Maggie, Maggie, Maggie
Giles Scott-Smith,(1) who wrote about the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Lobster 36 and 38, has written a very interesting study of Margaret Thatcher’s first visit to America in 1967.(2)
Scott-Smith shows that Thatcher, then a junior shadow spokesperson in the Tory Party, was talent-spotted by the State Department’s man in the London embassy who liaised with the Tory Party, and was sent on a six week freebie in 1967 c/o the State Department’s International Visitor Program. While there she was given VIP treatment and introduced to many big figures in American politics and business (described in detail by Scott-Smith, using declassified files) because, to quote Dean Mahin, then director of visitor programming at the Governmental Affairs Institute, ‘the embassy clearly indicated that it was possible that she would become the first female PM of Britain.’
This raises two points. The minor one is that this supports Gordon Winter. For in his memoir Inside BOSS, Winter describes (p. 186) a 1968 meeting with Cecil Eprille a employee of the CIA front, Forum World Features, whom he quotes as saying, ‘There’s a feeling in America that she could become Britain’s first woman prime minister’, and suggesting that Winter do some detailed research about her and write a feature for Forum World Features.
The significant one is to what extent is the American embassy’s description of someone as ‘she could become’ a self-fulfilling prophecy? In other words, how much influence does/did the US have on UK domestic politics? The declassified files show that the Tories with whom the US embassy had most to do in the late 1960s and early 1970s were James Prior, William Whitelaw, Sir Alec Douglas Home, Edward Heath and Sir Michael Fraser. The least familiar name on that list is Sir Michael Fraser; but in Lobster 55 Simon Matthews wrote this of Fraser, who with Thatcher, challenged Heath for the leadership of the Tory Party in 1975:
‘The emergence of Fraser – a war-time SAS colleague of Clermont member David Stirling – was curious, as neither prior to this event nor subsequently, did he demonstrate any interest in being leader of the Conservative Party. His candidacy, which allowed Thatcher to look more ‘centrist’ than she actually was, attracted 16 votes and damaged Heath, who lost to Thatcher by 119 to 130. Was Fraser a spoiling candidate put up to enable a Thatcher victory?’
Well, now……
It’s a funny old world….
…when the Director of Public Prosecutions attacks ‘the relentless pressure of a security state’ and describes the government’s response to the terrorism threat as ‘mediaeval delusions’; (3) and when the former head of MI5 describes the response to 9/11 as ‘a huge overreaction’.(4)
The minds of bankers
Some years ago I was told the following story by someone who was present at some of this.
When Nick Leeson’s massive currency bets went wrong and he bankrupted Baring’s Bank in 1995 (the big warning bell which didn’t ring for those notionally involved in regulating the City of London), the Bank of England launched a ‘lifeboat’ to rescue the bank: other banks lent money to bail the bank out. All was going well and the deal was just about done when the committee running the ‘lifeboat’ got a phone call from the Barings people: they needed another £20 million. Why? asked the ‘lifeboat’ committee. ‘For our bonuses’, came the answer. Some banker version of ‘With our money? No fucking chance’ was the reply and the ‘lifeboat’ turned round and sailed back to shore, leaving the bank to fail. But with taxpayers’ money, in the 2008 bailout – gee, who would have thought it? – the bonuses are getting paid.
The end of the beginning?
The quote which follows from then Economic Secretary to the Treasury, Ed Balls, in late 2006, expressed the NuLab government’s view of the City. Has anything happened to change this view?
‘London…..is the location for 70 per cent. of the global secondary bond market, for more than 40 per cent. of global derivatives, and for more than 40 per cent. of cross-border equities trading. London today has more foreign banks than any other financial centre, and it is the location for the headquarters of six of the world’s 10 largest international law firms. Based on its global reach and its reputation for free, fair and open global markets, London has in recent years been attracting business and listings from around the world. We are determined to keep it that way.’
(Hansard 28 Nov 2006: Column 989)
The fact that London is ‘the location for 70 per cent of the global secondary bond market, for more than 40 per cent of global derivatives’ means that much of the chaos of the past year originated in London, while Gordon Brown and Ed Balls were in charge of the Treasury. Which makes Brown’s posturing as the man who will reform the financial world the more ridiculous.
Credit where credit is due (1)
- Paul Lashmar asked some interesting questions about the role of financial journalism in his essay ‘Sub prime – a crisis in journalism?’, (5) in which he noted:
‘Searching through the Lexis Nexis database I cannot find any UK journalist seriously warning about the dangers of CDOs [Collateralised Debt Obligations] before 2007. There is a certain amount of discussion but the general tone of the business press was supportive of the industry’s expanding use of CDOs.’
- Even when the crisis was in full flow one of the most important critical and informed voices in this country, Prem Sikka, Professor of Accounting at the University of Essex Business School, was relegated to The Guardian on-line rather than the printed version with his comments on the fact that the bankrupt banks had their accounts approved by one of the global accountancy firms.(6) Professor Sikka is too polite to point out that the various rackets run by the banks depended on bribing, with very large ‘fees’, the ratings agencies (Standard and Poors, Moodys, Fitch) which pronounced their ‘products’ worth buying, and the auditors which approved the banks’ accounts. It is organised crime as near as damn it.
- In May a group of former European ministers, including former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, France’s Lionel Jospin and Michel Rocard, and former EU Commission chief Jacques Delors, issued a statement about the then developing financial crisis in which they wrote:
‘The financial world has accumulated a massive amount of fictitious capital, with very little improvement for humanity…..The current financial crisis is no accident. It was not, as some top people in finance and politics now claim, impossible to predict. For lucid individuals the bell rang years ago. This crisis is a failure of poorly or unregulated markets, and shows us, once more, that the financial market is not capable of self-regulation.’
They called for a ‘European Crisis Committee’ to get a grip on things.
This was reported in The Daily Telegraph of 22 May under the headline ‘EU-wide “super regulator” poses threat to City of London.’ At last, a reason to support the EU!
Disinfo: an oldie but a goody
In Richard Belfield’s Terminate with Extreme Prejudice (London: Robinson, 2005) there are two pages about the late Lord Mountbatten, recycling the claims of some on the right that he was a Soviet agent (without any evidence) and there is this:
‘Many within British intelligence circles knew him as a visitor to Kincora, a boy’s home used by the paedophile and gay members of the Protestant Order [sic], civil servants and intelligence officers.’
Well, there’s no evidence offered for this either; and the stories about Mountbatten being gay appeared in print first in one of the last editions of International Times (Vol. 5, no 5, 1980) at a period when who was running IT was murky – murky as in: no editorial names appeared in it – and the suspicion was that it was being used to run disinfo. This Mountbatten-Kincora story looks to me like just another one of the disinfo stories that were built around Kincora none of which (thus far) have ever amounted to anything, despite the possibility of considerable compensation for the victims.
IRD reborn?
On 17 October 2008 in ‘Paedophiles unite with terrorists online’, ‘an investigation by The Times’ claimed that examination of Jihadists’ computers showed that some contained child pornography images.(7) This story included speculation either that there was something about being a Jihadist which leads to paedophilia or that Jihadists were using child porn pictures to conceal messages hidden in them. The latter idea seems improbable: why conceal secret messages among images which are themselves being hunted by the world’s police?
Another thought about the story in this ‘investigation by The Times’ – which looks like crude psy-ops, as a couple of my correspondents pointed out – is how much, if any, input did it have from the new Research Information and Communication Unit, [RICU], set up last year by the then Home Secretary, John Reid, ‘to counter al-Qaida propaganda at home and overseas’?(8) RICU, one report told us, was tasked to degrade al-Qaida ‘as a brand’.
If the notion of al-Qaida as a brand sounds familiar it may be because it was discussed by Corinne Souza in Lobster 52.
We let him down
There is a filmed interview with Henry Kissinger on the Net during which he says of the European Union:
‘We overestimated…..what would be achievable. We thought you could transfer the loyalties of the nation-states to the greater organization that was being created, and that has turned out to be wrong, or not feasible. So Europe in a way is now suspended between its past… and its future.’ (9)
Big pictures
ISGP is the grand-sounding Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics. It seems to be one man, Joël van der Reijden, and his site has some interesting things on it, notably the recent (November) addition of David Teacher’s Rogue Agents: The Cercle Pinay complex 1951-1991. Teacher, who wrote about what we then called The Pinay Circle, in Lobster 17 and 18, had said he was going to write a book but it never appeared. (Teacher’s version of Pinay was accurate enough for Brian Crozier to cite it in his memoir Free Agent .) Well it has now appeared, all 110,000 words of it, Teacher tells me, and is available as a free download in PDF format at ISGP.
Of van der Reijden’s own material on the site, most interesting to me is a long essay ‘Beyond Dutroux’ which begins with the Belgian paedophile-kidnapping affair, but ramifies out through the ‘Brabant killings’, the right-wing destabilisation plans in Belgium, and into an apparent global paedophile network. This was difficult to follow (mainly because most of the names were new to me) but is fascinating, not least as an illustration of what can be pulled together these days, and of what you can get away with on the Web which you couldn’t get away with in print.(10)
Sarko
‘Mr Sarkozy and the CIA’ is an English translation of an essay by Thierry Meyssan about the pro-American networks from which French President Sarkozy emerged.(11) Although very interesting, this does not seem to me to quite show that Sarkozy is a CIA agent. Meyssan, you may remember, was the author of 9/11: the Big Lie, the first book challenging the official version of 9/11.
Credit where credit is due (2)
With Obama in the White House, everybody is going to claim that they spotted his potential. One who did is Corinne Souza. In Lobster 52, page 33, talking about American PR versus China’s PR, she wrote:
‘…..[American PR] could succeed far more quickly than people suppose if the stunningly good looking Democrat Senator Barack Obama becomes its first non-white president. Whatever his qualities or racial mix, visually he strikes a chord with Africans, Arabs and Hispanics, as well as with all who have one white parent, a visual but crucially non-Caucasian foil to Asian features…..’
Notes
- Biog and picture at <www.roac.nl/roac/ssc-dept.phtml?st=scott-smith>
- ‘ “Her Rather Ambitious Washington Program”: Margaret Thatcher’s International Visitor Program Visit to the United States in 1967’, in Contemporary British History, Vol. 17 No. 4, Winter 2003 at <www.nciv.org/media/article_thatcher.pdf>
- ‘DPP attacks approach to fighting terror’ The Guardian, 21 October 2008.
- Stella Rimington in The Guardian, 18 October 2008.
- The UK Press Gazette 18 July 2008. On-line at <www.paullashmar.com>
- <www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/07/creditcrunch.banking>
- <www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4958674.ece>
- <www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/26/alqaida.uksecurity>
- At <http://tv.nationalreview.com/>
- <www.isgp.eu/>
- <www.rense.com/general83/skr.htm>