Lost plot
After Lobster 35 I received a long letter from John Pilger, followed by a revised version of it, complaining about my review of his recent book, Hidden Agendas in 35. With the second version came a note asking me to publish his letter without comment. I replied that I was happy to publish his 1500 word letter but not without comment. Back came the reply that my review ‘was not merely mean-minded in the extreme, it was a gross misrepresentation, and with an agenda’ (I confess that I am still in the dark about this ‘agenda’); that by refusing to publish his letter without comment ‘I was imposing a form of censorship’; and I was now forbidden to publish his letter.
By agreeing to publish his letter uncut I am censoring him?
Pilger’s column on the British-American Project in the New Statesman of 16 October was lifted, unattributed of course, from Lobster 33. Why is it that journalists have to pretend that everything starts with them?
Milner’s Kiwi Milner
In car-boot sale near Scarborough I picked up a copy of the Australian-published The Rhodes Scholar Spy by Richard Hall (Random House, Australia, 1991). It is an account of Ian Milner, a pre-WW2 New Zealand Rhodes Scholar who became a Soviet agent in the same period as the Philby group while working for the New Zealand Foreign Ministry. What is interesting about the book, however, is not the spy aspect, but the portrait of the Round Table Network at work in the 1925-50 period within which Milner operated By focusing on one individual, Hall shows the network – of which he is apparently unaware – operating much more clearly than Carroll Quigley managed with his much wider focus.
The sewer and the sewage
The Sunday Times has been one of the secret state’s major disinformation tools for over a decade now – and maybe longer; I haven’t looked any further back. In my ‘Miscellaneous cuttings’ file I noticed an absolute classic from the ST from 8 February 1998 which is too rich to pass over. At the beginning of the revving-up of the US v Saddam event earlier in 1998, the ST ran a front page story, under the ‘Insight’ imprint, headlined, ‘Saddam’s son made millions shipping cocaine to Britain’. The story refers to an ‘alleged Iraqi plot to flood Britain and Europe with the drug’. And the source? ‘Lawyers for a high-ranking Iraqi defector’, former Iraqi ambassador to Venezuela, now seeking asylum in London. Later on in the story, on page 2, the defector denies the story.
IRD is dead! Long live IRD!
Liam Clarke and Barry Penrose (see review of The Committee, below) co-authored the story ‘Syria paid IRA to kill Mountbatten’ in the Sunday Times 17 May 1998, in which they reported that they had been told by former IRA member Sean O’Callaghan that he had been told that…… Is there a name for serial hearsay?
On 27 September 1998 in a piece in the Sunday Times, ‘Found: renegade soldier wanted for IRA bombings’, the same duo report in the opening paragraph that said soldier ‘is living openly in an Irish town close to the border with Northern Ireland;’ and two paragraphs later that ‘Senior republicans know where he is hiding…’ Subbing ain’t what it used to be..
Some of the people, some of the time
November’s Nexus reports a poll conducted in the US last year which found the following:
- 51% believe it is either very likely or or somewhat likely that federal officials were ‘directly responsible’ for the assassination of JFK.
- More than 33% suspect that the US Navy, either by accident or design, shot down TWA flight 800;
- More than 50% believe it is possible that the CIA ‘intentionally permitted Central American drug dealers to sell cocaine to inner-city black children’.
- 60% believe that the government is withholding information about Agent Orange and other military auses in the Vietnam and Gulf wars.
- Nearly 50% suspect that FBI agents deliberately set the fires that killed 81 Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas.
- More people believed that US government were covering-up information and technology from aliens after the US Air Force report last year that the ‘alien bodies’ allegedly seen at Roswell were test dummies, than before the report’s release.
The article quotes Curtis Gans, the Executive Director for the Washington Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, on this poll:
‘Paranoia is killing this country. It is essentially reducing cohesion in our society and creating fear in the minds of our citizens.’
But at looking those poll results: propositions 1 and 4 seem to me to have been proven, more or less – at any rate are highly probable; 2 and 5 are certainly arguably true; 3 is half true, in as much as we now know that the CIA, as a matter of policy, were given permission to turn a blind eye to cocaine importing by their contra allies in the mid-1980s (see the review of the Webb book by Peter Dale Scott in this issue); and proposition 6 merely shows the failure of a piece of laughable Air Force disinformation.
If the US population is paranoid, the question is: are they paranoid enough?
Off message
The Daily Telegraph 10 August 1998 published the following in an otherwise pretty daft piece by Sion Simon, ‘Ministry of Silly Spooks’.
During his last vetting interview with the mandatory anorak and clipboard merchant from [MI5’s] C Branch, [Labour chief spin-doctor] Alastair Campbell was apparently asked a standard question along the lines of: ‘Have you ever knowingly divulged, or can you imagine any circumstances in which you would do so, sensitive or classified information to unauthorised sources.’ The ‘correct’ answer is obvious. But Mr Campbell, after an incredulous pause and with a look of disgust on his face, replied, with the impatient brevity that is his trademark: ‘That’s my fucking job.’
Who was Jack Hill?
In Lobster 35, in this column, I touched on the mystery surrounding David Williams/Jack Hill, the major contributor to the Common Cause Bulletin.
Harold Smith writes: Jack Hill was the name of a young, bright, good looking Labour Agent who, in the late 1940s (when I was the Labour Candidate in Rusholme Ward for Manchester City Council) was Assistant or Deputy to Reg Wallis, the Regional Organiser (Lancashire and Yorkshire) for the Labour Party at its Office in Manchester. In the early 1970s, as Vice Chair of the Southgate (London) Labour Party, I met him again at some Labour do. He had gone downhill and had some kind of job, maybe with the London Labour Party, and didn’t own a house. Strange how you bump into people after 25 years and start talking again. I was amazed that he remembered me. I don’t think he was married and maybe he was fond of a drink. He was very bright and it was a mystery that, after such a good job, he’d not prospered. Maybe he fobbed me off with a cock-and-bull story of what he was doing.
John Alexander
On May 2, 1998, the editor of the Internet conspiracy zine The Konformist, Robert Sterling, with Kathy Kasten, one of the people involved in trying to make sense of the mind-control connundrum, went to see John Alexander, he of non-lethal weapon fame (see Lobster 25) speak at the California Institute for Human Science. In his account of this in his newsletter The Konformist, Sterling describes how Kasten asked Alexander if they were testing non-lethal technologies on humans. Of course not, he replied, that is illegal. So were the human radiation experiments, replied Kasten.
Sterling reports: ‘There was a look of confusion on Alexander’s face as he said, “Radiation experiments? What radiation experiments?”‘
British spooks killed Ghandi?
The party magazine of the Hindu nationalist party now in government in India, BJP Today, has suggested that the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi was the work of British intelligence agents. The article, written by R. Chandrachundan, a close friend of Ghandi’s son, reports the presence of two men from the British consulate with cameras on the spot when Gandhi was killed. The author claims that the two men were not on the consulate staff and left India on the night of the murder. (Report in Gulf Times [Qatar] 19 September 1998)
Staggering on
Still unwilling to acknowledge that the entire New Labour project is a turkey, the New Statesman remains pretty dull, padded out with an endless parade of life-style features, cooking, gossip and columnists. In September they actually had an interesting story, a piece by Greg Palast, the man who broke the ‘cash for access’, ‘lobbygate’ story. (‘Whatever happened to my scandal?, 25 September) Palast pointed out that after from the initial flurry of interest in ‘Dolly’ Draper, the media and the political opposition had abandoned the story. But where did the New Statesman put this substantial piece? On page 45!
Palast paid a heavy price for having the temerity to point this out, getting himself smeared by the Daily Mirror as a ‘sex pest’. What actually happened – an invention by MP Margaret Payne to discredit a critic of New Labour – is described in the New Statesman of 2 October. This story got promoted up to page 10. News values!
Aah, innocence
The Sunday Telegraph reported (28 April 1998) that the home of one of the senior Sinn Fein people involved in the Northern Ireland peace talks, Gerry Kelly, was bugged for the three years leading up to the talks. Transcripts from the bug ‘passed to the Cabinet, played a key role in helping the government decide if the UIRA ceasefire was genuine’. It is said the Kelly was tipped off about the bug by someone in the Northern Ireland office. Security sources were said to be ‘very angry’ about the tip-off.
We are to believe that someone in Kelly’s position didn’t assume his house was bugged? Didn’t have it swepted regularly? And if that is not believable, what is the alternative? That the IRA-Sinn Fein knew about the bug and used it to feed disinformation to the British state?
Oswald and ‘Oswald’
Michael Beschloss’s Taking Charge: the Johnson White House Tapes 1963-4 (Simon and Schuster, 1997) is an interesting read for many reasons, but Kennedy buffs will turn to the immediate post 22 November ’63 sections looking for insights. There is only one significant revelation that I can see. At 10 in the morning on the 23rd – i.e. less than 24 hours after the shooting – LBJ and Hoover had this curious exchange.
LBJ: Have you established any more about the visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico in September? (emphasis added).
Hoover: No, that’s one angle that’s very confusing, for this reason – we have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet embassy, using Oswald’s name. The picture and the tape do not correspond to this man’s voice, nor to his appearance.
LBJ’s use of ‘any more’ implies prior conversation on this subject which is not in the book; and to my knowledge this is the first time it has been revealed that audio tape and photograph of the false Oswald was being discussed this early.
Hugo Young bares all
The British state, normally so sure-footed in its appointment of the Great and Good to conduct inquiries and in drawing up their terms of reference, made a big blob in appointing Lord Neill of Blanden to chair its inquiry into the funding of political parties. For Neil, it turns out, is a Eurosceptic, as is fellow inquiry member Peter Shore; and they took the opportunity to recommend that in any future referendums, ‘the government should remain neutral’. Cue apoplexy among the pro single currency groups at the prospect of not being able to use the state’s propaganda assets in the promised referendum on entry into the single currency.
Hugo Young, a man who rarely if ever saw a Foreign Office line he couldn’t swallow, unloaded an hysterical couple of thousand words on the subject in the Guardian (20 October 1998). This included the revealing phrase that a referendum on the single currency would ‘abandon to the undirected mercies of the people a decision it has been laboriously building and arranging for months.’