The CIA
In a recent ‘Witness Seminar’ on the 1975 British referendum on entry into the European Economic Community (EEC), the Conservative MP, Sir Richard Body, who in 1975 was co-chair of the anti-EEC National Referendum Campaign, had this to say:
‘At the very beginning of the campaign two CIA agents came to see me in the House of Commons. They were Anglophiles and they were very upset at the way their agency was going to interfere in the referendum campaign. They said a new head of station was going to be appointed who was not a normal CIA man, he was well known in the federalist movement and they were going to intervene in different ways, and they produced a substantial number of documents to verify what they were saying.
I read these documents through and they seemed very hot stuff. I showed it (sic) to one or two others and they agreed. However no newspaper would publish these documents, nor were they willing to to inverview the two CIA men. In the end I was reduced to Time Out, which then had a very small circulation….’
(The 1975 Referendum On Europe’, in Contemporary Record, vol. 10, no. 3 1996, pp. 93-4. Emphasis added.)
I wrote to Sir Richard Body about these documents but did not receive a reply. If any reader knows where they are, please me know.
The Time Out piece was ‘Uncle Sam Goes to Market’, May 23 1975, and it was reproduced as ‘The CIA Backs the Common Market’ in Dirty Work: the CIA in Western Europe (Zed Press, London 1978). The head of station appointed to ‘intervene’ in the Referendum campaign was Cord Meyer, who, in the early post-war years had been one of the leading lights in the United World Federalists, before joining the CIA. Meyer was head of station in London, 1975-76.
IRD
The Sunday Telegraph April 27 1997 carried an important piece about the IRD operation between 1970 and 1972 to put out propaganda in favour of British entry into the EEC. The piece lists a number of senior media figures, politicians and civil servants involved.