Non-lethal weapons
This is a scam, essentially. A smoke-screen of wacky bits and pieces – sticky stuff and gooey stuff and slippery stuff – conceals the real agenda, the development of various form of energy weapons. There was a big conference – billed ‘secret US only’ – in June this year, a ‘Detailed review of directed energy warfare’. The final session consisted of presentations of work in progress within the industry and included laser systems from TRW and Martin-Merietta and RF weapons from Rockwell and Hughes.
In America, as the arms industry gets rolling in a promising new field, it is accompanied by the legitimation process. Harlan Girard sent me a copy of a report of ‘An Independent Task Force’ sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, titled ‘Non-lethal Technologies: Military Options and Implications’. The task force, whose members included Richard Perle and John Alexander, concluded that ‘a number of non-lethal technologies deserve serious consideration in U.S. planning and development for future military contingencies’. There is virtually nothing on the energy weapons which are the real agenda.
Uncle Brian Crozier
Foreign Policy Perspectives No. 26 from the Libertarian Alliance (25 Chapter Chambers, Esterbrooke St, London SW1P 4NN) is a 1995 speech by Brian Crozier, ‘The Return of the Communists in Eastern Europe’, in which he wonders if the Soviet empire really has shed its ideology. He begins by noting that many of the ‘best anti-communists’ had been CP members, and offers as examples the late Claire Sterling (who recycled all the Bulgarians killed the Pope nonsense) and Herbert Romerstein, latterly of USIS. It was Mr. Romerstein who accused me of recycling Soviet disinformation, and who, I would guess, is the source of the rumours in US intelligence circles that the KGB were funding Lobster.
Another SIS memoir
SIS buffs might like to check the Journal of Contemporary History, July 1995, in which former SIS officer Kenneth Benton is given 50 pages to describe his early years (1937-43) in SIS. Dr Christopher Andrew provides a brief introduction to the piece in which he outlines Benton’s SIS career in the period not covered by Benton’s extract. Benton also wrote some crappy thrillers, one of which, A Single Monstrous Act, portrayed violent, Trotskyist revolutionaries in Britain being run by….. the good old KGB.
Phone and games
On the day Armen Victorian went away for a few days in September my phone rang. I answered, to find Armen on the other end of a mobile. He hadn’t rung me; I hadn’t rung him. An odd technological fault? Or the people harassing Armen letting us know they were still around?
Liam Clarke and the Sunday Times
Erstwhile Daily Mirror editor Roy Greenslade boldly put his toe into the cesspit of the British media’s relationship with the state in a piece in the Media section of the Guardian, 7 August 1995. His major focus was on the Northern Ireland reporting of Liam Clarke. And about Mr Clarke there is a story to tell.
When I was trying to get the major media to take the allegations of Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd seriously, there were a number of journalists who appeared to be on their side, to whom I (and Wallace and Holroyd) spoke freely. Liam Clarke, then in Northern Ireland running an agency called Irish Features (if memory serves), was one of them. Clarke wrote a number of long pieces about Wallace and Holroyd – and about Kincora – for the Catholic end of the Irish media. (See, for example, ‘Framed? The spy caught up in his own web of intrigue’, Sunday World, 31 May 1987, ‘Garda “Spy” Now A Hero’, Sunday World, May 3, 1987, and ‘The MI5 Plot to Smear Paisley’, Sunday World, May 17 1987.) Occasionally his name would appear in the Sunday Times on small bits.
This all changed when he moved out of Northern Ireland to the mainland UK, apparently under the protection of the British state after some kind of threat. Quite soon after this news whistled round the grapevine, he rang me up. His tone had changed, Where once he had been friendly and chatty, now he was trying to pump me – and pretty crudely at that. I froze on him and the phone call ended quickly. He never called me again; and, to my knowledge, never wrote another friendly piece about Wallace and Holroyd.
In his Guardian piece Greenslade reports the opinions of a number of (anonymous) journalists on the unreliable, frequently intelligence-sourced nature of the Sunday Times’ recent reporting on Northern Ireland. In fact the spook fix was in at least seven years ago when James Adams became the Sunday Times’ defence correspondent and began running interference for MI5 at the Wapping gulag.
I wrote to Mr Greenslade pointing out these earlier events but to date have received no reply.
The murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher
Joe Vialls’ exploration of this murder – which he thinks he committed, while under some kind of mind control – has taken a significant lurch forward. In the Australian magazine New Dawn number 27 (GPO Box 3126FF, Melbourne, 3001), Vialls has a long analysis of the event, ‘The ‘Perfect” CIA Assassination’. In this Vialls analyses the event – shots, angles, newsreel coverage – and tries to show that the available evidence proves that the Libyans did not shoot Fletcher, and that the shots came from a then unknown office of the Hughes Tool Company in the same street. (Vialls does not name Hughes in the piece, but that is the outfit he means.) Vialls believes that the shooting was part of the demonization of Libya prior to the bombing of that country by the USA, with British assistance. Vialls’ attempt to prove that he committed a murder everyone else thinks done by someone else is unique, as far as I am aware.
IRD: new material, old lies
Another flurry of newspaper articles about IRD’s early years occurred in August based on the release of some hitherto secret government files on the department. The only new piece of information I noticed in the press reports was in the Times August 17 1995, ‘Celebrity team used in secret anti-Soviet campaign’. Right at the end, on page 2, was this sentence: ‘Its last big campaign in support of government policy was during the 1975 referendum campaign on Europe.’ Oh, really?
There was quite a bit of new detail, however, in an August publication by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in its History Notes series. Number 9, August 1995, is called IRD: Origins and Establishment of the Foreign Office Information Research Department 1946-48, a 21-page essay based on the recently released papers.(1) Below I present some of this new material with comments of mine in square brackets. All the emphases are mine.
In the second line of the introduction the author (or authors) states: ‘Its creation was prompted by the desire of Ministers in Mr Atlee’s Labour government to devise means to combat Communist propaganda’. [So there is the line of this study: it was the politicians who ordered it.]
But ten lines later we find this. ‘Within the Foreign Office…..IRD evolved from plans drawn up in 1946. It took some time, however, for officials to convince Ministers.’
It did indeed. In May 1946 ‘With the approval of the Prime Minister, an action programme was prepared involving a long-term propaganda campaign against Communism’. [It would be interesting to know what this ‘action plan’ consisted of; what it was Attlee thought he was approving.] But Foreign Secretary Bevin thought the plans too negative.
‘Informed observers’
At this point in chips the author or authors of the article with a paragraph to fill in between 26 May 1946, when Bevin rejected the ‘action programme’, and July 1947. ‘Throughout 1947 the Soviet propaganda barrage continued against a background of Communist expansion. Many informed observers [this kind of phrase is usually used in the absence of evidence] believed another war imminent…Powerful Communist parties in France and Italy were capable of sharing, and possibly taking, power. Britain’s colonial possessions were vulnerable to Communist influence.’ [This, as Mark Curtis shows in his new book, reviewed below, was the real agenda for the British mandarins.]
The Russia Committee of the Foreign Office, from whence these plans originated, discussed them again in July 1947, and, ‘In line with Mr Bevin’s opinion that factual propaganda was best, the Committee inclined towards strengthening the presentation of British policy by the inclusion of more positive material. [Gesture to what the Minister wanted.] The need for a more aggressive propaganda offensive was recognised however [back to the Committee’s own agenda], and Mr Bevin asked for a scheme to be worked out.’ [We were just doing the Minister’s bidding.]
Enter Christopher Mayhew
In October 1947 the Soviet Union set up the Cominform and in December along came junior minister Christopher Mayhew with a paper, ‘Third Force Propaganda’. Mayhew was ‘authorised to submit a Cabinet paper embodying his recommendations…… The final form of the paper was prepared by Christopher Warner [of the FO’s Russia Committee], and drew more extensively on the political arguments of his own 1946 draft than on the concept of the ‘Third Force’. [Thanks for the cue, Mr Mayhew, now back to the Russia Committee’s agenda]
Foreign Secretary Bevin presented this, among other things, to the Cabinet in January 1948, and spoke once again of Britain leading the Third Force – progressive, democratic, reformist anti-communists. However, ‘The practical arrangements for the new offensive, first proposed in the Third Force paper and refined in discussion with officials, [back to the Committee’s agenda] were retained.’
The Russian Committee ‘lost no time in instigating a preparatory circular to those Posts which could be expected to implement the new policy’ [Good news boys, we’ve got it past the politicians.] and IRD was formally announced to ‘departments at home’ on February 25 1948. And almost immediately it began to slip away from the politicians’ concept.
In September 1948 the first head, Ralph Murray, suggested transferring part of the costs to the secret vote. ‘The need to recruit specialist staff, free from the limitations of civil service pay and conditions’ was ‘one of the considerations’. More importantly, ‘In addition, the move to the secret vote enabled a more flexible use of money, and avoided the unwelcome scrutiny of operations which might require covert or semi-covert means of execution’.
The real agenda
In November 1948 IRD met the Cabinet Committee on Colonial Information Policy, which existed to ‘stimulate and concert the dissemination of publicity designed to counter Communist propaganda in countries overseas, especially in the self-governing and Colonial countries of the Commonwealth and neighbouring countries‘. As a result, ‘as well as developing the media in the colonies, where the local press was often hostile to the policies of the metropolitan power, IRD and the Colonial Information Policy Committee sought to introduce material illustrating the virtues of British colonial administration particularly on aspects such as labour relations where Soviet attack was most likely.’ [Likely but apparently then not actual; a theoretical ‘communist threat’. The real agenda, of combatting nationalism, is showing again.]
Note
- This can be obtained, free, from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Library and Records Department. Just ring 0171 270 4214 and ask for a copy.