Obituaries Ace Hayes (1940-1998) by Daniel Brandt
Ace R. Hayes, 58, an activist and political researcher who was well-known in the Portland, Oregon area, died on February 13, 1998 from an aneurism in the brain.
Corruption and conspiracy in high places is the name of the game, but Ace was on the case. His broad familiarity with the dark side of American history will be missed by senior colleagues and younger protégés alike. Yes, ‘colorful’ and ‘unforgettable’ are words that come instantly to mind, but ‘committed’ is more important, and ‘permanent state of indignation’ is best of all. Ace Hayes was a whirlwind, and his moral outrage could suck you in.
I first heard his name in 1986, when he purchased a database I was developing and had just begun to distribute. The only other purchasers I remember that year were Newsweek (which had the Iran-contra story months before it broke but just sat on it), and Howard Rosenberg from CBS (who used the database several months later to scoop a story that eventually resulted in a conviction for Oliver North).
It took the CIA 13 months longer than Ace Hayes to place an order for this database, and it took the Soviet embassy 8 months longer than the CIA. Who’s this Ace guy from Portland? (By 1994 Ace had become a member of the advisory board at Public Information Research, Inc., the publisher of NameBase, the database in question.)
My records from 1986 to 1988 tell me that Ace had a Kaypro computer, and a brochure he enclosed said that he taught courses at the Red Rose School in Portland. They were titled ‘Radical Research’ and ‘Secret Government in America.’
I learned later that Ace already had a long history of activism by this time. He started out at Portland State, and was arrested for anti-Vietnam War protests. Then he lived in Oakland, California while the Black Panthers were active. Ace told stories about how he got into trouble for delivering guns to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua during the late 1970s. Once upon a time, the stories continued, the Communist Party invited him to join. But Ace turned them down ‘because they were too conservative.’
Ace was bright and articulate, in a gruff sort of way. He had no tolerance for the well-turned subtleties of talking heads and conventional wise men. As a one-man information highway, he slew such pundits-of-the-moment with a few well-deserved epithets. His opinions were backed up by an enormous personal library of books and periodicals on current history. Ace Hayes was a man on the move, a man on a moral mission, a man with no time to lose.
His political radar was firmly grounded in what might be described as militant populism. If you knew him only casually, you might mistake him for a militia type, such as those who were so upset over government conduct at Waco. But as Ace would point out, the more important question by 1993 was this: how did it come to pass that the so-called ‘left’ failed to express any outrage whatsoever over Waco? For the previous two years, Ace had been telling me that it was no longer a question of ‘left’ and ‘right’, but rather a question of ‘top’ versus ‘bottom’.
It’s clear that Ace had very good radar; even Ivy League black scholars are acknowledging today that ‘race’ issues have obliterated ‘class’ issues, and that the entire civil rights movement somehow missed a very big bus. (It’s also true that in the 1970s, Marxist scholars were quietly purged from American universities in favor of women’s studies, black studies, and this-and-that studies, all of which were well funded by Ford-Rockefeller-Carnegie. But why belabor the point by getting conspiratorial?)
Whenever I wanted the low-down on political trends, all I had to do was call Ace Hayes. I hardly needed to do even that. Between the Portland Free Press that he edited, and those thick packets of clippings he sent out to his mailing list, full of underscores and double exclamation points in the margins, all I had to do was empty my mailbox. Then I’d sit back with a six-pack to see if I could read his mind.
The ‘colorful’ aspect of Ace Hayes came to me in 1995, when I had the pleasure of visiting him, and his wife Janet Marcley, at their five-acre homestead near Portland. Soon a couple dozen of their friends arrived for a barbecue. Ace and Janet lived on the top floor of a big barn. Most of this floor was covered with stacks of magazines and shelves of books. The ground floor was half machine-shop (after college, Ace became a machinist), and half of what looked like junk.
After a few beers, Ace and Janet showed me their shitaki mushroom garden. Then Ace started up a monster yellow log skidder parked in the front, to show us how the pincers moved. Ace Hayes was packing a Glock 9-millimeter (he had a permit and loved guns), and a few additional beers later demonstrated his quick draw (I didn’t even see his hand move).
Later I watched a videotape of one of Ace’s ‘Secret Government Seminars’, which he has held monthly for over ten years. They are shown on cable-access television in the Portland area. Ace sallied forth in his inimitable style, blasting away at corruption and conspiracy in high places. He made his case with his usual foursome: a broad knowledge of current history, a belief in the Constitution and democracy, integrity with common sense, and an instinct that the price of democracy is eternal vigilance.
Ace wasn’t a leftist or a rightist, nor was he a refined intellectual or a smooth politician. To his credit, he had some qualities we all can use — a populist dignity, a well-informed ear to the ground, a massive sense of purpose, and unflagging energy. Such qualities are difficult to find as we anticipate the next millennium. I’m going to miss Ace Hayes. I hope he’s not watching us from somewhere, because his act is a difficult one to follow.(1)
Robin Ramsay adds: I never met Ace Hayes but around the time he bought Daniel Brandt’s database he subscribed to Lobster and we began corresponding. We disagreed about much. Ace was always more inclined towards conspiracy theorising than me: he took the Gemstone File seriously, for example. But chiefly we disagreed about the Soviet Union. Like other American radicals I have come across, Ace had problems accepting that the Soviet Union were not the ‘good guys’: since the US media lied about everything else, he argued, why would they tell the truth about the Soviets? We agreed to differ. Around Lobster 9 the magazine was in debt and Ace was one of two people – the other was G .F. Newman – who sent me money to keep the thing afloat. He sent $100 dollars – a lot of money in those days. As Lobster expanded in the subsequent years I hope he took pleasure in what he had helped to preserve.
Major-General Richard Clutterbuck (obit Guardian 9 January 1998). Soldier turned academic (at the University of Exeter), Clutterbuck was best known for writing a series of books about urban guerillas, trade unions and other threats to liberal democracy in the 1970s. Of these Britain in Agony (Faber and Faber 1978) was the best known (and had the silliest title).
David Floyd (obit Guardian 3 September 1997). Journalist, Soviet specialist, chiefly with the Daily Telegraph, later with Brian Crozier at Goldsmith’s Now!; IRD asset or employee – I don’t know which.
Brigadier Michael Harbottle (obit Guardian 8 May 1997). Founder member of Generals for Peace and Disarmament, which was routinely accused of being a Soviet front by the pro-NATO lobby in the 1980s. And might have been such; but where is the evidence?
Sir John Jones (obit Glasgow Herald 24 March 1998, Daily Telegraph 11 March 1998). MI5 officer, Director-General 1981-5.
General Sir Frank King (obit Guardian 14 April 1998). GOC Northern Ireland 1973-75. The Guardian obit is by Chris Ryder, in the 1970s a media asset of the British Army, and Ryder portrays King as the man who showed the Labour Government in 1974 that the Ulster Workers’ Council general strike could not be resisted. Another perspective would put King in charge while the British Army and secret state ran through their entire kit of counter-terrorist and psy-war strategies – with no success.
Dr Denis Leigh (obit Times 6 May 1998) psychiatrist, author; ‘for many years involved in the selection of candidates for MI5 and MI6…in 1966 appointed Secretary-General of the World Psychiatric Association.’
Charles Levison (obit Guardian 3 April 1997) International trade union leader, best known as author of Vodka Cola (Gordon and Cremonisi, 1979), a parapolitical analysis of multinational companies and organisations which, as its title suggests, is centred round the phenomenon of US capital being invested in the Soviet bloc in the 1970s. (US capital liked the Soviet bloc: no unions, low wages.) The book was not popular with the US powers-that-be and Levinson was the victim of what looks like a smear campaign in 1984. See ‘Cash, the US connection, and world union’, Keith Harper, Guardian 26 June 1984.
Donald McCormick (report Sunday Times 4 January 1998). Better known under his pen name Richard Deacon, McCormick was one of the post-war pioneers in the field of writing books about intelligence services and operations from scraps of real information.
James Earl Ray died, aged 70. Harold Jackson devoted fourth-fifths of his long obituary in the Guardian (24 April 1998) to describing Ray’s early life and his racism, briefly mentioned the curious fact that the apparently none-too-bright petty criminal Ray had managed to acquire the identities of four men in Toronto who all looked like him, but omitted any of the subsequent research on the King murder, such as that by John Edginton, the British TV producer, and particularly by Dr William Pepper. Godfrey Hodgson’s obit in the Independent (25 April 1998) was much better: Hodgson actually knows something about recent developments in the case.
In his generally excellent column in The Observer on 26 April 1998, Nick Cohen recycled Searchlight‘s assault on Dr William Pepper’s book on the King conspiracy at the time of its first appearance, dismissing it because one of the many leads Pepper turned up was a Sid Carthew who, unbeknown to be Pepper, is a former BNP member. Cohen used the syllogism first used by Searchlight: Carthew is a fascist therefore Carthew is not reliable; Pepper quoted Carthew therefore the book is not reliable.
B. A. Santamaria (obits Times 27 February 1998, Independent 12 March 1998, Guardian 4 April 1998) Catholic, anti-communist lawyer who split the Australian Labour Party in 1955. Santamaria’s Catholic Social Movement actually did in Australia what the British Left assumed Catholic Action in Britain was up to (but for which it never produced the evidence).
Frank Steele (obit Guardian 5 January 1998) MI6 officer sent into Northern Ireland in 1971. Involved in 1972/3 attempts to resolve the conflict.
C. Gordon Tether (obit Financial Times 3 December 1997) FT writer for 30 years, resigned in 1975 at paper’s refusal to run a number of his ‘Lombard’ columns. These rejected columns, including a number on the Bilderberg group, back in the days when the group really was secret, were subsequently self-published by Tether as The Banned Articles of C. Gordon Tether.(ISBN 0 905821 00 9)
George Urban (obits Guardian 20 October 1997,Times 8 October 1997) Hungarian exile, anti-communist writer and intellectual, Urban worked for the entire range of CIA-funded organisations in the cold war period.
Notes
- Daniel Brandt can be contacted at Public Information Research, Inc., PO Box 680635, San Antonio TX 78268
Tel:210-509-3160 Fax:210-509-3161 Nonprofit publisher of NameBase. http://www.pir.org/