HP source
‘The plot against Harold Wilson’, the drama-documentary broadcast on BBC 2 on 16 March, was a strange affair. It was really little more than a World in Action half hour from the late 1970s puffed-up, complete with redundant reconstruction of Wilson and Marcia Falkender meeting BBC journalists Penrose and Courtiour (Pencourt). Is the TV audience now presumed to be incapable of watching half an hour of factual material? Do we really need to see James Bolam-as-Wilson staring thoughtfully out the window every ten minutes? The British documentaries which have had the best reception in recent years were those by Adam Curtis in 2004, ‘The Power of Nightmares’ on the neo-cons, Al Qaeda and the growth of the PR industry. And these were done straight.
The programme missed a lot of tricks. There was much discussion of the talk of coup plotting in the mid 1970s yet it didn’t mention or, better, show the discussions about a coup carried in The Times. It talked about a smear campaign but didn’t refer to the various forgeries which were going around: Ted Short’s phoney bank account and all the forged leaflets and letters trying to link Wilson and others to the Communist Party and the IRA. And here is the core of my complaint: it wasn’t just a plot against Wilson; it was a plot against the Labour and Liberal parties and the Heath wing of the Tories. And it wasn’t just MI5 doing it, either.(1)
It did contain two significant new pieces of information. The first was Wilson’s attempt to steer Penrose and Courtiour towards Northern Ireland and Colin Wallace. Wilson’s tale of a press officer, a cleaning lady, a Times journalist and a classified document happened to Wallace. (The journalist was Robert Fisk.) But Pencourt didn’t pursue the ‘press officer in Northern Ireland’. Up popped the late Peter Bessel, Liberal MP and CIA agent, to steer them towards Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott instead.
The second significant snippet was the news that Jonathan Aitken had been hand-carrying messages from James Angleton, CIA’s head of counter-intelligence, to Mrs Thatcher, then leader of the opposition. What these said we don’t know but I think we may presume, as the programme did, that they contained some version of Angleton’s suspicion that Wilson was a KGB agent. These letters must have had some weight in Thatcher’s decision to take the KGB agent nonsense about Wilson to Robert Armstrong, then the Home Office liaison with MI5, in 1977.
‘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,(2)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.’ ([3])
The programme was built round the tapes of Wilson made by Pencourt; and thus around Pencourt’s investigation. In not pursuing Wilson’s hint about Northern Ireland, the programme treated them almost as if they were A and R men who had declined to sign The Beatles. But even if they had pursued the Wilson steer towards Wallace, in 1976/7 finding him would have been difficult: the MOD has parked him in Preston. Had they found him, Wallace says today:
‘…if I had been made aware that the former PM had asked Penrose and Courtiour to contact me about the “plots”, then I would certainly have used that opportunity to get the matter looked into. The fact that a former PM had asked me to talk to the journalists would have given me “clearance” of sorts to disclose information. Technically, I would still have been in breach of the Official Secrets Act, but I do not believe the MOD/DPP would have taken action against me in the circumstances.'(4)
‘What if Pencourt had found Wallace?’ is one of the great ‘What ifs?’ of recent British political history. But they didn’t; and in the circumstances they were in, knowing as little as they did then, it was not surprising that Pencourt chose to pursue a solid story about Jeremy Thorpe rather than a hint about Northern Ireland.
Alistair Campbell writ very large
It’s been years since anything from Rolling Stone has seemed worthy of note but in 2005 it published a long piece by chronicler of the NSA, James Bamford, on the American private sector psy-ops/perception managers, the Rendon Group: ‘The man who sold the war: meet John Rendon’.(5) Bamford’s essay shows the enormous role of the psy warrior/PR person in today’s society. It includes this startling paragraph.
‘His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help “create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power”. Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name – the Iraqi National Congress – and served as their media guru and “senior adviser” as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson.’
In the UK, Blair’s PR man, Alistair Campbell, got to tinker with intelligence reports. In the US, Rendon got to try and run a coup.
Blob of the year?
Professor Alfred McCoy is best known for his pioneering book The Politics of Heroin in Sout East Asia. He has a new book out in the US, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. On p. 219 is a long note about Lobster contributor, Armen Victorian, under his previous name of Henry Azadehdel. (6) McCoy quotes from something Henry/Armen wrote for Lobster 36 and then gives a very partial account of Henry/Armen’s career, focusing on his conviction for orchid smuggling and mentioning a UFO story which he was interested in about 25 years ago. McCoy also makes one of the more unfortunate typos I have seen, referring to Henry/ Armen’s ‘landmark conviction for opium smuggling’. He means orchid smuggling but still……did anyone else read this before it went to print?
Just how significant a figure Henry/Armen was in the orchid hunting field can be seen in pages 71-82 of Eric Hansen’s Orchid Fever (London: Methuen, 2001), which describe Henry/Armen’s career and his bust.(7 ) Kew Gardens, for whom he collected orchids for years and who provided him with the paperwork required to import them, sacrificed Henry/Armen for PR purposes in the international politics of plants: they and HM Customs needed a demonstration bust to show they were policing the trade in rare species. And who more convenient than Kew Gardens’ own supplier of orchids?
McCoy doesn’t describe any of this detail, just states that Armen got convicted and that this fact explains why the document about early British and American interest in what is now called ‘mind control’, which Armen found, could not be used in the main text of McCoy’s book – despite being seriously germane to his thesis. Even if McCoy’s account of Armen had been accurate, his reasoning goes thus: because he was convicted of orchid smuggling, his account of the document cannot be relied on. Huh? Did I miss something? Ironic, then, that McCoy’s account of Armen is so inadequate. He describes Lobster as ‘useful but sometimes erratic’. Guesses as to what ‘erratic’ might mean about a magazine’s content?
McCoy went to some trouble researching Armen, but didn’t contact me, the obvious point of reference; and if Armen is hard to find, I am not. I could have sent him a photocopy of the document Armen found but which didn’t pass muster for McCoy because of the nature of its ‘provenance’
Chris Tame
Chris Tame, founder of the Libertarian Alliance, died of cancer in March. He was 55. An obituary by his friend Sean Gabb is at <www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc 144.htm>.
Over twenty years ago, in the very early days of Lobster, when it was still a little A5 magazine, without a distributor, Chris sold copies in the Alternative Bookshop in Covent Garden which he managed. The first money I ever received from bookshop sales came from Chris. As a libertarian, Chris didn’t like the state; and because Lobster didn’t like the secret state, Tame promoted the magazine (my enemy’s enemy). Tame rationalised the fact that I wasn’t a libertarian by referring to me as a ‘libertarian socialist’, a description I found barely intelligible and rather funny as I thought of myself as neither socialist nor libertarian.
Tame was a very intelligent and amusing man with an enormous blind spot. Like many on the radical left, Tame, on the radical right, believed that people were just itching to be set free to take control of their own lives. Unfortunately, many – perhaps most – people don’t want to take charge of their lives. Where those on the left with this delusion turned to Marxism-Lenisim, syndicalism, trade union activism etc as the best means of achieving the people’s liberation, Chris turned to classical liberal economics and the notion of what we might call property-owning anarchism as the means to that end.
After Mrs Thatcher left office we had a long telephone conversation in which Tame expressed his disillusionment with Thatcher and many of her works. He – and, I presume, others with his views – really had believed when she took office in 1979 that the libertarian dawn was upon them. L’actualité was a profound disappointment. As I listened to him it struck me that in relation to the reality of Thatcherism, he was in a directly analogous position to those socialists in the Labour Party who thought the Labour governments of the sixties heralded a socialist Britain and never forgave Wilson and Labour for the ‘betrayal’.
Icke
If you were wondering if David Icke had changed his mind about the alien reptiles thesis, he commented in The Observer magazine, 22 January 2006.
‘In 1989, before the European elections, I was asked to go on Sky News. I went into make-up and sitting next to me was Ted Heath. He turned and scanned me and the whole of both his eyes went jet black. Was he part of the reptilian cabal? Absolutely.’
1989, it should be noted, was two years before Icke had his encounter with the ‘channeller’ which began his journey towards the alien reptile thesis. He is reinterpreting his earlier life in the light, not of experience, but of his more recent beliefs.(8)
Presidential Election theft 2004
Meanwhile, still barely reported by the major media on either side of the Atlantic, the evidence of fraud in the 2004 American Presidential election continues to grow. And never mind all the stuff from websites like blackbox: we now have reports from Senator Conyer at <http://truthout.org/Conyers report.pdf>, and from no less a body than the US government’s General Accounting Office, supporting most of the major charges. A report of the GAO studies is at is at <http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_16. shtml> and if you want to plough through the original GAO reports they can be found at the GAO site <http://www.gpoaccess. gov/gaoreports/index.html>. Search for reportsGAO-05-956, GAO-05-997 and GAO-05-478, especially the first. The theft of 2004 is now historical fact.
Notes
[1] MI5’s official and inadequate response to the charge of plotting is at <www.mi5.gov.uk/output/Page439.html>
[2] She had three goes at it, apparently, and must have had more than anxieties about Geoffrey Goodman’s ‘reliability’. I wonder what evidence Armstrong mustered to rebut her charges? This episode isn’t referred to in her memoirs.
[3] Kenneth O. Morgan, quoted in ‘Maggie Versus Wislon’ in Lobster 39. Ten years later the same Armstrong was sent off to Australia, where he failed to suppress Peter Wright’s Spycatcher and made him himself famous with the phrase ‘economical with the truth’.
[4] E-mail from Colin Wallace to me 4 April 2006.
[5] <www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/8798997?rnd=1132582290566&has-player=true&version=6.0.11.847>
[6] Thanks to Harlan Girard for spotting this.
[7] A species of orchid, Paphiopedilum Henryanum, was named after him. In the process of searching his property the police confiscated Armen’s legal orchids.
[8] See David Icke, In The Light of Experience, (London:Warner, 1993).