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Lobster
70
Winter 2015
● A fly’s eye view of the American war against
Vietnam: 40 years later: who won which war?
by Dr T. P. Wilkinson
● Holding Pattern by Garrick Alder
● Last post for Oswald by Garrick Alder
● Paedo Files: a look at the UK Establishment
child abuse network by Tim Wilkinson
● The View from the Bridge by Robin Ramsay
● Is this what failure looks like? Brian Sedgemore 1937–2015 by Simon Matthews
● Tittle-Tattle by Tom Easton
● The Gloucester Horror by Garrick Alder
● Tokyo legend? Lee Harvey Oswald and Japan by Kevin Coogan
● Inside Lee Harvey Oswald’s address book by Anthony Frewin
Book Reviews
● Blair Inc., by Francis Beckett, David Hencke and Nick Kochan, Reviewed by Tom Easton
● Thieves of State, by Sarah Chayes, Reviewed by John Newsinger
● The Henry Jackson Society and the degeneration of British Neoconservatism, by Tom Griffin,
Hilary Aked, David Miller and Sarah Marusek, Reviewed by Tom Easton
● Chameleo: A strange but true story of invisible spies, heroin addiction and Homeland
Security, by Robert Guffey, Reviewed by Robin Ramsay
● Blacklisted: The Secret War between Big Business and Union Activists, by Dave Smith and
Phil Chamberlain, Reviewed by Robin Ramsay
● Nixon’s Nuclear Specter, by William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball, Reviewed by Alex Cox
● Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice, by John A Nagl,
Reviewed by John Newsinger
● The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq, by Emma Sky,
Reviewed by John Newsinger
● Secret Science: A Century of Poison Warfare and Human Experiments, by Ulf Schmidt,
Reviewed by Anthony Frewin
● The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination, by Lamar Waldron,
Reviewed by Anthony Frewin
● Without Smoking Gun: Was the Death of Lt. Cmdr. William Pitzer Part of the JFK
Assassination Cover-Up Conspiracy?, by Kent Heiner, Reviewed by Garrick Alder
● Thatcher’s Secret War: Subversion, Coercion, Secrecy and Government, 1974-90, by Clive
Bloom, Reviewed by Robin Ramsay
● The Oswald Code, by Alan Jules Weberman, Reviewed by Anthony Frewin
www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
A fly’s eye view of the American war against
Vietnam
40 years later: who won which war?
Dr T. P. Wilkinson
Landing on the table: 1976
A fter 40 years there remains no easy answer to this question;
or better said, there are at least as many answers as there
were wars.
In 2005 at a US State Department conference held in
combination with the publication of the Foreign Relations of
the United States (FRUS) volumes covering the US war, Barry
Zorthian said in an exchange with Marvin Kalb, ‘I say to you
there is no single Vietnam War.’1 He did not count them or
name the others. Nonetheless it may be useful to reformulate
the question: who won which war in Vietnam?
When I was about 16 years old I wrote a term paper for
my English class and asked the question ‘Why did the US lose
the war in Vietnam?’ That was in 1976. I had a very simple
conclusion after reading the books and whatever elements of
the Congressional Record I could find in the county library: the
US had no war aims that it was capable of attaining with the
means at its disposal.
However, growing up as a virtual ‘Navy brat’ I still
thought until 1975 that I would graduate and land in a jungle
1 The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), is the official
documentary record of US foreign policy published by the US
Department of State (Office of the Historian). See <https://history.
state.gov/historicaldocuments>. Barry Zorthian (1920-2010) was head
of USIA/JUSPOA (Joint United States Public Affairs Office) in Saigon
from 1964 until 1968. JUSPOA was the central office for press,
propaganda and psychological operations in the US mission in
Vietnam. The conference was ‘The American Experience in Southeast
Asia 1946-1975’, Washington, DC 29-30 September 2010. See
<https://history.state.gov/conferences/2010-southeast-asia>.
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full of booby traps and snipers like those depicted in John
Wayne’s fake film, The Green Berets.2 In other words, as a
pubescent young man I unknowingly shared the view of many
hard-core policy makers and combatants that this war would
not end anywhere in the near future.
Yet the scenes of retreat I, too, saw on television in April
1975 did not mean much more to me than that I would not
end up dead on some jungle patrol. I confess I never believed
that communism was on our doorstep. I had begun to read
some military history and nothing could convince me that
Russians could march across the Bering Strait or land on the
beach of the coastal island where I lived and send us all to
gulags. I had read Solzhenitsyn and that all struck me as
terribly Russian and very, very far away.3 What we arrogantly
call civilisation in the West never seemed to me in imminent
danger — except perhaps from people like my school principal
and the corrupt teachers that worked for him. Maybe
something had gone wrong with my indoctrination, I mean
education, since despite years in one of the most reactionary
parts of the US I did not acquire the endemic paranoidschizophrenia that passes for political culture in North America
between the St. Lawrence and the Rio Bravo.
I had an uncle who was unwittingly abused both
physically and mentally after at least three tours in Thailand,
before he retired from the Air Force. The rest of the family
seemed to have been left largely unscathed, either too old or
too young (like me) to have been sucked into the venal vortex
of viciousness.4 That — at least in 1976 — was ‘my Vietnam
war’.
2 The Green Berets (1968) was a film directed by and starring John
Wayne, seen by him as advocacy for the US war effort in Vietnam.
Nominally based on a book of the same title by Robin Moore about his
experience with the US Special Forces at Fort Bragg and in Vietnam
with the 5th Special Forces Group, the film was utterly panned, even in
the New York Times (Renata Adler, 20 June 1968).
3 The Gulag Archipelago was published in English in 1974.
4 Pardon my retort to US Vice President Spiro Agnew’s infamous
alliteration, calling liberals ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’ in an
address delivered to the California state Republican convention held in
San Diego in 1970.
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However I do not think that does justice to Mr Zorthian’s
remark. If there was more than one Vietnam War, what did he
mean? Historical scholarship distinguishes formally between
the first and second war in Indochina. The first war was
waged against the French and the second against the United
States. Despite the chronological convenience that implies, I
think it is far more accurate to speak about at least four wars
in Vietnam. I will try to describe them briefly and then
elaborate possible answers to the questions this framework
implies.
War nos. 1-4
The most obvious one is the invasion and occupation of
Vietnam by the US regime in violation of its sovereignty and
the dignity of its people. This invasion began well before US
Marines landed near Da Nang on 8 March 1965. It began with
the decision of the country’s white settler elite to use covert
and clandestine means to prevent the implementation of the
Geneva Accords by which the French had to concede control of
Vietnam to the people who had lived there for thousands of
years and who had been exploited for the previous century by
French and Japanese conquerors.5
Then there was a second Vietnam War. That was the
war most people in the US remember, whether from numerous
tours as soldiers or as television viewers. This was the daily
violence on an unimaginable scale guided by numbing
bureaucratic processes that seemed to reduce the mass
murder to soporific tedium. It was the war that sent mainly
African-Americans and poor whites to kill ‘gooks’ ostensibly to
5 The Geneva Agreements of 1954 ended the First Indochina War.
Central provisions were a ceasefire and withdrawal of French troops.
French Indochina was split into Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Vietnam
was temporarily divided along the 17th parallel until elections could be
held. The French ‘shell company’, the Republic of Vietnam, was
managed by first by Bao Dai and then Ngo Dinh Diem from Saigon
when the US took over. Ho Chi Minh led the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam from Hanoi. The US did not sign the agreement and did not
consider itself bound by its terms.
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protect rights they scarcely enjoyed at home.6 It was the war
that turned a brief period of post-WWII prosperity into an
unending autorotation7 from which most of the working
population of the US never recovered.
The third Vietnam War is the covert war waged against
the peoples of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — with ‘collateral
damage’ in the US itself. Much more needs to be said about
this war since it remains largely hidden in the swamp of
deniability.
Finally there was the fourth Vietnam War: the
unrelenting hostility combined with all the available systemic
weapons deployed since 1975 in order to both punish and
further exploit the Vietnamese people while expanding the
covert terror system developed in the third Vietnam War. This
was the continuation of the ‘Big Picture’, the crusade that
began as early as 1776 when the ‘white man’s empire’
declared its unilateral independence from Great Britain.8
Having named the wars concerned it might be possible
to ask why they were waged, who won – if anyone – and
what lessons were learned or not. Without counting how
often all sorts of clever folks have repeated the adage about
6 On 28 April 1967, heavyweight boxing champion Mohammed Ali
(aka Cassius Clay) refused to accept his draft into the US Army to be
sent to Vietnam. He explained: ‘Why should they ask me to put on a
uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and
bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in
Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?...’
7 An autorotation is a standard emergency procedure for landing or
‘restarting’ a helicopter in the event of engine failure. The pitch of the
blades is adjusted so that the rotor will turn more rapidly in descent,
either slowing the descent to a speed which softens the crash or firing
the motor again so that the pilot can recover flight control.
8 The Big Picture was a series of US Army propaganda films broadcast
by ABC-TV from 1951-1964. The unilateral declaration of
independence in 1776 arguably aimed to preserve chattel slavery and
free the British colonies in North America to expand beyond the
boundaries set by the 1763 Treaty of Paris. See Gerald Horne, The
Counter-Revolution of 1776 (2014). The term ‘white settler-colonial
regime’ was popularised in Left criticism of white supremacist states in
Southern Africa (especially Rhodesia, Mozambique, South Africa).
However the term can be and has been applied to describe the US
regime, e.g. in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of
the United States (2014).
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‘learning from history’, Tolstoy wrote more than a century ago
in War and Peace (1869) that nobody has ever been persuaded
by mere words. As long as the ‘lessons’ people talk about do
not go beyond talk, nothing at all will be learned. But even this
assertion must be qualified because lessons have been
learned from the war against Vietnam. Unfortunately these
lessons are not for everybody and they are rarely discussed in
open. This suggests in itself that despite all the talk, the very
people who were supposed to have opposed the war against
Vietnam have learned the least from history.
A war of unlimited opportunity (part one)
The US invaded Vietnam publicly in the ‘wake’ of the so-called
Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964.9 Since then this action by the
US regime is customarily dignified by the term ‘intervention’.
Although the pretext for the congressional resolution was at
least suspicious then and long since discredited as fraudulent,
the perception of the war as an ‘intervention’ is still widely
shared.1 0 ‘Intervention’ is itself a term of deception. It implies
that the US was an intervener, that it joined a pre-existing
dispute lending an air of impartiality or indifference to the
substance; or, even worse, that it had no prior role in the
dispute or relationship to the parties. The failure (refusal) to
seek an explicit constitutionally defined framework, e.g. a
declaration of war or other legal status, reinforces the belief
that the US invasion was spontaneous, a reaction rather than
a planned measure. The absence of any unequivocal legal
instrument directing the US president to act also guaranteed
what became a virtually unrestricted field of discretion for the
executive in the conduct of operations (overt and covert) in
9 Southeast Asia Resolution, 7 August 1964. Adopted unanimously in
the House of Representatives, only two US Senators voted against it,
Wayne Morse (Oregon) and Ernst Groening (Alaska), both Democrats.
10 The term ‘intervention’ is used throughout the historical literature
to refer to US military operations in the absence of a formal
declaration of war under the US Constitution, which reserves to the
Congress the power to declare war (Article I, section 8, clause 11). The
War Powers Resolution of 1973 was adopted over presidential veto to
reaffirm explicitly the necessity of congressional authorisation for
deployment of US military in armed conflict outside the United States.
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Indochina. This omission imposed a burden upon all
opponents of the war to seek specific remedies, e.g. singular
prohibitions, denial of funds or rejection of appointments; in
other words it pre-shaped the constitutional resistance to the
war from the beginning.
It also shaped the language and scope of action for the
political opposition in the country as a whole. Already the war
against Korea and the great purge, commonly associated with
Senator McCarthy, had established the new terms of reference
for US Asia-Pacific policy.1 1 By conflating the theatre conflict
the US was conducting against the Soviet Union in Europe
with all other foreign expeditionary aims, the well-cultivated
antagonism toward the Soviet Union was transferred to US
foreign policy as a whole.
Prior to 1945, the US regime had relied upon the navy
and marines to execute foreign policy. Thus most violence was
wreaked by volunteer and elite forces with which the general
public had minimal contact. Very little attention was paid to
Latin America and the Philippines. Only Mexico served as a
venue for publicity and promotion of military careers. When the
US invaded Korea in 1945 little attention was devoted to the
activities of either the US Military Government in Korea
(USMGK) or the driving force in Asia — Douglas MacArthur’s
viceroyalty in Tokyo with its plans for expansion into China.1 2
11 Commonly referred to as the ‘McCarthy era’ or the Second Red
Scare, the purge began well before Senator McCarthy (R-Wisconsin)
attained prominence. The expiration of wage and price controls
imposed during WWII led to labour demands for wage increases,
which met with violent resistance by employers and hence increased
industrial action by unions. Employer organisations combined to
advocate strong anti-union legislation, e.g. the 1947 Labor
Management Relations (Taft-Hartley) Act that effectively repealed key
New Deal legislation like the 1935 National Labor Relations (Wagner)
Act. The first ‘red scare’ was an equally repressive period between
1917 and 1920, immediately following the October Revolution in
Russia (Soviet Union).
12 Arthur MacArthur, Jr. was the Military Governor of the Philippines
(1900-1901). His son Douglas MacArthur was appointed Military
Advisor to the Commonwealth Government of the Philippines in 1935,
a position he held until the Japanese occupation of the US colony.
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It took the surprise battle between the army of the PDRK1 3
and the surrogate army of US vassal Syngman Rhee to force
the regime into its first major propaganda campaign since
Pearl Harbor in 1941. Truman’s officials claimed that
communists had invaded the South — implying that they were
anything but Koreans — and that the US was obliged to aid its
man in Seoul by mobilising US forces to defend South Korea
from the communists. The communists had already seized
China and forced the Chinese into exile on the island of
Formosa. There was imminent danger of all Asia being
conquered by foreigners (communists) and the fact that the
South had to combat a fully-armed force of regular soldiers
meant that this was a threat to world peace, triggering United
Nations action. The Koreans living in the North, separated by
US fiat from the rest of their country, including families, were
decreed en masse to be communist non-persons and white
Americans had been urged to fanatical hatred of communists,
especially as non-Americans, the extermination of which
became a self-evident and holy cause.
Fantasy threat
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution pre-empted any need to appeal to
international bodies, gave the executive carte blanche to wage
war (albeit without calling it that) and served as proof that
Americans must support their leaders in the elimination of the
communist threat. That threat was a fantasy, a propaganda
contrivance, but it remained an effective device for controlling
the scope of dissent in the US and its vassal states. It was so
effective that most of the debate, in the US at least, focussed
not on the US invasion, slaughter and destruction of Vietnam
(or Korea before that) but whether the enemy or the
opposition was really communist, or whether there was an
alternative to annihilating communists, or whether communists
could be converted from the errors of their ways. Part of this
continuing idiocy, even found among bona fide opponents of
the war, is that not even actual regime policy is consistently
13 People’s Democratic Republic of Korea (PDRK), created in the
north after the US forced the division of the peninsula.
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anti-communist.14 The propaganda is so effective in stipulating
the terms of reference for US foreign policy that ‘communism’ is
reified as a true movement challenging Americans when it is
nothing of the sort.
A basic Cold War tenet — again very widely accepted in
the US — was that the emergence of independent countries
from the remains of European empires had to be protected
from an expanding Soviet Union.1 5 To render this model
plausibility, the emerging states were compared with Eastern
Europe, where supposedly the Soviet Union had unilaterally
conquered Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania,
Bulgaria, Ukraine and the Baltic States. This historical
distortion could be sold in part because the US regime had a
substantial contingent of refugees from these countries,
including Nazi collaborators, who could promote this image
from posts in academia and the media.1 6
No amount of appeals, argument or facts, even from
people like Kwame Nkrumah or Ho Chi Minh, who had lived in
the US and admired it, could overcome the disinformation used
by the US government and US corporations to depict any
14 Philip Agee pointed out that in Latin America the CIA station were
passing money to everyone, including the Left. The US/UK supported
Pol Pot in Cambodia (against Vietnam). In another words there have
always been policy decisions or actions taken which at least appear
inconsistent with fundamentalist anti-communism. Hence a public
policy of ‘opposing communism’ cannot be taken at face value, nor
can this policy in practice be taken as a measure of what strategic
objectives were being pursued by the US regime.
15 In 1949 the People’s Army under Mao Zedong defeated the
Kuomintang under Chiang-Kai-Shek and it had to evacuate the
mainland and move to the island of Formosa where it continued under
US protection. The mainland became the People’s Republic of China
under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party. The defeat of the
right wing of the old Chinese Nationalist Party, founded by Sun YatSen, in the civil war following the defeat of Japan, triggered a massive
conflict in the US as to ‘who lost China to the Reds’, a conflict that
fuelled the great purge already under way. Both Mao and Chiang had
been members of the Kuomintang until the Japanese occupation when
the party split.
16 The history of overt and covert recruitment of Nazi and fascist
recruits for service to the US starting in 1945 is too extensive to
elaborate here. See e.g. Christopher Simpson, Blowback (1988)
reissued in Forbidden Bookshelf e-book series.
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nationalist leader not utterly subservient to Washington or
New York as a stooge of Moscow and the international
communist conspiracy.1 7 The usual responses of domestic
opposition to this form of international redbaiting were either
to insist that the country’s leader was not a communist or to
advocate more support to insulate the country from Marxist
influence. Another option deemed acceptable by liberal
opponents of a leader or party on the US regime’s black list is
to encourage also official support of alternatives that could
dilute the supposed concentration of power and engender a
competitive system like that in the US (despite the fact that
the US system itself is anything but competitive).
Despite the declassification of numerous foreign policy
documents (e.g. NSC 68) produced before the US war against
Korea, the public debate, whether among academics or lay
people, still focuses on such issues as (a) was there a
communist threat in fact? (b) was there a risk to other
countries and to the region as a whole that had to be
prevented or minimised? and (c) did US action actually serve to
check (contain), if not rollback (imputed) Soviet and/or Chinese
expansionism? Subsidiary justification for ‘intervention’ was
found in the need to deter future threats and to demonstrate
the will and ability to fulfil obligations (to whom?) as ‘champion
or guarantor of the free world’.
Walt Rostow’s ‘stages of development’ theory provided
an additional argument for US intervention in order to protect
new nations in their initial stages so that they would mature
into the right kind of political-economic entities.1 8 To do this
the US regime would guarantee the country at whose
invitation it came freedom from foreign interference (the US
17 Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), first president of Ghana, the first
African colony (formerly Gold Coast) to achieve independence from
Great Britain (1960), had earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees
in the United States. Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969) travelled in the US
between 1911 and 1917. Both Nkrumah and Ho wrote letters in which
they expected that the US would support their independence
movements, especially against European colonial powers. Both were
seriously disappointed. The US succeeded in having Nkrumah deposed
in 1966. Ho died before the Vietnamese people forced the US forces
to retreat from their country.
18 W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (1962)
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itself was never foreign) while it developed the capacities to
reach its national goals. The fiction of ‘invitation’ could provide
the trigger for either unilateral intervention or application of
one of the US post-war vassal systems (e.g. NATO, SEATO
etc.)19
The language used
A ny explanation as to how the US regime could wage this war
for some thirty years with virtually no domestic opposition
must give due weight to the language used to control both
private and public responses to the regime’s actions, both in
Vietnam and at home. It is not accidental or trivial that the
events in Indochina were almost never called a war. It was
always an ‘intervention’, a ‘conflict’, or a ‘quagmire’ from which
finally the US had to ‘extricate itself’, to ‘withdraw’, to ‘reduce
its exposure’, to ‘get out’. Even as the last US Americans2 0
and their Vietnamese retainers were being ferried out of
Saigon forty years ago, there was no talk of surrender.
Richard Nixon always spoke of ‘peace with honour’: this is the
perfume of a bully applied to the skin of a coward.
As far as the White House, the Congress, the military
and other government agencies were concerned, the US was
never a party to the war, merely an intervener. Hence it had
no obligations or responsibilities to either of the principals. The
US essentially used a shell company to conduct the war and
through fraudulent bankruptcy to escape the duties incumbent
upon a vanquished aggressor. Thirty years later this was still
the dominant perspective and hence the implicit policy of the
19 US post-war military operations abroad were supposed to be
justified either by ‘invitation’ of individual governments or through
‘collective security’ arrangements. The first of these was NATO formed
to galvanise Western Europe as an anti-Soviet military alliance.
SEATO, the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation, was founded in 1954
to include Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand,
Pakistan, France and the United Kingdom as a US-led anti-communist
block. India was non-aligned. SEATO was dissolved in 1977. The
Organisation of American States (OAS) had been founded by the US in
1948 to facilitate a similar policy in Latin America.
20 As opposed to the rest of the Americans – South, Central, Latin
etc.
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US regime (e.g. promised reparations never paid) toward the
people and government of Vietnam. For US Americans, the war
against Vietnam is still seen primarily as a misguided intrusion
in a war the Vietnamese should have been able to fight
among themselves. When critics of US policy get serious they
say the same things about Vietnam and all subsequent US
wars — when the US military does not prevail. Namely US
‘hubris’ — meanwhile also a cliché — led the US government to
believe it knew best and was capable of imposing a solution to
other people’s problems.
The basic pattern of colonial warfare
A ll these arguments however, are beside the point. They only
serve to obfuscate, conceal or simply deny the essential facts
of the war against Vietnam. First it was an invasion and war
against the Vietnamese people as a whole, extending to all of
Indochina. Second, it was a unilateral action by the US regime,
neither provoked nor unplanned. Thirdly, it was neither a
unique nor necessary action. In fact the US war against
Vietnam was consistent with the basic pattern of colonial
warfare that shaped the white-settler republic when it was
founded. As in all US wars against non-whites, the strategy
and tactics derive from the fundamental principles of white
America: Negro slavery and annihilation of indigenous
peoples.2 1 The arrival of advisors in Vietnam was not an
isolated security action. The US regime was simultaneously
active throughout Southeast Asia, in Thailand, Cambodia and
Laos, together with its only real ally in the region, the Chinese
gangster fascists of the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek
who had been driven to Formosa in 1949.
The domino theory, popularised by President
Eisenhower, was — as is so often the case with US policy
21 For simplification the term ‘white’ is used in its ideological sense
following the argument extensively articulated in Theodore White’s The
Invention of the White Race (Vol. 1 1994, Vol. 2 1997). White in this
sense refers to both implicit and explicit white supremacy by means of
enforced race-based practices as well as direct and indirect benefits
accrued usually at the expense of non-whites. It does not mean
imputing racism per se to every particular member of the group so
identified.
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pronouncements — a deceptive reversal of perspective. US
Asia–Pacific policy after the defeat of Japan (from which the
Soviet Union was deliberately excluded) was to start from
Japan and capture all the countries needed to feed it, while
preparing to open the door to China as wide as possible for
US corporations. The reversal in Korea was seen as the
harbinger of future failures once China had been lost to Mao.
At the same time as the US was murdering some three million
Koreans and levelling every town and city north of the 38th
parallel, MacArthur’s friends on Formosa were hoping they
could sufficiently ingratiate Washington to have a sign-off on
— if need be even nuclear — restoration to the mainland. This
‘unknown war’ was the template for US policy in Vietnam but
since hardly any American has a clue about the US war in
Korea, they believe Vietnam was a unique and isolated case —
an anomaly and misadventure for US Americans.2 2
Korea was divided by the US.2 3 The popular government
already in place when US forces invaded was deposed and a
fascist, educated by US Christian missionaries, named Sygman
Rhee, was installed. Rhee proceeded with US help to wage a
major counter-insurgency to destroy peasant resistance to
further expropriation of their rice crops to feed the Japanese.
When the Korean army in the North under Kim Il Sung
marched into Seoul they were greeted as liberators who
chased the hated Rhee into the protection of the US military.
Truman used subterfuge (as Johnson would later) to get a UN
blanket and also avoid a declaration of war before unleashing
the most vicious bombing campaign ever waged on a country
with no air defence and no air force. The bombing was so
22 Bruce Cumings prefers the term ‘unknown’ as opposed to the
more common description ‘forgotten’ since at least in the West,
especially in the US, almost total ignorance of the war prevails. For
detailed treatment of the war and its origins: see Cumings, The Origins
of the Korean War (Vol. 1 1980, Vol. 2 1991). I draw on this extensive
work and reading of many of the primary sources he cites for the
recount of US Asia-Pacific policy and the Korean War. See also
Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea (2010).
23 As had been agreed with the Koreans and the US, the Soviet Union
withdrew its forces in 1948, while the USMGK backed Syngman Rhee
in the formation of the Republic of Korea with its capital in Seoul. US
Forces are still there fifty years after they began their occupation.
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comprehensive that when someone in the National Security
Council suggested using an atomic bomb against the North,
Dean Rusk said that made no sense since the US Air Force had
already destroyed everything in the North that an atomic
bomb could hit.24
Despite MacArthur throwing every conceivable
conventional weapon into the battle, massive troop
deployments, endless saturation bombing and murderous
covert action against the civilian population (all to reappear in
Vietnam), the North Koreans forced the US Forces out of the
North before a ceasefire was declared. The war has yet to end
and the US has drawn one lesson from it: South Korea can
only be controlled by full-scale military occupation. That
occupation continues to this day, with the largest contingent
of US military forces outside of the continental US based in
South Korea.
After this humiliating defeat, only hedged by the
presence of a huge standing army on the peninsula, the US
regime feared their hopes of absorbing French Indochina
would also be dashed. No-one among the US ruling elite
wanted to see Indochina go the way of Korea. On the other
hand everyone responsible for policy in Korea (and Dean
Rusk2 5 was one of the most important people with Korea
experience) knew that they could not hold Vietnam if China
intervened. Hence the pretence that at best a limited war
would be waged in Indochina to avoid ‘great power
confrontation’ was a deceptive statement of policy at best.
The US had brokered Japanese colonisation of Korea at
the end of the Russo-Japanese War. Koreans became slaves
of the Japanese and Theodore Roosevelt was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize. (Proof that even making a presidential
24 ‘In North Korea there were no atomic targets. We were bombing
with conventional weapons everything that moved in North Korea.’
Interview in Korea: The Unknown War, Thames Television (UK) 1988.
25 David Dean Rusk (1909-1994) was a Rhodes scholar and became
a US Army intelligence officer during WWII; later Deputy Under
Secretary of State and then Assistant Secretary of State for Far East
Affairs, and finally Secretary of State to Presidents Kennedy and
Johnson (1961-1969). It was he who proposed the 38th parallel as the
demarcation between US-occupied Southern Korea and the North.
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warmonger into a Nobel laureate has its precedent.) Japan
used the South as a breadbasket to provide cheap food for its
own population and, taking advantage of mineral wealth and
water, industrialised the North. When MacArthur arrived in the
capital of his expanded Pacific viceroyalty, it became clear that
cheap food would have to flow to Japan if the economy was to
be rebuilt as planned. The USMGK arrived in Seoul and helped
assure that the rice crop in the South was faithfully delivered
to Japan. Korean peasants could starve, and did.
Essentially the same process occurred in Indochina,
except the French had control over the rice export from
Vietnam along with exploitation of other sources of wealth.
When Japan invaded, Vichy France joined with the Japanese
Empire and continued to make money. However when the war
ended France was poorly equipped to maintain control of its
Asian colony.2 6 Finally France appealed to the US for support.
Although the US financed the restored colonial regime, its
Asia-Pacific policy anticipated US displacement of Europeans.
The French surrendered, leaving the ‘shell company’, the
Republic of Vietnam in Saigon, which the US continued to fund.
There were no plans to alter the economic relationships that
had made rice exports profitable business. Things had
changed in Asia since the ceasefire in Korea. No doubt the
regime in Washington, now resigned to the Chinese
Revolution — even if the government in Peking was not
recognised — hoped to develop an economical means of
stabilising a US vassal in the South, as in Korea, but without
going to war against China again.
‘Credibility’
W hy were so many official and semi-official discussions about
the need for US presence in Vietnam focussed on ‘credibility’?
26 Initially British troops were sent to Saigon to help the French
suppress Vietnamese nationalists intent on ejecting the French, as
colonisers and collaborators under Japanese occupation. Ultimately the
first uprisings were defeated by British and French troops — and as in
Korea — along with elements of the Japanese constabulary who were
released from prison for that purpose. See John Newsinger, The Blood
Never Dried (2006).
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The answer I believe is simple. The cost of the war in Korea
was enormous (and with the occupation remained so). A major
political purge was necessary to prevent opposition to the war
from destabilising the US regime itself. As exaggerated as this
may sound, the classified decisions of the National Security
Council acknowledged the need for massive military
expenditure to prevent the economy from reverting to its
1930s depression. They also reflected an awareness that
without military force (both overt and covert) the US could not
continue to control and consume the current disproportionate
amount of the world’s resources. The people in Washington —
in other words the bureaucratic apparatus of the US corporate
state — had to reassure the ruling class for which it works
that the state has the ways and means to impose the political,
social, and economic priorities of US corporations and the class
that dominate them. This obviously meant the capacity to
intimidate peoples and countries whose resources are
targeted.
The great danger for Washington was that having set
the target of absorbing Europe’s empires after World War II, it
would lack the force needed to maintain that control. Since it is
impossible to say this openly in the US — hence also the
classification of such NSC documents — it has been necessary
to create and maintain another discourse that carefully
separates economic, political and social issues. In the US, race
plays a very crucial role in upholding these cognitive barriers —
in preventing open discussion of class or capitalism or the
nature of the plutocracy that rules the US. Race — specifically
the constant terror waged against African-Americans — is
used to consolidate the fictive ‘white race’ which in turn can
identify with the ‘white’ ruling class as opposed to the black
descendants of slaves. The complement of race is ethnicity. At
the same time as African-Americans are terrorised in order to
constitute ‘whiteness’, ethnicity helps constitute patriotism.
Prior to the Russian Revolution, Americans were to be
separated from anarchists. After 1917 Americans were to be
separated from communists. Anarchism and communism were
defined as foreign and usually associated with specific ethnic
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groups imported as labourers to the US from Europe. (Asians
were subjected to the race code.2 7 American patriots could
license or even abandon their ethnicity by dogmatic
compliance with US political orthodoxy, especially abandoning
their mother tongue along with any European ideas they had
brought with them (unless of course they were monarchist or
fascist).
War abroad and a purge at home
H ence at the outbreak of peace in 1945, the US corporate
elite was acutely aware not only of an impending collapse in
the rate and amount of profit the administered wage and price
regime had assured during the war, they were also faced with
global resurgence of revolutionary and nationalist movements
— especially among the inferior coloured races. This could (and
did) catalyse radicals and African-Americans and Native
Americans in the US. So it was war abroad and the great
purge with Senator Joseph McCarthy as its poster child and
the Klan as its Southern delivery boys. While the suppression
of political radicalism among whites was successful, the defeat
of the Black liberation movement in the US required more time
and a very nasty covert campaign, including imprisonment,
detention, torture and assassination. While CIA advisors were
developing what would be called the Phoenix Program in
Vietnam — an improvement and systematic organisation of the
methods used in Korea — the FBI, together with Army
Intelligence and local police forces were waging a
counterinsurgency equivalent against Blacks and Indians in
the US. Even liberal youth were targeted, e.g. the students
killed during the notorious demonstration at Kent State
university.
27 E.g. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (only repealed in 1943),
the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924. These US immigration laws were
specifically ‘race’ based. Racial discrimination and terrorism against
Asians, especially Chinese. Executive Order 9066, issued by Franklin
D. Roosevelt in 1942, authorised the deportation and incarceration of
US citizens of Japanese origin or descent, without due process. The
last internment camp was closed in 1946. Ronald Reagan was said to
have made a small fortune dealing in forced sales of real estate
forfeited by interned Japanese.
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Until World War II, wars among whites were essentially
waged in order to divide or redivide colonies and
protectorates. After WWI Germany had been excluded from
the international community (of colonial empires). Britain and
France eliminated all the other European colonial competitors
with the help of the US and by promoting ethnic nationalism
among the multiethnic Central powers. This created a new
group of national states and they were institutionalised
within what became the League of Nations.2 8 When the
German industrial and financial elite decided to recapture its
imperial prerogatives — of which it had been unjustly deprived
by the Anglo-French armistice terms — the now inconvenient
nationalism was brushed aside so that Nazi Germany could
exploit Eastern Europe rather than threaten Anglo-French
overseas interests. In the Asia-Pacific region (and Africa) it
should be noted concessions to nationalism were scarcely
considered — this was a white man’s prerogative.
Nationalism is abandoned
W orld War II was another matter entirely. The US emerged
richer and unscathed with its long sought after control of
Japan and the old empires hopelessly indebted to US bankers.
The nationalism in Eastern Europe that had been abandoned
to pacify Hitler and encourage his campaign against the Soviet
Union was now useful again to attack the temporary ally and
revive the US ‘open door policy’ in the dependencies of its
biggest debtors.
It was almost impossible to avoid extending national
self-determination to the non-whites after the war. Britain
would be forced to grant its largest, non-white dominion
independence in 1947. This was not only a political necessity
28 For a detailed discussion of the role ascribed to British support of
nationalist movements in Europe prior to and during WWI, see Markus
Osterrieder, Welt im Umbruch (2014). For a detailed argument as to the
change in British policy under Neville Chamberlain, usually
connected with so-called ‘appeasement’, see Carroll Quigley, The
Anglo-American Establishment (1982). Quigley argues that Chamberlain
secretly sacrificed the sovereignty of Czechoslovakia and then Poland
to facilitate Germany’s advance against the Soviet Union and to divert
it from threatening the British overseas empire.
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but was no doubt catalysed by Britain’s enormous trade deficit
with India after the war. Although as Michael Manley once
pointed out in an interview, the United Nations system,
including the so-called Bretton Woods institutions (IMF/World
Bank) were conceived by the colonial empires (or what was
left of them) on the assumption that their dependencies would
continue to be economically subordinated. In fact this is the
way most of the Charter and the Bretton Woods instruments
have been implemented. But on its face the language was
taken to be a departure from the League of Nations which did
not seriously consider de-colonialisation, but mere
reapportionment of territory.
With Indian independence the white privilege of
dominion status or even complete independence could no
longer be defended — financially or ideologically. The same
process unfolded in the French empire. With very few
exceptions, territorial colonialism was doomed.
The US accomplished a major ideological innovation
during WWI, the fruits of which only became apparent after
1945. Until the end of the 19th century US imperialism was
expressed mainly in killing Native Americans, taking their land
and working it with slaves or European immigrant labour. In
the West, Mexicans and Chinese were used instead of African
slaves or European immigrants. Overseas colonial enterprise
was undertaken by US corporations or pirates who, when in
need of help, called in the US Marine Corps or a few naval
ships. This was corporate conquest and was state-subsidised
but not state-sponsored or administered. Essentially US
colonial enterprise followed the model of the British East India
Company, even employing company armies or buying the local
government for the same purpose.2 9 Hence the US regime
had almost no colonial bureaucracy to maintain with taxes.
This was the model that the US pursued after 1945: after
forcing open the doors of its European rivals, it protected its
corporations while they invaded and extracted everything they
could get out of the target country without any traces of an
29 For a historical examination of ‘the world’s first multinational
corporation’ see Nick Robins, The Corporation that Changed the World:
How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (2006).
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imperial government. People could learn to hate United Fruit
and still love ‘the American way of life’. The ‘American way of
life’ was not obviously racist since it was not the same as the
British or French lifestyle visible in all their colonies. It had
been marketed successfully despite the vicious racism
prevailing in the US itself. When linked with the promises of
the United Nations Charter it inspired people to imagine
independence and prosperity that had previously been
reserved only to the white races and nations. More than a few
nationalists from Africa and Asia went home believing that the
US would champion true independence and progress.
Given this impressive marketing accomplishment and the
expectations it awakened throughout the world, US Asia–
Pacific policy could not be articulated in the terms used by its
European predecessors. Another US advantage was that it
was formally free of monarchs and emperors. The term
‘empire’ just did not seem to fit.
Control of people not territory
U S domination after the Creel Committee expressed itself
foremost in psychological terms.3 0 The aim of US imperialism
became the control of people not territory. Rather than
importing an extension of feudal forms, the regime fosters
private property (mainly for its corporations) and the
opportunity to enjoy the benefits of the American way of life.
The ‘American way of life’ is an integrated discipline including
economic and psychological coercion/bribery and backed by
covert, largely corporate force. Its principal instruments are
private ownership and ‘autistic’ individualism. Thus it is a
totalising and totalitarian world view: to see life as American
without actually being an American requires a vast array of
consumption habits, social rituals, and obsession with
personal liberty as opposed to healthy social organisation.31
30 See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Committee_on_Public_Information> and George Creel, How We
Advertised America (1921).
31 Anthony Sampson, The Sovereign State (1973) discusses ITT as a
typical totalitarian US corporation. An extensively researched
Continues at the foot of the next page.
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Hence when the ‘enemy’ was conceived in order to give
content to the all-encompassing fear of ‘communism’, a
caricature emerged: the extreme opposite of this ‘American
way of life’. Neither Americans, nor anyone else can actually
find a communist or communism that fits the image
propagated by the regime. The simple reason is there is no
counter-ideology constituted solely by the negation of this
marketing product. Communism for the US regime and its
praetorian guard around the globe is nothing more than a
label for the enemy which, in order to appear convincing, must
threaten the subject population with the loss of something
they value. Since not everyone values the same elements of
the ‘American way of life’ the regime is forced to defend them
all at once and punish any and every heresy — like its
ideological ancestor the Roman Catholic Church, selling
salvation (for money) or torturing and executing those who
failed to show adequate enthusiasm for the faith.
The first war in Vietnam, the one fought for credibility, to
oppose communism, to defend the American way of life or
‘freedom’ — this was a crusade in the most medieval sense of
the word. It was a summons to white folks (although
disproportionately more coloured folks died) to punish
heretics, to bring salvation to Vietnam by subjecting the entire
country to an auto de fé. As Michael McClintock called the
policy: convert or annihilate.3 2 Of course in an auto de fé one
does both.
In the ointment
In 1966, the US anthropologist Jules Henry wrote in The
Nation:
‘The establishment throughout Southeast Asia of
Footnote 31 continued
description of the DuPont companies can be found in Gerald Colby
Zilg, Beyond the Nylon Curtain (1974). Reissued in 2014 in the
Forbidden Bookshelf series, Colby Zilg not only describes the oldest
and richest industrial dynasty in the US and its ubiquitous role in the
economy, he shows the extent to which US policies and military
operations were influenced, if not driven by corporations of which
DuPont was one of the most powerful.
32 Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft (1992)
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industrial complexes backed by American capital is sure
to have a salutary effect on the development of our
foreign involvement: the vast land’s cheap labour pool
will permit competition with the lower production costs of
Chinese and Japanese industry, which have immobilised
our trading capabilities in Asia for many years...... The
destruction of the Vietnamese countryside is the first,
and necessary step, to the industrialisation of Vietnam
and the nationalisation of its agriculture.’33
Henry’s assessment of US Asia-Pacific policy was quite
controversial at the time, certainly not because it was peculiar
but because it was open. Social science in America has
occasionally been critical but most of its practitioners, seated
in well-endowed universities and research institutions, were
wittingly and unwittingly complicit in the collection and analysis
of data to advance corporate penetration of markets, both at
home and abroad.34
Social scientists were first employed on a large scale in
the US during the so-called ‘Progressive Era’. They replaced or
augmented the work previously done by missionaries in the
colonies. That is to say they were on one hand part of the
informal intelligence apparatus supplying the data about
indigenous cultures and social structures then used by colonial
33 Jules Henry, ‘Capital’s last frontier’, The Nation, 25 April 1966.
34 The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations have not only acted as
conduits for covert funding of research, they have often provided cover
for CIA operatives. Anthropology has had some notorious intelligence
operatives such as Margaret Mead. Foundation-funded social science
survey studies were used intensively during the 1960s, 1970s and
1980s both to produce intelligence about popular movements in Latin
America but to identify structures and personnel that were then
targeted by state-sponsored death squads. More innocuously the
foundations use their resources on the behalf of corporations and the
state to reward ideological conformity or promote it. Not everyone who
benefits from this largesse is aware of the source of their funding or
the purposes to which it may be used or why it was funded. The fact
that links are occasionally disclosed has yet to diminish the deniability
these corporate institutions offer. The East-West Centre in Hawaii is
one institution that has educated and trained numerous covert
operatives in the Asia-Pacific region. See, inter alia, James Petras, ‘The
CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited’, Monthly Review (November
1999).
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authorities to penetrate local communities either to turn them
in favour of the invading forces or to make administrative and
military measures against them more effective.
Social science as a profession developed as an academic
discipline largely through the funding of corporations that
recognised its value for training management cadre sensitive
to population control issues. Parallel to eugenics, which
essentially saw control in terms of depopulation, intensive
research was devoted to manipulating indigenous social
structures in the same way marketing was elaborated as a
system of surveillance and intervention to control the
population of industrialised societies. This was fostered by the
process of professionalisation, especially in medicine and
journalism. The outgrowth of professionalising healthcare and
information flows drew directly on the experience of
missionaries: the gospel and medical mission both had
ostensibly civilian ‘developmental’ agendas. However they
were actually techniques for social reengineering. In Vietnam
this led to the creation of extensive programmes combining
provision of clinics (also used as fronts for covert action) and
opinion survey action (in Vietnam the Phoenix component was
called ‘census grievance’). Pacification meant everything short
of total depopulation of the countryside.
Henry’s point-blank analysis of the strategic and tactical
operations of capital was certainly a source of embarrassment
to those who were determined to keep imperialism cloaked in
philanthropic garb. Henry’s honest statement of the US
regime’s objectives in Southeast Asia (already a firm
component in US Latin America policy) actually describes the
creation of ‘surplus population’ that results from Marx’s
‘primitive accumulation’. Traditionally the surplus population
filled factories with labour and facilitated the conquest and
colonisation of foreign territories. Walt Rostow reduced this
process to the euphemistic model called ‘stages of
development’. ‘Development’ is simply the strategic
implementation of capital accumulation processes, either by
conquest or institutional grafting. The division of labour —
usually depicted as an element of progress — includes
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‘professionalisation’ which is simply another term for social
reorganisation of knowledge to create wealth extraction
hierarchies. The consequence of this intellectual development
is simply the systematic degradation of human relations.
It is no accident that the most sophisticated and
differentiated social formations, states, are almost universally
genocidal when it comes to the treatment of the ‘countryside’
— especially so-called indigenous peoples who are then
relegated to the status of ‘primitive’ — another
euphemism meaning worthless or non-persons. The creation
of states and their progeny, the multinational corporations,
has exhibited what may be called nihilistic tendencies. These
can be seen best in the continual destruction which
accompanies supposed creativity and stabilisation. Therein lies
one of the central contradictions in both imperial crusades and
wars of national liberation. In other words, if we take the
finite nature of the planet seriously and with it the fact that
humans are ultimately terrestrial (as opposed to aquatic or
aerial) creatures, the basic struggle can be reduced to how
any given portion of the human species establishes its ability
to survive on the finite amount of land the planet offers. With
the exception of the insignificant quantity of landfill
concentrated in coastal and riverine regions, the amount of
habitable land has not changed much in the course of human
history. The allocation for occupation and exploitation of that
land constitutes the underlying dispute at the core of all
‘advanced’ political organisations. Yet this central issue
remains one of the most obfuscated. This source of conflict in
everyday life within so-called developed countries is obscured
both by the high level of urbanisation and the subsequent
derivative forms of land occupation and use found there.
Suppression of this issue is one of the primary goals,
if not the ultimate goal, of political warfare.
The legitimacy of any claim to control of land, whether
individually or collectively asserted, is still — all
industrialisation and digitalisation notwithstanding — the
political aim of all social, economic, military or religious
violence. Politics in this context means the organisation of the
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means to legitimate, enforce and exploit the claim to land —
abstracted as territory and endowed with metaphysical
attributes from which the claimant asserts sovereignty.3 5
Since the war in Vietnam, like the war in Korea, was
essentially a war against the peasantry, even the post-war
Vietnam government was faced with the fact that the
peasantry was fundamentally changed by thirty years of US
warfare — and focussed on converting the mainly peasant
population in the South into a peri-urban conglomeration. After
1975, the government in Hanoi would be confronted with
conditions that could no longer be managed independently of
the wider economic and political system, which the US still
dominates.
In 1953, US President Eisenhower told a conference of
state governors:
‘Now, let us assume that we lost Indochina.....the tin
and tungsten that we so greatly value from that area
would cease coming....So when the United States votes
400 million dollars to help that war, we are not voting a
give-away program. We are voting for the cheapest way
that we can to prevent the occurrence of something that
would be of most terrible significance for the United
States of America, our security, our power and ability to
get certain things we need from the riches of the
Indonesian territory and from Southeast Asia.’ 3 6
The wars in Indochina, concentrated in Vietnam, can be
understood as wars over the control of land. However that,
too, is an oversimplification. In fact the major complaint of the
European and American forces, and those who led them, was
that they often never felt able to control the land. Instead
they were barely able to occupy it, albeit briefly, and destroy
35 The title of Thomas More’s classic Utopia bears a certain irony in
that the word means ‘nowhere’. One might argue that the search for
an irrefutable claim to political order can only end in ‘nowhere’, in the
denial of human habitation as a local and natural given, no different
from that ascribed to flowers or even birds.
36 Dwight Eisenhower, Speech to the Conference of State Governors in
Seattle (4 August 1953) cited in Gerald Colby Zilg, Beyond the Nylon
Curtain (1974), reissued as an e-book in the Forbidden Bookshelf, pp.
404-5.
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its utility for the indigenous inhabitants. Unlike the North
American continent, Indochina seemed to resist every means
to which the US military was accustomed in the seizure of
territory. The simplest explanation for this is that the forces of
the United States no longer sought — for reasons the
explanation of which would exceed the scope of this essay —
to replace the native inhabitants with its own population
imported as surplus from the US itself. The US ruling elite did
not seek (and arguably could not have achieved) a
resettlement on the scale necessary to become a dominant
presence in Indochina, let alone Asia.
War aims
In 1965, Henry Cabot Lodge — who was then Kennedy’s
ambassador to South Vietnam — was quoted in the Boston
Globe:
‘Geographically, Vietnam stands at the hub of a vast
area of the world — Southeast Asia — an area with a
population of 249 million persons. He who holds or has
influence in Vietnam can affect the future of the
Philippines and Formosa to the east, Thailand and Burma
with their huge rice surpluses to the west, and Malaysia
and Burma with their rubber, ore, and tin in the south....
Vietnam does not exist in a geological vacuum — from it
large storehouses of wealth and population can be
influenced and undermined.’ 3 7
Gabriel Kolko distinguishes the initial US war aims:
‘to quickly redress many of the post-war global dilemmas
and frustrations of its military power, to confirm its
symbolic credibility and the technical efficiency of its
arms. The goal was to neutralize the rising potential
throughout the Third World for revolutionary nationalist
regimes....The primary origin of the Vietnam War was the
American intervention and effort to establish and sustain
an alternative to the Communist Party, and Washington
assumed there was a sufficient indigenous basis to give
37
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it increasing hope for success.’ 38
He goes on to argue that US foreign policy after WWII aimed
‘to create an integrated capitalist world framework out
of the chaos of World War II and the remnants of the
colonial systems....because it sought a controllable,
responsive order elsewhere, one that would permit the
political destinies of distant places to evolve in a manner
beneficial to American goals and interests far surpassing
the immediate interests of its domestic society.’3 9
However, as Philip Agee so poignantly argued, capitalism
cannot survive without the repressive apparatus of its
‘invisible army’.4 0
Kolko’s staid formulations are like many that can be
found throughout political science scholarship.4 1
How then are such objectives to be judged? What do
these statements of Lodge and Kolko tell us about the kind of
violence organised and unleashed against the Third World?
Why should the US regime — given the admittedly vast
38 Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War (1994) pp. 7-8.
39 Kolko (see note 38) pp. 72-73.
40 The military was subservient to the CIA in Vietnam. However, since
the military is the visible war machine this is taken to be the essence
of the war against Vietnam. The opposition to ‘military intervention’ of
whatever sort is focussed on how to prevent the US regime from
deploying its military as an instrument of policy. Agee’s ‘invisible army’
– a pun on CIA – is the organised violence and subversion without
which US corporate capitalism cannot be imposed and maintained
against the will of an exploited population.
41 I am implying that Kolko – whom I consider to be a representative
of the Vietnam War historians who are considered critical and generally
accepted on the US Left as authoritative – sees the pacification as a
side-show to support the military in its effort to secure the South and
stabilise the Saigon regime. My argument is the opposite: the military
was brought in to cover the pacification program.
I find the formulation ‘permit the political destinies of distant
places…’ to be staid because it does not escape the language by which
‘American goals and interests’ are reified. Whose goals and interests
are really meant here? Very little of the work I have read disagregates
‘American goals and interests’. I believe it is necessary to say for
whom various campaigns of death and destruction were parts of ‘goals
and interests’. No one has problems doing this when it comes to
Germany under the Nazis. However it always becomes diffuse when the
US regime is involved.
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ignorance of its military and foreign policy establishment
regarding Indochina — have had any reason to believe that it
could determine the nature of legal and accepted political
organisations in Vietnam? To come to a reasonable
understanding of what the US regime’s aims in the war were,
it is essential to know who sets those ‘American goals and
interests’? Why should the US population, unscarred by war at
home since 1865, be motivated to fight and die as well as
submit to privation for the reasons Kolko enumerates?
Moreover, why were the war aims for the military ostensibly
framed in conventional war doctrine — as if this were a war
between Germany and France over Alsace — while the real
war was fought in accordance with completely different
principles? The answer to this question is not made any easier
by noting that the US was (and still is) waging war throughout
the world, making Vietnam only one theatre of operations.
The US war aims — at least in the terms comprehended
by its own military institutions — could not have been achieved
by any amount of armed force applied. While this may seem
obvious, especially in retrospect, the discrepancy between US
military capability and the real as well as perceived success of
US forces in Indochina ought to raise the question what the
real war aims were and what is the proper understanding of
strategic and tactical operations in Indochina between 1946
and 1975. A brief consideration of some ‘highlights’ might help.
Here it is important to pay attention as much to what is
omitted as what is said, to the assumptions upon which selfdeception fundamentally relies.
CBS News correspondent Morley Safer established the
company’s Saigon bureau in 1965. Shortly thereafter he was
witness to a ‘search and destroy’ mission conducted by US
Marines in the village of Cam Ne, near Da Nang.4 2 His field
dispatch became famous as he showed US Marines entering a
village with no opposition and subsequently destroying it. His
film was broadcast into US living rooms showing marines
torching thatched cottages with Zippo lighters and
flamethrowers, leaving the entire village homeless and
42
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destitute. An apparently astonished Safer can be seen looking
into the camera while the marines are at work. The report
caused an outrage, especially in William Paley’s
ultraconservative (mainstream) corporate headquarters. In
reflecting on the report later David Halberstam added that this
was certainly an uncommon and surprising scene because
Americans had been brought up to think of Indians burning
villages and the US military coming to the rescue — while here
it was the US military torching the huts.
Safer then submitted a report on the Battle of Ia
Drang.4 3 The dispatch was broadcast as a CBS News Special
Report, introduced by Walter Cronkite and followed by Safer’s
description of the event with the film. Safer explains that the
US Army 1st Air Cavalry regiment was being sent to raise the
siege against a Special Forces camp in Plei Mi, located in the
central highlands near the Laotian border. The viewer is not
told what Special Forces (Green Berets) do or why the
Vietnamese might want to destroy the camp. The story
continues more or less modelled on the reporting everyone
has been taught in the newsreels. At the end of the story the
US Army wins: the Army takes a hill that had been held by
Vietnamese troops. The settlers have been saved from the
‘Indians’.
Thirty years later, he recounted the Cam Ne incident with
the same bewilderment to an audience meeting at the State
Department to discuss the American experience in Southeast
Asia.4 4 He recalled how much trouble he had gotten because
of this naïve report. The vicarious shock was magnified by the
doubts inserted as to whether this was premeditated arson or
merely an extreme reaction to an invisible enemy.
Thus a report of what was essentially criminal activity by
US troops was coated with dishonesty. By suggesting that the
US Marines had assumed the role usually associated by
Americans with the ‘Indians’ he was in fact providing the
subliminal rationale for the unacknowledged counter-terror
campaign, which had been and was to remain the foundation
43 <www.youtube.com/watch?v=25x53ibwp7A&feature=related>
44 Media roundtable <https://history.state.gov/conferences/2010southeast-asia>
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of US military operations throughout the war.
Actually it was the US Army that had historically attacked
Indians, burning their homes and destroying their means of
subsistence — if they were not killed outright. The burning
settler homes enshrined in the penultimate US film and literary
genres were misrepresentations of the ultimately futile Indian
resistance to invasion of their lands and destruction of
everything they needed to survive.
Morley Safer and others were shocked to the extent that
they could not point to any white settlers that the marines or
air cavalry had to defend. The story of the non-human
communists in Vietnam, who were actually Vietnamese but
could never be called that, had to be repeated daily and
nightly in order for this ostensibly occasional violence to be
rationalised as some kind of self-defence. The war waged by
the US in Vietnam had to be framed in terms of territorial
defence. The vast incoherence between the territorial defence
rationale for US conventional warfare — actually the pretence
of conventional warfare — lies in the fact that aside from the
War of 1812, which it nearly lost to the British, the US has
never had to defend its territory from a foreign invader. The
overall deceit underlying the war against Vietnam was not the
concealment of military tactics but the cultivation of the
perverse set of fears among US Americans manipulated
according to the country’s most primitive but historically wellanchored founding myths and fantasies.
Even the landing of marines at Da Nang was not so
much a military necessity as a narrative device to touch the
hearts of the home front with imagined memories of the D-Day
landing during the ‘good war’.4 5 The purportedly most
televised war in US history (at that time) would have made
little sense to US viewers had they not been force-fed
Hollywood/War Department war films and newsreels for
decades. Without the thousands of miles of Westerns
exhibited as mass entertainment, the Indian analogy would
have been accessible to relatively few viewers.
45 Whether WWII really ought to be called the ‘good war’ is the
subject of an interesting book by Jacques Pauwels, The Myth of the
Good War (2000).
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Moreover without television and cinema there would
probably have been little support for the war at all.4 6
Eisenhower had been forced to end the Korean War not only
because of Chinese intervention to help the North Koreans
repel ‘UN’ forces but also by potential domestic disruption as
what would be called the civil rights movement escalated.4 7
In fact although the US corporate state has been voracious in
its appetite for foreign wars, it has always taken enormous
amount of propaganda and compulsion to persuade the
majority of US Americans to fight abroad. At the same time
however, the massive violence and displays of overwhelming
fire power was certainly not embarrassing to those in the US
who had been bred to believe in the virtue of American might
and invincibility — real or imagined.
The public perception of the war was not only shaped by
the reporting during the war but by the approximately two
million US Americans who went to Vietnam in the course of the
war. Some 55,000 of them died there.48 Although this figure is
modest in comparison to the number of Vietnamese dead,
conservatively estimated at between 1.5 and 3.8 million
(Korean deaths are also estimated at approximately 3 million),
it was the perceived magnitude of US deaths that had the
greatest, if not the only, decisive impact on American
consciousness. What might be called ‘Post-Vietnam Stress
Syndrome’ triggers either bouts of self-pity or vindictiveness,
sometimes both, in the US. American deaths were not only the
major public issue for those opposing the war, while it was
46 See Bruce Cumings, War and Television (1992) for an investigation
as to the nature of ‘televised war’. Cumings challenges both the belief
that Vietnam was seriously televised and the mistaken idea that the
fully televised Gulf War in 1991 was actually shown at all.
47 President Truman issued Executive Order 9981, ordering an end to
racial discrimination in the military in 1948. The US Supreme Court
rendered its decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, declaring
‘separate but equal’ to be unconstitutional. The struggles that led to
that order and the later Supreme Court ruling and conflict between
Black Americans and the defenders of Jim Crow continued throughout
the Vietnam era. Despite the formal abolition of racial discrimination,
the effective implementation in the armed forces took many years.
48 In contrast, 405,399 died in all combat theatres during World War
II (1941-1945) and 36,516 died in the US war against Korea (19501953).
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being waged; they fuel the retroactive appreciation of the war
against Vietnam.4 9 The war against Vietnam might be
considered the first major war the US fought with a nonsegregated military. However the rank and file were
disproportionately black and poor. Perhaps it is also no
coincidence that segregation ended in the US military once the
enemy was no longer mainly ‘white’.
The white command structure no longer had to fear
unleashing black soldiers on white womanhood since Asians
were not considered ‘white’ within the meaning of the act.
They too were only ‘gooks’. The desegregated military was by
no means purged of racism. Nor could it suppress the racism in
its greatest reservoir of white cannon fodder — the South.
Returning soldiers rarely had noble and heroic tales to share
(if that was ever a significant part of war memory). There is no
way to measure the real damage done to the bodies and
souls of draftees for whom professional killer had not been the
occupation of first choice. Since the war ended ignominiously,
the largely working class, poor and non-white veterans had to
accept having fought for nothing.
There were also those whose perceptions of the war
triggered opposition: to the war, to the military or even to the
government itself.
The war that was actually fought
And yet the war perceived had very little to do with the war
that was actually fought, even for those who had been there,
been in Vietnam (or elsewhere in Indochina unofficially).
Allowing for the distortions in memory over time, it is
remarkable how few participant-observers have been able to
present a coherent image of the war in which they fought.
Frequently statements are made like, ‘We always won, even if
49 It is exceedingly difficult to obtain reliable figures for Vietnamese
or Korean deaths because of the nature of US warfare, especially the
saturation bombing during both wars. While much has been made of
the ‘body count’ policy in Vietnam, there was no way to count the
victims of B-52 raids (e.g. 126,615 some sorties for Rolling Thunder,
Arc Light, Linebacker etc.) or murders committed by irregular forces
and ‘pacification’.
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we don’t know what.’ The PBS documentary, Vietnam: A
Television History, seems quite typical at least of the film
record.5 0 Not a single one of the ordinary soldiers interviewed
was able to conclude from his experience what the war’s aims
were and whether they were even being achieved at the
operational level, let alone at the command level. Even
allowing for problems of interviewing methodology, the PBS
series presented witness testimony at all levels, from ordinary
soldiers to cabinet members. Nevertheless the viewer comes
no closer to understanding the war as a whole since the story
is told in the same way it was told during the war itself. The
films and extracts available today in the Internet rely on
essentially the same footage, occasionally with different
editing.
Another problem, reflecting the real prosecution of the
war, is the inconsistent, inaccurate or one might think
deceptive designation of the participants interviewed. To give
a few examples in the PBS production: John Negroponte is
identified as a delegate to the Paris peace negotiations. This
is accurate to the extent that the only statements used in the
film were his descriptions of negotiations with the DRV in Paris.
At the same time this obscures the extent to which he was
actually involved in actually waging the war. Negroponte and
his colleague Richard Holbrooke (who was not interviewed in
the film) were both active participants in the rural pacification
program, an element of Phoenix.Negroponte went from rural
pacification where he reported operations in II Corps, the
military region of central Vietnam, to be the director for
Vietnam of the National Security Council.5 1
50 WGBH-Boston (Public Broadcasting System), Vietnam: A Television
History (1983)
51 John Negroponte would first gain notoriety among the Left when he
served as ambassador to Honduras during the US wars in Salvador
and Nicaragua in the 1980s. He then went on to serve as ambassador
to occupied Iraq. These assignments are only surprising to those who
do not know that he learned counter-insurgency doctrine and practice
as a 27-year-old in Vietnam. The same applied to Richard Holbrooke
who ran the political war against Serbia and before his death assumed
overall responsibility for political warfare in Central Asia.
Continues at the foot of the next page.
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Another example is the interview with William Colby.5 2
He was identified as the head of the Phoenix Program. The
viewer might know that he later became director of the CIA.
On one hand Colby is identified as head of Phoenix while on
the other hand the film says: Phoenix was run by the South
Vietnamese with the help of US ‘advisors’. In fact William Colby
was the CIA station chief who is considered to be largely
responsible for creation of Phoenix out of a program called
ICEX.5 3 Colby does not say what Phoenix was in the film, only
what it supposedly was not. The only descriptions of what
Phoenix might have implied are left to Jane Barton, identified
as a civilian aid worker. This is also confusing because
although Ms Barton is described elsewhere (Internet) as an
employee of the American Friends Service Committee, another
person, Everett Bumgartner, interviewed in the film, is also
identified as a civilian aid worker. Bumgartner was William
Colby’s deputy in the pacification (Phoenix) program and
definitely CIA.54
The PBS film is a typical example of how an essential part
of US strategy and tactics is presented as no more than a
side-show. Thus the focus on apparently conventional warfare
is magnified to produce and sustain confusion about the war
and inadequate analysis at the same time. Today it is very
difficult to draw any sensible conclusions about the war in
Vietnam because there is almost no discussion about the war
that was actually fought. The narrative of American foreign
policy and military strategy is still determined on the official
level by the myths of World War II. Any attempt to penetrate
that screen which hides the unstated policies, strategy and
tactics of the US regime ought to begin with the simply
question of who specifically wants to control what exactly?
Note 51 continued
John Negroponte, ‘Address to the US State Department conference,
American Experience in Southeast Asia 1946-1975’ (29-30 November
2005) at <https://history.state.gov/conferences/2010-southeastasia>.
52 In Vietnam: A Television History, (1983) Episode 7 (see note 49).
53 Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (2000), reissued as an ebook in the Forbidden Bookshelf series.
54 Valentine (see note 53) pp. 50–51.
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Ultimately there are only two objects of war: land and people.
However humans have shown repeatedly through the
centuries — they actually have little control over land itself —
no one can live without it. So the central question becomes in
reality: who controls what people and how?
To show just how easily this issue can be actively
concealed one can return to Morley Safer. At the American
Experience conference he told the following story about a
meeting with William Colby who had just assumed his post in
Saigon.5 5 Colby’s office called Safer and asked him to come
meet the next day:
(Colby said) ‘Look, can you disappear for three days?’
(Laughter.) And I said, ‘I guess.’
(Laughter.) And he said, ‘Well, be at the airport – be at
(inaudible) at the airport tomorrow morning at 5:30.’
‘No, no. And I showed up and he said, “Okay, here are
the rules. You can see that I’m going on a tour of all the
stations. You can’t take notes and you can’t report
anything you hear.” And I spent three days – made –
first of all, down in the delta and they were really, really
revealing. There was only one meeting that he would
ask me to leave the barracks. And it was fascinating
because the stuff that these guys were reporting
through whatever filters to you had been so doctored by
the time it got to you – I mean, to this day, I still feel
constrained in terms of talking about. As Telford Taylor
once said to me, he said, “Once you know a secret – one
you swear to keep a secret, you keep it to the grave.”
Well, I keep most secrets to the grave but – and I so I
don’t want to go into detail, but – and I’ve often
wondered what his motivation was, being a sceptic, why
is he doing this, what’s the real story. And to this day, I
don’t know unless he was – wanted an uncommitted
witness, some – I just don’t know.’
Marvin Kalb responded in a manner that ought to seem bizarre
now.
55 Media Roundtable at <https://history.state.gov/conferences/2010southeast-asia>.
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‘Well, at least Colby did it with you for three days. Think
about McChrystal inviting a reporter from the Rolling
Stone in for a month.’
Of course the remark is bizarre because Safer is still alive.5 6
Without knowing who are initiating, managing and
conducting what are always called merely ‘operations’, it is
impossible to draw any informed conclusions about the
relationships between these people, the institutions they
represent and the interests vested in those institutions — the
progenitors of the war against Vietnam and the wars for the
control of land and population that have continued since.
Wear jeans, millions of flies can’t be wrong
C olonel, later major general Edward Lansdale began his
professional career in advertising. In other words, Lansdale
was a corporate propagandist. He is credited with the
campaign that made Levi’s Jeans into a ‘national craze’ and
converted plain working clothes into what has become the
standard clothing item of the American empire.5 7 Lansdale
went to the Philippines in 1950 and where he became
infamous for his contributions to the development of US
political warfare tactics.58 He introduced tactics applied by the
US colonial Commonwealth forcesto suppress popular revolts
that began after the defeat of Japan and the restoration of US
rule in the archipelago. It was the success attributed to
56 Michael Hastings received the George Polk Award for Journalism as
recognition for his 2010 Rolling Stone article ‘The Runaway General’, a
profile of General Stanley McChrystal. After the article was published,
General McChrystal resigned his command. Hastings died in 2013 in a
peculiar automobile accident in which his car apparently exploded into
flames.
McChrystal was a general out of the special operations stable,
from way-back. Hastings certainly was expected to behave like Safer.
He didn’t and his car exploded. That was some five years later.
However, any of these guys would have known the ‘ground rules’:
don’t ask, don’t tell. A reader who surmises Hastings’ fate might
imagine that Safer kept his mouth shut for good reason back then –
even if it might be unimportant today.
57 Douglas Valentine at <http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/07/
dirty-wars-and-the-cinema-of-self-indulgence/>.
58 Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire (2009) p. 337 et. seq.
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Lansdale’s guidance and the subsequent suppression of the
Huk rebellion that earned him a reputation as the US counterinsurgency expert of the post-war period.5 9
The US began its advice and support to the French in
Indochina in 1945. The first advisors came from the OSS that
already had acquired considerable experience in the region
through its co-operation with various groups resisting the
Japanese occupation. The OSS had even advised the
Vietnamese resistance under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh.6 0
OSS operatives helped train and arm the Vietminh during the
war. When the war ended and US policy dictated restoring
France to power, OSS operators began working with their
French counterparts — to the extent the French trusted them
— to suppress the Vietnamese nationalists.6 1 Thus they were
participant-observers from the very beginning of the First
Indochina War. Moreover they knew both sides intimately.
Today one must ask therefore whether any credibility can be
given to claims by those in the US regime that relied on OSS
intelligence that they did not understand the nature of the
Vietnamese nationalist struggle and the determination of the
Vietminh to fight for an independent Vietnam.
However there is a more important point to be made
here. Namely that the agents and officers of the US secret
armies (aka intelligence community) were part of what became
the war against Vietnam from the very beginning — years
before the US became officially involved, before the invasion
was visible and acknowledged. That means not only did the
war against Vietnam begin well before the USS Maddox
incident that unleashed the bombs against Tonkin (the
province of Indochina comprising the bulk of the Democratic
59 The US granted nominal independence to the Philippine
Commonwealth prior to actual legal independence later. Puerto Rico is
still a Commonwealth, as opposed to a state or independent
sovereign entity. Hence the Philippine military deployed after WWII to
suppress the Huk were ‘Commonwealth forces’ – the military of the
Commonwealth of the Philippines (although heavily advised by US
Americans…)
60 For example OSS/CIA officer Lucien Conein came to Indochina
around late 1944.
61 Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (1990) (see note 54), p.
22 et seq..
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Republic of Vietnam).
Before describing or explaining the significance of this
fact, some points need to be made. Every intelligible argument
is always an argument against something. Every open
argument presumes that those who are arguing know, admit
and accept the terms of the argument and feel constrained by
them. Elaborate rituals in courts and legislatures are based on
the assumption that only what is openly reported, debated
and decided is legitimate. If this standard is applied to the
fundamental questions about the war against Vietnam one will
soon find that much if not most of what constitutes the
scholarly or public debate about the US role in the mass
murder of over three million people in Indochina does not
come close.
As I have already argued, the war against Vietnam is
treated as an ‘intervention’ which it was not, at the invitation
of a ‘friendly government’ that did not exist, under premises of
collective security which were fabricated, for opposing
‘communist (Soviet/Chinese) imperialism’ imagined (aka ‘Cold
War’) and in a limited form, which it clearly was not. Since the
central assertions about the origin and nature of the US
invasion of Vietnam and its war against all of Indochina,
definitely from the side of the US government and mostly from
those who claim to have studied it (even opponents), are
demonstrably false, it follows that any argument about the
war, its nature and consequences based on these false
premises will lead nowhere except to an indirect (by
opponents) and direct (by proponents) affirmation of the
foregoing assumptions. This leads subsequently to the
conclusion — by and large shared by both ‘sides’ of that
argument — that the war was a regrettable mistake. From this
consensus arise such tedious questions as ‘What should the
US have done differently?’ or ‘Could the US have won the
war?’ or ‘Couldn’t peace have been achieved sooner?’ The list
could continue. To demonstrate the futility of these questions
it helps to recall that while a visible if not numerically
significant minority of white Americans demonstrated against
the war in Vietnam, for both strong and weak reasons, there
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was no comparable mass demonstration to demand that the
US government fulfil its treaty obligations, e.g. paying
reparations to Vietnam for the poisoning and destruction of
enormous parts of the country and the killing and maiming of
millions of its inhabitants. It took until 1995, twenty years
after the last helicopter lifted off of the roof of the Saigon
embassy compound before the ‘loser’ extended full diplomatic
recognition to the country that had defeated it. President
William Clinton was quoted as saying that the time was at
hand ‘to bind up our wounds’.6 2 Never mind that President
Clinton avoided the draft and any personal wounds at the
time; it does stretch the imagination to compare some 55,000
deaths with over three million by calling them ‘our wounds’.
If scholarly debate or public politics are to say anything
meaningful about the war, then they have to explain not only
the 22 year hiatus, with almost Cuba-like embargo conditions,
but the inability of such scarred and divided US Americans to
acknowledge the crimes of their government and compel that
government to do justice to a country it did its best to destroy.
To place this in its proper perspective one must consider that
although the Allies (US, France, Britain, Soviet Union) agreed
that Germany must pay reparations for the slaughter and
destruction wreaked by the Nazi regime in the Soviet Union
(and other countries), it collected its own share of reparations
through corporate (not state) ‘investment’ in the German
economy, including seizure of intellectual property, which was
of course given to US corporations, and deprived the Soviet
Union of the reparations agreed by dividing Germany in May
1949.6 3 The US claimed reparations although it never fought a
single battle against the Wehrmacht on its own soil and only
actually waged war against Germany starting in 1944. The US
62 Alison Mitchell, ‘Opening to Vietnam...’, New York Times (12 July
1995).
63 By declaring the establishment of the Federal Republic (FRG) in
the western occupation zones, the Soviet Union was forced to support
the creation of a state in its zone of occupation. The government
seated in Bonn and controlled by the US through Konrad Adenauer was
not compelled to pay any reparations to the Soviet Union. Before the
official creation of the US vassal, much of the industry (concentrated in
Saxony) was dismantled and removed to the US sector leaving the
Continues at the foot of the next page.
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concluded hostilities with Germany unilaterally in 1951. By
1955 Germany enjoyed full diplomatic recognition — a mere
ten years after the war, and Germany started the war!
The war against Vietnam was ‘a mistake’ for US
Americans: for its proponents, because the US did not win, for
its opponents, well, for the same reason.6 4 If the US had won,
Cam Ranh Bay would probably still be a major US naval base
and US soldiers on leave or liberty would still be raping the
local women like many do in Guam and Okinawa, where no
war is being waged.6 5 Instead of litanies about how
traumatic the war was and self-congratulation among those
well situated reminiscing about the good old days in Berkeley
(but not Watts), discussion would be confined to obtuse base
Note 63 continued.
Soviet Union with a part of Germany heavily damaged by the war from
which to exact the reparations it was due and needed to rebuild what
the Nazi armies had demolished in four years of vicious warfare. In
fact the creation of the FRG gave the US secure bases in Europe both
for its bloated military and its expanding corporations. The German
state created by the US in 1949 continues to function as a forward
base even since 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the German
Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Soviet Union. In other words, the
US regime recognises even the most flimsy excuse for a government
by its vassals, while withholding every dignity from those it cannot
immediately dominate.
64 If the war had been won, those ‘opponents’ nothing to protest. It
would have been successful policy. Nobody talks about Grenada or
Panama and certainly not about the successful counter-insurgency in
the Philippines. There is no public discussion about the US
involvement in deposing Indonesia. Some people think Chile was a
bad idea but colleges and city centres were not closed for a minute
when Allende was replaced by Pinochet. Even the US ‘Left’ does not
like to lose. If the US had won they would still be filing suits for civil
rights in Vietnam
65 For example, Bob Kovach and Chelsea J. Carter, ‘U.S.-Japan deal
withdraws 9,000 Marines from Okinawa’ CNN (27 April 2012)
<http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/27/world/asia/japan-us-okinawa/>, Ann
Wright, ‘Guam Resists Military Colonization’, Common Dreams (17
August 2009): ‘In 2008, the US Ambassador to Japan had to fly to
Okinawa to give his apologies for the rape of a 14 year old girl by a
US Marine. The US military forces on Okinawa had a 3 day stand-down
for ‘reflection’ and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had to express
her ‘regrets’ to the Japanese Prime Minister ‘for the terrible incident
that happened in Okinawa.....we are concerned for the well-being of
the young girl and her family.’ <http://www.commondreams.org/
views/2009/08/17/guam-resists-military-colonization>
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realignment measures or other niceties of the war
department’s budget.
Probably the most hypocritical of all apologies for the
result in 1975 — also represented throughout the political
spectrum — is that the US regime ‘didn’t understand the
Vietnamese or underestimated their fierce patriotism’. This
excuse betrays a more fundamental quality in the ‘American’
character. US Americans have been raised — or indoctrinated
— to believe that behind the face of every person who does
not live in the US there is an American yearning to be free
(free of everything that is not American that is). Even among
themselves, US Americans are notorious for their belief in the
natural superiority of their way of life. Even people who have
written admiringly about the US have taken note of this
quality.
Domestically this can be felt in the oppressive conformity
demanded in the ‘land of the free’. Tocqueville noted that the
conformity of opinion he found was stronger than anything he
had experienced under the most tyrannical European
monarchy. The German Hermann Graf Keyserling, although he
thought the USA was destined to be a great country, said that
Americans talk a lot about freedom of opinion but do not think
much of it. C L R James, a Trinidadian sports journalist and
historian, complained that although his American Civilization
was complimentary of the country’s virtues, it was still
confiscated by the US customs authorities and he was
deported to England.6 6 The claim to have misunderstood the
Vietnamese is cynical when uttered by those privy to the
intelligence acquired as early as 1945 by OSS operatives. For
the rest of US Americans such a claim only underlines the
ethnocentrism or nativism which equates patriotism with
loyalty to the United States and denies the possibility, let
alone the legitimacy of other peoples’ loyalty to their country.
The ‘American way of life’ as a crusade
66 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835), Hermann Graf
Keyserling, America Set Free (1929), C L R James, American
Civilisation, written between 1950–1953 and published posthumously
(1993).
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To properly understand why the United States of America has
been able to terrorise the entire planet, even more than their
British cousins did, one has to bear in mind the fanatical
religious conviction underlying the ‘American way of life’.
Whether one calls it a ‘civil religion’ or focuses on the strength
of the weld between patriotism and fundamentalist Christian
sects in the US, there can be no doubt that the ‘American way
of life’ became a crusade. Arthur Sullivan’s hymn ‘Onward
Christian soldiers’ is even more fitting to the US than for the
relatively modest British missionary effort. The British, despite
their established church, had an ambivalent relationship to
missionaries in their colonial possessions. There was business
and then there was the church. In the ‘American way of life’,
business is the church, just as the church is a business. For
example, John D. Rockefeller, the robber elevated to the
barony of business through his Standard Oil cartel, became a
major benefactor of the mainline Baptist churches throughout
the country. His grandson Nelson continued this business to
enhance his South American investments.67
Probably the most infamous of the business evangelicals
has been Billy Graham, a Southern Baptist minister who could
be seen as a kind of ‘spiritual advisor’ to the war against
Vietnam. Although Graham, in contrast to other white
evangelical crusaders, opposed racial segregation early, he
was a staunch supporter of US foreign policy from Eisenhower
through to Nixon, counselling each president except Kennedy.
On the other side, people like the deceased Steve Jobs of
Apple was a classic example of business as religion, promoting
all the company’s products like ‘iLife’ in the format of a
Christian revival meeting.6 8 The archetype of this aspect of
the ‘American way of life’ was Dale Carnegie, whose book How
67 See Gerald Colby, Thy Will Be Done, the Conquest of the Amazon
(1995) which describes the activities of Nelson Rockefeller and his
sponsorship of William Cameron Townsend of the Wycliffe Bible
Translators, using missionary activity to support his business and
political agenda. See also Rubem Alves, Protestantism and Repression
(1985) for an examination of missionary complicity in the Brazilian
dictatorship (1964-1986).
68 iLife was presented by Jobs at MacWorld in San Francisco (2003)
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iOWA2wEFPE>.
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to Win Friends and Influence People achieved canonical status in
the entrepreneurial communion of faith.6 9
Capitalism is not a popular ideology or political
movement but a term for the critique of the political-economic
system. Hence there is little explicit promotion of capitalism as
an ideal in itself (except perhaps among the reactionary
‘Austrian school’ which came to dominate economics faculties
in the US in the 1980s). Ayn Rand attempted to elevate
capitalism to an explicit American ideology articulated in her
novels published in the beginning of what would be called the
Cold War.70
Islam
Today Islam appears to have replaced communism as ‘public
enemy number one’. Many well-meaning US Americans,
embarrassed by the attacks on Islam in a country which brags
about its constitutionally guaranteed religious freedom, still
feel compelled to follow the regime’s public arguments against
supposed fanatics because they believe the US to be the
bearer of Enlightenment humanism, leaving all other countries
and creeds somehow less humanist, less enlightened and less
69 Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936).
Another canonical text of the ‘self-help’ movement is Norman Vincent
Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). Self-promotion by the
authors and substantial corporate support made these books
bestsellers.
70 The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) are her two
most well known novels. In 1966 she published the essay ‘Capitalism,
The Unknown Ideal’. Although she managed to acquire cult status,
attracting people like former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan
Greenspan to her circle, her vision of capitalism as a positive ideology
never achieved a broad following. However Rand did become a kind of
aesthetic galleon figure for the Austrian school economists in their
crusade against Keynesianism. The Austrian School is generally
associated with Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. In the 1950s
the Austrian school was little more than a cult among anti-communist
economists, some of whom were close to what became known as the
monetarist or Chicago school of which Milton Friedman was the high
priest. During the Reagan Ascendancy however, the Austrian school
emerged from the cracks and has since infested political-economic
policy in the US. Keynesianism — to the extent it recognised the need
for state spending to ameliorate the damage done by capitalism —
was displaced from public policy and public consciousness.
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tolerant. To place this misconception in proper context
consider that one of the great men of early American history,
Cotton Mather, a model of religious intolerance in puritan
Massachusetts Bay, was born in 1663. On the other hand
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, after whom Wahhabi Islam is
named, was born in 1703. Reverend Mather was a good thirty
years ahead, burning witches before the Sunni preacher who
inspired Saudi kings to beheadings could formulate his
teachings. It is true that the US Constitution prohibits the
state from establishing a church or forbidding free exercise of
religion. This amendment has been interpreted as
guaranteeing religious freedom but it was ultimately a Puritan
response to the British establishment of the Church of England
with the monarch as its head. It was certainly not a testimony
to religious tolerance in public life.71
When those English colonists declared their
independence from Great Britain, the Southerners among
them did so to preserve chattel slavery while the rest wanted
the freedom to slaughter the indigenous and steal their
land.7 2 The majority of ‘white’ Americans who came afterwards
had to accept this or pay the consequences. The compliant
were rewarded with ‘other peoples’ land’. US Americans have
learned by and large to accept the annihilation of indigenous
71 Religious restrictions to eligibility to elected office were common in
the colonies that became the US. Only in 1961 did the US Supreme
Court declare religious qualifications for public officeholders
unconstitutional. For example Jews and atheists had been barred from
public office in some states. In Torcaso v. Watkins (367 US 488) the
Court reaffirmed that both states and the federal government were
prohibited from requiring any kind of religious test for public office.
The Maryland law in dispute required that even a notary public certify
belief in God. A 1997 South Carolina case invalidated a state law
requiring the acknowledgement of a supreme being as a condition for
public office. Emerson v. Board of Education (1947) extended the
separation of church and state doctrine to include public aid to
religious organisations whether singularly or severally. While many US
Americans like to take religious freedom and tolerance for granted,
none of these decisions has remained unchallenged in practice. The
laws governing termination of pregnancy and the privatisation of social
services since the 1980s has created, through e.g. ‘faith-based
initiatives’, problematic circumventions of the Constitution, while the
Supreme Court has restrained its hand.
72 Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (2014)
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peoples because without it they would have been forced to
fight against their wealthy Anglo-American masters. In other
words US patriotism was grounded in bad faith and
dishonesty. Only by pretending, like the settler-colonisers in
Australia, that they had acquired or inherited a land without
people could they continue to build the country into what it
became. Brazil was organised under a similar principle
(especially in the southern states of Sao Paulo, Rio Grande do
Sul and Santa Catarina), but Brazil was not in Vietnam
(Australia was!).
That is why it can (and should) be argued that the US
invaded Vietnam just as it had invaded Korea (and Mexico as
well as Cuba in the 19th century) not by mistake, not because
of a misunderstanding, or because of some communist threat,
but because ‘invading’ other people’s territory is how the US
was created in the first place. It is just natural for the US
regime to invade territory when that territory belongs to nonwhites. That is what was meant by manifest destiny.
The bomb
The atomic bomb was built by the US with the help of a
peculiar combination of German and Eastern European
scientists. Officially the bomb program was accelerated
because of fears that the Nazi regime would build one first.
That was clearly Albert Einstein’s motivation for writing
President Roosevelt — although he changed his attitude
toward the bomb later. People like Einstein definitely feared a
fascist regime armed with an atomic bomb. However that was
not the primary concern of those who ultimately pushed for its
use against Japan. DuPont was keen on the enormous
amounts it would earn on this exclusive and very expensive
weapons project. The hopes that Hitler would do what the
Allied expeditionary forces from 1917–1925 were unable to do,
destroy the Soviet Union, were dashed at Stalingrad. The
bomb offered the Western powers the potential to blackmail
the Soviet Union with overwhelming destructive force and no
need for troops on the ground. It also seemed to be an
answer to the problem of manpower in the Pacific. Strategic
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planners knew that the US could never field a force with the
numerical strength to dominate China. Dropping two atomic
bombs on Japan allowed open-air tests on its main targets —
non-whites in Asia and, if necessary, the Soviet Union. The
Soviet Union understood this, just as they grasped that the
Western allies waited until 1944 before attacking Germany,
despite official promises to relieve the Soviet Union by
threatening Germany’s western front. So when Stalin
demanded assurances in Eastern Europe, Roosevelt was
compelled to give them. Very few US Americans knew either
about the promises to open a second front or the promised
reparations and control over the ‘road to Moscow’ to prevent
future attacks on the Soviet Union. When he gave his
infamous ‘Iron Curtain’ address in Fulton, Missouri, Winston
Churchill knew that the Allies had given their full consent to
the Soviet occupation. Most US Americans did not.
When US forces occupied Korea and installed the fascist
Syngman Rhee in the South, Japan had already been
defeated. The Koreans and Russians had forced the Japanese
out of the North and they had surrendered in the South.
Again, what most US Americans appear not to have known or
never mention is that prior to 1949 substantial US financial
and commercial interests — in other words corporations and
crime syndicates — were integrated in the drug and
contraband trade that had been based in the Chinese ‘treaty
ports’ for nearly a century. The foremost of these was
Shanghai which was divided into three extraterritorial
settlements for the US, Great Britain and France.
Just as US industrial magnates viewed Japanese
industrialisation after the Meiji restoration (1868) as a threat
to their expansion into the Pacific ‘markets’, the crime
syndicates and their interface to legal business activity, the
intelligence community together with merchant banks, saw the
Japanese as competition in the extremely lucrative opium
trade. The British had established the opium monopoly for
exporting opium to China — a right they had won by waging
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two wars against China.7 3 Chiang-Kai-shek had become the
local managing director of this Sino-European drug trade until
Mao Zedong drove him and his gangsters, together with their
OSS supporters, to Formosa. There the Kuomintang (KMT)
warlords subjugated the island’s indigenous population and
waited until MacArthur or some other great American
appeared to lead them across the straits to restored power
on the mainland.
In the 1950s the so-called China Lobby enjoyed a status
not unlike that enjoyed by the Israel lobby today. It is
probably no accident that both KMT-ruled Formosa and Israel
are substantial hubs for the whole range of offshore illicit
traffic, whether drugs, weapons or money itself. Like the KMT,
Israel enjoys the more or less unconditional support of the US
regime, especially its intelligence community, which maintains
close professional links to Israel as well as its other
‘offshores’.
In the wake of the Japanese defeat, the British first
reinforced the French in southern Vietnam while the KMT was
given control of Tonkin. After KMT troops pillaged Hanoi, Ho Chi
Minh asked the French to return to displace the Chinese. Given
the stakes it is not hard to imagine — if hard to prove — that
the French colluded with the KMT to force Ho to abandon his
immediate plans for Vietnamese independence. Far-fetched?
Only if one knows nothing about the European exploitation of
China until the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Douglas
MacArthur was a stalwart of the China lobby. He was also the
US warlord in the Pacific.
The restoration of French rule after 1945 has been
defended due to the exigencies of the Cold War. But the ‘Cold
War’ was stated policy for common consumption, just like the
fairy tales about the US relationship between all belligerents
in the European theatre. These fairy tales have been so well
73 Opium Wars: First Opium War (1839-1842) and Second Opium
War (1856-1860) also known as the ‘Arrow War’ waged by Britain
against China first as retaliation for Chinese destruction of the opium
cargo belonging to a British trader. As a result China was induced to
lease Hong Kong to the British and to permit them to import opium
into China.
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marketed in the US that even respected critical scholars have
never questioned them — at least not out loud.
If the Cold War is seen for the fraud that it was, then a
major premise for the rationalisation of the US war against
Vietnam must be seen as equally fraudulent. That does not
mean that no-one defending US policy in such terms was
aware of this deceit. Given on one hand the intensity of
indoctrination to which the recruits to the corporate and
imperial bureaucracy are subjected, one can accept that many
people in that bureaucracy, both in government employment
and in the media genuinely believed in the ‘threat’. On the
other hand there is a more elemental factor involved. In 1940,
US Attorney General Robert H. Jackson, who led the US
prosecution team in Nuremberg and later was appointed to
the US Supreme Court wrote:
‘Activities which seem helpful or benevolent to wage
earners, persons on relief, or those who are
disadvantaged in the struggle for existence, may be
regarded as “subversive” by those whose property
interests might be affected thereby; those who are in
office are apt to regard as “subversive” the activities of
any of those who would bring about a change of
administration. Some of the soundest constitutional
doctrines were once punished as “subversive”.’ 74
Frank Donner notes further:
‘American liberalism has failed to curb the repressive
thrust of nativism — and not only because it has chosen
to take a stand at the wrong point (the courtroom) in
the governmental structure. Its commitment to the
libertarian tradition has been deeply flawed (I refer here
to its dominant sectors) by anti-communism and by
subservience to the corporate sector. And, since the
New Deal, liberal standard-bearers — intellectuals,
academics, and lawyers outside the political mainstream
— have been all too ready to compromise a professional
commitment to full freedom of political expression as a
demonstration of political realism, the price the idealistic
74 Quoted in Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance (1980) p. xv.
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outsider must pay to enter the corridors of power in an
insider’s role. In its retreat, liberalism has historically
acquiesced in substantive limitations on political
expression in exchange for procedural, “due process”
palliatives. In the same spirit, and until recently, it
embraced clandestine counter-subversive domestic
intelligence sponsored by the executive as a libertarian
alternative to such cruder repressive modes as
legislation and exposé-style congressional investigation.
Like other dubious enterprises, intelligence has
resorted to a claimed professionalism — and in
particular, a cosmetic vocabulary — as a badge of
legitimacy. Language has become an integral part of the
subject of intelligence. Not because its terminology is
particularly arcane and technical, but rather because it
uses what George Steiner has called the “complex energies
of language” as a shield against the constitutional, political,
and ethical attacks to which it is highly vulnerable. (The
same defensive need explains the proliferation of
euphemisms and pseudo-professional jargon in the
Vietnam War era.)’ (emphasis added)75
Donner’s analysis of the role of so-called intelligence, which he
considers itself to be a form of political repression, does not
apply only to domestic intelligence operations — notably the
Red Scares since the Palmer Raids — but to foreign intelligence
operations which became the focus of US foreign policy in the
post-war era.
This liberal position is the same held by most of those
who call themselves ‘progressives’ in the United States. In
fact, the term ‘progressive’, easily confused with the ideology
of late-19th century middle-class reformism although actually
closely related to it, arose out of submission to political
repression in the United States under President Theodore
Roosevelt. At that time political repression was primarily
corporate terror, e.g. the domestic spying and terrorism
perpetrated by companies like the Pinkerton Detective Agency
75
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and the various railroad police.7 6 In the rural South the Ku
Klux Klan performed this function. By the time Wilson became
president the demands of ‘progressives’ for government
regulation of corporations were translated into increasing
nationalisation of corporate police and the creation of federal
police and intelligence services, foremost of which became J.
Edgar Hoover’s infamous Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI). By adopting the term ‘progressive’ the liberals distanced
themselves from socialists, communists, anarchists, and
anyone else who advocated fundamental change in the
political and economic system dominated by corporations.
The foundations
H aving conceded the corporate distinction between
acceptable opposition and radical demands for change, a blind
eye was turned to America’s particular kind of political
repression. The result was a thorough isolation of popular
movements such as those that aimed to abolish the racist
tyranny in the South or mass unionisation in the industrialised
North. At this point government political repression was
augmented by the work of tax-exempt foundations like those
created by Rockefeller and Carnegie — the predecessors of
the National Endowment for Democracy founded during the
Reagan administration to intensify political warfare abroad. As
already argued, at the end of World War II the liberal
establishment and corporate progressives both agreed on the
need for an alternative to Marine expeditionary forces as a
means of coercing countries targeted for (continued)
exploitation by US corporations. This was the main reason why
William Donovan proposed the creation of what became the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after the US emerged as the
76 Harry Anslinger, the first and long-lasting director of the Federal
Bureau of Narcotics, began his career as an officer in the Pennsylvania
Railroad Police, the goon squad of Mellon’s railroad empire.
Interestingly enough, Anslinger — a great rival of J Edgar Hoover —
considered his agency an important institution for maintaining white
supremacy by policing Blacks who were disproportionately targeted by
the drug laws. The FBN cooperated with the CIA in managing the US
interest in the international drug trade and hence part of the covert
war in Asia. See Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf (2006)
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number one world power in 1945.
With the unexpected (and undesired) survival of the
Soviet Union the liberal elite saw its failure to directly or
indirectly crush a revolutionary regime. George Kennan also
saw — and that was the real point of his ‘X’ article in Foreign
Affairs — that the US (especially its corporations) would be
vulnerable now that there was a major industrialised power
capable of defending itself against US attacks, whether overt
or covert. This also meant that US corporate liberalism was not
the only alternative to classical European colonialism. While it
is true that Donovan’s ostensible credentials for proposing a
post-war intelligence service derived from his responsibility for
wartime intelligence directed against the Axis powers, the real
pedigree upon which he built was his work as a ‘white shoe’
lawyer. The ‘white shoe’ firms were corporate law firms mainly
located in New York City. The represented their clients in
classical legal disputes and transactions but also organised
the political repression where US corporations had their
overseas operations. The star among these political law firms
was Sullivan & Cromwell, where John Foster Dulles and his
brother Allen were partners. John McCloy, the Standard Oil
lawyer who served as Deputy Secretary of War during WWII,
came from similar stock. The methods that became CIA stock
and trade were first used by these law firms and the
corporations they represented.
‘Intelligence’ is called ‘market research’ in business
administration. In fact it involves spying on competitors and
consumers/clients. ‘Propaganda’ is what business folks call
‘public relations’ and ‘advertising’. Finally ‘foreign intelligence’,
which includes ‘counterintelligence’, is the equivalent of sales
and industrial sabotage.
Donner adds:
‘In addition to supplying a functional rationale, both
military conflict and social science have contributed
cosmetic language and images to disguise the realities
of investigative purpose and conduct. Thus, for example,
sociology contributed the term “data collection” to
describe, inter alia, surveillance, wire-tapping and the
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use of informers. The FBI uses “domestic” or “internal
security” intelligence to designate what I here call
political intelligence. It staunchly rejects “political
intelligence” as a suitable usage because that includes
mainstream politics. However, the terms “political
intelligence” or “domestic political intelligence” accurately
describe what the Bureau does: it collects information
about the politics of domestic targets....Domestic
intelligence is our shield against threats to “internal
security”, while foreign intelligence is supposed to
provide the same protection for “national security”, the
interest threatened by hostile external activity.’ 77
How was the war against Vietnam actually waged? It was not
a war against two belligerents meeting on the battlefield to
contest territory. When the US regime sent its first ‘advisors’
to Indochina their job was to determine how US (corporate)
interests could be secured and furthered in the region. When
Eisenhower told state governors what the US needed in
Indochina — cheap or free minerals, natural resources and of
course captive labour — he was certainly speaking with the
knowledge that one of his chief foreign policy advisors, Clark
Clifford, was DuPont’s chief lobbyist and that his Secretary of
State John Foster Dulles represented powerful banking and
merchant interests, both as lawyers and personal
beneficiaries of their clients. Although he had worked as a
junior officer with corporate bullies like Douglas McArthur,7 8
Eisenhower was no Smedley Butler, his warnings about the
military–industrial complex notwithstanding.7 9
The war began with an ‘intelligence operation’, partly to
77 Frank Donner (see note 74) p. xv
78 On 28 June 1932, Douglas MacArthur together with George Patton
was ordered by Herbert Hoover to suppress the so-called Bonus Army
protest in Washington. Cavalry, infantry, tanks, tear gas and all the
trimmings were deployed against unarmed veterans.
Dwight Eisenhower was an aide to MacArthur during the
repressive action taken at the height of the Great Depression.
79 Smedley Butler (1881-1940), US Marine general and two-time
Medal of Honor winner, denounced DuPont and other companies
before Congress for conspiring to overthrow the US government while
Continues at the foot of the next page.
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support the French, partly to undermine them and make way
for the US. By 1948 the French were no longer able to protect
their troops so they launched counter-intelligence/counterinsurgency operations with the help of the CIA. GCMAs8 0
were formed (at the same time as US Army First Special
Forces), the precursors of the PRUs (Provincial Reconnaissance
Units) developed by the CIA in the beginning of what would
become Phoenix. In 1954 Edward Lansdale arrived with his kit.
By the mid-1950s US soldiers were fighting with the French
and the 350-member US Military Assistance and Advisory
Group (MAAG) was stationed in Saigon to dispense money to
the French and anyone else who might serve US interests in
Indochina at the time.81 This was the pattern set well before
the Southeast Asia Resolution (Gulf of Tonkin).
Phoenix is usually presented as a perhaps unpleasant
program introduced to help the military perform its
conventional warfare role to secure South Vietnam from
communist subversion. The reverse is the case. Increasing
military deployment was ordered to support CIA’s intelligence/
political warfare assignment. The US did not want war with
China after Korea. It also did not want to openly cloak itself in
‘colonialism’ by supporting the French to the end or openly
taking their place. Edward Lansdale was brought in because
of his reputation in the Philippines (all yellow folks look alike)
to develop psychological operations. However Lansdale’s
personal forte was marketing through terror. While his critics
said that he was just too idiosyncratic and self-important,
convinced of his own mastery of the field, they clearly
underestimated something Lansdale understood well: selling
the war at home and not just promoting political repression
with a smile. Lansdale did not have to be an expert, he just
Footnote 79 continued.
Franklin Roosevelt was president. He also wrote War is a Racket (1935;
available as a PDF at < http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/
warisaracket.pdf>) in which he admitted that his career in the Marine
Corps consisted of leading expeditionary forces to kick small countries
and popular movements so that they would not threaten the wealth
and property of US corporations.
80 ‘Groupement de Commandos Mixtes Aéroportés’ (Mixed Airborne
Commando Group).
81 Douglas Valentine (1990) (see note 53), pp. 24-25.
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had to appear like one. In helping to expand the covert war
for control of Vietnam, he also convinced many at home that
this was the way to win against the Vietnamese as well as
domestic and international public opinion. At first it seemed
like he had the wonder drug to overcome the Vietminh. When
he didn’t he became the target of heavy criticism both by
civilian and military leadership. Yet by insisting that the great
Lansdale came with a counterinsurgency plan — that didn’t
work — he also gave an alibi to an enormous escalation in
political warfare and the subordination of the conventional
military to these objectives and the organisation created to
fulfil them. If Lansdale was a ‘failure’ in the field, this ‘failure’
made it possible for people like William Colby to deny that
Vietnam was a war waged by the covert corporate forces,
capitalism’s invisible army. Even the ultimate failure of the US
military to hold ground, to drive the ‘VC’ or the regular
Vietnamese army out of the South could be blamed on the
military. The scope, strategy and tactics of the primarily
political war waged against the Vietnamese civilian population
and the systematic political repression for which Phoenix was
born remained in the shadows of B-52s, inaudible behind the
tremendous blasts. Meanwhile the CIA could blow craters of
its own into the population in the hopes of persuading the
Vietnamese of the great transcendental value of wearing
Levi’s blue jeans and working for the Yankee dollar.
Dr T P Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English,
directs theatre and coaches cricket in Heinrich
Heine’s birthplace, Düsseldorf. He is also the author
of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of
Apartheid in South Africa (Maisonneuve Press,
2003).
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Holding Pattern
Garrick Alder
Mrs Mopp and the ‘wet jobs’
The ‘review’ of the Freedom of Information Act is in the news
as I write and I don’t think anyone who cares passionately
about the Act can be under any illusions about the result this
review is expected to produce. (In his autobiography Tony
Blair disowned it as the worst mistake he made as Prime
Minister, which is surely both unexpectedly honest and
chutzpah on a scale so gobsmacking that it could eclipse a
galaxy.)
Less discussed is FOI’s little sister, the Environmental
Information Regulations (EIR), which are far narrower in scope
but much much wider in reach: EIR essentially entitle you to
any information you want from just about anyone, so long as
it has an environmental connection.
Not even the spooks are exempt from EIR and the dear
old BBC, whose investigative journalism knows no depths,
recently used the regulations to gain information about the
energy efficiency of the headquarters of MI5 and MI6, vital
information which the public no doubt lapped up hungrily.
I decided to use the ‘catchall’ net of the EIR to winkle out
some rather more interesting information from MI6.
The disposal of human remains is considered an
environmental issue by central Government (and what else
could it possibly be?) and since MI6 has the ‘class 7’ power to
use lethal force,1 I thought I’d find out how MI6 gets rid of
those inconvenient stiffs. Accordingly, I submitted an EIR
request to MI6 asking how many corpses had been disposed
of since the turn of the century.
The in-house legal team obviously found my reasoning
irrefutable because a short while later I received a reply (on
1
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plain A4 paper, signed with a wiggly line with no name
beneath it) informing me that the Secret Intelligence Service
has not disposed of human remains in the last 15 years.
Encouraged, I wrote again, this time asking for the
release of the Service’s internal codes/regulations/whatever
concerning the disposal of human remains.
The Service’s next letter thanked me for my
supplemental question and informed me that no such
framework exists.
No doubt, MI6 was entirely honest and forthright in its
responses.
I was understandably puzzled by such a glaring omission
in such a strictly regulated environmental area of law and so I
wrote to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs to ask how the Government ensured MI6 wasn’t
polluting the planet with lead-overdose patients.
There was a pause of a week or two and then the
Department’s press office wrote back telling me the whole
thing was nothing to do with them and that I should approach
the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice instead – neither of
which, of course, has the slightest oversight of MI6.
I think I recognise a wild goose chase when I’m being
led on one, so I left the matter there.
Crozier’s cronies
Among the recent revelations from Consortium News
concerning Keith Rupert Murdoch’s clandestine relationship
with the CIA (see Lobster 69) was the fact that in 1984 Mr
Murdoch had funded a European ‘fact finding’ mission by that
noted spook-cum-hack the late Brian Crozier. Consortium’s
piece did not explore what Crozier did to earn his keep, but a
little niggle at the back of my head told me that this news
wasn’t entirely a surprise.
When I finally got round to buying a second-hand copy
of the book to refresh my memory, the answer was indeed
staring me in the face from the pages of the first volume of the
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diaries of Woodrow Wyatt, AKA Baron Wyatt of Weeford, AKA
‘The Voice of Reason’.2 Wyatt’s entry for Monday 2 June 1986
begins:
‘To the Stafford Hotel, 11 am. Meeting with
conspirators. Brian Crozier,3 Julian Lewis,4 a man from
Aims of Industry whose name I’ve forgotten and
another man who I never identified.5 How to make the
public realise that Labour is still dominated by Militants,
Communists and Marxists.’
Wyatt of course was a close friend of Mr Murdoch (until the
1990s, when the tycoon decided that the Vox Rationis was no
more use and dumped him, leaving Wyatt to lament into his
tape-recorder that Murdoch ‘has behaved like a swine and a
pig’) and so to my mind the look of this ‘meeting with
conspirators’ is that the whole thing was orchestrated by Mr
Murdoch himself. It’s the simplest explanation.
It’s clear from this entry that the Stafford Hotel meeting
wasn’t the start of a plan but a continuation of something
already in motion. Wyatt recorded: ‘A lot of work has been
done on bias in the media and there will be a report coming to
me soon I hope. It covers BBC and Independent TV.’
At this stage, it’s not clear to me what came of this
plotting, if anything.
But there is a lovely coda in Wyatt’s entry for 12
November 1987, which records a lunch with David Hart,
2 Of this News of the World editor, Derek Jameson, said in 2008:
‘True, Murdoch did foist Woodrow Wyatt on me at the NoW. I got my
own back by putting this subhead under his by-line: The voice of
reason. I reckon the whole world with the exception of Wyatt and
Murdoch knew I was taking the piss.’ <http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/
node/41321>
3 Crozier is referred to in a footnote by Wyatt’s editor Sarah Curtis
as: ‘Journalist and author, in the Guinness Book of Records as the
writer who has interviewed the most heads of state and government’,
which is true as far as it goes.
4 Sarah Curtis notes simply that Mr Lewis was: ‘Conservative MP,
elected 1997’ – which again, is true as far as it goes but does not
reflect Mr Lewis’ status at the time or, for example, his intriguing
exploits with The Freedom Association during the 1970s.
5 I feel sure that we glimpse here the fleeting shadow of an MI5
officer.
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alumnus of the far-right Murdoch-funded Campaign for a Free
Britain, in which Hart tried to cajole Wyatt (a friend of Mrs
Thatcher and the Queen Mother) into recommending Crozier to
Thatcher for a knighthood.
It really is a small world in the British Establishment.
Speaking of which.....
Coulson and co
Now that the Tommy Sheridan perjury trial has acquitted
former Murdoch employee Andy Coulson, there’s no risk of
contempt of court and so I am free to explore a matter that
has interested me for some time.
Throughout the byzantine and years-long unfolding of
the News International hacking scandal, there have been a
few glimpses of what might have been peripheral involvement
by the Security Service, MI5. I have only been keeping half an
eye on the entire affair so the one that sticks in my mind is the
2011 revelation that News Int’s semi-detached private
investigator Glenn Mulcaire had somehow got access to an
MI5 file on a friend of Princes William and Harry.6 Since the
friend in question was not suspected of any wrongdoing, the
look of this disclosure is that MI5 routinely keep tabs on those
close to Royalty – although they seem to have missed Jimmy
Savile for some reason.
Anyway, the Mulcaire/MI5 connection was never
explored or brought before Lord Leveson and died amid the
long grass of official silence. Earlier this year it was revealed
that former News of the World high-flier (and recently theatre
critic for the Surrey Comet) Neville Thurlbeck was an MI5
informant.7 Mr Thurlbeck has stated that the flow of
information was ‘strictly one way’ – no doubt, Mr Thurlbeck
was motivated purely by patriotic national security concerns –
and that moving from journalism to work for MI5 would have
6 <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/world/europe/mi5references-emerge-in-britain-phone-hacking-suit.html?_r=3&>
7 <http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/former-news-world-reporter-nevillethurlbeck-reveals-25-years-tabloid-secrets-exclusive-extracts>
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entailed a drastic pay cut (a claim that I find wholly
believable).
Later, Mr Thurlbeck would find himself the cellmate of
Andy Coulson during the thirty seven days Mr Thurlbeck was
imprisoned, a situation that it is hard to believe was
coincidental, although what might have motivated it remains
unclear (there is material for a playwright here, I think).
Mr Coulson of course had taken Mr Thurlbeck’s dreaded
pay cut in order to become David Cameron’s communications
chief, in which position it was later revealed he was not
vetted. The emergence of this fact is said to have ‘shocked
Whitehall’, and not without reason: allowing someone to get
to the centre of government without proper background
checks is like handing your bank card and PIN to a stranger on
the street. Marcia Faulkender’s supposed ‘non-vetting’ was
enough to inspire a smear campaign involving compromised
national security during Harold Wilson’s term in office.
Number 10 itself argued....well, it’s not entirely clear
what Number 10 argued.8 First of all, Coulson was said to
have undergone basic vetting and not to have had access to
top secret material. Then the line was that Coulson would
have been subject to developed vetting9 but it would have
been too expensive. Then the claim was that Coulson was
being subjected to developed vetting but it was never
completed. Finally, Number 10 declared that ‘No information is
held that shows Andy Coulson was sent information incorrectly
or for which he was not authorised’, a statement that
deserves very careful reading indeed.
When Coulson finally appeared before Lord Leveson’s
inquiry (the second act of which is now well overdue) he
cautiously said that he ‘may have’ had unsupervised access to
material classified top secret and above. Obviously, he couldn’t
be sure about that.
It is very, very hard indeed to accept, per Number 10’s
protean statements, that there was somehow an absolutely
8
<http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/may/10/andy-coulsonsecurity-vetting-timeline>
9 See <https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/
attachment_data/file/61938/NSV002-Active-2-8.pdf>.
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unprecedented vetting failure in Coulson’s case and that this
failure was repeated several times for different reasons and
that no-one realised at any stage. In Whitehall terms, this is
quite literally unthinkable. It would crease the brow of even
the average Daily Star reader. But it would make perfect sense
if Coulson had already been thoroughly checked out by MI5
and so – not expecting it ever to come to light – no-one at
Number 10 bothered to go through the redundant procedural
rigmarole of vetting him again.
Tory Party like it’s 1992
A nd so the Miliband rocket proved to be a damp squib at the
ballot booth and now the brothers (and sisters) are at each
other’s throats providing a neat distraction from all that boring
post-election analysis that no-one cares about. Which is a
pity, because on the face of it 2015’s General Election result
was every bit as scepticism-worthy as 1992’s. In 1992 it will
be recalled, the Tories won by a margin of 11 seats, involving
an average victory margin of 119 votes in each – and four of
those seats reported signs of election-rigging.
This time round the Tory win was dependent on just six
seats, all with wafer-thin margins of victory.
* In Wales, the Tories took the historic Labour seat of Gower
by a margin of 27 votes and the Vale of Clwyd (also taken
from Labour) by 237 votes.
* Derby North was taken from Labour by a margin of 41 votes.
* The Tories held Croydon Central by 165 votes.
* Tories held Bury North by 378.
* Thurrock stayed Tory by a margin of 537 votes.
All of these margins are well within the capabilities of a
team of determined local riggers, fiddlers and fixers. But since
all the parties play the game, it’s unlikely that anyone will
officially complain, meaning that for the second time in a
generation, a ‘squeaker’ of a poll might have been corrupted
and invalid..... and with only a year and a day until the ballots
are destroyed by incinerator, we may never know the truth.
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Bogles
T he SNP’s endless denunciation of treacherous spies in their
midst, plotting against Scottish nationalism, has generated a
lot more heat than light. It was interesting, however, that
Baroness Meta Ramsay, who will need no reintroduction, was
the key figure in the Lords who allowed Jim Murphy to triumph
over the motion of No Confidence tabled against him and
thereby quit with honour. What a semi-detached ‘ex’-MI6
officer was doing helping out a key New Labour figure is
somewhat obscure but my hunch is that it was a case of ‘my
enemy’s enemy’ aimed at depriving the SNP of a symbolic
scalp.
I’m not going to list all the allegations of spook
involvement in the ScotNat political scene that have been
made since the referendum campaign period: it would take too
long and anyone who’s been following the saga already
knows at least some of this. My opinion is that MI5 wouldn’t
be doing its job if it wasn’t working, on some levels, to
maintain the integrity of the United Kingdom, a position with
which I have no small amount of sympathy, the
unquestionable romance of the Scottish independence
narrative to one side.
What has escaped attention so far is the fact that in
2010 a British diplomat cabled a Belfast colleague about
Holyrood’s state of mind and reported insights attributed to
‘well-placed sources’ – those sources being clearly, from the
context, within the SNP.10
So it appears that the SNP has been comprehensively
infiltrated years ago. Perhaps private knowledge of this is why
SNP figures have been so jumpy about possible security
service interventions.
I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the
CIA around the time of the referendum, asking them for any
and all available material relating to the Scottish
independence movement since 1979, figuring that would catch
everything in modern times and could be winnowed down to
10
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the releasable few pages by declassification staff. Instead, the
CIA declined to confirm or deny that it held any such material
concerning a force that threatened the constitutional
composition of a key strategic ally nation.
Make of that what you will.
The SNP’s ‘oil field cover-up’
W hen the discovery of the new North Sea oil field referred to
as Vorlich/Marconi was announced shortly after the Scottish
referendum last year, many immediately cried smelled a rat. It
had been a major plank of the SNP’s campaign that major new
North Sea discoveries lay ahead and/or were being hushed up
in order to promote uncertainty over the SNP’s bold claim that
a seceded Scotland could run on oil money.11
I can’t say either way whether the SNP is ‘onto
something’ in the most general terms, although it would
appear that North Sea extraction has certainly peaked and is
on the decline; but in the case of the Vorlich/Marconi oil field I
can say that it appears they are barking up the wrong tree. I
applied under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain e-mails
sent between site discoverers BP and the Department for
Business, Innovation and Skills concerning the oil field’s
discovery. The exchanges captured by my request aren’t
interesting enough to bother reproducing here; however while
the e-mails don’t absolutely rule out some kind of
underhandedness (it being impossible to prove a negative, of
course), I can say that it appears that BP caught the
Department on the hop with its announcement and that I’m
satisfied (any new information notwithstanding) that the SNP’s
concerns appear to be groundless. (I’ll be glad to forward the
e-mails on to anyone who fancies a brief but boring read).
11 This claim ricocheted back and forth from October to December
2014 and a chronological list of pro- and anti- sources would be boring
and confusing. There is a sceptical and closely detailed summary
here: <https://mercinon.wordpress.com/2014/10/26/the-snps-deceitor-naivety-about-the-uk-oil-and-gas-industry/>.
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Not in the Albert Hall
30 April marked the anniversary of the suicide of Adolf Hitler
and also – allegedly – that of Eva Braun, his lover. ‘Allegedly’
because Hugh Thomas, in his book Doppelgangers: The Truth
About the Bodies in the Berlin Bunker (1996), proved that Eva
escaped from the fuhrerbunker and for all intents and
purposes disappeared, leaving behind a corpse doctored to
look superficially like hers but with completely different teeth.
Mr Thomas’s work on Nazi body-doubles of the Second
World War has proved contentious over the years but the Eva
Braun case is the one in which there is absolutely no room for
doubt. Unless one imagines that Thomas invented his book
from whole cloth, the evidence he cites makes it absolutely
impossible for the female body found at the site of the
attempted cremation of Hitler to be Eva’s.
This gives me the chance to set out a little theory I have
nurtured for many years.
It’s well known that when autopsied, Hitler’s charred
corpse was found to only have one testicle. The Russian
autopsists even examined the abdominal cavity to see if it had
‘ascended’. Nope, it wasn’t there. What’s less well-known is
that all Hitler’s medical records from his lifetime recorded no
such abnormality.
So there are two options: either every medical
examination that included details of Hitler’s genitals has been
doctored or forged on this one detail, or.....one of his testicles
went missing after his death. If you add in certain other
details, a strange solution to this little set of mysteries starts
to come into focus.
Why, for example, did Hitler marry Eva shortly before
committing suicide? (She even wrote her surname as ‘Hitler’ on
their marriage certificate). Could it be that the last-minute
marriage was to ensure that any child borne by Eva would be
legitimate? Artificial insemination was not then a new
procedure by any means and if Eva escaped and some
medically-minded Nazi took one of Hitler’s testicles for the
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sperm it contained.... In this theory, Eva escaped (perhaps to
Argentina) where she gave birth to Hitler’s child.
Yes, it would have been a cockamamie procedure to
attempt; but let’s face it the Nazis had some very odd ideas
indeed about science and biology. It’s exactly the sort of thing
you can easily imagine them doing.
So that explains the lot: Mr and Mrs Hitler’s legitimate
child, conceived by artificial insemination, to be born in exile –
one day to return. Whether or not it would have worked is
another matter altogether. If it was ever tried, no heir to the
Reich has ever appeared.
Of course, all this is pure speculation (one might even be
forgiven for calling it ‘a load of balls’) but I find the possibility
beguiling. And even though it’s only a game of ‘what if?’, it
explains a lot of things in one go, so it has the virtue of
simplicity on its side.
The ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ redux
C urious that Monica Lewinsky reappeared in the news earlier
this year, as the guest speaker at a TED talk, nearly 20 years
after her moment of fame, just as Bill Clinton’s long-suffering
wife Hillary was preparing her run for the US presidency. Even
more curious, it turns out that TED has been co-operating with
the CIA.1 2 As far as we know TED has been brought in to
provide private ‘corporate’ events for the Agency but
still.....curious.
12 <http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/27/8503821/cia-ted-talktedxcia-false-flag>
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Last post for Oswald
Garrick Alder
On the morning of 20 November 1963, something very
ordinary happened in Texas. The mailman delivered a
standard Postal Service slip to the Irving home of Ruth Paine.
It stated that a package with 12 cents postage due was being
held at the post office for Lee Oswald, the husband of her
temporary lodger Marina Oswald. This form was found on 23
November, the day after the assassination of US President
John Kennedy, during the Dallas Police Department’s search of
Mrs Paine’s home.
On 6 December a parcel was found in the dead letter
department of the Irving post office. It had 12 cents postage
due and had a gummed label attached on which was the
address ‘Lee Oswald, 1602 West Nassaus Street, Dallas,
Texas’. Dallas has no West Nassaus Street and the parcel
gave no return address.
The Dallas post office’s dead letter department was
referred to as The Nixie Room, and so this package is referred
to here as the Nixie parcel.
The address label appears to have been written by Lee
Oswald himself, but someone had crossed out the word
‘Dallas’ and written ‘Irving Texas’ below the label in
conspicuously different handwriting.1
When the Nixie parcel was eventually opened by
investigators, it proved to contain a long handmade paper
1 There appear to be just two websites that address this episode
head-on. George Bailey, at <http://oswaldsmother.blogspot.co.uk/
2010/01/mysterious-package.html> records his belief that the address
label had been applied so as to partially obscure the intended
destination. On the other hand, Gary Murr at
<http://www.jfkresearch.freehomepage.com/murr.htm> is of the
opinion that the writing was added below the address label after the
‘West Nassaus’ details had been scored through by someone
unknown. Mr Murr is obviously correct, as an examination of the
photographs on each site will demonstrate.
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bag, open at one end, not unlike the paper bag, apparently
made from rolls of paper used in the Book Depository, that
was later produced as evidence of Oswald disguising his rifle
in order to carry it into the building.2
This Nixie parcel and the paper bag were dusted for
fingerprints and no prints suitable for identification purposes
were found (not quite the same thing as no prints being found
at all). The paper was analysed and found not to be identical
to the paper used in the construction of the incriminating ‘gun
sack’. This is not actually proof of the Nixie parcel and its
contents having originated from somewhere other than the
Book Depository, since rolls of paper used on the sixth floor
lasted an average of about three days, and varied in their
composition. This meant that two samples of paper obtained
from the same location but on different dates could and did
show up under analysis as having two discrete chemical
profiles.3 However, this non-match was presented as an
investigative dead end. The puzzle of the Nixie parcel was
being left deliberately unsolved.
Something happened between the discovery of the Nixie
parcel and the FBI’s interviews with Ruth Paine and her
housemate, Lee’s wife Marina Oswald.
On 20 February 1964 Irving postal inspector Roy
Armstrong told FBI interviewers that by inquiring in Irving and
Dallas, he had somehow ascertained that the delivery slip of
20 November related to a magazine delivered to Mrs Paine’s
address on 21 or 22 November. When Marina Oswald was
interviewed five days after Mr Armstrong, she obligingly told
the FBI that the delivery slip was for one of her husband’s
magazines and that she had paid the 12 cents excess
2 According to both Mr Murr and Mr Bailey, Ruth Paine told the Detroit
Free Press (07 December 1963) that when she found the delivery form
she had telephoned Oswald at his boarding house to tell him about
the Nixie parcel held at the post office. An archival copy of the final
edition of the paper from that date has been examined and contains
no such comments in its three lead pages of assassination reportage,
although Mrs Paine is quoted extensively. The claim can therefore be
dismissed as spurious or a misunderstanding.
3 <http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commissionreport/chapter-4.html>
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postage and accepted the parcel at Mrs Paine’s home.
Mrs Paine herself wasn’t interviewed about the delivery
form until 31 July 1964, when she didn’t actually address the
matter at all, instead going off at a tangent about the delivery
of various magazines to which Oswald subscribed. The FBI
does not have appeared to have pressed the matter further.4
If Mrs Paine was avoiding the subject without telling a
direct lie, Marina was lying.5 No-one addressed the question
of why a magazine for which Oswald had already paid a
subscription was suddenly delivered with postage due; or the
‘coincidence’ of the timing and the amount of postage that
was due being the same for the parcel as the alleged
magazine; or the fact that the overweight Nixie parcel had
been put through an unidentified metered posting system
(what is known in the UK as ‘mail franking’, a business
practice) rather than having standard postage stamps affixed
as one might expect for personal mail.6
Quite plainly a lie was being established to separate the
witnesses from the Nixie parcel, the Nixie parcel from the
delivery slip, and the postal service from the entire episode.
This is one of the instances in which it is possible to
demonstrate beyond any doubt an outright fiction being
created during the Warren Commission’s investigation.
How Mrs Paine and Marina Oswald were cajoled into
going along with this fake story seems likely to remain a
mystery. Perhaps, once they knew Mr Armstrong’s version of
events, they simply felt it was easier to go along with the
‘official line’. They may not have understood the significance of
4 <http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/
showDoc.do;jsessionid=32BC4AA9E6DD148F2A2511D6C6FCB7AA?docId
=62240&relPageId=26>
5 The Dallas Postal Service informed me that it was quite possible for
a letter with a 20 November Dallas postmark to be delivered on one of
the same day’s delivery rounds in Irving, just 11 miles from Dallas.
And swallowing Marina’s lies would have meant accepting that no
delivery slip existed corresponding to the Nixie parcel at all, despite
her having supposedly been in contact with the local dead letter office
to arrange re-delivery of the alleged magazine. This must have been
obvious at the time but no-one pursued it.
6 You can see this on the photographs reproduced by Messrs Bailey
and Murr.
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the postal service, in the days before e-mail, the internet and
bulk data collection of information. The FBI was operating a
constitution-violating domestic mail interception program, and
the CIA had its own version called HT/LINGUAL to monitor
overseas mail (in which capacity the Agency was already well
aware of Lee Oswald’s letters to and from his mother while he
was in the Soviet Union). These programs in themselves would
have been enough to make the Bureau and Agency want to
show a clean pair of hands with regard to the mysterious Nixie
parcel. But there was more to it than that.
Lee Oswald had always been meticulous about receiving
his mail during his previous movements between various
rented homes. The Warren Commission received a statement
from Dallas Postal Inspector Harry D Holmes detailing the
various change of address notifications that Oswald had
submitted to the US Postal Service during the months
preceding his death. These record Oswald opening a Dallas PO
Box in September 1962, shifting from Dallas to New Orleans in
May 1963, and a new PO Box in Dallas being opened in his
name at the start of November 1963.
However, what is conspicuously not shown is Oswald
registering his address with the Post Office as Ruth Paine’s, in
Irving. This is at least part of the reason for the charade over
the Nixie parcel: someone in the Dallas postal system had
noticed Oswald’s name on the wrongly-addressed parcel and
had redirected it to Irving – and it nearly got delivered to Mrs
Paine’s Irving address despite the fact that the parcel did not
even have a street address on it. Oswald’s mail was being
intercepted and his supposedly unknown address at Ruth
Paine’s was known to at least one person in the postal
system.
A clue as to one reason for the cover-up of the failed
delivery lies in Harry Holmes’s affidavit to the FBI, which is at
pains to state that Mr Holmes only provided the information
about Oswald’s changes of address when Holmes was served
with a subpoena. This proves to be the key to understanding
a substantial part of this episode. The FBI’s mail interception
program had to be kept hidden (in fact it did not come to light
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until the 1970s); and doing so meant that the fact that the
mis-addressed Nixie parcel had almost been delivered, to
Oswald’s unofficial post-restante at Mrs Paine’s house, had to
be avoided at all costs. It was an almighty cock-up.
With regard to Oswald himself, the Nixie parcel showed
how he had managed to get his paper sack to his home
without anyone noticing in order to carry his rifle to work on
the day of the assassination: he had made it at the School
Book Depository, wrapping it as a parcel and used the
company’s metered mail to send it via the postal service. The
FBI never sought to ascertain whose metered mail Oswald
had used, even though the answer was obvious.
But most important of all was the fact that Oswald had
sent a duplicate sack to himself through the post with no
intention of it being delivered, so that it would be found at a
later date. This is shown by his use of a non-existent address,
the deliberate underpayment of postage, and then his
consequent failure to go to the post office to pick up the Nixie
parcel.
The implication appears to be is that Oswald was laying
a trail pointing to himself, which would eventually fit into a
narrative that would show him in the process of preparing to
smuggle his rifle into the book depository.7
This explains why the FBI and then the Warren
Commission did not seem to want to know how Oswald
managed to get paper from the Book Depository to Ruth
Paine’s address in order to disguise his rifle as ‘curtain rods’
on the morning of the assassination: by demonstrating
premeditation the sudden appearance of the TSBD paper in
Oswald’s hands contradicted the Warren story that Oswald
was an unpredictable lone nut who decided to do the shooting
7 The US Postal Service informed me that metered first-class mail
could be put into public mail collection boxes and that the postmark is
consistent with the parcel having been deposited before 8:30 p.m. the
previous day, the typical cut-off time of the last daily collection.
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the night before JFK’s arrival.8
This, however, does leave some questions unanswered:
why did the post office redirect Oswald’s Nixie parcel in the
first place, and at whose behest? And most importantly, why
was Oswald deliberately leaving clues that not only
incriminated himself but explained how he had prepared for
the murder of which he was eventually accused? For the
answers to these questions we have to retrace the tracks left
by Oswald as he and his mail moved through the US Postal
Service.
Delivery in Dallas
Between his return to America from the Soviet Union in 1962
and his death in 1963, Lee Oswald left behind him a trail of
postal redirections, sending his mail backwards and forwards
across the US South. In October 1962 he had rented Dallas PO
Box 2915 in his own name.9 This was in order to receive any
mail wrongly addressed to him at rented accommodation on
Mercedes Street, Fort Worth, after he had moved elsewhere.
Section three of his application form – which might have given
the names of other people authorised to receive mail at
Oswald’s new PO Box – was missing by the time the form was
produced before the Warren Commission by Post Office
Inspector Harry Holmes on 23 July 1964. US Postal regulation
846.53b states:
‘Part III of the box rental application, identifying persons
other than the applicant authorized to receive mail must
be retained for two years after the box is closed.’
The Commission ignored this inconvenient fact.
Warren Commission exhibit CE 2585 is an FBI report of 3
June 1964. In this, the Bureau stated unequivocally that
Oswald did not list the Hidell alias on this PO Box
8 19 November 1963, the day of the Nixie parcel's posting, was the
day on which details of Kennedy’s forthcoming Dallas motorcade were
published for the first time, in two local newspapers, specifically
mentioning the turn onto Elm Street that would take the limousine into
the School Book Depository’s shadow.
9 <http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh19/html/
WH_Vol19_0152b.htm>
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application.10 Since the Bureau was able to state this without
any doubt, it means that part three of the form disappeared
between the Bureau’s statement and Harry Holmes’ testimony
the following month. This presented a problem for any attempt
to link the mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano rifle supposedly sent
to the ‘Hidell’ alias at Lee Oswald’s PO Box 2915, because
Section 355.111b(4) of the US Postal Manual says:
‘Mail addressed to a person at a post office box, who is
not authorized to receive mail, shall be endorsed
“addressee unknown”, and returned to the sender
where possible.’
The ‘assassination rifle’ could never have reached Oswald
under the Hidell alias at Dallas PO Box 2915. Therefore, the
non-incriminating part three of Oswald’s PO Box application
form had to disappear after his death for the entire ‘lone
assassin’ story to work.
From Dallas to New Orleans
In May 1963, Oswald filled out a form to redirect his mail from
Dallas PO Box 2915 to his new Louisiana home address, given
as 4907 Magazine Street, New Orleans.1 1 This was false.
Oswald had moved to 4905 Magazine Street. This form [then,
as now, Postal Service Form 3575] was sent to the Dallas
postmaster postmarked 9 May in Louisiana, with the change of
address effective from the 12th.12
On 3 June 1963, Oswald opened Louisiana PO Box
30016, meaning that he now had two postal addresses in
10 Ironically, the FBI made this disclosure in an attempt to refute the
claims of one of the first published JFK conspiracy theorists. See
<://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh25/pdf/
wh25_ce_2585.pdf>.
11 <http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh19/
html/WH_Vol19_0153a.htm>
12 There is a rather furtive twist in his choice of apartment. 4905
Magazine Street is not a separate building, but a subdivision of 4911,
with a second subdivision being 4907, both subdivisions sharing the
same front door thereby allowing Oswald to inspect mail addressed to
4907. There was no 4909, and the existence of 4905 itself is not
discernible from the street. See <http://www.history-matters.com/
archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh10/pdf/WH10_JesseGarner_aff.pdf>
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New Orleans. Testifying before the Warren Commission on 23
July 1964, Dallas Postal Inspector Harry Holmes said that part
three of Oswald’s application form had survived by fluke
(unlike part three of his previous application in Dallas) and
that Oswald had falsely given his home address as 657 French
Street and identified Marina Oswald and A J Hidell as
authorised to receive mail at this new box number. The form
itself, supporting those claims, was entered into evidence.13
Holmes then told Commission assistant counsel Wesley
Liebeler a flat-out lie, stating that it was lucky this section of
Oswald’s Louisiana application form had survived because
postal regulations specified that part three of a PO Box
application should be discarded once the box itself was closed,
which, as we have seen, is the exact opposite of the truth.
This lie indirectly explained the disappearance of part three of
the vital Dallas form as normal post office procedure.
So Oswald provably identified himself with the Hidell
alias for the first time as a recipient on his PO Box application
in Louisiana. He was associated with the Hidell alias while in
New Orleans, giving the name and PO Box number out as
contact details on some of his ‘Hands off Cuba!’ recruitment
leaflets. But he never gave his own name as Hidell, not even
to his landlord on Magazine Street. Coupled with the missing
part three of his previous PO Box application in Dallas, there
was no evidence connecting the Hidell alias from Texas to
Louisiana.
From New Orleans to Irving
On 25 September 1963 Oswald filled in a redirection form in
Louisiana for PO Box 30016, giving Mrs Paine’s correct address
(2545 West Fifth Street, Irving, Texas) as the new destination
for his mail. The Dallas post office therefore knew only that
Oswald had gone to an address on Magazine Street in New
Orleans in May 1963, while the Louisiana post office knew only
that mail arriving for the holder of PO Box 30061 was being
forwarded to Irving, commencing in September. His given New
13 <http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh19/html/
WH_Vol19_0157a.htm>
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Orleans home addresses (4905/4907 Magazine Street and
547 French Street) now become dead ends in the Oswald
trail.14
On 3 October Oswald arrived in Irving in person. About a
week later a change of redirection form in Oswald’s name was
filled in by someone else and posted from Louisiana to the
Dallas postmaster (postmarked 11 October in New Orleans
and then again on 16 October in Dallas). Despite the official
purpose of this form [then, as now, Postal Service Form 3546]
being to alter incorrect details on a change of address form,
this new form in Oswald’s name simply gave Mrs Paine’s
address correctly for the second time.
In other words, there was no alteration made to
Oswald’s redirection and the form need never have left
Louisiana in any event; but the Dallas post office was now
informed of Oswald’s new address in Irving. Someone in the
postal service in Louisiana had noticed Oswald’s mail
redirection and was now making sure that Oswald’s new local
post office knew exactly where he was picking up his mail. This
is how someone in the Dallas post office miraculously knew
where to deliver the Nixie parcel.
Dead end in Dallas
O n 1 November 1963, Dallas PO Box 6225 was opened in the
name ‘Lee H Oswald’, giving his address as the street on
which he was indeed living (North Beckley) but the wrong
house number (he was boarding at 1026 under the alias ‘O H
Lee’, but the scribbled address on the application form
definitely begins with a ‘3’.)1 5 No mail redirections from
anywhere at all pointed to this third PO Box and the Hidell
alias did not appear on the application form. ‘The Fair Play for
Cuba Committee’ was listed as an entitled business recipient,
a fact which would of course become significant. The postal
aspect of the Hidell alias seems therefore to have been
14 The US Census Bureau informs me that due to lack of recordkeeping at the time, there is no way of knowing who lived at the two
addresses falsely given by Oswald.
15 <http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh20/html/
WH_Vol20_0096b.ht>
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brought into existence purely for Oswald’s pro-Cuba
campaigning in New Orleans and then abandoned on his
return to Dallas. The forged ‘Hidell’ ID found on Oswald when
he was arrested is another matter altogether.
According to Dallas Postal Inspector Harry Holmes, he
ended up taking part in Oswald’s interrogation on the morning
of Sunday 24 November 1963 purely by happenstance. He
supposedly changed his mind about going to church at 9.30am
and made his way to Dallas Police HQ instead, where Captain
Will Fritz unexpectedly invited him into the interrogation room.
According to an FBI report, a confidential source within
the postal system (‘Informant T-7’) claimed he saw the key to
Dallas PO Box 6225 among Oswald’s possessions during his
questioning on Friday 22 November 1963.16 In CE 1152 Harry
Holmes states that the key was found on Oswald’s person
after his arrest.17
Harry Holmes made the following statement before the
Commission on 2 April 1964:
‘Well, throughout the entire period [of Oswald’s
interrogation] I was feeding change of addresses as bits
of information to the FBI and Secret Service, and sort of
a co-ordinating deal on it, but then about Sunday
morning about 9.20 –’
At this point, the Commission’s assistant counsel David Belin
cut him off in mid-sentence. There was an off-the-record
discussion and when questioning resumed the subject of
Holmes’s role as FBI informant had been dropped.
In his subpoenaed statement to the FBI of 27 November
1963, Harry Holmes had listed the evidence available to him in
Dallas concerning Oswald’s use of the postal system.1 8 The
anonymous redirection form sent from Louisiana to the Dallas
postmaster on 11 October was not mentioned, and nor was
the Louisiana box application itself. Testifying before the
16 <http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh22/pdf/
WH22_CE_1152.pdf>
17 <http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh22/pdf/
WH22_CE_1152.pdf>
18 <http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh22/pdf/
WH22_CE_1390.pdf>.
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Warren Commission in July 1964, Holmes said, untruthfully,
that he had confronted Oswald with the original application
form for the Louisiana PO Box that gave the Hidell alias.
Chapter VI of the Warren Report report states: ‘The
single outstanding key [to Dallas PO Box 6225] was recovered
from Oswald immediately after he was taken into custody.’ But
the items found on Oswald’s person at the time of his arrest
are listed on pages 614-7 of the Warren Report19 and the key
to PO Box 6225 is not among them; nor does any other
witness refer to it, nor does it appear among the
Commission’s exhibits. The crucial evidence supposedly linking
Oswald to the Dallas PO Box and the Fair Play for Cuba
Committee had simply disappeared. It had never existed at all.
Harry Holmes, FBI informant T-7, had doctored evidence
and lied his head off from start to finish in order to incriminate
Oswald. He repeated those lies till the end of his life.2 0
Postscript
Why did the Nixie parcel not come before the Warren
Commission? One clue is the ‘West Nassaus St’ address in
Oswald’s handwriting. There is no such street in Texas, never
mind Dallas. However, there is a West Nassau St in Tampa,
Florida, Zip Code 33607, although there is no block numbered
1602. It was in Tampa that an apparent assassination
attempt on Kennedy’s life was thwarted on 18 November
1963, just four days before the president was killed in Dallas.
The would-be assassin was one Gilberto Policarpo Lopez – like
Oswald, a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. On 20
November 1963, Lopez obtained a tourist visa and shortly
after the assassination he flew to Cuba from Mexico City.2 1 A
19 <http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wr/html/
WCReport_0320a.htm>
20 Harry Holmes died in 1989. The last recorded version of his stories
was published in 1998, and that version can be read at
<http://www.kenrahn.com/JFK/History/The_deed/Sneed/
Holmes.html>. Fittingly, the canard of the key to box 6225 is swallowed
by Vincent Bugliosi in his enormous book on Oswald’s lone guilt,
Reclaiming History.
21 <http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committeereport/part-1c.html> See page 118.
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John Kaylock claimed to have met Oswald in Punta Gorda,
Florida, shortly before the assassination.2 2 A week after the
assassination, CIA hand and future Watergate burglar Frank
(Fiorini) Sturgis alleged that he had met Oswald in Florida in
the days prior to the assassination itself, a claim that is surely
a flashing red warning light indicating something highly
suspicious being spun.
And then there was Chicago. A JFK motorcade there had
been called off after the discovery of an apparent
assassination plot there on 2 November, a fortnight before
Tampa. This time, there appeared to be a ‘lone nut’ set up in
advance, in the form of Thomas Arthur Vallee who worked at a
printing company whose offices overlooked an awkward lefthand turn (like the Elm Street turn on the Dallas motorcade
route) that would have taken Kennedy right past any waiting
sniper in that building. But if Vallee was the designated patsy,
the plan was a dud because Vallee had a holiday booked on
the day of the Chicago motorcade and was not at work. The
question then is whether the plan was ever meant to succeed
at all, unless one assumes highly incompetent conspirators
who couldn’t even get their fall guy into place on the right
day.2 3
Oswald is also connected to Chicago, and not only
because of his supposed purchase of a rifle from that city’s
Klein’s store. Shortly after the assassination, an FBI memo
recorded an allegation that Oswald was connected to a car
registered in Vallee’s name.24 And on 25 November, the FBI
received information that explicitly linked the ‘Chicago Plot’ to
the assassination in Dallas. An informant gave information predating the assassination that linked Cuban-Texan
businessman Homer Echevarria to the sale of weapons to an
anti-Kennedy Cubans in Chicago and quoted Echevarria as
22 <http://www.maryferrell.org/
showDoc.html?docId=59624&relPageId=24&search=kaylock>
23 A useful précis of the discovery of the ‘Chicago Plot’ was made by
the House Select Committee on Assassinations. See pages 230-232 at
<http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-report/part1d.html>.
24 <http://www.maryferrell.org/
showDoc.html?docId=62272&relPageId=50>
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saying that Kennedy’s murder was imminent.2 5 By December,
an anonymous whisper had reached the FBI alleging that
Oswald had actually been arrested and appeared in Court in
Chicago on 2 November, the day of the ‘plot’ itself.26 A few
days after the rumour of Oswald’s arrest, the Warren
Commission received an FBI report concerning Vallee and his
time in the US Marine Corps which discussed similarities
in Vallee’s and Oswald’s choice of ammunition.27
Lines were being sketched between the Chicago and
Tampa ‘plots’ and the eventual murder in Dallas. If these
threads had been uncovered by the Warren Commission, they
would have given the unmistakable impression of Cuban
involvement in a sprawling cross-America assassination plot
that got lucky on the third attempt. It would have been
curtains for Castro, at the very least. Oswald’s Nixie parcel
was one loose end that, when tugged at, would have
unraveled an assassination conspiracy on a national scale.
However, as Warren Commission counsel J Lee Rankin told
frustrated staffers: ‘We’re supposed to be closing doors, not
opening them.’
25 <https://www.maryferrell.org/
showDoc.html?docId=10490#relPageId=364&tab=page>
26 <http://www.maryferrell.org/
showDoc.html?docId=10448&search=vallee#relPageId=10&tab=page>
27 <https://www.maryferrell.org/
showDoc.html?docId=10510#relPageId=2&tab=page>
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Paedo Files: a look at the UK Establishment
child abuse network
Tim Wilkinson
1: Conserving the Conservatives
O n 24 October 2012, the Labour MP Tom Watson asked Prime
Minister David Cameron about a paedophile ring centred on
the Prime Minister's office at Number 10 Downing Street.
Visibly discomfited, Cameron first affected not to know which
former prime minister Watson might be referring to, then
issued a bland assurance that the matter would be looked
into.
The allegations to which Watson referred do not fall in
any grey area. They involve coercive, forcible and sadistic
sexual abuse of unambiguously underage children trafficked
from children's homes around the UK. The accused are not
social outsiders or ordinary families who might find themselves
railroaded or caught up in some witch-hunt; quite the
opposite. Among those under suspicion are judges, civil
servants, right-wing politicians, foreign and domestic
diplomats, and other official VIPs.
Police, judges, politicians, officials and security agencies
appear to have been involved in the cover-up. There is little
appetite for any rigourous inquisition: working police officers
fear for their jobs and the media are complicit, gagged or
scared of libel actions. This is no spurious moral panic
drummed up by a hostile press on the word of gold-diggers,
cranks or fantasists. It is a serious matter, and those seeking
to investigate face an uphill struggle.
Cameron himself had in 2002 sat on a Parliamentary
committee investigating supposedly over-zealous
investigations into child abuse. Journalist David Rose,had
volunteered to that inquiry:
‘I think one idea which I would like very much to plant in
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the minds of the committee is this: in none of these
cases, in no example of these 90-odd investigations has
a so-called paedophile ring ever come to light. There
were no paedophile rings in care homes and similar
institutions in this country.’1
Cameron later took up this point, referring back to Rose. In a
line of questioning addressed to senior police officer Terence
Grange, he raised the incongruous question:
‘Can you confirm whether or not you have unearthed
any evidence of a paedophile ring during these
investigations? It was put to us by the Observer
journalist [Rose] who did the Panorama programme that
no-one had found a paedophile ring in their
investigations.’2
Grange responded:
‘I think that is true. The paedophile ring is probably a
media hype, if I may say so. The forces were actually
investigating allegations of physical or sexual abuse
made by individuals, and it spread. No-one has raised
the issue with me that they have found a paedophile
ring, and I am defining a paedophile ring as a group of
people who work in one place or, the suggestion was
last year, move from place to place conducting their
sexual abuses. I do not think anyone has found that and
I doubt that it existed.’
The definition of ‘paedophile ring’ here is an odd one, since
most of the outstanding allegations involve children being
taken out of children’s homes to be abused elsewhere.
Grange, now dead, subsequently resigned his post while
under investigation for failing to investigate a judge accused
1 <http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200102/
cmselect/cmhaff/836/2051402.htm>
Rose later spread some of the Iraq War propaganda and then
tried to rehabilitate himself with an article in the New Statesman openly
admitting that he had for years been open to ‘manipulation’ by
security and spy agencies. See <http://www.newstatesman.com/
politics/2007/09/mi6-mi5-intelligence-briefings>.
2 <http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200102/
cmselect/cmhaff/836/2061802.htm>
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of child abuse.
Cameron then asked the panel of police witnesses
another loaded and leading question:
‘Last week we had the solicitors who were involved in
one set of compensation cases, and they referred to the
Paedophile Information Exchange, and they said they
thought there was evidence of a paedophile ring. Do the
police experts we have here all share that view that no
ring has been uncovered?’
One officer replied:
‘Certainly during our inquiries, which have been going
on for over eight years now, we have never actually
found evidence to show networking between offenders.’
This and the reply from Grange make it clear that the focus, as
with so many other investigations, was on low-level
employees, and not on police or senior child protection officials
like Peter Righton, who was a prolific child abuser and
founding member of the Paedophile Information Exchange.
Given that such higher-level involvement was never properly
investigated, it is no surprise that 'networking’ between lowlevel offenders was not discovered.
The Home Affairs Committee investigation and report
helped to cement the idea that paedophile rings were a
matter of ill-informed popular hysteria. This assumption is one
of the most powerful deterrents to serious consideration of
these matters among influential sections of the public. It both
reinforces and appeals to the supercilious anti-populism of the
comfortable classes.
Slick, cultish, pseudo-left website Spiked exemplifies this
attitude.3 The Spiked orthodoxy finds ‘moral panics’,
‘conspiracy theories’ and ‘anti-science attitudes’ wherever
criticism of the rich and powerful is voiced. Most of the claque
of regular Spiked contributors have no credentials beyond the
vicious circle of mutual support they provide one another,
amplified by an echo-chamber of proliferating think-tanks,
3 Not to be confused with another ‘Spiked’, the short-lived successor
to the scurrilous 1990s UK magazine Scallywag, which first aired some
aspects of the current scandal.
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publications and discussion groups. Barbara Hewson is an
exception. A member of the Bar, her word carries some
independent weight. She has produced a number of Spiked
articles on the topic of child abuse. One specimen, ‘Abuse
inquiry: built on conspiracy theories?’ will provide a useful foil
for discussion.4 There Hewson exemplifies the dismissive
attitude Spiked takes to these allegations: ‘The myth of
powerful, protected perverts has been around for decades.’
The old ‘old news’ gambit
G ossip, and indeed clear evidence of serious child abuse
among politicians and the establishment in general has indeed
been ‘around for decades’. The former Conservative MP
Edwina Currie mentions in her memoirs that Peter Morrison, a
fellow Conservative MP and aide to Thatcher, was a ‘noted
pederast with a taste for young boys’. She adds that he
confessed as much to another senior Conservative MP,
Norman Tebbit, and wonders why the Thatcher government
would take such a risk.
Tebbit, asked whether there was a political cover-up of
such matters, replied: ‘I think there may well have been. It
was almost unconscious. It was the thing that people did.’ He
explained:
‘At that time I think most people would have thought
that the establishment, the system, was to be protected
and if a few things had gone wrong here and there that
it was more important to protect the system.’
Currie has more recently explained in this connection that such
matters were met with a ‘culture of sniggering, of giggling and
of nudge-nudge, wink-wink’. None of this was discussed in
public while Morrison was alive, and he is not necessarily
involved in the unambiguous forms of organised child rape
that are at the top and centre of this re-emerging scandal.
Currie has stated that Morrison’s actions, while certainly illegal
at the time, may not have involved children under 16.
But who knows? Certainly not the members of the
4 Spiked, 16 July 2014 at <http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/
article/abuse-inquiry-built-on-conspiracy-theories/>
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Conservative Party who were so conspicuously incurious
about the exact nature of his activities. It is unlikely that
politicians would have spoken so freely about Morrison if he
were alive or if it were thought likely that investigators might
link his personal life with an organised paedophile ring.
Still, in the light of this kind of remark, Hewson’s
assumption that nothing of concern happened is clearly
unwarranted. That is what the current patchwork of
disconnected inquiries and police operations is supposed to be
investigating. The fact that investigations thus far have at
every turn been hampered, overruled, disbanded, censored,
smeared is no argument for continuing to ignore these
matters – and in any case that is no longer possible.
Mutterings about Jimmy Savile, were around for decades,
too. Savile’s hobnobbing with royals and his relationship with
Margaret Thatcher during her premiership would undoubtedly
have meant he was subjected to scrutiny by the Security
Service, and that his activities are likely to have been known
to them. To award him a knighthood, Thatcher indeed had to
overrule ordinary civil servants who objected, perhaps too
delicately, that his lifestyle made him an unsuitable candidate.
Liberal MP Cyril Smith has – posthumously, like Savile –
been exposed as a prolific and sadistic child abuser; and he
too was able to keep a lid on his behaviour for decades.
Also ‘around for decades’ are the revelations of Colin
Wallace, an impeccable witness who, at very considerable cost
to himself, brought to light sexual abuse in the Kincora boy’s
home in Northern Ireland, involving politicians and protected
by the Security Service. Thanks to Wallace, these events
received some limited exposure; but while no-one seriously
contests them, their implications are not discussed in polite
society. It appears that Knox Cunningham, aide to
Conservative ex-PM Harold Macmillan, was among a number of
well-connected visitors to the home, and that some children
were trafficked as far afield as Brighton in the South of
England to be abused.
Other homes in Northern Ireland, housing children under
the age of 16, and other politicians and senior Establishment
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figures have been implicated. Wallace has offered to tell all if
granted legal authority to do so.5 Both he and others state
that blackmail was part of the purpose of facilitating the
abuse.
Your secret is safe with us
This is a key issue: it is clear that security services have been
heavily involved in these events, and it is equally clear that
child sexual abuse is very useful to those who, like them, are
in the blackmail business.
One obvious example is that of party whips. In 1995, Tim
Fortescue, recalling his career as Conservative MP and whip,
reported that a member of his party who faced ‘a scandal
involving small boys’ would ask the party whips to help hush it
up. As Fortescue put it, ‘we would do everything we can
because..…if we could get a chap out of trouble then he will do
as we ask forever more.’ Others have reported that the Heath
government was more pro-active, keeping a ‘dirt book’ of MPs’
indiscretions which could be used to exert pressure.
Another intriguing instance in which child abuse blackmail
has been suggested relates to the recent inquiry headed by a
senior judge from Northern Ireland, Brian Hutton. The inquiry
was supposed to investigate the death of David Kelly, a
government scientist who leaked details about the falsification
of intelligence relating to Iraqi WMD, but whose death ended
up being used instead as a vehicle for the Blair government to
attack the BBC, who had reported the leak. Among the
documents posted on the inquiry’s website was a bizarre and
cryptic document concerning child abuse, the presence of
which has never been officially explained or even mentioned.
In his book about Kelly’s death, Liberal Democrat MP Norman
Baker refers to rumours about the document:
‘One, actually repeated to me in all seriousness by a
very senior BBC executive, was that a leading figure in
the Hutton inquiry process was known by the
5
Wallace has been given permission to talk. See
< http://www.u.tv/News/2015/06/02/Former-army-officer-can-giveevidence-on-Kincora-38329>.
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government to have had a paedophile past in a part of
the United Kingdom well away from London. Was the
inclusion of this particular document a way of reminding
him to “do his duty”?’
Who's panicking?
Evidence from Wallace is not easily dismissed as so-called
‘conspiracy theory’, despite Hewson’s portrayal of the affair as
a populist ‘moral panic’. There are other highly credible
witnesses and investigators who stand to gain nothing from
speaking out.
One example, whose case has been raised in Parliament
to deafening silence, is Stuart Syvret. Syvret was a longserving member of the government of the small island of
Jersey, the independent ‘Peculiar of the Crown’ and
playground for rich tax-dodgers. He attempted to publicise
allegations of abuse and surrounding corruption. No libel
proceedings were ever brought. Instead Google closed down
his blog at the request of the Jersey authorities and Syvret
was prosecuted and imprisoned under a bizarre construal of
Jersey’s data protection law. Another Jersey Senator was
forced to resign when it was revealed that he had advised
Syvret to commit suicide.
Others report that they have been obstructed by police,
prosecutors and other powerful persons, and in some cases
explicitly threatened. For example, child protection officer Chris
Fay, who attempted to take statements from children in
connection with the exclusive Elm Guest House child brothel,
reports that his house was shot at in his absence, and that he
was threatened at gunpoint by officers of the Metropolitan
Police Special Branch – a unit with national reach which liaises
with the Security Service. Ten days after he raised the issue in
the House, Tom Watson MP himself reported ‘warnings from
people who should know that my personal safety is imperilled
if I dig any deeper’.
It is undoubtedly true that in this kind of situation there
is a general risk of false accusations and overzealous police
action. But the public response to the Savile revelations, and
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the consequent opening of the floodgates, has not had such a
character. If anything, the general public seems numbed and
rather baffled by what is going on. Of course, if asked,
members of the public will express an entirely appropriate
disgust at the abuses described. Some feel strongly enough to
type out a tweet on their smartphone. But there is little sign
that the madness of crowds is driving anything here.
There is certainly an increased level of activity by police
investigating sexual crimes among the general public and
among showbiz celebrities. Thousands of people have been
raided for viewing ‘indecent images of children’ on their
computers. A succession of ageing celebrities have been
investigated for, and some convicted of, child sex abuse.
Attention has returned to child abuse in Rotherham and some
gruesome allegations have emerged of street-level sexual
abuse there.
But none of this is being driven by populist sentiment. If
anything it is a topdown process, and ultimately the police,
press and government are reacting to the inescapable facts of
the situation. The revelations about Savile and Smith, and the
willingness of two Labour MPs to say the hitherto unsayable,
has generated an imperative for action which has a logic of its
own.
Some of this may amount to displacement activity; some,
even, to deliberate misdirection. Something must be done, but
there is considerable flexibility as to exactly what that
‘something’ might be. There is always a danger in such
circumstances that the innocent may be falsely convicted, or
relatively minor offences exaggerated – especially among
those who must rely on the rapidly dwindling resources of the
Legal Aid Board.
But there is another risk: that all this busy activity, for all
that much of it is no doubt necessary and long overdue,
distracts us from the most serious and most difficult cases of
all. Distinctions are becoming subtly blurred: isolated cases of
the rape of adults, or of apparently consensual sex with those
close to the age of consent, or involving relatively mild forms of
sexual touching are all being lumped together in a way which
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may tend to distract from the core allegations of organised
trafficking of young children for the purposes of sexual abuse,
including violent and sadistic rape and torture. The
Conservative Prime Minister disgracefully warned of a ‘gay
witch-hunt’: it seems that conflating homosexuality with child
abuse is a price worth paying in the effort to smear
investigators as homophobes.
Web of intrigue
The genuinely powerful have, unsurprisingly, not been subject
to police questioning over child abuse allegations – at least
not so far as Britain’s opaque censorship apparatus of Dnotices and super-injunctions allows us to discover. Both
corporate and citizen media have been reticent following the
unbelievably inept failed exposé by the BBC’s Newsnight of an
unnamed person who was revealed to be long-suspected
abuser, the baron Alistair McAlpine.
In a convoluted and never adequately explained mix-up,
the key witness appeared to have been mistaken as to the full
name of his abuser, and rapidly issued a retraction before
going to ground. McAlpine died soon afterwards, but had time
to issue a carefully worded and superficially watertight
rebuttal, accompanied by numerous threats and claims for libel
against Twitter users, one of which he took to trial and won,
and a libel claim against the BBC (who had not even named
him) which the abject corporation settled for £185,000.
This was unexpected, since McAlpine had refrained from
suing Scallywag magazine for making similar lurid allegations in
1994, though the magazine was prominent enough to be
considered worth suing by Conservative Prime Minister John
Major when it alleged he was having an affair (we now know
that they were right about an affair, but misinformed about
the identity of his paramour). In this case, though, Alistair
McAlpine seemed sure of his ground.
As a result of this strange affair, a chilling effect was
exerted on the Twittersphere, the press and broadcast media,
while an increasingly cowed BBC descended into yet another
spectacular and abject bout of self-flagellation. It is ironic that
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these events, in their effects at any rate, should mirror so
closely the straw-man tactic that McAlpine himself had
advocated in his book The New Machiavelli, praised by Margaret
Thatcher as a ‘shrewd commentary on Machiavelli’s timeless
principles of skulduggery’:
‘First, create a situation where you are wrongly accused.
Then, at a convenient moment, arrange for the false
accusation to be shown to be false beyond all doubt.
Those who have made accusations against both the
company and its management become discredited.
Further accusations will then be treated with great
suspicion.’ 6
It is notable, too, that there seems to have been no
investigation into who the mysterious abuser, if not Alistair
McAlpine, might have been. The evidence leads almost
ineluctably to the late Alfred ‘Jimmy’ McAlpine, a cousin of
Alistair. But the Establishment cannot allow this very obvious
angle to be pursued in public. The jealously-guarded official
line has always been that no powerful persons have ever
been involved in abuse of ‘children in care’; such abuse has
always been presented as limited to staff members operating
in isolation. The bizarre figure of Jimmy Savile is supposedly an
anomalous exception, and the right-wing press has sought to
blame his decades-long impunity solely on the National Health
Service and the BBC – both, conveniently enough, much-loved
public sector institutions, and as such prime targets for attack
by the Right.
Yet the cat remains out of the bag. The available
information all points to the existence of a powerful and wellprotected paedophile network in the UK which preyed on the
most vulnerable children in society. It is clear that some in the
Conservative Party are deeply concerned about the
allegations. Simon Danczuk, one of the two Labour MPs who
have been instrumental in bringing awareness of these
matters out of the shadows, reports that the day before he
was due to give evidence on the matter he was accosted by a
Conservative MP who had never spoken to him before.
6
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‘He warned me to think very carefully about what I was
going to say the next day before the Home Affairs Select
Committee when I’d be answering questions on child
abuse. “I hear you’re about to challenge Lord Brittan
about when he knew about child sex abuse,” he said. “It
wouldn’t be a wise move”, he advised me. “It was all put
to bed a long time ago.” He warned me I could even be
responsible for his death. We looked at each other in
silence for a second. I knew straight away he wasn’t
telling me this out of concern for the man’s welfare.
There was no compassion in his voice.’
The question of whether such activities continue remains
almost entirely unasked. It is seemingly supposed that the
demise of the Conservative government of the 80s and 90s
saw an end to them.
Nonetheless, thanks to Labour politicians, the current
resurgence of interest in a previously slow-burning scandal of
organised child abuse at the very top of the British
Establishment is finally getting the public and – to some extent
– official attention it merits. A bewildering array of inquiries
and police operations has been sparked, but the
Conservative-led UK government resisted calls for an
overarching public inquiry into the affair.
Initially it announced a grudgingly-convened inquiry into
the general issue of institutional failures to protect children.
This was a carefully chosen brief, but if sufficient scrutiny is
applied, it could have been forced to address, at least
nominally, the central allegations of organised abuse in high
places.
The first choice as chair was the baroness Elizabeth
Butler-Sloss. She found herself in a conflict of interest (it was
clear that the investigation would be called upon to inquire
into the actions of her deceased brother), and when the public
and press proved persistent in their challenges, she had to
go. The inquiry was then to have been chaired by Fiona Woolf,
a ranking member of the Establishment by virtue of her
position as Lord Mayor of the confusingly-named City of
London, the enclave of transnational bankers that lurks, like
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some godless Vatican, in the centre of London. But her friendly
relationship with the former Conservative Home Secretary and
European Commissioner, the late Leon Brittan, who plays a
part of unknown scope in the allegations to be investigated,
gave rise to a conflict of interest. Woolf was a neighbour of
Brittan and his wife, whom she sponsored for a charity ‘fun
run’ with a friendly ‘good luck’ message. She had been a
colleague of each of the Brittans in a number of capacities,
official and honorary. Pressure on Woolf mounted and
eventually the Prime Minister stated that she had his ‘full
confidence’. Experience suggested that once it is found
necessary to assert this a resignation would not be far
behind. So it proved and she duly resigned at the end of
October 2014.
A third chair was appointed, New Zealand judge Lowell
Goddard, and a new inquiry began with these terms of
reference:
‘To consider the extent to which State and non-State
institutions have failed in their duty of care to protect
children from sexual abuse and exploitation; to consider
the extent to which those failings have since been
addressed; to identify further action needed to address
any failings identified; and to publish a report with
recommendations.’
The new inquiry,
‘will be a statutory inquiry established under the 2005
Inquiries Act. Unlike the previous panel inquiry it will
have powers to compel the attendance of witnesses and
the production of evidence by institutions and
individuals. Justice Goddard and her legal advisers will
be able to review open and classified sources. This new
inquiry will therefore have all the powers it needs to
penetrate deeply into the institutions that have failed
children in the past, and to identify those institutions
that are reportedly continuing to fail children today.’ 7
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord
7
<https://childsexualabuseinquiry.independent.gov.uk/terms-ofreference/>
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Bates) told the House of Lords:
‘There are, however, good reasons for confining the
inquiry’s scope to England and Wales. The Hart inquiry in
Northern Ireland8 and the Oldham inquiry in Jersey are
already underway, while the Scottish Government have
announced their own inquiry into child abuse, but I shall
discuss this with the new chairman. In the event that
the geographical scope remains the same .......I wish
once more to reassure the House that the Official
Secrets Act will not be a bar to giving evidence to this
inquiry.’ 9
The mainland UK inquiry led by Lowell Goddard will say Kincora
et al is the purview of the Hart inquiry in Northern Ireland
inquiry.10 But that inquiry will not have the same powers as
that on the mainland UK – its remit to compel the appearance
of people and documents extends only to Northern Ireland –
and thus the state’s attempt to conceal the Northern Ireland
events continues.11 And it remains to be seen if ‘State and
non-State institutions’ in the terms of reference will extend to
businesses such as the Elm House Guesthouse and informal
networks.
2: Conflicts of interest
In recent decades commercial influence has seeped into every
area of public life, eroding the significance of the crucial
concept of conflict of interest. Politicians, civil servants and
influential advisors move unimpeded through the ‘revolving
door’ between industry and officialdom, or operate on both
sides at once. Journalists routinely provide plugs and
recommendations in exchange for money or other benefits.
The bar for establishing a conflict has, where possible, been
raised so as to require proven bias. Since neither the person
8
<http://www.northernireland.gov.uk/statement-to-assembly-hiainquiry-tor>
9 <http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201415/ldhansrd/
text/150204-0001.htm>
10 And events of Jersey will left to the Oldham inquiry. See
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-jersey-28408981>.
11 See <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-29705408
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subject to the conflict nor their colleagues are likely explicitly
to accept that actual bias is in the offing, we increasingly hear
that a conflict of interest is merely ‘apparent’, and thus may be
ignored. The great and the good close ranks to salute the
unquestionable integrity of such ‘eminent’ characters, while
media commentators mostly prefer not to rock the boat. So it
was with Butler-Sloss and Woolf.
Barrister Barbara Hewson’s article, cited above, refers
dismissively to Woolf’s ‘alleged’ conflict of interest. Hewson did
not deny that Woolf is on friendly terms with the Brittans. To
speak of an ‘alleged’ or ‘apparent’ conflict of interest, then, is
absurd. Conflict of interest is a procedural concept: it does not
depend on demonstrating any actually operative bias. In fact it
is precisely to avoid the difficulty and embarrassment involved
in anticipating or proving corruption or subconscious prejudice
that the concept has come to play the role it does. The legal
maxim that no-one may judge his own case does not amount
to the assertion that all judges are corrupt: it recognises that
there is always some potential for illicit bias in the exercise of
official duties, and simply seeks to avoid situations in which
such bias may arise or appear to arise.
To identify whether a person is subject to a conflict of
interest, we compare two things: the potential influence of
their professional decisions and actions, and the range of their
interests. If the two overlap, there is a conflict of interest.
Interests are defined on an objective basis, informed by a
general understanding of human behaviour. Such interests
include the possibility of financial gain, and, as in these cases,
the avoidance of potential damage to the reputation of a
family member or friend.
Conflict of opinion
W hile dismissive of Butler-Sloss’s and Woolf’s conflicts of
interest, Hewson did suggest that her ideological opponent
the National Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Children
(NSPCC), ‘which’, she said, was ‘effectively leading the first
investigation’, was far more ‘conflicted’ than Butler Sloss.
Because the NSPCC campaigns on issues relating to child
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welfare, it too – or rather its head, Peter Wanless – is
‘conflicted’ in dealing with one of the many disconnected
inquiries into these issues.
Even allowing that Wanless is anything more than a
careerist ‘safe pair of hands’, this accusation is doubly inapt.
When an official inquiry is made into the powerful and wellconnected, the primary risk is of a false negative, rather than
a false positive. A quietist chairperson can exclude or ignore
testimony; an overzealous one is not able to conjure extra
evidence out of thin air.
An unjustified positive finding would be very hard to put
forward. Extraordinary scrutiny would be applied; grounds
would have to be given; a heavy burden of proof would be
imposed. By contrast, common sense and experience both tell
us that a report may exonerate the powerful in spite of the
evidence actually heard. No matter how loud and welljustified, cries of ‘whitewash’ do not form part of the official
record.
More importantly, a normative belief is not an interest.
Hewson did not make this clear, but she was not here talking
about a conflict of interest, but instead the murkier issue of
apparent bias. She did not make clear what stance espoused
by Wanless might have tended to disqualify him from chairing
the inquiry. Presumably the idea is not just that ‘balance’
requires that we find someone neutral between the interests
of vulnerable children and those who seek to dominate and
abuse them.
The interest of justice
T he appeal to personal opinion as a disqualifying factor was
notably on show in 1999, for example, when a panel in the
highest public British court, then known as the Law Lords,
adjudged another of their number, Leonard Hoffmann, to be
subject to a conflict of interest in finding that Augusto
Pinochet, the former president of Chile, should be extradited.
The finding was based on Hoffman’s connections to Amnesty
International. While the panel accepted that there was no
precedent for treating such connections as a disqualifying
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‘interest’, they decided, with little substantive argumentation,
to treat them as such. The panel was thus able to disqualify
Hoffman automatically, without having to make and
substantiate an accusation of illicit bias.
One of their number, Brian Hutton, nominally joined the
unanimous concurrence with the panel’s leading judgement,
but was willing to go further. Rather than discreetly nodding in
the direction of a fictional objective interest, he preferred to
enunciate a more sweeping doctrine:
‘I am of the opinion that there could be cases where the
interest of the judge in the subject matter of the
proceedings arising from his strong commitment to some
cause or belief or his association with a person or body
involved in the proceedings could shake public
confidence in the administration of justice as much as a
shareholding (which might be small) in a public company
involved in the litigation.’
The only point of introducing the phrase here italicised is to
assert that Hoffman’s opinions about justice and international
law could be treated as an automatically disqualifying
‘interest’. Hutton’s statements to this effect did not however
form the basis of the panel’s judgement, and are at the very
least eccentric by the usual standards of natural justice. This is
perhaps even clearer when one recalls that the opinion in
question was that, in the words of the Nuremberg tribunal:
‘The principle of international law which, under certain
circumstances, protects the representatives of a state cannot
be applied to acts condemned as criminal by international law.’
There is another notable case in which conflict of interest
principles have been artificially tightened, against the
prevailing trend towards laxity. In 1996, the Belgian
investigating judge Jean-Marc Connerotte was removed from
an investigation into the Marc Dutroux affair.
Prejudiced against murder?
D utroux was found to have a well-designed secret dungeon in
his basement, in which he had held captive two abducted
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children whose bodies he buried at another of his properties.
An accomplice reported that the girls had been kidnapped to
order. The investigation led to a businessman and regular face
at sex parties, Jean Michel Nihoul. A witness, Regina Louf,
implicated Dutroux and Nihoul in organised sadistic child abuse
involving blackmail and large sums of money. She gave
detailed and checkable testimony to police describing the
involvement of judges, a prominent banker and a top
politician. The case featured threats to judges, witnesses
dropping like flies, grotesque smear campaigns against
witnesses and the removal of investigators. Nihoul openly
boasted to journalists that he was ‘the monster of Belgium’
but had impunity because he had information on too many
politicians and other prominent figures. Dutroux himself
claimed that highly-placed individuals were complicit in his
crimes.
Connerotte was the only judge who made much
progress in investigating the matter. He was removed when
he was found to have a conflict of interest on the grounds that
he had attended a fund-raising dinner in support of known
victims’ families. Sympathising with the families of children
known to have died does not, of course, imply any prejudice
as to the question of who killed them. Apparently such
sympathy was enough to generate a ‘conflict of interest’. With
Connerotte gone, the investigation stalled.
Two years later, in 1998, a government inquiry
announced that Dutroux had no accomplices in high places.
The case was paralysed for another six years before Dutroux
was eventually brought to trial in the matter, along with three
other accused, including Nihoul, who alone escaped conviction
when the jury were unable to reach a verdict on the evidence
made available.
In stark contrast to these instances, Woolf’s and ButlerSloss’s conflicts of interest were initially indulged by the
authorities and supporters such as Hewson. The natural
assumption is that the authorities were seeking someone who
will be predisposed to find that the allegations are without
substance.
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Get-out clause
There is also a further possibility, which has no doubt
occurred to others besides myself. In the Pinochet case, the
lead opinion blandly explained:
‘It appears that neither Senator Pinochet nor (save to a
very limited extent) his legal advisers were aware of any
connection between Lord Hoffmann and AI [Amnesty
International] until after the judgment was given on 25
November. Two members of the legal team recalled that
they had heard rumours that Lord Hoffmann’s wife was
connected with AI in some way. During the Newsnight
programme on television on 25 November, an allegation
to that effect was made by a speaker in Chile.... On 7
December a man anonymously telephoned Senator
Pinochet’s solicitors alleging that Lord Hoffmann was a
Director of the Amnesty International Charitable
Trust....Senator Pinochet’s solicitors informed the Home
Secretary of these allegations. On 8 December they
received a letter from the solicitors acting for AI dated 7
December....Mr. Alun Jones Q.C. for the CPS [Crown
Prosecution Service] does not contend that either
Senator Pinochet or his legal advisors had any
knowledge of Lord Hoffmann’s position as a Director of
AICL until receipt of that letter.’
The conflict of interest in the child abuse case has been widely
noted. Simon Danczuk, one of the two Labour MPs responsible
for bringing this matter to public attention, was ‘dismayed’ by
the discovery of Woolf’s conflict, stating that it rendered her
position ‘untenable’. He reluctantly capitulated in the face of
government intransigence, unwilling to countenance the
further delay involved in waiting for the government to choose
yet another candidate – with no guarantee that they would
not try the same thing. He remarked: ‘I’m beginning to wonder
if [Conservative Home Secretary Theresa May] doesn’t want
this inquiry to ever really see the light of day.’
Danczuk was too polite to say so, but quite apart from
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the formal conflict of interest, Woolf was inevitably and
incorrigibly biased. This is not a spurious ‘bias’ imputed on the
basis of principled beliefs or opinion. Quite the opposite: it is
the Establishment sense of merited privilege, shorn of all
vestige of responsibility by the Thatcherite right. It is exactly
the attitude that has led Conservative politicians to close
ranks thus far. It is the same sense of entitlement that ends
with high-level child-abusers casually playing power games
with the bodies and minds of defenceless children.
3: Nothing to Be Done
In part 2 I referred to the arguments of the barrister Barbara
Hewson. Hewson has another argument, which would bypass
all talk of conflict of interest. The inquiry, even were it properly
run, would not matter, since it would have little hope of
discovering the facts. This is a counsel not so much of despair
as of indifference: Hewson, preoccupied as she is with the
Spiked doctrine of ‘moral panic’, has already rejected the
allegations, as we will see.
Unreliable witnesses
Drawing on her background in the document-heavy field of
commercial law, Hewson makes the remarkable claim that
witness testimony is worthless. If accepted by the criminal
courts, this principle would surely reduce the conviction rate to
a very low order.
The claim is based on a judge’s observation that in
commercial disputes, little is to be gained from an attempt to
evaluate contested and biased recollections of the fine detail
of unminuted negotiations, and that in such circumstances it is
preferable to cut the Gordian knot of oral contract and rely on
documents (underwritten, of course, by testimony as to their
provenance).
This kind of consideration does not apply in the criminal
field of offences against the person, in which crossexamination is more likely to find inconsistencies, a far wider
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range of corroborating evidence is generally available, the
events being recalled are considerably more memorable and
less open to interpretation than some oral representation
made in the course of business. Criminal courts do not, except
in the case of white-collar offences, generally rely heavily on
documents.
Hewson is correct to point out that documents in these
cases tend to disappear or to be confiscated or shredded.
That is certainly a problem so far as some aspects of these
cases are concerned. However, dossiers directly relating to
sexual abuse are likely to contain written testimony, in some
cases at second hand. These can be extremely useful as leads
in an investigation, and – notably – as evidence that claims
were made at an earlier time rather than recently concocted,
as in the case of some of Colin Wallace’s allegations. But they
would not normally be admitted as evidence in a criminal trial.
The underlying reasons for this are that their provenance may
not be clear, and – crucially – their content cannot be
subjected to cross-examination.
While the degradation of evidence over time is
undoubtedly a problem, especially when there is any kind of
cover-up, Hewson’s particular argument therefore seems
misplaced.
Destroyed files
Hewson’s general stance, too, is misguided. An inquiry into
those who are in a position to destroy evidence must take
account of their power. Time and again, we find
whistleblowers’ credible testimony officially rejected because
relevant records that might corroborate it are missing. To take
one obvious example: when the Brazilian Jean-Charles De
Menezes was shot by heavily armed specialist officers on a
London Underground railway carriage in 2005, the
Metropolitan police reported a fortuitous absence of CCTV
coverage. There was apparently no proper investigation into
this claim and how such a total blackout could have occurred,
and as a result the police were able to force though their own
version of events.
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In such cases, lack of evidence is often more a pretext
for quietism than a genuinely insurmountable impasse. To
follow Hewson’s lead in using civil litigation as a model, one
might reflect on the legal maxim omnia praesumuntur contra
spoliatorem – literally ‘all things are presumed against the
destroyer of evidence’. When evidence is missing, we should
not simply hand the benefit of the doubt to the person or body
who disposed of it. To do so is not only to ignore an important
piece of circumstantial evidence, but to follow a policy which
rewards cover-ups. Inferences based on apparent motive
should not, especially in a fact-seeking inquiry, be ignored: if
someone appears to have tried to cover up, that is prima facie
evidence that they thought they had something to cover up.
Even more obviously, the exact circumstances in which
evidence is spoilt must be inquired into thoroughly, rather
than disregarded as a fait accompli and an evidential dead
end.
The issue of spoliation came to the fore in 1996, when
Clwyd County Council recalled all publicly held copies of the
‘Jillings report’ into child abuse in North Wales children’s
homes. The council’s insurer, then administered by Zurich
Mutual, had threatened to void the council’s cover on the
grounds that describing the abuse would be a ‘a hostage to
fortune’ and tantamount to admitting liability. Reporters saw
extracts at the time, one of which disclosed that the same
insurer had previously brought similar pressure to bear. As the
Independent newspaper reported:
‘...fears by the Municipal Mutual of victims launching legal
actions helped to ensure that a full report of an earlier
investigation into the abuse was never seen by elected
councillors, and was confined to a very small group of
senior social services personnel.’
Very soon after, Clwyd Council itself was destroyed, split into
three smaller councils. Hewson’s self-fulfilling pessimism about
destroyed records does not apply in this case: not all copies of
the Jillings Report were in fact destroyed, and a very heavily
redacted copy was recently released following a Freedom of
Information request.
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Dodgy dossier?
H ewson is unconcerned about spoliation in the case of the
Conservative Leon Brittan. As Home Secretary in 1983, he was
handed a file of papers by another Conservative MP, Geoffrey
Dickens, an outsider in the party viewed as something of an
eccentric. That file, relating to child abuse allegations, is now
missing.
Stressing the very slightly unconventional aspects of
Dickens’s character, Hewson hints that his information may
have been pure fantasy. In fact the most eccentric of Dickens’s
qualities appears to have been his willingness to violate group
norms and blow the whistle, as when he asked in the
Commons why former high-ranking diplomat and reputed MI6
officer Peter Hayman, a member of the Paedophile Information
Exchange (PIE) who had been found to have been in
possession of child porn, had escaped prosecution and
publicity.
Hewson is dismissive:
‘Dickens unfortunately did not keep back-up copies of his
fascinating files. Their disappearance has been given a
sinister spin, though it is far from clear why the Home
Office should have been expected to copy and archive
Dickens’ papers for him.’
In fact, Dickens did keep a copy at his family home. Since he
reported that his constituency home and London flat were
both broken into by someone not looking for valuables, it is
perhaps unsurprising that the file should have been destroyed
after Dickens died in 1995, apparently at the behest of his
wife who considered it too sensitive to keep in the house. The
‘sinister spin’ Hewson refers to was perhaps exemplified by
the ex-Director of Public Prosecutions, Kenneth Macdonald,
who described the disappearance as ‘alarming’ and called for
an inquiry.
Hewson does not relate that on his third attempt at
recalling the story, Brittan accepted that he had written to
Dickens assuring him that ‘I am now able to tell you that, in
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general terms, the view of the Director of Public Prosecutions
is that two of the letters you forwarded could form the basis
for inquiries by the police and they are now being passed to
the appropriate authorities.’ No further information about
those police inquiries has, to my knowledge, come to light.
In view of all this, we may certainly agree that
disappearing documents are a problem – especially, as noted
previously, where there is a cover-up in place. But a sensible
approach to such destruction of evidence is to dig deeper, and
to make ‘spoliation inferences’ where the facts justify them.
An over-reliance on documentary exhibits as the gold
standard of evidence not only tends to produce false
negatives when spoliation has occurred – it can also give rise
to false positives. Words on paper have an almost mystical
authority for those who seek comfortable certainties –
historians find them especially convenient – but a piece of
paper cannot be cross-examined. Where there are any
grounds for doubt, a document’s provenance, integrity and
authorship must be subjected to rigourous forensic
examination before its content may be relied upon as fact.
Hewson suggests that eyewitness testimony is almost
worthless by comparison to documentary exhibits, because it
is a potentially inaccurate record, subject to falsification and
degradation over time. But she then goes on to dismiss the
possibility of using documents in this case, because they have
‘disappeared’! She is wrong on both counts. Not only are
there many credible witnesses, not limited to supposed victims
of abuse, making consistent, long-standing allegations
capable of corroboration, but not all documents have
disappeared; and of those that have, the circumstances of
their disappearance can help to establish a cover-up and thus
complicity.
Is the ‘myth’ true?
H ewson, though, does not countenance even the possibility of
a cover-up, since it seems she has already decided that there
is nothing to cover up. Her article’s subtitle reads: ‘The myth of
powerful, protected perverts has been around for decades’.
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And ‘myth’ here clearly means something entirely untrue.
In the text of her article, Hewson asks, rhetorically: ‘All of
this sounds shocking, but is it true?’ Rather than address this
issue in any direct way, though, she prefers to take a
innuendo-laden detour through the cherry orchard of social
history:
‘This latest panic rehashes specific aspects of the moral
panics that swept Britain in the late 1980s and early
1990s, in which Dickens was a major player. As
Professor Philip Jenkins shows in Intimate Enemies
(1992), exposure of spies like the homosexual Anthony
Blunt helped shape a popular image of upper-class
perverts [sic] from public schools, where homosexuality
was rampant, and whose colleagues concealed their
activities.
Jenkins called this a powerful weapon in populist
rhetoric, used to attack the ruling elite. MPs from Jeremy
Thorpe to Harvey Proctor were accused of deviant
sexuality [sic] and criminal activity.’
No doubt some people regard anything that might be used to
attack the ruling class as ipso facto beyond the pale. The
question, though, remains: are they true? Hewson seeks to
elicit a blanket, if implicit, ‘no’. But the handful of sneers and
smears she offers could deflect only the most incurious and
ignorant of readers. Since Hewson brings him up via Jenkins’
plausible-sounding but ultimately irrelevant musings, it is
worth noting that it now appears that Anthony Blunt was
himself involved in paedophiliac activities connected to the
wider network or networks now under investigation, and that
he may have been blackmailed on that basis.
The ‘latest panic’, as Hewson chooses to frame it, is not,
as she suggests, a ‘rehash’. It is unfinished business, which
the Conservative Home Secretary has been forced to reopen
by the objective facts of the situation, as brought into the
open by Labour politicians. The Conservative establishment
will try to sweep the central issue under the carpet, but there
will be no hiding the elephant-sized lump it makes.
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Unknown knowns
The internet is awash with relevant material. Predictably,
there is a quantity of anti-gay and hyper-conspiratorial
ranting. There also appear to be planted smears (for example,
a heavily distorted account of a cancelled police investigation
into reports of abuse and the discovery of human remains at a
children’s home at Haut-de-la-Garenne) and the odd strawman hoax (a probable instance being certain claims made
against Conservative ex-Chancellor Kenneth Clarke), aimed at
muddying the waters and discrediting well-founded claims. But
none of this can now entirely drown out the trickle of credible
accounts of abuse and cover-up, including numerous news
stories from mainstream media, notably the Mirror newspaper
and Exaro news website, amply supplemented by blogs such
as ‘Spotlight On Abuse’, ‘the Needle’ and ‘Desiring Progress’.
Still, none of this is enough to bring a full appreciation of
the known facts and their clear implications to critical mass
among the general public, or to convince those in the
chattering class who are too comfortable, too fearful or too
corrupt to face the unfolding truth.
Will ‘child abuse fatigue’ kick in? Will the cumulative effect
of a few high-profile retractions and one or two spectacularly
failed investigations combine to slow what at present seems
an unstoppable momentum? Will tame inquiries tactfully avert
their eyes from members of the elite and from the security and
secret services? Quite possibly.
If so, though, this will join the list of unknown knowns,
facts tacitly and imperfectly understood, which assert
themselves as a sense of distrust, sometimes diffuse but
always corrosive, in British society. Paedophile panics may well
have happened in the past – claims of widespread ritual
satanic abuse based on dubiously ‘recovered’ memories would
appear to have had this character. But witch-hunts literal or
metaphorical tend to arise as the misdirected expression of
other anxieties, and are always directed at the relatively
powerless. When the officially unarticulated but deeply
unsettling facts are real instances of organised child abuse,
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and the suspected culprits are untouchable, who knows how
the resulting societal angst will manifest itself?
The British working class is already groaning under the
strain of punitive and politically-motivated ‘austerity’
measures. Rioting has flared up across England. The Scots,
understandably, have come close to secession from the UK.
Mistrust is rife, and multiplied by increasingly desperate
infighting between factions of the ruling elite, all seeking to
distract from their own misdeeds by exposing those of others.
The City of London, under fire as never before, appears to
have mounted a diversionary attack on politicians by releasing
the shabby details of their expenses claims. The politicians
capitalised on the ‘phone hacking’ scandal to attack the press.
The Conservative press attempted a stunningly audacious
pre-emptive counterattack on Labour politicians by spuriously
accusing them of having supported the activities of the
Paedophile Information Exchange in the 70s. As a result of all
this, the public is beginning to get a sense, albeit hazy and
misdirected, of pervasive corruption throughout the ruling
institutions of British society.
The Conservative government is falling back on the
‘security’ agenda, trying desperately to convince a jaded
British public that the civil wars in Iraq and Syria somehow
pose a threat to Britain. They hope to rekindle the patriotic
fervour of the Falklands war to rescue them, just as in 1983,
from the electoral effect of brutal laissez-faire policies. But all
they are doing is exacerbating the deep unease in British
society.
A lid may yet be kept on the establishment child abuse
network long enough for attention to wane, but public disquiet
will continue to simmer underneath. The ultimate beneficiaries
of such pent-up anxiety are, perversely, likely to be the
proponents of far-right ideology, in particular the fauxpopulists of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP)
whose purposely ill-defined position is tailor-made to capitalise
on ill-defined grievances.
Amid all this mistrust and doubt, the Conservative Party
may yet slip through seemingly unscathed. If so, the stench
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will linger in the air at Westminster for years to come.
Author’s note: This article is a snapshot of a work in
progress. The sheer volume of material available means
many aspects of the story, in particular recent
developments, could not be covered.
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The View from the Bridge
Robin Ramsay
Even Wikipedia.....
In August much of the major media, including the BBC, ran a
story about the late Cedric Belfrage, claiming he was a Soviet
spy, ‘the sixth man’. Christopher Andrew was among those
prominently quoted supporting this thesis. The estimable John
Simkins published a devastating rebuttal of this, pointing out
that Belfrage has been leaking material to the Soviets on
instruction from BSC (British Security Co-ordination).1 Simkins
included this killer paragraph:
‘If Gordon Corea [of the BBC] and the other journalists
working on this story had carried out a simple search for
“Cedric Belfrage” on the Net they would have arrived at
my fully documented page on Cedric Belfrage and would
have found evidence that contradicted the SIS press
release. Even the much criticised Wikipedia had a far
more accurate account of Belfrage than supplied by
Andrew and his media stooges.’
This was punted at various major media outlets but there
were no takers.
JFK and the unthinkable
I finally read David Talbot’s Brothers (2007), about JFK and
RFK. Talbot did something interesting: he contacted all the
surviving members of the Kennedy network of the sixties –
pols of one sort or another, speechwriters, drivers etc., or
their wives, ex-wives and children, and asked them: what did
you – and what did Robert Kennedy – really think at the time
of JFK’s assassination? Almost universally they thought that
the Warren Commission was bullshit.
1
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On whodunit they were uncertain but looked mostly at
the anti-Castro Cubans. No-one seems to have thought it
might be Johnson behind it, not-a-one. Johnson is entirely
missing from this account. Which is odd considering that the
Kennedys were trying to destroy Johnson’s career. Intent on
generating enough scandal to get Johnson ‘off the ticket’ for
the 1964 election, Attorney General Robert had sent a team
down to Texas to investigate Billie Sol Estes (one of the
Johnson network and a major financial contributor) and his
Justice Department was leaking dirt on Johnson’s right-hand
man, Bobby Baker, to Life magazine. Yet when JFK was killed in
Johnson’s home state and was the obvious beneficiary of the
event, not one of them thought that these facts might be
connected.
My guess would be that Texas was a long way away
from Washington in the sixties and while the East Coasters
round the Kennedys knew that LBJ was a vulgarian and a
boor, definitely not their kind of person – this is the Yankees
versus Cowboys thesis in a sense – it just never occurred to
anyone that messing with LBJ could have such serious
consequences; and it still hadn’t by the time Talbot got round
to talking to them in the 2000s.2
The political economy
The most surprising thing I have read recently was a talk,
‘Who owns a company?’, given by the Bank of England’s chief
economist, Andrew Haldane. In this he compares corporate
culture in the Anglo-American world with that of continental
Europe and concludes that we should be more like Sweden or
Germany where the interests of shareholders are not the only
thing of importance. This is his conclusion:
‘Challenges to the shareholder-centric company model
are rising, both from within and outside the corporate
sector. These criticisms have deep micro-economic roots
2 The one Texan politician who wrote about Johnson in the 1960s, J.
Evetts Haley, dropped broad hints that the Johnson network had killed
several witnesses in the Billie Sol Estes affair in his A Texan Looks at
Lyndon (1964), still available.
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and thick macro-economic branches. Some incremental
change is occurring to trim these branches. But it may be
time for a more fundamental re-rooting of company law if
we are to tackle these problems at source. The stakes –
for companies, the economy and wider society – could
scarcely be higher.’3 (emphasis added)
But none of our major political parties is anywhere near
suggesting something as radical as this.
The Conservative Party annual conference was
noteworthy for a striking piece of nonsense from Prime
Minister Cameron claiming that the Conservatives were the
now the party of ‘working people’. Many commentators, who
really ought to know better by now, took this seriously. The
claim is true in one profound but unstated sense: the
Conservatives will continue to harass those who are not
employed. Thirty years of propaganda against those
dependent upon the state has resulted in a public climate
hostile to almost all those claiming benefits: the ‘deserving
poor’ category has now shrunk enormously.
There is a kind of logic behind all this which Cabinet
member Jeremy Hunt expressed in his comments during the
conference that cuts in tax credits would force the British to
work as hard as the Chinese. Or: in a globalised world there is
no alternative to the race to the bottom, and the Brits are
going to be forced to take shitty, badly paid jobs, just like
much of the rest of the world. It remains to be seen how the
Conservative government reconciles this with their plans for a
minimum ‘living wage’.
Keeping on keeping on
Jonathan Marshall was first sighted by me in the early 1980s
when he published a newsletter called Parapolitics USA.4 A
series of books followed, some co-authored with Peter Dale
3
<http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/
2015/833.aspx>
4 The first issue of this can be seen at <http://www.scribd.com/
doc/63837535/Parapolitics-USA-no-1>
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Scott. He’s still writing. A piece of his, on the barely reported
US-sponsored coup in Honduras, appeared recently on the
Consortium site.5
Bill Blum has been at it nearly as long and recently he
announced in his e-mail bulletin, Anti-Empire Report,6 that he
was suspending publication because he was ‘burnt out’. He
explained:
‘After more than a dozen years of putting out the report,
because US foreign policy keeps repeating itself, with
the same lies, I too often find myself repeating the same
ideas I’ve expressed before, often in more or less the
same words.
I also feel the effect of day after day, year after
year, intensively reading and seeing images of the
human horrors; not just the horrors, but the lies and the
stupidity.’
I empathise with some of that. I gave up my column in the
Fortean Times precisely because I had begun repeating myself.
Occasional contributor to these columns, Bernard Porter,
currently has three books out. One is a reissue in the
Routledge Revivals series7 of his 1989 Plots and Paranoia. The
two new ones are British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t and
Empire Ways: aspects of British Imperialism, both from I.B.
Tauris. The latter is a collection of essays, some of which
appeared originally in the London Review of Books.
Mike Peters RIP
M ike Peters died in June. Mike was a sociologist and a lefty,
though of what particular stripe I’m not sure (tendence
Groucho, perhaps.) We only met a handful of times.8 He wrote
the seminal article about Bilderberg for Lobster 32. Nothing
5
<https://consortiumnews.com/2015/08/19/the-honduran-coupsugly-aftermath/>
6 <http://williamblum.org/aer>
7 <https://www.routledge.com/series/REVIVALS>
8 A photo and brief biog, from the perspective of a group in Leeds to
which he belonged, is at <https://leedssurrealistgroup.wordpress.
com/2015/06/11/mike-peters/>.
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better has appeared since. That essay is behind our tiny pay
wall (which pays for this site) but a version is on-line at
<www.bilderberg.org/bblob.rtf>.
City politics
Remember ‘rebalancing the economy’? After the great
crash/taxpayer rip-off of 2008 it dawned on some of our
politicians that it might be a good thing if the economy’s
dependence on the financial sector was reduced; which
meant, in effect, expanding the manufacturing sector. Prime
minister Cameron talked of this in 2010,9 was still talking
about in 2015,1 0 but nothing happened. Tony Burke, assistant
general secretary of Unite, wrote in January 2015 that
‘Osborne and Cameron’s promised rebalancing of the economy
in favour of manufacturing has long disappeared in the rear
view mirror.’
The appointment of Sajid Javid as Secretary of State for
Business, Innovation and Skills in May 2015 tells us all we
need to know about the government’s intentions. For Javid
was one of the architects of the 2008 crash, one of the clever
people creating ‘financial products’ – packaging debt for sale
by banks – which caused the problems.11
Given the cconsequences of 2008, you might think that
the politics of the City would be front page news. But it’s still
regarded as esoteric for the most part, and confined to the
business pages. But the game goes on.
Martin Wheatley quit as head of the Financial Conduct
Authority1 2 at the beginning of August. The report of this in
the Financial Times noted that he resigned
9 <https://www.gov.uk/government/news/article-for-the-yorkshirepost>
10 <https://www.politicshome.com/economy-and-work/articles/news/
david-cameron-speech-rebalancing-economy>
11 <http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/15/sajid-javid-whatthatcherite-union-buster-learned-from-wall-street>
12
<http://www.standard.co.uk/business/business-news/city-shockedas-watchdog-martin-wheatley-quits-financial-conduct-authority10396711.html>
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‘after being told by George Osborne that he would not
renew his contract when it expires in March....The move
comes a month after Mr Osborne, the chancellor,
unveiled a “new settlement” with the City of London......
....[Wheatley] did not always have the confidence of
government officials, who have privately urged
regulators to take a lighter approach as the economy
improves and banker-bashing falls out of favour. Some
industry executives, meanwhile, viewed him as remote
and unhelpful and complained to senior Conservative
politicians about his consumer-champion agenda.’ 1 3
The FT could hardly be plainer: the financial crisis is over, so its
back to business as usual; Wheatley was taking his job too
seriously and had to go.
But what’s this ‘new settlement’ between the City and
the government referred to by Osborne? It comes from his
Mansion House speech this year. Each year at the Mansion
House Chancellors give a speech in which they tell the City
what they’re going to do for them. The key paragraphs from
Osborne were these:
‘We have been seeking to resolve that British dilemma
of being a host for global finance without exposing our
taxpayers again to the calamitous cost of financial firms
failing.
I believe that in restoring the Bank of England’s
role in the heart of supervision, in ring-fencing retail
banking and insisting on much better capitalised firms,
we have made enormous progress in solving that
dilemma.......Yet one of the greatest threats to our
international competitiveness comes from ill-designed
and misguided European legislation imposed not just on
our financial services industry, but many other industries
too.’ 1 4
For which read: regulators from the European Union are a
13 <http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/61f867fa-2c76-11e5-8613e7aedbb7bdb7.html#axzz3i0K9RHjD>
14
<https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/mansion-house-2015speech-by-the-chancellor-of-the-exchequer>
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threat to the City. Bottom line: to preserve the City as a world
centre of money-laundering, gambling and financial fraud the
UK may have to leave the Union.
Huh?
Did someone say the world of politics is getting complicated?
This appeared in the Daily Telegraph.1 5
‘Iraq......The most disgusting abuse of power in a
generation and a moral quagmire that never ends.
America is attacked by terrorists and so, declares war on
a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the
attacks, while ignoring an oil rich ally which had
everything to do with them. The justification for war is
based on some witches’ brew of faulty intelligence,
concocted intelligence and ignored good intelligence.
Decent people are forced to lie on an international
stage. All sensible advice is ignored and rabid neo-con
draft dodgers hold sway on military matters. The UK
joins this fool’s errand for no good reason. Blood is
spilled and treasure is spent.
The result is a disaster that was predicted only by
Middle Eastern experts, post-conflict planners and
several million members of the public......
The banking crisis.....A nice financial counterpoint to
Iraq. Virtually destroy the western financial system in
the name of greed. Get bailed out by the taxpayers who
you’ve been ripping off. And then carry on as if nothing
whatsoever has happened. No jail, no meaningful extra
regulation, the idea of being too big to fail as much of a
joke as it was in 2005. Not even an apology.......
But actually what we should be thinking is that a
lot of this is what happens what you dismantle
regulatory frameworks. This is what happens when you
15 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11671617/
Perhaps-the-worlds-conspiracy-theorists-have-been-right-allalong.html>
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let money run riot and you allow industries to police
themselves. This is what happens when the rich and
powerful are endlessly granted special privileges,
celebrated and permitted or even encouraged to place
themselves above the law. And this is what happens
when ordinary people feel bored by and excluded from
politics, largely because their voices matter so little for
the reasons above. Effectively, we are all living in Italy
under Silvio Berlusconi.’
W[h]ither Labour?
I wasn’t going to bother adding my 5p’s worth to the
discussion about the Labour Party’s future but then I saw the
following quote from Ken Livingstone in a ‘what’s on’ free
sheet in Hull.
‘[Thatcher] created today’s housing crisis, she produced
the banking crisis, she created the benefits crisis. It was
her government that started putting people on
incapacity benefits rather than register them as
unemployed because the Britain she inherited was
broadly at full employment. She decided when she wrote
off our manufacturing industry that she could live with
two or three million unemployed and the legacy of that,
the benefits bill that we are still struggling with today. In
actual fact, every real problem we face today is the
legacy of the fact she was fundamentally wrong.’16
This is true now and was true in 2008 when Ken said it. Ken
may have come from the world of the Trot groupescules1 7 but
he understood British political economy.1 8
16 They had seen it on the Net, of course. See <http://www.itv.com/
news/update/2013-04-08/livingstone-thatchers-policiesfundamentally-wrong/>.
17 On which see Simon Matthews, ‘The once and future king?’ in
Lobster 56.
18 And the fact that he did so is one of the reasons the NuLab faction
– Brown, Blair et al – detested him: he knew more than they did, knew
they were talking shit and told them so.
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For a political leader, like Mrs Thatcher, acknowledging
error and changing minds is a peculiar problem. A leader
attracts followers, or builds a coalition of support, based on
two things: policies and prospects of winning. Blair’s coalition
of support was based on his prospects of winning: the core
group of ‘Blairites’, neo-cons within the parliamentary Labour
Party, was never very big.1 9 Mrs Thatcher’s coalition was
based very largely on policies defined by the failure of Edward
Heath between 1970 and 74. To her supporters Thatcher
promised to attack the British labour movement – ‘the enemy
within’ – who had defeated Heath, and ‘cure’ inflation, partly
caused by Heath’s attempt to generate growth in the UK
economy. When she announced at the annual Conservative
Party conference in 1980, ‘You turn if you want to. The lady’s
not for turning’ 20 – it was a promise to maintain the
ideological coalition which supported her and not imitate
Heath’s ‘u-turn’ in 1972. Since her economic policies were
having serious unforeseen negative consequences, rationally
she should have been changing her mind; politically she could
not do so.
Of the Thatcherites, the key group around her in the late
1970s, only Nigel Lawson could be said to have had any
economic knowledge. His view of the political economy was
that of a former City journalist; and the City was doing
splendidly under Thatcher: it was their agenda of deregulation
which was being implemented under the rhetoric of
‘freedom’.2 1
In this country our leading politicians are not required to
understand economics, let alone political economy. Polly
Toynbee made this comment on the current Labour leadership
campaign.
19 It was not as big as the left-wing Campaign group, for example.
20 In a speech written for her by playwright Ronald Miller. Thatcher
had no interest in nor knowledge of Britain’s literary culture and did
not get the reference to the Christopher Fry play, The Lady’s Not For
Burning.
21 A member of Thatcher’s inner policy group, John Hoskyns, is
scathing about the economic ignorance at the top of the Tory Party in
his Just in Time: Inside the Thatcher Revolution (London: Aurum Press,
2000).
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‘[Yvette] Cooper is on the up, her every outing leaving
audiences thinking better of her. She even impressed
the press gallery last week, the toughest gig of all. This
question killed Miliband: did Labour overspending leave
Britain vulnerable in the crash? Unlike Kendall, Cooper
refuses to concede. It’s not true, she won’t say it and
she can say why with a punchy economic explanation
poor Miliband never learned.’ 22
Two things struck me about this. Firstly, Toynbee is impressed
that Yvette Cooper can actually muster a response to the
question, ‘Did Labour overspending leave it vulnerable in the
crash?’ I don’t know what Cooper’s ‘punchy economic
explanation’ was2 3 but the fact that something as banal as
this is praiseworthy speaks volumes. The Greek finance
minister until recently, the economist Yanis Varoufakis,
commented that it took ‘the mathematical expertise of a smart
eight-year-old’ to work out that imposing austerity on Greece,
and thus diminishing further its economy and thus government
revenues, was not the way to get it to pay its creditors.2 4
Dealing with the notion that Labour’s borrowing handicapped
it when it came to the great bank bail-out is no more
intellectually taxing.
On the other hand Labour did borrow too much, and
borrowed it expensively – just think of the stupid PFI deals:
£54 billion borrowed will become £300 billion repaid by the
time they are paid off.2 5 They also spent lots of the borrowing
on dumb computer projects which came to nothing (which,
with hindsight, look more like frauds by the computer
companies2 6) and cheap and nasty public buildings (notably
22
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/23/labourleadership-race-yvette-cooper-andy-burnham>
23 Presumably something along the lines suggested at
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11606876/YvetteCooper-Labour-didnt-spend-too-much-before-the-crash.html>
24
See <http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2015/07/11/behind-germanysrefusal-to-grant-greece-debt-relief-op-ed-in-the-guardian/#more8970>.
25 See <http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/jul/05/pfi-cost300bn>.
26 See for example David Craig and Richard Brooks, Plundering the
Public Sector (London: Constable, 2006).
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schools) which will only last 20 years, if that. Blair and Brown
should have put up taxes but flunked it; and instead of
curtailing public spending moved from tax and spend to
borrow and spend. But this was small beer compared to the
costs of bailing-out the banks.
The second point Toynbee made was that journalists are
‘the toughest gig of all’. Labour politicians of an earlier
generation – Healey, Jenkins, Crossman, Crossland; or
Livingstone and Benn – had no fear of journalists. That being
interviewed by an intellectual lightweight like Jeremy Paxman
is regarded as some kind of ordeal says much about the
decline in the quality of politicians. But it also reflects the
difficulty suggested by the title of one of William Goldman’s
memoirs about Hollywood, Which lie did I tell?. Today’s
mainstream Labour politicians are not just explaining what
they believe, they are also trying to remember the line
generated by the most recent focus groups. If they look
inauthentic it is because they are – deliberately – inauthentic.
Labour went down the wrong road when it chose John
Smith as leader of the party in 1992. Smith had been on the
steering committee of the Bilderberg group, one of the leading
promoters of globalisation. From there we got the careerists,
Blair, Brown and their initial followers, of whom Yvette Cooper
is the last survivor, who were captured by the Americans and
who thought the way to get into office was to copy Bill
Clinton’s style – New Democrats, New Labour – and his
policies: financialisation and immigration. Essentially, give the
bankers their heads and get immigrants in to do the shit-work
the white working class won’t do.
I hear people say ‘Politics is getting so complicated’. Well
yes and no. Marine Le Pen, leader of the French Front National,
said a while back that the issue today wasn’t left or right but
nationalism or globalisation. Of course left or right is still an
issue; but is the world safe in the hands of the global
corporations and the 1% who own them? Obviously it isn’t:
they will destroy the planet. On a smaller scale everything the
Labour Party used to believe in is incompatible with
globalisation. So politics is simple in the first instance: see
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what the global corporations want and support the opposite.
You may have to hold your nose sometimes while you do so,
given the company from the far right on some issues, but
nevertheless I’m with Madame Le Pen and la belle France at
that first crucial divide. And so should be the Labour Party.
Nixon’s treason: still officially unspeakable
In 1968, as that year’s presidential election came into view,
President Johnson and those around him learned that Richard
Nixon was doing his best to frustrate the Vietnam peace talks
then underway in Paris. Nixon was afraid that a peace deal
would enable the Democrats to win the presidential election.
Never mind thousands of people dying a week: his chances of
becoming president were at stake, ffs. So he had Anna
Chennault, one of the key members of the ‘China lobby’,
talking to the South Vietnamese delegation at the peace talks,
promising them a better deal if they dragged their feet during
the talks until after the election. Which they duly did.
Chennault’s role became known in the Johnson White House –
presumably the NSA or CIA had the conference wired for
sound – but Johnson did nothing, said nothing.27
And these events are still being suppressed on the
Democratic side of American politics. In the LBJ library’s oral
history section there is an interview with Cartha Deloach, a
senior FBI man of the period, who was that agency’s liaison
with President Johnson, in which this exchange takes place.
Question: ‘There was evidence, though, that Anna
Chennault had been urging the South Vietnamese
government to balk at coming to the table in Paris. Did
you have any insight on that from--?’
Deloach: Well, I did not specifically mention those facts in
my previous remarks. You have brought it up and I will
say that the President told me, or Walter Jenkins told
27 See Robert Parry’s account at <https://consortiumnews.com/
2015/03/13/lbjs-x-file-on-nixons-treason-2/>. As Parry commented,
the threatened peace deal was the original ‘October surprise’.
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me, I don’t know which one, that
Gemstones are forever
The first thing I wrote was a critique of an American
conspiracy theory called the Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File
which was circulating in pamphlet form in the UK in 1976/7.28
Gemstone was the first conspiracy theory I can remember
coming across and may mark the beginning of the current age
of conspiracy theories. Like all good conspiracy theories,
Gemstone is impossible to kill off and interest in Gemstone
continues. Shawn Hamilton, for example, has an essay, ‘A
Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File turns 40’, in which he
discusses the background to its appearance.29 Gemstone’s
claims were nonsense or uncheckable but exploring them led
me into the American studies section of the university library
where I began the reading which led eventually to the
creation of Lobster.
Cold War 3
Russian forces ‘practised invasion of Norway, Finland,
Denmark and Sweden’ was the headline in the Telegraph on 26
28 My article is now on-line in the International Times archive at
<http://www.internationaltimes.it/archive/index.php?year=1978&volum
e=IT-Volume-4&issue=11&item=IT_1978-11-01_H-IT-Volume-4_Iss11_012-013>.
29 At <http://theswillbucket.com/>.
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June.30 The Americans are a step ahead: they have been
conducting anti-Russian manoeuvres in Poland and Bulgaria
and running amphibious landings in the Baltic.31 There have
even been reports of American troops in the Ukraine.3 2 All of
which is profoundly depressing but which might just have an
upside. If the Cold War – with Russia instead of the Soviet
Union – is re-established, the American arms companies, who
are driving this, will have less need of the ‘terrorist threat’
their political fronts in America cobbled together in the early
1980s with Israel to justify their huge share of the US tax
take; and just maybe the American presence in the Middle
East and Africa will diminish.
Bin Laden’s bookcase
On 20 May the CIA issued what it claims was a list of the
books found in the house in which Osama Bin Laden was
killed.3 3 Assuming the list to be genuine, it is a curious
collection, with a couple of conspiracy theorist classics – John
Coleman and Eustace Mullins – Noam Chomsky, a couple by
William Blum and The Taking of America 1-2-3 by Richard
Sprague. This last is the weird one, for Sprague’s book, a copy
of which I used to own before the last weeding of my shelves,
is seriously obscure. Self-published in the late 1970s, this was
30 It might even be true, even though the author of the report on
which the headline was based is an old cold warrior named Edward
Lucas, now senior vice-president of the Centre for European Policy
Analysis. CEPA is part of the current attempt by the Americans to
rekindle the Cold War and thus, by amplifying the Russian ‘threat’,
sell US weapons to the Central and Eastern European nations which are
CEPA’s field of interest. Its website shows that its funding comes
mainly from American arms corporations. See
<http://www.cepa.org/content/about-cepa>.
31 For details of NATO’s current operations see the excellent Rick
Rozoff at <https://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/>.
32 <http://www.salon.com/2015/05/07/the_new_york_times_does_
its_governments_bidding_heres_what_youre_not_being_told_about_u_s
_troops_in_ukraine/>
33 The list can be seen at <http://blackbag.gawker.com/was-osamaa-9-11-truther-and-also-a-gamepro-reader-1705770658>.
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$115 on Amazon when I checked recently.34 How did Bin
Laden ever come across it? And why that book about the
Kennedy assassination? The answer may be that Sprague
was one of the few JFK theorists to argue that there was a
central body – the power control group he called it –
responsible for the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin
Luther King as well as JFK. As the fundamentalist Islamic mind
seems to have difficulty with pluralism, let alone the byzantine
complexity of the politics (and parapolitics) of the United
States, Bin Laden may have found congenial the thesis that
there is a central controlling group beneath the surface chaos.
War war
Lobster contributor T. J. Coles has put together an anthology
of essays about American imperialism and related subjects,
Voices for Peace: Leading Scholars and Activists Examine
America’s Modern Wars. As well as Messers Chomsky (who is
interviewed), Blum and Pilger there are several names I
haven’t come across before, several short essays by editor
Coles and one by former US Congresswoman Cynthia
McKinney on ‘truth movements’ from JFK’s assassination
onwards.
Details at <www.pipr.co.uk/ebooks>.
Zersetzen
Roderick Russell is one of the victims of persecution among
the Western ‘democracies’; in his case not by the state but by
employees of a company. He calls this persecution/harassment
zersetzen, after the Stasi name for it.35 He has now made a
video and you can see him and his wife – the faces which go
34 But is free on-line at <http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ToA/
ToA.html#TOC>.
35 See his <http://zersetzen.wikispaces.com>. This story has been
appearing in Lobster since issue 56 but see in particular
<http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster65/lob65-canadianspy-agency.pdf>.
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with the story.3 6
Also on video, from another point on the same spectrum,
is the Swede Robert Naeslund who had the misfortune to be
given a brain implant in still officially-denied mind control
experiments in the early 1970s.3 7 A lecture of his – in Swedish
with English subtitles – on his experiences and thinking on the
subject is now on-line.38 Naeslund has had no more success
in persuading the political system and the major media in
Sweden to deal with his story than mind control victims (or
zersetzen victims) have had here and in the USA.
Kincora
The Kincora story featured on Channel 4 News on 1 June,
Colin Wallace was interviewed at length and a decent
selection of photographs from his days in Northern Ireland
were shown. Most of the information used and the
photographs shown were in Channel 4 News’ office in 1987,
when that programme did several pieces on Wallace and his
allegations about MI5’s psy-ops projects against British
politicians on the centre and left. But in 1987, with Thatcher in
her pomp, C4N didn’t feel able to do Wallace’s I-have-told-Mrs
Thatcher-all-about-Kincora story at the time.
NATO
36 At <https://vimeo.com/125412279> and
<https://youtu.be/xYblQGrGWpU> (part 1) and
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_epvKEq-eo&feature=youtu.be>
(part 2).
37 For some of his original story see
<http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_mindcon
29.htm>
38 <https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=ei3zla5hS9o&list=UUvaAu9cZ7WH8uQSmAUC9Low&index=1&f
eature=plcp>
If you are wondering why I am using these long URLs and not
the TinyURL programme, on a couple of occasions the TinyURL
programme didn’t work and the abbreviated URL it produced didn’t
open.
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W hat is NATO for these days? It has two obvious functions: it
provides nice jobs, careers, and perks for a slice of the military
of its member states; and it generates weapons sales for
(mostly American) weapons corporations. Reuters reported
recently that NATO member Poland was about buy the Patriot
missiles: ‘Poland strike deals for US Patriot missile systems
that could be worth up to $8 billion’ was the subheading to
the story.3 9 To sell weapons, ‘threats’ need to be created and
thus the recent and current amplification of the ‘threat from
Russia’.
Who owes who?
John Ward’s blog, The Slog, is consistently interesting and he
recently posted a very good short summary of the mire that
the British economy is in.4 0 Inter alia he wrote:
‘When the Conservatives came to power in 2010, the
national debt was £900bn. It’s closer to £1.6trillion
today.......80% higher in five years.
No matter what any politician tries to tell you, our
current woefully negative trading account means that
the UK National Debt is as unrepayable as that of
Greece. The big difference being that we have far, far
more to lose than they do.
There is no way further spending cuts can have any
effect on that, because the welfare and health bills for
government aren’t the real problem. The real problem is
an unreformed economy ludicrously over dependent on
financial services, and a Conservative administration
with almost no commercial experience in its ranks to
switch to high-margin manufacturing and retraining of
the workforce to make stuff.
39 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/poland/
11553975/Poland-to-buy-US-Patriot-missiles-as-it-keeps-wary-eyeon-Russian-expansion.html>
40
<https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/heading-for-disastera-failing-british-economy-an-unrepayable-debt-an-unrepentantpolitical-class/>
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The money saved by Osborne was a minute part of even
the deficit reduction. In relation to the debt, the best
analogy I can offer you is that more expenditure cuts
now would be like putting one pipette into the Pacific in
an effort to stem rising sea levels. The idea that
austerity on the one hand is part of the cure for longterm British commercial and business failure is obscenely
infantile.’
Good stuff: but how dependent upon financial services is the
British economy? As I have been arguing in these columns
since 2008/9, the contribution of the City to the UK economy is
difficult to quantify precisely and usually exaggerated. The UK
financial sector is apparently (best guesses) 10-12% of the
economy; and about half of that is the domestic retail
banking/insurance fields. What we think of as ‘the City’, the
global financial hub, is about 6% of the GDP. Which is to say
about half the size of the British manufacturing sector.
It’s less that the UK economy is ‘ludicrously over
dependent on financial services’ and more that its politicians
have been persuaded that this is true and thus doing
something about ‘the City’ is beyond their ambitions. The
Green Party, on the other hand, is not intimidated by the
gleaming towers of central London and in its manifesto for the
2015 general election offered a selection of proposals, central
to which is idea that the creation of money (debt) should
become a state function:
‘Move towards creating all national currency through a
national monetary authority, answerable to Parliament.
The power to create money must be taken out of the
hands of private banks.’ 4 1
As I mentioned in the previous issue, this is being considered
by the Icelandic government.42
Debt levels are beginning to worry global capitalism’s
41 The financial journalist Ian Fraser discusses these on his blog at
<http://www.ianfraser.org/greens-the-only-party-contemplatingfinancial-reform/>.
42 See <http://icelandreview.com/news/2015/03/31/pm-calls-reformicelands-monetary-system> and <http://www.positivemoney.org/
2015/04/economists-saying-icelands-sovereign-money-proposal/>.
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managers. The McKinsey Global Institute recently reported on
the rising tide of debt,4 3 as did one of the arms of Goldman
Sachs.4 4 Many voices warning that we are heading for another
great financial crunch.
Some banks (and quasi banks such as hedge funds4 5)
with operations in London are becoming apprehensive about
the regulations that are being introduced by the European
Union; and they are the source of some of the impetus behind
the campaign for a British exit from the EU and the talk of
London becoming a city-state and detaching itself from the
rest of the UK. (Other sections of the City are determined that
we should stay in the EU.)
The post Snowden world
O n his website Duncan Campbell tells us something of a big
powwow held in May by the Ditchley Foundation on the postSnowden world:
‘The audience and participants at Ditchley Park, a
conference centre near Oxford, included intelligence
regulators and human rights specialists from Europe and
English speaking countries. They were mixed in with
twelve current or past directors or senior staff of Five
Eyes intelligence and security agencies, including the
German BND, France’s DGSE, Sweden’s sigint agency
FRA, Australia’s ASIO and ASIS, Canada’s CSIS and a
former Director and a former Director of Intelligence of
the CIA, as well as GCHQ and SIS.’4 6
One of the sessions was co-hosted by Campbell. I wonder
how many of those present knew that Duncan Campbell was
the Julian Assange and Edward Snowden of the late 1970s
and 80s, and that the British state tried (and failed) to convict
43 Debt and (not much) deleveraging at <http://www.mckinsey.com/
insights/economic_studies/debt_and_not_much_deleveraging>
44
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11625406/Theworld-is-drowning-in-debt-warns-Goldman-Sachs.html>
45 Who are among the Tory Party’s biggest financial donors. See
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/how-hedge-fundsuperrich-donated-19m-to-tory-party-10024548.html>.
46 <http://www.duncancampbell.org/content/talking-gchqinterception-not-required>
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and imprison him.47
An article on The Intercept 4 8 listed UK attendees:
‘Robert Hannigan, current chief of British surveillance
agency GCHQ; Sir David Omand, former GCHQ chief; Sir
Malcolm Rifkind, former head of the British parliament’s
Intelligence and Security Committee; Lord Butler of
Brockwell, member of the Intelligence and Security
Committee; Dr. Jamie Saunders, director of the National
Cybercrime Unit at the National Crime Agency; Sir Mark
Waller, Intelligence Services Commissioner; Peter Clarke,
former head of Counter Terrorism Command at London’s
Metropolitan Police; Baroness Neville-Jones, House of
Lords special representative to business on cyber
security and member of the joint parliamentary
committee on national security strategy; John Spellar,
member of parliament; Duncan Campbell, investigative
journalist; Gordon Corera, BBC security correspondent;
and Professor Timothy Garton Ash, historian and author.
Only one MP, and a Labour one at that, John Spellar. But
Spellar has always been ‘on-side’ with the Americans, NATO
and the British military. Spellar was a member of the Trade
Union Committee for European and Transatlantic
Understanding which, if it wasn’t one of the CIA’s wedges into
the Labour Party, certainly looked like one.49
47 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_trial>
48
<https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/22/apple-google-spysummit-cia-gchq-ditchley-surveillance/>
49
See <http://powerbase.info/index.php/
Trade_Union_Committee_for_European_and_Transatlantic_
Understanding>.
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Is this what failure looks like?
Brian Sedgemore 1937–2015
Simon Matthews
Brian Sedgemore’s obituaries in the major media were
reasonable. The broadsheets were fair-minded and covered
his life’s main points without snidery. There were no obvious
inaccuracies and, in terms of column inches, they were
probably longer than usually accorded to a backbench MP. The
accounts were clear that he was independently minded and
latterly something of a rogue elephant on the Labour benches.
Perhaps they could have paused to reflect on how much
he had achieved by the time he was thirty-five: brought up by
a single parent on a council estate, he had already served in
the RAF, graduated from Oxford, worked in the Civil Service
(with Bob Mellish MP at the Ministry of Housing), and been
called to the bar and practised as a Criminal Law barrister. He
was elected to Wandsworth council when Labour regained
control of the authority in 19711 before being selected a year
later as Labour prospective parliamentary candidate for the
newly created seat of Luton West. How many MPs in 2015 can
claim such a background?
Rising star
Elected MP for Luton West in February 1974, he was quickly
seen as a rising left-wing star. He spoke well. He wrote well.
Using his experience of working with the mandarins (and
watching them slyly undermine Labour ministers), he helped
draft the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES), adopted by
Tony Benn as a campaigning tool in early 1975. Framed to cast
Labour as firmly opposed to the decisions taken by the
preceding Conservative government (and of course, by
implication, critical of any accommodation with those hinted at
1 Labour won Wandsworth – at that point a pre-Thatcher, pregentrified area of London à la Up the Junction – in 1971 and held it
until 1978.
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by Wilson, Jenkins, Healey and Callaghan), its central thrust
was virulently anti-Heath. Thus the AES recommended that the
UK should leave the EEC and also (mistakenly) accused the
Conservatives of being the party of increased taxation.2
When the UK voted to stay in EEC in June 1975 the central
part of this approach became obsolete. However, the AES
remained a prop of left politics, being revived as an alternative
by Benn in the summer of 1976 during the negotiations for an
IMF loan; and, though defeated again then, alluded to for
many years afterwards.
Just prior to this, on 14 March 1976, Sedgemore had
made his TV debut on the politics show Weekend World,
presented by Peter Jay.3 He appeared with Neil Kinnock,
whose CV at this point included membership of the Institute of
Workers Control and who was regarded by some Labour MPs
as ‘the new Nye’.4 Which of the two would get a first footing
on the ladder of ministerial office? At this stage (and not
alluded to in the obituaries), it was Sedgemore who duly
became parliamentary private secretary to Tony Benn at the
Department of Energy, an appointment looked at askance by
Callaghan who regarded him (but not Kinnock) as trouble;
surely an endorsement in reverse if ever there was one.
Knowing how the Treasury worked and how the economy
functioned on a macro scale was clearly not something
regarded as essential in the upper echelons of the Labour
Party, certainly post-Wilson.
During his time with Benn, and for some while
afterwards, Sedgemore wrote an anonymous column for
Private Eye on the workings of the City of London. He also
looked back at files covering the 1964-70 Labour government,
2 Primarily because of the introduction, by Heath, of VAT. Not because
Heath cut the standard rate of income tax.
3 Labour royalty, and married to Jim Callaghan’s daughter. Appointed
UK Ambassador to the USA by Callaghan in 1977. His father, Douglas,
had been MP for Battersea while Sedgemore was a local councillor in
the area and was President of the Board of Trade 1964-1967.
4 Kinnock’s Who’s Who entry for 1975 states that he had published As
Nye Said.... Actually the book never appeared and was deleted from
subsequent entries after he became Labour Party leader. See London
Review of Books 20 September 1984.
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finding clear proof that civil servants had frequently misled
ministers. Much of this found its way into his novel Mr Secretary
of State (1978), the plot of which revolves around a left-wing
Labour politician being comprehensively and covertly
undermined by the state. It was readable, up to a point, in the
style of George Bernard Shaw, with two-dimensional who
spout ideas and theories. Sedgemore, though, was no literary
Shavian. Nor did his ministerial career prosper. Callaghan
infamously decided against an autumn ’78 election – when he
might well have won – and went to the polls in May 1979, duly
losing to Margaret Thatcher, and thus ending (although not all
saw it like that at the time) an era of high-spending Keynesian
interventionism. Sedgemore was one of Callaghan’s
casualties, losing his seat in Luton West by 246 votes (despite
increasing his own support) to Tory Monday Club member John
Carlisle.
Financial salvation came via a stint as a researcher at
Granada TV while he searched for a new seat. Kinnock,
meanwhile, prospered. With trade union connections, friends
in the US embassy in London,5 and a safe seat in a ‘traditional
Labour heartland’ (features Sedgemore conspicuously lacked
throughout his career), Kinnock’s potential was spotted by
Callaghan, and, with references to the Institute of Workers
Control erased from his CV,6 he became Shadow Spokesman
on Education in June 1979, thus commencing his ascent to the
parliamentary leadership. Eighteen months later, Sedgemore,
helped by his Bennite connection, was selected for Hackney
5 This is in an interview with Carl Dillery, Political/Military Officer, at
the U.S. embassy in London, 1973-1976.
DILLERY: Take an important case. Thatcher’s current head of
loyal opposition, Neil Kinnock, was a junior MP when I was there.
Our Labor Party reporting officer, Jack Binns, was a real friend of
his. He was a great party guy and would come to all of our
parties and talk to all of us.
He and Jack were on a first name basis. So Jack became
the political counsellor when Kinnock got to be the leader of the
Labor (sic) Party. Literally, Binns could call up and have access
to him at any time.’
See <http://www.adst.org/Readers/United%20Kingdom.pdf>.
6 For Kinnock and the Trotskyist IWC see The Times Guide to the
Election 1970.
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South and Shoreditch after its sitting Labour MP Ron Brown
defected to the Social Democratic Party (SDP).7
With the SDP/Liberal Alliance polling 50% at this point
(and leading the polls continuously from October 1981 to April
1982 during which period Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins won
by-elections) matters were clearly complicated but most
commentators still calculated that Labour would win an
election held in 1983-1984. The ‘Broad Left’ in particular were
organising to this end, through Ken Livingstone and Ted
Knight, in the hope of having the numbers in the Parliamentary
Labour Party to allow Benn to oust Labour’s post-1980 leader,
Michael Foot. Sedgemore’s selection in Hackney South could
be seen in this light.8 Instead of picking up a significant role in
a future Labour government, though, he found himself
plunged into the whirlpool of London politics, while nationally
the war with Argentina rebooted the Conservative vote and
saw Thatcher first past the post in June 1983.
Opposition
Back in the Commons, rather than returning to a ministerial
career, Sedgemore found himself in opposition and
concentrating on being an exceptionally good constituency MP,
while fighting a locally ascendant Liberal Party which had won
seven seats on Hackney council a year earlier (an echo of the
simultaneous Liberal rise in Tower Hamlets and the election of
Simon Hughes in Bermondsey in February 1983). He did his
surgeries, responded and instigated correspondence
punctiliously, chaired a local housing association committee
and knocked out a second novel, Power Failure (1985). At
Westminster he was a pragmatic Treasury Select Committee
member, but with Labour – arithmetically – out of it for ten to
fifteen years, he lost interest in the Tribune Group and
developed a strong dislike of Diane Abbott after her election in
7 The Hackney South and Shoreditch CLP had actually decided, in the
interests of unity, to reselect Brown, only to be told by Brown at the
meeting that he had ‘a little lifeboat’ and was joining the SDP.
8 Anthony Blair was a keen Bennite in Hackney South – a pose he
noticeably avoided whilst simultaneously seeking selection in various
locations in the North East of England 1980-1983.
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Hackney North and Stoke Newington in 1987, considering her
to be lazy.
Not surprisingly the major media obituaries avoided
narrative complications like this. However, it should be noted
that although Sedgemore might have set himself apart from
the sterilities of the hard left, he was not particularly liked
either by the local middle class Labour Party membership (a
modest but influential grouping led by Glenys Thornton,
Charles Clarke and others), nor by many women members.
Matters reached a low point when Power Failure was passed
around the constituency General Committee by the Women’s
Section with its ‘dirty bits’ underlined (!) Things didn’t improve
with time. In the late 80s he was publicly cut and humiliated
by Kinnock in the House of Commons and deeply hurt by this.
He got reselected in 1985 and 1988 but his early and firm
criticisms of well known figures – for example: ‘Gordon Brown
is completely mad’ circa 1990 – made to a local membership
inclined to loyalty and with no means of judging the
comments, puzzled many. In time, though, many turned out to
be broadly accurate, particularly his claims made in a local
meeting in 1989 that ‘the City of London produces absolutely
nothing of value to the wider UK economy’. He was particularly
pleased at the progress made locally after 1990 when the
leadership of the council ditched the leftist politics of prior
years and successfully sought huge inward investment. He
was always willing to lobby Michael Heseltine and Sir George
Young (among others) and get more money into Hackney.
After 1994 the combined attentions of the Livingstone
gang and the emerging Blair cult proved trickier to deal with.
Roger Warren Evans, a colleague of Glenys Thornton’s, led a
serious attempt to deselect him but Sedgemore survived.9
Locally an increasingly nasty battle started between a group
of councillors backed by Abbott and Livingstone and the
incumbent leadership in Hackney – people who generally had
Sedgemore’s support. He backed them again, as did a formal
Labour Party enquiry led by Vernon Hince. Facing expulsion in
9 Roger Warren Evans was a colleague of Glenys Thornton at the
Institute of Community Studies, and a long time associate of Michael
Young
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the summer of 1996, the Abbott/Livingstone–supported
faction escalated their media campaign against this by alleging
a cover-up of historic child abuse in the borough, claiming,
inter alia, that this now involved the General Secretary of the
Labour Party Tom Sawyer (due to Sawyer and his officials’
refusal to budge from the findings of their enquiry) and that
the failures in the past were due to political correctness
toward gay Labour Party members locally; and involved – by
implication – many prominent persons who had previously
been Labour Party members in the area. The Abbott/
Livingstone–supporting faction were duly expelled and formed
their own political grouping, named, at the suggestion of
Diane Abbott, Hackney New Labour. The denunciations, and
Sedgemore’s noisy defence of himself and his colleagues,
continued for the next two years.1 0
The strange case of Mr Betts
Brian Sedgemore was re-elected in May 1997. In the general
excitement during and after the Blair landslide the weird
goings on in Hackney South and Shoreditch were not accorded
any publicity. Perhaps they should have been. Sedgemore was
the only official Labour candidate in the UK to have a New
Labour candidate run against him. The individual, Terry Betts,
described himself in his election address as having been a
financial consultant in the City for fifteen years. He was
unknown locally and had only moved into the area in October
1995 when he purchased a house in Chart Street N1 with his
partner Marcello Manfrini.1 1 He had no known earlier political
affiliations and none subsequently. He had not campaigned on
any issues affecting the area prior to announcing his
candidacy. He left the UK immediately after polling day to
manage – with Manfrini – an upmarket holiday retreat in
Tuscany that ‘regularly wins prizes as the best bed and
10 The allegations themselves were that a deceased, gay social
worker, Mark Trotter, had been allowed to abuse children because of
his local political connections. No proof of this was ever found.
11 Land Registry details and election address statement from Betts.
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breakfast in the world’.1 2
During the election Betts had an up-to-date Labour Party
membership list for the constituency, which he used for a
personalised mailing shot explaining his candidacy. Betts also
produced an expensively printed eve of poll leaflet, which
appeared on the same day as the official Labour Party leaflet
in exactly the same style, font and colour (purple); which was
odd, given that nobody outside the upper levels of the Labour
Party knew about the choice of the colour purple for the final
campaign leaflet. Among other things his literature stated that
he supported Tony Blair, that ‘we need to maintain our armed
forces and our military standing’ and that he was against a
federal Europe and a single currency. In short, he was
impeccably new Labour, unlike Sedgemore.
On polling day Betts polled 2346 votes and saved his
deposit. That evening, in the Town Hall assembly rooms where
the votes were being counted, he apologised to Sedgemore
‘for what happened today’ – not something a genuine
independent candidate would have done. It suggests that
Betts didn’t know what he was doing and had probably been
asked to run by a third party. Sedgemore denounced Betts
and his actions in a House of Commons debate on electoral
fraud on 21 May 1997.1 3
But who asked Betts to run? It looked like an inside job:
but was it just another manifestation of chaotic Hackney
infighting, or, was there someone high up in the Labour Party
who had previously been a member in the area and was
desperate to avoid being dragged into a media storm about a
gay/political correctness ‘cover-up’ of alleged abuse?
12 See <http://www.tuscanbreaks.com/pages/hosts.htm> and also
statement ‘we live here and have provided accommodation to visitors
to this region since 1997’.
13 See Hansard 21 May 1997. Curiously, Betts was also co-director of
Financial Analysis Bureau Limited with one Stanley Swaine, presumably
a business partner. Swaine had been arrested and charged with
handling stolen goods (which turned out to be comedian Bob
Monkhouse’s notebooks) at the point Betts entered the fray in
Hackney. See The Independent 19 November 1996 at
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/bobs-laughing-as-his-jokesmake-a-recovery-1353059.html>.
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The Betts candidacy certainly allowed the Labour Party
leadership to adopt a ‘plague on all your houses’ jocularity
toward Sedgemore in particular and Hackney generally.
Something like: ‘We don’t know who our candidate is in
Hackney!’ That is we don’t take Brian Sedgemore seriously –
and neither should you.
End game
W hatever the case, it was pretty clear after May 1997 – if not
so beforehand – that Blair and Brown had no use for MP’s like
Sedgemore. (Nor even much for centrists like Giles Radice,
who, after making some mild suggestions at a Treasury Select
Committee that there should be slightly more regulation of the
City of London, found himself being phoned up at two am and
threatened by Gordon Brown.)1 4 Times had changed and
newly-elected Labour MP’s were now much more conformist
than had been the case twenty to thirty years earlier.
Sedgemore immediately did himself no favours by deriding the
New Labour female intake, referring to them as the Stepford
wives. He occupied himself with local struggles and after wideranging fraud at the 1998 council elections he reported a
number of specimen cases to the police. Two years later the
main perpetrators of the fraud were jailed and it was admitted
that the 1998 elections in Hackney – where ‘officially’ the
council had gone hung – were in fact elections that the Labour
Party had won. It was a small victory but one that had the
effect of making him valuable to the Labour leadership
nationally as a kind of licensed attack dog when the London
Mayoralty elections loomed and Ken Livingstone swung into
action as an independent candidate. Blair expelled Livingstone
from the Labour Party in 2000, but Livingstone won anyway.15
14 This is recorded in the Mullin diaries, and I have had it privately
corroborated by a friend.
15 The Livingstone apparatus in 1999-2000 ran almost the same
campaign (largely involving the same people) as it had done twenty
years earlier when Livingstone was seeking the Brent East CLP
nomination and the leadership of the GLC. One of the curiosities of
the Kinnock era was that while Kinnock took action against Militant
(because they were seen as a threat to Labour in the north) he
avoided action against Livingstone.
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A year later Sedgemore announced he had fought his
last General Election. His final years in the Commons were
largely friendless. He features a couple of times in the diaries
of the period (Benn, Mullin), usually in the role of a minor comic
commentator.1 6 After the Iraq war he was increasingly
vituperative about Blair and despised the calculations made at
the highest level of the Labour Party in 2003-2004 to readmit
Livingstone so that opposition to Blair and the New Labour
project did not reach a critical threshold. Shortly before polling
day in May 2005 he very publicly defected to the Liberal
Democrats, being formally welcomed into the party by Charles
Kennedy MP. His former colleagues in Hackney, who knew
nothing of this beforehand, were stunned.
There was no second act, no seat in the Lords, no
position on a quango or enquiry; and, curiously, no more
writing or journalism. He faded away into retirement. Could he
have got further in politics? It is interesting to compare him
with Chris Mullin: like Sedgemore, active in the Labour Party as
far back as 1970, originally a Bennite and briefly a colleague at
Granada. Mullin was offered a minor ministerial position in
1999, surviving in a succession of these until 2005. Reading
his account of this now, it seems clear that Mullin was helped
by being an MP in the North East, and, by virtue of his well
known ‘leftism’, useful perhaps to have around at the lower
level of government if only to encourage the troops that Blair
and Brown welcomed a broad range of opinion. It’s not clear
that Mullin (or others like him) being in government made any
difference at all to the political direction taken by Blair and
Brown. But Mullin had a bigger dose of loyalty than Sedgemore
and could be relied on. Neither Sedgemore nor Mullin were
dangerous extremists and today neither look particularly ‘leftwing’. It might be concluded that the loyalty shown by Mullin
inhibited him from taking a more critical line earlier, and
16 Example from Benn’s final volume......Benn: ‘Blair is being
perfectly disgraceful. He’s behaving like Mussolini.’ Sedgemore: ‘No
he’s not. Mussolini made the trains run on time.’
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therefore prevented wider debate.17
Many have said that the left were comprehensively
defeated in British electoral politics in 1983 and prior to that in
1979 too. We might argue long and hard about what ‘left’
means in the context of UK politics, but, given what featured in
the Labour Party manifestos in 1979 and 1983, this doesn’t
seem an unfair conclusion. With Labour now expelled from
Scotland and facing ten to fifteen years in opposition, with
both Kennedy and Sedgemore dead and the Lib-Dems
knocked back from their post-Iraq/Kennedy era peak of sixtytwo MPs to a mere eight, are we not seeing something more
ominous? The recent decision of the new Conservative
government to vigorously pursue allowing only English MPs to
vote on laws affecting England (the important stuff)
automatically gives Cameron a majority of one hundred and
four. It will surely usher in a lengthy era of free market
economics, low spending, low taxation and limited public
services. London will continue on its path as Europe’s offshore
version of Dubai with the rest of the UK resembling Kansas or
some other similarly hopeless US midwestern state. For the
English Tories all their Christmasses have come – without
even the need for legislation to permit this (the new voting
arrangements apply once Parliamentary standing orders have
been amended by a single majority vote).
Should we now say that 2015 saw the centre being
comprehensively defeated in UK politics?
Is this what failure looks like?
17 Similarly, Ann Clwyd MP, a strong personal friend of Sedgemore’s,
held senior Shadow Cabinet positions under Kinnock and Smith from
which she was dropped in 1995. Under Blair she proved a useful, loyal
and supportive backbencher on the Iraq war (due to her long affinity
with the Kurdish people).
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Tittle-Tattle
Tom Easton
Balls to the wall
The Daily Mirror neatly summed up the post-election fate of two of New
Labour’s so-called big beasts when its 15 June headline read: ‘Ed Balls
has a new job: Ex-shadow chancellor follows David Miliband to America
after election defeat’.1 Milband’s job with the International Rescue
Committee (see Lobsters passim) earns him a reported annual
£300,000 whereas Balls’s one year at Harvard’s Mossavar-Rahmani
Business and Government Center is said to be unpaid. But as the
defeated former MP for Morley and Outwood received a reported
£88,000 golden goodbye from the British taxpayer and then attended
the Bilderberg conference in June, it’s safe to assume austerity will not
be a worry for the household of he and his MP wife Yvette Cooper,
especially after their second-home flipping antics revealed in the
expenses scandal.2
Balls and Miliband have returned to their roots in many ways.
Both left Oxford to take US scholarships, returning with the neoliberal,
neocon attitudes which outfitted them nicely to be spear carriers in the
stage army that became New Labour. Miliband went into the think-tank
world before No 10 and then the ultra-safe seat of South Shields, deep
within New Labour’s North-East redoubt. Balls, with no journalistic
background, landed a leader-writer job with the Financial Times before
becoming Treasury adviser to Gordon Brown. Then, like Miliband with
no experience of electoral politics, he was parachuted into a former
mining seat in Yorkshire in 2005 near to the one his wife had similarly
been given in 1997.
A little due diligence would have revealed that the Normanton
constituency was about to be broken up by the Boundary Commission.
When it duly was, Balls persuaded his local Wakefield council to seek a
1 <http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/ed-balls-new-job-ex-shadow5900959>
2
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5325590/EdBalls-and-Yvette-Cooper-flipped-homes-three-times-MPs-expenses.html>
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costly judicial review of the decision, a case supported unsuccessfully
by one of his old Oxford dons.3 What came next – and Balls’
subsequent demise – was a classic example of New Labour behaviour
and payback, hardly any of it reported in the mainstream media. In a
desperate effort to keep Balls in Parliament, the Brown machine forced
out Colin Challen, the sitting Labour MP for Morley and Rothwell, to
give the favoured son another safe berth, again handily near that of
his wife.
Challen had lived in the constituency years before becoming its
MP in 2001. His solid constituency record, his parliamentary profile on
climate change, his previous experience as local councillor and party
official, and his Euroscepticism all helped him maintain a healthy fivefigure Labour majority in 2005. Balls took some of his former
Normanton constituents into the new Morley and Outwood seat, but
saw the 2010 majority fall to 1,101. UKIP built its local support strongly
in the following years at Labour’s expense and in May 2015 the
Conservatives took the seat. It was the first time since before the
Second World War that Morley – the core of the constituency – found
itself with a Tory MP.
Apparently Balls intends to spend part of his latest US sojourn
doing some writing. During his first spell at Harvard he did some for
Larry Summers, who became President Clinton‘s deregulating Treasury
Secretary. Will Balls’ return visit produce an academic analysis of how
to switch three second homes and lose two safe seats while only
applying a ‘light touch’ to City scams?
After Ed: Progress?
B alls’ wife Yvette Cooper was quick to launch her leadership campaign
following the May Labour defeat, along with Wakefield MP Mary Creagh
– two New Labour MPs not forced out of their West Yorkshire seats to
provide Brown’s pal with a safe haven in 2010. Creagh has since pulled
out of the contest as have Chuka Umanna – in rather farcical
circumstances – and Tristram Hunt, who was ubiquitous in the media
for weeks after May 7 while never actually being a declared contender.
Some good work has been done by Solomon Hughes in the
Morning Star on Hunt. He says the protégé of Peter (now Lord)
Mandelson is also very close to big New Labour funder David (now
3
<http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2006/oct/13/labour.uk>
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Lord) Sainsbury.4 When Ed Miliband became party leader, Sainsbury
stopped funding Labour. But he maintained it for Progress, effectively
the party within the party for the remaining New Labour fragment. In
so doing the supermarket multimillionaire was repeating his 1988
action when he continued to fund David Owen’s SDP remnant, in which
Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee was prominent, after the rest of the
Gang of Four followers merged with the Liberal Party. (See Lobsters
passim.) Hughes wrote in November 2014:
‘When I went to the Progress rally at the last Labour conference,
Tristram Hunt was one of the speakers, where he declared he
was “delighted to be with Progress” because “you might be an
unaccountable faction dominated by a secretive billionaire, but
you are OUR unaccountable faction dominated by a secretive
billionaire”.
Here were two dozen true words spoken in jest. Hunt’s
joke was so close to the bone that the shiny happy people of
Progress — this is one of the biggest events on Labour’s fringe
— seemed embarrassed into silence.
Hunt’s insistence that Progress was “the Praetorian Guard,
the Parachute Regiment, the Desert Rats of Labour” also raised
few laughs, even though the meeting took place in a Comedy
Club at the edge of the Labour conference site. Even joking that
Progress is new Labour’s shock troops was a bit too much.’
The Progress strategy board includes Mandelson and Tony Blair’s
successor in the Sedgefield constituency, Phil Wilson MP.5
Mandelson’s long-time associate, vice-chair of his Policy Network and
frequent Guardian columnist, Patrick Diamond, is a co-opted board
member. Former Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) chairman Stephen Twigg
MP is president of Progress and the chair, John Woodcock MP,
succeeded Blair loyalist John (now Lord) Hutton into the Barrow and
Furness seat. Woodcock wrote the foreword to the LFI’s Making the
progressive case for Israel.6 Hunt is one of Progress’ vice-chairs along
with the post-May 8 figure widely touted as possible leader, the
4 <http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-3e8c-Blairite-Ghost-in-theMachine#.VZZGvucyFE4>
5
<http://www.progressonline.org.uk/campaigns/progress-strategy-board-2/>
6
<http://www.lfi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/making-the-progressivecase-for-israel-an-lfi-book.pdf>
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neophyte MP for Barnsley, Dan Jarvis.7
That role as bearer of the New Labour torch for leader has
apparently now passed to Liz Kendall MP, the former adviser to Patricia
Hewitt and inheritor of her Leicester West seat, the one previously
held by Greville (now Lord) Janner (see Lobsters passim) who
succeeded his father there. The interests of Israel never seem far from
Progress’ concerns and Kendall duly received positive coverage in the
Jewish Chronicle the week after Labour’s defeat under the headline
‘Labour must now pass the “Israel test”’.8
Dolly and Mandy
Two of the founding Progress figures not much mentioned by the
organisation these days are Mandelson’s former aide Derek Draper
(see Lobsters passim)9 and Liam Byrne. It was Byrne who, as Chief
Secretary of the Treasury in 2010, left the ‘no money left’ note to his
successor,1 0 words that have helped Chancellor George Osborne and
the Conservative party to frame the assault on Labour’s economic
record ever since.
Draper’s alma mater, the University of Manchester, was the
setting for another electoral defeat for one of those in the
neoliberal/neocon network who has dominated much of the politics of
the past quarter century. Many of them – from Rupert Murdoch to Paul
Wolfowitz – never stood for election, of course. But of those who did,
George W Bush needed the help of brother Jeb and the US Supreme
Court to get him over the presidential line. And as Christopher Bollyn1 1
often reminds his audiences, Bush’s Attorney General and author of
the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft, actually lost a Senate election to a dead
man.1 2 In this case the loser – third in a field of three for the honorary
post of chancellor of the University of Manchester – was Draper’s old
friend Mandelson. On 1 April The Guardian’s sister paper, the
Manchester Evening News, announced his candidature in glowing terms:
7
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_%28organisation%29>
8
<http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/analysis/136348/labour-partymust-now-pass-israel-test>
9 <http://derekdraper.net/>
10 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24173270>
11 <http://www.bollyn.com/>
12 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
United_States_Senate_election_in_Missouri,_2000>
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‘His appointment would be considered a major coup for the city, with
the university at the heart of the strategic vision for Manchester and its
position on the science corridor.’1 3 This was not a view shared by the
electorate who put Halle Orchestra music director Sir Mark Elder ahead
of Mandelson with poet Lemn Sissay comfortably topping the poll.1 4
It will be remembered that Mandelson’s previous attempt to
obtain popular support – from Labour party activists to secure election
to its national executive committee in 1987 – likewise ended in
defeat.1 5 Little wonder then that now Jeremy Corbyn seems to be
gathering members’ support for his party leadership bid that the
Mandelson/New Labour/Progress rump seem so anxious. Expect more
unattributed smear stories in the coming weeks about the nondrinking, non-smoking, allotment-tending, peace campaigning cyclist
who is the Labour MP for the non-Granita-dining part of Islington.
Sharing a similarly disappointing fate in the general election were
two of Mandelson’s younger New Labour Cabinet colleagues of the
previous decade. Douglas Alexander was Labour’s 2015 ‘chair of
election strategy’ who couldn’t manage in May to defend his 16,000
majority in Paisley and Renfrewshire South. The long-standing member
of the British American Project (see Lobsters passim) who was Shadow
Foreign Secretary lost to 20-year-old politics student Mhairi Black
representing the Scottish National Party (SNP). Alexander, a staunch
supporter of Israel,1 6 shared his fate with former LFI chairman Jim
Murphy who had been made leader of Scottish Labour months before
in an unsuccessful effort to stem the SNP tide.1 7
Murphy, a former Defence Secretary, had received £2,000 from an
earlier one, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen and himself a BAP founding
13 <http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchesternews/peter-mandelson-confirms-bid-become-8961726>
14
<http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/22/poet-beats-petermandelson-in-race-to-be-manchester-university-chancellor>
15
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/labour-conference-left-jubilant-asmandelson-fails-in-nec-election-1242024.html>
16 <http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jan/21/uk-politicians-bewarefamiliar-antisemitic-attacks-labour>
17 The declining fortunes of Labour north of the border were a cause of great
concern to Israel supporters, according to Robert Philpot writing in the Jewish
Chronicle the week before the May election. Philpot is a former director of
Progress and commissioning editor of Mandelson’s Policy Network.
<http://www.thejc.com/node/135597>
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member (see Lobsters passim), for his leadership campaign.1 8
SNP MP Black graduated from Glasgow University in June with a
first-class degree in politics. Unemployed Alexander already has a
graduate qualification, earning part of it in the United States where he
worked for American politicians. But Murphy, who spent nine years at
Strathclyde University laying the foundations of his career through
student politics, is yet to graduate. Back to life-long learning perhaps?
The boys in blue
1: Cleveland
One police force that could do to learn from its past, perhaps, is
Cleveland. Its history of corruption has been well documented by
many, including former Hartlepool Mail editor Harry Blackwood (Lobsters
passim). Since losing his job and journalistic career in 2003 after
upsetting his readers’ two local MPs, Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson,
fitness enthusiast Blackwood has spent more time with his bicycle,
regularly making 50-mile excursions from his Co. Durham home. It was
on one of these trips last year that he became involved in an incident
with a motorist that bizarrely resulted in Blackwood’s prosecution eight
months later. His testimony, including that of being assaulted by four
Cleveland police officers in Middlesbrough as they forcibly sought to
take his DNA sample, proved more convincing to Teesside magistrates
court than that of the police. Blackwood was acquitted of assault and
threatening behaviour in June, the bench chairman praising Blackwood
for his ‘forceful, clear and consistent’ account. He is now considering
what steps to take against the Cleveland Police.
The case was not widely reported outside the North-East except
by Simon Walters, the political editor of The Mail on Sunday.19 Walters
had suffered employment difficulties at the hands of New Labour in a
previous job and had been supportive of Blackwood when he was
getting similar treatment in 2003. Walters jointly authored with Peter
Oborne a fine critical biography of Alastair Campbell, an important text
for those seeking to rebuild Labour.2 0 His evidence to the Leveson
18 <http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/13196692.
Revealed__Murphy_s_cash_backers/>
19 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3113867/I-assaulted-cellsfourpolice-road-rage-row-says-cyclist-exposed-UK-s-worst-force.html>
20 <http://www.amazon.co.uk/Alastair-Campbell-Peter-Oborne/dp/
1845130014>
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Inquiry also makes interesting reading.2 1
2: South Yorkshire
Another force deserving scrutiny is the South Yorkshire Police (SYP)
and Home Secretary Theresa May seems to be on their case. Child
abuse in Rotherham has marked them out for her special attention as
have the revelations from the ongoing Hillsborough inquests at
Warrington. Before the summer Parliamentary recess she met
members of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign2 2 after the
Independent Police Complaints Commission had a month earlier
rejected its call for a public inquiry.2 3 As David Conn reported in The
Guardian,2 4 May clearly does not see the IPCC decision as closing the
door on allegations of police misconduct at the highest level which the
commission itself identified as ‘extremely serious’.
Of course not all of those should be laid at the door of the SYP as
forces from around the country were deployed by the Thatcher
government during the 1984-85 miners’ strike. May does not seem
unhappy at taking them all on. She has long targeted the Police
Federation for criticism2 5 and her actions in setting up the Pitchford
Inquiry2 6 on police spying and choosing a judge from New Zealand to
head the one on child abuse,2 7 prompt the question ‘why’? Is it that
the woman who, as Conservative Chair in 2002, branded hers as being
seen as the ‘nasty party’, is on a mission to lead it into purer waters as
the next prime minister? Could leadership ambition be one of the
reasons for banning the use of water cannons, advocated by potential
21 <http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20140122145147/http:/
www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/ Witness-Statement-ofSimon-Walters.pdf>
22 <http://otjc.org.uk/>
23 <https://www.ipcc.gov.uk/news/ipcc-announces-decision-followingorgreavescoping-exercise>
<http://www.southyorkshiretimes.co.uk/news/local/orgreave-campaignerstoapply-to-government-for-hillsborough-style-hearing-1-7376155>
24
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/22/orgreave-truthpolice-miners-strike>
25
<http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/05/20/theresa-maypolicefederation_ n_7341130.html>
26
<http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/12/senior-judge-to-leadinquiry-into-police-spying-on-political-campaigns>
27
<http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/feb/04/new-zealand-highcourt-judge-lowell-goddard-appointed-chair-child-abuse-inquiry>
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rival Boris Johnson? Or, having reconciled herself to George Osborne
winning that contest before 2020, does she now want to go down in
history as a reforming Conservative Home Secretary?
Grauniadia
David Conn is one of The Guardian’s staff who seems to prefer actual
reporting on matters outside London to expressing opinions from
inside the M25. As well as his excellent work for the paper on Orgreave
and Hillsborough, he has a good track record on the sports front, his
enthusiasm as a football fan not stopping his regular inspection of the
game’s dirty linen.2 8 In that he differs from many of his London-based
colleagues whose efforts to rubbish Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership
bid seem to know no bounds. Leading the pack after a YouGov poll put
Corbyn ahead of his rivals, was Jonathan Freedland.2 9 The paper
describes him as ‘its executive editor, Opinion, overseeing Comment is
Free, editorials and long reads’3 0 and he is a regular contributor to
BBC Radio 4, the Jewish Chronicle and The New York Review of Books.
At the height of the Charlie Hebdo events in January Freedland
wrote in his Guardian column: ‘There were two groups especially
shaken by last week’s attacks – journalists and Jews – and I inhabit
that small shaded area of the Venn diagram in which the two overlap.’
31
Can he really believe that? On his own paper ‘that small shaded
area’ includes Hadley Freeman, who had already written on Charlie
Hebdo, as had Nick Cohen in its sister publication, The Observer.
Freedland’s long-time friend and colleague is former deputy editor Ian
Katz. Now editing BBC2’s Newsnight, Katz was interviewed for the
Guardian editorship earlier this year. Ian Black is the paper’s Middle
East editor, having previously been its foreign affairs leader writer and
European editor. George Monbiot is one of the paper’s longest-serving
columnists following in the earlier footsteps of Melanie Phillips, Alex
Brummer and David Aaronovitch. As Professor C E M Joad might have
said: ‘It all depends on what you mean by “small shaded area”.’
Monbiot was harsh in 2007 to those raising questions about
28 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Conn>
29
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Freedland>
30 <http://www.theguardian.com/profile/jonathanfreedland>
31
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/16/paris-attacksfear-factor-dare-not-speak-is-name>
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9/11.3 2 Among those he criticised as ‘morons’ who believe in ‘magic’
was ‘high priest’ David Ray Griffin, the author of many books on 9/11,
all well referenced and, as far as I can tell, posing serious questions to
which many, including victims’ families, are still seeking answers.
Professor Griffin’s reply3 3 did not receive quite the same publicity.
Matt Campbell’s brother Geoff was one of the Britons who died in
the North Tower of the World Trade Centre. Earlier this year Campbell
appeared in a Sussex court after refusing to pay his BBC licence fee on
the grounds that the broadcaster covered up evidence about 9/11 and
so was in violation of antiterrorism legislation.34 Before the hearing,
Campbell wrote to Monbiot citing the mounting evidence that the truth
about 9/11 has yet to be fully told and asking if the columnist still held
to the views he had expressed seven years earlier. Monbiot replied: ‘Hi
Matt. Yes I do. I’m sorry that your brother was among the victims. With
best wishes, George.’
The Guardian’s long association with Zionism dates back to the
early days of both, a story well told in its own 2008 publication of
Daphna Baram’s Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel.35 It will be
interesting to see if any changes to the paper’s line follow the
appointment of new editor-in-chief Katharine Viner.3 6 With actor Alan
Rickman she co-edited for theatre the diaries and writings of Rachel
Corrie, the young American peace activist killed by an Israeli Defence
Force bulldozer in Gaza in 2003. Interesting, too, to see how much
publicity would-be London mayor Tessa Jowell receives now Viner’s
predecessor, Alan Rusbridger, has become Principal of Lady Margeret
Hall, Oxford. His wife and former Guardian reporter Lindsay Mackie is a
great friend of Jowell whose tax lawyer husband and Silvio Berlusconi
adviser, David Mills, is reportedly a golfing pal of Rusbridger.
32
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/06/comment.film>
and <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/20/
comment.september11>
33 <http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17256.htm>
34 <http://www.reinvestigate911.org/content/matt-campbell-vs-bbc>
35
<http://www.amazon.co.uk/Disenchantment-%2522Guardian%2522-IsraelGuardian/dp/0852650906/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1437839964&sr=1
-1&keywords=Daphna+Baram>
36
<http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/content/new-guardian-editor-katharineviners-challenge-what-do-964-staff-and-£850m>
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Both couples have nearby Cotswold second homes.3 7 In the
small world that is London metro-politics Mills’s brother, John, is the
Labour funder warning of financial and political horrors if Corbyn is
elected party leader.38
Blairusconi
No longer in Parliament but still with an appetite for public life, the
former Prime Minister has resigned from his role as Middle East envoy
for the Quartet to land what The Times front-page headlined on 4 June
2015 as ‘Blair lands new role in fight against European extremism’. The
Times reported:
‘The former prime minister is to become chairman of the European
Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation (ECTR).....The
organisation campaigns for all European countries to adopt laws
that criminalise Holocaust denial, to create clearer definitions of
constitutes racism and antisemitisim, and to oblige governments
to pay for security at synagogues and Jewish schools.
Writing in The Times today, Mr Blair and Moshe Kantor, a
Russian-born Jewish philanthropist and businessman, say that
Europe is at a turning point....According to a recent annual report
on global antisemitic incidents by the Kantor Centre at Tel Aviv
University, 2014 was one of the worst years in past decade, Mr
Blair and Mr Kantor write.’
Mr Kantor, says the report, is chairman of the European Jewish
Congress and ‘the main funder of Mr Blair’s new organisation’.
‘Mr Blair replaces a former Polish president, chairing a board that
includes José Maria Aznar, the former Spanish prime minister. He
will not be paid personally for the role, which involves attending
several functions a year, but his faith foundation is to receive an
annual donation. His office refused to disclose the amount.’
37 <http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/feb/22/profile-tessa-jowelldavid-mills> and <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3166592/TessaJowell-s-husband-shady-Black-Baron-toxic-secret-report-MoS-unearthssuppressed-Greenpeace-reportlinking-lawyer-criminal-network-dumpingradioactive-waste.html>
38 <http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/23/jeremy-corbyn-win-couldcause-sdp-style-labour-split-says-donor>
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Israel lobby news
Still in Parliament but no longer in the Cabinet is Tory former chairman
Eric Pickles whose last act as Communities Secretary was to appoint
additional commissioners to run Tower Hamlets. He has two new jobs:
‘anti-corruption tsar’ and chairman of the Conservative Friends of Israel
(CFI).3 9 In his previous post Pickles closed down the anti-corruption
unit along with the rest of the Audit Commission.
Pickles’s former Liberal Democrat Coalition government partner
Nick Clegg has lost not only most of his LibDem MPs but also his former
head of communications. According to the Jewish Chronicle, James
Sorene ‘will lead BICOM [Britain Israel Communications & Research
Centre] after 15 years in senior positions at the Cabinet Office, Home
Office and Department of Health....Previously head of public affairs at
the Israeli embassy in London, Mr Sorene has experience of working
on Middle East issues.’40
Perhaps it’s not too surprising that Baroness Tonge resigned the
LibDem whip after speaking out on Palestine.41
Councillors newly elected in May have received invitations to join
the Local Government Friends of Israel network from Rachel Kaye who
describes herself as ‘Campaign Executive, We Believe in Israel’. She
tells the invitees:
‘Local Government Friends of Israel serves to: Combat attempts
to boycott and delegitimise Israel in local authorities; educate
and inform councillors about Israel; build links between British
and Israeli local authorities, and advocate for a two-state
solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict....We attended the
Local Government Association Conference last week where we
formally launched the Local Government Friends of Israel
network. We had already been recruiting supporters to this
network, so it starts with 450 councillors from 200 local
authorities. At the Conference, we had a stall in the exhibition
area and hosted a reception.
Our reception was attended by 50 delegates who were
addressed by Luke Akehurst director of We Believe in Israel,
39 <http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/136184/eric-pickles-newconservativefriends-israel-chairman>
40 <http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/139700/bicom-appoints-former-nickclegg-adviser-chief-executive>
41 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17218291>
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Claudia Mendoza head of policy and research at the Jewish
Leadership Council, and Marie Van Der Zyl Vice President of the
Board of Deputies of British Jews.’
Akehurst is a former Hackney councillor,42 and like many of the New
Labour praetorian guard, was a student politician before joining
Mandelson’s one-time press deputy at the Labour party, Colin Byrne,
at Weber Shandwick, the international PR and lobbying firm.43
Spooks and hacks
W ill the time ever come when a British editor comes clean and tells us
of his paper’s association with foreign intelligence services – or even
British ones, come to that? Richard Keeble has surveyed some of what
is known about such British links4 4 but nothing has emerged as explicit
as the revelations of Udo Ulfkotte. The former editor of Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s most influential papers, was also
once an adviser to the government of German Chancellor Helmut
Kohl.4 5 Following the publication of his 2014 book Bought Journalists46
(currently available only in German) he said that he accepted news
stories written and given to him by the CIA and published them under
his own name. Ulfkotte said he gathered the aim of much of the
deception was to drive nations toward war; that corruption of
journalists and major news outlets by the CIA is routine, accepted, and
widespread in the western media; and that journalists who do not
comply either cannot get jobs at any news organization, or find their
careers cut short. I saw little in the British press about Ulfkotte’s
allegations. Is this evidence of similar corruption here or simply the
nodding acquiescence of the parochial and none too curious
inhabitants of the Westminster Village?
42
<http://lukeakehurst.blogspot.co.uk/>
43 <http://www.webershandwick.com/who-we-are/bio/colin-byrne>
44 <http://z13.invisionfree.com/julyseventh/ar/t119.htm>.
45 <http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/editor-of-major-germannewspapersays-he-planted-stories-for-cia/article/424470>
46
<http://www.amazon.com/Gekaufte-Journalisten-UdoUlfkotte/dp/3864451434/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1422242915&sr=83&keywords=udo+ulfkotte>
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The Gloucester Horror
Garrick Alder
The importance of a ‘clean’ genetic history in dynastic politics
throughout history cannot be overstated. Apart from wealth
and power, a viable heir must be healthy and presentable – at
least initially. Perhaps this is even truer in the age of mass
communication.
According to history, Thomas Lyon-Bowes – granduncle
to the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother – was born
and died on 21 October 1821. According to legend, however,
he was born deformed and immediately baptised as Christian
but unexpectedly survived the antenatal period. His noble
parents are said to have pretended Thomas had died, while
keeping him hidden from view in a secret room within the walls
of the family seat, Glamis Castle, Scotland. Various versions of
the legend describe Thomas as ‘half-man, half-frog’, or barrelchested, with toy-like arms and legs. These descriptions of
‘the Monster of Glamis’ can be dismissed as inherently
implausible.
But again, according to history, there really was a secret
room in Glamis Castle. In 1968, the 16th Earl Strathmore told
royal biographer Michael Thornton that the chamber had been
accessible via a hidden door from the castle’s map room but
that he had had it bricked-up.1 The Earl did not confirm the
existence of the ‘monster’ to Mr Thornton – but perhaps
tellingly, he declined to deny it.
Also according to history, Thomas’s lifetime of captivity
would not have been the only time a genetic abnormality had
been concealed for decades by the Strathmore dynasty. Well
into the 20th century, the Queen Mother’s family falsely
declared two of her nieces dead in Burke’s Peerage. Catherine
and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon were in fact secretly committed to a
1 An admission recorded in Mr Thornton’s exhaustive Royal Feud: The
Duchess of Windsor and the Queen Mother (Michael Joseph, 1985)
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mental institution, on account of their severe learning
disabilities, eventually dying for real during the 1980s.2
This terrible deception can only give a degree of
plausibility to the legend of the Glamis Monster: the freakish
descriptions of ‘Thomas’, who would have been the rightful
Earl Strathmore, could be folkloric embellishments on a similar
disability or even something as commonplace as Down’s
Syndrome – not at all understood in late Hanoverian times and
certainly not desirable in the reputation of a dynastic
bloodline. To this day a section of the ramparts of Glamis
Castle, on which the ‘monster’ is said to have been exercised
under cover of night, is known as ‘the Mad Earl's Walk’.
At around the same time that Michael Thornton visited
Glamis, another member of the Royal Family was becoming
very concerned about the health of a family member. In
August that year, the Duchess of Gloucester (later Princess
Alice, deceased 2004) asked physician Henry Bellringer to
examine her son, Prince William of Gloucester, born 1941, who
was then seventh in line to the throne.3
The prince had been suffering from an unpleasant skin
condition for the preceding five years, the onset of which had
itself been preceded by a feverish and nauseous condition
over the Christmas and New Year period of 1964-65. Since at
the time of this acute affliction the prince had recently arrived
in Lagos, Nigeria, to take up a diplomatic position, Malaria was
initially suspected. However, after the acute condition had
subsided, the prince was plagued with ‘quite large’ blisters
that appeared continuously on his hands, chest and face.
These sores took a long time to heal and left conspicuous
scars. The patient also reported that his urine was sometimes
darkly discoloured. Since the prince was about to depart for
another diplomatic role in Japan, Dr Bellringer made a
tentative diagnosis of porphyria and arranged to see him on
2 <https://news.google.com/
newspapers?id=6kFhAAAAIBAJ&sjid=NnUNAAAAIBAJ&dq=nerissa+bowes
-lyon&pg=6104,1956199&hl=en>
3 Prince Charles apparently idolised his dashing and charismatic
cousin and Charles’s first son, the present Duke of Cambridge, was
named in his memory.
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his return to the UK.
In August 1970, Dr Bellringer was finally able to examine
Prince William again. In the intervening two years the prince
had accumulated many more scars and blemishes and at the
time of the appointment also had many active and fluid-filled
blisters on his hands and face. A second opinion was sought
from a consultant at Addenbrookes later that year and blood
tests confirmed the two opinions: Dr Bellringer eventually
recorded in his notes that ‘there can be scarcely any doubt
that this is a case of porphyria’.4
Porphyria is an umbrella term for a family of conditions
known as the porphyrias, the genetic description of which
need not detain us, except to say briefly that porphyrins are
required by the body to produce heme, the oxygen-binding
agent in human blood. Porphyrin abnormalities fall into two
types: the acute variety affects the nervous system producing
symptoms such as unpredictable mental disturbances,
muscular weakness and stomach problems; the cutaneous
variety blights the victim with gradual skin and tissue
destruction. The porphyrias were only described in the late
19th century, meaning that medical science has in historical
terms only recently been able to address them adequately.
The telltale sign of all the porphyrias is discoloured urine,
classically purple but sometimes tending to either the red or
blue components of the shade. Prince William of Gloucester
was twice cursed – his diagnosis was variegate porphyria,
meaning he suffered both acute and cutaneous varieties.
Advanced cutaneous porphyria is a horrific disease.
Accelerated by sunlight, exposed areas of the sufferer’s flesh
gradually necrotise, leaving the victim resembling an animated
but semi-decayed corpse. Digits are reduced to stumps and
among other effects, the nose, lips, eyelids and ears gradually
disintegrate. In 1985, an academic famously (and
persuasively) theorised that cutaneous porphyria is the
4 This summary of Prince William’s condition, treatment and
diagnosis is condensed from pages 213-219 of Purple Secret: Genes,
'Madness' and the Royal Houses of Europe, by Rohl, Warren and Hunt
(Bantam Press, 1998), which remains the key text for those interested
in the historical role of porphyria.
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historical origin of the vampire myth.5 Certainly, the aversion
to sunlight and mirrors makes immediate sense.
It is impossible to say when porphyria, a strongly
heritable condition, entered Britain’s Royal Family. Prince
William of Gloucester was a grandson of George V and his
consort, Princess Mary of Teck.6 Mary’s ancestors can be
traced back to the infamous and all-too-real Vlad III of
Transylvania, AKA ‘The Impaler’. Vlad Dracul, to give him his
proper name, notably inspired Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula,
whose filmic portrayal by Bela Lugosi was so hugely influential
on the modern version of the vampire myth, upgrading
vampires from the shambling blood-drinking animated corpses
of European folklore to the now stereotypical articulate but
decadent aristocrats and nobles. However, this seems to be
nothing more than an ironic coincidence,7 as porphyria
appears to have been present in British royalty well before
Mary of Teck married George V; and in any case there is no
evidence that Vlad III suffered from porphyria to add to his
5
<https://suite.io/diane-evans/2fha2zt>
6 Princess Mary was originally betrothed to George’s older brother,
Prince Albert Victor, the first son of Edward VII, whose unfortunate
genetic inheritance included deafness, and abnormally long arms and
neck that were disguised with tailored clothing, earning him the
nickname ‘collars and cuffs’. Albert Victor may have had a learning
disability, with one of his tutors calling him ‘abnormally deficient’ and
another complaining 'he hardly understands the meaning of the words
“to read”.’ The reasons for Albert Victor’s many problems are not
understood, although it is perhaps worth noting that his paternal
grandparents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, were first cousins.
Albert Victor died in 1892 of an acute and unknown illness (while under
the supervision of two Royal doctors who were subsequently knighted)
well before he could inherit the throne. The fact that the Princess was
then married off to Edward’s now heir Prince George strengthens the
impression that more was going on in this dynastic union than is now
known. For example, Anne Edwards, author of a reputable biography
of Queen Mary entitled Matriarch, openly discusses the possibility that
Albert Victor was allowed to die or perhaps actively murdered in a
perverse ‘mercy killing’ carried out for the dynasty’s sake.
7 As is the fact that Princess Michael of Kent is descended from the
father of Eleonore of Schwarzenberg, ‘the Vampire Princess’. See
<http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Article/1296223>.
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unrestrained psychopathy.8
Since porphyria is such a ‘new’ illness, it was only in the
1960s that it was realised that the acute variety of the
disease was the probable reason for the then unsolved
mystery of the insanity that repeatedly afflicted King George
III (1738-1820). The fact that George’s urine was recorded by
a physician as being blue-indigo in colour seems to clinch the
matter, but the porphyria theory is still contested, as there are
few clearly described precedents for George’s supposed
porphyria in royal history that occurred before the advent of
modern medical science.9
In 1966, Dr Ida Macalpine and colleagues advanced the
then unheard of porphyria theory in a paper, ‘The “insanity” of
King George III: A classic case of porphyria’.10 The same team
followed this up in January 1968 with a study of possible
porphyrias in the houses of Stewart, Hanover and Prussia.11
Seven months later, as awareness was spreading among
historians concerning the disease’s postulated role in Royal
history, Princess Alice called Dr Bellringer to examine her son’s
mysterious malady. Two years later, Prince William’s porphyria
was clinically established as a fact. Two years after that he
was killed in a plane crash, the causes of which are far from
clear.
The crash
On 28 August 1972, Prince William – a keen pilot with his own
single-engined Piper Arrow – took part in the Goodyear
International Trophy air race, started at Halfpenny Green
Airfield, Staffordshire. Thirty seconds after takeoff, witnesses
saw the prince’s plane ‘drop out of the sky’ and explode on
8 It is to my mind plausible that the disease itself is the actual origin
and ‘calling card’ of European royal houses (royals being jocularly
known in Britain as having ‘blue blood’), since the classical sign of
purple urine was precisely the colour of the rarest and costliest dye
known in ancient times, only extractable from one particular sea
mollusc until it was finally synthesised during the mid-19th Century.
9 <http://www.rsc.org/education/eic/issues/2008Mar/
GeorgeIIIindigoBlueRingTest.asp>
10 <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1843211/>
11 <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1984936/>
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hitting the ground. The crash was watched by 30,000
spectators. It took two hours to bring the fire under control
and retrieve the bodies of the prince and his friend and copilot Vyrell Mitchell from the wreckage.1 2 The men were
identified by dental records the next day as an Inquest on the
pair was opened and adjourned by South Staffordshire
Coroner Dennis Cave.1 3 On the same day, a formal
investigation of the crash was opened by the Accident
Investigation Branch of the Department of Trade and Industry
(DTI).
The Coroner was recorded as saying that ‘it would not
be proper to hear evidence on the cause of the crash until the
Accident Investigation Branch had reached its findings’.
On 29 November the Inquest resumed and the jury
heard that the piloting prince had made too sharp a turn at a
‘scatter point’, colliding with a tree before hitting the ground.
(A scatter point is a marking point at which aircraft in paired
takeoffs part routes.) The Jury were told that DTI examiners
had ascertained that the wrecked plane had been in perfect
working order and also heard from a Board of Trade
investigator who said analysis suggested ‘nothing more than
an error of judgement by the pilot’.1 4 Accordingly, the Jury
returned a verdict of Accidental Death.
However, when the DTI’s report on the crash was
published in September 1973, the report did not blame pilot
error, simply recording a ‘narrative finding’ that the prince
appeared to have manoeuvred sharply to avoid a wing
clipping some houses along the ascent portion of his flight
path. Section 2.1 of the report stated:
‘It was at first thought that the accident had resulted
from some error in flying technique. However, a frameby-frame examination of [BBC Television News] film
shows that at about 21.5 seconds after starting the
takeoff, and whilst very steeply banked, the aircraft was
pulled very sharply in a manner indicative of an abrupt
12 Wolverhampton Express and Star, 29 August 1972
13 Wolverhampton Express and Star, 28 August 1972
14 Wolverhampton Express and Star, 7 September 1973
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application of full stabilator control. This implies some
compelling external influence rather than a simple flying
error.’
The hypothesised ‘external influence’ was the prince's
supposed desire not to collide with any of the houses along
the ascent, a verdict concurred with by eyewitness Jessie
Bishop, who said: ‘[The prince] could have caused many
deaths if he hadn’t taken the action. There were many people
right down the road [under his flightpath].’ Two more
eyewitnesses agreed: Jean Baron stated her belief that the
prince had been trying to avoid hitting the houses, and
Catherine Gibson said: ‘I am sure he was trying to avoid the
road.’15 The previously suspected ‘scatter points’ were
dismissed by the DTI as non-contributory.
Conflicts with the Inquest notwithstanding, the DTI
accident investigation file was then deposited in the National
Archives.
The secret file
The DTI’s file on Prince William’s crash (AVIA 101/745) was
listed in the National Archives catalogue as ‘exempt’ from
release, citing regulation 18 of the Civil Aviation Regulations
(1996). This gave the Archives a clear 100 years before the
file’s release. However, the matter was not as straightforward
as the responsible archivist had apparently thought. Civil
Aviation Regulation 18 (3) defines ‘relevant records’ (i.e.,
exempted documents) by reference to a list contained in
annex 13 of the Convention on International Civil Aviation.
This annex is not a set of absolute exemptions. It quite clearly
states that the types of record listed can be released if the
impetus for doing so outweighs the potential (n.b.) impact on
the investigation in question or on any other.
Crucially, annex 13 has an explanatory note appended
explicitly stating that the purpose of the exemptions is to
ensure that people interviewed during an investigation are
not subjected to ‘inappropriate’ civil/criminal/professional
proceedings as a result of their evidence being made public, a
15 Wolverhampton Express and Star, 7 September 1972
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development which could (n.b.) discourage people from
speaking openly to future investigations. In other words, the
Annex is not absolutely prohibitive but instead identifies
varieties of records which could be released after
consideration on a case-specific basis.16
Since both the prince and his co-pilot are dead, since it
has never been suggested that anyone else was at fault in
any way, and since the information was over 40 years old, I
filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the National
Archives in March 2015, arguing that that the listed document
exemptions in Annex 13 are plainly purpose-specific and
certainly could not be automatically presumed applicable in
this particular case. After months of tantalising bureaucratic
toing and froing, the file was opened without fanfare in June
2015 and I was able to travel to Kew and examine it for
myself.
As is so often the case with FOI-responsive material, the
file is far from straightforward or self-explanatory, consisting of
correspondence nearly devoid of context, written references
to unrecorded conversations, obscure diagrams, technical
jargon and assorted indecipherable or irrelevant pages. There
are also some withheld documents, chiefly the autopsy reports
and photographs of the dead men. These are being kept back
apparently because the prince’s co-pilot ‘may have’ family who
would be distressed by their release. This is far from being an
ascertained factor and the late prince himself had no family of
his own, so the assumption has to be that the habitual
secrecy surrounding everything Royal has influenced
declassification. Also withheld in its entirety (spuriously, in my
view, by reference to the Data Protection Act) is the statement
of a single eyewitness to the crash. All these exemptions could
be contested, I believe, but there is currently no reason to
suspect that the withheld documents would add significantly
to our understanding.
What is abundantly clear from what has been
declassified, however, is that the DTI’s investigation did not do
its job properly at all. One document records that, contrary to
16 <http://www.emsa.europa.eu/retro/Docs/marine_casualties/
annex_13.pdf>
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the DTI experts heard by the prince’s Inquest, the aircraft's
cockpit instruments were completely destroyed by the fire
after the crash and could hardly therefore be said to have
been in ‘perfect working order’ as the Inquest was assured.
A pro-forma document completed by an anonymous
investigator lists as its fifth checkpoint: ‘Any evidence of precrash failure in aircraft or equipment’, to which the
handwritten answer is a single circled question mark. The
same cryptic glyph is recorded against the pro-forma’s
question of whether the crash was ‘survivable/not survivable’.
While these are highly suspicious, the anonymous
official’s answer to the form’s point 6 is outright false: ‘Any
evidence of medical defects affecting the crew’ has been
annotated with the categorical word ‘None’. Prince William’s
diagnosis of porphyria – physical symptoms of which include
bilious attacks, mental disturbances, general malaise and
muscle weakness – had been recorded in his medical notes
two years previously and should therefore have been
available to the Air Accident Investigation team. It is possible
that access to the prince’s medical history was blocked by a
force outside the DTI, and also possible that the same force
prevented the prince’s diagnosis from being recorded at the
Inquest. At whichever stage or stages the information was
withheld, there was incontrovertibly a cover-up of the prince’s
porphyria.
Nor is that all that was being concealed. An internal DTI
minute from Training and Licensing Inspector C A Hayley,
dated 24 November 1972 – four days before the prince’s
Inquest resumed – records that the prince’s Private Pilot's
Licence had expired on 11 July 1972, over a month before his
death. Mr Hayley recorded:
‘At that date [Prince William] had flown during the 13
preceding months 118 hours 5 minutes as pilot in
command of aeroplanes (landplanes). This more than
satisfied the requirement of 5 hours of such flying to
qualify him for a Certificate of Experience to be signed
which would renew the privileges of the licence as pilot
in command of Group A aircraft for a further period of 13
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months. He appears to have failed to obtain the
signature to which he was entitled.’
This was never revealed to the Inquest Jury and if there was
ever any written response to this minute within the DTI, it is
not held by the National Archives.
It is actually possible to witness part of the cover-up
unfolding, in an exchange between the Accident Investigation
Board’s Richard Westlake and William Sargeant, procurement
executive of the Ministry of Defence’s RAE (Royal Air
Establishment) Bedford. The language is of confidentiality and
consistency but the emerging motive is transparent.
In a typed and lengthy letter dated 3 January 1973, Mr
Westlake wrote concerning Mr Sargeant’s analysis of the
above-mentioned BBC film of the crash:
‘George Carley and I have now had time to digest your
analysis and as your draft now stands there is liable to
be some discrepancy between it and our formal AIB
report when both are published.’
A little later, Mr Westlake’s concerns became clearer as he
stated:
‘We shall never know whether [Prince William and his copilot] were aware of the precise position of the houses
relative to the [flight path’s] scatter point but certainly
they had made only one previous take-off on this
runway and this was not of the low level type employed
in this race.
The excessive rate of turn may, therefore, have
been a desperate attempt to escape from the trap and
not just ham-fisted flying. The fact that entry into the
trap may have resulted from poor judgement originating
in over-enthusiasm to beat a rival is another matter […]
You will see from the foregoing that the emphasis
in our report is likely to differ from that contained in your
conclusions. Whether you feel inclined to change your
phrasing is entirely up to you [...]’
Mr Sargeant’s handwritten reply (dated 8 January 1973)
acknowledges and assuages DTI concerns:
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‘I had modified my conclusions before I sent the report
to the vetting officer and I think that has reduced the
discrepancy you speak of.’
Here we see the question of possible princely incompetence
being shuffled behind a rather nobler narrative suggestion,
that of a doomed prince whose last thoughts were to avoid
any loss of civilian life rather than to preserve his own in an
inescapable crash. And indeed, this is the romanticised version
that the DTI’s report eventually adopted, overriding the
Inquest’s verdict of ‘Accidental Death’. Neither version,
ultimately, definitively identifies what actually caused the
prince to crash.
However, National Archives file AVIA 101/745 is perhaps
most interesting not for what it contains but for its folder. In
common with such files of government paperwork, the brown
card ‘dust jacket’ bears columns that record to whom the
completed file was referred and on what date, allowing a
reader to trace its bureaucratic travels. The first entry shows
the holder was the DTI’s aforementioned Mr Casley, on 6
December 1972. A decade later, on 16 March 1982, the file
was marked as referred to ‘Archives’ and stamped ‘CLOSED –
No further action to be taken’. Another stamp (eventually
cancelled by my FOI request and crossed out by Archives staff)
specified ‘Closed until 2071’. Archival darkness descended for
four years, until 16 October 1986, when the file was
inexplicably retrieved from storage and referred back to the
Accident Investigation Board Registry. Four days after that, on
20 October 1986, the file was marked as being referred to
‘DCIA’. The file stayed with DCIA for another four years before
being returned to its archival hibernation and marked PA (‘Put
Away’) on 26 June 1990.
Shortly after viewing the newly-released DTI file on the
prince’s crash, I wrote to ask the National Archives what the
initials DCIA recorded on the file’s cover might stand for.
National Archives staff were able to offer no solution.
D/CIA was of course the official designation of the
Director of the USA’s Central Intelligence Agency, who in 1986
would have been William J Casey (died 1987). At the time, the
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office was designated DCI (Director of Central Intelligence),
until finally rationalised to D/CIA in 2005. In the absence of
any known alternative, the look of this annotation on the file’s
referral list is that a British archivist unfamiliar with the correct
abbreviation recorded the file being passed in 1986 to the
then Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose
successor William H Webster finally returned it four years later.
However, if this is the case, the question of why the CIA might
have been interested in secret documents on the death of a
member of the Royal Family remains unanswered.
Afterword
Briefly mentioned in contemporary news coverage of the
death17 was the fact that a gold signet ring was found on one
of the burned bodies recovered from the wreckage, which
helped identify the prince’s remains because it bore an
engraved ‘W’ surmounted by a crown. This ring was one of a
matching pair commissioned by the prince’s lover, Hungarianborn Zsuzsi Starkloff, who is still alive and wears the
remaining ring on a chain round her neck. In 2012 she gave an
account1 8 of how she believed the Queen repeatedly
attempted to force her and the prince apart over a period of
years, and how she believes the prince was going to propose
to her had he not been killed. I wrote to Ms Starkloff in April
2015 but received no response.
17 Wolverhampton Express and Star, 30 August 1972
18 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2193349/How-Queensabotaged-passionate-affair-cousin-Zsuzsi-Starkloff-tells-story-PrinceWilliam-Gloucester-fell-scandalised-royals-process.html>
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Tokyo legend?
Lee Harvey Oswald and Japan
Kevin Coogan
What do we know about Lee Harvey Oswald’s stay in Japan?
Surprisingly, the answer is ‘very little’.
From autumn 1957 to late 1958, Lee Harvey Oswald
worked at an American military base in Atsugi, Japan, as a
member of a military air traffic control unit for Marine Corps
planes. Oswald served in MACS-1 (Marine Air Control
Squadron) of Marine Air Group 11 as part of the First Marine
Aircraft Wing. With other members of his MACS-1 unit, he
briefly deployed to the Philippines and Taiwan, redeployed
back to America in November 1958 and served in a MACS unit
at El Toro, California, until his discharge from the military.
Oswald arrived in Japan on 12 September 1957. On 27
October he injured himself in the accidental discharge of a .22
gun and was hospitalized for a bullet wound to his elbow until
15 November. Five days after his discharge, his unit deployed
to the Philippines and stayed for some time thanks to a
potential international crisis in Indonesia. Oswald’s MACS-1
unit established a base at Cubi Point in Subic Bay. It then
sailed back from the Philippines on 7 March 1958 and arrived
at Astugi some 11 days later. On 11 April, Oswald was officially
court-martialled for the accidental discharge of a gun but the
sentence was suspended as long as he kept out of trouble for
six months.
Two months later, on 20 June 1958, Oswald was
arrested for cursing at an officer at the Bluebird Café in
Yamoto, Japan; on 27 June, he was sentenced to serve time in
the brig until his release on 13 August. One month later, on 14
September, the Warren Commission stated that Oswald and
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his unit sailed into the South China Sea during a major crisis
between Taiwan and Communist China. On 30 September, his
unit set up base at P’ing-tung in North Taiwan. The unit then
returned to Atsugi on 5 October. Oswald next spent some
days being treated for a venereal disease at the Atsugi
Station Hospital. He finally left Japan on 2 November and
arrived back at San Francisco 13 days later.1 Oswald then was
based at Atsugi for his tour of duty except for one MACS-1
assignment to the Philippines from 20 November 1957 to 7
March 1958 and another, much briefer, tour of Taiwan from 14
September 1959 till his return to Atsugi on 5 October 1959.
Some critics of the ‘official story’ of Oswald’s time in
Japan claim that he managed to penetrate the CIA-Air Force U2 program run out of a highly restricted area in the huge
Atsugi base on behalf of the Soviet Union’s intelligence
services; that as an air-traffic controller, Oswald tracked U-2
flights out of Atsugi and learned just how high the U-2 flew.
With this information, the Soviets were able to shoot down
Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 flight on 1 May 1960. The claim has
even entered otherwise sober studies of the U-2 affair such as
historian Michael Beschloss’s well-regarded book Mayday,
where he makes a passing reference to Oswald’s possible role
in betraying U-2 secrets.2
A deeper understanding of Oswald’s role in Japan,
however, has been long distorted by the 1978 publication of
Edward Jay Epstein’s book Legend: The Secret World of Lee
Harvey Oswald 3 in which Epstein tries to prove that Oswald
fell victim to an elaborate Soviet intelligence ‘honey trap’ while
in Japan that led him to spy for the KGB. Shortly after Legend
appeared in print, however, investigators for the House Select
Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) interviewed some of
Epstein’s purported sources. The interviews (many now
available on the Mary Ferrell Foundation website) show that
Epstein concocted a bogus recreation of Oswald’s time in
1 For Oswald’s itinerary in Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan, see the
Warren Commission Report section entitled ‘Marines’, pp. 683-684.
2 Michael Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair
(New York: Harper & Row, 1988) p. 236.
3 Edward Jay Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald
(New York: Reader’s Digest Press/McGraw-Hill, 1978).
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Japan.4
Part one of this study will focus on Legend. I also hope
to show just how little we know about Oswald’s activities in
Asia in general and Japan in particular. The Warren
Commission and the House Select Committee on
Assassinations (HSCA), for example, could not even agree on
an issue as basic as whether Oswald did or did not spend any
time in Taiwan. Nor do we know, for instance, if there was any
U.S. government investigation into Oswald’s activities in Japan
following his 1959 defection to Russia.
In part two, I will argue that Oswald’s story must be
seen at a minimum in the context of an even more striking
espionage affair, the defection to Moscow in the summer of
1960 of Bernon Mitchell and William Martin, former National
Security Agency (NSA) officials, both of whom had earlier
served in different posts in Japan in the mid-1950s and at
Atsugi in particular. As I will document, the American security
establishment went to great lengths to examine Mitchell and
Martin’s past to determine whether the men were first
recruited into Soviet intelligence in the early to mid-1950s.
Part one
Queen Bee
Legend was published in the spring of 1978 and extensive
excerpts appeared in the March 1978 Reader’s Digest. Legend
argues that Oswald most likely had been compromised by a
Soviet ‘honey trap’ after he became romantically involved with
a Japanese hostess at a posh Tokyo night-club called the
Queen Bee. A fellow MACS-1 Marine named Zack Stout was a
crucial source for Epstein. From Legend:
‘Zack Stout knew of only one possible piece in the puzzle
of Oswald’s absences [when Oswald visited Tokyo]. He
seemed to have fallen in love, perhaps for the first time
in his life, with a Japanese girl. When Stout asked where
she worked, Oswald told him that she was a hostess at
the Queen Bee in Tokyo.....one of the three most
4 See The Mary Ferrell Foundation web page at
<http://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Main_Page.html>.
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expensive night-clubs in Tokyo. It catered to an elite
clientele – field grade officers, pilots (including U-2 pilots)
and a few junior officers with private incomes – not
impoverished Marine privates. To take a hostess out of a
night-club, customers required paying not only the girl,
but the night-club as well for the bar business it lost
during her absence. The man also had to pay for the
accommodations for the evening. For an evening at the
Queen Bee, a date could cost anywhere from $60 to
$100.
Yet Oswald, who was earning less than $85 a
month take home pay, went out with this woman from
the Queen Bee with surprising regularity, even bringing
her back to the base area several times. “He was really
crazy about her,” offered Stout, who met the woman
with Oswald on several occasions in local bars around
the base. Other Marines, less friendly to Oswald, and
who saw him with the woman, were astonished that
someone of her “class” would go out with Oswald at
all............... (According to one source, Navy intelligence
was also interested in the possibility that hostesses
from the Queen Bee were being used at the time to
gather intelligence and that Oswald was receiving
money from someone at the Queen Bee.)’ (Epstein pp.
71-72)
On 1 June 1978, a few months after Legend’s publication,
HSCA investigator Jack Moriarty interviewed Stout, who
directly contradicted Epstein. Stout first explained that liberty
from the base
‘.....was chiefly “Cinderella” form (required to return by
midnight) which effectively limited such free time to
Yamoto, near the east camp of Atsugi, or Sagmi Oaksta,
near main side. Weekend liberties permitted a wider
scope, which included Tokyo some 4-5 hours by train. So
the normal pastimes were those bars in Yamoto. It was
less expensive in terms of time (Yamoto was a 20minute bus ride) and money (Tokyo was the location of
the affluent bars and other places of entertainment).’
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The discussion then turned to the Queen Bee(s).
‘Asked about the location of the Queen Bee, he [Stout]
asked me “which one”? He advised “Queen Bee” and
many such names were popular in nearly all the liberty
towns. Those people just seemed to like the title
“Queen” and used it in many enterprises in many areas.
Most of the MACS-1 [Marine Air Control Squadron]
men frequented The Queen Bee in Yamoto. He’s seen
Lee Harvey Oswald in there as well as most of MAC[S]-1.
He sometimes went with Lee Harvey Oswald and
sometimes just saw him in there. He would usually be
with the same girl. He never actually met her, but that’s
not usually the case, anyway. He advised that in order
to really understand the environment, I must realize it’s
nothing like society is here in the States. The girls work
in bars and when you visited a place for the first time,
you got paired off with a bar girl. All subsequent trips
provided you with the same girl. The joke around the
barracks during those days was that when a Marine –
any Marine – visited a particular bar several times, he
was in love.
So, yes, he saw LHO (like the rest of MACS-1) in
the Queen Bee with the same girl, but it was an entirely
different connection than the same situation would have
been in the States. In the first place, that was [the]
rule, not exception and secondly, why would LHO or
anyone else, spend four to five hours for a more expensive
train ride to go to the Tokyo Queen Bee, which would cost
him a month’s pay in one trip.
As far as LHO’s money was concerned, he was
under the impression he had less, not more, than the
rest. Eighty some dollars a month was the norm, but
LHO had an allotment sent to his mother (“at least
that’s what he said”) which caused a deduction. Nor did
his lifestyle indicate anything different....As far as
women went, Yamoto girls were the cheapest and he
didn’t see LHO with them anywhere else. And this was
only a later development.....In any event, the consensus
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was LHO was anything but affluent.
Again, he pointed out the implied inaccuracies of
Legend. It states that LHO had a regular girlfriend in
the Queen Bee suggesting he had a serious romance
going and also had plenty of money due to the high
prices in the [Tokyo] Queen Bee.’ [Emphases added.]
Stout believed that Oswald staged an ‘accidental’ shooting of
himself in the arm to avoid going to the Philippines because he
wanted to stay in Japan with his local girlfriend:
‘Stout assumed, as did the rest, LHO was attempting to
forego the maneuvers in the Philippines, which was
timed to coincide with local unrest. It seems the first
“accidental” version didn’t hold up. He was also privy to
the “Buck Sergeant” problem LHO was concerned with.
Again local mores permit “your regular girl” to have other
“regular boy friends” as long as the individual schedules
don’t conflict. It seems this buck sergeant (no name)
was paying her rent and that bucks have all night
liberty. She, like the rest, was utilizing some of her free
time before midnight with LHO and whoever. Stout says
they used to refer to the more resourceful ones as
“business women”.’
Stout’s recollection about Oswald’s dislike of a local unit
sergeant might help explain the incident that took place after
Oswald returned to Atsugi from the Philippines and led in his
being court-martialled for the second time.
On 20 June 1958, Oswald was in the Blue Bird Café in
Yamato, near the Atsugi base. He spilled a drink on a fellow
Marine, a technical sergeant named Miguel Rodriguez.5
Oswald, who later testified he was drunk at the time, tried to
engage Rodriguez in some kind of confrontation. Oswald said
Rodriguez had assigned him to mess duty back at Atsugi
instead of his radar operator post and Oswald took it
personally.
Daniel Powers, one of Oswald’s Marine comrades,
5 A technical sergeant is a sergeant just above staff sergeant but
below master sergeant. Rodriguez was below the rank of master
sergeant and hence a ‘buck sergeant’.
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discussed mess duty in the Marines. On 30 November 1963,
FBI SA John Schaller interviewed Powers. Powers told Schaller
that when he and Oswald were stationed in the Philippines for
a few months in 1958, ‘OSWALD was on mess duty’. Warren
Commission lawyer Albert Jenner, in his 1 May 1964
questioning of Powers, said that he assumed Oswald was not
on mess duty in the Philippines ‘all the time’. Powers replied,
‘No; you’re assigned – privates and privates first class are
assigned this duty periodically. I think you’re assigned one
week of the year.’
If Rodriguez did assign Oswald mess duty even though
Oswald had served mess duty in the Philippines earlier that
year, Oswald may have been right to be angry with him. Why
would Rodriguez want to humiliate Oswald? If we follow Zack
Stout, one possible answer is that Rodriguez moved in on
Oswald’s prostitute (the ‘Buck Sergeant’ problem) and in the
military caste system, Oswald was simply supposed not to
object. In any case, after Rodriguez refused to fight even after
Oswald called him a coward, the MPs intervened and arrested
Oswald. On 27 June 1958, Oswald was court-martialled for the
incident. Although the Court believed he was drunk at the
time, it convicted him of using abusive words to a superior.
Oswald’s conviction was a disaster. Recall that on 11
April 1958 after his return from the Philippines, Oswald was
first court-martialled for the accidental shooting incident and
given 20 days hard labor in the brig. The court then
suspended the sentence as long as Oswald stayed out of
trouble for six months. Following his 27 June conviction,
however, Oswald now had to serve 48 days hard labor in the
brig with a new sentence of 28 days tacked on to the earlier
sentence.
The larger point is that Epstein used Zack Stout to say
something very different from what Stout told the HSCA. Citing
Stout as his ‘source’, Epstein apparently invented a fantasy
about Oswald partying on a private’s salary with one of the
most expensive bar girls in all Tokyo. All this to suggest the
KGB must have paid for Oswald’s high living as part of a Soviet
plot to steal U-2 secrets.
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As we shall see later, Stout thought the idea that that
Oswald had any ability to steal U-2 secrets was totally absurd.
The CIA thought similarly. In a 14 April 1964 letter to J. Edgar
Hoover, then CIA Deputy Director of Plans, Richard Helms,
stated that it was virtually impossible for Oswald to spy on the
CIA’s operations at Atsugi known as the Joint Technical
Advisory Group (JTAG):
‘JTAG air activities were conducted from a classified
hanger area at one end of the flight line. OSWALD did
not have access to this area. Prior to the time in
question, JTAG had been publicized by Radio Peking as
being a headquarters for American intelligence activity.
For this reason, and because JTAG was obviously not a
part of the Naval Air Station complement, there were
rumors and gossip regarding the unit and its activities.
This condition was regarded as normal under such
circumstances. Being there at that time, OSWALD could
have heard such gossip; however, there is no
information to indicate, nor is there reason to believe,
that he obtained factual knowledge regarding JTAG and
its mission.’
Helms concluded his memo to Hoover (which he also sent to
the Warren Commission):
‘There is no evidence or indication that OSWALD had any
association with, or access to, the JTAG operation or its
program in Japan. This applies also to information
regarding the U-2 or its mission. Even if OSWALD had
seen a U-2 aircraft at Atsugi or elsewhere, this fact
would not have been considered unusual nor have
constituted a breach of security. Limited public exposure
of the craft itself – but not of its nomenclature or mission
– was accepted as a necessary risk. It is most unlikely
that OSWALD had the necessary prerequisites to
differentiate between the U-2 and other aircraft
engaged in classified missions which were similarly
visible at Atsugi at the same time.’
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Iwakuni
Legend included another sensational ‘revelation’. For it Epstein
turned to Owen Dejanovich, whom he described as ‘a tall,
lanky native of Chicago who went on to play professional
football’. Dejanovich first met Oswald when they spent May
and June 1957 at radar school in Keesler Air Base in Biloxi,
Mississipi, as part of the same group that included Daniel
Powers. Once in Japan, Oswald and Powers were assigned to
Atsugi; Dejanovich went to the Marine Corps Station at
Iwakuni.
Legend stated that when Oswald reportedly returned
from a stint in Taiwan in October 1958, he ‘was assigned to a
Marine squadron in Iwakuni, an air base some 480 miles
southwest of Tokyo’ for temporary duty. At Iwakuni, Oswald
hooked up with his old Biloxi fellow trainee Owen Dejanovich.
In Epstein’s telling, Oswald arrived at Iwakuni’s Marine-run
Tactical Air Control Center for the northern Pacific area. In the
case of a Communist Chinese, North Korean, or Soviet attack,
it was the center’s job to co-ordinate air defenses. Epstein
continues:
‘On this temporary duty, Oswald again was assigned to
the translucent plotting board. Owen Dejanovich.....
immediately recognized Oswald in the center as
someone he had gone to radar school with at Keesler Air
Base and tried to renew the acquaintanceship. He
quickly found that Oswald had grown extremely bitter
since he had last known him.
“He kept referring to the Marines at the center as
‘You Americans,’ as if he were some sort of foreigner
simply observing what we were doing,” says Dejanovich.
His tone was definitely accusatory. He spoke in slogans
about “American imperialism” and “exploitation,” which
made Dejanovich think at the time that Oswald – whom
he called Bugs – was merely being perverse for the sake
of shocking the other Marines at the center.
In the evenings, Dejanovich would occasionally see
Oswald speaking to an attractive Eurasian woman. “She
was much too good-looking for Bugs,” he recalls
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thinking, and he wondered why such an attractive
“round eye”, obviously not a common bar girl, would
waste her time with a Marine private.
Another Marine in the unit, Dan Powers, had got
the impression from Oswald that this Eurasian woman
was half-Russian and was teaching Oswald the Russian
language. Other Marines speculated that Oswald had
simply set up a “ranch”, or living arrangement with the
Eurasian at Iwakuni. But whenever Dejanovich would
see Oswald with this girl at the Orion bar in Iwakuni, he
would just shake his head at what he considered
Oswald’s perverse nature. “Who but Oswald would
come to Japan and find a round-eyed Russian
girlfriend?” he would ask himself.’ (Epstein pp. 82-83).
In a 20 November 2003 Frontline program on the JFK
assassination that prominently featured Edward Jay Epstein,
Dejanovich popped up with an even more telling revelation:
‘There was a small business section [at Iwakuni] across
one bridge that was called “Skivvy Bridge”. We were
allowed, as Americans, to go into that sector of the
residential portion of Iwakuni. The other sector was
considered to be communist, Japanese communists, and
we were – it was an off-limits area that we were not
allowed to go in, as Americans. The first time I saw
Oswald with the round-eye – she was a beautiful White
Russian – he was walking with her. They were going
across the bridge into the section that was off limits to
us.’
Dejanovich noticed Oswald walking with the beautiful woman
across a bridge into a forbidden area; the MPs apparently did
not.
This was stunning. Clearly it demanded a new look at
Dejanovich’s earliest testimony to the FBI to learn more about
the exotic beauty. From FBI SA (Special Agent) Daniel Pelton’s
5 December 1963 interview with Dejanovich:
‘He [Dejanovich] advised that in August 1957, he and
OSWALD were part of a 120 man overseas draft and
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OSWALD went to a Marine Base at Atsugi, Japan, while
DEJANOVICH went to a base at Iwakuni, Japan. The next
time he saw OSWALD was in December 1958 when they
came back to the United States together in a 100-man
draft.’ (Emphasis added.)
Dejanovich did not see Oswald at Iwakuni because Oswald
was never at Iwakuni.
In his 2008 book The Missing Chapter: Lee Harvey Oswald
in the Far East, former Marine Corps investigator Jack Swike
notes that there are no records to suggest that Oswald was
ever in Iwakuni. Swike, however, cites the testimony of
Dejanovich and another Marine named Sherman Cooley that
they both saw Oswald at Iwakuni. Cooley is also interviewed
in Legend but he only recalls Oswald’s time in boot camp in
California.6
Did Cooley’s later statement really confirm Dejanovich’s
claims? A JFK researcher named Bill Weston interviewed
Sherman Cooley for an article entitled ‘Pfisterer Dental
Laboratory’ that appeared in The Fourth Decade (5/3, March
1998).7 Cooley recalled that he first met Oswald at Marine
Corps boot camp in San Diego, California, in October 1956 and
went with him in March 1957 to Jacksonville, Florida, where
they were in the same class at the Air Frame and Power
School. Two months later, in May 1959, both men were
assigned to Kessler Air Base, in Biloxi. Weston then writes:
‘They were transferred to Japan but Cooley did not see
Oswald there, for they had been assigned to two widely
separated bases. The next time he saw him [Oswald]
was in the Philippines towards the end of November
1957. In fact, the picture of Oswald sitting among a
group of Marines waiting to board an LST was taken by
Cooley himself. At the end of December, Cooley was
sent back to Japan with a portion of the unit [back to
Iwakuni], while Oswald stayed with the rest of the unit
at Corregidor. They did not see one another again until the
6 Epstein pp. 62-63.
7 See <http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/
Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/L%20Disk/Livingstone%20
Harrison%20Edward%205-93/Item%2025.pdf>
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beginning of January 1959, when they were assigned to a
radar unit in El Toro, California. Oswald had mess duty
and Cooley used to see him every morning serving
coffee to the men.’ (Weston p. 21) (Emphasis added.)
Obviously if Cooley had not seen Oswald after the Philippines
until they were reunited at El Toro, he could not have met him
at Iwakuni after Cooley was reassigned there.
Why is there no Oswald paper trail? Why did Dejanovich
never mention any of this to the FBI in 1963? Or to the
newspapers? The 28 November 1963 issue of The Arizona
Republic, for example, carried an interview with Dejanovich
that read in part:
‘Dejanovich’s final 10 months with the Marine Corps
were served at El Toro, Calif., where Oswald was
stationed. “I personally knew him in Biloxi, Miss., where
we attended a radar specialist school,” Dejanovich
said.....Dejanovich said Oswald studied the Russian
language while stationed at the El Toro Marine Base.
“We used to encourage him to say something in
Russian, but it was strictly for laughs,” Dejanovich said.
“I guess you never know who you are talking to.”’
Again, no mention of Iwakuni, Oswald, and the mysterious
woman.
Legend, however, cannot let Iwakuni alone. Along with
Dejanovich, Epstein cites another Marine, Daniel Powers, who
supposedly confirmed Dejanovich’s story to Epstein just as
Cooley supposedly later confirmed Dejanovich’s story to
Swike. Recall that in Legend Epstein cites Dan Powers being at
Iwakuni when Oswald was supposedly there in early October
1958 and that Powers ‘had got the impression from Oswald’
that the Eurasian girl ‘was half-Russian’ and was teaching
Oswald the Russian language.
In Epstein’s telling, while stationed at Iwakuni,
Dejanovich spots his old Keesler Air Base fellow trainee
Oswald with the ‘round-eyes’ Eurasian temptress in the Orion
bar, as well as walking across a bridge at Iwakuni into a
restricted area filled with Japanese Communists. Oswald then
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told Powers (or ‘implied to him’) that the mystery woman was
half-Russian and that she was teaching ‘Bugs’ Russian. The
news must have filtered back to Dejanovich since he could
then claim that the ‘round eyes’ really was a ‘White Russian’.
Oswald and Powers were in the same unit, the unit at
Atsugi, not Iwakuni. Again, we begin with Powers interview
with FBI SA John Schaller on 30 November 1963. From the
interview:
‘After their arrival at Atsugi, POWERS played football
while the rest of the squadron, including OSWALD, went
to the Philippines on maneuvers [on 20 November
1958].
In January 1958, POWERS rejoined the squadron,
which included OSWALD, at Cubi Point in the
Philippines....POWERS recalled that OSWALD and the
squad were then put aboard a Philippine LST en route to
Corregidor where they remained for two or three
months during which time OSWALD was on mess duty.
He recalled that OSWALD, POWERS and the group
in March 1958 [7 March] returned to the LST to Cubi
Point in the Philippines. POWERS remained at Cubi Point
while OSWALD continued on to Japan. In May, 1958,
POWERS left by plane from Cubi Point to Atsugi where
he rejoined the squad and again saw OSWALD. It was
at Atsugi that Oswald shot himself in the leg8 ......He
informed that the last time he saw OSWALD was in May,
1958, when OSWALD was returned to the United
States.’
(It was Powers, not Oswald, who left Japan sometime in late
May or early June 1958. Oswald only shipped back to the
States in November 1958. This discrepancy most likely was an
error by SA Schaller in taking down Power’s statement.)
There is no mention of any time Powers and Oswald
spent together in ‘Iwakuni’ or any mention of a mysterious
Russian woman. Powers did say that Oswald had a girlfriend
but she was an Atsugi-based Japanese prostitute:
8 Oswald shot himself in the elbow (not the leg) during the 27
October 1957 incident.
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‘He believes OSWALD had a Japanese girlfriend while at
Atsugi, possibly a Japanese prostitute. He stated that
he recalls that liberty was given to the group from 5:00
PM to 6:00 AM each night and that the group was also
given liberty two out of every three weekends. He
stated that he cannot recall that OSWALD spent his time
in the barracks while on duty but he is of the opinion
that OSWALD took all the liberty he could get.
He stated that he also vaguely recalls that while at
Atsugi in Japan, OSWALD was studying RUSSIAN and he
vaguely recalled that OSWALD carried with him a dark
blue or a black book, which POWERS believed to be a
Russian language book.....POWERS concluded by
informing that OSWALD was a “loner”. He stated that
OSWALD never expressed sympathy toward the
Communist Party, Communist principles, or Marxist
doctrine.’
Powers’ testimony did not end with the FBI. On 1 May 1964,
the Warren Commission’s Albert Jenner further questioned
him. Powers said he first met Oswald sometime in early May
1957 when they transferred from Florida for training in
Mississippi. Later on, Jenner asked him about Oswald, Atsugi,
and women. Once again, Powers fails to mention any exotic
‘White Russian’ woman.
Mr. JENNER: Okay. What did Oswald do for
entertainment on leave?
Mr. POWERS: This seems to me now that he made a
statement, and this was after he went out and procured
or secured a female companionship and set up
housekeeping, or whatever you might want to call it in
Japan, and this was common practice.....
Mr. JENNER: Did he set up housekeeping, set up some
Japanese girl; is that what you mean?
Mr. POWERS: Yes. This is – this was the normal
procedure over there, the practice with a lot of
individuals, and I think that he was one of the ones that
did – went for this type of thing. I’m not sure whether
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he did, but I can attribute this statement to him that he
did.
Mr. JENNER: In other words, you have a recollection of
him having said that somewhere?
Mr. POWERS: Yes, he said that, and again looking back,
he was finally attaining a male status or image in his
own eyes, and this is why he wanted to stay in that
particular country.’
Powers’ testimony supports Zack Stout’s statement that
Oswald had a ‘girlfriend’ from one of the Atsugi off-base
bars/whorehouses. Apparently, once a soldier was ‘assigned’
to a woman by the bar/whorehouse, for a certain price he
could rent her for the weekend in an off base flat.
Powers did visit Iwakuni, however, as this jumble from
his Warren Commission testimony suggests. Powers discussed
a group of Marines who came to Japan and with whom he
tried to stay in touch. From his testimony:
Mr. POWERS: Getting back to your original
question....But Oswald and myself, but I think that
Bandoni went on the east coast, but Brereton went to
Iwakuni, which is another Air Force – rather Marine base,
and Camarata went down to a helicopter base
somewhere in Japan, down in the harbor somewhere. I
used to call him on the phone once in a while and talk to
him.
And Brereton, I think – no, by gosh, maybe
Bandoni was down at – no, that was Mike Cainey. We
were flying between the Philippines, and if he would
stop in at Iwakuni, I would stop in and see Mike.’
In other words, if Powers was on a plane that made a
scheduled stopover at the Iwakuni base, he would use the
time to reconnect with his friend.
The questioning continued:
Mr. JENNER: Where?
Mr. POWERS: Iwakuni, this is a base in the lower part of
Japan.
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Mr. JENNER: I-o-w-c–––
Mr. POWERS: I-o-w-a-k-o-n-n-i, I think. Iwakuni – i.e.,
possibly. I think it’s –I. I don’t know. I’m lost, where was
I. It seems to me that Brereton was over there, too, at
Iwakuni, but I don’t recall if I possibly saw him over
there once or twice; it was either on a football trip or
when I was flying down to the Philippines after wrestling
season.
Far from being assigned to Iwakuni (whose name he could not
spell), Powers told the Warren Commission he may have
visited it ‘during a football trip’ that would have taken place in
the late fall of 1958 when Oswald and his unit was already in
the Philippines. Powers flew down from Japan to the
Philippines or sometime in mid-January 1958 after he finished
up with his wresting team schedule so he may have stopped
off at Iwakuni on that flight. In short, Powers either visited
Iwakuni once or twice, he couldn’t be sure.
As is evident from his testimony, at no time does Powers
say he was ever assigned to Iwakuni in a military capacity,
that he met Oswald at Iwakuni or that Oswald was in the
company of an exotic half-Russian Eurasian woman who was
teaching him Russian.
Powers further demonstrates that he could not have
seen Oswald even during his stopover as Oswald and his unit
had deployed to the Philippines well before Powers did.
Oswald then returned with his unit to Atsugi well before
Powers did:
Mr. JENNER: And you were headquartered at the naval
air station at Atsugi?
Mr. POWERS: Yes, sir.
Mr. JENNER: Oswald – what did he serve as? I mean was
he a radar operator?
Mr. POWERS: I assume he was a radar operator. From
here, I lost almost total contact with the individual other
than just seeing him. I played football during the fall and
during this period of time we would play, we played in
the bowl games, and the squadron went down to the
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Philippines and I stayed in Japan. (Emphasis added.)
Mr. JENNER: You didn’t go to the Philippines?
Mr. POWERS: I did at a later date, but when the rest of
the squadron went down to the Philippines, they went
down, oh, I don’t know, probably sometime in
November, and I stayed down [in Japan] and played
football, and then after that, I was wresting – I wrestled
for a while, and then out of the blue came orders to go
to the Philippines, and from that time, I think this was
sometime in the middle of January ––.
Nor did Powers return with Oswald’s unit when they sailed
back to Japan from the Philippines on 7 March 1958. Instead,
he stayed on in the Archipelago because Powers said he had
been assigned special guard duty at a U-2 hanger there.
Mr. JENNER: Do you recall anything in this connection
with respect to guard duty relating to some kind of a
special airplane?
Mr. POWERS: Yes, we – this happened again, I think,
after the rest of the squadron left to go back to the
Japanese mainland, and some of us were assigned
temporary duty in Cubi Point there. I believe there were
two of us, or three of us from the squadron.
Mr. JENNER: Who were they?
Mr. POWERS: Murphy, I believe, was one of them and
Private – Private First Class Murphy, and I don’t recall
the other individuals, who the other individuals were,
but anyway, we were assigned there, and at this
particular time, they were closely guarding a hanger.
And as it developed, this was, not knowing what it was,
it was a U-2 aircraft, but this was after the rest of the
squadron left, which Oswald was included in, for the
mainland.
Mr. JENNER: Oswald was included in a group that had
returned to the mainland?
Mr. POWERS: Yes, sir.
Asked when he returned from the Philippines to Atsugi,
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Powers replied ‘late April or early May of 1958’. Nor did Powers
fly back to Japan. When Jenner asked him if he had ever been
to Formosa, Powers relied:
‘Yes, we – this was on our way home. Now, this wasn’t
– he [Oswald] was still in Japan, and on our way home,
we went to Formosa and no one got off the ship; we
just picked up some civilians, I believe there.
Mr. JENNER: But Oswald was not there with you?
Mr. POWERS: No. And then we just went on across ––
Powers told the Warren Commission he returned to America
on 4 July 1958 and so he must have been on route back ‘most
of June’. This is important because Epstein alleges that
Oswald came to Iwakuni sometime in October 1958 after he
returned to Japan not from the Philippines but much later from
a second assignment in Formosa (Taiwan).
Oswald’s unit left for Formosa on 14 September 1958
and Oswald was back at Atsugi by 5 October with the rest of
his unit. Given that Powers left Japan permanently either in
late May or in early June for America, it is impossible that he
could have met Oswald in Iwakuni in early October 1958, the
time Epstein claims Oswald received assignment to ‘temporary
duty’ at Iwakuni and informed Powers about his exotic
Eurasian girlfriend.
Jenner then asked Powers a series of questions about
Oswald:
Mr. JENNER: But you have no impression of Oswald in
that particular connection?
Mr. POWERS: No, nothing. My actual association with him
in Japan was limited to other than just seeing him in the
barracks and saying ‘Hi Ozzie’.
Jenner continued a bit later: ‘Did he ever express any
sympathy toward the Communist Party?’
Mr. POWERS: None that I recall.
Mr. JENNER: Toward Communist principles?
Mr. POWERS: None that I recall.
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Mr. JENNER: Or Marxist doctrine?
Mr. POWERS: None that I recall; no, sir.
Jenner finally asked him, ‘You don’t think you had enough
contact with him in Japan because he was not a member of
your platoon?’ Powers replied, ‘That’s correct.’
This then is Daniel Powers, the individual whose
testimony Epstein invokes in Legend to confirm Dejanovich’s
story about the mysterious Eurasian woman with Oswald in
Iwakuni!9
John Donovan’s tale
Epstein’s strangest military witness was former Marine First
Lieutenant John Donovan, whom Epstein thanks in Legend for
serving as ‘a technical advisor on Oswald’s Marine Corps
activities’. On 5 May 1964, Donovan extensively testified to the
Warren Commission about Oswald, whom he said he first met
in El Toro, California, after Oswald returned from Japan.10
On 7 April 1978, HSCA investigator Robert Genzman
interviewed Donovan, who was then living in Arlington,
Virginia. Donovan first told Genzman that during his initial
testimony before the Warren Commission, he had ‘forgotten’
that he had known Oswald both in the Philippines as well as in
El Toro. From the interview:
‘When he testified before the Warren Commission,
Donovan stated he had contact with Oswald only in
California; but he has since refreshed his recollection
and he now recalls that he first knew Oswald when they
were both stationed in the Philippines. Donovan recalls
that before he testified before the Commission he was
advised by his superiors only to answer the questions
asked and not to go off on tangents.’
9 More recently, Daniel Powers spoke to the author Peter Savodnik for
Savodnik’s book The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet
Union (New York: Basic Books, 2013). Again, Powers makes no
mention of a mysterious Eurasian woman at Iwakuni, even though
Savodnik interviewed him about his knowledge of Oswald.
10 For Donovan’s testimony, see Warren Commission Hearings vol. 8,
pp. 289-304.
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New revelations flowed from Donovan’s now-liberated
memory, including the claim that Oswald had a gay fling in
Taiwan:
‘According to Donovan, Oswald was very interested in
the U-2 airplane while he was stationed in the
Philippines. In Formosa, Oswald took photographs of
troop deployments, fighter aircraft, ammunition bunkers,
and F-86 aircraft with radar attached. In addition, Oswald
allegedly had a liaison with an effeminate boy in Formosa.’
(Emphasis added.)
Putting the Taiwan tale aside for now, even Epstein had
doubts about Donovan’s ‘refreshed recollections’ about the
Philippines, where Donovan now claimed to have first met
Oswald. From Legend:
‘The officer who recalls Oswald’s interest in the U-2 is
John Donovan, a former lieutenant in the Marine Corps.
Donovan remembers clearly that Oswald called his
attention to radar images of the U-2 and that this incident
took place at Cubi Point. However, other officers and
enlisted men from Oswald’s unit remember that their unit
did not set up radar operations at Cubi Point at that
time. One possible explanation for this discrepancy is
that a number of different Marine squadrons were
temporarily camped in the same vicinity, and Oswald may
have come into contact with Donovan while their
individual units were together at Cubi Point. (Emphasis
added.)
Donovan was also Oswald’s officer at the Marine
Air Station at El Toro, California, in 1959 where he
worked constantly with Oswald in the radar bubble. It is
conceivable that after nearly twenty years, Donovan is
recalling an incident that took place there. In any case,
since there are no other witnesses, it cannot be
resolved where, and if, this incident took place.’ (Epstein
p. 280)
Epstein omits the fact that Donovan says he only remembered
his supposedly knowing Oswald in the Philippines years after
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he testified in detail to the Warren Commission and that no U2 ever flew out of El Toro.
In his book Oswald and the CIA, author John Newman
(who interviewed Donovan on 19 July 1994) is even less
critical of Donovan than Epstein. From Oswald and the CIA:
‘[Oswald’s unit] set up their radar bubble at Cubi Point
Air Base, next to a special hanger. Inside it, the CIA
often stored a U-2 reconnaissance plane. “I saw it take
off and land,” recalls Oswald’s commander John
Donovan, “and I saw it hand pushed into the hanger.”
On this assignment, Oswald’s unit had an additional
mission with a direct connection to the U-2: sentry duty
to guard the U-2 hanger.’
That task, which Oswald, like the rest of the enlisted
men, performed, did not curtail his interest in the U-2
when he was at his favorite place – drawing traces of
aircraft trails with his grease pencil on the plotting board
inside the radar bubble. Oswald’s unit had not been
operational very long before Donovan noticed something
interesting.
‘One time we were watching the radar there at Cubi
Point and Oswald said, “Look at this thing.” He had a
trail in grease mark and he said, “This thing just took off
from Clark and it’s moving over China!” And I said, “You
can’t be right,” and he agreed. A week later he saw it
again, so several of us began looking hard and we saw
it. Oswald was right and we saw it so regularly that we
started clocking them. I even called the duty officer
about them and he said, “Look, fella, there’s no planes
flying over China.” We knew better. We saw them all the
time, mostly flying out of Cubi Point, but sometimes they
flew out of Clark.’1 1
U-2 flights out of Clark AFB in the Philippines did begin in late
March 1958. In his book Eyes in the Sky: Eisenhower, the CIA
and Cold War Aerial Espionage, retired CIA analyst Dino
Brugioni, a founder of the CIA’s National Photographic
11 John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York, Carroll & Graf, 1995)
p. 32.
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Interpretation Center, writes: ‘On 28 March 1958, Agency U-2s
were deployed to Clark AFB in the Philippines and began to
overfly the entire Indonesian Archipelago. Thirty U-2 missions
would be flown, the last on June 7, 1958.’1 2 Oswald’s unit,
however, sailed back to Japan from the Philippines on 7 March
1958, weeks before the first U-2 flights out of Clark.1 3 How
then could Oswald have been ‘obsessed’ about U-2 plane
flights in the Philippines when the plane was not even there?
In The Missing Chapter, Jack Swike states:
‘Several researchers and authors have stated that
Oswald became interested in U-2 Spy Planes going over
China when his unit was in Corregidor, but my research
has confirmed that such theories are absolutely false,
with the misinformation being spread in part by a Marine
officer [almost certainly a reference to John Donovan]
who was not in Oswald’s unit [in Japan] and who had no
connection whatsoever to U-2 operations. Furthermore,
there were no U-2 Spy Planes in Subic Bay at the time,
nor did Marines guard any hangers that contained U-2s.
What’s more, the search radar could only reach a height
of 40,000 feet at a maximum distance of 40 miles out.
The U-2 flew at 70,000 feet and China was
approximately 1,000 miles away, beyond the range of
scope radar.’
Donovan next ‘remembered’ that he worked closely with
Oswald not just in the Philippines but in Taiwan as well.
Donovan further claims that while the unit was stationed in
Taiwan, Oswald ‘spent many hours drawing traces of the U-2’s
12 Dino Brugioni, Eyes in the Sky: Eisenhower, the CIA and Cold War
Aerial Espionage (Naval Institute Press, 2010) p. 281.
13 Brugioni’s testimony further suggests that Dan Powers may have
told the truth when he said that he and two other men had been
specially selected to guard a hanger, which may have housed a U-2
because he did not go back to Japan with the MACS-1 unit on 7 March
1958. (Powers only went to the Philippines in mid-January 1958 while
the regular MACS-1 unit with Oswald first arrived there in midNovember 1957.) In his Warren Commission testimony, Powers said
he was assigned to guard a U-2 plane in the Philippines but his
assignment took place after Oswald and the rest of his MACS unit had
returned to Japan.
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tracks’ over the People’s Republic of China. Again from Oswald
and the CIA:
‘Oswald’s unit later deployed (September 14 through
October 6) to Ping Tong on the north side of Taiwan,
and Donovan was his commander there too. Donovan
recalls: “In Formosa [Taiwan] we were near the U-2 as
well. There, Oswald spent many hours drawing traces of
the U-2’s tracks over the People’s Republic of China.1 4
(Emphasis added.)
Returning to his 7 April 1978 HSCA interview, Donovan next
confused the high-priced Tokyo Queen Bee hostess who never
existed with the beautiful Eurasian ‘White Russian’ at Iwakuni
who also never existed. In the alembic of Donovan’s mind, the
Tokyo Queen Bee B-girl now became fluent in Russian:
‘In Japan, Oswald, who was paid only $87 per month,
frequented the Queen Bee Bar, a night-club and brothel
where an evening cost $50. Oswald was seen in the
company of a stunning Eurasian bar girl who was
multilingual. According to two sources, she spoke
Russian.’
‘Two sources’ indeed.
Donovan next discussed Oswald’s activities in El Toro.
Donovan had testified extensively (and as far as I can tell
accurately) about his time in El Toro to the Warren
Commission. Now well over a decade later he gave HSCA
investigator Genzman new revelations.
‘The following suspicious incidents in California. Oswald
possessed a sea bag full of photographs and he paid
someone two dollars to take the sea bag to the bus
station in order to send it to New York. Oswald was
seen talking to a wealthy Japanese man, possibly
named Hattori, who allegedly travelled to the Soviet
Union along the same route Oswald later took. Oswald
was seen receiving a package from a suspicious-looking
civilian at the base gate. A fellow Marine crewman fixed
a date between Oswald and a relative, Rosalyn Quinn,
14
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who spoke Russian and who was allegedly staying at
the Hotel Metropole in Moscow when Oswald stayed
there.’
As we shall see, one of Epstein’s friends, another early JFK
assassination investigator named Jones Harris, also
interviewed Donovan about the mysterious Japanese visitor to
El Toro and even he decided Donovan’s claims were wrong.
U-2 spy?
Epstein presents the U-2 spy plane as the holy grail of Soviet
intelligence operations in Japan. In Legend he tries to sell the
idea that Oswald took U-2 secrets to Russia and that his
information may have led to the shoot-down of an American U2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers on 1 May 1960. Over the
decades, the claim that Oswald somehow uncovered U-2
secrets at Atsugi has taken on almost urban legend status.1 5
But what did Oswald’s fellow Marines think about the idea of
Oswald stealing U-2 secrets?
Zack Stout, who worked the MACS-1 station at Atsugi
with Oswald, said he did not believe Oswald could have
acquired any detailed secret knowledge of the U-2. In his 1
June 1978 HSCA interview, Stout recalled:
‘LHO was run-of-the-mill radar man, which wasn’t bad....
Conversely, there was little, if any, knowledge or
interest in the “experimental plane.” All the operators
were aware it flew “high and far – beyond our scopes,”
but it never registered with the radar crews anyway, so
15 ‘Left’ critics of the Warren Commission argue that the CIA gave
Oswald information on the U-2 so that he could pass it to the Soviets
who used the knowledge to shoot down Powers’ plane and thus ruin a
planned Paris summit meeting between Eisenhower and Khrushchev in
Paris in May 1960. In effect, the CIA pulled off a back door sabotage
of détente. Of course, Oswald defected to Russia in October 1959.
‘Right’ critics of the Warren Commission like Epstein argue that
Oswald gave the Russians key U-2 secrets because Oswald was a
Soviet agent. Hence, the ‘Left’ accuses the Warren Commission of
covering up Oswald’s CIA ties while the ‘Right’ denounces the Warren
Commission for failing to expose Oswald’s KGB pedigree. To make
their respective cases, both sides have to have Oswald give the
Russians significant information about the U-2.
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no one paid any attention to it.’
Stout explained that all military aircraft did check in and
out with them except that one. They didn’t even know
how many there were. All he recalls was they only used
one at a time. Security was tight. You couldn’t get near
the plane. No cameras allowed in that area. They didn’t
know any of the pilots. Someone may have said it was
an ‘experimental’ or ‘weather’ plane, he didn’t pay that
much attention to it at the time. The only recollection he
has was it differs in two respects from the conventional
aircraft in that the wings were so relatively long, there
seemed to be an extra set of wheels under them and it
needed much less runway to take off.
Stout added that the basic ‘legend’ [a reference to
Epstein’s book?] portrayed the U-2 as using ‘Racecar’ as
its call and checking in and out with them, neither of
which is remotely true. Stout said there’s no way he
wouldn’t have been aware of this and he never heard of
either situation.’
Stout’s memory corresponds with Jack Swike’s investigation. A
former Marine intelligence officer at Atsugi, Swike – who left
the base shortly before Oswald arrived – spent some 27 years
investigating Oswald’s actions in Japan. Like Stout, he
concluded that Oswald had zero access to U-2 secrets at
Atsugi. In his 2008 book The Missing Chapter: Lee Harvey
Oswald in the Far East, Swike discussed U-2 security at Atsugi
with a fellow former Marine officer named Capt. J. E. Dolan,
who worked with the CIA on the U-2. In a 23 June 2006 letter
to Swike, Dolan recalled, ‘There were two separate clearances
for the U-2 – one for operations which had a separate
channel, and one for the product which had its channel. I was
the CIA alternate control officer for each.’ Dolan told Swike
that the Soviets operated their own SIGINT intelligence
gathering trawlers in the Sea of Japan that regularly
monitored U-2 fights. The Soviets could calculate both the
speed and height of the planes and could determine just how
high the U-2 could fly.
The real Soviet problem with the U-2 was simple; their
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anti-aircraft missiles still could not quite reach the phenomenal
height at which the U-2 flew.
The CIA/Air Force unit at Atsugi in charge of the U-2 was
dubbed Detachment C and had separate weather and
communications officers and operational staff. Swike states
Detachment C operated separately as a sub-unit of the CIA’s
Atsugi-based Joint Technical Advisory Group (JTAG). In his 14
May 1964 letter to the FBI, then CIA Deputy Director of Plans
Richard Helms described JTAG’s operations at Atsugi Station.
Helms stated that the JTAG unit:
‘....occupied an area within the Station, consisting of 20
to 25 individual residences, two dormitories, an office
area, a power plant, several Butler-type warehouses,
and a club building used for recreation and a bachelor
officers’ mess. The JTAG area was not closed, but it was
located about 400 yards from the main Station area and
there was no occasion for the regularly assigned Station
personnel to visit the JTAG area. The club was open only
to JTAG personnel and their guests. Two of the living
quarters were occupied by the Navy commanding officer
and his deputy because the quarters at JTAG were of
better quality than the housing accommodations
provided at the Station.’
The MACS-1 radar unit where Oswald worked had absolutely
nothing to do with the U-2 program. Nor would Oswald and his
co-workers have heard communication as the U-2 maintained
radio silence after it left base. In addition, the MACS-1 radar at
the time went no higher than 40,000 feet. When a U-2
launched, it would quickly disappear off their screens.
Taiwan
Even if Oswald did not steal highly guarded U-2 secrets to pay
for his high-class Tokyo geisha girl, as Legend wants the
reader to believe, that does not mean that Oswald’s stay in
the Far East was completely devoid of mystery. Oswald’s story
becomes even more curious when we examine reports of the
time he allegedly spent in Taiwan. The word ‘allegedly’ stems
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from one of the most bizarre aspects of Oswald’s story: the
Warren Commission believed that Oswald had been in Taiwan;
the HSCA, however, claimed he never left Japan.
Reports about Oswald’s activities in Taiwan rest on the
Warren Commission’s belief that Oswald had indeed spent
time there. Summarizing its research, the Warren Commission
wrote:
‘On September 14, Oswald sailed with his unit for the
South China Sea area. The unit was at Ping Tung, North
Taiwan, on September 30 and returned to Atsugi on
October 5. He was transferred out of MACS-1 and put on
general duty in anticipation of his return to the United
States. He spent several days thereafter in the Atsugi
Station hospital.’ 1 6
The HSCA, however, concluded that Oswald never went to
Taiwan and remained at NAS (Naval Air Station) Atsugi as part
of the MAG-11 (Marine Aircraft Group) rear echelon unit. From
page 220 of the HSCA report:
‘It has been stated that Oswald claimed to have served
in Taiwan. The committee’s review of his military records,
including unit diaries that were not previously studied by
the Warren Commission, indicated, however, that he
had not spent substantial time, if any, in Taiwan. These
records show that, except for a 3-1/2 month period of
service in the Philippines, Oswald served in Japan from
September 12, 1957, until November 2, 1958. Although
Department of Defense records do indicate that MAG
(Marine Air Group) 11, Oswald’s unit, was deployed to
Taiwan on September 16, 1958, and remained in that
area until April 1959, an examination of the MAG 11 unit
diaries indicated that Oswald was assigned at that time
to a rear echelon unit. The term rear echelon does not,
on its face, preclude service with the main unit in
Taiwan, but the Department of Defense has specifically
stated that “Oswald did not sail from Yokosuka, Japan,
on September 16, 1958. He remained aboard NAS Atsugi
16 See p. 684 at < http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warrencommission-report/appendix-13.html>.
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as part of the MAG-11 rear echelon.” [29] Oswald’s
records also reflect that on October 6, 1958, he was
transferred within MAG 11 to a Headquarters and
Maintenance Squadron subunit in Atsugi, Japan. He
reportedly spent the next week in the Atsugi Station
Hospital. On November 2, 1958, Oswald left Japan for
duty in the United States.’
Accordingly, based upon a direct examination of
Oswald's unit diaries, as well as his own military records, it
does not appear that he had spent any time in Taiwan. This
finding is contrary to that of the Warren Commission that
Oswald arrived with his unit in Taiwan on September 30,
1958, and remained there somewhat less than a week,
but the Commission’s analysis apparently was made
without access to the unit diaries of MAG 11. [30]
(Emphasis added.)
The HSCA report included these footnotes:
Footnote [29] ‘This is contrary to statements attributed
to Lieutenant Charles R. Rhodes by Edward Epstein in
his book, [Legend] The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Rhodes maintains, according to Epstein, that Oswald did
make the trip with the main unit but was sent back to
Japan on October 6, 1958.’
Footnote [30] ‘Similarly, a message sent on November 4,
1959, from the Chief of Naval Operations concerning
Oswald, which states that he had “served with Marine
Air Control Squadrons in Japan and Taiwan,” may have
been issued without checking unit diaries which
indicated that Oswald had not been so deployed.’
The HSCA did say that Oswald’s MACS-1 unit left Japan on 14
September 1958 for a week-long voyage to Taiwan on board
the USS Skagit. The unit set up base at P’ing-tung in North
Taiwan during a period of acute geopolitical tension. On 23
August 1958, PRC military units began shelling the Kinmen
(Quemoy) island claimed by Taiwan and triggered the Second
Taiwan Strait Crisis. In the shelling, an estimated 2,500
Taiwanese soldiers died along with 500 Communist troops. Yet
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the HSCA concluded during the crisis Oswald remained at
Atsugi, where he received medical treatment for a case of
urethritis reportedly due to gonorrhoea, although the HSCA
hedges its bet by saying he did not spend ‘any substantial
time, if any’ on Taiwan.
Enter Legend, a book based on the Warren Commission
belief that Oswald spent some time in Taiwan. Legend’s
colorful description of what happened in Taiwan, however, is
almost exclusively based on the testimony of a Marine
Lieutenant named Charles R. Rhodes, the very individual that
the HSCA critiques in its footnote 29, cited above.
Before turning to Rhodes’ story as recounted in Legend,
a few words about his earlier relationship to Oswald. Although
apparently never interviewed by the Warren Commission or
the HSCA, Rhodes knew Oswald at Atsugi. Documentation for
this emerges out of Oswald’s second court martial for his
confrontation with Sergeant Rodriguez, the incident that
occurred on 20 June 1958. Oswald’s second trial included
statements from Rodriguez, a Marine named Milam who was
sitting with Rodriguez in the Blue Bird Café at the time of the
confrontation, and Lt. Charles R. Rhodes, who was Rodriguez’s
superior officer.
In Legend, Epstein mentions Rhodes’ role in this incident
this way:
‘Lieutenant Charles Rhodes witnessed the incident: “I
walked in right after it happened – before the MPs got
there – and there were three or four guys standing
around ready to let Oswald have it........Rodriguez was
about to let him have it, but some of his friends
convinced him it wasn’t worth getting into a fight over.”
Rhodes says that he later told Rodriguez that he
believed a sound thrashing would have been just what
Oswald needed. Rhodes recalls that Oswald had been
complaining to him that Rodriguez had been picking on
him. Rhodes, who knew Rodriguez and remembers him
as a well-respected sergeant who treated the men
evenhandedly, went to Rodriguez to discuss the matter.
Rodriguez told him that Oswald was wrong – that he
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was not being picked on and that Rodriguez was
beginning to get tired of his constant carping about it.
Rhodes then told Oswald that he was being
unreasonable – that he was imagining things if he
thought he was being singled out for undesirable
assignments.
Rodriguez, who today does not claim to
understand the incident, recalls a meeting of NCOs
shortly before his trouble with Oswald at which they
were told there was going to be a crackdown on
Marines who persisted in getting into fights in town
bars. The NCOs were told that the best place to start
was among themselves. Rodriguez believes that he
possibly would have been demoted if he had got into a
fight with Oswald at the Bluebird.’ (Epstein p. 284)
Rhodes stated that he went to Taiwan and served in the same
unit with Oswald. He next told Epstein a remarkable story that
somehow both the Warren Commission and the HSCA missed.
Rhodes recalled that on the evening of 4 October 1958,
Oswald was assigned to guard duty at P’ing-tung, where
there was a military airport. Around midnight, Rhodes heard
shots coming from the area Oswald guarded. Drawing his .45,
Rhodes ran over and found Oswald slumped against a tree,
shaking, crying, and holding his M-1 rifle across his lap. Oswald
claimed that he had seen unknown men in the woods. After he
challenged them, he began shooting. Rhodes said that he put
his arm around Oswald and walked him back to the tent while
Oswald told him he could not bear guard duty. Rhodes then
informed his commanding officer about the incident. Oswald
flew to Japan two days later on a military plane for medical
treatment. Oswald apparently had suffered some kind of
nervous breakdown. (Epstein pp. 81-2)
Everyone who believes that Oswald went to Taiwan also
agrees that Oswald returned to Atsugi on 5 October and
entered treatment for either gonorrhoea or some related
disease. (Swike says that there was a form of non-venereal
urethritis at Atsugi because the Japanese in charge of the
laundry often did not wash clothing at a temperature above
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160 degrees.)
The Warren Commission states that Oswald returned to
Japan and received medical treatment for a venereal disease.
Did he sail back to Atsugi (presumably with his unit) as the
Warren Commission believed? Did Oswald fly back on a military
plane as Legend states? Would the military really fly Oswald
out of a crisis zone (one that presumably had medical facilities
able to treat venereal diseases) simply to treat a case of
gonorrhoea?
Assuming that Oswald was in Taiwan, what pushed him
to his alleged mental meltdown? For Epstein, the answer is
obvious: Oswald cracked under the pressure of being a
Communist spy. As recounted in Legend, Rhodes told Epstein
that the MACS-1 unit on Taiwan discovered that IFF
(Identification Friend or Foe) codes had been seriously
compromised. Communist Chinese pilots, when challenged,
answered using code words that identified them as friendly
and were allowed through without any further challenge.
Rhodes recalled to Epstein, ‘We really caught hell about that.’
In Legend, the trigger for Oswald’s supposed collapse is
clear: he cracked because he feared exposure as a Communist
spy who had provided the Chinese with the unit’s IFF codes.
In 1994 John Donovan upped the ante with his claim about an
Oswald who ‘spent many hours’ while in Taiwan tracing out U2 flights to China when not romancing a Taiwanese boy.
Twisted trail
Were there other witnesses besides Rhodes who placed
Oswald in Taiwan? The spotlight now turns to a Marine Second
Lieutenant named William K. Trail who said that either Oswald
went to Taiwan or that he did not go to Taiwan. His
contradictory testimony begins on 5 December 1963 when FBI
SAs Kinzer and Waldrup interviewed him. Trail states that
Oswald went to Taiwan. From the interview:
‘He [Trail] served in the United States Marine Corps from
September 1956 until November 1959, as a second
lieutenant and later as a first lieutenant. During late
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August or early September 1958, while assigned to the
Atsugi Naval Air Station in Japan. With the First Marine
Air Wing, Marine Air Group 11, Marine Air Control
Squadron 1, his group was transferred to Taiwan. At
that time, he first became aware of the fact that LEE
HARVEY OSWALD was assigned to this same Marine Air
Wing. At the time their group was moving to Taiwan, he
recalled that OSWALD and another Marine were being
held prisoner at Atsugi and had to be picked up by a
“chaser” with a gun. He was unable to recall any other
circumstances surrounding this event other than he
seemed to recall that OSWALD was marched from the
Marine jail without shoes which seemed odd to him at
the time.
During the ensuing months on Taiwan, from
September [1958] to January or February 1959, he,
TRAIL, saw little of OSWALD [Trail seems unaware that
Oswald returned to Japan in early October sailed back to
America in early November 1958 – KC] but heard rumors
of his being different than the other men in his group. In
this regard, he explained that OSWALD did not seem to
get along well with the other men and gave the
impression that he felt he was smarter than the others
and enjoyed showing off his purported superior
intelligence.
In January or February 1959 Trail returned to the
United States and was thereafter assigned to the
Marine Corps Naval Facilities at Santa Ana, California. He
recalled seeing OSWALD again at this Marine Base
during early or mid-1959, at which time OSWALD spoke
to him and seemed to be more sociable than he had
been while they were in the same group in Japan and
Taiwan.
Mr. TRAIL concluded by saying that he had very little
contact with OSWALD at any time during his military
career and his recollection[s] of OSWALD and his activities
were very limited. He did recall reading in the paper
during the fall of 1959 that OSWALD had defected to
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Russia but heard nothing further of him or about him
until November 1963.......(Emphasis added.)
One day before the FBI interviewed Trail, Secret Service SA
Charles E. Taylor spoke with John Donovan. In 1959 Trail and
Donovan shared quarters at El Toro. In his 5 December 1963
interview with the Secret Service, Donovan recalled, ‘William K.
Trail had just returned from a tour of duty with the Air Control
squadron in Japan and they were discussing personnel who
had been transferred from Japan to Squadron 9 in California.’
Donovan continued:
‘Lt. Trail mentioned that Lee Harvey Oswald served
under his direction as a radar operator in Japan and was
remembered as a very unusual person, argumentative,
difficult to get along with, showing a dislike for any
authority whatsoever, and an individual who would
spend great periods of time alone. Trail furnished
information to Donovan that Oswald served under his
command for a period of slightly less than two years and
Trail recalled that he placed Oswald on report for drunk
and disorderly conduct and the use of argumentative
and insulting language in conversations with a company
sergeant. [Almost certainly a reference to the Blue Bird
Café incident.] In addition, Trail recalled Oswald was
court-martialled for not reporting the ownership of a
pistol.’
Yet just one day earlier, Trail told the FBI that his
‘recollection[s] of OSWALD and his activities were very limited.’
Years later, Jack Swike spoke to Trail about Atsugi in
general and Oswald in particular. In a 17 July 1981 letter to
Swike, Trail said about Oswald:
‘I do recall that the night before MACS-1 was to embark
for Taiwan (during September 1958), I was the dutyofficer and I recall that a couple of men were brought
from the brig (Oswald was one of them) and spent the
night in the duty shack with a brig guard in attendance. I
do not recall any further details about Oswald during
this time (I flew to Taiwan about a week or two after
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MACS-1 sailed) and my next recollection of him was in
MACS-9 in California. I have no recollection of any
significant events in California.’
Even though Swike reprints Trail’s letter where Trail writes, ‘I
flew to Taiwan about a week or two after MACS-1 sailed’,
Swike – who believes Oswald never went to Taiwan – writes
‘Trail flew out of Atsugi [to Taiwan] the next day.’ It was the
USS Skagit bound for Taiwan, however, that left Atsugi the
next day. Yet if Trail had no memory of Oswald until California,
it seems logical (as Swike assumed) that Oswald never went
to Taiwan.
Is Trail a reliable witness?
Let us examine Trail’s memory of Oswald wearing no
shoes. Although there is some debate about just how much
time Oswald spent incarcerated, the conventional belief is that
Oswald spent 48 days in the brig from 27 June to 13 August
1958. Since the MACS-1 unit sailed for Taiwan on 14
September 1958, Oswald clearly was not in the brig at the
time Trail claims he was. In any case, there is no evidence to
suggest that Oswald spent any time in the brig after 13
August, or a month before his unit shipped out to Taiwan. Yet
if, as Trail says, he did not sail to Taiwan with the unit but flew
out of Atsugi to Taiwan a week later, clearly he was not on the
boat. Trail seems not even to know why Oswald was brought
to the duty shack in the first place. In short, Trail seems not
very reliable.
Let us, however, assume that Oswald did deploy to
Taiwan and that Trail caught up with him and his unit a week
later at P’ing-tung. If the shooting incident that Rhodes
described in such detail really happened, how could Trail not
be aware of it? Rhodes and Trail were Marine lieutenants, they
both knew Oswald, and they both were stationed at P’ingtung at the height of the Second Taiwan Strait crisis.
Iwakuni: take two
Even if we assume Oswald was in Taiwan and the Warren
Commission got it right, Legend’s chronology remains bizarre
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since Epstein next asserts it was sometime in October 1958
that Oswald arrived in Iwakuni!
Epstein states that after returning to Japan on 5
October, Oswald ‘complained of having injured himself doing
“heavy lifting” in Formosa, but the only unambiguous
symptoms the doctors were able to find were urethral
discharges which had persisted from the gonorrhoea.’ We now
have three supposed reasons Oswald returned to Japan. They
are 1) venereal disease; 2) some kind of mental breakdown
most likely induced by the psychological pressure of being a
Soviet spy; and 3) Oswald’s supposed claim he had been
injured due to ‘heavy lifting’.
In any case, Epstein continues:
‘With his unit still overseas [in Taiwan], Oswald was
reassigned to the Marine squadron at Iwakuni, an air
base some 430 miles southwest of Tokyo, which manned
the Tactical Air Control Center for the northern Pacific
area.’ (Epstein p. 82)
In other words, Oswald – who had risked a nervous
breakdown to betray America in Taiwan – now managed to
ensconce himself in yet another key American military center.
Just as he had fed top-secret ‘IFF codes’ to the Communist
Chinese in Taiwan, now he could work similar magic in Iwakuni
and dismantle America’s air defense against a Communist
attack. Yet the evidence from medical records is overwhelming
that Oswald spent most of October receiving treatment for
urethral discharges at Atsugi. He was then assigned ‘general
duty in anticipation of his return’ to the States before finally
shipping out in early November. While the Warren Commission
assumed Oswald had been in Taiwan and the HSCA believed
he never left Atsugi, both the Warren Commission and the
HSCA agreed that he never went to Iwakuni to buy a bowl of
rice, much less to work in an air defense center.
Based solely on Owen Dejanovich’s statement, Jack
Swike tried to figure out when Oswald could have spent time
in Iwakuni. Swike argues that Oswald could have only gone to
Iwakuni before and not after his April 1958 court martial.
‘Therefore,’ Swike opines, ‘if Oswald went to Iwakuni, it was
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before the deployment to Taiwan.’ Swike says this ‘seems
likely’ because some of the MACS-1 people who went to the
Philippines were later assigned to the First Marine Air Wing at
Iwakuni where they remained until the end of April 1958.1 7
Since Oswald’s first court martial for the gun discharge incident
took place at Atsugi in late April, Swike believes the only time
Oswald could have been at Iwakuni was before his court
martial proceedings, even though there are no records to
support such a view. Swike clearly is trying to find some
timetable where Oswald might have conceivably been at
Iwakuni that does not violate common sense.
Epstein, alas, has Oswald flown back from Taiwan to
Japan in early October and then sent to Iwakuini. According to
Legend, sometime between early October and his shipping out
of Japan on 2 November 1958, Oswald was assigned
‘temporary duty’ at Iwakuni. While there, Oswald regularly
drinks in the Orion bar in the company of a beautiful Eurasian
woman who teaches him Russian. He goes with this woman
on visits to military-restricted Communist sections of Iwakuni
without being stopped by MPs. Oswald even informs Daniel
Powers that the exotic woman is in part White Russian. He
speaks to Powers in October 1958 although (according to his
testimony before the Warren Commission) Powers left Japan
earlier that summer.
EL Toro spy?
Oswald’s mysterious connections to exotic Orientals does not
17 I believe Swike is basing his view on Cooley. Cooley – who was
with Oswald in the Philippines – reported that he and some other
members of the unit returned to Japan [Iwakuni] while other unit
members went back to Atsugi. Recall that in the Weston article in The
Fourth Decade, Cooley says part of his unit went to Iwakuni from the
Philippines. Cooley says that this group returned to Japan in late
December while the full unit only left the Philippines in early March for
Atsugi. The duty at Iwakuni, however, was temporary and Cooley
eventually returned to his full unit Atsugi, if I am following the
chronology correctly.
Epstein, however, accepts the Warren Commission narrative that
has Oswald and his unit leaving the Philippines in early March. Hence,
the one window that Epstein has to stick Oswald in Iwakuni has to be
in early October 1958 after Oswald’s return from Taiwan.
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end when he returns to a Marine air control unit at El Toro,
California.18 We begin by recalling John Donovan’s claim to the
HSCA about his suspicions of Oswald’s activities in El Toro,
suspicions he never mentioned to the FBI or the Warren
Commission years earlier.
In his HSCA interview, Donovan reported:
‘The following suspicious incidents in California. Oswald
possessed a sea bag full of photographs and he paid
someone two dollars to take the sea bag to the bus
station in order to send it to New York. Oswald was
seen talking to a wealthy Japanese man, possibly
named Hattori, who allegedly travelled to the Soviet
Union along the same route Oswald later took. Oswald
was seen receiving a package from a suspicious-looking
civilian at the base gate. A fellow Marine crewman fixed
a date between Oswald and a relative, Rosalyn Quinn,
who spoke Russian and who was allegedly staying at
the Hotel Metropole in Moscow when Oswald stayed
there.’
What are we to make of Donovan’s reference to a mysterious
Japanese man ‘possibly named Hattori’? In his book The Man
Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell notes the existence of a
notorious post-war Japanese spy operation funded by far right
American Army intelligence officers and known as the Hattori
Organization. Russell claims that this Hattori (Tokushiro
Hattori) ‘may have been related’ to the ‘wealthy Hattori family’
that reputedly owned a group of Tokyo night-clubs including
the Queen Bee.1 9 Russell reports that the CIA’s James
Angleton told one of his media contacts, Joseph Trento, that
the Tokyo Queen Bee was one of the KGB’s most intensive
18 Oswald is often cited as serving at the main Marine facility at
Santa Ana, California, but he actually was assigned to a subsidiary
Marine unit at El Toro known as the LTA (Lighter than Air) Facility, a
few miles away from the main base at Santa Ana. It was called LTA
because it formerly was used for housing dirigibles.
19 The blizzard of confusion about Oswald’s role in Japan promoted
by a former Army Intelligence agent named Richard Case Nagell, an
Alice in Wonderland figure, dominates a good deal of the Japan section
of The Man Who Knew Too Much. See Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too
Much (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992).
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recruiting grounds and that, according to Angleton, various
CIA officers and U-2 pilots ‘began relationships’ with girls in
that bar. Yet as we have seen, Oswald never went to the
highly upscale Tokyo Queen Bee club. [For more on Angleton
see the postscript below.]
In any case, if Tokushiro Hattori was in fact ‘related’ to
the ‘wealthy Hattori family’ and they in turn ran upscale bars
that served as recruitment centers for the KGB, are we
supposed to believe that the U.S. Army Intelligence-backed
Hattori Organization itself was under KGB control? Again, the
story sounds absurd. What remains clear is Legend’s need to
plant Oswald in the Tokyo Queen Bee at all cost given
Angleton’s claim.
Dick Russell also reports:
‘When author Edward Jay Epstein was researching his
1978 book about Oswald, Jones Harris, then one of his
research assistants set about obtaining the names and
addresses of the men who had served overseas with
the young Marine.
Harris was able to interview, among others, Marine
lieutenant John Donovan, once stationed with Oswald in
Japan and later at the El Toro Marine Base in California.
While at El Toro, Donovan recalled that Oswald had
received a visit in 1959 from a member of the Hattori
clan. Donovan recognized the visitor as the brother of a
Hattori girl he himself had known in Tokyo. The young
man, according to Donovan, was Noboru Hattori, son of
the president of the Hattori Watch Company in Tokyo.
Harris added that Noboru Hattori was located and
admitted having visited the El Toro base en route to
Chicago, but maintained that his trip was in 1962 (not
1959) and denied ever having met Oswald.’ 20
Jones Harris was yet another early Warren Commission critic
like Epstein. In his preface to Legend, Epstein writes: ‘I also
benefited enormously from the insights and experiences of
Jones Harris, especially as they pertain to Oswald’s service in
20 See <https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
msg26370.html>
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Japan.’ In that same preface, Epstein says, ‘I would also like
to thank John Donovan, one of the officers under whom
Oswald served in the Marines. He served as a technical
advisor on Oswald’s Marine Corps activities.’ In short, one
Epstein researcher interviewed another Epstein researcher.
Donovan told Harris that he just happened to recognize
Noburu Hattori because he was the brother of a woman he
had known in Tokyo, an extraordinary coincidence. Donovan
surely would have asked Oswald just how he knew the
brother of a woman Donovan knew and why he had decided
to visit Oswald of all people. Yet there is no indication that
Donovan bothered to question Oswald about his remarkable
visitor, an event that Donovan failed to mention to the FBI and
the Warren Commission. Harris then told Dick Russell that
Noburu Hattori claimed he visited the El Toro base in 1962 for
some inexplicable reason. How could Donovan then remember
an incident that never happened in the first place? Nor could
he have misplaced the dates 1959 and 1962 and simply misremembered Hattori visiting El Toro in 1962. By 1962, Donovan
was living in Washington; Oswald, of course, left El Toro in
1959. Mercifully, Epstein left this Donovan tale out of Legend.
As for Rosalyn Quinn, she was an airline flight attendant
and the aunt of a Marine at El Toro who introduced her to
Oswald. They went on one or two dates where they practised
their Russian. There is no evidence that Quinn was in the
Hotel Metropole in Moscow when Oswald stayed there in
October 1959. Thankfully, Epstein omitted this story as well.
Yet Epstein cannot resist the idea that Oswald had
taken suspicious photos as Donovan referenced in his 1978
statement. From Legend:
‘As Oswald’s tour of duty neared completion, [his fellow
Marine Nelson] Delgado noticed a stack of “spotter”
photographs showing front and profile views of a fighter
plane among Oswald’s papers. He realized that they had
probably been used as a visual aid in training classes,
and wondered why Oswald had them in his possession.
Oswald stuffed the photographs into a duffle bag with
some other possessions and asked Delgado if he would
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bring the bag to the bus station in Los Angeles, put it in
a locker, and bring him back the key. According to
Delgado’s recollection, Oswald gave him two dollars for
doing this.’ (Epstein p. 89)
It is a curious story. First, when did all this supposedly
happen? Delgado was on extended leave when Oswald left
the Marines. He already had a falling-out with Oswald over
Oswald’s continuing praise of Castro. Before he went on
leave, Delgado put in a request to switch huts just so he could
get away from Oswald. Epstein looked at Delgado’s testimony
before the Warren Commission and he reports that Delgado
never mentioned this alleged incident. Epstein includes this
endnote about Delgado:
‘Another Marine, James Botelho, also vaguely remembers
Oswald having these spotter photographs. Delgado did
not mention these photographs to the Warren
Commission, and his memory, eighteen years after the
event, is vague. In my first interview with him in
Germany, he remembered the photographs to me, but
indicated that he had shipped them to an address in
Brooklyn. In subsequent interviews, however, he
recalled that he had merely left the photographs in a
locker. In any case, there is no record of these
photographs or what happened to them.’ (Epstein pp.
286-87)
When Donovan spoke to the HSCA, he went with the first
Delgado story about shipping the mysterious sea bag stuffed
with photos to a Brooklyn address. Yet in Delgado’s second
story, we are down to ‘front and profile views’ of one plane
used for instructions that supposedly wind up in a locker in the
Los Angeles bus station. These pictures, of course, were not
of secret U-2 spy planes since no U-2 planes flew out of El
Toro.
The image of Oswald snapping suspicious photos,
however, preys on Epstein’s mind. In Legend, Epstein claimed
that Oswald wandered around Atsugi ‘taking pictures of the
various objects that apparently interested him – such as radar
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height-finding antennas.’ Yet in a world where Minox cameras
are easily purchased, Oswald owned a cheap American-made
box camera with its primitive lookdown viewfinder. Oswald did
take pictures in Japan and some of them were taken at Atsugi.
Oswald therefore must have been photographing ‘radar
height-finding antennas’ that ‘apparently interested him’.
Yaeko Okui: Legend’s false femme fatale
Determined to uncover nefarious Japanese contacts with
Oswald, Epstein turned a one-time chance meeting Oswald
had in Dallas with a Japanese woman named Yaeko Okui into
a potentially sinister espionage encounter.
On 28 December 1962, Lee and Marina Oswald, along
with George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt, attended to a
Russian-style Christmas party in Dallas. At the party, Oswald
met Yaeko Okui, a Japanese woman then living in Dallas. Born
in Japan on 19 January 1933, Yaeko Okui spent three-and-ahalf years at Waseda University in Tokyo studying economics
and business administration and seven years studying flower
arrangements at the Sogetau School of Professional Flower
Arrangement in Tokyo, where she received a teacher’s
certificate. She further became a highly skilled player of the
kato, a thirteen-string instrument often used in Japanese
symphony orchestras.
In the spring of 1959, Okui met the president of Ozawa
& Company which served as the Japanese agent for a Dallasbased corporation called Schwabach Perutz, which was
involved in the cotton exchange and eager to do business in
Japan. After Okui, a fluent English speaker, expressed a desire
to see America, Ozawa arranged for her to work for Gerardo
Weinstein, president of Schwabach Perutz. She arrived in
Dallas in the summer of 1959 and worked as a governess at
Weinstein’s Dallas home.
After a period in New York, Okui returned to Dallas in
August 1962 as the southwest representative of Nippon
Service, the U.S. representative for the famed Takashimaya
Department Store. She worked in public relations and
maintained regular contact with firms doing business in Japan.
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She frequently lectured before women’s clubs on flower
arrangements and Japanese ways of origami paper folding.
With her musical background, Okui became friends with
Latvian-born, Russian-speaking, Lev Aronson, a cellist and
music teacher, whom she met at a Dallas chamber music
concert. Okui attended the White Russian-style Christmas
party with Aronson. Here is how Legend describes what
happened at the party:
‘[Oswald] turned instead to a young and exquisitely
beautiful Japanese girl named Yaeko Okui. Yaeko had
come to Dallas that year to do public relations work for
Nippon Services, Inc., a chain of Japanese departments
stores.
She was also a certified teacher in ikebana, the
Japanese art of flower arrangement, and an
accompanied musician. Another musician, Lev Aronson,
had brought her to the party, but Oswald showed little
interest in talking to him. For almost three hours, Yaeko
sat with Oswald at the far end of the living room and
talked. She seemed able to speak Russian and English
with equal ease. (Epstein p. 201) (Emphasis added.)
Alas, there is absolutely no evidence that Okui spoke any
Russian. Okui’s testimony appears in the Warren Commission
as CE 1862 (the FBI summary) and CE 1866 (Okui’s 5 May
1964 FBI interview). From that FBI interview:
‘Miss Okui recalled that, upon arrival at this party, she
was introduced to a large number of people in
attendance, none of whom she can recall now, but she
does recall being introduced to an individual, who she
now knows was LEE HARVEY OSWALD, and his wife,
MARINA, who were also in attendance at the party. Miss
OKUI stated she recalls further having a conversation
with MARINA OSWALD, through Mr. ARONSON as
interpreter and she received a good deal of attention
from the guests at the party, inasmuch as she was the
only Oriental in attendance. Miss OKUI recalled she
discussed with MARINA OSWALD the fact that she,
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MARINA, had recently arrived in the United States and
had little or no opportunity to see the country and get
acquainted with the people.’ (Emphasis added.)
The only way Marina Oswald and Yaeko Okui could have any
conversation at all, as Okui states, was by having Lev Aronson
interpret as Okui did not speak Russian and Marina barely any
English, much less Japanese. Nor do witnesses such as
George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt mention Okui speaking
Russian. Yet Legend states that Oswald and Okui sat alone in
a corner for almost three hours conversing in English and
Russian.
Nor did they sit entirely alone if Okui’s interview with the
FBI is to be believed:
‘Miss Okui further stated she does recall having a
discussion with MARINA’s husband, whom she now
knows to be LEE HARVEY OSWALD, concerning Ikebana,
or flower arrangement, and OSWALD, to the best of her
recollection, queried her about how she liked the United
States in relation to Japan, insofar as the customs of the
people were concerned. She stated OSWALD did not, at
any time, broach the subject of politics and, if he had,
she would have been inadequate in that regard, as she
takes little interest in that subject.
Miss Okui stated that, if there was some
consternation by any of the guests at her discussion
with OSWALD, she was not aware of it and, in fact, feels
certain Mr. ARONSON was at her side at all times that
evening. Miss OKUI stated further that was the first and
last time she had ever met or talked to either LEE
HARVEY OSWALD or his wife, MARINA OSWALD, and, in
fact, did not, at any time, know his name until OSWALD
received notoriety as a result of the assassination of
President KENNEDY. Miss Okui also stated that, to the
best of her recollection, Mr. ARONSON did not, at least
not to her, express any displeasure over her discussion
with LEE HARVEY OSWALD, and she stated she feels
certain he would have mentioned it had that been true.’
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Yet Legend cannot resist turning Yaeko Okui into a suspected
spy:
‘Marina, even when she was singing Russian songs with
the rest of the guests, watched her husband and Yaeko
with some concern. A number of her friends, including
Jean de Mohrenschildt, simply assumed that she was
jealous over the attention that Oswald was paying to
this Japanese girl. Marina’s real concern, however, as
she later explained to her biographer, Priscilla Johnson
McMillan, was that Yaeko might be an American
intelligence agent. At one point she took her husband
aside and warned him that Yaeko “may be a spy. Don’t
be too frank with her”.
George de Mohrenschildt subsequently testified
that he was also impressed with the “extraordinary
interest which developed between....Yaeko and
Oswald....” He knew that Oswald had served in Japan in
the Marine Corps before he defected to the Soviet
Union. He also knew that Oswald had made some
“contacts with Communists in Japan” and that these
“contacts” had induced him to go to the Soviet Union.2 1
At least this is what Oswald confided to him. Now, as he
watched them talk across the room, he wondered
whether she might be trying to find out about this
earlier period in Oswald’s life. In any case, he didn’t
trust her.
Yaeko herself never fully divulged the contents of
this long conversation with Oswald. She told her friend
Lev Aronson, who was showing some signs of
impatience over Oswald, that they had talked about
“nothing at all”. She would later say when questioned
by the FBI in 1964 that she and Oswald discussed
21 This is classic Epstein. The Japanese Communists ‘had induced
him to go to the Soviet Union.’ In fact, de Mohrenschildt told the
Warren Commission that Oswald had met some Japanese
Communists ‘and they – that got him interested to go and see what
goes on in the Soviet Union......[Oswald] said, “I have met some
Communists in Japan and they got me excited and interested, and
that was one of my inducements in going to Soviet Russia to see what
goes on there.”’
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“flower arrangements”.
At about midnight, De Mohrenschildt suggested to
Oswald that they leave. He had arranged a baby sitter
for Oswald’s daughter, and she had said that she could
not work past midnight. Oswald wrote down a number
that Yaeko gave him, as Marina observed, then he
followed De Mohrenschildt to the door.’ (Epstein pp.
201-02)
George De Mohrenschildt discussed Yaeko Okui during his 23
April 1964 Warren Commission testimony:
‘Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT......What really impressed me
that particular night was an extraordinary interest which
developed between this Japanese girl, Yaeko – I don’t
remember her last name – but I already had given that
impression of mine at the American Embassy so they
could check on that. She was a Japanese girl, very good
looking, who worked, I think, at Neiman-Marcus in
Dallas, and was brought into Dallas from Japan by some
people in the cotton business to take care of their
babies.’
What De Mohrenschildt means about contacting the American
Embassy about Yaeko Okui (whom the de Mohrenschildts
seem to have met socially in Dallas even before she moved to
New York) is anyone’s guess. The de Mohrenschildts, as we
shall see, were highly suspicious of all Japanese people based
on Jeanne’s experiences in the Far East.
George de Mohrenschildt’s testimony continues:
‘Now, this girl is a much superior girl as to be just a baby
caretaker. She eventually left that couple that is all
hearsay, you see, and became sort of a girl friend of a
Russian musician who lives in Dallas by the name of Lev
Aronson. And I do not recall whether he was at the
party or not. [In fact, Aronson brought Okui to the
party.] But Yaeko was, and they developed an
immediate interest in each other – Oswald and Yaeko.
They just went on sight and started talking and talking
and talking. I thought that was understandable because
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Oswald had been in Japan, you see. But the interest
was so overwhelming that Marina objected, and became
very jealous. She told us, either that night or later, that
Oswald got her telephone number, she noticed that
Oswald got this girl’s telephone number. And once or
twice later on she told us that she has the impression
that Oswald is carrying on something with this girl.......’
In her 22 April 1964 Warren Commission testimony, Jeanne de
Mohrenschildt discussed Okui at some length:
Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. There were quite a lot of
people from this Russian colony and among them there
was a little Japanese girl. Do you know about Yaeko?
Mr. JENNER. Y-a-e-k-o?
Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. That is right.
Mr. JENNER. Did you know Yaeko before?
Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. Yes; we knew Yaeko before.
Mr. JENNER. What was her last name?
Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. I don’t remember her last
name because we always called her Yaeko.
Mr. JENNER. Where was she working?
Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. I don’t know whether she was
working at the time or not, but she was imported by
some American family. She came with the family. She is
supposed to be from a very fine Japanese family. She
was wealthy. It was strange she worked almost as a
servant in some family. I know she had only one day off,
because I remember when we wanted to invite her it
was only one day, Thursday, that we could invite her.
Then she did some work with Neiman Marcus.
Mr. JENNER. Neiman Marcus?
Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. Then she was a musician. She
played the Japanese special long, long instrument [the
kato], and she was playing with the Dallas Symphony,
and she was also playing at exhibits, Neiman Marcus
gives exhibits, you know, oriental exhibits, whatever it
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was, that fall, and she was participating in it. That is
what we know about Yaeko. But then we heard that she
was in New York. To tell you frankly I never trusted
Yaeko. I thought there was something fishy, maybe
because I was brought up with Japanese, you know,
and I knew what treachery it is, you know. I just
somehow – she was very pleasant, but was very
strange to me the way she was floating around, you
know, and everything. There is another strange thing
happened, too, with that Yaeko.
Mr. JENNER. Involving the Oswalds?
Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. Yes.
Mr. JENNER. Tell us.
Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. That was very funny because
they practically spent all evening together at that party,
and Marina was furious, of course, about it. And the
party that brought Yaeko to the party [Aronson] was
furious about it, too, and I don’t blame him for it. And
from what I understand, Marina told me that Oswald
saw Yaeko after, which was very unusual, because I
don’t think Oswald wanted to see anyone, let’s put it
that way. He would rather just sit by himself and –
locked, in a house, not to see anyone. And, in fact,
Marina was jealous of it, from Yaeko. She was the only
person we know that Oswald really liked................
Mr. JENNER. How, otherwise, did Oswald act at this
Christmas party. He paid a great deal of attention,
apparently, to ––
Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. Yes; they talk, talk, talk, talk,
talk.
Mr. JENNER. To the Japanese girl?
Mrs. De MOHRENSCHILDT. Yes; what did they talk about,
I don’t have slightest idea. But everybody remarked and
we were laughing about it. We were teasing Marina how
he had a little Japanese girl now, you now. That was
just as fun, of course, you know. But evidently they not
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only talked because she [Marina] said he saw her later
and he liked her. That is what she told me. He really
liked Yaeko.
This then is the meeting that Epstein implies had some exotic
espionage overture as Oswald and Okui conversed in both
English and Russian ‘with equal ease’. Recall that Legend has
already given us a beautiful high-class Japanese bar girl
operating out of a luxurious KGB-run club in Tokyo, and a
mysterious ‘Eurasian’ or half-White Russian beauty that
tutored Oswald in Russian in Iwakuni. Epstein now gives us
the exotic Miss Okui. Yet as is clear from the testimony of the
de Mohrenschildts, at no point do they (or any other witness)
mention that Okui spoke any Russian at all, much less fluent
Russian. Once again, Epstein has concocted his very own
legend.
The puzzle of Legend
Legend relentlessly promoted the thesis that the KGB had
some sinister connection to Oswald that began in Japan.
Although Legend’s attempt to show such a link was woefully
inept, it does not therefore mean that the KGB had not
contacted Oswald. The most telling evidence for a possible
KGB link to Oswald comes not from imaginary encounters at
the Tokyo Queen Bee but from Oswald’s reported encounters
with members of the Japanese Communist Party, as reported
by George de Morenschildt, as well as his attempt to learn
Russian while still in Japan. If the Soviets saw Oswald as a
potential infiltrator into the Marines, his actions in El Toro
suggest this was almost certainly not the case. If the KGB had
some hook into Oswald, the last thing the Soviets would have
wanted would have been for Oswald to openly receive
Communist publications and make provocative political
remarks favoring Castro.
The more exaggerated claims Legend makes for Oswald
as a Soviet superspy, the more absurd the book becomes. Let
us, however, suspend disbelief and accept Legend’s premise
that Oswald managed to steal U-2 secrets (or any vital military
secrets) while in the Far East and pass them onto his KGB
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handler. Oswald’s very public defection to then USSR – not to
mention the fact that he told the U.S. Embassy that he
intended to give the Soviets military secrets – would have
insured that the U.S. would have had to make an assessment
of any potential damage Oswald may have inflicted and
implement immediate counter-measures. Therefore the more
valuable the information Oswald possessed, the more the
Soviets would have opposed any public defection. Oswald
would have been a far more effective KGB asset if, after
leaving the military, he worked in some minor job in America.
After a successful Soviet downing of a U-2, he could have gone
to the USSR and received a hero’s welcome. Yet none of this
happened.
Yet another espionage scenario would have Oswald
prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies while he was in Japan
as a future ‘false defector’ sent into the Soviet Union either to
feed the Soviets deceptive information or to carry out some
yet unknown task behind the Iron Curtain. As we know now,
the Soviets never trusted Oswald; the MVD (the Soviet version
of the FBI) kept him under continual surveillance, both in
Moscow and Minsk. If Oswald were a ‘controlled defector’,
perhaps he did secretly go to either Iwakuni or Tokyo (or
Miami Beach for that matter) and was there introduced to a
Russian tutor as part of a planned defection. Since Legend is
such a hopeless muddle, it is impossible to trust it as a serious
examination of Oswald’s actions in Japan either as a KGB
recruit or as a controlled defector.
Legend could make its claims in large part because there
supposedly does not exist any American counter-intelligence
investigation of Oswald following his defection. Epstein,
unfortunately, only references this critical issue in two
endnotes that appear one after the other:
‘The official record of this investigation [of Oswald
following his defection] remains missing or at least
unavailable. The FBI inquired about it shortly after the
assassination but apparently never received it or, in any
event, never turned it over to the Warren Commission.
In the course of my research, the Marine Corps, which
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was otherwise extremely co-operative, searched its files
but found no trace of the investigation. The Office of
Naval Intelligence and the Naval Investigative Services
replied to my Freedom of Information request by stating
that the report of the investigation was not in their files.
The CIA has also denied to me that it conducted such an
investigation. Finally, the Air Force Office of Special
Investigations, which was responsible for base security
at Atsugi, also denied partaking in any such
investigation.’
In his next endnote on the same page, Epstein writes:
‘The practice of doing net damage reports also persisted
immediately after Oswald defected. An Army sergeant
defected in July 1960, and an Army private defected in
August 1960. Army counterintelligence suspected both
had had prior dealings with the KGB while serving in the
Army, and both were under military investigation at the
time of their defection. The two defectors from the
National Security Agency [Mitchell and Martin] in June
1960 were also suspected of having had prior KGB
connections. Indeed, in all military cases where
defectors had access to classified information – except
for the Oswald case – there was some indication of a
pre-defection relation with the KGB, though since Soviet
records are never available, such contact is never
positively established.’ (Epstein p. 293)
If there had been an extensive investigation of Oswald’s
activities in Japan, why has it never been made public? How
can there be no record that American intelligence ever
questioned Oswald following his return to America? The CIA’s
Domestic Division regularly interviewed business executives,
tourists, academics, and other Americans who had spent time
in Russia. Yet no one thought to question Lee Harvey Oswald?
For all its flaws, Legend finally does raise a vital question
directly related to Oswald’s stay in Japan – and then buries it
in two endnotes.
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Part two
The Mitchell/Martin affair
Given Legend’s distortions of Oswald’s experiences in Japan, it
is almost impossible to offer any serious overview of Oswald’s
stay in the Far East. Yet Oswald’s October 1959 defection – if
genuine – would almost certainly have raised a host of
intelligence red flags. To understand why, we must look at the
most famous defector case of this period, the Mitchell-Martin
affair. Not long after Oswald defected to Russia, a remarkable
spy saga shook America’s espionage establishment when two
civilian employees of the military’s ultra-secret National
Security Agency (NSA) showed up in Moscow. The scandal and
its similarities to the Oswald saga once again suggest how
unlikely it is that the American government had no interest in
investigating Oswald’s past.
In mid-October 1959, Lee Harvey Oswald crossed the
border from Finland to Russia. Then on 6 September 1960, two
former National Security Agency (NSA) employees named
Bernon Mitchell and William Martin held a press conference in
Moscow. The two mathematician/cryptographers formally
announced their defection.2 2 As it so happened, the two men
had earlier worked at the U.S. military base at Atsugi, Japan.
At their Moscow press conference, Mitchell and Martin
denounced the U.S. government’s policy of sending military
aircraft over the Soviet Union’s borders to gather electronic
information on Soviet defenses. They said that while working
for the NSA, they learned about ELINT (electronic intelligence)
missions where planes deliberately crossed the Soviet border.
The planes gathered information to develop new radarjamming devices that could be deployed from American bases
close to the Russian border. Such devices, they argued, would
only be used if the United States were planning a possible
nuclear first strike attack. As they explained in their press
22 On the defection, see Wayne Barker and Rodney Coffman, The
Anatomy of Two Traitors: The Defections of Bernon F. Mitchell and William
H. Martin (Laguna Hills, CA: Aegean Park Press, 1981). Unfortunately
this short book is amateurish in the extreme.
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conference:
‘It should be clear even to a layman that information
about radar defenses has no bearing whatsoever on the
problem of ascertaining whether or not the Soviet Union
is preparing for a surprise attack. This information can be
utilized only for the purpose of determining the defense
potential of the Soviet Union.’ 2 3
Another terrifying prospect was that the USSR would misread
an American incursion into Soviet airspace as part of planned
U.S. first strike: ‘A single incident or misinterpretation
concerning the purpose of planes involved in these flights
could be the cause of war,’ they warned. The two men then
cited a statement by Thomas Powers, the Commander of the
U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC). During a discussion of the
military budget, Powers told the House Committee on
Appropriations about
‘....the tremendous advantages that accrue to the man
who starts a war. You always must have a capability to
strike first, because obviously if these people thought
we never could start a war, why then they could just
take this world away from us piece by piece, because
they would know that as long as they do not strike us,
we could never do anything about it.’
At their press conference, Mitchell and Martin reported that on
2 September 1958 a MIG-17 aircraft shot down an American C130 plane out of Turkey crammed with NSA spy gear. The
plane crash-landed in Soviet Armenia, killing all 17 crew
members. Eleven of the dead were members of the Air Force
Security Service, the Air Force wing of the NSA.
In a prelude to President Eisenhower’s fateful decision
to lie about the true nature of the U-2 after Gary Power’s U-2
was shot down over the Soviet Union on 1 May 1960, the U.S.
government claimed the C-130 was on a scientific information
gathering flight that accidentally wandered off course when
the Soviets shot it down without provocation. Minnesota
23 For the full text of the Moscow press conference, see
<https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/60th/interactive_time
line/Content/1960s/media/19600701_MitchellandMartin.pdf>
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Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey publicly denounced the
Soviet Union for what he claimed was an unprovoked attack.
Knowing better, Mitchell and Martin arranged a meeting with
Congressman Wayne Hays, an Ohio Democrat, to tell him that
the government lied to Congress. They said that during their
meeting with Hays:
‘Our conversation was interrupted when the
Congressman received a telephone call from the
Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional
Relations, Mr. William Macomber, who requested him
to refrain from further public discussion of the C-130
incident. Again, it is clear that if this plane had been
engaged solely in gathering scientific information, the
State Department would have had no reason to be
concerned.’
Prelude to defection: Kamiseya station
Mitchell and Martin first met in the Navy and both served from
1951 to 1954. After enlisting, the Navy assigned them to the
Naval Security Group (the naval wing of the NSA) as
‘communication technicians’. They recalled that they had
‘served.....at several United States naval radio intercept
stations during this period.’ The key station, however, was the
Naval Support Station in Kamiseya, Japan, where they were
stationed from 1952 to 1954. Kamiseya Station was a
detachment from the U.S. Naval Facility at Atsugi, Japan. (The
station was located just three miles north of the main base at
Atsugi.)
Mitchell and Martin described Kamiseya Station this way:
‘The United States Government has recently admitted
carrying out intelligence flights around and over the
borders of Communist nations only during the last four
years. However, we would like to state that these flights
were also being conducted in the period 1952-54, when
we were serving at a United States naval radio intercept
station at Kamiseya, Japan, near Yokohama.
In advance of a reconnaissance flight of a United
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States military plane along the Chinese or Soviet Far
Eastern borders, a top-secret message would be sent to
Kamiseya and other communications intelligence
stations, informing them as to the flight time and course
of the plane.
At the designated flight time, monitors at these
stations would tune in on the frequencies used by radar
reporting stations of the target country, i.e., the Soviet
Union or Communist China. At the same time, radio
direction finders would tune in on these frequencies to
seek out the locations of the radar reporting stations.
Information gathered in this manner would then be
forwarded to the National Security Agency. There,
analysts study the communications and code systems
used by the radar stations. NSA is then able to estimate
the degree of alertness, accuracy and efficiency of the
radar defenses of the target nation, and it is also able
to collect information about the organization of
command within the target nation’s internal defense
system.’
Although the two men became good friends, they went their
separate ways after the service. While Mitchell returned to
America, Martin – enamoured of Japanese culture – stayed on
as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army until mid-1955. They
then began advanced academic studies in mathematics back in
America. Martin also took up Russian. Independently recruited
into the NSA in 1957, they quickly resumed their friendship. For
their part, NSA recruiters looked very favorably on both men.
Besides being gifted mathematicians, they already had served
as enlisted men in a top NSA listening post at Kamiseya
Station, where they held high security clearances.
After joining the NSA, Mitchell and Martin learned of a
kind of incursion into Soviet air defenses unlike the flights they
monitored in Japan that saw fighter jets cross the borders of
both Russia and China. The high-risk ELINT missions, instead,
flew ‘in the immediate proximity of radar installations of the
Soviet Union and other countries to obtain data about the
physical nature of radiations from radar transmitters.’
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In December 1959, Mitchell and Martin visited Fidel
Castro’s Havana by way of Mexico City. While in Mexico City,
Mitchell reportedly contacted the Soviet Embassy and
requested political asylum. Although the Soviets tried to
persuade him to return to Washington as a ‘mole’ inside the
NSA, Mitchell insisted he wanted to defect.
Less than a year later, on 25 June 1960, Mitchell and
Martin flew from Washington to Mexico City, then to Havana,
and from there to the USSR where they were granted asylum
on 11 August 1960. Less than a month later, they held their
Moscow press conference and made their defection public.
Mitchell and Martin defected to the Soviet Union less
than a year after Oswald. All of them worked in
communications at Atsugi: Oswald in a relatively low security
Marine MACS air control unit, Mitchell and Martin in the NSA’s
top-secret Naval Security Group at Kamiseya Station. Given
the Atsugi link, might not the government at least try to
determine if all three men had been compromised by a larger
Soviet intelligence operation in Japan?
Investigating Mitchell-Martin
The Mitchell-Martin defection was a tremendous shock to the
NSA, which launched an internal investigation that involved
speaking to some 450 witnesses. The FBI, the CIA, and
military intelligence all worked the case. The inquiry included a
microscopic look of both men’s earlier experiences in Japan. To
illustrate the lengths the CIA went to investigate a possible
Japan-KGB connection, on 23 December 1960, a top CIA official
named William K. Harvey submitted a report on Mitchell-Martin
to the FBI. By then the government knew that Martin was a
hardcore sexual masochist. One of women he turned to fulfil
his needs was a prominent Baltimore stripper named ‘Lady
Zorro’ (Shelia Bowater) whom the FBI interrogated.2 4
Harvey, however, was more interested in another
woman friend of Martin’s named Ardelle Gasda (or Kasda),
24 Movie director John Waters has written a portrait of Lady Zorro in
his 2011 book Role Models although he had no idea of her connection
to the Mitchell-Martin affair.
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who met Martin at the Lord Baltimore Hotel on 28 February
and 1 March 1959. Martin told Gasda his sexual preferences
included being burnt on his arms with lit cigarettes. When
Gasda reportedly protested that such conduct was ‘an
Oriental practice’, and American girls ‘were not of that type’,
Martin told her that he once had a Japanese girlfriend but that
his new girlfriend was an American showgirl who had worked
in night-clubs like the Latin Quarter and the Copacabana. This
showgirl was the ‘donor’ of ‘the chain-linked manacles’ that
Martin showed to Gasda.
Gasda assumed that Martin had referred to two famous
New York night-clubs when he mentioned the Copacabana
and the Latin Quarter. Harvey, however, wanted the FBI to reinterview Gasda because he said that there were two nightclubs in Tokyo also called the Latin Quarter and the
Copacabana. Harvey believed both clubs might have Soviet
connections via the murky world of organized crime.
An ex-OSS man named Al Shattuck ran the Tokyo Latin
Quarter. Shattuck, in turn, fronted for another American
investor in the club named Ted Lewin, whom Harvey described
as ‘the kingpin of vice and crime in the Orient’. Lewin and
Shattuck imported American showgirls to work at their clubs in
Japan. On 1 July 1960, Shattuck voluntarily left Japan to avoid
deportation over a jewel theft. Allegations in the Japanese
press (the English-language Asahi Evening News in particular)
suggested Shattuck may have been involved in a supposed
Soviet spy ring thought linked to a Greek businessman in
Japan named ‘George Peris’ (George Peristeropoulos).
Whether the jewel thief story had been planted in the press
to force Shattuck out of Tokyo remains an open question.
As for Shattuck’s partner Ted Lewin, he was born
Theodore Lieweraenowski. A former boxer, the mob sent
Lewin to the Far East where he served as the syndicate’s
Asian Meyer Lansky. Captured by the Japanese after the
invasion of the Philippines, Lewin ran gambling operations
even in jail. He later became part of a Murder Incorporatedstyle outfit set up by top McArthur aide named General Charles
Willoughby who ran Army Intelligence (G-2) during the U.S.
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occupation of Japan. He worked closely with a far right
Japanese criminal named Yoshio Kodama and the ‘Canon
Agency’ or ‘Z Unit’ which employed yakuza criminals to attack
leftists. Willoughby also maintained close ties to the far right
Hattori Organization, which was involved in planning for the
military rearmament of Japan as well as spying on the
Japanese Communist Party.25
By now a top syndicate figure who travelled the globe,
Lewin often operated out of Manila where he was on very
close terms with Philippine President Carlos Garcia, A kingpin
of crime, he proved very active in the Caribbean as well. In
1958, for example, he worked with a top Washington public
relations man and lobbyist named I. (Isaac) Irving Davidson to
broker a weapons shipment to Israel that also involved
Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic.
On 9 September 1961, yet another club with suspected
Soviet connections, whose Japanese name translates as
‘Tomorrow Is Too Late’, also came into play. William Martin
apparently had met a Japanese hostess at that club named
Noriko Matsutakaya. A CIA source now suggested:
‘....that MARTIN’s introduction to the fine art of
masochistic torture by an unidentified Japanese female,
as reported by Mrs. Ardelle GASDA to FBI agents, may
have been effected at or through his patronage of the
“Tomorrow Is Too Late” Club to which he may well have
been taken or introduced by his friend PERIS. This
possibility, however, is subject to further investigation.’
What is so revealing for our purpose in the Mitchell/Martin
defection is the depth of the CIA’s investigation. The CIA even
tried to identify the Japanese woman who may have first
initiated Martin into sadomasochism in the mid-1950s. Yet no
U.S. intelligence agency investigated Oswald’s defection just
months earlier? Oswald’s defection, after all, would be
analogous to a Russian military technician who had spent two
25 For an overview of early American intelligence operations in postwar Japan, see Tessa Morris-Suzuki, ‘Democracy’s Porous Borders:
Espionage, Smuggling and the Making of Japan’s Transwar Regime’ in
The Asia-Pacific Journal, 41/12 at <http://japanfocus.org/-TessaMorris_Suzuki/4201/article.html>.
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years at one of those radar bases ELINT flights tried to
monitor walking into an American Embassy and offering to tell
the CIA everything he knew about Russian radar and
communication systems. Would not the KGB then try to
investigate just why one of their radar operators suddenly
chose to defect as well as the secrets he might have
betrayed?
To ask the question is to answer it.
Conclusion: Popov’s ghost?
Finally, we must conclude with the Popov affair.
In his 1986 book Mayday on the U-2 affair, historian
Michael Beschloss devotes a brief discussion to the notion that
Lee Harvey Oswald may have given Russia information that
led to the shoot down of Francis Gary Powers. Hedging his
bets, Beschloss suggests that perhaps Oswald did have some
information on the U-2 but he concludes by citing Richard
Bissell, the CIA leader who oversaw the U-2 program, as
saying ‘I don’t think Oswald could have told them much they
didn’t already know.’ However, Beschloss does report
something quite extraordinary when he writes:
‘In early 1959, the CIA learned from Pyotr Popov, one of
its prize moles in Soviet military intelligence, that the
Russians had amassed much information about the U-2.
“It brought me right out of my seat,” Richard Helms
recalled. “Bissell and I wondered where they could be
getting their information from.” Before Popov could tell
them, he was captured while passing notes to an
American on a Moscow bus and executed.’ (p. 236)
In early 1959, Lee Harvey Oswald had just returned from
Japan and was stationed at the Marine facility in El Toro. It
was also in early 1959 that Oswald began to extravagantly
praise Castro and promote himself as some kind of oddball
leftist Russophile. At no time did Oswald do anything similar
while he was in Japan. In short, Oswald’s career as a radical
eccentric really seems to have begun in California and not in
Japan.
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If Oswald were a controlled defector on some kind of
intelligence mission, it may well be that planning for the
mission only got underway in early 1959 in the wake of the
Popov revelations. Oswald’s time in Japan, then, may be
largely irrelevant to his subsequent adventures in the Soviet
Union even if we assume that some government intelligence
agency conceived of sending Oswald on a controlled defector
mission to the Soviets in the wake of the Popov revelations.
Finally, there is always the possibility that while
stationed in Japan, Oswald met members of the pro-Moscow
wing of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) as George de
Mohrenschildt informed the Warren Commission. Oswald had
been fascinated by communism via classic Cold War TV shows
such as I Led Three Lives, which he regularly watched with his
mother in New Orleans.
Recall that on 23 April 1964, Lee Harvey Oswald’s Dallas
companion George de Mohrenschildt testified before the
Warren Commission and briefly mentioned what Oswald told
him about his experience in Japan.
Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT. A few words I remember now.
He said that while he was in Japan he saw tremendous
injustice. By that he meant, I think, the poverty of the
Japanese working class or the proletariat, as he called
them, and the rich people in Japan. He said it was more
visible than anywhere else.....And he also told me that
he had some contacts with the Japanese Communists in
Japan, and they – that got him interested to go and see
what goes on in the Soviet Union.
Mr. JENNER. Just concentrate on this, please.....You said
he had some contacts with the Communists in Japan
Now, try and recall what he said or as near.......
Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT. That is all I recall – that he
said, ‘I have met some Communists in Japan and they
got me excited and interested, and that was one of my
inducements in going to Soviet Russia, to see what goes
on there.’
Oswald could very well have met members of the Japanese
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Communist Party (JCP). Although bitterly divided between
supporters of Moscow and Beijing, the JCP was extremely
active in major Japanese cities and towns. As an American GI,
Oswald was very visible and it would not be surprising if he at
least had some conversations with Japanese Communists.2 6
There were also strong left-wing student protests against the
American military presence in Japan that in 1960 culminated in
huge street protests against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan
Security Treaty, demonstrations that forced President Dwight
D. Eisenhower to cancel a planned visit to Japan and toppled
Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi’s government.
If George de Mohrenschildt’s memory is correct (and
Oswald wasn’t lying to him), Oswald’s interest in the Soviet
Union and his ultimate decision to defect to Moscow may have
begun with a seemingly chance encounter in Japan and there
is no need to discover an elaborate KGB or CIA plot to explain
his actions. Perhaps Oswald’s strange story really began with
a casual street corner encounter with a JCP member and had
absolutely nothing to do with U-2s, KGB bar girls, ‘controlled
defectors’, and the larger and seemingly endless Cold War
machinations of both Moscow and Washington. Perhaps the
truth, then, is just this simple, so simple in fact that we will
never know it.
Postscript
Angleton, Epstein, and the creation of Legend
Some background on how Legend came about is worth noting
since Reader’s Digest, a conservative publication known for its
sympathetic coverage of the CIA, heavily bankrolled it. In 1974
Reader’s Digest published John Barron’s book KGB: The Secret
Work of Soviet Secret Agents, a book that caused the KGB
considerable harm when Barron publicly identified numerous
26 By the time Oswald arrived in Japan, the new Soviet government
under Khrushchev was actively pursuing a policy of ‘peaceful
coexistence’ with the West. Beijing, however, rejected any such
overtures. It would make some sense that the pro-Moscow wing of the
JCP might be willing to talk with Americans about changing the
dynamics of the Cold War.
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KGB agents operating in foreign nations.2 7
Reader’s Digest next contracted Epstein to write what
became Legend at a time when the CIA was under intense
scrutiny for a series of illegal activities, most famously a CIAMafia plot to kill Fidel Castro. The political climate led to
investigations by the Senate Church Committee and the
creation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations
(HSCA). The CIA was understandably sensitive about claims
that the Agency had anything to do with Kennedy’s
assassination, claims that the CIA saw as deliberately fuelled
in part by KGB disinformation operations against its chief
intelligence rival.
Showing its intention to cooperate with the new Reader’s
Digest project, the CIA gave Epstein access to a controversial
former KGB agent in the hope that Epstein would support the
CIA’s official view that the KGB had nothing at all to do with
Kennedy’s assassination. Yet if that was the CIA’s intent,
Epstein sorely disappointed the Agency. In a post-Watergate
nation deeply cynical about government cover-ups, Legend
offered its own version of a government deception; namely,
the CIA’s reliance on a false Soviet ‘defector’ who claimed the
KGB never even bothered to interrogate Oswald after his
defection.
In 1964, a second-tier KGB officer named Yuri Nosenko
defected to the United States. Nosenko raised eyebrows
when he claimed, among other things, that the KGB did not
interview Oswald about any military secrets he might have
brought with him to Russia. Nosenko said that he had worked
for the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate’s (SCD) American
section that tried to recruit U.S. Embassy personnel as well as
27 John Barron, KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents (New
York: Readers Digest Press/distributed by E.P. Dutton, 1974). Barron’s
book was most likely in part retaliation for the KGB sponsorship of
Julius Mader’s book Who’s Who in the CIA (East Berlin, 1968).
For the impact the Barron book had inside the KGB, see Oleg
Nechiporenko, Passport to Assassination: The Never-Before-Told Story of
Lee Harvey Oswald by the KGB Colonel Who Knew Him (New York: Birch
Lane Press, 1993). Nechiporenko writes, ‘My personal opinion is that
Barron’s work can be called the most successful active measure taken
by the CIA against our service in many years. As a result, the KGB
suffered a significant loss of morale.’ (p. 299)
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tourists visiting the USSR. Nosenko further stated that he had
access to KGB files on Oswald and that the KGB had no
interest in Oswald.
After Epstein interviewed Nosenko for some six hours,
he recalled:
‘I found several of the assertions he made about the
KGB’s treatment of Oswald inconsistent with other
evidence furnished the Warren Commission. Even
though I was assured by his CIA handlers that he was
utterly reliable on the subject, and had full access to
KGB records, as he claimed, I was not completely
satisfied. His insistence that the KGB had never
contacted Oswald during his stay in the Soviet Union
seemed implausible since Oswald had loudly advertised
on his arrival there that he had some secret information
of special interest to the Soviet Union.’ 28
It was just these doubts that led Epstein to James Jesus
Angleton, the legendary, long-time head of CIA CounterIntelligence who was forced to resign from the CIA in early
1975 by the Agency’s new director William Colby. Angleton
concluded that Nosenko was a Soviet ‘double agent’, a false
defector sent by Moscow to confuse American intelligence
about KGB operations in general and Lee Harvey Oswald in
particular. Angleton and Epstein met for the first time in
February 1976 and the two men remained in close contact
until Angleton’s death on 14 May 1987.
Nor was Angleton alone in his suspicions. Some highranking members of the CIA’s Soviet Division voiced similar
doubts. One of Nosenko’s fiercest critics was a Soviet Division
officer named Tennent ‘Pete’ Bagley, who had first helped to
recruit Nosenko as a CIA asset a few years before Nosenko
fled to the West. After Bagley retired from the CIA, Epstein
interviewed him at the recommendation of former CIA Director
Richard Helms. Bagley also submitted a long statement to the
HSCA on 11 October 1978 and he testified before the HSCA on
16 November 1978 to refute the CIA party line that Nosenko
28 For Epstein’s recollections, see his 2013 e-book entitled James
Jesus Angleton: Was He Right? (EJE Publications).
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was a reliable defector. In 2007, Yale published Bagley’s book
Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games where Bagley
recalls:
‘As we questioned Nosenko about President Kennedy’s
assassination, it was becoming even more likely that his
story was a message from the Kremlin to reassure the
American government that the KGB had not commanded
the deed. That message might well be true, but Nosenko
was wildly exaggerating the KGB’s indifference to
Oswald. He was saying and repeating (with claimed but
unlikely authority) that neither the KGB nor GRU had paid
the slightest attention to this, their first Marine defector
who moreover had been a radar operator at a U-2 spy
plane base in Japan and was eager to help the Soviets
in any way he could. This tale was so hard to believe
that it might cause someone to jump to the conclusion
that Nosenko was covering up a contrary truth – that
the KGB did form some relationship with Oswald and
that the Soviet Politburo really did order JFK’s
assassination.’ (Bagley p. 178)
How could the KGB and GRU not be interested in what Oswald
apparently was willing to volunteer about American radar and
air control installations? At the very least, the Soviets would
want to determine if Oswald was himself a ‘controlled
defector’.
Years later, the KGB’s Colonel Nechiporenko admitted
that the Soviets did in fact place Oswald in its highest suspect
category as a possible American agent. Contrary to Nosenko’s
claims about Soviet disinterest in Oswald, they kept him under
close surveillance and extensively bugged his Minsk
apartment.2 9 In the Nosenko chapter of his book Passport to
29 Colonel Nechiporenko, for example, writes, ‘It may also seem
utter nonsense or an attempt by the KGB to deceive the Central
Committee of the Communist Party......that the KGB has no interest in
an individual who was watched closely for suspected espionage ties for
more than two years and who was the subject of eight months of
correspondence between various internal and foreign agencies.’ (p.
111). On the Soviet extensive surveillance of Oswald in Minsk in
particular, see Peter Savodnik, Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald inside the
Soviet Union (New York: Basic Books, 2013).
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Assassination, Nechiporenko even obliquely admits that the
KGB did question Oswald when he writes, ‘Oswald was never
interrogated by the KGB, only debriefed by KGB officers who
appeared to him as employees of other organizations. There is
a great difference.’ 30 In brief then, there were many reasons
to question aspects of Nosenko’s testimony about Oswald’s
time in the Soviet Union. In reading Legend today, it is
important to understand the broader battle inside the CIA.3 1
The debate over Nosenko’s credibility, however, has no
direct bearing on Epstein’s belief that Oswald began working
with the KGB in Japan. Yet if Epstein did find proof of an
Oswald connection to the Soviets while in Japan, such a
revelation would obviously further discredit Nosenko. Epstein’s
desire to debunk Nosenko and prove Angleton right may well
explain why Epstein so feverishly tried to argue the case that
30 Nechiporenko (see note 27) p. 247.
31 Angleton’s reputation has come under relentless attack, most
recently at a 29 March 2012 conference sponsored by the Woodrow
Wilson Center and the Georgetown University Center for Security
Studies entitled Moles, Defectors and Deceptions: James Angleton and His
Influence on US Counterintelligence. At the conference, which was heavily
stacked against Angleton, Epstein was one of the few participants who
spoke in favor of him.
In the ‘small world’ department, Angleton helped oversee the
CIA liaison to the Warren Commission that included his close friend
and former boss, Allen Dulles. Angleton’s top aide Ray Rocca worked
closely with the Warren Commission as well. Either Angleton or Rocca
appears in Legend in a disguised way in an endnote when Epstein
writes:
‘In May 1975, the former CIA liaison with the Warren
Commission prepared a memorandum for the Commission on
CIA Activities within the United States headed by Nelson A.
Rockefeller on his assessment of what areas involving possible
foreign conspiracies in the assassination of President Kennedy
the Warren Commission had failed to explore. He noted that
“such evidence could exist in Moscow and/or in Havana, whose
voluntary inputs to the Warren Commission were minimal in
quantity and quality, designed to cover up any admissions of
knowledge of, or connection with, Oswald......” Therefore, the
belief that there was a Soviet and/or Cuban (KGB and/or DGI)
connection with Oswald will persist and grow until there has been
a full disclosure by these governments of all elements of
Oswald’s handling and stay in the Soviet Union and his contacts
in Mexico City. The Warren Commission report should have left
a wider “window” for this contingency.’ (Epstein p. 286)
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Oswald was spying for the Soviets while he was stationed in
Japan.
Kevin Coogan is the author of Dreamer of the Day:
Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist
International (New York: Autonomedia, 1999).
He is currently working on a study of Marx,
Russia and the 19th ‘Great Game’.
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Inside Lee Harvey Oswald’s address book
Anthony Frewin
In chapter three of Jeffrey H. Caulfield’s monumental work on
General Walker1 (yes, that General Walker) and the
background to JFK’s assassination he notes that the following
was found in Lee Harvey Oswald’s address book by the FBI
shortly after his arrest in November 1963 (styling as original):
NAT. SEC. DAN BURROS
LINCOLN ROCKWELL
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
AMERICAN
NAZi PARTY
(AMER. NATIONAL PARTY)
Hollis sec. oF Queens
N.Y.
(NEWSPAPER)
NAT. Socialist Bulletin.
Caulfield writes that ‘the information contained in Oswald’s
notation was so obscure that it would have had to come from
either Burros or someone close to him’. Well, not necessarily.
So, who was Burros? Caulfield says that Burros had left
the American Nazi Party in 1961 after a disagreement with
George Lincoln Rockwell in order to start a rival group, though
two years later they had made up and were friends again.
Burros was prominent and active in American Nazi and far right
politics, and had served in the US army under General Walker.
Burros’ splinter group was actually the American
Nationalist [sic] Party and according to Caulfield never
1 Monumental indeed. Almost one thousand pages. Jeffrey H.
Caulfield M.D., General Walker and the Murder of President Kennedy
(Moreland Hills, Ohio: Moreland Press, 2015). The entry in LHO’s
address book is reproduced on p. 75. The work is available from
amazon and from the author’s web page:
<http://jeffreycaufield.com/>.
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numbered more than six people. It operated from a ‘one-room
wooden shanty’ in the Hollins section of the New York borough
of Queens.
The bulletin noted at the end of the address book entry
is the National Socialist Bulletin that was George Lincoln
Rockwell’s main serial publication.
Caulfield further notes that for Oswald to have this
address he ‘would have been close to either Burros or one of
his associates’. However, that is not the case. Oswald’s
source had been discovered some sixteen years before by
Kevin Coogan in his study of Francis Parker Yockey, and it was
in the pages of The Worker, the American Communist Party
paper, where a front-page story was headlined, ‘American
Nazis Establish Their National Headquarters in Queens’ (it got
some facts wrong, like claiming it was Rockwell’s party not a
breakaway group).2
The agencies charged with investigating the JFK
assassination together with the various governmental
inquiries have been remarkably uninterested in Oswald’s
address book, and the Warren Commission, despite
reproducing the address book in the volumes of Hearings and
Exhibits (Exhibit 18 in Volume XVI), notably so.
Now, why were these details in the address book?
Caulfield argues that it was because of Oswald’s involvement
in the fascist far right, while Coogan says a photo in The
Worker would have been of interest to Oswald as it showed
Burros and his Nazi pals on a ‘Hate Bus’ trip to the Deep South
opposing desegregation where, according to The Worker,
Burros was arrested in New Orleans (he wasn’t), a city where
Oswald had spent much of his life and, thus, was nostalgically
interested. Coogan goes on to say that when this issue of The
Worker appeared Oswald was then living in Minsk and he was
given the paper by the Russian Red Cross or ‘the local CP
apparat’ or ‘he simply read it in a local library’. This all seems a
little unlikely.
Neither of these explanations cut the mustard, though, I
2 Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the
Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1999), pps.
616-7.
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must add, that I’ve only just started Caulfield’s book and, to
be fair to him, he may adduce more convincing arguments
further on.
Oswald’s address book presents a lifetime’s study for
anyone seeking to analyse and understand it.
The entire address book (in colour yet, Oswald used
different coloured inks) is available here on a site put up by A.
J. (Allan) Weberman: <http://www.theoswaldcode.com/>.
Weberman’s name probably rings a bell. He was the coauthor of the JFK assassination book Coup d'état in America
back in 1975 that, if I’m not mistaken, was the first use of the
term coup d'état in connection with the assassination and reframed a lot of thinking about the event.3
He may also be recalled as the originator of ‘garbology’,
principally rooting through Bob Dylan’s dustbins, and compiling
a 500-page concordance of Dylan’s songs in his guise as a
‘Dylanologist’. There’s a lot of him on YouTube.
3 A J Weberman and Michael Canfield, Coup d'état in America: The CIA
and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York: Third Press, 1975).
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Blair Inc.
Francis Beckett, David Hencke and Nick Kochan
London: John Blake, 2015, £20.00, h/b
O ne of the two reported contributions Tony Blair made to
Labour’s 2015 election campaign was a speech in support of
the European Union. In April the former leader said: ‘The
referendum will, for the first time since we joined Europe after
years of trying unsuccessfully to do so, put exit on the
agenda.’
Most Britons were not electors in 1975 and so have
never had a say on what was then the Common Market and is
now the European Union. This perceived illegitimacy was
acknowledged by the Conservatives, Greens and UKIP who all
offered voters on May 7 the opportunity of a referendum. But
not Labour, which hardly mentioned the EU in the campaign,
leaving it to Blair to bang the Brussels drum.
The former Prime Minister’s other campaign bestowal
was £1,000 to candidates in target seats. Some refused Blair’s
cash, with Sophie Gardner, Gloucester hopeful and a former
RAF officer, saying it would be ‘hypocritical’ for her to accept Mr
Blair’s donation because of her decision to criticise the Iraq
war.
Europe and money are two of the big themes of Blair
Inc., a conscientious effort by Francis Beckett, David Hencke
and Nick Kochan to uncover the New Labour leader’s activities
post No. 10: Europe because the authors claim that Blair still
longs for a world role, one the European presidency would
provide; and money because they say he has made rather a
lot of it since 2007.
It was an old American friend who first alerted me to the
Blair family’s fondness for the folding stuff. After seeing Cherie
being interviewed on US TV soon after Tony became Labour
leader, she told me: ‘My mother had a phrase for people like
her – “She’ll go grasping into the grave”.’ Twenty years later,
the authors of Blair Inc. tell us that the couple now own 36
properties. Their portfolio includes the former Bucks home of
Sir John Gielgud that the couple acquired for a reported £4m in
2008 as a sort of personal Chequers. As far as Beckett,
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Hencke and Kochan can establish, given the complexity and
secrecy that surrounds his affairs, Blair himself is now worth
around £60m.
In books and articles written over many years this trio
have a good record of illuminating dark places. But despite all
their experience and persistence they still found it hard to
uncover exactly what the former New Labour prime minister
has been up since he left No. 10 in 2007. With few exceptions,
those who have worked or currently work for Blair did not
respond to their inquiries. Most of his former colleagues follow
the same pattern of omerta, former Home Secretary Charles
Clarke aggressively so.
The Blairs’ financial interests seem to be arranged to
defy scrutiny, hidden in part behind the pious façade of the
Tony Blair Faith Foundation (TBBF). In its own self-description,
‘TBBF is a “think-do” tank, meaning that all of our entire
intellectual content is supported by practical delivery on
the ground and that all our practical delivery is
supported by a robust and intellectually grounded
theory of change.’
All clear?
From the golden days when Blair was regarded by many
inside and outside Labour as the charismatic shoe-in to follow
John Smith as leader, he has become a toxic presence with a
legacy his successors still find difficult to live with. His years in
charge – control freakery by a small clique with a largely
supportive press better describes it – saw falling party
membership and morale alongside a wider loss of trust in
politicians and the democratic process, all to a background of
war and conflict. A Blair premiership many saw founded on
hope ended with support for the old Cold War/Neocon gang of
the Bushes, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Greenspan and
Wolfowitz. It was during those years that many activists in
Scotland left Labour to put their energies into the SNP, with
results now self-evident.
Post-1997 the authors trace a dismal pattern of lucrative
speechmaking, advisory posts, property acquisition and
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endless jetting around the world. Previous prime ministers
have made money after No. 10, with Blair’s predecessor John
Major adding board membership of the sinister Carlyle Group
to his well-endowed portfolio. Labour’s last PM before Blair,
Jim Callaghan, didn’t seem short of cash for his Sussex farm
and was much involved in the murky affairs of the Bank of
Commerce and Credit International, as well as being close to
Welsh multimillionaire banker Sir Julian Hodge. Neil Kinnock
never made it to No. 10, but he and his wife have not done
too badly from their EU earnings, not forgetting their generous
tax-funded pension arrangements following retirement from
their respective British and European parliaments.
Look to the US where Blair, the authors tell us, has
based much of his money earning either directly or through
Washington’s network of friends and allies, and there’s big
money for ex-leaders there, too. George W Bush has always
had enormous family sources to draw upon from his father’s
post-White House dealings, and Bill Clinton has reaped huge
rewards from speechmaking around the world. And not just
former presidents: Henry Kissinger is still making piles as a
consultant almost 40 years after leaving the State
Department. The authors suggest their subject might even
have had Kissinger Associates as the model for his own Tony
Blair Associates money-spinning.
The authors tell us that Blair and his fellow New Labour
founder Peter (now Lord) Mandelson are not so close these
days, each building their multi-million businesses in a way that
suggests some rivalry. Where Blair largely depends on the US
network he developed as PM, especially in the Middle East,
Mandelson looks largely to the Russian and East European
oligarchs with Nat Rothschild and Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP
being key figures in helping build the wealth that now affords
him an £11m home in Regent’s Park.
What both seem still to have in common are close
relationships with wealthy Zionists, a continuation of the
pattern by which Levy and David Sainsbury, both ennobled by
Blair, helped the pair launch and sustain New Labour. A big
contributor to Blair’s Faith Foundation is Haim Saban who the
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authors quote as saying: ‘I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is
Israel. I used to be a leftie but am now very much on the right.
The reason for the switch is Israel.’
Little known in the UK, Saban is a powerful TV owner in
Germany. He has huge media and other interests in the US
where Rupert Murdoch has been a business associate. Saban
also funds the part of the Brookings Institution known as the
Saban Center for Middle East Policy under former US
ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk. Saban donated heavily to
George Bush’s re-election campaign after the Iraq war and is
known to be a strong backer of vocal Israel supporters John
McCain and Joe Lieberman.The authors write:
‘Tony Blair is publicly signed up to Saban’s views about
Iran and Israel. If that were not the case, it is most
unlikely that Saban would be funding his Faith
Foundation.... Money comes with strings attached. Tony
Blair would have to be very careful even to appear to
criticise the government in Tel Aviv, should he ever wish
to do so, if he wants his Faith Foundation to keep
receiving Saban’s money.’
This mattered for the future of the Middle East – and so for the
rest of the world – because one of the many hats Blair had
worn since 1997 until his resignation in May 2015 was Quartet
Representative (QR). He was found the job, say the authors,
by George Bush after the previous QR, John Wolfensohn,
concluded that his mandate was inadequate for the scale of
the job and because he lacked the support of the Bush
administration, especially that of veteran neocon Elliot Abrams
in the State Department. (Abrams, it will be remembered, was
pardoned by George H W Bush for his role in Iran-Contra.)
Blair accepted that limited mandate and by most
accounts put only a fraction of Wolfensohn’s time and effort
into the job. Rather than engage in the patient, detailed work
required to move Israel/Palestine matters forward, the
authors suggest that he has been broad brush at best and
mixed in his motives between apparently pursuing a peace
process and advancing his own commercial interests in the
region. The authors say:
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‘He has irrevocably contaminated the QR job with his
other activities. He often takes his personal staff, not QR
staff, to meetings, and his personal staff, not QR staff,
often speak for him in his role as QR.....Today as QR he
is a passenger at best, a liability at worst.’
Blair Inc. describes the work the ex-PM has done for some
seedy regimes, often aided by former No 10 staff – Jonathan
Powell, Alastair Campbell, Tim Allan being three of the most
prominent. Its authors also also list Blair clients, from Louis
Vuitton and Moet Hennessey to JP Morgan, adding in titbits
like the £50,000 fee for a speech to the International Sanitary
Supply Association.
Such information the authors have assiduously gleaned
help form a picture of a figure lost in endless money-making,
carefully concealed by lawyers, accountants and draconian
terms of employment confidentiality that apply even to interns.
Blair jets around the world with a self-regarding sense of
mission apparently unaware of – or perhaps simply indifferent
to – the toxic tag he carries with him. That reputation derives
not just from the Iraq war but for the deceit that induced it
and which coloured much of his administration.
The authors open their final chapter, ‘A gold-plated
prison’, with a quote from his former friend, Greg Dyke: ‘I think
Blair is now a very sad man. Rich, but [he] betrayed everything
the Labour Party was about.’ I’m not happy in general with
this ‘betrayal’ approach: it is often applied by those who
personalise the gap between unreasonable expectations and
real life. Blair has some praiseworthy achievements to record
in his time as prime minister after a long period when Labour
under Foot and Kinnock looked unlikely to enter government
at all. What matters more to me is the legacy of those who
have exercised great influence. In Blair’s case the verdict is
not good, as we can see clearly after May 7. Many of Blair’s
young New Labour praetorian guard are no longer MPs;
Scotland is now SNP territory; the Tories have a majority for
the first time in nearly 20 years; inequality grows while
bankers continue their bad old ways and we remain
subservient to Washington and the largely bogus nostrums of
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the ‘war on terror’.
The secrecy surrounding Blair encountered by the
authors has always been part of his story. His leadership
campaign after Smith’s death was managed by ‘Bobby’ for fear
that his bid would be tainted by association with Mandelson.
His early biographers made no mention of his introduction to
the Israelis by his law chambers colleague and president of
the Board of Deputies Eldred Tabachnik. Nor is it still widely
known that the Israeli embassy introduced Blair to Levy, who
then opened the till that freed his tennis pal from party
obligations.
Much of what happened under the Blair premiership
remains under 30-year-rule wraps and we now hear that the
Chilcot Inquiry of the Iraq war set up in 2009 will not now
report before 2016.
In March this year the London Evening Standard
reminded us of the sinister dimension that now accompanies
this secrecy. Under the headline ‘Secret terror trial ends in
farce as student is cleared of targeting Blair’ it reported:
‘Britain’s first secret terror trial descended into farce today as
a law student caught with the address of Tony Blair’s house
was cleared of plotting terrorist attacks.’ The paper went on:
‘Media lawyers are trying to have more details made
public of what was said behind closed doors. MPs and
pressure groups have condemned secret trials but
prosecutors claimed the secrecy was justified in the
interests of national security, and described it as “an
exceptional case”.’
Beckett, Hencke and Kochan have done us a service in trying
to pierce the barriers Blair has erected around his life and
business since 2007. The cost of that concealment does not
just burden British citizens – his personal security guards claim
£250,000 a year in expenses alone from the taxpayer, they
tell us – the secrecy and the cynicism that it helps generate
leaves a noxious legacy to whoever again would claim to lead
the country in a more decent direction. Will Labour’s next
leader be able to assure us that he’s ‘a pretty straight sort of
guy’ – and be believed?
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Tom Easton
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The Good Guys?
Thieves of State
Sarah Chayes
London: W. W. Norton, 2015, £16.99, h/b
W hy were British troops in Afghanistan? Was it to help
liberate Afghan women, to establish good governance and
prosperity for the Afghan people, or to protect Britain’s streets
from terrorist attack? All these pretexts were at various times
put forward. None was true. The real reason was, of course,
to try and sustain the ‘Special Relationship’ with the United
States. In pursuit of this end, the British found themselves
supporting one of the most corrupt governments in the world,
a government that was dominated by drug traffickers and
warlords. This essential truth about the war in Afghanistan is
still not generally known so that the politicians responsible
have by and large prospered in retirement; unless, that is, like
Geoff Hoon and Jack Straw, their personal venality became a
public scandal. Sarah Chayes’ new book, Thieves of State,
which recounts her part in the fight against corruption in
Afghanistan, will go some way towards remedying this,
although I suspect that the unholy alliance between the
political establishment, the media and the military high
command will continue to succeed in portraying Afghanistan as
‘the good war’.
The United States overthrew the Taliban by means of a
comparative handful of CIA agents and special forces
personnel allied with the warlords of the Northern Alliance.
With the support of overwhelming US air power, this small
army was able to defeat the Taliban, although their leadership
escaped capture. Two things stand out about this success:
first of all, the Northern Alliance would never have been able
to defeat the Taliban without US support, which did rather
suggest that they would need continued US support to remain
in power. The shift in US attention and resources to Iraq was,
from this point of view, a disaster. Second, the Northern
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Alliance was a gangster organisation of warlords and drug
traffickers. Putting them in power was like invading Colombia
to instal the drug cartels in government. And, once the Taliban
were removed, opium production did indeed dramatically
increase. These two factors together made the return of the
Taliban inevitable.
Sarah Chayes arrived in Kandahar at the end of 2001
and remembers that it was not long before people were
complaining to her of ‘the presence of notorious criminals in
their new government’. She watched ‘warlordism take hold
and solidify’ and came to the conclusion that the resulting
corruption was what ‘was driving people to violent revolt in
Afghanistan’. Eventually she went to work for the
International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) where she
was one of a number of people arguing that corruption was
fuelling the insurgency and that combating it was a military
priority. ‘Corruption’, she writes, ‘in army-speak, was a force
multiplier for the enemy’. While lip-service was sometimes paid
to this insight, in practice the US commitment to the gangster
regime they had installed in power was too strong for
anything effective to be done about the problem.
She describes the government of the Islamic Republic of
Afghanistan as
‘best understood not as a government at all but as a
vertically integrated criminal organization – or a few such
loosely structured organizations, allies but rivals,
coexisting uneasily – whose core activity was not in fact
exercising the functions of a state but rather extracting
resources for personal gain’.
Every government post, from top to bottom, was for sale with
the purchaser expected to recoup their investment by means
of bribery and extortion. Predictably, the most expensive
positions were in the Ministry of Counter-Narcotics, where
senior posts could cost as much as $200,000 a year. Such an
outlay would, of course, be recouped by actual involvement in
drug trafficking. The Minister for Counter-Narcotics, Daoud
Daoud was, she writes, ‘according to multiple, separate
strands of information, one of the biggest drug traffickers in
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the country’. This goes some way towards explaining the
failure of the Karzai government to not only curb opium
production, but to preside over its dramatic expansion. The
people at the top also systematically pillaged the foreign aid
budget to the tune of billions of dollars, while lower down
police and local officials systematically robbed and oppressed
the local population. Afghanistan under Karzai was a
‘kleptocracy’; and it was, she argues, ‘the moral and material
depravity’ of the Karzai government that was fuelling a ‘brutal
and tenacious insurgency’ as many Afghans were persuaded
that the only way to end the government’s depredations was
through ‘religious rectitude’. Interrogation of Taliban prisoners
showed that they were not primarily motivated by religion or
hostility to foreign occupation but by ‘the perception that the
Afghan government was “irrevocably corrupt”’.
The 2009 Presidential election gave public notice of the
extent of the corruption with the electoral fraud ‘so egregious
and widespread as to stun even seasoned election monitors’.
Subsequently, Karzai pacified international opinion by
promising to curb corruption. When he made the public
announcement of his intention to ‘clean the government’,
however, he had standing either side of him his two vice
presidents, Karim Khalili and Muhammad Qasim, ‘two of the
most notorious war criminals in all Afghanistan’. They were
there in order to make clear to corrupt officials, policemen and
soldiers that the promise was empty, meaningless, just
something to appease the Americans, but that otherwise it
was business as usual. And indeed every effort to actually
curb corruption was blocked by Karzai.
Attempts to persuade the Americans authorities to do
something about this failed. She had high hopes of General
Stanley McChrystal when he took over command, but he was
not prepared to risk alienating Karzai and co. When General
David Petraeus took over, she was confident that he would
take action. She ‘had been corresponding with him about
corruption and the insurgency in Afghanistan for nearly two
years’ and knew that as far as he was concerned the Karzai
government was a ‘criminal syndicate’ (his words). Petraeus
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was the principal advocate of a US turn towards a long-term
counterinsurgency strategy and had been instrumental in a
dramatic reshaping of military doctrine in the form of Field
Manual 3-24. This shift had been celebrated in the media and
the Field Manual itself was, unprecedentedly, a best seller.
Chayes believed that she had persuaded him that countering
corruption and establishing good governance was an essential
component of such a successful counterinsurgency strategy: ‘I
heard Petraeus murmur something under his breath: “This is
the revision of the Field Manual”’. Her hopes that he would
tackle the problem were never fulfilled.
Looking back, she blames the CIA which was heavily
involved with the gangsters, warlords and drug traffickers.
Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, for example, ‘stole
land, imprisoned people for ransom, appointed key public
officials, ran vast drug trafficking networks and private militias’
and was hated by ‘the inhabitants of three provinces’; but he
was also a CIA ‘asset’. They paid him undisclosed amounts of
money for his ‘services’. Of course, none of this will come as a
surprise to anyone familiar with the activities of the CIA. She
refers to Matthew Rosenberg’s revelation, writing in the New
York Times, that President Karzai himself was also on the CIA
payroll, the recipient of ‘millions of dollars per year in cash’.
The CIA effectively sabotaged any ‘anticorruption agenda’ and
to her surprise Petraeus, in the end, went along with this.
Indeed, he went on to become Director of the CIA!
What she does not take into account is the Obama
Administration’s decision not to embrace a long-term
counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan or anywhere else
for that matter. Instead, the decision was taken to exercise
US power through assassination by drone, special force raids
and proxy armies. Corruption was an essential component of
this strategy.
One other important point that Chayes makes concerns
the number of regimes that there are that have similar
characteristics to the Karzai regime in the sense that they are
little more than ‘criminal organizations’, despoiling their own
countries. She discusses Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt,
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Uzbekistan and Nigeria as variations on this theme. They are
all ‘kleptocracies’ facing Islamist challenges. The regime the US
put in place in Iraq is another obvious example. These
regimes, she argues, are a threat to US security because they
provoke rebellion and today this rebellion all too often puts on
an Islamist face.
There is nothing new about ‘kleptocratic’ regimes or
rebellions against them. What is new is that the US is much
weaker than it was and is less well placed to intervene in
other countries. They can bring governments down but no
longer determine their replacement. And second is the impact
of globalisation. The bosses of the ‘criminal organizations’ she
writes about, the ‘kleptocrats’, today invest their money in
Dubai, Switzerland, Britain (or, more properly, London) and
elsewhere. If Islamist rebels make life too uncomfortable they
can always go and live elsewhere. Indeed, she sees
‘kleptocracy’ as the way that so-called liberal democracies are
moving. Altogether a very interesting and thought-provoking
book.
John Newsinger
John Newsinger is a semi-retired academic.
A new edition of his British Counterinsurgency
is due out later this year.
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The Henry Jackson Society and the degeneration of British
Neoconservatism:
Liberal interventionism, Islamophobia and the ‘war of terror’
Tom Griffin, Hilary Aked, David Miller and Sarah Marusek
Spinwatch Public Interest Investigations, 2015
PDF version:
http://www.spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/more/item/5777new-report-on-the-henry-jackson-society
Perhaps it’s some mark of the state of British politics that
Michael Gove, the British Lord Chancellor and Justice
Secretary, helped found a society in honour of a US politician
known in his lifetime as the whore for Boeing. The fact that
Gove, in an earlier job as Education Secretary, urged teachers
to show a greater appreciation of history, adds a farcical
element to a pre-parliamentary career distinguished by his
work as a news executive for Rupert Murdoch.
In this latest Spinwatch report, the authors trace the line
from the long-dead pro-Vietnam war, pro-Israel, pro-arms
industry senator from Washington via a Cambridge group at
Peterhouse through the ‘war on terror’ to Gove’s ‘Trojan
Horse’ campaign against some Birmingham schools. Along the
way they tell us lots about the fractious history of Douglas
Murray’s Centre for Social Cohesion, the role of William
Shawcross as chairman of the Charity Commission and the
Henry Jackson Society’s (HJS) sources of funding.
They point out that a few New Labour luminaries,
including departed Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy and
convicted fraudster Denis MacShane, are part of the HJS circle
that strongly backed the Iraq war and the repression of civil
liberties that followed the example of the United States after
9/11.
This well-referenced report tells us that the HJS
promotes a strongly pro-Israel agenda; organises anti-Islam
activities, particularly against British Muslim students, and
advocates a transatlantic military and security regime.
The authors conclude:
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‘The fact that HJS refuses to publish its list of donors
also highlights its own illiberal tendencies. Far from
promoting democracy both domestically and abroad, like
the original founders intended, the society has joined
the ranks of the transatlantic Islamophobia network by
relying on the financial support of strident pro-Israel
elites and their grant-making foundations.’
What it doesn’t tell us that is that much of this important HJS
story goes untold in the media, and not just that large part
owned by Murdoch whose organs have provided many HJS
figures with work and income.
Spinwatch say they intend to launch the report in
Parliament after the summer recess. Don't hold your breath for
mainstream coverage or Parliamentary debate.
Tom Easton
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Chameleo
A strange but true story of invisible spies, heroin addiction and
Homeland Security
Robert Guffey
London and New York: O/R Books, 2015, £11.00/$18.00, p/b
http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/chameleo/
In 1989 Harlan Girard was going round the London media
trying to interest them in his story. He got no takers but
someone suggested Lobster – then one of the publications of
last resort; too small to be worth suing, perhaps – and he
rang me. ‘Sure’, I said, ‘Come to Hull and we can talk.’ It’s
what I say to people; and a handful of serious and/or
desperate people have got on the train. Harlan arrived and
told me this strange story about the CIA, microwaves and
mind control; how he was the victim of a CIA experiment. At
that time I knew nothing about microwaves but I had read the
handful of books on the subject of mind control and knew
enough about the CIA’s history of experimenting on unwitting
citizens not to reject this out of hand. Harlan was lugging a
heavy suitcase full of photocopies of scientific articles about
microwaves – both his hands were blistered from carrying it –
and the next morning he departed leaving me with the
beginning of my collection on the microwave/mind control issue
and the distinct impression that there might be something to
this.
In 2003 the author of Chameleo, a teacher of literature
with an interest in conspiracy theories (and also a member of
the Scottish Rites Masons), was told a strange tale of mind
control and harassment and much more by a friend of his.
And there the similarities end. Where Harlan Girard was
a polite, prosperous, middle-class American, Guffey’s friend
Dion was a working-class multiple drug user, living a chaotic,
poverty-stricken life on the margins of American society.
Where Harlan Girard talked of voices in his head,
Guffey’s informant talked of invisible midgets, rooms that
altered size, views from his window which changed, drones
that surveilled him and gang-stalking by teams of military
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personnel. Where my information sources on mind control in
1989 consisted of fragments in libraries, journals and books,
and the occasional account from other subjects of these
experiments, Guffey had the Internet and began using it to
make sense of his friend’s tales; and fairly quickly discovered
that, bizarre though some of them were, traces of most of
Dion’s experiences could be found in extant US military
programs, real technology, or in reports on the Net.
Druggie Dion was living in San Diego (a heavily
militarised city), running a kind of open house/crash pad
through which moved all manner of flotsam and jetsam,
including an American soldier AWOL. Said soldier was followed
by a team from the military police (NCIS) who believed he had
stolen some night vision goggles. It was when Dion denied
knowing where the solider had gone or where the goggles
were that the US military began playing their games with his
head. Months of psychic torture ensued but Dion didn’t crack.
It may have been Dion’s wide experience of mind-altering
chemicals which enabled him to survive having his reality bent
so severely: serious drug users are accustomed to the world
shifting around them.
The author places his accounts of Dion’s stories and his
Internet researches in a personal narrative which includes
much (to me irrelevant) information about his life – jobhunting, girl friend troubles etc. There are thirty pages of
transcribed phone calls with Dion and, towards the end, fifty
pages of transcribed interview with the man (like the author,
also a Freemason) who invented the ‘cloaking’ or invisibility
technology which enabled the invisible NCIS ‘midgets’, whom
Dion glimpsed occasionally, to search his flat while he was
present.
Whether Dion was an experimental subject or merely
one of the first people to experience the full range of the new
technology which the US military have in store for dissidents in
the near future isn’t clear. Either way this is an important
glimpse into our future as ‘democratic’ states gear up for their
coming task of defending our ‘freedom’ from threats – some
real but mostly imaginary – within.
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This is an interesting, nicely written, occasionally funny
tale but the key material – Dion’s account of being on the
receiving end of the high-tech military harassment and the
author’s research into it – is merely a part of it.
Robin Ramsay
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Blacklisted
The Secret War between Big Business and Union Activists
Dave Smith and Phil Chamberlain
O ne of the co-authors, Phil Chamberlain, wrote an early
sketch of this material in Lobster 58 (which is on-line 1 ) and
the subtitle of that piece, ‘How the Economic League lived on’
might have been the subtitle title of this book.
When the League formally closed in 1993 (or 1994;
reports vary) their monitoring of the left and the unions for
companies was taken up by a little organisation called Caprim,
with a couple of ex-League employees at the helm,2 and by
The Consulting Association (TCA). While Caprim did research
into left/environmental campaigns which might impinge on
companies, The Consulting Association was focused specifically
on the ‘threat’ of union activities in the construction industry
and was essentially the League’s unit in that field under a
new name. Caprim was exposed in 2000 but TCA remained a
secret until 2009 – when Chamberlain began writing about it.
This book is that Lobster essay by Chamberlain
massively expanded to include:
* subsequent parliamentary and legal activities concerning
TCA;
* accounts of many of those affected by the blacklist which
TCA was operating;
* the campaign by unions against TCA;
* analysis of the files exposed by the legal action against
TCA;
* historical analysis to place TCA in context;
* accounts of the other forms of left/union monitoring
conducted by the state, notably the Met’s undercover unit, the
Special Demonstration Squad (SDS).
The one area which is still fuzzy is the relationship
between groups such as TCA and the police and security
services. There are fragments suggesting that there was such
a relationship but the evidence is thin.
1
2
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<http://www.theguardian.com/business/2000/sep/09/emu.theeuro>
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There are hints that there are other companies doing
this vetting/research for companies – Kroll and Control Risks
for example; but for the construction industry TCA did seem to
be the place. Why were the building firms so keen on it? This
may simply be an aspect of the intense competition for big
construction contracts. The TCA files that were exposed – and
most were not – showed that the companies were centrally
concerned to avoid hiring union members who might try to
improve the safety culture on sites. Building work is
intrinsically dangerous; many are killed and injured. Improving
safety regimes means working more carefully and slowly, and
this increases labour costs. The picture that emerges of the
construction industry in the UK in recent years is that of
ruthless companies, for whom injuries to and deaths of casual,
frequently subcontracted staff are merely part of the costs of
doing business. Welcome to one of the down sides of
competition – the race to the bottom.
This is a significant book, nicely produced, thoroughly
documented and well written. It is also a good news book –
the unions won a partial victory – and there are few good
news tales in the fields Lobster covers. Recommended.
Robin Ramsay
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Nixon’s Nuclear Specter
William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball
University Press of Kansas, 2015, h/b, £35 (approximately)
‘Credibility’ is a peculiar concept, of interest mainly to those
who fear they lack it. In our daily lives we deal with people on
simpler and more profound bases like reliability and
trustworthiness. ‘Credibility’ is the concern of an individual, or
an institution, which has already demonstrated unreliability
and untrustworthiness, yet seeks to retain influence, and
exercise power.
Nixon's Nuclear Specter, by William Burr and Jeffrey P.
Kimball, deals with President Nixon’s attempts to bring the war
in Vietnam to a satisfactory conclusion. According to the
authors of this detailed and thoroughly footnoted book, both
Nixon and his foreign affairs adviser, Henry Kissinger, had
concluded by late 1967 that the war was unwinnable. Nixon
had been elected on a promise to bring the war to a quick
conclusion. Yet the war dragged on for six more years: the
United States expanded it to Laos and Cambodia, and even
engaged in a mock nuclear force alert in an attempt to
intimidate North Vietnam’s Russian allies. Why? According to
Burr and Kimball, ‘credibility’ was the key.
One of Nixon’s desires was that the President of South
Vietnam, Thieu, remain in office for a ‘decent interval’ after the
last US forces withdrew. Nixon and Kissinger knew that Thieu’s
regime would collapse: their initial concern was that US
‘credibility’ in foreign affairs would suffer if a US client were
speedily dispatched. The North Vietnamese negotiators at the
Paris peace talks were not concerned about US credibility;
their goal was to see Thieu gone, and their country reunited.
Nixon continued to withdraw US troops, but in discussions
with his advisers often flirted with his ‘madman’ theory, in
which Nixon thought he might overcome powerful adversaries
by scaring them that he was capable of an insane act – such
as resorting to the first use of nuclear weapons.
At some point early in his presidency, Nixon began to
conflate himself and the nation, and to consider the ‘credibility’
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issue as personal, rather than related to matters of state.
Kissinger played Nixon’s confusion to his own political
advantage. Believing, like his boss, in ‘threat diplomacy’,
Kissinger encouraged the president to adopt increasingly
drastic measures: ‘Be prepared to take tough escalatory steps
....(mining Haiphong, bombing Cambodia, etc.).... to fail to do
so would be to risk your credibility.’ (p. 118)
Kissinger told Russian ambassador Dobrynin that the US
would not accept a loss of prestige in the peace settlement.
Dobrynin promised to pass the message on to the North
Vietnamese, but also advised Kissinger not to escalate a war
the US wanted to end. Burr and Kimball write:
‘Believing their threat-making credibility was on the line
and putting their faith in the coercive power of military
force, Nixon and his adviser began to consider....tougher
escalatory steps...’ (p. 137)
One of the options advocated by Kissinger was the use of
nuclear weapons against North Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs
provided Kissinger and Nixon with two sets of nuclear options:
‘clean nuclear interdiction of of three NVN-Laos passes’ and
‘nuclear interdiction of two NVN-CPR railroads’. The authors
speculate that a ‘clean’ nuclear weapon might have been ‘an
airburst of a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon, so as to
minimize fallout effects but kill soldiers, truck drivers, and other
logistics personnel in the area through immediate radiation
effects.’ (p. 233) Fortunately, Nixon did not initiate a nuclear
war, but he did put in motion a nuclear alert designed to
support his ‘madman’ theory and pressure the Russians to
influence the North Vietnamese.
Nixon claimed to be a poker ace, who had won $10,000
playing poker while in the US Navy. Yet in a meeting with
Dobrynin prior to the 1969 nuclear alert, Nixon threw his cards
face-up on the table, constantly dragged the conversation
back to the Vietnam war, and asserted aloud ‘that the Soviet
leadership is apparently trying to “break him”.’ Dobrynin
concluded that Nixon was not mad, but ‘lacking emotional selfcontrol’. (p. 291)
The 1969 alert rang no Russian alarm bells, since it was
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not accompanied by DEFCON military status. The war in
Vietnam continued. In 1973 – with Nixon incapacitated by
paranoia and alcohol – Secretary of State Kissinger initiated
another, much more provocative nuclear alert, with DEFCON 3
status, to demonstrate US resolve over the Arab-Israeli war.
The authors conclude:
‘The most extreme threats – nuclear threats – are
unlikely to succeed when the side threatened possesses
its own nuclear weapons, when a non-nuclear state.....is
presumably under the protection of a nuclear state.....or
when the threat is disproportionate because it is aimed
at a small country.’ (p. 333)
Given those three categories, there are no states anywhere
where nuclear threats might have any success at all. Certainly
the threats described here made no practical difference to
Vietnamese or Russian policy. Russian foreign minister
Gromyko remarked that ‘the Americans put forces on alert so
often that it is hard to know what it meant.’ Le Duc Tho told
Kissinger in 1972:
‘We sometimes think that you would also use atomic
weapons, because during the resistance against the
French, Vice President Nixon proposed the use of
atomic weapons....But....no matter what destruction is
brought to our country, we will continue the struggle.’
(p. 256)
President Nixon was not the only world leader to threaten the
use of nuclear weapons. President Eisenhower threatened to
use them in Korea, and offered them to the French in Vietnam.
President Kennedy practised nuclear brinksmanship twice: the
authors discuss the Cuban missile crisis, but not the equally
serious crisis over NATO access to Berlin, for which the
Pentagon offered a slate of nuclear options. Lyndon Johnson
differentiated himself from his Republican opponent, Barry
Goldwater, over the nuclear issue and issued no nuclear
threats during his presidency. President Carter raised the
possibility of a nuclear attack on Iran during the hostage crisis.
President Reagan presided over a massive nuclear build-up
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which came close to accidental thermonuclear war during the
misinterpreted Able Archer alert. President Clinton discussed
using B61-11 tactical nuclear weapons against Libya. The
second Bush administration threatened the use of the same
nuclear weapons during the invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq; the Obama administration contemplated their use during
the 2011 NATO bombings of Libya; Sen. Hilary Clinton has told
MSNBC that she would support a nuclear attack on Iran, in
defence of Israel.
Based on Burr and Kimball’s conclusions, none of these
threats had any impact on their recipients in terms of altering
their behaviour – not even the alarms triggered by the Able
Archer exercise, which a lone Russian intelligence officer
decided to ignore.1
Often these nuclear threats and alerts have been
described as essential to US credibility. That magic word was
also used in 2008, when five NATO commanders drew up a
manifesto urging that the West adopt a policy of pre-emptive
nuclear attacks against potential enemies who might possess
WMD. ‘NATO’s credibility is at stake’, observed General Henk
van den Breemen, the former Dutch chief of staff. But
credibility and survival are two different things. A nuclear war,
started by accident during a period of high-alert tension,
initiated to preserve an individual’s or a state’s ‘credibility’, no
matter how applauded by the media, is something it would be
in our interests to avoid.
Alex Cox
Alex Cox is a filmmaker and writer. His
most recent book, on the Kennedy assassination,
1 There is one possible caveat here. It has been reported that during
the Falklands/Malvinas war Mrs Thatcher threatened to use nuclear
weapons against Argentina unless the French state gave the British
the codes to disable the electronics of the French-manufactured Exocet
missiles which were damaging British ships. French president
Mitterand, it is said, complied. The source for this story is a
psychoanalyst reporting things Mitterand told him. See
<http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2005/nov/22/books.france>.
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The President and the Provocateur,
was reviewed in Lobster 68.
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The Owl of Minerva has crashed and died
Knife Fights:
A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice
John A Nagl
PenguinRandom House, 2014, $27.95 (h/b)
The rise and fall of the US doctrine of Counterinsurgency
(COIN) took place over such a short time span that some of
those intimately involved in originally propagating the doctrine
seem still blissfully unaware that its moment has passed. John
Nagl, for example, writes that his memoir is ‘about counterinsurgency and its journey from the far periphery of US military
doctrine to its center’. The reality is that after the failures in
Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States is not about to commit
large ground forces to a protracted military occupation again
any time soon. Even the rise of Islamic State has not changed
this.
Nagl was a career officer who first saw combat during
the 1991 Gulf War. This was more of a massacre than a war.
As Nagl puts it: ‘the Iraqi infantry had few weapons that could
put a serious dent in an M1A1 Abrams tank’. Such one-sided
affairs could be ‘exhilarating and wild and intoxicating, every
minute an adventure’. The biggest problem he seems to have
faced in this war was his sergeant becoming over-familiar but
he dealt with this by ordering him to write a ‘counselling
statement’ acknowledging his mistake. The man had ‘tears in
his eyes’ when he handed over the statement ‘which I
promptly rolled into a ball and told him to eat’. Suddenly
‘fragging’ becomes perfectly understandable!
At a time when attention was focussed on the so-called
Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), the technological advances
that had supposedly transformed the nature of warfare and
ushered in an age of US military invincibility, Nagl was
convinced that guerrilla insurgency was the most likely
challenge that the US was going to find itself confronting.
While the Gulf War had dramatically put on display America’s
overwhelming technological superiority, he was concerned
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with how ill-equipped the US military was for
counterinsurgency; for, as he puts it (borrowing from T E
Lawrence) ‘eating soup with a knife’.
Nagl’s studies at Oxford, where he went on a Rhodes
scholarship to ‘learn the lessons of empire’, resulted in a
comparative study of the US experience in Vietnam and the
British experience in Malaya that was to be eventually
published in 2002 as Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. As he
puts it in this memoir: ‘Malaya is famous as the shining
example of the “hearts and minds” school of
counterinsurgency, the idea that the population must be
protected in order to allow them to reveal the identity and
location of the insurgents’. This was, of course, not an
accurate account of the scale of the repression and of the
overwhelming force that the British used in Malaya. Indeed he
does acknowledge that Gerald Templer, the supposed
architect of British victory in Malay, actually admitted that he
had overseen ‘the use of techniques that would be seen
today as relying upon excessive force, including resettling
entire communities in concentration camps’. His academic
studies were to be given relevance by the US invasion of Iraq,
America’s perverse response to the 9/11 terrorist attack.
Nagl freely acknowledges the scale of the disaster that
Donald Rumsfeld inflicted on the US military. He describes
Rumsfeld as ‘spectacularly bad’, pretty much a unanimous
opinion among the soldiers on the ground. The initial invasion
force was ‘just barely big enough to topple Saddam Hussein’,
but completely inadequate ‘to secure Iraq’s cities’. He
describes the invasion and its aftermath as ‘one of the least
successful military operations in American history’. The policies
implemented by the Coalition Provisional Authority (disbanding
the Iraqi Army and de-Baathisation) played ‘a huge role in
incubating the chaos that erupted’ and were ‘a perfect recipe
for an insurgency’. When Nagl was himself deployed to Iraq to
fight the insurgents, his unit was ‘completely unprepared for
the war we were about to fight’. Quite remarkably, the
Americans had managed to provoke ‘a general uprising, not
just of all Sunnis in Al Anbar, but also of the Shia in the rest of
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Iraq’.
A brief digression is necessary here because the
subsequent descent of Iraq into sectarian civil war has
marginalised this ‘general uprising’. What aborted this
development was not any action on the part of the United
States, but the launching of a murderous war against the Shia
by al-Qaeda in Iraq, very much against the wishes of Osama
Bin Laden, who considered the Americans to be the main
enemy, but almost certainly at the behest of the Saudis. AlQaeda’s atrocities were deliberately intended to provoke
sectarian civil war, a methodology that is continued by Islamic
State today. This inaugurated the proxy war with Iran that the
Saudis have been waging in Iraq and later in Syria ever since.
The extent to which the United States has found itself caught
in the middle of this proxy war is the largely untold story of the
current Middle East conflict.
As for Nagl, he describes his tour of duty in Iraq as little
more than an exercise in futility: ‘It was like pulling your hand
out of a bucket of water and hoping that you’d made a lasting
impression’. He goes on:
‘It was hard to argue that we’d won. In fact, in a final
insult, the ammunition supply point at Taqquadom
Airfield, from which many of us (including me) were
scheduled to fly out.......was hit by a mortar round the
night before our scheduled departure in what was
clearly an inside job. The aim point was so precise that it
detonated the entire ammo dump, raining down still-live
munitions on the airfield and keeping us in Iraq for a
week longer’.
There was a widespread belief at this time that the US actually
faced military defeat in Iraq, that the insurgents might actually
make the US position untenable. Desperate for an answer, the
politicians and the high command turned to the advocates of a
counterinsurgency strategy. Nagl’s moment had come.
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife was taken up and
championed by Newt Gingrich who persuaded the publisher,
Praeger, to bring out a paperback edition. Gingrich pressed a
copy on the Army Chief of Staff, General Schoomaker, who, in
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turn, gave a copy to the new US commander in Iraq, General
Casey. By 2009, even the then Labour Defence Secretary, Bob
Ainsworth, a man for whom mediocrity was merely an
aspiration, admitted that he was reading the book.
More importantly, Nagl became one of a group of
‘counterinsurgents’, the so-called ‘COINdinistas’, associated
with General David Petraeus. He was involved in writing the
new counterinsurgency Field Manual 3-24 that became the
bible of those advocating a counterinsurgency strategy. The
Manual was published with considerable publicity by the
University of Chicago Press in December 2006. Publication of a
military manual by a university press was itself unprecedented
and the book quickly became a best-seller. As Nagl proudly
observes: it ‘was downloaded more than a million times in the
first month after it had been published. Ultimately copies were
even found in Taliban training camps in Pakistan and it was
translated and critiqued on jihadi Web sites’. No greater
praise!
One of the great ironies of the Iraq War is that just as
the Americans were embracing their understanding of the
British school of counterinsurgency, the British themselves
were suffering a humiliating political and military defeat in
Basra. While the scale of the debacle has been successfully
kept from the British people, the Americans were well aware of
the extent of British failure. This lack of success was to be
replicated in Helmand. Without any doubt, fear of a third
defeat is one of the factors that make it very unlikely that
British ground troops will be committed to fighting Islamic
State.
How successful was the US turn to counterinsurgency?
Nagl himself writes of the outcome in Iraq as being ‘an
unsatisfying and untidy sort of victory.....an unsatisfying return
on the blood and treasure we poured in’. This was before the
spectacular rise of Islamic State brought home the full scale of
the US failure in Iraq. What about Afghanistan? Here he
identifies Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan as one of the main
reasons for failure, the other being ‘the endemic corruption of
the Afghan government’.
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He consoles himself with the thought that this is ‘an age
of unsatisfying wars’. This is not good enough. The reality is
that for all the success that Petraeus had at public relations,
the counterinsurgency strategy was never actually
implemented. Instead, it served as a sort of smokescreen,
disguising what were no more than holding operations
intended to allow the United States to escape from the
disastrous involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan with as little
loss of face as possible. A successful counterinsurgency
campaign in either country would have taken years longer and
involved a huge open-ended commitment of troops and
resources without, moreover, any guarantee of victory. No US
government was going to make that sort of commitment.
Nagl actually realises this, but refuses to recognise that
it amounts to a repudiation of counterinsurgency. On the one
hand, he insists that we still live in an ‘age of counterinsurgency’ which will last as long as ‘insurgencies roil the
globe’; but on the other hand he argues that the US ‘should
intervene in them with ground forces as seldom as possible,
only when vital national interests are threatened, and only
when she can be confident that the peace that will follow the
conflict will be an improvement over the pre-war situation’.
Using these criteria, he considers military intervention in Libya
and Syria as not being in US interests. Instead, the US should
follow ‘a light-footprint policy of sending advisers and
equipment in support of people fighting for freedom’. This is
pretty much a repudiation of the counterinsurgency strategy
whether he likes it or not.
With the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, what the US
has reverted to is a strategy much more murderous and brutal
than anything Nagl is prepared to acknowledge. Today, the US
is trying to protect its imperial interests with proxy armies that
it trains, equips and supports with CIA and special forces
operations, aerial bombardment and drone attack. This is the
age of the Dirty Wars, the age of a global Phoenix Programme.
John Newsinger
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A new, revised and expanded edition of Newsinger’s British
Counterinsurgency is out in October, published by Palgrave.
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Useful idiot
The Unravelling:
High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq
Emma Sky
Atlantic Books: 2015, £18.99, h/b
D efeated armies often console themselves by constructing a
‘stab in the back’ myth. The war was going well, victory was in
sight, but the politicians back home let the troops down. Most
famously, the German Army responded to its defeat in the First
World War with such a myth. More recently we have seen such
responses to both the British debacle in Aden and the
considerably more momentous US defeat in Vietnam. And
today such a myth is already under construction with regard to
the Iraq War.
So much was only to be expected; what is surprising is
that leading the way in the myth-making is Emma Sky, a British
woman, who, in this generally acclaimed memoir of the
Occupation, goes out of the way to proclaim her opposition to
the first Gulf War (she demonstrated against the war and
actually offered herself as a human shield!), her impressive
humanitarian credentials, and how she considered Bush’s
invasion a serious mistake for which she felt obliged to
apologise personally to the Iraqi people.
How did such an unlikely person go on to become an
apologist for and servant of US militarism? She volunteered to
serve in occupied Iraq, first of all working for the Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) in Kirkuk and later becoming
political adviser to the US General Ray Odierno (one of those
to whom she dedicates her memoir). Her intention in going
down this road was, as she puts it, ‘to apologise to Iraqis for
the war and to help them rebuild their country’.
She is very much aware of the incongruity of her position
and recognises that working for the Occupation changed her.
How does she deal with this? The narrative device she
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employs is to make a joke of it. When Tony Blair visited the
country in May 2007, she was invited to meet him at the
British Embassy. The Embassy was ‘rocketed....minutes before
Blair arrived – he was running ten minutes late. Two vehicles
were destroyed’. She was introduced to him by US General
Petraeus as ‘a national treasure’ and he was astonished to
discover that this trusted adviser to the US military was in fact
British. When he asked her how she came to be working for
the Americans, she replied ‘Stockholm syndrome’.
Unfortunately their conversation was curtailed by a renewal of
the insurgent attack with Blair being taken off ‘to the safe
room....We heard a thud – the rocket landed close by’.
One is tempted to say that she had gone ‘native’; but
she had, of course, gone ‘colonialist’. On occasion she was
described by the Americans as their ‘Miss Bell’, after Gertrude
Bell, who had advised the British during their post-WW1
military occupation of Iraq. She finds this quite flattering and
one chapter is actually entitled ‘Our Miss Bell’.
She had come to apologise to the Iraqi people for the
invasion and now ‘I was sitting like some colonial
administrator in the office that before the war had served as
the governor of Kirkuk....There were lines of Iraqis waiting to
see me’. Inevitably, despite the best will in the world, far from
apologising to the Iraqis, in the best colonialist tradition, she
finds them annoyingly ungrateful:
‘Iraqis often failed to acknowledge what we had done
for them and consistently complained. (I was sometimes
reminded of the sketch from Monty Python’s Life of Brian
when the People’s Front of Judea asks, “What have the
Romans ever done for us?” before acknowledging a
litany of accomplishments that would have been familiar
to anyone who had been serving in Iraq: “The aqueduct,
sanitation, the roads, education.’’)’
Considering the damage done to the country by sanctions,
invasion and occupation, this verges on the obscene.
Her stance is perhaps best laid bare in another jokey
episode where she describes how she advised the British
General Graeme Lamb to remove the Union Jack from the
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cover of a strategy document and a tongue-in-cheek exchange
followed. He accused her of ‘having spent too long in the
company of Americans’ and reminded her that the Union Jack
had flown ‘over an Empire on which the sun never set etc.,
etc’. She replied: ‘I know it may be hard for you to come to
terms with, but Great Britain has lost Her Empire (as well as
the Great) some years ago. These days we have to be more
skilled and subtle, and rule indirectly through our cousins. We
should therefore embrace the Stars and Stripes as our own’.
Joking aside, this does indeed seem to the rationale behind
her decision to work for the US military. Lamb, one of the very
few British senior officers that the Americans had any time for
(he was one of the architects of the ‘Sunni Awakening’), duly
removed the flag.
She insists that in Iraq she was ‘an internationalist, who
was dedicated to fighting injustice and promoting peace’.
Quite perversely she convinced herself that the US military
was the vehicle for the realisation of these objectives. The
United States was the most powerful country in the world and
so if any progress towards justice and peace was going to be
achieved it would have to be through the agency of the United
States and its interventionist arm, the US Army. She is not
uncritical of the US military, far from it! She was one of the CPA
officials who visited Abu Ghraib after ‘the revelations that US
forces had been torturing detainees’. She records her
astonishment that ‘even interrogation was contracted out’.
The place ‘exuded evil’. She describes how US vehicles carried
placards that read ‘STAY BACK FIFTY METERS OR YOU WILL BE
SHOT’, which could only be read twenty metres away. And on
one occasion, she queried a report that five enemy had been
killed in Diyala including an ‘IED emplacer’. Who, General
Odierno asked, were the others? He was told ‘Four children,
sir, who were in the vicinity’. ‘How many more enemies had we
created?’, she asks.
She is engaged in the most monumental self-delusion,
playing the traditional role of the ‘useful idiot’, a decent person
defending the indefensible.
Nevertheless, the war was being won, she assures us.
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The US Surge and the Sunni Awakening had turned the tide.
‘The new religion was Counter Insurgency, which we called
COIN’, she tells us. But it was all thrown away by the incoming
Obama administration, which was determined to get out of
Iraq regardless of the consequences. She singles out Vice
President Joe Biden and the new US Ambassador Chris Hill as
the men most responsible for pushing this policy, handing the
country over to Nuri al-Maliki. Her hostility was reciprocated
with one of Hill’s staff describing her as a ‘goddam fucking
British spy’. For the US military, ‘the greatest threat to the
mission had become the US embassy’.
Her identification with the US military was complete. They
had success in their grasp, but cowardly politicians snatched it
away: ‘Washington....had betrayed the very principles the US
military believed it was fighting to uphold’. There is a certain
irony in the fact that it is not the Bush administration that
bears the brunt of her criticism after all the suffering the war
and occupation had inflicted on the Iraqi people, but the
Obama administration for bringing it to an end!
She has not returned to Britain now that the Occupation
is over, keen to resume her humanitarian work, but has
instead become a part of the military-industrial-academic
complex with the Directorship of the Yale University World
Fellows programme and a Senior Fellowship at the University’s
Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Other Senior Fellows at the
Institute include General Graeme Lamb, the US General
Stanley McChrystal and Robert James Woolsey, a former
Director of the CIA.
John Newsinger
A new, revised and expanded edition of Newsinger’s British
Counterinsurgency is out in October, published by Palgrave.
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What’s your poison?
Secret Science:
A Century of Poison Warfare and Human Experiments
Ulf Schmidt
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, £25, h/b
Schmidt is Professor of Modern History at the University of
Kent. He has been Wellcome Trust Post-Doctoral Research
Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, amongst other
positions. His research interests, so we are told on the back
flap of the jacket, include ‘the history of modern medical ethics,
warfare, and policy in twentieth-century Europe and the
United States.’ And he is the author of several books including
Medical Films, Ethics and Euthanasia in Germany, 1933-1945
(2002), Justice at Nuremberg (2004), and Karl Brand: The Nazi
Doctor: Medicine and Power in the Third Reich (2007).
Seemingly the right man for the job.
Chemical warfare began late on the afternoon of 22 April
1915 near the Belgium town of Ypres when the German
military released 160 tons of pressurized liquid chlorine from
6,000 steel cylinders along a four mile front. Germany had
been a signatory of the Hague Declaration Concerning
Asphyxiating Gases in 1899, a codicil as it were to the Hague
Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War, that
was signed in total by some twenty-six countries including
Britain, France, and Russia. However, Germany had not
violated that Declaration as it stated that signatories must
abstain ‘from the use of projectiles, the sole object of which is
the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases’. So, they
didn’t use projectiles. It’s all right then, OK?
Germany’s gas attack ‘initiated a Europe-wide chemical
arms race on an unprecedented scale’ in which there was ‘no
time to worry about ethics’ and on the Western Front the
British retaliated with the use of poison gas delivered by the
Stokes mortar, the sole purpose of which was the delivery of
chemical projectiles; and thus Britain was the first country to
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contravene the terms of the Hague Declaration, not Germany.
It was against this background that the Allies started making
up for lost time, and none more so than Britain with the
establishing of the research station in Wiltshire known as
Porton Down (and still going today).
Schmidt is largely concerned with Porton and one
wonders why the name wasn’t used in the title or subtitle to
give a clearer impression of the book’s contents. Yes, there
are ‘walk-on’ parts for the United States and Canada and a
few other countries but these are dealt with essentially en
passant. Porton is the main concern. Schmidt charts in great
detail the research and development at Porton but he is
equally concerned with the ‘fluid’ ethical and moral aspects of
such research and the use of volunteer human guinea pigs
(termed ‘observers’ at Porton!) and the question of consent.
Yes, the service personnel were ‘volunteers’ and gave their
consent, but was it always informed consent? Schmidt
highlights the very moving case of twenty-year-old RAF
Leading Aircraftman Ronald Maddison who in 1953 was
subjected to exposure to the highly toxic Sarin1 and died
shortly after. It took his family fifty years to find out what
actually happened.
Schmidt’s research has been prodigious and, as an
example, the bibliography runs to nearly forty pages; but this
is within the fields he has selected (I’ll return to this). He has
thrown up much of interest. For instance, the US Army did research on the susceptibility of human skin to various agents
and this showed that 80 per cent of ‘negroes’ were resistant
to mustard gas as compared with only 20 per cent of ‘white
men’. The report’s author noted that it should be possible ‘to
obtain coloured troops who would all be resistant to mustard
gas blistering in concentrations harmful to most white men.
Enough resistant whites are available to officer them’. Or the
fact that thousands of travellers on the London Underground
were unknowingly exposed to a ‘plague-like’ bacteria in 1963
1 Classified as a weapon of mass destruction by UN Resolution 687.
It was discovered by German scientists at I G Farben in the late 1930s.
This was the substance released on the Tokyo subway by the Aum
Shinrikyo sect in 1995 that resulted in thirteen deaths.
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in a ‘dispersal’ test. There’s much like this throughout the
book.
There are many leads here that need to be followed up.
One that struck me was the case of Major D. C. Evans, British
Army, who was the senior military liaison officer at the British
Joint Service Mission in Washington DC, and thus responsible
for the exchange ‘of top-secret chemical warfare information
between the two Allied powers’. In January 1948 he was sent
to Nuremberg to assist in the prosecution of the I G Farben
chemical conglomerate. His secondary purpose was to seek,
on behalf of the Ministry of Supply, technical data about Nazi
warfare experiments on humans and ‘mass exterminations’
using hydrogen cyanide (I G Farben trade name Zyklon B).
This, in the words of Schmidt, ‘took him right to the heart of
Nazi war crimes’. Evans appears to have gathered much
information but Schmidt rather trails off as to what exactly the
Major did and who he saw, and one wonders whether it
resulted in some Operation Paperclip shenanigans with the
result of German scientists and others coming over to the
Allied side now that hostilities had ceased.
A section three-quarters of the way through the book is
headed ‘Truth Drugs’ and runs to some eleven pages. Schmidt
asserts that Britain’s exploration of ‘truth drugs’ seems to
have ‘partly’ come from the United States with a visit to the UK
by Henry K. Beecher, a Harvard anaesthetist and former
member of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services). Beecher was
tasked by his bosses to gather information on drugs and
narcotics and asses their potential as weapons. This
assignment was part of Operation Artichoke2 set up by the
CIA in 1951.
Another of Beecher’s objectives was to identify scientists
who could be recruited for secret work back in the US. Schmidt
then goes on to discuss LSD experiments with service
personnel at Porton Down in the 1950s done at the behest of
MI6 who were much vexed by questions of mind control, truth
drugs and brain washing, and that’s it. End of the discussion
of ‘truth drugs’, LSD, mind control experiments, and so on. Our
2 Subsequently known more famously as Project MKULTRA, though
this is not noted by Schmidt.
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learned professor cannot be unaware of this vast field and the
literature it has produced, but he chooses to ignore it.
Now let’s return to the subject of human guinea pigs.
Scientists in Britain, chiefly at Porton Down, experimented on
some 21,000 service personnel between 1939 and 1989. The
cover story to them was that Porton was searching for a cure
to the common cold or something similarly innocuous. It was
rarely explained in any greater or more accurate detail. These
volunteers produced certain difficulties for the authorities:
they were service personnel under the government’s ‘duty of
care’ and while their treatment was ‘regulated’ with ‘oversight’
things could easily go wrong with bad publicity, not to mention
legal cases ensuing (which is what happened). What was
needed were ‘subjects’ who were not regulated for the mind
control experiments, but where were these to be found?
A few years back I reviewed Albarelli’s book on the
death of Frank Olson in the pages of this magazine.3 Olson
was a US government bacteriologist working on germ warfare
projects who was probably pushed to his death out of a tenth
floor window of the Hotel Statler in New York in 1953.
Reviewing the book led me to do some desultory research on
the UK’s forays in to mind control drugs, and while I won’t go
through all the details again there are a number of things I’d
like to mention from the review.
Where were unregulated subjects suitable for mind
control experiments to be found? They were all over the
country....... in mental hospital wards. The clinicians/
psychiatrists were supreme rulers of these wards, no consent
was needed from the patients, there was no oversight, and
these rulers could do just as they liked. There were two
doctors who piqued my interest. One was Dr William Sargant
(1907-1988) of St Thomas’ hospital in London, and the other
was Dr Ronald Sandison.
The rather creepy Dr Sargant was, according to Nigel
West, MI5’s in-house psychiatrist, though West may have
meant MI6, and it seems likely he visited Porton Down.
3 The Dr Strangeloves of the Mind’, a review of H. P. Albarelli Jr’s A
Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War
Experiments, in Lobster 59, Summer 2010.
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Further, Sargant’s ward sister recalls him telling tales about
‘cloak-and-dagger exploits’. He was in contact with the
notorious Dr Euan Cameron in Montreal, exchanging
information, and this was hardly likely had he not been
‘cleared’ by the authorities. When Beecher was visiting the UK
in 1951 he was put in touch with Sargant by Sir Henry Dale,
President of the Royal Society.
Dr Sandison was pursuing LSD ‘therapy’ at the Powick
Hospital in Worcestershire in the 1950s through until the early
1970s. In all some 683 patients were dosed in some 13,785
sessions. Sandison’s research was conducted on a small scale
to begin with until his friend Professor Joel Elkes, head of the
Department of Experimental Psychiatry at the University of
Birmingham, stepped in and arranged a £50,000 grant from
the regional hospital board to build a dedicated LSD wing at
Powick. This was a pretty sizeable sum in the 1950s and the
question is, was the hospital board really that enlightened or
was it acting merely as a conduit for money from, possibly,
security or military agencies?
Dr Elkes was advising Porton Down (and thus MI6) at
the time on the interrogation possibilities of LSD. He, like
Sargant, believed in the ‘physical, neurochemical basis for
psychiatric phenomena’. No room here for psychoanalysis.
Straight in with the drugs! Elkes went to work in the US in the
late 1950s and remained there.
What I’m suggesting here is that research needs to be
done in this area. To what extent were mental hospitals used
in psycho-chemical research? There seems little or no
literature on the subject beyond newspaper reports of expatients taking hospital authorities to court (eg the Powick
case).
Finally, on Schmidt’s book. He has done an admirable job
on what he does cover, but he falls on what he doesn’t cover.
For instance, there isn’t even a mention of anthrax in the
nearly seven hundred pages, let alone MKULTRA and what
that engendered. And where is the mention of the US Army’s
Fort Detrick, the centre of US biological weapons research from
1943 onwards? I could go on. Here we have Hamlet without
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the Prince of Denmark.
Anthony Frewin
Anthony Frewin works in what is left
of the British film industry.
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An offer we can refuse
The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination
Lamar Waldron
Berkeley, California: Counterpoint, 2013, h/b, £20 (approx.)
Waldron has some form. This is his third book on JFK and is
largely a rehashing and enlargement of the previous two.1 He
has earlier argued for a secret Kennedy venture known as CDay that planned for a coup in Cuba to be carried out by the
Pentagon and the CIA which would be synced with the
assassination of Castro by an undercover operator on the
island. The Soviets would be blamed, the populace would rise
up, and an armada of Cuban exiles would invade (with the US
military on standby in the wings awaiting a call). The only
trouble with this is that there is no evidence that C-Day
existed; but this hasn’t prevented Waldron for continuing to
argue the case and stating that JFK’s failure to realise the plan
resulted in his assassination.
The present book is a wet dream for the-Mafia-did-it
crowd. According to Waldron the hit was organised and carried
out by those two poster boys of organised crime, Santo
Trafficante and Carlos Marcello. Yes, we’ve heard this before,
and the theory has been knocked down before, but it keeps
coming back like a bad penny.2
Let’s start where our author started, with an individual
1 Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba,
and the Murder of JFK (New York: Carroll and Graf, 205), Legacy of
Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination (Berkeley, California:
Counterpoint, 2008). Jim DiEugenio slices-and-dices the first title at
<http://www.ctka.net/ultimate_final.htm>.
2 The Mafia-did-it started with Robert Blakey and the House Select
Committee on Assassinations and the publication of its Report in 1978.
The thesis has been followed up by John H. Davis, Mafia Kingfish:
Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1988), and David E. Scheim, Contract on America: The Mafia
Murder of John F. Kennedy (New York: Shapolsky, 1988) to name but
two.
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named Jack Van Laningham upon whom Waldron predicates
virtually his whole argument. Van Laningham was an FBI
informant/snitch who was in prison with Marcello and he,
Marcello, is alleged to have said to him, ‘Yeah, I had the son of
a bitch killed. I’m glad I did. I’m sorry I couldn’t have done it
myself.’
Did Marcello actually say this? We only have Van
Laningham’s word for it (he had been promised early release
for co-operating on the Marcello investigation). And if he did
say it does it really mean anything? Could it not have been
simple braggadocio (success has many fathers)? Marcello was
then an old man on the foothills of dementia, and his mind
was wandering. We’ll probably never know one way or the
other, not that this is that important.
Working from this starting point Waldron then cherrypicks his evidence to build up his case. He is a diligent
researcher but does tend to skew the evidence in the theory’s
favour.
If Marcello goes in for some self-aggrandising so does
Waldron. In his Preface he notes that his previous two books
were each more than nine hundred pages with ‘a combined
total of almost four thousand endnotes documenting sources’
(wow!). He continues, ‘my work has received more mainstream
press coverage that most books documenting a conspiracy in
JFK’s murder’.3 And so on, and so on. Now comes something
quite remarkable. ‘Though The Hidden History of the JFK
Assassination has the same high level of documentation as my
earlier works, we [sic] have dispensed with endnotes for this
book.’ Oh, what a pity. And here is the clincher: ‘Now, it’s easy
to simply Google most quotations to find more information
about their source’! What an innovative time-saving
suggestion this is for the author; but time-intensive for the
reader. It’s bad enough some writers putting their notes on
their website rather than in a book, but here we haven’t even
got that.
There’s much of interest buried away in the book, but
3 Possibly because he takes the spotlight off government agencies
and those associated with them.
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the work’s prolixity and without sourcing to hand sadly
diminishes whatever value it has.
Anthony Frewin
Anthony Frewin works in
what is left of the British film industry.
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Without Smoking Gun:
Was the Death of Lt. Cmdr. William Pitzer Part of the JFK
Assassination Cover-Up Conspiracy?
Kent Heiner
Trine Day, 2004, p/b, £16 (approximation from current dollar
value)
A catchy title for a book this is not, although given that Lt.
Cmdr. Pitzer is such an obscure figure you can hardly fault the
author’s publisher for setting out his wares. It was published
in 2004 and hasn’t set the world on fire. This is a shame,
because it’s a great book, far removed from the all-toorecognised ‘X knew Y who hated Z who was friends with A’
school of JFK thinking. I picked up Mr Heiner’s book because I
was interested in the complex enigma of JFK’s autopsy and
recognised Pitzer’s name from one of those ‘mysterious
deaths’ lists. Reading it, it became clear that this book
deserved a review to alert others.
First of all, the ‘pitch’: Pitzer’s death – an apparent
suicide by gunshot. Is it suspicious? Well, yes, certainly. Heiner
does a good job of picking apart the scene of death, with not
too much of the ballistics-wrangling you might expect in
connection with JFK’s death.
The truly suspicious aspect is that prior to his death,
Pitzer – who lived near Walter Reed Hospital where JFK’s body
was originally meant to be taken – was seen leaving his
home, carrying a movie camera, after receiving a phone call on
the day of the assassination; and later actually showed what
appeared to be film of JFK’s autopsy to a friend. The film, of
course, disappeared. But eyewitness testimony is not
unimportant; and Pitzer’s actual death is just one tableau in a
positive panorama.
Take, for example, the autopsy (singular, in the official
version). Mr Heiner deconstructs the official story of the
handling and transport of JFK’s corpse very well. It’s a minor
triumph in its own right to put the pieces back together again
in a way that (a) makes sense and (b) makes things simpler.
Mr Heiner’s reconstruction is cohesive and convincing. And,
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much to my surprise, David Lifton’s ‘bodysnatchers’ theory
from his book Best Evidence comes out of it rather well (not the
first time this outcome has surprised me. I can see I’m going
to have to read Best Evidence again).
As for unpicking the riddle of the infamous autopsy
photographs, I will not spoil the reader’s enjoyment. I shall
however offer this enlightening titbit: the notorious black and
white ‘Stare of Death’ photo is from JFK’s first autopsy, not the
second. The reason this is clear is that the checkered tiles of
the mortuary floor, visible in the frame, belong to a different
hospital to the one where the autopsy officially took place.
Reflecting on this minor bombshell, it finally dawned on me
that something really obvious had always bothered me about
the autopsy photographs – JFK’s eyes are open in the ‘stare’
picture but closed or semi-closed in the others, which is sort of
circumstantial evidence of ‘stage management’; and since
there was obviously never going to be an open-casket viewing
there was no innocent excuse for it. This was a clue I only
recognised after reading Mr Heiner’s partial solution, and a
minor example of how stimulating and rewarding it is.
The bulk of the book (it’s not actually bulky, but a slim
volume) consists of an exploration of the claim of Lt. Col. Dan
Marvin that he was ‘sounded out’ by a CIA officer as Pitzer’s
assassin. Lt. Col. Marvin didn’t go through with it, but clearly
even a failed attempt to recruit a murderer counts as evidence
connected with a disputed death.1 Lt. Col. Marvin’s fascinating
story is examined this way and that, and its faults and failings
assessed impartially. And it survives this scrutiny more or less
intact. There are some military paper-trails unearthed, which
go a long way toward helping the reader get his/her bearings
and corroborate Lt. Col. Marvin’s recollections; however most
of the evidence consists of independent eyewitnesses whose
accounts interlock and overlap at critical junctures. The
forensically-minded might dismiss this as a ‘spider-webs and
1 Lt. Col. Marvin has submitted his own review of Heiner’s book to
amazon.com, which can be read here:
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2Q1NRGZD7FO6A/
ref=pdp_new_read_full_review_link?ie=UTF8&page=2&sort_by=MostRec
entReview#R1GBFO69OXILBS>.
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sealing-wax’ way to construct a case, but we should
remember that eyewitness testimony can overrule forensics in
court. The witness has traditionally had primacy (and one day,
this primacy might be properly reasserted if digital video, audio
and photography remain dominant, with all their possibilities
for tampering and doctoring).
Mr Heiner weaves a fascinating, convincing and
unpredictable tale, told well in a sober and impressive style,
and it will not spoil it to reveal that by the end of the book the
titular question has not been answered. In that way, it is
unlike the book that it reminded me of most in its style and
approach, William Pepper’s magisterial solution to the murder
of Martin Luther King. However, what is clear from Mr Heiner’s
work is that there is definitely a strong case to be made for
Pitzer’s death being a murder. No smoking gun, perhaps, but
there’s certainly smoke and it’s a fair bet that there were
genuine flames behind it.
Garrick Alder
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Thatcher’s Secret War
Subversion, Coercion, Secrecy and Government, 1974-90
Clive Bloom
Stroud: The History Press, 2015, £20 (h/b)
I was seriously interested when I got the publisher’s flyer
about this book. To my knowledge no-one has tackled this
subject in its entirety; and no-one has even re-examined
Thatcher’s rise to power, the 1974-79 period, since Stephen
Dorril and I wrote Lobster 11 and the expansion of that
material in Smear! Wilson and the Secret State; and they were
published in 1986 and 1991, before the Internet. What could
be done these days with Google and Nexis-Lexis?
A little alarm bell rang when I saw the cover. The rear
page of the sleeve announces: ‘Everything in this book is true;
everything is false. It all depends on which side of the looking
glass one is standing’. (And this is repeated on the first page
of the text.) As an image this is faulty because on one side of
a looking glass you get your own reflection, the other side is
non-reflective, and on neither side can you see through.1 As a
preface to a purported history book, what does it suggest? Is
the author2 merely nodding towards bullshit, pop postmodernism? Or is he telling the reader that the book cannot
be trusted? In which case, why write it? In keeping with his
warning on the cover, the author writes on page 12:
‘...what is recorded here is the disparate investigations
of different people often working in isolation and never
quite sure of what was true or false. In a sense, these
pages represent speculation of a rather particular
research type, half history and half the innuendo that
history is made from.’
I have no idea what that ‘half the innuendo that history is
made from’ means but I doubt that Tony Bunyan, Duncan
Campbell, or the State Research collective, for example, felt
they were engaged in ‘half history and half innuendo’. Coming
along in their footsteps, I certainly didn’t. None of us are in the
author’s index, incidentally, though Bunyan and I make it into
1
2
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Anthony Frewin made this point to me.
The author has a website <Clivebloom.com/>.
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the author’s ‘secondary sources’, where he has me as Robin
Ramsan. Duncan Campbell is mentioned twice, en passant, but
is missed by Bloom’s indexer.
The book is in two distinct sections: the 1974-1979
period, before Thatcher took office, and her period at No. 10.
The 1974-79 period is the most interesting to me and about
which I know most, and it is that section on which I will
concentrate; and I am afraid this will be almost entirely a
catalogue of the author’s errors.
On page 15 we have this:
‘This was politics by other means, which journalists
Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsey named “para-politics”
in 1983.’
Well my name is Ramsay, not Ramsey; but OK, this error is
often made in England. And we didn’t name it ‘para-politics’
(more usually, parapolitics): the term came from Peter Dale
Scott in the 1970s, as we repeatedly acknowledged. A couple
of lines later there is the following quotation.
‘Brutally summarised......Mrs Thatcher and Thatcherism
grew out of a right-wing network in this country with
extensive links to the military-intelligence establishment.
Her rise to power was the climax of a long campaign by
this network which included a protracted destabilisation
campaign against the Labour and Liberal parties –
chiefly the Labour Party - during 1974-76.7 ’
I recognised this as a paragraph I wrote in Lobster 11. But
what has been excised by Bloom after ‘summarised’? He’s
taken out the words ‘our thesis is’. Having removed them he
can then cite Paul Foot as the source at note 7. (But Foot,
doing this honestly, cited Lobster 11 when he quoted that
paragraph.)
Immediately below this quotation he lists some of the
whistle-blowers and investigative journalists of the period
(this is where Duncan Campbell gets a name-check) and then
adds: ‘Amateurs such as Peter Green would not let
explanations lie...’. Who is Peter Green? Does he mean Rob
Green, Hilda Murrell’s nephew?
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Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd are discussed.
‘Holroyd
after he
MI5 and
Ireland’.
was apparently confined to a mental hospital
made public the turf war that raged between
MI6 over who ran operations in Northern
(p. 23)
‘Apparently’? Fred was briefly sent to the Army mental hospital
at Netley while he was still serving and long before he began
whistle-blowing. This stain on his service record has been one
of Holroyd’s biggest complaints for the last 30 plus years and
Bloom would know this had he consulted Holroyd’s memoir. A
couple of paragraphs later we are told that when Holroyd
testified before the Barron Inquiry in the Irish Republic into the
Dublin and Monaghan bombings ‘Holroyd was considered a
Walter Mitty character’. (p. 24) No, he wasn’t. You can check
for yourself: the Barron hearings and comments are on-line.3
After Holroyd, Bloom turns to Wallace and the errors
continue. ‘Wallace joined the regular army and quickly rose
through the ranks.’ (p. 30). It’s more complex than that. In his
media/psy-ops roles he was a civilian employee of the army.
But he was also a part-time member of the Ulster Defence
Regiment, resigning in 1975 with the rank of Captain. Wallace
‘had been dealing with a Protestant murder group and
paedophile operation out of the Kincora Boys’ Home’. (p. 30).
There was no ‘murder group’ at Kincora I have ever heard of
and Bloom offers no source for this claim.
On Wallace, Bloom quotes occasional contributor to
these columns, Bernard Porter, thus:
‘[Porter] suggests that Wallace was a man with a
“grievance” whose “horse’s tale” was the result of
embitterment and “flakiness”. (p. 32).
What Porter actually wrote was this:
‘At around the same time [as Peter Wright’s allegations]
an army “black” propagandist from Northern Ireland,
Colin Wallace, appeared with more horse’s mouth tales
of either the same plot, or a parallel one. He also
brought documentary evidence with him: mainly his
3
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notes, made at the time. Both these sources were
tainted. Wright had his grievance over his pension, and
a general air of “flakiness”; and Wallace had just
completed a gaol sentence for a manslaughter charge
which he claimed was a put-up job.’ 4
Porter used ‘grievance’ and ‘flakiness’ about Peter Wright not
Wallace; and it wasn’t a ’horse’s tale’ but ‘horse’s mouth
tales’. Is Bloom’s misuse of this paragraph to denigrate
Wallace sloppy or malicious?
Still in Ireland, Bloom turns to Maurice Oldfield, and
mentions the 1987 story in the Sunday Times which said
Oldfield had:
‘been a security risk when caught “cottaging” in 1980. It
was not exactly true, however, but plausible enough to
cause damage.’
What does ‘not exactly true’ mean? Oldfield wasn’t exactly
caught cottaging? In fact the story was entirely an invention,
an MI5 smear run into the Sunday Times via James Adams.5
Oldfield’s death, and some suspicions about its cause,
leads Bloom to Gary Murray who mentions this in his 1993
book Enemies of the State. This, says Bloom, ‘became a bible a
both for conspiracy theorists and those whose legitimate
investigations suggested an actual series of conspiratorial
situations’. (p. 35) It did? News to me. Murray’s book was full
of fascinating anecdotes and leads, few of which could be
followed because of his unwillingness (or inability) to name
names.
As we move into the paranoia about the British left in
the 1970s we have the ‘Trotskyist Workers’ Party’ (p. 43)
which, from the context, should be the Workers’ Revolutionary
4 Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia (London 1989, p. 211). This has
recently been republished in the ‘Routledge Revivals’ series.
Said conviction was overturned, something Bloom omits in his
account.
5 The first thing I did during my brief period at Channel Four News
that year was ring up all the people named in that story as sources for
it and they all denied saying what was attributed to them.
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Party.6 We are told that Frank Kitson ‘became the first head of
military intelligence in Ulster’ (p. 44) – he didn’t – and on the
next page Bloom gives us both Captain Laurence Nairac
instead of Robert Nairac and John ‘Francie’ Green instead of
John Francis Green.
Into the section on the so-called private armies of the
mid-1970s and the author’s wholly inadequate documentation
really begins to irritate. He tells us that David Stirling’s GB75
was
‘a strike-breaking force that included all sorts of
disgruntled intelligence operatives, former soldiers and
arms dealers who were preparing for a coup against
what they considered a communist government led by a
communist agent – the Prime Minister himself.’ (p. 47)
But to my knowledge the personnel of GB75 were never
revealed and Bloom offers no source on this. And was it
intended to break strikes or run a coup?
He tells us that GB75 ‘maintained contacts with Walter
Walker’s Unison Committee for Action and an ex-MI6 officer
called George Young.’ (p. 48) In fact Unison was run by Young
and Walker was initially a member of it but quit to start his
own group, Civil Assistance when, as he told me in a letter, he
could not work out what Young was really up to. Bloom
continues:
‘Later, in 1975, Young organised Tory action alongside
Airey Neave and can be seen in that respect to be one of
the secret architects of Thatcher’s rise to power.’
It should, of course, be Tory Action; the claim that Neave was
involved with Young in this is not sourced by the author;7 and
what – if anything – Tory Action actually amounted to has
never been clear.
6 There was a Workers’ Party at the time, a split from IS, with a
membership of about 50. But this isn’t the party to which Bloom is
referring.
7 There is a Wiki entry on Tory Action which says Neave was involved
but the source for that claim is given as Paul Larkin’s A Very British
Jihad (Belfast, 2004) and that merely asserts, without any sources,
that Neave ‘helped’ Young found Tory Action.
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Back to the subject of Wallace. He tells us that Airey
Neave:
‘certainly knew a great deal about Operation Clockwork
Orange. Here all the threads came together: Irish
Catholic gunmen supplied by the Soviet Union and the
trade unions....’.(p. 53)
Did Neave know about Clockwork Orange? I asked Colin
Wallace while writing this review and he said that though it
was a long time ago, he was pretty sure he would not have
discussed Clockwork Orange with Neave. Taken literally, this
statement by the author is nonsense: the Soviets and unions
did not supply gunmen. Bloom is clumsily compressing a great
of deal of disinformation material about Soviet activity in
Ireland and the UK: essentially the beliefs that the Soviets
were subverting Britain through the CPGB’s role in trade
unions and were attempting to turn Ireland into another
Cuba. If the CPGB’s role in trade unions was real, there is no
evidence that it was being directed by the Soviets – had there
been any we would have heard about it – and Ireland-asCuba was simply an invention by those creative amplifiers of
the ‘red menace’ at IRD. (Bloom does not mention IRD.)
Bloom then tells us that Neave met Wallace three times
and ‘Wallace was dismissed with £70 for his information.’ (p.
53) Actually the £70 was the fee from the Daily Telegraph for a
piece Wallace wrote, anonymously, about the Northern Ireland
situation.
Further into the ‘Wilson plot’ material the author gives
us Brian Crozier and gets the Crozier chronology wrong, with
Forum World Features in the 1970s and the Institute for the
Study of Conflict in the 1960s, instead of the other way round.
(On page 73, he calls the Institute for the Study of Conflict
‘Crozier’s anti-Trotskyist think tank’. Whatever it was, it wasn’t
that. Crozier never took the Trot groups seriously: his eye was
firmly fixed on the Soviet ‘threat’.)
The rest of the book is mostly chapters about specific
events in the Thatcher period. Some are familiar – the miners’
strike; nukes civil and military; the deaths of Hilda Murrell and
Willie McRae; arms for Iraq. These later chapters are less
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error-strewn (though no better sourced) than his account of
the 1974-79 period, perhaps because the material is less
complex.
When he strays off familiar territory it goes wrong. He
has a short chapter on mind control, for example, which in ten
pages, citing only three books, one newspaper article and five
websites (none of them serious sites on mind control issues),
he skips across the last 35 years from the apparently
mysterious death of the Marconi scientists, and part of the late
Joe Vialls’ story in the 1980s, to John Allman (who wrote in
Lobster 48). En route he conflates gangstalking and Internet
trolling (p. 175) while omitting 99.99% of the serious work
done in the field. If the book had an editor s/he should have
removed this chapter.
The author presents these chapters as illustrative of his
thesis:
‘that there was an undeclared and internal “cold war”
fought throughout the 1980s in which rogue elements in
the government, military and secret services seemed to
have free rein to distort facts and even kill opposition
voices under the camouflage of black propaganda’. (p. 1)
Well, yes, something like that, even if that is oddly expressed.
But while the author’s thesis is generally correct (we might
argue about ‘rogue elements’) and supported by his account
of various incidents during those years, the chapters on the
1975-1979 period are so sloppy and the whole thing is so
inadequately sourced as to render it useless.
Robin Ramsay
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Oswaldology, as it were
Anthony Frewin
The Oswald Code
Alan Jules Weberman
New York: Independent Research Associates, 2014, 300 pps.
Illustrations, notes, index, $17.00 (amazon)
Alan Jules Weberman or, more familiarly, A J Weberman, is
widely known as a garbologist, Dylanologist, and as the
author of a book on the JFK assassination.1
The main title page has a photograph captioned in caps
THE AUTHOR SUMMER 1963 HITCHING TO THE YUCATAN. Just
why this photo is positioned so prominently here and its
significance are unexplained. Could it be that the author
wanted to prove he was actually about in the year that JFK
was assassinated, and therefore qualified to write about it?
(This is along the lines of Ned Polsky declaring that many
writers consider themselves sociologists merely because they
are members of society.)
Weberman explains in the opening chapter that studying
Oswald’s address book ‘confirmed my belief that Oswald was
adept at steganography and hid information in it.’ He
continues by saying that whereas cryptography is making
information unreadable by third parties, steganography is the
practice of hiding [italics supplied] information, and he should
have added the qualifier in plain sight. Or, to put it another
and better way, as the inestimable David Kahn has written:
‘The methods of steganography conceal the very existence of
the message.’ 2
So, whereas official investigations have paid only a
cursory interest to Oswald’s address book, Weberman will
venture forth where angels and dupes fear to tread.
1 See my ‘Inside Lee Harvey Oswald’s address book’ in this issue.
2 David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (New York:
MacMillan Publishing, 1967) p. xiii. Still, after all these years, the best
book on the subject.
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The author jumps about like a pimp with dog shit on his
shoes. We have this document, then that document, this
illustration, then that illustration, and one hopes they will be
tied together and their importance explained. But it never
comes. Then Gerry Patrick Hemming appears on the stage,
described by Weberman as a ‘fascinating dude’, who confided
in him all sorts of Big Secrets; but Weberman doesn’t realise
he is being toyed with.
Oswald worked for a time in Dallas at Jaggars-ChilesStoval, a firm that undertook classified security typesetting for
the US government. The address of the company together
with their phone number is in the address book and
underneath Oswald has written micro dots. Well, big deal. So
what? Weberman comments:
‘An FBI document dated October 2, 1964, revealed that
the Bureau examined photographs of Oswald in the
USSR and his Russian books for microdots, but found
none. Among Oswald’s possessions the Dallas Police
Department discovered a pair of Russian binoculars. The
binoculars could be reversed to blow an image down.’
So, not good honest US binoculars, but sneaky Russian ones.
This claim is absurd, as anyone can easily demonstrate
whether with Russian or other binoculars. The optics are just
not capable of achieving this.
There are many reproductions of pages from the address
book with Weberman seeing things that are just not there. To
take one example, Frank Fiorini Sturgis, one of the Watergate
burglars and a familiar face to the JFK critical community,
features prominently. Weberman has this:
‘The name FIORINI appeared twice in Oswald’s address
book disguised as two words. One was “orinis” the
other was “Russ for Forin”. As you can see letters “i-n”
were written in a different ink.’
Pretty conclusive proof, eh? This is up there with Ignatius
Donnelly and his Great Cryptogram.3
3 Ignatius Donnelly, The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher In The
So-Called Shakespeare Plays (1881). The title is self-explanatory. Could
well have served as an inspiration to Weberman.
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We are not finished with Sturgis yet. There is a
photograph of him in his pyjamas and dressing gown holding a
saucer and cup of tea sitting on a sofa next to his matronlylooking mother who has one hand on his shoulder while the
other points an accusatory finger at him. It’s captioned, again
caps throughout, FRANK’S MOM BAWLS HIM OUT FOR KILLING
KENNEDY. Anywhere else I would assume this was a lame
attempt at humour, but here I suspect it is meant to be taken
seriously.
Weberman presents further photos of Sturgis and claims
he was one of the Three Tramps arrested on 22 November in
Dealey Plaza. One of the others was Howard Hunt. The third
was David LeMar Christ. Who he? You’ll find his name in
Oswald’s address book, but disguised of course.
It was only a matter of time before the name of James
Jesus Angleton appeared. Weberman writes, ‘Angelton’s name
was cleverly encrypted in Oswald’s address book, disguised as
“Plug for Radio”.’
Plug for Radio? This is on page 86. The thought of
wading through 200 more pages of the book was too much to
contemplate. The non sequiturs, the irrelevancies, the tortured
decrypting, the Zen-like illogic, and so on were doing my head
in big time. Enough already!
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