"I do not accept, that economic growth is the principle measure of the success of nations."
"The purpose of the economy is to serve the true needs of society: prosperity, social stability and contentment. "
The "Goldsmith" version "had been circulating in aristocratic circles for a long time."
Officially, Diana was the daughter of the Earl Spencer and Frances Shand Kydd.
Sources have long maintained that Goldsmith was conducting an affair with Frances around the time that Diana was conceived.
Nobody denies that the affair took place, "at a time when Frances was deeply unhappy in her marriage to the Earl, who was 'drinking heavily' and 'being beastly towards her'".
Tina Brown, author of The Diana Chronicle, suggests it was a long-running affair.
In Brown's version, there is strong support for the idea of Goldsmith being the father of Lady Diana, though she can't prove it.
Sir James Goldsmith who has links to the Rothschilds. He multiplied his fortune as a brash corporate raider in the United States during the 1980s (Billionaire with a Cause vanityfair.com ) "He inherited many of his traits from his father Frank Goldsmith, the descendant of a distinguished Jewish banking family from Frankfurt once as famous as the Rothschilds." (Obituary: Sir James Goldsmith - People, News - The Independent)
Tory MPs were paid to plant questions says Harrods chief
A Westminster lobbying company was paid tens of thousands of pounds to give to two high-flying Conservative MPs for asking parliamentary questions at £2,000 a time on behalf of Harrods during the height of the Lonrho and House of Fraser controversy.
Neil Hamilton, now minister at the Department of Trade and Industry responsible for business probity, and Tim Smith, junior Northern Ireland minister, were both named yesterday as recipients of payments passed to Ian Greer Associates by Mohamed Al-Fayed, the owner of Harrods, on top of a £50,000 fee for a parliamentary lobbying campaign.
Mr Al-Fayed said yesterday: "I felt it was now my public duty to make these facts known."
Mr Hamilton subsequently requested and received a free week's holiday for himself and his wife, Christine, at the Ritz hotel in Paris, owned by the Al-Fayed brothers, where he ran up a further bill of over £2,000 on such extras as chauffeur-driven cars.
The couple also went shopping free at Harrods at the invitation of Mr Al-Fayed. None of the payments or free trips were declared to parliament.
Details of the transactions - including confidential memoranda from Ian Greer and letters from Neil Hamilton - passed to the Guardian show that Mr Hamilton worked closely for years with the lobbying company on the campaign. One letter on Mr Hamilton's House of Commons notepaper, to be sent to Douglas Hurd, then home secretary, carried the phrase "Not to be released under any circumstances without the permission of Ian Greer."
Mr Al-Fayed came forward to disclose the payments yesterday as the Commons Committee of Privileges inquiring into the "£1,000 cash for questions" to two Tory backbenchers, Graham Riddick and David Tredinnick, decided to go into secret session.
Mr Al-Fayed's payments relate to the period between 1987 and 1989 when the controversy over his ownership of House of Fraser, including Harrods, had reached seismic proportions with the DTI inspector's report into his take-over of the company.
He told the Guardian: "I was approached by Ian Greer, who offered to run a campaign. He came to me at my home and offered his services. You must remember that at the time we were in a desperate situation, facing a barrage of criticism from MPs run by Tiny Rowland like Edward Du Cann.
"He told me he could deliver, but I would need to pay. A fee of about £50,000 was mentioned. But then he said he would have to pay the MPs, Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith, who would ask the questions.
"Mr Greer said to me: "You need to rent an MP just like you rent a London taxi."
"I couldn't believe that in Britain, where Parliament has such a big reputation, you had to pay MPs. I was shattered by it. I asked how much and he said it would be £2,000 a question."
He went on: "Every month we got a bill for parliamentary services and it would vary from £8,000 to £10,000 depending on the number of questions. Then Mr Hamilton rang and requested to stay at the Ritz Hotel with his wife. I agreed. I am a generous man. But he ran up such a big bill, even coming back for afternoon tea.
"After he left to go on a trip around France, he even asked to stay again. I told the manager to tell him the hotel was full. There are limits to my generosity.
"He's been to Harrods with his wife shopping free. Yet when I wrote to him congratulating him on his appointment at the Department of Trade, he didn't even acknowledge the letter and complained it had sent to the DTI and opened by a civil servant."
Earlier this year, Mr Greer told a Central TV team: "We would never go out and say we can arrange to have a question tabled, but actually we can".
Mr Al-Fayed has long since severed relations with Ian Greer Associates and no longer employs any parliamentary lobbyists.
Mr Hamilton is MP for Tatton. Mr Smith is MP for Beaconsfield. The records show that he asked a succession of questions on the Al-Fayeds' behalf, ceasing in January 1989 when Tiny Rowland circulated an open letter denouncing his support of the Al-Fayeds. The Guardian has traced 22 questions asked in the Al-Fayed interest by the two MPs.
Documentary evidence shows that Mr Hamilton devoted many hours to pursuing Lonrho issues on Mr Al-Fayed's behalf - after he had requested his free stay at the Ritz. The letters also reveal how closely he was working with Mr Greer, the lobbyist in receipt of the large retainer for the campaign.
The first involves a private letter written on January 28, 1988, to Mohamed Al-Fayed at his Park Lane address, enclosing a letter he had sent to Lord Young, secretary of state for trade and industry, concerning the House of Fraser inquiry.
The letter to Lord Young talks of "a collection of papers which prima facie provide evidence of Lonrho's failure to disclose to its shareholders certain dealings in emeralds."
He wrote to Lord Young: "You will know that the fraud squad has not lost interest on these matters. It is difficult for some of us to understand why the DTI seems to be less vigorous in its desire to get at the truth. Rowland and Lonrho were long ago described as the "unacceptable face of capitalism." The record gets worse with the years and still nothing is done about their breaches of company law."
In his private letter to Mr Fayed, expressing his sympathy for the case, he said: "Everyone knows the Al-Fayeds to be amongst the world's most significant businessmen. I have no doubt that, were it not for the paranoid and personal vendetta pursued by Tiny Rowland, you would not now be enduring the indignity of this inquiry.
"Having myself suffered invasions of privacy and campaigns of lies in my successful battle with the BBC in 1984/86, I have the greatest possible sympathy for you."
Five months later, on May 27, a fax from Patrick Ferreira, one of Ian Greer's senior aides, enclosed priority written questions tabled by Mr Hamilton for answer on June 7 on the DTI House of Fraser report.
Then on September 1, 1988, Mr Hamilton wrote to Mr Fayed: "I am glad to learn from Ian Greer that meetings are taking place with the DTI concerning the inspector's report and I very much hope that this matter will not drag on for much longer. Perhaps it might be useful if the three of us get together shortly".
The following March there were further exchanges. On March 12, Mr Hamilton wrote enthusiastically to Mohamed Al-Fayed praising him for taking a firm line against Lonrho.
Then, nine days later, a letter was prepared by Mr Hamilton to be sent to Douglas Hurd, calling for an investigation into Ahmed Gadafsdam, a board member of the aircraft cargo firm, Tradewinds, a Lonrho subsidiary, and his alleged connections with Colonel Gadafy, the Libyan dictator. The letter was marked "not to be released under any circumstances without the permission of Ian Greer."
The most detailed connection between Mr Hamilton and Mr Greer is shown in two faxes from Mr Greer to Mr Al-Fayed and his legal adviser on March 29 and April 4 1989.
In them it is made quite clear that the tabling of parliamentary questions by Mr Hamilton was being arranged by Mr Greer as part of his parliamentary services fee. "Tried to contact you earlier today without success. Spoke to Brian Basham's (City PR company) office last night and today. Agreed with Neil Hamilton four questions (faxed to you earlier today) which have now been sent to Brian for use in tomorrow's press. Believe it will be possible to put more questions down next week. Suggest you mention that I will be in contact when you see Michael Grylls MP (the only MP who declares a link with Ian Greer Associates) because I believe he would want to help. Also believe letter possible from Neil to Chairman of CAA (Civil Aviation Authority) about Marwan flights and facilities."
The other simply stated: "The following questions will appear in tomorrow's Order Paper."
Mr Greer said last night: "These allegations are wholly and totally untrue." Neither Mr Hamilton nor Mr Smith responded to an invitation to comment. When a similar request was to put to them by the Guardian last year, both denied accepting money for their role in this affair.
A liar and a cheat
Neil Hamilton, the disgraced former minister, yesterday walked away in humiliation from a £10 million libel suit against the Guardian over the "cash for questions" scandal hours before the case was due to start today.
The former trade minister abandoned the case and agreed to pay some of the Guardian's costs after a bitter two-year battle. He had recruited 421 Conservative MPs and peers, including Lady Thatcher, Lord Archer and cabinet members to change a 300-year-old law, which had prevented him, as an MP, bringing his action.
Ian Greer, the parliamentary lobbyist, also dropped his claim, part of the same libel suit, just minutes before a legal deadline to do so. He, too, agreed to pay some of the paper's costs.
The Guardian stated on October 20, 1994, that Mr Hamilton had received thousands of pounds for asking parliamentary questions for Mohamed Al Fayed's Harrods group. Mr Greer, who had been retained by Mr Al Fayed, was identified as the middleman.
Another MP, Tim Smith, resigned his post as a Northern Ireland minister after he was accused in the same article of taking undeclared cash. He immediately admitted the Guardian story was true. Mr Hamilton, MP for Tatton, had instead tried to tough it out before resigning under pressure from Mr Major.
The settlement, on the eve of what was labelled the libel trial of the century, came after a dramatic weekend of legal developments. Those began when the government disclosed crucial documents to the Guardian. The papers led to Mr Greer and Mr Hamilton falling out, and a conflict of interest developing. Mr Greer's accounts were also in the newspaper's possession.
The Guardian also served on the men's lawyers three statements from employees of Mr Al Fayed. They said Mr Hamilton and Mr Greer regularly called for envelopes stuffed with £50 notes in return for parliamentary lobbying.
Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, said: "The decision by Neil Hamilton and Ian Greer must be one of the most astonishing legal cave-ins in the history of the law of libel."
He called for the trial papers to be examined by John Major, Sir Gordon Downey, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, and the Inland Revenue.
Although hampered by the law on what evidence it can publish, the Guardian today reveals the extent of Mr Hamilton's covert links with Mr Greer. It also details the network of MPs linked to Mr Greer, including Mr Smith, Sir Michael Grylls, chairman of the backbench trade and industry committee, Sir Peter Hordern, MP for Horsham, and Sir Andrew Bowden, MP for Brighton Kemptown.
It was because the Guardian had subpoenaed Mr Major and Michael Heseltine to give evidence in the case that the government handed over key documents to the newspaper's lawyers, Geoffrey Robertson, QC, and Geraldine Proudler. It would have been the first time this century a serving prime minister had appeared in the libel courts.
The trial would have re-opened the vexed question of parliamentary sleaze during the Tory party conference, and only a year after the government had made strenuous efforts to bury the issue. It implemented the Nolan Committee report and appointed a new Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to handle complaints about MPs.
Of the embarrassing climb-down by both men, Mr Rusbridger said: "Both Hamilton and Greer knew that the evidence the Guardian had obtained would have blown their action out of the water and revealed a pattern of parliamentary sleaze more far reaching than anyone had ever imagined.
"The Guardian has never doubted the truth of its original story. We would have produced damning evidence of Mr Hamilton and Mr Greer's lack of integrity if the case had proceeded. No doubt that is why they dropped the action.
"The Greer accounts and the government documents tell an outrageous story of corruption which the public should know but which we are prevented, for legal reasons, from publishing."
Mr Hamilton said he was 'devastated' at having to withdraw. He claimed he was innocent, but because of the conflict of interest with Mr Greer, each had to instruct new solicitors and counsel.
"The consequence of this is that the trial would have had to have been postponed to enable new sets of lawyers to go through the huge volume of papers and prepare the case afresh at enormously increased cost."
His costs were already £150,000, and he did not have the cash to continue.
Mr Greer said: "I would want to continue on a matter of principle, but I have had to take a sensible commercial decision and I am happy a compromise has been reached."
A spokesman for Mr Al Fayed said: "He was looking forward to telling the court of his experience of dealing with a number of Conservative MPs who describe themselves as "honourable members". He will be sending his papers on the matter to Sir Gordon Downey."
Downing Street last night insisted that the end of the libel action was purely a "matter between Mr Hamilton and the Guardian".
Damning evidence
Sometimes he (Mr Greer) would ask me bluntly whether Mr Al Fayed had his money ready. Mr Hamilton was as persistent as Mr Greer, if not more so, in asking for his envelope.
Mohamed Al Fayed's ex-personal assistant
I remember on several occasions that prior to a meeting with Mr Hamilton, Mr Al Fayed would make a remark... that he was coming to collect his money and would prepare an envelope for him with a bundle of £2,500 (in) notes in my presence.
Mr Al Fayed's secretary
On at least two occasions when I was sitting at the front desk, an envelope was brought down to me from Mr Al Fayed's office and I was informed that Mr Hamilton would be stopping by to collect the envelope.
Mr Al Fayed's security man
Starring Jeff Steinberg of Executive Intelligence Review and Adnan Kohshoggi of Iran-Contra, "The World's Richest Man", and Mohammad al-Fayedd's Brother-in-law.
Ostensibly a hit-piece deconstructing the Fayedd side of the Diana assassination myth (they were engaged, they were in love, she was pregnant, Fayedd is "an outsider" to the British Establishment because he is a Muslim (he is anything but), and that the security detail at the Ritz were unconnected to British Military or Secuity Services).
Whoever is in charge of the Security around an assassination and allows the gaps to open in the security around the target is the prime suspect - and that's "Establishment Outsider and Pariah", Mohammad al-Fayedd.
The crash did not kill Diana, she was killed in the ambulance, and fully conscious following the crash - and there is absolutely zero proof that Henri Paul and Dodi Fayedd are dead.
The Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson made the following comment about Denis Healey in his memoirs:
"He is a strange person. When he was at Oxford he was a communist. Then friends took him in hand, sent him to the Rand Corporation of America, where he was brainwashed and came back very right wing."
Harold Wilson,
Memoirs: The Making of a Prime Minister, 1916-64 (1986)
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.
"Officers of MI5 have no prerogative to justify any of their actions." - LORD DENNING
MI5 officer Cathy Massiter, who quit the service in disgust over its illegal activities against the left.
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.
CIA director William Casey, who funded Brian Crozier's activities in Britain. Behind Casey is an aerial photo of the CIA's headquarters at Langley, Virginia.
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 Mossadeq). 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.
"Like the United States, Britain has become a single-ideology state with two principal, almost identical factions, so that the result of any election has a minimal effect on the economy and social policy." - JOHN PILGER
"It is not surprising that more and more people are coming to the conclusion that the ballot box is no longer an instrument that will secure political solutions…. They can see that the parliamentary democracy we boast of is becoming a sham." - TONY BENN
"Israel" is not a good name - his name was Jacob at first...
