Paul Rigby

Just a shift in emphasis, or a dropping of the mask? Great questions! Paul

A further potential lead on British involvement in Vietnam peace negotiations came earlier this year from a surprising source – the Cottesloe theatre, London, and playwright Nicholas Wright, whose play, “The Reporter,” took as its subject the career and suicide of one-time star BBC reporter James Mossman. Mossman’s was a household face in the UK in the early-to-mid ‘60s thanks to his appearances, among other places, on Panorama, BBC TV’s flagship current affairs-cum-investigative reportage programme. Founded in 1953, Panorama’s first editor, Dennis Bardens, was a spy-occultist – pre-war he “joined the bohemian and occult circles gathered round Victor Neuberg, the great disciple of Aleister Crowley” before a spot of “secret service work in Czechoslovakia” in the immediate post-war period (1) – who appears to have bequeathed the programme a tradition it was never to loose, as a front for British intelligence. Among the Brit spooks who wound their way onto the programme was James Mossman, who did “undercover work for MI6” earlier in his career (2). In the summer of 1963, Mossman was in Saigon, where he witnessed “a Buddhist monk immolate himself, like a charred tottering marionette” (3). The inevitable question – was Mossman there on behalf of his former employer, MI6? And if so, what was his role? Mere observer? One strong clue as to Mossman’s personal assessment of the political situation in Saigon was offered in a pre-curtain up piece for the Guardian by the playwright himself: The script of the play appears to be unavailable as yet – has anyone reading this seen the play? And recall Wright’s version of what Mossman said the evening of Diem’s overthrow and murder? (1)C.A.R Hills, “Obituary: Dennis Bardens,” The Guardian, Saturday, 21 February 2004, p.23. (2)Kate Bassett, “Theatre: The life and loves of a fatal Englishman,” The Independent on Sunday, ABC section, 25 February 2007, p.15. (3)Ibid. (4)Nicholas Wright, “The real Jim,” The Guardian, Saturday Review, 3 February 2007, p.14.

Myra, One of the most intriguing and, from Diana’s point of view, ominous, pre-assassination pieces on her appeared in the Guardian’s Outlook section in mid-May 1993. Jointly attributed to Martin Kettle (a New Labour bootlicker, but a well-connected one), Richard Norton-Taylor (no stranger he to MI6) and Michael White (a political correspondent ever willing & able to discern wisdom in our unelected rulers), it bore the snappy title “Diana may be a loose cannon on the English flagship. But its officers are also feeling the heat. Accustomed to greatness, the English ruling class is being destabilised and it is reacting with venom,” Saturday, 15 May 1993, p.23. Though making a passing nod in the direction of her utility to Rupert Murdoch’s campaign against the traditional Right in Britain, the article was primarily concerned with Diana’s serious flirtation with conversion to Catholicism. (Her papal pied piper was Dom Henry Wansborough, the Benedictine monk who was master of St. Benet’s Hall, Oxford, and a former housemaster of her “friend” James Gilbey at Ampleforth.) There followed a surprisingly serious consideration of the implications of such a conversion for the Church of England, the Monarchy – and the intelligence services. The most interesting passages in that meditation follow. Ignore the absurd bit about MI5 officers deferring to “no other power” – you can’t become head of either MI5 or MI6 without CIA approval: As is obvious, this was well-informed, shrewd and deeply serious stuff – and entirely forgotten in the wake of Diana’s death, most notably by that obsessive attacker of things even remotely conspiratorial, the Guardian, the very paper in which it had appeared. Paul

Again: And again (though note the adverb "partially" - the car's position of rest in transition?): The delay in getting the injured and dead out of the car: Given the weight and speed of the Mercedes, it would appear unlikely that a small Fiat Uno - or whatever it was - was capable of bumping the Merc into an unwanted change of direction. Was the white Fiat introduced into the tale as a "grassy knoll" piece of mis-direction from the Merc itself?

But chose not to testify at his trail in Pakistan - odd, really, if he wanted to deliver his message to his home audience. Given who he worked for - see below - my faith in the testimony of his roommate isn't the greatest. Planted evidence? Police in cahoots with the CIA? Unthinkable. Or may be that wasn't the case here (see final item). Not too often you get a boat-load of eyewitnesses who openly admit to working for Langley. All you've shown me, Len, is a photograph with what appears to be an unnatural light source on his face, a photograph whose provenance and handling would require a great deal more investigation than a thumbs-up from an habitual establishment shil. And then there's the small matter of Kasi's job. Here's the aforementioned Rashid and Adams on that and other interesting bits and pieces: Can we say "CIA"? I think we can. And just in case there's any doubt about this, we need only look at his employ at the time of the shooting. Rashid and Adams again: So a man who presumably has access, but virtue of his job, to some interesting CIA locations, chooses to register his alleged protest by a harum-scarum random shooting at the entrance to a heavily guarded site when he could have pulled off something much more murderous much more easily in the course of a standard working day, and got away without a hot pursuit. Ho-hum. Yet another dog that doesn't hunt. To finish, Rashid and Adams again: The Agency burns yet another Muslim asset? The only novelty was in the location for, and the elaborateness of, the fit-up.

Sorry, Nat, I should have been clearer. (Brevity is sometimes, alas, no more than the soul of tiredness…) I was merely alluding to themes touched upon previously in the thread. Humour me while I revisit them. We are routinely invited to deride Kennedy, Harriman et al – the small group favouring a political settlement, not a military one, along the lines of the Geneva agreements on Laos – for their hypocrisy. Here’s a group of prize hypocrites, this view would have it, which publicly opposed assassination and coup d’etats until it suited, as, allegedly, in Diem’s case in November 1963. Now here’s that remarkable oddity again. If this version had any truth in it, its advocates would surely seize upon any pre-coup instances of the peace group’s support for Diem to ram home the charge of hypocrisy. And who could blame them, for their interpretation would be true and justified? Yet for the most part, they don’t. Why the silence? Well, part of the problem lies in the terms in which Kennedy, Harriman et al defended Diem. As we have seen earlier in the thread, courtesy of the estimable Bernard Fall, Harriman’s defence of Diem on a US radio station in February 1963 was anything but starry-eyed. The peace group did NOT harbour any great illusions about the nature of Diem’s government. Furthermore, what was true in Feb ’63 – that there simply was no viable political alternative to Diem – was as true in November of the year as it was eight months earlier. It was particularly true if, as was obviously the case, Kennedy and the peace faction were continuing to push for the political settlement strategy for Vietnam initiated in earnest at Honolulu in the summer of ’62. Diem was essential to it. A further crucially important factor constraining the scope of the attack on Kennedy and the peace group is to be found in the propaganda myth erected around the work of the CIA’s press group in South Vietnam, the men used to sell us the Agency view – and plan, for Langley works assiduously, if necessarily covertly, to fulfil its own prophecies, thus appearing infinitely sage – embodied in Carver’s Feb 63 NIE. Halberstam, Sheehan, Browne, and Arnett, to name but four of the most prominent “salesmen,” were sold to the US people as independent truth-seekers, fearlessly telling it like it was in the face of the best endeavours of a schlerotic, delusional, and pro-Diem foreign policy establishment. Recall that Halberstam boasts that Kennedy personally intervened with his publisher in late October 63 to have him recalled; while Arnett has Harriman seeking his removal a month earlier. You see the problem at once: If Kennedy and the tiny pro-peace deal faction which he headed really were resolved to dish Diem, why on earth would they be seeking the removal of the very US journalists campaigning most vigorously for that very end? It makes no sense. But it does, I submit, account for the above-noted absence of vigour in unearthing and publicizing the peace faction’s public pronouncements in favour of Diem’s retention. In this specific context, to publicize Harriman’s Feb 63 support for Diem would be to leave the unmistakable suggestion, when allied to Arnett’s revelation that Harriman sought his removal in September 63, of continuity in the peace faction’s position. Now that would never do. In summary, then, we have an apparently blatant disconnect in the CIA version of who advocated what, when, and for what purposes. But the contradictions are superficial and relatively easily accounted for by chronology and context: CIA propaganda requirements shifted as the year progressed; and, post-coup, necessitated the maintenance of mutually contradictory propaganda positions. The really malign genius of the CIA’s work on Vietnam 1963 was in the realm of propaganda: the image-work with the Buddhists; and, above all, the campaign to create the impression, via selective leaks to the US press, that the peace faction, not the Agency, was driving the campaign in Washington to remove Diem. That’s the real hypocrisy I had in mind. I'll come back to your other questions when time permits. Paul

Those ISI interrogators - such gentle souls. My used car emporium beckons, Len..."glass shards...bought a ticket for Pakistan...reported missing" - proof positive, indeed. Why not go the whole hog, Len, and give him pink eyes - now a Pakistani albino, there's a runner!

Er...logic's obviously a strong point of yours, Len. If it ain't on the Net, it never happened, right? A truly fascinating position, for which I feel confident chemical remedy will soon be found. Particularly eyewitnesses to an event quoted shortly afterwards who have not yet seen any television footage of the event. Jeesh, Len, you're losing it. Let's see if we can help Greenie out, shall we: Bush is an habitual lier with a memory of convenience and the IQ of a gnat? There, not too difficult, surely? Most kind. Who said Americans don't do understatement? Paul

One man particularly resolved to keep the true role of the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao in the “NLF” campaign against Diem firmly under wraps was George A. Carver, Jr. The son of missionary parents later to spend much time in China, Carver was talent-spotted at Yale, and reportedly joined the CIA in 1953 (1). In the April 1965 edition of Foreign Affairs, he modestly set out to refashion Vietnamese history in the interests of CIA propaganda against Diem. Predictably, suppression of information was nine-tenths of the lie. The remaining tenth was pure euphemism: “The Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao have emerged from nearly a decade of political insignificance to play influential roles, particularly in the provinces where their adherents are concentrated” (2). In accordance with the Langley fashion of the time, Carver’s farrago insisted the CIA-backed “revolutions” targeting Diem were a) spontaneous; and undertaken by the most patriotic elements of the society. Foreign Affairs, on its “Contributors to this issue” page, described Carver as a “student of political theory and Asian affairs, with degrees from Yale and Oxford,” and a “former officer in the U.S. aid mission” (3) – a description as meaningful as characterising James Angleton as a keen angler with a penchant for orchids, and secreting hooch on riverbanks. Carver’s real career was much more interesting and sheds revealing light on two key aspects of post-Dallas CIA propaganda about who-did-what in Vietnam: the pretence that attempts on Diem’s life began and ended with Kennedy; and the CIA’s self-portrait as dutiful servant of White House policy in the Kennedy years. In July 1963, Carver had been named as one of two senior CIA officers – the other was Howard C. Elting – who had masterminded a hasty and unsuccessful military putsch against Diem. Carver had served as the case officer of the coup’s domestic political front-man, Dr. Phan Quang Dan (4). The date? 11/12 November 1960, within days of Kennedy’s election. If the CIA was indeed steadfast for Diem until Kennedy gave the green light in the autumn of 1963, its post-November 1960 treatment of Carver demonstrates it had a somewhat peculiar way of showing it. By the time of Dan’s trial – it was delayed by Diem and Nhu until such time as it seemed useful to expose an earlier set of CIA machinations, the better to reinforce allegations of current attempts – Carver “was assigned to CIA headquarters” where he served in Sherman Kent’s Office of National Estimates as “one of the analysts who could be called upon to write the first drafts of the National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), as they were called.” In short, then, a position of considerable bureaucratic power. Prados assures us that though colleagues recalled his “passionate” desire to see Diem toppled, the tone of Carver’s crucial NIE (58-63) of February 1963, “drawn to measure progress in South Vietnam,” was “balanced.” Prados then rather ruins the effect by listing some of its most important conclusions: “At best Carver was saying…the Vietnam struggle would be protracted and difficult due to the many weaknesses of the Saigon regime, including poor morale and leadership, lack of trust, inadequate South Vietnamese intelligence, obvious penetration of the government by Viet Cong spies, and poor tactical use of available troops” (5). This was precisely the kind of boilerplate that was already forming the mainstay of the work of Halberstam, Sheehan et al; and much more dishonest than anything produced by Diem’s defenders in Washington in the same period. 1.John Prados. The Secret History of the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995), p.30. 2.George A. Carver, Jr., “The Real Revolution in South Viet Nam,” Foreign Affairs, April 1965, (Vol. 43, No.3), p.399. 3.Ibid., p.386. 4.Prados, op. cit., p.31. 5.Ibid., p.32.

On 26 January 1993, the Guardian carried a surprisingly short report from the paper’s then Washington correspondent on a dramatic shooting spree right outside the entrance to CIA’s Langley HQ. The germane passages follow: So far, so clear: Witnesses were numerous, close, and presumably expert observers, many of them being career spooks. There was a rapid, large-scale pursuit. A young, white gunman did it.. Until, that is, the NYT of 27 January 1993: On 10 February, the Guardian, playing a straight bat, though not necessarily maintaining a straight face, informed readers that “Police yesterday launched a worldwide manhunt for a Pakistani gunman…named…as Mir Aimal Kansi, aged 28” (Agencies, “Pakistani sought for CIA killings,” The Guardian, 10 February 1993.) Four days later, the (London) Sunday Times offered an explanation for the initial eyewitness “confusion”: Some obliging soul – Martin Walker, perhaps - should really have sent David Franklin, the commander of the major crimes unit of the Fairfax County Police, a copy of the Guardian’s initial brief despatch on the shooting. In late January 1998, the Guardian noted the effective end of the affair – justice done, honour satisfied – in a laconic piece in its “News in brief” column: Talented coves, these Muslim terrorists. Not only are they blessed with the power of foresight - being able to anticipate massive US defence drills, and thus plan multiple, simultaneous attacks accordingly - but also the ability to change colour. Remarkable.

My favourite metamorphosis is the Langley gates shooting of January 1993. If I can find the clippings concerned, will bang them on the forum. Paul

I appear to have caught you on an "off" day, Len. Revisit my post. My point was that both the wife and I saw the footage of the Merc upside down on the Sunday morning's TV coverage. We didn't need confirmation of the fact - which I strongly suspect contributed to the delay in getting Diana to hospital, as it was clear the door of the upside down vehicle wouldn't open cleanly - and I really paid no heed to this element of the newspaper coverage on Sunday* because it was such an obvious and unremarkable thing to say (that the vehicle came to rest upside down). It was only retrospectively that it assumed significance as recreation after recreation omitted this blatant fact. Paul *The story made the later editions of all the Sunday heavyweights available in this part of northern England.

I once enquired of retired Customs & Excise nabob who within the British establishment had green-lighted the expose of HMG's love-affair with Iraq. Came the answer: "The F.O." Cynics have long pondered the precise point at which the Foreign Office ends and MI6 begins. No wonder Norton-Taylor was so well-informed - and foregrounded - during that black farce. Paul

My suspicion, too. The JFK testimony it reminded me of came from Norman Similas. Now, that is a reordering of our accepted understanding of what happened comparable to the Diana testimony in the Sunday Times quoted above. One other obvious trend within British newspapers over the first few weeks after the Diana assassination was a substantial reduction to the speed of the Merc. By about the end of the second week, I recall, it had been roughly halved, from circa 120mph to approx 60mph. Why this need to change these particular facets of the event, one can only guess. Paul

“Dodi is killed, Diana badly injured in Paris car crash,” Sunday Times, 31 August 1997, p.1: “Mike Walker, an American tourist from Ohio, saw Diana’s overturned Mercedes in the aftermath of the crash: ‘We were travelling in the opposite direction and saw the car lying flipped over at the bottom of the hill…’” I can't find the box with my copies of the papers from Sunday, 31 August, but I did have the above as a handwritten note in a box containing subsequent clippings. From memory, there are several more quotations - most from American eyewitnesses - to this effect in that day's coverage, but that all changes just one day later, in the UK "qualities" at least, on Monday, 1 September. I suspect a survey of US press coverage from the same two days would yield similar results. Paul

Well said. Anyone in any doubt that it was an assassination might usefully reflect on perhaps the most blatant lie peddled by the British mainstream media ever since. In every recreation I have seen, we are invited to believe that the Mercedes remained the right way up after the crash. It did not. As both my better half and I saw on television on the morning of the accident, and the next day's newspaper accounts from eyewitnesses confirmed, the car came to rest on its roof. There is plainly something very sensitive here concerning the speed of the Merc and its subsequent trajectory. The question is, what exactly are they hiding? I wish I knew. But I do know, beyond any doubt, that the media is lying; and doing so in an orchestrated fashion. Paul

Seconded: and faced by an equally fine piece - by Simon Jenkins - on the British foreign policy elite's moronic consensus with regard to Afghanistan. Care to do the honours, John?

The Guardian’s Richard Norton-Taylor, the paper’s veteran expert on matters spook, has long enjoyed a reputation as one of MI6’s most fervent admirers. In Saturday’s edition of the paper, he again demonstrated why the reputation is so richly deserved. “The calamity of disregard,” 4 August 2007, p.32, represents a significant attempt to rewrite the historical record of that bloated bureaucracy’s catastrophic contribution to the Iraq charnel-house: All mention of John Scarlett is banished, and we are instead treated to a portrait of the organisation’s Richard Dearlove, the service’s nominal head (the real masters, of course, are in Washington) as a dissident seer fearlessly resisting the drift to illegal invasion. Read Norton-Taylor’s Stalinoid drivel here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/st...2141409,00.html For a pithy, accurate, and pointed rebuttal, see today’s letters page contribution in the same paper from Dr. Brian Jones, a senior defense intelligence analyst who really did offer meaningful resistance to the lies concocted by, among others, MI6’s Scarlett, lies utilised so eagerly and efficiently by the wretched Dearlove: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2142964,00.html

So what was the CIA’s “Third Force” in Vietnam? The short answer, and the core component, was – the “National Liberation Front.” But wasn’t the NLF teeming with southern Viet Cong? To the contrary: It was full of zealous anti-communists. As contemporary press reports reveal, no sooner were Diem and Nhu dead than General Minh made a bee-line for the “NLF” to end hostilities: Hanoi well understood the CIA-origins of the NLF. In response to the “clandestine” radio broadcast in March 1960 announcing its formation - in the form of a proclamation by “Former Resistance Fighters” - Hanoi radio immediately denounced it as a trap. (1) Hanoi also acted militarily in concert with Diem against the NLF: In May 1962, Hoa Hao battalion 104 “was caught in a simultaneous drive by the ARVN and Viet Minh battalion 510.”(2) (1) Senator Ernest Gruening & Herbert W. Beaser. Vietnam Folly (Washington, D.C.: The National Press, Inc., 1968), p. 186. (2) Bernard Fall. The Two Viet-Nams: A Political and Military Analysis (London: Pall Mall Press, 1963), p. 355.

Sounds just like British archives... And so RFK did, sir, but the last place on earth he would have wanted WKH was in Italy as the Kennedy-inspired apertura a sinistra was in finely balanced motion. Was Harvey sent there to help co-ordinate its sabotage? I struggle to see what other value he had in Rome: his particular expertise was not in the field of paramilitary/Gladio actions, as far as I understand his career, but political sabotage. (Thinking aloud, however, was Harvey mixed up in the German gladio ops exposed in 52-53? Can't remember...) You mean the Andreotti? Delighted to get an Italian viewpoint: please stick around! Paul

Was Mrs. Cross by any chance connected, however distantly/covertly to the circle of businessman etc. who backed Roosevelt? For a goodly list of the latter, see Jeffery. M. Dorwart, "The Roosevelt-Astor Espionage Ring," New York History, July 1981, (62), pp.307-322.

The credibility of Butler’s allegations would have been considerably bolstered had they appeared in a different context. In fact, the plot described by Butler was not the first time FDR had been threatened with political destruction. The shooting of Chicago mayor Anton Cermak – and Mrs. Joseph Gill - in Miami in February 1933 – begged the question was Roosevelt the real target? According to the London Times’ correspondent, basing his despatch in part on Roosevelt’s description of the attempt given while en route back to New York, very much so. The extract to follow first appeared in The Times on 17 February 1933; it was reprinted by the paper, in its series “On this day,” on 17 February 1998, p.23: Who was this Mrs. Cross; and what press coverage did she receive, particularly in Miami, after her intervention? Just as interestingly, information contained in the despatch suggests FDR would have been a more visible target if he had acceded to a request from newsreel photographers to repeat his speech for their benefit; and that he was “fixed” in place at the time of the shooting by “a man who came forward with a long telegram,” the contents of which the unnamed official (?) insisted upon elucidating. Who was this “official”?

In today’s Grauniad, yet more BBC news footage manipulation-by-editing from the 1980s recalled. This is proving to be a fruitful little series. What a pity the paper couldn’t assign a reporter to bring all these disparate items together. Or re-evaluate its slavish editorial support for this discredited organisation. http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,2137476,00.html The two letters (Sense of injustice over strike reports, July 28) reminded me of a similar incident in the 80s. The TUC held a peaceful rally close to the Commons. Between us and a line of mounted police at the bottom of Whitehall were TV cameras. Suddenly floodlights came on and the mounted police charged towards us, stopping within 20 yards of the main crowd, then retreated. On that evening's TV news we saw the charge with the comment "police charge unruly trade unionists threatening parliament". Nothing could have been further from the truth. David Buckle Abingdon, Oxfordshire While Mr. Turner takes a trip down memory lane, armed only with a good book, and a burning sense of well-founded injustice, a view from inside the spook leviathan that is the BBC. If you’re a dedicated spook-spotter, have a long, hard look at who does – and who has done - the editing within the organisation’s various news fronts: Of course, there never was a golden age of impartiality at the BBC, as its actions during the 1926 miners’ strike demonstrated so graphically. When push came to shove, the Beeb served (serves) power, not the truth.

Francesca, This is splendid - can you explain to me what the Depatron service was; and how it connects to Harvey? A further couple of questions: when did Harvey arrive in Rome and what did he do while there? Paul

Charles, Let me offer three useful criteria by which to judge JFK's position on the American spectrum. Until the time of Truman, it was common for New Deal Democrats to describe the big business right and the family corporate dynasties as "Tories." For American High Tories, as for their British predecessors, power unutilised was (and remains) power surrendered. The neo-cons are today intermittently very frank about this: Occasionally, we must go out and blat a weaker power to encourage the others. Kennedy's persistent refusal from the very earliest days of his administration - pre-Bay of Pigs - to deploy US military power to the full marked him irrevocably as "not one of us." He was, in short, a multilateralist, not a nationalist. Second, Kennedy was entirely relaxed about foreign governments using the state to intervene economically to improve the lot of their people. He said as much in the course of his visit to Mexico (in 62?). He again evidenced powerful sympathy for the economic predicament of developing nations by throwing his weight behind the Volta Dam project, the hope being, of course, that a country such as Ghana would cease merely to export its raw materials. Third and finally, he threw his full weight behind the attempt to prevent the Congo being balkanised by US and European mining interests, a policy in which he was predictably resisted by the CIA, as part of a determined effort to woo neutralists to the US cause, not exterminate or overthrow them. His contempt for the CIA policy of murdering those it did not like was unwavering: He even sent a trusted emissary, at considerable risk to his good friend's life, to Saigon in a vain attempt to save Diem. Paul