From: David Renton
I am grateful to Lobster for printing Larry O’Hara’s review of my book. It is always a pleasure to see your ideas considered in detail. However, your reviewer devoted a great deal of energy to criticising an argument which he has not fully grasped, and I suspect that readers of this magazine may be interested to know something of the more interesting approach behind the book itself. Fascism: Theory and Practice opposes what I think are two wrong but partially correct ways to understand fascism. The first is that fascism should be understood simply as a violent mass movement (in Ross Bradshaw’s phrase, ‘fascists are psychotic misfits who want to do me in’). The second view is O’Hara’s, that fascism is primarily an ideology, with a program and a coherent set of slogans. One problem with this latter theory is that the ideology of fascism changes. For example, immigration is a major concern to today’s fascists, but was barely mentioned in the 1930s. This leads some commentators (though not Larry O’Hara) to conclude that fascism no longer exists. My point was simply that either view is partial, fascism is both ideology and movement and both need to be grasped if the movement is to be opposed or understood. If O’Hara disputes this, then he does at least dispute the core idea of the book. Until then his argument will remain 1000 words of froth.
From: David Hambling
David Guyatt’s account of alleged chemical/biological warfare operations in Lobster 35 needs a more thorough analysis than Tony Hollick provides in Lobster 38. Mr Hollick makes incorrect assertions and fails to highlight some of the glaring errors in the earlier piece.
Guyatt describes the Black Cat mission as being carried out by a B-52 from Nebraska, with the target site then being cleaned by five-ton fuel-air explosive devices dropped by a Hercules from Dhahran. Hollick says that the B-52 could have dropped all three weapons and would not have been based at Omaha.
The FAE device would have been a BLU-82, known as Big Blue 82 or Daisy Cutter. Actually six tons rather than five, it can only be deployed from an C-130 Hercules (not from a B-52), and is indeed rolled out of the rear loading bay. It is as much an engineering tool as a weapon: in Vietnam it was used to clear minefields and to create instant helicopter landing sites. Fuel air explosives are 5-10 times as powerful as conventional ones, and the BLU-82 has been described as the nearest thing to a nuclear explosion. It would be an effective way of dispersing a chemical agent and destroying much of the evidence. (Why they would do this, given that the intention was to display a willingness to use chemical weapons against Iraq, is not explained). A total of eleven BLU-82s were used in Iraq on unspecified targets.
The B-52 is quite capable of reaching the Gulf from Omaha with air-to-air refuelling. During the Kosovo conflict B-52s routinely flew 37-hour bombing missions from the US. The alternative for Black Cat would be to have chemical munitions transported separately (and covertly?) to a foreign site and then loaded on to a strike aircraft. Few countries would be happy to host completely illegal US operations of this sort, whereas a mission from the US would not risk ruffling any diplomatic feathers.
In summary, the Black Cat mission resembles a Tom Clancy novel: technically feasible, but not necessarily plausible.
The Black Dog mission is another matter. In this elaborate tale a specially-modified S-3A Viking, flown by the CIA and carrying both chemical and biological weapons crashes in Iraq. A daring recovery operation is then carried out by an ultra-secret special operations team.
The premise that a Viking could be sanitised so it could not be traced to the US is ridiculous. An aircraft like the Hercules can be sanitised by obliterating serial numbers, because they are operated by dozens of different nations. The Viking, on the other hand, has only ever been operated by the US Navy and no denial would be plausible.
The aircraft involved was said to be heavily modified with stealth capabilities, and was coloured a flat dark grey. Since all 102 Vikings are painted a flat dark grey this is hardly surprising. We are also informed that the bombs were externally attached to wing pylons – a configuration inconsistent with any kind of radar stealth, and completely unnecessary as the Viking can carry 4,000 lbs of ordnance in its internal weapons bay.
Interestingly, there are two specially modified versions of the Viking, known as Grey Wolf and Outlaw Viking. Neither of these resembles the craft described in the Black Dog mission. The latter was used for intelligence gathering in the Gulf, but not operated by the CIA.
The report refers to the pilot, who did not eject but was recovered alive. However, the S-3 actually has a crew of four.
The weapon used is described as an MC-117 munition modified for liquid chemical usage. Again, this is highly unlikely. The M-116 Weteye chemical bomb has the same characteristics as the 117 and is specifically designed to deliver nerve gas. If the mission was supposed to be covert, it is hard to believe the CIA would have used a bomb which could be so easily traced to the US. When mining Nicaraguan ports in the 1980s the CIA made a point of not using American hardware. A Russian, Iraqi or French designed weapon would make more sense as it could be blamed on Saddam Hussein.
Technical considerations aside, there is an operational objection to Black Dog. Two sources say it took place on 24th Feb. or so, and that the target was a chemical/biological warfare facility. But why would such an installation still be standing after six weeks of air assault with exactly this kind of facility being the highest priority target? If it was only
just discovered intact at the time, why did the military agree to attack it with the least reliable and most experimental weapon in the arsenal instead of pounding it with cruise missiles and laser-guided HE? On the very eve of the ground assault, Iraqi chemical weapons were the Allied commanders worst nightmare and they would be unlikely to risk leaving anything intact.
The scene where the two-person recovery team from a civilian agency arrives to find the crash site surrounded by dead Iraqis seemed familiar. Isn’t this the episode where Mulder and Scully find the US is secretly using alien biological weapons, and the whole thing gets covered up afterwards?
In short, none of the details of the Black Dog story stand up to scrutiny. In light of Mr Guyatt’s other comments, it is possible that the story was circulated simply to discredit the whole idea of US covert chemical/biological operations in the Gulf.
David Guyatt’s reply to this will be in the next Lobster.
From Mick Jones
In his review article about Philby:The Hidden Years, John Burnes talks of the Comintern and the ‘Cambridge Comintern’ in a very broad way, as a label for the people who became Soviet agents. It seems unhelpful to me do do this and can, in fact, cause confusion and even help those wishing to lay false trails.
The Comintern (Communist International) was set up in March 1919, as the supposed successor to the Socialist International that had collapsed with the outbreak of war in August 1914, and sought to unite all those parties still claiming adherence to genuine Marxist aims and the body of theory they rested upon. Some communists were recruited by the Soviet intelligence agencies, but until 1935, when the GPU moved into it in a big way, the various bodies were separate. And the Comintern was never just a bunch of Soviet intelligence but a world party, even if it did become so loyal to the Soviet Union and the CPSU, the Soviet section of the Comintern.
The tendency by authors of the spying genre to blur the differences between pro-Soviet socialists and even liberals, ordinary communist militants, and people working for Soviet intelligence, leads not only to unscholarly work but to nasty witch hunts.
What first drew my attention to this trend was when Peter Wright came out with his accusation about Sir Roger Hollis. Chapman Pincher was wheeled out to back up the claim that Hollis had been recruited to Soviet intelligence by Arthur Ewert when in China. Ewert was in Shanghai between autumn 1932 and summer 1934, as the Comintern’s advisor to the illegal Chinese Communist Party. A flatmate of Hollis recalled him being visited by Agnes Smedley and Ewert in 1930-31, although there is no evidence of him being in Shanghai before 1932. All sorts of other Comintern people operated in Shanghai overseeing work in the trade union and communist movement in that part of the world. The Soviet spying was undertaken by Richard Sorge.
Arthur Ewert came into the limelight in late 1935, when he and his wife Elise were arrested in Brazil after an abortive uprising. But for most of the 1920s he had been a leading figure in the German CP. An opponent of the the sectarian policies pursued by Stalin’s henchman Thalmann, Ewert was gaining in influence over the latter in 1927, and in late 1928 almost succeeded in ousting him entirely over a corruption scandal. Stalin needed Thalmann and Ewert was demoted and in 1930 shifted into Comintern work.
When Ewert’s Brazilian lawyer Heraclito Sobral’s obituary was published in the Guardian (3 December 1991), I wrote a letter correcting inaccuracies (11 December 1991). In it I pointed out that in his Too Secret too Long (1984) Chapman Pincher has Ewert ‘training in communist and conspiratorial affairs… in 1914’, before he and Elise emigrated to Canada before the war broke out. The Guardian made a cut in my letter which weakened my point, namely that Pincher has Ewert engaging in ‘conspiratorial affairs’ (spying?) and a ‘communist’ five years before the Comintern was set-up!
Judging by what we know of the calibre of person recruited to British intelligence in those days, the suspicion of Roger Hollis, as in the Harold Wilson case, surely resulted from a paranoia that covered for ineptitude. Blaming traitors is easier than self-criticism. The Cambridge crew dropped out of communist politics when they were recruited as agents. Sorge wrote economics analyses when an active communist but dropped out of sight once he became an agent. So the ‘Cambridge Comintern’ label is inaccurate.
Apropos of Robert Henderson’s item on Tony Blair’s rhetoric being peppered with fascist buzz-words and the comparison with Oswald Mosley, one in which I believe there is something, only Boris Johnson and Mathew Parris among the British political commentators picked up on the reference in Blair’s speech at the 1996 LP annual conference to 1,000 days left of the old millennium after Labour’s coming victory in the 1997 General election, ‘in order to be prepared for a thousand years’. The reporter for the Suddeutsche Zeitung, Gerd Kroncke, at Blackpool, in his often light-hearted report from the conference, commented: ‘As a German one was quite shocked.’ (3 October 1996)
Information Wanted
Dr. David Turner asks:
John Vidor (pseud.), Spying in Russia (John Long, London 1929) is an account of how the author, having infiltrated the CPGB at a senior level, go himself sent on a delegation to Russia in 1927 and used the opportunity to act as a spy on behalf of ‘the Chief’, who was apparently the head of a non-governmental intelligence outfit.
Does anyone have any idea who ‘Vidor’ might have been? Could he have been the mysterious James McGuirk Hughes (alias P. G. Taylor — one of MI5’s people in the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s)?
And might ‘the Chief’ have been Maxwell Knight (whose free-enterprise intelligence gathering organsiation became a semi-autonomous part of MI5 in 1931)?
Or was the whole thing just a hoax designed to discredit the CP and sow the mutual suspicion in the Party’s ranks?
Reply c/o Lobster