12-09-2009, 09:50 PM
Paul Rigby Wrote:Quote:A Viscious Experiment in Wheenland
By Paul Rigby
April 1999
As prelude to conscripting Orwell (1) for Washington's war of petro-strategic position in the Balkans, Guardian columnist Francis Wheen bravely invited readers to mock an unnamed correspondent. The holder of conveniently pat Old Labour views, the angry straw man of Glasgow had written to object both to the war, and Wheen's support of it (2). Like LBJ contemplating Vietnam in the autumn of '64 (3), the certain cost - both domestic and to the inevitable victims - held no terrors for Farringdon Road's unfailingly "progressive" voice of conscience.
He was even less troubled by his correspondent's opening salvo, "Have you been got at by MI6?" The very suggestion that a Guardian journo might act as a spook mouthpiece was so self-evidently absurd that Wheen generously proceeded as if the question had never really been posed. Quite why was, if not immediately obvious, ultimately ascertainable: History - evidence - was on the side of his interlocutor. The source of this less than shocking revelation? Wheen's own paper, the daily house organ of what passes for the British liberal-left.
The admission came courtesy of Richard Gott, himself no stranger to controversy in this area (4), in a November 1987 edition of the paper. The Manchester Guardian, he wrote, had two correspondents in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. The original, Price Phillips, was in no doubt that the second, David Soskice, was there at the behest of the Foreign Office, and with the knowledge of C.P. Scott, the paper's legendary editor (5). Contrary to the paper's assurance at the time, Gott revealed the following day, MI6 man Soskice had indeed filed many of his compellingly independent despatches while doubling as Kerensky's secretary (6). Covert collusion with the spooks inevitably issued in a prime specimen of Guardian cant.
In May 1923, the MG devoted an editorial to the subject. The trigger was a law suite involving Marguerite Harrison, a US military intelligence asset caught masquerading by the Cheka as a correspondent for both the Baltimore Sun and the Associated Press. Unencumbered by considerations of elementary consistency and honesty, the paper thundered: "We think…that an ugly blow at that honesty and independence which the public can ill afford to see tampered with, was struck by the combination of secret agent and special correspondent which some ill-advised American authorities evolved…The main thing is that the light thrown on this case should make the viscious experiment impossible of repetition" (7). It is the editorialist's power of prophecy that impresses most.
In the good old days of C.P. Scott, British intelligence was invisible, even as it played a key, perhaps dominant, covert role in the rise of Europe's fascist dictatorships (8). The Cold War saw only one change of note, and that was for the worse. In addition to the usual welter of British Intelligence officers and assets - by the mid-1950s, the paper was little more than a front for the infamous Information Research Department (9) - the Guardian increasingly acted as the CIA's primary vehicle for channelling harmlessly the Non-Communist Left in Britain.
The ties with America considerably pre-dated the onset of the Cold War. In 1921, the paper formally hooked up with the New York World, the J.P. Morgan-funded (and Walter Lippmann-fronted) attempt to recreate an American equivalent of the Manchester prototype (10). The CIA's involvement was characteristically brazen. As with Encounter, it took the form of subsidy by subscription (11). Thus by August 1952, no less than nine percent of the paper's circulation of 127,000 made its way, ostensibly at least, to the US (12).The appeal to American readers - all 12,000 of them - was obvious: the paper still carried adverts on its front-page, and continued to be published in Manchester, the very heart of state power in highly decentralised fifties Britain.
The paper's move to London publication in 1961 provoked a flurry of speculation as to the source of the funding. Such questions intruded upon even the most fulsome of tributes to the paper's achievements and reputation. One experienced observer expressed the view that the paper was now set to become a "third force" - next to the Times and the Daily Telegraph - in British journalism (13). Whether inadvertent or mischievous, the phrase was inspired: By 1961, the phrase was routinely used in America to denote the CIA (14). Amusingly, the Guardian's pride in its "exceptionalism" - that the paper is uniquely independent and virtuous (by virtue of its ownership by a Trust) - replicates precisely a core belief of the American right, which ordinarily sees a rather more divine source for the blessing (15).
Today's Guardian appears very different. In the columns of Wheen and colleagues, spook malfeasance is regularly exposed and denounced. More attentive scrutiny reveals, alas, a less edifying truth: A more subtle and elaborate dishonesty has merely supplanted an older, and cruder pattern of lying. The new dispensation offers a world in which MI5 conspires frequently, MI6 when in conflict with CIA, and the George Bush Center for Intelligence only when the New York Times decrees. No such reticence, it is striking, attends the paper's treatment of conspiracies among what the paper presumably considers the lesser breeds (16)
Still closer attention confirms that Wheen's criticisms of British Intelligence are purely tactical, and highly selective (17). Consider his account, as found in his biography of Tom Driberg, of the assassination of Aung San in 1947. Of the Burmese leader's murder, all Wheen could offer was that he "was mown down by a machine gun at a political meeting" (18). In fact, the assassination occurred at a heavily guarded pre-independence Cabinet meeting, and was the product of a large and well-organised conspiracy (19). Among its British plotters was a senior Fleet Street figure so well known to Driberg that he duly - unavoidably - features in Wheen's biography (20). But Wheen omits to mention the same figure in connection with the assassination, and similarly overlooks the angry parliamentary reaction of a Labour MP, who denounced a right-wing cabal with close links to the Conservative Party. The name of this conspiracy theorist MP? Tom Driberg. In a lengthy 1997 piece on the case, Guardian readers were implicitly invited by a guest contributor to believe that this cabal of "old Burma hands" was entirely unconnected with MI6 (21). Students of the Gandhi assassination a year later doubtless found it difficult to banish the suspicion that both murders were part of a broad and distinctly institutionalised strategy which used the incipient Cold War as a smokescreen and pretext.
Yet Wheen's real obsession - one shared, less than coincidentally, by an astonishing number of other contributors to the paper - is with selling the Allen Dulles line on that locus classicus of American Stalinism, the Warren Report. The frequency with which critics of that multi-volumed monument to establishment mendacity are smeared and insulted has long since ceased to surprise (22). Which is as it should be, for the Guardian is, after all, not merely predominantly an MI6 paper (23), but the house-organ of Britain's "social democrats," arguably the most pliant and subservient group known to the CIA and Foggy Bottom. The ability of a Jonathan Freedland (24), Mark Lawson (25), or Martin Walker (26) to overlook an assassination here, or a bloodbath there, is no doubt highly prized in imperial Washington, and guarantees intermittent, though assuredly lucrative, appearances in those few branches of the American media where, rather quaintly, it is still felt necessary to furnish the occasional cloak of moral and intellectual respectability for the charnel consequences of dollar diplomacy (27). Though Wheen has assiduously put rhetorical distance between his "own" views and those of the "social democrat" claque which dominates the Guardian, in practice, his is not merely of a piece with their work, but a leader in the field. Again, the chief tactic is one of selective concession, allied to a wholesale whitewash of the CIA.
A March 1996 column, "A theory to end all theories," constitutes the quintessential expression of Wheen's fidelity to the CIA version of post-war US history. It is all there, from the child's version of two notorious scandals - "Richard Nixon did indeed try to conceal the truth about Watergate, and Ronald Reagan did trade arms for hostages" - to the obligatory citation of Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style In American Politics." A motley assortment of spook-serving nutters are quoted, and held up as representative of all those who talk and write seriously of the CIA's responsibility for the liquidation of a Kennedy or Martin Luther King. For the genuine researcher, predictably, he offers nought but abuse (28).
The "rancid stew"29 of cowardice, hypocrisy, and codswallop that is Wheen's moral imposture was nowhere more manifest than in the silence with which he responded to Clinton's recent apology to Guatemala (30). US-backed forces there murdered approximately 200,000 (31). The records of this five-decade long slaughter are unusually detailed and voluminous (32). By any reasonable criteria, those responsible within the US should be brought before a court as a matter of urgency. If Wheen were remotely consistent, he should now be banging the drum for NATO air strikes on CIA headquarters.
It was only to be expected, therefore, that Wheen, like his paper, would miss the mass influx of CIA personnel into Albania in the early 1990s (33). Miss it he duly did, too, even as the Agency created the KLA, and rendered it the dominant force in exile politics. Wheen did no better with the CIA's work in sustaining - not least through old friends in Israel - Milosevic and his repulsive cronies in power. The CIA backing both sides? Perish the thought, for that would mean that the entire crisis had been contrived, and the Kosovans used like mice in a lab. And the purpose of this utterly fantastic scheme? To create a pretext for the vast expansion of the US military presence in the region, and establish a precedent for military intervention in the oil- and gas-rich states of the Caucasus and Central Asia (34).
Moscow will fight. We know this for sure because, for almost a decade, it has been engaged, in stark and revealing contrast to the Cold War, in a murderous covert struggle with Washington. The best known, if not highest ranking (35), CIA officer to die in that war was Fred Woodruff. At the time of his murder in August 1993, Woodruff was station chief in Tbilisi, Georgia (36). By complete coincidence, as the Guardian's Martin Walker detailed at the time, the State Department was busily soliciting comments from client chancelleries on the infamous Directive 13. That Directive's prime purpose was the establishment of the criteria under which Washington could plausibly justify military intervention in Russia and its traditional spheres of influence (37).
Moscow's response to that document contained two components. The first was the rank and service of the corpse. The second, the manner of his death. The former left no doubt as to the seriousness of Moscow's resolve, while the latter guaranteed a restrained reaction from the US media. Inhabitants of Wheen's world will find the explanation puzzling. No so those conspiracy theorists so regularly assailed, and ruthlessly censored, by Wheen and his ghastly paper.
Woodruff died of a single shot to the head while allegedly travelling in the right-rear passenger seat of a government vehicle driven by the chief of Shevardnadze's bodyguard (38). Moscow offered no less than four blatantly incompatible versions of the single, magic bullet's point of origin and subsequent trajectory. Three of the four - from the front (39), the rear (40), and the Georgian grassy knoll to the right front (41) - were purely for public consumption, and of no consequence. Not so the fourth. According to this version, the shot had emanated from the front seat of the car.41 The message to Washington's elite delivered, it remained only to serve up a Georgian Oswald (42).
This is the way power really functions. It bears as much resemblance to the censored and corrupt guff purveyed by Wheen and the Guardian as a lion does to a unicorn. Unchallenged, their lies will lead us to disaster.
1 A less prudent invocation than Wheen realised. The belief that Orwell's connections to the British spook community long pre-dated the aftermath of the Second World War was not confined to Moscow and the CPGB, but rarely found public expression outside of that world. Subsequent to the completion of this piece, it did. See ROGER HOWE, "A Divisive Tendency," Tribune, 22 October 1999, p.8:[ Review of John Newsinger's Orwell's Politics (Macmillan, £42.50)]:"The suspicion must remain, in view of the Information Research Department revelations, that Eric Blair was some kind of plant, a competent young policeman picked while out in Burma to infiltrate the Left, building up a pseudo-identity. At any rate, it seems certain there are large hidden objects in Orwell's life-story, black holes for academics to fall into";
"Tactically, Orwell tended toward the divisive. The POUM militia were [sic] largely ineffective. The Independent Labour Party split…The English Socialist Party envisaged by Orwell sounds like the ultimate splinter group, a cross between the Socialist Party of Great Britain and the English National Party."
2 FRANCIS WHEEN, "Why we are right to bomb the Serbs," The Guardian, 7 April 1999, G2, p.4. In his column of 14 April, Wheen had recourse to alleged MI6 phone taps as part of an attack on the previous Conservative government's excessively close ties to Milosevic ("Peeps from a pipsqueak," G2, p.5). Wheen's dependence on such a source - when need arose - was revealing, and suggests the chairman of the Scott Trust should have a word. For as columnist Hugo Young once wrote, "[F]or journalists to have dealings of any kind with the secret service of any country makes them a likely tool of the paranoia which is the professional condition of secret services" ("Spies slip out of the shadows into their Thames ziggurat," The Guardian, 27 December 1994, p.18). Wheen sought to cover his back by sourcing the alleged MI6 intercepts to a Sunday Times article of some time before.
3 The Guardian ordinarily prefers not to dwell on the cynicism of "Landslide's" 1964 election victory, for good and obvious reasons. For a typical piece of evasion, complete with obligatory anti-JFK dig, see MARTIN WALKER'S "Remembering the way of LBJ," The Guardian, 7 November 1994, p.20. Attacks on LBJ are invariably CIA-sourced, and designed to bolster the lie that the Agency was dovish on military intervention in Vietnam. For a recent example, see PETER LENNON'S "The attack that never was," The Guardian, 17 April 1999, Saturday Review, p.3. The unquestioning faith here reposed in the "CIA's chief radar analyst, Gene Poteat," is remarkable.
4 In December 1994, Gott was charged by The Spectator, the right-wing weekly with positively organic ties to the Anglo-American spook empire, with being a KGB "agent-of-influence." He subsequently confessed to having accepted free trips from the Cheka. This was obviously not the full story. A more plausible reading would have Gott being used by British Intelligence to move against the paper's editor, Peter Preston, under whose editorship the paper came to resemble a Foggy Bottom house journal. There was an amusing footnote to the saga of Gott. Dominic Lawson, the editor of The Spectator, was himself subsequently exposed as a witting disseminator of MI6 propaganda on the Balkans. Like father, like son: In 1966, Lawson's father, Nigel, the future Conservative chancellor, was editor of the same weekly when it published a fulsome review of a CIA-authored work on the assassination of JFK. The book in question was Inquest, by Edward Jay Epstein, the Angletonian mouthpiece; and the reviewer, senior CIA man Ray Cline. The Spectator declined to reveal Cline's background. An addiction to advancement by collusion with the spooks manifestly runs in the Lawson family.
5 RICHARD GOTT, "The MG and 1917," The Guardian, 7 April 1987, p.18;
6 RICHARD GOTT, "Giving a voice in the paper to both reform and revolution," The Guardian, 3 November 1987, p.26. This headline, it should be noted, was a lie. As Gott's text leaves no doubt, Soskice/MI6 had no interest whatever in reform in Russia. To the contrary, their agenda here, as everywhere else, was entirely reactionary.
7 GEORGE SELDES. Tell the Truth and Run: My 44 Year Fight for a FreePress (New York: Greenberg, 1953), pp.122-123.
8 MI6's role in the rise of Franco is reasonably well known. The full story of MI6's roles in Weimar Germany, and in the emergence of Mussolini, awaits a teller. MI5 created the earliest fascist British movements of the post-First World War period. For the latter, see JOHN HOPE, "Fascism, the Security Service and the curious careers of Maxwell Knight and James McGuirk Hughes," Lobster, (22), November 1991, pp.1-5; and, by the same author, "Surveillance or Collusion? Maxwell Knight, MI5 and British Fascisti," Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 9 No. 4, 1994; and "British Fascism and the State, 1917-1927: A Re-examination of the Documentary Evidence," Labour History Review, Vol. 57 No.3, Winter 1992. On all of the aforementioned, the Guardian offered only silence, a fact which puts into perspective the Guardian's reputation for being, throughout the 1930s, the most sympathetic Fleet Street commentator on the plight of Germany's Jews. For a taste of the paper's characteristically repugnant smugness on this issue, see the obituary for David Ayerst, himself the author of a monumentally self-satisfied history of the paper, "All the views fit to print," The Guardian, 23 September 1992. According to his obituarist, Ayerst argued that "from Peterloo to Suez the Scott family throughout…endeavoured to speak plainly and truthfully."
9 For a list, by no means exhaustive, of Guardian editorialists, columnists and reporters working with and for the IRD, see PAUL LASHMAR & JAMES OLIVER. Britain's Secret Propaganda War, 1948-1977 (Stroud, Gloucester: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1998): John Midgely (p.118); Guy Wint (p.121); Victor Zorza (pp.120-121); and Darcy Gillie (p.97). Gillie was commended to IRD by Orwell (p.97). Zorza, the paper's resident Sovietologist, was later to earn a reputation as a critic of the CIA line on détente. Earlier, however, he had run the spook propaganda line on the Beria interregnum. Wint wrote editorials. Midgeley had earlier worked for The Economist, "many" of whose staff, according to the same authors, "were very close to the intelligence establishment" (p.118). That link evidently endures. "Joan Phillips," the deputy editor of Living Marxism (see note 33 below), worked, under the name of Jane Hoey, for the Economist Intelligence Unit ("Media News," Private Eye, (918), 21 February 1997, p.10). By the late 1960s, The Guardian was the recycler of much material from a series of CIA fronts, most obviously the news services of Kern House Enterprises Inc., a typical Delaware-registered scam. See Lashmar & Oliver p.134.
10 LUCY MAYNARD SALMON. The Newspaper and the Historian (New York: Octagon Books, 1976 [reprint of Oxford University Press, 1923]), p.123, f.15.
11 FRANCES STONOR SAUNDERS. Who paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), p.186.
12 "The Press: A radical change," Time (Atlantic Edition), 25 August 1952, p.41.
13 "Journalistic shot in the arm," The Guardian, 1 August 1961, as reprinted in The Guardian Century, Part Seven: 1960-69, p.5, as issued free with the edition of Saturday, 20 November 1999. The commentator was Arthur Christiansen, former editor of the Daily Express.
14 RICHARD & GLADYS HARKNESS, "The Mysterious Doings of CIA," Saturday Evening Post, (227), 6 November 1954, p.66: "Besides its spy network, and the open CIA function of research, the agency operates a superclandestine third force…"; HARRY HOWE RANSOM. Central Intelligence and National Security (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), pp.203-204: "The CIA: A Third Force?: Quite possibly the ascendancy of CIA to prominence and power in national policy making represents the growth of a third force…"; RICHARD STARNES, "Arrogant CIA Disobeys Orders in Viet Nam," The Washington Daily News, 2 October 1963, p.3: "Unquestionably Mr. McNamara and General Walters both got an earful from people who are beginning to fear the CIA is becoming a Third Force co-equal with President Diem's regime and the US Government - and answerable to neither."
15 HUGO YOUNG, "A biased strategy," The Guardian, 20 December 1993; POLLY TOYNBEE, "Guarding the Guardian," The Guardian, 10 September 1999, p.21: "The Guardian is not like any other national newspaper…" Quite so. No other British national so routinely bothers to masquerade as independent of intelligence service control.
16 Africans, Asians, Latin Americans and the white tribe of southern Africa conspire regularly in the pages of The Guardian. Among Europeans, this unnatural vice resides only in France, a point long staple in post-war US and British spook propaganda.
17 Compare the frequency with which Wheen assails MI5, as opposed to MI6. For the former, see The Observer, 10 October 1993; "Spooks, simpletons, and a nose for truth," The Guardian, 10 September 1997, G2, p.5; and "The spy left out in the cold," The Guardian, 25 August 1999, G2, p.5. I can find only one equivalent all-out assault on MI6: "Spies, lies, old school-ties," The Guardian, 19 May 1999, G2, p.5.
18FRANCIS WHEEN. Tom Driberg: His Life and Indiscretion (London: Pan Books, 1992), p.216.
19 KIN OUNG. Who Killed Aung San? (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1996).
20 See note 9, pp.171 & 211. The journalist in question was Frank Owen, at the time editor of the Daily Mail. He was previously of Beaverbrook's Evening Standard. In 1945, he edited SEAC, the newspaper of the South-East Asia Command. Owen was not by any stretch of the imagination an "Old Burma hand."
21 FERGAL KEANE, "Save us from our friends," The Guardian, 19 July 1997, The Week, p.5.
22 The obsession inevitably found expression in the paper's coverage of the death of Diana. In the editorial "Diana's never ending story," 16 February 1998, p.14, the paper revisited an old CIA line: "The Americans who could never accept the assassination of President Kennedy built a conspiracy industry that flourishes to this day." An "industry"? The paper might more usefully have explained a curious feature of the aftermath of Diana's death: Why have all subsequent recreations in the British media sought to depict the Mercedes as coming to rest upright rather than upside down, as it unquestionably did. It should be noted that it was, rightly or wrongly, MI6 which came under widest suspicion for her death.
23 The paper carries obvious MI5 material, too. See anything, for example, about Northern Ireland by John Ware or Peter Taylor.
24Freedland, like fellow-columnist Polly Toynbee, argued that American selectivity in the field of humanitarian intervention should be the occasion for renewed hope, not scepticism. Neither supplied any grounds for such a conclusion. For Toynbee's spectacularly witless vapourings on the subject, see "Left behind and left seething as a new way struggles to be born," 12 April 1999, p.14. It included the following priceless sentence: "Our only booty will be the satisfaction of trying to establish liberal democracy as far as we can." Go tell that to Lockheed, or Standard Oil. Or even Pat Buchanan, who more realistically noted "America cannot police the planet on a defence budget of 3% GDP" (Washington Post, 13 April). But it can if it uses a series of regional proxies. For Freedland's enthusiastic endorsement of the assault on Serbia, and delight at the imminent end of Vietnam-era reservations on the use of ground troops, see "Clinton may even defy the Dover Test. That's the one about body bags," The Guardian, 7 April 1999, p.18. It is only fair to point out that not all Guardian journalists were blind to the "ironies" of the interventionist argument. See ISABEL HILTON, "A memo to the US: no one should be above international law," The Guardian, 29 March 1999, p.16.
25 MARK LAWSON, "Honestly, there are no conspiracies," The Guardian, 1 October 1998, G2, p.8. In accordance with Lawson's truly bizarre - and very funny - "continuum theory," Oswald did it. His take on the Lincoln assassination is awaited with some eagerness. The lie that the US & British establishments do not resort to conspiracies and assassinations is arguably the keystone of their respective propaganda systems. For another piece of CIA-serving hackwork, see Lawson's "What if Oswald had been a lousy shot?," The Independent, 23 November 1993.
26 For many years, until his recent and decidedly mysterious sacking, Martin Walker was the paper's premier JFK hit-man. See, for examples, "JFK: Half man, half myth," The Guardian, 19 January 1991, Weekend Supplement, pp.1, 4 & 5; and "Sixties man incarnate had a headache coming on," [a review of China Lobby propagandist Richard Reeves' President Kennedy: A Profile of Power], Literary Review, September 1994, pp.6-8.
27 Thus Martin Walker, for example, popped up in the pages of the Washington Post reviewing two books on Yeltsin's Russia. Both contained fleeting, and decidedly unenlightening, references to the murder of CIA man Fred Woodruff. See "In the post-Soviet wonderland," 20 April 1997, p.X01.
28 FRANCIS WHEEN, "A theory to end all theories," The Guardian, 13 March 1996, G2, p.4. Dean Swift, this wasn't.
29Wheen's phrase to describe the arguments of parliamentary opponents to the NATO invasion of Serbia. In the course of his rant against the uncomprehending unwashed, Wheen inveighed against their "historical amnesia." For a journalist who hadn't forgotten American support for the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Bosnia and Croatia, see SIMON JENKINS, "Suckers for punches," The Times, 14 April 1999, p.18: "President Tudjman, supported by the Americans, did to his Serb population in 1994-95 exactly what Mr. Milosevic is doing to his Kosovans."
30"Clinton regrets support for Guatemala," Washington Post, 11 March 1999, p.A1.
31 MARY MCGRORY, "Apologies are U.S.," Washington Post, 14 March 1999, p.B1.
32 DOUGLAS FARRAH, "Papers show U.S. role in Guatemalan abuses," Washington Post, 11 March 1999, p.A26.
33 JOAN PHILLIPS, "America's Baltic Intrigue," Living Marxism, (60), October 1993. For a sustained pretence that the CIA was not the creator of the KLA, see ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, "Arm the KLA. And if that doesn't work, send in the ground troops," The Guardian, 31 March 1999, p.15. The CIA armed the KLA to provoke, not to conquer. There is every likelihood that the KLA will be transformed in due course into the core force of an Islamic "rogue state," against which the European and American tax-payer must be protected at extravagant cost. For the paradigm of such operations, see the rise of Fidel Castro, whom the CIA installed for the purpose of reviving the Cold War by bringing it to US shores. Living Marxism, it should be noted, came under sustained attack by both Private Eye and the Guardian after becoming embroiled in a squalid row over the alleged falsification of film footage of a Serb camp for Bosnia prisoners. Both sought to imply - ironically enough, by wondering "who and what lies behind such an expensively produced magazine" (Letter to the editor: CAROLE HODGE, "Living a Lie?", The Observer, 9 February 1997, Review, p.2) - that Living Marxism is a front for British intelligence. The case made was at once compelling and utterly hypocritical. Private Eye was founded - or, rather, initially fronted - by Andrew Osmond, a serving MI6 officer, at a time when Britain's external intelligence arm was in open revolt against Macmillan's attempts to end the Cold War, and change tack in southern Africa. The Observer became a government tool no later than the mid-nineteenth century. See ALEXANDER FREAN, "The battle for Britain's oldest Sunday paper," The Times, 1 February 1995, p.21: "Launched in 1791 by W.S. Bourne, an impecunious but resourceful young Irishman, as a high-principled anti-government paper, it had changed allegiances by the mid-19th century and established close links with the Government. At that time it even published editorials in support of its foreign policy written by Lord Palmerston, who kindly arranged payments to the paper from Secret Service funds."
34 Editorial, "Directive 13," Wall Street Journal, 18 August 1993, p.A10: "The parallel with Yugoslavia, where the West also sought to 'mediate,' is compelling."
35 That honour almost certainly goes to Fred Cuny, who disappeared in Chechnya in 1995. His vanishing prompted an unprecedented outpouring of public grief from three of Britain's leading intelligencer-journos: WILLIAM SHAWCROSS, "Search for an aid expert," Sunday Telegraph, 30 April 1995, p.27; ROBERT FISK, "Fred Cuny saved thousands of lives. Now has he lost his own?", The Independent on Sunday, 14 May 1995, p.12; and CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, "Bill and Boris: A fragile friendship built on fear of something worse," The Independent on Sunday, 27 August 1995, p.18. For an insistence that Moscow's posture was a bluff, see MARTIN WOOLLACOTT, "Russia may be bluffing. NATO must win, as the importance of victory to us is great," The Guardian, 10 April 1999, p.23. Woollacott was right about Serbia, but then Russia was always going to make its stand within its own territorial borders, as events in Chechnya have proved. All of the above cited are MI6.
36 ANATOL LIEVEN, "How Moscow military aided the collapse of Georgia," The Times, 28 September 1993, p.15.
37 MARTIN WALKER, "Russia fears U.S. meddling," The Guardian, 19 August 1993, p.7.
38 ANATOL LIEVEN, "U.S. treads heavily on Moscow's new imperial dreams," The Times, 14 August 1993, p.10.
39 IAN BRODIE, "Murdered CIA agent was training Georgian Guards," The Times, 11 August 1993, p.10. In this early version, Woodruff was hit "in the forehead as he sat in the front." With the Cheka's assistance, a consensus was soon reached that placed Woodruff in the right-rear seat.
40 JAMES ADAMS & ROYCE GROH, "Georgia calls in CIA to fight new Cold War," Sunday Times, 15 August 1993, pp. 1 & 13. Adams was in characteristic form. The "single round from a Kalashnikov went through the rubber seal surrounding the rear window and struck Woodruff in the head." And thereafter struck a nearby flying pig.
41 ANDREW HIGGINS, "CIA agent's murder is hard blow for Georgia," The Independent, 24 August 1993, p.7. Higgins' version was attributed to the alarmingly well-educated barmaid - she boasted a degree in philology, and three languages, as they tend to - who was allegedly seated beside Woodruff when the shot struck. Though "Marina" did not directly invoke a Georgian grassy knoll, the inference was unmistakable, for she insisted there was no damage to the windscreens front or back; and "Freddy" did have his window wound down. That repulsive deployment of the diminutive, "Freddy," is eerily reminiscent of the attempt by a number of senior CIA men to feign intimacy with, and affection for, JFK. The spook mind-set is of course universal, and universally debased.
41 JOHN KAMFNER, "CIA role in Georgia exposed after US 'diplomat' is killed," The Daily Telegraph, 11 August 1993, p.10. Kampfner's piece included some additional touches. The chief of Shevardnadze's bodyguard, Gogoladze, was, according to an unnamed source within the Georgian Interior Ministry, "in a state of drunkeness" at the time of the shooting, and was generally "known for his excesses when drunk." The Georgian equivalent of the Cellar club was not offered.
42 Anzor Sharmaidze. See: REUTER, "Georgian killer of 'CIA agent' jailed," The Times, 8 February 1994, p.12.
If at first you make don't succeed, do the same thing all over again:
An establishment dog returns to his vomit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep...ncis-wheen
Quote:Review of Strange Days Indeed by Francis Wheen
Wheen's dissection of the 70s hilariously reveals the paranoia that characterised that decade, says Andrew Anthony
Andrew Anthony, The Observer, Sunday, 6 September 2009
If you can remember the 60s, the saying goes, then you weren't there. The problem is the reverse with the 70s. It's the decade that no one who lived through can seem to forget. The era of three-day weeks, Abba and skyjacking has become a myth-decorated sanctuary from the present, a magnet for nostalgia junkies, ironists, romantics and cultural historians of various prejudices and stripes. For frustrated ideologues and all those who think everything went wrong in the world the day that Margaret Thatcher came to power, it represents a period of radical possibilities, the last time educated people could speak of "revolution" without joking. For those who tend to trace social change to the pop charts, it was the period in which punk replaced progressive rock and flares went straight.
The Seventies have inspired a host of documentaries, films, articles, fashions – and books. Many of these have focused on the overfamiliar, but in recent years there has been a revisionist movement of sorts that has set out to combat cliches. Howard Sounes's Seventies: The Sights, Sounds and Ideas of a Brilliant Decade was a riposte to the view that Love Thy Neighbour and the Austin Allegro were typical of the times. And recently Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out sought to rescue progressive politics from the image of suicidal industrial disputes.
Now, before the gloss has had a chance to dry, along comes Francis Wheen with what amounts to a blowtorch and an industrial sander. Wheen has no interest in playing down the turmoil that rent the country during the years of energy blackouts, strikes and urban terror. He summons up an atmosphere of almost surreal resignation, as captured in Tony Benn's diary entry of 23 December 1973: "Three more IRA bombs in London. I tidied the office and wrapped Christmas gifts."
Benn's diaries come in for a number of citations because they are such a fertile source of the emotion that for Wheen best characterises the era: paranoia. The book's subtitle is "The Golden Age of Paranoia" and certainly when it came to insecurity, suspicion and fear, the Seventies had little to learn from the cold war tensions of the Fifties.
Wheen begins his assessment with that exemplar of paranoia, Richard Nixon. With his "ineradicable inferiority complex", fixation on the enemy within and obsession with secretly recording all his conversations, the disgraced president embodied the anxiety that afflicted not just the establishment but the counterculture too. Wheen's portrait of Tricky Dicky is sharp and amusing and he comes across as about as well-balanced as a drunk on a unicycle. "Bob," Nixon requested of Bob Haldeman, his chief of staff, "please get me the names of the Jews, you know, the big Jewish contributors of the Democrats… could we please investigate some of these cocksuckers?"
Yet if a lunatic was running the asylum, that didn't make the other inmates sane. The CIA kept 500,000 files on US citizens, even if some of them were, well, worthy of suspicion. Wheen notes, in passing, that Jane Fonda's former husband, Tom Hayden, lived on a commune devoted to the North Korean dictator, Kim Il Sung, where they sang, to the tune of "Maria" from West Side Story: "Kim Il Sung, Kim Il Sung, Kim Il Sung. Say it loud and there's music playing; say it soft and it's almost like praying."
Wielding a magpie mind and an anteater's nose for dirt, Wheen is a rare hybrid beast in British letters. He combines genuine intellectual curiosity with deliciously humorous irreverence. A seasoned connoisseur of the bizarre and scurrilous, he provides here a feast of startling and droll anecdotes, featuring Harold Wilson, Idi Amin, Tariq Ali, Carlos the Jackal and Uri Geller. Page for page, it will doubtless rank as one of the most entertaining books of the year.
But at times, the selection can seem a little random. "Slice the Seventies where you will," Wheen writes, "the flavour is unmistakable – a pungent melange of apocalyptic dread and conspiratorial fever." But the slices would be more revealing and the book more coherent, were they to create a recognisable shape.
One grows impatient for a unifying thesis to emerge, some overarching idea or explanation that will tie all the disparate characters and scenes together. It's fascinating to learn that Carlos, the high-living urban guerrilla, sent a letter admonishing the Guardian – "my daily since 1966" – for giving him nickname of "the Jackal". "Jackals are cute, fox-eared predators which hunt in large family groups," he complained. "I have observed them in the wild." And it's sobering to be reminded that, after he resigned his premiership, Wilson thought of himself, in his own words, "as the big fat spider in the corner of the room", directing investigative journalists to "kick a blind man standing on the corner [of Charing Cross Road]".
But what links these two situations and what do they tell us about the era beyond the warped outlook of the two individuals involved? Does the symptom have causes or is symptom itself the cause, paranoia breeding further paranoia?
Perhaps it's missing the point to look for a big answer. After all, it's the need for a totalising pattern, the notion that everything is connected, that is the hallmark of paranoia. As Wheen writes: "A belief in conspiracy as the motive force of history can give you nightmares, but by detecting a grand design in the most random events and thus creating some kind of order from chaos it also offers a solace that others find in religion." He goes on to argue that paranoia is "a solipsistic pathology, bestowing a sense of grandiosity and self-importance". This is a truth that deserves to be universally acknowledged. It's also true that I could have done with Wheen indulging in a tad more solipsism.
He inserts himself, very briefly, into the story in two or three tantalising episodes, first as a 13-year-old chorister meeting a tight-fisted Edward Heath and later as an aspiring hippie who's just missed the love boat. These glimpses are rich with self-deprecating wit, but they also offer a wider-eyed contemporary perspective that reaffirms the wisdom of retrospection. A more generous helping of this youthful innocence might have been sprinkled on his sage observations without risk of self-importance.
Ending in 1979, Strange Days Indeed is a kind of prequel to Wheen's previous book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. For anyone who savoured that elegant savaging of nonsense thinking, this is essential reading. But more than that, it's a timely reminder, in this age of 9/11 "truthers" and reborn conspiracy theorists, that paranoia illuminates nothing so much as itself.
• Andrew Anthony is the author of The Fallout: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence (Vintage)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep...ays-indeed
Quote:Strange Days Indeed by Francis Wheen
Andy Beckett spots some gaps in an entertaining portrait of the politics and personalities of the 1970s
Andy Beckett, The Guardian, Saturday, 12 September 2009, p.7
Francis Wheen is not terribly impressed by the 1970s. In his brisk global portrait of the decade, Richard Nixon is a "toxic" person, China is ruled by "basket cases", Africa by "crazy" dictators, and "sensational metaphysical tosh" is the predominant western intellectual fashion, swallowed by "drugged-up, spaced-out hippies". The book concludes by comparing the political and social atmosphere of the era to that of communist North Korea.
Wheen, as you would expect of a Private Eye veteran, can be a bracingly irreverent writer. But in this account, behind all the adjectival graffiti, he remains doggedly faithful to the conventional wisdom – steadily undermined though it has been by every subsequent period of international crisis – that the decade was uniquely dark and turbulent.
The fresh element here is his focus on a single gothic theme: the paranoia that infected heads of state and the wider culture. "Slice the Seventies where you will," Wheen writes in his slightly haughty gentlemen's club style, "the flavour is unmistakable – a pungent mélange of apocalyptic dread and conspiratorial fever." In a dozen fluent chapters of potted biography and cultural history, he sketches a broad jittery panorama. An insomniac Nixon plots and frets and, in one startling episode, wanders out of the White House on his own in the middle of the night to speak in riddles to anti-Vietnam war protesters camped nearby. In Uganda, the capricious and vicious Idi Amin expels thousands of law-abiding Asian businessmen from his country as alleged "economic saboteurs". In Britain, the fading prime minister Harold Wilson fears his annual summer holiday on the Isles of Scilly is being monitored, offshore, by Soviet trawlers. Simultaneously, members of the British secret services and the Conservative establishment convince themselves that Wilson is a Soviet agent.
With a mixture of relish and distaste, Wheen also details the worldwide surge in terrorism; the era's excited stirrings on the far left and far right; and Hollywood's unusual interest then in political conspiracies – All the President's Men, The Parallax View – real and imagined. Now and then he personalises and brightens his doomy canvas with a small shading of memoir: Wheen was an apprentice journalist at the time and moved in mildly well-connected London circles. "[In] the late Seventies," he namedrops, "a puppyish young barrister named Tony Blair ... turned up at the New Statesman offering a short article ... and then accompanied me to our local pub."
Overwhelmingly, though, Wheen relies on written sources, most often books and newspaper cuttings, with the occasional "rummage", as he puts it, in American and British government archives. This is fine as far as it goes. Wheen has long been a master at unearthing embarrassing quotations and juxtaposing them with the more palatable official stances of the great and the good. There is a particularly sharp-eyed exposé of the late Alan Coren, who in the 70s wrote a wildly popular, supposedly comic column about Amin's dictatorship, which managed to be both racist and astonishingly offhand about what was happening under his government. A better example of the post-imperial sourness of parts of British culture at the time would be hard to find.
Yet the nature of Wheen's research, along with his disdainful attitude to the decade, also limits his book. For one thing, much of his material does not feel very new. In recent years high-profile books, plays and films such as Frost/Nixon, The Last King of Scotland and The Baader Meinhof Complex have already featured his protagonists and their brutalities and anxieties. And for decades now historians have been quoting from the same bleak 70s sections in politicians' memoirs which Wheen presents as revelations. Neither of these things would necessarily matter – the personalities and tangled plotlines of the era's politics will keep writers busy for decades to come – except that he does not seem very interested in making discoveries.
He lists a single interview in his notes on sources: with a friend, the distinguished former Sunday Times journalist Bruce Page, who in 1975 attended a dinner, according to Wheen, at which a group of leading British businessmen, senior media figures and "old soldiers" discussed overthrowing Harold Wilson's government by unconstitutional means. For a couple of fascinating long paragraphs, the plotters talk in grandees' euphemisms about involving the army and using emergency electricity generators and imposing a "government of national unity". Then the anecdote abruptly ends, with Page's dismissal of the plan as "all a bit ridiculous". How substantial this and other fringe rightwing plots against Wilson were – and there were undoubtedly many – Wheen never quite says.
A lack of concreteness hampers his book in other ways. He correctly points out that the paranoia boom of the 70s was partly a product of troubled economic times, such as the 1973 oil crisis and the sudden global recession that followed. But the important facts of this downturn – how long did the recession last? How was everyday life actually affected? – are almost absent. Wheen prefers to portray the period through the obsessions and flaws of its political leaders. Only rarely does he show any empathy towards them. This is another drawback of not doing many interviews: if you never meet your subjects, or at least people who worked closely with them (Nixon and Wilson being long dead), it is quite hard to give a fair account of their state of mind or actions.
Instead, what we have is a depiction of a vaguely defined political mood – "strange days indeed" – that settled over some countries in the mid-70s. Those aspects of political and cultural life that do not fit this gloomy picture, such as the giddy liberations of feminism or consumerism, barely feature. And neither does the fact that the mid-70s mood passed. For all the forebodings of Nixon and Wilson and their opponents, the sky did not fall in: by the late 70s, a new horizon of global free-market economics and politics was opening up instead, for good or ill. But then Private Eye has never been very interested in happy endings.
• Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies is published by Faber.