Bilderberg
Originally given as a paper at the British Association for American Studies 2002 Annual Postgraduate Conference, this draws on newly available archival evidence to document the origins of the Bilderberg Group. It also considers the various conspiracy theories which have attached themselves to the Group. Is it a CIA plot to undermine socialism or a socialist conspiracy to destroy the US’s capitalist, democratic institutions? The author concludes that the view of Bilderberg as a seat of hidden global government comes closest to the truth.
Hugh Wilford, ‘CIA plot, socialist conspiracy or New World Order? The origins of the Bilderberg Group 1952-55’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 14 (3) (2003) pp. 70-82.
Is there intelligent life out there?
Alan Block confirms our worst fears in his first paragraph:
“The history of the Central Intelligence Agency illustrates that it can neither control its agents, operatives, assets, and, indeed, officers, nor are its covert policies divorced from both common and often uncommon crime. This has always been the case and almost always known by those in charge.”
Forty pages and several examples later he cheerlessly concludes: ‘Out of control and on their own, the National Intelligence Service was a peerless environment for organising crime.’
On the other hand, Frank J. Cilluffo and his fellow authors argue that the US intelligence community is ‘…Uncle Sam’s lifeblood in the campaign against terrorism’ and the $30 billion spent annually on intelligence gathering is not enough. This view could be partly explained by the fact that co-author Ronald A. Marks is a former CIA officer.
However, if an intrepid Fortune reporter is to be believed, the CIA has been much improved since George Tenet took over the post of Director of Central Intelligence. Use of classic management techniques has transformed ‘turned around’, to use management speak the organisation. It even has the makings of a corporate mission statement ‘We steal secrets so the President can know about things happening in the short and long run in places that he needs to know about’. Soon to come on stream is Quantum Leap, a ‘data-mining program’ that allows an analyst ‘…to get quick access to all the information available classified and unclassified about virtually anyone’.
Meanwhile, Kevin J. Lawner ruminates on the impact that the Echelon interception system might have on the right to privacy, concluding that the National Security Agency’s ‘……
surveillance activities in Europe must be subject to rigorous oversight, and guarantees must be provided to safeguard against abuse’.
Alan A. Block, ‘The National Intelligence Service murder and mayhem: a historical document’, Crime, Law and Social Change, 38 (2) (September 2002) pp. 89-136.
Frank J. Cilluffo, Ronald A. Marks, and George C. Salmoiraghi, ‘The Use and limits of U.S. intelligence’, Washington Quarterly, (25) (1) (Winter 2002), pp. 61-74 (also available at < http://twq.com/02winter/cilluffo.pdf >).
Kevin J. Lawner, ‘Post-Sept. 11th international surveillance activity a failure of intelligence: the Echelon interception system and the fundamental right to privacy in Europe’, Pace International Law Review, 14 (Fall 2002) pp. 435-480.
Bill Powell, ‘How George Tenet brought the CIA back from the dead….’, Fortune (European edition), 148 (8) (13 October 2003) pp. 84-92. (also available at < http://www.fortune.com/ fortune/articles/0,15114,490641-3,00.htm >).
The Other 9/11
Peter Kornbluh (1) analyses CIA and White House records to show how the former made use of the Chilean media to help undermine Allende’s government prior to the military coup of 11 September 1973. Augustin Edwards (owner of the country’s leading newspaper, El Mercurio, and tactfully described as a Chilean Rupert Murdoch) had already been lobbying influential Americans to argue for ‘aggressive US intervention’ to remove Allende, and eventually met with Nixon and Kissinger to further press his case. He succeeded and the US did indeed intervene. El Mercurio (bankrolled to the tune of millions of dollars by the CIA) began a lengthy anti-Allende campaign, encouraging dissent and, just weeks before the coup, running an editorial effectively calling for insurrection. Thirty years on the Academy of Chilean Journalists is calling for Edwards’ expulsion from its ranks on the wholly justifiable grounds that he violated its code of ethics.
Peter Kornbluh, ‘The El Mercurio file: secret documents shed new light on how the CIA used a newspaper to foment a coup’, Columbia Journalism Review, (5) (September-October 2003), pp.14-19 (also available at < http://www.cjr.org/issues/2003 /5/chile-kornbluh.asp >).
Digging deep
David Price is a cultural anthropologist based at St. Martin’s College in Washington with an interest in how the Cold War has impacted upon American anthropology. The selection of articles below gives a flavour of his work, as does his home page at: < http://homepages.stmartin. edu/fac_staff/dprice/ index.htm >
Next year sees the publication (by Duke University Press) of his first book Threatening anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s surveillance of activist anthropologists which aims to show how anthropologists working to end racial, ethnic, gender and economic segregation were targeted as suspected Communists.
‘Cold War anthropology: collaborators and victims of the national security state’, Identities, 4 (3/4) (1998), pp. 389-430.
[co-author] ‘The Cold War context of the FBI’s investigation of Leslie A. White’, American Anthropologist, 103 (1) (2001), pp. 164-167.‘Past wars, present dangers, future anthropologies’, Anthropology Today, 18 (1) (February 2002), pp. 3-5.
‘ “Terrorism” and the responsibility of the anthropologist’, Anthropology Today, 18 (2) (April 2002), pp. 22-23.
‘Interlopers and invited guests: on anthropology’s witting and unwitting links to intelligence agencies’, Anthropology Today, 18 (6) (Dec 2002), pp. 16-21.
[co-author] ‘Un-American anthropological thought…’, Journal of Anthropological Research, 59 (2) (2003), pp. 183-204.Iraq
Business Week examines the US military’s heavy reliance on PMCs (Private Military Companies) to help with the provision of essential support services in Iraq. In the vanguard is Kellogg Brown and Root, which just happens to be a subsidiary of Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton. Particularly heartening is the final paragraph:
‘If conditions in Iraq continue to deteriorate, …people will be focused on whether the policy of replacing soldiers with private contractors, even in support roles, can be taken too far. The ultimate fear…is that contractors under extreme duress will flee en masse, exposing US soldiers to catastrophic risk…’
The recent and ongoing events in Iraqalso feature heavily in a recent issue of theAmerican Journal of International Law, which devotes almost a hundred pages to the subject, covering topics such as ‘Pre-emption, Iraq and international law’, ‘Iraq: the shifting sands of pre-emptive self defence’, and ‘The Prospect for international law and order in the wake of Iraq’.
Anthony Bianco and Stephanie Anderson Forest, ‘Outsourcing war: an inside look at Brown & Root, the kingpin of America’s new military-industrial complex’, Business Week 15 September 2003, pp. 68-76.
‘Agora: future implications of the Iraq conflict’, American Journal of International Law, 97 (3) (July 2003), pp. 553-642. (nb An agora is an assembly or meeting place.)
A further selection of related articles and commentaries from the journal’s publisher, The American Society of International Law, is at < http://www.asil.org/iraqindex.htm >
The Madness of King, Cecil
Ruth Dudley Edwards’ joint biography of Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp touches briefly upon King’s abortive plan to replace Harold Wilson’s government with an ‘Emergency Government’, with Lord Mountbatten as a potential titular head. Mountbatten himself suggested Barbara Castle (then Employment Secretary) as someone who could ‘…rouse the national spirit’ if called upon. At a meeting of King and Mountbatten in May 1968, the latter decided against any further involvement. According to Cudlipp he was warned off by Sir Solly Zuckerman (‘This is rank treachery.’). King’s account has himself advising Mountbatten to keep ‘…out of public view so as to have clean hands if [an] emergency should arise in the future.’ Mountbatten later recollected that ‘…King was a man filled with folie de grandeur…I said, “This is rank treason. Out.” ‘
King continued to rail against Wilson through the columns of the Daily Mirror but without support from other public figures he became a figure of fun.(2) Although his own ‘coup’ failed, King was the victim of an internal power struggle when he was ousted as Chairman of the International Publishing Corporation just three weeks after meeting with Mountbatten.
Ruth Dudley Edwards, Newspapermen: Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil Harmsworth King and the glory days of Fleet Street, London: Secker & Warburg, 2003
The Weakest Lynk
Tucked away in the list of those attending the memorial mass for Sir Paul Getty held in September was the name of Roy Lynk (a leading working miner during the Miners’ Strike and founder of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers). This may help confirm the claims that, back in 1985, Sir Paul (then plain John Paul Getty jr.) gave at least £150,000 to the National Working Miners’ Committee (forerunner of the UDM). At the time Lynk stated: ‘We have received no such money. All our campaigning material has come from our area funds and from a few small individual donations.’ His presence at the celebration of Sir Paul’s life perhaps suggests otherwise… (In fairness it should be noted that Getty money also found its way to the families of striking miners.)
Patrick Wintour, ‘Getty money “helped finance breakaway miners” ‘, The Guardian, 23 September 1985.
Martin Wainwright, ‘Families appeal heading for £500,000’, The Guardian 15 December 1984.
Iris spy?
There’s been a degree of scoffing by certain members of the literati at A. N. Wilson’s passing mention in his recent memoir that Iris Murdoch fed ‘information’ to the Communist Party when she worked at The Treasury in the early 1940s. The late Dame’s widower, John Bayley, has backed up the claim up to some extent. ‘She was required, only once I recall, to leave a letter in a drop in some tree in Hyde Park. She did so, but didn’t like it, and it was one of the many reasons she left the Communist party.’
A. N. Wilson, Iris Murdoch as I knew her, (London: Hutchinson, 2003). The revelation is on page 81.
Sam Leith, ‘Comrade Murdoch’s trip to the park’, The Daily Telegraph, 17 October 2001.
Notes
1 Director of the Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archive and author of The Pinochet File: a declassified dossier on atrocity and accountability (New York: New Press, 2003).
2 The one person who did support and encourage him was his second wife, Dame Ruth Railton, described by Edwards as ‘…jealous, merciless, fiercely manipulative and an inveterate liar and fantasist.’ A subsequent fantasy of the duo was a joint belief that they could solve the problems besetting Northern Ireland, at one point simultaneously courting Ian Paisley and IRA Army Council member David O’Connell.