The Clandestine Caucus

The Clandestine Caucus was written in the 1996 by Lobster editor Robin Ramsay and was an early attempt to understand the significance of a nexus of intelligence connected groups which covertly influenced the political landscape of the post-war UK including the Economic League, The Council on Foreign Relations, Common Cause
==Part 1: Clearing the ground: the unions, socialism and the state==
A surprising number of Labour Party members believe that it was once a socialist party, began as a
socialist party, and was then seduced from the golden pathway. This engenders the language of betrayal and sell-out which is so familiar and depressing a part of life in the Labour Party and on the British Left in general.(1) But the view of the Labour Party as originally socialist is just wrong. The history of Britain's union and labour movement is one of continuous conflict between socialist and anti-socialist wings; and within that conflict the bit of the story that is usually not told is that describing the relationship between the anti-socialist section of the labour movement and British and US capital and their states. 
The conflict between the anti- and pro-socialist wings of the labour movement sharpened markedly after the 1918 Bolshevik revolution and the subsequent formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Although wehave surprisingly little information on the turbulent years between 1918 and 1926, and, in particular, on the British Right's preparation to meet the Bolshevik 'threat',(2) we know that much of the early effort was put into groups aimed at the exploitation of so-called 'patriotic labour', such as the British Workers League.(3) 
World War 1 produced the modern British state - the Cabinet Office etc. - and mobilisation: things wererun from the centre and new relationships were formed.
:'By the end of 1919, a new form of political activity was growing up, as yet only half understood, but radically different from the pre-war system ..... but there now existed formal, powerful, employers' institutions, a fully fledged Ministry of Labour, and a TUC Trades Union Congress increasingly accustomed to dealing in the political arena, wedded to a major political party which, almost alone in Europe, encompassed the majority of the non-Conservative working class. At the same time, the government's apparatus for manipulating public opinion had grown inordinately, enabling it - on its own estimate - to confront the spectre of Bolshevism and survive. Lloyd George himself, searching always for a middle way in politics, had shifted away from Liberal radicalism towards a corporatism best described as the creation in Parliamentary politics of a staatspartei, composed of Liberals and mainstream Conservatives (leaving a fringe right wing and a much larger, but powerless Labour Left); complemented in industrial politics by a triangular collaboration in which employers' organisations and TUC should make them-selves representative of their members and in return receive recognition as estates by government.'(4) 
The British Commonwealth Union, the FBI (Federation of British Industries, precursor of today's CBI) and the other predominantly Midlands manufacturing group, the National Union of Manufacturers, were set up during the first World War and they mark the origins of the British corporate movement.(5) One of the leading figures of the group, Sir Dudley Docker, envisaged 
:'a completely integrated society and economy in which industry would have its organisation of workers and management, the two sets of organisations united by peak federations and all finally capped by a great national forum of workers and managers and employers, embraced by the protection of an Imperial Tariff.'(6) 
Another of the corporatist groups financed by Midlands industrialists, the British Commonwealth Union (BCU), led by the Birmingham MP, Sir Patrick Hannon, began funding MPs to form an Industrial Group in Parliament. The first 11 candidates were subsidised by the BCU in the 1918 election: by 1924 the group in parliament consisted of 105 (mostly Tory) members. Hannon's Industrial Group chiefly wanted government protection of British industry against foreign competition, but, to quote Hannon, they also 'wanted the largest measure of freedom in the relationship between capital and labour and the least state intervention possible.'(7) 
These early corporatist dreams failed for a number of reasons. Employer organisations were none too happy at the idea of the trade unions as some kind of partners.(8) And vice versa. Too much was being expected; it was too big a change, happening too quickly. In any case, the corporatists among the members of the Federation of British Industries (FBI) were a minority strand in the thinking of the Tory Party and British industrial capital; and even among the corporatists there were divisions.(9) 
Frank Longstreth called this network of BCU, Industrial Group, FBI and other employer propaganda groups of the period, such as the Economic League, the Preference Imperialists, and noted their links to the earlier Midlands manufacturing-based Tariff Reform League.(10)As Longstreth suggested, it is possible to view the British economy since 1900 as a protracted struggle between British manufacturing (domestic capital) and the City of London (international finance capital), with the City in control for most of the century.(11) Oswald Mosley's movement in the 1930s was
:'in effect, the perverted continuation of the social imperialism of an earlier generation of industrialists, supporting imperial autarchy, social reform, conversion from a bankers' to a producers' economy, protectionism, public control of credit, and the suppression of the class struggle through the state'.(12) 
Although the great schemes of corporatism failed, the cooperation between the state and the trade unions which began during the First World War, continued after the General Strike and was deepened by the first two Labour governments.(13) Peter Weiler quotes Ernest Bevin's view in the 1930s that that the TUC had 'virtually become an integral part of the State, its views and voice upon every subject, international and domestic, heard and heeded.'(14) This statement of Bevin's is an exaggeration: no doubt the TUC's views were heard; but heeded? 
The powers-that-be set about educating and socialising these new leaders. In 1938, for example, one of the most important of the trade union leaders, Ernest Bevin, with his wife, was taken off on a tour of the empire, at the behest of the Royal Institute of International Affairs.(15) Trade union leaders they might be, seeking justice and a better deal for the British worker, but they remained patriots and imperialists for the most part, and not socialists. The gentlemen (mostly men) of the TUC did not dream - publicly or secretly - of taking over British capitalism, or of destroying the British empire. The institutional links with the British state begun before World War 2 were solidified enormously by the war. The trade unions were in the national coalition
government, and some of their leaders were Ministers of the Crown - very important people. 
== After the war ==
 
In the immediate post-war period the TUC was dominated by what Lewis Minkin called a 'praetorian guard' against the left; Arthur Deakin of the Transport Workers, Will Lawther of the Mineworkers and Tom Williamson of the General and Municipal. Minkin describes in detail how this trio ran the what he calls 'an unprecedented period of "platform" dominance at Party conference';(16) but noted that this alliance was defensive in nature and saw a communist conspiracy behind all criticism. 
The political beliefs of the leaders of trade unions in this period was mixed. Some were supporters of Moral Rearmament (MRA). At the 1947 MRA World Assembly at Caux-sur-Martreux in France, delegates from Britain included E.G. Gooch MP, President of the Agricultural Workers. An MRA press release on October 15, 1947 noted that signatories to a message of support for the Caux assembly included trade union leaders Andrew Naesmith, (General Secretary of the Amalgamated Weavers' Association), G. H. Bagnall (TUC General Council representative; former General Secretary of the National Union of Dyers, Bleachers and Textile Workers), George Chester (General Secretary of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives), W. B. Beard and J. W. Stephenson (Chair of Building Trade Operatives).Some trade union leaders supported campaigns by avowedly anti-socialist groups such as Aims of Industry and the Economic League. In 1952 the New Statesman reported that recent Aims of Industry literature had included essays by - or under the name of, perhaps - Florence Hancock of the TUC General Council and Bob Edwards, the General Secretary of the Chemical Workers' Union, who was later to be found on the Advisory Council of the anti-communist organisation, Common Cause.(17)
== The Trades Union Congress and the state ==
 
Bevin's 'integration' into the British state meant a role for the TUC in the overseas state, the empire, as well as in Britain itself; and before and during the war the TUC began working with the Foreign and Colonial offices - a relationship about which few trade unionists knew - or know - anything at all.(18) As one of the Colonial Office officials quoted by Weiler said, with the clarity of simpler times, the TUC could be relied upon to guide young trade unions in the empire into becoming 
:'trades unions which the employers in the colony would feel they could respect and trust and which could be relied upon loyally to keep an agreement.'(19) 
In 1948, a member of the US State Department, Third Secretary at the London Embassy, Herbert E. Weiner, reported from London on 'Attitude of Trades Union Congress Towards World Federation of Trade Unions and American International Trade Union Leaders', and wrote: 
:'When asked how the Trades Union Congress hoped to prevent the Communists from using the technique of bona fide forms of trade union action in order to infiltrate unions in Germany and in "undeveloped"(colonial) areas, my informant said ........:in areas where trade unionism is undeveloped e.g. colonial areas, the Trades Union Congress through the British Labour Attaches keeps in close touch with Communist union activities'.(20) 
In the 1970s the TUC seconded two of its international staff to the Foreign Office. This caused a minor furore when it was brought to the attention of the TUC members.(21) Alan Hargreaves, TUC International Secretary in the 1970s, came to the TUC from the Foreign Office and refused to discuss his Foreign Office work.(22) 
Attacked by the socialists - and communists - on the left at home, and working against the left abroad with the Colonial and Foreign Offices, little wonder that the TUC slipped so comfortably into the Cold War role allotted to it.
== Notes ==
Please note: details of the books and articles cited in these footnotes are in the bibliography at the end of the essay, indexed by author's surname. 
1.There is wide-spread confusion about whether or not to capitalise the 'L' in left or the 'R' in right. I will try to stick to this rule: capital letters only when proper nouns; thus British Left and the left.
2.Or am I being naive to be surprised that the one period in British twentieth history when there may have been something like a pre-revolutionary climate seems under researched? Stephen White, in 1975, offered a glimpse of a dense hinterland of largely short-lived parties and groups forming on the right in Britain in this period. Stephen White, 'Ideological Hegemony and Political Control: the sociology of anti-Bolshevism 1918-1920' in Scottish Labour History Society Journal, No. 98, June 1975. See also Webber 1987, and John Hope's 'Fascism, the Security Service and the Curious
Career of Maxwell Knight and James McGuirk Hughes' in Lobster 22. 
3.See, for example. 'In The Excess of Their Patriotism: the National Party and Threats of Subversion' by Chris Wrigley in Wrigley (ed.). Of the groups which appeared in this period only the Economic League survived into Mrs Thatcher's era. 
4.Middlemas p. 151.
5.This mirrored what was happening elsewhere in Europe, notably Germany and Italy. See, for example, Scott Newton's 'The economic background to appeasement and the search for Anglo-German detente before and during World War 2', in Lobster 20.
6.Blank p. 14.
7.Farr, thesis, p. 179. See also Wrigley, 'In The Excess' pp. 108 and 9, and 'Sir Allan Smith, the
Industrial Group and the Politics of Unemployment 1919-24' by Terence Rodgers, in Davenport-Hines (ed.).
8.Ibid. pp. 222-5.
9.Patrick Hannon's abortive attempt to create an Industrial Group of MPs and union leaders using the British Commonwealth Union is in Barbara Lee Farr's thesis. Her information came from the Hannon papers in the House of Lords. I was alerted to this remarkable piece of work by John Hope. 
Rodgers, in note 7, does not cite Farr's work and gives slightly different figures for the size of the Industrial Group of MP's, while quoting the same source, namely the Hannon papers. See his footnotes 13 and 16. Hannon's obituary appeared in The Times, 11 January 1963.
10.Frank Longstreth, 'The City, Industry and the State' in Crouch (ed.).
11.See, for example, Newton and Porter.
12.Longstreth, ibid. p. 171. 
13.This is a major theme of the Alan Bulloch biography of Ernest Bevin, for example.
14.Weiler p. 19.
15.I discussed this in Lobster 28, p. 11.
16.Minkin, Contentious Alliance, p. 83.
17.New Statesman, 12 January 1952. See also H.H. Wilson, 'Techniques of Pressure - Anti-Nationalisation Propaganda' in Public Opinion Quarterly, Summer 1951. Edwards' obituary in The Independent, 25 June 1990 noted that he had been a member of the ILP and was an enemy of the Communist Party. His was thus an improbable name on the list of labour movement figures who had allegedly helped the KGB supplied by former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky. See Gordievsky pp. 286
and 7.
18.'At least since the foundation of the International Affairs Department, TUC staff have kept
close contact with the Foreign Office, a practice which persists to the present day.' Harrod p. 105. The study by Marjorie Nicholson of this subject does not mention the International Affairs Department, though as Anthony Carew pointed out, this may tell us nothing as she worked in the Colonial/Commonwealth Department. For a more critical view see Peter Weiler, chapter 1.
19.Ibid. p. 29.
20.My thanks to John Booth for this document. On the origins of this see Majorie Nicholson, chapter 6, especially pp. 209-11, and Weiler chapter 1.
21.See Thompson and Larson pp. 27-8, and New Statesman, 16 November, 1979, 'FO reinforces TUC
links', for two examples. I do not know if this practice pre-dates the 1970s.
22.See the New Statesman, 20 April 1979 for the TUC's response, and 'TUC's foreign policy' by Patrick Wintour, New Statesman, 2 March 1979. 
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== U.S. influence after the war ==
I do not want to re-run the long debate about the origins of the Cold War or - in particular - the causes of the break-up of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) in 1949, except to say that it is pretty clear now, with this much hindsight, that by then the British trade union leaders were determined to break the WFTU - whatever the Soviet bloc had done - and this would have been pushed through, supported by the Americans.(23) As Dennis MacShane MP demonstrates in his book,(24) the European social democratic trade union movement was not going to coexist with the Soviet bloc, either. If the USA leaned on the door, as Peter Weiler and what might loosely be called 'the left' believe, it was half open already - and was never going to shut again. Into this domestic anti-communist climate came the USA's loans - and the people and ideas, the strings attached to the
money. 
From the first request from Churchill for clandestine assistance before America had officially entered the war, the US 'aid' had come with strings attached. Despite his famous remark that he had not taken office to oversee the destruction of His Majesty's empire, Churchill had actually done precisely that to pay for the war: and the process continued after it. It was left to some of the Tory Right and some of the Labour Left - the same groups that are still sceptical of the European Union - to oppose the acceptance of the conditions attached to the post-war US loans.
== The Council on Foreign Relations ==
Planning for the US takeover of the countries of non-communist Europe was done, during the war, in the Council on Foreign Relations, the informal, semi-secret, think tank-cum-social club of the East
Coast elite - the bankers, the lawyers and managers of US international capital.(25) But when the war ended the details had not been worked out, and there was significant domestic opposition to be taken into consideration. The result was that in the chaos of the post-war years the American 'interventionists', as Pisani calls them, had to improvise.(26) The 'coordination of public and private efforts was achieved by using the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as a clearing house for projects'.(27) It was CFR personnel, for example, who raised money to intervene in the Italian elections of 1947.(28) And in the immediate post-war years the political interventionist picture is complicated: there was nothing like the clear-cut overt/covert dichotomy which we think characterised US foreign policy when things settled down into the State Department/ CIA mix perceived after the sixties.(29) 
== The Economic Cooperation Agency ==
At the most overt level, there was the Economic Cooperation Agency (ECA) which doled out the dollars in support of what is known as multilateral trade: that is, the ECA sought to break down barriers against American goods. A former acting head of the ECA said that: 
:'In everything we did we sought to change or to strengthen opinions - opinions about how to build free world strength, about America's role, cooperative effort by Europeans, investment, productivity, fiscal stability, trade measurement, industrial competition, free labour unions etc.'(30) 
But ECA also had what we would call a covert arm and ran psychological warfare operations.(31) In France, 
:'The ECA mission chief wore two hats. He was the conduit for economic assistance and defense
mobilisation, as well as for psychological and economic warfare components provided by the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC).'(32) 
As part of that psychological warfare programme, for example, the ECA persuaded the British TUC to produce - a least put its name to - a report on productivity subsequently used all over Europe. 'The ECA mission in London distributed a large number of copies abroad, urged its translation into foreign languages and prepared numerous press releases and feature articles for planting in the British and foreign press.' The US London Embassy's Labour Information Officer William Gausmann reported that 'from a trade union point of view, this is the most valuable document that has been produced under ECA auspices to date.'(33)
== The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) ==
The OPC, the first of the euphemistic cover names of US covert action agencies in the post-war era, was formed in 1948, staffed and run by the newly created CIA but nominally under the control of the State Department. In effect the CIA's covert arm, by 1952 the OPC had forty-seven stations, 2,812 staff and a budget of $84 million.(34) Much of this growth had been funded by money from the Marshall Plan.(35) What we now think of as the CIA, that is the covert operation, intervention arm of US multi-national capital - the post-war bogey man supreme for the left - began as the enforcement arm of the Marshall Plan, engaged in operations against the left and the trade unions of Europe, communist or non-communist. The OPC was the US administration's recognition that the ECA alone couldn't 'get the job done'.(36) 
== Labour Attachés ==
Another weapon in the post-war US armoury was the Labour Attache programme which was established towards the end of the war. In the words of one its creators, Philip Kaiser, 'the labor attache 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....' (Emphasis added)(37) The first Labour Attache in London was Sam Berger, who, in the words of Denis Healey, 
:'By developing good personal relations with many key figures in the British Labour movement at the end of the war, including Sam Watson and Hugh Gaitskell, exerted an enduring influence on British foreign policy.'(38) 
Philip Kaiser commented that Berger 
:'had extraordinary access to many members of the [Attlee] cabinet, including the prime minister. It was universally recognised that he was the key member of our embassy.'(39)(emphasis added) 
There were also 'Labour Information Officers' attached to the Marshall Plan staff in the US Embassy in London. One such, William Gausman, 
:'in May 1950 began discussions with a section of the leadership of the Clerical and Allied Workers Union on how to eliminate communists from the union..... 
:'cultivated the leadership of the Birmingham Labour Party, whose journal, The Town Crier, closely
supported Atlanticism and American foreign policy objectives in general..... 
:'convened a group in South Wales....to launch a Labour-oriented newspaper, The Democrat.... 
:'worked unofficially on Socialist Commentary"' .....and became a founder member of its offshoot, the Socialist Union, 'which served as a think tank for the emerging Gaitskellite wing of the Labour Party..... 
:'liaised, advised, wrote, lectured, published - and helped IRD [the Information Research Department] with the distribution of one of their early publications, The Curtain Falls.'(40) 
The US post-war penetration of the British Labour Party and wider trade union movement climaxes with Joe Godson, who was Labour Attache in London from 1953-59. Godson became very close to the Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell - to the point where Gaitskell and Godson were writing Labour Party policies and planning campaigns against their enemy, Aneuran Bevan. For example, after a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party to discuss the expulsion of Bevan, Gaitskell recorded how he 'drove to the Russell Hotel, where I saw Sam Watson with Joe Godson, the Labour Attache at the American Embassy.'(41) 
The leader of the Labour Party is discussing Executive Committee tactics with the US Labour Attache! This is one of the dividing lines of this essay. You either think is this unexceptional, uninteresting - even a good thing - or you do not. I do not. I think it is rather shocking; and I think that would have been the reaction of most of the Executive Committee at the time had they been made aware of it. In a footnote on p. 384 of the Gaitskell Diaries, editor Philip Williams writes, 
:'Godson, Sam Watson's close friend....thanks to his trade union post was, like many labour attaches, seen as representing his country's workers rather than its government. But Gaitskell came in time to feel that he was involving himself too deeply in Labour Party affairs.'(42) 
It may even be more complex than this for there is evidence that the Labour Attache posts have been used as cover by the CIA. Jonathan Kwitney of the Wall Street Journal tracked down one Paul Sakwa, who told him that he had been the case officer for Irving Brown, the most important CIA agent in the labour movement in Europe, handling Brown's budget of between $150,000 and $300,000 a year, between 1952 and 1954. From being Brown's case officer in Washington, Sakwa went on to a post under cover as the Assistant Labour Attache at the US embassy in Brussels.(43) 
It was about the CIA - but not just them. The CIA was only one of many agencies working in Britain in the post-war years. Labour Attaches reported, formally anyway, to the State Department. In the end, would it make any difference to know that Joe Godson had really been a genuine employee of the State Department, and not CIA under cover as we might have once suspected?
== Notes ==
23.This thesis has been most convincingly articulated
by Peter Weiler.
24.International Labour and the Origins of the Cold
War, Clarendon, Oxford, 1992.
25.See Shoup and Minter.
26.I guess 'interventionist' is less offensive to the American academic ear than imperialist. 'The
determination to intervene in Europe between 1945 and 1948 was fragmented, uncoordinated.' Pisani pp. 40 and 41.
27.Ibid. p 4.
28.'James Forrestal raised private money for the Italian elections of 1947. His initiative 'signalled an end to the notion that redemocratizing European countries could be accomplished simply by regenerating their economies'. Ibid. p. 67.
29.I put it as 'think' because the reality was never that neat and tidy.
30.Cited in Carew p. 84.
31.Pisani p. 91.
32.Ibid. p. 96. ECA 'does engage in some gray and black propaganda' but 'the programmes represent a very small percentage of the total effort and are coordinated with the CIA' Ibid . p. 12.
33.Carew p. 153.
34.Ranelagh p. 135.
35.'From its creation in 1948 until 1952 when the Marshall Plan was terminated, the OPC operated as the plan's complement.' Pisani p. 70.
36.Ibid. p. 67.
37.Kaiser p. 113 'The labor attache...had...an unusual opportunity to enhance American influence
among individuals and institutions that historically have no contact with U.S. diplomatic missions'. Ibid. p. 119.
38.Denis Healey p. 113. Berger has two innocuous entries in the Gaitskell Diaries, and the footnote
from the editor, Philip Williams, on p. 120 that he was 'first secretary at the U.S. Embassy'.
39.Kaiser p.120.
40.Carew pp. 128 and 9.
41.Godson obituary in The Times, 6 September 1986. See Gaitskell Diary ed. Philip Williams, pp. 339-41. Carew p. 129 notes that there was some conflict between Gausmann and Joseph Godson, apparently reflecting divisions within the US labour movement. He discusses these differences on pp. 84-5.
42.Godson's son, Roy, who appears on the same trade union/spook circuit in the 1970s, married Sam Watson's daughter. Watson was one of the most important trade union leaders in the post-war period, chairman of the National Executive Committee's International Committee and a 'liaison officer' between the Parliamentary Labour Party and the major unions.
43.Kwitney pp. 334-5 
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== Post-war: private sector propaganda begins to regroup ==
As the war ended domestic politics returned to normal. The propaganda organisations of domestic capital restarted, though without the frenzy which had marked the post 1918 period. Their big issue was the threat of nationalisation of companies. The so-called Mr Cube Campaign of 1949/50, against the possibility of the nationalisation of the sugar industry, spent an estimated £250,000 in that year.(44) The campaign had been jointly organised by the sugar company, Tate and Lyle, and Aims of Industry, an anti-socialist pressure group formed in 1942 by a group of well known British
industrialists. The Aims original Council had representatives from Fords, English Electric, Austin, Rank, British Aircraft, Macdougall's and Firestone Tyres.(45) There were also smaller campaigns by the Cement Makers Federation, the Iron and Steel Federation and by the insurance companies represented by the British Insurance Association.(46) The Road Haulage Association sponsored anti-nationalisation campaigns by the British Housewives' League, led by Dorothy Crisp.(47) 
By 1949 Aims of Industry had 'twelve area offices blanketing the industrial sections of Britain. For the fiscal year 1949-50 expenditures were budgeted for an an additional anticipated income of £260,000'.(48) The pre-war tradition, discussed below, of newspapers reprinting anti-left briefings from Conservative Party groups or fronts, continued with Aims of Industry. Aims estimated that they had gained 93,178 column-inches of editorial space in 1949, worth over £1,800,000.(49) In the first six months of 1949 Aims claims to have had 41 radio broadcasts on the Home or Light programmes of the BBC; and just before the election of 1950 in January, 362 magazines and newspapers gave 11,269 column inches to Aims-inspired stories. Aims magazine, The Voice of Industry, thanked the British press for their 'impartial partnership', in March 1950, noting that 'News about the achievements of private enterprise and the failures of nationalisation and state control has been of sufficient value to editors for them to have given it space in their columns free.'(50) 
The Economic League survived the war. In 1951 it claimed to have held 20,058 meetings and 57,505 group talks in the previous year; distributed 18 million leaflets, and obtained 31,064 column inches of press publicity; it employed 50 full-time speakers, 27 part-time speakers and 37 leaflet distributors; had a full-time staff of 135, owned 43 vehicles etc.(51) These figures apparently describing massive campaigns by Aims and the League have to be treated with caution. They might well be exaggerated and it is not clear how successful they were. For all this anti-Labour propaganda, Labour's total vote went up in the 1951 General Election. 
== The Information Research Department ==
In the labour movement the Trades Union Congress was working with the newly-formed, Foreign Office-based, political warfare executive, operating under cover as the Information Research Department (IRD), in an anti-communist drive. IRD was not an innovation. British politics since World War 1 is studded with clandestine propaganda operations involving the mass media of the day. The claims of massive post-World War 2 media penetration by Aims of Industry and the Economic League are reminiscent of the operations of the post World War 1 propaganda network operated by Sydney Walton, described in Keith Middlemas' wonderful book about British political history.(52) In the great Bolshevik panic following the First World War, funded by the industrial sources like the Engineering Employers' Federation, Sydney Walton 
:'took the main propaganda role from a variety of front organisations, set up during the war, such as the British Empire League, the British Workers' League, the National Democratic and Labour Party, and the National Unity Movement, all of whom had been in receipt of industrial subscriptions'. 
With a budget of £100,000 a year - about what, £20 million in today's money? - Walton's 'information service' was supplied with information by the Special Branch and the intelligence services of the day. Walton eventually claimed to be able to put 'authoritative signed articles' in over 1,200 newspapers.(53) Parallel to the Walton network, another group of major employers formed National Propaganda,(54) which evolved into the Economic League.(55) McIvor tells us that the League by 1926 had formed an Information and Research Department,(56) was organising in 'cells',(57) and was forming 1000 study groups a year.(58) 
The state followed suit. In 1919 it formed the Supply and Transport Committee and prepared to run two separate propaganda organisations in an emergency, headed by..... Admiral Blinker Hall of National Propaganda and Sydney Walton.(59) After 1922, this network had largely been abandoned, and Middlemas makes the point that while Walton spent over £25,000 in the first six months of the 1926 General Strike, this was spent on publicity, advertising and speakers - not on the bribing of journalists and his earlier techniques.(60) Out of this milieu - and the changes in tactics it went through - emerged the Economic League. 
The Conservative Party had also been busy between the wars developing propaganda systems through which it issued, sometimes under its own name, sometimes under cover of fronts, pro-Conservative material to the newspapers for them to 'top and tail' and present as normal, internally-generated copy.(61) 
These examples of how to manipulate the media had been learned by others in the British state system and a few years later Neville Chamberlain and other supporters of the appeasement policy secretly bought and ran the weekly newspaper Truth. This was largely an operation run by the former MI5 officer and eminence grise of the time, Sir Joseph Ball. Ball used the official government information machine to push the Chamberlain line, formed the National Publicity Bureau to do the same and, in 1937, through a frontman, Lord Luke of Pavenham, bought Truth, and proceeded to use it to denigrate the opponents of Chamberlain and appeasement.(62)
== IRD's genesis ==
Former Labour Minister Christopher Mayhew still thinks he was responsible for the creation of IRD.(63) In fact its origins are a good deal earlier. In March 1946 Frank Roberts in the British Embassy in Moscow began sending telegrams to London warning of Soviet imperialism and aggression.(64) In April the Russia Committee of the Foreign Office was formed. In its second meeting on May 7 1946, the Committee decided to set up a propaganda organisation.(65) It was then just a question of getting the Labour Cabinet to approve the proposal. On the way junior Foreign Office Minister, Christopher Mayhew, proposed such a propaganda offensive in October 1947, and the
combination of deteriorating political circumstances and a proposal from within the Party itself swung the day and the Cabinet approved the formation of this outfit in January 1948. In the second volume of his Diaries, Robert Bruce-Lockhart, who had been a part of the war-time clandestine propaganda system, records on 4 February 1948 that he dined with Christopher Warner who had just become the Assistant Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in charge of 'our Information Services'. Warner offered a new version of the origins of IRD, telling Lockhart that As a result of a paper
put up by the Imperial Defence College, F.O. [Foreign Office] have decided to renew political warfare on a limited scale.' (emphasis added)(66) 
In Foreign Secretary Bevin's presentation to the Cabinet he spoke of Britain as a 'third force', who would 'give a lead in the spiritual, moral and political sphere to all democratic elements in Western Europe'. The line was to be neither Washington nor Moscow, apparently.(67) How seriously Bevin intended this we do not know. But however nicely it was being dressed up, this was pretty clearly part of the developing anti-communist struggle. Mayhew said so in a memo to Bevin. In any case, why would propaganda in favour of social democracy have to be hidden?(68) 
IRD was in a kind of management limbo between MI6, who supplied it with some of its information and tasks, and the Foreign Office, whose budget concealed it. IRD was, very clearly, simply the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) reborn - another example of the ability of intelligence agencies, once established, to survive the vagaries of their nominal masters in the political system. 
IRD was a triple layer. On the surface was its formal cover within the Foreign Office as an information and research department. Beneath that was IRD's role as a propaganda organisation, dispensing white (true) and grey (half true) propaganda in briefings to journalists and politicians. But beneath that was the third layer, the 'black' or psychological warfare (psywar) tier. This third tier is hinted at in the Foreign and Commonwealth Offices recently published
history of IRD's origins . On p. 7 it notes that in September 1948 - i.e. almost immediately - 'part of the costs of the unit [were] transferred to the secret vote......the move would.....avoid the unwelcome scrutiny of operations which might require covert or semi-covert means of execution.'(69) 
There is little evidence of Bevin's 'third force' notions in IRD's work once the politicians' backs were turned and they had moved on to another item on the agenda. The minutes of a 1950 meeting between IRD officials and their U.S. counterparts show no evidence at all such concepts. Christopher Warner, one of the 'fathers' of IRD, talks exclusively of anti-communist activities.(70) 
IRD eventually had representatives in all British Embassies abroad. In the recollection of a former MI6 officer of the period, IRD was involved in 'some of the more dubious intelligence operations which characterised the early years of the cold war.'(71) Former Ambassador Hilary King was told by a former SIS officer who had worked in Germany after the war trying to estimate Soviet bloc tank strength, that IRD circulated a paper on the subject over-estimating that strength by a factor of 40.(72) When the SIS officer complained about the inaccuracy of the estimate he was told by an IRD official 'what does it matter old boy as long as the Labour government [i.e. of Attlee] push
through rearmament.' At home, in its second level role, IRD wrote papers and briefing notes, and planted stories in the media. Mayhew remembers that 'at home, our service was offered to and accepted by, large numbers of selected MP's, journalists, trade union leaders, and others, and was often used by BBC's External Services. We also developed close links with a syndication agency and various publishers.'(73) The 1950 minutes of the IRD-US talks include Ralph Murray's comment that 'Trade Union organisations and various groups are used to place articles under the by-line of well known writers.'(74) Among individuals who received IRD material were Percy Cudlipp of the Co-operative Movement, Herbert Tracey, pub-licity director of the TUC and the Labour Party, and Denis Healey, then the Party's International Secretary.(75) 
==The Freedom and Democracy Trust==
Part of this anti-communist programme was the creation of 'an influential group, including several members of the [TUC] General Council, which was determined to root out the communists.'(76) Among the group were George Chester (General Secretary of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives), George Gibson (former TUC chair), Lincoln Evans (General Secretary
of the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation [ISTC]) Andrew Naesmith (General Secretary of the Amalgamated Weavers' Association), Alf Roberts (General Secretary of the National Association of Card, Blowing and Ring Room Operatives, later on the Board of the Bank of England), G. H. Bagnall (TUC General Council representative; General Secretary in 1939 of National Union of Dyers, Bleachers and Textile Workers), John Brown (ISTC) and Tom O'Brien (Kine Employees).(77) In
April 1948 this group became the Freedom and Democracy Trust, and began publishing a periodical called Freedom First. with the help of IRD.(78) 
Unfortunately for all concerned, mixing with the founders of the Trust was an American businessman
called Sydney Stanley, and the whole enterprise was 'blown' when Stanley became the centrepiece of the infamous Lansky Tribunal hearings into civil service corruption during the winter of 1948. Not only did Stanley have many pre-war contacts with the U.S unions, he adopted the robust American attitude to officialdom: bribe it when you have to. But he got caught. 
== Notes ==
44.Finer p. 94.
45.See H.H. Wilson for an account of the Mr Cube campaign. Aims Council personnel is from Kisch p. 28.
46.See Crofts, chapter 14 for these examples.
47.See ibid. pp. 99-109, especially p. 106 where the League's funding by the Road Haulage Association, then distantly threatened with nationalisation, is discussed. Best account is Hinton's. Dorothy Crisp is the historical figure who most resembles Margaret
Thatcher.
48.H.H. Wilson p. 228.
49.Crofts p. 216. For more details of alleged activities, see also the pamphlet The FBI, (Federation of British Industry) Labour Research Department, 1949.
50.H.H. Wilson pp. 229 and 238. Kisch p. 37 claims that by the late 1950s Aims 'controlled no less than twenty-six monthly, weekly and quarterly publications [and] edited and produced forty-five house magazines for the Tate and Lyle organisation, the Express Dairy and other organisations as well as the house magazines of most of the leading members of the 4,000 or so companies who constituted its chief supporters'.
51.Labour Research, July 1952. As late as 1981 it had 130 full-time employees. See the Daily Telegraph, 26 January 1981.
52.Politics in Industrial Society, Andre Deutsch, 1979.
53.Ibid. pp. 131/2.
54.Ibid.
55.See, for example, McIvor's essays.
56.Echoed - intentionally? - twenty years later by the state's IRD.
57.	McIvor 'A Crusade...' p. 641.
58.Ibid p. 646.
59.Middlemas pp. 153/4.
60.Ibid p. 354.
61.See 'The Party, Publicity and the Media' by Richard Cockett in Seldon and Ball (eds.), especially pp. 550-553.
62.Cockett pp. 9-12.
63.Mayhew p.107 where he cites the memo he wrote in late 1947 to Bevin. Philip M. Taylor in his 'The Projection of Britain Abroad, 1945-51', writes that 'The IRD was formed at the Foreign Office as a direct response to increasingly hostile Soviet propaganda in the wake of the communist coup in Prague, the escalating blockade of West Berlin and mounting pressure on Finland.' Taylor in Michael Dockrill and John W. Young (eds.) 1989.
64.See, for example, Ray Merrick; and, more recently, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's own publication, IRD: Origins and Establishment of the Foreign Office Research Department 1946-48, (History Notes, August 1995).
65.Ibid. p. 458 This is before the Cominform rejection of the Marshall Plan, for example, over a
year away in 1947; before even the March arrest of Dr Allan Nunn May and the revelation of the
Canadian-based Soviet spy ring; and before Churchill's American speech in which he first used the term 'Iron Curtain'.
66.Kenneth Young (ed.) p. 648.
67.Merrick p. 465.
68.Best account of IRD's early years is in Lucas and
Morris.
69.See note 21 above.
70.Notes on a meeting between Christopher Warner and Edward Barnett, in London, Saturday May 20, 1950, in Foreign Relations of the United States, Government Printing Office, Washington DC, 1977, pp. 1641-6.
71.Verrier, Looking Glass, p. 52 . Someone might usefully re-examine all the forgeries in the first
phase of the Cold War and what influence - if any - they had on policy-making. Two examples are discussed in Sulzberger pp. 345-7. In 1948, having discovered that something called 'Protocol M', alleging secret Comintern instructions to the West German communists was a forgery, a month late he is offered another one in Italy, 'Plan K', plans for an alleged communist insurgency. He comments that there is 'a network of forgers and falsifiers ...busily peddling allegedly secret documents to embassies, intelli-gence officers, ministries and correspondents'. (p. 346) 'Protocol M' is reproduced in Appendix II of Heilbrunn.
72.Telephone conversation with author, June 27, 1987.
73.Mayhew p. 111. There are some details of this in the FCO publication in footnote 64 above.
74.Foreign Relations op. cit.
75.Weiler p. 216.
76.Ibid. p. 217 citing The Times, February 10, 1948.
77.Weiler op. cit. fn 184, p. 369.
78.Ibid. fn 189 citing The Times, 2 December 1948. 
--------------------------------------------------------------------
==Common Cause and IRIS==
The failure of the Freedom and Democracy Trust seems
to have deterred the TUC members from creating another
body so directly linked to the TUC General
Council.(79) Instead, some individual members of the
General Council, who had been involved in the Freedom
and Democracy Trust fiasco, joined a private group
with the same anti-communist aims. This was Common
Cause, whose origins are to be found in the merging of
two quite distinct political strands. 
==The AEU's 'Club'==
One strand was the clandestine anti-communist (and
anti-socialist) organisation in British trade unions,
of which the best example is to found within the
Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU). Within the AEU, 
'An anti-Communist organisation was established at
meetings of the fifty-two-member national committee,
their ruling body in 1943 and 1944, and was followed a
few years later by a loose national organisation,
working in secret and known as "the side" or the
"antis" which succeeded in removing a good many
communists from office.'(80) 
This was the organisation which later came to be known
as 'the Club' or 'the Group', and 'defined its purpose
in terms of preventing a Communist takeover of the
union'.(81) 
'In the mid 1950s ..... the Right-wing members of the
Executive Council began attending the factional
meeting. In this period also a National Committee
"Club" organiser was discreetly appointed from amongst
the regular delegates to tighten the organisation of
the Right-wing faction(82)....At all National
Committee meetings during the period from 1956 to 1970
the right-wing controlled all places on the Standing
Orders Committee, and J. Ramsden, organiser of the
National Committee "Club" for nine years, was also
Chairman of its Standing Orders Committee for seven of
them. With [President] Carron in the Chair at the
National Committee and the union Secretaryship also
held by a "Club" member for the whole of the period,
procedural control by the Right was overwhelming.'(83)
The late Ernie Roberts MP quotes from a report of a
1951 meeting of 'the Club' (infiltrated by a member of
the left in the union), and notes that the principal
figure was Cecil Hallett, then AEU General
Secretary.(84) 
==Common Cause==
This clandestine trade union anti-socialism joined up
with an Anglo-American anti-communist group called
Common Cause. The American group was formed in January
1947 as Common Cause Incorporated, by Mrs Natalie
Wales Latham (nee Paine). Among the great and the good
on its letterhead National Council were Adolph Berle
Jnr, Max Eastman, Sumner Welles and Hodding Carter.
Another well-known member was Clare Booth Luce, wife
of the owner of Time, Henry Luce, and later US
Ambassador to Italy. In his biography of Mrs Luce,
Alden Hatch notes that as early as 1946, before its
official launch, Common Cause had established liaison
with the anti-Soviet group, Russian Solidarists,
better known as NTS, and that John Foster Dulles was
the organisation's 'unofficial adviser'.(85) Hatch
also notes that Mrs Wales Latham became Lady Malcolm
Douglas-Hamilton - the only link I am aware of between
the US and UK groups. For when the British Common
Cause was formally launched in 1952, its first joint
chairs were John Brown, ex General Secretary of the
Iron and Steel Trades Confederation and member of the
TUC General Council and the self-same Lord Malcolm
Douglas-Hamilton MP.(86) 
The British Common Cause, however, had been in
existence for some years before its official launch,
originally very much as the vehicle of Dr. C. A.
Smith, one of the more interesting mavericks of the
British Left in the 20th century. Smith met Trotsky in
the 1933, was Chairman of the Independent Labour Party
from 39-41, quit and joined Common Wealth as its
Research Officer in 1941. When some of the Common
Wealth party left to join the Labour Party, Smith
became Chair of Common Wealth. As the nature of the
Stalinist takeover of Eastern Europe became clear in
1947, Smith tried to take Common Wealth with him in
his increasingly anti-Soviet stance. They baulked and
eventually Smith left the party and joined or formed -
which is not clear - Common Cause in Easter 1948.(87) 
==The British League for European Freedom==
Whatever the British Common Cause amounted to in 1948,
four years before its official launch, it had joined
forces with the British League for European Freedom
(BLEF), the first organisation formed in this country
in direct response to the Soviet Union's takeover in
Eastern Europe. The BLEF had been initiated in 1944 by
a quartet of Tory MP's, including Victor Raikes, a
pre-war member of the Imperial Policy Group.(88)
Despite the dominance of Tory MPs, the BLEF attracted
a trio of Labour MPs: Ivor Thomas (who defected to the
Tories in 1950 after the publication of his book The
Socialist Tragedy); George Dallas, former TUC General
Council member and Labour MP, Chair of the Labour
Party's International Committee during the war; and
Richard Stokes MP. Stokes was a 'socialist' of the
most idiosyncratic kind, having been a member of the
anti-Semitic Right Club before the war.(89) Although
information on these groups in this period is very
thin, it is clear that Common Cause and the BLEF were
very close. In 1950, for example, Common Cause
published a pamphlet, Communism and Democracy, by
Smith, in which he said he was writing as a member of
the BLEF. The two groups shared an office in Elizabeth
Street in London donated by the wealthy Duke of
Westminster.(90) 
The Duchess of Atholl, one of the founders of the
BLEF, notes in her autobiography that the decline in
the BLEF's 'political work' was attributable to the
arrival of Common Cause, and from then on the BLEF
'concentrated its efforts on bringing home to people
the unhappy plight of the many Displaced Persons still
in Germany.'(91) This is something of a euphemism for
the BLEF's role as support group for Eastern European
exile groups such as the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of
Nations (ABN) then being run by the Secret
Intelligence Service (SIS). The BLEF produced an
offshoot, the Scottish League for European Freedom,
headed by Victor Raikes' colleague in the Imperial
Policy Group, the Earl of Mansfield. In 1950 the
Scottish League organised a conference in Edinburgh
for Eastern European exiles, many of them Nazi war
criminals and collaborators, who had been recruited by
SIS. They had been moved to the UK during the scramble
at the end of World War 2 by the British and American
governments for good, reliable, anti-Soviet 'assets'.
(92) 
==Common Cause USA==
In the USA the fledgling CIA had sponsored a front
organisation, the National Committee for a Free Europe
(NCFE). NCFE's 'sister organisation' was Common Cause
Inc., which included among its personnel 'many of the
men - Adolf Berle, Arthur Bliss Lane, and Eugene
Lyons, among others - who simultaneously led
CIA-financed groups such as the NCFE and, later, the
American Committee for Liberation from
Bolshevism.'(93) Christopher Simpson notes that it was
Common Cause Inc. which, in 1948, sponsored the NTS
founder on a tour of the United States. (94) Just as
the British League for European Freedom became the
sponsor for the British exile groups in the
Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), Christopher
Emmet, Chairman of the American Common Cause Inc,
turns up later as head of the American Friends of the
Captive Nations, the domestic support group for the
CIA-sponsored Assembly of Captive Nations (ACEN).(95) 
The BLEF's George Dallas was one of those who stayed
close to American interests. He became preoccupied
with the danger of a communist take-over in China, and
formed the Friends of Free China Association, with
himself as chair and the Duchess of Atholl as
president. Dallas eventually attended the 1958
foundation meeting of what became the the World
Anti-Communist League. The one time socialist farm
labourer had come a long way. With him at that meeting
were Marvin Liebman, one of the key members of the US
'China Lobby', the late Yaroslav Stetsko, Ukranian
collaborator with the Germans and head of the ABN, and
Charles Edison of the John Birch Society.(96) 
==Common Cause UK==
The official, 1952-launched Common Cause was
apparently founded by Neil Elles, Peter Crane (on both
of whom, more below) and C.A. Smith. Lord Malcolm
Douglas-Hamilton, then a Scottish Tory MP, and John
Brown were joint chairs. Brown had been the Treasurer
of the Freedom and Democracy Trust which had tried to
launch Freedom First five years before. It set up a
national structure with local branches - in 1954 there
were 14 - published a monthly Bulletin, and
distributed many of the standard anti-communist texts
of the time, for example Tufton Beamish's Must Night
Fall?; some, such as the 'Background Books' series,
published and/or subsidised by IRD; and leaflets from
the CIA labour front in Europe, the International
Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).(97) 
In 1955 Common Cause's 'Advisory Council' included: 
*	Tom O'Brien and Florence Hancock, both past TUC
presidents;(98) 
*	Bob Edwards, General Secretary of the Chemical
Workers Union, 1947-51;(99) 
*	Cecil Hallett, Assistant General Secretary of the
AEU 1948-57; General Secretary 1957-64;
*	Philip Fothergill, ex President of the Liberal
Party;
*	Admiral Lord Cunningham;(100) 
*	a coterie of other retired senior military, the
Duchess of Atholl and Lord Ammon. 
Such 'advisory bodies' may mean very little: this
might just be a notepaper job. Nonetheless, some of
the 'advisory body' were people with rather
specialised interests. For example, at one point the
name of General Leslie Hollis appeared on it. Hollis
had been the Secretary of the Chiefs of Staff
committee which 'considered, with Sir Stewart Menzies,
the head of MI6, and Warner [of IRD] and William
Hayter of the Foreign Office, what form of
organisation was required to establish a satisfactory
link between the Chiefs of Staff and Foreign Office on
matters connected with the day-to-day conduct of
anti-Communist propaganda overseas.'(101) 
In the Autumn of 1955 the Common Cause Bulletin
reported that there had been moves at the Labour Party
conference that year to get it proscribed - but the
motion to that effect 'was among the many crowded out
from discussion'.(102) 
The Labour Party's intelligence-gathering
Common Cause was one of the sources of information
used by the Labour Party in its anti-communist
activities in the 1950s. While no central unit was
ever formally established 'for collecting information
or monitoring the activities of communist-inspired or
pro-Soviet groups', in practice the National Agent's
Department at Labour headquarters, Transport House,
did the job, using as sources the publications of
proscribed organisations, regional organisers'
reports, 'Foreign Office' material - i.e. IRD - and
Common Cause.(103) The National Agent's Department
[NAD] had 'lay responsibility for compiling the
[proscription] list'. Shaw notes that in 1953 the
proscription list was expanded by the addition of
eighteen fresh groups. 
'What happened was rather unusual. Without consulting
the NAD the International Department had submitted a
report to the Overseas Subcommittee on "peace" and
"friendship" societies. In response the Subcommittee
recommended that they all be proscribed. NAD officials
were never told the source of the International
Department's information though they assumed it to be
the Foreign Office [i.e. IRD] and Special
Branch.'(104) 
A glimpse of the content of the NAD's
intelligence-gathering has been provided by the late
Ian Mikardo MP, who saw 'dossiers' in the possession
of National Agent Sarah Barker At a meeting of a
subcommittee of the NEC in 1955, Sara Barker objected
to Konni Zilliacus and Ernie Roberts as prospective
Parliamentary candidates. When Barker began quoting
derogatory comments from files she had in her
possession, Mikardo demanded to see the files. 
'They were an eye-opener. No MI5, no Special Branch,
no George Smiley could have compiled more
comprehensive dossiers. Not just press-cuttings,
photographs and document references but also notes by
watchers and eavesdroppers, and all sorts of
tittle-tattle. I'm convinced that there was input into
them from government sources and from at least a
couple of Labour Attaches at the United States embassy
who were close to some of our trade union leaders,
notably Sam Watson.'(105) 
==Common Cause splits - IRIS is formed==
The pretty unstable-looking mixture of admirals, generals and trade union leaders that was Common Cause, disintegrated in 1956. C.A.Smith resigned along with Advisory Council members Fothergill, Edwards, Ammon, Professor Arthur Newell and Sydney Walton.(106) This group complained that the organisation had become 'reactionary' and that the promised democratic structure had never materialised. In August 1956 Common Cause Ltd was registered, owned and controlled by the 'reactionary' faction. 
The original directors of Common Cause Ltd were: 
*	the new chair, Peter Crane, the director of a number of British subsidiaries of American companies, including Collins Radio of England, whose American headquarters had connections with the CIA.(107) 
*	David Pelham James - Conservative MP, and Director of the Catholic publishing house, Hollis and Carter. There were a number of Catholics prominent in the Common Cause network, including the man who ran IRIS for any years, Andy McKeown. This is discussed below.
*	Neil Elles, barrister and later a member of the European-wide anti-subversion outfit, INTERDOC.(108) 
*	Christopher Blackett - a Scottish landowner and farmer and, I presume, but cannot prove, a relative of Frances Blackett, the original secretary of the British League for European Freedom, discussed above.(109) 
IRIS
More or less in parallel with the formation of Common
Cause Ltd., an industrial wing, Industrial Research
and Information Services (IRIS) Ltd. was formed and
set up in the headquarters of the National Union of
Seamen, Maritime House. Initially, IRIS Ltd listed
three directors: 
*	Jack Tanner, the recently retired President of the AEU;
*	William McLaine, General Secretary of the AEU from 1938-47;
*	and Charles Sonnex, the Secretary and Managing Director, and the link with the parent body Common Cause.(110) Also it had a manager, James L. Nash.(111) According to Labour Research (January 1961), Nash left to join the CIA labour front, the ICFTU. 
In an interview with Richard Fletcher in 1979, C. A.
Smith, attributed the formation of IRIS to Common
Cause's discovery of just how careful they had to be
about interfering in union affairs.(112) Another
proximate cause for the formation of IRIS is suggested
by the comment from the Common Cause Bulletin of
January 1956 (pp. 4/5) that 'only a near-miracle can
prevent the Executive of the AEU from passing under
communist control during 1956.....already there are
clear signs of an all-out Communist effort to put Reg
Birch in this top trade union job'. 
However, another interpretation of the Common Cause
split and the formation of IRIS is possible. In April
1955 SIS (MI6) were forced to acknowledge that their
networks of 'agents' inside the Soviet Union had all
been penetrated. Worse, the Soviets had been running a
deception operation with uncomfortable parallels with
the 'Trust' deception in the 1920s in which the Soviet
intelligence service created and ran a fake resistance
group to which the British government gave a lot of
money.(113) SIS had been using agents from Bandera's
OUN in Ukraine and from NTS.(114) Some time later that
year, SIS gave up all its emigre groups and in
February 1956 SIS handed over control of NTS to the
CIA.(115) What follows is what I surmise happened but
for which I have no evidence. Having taken control of
the British networks, new people were put in to run
things. The NTS support group in the United States was
Common Cause Inc. - with its British counterpart. In
London, the limited company Common Cause was formed
and all the trappings of members and branches were
dumped; a CIA officer or agent, under cover, the
cut-out to the Agency, was installed. (If this sounds
banal, it has to be remembered that in 1956 none of
this had ever been made public and there was no reason
for them to be anything but banal.) The American
assessment of the group's activities was that its most
important work had been, and should continue to be, in
the British trade union movement. The previous year's
attempt to have Common Cause put on the Labour Party's
proscription list was noted and a spin-off, trade
union subsidiary, was formed. Common Cause would fund
it - and act as another layer of insulation between it
and the Agency. 
IRIS activities to 1963
IRIS published a newsletter and a variety of
pamphlets. They formed 'cells' - their word - to
combat communists in the trade unions. How many cells,
we do not know; nor in how many unions other than the
AEU. They intervened in union elections. A member of
ASSET, (which became ASTMS and is currently a part of
MSF) sued IRIS and won in 1958 after IRIS News called
him a communist. In the report of the TUC annual
conference in 1960, delegates describe IRIS personnel
intervening in the Association of Engineering and
Shipbuilding Draughtsmen (AESD) and the Association of
Supervisory Staff and Technicians (ASSET). The
delegate of the latter describes IRIS News publishing
the allegation that a candidate in a union election
was a communist. Labour Research alleged an IRIS role
in the National Union of Mineworkers and the Foundry
Workers (as well as AESD and ASSET).(116) Reporting
these events, Labour Research commented on IRIS News
that 'the main feature in the paper however is and
always has been news and advice about union elections.
In most cases the paper reports that certain
candidates are "receiving communist support" '. It
seems reasonably certain - though unproven - the IRIS
was receiving some of its information from IRD. 
In putting out information - its monthly magazine and
pamphlets - and telling its readers who to vote for
and not vote for in union elections, IRIS behaved as
an exact mirror image of the groups on the left: start
a paper and put out a 'line'. The late Ernie Roberts
MP, for many years the only left-winger in the senior
ranks of the AEU - the union from whence came two of
the IRIS directors in 1956 - describes how the left in
the union and IRIS/and 'the Club' spent their time
infiltrating and reporting on each other's
meetings.(117) 
In February 1966 the left-wing magazine Voice of the
Unions, part of the opposition to IRIS within the AEU,
asked where the IRIS money was coming from and
commented, 'At one time we are told IRIS employed an
office staff of six to ten.' Almost thirty years later
we learned that some of the money had come from the
British government after Lord Shawcross had contacted
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and asked for funding
for IRIS.(118) 
Shawcross had approached Macmillan at the right time,
for 'Supermac' had become infected with the fear of
the 'communist threat'. The Radcliffe Tribunal had
reported in 1962, devoting a whole section to the
Civil Service staff associations and trade unions,
expressing concern at the number of communists and
communist sympathisers holding positions in the
unions;(119) and his administration was being
afflicted by the espionage scandals of George Blake
and Vassell - and the Profumo Affair which Macmillan
apparently believed was part of a communist conspiracy
the bring him down.(120) 
Catholic Action?
There is a distinct Catholic tinge to Common Cause and
IRIS. Hollis and Carter, the company which published
the Common Cause Bulletin, was a Catholic publishing
house. Catholics among the leading figures in Common
Cause included chairs David Pelham James(121) and
Peter Crane, Brigadier George Taylor, a director of
Common Cause circa 1958,(122) and Sir Tom O'Brien.
Catholics among the AEU/IRIS network include AEU
President Bill Carron and Jim Conway, IRIS's Cecil
Hallett, and the man who ran IRIS for nearly twenty
years, Andy McKeown.(123) So was there, as some on the
British Left believed,(124) a national Catholic Action
organisation operating in Britain, as it had in other
countries, such as Australia? Joan Keating
investigated this belief in the course of her doctoral
thesis, and though she found quite a thriving
Association of Catholic Trade unionists - the Catholic
Worker was selling 25,000 copies in 1956 - she found
no evidence at all of any national, co-ordinated
organisation.(125) 
Notes
79.	Though there is a hint that such activities may
have been continued abroad. In Coleman's book on the
Congress for Cultural Freedom (discussed below) there
is a reference to an Indian anti-communist politician,
Minoo Misani, who in the early post-war years, founded
the Democratic Research Service and published a
magazine called..... Freedom First. Coleman p. 150.
80.	Wigham, p. 128
81.	Minkin p. 180
82.	Ibid.
83.	Ibid.
84.	Roberts pp. 124/5
85.	Hatch, p. 187
86.	The Times 25 February, 1952
87.	Details on Smith from J.C. Banks, Editor of the
Common Wealth Journal. In the obituary of Smith in the
The Libertarian, the Common Wealth journal, no. 25,
Summer 1985, Smith is said to have formed Common
Cause. I believe this to be mistaken.
88.	The Imperial Policy Group was largely the work of
Kenneth de Courcy. De Courcy edited and published the
Review of World Affairs during the Second World War.
The IPG and de Courcy in particular were much disliked
by the Soviet government of the time. Since then de
Courcy has published the newsletters Intelligence
Digest and Special Office Brief. De Courcy had some
influence on the right of the Tory Party into the
1960s. See index references in Highams on De Courcy.
89.	This information from John Hope who has had access
to the Right Club's membership list. It is possible
Stokes had joined for reasons other than agreement
with the Club's aims.
90.	Duchess of Atholl p. 252
91.	Ibid.
92.	Loftus p. 204
93.	Simpson p. 222
94.	Ibid p. 223
95.	Ibid. p. 222. 'Christopher Emmet is a classic
example of those who ran the British Intelligence
fronts before and during World War II and who, having
proven themselves faithful and competent, went on to
run the CIA/MI6 fronts of the Cold War.' Mahl, thesis,
p. 198.
96.	Details of the WACL meeting is in Charles
Goldman's 'World Anti-Communist League', adapted from
Under Dackke, ed. Frik Krensen and Petter Sommerfelt
(Demos, Copenhagen, 1978). I am unsure of the source
of this Goldman article but it appears to be an early
edition of Counterspy. Dallas' career, with some of
the later associations glossed over, is described by
his son in the Dictionary of Labour Biography eds.
Saville and Bellamy, vol. 4 1977.
97.	On ICFTU and the CIA see the comments of former
CIA officers Joseph Smith (p. 138) and Philip Agee
(CIA Diary) (p. 611). For a more general discussion
see Winslow Peck. The rival but much less significant
World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) was, of
course, funded and run by the Soviet Union.
98.	Hancock had been Chief Woman Officer of the TUC.
99.	Edwards had been chair of the ILP. During 1948 the
Chemical Workers Union had been involved in protracted
proceedings over alleged forged ballot papers by
communists.
100.	In 1945, as Chief of the Defence Staff he had
threatened Attlee with resignation over proposed
defence cuts.
101.	Scott Lucas and Morris p. 101.
102.	For which, perhaps, read 'our friends fixed the
agenda'.
103.	Shaw p. 58
104.	Ibid. pp. 58 and 9 Shaw notes in footnote 44 p.
314 that 'at least one NAD official was approached by
a member of the Special Branch [and brother of a
future International Secretary] offering
"assistance".'
105.	Mikardo p. 131.
106.	The Times, April 6, 1957
107.	Collins Radio was first linked with CIA
operations by Peter Dale Scott in his unpublished
manuscript, The Dallas Conspiracy, ch. 11 p. 3. More
recently, 'Collins Radio' by Bill Kelly, in Back
Channels, (USA) Vol. 1, Number 4, lists a number of
links between the company and the CIA-controlled
anti-Castro milieu of the early 1960s
108.	On INTERDOC see Crozier pp. 49 and 81.
109.	Frances Blackett in Duchess of Atholl, p. 250.
110.	The Times, 6 April 1957
111.	IRIS News, vol. 1, no 1, 1956. According to
Anthony Carew, Nash was also a member of the AEU.
112.	Fletcher's notes of the conversation say that
that 'wealthy people got at [Common Cause executive
member Charles] Sonnex (without telling CAS) asked him
to lead IRIS. S.[onnex] remained on CC exec. Rich
people attached more importance to IRIS.'
113.	See Tom Bower's Red Web on the SIS post-war
operations and chapter 8, in particular, on the
dawning realisation that they had been taken for a
ride - again. On 'the Trust' see Andrew, Secret
Service pp. 445-8
114.	Ibid p. 165
115.	Yakovlev p. 105. Soviet publications in this
field are not famously accurate, but this account has
since been confirmed by Tom Bower's biography of SIS
chief Dick White The Perfect English Spy, pp. 206 and
7. Yakovlev quotes from what purports to be an SIS
document, 'A Proposed Statement to the NTS
Leadership', which, presuming it to be genuine, may
have been given to the Soviets by Kim Philby or George
Blake. Bower quotes a brief section from the same
document.
116.	Labour Research, January 1961, p. 10
117.	See Roberts pp. 101, 122-4, 131 157, 203.
The left-wing Engineering Voice, Christmas 1966,
reported having received 'an anonymous and undated
document purporting to describe the proceedings of a
secret meeting recently convened by supporters of the
present leadership of the AEU.' The document referred
to a 'National Group meeting' and said attending it
had been fourteen full-time officers of the AEU.
118.	Guardian, 2 January 1995, based on papers
released under the 30 year rule. See also 'Anti-red
and alive' in New Statesman, 10 February 1995.
119.	Pincher, Inside Story p. 335
120.	On Macmillan's paranoia about the 'communist
conspiracy' see Bower, Perfect English Spy pp. 308-9.
121.	A director of Hollis and Carter
122.	Keating, PhD thesis, p. 350
123.	Ferris, p. 85. Engineering Voice, March 1969,
reported a two-day conference of the Association of
Catholic Trade Unionists, at which were H.E. Matthews,
a director of Cable and Wireless and some time
director of IRIS, and Andy McKeown of IRIS. Keating
quotes McKeown as suggesting that originally IRIS was
anti-Catholic because 'Freemasonry' had a 'strong
hold' on the organisation, and claiming that the man
who initially ran IRIS, Charles Sonnex, was a Mason!
124.	One of those who believes there was a national
Catholic Action is former President of the Trades
Union Congress, Clive Jenkins. Conversation with the
author, 1995.
125.	Keating thesis, p. 335. 
----------------------------------------------------------------
==Part 2 - Atlantic Crossings==
The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Campaign for
Democratic Socialism and the CIA
As well as the programmes to inculcate American
notions of free market economics and union-management
relations - and good feelings about America - there
were operations aimed at the wider public and the
Labour Party. Large numbers of Labour MPs and trade
unionists were paid to visit the United States. Among
the Gaitskellite grouping in the Parliamentary party,
Gaitskell, George Brown, Anthony Crosland and Douglas
Jay all made visits.(1) Under the umbrella of just one
minor aspect of the Marshall Plan, the Anglo-American
Council on Productivity, 900 people from Britain -
management and unions - went on trips to the United
States to see the equivalent of 'Potemkin
villages'.(2) Hundreds of trade unions officers went
on paid visits to the US in the fifties under the
auspices of the European Productivity Agency and
groups of British union leaders were sent on three
month trade union programme run twice yearly by the
Harvard Business School.(3) 
===The Congress for Cultural Freedom===
There was a European-wide - and world-wide - programme
to boost the social democratic wings of socialist
parties and movements. 
'At Thomas Braden's suggestion and with the support of
Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner [then head of the Office
of Policy Coordination], the CIA began its covert
support of the non-Communist political left around the
world - trade unions, political parties and
international organisations of students and
journalists.'(4) 
The biggest of these programs that we are aware of was
the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF from here on),
which began in 1950 with a large conference in the US
zone in Berlin, a demonstration of the strength of
anti-Soviet feeling among some of the West's
intellectuals and a response to the Soviet 'Peace
offensive' then underway.(5) At the time funds for
these gatherings were said to have come from the
American Federation of Labour, via Jay Lovestone - a
story offered up again recently by CCF apologist Peter
Coleman in his The Liberal Conspiracy. In fact they
came from the CIA, something alleged by the Soviet
bloc's media at the time but not believed.(6) The one
thing the Congress for Cultural Freedom's paymasters
were not interested in was cultural freedom. Peter
Coleman does his best. Of the first big 1950 jamboree
he writes, 
'almost all the participants were liberals or social
democrats, critical of capitalism and opposed to
colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, racism and
dictatorship'. 
If the British delegation is anything to go by, this
is not true. Of the four British delegates named by
Coleman, one was Christopher Hollis, a right-wing
Catholic and some time Tory MP, (7) and another was
Julian Amery, one of the Tory Party's leading
imperialists! In any case 'cultural freedom' was a
euphemism for 'American capitalism'. 
===Encounter===
The CCF began publishing journals - in Britain,
Encounter, which first appeared in 1953. Encounter
became a major outlet for the 'revisionist' - i.e.
anti-socialist, anti-nationalist - thinking of the
younger intellectuals around Labour leader Hugh
Gaitskell, such as Peter Jay, Patrick Gordon-Walker,
Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland, all of whom were in
Harold Wilson's first cabinet in 1964. The 1955 CCF
conference in Milan, 'The Future of Freedom', was
attended by Crosland, Richard Crossman, Denis Healey,
Roy Jenkins and W. Arthur Lewis MP.(8) Anthony
Crosland was a member of the International Council of
the CCF: his role, said the CIA officer who was
running CCF, was 'encouraging sympathetic people' to
attend CCF conferences.(9) There is no evidence that
Crosland was witting of the CIA connection. (And none
that he was wasn't, either.) Peter Coleman(10) lists
Gaitskell, Jenkins, Crosland, Rita Hinden, Patrick
Gordon-Walker, John Strachey, Dennis Healey and
Roderick Macfarquhar as Labour writers published in
Encounter. In 1960 editor Melvin Lasky wrote to fellow
CCF officer, John Hunt, referring to 'an enormous
friendly feeling for Encounter' in the centre and
right wing of the Labour Party.(11) 
The revisionist wing of the Labour Party also had
Forward, the less glamorous (and poorer) Labour
weekly, set up to combat the influence of Tribune.
Money for Forward came from Alan Sainsbury, Chairman
of the retailers Sainsbury (whose son was to fund the
Social Democratic Party in the early 1980s), Henry
Walston, the land-owner, and the restaurateur, Charles
Forte.(12) There was also the $3000 'expenses' paid
made to Hugh Gaitskell for a talk to the Jewish Labour
Committee in the USA.(13) 
===Socialist Commentary===
As well as Encounter and Forward there was the monthly
Socialist Commentary as a vehicle for the
anti-socialists in the Labour Party. Socialist
Commentary began life as a journal of an obscure
revisionist group of German refugees but by the early
1950s it had been absorbed by the revisionist wing of
the Labour Party. In 1953 a 'Friends of Socialist
Commentary' group was set up with Gaitskell as
Treasurer.(14) 'Socialist Commentary and the Socialist
Union were plugged in direct to the USA's Marshall
Plan operation in Britain by virtue of the fact that
William Gausmann, Labour Information Officer in the
London mission, was a member of the journal's
editorial board.'(15) 
The dominant figure in Socialist Commentary was its
editor for 20 years, Rita Hinden, who had been
co-founder of the Fabian Colonial Bureau in 1940. The
Bureau, and Hinden in particular, became an important
influence on the thinking of the Labour Party - and,
to some extent of the British state - on post-war
management of the empire.(16) Hinden was also a
participant in CCF functions, wrote for Encounter, and
was described by the CIA officer in charge of CCF,
Michael Josselson, as 'a good friend of ours', on
whose advice the CIA 'relied heavily ...for our
African operations.'(17) On her death Denis Healey,
who had written widely for Socialist Commentary's
American counterpart, New Leader, said that 'Only Sol
Levitas of the American New Leader had a comparable
capacity for exercising a wide political influence
with negligible material resources.' But as Richard
Fletcher commented, 'He [Healey] obviously hadn't paid
a visit to Companies House whose register shows that
in recent years Socialist Commentary has been drawing
on a capital reserve of over �75.000.'(18) (Healey was
apparently also unaware that Sol Levitas was also
taking the CIA shilling.) 
Socialist Commentary has got to be CIA but there is
not a shred of direct evidence that I am aware of. 
===The social democratic network===
By the mid 1950s there was a palpable social
democratic network operating in and around the Labour
Party in Britain and reaching out into the British and
American states, both overt and covert. The career of
Saul Rose in this period illustrates this. After
wartime service in Army Intelligence, Rose was a
lecturer at Aberdeen University, before becoming the
Labour Party's International Secretary for three
years. He then moved to the then recently established
St Antony's College at Oxford, one of two British
institutions which sponsored Congress of Cultural
Freedom seminars in the UK. The other was Ditchley
Manor, Oxford. Both were outposts of the Foreign
Office/MI6 network.(19) (Former MP Dick Taverne,
mentioned recently that as as young man he went to a
Young Fabian conference at the other major Foreign
Office country retreat, Wilton Park....(20)) 
The same elements are visible in the contributors to
the short-lived Fabian International Review, begun in
1953. In its three years its contributors included two
academics from St Antony's, Gausmann, the Labour
Information Officer at the US embassy in London,
Douglas Jay, William Rodgers, and Mary Benson of the
Africa Bureau.(21) 
It is easy at this distance to be indignant about
Labour politicians hobnobbing with the CIA. But in
1955, say, when Saul Rose left his job as Labour's
International Secretary, the media simply did not
discuss the Anglo-American intelligence and security
services. There were Americans with money scattered
about the higher reaches of the Labour movement in
Britain; but Americans with money had been scattered
about Britain since the war years, they had been
Britain's allies only a few years before, they were
anti-Stalinist - and some of them, the labour officers
in one guise or another, were originally from the US
labour movement.(22) I think it likely that in the
1950s the Labour revisionists, the Hindens and
Croslands, believed they were taking part in a
'liberal conspiracy'(23) against the Soviet Union,
with progressive, democratic forces - people they
perceived to be like themselves. But from the CIA's
point of view, they were being run in one of the most
successful psy-war operations of the Cold War. This
operation had as one of its aims the struggle against
Stalinism; but the Americans sponsored and funded the
European social democrats not because they were social
democrats, but because social democracy was the best
ideological vehicle for the major aim of the
programme: to ensure that the governments of Europe
continued to allow American capital into their
economies with the minimum of restrictions. This aim
the revisionists in the Labour Party chose not to look
at. As the history of US imperialism since the war
shows, the US is basically uninterested in the
ideology of host governments, and has supported
everything from social democrats to the most feral,
military dictatorships in South and Central America.
But its other aims went largely unrecognised. (This,
perhaps, is a tribute to the skill of the US personnel
running the operations.) Looking at the networking of
the social democrats in the these post-war years, the
intimacy between US labour attache, Joe Godson, and
Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, which once looked so
extraordinary, now looks less some awful aberration -
and triumph for Godson - than business as usual. 
===The end-of-ideology ideology===
The strategically important thing for the United
States about the revisionist's version of socialism
was its central conclusion that ownership of economic
assets was no longer of paramount importance. (In the
USA, sociologist Daniel Bell was arguing the same
thesis, sponsored by the same people, under the rubric
of 'the end of ideology'.) This was obviously the key
line for US capital which wanted to penetrate the
world's markets and was meeting resistance from people
who called them imperialists. Officially the US was
also opposed to colonialism - especially British and
French; imperialism - especially British;
totalitarianism (except where dictators were the best
allies US business could find) and nationalism -
except Americanism, which was a universal creed of
such perspicacity and moral purity as to be beyond
objection. The one to take seriously among that
quartet is nationalism. In democratic Europe the CIA
chiefly funded those who were not nationalists. To US
capital, socialism was functionally simply a form of
exclusionary, anti-American, economic nationalism:
communism the most extreme of all.(24) The
internationalists in democratic Europe in the
immediate post-war years were, mostly, on the liberal
or centre left; the European right was, mostly,
nationalist. In France De Gaulle opposed US capital.
(And the CIA was to help finance the OAS against him.)
In Britain it was the nationalist Tories and some of
the socialist left who voted against the Marshall Plan
in the House of Commons. The US government only had
one operating criterion where a foreign government was
concerned: is it willing to allow US capital in or
not? It was called anti-communism, but it was also
anti-nationalism. Yes, it was precisely 'Taking the
teeth out of British socialism', as Richard Fletcher
put it in his seminal piece in 1977;(25) but it could
just as accurately have been called 'Taking the teeth
out of British economic nationalism'. 
The US-supported drive by the revisionists in the
Labour Party had its first major set-back with the
rise of CND, climaxing with the famous narrow majority
in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament at the
party conference in 1960. To the Gaitskellites in the
Labour Party it was little more than another communist
conspiracy. Gaitskell's leadership of the party had
largely been defined by the struggle with the left
(real and imaginary), and he believed the CPGB had
infiltrated the Labour Party, and was manipulating the
apparently Labour Left gathered round the newspaper
Tribune.(26) The Gaitskellites' response to the 1960
resolution had three dimensions: the formation of a
party faction, the Campaign for Democratic Socialism
(CDS); in the unions, the work of IRIS cells and other
anti-communist groups; and the use of the party
machine itself. 
The Campaign for Democratic Socialism (CDS)
While the Gaitskellites dominated the PLP leadership,
and had the support of the major unions, they had
socialist opposition among the party's members.
Gaitskell needed a faction. What became the Campaign
for Democratic Socialism began before the pro-CND
Labour Party conference resolution in February 1960
when William Rodgers, Secretary of the Fabian Society,
a part of the social democratic network in the UK,
organised a letter of support for Gaitskell from
prospective parliamentary candidates. Among the
fifteen who raised their heads above the parapets in
this way were: 
*	Maurice Foley, who had been secretary of the British
section of the European Youth Campaign from
1951-59,(27) and later became a Foreign Office
Minister and trustee of the Ariel Foundation; (28) 
*	Ben Hooberman, a lawyer involved in the ETU
ballot-rigging case;
*	Bryan Magee, who subsequently became a Labour MP and
then joined the SDP;
*	Dick Taverne, who later stood against the Labour
Party as 'Democratic Labour' and joined the SDP;
*	Shirley Williams, one of the 'Gang of Four', who
founded the SDP; 
Shortly after, a steering committee, containing
Crosland, Jenkins and Gordon-Walker, was set up with
Rodgers as chair. The group began working on a
manifesto to be released in the event of Gaitskell's
defeat in the forthcoming defence debate at the Party
conference. On 24 November 1960, after the narrow
defeat for Gaitskell's line at the conference, this
group announced itself as the Campaign for Democratic
Socialism, with Rodgers as chair.(29) Immediately
after the formation of CDS, after his speech at
Scarborough Gaitskell 'consulted Sarah Barker [the
party's National Agent] who advised him that the
Campaign could have his distant blessing'.(30) 
It set up permanent headquarters, officially 'financed
by contributions from individual members of the Labour
Party'. Ever since the Richard Fletcher article on CDS
et al in 1977 there have been questions about how this
operation was funded. In mid November 1960 - i.e. a
fortnight after the launch - Rodgers 'reported to the
steering committee that many small donations had been
received, together with a large sum from a source who
wished to remain anonymous.' As we saw above, Charles
Forte donated money to the founders of Forward, and in
his autobiography he quotes a letter from Gaitskell,
thanking him for his financial generosity. This is
undated unfortunately, but from the context it is 1961
or thereabouts.(31) 
This donation, whatever it was, enabled CDS to have
'field workers in the constituencies and unions, whom
it supported with travelling expenses, literature and
organisational back-up, and other publications, plus a
regular bulletin campaign, circulated free of charge
to a large mailing list within the movement. And all
this was produced without a single subscription-paying
member.'(32) John Diamond was the CDS fund-raiser.(33)
A 1961 letter in CDS Campaign announced support from
45 MPs including Austen Albu (who wrote for IRIS),
Crosland, Diamond (who joined the SDP), Donnelly
(Desmond), who resigned in '68; Roy Jenkins (founder
and leader of the SDP), Roy Mason, Christopher Mayhew
(who joined the Liberals) and Reg Prentice (who joined
the Tories).(34) The following year were added new MPs
William Rodgers (another of the 'Gang of Four') and
Dick Taverne (who defected as a Democratic Labour MP,
later SDP) The Gaitskellites' historian, Stephen
Haseler noted, 'The whole Central Leadership of the
Party in Parliament, with the single exception of
Wilson, were Campaign sympathisers.'(35) In the
party's grassroots their significance is harder to
assess but a 1962 study found that CDS did have some
measurable effect in swinging perhaps as many as 1 in
3 of the Constituency Labour Parties in which they
were active.(36) 
===In the unions===
Working in some of the unions were clandestine
anti-communist groupings, the best known of which was
the AEU's 'club', and IRIS discussed above.(37) One of
the people bridging the gap between the parliamentary
and trade union wings of the movement was Charles
Pannell, Secretary of the Parliamentary Trade Union
Group of MP's and an AEU-sponsored MP.(38) Pannell
told the American academic Irving Richter, of his
'close relationship' with the General Secretary of the
AEU, Cecil Hallett,(39) and of their combined efforts
to defeat the Left in the industrial and political
wings of the movement, by building IRIS 'cells'.
Pannell told Richter that he, Hallet, and the IRIS
cells working inside the AEU, were crucial in
overturning the AEU's 1960 vote for CND and so
restoring Labour Party's policy to being pro-nuclear,
pro-NATO.(40) Birmingham MP Denis Howells 'devoted
himself full time from the beginning of the Campaign
until his reelection to Parliament and then after that
part time to reversing the votes in the Trade
Unions....[and] played a very important part.'(41) 
After the 1960 Party conference 20 members of the TUC
General Council signed a statement supporting NATO.
Four of them, James Crawford, Harry Douglass, John
Boyd and Sid Greene, were or were to become, officers
(on paper, at any rate) of IRIS: a fifth, Sir Tom
O'Brien, was still on the notepaper of Common Cause.
There were public gestures of support for CDS from
messrs Carron, Williamson and Webber, Ron Smith (Post
Office Workers), Dame Flora Hancock, Anne Goodwin, W.
Tallon and Jim Conway (both AEU), and Joe Godson's
friend, the NUM's Sam Watson.(42) 
===Using the party organisation===
A committee 'consisting of the Party Leader, the Chief
Whip, Bill Rodgers, the secretary of the right-wing
ginger group the Campaign for Democratic Socialism,
and other influential figures' was formed and met
regularly 'to secure the selection of right-wing
candidates for winnable constituencies'.(43) Professor
George Jones, who had also been in CDS, commented that
'the relationship between CDS and the regional
organisers of the Labour Party was very
important.'(44) The CDS had the support of at least
half of the Regional Organisers, though how many is in
dispute. Seyd suggests seven out of the party's
twelve. Shaw thinks that Seyd must have got this wrong
because one of the seven was left-winger Ron Hayward,
who denies it.(45) CDS organiser Bill Rodgers said
that the regional organisers 
'were fairly well disposed, including the youngest of
them who was called Ron Hayward, was very keen to have
CDS making a contribution in the areas in which he was
responsible..... We believed that the party could be
saved from itself and Hugh Gaitskell offered the best
prospect of saving it. Once we had established that
thought in the minds of the regional organisers, they
acquiesced in what we did.'(46) 
===Partnership of the two wings===
There are glimpses of the two wings of the labour
movement working together. Cecil Hallett described a
meeting between IRIS and the Trade Union Group of MPs
in 1955 addressed by the CIA's labour man in Europe,
Irving Brown.(47) CDS member Bernard Donoughue
recalled how 
'In the summer of 1964, the MP for Finsbury died and I
was telephoned by a friend, a left-wing journalist,
and told that I must watch out, that there had been a
meeting of key left-wing people and they had decided
to capture Finsbury. They had a candidate, they had
approached a number of people in the constituency,
they had 27 votes, the candidate was going to be Clive
Jenkins. I contacted one or two friends and the list
of CDS people in Finsbury, including the Post Office
and Telegraph Union people and they organised very
actively. It emerged that the left, despite its
incompetence,(sic) had their candidate and had 27
potential votes. CDS campaigned in the constituency
and we won by 31 to 27, that was the summer of
1964.'(48) 
In the recollection of the candidate concerned, Clive
Jenkins, it was 1963. He was 'approached by a number
of trade unions and ward Labour parties to stand for
selection'. At the TUC at Blackpool he was tipped off
that the General Management Committee of the
Shoreditch and Finsbury constituency had been sent a
document which described him as, among other things,
the 'chief Trotskyist in Great Britain'. This had been
given to journalists by none other than Jim Matthews,
the national industrial officer of the Municipal and
General Workers Union, and an officer of Common Cause.
Jenkins sued, collected damages and costs and later
speculated about a CIA connection: 
'I was told by reliable friends that the anonymous
letter, which had been mailed to every member of the
selection committee came from a man who was seemingly
a member of the CIA and operating under the cover of a
petty news agency.'(49) 
It is interesting to see Donoughue referring to 'the
Post Office and Telegraph Union people'. I presume he
means the Union of Post Officer Workers, one of the
British unions with which the CIA is known to have
worked in the 1960s. In the 1950s Peter D. Newell was
an active member of the Socialist Party of Great
Britain. He worked as a draughtsman but wanted a
change of career. It was suggested to him that he join
the Post Office Initially not keen on what he saw it
was a downward move, he has recalled how 'quite subtly
(I now realise) it was suggested that once in the PO,
I would soon be able to write forThe Post , the
official fortnightly journal of the UPW [Union of Post
Office Workers] - and be paid for it!'(50) He duly
joined the Post Office, was contacted by Norman Stagg,
the editor of the journal almost immediately, and
began writing an anonymous, anti-communist column for
it under the by-line of 'Bellman'. For his column
Stagg provided source material from the ICFTU, IRIS
and the AFL-CIO. At the time the Union of Post Office
Workers was a member of the trade union international
body Postal, Telegraph and Telephone International.
(PTTI) Like many of the these international trade
union organisations, the PTTI was penetrated - some
would say run - by the CIA.(51) Its president was the
late Joe Beirne of the Communication Workers of
America. Beirne was also founder and
Secretary-Treasurer of American Institute for Free
Labor Development (AIFLD), created and run by the
CIA.(52) As far as it is possible to be sure of
anything in this field without a confession from the
man himself or his case officer, Joe Beirne was a
major asset of the CIA in the American and world
labour movements.(53) 
===Social democratic centralism===
What Eric Shaw wittily calls social democratic
centralism, the attempt by the right to police the
entire Labour Party and trade union membership, peaked
in 1962. In March 1961 five MPs, including Michael
Foot, were expelled from the Parliamentary party for
voting against the Tory government's defence
estimates. The Gaitskellites repulsed the
unilateralists at the annual conference that year; and
in the Labour Party its 'personnel committee', the
organisational subcommittee, was dominated by Ray
Gunter MP(54) and George Brown, a 'CIA source', and
serviced by the Party's National Agent's Department,
which received its information from IRD and others.
Then things went wrong. Determined upon a final purge
of the Parliamentary party, George Brown approached
MI5, via the journalist Chapman Pincher, for evidence
of Soviet links to Labour MP's believed to be 'fellow
travellers'. But MI5 declined, apparently because
afraid that to do so would reveal their sources within
the PLP;(55) and then, with the Macmillan government
in what appeared to be terminal decline, Gaitskell
died suddenly and the right in the Parliamentary Party
- and the Anglo-American intelligence and security
services - saw the party leadership slip from the
Gaitskellites' hands as Harold Wilson won the
leadership election - and then the general election of
1964. 
===Notes===
1.	There is no detailed examination of this as far as
I know and I am not even sure how many such programmes
were run. Roy Hattersley recently commented that his
first visit to the US was paid for by 'something which
was laughingly called The Young Leaders' Program'. The
Guardian, 27 February 1995. In his memoir, A Bag of
Boiled Sweets (Faber and Faber, 1995) pp. 77-8, the
Conservative MP, Julian Critchley describes how, upon
letting the Tory Party Whips know that he had never
been to the United States, he was immediately fixed up
with a six week freebie courtesy of the US embassy in
London.
2.	Carew p. 137
3.	Ibid. pp.189/90. The British trade union whose
leadership responded most enthusiastically to these
American overtures was the General and Municipal
Workers' Union (GMWU) and it 'provided from among its
leading officials half the British participants in the
university trade union courses at Harvard and
Columbia...' Ibid. p. 191. GMWU General Secretary, Tom
Williamson, was one of the participants at the first
meeting of the Bilderberg Group in 1954. (Eringer p.
49) Other British participants included Hugh Gaitskell
and Dennis Healey, who discusses the Bilderberg
meetings in his memoir, The Time of My Life.
4.	Smith, OSS p. 368.
5.	Lasch p. 332 The 1951 CCF conference in Delhi was
explicitly a reply to a 'World Peace Conference'
sponsored by the Soviet Union.
6.	Dittberner p. 112. Mr Coleman's objectivity on this
matter can be seen by his description of CIA officer,
Irving Brown, as 'European representative of the AFL',
the cover story even the Americans have abandoned.
Coleman p. 34.
7.	Later a member of the editorial board of the
Catholic magazine,The Tablet This is the Hollis family
in Hollis and Carter, the Catholic publishers of the
Common Cause Bulletin.
8.	Coleman p. 110 'Finally, Lasky moved Encounter
closer to the Hugh Gaitskell wing of the British
Labour Party.... Encounter became one of the principal
publications in which C.A.R. Crosland developed his
"revisionist" social democratic, Keynesian program'.
Coleman p. 185
9.	Hirsch and Fletcher pp. 59 and 60. Labour Party
leader Hugh Gaitskell attended the conferences in in
1955, 57, 58 and 62.
10.	p. 73
11.	Coleman p. 185. Roy Jenkins, splendidly
insouciant,on Encounter: 'We had all known that it had
been heavily subsidised from American sources, and it
did not seem to me worse that these should turn out to
be a US Government agency than, as I had vaguely
understood, a Cincinnati gin distiller.' Jenkins,
Life, p. 118
12.	Francis Williams p. 309
13.	'...which helped him underwrite the costs of
Forward.' Carew pp. 129 and 30
14.	Haseler, Gaitskellites p. 68
15.	Carew p. 245
16.	The Bureau 'enjoyed a direct and amiable
relationship with the Colonial Office, its advice was
always considered if not always followed.' Pugh p.
222. Another commentator's assessment was that
'Officials at the Colonial Office came to respect her
knowledge, judgement and persistence.' Labour MP and
fellow Bureau member, W. Arthur Lewis, quoted in the
entry on Hinden in the Dictionary of Labour Biography,
vol. 2, Macmillan 1974.
17.	She visited India and Japan on a CCF-sponsored
trip after the Suez crisis. Fletcher in Agee, Dirty
Work p. 195
18.	Hirsch and Fletcher p. 67. This �75,000 must be be
'the small capital grant (a modest bequest) on which
it had so far survived' in the account of Desai.
Commenting on the closure of Socialist Commentary in
1978, Desai writes (p. 174) that it 'had always
operated on a shoestring budget which had to be
supplemented by the dedication and persuasive power of
Rita Hinden, its editor for most of its life'. �75,000
was a lot of money in the mid 1970s when Fletcher
found this out. The accounts of Socialist Commentary
were prepared by the accountancy practice of John
Diamond MP, one of the leading Gaitskellites, who
later joined the SDP and is now in the House of Lords.
He was also, for example, the Honorary Treasurer of
the Labour Committee for Europe. See Finer, Appendix
2. In this latter role John Campbell in his biography
of Roy Jenkins, p. 51, states that Diamond was
'charged with raising money that did not come from the
City of London.
19.	Coleman p. 260 for the CCF connection. St
Antony's, Richard Deacon wrote in his The British
Connection, was 'an unofficial annex of MI6 in the
fifties.' p. 259
20.	Dick Taverne, Institute for Historical Research
(IHR) Witness Statement on CDS, 1990, p. 8
21.	Of the Africa Bureau, Anthony Verrier wrote:
'liberal, UK-based....on which [Colonial Secretary]
Macleod relied greatly for detailed background
intelligence on African independence movements. Unlike
some liberal organisations, the Africa Bureau was
never troubled by the attentions of the security
services or the Metropolitan Special Branch.' Verrier,
The Road to Zimbabwe, p. 335. From an old SIS hand
like AV, this is running up a flag and shouting
'spook'.
22.	There had been contacts between the British TUC
and the U.S. labour movement ever since the late 19th.
century. See Marjorie Nicholson pp. 27 and 28. These
contacts were sufficiently intimate for Sir Walter
Citrine to work with senior figures from the US AFL in
one of the many front groups set up by British
intelligence to persuade US public opinion to support
the war in Europe. Mahl, thesis, p. 75.
23.	The title of Coleman's study of CCF.
24.	The best exposition of this thesis is in Fred. L.
Block.
25.	Richard Fletcher, 'Who Were They Travelling with?'
in Hirsch and Fletcher.
26.	For this latter belief, to my knowledge, the
Gaitskellites produced no evidence. Some of the Labour
Right proved incredibly gullible when it came to this
'communist conspiracy', accepting as genuine the most
obvious forgeries. See for example pp. 224-6 of Jack
and Bessie Braddock's memoir The Braddocks,
(Macdonald, London, 1963) for a particularly choice
example, passed to them by J. Bernard Hutton, who
fronted several such forgeries. Who produced the
forgeries? We do not know, but my guess would be IRD.
27.	This was funded by the CIA, though Foley has
denied knowing this. See Bloch and Fitzgerald p. 106
28.	On Ariel see ibid pp. 151-2 and Kisch pp. 67-8.
29.	Haseler, Gaitskellites p. 211
30.	David Marquand, IHR CDS Witness Statement, 1990,
p. 6. At the same seminar Bill Jones noted 'the
importance of Philip Williams...Philip had a fantastic
network of MPs'. IHR CDS Witness Statement, p. 13
31.	Hirsch and Fletcher p. 62. See Forte p. 81 where
Gaitskell writes, 'things have gone remarkably well
inside the Party. And for this a very large amount of
credit must go to our friends in the Campaign for
Democratic Socialism, which you have helped so
generously.' (emphasis added.)
32.	Hirsch and Fletcher p. 62
33.	Windlesham p. 107
34.	Haseler p. 217
35.	Ibid p. 219
36.	Driver p. 97 citing Political Quarterly.
37.	There are odd traces of such groupings elsewhere:
In Labour's Northern Voice in May 1969 Chris Norwood
MP reported on the the 'Progressive Labour Group' in
the shop-workers' union, USDAW, originally formed to
fight communists but still operating and producing
lists of approved candidates, the core activity of
such a caucus.
38.	Windlesham fn 3 p. 82
39.	Hallett was on the Common Cause council in the
fifties.
40.	Richter pp. 144 and 5
41.	IHR CDS Witness Statement p. 14
42.	Windlesham p. 109
43.	Shaw Discipline p. 114
44.	IHR CDS Witness Statement p. 24
45.	Shaw fn 150, p. 331
46.	Rodgers, IHR, CDS Witness Statement p. 25
47.	Richter p. 151. George Brown, according to Tom
Bower's recent biography of Sir Dick White, was a 'CIA
source'. See p. 356
48.	Bernard Donoughue, IHR CDS pp. 23/24
49.	Jenkins pp. 49-51. I asked Jenkins about this in
1995 but he was unable to remember further details.
50.	Letter to author, 25 May 1990.
51.	See Agee, CIA Diary p. 618
52.	Newell was introduced to Beirne at the UPW
conference at Blackpool. Newell wrote of this episode
in his life in 
Freedom, September 25 1976, and more recently in
Perspectives number 9, 1995. On the late Joseph Beirne
and CIA see Counterspy, February 1974 pp. 42 and 43
and May 1979 p.13, and Agee CIA Dairy, p. 603.
53.	On AIFLD see Fred Hirsch 'The Labour Movement:
Penetration Point for U.S. Intelligence and
Transnationals' in Hirsch and Fletcher, and 'The
AFL-CIA' by former US Air Force Intelligence officer
Winslow Peck in Frazier (ed.).
54.	In 1968 he became a director of IRIS.
55.	It also possible, of course, that they declined
because they had no such information, either because
none existed, or because they were too incompetent to
collect it. 
----------------------------------------------------------------
The subversion hunters and the social democrats in the
1970s
The arrival of Harold Wilson as leader of the Labour
Party must have been a serious shock to the
Anglo-American intelligence services. One minute the
party was in the complete control of a faction which
they had been promoting - 'running' would be too
strong - since about 1950, and the next the party, and
the second most important part of the NATO alliance,
is in the hands of someone who has spent the post-war
years going to and from Moscow as an East-West trader!
The rise of the left in the Labour Party and trade
union movement, symbolised by the ascent of Wilson,
was being monitored by IRD and its satellites, the
Economic League, IRIS, Common Cause - and by Brian
Crozier, who raised the alarm in the 1970 collection
he edited, We Will Bury You..(73) Working the same
seam - presumably for different sponsors - was former
Army officer and Conservative MP, Geoffrey
Stewart-Smith. In Stewart-Smith's journal, East-West
Digest, in 1972, for example, we find the names who
appeared in Crozier's 1970 anthology: Harry Welton of
the Economic League, who had been in the anti-left
business for 'fifty fighting years', to cite the title
of the League's in-house history, and David Williams,
the main writer for the Common Cause Bulletin.(74) 
The abolition of the proscription list
Anxiety among the subversive-watchers heightened
throughout the Heath years as the insurrection in
Northern Ireland continued and conflict with the
labour movement on the mainland UK increased, and
leapt enormously with the abolition of the
Proscription List of the Labour Party in 1973. Most of
the Parliamentary Labour Party at the time seems to
have barely noticed its abolition, so insignificant
did the event seem. Of the various members of the
Wilson governments who have published memoirs or
dairies covering this period, only Tony Benn thought
it an event worth recording.(75) But to the
subversion-watchers it showed the extent of the CPGB's
influence in the Labour Party. Chapman Pincher at the
Daily Express, for example, one of the outlets for the
anti-subversion lobby, wrote nearly twenty years later
that 'the left-wing extremists who had infiltrated the
National Executive of the Labour Party induced the
1973 Party conference to abolish the Proscribed list.'
(emphases added)(76) But to what end? Pincher tells us
it 'meant that even MPs could join the World Peace
Council, the British-Soviet Friendship Society and
other outfits run essentially for the benefit of
Moscow.'(77) But these never amounted to much in the
1950s, and meant less than nothing in 1973. It was
precisely because those groups meant so little that
the list was abolished as an anachronism.(78) 
For the subversion hunters the Proscription List
disappearing was one more event in a bad year, for
1973 also saw the first assault on IRD by the rest of
the more detente-minded Foreign Office.(79) The next
year saw the Heath government's defeat at the hands of
the National Union of Mineworkers, in some part due to
a CPGB sympathiser named Arthur Scargill. By mid 1974
the anti-subversive chorus were all singing from the
same page and the theory of Soviet control through the
CPGB, through the trade unions, through the Labour
Party, was being broadcast by everything from the Tory
press to the activists with connections in the
intelligence services and the military.(80) This is
the background to the cries and alarums of 1974/5, the
talk of military coups and the formation of
semi-clandestine 'action groups' and militias by,
inter alia, former Deputy Chief of SIS, the late
George Kennedy Young, and the late David Stirling. The
trade unions were at the heart of the
subversive-hunters' theory, with the AEU the most
important of them. When David Stirling's grandiose
Better Britain-GB75 plans were 'blown' prematurely in
1974, he abandoned them and joined forces with
TRUEMID, another group of anti-socialist former AEU
officials. (TRUEMID is discussed below.) 
===The Social Democratic Alliance (SDA)===
Within the Labour Party itself there was activity to
combat the rise of the left. On the party political
axis two latterday Gaitskellites, Stephen Haseler and
Douglas Eden, in 1975 formed the Social Democratic
Alliance (SDA) and began the struggle with the left in
local London politics. (81) Over the next three years
the SDA, and Haseler in particular, received much
favourable newspaper coverage for their accounts of
the subversives' takeover of the Labour Party and
trade unions, much of it fanciful in the extreme.(82)
For example on the publication of his book, The Death
of British Democracy, Haseler wrote in The Times (29
April 1976) that 'we may now be on the verge of an
economy which will remove itself from the Western
trading system by import controls, strict control of
capital movements and eventually non-convertability of
the currency. At home this will involve rationing, the
direction of capital and labour and the final end of
the free trade union movement'; and in 1980, among the
Labour MPs Haseler and the SDA proposed to put up
candidates against, were those well-known
revolutionaries Stan Orme, Clive Soley, Neil Kincock
and Geoff Rooker! (83) Among the SDA's early
supporters was Peter Stephenson, then the editor of
Socialist Commentary. 
===And the AEU===
July 1974 saw the formation, with Common Cause
funding, of the Trade Union Education Centre for
Democratic Socialism (TUECDS), which described itself
as 'an independent trade union education body run by
politically-moderate trade unionists for
politically-moderate trade unionists'.(84) TUECDS was
launched in November 1974 with a lecture by the SDA's
Dr Stephen Haseler. The personnel involved in the
early stages of TUECDS's life were members of the AEU,
notably John Weakley, and the building workers' union
UCATT. Among those who had been attending the first
year's meetings were UCATT officials, AEU officials,
David Moller, a journalist from the Readers' Digest,
then still one of the most important psy-war outlets
for the CIA, the widow of Leslie Cannon, Lord Patrick
Gordon-Walker and Kate Losinska, then recently elected
president of the civil service union, the CPSA.(85) 
More former AEU officials, Ron Nodes, Sid Davies and
Ron McLaughlin, were involved in the formation of
TRUEMID, (the Movement for True Industrial Democracy
or the True Movement for Industrial Democracy, it's
been called both), launched in 1975 with finance from
a variety of industrial and City enterprises.(86)
TRUEMID did was IRIS had done: it tried to influence
the election of union officials by putting out
information about the supposed left in the union.
TRUEMID's activities were chiefly focused on the AEU,
the civil service union the CPSA and the electricians
union, the EETPU. David Stirling, after the collapse
of his GB 75 and Better Britain plans, was recruited
onto the TRUEMID council.(87) 
Also reappearing in this period was the some time US
Labour Attache to Britain, Joseph Godson who, though
formally retired, had returned to the UK in 1971 and
continued with his labour attache work - pushing out
US views and interests among the British trade union
movement, and selecting trade unionists for freebies
to the US. Godson was a founder member of the Labour
Committee for TransAtlantic Understanding (LCTU), the
labour section of the British Atlantic Committee, a
NATO support group.(88) In May 1976 LCTU began the
Labour and Trade Union Press Service (LTUPS). On the
LTUPS editorial committee was the ubiquitous Peter
Stephenson, editor of the Gaitskellite Socialist
Commentary, and one of the early members of the Social
Democratic Alliance. Treasurer of the LTUPS was
General Secretary of the EEPTU, Frank Chapple, and its
chair was Bill Jordan of the AEU.(89) 
===Europe===
The social democratic wing of the Labour Party had two
key positions: British membership of NATO and
retention of British nuclear weapons, and membership
of the EEC. After the defeat of CND at the Labour
conference of 1961 it was European Economic Community
(EEC) membership which became their great cause. With
this achieved with the EEC referendum vote 'yes' in
1975, when it came to the ideological struggles within
the Labour Party in the mid and late 1970s, in David
Marquand's words, 'they lost the battle of ideas with
the Left by default ....they really didn't fight the
battle of ideas.' 
Support for EEC membership within the Labour Party had
been formally organised first in 1959 by the Labour
Common Market Committee (founders Roy Jenkins, Jack
Diamond and Norman Hart), which became the Labour
Committee for Europe in the mid 1960s. European unity
had been one of the projects favoured by the USA,
looking for good anti-Soviet alliances in the early
post-war era, and the European Movement had been
funded by the Agency.(90) As well as receiving the
support of the US, in the 1960s Gaitskellites Roy
Jenkins, Shirley Williams and William Rodgers were
among the regular attenders of the annual Anglo-German
Konigswinter conferences.(91) This time the social
democrats were being supported by the British Foreign
Office, which had decided by then that their future
lay in the Common Market. 
The CDS, the Gaitskellites, never accepted Wilson as
the legitimate leader of the Labour Party and plotted
constantly against him. The personnel of the
Gaitskellites, the Labour Committee on Europe and the
CDS were virtually identical.(92) In the 1960s it was
the CDS that Harold Wilson identified as the group
working against him.(93) When the group formally broke
up it continued as a dining club, the 1963 Club. In
the early 1970s Tony Benn identified them as 'the old
Campaign for Democratic Socialism-Europe group'.(94) 
In 1970 the election of the Heath government meant
that another serious effort to get Britain in the EEC
would be made and the issue would divide the Labour
Party then in opposition. In early 1971 Tony Benn's
diary records him talking - with Roy Jenkins - of the
Common Market issue splitting the Labour Party.(95)
Ten months later, on October 19, after a pro- and
anti- clash in the Shadow Cabinet, Benn commented on
the emergence of 'a European Social Democrat wing in
the Parliamentary Party led by Bill Rodgers.'(96) This
group formally announced itself on 28 October 1971
when 69 pro-Market Labour MPs voted with the
Conservative government in favour of entry into the
EEC in principle. From then on the group operated as a
party within a party, with William Rodgers acting as
an unofficial whip.(97) 
===A new social democratic party?===
The leadership of the Parliamentary Gaitskellite
faction had fallen to Roy Jenkins, and as early as
1970 some of that group has begun trying to get him to
lead the formation of a new party.(98) After the
Europe vote in 1971 Dick Taverne and Bill Rodgers went
to Jenkins and told him they should resign and form a
new party.(99) Jenkins declined. Taverne's selection
for the Lincoln seat had been organised by the
pro-CDS, pro-Europe, Labour Party regional organiser
for the area, Jim Cattermole.(100) In December 1972 MP
Taverne, at odds with his constituency party, and
about to be deselected, decided to fight them and
suggested again that Jenkins leave and form a new
party. Jenkins declined.(101) In 1973, after winning
the Lincoln by-election as a Democratic Labour
candidate, against the official Labour Party
candidate, Taverne formed the Campaign for Social
Democracy and sought Jenkins' support. Jenkins
declined.(102) That year, however, helped by Sir Fred
Hayday, former chair of the TUC, and Alf Allen, future
chair of the TUC, Jenkins did 'set up an institutional
framework' with moderate trade union leaders - a
regular dining group in the Charing Cross Hotel.(103) 
In December 1974 the Manifesto Group was formed within
the PLP. Described by Barbara Castle as 'a group of
middle-of-the-road and right-wing Labour MPs [which]
had been meeting to discuss how to counter the growing
influence of the left-wing Tribune group of MPs',(104)
its chair was Dr Dickson Mabon, its Secretary was John
Horam, now (1995) a Tory Minister, and two of its most
active members were CDS enthusiasts David Marquand and
Brian Walden.(105) 
In the third Wilson government, formed in 1974, the
Jenkins group in cabinet was down to 'a beleaguered
minority of four', to use Jenkins' words, Jenkins,
Harold Lever, Shirley Williams and the late Reg
Prentice.(106) In his memoir Jenkins describes
Prentice as 'a man of flat-footed courage who had
emerged in the previous two years [i.e. 1973 and 74]
out of the rather stolid centre of the Labour Party
into....my most unhesitating ally in the
Cabinet.'(107) Throughout 1974-5 Prentice was moving
right very quickly and his speeches began to reflect
this. In 1975 Prime Minister Wilson took exception to
one of them, and 'More out of enlightened
self-interest than generosity', as he put it, Jenkins
told Wilson that if Prentice was sacked from the
cabinet he would also go.(108) Shortly afterwards
Wilson called Jenkins' bluff and shifted Prentice to a
junior ministry post outside the Cabinet proper.
Jenkins resolved to resign, tried to take Shirley
Williams and Harold Lever with him in resignation -
only to find that while he was ready now, Harold Lever
was not.(109) 
In Jenkins' memoir there are some wistful remarks on
'1975 as a great missed opportunity for Heath and
Whitelaw and a whole regiment of discarded
Conservative "wets" as much for Shirley Williams and
Steel and me.'(110) Jenkins was looking back on the
1975 Common Market referendum campaign during which he
found it more congenial working with pro-EEC Tories
and Liberals than he did with the left-wing of his own
party. It would not be hard to imagine that left-wing
Tories like Heath and Whitelaw found Jenkins more
congenial than some of the right-wing yahoos then
gathering on the Tory Party's fringe;(111)and there is
a large hint in Mrs Thatcher's second volume of
memoirs, that some kind of realignment was attempted
on the back of the referendum.(112) 
In December 1976 Prentice was discussing how to bring
down the Callaghan government with, inter alia, Tory
MPs Julian Amery and Maurice Macmillan, and
Gaitskellite Labour MP's Walden and the late John
McIntosh.(113) Haseler, whose information on this
comes from Prentice's diaries, tells us that, 'For
some years past the arguments for a realignment had
been taken seriously by a section of the Conservative
Party who had been close to Macmillan.'(114) Prentice
may have thought he was discussing bringing down the
government with Parliamentary colleagues, but in this
context they had other, more interesting, connections.
Amery was a former SIS officer and a friend of the
former Deputy Chief of SIS, the late George Kennedy
Young, who was then machinating against the Labour
government with his Unison Committee for Action.(115)
Maurice Macmillan had been a director of one of the
IRD front companies and had also been involved in the
attempt in the mid 1974 to launch a government of
national unity to prevent the reelection of Harold
Wilson. Prentice proposed that Jenkins form a
coalition with Margaret Thatcher as leader but, on
Prentice's account, haunted by memories of 1931 and
the fate of Ramsay MacDonald, not surprisingly, once
again Jenkins declined.(116) 
When Harold Wilson resigned in 1976, Jenkins stood for
leader of the Labour Party, lost, and went off to
Brussels as President of the EEC. Jenkins bailed out
at a good time, for the pro-Common Market wing of the
Labour Party was losing the fight against the left in
the Parliamentary Labour Party - while constantly
talking about quitting and forming a new party. In
1977 the Campaign for a Labour Victory, 'in many ways
a resurrection of the of the Campaign for Democratic
Socialism', was launched.(117) William Rodgers' PA was
one of the chief organisers and it set up its office
in the HQ of the EETPU.(118) Its full-time organiser
was Alec McGivan who became the first full-time worker
for the SDP, four years later. 
Around Jenkins in exile gathered some of the
Gaitskellites. Mike Thomas, a Labour and then SDP MP:
'there in fact were a group of people working with Roy
Jenkins outside parliament, most of whom were known to
many of us, friends of ours, some who were less well
known, in the SDA or elsewhere'.(119) In November
1979, after Jenkins' had been given the Dimbleby
Lecture on BBC TV in which to more or less announce
his intention of forming a social democratic party,
businessman Clive Lindley and London Labour Councillor
Jim Daley, both of whom had been active in the
Campaign for Labour Victory,(120) set up the Radical
Centre for Democratic Studies, 'a press cutting and
information service on the political scene in Britain'
- and a support group for Jenkins.(121) 
Finally a group met to discuss forming the new party.
From the SDA there was Stephen Haseler; from Roy
Jenkins' UK support group, Clive Lindley and Jim Daly;
David Marquand, Jenkins' his PA in Brussels, and Lord
Harris, who had been Jenkins' PR man in the
1960s.(122) The last stop on their way out of the
Labour Party for these social democrats was the
formation of the Council for Social Democracy in 1981.
Soon after the Social Democratic Party launch, issue
52 of the now defunct radical magazine The Leveller
had as its cover story: 'Exposed:the CIA and the
Social Democrats'. The author was Phil Kelly, one of
the journalists who had exposed Brian Crozier's
Forum/CIA links, who had been the recipient of the
leaked documents from inside the Institute for the
Study of Conflict, and had led the campaign to prevent
the Labour government expelling former CIA officer,
Philip Agee. For his temerity Kelly had been labelled
a 'KGB man' in briefings given by MI5, one of which
was foolishly committed to paper by Searchlight editor
Gerry Gable.(123) Kelly's article went over some of
the ground covered in this essay, but though the CIA
was visible in the connection to the [[Congress for
Cultural Freedom]] and Forum World Features, the piece
otherwise failed to justify its billing. 
===Notes===
73.	The charge that these groups were IRD 'satellites'
is difficult to substantiate. None of their personnel
has, to my knowledge, every admitted it. However, all
these groups have published material which, in my
view, could only have come from the state - and I
presume that IRD was the proximate conduit. Take, for
example, the Economic League's 'Notes and Comments'
series. In No. 895, 'The New Face of Communism', there
is material quoted from Yugoslav radio and TV and
Radio Moscow. The Economic League, presumably, did not
have its own monitoring service.
74.	East-West Digest mostly consisted of large chunks
of blind (authorless), extremely detailed, apparently
pretty accurate material on the British Left: reports
on meetings and conferences; documents and journals
analysed.
75.	Benn entry for 11 June 1973.
76.	Pincher 1991 p. 113.
77.	Ibid.
78.	The important group on that list was the then
minute Revolutionary Socialist League which was to
spend the next decade penetrating the Labour Party as
the Militant Tendency.
79.	Crozier calls this 'the IRD massacre', but points
out that IRD had grown to become the largest single
Foreign Office department. See Crozier pp. 104-8.
80.	From the likes of KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky we
have learned that the KGB were unaware that they were
apparently on the verge of controlling the Labour
Party through the trade unions.
81.	Patrick Wintour in the New Statesman, 25 July
1980: 'three of [Frank] Chapple's closest union
colleagues, including his research assistant, have
been active in the Social Democratic Alliance'. 
Crozier notes in his memoir that he first met the
SDA's Douglas Eden at one of the early sessions of the
National Association for Freedom. 'The NAF was
supposed to be strictly non-party, and the presence of
a long-time Labour man, as Eden was, emphasised this
aspect of its work.' p. 147
82.	See, for example, Daily Telegraph, 7 July 1977,
The Times, 29 April 1976, and Daily Mail, 9 August
1979.
83.	See 'Moderates drive to challenge 11 Labour MPs',
Daily Telegraph,1 February 1980.
84.	This is from the only TUECDS document I have seen,
a progress report dated May 12, 1975.
85.	TUECDS is discussed by Paul Foot in Socialist
Worker, 1 November 1975.
86.	Michael Ivens of Aims of Industry claims the
credit for introducing Stirling to Ron Nodes. See his
obituary notice on Stirling in the Independent, 17
November 1990. Some of the TRUEMID funding is given in
'The bosses' union' in Leveller 17, 1978, and the most
detailed account of the organisation is in Hoe ch. 24.
87.	See 'The Company They Keep', Monica Brimacombe, in
the New Statesman, 9 May 1986. Paul Foot in the piece
cited in note 12 states that TRUEMID had six permanent
full-time staff and three temporary full-time staff.
88.	see also State Research no. 16, pp. 68-74 and no.
17 pp. 95 and 96, and Sunday Times, 17 February 1980.
It was later funded by the US government's National
Endowment for Democracy.
89.	Jordan was later to be among the founders of
another 'moderate' caucus in the trade unions in the
1980s, Mainstream.
90.	The Movement's youth wing, the European Youth
Movement, had as its secretary Maurice Foley, one of
the Gaitskellites. See 'The CIA backs the Common
Market' by Weissman, Kelly and Hosenball in Agee ed.
Dirty Work.
pp. 201-3.
91.	Bradley p. 52
92.	With a number of important qualifications. Hugh
Gaitskell, for example, was not pro EEC membership.
93.	Dorril and Ramsay p. 188
94.	Ibid.
95.	Entry for 13 January 1971, pp. 324-5 of Office
Without Power
96.	Benn ibid. p. 381. Benn also added in that
paragraph: 'When I heard Charlie Pannell say that for
him Europe was an article of faith, he put it above
the Labour Party and above the Labour Movement, I was
finally convinced that this was a deep split.'.
Pannell was AEU, Common Cause, Catholic.
97.	Bradley p. 53
98.	'Dick Taverne recalls a meeting of pro-Marketeers
in his flat to discuss tactics as early as June 1970.'
Ibid.
99.	Ibid. pp. 53/4
100.	Shaw, Discipline, p. 108. In the 'witness
seminar' on the CDS, p. 24, David Marquand referred to
'the great barony of Jim Cattermole'.
101.	Ibid. p. 55
102.	Jenkins in his memoir on 1973: 'Excluding the
possibility of forming an independent party, which at
that stage neither I nor my supporters were remotely
prepared for...' p. 360 (emphasis added).
103.	Jenkins p. 354. In the CDS 'witness seminar", p.
27, William Rodgers stated that CDS had a 'very close
working relationship with Fred Hayday of the General
and Municipal Workers'.
104.	Castle Diaries p.156
105.	Bradley p. 60. With the exception of Giles Radice
and George Robertson, both GMWU/GMB-sponsored, the
whole of the active leadership of the Manifesto Group
subsequently defected to the SDP.
106.	Jenkins p. 427
107.	Ibid. p. 419
108.	Jenkins tells us that he sent this message
through the Prime Minister's Principal Private
Secretary, Robert Armstrong, thus - deliberately or
not - informing the Whitehall establishment. Ibid. p.
420
109.	Ibid. p. 422
110.	Ibid. pp. 425-6
111.	On 14 October 1975 Tony Benn records in his
diary: 'Robert Kilroy-Silk, Labour MP for Ormskirk,
told me that �2 million had been left unspent by the
pro-Market lobby and it was a fund of which the
trustees were Heath, Thorpe and Jenkins....the rumour
was that if Wilson moved too far to the Left they
would use the money to set up a new party.'
112.	See The Path to Power, p. 331.
113.	Haseler, Battle for Britain, pp. 59 and 60
114.	Ibid.
115.	The best account of Unison is in Dorril and
Ramsay.
116.	Prentice thus managed to misunderstand - and
insult - both Jenkins and Mrs Thatcher.
117.	Bradley p. 59
118.	'How Frank Chapple says on top', New Statesman,
25 July 1980
119.	CDS Seminar p. 50
120.	Owen p. 457
121.	Bradley p. 73
122.	Ibid. David Marquand on Haseler; 'Haseler's
invective is all working class... He's invented a
history of a sort of populist radicalism, Norman
Tebbitry in a way, ....I remember being involved in a
television thing in the early 1970s on Europe where he
opposed it on a sort of proletarian, solidarity,
populist-nationalist ground.' Desai pp. 10-11 fn. 11
123.	This is the so-called Gable memo, first revealed
in the New Statesman, 15 February 1980 and reprinted
in full, for the first time, in Lobster 24. 
----------------------------------------------------------------
===The Crozier operations===
Running through much of this activity in the 1970s was
Brian Crozier who had been warning about the rise of
the British Left since the late 1960s. Crozier takes
us back to the CIA operation the Congress for Cultural
Freedom (CCF) discussed in chapter five. The CIA
control of the CCF and the magazine Encounter began to
be threatened with exposure in 1963 when, reviewing an
anthology from the magazine, Conor Cruise O'Brien
wrote that 'Encounter's first loyalty is to America';
and an editorial in the Sunday Telegraph referred to a
secret and regular subvention to Encounter from 'the
Foreign Office'.(124) The next year, after a US
congressional inquiry into private foundations found
that some had received donations from the CIA, the New
York Times set journalists to work on the story. From
that point on exposure of the CIA fronts, which were
funded by some of these private foundations, was
inevitable. 
===Forum World Features===
Faced with this impending exposure, the CCF/CIA began
to take action. The Congress's press agency was
detached, reorganised and renamed Forum World
Features, and Crozier was appointed its director in
1965.(125) Crozier claims that 'In 1968 the KGB made a
first attempt to wreck Forum';(126) and perhaps in
anticipation of the day when Forum was 'blown', with
other personnel from the IRD network Crozier set up
the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC) between
1968 and 1970.(127) 
===ISC===
The first funding came from Shell and BP but then, as
Crozier puts it, 'the Agency [CIA] now came up with
something bigger', and put him in contact with the
American multi-millionaire, anti-communist Richard
Mellon Scaife, who duly came up $100,000 p.a. for
ISC.(128) 
ISC commissioned and published reports and began
briefing the UK military and police establishments on
the Crozier view of the Soviet threat to Britain.(129)
Crozier became a founder member of the National
Association for Freedom (NAFF), whose launch was timed
to coincide with publication of the dystopian
disinformation in The Collapse of Democracy by his
ally and colleague at ISC, Robert Moss. The
unfortunately acronymed NAFF was a gathering of the
anti-subversive and pro-capital propaganda groups such
as Aims of Industry, and, almost immediately became
the major focus of the British Right. It absorbed the
remnants of the 1974/5 civilian militias, and began
series of psy-war projects against the left and the
unions which prefigured much of what was to come in
the Thatcher government.(130) 
===Shield and the Pinay Circle===
At the same, Crozier's voice was being heard in
Shield, a committee of former intelligence officers
and bankers, who, in the absence of IRD, prepared
briefings on the alleged communist threat for the then
leader of the Tory Party, Mrs Thatcher.(131)Crozier
was also a member of the transnational psy-war outfit,
the Pinay Circle, working alongside senior
intelligence, military and political figures from the
NATO countries,(132) was working with US Senate
Subcommittee on International Terrorism,(133) and
launched the apparently still-born US Institute for
the Study of Conflict.(134) 
===The Wilson plots===
Because hard information on the covert operations of
this period came first from Colin Wallace, a member of
the British Army's psychological warfare unit in
Northern Ireland, in whose narrative the 'bad guys'
were MI5, and from Peter Wright, who had been an MI5
officer, those of us who began researching this period
in 1986 and after began by looking for MI5
operations.(135) In fact three British intelligence
agencies had an iron in the fire of the mid 1970s
crisis. There was a group of MI5 officers, led by
Peter Wright, who were plotting against the Wilson
government and, for example, trying to use the
Information Policy Unit in Northern Ireland to spread
disinformation about Wilson and other British
politicians whom MI5 regarded as 'unsound';(136) there
was also a group of ex SIS and former military
officers, led by former SIS number two, the late
George Kennedy Young, operating as the Unison
Committee for Action;(137) and there was the
Crozier-IRD subversion-watcher network. 
The detente with the Soviet Union was the background.
In the UK it provided the context for IRD to be
reigned back. In the US, in the wake of Watergate and
the subsequent revelations of CIA activities in the US
and abroad, and the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976,
there was a purge in the CIA. To Crozier and others of
his ilk detente was a farce - a Soviet deception
operation - and these intelligence cuts a catastrophe.
(In their worst imaginings they were the result of
Soviet operations.) 
===Private sector intelligence agencies?===
Into the breach stepped Crozier and a group which
included ex SIS officer Nicholas Elliot and US General
Vernon Walters. They created 'a Private Sector
Operational Intelligence agency' and named it 6I - the
Sixth International(138) - and found funding in the US
Heritage Foundation. Crozier began publishing
newsletters, Transnational Security, and British
Briefing, his own version of the IRD briefings on
British subversion which had been curtailed in 1974
upon the election of the Labour government. British
Briefing was financed by the Industrial Trust, edited
by Charles Elwell, 'soon after retiring from MI5', and
published by IRIS.(139) 
What had begun a quarter of a century before as an
anti-communist caucus among the AUEW's senior
officers, had ended up fronting for Britain's leading
anti-socialist psychological warfare expert. I do not
know when British Briefing was first published, but
the issue which began to circulate on the left in the
early 1990s, number 12, was published in 1989, at
which time IRIS's directors included Sir John Boyd
CBE, General Secretary of the AEU 1975-82, Lord
(Harold) Collinson CBE, General Secretary of the
National Union of Agricultural and Allied Workers from
1953-69, and W. (Bill) Sirs, General Secretary of the
Iron and Steel Trades Confederation from 1975-85.(140)
===The union leaders and the spooks===
The IRIS-Crozier-British Briefing set-up sums up much
of what I have been trying to tease out. Three
anti-socialist, senior trade union leaders fronted the
clandestine production of an anti-socialist bulletin,
written and edited by former intelligence officers,
financed by British capital.(141) This anti-socialist
mechanism also involved the connivance of the Charity
Commission which allowed the Industrial Trust to
operate in a breach of the charity laws,(142) another,
non-charitable trust, the Kennington Industrial
Company, and personnel from large numbers of British
companies which funded it. (The money went to the
Industrial Trust which passed it on to Kennington,
which passed it on to IRIS; thus enabling the
Industrial Trust to cling on to its charitable - and
tax deductible - status.) 
If this was still being funded in 1989, after 15 years
of Thatcherism and the fall of the Soviet Empire, how
big was this anti-socialist structure in, say, 1975?
Or 1965? Our knowledge of the whole operation while
greater now than ever, is still pretty limited,
despite the revelations about the Economic League in
the past ten years. For example, Aims of Industry is
thought of as simply a propaganda organisation. But it
is not so; at least it was not always so. In 1990 the
Aims Director, Michael Ivens, wrote: 
Once, when Aims of Industry was rather more flexible
than it is now, we put a member of our staff into a
factory, at the request of the management, to prevent
a far-left take over.' (143) 
Another part of this anti-socialist network is British
United Industrialists (BUI), one of the funnels
through which British companies pour money into the
Conservative Party and other groups on the right. In
1985 BUI's then director, Captain Briggs, told a
researcher I know who wishes to remain anonymous, who
was posing as a right-winger, that BUI were then
funding the Solidarity group of Labour MPs, the Union
of Democratic Mineworkers and the right-wing faction
in the Civil and Public Servants Association
(CPSA).(144) 
The Labour Left has never really grasped just how
central, how commonplace a function of British
capitalism it has been to fund its opponents. This
knowledge has remained largely confined to Labour
Research and pockets within individual unions. (It is
hardly surprising that the Labour Party has never
shown much interest in this as it would have
embarrassed some of its biggest supporters in the
trade unions.) 
By 1980 Crozier seems to have gone some way towards
replacing IRD's anti-subversive role by his own
efforts; and, with the election of Mrs Thatcher, he
and Robert Moss abandoned the National Association for
Freedom (by then renamed the Freedom Association) and
concentrated on the USA and the wider Soviet 'threat'.
It is impossible to evaluate the significance of
psychological warfare projects. Was the barrage of
anti-union propaganda put out by the
subversion-watchers in the period 1972-79 as
significant as the so-called Winter of Discontent in
its effect on public opinion in Britain? How effective
Crozier was, I don't know. He seems to think he had
quite a hand in the election of Mrs Thatcher in 1979.
In one of the planning papers written by Crozier for
his 'transnational security organisation', he wrote: 
'Specific Aims within this framework are to affect a
change of government in 
(a) the United Kingdom - accomplished......'(145)
Grandiose nonsense? Perhaps. Crozier has never been
taken as seriously in this country by the London
media-political establishment as he has has been
abroad, and his memoir was hammered by most of its
reviewers.(146) But this, for example, was the view of
a German intelligence officer, the source of the Der
Spiegel pieces, of Crozier in November 1979. 
'The militant conservative London publicist, Brian
Crozier, Director of the famous Institute for the
Study of Conflict up to September 1979, has been
working with his diverse circle of friends in
international politics to build an anonymous action
group(147) "transnational security organisation", and
to widen its field of operations. Crozier has worked
with the CIA for years. One has to assume, therefore
that they are fully aware of his activities....' 
===Notes===
124.	Coleman p. 186. In this context 'the Foreign
Office' is a euphemism for MI6.
125.	In his 1993 memoir Crozier acknowledges the CIA
connection. See pp. 63-5. But he had denied it as late
as 1990, in his review of Coleman's history of the
CCF. See 'A noble mess' in The Salisbury Review,
December 1990.
126.	Crozier p. 75
127.	With a Council including Max Beloff,
Major-General Clutterbuck, Sir Robert Thompson and
Hugh Seton-Watson.
128.	Crozier p. 90.
129.	See the documents leaked - or stolen - from ISC
published in Searchlight 18, 1976, and Crozier pp. 121
and 2
130.	Crozier acknowledged the psy-war role in his
memoir. See page 118. 
131.	Shield employed as its researchers Peter Shipley,
who ended up in the Conservative Party Central Office
in time for the 1987 election, and Douglas Eden,
co-founder of the Social Democratic Alliance. But
Stephen Hastings has a slightly different version from
Crozier. See Hastings p. 236.
132.	On Pinay see David Teacher's pieces in Lobsters
17 and 18. Crozier more or less gave a nod of approval
to these accounts by citing them, without criticism,
in his memoir. See note 3 facing p. 194. Among the
Pinay personnel were ex CIA director Colby, ex-SIS
officers Julian Amery and Nicholas Elliot, and Edwin
Feulner from the Heritage Foundation.
133.	Crozier pp. 123-4
134.	US ISC is missing from his memoirs. It was
formally launched in 1975, chaired by George Ball,
with a line-up which included Richard Pipes and Kermit
Roosevelt. See Document 3 in Searchlight 18.
135.	Hence Lobster 11, 'Wilson, MI5 and the Rise of
Thatcher'.
136.	This is discussed at length in Foot, Who Framed
...
137.	It was Young and Unison, for example, who
initiated General Sir Walter Walker's Civil
Assistance.
138.	Crozier pp. 134-6. Six 'I', says Crozier, because
there had already been 5 'internationals'. 'The fourth
International was the Trotskyist one, and when it
split, this meant that on paper, there were five
Internationals.' p. 136
139.	On the Industrial Trust see Black Flag, 15 August
1988 which reproduced the Trust's accounts for 1986/7;
and on the IRIS connection to British Briefing, and
Elwell's role, see the Observer, 16 December 1990,
'Top companies funded smears through charity', and 23
December 1990
140.	Although IRIS was still publishing its little
newsletter, IRIS News, in 1989, compared to British
Briefing it was so piffling as to be little more than
a cover story. Collinson and Boyd are dead and Sirs
did not respond to my questions
141.	In 1986/7 twenty eight British companies gave
money to the Industrial Trust, including BP, Bass,
Unilever, ICI, Cadbury Schweppes and Grand
Metropolitan. Industrial Trust accounts filed with
Charity Commissioners were reproduced in Black Flag,
15 August 1988.
142.	See 'Breach of charity rules justified' in the
Guardian,7 February 1991.
143.	Sunday Telegraph (Appointments) 4 February 1990
144.	I reported this first in footnote 93 on p. 43 of
Lobster 12 in 1986. I received no reaction to what I
thought was a rather explosive allegation. Kevin
McNamara MP, when I told him of this, replied that the
UDM hardly needed money as they had inherited the
considerable wealth of the old 'Spencer' union formed
in the 1920s.
145.	Originally published in Der Spiegel no 37, 1982,
this was translated by David Teacher and reproduced in
Lobster 17, p. 14.
146.	The best review was by Bernard Porter in
Intelligence and National Security, vol. 9, No. 4.
Most of Crozier's projects, says Porter, were
'pointless.'
147.	'Action group', is one of the key terms used in
this field. G.K. Young's Unison was the Unison
Committee for Action, a clear hint to the intelligence
insider as to its intentions. 
----------------------------------------------------------------
===Was there a 'communist threat'?===
The term 'communist' was always flexibly applied by
the anti-socialist groups. The Common Cause and IRIS
reports, for example, went much wider to actually mean
the left, i.e. socialists; and sometimes simply anyone
who opposed those in positions of power.(148)
Nonetheless in a thesis about the political uses of
anti-communism we have to consider whether there was
anything to the 'communist threat', or if it was
simply a red herring dragged across the trail of
British politics. 
On the British Left the question which heads this
chapter would provoke laughter, derision or anger from
many. For some, since 1956 the CPGB has been a
declining, bureaucratic relic, hardly a 'threat' to
anybody.(149) For others merely asking the question
gives credibility to disinformation from the right.
But the fact remains that significant sections of the
British Right, in the propaganda organisations of
capital, the state and the Conservative Party,
believed that the CPGB was part of a global
conspiracy, directed and financed by Moscow, which was
working in the union movement and wider society to
undermine capitalist democracy in Britain. And it is
no longer self-evident that this was complete
nonsense. 
===Orders from Moscow?===
We now know that the CPGB actually was being directed,
to some extent, from Moscow after the war. Bob Darke
was a member of the Party's National Industrial Policy
Committee from the end of the war until 1951, when he
left the Party. He described that committee as 'a
Cominform puppet', receiving instructions, via
visiting French communists, from the Cominform.(150)
In the year Darke quit the Party, 1951, the CPGB
published a landmark policy statement, 'The British
Road to Socialism'. This announced a major shift in
policy in which the British CPGB ceased to base itself
on the Soviet model and would henceforth pursue a
peculiarly British, 'parliamentary road to
socialism'.(151) But in 1991 former CPGB assistant
general secretary, George Matthews, admitted that much
- though precisely how much is still not clear to me -
of the programme contained in the 'British Road to
Socialism' had been written by the Soviet Politburo
and approved by Stalin himself.(152) 
===Moscow gold?===
There was 'Moscow gold' - bags of used notes, as well
as the subsidy by virtue of the Soviet Union's bulk
order of copies of the Daily Worker/Morning Star. The
'Moscow gold' claim was regarded as absurd, a state
smear, by most on the British Left, not least by CPGB
members, subjected to endless fund-raising appeals and
newspaper selling, and CPGB employees surviving on the
terrible wages the Party paid its staff.(153) But now
we know that the Soviet Union began sending money to
the British Party after the Hungarian revolt was put
down - apparently to compensate the British Party for
the loss of its membership (and hence membership fees)
incurred by the Party's refusal to condemn the Soviet
invasion. Senior CPGB person, Reuben Falber, would
meet the man from the Soviet Embassy and take delivery
of the bags of used notes. These would be stored in
the loft of Falber's house and then laundered through
the Party's accounts as 'anonymous donations' and the
like. It was as amateurish as that. 
The Moscow money seems to have been used chiefly to
fund the Party's full-time staff. In the 1960s,
despite constantly falling membership, the party
employed a lot of people, 70 according to one source,
including the industrial network,(154) what 1980s CPGB
member Sarah Benton described as 'until the late
1970s, the privileged section of the party'. (The
Moscow subsidy ended in 1979.)(155) 
===Secret Party members?===
There were also secret Party members, though how many
there were and what they did is unclear. The existence
of 'secret members', a staple on the right since the
war, appeared most strikingly in Spycatcher in which
Peter Wright recounts how MI5 had found the CPGB
membership files stashed in a rich member's flat and
photographed the whole lot - 55,000 files - in one
weekend, 'with a Polaroid camera'.(156) Wright claimed
that these files also 'contained the files of covert
members of the CPGB..... people who had gone
underground largely as a result of the new vetting
procedures brought in by the Attlee Government'.(157)
Wright's claims were denied by George Matthews, who
had been editor of the Daily Worker and assistant
general secretary of the Party.(158) However Bob Darke
described members, who for 'Personal Security', were
allowed not to reveal themselves as members when the
Party decreed that all members should 'come out' as
CPGB members in the other organisations to which they
belonged.(159) It may be that Wright simply remembered
it wrongly: it was not members who went underground
but who stayed underground. Further, Francis Beckett
reveals (though without a source) the existence of a
hitherto secret section of the Party, the Commercial
Branch, consisting of 'rich members, often Jews...
secret members... important industrialists' (emphasis
added), set up by Reuben Falber in the 1930s, which
apparently survived into the mid 1950s.(160) It
appears that it was partly the loss of the income from
this group after the revelations of anti-semitism in
the Soviet Union and the invasion of Hungary which
forced the Party to go to Moscow for money.(161) 
But some money and instructions from Moscow, though a
striking confirmation in part of the right's theories,
do not in themselves tell us anything about the
influence of the CPGB.(162) (Conspiracies may be small
and ineffectual but nonetheless conspiracies.) And
measuring the influence of an activity with
clandestine aspects, which both the Party and its
opponents have had good reasons to exaggerate, will be
very imprecise at best. 
Initially, post-war, the major focus of the state's
anti-communists seems to have been on the Soviet front
groups - the friendship societies etc. Eric Shaw
mentions that in 1953 the Labour Party's Proscription
List suddenly expanded with information about these
groups assumed to come from 'the Foreign Office [i.e.
IRD] and Special Branch' run through the International
Department of the Party.(163) This focus on the CPGB
front groups seems to be attributable to two things.
If Bower's recent biography of MI5 head Dick White is
accurate, one is the inadequacies of MI5 in the
post-war years.(164) The second is the the locus of
IRD within the Foreign Office network, where, engaged
in a propaganda struggle with the Soviet bloc
overseas, it was thus more interested in pro-Soviet
groups than in activities on the shop-floor. 
The network of pro-Soviet groups is still the focus of
the big IRIS pamphlet in 1957, The Communist Solar
System; but the 1956 pamphlet by Woodrow Wyatt MP, The
Peril in Our Midst was subtitled 'the Communist threat
to Britain's trade unions', and since then it has been
the Party's industrial wing which has received almost
all of the attention - and about which there has been
quite wide agreement, across a broadish political
spectrum.(165) Wyatt in 1956 claimed that the CPGB
controlled the ETU and the Fire Brigades Union, nearly
had control of the AEU and had considerable influence
in the NUM. In 1962 the Radcliffe Committee, set up by
the Macmillan government in the wake of the Vassell
spy case, reported on the apparently extensive Party
control of the civil service unions; and that year the
Conservative MP Aidan Crawley claimed that the CPGB
was strongest in the NUM, building workers and the
AEU, and claimed they were making inroads into the
clerical unions, citing sections of the woodworkers',
the plumbers' and the painters' unions as being under
CP control.(166) Less ideologically interested,the
historian Keith Middlemas saw 'substantial CP
influence in the ETU, Foundry Workers, AEU and the
NUM, especially in Fife and South Wales';(167)and in
his recent history of the Party Francis Beckett
claimed that 'the Party practically had full control
of the Fire Brigades Union, the Amalgamated
Engineering Union, the Foundry Workers and the
Electrical Trades Union'.(168) Though not in
themselves proof of anything - proof would entail much
more detailed analysis of the various unions than I am
capable of - the lists are strikingly consistent over
the period from 1956 to 1994. 
===The struggle for the AEU===
One of the recurring themes in the literature, from
the 1950s onwards, is the centrality of the struggle
in the AEU. IRIS was formed by AEU members and was
most active in that union (discussed above). This
concern quickens in the late 1960s and early 1970s as
the left, focused round the publications Voice of the
Unions and Engineering Voice, began to make
progress.(169) It is found, for example, in Brian
Crozier's 1970 anthology We Will Bury You, and in the
1972 IRIS pamphlet In Perspective: Concerning the role
of the Communist Party and its Effectiveness. In David
Stirling's GB75 documents, leaked and printed in Peace
News in August 1974, Stirling's opening paragraph,
'The Objective Summarised', is about the lack of a
contingency plan to 'weather the crucial first 3 or 4
days of a General Strike or one involving the
Amalgamated Engineering Union and the Electrical
Trades Union.'(170) Shortly after the leak, i.e. late
August 1974, Stirling met Ron McClaughlin and Frank
Nodes, both former AEU officials, who were forming
TRUEMID, the Movement for True Industrial Democracy. A
decade later the AEU was at the centre of former SIS
no. 2, G. K. Young's Subversion and the British
Riposte.(171) 
While CPGB influence in the British unions - and thus
in the Labour Party - was a constant refrain on the
right, before the hysteria of 1974/5 there were only
two occasions in the post-war period when the CPGB was
even semi-seriously alleged to be posing a threat to
the whole economy. The first was the 1948 dock strike.
Charges of communist control were made at the time,
and by senior members of the Labour Government,(172)
but I have seen no evidence to support this claim and,
in its absence, think we can reasonably attribute the
claims to cynical manipulation of the 'red card'
during a period of intense domestic difficulty for the
Attlee government. 
'Cynical manipulation of the red card' has often been
the description of the second occasion, during the
1966 seamen's strike, when Harold Wilson made his
notorious comments in the House of Commons about the
role of the CPGB in the strike, and actually named
CPGB members said to be active in it. This incident
deserves examination. 
===The 1966 seamen's strike===
There are two issues here, only one of which, whether
Wilson should have said what he did, usually gets
discussed. Most people, including most of his
colleagues at the time, think it was a tactical
mistake, at best. Peter Shore told Tony Benn that he
thought Wilson's remarks were 'completely bonkers';
and Benn noted in his diary, 'I think I share this
view'.(173) The Labour Left were appalled by Wilson's
behaviour; some by his use of what they perceived as
the 'red card', and others by his use of clandestine
sources of information from MI5 and Special Branch.
For some, this was when they first perceived the
shifty, careerist Wilson, prepared to even play the
anti-communist card, to break the seamen's strike.
This view is powerfully expressed by Paul Foot in his
1967 essay 'The Seamen's Struggle'.(174) 
In his essay Foot says that the 'basic charge' in
Wilson's second statement to the Commons was 'that
certain members of the Communist Party had been
engaging in a desperate battle to extend the seamen's
strike against the will of the NUS members.'(175) In
fact what Wilson said was much more complicated - and
more reasonable - than this suggests.(176) He began by
describing the CP's 'efficient and disciplined
industrial apparatus', and continued that 'for some
years now the Communist Party has had as one of its
objectives the building up of a position of strength
not only in the Seamen's Union, but in other unions
concerned with docks and transport. It engages in this
struggle for power in the Seamen's Union because it
recognises..... that democracy is shallow-rooted in
the union, not only that grievances and exploitation
have festered for many years.' He called it a
'take-over bid'. 
Wilson said the objectives of the CPGB in the strike
were: 'First, to influence the day-to-day policy of
the executive council; secondly, to extend the area of
stoppage' [this is the bit emphasised by Foot] and
thirdly, 'to use the strike not only to improve the
conditions of the seamen - in which I believe them to
be genuine - but also to secure what is at present the
main political and industrial objective of the
Communist Party - the destruction of the government's
prices and incomes policy.' Wilson went on to say that
he knew that the NUS executive committee was dominated
by Joe Kenny and Jim Slater and that, while he knew
neither of them were communists, he knew of their
meetings with CPGB members in the union and the CPGB's
industrial organiser, Bert Ramelson.(177) 
But smashing Wilson's pay policy was the aim of the
CPGB - and just about everybody else on the British
Left and in some of the trade unions. The rest of what
he said amounts to little more than an account of the
routine activities of all left groups in the labour
movement. They try to expand their positions and
influence inside every forum. This is what they do. If
Bert Ramelson et al were not trying to do these
things, CPGB members would be entitled to ask for
their subscriptions back. This is what they were
employed to do. The young Tony Benn also thought
Wilson's statement less than overwhelming. On June 28,
after Wilson' s listing of the CPGB members allegedly
involved in the strike, Benn wrote in his diary that
while the speech made him 'sick' and reminded him of
'McCarthyism', he added: 'In a sense Harold said
nothing that was new, since every trade union leader
knew it.' 
The seamen's strike was a great boost for the CPGB and
for Bert Ramelson who had only taken over as the
Party's chief industrial organiser from Peter Kerrigan
earlier that year. Under Ramelson the Party began
classical 'broad left' campaigns in many of the
unions, run by Party-controlled 'advisory committees'.
Willie Thompson, himself a member of the CPGB, derides
the idea that these committees had any power. 
'The CP advisory committees...were credited by an
alarmist press with being an organisational framework
through which a tight stranglehold was maintained upon
the country's economic existence; a network through
which flowed intelligence and commands enabling the
Kremlin via King Street to direct its thrusts...For
better or worse the advisories were just that - advice
forums - and their coordinating function even within
the individual area each one covered was weak.' (p.
136) 
The evidence on this just is not clear: Beckett offers
a different account of these committees. However
Thompson more or less agrees with Beckett's claims
that destruction of the Wilson-Castle trade union
reform proposals, in the 'In Place of Strife'
document, was 'largely a communist triumph and Wilson
knew it';(178) and the latter cites the 1970 dock
strike, the postal strike of 1971 and the miners'
strikes of 1972 as disputes in which the Party played
a significant role. 
In the 1970s, the anti-subversion lobby, orbiting
around IRD, and presumably informally briefed on the
reality of the 'Moscow gold' by MI5, took the picture
of real - and arguably, increasing - CPGB influence on
the trade unions, and added KGB/ Soviet control.To
this theory the Communist Party itself contributed by
occasionally boasting of its influence on the Labour
Party;(179) with the Labour Party itself unwittingly
adding the final touch by abolishing in 1973 the
Proscription List of organisations - mostly the 1950s
Soviet fronts - that Labour Party members could not
join, thus convincing the paranoids on the right that
the mice were in pantry. (180) Unaware of the 'Moscow
gold' evidence, the left dismissed the right's Soviet
angle as manifestly nonsense. 
===MI5's role===
Unaware of the evidence: this is the key point. For
while the members of the CPGB - and the wider public -
knew nothing of the packets of used fivers arriving in
London, we know now that MI5 had been aware of the
Moscow gold run almost as soon as it was begun. We can
start with Peter Wright's memory again. 
'Then there was the Falber affair. After the PARTY
PIECE operation, MI5 went on the hunt for CPGB files
which listed the secret payments made to the Party by
the Soviets. We suspected that perhaps they might be
held in the flat of Reuben Falber, who had recently
been made cashier of the Russian funds.'(181) 
MI5 knew about the payments, and knew Falber was in
charge of them.(182) All they wanted were the presumed
accounts, the books - the evidence. Wright tells us
that MI5 planned to burgle Falber's flat but their
first plan failed - and leaves it there! To MI5 the
proof of the Moscow Gold must have had something of
the status of the Holy Grail; and we are to believe
that having located it they made only one attempt to
get it? Wright really wants us to believe that for 20
years, aware that the CPGB were getting actual Soviet
cash money, MI5 were either unable to detect the
payoffs in London, or, having made one failed attempt,
just gave up? This is simply not credible. 
In the USA the FBI famously had so many agents inside
the CPUSA as to make the whole enterprise a farce; and
J. Edgar Hoover is quoted by a fairly senior ex FBI
source as having said, 'If it were not for me, there
would not even be a Communist Party of the United
States. Because I've financed the Communist Party, in
order to know what they are doing.'(183) As far as we
know, nothing quite like this happened in the UK. The
large transmitter found attached to the bottom of the
table in the CPGB's central meetings room, displayed
by ex CPGB Central Committee member George Mathews in
the Independent (25 November 1989), illustrates Peter
Wright's claim that 'By 1955....... the CPGB was
thoroughly penetrated at almost every level by
technical surveillance or informants'; and with the
spreading disillusion in the 1950s, climaxed by
Hungary, MI5 can have had no trouble recruiting active
and former party members, like the late Harry Newton,
to inform on the British comrades. 
I do not want to argue that MI5 were running the CPGB.
But it did allow the CPGB to run.(184) 
Had the existence of the 'Moscow gold' been revealed
in 1958 or 9, coming after the Soviet invasion of
Hungary, the CPGB would have been terminally damaged.
But for MI5 the 'communist threat' - and the link to
the Soviet Union - was simply too useful a stick with
which to beat the much more important wider labour
movement and Labour Party to be surrendered. The
Soviet connection with the CPGB enabled the Security
Service to portray both unions and the left of the
Labour Party, some of whom worked with the CPGB, as
subversives; and with a subversive minority in its
midst, this enabled the Labour Party as a whole to be
portrayed as a threat to the well-being of the
nation,(185) and thus a legitimate target for MI5.
Reviewing Willie Thompson's history of the Party,
social democrat John Torode (whose father had been a
significant pre-war member of the Party) charged that:
'The [CPGB's] constant encouragement of strikes in
support of unrealistic wage demands, the destruction
of Barbara Castle's union reforms and the coordinated
attempts to capture positions of power in order to
influence Labour Party policy, did much to destroy the
credibility of that party.'(186) 
In one sense Torode is merely saying that the CPGB
tried to use such influence as it had in the trade
unions to frustrate social democratic policies and
build up its own position. Is this not what Communist
Parties always did? But in another way Torode has
missed the point. For the link with the CPGB
discredited the Labour Party because of the CPGB's
perceived connection to Moscow. If Torode's charge is
true - and I think it is to some extent - it was only
possible because MI5 had concealed the Moscow
financial connection and preserved the CPGB as a
significant force on the British Left. 
Since so much of the British Left came either from, or
in opposition to, the CPGB, it is impossible to even
speculate convincingly how the the British Left - or
British Politics - would have developed if the Moscow
gold had been exposed in the late fifties. But it
certainly is possible that the anti-union hysteria of
the late 1970s, leading to the catastrophe of
Thatcherism - and the subsequent collapse of the
Labour Party - could have been avoided. 
===Notes===
148.	In 1964, for example, Common Cause issued a
pamphlet naming 180 people in Britain with 'Communist
connections', including Bertrand Russell, Lord Boyd
Orr and the painter Ruskin Spear! See the Sunday
Times, 31 May 1964. 'Big Jim' Matthews of the GMWU was
one of the Common Cause directors who approved the
publication
149.	For this view see the memoir by Des Warren, The
Key to My Cell, New Park, London, 1982. One of the
so-called Shrewsbury pickets, imprisoned in 1972,
Warren had been a member of the CPGB, became
disillusioned and joined the Workers' Revolutionary
Party.
150.	Darke pp. 59 and 60
151.	A CPGB activist at the time, Harry McShane
describes in his memoir how 'overnight we all became
democratic and amazingly interested in Acts of
Parliament.....the idea was that, whereas the old
Industrial Department was concerned with industrial
action, the Labour Movement Department would influence
the Labour Party and the trade unions and change the
character of those bodies....'. McShane p. 246.
152.	See Guardian, September 14 1991 and the
discussion in Labour History Review, Vol. 57, no. 3,
pp. 33-5.
153.	My parents were both in the CPGB in the 1945-56
period and talked of the burden of trying to sell
Party literature. On the Party's low wages see, for
example, the letter from former Party employee Bill
Brooks in Guardian, 21 November 1991.
154.	Independent, 15 November 1991
155.	The people I knew of in the CPGB were, on the
whole, well intentioned left democrats who, almost to
a man and woman, became Euro-communists in the 70s and
80s. The impact on the Party of the revelation of
Soviet funding is discussed in detail in Mosbacher.
156.	Think of the logistics of this: assuming only one
page per file, for 48 hours, using 1955 technology,
and without disturbing the other tenants in the block
of flats? It seems unlikely to me.
157.	Wright, Spycatcher p. 55
158.	Beckett p. 138 repeats the denials of Matthews,
attributing it to 'CP officials'.
159.	Darke p. 86. On this 'coming out' of concealed CP
members, see the conference report in Labour History
Review, vol. 57, No. 3 Winter 1992, p. 29.
160.	Beckett pp. 147-8
161.	Evidence of secret CP members also comes from
another Communist Party. In her 1990 autobiography the
Australian feminist, poet and Communist Party
activist, Dorothy Hughes wrote of the period just
after World War 2, when the ACP was under pressure
from the state: 'Peter Thomas, Joan's former husband,
writes leaders for the West Australian and is an
undercover member of the State Committee of the
Party.' (emphasis added) Dorothy Hughes, Wild Card,
Virago, London, p. 122.
162.	Other left-wing parties in Britain have received
foreign funding without amounting to anything. The
Workers' Revolutionary Party for example.
163.	Shaw, Discipline, p. 59
164.	See Bower, The Perfect English Spy, chapter 4
165.	The Peril In Our Midst, Phoenix House, London,
1956.
166.	The Hidden Face of British Communism, Aidan
Crawley, Sunday Times, October 28 1962, reprinted as a
pamphlet.
167.	Middlemas, footnote on p. 414
168.	Beckett p. 109. Like the rest of Beckett's book,
this is unsourced but presumably the estimate is from
CPGB members or former members.
169.	See Roberts pp. 210-216. IRIS discussed 'Voice'
newspapers in their pamphlet The British 'Left',
August 1970, pp. 18 and 19. The scare quotes round
'Left' are IRIS's.
170.	Peace News, special issue, 23 August, 1974.
171.	Ossian, Glasgow, no date but circa 1984.
172.	This is still believed on the right. See for
example in the obituary of the London CPGB dockers'
leader, Jack Dash, in the Daily Telegraph June 9,
1989. The various dock strikes and the alleged
'communist threat' are discussed in Jim Phillips.
173.	Pimlott p. 407
174.	In Blackburn and Cockburn (eds.). In that, and in
his book The Politics of Harold Wilson, Foot traces
the origins of the strike back to the smaller 1960
strike and the formation of the National Seamen's
Reform Movement. I discussed Foot's highly selective
account of the origins of the strike in Lobster 25. 
Historian of the CPGB Willie Thompson writes that 'the
Prime Minister indicted the CP (quite inaccurately)
for fomenting and organising the strike....accusing
King Street of having organised it with the deliberate
purpose of inflicting damage on the national economy.'
(emphasis added) p. 137. Actually Wilson did not
accuse the CPGB of deliberately trying to damage the
national economy, and Thompson says nothing more about
the alleged CPGB influence on the strike.
175.	Blackburn and Cockburn (eds.) p. 175
176.	His statement is reproduced in his The Labour
Government 1964-70 Penguin 1974, pp. 308-11.
177.	On this the evidence is incomplete and
contradictory. On the one hand Dr Raymond Challinor
told me that he discussed this with Jim Slater just
before the latter's death, and Slater told him that he
had never met Bert Ramelson, that he had told Wilson
this, and that Wilson had acknowledged that he had
been misinformed. But in his history of the CPGB
Beckett tells us that Slater was part of a 'left
caucus.... people who had a high regard for [CPGB
Industrial Organiser] Ramelson'. Beckett p. 182
178.	Beckett p. 175, Willie Thompson pp. 138/9.
179.	This is attributed to Ramelson in Seamus Milne's
obituary of him in the Guardian, 16 April 1994.
180.	Blake Baker, one of the media experts on the
CPGB, who wrote for the Daily Telegraph for many
years, on p. 96 of his The Far Left wrote of the
subsidies from Moscow: 'No one has ever been able to
produce evidence, let alone prove it. ... All that
would be necessary is a car or a taxicab to collect a
suitcase full of money.' Is Baker hinting here that he
knew about the cash from Moscow and how it was
delivered?
181.	Spycatcher p. 175 Falber's account is in Changes,
16-19 November 1991. In it he writes: First, did the
authorities know about it [the Moscow money]? I think
they did.'
182.	This suggests either that the CPGB had a
high-level MI5 mole in its ranks who has never been
identified, or that SIS had a hitherto unknown agent
inside the Soviet intelligence apparatus.
183.	Summers, p. 191
184.	Something similar happened in the United States
where the people who handled the secret Soviet Union
donations to the CPUSA, Morris and Jack Childs, were
actually FBI agents. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics
II: Essays on Oswald, Mexico and Cuba (Green Archive
Publications, Skokie, Illinois, USA 1995), p. 93,
citing David J. Garrow's The FBI and Martin Luther
King (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1981).
185.	This was a staple of the subversive-hunters in
the mid 1970s. But compare and contrast Geoffrey
Stewart-Smith's Not To Be Trusted: Left Wing Extremism
in the Labour and Liberal Parties of February 1974,
with his 1979 Hidden Face of the Labour Party, 1979.
By 1979 he has added Trotskyist groups in the Labour
Party to the CPGB as 'the threat'.
186.	The Independent, 1 October 1992. 
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