“CHINA’S NEW EMBASSY COULD BE A NEST OF SPIES” – HEADLINE IN THE TIMES. by Donal Kennedy

The half-page Comment by Roger Boyes, who seems to be  privy to much Intelligence (with a Capital “I”)  appears today March 10th.

He writes about the new London Embassy.

Living in London the prospect doesn’t alarm me. But if it functions as some Embassies of powerful Western Democracies have done in many countries I would be scared stiff.

When the US Air Force was bombing the bejasus out of Cambodia under Nixon and Kissinger. unknown to the American Congress and citizenry,  Chris Mullin was in the country and overheard radio instruction being given to the pilots by diplomatists in the US Embassy in the Cambodian Capital. Kissinger was rewarded with a Nobel Peace Prize and was feted by the Great and Good of the Capitalist World including Ireland’s own Peter Sutherland, virtually canonised on his death last year.

The 1953 coup which overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Dr Mossadegh was orchestrated by the CIA but along lines (or using a road-map?) prepared in the United Kingdom’s Tehran Embassy during the Attlee government some years earlier.

Mossadeq had nationalised his country’s oil which had been stolen by the British early in the 20th Century and had offered the thieves generous compensation in the circumstances. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was presently renamed BP. Amongst the glittering prizes,  (a British Honorary Knighthood, a Papal title and other Gongs) collected by Peter Sutherland, was the Chairmanship of BP.  In 1981 the street hosting the British Embassy in Tehran was renamed in honour of Bobby Sands.

In the annals of democracy Bobby Sands, elected whilst a prisoner on hunger strike as an MP for a single-seat constituency must rank rather higher than the Blue-Shirt  Peter Sutherland, who failed to get elected in a multi-seat constituency for Dail Eireann.

British and American embassies have been involved in orchestrating and financing coups in numerous countries, and not in the best interests of those countries’ people.

In 1965 the British Ambassador in Jakarta, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, pulled off an amazing coup, fooling the BBC and other British media generally supportive of British foreign policy which deposed the popular President Sukarno and installed General Suharto which made Indonesia a slave of the World Bank and impoverished its people. During   the coup unarmed trade unionistsand socialists, many ethnically Chinese, to the number of between 500,000 and one million, were murdered and thrown in the sea and were washed up on lawns and gardens in numerous places. Apparently this was a cause for rejoicing in the Wilson Government.

In September 1969 Sir Andrew Gilchrist was Ambassador in Dublin. He was approached by Major Tom McDowell, a member of MI5, Chief Executive and Managing Director of THE IRISH TIMES who was perturbed by the conduct of the Editor, Douglas Gageby, and wanted  British advice on the political line the paper should take, Both McDowell and Gageby were Protestants from Belfast. And both had been Army Intelligence Officers, McDowell in the British and Gageby in the Irish Army. Gageby supported the Pro Democracy Civil Rights

movement,and had no truck with the IRA, which at the time was not a significant element in politics. Gilchrist wrote to the Foreign Office in London a “secret and personal letter” inadvertedly lodged in the Public Record Office in December 1999, undiscovered, or covered up by salaried media professionals then, and discovered by Jack Lane of the Aubane (Co.Cork) Historical Society in 2003.

Gilchrist’s letter from the Embassy in Dublin to W.K.K.White at the Western European Dept of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in 

London is dated 2 October 1969 and reads –

Dear William

 Your letter of September 24th – Major McDowell and No.10 Downing St.

I had McDowell to lunch today. It is all about something he said to me before, but now he is hotter under the collar about it.

 McDowell is one of the five (Protestant)  owners of the Irish Times, and he and his associates are increasingly concerned about the line the paper is taking under its present (Protestant Editor) Douglas Gageby, whom he described as  a very fine journalist, an excellent man, but on Northern questions, a renegade or white nigger. And apart from Gageby’s influence, there is difficulty, lower

down, whereby sometimes unauthorised items appear and authorised items are left out.

So far,  (except for the last item) nothing new. But McDowell went on to say that he now felt that a certain degree of guidance, in which lines are helpful and which unhelpful, might be acceptable to himself and one or two friends on the board; this was what he had in mind in telephoning in to No. 10.

5Oddly enough I had McDowell in mind in certain conversations I had in London a fortnight ago. His present approach requires rather careful handling and I shall discuss it in London next week. I am writing this letter merely in case you wish to brief No. 10 and to assure them that we will do what we can to exploit this opening. I am destroying this correspondence.

Yours etc

Andrew Gilchrist.