MI5 + CIA in UK media attack Labour Party

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MI5 + CIA in UK media attack Labour Party

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Wed Sep 05, 2007 3:16 am

(I found this on a Belgian website which claims to have gotten it from a UK link but the UK link looked like a dummy mirror of a 'conspiracy' type website. Perhaps the original website expired and got replaced.

But even though I can't source this, it reads credibly based on what I already know about MI5, MI6, CIA, psy-ops media, and efforts to destroy or control labor in every NATO country.
-HMW)


http://www.dedefensa.org/article.php?art_id=950

PSYOPS War,

British Intelligence and the Covert Propaganda Front, — and the CIA’s Interference in British Politics

THE BEGINNINGS OF COVERT PROPAGANDA AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE

In 1948, a secret political/psychological warfare department known as the Information Research Department (IRD), was set up within the Foreign Office, with the aim of embarking on a ''propaganda offensive'' against the left. To conceal the operation's existence from the public, its funding was obtained from Parliament on the ''secret vote''.

The IRD had two main purposes. It created ''grey'' propaganda for overseas' consumption, which was directed against ''Communism'', a catch-all label that included anything remotely left-wing or anti-imperialist. The primary targets were Western Europe and South East Asia, followed by India, Pakistan and the Middle East. (The Soviet Union was left largely to American intelligence). The IRD's second area of action was the moulding of domestic opinion in Britain. It used anti-Communist material created with government funds to aid right-wing social democrats within the Labour Party and the trade union movement.

Christopher Mayhew, the Foreign Office minister who set up the IRD, later reported to his boss, Ernest Bevin, that he had made arrangements with Herbert Tracey, public secretary of the Trade Union Congress, ''for the dissemination inside the Labour movement at home of anti-Communist propaganda which we are producing for overseas consumption.''

The staff of the IRD were a mixture of émigrés, carefully chosen writers and journalists, and intelligence operatives. The IRD took part in regular liaison meetings in London between MI6 and the CIA. The head of the IRD between 1953 and 1958, John Rennie, was later appointed head of MI6.

At its peak, the IRD had up to 400 staff working at a twelve-storey office block in Millbank, Riverwalk House. The information from IRD fell into two categories, succinctly described by a department head: ''Category A is secret and confidential objective studies re: Soviet policies which are designed for high level consumption by heads of states, cabinet members, etc.…. none of this material publishable or quotable for obvious reasons. Category B is less highly-classified information suitable for careful dissemination by staff of British missions to suitable contacts (e.g. editors, professors, scientists, labour leaders, etc.) who can use it as factual background material in their general work without attribution. Success of Category B operations depend upon the activity of British representatives in various countries.''

The IRD ''ran'' dozens of Fleet street journalists in the 1950s and 60s. To start a particular propaganda campaign, IRD would often individually brief a well-trusted journalist. Once the journalist had published their ''exclusive'' article without even the usual attribution to ''official sources'', IRD would then transmit the story as gospel all around the world.

IRD had arrangements with several British newspapers which allowed it to reprint and distribute articles from them to foreign newspapers. These reprints made no mention that the articles had initially been planted in the papers by British intelligence. IRD also arranged British government funds for foreign newspapers who were finding it difficult to pay the subscription rates to British news services. For instance, a deal with The Observer's Foreign News Service gave IRD the right to distribute articles cheaply or even free of charge to the media of selected countries. In addition, the department hired some of its personnel as ''freelance'' journalists to place material in British newspapers without the editor being aware of the source.

IRD tactics often necessitated the repetition of the same doctored story in several newspapers, in order to ensure its apparent credibility. The most enduring success for the IRD was in misrepresenting the Soviet Union, in the eyes of the British public, as the source of a global conspiracy that threatened the entire Western world. A typical IRD operation was its ''Red Scare in the Indian Ocean'' scheme. In March 1974, two IRD articles appeared, one written by MI5/CIA agent Brian Crozier in The Times and the other by David Floyd in the Daily Telegraph. Both concentrated on the fear of a build-up by the Soviet Navy in the Indian Ocean after the Somali government offered the Soviets a naval base near the Gulf, and described a build-up of Soviet advisers in neighbouring countries. A further article appeared in the Financial Times, followed by the release of spy satellite photos from the U.S. State Department.

By the time the campaign had run its course, a carefully-created illusion had been created that Somalia was a Soviet puppet. (Ironically, this ''Soviet puppet'' actually kicked out all Russian military advisers in 1977 during its war with Ethiopia).

IRD also took an interest in books as a propaganda vehicle and a number of leading academics contributed to a series of short books published by the IRD subsidiary company Ampersand Books. Amongst IRD operatives were Alan Hare, who worked for the Foreign Office from 1947 to 1961 and became chairman and chief executive of the Financial Times, Lord Gibson, later chairman of the holding company Pearson Longman, which owns the Financial Times, and Charles Douglas-Home, later editor of the Financial Times.

PSYOPS

The work of the IRD established some of the techniques perfected by the intelligence services and other organisations working on their behalf as part of a concerted campaign to infiltrate and control the media (and hence public opinion). This field of operations is termed psychological warfare.

(...)

Frank Snepp, a CIA field officer in the 1970s, described how British intelligence was ''using journalists as field operatives…. certain MI5 men were operating under deep cover as journalists and we were using them to plant stories favourable to American interests in certain publications that we couldn't reach the same way.''

Intelligence officers may pose as journalists or working journalists may be recruited as agents, either on contract for a fixed spell or pro rata. MI5 holds a dossier on many journalists, noting their abilities, personalities end recommendations on what circumstances they should be used. Malcolm Muggeridge was acting as an MI5 agent while editorial writer of the Daily Telegraph. Alan Pryce-Jones, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, worked in British intelligence during the war. The Daily Telegraph's Foreign Editor, S.R. Pawley, was recruited by MI6 to help run journalist agents for the paper overseas.

MI5 targeted labour correspondents in both newspapers and broadcasting right up to the 1980s; they were recruited in droves for their contacts with a wide range of trade union officials, and with each other. According to Peter Wright, MI5 always had about twenty senior journalists working for it in the national press. ''They were not employed directly by us, but we regarded them as agents because they were happy to be associated with us.''

At the BBC, Brigadier Ronald Stonhem liaised with MI5 and Special Branch and advised the corporation on whether or not to employ people. Names of applicants for editorial posts in the BBC were similarly ''vetted'' by MI5. Reputed journalists such as Isabel Hilton of the Sunday Times and Richard Gott of The Guardian were refused BBC posts because they were not considered suitable. This secret process went on for over forty years until exposure by The Observer in 1985.

On 25th May 1989, the BBC's Nine O'clock News ran a major smear item claiming that eleven Soviet officials had been expelled from Britain because ''they were subjecting Labour MPs to blackmail''. The BBC's chief political correspondent John Sergeant had been at an ''off-the-record'' lunch with William Waldegrave, junior minister at the Foreign Office, who briefed him on the alleged KGB blackmail attempts and links of left-wing Labour MPs with Middle Eastern terrorist states. It was MI5 who had planted the story on Waldegrave. The Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, was forced to disclaim the smear and acknowledge that there was no truth in the allegations.

In 1991, it was revealed that some 500 prominent Britons were paid by the CIA through the corrupt Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI). They included ninety journalists and broadcasters, many in ''senior positions.''

The British Army also has a psychological warfare section. By 1971, there were thirty army psyops staff based at three overseas headquarters and one at the Ministry of Defence.

Psyops training is undertaken at the Joint Warfare Establishment in Latimer. There are two types of course; one for staff officers, which includes lectures on anti-Communist propaganda practice, the urban guerrilla, modern advertising techniques and experience from recent psychological operations; and a unit officer's course which includes propaganda and community relations and the role of a unit within the overall psyops plan.

In 1976, the MoD confirmed that in the previous three years, 1,858 army officers and 262 senior civil servants had been trained to use psychological techniques for internal security purposes. The civil servants were drawn from the Northern Ireland Office, Home Office and Foreign Office. Commissioned officers were also seconded for psyops training at the United States Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg and instructors from the Joint Warfare Establishment made lecture visits to Commonwealth countries.

THE INVOLVEMENT OF U.S.INTELLIGENCE

In 1974, Sir Colin Crowe submitted the secret Crowe Report, recommending that IRD should take control of the Counter-Subversion Fund (a Foreign Office fund used to finance propaganda operations). The department was then merged with the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC), a right-wing propaganda group set up by the CIA and British intelligence in 1970, and run by Brian Crozier.

Crozier was a journalist who worked for both MI6 and the CIA. He was also head of Forum World Features, a commercial news agency which sold weekly packets of news stories to newspapers all over the world. At its peak, Forum supplied over 250 newspapers world-wide. The CIA used it as a conduit for propaganda and also as a cover to send agents posing as ''journalists'' around the world. Forum received backing from the CIA through Kern House Enterprises, a publishing firm which was a front for the Agency. Further backing came from British companies such as Shell and BP.

A 1968 memorandum from CIA headquarters to CIA director Richard Helms described Forum as having ''provided the United States with a significant means to counter propaganda, and it has become a respected feature service well on the way to a position of prestige in the journalism world.'' Hand-written at the bottom was a note stating that Forum functioned ''with the knowledge and co-operation of British intelligence''.

Forum was suddenly closed down in 1975, shortly before its exposure as a CIA /British intelligence front. Forum's library and some of its research staff were absorbed into the ISC. Files removed from the offices of research director Peter Janke in 1975 showed extensive contacts between ISC and the British police and military establishments.

In June 1972, Janke visited the Police College at Bramshill at the invitation of its commandant, John Alderson, who later became Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall. Alderson wanted ISC to assist in developing a training programme on subversion and terrorism for the police. ISC members have since lectured on numerous occasions at the college and the police make use of the ISC's Manual on Counter Insurgency. The ISC also provides lecturers for several military establishments, including the National Defence College, where courses on psyops are taught.

The ISC has produced a series of special studies on subversion. The first such report was written by Nigel Lawson in 1972, entitled Subversion in British Industry. The report was not for the general public; it was aimed at the heads of industry itself. Brian Crozier noted that the Lawson report ''unlocked doors, gave courage to the timid and opened purses''.

Amongst the ISC's converts and allies were John Dettmer, chairman of the Economic League (a right-wing private vetting agency for British industry, which kept intelligence files on left-wingers), Michael Ivens, director of Aims of Industry (a right-wing pressure group) and John Whitehorn, Deputy Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI).

Conservative MP Geoffrey Stewart- Smith (who was funded by MI5) arranged distribution of the group's anti-left propaganda in the run-up to the 1974 general election. Just before polling day, the ISC's report Sources of Conflict in British Industry (which blamed left wing militants for industrial unrest) was published with unprecedented publicity in the national press.

The ISC encouraged the use of pre-emptive surveillance and other measures against a broad range of ''subversives'', a term which easily included law-abiding trade unionists and anti-establishment intellectuals. Crozier wrote articles advocating military intervention to crush ''left-wing insurgency'' in Britain.

THE NETWORK WIDENS

The ISC's impact extended far beyond its base in Britain. In France, the Pinay Circle, a group of right-wingers formed around former Prime Minister Antoine Pinay, helped pay for an ISC study European Security and the Soviet Problem. The Pinay Circle members were so delighted with the report that they personally showed it to President Nixon, Pompidou, Kissinger and the Pope. In the Netherlands, Crozier worked closely with the East West Institute and its International Documentation and Information Centre, which recorded left-wing activities in Europe.

The ISC's records also show close contacts with top politicians in South Africa and other right-wing leaders around the world. Crozier helped set up a Washington-based Institute for the Study of Conflict in 1975, despite a supposed congressional ban on any CIA-backed propaganda campaigns within America.

Despite supposedly closing down in 1990, the ISC still functions today under the name of the Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism (RISCT), based at 136 Baker Street, London W1N 1FH. The Institute's director is Paul Wilkinson, a leading government advisor on counter-terrorism.

The RISCT's council is composed entirely of figures from academia, politics and the military, including former Defence Intelligence chief Sir Louis Le Bailly; counter-insurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson; former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO Sir Henry Tuzo; Thatcher speech-writer Robert Moss; and ex-diplomat Sir Edward Peck. The calibre of its personnel, with their intimate knowledge of the workings of the state, makes the institute an influential part of the right-wing lobby in Britain.

Brian Crozier also helped set up the National Association for Freedom (NAFF), along with Norris McWhirter, Lord De L'Isle, Michael Ivens of Aims of Industry, Winston Churchill MP, merchant banker John Gouriet, and Robert Moss.

NAFF was a network of senior military and intelligence figures, senior industrialists and cabinet ministers; its members included Churchill, Jill Knight, David Mitchell, Rhodes Boyson and Nicholas Ridley.

When Harold Wilson resigned as prime minister (amidst allegations of an MI5 smear campaign), NAFF's journal Free Nation carried a lead article written by Crozier entitled Affront to the Queen, which stated that the Queen would be within her constitutional rights in refusing to see a new left-wing Labour prime minister and in ordering a dissolution of Parliament and fresh elections.

NAFF changed its name to The Freedom Association (FA) in January 1979, under the chairmanship of Norris McWhirter.

THATCHER AND PSYOPS

In 1976, Brian Crozier set up a covert advisory committee called Shield, in order to brief Margaret Thatcher and her closest colleagues on security and intelligence. Crozier met secretly with Thatcher on many occasions, at the Thatchers' London home at 2 Flood Street, Chelsea, in her room in the House of Commons, and later at Chequers and 10 Downing Street. The Shield Committee was composed of Crozier, MI6 agent Stephen Hastings MP, Conservative backbencher Nicholas Elliott and Harry Sporborg of Hambros Bank.

With the resources of the ISC at their disposal, Shield produced some twenty papers on various aspects of ''subversion'' which were made available to Thatcher and three other members of her shadow cabinet: Lord Carrington, William (later Lord) Whitelaw and Sir Keith Joseph.

Crozier considered it one of his prime tasks to strengthen Thatcher's ''self confidence'' and to ''suggest ways in which to cultivate and consolidate a public image of clear-headedness and resolution'', to which end he instructed her in a programme of ''Psychological Action''. Crozier described the programme thus: ''The essence of the technique is to find short, sharp answers to three questions: What do people want? What do they fear? And what do they feel strongly about?.... Psychological Action has nothing to do with the intellect and everything to do with gut emotions. Having made a list, the next step is to find the right things to say to carefully selected groups of voters.''

As part of his Psychological Action programme, Crozier proposed a list of selected questions to be put in political speeches such as: ''Do you think it right that people like Jones and Scanlon (union leaders of the TGWU and AUEW) should tell the government what to do?'' and ''Is it right that Trots and Commies should order you to strike?'' and suggested judiciously chosen side arguments such as: ''The trade unions are pricing Britain out of the market and you out of a job,'' and: ''American workers are three times as well-off as you - because of free enterprise''.

After reading Crozier's paper, Thatcher sprang to her feet and exclaimed: ''From now on Brian, these are my ideas''.

On February 11th 1977, Crozier and a group of like-minded people including Nicholas Elliott, General Vernon Walters (former Deputy Director of the CIA and later to emerge as President Reagan's ambassador to the UN) and ''a leading figure in a major City of London bank'', met to create a 'Private Sector Operational Intelligence' agency whose main aims would be ''to provide reliable intelligence in areas which governments are barred from investigating, either through legislation or because political circumstances make such enquiries difficult or potentially embarrassing, and to conduct secret counter-subversive operations in any country in which such actions are deemed feasible.''

With an initial budget of $5 million a year, the group named itself 'The 61'. Crozier, an obsessive right-wing fanatic, was motivated by his view of Britain as a nation ''dominated by extreme Left Labour MPs and trade unions, whose long term goal.... is to transform Britain into another East Germany or Czechoslovakia. Without a correctly motivated intelligence and security apparatus, the subversives would win''.

Between May 1977 and July 1979, Shield produced fifteen strategic papers recommending covert action against ''subversives'', proposals for reorganising the intelligence and security services, and three papers on contingency planning against strikes and domestic unrest which a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher might face when it came to power. Crozier proposed an urgent redefinition of the terms of reference of MI5 to enable it ''not merely to report on subversion but to go over to the counter-offensive''. For MI6 also, he proposed an extension of covert action in Angola and Mozambique, and the fermenting of ''internal disruption'' within the USSR.

In May 1977, Crozier set about tackling what he saw as ''the trickiest of the major areas of subversion in the United Kingdom - television''. He set up a study group with Brian Connell of Anglia Television (who described himself as having spent ''15 years as an anti-Communist Trojan horse inside the television fortress''), Michael Charlton (the radio and television interviewer) and the interviewer Robin Day (later Sir Robin). A full conference was held on April 21st to 23rd 1978 in W.H. Smith's training centre at Milton House, near Oxford. The participants were a roll-call of those inside the television medium. In the chair was Sir Edward Pickering, former editor of the Daily Express (and later vice-chairman of the Press Council), Sir Robert Mark, former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Kenneth Newman, Chief Constable of the RUC, Colonel Colin Mitchell MP, and media professionals Brian Connell, Robin Day, Richard Francis (the BBC's Director of News and Current Affairs), Christopher Capron (editor of Panorama) and Colin Shaw (Director of Television in the Independent Television Authority), together with Michael Ivens of AIM, Norris McWhirter, Dr Anthony Flood (a consultant psychiatrist) and Sir Robert Thompson (an adviser to the White House and the National Security Council). Thompson set the tone of the debate with the words: ''The Vietnam war was lost on the television screens of the United States''.

On 19th June 1977, Crozier drafted A Stategy for Victory, which he defined as ''the total defeat of the country's enemies, eliminating all risks of their recovery in the foreseeable future''.

In July 1978, the Shield Committee met in the boardroom of a City bank, presided over by Margaret Thatcher, and a new body was proposed - the Counter Subversion Executive (CSE), whose function was defined as ''not only to counter anti-British subversive activity both in the United Kingdom and in other parts of the world, by all clandestine means, both offensive and defensive; but also actively to conduct a clandestine offensive against Soviet power''.

DESTROYING THE PEACE MOVEMENT

In November 1979, The 61 moved into offices in Grand Buildings, Trafalgar Square, where Crozier set about building up its funds and activities. The 61's prime functions were briefing Western and friendly Third World leaders, covert action to influence policy decisions and the dissemination of anti-Soviet propaganda. A restricted-access newsletter, Transnational Security, was produced for consumption by Thatcher, Reagan, selected politicians and friendly secret services, and a number of trusted journalists. Crozier was to state that ''the best thing The 61 ever did was to penetrate and defeat the Soviet 'peace' fronts and the Western campaign groups''.

The London section of The 61 infiltrated two moles into the Militant Tendency and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Crozier reported that ''both operations were successful''. The 61 also created fake ''peace'' groups to counter the work of CND. One such group, the Coalition for Peace Through Security, was set up by Edward Leigh (who went on to become a Thatcherite MP) and Julian La Lewis (introduced to Crozier by Norris McWhirter), who became The 61's leading activist in Britain.

Crozier was involved in setting up the Council for Arms Control, run by John Edmonds, a former Foreign Office official, and General Sir Hugh Beach. CIA Director William Casey provided Crozier with £50,000 in 1981 and $100,000 the following year to aid with these activities.

Another of The 61's campaigners was Paul Mercer, whose book Peace of the Dead was a savage denunciation of CND. It carried a forward by Lord Chalfont, former Labour Minister for Disarmament under Harold Wilson, who had drifted from the left to the extreme right.

In Belgium, The 61 set up an organisation called Rally for Peace in Freedom, whose influence spread rapidly not only through the Belgian Parliament but into the country's schools, with the distribution of officially approved booklets on defence.

In West Germany, The 61 liaised with the Bonn Peace forum, providing posters and banners for demonstrations which warned students of ''the dangers of unconditional pacifism''.

In France, The 61 set up a link with the Comité Francais Contre le Neutralisme, which brought together some 75 well-known personalities from politics, the media and education.

In Britain, Julian Lewis and his cronies wrote letters to the press, hired light aircraft trailing anti-CND slogans, organised counter demonstrations and heckled Bruce Kent and other speakers at CND rallies. Anti-CND propaganda was produced in the form of booklets, pamphlets, posters and folders, such as one entitled 30 questions… and honest answers about CND.

There was even a plan which sent two operatives - Harry Fibbs, Chairman of the Westminster Young Conservatives, and Peter Caddick-Adams, another Young Conservative - into Moscow to distribute leaflets calling for nuclear arms reduction by the USSR. On their return, the two held a press conference on 10th September 1982, which was covered by nearly all the British daily press.

At the World Peace Conference in Copenhagen 1986, The 61 packed the hall with delegates from imaginary peace groups such as 'Welsh Miners for Peace'. The conference was disrupted when the microphone was seized by a 61 agent, who launched into an anti- Soviet speech, while 61 propaganda leaflets were distributed.

Brian Crozier was to state that his ''peace counter-campaign'' succeeded with the decision to employ the US missiles Cruise and Pershing II in Britain, West Germany, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands.

MI5's F2 Branch (which counters ''domestic subversion'') was simultaneously involved in covert action against CND. In September 1981, Thatcher convened a number of highly secret 'liaison committees' at 10 Downing Street which were to concentrate on policy areas that night be vulnerable during the forthcoming election, such as Britain's nuclear deterrent. A propaganda drive was organised to expose what she termed ''the myths of unilateralism''. Piers Wooley, a Tory party official who took part in the campaign, described the nature of the attack as ''information, disinformation, and on many occasions, character assassination''.

In March 1987, Minister of Defence Michael Heseltine set up a special counter-propaganda unit called Defence Secretariat 19 (DS19) to write anti-CND material. DS19 liaised with MI5, who illegally tapped the phone of CND vice-president John Cox and other members of the organisation.

MI5 officer Cathy Massiter was instructed to carry out the phone-tapping operation by Tony Crasweller, who also supervised the agency's F4 and F6 sections, which ran agents inside political parties and organisations. At the same time, CND member Stanley Bonnett, a former editor of the CND magazine Sanity, was recruited as an informant by Special Branch, on the instructions of MI5. Bonnett gave the intelligence services minutes of meetings and lists of CND activists throughout the country - lists which the officers told him ''would be used for political purposes.''

Cathy Massiter gathered material on any left-wing affiliations of CND's leaders. A report was then passed to civil servant John Ledlie, who was seconded to DS19, and he passed it on to Michael Heseltine and Sir Peter Blaker MP, Heseltine's lieutenant in the propaganda campaign. Blaker, in turn, passed the information on to the local Conservative Association of Ray Whitney, former head of the Information Research Department.

As the general election campaign was getting under way, the Blaker/Whitney letter was circulated to prospective Tory candidates. The Daily Mail ran an article entitled CND Is Branded a Tool of the Kremlin, which drew from MI5 smears of the organisation and included allegations attributed to Stanley Bennett.

In the same period, the private anti-Communist propaganda group Common Cause, which monitors subversion in industry and the unions, published a pamphlet, The Communist Influence on CND, which had been written under the direction of Charles Elwell, head of MI5's F Branch. Elwell was also responsible for targeting the National Council of Civil Liberties (NCCL) as a subversive group.

THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST LABOUR

On leaving MI5, Charles Elwell went to work for Brian Crozier as an editor and researcher on an anti-Communist news sheet, Background Briefing on Subversion, later known as British Briefing. Echoing MI5's line of action, British Briefing's technique against left-wing Labour MPs was to establish ''Communist'' guilt by association. Its tone was best expressed with this editorial: ''The march of Communism through the trade unions, the Labour Party, local government, religion, education, charity, and the media under the leadership of Communists who may or may not be members of the Communist Party, is what BB is all out. BB seeks to provide those who have the means to expose a Communist threat with clear evidence of its existence.''

Among the Labour politicians targeted by British Briefing were Neil Kinnock, shadow health secretary Robin Cook, spokesman for social services Michael Meacher and spokesmen for local government David Blunkett (an ironic list of names considering those MPs' right-wing credentials today).

The Labour MP Chris Mullin was singled out for his ''perpetual vendetta against British security arrangements'', while Derbyshire MP Harry Barnes was labelled as ''quite a vigorous Stalinist underminer of British parliamentary democracy''. Other organisations were tarred with the Communist brush, notably the charity Shelter (for its ''Communist affiliations''), the Institute for Race Relations (''effectively controlled by revolutionary socialists'') and the World Council of Churches.

The newsletter was printed by the anti- Communist Industrial Research and Information Service (IRIS), whose parent body had been Common Cause. Copies were circulated to ''political leaders, MPs, journalists and others'', who were requested to treat it as confidential. British Briefing was funded to the tune of £270,000 over a three year period by Crozier's friend Rupert Murdoch.

The 61 was active in attacking the Labour Party in the run-up to the 1981 general election, with Douglas Eden writing a series of articles for the Daily Telegraph alleging Communist penetration of Labour. Tony Kerpel, a Tory councillor in Camden, designed for the Coalition for Peace Through Security a poster of Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich in 1918 with his piece of paper signed by Hitler, alongside a picture of Labour leader Michael Foot with a piece of paper. The captions under the pictures read: ''1938, Neville Chamberlain'' and ''1981, Michael Foot'' with the wording at the foot of the poster stating: ''Don't let appeasement cause another World War''. The poster was published by Norris McWhirter's Freedom Association.

On February 26th 1985, Crozier met again with Thatcher, when the prime minister asked him to help with a propaganda campaign against the municipal councils, including the Greater London Council (GLC); Crozier suggested a full counter- subversion programme. Also present was the CIA's William Casey, who proposed a ''suitably substantial budget'' for this rapid expansion of Crozier's UK operations.

Crozier planned action on several fronts, which he called: ''penetration, legislation, influence and publicity''.

An organisation called Campaign Against Council Corruption (CAMACC) was set up, whose director Tony Kerpel was later appointed to the post of special adviser to Kenneth Baker, secretary of state for the environment. In Parliament, CAMACC's main activist was The 61's Edward Leigh MP. CAMACC briefed various peers and drafted speeches for them in relevant debates in the House of Lords. Letters and news coverage were secured in national papers and the councils were branded in much of the British public's imagination as ''loony lefties'' who were misusing public funds.

With Thatcher's approval, Brian Crozier liaised with Keith Joseph in ''certain psychological actions'' in the election year of 1987. One move was to brief the television presenter David Frost for a proposed interview with Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Frost met with Crozier at the Connaught Hotel on 6th January, where Crozier supplied a detailed background paper on Kinnock's ''views, activities and personal relations in politics''. The interview took place on May 24th during the election campaign and Crozier reported that a number of his points were raised by Frost; the interview ''made a considerable impact'' against Labour.

The 61 produced a booklet The Vision of St. Kinnock, which satirised and slandered the Labour leader. It was distributed to hundreds of Conservative candidates who made ''good use'' of it in their speeches or election pamphlets. The 61 also supplied to the Liberal Party details of a list of 130 supposedly ''hard Left Labour MPs''. Liberal leader David Steel published the list under the title Labour's 101 Damnations.

For months in the run-up to the election, The 61 continued to provide propaganda material to politically compliant columnists in the national media, including Woodrow Wyatt of the News of the World and The Times, Frank Chapple of the Daily Mail, Bernard Levin and Lord Chalfont.

On 12th June 1987, Margaret Thatcher won her third consecutive term as Prime Minister.

HOW THE CIA TOOK THE TEETH OUT OF BRITISH SOCIALISM

The CIA works systematically to ensure that the socialist parties of all Western countries toe a line compatible with U.S. interests. In Britain in the 1950s, the CIA's manipulation of the right wing of the Labour Party swung the party away from its pledge to nationalisation (enshrined in the celebrated Clause IV), away from nuclear disarmament and back towards a commitment to NATO. This decisive intervention by the Agency could be said to have changed the course of modern British history….

Following the end of World War II, the Labour Party was elected on a platform of extensive domestic social reform, and of peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union in Europe. Fearful of the spread of Communist influence, the right wing of the party, under the new Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, organised themselves around the journal Socialist Commentary, which became their most important mouthpiece.

Throughout the post-war period, Labour's Gaitskellite right wing worked closely with MI5, Special Branch and a variety of CIA front organisations to advance its cause and keep the left at bay. Channelled with massive CIA funds, the right grew in confidence and influence, and vigorously campaigned against left-wingers like Aneurin Bevan, whom they denounced as ''dangerous extremists''.

Socialist Commentary set out to alert the British labour movement to the ''growing dangers of international Communism''. It was supported by David Williams, the London correspondent of the New Leader, an American anti-Communist publication backed by the CIA. Williams made it his business to join the British Labour Party and to take an active part in the Fabian Society.

In America, the New Leader provided a focus for weekly meetings of professional anti-Communists in the unions, universities and government service. It had a large staff and a world-wide network of overseas correspondents. New Leader began openly to advocate the infiltration of foreign socialist parties. In 1949, it carried a piece by CIA chief Allen Dulles advocating ''a commission of internal security to examine subversive activities in the US and to use the institutions of democracy to destroy them''; this was rather like the head of MI5 writing for The Guardian.

In 1954, Denis Healey MP became the New Leader's London Correspondent.

CIA covert financing of the international student movement also began about this time. The student movement was diverging into two factions: those on the left, who supported the Soviet-funded World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) constituted the most organised section and there was no home for right-wingers and social democratic organisations. To aid the right, MI6 and the CIA helped organise and fund the World Assembly of Youth (WAY).

WAY's initial membership was quite broad and included a number of left-wing socialists with no alignment to Moscow. However it was not long before the right asserted itself in the organisation, turning the student movement into an acceptable stamping ground for those wanting to make their name in preparation for parliamentary politics. Labour backbencher and Sunday Mirror columnist Woodrow Wyatt (who had received many IRD funds in the past) described WAY as ''an organisation which does extremely valuable propaganda for the free world, without looking like a propaganda organisation'' .

WAY was in contact with major establishment figures: a Friends of WAY Society included Conservative prime minister Sir Anthony Eden, ex-Labour prime minister Clement Atlee, Viscount Chandos (ex-colonial secretary) and Lord Mountbatten's wife Edwina. CIA officer Joseph Burkholder-Smith revealed that 10 (the CIA division which handled front groups) was in liaison with MI6 on all its world-wide front operations, in WAY in particular, and that the CIA were manipulating WAY student leaders.

WAY worked through the Colonial Office to extend its influence in Africa, setting up National Committees in Kenya, Mauritius, Sierra Leone, Seychelles and Uganda. The Colonial Office brought WAY events to the attention of the African colonial governments, arranged for WAY film shows and helped pay the travel expenses of the generally poor African delegates.

During the 1950s, WAY's European Youth Campaign received over £1,300,000 of CIA money, the largest proportion of which went to the British affiliate.

Meanwhile, in June 1950, the New Leader's Melvin Lasky helped set up the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a body whose declared purpose was ''to defend freedom and democracy against the new tyranny sweeping the world'' - namely Communism. Given massive CIA funding, the CCF launched political seminars, conferences, newspapers, periodicals, news services and a wide range of political and cultural activities throughout Western Europe. The CCF was one of the CIA's conduits for funding Brian Crozier's Forum World Features.

CCF also organised world-wide student exchanges and conferences in support of the new anti-Communist youth organisations which were promoted by the CIA.

In 1953, the CCF launched Encounter, a joint Anglo-American monthly journal involving MI6 agent C.M. Woodhouse, a covert action veteran who had been involved in Operation Ajax in Iran (a joint CIA/MI6 plot to overthrow the elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh). The magazine exchanged facilities with Socialist Commentary and used many of the same staff and writers. Encounter became one of the most influential liberal journals in the West.

As the CCF network grew, it embraced many prominent figures in the Labour Party - among them Anthony Crosland, who began attending CCF seminars along with Hugh Gaitskell, Denis Healey, Rita Hinden, Daniel Bell and a bevy of American and European politicians and academics.

Crosland's book The Future of Socialism was a major new political thesis which had been influenced by CCF conferences, in which he argued that growing affluence had radically transformed the working class in Europe and thus Marx's theory of class struggle was no longer relevant. The book was immediately adopted as the gospel of Labour's new leadership under Hugh Gaitskell.

During the 1950s, Gaitskell and his friends in the Socialist Commentary group adopted the argument forcibly put in the New Leader that a strong united Europe was essential to prevent the West from Russian attack. They received support from a New York-based group called the American Committee on United Europe, whose leadership included General Donovan, wartime head of the OSS (the fore-runner of the CIA), George Marshall, the U.S. Secretary of State, and Allen Dulles of the CIA.

This high-powered CIA-funded pressure group financed the so-called European Movement, headed by a friend of Hugh Gaitskell's, Joseph Retinger, who promoted select gatherings of European and American politicians, businessmen, aristocrats, top civil servants and military leaders. Founder members of the movement were Hugh Gaitskell and Denis Healey, along with such diverse characters as the president of Unilever and Sir Robert Boothby.

There were also U.S. labour attachés based in the London American embassy. One of them, Philip Kaiser, described his years in London in his memoirs: ''The labour attaché is expected to develop contacts with key leaders in the trade union movement and to influence their thinking and decisions in directions compatible with American goals....''

The CIA ran the anti-Communist international trade union movement, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), and its various spin-off groups, such as the trade secretariats. The TUC itself helped fund the ICFTU through its affiliation fees. By the mid 1950s, nearly a quarter of the TUC's annual budget was going to the ICFTU.

No-one has yet assembled the full data of trade union officials and Labour politicians who took advantage of the education programmes and freebie trips run by American intelligence for sympathetic people in the labour movement, but it probably runs into thousands. In other words, much of the international political landscape of the post-war era in Britain consisted of U.S.-funded or directed political propaganda/psychological warfare projects. And this was on top of the formal military-diplomatic-financial influences of NATO, the IMF, World Bank, GATT, the UN, etc.

By the late 1950s, Anthony Crosland was acknowledged as the Labour Party's chief theoretician and his role in the CCF was expanded to ''encourage sympathetic people'' to participate in CCF-sponsored seminars, congresses and private gatherings all around the world. Hugh Gaitskell and other Labour politicians travelled to CCF functions in Europe, New Delhi, Rhodes, Australia and Japan, where they lectured on the theme that traditional socialism was irrelevant in a modern capitalist society. They spent years working to remodel European socialism in the image of the American Democratic Party, and this was backed up by the fullest publicity in Encounter, Socialist Commentary, Preuves, Der Monat and other CCF journals.

The day after Labour's defeat in the 1959 general election, Roy Jenkins, Anthony Crosland and Douglas Jay were among a small group who met with Gaitskell to propose that Labour drop its old commitment to traditional socialism, particularly Clause IV which pledged ''common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange''.

In February 1960, William Rogers, general secretary of the Fabian Society, set up a steering committee with Crosland, Roy Jenkins, Patrick Gordon Walker, Jay and some sympathetic journalists. This group started to work on a manifesto to be released in the event of Gaitskell's defeat in the defence debate at the party conference that year.

Gaitskell was indeed defeated and CND won its campaign of committing the Labour Party to a neutralist programme. With widespread press coverage, Rogers and his friends immediately released 25,000 copies of their manifesto, which appealed to Labour Party members to rally behind Gaitskell and ''fight and fight and fight again''. The group set up the Campaign for Democratic Socialism (CDS)and with large sums of CIA money channelled through the CCF, they were able to take a permanent office and appoint paid staff. Given the full support, resources and unlimited financial backing of the CIA, the CDS had great advantages over their opponents in the party, who had to rely entirely on unpaid volunteer workers. At the CDS's disposal were field workers in the constituencies and unions, whom it supported with travelling expenses, literature and organisational support, as well as supplying tens of thousands of free copies of the manifesto, pamphlets and other CDS publications, plus a regular bulletin, Campaign, which was circulated free of charge to a large mailing list. All of this was produced without a single subscription-paying member.

CDS achieved its objectives: the trade unions cracked under the pressure and the Labour Party returned to its support for NATO at the party conference in 1961. The Campaign for Democratic Socialism - with its CIA backing - was the most effective pressure group the Labour Party had ever seen. Its influence was out of all proportion to its original support among party members and its financial backers could justly claim to have changed the course of British politics.

George Thomson - a pillar of the CDS, who later resigned from Labour's front bench with Roy Jenkins to form the more right-wing Social Democratic Party (SDP) - said of Rita Hinden: ''In the 50s, her ideas were greeted with outraged cries of ''Revisionism!'' But by the mid 60s, the revisionism of Social Commentary had become the orthodoxy of the Labour Movement''.

The Labour Party apparatus remained firmly in Gaitskellian hands over the following decades, particularly the International Department of which Denis Healey had been head until he won his seat as an MP. In 1963, The Labour Party's Organisation Subcommittee was chaired by George Brown, one of the CIA's sources in the Labour Party.

In 1965, Healey's old post was taken over by J. Gwyn Morgan, who had been elected President of the National Union of Students on an anti-Communist ticket. Morgan became General Secretary of the International Student Conference, in charge of finance, in which capacity he negotiated with the CIA's foundations which supplied the bulk of the organisation's funds, and supervised expenditure of the several million dollars devoted to world-wide propaganda.

Morgan visited over 80 different countries in five years and got to know personally many heads of government and leaders of the world's principal social democratic parties. In 1965, he became head of Labour's Overseas Department and two years later he became Assistant General Secretary of the Labour Party.

Around this time, a group of Labour leaders, including Hugh Gaitskell and George Brown, made a direct approach to MI5 for records of tapped telephone conversations of Labour left-wingers, bank-account records of payments from Soviet organisations, or names of East European contacts which could be used to smear their left-wing opponents in the party. Informal flows of information between MI5 and Labour's right-wing became more common, and over the years MI5 recruited freely in Labour's headquarters and among the parliamentary party.

The Labour Party, moulded by American and British intelligence in the Gaitskell image, with its policies firmly rooted in Crosland's manifestos, became the programme of the next Labour government under Harold Wilson.

Michael Stewart, foreign secretary in the Wilson government during the escalation of U.S. military action in Vietnam, and Sam Watson, the powerful Durham miners' leader and ally of Gaitskell, were among those who have since been identified as CIA ''agents of influence.''

Charles Clarke, who was Neil Kinnock's closest political adviser throughout his years as labour leader, had a background as chair of the World Youth Council, which had well-documented CIA links.

The CIA was also involved in ensuring Labour's commitment to Britain's entry into the Common Market through the afore-mentioned European Movement, the elite international pressure group secretly funded by the CIA, which took most of the credit for the founding of the Common Market. The European Movement wanted a United States of Europe and the rearmament of Germany, which the U.S. government saw as a key to winning the Cold War with Russia.

The European Youth Campaign (EYC) was set up as the most active component of the European Movement in 1951. In one year alone it organised 1,899 sessions and conferences, 900 cinema shows, distributed 1.8 million brochures, staged 21 exhibitions and secured 2,400 minutes of radio time for the cause of European unity. The secretary of the British section of EYC was Maurice Foley, later a Labour MP and minister. Virtually every penny he, and the campaign's other organisers spent, came from the CIA. In eight years, £1.34 million of covert funds were passed on to the EYC by the CIA's American Committee on a United Europe.

SPLITTING THE LABOUR PARTY

American intelligence played a major hand in the formation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). The inspirers of the SDP were Labour's Douglas Eden (who had previously worked for Brian Crozier's Shield as a researcher) and Stephen Haseler (who taught politics at the City of London). Both met with Crozier at his office while he was running the ISC and afterwards. The three agreed with the creation of a new political party in Britain, with the objective of attracting Labour's right-wing, thereby isolating the left and ''cutting it down to size''.

Eden and Haseler founded the Social Democratic Alliance (SDA), which had some 700 members, mostly municipal councillors, all over the United Kingdom. Crozier gave financial assistance to the SDA and arranged with Eden and Haseler to approach Roy Jenkins to lead their proposed new party. At the end of February 1981, four Labour right-wingers - Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and William Rodgers -announced the creation of a Council for Social Democracy and left the Labour Party to form the SDP.

Crozier lays the blame for the failure of the SDP to fully achieve his aims on Roy Jenkins' policy of aiming not so much to split Labour as to attract moderate anti-Thatcher MPs from the Conservative Party. In any case, the SDP experiment could be regarded as succeeding in the CIA's designs because it divided the anti-Tory vote at the following elections and contributed to the Conservatives' retention of power.

EXPOSURE

In 1967, investigations in the U.S. revealed that the CIA had manipulated the National Student Association since the early 1950s, with the active connivance of the Association's elected officers, and that CIA money had been channelled through a group of dummy foundations, such as the Fund for Youth and Student Affairs, which supplied most of the budget of the International Student Conference, which in turn was found to have been set up by British and American intelligence to counteract Communism.

Michael Josselson of the Congress for Cultural Freedom admitted that he had been channelling CIA money into the CCF ever since its foundation - at the rate of about $1 million a year - to support some twenty journals and a world-wide programme of political and cultural activities.

After these disclosures, the CCF changed its name to the International Association for Cultural Freedom. Michael Josellson resigned but was retained as a consultant and the Ford Foundation agreed to pick up the bills.

The exposure of CIA financial aid to WAY headquarters led to the organisation becoming discredited and the British National Committee was disaffiliated in 1977.

The revelation of its network of front organisations persuaded the CIA that its future lay in more discrete operations with better cover. Lots of covert psychological warfare and propaganda think tanks began to appear on the scene; Brian Crozier's Institute for the Study of Conflict was a pioneer in this field.

THE CIA AND NEW LABOUR

CIA-backed fronts such as the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding (LCTU) continued to attract right-wing trade union and Labour Party figures well into the 1980s. LCTU was formed ''in order to develop a better understanding of the objectives and democratic values of the Western Alliance in the ranks of socialist and trade union movements in Europe and their counterparts in the United States''; it distributes a news service amongst the trade union movement and provides regular seminars and conferences for senior trade unionists and politicians. Speakers at LCTU's conferences have included Dr John Reid MP (later to become Tony Blair's armed forces minister) Peter Mandelson MP, and George Robertson MP (Blair's defence secretary).

Another example of infiltration into the Labour Party was the case of MI6 officer Margaret ''Meta'' Ramsay. She had attended Glasgow University and had been elected President of the Scottish Union of Students. In 1962, she became associate secretary of the CIA-front the International Student Conference at Leiden, Holland. From 1965 to 1967, Ramsay was secretary of the Fund for International Student Co-operation, which was later identified as another recipient of CIA funds. She became an active member of the Labour Party, attending conferences where party officials were ''unaware'' of her intelligence connections. In late 1981, she was even on the short-list to become the new chief of MI6. (In the event, Sir Colin McColl, who was due to retire as chief in September 1992, was asked by John Major to stay on for another two years).

In August 1992, Margaret Ramsay was appointed to the position of foreign policy adviser to Labour leader John Smith, who was a friend of hers since university days. As well as raising a few eyebrows, this appointment begs the question: What was the leader of the Labour Party doing employing a known high-ranking MI6 agent in such a senior position?

With friends like these, the opportunities that the intelligence services have had for manipulating Labour politicians have plainly been many and varied.

Today, Tony Blair maintains the CIA's designs for the Labour party, with a commitment to the largest military budget in Europe and an unswerving allegiance to NATO. The assortment of transatlantic study trips, scholarships, trade union ''fellowships'' at Harvard and seminars paid for by U.S. agencies and the CIA continue to mould and influence Labour Party policies. For example, both Gordon Brown and John Monks (an important Blair ally as head of the TUC) were welcomed by the secretive Bilderberg Group (one of the key organisations of the European-American elite.) Brown and his economic adviser Edward Balls were both at Harvard. David Miliband, Blair's head of policy, was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1986, Tony Blair went on one of the myriad of U.S.-sponsored trips to America that are available for promising MPs and came back a supporter of the nuclear deterrent. In 1993, he went to a meeting of the Bilderberg Group.

Jonathan Powell, Blair's foreign policy advisor, used to work in the British embassy in Washington and is suspected by some of having been the liaison officer between British intelligence and the CIA.

In 1976, Peter Mandelson was Chair of the British Youth Council, which began as the British section of the World Assembly of Youth, which as we have seen, was set up and financed by the CIA. By Mandelson's time in the mid-1970s, the British Youth Council was said to be financed by the Foreign Office, though this was thought to be a euphemism for MI6.

A variety of senior Labour politicians - Peter Mandelson, George Robertson, Mo Mowlam, Chris Smith, Elizabeth Symons, George Robertson and Blair's chief of staff Jonathan Powell, were members of the British-American Project for the Successor Generation (BAP), a little-known but highly influential transatlantic network of ''chosen'' politicians, journalists and academics. The fingerprints of British and American intelligence are everywhere to be found amongst the network of BAP members; regular attenders at BAP meetings are defence and security specialists, NATO advisers, Defence Ministry think-tank people and counter-insurgency experts. Also included is Jonathan Powell, the career diplomat who now runs Tony Blair's No. 10 office as chief of staff. Powell is the youngest of the Powell brothers, of whom Charles, the eldest, was Margaret Thatcher's foreign policy specialist. At BAP conferences, subjects discussed include such titles as 'Sharing the Defense Burden' and 'The Welfare State on Trial'.

The first recorded mention of the need for a ''successor generation'' came in 1983 when President Reagan spoke to a select group, including Rupert Murdoch, Sir James Goldsmith and senior CIA officers, in the White House. Reagan told them: ''Last June, I spoke to the British Parliament, proposing that we - the democracies of the world - work together to build the infrastructure of democracy. This will take time, money and efforts by both government and the private sector. We need particularly to cement relations among the various sectors of our societies in the United States and Europe. A special concern will be the successor generations, as these younger people are the ones who will have to work together in the future on defense and security issues.''

BAP is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts of Philadelphia, which was established in 1985 by the billionaire J. Howard Pew, a devoted supporter of the Republican Party and other right-wing groups. These include the far-right Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a foundation which was set up by former CIA head William Casey to sponsor books ''widely regarded as influencing Reagan Administration economic and social thinking.'' One such book was Losing Ground by Charles Murray, the extreme-right inventor of the term ''underclass'' and advocate of the abolition of welfare.

In the records of the foundation of its ''successor generation'', BAP describes regular meetings of ''24 Americans and 24 Britons aged between 28 and 40 who, by virtue of their present accomplishments, had given indication that, in the succeeding generation, they would be leaders in their country and perhaps internationally.''

In its 1997 newsletter, BAP warmly welcomed the elevation of its members to the Blair Cabinet: ''Congratulations from all of us!''

All of Blair's new political appointees at the Ministry of Defence, including Defence Secretary George Robertson, have been members or associated with the Atlantic Council and its labour movement wing, the Trades Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding (TUCETU), which formed from the afore-mentioned Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding (LCTU), organisations that are backed by the CIA.

TUCETU's membership has included Doug Mc Avoy (general secretary of the National Union of Teachers), Lord Richard (Labour leader in the House of Lords), Lord (John) Gilbert (Tony Blair's defence procurement minister), right-wing trade union leaders such as Bill Jordan (head of the International Confederation of Free Trade Union, the CIA's chief labour movement operation), Lord (Eric) Hammond and Lord (Frank) Chapple, and former Portuguese president Mario Soares (recently revealed to have been a CIA asset).

TUCETU also incorporates Peace Through NATO, the group central to Michael Heseltine's covert MoD campaign against CND in the 1980s. It receives over £100,000 a year from the Foreign Office, as well as payments from CIA-backed trusts. TUCETU chair Alan Lee Williams was a Labour defence minister under Callaghan, who defected to the SDP. He now describes himself as a ''defence consultant''.

CONCLUSION

This is just some of the complicated network of British and U.S. intelligence's efforts to infiltrate and manipulate the right-wing of the trade union movement and the Labour Party in recent decades, and there are grave lessons here for the left.

Under the pretence of a media with freedom of expression, the intelligence services have spoon-fed the British public a carefully-controlled political diet of ''news'' which controls their attitudes and responses to strikes, protests, wars and general elections, while the broad domestic and foreign policies of the Labour Party that the CIA helped establish (pro-NATO, pro-free market economy, anti-socialist etc.) have remained in place to this day.

Robin Ramsey of Lobster magazine, which has uncovered much of Blair's clandestine transatlantic intelligence connections, describes New Labour as just the latest manifestation of the party's social democratic tendency, which has existed since the Cold War, running from Hugh Gaitskell through Roy Jenkins and the SDP and which should more properly be called the American Tendency:

''The people round Blair are all linked to the United States…. And here is the source of the tension between so-called Old and New Labour. For who are the Labour Party's traditional constituencies? British domestic manufacturing and British public sector workers. Old Labour is the domestic economy; New Labour is the overseas British economy; in other words, the multinationals, the City of London, and the Foreign Office which represents their interests.''

It would be foolish to underestimate the influence of the intelligence services on Britain's political map. We know that the intelligence services never stand idly by and watch events happen. Brian Crozier is but one CIA operative in Britain whose activities have come to light. During the mid-1970s, renegade CIA agent Philip Agee revealed a list of ten CIA officers working in London; MI6 later confirmed to a group of MPs that this was correct. We have seen CIA operatives attain senior positions of influence under successive Labour governments. How deeper does the infiltration of the Labour Party go than has so far come to light, and to what extent are the intelligence services able to manipulate the party's policies?

The whole purpose of trade unions is to be independent workers' organisations standing up for the interests of their membership. The Labour Party itself was originally founded to represent the interests of the working class against the exploitation of capitalism. We have seen a concerted, massively-funded and far-reaching campaign by the intelligence services and other state agencies to covertly manoeuvre the labour and trade union movements in this country to total compliance with the interests of the ruling class. This is not merely undemocratic; it is the mark of totalitarianism.
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CIA and the Labour Party by Richard Fletcher pt 1-3 of 5

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Wed Sep 05, 2007 3:34 am

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http://www.wcml.org.uk/internat/atlantic.htm

The first documents here come from a 1974 publication by Radical Research Services. The central article is an unpublished Sunday Times report from 1972 "Who were they traveling with?", looking at the entanglement of CIA funded cold war liberalism with the British and European Labour movements in the 1950s and 60s. Other articles examine the circumstances surrounding the shelving of investigative articles by Richard Fletcher in 1967 and 1972, and the launch in 1948 of the European Movement.

links-
The perplexities of moderate men.
How the Sunday Times censored its magazine.
Who were they travelling with?
How the CIA tried to nobble the world's press.
How the European Movement was launched.

http://www.wcml.org.uk/internat/moderatemen.htm
(The Labour Party and the C.I.A. - part 1)

The Perplexities of Moderate Men

IN THIS ISSUE we print the text of an article commissioned by the "Sunday Times Magazine" in 1972 and withdrawn from publication by the Editor, together with an account of the surrounding circumstances.

Our purpose is to examine the pressures which help to inform decision-making inside the British Labour Party. Inevitably, certain individuals are named. This is done not out of malice to the persons concerned, but because we believe that it is in the public interest that the full story should be told. All facts asserted are true, to the best of our knowledge.

Firstly, the article sheds fresh light on the leadership of the social democratic parties of Europe and particularly of the British Labour Party. Throughout Europe the long period of post-war consensus is breaking down. Political solutions to accelerating inflation are to be found either to Right or Left, not in the centre. Increasingly, the choice lies between tight monetary control and resulting unemployment or massive social intervention in the economy. In response to a changing situation, Labour Party policy is moving firmly to the left, but many of its leaders, socially conditioned by the "End of Ideology" climate of the 1950s, and the illusions of the Kennedy era, have been left without a coherent political position.

Nowhere is this conditioning clearer than in the field of foreign policy. To many socialists, the reactionary decisions of the British Cabinet, opposing as it now frequently does the decisions of its own Party Conference, N.E.C. and Transport House, are inexplicable. Recent press cuttings reproduced in our report illustrate the point.

CYPRUS
Why does a socialist government maintain British bases in Cyprus? On the one occasion when they could legitimately have been used -in defending the constitutional President, Arch-bishop Makarios - the troops were immobilised. If our analysis is correct, bases are maintained there solely because the United States needs a staging post to the Middle East. The full story of the Cyprus coup and of U.S. involvement in it, is just beginning to emerge. (See "Sunday Times", October 20, 1974, p.11).

Labour Party policy on Chile is totally opposed to the Junta, yet the Labour Government has recently helped to reschedule Chile's debts, and continued the supply of arms.

SOUTH AFRICA
The same pressure has caused the Government to maintain strategic and economic links with South Africa when the Party is pledged to fight apartheid, and to postpone and water down the defence review to which the Party is committed.

There is now a growing gulf between a left-leaning Labour Party and a Cabinet many of whose members are committed to support for United States policies at any cost . We should now ask what it is we are defending in terms of these same American interests. Is the Labour Party leadership prepared to sanction indefinitely the right-wing regimes on which Washington will, in future, be increasingly forced to depend to protect its vested interests?

In the aftermath of Watergate and with the truth emerging about the regimes in South Africa, Latin-America and the Middle East, it is now becoming increasingly indefensible for any socialist to continue to support United States foreign policy. Those prepared to do so must also be prepared to accept a growing alignment between social democracy and fascism. There is an urgent need for reappraisal on the part of many of the Labour Party leaders.

A second purpose of the attached article is to provide some analysis of the "free" press that bodies like the International Press Institute and the Congress for Cultural Freedom were set up to defend. Such is the degree of cultural conditioning of those who have fought the cold war for a generation that no external censorship is needed to protect U.S. interests. The Press is prepared to do the job itself. It is no accident that many of the leading Cold Warriors were ex-communists, for their methods are often a mirror-image of those of their adversaries.

The editorial chair of one of the world's leading newspapers brings power and prestige to its occupant it also carries the responsibility of using the resources at its disposal impartially and in the public interest.

"Everybody believes in the truth, you know, until it affects his vested interests " The Editor of the "Sunday Times" told a Cultural Freedom seminar in Turin in 1971. It could be asked why, when presented with detailed evidence of a massive international campaign to subvert and overthrow democratically elected governments, using trade unions and other "voluntary" organisations, the "Sunday Times" did not immediately start to search out the truth.

If a single researcher in 1967 was able to name the Front Royal training school in Virginia at which the CIA instructed Latin American trade unionists in subversion, the Insight team could surely have uncovered the whole story before the British TUC met that same year. World opinion would then have been alerted and democratic governments and free trade unions strengthened in resisting 'destabilisation" by the United States seven years before the story finally emerged. It is even possible that Allende might still be alive today.

SUBSIDISED

"What should a 'freethinker' do" asks the "Sunday Times" of London (May 14th, 1967), "when he finds out that his free thought has been subsidised by a ruthlessly aggressive intelligence agency as part of the international cold war ?" It would seem that the answer to this must be that, according to the curious values that prevail in American society, he should make a redoubled effort to salvage the reputation of organisations that have been compromised, it would seem, beyond redemption. Far from "reforming" themselves -Encounter and the Congress for Cultural Freedom have vindicated the very men who led them into disaster.
So writes Professor Christopher Lasch, an American sociologist.

But the same "curious values" are found this side of the Atlantic. Three years later, the Editor of the "Sunday Times" was lending his name to Cultural Freedom activities in Europe.

The third function of the article is to reveal a little more of the means by which U.S. foreign policy has been conducted since World War II. The CIA's exploits were not the work of a "lunatic fringe" temporarily out of the control of their masters in Washington, but were, as Robert Kennedy pointed out, deliberate acts of policy initiated by the National Security Council (of which Kissinger is now Chairman) directly responsible to successive Presidents of the United States. This important point was made in the article which the "Sunday Times" suppressed in 1967, and was re-stated in the "inquiry into Kissinger's policy of secret American intervention in the politics and economy of foreign nations" by Godfrey Hodgson and William Shawcross which appeared in the paper, October 27, 1974. "The CIA" they say "was only one of the instruments for Kissingers will. He sat at the controls of a giant console, able to direct now the CIA, now the State Department, the Treasury or the Navy Department as each seemed fitted for his purpose. That was to destroy the constitutional government of Chile." Could such a message fail to have had impact some seven years earlier?

This console is linked, also, to the great "charitable" foundations - Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie - which have picked up the tab whenever private "non-political" philanthropy has appeared more appropriate than direct government funding.

Secret U.S. funding of trade unions and other voluntary organisations all round the world was initiated by Thomas Braden who set up the CIA's International Organisation Division in the early fifties. He was succeeded by Cord Meyer, founder of the United World Federalists which helped to launch the European Movement, and a lifelong CIA employee. Meyer was in charge of covert funding of Encounter and the Congress for Cultural Freedom and by 1973 was assistant deputy director of plans in line for the deputy directorship. In the event he was promoted to be station chief in London. At the time he was thought to have been "kicked upstairs" but Washington CIA watchers are now having second thoughts.

COVERT ACTION
Since de Gaulle drummed the Americans out of France, covert action for the whole of Europe, East and West, and the Mediterranean has been centred on the Embassy in London, in premises close to Grosvenor Square. Far from being put out to grass, Meyer has been hard at work in what promises to be the most active field of U.S. intervention over the next five years. Irving Brown is back in Europe, and his old prot~g~, Helmust Schmidt, is now German Chancellor. Already evidence is emerging of the CIA's hand in the curious circumstances surrounding Brandt's downfall. As the Labour Party moves to the left, is it too much to predict the appearance in Fleet Street of "secret" documents attacking prominent members of the Government - or are they emerging already?

In answer to a Parliamentary question in 1967 Harold Wilson said there was no evidence that the CIA was operating on British territory. The Government, in its own interest, should set up an immediate enquiry to find out if this still holds true.

In the meantime, it should demand the immediate recall of Cord Meyer and the 100 or more intelligence men now swelling the grossly inflated establishment of the U.S. Embassy in London -just as Lord Home expelled many of the K.G.B. agents attached to the Russian Trade Mission in Highgate a few years ago.

The tragedy of the "freethinkers" is that their thought is not yet free. Whether it ever will be is their problem, but meanwhile we must protect ourselves from its consequences. Cultural conditioning - it used to be called brainwashing -is difficult to expunge. Destalinisation is immensely difficult for the Stalinist, and we are right to demand more than a few crocodile tears from the communists as evidence of their conversion to representative democracy.

So for those who have unwittingly travelled with (and dined off) the CIA - overlooking their naivete in not questioning where the money was coming from - it is not sufficient for them to claim that they were never consciously influenced by their mentors. The fellow-travellers of the State Department - like those of Moscow - were picked out in the first place because of their blind devotion to one side in the cold war.

There can be no "free press" until senior editorial staff are able to take a view of world politics that is genuinely independent of all power blocks. Nor does independence mean neutrality. Criticism must not be withheld wherever it is deserved.

If editors are unable to accept this lesson then the responsibility lies with newspaper employees to bring them under democratic control.

http://www.wcml.org.uk/internat/censored.htm
( The Labour Party and the C.I.A. - part 2)

How the Sunday Times censored its magazine

INSIGHT

THE "Sunday Times" has always been equivocal in its attitude towards the CIA. While reporting its cloak-and-dagger exploits the paper has, until recently, seemed reluctant to draw political conclusions from these activities.

This was illustrated in the publication of two articles on "How the CIA got rid of Jagan" in British Guiana (16 and 23 April 1967). The second piece said that Macmillan and Sandys, then Colonial Secretary, had sanctioned the CIA's presence in the colony under cover of certain international trade union organisations.

Sandys was away at the time of publication, but questioned by "Insight" editor Bruce Page shortly after, he refused to comment, saying, "Do you want to make something of it then ?" The "Sunday Times" didn't, and no more was heard of the matter in spite of a non-committal reply by Harold Wilson to a Parliamentary question by Stan Newens, MP, on CIA attempts "to infiltrate and influence organisations which function on British administered territories". Material for the articles had been provided by Richard Fletcher, an independent researcher interested in the international trade union movement, and the "Sunday Times" at that time had on file further information about CIA operations on British territory which it did not use.

INSTIGATOR
One of the key instigators of the trouble in British Guiana was Gene Meakins of the American Newspaper Guild, under cover of the International Federation of Journalists. The stream of anti-Jagan propaganda which, for over a year, he helped to produce, in the Press and through a radio station paid for by the Americans, had a significant effect in "destabilising" the Jagan government. The American Newspaper Guild received nearly one million dollars of CIA money between 1960 and 1964 to finance activities-which included "combating communist newspaper unions - in South America and Asia. It also helped the Asia Foundation, another CIA conduit, organise a three-month seminar for South Vietnamese journalists in 1966, under the auspices of the IFJ. ("New York Times", 18 and 19 Feb., 1967).

It is quite clear from the content of such seminars that their long-term aim was to produce a Press sympathetic to the United States and "free enterprise" and hostile to communism and neutralism and, more importantly, to any form of socialism. To be neutral by their standards was indicative of communist leanings.

INFLUENCE
These seminars derived their influence in developing countries from providing much-needed technical services in editing, layout and newspaper production, through top-ranking professionals imported as "consultants" from Britain and the United States.

As a student of international trade unionism Fletcher had noticed tell-tale signs of American activity on the British Guiana model in other parts of the world and in the following months he collected enough evidence to show that this was part of a general pattern. In August 1967 he wrote a detailed study of American penetration of the international trade union movement which was bought by the "Sunday Times's-through Stephen Fay, then Industrial Correspondent-for publication immediately before the TUC annual Congress opened at Brighton early in September.

This long article, which was soberly written by "Insight's" "we can now reveal" standards, described how the Cold War had been fought in the unions-the role of Jay Lovestone (once General Secretary of the US Communist Party) and his agents, such as Irving Brown, in subverting the European labour movement after World War II and overthrowing governments in Brazil, British Guiana and many other parts of the world. In particular the working methods of the American Institute for Free Labour Development at its Front Royal, Virginia school were described and those of other CIA front organisations for journalists, electrical, plantation, clerical, petroleum, telephone, retail and other workers. Fay was well satisfied with the piece. It contained a mass of factual information of great public interest which would undoubtedly have an impact at the TUC; it merely needed shortening and tidying up.

REJECTED
However, the Editor took the article out of Fay's hands and assigned it to Insight where Bruce Page gave it to a young reporter recently arrived from Australia. He had little knowledge of trade unions or global politics and by the time he had finished with it the piece was not worth printing.

At the TUC on September 5th, 1967, Jim Mortimer of the Draughtsmen's union (now chairman of the Government's new Conciliation and Arbitration Service) asked the General Council to investigate reports that international organisations to which the TUC and member unions were affiliated were being used by the CIA to "carry out the policies of the American government". George Woodcock rebutted the charges angrily. As far as he knew there was no evidence whatsoever that any such intervention was taking place. Had the "Sunday Times" article appeared the previous Sunday he would have had to reply very differently.

In the spring of 1972 the "Sunday Times" magazine asked Fletcher to write the final episode in their series "Unofficial History of the 20th Century". According to Robert Lacey, assistant editor, they had more than enough material to cover the early part of the century but now needed a major contribution for the period since World War II-how about a piece on CIA attempts to penetrate the Labour Party? Fletcher agreed on condition that he be given adequate support-in back-up research and from overseas correspondents-to make a serious investigation, and that the resulting article would not be over-sensationalised by playing up the CIA's more spectacular escapades at the expense of the political significance of its intervention.

Then followed six weeks of intensive activity. Enquiries around the world showed that leading Labour politicians had been advising and deriving support from organisations subsequently shown to be set up and financed by the CIA. Senior editorial staff on the Magazine were pleased with the 5,000-word piece' whose gist was that the CIA socialists had, since the war, used exactly the same methods of subversion and political manipulation as their enemies the Communists.

After a week of thorough vetting for libel by the "Sunday Times" lawyers, James Evans and his assistant, expensive art-work was prepared and a final draft sent "upstairs" for formal approval by the editor of the paper, Harold Evans.

Evans' immediate reaction was that the article should not be printed. Told that it had been cleared for libel, he said that the piece was unfair and that he was withdrawing it on editorial grounds. "Anyway," he said, "these are the people we support." Having rejected the piece, Evans then asked the lawyers to have another look at it-apparently hoping that his decision might, after all, be legally justified.

Feelings were running high amongst the Magazine editorial staff. Lacey talked of resigning but was dissuaded by colleagues as his wife had just had a baby. Like Francis Wyndham, a writer of some repute and the Magazine's watchdog of literary standards, they felt the piece had merit and should be published. By withdrawing it from the paper without even consulting them about possible changes Evans was, they felt. questioning their professional competence and integrity.

Fletcher tried to see Evans to find out the reasons for the article's exclusion and to tell him of the reaction of the Magazine staff, but he was unsuccessful.

But Stephen Fay had the last word. Told of the episode on returning to Thomson House after two years in the USA for the "Sunday Times", his comment was "It's all true."

http://www.wcml.org.uk/internat/wattw.htm
( CIA and the Labour Party - part 3)

Who were they travelling with?

How CIA Money Took the Teeth Out of Socialism
by Richard Fletcher

Research: USA, Susan Bidel; France, Anthony Terry and Frank Dorsey; Netherlands, Leo Hendrick; Japan, Christopher Reed; Switzerland, Alan McGregor; Austria, Ritchie McEwen; Italy, Andrew Hale; England Philip Kelly and Jenny Richards.

Since the Second World War the American Government and its espionage branch, the Central Intelligence Agency, have worked systematically to ensure that teh Socialist parties of the free world toe a line compatible with American interests...CIA money can be traced flowing through the Congress for Cultural Freedom to such magazines as Encounter which have given Labour politicians like Anthony Crosland, Denis Healy and the late Hugh Gaitskell a platform for their campaigns to move the Labour Party away from nationalisation and CND-style pacifism. Flows of personnel link this Labour Party pressure group with the unlikely figure of Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who has for 20 years sponsored the mysterious activities of the anti-Communist Bilderberg group launched with covert American funds.

There is no suggestion that these prominent Labour politicians have not acted in al innocence and with complete propriety. But it could be asked how such perspicacious men could fail to enquire about the source of the funds that have financed the organisations and magazines which have been so helpful to them for so long. Nevertheless, they are certainly proud of the crucial influence their activities had in the years following 1959 when they swung the British Labour Party away from its pledge to nationalisation, enshrined in the celebrated Clause IV, and back towards the commitment to NATO from which the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had deflected it. CIA operators take the credit for helping them in this decisive intervention which changed the course of modern British history.

The cloak and dagger operations of America's Central Intelligence Agency are only a small part of its total activities. Most of its 2000 million-dollar budget and 80,000 personnel are devoted to the systematic collection of information - minute personal details about tens of thousands of politicians and political organisations in every country in the world, including Britain. And this data, stored in the world's largest filing system at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, is used not only to aid Washington's policy-machine, but in active political intervention overseas - shaping the policies of political parties, making and unmaking their leaders, boosting one internal faction against another and often establishing rival breakaway parties when other tactics fail.

In fact the CIA carries out, at a more sophisticated level, exactly the same sort of organised subversion as Stalin's Comintern in its heyday. One of its targets in the years since the Second World War has been the British Labour Party.

The Labour Party emerged from the war with immense prestige. As the sole mass working-class party in Britain it had the support of a united trades union movement whose power had been greatly enhanced by the war, and it had just achieved an unprecedented electoral victory. The established social democratic parties of Europe had been destroyed by the dictators, while in America all that remained of the socialist movement was a handful of sects whose members were numbered in hundreds. Labour was undisputed head of Europe's social democratic family.

But as the euphoria wore off, old differences began to emerge with prolonged post-war austerity. The Left wanted more Socialism and an accommodation with the Russians, while the Right wanted the battle against Communism to take precedence over further reforms at home. And those who took this latter view organised themselves around the journal Socialist Commentary, formerly the organ of anti-Marxist Socialists who had fled to Britain from Hitler's Germany. The magazine was reorganised in the autumn of 1947 with Anthony Crosland, Allan Flanders and Rita Hinden who had worked closely with the emigres as leading contributors. And Socialist Commentary became the mouthpiece of the Right wing of the Labour Party, campaigning against Left-wingers like Aneurin Bevan, whom they denounced as dangerous extremists. Crosland, who ended the war as a captain in the Parachute Regiment, had been President of the Oxford Union, and a year later, in 1947, became Fellow and lecturer in economics at Trinity College, Oxford. Flanders was a former TUC official who became an academic specialist in industrial relations and later joined the Prices and Incomes Board set up by the Wilson Government. Rita Hinden, a University of London academic from South Africa, was secretary of the Fabian Colonial Bureau - an autonomous section of the Fabian Society which she had set up and directed since the early Forties. In this position she exercised considerable influence with Labour Ministers and officials in the Colonial Office, maintaining close links with many overseas politicians.

The new Socialist Commentary immediately set out to alert the British Labour movement to the growing dangers of international Communism, notably in a piece entitled "Cominformity', written by Flanders during a period spent in the United States studying the American trade union movement. The journal's American connections were further extended by its U.S. correspondent, William C. Gausmann, who was soon to enter the American Government Service, where he rose to take charge of US propaganda in North Vietnam, while support for the moderate stand taken by Crosland, Flanders and Hinden came from David C. Williams, the London Correspondent of the New Leader, an obscure New York weekly specialising in anti-Communism. Williams made it his business to join the British Labour Party and to take an active part in the Fabian Society.

This close American interest in Socialism on the other side of the Atlantic was nothing new. During the war the American trade unions had raised large sums to rescue European labour leaders from the Nazis, and this had brought them closely in touch with American military intelligence and, in particular, with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), whose chief in Switzerland and Germany from 1942 to 1945 was Allen W. Dulles, later, of course, to become famous as head of the CIA in its heyday.

The principal union official in these secret commando operations had been Jay Lovestone, a remarkable operator who had switched from being the leader of the American Communist Party to working secretly for the US Government. And as the Allied armies advanced, Lovestone's men followed the soldiers as political commissars, trying to make sure that the liberated workers were provided with trade union and political leaders acceptable to Washington - many of these leaders being the ~migr~s of the Socialist Commentary group. In France, Germany, Italy and Austria the commissars provided lavish financial and material support for moderate Socialists who would draw the sting from Left-wing political movements, and the beneficiaries from this assistance survive in European politics to this day - though that is another story.

In America the New Leader came to provide one focus for these activities, organising a weekly meeting of minds for professional anti-Communists in the unions, universities and government service, both at home and abroad. It had a relatively large paid staff and a world-wide network of overseas and roving correspondents. Its guiding spirit as Executive Editor and business manager was Sol Levitas, a Russian 6migr~ who had worked with Trotsky and Bukharin during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and had fled from Stalin's prisons to the US in 1923, bringing with him a life-long hatred of Bolshevism. Amongst Levitas's "boys", as he liked to call them, were Melvin J. Lasky, an ex-Trotskyist from New York City College who joined the staff in 1941; Daniel Bell, a former Managing Editor of the New Leader who is now a professor at Columbia University; and Irving Brown, Lovestone's hatchet man in the European trade unions.

The New Leader claimed to be independent, but in 1949 it carried a piece by Allen Dulles advocating a "commission of internal security", to examine subversive influences in the US and to "use the institutions of democracy to destroy them" which, in the light of Dulles's work helping the White House reorganise 055 as the Central Intelligence Agency, was rather like the head of MIS writing for the New Statesman. And at this time too, although the New Leader was issuing frantic appeals for funds to pay off its $40,000 worth of debts, it started appearing in April 1950 as a new New Leader with an expensive Time-like magazine format.

The importance of this dramatically reborn publication for British and European Labour parties was that it now began openly to advocate the infiltration of foreign socialist parties, echoing the arguments of James Burnham who, in his book The Coming Defeat of Communism, proposed that "the Western World, led by the United States should go over to the offensive by using the same sort of methods - open and covert - that the Kremlin has so massively employed". Allan Flanders contributed an article to the revamped magazine on the British Labour Movement, and in 1954 Denis Healey, who had entered Parliament as a Labour MP in 1952, became the New Leader's London correspondent.

American Cold War strategy, as Burnham and the New Leader had proposed, now moved into the financing of world-wide front organisations, and in June 1950 the free world's top men of letters were duly assembled in the Titania Palace Theatre in the US zone of Berlin, before an audience of 4,000, to faunch the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a body whose purpose was to "defend freedom and democracy against the new tyranny sweeping the world". It was no coincidence that the main organiser and chairman of the Congress was Melvin Lasky, who in 1948 had been 'lent' by the New Leader to the US High Commission in Berlin, where he had set up a successful literary magazine, Der Monat. with the encouragement of General Lucius D. Clay, head of the military government. Nor that the man chosen to head the permanent secretariat of the congress was an official of the American military government, Michael Josselson, who administered and arranged the financing of the vast organisation.

The Congress seemed to have unlimited funds which were said to come from Jay Lovestone's union in America, and CCF, as it came to be known, was soon organising political seminars and student exchanges, and publishing literature on a world-wide basis in support of the new youth organisations which suddenly emerged to fight the Communists - notably the International Student Conference at Leiden in the Netherlands.

In 1953 the Congress for Cultural Freedom launched Encounter, an English language monthly which was an immediate success under the editorship of Irving Kristol, another of Levitas's New Leader proteg6s and an exLovestoneite, and soon a bewildering range of publications in several languages had joined the CCF stable, with Encounter becoming one of the most influential journals of liberal opinion in the West.

As the CCF network grew it embraced many prominent figures in the British Labour Party -among them Anthony Crosland, who began attending CCF seminars, where he met Daniel Bell, who was at this period moving away from journalistic red-baiting in the New Leader towards academic respectability. Bell's thinking was later summarised in his book The End of Ideology, and it formed the basis of the new political thesis set out in the major work that Crosland was now writing and which was published in 1956 under the title The Future of Socialism. The book had also been influenced by the arguments put forward at the Conference of the Congress for Cultural Freedom held in the previous year in Milan, where principal participants had included Hugh Gaitskell, Denis Healey and Rita Hinden as well as Daniel Bell and a bevy of American and European politicians and academics.

Put at its simplest. Bell and his colleagues argued that growing affluence had radically transformed the working-class in Europe - and Britain - which was now virtually indistinguishable from the middle-class, and thus Marx's theory of class struggle was no longer relevant. Future political progress, they thought, would involve the gradual reform of capitalism and the spread of equality and social welfare as a consequence of continued economic growth.

Crosland's book, though not original in content, was a major achievement. In over 500 pages it clothed the long-held faith of Labour's new leader Hugh Gaitskell in the academic respectability of American political science and was immediately adopted as the gospel of the Party leadership. Labour's rank-and-file, however, still clung to their grassroots Socialism, and Gaitskell's obvious preferences for the small coterie of cultured intellectuals and visiting foreigners who met at his house in Frognal Gardens, Hampstead, alienated the Party faithful, and gave added bitterness to the internecine quarrels that were to follow Labour's defeat in the 1959 election.

In 1957 Melvin Lasky had taken over the editorship of Encounter which had, by then, cornered the West's intelligentsia through its prestige and the high fees it was able to pay. Lasky was a trusted member of Gaitskell's inner circle and was often to be seen at his parties in Hampstead, while Gaitskell became at the same time a regular contributor to the New Leader. Sol Levitas would drop in at his house on his periodic tours to see world leaders and visit the CCF in Paris.

It was during the Fifties furthermore, that Anthony Crosland, Rita Hinden and the other members of the Socialist Commentary group adopted the argument put forcibly in the New Leader that a strong united Europe was essential to protect the Atlantic Alliance from Russian attack, and European and Atlantic unity came to be synonymous in official thinking as Gaitskell and his friends moved into the Party leadership. They received transatlantic encouragement, furthermore, from a New York-based group called the American Committee on United Europe, whose leadership was openly advertised in the New York Times as including General Donovan, wartime head of OSS. George Marshall, the US Secretary of State, General Lucius D. Clay and Allen Dulles of the CIA.

This high-powered and lavishly-funded pressure group - whose thesis was essentially that a United Europe would defend America's interest against Russia -financed in Europe the so-called 'European Movement', whose inspiration was a friend, of Hugh Gaitskell's, Joseph Retinger, an elderly Polish James Bond, who, after a professional career as an ~minence grise. had come to rest at the Dutch court under the patronage of Prince Bernhard.

Retinger had, furthermore, secretly persuaded Shepard Stone of the US High Commission in Germany to finance his European Movement out of so-called "counter-part funds" - Marshal Aid repaynients which the Americans banked in Europe. Later he promoted select gatherings of European and American politicians, businessmen, aristocrats, top civil servants and military leaders to propagate the ideals of Atlantic and European unity. Invitations to these Bilderberg Group meetings -named after the Dutch hotel where the first gathering was held in 1954 - were issued personally by Prince Bernhard on Retinger's recommendation. Few of those who received the card of invitation embossed with the Royal Netherland coat of arms declined to spend three or four days in civiised discourse with the world's leaders in luxurious surroundings - certainly not Hugh Gaitskell and Denis Healey, who were founder members of the Group along with such diverse personalities as the President of Unilever and Sir Robert Boothby.

Healey, an ex-Communist, had been head of the International Department at Transport House before entering Parliament in 1951. He was a convinced supporter of Atlantic Union and spread the message through Socialist Commentary and the New Leader, for whom he wrote nearly 80 articles before joining the Labour Government as Defence Minister in 1964.

While top people were relaxing with Prince Bernhard, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was establishing solid ties with the coming man of the British Labour Party. Anthony Crosland, who was by now acknowledged as the Party's chief theoretician. He had lost his seat at Westminster in the 1955 election, but in the following years was travelling regularly to Paris to plan the International Seminars of the CCF with Melvin Lasky and Michael Josselson under the directorship of Daniel Bell. Michael Josselson, who in 1967 admitted that he had for 17 years been channelling CIA money into the CCF, has described to us Crosland's role at this period. Crosland's contribution, he says. was "encouraging sympathetic people" to participate in the seminars sponsored by the Congress all over the world. Hugh Gaitskell travelled in these years to Congress functions in Milan 1955. New Delhi 1957, the island of Rhodes 1958 and Berlin 1962. Crosland himself travelled to Vienna in 1958, to Berlin in 1960 and to Australia and Japan in 1964 on a Congress-sponsored tour.

He was at this date a member of the International Council of the CCF after nearly a decade working to re-model European Socialism in the image of the American Democratic Party, a cause for the sake of which the CCF had financed a systematic campaign of congresses, seminars and private gatherings for leading Socialists throughout Europe. This had been backed up by the fullest publicity in Encounter, Preuves. Monat and the other CCF journals - whose influence was further extended by discreet arrangements with Socialist Commentary for publishing each other's pamphlets and articles.

Rita Hinden was by now the editor of Socialist Commentary and playing a similar role to Crosland in picking African participants for Congress seminars. Michael Josselson describes her as "a good friend of ours. We relied entirely on her advice for our African operations". She also visited India and Japan on a CCF-sponsored trip after the Suez crisis, speaking on the theme that traditional Socialism was irrelevant in a modern capitalist society where there was full employment.

This was the nub of the matter. Many of Europe's Socialist parties still had old-fashioned Marxist notions written into their rule-books, which had become an embarrassment to their leaders. A glaring example was the British Labour Party whose Clause IV -"common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange" and so on - sounded to some like a passage from the Communist Manifesto. The proof of its irrelevance seemed provided by the 1959 General Election in which Anthony Crosland regained h& seat at Westminster, but which represented a catastrophic defeat for the Labour Party. The day after Labour's defeat, Roy Jenkins, Anthony Crosland and Douglas Jay were among a small group who met with Gaitskell at his home. They decided that the time had come for Labour to drop its old commitments and get rid of its cloth cap image which had become an electoral liability.

Douglas Jay immediately wrote the now celebrated article which appeared in Forward the following week, calling for the abandonment of Clause IV and a change in the Labour Party's name. And early in 1960, Socialist Commentary commissioned Mark Abram's firm, Research Services Ltd., to carry out an attitude survey on "Why Labour Lost". The results were published in the journal's May to August number, and they confirmed the Gaitskell thesis that nationalisation was a liability. This Abrams survey had been turned down by the Labour Party Executive before the 1959 election as being too costly. But now Socialist Commentary found the money to pay for it, and in February 1960 William Rodgers, General Secretary of the Fabian Society since 1953, organised a letter of support to Gaitskell signed by 15 young Parliamentary candidates. Shortly afterwards, a steering committee was set up with Rodgers as chairman, and including some of the signatories of the Gaitskell letter together with Crosland, Roy Jenkins, Patrick Gordon Walker, Jay, other Party members from Oxford and some sympathetic journalists. This group started work on a manifesto to be released in the event of Gaitskell's defeat in the defence debate at the Party Conference. This duly occurred in the autumn of 1960, when the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament triumphed in its campaign to win the Labour Party to a neutralist programme.

So in October 1960 Rodgers and his friends released their manifesto in 25,000 copies with widespread Press coverage. Calling for "Victory for Sanity" - a dig at their old enemies the "Victory for Socialism" group - they appealed to Party members to rally behind Gaitskell and his Conference call to "fight and fight and fight again". They also issued an appeal for funds with which to continue the campaign, and in mid-November Rodgers reported to the steering committee that many small donations had been received, together with a large sum from a source which wished to remain anonymous.

Rodger's windfall enabled the group to take a permanent office and appoint paid staff. The title "Campaign for Democratic Socialism" was chosen and a six-man Executive Committee set up with Rodgers as full-time paid Chairman. The Committee was told that available funds were sufficient for a year's activities, and CDS thus had a start on its opponents who, in spite of their widespread support in Labour constituencies and trades unions. were unable to raise more than a few hundred pounds over the following year and had to rely entirely on volunteer workers. At CDS's disposal were field-workers in the constituencies and unions, whom it supported with travelling expenses, literature and organisational back-up, tens of thousands of copies of the manifesto, pamphlets and other publications, plus a regular bulletin, Campaign, circulated free of charge to a large mailing list within the movement. And all this was produced without a single subscription-paying member.

CDS achieved its objectives. The unions cracked under the pressure and the Labour Party returned to the Atlantic fold at the Party Conference in 1961 after a campaign by the most effective pressure group the Party had ever seen. Rodgers was its driving force. With financial backing assured, he created an organisation whose influence was out of all proportion to its original support among Party members. Whoever put up the money could justly claim to have changed the course of the history of the Labour Party and Britain in the 1960s.

Nor did the importance of CDS vanish totally after it had restored the Labour Party to commitment to NATO, for its adherents felt bitterly betrayed when Hugh Gaitskell later qualified his support for Common Market entry at the Brighton Conference in 1962. Standing at the back of the hail Rodgers turned to the Party press officer. John Harris - later Roy Jenkin's PR man - and said "I'm through with that man, John". Anthony Crosland, furthermore, supported Gaitskell's compromise and so also lost the backing of the ardent marketeers, who henceforward rallied around Roy Jenkins.

The main significance of all these divisions was that they helped Harold Wilson to capture the leadership on Gaitskell's death. Finding the Parliamentary Party moulded in the Gaitskell image, its policies firmly rooted in Crosland's Future of Socialism. Wilson made no attempt to alter the package which became the programme of the next Labour Government.

Throughout this post-war period the Party apparatus remained firmly in orthodox hands. particularly the International Department of which Denis Healey had been head until he entered Parliament in 1951. Then in 1965 his old post was taken over by J. Gwyn Morgan, one of the rising generation of Party and union officials whose careers began in the National Union of Students, to whose Presidency he had been elected in 1960 on an anti-Communist ticket. As President he took charge of international affairs, representing the Union in the International Student Conference at Leiden, and on leaving the NUS in 1962 he became Assistant General Secretary of ISC in charge of finance. In this capacity he negotiated with the American foundations which supplied the bulk of ISC funds and supervised expenditure of the several million dollars devoted to world-wide propaganda and organisation. In( 1964 he became Secretary General of ISC.

In his five years' association with the organisation he visited over 80 different countries and got to know personally many heads of government and leaders of the world's principal social democratic parties. An ardent pro-European and active supporter of Roy Jenkins, he was an obvious choice to fill the vacant slot as head of Labour's Overseas Department at the beginning of 1965. Two years later Morgan was promoted to the newly-created post of Assistant General Secretary of the Labour Party, with the expectation that he would fill the top job on Harry Nicholas's retirement.

But early in 1967 the US journal Ramparts revealed that since the early Fifties the National Student Association of America had, with the active connivance of its elected officers, received massive subventions from the CIA through dummy foundations and that one of these was the Fund for Youth and Student Affairs which supplied most of the budget of ISC. The International Student Conference, it appeared, had been set up by British and American Intelligence in 1950 to counteract the Communist peace offensive, and the CIA had supplied over 90 per cent, of its finance. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was similarly compromised. Michael Josselson admitted that he had been chanelling CIA money into the organisation ever since its foundation - latterly at the rate of about a million dollars a year - to support some 20 journals and a world-wide programme of political and cultural activities. Writing of Sol Levitas at the time of his death in 1961, the editor of the New Leader, William Bohm said "the most amazing part of the journalistic miracle was the man's gift for garnering the funds which were necessary to keep our paper solvent from week to week and year to year. I cannot pretend to explain how this miracle was achieved.we always worked in an atmosphere of carefree security. We knew that the necessary money would come from somewhere and that our cheques would be forthcoming."

The "Miracle" was resolved by the New York Times: the American Labour Conference for International Affairs which ran the New Leader had for many years been receiving regular subventions from the J. M. Kaplan Fund, a CIA conduit.

The CIA had taken the lessons taught back in the early Fifties by Burnham and the New Leader to heart. With its army of cx-Communists and willing Socialists it had for a while beaten the Communists at their own game -but unfortunately it had not known when to stop and now the whole structure was threatened with collapse. Rallying to the agency's support, Thomas Braden, the official responsible for its move into private organisations, and Executive Director of the American Committee on United Europe, explained that Irving Brown and Lovestone had done a fine job in cleaning up the unions in post-war Europe. When they ran out of money, he said, he had persuaded Dulles to back them, and from this beginning the world-wide operation mushroomed.

Another ex-CIA official, Richard Bissell, who organised the Bay of Pigs invasion, explained the Agency's attitude to foreign politicians: "Only by knowing the principal players well do you have a chance of careful prediction. There is real scope for action in this area: the technique is essentially that of 'penetration' . . . Many of the 'penetrations' don't take the form of 'hiring' but of establishing friendly relationships which may or may not be furthered by the provision of money from time to time. In some countries the CIA representative has served as a close counsellor... of the chief of state."

After these disclosures the CCF changed its name to the International Association for Cultural Freedom. Michael Josselson resigned - but was retained as a consultant - and the Ford Foundation agreed to pick up the bills. And the Director of the new Association is none other than Shepard Stone, the Bilderberg organiser who channelled US Government money to Joseph Retinger in the early Fifties to build the European Movement and then became International Director of the Ford Foundation.

When Rita Hinden died at the end of last year after 20 years as editor of Socialist Commentary. George Thomson - a pillar of CDS who resigned recently from Labour's front bench with Roy Jenkins - paid tribute to her key role in transforming the Labour Party. In the Fifties, he said, her "ideas were greeted with outraged cries of 'Revisionism'. But by the mid-Sixties the revisionism of Socialist Commentary had become the orthodoxy of the Labour Movement." And Denis Healey's comment was equally revealing. "Only Sol Levitas of the American New Leader." he said, "had a comparable capacity for exercising a wide political influence with negligible material resources." He obviously hadn't paid a visit to Companies House whose Register shows that in recent years Socialist Commentary has been drawing on a capital reserve of over £75,000.

Through its network of front organisations, magazines and subsidies the CIA in the late Fifties and early Sixties had a decisive effect on Socialism throughout Western Europe. and in Britain in particular, but the Gaitskellism that it backed is now on the retreat. For those Labour leaders who, in all innocence, built their careers in the seminars of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the columns of Encounter or the New Leader, rather than in the trade union branch or on the Conference floor, are now feeling the lack of a mass base within the Party.

Attacked by Gaitskell at the Labour Party Conference in 1960 as a fellow traveller, Michael Foot retorted 'but who are they travelling with?' and the question is one that other members of the Party echo. For the chairmen of the world's largest capitalist organisations, monarchists, Ex-Nazis, commanders of the American and German forces, the Crown Princes of Europe and CIA agents do indeed make strange travelling companions for Socialists.


(parts 4 and 5 continued in next post due to limitations of web page)
Last edited by Hugh Manatee Wins on Wed Sep 05, 2007 3:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
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The CIA and the Labour Party by Richard Fletcher pt. 4 + 5

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Wed Sep 05, 2007 3:52 am

(continued from parts 1 - 3 above)

The CIA and the Labour Party by Richard Fletcher

http://www.wcml.org.uk/internat/haroldevans.htm
( CIA and the Labour Party - part 4)

How the CIA tried to nobble the world's press

HAROLD EVANS is the professional newsman par excellence. Starting on the local paper in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, at the age of 16, some 20 years later he was Editor of the "Sunday Times". Born in 1928, he served in the RAF from 1946 to '49 and then spent three years at Durham University. He joined the "Manchester Evening News" in 1952 becoming Assistant Editor in 1958.

In 1956 he was awarded a travelling fellowship by the Commonwealth Fund of New York and spent 15 months studying at Chicago and Stanford Universities and working and advising on many newspapers throughout the United States.

From 7th to 18th November, 1960 Evans was in New Delhi as an Editorial consultant helping to run the first Asian Seminar of the International Press Institute for News Editors and Chief Sub-editors of Indian newspapers. This was the first venture in the I.P.I.'s Asian Programme which was funded by the Asia Foundation. One of Evans fellow-instructors in New Delhi was Vincent Jones, Executive Editor of Gannett Newspapers, Rochester, New York. The director of the Asian Programme was a Singa~lese journalist Tarzie Vittachi who had been London Editor of the Associated Newspapers of Ceylon, 1952-53, and was the I.P.I.'s Asian Representative from 1960-65. He subsequently became director of Forum World Features, an agency centred on Paris set up by Melvin Lasky in 1957 to "supply news and articles to editors and journalists throughout the world."

Another active participant in the Asia Programme was Armand Gaspard, Head of Research at I.P.I. headquarters, Zurich, and soon to become Editor of Preuves Informations, Paris, the French language edition of Forum, closely linked to the magazine Preuves published by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. C.C.F.

Earlier Vittachi spent some time at the American Press Institute, attached to Columbia University, New York, learning the technique of running seminars for journalists from the A.P.I.'s director Montgomery Curtis who helped to plan the first Asian seminar.

The seminar was opened by Jim Rose who was director of the I.P.I. at its Zurich headquarters from 1951 to '62. Since 1970 he has been Editorial Director of the Westminster Press. Prominent in I.P.I. affairs at the time were the late Charles Fenby, Chairman of the British Section, and Peter Calvocoressi, both of Westminster Press.

Shortly before the first Asian Seminar they were both in Bonn for the I.P.I.'s first conference of British and German editors with Melvin Lasky, Heilmut Jaesrich- Editor of Der Monat, the C.C.F.'s German magazine- and other pressmen.

Evans' "cool professionalism" was so successful at the Far East seminars that he was asked by those directing the Asian Programme to write a handbook aimed primarily at newsmen in developing countries. This manual appeared early in 1962 as "The Active Newsroom" published by I.P.I. and funded by the Asia Programme.

In 1961 Evans was appointed Editor of the Northern Echo, a daily paper centred on Darling-ton and belonging to the Westminster Press group. In 1963 he be-came, in addition, Editor-in-Chief of North of England Newspaper Co., the local Westminster subsidiary.

During this period the Asian seminars took him to Malaysia, and Korea in the Autumn of 1965; he also toured the United States as consultant to Gannett Newspapers, a group of over 100 papers centred on Rochester, N.Y., whose president, Allen Neuharth, was connected with the American Press Institute between 1956 and '63.

Gannett - a major group with some 14,000 employees and turnover 300m. dollars - had given the I.P.I. the same sort of technical back-up from the United States as it had received from Westminster Press in Britain throughout its existence. R. D. Rivett, who succeeded Rose as director of I.P.I. in 1962 spent a month with the Westchester Rochland newspaper group - a Gannett subsidiary - in May of that year, while Gannett newsmen and women assisted in the overseas programmes of both I.P.I. and the International Federation of Newspaper Editors with which it organised joint activities.

Throughout the 'sixties the I.P.I. extended its activities. In 1963 - with support from the Ford Foundation - it set up an African training programme and press centre on the model of the Asian programme, with Tom Hopkinson, former Editor of Picture Post, as director until 1966.

The Asia Programme received a further grant of 90,000 dollars from the Asia Foundation for the two year period ending 1968.

I.P.I. had close links with the Thomson organisation through Denis Hamilton, a member of the I.P.I. Executive and Editor of the Sunday Times, 1961-'67 and now chairman of Times Newspapers. Roy Thomson himself was guest of honour at several I.P.I. functions in the 'sixties.

According to his biographer, Russell Braddon. Thomson was desperate to receive a peerage. Let down in the 'fifties by Dief en-baker, Canadian Prime Minister, Thomson started quite shamelessly to lobby British P.M. Macmillan who let it be known that he could do nothing unless Thomson took out U.K. citizenship. This he did shortly after, sending the papers to Macmillan who returned them duly noted.

Thomson's first major killing in Britain had been The Scotsman whose Editor, Murray Watson, had been a founder Executive member of I.P.I. In 1955 Thomson hired James Coltart, one of Beaver-brook's top Scottish executives to run the Scotsman. Coltart's passionate commitment to Moral Re-armament remained apparent in the Scottish Daily Express until its recent collapse. According to M.R.A. propaganda at the time "In Canada and the United States the floodtide of Communism washes over the nation every day" -every libertarian or social reformer was a Communist in disguise. Coltart became Thomson's closest aide, helping him to buy the Sunday Times from Lord Kemsley in 1959 - and with it stayed Denis Hamilton, Executive member of the International Press Institute, and shortly to become Editor.

Thomson's marked Philistinism, meanness and singleminded pursuit of profit - illustrated by the "licence to print money" remark - had not gone down well in Britain.

Coltart stressed the need to improve his image as a public benefactor if he were to have a chance of a title.

According to Braddon "Coltart (with whom Thomson now shared a Piccadilly flat: to save money) impressed upon him the duty of a publisher like himself to spread to less enlightened countries the gospel of the freedom of the Press, literacy and democracy. . . . Coltart was fortunate at this time that his missionary fervour coincided with Thomson's desire for well - publicised philanthropy." In Thomson's words . . "these African peoples have no idea what journalism means . . . if someone doesn't get in there soon and give it to 'em - teach 'em - other people we don't like so much are going to do it, and in a way we won't like at all" - that is, the Communists.

Thus the Thomson Foundation was born in 1962 with an initial grant of £5m. Its purpose was "the development of mass communications in emerging countries" and it aimed "to give aid without political or economic strings by training and advising those working in television, the Press and other media." Its chairman was Coltart and one of its trustees was trade unionist Lord Williamson, Executive member of the Public Services International which helped topple Jagan in British Guiana in 1963. Its Director is a former top colonial civil servant in Kenya.

The Thomson Foundation runs an Editorial Study Centre in Cardiff for overseas journalists sent on 12-week courses, generally on the nomination of their editors, many of whom have participated in the I.P.I.'s Asian and African programmes.

In 1966 Evans left the Northern Echo to become Chief Assistant to Hamilton, then Managing Editor of the Sunday Times. In January 1967 he was appointed Editor on the recommendation of Hamilton who became Chief Executive. "I liked his work with the International Press Institute, especially in Asia," said Hamilton in support of his appointment.

Under Evans' guidance the Insight team, with the immense resources of Thomson House behind it, set new standards for investigative journalism.

In general these resources have been employed in hounding unfortunate, if undesirable, "foreigners" like Emile Savundra & Robert Maxwell, or exposing nasty goings-on amongst wine merchants and antique dealers, rather than digging into the power structure of Britain or the United States - a task left to such shoestring publications as Private Eye and I. F. Stone's Weekly.

In 1971 it was announced that Evans had become Adviser on the Press to the International Association for Cultural Freedom and the same year he conducted a seminar for the Association in Turin on "The press we deserve".

Recently Ron Knowles, Editor of "The Journalist", published by the National Union of Journalists, was invited to University College, Cardiff, by Tom Hopkinson to speak to students on a course in journalism which he had been running there since 1970. Knowles' topic was "democratisation of the press" which, he said, could best be brought about by action through the Union, rather than nebulous bodies like the I.P.I. and others which he named. Hopkinson was not pleased by this remark. Soon afterwards Knowles was surprised to receive a phone call from Harold Evans who said that I.P.I. was a fine body. It had been set up at the end of the war when it was realised how easily the Press could succumb to dictatorship - as under Hitler and Mussolini - and to prevent this happening again. Further, Evans deplored such remarks coming from a responsible journalist as they could well be exploited by governments of Communist countries whose treatment of their own newsmen was under constant criticism from the I.P.I.

The I.P.I. was set up as an instrument in the Cold War. It worked to secure favourable treatment of U.S. foreign policy in the world's press by influencing editorial staff. As an anti-Communist "house journal", the "I.P.I. Report" performed the same function for newspaper editors as the "New Leader" did for politicians. In 1967 it was revealed in the United States that the Asia Programme - like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Forum News Services, Preuves, Monat, etc. -was a front for the C.I.A., with the Asia Foundation as funding "conduit", and Tarzie Vittachi as go-between. The methods used both in Europe and in the developing countries are illustrated by the following quotations from I.P.I. sources:--

Facts and Propaganda studies at Montreux seminar

It was a far cry from the sternly practical exercises in newspaper techniques now being inculcated in the I.P.I.'s Asian seminars to the more recondite problems of Disarmament which were the subject of the meeting held at the Montreux Palace Hotel from May 9th to 11th. But in the cause of "improving the practices of journalism" the I.P.I. has traditionally held that depth and real understanding in the reporting of difficult matters is no less important than efficient presentation of news. Thus the Montreux seminar, while not primarily concerned with technical press problems, was in the clear line of succession to previous "background" seminars.

Moreover, since the whole international debate on disarmament plays a special part in that intricate game known as "psychological warfare" - as at least two of the speakers at the seminar pointed out - it is particularly useful for newspapermen to be well-informed on the realities of the whole subject and to be able to differentiate, on behalf of their readers, between fact and propaganda.

This, at least, seems to have been the view of all the 24 participants from eleven European, Asian and American countries who took part in the seminar.

Some aspects of the American approach to the problem were outlined by William Frye, U.N. correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor. The basic strategic considerations which at least partly explain the Soviet attitude to the whole disarmament question were brilliantly made clear by Malcolm Mackintosh, consultant on Soviet Affairs to the Institute for Strategic Studies.

Thanks must go to the eight principal speakers, as well as to the Ford and Carnegie Foundations who were the meeting's sponsors and to the London Institute of Strategic Studies, in collaboration with whom the Montreux programme was planned.

Professor Wilson, Adam Smith Professor of Economics at the University of Glasgow, dealt effectively with the time-worn "leftist" argument that if the "capitalist" countries cut down on the profitable business of arms manufacture they would be threatened with economic collapse. Quite the reverse might well be possible, the professor suggested.

Finally Alastair Buchan, director of the Institute for Strategic Studies, London, made clear the important role played by the disarmament debate in the cold war.

As with other I.P.I. meetings, not the least useful part of the Montreux Seminar was the possibility it offered for newspapermen of different lands to meet and talk informally of many other matters besides the ones immediately in hand. On the social side of the three-day meeting the highlight was certainly the candle-light dinner so hospitably given in the Chateau de Chillon - immortalised by Lord Byron.

[I.P.I. Report, August 1962.]

The Asian Representative* himself an editor who had never had journalism school or any other training except on the job, spent two weeks at the American Press Institute to learn the technique of running seminars for journalists. A.P.I.'s director, Montgomery Curtis, readily shared his massive experience and showed him the mysteries of seminar management which had been developed at Columbia University. The first seminar of the Asian Programme was planned in consultation with Mr Curtis. It was planned as an all-India exercise to lay open the variety and extent of the problems involved and to prove to the sceptics - and there was no shortage of them - that the Asian Programme was a worthwhile professional undertaking.

Selection of participants was, at that time, a real problem.

Later, when the programme got into its stride and the Asian Representative and his team of consultants had got to know the newspapers individually and intimately, selection was easier. Many I.P.I. members and the men who had attended the seminars to some purpose proved to be reliable advisers on the selection of particicipants and the content of the seminars and the programme in general.

The first Asian seminar set the pace and direction of the Asian Programme. It also broke down the resistance to "foreign" consultants. This was largely due to the practical skill and sense of professionalism displayed by Harry Evans, then Assistant Editor of the Manchester Evening News.

["I.P.I. in Asia", I.P.I. Zurich, 1966.]

*The Asian Representative was Tarzie Vittachi who, in 1966, helped Evans nail Emil Savundra, the financier.

It is clear from these and many other similar reports that those running the I.P.I. were well aware of the value of the technical seminars in securing the confidence of participants and leading them into the more sensitive area of ideology. But there is no suggestion that Harold Evans and the other technical specialists were aware that they were being used for this purpose, and presumably they were given satisfactory explanations as to the source of the substantial sums spent on their trips to the Far East and the ''candle-light dinners''.

The running costs of the Institute in its first three years were about 75,000 dollars per annum. By 1955 it had reduced its staff to 11 and its budget to 55,000 dollars, but this amount was for central administration only; field activities were separately financed by the Asia Foundation, Ford Foundation and other sources. At this time income from members and publishers had grown only to 25,500 dollars.

It is clear that the greater part of I.P.I.'s work was financed by the Americans, the more sensitive activity being f u n d e d from covert sources.

One of I.P.I.'s founders was Barry Bingham, also chairman of the American Press Institute Advisory Board. He was Marshall Plan head in France after the war and director of the CIA-financed Asia Foundation.


http://www.wcml.org.uk/internat/euromove.htm
( CIA and the Labour Party - part 5)

How the European Movement was launched

SECRET US funding of "voluntary" organisations began with the Marshall Plan. In June 1947 George Marshall, US Secretary of State, in a speech at Harvard, suggested that the European nations, including the USSR, should agree a joint programme of reconstruction to which the US would contribute. Within three months 16 European nations had formulated a European Recovery Programme (ERP) for the period 1947-51. ERP was welcomed by President Truman, immediate interim aid was authorised for Austria, France and Italy, and in April 1948 Congress passed the Economic Co-operation Act which set up the Economic Co-operation Administration (ECA*) to administer some 13,000 million dollars of aid to Europe over the period 1948-51. (*ECA administrator for France was Barry Bingham, who helped launch the International Press Institute.)

Russian refusal to join ERP marked the start of the Cold War and historians will continue to argue which side was to blame. Certainly Congress imposed strict economic conditions which the USSR would have found very difficult to fulfil. It also required recipients to make substantial repayments which - except for certain carefully specified educational provisions such as the Fulbright scholarships - were to be repatriated to the USA.

These repayments - known as counterpart funds - accumulated under the control of ECA's American administrators in Europe in various local currencies and, in flat violation of Act of Congress, only part were returned to the United States. Thus there existed across Europe in the late 'forties a network of American territorial baroncies with massive funds available to finance their own pet projects, the most powerful such grouping being the US Military Government in Berlin whose chief was General Lucius D. Clay. The use of these funds was illegal and their deployment, therefore, had to be negotiated between the local baron, or his agent, and the recipient in secret. Thus it was that Joseph Retinger persuaded Shepard Stone, then in the US Military Government, to back the Congress of The Hague in May 1948 which launched the European Movement.

The Congress received worldwide publicity without which the European Movement would probably have been stillborn. Seven hundred and fifty top people were brought to The Hague, lodged and entertained for a week at the expense of the organisers. Without the £40,000 that this cost-a huge amount for Europe still recovering from the war-the Congress could not have been held.

The launching of the Congress for Cultural Freedom by Melvin Laskey in Berlin in 1950 was financed in the same way. Disaster threatened the Cold Warriors in 1950-51 when Congress refused to renew Marshall Aid. As Thomas Braden has confirmed, they had either to shut up shop or turn to the CIA. They chose the latter. Thus continued 17 years of secret US funding.

When, in the early sixties, it seemed to the National Security Council (NSC) that the CIA's cover was about to be blown, funding was quietly shifted to the larger charitable fundations whose directors were well aware of what was going on. The Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations moved into international affairs in a big way in 1950. Ford's international director for the next 17 years was Sheperd Stone under the NSC members Mr George Bundy, Presidential Adviser on Security, and Robert McNamara, Defence Secretary. Carnegie president was Joseph E. Johnson who organised the American end of Bilderberg. Thomas Braden was a Carnegie trustee.

Rockefeller trustees included Barry Bingham - ECA Administrator France 1949-50, chairman International Press Institute, director Asia Foundation - and Arthur Houghton, whose Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs channelled millions of dollars of CIA money into the US and world students movements. For those who continue to protest the innocence of the US (and some European) foundations, massive documentary evidence can - and will - be produced to show that in their international affairs they acted as agents of the US State Department.

But to return to the European Movement. Thomas Braden had been in the US Military Government in Germany. From 1949 to 1951 he was executive director of the American Committee on United Europe-a body resulting from a visit by Retinger and Duncan Sandys to Allen Dulles and others in the United States in July 1948. Its aims were to fund the European Movement and to bring about the establishment of a European army rearming the Germans against the USSR. It also worked closely with Cord Meyer's United World Federalists.

In a letter to Duncan Sandys, 20 January 1950, Thomas Braden wrote that the ACUE's purpose was ''not only to influence public opinion, but to sell the idea of the European Movement . . . and to justify the appeal for important sums of money."

According to Allan Hovey, Jnr., ACUE representative in Europe, the vast majority of US funds for Europe and nearly all for the European Youth Campaign (EYC) came from State Department covert funds. This was, of course. kept very secret. ACUE was a legal covering organisation.

Braden joined the CIA as Dulles' assistant in 1950 while continuing as ACUE executive director. Funds were sent to the European representative in Brussels, and those intended for the EYC were passed through a covering body in Paris - the Centre d'Action Europiènne - which submitted a monthly budget to Brussels.

Total secret US funding to the European Movement from 1947 to 1953 was £440,000. (Source: EM Archives, FIN/P/6 "European Movement: EYC Treasurer's Report 1949/53").

Thus, far from being a spontaneous expression of the desire for unity of the people of Europe, the European movement was launched by Retinger with secret money from the State Department and kept afloat with massive subventions through Thomas Braden, head of the CIA'S International Organisation Division.
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An Unholy Alliance by Phil Kelly (1981)

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Wed Sep 05, 2007 3:55 am

http://www.wcml.org.uk/internat/leveller52.htm

An Unholy Alliance by Phil Kelly

from The Leveller #52 (1981)

THE POLICE have had great success in the US, and now they've made a down-home 'thank y'all' gesture to the system that has kept the west safe, so far, for free enterprise (including the rock music industry). £50,000 of their hard-earned royalties have been channelled into Encounter magazine, a ponderous right-wing literary journal that has fallen on hard times (and has been appealing for money from its supporters almost as much as The Leveller).

Time was when Encounter had more money than it knew what to do with. These were the heady days of the 1950s and 60s when the CIA could slush funds into cold war European organisations with impunity.

Things have changed since the labour movement in Britain, and elsewhere, realised that all this money wasn't exactly being used to promote policies that most of the left wanted, and since the CIA and its stooges came under a healthy scrutiny even back home.

But now they're changing again. After decade on the losing side, the 'cold war liberals' - in British parlance, 'social democrats' - are able to come out again, thanks to the rightward swing of the consensus on both sides of the Atlantic.

Encounter is not noted as a youth culture paper. For The Police - whose very name was an authoritarian reaction to the anarchic handles of the punk bands - it doesn't directly promote their interest, but indirectly. Perhaps it's just that the group's manager, Miles Copeland, and drummer, his brother Stewart, are sons of a CIA agent, also called Miles Copeland, one who, since retiring, has spoken out about the Agency, though not, regrettably, in the manner of Philip Agee, but for the other side.

The cold war liberals might have lost the Labour Party, but they're still staging a comeback - not just through the Council for Social Democracy, but through the revival of the old CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom, which originally ran Encounter, as the Committee for a Free World. It's a mighty tangled web, the network of right-wingers around the social democrats, but Phil Kelly has a go at sorting it out.

WHEN THE Council for Social Democracy made its Parliamentary debut in the defence debate on February 25, a reporter on Independent Radio News expressed amazement that 'they seemed to the right of the Liberals.'

That's no surprise at all. There's nothing politically new about this clique of centrists. Dress them up with opinion polls or media hype as much as you like, and they're still the same gang of Gaitskellite 'Atlanticists', the American-controlled lobby that channelled foundation-fulls of money into the British labour movement in the 50s and 60s to keep it safe for capital. The input came from that vile alliance of CIA, American labor, the State Department and the right wing of the Democrat Party.

At the same time that Labour was splitting, these cold war ghouls were reviving their Euro front organisation, the Committee for a Free World, launched in London at a press reception in February. Resting their cocktail glasses on rather portlier tummies was the same cast as before. It was like a rerun of a 2O-year-old episode of 'Coronation Street': the faces are more lined, but the lines remain the same.

One of the central characters now distinctly overweight is Stephen Haseler, founder of the Social Democratic Alliance, the vanguard split from Labour, expelled last year for threatening to run candidates against it, a threat now to be fulfilled, in the GLC elections in May. Now that others have 'come out' the SDA hopes to be the organisationa! core of the planned social democrat party.

Haseler works for the US National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) founded in 1962 by William J Casey now appointed by Reagan to head the CIA. NSIC is a pressure group for militant anti-communism and is at the centre of a vast network of front organisations. One of its main activities, Casey told the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on his CIA appointment, has been the buiIding of academic respectability for the practice of intelligence. It has helped to sponsor more than 200 professorial chairs and teaching posts in US universities and colleges devoted to teaching and researching intelligence.

NSIC provided some of the cash used by journalist and CIA contract employee Brian Crosier to transform his news agency foorum World Features, a CIA front organisation into the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC). Haseler works for the NSIC's 'left face', the Advisory Committee on European Democracy and Security (ACEDS), which published his book, Eurocommunism. Co-author of the work was NSIC's Dr Roy Godson, director of the International Labor Programme at Georgetown University in Washington DC. This institution has been a centre of cold war sentiment among US intellectuals, and many of itsstaff now find themselves in the Reagan administration. According to Haseler and Godson, Eurocommunism is nothing more than a Soviet ploy to detach western Europe from the U.S. without a war.

The same theme articulated by (among others) Henry Kissinger and David Owen, has been faithfully echoed in the Labour and Trade Union Press Service, a duplicated bulletin issued to trade union papers by the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding (LCTU). The press service is 100 percent subsidised by NATO. It was started by a former US Labor Attache in London, Joseph Godson, who also works at Georgetown University and happens to be Roy Godson's dad. Three leading right-wing US trade unionists who are vice-chairmen of the LCTU are also members of the ACEDS. British members of the LCTU include Owen, Rogers, Tom Bradley (another renegade Labour MP) and EEPTU leader Frank Chapple.

The US trade union movement has declined seriously since the second world war - about 25 percent of workers were unionised in 1955 (when the AFL-CIO was founded), but this had dropped to 19 percent by 1977, and only 13 percent were then in unions affiliated to the AFL-CIO, the rough equivalent of the TUC. The decline has been a direct result of the AFL-CIO's anti-communist 'business union' policies, directed towards the destruction of rank and file militancy and relying instead on collaboration with employers and the expansion of the economy through massive military spending. The AFL-CIO has at the same time been one of the principal methods through which successive US governments have imposed their policies abroad, particularly on western and third world labour movements.

One of the more successful political interventions backed by the NSIC has been the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a grouping of academics, politicans and retired military and intelligence personnel. Many CPD members have been 'cold war liberals' - mostly Democrats supporting civil rights at home but violently anti-communist everywhere; it's exactly the same formula as that behind the CSD in Britain. The nomination of George McGovern as Democratic Candidate in 1972 on a 'stop the Vietnam war' platform sparked the Democratic right into a counter-attack, which grew into the CPD in 1976.

The CPD had the backing of the right-wing think tanks among them the NSIC. It was one of the central institutions of the 'new right', preaching monetarist economics, aggressive and interventionist foreign policies, and a return to 'traditional moral and social values', all of which contributed to the swing to the right under Carter and set the stage for the election of Reagan.

In particular it helped push the Carter administration righrwards on a whole range of foreign policy issues.and its members were responsible for the change in the official assessments of Soviet military strength and intentions which formed the basis for the US bullying NATO members into increasing military spending by 3 per cent a year.

Now this new right is organising internationally again, through the Committee for a Free World (CFW). Its executive director is Midge Decter, a leading CPD member and the author of the anti-feminist tract, 'The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation'.

The founding statement of the CFW, released at that London press do (chaired by Lord Chalfont) pledged to spread greater understanding of the policies of the western alliance, for 'the struggle for freedom may not in the end be won or lost on battlefields, but in books, newspapers, broadcasts, classrooms and in all public institutions where the determination to remain free is enhanced or undermined'.

Decter said the idea for the CFW originated at an Isreali government-sponsored conference on terrorism in 1979. Her husband, Norman Podhoretz,also a member of CPD and CFW, is editor of 'Commentary', the organ of the American Jewish community, which, like 'Encounter' was closely associated with the now-defunct Congress for Cultural Freedom,the major US post-war cultural intervention~ The CCF collapsed in 1967 when it was revealed that its main source of income had been the CIA, through dummy foundations.

The editor of 'Encounter', Melvin Lasky, is another director of the CFW. He denies it is a reincarnation of the CCF: the difference, he says, is that the CFW confines its membership to the US, Europe and Israel, while the CCF had sought to attract third world intellectuals, which 'fudged' the organisation's anti-communism. The CFW, he says, is 'a committee for the First World, if you like'.

CFW's British membership is as hoary a catalogue of reactionaries as you could wish not to meet, and the alliance with far-right right-wingers, many of them even off the Thatcherite Tory scale, says a lot about the social democrats' 'moderation. There is Sir James Goldsmith, Professor Julius Gould (author of the two ISC reports on the 'Marxist infiltration of higher education'), Paul Johnson (Thatcher-loving former editor of the 'New Statesman'), Richard Hoggart (recently deposed as chairman of that magazine), Robert Moss (the CIA's Man in the Media, fanatical anti-communist columnist in the 'Daily Telegraph' and Goldsmith's 'Now" contributor to Forum World Features and the ISC, and council member of the Freedom Association, formerly of course the NAFF) and his media colleague Peregrine Worsthorne. Rubbing shoulders with this lot are ...Haseler, SDA co-founder and co-expellee Douglas Eden, renegade Labour MPs Mike Thomas and Neville Sandelson, and, of course, without whom no such list can be complete, Frank Chapple.

ISC director Professor Hugh Seton Watson was a speaker at the launch, and one of the major sources of the CFW's income, apart from rock bands run by the offspring of CIA agents, is the Scaife Foundation, the Gulf Oil family trust headed by Richnrd Mellon Scaife, who had provided the CIA's cover for Forum World Features.

It's a right nasty cesspit the social democrats are in. History is repeating itself; the tragedy of the 50s and 60s was the CCF, for which the late Anthony Crosland, 'ideological mentor' of the new splitters, was a full-time worker, and whose seminars were attended by all the leading right-wingers, including Gaitskell.

When the Labour left persuaded the party conference to support unilateral disarmament in 1960, the right organised the Campaign for Democratic Socialism to reverse the decision, and of course succeeded. The CDS employed full-time organisers to work in constituency parties and the unions. Organising secretary was William Rodgers. To this day he has never satisfactorily answered questions on the sources of the cash.

At the same time the CIA was funding the International Student Conference (another ISC!), and the British National Union of Students was a prominent supporter. The funding was eventually exposed, and the ISC fell apart as third world student unions left in droves The NUS stuck to the last, its executive members denying everything until they could do so no more. Among them were Mike Thomas and Ian Wrigglesworth, both now CSD MPs.

The repeated farce of the 1980s is the CSD. But while the CDS was successful, the CSD is a discredited rump. The Labour Party now is better placed and organised to see through and fight their participation in such covert activity on behalf of US imperialism.
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Re: MI5 + CIA in UK media attack Labour Party

Postby MinM » Sat Aug 20, 2016 11:02 am

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