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American Comintern: Six decades of covert operations in Britain

tim — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:50:28 +0000

Is the Cold War the best guide to how Britain should deal with Islam? That is what Charles Moore (pictured) suggested in a speech to the Centre for Policy Studies last month:

Think of the long debate about how best to deal with trade union militancy and with its relationship to Communist infiltration during the Cold War. It was not, in fact, the Conservatives who first tried to tackle this. It began as a conflict within the Labour movement in which a few brave souls, like Frank Chapple of the Electricians, would not bow to the extremist tactics.

As Moore admits, ‘the analogies between British trade unions and an ancient world religion are inexact, to put it mildly.’ Nevertheless, the anti-communist paradigm is becoming increasingly influential as a template for dealing with Islamist extremism.

Moore’s Policy Exchange colleague Dean Godson wrote in 2006:

During the Cold War, organisations such as the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office would assert the superiority of the West over its totalitarian rivals. And magazines such as Encounter did hand-to-hand combat with Soviet fellow travellers. For any kind of truly moderate Islam to flourish, we need first to recapture our own self-confidence. At the moment, the extremists largely have the field to themselves.

As I have noted previously , the Information Research Department and Encounter were both covert operations, created as part of a wider effort known as the ‘Cultural Cold War.’ The CIA ran Encounter through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was secretly funded throughout the 1950s and early 1960s to carry out propaganda among European intellectuals. Some of those involved had carried out similar activities for Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s as agents of the Comintern.

One former Comintern delegate was Jay Lovestone, the one-time head of the American Communist Party and disciple of Nikolai Bukharin. His Communist Party (Opposition) faction of the 1930s became over time an anti-communist network with close links to the US Government.

Jay Lovestone, Irving Brown’s boss, [from] 1955 was run by James Jesus Angleton. Lovestone’s task was to infiltrate European trade unions, weed out dubious elements, and promote the rise of leaders acceptable to Washington. During this period, Lovestone supplied Angleton with voluminous reports on trade union affairs in Britain, compiled with the assistance of his contacts in the TUC and the Labour Party¹.

A key member of the Lovestoneite network in Britain was Dean Godson’s father, the US labour attaché, Joseph Godson. He attempted to ‘weed out’ the founder of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, while promoting the rival Labour Party faction led by Hugh Gaitskell.

Gaitskell held a series of secret meetings at the Russell Hotel, where he planned the expulsion campaign with Sam Watson, the leader of the Durham miners. Also in attendance was the Labour Attaché at the American Embassy in London, Joe Godson. One of the most important post-war events in the Labour Party’s internal affairs was overseen by an American spook².

The fullest description of Godson’s role is in Hugh Wilford’s ‘Calling the Tune?’, an admirably nuanced account which is often sympathetic to US labour diplomacy:

His Lovestonite style – obsessively anti-communist, hectoring, conspiratorial – in time alienated even his closest allies. For example, Arthur Deakin, that most hardline of Labour anti-communists, entertained misgivings about his involvement in TUC affairs, while Gaitskell himself had similar concerns about his role in the Labour Party³.

Joe Godson retained his interest in British affairs after moving to other diplomatic posts. He helped to found the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding, a little-known organisation that came to the attention of the Guardian in the mid-1980s because it was funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which had become embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal.

The committee is the labour section of the British Atlantic Committee, which lobbies for Nato among European trade unionists. It has no connection with the Labour Party but its members include figures from the Labour and trade union rightwing, including Lord Chapple, Mr Roy Mason, and Lord Stewart, former Labour foreign secretary. One of its American vice-presidents, Mr Lane Kirland, is on NED’s board of directors.

Funding of the committee, founded in 1976 by a former US embassy labour attache, Mr Joseph Godson, remained a secret until 1980, when the British government said that Nato had given £32,000 over the previous four years. Mr Godson told the Guardian that he understood the money had come from the American Youth Council. He had complained to the endowment fund for its inaccuracy, but ‘I don’t object to anything which funds a good cause⁴.’

Among those implicated in the Iran-Contra affair was Joe Godson’s elder son. In 1981, Roy Godson was appointed by Elliot Abrams to head the International Youth Year Commission, which came under Congressional investigation in 1987⁵. Although he escaped prosecution, an independent counsel’s report concluded that he had helped Oliver North channel funding to the Contras through the Heritage Foundation.
Roy Godson went onto become a leading figure in the academic study of intelligence, with a particular expertise in propaganda, disinformation, covert action and counterintelligence . As head of the National Strategy Information Center, he presided over the development of a distinctive neo-con philosophy of intelligence:

Two longtime advocates of the type of flexible intelligence operation put in motion by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith are Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt, senior associates at the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) in the 1990s. The NSIC along with a half-dozen other think-tanks and committees produced reports in the mid-1990s that recommended intelligence reforms. As it turns out, the NSIC’s recommendations had the most influence in shaping the intelligence practices of the George W Bush administration.

In a 1998 essay Shulsky and Schmitt linked this emerging theory of intelligence to the philosophy of Leo Strauss . Shulsky in particular would have the opportunity to put that theory into practice as head of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans prior to the Iraq War.

Journalist Robert Dreyfuss captured a snapshot of the situation in the run-up to the conflict in December 2002:

Even as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq, according to former CIA officials. Key officials of the Department of Defense are also producing their own unverified intelligence reports to justify war. Much of the questionable information comes from Iraqi exiles long regarded with suspicion by CIA professionals. A parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation, in the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, collects the information from the exiles and scours other raw intelligence for useful tidbits to make the case for preemptive war.

These morsels sometimes go directly to the president. “Informed sources say the person in charge of the unnamed unit is Abram Shulsky, another key member of the Perle-Wolfowitz war party,” Dreyfuss noted. “Roy Godson, the head of the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence and a colleague of Shulsky’s for many years, has high hopes for the success of the Pentagon’s Iraq intelligence unit, despite its small size when arrayed against the CIA’s might. ‘It might turn out to be a David against Goliath,’ says Godson⁶.”

At the same time, Feith’s office was devising plans to revive covert operations in Europe, with a new focus on Islam. In December 2002, The New York Times reported that “the Defense Department is considering issuing a secret directive to the American military to conduct covert operations aimed at influencing public opinion and policy makers in friendly and neutral countries.”

Such a program, for example, could include efforts to discredit and undermine the influence of mosques and religious schools that have become breeding grounds for Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism across the Middle East, Asia and Europe. It might even include setting up schools with secret American financing to teach a moderate Islamic position laced with sympathetic depictions of how the religion is practiced in America, officials said.

Not everyone in the Pentagon was happy about these proposals:

Some are troubled by suggestions that the military might pay journalists to write stories favorable to American policies or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to the Pentagon to organize rallies in support of American policies.

Implementing this strategy would have required changes to the Pentagon directive governing information operations, allowing ‘adversarial decision-making’ to be targeted, rather than the more restrictive ‘adversary decision-making.’ Former US Army Colonel Sam Gardiner has claimed that a 2003 London conference was briefed about a change on exactly these lines by Captain Gerald Mauer, the Pentagon’s Assistant Deputy Director for Information Operations.

Gardiner has compiled a list of misleading news stories which he believes resulted from such information operations. A notable inclusion is the April 2003 series of stories claiming that George Galloway had received payoffs from Saddam Hussein. One of the papers which ran the story was the Daily Telegraph, then under Charles Moore’s editorship. The Telegraph was ultimately ordered to pay Galloway £150,000 in damages as a result.

After leaving the Telegraph, Moore would go on to chair Policy Exchange, the think-tank which the BBC accused of fabricating evidence about British mosques.

In advocating a return to cold war covert operations, Moore and Godson do nothing to allay the fear that such episodes are the results of methods that owe more to the world of intelligence than the ethos of journalism or scholarship.

Notes:

1. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders, Granta Books 2000, pp329-30.

2. Smear! Wilson & the Secret State, by Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, Fourth Estate Limited 1991, p14.

3. The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War, Calling the Tune? By Hugh Wilford, Frank Cass Publishers 2003, p180.

4. Britons get cash from US ‘slush fund’ / British organisations receiving money from US sources to ‘promote democracy’, The Guardian, 9 December 1985.

5. House probes link between Contras and youth commission, by Pat O’Brien, United Press International, 23 March 1987.

6. The Pentagon Muzzles the CIA; Devising bad intelligence to promote bad policy, by Robert Dreyfuss, The American Prospect, 16 December 2002.

Saudis: UK could have prevented July 7 bombings

Tim Holmes — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:00:49 +0000

King Abdullah’s accusation that the UK failed to act on Saudi intelligence that could have prevented the July 7, 2005, London bombings has met with vigorous denials from the Brown government. Fifty-two people were killed in the attack.

The king’s allegations were made on the eve of his visit to London to begin a five-country tour of Europe. In advance of this first state visit by a Saudi monarch to the UK in 20 years, the king gave a rare interview to the BBC, during which he complained that many countries, “including, unfortunately, Great Britain,” were not treating global terrorism “seriously.”

“We have sent information to Great Britain before the terrorist attacks in Britain but unfortunately no action was taken. And it may have been able to maybe avert the tragedy,” he said.

The British government had been prepared to court all manner of controversy over the king’s visit. Notwithstanding the kingdom’s well-publicised human rights abuses and the stench of corruption surrounding the Al Yamamah arms contract between Britain’s BAE systems and Saudi Arabia—a Serious Fraud Office inquiry into which was quashed by former Prime Minister Tony Blair—the visit was accorded full ceremonial honours.

On the matter of what the British authorities knew of a potential terrorist plot in advance of the July bomb blasts, however, the powers-that-be were decidedly uneasy.

The government rejected the king’s claims. A Home Office spokesman said that information provided by the Saudis “was materially different from what actually occurred on 7 July and clearly not relevant to those acts.”

“We have made it clear that if we had intelligence that could have prevented the attacks we would have acted upon it,” the spokesman added.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown said, “We made it very clear at the time that no specific warnings were received from any source. We do have a very close intelligence relationship with the Saudis. We just happen to disagree on this point.”

The British media was at one with Downing Street in its denials.

Writing in the Guardian, Richard Norton-Taylor said the monarch’s accusations were intended as a “welcome distraction” from his “country’s record in exporting Islamist extremism.”

“Fifteen of the suicide bombers in the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US were Saudis,” he noted, continuing that the claims also diverted “from the claims of bribery and corruption” surrounding UK/Saudi arms deals.

Robert Fisk, for the Independent, said that the king’s claim that the July 7 bombings could have been prevented if Saudi intelligence had been taken seriously was “frankly incredible,” recounting how “Saudi Arabia’s role in the 9/11 attacks has still not been fully explored.”

Michael Evans in the Times said the Saudi intelligence “was full of holes.” Having been checked out by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC), “None of the experts considered the Saudi intelligence had sufficient merit or credibility to sound the alarm, let alone to persuade JTAC to recommend a raising of the terrorist alert.”

Whatever the king’s reasons for making his public accusation, such categorical refutations of its veracity are at odds with the evidence.

It is a matter of record that the Saudi authorities did pass on intelligence to the UK prior to the London bombings.

The Observer first reported the exchange in August 2005, one month after the explosions. After months of British denials, in February 2006, the Observer cited White House sources confirming specific reports of a bomb plot on the UK capital from Saudi intelligence.

A 2006 investigation into security issues surrounding the bombings by the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) finally acknowledged that intelligence from Saudi Arabia had been received, but it “was examined by the agencies who concluded that the plan was not credible.”

The ISC gave no further information on this intelligence. Nor did it make any mention of additional warnings of potential terrorist attacks. On the day of the blasts, the US web site Stratfor reported, “unconfirmed rumours in intelligence circles indicate that the Israeli government actually warned London of the attacks ‘a couple of days’ previous’” to the bombings.

Though the Times’s Evans, repeating the ISC, states that the Saudi intelligence was “full of holes,” details of it have never been made public.

In his BBC interview, the king refused to elaborate on the intelligence supplied, saying that it “may cause sensitivities” between the two countries. According to the Associated Press, however, in the months prior to the July attacks, the Saudis informed the British and US governments that they had arrested a man who confessed to raising money for terror attacks in London.

Although no names were supplied, the intelligence specified that several of the attackers would be British citizens. The Associated Press report continued that the information “gleaned from the suspect after he was captured returning to Saudi Arabia was detailed enough to heighten British concerns about the possibility of an attack around July 2005 in crowded sections of London.”

The Observer’s February 2006 article also reported the Saudi information as stating an imminent attack would involve four Islamic militants, some of whom would be British citizens, who could target the London Underground.

On July 7, four British citizens, Mohammed Siddique Khan, Shazad Tanweer, Hasib Hussein and Jermaine Lindsay, detonated suicide belts on the London Underground and a bus.

In addition to the Saudi intelligence, it is now known that the security services had been tracking two of the bombers for at least two years prior to the attack.

The ISC findings reported that on two separate occasions, both Khan and Tanweer had been placed under surveillance for potential terrorist involvement by MI5. The pair had also been observed in Pakistan, where it was “likely that they had some contact with al-Qaeda figures,” the report stated. MI5 even had Khan’s telephone number as a contact of a terror suspect and also the phone number of Lindsay.

(Earlier this year, it was revealed that MI5 had recorded meetings between Khan and Tanweer on four occasions in 2004 with Omar Khyam, one of five men jailed for life in May for the so-called “fertiliser bomb” conspiracy.)

Nonetheless, the ISC fully exonerated the security services, maintaining that it was “understandable” that they had decided not to pursue a more detailed investigation, and that the actions of the four bombers could not have been predicted.

This raises another fundamental question. As cited, in his Times article Evans claimed that the Saudi intelligence was not considered of sufficient merit to recommend raising the “terrorist alert.”

The point, however, is that not only was the alert not raised, it was actually lowered less than one month before the bombings from “severe general” to “substantial.”

The ISC said that this was “not unreasonable,” and that the reduction was “unlikely” to have affected the chances of preventing the attacks.

It is this claim that is truly without merit or credibility.

This was at a time when Britain was implementing a massive security operation as it hosted the 2005 G8 conference. Just as preparations were under way to mobilise thousands of police officers to guard the leaders of the major powers—including President George W. Bush and Blair, the architects of the Iraq war—reports were coming in from foreign intelligence agencies of an imminent attack in the capital.

And yet the British authorities chose to lower the security alert?

For all the reassurances, there are just too many unanswered questions as to July 7, not least as to whether some or another faction of the ruling elite allowed an attack to take place in order to serve their own political agenda. Despite it being the largest ever terror assault on British soil, the government has continuously refused a public inquiry—forcing survivors and relatives of the victims of the bombings to seek a judicial review into its decision.

Although King Abdullah’s remarks were an embarrassment for the British government, every effort will be made to ensure relations are not damaged, and that any further unwelcome revelations are not forthcoming.

This was underscored by Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells’s statement that the two states should unite around their “shared values.” No matter that the Foreign Office’s own country profile on Saudi Arabia states that “Women are subject to discrimination. Prisoners suffer maltreatment and torture. Capital punishment is imposed without adequate safeguards, and often executed in a cruel way and in public. Amputations are imposed as corporal punishment. Shiite citizens suffer discrimination. We also have concerns about freedom of expression, assembly and religion.”

Human rights campaigners have pointed out that the monarch’s red carpet treatment makes a mockery of the government’s supposed crusade for human rights, on which basis the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were launched.

Most commentary has concentrated on the economic self-interest at the heart of such duplicity. Saudi Arabia is Britain’s largest export market in the region—worth £73.5 billion annually—while British financial ventures, which include HSBC, Shell and BAE Systems, are estimated at £7 billion. The king is reportedly to officially sign a contract for BAE to supply 72 Eurofighters to Saudi Arabia during this tour.

There is an additional, related factor in Saudi/UK relations.

Only last week, Washington unilaterally imposed economic sanctions on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, as it stepped up its preparations for a military assault on Tehran.

Thus far, the British government has made little comment, other than to endorse the US action. Reports indicate, however, that Prime Minister Gordon Brown has assured the Bush administration of British support in the event of an US attack.

Similarly, the BBC noted that “one of the Saudis’ prime concerns today is how to contain their giant neighbour Iran.”

A reliable US ally, the Saudi regime is one of the sponsors of the upcoming Maryland summit on Israeli/Palestinian relations, which several political commentators have suggested Washington intends to utilise to sign up other Middle Eastern regimes behind an imminent strike on Iran.

The BBC reported that “So sensitive is this issue [Iranian containment] that King Abdullah declined to discuss it” during his interview. Behind closed doors, however, there will be no such restrictions on this latest war conspiracy.