Quotulatiousness

June 4, 2024

Assassination-to-order, or war by other means

Filed under: Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I was not well-informed about the goings-on within Vladimir Putin’s Russia even before the Russo-Ukrainian war went into high gear and disrupted all information from that part of the world and I hear much but trust nothing I’ve been hearing since then. kulak, on the other hand, seems to have paid much closer attention to Russian internal affairs, including one particular political assassination:

On August 20, 2022, 29 year old Daria Dugina was killed in a car bombing on the outskirts of Moscow. The bomb, it was widely agreed, had been intended for her father the famed/infamous Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin (whose works are now shockingly hard to get in English and appears on my “Real Banned Books List“), and while there were lots of deflections and denials, it was fairly widely agreed the plot had been carried out with US and UK backing by Ukrainian-aligned insurgents and agents within Russia.

Indeed many US aligned “Journalists”, “Open Source Intelligence” types, Bellingcat-associated influencers, and other CIA-aligned carve outs openly CELEBRATED the death of Daria, since she had been involved in Putin-aligned political youth organizing.

Of course, the fact political volunteers and door knockers have NEVER been considered legitimate military targets, nor the fact the real target was a PHILOSOPHER and everything he had ever done would have been perfectly legal to do even within the United States under the auspices of the first amendment … that somehow never occurred to these commentators. Nor the wider US intellectual class, and somehow neither did the natural logical conclusion.

Russia is by and large NOT run by its political organizers and academics. You could probably kill 1000 Russian university professors and it wouldn’t unbalance the Russian state too extraordinarily. Russia is run by a combination of old Soviet secret policemen, gangsters, and crooked/”reformed” oligarchs all attempting to reorganize themselves into a somewhat respectable upper-class, with a blend of impressive and farcical results.

Before he was killed in an internal power struggle the former head of Wagner PMC Yevgeny Prigozhin embodied this, turning from a St. Petersburg gangster, to a prisoner, to a (definitely money laundering) caterer for the presidential palace, to the head of a PMC mercenary company. Every prominent person in Russia has a career like this Right down to Putin going from a KGB officer, to a gangster/political fixer, to president … Every elite member of Russian society is basically leading a life ripped right from Grand Theft Auto IV, complete with the eternal struggles of trying to “go legit” and formalize everything as a normal upper-class elite, to being dragged back into gangsterism or even Soviet power struggles by their complex past.

Put simply the actual Russian Elite are not people very intimidated by assassination. They’ve all known people to be killed in power struggles, espionage, and criminal altercations, and are used to the anxiety that death might wait for them around the corner. And the US and Ukraine lashing out at academics who might be intimidated doesn’t really affect them.

However, if the Russian state did the logical tit-for-tat escalation and responded in kind … that would shake America to its knees. America actually IS run by its academics, political organizers, and bureaucrats. And almost none of the people with power have a gangster or KGB agent’s stoic familiarity with death and danger.

Killing a Russian Academics daughter did very little to the Russian state… It’d be a very different story for Russia’s armed agents to do the same in America and kill Chelsea Clinton, daughter of current Columbia professor Hillary Clinton.

It’s be a very different story if Russia assassinated Brookings senior fellow Robert Kagan, husband of former under-secretary of state Victoria Nuland. Or any number of Harvard, Stanford, Yale or Princeton political philosophers or International Relations commentators, or members of their family.

One can imagine the headlines if John Hopkins and RAND fellow Francis Fukuyama was so killed:

“It is the end of Fukuyama”
– History

And again remember, though the various income streams of the US elite may resemble embezzlement, protection rackets, and money laundering … these aren’t gangsters. These are complacent, highly agreeable, shockingly unoriginal and cowardly … academics and bureaucrats.

Indeed one can imagine Putin weighing the risk of such a reprisal and then deciding against it, not out of ethical concerns, but because the American ruling class is too unpredictable and prone to womanly hysterias.

Indeed amongst the few senior American and Ukrainian officials who knew of the attack beforehand you can imagine them salivating that Putin might respond in kind and the subsequent freakout might commit the US to joining the war (one of the few scenarios where Ukraine could possible survive against their overwhelming odds).

May 2, 2024

When Malcolm Muggeridge investigated P.G. Wodehouse for MI6

Filed under: Books, Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Alan Ashworth explains the circumstances under which the great P.G. Wodehouse became the subject of an MI6 (Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service) treason investigation near the end of the Second World War:

P.G. Wodehouse, circa 1904.
The American Legion Weekly, 24 October, 1919 via Wikimedia Commons.

[Malcolm Muggeridge:] “I first made Wodehouse’s acquaintance in circumstances which might have been expected to shake even his equanimity. This was in Paris just after the withdrawal of the German occupation forces. As Wodehouse well understood, the matter of his five broadcasts from Berlin would now have to be explained; and in the atmosphere of hysteria that war inevitably generates, the consequences might be very serious indeed. It would have been natural for him to be shaken, pale, nervous; on the contrary I found him calm and cheerful. I thought then, and think now more forcibly than ever, that this was due not so much to a clear conscience as to a state of innocence which mysteriously has survived in him.”

Muggeridge explains that he was attached to an MI6 contingent and a colleague “mentioned to me casually that he had received a short list of so-called traitors who cases needed to be investigated, one of the names being PG Wodehouse”. Muggeridge readily agreed to take on the case, “partly out of curiosity and partly from a feeling that no one who had made as elegant and original a contribution to the general gaiety of living should be allowed to get caught up in the larger buffooneries of war”. He duly visited Wodehouse at his hotel that same evening and the author described what had happened to him from the collapse in 1940 of France, where he was living with his wife Ethel, to his internment at a former lunatic asylum in Tost, Poland.

“The normal wartime procedure is to release civilian internees when they are sixty. Wodehouse was released some months before his sixtieth birthday as a result of well-meant representations by American friends – some resident in Berlin, America not being then at war with Germany. He made for Berlin, where his wife was awaiting him. The Berlin representative of the Columbia Broadcasting System asked him if he would like to broadcast to his American readers about his internment and foolishly he agreed, not realising the broadcasts would have to go over the German network and were bound to be exploited in the interest of Nazi propaganda.” [Here are German transcripts of the offending items.]

Muggeridge goes on: “It has been alleged that there was a bargain whereby Wodehouse agreed to broadcast in return for being released from Tost. This has frequently been denied and is, in fact, quite untrue but nonetheless still widely believed.”

Wodehouse came under virulent attack, particularly from Cassandra, the Daily Mirror columnist William Connor, who denounced him as a traitor to his country. Public libraries banned his books. Wodehouse wrote to the Home Secretary admitting he had been “criminally foolish” but said the broadcasts were “purely comic” and designed to show Americans a group of interned Englishmen keeping up their spirits. But the damage was done and the stigma stuck. After the war he spent the rest of his life in America.

In words that resonate half a century after their publication, Muggeridge says: “Lies, particularly in an age of mass communication, have much greater staying power than the truth.

“In the broadcasts there is not one phrase or word which can possibly be regarded as treasonable. Ironically enough, they were subsequently used at an American political warfare school as an example of how anti-German propaganda could subtly be put across by a skilful writer in the form of seemingly innocuous, light-hearted descriptive material. The fact is that Wodehouse is ill-fitted to live in an age of ideological conflict. He just does not react to human beings in that sort of way and never seems to hate anyone – not even old friends who turned on him. Of the various indignities heaped upon him at the time of his disgrace, the only one he really grieved over was being expunged from some alleged roll of honour at his old school, Dulwich.”

[…]

Muggeridge records that, when the war ended, the Wodehouses left France for America. “Ethel has been back to England several times but Wodehouse never, though he is always theoretically planning to come. I doubt if he ever will [he didn’t, dying in 1975 at the age of 93]. His attitude is like that of a man who has parted, in painful circumstances, from someone he loves and whom he both longs for and dreads to see again.”

March 5, 2024

The National Microbiology Laboratory scandal in brief

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government, Science — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tristin Hopper rounds up some of the eye-opening details of the security breach at Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Lab which certainly looks like a factor in the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic story:

Whether or not COVID-19 started as an accidental lab leak, the pandemic just so happens to have originated in the same neighbourhood as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, home to a coronavirus laboratory with a known history of lax security protocols.

For that reason alone it’s a major scandal that Canada’s own high-security biolab was employing two scientists – married couple Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng – who according to CSIS exhibited a reckless disregard of lab security and the protection of confidential information. Now, tack on the fact that both Cheng and Qiu are suspected of prolonged unauthorized contact with the Chinese government.

This week, Health Canada bowed to opposition pressure and published an illuminating package of more than 600 official documents detailing CSIS’s evidence against the couple, as well as internal emails from the Winnipeg-based National Microbiology Laboratory where they worked. The highlights are below.

The lab is surprisingly casual about shipping planet-altering pathogens

One of the main accusations against Qiu is that she sent lab samples to China, the U.S. and the U.K. without proper authorization. Around this same time, she also sent highly virulent Ebola samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

[…]

Cheng was accused of breaking virtually every cyber-security law in the book

If Qiu’s signature offence was sending out lab materials without proper authorization, Cheng’s was that he routinely ignored even the most basic protocols about computer security.

[…]

Throughout, both were in constant (unauthorized) touch with China

The CSIS reports don’t necessarily frame Qiu and Cheng as traitors.

[…]

The pair kept changing their story after being presented with smoking gun evidence, according to CSIS

Some of the documents’ more cinematic passages are when CSIS agents describe lengthy interrogations in which the pair were confronted about their alleged breaches of Canadian national security.

February 19, 2024

The CIA’s covert operations … as inspired by Vladimir Lenin

Filed under: Government, History, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Along with most people who’ve been paying attention to history since the start of the Cold War, I hold the CIA in dubious regard. They seem to have been involved in so many underhanded escapades in countries around the world — certainly by reputation, if not in reality — that they stand almost in direct opposition to how most Americans liked to think of their country. Jon Miltimore thinks that among their inspirations was the founder of the Soviet Union himself:

I bring all of this up because I recently came across an old document of some significance that I’d never heard of before titled, “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare“.

It was authored by George Kennan, the State Department Policy Planning Director who’d go on to be a successful US diplomat, for the National Security Council (which governed the CIA), and the document explained how the US government had to mobilize national resources “for covert political warfare” to combat the Soviet Union.

Kennan was not, in my opinion, a bad man. He had good instincts and sound motives, at least compared to others in the US intelligence apparatus. He was an early opponent of the Vietnam War and later was one of the first diplomatic leaders to warn against the US policy of expanding NATO up to Russia’s doorstep, something he predicted would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era”.

That said, it’s clear that Kennan was not appalled by the Soviet Union’s use of covert political warfare. He was impressed by it.

“Lenin so synthesized the teachings of Marx and Clausewitz that the Kremlin’s conduct of political warfare has become the most refined and effective of any in history,” Kennan wrote in the document.

    We have been handicapped however by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war, by a tendency to view war as a sort of sporting context outside of all political context, by a national tendency to seek for a political cure-all, and by a reluctance to recognize the realities of international relations — the perpetual rhythm of [struggle, in and out of war].


The document is fascinating because it appears to mark the genesis of the US government’s first formal steps into the world of political warfare — a well-documented history that includes toppling governments, assassinating world leaders, tipping elections, and torturing enemies.

All of these efforts, of course, initially targeted external parties and countries to serve “the national interest”.

This is no longer the case. The CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies no longer restrict their covert political warfare to foreign states, and I’m not talking about just Operation Mockingbird and other domestic propaganda efforts.

The CIA is clearly putting its thumb on the scales of US elections in ways that should terrify all Americans.

February 16, 2024

Regional Power: North Korea

Filed under: Asia, China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Army University Press
Published Feb 13, 2024

This film examines the current political and military situation in North Korea. Subject matter experts discuss Korean history, DPRK current affairs, and KPA military doctrine. Topics include the rise of the Kim family to political leadership of the DPRK, its influence in the region, and how the U.S. works in partnership with the Republic of Korea.

February 7, 2024

The Magician Who Fooled the Nazis (and all of us)

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Germany, History, Media, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

World War Two
Published 7 Nov 2023

Military deception is tricky. Sometimes you need to destroy a crucial piece of war industry or make an entire harbour disappear. Who do you call for this sort of job? Well, someone who knows a thing or two about tricking the eye. You need a professional magician. You need Jasper Maskelyne. But is there more to this illusionist than meets the eye?
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February 2, 2024

The Sad Story of Churchill’s Iceman, Geoffrey Pyke

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published Jan 31, 2024

Geoffrey Pyke is remembered as an eccentric scientist who spewed out ideas like giant aircraft carriers made of icy Pykerete. But there was much more to him than that. He was a spy, a special operations mastermind, and his novel ideas contributed to the success of D-Day.
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January 27, 2024

QotD: McCarthy was right

Filed under: Bureaucracy, History, Politics, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s likely that just about everything you know about Joe McCarthy, his life, his political career and his work against the Soviet infiltration of American government is incorrect, the history having been almost without exception written by his staunch enemies, in turn building on the work of McCarthy’s contemporaries to delegitimise and destroy the junior Senator from Wisconsin. Even in the conservative circles, the memory of McCarthy is often treated as a bit of family embarrassment; in part the testament to how successful the left-wing narrative has been but also perhaps the faint memory that half of his own party (the so called liberal wing) despised him at the time and worked hand in hand with the Democrats to destroy him.

Yet McCarthy was right – not just in a general sense of clearly understanding that communism is not merely an alternative path to a brighter future but an evil and inhuman ideology at war with the liberal, democratic and Christian West, but also in focusing on the federal bureaucracy’s strangely ineffectual response to the presence in its ranks of many people, often in very senior and influential positions, suspected of working for the communist cause.

Contrary to the official version, it was never McCarthy’s role to unmask Red agents; a job more appropriately done by investigative agencies. In his legislative role overseeing federal bureaucracies, he made it his mission to inquire why so many individuals, whose loyalty has already been put under the question mark by numerous internal and external investigations, had no problems staying in sensitive jobs for years and moving unhindered from one agency to another. Those named by McCarthy (on the Democrat insistence) were not simply some random individuals with vaguely progressive sympathies; already at the time many of them have been identified as Soviet agents and security risks in the testimony of communist renegades (like Whitaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley) or through secret FBI surveillance. Others were suspects on the account of their associations with Eastern European or local communists and causes.

Over the following decades, most have been further incriminated from a variety of sources, including Soviet defectors and the deciphered Venona transcripts of secret Soviet intelligence cables, which mention some 400 individuals in the 1940s and 50s United States as active agents and contacts or abettors and helpers. The problem was not Reds under the beds, but Reds quite literally in positions of access to highly valued classified information or positions of influence over the shape of US policy, from the White House, through the State Department, to a host of other departments and agencies. All this is now beyond any dispute, but these weren’t mere idle speculations at the time either. Lauchlin Currie, Owen Lattimore, Harry Dexter White, Nathan Silvermaster, T.A. Bisson and dozens and dozens of others did conspire in small groups and networks to pass on classified information to the Soviets or steer the American foreign policy into the direction favourable to the communists (particularly in China during and after the war). And yet, despite all having serious question marks over them, they were allowed to work in government for years undisturbed. It was not because of some giant communist conspiracy at the highest levels of government but because of the bureaucratic inertia, old boys’ networks and the organisational reluctance to admit problems – but also because communist agents within protected and promoted each other. Time and time again mistakes got buried instead of rectified. McCarthy dared to shed the public spotlight on the continuing outrage and ask why. It was like a poor country cousin being invited to a formal dinner by his big city relatives and dropping a loud fart between the entree and the main.

But the story of McCarthy goes beyond these well-established historical facts to the campaign of character assassination and falsification of the record that succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. There is truly nothing new under the sun when the entrenched liberal establishment wants to protect its turf and fend off its enemies and as you read what McCarthy has been subjected to in relatively short period of 1950-54 you will no doubt experience a sense of deja vu from recent history: indiscriminate mud throwing in a hope that something sticks; blatant lies, misrepresentations and misinterpretations of evidence; politicians working hand in hand with public servants to coordinate the attacks; destroying and withholding of information and evidence (for example, the security information about the suspected individuals being physically transferred from the State Department to the Truman White House so that it could not be subpoenaed or otherwise accessed; a practice condemned by the Republicans and then continued by the Eisenhower White House); blackmailing witnesses or preventing them from testifying; biased media running the narrative (fake news is nothing new); whitewashing the accused and discrediting the accusers; incessant lawfare; trumped up charges and defamation. Coincidentally, McCarthy too was compared to Hitler while at the same time being accused of helping Russians. McCarthyism is not what McCarthy has done to his supposed victims; it’s what the left has done to him. It’s what it keeps doing to people who get in the way and threaten to disturb the business as usual.

Arthur Chrenkoff, “Before there was Trump, there was Joe McCarthy”, Daily Chrenk, 2019-09-30.

January 7, 2024

“Of course, you know that you Eeenglish invented modern people smuggling?”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Peter Caddick-Adams talks about the huge problems faced by European nations in combatting people smuggling:

Title page of a book covering the trial of seven smugglers for the murder of two revenue officers. In the preface the author says “I do assure the Public that I took down the facts in writing from the mouths of the witnesses, that I frequently conversed with the prisoners, both before and after condemnation; by which I had an opportunity of procuring those letters which are herein after inserted, and other intelligence of some secret transactions among them, which were never communicated to any other person.”
W.J. Smith, Smuggling and Smugglers in Sussex, 1749, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Prime Minister has nailed his colours to his mast and decided we should “stop the boats”. The slogan is everywhere. What Mr Sunak means is the vessels crossing the Channel laden with bedraggled folk seeking succour on the shores of Albion. I attended a conference recently to see how this was to be done. As the perpetrators are highly organised transnational criminals, the response must be a multi-national one. Delegates were given some historical context. Ours is not a unique era. Since pre-recorded history, mankind has been inclined to see the grass as always greener on the other side of the fence. Hollow out a log to cross a river, invade an island, a coastline, Troy, the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Nile. Anywhere, for trade, for adventure, for sanctuary. Leap the Channel by longship to escape overcrowding, poor crops, for plunder, to claim a crown.

However, we were reminded — for the conference was hosted by several coastal nations studying security and crime — that most of Europe’s maritime problems with criminality and smuggling, be it booze, tobacco, narcotics, fake branded goods, or people, involve rivers, not the open sea. An old friend from the Gendarmerie Maritime observed that the great rivers of the world are not only frontiers, but also highways; earlier versions of today’s motorways, as logistically familiar to the Romans as to our own times. Those long gaggles of barges which still shuffle along the Rhine or Danube are a happenstance of trade we Brits tend to overlook, as our canals and rivers have long been consigned to pleasure-boating.

Based in Messina, the gendarme’s opposite number from the Servizio navale of the Italian Carabinieri, wearing the most resplendent braid-laden uniform of anyone at our gathering, then fixed me with his gimlet eye. “Of course, you know that you Eeenglish invented modern people smuggling?” By this he went on to explain that many of the tricks of shifting people covertly through the Mediterranean, along the Dalmatian coast, by patrol boat about the Baltic, trawler braving the North Sea, MTB across the Channel, caïque over the Aegean, among the Ionian islands, and along the Adriatic, were devised by Britain’s Special Operation’s Executive (SOE) during the Second World War.

My Belgian and French friends observed that such smuggling had honourable roots. From 1789 and post-1917, many nations had aided middle class and aristocratic refugees to flee Revolutionary France and Russia. Subsequently, their descendants helped Jewish families quit the Third Reich. Others aided the British to move vast numbers of manpower by small boat in 1940 from Dunkirk, which emboldened fishermen to repeat the manoeuvre on a smaller scale to confound their German foes. Female Greek, Turkish and Croatian officers chipped in with their knowledge of various rat-lines established during World War Two to support partisans with personnel and weapons, and extract downed airmen, spies and important scientists. Post-war, as a Spanish policeman I knew from my days in Gibraltar observed, the same systems exported Nazi war criminals, and imported drugs and guns.

The modus operandi created in those heady days of derring-do were continued for spies during the Cold War, often by the same families, using the same craft. This applied as much to jaunts and japes up and down the Danube, Rhine, Meuse and Elbe waterways as it did to the open seas. Our Danish representative observed that “boat people” were a distraction. Their numbers were vastly overshadowed by far greater numbers of religious refugees and assorted shady characters, then and now, who used stolen genuine, or expertly forged papers; another legacy from the even more distant times that preceded World War Two. The man from Interpol revealed that today’s Italian and Albanian crime families have such advanced facilities for reproducing many of the world’s passports, ID cards, work permits and driving licences, that they will pass muster even at most European electronic frontier posts and airport controls. Our Albanian colonel shifted uncomfortably.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain, espionage went out of business and, casting about for new business, these latter-day privateers and licenced black marketeers started smuggling industrial quantities of things and people, to replace the nocturnal movement of atomic secrets by night over water. A dinghy full of people in mid-Ocean is merely the tip of a giant iceberg of organisation and logistics that started on 22 July 1940 by direct order of Winston Churchill, but has continued in various legal, semi-legal and illegal forms ever since.

November 24, 2023

The Man Who Started the Cold War

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Germany, History, Military, Russia, USA, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 23 Nov 2023

What if I told you that a new conflict will sweep the globe in less than a year? It will open not with gunshots but with silent, shadowy espionage. The man who will kick off the Cold War is a quiet Canadian pilot, millionaire, and spymaster. A trusted aide to Churchill and FDR. I bet you haven’t heard this name before: William Stephenson.
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October 14, 2023

A Jacobite spy for Bonnie Prince Charlie

Filed under: Britain, Business, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes talks about the career of John Holker of Manchester, cloth manufacturer, who joined the army of Prince Charles Edward Stewart in 1745, and eventually became an expert in industrial espionage:

Prince Charles Edward Stuart, 1720 – 1788. Eldest Son of Prince James Francis Edward Stuart.
Portrait by Allan Ramsay, National Galleries Scotland via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve lately been reading about one of history’s greatest spies — not a James Bond-like agent with licence to kill, but a master of industrial espionage, John Holker.1

Holker was originally from Manchester, in Lancashire, where he was a skilled cloth manufacturer in the early eighteenth century, his specialty being calendering — a finishing process to give cloth a kind of sheen or glazed effect. But Holker was also a Catholic and a Jacobite — a believer in the claim of the Catholic descendants of the deposed king James II to be the rightful rulers of Great Britain, instead of the Hanoverian George I and George II who had only succeeded to the throne because they were Protestants. In 1745 James II’s grandson Charles, also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie — likely the “Bonnie” who lies over the ocean in the famous song — landed in the Scottish Highlands and raised the royal standard. Charles’s uprising defeated the British troops stationed in Scotland, captured Edinburgh, and then marched down the west coast of England, capturing Carlisle and entering Lancashire.

To Holker, who had been born in the same year as the last Jacobite rebellion in 1719, the arrival of Charles in Manchester must have seemed like a once-in-a-generation opportunity. He and his business partner instantly joined Charles’s troops and he was appointed a lieutenant. But Manchester was the last place to provide many eager volunteers for the uprising, and when Charles reached Derby he lost heart and turned around. Holker and his business partner ended up being left to garrison Carlisle as Charles and his force retreated into Scotland to hunker down, and they were soon captured by the British troops sent to quash the uprising. They were then, as officers, sent to Newgate prison in London to sit with their legs bound in irons and await trial and certain execution.

But they never made it to trial. In the first demonstration of Holker’s extraordinary talent for espionage, they escaped. Holker had been allowed visitors in prison, so had drawn on London’s crypto-Jacobite circle to smuggle in files, ropes, and information about the prison and its surroundings. They managed to file through the leg-irons and window bars, climbed up the gutters onto the prison roof, and then used planks from the cell’s tabletop to cross onto the roof of a nearby house. In the event, they disturbed a dog guarding the house, and so Holker hid in a water-butt and became separated from the others. He eventually found refuge at a crypto-Jacobite’s house, then escaped into the countryside before managing to make his way to France.

In France, Holker joined his fellow veterans of the failed uprising of ‘45, becoming a lieutenant in a Jacobite regiment of the French army. He fought for the French in the Austrian Netherlands — present-day Belgium — against the Hapsburgs, the Hanoverians, the Dutch, and the British. Even more extraordinary, however, was that when Bonnie Prince Charlie wanted to go in secret to England in 1750, it was Holker who went with him as his sole companion and guide. Although Charles failed to persuade his supporters in England to rise up in rebellion on their own, Holker managed to get the prince secretly and safely to London and back.

By the time Holker reached his early thirties he had been an industrialist, rebel, prisoner, fugitive, soldier, undercover agent, and even spy-catcher: he successfully identified a spy for the British in Charles’s circle, even if Charles failed to heed his warning. But in 1751 Holker’s career took yet another turn when he was recruited by the French government as an industrial spymaster.

Holker’s chief task was to steal British textile technologies.

    1. Unless otherwise stated, I’ve drawn much of my information on Holker and the industries that the French attempted to copy from John R. Harris, Industrial Espionage and Technology Transfer: Britain and France in the 18th Century (Taylor & Francis, 2017), particularly chapter 3.

October 13, 2023

Elvira, the Party Girl Double Agent

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 11 Oct 2023

She’s the gambler with a hotline to the Abwehr. The party girl tearing up the London social scene. Now she’s doing her bit to hold back the Panzer divisions and pave the way for D-Day. This is the story of Elvira Concepcion Josefina de la Fuente Chaudoir, Double Cross’s most flamboyant double agent.
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One of the reasons Israel was surprised by the Hamas attacks

Filed under: Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In UnHerd, Edward Luttwak explains why Israeli intelligence was deceived leading up to the Hamas terror attacks last week:

The last major news item about Gaza before the first news of Hamas’s surprise attack was the September 22 announcement that 17,000 Gazans would immediately receive permits to work in Israel, with that number set to rise to 20,000. All understood the likelihood of a permit-holder smuggling in a bomb, or perhaps stabbing an Israeli fellow worker, but that seemed a risk worth taking.

Hamas, after all, had stopped launching rockets against Israel, and appeared to be focused on containing the influence of Islamic Jihad — Hamas’s only remaining competitor after its suppression of the PLO, and one which is financed by Iran to propagate Shi’ism in Gaza. This obvious rivalry was skilfully exploited by Hamas to deceive the Israelis into thinking that it was no longer launching rockets because, as an emphatically Sunni organisation, it wanted to join the Sunni reconciliation with Israel that was already a fait accompli from Morocco to Bahrain.

Once again, as so many times before, Israel’s leaders were deluded into thinking that a Palestinian leadership had some concern for the welfare of its own people, as opposed to its ideological aim: “Palestine” for the nationalist PLO (which always included Christians), and Islamic supremacy for Hamas. The latter’s leaders have frequently explained that Islamic rule must be imposed not just on Israel but on the entire world, and that Palestinian nationalism is un-Islamic twice over — because it includes Christians, and because any nationalism intrinsically subverts Islamic unity.

With Hamas seemingly on a path to reconciliation, only the much smaller Islamic Jihad was still assembling and launching rockets. But most of those attempts were pre-empted by Israeli strikes, guided by precise intelligence supplied by a seemingly reliable agent network. Almost certainly, Hamas itself supplied the “actionable” information passed on by those agents. This efficiently blinded Israeli intelligence, which has plenty of expertise in detecting double agents peddling false information, but could hardly suspect agents who were supplying highly accurate information.

This was the first Israeli failure: its intelligence analysts did not realise that the silence of Hamas was not due to inactivity, but to planning that they could not detect. Such silence was far from normal, and it should have inspired efforts to find out what was going on. But it did not.

On top of that, there was a separate failure which was purely military. Even if intelligence reported that all was well and that Gaza was on the path to peace, military planners should not have yielded to such optimism — for a very specific Israeli reason. Since the Israeli armed forces rely on reservists, who must be recalled to duty and kitted out before they can fight, as opposed to an enemy that can switch from peace to war instantaneously, military planners must be professional pessimists no matter what. They must always be mindful of the minutes needed to broadcast an alert, of the hours that even soldiers in situ need to prepare for action, and the full 24 hours required to mobilise the reservists.

At Spiked, Frank Furedi is angered by the widespread victim-blaming being shared on social media to pretend that the Hamas terror attacks were somehow “legitimate” and the atrocities committed against civilians somehow “okay”:

The assault on southern Israel last weekend was more than an atrocity. This callous and systematic murder of civilians was nothing less than a 21st-century version of a barbaric pogrom. The videos recorded by Hamas operatives as they slaughtered people serve as a frightening testimony to human depravity. They more than match the numerous beheading videos that glorified the barbarism of Islamic State and other terrorist organisations in recent decades.

Seeing the Hamas-orchestrated pogrom was gut-wrenching. But what I have found almost as disturbing are the smug voices of those in the West who say that Israel is responsible for Hamas’s barbarism. That it brought this horror on itself.

Ever since Hamas operatives embarked on their depraved killing spree, self-styled “progressives” have been queuing up to tell anyone who will listen that the evil Zionists had it coming. Not even this week’s reports of Hamas’s massacre of babies have given them pause for reflection. Their victim-blaming is echoed by numerous Western Muslim organisations and even by some mainstream politicians. They too say that Israel had it coming. With his usual smug complacency, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis declared in an interview that he would never denounce Hamas for these atrocities. Pointing the finger at Israel, he stated that “the path to ending the tragic loss of innocent lives – both Palestinian and Israeli – begins with one crucial first step: the end of the Israeli occupation and apartheid”.

Varoufakis’s apologism for atrocities against Jewish men, women and children appears civilised compared with the response of the West’s Palestine-solidarity campaigns. Many of them have actively celebrated this pogrom. One speaker at an “All Out for Palestine” protest outside the Israeli consulate in New York seemed to think that the systematic murder of 260 young people at the Supernova music festival provided excellent “comedy” material. “As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time”, he said, “until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took out at least several dozen hipsters”. The rabble assembled outside the Israeli consulate responded to this “joke” about the mass murder and kidnapping of “several dozen hipsters” with gales of laughter.

Time and again, these atrocities are excused and their victims are dehumanised. Dr Mennah Elwan, an NHS medic, tried to excuse Hamas’s assault on innocent Israeli civilians by claiming that these youngsters fleeing for their lives were not civilians at all, because “there are no civilians in Israel”. She then said of the revellers that “if it was your home, you would stay and fight”.

On Saturday, while the pogrom against Jewish people was still unfolding in Israel, Somali-American journalist Najma Sharif felt the need to remind her followers on X: “What did y’all think decolonisation meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.” That she associates a blood-soaked pogrom with the objectives of the “decolonisation” movement in Western universities is revealing.

Indeed, Sharif was far from alone in framing this pogrom as an instance of decolonisation. This view has been systematically promoted by Hamas apologists. Maggie Chapman, a Green member of the Scottish parliament, responded to public disquiet over the Hamas attack by posting: “The oppressed are fighting back for their rights … Don’t let the Western media fool you into thinking it’s terrorism, this is decolonisation.” It is worth noting that Chapman is deputy convenor of the Scottish parliament’s human-rights committee. How long before she argues that perpetrating a pogrom is the human right of the oppressed?

The “decolonisers”, whether they realise it or not, are sending an unambiguous message to the world: “This is no time to be squeamish; after all, they are only Jews.”

October 11, 2023

How Britain Broke Hitler’s Brain

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 10 Oct 2023

In a re-upload of one of our D-Day 24 Hour videos, Astrid introduces you to the war’s most effective counter-espionage and deception programme, The Double Cross system. Today she’ll talk about their operations before and during D-Day and introduce you to some of the most important double agents. Their mission: fool the Führer.
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October 5, 2023

The Soviet Spies who Kickstarted the Nuclear Arms Race

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, Technology, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 4 Oct 2023

Last episode we saw Klaus Fuchs steal details of the American atomic bomb for the Soviet Union. But he’s only one component of a much bigger conspiracy. Today, Astrid introduces you to the mysterious web of Soviet atomic spies. Their work changed our world forever.
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