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>


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>



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/>



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>



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>



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>



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>



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>



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>



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/>



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>



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>



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>



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.



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>



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



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>



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>



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>



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)



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>



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>



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



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.



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/>



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>



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>



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>



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>.



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.



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>.



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->



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.



‘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



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>



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>



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



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>



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>



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).



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/>



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>



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-



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.



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>.



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



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......



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.



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-



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



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.



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



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.



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.



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.



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



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>



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>



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>



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>



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!



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>.



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>



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



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



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>



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>



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>



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/>



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



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.



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



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.’



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.



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:



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)



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



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



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



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



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



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



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.



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.



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



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.



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



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.



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).



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



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.



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



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



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



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.’



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.’



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/



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



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



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>



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>

