Crozier country: Free Agent: the unseen war 1941-1991

Brian Crozier
HarperCollins, London, 1993

This is a very interesting book which greatly adds to our knowledge of the clandestine shaping of British politics in the 1970s and 80s. It is also a book which, like Chapman Pincher’s Inside Story, will repay repeated re-reading. But amidst all the new material a surprising amount of these putative ‘unseen’ activities have already been identified. It confirms that, from the mid-1970s the spook-wise British left — the line which begins with the Leveller, the State Research collective and Time Out — basically got it right: Crozier was a spook, working for the British and American intelligence services.

Crozier would deny that he worked for anybody: ‘at all times I remained independent, executing only tasks that were in line with my own objectives.'(pp. xii, xiii) But on p. xii of the preface he tells us he ‘worked with’ the CIA, MI6 and IRD; on p. 20 he tells that briefings he had been getting from an MI6 officer secured for him the job as editor of the Economist’s Foreign Report; on p. 51 he writes of a ‘part-time consultancy for IRD’; and on p. 86 that IRD ‘put an office at [his] disposal.’ He also boasts of ‘dealings with the secret services of many other countries including France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Israel, Morocco, Iran, Argentina, Chile and Taiwan.’ As early as p. 20 it is hard to avoid concluding that Crozier is describing how he was recruited by MI6; and his ‘independence’ is finally revealed as simply a cover story on p. 92 when he writes of contacting his main ‘case officer’ in the CIA. Independents or genuine free-lance journalists don’t have case officers.

The book is studded with bits of new information on the intelligence services, on IRD, the Pinay Circle, Interdoc etc. etc. far too many even for a list. But here are some fairly typical snippets.

• He tells us (p. 108) that when Labour won the election in 1974, IRD dropped its briefings on subversion in Britain. This may explain why Colin Wallace was in such demand post February 1974. With the IRD briefings stopped, Wallace’s InfPol unit in Northern Ireland was the last official U.K. source of unattributable briefings on the British left.
• He says (p. 113) that the late Iain Hamilton, biographer of Arthur Koestler, and Director of Forum World Features was ‘fully “conscious” and in touch with the CIA officers in London’. There may be people in the London literary scene with comments on this.
• He admits (p. 117) that he conned the Guardian in 1976 into printing his letters about the Congress for Cultural Freedom purporting to show that he knew nothing about its CIA links. ‘The truth was told…. but not the whole truth of the still secret role of the CIA.’ Peter Preston, please note.
• In 1979 Crozier met to discuss MI5 with ‘a senior officer of MI5 who had just retired’ (probably Charles Elwell) (p. 144). Crozier is told about ‘an intellectually weakened organisation no longer prepared to take Marxist-Leninist influences seriously. Too much time and resources were devoted to trailing foreign spies (which, it was argued, could be left to the police Special Branch) and too little to domestic subversion.’ This is the exact opposite of the picture given by Peter Wright on p. 359 of Spycatcher, of the 1970s expansion of the counter-subversive F-branch at the expense of counter-espionage K branch.

But there are lots of things missing. This is the list I compiled on first reading. Missing are:

• his failed Freedom Blue Cross venture;
• his role in James Goldsmith’s Now!;
• BOSS;
• James Angleton and his fantasies;
• his role in the disinformation put out in the early 1980s that the KGB was running world terrorism;
• the Israeli connection;
• Crozier’s financial funnel, the International Freedom Fund Establishment.

The central chapters for me are those on Britain in the 1970s and 80s, the years when Crozier was engaged full-time in psychological operations, running a large network in the UK. Forum World Features in which, ‘with the full agreement of SIS [he] would deal directly with CIA personnel’ (p. 71), was succeeded by the Institute for the Study of Conflict. After Sir Dennis Greenhill, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, vetoed British state money for ISC and the CIA felt obliged to follow suit, ‘the Agency came up with’ Richard Mellon Scaife, who provided $100,000 a year (p. 90). (1) After the formation of ISC came the so-called Sixth International (6I) (sic), most of whose activities remain undisclosed; his domestic counter-subversion agency The Shield; and, of course, the Freedom Association.

Crozier, Robert Moss and Ross McWhirter had been ‘meeting with a small group of like-minded friends concerned about the relentless spread of subversion.’ (2) After McWhirter was shot by the IRA this group formed the National Association for Freedom. But ‘to avoid the delays implicit in formal council meetings, a small group of us [Lord De L’Isle, Winston Churchill MP, John Gouriet, Moss and Crozier] decided to function as an informal action committee, without reporting to the Council.’ (3)

Parallel to the Freedom Association, with Stephen Hastings MP, Crozier formed the Shield Committee to brief Mrs Thatcher while Leader of the Opposition, on the ‘subversive menace’. He claims Mrs Thatcher ‘was listening [to him]…. because [he] was telling her things nobody had yet mentioned to her about subversion in the United Kingdom and worldwide.’ Are we to believe that Airey Neave, Mrs T’s mentor, wasn’t briefing her on this? Hugo Young, in the Guardian, April 30, 1987 observed that ‘Airey Neave…. was, among other things, her tutor in security matters, in which she immediately took the keenest interest, attending frequent briefings through the very active Tory network in both MI5 and MI6.’

Not mentioned by Crozier: G.K. Young, Airey Neave …..

In the 1970s and 80s Crozier claims to have run, inter alia:

• Peter Shipley (last seen at Conservative Party Central Office);
• Douglas Eden of the Social Democratic Alliance;
• Dr Julian Lewis (last seen at Conservative Party Central Office);
• Tony Kerpel (last seen listed as a ‘consultant’ to the recent (AugustSeptember 1993) 3-part tv series by Kenneth Baker MP on BBC TV);
• and Edward Leigh (now an MP and junior Minister).

Crozier also claims to have created the psy-ops outfits of the Coalition for Peace through Security (anti CND), the Campaign Against Council Corruption (anti Labour-controlled local authorities) and the Media Monitoring Unit (anti BBC).

Welcome to Crozier country

In the 1970s Crozier lived in a Britain in which ‘the dominant role, increasingly, was played by extreme Left Labour MPs and constituency managers, and by trade unions whose long-term goal, whether consciously or not on behalf of the Soviet Union, was to transform Britain into another East Germany or Czechoslovakia’ (pp. 137 and 8, emphases added). (4) There were (are?) also ‘the cryptos…… a group of Communists, who, by agreement with Moscow, were no longer card-carrying Party members. They operated in Parliament. Their status, according to a major Soviet defector [which one?] with whom I discussed the matter some years later, was that of “confidential contacts” of the Soviet embassy. One or two dealt directly with the Soviet International Department. They exerted a covert but at times decisive influence on Party policy’ (p. 274, emphasis added). Crozier tells us on p. 115 that MPs Stan Newens, Jo Richardson, Joan Lestor, Frank Allaun and Joan Maynard were identified by a ‘senior KGB defector in London’ as ‘confidential contacts’ of the Soviet embassy.
As examples of ‘extreme’ left-wing Labour MPs he cites Sidney Bidwell, Ron Thomas and Eddie Loyden, Eric Heffer, Arthur Latham, James Lamond and Tony Benn (pp. 115 and 139). Of that group, only Benn mattered at all, and in the period Crozier is writing of, post 1974, he was completely marginalised by Prime Ministers Wilson and Callaghan.

Yes, there were Labour MPs — a handful — who were still friendly with the Soviet bloc. Mr Crozier will not be shocked to learn that on the British Left, in the 1970s, there were some who still didn’t believe the stories about the Soviet bloc told by the anti-communist media and Conservative politicians. But the idea that they ‘exerted a[n]….. at times decisive influence on Party policy’ is a fantasy. But then on p. 145 Crozier writes of ‘the Tribunites, under Tony Benn’, an error equivalent to writing ‘the Monday Club, under Peter Walker.’ (5)

Some of this is so inept as to be comic. On p. 257 Crozier tells us of a debate in the House of Lords on ‘disarmament and subversion’ in which Lord Orr-Ewing, ‘with the advantage of parliamentary privilege….. was able to name James Lamond, a Labour MP, as Vice-President of the World Peace Council, and various trade union leaders as members of the WPC’s British off-shoot the British Peace Assembly’. Except he hardly needed parliamentary privilege to do this; and while the World Peace Council looms large in Crozier country, out here on the real British Left it had no influence. Mr Lamont’s profile within the British labour movement was low verging on invisible.

In Crozier’s bizarre view of the British Left everybody, from the CPGB to the WRP, is lumped together. He writes (p. 119) of ‘Communists, mainly of the Trotskyist variety’. This thesis, that the KGB is (should that now be was?) behind everything, from the Labour Party to the Trotskyists, was articulated in fiction by Frederick Forsyth in The Fourth Protocol and by (ex MI6 and IRD author) Kenneth Benton in A Single Monstrous Act. This clearly was ‘the line’ of the period.

Crozier quotes some 1978 comments from the then Labour MP, Brian Magee, to Iain (CIA agent) Hamilton. Magee wrote, ‘Everything that comes from over there [ISC] on the subject of social democracy in general and the Labour Party in particular is so inane that I’ve come to think of you (plural) as being some kind of political equivalent of Mary Whitehouse.'(p. 154) This may be a rather better comparison than Magee realised or intended, for Mrs Whitehouse, like Crozier, is an enthusiastic conspiracy theorist. (6)

Crozier’s beliefs are immune from reality. On p. 150 he tells us that ‘socialism….. is by its nature irreversible’, something of great comfort, no doubt, to the unemployed members of nomenklatura all over the former Soviet bloc.

Still at the crease

1979/80 was a some kind of watershed. Mrs T. got elected and Private Eye reported — accurately, it turns out (who leaked this?) — that Shield members Crozier and ex MI6 officer Nicholas Elliot had triumphantly gone to see her at Chequers. What the Eye didn’t say was that, on Crozier’s report, Mrs T. said ‘thanks but no thanks’. She didn’t need Crozier now she had the British secret state to brief her. He and Moss resigned from the Freedom Association — job done. Now even the ISC council began to flex its hitherto dormant muscles and forced his resignation.

With the election of regimes in Washington and London with similarly dotty views to his own (the U.S. end of this is illustrated very nicely by Perry, reviewed below) Crozier’s day was done. Although he continued with various psy-ops projects, you sense that for Crozier 1980 was the peak.
Crozier is a familiar figure in the post-war world, though more readily identified in the U.S. than here. The unrepentant McCarthy apologist permanently at war with the compromising, pragmatic pinkoes at the Foreign Office or State Department. He was roll-back, not containment; action man versus inaction man of the FO. Both Robin Lustig in the Observer (25 July, 1993) and Fred Halliday in the New Statesman and Society, (10 September, 1993) dismiss Crozier as ‘a nuisance’ — which he was on occasions to the Foreign Office. Though he was more important than that, quite how important is still impossible to tell. For although we know quite a lot about the clandestine operations in Britain in the mid-1970s, we still don’t know enough to evaluate the significance of projects like Crozier’s. (7)

Crozier concludes his preface with this statement of principle: ‘All my adult life, I have been for freedom and against regimentation and coercion except in emergencies such as war.’ Like others of his ilk he believes — or pretends to believe; I can’t tell which — that Mrs Thatcher increased freedom. Sadly, he never gets round to asking and answering the awkward questions: Freedom for whom? Freedom from what? Freedom to do what?

Notes

1. This won’t exactly reduce the suspicions that Scaife was merely a front man for Agency money.
2. I wonder if this group included George Kennedy Young, who was certainly working with McWhirter at this point in Unison on the same lines. Young isn’t mentioned here.
3. This largely confirms the version of the Freedom Association I initially wrote in Lobster 11 and expanded somewhat in Smear!. In Lobster 11, based on information from a founder member of NAFF, I named Moss, Gouriet, McWhirter and Michael Ivens of AIMS as the core group.
4. I’ve never met a ‘constitutency manager’ and strongly suspect no such beast ever walked on this earth. As a former Labour Party branch secretary, it is my experience that without exception the prerogative of all positions involved in running Labour Party branches and constituencies is responsibility without power.
5. He tells us (p. 118) that in 1976 he and the Freedom Association were worried that Michael Foot was a possible successor to Wilson. Anybody who thought that Foot was within a million miles of becoming leader of the Labour Party, let alone Prime Minister, in 1976 isn’t on the same planet as the rest of us.
6. Chapter 12 of her book Whatever Happened to Sex? (Wayland, Hove, East Sussex, 1977) begins with her denial that ‘there’s a plot’, and ends with a quote from the U.S. conspiracy theorist W. Cleon Skousen, attributing the whole of the sexual-cultural changes of the post-war era to ‘the communists’. Crozier rather half-heartedly even tries to lay the spread of drugs at the door of the KGB.
7. Crozier indeed, did appear to claim the credit for her election at a meeting of the Pinay Circle. See Lobster 17 p. 14.