At Home and Abroad . . . (1971)

The Home and Abroad Column from the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Review December 1971

At Home

It is impossible to sympathise with the howls of frustrated rage over the cynical semantics of the Compton report on the interrogation methods of the British in Northern Ireland. The military correspondent of the Daily Telegraph pointed out that the methods employed were also used on some British shock troops, with the idea of training them to resist pressure if they were ever captured. This was of course a poor attempt at justifying the methods used by the British but it did underline the fact that brutal interrogation is widely used, on all sides, in war. And anyone who really expected the inquiry to come up with anything other than a whitewash themselves need some sort of interrogation but on a psychiatrist’s couch.

Cynical semantics have also been used by government spokesmen about two of their most pressing problems. When he addressed the well-fed Institute of Directors at their annual conference, Chancellor of the Exchequer Barber forgot all about the mounting unemployment and claimed that we are about to experience the biggest boom for years, that the economy is expanding and that price restraint is working. Perhaps he was drunk—the directors always enjoy a good lunch, with a small bottle of wine. Shortly afterwards Barber’s colleague Peter Walker, not to be outdone, was burbling out the same stale old promises about housing which we have been hearing for so long. His new Housing Bill, he said, is the most important reform in the field this century and then, like housing ministers before him, he made the ritual promise about slums. Walker, who lives in a posh house himself, reckons that he will have cleared the slums up in ten years. There is no mitigating evidence, that he was drunk.

Abroad

Never before have the protests about Bomb tests been taken as high as those about America’s latest one underneath the island of Amchitka. If this indicates a heightening of the energy of the protesters, it also hints that their unrealistic hysteria is becoming acute. Surely they didn’t expect the Supreme Court to rule that human interests should come before those of the American ruling class? To overturn every priority, every assumption, upon which capitalism everywhere works? Perhaps in future they will realise the order of things under capitalism and then begin working against the system instead of against one of its effects.

Meanwhile, another of the world’s nuclear powers—and one where there is no opportunity to protest against its Bomb tests—was finally allowed to join the club. China’s entry into the United Nations, although a big diplomatic defeat for Nixon, showed the contempt with which the UN (which, we may remember, was once going to be the means to a securely peaceful world) is treated by the world powers. In the old days America would never have allowed such a defeat. For after all the fine words and the lies about it, the United Nations is little more than an international gangsters’ club. It is fitting that the latest recruit to the top league of international capitalism should at last be welcomed into it—bombs and all.

Politics

Despite the recent upheaval in the Labour Party over the Common Market, it was a fairly safe bet that Jenkins would beat Foot for the Deputy Leadership. Most of the press applauded the vote, as a sign that Labour is still interested in men of principle and honesty. In its present depression, Labour could do with a new hope; even the problems which the Tories are finding in trying to run British capitalism have not yet erased the memories of those six gloomy years of Labour rule. So once again we have a rising star, who is going to lead us to yet another promised land. In this one incident we have all the history of capitalist politics; promise and disillusionment, confidence and panic, hope and despair. This wearying process goes on year in and year out, with each successive leader being hailed as the answer to our problems then quickly exposed for a futile trickster. And none of them, yet, has been honest enough to admit it.

Honesty is a word very foreign to the Communist Party, whose recent national congress came well up to the expectations of those who always look to the Communists to provide some hilarious political double acts. This year, of course, they had to talk about Northern Ireland, and to hammer out a typical reformist line. They showed a touching concern for the catholic minority, then took the line that the best thing to happen was for the British troops, whose methods have been under such fire, to stay there. This was typical of the confusion and the trickery of the Communist Party, who as usual are dabbling their hands in the blood of the workers in the hope of fishing up a few miserable scraps of ignorant support.

Blogger's Note:

See the article, 'Northern Ireland: The Gentle Art of Interrogation ', from the same issue of the Socialist Standard.

Spycatchers (2022)

Book Review from the November 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

A good number of years ago the branch of the Socialist Party I’m a member of was holding its meetings in a room in a pub on the edge of Swansea town centre. We would advertise our fortnightly Monday meetings via posters, leaflets and in the local daily paper. When I arrived at the pub early for one of the meetings and stood at the bar, the landlady informed me, quite innocently, that a detective had been there asking what we were doing. I thanked her for telling me and suggested that, if he came again, she might tell him that our meetings were open to everyone, nothing was hidden and he was perfectly free to find out by attending. She thanked me and we heard nothing more, but at the time it reminded me of conversations members sometimes had about being spied on, either by having their telephone tapped or by someone from the Special Branch attending meetings covertly or even infiltrating the Party by becoming members.

I’d always wondered about this, but on balance thought it was unlikely to be happening. After all, if even a small number of such people had attended our meetings or otherwise found out what we were about, surely they would quickly realise that we didn’t pose a threat to ‘national security’ in the sense that the Security Services understood it. While it’s true that we are ‘dissidents’, we have never supported one government or state against another and we have never advocated any kind of violence. Yet that incident couldn’t but shift my thinking a little and what now, many years later, has shifted it even more is a recently published book entitled Red List: MI5 and British Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century by David Caute (Verso, 2022, 404 pp.). It’s a book that draws on official MI5 documents released to the National Archive and so publicly available which provide startling insights into the enormous efforts (and massive resources) put into tracking the activities and affiliations of an extraordinarily wide range of people who, over most of the 20th century, were suspected of being sympathetic to or interested in regimes deemed to be enemies of the British state (largely the Soviet Union) or were seen as constituting a possible ‘threat to national security’.

Threat to national security?

The main thing that switched on the light of suspicion in the minds of the security men and women (mainly men) of MI5 (or Special Branch, as its police service was called) was any connection whatever to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) or to anyone associated with it. While it’s true that the Communist Party was in thrall to Moscow and in effect the British arm of the Soviet regime during most of the years of its existence and some of the individuals targeted by MI5 were members of the CPGB, many were not and some had only peripheral connections to it or to any of its members or sympathisers. But MI5 did not, as David Caute’s book shows, stop at the CPGB. It extended its investigations to any other organisations it considered potentially ‘subversive’, for example to small left-wing groups who were not actually supportive of the Stalinist Soviet regime and in fact were disciples of Stalin’s arch-enemy, Leon Trotsky. Their investigation also extended to trade unions, to anti-colonial national independence supporters, and, from the 1970s onwards, to the IRA. Given MI5’s apparent failure, as made clear in this book, to distinguish between different kinds of potential ‘subversives’ , it seems quite likely that not just those small Trotskyist groups but any group with the word ‘socialist’ in its name was being targeted, and perhaps still are today – even if, as the author points out, much more of their attention nowadays is likely to be focused on newly perceived threats to national security such as militant Islam and, maybe, a resurgent non-Soviet Russia.

But what of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and the detective asking questions in that Swansea pub? Surely anyone attending a single meeting or reading just one Party pamphlet or issue of the Socialist Standard would have understood that we didn’t pose an immediate, violent, non-democratic threat to the British state but that our aim was to openly spread socialist ideas among workers with a view to a socialist society being established democratically through the ballot box once the majority had come to understand those ideas? Yes, but what emerges from the pages of this book is that neither the security system nor its operatives stood out for their brightness or intelligence. Despite countless and ongoing phone taps, mail interceptions, buggings, burglaries, physical surveillance and even infiltration by ‘moles’, the released papers investigated by David Caute show that they seemed to find it difficult to work out whether individuals or organisations constituted genuine, plausible threats to ‘national security’ or whether they just happened to be friends or associates of those who might have ‘subversion’ in their minds and might quite innocently have found themselves in particular places at particular times. So, as we learn, ‘the net cast was incredibly broad’ and ‘guilt by association was paramount’, even if that association was sometimes imagined rather than real. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that the Socialist Party and its members, though they could not be sensibly categorised as any kind of immediate threat to national security, should be (and probably still are) lumped together with those who perhaps could be seen as some kind of threat – even if of course most of them weren’t.

Incompetence and bungling

The result of all the glaring incompetence recorded in this book (referred to by the writer with typically entertaining wry commentary as ‘the stumbling confusion of M15 minds’) is that most of the targeting of potential spies came to nothing, simply because they weren’t spies and never constituted any feasible threat to the British state, while the real spies, such as Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Philby, operated for many years before their activities became known. The lenses of MI5 were clouded partly because it was staffed at the top by out-of-touch former military and colonial officers and its agents on the ground, the ‘Special Branch’ operatives, were, as already noted, simply not very bright. They often included manifestly irrelevant and sometimes unintentionally comic details in their reports. Surveillance of the home of poet C. Day Lewis, for example, produced such vital information as ‘seldom wears a hat, not altogether smart appearance in dress’, and the agent reporting from Harwich on the historian Christopher Hill returning from Russia wrote: ‘He has the appearance of a communist; but his baggage, which was searched by HM Customs, did not contain any subversive literature.’ Charlie Chaplin came under investigation but was deemed to be ‘a progressive or radical rather than communist’, even though it was widely known, as the book points out, that ‘Chaplin had long been an out-and-out fellow-traveller of Stalin’s Russia’. The contents of the papers examined here also reveal MI5 culture as highly bigoted and in particular, perhaps predictably, racist and anti-semitic. One memo quoted states that ‘the chief Bolshevik leaders are not Russians but Jews who carefully hide their real names’. Another report talks about a suspect’s home being visited by ‘a number of young men who have the appearance of Communist Jews’, while an uncle of the historian and Communist Party member Eric Hobsbawm is described as ‘sneering, half Jew in appearance, having a long nose’.

Intellectuals and others

Yet what we have in this study is only a small taste of everything MI5 has got up to over the years. That is firstly because the records made publicly available only cover people already deceased, and secondly because this study focuses only on ‘intellectuals’, (eg, writers, artists, scientists, historians, politicians, actors, musicians, lawyers), for the most part well-known ones (eg, John Berger, Benjamin Britten, Jacob Bronowski, Cecil Day-Lewis, Michael Foot, Eric Hobsbawm, Doris Lessing, Ewan McColl, George Orwell, J.B. Priestley, Paul Robeson, Stephen Spender, E.P Thompson). Yet, despite the 200+ suspect ‘intellectuals’ covered, many records relating to deceased individuals have, as the author tells us, not been released (without any reason being given) and there is significant redaction of some of those that have been. So who knows how much other bungling, how many other dead ends would be revealed if the totality of security records were available, especially if those also included people still alive? And who knows whether, if the net were cast wider than those the authors see as ‘intellectuals’, suspicions many other people have had about being spied on over the years would be confirmed? And who knows whether there would not be reference to the Socialist Party and any covert investigations carried out over the years on both the organisation and its members, living or dead? From what we find here, there very likely would.

It should be added that, despite the vast majority of this activity leading nowhere in particular and being a pale shadow of the McCarthyite witchhunt that took place in the US in the 1950s where intense persecution took place of anyone deemed to be or to have been in any way associated with ‘communism’, MI5 spying did nevertheless have negative consequences for some in the shape, for example, of difficulty in finding or keeping employment or being refused entry to or residence in Britain if you were a non-British subject. And in some cases, when spying was proved, prosecution did lead to prison sentences, such as the 10 years given to physicist Alan Nunn May (he served 6½).

All this took place and was sanctioned under both Conservative and Labour governments, with Caute’s book highlighting the particular emphasis put on this work by the immediate post-war Labour government under Clement Attlee, who in 1947 introduced a new more stringent vetting system. One of the results of this – perhaps ironic – was that a not insignificant number of Labour Party politicians, even leading ones such as Harold Wilson and Tony Benn, found their way on to the ‘red list’ and the author of this book has discovered that others still living (eg, Harriet Harman) have unreleased files against their names.

The BBC and democracy

The BBC was complicit too. David Caute dedicates a whole chapter, ‘The BBC Toes the Line’, to illustrating how, until recent times at least, the BBC was ‘up MI5’s armpit’, functioning as a servile collaborator of the Secret Services. It was, as he calls it, ‘a semi-covert department of state’, which even carried out its own extensive vetting procedures on those within it or seeking to enter it to check whether there was any sniff of ‘subversion’ about them. This led, for example, to the BBC cancelling a planned series of radio talks on atomic power scheduled to be given by a listed MI5 ‘suspect’, the celebrated scientist Jacob Bronowski.

Finally any security set up, any ‘spy industry’ involves a colossal squandering of resources, human and material, and, as David Caute’s book uncovers, MI5 was no exception. It should be added however that this kind of waste is an inevitable function of a social system that pits capitalist classes and governments of whatever kind (even those that may falsely call themselves ‘communist’, ‘socialist’ or ‘Marxist’) against one another in the battle for political and economic control of the world’s resources. But it also throws significant light on the severe limitations that the system, even in so called ‘liberal democracies’, inevitably imposes, via institutions like MI5, on freedom of speech and free exchange of ideas and thought. In the end capitalism, whether it takes the form of state control or a relatively unfettered market, needs state secrecy to assist the national interests of each country’s wealth holders in their never-ending quest for profit as they compete on the world market with those elsewhere who own and control the world’s wealth.

Howard Moss

Big Sister is watching you — official (1994)

From the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Stella Rimington, who is the Director-General of what is laughably called The Security Service (in short, the spying game) has spilt the beans regarding the dirty work of these government-funded low-lives who earn their salaries by spying on workers considered to be dangerous to the ruling class.

In her 1994 Dimbleby Lecture Rimington provides a definition of subversion which is most instructive: "activities intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means". Now, socialists intend to overthrow so-called parliamentary democracy. Our aim is the democratic establishment of full economic democracy. And we intend to achieve this through democratic political means. This, according to Rimington’s definition, is subversive.

So, what do the spies have in mind for subversives? Rimington’s lecture was chillingly candid:

   "The Service set out to identify all the members of these subversive groups and to investigate their activities . . . With the proper legal authority, we may need to tap their telephones, open their letters or eavesdrop on their conversations to find out their intentions. We may have to observe their movements secretly, or recruit members of those organisation as agents to tell us from the inside what is being planned."

Feeling paranoid? Not as much as they are. According to BOSS agent, Robin Ramsay (in an interview cut from a 1981 Panorama programme, but printed verbatim elsewhere), "British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in Britain bigger than a football team our man is the captain or vice-captain, and if not, he is the referee and can send any man off the field and call our man on any time he likes" (Perspectives, issue 8). Who is to know how many of the leaders of the leftist sects are paid confusionists appointed by the state? We have often said that certain left-wing parties have done so much discredit to the cause of socialism that the ruling class could not have done a better job. Perhaps the ruling class have sometimes been doing the job.

Incidentally, these spies are not totally stupid. At one point Rimington mentions that it was "state capitalism" which many of the leftists were on about. And is it quite right that for most of this century many of those calling themselves "socialists" or "communists" (with the unqualified exception of the Socialist Party) were not actually opposing capitalism, but supporting a different version of capitalism, often identified with overseas dictatorships.

As far as this party is concerned. Big Sister and her spies are welcome to observe us. Indeed, we hope that they will learn something about the nature of society in the process. We are a party without leaders. So, they can infiltrate who they like into our ranks (as long as they convince us that they are socialists) and preferably send their spies out to sell this journal for us because somebody has to do it. Unlike the conspiratorial Leninist would-be vanguards, we have no secrets from the working class, so there is nothing worth bugging in the Socialist Party. In fact, in return for a generous donation, we can post our conference minutes and other fascinating documents directly to MI5, with free leaflets explaining the case for socialism to spies looking for a way out of a lousy job.

Down with justice!
The new Criminal Justice Bill is a piece of vicious legislation enacted by legalised criminals in the interest of injustice. The basis of property ownership is nothing less than the legally enforceable right of a small class of thieves (less than five percent of the population) to monopolise the earth and its resources at the expense of the wealth-producing majority. Any laws passed to solidify this freedom of thievery is deemed by them to be Justice; offenders against the holy law of property power are called Criminals. Hence the Criminal Justice Bill.

The Bill, which will give sweeping new powers to the police against workers in conflict with the rights of property, is another in a long line of attacks upon the ever-limited freedoms of the working- class majority in society. The powers given to uniformed boot-boys (themselves working-class mercenaries, of course) against homeless people who squat in unused properties or occupy available land will result in more misery and poverty for wage-slaves who have refused to knuckle under the conventional property code of the system. In truth, the idea of beating capitalism by squatting in empty houses (usually slums) or retreating into some ill-defined and rather uncomfortable "New Age" has always been a non-starter; but now the state is out to teach these workers just how unfree they are.

The new law contains fresh powers to control and suppress free assembly, including the rights of police to close down public gatherings of workers. Our rulers have never liked the idea of workers meeting together; our collective intelligence has always been a threat to them. In the last century they passed the infamous Gag Acts, laws forbidding more than six workers to meet in one place without the permission of a magistrate, and Sedition Acts which made it a conspiracy to advocate workers’ freedom. In 1819 they showed their democratic credentials when they massacred a peaceful crowd gathered to defend free speech in Manchester: the British Tiananmen Square. The new law being introduced now, which is partly the opportunist creation of a desperate Thatcherite Home Secretary who is anxious to keep his job by appealing to the class-spite of his party supporters, is no more than a continuation of the British state’s long-standing antagonism towards democratic freedoms for workers.

Capitalist democracy is something of a joke. Their justice is a sick joke. And when a class which has stolen the wealth of the world and spat on the liberties of the wealth-producing majority lectures us about threats to democracy and justice we are determined to be more openly subversive to their system than ever.

Steve Coleman

The Silent Conspiracy (1993)

Book Review from the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Silent Conspiracy: Inside the Intelligence Services in the 1990s by Stephen Dorril. (Heinemann, London, £16.99.)

The existence, and function, of the modern state is accepted and not questioned by most people. Yet the state has not existed, in the words of Frederick Engels. “from all eternity. There have been societies which have managed without it. which hail no notion of state power" (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State). The state came into existence with the emergence of class society.

The modern state, therefore, exists to facilitate the running of capitalist society as smoothly and efficiently as possible, and to look after and protect the interests, internally and externally, of the owners of capital—the capitalist class. Although at various times, and in varying degrees, in different countries, industries and means of transportation have been owned and run by the state (the nationalized industries), the central core of any modern state comprises the civil service, the armed forces and the police. Such organizations are there for all to see. But many of their functions, departments and offshoots remain secret, semi-secret and largely unaccountable. They are sometimes referred to as "the secret state”. This book deals in part, in some detail, with aspects of those parts of the modern state generally described as the security and intelligence services, largely in the 1980s and into the 1990s.

There are useful chapters on MI5, MI6 and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHO). Spying on trade unionists and unions as well as organizations such as CND are discussed. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, and the subsequent decline of the Communist Party, more emphasis by the security service, as well as the so-called secret intelligence service, is now put on other “subversives” and “terrorists" within the United Kingdom, and industrial spying by foreign capitalist states, "friendly” or otherwise.

The Silent Conspiracy provides useful information for socialists, striving for a world of production for use and the satisfaction of needs, and shows how necessary it must be for a socialist majority to gain control of the state. The book demonstrates just how impossible it would be for "revolutionaries" to abolish the state by “smashing” it. A socialist majority would have to dismantle the repressive apparatus of the state and, obviously, close down such organizations as MI5. MI6 and GCHO. No doubt the buildings, computers—and their staffs—could be put to different use. And as quickly as possible after a socialist majority wins control of the State. Socialism would have no use for a coercive stale machine.

Peter E. Newell

A not very secret service (2000)

Book Review from the July 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

'MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations', by Stephen Dorril. (Fourth Estate, London 2000. 907 pages)

Even before this book had been put on sale in bookshops, review copies had given rise to considerable controversy. Towards the end of MI6 (p.722), Dorril asserts:

"Another MI6 catch was ANC leader Nelson Mandela. Whether Mandela was recruited in London before he was imprisoned in South Africa is not clear, but it is understood that on a recent trip to London he made a secret visit to MI6's training section to thank the Service for its help in foiling two assassination attempts directed against him soon after he became President."

No source is, however, given for the statement. According to the Guardian (23 March), Mandela "reacted angrily to a claim" that he had been recruited as a British "agent of influence"; and he added that "he had never visited the headquarters of any intelligence service". Christopher Andrew in his review of Dorril's book (Times, 30 March) also dismisses the claim that MI6 recruited Mandela. In a letter to the Guardian (24 March), Stephen Dorril's weak reply was "there is nothing implausible in the idea that someone such as Nelson Mandela might have been recruited", as he states in his book with regard to a number of African nationalist leaders.

There is, however, little in MI6 on Africa. As the author says in his Preface, "the prime focus is the European continent, and some areas of the Service's operations and intelligence-gathering, principally in South-East Asia and Africa, are not dealt with in any great detail". The author does detail areas of the Middle-East, as MI6 had the dubious task of subverting, and overthrowing governments and organisations who nationalised or threatened British-owned oil fields and supply routes. Furthermore, although the book describes "fifty years of special operations" by MI6, it largely concentrates on the period between the end of the Second World War, and about 1970, when technological surveillance began to take over from HUMIT (human spies).

Within a very short time following the Second World War, the "allies" fell out, the Soviet Union began to consolidate its control over eastern Europe, and the "Cold War" began. MI6 was more than ready to carry out orders to combat and "roll back" what was erroneously called "communism" in the area. It was soon sending spies and saboteurs into Poland, and particularly western Ukraine. Almost all of these, as Dorril demonstrates, were Ukrainian nationalists who had collaborated with, or fought for, Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. Most were captured within days by the KGB. Both Conservative and Labour administrations were involved in such activities.

In Greece MI6, supported by Labour foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, backed the right-wing Monarchists; and MI6, together with the CIA, sent scores of agents and saboteurs into Albania over a number of years. Few of them survived or returned to the West. Dorril recounts in considerable detail the, by now well-known, joint-MI6/CIA campaign to overthrow Mohammed Mossadeq, the Iranian Prime Minister who nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. They were successful, but the United States was playing a double game. Anglo-Iranian which changed its name to British Petroleum (BP), was left with 40 percent, and the American corporations got the rest. Stephen Dorril's book also recounts in detail MI6's assassination attempts against Egypt's President Nasser, following his nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956. Such attempts were both sinister and bizarre. Some of MI6's "special operations" were successful; many were not, but all were carried out in the interests, not of democracy but of British capitalism.

With MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations containing almost 900 pages of reading matter, and being divided into seven sections, the reader gets about half-a-dozen books for the price of one. In the main, the book is well-sourced.

Dorril suggests that "given a work of this size", the reader might wish to "dip into a particular area of interest". A good idea. Inevitably, being the size it is, there are errors in MI6. It would be surprising if there were not.

Peter E. Newell

The Patriotism Game (1987)

From the March 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Have you heard about the new game they're playing in Westminster? It's called "I'm a bigger patriot than you are". In the blue comer there's the Conservative team led by Maggie "Falklands-factor" Thatcher. In the rose pink comer there's the Labour team led by Neil "I'd-die-for-my-country'' Kinnock. And sitting on the fence as usual there's the Alliance in their new yellow team colours. And the prize? Up to five years of intoxicating power; and for the winning team leader residence at that most desirable of addresses - Ten Downing Street.

The BBC put the ball into play by banning a programme about Zircon, a £500 million spy satellite, whose existence had been kept a secret from Parliament. Alasdair Milne, director-general of the BBC, showed his own patriotic colours by insisting that he had not been got at by the Conservative team coach, Norman Tebbit, but had banned the programme all on his own because it "could represent a breach of national security". However. this bold attempt to enter the patriotism game was not enough to prevent him being declared unfit to play by the BBC chief Duke Hussey.

The Tories picked up the ball that had been tossed in the air by the BBC to loud cheers from all sides and immediately appealed to the referee. House of Commons speaker Bernard Weatherill, who ruled that it was off-side for the Zircon film to be shown to Labour team supporters inside Westminster. But just as Thatcher looked as if she was going to surge ahead in the patriotism stakes, there running right beside her was Kinnock who quickly scored a couple of points for the Labour team by not only accepting the refs decision but also supporting the government's motion to stop his own team members from seeing the film. He recognised that Thatcher was wielding the national security card - always a trump - and said:

If the Government says that this is a serious matter of national security, I must take their word for it until such time as that claim is substantiated or otherwise.

This earned him and other leading lights of the Labour team a bonus point in the form of a secret briefing on "Privy Council" terms with the Foreign Secretary which convinced them that national security was indeed at stake. But just as Labour were beginning to look like seriously patriotic contenders, some renegade Labour team members were in danger of scoring an own goal by arranging a private showing of the banned film in Westminster. But they were met by a picket consisting of the Serjeant-at-Arms' linesmen. With some fancy ducking and weaving the renegades headed for Transport House where they watched the film out of sight of the ref.

Kinnock, recognising that the activities of the Labour renegades could lose him points, launched a new attack himself by claiming that if the government side really cared about national security as much as he did, then they would not only have banned the film, but also prevented publication of an article in the New Statesman giving details about Zircon which had been written by Duncan Campbell (who had made the film). This audacious tackle left even some of his own team reeling in astonishment. After all wasn't the New Statesman a Labour supporters' mag? What was the wily Welshman up to?

The score was looking pretty even when Thatcher raised the spectre of the "enemy within", a favourite move for the Iron Lady when feeling cornered. She said:

Unfortunately, there seem to be people who are more interested in trying to ferret out information of use to our enemies than in preserving the defence interests of this country and thus the freedoms that we all enjoy.

It was a good try but Kinnock had seen it coming and had already dissociated himself from the New Statesman and the unfortunate Campbell.

But this was not the last attack the journalist was going to suffer. Three days later the government raised the stakes by authorising a raid on Campbell's home and the New Statesman's offices by its henchmen at the Special Branch. The Labour renegades led by Robin Cook tried to start a new game - the "We-support-civil-liberties-more-than-you-do" game - and began to look as though they might attract supporters away from the patriotism game. But again the Tory team upped the stakes with another surprise tackle by the Special Branch this time on the offices of BBC Scotland who had made the banned film.

At first they looked as if they might be over-stretching themselves. The BBC claimed that the Special Branch's authorisation to play, issued under Section Nine of the Official Secrets Act, did not permit them to remove anything they took a fancy to. A judge agreed and made the Special Branch give everything back to the BBC. The Special Branch withdrew, regrouped and armed with a new search warrant issued under Section Two of the Official Secrets Act, launched a new attack which resulted in them carrying off the trophies they had been looking for - anything they could get their hands on that had anything at all to do with any of the six Secret Society programmes. Kinnock was caught off balance by this new tactic and looked as if he was in danger of forgetting which game he was playing. Was it the "patriotism" game or "civil liberties"? He said that the raid was "deeply offensive to the standards of freedom" but then went on to say:

The Government was told there had been a security leak about Zircon last June - not October as the Prime Minister said. For seven months they have done nothing useful. Now they have ordered the police to go charging off to Scotland to search through the whole series.
I thought wasting police time was an offence.

Was this a crafty attempt to play both the civil liberties and the patriotism games at the same time? Would he be able to pull it off? Would people notice that he was asking for films to be banned and also condemning police raids on the BBC as infringements of civil liberties? By this time the Alliance also thought that it was safe the enter the fray. David Owen briefly jumped off the fence to give a rallying cry. "The BBC must not take this lying down" he said. Roy Jenkins was more or less obliged to stick his oar in since BBC Scotland is in his constituency and asked: "What is the supreme objective for which the Government is prepared to look as though it were running a second-rate police state infused by illiberalism and incompetence?" But what did this mean? Did he want a first-rate police state infused with liberalism and competence instead? David Steel asked a similar question: "Is the knock on the door in the middle of the night to become part of our society?"

Meanwhile the game was getting to be more and more farcical: hundreds of people queued up to see a bootleg copy of the banned film; every newspaper was carrying as many details as they could about the "not-so-secret" spy satellite; Sir Frank Cooper, former permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, said that "everybody knows where everybody's satellite is and you can see lists which are published in defence journals of who's launched what, where, what its orbit is. And I think you can probably do this using schoolchildren in Milton Keynes or somewhere". And just to put the boot in completely it turned out that the "subversive" Campbell had had a friendly chat over lunch with Sir Michael Havers, the Attorney General. about the film; one of the programmes in the Secret Society series was made with the full cooperation of the Ministry of Defence; and the government really had known about the leak about Zircon and the BBC film for ages without doing anything about it. The Thatcher team tried to win back some lost ground by trying to dissociate themselves from the Special Branch and claimed that they had not authorised the raid on the BBC. So who had? Or had the Special Branch broken away and formed their own independent team?

Or maybe the Tory team weren't playing the "patriotism" game after all. Maybe it was all a front and what they were really playing was that other Whitehall favourite - "Them and Us". The rules for this are as follows: "They" are a very small team but have a number of things in their favour. They control, directly or indirectly, most of the TV and radio companies, most of the daily newspapers and other sources of "news”. What's more they have access to important information that no-one else can see unless they say so. The object of the game is for us to find out as much as we can about government, politics and the civil service. However, they have a few other tricks up their sleeve should we get too close to finding out anything that they think will show them up to be dishonest, incompetent and undemocratic: the umpires — the courts — are usually on their side so that if they say the magic words “national security" then the judges will say that we can't have the information. Also they can make up the rules as they go along to suit themselves. They can also feed us bits of "news" which show them up in a good light in the hope that this will distract us from what is really going on. And finally, if we get too close to the truth, then they can call up reinforcements in the shape of the police and Special Branch. This doesn't mean we can't win. only that it is difficult. However, we have the advantage of numbers on our side. What we don't have as yet is the determination and clear sense of purpose that are necessary. However, if they continue to behave in the duplicitous and ridiculous manner that they have over the Zircon film, then things might very well become considerably easier.

Janie Percy-Smith

Northern Ireland: The Gentle Art of Interrogation (1971)

From the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anybody living in Northern Ireland today who doubts the assertion that the British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary are waging a vicious war against that section of the working class who are Catholics or who question the allegation that part of the weaponry of that war are brutality and torture can carry out his own inquiry.

There are a number of approaches.

For example, one could go into a Catholic district almost any night and linger in the vicinity of a street corner until the inevitable military patrol comes along. When one has been called a “fucking Irish pig”, or a “fenian bastard” or when one has been put against a wall and had one’s ankles or knees kicked or, even, a baton deflected off one’s testicles, one can quote “the Law”—which, along with “Order", the military are defending for one’s protection—and the consequences will complete a definite stage of one’s inquiry! It is a simple test which we would urge on marble-mouthed gentry who speak down to us from Westminster or Stormont—though, if they were to get the full benefits of such a test, it would have to be carried out incognito!

If one has escaped the needs for hospitalisation at this stage of the test, it can be carried further by indulging in some simple and minimal act of self-defence. Irrespective of one’s age or sex this is guaranteed to provoke the “security forces” into a flurry of security excitement which will ensure that in future one will have no difficulty in appreciating why so many people who, a short time ago, laughed at the military posturings of the I.R.A. are now, tragically, finding their way into its ranks.

There are, of course, no gas chambers in Ulster. Unlike the ghetto Jews in Nazi Germany, Ulster’s ghetto Catholics are not herded into gas chambers and murdered. They may be gassed in their bedrooms or living rooms but then they have the satisfaction of knowing that a group of humane medical people, acting for the British government, have said that the gas used has no long-term effects—unless, that is, the concentration is heavy, in which case permanent brain damage may result. Again, maybe, they could be disturbed by other medical opinion that asserts that inhalation of the gas does produce permanent and damaging side-effects or they could be apprehensive about the fact that the power determining the concentration of the gas is the same power that shot an unarmed man outside his own door, further up the street, last night.

One can understand the brutal reaction to taunt and provocation. One can appreciate the anger of a member of a military machine, embracing the most awesome devices for killing, to the death of comrades at the hands of amateurs who must compensate for lack of numbers and weaponry with stealth. What continues to surprise is the fact that politically ignorant members of the working class, with normal emotional appetites, can be induced into the trade of killing at all; but worse, that there can be a process whereby such men can be brutalised into a condition that allows them to engage in acts of savagery against homes that look like their own homes, women who look like their own wives and mothers, and children who look like their own kids.

When we go up the scale to the professional torturers, the mind simply boggles. Here’s one person’s reaction:

. . .  I knew I was in a torture chamber. Yet my mind could not conceive that I was living in the twentieth century . . . Surely these men could never bring themselves to torture me in cold blood. Looking around at their faces I saw neither passion nor compassion in any one of them.

The writer in question details the ensuing physical and psychological torture to which he and his fellow-prisoners were subjected:

. . . Corporal Walters had been compelled to stand to attention for over forty hours before he collapsed. Fusilier Kinne had been kicked so savagely during a beating-up in jail that he sustained a double-rupture . . . Denis’s hands were secured so far up behind his back that he had to stand on tip-toe.

The quotations are from The Edge of the Sword a book written by Lieut-General Farrar-Hockley, who recently commanded British Land Forces in Northern Ireland. The writer is describing the experiences of himself and his comrades at the hands of the Chinese and Koreans when, as Captain Farrar-Hockley, he was taken prisoner in Korea in 1951 and he digresses at length on the mere beatings and kickings meted out by his captors as well as the foul system of psychological tortures devised to break them.

It was after Korea that the British Army began to develop its own techniques for the interrogation of prisoners and the specialisation in brutality and torture devolved on men whose personality and behaviour showed aptitude for the trade. Such men were seconded from their regiments and “elevated” to the Special Air Services (SAS) where the entire curricula of known brutality was imparted to them in “schools” such as that at Bradbury Line, near Hereford. The activities of these heroes is the subject of a permanent “D” notice imposed on the British press. Apart from their employment as torturers, killers, and specialists in counter-espionage activities these worthies are sometimes employed in the business of toughening-up and brutalising ordinary troops.

Despite denials by Lord Balniel, the British Minister of State for Defence, and the protests of Lord Carrington—sometimes known in Ireland as Himmler Carrington—of SAS presence in Ulster, some Irish newspapers have given quite detailed information about the activities of SAS Unit 22 in the province. It is possible, however, that Balniel’s honesty may be vindicated in the suggestion that the SAS unit concerned got around the dilemma of plying their foulness in the UK by seconding their Ulster contingent back to their old regiments. Certainly, if they are not in Northern Ireland, there is a lot of evidence to indicate that the brutality of the army and police dealing with political detainees makes the work of the SAS superfluous!

After being given the overall I was taken outside the room and along the corridor into another room and made to stand against the wall as one is made for frisking only I was made to stretch my legs and arms as far apart as I could get them. My feet also had to be as far from the wall as possible. I was to remain in this position for at least two, and at most four, days with the hood on. I lost all track of time, but there is no doubt that 1 remained in this position for days. If I did not keep my head straight I was hit with a fist in the small of the back, the genitals, the arms. As the duration of my stance against this wall grew longer, the collapsing and falling became more frequent, until I began falling every twenty or thirty minutes.

No, we are not back to Lieut-General Farrar-Hockley and his Edge of the Sword; this time we are with a Mr. Michael Donnelly who was arrested in Ulster by Crown Forces on 9 August 1971, “on suspicion”. The extract above is from his sworn statement made eleven days later.

There are many other statements that speak of beatings and kickings, the “disorientation treatment” which involves putting a hood over a prisoner’s head and putting him in a confined space where he is subjected to a constant high-pitched or throbbing noise for days on end, the discharging of firearms, using blank cartridges, at the prisoner’s head, sexual assault, electric shocks, and the use of injections. Many of these statements are attested to by medical evidence of the victim’s condition after “treatment”, by the corroboration of other prisoners (and it is noteworthy that prisoners who did not know one another and had no chance to devise corroboration after their experiences, relate the same details), by the “disappearance” of prisoners for periods up to eleven days after arrest (during which the police, the military, and the local Home Affairs Ministry pass the buck about the prisoner’s whereabouts until he subsequently turns up in a prison hospital).

Following on the adverse publicity which the Authorities have been subjected to as a result of the well-documented revelations of torture and brutality, the Westminster government yielded to pressure and set up the inevitable inquiry. That such serious allegations should be answered by an inquiry confining examination, by its terms of reference, to a mere fraction of the total complaints, that it should be presided over by a paid British government official, that it should have no powers to compel witnesses to attend or to order the production of any records relating to the complaints, gives rise to the suggestion that it is a mere whitewashing exercise.

By the time these lines are in print the official inquiry will be complete (the complainants, predictably, boycotted it) and will have published its report. It is safe to say that while it may make scapegoats out of some minor thugs for some slight overstepping of the mark—doubtless “as a result of the regrettable circumstances of the occasion”—it will not, and could not, find the political flunkeys of capitalism guilty of the charges levelled against them. If you reflect on the effects of such a decision on the British government and its Stormont rubber-stamp you will understand what we mean!

The “Security” Chiefs themselves are revealing. As part of the general propaganda drive against the IRA which includes finding “large caches” of arms conveniently deposited on vacant lots and empty houses and killing gunmen who are carted off by their comrades and, presumably, buried secretly—despite the fact that anyone conversant with IRA tradition knows that the denial of a patriot funeral to an IRA man killed in action would be an affront that his family and comrades would regard as blasphemous — the “Security” people are now justifying the internment of men without trial by claiming that it is bringing them the necessary intelligence to take the initiative against the IRA. The proposition is worth pondering; surely if a suspect’s arrest is justified in the first place the authorities must be well satisfied that he is an IRA activist and, indeed, the claim that they are getting information from those arrested would appear to bear this out. But if there is no brutality, no torture, why do these vicious enemies of the State who must be arbitrarily incarcerated in the public interest, suddenly decide to give helpful information to the Authorities?

There are those, of course, who will claim that whatever methods are being used are justified. It is a convenient stance when one is not included among the innocent—and the Authorities have released considerable numbers of people who claim they were victims of torture and brutality after relatively short periods, showing that even in their own recognition they had “made a mistake” and have even admitted that some of those detained were victims of mistaken identity.

One can be sickened by it all; can say impotently “I must do something”. But what to do? That is the question . . . the question that chokes on emotion. On pity, on sadness, on hatred, on a blind desire to strike wildly at the perpetrators of the foulness. By all means, we must strike back at the evil but not wildly, not emotionally, not stupidly. There is no solution in wanting to strike back at the leering face of the soldier or widow the wife of the cop. Certainly violence, riots, killings, bombings etc., could decide the issue against those who use the weapons of torture and brutality. Enough deaths and destruction of property and the British government may decide that the job is not worth the candle and, if one is a Republican, one may have the joys of victory and the pleasure of imposing one’s notions of freedom on those in Northern Ireland who don’t want a Republic.

It could happen then that those who presently support the British connection in Northern Ireland could become the rebels and one could become a member of the new Irish Republican “Security” Forces—it’s even possible, and it has happened before, that one could be seconded to a British SAS “school” to learn the techniques of brutality and torture in order to put one’s talents “in the service of Ireland”.

It could happen because the material conditions that now allow it to happen here would continue to exist in the Irish Republic of one’s ambition despite the vapourings of the IRA and similarly-confused pundits regarding the establishment of “a Workers’ Socialist Republic”. It did happen when the British withdrew from the south of Ireland in 1922 and left the Irish Free State Army to deal with the unfortunate idealists who thought that among other things, freedom meant more than changing flags. It continues to happen now in the various state-capitalist “Socialist Republics” throughout the world where freedom is mortgaged for the State organisation of poverty—“Socialist Republics” established by the efforts of IRA-like idealists who were strong on the poetry of freedom and weak on the economic and political conditions required to establish it. How often does theirs become the face that leers behind the riot vizor? Theirs the finger on the executioner’s gun? Theirs the macabre brain of the torturer: Cuba . . . Russia . . . China . . . Israel . . . Egypt . . Kenya . . .

Just think of a country, any country, where a minority—a group who identify their economic privation with some common ethnic or religious distinguishing feature —resist their condition by real or alleged extra-constitutional means and there you have the Northern Ireland situation. What is happening in Northern Ireland today is happening, somewhere in the world of capitalism, every day. It is yesterday’s news from Czechoslovakia, or Aden, or Vietnam; it is today’s news from East Pakistan and Ulster; it will be tomorrow’s news from somewhere else in the crazy world where trade and profit take precedence over human beings. The news deals only with the death, the shootings, the bombings and organised barbarities. The poverty, frustration, bad housing and utter social despair that causes the eruptions rarely breaks through the veneer of religious bigotry, racial prejudice or political hatreds they have created. For poverty and human privation is not news . . . they are too general ... too mundane ... too constant a feature of capitalism.

It is only in capitalism, with its market economy and its need to deceive the overwhelming majority of those who produce wealth that the wages and money systems are essentials of production and distribution, that the material conditions for friction and violence can continue to exist. It does not matter what political party presides over the system of wages exploitation, whether it calls itself “Socialist”, “Communist”, “Republican”, “Democratic” or any other name; the capitalist system, identified by its broad masses of wage workers, its production of wealth for sale and profit and the continuing existence of poverty and want on the one hand and privilege and power on the other hand is an anachronistic foulness that cannot exist without war, violence and brutality. It is a foulness that not only deprives the great majority of the material means of a full and happy life, but degrades and brutalises people to play the role of soldiers, “freedom fighters”, gaolers, torturers and murderers.

How can we then strike back at such a system? Not surely of degrading ourselves with the same foul weapons of murder and torture simply to drive out the present administrators of the system and the flag that identifies them in order to submit to the same system under a different gang of political administrators?

It is essential that we should understand that capitalism is a world system, a world problem to which a world solution is required. Wealth today is produced by social labour from the resources of the world and the abundant evidence of those countries that have attempted to counter the effects of world capitalism by tampering with the economy at national level has demonstrated the truth of the Socialist contention that only the total abolition of capitalism as a world system can end the problems of society in general and the working class in particular. Even more, perhaps, experiments in State-capitalism, as proposed by the IRA and other political groups in Ireland, and as practiced in many countries of the world today, have shown that not only do the old miseries of poverty, etc., remain but that, faced with the disillusion and frustration of a working class that believed State ownership could solve its problems, the new regime resorts to the worst excesses of capitalism and denies its subject class access to the very political avenues essential to its emancipation.

Richard Montague

Material World: Criminals in Business Suits (2012)

The Material World Column from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Few of us have any real understanding of the secretive world of intelligence and undercover operations. Spy thrillers are hardly a reliable guide. But perhaps we can learn a bit from the revelations of whistleblowers – disillusioned insiders who decide to tell all and damn the consequences.

I have before me memoirs by two American whistleblowers –Susan Lindauer, Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq (2010) and Sibel Edmonds, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story (2012). Both books are self-published. Which could mean either that no publisher would risk taking them or that no publisher thought them credible.

Lindauer was a CIA “asset”who represented the US in unacknowledged and therefore deniable “back-channel”communications with various governments. She negotiated an agreement with the government of Saddam Hussein that took all declared American interests into account but still failed to avert the US attack on Iraq. She says that when she blew the whistle, she was arrested on obscure charges under the Patriot Act and that while she was in prison an attempt was made to declare her insane and forcibly drug her.

Edmonds translated tapped telephone conversations from Turkish and Persian sources for the FBI. She discovered that a colleague was working for the very businessmen it was their task to monitor and says when she tried to persuade her bosses to do something about it she was fired. She was also branded a traitor by the government of her native Turkey, to which she could no longer safely return.

Pillars of society

The official mission of the FBI is to fight dangerous forms of organized crime like terrorism, money laundering and the illegal trade in narcotics, arms, nuclear components, and military and industrial secrets. The trouble for FBI agents who sincerely want to pursue this mission is that many of the criminals engaged in these activities are extremely well-connected and influential –real ‘pillars of society’. As Edmonds remarks, most of us associate global crime with gun-toting gangsters and Mafiosi. However,

“Turkish criminal networks consist mainly of respectable-looking businessmen (including top international CEOs), high-ranking military officers, diplomats, politicians and scholars.”  (p. 97)

These respectable people employ the best lobbying firms and cultivate (to put it more crudely, buy) equally respectable American public officials and Pentagon, State Department and White House bureaucrats, securing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in US government contracts for Turkish companies.

Naturally, those officials and bureaucrats do not want to receive FBI reports about the criminal activity of their partners. They made it clearly understood that even raising such delicate matters, let alone acting on them, would “irreparably damage our relations with a key ally.”

Nor did Bush Administration officials want to endanger even more lucrative relations with another “key ally”by having the connections of prominent Saudis with Islamist terrorism brought to their attention. It was much more convenient to blame Saddam.

This does not mean that nuclear non-proliferation, prevention of terrorist attacks and other declaratory goals are completely phoney. In principle, some policy makers might like to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons. And they do not relish the prospect of being blown to pieces in their plush air-conditioned offices. It is just that they do not give these issues high priority. Other things take precedence. Especially making money.

Terrorism, of course, is only a bad thing when it is directed against ‘us’. The CIA has always been happy to fund and promote terrorism against Russia and other rival powers. Sometimes terrorists escape the control of their patrons and ‘bite the hand that fed them’. This is known in the trade as blowback. 

Divided agencies

Neither of the whistleblowers gives credence to the theory that the Bush Administration actually arranged the attacks of September 11, 2001. Lindauer, however, speculates without any proof that a rogue group of US intelligence agents could have given the terrorists a helping hand by laying explosives under the Twin Towers.

In the weeks and days leading up to September 11 it wasn’t easy to discern what exactly top US officials wanted. They received warnings of imminent terror attacks from their own agents and from other governments (the French, for instance), but appeared not to heed them. How was their unresponsiveness to be interpreted? Most likely they were ‘in denial’ – their heads stuck firmly in the sand.

Some agents continued right up to the last moment to repeat the warnings and urge the adoption of countermeasures –for example, the deployment of anti-air defences on the roofs of threatened buildings. Others took a different view.

What makes such things possible is the division of intelligence agencies into numerous small groups that are isolated from one another and responsible only to the very top of the government hierarchy. When –as evidently often happens –they find themselves without clear guidance from above, they may begin to act autonomously and at cross purposes. Thus, in the run-up to the war with Iraq, some groups of agents (like the one Lindauer belonged to) were trying to avert war while others were trying to bring it about.

Stefan