Shorts: James Rusbridger. Illuminati. Gordievsky. Cavendish

The usual suspects

Fascinating piece by Paul Webster in the Guardian (1 February, 1994) about the Dreyfus Affair. He quotes a book by the French historian Jean Doise who has examined French Army documents from the time. Doise has discovered that the affair developed because of French secret service attempts to disinform the Germans about the state of French military development. In other words, false documents were leaked to the Germans; and the authenticity of the disinformation was bolstered by charging Dreyfus with the leak!

James Rusbridger

Died in February, his death provoking an amazing amount of newspaper coverage for someone who had published a few books and written a lot of letters to the papers. Rupert Allason (‘Nigel West’) and Chapman Pincher slagged him off in the Daily Telegraph of 18 February; James Adams was given nearly have a page (and the usual briefing) to attack him in the Sunday Times on 20 February. These were balanced to some extent by a long, sympathetic piece in the Guardian tabloid section of 24 February, 1994 by Richard Norton-Taylor and Ian Katz.

A number of people contacted me thinking that his death was suspicious — something that has been disposed of, I believe, by the Katz and Norton-Tayor article. I never met Rusbridger but enjoyed his letters and shared his lack of regard for the intelligence and security services. His disparaging critics on the right, however, were almost certainly correct in claiming that he had few sources within the spook community. His The Intelligence Game (I.B.Tauris, 1991) was an amusing and witty read, but showed few signs of clandestine sources.

Rusbridger would have been amused to learn that since his death he has been reported to have been writing books on the Hilda Murrell murder (private correspondence), autoerotic techniques (Independent [news], 18 February), the Lusitania (Independent [obituary], 18 February) and the production of chemical weapons at Nancekuke in Cornwall (The West Briton, [Cornwall] June 10, 1993.)

The Illuminati are coming

Father Arthur Lewis is a name which may be familiar to students of the British right. (See the many index entries in Derrick Knight’s Beyond the Pale, for example.) Lewis was a Rhodesian Senator under Ian Smith’s regime, and used to lead the Rhodesian Christian Group. For some years now he has been issuing occasional newletters, mostly about events in South Africa, in which he used to warn of Soviet-inspired communism poised to seize the country. And now that the Soviet empire has folded? In his most recent newsletter, Easter 1994, there is a shift. ‘The malign influence of the Soviets has dwindled, but the power of the international financiers, who have long bankrolled communism, is undiminished.’

So now you know. The Illuminati can only be months away.

A blast from the past

The Independent, 5 March, 1994, reported a murder case in which the major prosecution witness, a Tony Cox, was allowed to give evidence from behind a screen. Cox admitted having been a member of the ‘Military Reaction Force’ in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. The defence lawyer is quoted as saying that an ‘inquiry has been opened into allegations that members of the Military Reaction Force over a period of time were driving around Belfast in unmarked cars shooting people out of the widows.’ This last bit I don’t understand: such allegations were made in the early 1970s.

Gordievsky and his emanuensis

Instructions From The Centre: Top Secret Files On KGB Foreign Operations 1975-85 (Christopher Andrews and Oleg Gordievsky, Sceptre, London, 1993)) is mildly interesting, chiefly for showing how incompetent the KGB was. It is curious that the two areas of Soviet life presumed to have been exempt from the chaos and shambles of the other sections were the armed forces and the spooks. (This myth was massively undermined in the case of the Red Army by Victor Suvorov’s first book The Liberators.)

Instructions shows that the KGB’s overseas disinformation operations, much vaunted in the 1980s by the U.S. intelligence services, consisted of little more than a few naff projects which seem to have fooled nobody. So poor was the output of these disinformation programmes (a couple of examples are reprinted in this volume) that a tape recording in which the voices of Reagan and Thatcher had been edited together to apparently show them discussing a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union was attributed to the KGB. In the event the tape turned out to be the work of the now defunct rock group Crass. (This is discussed in the Observer, 22 January, 1984.)

There is one unintentionally funny chapter in which the KGB discusses at length the penetration of the Socialist International — a social democratic talking shop with no actual or potential influence over its respective members.

This is the second major expression of interest in the Socialist International by the spooks. The first was the 1985 report by Mid Atlantic Research Associates Inc. (directors Robert Moss, Arnaud de Borchgrave and John Rees), reproduced in the otherwise dreadful The Socialist International at Gunpoint, Manos Harris (Picton, Chippenham, Wiltshire, UK 1988).

Would it just be a coincidence that this report, by well known intelligence assets, should appear on a subject on which Gordievsky, still a defector in place when it was published, was an expert on the Soviet side?

A Cavendish miscellany

Anthony Cavendish, former MI6 officer, banker and author of the longest ‘Christmas card’ in recorded history — his book Inside Intelligence — wrote to inform me of the following appertaining to material in Lobster 26.

1. Among the responses to The Times’ serialisation of bits of Brian Crozier’s book Free Agent (reviewed Lobster 26), was a letter (5 July, 1993) from Cavendish pointing out that he, that is Cavendish, was among the founders of the Democratic Party of Britain in the 1960s with disillusioned former Labour MP Desmond Donnelly — long before Crozier and others formed the Social Democratic Party in the 1970s. Cavendish notes in his letter that the Democratic Prty was set up ‘to attract Labour voters who would never vote Tory’, and folded when Donnelly died. Among the other founders Cavendish lists Maurice Buckmaster (a big-wig in SOE) and Air Marshal Johnny Johnson.
2. (b) An indexing error in the hard-back edition of Gary Murray’s Enemies of the State refers to ‘Cavendish, Anthony, mysterious death of’. Presumably it meant to say ‘Cavendish, Anthony, and mysterious death of Sir Maurice Oldfield’.
3. Cavendish further notes that he is not a Bulgarian — as I reported that Rupert Allason has it in his Faber Book of Espionage (reviewed Lobster 26). This arose because, pestered by Allason to say where he was born (in Switzerland, of British parents) Cavendish, as a joke, told Allason he was born in Bulgaria.

Finally, let me add that Cavendish is mentioned in Alan Clark’s Diaries (paperback edition, Phoenix, London, 1994) as one of those attending a Pinay Circle meeting in the Middle East. Clark casually discloses (p. 373) that the Circle is funded by the CIA.

Don’t shoot, I’m a journalist

In the Guardian (12 February, 1994) Richard Gott reviewed a recent memoir by Independent Television News reporter, Sandy Gall (News From The Front, Heinemann, 1994). Gall boasts of working with MI6 in Afghanistan to produce exciting footage to ‘keep the Afghan war in front of the British people.’ Jolly lunches with the head of MI6 etc.

U.S. spooks’ use of journalist cover also runs through the Goddard/Coleman book, Trail of the Octopus, discussed by Peter Smith in this issue.

Ken Roberts died

— obituary in the Guardian, 5 February, 1994. Roberts was a trade union leader, at the centre of the mysterious ‘Kodak affair’ in 1964 and ’65, discussed in Smear! Roberts was sent a packet of photographs showing four men inflagrante dilecto, as they used to say. One of them was MI5 D-G Roger Hollis. The meaning of this episode has always seemed obscure. However Roberts’ obituarist, Simon Hattenstone, confidently asserts thus:

‘It did not take him [Roberts] long to conclude, with good reason, that he had been caught up in MI5’s civil war; one side trying to discredit the leadership (hence the photographs), the other engaged in a damage-limitation exercise.’

Foreign Office wallahs

John Dickie’s Inside the Foreign Office (Chapman’s, London 1992) has now been remaindered in the UK. Despite the hagiographic tone, it contains a number of interesting fragments — half a page, for example, about George Wigg’s fantasies of military action during the Rhodesian crisis in the sixties. At its heart is a long account of the negotiations leading up to the Rhodesia-Zimbabwe deal between the Patriotic Front and the Thatcher government in 1979. Predictably, Dickie fails to tell the reader that, according to Peter Wright, the British government’s negotiating position was facilitated more than somewhat by MI5 bugging all the rooms used by the various African delegations.

Famous junkies in history, part 1

Jim Hougan wrote to point out a recent reference to the extraordinary fact that the late Senator Joe McCarthy was a morphine addict, and that he got his supplies — where else? — from the head of the then Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger. This is referred to in Brian Freemantle’s The Fix, (Corgi, London, 1985) p. 88.

Liberal baiting

In May the Observer newspaper sponsored a debate on censorship at the National Film Theatre. (Part of a PR exercise which included two crappy little Censorship ‘supplements’ in the newspaper.) Two groups of people tried to leaflet the meeting. The Living Marxism people, who succeeded, and Harold and Carol Smith, who failed. They were prevented by the NFT floor management — who then tried to eject them. But the Smiths had tickets and eventually, after promising to be good children, and not make a fuss, they were allowed in. Where, best of all, the chair publicly promised to allow Smith speak to the meeting at the end of the questions and comments from the floor — and then tried to close the meeting on him! At a meeting on censorship!

To cries from the audience of ‘Let him speak’, Harold Smith finally had his say.

To date neither the Observer nor its new companion, the Guardian, have found Harold Smith’s account of the rigging of the pre-independence elections in Nigeria, by the Brits, to be worthy of interest. (See Lobster 25) Essentially they say, ‘It’s not a story’ — a preposterous judgement, reeking of ‘guidance’ from Whitehall. Presumably the reason is the consequences in Nigeria if Smith’s allegations were taken seriously. (You think the northern Nigerians have forgotten the Biafran War, which flowed from the election-rigging?)

Another spook joke

Good spook jokes are hard to find. This one came in a letter signed by David Koresh. Since Koresh is dead, this is either a drole spoof by someone called Chuck Hammill, or proof of the resurrection. Presumably the former. Anyway ‘Koresh’ begins his First Epistle to the Hebrews thus:

‘The other day, a little boy in our compound here at Mt. Carmel was talking to one of his Jewish friends about how Christ was crucificed for our sins. Upon learning that Jesus himself was a Jew, his friend’s eyes widened in surprise and exclaimed, ‘Well, where the fuck was Mossad?’