It's raining Lobsters The covert origins of the Biafran War Moscow Gold: 'the Communist threat' in post-war

Britain Non-lethality: John B. Alexander, the Pentagon's Penguin Mind control update Enemies of the state Churchill and The Focus Clinton and Quigley: a strange tale from the U.S. elite The Anglo-American Establishment From Rhodes to Cliveden Notes from the underground part 3: British fascism 1983-6 I am being slagged off, therefore I am Review: Smear! Wilson and the Secret State Hess - the Fuhrer's Disciple Books: Harold Wilson Official and Confidential:The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover Reviews David Stirling: the authorised biography of the creator of the SAS The Gemstone File Eustace Clarence Mullins; the World's Premier Conspiracy Historian on the Jews, the Fed and the New World Order The British Lion "Letters to the Editor", from Maxwell Knight Sources Bits and Pieces

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It's raining Lobsters

Readers of the fly-leaf of Steve Dorril's new book The Silent Conspiracy will notice that he gives his address as the contact point for Lobster. More accurately, I should have written for his Lobster. Yes, as I write this in early June the word is that Dorril going to produce another magazine called...Lobster. Here's what happened. For some time I had been irritated by the description of Steve as 'co-editor' of Lobster (a description you will not find on the magazine, incidentally.) For with the exception of the Who's Who, Steve didn't edit a line. The truth is that from issue 1, I have done 99.95% of all the actual work -- key-boarding, type-setting, pasting-up, editing, running the subscription base, dealing with correspondence, keeping the books, dealing with the printers and so forth. (Not to mention taking the occasional legal risks involved in being the named publisher.) The last straw came while he was working on The Silent Conspiracy. For nearly six months he claimed to so busy he didn't have time to meet me to talk about.... the magazine of which he was said to be the co-editor. So I took his name off issue 24. I could go to court and get an injunction against him using the name, but I can't afford it. So, if he choses to persist with this, there will be two 'Lobsters' and we will look ridiculous. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do about this. For my part, nothing has changed and Lobster -- this Lobster, the turgid, design-free zone Lobster -- will continue as usual, an issue appearing in June and December.

The covert origins of the Biafran War

Since 1988 a goodly slice of the Great and the Good of British civil, political and media society, from the current Prime Minister downwards, have been getting letters and press releases from Mr Harold Smith. Smith's letters have served as a kind of substitute for the non-publication of his memoir Sons of Oxford. Commissioned in 1986 by the late Graeme C. Greene, the book got lost in the shuffle when the publishing house Jonathan Cape changed hands. An Oxford graduate from a working class background, Smith picked up the Fabian version of the white man's burden concept and went to Nigeria in the early 1950s for the Colonial Office. Working in the Labour Ministry, he drafted some of Nigeria's labour and factory legislation. His memoir is a fascinating insight into the underbelly of British colonial administration. Smith not only describes the sexual and political exploitation of the black Africans, his is the first such memoir I have seen in which the covert world is shown to play a significant part in colonial life. Smith portrays MI5 working with the Colonial Office, bugging, tapping, intercepting mail -- as well as producing inept anti-communist propaganda. Then as independence loomed, the Colonial Office/MI5 team were replaced by the Foreign Office/MI6 people. Smith's encounter with colonial corruption climaxes with his discovery that among his duties was election rigging for the British. 'I had been ordered during the first stage of the Independence Elections at State (Regional) Level in 1956 to take all Department of Labour

Headquarters staff and vehicles to campaign for allies of the key politician who was the British government's No.1 political henchman, Festus Okotie Eboh, the most corrupt Nigerian politician. My senior officer, Charles Bunker, had orders to obtain, by pressure and harassment if necessary, free cars, petrol and huge donations from large multinationals for the British-backed Northern Peoples' Congress and its allies in the South..... the Governor General confirmed that the order I had received to rig the elections was from him personally. He said I was the only senior British civil servant to refuse to take part in the covert operation. I had minuted under his order, "No, sir. This would be a criminal act."' A mild sort of social democrat member of the Labour Party, Smith complained to head office when he was next in London. Head Office threatened to kill him, but settled for destroying his career -- hence Smith pictured working as a clerk at a labour exchange in 1959. He also brought back with him as a souvenir from his last trip an obscure, wasting, tropical disease, which he has to this day. Noting the presence in Nigeria of an outpost of the British biological warfare centre at Porton Down -- presumably out there doing tests on the black Africans -- Smith now wonders if he was poisoned by the British state. Despite his complaints the Brits went ahead anyway and duly rigged the elections, suppressed a census of the population of the northern region which would have revealed what a minority the northerners were, and handed power over to their stooges in the North. A model example of 'successful decolonisation.' In the press release quoted above, Smith wrote, 'That the British felt most at home in the backward North was common knowledge. The Hausa/Fulani chiefs were almost feudal and cared little for the welfare of the Northern peasant and, if it were possible, some of the British officials cared rather less. The hard-working progressive British administrators in the South loathed the Northern District Officers and often referred to them as as "polo-playing pricks". The Northern white sahibs retaliated by calling the white officials of the South, who were forever building schools and dispensaries, "nigger lovers". 'In this topsy turvy world of secret intelligence reports, MI5, pimps, prostitutes, rape and murder, presided over by the Colonial Office and Harold Macmillan, it was not surprising that the Nigerian political leader of great personal integrity and honesty -- Awolowo -- who based his party machine on the Conservative Party and was a devout Christian and believer in British fair play would soon after Independence find himself not in the President's or Prime Minister's office but rotting in a small prison cell.' Smith's account of the election-rigging is the missing link in the received account of the period which begins with Nigerian independence and ends with the Biafran War. The entry on that subject in the Encyclopedia of Modern History begins 'Nigeria achieved independence in 1960 with a federal system of government dominated by the most backward region, the north...'. 'With a system' -- as though that system were some kind of natural feature, not one created by the out-going colonial administration Smith's account explains how and why this happened

Rigging the elections in 1956 and 1960 led to the Biafran War as the Ibos rebelled against domination by the British stooges in the North. Continuing British neocolonial control of Nigeria can be priced in bodies: perhaps two million dead during the Biafran War. Little wonder that nobody wanted to know about Smith's experience until recently. In July 1988 chunks of his story were published in those notorious radical weeklies, the Wiltshire Times (July 15, 22 and 29 July), the Chippenham News (15 July) and the Oxford Mail (September 1). These pieces, in turn, were spotted and reported on by the UK Press Gazette of August 15. Jonathan Aitken MP, now a junior Defence Minister, wrote in a letter to Smith that the Wiltshire Times articles showed 'a marvellous example of the abuse of secrecy in our country.' Some day somebody will publish Smith's memoir. In the meantime Smith has been seeding academic libraries and institutes with a version on IBM compatible 3.5 inch disks. I would print Smith's address and phone number, but some of the British neo-fascist right are collecting and circulating lists of 'targets' for abusive phone-calls (and worse). So contact him via Lobster. Smith's story, which I have only sketched in here, is a bomb waiting to go off under the British state. Notes 1. Secret Africa: British Treachery and Phoney Independence, press release, September 1991. 2. In the estimable Anthony Verrier, for example, we find this: 'Critics of Colonial Office policy for Nigeria had always said that officials favoured the north, because of its superior culture, ability to produce good soldiers, and the cordial feelings of its rulers towards most things British. By contrast, the assorted tribes of the other regions were said to be regarded by Sanders of the River and his like as a bunch of money-grubbing traders or, on a more charitable view, simple sambos who had to be told what to do.' Verrier thus captures in one sentence the racism and contempt for work which characterises the English ruling class. Through the Looking Glass, Anthony Verrier, (Macmillan, London, 1983), pp. 266/7. 3. Sons of Oxford, unpublished ms, 1993 edition p. 217. 4. Encyclopedia of Modern History, editor James Clark, (Hamlyn, London 1978) p. 308.

Moscow Gold: 'the Communist threat' in post-war Britain

Robin Ramsay
Since the Berlin Wall fell the information from the former USSR about the Cold War

that I am aware of has mostly been confirmation of what we knew already: the Soviets were apparently not running Alger Hiss or Roger Hollis; but they were funding the World Peace Council and the rest of the well known fronts. The only important news so far has been the confirmation that the Soviets were also funding communist parties around the world -- including the Communist Party of Great Britain. There really was 'Moscow Gold' in there after all, and KGB gold at that. Confirmation of this at the British end came from senior party figure Reuben Falber, who looked after the CP's accounts from 1958 to 1979 and who handled the money from Moscow -- up to 100,000 a year -- from 1958 to 1979. Falber met the man from the Soviet Embassy and got bags of money which he hid in the loft of his house until the money was laundered through the party's accounts. This was the quid pro quo for the CPGB's refusal to condemn the Soviet invasion of Hungary. (1) Of course the average CP member knew nothing of the Soviet money, and to most of them 'Moscow Gold' was a joke, at best; at worst just another piece of crude propaganda from the Right. (2) No wonder the remaining CP members were so shocked in 1991 when they discovered that the right's view of the CPGB as a Moscow-directed conspiracy turned out to be partly true. Former member and CPGB employee, journalist Sarah Benton, reacted with talk of 'the other communist parties', meaning, I guess, various tankie factions dug into the party's headquarters at King St, besides the civilised, Euro-communist CP she belonged to. (3)

Enter MI5
So far, so straightforward but, like most stories which involve the security services, there is more here than meets the eye. According to Falber, in 1958, the year the clandestine payments started, 'MI5 were planning to break into [his] house at Christmas'. (4) According to Peter Wright, MI5 wanted the records of the Soviet transactions and thought Falber was keeping them. But the plan to burgle his house was foiled. Here is Wright's account. Then there was the Falber Affair. After the PARTY PIECE operation, MI5 went on the hunt for the CPGB files which listed the secret payments made to the Party by the Soviets. We suspected that perhaps they might be held in the flat of Reuben Falber, who had recently been made cashier of the Russian funds.' (5) MI5 knew of the Soviet money, either from penetrating the CP, or from the bugs it had planted in the party's headquarters. Or -- most likely -- from both. (6) But if MI5 knew that Falber was getting the money, why didn't they expose this? Why didn't they film the money being handed over, or arrest Falber and his KGB bagman with the suitcase of used tenners? Wright tells us that MI5's first plan to burgle Falber's flat failed -- and leaves it there. Are we to believe that for 20 years MI5 were unable to detect KGB pay-offs in London, or that MI5 didn't make another attempt to burgle Falber's house? Surely not: KGB gold to the CP was the Holy Grail for MI5. The conclusion must be that MI5 chose to leave the Soviet funding operation running. Finding Reuben Falber as the conduit to the Soviet Embassy meant MI5 could keep an eye on the connection and see where it went. If they blew' the Falber link, they would reason, the link would be re-established using some other CP conduit and they would just have to find it all over again. Blowing an operation generally just means more work identifying the operation's replacement. (This, rather than MI5 incompetence, may explain why so few Soviet operations were exposed in post-war Britain.)

More cynically -- and cynicism is appropriate where all intelligence and security services are concerned -- MI5 had two compelling reasons not to 'blow' the CP-KGB link. While they would get some temporary kudos for so doing, in the post-Hungary climate irrefutable exposure of the Soviet connection would have terminally damaged the CP, and in the medium to long term, this would only have benefitted the Labour Party. For the Red Scare -- at whose core was the link to Moscow -- has been a key feature in the political armoury of the anti-Labour alliance between the Tory Party and the state. Secondly, the end of the CP in Britain would have been bad news to MI5 in the Whitehall budget struggle. Nowadays they've got the IRA to frighten the politicians with. In the late 50s, if the CPGB had folded, who would they have had as a credible threat? MI5 needed the Communist Party and 'the threat' created by the Moscow link, just as today it needs the IRA, the Welsh and Scots Nats and the Animal Liberation Front. (7)

Perceived CP influence
When the significance of the Falber revelation finally struck me, I had another look at my small collection of anti-communist literature from this period -- the work of Common Cause, IRIS, East-West Digest etc. I thought I might now see hints of MI5's knowledge about the 'Moscow Gold', but found none, not even in the early 70s when the British state was getting anxious about the rise in militancy in the unions. (8) What is visible in the anti-communist literature is a shift in emphasis on the perceived main threat represented by the CP. In the early post-war years that seems to have been centred on the plethora of CP front organisations such as the friendship societies. This is presumably the early influence of the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD) in supplying anti-communist material. Focused on events in Europe, it was the the Soviet-run front organisations which struck IRD. But from the early 1950s, as the NATO-Soviet confrontation in Europe waned, it is the CP's industrial wing and the network it had in the trade unions which is perceived as the threat. You can see it for example in Bob Darke's 1952 account of being active in the CP, The Communist Technique in Britain. (9) In chapter 4, Darke describes how the party's National Industrial Policy Committee, of which he had been a member for 10 years, had been the link to the Cominform, which transmitted instructions via the French PCF to the CP. In his 1956 pamphlet, The Peril in Our Midst, Woodrow Wyatt, then a Labour MP, wrote exclusively about the CPGB's role in the unions, 'aiming at complete capture of the British trade union movement' (p. 9), and wrote of 'a centrally initiated plan..... full-time industrial organizer Peter Kerringan..... issuing directives from the top, worked out by the National Industrial Committee of the CP'. (10) The 1962 series of articles in the Sunday Times by the Tory MP Aidan Crawley, reprinted as a pamphlet, The Hidden Face of British Communism, had Kerrigan and the 'advisory committees which meet in secret to decide how party policy is to be applied to their own union...'. And by the time we reach George Kennedy Young's Subversion and the British Riposte in the mid 1980s, industrial organiser Peter Kerrigan, his successors Ramelson and Costello, and the industrial wing -- what Young calls 'the hard core of Party professionalism' -- is the whole story. (11)

Given the role of the secret Moscow funding, it isn't much of a step to see the CP's industrial network, including the advisory committees in industries, as analogous to an intelligence network. (12) Sarah Benton describes the industrial wing until the late seventies as the 'privileged section of the party' away from which ordinary members were steered. (13) Increasingly the public CP, the party with members and policies which put up candidates in local and national elections, looks like little more than cover for what Benton called 'the dour men in grey suits'. (14)

But did the CP matter?

How much influence did the CP have in the post-war years? I don't think we can actually answer this question yet. Most of the information available comes from scarcely disinterested sources on the right. Do you believe Woodrow Wyatt? Common Cause? The Economic League? Would you believe MI5's F branch if we could see its estimates of the situation? I really do not know; and I have never seen any independent research in this field. Woodrow Wyatt in 1956 claimed that CP controlled the Electricians' Trade Union (the ETU) (which was certainly true) and the Fire Brigades Union (often repeated as true), nearly had control of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) (often described as a CP target), and had considerable influence in the National Union of Miners (NUM) (true). But he also wrote of a long list of unions in which the CP were said to have been defeated by people using methods like the CP's -- i.e. internal caucusing. He cites the Chemical Workers; the shop workers, USDAW, and the woodworkers and the foundry workers. Six years later Aidan Crawley MP claimed the CP was strongest in the NUM, building and the AEU again; claimed they were making in-roads into the clerical unions (claimed that five of the ten full-time assistant secretaries of the Civil Service Clerical Association were security risks); and cited sections of the woodworkers', the plumbers' and the painters' unions as being under CP control. Crawley also mentioned CP support for the Seamen's Reform Movement in the National Union of Seamen, to whom I return below. The lists vary, but they also agree in places. Should we believe these stories? My impression is yes, OK, something like that; some of these claims can be checked. Equally, this influence should not exaggerated. Even the propagandists on the right never claimed that the CP ever got beyond controlling 10% of the TUC's General Council. While CP influence in the British unions -- and thus in the Labour Party -- was a constant refrain on the right, there were only two occasions in the post-war period when the CP was seriously alleged to be posing a threat to the whole economy. The first was the 1948 dock strike. Although claims of communist control were made at the time, I have seen no evidence to support this view. The second occasion was during the 1966 seamen's strike when Harold Wilson made his notorious comments in the House of Commons about the role of the CP in the strike, and actually named CP members said to be active in it.

The seamen's strike

There are two issues here, only one of which, whether Wilson should have said what

he did, usually gets discussed. Most people, including most of his colleagues at the time, think it was a tactical mistake, at best. The Labour left were appalled, and it is now the received view of this incident that this was when the scales fell from people's eyes and they perceived the shifty, careerist, sell-out Wilson, prepared to do anything, even play the anti-communist card to break the seamen's strike.(15) This is certainly the view of Paul Foot who wrote the only extended analysis of the strike I am aware of in his 1967 essay 'The Seamen's Struggle'. In that and in his seminal book The Politics of Harold Wilson, (16) Foot traces the origins of the strike back to the smaller 1960 strike and the formation of the National Seamen's Reform Movement. He notes in his essay on the strike that in the run-up to the 1962 contest for NUS General Secretary, the union's assistant General Secretary, William Hoggarth, published in the NUS paper, The Seaman, 'a massive three-page article entitled "What we are up against," in which Hoggarth described the full horrors behind the National Seamen's Reform Movement'. I looked up the article. It was indeed three pages long but only one of the article's six columns was about alleged Communist influence in the Reform Movement. The title 'What we are up against' covered a range of problems in Hoggarth's tour d'horizon, one of which was subheaded 'Coasters and the C.M.' (CM = Common Market), and a third, 'The Goanese Problem'. (And the author, William Hoggarth, was Acting General Secretary, not Assistant General Secretary.) However, Hoggarth did indeed write in one section 'of evidence that a Communist take-over is under way, and that the reformers are now little better than stooges' (for the Communist Party). (17) Later in his essay Foot discusses Wilson's second statement to the Commons 'naming names'. He notes that Wilson quoted a letter in the January 1965 edition of The Seaman by a former member of the Seamen's Reform Movement, 'warning of a Communist takeover..... the standard witch-hunting of the NUS.' I looked that one up, too. What Foot chose to omit were (a) that the letter is almost an entire page in length; (b) that the author, Chris Ashton, was not merely 'a former member of the Seamen's Reform Movement' but one of its founders and a former chair of the Movement; and (c) that after recapping his role in the formation of said Movement, Ashton continued that 'the former 1960 leaders of the Reform Movement now refuse to play an active part because they object to being used by the Communist Party.'

What Wilson said

For Paul Foot and many others the fact that the strike was overwhelmingly popular with NUS members -- which it was -- makes it absurd to talk of CP attempts to manipulate it. But there is no logical contradiction. In his book about Wilson, for example, Foot says that 'the basic charge' in Wilson's second statement to the Commons was that 'certain members of the Communist Party had been engaging in a desperate battle to extend the seamen's strike against the will of the NUS members.' (18) In fact what Wilson actually said was much more complicated that this suggests.(19) He begins by describing the CP's 'efficient and disciplined industrial apparatus controlled from Communist Party headquarters.' Conceding that in their own way they desire 'to see an improvement in working-class standards', he continued that 'for some years now the Communist Party has had as one of its objectives the building up of a position of strength not only in the Seamen's Union, but in other unions concerned

with docks and transport. It engages in the struggle for power in the Seamen's Union because it recognizes.... that democracy is shallow-rooted in this union, not only that grievances and exploitation have festered for many years.... the bid that the Communists are making is directed at next year's conference.... this is a take-over bid....' He said the objectives of the CP in the strike were 'first, to influence the day-to-day policy of the executive council; secondly, to extend the area of stoppage [the bit emphasised by Foot]; and, thirdly, to use the strike not only to improve the conditions of the seamen -- in which I believe them to be genuine -- but also to secure what is at present the main political and industrial objective of the Communist Party -- the destruction of the government's prices and incomes policy'. All of which is surely unexceptional. Smashing Wilson's pay policy was the aim of the CP -- and just about everybody else on the British left and some of the trade unions. The rest of what he said is an account of the routine activities of all vanguardist and/or revolutionary left groups in strikes. Wilson then described how, from his own dealings with it, he knew that the NUS Executive Committee was dominated by Joe Kenny and Jim Slater -- 'neither of them a member of the Communist Party' -- and how and when they had been meeting with CP members in the union and the CP's industrial organiser, Bert Ramelson. (20) Paul Foot mocks Wilson's statement in his essay rather than refuting it. But as a member of the then International Socialists (now the Socialist Workers Party) it was axiomatic for Foot (a) that the CP was useless, and (b) that there is never any truth in charges of infiltration by any left group. As far as I can tell, the veracity of Wilson's information has never been challenged. I talked recently to a full-time official of what used to be the NUS (now amalgamated with the National Union of Railwaymen, NUR, and called the Rail, Maritime and Transport, RMT), who was active during the strike. Were the CP involved in the strike? Of course they were, he said. The CP members -- the people named by Wilson -- were 'the core' of the strike. Wilson's information was almost certainly accurate. But it should have been accurate as it came from phone taps, penetration, mail intercepts and bugging by Special Branch and MI5. Not that Wilson kept this a secret. In his book he writes of 'receiving undeniable evidence of what was going on, even to the point where we could predict the exact line the group would take at the next meeting, as well as the approaches made to Communist sympathizers in unions whose support the seamen were canvassing.' (21) I suspect that Wilson did not originally intend naming names. After his first statement in the Commons, with its talk of 'politically motivated' but unnamed men, Wilson briefed the so-called lobby journalists, as well as Hugh Cudlipp, then editor of the Daily Mirror. (22) Unexpectedly, the media refused to play ball. (23) It was only then that Wilson went back to the Commons and made his second statement giving the details. Two days after his naming names speech, the NUS Executive voted to call off the strike. Wilson thinks his speech ended the strike. Perhaps it did push the NUS Executive over the edge, but the strike was crumbling anyway. This may have been the high point of CP industrial influence. The evidence of the 1970s is unclear to me, because by then the CP had industrial rivals in the shape of

various Trotskyist groups.

A Communist threat?
I think it does makes sense to talk of 'a communist threat' in the post-war period in this sense: there was a group of people working to overthrow British capitalism, a group which was partly funded by and, at some level, responsible to, agents of the USSR. This isn't to say that 'the threat' was ever substantial; and it isn't to deny that at the same time there were parallel, much larger clandestine operations by the British and American states. Finally, there are two further, rather more important conclusions. The real victims of the communist threat' have been the Labour Party and the wider democratic left in Britain. Reviewing Willie Thompson's book about the CP, The Good Old Cause, in the Independent (January 10 1992) John Torode, whose father had been an important CP member before the war, commented on the period of the Labour governments: The [CPGB's] constant encouragment of strikes in support of unrealistic wage demands, the destruction of Barbara Castle's union reforms and the co-ordinated attempts to capture positions of power in order to influence Labour Party policy, did much to destroy the credibility of [the Labour Party]. But Torode wrote his piece before the revelation of MI5's knowledge of the 'Moscow Gold'. MI5 knew of the Soviet funding, it had the party's HQ wired for sound, and we must assume that, as in the America for example, the party had been thoroughly penetrated by the state. In the eyes of some intelligence officers, that would be enough to say that the CP was being manipulated, even run, by MI5. Manipulated or not, after 1958 and the discovery of the Falber conduit to the Soviet Embassy, the 'Communist threat' in Britain was chiefly coming courtesy not of Moscow, but of MI5. (24)

Notes
1. General accounts of the 'Moscow Gold', see Independent 27 March 1992; Falber's confession, see Guardian and Independent 15 November 1991. For one reaction to the parallel revelations about the CPUSA, see 'Moscow Gold' by Eric Breindel in Commentary, December 1992. For a more detailed and more academic discussion of the CPGB-Moscow relationship, but which does not cover the 'Moscow gold', see 'The Communist Party of Great Britain and Moscow', Stephen Hopkins, in Labour History History Review, Vol 57, No. 3, Winter 1992. 2. For one response see the letter from former full-time CP employee Bill Brooks in Guardian 21 November 1991. 3. 'The rumbled rouble trauma', Guardian, 19 November 1991. 4. Guardian 15 November 1991 5. Spycatcher p. 175 In fact, says Falber, he kept no records. 6. One such bug is pictured on p. 31 of the Independent, 25 November 1989. 7. How was the money used once it reached the CPGB? That is not yet known in detail. Some went to keep the Daily Worker afloat; the rest into Party funds -chiefly the salaries of its full-time employees, said to number more than 70 in

the 1960s. See the Independent 15 November 1991. The Sunday Telegraph of June 21 1992 claimed that the money was used to 'finance industrial action' -but offered no specific evidence, presumably because it has none. 8. My guess would be that there must have been some serious irritation in MI5 at Wright's comments about Falber, the significance of which nobody seems to have noticed at the time of the book's publication. 9. Penguin 1952, and still widely available second-hand. The Common Cause Bulletin in 1964 was still recommending Darke on its core reading list. 10.Published by Phoenix House, London, pp. 23 and 24. 11.Ossian, Glasgow, no date but circa 1985. 12.In East West Digest, June 1972, David Williams, Common Cause's main writer, noted how at the CPGB's 31st National Congress in November 1969, a report from the national executive on the year's work omitted reference to the party's advisory committees. 13.Guardian 19 November 1991. The 'Moscow gold' finally dried up in 1979. 14.What we don't know yet is how much -- if any -- consultation went on between the CPGB and its KGB sponsors. 15.Most of Wilson's cabinet colleagues thought he had made a terrible blunder. In his new biography of Wilson, Harold Wilson (HarperCollins, London 1992) Ben Pimlott writes that Peter Shore told Wedgewood Benn that he thought Wilson's remarks were 'completely bonkers'. And Benn noted, 'I think I share this view.' (p. 407) But it depends which bit of Benn's diary you pick. On June 28, after Wilson had named in the Commons the CP members involved in the strike, Benn wrote in his dairy: 'In a sense Harold said nothing that was new, since every trade union leader knew it.' It is not in dispute that Wilson played the anti-communist card for political ends, breaking the NUS strike and saving the government's incomes policy. But his colleagues saw other dimensions to Wilson's actions. Richard Marsh remarked of the strike that Wilson 'always felt very strongly about the supremacy of Parliament and he was convinced that the supremacy was being challenged by small groups in the trade unions who had no right to exert such power.' Richard Marsh, Off the Rails, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976) p. 133. Richard Crossman attributed much of 'the tremendous victory' and 'great triumph' to George Wigg, and described it as Wigg's biggest success since the Profumo affair. Crossman thought that Wilson and Wigg wanted to use the strike to 'discomfit the communists, not only in the seamen's union but in other unions as well.' Richard Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, vol. 1, (Book Club Associates, London 1976), pp. 544 and 5. Of the other cabinet memoirists: Denis Healey omits the strike entirely. Roy Jenkins' reference is so brief as to be practically subliminal: 'Thus the upheaval of July 1966 stemmed from a combination of bad trade figures of July 1966 (following a seamen's strike).' A Life At The Centre, (Macmillan 1991) p. 190. James Callaghan, who was Chancellor at the time, sees it the same way, as a cause of sterling selling (his major preoccupation) and gives it 8 lines in his Time and Chance, (Collins, London, 1987) pp. 194-5. 16.The essay is in The Incompatibles; Trade Union Militancy and the Consensus, ed. Claud Cockburn and Robin Blackburn, Penguin 1967. The hatred of Wilson expressed by the British Trots is astonishing at times. The late David Widgery, of IS/SWP, like Paul Foot, wrote that 'Wilson was doing his level best to get British troops implicated [in Vietnam].' In fact the exact opposite was true. Despite massive U.S pressure Wilson refused to send even a token British force to Vietnam. David Widgery, Preserving Disorder,

(Pluto, London, 1989), p. 195. 17.Foot's essay does include some interesting and accurate information on the relationship between the anti-communist group Industrial Research and Information Services (IRIS) and the NUS. See pp. 178 and 9. As he points out, IRIS had their offices in the NUS building, Maritime House, and a former IRIS employee, Jim Nash, was, at the time of the 1966 strike, the NUS's press and publicity officer. IRIS had been formed in 1956 as the industrial wing of Common Cause -- my choice as the place where the CIA spent some of its money in the UK. See the essay in Lobster 19. Nash's former role as an employee of the ICFTU presumably explains the occasional ICFTU-authored anti-communist article in The Seaman. For example 'Who are the real friends of the South African people?' in the August 1963 issue. 18.Foot, Incompatibles, p. 175. 19.In the three page extract devoted to reproducing parts of his statement in his account of the 1970 Labour government, The Labour Government 1964-70, (Penguin 1974) pp. 308-11. 20.Ibid. pp. 310 and 11. George Wigg, then Wilson's liaison with MI5, wrote in his memoir that 'denied public and trade union support at home and abroad, they [i.e. Slater and Kenny] became associated with their sole supporters, the Communist Party.' George Wigg, Lord Wigg, (Michael Joseph, London 1972) p. 331 21.Wilson op. cit.. p. 308. 22.The Cecil King Diary, 1965--70, (Cape, London 1972) p. 71. King records Wilson's information, presumably from the Special Branch, was that 'a group of three communists meets every morning to run the strike.' It has also been claimed that then security adviser, George Wigg, went round the newspapers offering them tit-bits of the clandestinely acquired information, expecting them to play the anti-communist card for the government. Wigg denied this in his memoir but I think it likely. 23.This incident has not had the attention it deserves. Our Tory Party-supporting, left-baiting press declined to write stories about communist interference in a major strike based on an off-the-record briefing by the Prime Minister? A definite first, I think, and pretty obviously done to embarass Wilson, though this doesn't seem to have been perceived at the time. 24.In his recent biography of J. Edgar Hoover, Official and Confidential, (Gollancz, London 1993), p. 191, Anthony Summers quotes a former State Department employee who, in turn, quotes Hoover as saying of the CPUSA, 'If it were not for me there would not even be a Communist Party of the United States, because I've financed the Communist Party, in order to know what they are doing.' My thanks to Daniel Brandt for pointing this out to me.

Non-lethality: John B. Alexander, the Pentagon's Penguin

Armen Victorian
On April 22, 1993 both BBC1 and BBC2 showed on their main evening news bulletins a rather lengthy piece concerning America's latest development in weaponry -- the non-lethal weapons concept. David Shukman, BBC Defence Correspondent, interviewed (Retired) U.S. Army Colonel John B. Alexander and Janet Morris, two of

the main proponents of the concept. (1) The concept of non-lethal weapons is not new. Non-lethal weapons have been used by the intelligence, police and defence establishments in the past. (2) Several western governments have used a variety of non-lethal weapons in a more discreet and covert manner. It seems that the U.S. government is about to take the first step towards their open use. The current interest in the concept of non-lethal weapons began about a decade ago with John Alexander. In December 1980 he published an article in the U.S. Army's journal, Military Review, 'The New Mental Battlefield', referring to claims that telepathy could be used to interfere with the brain's electrical activity. This caught the attention of senior Army generals who encouraged him to pursue what they termed 'soft option kill' technologies. After retiring from the Army in 1988, Alexander joined the Los Alamos National Laboratories and began working with Janet Morris, the Research Director of the U.S. Global Strategy Council (USGSC), chaired by Dr. Ray Cline, former Deputy Director of the CIA. (3) I examine the background of Janet Morris and John Alexander in more detail below. Throughout 1990 the USGSC lobbied the main national laboratories, major defence contractors and industries, retired senior military and intelligence officers. The result was the creation of a Non-lethality Policy Review Group, led by Major General Chris S. Adams, USAF (retd.), former Chief of Staff, Strategic Air Command. (4) They already have the support of Senator Sam Nunn, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. According to Janet Morris, the military attache at the Russian Embassy has contacted USGSC about the possibility of converting military hardware to a nonlethal capability. In 1991 Janet Morris issued a number of papers giving more detailed information about USGSC's concept of non-lethal weapons. (5) Shortly after, the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, VA, published a detailed draft report on the subject titled 'Operations Concept for Disabling Measures'. The report included over twenty projects in which John Alexander is currently involved at the Los Alamos National Laboratories. In a memorandum dated April 10, 1991, titled 'Do we need a Non-lethal Defense Initiative?', Paul Wolfwitz, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, wrote to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, 'A U.S. lead in non-lethal technologies will increase our options and reinforce our position in the post-Cold War world. Our Research and Development efforts must be increased.'

How lethal is non-lethal?

To support their non-lethal weapons concept, Janet Morris argues that while 'war will always be terrible..... a world power deserving its reputation for humane action should pioneer the principles of non-lethal defense'. (6) In 'Defining a non-lethal strategy', she seeks to establish a doctrine for the use of non-lethal weapons by the U.S. in crisis 'at home or abroad in a life serving fashion'. She totally disregards the offensive, lethal aspects inherent in some of the weapons in question, or their misuse, should they become available to 'rogue' nations. Despite her argument that non-lethal weapons should serve the U.S.'s interests 'at home and abroad by projecting power without indiscriminately taking lives or destroying property' (7), she admits that 'casualties

cannot be avoided'. (8) Closer examination of the types of weapons to be used as non-lethal invalidates her assertions about their non-lethality. According to her white paper, the areas where non-lethal weapons could be useful are 'regional and low intensity conflict (adventurism, insurgency, ethnic violence, terrorism, narco-trafficking, domestic crime)'. (9) She believes that 'by identifying and requiring a new category of nonlethal weapons, tactics and strategic planning' the U.S. can reshape its military capability 'to meet the already identifiable threats' that they might face in a multipolar world 'where American interests are globalized and American presence widespread.' (10)

The potential inventory

Janet Morris's 'White Paper' recommends 'two types of life-conserving technologies': 1. Anti-material non-lethal technologies. To destroy or impair electronics, or in other ways stop mechanical systems from functioning. Amongst current technologies from which this category of non-lethal weapons would or could be chosen are: chemical and biological weapons for their anti-materiel agents 'which do not significantly endanger life or the environment, or anti-personnel agents which have no permanent effects.' (11) Laser blinding systems to incapacitate the electronic sensors, or optics, i.e. light detection and ranging. Already the Army Infantry School is developing a one-man portable and operated laser weapon system known as the Infantry Self-Defense System. the U.S. Army's Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC), is also engaged in the development of nonlethal weapons under their programme called 'Low Collateral Damage Munitions' (LCDM). The LCDM is trying to develop technologies leading to weapons capable of dazzlng and incapacitating missiles, armoured vehicles and personnel. Non-lethal electromagnetic technologies. Non-nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse weapons. (12) As General Norman Schwartzkopf has told the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, one such weapon stationed in space with a wide-area-pulse capacity has the ability to fry enemy electronics. But what would be the fate of enemy personnel in such a scenario? In a joint project with the Los Alamos National Laboratories and with technical support from the Army's Harry Diamond Laboratories, ARDEC are developing High Power Microwave (HPM) Projectiles. According to ARDEC, the Diamond lab has already 'completed a radio frequency effects analysis on a representative target set' for (HPM). Among the chemical agents, so-called supercaustics --'Millions of times more caustic than hydrofluoric acid' (13) -- are prime candidates. An artillery round could deliver jellied super-acids which could destroy the optics of a heavily armoured vehicles or tanks, vision blocks or glass, and 'could be used to silently destroy key weapons systems'. (14) On less lethal aspects the use of net-like entanglements for SEAL teams, or 'stealthy' metal boats with low or no radar signature, 'for night actions, or any seaborne or come-ashore stealthy scenario' are under consideration. (15) More

2.

3. 4.

5.

colourful concepts are the use of chemical metal embrittlement, often called liquid metal embrittlement and anti-materiel polymers which would be used in aerosol dispersal systems, spreading chemical adhesives or lubricants (i.e. Teflon-based lubricants) on enemy equipment from a distance. 6. Anti-personnel non-lethal technologies Hand-held lasers which are meant 'to dazzle', could also cause the eyeball to explode and to blind the target. 7. Isotropic radiators -- explosively driven munitions, capable of generating very bright omnidirectional light, with similar effects to laser guns. 8. High-power microwaves (HPM) -- U.S. Special Operations command already has that capabilty within their grasp as a portable microwave weapon. (16) As Myron L. Wolbarsht, a Duke University opthalamist and expert in laser weapons stated: 'U.S. Special Forces can quietly cut enemy communications but also can cook internal organs.'(17) 9. Another candidate is Infrasound -- acoustic beams. In conjunction with the Scientific Applications and Research Associates (SARA) of Huntingdon, California, ARDEC and Los Alamos laboratories are busy 'developing a high power, very low frequency acoustic beam weapons.' They are also looking into methods of projecting non-diffracting (i.e. non-penetrating) high frequency acoustic bullets. ARDEC scientists are also looking into methods of using Pulsed Chemical Lasers. This class of lasers could project 'a hot, high pressure plasma in the air in front of a target surface, creating a blast wave that will result in variable but controlled effects on materiel and personnel.' 10.Infrasound. Already some governments have used it as a means of crowd control -- e.g. France. 11.Very low frequency (VLF) sound (20--35 KHz), or low-frequency RF modulations can cause nausea, vomiting and abdominal pains. 'Some very low frequency sound generators, in certain frequency ranges, can cause the disruption of human organs and, at high power levels, can crumble masonry.' (18) The CIA had a similar program in 1978 called Operation Pique, which included bouncing radio or microwave signals off the ionosphere to affect mental functions of people in selected areas, including Eastern European nuclear installations. (19)

John Alexander
The entire non-lethal weapon concept opens up a new Pandora's Box of unknown consequences. The main personality behind it is retired Colonel John B. Alexander. Born in New York in 1937, he spent part of his career as a Commander of Green Berets Special Forces in Vietnam, led Cambodian mercenaries behind enemy lines, and took part in a number of clandestine programmes, including Phoenix. He currently holds the post of Director of Non-lethal Programmes in the Los Alamos National Laboratories. Alexander obtained a BaS from the University of Nebraska and an MA from Pepperdine University. In 1980 he was awarded a PhD from Walden University for his thesis 'To determine whether or not significant changes in spirituality occur in persons who attended a Kubler-Ross lifedeath transition workshop during the period June through February 1979.' (20) His dissertation committee was chaired by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. He has long been interested in what used to be regarded as 'fringe' areas. In 1971, while a Captain in the infantry at Schofield Barracks, Honolulu, he was diving in the

Bemini Islands looking for the lost continent of Atlantis. He was an official representative for the Silva mind control organisation and a lecturer on Precataclysmic Civilisations. (21) Alexander is also a past President and a Board member of the International Association for Near Death Studies; and, with his former wife, Jan Northup, he helped Dr.C.B. Scott Jones perform ESP experiments with dolphins. (22)

PSI-TECH
Retired Major General Albert N. Stubblebine (Former Director of U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command) and Alexander are on the board of a 'remote viewing' company called PSI-TECH. The company also employs Major Edward Dames (ex Defence Intelligence Agency), Major David Morehouse (ex 82nd Airborne Division), and Ron Blackburn (former microwave scientist and specialist at Kirkland Air Force Base). PSI-TECH has received several government contracts. For example, during the Gulf War crisis the Department of Defense asked it to use remote viewing to locate Saddam's Scud missiles sites. Last year (1992) the FBI sought PSI-TECH's assistance to locate a kidnapped Exxon executive. (23) With Major Richard Groller and Janet Morris as his co-authors, Alexander published The Warrior's Edge in 1990. (24) The book describes in detail various unconventional methods which would enable the practitioner to acquire 'human excellence and optimum performance' and thereby become an invincible warrior. (25) The purpose of the book is 'to unlock the door to the extraordinary human potentials inherent in each of us. To do this, we, like governments around the world, must take a fresh look at non-traditional methods of affecting reality. We must raise human consciousness of the potential power of the individual body/mind system -- the power to manipulate reality. We must be willing to retake control of our past, present, and ultimately, our future.' (26) Alexander is a friend of Vice President Al Gore Jnr, their relationship dating back to 1983 when Gore was in Alexander's Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). NLP 'presented to selected general officers and Senior Executive Service members' (27) a set of techniques to modify behaviour patterns. (28) Among the first generals to take the course was the then Lieutenant General Maxwell Thurman, who later went on to receive his fourth star and become Vice-Chief of Staff at the Army and Commander Southern Command. (29) Among other senior participants were Tom Downey and Major General Stubblebine, former Director of the Army Intelligence Security Command. 'In 1983, the Jedi master [from the Star Wars movie -- author] provided an image and a name for the Jedi Project.'(30) Jedi Project's aim was to seek and 'construct teachable models of behaviorable physical excellence using unconventional means.' (31) According to Alexander the Jedi Project was to be a follow-up to NeuroLinguistic Programming skills. By using the influence of friends such as Major General Stubblebine, who was then head of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, he managed to fund Jedi. In reality the concept was old hat, re-christened by Alexander. The original idea which was to show how 'human will power and human concentration affect performance more than any other single factor' using NLP skills, (32) was the brainchild of three independent people; Fritz Erikson, a Gestalt therapist, Virginia Satir, a family therapist and Erick Erikson, a hynotist.

Janet Morris
Janet Morris, co-author of The Warrior's Edge, is best known as a science fiction

writer but has been a member of the News York Academy of Sciences since 1980 and is a member of the Association for Electronic Defense. She is also the Research Director of the U.S. Global Strategy Council (USGSC). She was initiated into the Japanese art of bioenergetics, Joh-re, the Indonesian brotherhood of Subud, and graduated from the Silva course in advanced mind control. She has been conducting remote viewing experiments for fifteen years. She worked on a research project investigating the effects of mind on probability in computer systems. In a recent telephone conversation with the author,(33) Janet Morris confirmed John Alexander's involvement in mind control and psychotronic projects in the Los Alamos National Laboratories. Alexander and his team have recently been working with a Dr Igor Smirnov, a psychologist from the Moscow Institute of Psychocorrelations. They were invited to the U.S. after Janet Morris' visit to Russia in 1991. There she was shown the technique which was pioneered by the Russian Department of PsychoCorrection at Moscow Medical Academy. The Russians employ a technique to electronically analyse the human mind in order to influence it. They input subliminal command messages, using key words transmitted in 'white noise' or music. (34) Using an infrasound very low frequency-type transmission, the acoustic psycho-correction message is transmitted via bone conduction -- ear plugs would not restrict the message. To do that would require an entire body protection system. According to the Russians the subliminal messages by-pass the conscious level and are effective almost immediately.

C.B. Scott Jones

Jones is the former assistant to Senator Clairborne Pell (Democrat, Rhode Island). Scott Jones was a member of U.S. Naval Intelligence for 15 years, as well as Assistant Naval Attache, New Delhi, India, in the 1960s. Jones has briefed the President's Scientific Advisory Committee, and has testified before House and Senate Committees on intelligence matters. After the navy he 'worked in the private sector research and development community involved in the U.S. government sponsored projects for the Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command.' He has been head of the Rockefeller Foundations for some time and chairs the American Society for Psychical Research. (35)

Birds of a feather
Alexander and C.B. Jones are members of the AVIARY, a group of intelligence and Department of Defense officers and scientists with a brief to discredit any serious research in the UFO field. Each member of the AVIARY bears a bird's name. Jones is FALCON, John Alexander is PENGUIN. One of their agents, a UFO researcher known as William Moore, who was introduced to John Alexander at a party in 1987 by Scott Jones, confessed in front of an audience at a conference held by the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) on July 1 1989 in Las Vegas, how he was promised inside information by the senior members of the AVIARY in return for his obedience and service to them. He participated in the propagation and dissemination of disinformation fed to him by various members of the AVIARY. He also confessed how he was instructed to target one particular individual, an electronics expert, Dr Paul Bennewitz, who had accumulated some UFO film footage and electronic signals which were taking place in 1980 over the Menzano Weapons Storage areas, at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. As a result of Moore's involvement, coupled with some surreptitious entries and psychological

techniques, Bennewitz ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Just before the publication of my first paper unmasking two members of the AVIARY (36) I was visited by two of their members (MORNING DOVE and HAWK) who had travelled to the UK with a message from the senior ranks advising me not to go ahead with my expos. I rejected this proposal. Immediately after the publication of that paper, and with the full knowledge that myself and a handful of colleagues knew the true identities of their members, John B. Alexander confessed that he was indeed a member of the AVIARY, nicknamed PENGUIN. The accuracy of our information was further confirmed to me by yet another member of the AVIARY, Ron Pandolphi, PELICAN. Pandolphi is a PhD in physics and works at the Rocket and Missile section of the Office of the Deputy Director of Science and Technology, CIA. In his book, Out There, (37) the New York Times journalist Howard Blum refers to 'a UFO Working Group' within the Defense Intelligence Agency. Despite DIA's repeated denials, (38) the existence of this working group has been confirmed to me by more than one member of the group itself, including an independent source in the Office of Naval Intelligence. The majority of the group's members are senior members of the AVIARY: Dr. Christopher Green (BLUEJAY) from the CIA (39); Harold Puthoff (OWL) ex-NSA; Dr Jack Verona (RAVEN) (DoD, one of the initiators of the DIA's Sleeping Beauty project which aimed to achieve battlefield superiority using mindaltering electromagnetic weaponry); John Alexander (PENGUIN) and Ron Pandolphi (PELICAN). The mysterious 'Col. Harold E. Phillips' who appears in Blum's Out There is none other than John B. Alexander. John Alexander's position as the Program Manager for Contingency Missions of Conventional Defense Technology, Los Alamos National Laboratories, enabled him to exploit the Department of Defense's Project RELIANCE 'which encourages a search for all possible sources of existing and incipient technologies before developing new technology in-house' (40) to tap into a wide range of exotic topics, sometimes using defense contractors, e.g. McDonnel Douglas Aerospace. I have several reports, some of which were compiled before his departure to the Los Alamos National Laboratories when he was with Army Intelligence, which show Alexander's keen interest in any and every exotic subject -- UFOs, ESP, psychotronics, anti-gravity devices, near death experiments, psychology warfare and non-lethal weaponry. John Alexander utilises the bank of information he has accumulated to try to develop psychotronic, psychological and mind weaponry. He began thinking about non-lethal weapons a decade ago in his paper 'The New Mental Battlefield'. He seems to want to become a 'Master'. If he ever succeeds in this ambition the rest of us ordinary mortals had better watch out.

Notes
1. Letter dated 2 April, 1993, to author from Mrs Victoria Alexander. 2. The U.S. Army Chemical and Military Police used 'Novel Effect Weapons' against the women protesters at the Greenham Common base.

3. The United States Global Strategy Council is an independent think tank, incorporated in 1981. It focuses on long-range strategic issues. The founding members were Clare Boothe Luce, General Maxwell Taylor, General Albert Wedemeyer, Dr. Ray Cline (Co-chair), Jeane Kirkpatrick (Co-chair), Morris Leibman, Henry Luce III, J. William Middendorf II, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer USN (retd), General Richard Stilwell (retd.), Dr Michael A. Daniles (President), Dr. Dalton A. West (Executive Vice President). Its Research Directors were Dr. Yonah Alexander, Dr Roger Fontaine, Robert L. Katula and Janet Morris. 4. Nonlethality: Development of a National Policy and employing Nonlethal Means in a New Strategic Era -- a Project of the U.S. Global Strategy Council, 1991, p. 4. Other staff members at the USGSC are Steve Trevino, Dr. John B. Alexander and Chris Morris. 5. The USGSC has issued a wide variety of papers on the Nonlethal Weapons Concept. For example, In Search of Nonlethal Strategy (Janet Morris); Nonlethality: A Global Strategy -- White Paper; Nonlethality Briefing Supplement No. 1; and Nonlethality in the Operational Continuum. 6. In Search of a Nonlethal Strategy, Janet Morris, p. 1. 7. Nonlethality: a Global Strategy -- White Paper, p. 3. 8. In Search of... p. 3. 9. In the recent cult siege in Waco, Texas, a 'nonlethal' technique, projecting sublimal messages, was used to influence David Kuresh -- without success. 10.Nonlethality: a Global Strategy -- White Paper, p. 2. 11.The computer data base compiled during the CIA/Army's Project OFTEN, examining several thousand chemical compounds, during 1976-1973, is a most likely candidate for any chemical agents for nonlethal weapons. 12.The British MoD is already developing a 'microwave bomb'. Work on the weapon is going on at the Defence Research Agency at Farnborough, Hampshire. See Sunday Telegraph September 27, 1992, partly reproduced in Lobster 24, p. 14 The Royal Navy is already in possession of laser weapons which dazzle aircraft pilots. The Red Cross has called for them to be banned under the Geneva Convention because could permanently blind. 13.In Search of a Nonlethal Strategy, p. 13. 14.Ibid. 15.Then U.S. Navy, through its Project SEA SHADOW, has already developed a stealth boat. Like the Lockheed F117A, stealth fighter, it leaves no radar signature -- BBC, Newsround, April 28, 1993. 16.Taped conversation with Janet Morris, March 1 1993. 17.The Wall Street Journal, January 4, 1993. 18.In Search of a Nonlethal Strategy, p. 14. 19.'Remote Control Technology', Anna Keeler (Full Disclosure, Ann Arbor, USA, 1989) p. 11. 20.Walden University, 801 Anchor Road Drive, Naples, Fl. 33904, USA. Walden University considers itself a non-traditional university and does not offer any undergraduate courses to its students. 21.Brad Steiger, Mysteries of Space and Time, (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey) pp. 72 and 3. The U.S. Army Command and General College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, issued this on Alexander's career: 'Colonel John. B. Alexander, U.S. Army Retired, manages Antimateriel Technology at Los Alamos National Laboratories, Los Alamos, New Mexico. His military assignments included; Advanced Systems Concepts Office, Laboratory Command; manager,

Technology Integration Office, Army Material Command; assistant deputy chief of staff, Technology Planning and Management, Army Material Command; and chief, Advanced Human Technology, Intelligence and Security Command.' 22.Taped telephone conversation with Dr. Scott Jones, August 17 1992. 23.Taped telephone conversation with Maj. Edward Dames, June 27 1992; and The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, December 1992, p. 6. As this was going to print I learned that retired Major General Stubblebine is now longer associated with PSI-TECH. 24.The Warrior's Edge, Col. John B. Alexander, Maj. Richard Groller and Janet Morris, (William Morrow Inc., New York, 1990). 25.Ibid. p. 9. 26.Ibid. pp. 9 and 10. 27.Ibid. p. 47. 28.Ibid. 29.Ibid. 30.Ibid pp. 72 and 3. 31.Ibid. p. 12. 32.Ibid. p. 13. 33.The American Security Council (ASC) Box 8, Boston, Virginia 22713, USA. ASC is militarist, anti-communist and right-wing. Formed in the mid-1950s, the Council acts as a right-wing think tank on foreign policy and lobbies for the expansion and strengthening of U.S. military forces. In 1985 the ASC had 330,000 members. See, for example, the entry for the ASC in The Radical Right: a World Dictionary, compiled by Ciaran O Maolain (Longman, London 1987). 34.Taped telephone conversation with Janet Morris, March 1, 1993. 35.In 1989 a U.S. Department of Defense consultant and contractor explained to the author how he was tasked to examine the possibility of devising operational methods of transmitting subliminal messages through the TV screen. 36.'Will the Real Scott Jones please stand up?'-- unpublished paper by George Hansen and Robert Durant, February 20, 1990, pp. 4 and 5. 37.'The Birds', Armen Victorian, in UK UFO Magazine, Vol. 11 No. 3, July/August 1992, pp 4-7. 38.Out There, Howard Blum (Simon and Schuster, London 1990) pp. 44, 46-51, 55-57. 39.DIA's letters to author dated 12 July 1991, July 8 1992 and December 18 1992. 40.Dr. Christopher 'Kit' Green, BLUEJAY, has admitted that the CIA has compiled over 30,000 files on UFOs, 200 of which are extremely interesting. Green was a key CIA member in examining the UFO problem for several years. 41.Los Alamos National Laboratory, Institutional Plan Fiscal Year 1992 -- Fiscal Year 1997, p. 14.

Mind control update

Writing about something you don't really understand, it's easy to make bad early decisions. It's like being self-taught on an instrument and acquiring bad habits. In this case I began by naming this subject 'ELF', extremely low frequency, which was about all I picked up from my initial reading of the torrent of documents which descended on me from Harlan Girard. Me being a scientific moron, you understand. Three years later, no less ignorant of basic science, it is now clear that there are at least four discrete issues involved here.

Murderous furniture?
The first is the question of the largely unexamined consequences of electromagnetic and microwave radiation, such as the accidental by-products of electricity pylons, electric blankets, VDU's and other sources of electro-magnetic radiation. In this country we're still at 'Oh gee, do pylons do things to folks?' stage. (1) The commercial pressures against the notion that routine electrical products might be making us ill can be imagined.

ELF
The second story is about the use of ELF and microwaves as weapons and mind control devices, carriers and enforcers of behavioural programmes. 'Beam weapons' conjours up images of those Star Wars animated films showing what U.S. laser beams, mounted on platforms in space, would do to the in-coming Soviet ICBM fleet. That was all a hi-tech scam of course, and never likely to work. The real 'beam weapons' being developed are anti-personnel and mind control devices. (2) In the new, post Cold War climate, some curious alliances are being formed. The U.S. magazine Defense News, of January 11-17 1993, reported that Russian mind-control techniques -- so-called acoustic psycho-correction -- were being examined by U.S. personnel. 'In an effort to restrict potential misuse (sic) of this capability, Russian senior research scientists, diplomats, military officers and officials of the Russian Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology Policy are beginning to provide limited demonstrations for their U.S. counterparts.' The core technique is said to consist of 'transmission of specific commands via static or white noise bands into the human subconscious without upsetting other intellectual functions.' And with that entirely unconscious irony only the Americans seem capable of, the U.S. company presently evaluating these technologies is called Healthline Corp.

The McKinney Report

In that Defense News article there is not enough information about the Russian system to tell if 'acoustic psycho-correction' is simply their name for the kind of devices whose results are described in a 20-page report, Microwave Harassment and MindControl Experimentation by Julianne McKinney, published under the auspices of the Association of National Security Alumni. McKinney has compiled a digest of some of the known scientific research, some of the known military research, and a selection of the many allegations currently being made by 'wavies' -- alleged victims of these

techniques -- in the United States.

The claims of 'wavies' are very difficult to deal with. Mostly they look impossible to verify; some are very hard to believe. McKinney writes in the introduction to her report that 'Four months ago, when this Project commenced, we approached these complaints of government harassment and experimentation with an admitted "high degree of caution". We are no longer skeptical. The growing numbers of independent complaints and the similarities between these complaints cannot be ignored.' 'We are no longer sceptical.' About what? I'm not sceptical in the general sense: antipersonnel and psychotronic devices are being used by state forces in the U.S. and the former USSR for sure; and probably also in Sweden and the U.K.. But I try to be sceptical with individual claims. This isn't easy. What are the criteria involved here? McKinney is in danger of solving the problem of 'Who do we believe?' by declaring, in effect, 'Everybody'. But as she pointed out in a letter to me, her report is 'not meant to be a scholarly, definitive study. It is an alarum, intended to warn citizens of this country, as a minimum, of patterns of activity which point to resurgent mind-control experimentation and civil rights abuses.' One final quibble on my part. Some of the material in this report has come from Harlan Girard, yet he does not receive a credit. When this story is finally out in the open, much of the credit will be down to Girard's research efforts over the past four or five years. Notwithstanding these reservations, this is an important -- and elegantly produced -- piece of work. It is available from Ms McKinney for $2.00 (i.e. postage) from her at PO Box 13625 Silver Spring, MD 20911-3625, USA. Outside the U.S., best to simply send dollar bills.

The first mind control disclaimer?

The U.S. Air Force is proposing to construct at the University of Pennsylvania an 'Institute for Advanced Science and Technology'. In a 'Draft Environmental Impact Statement' the USAF issued about this -- a kind of prospectus -- dated February 1992, one paragraph begins 'Sources of electromagnetic radiation......', and concludes that 'No Research would involve the impact of directed energy or radiation upon thought processes.' This, as Harlan Girard points out, is the first mind control disclaimer!

And implants too

The third story is the issue of devices allegedly implanted in the human body, usually the head: 'Man claims to have radio receiver in brain.' Until recently I had seen no research which suggested this was either technically feasible or had been considered. But this research is now available. A Freedom of Information request by Jane Affleck produced a 1970 NASA report, Implantable Biotelemetry Systems, which describes the development of precisely the kind of devices claimed by the victims of this technology. In 1970 NASA were producing receivers the size of small coins: there are photographs of these things in this report. This means that we now cannot just dismiss out of hand people who claim to have had electronic devices implanted in their heads. Yes, I'm afraid so: the implants story is also going to turn out to be true. It is getting very weird out there.

Non-lethality
On the other hand, all of the above could be considered as merely dimensions of the wider conception of so-called non-lethal weapons, the latest train to Pork Barrel County, now pulling out of Washington's main station. This is discussed below by Armen Victorian.

Notes
1. See, for example, 'Scandanavian studies fuel cancer link fears' in the Independent, 1 April 1993, for a recent example. 2. In 1986/7 I was friendly with a laser researcher at Hull University. People in that field all knew the 'Star Wars' thing was bullshit but didn't care because they were getting research money from the programme.

Enemies of the state

At the end of a very long and well publicised trial for corrruption, the former Deputy Leader of Liverpool City Council, Derek Hatton, was acquitted earlier this year. (See U.K. daily papers on 13 and 14 March 1993. The Independent of that date had as the heading to its second Hatton story, 'Prosecution hung on two ambiguous diary entries'.) This is the latest instance where there is almost enough evidence to show that the prosecution was mounted by the state simply to discredit an individual. Millions of pounds are being spent trying to ruin the reputations of individuals in the UK. The obvious other examples which spring to mind are:

Colin Wallace
-- framed on a manslaughter charge then the victim of a disinformation campaign by state sources.

Dr. Hugh Thomas

-- on whom the state spent an estimated 3,000,000 in 1985/6 in a failed attempt to

convict him of fiddling his medical expenses. At one point the medical records of every person living in Wales were examined! This bizarre episode was either an attempt to discredit Thomas's allegations about Rudolph Hess and the doppelganger in Spandau, or a pre-emptive strike to ensure that if Thomas ever goes public on what he knows about Kincora and other Northern Ireland stories the state has some dirt to throw at him. Either way the state failed, and Thomas was acquitted.

Arthur Scargill
-- smeared all over the media as recepient of a cheap morgage (in some versions a morgage paid for by Moscow and/or Libya) which didn't exist. (It astonishes me that Terry Pattinson at the Daily Mirror and Roger Cook at Central TV, in particular, have stayed in their jobs after fronting stories on this not only completely false but so obviously sourced back to the secret state. The question arises with them as it does with the police: what do they have to do to get the sack?) NB on this paragraph see the correction in Lobster 26.

Kevin Taylor
-- Manchester businessman, Chair of Manchester Conservative Association, whose life and business were ruined by MI5 and the police looking for dirt with which to smear his friend John Stalker, then deputy chief constable of Greater Manchester. (See The Poisoned Tree, Kevin Taylor [Sidgwick and Jackson, London 1990].) There are two key questions about incidents like these. At what level is the decision made to attack, say, Hugh Thomas? And secondly, when the police and/or prosecuting service find they have no evidence against Hugh Thomas (or Hatton, or Taylor), how are they persuaded to ignore this fact and carry on as if they did have said evidence?

Churchill and The Focus

Mike Hughes
Introduction
From 1935 until the outbreak of the Second World War Winston Churchill was a determined and vociferous opponent of the British government's policy of appeasing Hitler. In the popular imagination Churchill's prominence at the head of the antiappeasement movement has become a picture of the prophet crying in the wilderness. A fantasy encouraged by himself and his friends, this was also a view endorsed by some of those who had sought to explain their support for appeasement in the light of some notion of a pro-appeasement consensus. In fact there was a group around Churchill which called itself The Focus. Through this group Churchill came to dominate the campaign against appeasement. Unable to persuade the government to change its policy, Churchill had to campaign. Churchill might complain that he had 'no party base or backing, no platform, no press' but this simply was not the case. Not only did Parliament and The Focus give him a platform, in Parliament he could eventually count on the support of some forty Conservative MPs, the Liberals under Archibald Sinclair, and, after Munich, almost all of the

Labour Party.

Origins of The Focus

The Focus was partly a dining club and partly a campaign co-ordinating committee. If not strictly secret, it was private and avoided publicity. For example, after attending his second Focus lunch on 6 April 1938, the National Labour politician Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary: 'This is a mysterious organisation. I do not understand who pays.' When it did make public appearances, it was under the guise of other organisations, generally the League of Nations Union.(1) The group which eventually became The Focus was founded by Walter Citrine, the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress. In 1933 the World Jewish Economic Federation, under the direction of a New York attorney called Samuel Untermyer, had organised a trade boycott of Germany. The following year Untermyer and the Mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, established the World Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi Council. Soon afterwards Untermyer was visited by Citrine who, on his return to Britain, established the British Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi Council to Champion Human Rights (BNANC). (2) On March 7 1936 Hitler's troops marched into the demilitarised zone of the Rhineland. At an emergency conference on March 19 and 20 Walter Citrine and Transport and General Workers Union leader Ernest Bevin launched a campaign for re-armament. Speakers included the former Bradford Labour MP and Nobel Peace Prize winner for 1933, Norman Angell, and Henry Wickham Steed, a veteran diehard Tory, former editor of The Times and agent of the Czechoslovak government. (3) A month later, after a rousing Commons speech on the subject of Germany on April 6 1936, the BNANC approached Churchill, and on 19 May 1936 what can be regarded as the first Focus lunch took place at the Hotel Victoria. Apart from Churchill, those present included Sir Robert Mond, the leader of the Liberal Party, Sir Archibald Sinclair, Labour MP Hugh Dalton and, at Churchill's suggestion, another leading Liberal, Violet Bonham Carter. (4) The meeting appointed Steed, Sir Robert Whaley-Cohen, chairman of British Shell, and Violet Bonham Carter to draft a manifesto. Hugh Dalton insisted that the manifesto should 'point the finger' at Hitler. (5) Meeting under the auspices of the BNANC, Churchill wanted a less cumbersome title. Two months later, on 24 July, a second BNANC lunch was held in Morpeth Mansions, Churchill's London home. Ten key members were present and the group adopted the name 'The Focus' -- though the name was to be kept to themselves.

Funding
Some initial finance had been made available by an exiled German socialist Eugen Spier who contributed 9600 between 1936-39. Additional funds were arranged by Sir Robert Whaley-Cohen who launched a 50,000 fund of which half was paid immediately and half pledged. According to his biographer (who was also the treasurer of the BNANC), Whaley-Cohen was 'the veritable dynamic force of Focus.' (6) Further money came from Sir Robert Mond who gave 5,000 to organise research, under Steed's supervision. (7) At the next identified Focus meeting on 15 October 1936 it was decided that the group would have no formal membership and would set up a new movement, Defence of Freedom and Peace, under the auspices of the League of Nations Union. (8) Churchill

wrote to his son Randolph, explaining that 'this committee aims at focusing and concentrating the effects of all the peace societies like the New Commonwealth and League of Nations Union in so far as they are prepared to support military action to resist tyranny or aggression.' (9) For the next three years The Focus organised public meetings, and prepared and disseminated information and propaganda -- what we might now call networking and campaigning -- among Britain's political classes, up to and including two serving Foreign Secretaries, Eden and Halifax. (10) On October 3 1937 Churchill invited Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary, to a Focus lunch. The Focus, wrote Churchill, in his letter of invitation, 'hold meetings all over the country, at which the municipal authority usually presides, and socialists, Liberals and Tories advocate organised resistance to Nazi and communist propaganda. The League of Nations Union and the New Commonwealth, of which I am President, are both closely associated and many of our meetings are held under this aegis. I may add that our contacts go right into the heart of the Trade Union world, and act with them in the utmost harmony.... It may well be that in the future Trade Unionists will detach themselves from particular parties.... Pray treat this for your private information only.' (11) Eden accepted the invitation and on October 23 Churchill wrote to Lord Derby to tell him that the Focus was entertaining Eden on November 2 with Joseph Toole 'the socialist mayor of Manchester' and about 35 others. The meeting 'would involve no political commitment, and is of course strictly private'. As early as 1937 Churchill began to consider turning The Focus into a formal crossparty opposition to the National Government. In early April that year Kingsley Martin of the New Statesman put out feelers to Labour and Liberal politicians to assess the interest in a coalition dominated by The Focus. (12)

Focus friends in the media

In the media The Focus eventually recruited Wilson Harris (The Spectator), Kingsley Martin (New Statesman), Lady Rhonda (Time and Tide) and Harcourt Johnstone (The Economist). Using a publishing company it had set up, Union Time Ltd, The Focus bought the League of Nations Union magazine Headway. The Headway agreement, wrote Focus Secretary A.N. Richards to Churchill, 'should be a powerful instrument for the advocacy and the advancement of our aims and objectives....' Headway was relaunched and its first issue contained articles by Nicholson, Angell, Bonham-Carter, Liddell Hart (who became Focus military advisor), Crabourne, Steed, Harper Poulson, Sir John Orr and Roger Fortune. However Headway was in a decline which the change of ownership did not reverse. (13)

The Focus and Churchill's intelligence network

The 1930s came to be called the 'wilderness years' for Churchill because during that period he failed to be given any position of political authority. But his exclusion from government did not mean he was excluded from the state. He served on a secret subcommittee of the Committee for Imperial Defence which reviewed and commissioned research into aerial warfare. (14) More significantly, Prime Ministers Macdonald,

Baldwin and Chamberlain allowed him access to the intelligence product of Desmond Morton, head of the Industrial Intelligence Centre, and of Group Captain Frederick Winterbotham of the SIS Air Section.' (15) Other sources were less formal. John Baker White, for example, the Director of the Economic League from 1926 til the end of the war, ran his own intelligence network, 'Section D', and prepared regular reports for Churchill until 1939. (16)

Politics and the Focus

The Focus was an extraordinarily broad political coalition, ranging from Diehard Tories to the trade unions and Labour Party. Although the origins of the war-time coalition government led by Churchill can be seen in the multi-party Focus meetings, the significance of The Focus in the politics of the period is impossible to evaluate. Historians of the period have not taken The Focus seriously. There is Eugen Spier's first-hand account -- but Spier was a peripheral figure (17); there are a few passing references in memoirs, and a frustratingly incomplete collection of fragments in Gilbert's companion volumes to his authorised biography of Churchill. Though well known to many contemporary politicians, The Focus made no appearance in newspapers and one respected insider commentator came to believe that it had faded away in 1938. (18) Unfortunately the only historian who has devoted any significant space to The Focus is the Nazi apologist David Irving, who adds little to the story, omits much that was known, and bends the rest to fit his conspiracy theory that the Second World War was the work of an International Jewish Conspiracy. (19)

Notes
1. Members of The Focus, including Churchill, continued to be secretive about The Focus after the war. When Churchill found out that founding member Eugen Spiers was planning to publish an account of it in 1963 he attempted to dissuade him. On the League of Nations Union see Donald S. Birn, The League of Nations Union 1918-45 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1981) 2. Irving, citing Walter Citrine's Men and Work (London, 1964). The following year the BNANC's officers were listed as Chair, George Latham; Vice Chair, Sir Robert Mond; Vice Presidents, Norman Angell, Herbert Morrison, Sylvia Pankhurst, Cannon F. Lewis Donaldson, Eleanor Rathbone; Secretary, F. Rodgers; Treasurer, C.O. Henriques. 3. According to David Irving, beginning in 1923 Steed had been an agent of some kind for the Czechoslovak government, receiving an initial payment in 1923/4 of 23,000. However it is not clear if these monies were simply to fund the teaching of Central European History by Steed at King's College, London. David Irving, Churchill's War -- Vol. 1: The Struggle for Power, (Veritas, Australia, 1987) pp. 55-56. 4. Those who have been identified as supporting Focus in one way or another are: Leo Amery, Norman Angell, Duchess of Atholl, Ronald Cartland M.P., Violet Bonham Carter, Sir Walter Citrine, A. J. Cummings, Sir Robert Whaley Cohen, Duff Cooper, J.R. Clynes M.P., Hugh Dalton, Earl of Derby, Paul Emrys Evans M.P., John Eppstein, Megan Lloyd George, Wilson Harris, C.O. Henriques, Arthur Hudson, Harcourt Johnstone, Sir Walter Layton, Lord Lloyd, Earl of Lytton, J. McEwan M.P., Kingsley Martin, Henry Mond, Sir Robert Mond, Harold Nicolson, Eleanor Rathbone M.P., James de Rothschild, Lady Rhonda, A. H. Richards, Sir Malcolm Robertson, Duncan Sandys, Sir Arthur Salter, Sir Archibald Sinclair, Eugen Spier, Earl of Stamford, Henry

Wickam Steed, Alderman Toole and Alfed Wall. The inner circle of The Focus consisted of Churchill, Bonham Carter, Angell, Whaley-Cohen, Steed and A.H. Richards. 5. Violet Bonham Carter to Churchill, 19th May 1936. (Churchill Papers 2/282). Michael Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Volume V campanion part 3 Documents, (Heinemann, London 1982), pp. 162-3. 6. C.O. Henriques, Sir Robert Whaley-Cohen, 1977-1953 (London, 1966) 7. A.H. Richards to Churchill, 29th July 1939, published in Gilbert's companion volume, p. 295 8. Churchill to Austen Chamberlain, 17th October 1936, published in Gilbert, p. 367. 9. Winston Churchill to Randolph Churchill, 5th November 1936, cited by Irving, p. 59. 10.Eden attended a Focus meeting in December 1937 and others after his resignation from the government. Halifax attended a Focus meeting early in 1939. 11.Churchill to Eden, 3rd October 1937, published in Gilbert's companion volume, p. 774. 12.At a Focus meeting on 22 June 1938 Churchill raised the idea again. 13.Birn op. cit. p. 190 states that Headway's circulation had dropped to 8,000 by March 1939. Werner Kop, foreign news editor of Brendan Bracken's Financial News and Banker, was appointed editor. Bracken was a Tory M.P. and confidant of Churchill. David Irving claims that Union Time Ltd also funded 'Stephen King-Hall's pamphleting in Nazi Germany' but gives no evidence. 14.See for example, Stephen Roskill, Hankey, Man of Secrets, Vol. 2, (Collins, London, 1972) 15.Christopher Andrew, Secret Service (Heinemann, London, 1985) pp. 502-3. 16.John Baker White,True Blue (Frederick Muller, London 1970) pp. 160-164. Private intelligence organisations were a feature of the right before the war, presumably because the state's intelligence organisations were inadequate. Sir Robert Vansittart was running his own semi-official, anti-appeasement outfit at the Foreign Office and the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had a private intelligence organisation run by Kenneth de Courcy, and a clandestine propaganda organisation run by Sir Joseph Ball. On Ball see 'Chamberlain and Truth', The Historical Journal 33, 1 (1990) pp. 131-42. De Courcy's intelligence gathering role for Chamberlain is the source of the 'Special Office' in the title of de Courcy's newsletter, Special Office Brief, still going as far as I know. This much is certain. The most interesting -- but unsupported -- claim about Churchill's private intelligence network of the 1930s is in William Stevenson's 1972 biography of Sir William Stephenson, A Man Called Intrepid, (Sphere, London 1978). According to Stevenson (p. 56), 'Focus was one of these influential groups pulled together by Admiral Hall.' Admiral William 'Blinker' Hall was Director of Naval Intelligence during WW1, and had developed its Code Breaking section in the now famous room 40 at the Admiralty. After the war he became a leading Diehard Tory MP, was one of the founders of the Economic League, and became the first Conservative M.P. to also run the Tory Party's administration as Principal Agent. Further, he was the General Manager of Winston Churchill's newspaper The British Gazette during the 1926 General Strike and is said to have been involved in other key incidents of the period, including the Zinoviev letter. Hall was perhaps the British state's most significant covert political operator of the period, and it would make perfect

sense if this claim of Stevenson's were true. Unfortunately he offers no evidence and I am aware of none since the book's publication. On 'Blinker' Hall, follow index references in Andrew's Secret Service, op. cit. Despite the comments in the introduction by former SIS officer Charles Ellis, intended to give the book a quasi official status, the status of A Man Called Intrepid is low among historians of the intelligence services. 17.How peripheral Spier was is suggested by the fact that he was arrested and interned as an enemy alien in 1939, deported to Canada and not released until 1941. 18.James Margach, The Anatomy of Power, (W.H.Allen, London, 1979) pp. 113 and 4. 19.The strength of Irving's obsession is demonstrated by his choice of The Focus Policy Group for the name of his own little group

Clinton and Quigley: a strange tale from the U.S. elite

Robin Ramsay
U.S. President Bill Clinton has made a number of public references to the impresssion made on him as a young student by Professor Carroll Quigley. (1) As Lobster readers will know, Quigley was the author of Tragedy and Hope (U.S., MacMillan, 1966) in which he described for the first time the role of the Round Table network and its origins in the megalomaniacal fantasies of Cecil Rhodes. From the Round Table grew the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR); and from the CFR grew the Trilateral Commission. President Clinton has been a member of both (as well as a Rhodes Scholar). (2) Even without the article of endorsement by the Trilateral Commission founder, David Rockefeller, just before the presidental election, (3) Clinton was obviously Jimmy Carter 2 -- southern Democrat governor, sponsored and groomed by the Trilateral/CFR networks. (4) As Daniel Brandt points out in his recent essay on this subject, (5) the American Left of today is not much interested in the Trilateral Commission -- and for the most part has no idea who Carroll Quigley is. (6) Christopher Hitchins (a Brit in the U.S.) sounds as though he might know, but in his piece in The Nation (December 14, 1992), musing on the links between Clinton, Rhodes Scholars, the Rhodes Trust and the CFR, he never quite gets there. My guess is that Quigley is just not respectable enough for Hitchens yet. (Too popular with the right.) Hitchens should take heart and note that Quigley's work is creeping into the edge of the mainstream. (7)

Time for the Tris?

Perhaps one of the positive consequences of the Clinton presidency will be a resurgence of interest in the role of elite planning and induction mechanisms like the Trilateral Commission. If I were in charge of the Cambridge University Press, I might send out a few press releases about Stephen Gill's American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge University Press, 1990), which didn't exactly set the world on fire upon its first appearance. Gill is a Marxist, tendence Gramsci, and he is primarily interested in using Gramsci's notion of hegemony in international affairs.

This works tolerably well, in my opinion, but en route to his theoretical conclusions Gill presents a lot of research about the Trilaterals, their personnel and their ideas. It certainly is a pleasure to read a Marxist academic who understands the sequence of Round Table, CFR, Trilateral Commission and writes of 'the economism which persists in much left-wing writing.' (p. 210) With Clinton introducing Quigley onto the agenda, and the prospects receding of my ever getting a Best of Lobsters 1-8 together, it occurred to me that it might be useful to reprint the piece I wrote on Quigley which appeared in Lobster 1 in September 1983. Here it is, unchanged, apart from some minor fiddling with the punctuation.

The Anglo-American Establishment From Rhodes to Cliveden

Carroll Quigley Books in Focus, New York, 1981 This, I think, is the most important book every written about the British ruling class and its foreign policy. In outline Quigley has rewritten the political and diplomatic history of Britain (and thus some of the world) from 1900-1939. In his introduction, the publisher tells us that Quigley had finished the book in 1949 but could not find a publisher for it. No surprise. His earlier work, Tragedy and Hope, (Macmillan, U.S., 1966), was almost totally ignored by the academic press (8) and seems to have had the habit of 'disappearing' from the shelves of those few libraries in the U.S. which did bother to stock it. (9) For writing it, or rather, for writing certain sections of it, Quigley was ostracised by the academic community and found his lecturing contracts drying up. When the journalist Robert Eringer went to see Quigley just before his death, Quigley warned him off the subject of Tragedy and Hope, saying that it would get him (Eringer) into trouble. (10) After Quigley's death there was a (not wholly reliable) report that his papers had been stolen. (11) The sections of Tragedy and Hope which caused Quigley problems were essentially, though not entirely, a precis of this earlier work. Baldly, Quigley claims that an organisation, variously titled the Rhodes-Milner Group, the Round Table, and just the Milner group, had virtual control over British foreign policy for much of the first half of this century. The inner core of this group (which I will refer to as the Round Table), was a secret society founded by Cecil Rhodes. Using Rhodes' money, this group set up the Round Table groups in then British Dominions; the Council on Foreign Relations in the U.S.; the network of Royal Institutes of International Affairs; the various Institutes of Pacific Relations; controlled The Times and the Observer, All Souls in Oxford and the Rhodes Scholarship program; was largely responsible for the destruction of the League of Nations and the appeasement policies of the 1930s; converted the British Empire into the Commonwealth; and so on. These 'gracious and cultivated men of somewhat limited social experience constantly thought in terms of Anglo-American solidarity, of political partition and federation.... were convinced that they could gracefully civilise the Boers of South Africa, the Irish, the Arabs and the Hindus.... and were largely responsibile for the partition of Ireland, Palestine and India, and for the federations of South Africa, Central Africa and the West Indies.' (12) And so on and so on. The full list is far too long to give here.

Should we believe Quigley?

As claims about the existence of such secret organisations are usually the trade-mark of the right-wing loony, it is perhaps worth giving Quigley's c.v. at this point. Educated at Harvard and Princeton, he taught at the School of Foreign Service, the Brookings Institute and the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department.(13) A more impeccable group of American ruling class institutions is hard to imagine. But even with Quigley's immaculate intellectual credentials his claims raise obvious difficulties. How do we check them? A secret society is, by definition, secret. And Quigley's books tantalise. Assertion follows assertion but the supporting evidence is patchy: surprisingly for an academic, Quigley provides fairly scanty documentation here. In part this seems to be just a consequence of the nature of the material he is attempting to handle; in part you sense that Quigley is deliberately revealing only part of what he knews -- creating a mystery while (apparently) solving one. It is as if he is saying 'Look, I'll lift the corner of this rug and... there, did you see it?' My fairly casual attempts to check some of his claims have neither falsified nor confirmed them in any real sense; I just do not have the research resources to do so. But if you consider his thesis about a ramified Round Table network merely as a hypothesis and then read some of the conventional accounts of the period, his version of events is suddenly visible everywhere.

The received version

It is not that the Round Table people have been unknown. The names Quigley gives -e.g. in the inner group: Rhodes, Rothschild, William Stead, Viscount Esher, Milner, Abe Bailey, Earl Grey, H.A.L. Fisher, Jan Smuts, Leopold Amery, the Astors -- are well known. The Round Table group are conventionally viewed as a group of enthusiastic imperialists who had a period of some visibility and influence in the 191020 period. Their journal, The Round Table, was well known between the wars, and is in many university libraries. (It continued until the mid 1970s.) Ellinwood, Rowse, Fry, Nimocks, Kendle, Butler, Madden and Fieldhouse, Astor, and Toynbee, to give a selection of those who have written about the Round Table people, offer accounts of the period which are, more or less, consonant with Quigley's thesis. (14) Toynbee, for example, attributes the Royal Institute of International Affairs to the Round Table people; and Butler, himself part of the group on Quigley's account, acknowledges that the so-called 'Cliveden Set' of the 1930s were, as Quigley claims, merely the Round Table at one of their regular meeting places. Kendle, although he dismisses Quigley's thesis without an explanation, is of particular interest: he, at least, had read Tragedy and Hope. No other historian of the period seems to have done so. (15)

Enter the 'radical right'

The one group of people who took Quigley to heart were the 'radical right' in America for whom Tragedy and Hope became a kind of bible. Here was the proof, the academically respectable proof, of the great conspiracy. It may not have been quite the conspiracy they had in mind, but it was a conspiracy none the less. But apart from them, the only people who seem to have taken Quigley on board have been Shoup and Minter and the splendid Carl Oglesby. (16) (And Shoup and Minter are only interested in the Round Table as the parent body of the Council on Foreign Relations.) But Flint, for example, in his recent biography of Rhodes, gives a good deal of room to an

account of the size and possible influence of the Rhodes Scholar network. (17) He writes of 'the excessive number of Rhodes Scholars in the Kennedy Administration' (18) and of the Rhodes Scholars forming 'a recognizable elite in Canada.' (19) Apparently unaware of Quigley, Flint notes that 'in each of the white settled Commonwealth countries, South Africa and the United States, a similar, if less influential elite, had emerged.... and since 1948 India, Pakistan and Ceylon may be experiencing a similar development.... Rhodes Scholars created links between American, British and Commonwealth ''establishents''.... and they have played a role in creating the "special relationship" between the U.S., Britain and the dominions after 1945.' (20) There have been some odd moments in the history of this vast Anglophile network. Rudolph Hess flew to Britain in 1941 with a list of people he should try and see to arrange a peace. Top of the list was a group containing Lord Dunglass (Lord Home) and the Duke of Hamilton. But second on this list was the Round Table (named as such). (21) Haushoffer, the German intellectual and mentor of Hitler, who prepared the list, evidently had a better understanding of the actual nature of Britain's ruling elites than did Claud Cockburn, who, despite having worked at The Times, one of the key elements in the group, spent the second half of the 30s belabouring 'the Cliveden Set' without ever realising that they were the Round Table. The 'radical right' in America attacked the Round Table's various front organisations in the late 1940s, thinking they were attacking the 'international communist conspiracy'. (22) More recently both Nixon and Mrs Thatcher have explicitly set themselves up as the enemies of the foreign policy 'establishment' without ever showing the slightest signs of understanding who it is they are hostile to. (23)

And after the war?

Quigley's account comes to a halt after WW2. The Round Table was one manifestation of the power of the British Empire and, as that disintegrated after the war, to be replaced by the new American economic empire, so the Round Table network's influence waned. The Rhodes Scholar network is still there (24) and the Council on Foreign Relations (some of whose members in turn spawned the Trilateral Commission) is still pretty much the single dominant force in the formation of American foreign policy. But the idea that the CFR is still at the behest of some central British group is ludicrous. (25) The Royal Institute of International Affairs is still going strong but some of its standing as an 'unofficial foreign office' has declined with the rise of other foreign policy think tanks. The journal Round Table folded in the mid 1970s and the last sighting of the Round Table as an organisation I have seen is a reference to it in the early 1970s. (26) One or two people who were on the board of the Round Table journal are now in the present cabinet but how significant this is I am unable to work out. Quigley's thesis presents the old problems raised by the existence of all such elite groups: how to decide whether any particular policy outcome advocated by such groups was in fact the result of their advocacy. Most of the time Quigley claims, convincingly implies and suggests, rather than actually proving, the causal connections. But while I think he may overstate the extent to which the network was ever centrally controlled, and he certainly understates the financial background to the group's apparently disinterested advocacy of its philosophy, his thesis is generally convincing. Throughout this essay I have been unable to write as though Quigley's

thesis was merely provisional: in practice I accept it as proved, even though such 'proof' is essentially lacking. In the end all I could say was: it fits. In a sense what Quigley describes as the Round Table's conspiracy is merely the traditional behaviour of the British ruling class -- only systematised slightly. Instinctively secretive, screened from public scrutiny by its control of the mass media and from academic investigation by its control of the universities, in a sense the British ruling class is the most successful 'conspiracy' ever seen. What Quigley has done is provide us with the most substantial key yet with which to unlock the details of its history.

Notes
1. An early sighting of Clinton's esteem for Quigley is in Antaeus: Journals, Notebooks and Diaries, ed. Daniel Halpern (Collins Harvill, London 1989) This is on p. 73 from the then largely unknown Governor Bill Clinton. 'I had a course in western civilisation with a remarkable man, the late Carroll Quigley. Half the people at Georgetown thought he was a bit crazy and the other half thought he was a genius. They were both right.' 2. So obvious has Clinton's education in the Anglo-American elite become, even the Sunday Telegraph had a long piece on the Rhodes Scholars connection, sneering at the Rhodes Scholars in the Clinton administration as 'charming dreamers'. See 21 March, p. 22. 3. New York Times, October 16 1992 4. Gore Vidal points out in an essay in his collection Matters of Fact and of Fiction (Heinemann, London 1977) how curiously little attention is given to Louis Auchincloss, the only American novelist of quality to write about the lives and beliefs of the east coast WASP elites. 5. Daniel Brandt, 'Clinton, Quigley, and Conspiracy', in NameBase Newsline, no. 1 April 1993 -- a supplement to subscribers to Brandt's NameBase data base. Non-NameBase subscribers in the U.S. can write to Brandt at PO Box 5199, Arlington, VA 22205 and request a copy of this essay. The essay will be published in a forthcoming issue of the U.K. magazine Here and Now. 6. See for example, Jeff Frieden, 'The Trilateral Commission: Economics and Politics in the 1970s', in Monthly Review, December 1977. 7. Quigley's work on the Round Table network is included in Jan Nederveen Pieterse's Empire and Emancipation. (Pluto, London, 1989), part of which originally appeared in Lobster 13. 8. It seems to have attracted only two tiny, dismissive, reviews, See Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1966, and Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, November 1966. 9. See the comments of the editor of Lords of the Realm, issue 2 p. 16. [Lords of the Realm folded afer two issues.] 10.Eringer's account is in his The Global Manipulators (Pentacle Books, Bristol 1980). 11.Mentioned in a late 70s issue of the U.S. magazine Conspiracy Digest which I seem to have lent and lost. 12.Tragedy and Hope p. 954. 13.Quigley's entry is in Who's Who in America, 1966 through 1977.

D.C. Ellinwood Jnr., 'The Round Table Movement and India 1909-20' in the Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies, November 1971; A.L. Rowse, All Souls and Appeasement (Macmillan, London 1961); M.G. Fry, Illusions of Security (University of Toronto, 1972); W.B. Nimocks, 'Lord Milner's Kindergarten and the Origins of the Round Table' in South Atlantic Quarterly, Autumn 1964; D.C. Watt, Personalities and Policies (Longman's, London 1965); J. Kendle, The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union (University of Toronto, 1975); J.R.M. Butler, Lord Lothian (Macmillan, London 1960); F. Madden and D.K. Fieldhouse (eds.) Oxford and the Idea of the Commonwealth (Croom Helm, London, 1982); David Astor, Tribal Feeling (John Murray, London 1964); Arnold Toynbee, Acquaintances (Oxford University Press, 1967).

14.Kendle p. 305 -- the last paragraph of the book. 15.Carl Oglesby, The Yankee and Cowboy Wa r (U.S. 1976 and 1977); Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust (Monthly Review Press, London and New York 1977). 16.John Flint, Cecil Rhodes (Hutchinson, London 1976) 17.Six in the State Department and at least 12 in the upper reaches of the administration. See Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days (London 1975) p. 181. JFK's father was close to the Round Table people while U.S. Ambassador to London in the 1930s. 18.Flint provides a list, circa 1973, begining with the Governor General, three cabinet ministers, head of the armed forces, most of the permanent officials in the civil service, etc etc. Flint, pp. 2445. 19.Flint p. 245. 20.Eugene Bird, Rudolph Hess in Spandau (London 1974) p. 27. 21.Quigley describes this episode with some patrician amusement in Tragedy and Hope. 22.Nixon, of course, as a long time member of the CFR, was in a fairly paradoxical position. 23.They had a great reunion recently in Oxford, attended by the Queen. See Time, July 11 1983. Time currently has six Rhodes scholars on it. 24.Ludicrous but still believed by the curious U.S. Labor Party -- the conspiracy theorists' conspiracy theorists. 25.Cecil King, Diaries (London 1975) p. 52.

Notes from the underground part 3: British fascism 1983-6

Larry O'Hara
'Let a thousand initiatives bloom...' While the piece in Lobster 24 was a (necessary) digression, treating of individual careers and various lurid allegations, this essay takes up the story where my first article left off -- the aftermath of the 1983 election. The period under review is a short one, and because the split that ripped the National Front (NF) asunder in 1986 can, in

retrospect, be seen as even more important than it was at the time, consideration of it will be left to the future. For organisations such as the British National Party, the years 1983-6 were spent marking time and surviving. Thus the interesting developments occurred in and on the periphery of the NF, and its political fortunes must properly occupy the bulk of this essay. (1)

The removal of Martin Webster-reasons and implications

With the walk-out of John Tyndall from the NF in 1980, Martin Webster, continuing in his position as National Activities Organiser, was left in a very powerful position (and that is exactly how he looked at things). In Lobster 23 I pointed out how the NF's policy became more and more radical by degrees, importing elements of Strasserism. The 1983 AGM continued this process, deciding that an NF government (sic) would ban hunting (as well as the more obvious, because anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim, ritual slaughter), and the abolition of the House of Lords was confirmed as a policy aim. (2) Beneath the surface however, all was not well, and discontent began to focus around the continuing retention of power by, and baleful influence of, Webster. Both the people I have spoken to and the literature are virtually unanimous that he exercised an ultimately counter-productive grip on the day-to-day running of the NF. Ian Anderson, who at the time worked very closely with Webster and was Deputy Chairman, described him as having 'a lousy temper, very irrational, very irregular in work habits... he liked directly to hold all the strings of power he could lay his hands on... he wanted all decisions to go back to him.' (3) Further, Webster had no new strategic ideas, and in the early 1980s sought to repeat, in changed circumstances, the strategy that had given the NF apparent success for a time in the 1970s -- standing in elections and engaging in confrontational street marches. His position had been weakened by the increasingly evident failure of this tactic. Aside from derisory electoral votes, even on their own figures the annual turn-out for Remembrance Day -- the ultimate barometer of street credibility -- had declined from 2,000 in 1980 to 1,000 in 1982 and 1983. (4) Not only was Webster's policy evidently not working, the high ground of political initiative had been shifting against him since 1980, when the retention by Tyndall of Spearhead meant the NF was deprived of a regular theoretical journal to discuss tactics and ideology. Webster had then, reluctantly, sanctioned the emergence of Nationalism Today (NT), and the ideological chickens began coming home to roost. Steve Brady has said the aims of NT were three-fold: 'to radicalise members, change the direction of strategy and get rid of Webster'. (5) In the summer of 1983, after the General Election, the NT editorial board (then including Brady, Derek Holland, Nick Griffin, Joe Pearce and Tom Acton) met in Suffolk and took stock of the situation. The NT line now predominated within the NF, and many of the younger, more ideologically zealous members were against Webster. Thus it was decided in general terms that 'something' should be done. Webster wasn't entirely unaware of the impending crisis facing him. In August 1983 he became worried about the 'Rising' seminars, held in Liss Forest, to which he had not been invited, and sent Patrick Harrington to investigate. By October 1983 Webster had persuaded the Executive Council (the day-to-day body running the NF between Directorate meetings) to mount an enquiry. (6) The preliminary findings of the enquiry were discussed at the Directorate meeting of 5 November 1983, and in the light of subsequent events, the minutes make wry reading. After assurances from Nick Griffin

that no harm had been meant by it, Webster himself, normally the most paranoid of individuals, proposed successfully that in 'view of the general opinion that there did not appear to be anything malicious in the activities of the Rising organisation, that no further action be taken in connection with the Executive Council's inquiry into Rising.' (7)

The resignation of Pearce and Griffin

The climb down by a contrite Griffin at the Directorate meeting, and apparent conciliatory moves towards Webster, were shown to be merely a tactical retreat by the next salvo in this affair, the widely distributed joint resignation letter of Pearce and Griffin from the Directorate and the NF, dated 12 November 1983. (8) The letter was a searing indictment of NF strategy and Webster. They declared that 'the NF is a desperately sick organisation. Morale is at an all time low. Membership figures have risen slightly as a result of the general election.... but overall it has fallen so much that we are now back to the levels of the start of the 1970s.' They criticised the obsession with marches, admitting that 'marches alone, expecially if they advertise our weakness rather than our strength, will not bring the NF to power'. They also pointed out that while 'the need to sink local roots has been discussed, beyond door-to-door sales in a few wards, nothing has happened.' After defending Holland and criticising Webster, they went on to say that necessary major change would not 'be possible while Martin Webster continues with his present attitude and stranglehold on key party offices.' (9) While declaring their commitment to the NF, and urging others to stay, Pearce and Griffin concluded by announcing their own resignation. The paradox was only superficial, for, as intended, the letter was a bombshell that sparked off fierce debate. (10) According to Tom Acton (NF auditor), who was there when Webster's copy of the Pearce-Griffin letter arrived, Webster resolved to try and split Pearce (who had charisma, working-class street credibility and intellectual ability) from Griffin. To this end, Ian Anderson was despatched, accompanied by Acton, to try and win Pearce over. At this meeting, the turning point came when Anderson was asked the ultimate question: 'Do you think a Websterite party can become a real political force?' Nobody serious could give a positive answer to that, and Anderson then sided with the rebels. (11) The end came swiftly, shortly after, when on 10 December prior to a 'strategy conference' held (where else!) at the Hancock's Heidelberg Hotel in Brighton, Webster attended what he believed to be a routine Directorate meeting, called, ironically enough, to formally ratify the resignations of Griffin and Pearce among other things. The first item on the agenda was the removal of Webster and his close friend (and office manager) Michael Salt from all positions within the NF, proposed by Andrew Brons as Chair and seconded by Anderson as Deputy Chair. This coup de grace took only ten minutes, and (almost uniquely) reduced Webster to speechlessness. The event was a shock from which Webster never really recovered, and, despite a flurry of High Court Writs which caused serious administrative and financial inconvenience to the new regime, he was a spent force politically. Indeed, only 12 members were expelled as a result of supporting him. (12)

The NF under Webster

Before looking at the politics of the post-Webster regime, a few comments about the

state of the NF under his leadership are in order. First, as we have seen earlier, it was during this period that the first serious attempts were made to broaden and deepen the NF's ideology. It is precisely this point -- the determined efforts made by those remaining in the NF to construct a new ideological mix to avoid being again outflanked by the Tory right -- that has been missed by virtually all academic studies of the NF, whose authors have remained content merely to assert ideological continuity with throwaway phrases about Strasserism and the ideas of Julius Evola (as though the two were easily compatible), and finishing off with guarded warnings culled from sundry issues of Searchlight about 'going underground', 'moving towards terrorism' etc.. (13) Webster hadn't consciously initiated this process of ideological reconstruction, but it had nevertheless flourished during (and even despite) his regime. Partly this was because he had no alternative ideas himself, and also because he wanted to outflank more orthodox Nazis such as Tyndall and the British Movement. Fundamentally, Webster underestimated the role and potentially subversive effect of ideas -- until it was too late. He was aware of some of the problems facing the NF, expressing this in an exasperated confidential memorandum he sent to Chairman Andrew Brons and other Directorate members in September 1983 concerning 'Internal Discipline and Morale'. This had been triggered off by events at what had been billed as a familyoriented 'Garden Party' held at a farm in Kent. (14) This and similar incidents caused Webster to propose a period of probationary NF membership for new recruits, touching on a problem that has plagued the far right to this day: 'The situation which the party faces is in part due to the fact that the gutter press during 1977 to 1980 maintained a campaign of depicting us as a party of delinquents, criminal thugs and anti-social cranks and, as a result of this, we have attracted the support of a significant number of such people, which in turn has fed the media campaign. We must make a sustained effort to break this "self-feeding" circle before it devours the whole party.' The dilemma for the Webster regime was that while skinheads were an important constituency of NF support,(15) they also alienated other potential recruits. Inasmuch as Webster was content to mark time himself, merely repeating earlier strategy, this wasn't so much of a problem for him. But it became one for those in the NF who wanted to break out of the political ghetto. The real question to ask about Webster may well be the one asked about Edward II: not why did he go, but why did he last so long in a position of power? Some of the answer lies in his abilities as an organiser, as well as his alliance with Tyndall up till 1980. Once the two were split, the writing was on the wall for him. His homosexuality doesn't seem to have been the most weighty charge levelled against him within the NF. It had been downplayed by his allies in 1980, and wasn't even mentioned in the Pearce-Griffin letter. (16) In another sense, Webster's sexual orientation had been a boon, ensuring that a network of sympathetic gays within local NF branches would alert him to challenges to his authority.(17) Attacks in the News of the World (e.g. 16 September 1979) had, for some, only created a certain sympathy for him. His control over the apparatus was further enhanced by his 'working relationship' with Special Branch. As if this wasn't enough, there is little doubt that the Webster regime had been maintained by fear on the part of many members: the list of proscribed organisations and individuals was long and ridiculous, Webster apparently unable to distinguish between real and imaginary threats. (18) Another factor aiding Webster, which turned out to be a double-edged sword, was the

'inertial thrust' within the NF of ordinary members who didn't much care who was in charge, and would support whoever had control of the Head Office, however obtained. While it would have been very difficult to dislodge Webster if he had received advance warning of the attempt, once he was dislodged it was difficult for him to get back, for the same reason. In the end, Webster was a man who aroused a variety of emotions in many -- grudging respect, fear and hatred being the most common -- but very little loyalty.

Let a thousand initiatives bloom: after Webster

1984 and 1985 saw a variety of new initiatives. With Webster gone, restraints on radical policy actions (as opposed to mere theorising) were lifted. The first activity of 1984 was an all-night vigil and 100-strong march at the US Air Force base in Lakenheath, Suffolk, along the lines of 'No to Cruise, No to CND'. (19) This marked anti-US turn in policy was certainly a new departure, and a Directorate meeting on 13 January, followed the next day by a strategy conference, set the seal on the new approach. 'Instant Response Groups' (IRGs) were revived, in order to mobilise for 'lightningstyle' activities at only a few hours notice' -- opposing pro-Irish Republican marches and so on. (20) Despite some imaginative touches (e.g. the occupation of Daily Mirror offices and distribution of a fake issue in 1985), IRGs do not seem to have caught on particularly, and were in any case only a reversion to what Webster had been well capable of organising in his early seventies hey-day. (21) A greater change was ushered in by a marked shift of attitude towards marches. As the Member's Bulletin put it, 'From now on the NF will not be marching for marching's sake, but will only march where there is political capital to be made.' (22) This meant not only fewer marches, but organising them around themes, with the emphasis on regional far more than national activities. Again, at first this didn't seem to have had a marked effect -- the highest 1984 turn-out for a non-Remembrance Day march was 300 in Stoke for St. George's Day. (23) By late 1984, there was a recovery, and Remembrance Day saw an official figure of 1,500 marchers. (24) Of more interest than march figures however, was the far broader conception of strategy encapsulated in a Joe Pearce article in Nationalism Today (19). In it (p. 10) he declared that 'it is absolutely vital that we don't restrict our fight solely to the political level. Our struggle is philosophical; our struggle is cultural; our struggle is spiritual. And if this is the case, it is crucial that our strategy is radically changed to reflect this.' What this meant was that many new sites of ideological contest were opened up, with unpredictable effects. (25) Commencing February 1984, 'Training Seminars' (under the auspices of the 'Nationalist Education Group') were set up to explore aspects of NF ideology. (26)

On the green front

Few things excited more alarm in outside observers than the NF's concentration on 'green' issues after 1983, although as we've seen, it started earlier. (27) Of great importance here was the Joe Pearce editorial in Nationalism Toda y for March 1984, which announced that there was now a fourth (new, but not acknowledged to be such), premise for NF ideology: 'the deep-rooted belief that man must again learn to live in harmony with the forces of nature instead of waging constant war against them.' (28) The practical (as opposed to propaganda) consequences were few, however. In 1985

one Michael Fishwick (later editor of NF News) was expelled from the Hunt Saboteurs Association. Enquiries made of the HSA have elicited the information that around that time Fishwick and (possibly) Paul Fortune attempted to join the Norwich branch of the HSA, but were turned away for their known far right views. (29) That this was the only NF case (aside from the activities of individuals such as Margaret Flynn) suggests that Fishwick and Fortune joined as individuals, rather as than part of a wider attempt to take over the HSA. Vivisection of animals also received coverage from the NF starting at this time.(30) David Henshaw, in his sensationalist and tendentious (though intriguing) book Animal Warfare (1989) alleged the NF around this time entered into a strategy of infiltration of anti-vivisection groups, with the Blackpool BUAV being singled out for special attention. Unfortunately neither Henshaw or the BUAV were able to furnish me with evidence of this.(31) However, the BUAV were clearly worried at the time, and in June 1985 passed a motion at their AGM condemning far right involvement in the animal welfare movement. The NF's reaction was to pass a motion at their AGM in November 1985, calling 'upon all nationalists to become actively involved in the animal welfare campaign in their localities thereby demonstrating that the NF has a thorough consistent ideology with which to tackle all problems confronting this nation'. (32) The lack of a widespread furore after that suggests that while this issue excited some individuals, it didn't interest most NF members. Ritual slaughter (of animals I hasten to add) was of rather more interest...

Ritual Slaughter -- a kosher target

Just as the far right in the 1930s added the Jewish ritual slaughter of animals for kosher meat to their list of evils, so did the NF in the 1980s. It now had two targets, Jews and Moslems, for the preparation of Halal meat requires similar (and indisputably horrific) ritual slaughter, centrally that the animal be fully conscious while it dies. The campaign was formally kicked off with front-page coverage in the May 1984 edition of NF News (No. 56). To the charge of a racist motive, the NF pointed to their additional policies against blood-sports and vivisection, hardly conclusive proof as we shall see. In July of that year there was a further attack on the availability of Halal meat in Bradford schools, but undoubtedly the high (or low, depending on your perspective) point of the campaign was the NF's first ever march on the theme of animal welfare. This took place in Brighton on 22 September 1984, and even on the NFs own estimates, only 100 took part.(33) From the point of view of the NF's traditional agenda, the issue of ritual slaughter was well-chosen. First, it allowed them to patronise the RSPCA for having 'followed the NF's lead' and launched their own campaign against ritual slaughter. This then enabled them to later accuse the RSPCA of equivocation when it came to confronting the Jewish community over the question, thus leaving the NF as 'the only organisation prepared to tackle head on the evil practice of Ritual Slaughter'.(34) A video was produced on the horrors of ritual slaughter, and the Brighton march was followed by a March 1985 North-West 'Day of Action', including demonstrations outside a kosher slaughter-house in Preston, and antics involving a pantomine horse in Lytham St. Anne's and Blackpool. But the numbers mobilised were small, and there was never again a national march on the topic. But the leadership did not give up. Throughout 1985 the NF's 'Campaign For Animal Welfare' had broadened its sights, and as well as the aforementioned policies on ritual slaughter, pursuit bloodsports and vivisection, there was now an advocacy of

free-range eggs and humane veal production. Despite this widening of the scope of the NF's concern for animal welfare, an article in Nationalism Today of October 1985 showed that for some ritual slaughter was still very much near the top of the NF's agenda. Entitled 'Animal Holocaust', its main target was the Jews: 'All the Jews have to do is stop this barbaric and torturous murder of defenceless animals. When they cease the slaughter the NF will cease its campaign. Until then the NF campaign for animal welfare will continue.'(35) Clearly, not all NF members were motivated by anti-Jewish prejudice, and some were undoubtedly moved by concern for animals. However the fact remains this was the only 'green' issue on which the NF felt the need to hold a march.(36) If the NF had undertaken marches and other activities in opposition to vivisection, their defence against the charge of anti-semitism might have been more plausible. One reason why Green issues weren't given an even higher profile was the simple fact that the NF's agenda was becoming overloaded by other matters.'

The miners' strike, 1984-5

In 1972-4, the NF was opposed to the miners in practice, but the miners' strike, commencing March 1984, was an issue tailor-made for the new radical leadership to show their colours.(37) While seeking to distance themselves from the 'Marxist' National Union of Mineworkers leader Arthur Scargill, the official policy was to 'support wholeheartedly the struggle of British miners to stop Ian McGregor's pit closure plan.' (38) In seeking to help, the NF had a poor reception. 'Some NF branches wrote to the NUM Head Office... offering to distribute NUM leaflets and help with food and money collections. But all they received for their troubles were insulting letters from the Union bosses, rejecting their help.'(39) This was hardly surprising, and the NF decided to set up a 'Solidarity with the Miners Campaign'. However, a planned meeting in Walthamstow, East London, on 28 August 1984, with speakers from the NUM and National Council for Civil Liberties, fell through when it was found that the publicity for the event was NF-originated, with Directorate member (and NF Trade Union Group Co-ordinator) Phil Andrews' home address on the leaflets. As well as opposition from without, there was also dissent within the ranks: one member later recalled that a 30-strong internal meeting in Sussex led to a bitter argument, as the AGM resolution supporting the miners was debated locally, with the branch 'committee just saving the day, and the Conference resolution [supporting the miners] being ratified by a majority of just one vote.'(40) As well as national self-sufficiency in coal, another theme that came to feature prominently in NF coverage was the heavy-handed tactics used by police against the striking miners.(41) The reasons for this support were broadly two-fold: the Strasserite elements in the NF's ideology, and their own experience at the hands of the police, of which more below. The relative novelty of the NF's stance, can be gauged by comparing their line on the strike with that of the BNP. After blaming government policy 'errors' for the strike, Spearhead went on to helpfully suggest that the state 'arrest and charge those ringleaders responsible for organising the violence -- starting with Scargill himself.'(42) The NF's support for the miners was not a conversion to the class struggle, any more than Strasser's use of 'socialist' language indicated he adhered to it either, but was nevertheless a clear break with the practice of past regimes.(43)

The NF and the state

The beginning of 1984 saw a marked deterioration of relations with the police. This was partly due to the loss of Webster's previous expertise in liaising with them concerning marches, and partly to a strong anti-police attitude on the part of some members.(44) The first evidence of a new attitude on the police's part was the NF's annual attempt to stop the 'Bloody Sunday' Commemoration March on 29 January 1984. This ended in something of a fiasco, with NF coaches held up outside Wakefield for some hours, with no members allowed to get off, thus depriving the NF of a rally. (45) While this was presented as a success (in that the Republican march had been called off), there was disquiet internally. Shortly after, on 28 February 1984, Joe Pearce's home was raided (in connection with his editorship of the NF youth paper Bulldog), and personal papers taken.(46) Thus, when similar restrictions on travel as had happened to the NF were placed on pickets in the miners' strike, some being stopped and turned back up to a 100 miles from their destination, the analogy wasn't lost on the NF. Their irritation led to them supplying the Guardian newspaper 'with considerable information about Special Branch activity against the party',(47) and Griffin in particular concentrated throughout this period on writing detailed and hostile stories covering the nefarious activities of the secret state and political police.(48) Theoretical articles are one thing, but in this case there were practical consequences arising from this concern about 'state repression'. For a start, it was decided at the end of 1984 that 'all officials and members should, as a matter of routine,' burn' all internal correspondence and circulars no longer needed for reference.'(49) In the public domain, Phil Andrews, speaking at a St George's Day demonstration in Stoke, is reputed to have said of the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher, 'What's all this fuss about the police woman who was shot outside the Libyan embassy? We should not shed any tears over the death of an agent of the Thatcher regime.' (50) His views weren't universally shared, and by October 1985 an Organisers' Bulletin was urging members to 'make an effort to be pleasant to PCs they meet while leafletting, paper selling, etc.'(51) The most tangible practical effect of the NF's policy, and something that determined both its contours and limits, was the series of prosecutions against NF members under the Race Relations Act. Of the eight members prosecuted under the Act, only two, Joe Pearce and Martin Wingfield, were found guilty, Pearce receiving a twelve month sentence in December 1985 for his past editorship of Bulldog. (52) In the period when the outcome of most prosecutions was still pending, the NF had laid off related street actions, the most tangible result being an 'Extraordinary General Meeting' on 22 June 1985, called to stiffen members resolve.(53) Once Pearce was convicted, members were urged to put into action the motion passed at the November 1985 AGM: to take 'direct action against the Tory Party and mass media', including spray-painting, slogans and occupations of premises, in support of both him, Martin Wingfield and Ian Stuart. (Stuart was jailed for assault.) (54) Some members got rather carried away. Paul Johnson, the Kent Regional Organiser, was jailed for sending an ingenious kind of hoax bomb to the local press calling for the freeing of Pearce on behalf of the 'December 12th' group; and at the January 1986 Anti-IRA Rally, Griffin, then NF Deputy Chair, suggested to the audience that they use the 'traditional British methods of the brick, the boot and the fist.'(55) At the start of 1986, the Members' Bulletin declared that 'there have been at least 20 reports of direct action against the offices of Tory associations and anti-British media groups and

this is increasing day by day.' (56) Again, as with the earlier period, although there were some instances of violence which can be attributed to individuals in the NF and similar groups,(57) there is no evidence of a general overall turn towards violence as the predominating strategy. Indeed, on the NF's part strident rhetoric coexisted with strenuous efforts to exercise their legal 'rights' within what was for them a surprisingly novel departure -- a foray into the National Council for Civil Liberties.'

Taking liberties:-- the NF, the NCCL and civil rights

After the NF coaches were stopped outside Wakefield in January 1984, and Joe Pearce's home was raided the following month, it was decided at the instigation of Nick Griffin, that Pearce should approach the NCCL and ask for their advice and help. He did so, and was advised that the police action in both cases was illegal and that he should consult a solicitor.(58) When the matter reached the public domain, there was furious criticism of the NCCL, at their AGM and in the media. They thus distanced themselves from the NF, leading to the 'Nationalist Education Group' (Griffin/Pearce) deciding in July 1984 that 'all members of the NEG should join the NCCL as soon as possible.' (59) In the event, Anderson puts the numbers joining at 15, although I have heard 20 from other sources.(60) I haven't been able to confirm or refute the rumour that in order to 'weed out' NF members, the NCCL privately allowed the 'Searchlight team' to scan their membership lists. Though the NCCL was officially taken off MI5's 'subversive' list in 1981, it was probably still the target of state attention later, and access to the membership lists by a para-state agent such as Gable would be useful indeed. Gary Gallo (visiting from the USA) attended the 1985 NCCL AGM in April, and explained his purpose as being 'to convince the NCCL not to refuse legal aid to NF members, or alternatively to demonstrate that the NCCL is... a political front for the left.' (61) The vote at the AGM did go against them, but the NF were happy in that it 'stirred up a right little hornet's nest and got lots of stunning publicity... [showing] the NF operating as an organisation not being granted the rights everyone else gets in this country.' (62) A similar dispute which raged throughout 1984, in which the NF was seen as the aggrieved party, concerned Patrick Harrington's attendance at the Polytechnic of North London. Students (and some staff) objected to his presence at the Poly, due to active NF membership,(63) and, commencing in March 1984, there were attempts to prevent him attending lectures. The Poly management responded by trying to have him taught privately on the one hand (something ultimately rejected by the courts) and taking harsh action against protestors on the other. The case gained a lot of media publicity, and the way the NF handled it was indicative of a more subtle new approach. An Organisers Bulletin stated that 'while NF members will feel like paying these Reds back in kind, it is essential that we do not fall into this trap. Please make sure your members stay away from his college -- any confrontation outside the college will prejudice Patrick's battle in the courts.' (64) This episode was a major propaganda victory for the NF, and also had the effect of hurtling Harrington into national prominence. (65)

Notes
1. As before, this essay isn't comprehensive, trying to concentrate on what was different as well as what was strategically significant. I don't mention, except in passing, the anti-Jewish policies of the fascists. For an overview there see my

'British Fascism -- the Persistence of Anti-Semitism' in Return, 5 December 1990, especially pp. 41-5. It is taken as given below that the NF is fascist (though at times of a novel kind), with traces of Nazi and non-fascist ideologies too. Although this view of the organisation isn't really accepted by NF members who have been so kind as to give me interviews, it can in my judgement be sustained, and will be, elsewhere. 2. See Press Statement 3 October 1983. 3. Interview with the author, 29 May 1991. 4. Estimates from NF News 29, February 1981 p. 4, NF News 44, Jan. 1983 p. 4, and NF News 52, Jan. 1984 p. 4 respectively. Outside estimates were even less charitable. For example the British National Party's Spearhead (issue 177 p. 20) estimated the 1982 turn-out to be only 500. As for other marches, whereas in March 1980 the NF had mobilised 900 for an anti-mugging march in South London (The Times, 3 March 1980), by 1983 their highest mainland march turn-out was 300 in Fulham on 28 August 1983. See NF News 51, October 1983, p. 4. 5. Interview with author, 27 October 1992. 6. See Webster circular of 3 January 1984, Appendix, 'The Political Background', for his later views on this. 7. Minutes p. 5 This is significant in that it contradicts Webster's later fulminations against the influence of Fiore et al importing terroristic methods into the NF via Rising. At the same Directorate meeting it was decided to suspend Derek Holland's membership, for writing a letter critical of Webster in Nationalism Today 18. 8. In 1989 Griffin (with Holland this time) was to use the same tactic of resignation from the NF as a means of carrying forward political struggle. 9. Webster is reported to have been particularly incensed at having been referred to by them as merely a 'capable journalist'. 10.The BNP's Tyndall, as would be expected, saw the letter as a 'vindication of our own position over the past 3-4 years'. Spearhead 182, December 1983, p. 20. 11.Interview with the author, 27 October 1992. Anderson has said he reluctantly sided with the opposition to Webster to ensure a 'blooodless coup', and the two accounts are clearly compatible. Interview with the author 29 May 1991. The defection of Patrick Harrington from the Webster camp also had some bearing on the matter too, in that he would have been able, should he have so wished, to rally some younger members to Webster's cause. Harrington interview with the author, 9 March 1991. 12.Anderson interview with the author, 29 May 1991. Webster's letters in his defence are nonetheless valuable for the gossip and allegations they contain. See those, for example, of 3 January 1984, 19 September 1984 and the especially interesting 'Petition for Inquiry into NF Financial Affairs' dated 8 July 1984. As Webster and Salt were dismissed without notice and with only four weeks severance pay, it may well be that, as his solicitor Tessa Sempick put it in her letter to Andrew Brons of 21 December 1983, they had been unfairly treated. The Webster removal episode also spawned some highly amusing factional literature, most notably the various spoof Gay Nationalists. Also of great interest was the consistently sympathetic coverage he received from Searchlight magazine, which (for a variety of reasons) as well as vastly overestimating his prospects of regaining control, reproduced his arguments with hardly any criticism whatsoever. See e.g. see issue 105, March 1984, pp. 3-4;

issue 109, July 1984 pp. 3-4; issue 110, August 1984, pp. 3-4; and issue 112, October 1984, pp. 4-5. 13.See for example Roger Eatwell, 'Fascism in Post-War Britain', in T. Kushner and K. Lunn (eds.) Traditions of Intolerance (Manchester University Press, 1989), where it is implied that it was because of the Italian exiles (Fiore, Morsello etc.) that Strasserite ideas 'were disseminated in the NF' (p. 228). Yet neither Rising nor its precursor, European Fight, of which there was only the one issue, could be said to be Strasserite (as opposed to 'Europeanist'). Christopher Husbands also speaks of the 'rise of "Strasserism" in the NF under the Italian Third Position influence' in his 'Extreme Right-Wing Politics in Great Britain', in K. Von Beyme (ed.) Right-Wing Extremism in Europe, (Frank Cass, London, 1988) p. 72. He then makes the usual claim that 'such future as the NF and other extreme-right groupings may have is increasingly likely to be in an extra-legal direction' (p. 77). For some fascists, that is the path, but not for all, or even the majority. Richard Thurlow, in his Fascism in Britain 191885 (Blackwell, Oxford, 1987), manages to avoid even mentioning Evola, and not too much weight should be attached to his declaration that post-1980 was characterised by the 'rise of a third generation of self-styled "Strasserites" ' (p. 296), when the most recent source he cites for this assertion dates back to 1975! I think the most important recent source of 'Strasserism' in the UK far right was ex-National Party activists, and only minimally A.K. Chesterton, who had very much a 'Tory Racialist' social agenda. The lack of sufficient rigorous, sourcebased, research on the NF after 1980 (and even more so after 1983) then results in the sloppy sort of article such as that by Steve Hunt, 'Fascism and the Race Issue in Britain' (Politics, Autumn 1992, pp. 23-28), where what purports to be an overview simply leaves out examination of any evidence for the post-1983 period, the most recent article cited based on research before 1983. This doesn't stop Hunt from referring to 'menacing' BNP-British Movement links, or from (correctly) warning of the need for 'constant vigilance'. It is just that his article hardly portrays him as a practitioner of this regarding the last ten years! Such sloppiness is also evident in Zig Layton-Henry's The Politics of Immigration (Blackwell, Oxford, 1992), where his commentary on the far right ends with the aftermath of the 1979-80 split. Given his most recent source cited is a book published in 1982, he doesn't even begin to prove his parting shot that 'the fragmentation of the far Right and loss of support for it have not ended its activity, but appear to have diverted it away from electoral politics and more towards sporadic violence and racial attacks against black people' (p. 97). Am I alone in thinking the subject of fascism in the UK deserves better and more rigorous research than such half-baked generalisations, culled from Searchlight and/or the Sunday newspaper supplements? One reason for such paucity of detail in what passes for scholarly works on the NF is the lack of available primary sources. As a result academics have been compelled to rely on Searchlight magazine for selective drip-feeding, and are thus reluctant to 'second-guess' the magazine's analysis. That isn't the whole story of course, inasmuch as virtually complete runs of publications like NF News, Nationalism Today, Spearhead etc. are available in some libraries. However,lack of primary evidence is one reason, and in that regard readers who are seriously interested should note the collection recently deposited at Warwick University Modern Records Centre by Patrick Harrington, bearing his name. This includes: a virtually full set of NF Directorate minutes 1976-83 (and quite a few after 1986); extensive runs of Members Bulletins and Organisers Bulletins

throughout the 1970' s and 1980s; and AGM Agendas and Constitutions, as well as factional literature from all the recent splits -- 197980, 1983, 1986 and 1989. Quite a lot of the material used in this article is deposited there, and I am glad to say I had a small part in ensuring that Warwick (geographically central and unlike other potential recipients committed to making the documents readily accessible to all students, irrespective of institution) received the documents. The gaps in the collection, and Harrington's possible motives, are not really things to be gone into here, though what I would say is that had his intention been to retain control of such invaluable research material, he would hardly have placed it in the public domain. By contrast, the Searchlight -originated Maurice Ludmer Collection housed at Southampton University Library has virtually no material of contemporary relevance, thus ensuring that important primary sources are retained under the magazine's control, a monopoly undermined at a stroke by Harrington's bequest. Used carefully, as evidence rather than ammunition to confirm prejudices and substitute for research, over a period of years the Warwick Collection will hopefully facilitate a drastic improvement in the generally dire state of research into the contemporary UK far right. 14.See Organisers Bulletin no. 15, 5 September 1983. The letter itself was dated 26 September 1983. Apparently, there had been 'foul-mouthed drunken aggressive hooligan conduct on the part of the yobbo element', who had, among other things, subjected '11 and 12 year old little girls to a gratuitious deluge of threatening obscenities'. 15.Indeed according to Griffin 'the skins kept the NF alive from 1980-1983'. Letter to Joe Pearce, 14 March 1986. 16.Tyndall made reference to it as the 80s progressed, although the difficult thing for him to explain was why (especially given he had at one point shared a flat with Webster) he hadn't raised it before. Tyndall's first public reference to Webster's sexual orientation was in Spearhead July 1983 (issue 177, pp. 1415). His defence against critics in the next Spearhead was less than convincing (178, p. 14). The truth was probably that Tyndall hadn't been bothered about or was prepared to tolerate Webster's sexual orientation while he was an ally, and for a long time felt embarrassed about raising it later precisely because he would then be criticised for evasiveness. This would explain Tyndall's memorandum to NF officials of 18 September 1979 distancing himself during the inner-party conflict then raging from 'libellous abuse of a very personal nature'. 17.Or in the case of Islington NF, virtually the whole branch would alert him for similar reasons. To be fair to Webster, his 'sexual politics' stance doesn't seem to have been hypocritical. The 1983 election manifesto contained, at his insistence, a remarkably (for the NF) tolerant 'Bill of Rights', including the 'right to choose one's own associates at home, at work and on social occasions'. (Let Britain Live, p. 25). 18.See NF Member's Bulletin Spring 1983, p. 4 for the full list. Expulsion from the NF was the fate awaiting anyone who even worked 'in association with' an individual or group so proscribed. 19.See the East Anglian Daily Times 7 and 9 January 1984 and also the article by Dave Stevens in Nationalism Today (hereafter NT) 19, p. 20. It has been suggested to me that Roberto Fiore and other Italian exiles featured prominently in this activity. 20.NT, 20 March 1984, p. 12.

21.In certain areas, 'direct action' by NF members was without doubt vexatious for their opponents. See e.g. Newham Recorder 24 January 1985 for an account of an intervention by Brady/Anderson in a local dispute concerning the eviction of a racist council tenant, the broad facts of which were confirmed in the Member's Bulletin Summer 1985, p. 1. 22.Spring 1984 p. 1. 23.NF News 57, June 1984, p. 4. And this internal estimate is obviously going to have erred on the high side. 24.NF News 62, Jan. 1985, p. 6, which in 1985 was exceeded, even by opposition accounts. Time Out (23 January 1986) speculated 1,800, the NF's own figure was 2,000. (NF News 81, October 1986 p. 3). 25.I do not see all this as flowing directly from Richard Lawson's IONA organisation and Michael Walker's Scorpion magazine. The successful motion proposed in their names at the 1984 AGM on 'Cultural Diversity' was very sparse, and merely spoke of the 'preservation and revival of the Celtic Languages and English dialects'. 26.See Griffin's article in NT 31, July 1985 pp. 8-9. Advance programmes for those I have seen give no hint of any 'military' aspects, and as I said in my last article, no proof of such aspects sustainable in court of law has as yet been forthcoming.... 27.See The Times 20 October 1984, p. 2, and New Statesman 26 October 1984, pp. 16-17. 28.NT 20, p. 2, 'On the Green Front'. Discovery of this extra premise had seemingly come about quite recently: in the programme Pearce wrote for the 7 February 1984 Training Seminar there were still only three! I suspect the NT questionnaire to subscribers sent out with issue 19 had something to do with it. 29.Letter to author dated 14 June 1990. 30.See for example Phil Andrews in NT 23, July 1984, p. 8: 'To oppose vivisection is a crime against capitalism. To support it is a crime against civilisation'; and the interview of noted anti-vivisectionist Hans Ruesch by Derek Holland (unattributed) in NT 30, June 1985, pp. 12-13. 31.Letter to author 22 May 1990. 32.Item 10, proposed by Holland, seconded by Fortune. 33.NF News 61, November 84, p. 2. The local Brighton Evening Argus of 22 September 1984 estimated 60. 34.NF News 59, September 1984 p. 3 and NF News, March 1985, p. 7. 35.NT 34, p. 4. Logically if there were no ulterior agenda, at the very least Halal should have been mentioned. 36.There were other changes in the NF's ideology of relevance to Green issues, most notably the articulation of 'ruralism' as an alternative to discredited city life. See e.g. NF News 68, July 1985, p. 5, which stated that the 'NF believes that modern man has been uprooted from the soil and placed in an artificial concrete world where he has become a materialist wage slave. A major return to the land is essential for the cultural, spiritual and economic health of the nation... It is up to us to build a Britain where the people are united by the bonds of blood and soil', sentiments that had even found their way into the 1985 Constitution -- pt. 5, Statement of Principles. The policy had already been slightly diluted by a motion passed at the 1985 AGM calling for the setting up of nationalist communities in 'both rural and urban areas' (item 20, proposed by Griffin and seconded by Anderson). Given there was little practical outcome concerning the policy of a 'Return to the Land', save perhaps for free labour being carried out by NF members to renovate various properties owned by

Nick Griffin over the years, it hardly needs consideration here. 37.It is noteworthy that in early 1983, NT had published an article regretting the failure of miners to vote for strike action in an earlier ballot: 'Miners Defeat is Britain's Defeat' p. 18. 38.1984 AGM item 30. See also 'The Miners Strike -- Answering Fleet Streets Lies', NT 23, July-August 1984, p. 18, and NF News 62, January 1985, 'The Miners Strike -- Where We Stand'. 39.NT 25, November 1984, p. 22. 40.Michael Sutton, writing in the Flag issue 68, November 1992, p. 7. This account of dissension is supported by a letter from Batley branch printed in NT 27, March 1985 p. 18, which talked of a North-South split at the AGM on the issue in November 1984. Even a local Northern newsletter highly critical of Scargill and Coal Board Chairman McGregor, seeing them as equivalents due to their 'commitment to twin alien ideologies' had to be withdrawn from distribution after Directorate intervention. Blackpool NF Bulletin Nov.Dec. 1984, p. 1. 41.See for example 'Violence? Whose bloody violence', NT 27, March 1985, p. 17. 42.Issue 186, April 1984, pp. 2-3. 43.To see the NF's line here as 'leftist' would be a mistake. See for example the NF 'Policy Briefing' of July-August 1985, where concerning large increases in salary for higher Civil Servants, Judges and Army officers, the official position was that, against critics, the 'Government's view is correct but need not be, and would not be, in a Distributive society'. (p. 1). The extent to which Distributism itself is anti-capitalist is a large theoretical issue not relevant here. The illogicality (from a radical perspective) of espousing both trade union activism and racism is well illustrated by the confusions in the article 'Trade Unions: Red power or White Power', in NT 35, Nov.Dec. 1985, p. 22. 44.See for example the contributions to New Nation, Autumn 1983, by Fiore (anonymously) on the 'Italian Experience' and Griffin on 'Repression in Britain Tomorrow' (pp. 12-14). 45.An account is given in NT, 21 April 1984, p. 19. 46.This is also referred to in NT 21, on p. 15. 47.Chairman's Bulletin 2, 27 April 1984, p. 2. The articles resulting appeared on 18 and 19 April 1984. 48.See for example, NT 22, 1984, p. 15; NT 27, March 1985, p. 11; NT 29, May 1985, p. 5; NT 33, September 1985, p. 21; NT 34, October 1985, p. 21, as well as Michelle Lawrence 'Towards the Police State' in NT 24, September 1984, p. 8. 49.Militant (Bulletin of Central London NF) December 1984, p. 1, followed by an Organisers Bulletin, 1 October 1985, which ordered the burning of records more than three meetings old. See p. 2. 50.Exact wording from Webster's 'Petition for an Inquiry' of 8 July 1984, p. 7. The broad accuracy of this rendition has been confirmed to me by others present on that day. Within earshot of hundreds of police officers, many present felt this was a somewhat infelicitous statement.... 51.Issue 22, 14 October 1985, p. 2. Special Branch were excluded from this general instruction. 52.See the Guardian 13 December 1985 and NT 36, February 1986, editorial p. 2. 53.While very understandable in individual terms, the motion passed which called on 'all individuals prosecuted under the Act to refuse to recognise the validity of any such proceedings except where the wider cause of British Racial

Nationalism would be harmed' (item 3) -- was quite literally meaningless except as a piece of rhetoric. 54.Item 21. Item 18 also called for an (implicit) flouting of the proposed revisions to the Public Order Act. 55.Yorkshire Post 17 February 1986. His private explanation of this comment (which he did not deny) was that it 'was necessary under the circumstances of the Kent ''Free Joe Pearce'' lunacy to stress forcibly to the large and militant audience that we oppose terrorism, which I characterised as alien, futile and indefensible on both tactical and moral grounds'. In letter to Joe Pearce, 14 March 1986 p. 7. The official response to 'December 12th' was put by Martin Wingfield (then Chairman) in 'The Lunatics in Our Midst' (NT 37, March 1986, p. 17). On another aspect of the NF's 'sexual politics', see Martin Durham's excellent 'Women and the National Front' in L. Cheles (ed.) Neo-Fascism in Europe (Longman's, London, 1991) pp. 264-8. 56.P. 2. But this picture of energetic activism was somewhat dissipated by Griffin's complaint in the Organisers Bulletin of 25 April 1986 (p. 3) that though five areas had done well, others had 'been slow to follow suit'. 57.E.g. see Racism and Fascism in West Yorkshire, Leeds Anti Fascist Action, 1987 for an overview in one locality, and the Guardian 30 July 1985 p. 8. The founding conference of Anti-Fascist Action also came under attack in that month -- Red Letter 13 August 1985. 58.On this initial sequence of events both the NCCL (in Barbara Cohen's internal report of 10 May 1984), and the NF (in the Chairman's Newsletter, issue 2, 27 April 1984, p. 2) agree. 59.NEG circular July 1984, p. 1. 60.Interview with the author, 29 May 1991. The NCCL themselves were unwilling to discuss this matter with me, instead referring me to.... Searchlight. 61.NT 30, June 1985 p. 8. 62.Anderson interview 29 May 1991. 63.See for example the P.N.L. student paper Fuse issue 167, June 1983, and Searchlight 109, July 1984, pp. 2-3. 64.22 May 1984, no. 10, p. 1. 65.For a full account see the Report of P.N.L. Committee of Inquiry 1985, chaired by Sheila Brown for the now-defunct Greater London Council, published by Swindon Press, 1985.

I am being slagged off, therefore I am

There have been several notable assaults on the good ship Lobster since number 24. On Thursday, 19 November 1992 a journalist researching a piece on MI6 rang me. He said had been to talk to the KGB defector, Oleg Gordiefsky, who told him that the KGB were big fans of Lobster. Since Gordiefky defected in 1985, his conversations with the KGB about Lobster can only have been, at best, about issues 1-6. In other words, this is bullshit, Mr Gordiefsky merely passing on a smear from his new employers in that funny Lego building being erected on the bank of the River Thames in London. On 22 November, three days after this curious telephone call, I was sent a photocopy of the review of Smear! by Robert Cecil from the Winter '92 issue of the Journal of

Intelligence and National Security. To quote the biographical material on his book about Guy Burgess, A Divided Life (Bodley Head, London, 1988), Mr Cecil is a former Head of the Cultural Relations Department of the Foreign Office, and war-time intelligence officer. This may be the most inaccurate review I have ever read. But then accuracy wasn't what he was after, was it? The Journal of Intelligence and National Security was founded and is co-edited by Dr Christopher Andrew. Oddly enough, Oleg Gordiefsky co-wrote a couple of books with Dr Andrew. Of course, none of these things are connected.

New Scientist
In New Scientist of 20 March 1993, the column 'Feedback' sneered at the piece I wrote in #24, 'The Alien on the grassy knoll', calling it 'nonsense', and 'very worrying'. (Though precisely what was worrying wasn't clear.) How sad that Britain's flagship popular science magazine should be so detached from what is actually going on. C.f. the piece by Armen Victorian in this issue.

Searchlight etc
Anyone sceptical of the joint Ramsay/O'Hara account of Searchlight in issue 24 might care to read the full page in the February issue of Searchlight devoted to rubbishing O'Hara, me and even Daniel Brandt. There was some talk of them sueing Lobster. Good luck guys: Lobster's total assets wouldn't pay Searchlight's subsidy for one month. (By the by, anybody know who is paying that subsidy?)

For the record

In defence of Chip Berlet, criticised by Daniel Brandt, Searchlight described Brandt as 'totally discredited' by his contacts with the followers of Lyndon LaRouche. I sent this to Brandt who pointed out in his reply that '[Chip] Berlet as of last July was referring to [Brandt's database] NameBase as "indispensible" and Dennis King, his close colleague -- particularly on anti-LaRouche research -- refers to NameBase as "crucial"'. And yes, with the letter he included photocopies of the evidence. The rest of the Searchlight article is about as accurate. Searchlight is being used to character assassinate Larry O'Hara. That's all there is to it. Apart from the 'why'... on which.... The magazine Green Anarchist has published a pamphlet written chiefly by Larry O'Hara on Searchlight et al. A Lie Too Far: Searchlight, Hepple and the Left, is 56 A5 pages, with many original documents reproduced. This is a flat-out attack on Searchlight as a disinformation/disruption front for the British secret state, tracing the career of one Tim Hepple in and out various groups on the British right and left, and analysing various recent Searchight disinformation campaigns. This has been written and produced very quickly and the result is an extremely complex narrative which is clumsily written and difficult to follow in places. Even so, nobody interested in the Searchlight saga can afford to miss it. Available for 1.60 either in stamps or in blank postal orders, from BM Box 4769, London WC1N 3XX.

Smear! Wilson and the Secret State

(London: Fourth Estate Ltd., 1991). pp. 390. 20. Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay Prudent readers will first note the two authors' identities; they are founders and joint editors of lite scandal-sheet Lobster. In their Prologue they admit that it may not rejoice the hearts of victims of smears to have these rehashed, even if 'almost all of them were false'. Thus Lady Falkender may not be best pleased to see so marry mentions of her illegitimate children; but the authors' sense of duty (or possibly some other motive) drives them on relentlessly. They never, plainly state whether, in their view, Lord Wilson's tendency to see spooks (their word for operatives of 'the secret state') under the bed was in every case justified; there are allusions to paranoia, qualified in one instance (p. 25) by the contradictory statement that 'Wilson's paranoia ... was entirely justified'. Our authors do not seem to think it would have been helpful to interview Wilson, who never emerges in these pages as a living, breathing figure, capable of arousing sympathy. The interminable accounts of assaults upon him tend therefore to have the tedious impact of watching bayonet practice on a straw dummy. The bayonets of 'The secret state' are equally shadowy. The Introduction proudly claims 'This hook is laden to the gunwales with footnotes'; but the sources upon which our authors mainly rely prove to be citations from the press and fellow journalists, salted by extracts from the diaries or memoirs of those who, like Tony Benn, believed themselves to be the victims of 'the secret state'. In building a house of cards, the addition of more and more cards does not make the structure more stable. 'The secret state' is defined in the Introduction as embracing MI5, MI6 and Special Branch; but the paucity of verifiable information about these organizations obliges our authors to bring in villains who are more visible. This means adding an entity called 'the permanent government', which comprises 'the Cabinet Offices, the Armed Forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear industry and its satellite ministries' [sic], as well as MPs, 'particularly Tory MPs' and 'the network of very senior civil servants'. At appropriate points the City arid the South African service BOSS are added for good measure. The idea that all those in these broad categories, extended to include former members, were somehow engaged in blackening the faces of Wilson, Benn, Falkender & Co is very hard to take seriously. Confusion is confounded when, without explanation, a fufther hostile entity called 'the British state' is introduced. Thus we read how 'As PM, Wilson was attacked by the British state, the city and their allies in the media' (p. 121). His enemies are then extended on the same page by addition of 'the right and left of the [Labour] Party'. We are thus treated to the strange spectacle of Wilson, as PM, standing virtually alone in No. 10 Downing Street. This can only be described as a Lobster state, existing in the minds of the authors. To make matters worse, we are never told what it was that Wilson's lonely struggle was designed to promote or conserve. It was not socialism, since we are assured 'Wilson was never a socialist' (p. 167). We learn on the next page something of his supposed corporative ideas; our authors seem not to know that the nearest approximation to a corporate state in modern times was Mussolini's Italy. Their own political standpoint emerges when they criticize Wilson for having denounced Communist influence in the seamen's strike of 1966; his denunciation is said to he 'a fatal error' (p. 131). Dorril and Ramsay ignore the damaging strikes of car workers, miners, dockers and others, which did so much to destroy these industries. They have keen ears for rumour, but seem not to have caught the admissions of KGB officers

who made their own contribution to Britain's industrial decline. They never discuss the possibility that this was 'the enemy within, rather than the so-called 'secret state'. Allegations of KGB intervention are countered by charges that the real villain was the CIA. There is no parallel here; KGB aimed to 'subvert the democratic system, where the CIA, even at its most heavy-handed, aimed to preserve it. The gold of Lanaley, Virginia, behind Encounter cannot be held to justify Moscow's gold backing The Morning Star. Long before the end the myth woven in this book has begun to unwind. MI5 and MI6, which were represented at the beginning as a threatening monolith, are said to have been 'bureaucratic rivals since the end of the Second World War' (p.296). By 1971 rivalry in Northern Ireland had supposedly developed into 'a fierce bureaucratic conflict' (p.328). If this is really what our authors believe, they cannot hope to persuade us that a 'secret state' so divided against itself could have frustrated Wilson's cabinets and endangered his hold on the premiership. Instead of ending the book with Wilson's resignation in 1976, a new conspiracy is unrolled and a new victim smeared in the person of the late Lord Rothschild, who is alleged to have been used by Oldfield, the head of MI6, 'to hit back at MI5 ... and reactivate [Peter] Wright' (p. 326). This dubious theory rests upon the uncertain foundation provided by Private Eye, Chapman Pincher and Anthony Cavendish, who had left the service of MI6 some 30 years earlier. In any case, it does nothing to bring the 'secret state' back to life. That Rothschild did reactivate Wright is beyond doubt; his aim was to vindicate his own reputation, which had suffered after the exposure of his friend Anthony Blunt, not to mention his association with MOSSAD. Unfortunately Wright seized the opportunity to pursue his own vendetta against Roger Hollis, who is now known by all honest men to have been innocent of any involvement with the Soviets. This is, perhaps. the only merit of this tedious book: it does not rehash the Hollis saga.

Hess - the Fuhrer's Disciple

by Peter Padfield Papermac, London, 1993, 12.99

Scott Newton
There are now several versions of the Hess affair. One is the official story - a politician whose star is one the wane, attempts a spectacular comeback, fails, is locked up for forty years and finally commits suicide in despair. Another is the double theory, first outlined in detail by Hugh Thomas and reiterated (though with an intriguing twist) by Frank Kippax. (1) Then there are the speculations by those who accept an element of conspiracy, both in Germany and Britain, in 1941 and 1987, but who reject the idea that the man in Spandau was an imposter. The recent work of John Costello (2) and Peter Padfield falls into this category. Padfield's books is for the most part carefully written and researched. It contains a good deal of useful information about the 'peace plots'. The Hess mission is analysed against a background of covert links between the Nazi leadership and reactionary elements in the British state, located mainly in the City, the landowning aristocracy and the imperialist wing of the Conservative Party. (The activities of those representing a significant part of large-scale industry are not really discussed.) In an interesting 'Afterword' Padfield suggests that the Hess flight was the culmination of

Anglo-German contacts stretching back to the outbreak of war: the Deputy Fuhrer was bringing a genuine peace offer approved by Hitler, guaranteeing independence and the integrity of the Empire in return for benevolent neutrality over Barbarossa. Churchill, keeping this secret from most of the Foreign Office and all but a handful of trusted colleagues, set up a committee to analyse the terms of what was, in effect, a draft treaty. The need for serious discussions was, however, obviated by the invasion of the Soviet Union and later by the entry of the USA into the conflict. This was what Churchill had banked on ever since becoming Prime Minister: by the end of 1941 Britain was not alone. Defeat was impossible. The Afterword's speculations, for which the evidence is tantalising but inevitably thin and second-hand, do at least make sense of the complete contradiction between the Foreign Office files on Hess (all but one of which were released last year) and documentary evidence found in the KGB and State Department archives. The former add nothing to our knowledge of the episode: they reveal the prisoner to have been a paranoid wreck of a man whose mental state was so bad that only reluctance to allow repatriation to Germany via Switzerland deterred HMG from agreeing to his being declared insane. This Hess knew nothing, spoke incoherently and wrote unbelievably childish and banal letters back to his family in Gemany. (3) Yet the KGB and State Department reports, based respectively on the testimony of Kim Philby, the Czech intelligence chief Colonel Moravetz, and Churchill's personal link to the security and intelligence services, Sir Desmond Morton, all point to one fact: Hess came with Hitler's backing so that the British would stand on the sidelines when the attack on the USSR was made. Padfield's plausible suggestion is that the intelligence reports tell the real truth. The Foreign Office documents merely comprise a legend, worked out because any talk of peace, had to be buried deep in case it encouraged attempts to destabilise a government committed to toal war. As for the death of Hess, this looks to Padfield like a case of conspiracy and cover-up, although he is reluctant to say by whom and dismisses Hugh Thomas's claim that all the evidence points to the British government. And it has to be said that the major flaw in the Padfield book is its treatment of the Hugh Thomas theory - he states with authority (p. 304) that 'there is no evidence for Thomas's assertion that Hess was not Hess - plenty to indicate he was.' Such a statement can only be made by ignoring all the aeronautical material concerning the Hess flight while simplifying and distorting the medical case for the doppelganger theory; and unfortunately this is exactly what Padfield does. Thomas himself has made the case for the double convincingly enough. But Lobster readers not wholly au fait with the arguments might be interested to know the following. First, there is no way the plane which crash-landed at Dungavel late on 10 May could have been the same one which took off from Augsburg earlier that day. The plane which left Augsburg was a D type Me 110. For this we have the word of Helmut Kaden, who was there at the time, having worked on the Hess plane, not to mention an entry in his personal logbook which he proudly showed to West German TV viewers in 1978. But the plane which arrived in Scotland was an E type, the latest model, just off the production line. Kaden later tried to wriggle out of this by claiming that he had the wrong year: he had meant May 1940. Absurd: Hess wasn't flying Me 110s at Augsburg in May 1940, nor for that matter in 1939; and as we all know he wasn't in a position to fly anything in May 1942. So how could it have been 'the wrong year'? There is more: the aviation number of the plane which landed in Scotland was

3869. Not only Helmut Kaden but Messerschmidt factory records say that the Hess plane was 1545 - the number of the D type. Secondly, Padfield is cavalier with the medical evidence. He fails to mention that the RAMC medical report on 'Hess' includes an X-ray examination which states, 'there is no evidence of a lesion, old or recent, in any other system' than the lower vertebra, tibia and ankle - all damaged on landing in Scotland. (4) 'No evidence of a lesion'? And this for a a man who was shot through the lung at 30 pages by a 7.62 mm Russian rifle in 1917? No entry wound? No exit wound? Of course, one way round this difficulty is to claim that the scars were very small. But this does not explain why nobody could find them, either in 1941 or in 1987 during the course of (oddly) numerous post mortems. Padfield resorts to a conversation between Spandau Pastor Charles Gable and 'Hess' in 1978, in which the prisoner pointed to two small marks on his chest. What he fails to say is that Gable was later informed, to his astonishment, that 'Hess' was actually wrong about the location of his wounds and if he really had been shot where he said the bullet would have gone straight through his heart and killed him on the spot. All this was recorded and broadcast in an edition of the French TV documentary, Tribulation, shown in the summer of 1989. The marks shown to Gabel were the result of a mock suicide attempt the prisoner had made some years before, using a knife. Leaving behind the medical evidence, Padfield tries to discredit Thomas's hypothesis that Himmler assassinated the real Hess and sent over the double as part of a plot to remove Hitler, by reference to the hoary old view that Himmler was 'utterly dependable'. Yet there is a pile of evidence from Foreign Office, State Department and U.S. intelligence files that Himmler was prepared to conspire against Hitler because he believed his Fuhrer commanded no confidence outside Germany and would never be able to negotiate peace with anyone. Some of this material has been in the public domain at least since the publication of the Von Hassell diaries in 1948. It is strange that Padfield should ignore it at this point especially since he acknowledges it earlier in the text, when discussing the Venlo affair (p. 110). Ultimately it is Padfield's dismissal of Thomas which is unconvincing - because it either ignores or plays games with hard fact. Maybe Thomas's theory of the politics and plots behind the Hess affair is flawed. And certainly it is hard to imagine what kind of a man would play the part of another for 46 years - unless the consequences of coming clean were even worse than that. Yet the medical and aeronautical evidence cannot be brushed aside and both, as they stand, make a nonsense of the single plot Hess-was-Hess theory. Sherlock Holmes said somewhere that once you dismiss the impossible you have to live with the improbable. That is the reality of the Hess affair: for all his merits Padfield fails to address it.

Notes
1. Hugh Thomas, Hess: a Tale of Two Murders (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988); Frank Kippax, The Butcher's Bill (London: Harper Collins, 1991) 2. John Costello, Ten Days that Saved the West (London: Bantam Press, 1991) 3. PRO FO 1983, passim. There is however one intriguing paper among the dross. It is a comment by a Ministry of Information official called Hood (6 June

1941) on a Ministry of Aircraft Production request for an exhibition staged around the Hess flight. Hood says, 'My Minister (Duff Cooper) is strongly opposed on the grounds that it can serve no purpose except to dramatise Hess's flight.' This is very odd. The word 'flight' is handwritten, a replacement for the typed word 'bluff' which has a line drawn through it. PRO FO 1093/10, 2nd of 2. How can 'flight' be mistaken for 'bluff', even assuming the memorandum was either typed from a hastily written scrawl or from shorthand notes? 4. PRO PREM 3/219/7, 13 May 1941. 5. Data concerning Hess's World War One injuries can be found in the regimental archive in Munich (there is an English translation by Dr Arnold Meier) and in a paper by Tony Marczan, who recently traced the steps of Hess's fateful campaign in Rumania.

Harold Wilson
Ben Pimlott Harper Collins, London 1992, 20 At one level, this deserves the plaudits it has received. It is a belting good read, such a good read, in fact, that I had got as far as 1967 before I realized that there was no mention of Lord Cromer, the Governor of the Bank of England between 1964 and 66, and the Labour government's number one enemy in that period. Hang on a minute, I thought, and consulted the index. No entry for Cromer. Back to the text I went. No, not a word. R.W. Johnson described this omission as 'a pity' in his review of Pimlott in London Review of Books (3 December 1992). That, I guess, is academic politeness. Wilson's account of the struggle with Cromer is the dominant theme of pp. 5966 of his The Labour Government 196470 (Penguin, 1974), and Cromer is also indexed at pp. 171, 173-4, 227, 325, 562. Missing out the Governor of the Bank of England in an account of Wilson's first administration is just seriously weird. Or perverse. Alerted by this omission, I began paying more attention to the book and noticed that it contains almost no sense of the extra-Parliamentary forces lined up against Wilson's governments. As a result some of Pimlott's decisions end up looking very odd indeed. For example:

the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation gets a paragraph but George Brown's resignation gets 5 pages.

There is nothing on Wilson's financial deal with the U.S. against the City of London (and its mouthpiece, Lord Cromer). There is the most cursory account of the Cecil King plot. In key incidents like the seamen's strike and the D-Notice Affair the received version is treated as unproblematic. The extraordinary period between the elections of 1974 is skimmed over in a couple of pages -- private armies, rumours of coups and Heathrow manoeuvres, are all missing.

And so on. There is a chapter on the 'Wilson plots' material -- the Wright, Wallace story. There is a choice here. Either: it is splendid that an important, main-line political biographer like Pimlott includes such a chapter. Or: though Pimlott cites many of the main texts, he hasn't really dealt with it adequately. The result is a bit of mess, a half-hearted 'OK, yes, something was going on but...' version which will be satisfactory to nobody. I still get from Pimlott a reluctance to believe it was really as bad as that, not in dear old Britain, not in the sixties and seventies. But Pimlott is a former Labour Party parliamentary candidate. Is it simply the politician's reluctance to acknowledge encroachment of extra-parliamentary forces, especially the British secret state, on the turf marked 'parliamentary politics'?

Official and Confidential:The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

Anthony Summers Gollancz, London, 18.99 Summers and his team of researchers have proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Hoover was gay and that he had been bought off and blackmailed by the Mob into ignoring organised crime. (I am less convinced by the evidence supporting the secondary allegations that Hoover was a transvestite.) Hoover, in turn, used his agency to collect the dirt on America's politicians and blackmail them into increasing his budget and allowing him to make himself wealthy. Post-war American domestic politics? In the beginning, the Mob fixed Hoover and Hoover fixed the politicians. Summers' book conveys a very powerful sense of just how intimate the Hoover-Mob connection was and how far the Mob had actually gone towards fixing the political and federal law enforcement system. Not that the Mob was trying to 'take over' America, but simply that it thought it had paid off and/or blackmailed enough people to ensure immunity from serious investigation. The fact that the Mob had the FBI in its pocket until the sixties and the arrival of the Kennedys, seems to add further weight to the notion that the Mob shot JFK -essentially to turn off Bobby Kennedy's 'war on crime'. Except.... the problem with the Kennedy story is distinguishing between myth and reality. Was there actually such a 'war'? Given old Joe Kennedy's relationship with various Mob figures, I have often found this difficult to believe. I was very taken with a snippet on how Robert Kennedy conducted such investigations into organised crime while still a young law graduate working for Congress, before John became President in 1960. In his Robert E. Kennedy (Trident, NY 1968) Kennedy-phobe Victor Lasky quotes a journalist called Roland May of the York [Pennsylvania] Gazette and Daily: 'The forays of the Kennedy sleuths.... into St. Louis, Chicago, Gary, Philadelphia, Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Miami were followed by a remarkable swing of

Democratic politicians in in the same areas to the Kennedy Presidential cause. And unions involved did the same.' (p. 119) It is tempting to think that something similar was going on during the Kennedy Presidency, that the 'war' was simply the Kennedys using the Justice Department to attack those bits of organised crime which didn't support the Kennedy wing of the Democratic Party. Indeed, some of the Mob did think that the Kennedy 'war on crime' was just politics. In the recent All American Mafiosi: the Johnny Rosselli Story, (Doubleday, London 1991) authors Charles Rappleye and Ed Becker recount how in 'certain select circles.... some of the very gangsters targeted in the war on crime believed at first that it was a sham, and then that they could handle it through surreptitious "diplomacy". Sam Giancana and John Rosselli.... were the last to realize that the Kennedy campaign against them was for real.' (pp. 203 and 4) (It was this 'diplomacy', presumably, in which Judith Campbell Exner was engaged in her role as the go-between for Giancana and JFK.) But the evidence -- mostly from wiretaps -- is clear that most of the Mob certainly didn't see it like that. They saw themselves under serious attack by Bobby. Of course it wasn't anything resembling a 'war' at all. Even a very Kennedy-phile account such as that in chapter two of Victor Navasky's Kennedy Justice (Atheneum, New York, 1971) makes it clear that 'campaign' or 'drive' is certainly a better term than 'war' which suggests a scale and commitment which is inappropriate. (As far as I am aware the Kennedy campaign against the Mob has yet to be critically re-examined. Where did the Kennedy team work? Who were their targets? How were the targets chosen? Is there a pattern -- geographical? political? -- in the group's activities?) The problem with the 'Mafia did it' thesis is that it only survives intact if a good deal of evidence, both about Oswald's history and the post-assassination cover-up, is ignored. There is enough evidence to make decent cases for both the Mob-did-it and the CIA-did-it hypotheses; and there is now quite a bit of evidence on the CIA-Mob relationship going back to WW2 and the original contacts with OSS. We might now reasonably expect a plausible hypothesis on the JFK assassination to include a role for both organisations. A crude Mob hit (with Ruby tidying-up the loose ends on the ground), followed by a sophisticated CIA-directed cover-up, perhaps? In Lobster 23 I hypothesized, semi-seriously, that the straw which finally triggered the CIA to remove JFK was his support for the rapprochement between the Christian Democrats and the Italian Socialist Party -- the so-called apertura a sinistra in Italy. Evidence of how seriously the NATO political establishment took this idea is suggested by the fact that the apertura and its ramifications was the lead item in 'Notes of the Month' -- the editorial -- in the Royal Institute for International Affairs The World Today (March 1962, pp. 89-91).

David Stirling: the authorised biography of the creator of the SAS

Alan Hoe Little, Brown and Co, London 1992, 17.50 As the subtitle suggests, most of this book is taken up with the story of the foundation of the SAS. I didn't read that section. I read the last third which contains lengthy accounts of both Stirling's ventures in Africa, especially with the Capricorn Africa Society in the 1950s, and

his Better Britain, GB75, Truemid activities in the 1970s. This is certainly the longest published account of the latter, containing a number of interesting bits and pieces which fill out the extant sketchy accounts, and the only account of the former I have seen. Stirling may only be a footnote in British post-war history but an interesting one nonetheless.

The Gemstone File

edited by Jim Keith IllumiNet Press PO Box 746, Avondale Estates, GA 30002, USA $14.95 Gemstone trundles on. This anthology includes the original 1976 Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File; the text to the so-called Kiwi Gemstone (discussed in Lobster 20); an interview with the Key's author, Stephanie Caruana which includes some information on the original Gemstone author Bruce Roberts; and the text of the late Mae Brussel's radio programme devoted to the file.

Eustace Clarence Mullins; the World's Premier Conspiracy Historian on the Jews, the Fed and the New World Order
A. Baron InfoText Manuscripts, co 93c Venner Road, Sydenham, London SE26 5HU, 3.99 This is 60 A4 pages, typed on one side and stapled together. It comprises an interview with Mullins conducted while he was in the U.K. at Mary Seal's Global Conspiracy Conference in London, January 1993; some commentary on the conference itself; and a detailed bibliography on Mullins and other conspiracy theorists. Mullins is a rather important, oldtime, Jew-hater on the American far right, now trying to play down his Jew-hating. Baron tries to nail Mullins down with quotes from his earlier work: Mullins claims not to remember. Mr Baron is obviously something of an expert on this subject. Mr Baron has been circulating odd bits and pieces around the British far right for quite a while now and his political aims -- and his beliefs -- are entirely unclear to me. This is quite interesting to the bit of me which is interested in the conspiracy theories of far right of the USA. But I didn't have to pay for it. Mr Baron should teach himself elementary typsetting (like this), then his manuscript would have come down to about 25 pages and could have been priced at 2.

Articles of note

The British Lion "Letters to the Editor" from Maxwell Knight

'Opium, tungsten, and the Search for National Security, 1940-52', by Jonathan Marshall, in Journal of Policy History, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1991. (Published at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA.)

Marshall is the former producer of the wonderful Parapolitics USA, and, most recently that I have seen, co-author with Peter Dale Scott of Cocaine Politics (University of California Press, 1991). This essay is typically dense parapolitics research, 20 pages, with 107 footnotes. Marshall shows how U.S. forces in the far East, initially in the war against Japan, and then in the desire to secure tungsten, a 'strategic' metal, became embroiled in the region's indigenous organised crime and began what Marshall, after P.D.Scott, calls the 'government-gang symbiosis....... The common nexus between narcotics, intelligence, ultraright nationalism, organized crime, and respectable politics in Asia has thus had ominous parallels in the United States.' (p. 461) This esssay makes a very interesting companion piece to Jeffrey Bale's esssay on WACL and the Moonies in Lobster 21. Anybody interested in John Hope's essay in issue 22 on Maxwell Knight, MI5 and the British Fascisti et al, will want to get a copy of its companion piece, 'British Fascism and the State 1917--27: a re-examination of the documentary evidence', in Labour History Review, Vol 57 no. 3, Winter 1992. This is a look at the evidence on the links between the 'radical right' groups like British Empire Union, National Citizens Union, British Fasciti et al and the then fledgling British secret state. One of Hope's footnotes refers to a letter from Maxwell Knight published in the British Fascisti's journal, British Lion, in 1927. This letter is perhaps the most striking piece of evidence supporting what Hope calls state/fascist 'collusion'. But 'collusion' makes it sound furtive and underhand; and as Knight's letter shows, the relationship was hardly that. The state -- and the secret state -- was very much more ramshackle in the 1920s than it is now; and fascism then did not carry the overtones of Hitler and Holocaust. Hope notes that some of the 'radical right' were anti-semitic but also notes that 'tariff reform, a united Empire and patriotic nationalism served as the basis of fascist ideology throughout the inter-war years.' The same concepts served as the basis of the ideology of much of the Conservative Party in this period. In 1927 it was not difficult see the 'radical right' as the continuation of the Tory Party; and the whole a part of a wider, anti-bolshevik, anti-socialist, conservative alliance.

The difficulty with these events of the 1920s is questions like this: How important were groups like British Empire Union? Nobody can be sure at this distance, so differences of interpretation are possible. Not that it matters greatly. As with his earlier essay on this period, this is chock full of fascinating information.

Sources
Covert Action
CAIB trundles on. I haven't always agreed with CAIB's line. With others on the U.S. left, it used to seem reluctant to deal with the real nature of the Soviet Union. Having got to he point where America has become Amerika, many American radicals have been unable to acknowledge that the other Superpower was equally murderous, imperialistic, oppressive etc. Partly this is the result of disinformation. Having discovered that the U.S. state lied a lot, they assumed that everything that state says was a lie, including -- and particularly -- its reports of conditions in the Soviet bloc. Even so, Covert Action remained the one indispensable American journal. Since the end of Cold War 2, the magazine has (a) changed its name -- it's now the Covert Action Quarterly, and (b) is slowly changing its content. In number 43, for example, they carried a couple of very interesting pieces on the war in Rhodesia. (I sent them to Fred Holroyd, who took part in that war. He pronounced them pretty accurate.) Even more striking is the essay 'Flouride: Commie Plot or Capitalist Ploy?' by Joel Griffiths in Number 42. This is quite a step for a journal called Covert Action, founded around the whistle-blowing of Philip Agee. For almost nothing is more redolent of crazy right-wing conspiracy theories than the debate about flouridation. So bravo to that. It's an interesting essay, too, by the way. Griffiths argues, with considerable respectable-looking documentation, that the benefits of fluoride have been wildly exaggerated and the side-effects of dumping it in drinking water have been suppressed -- in the interests of a chemical industry lobby. Now there's a surprise. Covert Action Quarterly, 1500 Massachusetts Avenue, NW #272, Washington, DC 20005, USA.

A conspiracy theory boom?

There does appear to be some kind of minor explosion of interest in parapolitics in the United States. And not before time. The interest in conspiracies is simply reality breaking through. The Reagan-Thatcher years saw unprecedented expansions of unregulated intelligence and military agencies, and breathtaking multi-billion rip-offs (most obviously, in the U.S., the S and L scam; in the UK, privatisation). No one should be remotely surprised that some of the electorate -- 0.01 % maybe - are finally asking some questions.

Steamshovel Press
An interesting manifestation of this explosion is the magazine Steamshovel Press. Now up to number 7, and appearing quarterly, Steamshovel is 60 pages. I have 5, 6 and 7.

Number 5, Summer 92, has interviews about JFK (and JFK) with Mark Lane, Dick Gregory, Kerry Thornley and Jim Marrs; a piece on alternative AIDS cures; pieces titled 'KKK, GOP and CIA' and 'An American Nazi and Ozark tourism' that are too obstruse to summarise here; a piece by the ubiquitous Robert Anton Wilson; and 'Supermarket Tabloids and UFOs'. Number 6, Winter 1992, has an interview with Deborah Davis on Katherine Graham, Mary Meyer etc; 'Was the Turin Shroud Buried?', 'Lenny Bruce in the Midwest' and the enticingly titled 'Danny Casolaro, the Octopus and UFOs'. Number 7 interviews John Keel, Jonathan Vankin (author of Conspiracies, Cover ups and Crimes), U.S. conspiracy theorist John Judge (Mae Brussel in heavy drag), and Carl Oglesby; and has pieces on Wilhelm Reich in Vienna, and a UFO congress in Las Vegas. In other words, this is more or less the U.S. conspiracy agenda as defined by the late Mae Brussel, from JFK-CIA through to UFO's, but done by people whose roles models are Reich, Leary, Hoffman, Lenny Bruce and Paul Krassner, rather than Chomsky, Scott and Herman. I would argue with it frequently, especially in giving space to one of the so-called Holocaust revisonists (in #7), but Steamshovel is consistently interesting, consistently informative and frequently amusing. As they say of themselves in their flier, 'It looks seriously at "conspiracy'" theories but also hopefully with a sense of humor.' 4 issues in the U.S., $20 US: outside U.S. $24 Single issues $5 in US, $6 outside. To: 5927 Kingsbury, St Louis, MO 63112, USA. It is also available in this country through AK -- on whom see below.

Flatland
Just as I knew I would like something calling itself Steamshovel, I knew that I would like Flatland. I have the Fall 1992 issue, its seventh edition. Flatland is essentially a catalogue of conspiracy theory related material, but a catalogue in which many of the items on sale are also reviewed. So it's part magazine, part catalogue. On the usual range: from JFK-CIA through to AIDS theories, Reich, Cancer cures, the Situationists and UFOs. It also supplies audio cassettes and stocks (and describes) many of the USA's more striking independent magazines. The catalogue/magazine is tabloid newspaper format, 32 pages, and is priced at $3 in the USA. Add at least another dollar if outside the U.S. for extra postage. Flatland, PO Box 2420, Ft. Bragg, CA 95437.

Prevailing Winds Research

This group? person? has done a very simple but very important thing: it is selling reprints of articles, trial and Congressional transcripts, cassettes of interviews, videos etc., as well as books and magazines. So, for example, from them you can get from them a pick of the main articles on, say, the October Surprise, Iran-Contra etc etc... This is an extremely valuable service. To get their catalogue send a couple of dollars to PWR, PO Box 23511, Santa Barbara, CA 93121, USA.

Out on the rim

Wellington Pacific Report is the only radical review of events in the New Zealand area of the Pacific I know of. Most of its contents mean nothing at all to me but in issue 41 is reproduced 7 A4 pages of 1965 official documents on the charter of the New Zealand Joint Intelligence Bureau. It seems likely that this will have been closely modelled on British examples. PO Box 9314 Wellington New Zealand. Ten issues, outside New Zealand, U.S. $26, cheques payable to the WPR.

UFOs, psi and other weird shit

Boy, did my little foray into these fields in issue 24 raise some hackles. Undeterred, I must mention that Magonia, Britain's premier magazine dealing with UFOs and related phenomena, is celebrating 25 years of publication. This is a remarkable achievement by its editor and chief producer, John Rimmer. Better yet, after years of being reproduced on a variety of barely legible dot-matrix computer printers, Magonia is finally easy to read. Magonia, 5 James Terrace, Mortlake Churchyard, London SW14 8HB

Bits and Pieces

Forthcoming
Greenwood Press in Connecticut, USA, are publishing this October Anthony Frewin's The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: An Annotated Film, TV and Videography, 1963-92. This began life as a proposed article for Lobster merely listing the more important films and videos, but it grew and grew until it became book length. Frewin contributed the essay 'Late Breaking News on Clay Shaw's United Kingdom Contacts' to Lobster 20 under his 'nom-de-guerre' Anthony Weeks. Price has yet to be announced but it is expected to be around $50. Lobster will be running an extract in number 26. Greenwood Press are no strangers to the JFK case. They published Guth and Wrone's magisterial bibliography The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Comprehensive Historical and Legal Bibliography 1963-79 (1980).

A spook joke (and a good one, at that)

Many prisoners do not fare too well in the hands of Shin Bet, an [Israeli] agency with a reputation for physically abusing suspects, especially Arabs, to obtain confessions. A joke that made the rounds told of a competition between agents from the CIA, the Soviet KGB and the Shin Bet to see who could most quickly a deer in the wild. The CIA agent entered the forest and returned three days later with a deer on a leash. The KGB agent came back after two days carrying bloody pieces of a dismembered deer. The Shin Bet agent was in and out of the forest in an hour, bringing with him a rabbit that showed signs of having been beaten. When the American and the Russian protested that object of the exercise had been to

capture a deer, the Israeli pointed at the rabbit and said, 'The rabbit confessed. He is a deer.' Taken from Triple Cross: Israel, the Atomic Bomb and the man who leaked the story, Louis Toscano (Robert Hale, London 1991) p. 231. Other spook jokes would be welcomed.

Public Records Office New Openings

In January the 1962 files of the Public Records Office were opened. These included: GS Grenade, Hanratty, Police National Computer, bombing hostile tribes, exporting fissile material, and BBC defence plans, plus over 700 others. Full listings for 1993 openings 10, and 5 each year for 1989-92 from: Roger J Morgan, 15A Kensington Court Gardens, London W8 5QF.

Roger Faligot
Roger Faligot is a prolific French writer on intelligence matters best known in this country for his The Kitson Experiment (Zed/Brandon, London/Ireland 1983). He has recently published, with Remi Kauffer, Histoire mondiale de renseignement: Tome 1: 1870-1939 (ISBN 2-221-07571-4 (t-1). The French I learnt at school is far too rusty to cope with this and I have no idea how good this is. Anybody reading this with good French who would like to review this for the next issue, drop me a line.

Good old Uncle Joe

Though the world is full of lost causes, the rehabilitation of the reputation of Joseph Stalin must be up there at the top of the list of Absolutely and Completely Lost Causes. Undaunted, Karl Dallas -- musician and journalist in the British folk music scene for at least the last 30 years; yes, that Karl Dallas -- seems to be attempting to do just this. He has written and published an 8-page pamphlet, The Murder of Joseph Stalin which seems to me to show little. However, you can decide for yourself, for it is available from Mr Dallas at 1.00 at 5 New Toftshaw, Bradford BD4 6QN.

NameBase/SpyBase in the UK
Richard Alexandra of CGH Services who used to offer these in the UK is no longer doing so. CGH Services has ceased to trade. NameBase is at PO Box 5199, Arlington, VA 22205, USA.