From David Guyatt:
David Hambling’s comments in Lobster 39 (Feedback) underscore the extreme difficulties involved in firstly accessing, then corroborating and, finally, reporting stories that are as obviously sensitive as Operation Black Cat and Operation Black Dog. It is easy to raise what appear to be realistic technical objections, but the Black Dog story consumed over seven months of my time and almost as much of the editor of a nationwide magazine I was working with in Washington.
Contact had been established with this gentleman some while earlier on another story and a cordial relationship had blossomed. For convenience sake, I’ll call him X. He was a very experienced and proficient investigator of military and intelligence stories in addition to being a recognised editor. Because of this, the excellence of his military and intelligence sources, I decided to ask X to collaborate in the investigation. The agreement was that the story, if it stood up to in-depth scrutiny, would be published in his magazine with a joint by-line. Consequently, I provided him with the basic facts of Operation Black Cat only. I refrained from mentioning Black Dog entirely and, at that point, was content to keep this strictly to myself to investigate.
Almost three weeks passed when I received a call from X stating he had come across something interesting from a good source about Black Cat, except it didn’t sound like the same operation. He went on to outline some of the basic details of Operation Black Dog which I was already familiar with. Excited, I was able to add to what he had discovered and tell him that he was right on target. Thereafter, seven months of daily effort followed.
Between us we had three different sources who were able to shed direct light on the mission. In addition, another independent source confirmed that the Viking aircraft had been recovered to a security fenced area at Camp Four where he had seen it. Meanwhile, photos of the recovered Viking at Camp Four were handed to X from someone else. Yet another source was able to confirm the existence of the two-man search team who operated out of Camp Four.
The journalistic maxim is that if three separate sources corroborate a story then it is considered viable. We had three principal and two other peripheral sources as described above. Moreover, I had reason to believe that other direct sources would agree to come forward were the story to have been published in the mainstream media. Unfortunately this didn’t happen.
We, too, were puzzled by the use of a Viking aircraft for this mission to the point that I spoke with the Jane’s aircraft expert on black aircraft operations, who saw no great reason to disqualify the aircraft from the basic mission parameters described to him.
The Viking has a larger cross-section than a B52, a fact that does not endear it to stealth technology in general. However, there do exist electronic forms of stealth that are more suitable to a larger airframe. As an example of what is possible, I met with a US Special Forces helicopter pilot at the Mildenhall airshow. He flew a Spec Forces chopper that had a neat little black box designed to manipulate radar returns that show the chopper to be miles away from its real location. A very useful gadget, I think.
What is also true, is that the Viking normally has a four-man crew and munitions are carried inside a large internal weapons bay, rather than on wing pylons. However, the fact is that for this sensitive mission, there was only one crew-member, the pilot. This makes sense in terms of secrecy, a consideration that would have been paramount in the mind of the CIA planners. Because of this necessary limitation, is it not possible that the aircraft was adapted to carry its munitions on wing pylons that, in turn, were specially rigged to enable the pilot to also act as bombardier?
What is clear to me from Mr. Hambling’s letter, however, is that he rates the intelligence factor in the Central Intelligence Agency at a far higher premium than I (and a great many others) do. The fact that non-US hardware was used by the CIA for its mining of Nicaraguan ports during the 1980s doesn’t amount to very much, I think. During the same decade the CIA provided Afghan rebels with Stinger missiles to shoot down Soviet aircraft. The Stinger is so obviously American manufactured they might as well have had a cartoon picture of the President stencilled on them along with the message, Hi, I’m Ronnie Raygun, fly me!
The less palatable fact of life is that the military and intelligence community is the residential home for comic cock-up, greed, corruption, vanity, stupidity, rice-bowl politics and far, far worse. Not only that, but the CIA is known to be split into competing factions. Each has an agenda of its own and some of these don’t just border on criminality but are mired deep within organised crime, while other factions appear to act in defiance of the laws of treason. For example, in his book Spider’s Web, author Alan Friedman recounts how some CIA officers were urgently trying to sell Saddam a consignment of Soviet-made shoulder-operated SAMs in February 1991, at the height of the air war against Iraq. This factionalism may also have accounted for the CIA target set that resulted in the whoopsy-daisy destruction of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo conflict.
Meanwhile, Mr. Hambling also asks why fuel air explosives were used in Operation Black Cat. One explanation might be that planners were concerned that a residue of VX nerve agent might have been blown back towards coalition troops and, therefore, utilised air fuel explosives to incinerate every last surviving particle of nerve agent. The best approach for Mr. Hambling, as for Mr. Hollick [see Lobster 38], is to approach Tim Sebastian, the former BBC Correspondent who investigated Black Cat, and to also speak with the Countess of Mar.
Tim Sebastian confirmed to me in a telephone call that he had fully corroborated Black Cat during a month- long trip to the US in late 1998. He also knew that a second mission that he dubbed Black Cat 11 had taken place but remained unable to penetrate it. This was obviously Operation Black Dog. Interestingly, Sebastian subsequently confirmed the Black Cat story to Sophie Goodchild from the News of the World (now with the Independent on Sunday) in a telephone conversation. This followed a meeting with me.
Margaret Mar, meanwhile, was at that time an approachable and very active and honourable campaigner in the House of Lords on Gulf War Veterans issues. On behalf of Tim Sebastian, she privately took up the matter of Operation Black Cat with a senior minister at the MOD. She was also kind enough to do the same with our Black Dog story with Dr. John Reid, whose only response was an off-the-cuff remark about the unsuitability of the Viking for such a mission. This, clearly, did not amount to a denial. In fact, details of both these missions have reached very high levels in the both the UK and US governments and the response on both from both have been very inadequate, to say the least. But, caught in flagrante delecto, what else could they do? Well, that, of course, is the leading question isn’t it?
After several months of digging and engaging in secret meetings with sources where documents were passed, the Black Dog story had all but been verified. However, X being a thoroughly belt and braces sort of person wanted some additional documentation before he would commit himself to go public with the story. A meeting was arranged. At about 2.30 a.m. London time X from Washington called and left a message on my BT answer-phone (I was on the internet at the time and so the phone was engaged). A tone of jubilation was in his voice as he recited his message: David (pause) Bingo! (pause) I got it! The very next day began what I can only describe as disengagement. Very shortly afterwards my calls and emails failed to be returned.
I waited patiently but eventually decided to take the story to another fairly well known editor in the US. In fact, this person, who I will call Y, knew I was working on an important story with X and had begged me to give him the story instead. Earlier in his career he had worked for X and told me that he had a proclivity to spike thoroughly sound stories for no apparent reason. I would have taken this with a pinch of salt had it not been for the fact that another journalist who had also worked with X later told me the same thing; and since there was no obvious beneficial reason for him to share this piece of information, I was inclined to accept what he said at face value. He knew what story I was working on, had undertaken some discrete enquiries at my urging and had been alarmed by at least one reply he received from a very senior military source.
In any event, I went ahead and provided Y with the core details of Operation Black Dog. He was clearly excited and although it was a Sunday morning immediately arranged a meeting with his publisher later that afternoon. This was to be followed by a meeting with a contact of his at the CIA. Y never contacted me again, apart from a brief email a few days later responding to my urgent messages asking what the hell was going on? He was, he said, busy on a rush story. Finito.
One final fact that is of interest is that the International Committee of the Red Cross stood ready to issue a press release once the story was published in the mainstream media. This would have attracted a furious storm of international protest at the US breach of the chemical weapons ban and international law. However, as we now know, the story didn’t reach the mainstream media and the rest is now history, as they say.
It is often the case that the background and surround-ground of a story of this significance is of equal interest as the story itself. I hope, therefore, that the foregoing will not only answer the central questions raised by David Hambling and I believe I have – but that it will also provide sufficient insight to add weight to the reality of both operations. I can add that I knew of other sources who could further corroborate Black Dog but out of fear wished not to come forward. I quite understand that.
From M. R. D. Foot
Scott Newton seeks to revive in your number 39 legends about SOE propagated by Robert Marshall and Anthony Cave Brown.
The collapse of Francis [sic] ‘Prosper’ Suttill’s SOE circuit, centred on Paris, in late June 1943 can be fully explained from the circuit’s own weaknesses: it was far too large, and its leaders had become far too careless. There is no need to bring in the extra complexity, that the circuit was betrayed by Dericourt, the air movement officer, on Dansey’s orders. We have Trevor-Roper’s word for it that Dansey was ‘an utter shit’, but it goes too far to blame him for over four hundred arrests. There is no reliable evidence for Marshall’s tale; that was why the programme played it down rather than emphasising it.
From John Hope
In Lobster 39 David Turner claims to have ‘solved one of the great mysteries about Maxwell Knight’, asserting that Knight was ‘working for MI6 from 1924-25 to 1931’ via a private intelligence agency used by MI6 to furnish information on communists in Britain. Alas, the matter is more complex and ambiguous than Turner claims and does not entirely support his conclusion in regard to Knight.
The private intelligence agency that Knight worked for from 1923 was the Industrial Intelligence Bureau (IIB), which had been established by the Federation of British Industries, the Mineowners’ Association and the Shipbuilding Employers Federation the previous year to monitor – and counter – ‘Communist subversion’ in British industry. Sir George Makgill, Honorary Secretary of the British Empire Producers Organisation and Secretary of the British Empire Union, was employed as the IIB’s Director. Makgill recruited the young John Baker White (later the Director of the notorious Economic League) to run ‘Section D’ of the IIB in 1923, and Baker White, in turn, recruited Knight as his one of his sub-agents. When Makgill died in October 1926, the agency was reorganised under the control of Baker White – and then incorporated into MI5 in 1931.
There is plenty of archival evidence to show that under both Makgill and Baker White the IIB was used to undertake work and recruit for Special Branch, MI5 and MI6, and that MI6, therefore, had no monopoly over the agency’s services. Anyone working for the IIB undertook work, on a subcontractual basis, for British employers, Special Branch, MI5 and MI6, and so can not be ‘claimed’ by any one them. The only real conclusion that can be drawn from the ‘Curry Report’, when pieced together with archival evidence from other sources, is that Maxwell Knight was employed by the IIB between 1923 and 1931, and that his ‘work’ was often carried out on behalf of the various state security and intelligence agencies willing to subcontract its ‘brief’.
To argue that Knight ‘was working for MI6 from 1924/25 to 1931’ is therefore both inaccurate and highly misleading, and serves to obscure the historical complexities and realities behind the relations between the ‘private’ and ‘state’ intelligence and security services.
From John McGuffin
I’m printing a couple of Loyalist leaflets from the Shankill – UVF naming UDA etc. – and I was reminded of the UCA smear which you referred to in Lobster 14. On rereading it, perhaps I can add some information.
I was a freelance reporter in Belfast at the time and remember the flyers – which is all they were. The source was obviously Brit Intell and they did not originate from Duke Elliott let alone Tommy Herron. Duke was perhaps a wannabee leftie – he did use to show off a copy of Che – but he was soon rubbed out by North Belfast UDA. Herron was a Brit agent and gangster who was stiffed either by Brit Intell or a UDA man.
The allegations that ‘the UCA had discussions with the PD, Officials and BICO’ is ridiculous. I can state with confidence that no approaches were made to the PD – I was the Editor of the Free Citizen and Unfree Citizen at the time and was at every meeting the PD ‘leadership’ had with the likes of Charlie Haughey – who, offered us guns one week before the arms crisis blew up – and meetings with everyone from Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and SLA personnel. In addition we had talks with the Italian, German and French leftwingers and I can assure you that we never talked to the ‘UCA’ which existed only in the imagination of the Lisburn Disinf machine – Wallace and Railton. With regards to the BICOs, there were at most six of them and they did fuck all except produce a few slim pamphlets – ‘two nations once again’. The only Officials who might have been involved with the UCA if it had existed were the element that went IRSP with Costello after the murder of Joe McCann. The few survivors, whom I met regularly, have no recollection of any such organisation let alone meeting them.
The leaflets were leaked to the press through some well known gullible dupes (at best) or ‘assets’ at worst – I’m talking of McKittrick, Ryder, Myers, Dillon, Fisk, Jim Campbell et al. I picked up my copies from the BBC drinking club where the hacks used to hang out for late night drinking. The Ron Horn stories were a complete red herring.
Back in ’72 and ’73 [IRD’s] Hugh Mooney was well known as a ‘spook’ by most journos. I encountered him when I was writing The Guineapigs – published by Penguin and withdrawn after one week on the orders of Lord Cowdrey and Reggie Maudling.
From Edward Crawford
May I make a comment on Scott Newtons ‘Historical Notes’ in Lobster 38 and his point about the wish of the Americans to dismantle the British Empire. The only Special Branch files that have ever been open to the public are The India Office Political Judicial files, released in 1997. (British Library L/PJ/12/). They were opened, I would guess, because they are duplicated in Delhi anyway. Research done by Wes Ervin on Philip Gunawardena, which will be published next year by Revolutionary History, is illuminating in this regard. It is clear from these files that in 1930-1 the British had no help at all from the FBI as regards nationalist and communist students and sympathisers from their colonies who were in the States. Indeed it appears that the British set up an independent intelligence operation in New York, under a cultural guise of a library, lectures etc, to spy on these people. However they did not know what Philip was up to when he was in the Mid West.
Britain however was a different matter. The CP, with whom Philip at that time consorted, must have been thick with spies and they went so far as to check on the books that he was reading at the British Museum! Even the Home Office thought the India Office was a bit paranoid. There are strong indications that a man called Glyn Evans, with whom Philip stayed at 30 Adelaide Rd in Swiss Cottage, was an agent; and Evans even simulated an interest in Trotskyism.
Finally, war plans are often mad. They are done as paper exercises to keep staff officers employed on the outside chance that something like it might occur. There are indications that in the twenties and before Hitler came to power the Army was planning for a war against Russia on the North West Frontier and in Afghanistan, the Navy was planning for a war against Japan and, barmiest of the lot, the Air Force, since planes then did not go very far then, was planning a war against France. I doubt very much that there was any political direction in this: it was simply that the service worked out their needs on the basis of a conflict with a formidable, but not too formidable, foe, so the Navy backed off from planning a war against the USA.