Paddy the spook
Since the last issue I have skimmed Paddy Ashdown’s two volumes of diaries. While dominated by his attempt to do a deal with the Blair-led Labour Party, there are some other interesting snippets; and, through Ashdown’s eyes, there is a detailed portrait of Tony Blair which suggests that Rory Bremner’s impersonation of him on Channel 4 has got it about right. Pages and pages of conversation with Blair are reproduced verbatim. Ashdown claims he wrote down their conversations as soon as his meetings with Blair finished. In which case he’s got a phenomenal memory. On the other hand, maybe he didn’t trust Mr Blair and went to the meetings wired.
In Lobster 9, in 1985, Ashdown was named as having been in MI6 by Steve Dorril, in the first batch of what eventually became the Who’s Who of the British Secret State. Though I cannot remember why Dorril thought this and though there is nothing specific in Ashdown’s known career which says ‘intelligence’, the career move from Special Boat Squadron to Foreign Office is pretty obvious.(1)
The alleged SIS affiliation seems to have stuck, however. The doyen of British political profile writers, Andrew Roth, wrote in the Guardian (19 March 2001), sixteen years after Dorril, that Ashdown ‘is popularly supposed to have been serving with MI6 in Geneva under the cover of being the first secretary to the UK mission to the UN.’ (2) In ‘Rebranding SIS’ in Lobster 40 Corinne Souza commented:
‘Lobbyists have known about Paddy Ashdown’s SIS background for years: that is why commercial clients pay them to write profiles. A former overseas client of mine whom I bumped into in the pub when Ashdown was made Lib-Dem leader, asked whether his election was “deliberate”.’
Ashdown has never confirmed having been a member of SIS; nor does he quite deny it. Asked in 2000 if he had been in member of SIS he replied: ‘I was a member of the Special Boat Squadron and the British Diplomatic Service no more and no less.’ (3)
In his The Ashdown Diaries Vol. One 1988-1997 (Penguin 2000) p. 402, he writes: ‘I had been invited to SIS to make a speech at the “passing out” dinner of a course of trainees.’ Oddly, he then refers to SIS as the ‘Special Intelligence Service’, merging as perhaps they do in his memory his time in the Special Boat Service with that in the Secret Intelligence Service. Since he chose to include this entry in his diary, he is giving his readers a hint that the story about him being in SIS is true.
Does disinformation work?
In Lobster 39 (p. 23) I commented on the disinformation project Operation Horseshoe, a purported Serb plan for the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, which had been recycled in Andrew Rawnsley’s book, Servants of the People. The Serbs may have intended doing this, but the ‘plan’ shown to the western media, complete with handy little illustrations, was a fake. Well, there it is again, this time cited by Paddy Ashdown, on p. 412 of the second volume of his diary.
Labour and Israel
In Lobster 44 I noted that it had been reported in The Times that Stephen Byers MP was hoping to make a political comeback by becoming chair of the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). In the event that failed. I was interested to read an article by Byers in the Guardian 15 March 2004 (4) which he signed as Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee Against Anti-semitism. Were these events connected in some way? I e-mailed Byers and he replied: ‘The news stories saying that I wanted to be or was about to become Chair of the Labour Friends of Israel were simply untrue. I have never sought or wanted such a position.’
Gordon Brown also apparently has the interests of Israel close to his heart. A report in the Jewish Telegraph 27 June 2003 described Gordon Brown addressing the annual lunch of the Labour Friends of Israel and telling the guests how his affection for Israel had been inculcated by his father, a Church of Scotland minister, who was a member and some time chair of the Church’s Israel committee.
Why are Labour MPs so supportive of Israel? There are three reasons. The most important is the prime minister’s (and chancellor’s) pro-Israel position. The second is that British Jews have become significant financial contributors to the Labour Party. This was discussed in Lobster 44 and is illustrated again by the list of names at the head of ‘Blair’s backers’ by Richard Winnett in the Sunday Times of 1 February 2004. The third is the present US administration’s support for Israel. For an averagely ambitious Labour MP, lightly encumbered with principles, it is thus a no-brainer to support Israel and, perhaps, show that support by joining the Labour Friends of Israel.
9-11
I hesitate to write about this. There is a two week gap between my finishing the copy for an issue and the magazine being mailed out to subscribers and, with a developing story like this one, there is a chance that the next paragraphs have already been overtaken by events.
Barely noticed by the mainstream media, the 9-11 Commission, without going at the Bush people terribly hard, has turned up some significant material.(5) Most importantly it has shown that the Bush administrations had many warnings about al Qaeda, and even about al Qaeda’s interest in plane bombs. During the hearings. NORAD put out a statement admitting, to quote, USA Today’s report:
‘In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties. One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center.'(6)
Not discussed by the Commission, as far as I know, was the document which shows that the decision-making process on intercepting hijacked airliners had been changed in 2001 and it was no longer a decision taken by NORAD but by the Defense Secretary. In other words, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had to personally approve any action.(7) These items alone make the case of the 9-11 conspiracy theorists look plausible.
On the World Socialist Web site, Patrick Martin concludes that the evidence suggests that the Bush administration was expecting al Qaeda to hijack planes and decided to let it happen to provide the pretext for its ‘warn on terrorism’ in general and the planned assault on Afghanistan in particular. (8) This seems to explain much of the anomalous behaviour but doesn’t require us to believe that the Bush administration actually organised the attack on the World Trade Center, something I still cannot believe despite all the evidence assembled by people like David Ray Griffin (see Books below).However, as we know from other incidents in American history (Gulf of Tonkein, Operations Northwoods being the most obvious), allowing a hijacking is within known operational boundaries.
One plus one equals?
In issue 56 of Tony Gosling’s Bilderberg-watching e-newsletter PEPIS (9) he writes this:
‘The Duke of Kent is the Grand Master of free-masonry’s governing body, the United Grand Lodge of England. (10) Interesting, then, that it is the Duke’s Personal Assistant, Andrew Palmer, (11) that organised the Turnberry Bilderberg conference, the last one to take place in the UK.’
From this Gosling concludes that ‘Bilderberg is some kind of masonic summit’, a conclusion not justified by this fragment of evidence, interesting though it is.
RIP
Geoffrey Stewart-Smith died (obituary The Daily Telegraph 20 March 2004). In the 1960s and 70s, former army officer Stewart-Smith was one of this country’s leading professional anti-communists, supporting the US in Vietnam and forming the Friends of NTS, Foreign Affairs Publishing Company, Foreign Affairs Research Institute (FARI) and Foreign Affairs Circle. For a time the last named was the British affiliate to the World Anti-Communist League, though Stewart-Smith fell out with WACL. Stewart-Smith was an English Tory and described WACL to me as ‘despotic Asian gangsters’. It has never been established where the funding came for most of this, though in 1987 he admitted that FARI had been mainly funded by the South African government.
He was called the CIA’s man in the House of Commons in the famous document The Monday Club: a danger to democracy, which I showed him. (He had apparently never seen it.) He was disappointed to discover it had been published anonymously: he wanted to sue the author and publisher. His journal, East-West Digest, certainly contained information which looked as though it had come from intelligence service files of some kind. However, in a letter to me in December 1987 he wrote:
‘I refuse to have dealings with intelligence services for the simple reason that if they give one any information and one is challenged in court they either might or might not be prepared to give evidence.’
I never decided whether I believed this or not.
The high point of his propaganda activities was probably the publication in 1974 and 1979 of The Hidden Face of the Labour Party, a large tabloid-style pamphlet warning of the penetration of the Labour Party by ‘communists’ and, in the 1979 version, by ‘communist’ and Trotskyist groups. Contemporary reports suggested these pamphlets had been distributed by the million.
I met him in 1987. He was a very charming toff. I asked him about the ‘Wilson plots’. He told me nothing of consequence; and he may have known nothing of consequence. I couldn’t tell.
Mind control
At <www.vxm.com/bib.doc.html> is a large 1986 ‘Bibliography on the psycho-activity of electromagnetic fields’ by two of the well known names in the field, Robert Beck and Eldon Byrd. This bibliography documents extensive scientific experimentation in the two decades before it.
At<www.datafilter.com/mc/remoteBehav-ioralInfluence.html> is a big 2003 paper by John McMurty who has pulled together the scientific evidence on the technology of ‘mind control’.
McMurty’s introduction states:
‘Herein is substantiated:
1. Human wireless internal voice transmission and tracking technologies.
2. Reports of electroencephalographic (EEG) thought reading capacity, evidence of covert development, and remote EEG capture technology.
3. References to the use of these, or similar technologies against humans.’
Taken together these two documents make it irrational to dismiss the claims of ‘mind control victims’. They may sound crazy and, no doubt, some of them are crazy; but, as I have been saying since I first tiptoed gingerly into this subject in 1989, the scientific evidence is there. The technology exists. My guess is some of the people claiming to be victims of this are involuntary experimental subjects.
Notes
1 The Who’s Who is long since out of print. However its contents were included by Dan Brandt in his Namebase data base on the Net at <www.namebase.org/nbhome.html>. In a European Union CV of Ashdown it states that in 1967 he went to Hong Kong to do a full-time course in Chinese, returning to England in 1970. Whereupon he was posted to Northern Ireland. In 1972 he left the Royal Marines and joined the Foreign Office. ‘He was posted to the British Mission to the United Nations in Geneva where he was responsible for Britain’s relations with a number of United Nations organisations and took part in the negotiation of several international treaties and agreements between 1974 and 1976. He was also involved in some aspects of the European Security Conference (the Helsinki Conference).’ <http://ue.eu.int/pesc/envoye/cv/Ashdown/Ashdown.htm>
2 <http://politics.guardian.co.uk/profiles/ story/0,9396,459350,00.html>
3 <www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,645-46265,00.html>
4 Byers was running the Israeli line that being critical of Israel is being anti-semitic. This is considered in a very good article in the US magazine The Nation 2 February 2004, by Brian Klug, ‘The Myth of the New Anti-Semitism’, in which Klug reviews four recent American books which attempt to argue that line. <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040202&s=klug>
5 There is a series of reports by Patrick Martin on the Commission hearings at the World Socialist Web site. For example <www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/911-a26.shtml>
6 <www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-04-18-norad_x.htm>
7 See <http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/analysis/norad/docs/intercept_proc.pdf> and <www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/d302515_021897/d302515p.pdf>
8 I suggested this explanation in my piece on this in Fortean Times 162, September 2002.
9 Found at <www.bilderberg.org>
10 <www.grandlodge-england.org/ugle/ whos-who.htm>
11 <www.bilderberg.org/1998.htm#palmer>