Feedback
Mark Taha (see Lobster 21, p. 25) wrote. ‘As someone who never joined any of the groups Larry O’Hara deals with [Lobster 23] but has attended their meetings, reads their publications, once nearly joined, and describes himself as a Libertarian Conservative Nationalist, (sic!) I read his article with interested. I noticed a few errors.
On page 15 he describes Lesley Wooler as a member of the 62 Group; Martin Walker describes him as a ‘former member of Mosley’s Union Movement’.
On page 16 — Martin Webster first attacked the League of St George months before the National Party was set up. His Spearhead article regarding the police was published either in March or April of 1978. And while the British Movement probably had about 3,000 members at its peak in 1981, it had nothing like that when the renamed British Nationalist and Socialist Movement was disbanded in 1983. Many of them do seem to have joined the BNP; how much of the BM’s decline was due to Ray Hill’s activities is a matter for speculation. I remember, at a meeting addressed by Sir Ronald Bell (the MP whose views best reflected mine) in October 1981, a young blonde woman saying that she was in both the New National Front (later the BNP) and the British Movement. My guess would be that the BM’s members simply found John Tyndall a more credible Fuhrer than Mike McLaughlin and that many young BMers simply dropped out of politics.
Also, Larry O’Hara left out another breakaway group, Anthony Read-Herbert’s British Democratic Party, founded around Christmas 1979 and which collapsed after a World in Action expose in July 1981. And the magazine Forewarned was never published in Birmingham but from a box number in south London; its editor lives in Greenwich.
Cold war, disinformation war
In the 1980s the Second Cold War was fought partly by disinformation. The U.S. ran the ‘KGB terror network’ story, through Clare Sterling, with help from the Israelis, messers Crozier and Moss and others, and then the KGB-shot-the-Pope story. Against that the Soviet Union ran the story (with several variants) that AIDS was a U.S. biological warfare experiment gone wrong.
A minor spin-off from this disinformation war was the magazine Counterpoint, based in England and then in the United States. Self-styled ‘Monthly report on Soviet active measures (see Lobster 22, p. 23), Counterpoint was U.S. propaganda lightly dressed as analysis of Soviet propaganda; and after being spotted in Canterbury and written up in the now defunct Digger it moved to the United States and became New Counterpoint. (I don’t know for a fact that the relocation was connected to exposure in Digger.)
Chalk up another little land mark in the post Cold War world: New Counterpoint has been wound up. At Volume 7 number 2 it ceased: its producers — Soviet defector Levchenko and former USIA official Herbert Romerstein — announced that they were too busy trying to make sense of the information flood from the former Soviet bloc to continue. This last issue carried an interesting article translated from a Finnish newspaper on the death throes of the Soviet Union’s World Peace Council network.
(And no, I have not received a reply from Mr Romerstein to my piece in Lobster 22 about his absurd analysis of Lobster as part of the Soviet disinformation network.)
Disinformation
(Surprise, surprise)
And then there was Ari Ben-Menashe and his tales of murky dealings at the clandestine cross-roads. Mr Ben-Menashe has a book, Profits of War, published in the U.S and Australia, for example, but not here, because of certain sections of it which contain allegations about the business affairs of Mark Thatcher. (See Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian October 8 1992) The story in outline has been hinted at often enough: Thatcherfils uses mumsy’s name to open doors and make a pile of money. Many journalists in this country have tried to stand the ‘Mark Thatcher millions’ story up, and they have all failed so far Lobster could run those sections of the book — they have been reproduced in a House of Commons Early Day Motion and thus legitimised — but I have a problem with Mr Ben-Menashe. A number of people in the U.S., Peter Dale Scott for example, and David McMichael, whose opinions I take seriously, do not trust him. Ben-Menashe illustrates a peculiar modern problem.
These days, when the state sees a story like the October Surprise (or the Wallace/Holroyd allegations) beginning to be taken seriously, it will launch disinformation and disinformation agents to muddy the pool and discredit the story and/or any genuine sources. It happened in the Garrison inquiry, as Gordon Novel, for one, has admitted. It happened with Wallace and Holroyd, for example when Professor Paul Wilkinson tried to nobble Channel Four TV’s investigation into Wallace’s allegations (see Lobster 16), and a couple of years later when an ex-Army prisoner contacted Holroyd and Wallace with a very striking story of state murder and cover-up. Eventually the story didn’t check out and they concluded that it had been an attempt to get them to endorse a false story and be discredited when it fell apart on them.
Mr Ben-Menashe might be one of those and he might not be. To all intents and purposes it appears to be impossible to tell.
La Penca disinformation
In her book In Search of the Assassin (Bloomsbury, London, 1991), the journalist Susan Morgan describes one very striking example of disinformation. Morgan was one of those injured at the La Penca bombing and the book is an account of her search for the person who planted the bomb. ‘One of the most widely circulated reports had the bombing carried out by Basque ETA terrorists on behalf of the Sandinistas. Curiously the reports were based on leaks – phone-calls to major newspapers in Washington and the U.S. from Intelligence sources, including the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy’.
The latter is a kind of updated IRD, and ‘public diplomacy’ is a 1980s euphemism for disinformation and psychological warfare. Morgan found that ‘The same story was also being pushed by what the Pentagon correspondent of the U.S. television network ABC called ‘reliable CIA sources’.’
Few disinformation stories can be traced back to their sources, but in this instance Morgan got close. The former contra leader, Edgar Chamorro, told her that just before the bombing ‘he had been handed a number of posters by CIA sponsors and ordered to display them. They bore the letters ETA and a gun superimposed on a map of Central America.’ Chamorro said ‘At the time I didn’t understand the purpose of the posters…. but then, after allegations that Basques were responsible for La Penca, I put two and two together and realised that the posters were part of a propaganda campaign to provide a legitimate ‘background’ to the Basque terrorist theory.’
RR
Elite syncopations
A-Albionic, discussed elsewhere in this issue, is one of the sources of copies of Carroll Quigley’s book Tragedy and Hope which revealed for the first time the ramifications of the Round Table group. (On which see, for example, ‘The Rhodes-Milner Group’ in Lobster 13.) A-A’s Lloyd Miller wrote to me pointing out that Bill Clinton had been at Georgetown University where his tutor and mentor had been Carroll Quigley; that on leaving Georgetown Clinton went off to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar; and that Clinton referred to Quigley in his acceptance speech to the Democratic Party convention. Holy moley! Clinton makes pitch for conspiracy buff vote? Birchers in hog heaven!
As Daniel Brandt points out in his essay in this issue, Clinton had been at a Bilderberg meeting in 1991, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, and had been endorsed in the New York Times by David Rockefeller no less. Southern Democrat governor with east coast elite connections? Yes, its Jimmy Carter 2.
On the same trail, of considerable interest is Richard Cockett’s David Astor and the Observer (Andre Deutsch, London 1991). The first two chapters contain a good deal of information about the Round Table network up to WW2. Astor’s father Waldorf had been one of the early members of the network and Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) became the first in a long line of father figures the poor Nancy Astor-afflicted David Astor was attracted to. (Many of the others were employed at the Observer.) Crockett tells us that Astor was rejected by MI6. Even if this is true the Observer’s staff list since the war under Astor contains a number people suspected of serving secretly in Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It would hardly be a surprise to discover at some point that MI6 had a hand in funding the Observer in the post-war years.
The Sunday Telegraph (26 July 1992) announced that for the first time the Rhodes Scholarship scheme will apply to Europeans, not just to inhabitants of the erstwhile British empire, Germany and the United States. They have picked eight so far. The story also announced that ‘To give Rhodes Scholarships to students from European countries, the trustees are drawing on a special reserve fund.’ This wouldn’t be a fund called HMG, would it?
The current trustees of the Rhodes Scholarship scheme are Sir Richard Southwood, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University; Duncan Stewart, Principal of Lady Margaret Hall; John Roberts, Warden of Merton College; Mary Moore, former Principal of St Hilda’s College; Lord Ashburton, chair of BP; Lord Sainsbury; Lord Armstrong, former Cabinet Secretary; and William Waldegrave, Conservative MP, former junior Foreign Office Minister.
Unclassified
Unclassified rather grandly calls itself the ‘Newspaper of the Association of National Security Alumni’ and is actually a magazine/newsletter run by and for the radical end (sic) of the former U.S. foreign service and spook world. It is edited by David McMichael, who quit the CIA in the mid 1980s over the distortion of the intelligence process forced on the Agency by the U.S. administration’s demands that the ‘facts’ be subservient to the policy goals of the war against Nicaragua. I have seen a couple of issues and, while exclusively concerned with the United States, Unclassified is extremely impressive. The May and July 1992 issues, for example, are 24 pages with updates on Iran-contra, the October Surprise, Inslaw, Noriega, ‘Iraqgate’ etc. Subscriptions terms are $20 (minimum donation) for six issues in the U.S., $25 outside the U.S.. Money to Verne Lyon, 921 Pleasant St, Des Moines, IA 50309, USA.
On the October Surprise story there is a very good piece by Jane Hunter (editor of Israeli Foreign Report) on the way Newsweek and New Republic have handled — i.e. tried to suppress and discredit — the Surprise story. ‘October Surprise: Debunking the Debunkers’ is in Extra!, June ’92. In the October/November issue there is a very good piece by her about the American journalist Steve Emerson, a spook asset in the U.S. media. Presumably for legal reasons Hunter doesn’t say this but her drift is obvious enough. Extra! is the journal of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) at 130 West 25th Street, New York, NY 1001.
G.K. Young, Unison etc
As I write, issue 2 of Open Eye has yet to appear. When it does it will contain an extremely interesting memoir of George Kennedy Young by Peter Cadogan. A stalwart of the British radical Left for about 40 years, Cadogan makes a curious companion for Young, as Cadogan acknowledges. But in 1974, when Young was machinating with his Unison Committee for Action, he was friends with Cadogan and let Cadogan in on his operations. In most details the account from Cadogan’s 1974 diary tallies with the version of Young in Smear! chapter 34. Nice to know I got it right. Interesting to note, however, that Cadogan does not explain why he did not inform the world of Young’s anti-democratic activities at the time.
Information Wanted
Libel victim seeks information about the following subjects:
- Fred Bridgland, a journalist, of South Africa
- post 1987 South African disinformation in Britain and Ireland
- post 1987 allegations of ANC-IRA co-operation.
All replies will be acknowledged and useful material will be paid for. Write in confidence to ‘Mr Fixit’ c/o Lobster.
Readers?
Let me give a plug to two other magazines. The first is The Wild Places, the latest production from Kevin McClure, who describes it as ‘an intelligent, radical, wide-ranging, bi-monthly magazine dealing with reports, research and investigation into all kinds of extraordinary human experience.’ Emphasise extraordinary. The most recent issue, no 5, for example, is 32 A5 pages, and ranges from ‘Heaven and the Dying Brain (Near-death Experiences and Transformation)’ to ‘Censorship and the Paranormal’. (Imagine a hybrid between Magonia, Fortean Times and a dash of The Sceptical Inquirer.) Issue 5 is worth buying just for the survey of about 60 other magazines in these areas.
Single issues 1.65 in U.K. (2.00 Europe, $5 USA/Canada); subs 6.00 for 4 in U.K. (Europe 7.50, USA/Canada $18). From Kevin McClure 42 Victoria Road, Mount Charles, St. Austell, PL25 4QD, U.K. (The Wild Places is also produced the way little magazines used to be produced; electric typewriters and Lettraset. Positively nostalgic.)
The second is The Republic: an Occasional Journal of Republican Studies, now up to Volume 8 no. 2. This is the first magazine I have heard of in the past twenty years devoted to republicanism in Britain. The editor says that ‘Republic is an association of democratic republicans who believe in the equality of value of all people and who regard the idea of hereditary privilege elites as both divisive and morally repugnant.’ 16 A4 pages, it is published by Dr. Edgar Wilson at 29 Heath End Road, Alsager, Stoke on Trent ST7 2SQ at 1.50 per issue. (No information on overseas prices or subscriptions.) I found it rather dull, perhaps because I agree with it. Among the contributors is Stephen Haseler.
Footnotes
Footnote enthusiasts will want a copy of a splendid polemic in their praise by Libertarian Alliance’s Editorial Director (a title which I think means that he does all the keyboarding) Brian Micklethwait: A Message to all would be Libertarian Alliance writers on the vital importance of supplying complete and completely accurate FOOTNOTES. This was Tactical Note No 11. No price is stated but its 4 A4 pages plus postage, from Libertarian Alliance, 25 Chapter Chambers, Esterbrooke Street, London SW1 P41N.