C. Gordon Tether
Mike Peters in Lobster 32 mentioned a book – actually, a pamphlet – called The Banned Articles of C. Gordon Tether (ISBN 0905821009) in which Tether had published those items written for his Financial Times column which the editor had seen fit to pull. Not having looked at it for about a decade, I thought it would be interesting to see the items, other than the two about Bilderberg cited by Peters, which the editor had baulked at. The largest group of articles are those commenting on or opposing Britain’s membership of the then EEC and the propaganda being put out in favour of it. The second biggest group is articles criticising the City of London. In the Financial Times?
The last sighting I have of Mr Tether was at least a decade ago writing something for the US far-right magazine The Spotlight.
Stuck in the grooves of academe
At the beginning of January Professor Peter Hennessy was seen a great deal on TV going ooh-aah over the latest batch of government files released under the 30 year rule at the Public Record Office. Hennessy was apparently astonished to see documentation of the conflict between the then Governor of the Bank of England, Lord Cromer, and Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Cromer wanted – guess what? – cuts in public expenditure and higher interest rates. Gordon Brown would have said, ‘It’s already in our program, Lord Cromer,’ but Wilson threatened to call a general election on the theme of the government or the Bank of England. Cromer backed down in a hurry. On 3 January 1997 the Guardian carried a long, splendidly condescending letter from John Cole, erstwhile BBC political editor, pointing out that this Wilson-Cromer conflict was not news, that it had been described in great detail in, for example, Wilson’s own account of his first term in office.
I like some of Hennessy’s books. His Cabinet, for example, is full of interesting bits and pieces. But like most British political scientists, Hennessy is wholly unwilling to discuss the secret arms of the British state.
In his most recent book, a series of interviews he did for Radio 4 published as Muddling Through; Power, Politics and the Quality of Government in Post-war Britain (Gollancz 1996), he tip-toes up to the spook problem and turns away again. Of Harold Wilson’s second term he writes:
‘There was, too, a trace of paranoia, not this time about Labour rivals but about something far more sinister. It’s impossible for outsiders – and, indeed, for most insiders – to reach an informed judgement about the alleged Secret Service plot against Wilson.’ (p. 264, emphasis added)
An ‘informed judgement’? Ah, yes, one of those. Hennessy has been around the civil service too long and has learned their escape hatches. His certainty of this impossibility would be the more convincing if he gave any indication at all of having tried to read the available literature on the subject. Hennessy’s relationship to the Anglo-American states is perhaps illustrated by his role as one of the administrators of the Kennedy Scholarship scheme which takes bright, promising, middle of the road British politicians and intellectuals across to the States to absorb the meaning of the ‘special relationship’ at first hand.
Put-down of the decade?
Edward Du Cann, some time Chairman of the Conservative Party, Chairman of the Party’s 1922 Committee, and, until 1991, Chairman of Lonrho, published an autobiography in 1995, Two Lives (Image Publishing, Upton upon Severn, UK), which received little attention. It’s quite interesting on the City, on the Heath government – and how it was wrecked by the City’s lending explosion in 1972/3 – and on the protracted struggle between Lonrho, the Fayed brothers and various factions of the Tory Party over the ownership of Harrods. It also contains one of the best extended put-downs in recent years. This exquisite hatchet-job is on fellow Lonrho board member, Nicholas Elliot.
‘Yet another dissident was Nicholas Elliot, a director of MI6, the man who botched Commander Crabb’s underwater investigation of the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze at the time of Kruschev’s visit to the UK in 1956. A former head of station in Beirut, he travelled there in 1963 to obtain the traitor Kim Philby’s confession. He succeeded in this, but then allowed his old friend from MI6 to escape to Soviet Russia. On the face of it these were two of the most monumental blunders perpetrated by British Intelligence since the War. Presumably the reality must have been different from the way in which the public perceived these events or he would surely have been dismissed in disgrace. For a while, until the shareholders of Lonrho dismissed him for his disloyalty to Rowland by an overwhelming majority, we were both directors of Lonrho. I never heard him make a single contribution of substance at any of our Board meetings. I always sat as far away from him as possible: he suffered badly from halitosis.’ (p. 161)
Colin Wallace/psy-ops
One of the lines Colin Wallace at Information Policy tried to get the media to run about Northern Ireland in 1973/4 was the one about the IRA hiring US Army veterans to do their fighting for them. One such story was planted on Chapman Pincher who ran it in the Express. See Lobster 16 p. 15 where the Pincher story is reproduced.
The story has resurfaced – and in the Express again. On 14 February 1997, its lead story said that the IRA sniper who shot the British soldier Stephen Restorick, ‘is believed to be a former member of American special forces.’ Since the rest of the story reported that British military intelligence ‘knows the identity’ of the sniper, and gives his age and address, this ‘is believed to be’ is a phoney: a phone call to the Pentagon would tell the British intelligence people whether the man was ex-special forces or not.
The Times 23 December 1996 reported that Britain was expanding its ‘psychological warfare operations department’ when it moved from Ashford to Chicksands, ‘after years of neglect’. The report included this:
‘Part of the reason for Britain’s reluctance to concentrate resources on psyops has been the publicity surrounding former Army information officer in Northern Ireland, Colin Wallace and allegations of a disinformation campaign.’
But I thought the MOD line was that Wallace was making it all up?
Tara lives?
Still in Wallace country, Roy Garland, former member of William ‘the Beast of Kincora’ McGrath’s organisation Tara, is writing in the nationalist Northern Ireland paper, the Irish News. In his column on 6 January 1997 Garland offers a dose of the strange Irish mythology material which was a part of McGrath’s ideology. The piece was headed ‘Legacy of a Celtic Church is to avoid ancient curse.’
Masons
I’ve always rather liked Roy Hattersley, despite disagreeing with some of his views. His memoir, Who Goes Home? (Little Brown and Co, 1995), as well as being a delightful read – delightful, that is, if you like anecdotes about politicians and the Labour Party – contains a number of minor revelations, of which this, on p. 248, is the most interesting.
‘George [Brown] tripped towards me on his tiny feet and, noticing that I was wearing a dinner jacket, made one of the oldest jokes in the world, “I know MPs are badly paid. But I didn’t realise you had to work as a waiter in the evenings.” I countered with the second most venerable dinner jacket witticism, “I’m just off to my Lodge meeting.” George became suddenly serious. “You don’t have to go outside,” he said. “There is a special parliamentary Lodge. Shall I get you transferred?”‘
The encounter isn’t dated but, from the context, it appears to be in the early 1980s.
There is also a Masonic lodge for parliamentary journalists, called the Gallery Lodge. One of its former Masters, Stanley Robinson, former head of The Times Parliamentary staff, died in November. See his obituary in The Times 25 November 1996.
Jam on it
The oddest item since the last Lobster was a report in the Sunday Telegraph 16 March 1997 on allegations of sex orgies among Belgium’s great and good. A senior Brussels policeman described various categories of sexual activities: ballets roses (with young girls), ballets bleus (with boys) and ballets de confitures. Of this last category, the Telegraph said, ‘apparently extreme Right-wingers like to strip and smear themselves with jam.’
Red nose alert
In January this year a news agency contacted Armen Victorian with the news that NORAD had put their forces on Red Alert in the Northern territories in Canada on Christmas Day, apparently in response to a UFO sighting. What did he know? Victorian contacted NORAD and received the following:
‘….regarding a sighting event which took place on Christmas Day in 1996…Given the timing of this sighting, the report refers to the annual NORAD alert that is put out when NORAD Tracks Santa Claus which has been a popular media and community relations tool for this command for many years.’
Electro-magnetic nightmares
Harlan Girard, the American who has been sending me material on electro-magnetic weaponry for many years, recently sent me a fascinating snippet. Girard now networks with some of the many US citizens apparently being assaulted by these weapons and he has been contacted by a couple of people reporting that the assaults had begun after attending conferences on the subject of UFOs. What perfect victims! They’ve got crazy ideas to start with. No-one will believe them!
Girard has obtained a copy of a document published by the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board called ‘Biological Process Control’. This discusses the possibility of ‘physical regulation of biological processes using electromagnetic fields’, and includes this chilling paragraph:
‘One can envision the development of electromagnetic energy sources, the output of which can be pulsed shaped and focused; that can couple with the human body in a fashion [which] will allow one to prevent muscular movements, control emotions (and thus actions), produce sleep, transmit suggestions, interfere with both short-term and long-term memory…’
Next time you read about or hear about someone claiming that the CIA (or whoever) is controlling their mind or body, re-read this paragraph before dismissing them as a nutter.
Gordon Brown is not gay – official
One of the really comic episodes in the pre-election period was the appearance of stories in the British press about Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown’s girlfriend. There have been rumours about Brown being gay for years; and every once in a while Labour Party HQ feels it necessary to launch evidence of Brown’s heterosexuality into the media – presumably to head off Gordon-is-gay stories from the Conservative Party. This time the stories began in the Sunday Telegraph on 12 January 1997, in the Mandrake column with the headline ‘Gordon Brown to marry’. The lucky woman was said to be Sarah Macauley, one of the people fixing things between the Labour Party and the business community.
This was followed, a fortnight later, in the Daily Telegraph of 25 January, in the Peterborough column, where it was announced – by Macauley’s brother – that the couple did not intend to marry because Macauley’s cat would not get on with the official 11 Downing Street cat! The New Labour-friendly Patrick Wintour joined in, reporting in the Observer of 26 January a dinner party attended by Brown ‘and his team, including his close friend Sarah Macauley.’ All three papers ran the same picture of Ms Macauley, who, I rather suspect, will disappear from view now that the election is over.