The view from the bridge

Votescam (again)

Reading the papers and listening to the radio in the days immediately after Bush’s election victory brought home what a parallel universe we – readers of magazines like Lobster – are living in. Here we had an enormous election surprise: despite many of the pre-election polls in the last few days of the campaign and the exit polls saying Kerry would win, a large Republican victory emerged. There was much scratching of pundits’ and pollsters’ heads as they tried to explain this – and much enjoyment was had by journalists at the expense of another bunch of egghead experts who screwed things up. And the word ‘theft’ was not mentioned. Yet the Republicans stole the last one and their opponents did nothing; and there had been mountains of information on how they were going to steal this one. Are the major media’s political journalists simply unaware of this? There will be another torrent of articles in the next few months on the theft of 2004 – the first e-mails on the subject arrived here on 6 November – and the Democrats will do what they did last time: nothing. Which means the Republicans can steal the next one.

Ware’s world

In the wake of the death of Paul Foot in July, Simon Hoggart commented in his column in The Guardian 24 July that the BBC’s John Ware had never believed Colin Wallace, the subject of Foot’s book Who Framed Colin Wallace? Hoggart quoted Ware as saying: ‘He [Foot] bought into all Wallace’s fantasies.’

I e-mailed Ware and the following exchange took place.

RR: I was curious to know what were Colin Wallace’s ‘fantasies’ in your view. (Cf Hoggart in Guardian, Saturday).

John Ware: Too numerous to mention

RR: Not good enough, John.

John Ware: It is for people who understand what evidence is.

RR: Ah, yes: that old cop out. Truly, this is pathetic from someone of your status but it will make a nice little feature in the next issue of Lobster.

John Ware: I’m quaking! Ever heard of Dave Spart?

RR: You keep trying to patronise me and it always misses. The reference to Dave Spart simply tells me you have never read Lobster.

Secret servants

Red faces at NATO where the official NATO Website carried for two months an English translation of an article, which had originally appeared in Croatia, which identified four SIS officers.(1) This was the comic climax of a series of stories about SIS’s activities in the states of the former Yugoslavia.(2) The exposure of SIS’s officers and operations there began in February, with the identification in the Serbian media of Anthony Monckton, a senior SIS officer, who, with two others, was recalled to the UK. The striking thing about this is the fact that Monckton had been identified, ‘blown’, in 1999 in the notorious list of SIS officers which appeared on the Internet and was attributed to the former SIS officer, Richard Tomlinson. (Tomlinson denied authorship but most commentators didn’t believe him. I don’t know.) (3)

‘The best fake Maoists’

In October Radio Netherlands reported on the memoirs of a former member the Dutch security service (BVD), Frits Hoekstra. This includes the BVD’s creation of a fake Maoist party in the 1970s, which fooled everyone, including the Chinese government.(4) The BVD also successfully penetrated radical left-wing organisations, including one linked to the West-German RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion). Hoekstra writes:

‘We were there all the time. We were so well positioned in the cells of that group that we could prevent actions because of the credibility of our source.’

This is reminiscent of the comment by former BOSS agent, Gordon Winter that, ‘British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in Britain bigger than a football team our man is the captain or the vice captain, and if not, he is the referee and he can send any man off the field and call our man on at any time he likes’. Presumably an exaggeration, MI5 felt strongly enough about the comment to have it excised from a 1981 Panorama programme, presented by Tom Mangold, the first ever made about ‘British intelligence’. Days of innocence, they were!

No regrets

John Morrison, the chief investigator for the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee, who was sacked for his comment about the collective raspberry blown through Whitehall at Tony Blair’s talk of Iraq being a threat (see ‘Iraq’, above), made some further comments on BBC Radio 4.

‘There was a culture of news management which came in after 1997 which I had not seen before and intelligence got swept up in that.’

During the bombing of Yugoslavia the pressure from the MOD press office to come up with good news was intense. Morrison said:

‘What I did, in effect, was within my crisis staff, set up in effect my own press office to handle the MoD press office. I took a very senior and tough-minded analyst and told him: “This is your job, to keep the press office off the analysts’ backs and make sure we only say in public what we are absolutely certain about.” We were under constant pressure to field talking heads at the press conference, to have themes for individual days and it was a very tricky balance not to reveal what one shouldn’t…..

The function of intelligence is to speak truth unto power. If it doesn’t do that, it fails and I felt somebody had to speak up for intelligence standards. I did that. I got sacked and I don’t regret it for a moment.’

CIA

<www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0401/S00151.htm> is the source of a detailed study of the CIA’s ‘black budget’ by Dr Michael Salla. And an interesting glimpse of the scale of the CIA’s operations in the early years of the Cold War in Europe was given in the Copenhagen Post 20 February 2004. (5)

‘……the CIA was provided with a complete copy of all Danish archives, which was transported over the Atlantic in the form of 244 spools of 16 mm film and 8 spools of 32 mm film containing over 400,000 pages of sensitive and top-secret information about hundreds of thousands of Danish citizens, enabling the American authorities to reject “unsuitable” individuals applying for visas…..’

We may reasonably presume that Denmark was not the only state to do this….

Is Google in bed with the spooks?

John Simkin runs a large Website on the Kennedy assassination <www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKindex.htm> In October he sent me an e-mail, of which this is an extract.

During my research on the JFK assassination I received information that an anti-communist group called the Intercontinental Penetration Force (Interpen) was involved in the operation. Interpen was a privately funded right-wing group that received support from the CIA in operations against Castro. I produced a page on Interpen for my website. I also produced biographies of the group’s leading members, including those I had been told were involved in the assassination.

When I produce a page on a group or individual, within a few days it is ranked first at Google (this is because of the large number of websites – about 170,000 – that link to my website). For example, if you type in ‘Intercontinental Penetration Force’ into Google’s search box my page comes out 1st out of 5,680 pages.

The same is true of my biographies of Interpen members. However, if you type in Bernardo De Torres you find it does not appear. In fact, further research shows that my biography is not in the Google index. You can test this out by typing in a passage from this page in the Google search-box. The page is just not in there. My whole website is indexed by Google every couple of days by its spider software. The only explanation is that someone at Google has consciously deleted it from the index. Torres obviously has some powerful friends. Another member of Interpen is also being protected by Google/CIA. Loran Hall also does not appear in the Google Index.

It was, of course, only a matter of time before Google came under pressure to censor its indexes. A growing number of people get their information via the web. Google is the main search-engine used by researchers. It was only natural that the intelligence services would have to get involved in censoring this information.’

The power of nightmares

The three films by Adam Curtis, shown here in October/November on BBC2, under the title of The Power of Nightmares, documenting the rise of militant Islam and the American neo-conservatives, deservedly received much praise. Curiously – or perhaps not curiously – none of the comments I read seem to have noticed that Curtis’s account of the origins of the neo-conservatives was based on a big omission. In Curtis’s view the neo-cons grew out of the ideas of a political philosopher, Leo Strauss, some of whose students are now prominent in the Bush regime. (Strauss is discussed in this issue by Bernard Porter.) But much more important in the neo-cons rise to prominence was the Israeli lobby in the United States. (The ‘house journal’ of the neo-cons in the 1970s was Commentary, the journal of the American Jewish Committee.)

Alarmed by the ‘even-handed’ approach taken by Henry Kissinger and Nixon during the 1973 Israeli war with the Arabs, the Israeli lobby set about remaking US foreign policy to protect Israel. This involved first recreating the Soviet Union as the big bad wolf (Cold War 2). As Curtis showed, this entailed the wholesale fabrication of a renewed ‘Soviet threat’, at the heart of which was the so-called Team B exercise.(6) Then the Soviets were presented as the controllers of international terrorism, enabling the Israelis to label the Palestinians as terrorists, controlled by the KGB. This theme was launched at the Jonathan Institute conference of 1979 in Israel before being taken up by anti-detente groups within the US intelligence community. Yet the Israeli lobby’s role was missing from Curtis’s films.

Support your local police

The Tetra microwave-based communications system is spreading across the world. A quick Google shows the system in Asia, Africa, Europe (it has been approved by the EU). Despite official endorsement, the reports of illness associated with Tetra continue to surface. The Sunday Telegraph (13 August) ‘Police blame health crisis on radio mast’, reported another group of British police officers suffering the ill-effects now associated with Tetra and other microwave systems – and being forbidden to talk about it. An anonymous source quoted by the Telegraph said:

‘They [the officers] are caught between going to work in a place that is making them ill and the huge financial and political pressures that demand Tetra must be a success at all costs.’

Notes

1 David Bamber and Guy Dennis, ‘Nato risks SIS lives by naming agents on website’, 29 August 2004 <www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/08/29/wnato29..xml&sSheet=/news/ 2004/08/29/ixnewstop.html> The fact that the article was on the site for two months tell us that no-one is reading the site.

The Croatian original, in English, with the names of the alleged SIS officers, is on Cryptome <http://cryptome.org/mi6-croatia.htm>

2 The best summary of this complicated tale was by Paul Mitchell on the World Socialist Website <www.wsws.org/articles/2004/oct2004/balk-027_pm.shtml>

3 This furore is discussed at <http://intellit.muskingum.edu/uk_folder/ukpostcw_folder/ukpostcwtomlin.html>

4 The text is at <www.agentura.ru/english/Right?id=20041020231000> and at <www.rnw.nl/special/en/html/041020dh.html>

5 In English at <www.cphpost.dk/get/75884.html>

6 On Team B see the review of the book by Anne Cahn in Lobster 45. Cahn was interviewed in the second of Curtis’s films.