Angela Rayner Has Forgotten the Shooting of Charles Menezes

Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, managed to kick up a storm of protest last week. I haven’t read any more than the headlines, but I gather she said that when it came to terrorists, the police should shoot first and ask questions second. I have absolutely no sympathy for any terrorists, regardless of their colour, religion or political cause. But this is an extremely dangerous attitude as it has already resulted in the death of a completely innocent man in the turmoil following 9/11 and 7/7.

Charles Menezes was a Brazilian student studying over here in London. His only crime was that he lived in the same block of flats as a suspected Islamist terrorist. The house was being watched by an armed police team. Unfortunately, only one of them knew what the real terrorist suspect looked like, and he’d gone off to relieve himself. The others saw Menezes leave the house and, thinking he might be the suspect, shouted to him to stop. I think there was some kind of issue with their uniform, as it appears that Menezes didn’t recognise that they were police. In Brazil apparently one of the tactics used by armed robbers is to disguise themselves as policemen, and it may have been that Menezes thought that something like that was happening to him. He ran away and the police gave chase. Reaching the railway station, he jumped over the barriers and got on the train. So did the coppers, who then shot him in the head.

It was a horrific killing of an entirely innocent chap through massive police incompetence and a ‘shoot first’ policy. The government and police were worried that if terrorists were given any warning by the cops, they’d set off their suicide belts. And so it was official policy to shoot first and ask questions later. In the inquiry that followed,, this policy was abandoned. But Rayner’s statement suggests she would drag us back to it, and so cause potentially cause more innocent people to be shot by mistake.

And possibly not just by mistake. Way back in the 1980s there was scandal of the shooting of an IRA terrorist group in Gibraltar. As revealed in the World In Action documentary, ‘Death on the Rock’, the terrorists were needlessly killed. They had been tracked by the British army all the way down through Spain and could have been rounded up without bloodshed at any time. But it looks like the British government wanted to send a message to the IRA and so set up what was, in effect, a death squad to exterminate them. The programme caused such a scandal and enraged Thatcher to such an extent that she withdrew London Weekend Television’s broadcasting licence, and gave it instead to Carlton. This wasn’t the only instance of lawlessness by the British army in Northern Ireland. Rory Cormac has a number of other examples in his book, Disrupt and Deny, about the underhand, covert operations and real conspiracies by the British state. Some of these were so controversial and repugnant that many Conservatives were also opposed to them.

I’m very much aware that the terrorist threat is very real. But we need sensible policies regarding the armed response to it in order to prevent the deaths of innocents, like Mr Menezes, and our government and security forces behaving like Fascist death squads.

But Rayner, it seems, forgot all that in an attempt to appear tough and ruthless to appeal to all those Thatcherite Tories Starmer thinks will flood into Labour now that he’s ditched that awkward thing, socialism.

Lobster Review of Book on the CIA’s Massive Covert Activities in Post-Colonial Africa

Also in the latest issue of Lobster is main man Robin Ramsay’s fascinating review of Susan Williams’ White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonisation of Africa, (London: C. Hurst & Co 2021). Ramsay begins by quoting Williams’ own summary of the book’s contents, which he says he can’t better. This summary says

‘Nevertheless, pressing on a range of sources has produced some extraordinary findings in relation to the Congo, Ghana and other African territories during their transformation from the status of colony, occupied by a European power, to independence. The best sources have been university archives and individuals who decided to speak about their past involvement with the CIA in Africa, most notably John Stockwell. It appears that the years of finding freedom—between the independence of Ghana in 1957 and the CIA-backed overthrow of Nkrumah in 1966—were also the years of an intense and rapid infiltration into Africa by the CIA. The agency’s operations took place in the territories themselves and at the
UN in New York.

The uncovered information reveals an extent and breadth of CIA activities in Africa that beggars belief. These activities took various forms and were performed by an extensive network that included Americans at agency headquarters in Washington; American agents operating under cover; American agents under non-official cover in the field and at the UN; Africans brought to the US and then recruited for use in various countries and situations, such as the Kenyan Washington Okumu; African assets recruited and used locally; third-country agents such as QJWIN and WIROGUE; and cultural patronage through Paris and elsewhere.

Underpinning the success of these activities were dollars. “Money ran the game”, notes [Lise] Namikas. “Even by 1960 standards the CIA had a reputation for spending”. Estimates of how much the CIA spent, she adds are hard to gauge. In 2014, Stephen Weissman wrote that between 1960 and 1968, CIA activity in the Congo “ranked as the largest covert operation in the agency’s history, costing an estimated $90–$150 million in current dollars”. But this did not include the cost of “the aircraft, weapons, and transportation and maintenance services provided by the Defense Department”.

CIA money was distributed, both within the US and in Africa, through a range of conduits, including dummy organisations and pass-throughs such as the Farfield Foundation. Bribes were handed out to selected politicians, to union leaders and to diplomats at the UN. CIA funds were
used to pay for soldiers’ wages and for weapons. They paid for front organisations, such as Imbrey’s public relations office in New York, Overseas Regional Surveys Associates. The funds were used to set up
airlines under cover and to buy and deliver aircraft, including the Fouga that may have shot down the plane carrying UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld.

Active intervention fostered division between different political groups, such as Holden Roberto’s UPA, heavily backed by the CIA, and the MPLA—both of which were fighting for the freedom of Angola from
Portuguese rule. The consequent strife sowed the seeds for decades of suffering in Angola.
Plans were implemented for assassinations. Governments were overthrown. The UN secretary general’s communications were accessed in real time in Washington, when he was on a flight in any part of the world, courtesy of the cipher CX-52 machine.

Propaganda and covert influence operations formed a thick web, frequently facilitated by CIA fronts dedicated to Africa, which were set up with the collaboration of powerful businessmen with interests in Africa. The fronts included the African-American Institute, with its headquarters conveniently located just minutes from UN headquarters in New York, and the American Society of African Culture. Both organisations published Africa-focused journals, perfect for covers and heavy with propaganda.
Highly respected organisations such as the American Fund for Free Jurists were penetrated by CIA officials using false pretences and were used to funnel funds secretly.

Cultural and educational centres, such as the Mbari Centres in Nigeria and the Institut d’Études Congolaises in Brazzaville, were set up. They organised conferences and events, such as the seminar in Ibadan, Nigeria, attended by an unwitting Lumumba, and the first Congress of African
Writers and Intellectuals at the University of Makerere, Uganda. Underpinning all these activities was the hand of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA front with an Africa programme based in Paris and with
fingers in most parts of the world.’ (pp. 509-11)

This shows just how extensive and nefarious the CIA’s activities were during this period of African history. Not that it was the Americans alone who were engaging in dirty tricks in Africa. Rory Cormac also describes the activities of the British state to manipulate African politics through vote rigging, espionage and propaganda in his book Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy.

Lawless Tories Pass Legislation Allowing Security Forces to Commit Crimes

This is very ominous. It’s another attack on the security of British citizens from potential persecution and tyranny from their own government. On Wednesday, 6th October 2020, Mike put up a piece on his blog reporting that Boris Johnson and his cronies have passed legislation that permits MI5, the National Crime Agency and other organisations using undercover agents and informants to commit crimes. They do, however, have to show that the offences are ‘necessary and proportionate’, but won’t say which crimes are authorised for fear of revealing the identities of their spies to the criminals and terrorists they are attempting to infiltrate and monitor. Mike also points out that there’s the danger of ‘mission creep’, that the scope of the crimes the undercover cops and agents are permitted to commit will expand as the security forces decide that this is required by their activities.

The new law was opposed by both Labour and Tory MPs, criticising the lack of safeguards in it which they described as ‘very vague and very broad’. In fact, only 182 Tory MPs voted for it. Keir Starmer once again showed his Blairite utter lack of backbone, and ordered the party to abstain. Only 20 Labour MPs voted against it. This means that it would have failed if Labour had had any principles and opposed it. Unsurprisingly, the Labour MPs who voted against it included the ‘far left’ MPs Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Ian Lavery, whose tweet explaining his reasons for doing so Mike also gives in his piece. Lavery said

I voted against the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill tonight. This was the correct course of action. I simply could not support legislation that would allow #spycops to murder, torture and use sexual violence without fear of any legal accountability.

Mike’s article also includes numerous other tweets from ordinary Brits condemning the new law and the Labour party and its leader for not opposing it, except for Corbyn and the other 19 courageous and principled MPs. Carole Hawkins, for example, tweeted

Mass kidnappings, torture & assassinations all without any comeback now the rule of law in 3rd world, nonentity Torydom. Every so called “British value” disappeared on the 5/10/20.

And Elaine Dyson said

#StarmerOut The Labour party & the public deserve better. During the COVID-19 crisis & with Brexit just a couple of months away, we need a strong opposition against the Tory gov. Labour must stop whipping its MPs to abstain on bills that leave sh*tstains on human rights.

Mike comments

There is only one reasonable response to legislation that authorises government agents to commit crimes – especially extreme crimes such as those contemplated here, and that is opposition.

But opposition is not in Keir Starmer’s vocabulary.

Let’s have a leadership challenge. He has to go.

And if he isn’t ousted this time, let’s have another challenge, and another, until he is. He has turned Labour into a travesty.

This is a real threat to the safety of ordinary citizens, and another step towards despotism and arbitrary government. This is very much the issue which made Robin Ramsay set up the conspiracies/ parapolitics magazine Lobster in the early 1980s. There is plentiful evidence that the western security forces are out of control, and are responsible for serious crimes against people and their governments. The late William Blum, a fierce, indefatiguable critic of the American empire and its intelligence agencies, has published any number of books exposing and discussing the way they have conspired to overthrow foreign governments and assassinate their leaders. One of these has two chapters simply listing the countries, whose governments the US has overthrown and in whose democratic elections it has interfered. One of the most notorious is the CIA coup of the mid-70s that overthrew the democratically elected socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, by the Fascist dictator General Pinochet.

Britain’s own security forces have also shown themselves no strangers to such activities. In the 1950s we conspired to overthrow the last, democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadeq, because he dared to nationalise the Iranian oil industry, the majority of which was owned by us. We’ve since engaged in rigging elections and other covert activities in other countries around the world. During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, British security forces colluded secretly with loyalist paramilitaries in the assassination of Republicans. The IRD, a state propaganda department set up to counter Soviet propaganda, also smeared left-wing Labour MPs such as Tony Benn as supporters of the IRA. All this and worse is described by the entirely respectable, mainstream historian Rory Cormac in his book Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy.

Such lawbreaking and criminality is the reason that there is a significant conspiracist subculture in America and Britain. Following the assassination of JFK and the shock of Watergate, many Americans don’t trust their government. This distrust mostly takes the form of paranoid, bizarre, and in my view utterly false and dangerous stories about the government forming secret pacts with aliens from Zeta Reticuli to experiment on humans in exchange for alien technology. But some of this distrust is justified. In the 1970s, for example, the CIA plotted to stage a bomb attack in Miami. This would be blamed on Cuba, and provide the pretext for an invasion to oust Castro and his communist government. Fortunately this was never put into practice, but this, and similar entirely historical, factual plots, mean that Americans are justified in being wary and suspicious of their secret state and intelligence agencies.

And so should we.

We’ve already taken several significant steps towards authoritarian rule. One of the most significant of these was the passages of legislation by Blair and then David Cameron setting up secret courts. This allows suspects to be tried in secret, with the press and public excluded, if it is deemed necessary for reasons of national security. The law also allows evidence to be withheld from the defendant and his lawyers for the same reason, in case it reveals the identities of agents and informants. As I’ve said numerous times before, this is very much the kind of perverted justice system that Kafka described in his novels The Castle and The Trial, and which became a horrifying reality in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Stalin’s Russia.

The idea that the state, or high-ranking individuals within it, are engaged in a conspiracy against their own people has now become something of a staple in American cinema and television. There was Nine Days of the Condor in the 1970s, in which Dustin Hoffman plays a secret agent, whose co-workers are killed by another covert organisation while he’s out getting lunch, and then the X-Files in the 1990s. Not to mention Star Trek: Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond, both of which feature rogue Federation officers conspiring to lead some kind of attack on the Federation itself.

Back down to Earth, the 1990’s British police drama, Between the Lines, also tackled the issue of rogue undercover agents. Between the Lines starred Neil Pearson and Siobhan Redmond as members of a unit set up to investigate offences committed by police officers. This included issues that are still, unfortunately, very much relevant, such as the shooting of unarmed suspects by mistake by armed police. One episode had the team investigating a secret agent, who had infiltrated a neo-Nazi organisation. This man was responsible for a series of assaults, raising the question that he had actually gone native and become part of the group he was supposed to bring down. This was at least 25 years ago, and it depicts exactly the kind of thing that could and no doubt has happened. Except that the Tory legislation means that the individuals responsible for such crimes, or at least some of them, will be exempt from prosecution under the new laws.

As for the claims that there will somehow be safeguards to prevent abuse, I’m reminded of the Charter of Verona, issued by Mussolini’s Fascists towards the end of Fascist rule in Italy. By then the majority of Italy had been occupied by the Allies. Mussolini himself was the puppet head of a rump Fascist state in northern Italy, the infamous Salo Republic. The Duce attempted to regain some popularity for himself and his movement by taking a leftward turn, promising the workers’ a place in industrial management. The Charter declared that no individual would be held for more than seven days without charge or trial. Which sounds far more liberal than previous Fascist rule. The reality, however, was that the Salo Republic was propped up by the Nazis, while brutal deaths squads like the Deci Mas roamed the countryside killing anti-Fascists.

Britain isn’t a Fascist state by any means at the moment. But legislation like this paves the way for the emergence of a genuine authoritarian regime. It is an active threat to the lives and security of ordinary Brits, and Starmer had no business whatsoever supporting it.

Fascist Leader Oswald Mosley on the Conservative Party

On page 261 on Mosley’s book, Mosley – Right or Wrong?, Britain’s Fascist leader is asked what he thinks of the Conservatives. Mosley’s gives a full and devastating reply, which very definitely shows that he’s not impressed by them. He says

The virtue of Conservatism is that it is the party of patriotism. It means well. Unfortunately, the leaders it selects arrive at results precisely the opposite to its intentions. So the party which existed to preserve the Empire has ended by liquidating the Empire. The party which believes in Great Britain has been the main architect of Small Britain. The party which believes in stability is bringing our country to the verge of chaos. But we need not traverse again the ground I covered in another answer. It is enough to state the undeniable fact that the Conservative Party has been chiefly responsible for the policies of Britain during the last fifty years.

What is the character which has produced this lamentable conclusion to a chapter in British history? ?This is the party of the smug, the satisfied, in an age which demands dynamism; the party of privilege when survival depends on promotion by merit; the party which exploits talent but never trusts it; the party of the tired, which calls a yawn a policy; the party of snobbery about the wrong things, which rejects intellect but reveres rank; the party of the climber, without aim to climb beyond a perch on a rotten bough; the party without purpose or great design; the party of small expedients to face the need of great decisions; the party which is always late, and now exists only as an ineffective brake on socialist policies; the party which wills the end of the greatness but always rejects the means; the party which excluded Churchill in all his years as a creative spirit, and used him only for the fatal process which finally destroyed the values in which it professed to believe; the party which detests brilliance and loves dullness; the party which idealizes the small, the the grey, the mediocre, and will achieve its ideal in the state to which it is reducing Britain, if that condition be not the final lethargy of death.

Mosley’s Britain would have been a brutal Fascist dictatorship, a one-party state ruled by fear and thuggery. Despite his repeated claims not to be an anti-Semite, Mosley would have put in place a kind of apartheid in which only those Jews, who were judged culturally British, would have been allowed to remain and Blacks and Asians very definitely discriminated against if not actively persecuted. I don’t doubt that had he seized power during the War, he would have turned Britain into another Nazi satellite or ally and fully collaborated in the Holocaust.

As for the British Empire, it was not the glorious institution Mosley and the Tories claim. There were some noble aspects to it – there were British governors and military commanders, who took very seriously their duty of stamping out slavery and the slave trade, for example. But we did exploit its subject peoples. Its end was marked by ruthless warfare against the rising nationalist movements in which British forces did commit atrocities and massacres. Quite apart from more covert systems of undermining these countries’ aspirations for freedom, like election rigging. In the case of Iran, an independent nation that provoked our wrath by nationalising its oil industry, we organized a coup that toppled its last, democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadeq. See John Newsinger’s book The Blood Never Dried: A people’s History of the British Empire, and Rory Cormac’s Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy.

But Mosley is absolutely right about the Tory party. They are the party of the traditional class system, and have shown themselves determined to maintain and expand the power of the immensely rich at the expense of everyone else – the poor, the disabled, working people, the unemployed. Their Brexit policies are destroying this country, their economic policies have wrecked this country’s industry and prosperity and their determination to privatise the NHS and destroy the welfare state is creating mass poverty, misery, starvation and illness. But never mind – their pet press sings their praises and spins every failure as some kind of magnificent achievement if it can, just so long as the poor are kept down, and the rich given more tax breaks and subsidies.

Mosley’s Britain would have been a murderous, totalitarian nightmare. Fascism everywhere needs to be fought and defeated. But he was right about the Tories.

PBS America Programme This Friday on Conspiracy Theories

According to this week’s Radio Times, the satellite/cable channel PBS America begins a new series this Friday, 25th September 2020, on conspiracy theories over on that side of the Atlantic. The programme’s entitled ‘United States of Conspiracy’, and begins with Alex Jones, the weird Texan internet radio and TV pundit. The piece about it by David Seale on page 106 of the RT reads

Contributing to this profile of the American broadcaster Alex Jones, British author Jon Ronson describes him as “the most… spiralling person I’ve ever met”.

Jones was a fringe figure until the confluence of 9/11 and the internet’s new power to build communities meant conspiracy theorists could band together and wield influence. Having turned fear and hatred into a lucrative commodity, Jones saw his tactic of repeatedly making wild statements with no supporting evidence enter the political mainstream.

Then in 2016, Donald Trump was elected President of the US and things really got weird.

Ronson was the director and presenter of two documentary series on Channel 4 about conspiracy theories and secret American military projects to develop psychic powers, The Secret Rulers of the World and Crazy Rulers of the World. He also wrote two books to accompany his series, Them: Adventures with Extremists, and The Men Who Stare At Goats. This last was made into a film a few years ago with Euan McGregor. It took its name from an American psychic warfare experiment, in which American squaddies tried to kill goats using only the power of their minds. I have no idea if they were ever successful, and did anything more than puzzle the goats, who may well have wondered why these men were staring at them.

I might be wrong, but I think Jones made his first appearance on British TV with Jonson on Secret Rulers of the World. He and Ronson sneaked into Bohemian Grove, the location of an annual gathering of America’s elite men that’s been held since the 19th century. As it’s an all-male party, you probably won’t be surprised that there have been allegations of sexual assault and harassment by some of these immensely rich geezers against the serving staff. It’s supposed to be a chance for the superrich running the country to network and let off steam during the summer. The culmination of the event is a piece of playacting called ‘The Sacrifice of Dull Care’. Or something like that. This involves an effigy representing Dull Care being ritually killed or burnt or otherwise sacrificed. There’s a widespread conspiracy theory, not just confined to America, that the world is run by a small cabal of immensely wealthy Satanists. Jones and others like him believe that this playlet is really a Satanic ceremony involving human sacrifice. Ronson and Jones filmed the ceremony, and it looked to me very much like it was only a effigy that was being ritually killed. But it was small, about the size of a child, and so to Jones and the others it really was a child, that was sacrificed to Satan by the elite men secretly ruling America. Jones was shown broadcasting this on his show, and then ranting to the camera about how Americans would never be forelock-tugging serfs and give up their guns.

Jones does a lot of ranting. And making bizarre, obviously fake smears against largely left-wing politicos and ordinary people. In one of his shows, he claimed that NASA had a secret base on Mars run by child slave labour. Which they obviously don’t, but the agency nevertheless felt that they had to issue an official denial. He also claimed that Barack Obama was the antichrist, ’cause he’s supposed to have smelt and had flies about him. Hillary Clinton was having a lesbian affair with one of her close political allies and is a witch practising black magic using human blood. She’s also either possessed by demons, or aliens, or is a robot from at least the waist down, because Jones reckons he saw something metal fall out of her trouser leg while she was out meeting the American public.

More seriously, Jones has made extremely dangerous, libelous claims that have caused innocent people great distress and nearly resulted in a shooting. He got sued a while ago by a Turkish businessman, who runs a yogurt factory in America. The man makes a point of employing immigrants and asylum seekers. The city where his business is located was hit by a series of rapes. Jones claimed they’d been committed by the Turkish bloke’s employees. They hadn’t, the man sued and won.

Then there was the Sandy Hook massacre, another school shooting. It’s a terrible tragedy, made worse by Jones’ paranoia. He’s convinced, or appears convinced, that such shootings are being deliberately staged to provide a pretext for the American government to pass legislation outlawing guns. From which the government will establish a dictatorship, forcing the American people into refugee and concentration camps. One of Jones’ nonsensical claims was that Barack Obama was going to declare a state of emergency and then have the American public rounded up into FEMA camps. Of course, no such thing has happened.

Jones claimed the Sandy Hook school shooting had similarly been staged, and that the parents shown grieving over the loss of their children were really ‘crisis actors’. It’s nonsense, and offensive nonsense, but that has stopped those who believe it pestering the parents to come clean and confess that it’s all fake.

And then there’s the incident when a gunman walked into a Boston pizza parlour looking for the kids that were allegedly being kept there ready to be abused by Democratic politicos. This was the rumour going round, according to which the abused kids were to be ordered up by their abusers with the pizza toppings used as a kind of code for what type of child the politicos wanted. In the meantime, the kids themselves were kept in an underground dungeon. A few years ago a bloke walked into the parlour off the street with a rifle demanding to be shown the dungeon so he could free the children. The parlour staff showed him that they didn’t have a dungeon, but only the cabinet where the business’ junction boxes were located, and a backroom which had their computer and lots of pizza boxes. All normal, no kids waiting for abuse. The gunman was satisfied with this, and gave himself up to the cops. It was a dangerous incident that very nearly could have ended in bloodshed. Even today, apparently, the parlour boss and his staff still get people demanding where they’re keeping the kids for abuse.

Jones has also appeared on British television. He turned up a little while ago on Andrew Neil’s show, where he started ranting about how Americans wouldn’t give up their guns, and 1776 would happen again if we tried to make them, before screaming nonsense like ‘metal shark!’ while the camera panned away to show Neil making the circling gesture around his temple with his finger showing precisely what he thought of Jones’ mental health.

No-one quite knows whether Jones believes the rubbish he spouts or not. Some people, who have met him personally say that behind the scenes he can be quite calm and rational. He has also formally deposed to the American courts that he doesn’t believe in what he broadcasts. His wife divorced him a few years ago, and sued for custody of their children. She was afraid for their mental health because Johnson’s TV studio was in their home. She was afraid that the children would come into it and hear all the terrifying, absurd gibberish that Jones and his guests and co-workers were broadcasting around America. Jones replied that he should retain custody of the kids, because he didn’t believe what he said. He was, he claimed, like a rodeo clown entertaining people.

I don’t know if Jones still is, but he was a staunch supporter of Donald Trump and several times had him as a guest on his show when he was campaigning for the presidency. It may therefore partly be thanks to the publicity Jones gave him that the Orange Generalissimo is in the White House.

Jones has more or less vanished from the airwaves in recent years. I think the bereaved parents of Sandy Hook took out a lawsuit against him, and as a result YouTube and other internet platforms decided he was too toxic and threw him off.

Jones is bizarre, and his antics entertaining if you’re not the one being libeled and smeared. But there’s a serious aspect to programmes like this, one which is not commented on by the mainstream media. There really are conspiracies and covert plots by the world’s governments, intelligence agencies and factions of businessmen. For example, there’s considerable evidence for the British state using loyalist paramilitaries to assassinate Republicans in Northern Ireland. One branch of the British secret services, the IRD, also forged material smearing Labour party politicos like Tony Benn as supporters of the IRA. Indeed, the entirely respectable academic historian Rory Cormac wrote a book about these very real conspiracies, Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy (Oxford: OUP 2018). But these aren’t covered when the media starts talking about conspiracies and conspiracy theories. Historians and researchers like Lobster’s Robin Ramsay aren’t invited onto any programmes. Instead, you get people like David Aaronovich, who blithely informs us all that there are no secret government conspiracies to deceive us going on, and we should all carry on trusting our rulers and betters.

The PBS America programme looks interesting, and these bogus conspiracies are interesting and important. While they aren’t real, they have real power because of the sheer number of people, who believe in them.

But there are also very real plots and conspiracies, like that al-Jazeera UK uncovered with Shai Masot at the Israeli embassy colluding with senior British civil servants over who should be in the cabinet. And the smears by the Integrity Initiative against Jeremy Corbyn, claiming that he was a Communist secret agent or collaborator with Putin. It’s these conspiracies that really do need careful analysis, dissection and exposure.

But that is precisely what the establishment does not want. And so for the moment conspiracy theories, as far as mainstream broadcasting goes, means the bizarre fantasies of people like Alex Jones.

‘I’ Feature on New Iranian Film about 1953 British-CIA against Mossadeq

Yesterday’s I, for 20th August 2020, published a very interesting piece by the Independent’s Kim Sengupta about a new Iranian film coming out today. It’s on the 1953 coup against Mohammed Mossadeq, the last democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. Mossadeq was overthrown because he nationalised the Iranian oil industry, then the company Anglo-Persian Oil, now BP, which was majority owned by us. The result was the gradual establishment of the Shah’s personal dictatorship during his ‘White Revolution’, a brutal dismantlement of human rights and rule by torture and secret police, which finally ended with the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the equally brutal and repressive rule of the ayatollahs. The coup is yet one episode in the long list of countries, in whose politics we’ve interfered and whose governments we’ve helped to destabilise or overthrow in our long campaign to retain some vestiges of our imperial power. And as Sengupta’s article points out, it has left a legacy of distrust for Britain among the Iranian people. According to John Simpson, they’ve got a saying: ‘If you find a stone in your path, it was put there by an Englishman.’ In fairness, Simpson also says in his book on Iran that when he was there reporting, he found absolutely no personal animosity towards him or Brits because of our nationality. The hatred was directed against the British state and its leaders, like Thatcher, rather than the British people.

The I article was titled ‘How MI6 and the CIA overthrew an elected leader’. It ran

Iran has a deep mistrust about Britain, dating back to an event that is unlikely to be forgotten or forgiven in the near future, and is the subject of a new documentary. Coup 53, released tomorrow, examines the overthrow of the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossaddegh, and his replacement by the Shah of Iran, all instigated by London and Washington.

The film, a fine production by Iranian director Taghi Amirani, features interviews with many of those involved – Iranian nationalists who supported the prime minister, royalists loyal to the Shah, and British and US officials.

Mossaddegh, a progressive and secular leader, earned the antipathy of the British government chiefly by nationalising the Anglo-Persian Oil Company – now BP – in which the UK held 51 per cent of the shares. The company had exclusive rights to pump Iranian oil. As relations worsened, the Iranian government broke off diplomatic ties with the UK and expelled embassy staff.

The documentary recalls how the Americans were initially disinclined to support the UK’s plans to overthrow a democratically elected government that, they thought, would be a check against totalitarian communism.

Such was the British sense of entitlement that the US secretary of state, Dean Acheson, under President Harry Truman, condemned it witheringly as “destructive and determined on a rule-or-ruin policy on Iran”.

This changed, however, with the election of Dwight Eisenhower. Winston Churchill claimed to the new president that Mossaddegh – who had been openly critical of communism – wou8ld veer towards the pro-Russian Tudeh Party. And with the Cold War, and fear of Soviet expansion, at its height, the US changed its position.

Operation Ajax was launched in 1953 to depose Mossaddegh, initially through a propaganda campaign and proposed election interference, with the CIA chief, Allen Dulles, authorising $1m to be used “in any way that would bring about the fall” of the prime minister.

The coup succeeded. Many of Mosaddegh’s supporters were arrested, imprisoned and tortured; some, including the foreign minister Hossein Fatemi, were executed.

The prosecutors demanded a life sentence for Mosaddegh, but a tribunal jailed him for three years in a military prison. After that, he was kept under house arrest until his death in 1967. He was denied a public funeral because of apprehension that his grave may become a political shrine, and was buried under his living room.

Coup 53 features Ralph Fiennes reading the words of Norman Derbyshire, an MI6 officer based in Cyprus whom the British claim was the real mastermind of the coup.

Only one photograph of Darbyshire, in dark glasses, is seen in the documentary. He died in 1993 and his account comes from an interview he gave to Granada TV’s End of Empire film in 1985, which was not shown because he refused to appear on screen.

Fiennes’ delivery is melodramatic. Through him, Darbyshire is a sort of Roger Moore-ish version of James Bond, licensed to coup.

Darbyshire claims he organised the kidnapping of the chief of police in Tehran, Mohammed Afshartous. The general was tortured and strangled, and news of his death was met with shock and anger.

Darbyshire claimed that was not his fault. “Something went wrong; he was kidnapped and held in a cave. Feelings ran very high and Afshartous was unwise enough to make derogatory comments about the Shah. He was under guard by a young army officer and the young officer pulled out a gun and shot him. That was never part of our programme.”

One wonders what would have happened if the Americans had stuck to their initial sceptical instincts about the coup in Iran – and reports of weapons of mass destruction held by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. They did not, and we see the legacy of that in the strife and suffering that unfolded in the Middle East.

I think I first came across the 1953 coup in a long article about it in the conspiracies/ parapolitics magazine Lobster back in the ’90s. But it is established history, and very definitely not a ‘conspiracy theory’ in the derogatory sense. It’s mentioned, for example, in a very mainstream History of the World published by W.H. Smith/ Hamlyn in the early 1980s, and is one of the long list of similar coups, electoral meddling and destabilisation in Rory Cormac’s Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy, published by the Oxford University Press in 2018.

And some of the same dirty tricks have been used in this country by the secret state to smear left-wing politicos, like Tony Benn, with accusations of pro-IRA and communist sympathies. It was done by the IRD before that was wound up, and carried on against Jeremy Corbyn by the Institute for Statecraft, ostensibly a private company but with extensive links to the British intelligence establishment.

And I would not be at all surprised if British and American intelligence aren’t involved in the apparent news blackout of the latest Israeli aggression against Gaza and the Palestinians. All to defend our ally in the Middle East, which seems to be done solely through libellous and malicious accusations of anti-Semitism. Because Israel’s actions are absolutely indefensible in themselves.

The late Labour MP Robin Cook wanted an ethical foreign policy. Unfortunately, he served under Tony Blair. It’ll never happen, not under New Labour, and not under the Tories. Which is why the establishment did everything they could to smear and vilify Corbyn and his supporters, because he did take such noble goals seriously.

The Tories would like hide shameful episodes like the 1953 coup under the imperial carpet, in order to retain an approved historical view of British imperial benevolence. Which is why films like Amirani’s are so vitally important.

 

Channel 4 Programme on the Queen’s Role in the 1953 Coup against Iran’s Mossadeq

Another interesting programme listed in next week’s Radio Times is Channel 4 documentary on Sunday, 14th June 2020, The Queen and the Coup. This is about how MI6 and the CIA conspired to overthrow Iran’s last democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, and how the Queen was manipulated by the intelligence agencies as part of it. Mossadeq had committed the crime of nationalising his country’s oil industry, which was owned by the British company Anglo-Persian Oil, which eventually became BP.

The blurb for the programme runs

It’s February 1953, the first anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, but the monarch is unaware that she is about to be deployed in a US plot to topple Iran’s democratic leader in favour of an all-powerful shah. Planned by MI6 and executed by the CIA, the coup destroyed Iran’s democracy and damaged relations between Iran and the West for many decades; this documentary reveals how the truth about the Queen’s role was hidden, even from her.

The piece about it by David Butcher a few pages earlier reads

This is one of those brilliantly detailed documentaries on recent history that uses declassified documents to explore a bizarre and little-known episode.

Professors Rory Cormac and Richard Aldrich have unearthed a paper trail in national archives showing how the 1953 coup d’etat to unseat Iran’s elected leader (Mohammed Mossadeq, whose crime had been to national British oil assets) relied at a crucial moment on using the young Queen Elizabeth’s name – unbeknownst to her.

It’s a fascinating, at times farcical yarn of MI6 and CIA intrigue, and the events had a huge effect on global politics; relations between Iran and the West never recovered.

The programme’s on at 9.00 pm.

Historians have known about the 1953 coup against Mossadeq for some time. The parapolitics/conspiracies magazine Lobster has published articles about it. I’ve posted pieces about it on this blog. However, it’s been largely ignored by the establishment because it is a real, genuine government conspiracy of the type that Britain and the US supposedly don’t commit. Lobster has been lamenting for decades how the majority of historians don’t take seriously the existence of real conspiracies committed by covert governmental, political or industrial groups as it contradicts the accepted idea of how politics operates and is conducted.

One of the presenters, Rory Cormac, is the author of a book on British official conspiracies and plots, Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy (Oxford: OUP 2018). This revealed how the British government, armed forces and intelligence agencies had secretly conspired and interfered in countries right across the globe from Northern Ireland in Britain itself, to Africa, Indonesia and elsewhere, removing leaders, rigging elections and overthrowing regimes that were an obstacle to British foreign policy. One of those countries was Iran, and the anti-Mossadeq coup is discussed in Chapter 5, ‘Operation Boot: Regime Change in Iran.’

This is all historical fact. But the coup was authorized and supporter by Boris’ hero, Winston Churchill. I wonder what the reaction of the Tory press to it will be? Assuming they deign to notice, of course.

Kate Maltby Smears Corbyn and his Supporters as Conspiracy Theorists

Last Thursday, 22nd August 2019, Kate Maltby decided to give us all the benefit of her views on Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn and the ‘Trumpification of British politics’ in the pages of the I. She opined that both BoJo and Corbyn were like the megalomaniac manbaby over the other side of the pond. She was also irritated by the fact that the similarity between Corbyn and Trump hadn’t been picked up by the public in the same way the similarity between Johnson and Trump had. She then went on to whine that both Trump and Corbyn’s politics were based in conspiracy theories undermining western democratic politics, conspiracies which she thought came straight from Putin and the Kremlin. She wrote

Yet to those of us hwo have followed Corbyn’s rise closely, the sight of him comparing any other politician to Donald Trump felt like an act of such shamelessness that it might only be matched by the Ponzi President himself. If there is a single line running through Tump’s politics, it is the practice of rule by conspiracy theory. Yet it is from those who believe that the existing democratic order is essentially a conspiracy that Corbyn also draws his base. As researcher Peter Pomerantsev writes in his superb new book, This Is Not Propaganda, “we live in a world of mass persuasion run amok, where the means of manipulation have gone forth and multiplied”. The digital imprint of the Russian state has been particularly successful in undermining the confidence of voters in western democracies in our own democratic norms and even our ability as voters to understand our political realities.

The analyst Ben Nimmo has summed up the Russian approach to disinformation as “dismiss, distort, distract, dismay”. Hence, the birth of a whole new online culture populated by voters who don’t even share a basic epistemology with existing “elites”. Johnson and the Brexit campaign benefited most clearly from this crisis of trust, but so does their fellow Eurosceptic, Jeremy Corbyn. Track the pro-Corbyn and pro-Trump networks online, and you’ll find a commitment to anti-vax theories that tell you the Government wants to make your children ill. Johnson, to his anti-Trumpist credit, has just announced a campaign to counter this particular theory.

Both are surrounded by supporters who trade in conspiracy theories about Jews. While Corbyn’s party is under formal investigation for anti-Semitism, only this week Trump was manically R’Ting the conspiracy anti-evangelical Wayne Allyn Root, who attacked Jewish Democrats for not supporting him.

She then goes on to take Corbyn to task for not coming down hard enough on the Russians about the Skripal poisoning, and for using the memory of the lies over the Gulf War to cast doubt on the Russian’s guilt.

This is all shameless bilge and propaganda itself. The I also reviewed Pomerantsev’s book, and declared that while it was very good on the subject of Russian propaganda, there was very little material about how the West also manipulates information.

And manipulate it the West certainly does. The conspiracy magazine Lobster has been showing since the beginning of the 1980s how the British and American secret state and other covert organisations have manipulated information and worked secretly to influence state policy to their advantage. During the Cold War there was an entire department, the IRD, or Information Research Department set up within the British state to counter Russian and other enemy propaganda. It also tried to undermine the Labour party by producing disinformation and fake texts linking Labour politicians with the IRA and Soviet espionage. And we’ve seen this campaign start up again under the Tories in the form of the Integrity Initiative, with its extensive links to British intelligence and the cyberwarfare division of the SAS producing smears trying to link Corbyn to the Russians. When various right-wing loons and shameless liars haven’t been trying to claim that Corbyn was somehow an agent for the Czechs.

That the British secret state has also done its best to undermine democracy is solid fact. Britain’s disinformation campaign against its foreign enemies is the subject of a book, Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy, by Rory Cormac, (Oxford: OUP 2018). The blurb for this reads

It has long been an open secret that British leaders use spies and special forces to interfere in the affairs of others-as discreetly as deniably as possible.

Since 1945, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, has spread misinformation designed to divide and discredit targets from the Middle East to Eastern Europe and Northern Ireland. It has instigated whispering campaigns and planted false evidence on officials working behind the Iron Curtain, whilst GCHQ now uses the internet to undermine terrorist recruiters. MI6 has tried to foment revolution in Albania, and to instigate coups in Congo, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran. It has sabotaged ships to prevent the passage of refugees to Israel, secretly funnelled aid to insurgents in Afghanistan, and launched cultural and economic warfare, not only against Cold War enemies such as Communist Czechoslovakia, but also NATO allies.

Through bribery and blackmail, Britain has rigged elections as colonies moved to independence. It has fought secret wars in Yemen, Indonesia, and Oman-and discreetly used special forces to eliminate enemies, from colonial Malaya to Libya during the Arab Spring. This is the world of covert action: a vital, though controversial tool of statecraft and perhaps the most sensitive of all government activity. If used wisely, it can play an important role in pursuing national interests in a dangerous world. If used poorly, it can cause political scandal-or worse.

In Disrupt and Deny, Rory Cormac tells the remarkable true story of Britain’s secret scheming against her enemies, as well as her friends. He uncovers a world of intrigue and manoeuvring within the darkest corridors of Whitehall, where officials fought to maintain control of this most sensitive and seductive work. A fascinating tale of covert operations in its own right, it is also the story of Britain’s attempt over the decades to use smoke and mirrors to mask its decline as global power.

As readers of this blog will be aware, it’s blatantly untrue that Corbyn and his supporters, or at least the vast majority of them, have conspiracy theories about Jews. What they are aware of is the way accusations of anti-Semitism have been levelled at Corbyn and the Labour left for purely political reasons. The Right, including the Blairites in the party, like Tom Watson and John Mann, are using it to try to maintain the Thatcherite status quo. And the Israel lobby is doing it simply to smear and discredit anyone critical of that nation’s apartheid system and its slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

I am at a loss, however, to know where Maltby got the idea that Corbynists are opponents of vaccination. The American anti-vaxxers, from what I’ve seen, tend to be on the political right, Conservatives and Libertarians. The kind of people who watch Alex Jones’ InfoWars and have the same bizarre ideas of ‘Purity Of Essence’ as the mad American general Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire, Dr. Strangelove. The type of people, who think putting fluoride in the water is a globalist plot, and any kind of welfare state is a horrendous Commie assault on democracy. Definitely not the kind of people, who support Jeremy Corbyn. In fact, it looks like the accusation is simply a shameless invention of Maltby herself.

I’m not surprised that Maltby has come out with this lying screed. Along with her CV, in which she informs us she’s written for The Financial Times, The Spectator, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The TLS, The Times, and The New Statesman, and appeared on various TV and radio programmes, she also declares that

Much of what I’ve gleaned about the workings of Westminster I’ve learned from my time on the team behind Bright Blue, the liberal Conservative pressure group and think tank. 

See: http://www.katemaltby.com/about-me/

She’s a Tory, and the only difference I can make out between ‘liberal’ and right-wing Tories, is that the ‘liberals’ are less open in their hatred of the poor and disabled, and their determination to punish, humiliate and kill them. Oh yes, and their better at deceiving the Tory rank and file that they don’t want to destroy the welfare state and privatise the health service.

She’s just another right-wing hack, upset and irritated by the fact that an increasingly media-savvy public are aware of how much the lamestream media is manipulated by corporate and right-wing political interests. And she’s just following a well-worn media path by trying to link Corbyn and his supporters to anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories and the Russians. It’s time she, and the various shameless hacks like her, were given the boot. Then people might start believing in their politicians and their media.

 

Lobster Article on British Prime Ministers and the Secret State

The Winter 2016 issue of Lobster also has a very disquieting review by John Newsinger of a book on the relationship between British Ministers and the intelligence services, The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers by Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac. This discusses not only the way British prime ministers have co-operated with the secret services in the bugging and surveillance of the Left, and how they used the services in a series of foreign operations, including Iraq, but also how the same intelligence services also worked against them, including interventions by foreign espionage services in Britain. In doing so, several reputations are left tarnished and some convenient myths destroyed.

One of the keenest supporters of British intelligence against his domestic opponents was Harold Wilson. When he was in office in the 1960s, Wilson had had leftwing trade unionists put under surveillance, taps placed on their phones, and bugged. This included the participants in the 1966 strike by British merchant seamen. Others kept under very close watch included, naturally, the Communist party. He also encouraged other rightwing union leaders to cooperate with MI5. Those, who did so included Harry Crane, the head of the GMWU, who passed information onto Sarah Barker, the Labour Party’s national agent, who in turn passed it on to the spooks.

Wilson also continued the secret wars the Tories had begun in Yemen and Indonesia. The British, Saudis and Israeli secret services provided aid and assistance to rebels, who perpetrated the same kind of atrocities as ISIS. Unlike ISIS, they didn’t cause a scandal and international terror by posting them online. Newsinger notes that Aldrich and Cormac state that the extent of the British involvement in the 1965 massacre of the Left in Indonesia is a mystery. As this also involved the commission of atrocities, besides which those of ISIS seem pale by comparison, this is a very convenient mystery. It’s widely believed that Wilson kept Britain out of the Vietnam War, but this is not the case. Wilson actually wanted to send a token force, but was prevented from doing so because of the extent of British public opinion against the War and the opposition of the left wing within the Labour party itself. This did not prevent him from providing the Americans with intelligence support. This involved not only GCHQ, but also MI6, who provided reports on the effect of American bombing campaigns from the British embassy in Hanoi. The Americans were also allowed to operate their biggest CIA station in that part of Asia from Hong Kong. In addition to this, Wilson also wanted MI6 to assassinate Idi Amin, but they refused. Considering the carnage wrought by this monster, it’s a pity that they didn’t.

Wilson himself was the subject of various intelligence plots and smears against him, despite his collaboration with the intelligence services. This involved not only MI5, but also the South African intelligence service, BOSS. This got to the point where it was literally spies watching other spies, with BOSS spying on the anti-apartheid campaign, while themselves being spied on by MI5. BOSS were allowed to get away with their espionage, however, as it was claimed that they had a film of MPs taking part in an orgy and a dossier on a sex scandal that was far more shocking and compromising than Christine Keeler.

Ted Heath in the 1970s had Jack Jones, the leader of the TGWU put under surveillance. Joe Gormley, the head of the NUM, was also an informant for special branch throughout the decade. The usual practice at MI5 when a company requested assistance monitoring radical trade unionist was to pass the case on to the Economic League, a private outfit specialising in blacklisting trade unionists. But Ford also demanded that Special Branch vet their workforce, to which Heath agreed. This led to more firms demanding information on trade unionists, including Massey Ferguson. Not only was the British government under Heath actively compiling blacklists of trade unionists, Heath himself demanded that MI5 should have some of the militant activists ‘done’.

Under Thatcher the number of private intelligence agencies tackling her domestic enemies, like CND, increased. But Newsinger observes that the book does not cover at all the involvement of this agencies in the machinations against the NUM in the Miners’ Strike, and the establishment of the scab Union of Democratic Mineworkers. Newsinger comments

Perhaps the official material is not available, but not to have any discussion of the great miners’ strike at all is a serious shortcoming. The very absence of material, if this was indeed the case, is tremendously significant and deserved discussion. This was, after all, the decisive engagement that shifted the balance of class forces and made everything that has followed possible.

The book also covers Blair’s wars, which Newsinger does not cover in his review, finding the book’s revelations about Cameron’s own warmongering in Libya and Syria more interesting. MI6 and the Defence chiefs advised Cameron not to try to bring down Gaddafi. This didn’t stop him, and Cameron had the agency and SAS give the rebels training, arms and body armour. MI6 wanted the Libyan dictator sent into exile into Equatorial Guinea, where his own links to them would not be placed in any danger by him having to appear before an international human rights court. But this problem was, as Newsinger notes, solved by his death.

The book also reveals that a number of people within MI6 and the CIA did not believe that Assad’s regime in Syria was responsible for the Sarin attack in Ghoutta. They believed that the real perpetrators were the al-Nusra Front, backed by Turkey, which hoped to provoke the US into starting a bombing campaign. The US was ready with a fleet of aircraft, which Britain was also set to join, but the operation was cancelled due to the disagreements over responsibility for the atrocity within the US secret services.

The authors also report that Mossad has also been responsible for kidnappings and murders in London, but give no further information.

Newsinger concludes that ‘after reading this book we not only know more than we
did, but also how much more we need to know and unfortunately how much we are likely to never know….’

What is also clear from reading this is not only the extent of the involvement of British prime ministers in covert operations, against left-wingers and trade unionists in Britain and a series of foreign regimes abroad, but also the weakness of parliament in restraining them. British involvement in the bombing of Syria was stopped because of dissension within the American intelligence community, not because of opposition from parliament. As for Heath targeting British trade unionists for surveillance and possible assassination, Newsinger remarks on how this is ‘dynamite’, which should be investigated by the Commons Intelligence Select Committee. There is not the most remote chance of this happening, however, as the Commons Intelligence Select Committee is really
just a parliamentary spittoon into which the intelligence agencies occasionally feel obliged to gob.

Lobster’s entire raison d’etre is the belief that western, and particularly the British intelligence services are out of control and responsible for immense crimes that otherwise go undocumented and unpunished. Newsinger’s review of this book and its potentially explosive contents bear out this belief. It also hints by its omissions that there is more buried yet deeper, which may never be brought to light.

The article’s at: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster72/lob72-black-door.pdf