-Caveat Lector-
from:
http://www.knowledge.co.uk/lobster/articles/rrtalk.htm
A HREF="http://www.knowledge.co.uk/lobster/articles/rrtalk.htm"The
influence of intelligence services on the B
/A
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The influence of intelligence services
on the British left
A talk given by Robin Ramsay to Labour Party branches in late 1996
This is an adaptation and massive compression of the pamphlet The
Clandestine Caucus written and published by Robin Ramsay in 1996. In
that the sources for most of the claims contained in this talk are to be
found.
Dirty tricks and covert operations
In the official theory of British politics the state in general and the
intelligence services in particular have no role. This is what I think
of as the Disney version of politics; and this is the one that is still
largely taught in British universities and regurgitated by the mass
media. In the Disney version, the state is neutral. Interests in society
align with political parties; and the parties contest elections. The
election winners form governments whose policies are then implemented by
the state. This was the view, for example, of Ron Hayward, the General
Secretary of the Labour Party. In 1974 Hayward was informed by a private
security company that the Labour Party's headquarters were bugged.
'Nonsense,' said Hayward. 'We don't have Watergate politics in Britain.'
Hayward simply didn't know. In 1974 hardly anybody outside Whitehall
did.
But we do have 'Watergate politics' and have had them since the cold
war. By Watergate politics I mean, loosely, dirty tricks and covert
operations. (Obviously they did exist to some extent before the war, but
I'm concentrating on the post-45 period.) With hindsight, post cold war,
it was inevitable that the major working class party of the second most
important member of NATO would be of interest to the intelligence
services of several countries Britain, the US and the Soviet bloc.
The first I want to look at is the UK's. In 1948 the psychological
warfare organisation, IRD, the Information Research Department, was set
up within the Foreign Office. IRD worked abroad trying to combat
nationalism in the British Empire, and at home to combat the British
left. IRD fed information and propaganda on 'communists' within the
labour movement through confidential recipients of its briefings one of
whom we now know was the late Vic Feather into the media, and into the
Labour Party's policing units, the National Agent's Department and the
Organisation Subcommittee. These latter organisations also received
information on a local basis from some police Special Branches. Special
Branches also surveilled the unions, the wider left and organisations
like CND. Also, and rather important in this period, surveillance and
data collection by private sector groups such as the Economic League,
the Building Employers Federation, was still important. [As the state
grew in the 30s, and then with the war and the cold war, the relative
significance of the private sector declined.]
But we also had American activities to contend with. Through the State
Department and the Department of Labour, the US ran education programmes
and freebie trips for sympathetic Labour movement people. Hundreds,
maybe thousands, no-one has yet assembled the data of British trade
union officials and MPs that had these freebies. The State Department,
via the London embassy, was sending back masses of reports. The idea
that this was just the role of the CIA is false. None of these British
reports have surfaced but over a 1000 pages of such reports made by the
New Zealand US embassy to the State Department on the tiny NZ labour
movement have been declassified and show surveillance down to the level
of trades councils and union branches. It seems a reasonable assumption
that the same attention to detail was being exercised on the
strategically far more significant British labour movement.
There were also US labour attachés based in the London US embassy. One
of them, Philip Kaiser, has written a memoir which includes an account
of his years in London. He writes: 'the labour attache is expected to
develop contacts with key leaders in the trade union movement and to
influence their thinking and decisions in directions compatible wth
American goals...'
And not just the unions. Joseph Godson, Kaiser's predecessor as the US
labour attaché, got so close to Hugh Gaitskell that in the climactic
struggle with the Bevanites, Gaitskell was planning strategy with
Godson, running between Godson and the National Executive Committee.
Under the anticommunism banner a series of domestic antileft groups
were, I believe, funded by the CIA in Britain. Let me emphasise believe;
for I don't have much concrete evidence. This network begins with Common
Cause, which then produced an offshoot, Industrial Research and
Information Services, IRIS, in the mid 1950s to work in the unions.
Common Cause and IRIS produced information and propaganda against what
it called
