Glimpses of America's Man-Made Disasters (Part 12)

by Trowbridge H. Ford

The defining moment for the use of nuclear weapons came when the Chinese exploded their first one in the atmosphere at Lop Nur in Xinjiang province on October 16, 1964, though almost no one realized it at the time. Ever since 1950, the United States had been at war, or on the brink of it with China. "Four of the five crises in which American Presidents seriously considered the use of nuclear weapons," Richard J. Aldrich has written in The Hidden Hand, "occurred in Asia." (p. 293) Most recently, in August 1958, the Air Force had recommended bombing the Chinese mainland with a dozen or so kiloton nuclear bombs if they went ahead with their plans of blockading the Taiwan Strait, but Eisenhower had rejected the proposal. Now with LBJ as President - thanks to the Dallas assassination of JFK after the world's narrow escape during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the heating up of the Vietnam War in August 1964 by the manufactured Tonkin Gulf incidents, - it seemed just a matter of time before a nuclear showdown with Beijing would happen. The newly-elected British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, refused to back the massive introduction of American troops into Vietnam for fear that it would be dragged into a nuclear Armageddon.

Soon, more sober views prevailed, as LBJ even learned that the use of atomic weapons would bring total disaster - what the invasion of North Vietnam or the bombing of China would trigger. As a result, the obtaining of a nuclear capability by China had helped stabilize the explosive situation, contrary to what the so-called nuclear
realists of international affairs had assumed - rather than led to all-out war. Of course, as the previous article showed, the Anglo-Americans had helped tremendously in bringing this about by supplying Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists with the scientists, know-how, and many materials for making such weapons - what fell to Mao's communists when the Generalissimo proved not up to the job - but there was no mournful confessions from either London or Washington about what had transpired because of unexpected nuclear proliferation. Mao, despite all his pronouncements about what he would do with the bomb, once he got it, proved to be just engaging in empty rhetoric. If Beijing had not had the bomb, Washington would have certainly used it by the time the 1968 presidential campaign rolled around.

Still, the Chinese staged the test in a way so as to thumb their nose at the USA, especially the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. From the very first, China had worked hard to minimize nuclear fallout by conducting tests in the atmosphere. "...there were no surface bursts at Lop Nur," Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman have written in The Nuclear Express, "sucking up great clouids of radioactive debris." (p. 128) This is a far cry from how the Americans staged tests, conducting them either on the surface of land or in the sea, and the agencies responsible more at war with themselves than keeping up with the communists. The hostility started, according to Hugh Gusterson in Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War, when Livermore instead of Los Alamos got media credit for conducting the first successful test of a hydrogen bomb, and intensified when its first real test only bent the tower which was supposed to be vaporized by the blast, leading Los Alamos's scientists to crack all kinds of jokes about the use of the damaged tower. (p. 24) It was not until the March 1955 Tesla and Turk tests that Liverpool finally got off the mark in the business, but they were still surface bursts, contaminating the Nevada Desert.

More important, Lawrence Liverpool's design, testing, and manufacture of nuclear weapons - what some physicists, especially Robert Oppenheimer, the alleged "Father of the Atomic Bomb", had denounced after the first ones were used on Japan - increasingly haunted its membership. These scientists - headed by Albert Einstein and Hungarian émigré Leo Szilard who had been most instrumental in getting FDR to adopt the Manhattan Project - led the Pugwash Conferences, warning of the dangers of the nuclear arms race, and calling for international control of atomic energy - what Oppenheimer assisted as best he could as head of America's Atomic Energy Commission until he lost his security clearance in 1954 because of the Red Scare. Thereafter, though, Oppenheimer became what Michel Foucault labelled in Power/Knowledge the prototype of the "strategists of life and death" whose pronouncements determined the "regime of truth" - how the whole issue of nuclear weapons, and what to do about them was determined by these experts of "technostrategic discourse".

Little wonder that the establishment experts, especially those at Lawrence Liverpool, became apopletic when Oppenheimer in increasingly emotional terms opposed their alleged rationality in doing such things. At Los Alamos, there was a stronger contingent of liberal physicists to question what was going on there, especially when Truman revived up its work to suit the demands of another Hungarian émigré, Edward Teller, but they soon saw themselves besieged by deriding cartoons on their doors, practical jokes at their expense, and so much censorship that they had no hope of gauging where things were going. As Oppenheimer explained about his continued presence there, and doing what he really opposed: "For the last four years I have had only classified thoughts." (Quoted from Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation, p. 199.) Still, long after Oppenheimer left, there were the deadly "blue flashes" of radiation emissions which nuclear weapons workers so fear, the naming of the results of ongoing tests as his babies, and his becoming the original and ultimate victim of speaking out against the whole process. (Gusterson, p.269n20).

Gusterson better illustrated the effect at Livermore when he discussed how George, an anonymous nuclear weapons designer, reacted to an above ground test, apparently in the Nevada desert - what led him to resign shortly thereafter from the laboratory: "And then there is this incredible flash of light, and you always go back to thinking how Oppenheimer describes this incredible flash of light. He described it as brighter than a thousand suns. Just incredibly intense. And it's very frightening. Just terrifying. Just absolutely terrifying. I was crouched over. I'm sure I urinated in my pants at the time as a result..." (Quoted from ibid., p. 128) "I encourtered no one," Alex Forman, co-founder of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, added to Gusterson's text after his inquiries during the Reagan years at the lab, "with the humanistic sensitivity of an Oppenheimer or a Szilard in those publicly representing Livermore." (p. 238)

Under the circumstances, it was hardly surprising that Reed and Stillman picked on Oppenheimer as a convenient Soviet spy throughout this whole period, though without naming him, and he left Los Alamos at the end of the war. "The Venona transcripts," they declared, "and supplementary sources" - Gordon Lonsdale courier Lona Cohen's alleged deathbed confession to her first KGB handler Anatoly Yatsov, and confirmed by several investigators of Soviet spying - "make it clear that another agent lay hidden deep within the Los Alamos fence, under the code name PERSEUS." (p. 30) Actually, this is an attempt to blame Oppenheimer for the fear, paranoia and isolation which pervade the nation's national laboratories without actually saying so - what was actually done by the still unidentified Soviet atomic spy 'K', apparently MI5's former Assistant Director Peter Wright, and others who provided the Cohens, later part of Lonsdale's spy ring as the Krogers, the means, especially microdots, for convening what they were able to collect through their book-selling business in Ruislip for Moscow.

For more on what Wright, Londale aka Vilyam Fisher, Rudolf Abel and Konon Molody, and the Cohens accomplished, see these links:

http://codshit.blogspot.com/2004/01/mi5s-peter-wright-cold-wars-most.html

http://codshit.blogspot.com/2004/01/gordon-lonsdale-cold-wars-most.html

When one looks for the supporting evidence of Reed's and Stillman's claims about the long time spy at Los Alamos, there is nothing in Nigel West's Venona and John Haynes' and Harvey Klehr's Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America to support them, though West in another book, The Crown Jewels, acknowledged that the most important atomic spy 'K' - the communist sympathizer also known as SCOTT who had previously helped recruit spies for Moscow in Whitehall until the Non-Aggression Pact with the Nazis, and British disinformers recently tried to make out was Wright's own choice for the role, Arthur Wynn (Spy Catcher, p. 265) - did exist. (p. 231ff.) The recent claim that SCOTT was Wynn is based upon a July 1941 memo that NKVD counterintelligence chief Pavel Fitin wrote to chief Vsevolod Merkulov to give the most important Oxford recruiter which Wynn never attended new cover in case anyone suspected that he was Wright. For more on the misinformation, see this link:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6276267.ece

For continuing spin about who 'K' might be, Christopher Andrew, as expected, does all he can to keep him from being identified. "In December 1942," he wrote in The Sword and the Shield, "the London residency received a detailed report on atomic research in Britain and the United States from a Communist scientist codenamed 'K'. Vladimir Barkovsky, head of scientific and technical intelligence (S&T) at the residency, later reported that 'K' 'works for us with enthusiasm, but...turns down the slightest hint of financial reward'." (pp. 114-5) But then he goes on about Barkovsky so helping him, even supplying a key to open 'K' own safe rather than the other way round, that 'K' is even identified as Barkovsky in the Index.(p. 689) For good measure, Andrew then acted as if 'K' was essentially Melita Norwood by atttributing his contribution to her without mentioning him (p. 127) while making it in the Index cited. This is junk research, intended to keep the lid on what British spies, especially Wright, did for Moscow.

The most intriguing thing about what Andrew wrote about 'K' is that Reed and Stillman, either ignorantly or more like deliberately, read it to mean that he was a U.S.communist scientist, especially when they wrote this which I earlier quoted: "We are of the view that PERSEUS was a real communist sympathizer/agent; he joined the Los Alamost Scientific Laboratory at its inception and remained there for decades until his retirement." (p. 38) To keep the convenient myth going, they take most seriously the alleged spying by Arhur Fielding - the name the dying Lona Cohen provided Yatsov aka Anatoli Yatskov. After the Red Scare passed, according to them, Fielding turned his spying "...to the new frontier of thermonunclear physics" (p. 39) - just what was driving Oppenheimmer et al. to despair. "Fielding was deeply involved in the hunt for ideas within the thermonuclear program. He exchanged memoranda and held discussions with Edward Teller, Stanislaus Ulam, Lab Director Norris Bradburgy, and other heavy hitters of the thermonuclear world as those ideas took shape." (ibid.) Prior to the Mike test of the first thermonuclear bomb, Fielding was appointed to a senior Las Alamos position from which he observed everything for years to come for the Soviets and the Chinese. (p. 40ff.)

"In the mid-1990s," Reed and Stillman concluded, "Stillman reported his suspicions as to the identity of PERSEUS to the FBI's special agent in charge of its Santa Fe office. Stillman reviewed the files and the supporting evidence with the Bureau's counterintelligence expert, but within weeks that agent was reassigned to the Wen Ho Lee case, and then became ill and was transferred to another state. Both the PERSEUS and Wen Ho Lee investigations died, botched beyond recognition, until the latter case returned to public scrutiny." (p.38) Of course, instead of identifying the man, especially since he has since died according to them - and Peter Wright died in 1995 in Tasmania - they provided a most unconvincing case about any such spy, though conveniently connecting Fielding to Los Alamos when Oppenheimer was its administrator. (p. 39)

The main purpose of all this disinformation is to explain away Chinese thermonuclear achievements to Fielding's alleged spying - what they had done earlier with Fuchs's when it came to their Fat Man atomic bomb. In doing so, they completely overlooked the achievements of Chinese scientists who continued to be trained in the West in the hope that they would work for the Nationals, and had returned to China, for one reason or another, to work in various areas for the communists, persons I had earlier partly identified. (p. 88) Chen Nengkuan, who became the Chairman of the Ninth Academy's department of nuclear weapons diagnostics in the city of Haiyan in Qinghai Province, obtained a Ph.D. in physics in 1950 from Yale. An associate of his, Deng Jiaxian, became Chairman of the Ninth Academy's nuclear weapons theoretical design department after he received his doctorate at Purdue in 1950. Guo Yonghuai became "Father of China's Space Program" Qian Xuesen's assistant after he got his Ph.D. at Caltech, and left in 1956. Zhu Guangya, a protégé of Peng Huanwu - the designer of the first fission and thermonuclear weapons - received his physics doctorate at the University of Michigan in 1950. The earlier mentioned Wang Gangchang, the manager of the nuclear weapons program, was deliberately brought back to Caltech after the war by the Americans, though he did not participate in classified research, only to return to China just before the communist takeover.

For more on this Anglo-American training of Chinese physicists - what made any spying superfluous - see John Wilson Lewis, and Litan Xue, China Builds the Bomb.

It was then Moscow's turn in the summer of 1969 to ask Washington for permission to attack Chinese nuclear facilities with nuclear weapons - what JFK had sought from the Soviets six years earlier but without success - but Nixon's White House refused (Henry Kissinger, The White House Years, p. 56), knowing full well that Beijing's response on the American forces involved in the Vietnam war would be devastating since the Chinese had two years before successfully tested a thermonuclear bomb, with a yield of 3.3 megatons. There could be no showdown by either the Soviets or the West with Beijing until Mao - who had regained power in May 1966, and had instituted the Cultural Revolution to put the country on a wartime basis - had departed, and some less obvious means of destruction had been found. In 1976, Prime Minister Zhou Enlai died In January, and the dying Chairman Mao confirmed in writing in April the unknown Hua Guofeng as his replacement

This lesson was particularly not lost upon the Soviets after they lost the race to the moon with the Americans, and managed to achieve détente with the Nixon administration as they became more and more embroiled in dísputes with China, thanks to Mao's return to power with his go-for-broke Cultural Revolution. The Soviets had hoped to put up a space station from which to launch their flight to the moon, but were never able to build the big rocket, N1, to manage it, losing out to NASA's space shuttles where Moscow was decidedly inferior because of its inadequate technical base. The best hope that the Soviets had - while the American weapons labs were creating more efficient ones for more sophisticated missiles despite the treaties signed with the White House, thanks to continuing underground testing - was to more than match the National Reconnaissance Office's KH-11 digital imaging satellites with first the Yantar-6KS ones, but they were cancelled in May 1977 because its project weight was beyond the power of the Soyuz booster, leaving the assignment to the Zenit-4MK ones which Dmitri Kozlov designed, and went into service in 1972. To go along with it were the first Tselina-O satellites which were first launched in 1970, and went into service a few years later because of the delays caused by weight growth and payload development.

About the Zenit-4MK and Tselina-O combination, Soviet Space History stated: "It not only localised and classified radio emitters but also characterized their functional regimes. This allowed it to identify command traffic from the military units, allowing the targeting of those units by photo reconnaissance satellites. Constant improvement resulted in Tselina-O being abandoned in 1984 and all systems being put on Tselina-D." To go into these satellites, the Soviets installed various high energy lasers, electro-magnetic rail guns, and novel warhead technologies of a space war nature - experiments which were planned to see if Moscow should really go ahead with a whole development program aka Fon-1 of such new weapons. For more about this, see this link about Sary Shagan weapons center in Kazachstan, near the Chinese western border:

http://oook.info/dyson/sdi.html

When China was in its greatest disarray because of Zhou's death, and the interregnum caused by Mao's slow demise, the Soviets, it seems, started heating up the territory around Tangshan, causing precursors of an impeding earthquake - clouds to rise, abnormal animal behavior, repeated boiling over of water and oil wells, "three belts of glittering flashes", etc. - just before it struck on July 28, 1976, killing around 240,000 people, and destroying about 90% of the surface buildings. The strangest fact about the earthquake - if it were a powerful one, caused by deep underground clashes of the earth's plates - is that no underground miners in all the region's mines were killed, none were even injured. The earthquake was caused by airborne beams, and the only ones who had them were the Soviets. For more on the earthquake, see this link:

http://www.earthquakesignals.com/zhonghao296/A991218.html

It was because of this earthquake that Professor Shou Zhonghao went on to make a career of predicting similar man-made earthquakes.

There were few Americans who had any idea of what had happened, but one of them was this same Thomas C Reed, the Secretary of the Air Force, and Director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) during the Ford and Carter Administrations - something he prefers to ignore while others, like Edward Teller aka 'Doctor Strangelove' prefer to talk about his work in designing thermonuclear devices at Livermore during the 1960s. As NRO Director, Reed's Keyhole-11 satellites discovered what the Soviet laser ones had done, and he took advantage of it, especially the safety of underground man-made structures like mines, when détente with the Soviets was scrapped, and a showdown with China loomed.

Glimpses of America's Man-Made Disasters (Part 11)

by Trowbridge H. Ford

In researching the most secret covert operations - like the plots to eliminate Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution or the campaign by the West during the 1980s to get rid of the Soviet Union without Armageddon by provoking it with air and sea intrusions - there are almost always aspects which get overlooked somehow, whether it be when and how the process actually started, unforeseen cockups along the way, unexpected blowback from seemingly unsuspecting adversaries, and the like, and looking into America's use of underground and space weapons, especially laser satellites, for strategic purposes has proven no exception. The whole build-up of the process has largely escaped my notice up until now.because it was connected, almost from the outset, by the United States and the United Kingdom with their efforts to gain a nuclear monopoly over the rest of the world.

When Washington and London were finally persuaded that an atomic bomb could and should be built by early 1943, the conventional fear was that the communists would somehow steal it - given their support in the United States and Britain - and, of course, they did, as we well know. For example, David Holloway has written in Stalin and the Bomb that intelligence materials the NKVD supplied Moscow from Britain in February, what the still ultra-secret spy 'K' provided, convinced Igor Kurchatov, head of the Soviets' atomic project, that an atomic bomb could indeed be made, resulting in the USSR going for broke to attain one. The possibility of this occurring had completely escaped the attention of the British and American intelligence services because they had little information about the Manhattan Project's existence, much less what it was all about. Their counter espionage agents were so busy catching domestic communists, and engaged in inter-service rivalry that they had no idea of what Moscow was up to.

By almost all accounts, Hoover's FBI and Britain's MI5 had a terrible time during WWII while dealing with the Soviets, much more interested in flushing out alleged
domestic spies like Under Srecetary of State Dean Acheson, Vice President Henry Wallace, John J. McCloy who presided over the Nuremberg trials et al. whose purpose was allegedly "obtaining all information possible with reference to atomic energy" (Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, p.350n), while the Security Service was involved in proving that British Ambassador to Moscow Sir Stafford Cripps, Professor J. B.S. Haldane, and Daily Worker reporter Ivor Montagu were more general Moscow spies. While William Donovan of the OSS had provided without Roosevelt's permission the NKVD with all kinds of equipment and intelligence for all kinds of spying, especially in the United States, the Soviets had all the agents they needed for spying in the UK. Little wonder after a decade of such unappreciated activities by Moscow, as Richard J. Aldrich has written in The Hidden Hand, "... the shock of the Soviet atomic bomb test in August 1949 was intense." (p. 219)

London and Washington had not been sleeping while all this had been going on, though, they had just been looking in the wrong direction - China. Ever since the Japanese had commenced their assault in 1937 on the country proper, the British had become increasingly concerned where it would all end. At first, they allowed the Japanese so any liberties in conducting their hostilities that Joseph Needham - a notable, left-wing Cambridge academic - "...was apoplectic." (Simon Winchester, The Man Who Loved China, p. 48) When conditions in China became worse, a meeting in North Oxford in November 1939, led by the young Chinese philosopher Luo Zhongshu, who later wrote the Fortress Besieged, urged that Needham lead a mission to determine the effects it was having upon its universities, apparently in fear that the Japanese were obtaining valuable information for the construction of atomic weapons. By the time the Anglo-Americans were on the road to constructing their own, in February 1943, they sent Needham there in a Douglas C-47 Skytrain over the Hump to Chungking aka Chongqing to assess its conditions - now that the West had repudiated almost all controls over its affairs - and to gather up all materials relating to its potential.

Needham, a rather naive ideologue, owed his appointment to the recommendation of Sir George Sansom, Britain's former Ambassador to Japan, and a current member of the Far East War Council in Singapore which determined how it should conduct the war East of Suez. Sansom knew first-hand that Japan had bitten off more than it could chew, especially because of its failure to mobilize completely for the massive task, by attacking America, ultimately writing Japan's Fatal Blunder - what would make China the force to be reckoned with in the Far East, especially when it came to reining in the rising Soviets. While Needham was officially given the assignment of finding out what the Chinese needed, his more important task was to work with the Sino-British Scientific Cooperation Office (SBSC). Winchester has claimed that its function was to inform Chinese universities that "...they needed to begin their own research all over again," (p. 79)

The real purpose of the SBSC - much like William Steveson's British Security Coordination before America joined the war - was to mobilize as much suuport for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government in Chungking now that Japan had nearly shot its bolt, and Needham - the Chinese speaking, rabid supporter of the underdog, especially in China - was the ideal spy to work his way upon the troubled land while, apparently innocently, supplying his spy masters all they wanted to know. The trips by Needham were carried out by truck, displaying the names of the SBSC in both English and Chinese, and they displayed both the Union Jack and the Nationalist flags - what Winchester has conveniently explained away by stating that it would have been imprudent and contrary to diplomatic protocol to be flying "...any hammers, sickles or red stars." (p. 102) This seems most counter-productive given the alleged purpose of the mission was to mobilize everything within "free China", especially since the communists' biggest army, the Eighth, was also headquartered in Chungking.

To determine where Chinese physics was starting from - what the West had last learned of when the famous nuclear physicist Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist who modeled the the atom's nucleus as a drop of water, held together by surface tension, visited China in 1937 - Needham first went to Chengdu, where he picked up his driver and assistant Huang, and then on his way back he stopped at Loushan, the temporary home of the University of Wuhan, where a thorough inspection was made of its facilities. (p. 85ff.) He found nothing faintly ressembling a modern physics laboratory, only a great ability to improvise - what Cambridge physicist Ernest Rutherford had done in establishing the half-life of radioactive elements, and following the tracks of alpha and beta particles in determining the structure of the atom. If Rutherford and his boys, as Richard Reeves has written in A Force of Nature, could achieve such breakthoroughs with merely their minds and hands (p. 177), why couldn't their Chinese counterparts do the same, once the rubble from the war had been cleared away.

Needham's report of his travels was so successful that his superiors in London saw to the allotment of space for material every week over the Hump to satisfy the growing needs of China's scientists. While all kinds of things were supplied, the most important items regarding the development of nuclear weapons were the weekly issues of the prestigious magazine, Nature, laboratory equipment, reference books, and other scientific journals. The articles that come to mind are James Chadwick's 1932 one on the "Possible existence of a neutron," the 1939 one by Lisa Meitner and O. R. Frish on a new kind of nuclear reaction through the disintegration of uranium by neutrons, and another one the same year by Enrico Fermi on why beta ray decay could result in either negatively charged electrons or positively charged positrons - what recalled Zen Buddhists solving koans, and Bohr and Werner Heisenberg laboring over questions whether Nature seemed to be absurd. (Frijof Capra, The Tao of Physics, pp. 48-50)

The potential of the Chinese physicists who had been trained in the West was already being demonstrated. Qian Xuesen, the father of its space program, gained an M.S. at MIT in 1936, and went on to get his Ph.D. at Caltech, working along side its famous nuclear and rocket designer Charles Lauritsen, three years later. Qian Sanqiang, the father of its atomic bomb program, attended the Curie Institute in Paris in 1937, and went on to get his doctorate there in physics during the war. Peng Huanwu, the designer of its first fission and thermonuclear weapons, received his Ph.D. at Edinburgh in 1945 after studying the subject there for a decade under the tutledge of Max Born, who most belatedly got the Nobel Prize in physics in 1954 because Paul Dirac plagiarized his work back in the early '30s to get it then. Wang Gangchang, the manager of China's nuclear weapons program, had received his doctorate degree at Berlin in 1934 where Heisenberg had recently received the Nobel Prize in physics. The great risk of this training with them and others was that they would learn the greatest secrets of making an atomic bomb while conducting experiments, and consulting with colleagues despite the fact that the scientific community was engaged in self-censorship when it came to publications, even in Nature.

While Needham completed eleven full-fledged, spying expeditions during his stay in China - bringing good cheer to the outposts of its scientific community, boosting its morale by supplying it with everything it could, e. g., electric motors, large tubes of rare gases, cases of optical glass for lenses of all kinds of microscopes, a cathode ray oscilloscope, rubber tubing, etc., and displaying continually the Union Jack for diplomatic purposes while taking advantage of his left-wing entry with the Chinese Communit leadership (Winchester, pp.98-9) - he did continue the spying left off by Sir Marc Aurel Stein, and Aussie Rewi Alley. They had tracked the movements of Buddhist monks who had spread the word of the Budda, finding ultimately Cave 17 whose contents Stein ultimately provided to the British Museum, most important the scrolls of star charts and the fifteen-foot long, printed one, now known as the Diamond Sutra. While Winchester has crowed about its being the first printed manuscript, the sutra, as Capra has repeatedly demonstrated, showed that the ancient Eastern mystics through their intuition had developed a world view similar to that of the new Physics.

The sutra, sounding so much like Einstein's theories, is best known for statements like this:

"Form is emptiness and emptiness is indeed form. Emptiness is not different from form, and form is not different from emptiness. What is form is emptiness, what is emptiness that is form." (Quoted from Capra, p. 215.)

The only problem the Chinese scientists had with such ancient theories is that they had neither the means of proving them in the laboratory nor of taking advantage of them in war and peace.

While Needham went on to make a career of publicing the Chinese manuscripts he found, particularly the 24 volumes of Science and Civilization in China, all the assistance that he had provided its phsicists backfired when Chiang and his Nationalists proved to be no match for Mao and his communists. The Generalissimo never was able to put their act together, ending up as an enigna who no one fully understands. (See Jonathan Spence's review of Jay Taylor's biography in the latest issue of the NYRB, pp. 32-4.) As for the Chinese Communists, their victory on the mainland in 1949 came as big a shock to the West as the Soviets denoting their atomic bomb five weeks earlier, thanks in part to its prejudice against the country, and its rabid anti-communism against its leadership. This only compounded the problems, though, by making gifted physicists, especially Peng and Sanqiang, return home from Britain, joined by those who fled the States, particularly Qian Xuesen, because of McCarthyism, inspired by all the hysteria about spying caused by Moscow's success.

Needless to say, with all this talent given the circumstances, China soon embarked on a go-for-broke campaign to have its own atomic weapons - what most Western observers and historians attribute to Soviet assistance, and Sino spying, but this is just a result of, as they say, closing the barn door after the cows have escaped. The Korean War had shown that the Americans would not use nuclear weapons to solve their most dire circumstances This meant that even the Soviet bear would not resort to their use even if their difficulties with Beijing, especially territorial disputes, resulted in military conflict. In 1955, the Chinese Secretariat, at Mao's direction, agreed to the development of nuclear weapons. Once the Soviets started dragging their feet about providing nuclear assistnace to the Chinese program - apparently because they intended to use them, once they had them - China had to rely on its own resources to complete the job, testing its first nuclear weapon in October 1964 at Lop Nur in the far Northwest.

Under these circumstances, it is simply ludicrous for Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman to contend in The Nuclear Express that the result was essentially
achieved by Chinese intelligence, especially the direct spying by Klaus Fuchs, and PERSEUS apparently Robert J. Oppenheimer throughout for the communist regime. Fuchs had been out of the loop for years, having been exposed in 1950 during the McCarthy era, and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. He was released on June 23, 1959 from Wakefield Prison, and then made his way to East Germany. In July, Fuchs was visited by Qian Sanqiang, according to Reed's Los Alamos associate H. Terry Hawkins, and gave him "...information that greatly assisted the Chinese program." (p. 102n.) Hawkins' source is some unclassied publication that he cannot recall, and Fuchs allegedly gave Qian the design and operation of the Hiroshima bomb, Fat Man! This is exactly a decade after the Soviets had tested their first nuclear weapon, RDS-1, internally an exact replica of America's Fat Man bomb in eastern Kazakhstan.

An even more bizarre tale by Reed and Stillman is their implication that Oppenheimer was PERSEUS, the crucial Soviet spy, it seems, who hung around long enough to even help out the Chinese. After isolating Oppenheimer from the whole process - making out that he only arrived as the administrator of Los Alamos after the key spying had started - they weave a tale about some American spy known as Arthur Fielding who the Cohens recruited and controlled in 1942, and Lona conveniently spilled the beans about on her deathbed to KGB operative Anatoly Yatsov aka Anatoli Yatskov: "We are of the view that PERSEUS was a real communist sympathizer/agent; he joined the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory at its inception and remained there for decades until his retirement." (p. 38) Reed and Stillman also claimed that the Venona transcripts, and the Mitrokhin Archives indicated Fielding's existence, though there is apprently no mention of PERSEUS aka Arthur Fielding in either John Earl Haynes & Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America or Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokin, The Sword and The Shield.

The only sense that I can make of this rigmarole is to tar Oppenheimer without saying so. It seems that Oppenheimer, a communist sympathizer like Needham, was forced to spy for the Soviets because while he was working with Max Born, he inadvertantly provided a paper of Born's which Paul Dirac plagiarized to win the Phsyics Prize in 1933. As a result, Oppenheimer was quite willing to overlook the communist background of almost anyone, especially Fuchs. While Born belatedly got the prize in 1954, the anger of other scientists in-the-know about the matter were unabating, particularly when Oppenheimer himself was awarded the Fermi prize by JFK.
As for who PERSEUS really was, I suspect the atomic spy 'K' - apparently aka Peter Wright, ultimately MI5's Assistant Director who Vladimir Barkovsky recruited during the war - and a few other still undisclosed spies.

These were only the first of many deceptions that Reed and Stillman engaged in, as we shall see.

My Recent Visit To The States Turns Sour

by Trowbridge H. Ford

Towards the end of August, the woman I have been living with in Sweden and Portugal for a generation and I decided to go to the States to help in the rehabitation of her son who had been critically injured in a motorcycle accident in early July in Napa, California, hoping that our help would make the process a bit less stressful. We bought round-trip tickets to San Francisco, stopping on our way there at the New York City area both on our way going, and returning.

Given my most critical writing about Western governments, especially the one in Washington, I was a bit trepidatious about going, especially since I have been warned by people apparently in the know that the authorities are very unhappy about what I have been doing, and my arrival in Newark, N. J. was alerted to its security officials by my having to sign a card about my coming, and where I would be staying - what all American citizens returning to and leaving the States are required to provide. The airlines won't even allow passengers to get on the planes without signing the form first.

When the SAS flight landed in Newark, and passengers had to go through Immigration, I became increasingly concerned as the two parties in front of me were questioned lengthily by the INS official, one couple even being required to undergo further questioning in an office connected to the hall where the immigration process was being conducted.

When my turn came, I was totally surprised by the most superficial, friendly chat I had with the black official. He seemed totally unconcerned about who I might really be, doing nothing more than checking the first page of my passport to make sure that I was the same person seeking entry into the country. He never looked at the temporary and permanent residences I had been granted by Swedish authorities, much less asking me any questions about why I had been living so long out of the States. He was only interested in my first name, Trowbridge, wondering how I had gotten it. I explained that it is my grandmother's maiden name on my mother's side, and my middle name is my mother's family name.

It was a drastic contrast to when I arrived at the same airport right before the 9/11 attacks, and was questioned by another INS official for about five minutes about why I was a resident in Sweden, where I had gone from Stockholm before I arrived in the USA, what I planned to do there, etc. - a questioning that I successfully stopped by refusing to answer any more unwarranted personal questions.

In sum, the whole process was surprisingly friendly and disarming until I finally returned to Sweden just last Wednesday. When I returned to our row house, everything seemed to be in order, thanks particularly to the almost daily care a friend in the neighborhood had provided. It was only the next day that I noticed that a CD player right below this computer that I am now using was missing. There had been no sign of any forced entry into the house, and, of course, I cannot entertain the idea that the friend stole it.

In fact, I am sure that she never thought that anything was missing, and certainly there were many more valuable things to steal which even an ignorant stranger would note upon entering the house - e. g., a brand-new tv in the lounge, valuable painting and lithographs on the walls, an automobile in the garage with a key conveniently in it for a massive theft and getaway, etc. The stolen CD player seems to have been a special, secret message to me to mind my movements after someone had searched the files and e-mails on my computer.

The reason for this seems to have been the result of my series of articles about America's use of space weapons, especially satellite lasers, to cause convenient earthquakes in countries of strategic concern to Washington, especially Iran. The last article had ended with a prediction I made that the most likely target now in this regard was around Qom, the religious center between the country's capital, Tehran, and its nuclear one in Natanz.

My prediction was not based upon any secret information from either Iran or the USA but from the pattern of earthquakes that the National Reconnaissance Office has carried out in not only Iran but also Turkey, Pakistan, and China. Washington has always picked targets which will put the greatest pressure on the leadership of these countries to shape up when it comes to fighting terrorism.

The earthquakes caused in Iran in 1990 and 2003, for example, were to make sure that the mullahs in Tehran were not tempted to meddle in the problems that Saddam Hussein was having with the West - what made sure that Tehran had enough domestic problems of its own to even think about doing something to help out the Iraqi dictator. The 2005 earthquake in Northwest Pakistan was intended to make General Musharraf take more action against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in this area by punishing its population - a strategy which clearly backfired.

When my prediction turned out to be what Washington had in mind as a likely target, the uranium processing plant outside Qom, it decided to check out what I really knew about the one being built ouside the holy city. Of course, I had no real idea of what was in the works. In fact, I had not even read The Nuclear Express by then, the book that American spies Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman wrote about Iran's military ambitions to become a nuclear power. It was while I was in Califormia that I purchased the book, and found its content very revealing about a lot of things, particularly about Iran when they wrote this: "Other uranium-enrichment research, based on laser isotope separation, was undertaken at the Tehran Nuclear Technology Center, without IAEA knowledge. A larger, also secret, laser enrichment facility had been built at Lashkar Ab'ad." (p. 293) They are obviously the source of the secret script that Washington is currently feeding the world about China and the countries it is helping to become nuclear players.

When Washington's secret players, whoever they may be, saw that I had no secret script for my writing, they still decided to let me know that they had been there with the stealing of the CD player, especially after they had gone to such lengths at Newark to assure me that I was of no interest to them.

Well, I can tell them that whatever their interest then, my next article about their obtaining space weapons and their use is bound to arouse it further.

Sir John Chilcot: Not yet Another Inquiry into the Iraq War!

by Trowbridge H. Ford

The terrible state of public accountability in the Anglo-American world became all too clear when Britain had to make some kind of accounting of its devastating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - where it had only followed American orders by joining, and felt increasingly obliged to render some scrutiny of since Washington did so too. When Washington did agree to the Iraq Intelligence Commission, co-chaired by Senator Charles Robb and Judge Lawrence Silberman, to assess the adequacy of the intelligence justifying Saddam's ouster - after the Iraq Survey Group had failed to find any of its claimed WMD, the Blair Government followed suit, appointing the Butler Review to see if Downing Street had sexed up the intelligence to justify war - what the similar secret Franks Commission had found to be essentially not the case when Argentina increasingly threatened to invade the Falklands in 1982. Instead of Thatcher's Downing Street ignoring the growing isolation of the Falklanders - what gave the Junta the expectation that it could get away with a successful assault - the Blair goverenment had used all kinds of suspect intelligence to justify most dubious claims, especially the one that Iraq could mount a serious WMD missile attack within a period of 45 minutes.

What was really interesting about the Butler Report is that most people thought that it was the creation of his Lordship - a well-known mandarin, noted for dealing with responsible politicians, especially serving as private secretary to no less than five PMs - and those who didn't took offence at Labour MP Ann Taylor, who was a vigorous supporter of the war, and chairman of the influential Intelligence and Security Committee in the Commons, making these complaints. There were actually three other members of the inquiry, Field Marhal Lord Inge, Conservative MP Michael Mates, and mandarin Sir John Chilcot. The Liberal Democrats had refused to participate in it because the efforts by politicians, unlike even the Franks Commission, were excluded from its scrutiny. Chilcot performed for three previous Home Secretaries, Merlyn Rees, Roy Jenkins, and William Whitelaw, the same kind of secretarial duties that Butler was known for with Prime Ministers. During the Butler Inquiry hearings, Chilcot was expected to mind the clock while witnesses, especially the current Prime Minister Blair, were giving their expected testimony while Butler presided from the chair.

The Butler Inquiry was further limited in the scope of its investigation by the Hutton one, appointed to clear up the unexpected death of weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly whose earlier claim about Saddam Hussein's expected WMD capability with medium-range rockets was the centerpiece of what it was supposed to be investigating. Lord Hutton was a law lord, noted for his most servile service for government authorities, especially in Northern Ireland, and he quickly showed that its confidence in giving him the responsibility for determining how Kelly died - what would normally have been decided by an inquest - was not misplaced when he simply delegated the decision to suicide expert, Oxford Professor Keith Hawton. The Hutton Report, consequently, concerned why, when and how Kelly had apparently been allowed to kill himself.

While Blair's replacement, Gordon Brown, fully expected this dribs and drabs approach to Britain going to war in Iraq would finally kill off calls for why it all happened, he was obliged to appoint a Chilcot Inquiry into why it still had. While one would have expected in the first place something like what happened to Lord Aberdeen's Ministry in Parliament 154 years ago, Chilcot was obliged at least to hold an inquiry in public, unlike what happened during the Franks Commission, and to put hard questions to leading politicians about why the war was a complete snafu from start to finish, unlike what the Butler Inquiry had done. Still, the Chilcot Inquiry sounded too much like the Hutton one, though many proclaimed that the investigation was in 'good hands' with the well-respected mandarin. This is also the motto of Allstate insurance, increasingly noted for ripping off its customers.

The doubts become more serious when one looks into the background of Chilcot's Whitehall service, especially when he really got on the map with his leaderhip of the Home Office's Police Department in February 1987 when John Stalker - leader of the inquiry of the Shoot-to-Kill murders in Northern Ireland - was being forced to resign from the Greater Manchester Police; apparent assassin Captain Simon Hayward of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was causing increasing problems about the still unsolved murder in Stockholm a year before, and the ongoing effort to stop the flow of Libyan arms to the Provisional IRA; the murders of private eye Daniel Morgan and Hayward's sister-in-law Chantal who were trying to clarify problems relating to the Haywards: and the continuing struggle by Manchester businessman Kevin Taylor, who was an acquaintance of Stalker's, to clear his name of cavorting with criminal associates. If these problems were not solved quickly, and effectively, no one could predict where the continuing problems would end up.

The drawn-out Stalker inquiry was running out of control, thanks to RUC Chief Constable's increasing stone-walling of the inquiry for fear that it was focusing on Simon Hayward's activities further afield, apparently the Stockholm assassination on February 28, 1986. The immediate cause of the delay was Stalker wanting a copy of the tape recording of the Hayshed shooting of Michael Tigue on November 24, 1982 near Lurgan in Northern Ireland, fearing that it would confirm Hayward's leadership of the reinforced RUC Special Branch operation - what Home Office Regional Inspector of Constabulary (Northwest) Sir Philip Myers feared would be extended to the statsminister's assassination, thanks to the clandestine Interim Report Stalker had provided. As Francis X. Clines of The New York Times wrote when Stalker finally resigned from the GMP: "His inquiry also looked into the death of one unarmed man who was shot through the back and heart when, policemen said, he presented a threat.." ("Detective in Ulster 'Shoot to Kill' Inquiry Quits," March 17, 1987, A13) This was obviously an allusion to the Stockholm shooting where Palme was shot by a single bullet which severed his spinal column and aorta. (Jan Bondeson, Blood on the Snow: The Killing of Olof Palme, p. 52) When Stalker attempted to continue his investigation despite Myers telling him twice to desist, he was removed permanently from it. (John Stalker, The Stalker Affair, p. 280)

Its effect upon the operation of the security forces in Northern Ireland, especially Hayward's South Detachment of the 14 Intelligence Company, was dramatic, with its refraining from all offensive operations, especially ambushes, despite the fact that the body of Frank Hegarty, the British tout who had tipped them off about where PIRA weapons caches in Ireland were located in anticipation of the Anglo-American non-nuclear showdown with the Soviets - what was to be triggered, if everything had gone ahead as planned, by the Palme assassination. The weapons were the threat that Clines had referred to in his article about Stalker's retirement. In contrast to the Brits adopting a most low profile, assuring that there would be nothing new to add to Hayward's alleged assassinations, the Provos went on a rampage in December, mounting 22 attacks on RUC stations until Hayward was finally rendered harmless by a drugs setup in Sweden in March. With the Op Officer finally out of the way, the British security forces then responded in April with the famous Loughgall Massacre.

Meanwhile, Hayward was lulled into thinking that he was going up the British military promotion ladder, attending classes which would allow him to be promoted to major (PQS 2) while he was not performing routine duties with the 14th back in Ulster. Hayward's problems were compounded, though, by the activities of Soviet spy, Michael Bettaney, who had worked for MI5's K Branch, and had become completely disaffected by its conduct in Northern Ireland. especially the Shoot-to-Kill murders. While he was on remand in Brixton jail, awaiting trial, he told IRA suspects all he knew about what the Security Service had done in Ulster, supplying, as Mark Urban wrote in Big Boys' Rules: The Secret Struggle against the IRA, "...the names and addresses of senior officers. including those involved in anti-IRA work, (who) had been compromised, and that the people concerned had taken increased security precautions, some moving house." (p. 99)

In Hayward's case, this meant getting a new job elsewhere - as he was now believed to be on the IRA death list - so he, it seems, was transferred to a new top-secret military intelligence postition in London, once he had taken a vacation with his brother Christopher on his catamaran, The True Love, in the Mediterranean. The Haywards were on a mission to carry out some kind of terrorist action, apparently an assassination, at Libya's expense This was just when Chilcot was taking over the Home Office's Police Department, and it decided, along with Anthony Duff's MI5, to make the best of Bettaney's betrayals. Now the Security Service was committed to capturing the Eksund, loaded with Libyan weapons for the IRA, and was willing to set up Simon as a drug runner to satisfy its tout in the PIRA Council, DOOK apparently aka 'Steak Knife', whose cooperation was vital to capturing the vessel. (For more on this, see Simon Hayward, Under Fire: My Own Story, p. 57ff.)

Once the set up of Hayward had finally been achieved, thanks particularly to the efforts by informant Forbes Cay Mitchell, it was the job of the Home Office's National Drugs Intelligence Unit (NDIU), especially Detective Sergeant Brian Moore and Detective Inspector David Morgan, to secure his conviction. They submitted a signed statement, claiming that Hayward was a professional cannabis trafficker who knowingly used his brother's Jaguar to transport 50.5 kilos of it into Sweden, and for which he was to be paid £20,000 - claims which fellow suspect Mitchell fully and freely corroborated. (p. 147) When Hayward's defense demanded that they be forced to give evidence at any upcoming trial, Scotland Yard's Assistant Commission Colin Hewett, under the supervision of the Chicot's Home Office police, refused to allow the officers to attend because what the NDIU officers had supplied was only hearsay evidence which would be inadmissable in an English trial.

When it seemed that this dubious case against Hayward was starting to break down, it was suddenly revived by the suspected murder of his sister-in-law Chantal by a massive drug overdose a few day later. "There is very little doubt in mind that Chantal was murdered" (p. 185), Simon wrote. The most disburbing evidence was that she, not known as a drug user, had suffered a puncture wound on her left arm, just below the elbow. Then right after Hayward's lawyer, Tom Placht, informed the prosectuor of DOOK's existence, and asked what it knew about him, Hayward's mother was immediately interviewed by British police on July 24th. "It also would appear that the authorities suddenly became extremely worried as to the security of the trial proceedings because of the possiblity, in their eyes, of IRA reprisals." (p. 195) Prosecutors then decided to prosecute Hayward, changing the venue of the trial to Stockholm because of fears as to his safety, and that of members of his family. Thanks to the hearsay evidence which British authorities were not willing to back up under oath, Hayward was duly convicted of drug-trafficking, and sentenced to five years in prison.

While Hayward was being legally disposed of, South London, private detective Daniel Morgan and Hayward's sister-in-law Chantal, Christopher's former wife, were being physicallly eliminated. Morgan had learned through his contacts in the underworld that Hayward had been set up to help protect the continuing trade in narcotics which the Metropolitan police were deeply involved in, and threatened to publish his information in media tycoon Robert Maxwell's Daily Mirror for an alleged £250,000, but when the criminal underworld got wind of what he was up to, it arranged a meeting in the parking lot of a South London pub on March 10th where a professional assassin killed Morgan with an axe in his head. Interestingly enough, the London police, thanks to the direction of officials like Chilcot, have not been able to find, and convict his killers of this terrible crime for 22 years now.

Then the security risk to Hayward's family had already resulted in the apparent murder of Chantal, who had visited her mother-in-law in Putney over Hayward's problems, and was in the process to fleeing to Canada because of fears over her own safety and that of her son Tarik. On June lst, a woman sounding like Chantal had met a female police officer in the South Croydon Railway Station, telling her of the drug ring which had set up Simon in Stockholm, and wrote to Hendon MP John Gorst, who was activity involved in securing Simon's release, thanks to encouragement by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former Home Secretary Merlyn Rees, to the same effect. The policewoman had simply allowed the woman to disappear without a trace. However way Chantal died, whether it was by her own hand or that of the Provos, the drug ring or crooked Metropolitan cops, it has never been investigated, though the Metro did revive her existence years later when it apparently wanted to finally solve the Morgan murder, and apparently set up GMP Chief Constable Mike Todd for a similar fate when he threatened to take action last year against Britain's covert state's complicity in secret rendering of suspected Muslim terrorists to places like Diego Gardica and beyond.

For more on this, see this link:

http://codshit.blogspot.com/2008/04/did-wanted-woman-witness-of-morgan.html

If all this wasn't enough to keep Chilcot most busy, then there were the problems that Manchester businessman Kevin Taylor was continuing to cause because of the police's pursuit of him. Even before Stalker was removed from his inquiry, he suspected that they raided Taylor's house on May 9th, hoping to find real evidence which would cooroborate simmering interest in their criminal activity - what, Stalker wrote, "...was brought to the boil only after the contents of my interm report became known in late 1985 and early 1986." (p. 267) Then Chilcot saw to the quashing of Taylor's summons against GMP Chief Constable John Anderton and some of his associates for conspiring to subvert the course of justice. In July, when Hayward's trial was beginning, the Home Office saw to the quashing of judicial review of the authority which allowed police access to his bank accounts. Then, when Hayward was convicted, the police arrested Taylor on a charge of conspiring to defraud one of the banks where he had an account - what would justify Stalker's removal from the inquiry if proven true, but turned out to be nothing more than the police committing perjury and losing documents when Taylor was acquitted right after Hayward's release from prison in Sweden in September 1989.

Then there was the problem of Stalker possibly revealing in some blockbuster book untoward action by the Home Office in his removal, especially the role of Chilcot and his Police Department. Actually, they were never even mentioned in The Stalker Affair, but Stalker added enough to make clear to the reader that it was not so. Chilcot managed to get the current Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, to conveniently write this in a letter to an unnamed Conservative Member of Parliament (Gorst?): "The Home Office played no part in the enquiry into Mr Stalker and there is no basis on which the Department might pay his cost." (Quoted from p. 223.) Of course, the claim was an outrageous lie as the text and index of Stalker's book showed, but since the responsible Minister was willing to say so, that was the end of it. It even has references to the role its Inspectorate played in his ouster, especially Sir Philip Myers, adding that Stalker would have seriously considered instituting a "...formal statutory disciplinary process that would have involved officials of the Northern Ireland Police Authority and the Home Office" (p. 266) if he had been allowed to continue his inquiry.
Little wonder that Chilcot was then made Permanent Under-Secretary of State for the Northern Ireland Office. During his tenure there, the still unsolved fire on January 10, 1990 at the NIPA which destroyed the files of the Sir John Stevens' investigation of collusion of the security forces in paramilitary murders - reminscent of what had started the Stalker inquiry - remained, though the Stevens' team after a decade finally got access to the Force Research Unit's "...top secret records (including the book that recorded all intelligence passed to the Special Branch) and getting ever closer to the truth of what happened." (Peter Taylor, Brits: The War Against the IRA, p. 295) Unfortunately, this expectation was suddenly crushed when the Castlereagh headquarters where the Special Branch files were kept was raided on St. Patrick's Day, 2002, and were carried away by a three-man team which had inside information about the facility. Then Sir John Chilcot was appointed to get to the bottom of the break-in - what he, unsurprisingly, did not manage to achieve.

With a track record like this, anyone who expects any surprises from the Chilcot Inquiry will be sadly disappointed.

Modern Warfare and the Decline of Parliamentary Sovereignty

by Trowbridge H. Ford

When a country, at least in modern times - especially in the Anglo-American world - suffers a disastrous military campaign or the loss of a serious war, there is rarely an inquiry into why everything went so wrong. Even if a country somehow still manages the adversity, there is rarely a complete investigation of why affairs went so badly at first. Of course, the reason for no such inquiries is that they happen so rarely that when they do, they are just dismissed as unique occurrances from which nothing worthwhile can be learned. As I recall, there was no inquiry into why the Northern States nearly lost the Civil War, and why the US government clearly lost trying to dictate its solution to the Vietnamese one.

The first such attempted investigation that comes to mind is that which started in Britain during 1810 when the invasion of Walcheren island in the Scheldt estuary along the now Belgium-Dutch border during the depths of the Napoleonic Wars turned out so badly. The plan was based upon a 40,000-man invasion force to make sure that the French Emperor did not secure total dominance of the continent - what was attained soon thereafter by his smashing victory at Wagram..The irrelevant force was then decimated by a plague of diseases, leaving the commander of the whole operation under threat of serious consequences. He was the Earl of Chatham, son of the famous Prime Minister, and a member of current Prime Minister Spencer Perceval's Ministry, who blamed the mission's failure upon the naval commander on the scene in a secret personal statement to ailing monarch, King George III.

Rising barrister Henry Brougham made such a case against such futile efforts that the Tory Ministry was engaged in around the world that the Whig opposition was obliged to see that he was elected to a seat in the Commons so that he could lead the fight against the Ministry. In his maiden speech, he charged that Chatham had engaged in unconstitutional behavior by dealing privately with the King, contrary to its customs and conventions, calling upon the House to censure the Government - what it threatened to dissolve Parliament if it occurred during this most difficult time.

When the whole House became involved in debating the question, however, it was compounded by Francis Burdett's breach of privilege by publishing in Cobbett's Weekly Political Register his challenge to Brougham's view of the Constitution, especially the role of the Crown in its functioning - what permitted the Percevel Ministry to defeat passage of Lord Porchester's hostile Resolutions, approving instead the continued retention of Walcheren during the confusion, as Brougham so lamented:

"Had it not unfortunately been mixed up with other subjects, so successfully introduced by the minister for the express purpose of distracting the public attention, we should in all likelihood have owed to the most eloquent event - that powerful display of the rhetoric of numbers - a complete change in the opinion of the people on the cause of reform, and a certain prospect of its being speedily victorious." (Quoted from Henry Brougham, "Rose on the Influence of the Crown," Edinburgh Review, vol. 16, no. XXXI, April 1810, p. 205.)

What Brougham threatened for the Perceval Ministry occurred for real in 1855 when Lord Aberdeen's Government floundered in its conduct of the Crimean War against expansive Russia. Thanks to its lack of planning, especially a strategy of reasonable targets to hit - what was exposed by the famous charge of Lord Cardigan's Light Brigade, and the treatment of casualities resulting in the process, the Commons got so worked up during the continuing hostilites that it called for the appointment of a select committee to investigate the manifest failures - everything from the recruitment of capable military leadership to the flogging of insubordinate subordinates - what the Ministry made a matter of confidence, resulting in its retirement when it failed, and shortly thereafter the resignation of its leading administrator, First Lord of the Admiralty Sir James Graham. The leadership of the succeeding one, Lord Palmerston, was so vigorous in the pursuit of victory that the necessary changes in Britain's military establishment were postponed in making for another decade - the Cardwell reforms effected by Gladstone's Secretary of State for War.

This experience was not lost upon British officialdom when similar kinds of disasters had to be covered up from the public. When the United Kingdom mounted Winston Churchill's dubious assault on Gallipoli in the midst of WWI in the hope of knocking Turkey out of the war, and opening up the Black Sea to unimpeded Allied forces, it resulted in an even worse result than the Scheldt adventure through disease and Turkish resistance, but there was no immediate inquiry into why things had gone so wrong for fear of breaking the Allied support for the continuing, irrational conflict. It did result in the recall of Mediterrean Expeditionary Force commander Sir Ian Hamilton, Churchill losing his position at the Admiralty, and Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith having to give way to a Coalition Government under Lloyd Geroge.

Only when the crisis had passed with the Allied victory at Beersheba in Egypt - what accomplished what Gallipoli had attempted - the Dardenelles Commission was appointed in 1916 to investigate what had gone so wrong in the Gallipoli campaign, particularly to molify AnZac complaints about its planning and conduct, and its composition - especially the presence of former Australian Prime Minister Andrew Fisher, the colonial politician so noted for his support of Britain through thick and thin, and so damning of the campaign as it was unfolding - assured that its report would only be a belated one, and even then only containing what everyone already knew. The commission had been headed by William Pickford, an uninformed Appellate Court judge, who later went on to become Master of the Rolls. The commission finally reported in 1919.

The lack of official assessments of British conduct during not only the wider war but also WWII only compounded the problems of keeping a handle on the whole process. Britain came quite close to losing both conflicts, but the public hardly even suspected it, much less why it almost happened. There is nothing of an official nature assessing their conduct, leaving even British officials to rely upon the volumes of the Foreign Relations of the United States to help reconstruct what happened during both wars. With the public having such wide misconceptions of what was attempted, and achieved until much later - what historians only started seriously supplying during the 1980s - it was most difficult for Governments to focus the public's attention on the real problems, and how to meet them, given the complete mythology about the real conflicts. - i. e., the 'good war' versus the 'bad war' when both claims were highly arbitrary. Rather than trying to educate the public about such complex concerns, Ministries simply settled for getting by in the hope that everything would work out okay.

Of course, Britain could have had a similar inquiry like the one about Gallipoli over the ill-fated Suez invasion in 1956 while it was trying to hold onto its Mideast influence as its empire was starting to fall apart, but the humiliation was so immediate, and so obvious to all that no inquiries were required. Without the expicit knowledge and approval by Washington of what Britain, France and Israel had planned in the area by the covertly coordinated assaults, they were doomed to fail unless they quickly toppled Egyptian President Nasser. President Eisenhower called for an immediate cessasion of hostilities, and a quick pullout of the forces involved or the United States would stop supporting sterling, undoubtedly causing its devaluation at a most critical time, the imposition of oil sanctions on the offending powers, and replacing them with UN ones if the offending ones refused to move. The result was the physical collapse of Prime Minister Anthony Eden, forcing his resignation when he tried to make a comeback after the dustup had settled, a cost which required no inquiry nor further resignations, not even that of the most deceitful Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, thanks to Ike's willingness to provide the necessary "fig leaves" to cover up the special relationship's snafu.

While the Suez debacle did not prevent Britain from going it alone in such adventures without explicit American approval when it considered action especially vital, as its recapture of the Falkland Islands confirmed when Washington provided another "fig leaf" - crucial air intelligence about Argentine air strikes - it still pretty well knew how to handle such difficulties if they occurred, especially if they backfired - i. e., having no serious parliamentary involvement in investigating the problem as it might well bring down the Ministry, having peripheral investigations which helped dilute the controversy by settling unexpected developments, especially of a personal nature, establishing no main inquiry even after the difficulty has been resolved, and making sure then that it was not conducted by someone with a well-known reputation for intelligence, independence, and probity - using someone who is used to being told by others what to think and do. Britain wanted no more Broughams, Fishers, or even Pickfords to tell it where it had gone so badly wrong in wars.

Glimpses of America's Man-Made Disasters - Part 10

by Trowbridge H. Ford

When Professor J. Reece Roth, a noted University of Tennessee researcher of plasmas, was convicted on September 3, 2008 by a federal jury of 17 counts of security violations of vital national security secrets - essentially 'constructive treason' according to British terminology going back to the Napoleonic Wars - by allowing research assistants, especially a Chinese one, access to 15 Department of Defense articles on the subject, the Bush administration was confident, perhaps too confident, that its secret use of them in covert space weapons operations, most recently in China and Myanmar, would never be exposed. Roth continued to maintain his innocence, and seriously contemplated appealing the conviction which would likely result in the 72-year-old scientist spending his remaining days in jail, and paying thousands of dollars in fines. Roth was ultimately talked out of the appeal because there was virtually no chance of a jury verdict in such a high profile case being overturned or an order for a retrial, and his sentencing was set for early January 2009.

Equally important was Physics Today deciding to publish in its entirety Thomas Reed's article, "The Chinese nuclear tests, 1964-1996," in its September issue, showing better some of the Chinese facilities under National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) eyeballing, and possible Air Force targeting - Malan, Juiquan, Haiyan, Lanzhou, and Zitong. The photographs showed how vulnerable they were to attack if so decided. Its publication showed that Reed and Danny Stillman were directly challenging the intelligence community's federal injunction against it - what they might have ignored if it only appeared in the Pakistan Defense Forum - contending that it was only intended for Pakistani domestic consumption, and had already appeared.

For good measure, The New Yorker published Steve Coll's supporting article "Pakistan's Atomic Chinese Take-Out" in its September 2nd issue for American domestic consumption. While ignoring Stillman's intelligence role in his many visits to China, and acting as if he only had "...had difficulty winning clearance for publication of this material from the U. S. intelligence community," Coll pinpointed the coup that Pakistan's President Ghulam Khan and Pakistani Army Chief of Staff Mirza Aslam had engineered against then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto for trying to stop the country's growing involvement of its nuclear establishment with the Chinese at its Malan facility in developing and testing its nuclear weapons. The first successful test of a Pakistan weapon, based apparently upon one of Chinese design, occurred on May 26, 1990, and she was removed from office in August.

Thse developments showed just how self-serving to Washington the prosectution of Roth, and allowing Stillman to divulge some of the secrets he had gathered about the Chinese nuclear establishment were. While the US intelligence community, especially DCI Michael Hayden's Agency, was overlooking what Stillman had accomplished through the Air Force and Reed - what it had tried to prevent before cyclone Nargis and the Sichuan earthquake but without success - the Pentagon, particularly Secretary of Defense Robert Gates through its Defense Intelligence Agency, was making out that the plasma researcher was a Chinese spy who was succeeding in making it invulnerable to American defensive measures - what was far from the truth. In sum, the innocent research efforts by Roth were being used legally to provide a cover for Stillman's illegal disclosures.

It was Barack Obama's capitalizing upon Bhutto's assassination in December when coming back to Pakistan, apparently either by Al-Qaeda et al. or their supporters in Pakistan's covert government, which snatched the presidential campaign initiative away for Hillary Clinton over foreign policy - as she had supported President Bush's ouster of Iraq's Saddam Hussein - and led to his nomination at the Democratic Convention. Confident that it would win the November election, it started a search campaign for new office holders which caught the media's eye for its openness and throughness, but it was essentially just eyewash to fool the public about what was going on. It knew far too well from the past who would be serving it in the future, especially in the area of covert operations.

While the leading members of Obama's oil administration, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, are well known, its lesser possible figures - Admiral Dennis Blair, Charles Freeman, Leon Panetta, Greg Craig, General Bruce Carlson, General Jim Jones, Peter Lavoy, Christopher Kojm, John Brennan, etc., and, most important, continuing Pentagon chief Robert Gates - are known far too little, especially what their new mission is. They are to keep the American public on board while it achieves what was sidetracked by the cockup over the 9/11 bombings - the pacification of Afghanistan so that a pipeline can be constructed through it, connecting Caspian oil on its eastern shores to Pakistan's Indian Ocean coast - what requires the defeat of its Taleban. If achieved, it would be a great blow to China's search for oil self-sufficiency, threatening even the loss of its oil-rich Xinjiang province, and making Iran's oil holdings much less important in global affairs.

In confirming the role of Big Oil, to use Antonia Juhasz's terminology in The Tyranny of Oil: The World's Most Powerful Industry - And What We Must Do To Stop It, the Obama administration has been largely bought by the industry despite its contentions to the contrary, particulary when one adds in what it has contributed to President Clinton, especially in the construction of his library. While Senator McCain received by far the biggest contributions from the oil industry since 1990, the total for the team of Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Biden is comparable, a bit over $1,000,000 dollars. Obama also fudged his acceptance of money by renouncing money from oil industry Political Action Committees (PACs) while accepting it from oil company executives, and he has only been on the national political scene recently.

However, in considering what elected officials can do when it comes to energy policy - like not closing the "Enron Loophole" which the Commodity Futures Modernization Act permitted spreading to energy traders working for oil companies - researchers should not overlook what control of government institutions, particularly the Pentagon and the CIA, can mean in this regard. They can lay out an estimate of future world developments, where the expected problems are, how to deal with them, and why. The personnel responsible for making such estimates, plans, capabilities and outcomes are the most important officials in govenment in today's world, and their nomination and selection should be the top priority of any democratic system to make sure that the nation's power is really exercised by those who appear to be in control.

The whole corruption of the process started when the transition team announced on December 18th the appointment of Admiral Dennis Blair, Senator Obama's military adviser, to be Admiral Mike McConnell's replacement as National Intelligence Director who then joined other hawks on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Blair, while he had been Commander of the Pacific Fleet during the last days of the Clinton administration, had been so aggressive in dealing with Chinese counterparts that he should never have been even seriously considered for the position. During a 1999 meeting at Hawaii, Blair told a Chinese admiral two things when they were discussing the Taiwan situation: "First. I own the water out there. Second, I own the sky over the water out there. Now, don't you think we should talk abouit something constructive?" (Quoted from "Meet new DNI boss Dennis Blair," Tribune/Opinion, February 22, 2009.)

When Admiral Blair's tough talk helped induce Beijing to take a tough stand when a U. S. Navy EP-3E spy plane intruded into what the Chinese considered their airspace on April 1, 2001, forcing it to land on their island of Hainan Dao, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was most disturbed by what had happened, and why during the first foreign crisis of the new Bush administration. "As Rumsfeld dug deeper," Bob Woodward explained in State of Denial: Bush At War, Part III, "he was asking what the intelligence missions accomplished. Who authorized them? Who assessed the value of the intelligence that was gathered? What about the risks versus the rewards? (p. 29) Blair, attending the meeting with Rumsfeld, suggested that the spy flights resume immediately, and the SoD agreed, ordering him to supply a one-page recommendation for the resumption by the next morning.

Well, the next morning arrived, but there was no report from Blair. He had sent it to the office of the absent Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and it would not make it available to Rumsfeld without his approval. Why he didn't provide it directly to Rumsfeld, as ordered, has not been explained though it seems that it was because it contained information about these missions which did not reflect well upon the indpendently minded admiral. Rumsfeld went absolutely ballistic over Blair's actions, being, as notetaker Rear Admiral J. J. Quinn noted, "about as furious as he had ever seen a human being." (p. 31) Needless to say, Rumsfeld soon saw the report, and the missions apparently were not resumed. In any case, Blair was passed over when it came to appointing a new Chairman of the Joint Chief, and he retired. Rumsfeld already had one too many Navy cowboys, CNO Vern Clark.

The first thing that Blair did as prospective DNI was to nominate veteran China watcher Charles Freeman to be the Director of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the body which draws up periodic National Intelligence Estimates about future global developments. The current Director, Peter Lavoy, was a holdover from the Bush administration, and he was too interested in predicting WMD surprises of a conventional nature by the usual suspected perpetrators. Blair wanted more alarming predictions, as he later told the Senate Intelligence Committee, especially about China's aggressive war-making plans which went well beyond its taking back Taiwan. He envisioned China soon fighting some kind of full-fledged war with the USA.

For more on Blair, see his article "Military Power Projection in Asia," in Ashley J. Tellis, Mercy Kuo and Andrew Marble, eds., Strategic Asia, 2008-09: Challenges and Choices (published by The National Bureau of Asia Research).

For a person with these views and this agenda to have nominated Freeman was simply ludicrous, an effort bound to fail given his additional views about Israel, and the suppression of the protesters at Tiananamen Square in 1989. Here is a good example of Freeman's thoughts about China from his article, "China in the Times to Come":

"China does not accept the logic of mutually assured destruction and it shows no interest in procuring stratgic lift, bomber forces, carrier strike groups, amphibious warfare or command, control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities that give U. S. armed forces their unrivaled capacity to conduct offensive operations in faraway places."

For more, see this link:

http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=6180

Little wonder that when the anticipated furore over his nomination developed, and Freeman withdrew from the proceedings, the Obama waited six months before replacing Lavoy, naming, of all people, George Washington University Professor Christopher Kojm from its Elliot School of International Affairs, Kojm was Deputy Director of the 9/11 Commission, thanks to his having worked in several capacities for Congressman Lee Hamilton, and helped craft the complete cover-up of the cock-up in its Report. Kojm even propagated its claims that the suicide bombings were a complete surprise by working for its Public Discussion Project. He certainly will have his hands full in this regard while working for the NIC.

Kojm's appointment had been slowed by Gabriel Schoenfeld's review of The Nuclear Express in The Wall Street Journal on January 17th, showing that Blair might well have been one of the sources when Reed and Stillman made their dire political predictions about Beijing: "The authors are deeply concerned about China, some of whose officials 'might not object to the nuclear destruction of New York or Washington, followed by the collapse of American financial power, so long as Chinese finger prints could not be found at the scene of the crime'." Blair made the connection crystal clear when he briefed the shocked Senate Intelligence Committee as if he were its own intelligence officer, "...telling them about the wars in which they ought now to show concern." (op. cit., "Meet new DNI boss Dennis Blair")

Little wonder that the sentencing of Professor Roth was put off indefinitely under the circumstances, hoping that future developments would provide insights into how to treat the alleged spy.

While Freeman's nomination was a complete fraud to fool the public, Leon Panetta's nomination to replace DCI Hayden - who was a convenient fallguy for the Bush administration's vast, illegal wire-tapping operation - was a pure deception. Panetta, President Clinton's former chief of staff, has long been involved in national security interests, especially those concerning the oceans. He was head of the Pew Oceans Commission while Admiral James Watkins ran the United States Commission on Ocean Policy - what were ultimately combined. While its Joint Initiative stressed the importance of what it was seeking for the nation's economic health, and that of the oceans, there was a national security concern pervading the whole exercise, as Watkins well knew when he was CNO, helping stalk the Red Banner Fleet's submarine force in various waters in anticipation of a non-nuclear conclusion to the Cold War after the assassination of Sweden's Prime Minister Olof Palme was intended to trigger its coountdown.

Instead of everyone's talking about this and more, they all acted as if Panetta was a complete ignoramus in such matters, and complained about not being informed of the choice before it was made - what they claimed would make for a bumpy confirmation process. Well, it didn't turn out that way, Panneta cruised through, though he was asked by Senator Carl Levin if he ever thought that as a contributor to the Institute for Polcy Studies, he would ever fall under the control of DNI Blair. While he foolishly answered affirmatively, "...he added that the CIA was an 'operational arm' and that the admiral's job was to 'coordinate activities' with the National Security Agency, the still rarely mentional National Reconnaissance Office and other agencies." (ibid., though note that I had reversed what was "foolish" and what was not in Panetta's answers by author Dateline D. C.)

Unfortunately, Panetta, though quickly confirmed, was in for a big surprise when President Obama agreed on April 7th to a "huge new classified spy satellite system" involving "electro-optical" capabilites - one which would just improve successful models used by the NRO in the past. It sounds like just more powerful Misty satellites with eyes which can identify even the smallest targets with the highest resolution.

For more, see this link:

http://www.dodbuzz.com/2009/04/´07/president-approves-new-satellite-system/

This immediately prompted the resignation of NRO Director Scott Large, the biggest support he had from DNI Blair getting his way in offensive operators. While sources put the usual kind of spin on his surprise - being tarred with the failure of the Future Imagery Architecture program, and not having had a chance under former Director Donald Kerr, Large had served for two years, and obviously saw what Blair and Gates were doing as a reversal to what had been going on at NRO before Kerr arrived.

For more on the resignation, see this:

http://www.dodbuzz.com/2009/04/08/spy-satellite-agency-head-resigns/

Large's resignation also shows that Gates is a key player in developments, and not just a caretaker, waiting for his permanent replacement.

America is now preparing for the even greater use of space weapons, and in the meantine it still has the capability to cause problems for troublesome countries, especially Iran, North Korea, and China. If I were a betting man, I would put my money on another earthquake in Iran, somewhere between Tehran and Esfahan, say Kom. And then there are all kinds of similar ones possible in China, ready to be hit if Blair gets the urge.

Let's hope that I would lose my wager, proving apparently that God does better.