Henry Brandon died (Obituary, Independent, 23 April, 1993). Brandon was one of the post-war school of journalists who were happy to act as mouthpieces for the secret services and foreign policy establishments of the NATO bloc. Had he been on the Soviet side of the Cold War, he would have been long dismissed as an “agent of influence’.
Former Liberal MP Michael Winstanley (Lord Winstanley) died in July. A long obituary in the Daily Telegraph of July 19 failed to mention Winstanley’s revelations about his knowledge of one of the anti-Harold Wilson plots of the 1960s, reported on p. 174 of the Dorril/Ramsay book Smear!
Clive Derby-Lewis, briefly a South African Conservative MP, elected Honourary President of the renamed Western Goals Institute in February 1992, was arrested in April for his alleged part in a conspiracy to assassinate the ANC leader Chris Harni (Independent, 19 April, 1993) and later convicted of the murder. The Guardian (21 April) reported that Derby-Lewis ran an organisation called The Stallard Foundation, which affiliated to Western Goals. Stallard rang a bell with me and I eventually remembered what it was.
In the January 29, 1987 edition of his newsletter Special Office Brief, Kenneth de Courcy devoted nearly half an A4 page to the fantasies about Harold Wilson of Dr Kitty Little. Little claimed she had been at Oxford University in 1940 with Wilson, where he was leading a Soviet cell at the university. Dr Little has been running this story for many years impervious to the fact that at the time Wilson had left Oxford and joined the government. (Wilson himself was reported somewhere — I’ve forgotten where — as believing she had confused him with a Tom Wilson.) According to de Courcy’s column, this Little fantasy had been first published, in June 1986, by the Clive Derby-Lewis’
Finally, the address of the Stallard Foundation was given as PO Box 500, Bedfordshire, South Africa. “PO Box 500′ used to be the UK contact point for MI5. What a curious coincidence…
Apologies to Ms Cramen Proetta, the woman who witnessed the SAS shooting of the 3 IRA members on Gibraltar, for not including her in my list of “enemies of the state’ who had been persecuted by the British state. The persecution was still going on late last year, lightly disguised as “press interest’. See Independent 30 November, 1992.
Suzanne Cronje died in September (obits in Guardian, 11 September and Independent, 23 September). Cronje was known to me only as the co-author of the book Lonrho: portrait of a multinational (Pelican/Julian Freidman, London, 1976) but her Guardian obituary by Richard Hall mentioned that she wrote for the newsletters Africa Analysis, Africa Confidential and the Economist’s Foreign Report. The last two are frequently talked of as intelligence operations — Brian Crozier and Robert Moss, for example, have edited the latter — but is there any evidence about the former?
Seth Kantor died in August (Obituary in’ Rocky Mountain News, August 19, 1993). A journalist in Dallas, Kantor knew Jack Ruby and bumped into him at the Parkland Hospital in the melee surrounding the arrival of the dead JFK. Kantor was thus one of the people whose information the Warren Commission had to ger round. Kantor was duly told he must have made a mistake. He later wrote two rather good books about Jack Ruby.