JOURNALISTS AND SPOOKS – HOW CAN YOU TELL ‘EM APART? – by Donal Kennedy

Much of what passes for disinterested comment is tailored to serve private interests or political ends. Erskine Childers, Malcolm Muggeridge, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Kim Philby, Brian Inglis and Conor Cruise O’Brien were associated with British Intelligence and/or Propaganda at one time or another, or for the whole of their active lives.

 Childers’  “The Riddle of  The Sands” was published in 1903 as a thriller and advocated that all Englishmen learn how to shoot a rifle to defend their country from a German invasion. No such intention has ever been convincingly documented. In 1904 the British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, a Tory, established the secret Committee For Imperial Defence and arranged a rapprochement with the perennial enemy,France “The Entente Cordiale. The young Liberal MP, David Lloyd George was told to his amazement by the ex-Prime Minister, Lord Roseberry, a Liberal Imperialist that the cosying up with the French meant war with Germany. Out of Office in 1910 Balfour scandalised the American Ambassador by saying that Britain should pick a pretext to make war on Germany to maintain British supremacy over the whole world.

 Malcolm Muggeridge had long journalistic experience in Russia, and India, and on the Manchester Guardian when he was conscripted in 1939. He wrote “THE THIRTIES” published in 1940. In it he stated that the IRA bombing campaign in Britain, started foolishly in 1938, had German support. No evidence to support that assertion has ever surfaced despite Allied capture of German archives in 1945. Nor any evidence that Germany had contemplated much less planned to fight Britain at that time, No serious plan for a German invasion of Britain was ever made.

Following Dunkirk,  Hitler asked for a paper on possibilities, but he and his miilitary advisers knew that the British Navy would make an invasion impossible,

A Document, “Occupation Sea Lion” was printed in English and given to some Prisoners of War to dishearten them. I saw, I think on the Internet, a snippet from a German “intelligence ” report on Ireland. Amongst the least startling things in it were photographs of the Hydro-Electric Generating Plant on the Shannon. My father had worked as an Engineer on the Shannon Scheme from 1923 to 1927 the largest Hydro-Electric project attempted and completed in the world. The Contract  had been awarded to Siemens Schukertwerke of (Weimar) Germany by the Irish Free State government within months of its cruel defeat of its former comrades in the Irish “Civil” War. Siemens was glad of the prestige the contract gave them, but they lost money on it.

Ernest Blythe, Ministry for Finance, who is remembered for reducing Old Age Pensions and Childrens’ Allowances and other cruelties held the Germans to their contract. But when Siemens offered to reward him for hiring them he rejected the offer of the sweetener with contempt. I have somewhere among my heirlooms “Progress on the Shannon” glossy magazines published by Siemens at the time. Most of the Management and Technical Staff on the Scheme were

German, and the reproduction  of photos from “Progress on the Shannon,” owed nothing to spies.

 Graham Greene was reputedly anti-Fascist, based on his writings on Mexico and he spent some time as a British Agent in Spain in the 1940s. It has been suggested that he was posted there because he was really pro-Fascist.

That could make sense. Mussolini had been bankrolled by British Intelligence in 1917 and dubbed a Knight of The Garter in 1923 and remained so until  1940. Franco had been flown from the Canaries to Morocco by British Agent Hugh Pollard in 1936 to launch his attack on Spanish democracy and was accredited to the British Embassy in Madrid from 1939 on.

 Kim Philby was on a British spook payroll but used his cover as an Observer journalist to go to Turkey and slip into the Soviet Union. I don’t believe a paper with distinguished fact-finders would have been unaware of his British Spook role. I’ll bet there is a vetting process for influential papers.

 I mentioned Brian Inglis, but I’ll deal with his case in a further blog

 By the time Conor Cruise O’Brien was given the  unprecedented  role of Editor-in-Chief of THE OBSERVER it was clear that they had netted an unapologetic British Empire Loyalist to gladden the heartless ghost of A.H. Chesterton and bring cheer in a Hot Climate to the shades of Titus Oates, Richard Pigott, Sadlier and Keogh.