Gerry Gable

Margaret Thatcher

Documents from Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street office, declassified at New Year 2024, show that Thatcher and her closest advisers discussed and approved of a right-wing smear sheet that attacked Searchlight’s editor and publisher Gerry Gable. This smear sheet – British Briefing – was edited by a former MI5 officer whose wife had worked for a secret Whitehall propaganda agency.

The document is one of several showing that far-right factions among former MI5 and MI6 officers continued to have influence over Thatcherite circles in the 1980s.

At the end of 1986 Thatcher’s government was increasingly embarrassed by its attempts to stop publication of Spycatcher, an autobiography by the retired MI5 officer Peter Wright. The latest declassified documents are mainly linked to the Spycatcher affair. Part of this book put Wright’s much-disputed case for believing that his former boss Sir Roger Hollis, who was Director-General of MI5 from 1956 to 1965, was a Soviet agent or ‘mole’.

But other revelations in Wright’s book concerned the activities of far-right factions in MI5 and MI6 whose conspiracy theories revolved around the Labour Party and especially around Harold Wilson, Labour leader from 1963 to 1976 and Prime Minister for eight of those years.

Part of Thatcher’s concern over Spycatcher was very personal. She knew that those factions existed and that they had played a part in her campaign to undermine her Tory predecessor Edward Heath, as well as in later propaganda against Labour, the unions and a broader left-wing “enemy within”. She would also have known that many of Wright’s allegations had already appeared in Chapman Pincher’s earlier book ‘Their Trade Is Treachery’, for which Wright was the principal source.

But in public she stuck relentlessly to her official line that the government must suppress Wright’s book to uphold the principle that an MI5 officer owed a lifelong duty of confidentiality.

Even here, paranoia was not far from the surface, in an assumption by Thatcher and her closest advisers that journalists who encouraged MI5 whistleblowers were part of a communist conspiracy to undermine the security services in Moscow’s interests.

Thatcher’s style of government began the practice of relying on highly politicised advisers (a habit followed by several later governments) in addition to, or instead of civil servants. Among these was Charles Powell (later given a peerage as Lord Powell of Bayswater), a former diplomat seconded to advise Thatcher primarily on foreign policy as Private Secretary from 1983 to 1990.

Charles Powell

On 2^nd December 1986 Powell sent Thatcher what he called “two quite revealing documents” which provided ammunition for her arguments against journalists and whistleblowers. These documents were articles from the secretive newsletter British Briefing, dated May 1984 and March 1985.

The more recent article was headlined “The Massiter File”, referring to an MI5 whistleblower Cathy Massiter who had been interviewed for a Channel Four documentary about security service abuses. The film – MI5’s Official Secrets – was banned by the IBA in March 1985 though later broadcast.

British Briefing attacked several people associated with the film, including its presenter – respected political columnist Hugo Young, later Thatcher’s biographer – and leading figures in the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) such as future government ministers Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman. It then took aim at Gerry:

“The research for the film was undertaken by a journalist named Gerry Gable of somewhat murky antecedents. A former member of the YCL and a CPGB candidate in a local government election, he was closely involved with Maurice Ludmer, the Communist founder and Editor of the (revived) Searchlight anti-fascist magazine (see British Briefing 6/81 p 8).

“He and Ludmer were also among the first sponsors of the Anti-Nazi League. As an anti-fascist activist he, with two others in the guise of Post Office engineers, entered the house of historian David Irving, in order to steal papers. The three were convicted in January 1964 of breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony.

“Sixteen years later the New Statesman (15th February 1980) published an article by Duncan Campbell, Bruce Page and Nick Anning (of State Research) suggesting that Gable had been used as an agent by MI5 and Special Branch to provide information and purvey disinformation about Agee, Hosenball, Phil Kelly, Aubrey, Berry and Duncan Campbell (the ABC trio).

“The object of the article was to discredit both Gable and the security authorities. Whatever the truth about Gable’s alleged connection with security, his credentials as a “researcher” do not sound either unbiased or reliable.”

While Gerry is labelled “murky” on the grounds of having been a Communist Party member more than 25 years earlier, the notorious nazi David Irving is described simply as a “historian”! The article also misstates the offence for which Gerry and other members of the anti-fascist 62 Group were convicted: there was no “breaking and entering” involved. Note also that British Briefing had targeted Searchlight in an earlier article in June 1981.

The articles passed to Thatcher went on to throw mud at several other journalists including Nick Davies and Ian Black of The Guardian. Commenting on Charles Powell’s suggestion that the smears were “quite revealing”, the Prime Minister replied with the single word: “Very”.

British Briefing (which was only circulated to a limited number of subscribers, mainly wealthy donors with an interest in union-bashing) was later taken over by one of Thatcher’s favourite shady businessmen, the property millionaire and former bankrupt David Hart, who had been centrally involved in a dirty tricks campaign to subvert the 1984 miners’ strike.

David Hart

But at the time of its attacks on Searchlight this far-right publication which the Prime Minister and her top adviser found so helpful was published by Brian Crozier, a notorious Cold Warrior with lifelong connections to right-wing factions in intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic.

It doesn’t surprise Gerry that Brian Crozier disliked him so much. Searchlight had been examining Crozier’s ties to European fascists and South Africa’s apartheid regime for years. Earlier the same year, on 28^th February 1986 another man Crozier and his far-right network hated, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, was murdered in Stockholm. Searchlight correspondent Stieg Larsson later spent years investigating the Crozier network and its possible involvement in Palme’s murder.

Brian Crozier

Those readers who watched a recent television documentary based on Stieg’s research will have heard the Swedish fascist and apartheid regime intelligence asset Bertil Wedin boasting about his “collaboration with senior figures from the CIA and MI6. There was an ultra-secret, as they say, intelligence organisation that had the modest name 61, and I was attached to it. So, I collaborated, worked with, worked for the organisation. …Our 61 had direct access to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. I have met Margaret Thatcher.” (Bertil Wedin died aged 81 in March 2022.)

The Crozier connection suggests that this was no idle boast. The group originally named 6I but sometimes referred to as “The 61” was a network of former intelligence officers funded by right-wing businessmen including Sir James Goldsmith and the American billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. Brian Crozier was the main coordinator of 6I and its membership overlapped with his other enterprises such as the Institute for the Study of Conflict and a broader international Cold War network of conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic, Le Cercle Pinay, named after a former French Prime Minister.

Born in Australia, Crozier moved to England as a child and became a journalist after the Second World War. During the 1950s while employed by Reuters and The Economist he was one of many militant anti-communists who were occasionally employed by a secret British propaganda unit formed by MI6 and the Foreign Office: Information Research Department (IRD).

In December 1963 Crozier became dissatisfied with his work for The Economist and suggested to his IRD contacts that he could become a full-time Cold War propagandist, if they could pay him a retainer, perhaps via some supposedly independent institute. He spent the rest of his long life (Crozier died in 2012 on his 94^th birthday) operating in the grey area between intelligence agencies, political think-tanks, and journalism.

Recently declassified official documents show that ever since the early 1960s if not earlier there were divisions between some Whitehall Cold Warriors (whether in IRD or the Foreign Office) and their Washington equivalents. Crozier increasingly took the side of those in the CIA and their front organisations who wanted to take a more blatant and aggressive line against communism, including action against those seen as “fellow-travellers”, a definition which for Crozier and his allies became stretched to include almost anyone who disagreed with them, including mainstream social democrats and even establishment figures in the civil service.

With CIA support at first provided via the immensely wealthy former US Ambassador in London, Jock Whitney, Crozier created a nominally independent news agency, Forum World Features. At the end of the 1960s Crozier decided to create a research centre, believing that existing organisations specialising in research on defence and foreign policy were taking too “soft” a line.

Crozier’s idea became the Institute for the Study of Conflict, and official records suggest that throughout the 1970s there was an ambiguous relationship between ISC and Western intelligence agencies who could see the advantages of his energetic propagandising but sometimes thought he was too aggressive and even paranoid.

This ambiguity also extended to Crozier’s links to European right-wingers in the “Pinay Circle”, whose leading members included several former fascists. Le Cercle’s chairman (and its real leader ever since it was formed in the early 1950s) was a French intelligence officer called Jean Violet, who was part of the fascistic Cagoule movement during the 1930s and whose post-war allies were often extreme right-wing Catholics in the secretive Opus Dei movement.

(In more recent years Le Cercle seems to have moved away from a radical right-wing approach and become closer to the mainstream of Western intelligence agencies.)

In particular, some intelligence bureaucrats were nervous about Crozier’s open contempt for democratic politics and his undisguised admiration for dictatorships in Spain, Portugal and Latin America, as well as his increasingly close relationship to South Africa’s apartheid regime and their very active propaganda and espionage agencies. Searchlight reported on some of ISC’s anti-democratic agenda in the mid-1970s, which seemed to be part of a dangerous pattern including “private armies” sponsored by the likes of George Kennedy Young, the rabid antisemite and former deputy chief of MI6. (Some of Young’s acolytes such as the far-right barrister Adrian Davies remain active in British fascist politics in the 2020s.)

It wasn’t only Labour and the trade unions who were attacked by these anti-democratic conspirators. It’s now known that Tory extremists close to Young and Crozier plotted against their own leader Edward Heath, Conservative Prime Minister from 1970 to 1974. Heath and Harold Wilson were bitter political rivals, but so far as Crozier and his friends were concerned, they both had to be smeared and cleared out of the way, so that a more hardline form of conservatism could take power, not only fighting communism abroad but wiping out every trace of socialism and even social democracy at home.

To this end the Tory MP and former MI6 officer Stephen Hastings (a friend and ally of G.K. Young) plotted with a Czech defector to spread a smear story alleging a homosexual connection between Heath and a Czech musician. Parts of this plot were investigated in 2012 by the BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera, but the core of the conspiracy was exposed by a Searchlight investigation as far back as 1975.

G K Young

Stephen Hastings

Hastings was the son of a Rhodesian tobacco farmer and MP. After Ian Smith’s racist government in Rhodesia illegally declared “independence” in 1965, Hastings took a leading role in the pro-Smith lobby in London, which also worked closely with the National Front from its creation in 1967.

It was perhaps because of these connections that some senior officials in Whitehall began to distance themselves from Crozier and Hastings as early as 1973, increasing their reciprocal hostility towards the Heath government. Almost half a century ago Searchlight obtained private letters sent by Young discussing some of his anti-Heath plotting. Now we have seen official documents from the period showing how some senior IRD, Foreign Office and MI5 officials started to drop Crozier, even while others in the right-wing faction of the intelligence world (and the Thatcher wing of the Conservative Party) maintained their links to him.

In June 1973 Home Office civil servant James Waddell wrote to Norman Reddaway, the Foreign Office official responsible for IRD, discussing top-level concerns about Crozier’s ISC project on “counter-subversion”. It seems that some people in Whitehall (and on the Heath wing of the Tory Party) shared the concerns later published in Searchlight about ISC’s work being anti-democratic.

Home Secretary Robert Carr and Defence Secretary Lord Carrington met and decided that the government should not associate itself in any way with this “counter-subversion” work, even though Hastings had privately lobbied Carr in Crozier’s support.

Reddaway cynically suggested that IRD could turn a blind eye and continue unattributable associations with Crozier, but MI5’s Director-General Sir Michael Hanley took a stronger anti-Crozier line writing that “we do not think it would be desirable to have any dealings with him at all” on the counter-subversion project.

By 1975 Hanley and MI5 were even more hostile to Crozier and seem to have cut him off completely, and it’s probably no coincidence that in this same year Crozier and his far-right faction of former intelligence officers started to build a close relationship with the new Tory leader Margaret Thatcher, for whom they created what they called the “Shield Committee”.

The reason why Thatcher was so nervous about Peter Wright’s revelations in Spycatcher was that in 1975 she had encouraged (in fact in Hastings’ words “commissioned”) a study of “counter-subversion” from the very same extremist faction led by Crozier who had been shunned by a Conservative government just two years earlier. Moreover, some of the individuals involved in that project (such as Hastings himself) were the same people whose conspiracies and smears against Heath had helped her topple him in the Tory leadership election of January 1975.

Although her shadow cabinet colleagues (notably Willie Whitelaw and Lord Carrington who were to become her first Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary respectively) had vetoed the idea of the “Shield Committee” being given any official recognition, Thatcher entertained Crozier, Hastings and two other former intelligence officers who had moved into City careers at a private lunch at Chequers just two months after taking office, on Sunday 15^th July 1979. No civil servants were present, though they were joined at lunch by Thatcher’s husband Denis and son Mark. Their conversation continued through the afternoon.

The other two old spies present at the meeting were Nicholas Elliott (an old friend of G.K. Young’s at MI6 who had become a stockbroker and for four years a director of the mining company Lonrho which had extensive interests in Rhodesia and South Africa), and Harry Sporborg, a senior officer of the MI6 wartime spin-off SOE and a director of the merchant bank Hambros.

Nick Elliott

This hardline faction hoped that Thatcher’s government would promote their ideas, perhaps even reshaping the entire security and intelligence apparatus to reflect their agenda. They were to be disappointed. More cautious figures in Whitehall mobilised around Thatcher’s first Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington – who had opposed Crozier during the Heath years – and the outcome was that Crozier found himself ousted from his own organisation ISC.

In 1983 when Sir Geoffrey Howe (who the right hoped in vain might be more Thatcherite) became Foreign Secretary, Crozier’s friend Hastings yet again tried to lobby for Crozier to be brought back into the Foreign Office good books, and he was very much involved with Reagan’s CIA director William Casey and his semi-official efforts to circumvent US law and use international right-wing networks to arm the Nicaraguan “contras”.

But from 1979-80 until the end of his life, Crozier no longer enjoyed official Foreign Office or MI6 support. (He had lost MI5 support much earlier during 1973-75.)

Nevertheless, the newly released official papers confirm Searchlight’s assessment that while exiled from ISC and shunned by the Foreign Office, Brian Crozier and his far-right allies operating internationally as 6I or “The 61” remained close to Thatcher, who tried in various fields to run her own foreign policy separate from official channels and sometimes hostile to Foreign Office policy.

The file attacking Gerry Gable is a visible part of what was almost a parallel structure within government reporting directly to the Prime Minister. Nicholas Elliott, the MI6 officer who was portrayed as an affable toff in a recent ITV dramatisation of his friendship with Kim Philby, was for some time an important part of this far-right network among old spies.

Elliott left MI6 in 1969 during a purge of G.K. Young’s remaining right-wing allies. In 1975 he was part of the gang with Crozier and Hastings who met at Thatcher’s home in Flood Street to plot a “counter-subversion” strategy. Downing Street files show that Elliott and Crozier had tea with Thatcher on 2^nd January 1982, again with no civil servants present, and again on 16^th October 1982.

Having just returned from South Africa (where he had a private meeting with Foreign Minister Pik Botha) Elliott had another private meeting with Thatcher on 26^th March 1986 to convey the apartheid regime’s appreciation of what Thatcher had “done to resist the pressures on sanctions particularly as they realise your difficulties”.

It’s significant that while Thatcher usually excluded civil servants from her meetings with these right-wing old spies, Charles Powell (who shared Thatcher’s views on South Africa) attended the 1986 meeting. Other documents reveal that Julian Amery, another old friend of Crozier and Elliott, was also used as a private channel between Thatcher and apartheid’s leaders. At one stage Amery seemed to favour the hardline faction in Pretoria led by General Magnus Malan who favoured a military crackdown on the ANC rather than constitutional concessions.

At least one old MI5 officer was still working closely with Crozier. His British Briefing newsletter that attacked Gerry Gable and Searchlight was edited by Charles Elwell, who was in charge of the “counter-subversion” section of MI5 known as F Branch from 1974 to 1979.

Charles Elwell

While his Director-General Sir Michael Hanley was opposed to Crozier, Elwell took a different view, and began working with Crozier almost as soon as he retired from MI5, even following Crozier after the 1979 split in ISC. This was yet another example of the extremist factionalism that plagued Britain’s security and intelligence services during the 1970s and 1980s. Elwell’s wife Ann was herself with MI5 during the war but spent the greater part of her career with IRD where she was a senior officer dealing with the Middle East.

The fact that extremist newsletters smearing Gerry were being quoted with approval by the Prime Minister herself is more disturbing evidence of how dangerously close the UK came to authoritarian politics.

Martyn Lester reviews James Ball’s account of the crazy world of QAnon and conspiracy theories

The ‘wellness-to-fascism pipeline’. It was a phrase almost guaranteed to catch our attention, and when we spotted it in the headline of a Guardian feature (‘”Everything you’ve been told is a lie!” Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline’) back in August, it certainly did that.

What could healthy living and hailing the swastika possibly have in common, we wondered. Might this be sketchily based on Hitler’s anti-smoking stance and supposed vegetarianism? Surely nothing like such thin gruel, considering the article was bylined James Ball – a highly respected and multiple award-winning journalist.

We don’t often regard ourselves as naive at Searchlight, but as we dived into Ball’s feature, we quickly found our jaws dropping at a series of examples of wellness enthusiasts of various types encountering attempts to draw them in – through meditation, yoga or reiki groups, for example – to increasingly disturbing right-wing arguments and/or conspiracy theories.

It’s not all going on through the internet – some report being hit on in person by their physiotherapist or personal trainer. For example, a physio who insisted on ‘[explaining] how the CIA was covering up evidence of aliens, and [offering] tips on avoiding alien abduction’ or a pole-dancing instructor who ‘muttered darkly about the Rothschilds’. But it is a predominantly online phenomenon, and although they are not always directly visible, QAnon seem to have a lot to do with it.

For more enlightenment, I procured a copy of Ball’s latest book – The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World – and I was not disappointed.

Almost all of us have heard of QAnon and have at least some idea what it is – a right-wing, conspiracist and often barking mad mega-forum. And we have a vague sense that it was heavily represented in the goings-on at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 – that bare-chested loon with the spear and cow-horns is even commonly referred to as ‘The QAnon Shaman’! But most of us tend to know little more than that, not least because we don’t loiter on the sordid internet servers where much of the Q action takes place.

Ball straightens a lot of this out for us. As a top drawer investigative journalist (he nailed a Pulitzer while with the Guardian US) he has navigated those mean cyberstreets for some years and knows this stuff chapter and verse.

The author has a thesis to sell us, but we’ll come to that in a moment, because the backbone of the book is (thankfully, for those of us only half-aware of the story) a pretty comprehensive history of QAnon, from the very first online posting by ‘Q’ to the movement’s current, global incarnation. It has been both intensively and extensively researched, with the kind of catalogue of citations that one rarely sees outside of purely academic publications. When Ball feels that a point he’s making needs its provenance establishing, he index-numbers it. At the back of the book there’s a whopping 35-page section of accompanying notes. Considering many of these are just URLs of where you can find the full story that supports a small quote in the main text, that’s a hell of a lot of background reference material.

The thesis that runs in parallel with this very useful chronology is not just that the internet has changed communication almost beyond recognition (we already knew that, I think) but that it has virtually become a lifeform, with the reproductive and (especially) disease-prone characteristics that one would associate with a living organism. In this, the author might be seen as picking up the ball that Richard Dawkins set in play with his memes-and-genes analogy and running with it.

When Ball refers to QAnon as being a ‘pandemic’, he doesn’t really want us to see this as a fanciful metaphor or allegory but as being more or less literally the truth. That if we don’t understand QAnon and its strains, mutations and offshoots as functioning like a rampaging virus, we have no chance of progressing towards a treatment let alone a cure. Reported in as few words as I have used here, that probably sounds more than a little batty, but follow the well-structured argument throughout the book and there’s a good chance that you will find it quite compelling.

Woven into this history/thesis structure is what is not really a third thread (even though I’m going to treat it as one for convenience) but an intrinsic and recurrent narrative, which is that of how more or less normal and rational people get sucked in by QAnon (in various guises) in a way that very rarely happened pre-internet.

Hence the ‘wellness’ people discussed in the Guardian piece. Anyone mildly off-centre – yes, even a yoga enthusiast! – is considered by conspiracists to be a potential target for step-by-step radicalisation. By the time you get on to reiki, crystal therapy or homeopathy fans you’re talking about people who may be tired of being regarded as ‘nutters’ and quite possibly self-primed to be drawn into, say, vaccine conspiracy theories – and onwards from there.

Especially fertile ground is the disaffected or not much more than grumpy. Anyone who is even slightly paranoid is relatively easy prey for QAnon and adjacent groups. Once someone believes in one conspiracy, however petty, it’s no great leap to convince them of another. A discussion group where people offer opinions such as ‘speed limits only exist as a pretext for collecting speeding fines’ is very likely to contain people who can be persuaded by the mischievous that low emission zones are there just to persecute motorists, and from there to the ‘evils’ of 15-minute cities – and almost before you know it your man angry about his speeding ticket is swallowing guff about global heating being a hoax perpetrated by a shadowy international cabal.

There are important offline spin-offs from this cyberspace recruitment. While much of the far right is exactly as it used to be – the lager-swilling, football-shirted knuckle-draggers who turned out to ‘protect’ the Cenotaph in November well illustrate that – you are increasingly likely to see less obviously bone-headed characters turning out for events such as pickets of hotels housing asylum seekers. Whether they were drawn into these circles via yoga or parking fines, they are not really the same kind of animals as the usual ‘paki-basher’ crowd, and anti-fascists would be foolish not to apply at least some thought to whether tactics and arguments should be adapted to take this into account.

The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World is an engrossing work. It has the intellectual heft of a textbook but is much more witty and engagingly written than a purely academic work. It is published by Bloomsbury at £20. A paperback edition is slated for release this July and can be pre-ordered at about half that price.

For a flavour of Ball’s writing style and quality (and for some really eye-opening tales) you could do much worse than pop over to the Guardian’s website and read the ‘wellness-to-fascism pipeline’ feature that first caught our interest.