A Wapping mystery
I noticed with some interest that Sunday Times editor, Andrew Neil, was described in the Guardian on May 27 as having been labour correspondent of the Economist in the 1970s. Was he, I thought, one of the correspondents recruited by MI5 in the big F branch expansion circa 1973-5? Did that explain all the disinformation run through the Sunday Times by James Adams, for example? Apparently not. I wrote to Mr Neil and he replied that he was ‘never approached’ by MI5.
Tapped and taped
Some people assume that because I produce Lobster, my life is full of spooks, phone-taps etc. Fortunately it isn’t. If my phone has been regularly tapped, I am unaware of it. (But would I know?) I’ve never been burgled, to my knowledge. (But would I know?) And in over ten years now hardly anything has gone missing in the mail. (But most letters from Holland arrive opened.)
On two occasions, however, individuals tried to get close to me to pick my brains. One succeeded for about 6 months before it dawned on me what he was doing. The second tried for some weeks in 1988 to get me to invite him up to live in Hull with a mixture of promises of information on his career as an agent for MI5 and stories about his ill-health and the failing NHS in London. He was quite a good actor — he had, indeed, been an actor by profession — but I smelled a rat.
In neither case could I prove anything. However, going through a pile of Levellers looking for something else, I noticed a short paragraph in issue 68, 1981, describing the latter character — under a slightly different name — as a ‘Special Branch snout’. That’s on p. 5, fourth column, if you want to check.
About 10% of my correspondents stick sellotape all over their envelopes. I assume they are doing this because of Peter Wright’s comments in Spycatcher (p. 45) that MI5 never found a way to surreptitiously open letters sealed in this way. What people may have forgotten is that Wright then continued, ‘In those cases, MI5 took a decision as to whether to open the letter and destroy it, or send it on in an obviously opened state.’
In my view it isn’t worth the effort trying to defeat the state’s agencies at their games. You will always lose. Taping up letters simply announces that you think the contents of the letter to be worthy of concealment. In any case, if you think what you have to communicate is so important or so secret, it shouldn’t be sent by letter at all.
An oldie but a goodie
After the IRA shot dead a British soldier with a single shot, Independent Television News on Saturday July 17 commented that there was ‘speculation that the IRA had trained — or hired – a crack shot.’
Of course we all know that the IRA are too stupid to shoot straight themselves, right? So they have to hire people to shoot for them. This particular canard was being run in the early 1970s by one J.C. Wallace. Kevin Dowling’s 1979 novel, Interface Ireland (Barrie and Jenkins, London), discussed at length in Lobster 17, has a character, transparently based on Wallace, called Major McDowell. This is on p. 213:
‘The police reporter from London…. was interviewing McDowell, who had information that the Provos had hired American veterans of the Vietnam war for 5000 dollars a month…’
The beam and the mote
Christopher Andrew, now Professor Christopher Andrew, proud possessor of what is known as a ‘personal chair’ at Cambridge University, wrote KGB:The Inside Story (Hodder and Stoughton, 1990). The book is part of the British secret state’s propaganda campaign around the KGB defector Oleg Gordiefsky.
Gordiefsky’s public role, the quid pro quo for the pension he is now receiving, is to bolster the key myth of MI6, that while we may be the junior partner in the intelligence relationship with the U.S., we’re the best, the most subtle and the most reliable — the people to handle those uncouth Yanks, to hold their hands and cool their tempers. For example:
There was Penkofsky, who not only saved the world during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but had been rebuffed by the Yanks; and then there was Gordiefsky on hand to whisper in Mrs Thatcher’s ear that Gorbachev was on the level, and that she could ‘do business with him’. (A station chief as defector-in-place, Gordiefsky was the ultimate pure espionage coup.) In espionage literature this myth is most strikingly displayed by Verrier’s Through the Looking Glass (Cape, London, 1983).
Pitched somewhere between the Sunday Express and the Oxford University Press, Christopher Andrew’s KGB appeared after a marketing campaign led by a series of tv appearances by a bizarrely disguised Gordiefsky. (As if the KGB, of all people, didn’t know what he looked like!) KGB made Andrew a lot of money but got widely attacked, not least because many of the book’s endnotes simply say ‘Gordiefsky’.(See, for example, the review by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in The Atlantic, March 1991.)
In his review of Steve Dorril’s The Silent Conspiracy: Inside the Intelligence Services in the 1990s, Andrew commented that ‘readers…. may find it disconcerting to discover from [his] endnotes that so many of his sources are press clippings.’ (Sunday Telegraph, 30 May, 1993). Andrew shares the academic distaste for contemporary sources: newspapers are unreliable (nobody believes what they read in the newspapers).
The opposite view is taken by the journalist Jonathan Kwitney of the Wall Street Journal. At the end of his excellent study of the Nugan-Hand affair, The Crimes of Patriots (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1988), Kwitney concludes with a sharp page on other versions of the story, especially an article in Foreign Policy (no. 47, 1982) by the historian James A. Nathan. This, says Kwitney, ‘contained sensational assertions’. Kwitney called Nathan to ‘seek documentation’ but ‘his only documentation ….was press clippings, including some from communist and other strongly partisan and unreliable publications, and from small-publication journalists I knew to be unreliable….. he had not tried to talk to the people involved to hear their denials…. behaviour that reporters for any responsible publication would be pilloried for.’
Finally, notes Kwitney, ‘in the spring of 1987, a Washington group called the International Center for Development Policy held a press conference to distribute portions of a manuscript about Nugan Hand written by Peter Dale Scott… In his manuscript Professor Scott made strong assertions about Nugan Hand that will not be found in this book, and everything he says is carefully footnoted. And who is the source for his assertions, if you turn to the fine print and look at the footnotes? Why, Professor Nathan, of course. And so it goes in academia.’
Who needs conspiracy theories?
In his book about working the October Surprise story, reviewed below, Robert Parry describes how mainstream U.S.journalists are mostly kept off the parapolitical agenda by the threat of being labelled a conspiracy theorist by their peers. Considering that since November 1963 U.S. domestic politics has been largely about unmasking state and/or political conspiracies, using ‘she is interested in conspiracies’ perjoratively has been a pretty neat trick. It has been possible because of the existence of really dumb conspiracy theories of the ‘it’s all the fault of the Xs’ variety. Who needs these crazy conspiracy theories? The great federal law and order and intelligence conspiracies like the FBI, CIA and NSA need them to legitimize and empower the term ‘conspiracy theorist’. OK, it’s just a hypothesis, but is there any evidence that the U.S. government has funded the purveyors of crazy conspiracy theories? It obviously isn’t difficult or expensive. At a minimum it would just involve spending a few hundred thousand dollars supporting, buying and circulating the books and magazines of the conspiracy theorists.
Did we ever find out who had been funding Lyndon LaRouche, for example?
Stone’s JFK
Those with access to academic libraries might like to glance at a symposium on the Oliver Stone movie, JFK, in The American Historical Review (Vol 97, no 2, April 1992). If you thought, like I did, that psycho-history had been discredited, think again. Two of the three contributors to this symposium offer Freudian explanations of the continued interest in the assassination of JFK. That’s right, old Uncle Oedipus and all that. ‘Oedipal odyssey….. regression from what Klein calls the depressive position, where loss can be acknowledged and overcome, to idealization, splitting and paranoia….’
Boy, does that sound familiar, or what?
‘JFK deserves attention, for making us experience how politically produced paranoid anxieties, somatized on the visually produced mass body, turn into paranoid analysis.’
On the other hand it is remarkable to read, in a major U.S. academic journal, that ‘those who think that groups of people do not get together to bring about a particular result are surely out of touch with reality. People, and especially governments, act with will and intention.’ Remarkable that this needs saying but, as the author points out, the movie tilts at ‘a carefully constructed weltanschauung that sought to teach the lesson that accidents and random events are more important in the processes of social, economic, and political life than structures and organizations.’
MLK
An important new development on the assassination of Martin Luther King has appeared. A paper called The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tennessee, reported that the U.S. Army was working with right-wing and racist organisations in operations against the civil rights movement; specifically that special forces personnel returning from Vietnam were assigned to carry out the surveillance of Dr. King and his colleagues in the days preceding his assassination. This is discussed in an interview with Mark Lane in Flatlands (see above) and also in Lies of Our Times (July, August 93), from 145 West 4th St New York, NY 10012.