Are raw prawns pink?
Fun and games Down Under where a great brouhaha developed over allegations that Australia’s most famous – and left-wing historian, the late Manning Clark, was a Soviet agent. It started when the Australian poet Sid Murray reported that 26 years before he had seen Clark at a dinner wearing the Order of Lenin, one of the Soviet Union’s highest honours. This factoid, plus the previously revealed fat ASIO file on Clark going back to the 1950s, was enough for a number of Australian papers to allege that Clark was a KGB agent. The Herald Sun (24 August 1996) ran a front-page story headlined ‘Red Agent?’. The question mark disappeared in the columns which followed as Oleg Gordievsky and Brian Crozier commented on the ‘fact’ of the medal. Support for Murray’s claim came from remarks attributed to the now dead Geoffrey Fairbairn, erstwhile council member of Crozier’s Institute for the Study of Conflict. Fairbairn, too, it transpired, had seen Clark wearing the medal nearly 30 years ago.
Nobody seems to have wondered why, if Clark had been a Soviet agent, and if he had been given the OL, he would do something as dumb as wear it in public.
Three months later the Canberra Times (7 November 1996) spoiled the witch-hunt by reporting that the Russian Ambassador in Australia, Alexander Losyukov, had checked with the Moscow archives and discovered that in 1970 Clark, like thousands of other foreigners, had been given a medal to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birth. Losyukov said that ‘every other Russian family has one.’
Da-doo Ron Ron
Having discovered that some of the scientists engaged in the US remote viewing experiments were Scientologists, Armen Victorian turned up an old interview with L. Ron Hubbard Jnr. (Penthouse June 1983) In a mass of fascinating stories of Hubbard Snr., is an account of him selling military secrets to the Soviets, and the Soviet bloc intelligence services sending agents into the Scientology org – precisely because the ideas of scientology appealed to people like the RV scientists who, in the course of their ‘therapy’, might reveal something. To my knowledge this has never been followed up.
Hubbard Jnr. mentions two famous people who were involved with Hubbard Snr. One was Errol Flynn and the other ‘a man who was high up in the Labour Party at the time…a double agent for the KGB and for the British intelligence agency MI5. He was also a raging homosexual. He wanted my father to use his black-magic, soul-cracking brain-washing techniques on young boys.’
This must be the late Tom Driberg MP, (And why are homosexuals so frequently described as ‘raging’?)
En Passant
- ‘Nixon stole the election in 1968 from Humphrey by sabotaging the Democrats’ peace talks with Vietnam.’ Thus the BBC’s Charles Wheeler, quoting William Bundy and Clark Clifford. (Observer, 4 February 1996). So now will the major media take the ‘October Surprise’ story seriously? (Stupid question.)
- Portuguese President and leader of the Portuguese Socialist Party, Mario Soares, alleged by a former aide to have been on the CIA’s payroll. (Guardian, 7 February 1996)
- Detailed article, complete with photographs, of a flying disc, the Avrocar, built in the 1950s for the US Air Force is in Invention and Technology (USA)(Winter 1996). The Avrocar reportedly never got beyond prototype stage and is now in the U.S. Army Transportation Museum at Fort Eustis, Virginia.
- British Army LSD tests in 1961 reported in Daily Telegraph,1 February 1996.
- Harold Wilson’s Labour government ruled out military action against the Rhodesian rebellion ‘well before Ian Smith’s unilateral declaration of independence in 1965,’ said the Guardian,1 January 1996, reporting official papers released under 30-year rule.
- The ‘Brabant Killers’ story – the campaign of motiveless robberies and murder conducted in Belgium between 1982 and 1985, widely assumed to be an attempt to destabilise the government – revisited in the Sunday Telegraph, 26 November 1995.
- Long piece in the Observer, 16 July 1995 on the now-defunct International Freedom Fund showing that its chief sources of finance were South African. But I had guessed that. Before the International Freedom Foundation there was the South African Freedom Foundation, and lots of South African subjects and authors were in IFF’s output.