Kim Besly
Kim Besly died in July. A brief notice appeared in the Guardian on 30 July 1996. Besly was one of the pioneers in this country in the campaign to alert people to the dangers of electromagnetic technology. I met Besly only once but Harlan Girard knew her better and, in response to her death, he wrote a piece, ‘Memories of an Inquisitive Woman’. Here is an extract from it. Seeking information on electro-magnetic weapons in the late 1980s, Harlan travelled, via Covert Action and the American Friends Service Committee, to CND in London. There he was put in touch with Kim Besly who had been collecting information on the women who claimed to have been ‘zapped’ at Greenham Common.
‘This is how I met Kim Besly – affectionate, loving, forgiving, compassionate, generous and exuburant Kim. Of course she would receive me. I was to come immediately, if not sooner, to her home in Southborne. I would stay over, of course, and we would have plenty of time to discuss everything there was to know about microwave weapons. With Kim, everything was obvious, and very, very simple.
Unless you have been relentlessly pursued and viciously tortured by the most grotesquely evil government on the face of the earth, year after year; unless you have been subjected to the smirks of the petty assistants to the best Congress money can buy; unless you have dealt with the evasions and delusions of the Liberal left; it may be difficult for you to comprehend the impression Kim Besly made on me.
Nothing had prepared me for what I found when I arrived chez Besly. Laura Ashley would have been appalled. I remember a tiny sitting room with a coal grate, a televison set, and furniture which would have been flattered to be described as nondescript. All this in a gloomy darkness hardly broken by electric light. I remember a slightly larger and slightly brighter dining room with heavy oak furniture; in particular a sideboard which wasn’t that old but might have been an heirloom. The centre of the house was occupied by a hall and staircase and in the back, behind the sitting room, was a large kitchen, tiled white, and behind that was a laundry which served a neighbouring caravan park.
The menagerie consisted of Kim, her devoted husband Charles, two cats, a dog (I seem to remember), an unemployed male boarder who paced in his room, and a village woman who dusted on Tuesdays. Altogether, Kim presided over a joyous bedlam centred on the kitchen.
Behind the laundry room, at one corner of the organic garden, was a tiny shed from which Kim conducted her ‘business’. Her business was spokesperson for the Greenham Common Women on the subject of electro-magnetic weapons which our U.S. Air Force had used on the women in an effort to dissuade them from protesting the basing of nuclear armed Cruise missiles on British soils. If the United States Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency had just played their cards cooly, Kim Besly would have remained a foot soldier in the battle against American imperialism. However one thing led to another and, oh hell, why not douse those blasted women with some radiation and scatter them. Kim, who had been a radar technician in the Women’s Royal Navy during World War 2, became the spokesperson for the Greenham Common Women on the pulsed microwave weapons being fired at them.
The example Kim set for me, her generosity, her good nature, her affection, her energy, are all qualities I try to bear, however inadequately, on the problem confronting us. The corporeal Kim Besly died at Seaford, East Sussex, July 14 at 10.00 am. Kim expired on Bastille Day. I don’t think her husband Charles, a Francophile like I am, noticed: nor did I. And every year, as time goes by, I shall raise a glass to the Revolution, and the immortal spirit of Kim Besly.
Anthony Verney
Anthony Verney died in September of pneumonia. He checked himself into a psycho-geriatric ward against the advice of family and friends, apparently in the hope that he would get relief from microwave pollution. There he was injected with a powerful anti-psychotic drug by a locum doctor, went into a decline and died. As far as I am aware there is nothing suspicious about his death: it was just an error committed by a doctor in our under-funded health service. It says more about the treatment of the elderly in this society than it does about anything else.
Verney and his wife were massively irradiated by some low frequency device over a decade ago at their retirement cottage in Kent. He wrote up his experiences in the pamphlet A Happy Retirement, subsequently published by Open Eye. Despite a long succession of afflictions brought on by the radiation, Verney spent a decade hammering away at the local and national authorities trying to get to the bottom of what had happened. He got nowhere, as did the journalists from the local and national media who investigated his story. At the time of his death he had been refusing to pay taxes for several years, inviting the state to take him to court so he could publicise his experiences. His invitation was declined.
It is still unclear what happened to the Verneys – or why. Latterly Verney became convinced that he had been targetted for some reason, but I thought it more likely he and his wife were unfortunate enough to have been in the way of something – accidental victims of some experiment. It says a great deal about this benighted country, and the sheer stupidity of so many of its secret servants that rather than just admit this, apologise, and offer restitution, the British state went into full-scale cover-up and harassment mode.