Book Reviews
Gerry Healey: A Revolutionary Life
Corinna Lotz and Paul Feldman
Lupus Books, PO Box 942, London, SW1V 2AR, £15.00
Ken Livingstone MP was given a large chunk of a page of the Guardian (tabloid section p. 13, September 6, 1994) to write a review of this book. The bit that caught my eye was this:
‘I have little doubt that the security services played a key role in the split in the WRP in 1985 that was to tear the organisation apart. The evidence in the book about the long-term financial destabilisation of the WRP only serves to strengthen this view’.
Well, it may strengthen Ken’s view, but what is provided here is a mile short of being evidence. The authors devote just one page to the security services, quote a couple of books, and get the name of the former D-G of MI5 wrong, calling him Maurice Hanley! If the Healey faction of the WRP have any evidence on the alleged conspiracy to destabilize the WRP it is not here.
Some years ago I spent an entertaining couple of hours with one of those named in this book as part of the conspiracy to smash the WRP. She tried to persuade me that some of the Healey faction represented by this book were……. agents of the state. And no, she did not have any evidence either. (If Ken Livingstone has any, I wish he’d he show it to us.)
Strike Back,
Ernie Roberts,
Published by Ernie Roberts, 13-15 High St, St. Mary Gray, Orpington,BR5 3NL. £6.95 (including p and p)
This is a self-published memoir by the recently deceased, former left-wing Labour MP: meetings I went to, strikes I was involved in, campaigns I conducted – dull stuff for the most part (or the texture of real life on the British Left). I include it here – the reason I bought it – because Roberts spent much of the fifties and sixties as virtually the only left-winger in the upper echelons of the Amalgamated Engineering Union; and one of the book’s recurring themes is the machinations of the union’s clandestine right-wing – ‘the Club ‘ – and IRIS against the left. For anyone interested in the Common Cause essay in Lobster 19, here are some more fragments of evidence.
Journeying Far and Wide; A Political and Diplomatic Memoir
Philip M. Kaiser
Maxwell MacMillan International/Charles Scribner, Oxford and New York, 1992
This one slipped by me when it was published and I came across it in the library. A pleasant, if unexceptional, memoir by US career diplomat, Kaiser, worthy of attention for bits of three chapters. In chapter 3 Kaiser describes being a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in the pre-war years and provides a nice account of the impact of the Oxford ‘thing’ on the US and the wider impact of the Scholars in the USA. In chapter 4, post WW2, he describes being Assistant Secretary of Labor, in which capacity he helped set up the Labour Attache’ Program. On which he comments:
‘Reporting is only part of the attache’s job. He has to explain to unions, governments, and employers abroad the unique philosophy underlying American labor-management relations. The labor attache’ is expected to develop contacts with key leaders in the trade union movement, and to influence their thinking and decisions in directions compatible with American goals.’ (p. 118 Emphasis added.) (He says nothing about the use of labour attache’ positions as cover for CIA.)
And there are one or two interesting anecdotes in chapter 7 about Kaiser’s time in Britain as the number 2 at the US Embassy during the first Wilson government. There’s this on George Brown while Labour’s Foreign Secretary: ‘….he was also particularly friendly to America. Several times he went along with Washington’s proposals even though he didn’t fully agree with them, as was the case on Middle East issues, where Brown was notoriously pro-Arab. “If that’s what Washington wants”, he would say, “then I’ll support it.” ‘ (p. 240)
And was it known, for example, that ‘the weekly report of the Joint Intelligence Committee in London…. was the product of a combined effort with the chief of our CIA station’ (p. 225), or that in 1967, when Soviet Foreign Minister Kosygin was in London, ‘the British had tapped Kosygin’s phones in his Claridges hotel suite’? (p. 221)
In From the Cold: National Security and Parliamentary Democracy
Laurence Lustgarten and Ian Leigh
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994, £22.50
The nearest equivalent I can think of to this massive work is the John Rawls book on the concept of justice. This really is that ambitious and impressive. The authors are senior British legal academics, and in this they survey the construction – and propose the reconstruction – of the British secret state.
After an opening discussion of the philosophical basis of their analysis, they methodically work through the historical and legal background to the extant legislation on surveillance, vetting, secrecy, bugging, the status and (non) accountability of the security and intelligence services, and so forth.
While the descriptive detail is overwhelming in itself, the authors’ critique is given particular bite by their knowledge of the comparable – and reformed – systems in Australia and Canada. The polite, academic disdain with which they treat our system is buttressed by devastating comparisons with the system of our former colonial cousins.
Part legal text, part history, part treatise in political philosophy, this is a brilliant and important book. But it’s big (over 500 pages, plus notes), it’s set in very small type, and it is hard going in places. I will not pretend I finished it. Around page 300 my brain began to buckle under the torrent of detail and minute argument. But as a reference work on the British secret state – as well as a program for its reconstruction – this is as good as it gets. The only question is: who is going to implement any of this? A Blair-led Labour government certainly will not.
ZR Rifle: The Plot to Kill Kennedy and Castro
Claudia Furiati
Ocean Press, Australia, 1994
Ocean Press, the page of publication details tells us, is based in Cuba, the book’s subtitle is ‘Cuba Opens Secret Files’, and the conclusion seems to be that this is a piece of propaganda by the Cuban Government. And it is crap. The book is in two sections. The first 126 pages consist of Ms Furiati’s account of the assassination. She has nothing particularly new to say, and as her text is strewn with simple errors, the odd new fragment simply is not credible. On the first page of her narrative proper, page 10, for example, she tells us that US organised crime’s investment in the casinos and whore houses of Cuba was the result of ‘a master plan springing from the famous secret meeting of Mafia leaders held the in Appalachian Mountains in 1954.’
Count the errors in that sentence:
- US organised crime had been in Cuba since prohibition, and maybe earlier;
- the meeting was held in 1957;
- the location was a little town due west of New York City called Apalachin, hundreds of miles north of the Appalachian Mountains;
- and, to my albeit limited knowledge of US organised crime, what the purpose of the meeting was has never been convincingly explained.
The second part of the book, an interview with a Cuban intelligence officer, General Fabian Escalante Font, is not much better. If the General has any substantial concrete evidence, he has not revealed it to the incompetent Ms Furiati; and his own credibility is diminished by his citation of the recent book by Chuck Giancana. He is quoted as saying that ‘The book Crossfire by Chuck Giancana, brother of the head of the Mafia in Chicago, and a friend of Trafficante…..allows us to bring together a series of dispersed elements.’ (p. 131) In the first place the book was called Double Cross, and in the second it is entirely incredible, consisting of Chuck’s account of his memories of what he says his brother said before his death, interspersed with bits and pieces from the large secondary literature on JFK, Monroe etc., the whole juiced up with some sexual fantasies about Monroe.
The Cuban intelligence service may have something interesting to tell us about the anti-Castro milieu of the period which they had apparently comprehensively penetrated. A pity they didn’t tell it to someone – Gaeton Fonzi, say, or Anthony Summers, or Peter Dale Scott – who actually knew something about the subject.
In the UK this book is being distributed by Central Books, London.
Espionage: Past, Present, Future?
ed. Wesley K. Wark
Frank Cass, London, 1994, £24.00
A collection of essays, most from a conference in 1991 at the University of Toronto. Thus we get three essays on things specifically Canadian, including ‘The Early Years of State Surveillance of Labour and Left in Canada’, ‘The Institutional Framework of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security and Intelligence Apparatus’; and ‘Intrepid’s Last Deception’, debunking some of the claims contained in the book A Man Called Intrepid. The rest consists of another couple of now redundant bits from the team of Andrews/ Gordievsky, and a couple of pseudo-theoretical essays which I found very hard going and not worth the effort. What the world does not need know is spook theory.