Kevin Coogan is the author of the study of the American fascist Francis Parker Yockey, Dreamer of the Day, reviewed in Lobster 39. He sent me an essay primarily about the American far-right group the Defenders of the American Constitution. The essay, while fascinating, is too big (about 20 pages) for these columns. However within it there is a short history of British League of Empire Loyalists, a rather important group on the British post-war right, about which there is almost no current published material. Here, extracted from the longer work, is that section.
The Defenders of the American Constitution (DAC) and League of Empire Loyalists (LEL) were set up within a year of each other; the DAC sometime in mid to late 1953 and the LEL in October 1954. (The LEL’s publication Candour, however, began publishing in late October 1953, almost simultaneous with the DAC’s creation.) There were other intriguing similarities. Like the DAC, the LEL had some leading retired military men in its ranks, most prominently Field-Marshal Lord Ironside, who had headed up the British expedition to overthrow the Soviet government in 1919. Ironside was a member of the LEL’s General Council, along with the Earl of Buchan, Lt. General Sir Balfour Hutchison, Brigadier A. R. Wallis and other retired military men.(1) DAC co-founder former Marine Corps Lieutenant General Pedro del Valle was also a friend of Admiral Charles Freeman (Ret.). (2) Freeman became the U. S. agent for Kenneth De Courcy’s Intelligence Digest after the war. De Courcy, in turn, had extensive contacts with far-right British military and intelligence circles favoured by the LEL.
The LEL’s founder and leader Arthur Keith Chesterton (better known as ‘A.K.’) was the cousin of the famous writer G. .K. Chesterton. A one-time member of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF), Chesterton broke with Mosley in 1938. During World War II, he supported Britain’s efforts against Hitler and thus never had to face the charge of treason that haunted Mosley throughout his post-war career. (3) In the late 1940s, Chesterton even held a fairly prestigious job in Lord Beaverbrook’s press empire.
From its inception, the LEL combined ‘right-wing Tory Empire loyalism and conspiratorial anti-Semitism’. (4) Its members regularly heckled speakers and disrupted political meetings, most famously the 1958 Tory Party conference in Blackpool that culminated in fist fights between League members and Tory stewards. (After that debacle, the Tories implemented strong measures against LEL sympathisers in its ranks.) The LEL also served as the most important training ground for the next generation of British neo-fascists and extreme loyalists. It contained men like John Tyndall, Martin Webster, Colin Jordan and John Bean, men who, after leaving Chesterton and indulging in the Nazi fantasy, returned (with the exception of Jordan) to provide the leadership of the National Front. Chesterton was the focal point of ‘respectability’ around which these men circulated. (5)
The journalist George Thayer, who interviewed leading members of the LEL, summarised its program this way: 1) British sovereignty should be maintained at all cost; 2) instead of liquidating its Empire, England should continue to build it; and 3) Third World immigration to England must be stopped. For the LEL
‘Any tendency towards world government or inter national alliances that requires a partial relin-quishing of British sovereignty is an anathema ………The UN, NATO, SEATO, CENTO, and the Common Market are all “monster plots to rob Britain of her independence and strength”. ‘ (6)
In November 1954 the DAC’s co-founder Colonel Eugene Pomeroy spent eight days in London where he held extensive talks with LEL leaders. Pomeroy told Task Force readers that the DAC and LEL ‘have in common the driving force of the same ideology.’ (7) In a more candid 10 November 1954 letter to del Valle, Pomeroy reported that the LEL felt that ‘the Jews seem to exercise even greater influence here over the British Parliament and politicians than they do at home’. The group was firmly convinced that Winston Churchill and his son Randolph (along with Anthony Eden) were ‘the abject slaves of Bernie Baruch’.
The LEL shared the DAC’s obsession with the ‘hidden hand’. One 1950s LEL pamphlet, The Menace of World Government, claimed
‘There is a hidden power, which only to close students of international politics is a revealed power, wielded by a known group of international financial interests, who brought into existence the UN and the International Bank as instruments to secure its further advance to world domination. It has openly declared war on nationhood and racial pride. It approves of every approach, direct or functional, which will render mankind defenceless against its cold war in the West and the hot war in Asia to stampede us into NATO, the European Union, and their projected Pacific counterparts. It uses dread of the H-bomb to try to secure acceptance of its full World Government. Once our sovereignty is abandoned, and we are completely at its mercy, it will drop its disguise as the foe of Russian aggression and betray us to the Soviet conspiracy as surely as it betrayed us at Yalta through the incredible simpleton Roosevelt and his incredible adviser, Alger Hiss. Hiss, let it be known, was only a fugleman. His protectors were powerful men who constituted and still constitute the effective hidden government of the United States.’
From The New Unhappy Lords to the National Front
The LEL’s polemics against the ‘one world order’ culminated with the 1965 publication of Chesterton’s book, The New Unhappy Lords (NUL). In NUL Chesterton set out to document a conspiratorial plot by ‘Money Power’ to establish ‘world tyranny’ by using both ‘Communism and Loan Capitalism as twin instruments with which to subdue and govern, not the British nations alone, but all mankind.’ (8) NUL quickly went through several editions and it continues to be sold today. Its success led Chesterton’s biographer to remark that A.K’s ‘extremely doubtful privilege’ is ‘to go down in modern history as the man most responsible for keeping alive, spreading, and developing the British tradition of conspiracy thinking’. (9)
Writing in seemingly reasonable tones, in NUL Chesterton attacks British foreign policy for the loss of the Suez Canal and other former colonies as well as for the government’s support for Third World immigration. He also criticised British involvement in a ‘Federated Europe’, the European Common Market, the Treaty of Rome, and any attempt to implement a NAFTA-like ‘Free Trade Area’ that would bring Britain’s tariff policies into line with the Common Market:
‘This would have meant joining the British economy to competitive economies, and the reservations intended to safeguard the British farmers and overseas producers must soon have been jettisoned, the complementary economy covered by the Imperial Preference system would have been abandoned and the British market flooded by products from Common Market countries with a lower standard of living.’ (10)
Chesterton, however, used his critique of what he saw as specific failures by the British establishment to prove that ‘Money Power’s’ hidden hand now pulled England’s strings. His attacks on such elite groups as the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), the American Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), and the Bilderberger Society as well as on organisations like NATO and the UN, served a larger narrative goal; namely, proving the existence of a vast Jewish conspiracy. In a chapter entitled ‘Is the Conspiracy Jewish?’ he claims that ‘the major Zionist objective’ is no less than ‘One World’. ‘Moscow and Peking’ were ‘no more than branch head-quarters of the conspiracy’ whose ‘supreme headquarters’ for the ‘overthrow of the West’ was actually based in New York. According to A.K.,
‘World Jewry is the most powerful single force on earth and it follows that all the major policies which have been ruthlessly pursued through the last several decades must have the stamp of Jewish approval.’ (11)
Indeed, ‘when Hitler rebelled against the Money Power’, World Jewry decided to ‘smash him and his barter system’.(12)
Samovars and spooks
The DAC and LEL were linked to the same White Russian network that del Valle first encountered when he was an ITT executive in Buenos Aires. (13)Task Force’s London corres-pondent George Knupffer embodied these connections. Born in Saint Petersburg, Knupffer was a leading figure in the White Russian monarchist community in London. He published his own newsletter, The Plain Speaker, while also contributing occasional articles to the LEL’s Candour. Knupffer first met Colonel Pomeroy in London in November 1954 as a representative of ‘His Imperial Highness’ the Grand Duke Vladimir, the son of the late Grand Duke Cyril. Knupffer also helped lead Mladorossy (Union of Young Russia), a far-right and extremely anti-Semitic political organisation that maintained a quasi-military wing known as the Russian Revolutionary Forces (RRF). A former intelligence officer himself, (14) Pomeroy used his visit to London to seek out contacts with East European exiles such as General Wladyslaw Anders, a Polish military leader who wanted the West to back a Polish exile army. (15) Captain Henry Kerby, who arranged Pomeroy’s meeting with Anders, was a former MI6 officer and Russian expert turned Tory parliamentarian. Kerby, in turn, maintained long-standing close ties to Knupffer. (16)
In his first article for Task Force in December 1955, Knupffer claimed that New York banking houses like Kuhn Loeb were behind the Bolshevik Revolution. He then argued that Russia was no longer completely under the control of the ‘conspiracy’ that had its roots in a two-thousand year old clash of ‘two Messianisms’; namely, the Christian world view that looked to the ‘world beyond the grave, of life everlasting’ and the messianism that focused on ‘this world of material power and possessions’. The Russian Communist regime, Knupffer said, was now being forced ‘slowly but surely’ to adjust itself ‘to the wishes and needs of the Russian people’. Since Moscow ‘is no longer an effective tool for the achievement of world domination by the materialistic messianists, if we continue to see only the enemy in Moscow, we will be stabbed in the back by the enemy in New York, who wants to lead us. But that enemy, like the one in Russia, is only using America as a base.’ Knupffer concluded that both Russia and America were ‘victims of a subtle and powerful subversive force which they have not recognised in time’. (17)
In 1956 the DAC touched off a heated controversy after Task Force reprinted a lengthy attack on a Russian exile group known as the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS) by Peter J. Huxley-Blythe, then a protégé of Knupffer. (18) The article, ‘Insecure Security’, accused the CIA of financing the NTS; Huxley-Blythe claimed NTS was really under KGB control. Knupffer and other White Russian monarchists especially despised the NTS because it had collaborated with CIA plans to balkanise the former Russian Empire by supporting an independent Ukraine. (19) Huxley-Blythe’s piece so enraged the Solidarists that Task Force was forced to print a rebuttal by NTS’s Washington representative to avoid a lawsuit.
Networking
Knupffer and del Valle also tried to develop a far right net-work around the globe that included a proposed ‘World Committee for Truth and Liberty’. In a 26 June 1967 letter to del Valle, Knupffer reported that he had visited Rhodesia, South Africa, Portugal, and Spain to seek backing for the committee.(20) In his 3 July 1967 letter replying to Knupffer, del Valle noted:
‘There already exists a measure of co-operation between our nationalists and those of other countries, especially yours. Co-ordination would increase our effectiveness. Chesterton and I have helped one another in a small way….. I too was in Spain in May and I believe I have good sympathetic contacts there. You may be certain I understand that the sources of help must not be mentioned. I’m sure [Wickliffe] Vennard, Oliver [R. P. Oliver, a leading American far rightist] and [Frank] Serpico [OMNI’s publisher] understand the need for discretion.’
Finally, both Del Valle and Knupffer became entangled in the weird ‘Knights of Malta’ group headed by Charles Pichel and Del Valle’s continued ties to Pichel, whom Knupffer despised, would eventually end their collaboration. (21)
Del Valle and Chesterton
Del Valle and Chesterton maintained regular contacts for two decades. In 1962, for example, Chesterton asked del Valle to supply him with contact addresses for American rightists who might be willing to help Candour out of some serious financial problems. (22) After del Valle sent some names, the LEL’s number two man, Austin Brooks, then visited the United States in 1963 on a fund-raising tour. (23) A. K. also sent del Valle updates on his trips to South Africa and Rhodesia.
In 1966 Chesterton asked del Valle to write an introduction to a proposed American edition of New Unhappy Lords that the Chicago-based right-wing publisher Henry Regnery had agreed to issue. Regnery, however, backed out of the deal at the last minute. Chesterton next approached another American conservative publisher, Devin Adair, but it too rejected the book. (24) At Chesterton’s request, del Valle searched for yet another American publisher. Through Josephine Beaty, the DAC Vice President and widow of Iron Curtain over America author John Beaty, del Valle found OMNI Press/Christian Book Club located in Hawthorne, California. (25) When OMNI’s edition of NUL appeared, it included a short introduction by del Valle that praised Chesterton for bringing the reader ‘face to face with the fact that a conspiracy to rule the world does exist and that it is rapidly approaching its goal’. NUL also showed that ‘the powerhouse of this conspiracy resides not in Moscow, nor in London, but in New York’. For del Valle, The New Unhappy Lords was ‘a treasure house of facts which patriots of all nations can use in the struggle against the Satanic power of the Conspiracy’.
Not long after the publication of New Unhappy Lords, Chesterton LEL’s played a pivotal role in the 1967 founding of the National Front (NF), England’s most significant post-war far-right party. The NF was established out of a merger of the LEL, the British National Party, the Greater Britain Movement, and the Racial Preservation Society. Chesterton served as the NF’s chairman for its first four years. Unlike the DAC-backed Constitution Party, the NF was a real political force until the late 1970s when Margaret Thatcher’s Tory Party stole much of its anti-immigrant thunder and the group spiralled into rapid decline.
Notes
1 George Thayer, The British Political Fringe (London: Anthony Blond, 1965), p. 55.
2. Del Valle became involved in intelligence work while serving under Admiral Freeman in Cuba in the 1930s. In the June 1961 Task Force, the journal of the DAC, del Valle said that in 1933-34, ‘I participated in the special service squadron, under Admiral Freeman’s command, in the operations concerned with the revolution which brought Batista into power in that troubled country. Orders from Moscow and money from New York we again traced by our intelligence.’
3 Against Mosley’s post-war Union Movement, the LEL saw England and its colonies as a united power bloc that should be maintained separately from an alliance with Continental Europe. Mosley, however, endorsed the idea of merging England into a new Continental Imperium that he called ‘Europe a Nation’.
4 David Baker, Ideology of Obsession: A.K. Chesterton and British Fascism (London: I.B.Tauris, 1996) p. 198. Baker, however, only devotes a few pages to Chesterton’s post-war career.
5 Baker p. 197.
6 Thayer (note 1 ) p. 56.
7 See the December 1954 Task Force for a report on Pomeroy’s visit.
8 A.K. Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords (London: Candour Publishing, 1965), p. 19.
9 Baker (note 4) p. 198.
10 Chesterton (note 8) p. 138.
11 Ibid. p. 204.
12 Ibid. pp. 208-9.
13 Del Valle established contact with other White Russian exiles in America like Prince Serge Belosselsky of the Russian Anti-Communist Center in New York. See the 14 December 1950 letter from Belosselsky to del Valle.
14 See TF’s February 1962 tribute to Pomeroy that states that he spent many years in the Far East on intelligence assignments for the U.S. government.
15 See TF’s September 1957 issue for del Valle’s article calling on the US to recognise anti-Communist governments-in-exile.
16 For more on the murky 1950s world of the White Russians, the intelligence community, the far right, and Knupffer, see Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day (New York: Autonomedia, 1999) pp. 598-615, and Stephen Dorril, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service (New York: The Free Press, 2000), especially chapters 20 and 21.
17 Knupffer based his views on the idea that the CIA, acting at the behest of Wall Street Jews, was committed to balkanising Russia. The White Russian right associated with the Grand Duke Cyril argued for maintaining the territorial integrity of the old Russian empire.
18 Task Force, August-September 1956. On Huxley-Blythe, see both Coogan and Dorril (note 21).
19 After Colonel Pomeroy met Knupffer on 6 November 1954, he sent del Valle a detailed report from Knupffer attacking NTS. Knupffer had also sent an earlier letter to Pomeroy on 25 May 1954 critical of NTS.
20 Knupffer claimed he had an especially important contact with the Duke of Montrose, Rhodesia’s Minister of Defence and Foreign Affairs.
21 This strange story starts in the mid-1960s and involves Colonel Michel Goleniewski, a high-ranking defector from Polish intelligence who had given the CIA invaluable information about Soviet ‘moles’. Pichel declared Goleniewski the Shickshinny Knights’ ‘Grand Master’ after Goleniewski (a haemophilic) announced that he was really the last remaining Czar of All Russia, Alexi Romanov. His claims flew in the face of the Grand Duke Vladimir’s assertion of his right to the throne. Knupffer, not surprisingly, declared that Goleniewski was an impostor. As for Pichel, Knupffer a genuine specialist on chivalric orders stated that anyone ‘who had any dealings with this mentally deranged and obviously criminal type (I mean this quite literally)’ should abandon the Shickshinny Knights. Del Valle, however, ignored his advice. Del Valle’s friend and fellow ‘knight’, Frank Capell was especially taken with Goleniewski’s claim that Henry Kissinger was a Soviet agent who had been recruited in Germany in 1946 under the code name ‘Bor’. Capell’s book, Henry Kissinger: Soviet Agent, received wide notice in right-wing circles. On Goleniewski, see Guy Richards, The Hunt for the Czar (New York: Doubleday, 1970).
22 The financial troubles arose due to a dispute over the will of Candour’s major financial backer, a wealthy British expatriate named R. K. Jeffery who had made a fortune in Chile mining nitrate.
23 26 April 1962 letter from Chesterton to del Valle asking for support. See the 9 May 1962 letter from del Vall e to Chesterton giving him some names. On Brooks’ tour, see Thayer, p. 64.
24 See the 4 February 1966 letter from Chesterton to del Valle asking him to contact Devin Adair on his behalf, as Chesterton hadn’t heard from the firm about its decision on New Unhappy Lords.
25 Joseph Serpico, a devout Catholic and former Marine, headed OMNI, which published books denouncing Vatican II (such as The Plot Against the Church) and tracts such as a pamphlet denouncing British Israel. Chesterton raised funds in England to finance OMNI’s edition of NUL after it became clear that it would be cheaper to reprint the book than to ship the English version to America. OMNI later published del Valle’s memoir, Semper Fidelis.