[A-List] Wilson plot: Leigh review, part 3

[Michael Keaney]

THE ENEMIES DEEP WITHIN

A review of David Leigh, "The Wilson Plot: The Intelligence Services and the
Discrediting of a Prime Minister 1945-1976", London: Heinemann, 1988

PART THREE

Setting the stage

So far we have encountered the interlocking institutions of the British
state and civil society as these encompass government, the security
services, the military, business and the press. There will be more to
follow. But enough has been established to make sense of the actions of some
of the key protagonists of this rather sordid tale - one which, even now,
continues to play out. It should also be noted that it was this
institutional configuration that rendered the 1976 intervention by the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) an integral part of the Anglo-US strategy
to bring the UK to heel.

Even as the Labour government of Clement Attlee was setting up the post-war
national security state, some of its officers were determined to root out
subversives and fellow travellers within the government. This was borne out
of a more widespread dissatisfaction among the British elite with a
government that threatened to alter too much of the status quo for comfort.
Not only that, but the Labour Party's origins and a significant portion of
its membership and ideological basis was far too close to the dreaded
communist menace for comfort.

As David Leigh records, there were those in the new administration (and
elsewhere) who, like Henry Wallace in the United States, believed that a
more friendly relationship with the Soviet Union was both possible and
desirable. However, their position was undermined by two key factors.
Firstly, the United States, in its newly dominant role, was determined to
isolate the Soviet bloc and enforce political discipline upon its allies to
that end. Secondly, British great power pretensions led to concerted efforts
- against US wishes but ultimately successful - to acquire the atom bomb. If
anything the foreign policy and security actions of the Attlee government
indicate how constrained were its personnel by the institutional
configuration of British state and civil society. A crucial component of
this configuration was the mindset of empire. The worthy egalitarian goals
of the Labour Party's domestic policies were not matched by its foreign and
security policies. To some extent this is because of the constraints imposed
by an overbearing hegemon, the US. In addition, British state and society
contained heavily vested interests in the maintenance of empire, even as
that became increasingly illusory. But Labour politicians themselves were
largely the product of a culture that was Kiplingesque in its regard for the
colonies and thoroughly imperialist in its geopolitical vista. It was a
pattern to be repeatedly displayed in the succeeding Labour governments of
Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. It is, perhaps, tempting to draw the
conclusion that only proletarian revolution could have successfully
overthrown the old order. However, as much as the personnel of the old order
might have been dispensed with, the cultural traits and assumptions they
embodied would have required a more sustained assault. As the Soviet cult of
Lenin showed, the iconography of the otherwise persecuted Russian Orthodox
Church was well understood by Stalin to be a useful means of legitimating
his regime in a manner that "scientific socialism" could not. The steadfast
attachment to empire and monarchy among significant sections of public and
elite opinion even today shows how even the notoriously empiricist-minded
British retain idealisms above their station. And these informed both the
actions and their unintended consequences of the Attlee government's foreign
and security policy.

MI5 had already sealed the downfall of a Labour government in 1924 with its
"leaking" to the Daily Mail of the Zinoviev letter. Leigh relates a
little-known tale involving Ramsay MacDonald's second government, elected in
1929 and collapsed in 1931, as MacDonald capitulated to economic "wisdom" in
the face of global depression and formed the National Government, splitting
the Labour Party and thereby marginalising it for the rest of the decade. In
1931 MI6 together with a Labour MP, Rex Fletcher (later an Aviation Minister
under Attlee and ennobled Lord Winster thereafter), retrieved a series of
compromising letters MacDonald had "written some years earlier to a
'continental cocotte' who was threatening to reveal them" (p. 26). A sexual
scandal would have ruined MacDonald immediately. A National Government, on
the other hand, would both defer and mitigate that ruin, by ensuring the
establishment's eternal gratitude to MacDonald for bringing down, for a
second time, a Labour government. Now, in the late 1940s, in the enveloping
cloud of anti-Communist suspicion and paranoia, MI5 and MI6 would turn its
sights on certain individuals within the new administration. One of these
was Harold Wilson, appointed as a junior trade minister under Sir Stafford
Cripps (who had been wartime UK ambassador to Moscow), and later his
successor as President of the Board of Trade.

Both Wilson and Cripps believed, like Wallace, that friendly Anglo-Soviet
relations were in the interests of Britain. This was particularly because of
the UK's desperate economic position, it being barely in a position to
reconstruct a shattered infrastructure. Another reason for British penury
was the Lend-Lease deal struck with the US by Churchill:

        "Wilson shared the sense of bitterness over the fact that the US,
with its shrewd terms for war-time 'lend-lease', had not only colonised
Britain's lucrative pre-war markets in Latin America, but had also stolen
her scientific heritage by getting free manufacturing rights to British
inventions in return for desperately needed supplies. Jet aircraft were one
of the key technologies Wilson singled out in his later reminiscences, along
with nuclear research, radar and antibiotics" (p. 39).

As a result Britain was saddled with what turned out to be a perennial
balance of payments problem. In the early post-war years, potentially
lucrative trade deals with the Soviet Union offered hope that this problem
could be mitigated, if not solved. Wilson's involvement with an ultimately
thwarted effort to sell Rolls Royce Air Force jet planes attracted MI6's
attention, especially when he formed a friendship with the Soviet trade
negotiator, Anastas Mikoyan. Also not helping matters was a rather pathetic
corruption case involving a junior trade minister, John Belcher, who was
involved in working political favours in return for gifts courtesy of
characters to whom Leigh refers simply as "the Sherman brothers" (p. 58),
who used a Polish-Jewish intermediary, Sidney Stanley, as their link-man
with Belcher. Wilson was cleared of any wrong-doing, but was subjected to
intense scrutiny by Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross, who later
resigned his Labour Party membership and became a longstanding enemy of
Wilson, as we have already seen.

Wilson subsequently went on to conduct many more business deals in the
Soviet Union in both government and a private capacity, working as a
consultant for such businessmen as Joseph Kagan and Rudy Sternberg - both
Jewish emigres from Central Europe (like Robert Maxwell) who excited the
attention of the security services because of their continuing links with
Communist countries. Over the years Peter Wright's grouping within MI5 would
keep a watchful eye on the activities of Kagan and Sternberg, using their
flaws to smear Wilson. But a more immediate confirmation of security service
suspicions regarding Wilson was his resignation from the government, along
with Aneurin Bevan and John Freeman, in April 1951 over the costs of a
rearmament policy forced upon Attlee by President Truman in support of the
Korean War. In so doing, Wilson aligned himself with the Bevanite faction of
the Labour Party, whose "anti-US" stance (including unilateral nuclear
disarmament) was immediately equated with a pro-communist one. This was
certainly how Wilson's new-found friends in the "Keep Left" group of Labour
MPs were regarded, especially by Labour rightwingers including the
aforementioned ex-MI6 agent Lord Winster, while Shawcross, Wilson's
successor at the Board of Trade, denounced him as a Communist
fellow-traveller. Attlee's successor as Labour Party leader, Hugh Gaitskell,
added to the strife by red-baiting the Bevanites.

Wilson's consultancy work for Montague Meyer, timber importers with whom he
had had dealings as a trade minister, during the 1950s added to the mistrust
among security agents concerned at the level of Soviet penetration of
British society. The discovery of high level spies like Guy Burgess, Donald
Maclean, Anthony Blunt (hushed up for years), George Blake and Kim Philby
ratcheted up the paranoia level within MI5, whose job it was to conduct
countersubversion. And its most enthusiastic exponent was Peter Wright.

The Wright/Angleton axis

George Wigg was originally appointed by Wilson as his link-man to the
security services. As we have seen, his efforts were subverted, largely by
Conservative MP Henry Kerby. Disastrously for both Wigg and Wilson, and way
beyond Kerby's smokescreen tactics, were the machinations of the CIA's
legendary head of countersubversion, James Jesus Angleton. With Roger Hollis
retiring as head of MI5 in 1965, it was important to Angleton that a
suitably reliable successor be found, and that was Martin Furnival Jones.
Hollis had resisted efforts by CIA chief Richard Helms to get involved in
British counterespionage, and ended up with being suspected as a KGB double
agent for his trouble. The two were not on speaking terms as a result. But
with the succession of "FJ", CIA-sponsored plans for international
reorganisation and coordination of intelligence efforts took shape:

        "The most important change planned was the decision to set up a
formal counter-intelligence machine on a multinational basis, to parallel
the systems which bound GCHQ and MI6 to their English-speaking cousins. This
was CAZAB - super-secret conferences every eighteen months or so, presided
over by Angleton, at which the contents of counter-intelligence files would
be freely shared between the Canadians, the Americans, the New Zealanders,
the Australians, and the British (hence the acronym). So, it might
reasonably be said, one of Wilson's first acts as head of the new Socialist
government was to give away even more British autonomy to the US. Except
that, according to Wright, Wilson was wholly unaware of CAZAB, which was set
up behind the backs of the politicians in Britain.
                "If George Wigg had imagined that the planned reforms in
MI5, about which he was no doubt told, constituted an improvement in
'security', he might well have asked 'Whose security?' In the long run,
Angleton, and Angleton's ideas, were merely given a free run in a process
that was to do Harold Wilson great harm. The finest service Wigg could have
done was to ensure that, when Hollis retired at the end of 1965, the Labour
government put in their own man as Director-General of MI5. Wilson had the
right to appoint the heads of the Intelligence services. Indeed, it was
reported that he had his own candidate in mind - Eric St Johnston, Chief
Constable of Lancashire, who had had many dealings with Leconfield House
[MI5 HQ]. But Wigg had been captured by those he had set out to control: he
persuaded Wilson to let the 'professional' Martin Furnival Jones inherit the
organisation" (p. 104).

Much has been written about Angleton. [*] His paranoia eventually led to his
downfall, as he ended up almost paralysing his own employer in a fruitless
search for a KGB mole. His long relationship with Wright contributed to a
similarly frantic introspection within MI5, as Wright and others came to be
convinced of the existence of a KGB mole within the British service. Wright
was sure that this was Roger Hollis, who succeeded Dick Goldsmith White as
head of MI5 in 1956, staying until 1966. Hollis's successor, Furnival Jones,
oversaw the Wright/Angleton-inspired inquisition within MI5 that led to his
own eventual successor's (Michael Hanley's) interrogation, and the dismissal
of "half a dozen junior Intelligence service officers" (p. 123). While this
was going on MI5 officers were involved in the investigation of members of
Harold Wilson's government that resulted in the smearing of rising stars
Niall MacDermot (himself a former MI6 agent) and Judith Hart, as well as
Cabinet Ministers Stephen Swingler, Sir Barnet Stross and John Stonehouse,
whose Czechoslovakian connections, tied to his rather dodgy business
practices, rendered him a very soft target in such a paranoid climate.
Robert Maxwell, then an MP, was also investigated and ultimately cleared.
[**] But the most egregious example of Wright's paranoia and his self-taught
interrogation methods is that involving the investigation of Labour MP
Bernard Floud.

While Anthony Blunt had long been known to have been a KGB double agent, his
treachery was covered up by the establishment until 1979. Blunt was given
immunity and was used by Peter Wright in a futile effort to glean more names
to add to the countersubversion tally. Blunt, despite copious amounts of
alcohol, remained evasive. He did concur, however, with Wright that it was
possible that his assistant at the Courtauld Institute, Phoebe Pool, was
also a KGB agent, having been in contact with communists at Oxford. However,
by this time Pool, having suffered severe clinical depression, had been
institutionalised. This did not stop an eager Wright from chasing this
apparently promising lead and badgering Pool at her bedside. Pool did,
incoherently, supply a number of names for Wright to check, including that
of Bernard Floud and his brother, Peter. Floud had, like many Labour Party
members and MPs, been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s. Even the
notoriously anti-Communist Gaitskell was, in 1932, calling for revolution.
But Floud had renounced his communism and had carved out a promising
political career within the newly ascendant Labour Party of Harold Wilson.
Wilson's friend, and yet another MI5 target, Sidney Bernstein, provided
Floud with a seat on the board of Granada Television. Prone to depression,
Floud experienced a severe bout when, after a long illness, his wife died in
January 1967. Plunged into gloomy despair, he broke down in the middle of a
Granada board meeting and was admitted to a London nursing home and treated
with electro-convulsive therapy. By July of that year Floud was released and
made several attempts to return to work. These were not successful. In part,
this was because it was at this time that Wright made his move, subjecting
Floud to repeated interrogations, although exactly how many we cannot be
sure of, because of the usual disinformation peddled by MI5, whether via
Wright himself, or apologists like Conservative MP Rupert Allason who, like
Chapman Pincher, writes semi-truthful "histories" of the intelligence
services under the name "Nigel West". Floud committed suicide on 9 October,
1967, after having admitted to his family and friends for some time that he
had been feeling suicidal. His attempt to resume work at Granada that very
day had been unsuccessful, despite Bernstein's and others' encouragement.
And worse was to follow:

        "When Roderick Floud came downstairs the next morning, he found that
his father, having carefully arranged his bank statements on the desk and
wrapped himself in a blanket, had turned on the gas poker and killed himself
with it. Shortly after hearing the news of Bernard Floud's death, the
distraught Phoebe Pool, who had unwittingly given his name to MI5, threw
herself under a Tube train. Wright does concede that he was now stopped from
carrying on his witch-hunt. He claims, although one is disinclined to
believe him, that Martin Furnival Jones said, 'All these suicides. They'll
ruin our image.'" (p. 135)

These were far from the last lives to be touched by the paranoid
Wright/Angleton axis. [***]

Coup de ville

It was in 1968 that the first of two planned military takeovers of Britain
took shape. Cecil King, Daily Mirror magnate, instigated a campaign to
overthrow Wilson and replace him with a government of national unity, backed
by the army. On 5 May of that year he sent Hugh Cudlipp, the editor of the
Mirror, to see Earl Mountbatten of Burma, whose dissatisfaction with
Labour's defence cutbacks had soured his originally cordial relationship
with the administration. Mountbatten subsequently met with King, whose
animus toward Wilson apparently derived primarily from Wilson's refusal to
grant him either a Cabinet post or a hereditary peerage. [****]

Mountbatten took with him his friend, and Wilson's own scientific adviser,
Solly Zuckerman. Zuckerman walked out of the meeting denouncing it as "rank
treachery" but keeping it secret nonetheless. Mountbatten apparently "toyed"
with the idea of heading a coup while King tried to drum up support,
including by addressing young army officers at Sandhurst and meetings with
Ministry of Defence personnel. It all came to nothing in the end, but it did
set the tone for events that took place during the next seven years, and was
also symptomatic of the kind of establishment anxiety that deepened in the
interim and was given full freedom of expression in the letters pages of
William Rees-Mogg's Times and the Daily Telegraph. Even Rees-Mogg's
economics correspondent, Peter Jay, a future ambassador to the US and chief
of staff to Robert Maxwell during the 1980s (all in all, a very interesting
CV), could write articles about spiralling demand pull inflation leading to
chaos and ultimately the emergence of a "strong man" to put things right
again. All such apocalyptic doom-mongering was given free rein by Rees-Mogg,
a key establishment player and notable example of a peculiarly English
species, the "leading Catholic layperson". [*****] Meanwhile others like
Pincher and William Massie continued to sow mischievous rumours in the
press, helpfully reminding their readers of past scandals and indiscretions
involving Labour MPs and present "concerns".

The paranoia within the security services and surrounding establishment
anxiety over the apparent radicalism of Labour politicians led ex-MI6 deputy
chief, George Kennedy Young, to put together in the early 1970s a more
substantial effort aimed at the "salvation" of Britain: the Unison Committee
for Action. A sample of Young's "reasoning" reads as follows:

        "Under a threat of invasion ... a security counter-action need cover
no more than 5,000 persons, including some 40 MPs, not all of them Labour;
several hundred journalists and media employees, plus their supporting
academics and clerics; the full-time members and main activists of the CPGB
and the Socialist Workers Party; and the directing elements of the 30 or 40
bodies affecting concern and compassion for youth, age, civil liberties,
social research and minority grievances. The total internment could easily
be accommodated in a lesser 'Gaelic archipelago' off the West Highlands ...
One fundamental change since that analogous 1940 situation would be the
presence of  those 3.5 million non-Europeans whose loyalties centre round
their own communities, and whose conduct would be unpredictable under threat
of conquest. _National survival demands that this delicate factor be fully
evaluated and taken into account_ (Young, quoted by Leigh, pp. 158-9).

This earlier application of Norman Tebbit's famous "cricket test" shows the
depth of thought that was devoted to the "problem" of a Britain fast going
out of control.

Young recruited the members of the Unison Committee from some well known
establishment haunts:

        "CIA and MI5 derangement with regard to the Prime Minister was
paralleled - parodied is perhaps a better word - by the moth-eaten would-be
junta which surrounded 'Unison' and George Kennedy Young. Some of these
people could be found in the Carlton Club, home of traditional Toryism.
Others had a natural habitat in a lesser-known building in Knightsbridge,
near Sloane Square. This was the Special Forces Club at 8 Herbert Crescent,
which has no name-plate and a discreet buzzer for entry" (p. 217).

Membership of this latter club included SAS troops past and present, some US
members with military and intelligence background (including Reagan's CIA
chief William Casey, who was an honorary member until his death), Marines,
RAF "special duty squadrons", Paratroops, Royal Navy "special duties", Naval
Intelligence, the Foreign Office, the Special Boat Service (former Liberal
Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown's alma mater), and the police (Chief
Constables and Special Branch officers). From this motley crew Young
recruited Colonel Robert Butler, who, in turn tried to get hold of Airey
Neave, who was too politically sharp to get overtly involved in such a
dubious enterprise, although hardly unsympathetic. As Leigh puts it, Butler
was subsequently "pointed towards another one-man warrior against the
Kremlin": General Walter Walker (p. 220). Walker was and remains truly the
archetype of "gung-ho"ism. He proudly boasts of having fought the
"communist" Sukarno [¤] He also regarded Wilson as a KGB agent.

Also on Young's committee was Ross McWhirter, brother of Norris (of the
Freedom Association and most recently the Campaign for United Kingdom
Conservatism), and associate of the racist anti-semite the Dowager Lady Jane
Birdwood, with whom he ran a far-right magazine "Majority", prior to his
assassination by the IRA in 1975. Both McWhirters regularly organised
strike-breaking activities and legal actions against trade unionists and
Irish republicans, hence the IRA's interest in this otherwise apparently
harmless compiler of the Guinness Book of Records. [¤¤] Leigh does not
explain whether Norris McWhirter was similarly involved in Unison, although
as a casual glance at the careers of these twin brothers might suggest,
there was a remarkable degree of shared interests and activities which would
reasonably incline one to assume Norris's close association with Young's
group. Possibly the English libel laws prevented Leigh from developing this
point.

Another Unison member was Colonel Ronnie Wareing, an MI6 agent who fled
Portugal in 1974 as the dictatorship there collapsed. Having fled
"communism" there, he pledged to fight it at home.

Butler also attempted to recruit apparently sympathetic army officers like
the army's commander in Northern Ireland, General Anthony Farrar-Hockley,
and Field Marshal Lord Carver, without success. But there were those who did
remain outside Unison who nevertheless retained contact with it, including
David Stirling, founder of the SAS and connected to intelligence. But the
increasingly rightwing and militaristic nature of Unison prompted him to set
up his own volunteer body, GB75, as a "more presentable" opposition to the
Labour Government-induced chaos.

Young believed that soldiers, indeed any citizens, acting in the name of the
Queen, could, with the utmost patriotism, act against the elected (Labour)
government of the day. It was a typical justification employed by MI5
officers like Peter Wright, Martin Furnival Jones and Michael Hanley. This
is also the line used by hardline Ulster loyalists, who justify their
apparently disloyal activities as directed at the government, not the
monarch. Of course the intimate links between loyalist paramilitaries and
institutions and personnel of the British state are well known. The
reluctance of the British army to break a loyalist strike that paralysed
Northern Ireland in May 1974 was in marked contrast to the efforts made to
intern republican activists and IRA suspects.

In the midst of this maelstrom of intrigue, Leigh relates:

        "Airey Neave, the Tory intriguer with Intelligence connections, took
a carefully provoking line. While publicly deploring the danger of 'an
unofficial force', he and other Monday Clubbers [¤¤¤] put their names to a
call for the next Conservative government to create a 'voluntary reserve' of
citizens. The Labour Defence Minister Roy Mason responded with a violent
speech in August 1974, attacking what he called a 'near-fascist
groundswell.' He asked Wilson to have the 'private armies' investigated by
Hanley's MI5 ... [Mason] banned contact between serving officers and the
'volunteer' organisations, which eventually petered out. Mason promptly
became the victim of a 'security' smear: in December 1974 William Massie in
the Sunday Express retailed the false story he had been given that MI5 were
anxious about Mason's own social indiscretions" (pp. 224-5).

Leigh says that there is no evidence of CIA involvement in these private
groups. It would have been necessary for any coup to have succeeded.
However, he does say that, during the early 1970s, the CIA "started to put
its own agents into British trade unions" (p. 213). He does not expand on
this any further, and the reader is left to speculate about what sorts of
activities these agents, apparently independent of the Unison Committee and
like-minded members of the British establishment, were hoping to accomplish
- indeed, if they did accomplish anything. Leigh, nevertheless, explains
this CIA infiltration as part of a larger, Angleton-inspired and directed
"defence of the West".

Global intrigue

The US's unhappiness with Harold Wilson stemmed from his refusal to adhere
absolutely to US foreign policy strictures. He did not, contrary to Lyndon
Johnson's wishes, send troops to Vietnam. His efforts at cutting back
British defence commitments "East of Suez" met with Johnson's opposition,
with the President effectively blackmailing Wilson into remaining committed
to unsustainable defence expenditures while the US supported the UK's
weakening currency in the face of a chronic balance of payments deficit -
the continuing legacy of "Lend-lease". But the 1974 Wilson government posed
even more problems. The secret Anglo-US intelligence "marriage" mentioned
earlier was thwarted over four issues by Wilson.

Firstly, the cost of keeping up GCHQ's technology with that of the US was
becoming prohibitive, and Wilson commissioned the academic Sir Stuart
Hampshire to produce a review effectively derailing GCHQ's demands in this
area. For his trouble Hampshire was smeared by Wright as a security risk,
because of his earlier acquaintances with Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and
James Klugmann, a lifelong Cambridge communist. As a result the US stopped
sharing intelligence gathered via its new RHYOLITE satellites, launched in
1970 and 1973, resuming the collaboration only after Wilson had resigned in
1976, as then CIA director George Bush sought to mend fences with a British
government thoroughly rattled by both Angleton's excesses and the IMF
intervention. Leigh also mentions here that in 1965 the US set up "an
intercept station at Vint Hills Farm, Virginia, to intercept and
successfully break British diplomatic transmissions" (p. 227).

Secondly, Wilson refused to expel renegade CIA officer Philip Agee, whose
book was written and published in the UK. Coming on top of the Watergate
scandal, and the Pike and Church Committees, the US establishment was
reeling, and again, it was only after Wilson's departure (together with that
of Home Secretary Roy Jenkins) that the more amenable adminstration of James
Callaghan, who struck up a good relationship with Gerald Ford and his
anglophile CIA chief George Bush, that Agee was expelled, at the behest of
Michael Hanley acting on behalf of his CAZAB partners.

Thirdly, Wilson refused to get involved in a plot to plunge a newly
independent, Marxist Angola into civil war involving the CIA and South
Africa. [¤¤¤¤]

Fourthly, the efforts at East/West détente, ironically engineered by Nixon
and Kissinger, much to Angleton's apoplexy, suited Wilson very well. Wilson
was heavily involved in putting together the European security and
cooperation agreement in Helsinki in 1975.

        "At Helsinki, where he was conference chairman, his Foreign Office
advisers caused a considerable row by repeatedly trying to delete the phrase
'peaceful coexistence' from his speech. They said it was Leninist
doublespeak favoured by the Soviets and which they in fact regarded as
giving them a licence to attempt world domination. This pressure to
interfere with Wilson's speech came from the US" (p. 230).

Coup du monde

Ultimately, of course, none of MI5's efforts, or those of the even shadier
Wright/Angleton axis, were successful in bringing down Wilson, who had
decided to resign, come what may, by the age of 60, much to the relief of
his wife, who had never enjoyed being a politician's wife. Their
difficulties were ruthlessly exploited by Wright and his gang, as they
sought to link Wilson with Barbara Castle and Marcia Williams, as well as
look for any sexual entrapments with which the KGB, according to Walter
Walker, had undoubtedly compromised him.

However, if Wright can be said to have accomplished anything of
significance, other than the smearing of prominent Labour politicians,
Wilson-connected businessmen and making at least an indirect contribution to
two (possibly three) deaths, it involves the downfall of West German
Chancellor Willi Brandt.

Wright had learned from associates within MI5 who had shared information
with CIA agents that Willi Brandt had himself been suspected as a Soviet
agent as a result of the discovery of old wartime Soviet ciphers. Wright,
already suspicious of Brandt, intercepted communications between the Soviet
Union and a member of Brandt's staff, Gunther Guillaume. Leigh traces the
affair back to the early 1960s when Swedish intelligence, in an interesting
interpretation of neutrality, passed on Soviet wartime coded radio traffic
to the British, who promptly shared it with the CIA. Among the names
mentioned was Brandt, who had fought in Scandinavia with the resistance
during the war. With antennae already primed to monitor Brandt very closely,
it was only a matter of time that Guillaume was discovered, thanks to both
Wright and GCHQ interceptions of East German signal traffic. The architect
of Ostpolitik fell on his sword. According to Wright, this was because he
wanted to stop further inquiries into his own activities.

Another world leader who was mysteriously shunted aside at this time was
Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam. Whitlam's attempts to shake up the
Australian intelligence services, removing the heads of both ASIO and ASIS,
together with his establishment of a commission of inquiry into the
intelligence services in August 1974 "caused chills among British
intelligence men" (p. 232), especially when he had already authorised his
Attorney General to "raid" the ASIO offices in March 1973. [¤¤¤¤¤] As
Britain was the former colonial power and, constitutionally, still a major
player in Australian politics, this was significant. Whitlam's threats to
the CIA that he would not renew the lease of its Pine Gap installation were
the last straw: CAZAB/Echelon's integrity was being undermined and it was
time to act. Kerr had already served with British intelligence during the
war. As we have seen, its tight old boy network was still very operational
right up to the end of the 1970s. It is safe to assume that Kerr had all the
same prejudices and views of Left politicians that his MI5/MI6 peers had,
and was regarded as safe by the his CIA contacts. Thus Kerr, with the full
assurance of the backing of the Wright/Angleton axis and its titular heads,
proceeded, on a constitutional technicality, to dispose of Whitlam.

Making the economy scream

Perhaps, if you have made it this far, you are wondering why, in a forum
devoted, supposedly, to the discussion of progressive political economics,
there is a lengthy (even tiresome) review of an old book about events that
do not appear to impinge directly on the e-list's raison d'être. There are
two basic, and related reasons for this. Firstly, to imagine that somehow
the "economy" and "economic policy" are spheres separate from the state is
to indulge the classical liberal fantasy that informs the contradictions
inherent in contemporary capitalism. Secondly, in May 2001 there took place
an extended, and often rancorous, debate about the IMF's 1976 intervention
in the British economy between Brad DeLong and me. It can be summarised as
follows:

... the substance of Brad's defence of the IMF is as follows:

1. The IMF gives governments in trouble a few more options in order to turn
a short sharp shock into, hopefully, a longer period of less painful and
more productive adjustment

2. The IMF provided exactly that to Britain in 1976

3. All went well, all things considered

4. Economists who do not go to work in Wall Street are, generally speaking,
charitable souls who wish to make the world a better place

In response to which, I have argued, taking time and effort to find
documentary support, that

1. There has not been one single notable success of supercharged
conditionality IMF intervention _improving_ the dire economic straits of any
country unfortunate enough to have to call it in. Despite being asked, Brad
cannot offer a single example to refute a claim made not only by me, but by
numerous other commentators across the political spectrum, including Jim
O'Connor and Chalmers Johnson. I have in fact suggested that, depending on
one's criteria, UK 1976 represents the only notable success of the IMF in
the last 25 years. But not for the reasons Brad would have us believe,
because...

2. The IMF in fact went to great lengths to close off a number of options
that Callaghan was pursuing in 1976. Not only was the offer from Helmut
Schmidt prevented from having effect, but also, Callaghan's efforts to use
Britain's NATO commitments as a bargaining chip were ignored completely by
the US Treasury team that was determined to impose economic policies upon a
democratically elected UK government more in tune with the "neanderthal
conservative" predilections of Arthur Burns and the Wall Street fraternity.
(For the NATO aspects of Callaghan's negotiations, see both Mark Harmon and
Kenneth O. Morgan's books, cited earlier).

3. What exactly is the counterfactual being employed here? What if Schmidt
had been able to bail out the UK free of being leaned on by Simon, Yeo and
Burns? What if the UK had been "allowed" to scale back its NATO commitments,
thereby reducing public expenditure? But we know that military spending,
even for neanderthal conservatives, never qualifies as "profligate".
Meanwhile, just look what happened to the government that took the
conditions but left the loan. Look at the social, political and economic
mess caused by these conditions. Look at the pitiful end suffered by
Callaghan and his government (for which Brad professes sympathy). Look at
the aftermath, whose consequences reached far beyond the shores of old
Blighty.

4. How rich is rich? Is sacrificing a Wall Street career for consultancy
with top level agencies such as the World Bank, IMF, US Treasury, Harvard
Institute for International Development really going to expose anyone to the
risk of penury? As far as I can see, the only poverty resulting here has
been that suffered by those supposedly the beneficiaries of wisdom from
people who argue, with impeccable economic logic, that toxic waste ought to
be dumped in poorer countries. Well, now the poorer folks of Russia can look
forward to just that, thanks to the sort of reasoning that places the
problems of fiscal crisis and balance of payments (themselves exacerbated
thanks to the very same "wisdom") above and beyond trivialities like
environmental and public health and safety.

[see http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2001II/msg01940.html]

Brad queried specifically my linkage of the IMF intervention with the
activities of MI5. Mark Jones offered a comprehensive reply. [#] In addition
to Mark's reply I offer the following additional pieces of evidence.

In Part 2 I quoted, at length, Leigh's description of the UK's security
services' penetration of "civil society": corporate boardrooms, university
common rooms, gentlemen's clubs, the Westminster lobby, Fleet Street. When
George Kennedy Young left MI6 in 1961, he joined merchant bankers Kleinwort
Benson (later to rake in fortunes courtesy of Thatcher's privatisation
bonanzas). Disgraced former Labour Cabinet Minister John Stonehouse, in his
memoirs "Death of an Idealist", published in 1975, wrote that when he, in a
private business capacity, had consulted with Kleinwort Benson during the
early 1970s, all the board could discuss over lunch was communist
infiltration and leadership of UK trade unions. Meanwhile Hambros, a
quintessentially City of London institution, is well known as the preferred
banker of MI6. It is precisely this sort of linkage and overlap that makes
the sort of analysis practised by G. William Domhoff in his studies of the
US power elite so suited to the scrutiny of the British establishment. And
the notion that somehow the UK banking fraternity would not have been a
party to the "settlement" forced upon the Callaghan government by the IMF
can be described, most charitably, as naïve.

The Wright/Angleton axis had, by the time Wilson resigned, dissolved.
Angleton was deposed in 1974, while Wright had retired in January 1976. But
of course it was not just the "rogue" elements of MI5 and the CIA that
conspired to bring down the Labour government. The head of MI5, Michael
Hanley, was very sympathetic to Wright's aims, if not towards Wright
personally. It was a blazing row with Hanley that confirmed Wilson's
decision to resign as Prime Minister. Meanwhile the US security
establishment was well up to speed with developments in the UK. Via its
National Security Agency listening posts and other institutionalised forms
of hegemony, it was very much involved in directing matters from the other
end of the Atlantic. Mark D. Harmon tells us that President Ford's National
Security adviser Brent Scowcroft kept Chairman of the Council of Economic
Advisers Alan Greenspan on a tight leash, eager as he was to comment
publicly on British economic policy ("The British Labour Government and the
1976 IMF Crisis", London: Macmillan, 1997, p. 142). Scowcroft prepared the
agenda of a meeting between Ford and Harold Lever, Cabinet Minister and
economic adviser to both Wilson and Callaghan (p. 178). To suggest that the
US Treasury and the IMF were acting in isolation from the rest of the state
apparatus is, once again, wrongheaded. The only arm of state apparently left
out of the loop in this instance was Henry Kissinger's State Department,
whose softly, softly approach was completely ignored, much to Henry's
dismay.

Coming on top of the domestic intrigue aimed at undermining the Labour
government, the IMF's intervention was a decisive blow that greatly assisted
the development of the policy framework so enthusiastically adopted three
years later by Margaret Thatcher, who had been hoisted into position by the
domestic intriguers of the MI5-Monday Club-City of London nexus. And
charitable "Left" views of the IMF intervention should take Harmon's
sobering conclusion into account:

        "For the Labour Party, the 1976 crisis was a dramatic demonstration
of the incompatibility of a Labour Government's domestic political
imperatives with Britain's external economic constraints. Under intense
bilateral, multilateral, and structural pressures, this incompatibility was
resolved through a sacrifice of the domestic imperatives rather than a
lessening of the international constraints. The humiliation of IMF
conditionality gave the Conservatives an issue that was used relentlessly
against Labour for the remainder of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s. For
the Party itself, the IMF crisis and economic retrenchment were contributory
factors underlying the trade union disenchantment and militancy of 1978-9
that led to Labour's disastrous electoral loss in May 1979, as well as the
internal convulsions Labour experienced in the early 1980s. Labour would
remain out of power for nearly two decades." (Harmon, p. 233)

New Labour, New Britain

Much has changed in Britain since the days of the Thatcherite ascendancy.
Thatcherism is firmly entrenched in the political and economic landscape,
having permeated the civil service and the vast majority of policy
discourse. Children are being indoctrinated with the ideology of business
from an early age, and this is pronounced good by a biographer of Scottish
socialist Jimmy Maxton, one Gordon Brown. Public services are being
rationalised and privatised, while hungry academics eager for a lucrative
slice of the action invent performance measures and spurious concepts by
which to monitor the "progress" of public service delivery. The Conservative
Party has succeeded in modernising Britain so much that it has made itself
obsolete, with Thatcher's iconic status within the party a ridiculous
anachronism without. And, of course, New Labour has emerged to continue her
work, but cognisant of the "new times" in which it must accomplish its
tasks.

While many changes are substantial, others are more superficial. We began
this review by noting the supposedly more "open" and "accountable" image
projected by the "modern" MI5 - an agency of state that still cannot
publicly admit its own past, for which a New Labour Home Secretary, Jack
Straw, professes not to bear a grudge. But, as has been hinted already,
elements of the Labour Right together with fallout from the Communist Party
(Demos) and assorted fellow travellers have created a new establishment,
with a very different personnel (the post-war generation has gone, finally -
either deceased or thoroughly irrelevant, as with the backers of Neil
Hamilton), but with remarkably similar predilections and techniques.

Mark Jones surprised many on the list (and elsewhere) when he declared that
the Guardian newspaper "is controlled and operated by MI5". [##] As we have
seen, MI5's tentacles stretch very far and deep into the world of UK
newspaper publishing. But the Guardian?? Surely not. I will offer one piece
of supporting evidence.

In 1977, an unauthorised biography of Harold Wilson was published. Entitled
"Harold Wilson: Yorkshire Walter Mitty", it was written by Andrew Roth.
Roth's resurrection of stories circulated by the security services in the
late 1940s concerning Wilson's unhappy marriage, his supposed affair with
Barbara Castle and his wife's supposed affair with a Polish academic,
prompted Wilson to issue a libel writ on this and other falsehoods. The book
was withdrawn and Wilson awarded £10,000 damages (Leigh, p. 55). Who was
Walter Mitty anyway? He was a famous fictional character invented by James
Thurber in 1941, whose perpetual daydreaming of himself in heroic guises
gets him into trouble with those closest to him. Appending this
characterisation to Wilson simply served to compound the rumours surrounding
his mysterious resignation that his paranoia had gotten to him. Of course we
now know, beyond a doubt, that there was plenty for Wilson to be paranoid
about. Roth, himself, was very much in a position to know that too, despite
his apparent rubbishing of the idea.

Roth, described as a "reputable Canadian political journalist" by Leigh (p.
55), served with the US Navy Office of Naval Intelligence during the Second
World War, and became a UK resident in 1950. His stock-in-trade is
"political profiles" - "humourous" pen portraits of UK politicians. He has
published a weekly newsletter, "Westminster Confidential", filled with
gossip about Parliamentarians - for almost five decades. [###]
Interestingly, it was this publication that was the first to uncover the
Profumo scandal in 1963. Roth has been a longtime contributor to the
Guardian, right up to the present. His inaccurate and scurrilous political
profiles can be accessed via the Guardian's website, and form the
"intelligence" often employed by other Guardian journalists in their
discussions of politicians, as with Andrew Brown's smear of Ken Livingstone,
highlighted in Part 2. One wonders how on earth Leigh could describe Roth as
"reputable", unless he was trying to indicate that Roth's reputation was
known, but not for the most reputable reasons. It seems a strange error for
someone like Leigh to make. The Guardian, meanwhile, describes Roth as
"inimitable", providing "masterly dissections of the key dramatis personae
of the British parliament" [####].

Thus, with roots deep in the inter-war period, the organs of the British
establishment have effected an immense change in the entire British
political economy, assisted by their allies/masters across the Atlantic as
and when necessary. The political vehicle for this transformation, the
Conservative Party, has, for the time being, outlived its usefulness, rather
like its former leader, the beneficiary of MI5 largesse. The new guardians
of the new establishment, New Labour, retain its predecessors' obsession
with secrecy and control-freakery, together with a paranoia about resurgent
Left organisation. The result is an overbearing state in partnership with an
equally hegemonic global monopoly capital.

Peter Wright, having suffered financial difficulty most of his life, finally
enjoyed prosperity thanks to his former employer's efforts to deprive him of
the opportunity. The publicity derived from Wright's fight with the Thatcher
government guaranteed stellar sales for "Spycatcher". He died in April 1995.
He had long since become a relic of an age that no longer existed, and
which, even then, was reluctant to acknowledge his existence. He exemplified
the hermetically sealed world of paranoia that characterised the post-war
security services, and which led them to be characterised by one-time Chief
of the British Staff, Field Marshal Lord Carver, as follows:

"The people concerned seem to live in a completely closed world, whereby
what really went on, and what people actually thought and did, they just did
not understand" (quoted in Leigh, p. 255).

Perhaps today, the same can be said of the economists employed by the IMF.
It is still the case with the national security states of the UK and the US,
whose activities have, if anything, been boosted by the "Third Way"
governments supposedly spearheading the progressive renaissance.

Harold Wilson, despite being a Bevanite, perhaps even because, was as much a
prisoner of the assumptions that underlay the British status quo. He was not
a revolutionary. Like Callaghan and Gaitskell and most other Labour Party
politicians, he was largely content to make the status quo work better by
tinkering with it. He did not question the underlying rationale of that
status quo. More's the pity. Wilson today seems far more radical than the
current New Labour leadership. Even Edward Heath has declared that Tony
Blair is far too right wing for him. But the UK establishment's hounding of
Wilson bequeathed to its successor generation a New Labour that carries on,
most assuredly, where its Thatcherite predecessor left off. Perhaps the
British Left will finally see beyond the Labour Party and find an
alternative outlet for its organising energies. If it does, it should do so
in the full knowledge that New Labour will be as quick to employ the
instruments of state to oppose it as the Conservative establishment was to
undermine Wilson and Callaghan. But at least it will not find itself held
hostage to a compromise that is, itself, doomed to failure because of the
uncompromising nature of the forces arrayed against it.


Footnotes

[*] A good place to start is the chapter devoted to him by Joel Kovel in
"Red Hunting in the Promised Land", op. cit.

[**] Maxwell was subsequently found, in a Department of Trade Inspectors'
report in 1971, to be "unfit" to direct a public limited company. This was
resurrected in the aftermath of his death in 1991. But the idea that
Maxwell's wheeling and dealing was an aberration stretches credibility.
Maxwell belongs with a unique group of individuals in British business life
who were never accepted into the hallowed establishment halls and were
consequently outsiders who had to go to extra lengths to gain the
credibility that they so earnestly desired. Others in this category included
Rowland "Tiny" Rowland, head of Lonrho and memorably described by Edward
Heath while PM as the "unacceptable face of capitalism", Joseph Kagan, an
exiled Lithuanian Jew with a successful raincoat manufacturing business,
and, more recently, Mohamed al-Fayed, who, with his brother and the backing
of the Sultan of Brunei, successfully bought the House of Fraser store chain
from under a predatory Rowland's nose, thus spawning one of the great
business feuds of the 1980s/90s. All of these individuals have, in one way
or another, been thwarted by the establishment they craved to join, although
it is the non-Jews, Rowland and Fayed, who have, perhaps had the last laugh
against their nemeses. Rowland very astutely appointed Tory backbencher
Edward du Cann as chairman of Lonrho, in succession to another Conservative
MP, Sir Duncan Sandys. As Chairman of the 1922 Committee of Tory MPs, it was
du Cann who oversaw, procedurally, the deposing of Heath by the Tory right,
masterminded by Airey Neave. Fayed, meanwhile, can be seen as an instrument
by which the old political order of which Neave was a major part was itself
allowed to crumble. His revelations concerning the "cash for questions"
scandal - in which largely Tory MPs availed themselves of brown envelopes
stuffed with cash in return for lobbying on Fayed's behalf - brought about
the downfall of Neil Hamilton, a Minister for Corporate Affairs, Tim Smith,
a junior Northern Ireland Minister, and Jonathan Aitken, a Minister for
Defence Procurement with intimate involvement in both the notorious
al-Yamamah arms deal struck by Thatcher with the Saudi regime and the
arms-to-Iraq scandal, as a director of Astra, the arms company at the centre
of the scandal. Aitken went to prison (briefly), found guilty of perjury,
while Hamilton sued Fayed for libel unsuccessfully. Hamilton's financial
backers and supporters read like a who's who of the Thatcher gang that
propelled her into the Tory leadership in 1975 and who made alternative
plans in the event that her ascendancy stalled: Lord Harris of High Cross,
Norris McWhirter, the Earl of Portsmouth, Alfred Sherman, Taki
Theodoracopolus, Lord Hanson, and Gerald Howarth MP. Howarth, together with
Hamilton, was the subject of a controversial BBC Panorama documentary in
1985, "Maggie's Militant Tendency", in which their past links with such
rightwing outfits like the Conservative Monday Club and other quasi fascist
organisations was aired. With the financial help of Sir James Goldsmith,
Hamilton and Howarth sued the BBC for libel. The BBC's board of governors,
chaired by Stuart Young (brother of Cabinet minister Lord David Young) with
William Rees-Mogg as his deputy, instructed Director General Alasdair Milne
to concede the case, thus discrediting the BBC's current affairs department
and signalling an intensification of the full-scale assault by the Thatcher
gang against the entire institution. The current affairs department was
subsequently merged with the news department by John Birt, overseer of
former Rees-Mogg acolyte Peter Jay's apocalyptic doom-laden warnings in the
1970s London Weekend TV series, "Weekend World". On Hamilton, see
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,3944279,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/hamilton/article/0,2763,510177,00.html
Lord Hanson was also involved in the Westland affair. Together with fellow
Thatcherite and then-British Airways chairman Lord King, he was alleged by
helicopter tycoon Alan Bristow to have offered Bristow a peerage if he
supported the Thatcher-backed US Sikorsky-Fiat takeover of Westland
Helicopters. Clearly, the wheeling and dealing of Maxwell, Rowland, Kagan
and Fayed was a mirror-image of the behaviour of those whom they so desired
to emulate. For a good summary of Rowland's career, see
http://www.wsws.org/news/1998/july1998/rowl-j29.shtml

[***] Leigh teasingly suggests that Wright may have been at least partly
responsible for the death of another person whose name was supplied by
Phoebe Pool - the diplomat, Sir Andrew Cohen. Shortly after Wright learned
of him Cohen died of a heart attack, and, as Leigh tells us, "Wright does
not volunteer in his memoirs whether he had the opportunity to threaten him
first" (p. 127). Whatever Cohen's medical condition prior to his death,
there is little doubt it would have prevented Wright from interrogating him,
had he the opportunity to do so.

[****] According to Wright, King was an MI5 agent "run" by Harry Wharton.
Wharton denies this, and Leigh seems to concur, although pointing out that
King and Mountbatten already moved in circles in which known MI5 and MI6
agents freely associated (p. 157).

[*****] Historically the Catholic Church has been persecuted in
post-Reformation Britain. Even today the heir to the throne cannot legally
marry a Roman Catholic. Catholicism survived largely in the cellars and
secluded premises of the landed gentry. Thus other "leading lay Catholics"
include the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Dumfries. Conservative former
Cabinet Minister Ann Widdecombe pointedly and very publicly entered the
Catholic Church in protest at the Church of England's ordination of women
priests. But their reactionary politics contrasts with the relatively
liberal social outlook of their clerical counterparts. Cardinal Basil Hume
was noticeably reticent in his pronouncements on abortion and divorce, while
his Scottish contemporary, the recently deceased Cardinal Thomas Winning,
combined a more outspoken opposition to homosexuality and abortion with a
more aggressive advocacy of redistributive economic policies. Hume was at
the centre of efforts to overturn the convictions of the Guildford Four, the
Birmingham Six and the Maguire Seven.
        The relevance of this becomes more apparent in the light of Leigh's
mention of the role of journalist Patrick Marnham, whom we have already
encountered in Part 2. Leigh describes Marnham as "a Catholic public
schoolboy of a rather secretive disposition" (p. 246). It was a journalist
friend of his at Rees-Mogg's Times who passed on the first of many dossiers
of scurrilous material on Harold Wilson for its exploitation by Private Eye.
Both Marnham and Rees-Mogg were later involved in the establishment of the
new "Independent" newspaper begun by Andreas Whittam Smith in 1985 as an
alternative to the increasingly more populist "Times" (prop. Rupert Murdoch
since 1980). Ostensibly "independent" in its outlook, it actually propagated
a steadfastly conservative (i.e. traditionalist) view of British politics,
and was a staple of SDP supporters impressed with its apparent rejection of
the old left/right divide of Westminster and Fleet Street. The effect of
this was, of course, to further marginalise the Labour Party, especially the
Left of the Labour Party and the trade union movement, especially important
in the aftermath of the long and bitter miners' strike and an equally long
and bitter dispute involving Rupert Murdoch and the printworkers' unions,
broken in Murdoch's favour by a combination of repressive Thatcherite
legislation and betrayal by Eric Hammond's engineering union.

[¤] http://www.pwstubbs.force9.co.uk/crownimp/president.htm
Walker is also involved with the rather mysterious and unpleasant British
Israel World Federation, a group that believes that the lost tribes of
Israel actually ended up in the British Isles. You can follow the "manifest
destiny" reasoning from there. See
http://www.britishisrael.co.uk/
He still writes indignant letters to the Daily Telegraph, recently bemoaning
the homosexual clique apparently running Britain under New Labour.

[¤¤] As a 7-year old at the time, it struck me as rather odd that Ross
McWhirter, a children's television personality, should join the long list of
part-time Ulster Defence Regiment members and RUC officers routinely
reported as killed in IRA operations. Understandably, perhaps, I did not
make the connection at the time, although I was surprised, five years later,
to be watching Norris McWhirter on the BBC's evening "Nationwide" programme
telling Frank Bough why the UK should join the US boycott of the Moscow
Olympics that year. Nationwide was actually a scene of some wonderful
political theatre over the years, giving space to Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams in
a very controversial interview (one of the first of its kind) again with
Frank Bough, if memory serves. Peregrine Worsthorne, former editor of the
Sunday Telegraph and eerie virtual clone of William F. Buckley, was the
second person to say the "F" word on British TV in 1973 when he told his
interviewer that he didn't think the British public gave a fuck about who
Conservative minister Lord Lambton was sleeping with. And, of course, there
was the famous episode where Robin Day, interviewing Defence Secretary John
Nott in 1982, described him as a "here today, gone tomorrow" politician,
prompting Nott to walk out of the studio on live television. Marvellous. For
a profile of Norris McWhirter, see
http://www.maybole.org/notables/norrismcwhirter.htm

[¤¤¤] The Monday Club was a right wing group within the Conservative Party
that was both racist and authoritarian. Leigh tells that George Kennedy
Young had attempted to take over the group at the beginning of the 1970s.
"One of his associates, Harvey Proctor, later became an anti-immigrant
Conservative MP, before being convicted of sex offences against teenage
boys" (p. 213). Prior to this affront to masculinity, Proctor was lauded on
the extreme right as one Conservative MP with whom it could do business.
Other Monday Club associates included the aforementioned Neil Hamilton and
Gerald Howarth, who was a member of the group's governing council. The
Monday Club still exists, although it is far from being as influential as it
once was. See
http://www.conservativeuk.com/

[¤¤¤¤] See Michael Keaney,
http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2001II/msg04501.html

[¤¤¤¤¤] See Michael Keaney,
http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2001II/msg04502.html
With respect to the Attorney General's raid on ASIO offices, Leigh relates:
"James Angleton himself made clear his views about this: in a later TV
interview quoted by William Blum in 'The CIA - A Forgotten History', he said
that the CIA seriously considered breaking Intelligence relations with
Australia at that point. 'This bumbling Attorney-General moving in, barging
in - we were deeply compromised as to the sanctity of this information which
could compromise sources and methods and compromise human life.' When his
interviewer protested, 'But it was done by the elected Attorney-General of
the country,' Angleton cut in, brusquely and revealingly: 'I am not
disputing the fact that he was elected. I don't understand the point of your
question.'" (p. 232)

[#] Mark Jones, http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2001II/msg02350.html

[##] Mark Jones, http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2001II/msg01756.html

[###] http://www.rothprofiles.demon.co.uk/westcon.html

[####] http://politics.guardian.co.uk/profiles/0,9392,449154,00.html
Roth's mischievous profile of Tony Benn, for instance, is typical of the New
Labour establishment's general handwashing of the 1970s. You will struggle
hard to find anything positive said about the Wilson/Callaghan
administrations by New Labour.


Michael Keaney