Print: Journals and book review

Robin Ramsay

Often referred to in other things is Israeli Foreign Affairs, ‘an independent monthly report on Israel’s diplomatic and military activities world-wide’.

It is 8 pages A4 and though this is not a subject I am interested in, this looks very impressive and is thoroughly documented. September 1988 includes (using IFA’s headlines)

• Jerusalem Christian ’embassy’ aids Contras
• Israeli Help on New South African Aircraft
• Pentagon Sleaze
• Pipeline Sleaze

etc etc. It’s your basic parapolitics methodology (read and collate a hell of a lot) applied to Israel’s foreign policy.

It is one of the tragedies of the post-war years that Israel should have lined itself up with all the pariah states – perhaps an unavoidable fate given the nature of the US administration these past 8 years and Israel’s dependence on the dollar. Headbangers in Washington produce headbangers in Israel? (Or is it the other way round?)

Subs US/Canada $20.00
Outside North America add $6.00 (surface mail), $10.00 (airmail)
From IFA, PO Box 19580 Sacramento, CA 95819, USA

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The Enemy Within

John Jennings
Campaign For Press and Broadcasting Freedom
(£1.50 from CPBF, 9 Poland St, London W1V 3DG)

Jennings wrote a piece about the Freedom Association in 1983 and got a writ from them. He began research to back up what he had said and this is a result: 24 A4 (glossy!) pages on the FA, Brian Crozier’s political opinions, and the relationship between the Economist’s Foreign Report and Crozier and Robert Moss; a long and essentially redundant account of what did happen in Chile when Pinochet took over (to rebut Crozier and Moss); and some details on who owns/runs the Freedom Association. It’s nicely produced, contains alot of useful information but has no new revelations. It is essentially part of the thesis of Lobster 11. (Not that our version was original…)

And there is one fascinating fragment on the late Ross McWhirter. His father was editor of the Daily Mail in the thirties, while it was supporting Mosley. We believe that Ross McWhirter was in the League of Empire Loyalists and there is an allegation – no more as yet – that he was in Mosley’s post-war group. This information on his father makes that rumour a little more interesting.

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Foreign Literary Intelligence Scene

Bi-monthly; subscription is $25.00 (US), though there is no indication of an overseas rate. May be best to write and inquire first if outside the US. To: NISC, 1800 K Street NW, Suite 1102 Washington DC 2006.

The only ‘perk’ we get running Lobster is doing exchanges with other magazines. This has recently joined the list. On one issue seen so far this appears to be what you would expect from something published by the NISC (President Ray S. Cline). This is mainstream, (ie by contemporary American standards centre-right) academic, orthodox anti-Communist, anti-Soviet, anti-left material.

The single issue we have carries a long review of a book purporting to show that the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) is a Soviet front. This may or may not be true: about the IPS’ funding I know nothing at all. Nor does it matter much to me. However the fact that the book is trying to substantiate the allegations first made in The Spike by Robert Moss and Arnaud de Borchgrave puts me off, as does the fact that the review was first published in the Moonie-owned Washington Times – edited now by Arnaud de Borchgrave. These are not recommendations. (The book is Covert Cadre; Inside the Institute for Policy Studies, Steven Powell, Green Hill Publishers, Ottawa, Illinois, USA 1987 $29.95). It sounds like a psy ops job: anybody read it’? Incidentally, the attempt to prove IPS Soviet-controlled is part of the story in the pamphlet about the Freedom Association, reviewed in this issue.

Elsewhere the proceedings of a RUSI conference (British and American Approaches to Intelligence edited by Ken Robertson) gets praise, and Bob Woodward’s Veil gets slagged. This is propaganda. Our (ie US, NATO) intelligence services are good things; the Soviet version is a bad thing. Story ends. But it is nicely done and by the standards of some such isn’t too expensive.

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The Radical Right: a world directory

Ciaran O Maolain
Longman, London

This is as massive and impressive as it sounds, a fairly mind blowing piece of research. The subject index runs to 69 pages. There will be nits to pick from almost everybody interested in the right, but this is a world directory, over 70 countries. The very idea of it is breathtaking.

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AMOK: Third Despatch

Table of Contents

CONTROL	2
EXOTICA	17
SLEAZE	22
R&D	28
ORGONE	33
SENSORY DEPRIVATION	39
NEUROPOLITICS	47
MAYHEM	53
PARALLAX	58
NATAS	69
SCRATCH ‘N’ SNIFF	75
RE/SEARCH	83
TACTICS	84
PULPS	90
CRITIQUE	95

Illustrated is the subject categories in the most interesting mail order catalogue I have ever seen, with wonderful illustrations on every page. (Were there still such a beast, a whole generation of the British ‘underground’ press could live off this catalogue’s illustrations for several years.) It does have a good deal of parapolitics, mostly under the ‘Control’ heading but its range is much wider. I opened the thing at random five times and these are the entries I saw first:

• Secrets of Metamphetamine Manufacture
• Men Behind Bars – Sexual Exploitation in Prison
• God and Golem – a comment on certain points where cybernetics impinges on Religion
• Turkish Folk Music from Asia Minor
• Making it Crazy – an ethnology of Psychiatric Clients in an American Community.

Send $6.00 (if outside the US/Canada) to AMOK, PO Box 875112, Terminal Annex, Los Angeles, CA 90087. (J. G. Ballard would love that ‘Terminal Annex’.)

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Researching For The Electronic Spies

Rob Evans
Campaign Against Military Research on Campus (CAMROC)
£3.50 from CAMROC at 190 Burdett Road, London E3 4AA

This report on research contracts in universities and polytechnics funded by GCHQ received substantial coverage in the press. See, for example, the Observer (24 July 1988). This is the kind of essential, primary research that should be supported. The group appears to be run on a shoe lace even shorter that usual.

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God’s Cop: The Biography of James Anderton

Michael Prince
Frederick Muller, London, 1988.

What happened to this one? Did it get any reviews? It should have because the second half of it, an account of the state operation against John Stalker, is important. The first half, about Anderton, would be interesting if the subject were. To me he isn’t, he’s just an Old Testament puritan. Lots of chief constables used to be like Anderton. I have a 20 year old memory of a Chief Constable of Edinburgh – Merrilees? – whose autobiography included the chapter ‘My Battle With the Poofs’, describing his great drive against Edinburgh’s homosexual men.

The meat is on Stalker, which gives me a problem. I’m no expert on the Stalker affair: I’ve kept all the clippings but I haven’t really read them. Maybe everybody but me knows this stuff already. According to his dust-jacket sketch, author Prince has worked for the Mail, Telegraph, Time/Life, Sunday Express – the right-wing press. Perhaps it shouldn’t but this fact makes reading a chapter titled “The Plot Against Stalker” that much more interesting.

Prince has a source, a member of Special Branch. He is not named but Prince is sure he’s real. (I was too, reading it.) This SB person describes in some detail the attempts to fix Stalker. It was nothing subtle: leaning on hookers to claim Stalker fathered their child; leaning on gay men to etc etc. This conspiracy – with MI5 – followed Stalker around. Alas he was a clean cop. ‘Special Branch’, as Prince calls him, even claims LSD was put into a drink intended for Stalker – but it got drunk by someone else. ‘Special Branch’ talks of a contract out on Stalker in Northern Ireland – but Stalker never went back.

Which is all fascinating – horrifying in a sense but absolutely par for the course in another; we are talking about Northern Ireland, after all – but simply allegations. Me, I believe it. But this isn’t evidence. Even more interesting to me is the account given by ‘Special Branch’ of the thinking of our secret state personnel.

“Stalker was becoming a pain to the security agencies, tantamount to a boil on the bum. The general consensus of opinion was that he had to be stopped. The most expedient treatment for a boil is to lance it.

We hold no brief for cowboys, like a few of those who had been involved in some of the shootings, but that wasn’t the issue for those who had to look after national security. If it became necessary to sacrifice the career and the reputation of one man, then that was no big deal. In war, thousands upon thousands of innocent people go to the wall …

Nobody wanted to frustrate Stalker’s murder investigation. Murder is murder. Mitigating circumstances for killing have to be justified in court. We’re all on the same side on that subject. But what Stalker couldn’t seem to come to terms with was that national security has top priority and rides roughshod – rightfully so – over all other considerations and principles of law enforcement. The Secret Service is a law unto itself and must always remain that way …” (p 134)

This rings true to me, the genuine intellectually and morally retarded voice of ‘national security’. L’etat? C’est nous.

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Nicaragua’s Drug Connection Exposed as Hoax

On July 28 the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime, chaired by Congressman William Hughes (D-NJ), held the first of a series of hearings into whether Reagan administration officials condoned drug smuggling and other criminal activities to further its Central America policy. Among other things, the panel sought to determine if top leaders of the Colombian cocaine cartel escaped arrest because the much ballyhooed “war on drugs” took a back seat to a covert operation designed to discredit the Nicaraguan government – this at a time when the administration was seeking additional aid to the Contras.

CBS Evening News (7-28-88) – the only major network to cover the proceedings – reported on the testimony of DEA agent Ernest Jacobsen, who said that White House officials undermined a DEA probe of the Colombian cocaine kingpins by blowing an undercover informant’s cover when they leaked information in an attempt to link Nicaragua to the drug trade. The case against the cartel had been engineered by Barry Seal, a convicted drug dealer turned informant who worked closely with Vice President George Bush’s anti-drug task force in Washington.

But the 1984 investigation got derailed when Seal told his handlers that cocaine was being trans-shipped through Nicaragua with the permission of high-level government officials. In an effort to frame the Sandinistas, the CIA installed a hidden camera in Seal’s C-130 cargo plane (the same plane, incidentally, that later crashed in Nicaragua leading to the capture of Eugene Hasenfus in October 1986). Seal took a blurry snapshot which purported to show himself with a high-level Nicaraguan official named Federico Vaughn, and a Colombian drug czar unloading bags of cocaine at an airstrip in Nicaragua.

CBS obtained pages from Col. Oliver North’s diary revealing that the former National Security Council aid communicated frequently with the CIA about the sting operation in the weeks before the photo was leaked to the press despite objections from the DEA. The Nicaragua drug story first appeared in the Washington Times (7-17-84) and was immediately given big play by all the major papers, wire services and TV networks. President Reagan displayed Seal’s photo in a nationally televised speech in March 1986.

But the media showed much less interest when subcommittee chairman Hughes recently disclosed he had new evidence that the entire Sandinista connection was a US intelligence fabrication. Particularly suspicious is the role of Federico Vaughn, the supposed Sandinista official, who appears to have been a US spy all along. An AP dispatch (Omaha World-Herald, 7-29-88) disclosed that subcommittee staffers called Vaughn’s phone number in Managua and spoke to a “domestic employee” who said the house had been “continuously rented” by a US embassy official since 1981. The unnamed embassy official, according to Hughes, was among the group of US officials recently expelled by the Nicaraguan government after a violent political demonstration in July.

No word of the Hughes hearings appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times. Instead the Times ran a brief item in its Sunday national edition (7-31-88) quoting President Reagan’s weekly radio broadcast about how Sandinista officials are still involved in drug trafficking.