Ex-British intelligence officer Richard Winch said KGB defectors regularly named 7 ‘MPs, trade union leaders and 1 former Conservative Cabinet Minister’ as KGB agents. (Daily Telegraph 24 and 27 September 1984)
What, only 7? According to Frederick Forsyth’s ‘sources’ in the British labour movement there are 20. (See Times 31 August 1984). And doesn’t Chapman Pincher talk of 60 plus in his various books?
Confirmation – if any were still needed – of the grotesque time-wasting that goes on under the name of ‘counter intelligence’ given in story of self-confessed ‘anarchist’, Peter Edge, and his dealings with British and East German intelligence. (Observer 7 October 1984). Edge apparently came forward with his story because he felt he was in danger (of being bored to death?).
For those interested in the continuing saga of the ramifications of the Golitsyn story (see Lobster 5 review) the Times‘ Peter Hennessy, a sort of apprentice Pincher, produced a resume of the story so far (Times 8 August 1984) In this Hennessy, brave fellow that he is, attempts to convince his readers that these intelligence ‘wars’ really do matter:
“…if the KGB has the benefit of agents in the West capable of massaging the assessment of the intelligence product, it can influence decision-takers in high places upon whose performance the successful management (sic) of the cold war depends. The consequences of failure in this area are stark.”
Oh yeah? What are they? What people like Hennessy always forget is that it is the state of the economy – and domestic political considerations – which determine expenditure on weapons etc, and not the intelligence assessments produced by the bright little paranoids in the intelligence services. The present Conservative government is about to start cutting expenditure on the armed forces, not because the assessment of the Soviet ‘threat’ has changed, or because the KGB has got agents who are ‘massaging’ those assessments but because the Ministry of Defence (sic), like other government departments is having its budget trimmed by the Treasury. On the logic of the ‘mole’ hunters, the place to look most closely for KGB agents would be the Treasury, where the important decisions are taken, and not in the intelligence services whose chief (intelligence) function is to provide rationalisations for decisions taken elsewhere.
It is never possible with old spooks like Julian Amery to know if they are pulling our legs or giving out serious information. But, with that reservation, there is a curious final sentence to an Amery letter to the Times (23 November 1984) on the Falklands and the question of Sovereignty:
“Should we not approach a defeated and bankrupt Argentina.. and lead her into a South Atlantic community (emphasis added) in which we would continue to play our full part as one of its sovereign components.”
Is this an Amery kite being flown, or someone else’s?
Cyprus
One of the problems facing any future Labour/socialist government in this country will be what to do about our spooks? A sort of answer is being given in Greece where the (nominally) socialist administration is sacking large numbers of its security personnel. (Daily Telegraph 8 October 1984).
With this and Papandreou continuing to make anti-Nato noises, somewhere in the Pentagon the Greek-coup computer model will be getting a spin. A flare-up in Cyprus might be the first stage. (On Cyprus, Christopher Hitchens’ Cyprus (1984) is of interest, especially to those who are interested in the veracity of Kissinger’s memoires. Hitchens does a fine hatchet job on the sections which refer to Cyprus.)
Seychelles
Two reports (Guardian 6 October and Times 15 October 1984) on events in the Seychelles which suggest that the US is trying to destabilise the government of President Rene. The Guardian report (from Reuters) quotes Rene as denying allegations that he had received $5 million worth of fuel that could be used by the Soviet navy. The Times has him denying allegations that he is creating close links with the USSR and has agreed to provide the Soviet navy with facilities. The Times report mentions leaflets circulating in the island and a denial from the US ambassador that the US has been supporting opposition groups.
This has that familiar destabilising ring to it. And is no surprise. In Lobster 3 we reported a piece in the Times (7 July 1983) by the well-known CIA flak Brian Crozier, describing the Seychelles as one of 4 countries which ‘stand out as qualifying for low risk or no risk intervention: Angola, Seychelles, Grenada and Surinam.”
We have been warned.
The ‘Bulgarian Connection’ is still rumbling along. Tana De Zuleuta reported in the Sunday Times (4 November 1984) that the French counter-intelligence chief had received advance warning of an attempt on the Pope’s life by East European agents and had sent two ‘senior officers’ to the Vatican to carry the message. The head of French CI at the time is quoted as saying that the warning wasn’t taken seriously.
None of this is made more credible by the role in it of the American journalist and frontman for right-wing elements in US intelligence, Arnaud de Borchegrave, co-author (with Robert Moss) of the excruciatingly badly written and misinforming ‘novel’ The Spike. De Borchegrave, it appears, is the source of the early-warning story. But who would believe anything he says after The Spike?
On things Italian … an interesting piece in Sunday Times (9 September 1984) claiming that Licio Gelli escaped from Switzerland using papers forged for him in Argentina.
One other aspect of the confusing jigsaw surrounding the Pope shooting is the claim by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) that KINTEX, the Bulgarian state trading agency and alleged cover for Bulgarian intelligence, has been in the drugs/guns business for at least 14 years. DEA claims that at least 10% of the heroin coming into the US comes via Bulgaria. (Guardian 26 July 1984). All of which may well be true, but its credibility isn’t helped by the DEA also accusing the Nicaraguan government of involvement in the cocaine trade. The accusation is based on ‘evidence’ said to have been collected during continuing US interest in Robert Vesco, who DEA is apparently saying, helped finance the Sandinista revolution. (Ho ho) (Sunday Times 12 August 1984)
There was a flurry of press interest in late September/early October 1984 as Lord Chalfont and ex Tory Minister, Sir Peter Blaker charged that the ‘Generals for Peace’ organisation were a ‘danger to Western security’. (Original press report Daily Telegraph 25th September 1984; reply by Michael Harbottle, Telegraph 5th October 1984; Chalfont/Blaker reply Telegraph 9 October 1984).
Assumptions that this was just a routine piece of scare-mongering by Chalfont/Blaker, who are inclined to see the hands of the USSR pretty well everywhere on the left and in the ‘peace’ movement might be tempered by the review of the ‘Generals for Peace’ book, The Arms Race to Armageddon published in the New Statesman (26 October 1984) by Martin Ryle.
Ryle (now dead) and one of the British ‘peace’ movement’s bigger names, writes:
“The authors not only endorse Soviet negotiating positions.. they endorse the official Warsaw Pact line almost in its entirety … (they) present recent Soviet missile deployments in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the GDR as legitimately defensive ” etc.
A large (two page) piece on the murder of Hilda Murrell (the anti-nuclear campaigner) in New Statesman (9 November 1984), laying out all the oddities in the case.
Tam Dalyell’s repeated claims that this was a British intelligence operation that went wrong are obviously of interest, but I have the suspicion that someone has fed him something to make him sound ridiculous on this particular case in the hope of then discrediting his other sources.
Without knowing what his information is, a priori the problem with his story is that it hinges upon extraordinary incompetence by said British intelligence. Any reader of spy fiction would have been able to create a more plausible scene for the police to find than that left by ‘British intelligence’.
Rather more plausible would be that some private security firm was employed to do the break-in to find out what Ms Murrell had on the nuclear industry and they, without the experience, then panicked and bungled. That makes a degree of sense. There have been other mysterious burglaries of anti-nuclear campaigners (one is referred to in the New Statesman piece) It just is difficult to believe that British intelligence would be that sloppy in something as important as this.
A sudden rash of suicides (or: ‘suicides’) using the old car exhaust fumes trick. Two partners in an engineering firm facing criminal charges as part of an international black market in stolen British naval parts. (Observer 28 October 1984), and an army major in MOD intelligence (plus his wife and 2 kids).(Sunday Telegraph 2 September 1984)
The newsagency, Reuters, is so widely assumed to be a routine cover for British intelligence agents, that when one of Reuters’ people in the Lebanon, a Jonathan Wright, went missing (Times 5 September 1984), Reuters’ managing director felt obliged to issue a statement declaring that Reuters “had no association with any government and did not represent the interest of any one country.” (Guardian 11 September 1984)
Wright, ‘aged 30 from Oxford, with fluent Arabic’ was due to become Reuters’ bureau chief in Oman ……
When Wright was finally released after 23 days he flew back to London saying he could not identify his captors. (Daily Telegraph 23 September 1984)
US State Department official Jeffrey Davidov claims UK intelligence bugged Joshua Nkomo’s delegation during the Lancaster House negotiations on Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. (Observer 2 September 1984). This information appeared somewhere else. Does anyone remember where?
And in the same part of the world in a piece in the Daily Telegraph (5 October 1984) there is reference to ‘Renamo’ an ‘anti-communist resistance force’ operating in Mozambique, ‘a movement organised by the old Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation in 1977… believed to have more than 10,000 men under arms and operating in most of Mozambique’s 10 provinces.’
10,000! A Kitson-esque pseudo-gang writ very large indeed! Curious, isn’t it, that no-one in this country has examined all the left-wing/Trotskyist/Marxist-Leninist groups operating in this country in the light of our knowledge of the pseudo-gang techniques developed by the British state in Kenya, Malaya and Northern Ireland. What about Militant for example?
Two Irish stories worth recycling. One is the information (new?) that at the time of the Birmingham pub bombings in 1974 – attributed, wrongly in my opinion, to the Provos – emergency legislation which became the Prevention of Terrorism Act six days after the bombings, was ‘already in draft form’. (Guardian 21 November 1984)
If one assumes – as most people who bother to check the bombing story do – that the Provos didn’t do it, this new bit of information makes it rather more likely that the bombings were the work of the British state, jogging the arm of the legislature. A similar move had been made when the Irish Republic was considering legislation against the IRA. An hour or so before the crucial vote in the Irish parliament a couple of car-bombs went off in Dublin. Although the evidence is nothing like conclusive, it seems probable that the bombs were the work of the British intelligence/ military. (See The Kitson Experiment by Roger Faligot, London 1983, p101/2).
The news of the prepared anti-IRA legislation is all the more striking in the light of Kenneth Littlejohn’s recent remarks that he was doing bank jobs and planning assassinations for the British intelligence services with the intention of forcing “emergency legislation against the IRA.” (Quotation remarks in the original story in the Guardian 26 June 1984)
The second Irish piece is Enoch Powell’s return to the Mountbatten assassination. In a speech quoted in the Guardian (24 November 1984) he spoke of a ‘plot’ to reunify Ireland, ‘a plot woven before 1979, and dyed with the blood of Mountbatten and the soldiers who perished at Warrenpoint’
This, surely the most staggering charge by a senior British politician since the war, will, of course, receive no further attention in the British mass media.
In an interesting review article on Chapman Pincher’s latest magnum opus in the Times Literary Supplement (14 December 1984) Nigel Clive points out the ambiguous nature of Pincher’s relationship with the wilder aspects of Golitsyn’s story. For where Pincher is happy to use some of G’s revelations – and the information supplied by some of G’s intelligence supporters, like Peter Wright – he has, to date, neither accepted nor rejected G’s claims of the SinoSoviet split et al being disinformation exercises.
In that review Clive reports Pincher as claiming that the famous Anglo-American tunnel dug under Berlin which allowed Nato intelligence to tap into Soviet communications was a source of nothing but misinformation. (I should say I haven’t yet read Pincher’s book.) This claim about the tunnel is also made by the US writer of spook fiction, Charles McCarry, in his 1984 The Last Supper. That book is virtually a thinly disguised history of the CIA – or, at any rate, bits of it. McCarry is the best of the spook fiction writers. His previous books – The Secret Lovers, Tears of Autumn, and The Merniek Dossier, all feature a CIA agent named Paul Christopher (as does The Last Supper.) Christopher is a ‘singleton’, an agent who works on his own.(This, incidentally, is the role that McCarry had while he was in the CIA.) McCarry presents a fairly positive picture of CIA people and activities (he was obviously on the liberal wing of the agency) and to judge by the acknowledgement by Alexander Haig to McCarry in the front of Haig’s memoire Caveat (1983) for assistance with its preparation, McCarry has clearly not blotted his copybook with the agency.
This suggests that ‘revelations’ like the tunnel-as-source-of-Soviet-misinformation are CIA-approved. It is in this light, then, that we might also regard McCarry’s ‘solution’ to the assassination of Kennedy – the subject matter of Tears of Autumn – namely, that Kennedy was killed by members of Diem’s family in revenge for his (Diem’s) own assassination in Vietnam. This latter thesis, incidentally, was described by that other well known ex CIA man Miles Copeland, as being the one ‘solution’ the CIA was most loathe to have considered, itself a sure sign that the opposite was true!
A very striking piece in the Observer (11 November 1984) on the Migs-in-Nicaragua nonsense, describing how the ‘crisis’ was created by a group of ideological hardliners known inside the administration as the ‘Cabal’. The Observer names as ‘Cabal’ members NSC adviser MacFarlane, NSC member Menger, and messers Ikle, Sanchez, Reich and General Paul Gorman, all second-level members of the military/intelligence establishment. (The ‘Cabal’ is, of course, strikingly similar to L. Fletcher Prouty’s ‘secret team’.)
The most interesting point in the Observer piece is the claim that the crisis was being stage-managed primarily to screw-up the approaching arms/disarmaments talks with the USSR. Although I know nothing of Reich and Sanchez, Ikle, Fred Ikle, was one of those strategic ‘theorists’ who spent the seventies warning of the arrival of Soviet nuclear superiority (Minuteman vulnerability, the window of opportunity etc).
Still unresolved, to my knowledge, is the question of whether the reports of large-scale military deployments inside the US during the crisis were real or mere factoids. This is more than an academic question, for if the movements of men and equipment were real, the ‘Cabal’ have more power than the ability to manipulate the world’s press (no big trick), and the ‘crisis’ may have been rather more serious than it is now presented as.
The following assertions – without evidence to support them – were made by someone called John Judge in Penn Jones’ The Continuing Enquiry (June 1984).
World Vision, a world-wide anti-communist missionary operation based in California, with links to CIA, DIA and USAID – refugee work includes management of the camps at Sabra and Shatilla, and along Honduran/Nicaraguan border – manages Cuban refugee camps in the US and has links to Cuban terror groups Alpha 66 and Omega 7 – employed Mark Chapman, assassin of John Lennon – on World Vision’s board is John Hinkley Snr, father of attempted assassin of Reagan, John Hinkley Jnr.
Judge suggests that World Vision is ‘an elaborate cover for the recruitment, training and placement of assassins world-wide.’
Well, maybe. Other explanations are available. But information on sources on World Vision would be most welcome.
Tucked away in the middle of a piece on freemasonry in the law (Observer 9 September 1984) is the information that William Whitelaw is a mason.
All this current interest in the masonic sub-structure of our society is really rather amusing. Five years ago – maybe even less – anyone who suggested in public that the police, Home Office, judiciary and uncle Tom Cobley and all were riddled with masons, all scratching each others backs and covering up their messes, would have been dismissed as a hopeless crank, not least by all those journalists and editors who are now busy churning out the mason stories.
The sudden change in view is entirely down to Stephen Knight’s book The Brotherhood. So who says books don’t change things?
The formation of a new intelligence unit with the acronym TIGER, announced in the aftermath of the Brighton bombing. Compare these two accounts of TIGER.
Daily Telegraph (23 October 1984) Observer (28 October 1984) COMPOSITION ‘representatives from various security organisations’ ‘civil servants from the Home Office, Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office’. TITLE Terrorism intelligence gathering evaluation and review Terrorism intelligence gathering evaluation and research MEETINGS ‘they will be frequent … (and) provision will be made for (it) to be called together for emergency situations’ ‘no plans for the committee to sit on a regular weekly basis … it will go into session only on an ad hoc basis’ ANTI-TERRORIST SQUAD ROLE ‘Scotland Yard Anti-Terrorist Branch… will have a major role to play’ ‘no representatives from the Anti-Terrorist Squad’
These curious discrepancies may just tell us either that the Observer and Telegraph get their briefings from different sections of the Whitehall information system, or that journalists are sloppy people. On the other hand they may say something else. These reports appeared just over a week after one Peter Shipley, who had been a ‘special adviser in the Prime Minister’s policy unit’ wrote a piece in the Times (14 October 1984) calling for an ‘anti-terrorist unit in the cabinet office’ with ‘an operational arm’.
Shades of Nixon’s ‘plumbers’! Is it possible that TIGER was set up in a great hurry to pre-empt a cabinet office unit? Great haste might explain all these discrepancies.
That Shipley piece is just one more voice in a growing chorus advocating ‘pro-active’ responses (sic) to terrorism (Pro-active means getting your retaliation in first. Britain’s police forces are now increasingly talking of pro-active policing: nicking people before they have a chance to commit the crimes they might do)
Another notable voice in this is good old Paul Johnson whose Wanted:World War on Terror appeared in the Times (10 August 1984). It is worth reading this piece just to see how far down very strange roads former ‘socialists’ can go. Johnson calls for an ‘informal and secret effort by the major civilised (sic) powers … prepared to devise and carry through concerted operations’. He cites the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 as ‘a major offensive blow… against the system (emphasis added) of international terrorism itself.’
Johnson’s piece is based on a paper he read at last year’s conference on international terrorism at the Jonathan Institute in Israel.
US Secretary of State Schultz was also at that conference, making similar noises. “It is time to think long, hard and seriously about defence (sic) through appropriate preventive and pre-emptive actions against terror groups before they strike.” (Guardian 26 June 1984) Schultz is reported as actually stating that the US would always oppose terrorists but support freedom fighters!
An account of Israeli anti-terrorist activities is given in George Jonas’ Vengeance (London 1984), claimed to be a first-hand tale of Israeli assassination squads assassinating various Arabs, allegedly terrorists.
RR
This arrived, as it is, anonymous, from someone in Amsterdam. We hope he or she will consider writing more for us. Material like this we can take a lot of.
Amsterdam: 14/12/84
For Irish readers whose curiosity may have been aroused by Jonathan Marshall’s article, (Lobster 5 & 6), the following is the Sovereign Military Order of Malta ‘first XII’ in Ireland in 1981:
President & Senior Executive: Noel L. Peart, GCM, KSG Vice President & Chancellor: Dr. Patrick C.D. MacClancy MB, FRCSI Treasurer: John Desmond Moran Hospitalier: Michael J. Egan, LLB Councillors: Malachy Powell, MD Carroll Moran Dr. Thomas Joseph Healy, MB, BCH, BAO Dr. Robert Finbarr O’Donoghue, FRGOC Joseph C. McGough, BL Kenneth Paul O’Reilly Hyland Dr. Thomas Joseph Campbell Thomas Mary Augustine Dunphy, MRIAI
These members of the ‘most exclusive club on earth’ met regularly at 32 Clyde Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4, Ireland.
source; ANNUAIRE 1981 (SMOM Internal publication / French edition)
Attention should also be paid to an article which appeared in the July 1981 issue of ROUND TABLE – The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs.
The article dealt with British (and Western) security in the event of a political and military withdrawal from Ireland and pointed out that the possibility of a united Ireland joining NATO was the option most frequently discussed at the meeting between Haughey & Thatcher, in December 1980.
The author of the article was Kenneth Whitaker, former governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, and Secretary of the Irish Department of Finance. Whitaker was regarded as a powerful figure in the Irish bourgoisie establishment, and has been widely accredited as the architect of Irish economic policy from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s.
The result of Whitaker’s influence is a present-day economy with 65% to 75% of the investment capital controlled by foreign interests; almost complete destruction of the indigenous agricultural and marine industry; and an unemployment figure of 25% and rising…fast.
The ‘attractions’ offered (including interest-free loans, tax-free profits etc.), to British, North American, and Japanese industrialists to ‘set-up shop’ in Ireland, by successive Dublin governments in the 1950s and 1960s, literally amount to one of the greatest economic rip-offs in Europe since WW 2, in financial as well an human terms.