A spook, moi?
One of the formative experiences of my youth – and we’re talking early 1960s here, beatnik days, when wearing a narrow leather tie was pretty hip – was going to the Mound in Edinburgh on Sunday nights. The Mound is like Hyde Park Corner in London, a place where local by-laws allow anyone to get up and say their piece. The people I remember most clearly are the Edinburgh branch of the anti-Catholic organisation, Protestant Action, and the Socialist Party of Great Britain (the SPGB). My memory says that the SPGB speakers were from Glasgow; wherever they came from, they were brilliant speakers with a devastating repertoire of put-downs for hecklers. All of which is a preamble for my recent discovery that not only is the SPGB still going, in the August 1994 edition of their magazine, Socialist Standard, on page 126, we find this paragraph.
‘Feeling paranoid? Not as much as they are. According to BOSS agent, Robin Ramsay (In an interview cut from a 1981 Panorama programme, but printed verbatim elsewhere), British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in Britain bigger than a football team our man is the captain or vice-captain, and if not, he is the referee and can send any man off the field and call our man on any time he likes.” (Perspectives issue 8).
As it happens I had a copy of Perspectives, issue 8, and looked it up. This is what they had published:
‘In Lobster 26 Robin Ramsay recalls the one section that was apparently cut from a BBC Panorama documentary on MI5 et al in 1981. This was Gordon Winter, BOSS agent, declaring: “British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in Britain bigger than a football team our man is the captain or vice-captain, and if not, he is the referee and can send any man off the field and call our man on any time he likes……”‘
The author of the Socialist Standard piece was able to copy, exactly, the long Gordon Winter quote, yet somehow manages to read ‘Gordon Winter, BOSS agent’, as ‘Robin Ramsay, BOSS agent’.
When I was sent a photocopy of the page from Socialist Standard by one of my regular correspondents, my initial reaction was laughter. I’ve been waiting years to be accused of being a spook, and it seemed entirely apposite that when it finally happened I should be accused of being a spook for an organisation which no longer existed – and in a journal I’d never seen before, produced by a party I didn’t know still existed.
The perils of disinformation
Elsewhere in this issue a collection of essays edited by Wesley K. Wark gets pretty short shrift from me. However, in one of the more abstruse essays, ‘Anti-diplomacy, Intelligence Theory and Surveillance’, under a sub-heading ‘Intertextualism and International Theory’, we read this:
‘An intertext, defined by the semiologist Roland Barthes as a “multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash”, aptly covers the field of intelligence, where there is no final arbiter of truth, meaning is derived from an interrelationship of texts, and power is implicated by the contingent nature and ambiguity of language and other signifying practices.’
Still with this? Good: it gets more interesting.
‘Anyone who doubts the intertextual nature of intelligence should undertake a careful reading of the transcripts of the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on the nomination of Robert Gates to be Director of the CIA. Consider just one incident, the textual appropriations, displacements, and strategies that surround the inquiry into the 1981 attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II. Ten texts are involved.
‘Text No. 1 is a speech given by the Secretary of State Alexander Haig the day after President Reagan’s inauguration, in which he links the Soviet Union to international terrorism.
‘Text No. 2 is a National Intelligence Estimate, commissioned by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which fails to find evidence that conclusively backs up Haig’s charge.
‘Text No. 3 is journalist Claire Sterling’s book The Terrorist (sic; Terror) Network, which goes a step further and claims that the KGB is the mastermind behind practically every international terrorist act.
‘Text No. 4 is the same text, aggressively waved in the face of the authors of Text No. 2 by Director Wiliam Casey, who claims that he learned more from it than anything that the CIA analysts were providing.
‘The analysts cite, to no avail, a very secret Text No. 5, a CIA disinformation campaign in Europe, that was probably (sic) the hidden source of Text No. 3.
‘In 1984 Text No. 6 appears, Sterling’s The Time of Assassins, which argues that the KGB was indeed behind the papal plot, prompting Casey in 1985 to order Robert Gates to commission Text No. 7, tendentiously entitled “Agca’s Attempt to Kill the Pope: the Case for Soviet Involvement”. Text No. 7, said by Gates in a cover memorandum to be the “CIA’s first comprehensive examination of evidence of who was behind the attempted assassination of Pope Paul II”, refutes the conclusions of Text No. 2, stating that “The Soviets were reluctant to invade Poland… so they decided to demoralise the [Polish] opposition by killing the Polish Pope.”
‘Text No. 8 emerges in July 1985, when three senior CIA analysts note a political bias to Text No. 7 but absolve Gates of tailoring the report to satisfy preordained conclusions.
‘Text No. 9 comes from former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman, who testifies before the Senate Committee hearings that Gates personally rewrote the Text No. 7 to confirm Sterling’s Text No. 6, and excised a “scope” note which stated no effort had been made to weigh arguments against Soviet involvement.
‘Text No. 10 is Gates’ rebuttal of Goodman’s charges before the Intelligence Committee: “based on the evidence, the allegations that I drove this paper to its conclusions and then knowingly misrepresented it to policy makers is (sic) false.” ‘
The author then states, inter alia, that ‘intertextualism is itself an imperfect yet apt surveillance practice applied to the intelligence text’.
Maybe so. More important – and more interesting – is the partial confirmation here that the so-called Bulgarian connection was the CIA (and Mossad?) disinformation campaign Edward Herman, Covert Action and all the others on the spook-wise American Left concluded at the time. How appropriate, what kharmatic insouciance, that the damned story blew back into the domestic intelligence process to the point where the Secretary of State and the DCIA were using part of the campaign’s product, the Sterling books, to bludgeon the CIA intelligence estimation process!
As we now know that the KGB launched the AIDS-as-US-biological-weapons-programme-gone-amok in retaliation for the KGB-shot-Pope story, who came off worst?
Son of God news
Former tv sports personality turned Green Messiah, David Icke, has stuffed another foot in his mouth. Sometime Lobster contributor, David Black, has a fascinating piece in Greenline, September ’94, pp. 14 and 15, about Icke’s latest discovery – the role in history of the Illuminati. Poor Icke, adrift from his moorings, lost in the ozone, is now quoting the crazy UFOnut William Cooper – he of the JFK-shot-by-his-driver theory. (Excuse me, wouldn’t the other people in the car have noticed this?) – and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The world of funny handshakes and the like
While we are in the country of secret societies, there have been a number of interesting sightings recently. Two snap-shots of the Masons, for example. One, spotted by Bill West, is in the autobiography of the British actor, Richard Todd, In Camera. On p. 228 he writes:
‘I was Bill Astor’s guest at a meeting of the New Welcome Masonic Lodge of which he was Master. I was very impressed with his quietly authoritative working and sure handling of the ceremony. Bill had just been through a dreadful time when the Stephen Ward scandal and trial had been in all the headlines.’
The other was in the Guardian, July 1, 1994. A profile of the black American singer and song writer, Bobby Womack, reported that ‘Bobby Womack’s a Mason. A lot of black American entertainers are. Womack decided to join when the family car broke down in Georgia and a bunch of rednecks responded to his father’s Mason hand-signals at the roadside.’
Did anybody tell 33 degree J. Edgar Hoover?
The third was a piece in the Guardian (Life, 31 July, 1994) by Claire Messud on the Yale-based Skull and Bones Society, whose current most illustrious member is George Walker Bush. Pretty eccentric of the Guardian to give two pages to this stuff while continuing to ignore Harold Smith’s more concrete allegations about election-rigging in colonial Nigeria. The fact that Ms Messud is the partner of Guardian chief literary critic James Wood, of course, has nothing to do with it…
Human guinea pigs
In the USA the General Accounting Office have recently published a paper, ‘Human Experimentation: An Overview on Cold War Era Programs’. giving some details of nuclear, chemical and drug testing. This paper is available, free of charge, from US GAO, PO Box 6015, Gaithersburg, MD 20884-6015, USA. Ask for GAO/T-NSIAD-94-266.
My copy was supplied by Harlan Girard, the source of many of the documents in this area I have mentioned in these columns. Mr Girard can now be contacted at PO Box 58700, Philadelphia, PA 19102-8700, USA, the address of the International Committee for the Convention Against Offensive Microwave Weapons.
Low intensity publishing operations
Fans of Frank Kitson will be delighted to learn that his 1971 Low Intensity Operations was published in India (Natraj Publishers, Dehra Dun) in 1992. (Thanks to MK for this.)
But what does this signify?
Briefly….
Christine Keeler now claiming that Stephen Ward was a communist, and that she ‘delivered stuff’ to the Russian Embassy. (Independent, 4 November). Assuming this version to be the truth, don’t I remember Peter Wright telling us that everyone going in and out of the Embassy was photographed by MI5? So where does this leave the story? ………..
Amusing to see that both the Sunday Times (6 November) and the Independent (5 November) ran stories on the use of British troops for LSD testing. The Times told its readers that this had just been officially confirmed. Except the story – and the confirmation – had appeared in Lobster 26 almost a year before (and both newspapers have subscribers to Lobster). ……….
Revolutionary Conservatives? In Lobster 27, p. 5, there was a brief piece about the Revolutionary Conservatives. Esquire’s British edition for July/August contained a three page article by the Guardian’s Francis Wheen about the RC’s Messers Millson and Bowden, as well as fellow-travellers Smith and Lauder-Frost, charting their journey from the now defunct Western Goals from whence they all came. Ah, the good old days when Taiwanese money paid the bills………
Way back in Lobster 9 the notion that the sub-text to the Falklands War had been oil was discussed. Interesting, therefore, to see the article headlined ‘Falklands braced for oil bonanza’ in the Independent on Sunday of 14 August, 1994…….
Interesting piece in the November issue of the usually worthy but dull New Internationalist by journalist David Hellier describing the events which befell him while investigating the British arming of Iraq in the 1980s. Two of his contacts died in suspicious circumstances, he was knocked down by a car which mounted the pavement, and various media suddenly lost interest in his investigation……
Reuters reported (Los Angeles Times October 9) that the CIA had funded the Japanese LDP during the 50s and 60s, to keep down the Japanese Left and fend off the ‘Communist threat’. Smart move that, as Japan continues to buy up large chunks of the USA in return for funding the US government’s debt……