A stranger harvest
The best single volume on the alien abduction connundrum I have come across is C.D. B. Bryan’s Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1995). In it Linda Moulton Howe, the American film-maker who made A Strange Harvest about the ‘cattle mutilation’ phenomenon in the United States, describes to Bryan how she went to the Kirkland Air Force Base at some point in the mid 1980s. In the Office of Special Investigations there she met one of its staff who told her that her film had ‘upset some people in Washington’, and, as a result, his superiors had asked him to brief her. She was shown a document called ‘Briefing Paper for the President of the United States on the Subject of Identified Aerial Vehicles (IAVs) – IAVs’. This contained a history of US Government retrieval ‘of crashed discs and alien bodies, dead and alive’. The Roswell incident was just one of several. But Howe was not allowed to make notes or copies of this document, just to read it.
At this point a little bell may be ringing in your ears. For this is precisely the technique used by Colin Wallace in the British Army’s psy-ops unit in Belfast in the 1970s. Wallace would take journalists, especially foreign journalists whose knowledge of British politics was limited, into back room and show them ‘secret documents’ – some genuine, some forgeries – which they could read but not copy, in the hope that the more naive of them would publish what they had been shown.
Alas, that warning bell seems not have rung for Howe and she lapped it all up. I’m not an expert on the long, intricate history of UFO revelations in the 1980s, but it was my impression, reading her account of this briefing experience, that a considerable chunk of the loopier end of the stories has emerged as a result of her account of that briefing.
In offices in the UK and the US there are groups of psy-war wizzards preparing nonsensical stories about secret bases et al which they then plant on the UFO magazines. They probably run bets with each other, just to make life interesting: ‘Bet you ten bucks you can’t get that one into print.’ Alas, these days, there is is practically nothing the UFO magazines won’t publish.
Common Causes
I received a phone call from David Moller, the Reader’s Digest journalist who was the subject of my ‘join up the dots’ invitation in Lobster 34. During an interesting conversation, Mr Moller denied that anything could be seen by joining up those dots, and told me a couple of interesting snippets about the Common Cause network of the 1960s and 70s. One of the most prolific and best informed of the writers for the Common Cause Bulletin was one ‘David Williams’. ‘Williams’, I was informed by a former Common Cause administrator a decade ago, was the pen name of Jack Hill. But of Jack Hill I have found no trace. Mr Moller informed me that ‘Jack Hill’ was the administrator of the Common Cause-funded Trade Union Centre for Education in Democratic Socialism in the mid-1970s; and that ‘Jack Hill’ and ‘David Williams’ were two pseudonyms of the same person, an agent for a Labour MP, now dead. But which one?
Match me, Sydney!
Vicky Woods in the Sunday Telegraph 30 November 1997:
‘I don’t understand why [Blair foreign policy adviser] Jonathan Powell finds the need to consult Sydney Blumenthal at the White House almost every day about the special relationship.’
Sydney Blumenthal? The co-author of that rather good book about the sixties assassinations, Government By Gunplay? That Sydney Blumenthal? Yes, indeed, the very same, come in from the cold.
Train of Destiny
In the Guardian 5 December 1997, on p. 23, there was a large chunk of Eurobull by Ian Black, ‘View from platform 24’, whose subheading warned us that ‘the train of destiny is about to leave without us’. ‘train of destiny’? Shouldn’t that be Train of Destiny? I mean, if we’re going to use this nonsense, let’s do it right. On the reverse of Black’s story, p. 24, was a piece about British steel firms pleading with the government to get the value of the pound down, subheaded, ‘Ministers told £1 billion of export orders have been lost……….’
Who shot Larry Flynt?
The following appeared in the rather good Internet newsletter The Konformist. (See Sources below for details)
‘Racist Serial Killer Pleads Guilty’
By Rachel Zoll
Chattanooga, Tenn. (AP) – A white serial killer who traveled the country targeting blacks, Jews and interracial couples pleaded guilty today to the 1978 murder of a black man in Chattanooga. Joseph Paul Franklin, 47, now has been convicted of killing seven people and is suspected in ten other murders. He was acquitted of shooting civil rights leader Vernon Jordan, but says the jury made a mistake. He admits shooting Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt in 1978, but was never prosecuted…….Flynt survived his shooting but was paralyzed.’
So Flynt wasn’t shot because of his interest in the Kennedy assassination! Life truly is a disappointment sometimes.
Insider view
Jeffrey Bale (see Lobsters 18, 19, 21, 29) sent me the following from Leo D. Carl’s CIA Insider’s Dictionary of US and Foreign Intelligence, Counterintelligence & Tradecraft (Washington, DC: National Intelligence Book Centre, 1996).
‘Lobster: title of an antiestablishment newsletter published two to three times annually by two British eccentrics with a limited distribution to “about 50 like-minded friends.” N.B. It is anti-intelligence, specifically against the Western intelligence services, particularly MI5, MI6 and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The subject matter is apparently varied, eclectic, and highly interesting and informative for intelligence professionals and buffs.’
While good reviews are welcome from any source, and I’m glad to see this didn’t recycle the story put about by USIS people that Lobster was some kind of KGB operation, it is worth noting the following.
- Lobster’s circulation is 1000 not 50.
- There has only been one ‘British eccentric’ involved for over five years.
- It has appeared twice a year for at least a decade.
The only substantive facts are wrong; and the judgement, in the final descriptive sentence, is second-hand (the use of ‘apparently’). And this from a CIA ‘insider’!
Hepple/Matthews update
My two-line squib about Tim Matthews’ previous incarnation as Tim Hepple in Lobster 34 seems to have set the cat among the UFOlogical pigeons. In response to it Mr Matthews sent out a document to various ‘UFO researchers’, in which he said the following:
‘In late 1991 I undertook to engage in undercover work for an internationally respected anti-fascist investigative magazine called Searchlight having previously been briefly involved with the British National Party in 1988/9 ….the work involved my joining the British National Party and meeting some very dangerous individuals. Within weeks of moving to London I was working at the BNP headquarters where I had access to the names and addresses of hundreds of fascist activists and sympathisers. These were passed onto the Searchlight team. In addition, I was able to expose the birth of a particularly nasty group called “Combat 18” set up by a group of football hooligans and organised with the help of an notorious American nazi called Harold Covington.’
As students of Larry O’Hara will know, this is not quite the whole story. Later in the piece Mr Matthews wrote this:
‘Lobster has suggested there is a government conspiracy to disinform the UFO community about abductions (see issue 34) partly involving an anonymous “taxi driver” who phoned Mr Victorian recently ……Any such conspiracy, were it to exist, could not possibly involve me (I don’t have a driving license for a start!)….’
Mr Matthews is denying something I did not suggest…
Nice one, John
A headline I never thought I’d see was, ‘Time to come clean over the army’s role in the Dirty War’, atop a piece by John Ware in the 25 April New Statesman. This is the John Ware who, with David McKittrick, did the big smear job on Colin Wallace in the Independent in September 1987. Then he was working to discredit Wallace whose information contained much about the Army’s role in the ‘dirty war’. A decade or so later Ware wants every stone turned.
Ware’s New Statesman piece was a follow-up to, and reslanting of, an even bigger piece of which he was co-author in the Sunday Telegraph 29 March, a month before. The two articles amount to the biggest leak of official, secret – most secret – information in the post-war era. Ware and his co-authors, Alasdair Palmer of the Telegraph, and Geoffrey Seed, the journalist who was the link between the media and Cathy Massiter, were given access to raw intelligence files on a hitherto secret Army undercover unit which was working with the Protestant paramilitaries to assassinate members of the Provos.
As the lead paragraph of the Telegraph story stated in 14 point bold,
‘We have seen secret files, that for the first time, provide evidence that the British Army’s Force Research Unit, a branch of Military Intelligence responsible for running agents in Northern Ireland, was complicit in a series of murders carried out by the UDA between 1987 and 1990.’
The worst case scenario, the one thing the Provos had always claimed, which the state had most vehemently denied, was being admitted.
As Paul Foot’s piece about this in Private Eye the week following the Telegraph article concluded, the piece showed that ‘the government and at least some of its intelligence services have finally lost patience with the Unionists over the delays in the peace talks.’ The piece was blackmail, pressure in the Protestant side of the then on-going talks with the Irish and British governments.
The story centred on the role of Brain Nelson, run by the British Army, who became the UDA’s ‘intelligence officer’. Ware and co. wrote in the Telegraph,
‘We have seen the records of Nelson’s meetings with his British Army handlers.’
In the New Stateman piece Ware reveals that ‘the evidence to which we referred is in a police vault in Britain.’
Raw intelligence about the dirtiest secret the British Army may have had, held by the police, is given to a newspaper?
Has anyone been prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act? No.
Would the Sunday Telegraph print such a piece without the most explict assurances from the state that no such prosecution would follow its publication? No.
Has Ware ever apologised for smearing Wallace or acknowledged he got that one wrong? No.
Is Ware’s change of line and the state’s change of line a coincidence?
A sheltered life
Fueled by the Blair faction’s determination to avoid reality, we are living through a period of unprecedented bullshit; Orwellian hardly describes it. And it is creeping in everywhere. Tony Frewin spotted the following in the Preface to a new translation of Julius Caesar’s Seven Commentaries on The Gallic War (Carolyn Hammond, Oxford University Press, 1996):
‘Besides, the subject-matter of The Gallic War is potentially distasteful, even immoral, for the modern reader. The drive to increase territorial holdings, high civilian as well as military casualties, and the predominance of economic motives for organized aggression – all these belong to an accepted norm of international activity in the ancient world, and hence need careful introduction and explanation as well as an up-to-date translation.’
Ms. Hammond can be found snoozing in Cambridge University.