168.Ibid.
169.‘Roads to Rome’, 17 June 1961; ‘Engagement Announced’, 30 September 1961; ‘Back to Bonapartism’, 19 January 1963.
170.‘Smut without Fire’, 30 March 1963; ‘After Mr Profumo’, 8 June 1963; ‘Prime Minister’s Crisis’, 15 June 1963; ‘Implications’, 26 October 1963.
171.‘Mr Butskell’s Dilemma’, 13 February 1954. This composite Chancellor – blending the Conservatives’ R. A. Butler and Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell – has passed into legend as a symbol of the post-war consensus between the two main parties on macroeconomic policy. Neil Rollings, ‘Poor Mr Butskell: A Short Life, Wrecked by Schizophrenia’, Twentieth Century British History, January 1994, pp. 186–87, 196, 199. Macrae’s use of the term supports this, but only in part. On the one hand, Macrae welcomed the moderating influence of ‘Mr Butskell’ on the wilder elements in both parties – in particular Labour and its ‘graver irresponsibilities’. On the other, he coined the term in 1954 precisely to point out a character flaw in this consensual figure – his tendency to ‘run away’ under ‘political pressures’ when ‘external economic events’ required unpopular decisions, to restore confidence in sterling or right the trade balance. From the start therefore ‘Butskellism’ was also about the limits of consensus, and carried a tinge of political cowardice – putting off the raising of bank rate, large spending cuts, suppression of wage demands, or the floating of the pound.
172.He postulated that these high growth, high-tech industries had ‘very significantly higher marginal productivity per factor employed than the average of other industries’ so that it had become, in current conditions, ‘economically profitable to inflate marginal demand up to a distinctly higher point than it used to be’. Norman Macrae, Sunshades in October, London 1963, pp. 17, 25.
173.Ibid., p. 28.
174.‘Tyerman, Donald (1908–1981)’, Norman Macrae in ODNB. In governing, Labour might also abandon antiquated ideas about planning and nationalization: ‘The Domestic Choice’, 3 October 1964; ‘A Vote of No Confidence’, 10 October 1964.
175.Memorandum by Geoffrey Crowther, July 1964, Layton Papers, TCC.
176.Donald Tyerman, ‘Crowther and the Great Issues’, Encounter, May 1972.
177.Donald Tyerman, ‘As We Move: 1956–65,’ Economist, 17 April 1965.
7. Liberal Cold Warriors
1.In characteristic fashion, his analysis began with jokes about ‘the coming to power of Mr. Paul Foot, Miss Vanessa Redgrave, or Messrs Eric Tomlinson and Des Warren’, and ended with a children’s poem by Ogden Nash, its final line, ‘let’s not despair’. Alastair Burnet, Is Britain Governable?, London 1975, pp. 21–22.
2.Beedham joined the Economist from the Yorkshire Post in 1955, but was only there for a few months before he left for the US. In 1958, he became Washington correspondent. ‘Brian Beedham: The Pipe Smoking Warrior’, 16 May 2015. Crozier cited an ‘amusing letter from Brian Beedham’ referring ‘to charges that BC worked for British intelligence’ in 14 January 1969, Brian Crozier Papers, HIA, Box 2, Folder 2. Moss had a letter of introduction from his father-in-law, Geoffrey Fairbairn, a founding member with Crozier of the Institute for the Study of Conflict and a lecturer at the Australian National University. Moss, by his own account, was a prodigy with an academic post in ancient history; frustrated with ‘teutonisms, complicated language and footnotes’, he decided to come to London in search of more excitement: Crozier, Free Agent, p. 98.
3.Russell Warren Howe, ‘Asset Unwitting: Covering the World for the CIA’, MORE, May 1978; ‘The CIA’s “Students” of Conflict’, Embassy Magazine, October 1976; Andy Weir and Jonathan Bloch, ‘Robert Moss’, Covert Action Information Bulletin, December 1979, p. 13.
4.Weir and Bloch, ‘Robert Moss’, p. 13.
5.Thatcher wanted to strongly denounce the Soviet Union, in light of what she saw as insufficient US support for ‘anti-communist forces’ in Angola. She found a draft speech from her own shadow foreign secretary, Reginald Maudling, ‘so weak it wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding’. Her political secretary Richard Ryder, later vice-chairman of the BBC, sent her to Moss, who ‘turned out to be an ideal choice’: Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power, London 1995, p. 361; Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography: Not For Turning, London 2013, p. 134.
6.‘Mr. Diem’s Critics Speak Out’, 7 May 1960.
7.Guerrilla tactics, cod citations from Mao, racial distinctions – all point to Crozier: ‘Vietnam’s Lessons’, 9 November 1963. As late as 1966, a special correspondent praised the ‘rehabilitated hamlets’, where ‘Buddhists work with Buddhists’, and ‘eager young American platoon-leaders’ try to ‘communicate with eager young South Vietnamese hamlet leaders’: ‘Hope for the Hamlets’, 18 June 1966.
8.‘This Is It’, 3 February 1968.
9.‘If He Gets to Saigon’, 17 February 1968.
10.‘The Only Innocents’, 29 November 1969.
11.‘Even Neutrals Need Guns’, 4 April 1970.
12.Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945–1990, New York 1991, pp. 274, 268.
13.‘Although he is not going to make it his policy to bomb them back to the stone age – that brutal phrase used years ago by one foolish American general, and so often put into other Americans’ mouths since – he can cause a great deal of damage to North Vietnam. They have their calculations to make’: ‘The Peace that Wasn’t’, 23 December 1972; See also, ‘It Is a Real Issue’, 19 August 1972; ‘The Ritual Becomes Real’, 15 July 1973.
14.Washington was doing the same good work London had in the 1950s in Malaya: ‘to demonstrate to countries momentarily intoxicated with their own power and revolutionary afflatus that there is a point at which their actions will meet resistance’: ‘The Narrow Channel’ 8 August 1964; ‘In the Face of Adversity’, 9 January 1965.
15.Rhiannon Vickers, ‘Harold Wilson, the British Labour Party, and the War in Vietnam’, Journal of Cold War Studies, October 2008, pp. 47–50.
16.‘How Not to Influence the Americans’, 9 July 1966.
17.‘Who Whom?’, 28 October 1967.
18.To be clear about the parallels: ‘It was people like this who on August 3, 1914 heard Sir Edward Grey spell out the argument for war … and could still believe, even then, that Germany was prepared to respect the integrity of Belgium and that the real trouble was Britain’s “mad desire” to maintain the balance of power. It was the same body of opinion which delayed rearmament in the 1930s until it was within a few weeks of being too late, and which then made Chamberlain jump through the Munich hoop’: ‘The Way We Go to War’, 26 June 1971; ‘Voices’, 10 July 1971.
19.The paper backed the war long after almost every other major London news outlet had given it up as a lost cause. For many, this happened in 1965 when the US began to heavily bomb the North, including with napalm and CS gas.
20.‘Vietnam: An Argument with the Poles’, 11 December 1965. The first letter the next week stated ‘any impartial reader of your argument with the Poles must conclude the Poles come out best’. The second felt the Economist had given too much ground to Polityka, by conceding South Vietnam was not in fact a democracy. ‘You say the South Vietnamese government broke its undertaking to hold elections in 1956. It made no such undertaking, was not a party to the Geneva agreements of 1954, and indeed strongly dissociated itself from them at the time.’ This was signed, ‘yours faithfully, Brian Crozier’: 18 December 1965.
21.Brian Beedham, ‘The Economist on Today’s World: Sukarno Must Be Checked to Prevent Worse Trouble’, Salt Lake Tribune, 18 January 1964. ‘For anyone who first discovered the area through the stories of Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham, it is hard to realize that the tangle of islands we now solemnly call Indonesia and Malaysia is the scene of some very dangerous developments.’ Sukarno was an even bigger threat than Nasser and might provoke a new Suez Crisis; whereas Washington had been right to oppose that ‘melodramatic’ adventure – this time, Britain could lead a ‘low-level’ war, with the same b
asic goals as the US in nearby Vietnam.
22.The Economist calculated the chances of Sukarno’s removal by ‘more responsible’ politicians and soldiers as high, so long as Britain helped Malaya: ‘In the Face of Adversity’, 9 January 1965; ‘Sukarno Confronted’, 25 December 1965. For subversion efforts, see Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, pp. 1–10; William Roger Louis, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez, and Decolonization, London 2006, pp. 569–71. For representative coverage of Suharto: ‘Low Posture for Asean, High Posture for Suharto’, 23 March 1968; ‘Suharto Reshapes his Army’, 8 March 1969; ‘Choreography by Suharto’, 18 October 1975; ‘Suharto and the Reins of Power’, 17 March 1990. Only in 1998 did the Economist call on him to stand down: his ‘rigidity and autocracy’ had been necessary to make Indonesia ‘a prosperous regional power’, but continued growth now required ‘flexibility and democracy’. ‘Stand Down Suharto’, 17 January 1998.
23.‘Left with Castroism’, 12 January 1963; ‘Too Damned Equal’, 28 September 1963; ‘Safety First in the Caribbean’, 8 May 1965. In 1963, Bosch became the first elected president of the Dominican Republic since the fall of General Trujillo. US intervention in 1965 ensured Trujillo’s protégé, General Balaguer, became president in 1966 – to whom the Economist quickly rallied on grounds of economic good management. ‘When the Peacemen Fly Away’, 27 August 1966.
24.‘How to Stay Democratic Without Actually Cheating’, 8 April 1967; ‘New Nemesis’, 29 April 1967; ‘Marching Back to the Good Old Days’, 13 May 1967.
25.‘Nasser Does It’, 27 May 1967; ‘Two Days’ Work’, ‘Americans Play It Cool’, 10 June 1967; ‘Most of Israel says the Arabs had to be taught a lesson; it says it with sadness more than anything else.’ They ‘want to keep the Old City but hate the idea of capturing everything up to the west bank of the Jordan’. ‘Will Israel’s success go too much to its head? One doubts it: this is a very levelheaded people.’ ‘Teach Them a Lesson’, 10 June 1967, and passim.
26.‘Israel Fearless’, 13 October 1973; ‘No Good Result’, 13 October 1973; ‘No More Doves’, 27 October 1973. After the Six-Day War, US aid increased from $63 million to $102 million annually, reaching $634.5 million in 1971, quintupling after the Yom Kippur War in 1973 to make Israel the largest recipient of US foreign aid since 1976. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, New York 2007, pp. 2–3.
27.‘Worth spending /not concerned risks involved /no involvement of embassy /$10,000,000 available, more if necessary/ best men we have/ game plan/ make the economy scream/ 48 hours for plan of action’: CIA director Richard Helms took these notes during a meeting with Nixon, Kissinger and others on 15 September 1970. At this stage, their plot led to the murder (by extremist officers) of René Schneider, the Chief of the Chilean General Staff, known to be against military intervention in the electoral process – but not to the hoped-for coup. See Jonathan Haslam, The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende’s Chile, London 2005, p. 67.
28.‘Urban Guerrillas in Latin America’ in 1970, ‘Uruguay: Terrorism vs. Democracy’ in 1971, The War for the Cities in 1972 – all retailed the idea that Che Guevara’s failure to raise a peasant revolt in Bolivia in 1967 prefigured a shift in tactics and terrain for left subversives from the countryside to the city: Robert Moss, The War for the Cities, New York 1972, pp. 7, 27, 241–48.
29.Crozier, Free Agent, p. 110.
30.‘Birth of a Civil War’, 11 March 1972.
31.‘Come off ITT’, 1 April 1972; ‘Who’s for Sweet-and-Sour Turkey’, 5 August 1972; ‘Ticket to Cuba’, 2 September 1972.
32.Fred Landis, ‘Robert Moss, Arnaud de Borchgrave, Right-Wing Disinformation’, CAIB, August 1980, p. 38.
33.Robert Moss, Chile’s Marxist Experiment, New York 1974, p. 190.
34.Ibid., p. i.
35.For the way Moss used CIA-invented stories while denying CIA involvement, a representative sentence: ‘The full extent of these preparations was not accurately known until after the September coup, when the military junta claimed it had discovered – in a safe in the office of the Communist under-secretary for the interior, Daniel Vergara – detailed plans for the assassination of hundreds of opposition leaders, senior officers, conservative journalists and businessmen.’ Ibid., pp. 188–89, vi; Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War, Chapel Hill 2011, p. 61.
36.Peter Chippindale and Martin Walker, ‘Tory’s Book Funded by CIA’, ‘Only the Views We Want You to Read’, Guardian, 20 December 1976.
37.‘Chile After Allende’, 13 October 1973.
38.For examples of overlap, see Robert Moss, ‘The Making of Europe’s Cuba’, National Review 11 April 1975 and ‘Don’t Do a Cuba on Portugal’, Economist 12 April 1975; Robert Moss, ‘Moscow’s Next Target in Africa’, Daily Telegraph 20 February 1977 and ‘Podgorny Goes South’, Economist, 8 January 1977. For ISC reports, see Iain Hamilton and Robert Moss, The Spreading Irish Conflict, London 1971; Robert Moss, Revolutionary Challenges in Spain, London 1974; Robert Moss, The Campaign to Destabilise Iran, London 1978.
39.New York Times News Service, London, 18 November 1979, quoted in Landis, ‘Robert Moss, Arnaud de Borchgrave, and Right-Wing Disinformation’, CAIB, August 1980, p. 37. When scant attention was paid to a propaganda piece by Moss in the Daily Telegraph – ‘Moscow’s Next Target in Africa’, 20 February 1977 – Pretoria had it reprinted as a full-page ad in the Guardian and Washington Post. In November 1978 Crozier arranged for ‘the top civilian in the SAVAK hierarchy to be closeted with Robert Moss for a whole week with a pile of secret reports in Farsi … evidence of Soviet involvement with the Shah’s enemies’. The result was the ISC’s Campaign to Destabilise Iran. ‘Shortly after the study had appeared the Iranian chargé d’affaires informed me that the Shah had authorised a first annual payment of £1 million to The 61’: Crozier, Free Agent, p. 161.
40.Arnaud de Borchgrave, a Newsweek editor known to keep ‘intelligence files’ on fellow journalists, became Moss’s co-author. The two met when de Borchgrave was hiding out in the English countryside – convinced his life was in danger after some threatening calls – at the estate of his cousin, Economist chairman Evelyn de Rothschild. ‘We eventually realized that between us we knew most of the intelligence directors in the Western world’, de Borchgrave told the New York Times. ‘We decided to pool these assets to gain access to the major defectors from Soviet intelligence, to see what they could tell us about disinformation and manipulating the media.’ Rather than something that ‘read like a PhD thesis’, he and Moss decided to write novels. All were devoted to the idea that liberal bastions in media and government were swarming with KGB moles, working to dampen Western resolve to fight communism. The Spike posited this as the path to the takeover of the US in five years’ time; in 1981, the danger was a Death Beam (originally Death Star until Lucasfilm threatened to sue); in 1983 in Monimbo, it was Fidel Castro, who planned to foment a race war in the US via the Black Panthers. Edwin McDowell, ‘Behind the Bestsellers’, New York Times, 22 June 1980. Marketed as containing news too explosive to be published in the mainstream press, the only truly distinguishing feature of the novels was gratuitous sex. Death Beam – featuring Vadim Krylov, KGB head, sloshing around with the prepubescent children of dissidents in a marble bathtub in East Berlin – was feted at its launch party in Washington by virtually the entire Reagan administration, including James Baker, Richard Allen, Edwin Meese and CIA director William Casey. Morgan Mason, the director of political affairs Reagan brought with him from Hollywood, told the Washington Post, ‘Arnaud and Robert are good guys, and they’re known to be on our side, so to speak. They are philosophically attuned to the administration, and we want to embrace them.’ ‘Beams All Around: Turning out for Robert Moss’ Book Party’, Washington Post, 11 November 1981. In 1985 de Borchgrave became editor of the Post’s rightwing competitor, the Washington Times, whose owner Sun Myung Moon was a Korean cult leader, presi
ding over mass wedding ceremonies. Moss went on an even more circuitous journey. Reacting to the collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 with the same intensity he had brought to fighting it, Moss had a breakdown, divorced his wife, moved to a barn in upstate New York, and took the time to look within. What he found there was a Native American woman, ‘a clan mother and powerful healer’, a friendly red-tailed hawk, a warrior shaman and an alter ego, Sir William Johnstone, ‘who flourished in the 1700s as both the King’s Superintendent of Indians, an adopted Mohawk war chief, and a redoubtable ladies’ man’. Through them and a number of other birds of prey, Moss learned to re-evaluate ‘previous ambitions and definitions of success’, which he defined rather untruthfully as ‘the commercial fast track in New York and London’. A group of Iroquois, helping him to interpret the archaic Mohawk dialect spoken in his dreams, led him to his new vocation. Moss has since published nine guides to ‘active dreaming’ and runs workshops where the spiritually curious can learn how to use ‘dreams to understand your past, shape your future, get in touch with your deepest desires, and be guided by your higher self’. The man who once jumped for joy at the death of Allende now runs a website, blog and Twitter feed on healing through dreams. One blog post shows a picture of the toy hawk he rubs against workshop participants to activate their ‘child selves’ and remind them ‘they can fly’. Robert Moss, Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life, New York 1996, pp. 12, 15, and back cover.
41.On returning from Brazil in 1965, Macrae contemplated the political commitments he shared with Crozier, Moss and Beedham. ‘Editing the proofs of this survey in The Economist offices in St James’s one is struck by an awkward thought’, he interjected. ‘If there was an organisation like this newspaper in Brazil – with a large staff of graduates from the national universities, communist activists would make a dead set at it. Down there in the canteen there would be a lot of smooth-faced men wielding large rolls of dirty banknotes.’ He realized ‘with some shock, that if he had been born in intellectual circles in Brazil, some of his very best friends would probably be communists’. Thankfully, ‘nearly all of his best new friends in Brazil are, to a man, and probably rightly, supporters of the Castelo Branco coup d’état.’ ‘No Christ on the Andes’, 25 September 1965.
Liberalism at Large Page 63