Who’s kidding whom?
The September issue of Fortean Times carried a five page article by Robert Irving, ‘The Henry X File’, about Armen Victorian. It was a very strange article, part profile, part smear job. Armen was ‘twice reportedly seen in the back of a Soviet embassy limousine in Ottowa… rumours associated [him] with the deadly trade in Red Mercury…’, and so forth. It was a great mish-mash of facts, factoids and rumours – it even contained a fictitious quote from the Sun attributed to his wife – almost none of which was put to Armen before publication.
It also included some startling sleuthing. Irving quoted from a letter I had written to Armen which had been seized by the police on a raid on Armen’s house. How did Irving get it? It was passed to him, replied Irving, by a ‘source within the Crown Prosecution Service’. Now this is impressive: London free-lance goes to Nottingham and finds a source within the CPS willing to break the law for him? (I wrote to the Nottingham CPS about this and have not yet had a satisfactory reply.)
Irving reports how he had filed a Freedom of Information Act request for ‘the Agency’s information on “Armen Victorian”, “Alan Jones”, Cassava N’Tumba” and others’ [alleged by Irving to be aliases used by Armen].’ But ‘the CIA reply simply referred me [Irving] to one man, a person identified as Henry Azadehdel.” ‘ Irving puts it this way to leave the reader to infer that the CIA had confirmed Irving’s thesis that these are aliases used by ‘Henry Azadehdel’.
Unfortunately for Irving, another journalist interested in Armen, Craig Glenday, working on a multi-part series for Marshall Cavendish, filed an FOIA request in September for a copy of the CIA’s response to Robert Irving’s request. This was duly sent. What it actually said was the following:
‘With respect to that portion of your request concerning Mr. Azadehdel (AKA Armen Victorian, Alan Jones, or Kasava N’Tumba), I must advise you that in all requests such as yours, the CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any CIA records responsive to this portion of your request.’
In other words, as is well known among those using FOIA requests, US government departments will not divulge files on living individuals unless that individual gives his or her written consent – and sometimes not even then.
Having not got what he sought from the CIA, Irving simply made it up.
But the mystery deepens. For further on the CIA’s letter to Irving states, ‘We have no record of having received any FOIA requests from Armen Victorian…’. Yet Armen has filed hundreds – some of which I have seen.
Searchlight news
Things get complicated for people who take on Searchlight, as Larry O’Hara’s experiences, described in many previous issues, illustrate. The most recent victim is Morris Riley, who contributed to Lobster 31. One of three people currently suing Searchlight for libel, Riley was visited in November by two detectives from Scotland Yard with a search warrant. Claiming to be searching for anti-semitic literature – they found none, of course – they went through Morris’s house in the minutest detail, right down to going through his wife’s underwear drawer. A well known hiding place, right?
I don’t buy Searchlight any more but I was given a copy of the issue of September 1996 and there, in the midst of a long article about alleged white South African terrorists in London, was this, in a side-bar on the sixties:
‘Britain becomes a battleground for agents working for Smith and the South Africans. Harold Wilson’s Cabinet Office is infiltrated. Rhodesian agents murder one of their own operatives who has turned against them in London, and another agent is killed by British intelligence after they and Special Branch monitor his activities. The agent, Geoff Dominy ….’ (emphasis added)
Typical of Searchlight to make a startling allegation without offering any evidence. What is ‘British intelligence’? MI5? SIS? And who was Geoff Dominy?
Clean aprons
A correspondent wrote to MI5 asking for its position on Freemasonry. MI5 replied that the Service
‘could not investigate the activities of the Freemasons unless they posed a threat to national security. In fact, membership of the Freemasons would not in itself prevent or hinder anyone from working for the Security Service’.
Help the CIA celebrate its 50th anniversary!
The May 1996 issue of the CIA’s in-house What’s News at CIA was devoted to the Agency’s 50th anniversary. Lasting the entire year, it
‘will celebrate our culture and our service inside the Agency, focusing on internal and external audiences. We will highlight our people, who they are, what they have done, what they do now, and what we expect their capabilities to be in the future ……It is time to celebrate within the family (sic), to say out loud which all know to be true – we are the best at what we do in the entire world.’
Submit your suggestion for the celebration to CIA, Agency Information Staff, Director of CIA50 Program Office, Washington, DC 20505, USA.
Let’s think: Operation Phoenix? Supporting every scumbag regime on the right since World War 2? Facilitating the world-wide heroin plague?
A parapolitical joke
How many Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Answer: Fifteen. One to screw it in, five to say he acted alone, one to say that someone hidden in the ceiling helped. One to film it, one to do an intense examination of the film and conclude (a) it was tampered with and (b) it proves that the first screwer did not act alone. One to insist that the bulb was altered after it was unscrewed, three tramps to walk across the room an hour later, one to insist LBJ really screwed the bulb in, and one to accuse all the others of being disinformation specialists.
One of 52 pages of light bulb jokes found at http://slalpha1.epfl.ch/light_bulb.html