Weird Web
Professor Peter Dale Scott reported the following in March. ‘Four times today I have tried to go to www.counterpunch.org. And four times Netscape was unable to find it. This happens frequently on my computer to websites which share my opinions, or to which I am hotlinked. And when I searched for ‘Alex Cockburn’ on my crawler (alltheweb.com), Counterpunch was no longer among the first 70 entries. (I’m sure it used to be.) Have you noticed anything similar?’
Are search engines programmed to drag their feet finding certain sites and subjects?
Peter Dale Scott’s website: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott
Gerry Gable loses another libel case
Thanks to Al Baron for the following.
After a five day trial before a jury at the High Court, London, on 23 February Chesterfield-based accountant [and occasional Lobster contributor] Morris Riley was awarded five thousand pounds damages against Searchlight magazine editor Gerry Gable, one-time columnist Ray Hill, and the magazine itself, in relation to an August 1993 article in the ‘Hill Street News’ column.
Riley is the author of Philby: the Hidden Years, the second edition of which was published by Janus of London last year [and reviewed in Lobster 38]. Janus publisher Sandy Leung gave evidence for Riley. Judge Walker sent the jury out at 11.30 am, and they returned at 3 pm to announce their unanimous verdict.
The defence elected to call no evidence; Mr Gable (who also appeared on behalf of the magazine) and Mr Hill, were in court to hear the verdict. Mr Hill had denied writing the article in question.
Tinker, tailor, soldier, granny
The Melita Norwood, ‘Stalin’s granny’, story opened the columns of The Times on 13 September 1999 to no less than Brian Crozier.(1) Crozier told us, inter alia:
For decades, I was one of the very few (sic) who tried to alert public opinion and successive governments to the Soviet threat …… in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal that brought down President Nixon, the CIA was virtually paralysed in the most important domain: countering the spread of misinformation by the KGB. When President Jimmy Carter, who succeeded Nixon, appointed Admiral Stansfield Turner, the CIA fired some 400 Soviet experts, on the spurious ground that they were no longer needed. The relevant CIA department, known as Covert Action, ceased to operate.
Never mind Crozier forgetting – and The Times subs missing – that it was Gerald Ford who succeeded Nixon, not Jimmy Carter, it was Crozier’s use of the term ‘Covert Action’ which rang my alarm bell: I don’t remember the CIA ever using such explicit titles for its departments. So I looked up Stansfield Turner’s account of these events, in his memoir Secrecy and Democracy. (2) On pp.193-205 Turner says the following.
- The CIA cuts were in what he calls ‘the espionage branch’, otherwise known as the Directorate of Operations.
- Under DCI George Bush this ‘espionage branch’ had been studied and a reduction of 1350 positions over five years had been recommended but not implemented.
- Turner rejected that and went for 820 positions – not people as he emphasises – over two years.
- Number of people actually fired was 17
- 147 were ‘forced to retire early’.
- ‘In short, the espionage branch’s authorised number of people shrank by 820; all of the reduction except the 147 forced into early retirement and the 17 dismissed was effected by attrition.’
Pity that no-one atThe Times thought it worth while either ringing Turner, checking the cuttings library or his book.
Notes
- The important story about Norwood was ‘Norwood: the spy who ever was’ by Phillip Knightley in the New Statesman 13 December 1999 which showed that whatever it was Norwood gave to the Soviets, it wasn’t nuclear.
- London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1986
Beams and motes
In the New Statesman of 3 April, John Pilger discussed the reply in the previous week’s issue by Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to his (Pilger’s) comments the week before. In response to Cook’s claim that Pilger had denied him the right to reply, Pilger reported that Cook’s officials had offered him
‘a “format” whereby Cook would have an exclusive screening of the film, then give an interview “as live”, restricted to ten minutes, all of which we would have to use‘ (emphasis added).
Having rejected Cook’s offer, Pilger commented:
‘To MPs [Cook] misrepresented his outrageous demand as a “right to reply” required by the broadcasting regulations – yet another falsehood.’
I have no sympathy for Robin Cook who has turned out to be at least as useless as any other Labour Minister, but readers of this column may remember that in issue 36 I described how Pilger had sent me a long letter and demanded I publish it without comment, saying that refusing to publish it without comment was a ‘form of censorship’.
The demand that I publish his letter without comment strikes me as closely analogous to what Robin Cook’s officials wanted – a suggestion which Pilger described as ‘an offer designed to be rejected by any self-respecting journalist’.
Quite.
Archery
One of the unanswered questions of the age is why have the Tories put up with Jeffrey Archer through the long series of scrapes and scandals he has got embroiled in? The probable answer was buried in paragaph 9 of a piece in Private Eye of 24 December 1999 which reported the role of Archer and his wife, Mary, in a company which, reading between the lines, was funnelling money from Kuwait into the Tory Party. (The Kuwaiti Investment Office is one of the major property owners in London.)
With hindsight
Among the books about British intelligence operations I, Kovaks by Leslie Aspin (London: Everest Books, 1975) was never taken terribly seriously. This was partly because there were fewer spook-wise journalists at that time; but mainly because there was no corroborative evidence for the fascinating allegations contained in it – notably the request by MI6 that Aspin kill the MI6 agent/bank-robber Kenneth Littlejohn. In the book Aspin’s MI6 handler was codenamed ‘Homer’. Surprise, surprise, an MI6 controller, Roger Hamer, codenamed Homer, is reported in Stuart Wavell’s ‘An awfully big adventure’ in the Sunday Times 6 February 2000, in the same period and same part of the world as in the Aspin book.
The shoe fits
I didn’t attempt to follow the NATO campaign in Kosovo in detail. But I remember one evening watching a news bulletin on TV either in the build-up to the bombing or at the beginning of it, during which a German member of the NATO command flashed on screen – visible for a second or two – a map showing big arrows encircling Kosovo from Serbia. This was ‘Operation Horseshoe’, the ‘proof’ of Serbian plans to encircle and drive out the Albanians from Kosovo.
Nice of the Serbs to provide such a clear graphic, I thought. How stupid do the NATO psy-ops boys think we are? I made a couple of searches on the Net for Operation Horseshoe, found nothing and forgot about it. This was an obvious fake and I knew it would turn up one day. And it did, in the Sunday Times 2 April, which reported under the heading ‘Serbian ethnic cleansing scare was a fake, says general’:
‘The plan, known as Operation Horseshoe, was revealed by Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, on April last year, almost two weeks after NATO started bombing Serbia…..it was presented as proof that President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia had long planned the expulsion of Albanians. James Rubin, the American state department spokesman, cited it only last week to justify NATO’s bombardment. However, Heinz Loquai, a retired brigadier general, has claimed in a new book on the war that the plan was fabricated from run-of-the-mill Bulgarian intelligence reports.’
LM=?
The Guardian reported that ‘the pivot of Living Marxism‘s activities in the mainstream is……..the Economist Intelligence Unit’. Would a reader care to offer an interpretation of this which does not conclude that LM is some kind of front for the British state? (Guardian G2 15 March 2000)
I opener
The lasting legacy of the MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson to our understanding of the way MI6 works may be his comments on 6’s Information Operations (I/Ops). There was a belter of an example in the Sunday Telegraph 26 March where Alan Judd (aka [former?] MI6 officer Alan Petty) tried to persuade us that we should not reveal the identity of intelligence officers or their sources because of the threat to their lives. In the US, of course, the CIA et al drag up the example of the CIA station chief in Athens, Richard Welch, who was murdered after being exposed in a Greek daily paper. Judd doesn’t have an actual British intelligence officer killed in harness in the post-war era and had to make do with the Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft, executed by the Iraqi government for spying. (Was Petty thereby telling us that Bazoft was, in fact, an agent of MI6?)
Mark Hollingsworth described another such I/Op, also run through the Sunday Telegraph, in the Guardian 30 March 2000. But then the Sunday Telegraph is full of them – which is why it is such fun to read.
McPhilemy 2, British press 0
Having already successfully sued the Express, Sean McPhilemy won his libel case against the Sunday Times. (Independent 31 March). The Times had claimed the McPhilemy programme on Channel 4 about ‘The Committee’ in Northern Ireland, later the subject of a book by McPhilemy, was a hoax – a charge the paper could not hope to sustain.
In a letter to Private Eye (no. 1000) McPhilemy’s lawyer, Geoffrey Bindman, noted that neither the Times editor, Andrew Neill, nor the author of the piece, Liam Clarke, were willing to give evidence in defence of the piece.
This case cost the Times an estimated £1.2 million. I was reminded of the other high profile cases the Times has lost in the service of Whitehall’s secret servants – for example the smearing of Carmen Proetta – and wondered again if the Times gets these losses back from some secret department of HMG. (And if it doesn’t, it is time they got better libel lawyers….)
Maggie v Wilson
One of the outstanding unresolved issues in the so-called ‘Wilson plots’ of the mid-1970s is the question of Margaret Thatcher’s role after she became Leader of the Opposition in 1975. She was surrounded by spooks and ex-spooks who believed, or pretended to believe, in the Global Communist Conspiracy. What did she believe and do while so many of those around her were muttering that Harold Wilson was a KGB agent?
This question is partly answered in Kenneth O. Morgan’s Callaghan: a life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Although Morgan’s discussion of the 1974-77 period is entirely inadequate – evasive essentially – there is this little snippet on p. 610.
[No 2 at the Home Office and liaison with MI5] Robert Armstrong, after guidance from the Prime Minister (Callaghan), saw Mrs Thatcher at Scotney Castle and then in Chelsea on 9 and 11 August 1977. On these occasions, she expressed ‘misgivings’ about Harold Wilson’s ‘reliability’ although her evidence was wholly anecdotal, based on such matters as Wilson’s visits to Russia thirty years earlier, and his employment of figures such as Geoffrey Goodman (on whom MI5 had a file) whose political reliability she evidently questioned.’
Three meetings to express her ‘misgivings’? Don’t think so….