalked by Calgary police vehicles; weird telephone calls about
our security; a computer annihilated by viruses; my cell phone
completely stopped working and so did its new replacement
phone (store assistants said they had never seen anything
like this before); smearing: a hood shouting sexual slanders at
me on the street and much more.
This flippant dismissal of our complaint and the further
threats is a serious violation of rule of law in Canada. Even the
Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, knows people who have
witnessed our intimidation – and we still don’t have justice.
Indeed all Mr. Harper would have to do to check my story is
lean over his garden fence.
PM Harper’s neighbours have seen intimidation
My wife and I have been friends with the Prime Minister’s next
door neighbours, at his private house in Calgary, for over 30
years. Not only have they met with several of our witnesses,
but they have seen some of the (minor) intimidation for
themselves. At one point when the woman tried to phone my
wife she kept getting messages that said (wrongly) that our
telephone was permanently discontinued. This is a likely CSIS
trick to stop her communicating with us and has happened
before. Subsequently she took my wife out to lunch and then
drove her to the Crowfoot LRT Station so that my wife could
get a train home. When they got to Crowfoot, the woman
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
remarked that they were being openly watched (i.e. stalked),
telling my wife not to get out of the car, but to stay in and lock
her door until the stalker went away.
We have had a car rammed into our house; vehicles
driven at us; shots fired; threatening phone calls to our
children; illegal surveillance; stalking; phone taps......the list
goes on. We have made every attempt to resolve this through
normal channels – police, politicians.
Some years ago it become obvious to us that it was the
Prime Minister’s Office/Privy Council Office that was stopping
an investigation of our complaints. I met with Sandra Frass,
Mr. Harper’s constituency office manager, explained the
situation of cover-up to her, and she agreed to get a letter I
had written on the subject to Mr. Harper personally. When
later I queried why nothing was happening, I got a telephone
message saying that the delay was because ‘Ottawa is so
slow’. I never heard from her again.
How ironic it is that a man with huge apparent conflicts
of interest is entrusted by Prime Minister Stephen Harper with
Canada’s intelligence secrets; whereas a decent family like
ours can’t get even basic justice from Mr. Harper’s people.
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David Miliband: working for the man
John Newsinger
The news that David Miliband was giving up politics and going
to work for a charity came as something of a shock for many
people. Here was the archetypal Blairite, a man apparently
only concerned with power, money and being of service to the
American Empire, and he was giving it all up. Had we all got
him wrong?
This was the man who had famously been exposed as
not having any idea of the level of JobSeekers Allowance at
the hustings during the campaign for the Labour Party
leadership! And once he had lost that election decided to
devote himself to making money, lots of money. In 2011-2012,
he earned a modest £446,000 on top of his paltry £65,000
MP’s salary. Oxford Analytica paid him £55,000 for eight days
work and the venture capital outfit, Vantage Point, paid him
£92,000 for four and a half days work. He seemed to be the
classic Blair clone, busy enriching himself while supposedly
representing a poor working class area, creating that
interesting New Labour phenomenon whereby the local
Labour MP is one of the richest people in the constituency. And
now here he was, giving it all up.
Admittedly, the salary at his new job, £300,000 a year,
seemed a bit excessive for a charity, but after all many
charities today seem to operate on the principle that charity
begins at home. Still, as Miliband himself pointed out, the
International Rescue Committee (IRC) had been ‘founded at
the suggestion of Albert Einstein in the 1930s for those fleeing
the Nazis’ and, as he went on, ‘given my own family history’
there was an obvious ‘personal motivation’ behind taking up
the job. But all was not as it seemed.
There is, in fact, an invaluable history of the IRC, Covert
Network, written by Eric Thomas Chester and published as
long ago as 1995. As this account reveals, what Miliband
conveniently failed to mention was that while the IRC might
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
well have been founded by various American socialists with
Einstein’s support, after the Second World War, it was
transformed into ‘a vital member of the CIA’s covert network’.
The IRC, according to Chester routinely operates ‘in close
conformity with the policy mandates of US foreign policy’. This,
one suspects, was what appealed to Miliband. Einstein, a
committed socialist, would never have touched what the IRC
became, but for Miliband this was ‘working for the man’, a
Blairite fantasy come true.
In Vietnam, for example, the IRC certainly ran ‘purely
humanitarian programs’, establishing refugee camps, providing
shelter, food and healthcare. But other areas of its activity
‘were directly tied to the intelligence community’. The IRC ran
the camps while the CIA trawled them for intelligence sources
and for recruits for the various paramilitary outfits it ran. And,
on top of that the IRC was also instrumental in establishing
the American Friends of Vietnam, a pro-war pressure group
that vigourously supported US intervention in the country.
Even while the Vietnam War was only beginning to get
underway, the IRC was also involved in providing assistance
for refugees fleeing the Cuban Revolution. In April 1960, the
IRC president, John Richardson, actually met with Allen Dulles,
the CIA director ‘to discuss potential projects’. The funds for
the IRC’s Cuban relief work were kindly donated by the US
companies whose Cuban subsidiaries Castro had nationalised
(Texaco, Standard Oil, United Fruit and others). Once again,
while the IRC provided humanitarian assistance, the CIA
trawled for recruits, recruits who were later to form part of the
US sponsored invasion force at the Bay of Pigs in 1961.
Richardson was to be appointed to a top job in the US State
Department by Richard Nixon in 1969.
And inevitably, when the Russians invaded Afghanistan
at the end of 1979, the IRC was involved in establishing
refugee camps across the border in Pakistan. According to
Chester, while ‘the Agency recruited, trained and armed
paramilitary units for guerrilla warfare…the IRC provided
health care and basic education for the residents of these very
same camps.’
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The overlap in personnel is also quite remarkable with a
number of American spooks showing a hitherto unknown
interest in charitable work. William Donovan, the man who set
up the forerunner to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), was heavily involved with the IRC, as was William
Casey, who went on to become CIA director under Ronald
Reagan. Of particular interest is John Whitehead, a former co-
chair of Goldman Sachs, who was IRC treasurer from 1960
until 1979, when he became its president, a post he held until
1985. In 1989, Whitehead went on to become the number two
man at the US State Department under George Bush, who
was, of course, himself a former director of the CIA. And today,
such well known humanitarians as Henry Kissinger and
Madeleine Albright, best remembered for her throwaway
remark that the death of 500,000 children due to sanctions
was a price worth paying for the containment of Saddam
Hussein, are on the IRC board. Miliband is in good company.
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The secret library of Georges Armoulian
Anthony Frewin
London: Ashgrove Publishing, 2012, £9.95, p/b
This is a very funny book. Anthony Frewin is a regular Lobster
contributor, novelist and screenwriter, and the book’s
intentions are stated when Frewin’s preface is headed by a
quotation allegedly from FBI taps on the phone of Chicago
mobster Sam Giancana, in which he is discussing the new
novel by Joan Didion.
‘Preface? What’s with these fucking prefaces? They’re all
at it. You know I don’t like the fucking things. I say what
I’m gonna say and that’s it. I don’t tell you what I’m
gonna say before I say it, you know? That’s a fucking
preface. Fuck them and fuck their prefaces.’
The idea of Giancana reading Didion made me laugh out loud.
If it doesn’t even make you smile, then this probably isn’t for
you.
On the rear cover is a quotation apparently from a
review in the New York Review of Books, which begins:
‘Exceptionally well researched and written, with all the
unexpectedness of Joan Crawford having a heavy
period.’
The book purports to be extracts from volumes in Armoulian’s
library. Opening it at random for this review I found entries
which begin thus:
[3] Adibe, Supreme ‘Big Guns’ Commander Prince
Virtuous.
GENOCIDE; A PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR MIDDLE RANKS OF
THE NIGERIAN ARMY
Lagos, Nigeria: The University of Lagos Genocide Faculty for
the Army Officers’ Association, 1969. Duodecimo. 128pps.
Publisher’s waterproof nylon (matte green), with matt
blocking.
A fine copy of an exceedingly rare genocide title only
slightly marred by flecked blood stains on the front and
back covers. Among the contents:
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FIRST STEPS IN GENOCIDE: WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM
WHITEY......
[20] Bruce, Lenny
WATCH OUT, WHITEY! JEWBOY’S GONNA SLIP IT TO
YOUR SISTER!
New York: Zit-Davis Books, 1961, Medium octavo.
134pps. Printed card cover.
This is, I believe, the only volume of Bruce’s monologues
to be printed during his lifetime......
[43] Erschatz, Maximillian
ALSO SPRACH JOSEPH GOEBBELS: LEADERSHIP SECRETS
FROM THE THIRD REICH FOR THE MODERN MANAGER
New York: Simon and Syzergy, 1979. Oblong crown
quarto. 272pps. ‘Bound in $500-a-suit material by Mr
Tony of Trenton.’ [Limited edition]
Erschatz was bitterly disappointed with the book’s
hostile reception and fled New York for Bavaria shortly
after publication.......
[63] Ickleford, Lenny [pseudonym of Mickey Morrance]
STEPHEN WARD BUGGERS A RANK STARLET IN DORSET
SQUARE; THE BOOK OF THE STAG FILM WITH STILLS!
London: Lenny’s Books, no date [1955]. Duodecimo.
48pps. Printed card covers.
Dr. Stephen Ward was the sinister osteopath at the
centre of the British Profumo sex scandal in 1963......
[82] Lovejoy, Bevis
WHAT WAS YOUR WIFE, GIRLFRIEND (OR, COME TO
THAT, MOTHER) DOING IN THE 1960S? DID SHE APPEAR
IN A SLEAZY PORNO FILM? AND HOW WOULD YOU KNOW
IF SHE DID? A COMPLETE CASTING LIST OF THOSE WHO
DID. (AND WHO MAY YET LIVE TO REGRET IT)
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
London: The Lovejoy Porno Database Research Agency,
1981. Imperial octavo. 228pps. Printed card covers.
‘The years 1961-1973 were the Golden Age of British
porno films.......’
Which is say: Frewin has created a format – an imaginary
library containing imaginary volumes – in which he has let
loose his imagination, his detailed knowledge of politics and
parapolitics and his opinions. It is those opinions that readers
of a delicate PC disposition should be wary of. If you think
Bea Campbell OBE is to be taken seriously, this isn’t for you.
But I think it is a hoot. Of course not all the entries work
completely (or maybe I just don’t know enough to get the
jokes); but there are layers of jokes in the best of them.
Robin Ramsay
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Destiny BetrayedJFK, Cuba, and the Garrison case
James DiEugenioNew York: Skyhorse, 2012, $16.95, paperback
This is the second edition of DiEugenio’s book. The first edition is among the hundreds of JFK assassination books I have not read. DiEugenio is very good indeed, as a quick perusal of some of his writing at <www.ctka.net/> will show. However, this is not a book for a beginner: this is a book written for other JFK buffs. Nor is this an attempt at another grand synthesis of the material. DiEugenio is presenting the case suggested by his subtitle: JFK was killed by the CIA and its Cuban clients, and Jim Garrison was on the right track when he pursued David Ferrie and Clay Shaw. Thus, for example, while he does refer once to John Armstrong, he does not attempt to incorporate into his thesis Armstrong’s ‘two Oswalds’ material, nor, for that matter, the ‘LBJ-dunnit’ evidence.
Nonetheless, this is full of fascinating material, on Garrison’s career, the inquiry his office conducted, and, of particular interest, on how it was penetrated and sabotaged by the CIA. For in his innocence Garrison opened his doors to volunteers and in came the CIA’s people. For what did the CIA do when Garrison began his inquiry? They formed a committee to decide how to nobble it. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? But in 1967, before much was known about the Agency and its methods, that this would happen did not seem to occur to Garrison and his staff.
DiEugenio presents Garrison’s investigation in detail and I still cannot see that he had a case against Clay Shaw. He had some evidence that Shaw had a conversation about killing Kennedy (him and a thousand others) and - less certainly - some evidence that Shaw and Ferrie had advance knowledge of the events in Dallas. (Them and at least half a dozen others we know of.) There is nothing else. Yes, Shaw and Ferrie lied to Garrison and his investigators; but this means what? DiEugenio does not to seem willing to acknowledge that the fact that X lied, or that the CIA screwed the inquiry, might not imply involvement in the assassination. Shaw and Ferrie had all manner of connections to US intelligence that they did not want to discuss; and Garrison’s inquiry was heading off into areas the CIA did not want examined: to name the obvious two, their role in the anti-Castro
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Cuban groups and their illegal domestic activities. At that point there had been no independent investigations into the CIA’s activities; of course nobbling Garrison’s inquiry would be top of the Agency’s agenda.
The general case against the Cubans/CIA is, of course, quite persuasive: yes, the Cubans were associated with Oswald and were involved in creating one of the Oswald personae, the gung-ho ex-Marine. But we don’t know what this meant. It may have had nothing to do with killing JFK. And as we get close to Dealey Plaza, there is nothing linking either the Cubans or the CIA to the events that day in Dallas. The only member of the cast of characters definitely identified around the assassination is Jack Ruby; and while in prison Ruby identified LBJ as the man behind the shooting.
Although I disagree with DiEugenio’s thesis, this is a really good book, with much new and newish material. Highly recommended.
Robin Ramsay
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ClassifiedSecrecy and the state in modern Britain
Christopher MoranCambridge University Press, 2012, £22.00, hardback
Most of this is a decently written and entertaining account of the British state’s attempts to enforce its ‘everything official is secret’ legislation – run through the House of Commons before WW1 during a panic about German espionage – and its subsequent modifications. Before WW2, in practice the state was willing to clobber little people – e.g. the novelist Compton MacKenzie who revealed a handful of secrets about MI6 in a book in the 1930s – but unwilling to do anything when prime minister Lloyd George took van loads of official (and thus secret) papers home while writing his memoirs. Later PMs, Eden, Churchill and Wilson followed this example.
After the war we get accounts of the familiar controversies surrounding the publication of the diaries of Richard Crossman, Harold Wilson’s memoirs, the Philby ‘third man’ story and the ABC trial in the 1970s; a detailed account of the hassles generated by the trickle of books which began in the early 1960s about intelligence during WW2, notably the Bletchley Park ‘ultra’ story; and the farcical events around Peter Wright’s Spycatcher. If the theme and the major incidents are familiar, much of the detail was new to me.
But within this is an 80 page section in which Moran tries to persuade us that in the 1950s and 60s the British press – essentially one man, the Express’s Chapman Pincher – was much less docile about official secrecy than most accounts have suggested. Though the author’s account of Pincher’s ‘scoops’ in the first decade post-war was new to me and rather interesting, of this thesis I am not entirely persuaded. As Moran acknowledges, having established itself as the paper willing to risk publishing official secrets, the Express, in the shape of Pincher, began to get lots of scoops as bits of the British state began to leak material which would serve its interests or damage that of its rivals. The author tries to persuade us that Pincher was a pioneering investigative journalist in the official secrecy field when Pincher simply wined
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and dined around Whitehall and was given the ‘scoops’. (Moran is aware of this but understates it.) The state knew it was going on but did nothing; too many state factions were using him.
Moran then gives us an account of the ‘D-notice affair’ of 1967, in which Pincher played a part, which is inadequate: a large element in it, involving the America NSA, the real subject matter, is backgrounded; and he underplays the extent to which some of the participants in the drama, notably Pincher and D-notice Committee secretary Lohan, were motivated by hatred of the Labour government. Prime Minister Wilson knew this, which explains his (failed, disastrous) attempt to tackle them head-on. And it really wasn’t, as he has it, ‘the British Watergate’: that epithet must surely go to the anti-Labour operations of the 1970s, about which he says nothing. The 80 pages on Pincher and the D-notice Affair feel like they’re from another book.
There is one striking error. In his section on the publication of The Quiet Canadian (1962) about William Stephenson, Moran describes the wartime organisation in New York, British Security Co-ordination (BSC), of which Stephenson was head, as ‘an umbrella organisation tasked with representing the interests of British secret services throughout North and South America’ (p. 299)’. Had Moran even consulted the Wikipedia entry on BSC he would know this wasn’t true. Actually tasked with destroying the American opposition to US entry into WW2, BSC was the biggest and, arguably, the most important covert operation mounted by the British state during WW2 and one of the biggest intelligence secrets.
Robin Ramsay
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The future’s not ours to see......
Simon Matthews
Going South
why Britain will have a third world economy by 2014
Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson
London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012, £14.99
The authors – Elliott of the Guardian and Atkinson until
recently at the Mail on Sunday – present this work in 3 parts:
an imagined description of the UK in 2014, a how and why of
the journey to that position and a discussion of the
alternatives that could have been adopted (and presumably
might still be) to avoid the ghastly scenario they sketch out.
Much of their material on our envisaged future – the UK in
2014 – is presented, with some relish, under the heading
‘Lagos-on-Sea’, a description that will appeal to Daily Mail
readers (and UKIP supporters) everywhere. It’s entertaining,
up to a point; but also curiously small-minded. Hosting the
Olympic Games was a waste of money, apparently. (Why?
Other countries do.) They also repeat the popular myth about
the country ‘running out of money’ and ‘needing an IMF
bailout’ in 1976, assertions long since shown to be false. In
general terms, though, they give a largely accurate overview
of the UK economy today; and, unsurprisingly, it doesn’t make
happy reading.
As to how this all came about, they write at length about
the failure to set up a sovereign wealth fund to invest the
income from North Sea Oil and remind us (p. 189) of the casual
spite of the Thatcher years by quoting Nigel Lawson’s 1984
Mansion House speech in which he admitted that most jobs
created in the future in the UK would be ‘no tech’. (Up until
then the line had been that ‘low tech’ employment was a
temporary tactical manoeuvre to recover competitiveness in
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the global economy.) This is all fine; but amidst this the
authors also lurch off into weaker territory when they state
that Britain ‘couldn’t afford’ its role in the world after 1945. Is
this true?
Take, for example, 1952, the year our current head of
state, Queen Elizabeth II, ascended to the throne. Britain had
full employment, an NHS with proportionally much lower
prescription charges, a huge public transport network, a 100%
government–funded housing programme that built 250,000
new homes per year (allocated as permanent tenancies and
at a very low rent)1 and maintained much larger armed forces,
together with a completely independent UK manufactured
nuclear deterrent. Britain also had a huge ship building
industry, a huge motor vehicle industry (much of it geared to
producing valuable exports) and was, much more than the US,
a world leader in aviation and jet technology. So was Britain
‘bankrupt’ in 1952? No. It simply lived with a higher national
debt and paid for everything with higher (some might say
normal) levels of personal taxes, as most European countries
do today.2
Sweden or Freeport
Discussing the alternatives to our current destination of
Lagos-on-Sea, the authors propose two models: Sweden and
Freeport. The Swedish option (high(er) taxes and excellent
social provision – hardly unique to Sweden) gets a couple of
pages before being smartly knocked to one side on the basis
of a single statement made by BBC journalist Evan Davis:
‘Personally, I suspect that most of us would not be willing to
pay a very high price for universal provision.’ Whether or not
1 Britain built 212,000 council houses and flats in 1952, rising to
262,000 in 1953, during the time Harold MacMillan was Minister for
Housing in the Churchill/Eden government.
2 The standard rate of income tax was 47.5% in 1952 compared with
23% today. Between 1947 and 1955 National Debt was stable at
£25bn-£26bn (twice GDP). The amount of National Debt fell below
annual GDP during the Wilson period (1964-1970) and has been so
ever since. Debt is not, in itself, a problem for the UK: the problems
today are caused by borrowing to cover the mismatch between
spending and an artificially low level of taxation.
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any government should volunteer a referendum asking if
people would ‘like’ to pay higher taxes, or base important
matters on the opinions of journalists is not considered. Nor is
the acceptance of the philosophical approach that the state
should only do what ‘people’ (meaning what, a majority?
some?) are ‘willing’ to accept. The possibility that a
responsible government would take a long term view, show
leadership and get on with the job for the greater good is not
broached. A little more time is spent ruminating over the
Freeport option, the UK as a sort of giant version of Singapore
or Hong Kong, a free trade paradise off the coast of a larger
continental bloc. Eventually this is dismissed, too, with the
lame conclusion: ‘Whichever model is chosen, the way ahead
will be tough…..’
The book concludes its grim narrative of terminal national
decline by taking swipes at an alleged huge expansion of the
public sector in the UK in recent years, the amount of
bureaucratic meddling that this creates and the delusional
thinking of our politicians, while slowly burying the reader
beneath an avalanche of facts and statistics. With some of
this, one wonders if Elliott and Atkinson can see the wood for
the trees; and much of their text reads rather like being stuck
in a saloon bar after closing time with UKIP’s Nigel Farage.
Two comments at this point: firstly, describing the UK of
the near future as Lagos-on-Sea is clearly overegging the
pudding. With endemic, grinding poverty and exploitation, an
infrastructure that is rudimentary in many places and
astonishing, commonplace levels of corruption, Nigeria is
unlikely to be where we end up in the next 18 months.
Secondly, their explanations of how we have arrived where
they say we have arrived fail to discuss in any detail what the
alternatives might have been in the last 60 odd years and
what they still might be now. As noted, they also make some
glib assertions (and repeat some myths) about the recent
political past. So: although containing much of value, and
being an interesting opinion piece, the authors have produced
a sort of non-fiction alternative future.
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Alternative futures
The alternative future literary genre – in our computer-
orientated era known as either steampunk or cyberpunk –
was founded almost single-handedly by H.G. Wells, a writer
and commentator of the left, whose works tended toward the
utopian rather than the dystopian. Largely abandoned as a
format by the ‘20s, when the world struggled with very real
practical problems, the use of the ‘alternative future’ as a
narrative device was revived from the ‘60s onwards by a
diverse array of writers: Philip K Dick, Michael Moorcock, Philip
Roth, Len Deighton, Christopher Priest, Robert Harris, Michael
Chabon and C. J. Sansom. Today books of this type are now
relatively mainstream and in their works the authors listed
above explain in some detail why the future they represent is
so different from the world we actually live in today. Elliott and
Atkinson simply don’t do this. By presenting a narrative in
which the last 70 years of British history becomes a kind of
gigantic and mysterious exercise in wrongheaded muddling
through, the authors do themselves and the reading public a
disservice. It might have been more interesting – and topical –
if, as well as going over the usual ground of strikes + inflation
+ Winter of Discontent + high taxes they had sketched out a
few instances, or ‘tipping points’ (to use contemporary
parlance), at which, had different counsel prevailed, the UK we
live in today would be a very different place. People will have
their own views about what such ‘tipping points’ might have
been, but the four below spring to mind. In them I sketch
alternative courses of action which were available to the
actors at the time, and which would have changed British
history had they been followed.
The dollar loan (1946)
Anxious to introduce a huge programme of social reforms that
can be fully funded – and with bitter memories of Lloyd
George’s abortive ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’ pledge of 1919 –
Britain considers asking the US for a dollar loan. The cabinet
takes advice from John Maynard Keynes who points out that
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their reasoning for this request is flawed.3 Unlike 1919,
European and Japanese industry (in 1945) has been
completely destroyed and therefore the UK will not face any
competition in foreign markets for at least 10 years from these
areas. As a result UK earnings from exports are expected to
increase quickly and significantly, producing sufficient income
for the extensive programme of social spending being rolled
out by the Attlee government. In addition it soon becomes
clear that the US terms are harsh: to get the loan the UK
needs to allow US access to its protected markets within the
Commonwealth (particularly Africa, the West Indies and the
Far East) thus lowering UK manufacturing exports to those
areas. The cabinet narrowly decides against the dollar loan
and maintains instead the policy of Imperial preference
adopted in 1932. The US are politely told that Britain has
already paid the highest price proportionally of the Allies in
winning the war and is declining to repay future ‘Lend Lease’
monies, writing off all such debts on the basis that the value
of the radar, jet engine and nuclear technology freely shared
with the US makes such payments unnecessary.4
Keynes advice turns out to be correct. UK exports
recover very quickly in the absence of foreign competition. Full
employment is maintained. Although the ‘40s are indeed an
3 On Keynes and the request that he seek a dollar loan see Scott
Newton’s paper ‘A Visionary Hope Frustrated – JM Keynes and the
Origins of the Post War International Monetary Order’ (2007). It
remains unclear as to whether Keynes was instructed to pursue this by
the government, or whether the initiative came directly from him.
Newton concludes that Keynes followed instructions in the hope that
the US would respond generously, and was on the verge of strongly
opposing the deal when he died in April 1946. The loan was not
approved until July 1946; would the required legislation have gone
through Parliament had Keynes lived? In defence of those making the
request to ask the US for a loan we should perhaps remember that
after the huge level of assistance given to the UK by the US after 1940
few in UK political life could have imagined the US pursuing its own
national interests quite so abruptly after 1945.
4 Proportionally the UK paid the highest cost of any of the Allies
between 1939 and 1945: £150bn with a population of 48m against the
US (population 140m) paying £288bn. A shorthand way of looking at
the contribution of the various Allies would be that the UK paid the
price of winning the war, the US provided the materiel and the USSR
and China shed the blood.
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austere decade, an extensive Welfare State is created. Britain
maintains a distinct identity in the world and is not anxiously
gauging its financial relationship with the US when making
future decisions. Because of the way their original request for
the loan was dealt with by the US, it also avoids uncritical
support for the US during that country’s ramping-up of the
Cold War later in the decade. In the medium and longer term
the UK economy does not experience the ‘stop-go’ features
that characterised the ‘50s and ‘60s.
Suez (1956)
After Egypt nationalises the Suez Canal, Britain and France
attack Egypt, with the aim of re-establishing a Suez Canal
Zone (that they will control), taking the canal back into their
ownership and, directly or indirectly, removing President
Nasser from power. President Eisenhower, seeking re-election
and angered at being seen by the US electorate to have no
role to play in this, threatens Britain and France with the US
withdrawal of financial support for the pound and the franc on
the world money markets, unless they desist immediately.
Britain and France ignore this, put an immediate block on US
deposits and assets in their countries and continue their
military action for the additional 48 hours needed to secure
their position militarily. The Suez Canal is taken back into
UK/French control and a pro-western government installed in
Egypt by elements of the Egyptian opposition. Both Britain and
France make it clear publicly that they regard Eisenhower’s
attitude as an electoral device and are offended at the
inconsistency between US rhetoric in the Middle East and US
actions in Latin America (particularly with regard to the
Panama Canal) and the Far East.
Suez is popular with the public, Eden is vindicated and
re-elected Prime Minister in 1959. Close co-operation with
France continues and is strengthened and the UK/French axis
emerges as a counter balance to both the US and USSR in
world affairs. Britain retains its independent nuclear deterrent
and does not conclude the 1958 agreement to ‘share’ this
with the US. Britain maintains significant overseas interests for
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many years afterwards and domestically retains a high-
spending ‘Gaullist’ style economy. In time the verdict of history
on the morality of the action against Nasser is softened as
intervention in the Middle East becomes more common.
In Place of Strife (1968)
Dismayed at the lack of a legal and strategic framework within
which UK industrial relations can take place, and annoyed at
the ability of relatively minor disputes to escalate into national
stoppages, the Wilson government puts forward modest
proposals (In Place of Strife) to address this. They recommend
a system of arbitration, statutory co-operation and legally
binding agreements similar to that used in Germany and
France. A considerable argument develops in the cabinet
about these, led by James Callaghan who, by appealing to the
trade union bloc vote and trade union-nominated MPs, sees
taking an oppositionist stance as his opportunity to destroy
the chances of Barbara Castle (who is promoting the
proposals) succeeding Harold Wilson in any future leadership
contest within the Labour Party. It soon becomes clear that
Callaghan and the trade unions have mobilised a majority
against Castle and Wilson. Although considering In Place of
Strife to be much less comprehensive an approach than would
be taken by a Conservative government, Edward Heath
decides against a purely party political opposition to the
scheme. An admirer of the West German industrial relations
system,5 of which In Place of Strife was a pale imitation, he
offers Wilson his support in a free vote in the Commons. In
Place of Strife is duly voted through and becomes law.
Although beset with many other difficulties, and
unpopular for reasons other than its failure to establish a clear
industrial relations strategy, Labour narrowly wins the 1970
general election, though with a substantially reduced.
Exhausted by 25 years in front line politics and worried about
his health, Harold Wilson resigns in early 1972. In the bitter
contest that follows, Barbara Castle succeeds him, becoming
the first woman to lead a UK political party and the first to
5 Which was created by a delegation from the British Trades Union
Congress after WW2.
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serve as Prime Minister. Despite bringing the Conservatives
much closer to office, Heath is quickly replaced by William
Whitelaw. In a subsequent election in 1974 Barbara Castle –
and Labour – are re-elected again.
The election that never was (1978)
With the economy recovering and Labour – at last – ahead in
the opinion polls, James Callaghan ponders about whether to
call an election in the autumn of 1978. After taking a wide
range of advice he does so. Labour run a competent campaign
and are returned to office with a small majority. Margaret
Thatcher is discredited and removed as leader of the
Conservative Party. Callaghan retires in the early ‘80s and is
replaced as Prime Minister by Roy Hattersley. The schism that
created the SDP does not take place. UK manufacturing avoids
the deliberate hollowing-out of the Thatcher years. The 1981
defence cuts do not take place and there is no Falklands War.
It is easy, of course, to engage in retrospective armchair
politics. However none of the above episodes requires
hindsight. In each case there were prominent and well
informed public figures whose arguments were not heeded.6
Other examples of ‘tipping points’ could be given; and it is a
pity that Going South isn’t a sufficiently comprehensive study
to consider the alternatives that existed as well as
highlighting the errors that have been made.
APPENDIX
Alternative future fiction
Much of the recent alternative future genre concerns different
outcomes emerging from World War Two. The pioneering
work, in this respect, appears to have been Philip K. Dick’s The
Man in the High Castle (1961) which has the Axis emerging
6 Lord Beaverbrook was the principal figure opposed to the dollar
loan. Keynes may have been inclined against it too, but his early
death makes it difficult to be precise about his view on the matter.
The strangest and most difficult to justify of the four instances listed is
Callaghan in 1978 – an entirely private decision made against all the
advice tendered, by a man who was never called on to answer for the
consequences. (Rather like Gordon Brown in 2007).
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triumphant on all fronts. In the US more recently other works
of this type have included Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America
(2004) which has a President Lindbergh introducing fascism
and keeping the US neutral and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish
Policeman’s Union (2007) in which the Jewish population of
Nazi-occupied eastern Europe and Russia have been settled
as refugees in Alaska while the US, again, remained neutral in
the wider conflict.
In the UK the initial reappearance of alternative future
fiction arose, as in the US, from authors working in the science
fiction genre. Michael Moorcock, in The Warlord of the Air (1971)
recast the plot of H.G. Wells’ The War in The Air (1908),
interpreting it from a point of view that readers in the counter
culture of the time (the early ‘70s) would be familiar with.
Moorcock also edited two collections, Before Armageddon – An
Anthology of Victorian and Edwardian Imaginative Fiction
Published Before 1914 (1975) and England Invaded (1977),
which republished works that appeared pre-1914 in which UK
writers anxiously imagined a future in which the British Empire
had been defeated and subjugated, usually by Germany.
Christopher Priest in Fugue for a Darkening Isle (1972 – and a
very prescient prototype for the Lagos-on-Sea option) had
Europe and the UK being overwhelmed, at some point in the
future, by a tidal wave of immigration from Africa, as that
continent implodes due to environmental and political
instability. Priest would later publish The Separation (2002)
which has a plot where Rudolf Hess successfully brokers a
peace treaty between Germany and the UK in 1941. Len
Deighton’s SS-GB (1978), Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1992)
and C. J. Sansom’s Dominion (2012) are all bleak and plausible
stories in which Britain is either invaded and defeated after
Dunkirk, or sues for peace, with the appeasers ousting
Churchill from power. Hitler winning seems a particularly
popular story line today; but a clear inference to be drawn
from all of this, whether in the UK or the US, is that writers are
now actively thinking about what type of future we might be
living in, had events in the past turned out slightly differently.
What if Roosevelt had lost the election in 1940? (Or had been
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assassinated by a fanatical neutralist?) Or the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbour caused greater destruction? Suppose
Halifax had succeeded Chamberlain, and not Churchill? Or
Hitler had been very slightly more consistent in his commands
and the German army had captured Moscow in November ’41?
What would 2013 look like today? In contrast Elliott and
Atkinson provide a grim destination for us all but little real
consideration of alternatives.
Farewell
During the writing of this article Margaret Thatcher died. This
produced a dominant media narrative of her career that
contained much that was arguable or simply wrong. Claims
that she was ‘inevitable’, that ‘she allowed people to buy their
own houses’, that ‘she made Britain great again’ and that ‘she
was a great war leader’ 7 all seem delusory and avoid some
simple questions: (1) What if Callaghan had called the election
in ’78? (2) Or a few more Argentine bombs had hit British ships
in 1982? (3) Or the IRA bomb had been an inch nearer the
rafter in the hotel in Brighton?
Despite all the debate that followed Thatcher’s death no
one put out a programme asking what type of country Britain
might be today if she had never made it to No. 10. Is the
British state deliberately propagating an imaginary past to
stop people thinking about an alternative future?
7 Thatcher as a great war leader seems particularly odd. She
committed 10,000 troops to take back control of a British dependency,
but was prepared (with her cabinet) during the conflict to agree to a
proposal for joint administration and lease back put forward by the US.
Only Argentine intransigence stopped this being pursued. (See The
Sunday Telegraph 21 April 2013.) By contrast in 1964-1966 the Wilson
government committed 60,000 UK troops to preventing Indonesia
taking control of large parts of Malaysia and at no time considered a
territorial compromise. Harold Wilson was not considered a great war
leader because of this and did not receive a state funeral.
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Six Moments of Crisis: inside British foreign policy
Gill Bennett
Oxford University Press, 2013, £20
Dan Atkinson
The author is a former chief historian at the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office, holding that post from 1995 to 2005. I
have always had rather a soft spot for the FCO’s support crew
of non-diplomatic professionals ever since the Seventies,
when my mother (a librarian and indexer) worked for some
years from home indexing the India Office library, part of the
Foreign Office.
A pass was needed for her occasional visits to London
and, on one occasion, she was stopped by a police roadblock
in the part of rural Sussex in which we lived, driving whichever
of our rather hopeless family cars we owned at the time.
Unable to remember her number plate, she was asked for
identification (rather less common then than now). Flustered,
she fished in the depths of her handbag and, on production of
her FCO pass, was rewarded with a smart salute from the PC
in question.
Gill Bennett’s moments of crisis are: the decision in July
1950 to send British forces into Korea; the decision in July
1956 to invade the Suez Canal area; the decision in July 1961
to apply for British membership of the European Community;
the decision in January 1968 to withdraw British forces from
‘East of Suez’ (other than Hong Kong); the decision in
September 1971 to expel 105 Soviet diplomats for alleged
espionage and the decision in April 1982 to despatch a naval
task force to the South Atlantic.
Two things should be said at the start. First, this is a
fascinating book, full of telling vignettes and illuminating
sidelights. Second, I am not sure how many of the six events
can be properly described as ‘moments of crisis’, as opposed
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to being simply important moments of policy choice,
although the ‘crisis’ word makes for a more interesting title.
Thus on Korea, this is her take on the attitude of both
Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin, respectively Prime Minister
and Foreign Secretary: ‘It was almost unthinkable for Britain
not to support the United States in a conflict affecting both
their interests and, potentially, the interests of world peace.’
Korea in itself may have threatened a world crisis, but there
seems little sense of crisis about Britain’s decision-making: we
were going to row in alongside the Americans.
At the opposite end of Gill Bennett’s timeline, the
invasion of the Falkland Islands was undoubtedly a domestic
political crisis of the first magnitude with a response to match,
even if one believes that the ‘civilised’ course of action would
have been to cut a deal with Argentina’s fascist junta (I don’t,
as it happens, nor did I at the time).
But between these two poles – crisis Falklands and non-
crisis Korea – is something of a mixed bag, to say the least.
Suez? Well, it turned into a crisis all right but largely one of
Britain and France’s own making. The process leading up to
the invasion, as the author makes clear, showed Prime
Minister Anthony Eden veer away from a course of action that
may have borne fruit – the forceful internationalisation of the
canal as a vital global artery, with essential American support
– towards a policy primarily concerned with unseating Egypt’s
President Nasser. Other than the lack of American
involvement, it rings a faint bell, doesn’t it?
Less plausible still as a moment of crisis is the 1961
decision to apply to join the European Community. One could
argue that it arose out of a long-running crisis of British
confidence, but that is hardly a crisis moment, more a crisis
longeur.
Slightly more presentable as a crisis moment was the
East of Suez decision, forced on a reluctant Cabinet by the
need to make cuts after the November 1967 devaluation of
sterling. Even in the pre-monetarist Sixties, it was thought
necessary to counterbalance the inflationary impact of the
lower pound with cuts to domestic demand, including public
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
expenditure. Labour’s left would buy cuts in domestic
spending only at the price of a drastic reduction in overseas
defence commitments. Many resisted, but, as the author
points out, by mid-1967: ‘There was no avoiding the
conclusion that Britain’s global responsibilities were
unsustainable.’
The ‘Soviet spy’ affair of 1971 certainly had potential to
turn into a foreign-policy crisis. In the event, the Edward
Heath government gambled that it would not and was proved
correct.
Rejigging the six ‘moments’ in ascending ‘crisis’ order,
rather than chronologically, gives us, I suggest, Korea, EC
membership application, the ‘spies’ affair, ‘East of Suez’, Suez
proper and the Falklands. Another way of approaching these
‘moments’ is in terms of the response of our principal ally
throughout this period, the United States. In ascending order,
with the worst reaction first, I would suggest the sequence is
Suez, then ‘East of Suez’, then the Falklands, then the ‘spies’
affair, then the EC membership application, then, at the apex,
Korea.
Bang in the middle of both sequences is the ‘spies’ affair,
of which more later.
The author’s technique is to take the reader through the
political discussions about each event, outlining the positions
and arguments of the main players, right up to the moment of
decision. What Katie – or rather, Clem, Anthony, Harold and
the rest – did next is for other books to cover, as indeed they
have.
The concentrated nature of the material yields some
marvellous anecdotes and demolishes a few myths along the
way. Thus those to whom the pre-Thatcher Tories were suave
internationalist moderates may be surprised to learn that
Selwyn Lloyd, Foreign Secretary at the time of Suez, ‘spoke no
foreign languages, had never been abroad except in wartime
and did not like foreigners’. By contrast, Eden was ‘an Arabic
speaker with a deep knowledge of Middle Eastern history and
politics, and had a long association with Egypt’.
So Harold Wilson grovelled in front of American President
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Lyndon Johnson at every opportunity? As Washington huffed
and puffed over ‘East of Suez’, insisting Britain ought to stay,
the British Prime Minister told his Cabinet that ‘if the US tried
to punish the British economically, the latter could reply in
kind’. Later, according to the diaries of colleague Barbara
Castle, quoted here, ‘he “cheerfully dismissed” the US
threats... “After all, America was very good at looking after
number one and would respect us for doing the same.”’
Still, a good thing Margaret Thatcher was about in 1982
to ignore those jellyfish from the Foreign Office and insist that
she knew in her bones that the Falklands were ours, right?
‘Now Mrs Thatcher was fully focused. Were the Islands
really British? Once Carrington [Lord Carrington, then
Foreign Secretary] had assured her that the British
claim was good (“because”, as she told him, “there is
no earthly point in sweating blood over it if it’s not
ours”) she had no doubts that the Falklands must be
defended, by force if necessary.’
All wonderful stuff, of which there is much, much more.
But along with querying the ‘crisis’ nature of most of
these moments, I have two other niggles. One, the author –
perhaps inevitably, in a work of this type – seems over-reliant
on what may be called the official-unofficial record. Here is an
example from the EC membership application chapter. We
learn that:
‘The decision to apply for British membership of the EEC
[European Economic Community] was taken at a meeting
held in the Prime Minister’s room in the House of
Commons at 3pm on Friday 21 July 1961.....A hot Friday
afternoon is an unusual time to hold a Cabinet meeting
except in times of crisis, particularly just before
Parliament rises for the summer recess.’
She concludes:
‘It is hard to avoid the impression that the timing was a
deliberate ploy on Macmillan’s part; he knew his
colleagues would want to go home, not engage in
lengthy discussion.’
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Absolutely spot on, I should have thought.
Later, however, she tells us that it would be an
‘oversimplification’ to say that Macmillan called the meeting
having become committed to British membership, that ‘he also
knew that a British application might not be successful’ and
that he noted in his diary the following day that the chances
were against an agreement, largely because of the French
leader Charles De Gaulle.
The French veto did come to pass, but it seems
implausible that Macmillan would have gone to all the trouble
of a carefully-staged meeting that could have been designed
to curtail debate simply in order to prepare the way for
something to which he was not committed and which he
thought may well fail. Far more likely, I suggest, is that
Macmillan was chivvying his fellow Tories from nostalgia for the
empire that had been lost after the war to acceptance of a
substantial shareholding in a new European power bloc.
My second niggle relates to the 1971 ‘spies’ affair, that
bizarre episode that, as we saw above, sits neatly in the
middle of the crisis-America grid. In plain language, what was
it all about? It seems ‘the numbers employed in Soviet
missions in the UK had by the mid-1960s reached record
levels, and though a ceiling was imposed on the size of the
embassy in 1968 the Russians had side-stepped it by filling
the Soviet Trade Delegation with intelligence officers and by
making use of “working wives”.’
By 1971, MI5 estimated that of the near-1,000 Soviet
officials (and wives) in the UK, a quarter were involved in
‘undiplomatic activities’. How had this been allowed to
happen? Some had few doubts:
‘[T]he Prime Minister [Edward Heath] felt resentment
towards his predecessor, Harold Wilson. Soviet
espionage was, in Heath’s view, only one of many issues
the Labour government had handled badly between
1964 and 1970. Wilson and his colleagues, though well
aware of the problem caused by increasing numbers of
Soviet spies, [my italics] had done little to tackle it,
principally to avoid disrupting Anglo-Soviet relations.’
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It’s that slander again!
Thus the weirdly named operation FOOT (their capital
letters, not mine), which remains, writes the author, ‘the
single largest expulsion of intelligence officials by any country’.
Heath later described it as ‘the most import security action
ever taken by any Western government’. In which case, one
wonders why the Soviet reaction was so muted, with little of
the feared reprisals against British diplomats and other
nationals on Soviet territory – ‘on the whole, there was more
noise than action’. Doubtless FOOT gets plenty of analysis in
other books, but I should have liked to read more in this one.
In conclusion, this is a book full of solid information and
intriguing sidelights. The author, as an insider, seems
confident in handling the former material, but unaware of quite
how much of the latter she has unearthed.
Dan Atkinson
Tel: 01342 300823
mobile: 07703 973006
http://atkinsonblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/
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Conspiracy theory in America
Lance deHaven-Smith
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013, $20, h/b
In a 2006 essay, ‘When Political Crimes Are Inside Jobs:
Detecting State Crimes Against Democracy’, Professor
deHaven-Smith gave us the term SCAD, state crime against
democracy. When I read his essay I didn’t think the term had
much chance of becoming widely used – Peter Dale Scott’s
deep politics and parapolitics had failed to make much
headway – but I may be wrong. The term is getting quite a
deal of traction as a Google search will show. There was a
conference in London a couple of years about SCADs. Or so I
remembered. But when I checked it was actually billed as
SCCADs, State and Corporate Crimes Against Democracy,
which indicates one of the problems with the SCAD concept,
which I discuss below.
In this book deHaven-Smith does two main things.
He traces the current use of the expression ‘conspiracy
theorist’ back to the notorious 1967 memo issued by the CIA
to all its agents and assets, with advice on how to respond to
critics of the Warren Commission’s verdict on the
assassination of JFK: namely that those criticising Warren’s
conclusion should be described as ‘conspiracy theorists’. The
author notes that this turned out to be ‘one of the most
successful propaganda initiatives of all time’; the ‘conspiracy-
theory label has become a powerful smear that, in the name
of reason, civility, and democracy, pre-empts public discourse,
reinforces rather than dissolves disagreements, and
undermines popular vigilance against abuses of power.’
Second, he tries to show that the authors of the
American constitution and its subsequent amendments were
well aware of the possibility of political conspiracy and created
a system of checks and balance in their political system in the
hope of preventing it. Thus, he claims, ‘conspiracy beliefs
about public officials constitute a separate and distinct
category of political thought that has been part of American
public discourse throughout its history’; and so ‘the post-WWII
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Summer 2013 Lobster 65
literature disparaging the popularity of “conspiracy theories”
and linking them to nineteenth-century ethnocentrism and
bigotry is an inaccurate and misleading account of American
history’. Well, it’s a nice move but it won’t quite stand up to
scrutiny. The founders of America did not have in their minds
something like the John Birch Society and other nativist groups
in the 1950s, let alone Alex Jones and David Icke; and Birch et
al are not primarily concerned with ‘conspiracy beliefs about
public officials’.
The problem here is that deHaven-Smith is basically only
interested in what have elsewhere been described as ‘event
theories’, of which JFK’s assassination and 9/11 are the
outstanding examples. The other kinds of conspiracy theories,
what we might loosely call the mega or meta theories, those
blaming our ills on some secret organisation or other, are
simply ignored. DeHaven claims that conspiracy theories are
essentially ‘faction theories’. This may be true of event
theories but not of the mega or meta theories which
contaminate event theorists with their nonsense. DeHaven’s
move to rename event theories as SCADs doesn’t solve this
problem; and as the addition of the extra C to SCADs in the
title of the London conference in 2011 shows, even for the
discussion of event theories, SCAD is too narrow.
Robin Ramsay
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Gangsterismo
The United States, Cuba and the Mafia: 1933 to 1966
Jack Colhoun
London and New York: OR books, 2013, £17.00 (UK), p/b
As academic historians are wont to say: this is not my field.
Like other JFK assassination buffs, I have acquired most of
what little I know about this subject while reading about the
assassination. The big surprise about this book was: there
was no surprise. This is the story we knew already; but done
in great detail – 776 notes for 247 pages of text and 56 pages
of notes and sources – and mostly sourced back to official
archives. So this is something like the official version. But only
from the US side. There is little from the Cuban state’s version
of events, notably its intelligence services, which penetrated
the anti-Castro groups in America.1
The Mob flits in and out of the story. Although they put
millions up at the beginning of Castro’s regime for the anti-
Castro Cubans, their involvement in the various Castro
assassination plots was less than serious. The Mob weren’t
dumb; they knew their involvement with the US state in these
activities gave them a get-out-of-jail-free card. So they went
through the motions, only to report back to their CIA handlers,
‘Gee, we failed again.’
Not only did the CIA fail to assassinate Castro, they
failed to get reliable information on events and sentiment
within Cuba; they failed to organise a plausible opposition, let
alone a government-in-exile in America and wasted millions
funding every raggedy outfit which could muster a plausible
looking letterhead. Their invasion plan was a failure – and
would have been a failure, even with the US air support
denied them by JFK. One of the plan’s architects, the CIA’s
Richard Bissell, is quoted here as saying that he knew the plan
was flawed but didn’t tell JFK because he was afraid Kennedy
would cancel it! The Agency failed to detect the Soviets
delivering medium range missiles and nuclear warheads, even
though it involved the Soviets using 150 ships under literal
1 On this penetration see, for example,
<http://www.dickrussell.org/articles/jfkcuban.htm>
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false flags to deliver the material.
This is also a case study of the US response to economic
nationalism. Fidel was no communist when he arrived. Castro
offered reasonable compensation for the US-owned assets he
wanted to nationalise but the Americans refused to consider
that. Instead they began economic sanctions and drove Cuba
into the arms of the Soviets. Thus Castro became a
‘communist’ and the Americans could say, ‘See? We told you.’
All standard stuff. The American state has always preferred
murderous psychopaths like Robert ‘Blowtorch Bob’
d’Aubuisson2 to social democrats.
So: very good and nicely written. There are nits that
could be picked, especially in the period between the Bay of
Pigs and JFK’s death: when the Kennedys were
simultaneously trying to appease the anti-Castro Cubans and
the US military/intelligence who wanted action; wanted to
manage the ‘Cuba problem’ politically with the 1964
presidential election in mind; and cool the Cold War with the
Soviets. There is more that could be said and other emphases
that could be made. (No doubt some of the more enthusiastic
Kennedy fans among the buffs will take the author to task on
this.) And writing as one of those buffs, it is a pity that so few
of the Cuban trails into Dallas are explored and the Cuban
view of things omitted. But including all that would have meant
another, much longer, less authoritative book.
Robin Ramsay
2 <http://professinghistory.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/blowtorch-bob-
duty-to-remember-roberto.html>
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