Harold Smith (Lobster 25)
Observer editor Jonathan Fenby replied to a letter from Harold Smith on 17 June, 1993: ‘I don’t think it is a story we want to go back over.’ Back over?
On 4 July the Observer ran a third of a page on the political situation in Nigeria, ‘New rules, new date, same old fraud on Babangida’s election.’ Roughly; for the first time the Northerners lost control in an election, so the army promptly ruled the election null and void.
The Guardian’s Hugo Young replied to the same Smith letter (on June 2), ‘Is the Nigerian election of 1960, however corrupt, a story our readers will be interested in?’ — concluding ‘no’, of course.
The behaviour of messers Fenby and Young is bizarre in the extreme. Are they concealing something in their newspapers’ behaviour over Biafra? Or are they responding to guidance from Whitehall?
Peter Cadogan
Cadogan’s memoir of G.K. Young circa 1974/5 is in the current Open Eye 2 (see reviews section for address), and he sent me some material printed during the Biafran War by the Save Biafra Campaign, of which he was Secretary. Published in 1968, an A2 format pamphlet, Biafra included some acute insights into the politics of oil, the feeble response of the Wilson Government, and the role of the tame British Africa correspondents recycling the Foreign Office line — almost everything, in fact, except the Harold Smith material.
Non-lethal defense, ELF etc.
A ‘classified conference’ on non-lethal defense was held in the U.S. on 16 and 17 November. Sponsored by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the flyer for the conference gave as its aim ‘to bring together industry, government and academia to explore the potential of non-lethal defense and identify requirements so that the defense community (sic) can work together in leveraging the non-lethal concept’.
As well an introduction for many of us to the new verb, to leverage, this might serve for all time as the perfect, concise, insider description of the function of such jamborees in the generation of new military spending by the military-industrial complex — sorry, I misspoke: I mean the defense community, of course.
Chairman of the conference was Dr. John Alexander, profiled in Lobster 25 by Armen Victorian, and among the celebrity speakers were Dr. Edward Teller (last seen flacking for the SDI nonsense). The presence of the Attorney General, Janet Reno, signalled the government’s approval. Among the speakers was Dr. Clay Easterly of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, talking on the ‘Application of Extremely Low Frequency Electromagentic Fields to Non-Lethal Weapons’.
Anybody who has wondered why I have been running — however incompetently — the material on ELF, mind control etc. since Lobster 19, please note. This stuff is for real: potentially this is the biggest military technology development since the hydrogen bomb.
Spooks bending spoons
There is a very useful and comprehensively documented (120 notes to 30 pages) survey of the literature on the attempts to find espionage uses for psi in chapter 10, ‘The Spook Circuit: Psychic Espionage’, of The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime, by Arthur Lyons and Dr. Marcello Truzzi (Mysterious Press, New York, 1991). Arthur Lyons is best known in the U.K. as the author of a series of crime novels; Dr. Truzzi is a sociologist and Director of the Center for Scientific Anomalies Research, PO Box 1052, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106-1052, USA.
The Red Menace
I thought my piece about the CPGB and MI5 (in Lobster 25) was something of a bombshell. In the event it turned out to be a damp squib. However, Laurens Otter wrote to me:
‘Your comments on Moscow Gold seem basically right, but you don’t take them far enough. After Suez-Hungary, though in theory only a third of the [CPGB] membership resigned, it was the most active third, including a lot of the best known rank and file industrial militants. Had the British state revealed anything about Moscow Gold at that stage, it would have been enough to destroy the party utterly; (it was only able to revive because it was later able to remake close relations with some of the leading trade unionists who left in ’57). If that had happened the New Left would have emerged as the non-Labour Party power base for left socialism. It would been not only less open to rightest propaganda but the fact that its organization was amorphous would have made MI5 penetration within it far less significant than it was within the CP. (Incidentally, of the 1961 rank and file seamen’s leaders who opened the door for changes in the NUS; George Foulser was a hard-line stalinist — too hard-line for his party which expelled him — but Jim Slater and the others were amongst those who were at that time New Leftists but subsequently went back to association with the CP.)’
And Dr Raymond Challinor wrote that he spent an evening with seamen’s leader Jim Salter just before his death. Slater told Challinor that he had not been part of a communist plot and had never even met the CPGB industrial organiser, Bert Ramelson; and that he had later discussed the seamen’s strike with Harold Wilson who had apologised for what he had said during the dispute, admiting he had been misinformed. Dr. Challinor is preparing something on this subject.
The late David Stirling
Reviewing Alan Hoe’s biography of David Stirling (Lobster 25, p. 24), I noted that it contained a long account of his Capricorn Africa Society. Bernard Porter has pointed out that a more detailed account of Capricorn is to be found in Ian Hancock’s White Liberals, Moderates and Radicals in Rhodesia 1953-80 (Croom Helm, London/St Martin’s New York, 1984) pp. 28-87.
The 1984 media assault on Greece
In Lobster 23, p. 20, I noted the press campaign against Greece in the British serious papers in 1984/85. At the time the Greek government of Papandreou was trying to reduce the size of its domestic spy apparatus and that seemed the likely proximate cause. I think I was probably wrong about that. In his Eclipse (reviewed in this issue) Mark Perry reveals (p. 43) that the CIA were angry with the Greek government because (a) they had released from jail two people the U.S. thought were terrorists, and (b) they had then expelled the CIA deputy chief of station for illegally searching the apartment of the girl friend of one of the suspected terrorists. Perry describes the fury of CIA chief William Casey, whose ‘face was beet red, and the veins on his neck stood out against his starched white collar’.