The swashbuckling Tasmanian thespian Errol Flynn became a subject of intense study lately, through some very complex, let's way weird, circumstances. While dealing in collectibles in New York, I came across a trove of letters written to Steven Lovett Jones, a designer who lived with the Austrian author and TV correspondent Rudolf Stoiber. The letters included details of Stoiber's correspondence with Charles Higham, whose book "Trading with the Enemy" I quoted in Hemp for Victory.
Higham wrote that book after writing a book on Errol Flynn, in which he alleged that Flynn was a nazi or nazi sympathiser, much of his thesis based on the fact that Flynn spent much time with a Dr Hermann Erben, actually an Austiran Jew who was also a nazi party member..and alleged Abwehr spy.
While Higham is a highly respected researcher, his book on Flynn was debunked extensively, and it appears that not only was Flynn not any kind of nazi sympathiser, but that Erben was quite possibly a double agent infiltrating the Abwehr for the OSS, and that he later worked for the CIA and possibly Mossad; in Saudi Arabia he was denounced by a former nazi, against whom he had tesitfied in China, and arrested as a spy for Israel. Ironically, his wife did not know he was Jewish and told the interrogators she had no Jewish firiends or relatives!
The plot is thick and murky and I dare not even attempt to go further with all the details...maybe I will write about it later in an article or even a book...just one more juicy detail will I drop here, Erben was given a job by GOP heavy Sterling Cole in 1974, he went to work for Gerald Bull in Barbados, Bull was later supplying weapons to Saddam Hussein, and in 1990 someone put a bullet to his head in Brussels. Cole, BTW, is claimed in a note by Higham to have hired Ilse Bohrmann at US taxpayer expence - she is the daughter of Martin Bohrmann, killed at the expence of the Russian taxpayer when Russian tanks opened fire on him as he tried to escape Berlin in 1945.
So quite possibly I will be posting more here. An unpuslished manuscript by Erben's wife with notes in Higham's hand is most interesting and incriminates the CIA.
So I had cause to go back and look in my book what quotes from Higham were used. They all appear on p. 65, endnotes 43,44,45, and 46. Here is wrote that required his research:
"Du Pont, financed by the Mellon Bank, had acquired GM, which was then placed under Irenee du Pont. As chairman, he led GM to new strengths, not only in his charismatic speeches about a 'race of supermen', but in reaching new sales, many to the Nazi war machine.
The workers, however, were not included in many of Irenee's ideas. Rather, they came under atack, were spied upon, beaten, tortured, and killed. Obsessed by Hitler's principles, he turned them on Americans, and such organisations as the American Liberty League (ALL), the Black Legion (BL) and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) were to play a hand in suppressing labour; terrorist organisations sponsored by 'patriots'.
For ALL. veteran's bonuses were an extravagance, whilst taxes for pensions and the unemployed were attacked. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was to clash with the du Ponts over this organisation, stating that it : "ganged up against people's liberties." Irenee had founded the league with Lammot and Pierre, and other anti-African-American and anti-Semitic organisations were to follow. Irenee also paid $1,000,000 for gas equipped storm troops to sweep through plants and beat up those who were not in line; moreover, the board kept personal links to Hitler, some signing an agreement of total commitment to the Nazi cause, vowing to stamp out Jewish influence in America. When the Nazis invaded France, James D. Mooney, GM's chief ofd European operations, went to New York to have champagne and celebrate, renting a suite in the Waldorf-Astoria on Park Avenue specially for the occasion."
So there is good Higham and bad Higham. Stoiber in his letters at the time (ca. 1980) wrote that Higham had fabricated some of the accounts, and some suggest that Higham had been spurned in his sexual advances as a young man by Flynn so sought revenge in his book. Who knows.
I will also be posting some information on an Errol Flynn site run by David DeWitt who knows his family and friends, and hope to help set the records straight. There are over 100 letters in my possession plus other documents in this story, so stay tuned...
And for information on Errol Flynn, here is the URL for the #1 Flynn site in the world.
http://www.theerrolflynnblog.com/2016/04/05/cache-of-dr-herman-f-erben-material-found/
Showing posts with label Mossad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mossad. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 19, 2016
Monday, February 25, 2008
SPIES, LIES & JOURNALISM
This weekend I got my copy of Flat Earth News. The publisher was either brave to send me one, or just did not know of my reputation as a scathing reviewer. Chatto & Windus need not be worried though, this is going to be one paen of praise to a very good writer. Nick Davies has ploughed his pen at the Guardian and other papers, so he is able to give us a glimpse into what happens in the newsroom. It's as if a reporter went undercover to cover reporters.
To those of you in the hemp movement, the story of Hearst and his dishonest methods will be no surprise, there is no need to enter at large upon that here. There is a need, however, to look at what is happening in the press today. Davies' book, published this month in London, is shaking up Fleet Street. It has already sold out twice, and there are a number of hacks already trying to downplay its significance. They like to out others, but boy oh boy do they whinge when the light is shone upon themselves! The Pharisees never cried so loud.
It starts off with a view of a non-event, the New Years Eve party in 1999, when so many journalists wasted their time waiting for the 2000 bug to wipe out civilisation. It never did. But for months, these guys had been scaring the public by reprinting PR releases from firms that were making a mint out of 2000 bug scare stories. It was an industry which used the press to its own advantage; not, however, a unique scenario, Davies points out that this is a ubiquitous practice.
In the 2nd chapter we get a look at the newsroom and the art of 'churnalism', which is a mix of robot-like plagiarism and failure to check facts. Reuters, Associated Press and the Press Association (in the UK) feed the local hacks a mix of news and propaganda, which is then fed to the massses to suck up. He quotes a character on the Simpsons: "Journalists used to question the reasons for war and expose abuse of power. Now, like toothless babies, they suckle on the sugary treat of misinformation and poop it into the diaper we call the six 0'clock news."
There are less journalists in the local rags to cover more news these days, some writing, or plagiarising, 10 articles a day. In some cases, real stories get overlooked because they require too much work, or the victim is black, or the story is too controversial. This becomes more apparent in the 3rd chapter, which talks about the suppliers, or, as they are called, 'grocers'. He notes (p. 85) that there are signs of a surge in secretly organised propaganda which has occured since the terrorist attacks of 11 Sep 2001. "The common element is the ease with which clever outsiders can manipulate the now vulnerable media", he asserts, and how correct he is! This thought it well backed up, Davies quotes no less an authority than Edward Bernays, the founding father of PR: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who pull the wires which control the public mind."
Contrasting all this, Davies notes examples of journalists who tried to commit journalism. Some of them are now dead, e.g., Gary Webb and Anna Politkovskaya. One who tried to run a story about US troops murdering hundreds of civilians got pushed out of the ranks. Both Webb and Politkovskaya had written about their governments' complicity in crime. Little wonder, then, that I have had the phone go dead after calling the Independent and other papers with leads on such information. At that paper in particular, I have had strange experiences, especially in dealing with them on the US extradition story. At one point they insisted they 'guaranteed an interest' in an interview with Ian Norris, who committed no crimes in his tenure at Morgan Crucible, yet was under threat of extradition to the US for acts which were completely legal. Much as I felt that the paper was trying to get the story only to kill it at the behest of US intel agencies, I agreed to set up the interview. It ran rather well, and then, for no reason at all, it was killed. They have for two years now refused to run it, much to the sorrow of all parties involved, including their own reporter, Genevieve Roberts, who has since quit.
Roberts, like thousands of very qualified writers, has joined the ranks of ex-journalists. The situation looks bleak, and there are specific reasons which are well worth noting, not just for the body of reporters now out-of-work, but for the public in general. Not only are they getting important stories suppressed, and the US extradition issue is a top concern - certainly of greater interest than the Naomi Campbell story that the Independent gave space to the week of the Norris interview - they are getting lied to by conmen and intel agents. As a case in point of the former, Davies recounts how Rupert Murdoch was made to look the fool after a certain Mr Josephs bilked him out of his dosh with a fairy tale about who killed Jimmy Hoffa. Even when Murdoch was shown that it was a hoax, he published it, much to his damnation. Of the latter, there is copious evidence in the public domain, yet Davies manages to top it with his own story about the Sunday Times being pushed to suppress a story about Kim Philby and his real role in MI6. In another cloak-and-dagger tale we are given the inside scoop on Mordechai Vanunu, who was taken to London by the Sunday Times only to be kidnapped right out from under them by Mossad, which set the honey trap for him here in London whilst he was a guest of that paper's famous, but now defunct, Insight Team. Murdoch finally got rid of this crew, which was famous for taking months on a caper and diligently checking facts.
Due diligence is seldom to be found in today's press, but utter lies get in all the time. Not surprising then that we have such a barrage of misinformation, some of it complete garbage and plagiarism about global warming. The aforementioned Independent is a leader in this field, and little wonder as it has been so duped - Davies recounts that their Washington bureau had one simple rule: no phone calls! That means no checking, and PR firms can run rough shod over them and other papers who are not diligent. One of the leading voices in that paper for climate change is Johann Hari, whose bitchy rants at times make good reading, but are more to be respected as fiction. Not only do they not do phone calls, they do not do much spell checking, and one of Hari's recent diatribes was an embarrassment to journalism as he could not even spell the name of his subject correctly, when writing of Lady Michele Renouf.
Given the fact that Davies worked for the Guardian (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?), it is no surprising that there is little criticism of that paper; nor is one too surprised to read much of their sister paper, the Observer. Those of us in the UK might recall that recently Alan Rusbridger, editor at the former, was involved in helping his rival Roger Alton, editor at the latter, to pack his bags. However, Alton and crew were badly in need of a course titled journalism 101. It was this Observer editor who blindly put Kamal Ahmed in as political correspondent to Whitehall; Ahmed was like a babe among the wolves there, and they used him mercilessly to plant ridiculous stories. It was he who was so much a part of the suppression of the story that was secretly passed to Yvonne Ridley by an anonymous informant at GCHQ about the NSA bugging UN delegates before the vote on the occupation of Iraq.
Credit does go to the Guardian, however, in their having made some attempt to question the barrage of stories about al-Zarqawi, who the US was trying to make out to be the next bin Laden. The US efforts were ridiculous, and at this point the book becomes light-hearted comedy' except, of course, for the citizens of Iraq who are suffering as a consequence.
But do any in the Fourth Estate really worry about the victims of their lies and distortions? Not often, but at times they themselves are the victims, as when Times reporters tried to get to the truth about the SAS shootings of suspected IRA terrorists; MI6 would plant stories with the editors, and the reporters would have their stories changed so as to suit the MI6 version of events. The reporters complained and insisted on seeing copy before printing, but even this was denied them in a dishonest manner. Davies notes the fact that there was an overall demise at the Times after Murdoch acquired it in 1981, which he bought at a knock-down price after mysterious striked at the paper. The former owner, Lord Thomson, was a lion who stood up to the intel agencies and governemnt, especially in the Philby affair.
This is quite a tome; it could, I am sure, go on for hundreds more pages, and for those of us working in the hemp movement, we could add quite a few of our own chapters. One issue I might have with Davies is his omission of any mentions of William Rodriguez, the hero of 9/11; after all, we did invite the Guardian to come and hear him many times in London, but maybe ther never got to his desk. He may well also be honestly ignorant of the fact that the BBC ran a broadcast on 11 Sep. 2001 at 5pm EST about Building 7 having just fallen. It did indeed fall that day, but not until some 20 minutes later. The journalist, Jane Standley, did not so much as turn her head to see if the story was true, maybe she was trained at the Indepedent and remembered the 'no phone calls' rule; it is one of the weirdest broadcasts of all time. When I asked Richard Porter of the BBC here in London why it happened, and why the archival footage of it mysteriously disappeared, he had no answer, and said it would not be wire to put Standley forward to answer for any of it. When asked where he got such information in advance, and why the Standley report was full of deliberate misinformation about the building's fall and the structure of it, he was quick to beg off. Did the CIA supply this story? We may not have an answer to that one, but we do now have in hand a highly important book that points to other cases of CIA/MI6 involvement in the press.
Well done Davies, you are rocking the boat and making waves. I recommend to everyone that they buy this book, read it, and then put pressure on papers like the Independent to get their heads out of the sand.
Flat Earth News, London, Chatto & Windus, 2008. ISBN 978-0-701-18145-1. 408 pp., printed on Forest Stewardship Council approved paper (but still not hemp!)
To those of you in the hemp movement, the story of Hearst and his dishonest methods will be no surprise, there is no need to enter at large upon that here. There is a need, however, to look at what is happening in the press today. Davies' book, published this month in London, is shaking up Fleet Street. It has already sold out twice, and there are a number of hacks already trying to downplay its significance. They like to out others, but boy oh boy do they whinge when the light is shone upon themselves! The Pharisees never cried so loud.
It starts off with a view of a non-event, the New Years Eve party in 1999, when so many journalists wasted their time waiting for the 2000 bug to wipe out civilisation. It never did. But for months, these guys had been scaring the public by reprinting PR releases from firms that were making a mint out of 2000 bug scare stories. It was an industry which used the press to its own advantage; not, however, a unique scenario, Davies points out that this is a ubiquitous practice.
In the 2nd chapter we get a look at the newsroom and the art of 'churnalism', which is a mix of robot-like plagiarism and failure to check facts. Reuters, Associated Press and the Press Association (in the UK) feed the local hacks a mix of news and propaganda, which is then fed to the massses to suck up. He quotes a character on the Simpsons: "Journalists used to question the reasons for war and expose abuse of power. Now, like toothless babies, they suckle on the sugary treat of misinformation and poop it into the diaper we call the six 0'clock news."
There are less journalists in the local rags to cover more news these days, some writing, or plagiarising, 10 articles a day. In some cases, real stories get overlooked because they require too much work, or the victim is black, or the story is too controversial. This becomes more apparent in the 3rd chapter, which talks about the suppliers, or, as they are called, 'grocers'. He notes (p. 85) that there are signs of a surge in secretly organised propaganda which has occured since the terrorist attacks of 11 Sep 2001. "The common element is the ease with which clever outsiders can manipulate the now vulnerable media", he asserts, and how correct he is! This thought it well backed up, Davies quotes no less an authority than Edward Bernays, the founding father of PR: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who pull the wires which control the public mind."
Contrasting all this, Davies notes examples of journalists who tried to commit journalism. Some of them are now dead, e.g., Gary Webb and Anna Politkovskaya. One who tried to run a story about US troops murdering hundreds of civilians got pushed out of the ranks. Both Webb and Politkovskaya had written about their governments' complicity in crime. Little wonder, then, that I have had the phone go dead after calling the Independent and other papers with leads on such information. At that paper in particular, I have had strange experiences, especially in dealing with them on the US extradition story. At one point they insisted they 'guaranteed an interest' in an interview with Ian Norris, who committed no crimes in his tenure at Morgan Crucible, yet was under threat of extradition to the US for acts which were completely legal. Much as I felt that the paper was trying to get the story only to kill it at the behest of US intel agencies, I agreed to set up the interview. It ran rather well, and then, for no reason at all, it was killed. They have for two years now refused to run it, much to the sorrow of all parties involved, including their own reporter, Genevieve Roberts, who has since quit.
Roberts, like thousands of very qualified writers, has joined the ranks of ex-journalists. The situation looks bleak, and there are specific reasons which are well worth noting, not just for the body of reporters now out-of-work, but for the public in general. Not only are they getting important stories suppressed, and the US extradition issue is a top concern - certainly of greater interest than the Naomi Campbell story that the Independent gave space to the week of the Norris interview - they are getting lied to by conmen and intel agents. As a case in point of the former, Davies recounts how Rupert Murdoch was made to look the fool after a certain Mr Josephs bilked him out of his dosh with a fairy tale about who killed Jimmy Hoffa. Even when Murdoch was shown that it was a hoax, he published it, much to his damnation. Of the latter, there is copious evidence in the public domain, yet Davies manages to top it with his own story about the Sunday Times being pushed to suppress a story about Kim Philby and his real role in MI6. In another cloak-and-dagger tale we are given the inside scoop on Mordechai Vanunu, who was taken to London by the Sunday Times only to be kidnapped right out from under them by Mossad, which set the honey trap for him here in London whilst he was a guest of that paper's famous, but now defunct, Insight Team. Murdoch finally got rid of this crew, which was famous for taking months on a caper and diligently checking facts.
Due diligence is seldom to be found in today's press, but utter lies get in all the time. Not surprising then that we have such a barrage of misinformation, some of it complete garbage and plagiarism about global warming. The aforementioned Independent is a leader in this field, and little wonder as it has been so duped - Davies recounts that their Washington bureau had one simple rule: no phone calls! That means no checking, and PR firms can run rough shod over them and other papers who are not diligent. One of the leading voices in that paper for climate change is Johann Hari, whose bitchy rants at times make good reading, but are more to be respected as fiction. Not only do they not do phone calls, they do not do much spell checking, and one of Hari's recent diatribes was an embarrassment to journalism as he could not even spell the name of his subject correctly, when writing of Lady Michele Renouf.
Given the fact that Davies worked for the Guardian (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?), it is no surprising that there is little criticism of that paper; nor is one too surprised to read much of their sister paper, the Observer. Those of us in the UK might recall that recently Alan Rusbridger, editor at the former, was involved in helping his rival Roger Alton, editor at the latter, to pack his bags. However, Alton and crew were badly in need of a course titled journalism 101. It was this Observer editor who blindly put Kamal Ahmed in as political correspondent to Whitehall; Ahmed was like a babe among the wolves there, and they used him mercilessly to plant ridiculous stories. It was he who was so much a part of the suppression of the story that was secretly passed to Yvonne Ridley by an anonymous informant at GCHQ about the NSA bugging UN delegates before the vote on the occupation of Iraq.
Credit does go to the Guardian, however, in their having made some attempt to question the barrage of stories about al-Zarqawi, who the US was trying to make out to be the next bin Laden. The US efforts were ridiculous, and at this point the book becomes light-hearted comedy' except, of course, for the citizens of Iraq who are suffering as a consequence.
But do any in the Fourth Estate really worry about the victims of their lies and distortions? Not often, but at times they themselves are the victims, as when Times reporters tried to get to the truth about the SAS shootings of suspected IRA terrorists; MI6 would plant stories with the editors, and the reporters would have their stories changed so as to suit the MI6 version of events. The reporters complained and insisted on seeing copy before printing, but even this was denied them in a dishonest manner. Davies notes the fact that there was an overall demise at the Times after Murdoch acquired it in 1981, which he bought at a knock-down price after mysterious striked at the paper. The former owner, Lord Thomson, was a lion who stood up to the intel agencies and governemnt, especially in the Philby affair.
This is quite a tome; it could, I am sure, go on for hundreds more pages, and for those of us working in the hemp movement, we could add quite a few of our own chapters. One issue I might have with Davies is his omission of any mentions of William Rodriguez, the hero of 9/11; after all, we did invite the Guardian to come and hear him many times in London, but maybe ther never got to his desk. He may well also be honestly ignorant of the fact that the BBC ran a broadcast on 11 Sep. 2001 at 5pm EST about Building 7 having just fallen. It did indeed fall that day, but not until some 20 minutes later. The journalist, Jane Standley, did not so much as turn her head to see if the story was true, maybe she was trained at the Indepedent and remembered the 'no phone calls' rule; it is one of the weirdest broadcasts of all time. When I asked Richard Porter of the BBC here in London why it happened, and why the archival footage of it mysteriously disappeared, he had no answer, and said it would not be wire to put Standley forward to answer for any of it. When asked where he got such information in advance, and why the Standley report was full of deliberate misinformation about the building's fall and the structure of it, he was quick to beg off. Did the CIA supply this story? We may not have an answer to that one, but we do now have in hand a highly important book that points to other cases of CIA/MI6 involvement in the press.
Well done Davies, you are rocking the boat and making waves. I recommend to everyone that they buy this book, read it, and then put pressure on papers like the Independent to get their heads out of the sand.
Flat Earth News, London, Chatto & Windus, 2008. ISBN 978-0-701-18145-1. 408 pp., printed on Forest Stewardship Council approved paper (but still not hemp!)
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