The Perplexities of
Moderate Men

IN THIS ISSUE we print the text of an article commissioned by the "Sunday Times Magazine" in 1972 and withdrawn from publication by the Editor, together with an account of the surrounding circumstances.

Our purpose is to examine the pressures which help to inform decision-making inside the British Labour Party. Inevitably, certain individuals are named. This is done not out of malice to the persons concerned, but because we believe that it is in the public interest that the full story should be told. All facts asserted are true, to the best of our knowledge.

Firstly, the article sheds fresh light on the leadership of the social democratic parties of Europe and particularly of the British Labour Party. Throughout Europe the long period of post-war consensus is breaking down. Political solutions to accelerating inflation are to be found either to Right or Left, not in the centre. Increasingly, the choice lies between tight monetary control and resulting unemployment or massive social intervention in the economy. In response to a changing situation, Labour Party policy is moving firmly to the left, but many of its leaders, socially conditioned by the "End of Ideology" climate of the 1950s, and the illusions of the Kennedy era, have been left without a coherent political position.

Nowhere is this conditioning clearer than in the field of foreign policy. To many socialists, the reactionary decisions of the British Cabinet, opposing as it now frequently does the decisions of its own Party Conference, N.E.C. and Transport House, are inexplicable. Recent press cuttings reproduced in our report illustrate the point.

CYPRUS
Why does a socialist government maintain British bases in Cyprus? On the one occasion when they could legitimately have been used -in defending the constitutional President, Arch-bishop Makarios - the troops were immobilised. If our analysis is correct, bases are maintained there solely because the United States needs a staging post to the Middle East. The full story of the Cyprus coup and of U.S. involvement in it, is just beginning to emerge. (See "Sunday Times", October 20, 1974, p.11).

Labour Party policy on Chile is totally opposed to the Junta, yet the Labour Government has recently helped to reschedule Chile's debts, and continued the supply of arms.

SOUTH AFRICA
The same pressure has caused the Government to maintain strategic and economic links with South Africa when the Party is pledged to fight apartheid, and to postpone and water down the defence review to which the Party is committed.

There is now a growing gulf between a left-leaning Labour Party and a Cabinet many of whose members are committed to support for United States policies at any cost . We should now ask what it is we are defending in terms of these same American interests. Is the Labour Party leadership prepared to sanction indefinitely the right-wing regimes on which Washington will, in future, be increasingly forced to depend to protect its vested interests?

In the aftermath of Watergate and with the truth emerging about the regimes in South Africa, Latin-America and the Middle East, it is now becoming increasingly indefensible for any socialist to continue to support United States foreign policy. Those prepared to do so must also be prepared to accept a growing alignment between social democracy and fascism. There is an urgent need for reappraisal on the part of many of the Labour Party leaders.

A second purpose of the attached article is to provide some analysis of the "free" press that bodies like the International Press Institute and the Congress for Cultural Freedom were set up to defend. Such is the degree of cultural conditioning of those who have fought the cold war for a generation that no external censorship is needed to protect U.S. interests. The Press is prepared to do the job itself. It is no accident that many of the leading Cold Warriors were ex-communists, for their methods are often a mirror-image of those of their adversaries.

The editorial chair of one of the world's leading newspapers brings power and prestige to its occupant it also carries the responsibility of using the resources at its disposal impartially and in the public interest.

"Everybody believes in the truth, you know, until it affects his vested interests " The Editor of the "Sunday Times" told a Cultural Freedom seminar in Turin in 1971. It could be asked why, when presented with detailed evidence of a massive international campaign to subvert and overthrow democratically elected governments, using trade unions and other "voluntary" organisations, the "Sunday Times" did not immediately start to search out the truth.

If a single researcher in 1967 was able to name the Front Royal training school in Virginia at which the CIA instructed Latin American trade unionists in subversion, the Insight team could surely have uncovered the whole story before the British TUC met that same year. World opinion would then have been alerted and democratic governments and free trade unions strengthened in resisting 'destabilisation" by the United States seven years before the story finally emerged. It is even possible that Allende might still be alive today.

SUBSIDISED

But the same "curious values" are found this side of the Atlantic. Three years later, the Editor of the "Sunday Times" was lending his name to Cultural Freedom activities in Europe.

The third function of the article is to reveal a little more of the means by which U.S. foreign policy has been conducted since World War II. The CIA's exploits were not the work of a "lunatic fringe" temporarily out of the control of their masters in Washington, but were, as Robert Kennedy pointed out, deliberate acts of policy initiated by the National Security Council (of which Kissinger is now Chairman) directly responsible to successive Presidents of the United States. This important point was made in the article which the "Sunday Times" suppressed in 1967, and was re-stated in the "inquiry into Kissinger's policy of secret American intervention in the politics and economy of foreign nations" by Godfrey Hodgson and William Shawcross which appeared in the paper, October 27, 1974. "The CIA" they say "was only one of the instruments for Kissingers will. He sat at the controls of a giant console, able to direct now the CIA, now the State Department, the Treasury or the Navy Department as each seemed fitted for his purpose. That was to destroy the constitutional government of Chile." Could such a message fail to have had impact some seven years earlier?

This console is linked, also, to the great "charitable" foundations - Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie - which have picked up the tab whenever private "non-political" philanthropy has appeared more appropriate than direct government funding.

Secret U.S. funding of trade unions and other voluntary organisations all round the world was initiated by Thomas Braden who set up the CIA's International Organisation Division in the early fifties. He was succeeded by Cord Meyer, founder of the United World Federalists which helped to launch the European Movement, and a lifelong CIA employee. Meyer was in charge of covert funding of Encounter and the Congress for Cultural Freedom and by 1973 was assistant deputy director of plans in line for the deputy directorship. In the event he was promoted to be station chief in London. At the time he was thought to have been "kicked upstairs" but Washington CIA watchers are now having second thoughts.

COVERT ACTION
Since de Gaulle drummed the Americans out of France, covert action for the whole of Europe, East and West, and the Mediterranean has been centred on the Embassy in London, in premises close to Grosvenor Square. Far from being put out to grass, Meyer has been hard at work in what promises to be the most active field of U.S. intervention over the next five years. Irving Brown is back in Europe, and his old prot~g~, Helmust Schmidt, is now German Chancellor. Already evidence is emerging of the CIA's hand in the curious circumstances surrounding Brandt's downfall. As the Labour Party moves to the left, is it too much to predict the appearance in Fleet Street of "secret" documents attacking prominent members of the Government - or are they emerging already?

In answer to a Parliamentary question in 1967 Harold Wilson said there was no evidence that the CIA was operating on British territory. The Government, in its own interest, should set up an immediate enquiry to find out if this still holds true.

In the meantime, it should demand the immediate recall of Cord Meyer and the 100 or more intelligence men now swelling the grossly inflated establishment of the U.S. Embassy in London -just as Lord Home expelled many of the K.G.B. agents attached to the Russian Trade Mission in Highgate a few years ago.

The tragedy of the "freethinkers" is that their thought is not yet free. Whether it ever will be is their problem, but meanwhile we must protect ourselves from its consequences. Cultural conditioning - it used to be called brainwashing -is difficult to expunge. Destalinisation is immensely difficult for the Stalinist, and we are right to demand more than a few crocodile tears from the communists as evidence of their conversion to representative democracy.

So for those who have unwittingly travelled with (and dined off) the CIA - overlooking their naivete in not questioning where the money was coming from - it is not sufficient for them to claim that they were never consciously influenced by their mentors. The fellow-travellers of the State Department - like those of Moscow - were picked out in the first place because of their blind devotion to one side in the cold war.

There can be no "free press" until senior editorial staff are able to take a view of world politics that is genuinely independent of all power blocks. Nor does independence mean neutrality. Criticism must not be withheld wherever it is deserved.

If editors are unable to accept this lesson then the responsibility lies with newspaper employees to bring them under democratic control.