Edward Heath Made Me Angry. The Christie File: part 3, 1967-1975 by ChristieBooks

Edward Heath Made Me Angry The Christie File, part 3,1967-1975 Capitalism

We rule you

We fool you

We shoot you

We eat for you

We feed all

American anarchist postcard, 1911

Also available: The Albert Memorial. The Anarchist Life and Times of Albert Meltzer. 1920-1996, by Phil Ruff (24pp). ISBN 1 901172 10 4, £5.00 (inc p+p). We, the anarchists! A study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), 1927-1937, by Stuart Christie (134pp). ISBN 1 901172 06 6, £9.45 (inc p+p). The CNT in the Spanish Revolution (Vol. 1) by José Peirats Valls (edited by Chris Ealham) (324pp). ISBN 1 901172 07 4 (h/b £60.00); ISBN 1 901172 05 8 (p/b £17.70(inc p+p). Remember... Poems of reflection. (26pp A4 book, audio tape/CD of poems on bereavement.) ISBN 0-9517251 3 0. £16.00 (inc p+p). The Floodgates of Anarchy, by Albert Meltzer and Stuart Christie (with new intro.). (eBook: £5.00). Stefano Delle Chiaie. Portrait of a ‘Black’ Terrorist, by Stuart Christie. (eBook: £5.00). To The Honourable Miss S..., by B. Traven (Ret Marut). (eBook: £5.00). The Great Game — The Russian Perspective, by Professor Gregory L. Bondarevsky. (eBook: £5.00). Three Plays: The Empire Builders; The Generals’ Tea Party; The Knacker’s ABC, by Boris Vian. Translated, with an introduction by Simon Watson Taylor £17.00 (inc p+p). Bending the Bars. Prison stories by John Barker (Book: £9.50). (Out of Print) My Granny Made Me An Anarchist. The Christie File: part 1,1946-1964 (The cultural and political formation of a west of Scotland ‘baby-boomer’) by Stuart Christie. ISBN 1 873976 14 3 (266 pages, A4 format paperback; illustrated — with index, £34.00 inc p+p) (Out of Print) General Franco Made Me A “Terrorist”. ‘The Christie File’: part 2,1964-1967. (The interesting years abroad of a west of Scotland ‘baby-boomer’) by Stuart Christie. ISBN 1 873976 19 4 (266 pages, A4 format paperback; illustrated — with index, £34.00 inc p+p) Secrets and Bombs. Piazza Fontana 1969 by Luciano Lanza (Book) 1873976208; 96 pages, A4 format; illustrated with index, £15.00. Adventures in Bukhara by Leonod Solovyev 1873976224; 146 pages, A4 format; illustrated, £15.00, (eBook £4.95). Frankenstein & Chickenhawks by John Barker (eBook FREE).

Coming soon The CNT in the Spanish Revolution (Vol. 2), by José Peirats Valls (edited by Chris Ealham). Building Utopia. The Spanish Revolution —1936-1937, by Stuart Christie.(eBook) For up-to-date information on publications available please register with www.christiebooks.com

Richard Warren, Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review

EDWARD.HEATH

MADE.ME

A N G R Y The Christie File:

Part 3,1967–1975 3, The Christie File: part (The later memoirs of a west of Scotland ‘baby-boomer’) STUART CHRISTIE

www.christiebooks.com

Edward Heath Made Me Angry The Christie File, part 3, 1967-1975

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Christie, Stuart, 1946 — Edward Heath Made Me Angry : the Christie File Vol. 3 : 1967-75 1. Christie, Stuart, 1946- 2. Christie, Stuart, 1946- Trials, litigation, etc. 3 Angry Brigade 4. Anarchists Scotland - Biography 5. Trials (Terrorism) - Great Britain History - 20th century Title 335. 8’3’092 ISBN 1873976232 If you find mistakes in this publication, please remember that they are there for a purpose. We publish something for everyone, and some people are always looking for mistakes!

Cover portrait by Ariane Gransac Sadori Cover design by Vitali Golev Cartoons by Roberto Ambrosoli (Anarchik), Richard Warren and Phil Ruff

for â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Bâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; the next link in the chain

I would like to thank the following friends for checking the typescript for content, syntax and readability: Liz Brown, Mark Hendy, John Patton, Phil Ruff andPaul Sharkey.

What did you do during the repression, daddy?

From King Henry IV (Part 2, Act 3, Scene 1) THERE is a history in all men’s lives, Figuring the nature of the times deceased; The which observed, a man may prophesy, With a near aim, of the main chance of things As yet not come to life, which in their seeds And weak beginnings lie intreasured. William Shakespeare

Barcelona 1936 WOKE one bright morning — not so long ago — heard the sound of shooting from the street below. Went to the window and saw the barricade of paving stones the workingmen had made — not so long ago. Met a man that morning — not so long ago — handed me a leaflet, on the street below. Lean and hard-faced workingman with with a close cropped head — held me for a moment eye-to-eye, then said: Read it, read it, read it, and learn what it is we fight for, why the churches burn. Down on the Ramblas she passed me on her way, weapon cradled in her arm — it was but yesterday. Not just for wages now, not alone for bread — we're fighting for a whole new world, a whole new world, she said. On the barricades all over town — not so long ago — they knew the time had come to answer with a simple yes or no. They too were storming heaven — do you think they fought in vain; that because they lost a battle they would never rise again; that the man with the leaflets, the woman with a gun, did not have a daughter, did not have a son? Hugo Dewar (1908-1980)

From Reason in History ‘Concerning original history...the content of these histories is necessarily limited; their essential material is that which is living in the experience of the historian himself and in the current interests of men; that which is living and contemporary in their milieu. The author describes that in which he has participated, or at least which he has lived; relatively short periods, figures of individual men and their deeds...it is not sufficient to have been the contemporary of the events described, or to be well-informed about them. The author must belong to the class and the social milieu of the actors he is describing; their opinions, way of thought and culture must be the same as his own. In order to really know phenomena and see them in real context, one must be placed at the summit — not seeing them from below, through the keyhole of morality or any other wisdom.’ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

Contents Mise en scéne Chapter 1 — 1967 (Autumn-Winter)

1 2

Back to reality; Sir Joseph Simpson and the ‘dirty squad’; 1960s’ ‘counterculture’; hedonism — metaphor for revolution; defining moments; present at the creation; a Parthian shot; hippies to yippies; 2 June 1967 — a significant event; the plots thicken; the Anarchist Black Cross; a matter of some concern; a detective calls; one in the Eye

Chapter 2 — 1968 (Spring-Summer)

Planted explosives; big bad John; why Belgium?; Grosvenor Square — 17 March, 1968; 22 March Movement; Paris today, Hornsey tomorrow!; values, not economics; France ‘68 — a warning from history; Gladio; great expectations; Vietnam — the high-octane fuel of dissent; internationalising the Anarchist Black Cross; the Carrara Congress; conversion in Essex; 27 October — all leave cancelled; manufacturing consent; ‘number two anarchist’; The Queen’s own ‘Hornsey guerrillas’; Burns turns; High Intensity Subversion, Low Intensity Operations; carrying the can; A question of violence; agents provocateurs; ‘trouble has broken out again...’

Chapter 3 — 1968 (Autumn-Winter)

Setting Essex alight; Gas! Gas! Gas!; the Siege of Sidney Street Appreciation Society; Franco — the resistance continues; exits and entrances

Chapter 4 — 1969 (Spring-Summer)

Franco’s bancos; Bow Street runners; no conspiracy; fascist machinations; Sardinia en toast; the fascist plot gathers momentum; Pinelli’s ‘active’ misfortune; back in Britain; Burnt!

Chapter 5 — 1969-1970

107

The ‘Brolly Brigade’; the ‘new’ left ; AFB Liverpool Conference; aims of anarchism; Miguel in London; the case for anarchism; meanwhile, elsewhere...; Muswell Hill interlude; harassment, what harassment?; Finsbury Park; Special Branch men take away Chinese; the man with the crystal ball; more questions than answers; communiqué 1, The Angry Brigade

Chapter 6 — 1970-1971(Écrasez L’infâme!)

135

And so it begins...; no cheery cove an’ sunburnt he...; Heath — a man obsessed; making greed respectable; 12 January 1971; baptism of fire; the morning after the night before; the mysterious Scotsman; let Harrow freeze; Ross’s raiders; Mr Prescott, meet Mr ‘A and Mr ‘B’; ‘I am not concerned with legal niceties!’; Scottish bees in policeman’s bunnet; gaps in the conspiracy

Chapter 7 — 1971 (Winter-Spring)

155

Habershon’s dirty dozen; fingerprints and footprints; Tintagel House‚ ‘We’re getting closer!’; changing targets

Chapter 8 — 1971 Arrest! (Summer)

171

Arrested; banged-up; more questions than answers... ;the fit-up; charges and committals

Chapter 9 — 1971 Brixton (Autumn-Winter)

183

‘A’ Wing, Brixton; Habeus Corpus; the struggle continues...; making up the numbers; toughs, toffs and beguilers; preparing our defence; a summer of protests; remand demands; singing in the rain; on governor’s report; the hobbling bandits

Chapter 10 — 1972 (Trials and Tribulations)

205

Purdie and Prescott — verdicts and sentence; committal proceedings; In the dock; the Court will rise!; jury selection; the prosecution opens; let them eat cake; we’re not going on a summer holiday; the defence case; for Edy; John Barker‚ a modern Tom Paine; summing up; conspiratorial pic ‘n’ mix; the longest trial; 12 Angry Men

Chapter 11 — 1972 (Verdict and Aftermath)

237

Compromise verdicts; jurors plead for leniency; ‘a warped understanding of sociology’; standing on corpses; free again ; unforgiving; the Angry Brigade, a creature of its time; corner cutting

Chapter 12 — 1972-1975 (End of an Era)

251

Sicilian interlude; Franco Leggio — the intractable Sicilian; birth of Cienfuegos Press; bad moon rising... ; death of an admiral; death of Puig Antich; the Suárez affair; kidnap demands; Suárez released; Francoist repression deepens; Noel and Marie Murray; John Olday; Heath’s end; conspirators wanting to be right; Move on, pilgrim!; Huddersfield anarchists; persona non grata; unmerciful to the end; death of a tyrant.

Chronology — January 1966 to December 1975 Index

286 300

Evil Looks like what drives me crazy Don’t have no effect on you — But I’m gonna keep on at it Till it drives you crazy, too Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

‘Jings, Crivvens And Help Ma Boab!’

Mise en scéne ‘The jury’s coming back.’ Fortunately, I wasn’t facing the death penalty — this time. But there was a good possibility I might be facing twenty years imprisonment or more. This time the charge was ‘Conspiracy to cause explosions.’ I was in the cramped visiting room of the Old Bailey trying to talk reassuringly to my partner, Brenda, when the dock officer tapped me on the shoulder with the news that the jury was returning to deliver their verdict. They had been deliberating for three days after what had turned out to be — at seven months — the longest criminal trial in British history, the trial of the Stoke Newington Eight, more commonly known as The Angry Brigade. More than 200 witnesses had been called, 688 exhibits passed around and more than 1000 pages of depositions printed and circulated. The judge’s summing up alone had run to 250,000 words. Now it was all over bar the verdict. Brenda hurried back to the relatives’ benches in the infamous Number One court while I joined my seven fellow defendants in the narrow wood-panelled passageway at the foot of the even narrower staircase that led up to the dock. Could I take a twenty year sentence — another one? It was only eight years since my last twentyyear sentence. That had been passed by a Francoist summary Council of War in Madrid in 1964 where I was charged with ‘banditry and terrorism.’ The proscribed sentence for that particular charge was death by garrote-vil. That had been commuted to twenty years of which I’d served just over three. Milling around in the passageway below the dock, waiting for the signal to be ushered upstairs, those of us who smoked pulled heavily on our fags. A blast of heavy-duty nicotine from my thick Boyar cigarette calmed me down slightly. Defensive light-hearted banter kicked in between me and John Barker, one of my fellow accused. We were re-spooling the final film moments of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Butch and Sundance who — injured and blissfully unaware that they are surrounded by hundreds of Bolivian soldiers — are debating about emigrating to Australia as they prepare to make a dash for their horses. Me: I got a great idea where we should go next. John: I don’t want to hear it. Me: You’ll change your mind when I tell ya. John: Shut up. Me: It’s Australia. I figured secretly you wanted to know, so I told ya. Australia. John: When we get outside, when we get to the horses, just remember one thing. Hey, wait a minute! Me: What? John: You didn’t see Habershon out there, did ya? Me: Habershon? No. John: Good. For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble. Me: Right, let’s go gang! As I emerged into the harsh light and noisy buzz of the Old Bailey’s packed Number One court, I had a sudden reprise of that scene in the Madrid court — another ‘Jings, crivvens and help ma Boab’ moment. ‘How in the name of the wee man had I got here — again?’

In Which I Return From My Adventures Abroad

Chapter 1 — 1967 (Autumn-Winter)

‘Stashy Dan’ (Wilson Russell) arriving at Madrid airport with mum immediately behind him.

Leaving Madrid with mum

ON THE FLIGHT back to London from Madrid, journalists queued in the aisle to buy my ‘story.’ I referred them to Ben Birnberg, my lawyer. Only one reporter impressed me, Dennis Cassidy of The People. He was polite, straightforward, and wasn’t pushy. Wilson Russell, otherwise known as ‘Stashy Dan’, from the Scottish Daily Express, on the other hand, was up and down the aisle between his first-class seat in the front and my seat in steerage like a demented polar bear in London zoo on a hot day. Agitated and worried by the way his scheming to get his hands on my story had gone agley, he was becoming tiresome. As the rest of us fastened our seatbelts for the descent into Heathrow, Stashy Dan tried one last assault, with a carrot and a stick. The carrot was a plane to Glasgow held especially for me and special clearance at customs and immigration. I could be back in Glasgow that afternoon, if I spoke exclusively to the Scottish Daily Express. If I didn’t, I would disappoint my granny, who had been campaigning for my release and was right now waiting by her door for my return. Imagine the headline, he said: ‘The granny who waited and waited for the prodigal grandson who never turned up.’ I told him what he could do with his plane, and his customs clearance. When I returned to Glasgow to see my granny, it was going to be on my terms, not those of Express Newspapers. His veneer of civility peeled away. ‘This is your last chance, Stuart,’ he spluttered. ‘If you don’t come with us, by tomorrow afternoon you will be the most hated man in Scotland.’ I told him that he was a piece of shite, and that I doubted he would even have a job the following day. The angry hack’s face changed from blotchy beetroot red to patchy blush white as he turned and stomped back to his seat to ponder on his next move — and what he would say to his news editor and his colleagues, many of whom, as I discovered later, despised him. When the plane taxied to a halt on the runway at Heathrow, a stewardess asked us to remain seated as special clearance had been arranged for us. The Scottish Daily Express obviously carried a lot of clout with the British Airports Authority and Her Majesty’s Immigration Service. I thanked the stewardess for her concern, but told her that the special treatment was unnecessary — I would be going through the normal channels. In spite of my continued refusal to have anything to do with them, the Scottish Daily Express wasn’t giving up. We were ushered into a VIP lounge and asked to remain there until called. This was a ploy to give ‘Stashy Dan’ and his colleague sufficient time to liaise with the Scottish Daily Express’s London office and work out some sort of strategy about how to handle the story. When eventually we were told we could leave, mum, Ben and I made our way to the baggage hall and exit. As we came closer I noticed a large and noisy crowd of people jostling beyond the constantly opening and closing automatic doors. I recognised the

Exits And Entrances

smiling faces of old friends and realised that this ‘And now, with the world before me, whither should I bend my steps?’ John Milton (Paradise Lost) was John Rety’s reception committee, hastily convened following our telephone conversation the previous evening. Grinning broadly, and with mum gripping my arm tightly, I made for the doors. As we crossed the threshold into the main arrivals hall, two burly and intimidating-looking heavies standing on either side of the customs side of the doors moved in on us, one grabbing my arm and the other my mum’s. With my arms held in a vice-like grip, the thug whispered not to worry, they would soon have us safely through the crowd where a fast car was waiting to take us to a quiet country hotel. Mum was getting the same story in her ear, but with the added proviso that if I did not want to go with them The Scotsman’s return from abroad she was to come on her own. They were Scottish Daily Express ‘minders.’ They were now trying to separate us. Mum was close to hysterics. ‘Whit’s goin’ on, Stuart?’ she shouted. ‘Whit’s happenin?’ She thought we were being kidnapped — which we were. As we passed through the automatic doors, straight into the waiting group of anarchist friends, I elbowed the man holding me to one side and called out that they were Scottish Daily Express heavies and were trying to kidnap us. Pandemonium broke loose as the anarchist reception committee jumped on our would-be kidnappers from the front and behind. To add to the confusion, other waiting television and newspaper reporters thought that my friends had been hired by the Scottish Daily Express to prevent anyone else talking to us. To make matters worse, a group of French hippies and assorted teeny-boppers waiting for a rock ‘n’ roll celebrity saw the commotion and rushed into the melee. It was the late summer of 1967 — the ‘summer of love.’ A Daily Telegraph reporter was punched on the nose by my friend, Mark Hendy, the secretary of the Christie-Carballo Committee, when he was accused of being a Scottish Daily Express thug. Mark was arrested, but fortunately, the Telegraph reporter decided not to press charges when the matter was explained to him. Albert Meltzer — a twenty stone ex-boxer — stood at the top of the escalator, preventing anyone getting past until we were safely Mark Hendy on the lower level. He didn’t stop everyone, though. An elderly lady returning from holiday in Spain had pushed in to wave at what she thought was the prime minister and had somehow been caught up in the human maelstrom that was my welcoming party. She didn’t stand a chance and was swept down the escalator like a barrel over Niagara Falls, shouting and waving to her bemused friend and companion at the top. We made it across the

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

John Rety

Albert Meltzer

hall to a waiting car by the exit. John Rety assured us that the driver was a safe and experienced ‘getaway’ expert — news that did little to reassure my mum who was by this time convinced we were about to be murdered. Mum’s panic attack was made all the worse when seven or eight people tried to squeeze into the back seat of the car with us. All I was aware of was her muttering loudly to herself ‘Oh, ma Goad!’ and ‘Whit’s happenin’ son?’ I eventually persuaded her that everything was alright and we were among friends. But we were not off to see my granny — yet. Aware that something like this might happen, I had rung gran from Heathrow to explain the situation with the press and that we would not be back in Glasgow that night. I also asked her to get rid of the Scottish Daily Express hacks who had been squatting in her front room for the past five days, ever since the news of my release had been leaked. And all this just to prevent other reporters beating them to the story! Taking pity on them, she had invited them in to wait for me. Two had been sleeping on her sofa! Once the Scottish Daily Express newsdesk absorbed the fact that I had no intention of returning to Glasgow and the story they thought was in the bag wasn’t, they collected my granny from Blantyre, and took her to their Glasgow office where they kept her for three hours in order to extort from her whatever distressed quotes they could. They began by working her into a real state of apprehension: ‘We have bad news for you!’ The Scottish Daily Express eventually ran the sob story of the ungrateful boy who refused to visit his ‘poor auld granny.’ Back on the road into London, Beaverbrook’s heavies soon caught up with our dilapidated and overweight car. Sturdy though it was, our elderly Rover was never designed to act as a troop carrier. We had travelled only a mile or so when a rear tyre blew out, forcing us to crawl to a halt on the hard shoulder to change the wheel. The car with the hacks’ heavies pulled in behind us. They sat and watched as everyone piled out and lifted the car up to change the wheel, the driver having forgotten to bring a jack. Beaverbrook’s men shouted they had one we could borrow. Our driver wandered over to speak with them. A minute or so later he stepped back and let a five pound note he held between his thumb and forefinger fly away in the breeze. It was like the final scene in Jacques Tourneur’s 1957 film, Night of the Demon (based on an MR James story called The Casting of the Runes) when the cursed runes are blown down the railway line. In handing him the jack, a Scottish Daily Express man had tried to slip him a fiver to let them know where we were being taken. But our driver could not be bought — or certainly not for five pounds! So, the fiver blew out of his hand, as did the jack, which instead of floating away on the breeze landed on the toes of one of the reporters. Ah! La comédie humaine! With the tyre changed, we set off again — this time minus some of our passengers, who followed on to our prearranged meeting place by public transport. We managed to lose our pursuit car in the back streets of West

Alarums and Diversions

London. Mum was still clutching my arm for dear life, and although she appeared to be in something resembling the fugue state I was supposed to have been in when I went to Spain, I could almost feel her glow of happiness. I gazed out the car window, mesmerised by the passing throng of people flooding the pavements of Earls Court. It was a balmy and sunny late September afternoon, and to me, having been away from London (and in a Spanish gaol) for three years, it was as though the circus had come to town. There were flower children with their faces painted in vivid psychedelic colours, long-haired people of indeterminate sex wearing pillar-box red Grenadier Guards jackets, and sensuous, confident-looking girls in skimpy tops, buttock-hugging miniskirts and thigh-length boots confidently easing their way through the going to San Francisco crowds. This was a very different Britain from IfBeyou’re sure to wear some flowers in your hair the monochromatic country I had left in the If you’re going to San Francisco You’re gonna meet some gentle people there… summer of 1964: wilder, younger, more free. It All across the nation such a strange vibration in motion held the promise of a new world. Scott People There’s a whole generation with a new explanation McKenzie’s hippie anthem ‘San Francisco’ People in motion people in motion… If you come to San Francisco blared out from the car radio. Summertime will be a love-in there We drove to the Earls Court flat of a Polish-Argentinean anarchist, Iain Kaliszewski, where a welcome home party had been prepared of old friends, acquaintances and sympathisers had been organised for me. Mum appeared a bit more relaxed by this time, but perhaps she had just surrendered. Anyway, she was now chatting away quite the thing to all the weird and wonderful people who had popped by to say hello and wish us well. She had her wee boy back at last, and that was all that mattered to her. It made a change from her everyday life in Blantyre. During the party, Albert Meltzer, the 20-stone ex-boxer who, at the Heathrow escalator, had stood like brave Horatius defending the gates of Rome, offered me a job in his Coptic Street bookshop and anarchist press when I came back from Scotland. At least I now had a job, and it involved printing anarchist literature. It was a promising start. But first I needed time out back home in Blantyre to see my granny, collect my senses and get some perspective on the new situation in which I found myself. Next morning Mum and I began the long drive to Scotland in a taxi. We were in a car with a driver organised by Ben Birnberg, who was in advanced negotiations with various newspapers. The cost of the taxi would be covered by whoever bought my story. I’d agreed to check in with Ben by telephone every hour or so on our way north. He was also under firm instructions was not to even consider any offer made by the Scottish Daily Express (although theirs was the highest). My preference was for The People, whose reporter, Dennis Cassidy, had behaved so impeccably during the flight from Madrid, and by the time we reached the first service station near Luton, Ben had agreed a deal. Ben told me to remain where we were, and that Dennis would be leaving London immediately to join us.

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Olivia, my sister, with granny

Socialist Worker

That Friday night we booked into a small hotel near Luton. Dennis and I didn’t get much sleep. We had a lot of ground to cover as he had to write his first article for that Sunday’s paper. Next morning we drove in Dennis’s car to nearby Luton airport and caught a plane to Glasgow. The press were waiting for us at Glasgow airport, but Hugh Farmer, The People’s Glasgow stringer was also there and we managed to get away without being followed. We drove first to The People’s Glasgow office where Dennis made a few calls and filed his story, then we headed off for Blantyre. Fortunately, just before we arrived at my granny’s house in Blantyre, the hacks — who had been hanging around there for days — decided I wouldn’t be arriving for a few hours and nipped off for a drink. We passed them at the bottom of gran’s road, but they didn’t see us. When mum and I walked through the front door, it was quite a moment. I was half expecting a skelp across the ear from my granny because of that day’s headlines in the Express accusing me of neglecting her, and for running off to Spain and almost getting myself killed. ‘Stashy Dan’ had done what he had threatened and used the granny angle. Instead of a skelp, I was welcomed into her substantial bosom with a familiar smile that came from the heart, a long tight hug. I breathed in the long-forgotten and comforting smell of granny and her freshly-laundered clothes — like the air of a fresh spring morning. This display of emotion felt awkward at first. Our family, like most Presbyterian families of the time, kept to the stiff upper lip principle in which feelings were mainly expressed by the raising of an eyebrow. Raising two would have signalled the onset of hysteria. Undemonstrative at the best of times, with this hug I suddenly found myself discarding the defensive habit of reticence acquired over the past three years. This had been a strength in prison, where any show of emotion could have been read as a sign of weakness, but not here at home. ‘Ye’ll no have had yer tea, then, son. Sit doon,’ she ordered. Like the reporters, she hadn’t been expecting us until later, and was mortified that she had nothing ready, apart from the mince ‘n’ tatties she had prepared for herself and the next-door neighbour. Like prodigal ‘Bisto Kids,’ mum, Dennis and I sat down to the homely smells and tastes of steaming mince’n’ tatties. For a moment, it seemed as if I had never been away. Dennis was growing fidgety and anxious about the imminent return of the Glasgow press pack. After a gobbled meal, granny packed an overnight bag and we all left hurriedly for a secluded country hotel near Renfrew, some 20-odd miles away, where the other reporters couldn’t get to us — at least until The People story had appeared and the hue and cry had died down. The Scottish Daily Express had a field day smearing me. Among their more imaginative headlines was ‘The Secret Thoughts of Christie’, which rightly implied that I was not going to settle down to a quiet suburban life, and that

Man of ‘The People’

even now I was ‘plotting the downfall of society,’ at least as the Scottish Daily Express knew it! It was not long before the Beaverbrook crusader was clamouring for my arrest again. Dennis Cassidy’s interview with me appeared in The People. It was the first of three instalments and was I to remain in what was effectively their protective custody until all parts had been published over three weeks. For this I received £600 which I used to cover my legal costs in Spain and Britain, and to reimburse mum for some of what she had spent on me while I had been in prison. But any resemblance between what I told Dennis and what was published in The People was coincidental. The People’s story portrayed me as some sort of prison baron who led the life of a sybarite, waited on hand and foot by flunkies. All three instalments were written in a similar sensationalist vein. I had heated arguments with Cassidy and Farmer after each episode appeared about their ‘misinterpretation’ of what I had told them. It was all a question of ‘emphasis,’ they said. But it was a useful lesson on the workings of Fleet Street. I learned then that you need a long spoon if you want to sup with the devil. Both Cassidy and Farmer were charming and hospitable while all this was going on, admittedly on generous expense accounts. But I still couldn’t shake the feeling that all this press and media attention was misplaced. My mission to Spain had been a fiasco in terms of its objective, even though I had focused embarrassing attention on the Franco regime for over three years. What more was there to say? While still under the ‘protection’ of The People, Scottish Television asked for an interview. After the broadcast, we went to a nearby pub. Standing at the bar, minding my own business, my mind’s meandering thought processes were interrupted by an attractive woman who said she recognised me. She was pleasant and feminine — and obviously coming on to me. I was flattered. It was the first heterosexual interest I’d had in over three years. But it wasn’t hard to see that she was on the game, like lots of other ladies in this particular pub, and her interests were pecuniary. Unfortunately, I had no money. Moreover, the old Presbyterian warnings were ticking away in my subconscious about the fickleness and deceit of the whore — and the downfall of those who consorted with the harlot. All this was somehow mixed up with the agents of the Pope! I was taken aback by the approach direct. It was the first time I’d spoken to a prostitute and wasn’t sure how to respond. Seeing how uncomfortable I was, she said reassuringly: ‘Don’t think a’ll tak ony money aff you. A’d never dream o’ chargin’ someone who hid tried tae blow up yon fascist bastard Franco. A followt yir case closely, son, an’ a wis ever sae pleased to read thit ye hid passed yir exams in jile. In fact, a wis sae happy when a heard you wir tae be released a wiz almost greetin’ ... Look, as a said, a’m nae gawn tae take ony money aff ye, but a am gawn tae git as much oot o’ those reporter bastards as a can, tha’s different.’

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

This logic seemed irrefutable, so as I pulled down the shutters on the flickering mental images of Presbyterian hellfire and followed her and her friend outside. From this point on, the combined recollections of Hugh Farmer and Dennis Cassidy, and those of myself — we never saw the girls after that night — sharply diverge. The reporters couldn’t afford to let me out of their sight, so Hugh Farmer drove us to Springburn. As I recall it, we stopped at a shebeen known to my female admirer to pick up a ‘carry-out’ and some condoms (a shebeen is an unlicensed and illegal drinking house usually selling home-made hooch or stolen spirits or wine). As Farmer and Cassidy later recalled the evening, what we actually did was to go to a better class of chip shop for a fish supper. But their recollections were somewhat hazy, as the accountant of the chip shop in question later gave evidence in the Royal Courts of Justice in London that it had been closed that particular day as it was a town holiday. The reporters felt it a slur on their professional reputations to say that they had paid the bill for this sordid assignation, or had even been in its vicinity. The girl, on the other hand, felt it a slur on her professional reputation to accept cash from me. Later that night, while we were making getting-to-know-you small talk in her curtained-off ‘hole-in-the-wall’ bed, in a minimalist one-room tenement flat — a ‘single-end’ — in Springburn, my Mary Magdalene told me I was a clever lad to have got my A levels while in jail. Her friend, slumped in a nearby chair, was by this time decidedly the worse for drink, and was weeping lugubriously into her gin wailing about how I must have suffered. She then rallied, and started shouting abuse at my embarrassed guardians — if indeed they were really there — seated at the kitchen table trying hard not to peek. The three issues of The People with my story ran their inevitable course from the newsagents’ counter to chip-shop wrapping paper. The country had tuttutted for a week or so about the Ealing Comedy type antics of the failed amateur assassin who had lived the life of Riley with his servants in prison, and remained an unreconstructed anarchist— then promptly forgot about me. I was yesterday’s man and of no further interest.

Back to reality And so, I left my luxury hotel in Renfrew to return to the normality of everyday life with my mum and gran in Blantyre. It was a difficult transition. According to the form book, I should have settled down to a steady job at nearby Colville’s Steelworks, or looked for a regular milk round with the Blantyre Co-op. My fifteen minutes of fame were over. But the form book also stipulated that I should have returned repentant, and certainly not admitting my guilt ... or if I did, then I should have blamed people who had nothing to do with it. The journalists had all these stories figured out. Francoist journalists went even further, one lyrically claiming that England had sent Spain a terrorist, and that they had sent back a good citizen — a vindication of Franco’s penal system.

Limits And Renewals

The VIP treatment mum and I had received at the airport was a three-week wonder. Once my story had appeared in The People, the other papers dropped me completely. I was not too upset by the sudden show of disinterest; on the contrary, I had not really appreciated that my story was ever news. There had been lots of anarchists in Franco’s prisons, some of whom had got much nearer the bull’s-eye than me, who had been freed without so much as a mention in the local paper. Nothing less than an equivalent of the London Gazette, the official newspaper of record in England and Wales, could have named all the political activists who had passed through Franco’s jails since 1939 — to say nothing of those who never came out, or were killed before they reached prison. Among these were quite a few non-Spaniards. But the image of the kilted, bagpipe-wielding youth who had innocently wandered into the murky ways of the anarchist resistance in Spain had proved too much for the British tabloid press to resist. Back in Blantyre, readjusting to speaking articulate English proved difficult. I had emerged from an almost monastic world where I spoke little, and in Spanish, into a whirlwind of constant questions and expectations of seamless, gripping accounts of prison life and deeds of derring-do. It was a curious sensation — I was learning my native language over again. I also felt uncomfortable in large groups of people. Interestingly, when my friend Miguel García García came out of prison two years later, after spending more than 20 years in Franco’s jails, he was unable to speak for about three months. Equally strange was being the centre of attention because of my short back and sides prison haircut. When I left Glasgow in 1964, I had been jeered in the street as a ‘pansy’ because of my long hair. Now I was a shorthaired ‘freak,’ an outsider, and it was just as noticeable. The atmosphere had changed too; the ‘permissive’ or ‘alternative’ society, with its focus on sex, psychedelics, acid trips and marijuana, flares, kaftans, tie-dyes, public ‘freak-outs,’ and bands like ‘The Grateful Dead’ and ‘Jefferson Airplane,’ had swept the country in my absence. Nowhere had this been more noticeable than in Glasgow, which had long prided itself on only knowing how to flourish by the preaching of the word, and a Calvinist one at that. I was a latter-day Rip van Winkle, and while I had been asleep the so-called ‘counterculture’ had taken over.

Sir Joseph Simpson and the ‘dirty squad’ My first impressions were that this ‘alternative’ society was somehow part of the libertarian protest movement which was either going to sweep away or radically transform the political order. But that was far from being the case. They occasionally overlapped with the radical political activism of the time, inasmuch as their style, behaviour and willingness to come on demonstrations signalled their revolt against traditional values, constraints, conventions and the dominant mores of the day. A few attempted to set up apolitical communes. Also, they found common cause and common enemies in

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Sir Joseph Simpson, Metropolitan Police Commissioner 1958-1968

the face of institutional hostility, particularly with the spread of drug use and the criminalisation of casual pot-smokers and small-time dealers. The reputation of the police was at an all-time low. In London, this was partly due to the anti-authoritarian culture of the time, but mainly to the stewardship of Sir Joseph ‘Homer’ Simpson, the Metropolitan Police commissioner since 1958. Simpson had presided over what was arguably the most corrupt and venal period in the history of the London police force. For the greater part of the 1950 and 1960s, the Met’s obscene publications squad, the ‘dirty squad’, had been a law unto itself, extracting money from the numerous semi-clandestine pornography shops in Soho. One notorious incident had taken place the previous August when officers from Scotland Yard’s obscene publications squad raided a greetings card shop on Regent Street, at the respectable edge of the Soho district, and confiscated its entire stock of Aubrey Beardsley illustrated cards and posters. This was in spite of the shop manager’s loud protests that the delicate black-and-white drawings, including one of ‘Lysistrata haranguing the Athenian women’ (to withhold their favours from their menfolk until the latter desisted from warfare!), couldn’t possibly be porn because they were all on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Sir Joseph, refusing to believe that the great Queen’s name could be associated with such degradation stormed into the museum without contacting the V&A’s director to see for himself if such ‘obscene prints’, complete with ‘naughty’ hair, were really hanging in a public art gallery. Faced with an enormous public outcry about the scandalous police ‘raid’ on one of the world’s greatest art collections and a national treasure, Simpson received a severe bollocking from the home secretary, Roy Jenkins (later Lord Jenkins of Hillhead). Even the director of public prosecutions, Sir Norman Skelhorn, was not amused and ordered Simpson to return the seized Beardsley drawings to the shop. The zealous commissioner’s defence of his men’s actions was to argue that some of the V&A’s drawings had fig leaves in ‘appropriate places’, while those in the Regent Street shop ‘showed what the fig leaves were supposed to cover.’ Within a month Simpson’s men had put their clod-like size-12s (US size-13s, European size-48s) in it again. This time they raided the Robert Fraser Gallery in Mayfair, seizing 20 paintings and drawings by Jim Dine, an American artist whose work was then hanging in the Tate — which Simpson’s men then promptly visited. They also raided — and prosecuted — the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in the Mall, in February 1967, for allowing a dead sheep to be dismembered as part of ‘an auto-destructive happening’ by the performance artist Gustav Metzger (possibly confusing him with Albert Meltzer). Next on Simpson’s list was the flagship of the counterculture hippy press, the International Times (IT). IT was a serious publication and, in my view, then the best of all the ‘underground’ publications, with informative articles on the

Bliss Was It In That Dawn To Be Alive, But To Be Young Was Very Heaven!

Vietnam War and the international protest movement — as well as its regular pieces on drugs, music and sex. When the police raided IT’s central London office in March 1967, they not only took 8,000 copies of various editions of IT, but also 35 books of ‘an obscene nature,’ including copies of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer and of I, Jan Cremer. Detective Sergeant Terry Beale was quoted at the time as saying: ‘All these books are, in my opinion, grossly obscene.’ What Simpson’s men overlooked was the fact that Naked Lunch had already been cleared under the ‘literary merit’ defence of the 1959 Obscene Publications Act — which the home secretary himself had played such a leading role in getting onto the statute book. Fed up with his Commissioner’s incompetent handling of the ‘dirty books squad,’ an irate Jenkins ordered Sir Joseph to back off — Simpson then authorised new and classic guidelines on how to spot porn: ‘The material and quality of printing used in the production of ‘dirt for dirt’s sake’ is that it is usually as dirty as its contents. Where, however, the material has — in the eyes of some experts — literary merit, the publication will usually be of a reasonably high quality which shows that the publisher has made a deliberate decision that his business is not likely to be placed in jeopardy by publication.’ In other words, if it’s porn ‘the ink comes off on your hands.’ But this looser definition of porn gave the corrupt coppers even greater control over their monopoly of the Soho vice rackets. Some of these guys were clearing over £2,000 a month. It was only later, after the 1971 Old Bailey trial of the editors of Oz magazine, that it emerged that Simpson’s men had repeatedly targeted the art galleries and hippy magazines to disguise the fact that they were being paid off by the Soho porn merchants. The police’s censorship kept prices high for the porn dealers, who were kept safe from arrest by regular payments to the coppers; when periodically, to keep the censorship alive and paying, a prosecution was necessary and a raid and arrest occurred, the shop owner had been tipped off well in advance and had installed a stooge as front-man, often an otherwise completely uninvolved guy who happened to be in desperate need of funds, who took the rap and did a few months in prison for a fee of perhaps £1500 paid by the porn dealer.

The 1960s’ ‘counterculture’ But, the flower power culture of 1967, the ‘counterculture,’ even though it was part of a massive challenge to authority — which I was very much part of — did embrace diverse and sometimes contradictory values, some of which tended to run at cross-purposes with what anarchists were about politically. Although I tried hard to be non-judgemental or not too puritanical about the ‘flower power’ people I came across, people like Sid Rawle, the capo of the Hyde Park Diggers, a would-be hippie cult, I was very uncomfortable with them. Whenever I began to feel unduly irritated I would quote to myself some appropriate lines from Walden, by the 19th century American writer Henry David Thoreau:

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

‘If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.’ For me their focus on a narcissistic music, drug and leisure-oriented lifestyle was offensively libertine, rather than libertarian. Don’t get me wrong. In the first few months after my release I smoked any spliffs that were passed around, but that stopped completely after one dramatically paranoid experience with unusually strong weed.

Hedonism — metaphor for revolution No doubt people trying to free themselves of their internalised mechanisms of oppression tend to reach for whatever tools are available, but instead of fighting oppression and injustice they just wanted to get high, talk therapy and listen to Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Jim Morrison and the Eagles. Music became an outlet for their hostility to the system and created a sense of generational solidarity for them. Hedonism had become a metaphor for revolution — frying their brains on LSD and other drugs, which they made an issue instead of oppression. The counterculture was becoming an end in itself rather than a means to an end. Personally, I had a pretty jaundiced view of the whole thing, but I saw no reason to make an issue of it as they were part of the movement that was challenging the ‘powers that be.’ There were plenty of selfish bastards among them, kidding on they were caring and committed to brotherly love, but on the whole they were a creative, colourful and cheery lot whose hearts were in the right place. But no way was the world going to be changed by good vibrations alone.

Defining times After a couple of weeks of life in Blantyre and Glasgow, the initial euphoria and sheer pleasure of being out of jail and home with my family ebbed to a state of content, then shrivelling boredom and frustration. My mate, Ron McKay, who had recently taken over the editorship of the local radical investigative Glasgow News from Brian Barr, had helped me survive the aggressive onslaught of waves of Scottish hacks who sought to devour me, and tried to talk me into staying on and working with him — but even his charismatic patter, commitment, integrity and energy couldn’t convince me to stay. The tectonic plates of history were on the move. A spectre was haunting Europe — the spectre of revolution. Political and social movements were emerging beyond the instigation and control of the political parties: had it been like this in England in 1648-49, in France in 1789, Europe in 1848, Paris in 1870, Europe in 1918-1920 and Spain in 1936-1937? Whatever was in the air, these were clearly defining times that would have an important impact on the future.

Present at the creation Inside I was bouncing with excitement and enthusiasm at the prospect of being present at the creation of a new world, but I certainly couldn’t participate from

The Spectre Haunting Europe

the periphery. My friends in Scotland were doing what they The French Revolution as It Appeared to could, but I had had different experiences and needed the Enthusiasts at Its Commencement — vibrancy and opportunities that only London in 1967 could offer. The Prelude OH! pleasant exercise of hope and joy! I had an agenda. I needed to capitalise on the momentum of my For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood release. There were things to be done that I felt only I could do. If Upon our side, we who were strong in love! I didn’t do them, it was unlikely anyone else would, simply Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, to be young was very heaven!— Oh! times, because of my personal experiences and friendship networks. I But In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways kept thinking of the people I had left behind in Spanish jails: Of custom, law, and statute, took at once good friends and comrades like Juan Busquets and Miguel The attraction of a country in romance! García, who had been in prison since 1949, or my old cell-mate, When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights, When most intent on making of herself Luis Andrés Edo. It was time to galvanise and do something — A prime Enchantress—to assist the work, organise material support and solidarity for those still in Franco’s Which then was going forward in her name! jails and bring their plight to the attention of those who cared — Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth, The beauty wore of promise, that which sets or I felt would care, if only they knew. (As at some moment might not be unfelt To most British people in the late 1960s, even the most Among the bowers of paradise itself) committed of anti-fascists, Franco’s prisoners were still as The budding rose above the rose full blown. shadowy and unreal — if as tragic — as those in Stalin’s Siberian What temper at the prospect did not wake To happiness unthought of? The inert Gulags. Yet I had gone in, and returned — like Orpheus from the Were roused, and lively natures rapt away! underworld. It was not as remote and unapproachable as They who had fed their childhood upon dreams, reputation had it. Prisoners had visiting days and postal The playfellows of fancy, who had made All powers of swiftness, subtilty, and strength deliveries, and people could get money from outside to spend in Their ministers —who in lordly wise had stirred the prison canteen — and there were ways of getting information Among the grandest objects of the sense, in and out. Both psychologically and morally, helping prisoners And dealt with whatsoever they found there As if they had within some lurking right was a real way of helping the Resistance. They were the To wield it;—they, too, who, of gentle mood, casualties of a continuing Civil War in which, if it was not Had watched all gentle motions, and to these immediately possible to act as a combatant, one could play a role Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more mild by supporting those inside. Also, Franco was still firmly And in the region of their peaceful selves;— Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty ensconced in power — and that power had to be challenged. Did both find, helpers to their heart’s desire, I felt I had no choice but to return to London. Nice as Blantyre And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish; and Glasgow were, they couldn’t compare with London for hope, Were called upon to exercise their skill, Not in Utopia, subterranean fields, expectation, variety and emotional fulfilment. I was now 21 years Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where! old and had to make my own life decisions. Telling mum and But in the very world, which is the world gran was difficult, and they were obviously disappointed, but Of all of us,—the place where in the end at all! they knew instinctively it was pointless trying to keep me in We find our happiness, or notWilliam Wordsworth Scotland when I had clearly made up my mind to leave. I knew they sensed I would come to no good in London, gran in particular. She had the second sight, but she was too wise a woman to push it.

Parting shot But first I had to take a pop at the Scottish Daily Express with a Parthian shot for the hate campaign they had run against me. The newspaper had seethed over its failure to get my story. Until then it had been a given that no newspaper could compete with them for news stories. I had broken the spell, and as a result they were a laughing stock in the editorial offices of all their rivals,

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

despite all the money, resources and time they had thrown at it. ‘Stashy Dan’ was a Toby Jug of a man who became a figure of derision in his own newsroom. If he wasn’t quite a broken man, he was certainly glazed and crazed. Stashy was not used to this kind of treatment, and the Beaverbrook Press was never a gracious loser. With some pals from the Glasgow Federation of Anarchists, the Glasgow Solidarity Group and the Syndicalist Workers’ Federation, we printed a leaflet describing exactly what a gang of lowlifes the Scottish Daily Express had as reporters, focusing on the abuse they had subjected me to over the previous few weeks — and juxtaposing my treatment with that of the victim of another recent case of Beaverbrook skulduggery, one involving the hounding to death of the father of John Duddy, whose son was serving life for the 1966 murder of three London police officers. The Scottish Daily Express had paid people to get hold of John Duddy’s love letters to his wife, which they did — by entirely underhand means. We managed to get into the Scottish Daily Express offices in Albion Street with the help of some sympathetic print workers and inserted thousands of our leaflets inside copies of that morning’s edition as it came off the presses to be packed. There were a few red faces in the boardroom the next when the management found out that their readers had sat down to their papers over their porridge and read something that was true, for once. The Scottish Daily Express printed an apology the next day for this unwarranted exercise of free speech, over which the Guardian chortled on for two columns. Feeling vindicated and satisfied with that night’s piece of creative vandalism, my mate Ross and I caught the bus from Glasgow’s Buchanan Street to London Victoria early the next morning, and headed south for a new life in the ‘big smoke.’ By that evening we were ensconced safely in a comfortable bedsit we had found in Belmont Road in Tottenham, North London. The only drawback was that our landlady, a Welsh woman, lived on the premises and frowned on us having female visitors. She was forever knocking on our door come 11 o’clock at night if she thought we might have girls in. I told the landlady my name was Wilkinson, a name inspired by the razor blades I used at the time, and that I worked in market research, which seemed to satisfy her. We did our best to humour her royalist prejudices, like commenting on how nice the trooping of the colour had been on television the previous night. Ross was a time-served engineer and quickly found a job at Bassetts, the confectionery manufacturer in Wood Green. Another friend from Glasgow, Dave Coull, a brickie and an anarcho-syndicalist, joined us in the flat. He too had no problems finding work, but I had my notoriety to live down. We stayed in Belmont Road until early December 1967 when the landlady struck it lucky and found a couple of girls in our room. The day we moved out to our new flat in Crouch End she said, as we were going out of the door, ‘It’s all right Stuart, I know who you are.’ She seemed pleased at being able to divulge her secret knowledge, but she would not tell me how she knew. I had

The Autumn Of Discontent

a good idea, however — the British political police had been paying her regular visits. They had also registered the name Wilkinson — the only time I had ever used it was in Tottenham — as one of my noms de plume in the grey ‘Watch List’ books used by Ports’ Special Branch officers

Hippies to Yippies The Britain I returned to that autumn was as restless and discontented as I was. Hippies were becoming politicised Yippies. Harold Wilson’s Labour government, which had come to power shortly after my arrest three years earlier, was in full economic crisis with more than half a million people out of work. These were the highest unemployment figures since before the Second World War. Unrest was March 19, 1967: 1000- students occupy spreading. Angry students were protesting against London School of Economics the education system and the roles for which they were being groomed. Students had occupied Nanterre and Madrid Universities and the London School of Economics (LSE), and militancy was on the rise in industry. Almost every day there were news stories of unofficial ‘wildcat’ strikes by rank-and-file workers no longer prepared to accept the leadership of the traditional trades unions. This was hardly surprising. Union officials were there to compromise and negotiate token agreements on wage demands October 16, 1967: police face striking building workers at Barbican construction site. and conditions with the employers; they were not there to defend and advance their members’ actual interests. Dissatisfied, frustrated, and distrustful of established authority, people were taking to the streets in greater numbers. They were protesting against unemployment, poor housing, social benefits October 21, 1967: military police confront — and, increasingly, about America’s Vietnam War. demonstrators attempting to enter the Pentagon in Washington Anger was also building at the lack of political will within the parliamentary systems to check the United States and its pliant surrogates in its attempts to build what George Orwell described as Oceania — the American Empire. On the other side of the fence, the Soviet Union was at the same time imposing its totalitarian hegemony on its own client states. Racist tension in Britain was also on the rise with the emergence of the newly constituted National Front, a merger between several ‘Keep Britain White’ factions including the League of Empire Loyalists and the British National Party. The guerrilla struggles in Latin America, the Third World liberation and anti-colonial movements, the US civil rights movement, the massive anti-

Top: SC 1967 Below: flatmate, Ross Flett

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Vietnam War protests in European, American and Asian cities — all happening at the same time — contributed much to the radicalisation of the time, and the growing sense of urgency that something had to be done — and soon. The world was turning upside down in 1967. At the beginning of the year, Chairman Mao had faced rebellion in Shanghai. In Franco’s Spain, workers and students had taken to the streets for the first time in many years to openly challenge the fascist regime. In Greece, in April, following the machinations of US Ambassador Talbot, ultra right-wing army colonels seized power, supported by the country’s neo-fascist secret and military police. Global tension had escalated dramatically with the Six-Day War in which Israel ‘preëmptively’ attacked Egypt and Syria, annexed Gaza and the Golan Heights, and occupied the Palestinian lands west of the river Jordan in Jordanian territory. In June, large-scale demonstrations had disrupted the Berlin visit of the US-supported Shah and Empress of Iran.

2 June 1967 — A significant event

October 1967: formal coronation of the Shah of Iran and Queen Farah.

Rudi Dutschke

Fritz Teufel

A significant event occurred on 2 June 1967 during the biggest of the anti-Shah demonstrations in Berlin, one that transformed the nature of the struggle for amelioration of injustice from reformist street protest to revolutionary violence. It was a signal from the institutions of power that they had reached the acceptable limits of protest. The event in question was the killing of Benno Ohnesorg, a young protestor shot dead in the street by an over-zealous German policeman. Its effect was to kick in the law of cause and effect. Ohnesorg’s murder led to an immediate hardening of attitudes among young protestors and the subsequent formation of the German anarchist urban guerrilla 2 June Group. If the limits of legal reform had been reached with the unjustifiable killing of Ohnesorg in a reformist street demonstration, then the choices were either to surrender to illegitimate authority — or break through the pretence and find alternative methods of working for change — going beyond reformism and striking at the core of the power system. Also in Berlin, the rabidly paranoid Springer press denounced the anarchist Fritz Teufel of Kommune: K-1 and the Marxist student agitator Rudi Dutschke in near-hysterical terms, calling on the authorities to detain them indefinitely for their subversive activities. Springer-Verlag’s demonisation of Rudi Dutschke later led to his being shot by a right-wing fanatic, and even more ratcheting up of tensions in German society. Dutschke suffered massive brain damage and eventually died of his wounds in 1979. America’s war in Vietnam with its rising death toll of American soldiers and innocent Vietnamese civilians was provoking everlarger anti-US protests across the globe, leading to what was to become, possibly, the largest extraparliamentary movement in world history. As in Germany, these demonstrations — under police provocation — were turning increasingly violent. In

Proud And Gay, Drunk As With Intoxication Of The Wine Of Desolation

We were outraged at what the Americans were doing in Vietnam

20 August 1967: First of May Group rakes US Embassy in London with machine-gun fire

Evening Standard 3 May 1966

Washington that October 50,000 demonstrators were brutally attacked by soldiers and federal marshals, while in Britain 5,000 protestors responded angrily to heavy-handed police violence when they were refused permission to deliver a petition to the US Ambassador. All this time and in the face of vociferous global opposition, US B-52 bombers were hammering away at the North Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and Haiphong, causing thousands and thousands of civilian deaths and injuries. In France, almost 100,000 students and striking workers marched together through Paris’s Latin Quarter in protest against the war. This global radicalisation was taking different forms in different places — and among different generations and groups. As for the anarchist action groups, the geo-political climate had changed since 1945, and the new generation of anarchists were no longer taking the anti-fascism of the Allies at face value. As the First of May Group’s kidnapping of Mgr Ussia in Rome in 1966 had showed, the anarchists were no longer content to remain an exiled Resistance movement fighting a blinkered and now clearly unwinnable battle against an old enemy. A new strategy was emerging. In July 1967 the First of May Group publicly committed itself to the principles of international revolutionary solidarity, in an attempt to channel the widespread sense of injustice, anger and frustrated political urgency by undertaking joint direct actions with other similar-minded clandestine European action groups, providing them with arms and explosives. In April 1967, First of May Group members had kidnapped the Spanish Ambassador’s personal secretary and, a short time later, the Legal Attaché of the Spanish Embassy in London. Both had been held for less than an hour, then released. In August, they machine-gunned the empty cars of two Spanish diplomats and the front of the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square in protest against the US’s regime-saving support for Franco — and for its aggressions in Vietnam and other Third World countries. They left a curt note at the scene:

B-52s: USA’s aerial terrorists

Round up the usual suspects

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

10 October 1967: Bolivian army officers gloat over remains of Ché Guevara.

‘Stop criminal murders of the American Army! Solidarity with all people battling against Yankee fascism all over the world! Racism No! Freedom for American Negroes!’ The communiqué was signed ‘Revolutionary Solidarity Movement — First of May Group.’ Earlier that year, on 1 May in Mexico City, agents of Franco’s secret police had murdered José Alberola, father of First of May Group spokesman Octavio Alberola. It was a vindictive act of revenge. Alberola senior had been tortured before he died, presumably in an attempt to discover the whereabouts of his son. In September, shortly after my release, the First of May Group published a three-page ‘Call To Action’ against the diplomatic and military representatives of Russian, American or fascist imperialism and dictatorship. Finally, in November, following the murder of Ché Guevara by US Rangers and Bolivian soldiers in Bolivia, the group carried out simultaneous bomb attacks on the Greek, Bolivian and Spanish Embassies in Bonn (the then capital of West Germany), the Venezuelan embassy in Rome, the Spanish, Greek and American embassies in the Hague, and the Spanish tourist office in Milan. The politicians who ordered Guevara’s murder could not have known that in so doing they would create a powerful icon of revolt for a new generation of rebels. After his death, Ché’s influence would spread far beyond the shores of Latin America. It was a politically electrifying time of ideas about fairness, equality, respect, dignity, justice, civil liberties, direct democracy, extra-parliamentary organisation, self-management, accountability — and the idea that no one had a right to exercise arbitrary power over others. This radical social and industrial ferment was also taking its psychological toll on the Establishment. For the first time since the Curragh Mutiny in 1914, when high-ranking army officers had prepared to overthrow the Liberal government’s plans for Irish independence, journalistic gossip was seeping through of talk in the smoke-filled backrooms of Whitehall and City boardrooms about a possible military coup to topple the government of Harold Wilson — similar to that carried out earlier that year by the CIA-backed colonels in Greece. And right-wing elements in the British Security Service, MI5, began peddling rumours aimed at discrediting the Labour government.

The plots thicken The plots and intrigues against Wilson had been building ever since he took over as Labour leader following the death of Hugh Gaitskell in January 1963. Gaitskellites, ultra-right-wing MI5 officers and James Angleton of the CIA were all convinced Gaitskell had been murdered by the administration of some sort of toxin, and Wilson was the beneficiary. Ipso facto, Wilson was behind Gaitskell’s death, directly or indirectly, and an agent of influence of the Soviet Union. They obviously didn’t know that it was in fact the Glasgow anarchists who had finished Gaitskell off on May Day 1962 when he came to Glasgow’s Queen’s Park. He never recovered from that drubbing and died some months later.

Paddy McGuinness’s Goat

By 1966 the right had grown obsessively paranoid about Wilson, mainly over its third sterling crisis and the Rhodesian deadlock. His main political enemies in the Labour Party were George Brown, a drunken arsehole, and Jim Callaghan, a considerably more astute political player. They were backed by Cecil King, the chairman of the Mirror newspaper group and a director of the Bank of England, who began lobbying for a ‘National Government’ of nonpoliticians. King first refers to the idea in his diary entry for 24 July 1966 following a meeting with Louis Franck, a former MI6 officer and chairman of Samuel Montague, the merchant banking house. By early 1967 King and Hugh Cudlipp, his Daily Mirror editor, were holding regular Saturday morning seminars postulating the political, social and economic collapse of British society. Thoughts of a coup were shared by a wider circle of the political, business and military Establishment, including the then US Ambassador, David Bruce. Some wanted a takeover by a coalition of the centre, others wanted a takeover of the right. The names of those involved mean little now, because nothing came of it, but they included top corporate bosses such as the heads of Associated Television (ATV), Lord Beeching, head of ICI and Lloyds Bank, Lord Watkinson, ex-Conservative Defence Minister, and Field Marshall Lord Harding, ex-chief of the Imperial Staff, and director of various banks and defence industry company Plessey. Other arcane bodies such as the antisocialist pressure groups Aims of Industry, Common Cause, and the Economic League were also involved to greater or lesser extents. These seething cabals of conspirators were to continue seething, plotting and intriguing for at least another eight or nine years before disappearing below the surface of British parapolitical life after Harold Wilson’s unexpected resignation in April 1976. I had been working for Albert Meltzer in his Coptic Street bookshop since returning to London. My job was to sort out, price and shelve any books that came in, and cover for Albert when he was out. I was also his printer, operating first his Gestetner 120 duplicator with its messy ink and illegible electric stencils and mangle-like handle, then moving on to a state-of-the-art Gestelith offsetlitho machine in a makeshift print shop he had set up in Pentonville Road. This was where we hid the stock from the bailiffs (who were always coming round) and printed, collated and stapled or bound the Coptic Press publications. Albert couldn’t afford to pay me a great deal, but at least I was now working and moving in a fairly dynamic group of people and could indulge myself in promoting anarchist ideas and an anarchist interpretation of history, that is, one which tried to understand the present by learning from past revolutionary experiences. That autumn of 1967 the group of us around Albert’s Coptic Press attended the Anarchist Federation of Britain’s annual general meeting in the Soho Square offices of the Association of Cinematographic Television and Technical Staff (ACTT). It was my first important anarchist meeting since returning from Spain, and it was here the Anarchist Black Cross was revived.

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

But even before the meeting got properly started, I was subjected to a torrent of abuse from Paddy McGuinness, an Australian anarchist and pacifist who accused me of kicking in the teeth those pacifists who had supported me ‘loyally — if non-violently — at the time of my arrest and betraying my supporters by allowing them to believe I was innocent of the charges laid against me in Spain. To some extent it was this meeting which marked the parting of the ways between what I would call the ‘militant’ and ‘quietist’ anarchists, the latter being those attracted to the anarchist movement because of their anti-nuclear and pacifist convictions, and the former determined to effect actual change. Those people who claimed to feel ‘betrayed’ by my post-release admission of guilt in The People were mainly centred around the anarchist paper Freedom, edited by Vernon Richards, a patriarchal control-freak figure who was disliked and distrusted by the section of the anarchist movement with which I was involved — the anarcho-syndicalist Syndicalist Wworkers’ Federation (SWF). The reason for this tension dated back to the end of World War Two and when Richards effectively mounted a coup and took over Freedom’s premises, and the paper itself.

Damned with faint praise The editorial line run by Freedom after my arrest and throughout my imprisonment had been to damn me with faint praise. Basically, they were taking a Harry Enfield line, namely ‘You didn’t want to do that!’ What I should have done, according to them, was to stand up in the Francoist court martial, admit my guilt and damned them all to hell. This might have been how things were done in the 19th century with earlier generations of more noble anarchists, but these were autre temps, autre moers and my worldview was a bit more pragmatic. I wanted to live to fight another day. The majority of my friends and supporters in the Christie-Carballo Defence Committee and the SWF had a much more common sense approach to the way I had run my defence and had known all along I was guilty, but that made them all the more determined to support me in what I did. The only people who ‘felt betrayed’ as they put it were a few do-nothing tossers who were only happy when posturing from an imaginary moral high ground As I had already made clear, the campaign conducted on my behalf in this country at the time of my capture had been entirely in keeping with the defence I had mounted during my trial, namely that I had been unaware that what I was smuggling into Spain was explosives, a harmless but altogether necessary falsehood directed simply and solely at saving my own life and that of my fellow accused, Francisco Carballo Blanco, arraigned as we were on a capital charge. It seemed, however, that to some the lives of two anti-fascists in the clutches of Hitler and Mussolini’s old partner were much less important than metaphorical dentition of some pacifists far away and safe in England. No

We Live In Deeds, Not Years; In Thoughts Not Breaths

wonder that, in the middle of the Australian’s harangue, Albert leaned across to me and said, ‘You must be wondering what sort of a nuthouse you’ve landed in.’ Fortunately, given the unsympathetic character of the Australian pacifist concerned, all the sympathy was on my side.

Birth of the Anarchist Black Cross On the other hand, we actually got some work done, by reviving the Anarchist Black Cross, a prisoner support organisation originally set up in Tsarist Russia in the later 19th Century for comrades imprisoned for revolutionary activities and promoting the ideas of anarchism. Albert and an Indian anarchist in Bombay, M. P. T. Acharya, had run an international committee for political prisoners in Asian countries for some years. But with the death of Acharya it had been impossible to continue with the project. Now I had turned up, someone Albert felt he could work with. Also, shortly after I started work at Albert’s shop in Coptic Street, Boris Yelensky, one of the old Russian émigrés and ABC activists, had turned up one day, out of the blue, with a copy of his book, The Struggle For Equality — a memoir of the anarchists in the Tsarist years and the Russian Revolution — and the idea took off from that chance meeting. We wanted this to be an international prisoners’ aid network to help people imprisoned because of their resistance to fascist and authoritarian states, irrespective of the crimes they were accused or convicted of. Most of Spain’s political prisoners were not supported by groups like Amnesty because they had been convicted of crimes involving violence. Our ethos was different: we believed that if an act was carried in furtherance of anarchist principles, then no matter what the act was, it was a political act, and needed our support. But our principal criteria were freedom and respect for human beings. There was no way the Anarchist Black Cross would have lent support and solidarity to any psychopath who killed or injured innocent people on the basis that claimed to be an anarchist. For the media and the politician the criterion is always the abstract weasel word ‘violence,’ not the dynamic in which events occur. The anarchists who tried to shoot Mussolini at various times throughout the 1920s and 1930s, for example, were denounced in Italy as ‘terrorists’, which is not how the rest of the world looked at them, or how most people would now describe them. Despite the cynicism of the pacifist, the professional politician and the public opinion formers, there is a real distinction between anarchist violence and the violence used by the state. At various times, anarchists have supported violent action against individual tyrants or their functionaries such as Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco. Anarchist confederal defence groups in Spain, such as los Solidarios resisted the gunmen, the pistoleros, hired by reactionary employers to systematically murder leading union activists in Spain between 1917 and 1923. These anarchists responded to this sort of institutionalised violence by killing the gunmen and their employers and political backers. It is possible to

MPT Acharya

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

understand the actions of one person or a small group of activists against a tyrant. It is, on the other hand, impossible to see a parallel with the violence used by the state: the murders, tortures and degradation of the concentration camps, the slow deaths in Siberia, the use of fascist squads to remove political opponents, the mass indiscriminate carpet bombings of the B52s, and the physical razing of towns and villages by tanks, helicopter gunships and bulldozers. For the most part, anarchist violence has been aimed at buildings and property rather than people, while the violence of the state has been very, very personal — arrests, incarceration, beatings (and in Spain executions, degradations, torture) against its own citizens; use carpet bombings, assassinations, invasions against the citizens of other countries. Perhaps violence is wrong, under any circumstances. But the state doesn’t think so, and as a member of that state, neither do you. The core idea was that we would set up an international secretariat, a worldwide clearing-house for information on prisoners under the aegis of the Bulletin of the Anarchist Black Cross. We would liaise with groups and individuals who would each adopt a prisoner with whom they would correspond and provide with food parcels — and anything else they needed. Spain at the time was then the only European country with a large number of political prisoners unsupported by any international liberal charity organisation, such as Amnesty. This was because Amnesty campaigned only on behalf of those who had been imprisoned for non-violent offences. For instance, they had refused to help me or any of the other anarchists in Carabanchel because our offences ‘involved violence.’ They did, however, support Jehovah’s Witnesses who had been imprisoned by the regime because of their beliefs. Amnesty International later abandoned this position in recognition of the fact that to avoid having a prisoner adopted by Amnesty a regime could, as many frequently did, simply frame a victim with an offence involving violence.

The original Anarchist Black Cross Originally known as the ‘Political Red Cross,’ the organisation not only provided aid for prisoners, but also helped them escape from prison or exile in Siberia. Peter Kropotkin was one of the many political prisoners whose escape was organised by the PRC. Around 1900 or so, certainly no later than 1905, the name was changed to the Anarchist Red Cross (ARC) and by 1907 the organisation had groups in Kiev, Odessa, Bialystock, Riga and most European capitals as well as a number of cities in North America — New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Brownsville, Detroit and Baltimore. In 1914 members of the Latvian ARC had been outraged when governor John D Rockefeller ordered the National Guard to open fire on striking workers and their families in Ludlow, Colorado. A number of miners and their families were killed in this government outrage and so the Anarchist Red Cross (probably involving Alexander Berkman) decided to assassinate Rockefeller. Unfortunately for the anarchists,

A Matter of Concern

the bomb they were preparing in their Lexington Avenue apartment exploded prematurely, killing four ARC members. After the Bolshevik coup which brought Lenin and a new dictatorship to power, the ARC changed its name to the Anarchist Black Cross to avoid confusion with the International Red Cross or association with the Communist Party. In the Ukraine, the Anarchist Black Cross was organised as defensive units under the revolutionary army of Nestor Makhno. The purpose of these units was to protect towns and villages and organise resistance to pogroms carried out by Cossacks, White Guards — or Trotsky’s Red Army. By 1924-1925 the organisation inside Russia had been decimated, its activists arrested, tortured and imprisoned or murdered by the Bolshevik government. Next came the victims of Mussolini fascism and Hitler’s Nazism. Eventually the numbers of anarchists who were the victims of reaction became too great for the organisation to cope with — especially when the depression in America made it difficult to raise funds in the last bastion of support for them, namely the foreign language speaking trade unions in the USA. Outside of Russia the ABC continued providing aid to anarchist prisoners in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy until the World War made it impossible. It finally gave up the ghost in 1958. Unsurprisingly, the revived Anarchist Black Cross became a matter of ‘concern’ to the authorities, in particular to the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, headed by a Scot, Commander Ferguson Smith, and to MI5’s ‘F’ Branch, the counter-subversive department of the Security Service, under Dick Thistlethwaite, whose boss was Sir Martin Furnival Jones. I became aware of this interest through ‘friendly’ journalists and by the number of visits by ‘men in suits’ to landlords, fellow tenants and others with whom I was involved on the most superficial level. The spider at the centre of the Home Office web to whom both MI5’s Dick Thistlethwaite and Special Branch’s Ferguson Smith reported was James Waddell, the Deputy Under-Secretary of State. Waddell was an Edinburgh Scotsman — the Establishment appears to be full of them — whose job it was to read the political police and security service reports and political summaries and decide on the degree of subversive threat we posed to public order. He, in turn, reported to the Home Secretary and the Cabinet Office through the Joint Intelligence Committee. I never saw any of the MI5 reports on us, but people who have seen them tell me that they were turgid and uninformative. The Special Branch reports, on the other hand were, apparently, of a higher quality. This may have been due to the fact that the Special Branch were out and about asking questions, and had a feel for what people actually thought and did — and could distinguish fact from fantasy. One theory — I learned subsequently — within MI5, Special Branch and some departments of the Ministry of Defence — was that my profile was supposed to have fitted that of a potential urban guerrilla, a development about which they were becoming increasingly concerned. Paranoid civil servants within the political, security and defence establishments had convinced

Martin Furnival-Jones: Director General of MI5 1965-1972.

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Cabinet Office: locus of power.

Old New Scotland Yard

themselves that the country was in a pre-revolutionary MI5 situation. The enemy was no longer the Soviet Union. Now they were predicting the rise of what they described as urban guerrilla foci groups into the British political process. If only! Put bluntly, they thought I was one of the conduits through which violent ideas would penetrate the new generation of British radicals. As well as being a bogeyman of the security and intelligence services, I had also been acclaimed anarchist ‘leader’ by the Special Branch, reactionary and politically illiterate journalists alike. This view was reinforced by a grossly inaccurate book, The British Political Fringe, published in Britain in 1965 while I was in Spain. The author, George Thayer, was an American research student who had written the book from his thesis on the British political system. Its small section on anarchism alone had no fewer than seventy-three mistakes. But in spite of these shortcomings, it became the ‘Bible’ of the Special Branch, security service and every conceivable non-governmental right-wing intelligence and gossip-gathering body. In the end, murderous methods of protest did not enter European politics through the anarchist movement at all, but from neo-Marxist groups such as the Red Army Fraktion in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy, and nationalist groupings such as the Provisional IRA in Ireland and ETA in the Spanish Basque country. But who could have foreseen that development? To counter the climate of subversion and the growth of the ‘far-and-wide left’ in 1967-68, Sir Joseph Simpson, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, increased the number of Special Branch officers to three hundred and moved them from the high-profile mock-Gothic Norman Shaw Building on the Embankment to new offices on the eighteenth floor of the purpose-built New Scotland Yard building in Victoria Street. One immediate consequence of this new threat evaluation by the right-wing security establishment was that I became a legitimate ‘target’ placed under ongoing surveillance by MI5’s ‘watchers’ and Special Branch agents infiltrated into the periphery of my social network. There was nothing personal about the police harassment of me. Had I been prepared to settle down as a ‘good citizen’ — without any nonsense about freedom, justice and equality — perhaps I could have done so, probably even without recanting my adventures in Spain. Such is the fairness of our liberal parliamentary democracy. I could have had a future without an obsessively solicitous British secret police delving into my affairs, and those early morning knocks on the door would have been those of the milkman. What was the virus that got into me? All I can say is that while my Covenanting and Episcopalian-Jacobite forebears had one answer — a sense of moral outrage; the authority toadies and state-subsidised mindbenders and fabricators had another. Let’s say that whatever it was, it’s got this world through some tricky situations to the present point. Without it, we perish.

Watchers Of The Night, Defenders Of The Right

Although we came very low on their list of priorities, the Foreign Officecontrolled Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), or MI6, headed in 1967 by Sir Dick Goldsmith White, was concerned with the international activities and connections of the Anarchist Black Cross. The Foreign Office’s priority was to maintain the delicate diplomatic balance that existed between Britain and Franco’s Spain before the dictator finally shuffled off this mortal coil. Franco’s regime, when it finally went, had to be replaced by one acceptable to Western (i.e., US) interests. Nothing was to upset or deflect this process, especially embarrassing high-profile anti-Francoist direct action campaigns such as those carried out between the spring of 1962 and 1965 by the clandestine anarchist resistance organisation, Defensa Interior (DI). This organisation had been unavoidably wound up in 1965 as a result of pressure from the French authorities on the official Spanish exile organisations, the CNT and the FAI, the sponsors of the DI. But the DI’s role as protagonist of the armed anti-fascist struggle had been taken over the following year, 1966, by the First of May Group, which, like the DI, was coordinated from Paris and Brussels by Octavio Alberola. More importantly, the First of May Group saw its role no longer simply in terms of the anti-fascist resistance to Franco, but as part of the growing worldwide resistance to an aggressive and expansionist US foreign policy. The First of May Group had launched itself in spectacular fashion on 1 May 1966 with the kidnapping of Spain’s ecclesiastical attaché to the Vatican, Mgr Marcos Ussia, to draw attention to the plight of Franco’s political prisoners. They followed this up in October in Madrid with the attempted kidnapping of the US Ambassador to Spain, Angler Biddle Duke, and Rear-Admiral Norman G. Gillette, Commanderin-Chief of the US forces in Spain. Five anarchists had been arrested as a result in a trap set by a Francoist police agent. Anything remotely leftist or independent in the Americans’ zero-sum view of the world could only serve Soviet interests. What the US lost in its endeavours to build the American Empire, the Soviet Union gained. If you were not with us, you were against us. The only post-Francoist Spanish government acceptable to Washington and its long-standing proxy, Whitehall, would be one composed of pro-Washington social democrats. A strong neutralist, leftist or communist government in Spain would almost certainly lead to the loss of US air bases in the country and the consequent reduction of US air power in the Mediterranean. Similar US-led machinations were going on in Italy at the same time (aimed at, notably, maintaining the Naples base of the US Sixth Fleet and NATO’s southern command base in Sardinia), which were eventually to lead to the murder of Aldo Moro, a loose cannon among Christian Democrat politicians who had been pressing for a greater role reflecting the importance of the Communist Party in Italian political life. And so, in early November 1967 Albert and I, together with six other core members (Ross Flett, Adrian Derbyshire, Roger Sandell, Mike ‘Digger’ Walsh,

Below: Sir Dick Goldsmith-White: Director General of MI5, 19531956. Head of MI6, 1956-1968.

CNT: Spanish anarcho-syndicalist labour union — sponsor of Defensa Interior

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Albert Meltzer, 1968 (Photo Ken Sutherland)

2a Fairfield Gardens Crouch End, Hornsey

Jim Duke and Ted Kavanagh) launched the Anarchist Black Cross. It was not so much a formal organisation as an extended affinity group, a milieu, like the Solidarity Group. We began by writing to the press, contacting journalists with information smuggled from inside Franco’s jails, researching cases, and putting prisoners and their families in touch with people who wanted to help. By the end of 1967 Ross and I had moved to character-building pre-trendy Crouch End in Hornsey, to. By this time, it wasn’t just London that was ‘swinging;’ the once-predictable political pendulum had also started to swing faster. For some reason, Hornsey and Crouch End were a magnet for a radicalised and highly educated new generation of workers and students who were rejecting traditional party politics in favour of libertarian, nonparliamentary or dissident communist organisations (Trotskyist, Castroist and Maoist). There were also the more erudite followers of Marxist revisionists such as Marcuse and the ‘Frankfurt School.’ But as for us, our radicalism was fed by real anger and outrage at what America was doing in Vietnam — and by the failure of Western governments and mainstream political parties to challenge the US’s strategy to become the dominant world power. Protests which had previously been peaceful were now ending in violent confrontations with the police and attacks on US-related property targets. The tension seemed to be building relentlessly, and with what outcome nobody knew. The displacement of Gestetner duplicators by the small offset-litho machine in the mid-1960s was probably the principal register of the radicalism of the time. The easy availability of this new and relatively cheap print technology, and its adoption by extra-parliamentary radical groups and community printshops up and down the country played a key role in promoting the political ferment of the period. The countless agitprop and radical publications which mushroomed with offset litho and the equally new electronic typesetting equipment, particularly the IBM Selectronic golfball typewriter, meant that individuals and small groups were no longer dependent on the political whims of expensive commercial letterpress printers and typesetters. They could now take on the media establishment, the traditional vanguardist parties and the state. It was a mini-revolution, as important in its own way as the introduction of Johann Guttenberg’s moveable type; it subverted the elitist infrastructure of establishment publishing and exposed its so-called ‘objectivity’ as class bias, put forward alternative analyses of world events through a tsunami wave of books, pamphlets and newspapers. It also left the smaller radical groups better equipped to foster a more searching and radical exploration of values. My Francoist penitentiary training had provided me with a grounding in general principles, but offset-litho printing was a completely different process. My tutors were Ted Kavanagh — a friend of Albert, who had edited the agitational sheet Ludd during the 1966 seamen’s strike and ran the Wooden Shoe Bookshop in Old Compton Street — and Martin Page, a professional litho

A Detective Calls

printer, both of whom gave their time and skills unstintingly. A chain of apostolic descent in offset printing came from Ted and Martin, who taught several who later taught others — and so the art went out to Spain, Portugal and Germany as the new media technology came into its own. Most of what we published — initially, under Albert’s Coptic Press imprint in Coptic Street, next to the British Museum — were commercial out-ofcopyright items such as Hawks and Hawking, The Ballad of Reading Jail, The Coffee Houses of Old London, books on typography and a selection of Tenniel’s Alice in Wonderland cards. But we also published a number of anarchist and surrealist pamphlets, which proved in the long run to be our best sellers.

Albert Meltzer and his electric Gestetner 120 duplicator

A detective calls I had been working less than a week at Coptic Press when a detective called at the shop to see Albert. He asked to speak to him in private. They went to the pizza bar across the street, where the detective asked Albert — whom he had only identified as the managing director — if he knew anything about his new employee Stuart Christie. Assuming the airs of a company tycoon — very easy at the time, since he had a weight problem — Albert stiffly replied, ‘He came with good references.’ The detective asked him if he knew that I had just completed a prison sentence. ‘What on earth for?’ ‘He was sentenced to twenty years in a Spanish prison.’ ‘That can’t be the same person, he’s not old enough — he’s only twenty-two.’ The detective sighed in that worldly wise manner, more indicative of sympathy than impatience, reserved by patrol constables for absent-minded motorists who leave their car doors unlocked. ‘The trouble with you gentlemen is that you never read your papers,’ he said. He gave a brief account of my crime and punishment. ‘I don’t know why you are worrying,’ Albert said in his grandest manner. ‘I thought the police encouraged old lags to go straight. Surely this will be a chance to rehabilitate?’ ‘But he’s a terrorist!’ protested the detective. Albert looked suitably shocked. ‘I wish you would put this down in writing. I couldn’t take the risk of acting without that.’ But the policeman wasn’t falling for that one. ‘My word should be good enough.’ He refused to give his identity and details of his complaint. ‘I’ve told you and you can find out more for yourself. It’s no secret, sir.’ His tone was deferential. He had not checked up to find that Albert Meltzer was as committed to anarchism, perhaps more so, than his erstwhile terrorist employee — certainly he had been active since well before I was even born. The press was cultivating the image of the anarchist as youthful and hippie, and burly, balding, middle-aged Albert hardly fell into that category. By late 1967, a debate was building within the anarchist movement between the pacifists and the advocates of the alternative society on the one hand, and

Highgate Cemetery, 1967 (Photo: Ken Sutherland)

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

those anarchists, of whom I was one, who believed that radical change would only come about through extra-parliamentary direct action, and confronting injustice on our own terms. On reflection, we spent a bit too much time deriding the former as sybaritic hippies and sock-and-sandal wearers. We were tilting at windmills. Hippies never really troubled us and there were several declared pacifists in the SWF who were no problem either — nor indeed were the believing Christians. The problem was not those individuals who believed in a different interpretation of anarchist principles or whose priorities were different to our own, but the fact that our message appeared confused and our efforts were divided that was frustrating. The fact is that the divisions themselves were far worse than their ideological expressions. United we stand, divided we perish — it was as simple as that. A body calling itself the International Anarchist Commission (IAC), which had the support of the rumps of the Spanish, French and Italian ‘official’ national anarchist federations, organised an international conference in August 1968 in the Tuscan town of Carrara, mid-way between La Spezia and Pisa on the North Western coast of Italy. Its secretary was a London-based Italian called Giovanni Baldelli, who later wrote a book for Penguin called Social Anarchism. Both Albert and I felt that the proposed Carrara conference was a selfserving device to give the bureaucratic and fossilized secretariats of the ‘official’ national anarchist federations some legitimacy among the growing numbers of young anarchists. i Since only national federations were to be allowed to nominate delegates this meant that the exiled Spanish CNT, the Bulgarian Anarchist Federation and the hidebound French and Italian anarchist federations would have a voice at the expense of the more activist groups within the FIJL or the Italian youth groups. It would also mean that the Toulouse Intercontinental Secretariat of the CNT-FAI — which had, with its compromises with the French Ministry of the Interior, done considerable harm to the anti-Francoist movement and the revolutionary tradition of Spanish anarchism — would be the only Spanish voice We hoped to take advantage of the Carrara conference and use the unique opportunity of having so many international activists in the one place at the one time to turn the nascent Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) into an effective international ad hoc network of activists and publicists. The ABC, we hoped, would ultimately provide a serious revolutionary focus and defence body for anarchist groups around the world, and help point them in the direction of struggle against injustice and oppression. The press attention I received due to my Spanish conviction helped enormously in establishing the ABC. First, they paid me for stories and, just as importantly, they were happy to use me as a source for stories about Spain and anarchism. A bemused Albert told me that I had broken Fleet Street’s longstanding conspiracy of silence against the anarchist movement. He recalled that

Last Came Anarchy: He Rode On A White Horse, Splashed With Blood...

during the Spanish revolution, many anarchist workers had spent night after night at meetings and demonstrations to try to capture people’s attention, so they could bring the facts about the Spanish Revolution to the workers in this country. Nothing could penetrate the wall of silence of the British press. It was trying to sell the conflict as one of Nationalists versus Reds, Democrats against Rebels, or even Fascists fighting Communists, thereby concealing the stunning successes — at the barricades and in the fields, factories and workshops — of the rank-and-file organisations and workers’ self-management. The various pet theories of the newspaper pundits merged into a single determination that the progress and achievements of the anarchist revolution in Catalonia and Aragon should be ignored by the press. Similarly, these revolutionary achievements were being squeezed out of living reality by the Spanish-colonial and Axis forces of Franco’s rebellion on the one hand, and the Communist Party-led counter-revolutionaries on the other. The curious thing is that with the possible exception of the then Manchester Guardian in 1936-37, the press had to wait for years — until books on the subject were reviewed in its columns — before any mention was made of the Spanish Revolution. So much for the newspapers. The word anarchist was anathema to the press and was used only occasionally as a form of vile pejorative. By the 1960s they were getting over this, though my case embarrassed them a little. I was classed an ‘unrepentant’ anarchist, just as demonstrators who supported me were ‘self-styled’ anarchists. When awaiting trial I had merely been an ‘alleged’ anarchist! The history of the working class movement was less well known to them than the interior of EI Vino’s wine bar in Fleet Street. To be an anarchist was a strange and alarming thing to them — if not positively actionable in itself. This proved convenient for the police, who would refer to people as being ‘anarchists’ as if in some way this clinched their accusations. It was unfortunate when Detective Sergeant ‘Tanky’ Challenor took this for granted and put a half-brick in the pocket of an anarchist demonstrator, Donald Rooum, who was sufficiently nimble-witted to turn the tables and, against considerable odds, prove it had been planted. Challenor was speedily transferred to a mental hospital while his subordinates took the rap for him. However, even this sensational case did not entirely break the silence about anarchists. With the new interest in anarchism the word was getting through even into the murky pages of the national dailies, but it was usually distorted out of all recognition, from one extreme, meaning throwing bombs

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

April 1894: Chief Inspector William Melville of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch arrests Theodule Meunier at Victoria Station (Illustrated London News). Meunier was suspected of blowing up the Paris restaurant where the French anarchist Ravachol was arrested in 1892

Inspector William Melville — virulent anti-anarchist

Emma Goldman, 1869-1940. by Flavio Costantini

and killing people for unknown reasons, to the beautiful people image which had more to do with trendy Christianity than anarchism. With my case before them, it seemed that the press could at last see, even if sometimes through a lens murkily, the old 1890’s spectre of anarchism in traditional Sandeman cloak and broad-brimmed black Fedora. The wheel had turned full circle. The suppression of anarchism, which had, until 1914, been the obsession of the head of the pre-First World War Special Irish Branch and War Office secret service, Superintendent William Melville, had again been moved to the top of the agenda. Born a Catholic in Sneem, Co. Kerry, in 1850, William Melville joined the Metropolitan Police on 16 September 1872, and was a member of the Special Irish Branch (SIB) from its inception in 1883. He held the post of head of SIB for 10 years before mysteriously resigning at the peak of his career in 1903.) Be that as it may, we did manage to get some publicity for Franco’s forgotten prisoners. Years before, Albert had worked as a young man with the ‘celebrity’ anarchist Emma Goldman. She had raged at the fact that she could not get a mention in the British press about Spain. All she ever got was a small write-up in 1936 at the beginning of her campaign — and an obituary in 1940 — despite the enormous publicity, news value and prestige attached to her name in the United States, where she could not campaign, having been deported to Russia in 1919. Emma Goldman’s frustration with the British press sprang to Albert’s mind one bitter cold day in January 1969 as we sat on the hard benches of the Law Courts in the Strand. It was the conclusion to my encounter with a prostitute after my release, which had turned into a saga over the previous year. Albert and I were waiting to give evidence before Mr Justice Brabin in the case of The People versus Private Eye over the latter’s publication of my story concerning the former paying for the prostitute for me. Albert consoled me with the story about Emma Goldman taunting the press at her meetings. ‘We won’t read much about the revolution in tomorrow’s papers,’ was her usual jibe.

One in the Eye The previous year I had given a story to Paul Foot of Private Eye about the Special Branch officer who had interviewed Albert to warn him off employing me. Foot listened attentively but caught on to an anecdotal aside about the prostitute incident with The People reporters in Glasgow. So The People had paid for the lady’s services, had they? That became the story in the Eye — not a word about the Special Branch harassment. It was a small piece, a postscript in fact to a much longer story about how Lord Snowdon and a Sunday Times reporter had done the same for another released prisoner on behalf of the Sunday Times Magazine. Cassidy and Farmer thought it highly derogatory (though the alternative was to pretend that they had let me loose when they had been told to keep an eye on me and pay for my needs). Their story brought the wrath of the judge

Foot Prints In Time

upon them. They claimed in court they had been in a Glasgow restaurant at the time. When the accountant was called with his ledgers to show the place was closed, that particular aspect of their story fell flat. We never heard their explanation of this contradictory evidence, but in spite of this the judge found the case not proven for the Eye. Because he felt he could hardly rely on the account of someone who had admitted to drinking quite heavily that night, he attached much importance to a corroborative account from two Scottish Television men who, incidentally, were on very friendly terms with Hugh Farmer. Both Albert and Digger Walsh, had been with me in a London pub when Cassidy tried to get me to recant, prior to the case going to trial. He said that my granny would murder me when she heard what had happened. Digger said, ‘I thought you said nothing happened,’ and I added, ‘You were too drunk at the time to notice anything.’ Cassidy replied, ‘I wasn’t so drunk I didn’t see Bollocky Bill here on the job’. At the trial the judge appeared to get on especially well with Albert. They seemed to be swapping music-hall stories from box to bench, to the great alarm of one of our friends, who wrote afterwards that he felt Albert would be sent down at any moment for convulsing the court in laughter. The judge finally hit on a new interpretation for Cassidy’s ‘Bollocky Bill’ statement. The judge maintained the remark in question could be given another way, ‘I wasn’t so drunk.’ Full stop. It was one up on the Panda’s ‘Eats, shoots and leaves.’ That must rank among the most expensive full stops ever. The judge found for the plaintiffs and awarded them £500 each for the libel, which he did ‘not consider to be grave.’ But Private Eye — or more precisely, Peter Cook, its owner — had to meet costs for both parties in excess of £10,000. As a result, Private Eye launched its ‘Gnomefam’ appeal, which ran for sixteen months, but it only managed to raise £1,932. The case didn’t do my public image much good either. It appeared a sybaritic tearaway was emerging in place of the quiet lad with the short back and sides. Some patronising pacifists who never stopped gunning for me (non-violently, of course) described me in private as an illiterate Glasgow numpty, or words to that effect. They wondered how anyone could ever have believed that I was the innocent victim of events. But it would be a poor heart that did not rejoice lustily and well after being banged up for threeand-a -bit years in a Spanish jail. Films as well as rock music, LSD and flower power played their part in creating the mood of 1967, and softening us up for 1968. Cometh the time, cometh the film. For me, the transcendental film of 1967 was Cool Hand Luke. It found absolute resonance with my generation. The reason it was so successful I think was because it was such a powerful human story which tapped into the prevailing culture and ideals of the time: the passion for freedom and the courage to take on the established powers-that-be, no matter what the personal

Royal Courts of Justice, London

Albert Meltzer and ‘Digger’ Walsh (left)

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

cost. Paul Newman gave one of the defining performances of his career, playing the protagonist, Lucas Johnson, the stubborn but dignified antiauthoritarian rebel who, contemptuous of authority, refuses to submit to oppression and who the system can’t break — it can only kill. As Luke points out to a ‘kindly’ screw putting him into the ‘box until after his I’m just sitting watching flowers in the rain mother’s funeral: ‘Aw, callin’ it your job don’t make it Feel the power of the rain making the garden grow, I’m just sitting watching flowers in the rain right, boss.’ The film also has the immortal line drooled Feel the power of the rain keeping me cool. by the sadistic redneck prison captain played by Strother Martin: ‘What we have here is a failure to communicate. So I lay upon my side with all the windows opened wide Some men you just can’t reach…’ Couldn’t pressurize my head from speaking Hoping not to make a sound I pushed my bed into the grounds Lucas Johnson’s multiple ambiguities said it all. In time to catch the sight that I was seeking. Although anarchic, Luke, an apparently self-effacing guy, was an unlikely revolutionary role-model whose I’m just sitting watching flowers in the rain Feel the power of the rain making the garden grow, low-level defiance managed to restore hope and pull I’m just sitting watching flowers in the rain together the prisoners against the prison warders. It Feel the power of the rain keeping me cool. spoke on lots of levels about struggle, the human condition — and about 1967. Luke was the guy we all If this perfect pleasure has the key Then this is how it has to be aspired to be. Flowers in the Rain Woke up one morning half asleep With all my blankets in a heap And yellow roses gathered all around me; The time was still approaching four I couldn’t stand it anymore Saw marigolds upon my eider down.

If my pillow’s getting wet I don’t see that it matters much to me.

I heard the flowers in the breeze make conversation with the trees Believed to leave reality behind me With my commitments in a mess my sleep has gone away depressed In a world of fantasy you’ll find me. I’m just sitting watching flowers in the rain Feel the power of the rain making the garden grow, I’m just sitting watching flowers in the rain Feel the power of the rain keeping me cool.

Sailing To Byzantium

Chapter 2 — 1968 (Spring-Summer) ‘WHERE’S CHRISTIE?’ I could hear the shouts distinctly in my sleep. They came from fearsome-looking moustachioed Guardia Civil, who all through my dream had been chasing away beautiful girls beating on the door of my cell. I rubbed my eyes. The door had crashed open and the room had filled with the mutter of aggressive male voices. The dark-eyed muchachas had vanished. I was out of bed and into a pair of trousers faster than Clyde Barrow Sunday Telegraph, 10 March, 1968 with Frank Hamer on his tail. I had been to the pictures the night before to see Warren Beatty’s film Bonnie and Clyde, hence the images and thoughts going through my mind. It was only then I realised that the intruders were not wearing green uniforms or tricorner hats — or Stetsons, come to that. I was now wideawake and these were tough-looking characters in overcoats and plain clothes. They were all British coppers. It was the early morning of 27 February 1968, just over five months since my release from a Francoist jail. The CID officer in charge of the raid introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Ian Ferguson — a fellow Scot, for all the difference that made. He was from West End Central police station, with a warrant from Bow Street Magistrates Court to search my flat in Crouch End, North London, for explosive substances and weapons. I felt like telling him that he had it all wrong — this was not the Cadogan Hotel, nor was I Oscar Wilde. But he might not have appreciated the Betjemanesque allusion The arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel so I restrained myself, having learned over the years not to be a ‘A thump, and a murmur of voices— smartarse to Scotsmen with pointy caps, even if they are not (“Oh why must they make such a din?”) wearing them at the time. They then proceeded to rip up As the door of the bedroom swung open And Two Plain Clothes POLICEMEN came in: floorboards, dismantle my prized reel-to-reel tape recorder and the ‘Mr. Woilde, we’ave come for to take yew bed, rummage through cupboards and drawers, throwing ‘Where felons and criminals dwell, everything into the middle of the floor. Trying to look behind the ‘We must ask yew to leave with us quoietly ‘For this is the Cadogan Hotel.’ wallpaper, they nearly pulled down the ceiling. One even plunged John Betjeman his hand down the lavatory pan. Pulling the bed away from the wall, they turfed out the cupboard behind. ‘Chrise!’ two of them cried in unison, ‘Wossiss?’ ‘Leaflets,’ I said. They had already passed over small packages of these in the drawers without comment. Seen in neatly stacked bundles of fifty at a time, done up with rubber bands, they seemed just what they were, innocuous political gimmicks. Seen in bulk, several thousand dollar bills have a traumatic effect on the viewer. They even had a traumatic effect on me — and I had printed them. The notes were propaganda leaflets to be used in a First of May Group action directed against the US Air Force base at Torrejón, and by no stretch of imagination could they be considered forgeries intended to deceive for gain. Una They were printed on poor quality paper in the form of US dollar bills, but Vida instead of ‘One Dollar’, the inscription said Una Vida (‘One Life’) — overprinted in red, with the words Primero de Mayo (‘First of May’) and ‘Is this worth the slaughter in Vietnam?’. Even the feeblest-minded Monopoly player

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Detective Sergeant Roy Cremer, Metropolitan Police Special Branch

would never have accepted these in payment for Liverpool Street Station. But the Metropolitan Police, the director of public prosecutions, Sir Norman Skelhorn, and the US Secret Service thought otherwise. Sergeant Ferguson was perplexed by his discovery. He had come to find guns and bombs, and instead he had stumbled upon an amateurish international forgery ring that couldn’t even spell ‘dollar’. He asked me what Una Vida meant. Meanwhile, the other sleuths went back to the drawers, picking out the little rolls they had previously passed over with disdain. They waved the packets about eagerly as if each were a nail in my coffin. ‘Lookadiss, Sarge — here’s another bundle . . . ’ ‘They’re all the bloody same,’ I said. I could see my lack of drama hurt them a little. Ferguson called down to the police officers searching my flatmate Ross’s room. Then a shadow seemed to glide up the stairs. Out of the gloom emerged the lugubrious-looking figure of suave ennui — Detective Sergeant Roy Cremer of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch. Cremer was Scotland Yard’s ‘anarchist expert.’ He was clearly a key officer in the investigation, although, as on later occasions, no mention was made of him in the subsequent court case. ‘Why me?’ I asked Ferguson rather ingenuously. Why I had been selected for a raid under an explosives warrant? He said it was obvious: I had a record for this sort of thing. ‘Bollocks,’ I retorted; I’d never had a conviction in my life. Surely they didn’t count Francoist courts martial! What next? Would they be arresting SOE and SIS agents who had survived the Gestapo in wartime Europe, or people sentenced by Stalinist or Maoist courts?

Planted explosives

Ariane Gransac Sadori and Octavio Alberola

The police were investigating a mortar device planted in a tub with a shrub opposite the Greek Embassy. Their presumption was that the First of May group was behind it, but they were wrong. The device had nothing to do with the First of May Group. I understand British libertarians were in fact responsible for the action. I said to the DS that it sounded quite an imaginative and professional operation, but added that my only experience with explosives had been as a courier, and I had been shown to be a distinct amateur in the field. The raid was no speculative ‘fishing expedition.’ The police were working on information received from the Francoist secret police who had, as I later discovered, infiltrated at least two agents into the First of May Group in France. Neither of these had yet been exposed. Octavio Alberola — the coordinator of the First of May Group and named by Franco’s secret police, the Brigada PoliticoSocial, as Spain’s Public Enemy Number One — had been arrested with his partner, Ariane Gransac, two weeks earlier in Brussels, during secret negotiations between Spain and the European Union over the former’s admission into the Common Market. The Belgian police — who kept the arrests secret — claimed that Octavio and Ariane had been planning to kidnap Franco’s chief negotiator at the talks, Antonio Garrigues y Díaz-Caabate, one of

For A Few Dollars More

Franco’s infamous ‘Fifth Columnists’ inside Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. Octavio had called a press conference in Brussels to denounce this diplomatic manoeuvre aimed at giving legitimacy to the Franco regime, and to remind the world of the plight of Franco’s political prisoners. But in Crouch End that day they found no bombs, guns, or explosive devices — only fake US dollar bills. When they finished searching Ferguson asked me to accompany them to another address, for which they also had a search warrant. They wouldn’t tell me where we were going. I was escorted downstairs to a waiting car where they stuffed my Una Vidas into the boot, much to the amazement of the slack-jawed neighbours congregating on the pavement outside our front door and leaning out of their windows. The police wanted me with them while the other premises were being searched. If they found anything, presumably I was to be readily available as a fall guy. I'd heard of people being driven to crime by the police, but I hadn't known that they used Hillman Hunter saloon cars. DS Cremer didn't seem particularly interested in the cod dollar bills. But for Ferguson they were an unexpected bonus and he beamed with joy throughout or journey. Cremer wanted to know if the words First of May had something to do with the First of May Group which, since 1966, had been responsible for direct actions targeting the Francoist regime, including the shooting-up of the US Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square the previous August. Personally, I had a cast-iron alibi for that incident. I had been securely banged up in a fortress prison on the outskirts of Madrid, but Cremer poohpoohed that as irrelevant. It was the target that mattered. He knew from Interpol and Spanish secret police files that I was closely linked to Octavio Alberola. That was true enough, but I didn’t think it was a crime. Cremer was convinced that Alberola had organised if not taken part in the attack on the American Embassy. His ‘proof’ was the statement that he had been in England a short time before the incident. I was often to come across this line of reasoning among police officers. It ran: you were there ‘a few days previously’ or even ‘a few months previously,’ and it suggests guilt when in fact it proves innocence — its meaning depends on the emphasis of the words. Our destination was the Fulham office of Freedom Press. Freedom was the anarchist weekly paper founded by a group including Charlotte Wilson and Peter Kropotkin in the 1880s. The search produced nothing more suspicious than a bottle of correcting fluid used for the duplicator stencils. Ferguson sniffed it apprehensively until I told him people did that sort of thing for kicks, whereupon he self-consciously put it down. They asked, hopefully, if there was a garden, and whether there was any weedkiller on the premises; sodium chlorate being a key ingredient of home-made explosives. There was every reason that weedkiller should have been on the premises, since the back garden was like the Amazon rainforest. Fortunately, there was none. Had there been any weedkiller we might have found ourselves facing heavy prison sentences. We drove from Fulham to West End Central Police Station where I was told

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

I would be held until the director of public prosecutions could decide on my fate. Nobody appeared to know whether or not to take the dollar bills seriously. Cremer seemed to treat them with contempt; perhaps that was his Special Branch mentality; Ferguson was sure some charge could be made to stick. But, after keeping me hanging around for half an hour or so, they said I could go. No charges would be made, at least not until Sir Norman Skelhorn, the DPP, was washed and shaved and able to attend to such important matters. Heigh-ho. I breathed a deep sigh of relief and my heart rate slowly returned Albert’s bookshop to normal. I made my own way back to Albert’s print shop by bus rather than take up the kind offer of a police car. We had a big job on The World Turned Upside Down that day, we were printing 1649 — Diggers and Levellers. In 1649, to Saint George’s Hill, A ragged band they called The Diggers came to show the people's will. The core of the book was, in my view, one of the great They defied the landlords, they defied the law. revolutionary texts in the English language — ‘A They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs. Declaration to the Powers of England and the Powers of the World.’ I wondered what the Diggers and Levellers ‘We come in peace’ they said, ‘to dig and sow. We come to work the land in common and to make the waste-land grow. would have made of that morning’s events. Things This earth divided, we will make whole, hadn’t changed that much since Cromwell’s day. So it can be a common treasury for all.’ Back in Crouch End I discovered that our house, ‘The sin of property, we do disdain. which was in a cul-de-sac, was under surveillance. For No man has any right to buy and sell the earth for private gain. the next week, a Hillman Minx was parked at the end of By theft and murder, they took the land. Now everywhere the walls spring up at their command.’ the road morning, noon and night with men taking notes and possibly photographs, of everyone who came and ‘They make the laws, to chain us well. The clergy dazzle us with heaven or they damn us into hell. went. We will not worship the god they serve; As Ross and I went out to work in the morning — The god of greed who feeds the rich while poor men starve.’ Ross to Bassetts’ Liquorice Allsorts factory and me down ‘We work, we eat together, we need no swords. to Coptic Street — we would give them a smile and a We will not bow to the masters nor pay rent to the lords. wave, wishing them good morning. Some neighbours We are free men, though we are poor. You diggers all stand up for glory, stand up now.’ commented on the suspicious characters in the car and I suggested they ‘phone the local police — who knew From the men of property what they were up to?’ — but I was deprived of the The orders came. They sent the hired men and troopers pleasure of seeing the local police come round to take on To wipe out the Diggers claim. the Gestapo. Tear down their cottages, Destroy their corn. But the affair didn’t end there. I was later to receive a They were dispersed — summons to appear at Highgate Magistrates’ Court But still the vision lingers on. charged with having in my possession four thousand ‘You poor take courage. pieces of paper upon which had been ‘printed words, You rich take care. marks, and devices similar to and used on banknotes of The earth was made a common treasury For everyone to share. one dollar by the United States of America contrary to All things in common, section 9(z) of the Forgery Act 1913.’ All people one. I appreciated their point of view to some extent, We come in peace’ — The order came to cut them down: though no doubt one shouldn't; the Anarchist Black Cross’s work for the anarchist prisoners in Spain was not ‘We come in peace’ — The order came to cut them down. that of just another charity. Our objectives were clear and Leon Rosselson tangible: to get activist prisoners out of jail and back into

‘Juan El Largo’

the struggle. We hoped that once people were made aware of the prisoners’ situation and how they could help them directly, they would also start asking how they had got there in the first place.

Big bad John On the morning of 3 March, four days after the raid, the surveillance team was gone. Six closely coordinated explosions had occurred that morning in three countries, damaging the buildings of US military and Spanish diplomatic missions in London, The Hague and Turin. In London the Spanish Embassy and the US Officers’ Club had been hit. All the actions had been claimed by the First of May Group. It was obvious the police had advance information on the attacks, but not enough. Nor did the withdrawal of the Hillman Minx and Hillman Hunters mean I was now cleared of suspicion. It was simply that they thought I was too cunning to get caught in such an obvious way. For them, I was the First of May Group’s ‘man in London,’ being the only reference point they had in Britain. They knew I was in regular contact with the group’s principal activists in France, Belgium and Italy, but at the time that was insufficient evidence on which to arrest, charge and convict suspects, in Britain at any rate. Alberola’s arrest in Belgium was not made public until 5 March. Intriguingly, it wasn’t a Belgian, French or Spanish paper which broke the story; it was the Times. The prestigious Establishment broadsheet gave over half a page to a detailed article which quoted a senior French policeman who

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Observer,19 May 1968

identified Alberola, whom he referred to as ‘Juan el largo’ (‘Big John’) — as le numéro un. Alberola, he said, was the prime suspect for the bombings in London, but neither he nor the journalist provided any evidence to back up this statement, other than the fact that he was a staunch anti-Francoist. The Times may not have gone to great lengths to get its stories, but on this occasion it certainly plumbed the depths for them. The highly tendentious report concluded: ‘For British police, the question must be whether the group has recruited sympathisers in London who are prepared to help it. It seems unlikely that any organisation would or could organise a hit and-run raid from foreign territory twice.’ The French newspaper L’Aurore was the next to pick up the story, following First of May Group bomb attacks on the Paris offices of TransWorld Airlines and two US banks — Chase Manhattan and the Bank of America. The rightwing paper warned of a ‘red-hot summer’ as did the more respected French weekly L’Express (11–17 March) with a remarkably similarly worded attack by its Netherlands correspondent on the First of May Group. The headline stated: ‘Anarchists prepare a hot summer.’ All the press reports looked as though they came from a common source, which certainly was not anarchist. No one had any idea as to what that summer would hold, but there was a feeling that something was in the air. The times they were a-changin’; all we could do was to keep pushing back the limits of protest. On 30 April 1968, I received a visit in the early evening from Detective Sergeant Ferguson to tell me my forgery case was listed to be heard the next day — 1 May — at Highgate Magistrates’ Court. My solicitor, Ben Birnberg, had already been informed and was waiting outside the court when I arrived the following morning. DS Ferguson told the magistrates there was no evidence of criminal intent with regard to the forged dollar bills, but the Spain-dollar link had a clear political message and it seemed to me they wanted me either in prison, or to have a Damoclean sword dangling over my head in the shape of a ‘suspended’ prison sentence. At the very least I would then have a ‘previous’ conviction in this country. Up to that point I had no criminal record in Britain The committal proceedings were brief, but not without a moment of light relief when the magistrates mistook the guilty exhibits for photostat copies and asked for the originals, which gives some idea of their value as forgeries! They were, of course, poor-quality litho reprints of a modified dollar bill, which I had spent the whole night printing in Albert Meltzer’s Pentonville Road office. Perhaps it was no coincidence that they chose the First of May as the date for the hearing. Maybe the authorities thought that it was a day when I would be better occupied in court, in case I had other plans with the First of May Group. The magistrates committed me to appear at the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey. ‘Dearie me,’ I thought when the summons arrived in the post, ‘from “terrorist” to “forger” and “defacer of the currency” — another fine pickle.’ I pondered on what the sentence would be if I did go down. I thought back to August 1964 and wondered if the next four years would prove just as dramatic.

Protest Against Belgium?

Why Belgium! ‘Protest against Belgium?’ The Embassy’s Chargé d’Affaires in London looked annoyed. ‘There are a lot more appropriate targets than the Belgian Embassy, I would have thought,’ he told me stiffly. Well, that was perfectly true. I had to reassure him. ‘We’ll consider those. too,’ I said. ‘But at the moment I'm representing the Anarchist Black Cross and we are protesting against the threatened deportation of Octavio Alberola from Belgium.’ As mentioned earlier, Octavio and his companion, the artist Ariane Gransac, had been arrested in Brussels, on information passed to the Belgian authorities by a Spanish secret police informant through Interpol. No doubt they would have preferred to shoot him down in the street, as Stalin’s agents had done with anarchist union organiser Carlo Tresca in New York in 1943; or at least to make his death appear an accident as the Italian police were to try the following year in the case of Giuseppe Pinelli. This was the incident on which Italian dramatist Dario Fo based his play Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Spain, at the time, was involved in advanced negotiations to join the Common Market and Franco had sent a senior government minister, Antonio Garrigues y Dìaz-Caabate, to Brussels to discuss terms of entry. As Spain’s reputation was about zero at the time, the murder of a leading anti-Francoist on the streets of Brussels would not have been the most diplomatic of moves. Octavio had two pistols and false identity papers on him when arrested, which he argued, in court, were for his personal protection. Franco’s secret police wanted him dead, and there had been at least one attempt to kill or kidnap him and take him to Spain. In fact, so dangerous was Octavio considered by the Franco’s regime that it had sent a death squad to Mexico City and murdered his father, the writer, teacher and academic José Alberola, one of the founding members of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) in 1927. Alberola senior’s mutilated body was discovered in his apartment on the morning of 1 May 1967. He had been tied to a chair, tortured, presumably in an attempt to find out the whereabouts in Europe of his son, and then coldbloodedly murdered. Alberola’s arrest was just one incident in a chain reaction of events that took place that Spring of ‘68. In the run-up to Octavio Alberola’s trial (Ariane had been deported) there had been many international protests. In Belgium itself anti-fascists and trade unionists organised protests marches, pickets and had bombarded the foreign and justice ministries with petitions in support of the anti-Francoist. Faced with such intense international and domestic pressure and the Belgian people’s innate distaste for the Franco regime, the court accepted Octavio’s defence and he received a nominal two months' imprisonment for illegal possession of arms. Having already served this sentence waiting for trial, he was allowed to leave the court a half-free man. I say half-free because his

Franco’s man: Antonio Garrigues

José Alberola Navarro

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application for political asylum had been refused and he was still liable for deportation to Spain. Of course this would mean his almost certain death. Octavio was placed under an ‘area confinement’ order at a chateau near Liège in northern Belgium, where the coöperative movement had offered him a job as assistant director at a school for deprived children. The director was another Spanish anarchist exile, Francisco Abarca, whose extradition had been sought four years earlier by the Swiss authorities for attacks on aeroplanes belonging to the Francoist state airline, Iberia. Ariane, being a French citizen, was expelled to France. In Britain, the Anarchist Black Cross organised a campaign in support of Alberola, and that was how I had come to call on the Belgian Chargé d’Affaires. That Octavio had been in real danger of being sent back to Spain was evident from the fact that the prosecution argued that the anarchists’ plan was not simply to hold a press conference, but to kidnap Antonio Garrigues, Franco’s Ambassador to the EEC. The Chargé d'Affaires was sympathetic and assured me the Belgian government recognised Alberola’s integrity and honoured his record as an antifascist, adding that he himself had fought in the Resistance during the war. Alberola, he said, would not face a punitive sentence — if any — and we parted on what I presumed were friendly terms. Late the following evening my doorbell rang; it was Detective Sergeant Roy Cremer accompanied by a man who I assumed was an MI5 officer or a senior Special Branch officer, as he wouldn’t give his name and whom Cremer didn’t introduce. The Sergeant said that someone — presumably the Chargé d’Affaires — had alerted ‘them’ that I had agreed that there were a lot more suitable targets than the Belgian embassy, which we would consider. What exactly had I meant by that? It was a ‘fishing trip,’ to find out what was in the wind regarding possible reprisals for the arrest of Alberola. I was bemused they imagined that if I knew I would tell them. On later reflection, I saw they were marking my cards that if and when the next action occurred I would be the principal suspect. It was a useful lesson in the close relationship between diplomats, the Foreign Office and the Metropolitan Police Special Branch. March 1968 teemed with a sequence of seemingly unrelated and random global events, all of which appeared to be coalescing to a point of synchronicity. New anti-hierarchical and libertarian movements were appearing in campuses all over the industrial world. In Spain’s universities — in Madrid, Seville, Zaragoza, Santiago de Compostella, Bilbao and even the Opus Dei university in Navarre. Although the Vietnam War and students played an important part in what was happening, it was far from being simply an anti-Vietnam War or student phenomenon. Similar developments were taking place in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Japan and in the United States where worker- and student-led strikes, demonstrations and protests were erupting quite spontaneously everywhere. Things were also moving fast in the Soviet

Grosvenor Square — 17 March, 1968

sphere of influence, with major anti-Soviet demonstrations taking place in Poland and in Czechoslovakia where the so-called ‘Prague Spring’ was now under way.

Ross Flett, 17 March 1968

Grosvenor Square — 17 March, 1968 When President Johnson announced on 16 March he was escalating the war by sending up to 50,000 more troops to Vietnam, the defiant response on the streets was immediate — and furious. Angry anti-war protestors took to the streets of every major city of the industrialised democracies, and the offices of US government buildings and corporations subjected to violent attacks everywhere. In Britain, the Trotskyist ad-hoc Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) led by, among others, Tariq Ali, quickly organised what turned out to be a massively successful protest march for 17 March, which brought around 25,000 demonstrators to the US Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square. The mood was such that we were ready to batter down the gates of Troy, let alone the US Embassy. Mounted police were used to break up the demonstration, and there were at least 300 arrests. This led to the VSC demo being repudiated and denounced by both the Communist and Labour Parties; and was strongly disapproved of by the official trades union movement, the TUC, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), Britain largest anti-war grouping, then mainly controlled by the Labour and Communist parties. The CND and Labour and Communist parties were remarkably prescient in not supporting the march. It turned out to be probably the most significant and widely publicised demonstration of the 1960s — and possibly the most confrontational. It also changed the nature of protest in the UK and brought it home to those with a vested interest in

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Jean-Pierre Duteuil (below), Nanterre Liaison des etudiants anarchistes. Photo: Ken Sutherland

Easter, 1968: Nanterre anarchists on the Aldermaston march. (Dominique Martine in foreground, with scarf)

keeping things as they were that for the first time since the Georgian era there was a real threat of public violence and civil — perhaps even revolutionary — disorder engulfing the streets of Britain. The mobile vulgus — the mob — was on the streets expressing its anger and frustration with America’s hegemonic foreign policy. Assessing the 17 March demonstration’s importance, the magazine New Society (21/3/1968) said: ‘The demonstration was something new, something that indicates the pattern of major protests we shall have in the future... things cannot be the same again after Sunday. The time of the orderly peace platform marchers are gone... The departure from orthodox CND type marches could be seen in the demonstration’s method of moving down streets, in its reaction to the police, in its speakers and in its platform... The 17 March demonstration had become street occupation... the idea was to seize the area, not march on the side of the road... the aim was maximum disruption... The main lesson was that the British tradition of polite politics is past.’ Equally, for the thousands who took part in the bloody Grosvenor Square confrontation with the police, things were never going to be quite the same again. The impact of the demonstration may well have contributed to the sudden death three days later, on 20 March, of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Joseph Simpson. The atmosphere in London was so thick with tension you could have cut it up and sold it as briquettes. Anarchists from all over Europe were turning up regularly at the Coptic Street bookshop or our print shop in Pentonville Road. Some would stay at my flat in Crouch End. Among our visitors were students from the 15 or so strong Liaison des étudiants anarchistes (LEA) at the Nanterre faculties of sociology and psychology: Jean-Pierre Duteuil, Dominique Martine, Élysée and Lydia Georgiev, Georges Brossard, and others including Dany Cohn-Bendit — known by the media as ‘Dany the Red’ because of his carrot-red hair. Dany, a 23-year old German student at Nanterre, had been at the centre of a major row, having been suspended from university for publicly denouncing Françoise Missof, the French Minister of Youth and Sports during the opening of a swimming pool in Nanterre. He had been threatened with sanctions, including the possibility of being deported. The LEA members were highly critical of the way sociology was being taught at university level, as a means of controlling and manipulating society, not as a means of understanding in order to change it. Along with the Trotskyists from the Jeunesse communiste revolutionnaire (JCR), Alain Krivine’s group they proved to be constant irritants to the French Ministry of Education and the paternalistic Nanterre faculty administration. They regularly organised demonstrations, boycotts of courses and exams, meetings on sexuality, anti-militarism, fighting fascism, the lessons of the Spanish Revolution, support for Spanish prisoners, education and trade unionism — and openly defied the ban on males visiting the women’s quarters.

22 March Movement

22 March Movement Jean-Pierre Duteuil, Dany and three Trotskyists, the five alleged ringleaders of what was now known as the 22 March Movement, were then summoned to appear before the University of Paris’s disciplinary committee on 3 May. At the height of all this radical hullabaloo in France that Easter, Jean-Pierre Duteuil and a few of the Nanterre anarchists — like many other anarchists from all over Europe came to London, as they did every year, for the big anti-nuclear Aldermaston March. Rudi Dutschke, the German student spokesman, had been shot and seriously injured the previous week by a right-winger following a hate campaign orchestrated by the Springer press group. On reaching Trafalgar Square on the Easter Monday, 15 April, many of the protestors decided, quite spontaneously, to continue the march to Axel Springer’s offices in the Daily Mirror building at High Holborn. They wanted to demonstrate their anger against the German publisher’s campaign of demonisation that had provoked the attempt on Dutschke's life. The Springer conglomerate controlled around 85 per cent of the West German press output at the time and the climate of intolerance it created throughout Germany left people in no doubt as to who was responsible. Similar demonstrations against the Springer group were taking place all over Europe that weekend. Chatting in the pub afterwards with Jean-Pierre Duteuil and other 22 March movement people, they were amazed at the turnout of at least 25,000 — and perhaps even as many as 100,000 people. They had been beavering away trying to generate anti-Vietnam War activity over the previous six months and no way, they said, would it be possible, in Paris, to attract a fraction of the numbers on the streets of London that weekend. The French people, they said, were apathetic and conservative. But they were wrong, very wrong.

20 March, 1968: anti-Vietnam War demo, American Express office, Paris

22 March, 1968: anti-Vietnam war demo, Paris Opera 22 March, 1968: occupation of Nanterre University admin building

A few weeks earlier, on 20 March, anarchist students from the Sorbonne and Nanterre campuses had occupied the Paris American Express office and a number of them had been arrested. Two days later, on 22 March, during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration outside the Opera, another 34 students were arrested. When they returned that night to Nanterre feelings were running high. One thing led to another and by the early hours of the following morning 142 anarchists Trotskyists, Maoists and independent Marxists, had taken over Nanterre’s main administration building. The students were angry and frustrated. This covert police operation had been going on since the big demonstrations the previous November. Up until this point, the unrest — apart from the anti-Vietnam war protests — had focused primarily on university and Ministry of Education issues and things might have passed off peacefully. The Dean, however, called in the police. This was the first time French police had raided a campus since the days of the Vichy regime during the Nazi occupation. The students did manage to drive off the first wave of police and retain control of the campus for another week, at which point more gendarmes were called in and the campus was officially closed.

11 April, 1968: Rudi Dutschke, shot and wounded by right-wing gunman. Below: police and protestors battle outside the Springer Press Building in West Berlin.

My Granny Made Me An Anarchist

29 March, Nanterre: Dany CohnBendit, being informed that the faculty has been closed. Meetings are moved to the foyer (below).

What Jean Pierre and Dany Cohn-Bendit had not realised was that they had already set in train the sequence of events that was to bring France to the very brink of revolution. The spark was a student demonstration against the Vietnam War outside the Paris offices of the American Express in the Rue Scribe on 20 March, 1968. During the protest the Amex window was broken, students were arrested, further demonstrations followed leading to the occupation of the Nanterre faculty on the night of 22 March — and so it began. Looking back on Jean-Pierre’s comments just three weeks later, I was amazed that the apparently inconsequential actions of this small group of anarchist and non-aligned Marxist students had triggered such an unprecedented movement of political, social, cultural and industrial demands, that it had brought the whole of France to the verge of a profound social revolution. It had also unmasked, again, the counter-revolutionary nature of the Communist Party and its support for the established order. It just shows you can never predict or second-guess revolution. It is people, not parties or leaders, who — apart from wars, such as Iraq — shape the pivotal moments in history.

Paris Today, Hornsey Tomorrow!

Dany Cohn-Bendit (l) and Jean-Pierre Duteuil. 3 May 1968: Sorbonne courtyard.

On the night of May 3, we had been out for a bevvy in our local, the Queen’s in Crouch End Broadway. Because my flat at 2a Fairfield Gardens was within a couple of minutes walk from the pub, people tended to drift back to my place after closing time with a carry-out to continue the ‘cheneral hilarity,’ as Para Handy would say. It was sometime after 11-ish and someone turned on Radio Luxembourg, when there was a news flash — the Sorbonne had been shut, there was rioting in the streets of Paris, cars were burning and barricades had gone up in the Latin Quarter. Earlier that day, several of the anarchists who occupied the Nanterre campus, including Jean Pierre Duteuil and Dany Cohn-Bendit, had been summoned to the Sorbonne to appear before the university’s disciplinary panel. In solidarity, the Nanterre students had called for a protest demonstration in the Sorbonne courtyard. Hundreds of protestors from across the radical leftist political spectrum turned up to support them. The exception was the Communist students’ union, who denounced it as a provocation. The real provocation was provided by the Sorbonne rector Paul Roche, who panicked and called in the hated French riot police, the Compagnie Républicaine de Securité, the CRS. The violence and heavy-handed way in which the CRS handled the situation, beating up and arresting students for trespass was catalytic. The university campus was sacrosanct, and apparently not even during the Nazi occupation had the police entered in an official capacity. The police action had the immediate effect of bringing more people onto the streets. Within hours students and young workers had taken over the Latin Quarter, chanting slogans calling for the release of their arrested comrades, the reopening of the university and the withdrawal of the police from the Sorbonne. The CRS and the gendarmes over-reacted by trying to break

‘Aux Barricades!’

up these demonstrations with baton charges and beating up literally anyone on the street, all of which further exacerbated the situation and triggering the more violent street fighting which followed. Meanwhile, back in my flat in Crouch End, a crowd of maybe eight of us sprawled on the floor, the bed, the table and the one solitary chair, tightly clutching our cans of McEwans, enthralled by the noisy chants, the shouting, the whoosh of exploding petrol bombs, the sounds of breaking glass and police sirens broadcast direct from the streets of Paris. Was this the big one? Was it the start of an insurrection — a re-run of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Kronstadt Republic of May 1917, the revolution of July 1936 in Spain? Whatever it was, it was a wake-up call, a break with the past, a defining moment, a turning point — and who could say where the fortuities and chance occurrences of the next couple of days might lead? Slightly pissed but euphoric and our hearts pounding with anticipation, everyone in the room jumped to their feet, grabbed the brushes and large cans of white emulsion and gloss we had bought to paint the flat, and raced downstairs, out the door and up Crouch End Broadway to Hornsey Town Hall to announce the birth of a new society. ‘Paris Today, Hornsey Tomorrow!’ was the slogan we scrawled across the full width of the building’s imposing façade. There was no doubt about it. We would make sure that by the following morning the good burghers of Hornsey would know the Revolution had begun. But our triumphalism was short-lived. By 10 am the next day the forces of reaction in the form of Haringey Borough Council had stepped in and their cleansing department had almost obliterated our handiwork — almost, but not quite. The ghostly outline of that night’s work remained for many years; it certainly outlasted our hoped-for revolution. Les événements in Paris lasted a bit longer, six or seven weeks perhaps, but the extent, significance and importance of what began on the night of 3 May is still unclear almost forty years later. May 1968 certainly spelled the end of one period and the beginning of another. Within 24 hours what had begun as an exclusively student-oriented dispute had erupted into a much wider social and industrial struggle. Two days later, by 5 May, Paris was witnessing the worst street fighting since the Liberation in 1944, with up to 30,000 students, young workers and the unemployed confronting de Gaulle’s CRS riot police across the barricades — always the best way to get a clear view of the enemy. The CRS entered the Latin Quarter the next day, 6 May, and brutally attacked a 20,000 strong protest march from Denfert Rochereau to St Germain de Prés. They arrested 422 and at least 800 protestors and innocent bystanders were injured in the brutal and indiscriminate matraquages (clubbings) which followed. The protests and demonstrations quickly spread to other French towns and cities. Throughout this time the Stalinist French Communist Party, the PCF, had been denouncing the young activists as groupuscules (extraparliamentary

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

revolutionary groups consisting of a couple of hundred members at most) and provocateurs — the privileged children of the high bourgeoisie serving Gaullist objectives. But by 8 May the Stalinist French Communist Party realised that what was happening was the emergence of a genuinely popular mass movement whose themes were anti-capitalist, internationalist and egalitarian. It was also a movement that was outside the Party’s control which quickly led it to shift its position to one of apparent support for the demonstrators. By 11 May the occupations had extended to secondary schools and colleges, with pupils and teachers marching in protest en masse through the Latin Quarter. The Minister of the Interior, Fouchet, and deputy prime minister Foux, ordered Paris police chief, Grimoud, to clear the streets — no matter what the cost. This order, in turn, sparked the infamous ‘night of the barricades,’ when protestors stood up to the hordes of sinister black-uniformed CRS charging their way down the Latin Quarter’s rue Gay-Lussac. Over a thousand people were injured that night, and at least 500 were arrested. When the TV and photographic images — burning cars, baton-wielding CRS goons attacking anyone and everyone in sight, young people throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, masked against the acrid fumes of CS gas — were flashed across France and the world they caught the imagination and inspired solidarity across the world. On 13 May over a million French workers, employed and unemployed, and students marched through central Paris carrying the red and black flags of socialism and anarchism. The Movement of 22 March, the libertarian group from Nanterre who had started the ball rolling ten days earlier, announced that the ‘struggle against repression,’ was now the ‘struggle against the State.’ At this point, the French state made an important tactical decision which provides an interesting glimpse into the political processes at work. That same day, 13 May, prime minister Georges Pompidou ordered the CRS to withdraw from the Sorbonne, allowing the students to occupy it, exactly as the authorities hoped. The government’s plan was to isolate the students from the escalating workers movement and contain them within the Latin Quarter. Whereas before the police were under orders to keep the revolutionaries out of the Latin Quarter, now they had to ensure they didn’t leave. The occupation of the Sorbonne faculty led to an extraordinary intellectual explosion. Every lecture hall and seminar room was filled to overflowing, day and night, with people enthusiastically debating every conceivable political, cultural and social idea. The intensity and spread of the intellectual debate is difficult to recapture, but it is interesting to note that during the period MayJune, the sale of books in Paris jumped by 40 per cent. One myth that has to be scotched here is that of Situationist influence on May ‘68, at least according to my Nanterre friends from the 22 March movement who were present at the birth. They assure me that although both Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem’s Revolution of

Aftermath of May 1968

Everyday Life were both published in 1967 and surreal graffiti were on the walls, Vaneigem and Debord provided little if any intellectual inspiration during the uprising. Their main contribution came later. Certainly the writings of Herbert Marcuse play no part at the time. In a book published in 1970, La révole étudiante, Dany Cohn-Bendit wrote: ‘People wanted to blame Marcuse as our mentor; that’s a joke. Not one of us had read Marcuse. Some of us had read Marx, maybe Bakunin and, among contemporary writers, Althusser, Mao, Guevara and Henri Lefevre. The political militants of the 22 March group have almost all read Sartre.’ Marcuse’s book One Dimensional Man only became fashionable after the events of May 1968, likewise with Guy Debord’s 1967 Society of the Spectacle. The only Situationist text that had been widely read and circulated before May ’68 was the Algerian Mustapha Khayati’s On The Poverty of Student Life, published in Strasbourg in 1966. I should also add that although anarchist critiques of power, and libertarian ideas of self management and anti-hierarchical structures were prevalent throughout the events of May, and for a considerable time afterwards, the organised anarchist movement had little influence other than in Nanterre and the parts played by individual militants in the weeks that followed.

Read: Jean Paul Sartre

Values, not economics Something happened around this time. Out of the acrid smoke of the CS gas a fearless radical political culture was born which affected everyone: students, workers — intellectual, industrial, agricultural and professional — and the unemployed. Whatever it was that took hold, it was clearly radical ideas and values that were driving the May events, not economics. These events had a deep political and moral resonance, not only in Paris but across France. People who had previously been average militant trades unionists and obstreperous students, began, through their direct experiences, to acquire a class consciousness and perceive themselves as revolutionaries involved in a liberation struggle, similar in a way to those taking place in South East Asia, South America and Africa. The war in Algeria still loomed large in the French political psyche, as did to a lesser extent France’s imperial role in Indo-China. Who knows, perhaps the events of May provided an opportunity for people to redeem themselves for the things that had been done to oppressed people in the name of France — and maybe even that of the Communist Party. Decolonisation and deStalinisation appeared to be two inextricably-linked processes of the time. Anyway, for whatever reasons, the police violence, the street-fighting and the tactical and strategic debates certainly gave participants and observers a practical and theoretical sense that revolutionary change was indeed possible, providing they could maintain the momentum and push the limits that bit further. Quite spontaneously, people began to emerge from the narrow boxes and confines of their everyday lives and cross hitherto impenetrable social barriers, They began to discuss and conduct their affairs collectively. The human

Unread: Herbert Marcuse

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

warmth, feel-good mood, fellow-feeling and common sense of purpose that swept across social and generational sectors was extraordinary. It was almost as though mankind was remaking itself. Jean Paul Sartre said of the May Days: ‘They expanded the field of the possible.’ The strike movement itself took off on 14 May with the first major factory occupation by the Sud Aviation workers in Nantes. Interestingly, Sud Aviation’s president was Maurice Papon, the Nazi collaborator and former head of the Paris prefecture, the man responsible for the cold-blooded police massacre of up to two hundred Algerians in Paris on 4 October 1961. Some of these had been drowned by having their hands tied behind their backs and thrown from the bridges into the River Seine. The Sud Aviation sit-in, which was probably a response to Papon’s management techniques, was followed the next day by workers at the Renault car factory at Cléon — and the occupation by its employees (many of them anarchists) of the Odeón Theatre in Paris. This was a whole new ball game in which the initiative had passed to the rank-and-file workers of the main French labour unions — the largest of which was the Communist CGT, followed by the CFDT and then Force Ouvrière. Soon, over 122 factories throughout France were occupied by their workers. Factory occupations had last been heard of in 1936, under the Popular Front. It was a strong signal of worker solidarity with the revolutionaries and of the widespread dissatisfaction among the rank-and file with the normal union processes of strikes and picket lines. The country appeared to be moving very close to the brink of revolution. By Tuesday 21 May over ten million workers across all sectors — public, private, agricultural, industrial, service and communications industries — had stopped work. France was in a state of almost complete paralysis. But les événements not only inspired revolutionary hope, they also struck real fear into the metaphorical hearts of the authorities — and the French Communist Party. As in all great events, there are features that illustrate the movement’s objective. For some, at least, of those who took part, the idea of revolution had quickly become the central feature of the May Days of 1968. They tended to think — as did I — of revolution in similar terms to those of the Paris Commune of March, April and May 1871, the Russian Revolution of October 1917, or a modern replay of the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1937. But maybe these were archaic notions. Who could say what form the transfer of power to the workers in 1968 would take, but it certainly wouldn’t be painless. Central to everything, we thought, was the role of the working class, but in France the organised working class was dominated by the functionaries of the highly-disciplined and giant labour union, the CGT, which in turn was firmly controlled by the Stalinist French Communist Party, the PCF — and they were having none of it. The PCF was not a revolutionary party; it saw itself as above classes and the guardian of the interests of the French nation. The strike movement,which by 21 May, had spread through every region and industry of France, began as a rank-and-file phenomenon, outside and

The Tumult And The Shouting Dies

beyond the control of the French unions. It was the members who had gone on strike, not the unions. This loss of control was a serious threat to the unions, particularly to the power and influence of the PCF and the CGT and their apparatchiks immediately set about re-establishing control over their members. When the CGT functionaries became involved in the take-over of the factories and public services it was not with the intention of socialising them and running them under workers’ control. Far from it. Their strategy was to divide and separate workers, their members, from the revolutionary movement by locking them out and excluding the students, intellectuals, and unemployed workers from further contact with the workers in the occupied factories. CGT officials also used every trick in the book to break the strike, including having their union officials go round the factories telling their members it was all over and to return to work. Neither of the two major French unions, the CGT and CFDT, were ever on the side of the revolutionaries; they merely used the situation as a bargaining chip in wage negotiations and to give them political leverage with de Gaulle and the French middle classes. The role played by the French Communist Party in May 1968 paralleled that played by the Spanish Communist Party during the Spanish Civil War, that is, counter-revolutionary. By the end of May the CGT had completely dissociated itself from the revolutionary movement. Without a mobilised working class, no revolution was possible. And although there was an angry uprising in May 1968, there was no insurrection, no break with the past, and no attempt to dismantle the State. Unlike revolutionary Spain in July 1936, when State power was seized by the barrio committees and the militias, in France there was no grassroots movement to take over and collectivise the factories and the land, or to run the other key service sectors of public life — and the ‘revolutionaries’ were all too busy talking themselves blue in the face in the Sorbonne! President de Gaulle, meanwhile, refused to back down and flew in secret to Baden Baden in Germany on 28 May to seek the backing of General Massu, the C-in-C of the French Army of the Rhine. Massu promised him the support of the army and de Gaulle then returned to Paris, dissolved the National Assembly and announced new elections. Speaking on national radio and television he told the French people that France was facing a Communist coup, and that the army was with him, and he would not hesitate to call on it to restore order as and when necessary. He also authorised the Prefects of France’s regions — as ‘Commissioners of the Republic’— to use all the powers at their disposal to ‘suppress subversion.’ Hardly had de Gaulle’s words ‘Vive la France!’ died away before a million loyal Gaullists and extremists of the centre and right were being bussed and trained into Paris from all over France to hit back at the leftists and show their support for ‘law and order.’ It ended in a huge and carefully staged march down the Champs Elysées. Not even the Countryside Alliance could have done better. It was de Gaulle who was proposing a violent resolution of the situation, not

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

After the barricades the bubble burst

the workers or the protagonists of the events of May. There never had been a Communist menace. De Gaulle’s threat to call in the troops was directed not at the students and young workers, but at the trade unionists to try and frighten them into accepting the Grenelle Accords. These were negotiated settlements agreed between the main union leaders and the government between 25 and 27 May in a attempt to break the strike movement and get the workers back to work. The Accords themselves — which allowed for a small increase in the minimum salary and some improvements in working conditions — had been rejected out of hand by the Billancourt, Citroën, Sud-Aviation, and Rhodiaceta workers, among others. De Gaulle may have had the support of the army, but if it had not been for the active support and complicity of the French Communist Party in breaking the solidarity of the ten million strong strike movement and subverting the revolutionary optimism of France by turning the events of May into a wage demand, it might all have been different. The strike movement continued into June, but was finally extinguished with the help of the CRS, the CGT, the PCF and de Gaulle. The last embers of revolt were extinguished by the CRS on 11 June when they went into the Peugeot factory at Sochaux and the Renault factory at Flins. Two workers were killed and over 150 workers and students were badly injured at the hands of the police. But the memory and legacy of May ’68 lingered on.

France ‘68 — a warning from history For the civil servants and politicians in the Whitehall Cabinet Office and for the captains of British industry, May 1968 was something they could not afford to ignore. The speed at which state, government and union authority had imploded when confronted with this totally unforeseen radical popular movement was shocking. France 1968 was a clear warning to governments in almost every industrial country, East and West. Lessons needed to be learned. The core stability of capitalism, state, government and institutional authority had been subverted. Uprisings and violent demonstrations were taking place everywhere: Mexico, Germany, Japan, the United States, Italy, Eastern Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia — all fuelled by America’s war in Vietnam and popular hostility to US, and in the case of eastern Europe, Soviet imperialism. What had happened in France in May could easily happen in Britain in October. The British government needed a contingency plan. The rioting in London’s streets during the 17 March 1968 anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Grosvenor Square, and now the breakdown of the established order in hitherto apparently conservative France seriously worried the Establishment. One of its key players, Cecil King, a director of the Bank of England and publisher of the Daily Mirror, was so convinced that Britain faced institutional meltdown by the threat from the left — compounded by his

A Very British Coup

obsession that prime minister Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent — that on 5 May he sent Mirror editor, Hugh Cudlipp to an urgently arranged meeting with Lord Mountbatten This influential royal earl, the queen’s cousin and her consort’s uncle, had recently retired as chief of the defence staff and King believed that he would be amenable to supporting an army-backed plot to overthrow the Wilson government and replacing it with a so-called ‘government of national unity.’ The IPC chairman had also been holding secret meetings with MoD officials and had addressed junior officers at Sandhurst military academy, calling on them to rise up against the Wilson government. Parallel with these covert activities, King had also been running a virulently anti-Wilson campaign on the front pages of his usually pro-Labour newspaper, demanding the prime minister’s resignation in the face of the country’s grave economic crisis. King’s conspiratorial foreplay leaked out and he was sacked a few days later as chairman of the International Publishing Corporation (IPC) and director of the Bank of England. But King’s fears certainly reflected the mood within the Establishment. A senior army officer at Ashford Barracks, the home of the Intelligence Corps, was reported as saying that planning for the coup had got as far as designating the Shetland Isles a home for ‘internees,’ and drawing up lists of trade union leaders acceptable to a ‘government of national unity.’ They obviously didn’t think too highly of Shetlanders. George Kennedy Young, the ex-deputy director of MI6 and member of the right-wing Monday Club, was also up to his neck in conspiratorial politics, talking about a figure of 5,000 people who would be sent to a gulag in the Scottish Highlands. Clearly they didn’t think too highly of highlanders either. But the Mirror wasn’t the only newspaper involved in the coup machinations. In their book Smear! Wilson and the Secret State, authors Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay claim that ‘Former Times editor Harold Evans specifically stated that the Times, under the editorship of William Rees-Mogg ‘encouraged Cecil King’s lunatic notions of a coup against Harold Wilson’s Labour Government in favour of a government of business leaders led by Lord Robens.’ [Robens was then a director of the Times.] MI5 chief, Sir Martin Furnival-Jones, later reported to Labour’s new Home Secretary, James Callaghan, that the names of the conspirators included ‘civil servants and military,’ including a Major-General. These were aided, according to Harold Wilson’s political secretary, Lady Falkender, by Lord Mountbatten, whom she described as a ‘prime mover’ and assisted by ‘elements in the city.’ Mountbatten apparently had a diagram on his office wall showing how it could all be done. Callaghan apparently never showed Furnival-Jones’ report to Wilson or his Cabinet. Faced with growing social disturbance and the rumours of insurrection fed by the Special Branch, Home Secretary, James Callaghan, advised by James Waddell, head of Home Office security liaison, and Sir Edward Peck, Chairman

The men on white horses?: Lord Mountbatten (top left); Hugh Cudlipp (top right); Cecil King (b/l) and George Kennedy Young (b/r).

James Callaghan MP, Labour Home Secretary 1968.

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

The Cabinet Office

of the Cabinet Office Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), ordered the newly appointed Metropolitan Police commissioner, Sir John Waldron — Sir Joseph Simpson’s successor — and MI5 chief Sir Martin Furnival Jones to re-think the government’s security strategy — and double quick. The enemy was no longer at the gate — it was among us. Academics and intelligence and security experts were tasked to address this threat and come up with some answers. The conclusions they reached were to change, dramatically, the thinking and strategy of the Cabinet Office and the Security Service. The previously held theory that blamed social discontent on small manipulative groups of sad and frustrated malcontents, collapsed overnight — at least as far as the Cabinet Office was concerned — although it was still a useful explanation to hawk around the press, starved as it was of a satisfactory world view with which to celebrate the state-worship for which it was paid. Ferguson Smith, the head of Special Branch, and Dick Thistlethwaite, head of MI5’s ‘F’ branch, the counter-subversive department had, until then, been focusing the energies of their respective departments’ on running informers and agents within the trade union movement and the Communist Party. From the Spring of 1968, however, they shifted their attention from monitoring Communist Party influence in industry to infiltrating agents and cultivating informers within the anti-Vietnam war movement and the anarchist and Trotskyist left. MI5 was also ordered to carry out an urgent subversion threat assessment in time for a report that autumn by the Chiefs of Staff on the ‘Security of the United Kingdom Base in the Pre-Attack Phase of General War,’ (Report D/DISSEC/7/3/1 — 9 September 1968). Whitehall was determined to learn from the French experience, but in a controlled way that would allow the authorities to dominate and defuse any situation that might develop. They had no wish to open a Pandora’s box, unleashing mayhem and revolution on an unsuspecting British public. It was political homoeopathy to kill the radical virus that brought France to its knees and forced de Gaulle to flee to Germany. The government was worried. They knew the events of May were not simply the result of student high jinks. It had been a genuinely prerevolutionary situation. They were also aware that what were then viewed as separate economic, political and social grievances and issues of contention could suddenly and unexpectedly conflate and trigger a popular movement that could destabilise the country and lead to civil disorder, and perhaps even revolution. This was, don’t forget, a Labour government supported by the traditional left — Her Majesty’s Communist Party and Trades Union Congress, so there was no obvious candidate to play Judas. The Cabinet Office authorised plans for counter-insurgency manoeuvres under cover of containment to ensure that the ‘unco’ guid’ could continue to sleep easily at night. MI5’s threat assessment, prepared over the summer of 1968, was incorporated into a War Book exercise — codenamed ‘Invaluable’ —

Gladio

planned for that autumn. The cover for this exercise was the much-heralded anti-Vietnam War demonstration called by the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) for Sunday 27 October 1968. From June to October, European media speculation about an imminent social revolution grew to near hysterical levels. False news stories were regularly planted in the press, with the newspaper editors’ connivance, about ‘Red’ plots to destabilise and take over the country. These were variations on ‘Russians seen in East Anglia with snow on their boots’ stories of the 1920s. No story was too far-fetched. In Italy, the threat of subversion and the accession to power of the Italian Communist Party was taken so seriously that the Italian general staff set up a training camp and recruited neo-fascists under the auspices of the NATO Gladio plan.

Gladio Gladio was the Italian code name for the formation of a secret national security authority to fight perceived enemies of the status quo by means of clandestine ‘citizen cadres’. This was a development which was to have serious political consequences for Italy for the next decade. Interestingly, the very first National Security Council Memorandum (NSC1) is about Italy and the first Italian elections. It said that if the communists came to power in the election, through legitimate democratic means, the US must declare a national emergency: the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean should be put on alert, the US should launch subversive activities in Italy to overthrow the Italian government, and America should begin contingency plans for direct military intervention. Most of us on the receiving end of this media abuse were bemused by the outlandish stories whose plots and language looked as though they had been lifted straight from late Victorian potboilers. Every day the newspapers sought to outdo their competitors in the headlines of fear. In Grub Street the clocks were ticking inexorably towards mid-day in the film High Noon. The problem was, it was us, the ‘good guys’, who were being cast in the role of ‘Killer Miller’s killers’! The only non-sectarian publication of the time which was respected by liberals, leftists and hippies was the weekly London listings magazine, Time Out. Another beneficiary of the offset-litho revolution, Time Out had been launched by Tony Elliott on 12 August 1968. Its editorial and Agitprop pages were to become essential reference points for finding out what and where marches, demonstrations and meetings were happening, And although Tony Elliott kept well clear of involvement with any particular group, he was on the side of the angels and the magazine quickly became the accepted voice of the non-aligned left. It also became the standard bearer of the new radical investigative journalism which began to explore the darker recesses of the secret state and capitalism. The only other publication doing anything comparable was Private Eye, particularly Paul Foot’s ‘Footnotes’ column.

Western values: summer 1968, as seen by Fleet Street and the Cabinet Office.

The radical publication of choice.

August 1968: Czech protestor defies Soviet tank.

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Great expectations

Christmas Humphries victim 1: Derek Bentley, hanged on 28 January 1953 for a murder he did not commit.

Humphries victim 2: Ruth Ellis, executed at London's Holloway Prison on 13 July 1955, the fifteenth, and the last woman hanged in England in the twentieth century. She was also the unluckiest. She did not kill for gain and, had the judge allowed her defence to be put to her jury, they may well have found her guilty only of manslaughter.

Spring, summer and autumn of 1968 was a time of great expectations of real political change — and not only in the industrialised democracies but in the Soviet bloc as well — as witnessed by events in Poland and Czechoslovakia that year. We, the politicised baby-boomers who wanted something more out of life than working and consuming, felt an almost tangible sense of something historic stirring. As Howard Phillips Lovecraft might have put it: ‘The Lurker was preparing to cross the Threshold…’ Wherever politicised people met there were heated discussions on the nature of authority, sexuality, equality, democracy and self-management. Government, party and trade union power was being challenged at every level and reactionary authority was on the defensive, and we knew it. The question was how far could our optimism carry us before we provoked real resistance? One evening in early September, Detective Sergeant Ferguson knocked on my door to let me know my trial for forgery was set for the following day at the Old Bailey. I had that night to prepare my defence. Everyone assumed the trial was going to be a short one; possibly even nasty and brutish given the fact that a hanging judge had been appointed to preside over my case. I was up before Mr Justice Christmas Humphries who, despite being Britain’s leading Zen Buddhist — and the most unlikely practitioner of Zen I ever came across — was the man responsible for securing the conviction of the mentally incompetent Derek Bentley, for the murder of a policeman, when Bentley had been unarmed and in police custody, well away from the victim. Derek Bentley was hanged in January 1953. Humphries had also secured the conviction of the last woman to be hanged in Britain, Ruth Ellis. She was hanged in 1955. But then he would have been an ideal prosecutor or judge in a capital case. As a Buddhist he would have believed that this world and everything in it is transitory, that all flesh is the dew on the grass and that death is commonplace and not to be resisted or railed against. My friends were refused entry to the Old Bailey the next morning — all the benches were occupied by Special Branch officers who had taken most of the public benches. Albert Meltzer, however, strolled past them unrecognised and unchallenged, having trimmed down to a svelte seventeen stone, wearing an Anthony Eden hat and carrying a rolled umbrella. The police, lined up at the entrance to the court, parted as the waves before Moses. My defence was that the ‘forged banknotes’ were political leaflets, and that this was common practice for political parties, businesses, advertisements (Nixon was to use imitation banknotes in his Presidential campaign later that year). Mr. Justice Humphries haughtily brushed this argument aside, telling my counsel he was wrong in law. They were not before him. I was. He didn’t care whether or not the whole country was breaking the law; his only concern was the defendant in the dock. If the Conservative Party was doing the same thing, no doubt the director of public prosecutions would consider the matter in his usual wisdom.

The Hanging Judge

The only prosecution witness was a US Secret Service agent by the name of Brooks T. Keller who flew over from their Paris Bureau to give convoluted technical evidence as to the complexities of international law. For the purposes of titillating the jury, presumably, he threw in interesting titbits to the effect that the US Secret Service was currently investigating an international gang of forgers who had been victimising American citizens in Germany. Poor dears — as if they hadn’t enough to cope with, being Americans. The implication was that all ‘defacers’ of currency were tarred with the same brush — undermining the state and spreading alarm and despondency among the people. Referring to the overprints on the dollars — ‘Una Vida,’ and ‘Is this worth the slaughter in Vietnam?’ — he commented these ‘were not generally found on genuine US banknotes.’ It was pointless for me to call my witnesses, and so Albert was prevented from entertaining the court — as he had done in the Private Eye case — with anecdotes about how he understood a man couldn’t sue for reflections on his chastity unless he was a clergyman. Albert was so bored with the whole proceedings that he fell asleep during the American agent’s testimony, and had to be nudged awake by a Special Branch officer lest his embarrassingly loud snoring brought Mr. Justice Humphries back from the ethereal plane to which he appeared to have retreated during this somewhat over-technical explanation of dollar bill markings. To cut a long story short, Judge Humphries asked for details of my past criminal record, which was read out by a Special Branch officer, though in fact no such record existed. British courts martial are not read out in civil courts so it was hard to know why a Francoist drumhead court martial should be deemed to be relevant, especially as my record had been expunged from Spanish judicial files as a result of Franco’s pardon. If I had no criminal record in Spain, how could my activities there be adduced against me in Britain? If this were to be accepted where would it stop? For instance, persons of German origin might be forced to listen to an account of their record in surviving years in a Nazi concentration camp because their face didn’t fit. Judge Christmas Humphries looked at me closely, as though estimating my weight for the drop. Adopting his most austere ‘black cap’ manner, he said that in no country in the world did anyone get twenty years for ‘just spouting.’ Arsehole! Had he been an apostate Christian in Franco’s Spain who had publicly avowed an Oriental heresy like Buddhism he would soon have discovered his mistake. But my counsel, perhaps wisely, did not explain that to him and suggested there were countries, like Russia, where one could get a lot of porridge for very little. Fortunately, Ross, who had left Bassetts’ sweety factory, had been able to wangle me a job with his new company, William Press Ltd. I was due to begin training in October for work on their new Essex-based contract to convert domestic and commercial gas appliances from coal-based gas to natural gas. The Special Branch officers were smirking about it in court, when they heard —

Holloway Prison, 13 July 1955: police disperse the crowds keeping vigil on the morning of Ruth Ellis’s execution

Judge Christmas Humphries

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

in mitigation — that I was due to start employment. They were sure I was going to go down for a reasonable prison sentence. One nasty piece of work candidly admitted to me that he hoped I would get a stiff sentence. I was really grateful for Press's job offer, having been turned down for all the other jobs for which I had applied. Humphries bound me over for two years in the sum of £300. As far as the Special Branch was concerned, the case confirmed me in their eyes as being as closely linked to the First of May Group as ever Christmas Humphries was to Nirvana. No use explaining that May Day was an important date in folk tradition since pre-Roman times or that in the political sense the First of May had been a symbol in the working-class movement since the execution of the Chicago Martyrs in 1887. I must have been unlucky with my timing. On his last day as a practising judge Humphries allegedly told his plumber that he planned to let everyone off, regardless of what they had done. Perhaps he thought this act of leniency would make up for all the judicial murders in which he played such an important part. NLF leader: ‘Tanky’Ho Chi Minh

VSC spokesman: Tariq Ali

Vietnam — the high-octane fuel of dissent America’s war in Vietnam was still providing the high-octane fuel for the radicalism of the time. The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) — which was cast by the media in the role of British Jacobins — was run by an ad hoc committee to which most of the Trotskyist and independent Marxist groups nominated representatives. At its core were the people who ultimately became the leadership of the International Marxist Group (IMG); it consisted of what connoisseurs of the 57 varieties of Trotskyism would recognise as the Pabloite tendency. The VSC differed from the other organisations opposing the Vietnam War in that it positively supported the authoritarian government of Ho Chi Minh and called for ‘Victory to the NLF.’ There were no anarchists on the VSC committee. The anarchist position throughout was to oppose the governments of both Washington and Hanoi and by opposing the war support the oppressed people of both North and South Vietnam, and everywhere else too, for that matter. We certainly had no time for Ho Chi Minh or the CP-led Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam, which was among the first — with Fidel Castro — to congratulate the Soviet Union for its ‘defence of the socialist revolution’ by invading Czechoslovakia that August. Who knows, if the flood tide of revolution had swept Britain in the summer of 1968 perhaps the VSC might have transformed itself into a Committee of Public Safety, with Tariq Ali in the role of Danton. But, like Danton, Tariq wouldn’t have lasted long — there were too many would-be Trotskyist Robespierres waiting in the wings. The press had an ambivalent view of the anarchists' attitude to the Vietnam War, just as they had to libertarian communism. The Marxists were criticised

The Anarchist Black Cross goes global

not for their belief in equality, but for their belief in the police state, inequality, reaction under and subservience to Russian imperialism. The anarchists opposed all of these things, and in fact were the only political tendency that had opposed them by force in the communist homeland... so they were a good deal worse! The word was used as a synonym for political criminal. The same applied to Vietnam. The Daily Mail, for instance, sneered at the VSC pretending to be a peace movement when it supported the victory of one side ... yet when it came to a punch-up between anarchists and liberation fronters, it reported this as ‘anarchists breaking up a peace march’. As the build-up to the October demonstration grew, the media ratcheted up its attempts to instill more and more fear in the public mind. To show they were on the case, they identified some of those they described as the ‘behind-thescenes anarchist troublemakers.’ I was one of those selected by the press as a leader or rather, one from ‘the chorus.’ Albert had been constantly pushing me to use my notoriety to get publicity for the anti-Francoist cause. Now I found myself not only a ‘leader’ in the cause of a Vietnamese authoritarian power struggle but, according to one issue of News of the World, a student leader into the bargain. The News of the World promptly denounced me in the next issue for never having been to a university myself, apart from once in a brief anti-apartheid protest in Aberdeen University in 1963 and again at the LSE in 1968. All my friends worked for a living. I didn’t know any students other than those from Nanterre and the Spanish acratas in Carabanchel prison. Anarchist student groups had emerged in Britain since the establishment of the redbrick universities in the early 1960s, but I had not met many at the time. Certainly, they must have resented the idea that I was their ‘leader’ — if, of course, they read the News of the World, which is the last paper which any self-respecting radical would admit reading!

1968: Fairfield Gardens, Crouch End Broadway

Internationalising the Anarchist Black Cross Earlier that year, at a meeting of the Anarchist Federation of Britain (AFB), I had been delegated to attend the International Anarchist Congress scheduled to be held in Carrara in Northern Italy from 31 August to 1 September. The purpose of the Congress was to establish an International of Anarchist Federations, something of which we in the Black Flag/Anarchist Black Cross Group were highly critical. This body would exclude the most active elements of the many libertarian affinity and action groups which had sprung up in the wake of May ’68, as well as the many groups who were neither affiliated to any national

Carrara: anarchist centre (Italian Anarchist Federation — FAI)

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Carrarense marble quarriers

José Lluis Facerías, July 1957

Goliardo Fiaschi, 1957

Dany Cohn-Bendit and Alfonso Failla, Carrara, 1968

federation, nor wanted to be. The congress organisers were, as we saw it, the moribund leaderships of the French, Belgian and Mexican federations, and the exiled Spanish, Portuguese and Bulgarian movements. They were old men and women tainted by oligarchy, defending the purity of anarchism against impatient and demanding Johnny-come-latelys such as Dany CohnBendit and other non-aligned libertarians who had done so much over the summer to focus the world’s attention on anarchism as a living and dynamic movement, probably more than they had done since their youth. On the one side were the defenders of organised tradition, and on the other, those of revolt renewed by each generation. One thing May ‘68 had done was to give a new historical dimension to the anti-hierarchical and libertarian movement and to make a lot of people aware of the counterrevolutionary nature of the traditional leftist parties, particularly the various national communist parties — but not of Leninism in general. The Tuscan town of Massa di Carrara, with its surrounding villages and marble quarries high in the Apuan Alps above the town, was a visually and historically impressive location. The Carrarenses were equally impressive people. Reputedly the descendants of the Phoenician slaves they had quarried the prized white stone for at least two thousand years. Carrara was also the cradle of Italian anarchism, and a historical centre of rebellion. The ideas of anarchism first took hold here in the early 1870s, in the wake of the return of Garibaldi’s volunteers, the influence of the First International (1864–76) and the powerful example of the Paris Commune of 1871. It is strange to think how much of the product of godless anarchist labour must be gracing churches throughout the world. It was also the hometown of my old comrade from Carabanchel prison, Goliardo Fiaschi who, after serving ten years in a Francoist jail, was now serving a further ten in an Italian penitentiary in Lecce, near Tarranto, in the deep south, for alleged fund-raising bank robberies with the Spanish anarchist José Lluis Facerias. Facerias had been living illegally in Carrara since 1952 with the sister of Gino Lucetti, the author of the 1926 attempt on Mussolini in Rome. The Spaniard had helped finance the anti-Francoist guerrilla resistance by spectacularly successful bank robberies throughout Italy in the early- to mid1950s. He was killed in a police ambush in Barcelona in August 1957; Goliardo was luckier — he had been taken alive and sentenced, like me, to 20 years in jail. Anarchists and anarchist activities were so commonplace in and around the town and surrounding villages that few paid attention to the number of international revolutionaries from all over the world who thronged its streets. They came from Korea and New Zealand, from Patagonia, Bolivia and Montreal. To paraphrase Michael Caine at Rorke’s Drift in the film Zulu: ‘Anarchists! Bleedin’ fahsends of ‘em!’ Until I visited Carrara I thought the

The Carrara Congress — August 1968

traditional image of the anarchist in a long black cape, artists’ floppy tie and wide-brimmed black sombrero was a caricature created by the yellow press – until I visited Carrara. Here the cloak was de rigeur. It was the Tuscan equivalent of the kilt. If the town’s citizens were not solidly anarchist, they were at least highly sympathetic, especially as anarchist partisans had liberated the place at the end of World War II. But the presence of ‘Dany the Red’ of the Nanterre anarchist group and 22 March Movement, by now a celebrity as a result of the events of May earlier that year, had turned the place into an international media circus. They pursued him everywhere. We were eating in a Carrara restaurant when the local police chief — a Communist Party member — came in and asked Dany for his autograph. Because the anarchists refused to participate in the electoral process, most local government officials were communists and were elected by default. Dany, like everyone else, was bemused by this request — especially coming from a senior police officer. But he agreed to sign on the condition that the policeman paid for everyone’s meal. As there were about twelve of us at the table, he demurred, but after a bit of banter the policeman agreed to pay for the wine in return for a signature in his autograph book. It was a case of ‘spoiling the Egyptians,’ but we felt this was the only way to look at it — most of us were broke by then anyway. For me — wearing my Anarchist Black Cross hat — the congress provided a networking opportunity to extend our activities, and a unique opportunity to recruit like-minded supporters of the more dynamic anarchist movement thrown up by May ’68. For the Congress organisers, the grudge-ridden and sectarian ‘old guard’ Spanish exiles of the Toulouse-based CNT-FAI, and the Italian FAI (Italian Anarchist Federation), the aim was to co-opt and claim for themselves this new movement of rebellious youth. They hoped to and capitalise on the media coverage the event was designed to attract given the spectre of revolution that was haunting the chancelleries and editorial offices of every capital in Europe. It was their chance to take their place in history. To be fair, most of these old-timers — with one or two notable exceptions on the Spanish side, such as Federica Montseny and Germinal Esgleas — had lived noble and selfless lives fighting injustice and pursuing the ideals of libertarian communism. But what many of these older militants didn’t see was that the organisational institution proposed at Carrara was oligarchic and would inevitably exclude or at best stifle this new wave of anarchists who were breathing new life into the movement and taking the initiative in new ideas, activism, and agitation without asking for the blessings of the various national federations which (since 1945 at least) had increasingly restricted their organisational activities to producing and distributing written propaganda and holding social gatherings. Montseny and Esgleas’s hostility was particularly directed against the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL). My remit from the commission of the Anarchist Federation of Britain (AFB) — which wasn’t really a federation at all, more an ad hoc body convened for a

Umberto Marzocchi (FAI)

International Anarchist Congress, 1968

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Stuart Christie and Jean Pierre Duteuil

Amedeo Bertolo

particular purpose then disbanded again — was to issue British delegates’ tickets to members of any militant group — such as the FIJL and the 22nd March Movement — who were excluded from the congress. Our committee was, in anarchist circles at least, as much entitled to grant British ‘status’ to people like Dany Cohn-Bendit, as was HM the Queen. Accordingly, the excluded participants from the FIJL and 22 March Movement, including Dany CohnBendit, turned up, to the great indignation of some of the bureaucrats, as ‘British delegates’ with full voting rights. But so great was the opposition from the national secretariats that we quickly decided it was a waste of time to continue attending after the first day. As the official British delegate I turned up for some of the early executive committee meetings in private session and was truly shocked at the behind-the-scenes machinations of the Toulouse CNT leadership. Federica Montseny and Germinal Esgleas pulled every trick in the book to ensure their agenda was not derailed. It was as bad as the manoeuvrings of the Executive Committee of the Springburn Labour Party. The only discordant note as far as I personally was concerned was Dany Cohn-Bendit’s wild accusation that the exiled Cuban anarchist movement, the Movimiento Libertario Cubano en Exilio (MLCE), was being funded by the CIA. He had no proof whatsoever for this accusation, which only served the interests of the Castro regime and undermined the credibility of the genuine Cuban anarchist movement in exile. The international press showed up in strength. In fact, the enormous coverage given to the conference in the Turkish press must have played a crucial part if not for the re-emergence of libertarian ideas in Turkey, then at least for its being made known to the new generation. No one had heard of the anarchist movement in that country since the crushing of the Turkish dockworkers by Kemal Ataturk. Yet, suddenly, a few months after the conference, the government was looking upon it as a major menace, meriting the same military attentions it later bestowed upon the Greek Cypriots. British journalists who came to Carrara to report on what was going on and feed the media frenzy of the ‘long hot summer of ‘68’ included Gary Lloyd of the Times (then not yet owned by Rupert Murdoch) and Charles Nairn of BBC Scotland. But because there was no violence only a few paragraphs appeared in the British papers, and a few minutes tagged on at the end of the 9 o’clock news. This was despite the fact that throughout the spring and summer reporters and editorial writers had been relentlessly redefining the term ‘anarchist’ as a synonym for Satan’s little helper. If they believed their own propaganda, an international conference of anarchists in Northern Italy might have been worthy at least of some comment.

An alternative Congress The idea of a ‘paper international’, at which non-existent organisations communicated with non-active bureaux, seemed a total waste of time. The movement, as far as we were concerned, could only be based on action and solidarity. For us the main business took place on the beach at Marina di Carrara

Intimations Of A Massacre

where we had taken over a very basic chalet-camp site for the four days of the congress. Ignoring most of what was going on at the main venue, the Teatro Degli Animosi, in Carrara our beach base became a mini-congress of direct action-oriented individuals and groups involved in intense Frascati-fuelled discussions, debates and sing-songs long into the night about how we could change the world from what it was into the world as it could be. It was at Carrara that the idea of the relaunching of the Anarchist Black Cross as an international prisoner support, solidarity and research network really took off. Our original intention was to coordinate material and psychological support for anarchist prisoners in Spain, but as the fear of revolution spread during that summer so too did state repression of radical activism. As a result, the ABC soon evolved into a loosely structured network of like-minded individuals and groups to coordinate protest, agitational and propaganda actions and to counter state repression. In Carrara, I had long talks with three comrades from Milan’s Ponte della Ghisolfa anarchist group who showed particular interest in establishing an Anarchist Black Cross group in Italy: Amedeo Bertolo, Umberto Del Grande and Giuseppe Pinelli. Bertolo and Del Grande were in their early twenties, but Pinelli, a railway worker, was older — in his early forties. He had been a partisan fighter during the Second World War and had been active in the post-war Italian anarchist movement. Pinelli was to die tragically the following year. But nobody could have foreseen how swiftly his name would pass into history, and become a symbol of resistance to a whole new generation of libertarians. In private discussions Bertolo and Pinelli explained that they were concerned about the true nature of some of the people describing themselves as ‘anarchists,’ some of whom were attending the congress. According to Pinelli and Bertolo, since the right-wing military coup in Greece the previous April, around 50 dyed-in-the-wool fascists from the farright parties Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale had been on cultural exchanges to Greece. These trips had been organised by two well-known neofascist leaders, Pino Rauti and Stefano Delle Chiaie, and were sponsored by the KYP, the Greek security police. On their return from Greece these men appeared to have undergone what could only be described as a mass ‘road to Damascus’ type conversion and had all returned to Italy convinced ‘socialists,’ ‘communists,’ ‘Maoists’ and ‘anarchists.’ One of these fascists, Mario Merlino, a close friend of Stefano Delle Chiaie, had even come back and set up an Italian version of the 22nd of March Group. Bertolo and Pinelli were unsure of what their game was, but they were marking my cards that something untoward was afoot.

Converting Essex By the time I got back to London in September 1968, Albert had been forced to close the bookshop, but I did have my new gas conversion job to go to at William Press’s in Billericay.

Cesare Vurchio and Giuseppe Pinelli (right), Ponte della Ghisolfa, Milan, 1969

Amedeo Bertolo (centre), Carrara, 1968

Greek Junta leaders: George Papadolous (l); Stylianos Pattakos (c); N Makarezos (r)

Pino Rauti (l), Stefano delle Chiaie (r)

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Clive Borrell: agenda setter — but whose agenda?

Sir John Waldron, Metropolitan Police Commissioner, 1968-1972

Meanwhile, the final countdown was taking place for what the press, at the Special Branch’s instigation, was calling the ‘October Revolution.’ It wasn’t a revolution at all. It was simply a major anti-Vietnam War demonstration to Hyde Park organised by the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC), an ad hoc organisation dominated by the Trotskyist International Marxist Group, the IMG, and various other anti-Stalinist Marxist organisations. The anarchists didn’t have much time for VSC. The various hues of Trots wanted the North to win whereas we wanted the people to be free of the lot of them `— Ho Chi Minh and the Americans. For the authorities, however, the 27 October VSC demonstration was a chance to implement their 1968 War Book counter insurgency exercise, codenamed ‘Invaluable.’ It had been planned since the events of May 1968. According to media and ‘police sources,’ ‘extremists’ and ‘anarchists’ were planning a coup for 27 October, the cover for which would be provided by the enormous numbers of anti-Vietnam War demonstrators flooding into London for the VSC demonstration. The newspapers, with the full connivance of the Cabinet Office, were interested only in creating a climate of fear to scare people off the October demonstration. The Special Branch claimed to have infiltrated people into ‘anarchist and other extremist cells,’ and had uncovered the previously mentioned ‘concrete evidence of a plot’ to seize London. They fed this story to crime reporters Clive Borrell and Brian Cashinella who obligingly broke the story in the Times and the Evening News. It was immediately picked up by the rest of Fleet Street, as well as by the radio and TV. The day the Times published the story, Home Secretary Callaghan convened a secret meeting of Fleet Street editors and publishers at the Home Office to tell them he believed ‘something’ could well happen on 27 October, and that he had set up a ‘hot line’ with the Police Commissioner, Sir John Waldron. He briefed the newspaper bosses that he had authorised hurried firearms training for scores of police officers to cover any eventuality. A crime reporter on a quality ‘Sunday’ asked, in all seriousness, if it were true, as alleged by one of his security service sources, that the anarchists had — or were making — an atomic bomb! But the Borrell-Cashinella story directly contradicted what the Times’ News Team had been reporting over the summer. Ever since the events of May when the authorities began to circulate stories of anarchists and revolutionaries preparing for a ‘hot summer,’ the News Team had been investigating these reports. In fact, until Borrell and Cashinella mysteriously appeared on the scene, the Times’ News Team was the only group of journalists who were reporting the background to the national debate and the preparations for the demonstration professionally and rationally. One of these journalists, Gary Lloyd, I knew from his coverage of the anarchist conference in Carrara earlier that year. They had done an enormous amount of research (and legwork) into the people involved in the organisation of the demonstration and the type of demonstrators likely to be going on the march. Finally, the Times News Team

The Manufacture of Consent

journalists concluded that the hysteria being generated by the rest of the media was totally unwarranted and grossly artificial — 27 October was simply going to be a big demonstration, and nothing sinister was being planned. The News Team reporters were the only group of national journalists with any integrity or grip on reality. Their assessment of the forthcoming demonstration, however, did not suit the interests of the powers-that-be, including those of their own newspaper. A clue appeared in a Times editorial comment: ‘There is a feeling these days that students are getting above themselves.’ An announcement was made that all army, police and air force leave in the Home Counties had been cancelled for the weekend of the demonstration. Some of the more rabidly right-wing newspapers covered up the names of their offices in Fleet Street, along the route of the march. And, for the first time ever, troops from the Parachute Regiment were posted on guard duty at Buckingham Palace and other royal homes. Massive police operations were carried out on the approach roads into London. Banner poles and marbles (used for rolling under the feet of the police horses) were removed from demonstrators, coaches were stopped and searched, including one or two bitterly protesting rugby teams who were taken for offensive radicals. Universities were raided, homes and offices of organisations broken into whether they were associated with the demonstration or not Waldron also held a further series of private meetings with Fleet Street editors and proprietors to talk up the situation and to make sure the press took it seriously. It was essential, according to Callaghan and Waldron, that for political reasons the public should be fired up with ‘anti-demonstration feeling.’ It was a clear example of what Walter Lipmann called the ‘manufacture of consent’ by the manipulation of the attitudes and opinions of the masses. This wasn’t journalism — it was the self-serving agit-prop of fantasists and fabricators. It was clear what they were up to. The government, with the connivance of the media, were taking advantage of the gratuitous and timely pretext of the October anti-Vietnam war demonstration as the trigger for revolutionary insurrection. Their agenda was both to test and to give a veneer of legitimacy to the counter-insurgency manoeuvres, the erosion of civil liberties, and the extension of police powers they had planned. Suddenly, William Rees-Mogg, the Times editor disbanded the News Team. This struck me as suspicious, given that of all the British press, the Times reporters had produced the most intelligent and insightful journalism on the preparations for the demonstration. Literally overnight the paper did a complete editorial u-turn, and its austere columns were turned over to sensational speculation under the bylines of its crime correspondent, Clive Borrell, and a former China correspondent, Brian Cashinella. Their remit, they told me, was to ‘cover the revolution.’ The Evening News, with a large readership in London and the Home Counties, was the most virulent of all the papers running scare stories. In the

Brian Cashinella: serving the insidious purposes of his political masters

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

last week before the October demonstration it ran a fiction serial about a group of agitators taking over London under the cover of a violent demonstration. The lines of distinction between fantasy and reality were becoming difficult to distinguish. The News responded to the Times and the Times fed off the News. Only a day or so before the demo, the News front-paged a story under Borrell’s and Cashinella’s by-lines saying that they had information from a contact that full-scale plans for insurgency were under way. The Times reprinted the News story — by-lined by both Cashinella and Borrell — almost verbatim the following day. Cashinella had even discovered the buildings targeted for occupation by revolutionary ‘flying squads.’ These included the BBC’s Broadcasting House in Central London and its Television Centre further west at White City. All this totally contradicted the serious research done by the disbanded News Team. Hardly a day passed after that without some unverified reports from unattributed sources being published about weapons being smuggled into London in preparation for violent attacks on US targets, coupled with plans to seize the BBC. One Times stringer turned up at an anarchist meeting and heard a fellow visitor attack them bitterly for the things he had read ‘they’ were going to do (this is now standard government-media practice eg Mayday, Genoa, etc.). ‘I am a pacifist,’ the man cried passionately. ‘But if I thought it would do any good, I would set fire to the American Embassy tomorrow ... but it won't do any good, I tell you.’ The Times reporter hurriedly phoned in a story which appeared the following day, saying that someone at an anarchist meeting proposed, apparently the next day, to set the American Embassy on fire. Access journalism at the service of the Cabinet Office and the spooks filled the columns of tabloids and broadsheets alike. Integrity and so-called liberal objectivity went out the window. Political, social and historical context played no part in their narrative. These reporters were on government business. Their job was to scare people witless and make them less likely to question government erosion of civil liberties and the draconian measures of the police and judiciary. The Special Branch had told their more accommodating journalists that they had incontrovertible proof that radicals and leftists were supposedly preparing to wage motiveless war on ‘society,’ because that is what revolutionaries do — and not one of them questioned them. There was no attempt to explain that popular anger on this scale about what the Americans were doing in Vietnam does not erupt from nowhere for no reason. The trouble with disinformation is that it acquires a life of its own. Everyone in the demonstration, Marxists, Trots, Liberals, Christians, etc., looked suspiciously at everyone else. Finally all of them came to the conclusion that no one was trying to — or capable of — pulling off a coup d'état. None of them, however, could be sure about the anarchists. Consequently, I was approached a good many times and asked what the anarchists were up to. The answer was clear, at least as far as the Black Flag group was concerned. We would

The Plot to Take Over London

participate, but on the basis of a plague on both Washington and Hanoi. It was being organised by the VSC as a 'Victory to the Vietcong’ demonstration and could in no way be construed as the beginning of insurgency. To the sophisticated journalists this seemed an obvious evasion. Everyone knew by now from their ‘newspaper reports’ of the lorry loads of explosives that had arrived in London. It was all pure fucking nonsense concocted by the Special Branch and fed to the press, who were complicit in the lies. Cashinella, served his masters well with his stories of consignments of arms, ammunition, Molotov cocktails — everything except tanks being smuggled into London. As a result, many would-be demonstrators and the general public came to believe that a violent riot and an anarchist plot existed ‘to disrupt a major portion of central London by direct sabotage.’ He ‘reported’: ‘… it was established beyond doubt that some extremist organisations as far apart as Liverpool, Scotland and South Wales, were actively engaged in a scheme to plant bombs in Westminster and the City of London. Further, there was direct evidence… serious plotting was taking place on how to take over, on military lines, such institutions as the Bank of England, Lloyds, the Stock Exchange, Ministry of Defence major communications centres and even Scotland Yard itself.’ Strangely, in spite of it ‘being established beyond doubt’ and all the ‘direct evidence’ held by the Special Branch, according to Cashinella and Borrell, no one was ever arrested or charged with conspiracy over these serious offences. It was a clear-cut case of a strategy of tension and incitement, for few demonstrators — if they believed the story — would have turned up unarmed and in a peaceful frame of mind. Borrell and Cashinella later admitted in their book Crime in Britain Today that they had allowed themselves to be used by the police: ‘The Special Branch then hatched up their own plot. They decided to “leak” their fears to the press and allow the situation to snowball. Public antipathy would do the rest, they reasoned. Certain Fleet Street journalists, including ourselves, were independently appraised of the situation through “the Old Boy” network. It was a story none could refuse coming from such an immaculate source. It was a story which no newspaper could ignore, and as article followed article, public reaction against the march grew. It was a clear case of the media being manipulated by the Special Branch to serve their own ends. But in our view it was totally justifiable, because the consequences otherwise could have been devastating.’ All over the country the police went on ‘fishing’ expeditions, ostensibly for these much-hyped weapon caches, but in fact these raids, unreported in the press, were to collect intelligence on the friendship and political networks thrown up by the ant-Vietnam War movement. They visited the homes and offices of activists in various political movements up and down the country, but no explosives were found, no weapons of mass or minimum destruction turned up, no arsenals were discovered — and no bombs went off. They only things they found were address books, names and the political sympathies of the occupants of the houses and flats they raided.

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

‘Number Two anarchist’

Sun, 7 September 1968

In addition to the raids, there were reports of mysterious ‘burglaries’ at addresses where, one presumes, warrants were difficult to get. The ‘burglaries’ had one thing in common. The ‘burglars’ were interested only in correspondence and address books, not in taking anything of value. I don’t know whether or not I was ever burgled. Everything in my flat was always in such a mess it was impossible to know whether or not anyone had been in and interfered with anything. Also, we didn’t have a phone so we couldn’t have been tapped either — not that we had any plans for the march in the first place, apart from deciding where to meet. The rest would be in the lap of the gods. Despite the hysteria whipped up against the organisers of the proposed demonstration, the press had some difficulty in knowing who they were. They decided it was ‘the students’. As there were very few anarchists among the students of the time one might have thought that would let us out, but this was not to be the case. We had to be there to add colour, and presumably terror, fear and loathing to the story. Tariq Ali became the mastermind of the whole affair and was appointed ‘student leader’ for the occasion by the Daily Mirror. Later, when they wanted him to write some articles, they promoted him to being ‘leader of the revolutionary movement’ in Britain. He was not, at that time, even leader of the Trots, nor even of his own International Marxist Group, which did very well from the publicity he brought them, and soared ahead in the student stakes. The Express, possibly still smarting under the rebuff it had received from me on my return from Spain, retaliated with its usual spite. It informed the world that I was ‘Number Two Anarchist’ in London. In view of the anarchist opposition to leadership, this was not quite so much of an insult as being called Number One — but there was much amused speculation as to who Number One might be. It was assumed that even the numbskulls in the plate glass buildings wouldn't cast Tariq Ali in that role. Probably they had mistakenly reported a police spokesman, who had called me Alberola’s Number Two. The Mirror asked me for an exclusive story. I was working in Essex so it was easier for me to meet them in the new East End offices of Freedom Press. The anarchist editorial group had moved from Fulham to Angel Alley off Whitechapel High Street, where their printer was located. The gloomy alley, the site, some say, of one of the Jack the Ripper murders, had a profound effect on the impressionable Mirror reporter who headlined his interview — ‘The Voice of Doom from Angel Alley’. Perhaps I disappointed the poor man by not wearing freaky clothes, as he made some disparaging sartorial remarks about my donkey jacket. He also pointed out sarcastically that there had been no revolution in England since the Peasants Revolt of 1381. God knows where he got that piece of information. I suppose most schools start history from the beginning and work up

The Voice of Doom from Angel Alley

gradually to the outbreak of World War I. If you leave too early you miss an awful lot. He obviously missed out on Cromwell as well. That a rudimentary sense of history was not an essential qualification, even for journalists who made it to the classier Sundays, was proved for me when some time later, when my hair had grown long again, I had a sympathetic interview in the Observer. Reporter Colin Smith maintained that I looked like Charles the First. Albert, who had been grumbling at my description of his loud snores during the forgery trial, growled good-humouredly that I was more like bastard Glasgow on a wet Saturday night. Anyway, mine was the voice of doom, and the Daily Telegraph graciously allowed me the use of its colour supplement to explain to its readers what revolutionary violence was all about. The correspondence which followed was staggering. There was a retired colonel who threatened to thrash the editor for propagating dastardly anarchist doctrines, a parson who pointed out that the Anarchist Black Cross had pinched the emblem of Christianity without due authority, and a surprised lady who pointed out that the trend of my article was to encourage anarchism — had I realised that? Someone even wrote that the early death of Hitler would have prolonged the war. Reading the papers, there was no doubt that troublemakers were set to launch a bloody revolution that October. Yet, curiously, in spite of all the media’s attempts to traumatize people, on a practical level, hardly anyone felt threatened. There was no mass exodus of the bourgeoisie or the aristocracy to the Bahamas or the Riviera (perhaps they were already there); nor was there a run on the pound or a collapse of share prices. In contrast to the press, those who would have been threatened by a revolution — like those who would have benefited by one — took no steps at all. Not for the first time was there a gulf between what the public was offered as its daily consumption of media food, and what it accepted. For the police and the security services it was too good an opportunity for surveillance and harassment of what they saw as the uncontrollable left, ie, those beyond the pale of established political parties, and tame trades unions. For them it was the ideal opportunity for intelligence gathering, contingency planning, surveillance and harassment.

The Queen’s Own ‘Hornsey guerrillas’ Our local pub, the Queen’s in Crouch End, Hornsey, had become a focal meeting place for anarchists, libertarians, Trotskyists, and a couple of members of the Young Communist League (YCL) who were no better than they should be. I didn’t know it at the time, but the pub was known to the police as the home of the ‘Hornsey Guerrillas.’ Something strange happened on the Friday night before the demonstration. First, seven or eight uniformed policemen, led by a Sergeant Phillips from Hornsey police station, filed into ‘our snug,’ and

Daily Mirror headline

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

called time — 15 minutes before last orders. When we objected and complained to Harry, the landlord, he didn’t try to remonstrate with the police, as you might have expected, and told us to drink up, covering the pumps with a tea-towel as he spoke. There were perhaps about twenty of us in the pub that night and hackles were rising. We didn’t particularly want a rammy starting in our local, and with the ‘big’ demo the next day wiser and more worldly counsels prevailed and we allowed ourselves to be ushered out onto the pavement singing the Internationale. Once outside we realised the whole street was crawling with police, from Tottenham Lane all the way up Crouch End Broadway and past the clock tower, where a large posse of policemen had massed. Beyond the clock tower we could see a convoy of Black Marias and police buses with reinforcements. Trouble was brewing. Our first thoughts were that there had been a right-wing coup and we were headed for internment in the nearby Arsenal football stadium. A small group of us turned right to go towards Fairfield Gardens, but our way was blocked by a line of policemen who started herding everyone up towards the clock tower. As we walked we sang the Internationale, fists clenched in the air. I think it was Jimmy Gilpin who kicked the whole thing off. Jimmy was another young Scots lad recently arrived in London from Dumfries to join the revolution. He had seen the events of May 1968 in Paris on the telly, read the stories of imminent insurrection in the newspapers, and he simply had to be there on the barricades so he gave up his pipefitting apprenticeship and ran off to Crouch End where his brother, Peter, an IS (SWP) activist lived with his wife Sheila up Crouch End Hill in Haslemere Road, next door to Tariq Ali and his partner, Jane. Jimmy was trailing along at the back of the crowd when a police Panda car drew up alongside him. A pasty-faced cop said to him, provocatively, in his best Estuary English ‘Shut the fakk up, you bastard!’ Jimmy ignored him and walked on, still singing. The Panda drew up again and the pasty-faced cop screamed at him ‘I told you to shut up, you bastard.’ Jimmy turned and leaned in the window and said, in as polite a tone as he could muster: ‘We are singing about “uniting the human race,” so that lets you out pal.’ Next thing the cop is out of the car and has Jimmy bent over the bonnet in a headlock. It was the move the police were waiting for; it had been a set-up, a provocation. Police appeared as if out of nowhere — uniformed and plain clothes, dog handlers, cars and Paddy Wagons. When Peter Gilpin and Mike Cohen dragged the policeman off Jimmy, fighting broke out up and down the Broadway. Ray Jones was wrestling with a copper in the middle of the street, Graham Packham, Vaz Clark, Ross Pritchard, Conn, Big Jack Finnegan, Mike Hyme,

The Hornsey Clock Tower Incident

Ross Flett, Allan Barlow, Phil Carver, Austin Berlin, Sheila Gilpin, Brenda, my girl-friend, and others were trading punches and insults with our attackers. The scene was straight out of Hieronymous Bosch, and the choreography out of West Side Story. Fashion victim that I was at the time, I was wearing my brand-new bespoke dark blue mohair suit. With my short hair and clean-shaven Man at C&A look, I was often taken for an off-duty policeman or CID officer. Taking advantage of this I dodged around in the melee doing what I could, taking the numbers of the policemen as they tried to bundle people into the waiting Black Marias. As fast as people were pushed into the police vans, we pulled them out again. I asked one policeman who was trying to handcuff Jimmy to release him, saying he was ‘one of ours.’ The copper immediately released him, no doubt thinking that one CID officer was asking for the release of an undercover agent. I think they arrested Jimmy three times that night. On the last occasion he tried to climb into the Paddy Wagon, but was booted out by a copper who told him they were full up — and they had got what they had come for. It obviously wasn’t Jimmy Gilpin. Jimmy then swung a punch at the policeman who lunged back, and then Mike Cohen stepped in took the policeman’s truncheon from him and cracked his collar bone with it. Mike got away, but Jimmy was grabbed, handcuffed and frog-marched to Hornsey Police Station Suddenly I was rumbled. Sergeant Phillips, who was in charge of the operation, shouted to a dog-handler, a vicious-looking retard with an Alsatian dog to grab me. I suddenly found myself grabbed by my tie by the dog handler who started to strangle me with it. He also ripped the front of my best and irreplaceable Bob Fletcher handmade shirt. I really should have learned never to fight for freedom and justice in your best clothes. Unfortunately, I hadn’t realised freedom and justice were on the agenda that night. With one mighty leap I broke free and ran off into the night. The policeman fell to the pavement in surprise, releasing his dog, which took off after me like a bat out of Hell. I ran into the alley behind the chip shop where I stopped and turned, hoping to pacify the dog with my winning ways, soft words and the divine intervention of St Francis of Assisi. The dog stopped, looked at me, bared its teeth, advanced slowly, growling then launched itself at my privates. I managed to turn and deflect the animal’s bite, so that instead of my bollocks, it sank its teeth into my knee, ripping my brand-new trousers badly. At this point anger and self-interest overcame my natural love of animals and, with no other weapons available, I pulled out a biro and thrust it up the Alsatian’s nose. The dog pulled back, howled, turned and ran off in search of its master. I took myself off through the back streets of Hornsey and took a mini-cab to Charing Cross Hospital, worried about rabies. Meanwhile, back at Hornsey Police Station, it was pandemonium. By that time I’m sure the police were regretting having launched the operation. Outside a crowd was picketing the nick, chanting ‘Cops out’ and demanding

The Queens and Crouch End Broadway Clock Tower (below)

The ties that bind

Jimmy Gilpin

Jack Finnegan

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

freedom for the Hornsey comrades, Inside the Station Inspector was trying to cope with charge-room full of hyped-up civil-rights conscious radicals, in addition to all the other Friday-night drunks that were being brought in. Jimmy was arguing with the desk sergeant that Sheila, his sister-in-law, should be released so she could go home as her son, Marcus, was with a baby-sitter, who would be getting anxious. The desk-sergeant told him that if they didn’t ‘get Christie,’ they would put her son into care. At that point another a sergeant and a plain-clothes man came in, looked around the crowded chargeroom, and said, ‘OK, which of you is Christie?’ Pete Gilpin, ever the pattermerchant replied, ‘I’m afraid he's not here but I’m Ché Guevara — will I do?’ I had become a convenient shorthand for troublemaker. In the end only four people were charged with assault and affray that night: Pete Gilpin, his partner, Sheila Gilpin, Mike Hyme and ‘Conn’ the carpenter. Amazingly, Jimmy was never charged. Everyone pled not guilty and employed the beautiful radical barrister Nina Stanger to defend them at Highgate Magistrates’ Court. Nina’s beauty and charm, however, weren’t enough to melt the hearts of the Highgate Magistrates who found all four guilty and fined them, with Sheila getting the heftiest fine of them all. We had a whip round in the pub after the case and paid the fines. Apparently, after they were released on police bail in the early hours of the morning they spent hours searching in shop doorways for the dope they had dumped during the battle of Crouch End Broadway. Years later the Observer colour supplement published an interview with the Queen’s landlord at a police charity ball. In the article — about ‘Hornsey’s Guerrillas’ — Harry admitted that he had kept the police ‘well-informed’ and provided them with all the facilities to keep us under surveillance. What a cunt! In the event, the 27 October demonstration came and went. Unlike the spectacularly successful 17 March demo, it proved a massive anti-climax for anyone who had believed the horror stories being generated by the press and Special Branch. Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 demonstrators turned up, but there were no bombings, no takeover of the Bank of England or the BBC TV Studios or even Marine Ices ice cream parlour in Chalk Farm. According to Borrell and Cashinella the plot was real, ‘but was thwarted by the advance publicity it received.’ The journalists claimed they had been ‘in a unique position to know,’ as they had broken the story jointly in the Times ‘once the Special Branch was certain that it had concrete evidence of what was being planned.’ As the police obligingly held back the traffic, the demonstrators chanting and roaring ‘Sieg Heil,’ ‘US Out’ and ‘Ho Ho Ho Chi Min’ swept through London from Charing Cross along the Embankment, up Ludgate Circus and along Fleet Street into Trafalgar Square. The march then turned down Whitehall, past Downing Street, Parliament Square, along Victoria Street, Grosvenor Place to Hyde Park Corner then up Park Lane to Speakers Corner for a rally and speeches in Hyde Park.

27 October — The End of the Affair

Burns turns Most anarchists had decided not to participate, but so many turned up to see what would happen that in the end they grouped, and found themselves to their amazement a force of almost a thousand strong rallying behind the red and black flags and banners. Had they organised a march themselves they would have been pleased to get seventy. Most wryly agreed, ‘If we want any more demonstrations we'll agree first not to have one.’ Predictably, instead of milling around in Hyde Park listening to the VSC platform speakers, a couple of thousand Maoist, Trotskyist, anarchists and other angry and hyped-up protestors broke away from the main march and headed for the American Embassy. But the police were well-prepared for this eventuality with well-defended ranks of policemen and mounted police cordoning off the grassy tree-lined square and forming a wall in front of the Embassy itself. There were also lines of coaches with more police reinforcements parked in the surrounding streets. There may also have been troops close by as well for all we knew. We linked arms, formed blocks and managed to break through the first police cordon into the square itself, but we were met with a much stiffer line of defence in front of the Embassy itself. People were chanting slogans, taunting the police, throwing the occasional firework, coins, marbles, poles and anything else at the Embassy, but it was all theatre and ended embarrassingly with some of the protestors linking arms with the polis and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ Rabbie Burns must have been doing somersaults in his grave. Only 44 protestors were arrested, and four police and about 50 demonstrators injured. Other protestors were so angry and exasperated they ran down Park Lane smashing the windows of the Rolls-Royce car showroom in a final gesture of defiant outrage against one of the most ostentatious symbols of capitalism. What we would have done had we been able to get inside the US Embassy without being shot by the armed marines was anybody’s guess — apart from maybe setting fire to the place, which had been talked about in moments of McEwans-fuelled wishful thinking. But no one who was there would have described it as unnecessary vandalism. Not after My Lai, the half a million Vietnamese dead, to say nothing of the Hornsey clock tower incident, the raids, the strip-searches, the harassments, the press wind-ups. It had to be Buggins’s turn sometime. From the point of view of the government, police, security service and army, it had been a highly successful exercise. After praising the police for their discipline and restraint, Home Secretary James Callaghan commended the demonstrators, saying that most of them had shown ‘self-control,’ and that he doubted ‘if this kind of demonstration could have taken place so peacefully in any other part of the world.’ The moment of danger had passed and the authorities had been able to contain and control the demonstration without triggering a night of rioting in the streets and insurgency.

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

After the smoke — anti-climax: Grosvenor Square, October 1968

Certainly the protest movement changed that day. For many, the angry rhetoric and rituals of street protests now seemed empty and contrived gestures. To be lauded by the Home Secretary spoke volumes. May 1968 in France had ended in June with a whimper, while the October demonstration, which had generated such high expectations, simply fizzled out. Some demonstrators left Grosvenor Square that day, disillusioned or burned out, to pursue their own agendas. Others, a minority, left convinced there had to be other more effective ways to put the politicians and the power system under pressure. It was definitely the end of the peer pressure show.

High Intensity Subversion, Low Intensity Operations

Brigadier Frank Kitson: gangster strategist

Meanwhile, the British Army had read the runes and foreseen trouble ahead in mainland Britain. They were preparing to face, or pre-empt, the music, when it came. The age of insularity from revolution was over for Britain. A rising star in the British Army, Brigadier Frank Kitson — who in 1968 was CO of the First Battalion of the Royal Green Jackets and received an OBE that year for unspecified services to the Crown — was seconded by the Ministry of Defence to University College Oxford in 1969 as a Defence Fellow to read counterinsurgency. Kitson, a 42-year old colonial warrior, was no stranger to the practicalities of the subject. From 1953 to 1955, he had been the Military Intelligence Officer in Kenya responsible for organising the terrorist counter-gangs during the emergency. He was posted to Malaya in 1957 and then to Cyprus between 1962 and 1964 to perform similar Machiavellian roles in those insurrectionary colonial hotspots. His brief now, following the ‘hot summer’ of 1968, was to work out what could be done to the natives of the home islands. His thesis on counter-insurgency techniques, which he completed in 1970, was published by Faber & Faber as Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency & Peacekeeping, with a foreword by Chief of the Defence Staff General Sir Michael Carver. By the time the book appeared in 1971, Kitson was commander of the 39th Infantry Brigade in Northern Ireland where he was implementing the policies and types of operations he had helped develop in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus. He also set up a covert Army Intelligence unit known as the Military Reconnaissance Force (MRF) (effectively a counter-gang), some of whose members were later charged with attempted murder of IRA suspects. Kitson’s strategy, as outlined in Low Intensity Operations, was threefold: penetration of the local government structure, the institutionalisation of a shoot-to-kill policy in ambush-type situations (later euphemistically referred to as ‘Observation Post/Reactive — OP/React); and corruption of the Common Law process by dispensing with jury trials. In Ireland this policy was implemented with the creation of the infamous Diplock courts in

The Spanish Prisoner

which the judge sits alone and interprets both the law and the facts — and by a string of lethal SAS ambushes of suspected Republican activists. Kitson admits that many regard subversion as being ‘principally a form of redress used by the down-trodden peoples of the world against their oppressors,’ and ‘there is something immoral about preparing to suppress it.’ But, he continues: ‘On the other hand subversion can be used by evil men to advance their own interests in which case those fighting it have right on their side… Fighting subversion may therefore be right on some occasions, in the same way that fostering it might be right on others, and the army of any country should be capable of carrying out either of these functions if necessary, in the same way it should be capable of operating in other forms of war.’

‘An evil soul producing holy witness is like a villain with a smiling cheek. A goodly apple rotten at the heart. O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!’ Antonio, Merchant of Venice

Carrying the can for Miguel Special Branch interest in me was aggravated by my on-going involvement in the anti-Francoist movement. The British authorities, it seemed, were under some pressure from Madrid. Anything that undermined the good order and discipline of Franco’s prisons from Cadiz to Barcelona — such as the smuggling out of letters to the international press — was down to me. How did I do it? I was only the scapegoat over which our comrades confessed their sins when caught. As Miguel García García described in his book Franco’s Prisoner, it was convenient to blame Christie: ‘I began to smuggle out letters in the way Christie had initiated, until one day the director of Soria Prison sent for me in a rage. I had letters and communications published in influential foreign papers, which were also sold in Spain. He would punish me, he said. I would never get out of prison alive. I denied authorship. ‘ “Who else could know so much?” he asked. ‘I shrugged my shoulders. “Who else but Christie?” I said. It was safe to blame him, for after three years he had finally been released.’ Who but Christie, indeed. I didn’t mind. Anything to oblige. Most of them thought, too, that I was, after all, in a democratic country and it wouldn’t cause me any problems. It was true, there was no charge that could be brought against me for all these activities, nor, had the allegations been correct, would there have been anything illegal about them. In fact, had it come to a question of law, the majority of Spanish political prisoners were kept in clear breach of constitutional law, even in breach of one constituted by Franco, that conditional liberty be granted to prisoners who had completed three-quarters of their sentence. But it was all down in Big Brother’s dossiers, and I was cast not so much as the scapegoat who went out into the wilderness to carry away the sins, but as the other poor Billy that was to be kept back and sacrificed. Around this time, I made my second appearance on Malcolm Muggeridge’s The Question Why, although my first on air, The programme was called ‘Why Violence?’ It did not endear me to the authorities.

Miguel García García

Monica Foot

John Rety

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

The Question Why (August 1964 — one week before leaving for Spain): l-r —Wynford Hicks, Stuart Christie, Adrian Cunningham, Kate Sanders, Ian Vine and Vincent Johnson. Muggeridge is in the foreground

This time I appeared with, among others, Monica Foot, John Rety and David Triesman, confronting a team of senior police officers, with a dear old nun sitting in the middle to see fair play, though her sympathies were fairly obvious from the fact that she had an enormous depiction of a public execution hung around her neck. Her main contribution was to explain that the anarchists were wrong and that government came from God — which is why Bakunin said if God existed, it would be necessary to abolish him. Somebody brought up, not very subtly I thought, the question of Glasgow thugs and what should be done with them. This feed provided me with my one bon mot of the programme — that the Glasgow thugs were only amateurs, whereas the police were professionals. At least two purple faces showed near-apoplexy. The right-wing journalist and police apologist Noel Picarda was the only one still capable of speaking. I asked him what the Special Branch would do if there were a fascist (‘or communist’ interjected Picarda, and I agreed) dictatorship established in this country. Would they hand over their political dossiers to the police, as M. Chiappe of the French Sureté did when the Gestapo moved in? Reply came there none — not in words, that is; their faces indicated they would do a lot more than that. Discussing violence as part and parcel of the political process is an emotive red herring. Like terrorism, violence is a weasel word whose definitions are to be parsed by Jesuitical politicians and clever spin doctors grasping at fine distinctions: it can mean whatever you — or they — want it to mean. It’s like discussing the existence of God. Everyone has their own idea as to when the use of violence for political, geopolitical, moral or ethical ends may or may not be legitimate. Little old ladies who are incapable even of upsetting a cat asleep on the chair they wish to occupy, can be rabid supporters of flogging and hanging for those demonized by the Sun newspaper. Politicians who have given the order to send hundreds of thousands of innocents to their deaths in carpetbombing or ‘shock and awe’ air raids — from Dresden to Baghdad — can be so morally outraged at such a non-violent event as publishing possibly staged photographs of real incidents of torture that they call for editorial resignations and threaten to introduce swingeing restrictions on press freedom. Yet, let an anarchist try to assassinate Mussolini, or the vilest autocrat, such as happened when a bomb was thrown at the king of Spain on his wedding day in 1906 in protest against the wholesale slaughter that was taking place in the Moroccan war, and everyone throws up their hands in horror. Horror at violence in this context is pure cant. It is objection to persons doing as individuals what the state legitimizes wholesale.

Why Violence?

Positions on violence are usually taken according to where one stands in relation to those in power, and whether one is a target, protagonist or a bystander. We are all conditioned early in life by the mass media, politicians, pundits and spin doctors to deplore the other side’s violence. For most people, only violence sanctioned by the State can be ‘legitimate’ on the basis that it is ‘Just,’ defensive’ and ‘liberatory.’ After all, the State makes, interprets and upholds the laws, and defines and applies its own rules and standards in defence of the status quo, ie, the values and laws which sustain the existing power hierarchy. But for those people who have no redress in the face of injustice and are victims of the authority structure, or those who question its legitimacy and are critical and distrustful of it and its actions, and have reached the limits of legitimate and acceptable protest staked out by those in power — beyond which dissent must not extend, even to defend important human values — then they have no alternative but turn to whatever methods are available to them to resolve or ameliorate the situation. Their response can be seen to be either morally appropriate and proportionate, or morally inappropriate and disproportionate, but as far as the State is concerned it is ‘illegitimate.’ As for the anarchist position on the use of violence, all I can say is there is none, other than the normal human right to defend oneself and one’s interests. Why, when and if men and women decide to take up arms is an entirely subjective and individual process, which can only be understood in the context and atmosphere of the time. Anarchists don’t seek political power, only moral authority. Nor do they plot to bring down democratic governments through aimless acts of malicious, visceral, hatred; but they do seek to sideline them as much as possible by empowering people through education, example, and by fashioning events wherever possible to promote the general principles of mutual aid and selfmanagement. I share the Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti’s attitude towards democratically elected governments. Asked about how the anarchists felt about the recently elected Republican government in Spain in 1931, Durruti said he knew it could not meet the expectations of the Spanish working people, but at least it should have the benefit of the doubt. The role of anarchists in relation to governments, revolutionary or otherwise, he said, was in opposition. But the degree of that opposition would be geared to the willingness of the Republic to confront the problems facing the Spanish workers. He also warned the politicians that they would not default on their revolutionary commitments as anarchists, or act contrary to anti-capitalist principles. ‘Our activities have never been and never will be at the service of any political party or any state. The anarchists and the trade unionists of the CNT, united with all revolutionaries and backed by pressure from the street, have it as their goal, to compel the people in government to carry out their mandate.’ If you can’t vote the bastards out, make it as difficult for them as possible!

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Agents provocateurs

Never watch telly in the pub with the Special Branch.

Prior to and during the October demonstration, Black Flag and the Anarchist Black Cross distributed a joint leaflet reiterating my arguments in the Telegraph colour supplement about the futility of supposing that anything could come of a violent demonstration such as had been suggested by the Marxist organisers. Just because people were fed up with non-violent demonstrations, which the pacifists had been urging, it did not follow that violent ones would be better or more effective. What was needed was what we described as ‘Monday militancy’ — week-long commitment — rather than weekend protest. The leaflet was launched at an Anarchist Black Cross social at The Roebuck pub in Tottenham Court Road, where two unwanted guests came along as agents provocateurs. They couldn’t have made it plainer had they been in uniform. One of these fine fellows, a DC Cardwell, came over to me at the bar where I was absent-mindedly watching an old 1952 film on TV while waiting to be served. The film was Director Henri Georges-Clouzet’s Wages of Fear (La Salaire de la peur) all about driving a truckload of nitro-glycerine across dangerous mountain roads. The subtle DC Cardwell saw his moment and seized it by broaching the subject of the difficulties involved in transporting explosives. I told him to piss off, so they went upstairs and approached another anarchist. The undercover cops asked if he wanted to buy rifles and machineguns. The other comrade explained that they had all the weapons they needed for the demonstration and these were already stored safely in Harrods repository on the Thames, but that he should keep the matter quiet, as the management didn’t know. This particular guy had been sacked from Harrods the week before, and was rather hoping they would make a raid on the best people’s furniture. Of our discussion in the bar, D.C. Cardwell later recorded that I was drunk, aggressive and engaged him in a lengthy discussion on the difficulties involved in transporting high explosives. He stored this information away in my file for three years and produced it, without corroboration, at what could have been the most damning moment of my life. That autumn I saw what was to me probably the most remarkable and powerful film I have ever seen — Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. Shot like a documentary using grainy black and white newsreel footage, it was the story of the FLN’s (Algerian National Liberation Front) urban guerrilla campaign in the city of Algiers between 1954 and 1957. The main protagonist — hero if you like — was Ali La Pointe, a young streetwise hustler politicised by the arrogance and injustice of his French colonial oppressors. The turning point for La Pointe comes in prison when he

Ali La Pointe — The Fool Who Tried To Hustle The French

witnesses the guillotining of an Algerian freedom fighter. On his release the former petty criminal contacts the FLN and organises a network of Resistance cells entrenching it within the Kasbah, the city’s old Muslim quarter. Using the tactics of the ‘people’s war,’ La Pointe’s fighters, men, women and children, emerge from the population at large to mount attacks and then return to their everyday lives.

‘Trouble has broken out again...’ Pontecorvo’s film didn’t pull any punches. It ended with the triumph of the French parachutists, the killing of La Pointe, the destruction of his network, and the apparent return of calm. But then the film fast-forwards five years to 1962 and scenes of violent street demonstrations with shots of ululating women and protestors waving Algerian flags. The narrator informs us: ‘It is not known why, but after two years of relative quiet, apart from the guerrilla war in the mountains, trouble has broken out again.’ That was the year the French were forced to withdraw from Algeria. It was extraordinarily moving. When the film credits rolled at the end, the entire audience stood up as one and clapped and whistled and cheered solidly for about five minutes. I’d never experienced anything like it in a cinema — ever. The intimidation, brutality, torture and outright murder of Algerians didn’t do the French much good. It provoked political scandals in France, discredited the French Army and traumatised French political life for years. Insurrection continued throughout Algeria, and though the French won the battle of Algiers, they lost the war for Algeria and withdrew in 1962. General Jacques Massu, the actual commander of French forces in Algeria and the model for the film’s Para Lt Colonel Philippe Mathieu, wrote a book in 1971 challenging Pontecorvo’s film, which led to it being banned in France for many years. In it he defended torture as ‘a cruel necessity.’ In 2000, his second-in-command, General Paul Aussaresses, acknowledged, without remorse, that thousands of Algerians had been ‘made to disappear,’ that suicides had been faked and that he himself had taken part in the execution of 25 men.

Gilo Pontecorvo’s ‘Battle of Algiers,’ a story of anti-colonialist struggle, spoke for a generation.

If you can keep the heid Another piece of cinema which contributed a lot to the mood of combativity in the wake of May 1968 was Lindsay Anderson’s surreal allegorical attack on the British class system and metaphor for Revolution — If. The story unfolds in a British public school, somewhere in the heart of England, building to boiling point with its mesmerising throbbing drum rhythms and harmonies of the Sanctus, the African Latin Mass from Missa Luba sung by a choir of young Congolese boys. The school’s smug, self-righteous and arrogant teachers, support staff and prefects represent the ruling class and their acolytes. The headmaster

Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If...’ spoke for 1968

Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus Dominus, Deus, Sabaoth, Dominus Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus Dominus, Deus, Sabaoth, Dominus Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

‘Dany the Red’ and ‘Lily the Pink’

who rules over this repressive parody of society sees himself as a man of integrity and good judgement who talks mince, thinks it’s wisdom, provoking anger and a determination for justice in the hearts and minds of Anderson’s protagonists. The rebel heroes were anti-establishment and sympathetic and the hail of bullets they rain down on their oppressors in the final scene is both unexpected, humorous and heart-lifting — in a schadenfreudal sort of way. Again, everyone stood up and burst out clapping. We ended the year with a big Christmas Lily the Pink* drink a drink a drink party, with lots of people from all over Europe. We’ll To Lily the Pink the Pink the Pink It would have made an historic photograph. The saviour of the human race she invented medicinal compound Who would have believed that the For Most efficacious in every case. merrymakers singing along lustily to the strain’s of The Scaffold’s big hit that year: Lily Lily the Pink, she Turned to drink, she the Pink were ‘dangerous anarchists out ‘to Filled up with paraffin inside smash society.’ Mind you, the presence of the and despite her medicinal compound Sadly Picca-Lily died. ‘notorious’ ‘Dany the Red’ might have given it Up to Heaven away. Her soul ascended All the church bells they did ring She took with her medicinal compound Hark the herald angels sing.

The Scaffold (McGough/McGear/Gorman * Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound

Conversion

Chapter 3 — 1968 (Autumn-Winter) I LEFT THE OLD BAILEY a free man in September 1968, after the banknotes affair. I was 22-years old. The Christie-watching industry must have received a jolt to hear I was involved in ‘conversion’. But it wasn’t the blinding light on the road to Damascus telling me to renounce my former beliefs. In fact, I was about to start work converting coal gas appliances to burn the new North Sea gas. The first natural gas from the North Sea gas fields was piped ashore on 7 March 1967 and by the end of the year it was reaching plants as far inland as Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham and Reading. My mate Ross got me started at the William Press Ltd’s training school in Mill Hill. For three weeks I learned the intricacies of dismantling, converting and even sometimes rebuilding gas cookers, gas central heating, water heaters and other sundry gas appliances such as gas irons and bath rails, some of which I had never heard of before, let alone seen. Although because a shortage of qualified fitters meant Press had to pay top wages, many applicants claimed to be experienced tradesman. Later, when I asked one guy who had made a terrible botch-up on a job if he really was a fitter, and he replied, straight-faced, ‘Yes, a carpet fitter.’ Because this was new technology, nobody really knew what would happen when we converted aging appliances from coal gas to North Sea gas. Some of the appliances we came across as we moved from house to house were between thirty and forty years old. Even many of the more modern appliances were in a terrible state, holding together only as long as nobody disturbed them. What would happen when these appliances were stripped down and put together again was anybody’s guess. As even the experts were keeping their fingers crossed, praying that the nation’s antiquated coal gas system wouldn’t blow to pieces, three weeks’ training qualified me as well as any of them. I passed the final exam and in no time at all was talking like an old time-served tradesman. I even learned how to take a sharp intake of breath.

Setting Essex alight Conversion Unit Number 8, based at Brentwood in Essex, just to the north-east of London, was my new base. Our contract covered the whole of Essex, which we were converting community by community, turning up every morning in our convoys of bright-orange three-ton vans wearing our trendy bright blue overalls. It was a bit like the Durruti Column heading for Zaragoza in July 1936. The early morning start from Brentwood meant that Ross and I had to be up and out of the flat by 5:30 a.m. at the latest. We walked the two miles to Manor House, where a William Press bus would pick us up at 6 a.m. and take us to Brentwood. If the transport did not turn up, as sometimes happened, we would take the bus and tube to Liverpool Street, then catch the train directly to the sector — if we knew where it was and could find our way through the backroads of Essex. Fortunately, after a months or so, one of our workmates, Alex Sannachan, another Glaswegian, bought an old banger. This gave us an extra hour of sleep in the mornings, but as we were on different sectors and

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

worked until different times at night, it often meant hitching home or, occasionally, sleeping at the yard. The hours were exhausting, but the job was interesting. The pay was better. I was bringing home about sixty to seventy pounds a week clear, as well as getting long weekends and was claiming my once-monthly travel allowance to my home in Scotland. My first conversion sector was a rural community near Billericay. The scattered cottages were about half a mile apart. My job in the morning was to go round the two or three houses allotted to me and check for gas leaks before starting any conversion. If the house was sound, the next job was to check that we had the correct conversion kit for the domestic appliance in that particular house. Lots of cookers and water heaters looked so alike that it required a bit of experience — more than I had — to tell the difference between them. Some were so old that it probably would have taken an Antiques Road Show expert to decide what model they were. It was not uncommon to be halfway through converting a house at nine at night before realising you had the wrong parts. My first conversion was a disaster. The lady had only two gas appliances, both modern and both too complex for my limited experience. One was a Cannon cooker with electric ignition and an automatic light inside the oven. The gas part of the conversion was reasonably straightforward. But when I finished I found I had more parts left over than either the makers or I bargained for. I had no idea what to do with them, but the cooker seemed to work well enough without them. Then I moved on to the central heating. Nothing in the training school had prepared me for this. It was a Servowarm central heating radiator — a burner inside a large master radiator that served other radiators in the house. Servowarm master radiators have a ‘balanced flue’, which takes in the required amount of air from an outside wall. Through the same opening it expels all the gas produced inside the combustion chamber. For this reason these master radiators are mounted with access to an outside wall. God alone knows what sort of cowboy had installed this one, but he had fitted it flush against the windowsill so no one could open the hinged top to service it. I spent seven hours on that radiator, not leaving until 11:30 p.m. — and it still wasn’t finished. At the end I had three other fitters working with me, all with the same experience as myself. In the end we had to leave it for someone from Servowarm to finish. To make matters worse I had to make the house safe before leaving. Thinking I was undoing what should have been the gas supply, I found I had undone the water supply and narrowly missed flooding the poor woman’s living room. I slept uneasily that night and wondered if it was politic to come back the following morning. Fortunately, no damage was done. The second day brought more difficulties. At training school I had been warned of the dangers of messing around with high-pressure rings (HPRs). These were mercury valves on pressure governors, found only in outlying areas where the gas pressure had to be increased considerably to get it through the

The ‘Willy Lotts’ Cottage’ Incident

pipes. Once a house had been converted to North Sea gas the governor had to be adjusted to a level matching the increased gas pressure. It was a bit like adjusting the pressure on car tyres. With normal spring governors found in most houses this was just a case of adjusting the screw until the correct pressure was reached. However, with these HPRs the screwing had to be done very, very carefully, otherwise all the mercury would be blown out of the valve and the gas would escape at extremely high pressure through a by-pass valve. My last house that second day was like Willy Lotts’ Cottage, the location of the Constable’s ‘Hay wain,’ an old chocolate box picture of a place with no electricity at all — even the lighting was gas. It was a job that had to be done as quickly as possible, so the elderly lady who lived there could at least make herself a cup of tea and have some light. I did my best. Even so I did not finish everything until eleven that night. When I asked where her meter was she led me by candlelight to a cupboard to show me where the meter was. I remember thinking that it was an extra large governor, one I hadn’t seen before, but paid no more attention — and started to adjust the valve cap as per normal.

Gas! Gas! Gas! Looking forward to the promised cup of tea and the prospect of getting home to bed, I suddenly became aware of low rumblings, like the sound of distant thunder. Either that, or an earthquake. It came from the meter. Although I had been warned of these devices, I couldn’t for the life of me remember what to do if they went wrong. The noise grew louder and louder — and more menacing. Adopting my most nonchalant manner, I asked the old lady not to panic, and if she would mind stepping outside and moving as quickly as possible to the back of the garden. I also asked her to call across the garden fence to her next-door neighbours and ask them to do likewise. The place consisted of only a few isolated cottages, miles from anywhere and neither the lady of the house nor her neighbours had a telephone. And I didn’t have a radio. We were also miles from technical support — if we had any at all. A vision flashed through my mind of the whole area being blown skyhigh. I could even see in my mind’s eye tomorrow’s newspaper headlines, once they knew who was involved: ‘Anarchist blows up Constable’s village.’ The noise from the gas main had by this time reached crescendo point and had blown the mercury completely out of the valve. A powerful geyser of highpressure gas was now gushing from a pipe on the outside wall right up the garden path. All it needed was one spark to turn it into a blazing inferno. I went to make sure the old lady was safe with her neighbours who had gathered together in their back gardens. It must have brought back to them the dark days of the Blitz. I then climbed the fence at the back and hared across the fields to telephone for help. Half a mile down the lane I found another house. Fortunately this was one of the few in the area with electricity. I banged on the door shouting about an emergency, that I was Gas Board and could I use their telephone? The woman

Willy Lotts’ Cottage, Constable

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

came out in her nightdress and was naturally horrified. She told me the lady next door had a phone. As I bolted next door, she put on a coat, dashed to her car and drove off to warn the rest of her neighbours to prepare to evacuate as the whole district was about to go up with a bang. I finally managed to get through to the Gas Board emergency service who said they would send someone right away. I then went back to the house where they were all standing at the bottom of the garden singing ‘We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when.’ The gas was still gushing out and the whole area smelled strongly. I was pacing up and down anxiously. At one point I even took out a packet of cigarettes and absent-mindedly offered them around — the startled looks on all the faces brought me out of my distraction. Eventually, around midnight, the lights of a bicycle betokened the arrival of the gas emergency service. An elderly man propped his bike against the garden wall, undid his bicycle clips and walked into the house completely unperturbed, and turned off the supply at another cock which I had completely overlooked. I was very shamefaced, especially when I turned around and saw the mistress of the house behind him watching his every move. ‘It’s my second day,’ I said apologetically. ‘Never mind, son,’ she said consolingly. ‘You did very well, considering.’ It took me some time to live down the events of that night. The women of the village had obligingly told the crews of every William Press van they came across. But in spite of all that I soon became a competent and conscientious workman. You might have thought that this would have persuaded the police to lay off me, but no, it was merely cited to the press by the ubiquitous ‘police spokesman’ as an example of my deviousness and animal cunning. It’s an interesting stereotype that anarchists are not good, reliable workers, an image that historically has grown out of, first, the Russian nihilist movement and later, work-shy hippies. But the great anarcho-syndicalist unions which flourished throughout Europe from the end of the 19th century to 1939 would never have been able to negotiate unless their workers — skilled and unskilled — had been the best there were. The revolutionary worker taking on the state has to be good at his job. But in Britain, the labour movement was the happy hunting ground of authoritarians. No one thought of it as being part of a libertarian development.

A Burglary In Houndsditch

The management at William Press Ltd, like everyone else, knew my history and politics. Few, if anyone, in the company believed that it was possible to be persecuted for having a different viewpoint from that of the government. They would say half-seriously that they didn’t support it themselves, except by way of tax. The manager shook his head in bewilderment at being told he shouldn’t employ someone who had been in a Spanish prison — and had not even been sent there by a properly constituted court — when they were regularly being asked by the Home Office to cooperate in resettling and rehabilitating British prisoners who had presumably had a fair trial. Just normal assumptions of fair play made everyone at work resent the police harassment of me. And they only saw a small part of it. By this time I had repaid the Foreign Office for my fare home from Spain and had my passport returned. With the long weekends we had with William Press, and the travel allowance, I was making regular Friday-to-Sunday weekend trips to France and Belgium on behalf of the Anarchist Black Cross to discuss general anti-Francoist strategy with Octavio Alberola. My name, however, was on the Special Branch’s ports watch list and — as a ‘code J’ — these foreign comings and goings were closely monitored. The police always wondered where we got the money to pay for these trips. It never occurred to them, either, that both Albert and myself were working bloody hard and long hours to fund them. My trips were regarded with suspicion by the French and Belgian police as well as by Scotland Yard. On one occasion when I got a really sympathetic interview with the Radio Times, the journalist commented that I looked, and came over as, respectable, but that people shouldn’t be deceived as I mixed with international anarchists. It was mixing with foreigners that made you less than respectable. Obviously the police hadn’t adapted themselves to that aspect of the era of the Common Market.

The Siege of Sidney Street Appreciation Society Fairfield Gardens in Crouch End was by now too ‘hot’ for meeting comrades from abroad, but it certainly was a focal point for local young radicals. The people in the flat downstairs moved out at the first opportunity. They had been badly frightened by the first raid. Here were police who wanted to talk politics. Something peculiar was going on upstairs, but they didn’t know what. The place appeared to be under round-theclock surveillance, and they never recovered from being woken up out of bed on the first raid in February and asked what alarm clock they used, as well as how they felt about the capitalist system. Two friends moved in: Alan Barlow, a Liverpudlian building worker, and Phil Carver from Wales. Both were anarchists and they held regular meetings in the downstairs flat. At the first meeting they decided on a name for the group which they called ‘The Siege of Sidney Street Appreciation Society.’ The Siege of Sidney Street (January 1911) followed an

Sidney Street, London, 3 January 1911 (Flavio Costantini)

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

attempted burglary of a jeweller’s shop in Houndsditch, during which five City of London policemen were shot (three fatally) when they interrupted the burglars (a group of Latvian anarchists). Two of the group responsible were besieged at 100 Sidney Street, Stepney, and died resisting 750 armed police and soldiers directed by the then Liberal Home Secretary, Winston Churchill. The jokey name seemed funny at the time, but the group was involved in some serious work around North London, focusing on local housing. Its members were also involved in pioneering projects such as squatting. They also organised weekly talks and discussions on anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist ideas and history in their flat downstairs My long hours on the gas conversion kept me from most of these meetings. The only political activity I had any spare time for was the Anarchist Black Cross. It was a two-way process. Involving militants here and in other countries meant that the Spanish Resistance during and after the civil war would not be forgotten and we also hoped that the spirit of that anarchist resistance to tyranny would rub off on those who came into contact with it. That was certainly how it turned out, though I cannot say I planned it. My original idea was for prisoners to benefit from the same sort of international help in regard to material comforts that I had enjoyed. It was Albert — whose record was entirely concerned with industrial action and who at the time didn’t have much belief that young militants would become involved in the international struggle — who insisted that all charities were rackets, and that the difference between institutional charity and fraud was one that only a legal brain could define anyway. He maintained that we should avoid the pitfalls of becoming a charity and instead ask people who wanted to help prisoners to get in touch with them directly, as opposed to channelling their aid through us.

Franco — the resistance continues People seemed to becoming more aware of — and angry at — what was happening in Spain. Most looked on the civil war as history. Even those who were alive at the time often did not appreciate that it was still going on, that a good part of the anarchist movement had never accepted the victory of Franco and had fought on since 1939. The Communist Party, which had been so insistent that the war be carried on despite overwhelming odds — right up to the last death in battle or the moment when Hitler became their ally — had never supported the active resistance, apart from a brief period in the late 1940s when they were involved with anarchists and republicans in a botched invasion into Spain through the Aran Valley. Others had taken the view that it might be all right to fight in wartime, but once Franco became ‘legal’ by right of conquest, it was criminal. Even certain so-called libertarians held such a point of view. They felt it was okay to use violence during the civil war, and even during the second world war when, if not legal, it was at least supported by the general consensus of opinion at the time, but to go on after 1945 was banditry.

Watchers At The Threshold

The continued resistance to Franco certainly inspired people. Even some of our close friends had not realised that they too could write directly to someone in prison, that they were separated not by time, only by distance. When they started sending in parcels and in some cases corresponding, I felt maybe I hadn’t wasted my time sitting in Franco’s nick. The Special Branch believed it was all a conspiracy to involve people in action against the Franco regime. I must confess it worked out that way. Attacks against premises owned by Francoist government institutions in Europe increased — as did the police surveillance on me. Ordinary non-politically involved people I came into contact with were by now not only aware of the Special Branch interest in me, but also looked with amazement at the personal vendetta fanned by the Beaverbrook Press. Not that the Express group ever really blamed me for anything — the ‘young Scottish anarchist who spent time in a Spanish prison’ who appeared in their columns could be almost anyone. Once, to be really subtle, the London Evening Standard made it not one who had spent time in a Spanish prison, but one who had ‘good cause to hate Spain.’ Well, that let me out. Speak not its name, I loved it but too well. A crime reporter for one of the Sundays who had close links with Scotland Yard told me in all seriousness, not knowing where I worked, that the Special Branch suspected a major gas conversion contractor in North London of providing cover for some sort of anarchist plot. This firm apparently employed a large number of suspiciously long-haired youths with anarchist sympathies. The police surveillance at work was strongly resented both by my workmates and me. There was even talk of a strike, at which the long-suffering management exploded with ‘You don’t think we invited them here!’

Exits and entrances As I said, not only was I watched carefully at work, but also I was on the SB ports ‘watch list,’ a grey ledger in which they had down every name I had ever given to a new landlord or used for postal purposes. Even ‘Sidney Street’ figured on the lists in case I thought that one up. In Brussels, Paris, Calais, Ostend, Geneva, Copenhagen and Milan the local political police were waiting and watching. I never bothered to find out if they had my name on the list at Irun and Madrid control points, as I had already figured I would be persona non grata on the Spanish peninsula, but France and Belgium were different. I was even on visiting terms with the latter’s chargé d’affaires. He had told me of all the fantastic things he was supposed to have done fighting fascism, which went a lot further than transporting plastic explosives in his rucksack. I was usually searched at the beginning of a trip and again at the end, I

Special Branch ‘Watchers’

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

suppose they expected, like the Lone Ranger, that I had a hideout in the sky. I often wondered what they expected to find in their searches. One typical journey was by air from Lydd in Kent to Le Touquet and then by bus to the Place de la Republique in Paris. Yes, it’s true that I went on these trips to meet other anarchists. On this particular journey I began chatting to a lad on the plane from Notting Hill, a West Indian. He was going to Paris for the first time on a short holiday. Suspecting that when we got to our destination I’d be followed or possibly detained, so — not wanting to involve him — I tried to leave him when the bus arrived at its destination, but he insisted we go for a drink before going our separate ways. I wasn’t hassled at the bus terminus, but I did spot one suspicious-looking character walking up and down the building outside. My instincts were immediately aroused to a hundred-fold velocity. It was one of those moments when the subconscious sends out signals of imminent danger and you respond with an idramatic acceleration of thought, perception and reaction. We strolled to a nearby cafe and we sat facing the Place de la République. I chose the spot to make sure I wasn’t being followed. I then saw the man I had noticed earlier indicating to four or five others in plain clothes to take up different points of the square. The waiter hadn’t yet taken our order, so I suggested that we move on to another bar. I needed to check if they really were following me. It wasn’t my imagination; they tailed us through back streets, alleyways, across boulevards and down other mean streets of Paris. My companion was beginning to get alarmed by my strange behaviour and must have thought I was luring him into an ambush to mug him for his holiday money. I decided to take him into my confidence and told him my story, or at least part of it. I explained that I was unsure as to whether or not the people who were following us were police, Deuxième Bureau or what. Many revolutionaries had disappeared mysteriously in Paris and I didn’t particularly want to add my name to the list. After I told him my story the look on his face indicated that my story was ringing bells somewhere at the back of his mind. In fact he remembered the story from The Jamaica Gleaner back home in Jamaica. I asked him to hang on with me for a little while longer until I could lose my pursuers. Amazingly, he agreed to see it through with me. We continued on through the back streets, across more boulevards, through markets, but still we couldn’t dodge them. Finally we came to a boulevard near the Place de la Bastille, where it dawned on me how we could give them the slip. I explained the plan to my new friend and accomplice. We went to a bar and sat by the window where we could easily be seen. Our watchers were across the road, sitting on benches or standing under trees, engrossed in their newspapers or chatting in pairs. After we finished our coffees I made as if to take my leave of my friend, shaking hands somewhat ostentatiously on the pavement, as if saying goodbye. He hailed a passing cab and I returned to the door of the cafe.

Not The Sort Of Thing That Happens In England

The cab drove off, then it suddenly braked and reversed as if he had forgotten something. It was me. He opened the car door and I jumped in quicker than greased lightning and the cab took off down the boulevard, with les flics scuttling like disturbed cockroaches to their own cars — which were all facing the wrong direction on the opposite side of the boulevard. The cab dropped us at the Bastille, where we dashed down into the Metro, and jumped on the first train that came along, getting off only when we felt sure we had lost them. As a matter of fact, it was no secret where I was going that night. I was staying with the family of my old cellmate, Luis Andrés Edo, who was still in prison in Spain for his part in the failed kidnap attempt on the C-in-C of US forces in Spain in 1966. When we parted later my new West Indian friend said it had been one of the most exciting days of his life and he was sorry it had to end. Elsewhere in Paris frenzied flics were no doubt arguing volubly with their superiors as to how they had lost me and how le diable écossais had the advantage of arms and numbers, and had even called on the troisième monde to assist him. But that wasn’t the end of it. At Le Touquet, on the way home on the Sunday, I struck up a conversation with a young English lad sitting next to me, a trainee manager with BOAC. The question of politics never came up -— something that the political police would have found difficult to believe. I didn’t want him to go through the rigmarole of suspicion that pursued me on these trips abroad, so before we got to Lydd I suggested that we separate to avoid going through immigration together, as it might compromise him in his job. He laughed. ‘What, are you one of these student troublemakers?’ he asked. ‘Something like that,’ I agreed. So I went through by myself. The Special Branch man recognised me and — as was usual — asked me pleasantly how I had enjoyed my trip and where I’d been. I invariably replied, ‘Here and there,’ which never failed to annoy them, but it always went down in the notebook. I sat in the passenger lounge with a cup of tea. The trainee manager came through and sat beside me, asking in a slightly sarcastic manner if I got through immigration all right — as if the British police would concern themselves with such things. I looked up to see the face of the Special Branch man peering at us through the slightly open door of his office. He saw me looking and quickly closed the door. I said to my companion ‘No, I didn’t have any trouble, but you will in a few minutes if you don’t move.’ He chuckled. A few seconds later a hostess approached him and said, ‘I’m sorry, sir. There seems to have been some mix-up with your passport. Could I have it back for a few minutes, please?’ He looked at me quizzically then handed it over. She returned it to him a few minutes later with a smile. The SB man had no doubt called Central Registry to check on the guy’s background. I then listened with good grace to him telling me that I was paranoid and had too lively an imagination. It wasn’t the sort of thing that happened in England. He was pursuing this line of argument as we were filing out on to the bus. I was in front and had just climbed on to the bus when the SB officer and three other men in plain clothes appeared beside him and pulled him out of the

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

queue to usher him back inside the terminal building. A guard stood outside and another by the bus. We waited for twenty minutes or so. A lady, who wanted to get off after some fifteen minutes for a wholly human need, was humiliatingly questioned and followed to the toilet. My new-found acquaintance finally reappeared. He was pale and visibly shaken. They had asked him time and time again if he were a friend of mine, how he had met me, what he had carried through for me or had been asked to carry through for me. They had telephoned his manager at BOAC and checks had been made at his local police station to see if anything was known about him. I doubt very much if anyone came forward to apologise, or pointed out to his friends, neighbours and employers that his only offence had been to talk to a stranger whose ideas of socialism were more libertarian than permitted by unwritten law. Incidents like this, though they drew a blank, were added to my dossier. Like the bishop who thought that finding an empty tomb was proof of Christianity, the faceless men at the Yard were convinced that I must be guilty of a great international conspiracy since they made so many raids and found nothing. Can it be only my imagination that after the great non-event of October 1968, the authorities became more arrogant, more contemptuous of public opinion? They now thought they could act with impunity. The attacks on me were symptomatic, perhaps, but they were far from being the only ones being carried out at the time. Everywhere the police seemed to think they could do as they liked, and the hippie drug scene gave them a fairly open hand anyway. Apart from the powers given to them by the law, magistrates were too deferential to refuse any warrant demanded of them. A lot of people who worked with me at William Press’s were quite indignant about what was going on, but despite the democratic myth they had no voice that could make itself heard. This and other minor forms of harassment were repeated up and down the country, wherever young radicals congregated, and at all the main rail stations and main roads into London. Young people had a voice, but everyone pretended it was a minority one. The politicians tried hard to sell the ‘silent majority’ idea, a weasel phrase that pretended that the majority of people supported the ‘status quo.’ The truth was very much the other way. A lot of people were getting angry at the post-October arrogance when the security forces seemed to imagine they had won a great — albeit stage-managed — victory. Sooner or later the anger was going to boil up. There only needed to be a minority that wasn’t going to accept it. It turned out to be sooner — and ‘angry’ was the key word.

Death in East Kilbride

Chapter 4 — 1969 (Spring-Summer) GRANNY DIED on 7 February 1969. She was 79-years old and had been ill for some time with bone cancer, diabetes and other lesser illnesses and infirmities that accompany old age. Granny hadn’t feared death, which made her passing all the easier, not only for her but for my mum, Olivia and myself. She had seen too much of death to be afraid. There had been pain, but the doctors had given her some morphine-based drug which appeared to keep it at bay. She showed signs of weariness, but other than that she was the same spirited woman up to her last breath. I had been going backwards and forwards up to Scotland whenever I could, which wasn’t often enough, to spend some time with her. Towards the end, before they took her to Hairmyres hospital, I would sit in the evenings in a chair at the foot of the bed we had made up for her in the corner of the room. She didn’t like the light on so the room was lit only by the flickering flames from the open coal fire in the grate. It was very peaceful. We didn’t talk much, just the occasional couple of words; we didn’t really need to say more. I wasn’t with her when she passed away in the hospital early one morning, something which I regretted, but as Robert Frost pointed out, no matter who is with you at the end, one always dies alone. The fact that she wasn’t there any more made me quite melancholic, but grief is the price of love and it has to be paid. I knew that she would have expected us to get on with our lives. She had left behind warm memories to treasure which helped transform that sadness and sense of loss into an optimistic appreciation of her life and the example she set others, particularly me.

Franco’s Bancos With the domestic political situation in Spain continuing to deteriorate, First of May Group bombings of Francoist institutions became more frequent through 1969. I was questioned regularly in connection with these incidents, irrespective of where I had been, or indeed which country they happened in. The closest I came to being connected with a violent incident was on 15 March 1969, when Alan Barlow and Phil Carver — anarchists who lived in the room below me in Fairfield Gardens — were arrested for putting a bomb through the letterbox of the Banco de Bilbao, a Spanish bank, in Covent Garden. We had spent an uneventful Saturday evening in our local, the Queen’s , in Crouch End Broadway and left the pub at closing time to walk the fifty yards or so to our flat in Fairfield Gardens. The moment we reached the corner I knew something was up. I could see figures lurking in the shadows at the far end of the cul-de-sac. I halted, briefly, and whispered to my girl-friend, Brenda, that the flat was being raided and to keep on walking. Her response was to kick me in the shin and tell me not to be so bloody melodramatic; there was ‘nobody there.’ It was my ‘paranoid imagination.’ She changed her mind when we got to the front door and found it wide open. Three plain-clothes policemen emerging from the shadows then surrounded us. It was pure film noir, though an inappropriate moment for me to crow ‘I told you so!’

Gran (Agnes McCulloch Davis): 1890-1969 ‘Weep not for her! Her memory is the shrine Of pleasant thoughts, soft as the scent of flowers, Calm as on windless eve the sun’s decline, Sweet as the song of birds among the bowers, Rich as a rainbow with its hues of light, Pure as the moonshine of an autumn night; Weep not for her!’ D.M. Moir — A Dirge From Home Burial The nearest friends can go With anyone to death, comes so far short They might as well not try to go at all. No, from the time when one is sick to death, One is alone, and he dies more alone. Friends make pretence of following to the grave, But before one is in it, their minds are turned And making the best of their way back to life And living people, and things they understand. Robert Frost — North of Boston

Fairfield Gardens: constant surveillance

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

‘We are the federales...I don’t have to show you any steenkin’ badges!’

One asked if we lived there, a pretty superfluous question given they’d been tailing me for months. Despite the innate desire to answer nothing but ‘name, rank and number’, I agreed, cautiously and we were ushered upstairs to our own flat. They wanted to ask questions and search the place. Luckily, Brenda had locked the door to our room and kitchen when we went out. When they asked me to open the door, I refused and told them they weren’t coming in until they produced a search warrant. ‘I don’t want you rummaging around and leaving anything,’ I said. ‘We don’t do things like that,’ said one of them haughtily, as if he had never heard of such a thing. ‘Just open up your room or we’ll break the door down.’ ‘Not without a warrant, I hope,’ I said. This guy was like ‘Gold Hat,’ the bandit chief played by Mexican actor Alfonso Bedoya in John Huston’s film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The heavily-moustached beaming and menacing ba’-faced bandido reproaches Bogart indignantly when asked for proof of identity: ‘We are the federales. You know, the mounted police. Badges? We ain’t got no badges. Badges, badges — I don’t have to show you any steenkin’ badges!’ It was a Mexican standoff. There was no point hanging around on the landing waiting for them to decide what they were going to do so we went into the room shared by Alan Barlow and Phil Carver. ‘I hope they know you’ve come here when they’re out,’ I said. ‘Out!’ cried the obnoxious detective. ‘Alan Barlow and Phil Carver won’t be out for a long time.’ ‘Have they been convicted?’ I asked in mock surprise. ‘They hadn’t even been charged with anything when they borrowed some coffee this morning.’ He scowled and said there was no call for sarcasm. The officer in charge, Detective Inspector Jack, took over at this point. Again he asked me to let them search my room and kitchen and again I declined until they produced a warrant. ‘We don’t need a warrant to search when someone has been arrested on a serious charge like this,’ he said. ‘All right, go ahead and search Alan and Phil’s place if you’ve arrested them. If you want to arrest me you can search mine as well.’ The officer began to lose his composure. I was wasting public time, they said. Considering the amount of time spent on me charged up to the public expense by the Special Branch already, a bit more or less didn’t overly concern me unless they were going to raise my tax code to pay for it. So DI Jack had to drive off to the local magistrate for a search warrant — they were notoriously easy for the police to obtain — while Brenda and I made ourselves comfortable on Alan’s sofa, joined by a growing number of friends of the accused, including a lot of highly articulate — and merry — Irish labourers, who were in the habit of coming around with a carry-out after closing time on Saturdays for some banter and a singsong. The waiting police didn’t particularly want to let them go once they had come in and they didn’t particularly want to go either, so we

The Curious Incident Of The Bomb In The Night

sat around drinking — come to think of it, it was my carry-out, but I won’t lay myself open to the usual accusations against the Scots by remembering it — and playing records. When the lads started singing Irish rebel songs the amusing thought struck me that perhaps the unsuspecting police wondered for a moment if they had the ideology of their suspects confused and they had landed in the middle of an IRA active service unit. Alan also had an excellent collection of recordings of Spanish Civil War songs, including the anarchist anthems A Las Barricadas and Hijos del Pueblo. These songs have fine rousing choruses, and were recorded by a massed choir evocative of the meetings of thousands of workers of the CNT (National Confederation of Labour) in the industrial cities of Catalonia and other parts of Spain. When it came to A Las Barricadas even people knowing no Spanish could belt out the chorus — and the volume on the record player was turned up full pelt. As the cream of Hornsey’s disaffected youths and malcontents — Irish navvies, Scottish ’poison dwarves’ (height-challenged Glaswegians), anarchists and a Heinz variety of Trotskyists sat on the floor or lounged on the chairs shouting out the battle hymns of revolution and Irish rebellion, the detectives stood against the walls as grim-faced as missionaries at a pagan dinner dance. But they concealed any resentment or anger admirably until DI Jack finally returned, waving his warrant triumphantly, at half-past-midnight. But he was no Neville Chamberlain with news of ‘Peace in our time’ and advice to go home and get a good night’s sleep. The Highgate magistrate hadn’t been at home, so Jack had had to traipse all the way to Bow Street to get his warrant. He was not a happy man!

Bow Street Runners

Banco de Bilbao, Covent Garden

Benedict Birnberg

Having searched the place and found nothing they asked me to accompany them to Bow Street Police Station. I still had not been told what the reason for the raid was, but it was pretty clear it had something to do with Alan and Phil. DI Jack said he was going to charge me when we got to Bow Street. ‘Anything in particular?’ I asked. He seemed uncertain. Before going I asked a friend to phone my solicitor, Ben Birnberg, right away. I passed Ben so much business that if I had ever paid his bills he would have been one of the richest lawyers in town — as well as one of the most conscientious. At Bow Street, Detective Chief Inspector Phillips took over the interrogation. Brenda came with me to make sure I was all right. We were interviewed in the charge room. When he realised that we were unable to assist him in his inquiries, and were unwilling to answer any questions except in the presence of our solicitor, DCI Phillips finally decided to release me at three o’clock in the morning. Phillips, although an experienced CID officer, made no attempt to conceal his anti-anarchist prejudices. Later, when Alan and Phil were charged, he objected to bail on the grounds that they were ‘hardened anarchists.’ Phillips, together with most of his colleagues, did not think much of anarchists. Perhaps

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Banco Español en Londres

Spanish Embassy, London

it was self-interest: if the state were made redundant his job and pension would go down the pan. We should have issued a manifesto promising to retire all policemen on double pay. He agreed to let DI Jack get us a car and driver to take us home. Driving out of the station we almost ran over John Rety, who had walked several miles from Camden Town on hearing of our arrest to help. With friends like that you can’t go far wrong. John lived in an old curiosity shop in Camden High Street with his wife Susan (who cherished her lovely antiques so much she hid them from customers who might be tempted to buy them) and their little daughter Emily. It was the next day before we learned what had happened. Alan had dropped a small bomb through the letterbox of the Banco de Bilbao, a Spanish bank, in Covent Garden. The device was set with a short fuse to ensure it went off early in the morning when the premises were empty and passers-by were less likely to be injured. This care to avoid injury was always a hallmark of the First of May Group, as it later was of the Angry Brigade. Although this method of protest clearly carries with it the danger of injury, that was never the intention. The prime target was property, not life. Unfortunately, for Alan and Phil, the fuse was too short and the device exploded as they were running away, straight into the arms of the police who apparently had the premises under surveillance, following information received from the Spanish secret police via Interpol. Phil’s defence was that he went along with Alan because he was going into town anyway, but had no idea of his flatmate’s intentions. Next day I went with my solicitor, Ben Birnberg, to Bow Street Police Station to be questioned. Most of the questions were about if I had known what Alan and Phil were planning to do. DCI Phillips also wanted to know if I was a member of any other political organisation besides the Anarchist Black Cross. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘inasmuch as I live in the same house where meetings of the Siege of Sydney Street Appreciation Society take place and I help them with duplicating leaflets, I suppose I belong…’ ‘The Siege of Sydney Street Appreciation Society!’ interjected Phillips, in about the tone the Chief Rabbi might use when hearing about the Cult for the Beatification of Adolf Hitler. One of the detectives smirked. ‘I have proof of this society,’ he said, tossing on the table a copy of Freedom in which its meetings were listed. They all exchanged significant glances. ‘So you admit to knowing about the explosion beforehand?’ asked DCI Phillips. ‘What — the one in Houndsditch?’ I asked. ‘That was before even you were born.’ He glared at me. ‘You say you know nothing about this explosion at the bank and yet you belong to this — society?’ he asked. ‘Yes.’ ‘Thank you, Mr. Christie,’ he said after an ominous silence. ‘That will be all — for the moment.’

‘Gawd Knows, an’ ‘E Won’t Split On A Pal’

It was in fact all. I wasn’t called upon again by the police in connection with either the Banco de Bilbao or the Houndsditch affair of 1911. However, some months later, during his trial, Alan was asked by prosecuting counsel if he knew anyone who went around throwing bombs. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You know Stuart Christie?’ ‘Yes.’ In the subtlety stakes it left a lot to be desired. But the defence counsel omitted to mention — perhaps he did not know — that the said Stuart Christie was up in the public gallery at that very moment, and if he went around throwing bombs and the court felt it high time that sort of thing was stopped, they had only to call on one of the many policemen patrolling the corridors of the building to apprehend him. After the poor old Siege of Sidney Street Appreciation Society had been brought in yet once more, the counsel for the prosecution suggested that if Alan and Phil were jailed all the woes of the kingdom would cease. Unfortunately for this thesis bombs, similar in every way to that which exploded in the Banco de Bilbao in March 1968, went off at the Spanish Embassy and Spanish National Tourist Office on 5 July 1969, at the very moment the court hearing Alan and Phil’s case was in session. The judge bent over backwards to explain to the jury that they had not to hold this against the accused, who were in the custody of the court at the time. ‘Grim Jim’ Callaghan had been adamant that political affiliations were a good enough reason for withdrawing bail in the case of Phil — and in the circumstances the result was surprisingly better than had been expected. How things have changed!

No conspiracy Alan changed his plea to guilty to the unlawful use of explosives — taking full responsibility for the attack and claiming Phil had no knowledge of his intentions that night — and received a 12-month sentence, most of which he had already served on remand. Grim Jim’s punishment for socialistic deviance came in handy for him, since the subsequent time he had to spend in the ghastly Wormwood Scrubs prison was reduced considerably. Phil, having been on bail throughout — on the condition he cleared out of our flat, it being thought there were corrupting influences there — was fined £150 and given a 12-month suspended sentence. He told the court he would go home to Wales, which was agreed to with relief by the authorities. They no doubt felt that nobody other than a fervent nationalist could go wrong among the hymn-singing, Labourvoting communist miners who are the end product of years of the great revolutionary Cymric tradition. Interestingly, although these bombings were later alleged by the police to have been part of the so-called ‘Angry Brigade’ actions, no conspiracy charges were brought against Alan or Phil, jut the unlawful use of explosives. The attacks on Franco’s institutions did not go unnoticed. The week after

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Albert Meltzer and Stuart Christie

Alan and Phil’s trial I was at home in our new flat in Fonthill Road, Finsbury Park, with Albert Meltzer discussing the book we were in the process of writing together, The Floodgates of Anarchy. The book had been commissioned by Morris Kahn of Kahn & Averill following the publication of the opinion piece on anarchism Patrick Marnham asked me to write for the Weekend Telegraph magazine. This was the article which had appeared on Friday 26 October, the day before the big anti-War demonstration the previous year. Strangely, it was always the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph that gave me the most sympathetic press coverage. As Albert and I were discussing how best we could convey the possibilities of a repression-free society, a loud knocking heralded the arrival of Special Branch Detective Inspector David Palmer-Hall, and another Special Branch officer. Both the Spanish Embassy and the Spanish National Tourist Office had been bombed the previous week. Naturally, they wanted to know what I knew about it. Perhaps they assumed that I would break down and say, ‘Well, guv, it’s a fair cop,’ in the manner of a crook in an Edgar Wallace novel, or even ‘By heavens, what a fool I’ve been!’ Fortunately, I had an alibi, having just returned from seeing my mum and sister Olivia in Scotland, who were still grieving for gran. The political policemen exchanged suspicious glances. If you didn’t have an alibi that was bad, but if you did have one, it was still suspicious. But the interview was conducted on a courteous basis, the police no doubt being restrained by the impressive Meltzer form comfortably filling my only decent armchair. The rest of us sat precariously on the other rickety bits and pieces that had been thrown in by the landlord to qualify the flat as furnished and hence make our tenancy relatively insecure. DI Palmer-Hall didn’t even ask to search the premises, but his eyes moved constantly around the room. He couldn’t resist commenting on the fact that there was an advertisement for pistols in an American magazine lying open on the table. There was also an advert on the same page for shoe salesmen, but no comments were passed about that. We had enough problems trying to get the week’s shopping, let alone spending money on firearms. The magazine was in fact Soldier of Fortune, which I was reading as part of my researches into the international connections of the extreme right. But then again, Palmer-Hall wasn’t to know that. He finally got round to asking me point blank if I had any advance knowledge about the double attack on the two Iberian institutions. ‘I’m not saying you did anything,’ he graciously conceded. ‘But I’m sure you could help in letting me know who it was.’ ‘It could have been an opponent of the regime in Spain,’ I suggested. He beamed, pleased to find me co-operative. ‘Who would you say it was? ‘I haven’t the foggiest.’ ‘Is there any significance in the date 4 July?’ ‘American Independence?’ ‘I know that.’ He was getting irritable. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen

An Inspector calls

Palmer-Hall lose his temper. The first time I’d come across him was during an Anarchist Black Cross demonstration outside the Spanish Embassy. It was a well-attended affair, if you counted the watching plain-clothes policemen. One of our photographers, Pat, had tapped one of these on the shoulder. It was David Palmer-Hall, who looked around beaming and was beautifully captured on film. Inspector Palmer-Hall lost his temper on that occasion, demanding to know why he had been recorded for posterity. When Pat claimed he was a tourist, Palmer-Hall refused to believe him and tried to grab the camera, but Pat was quickly pulled back to safety by the restraining hands of others in the crowd. ‘Someone was seen running away from the Embassy at breakneck speed, wearing a pair of sandshoes,’ he went on, adding pointedly, ‘Do you own a pair of sandshoes?’ ‘No.’ ‘But what an idiotic question,’ weighed in Albert (at about eighteen stone). ‘Thousands of people in London own a pair of sandshoes. I own sandshoes.’ ‘If you used them for running around Berkeley Square at breakneck speed once or twice a week we might have some chairs left to sit on,’ I countered ungraciously. Palmer-Hall failed to take advantage of the rift thus opened up in the opposing ranks — or maybe his bum was getting sore perched on what was virtually a three-legged stool — and he got up to go. He didn’t look very happy, so I said consolingly, ‘You should be grateful to me — I must keep quite a number of you in work just following me around.’ He smiled and replied, ‘Oh we have plenty of other things to do — watching the people who cause trouble in industry, for instance.’ The veteran syndicalist looked up from his armchair quizzically. ‘Employers?’ At least we sent them out laughing on that occasion. Who in Fonthill Road, seeing those two leave, would believe their neighbour had just been visited by the political police? As they said goodbye, the other detective said they might be back soon. ‘I’m going on holiday next week, so don’t come back too soon,’ I said. Palmer-Hall was all ears. ‘Anywhere nice?’ ‘Europe.’ ‘Have a nice trip,’ he wished me. ‘Not Spain?’ ‘Not this time.’ A few weeks later an excited journalist rushed up to Albert while he was eating in the Albion pub in Fleet Street. ‘Is it true that the Special Branch are looking for Christie over the bombings of the Spanish Embassy and Tourist Office and he’s fled the country and taken refuge in Italy?’ he asked. I was in Italy. ‘What is Truth?’ asked Albert expressively, waving his arms to the peril of various printers’ pints of beer. But the journalist did not stay to give an answer.

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

On the road: the Bergen was the same one I went to Spain with in 1964

Fascist machinations

25 April bomb trial: Paolo Braschi, Paolo Faccioli, Tito Pulsinelli and two others on lesser charges. Bottom — supporters

Inspector Luigi Calabresi, anarchist specialist of Milan’s political police squad

In the summer, Brenda and I took a holiday to Italy. We had intended to hitchhike to Sardinia, but it turned out to be more of a relay tour, visiting one group of anarchists after another all the way from Paris to Marseilles, Genoa, Milan and Rome. Not only did they put us up, they also made sure that we made it safely to our next destination. Most of these connections had been made through the Black Cross. Since the Carrara congress the previous August, when the idea was first mooted, the Anarchist Black Cross had grown. Autonomous ABC groups were springing up throughout Europe, the Americas and in Australia and New Zealand. With Albert and a few others we had launched an ABC bulletin in the late autumn of 1968. It was an idea whose time had come, and before the end of the year its circulation had jumped from fifty to five hundred, attracting many international subscribers, who were also contributors. When we arrived in Italy, the political tension was reaching its peak. Since the beginning of the year the European press had been prophesying a long hot summer of riots, strikes — and terror. It proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since early spring there had been a series of bomb attacks in northern Italy — 32 according to the Italian ministry of the interior and 140 according to nongovernmental sources. To anyone who knew anything about the anarchist movement it was obvious that the attacks had nothing to do with any comrades. These explosions were directed against premises where ordinary people went about their everyday occupations: a classic technique of fascist and nationalist terrorists to create a climate of fear and panic among the general population. The most damaging ones had been a bomb that exploded on Liberation Day, 25 April, on the Fiat stand at the Milan Trade Fair and another the same day at the Bureau di Change in the Banca Nazionale delle Communicazione in the city’s central station. Both bombs had been designed — and timed — to injure or kill. No one died, but dozens of people had been seriously injured. The right-wing press and the policemen and investigating magistrate leading the hunt for the perpetrators — police inspector Luigi Calabresi, his superior, Antonio Allegra, head of the Milan political police (Special Branch), and Judge Antonio Amati — immediately blamed the anarchists. Indeed, they did it a bit too soon for credibility, ‘knowing’ who was to blame almost as soon as the accidents happened, which suggested — and as subsequent events proved — they probably knew a wee bit before. Fifteen anarchists were pulled in for questioning and, of these, six were charged with the Fiat and bank bombings. All six — Eliane Vincileone, Giovanni Corradini, Paolo Braschi, Paolo Facciolo, Angelo Piero della Savia and Tito Pulsinelli — strenuously denied having anything to do with the bombings. Giovanni Corradini, an architect, and his partner Eliane Vincileone were Calabresi and Amati’s main

Strategists of Tension

suspects in the frame, being the best-known anarchists and, presumably, in the police view, best filled the role of the brains behind the operation. What probably damned them was the fact they were close friends of the wealthy and influential left-wing Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. The comrades with whom I had discussed the Anarchist Black Cross in Carrara the previous August — Amedeo Bertolo, Umberto del Grande, and Giuseppe Pinelli from the Ponte della Ghisolfa anarchist group — had not hung around; they had set up the Croce Nera Anarchica (CNA) in March that year, and had been publishing a bulletin since June. By the time we arrived all their energies were being taken up with the defence of the six anarchists who had been held in San Vittorio prison since 2 May. Since the previous summer, Pinelli and other comrades had been monitoring neo-fascist activities. He had made some interesting discoveries about the close relationship between the Italian neo-fascist Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale organisations and agents of the Greek junta operating in Italy. As he had told me then, Italian neo-fascists were travelling regularly to Greece, ostensibly invited on cultural exchanges, and were returning to Italy describing themselves as anarchists and Maoists. In practice, he had now found out, they were being briefed for their covert role in the exercise of a psychological and terrorist campaign designed to destabilise Italian society by provoking panic, disorder and political uncertainty. The aim was to prepare the ground for a right-wing military junta to take over in Italy, following the example of the Greek colonels. The Italian comrades also discovered that the neo-fascists were organising paramilitary camps around the country where their members were given quaint names derived from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, such as Hobbits, and received ideological indoctrination and training for insurgency and attacks on leftist militants and offices. True to political fashion in such a case, they did not merely deny they had them but accused the anarchists of holding them. Although we didn’t know it at the time, we had arrived in Italy slap bang in the middle of the birth of what came to be known as the ‘strategy of tension.’ The principal eminence gris behind this campaign, we discovered much later, was Federico Umberto D’Amato, the head of the Confidential Affairs Bureau of the Interior Ministry. As Amedeo Bertolo and Giuseppe Pinelli explained, the vast majority of the bomb attacks and outrages that year had been the work of these right-wing extremists, attempting to move public opinion against the anarchists. The question no one could answer was whether or not these were spontaneous events or were part of some sinister plan. The Italian neo-fascists were so close to the police, security and intelligence services as to be almost indistinguishable. Pinelli favoured the latter explanation. In the first issue of the Italian Anarchist Black Cross bulletin, published in June 1969, he wrote about a series of apparently out-of-character neo-fascist attacks on churches, barracks and

Giangiacomo Feltrinelli

Milan, 1969: the ‘hot’ summer and autumn begin

Milan, 1969: fascist street squads

Federico Umberto D’Amato, architect of the ‘strategy of tension’

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

1969: fascist provocateur Mario Merlino posing as an anarchist

Milan 1969: student-worker demonstration

Milan 1969: anti-fascist demonstration

carabinieri stations the previous May in Palermo: ‘Emotionally disturbed though the neo-fascists may be, we are not so naïve as to believe in seven of them going ga-ga at the same time. Plainly their actions were part of some plan.’ The Croce Nera Anarchica editor explored his hypothesis further: ‘For fascists to strike at “anarchist” targets is explicable only if the objective is either to whip up a panic about subversive attacks in order to justify a police crackdown and an imposition of greater controls by the authorities, or to bring anarchists and, by extension, the Left, into disrepute. ‘It is an essential part’, he continued, ‘of the first of these purposes and would suit the second that some innocent person be injured or — better still, if more dangerously — killed.’ He concluded with a prophecy: ‘What has happened in Palermo bears out what we said immediately after the 25 April attacks in Milan at the Trade Fair and railway station: the culprits do not come from within our ranks. And the police’s insistence in arresting and detaining anarchists gives rise to grave suspicions.’ Both Pinelli and Bertolo were convinced something major was afoot, and that there was a real possibility of a right-wing coup in Italy. As elsewhere in Europe, much of the conservative and extreme right genuinely believed they were living in a pre-revolutionary period. As in the 1920s and 1930s, this psychosis of fear of communist and leftist subversion was an important factor in the spurt in growth of neo-fascism, confronting as it did the growing radicalisation and militancy of the Italian workers. Neo-fascism was additionally boosted by its close relationship with the Greek Junta as well as the Mafia, via the Christian Democrats — not to mention its complete penetration, and vice versa, of the different branches of the Italian police, security and intelligence services. Although the anarchists were aware of the danger, they were not in a position to do much about it. But they said they had prepared contingency plans and were ready to go underground at a moment’s notice, and also were prepared to fight against the revival of fascism backed by the constitutional police state. We promised to be ready to do whatever was necessary to support them should that time come. While we were in Milan, in August, Pinelli was putting together the second issue of the CNA bulletin. A few days earlier, on 9 August, twelve people had been injured when eight bombs exploded on as many busy passenger trains, within two hours of each other. Bombs on two other trains had failed to explode. Again the police and the press blamed the anarchists. Pinelli wrote: ‘Where there is an authoritarian regime in place, in the lead-up to some important event, special checks are carried out and hotheads, subversives and anarchists are detained by the police — some to help with inquiries, some on criminal charges: all as a precautionary measure. So, in this ghastly year of 1969, we wonder — what on earth is going on in Italy?’ The truth about the sinister machinations that were in train in Italy and the preparations for a coup d’état did not begin to unravel until December that year.

Sea And Sardinia

To Nuoro From Milan we hitched to Genoa where we caught the boat to Porto Torres in Sardinia — a beautiful, rural, rugged island, still more or less a land of peasants and bandits, but above all of kindness and courtesy. We had arranged to go camping with Jean-Pierre Duteuil, his partner Dominique and other friends from the Liaison des étudiants anarchistes (LEA) and the 22 March Movement. Dany Cohn-Bendit had been due to come as well, but couldn’t make it due to problems resulting from his deportation from France earlier that summer. From Porto Torres we took a train to Macomer where we changed onto a train drawn by a hissing steam engine which took us to Nuoro in the heart of Sardinia. The route was a single-track mountain railway snaking tortuously across the mountains and through a strange and wild countryside with rocky ridges, macchia-covered plains and the occasional grove of cork trees. The steam engine and carriages were old and looked as though they might have been used in the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which we had just seen before leaving London. The train was crowded and the passengers were mainly peasants, mostly gold-toothed women with brightly coloured vermilion, orange and maroon embroidered Sard dresses and shawls. When I produced my very basic Instamatic camera and peered through the viewfinder at the countryside the face of the smiling middle-aged peasant woman facing me was a study. In fact she became quite uncontainably excited and within minutes there was a lively crowd of jolly laughing people milling around, queuing to peek through the viewfinder. I don’t think they had seen a camera before. They were delighted. These were people who believed in witchcraft and enchantment. I was told that in nearby Mamoiada and Ottana they still sacrificed goats in ancient pagan rituals. I was disconcerted to find that each carriage had a Carabinieri riding shotgun — or sub-machine gun in our case. We were travelling through bandit country and attacks on trains were not uncommon. Maybe Butch Cassidy and Sundance hadn’t gone to Patagonia after all, but had come here to the wilds of Sardinia, and were still roaming the macchia of the Gennartgentu Mountains, looking for an opportunity. When we puffed and hissed into Nuoro station at the foot of Monte Ortobene, Jean-Pierre and Dominique were waiting for us with an oldfashioned Maigret-style black Citroën complete with running boards. JeanPierre, a native of nearby Corsica, was a regular visitor to Sardinia and knew the country like the back of his hand. He was taking us to where they were camped in a pine forest that bordered the white sands of the beach near Cala Gonone, on the enchanting bay of the Golfo di Orosei. Never having driven with Jean-Pierre before, the trip down the steeply descending and sharply curving road that flanked Monte Ortobene put the fear of God into me. Fear became panic when we rounded a corner on this narrow road, which was little more than a wide lane, and ran straight into the back of a Carabinieri

Sard women in traditional dress

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Throughout Italy, anarchist camp sites were being raided by Carabinieri and police (© Revista A)

roadblock. But instead of pulling into the queue of cars and tractors waiting to be checked, Jean-Pierre suddenly reversed, pulled out and drove at high speed through the roadblock, ignoring the carabinieri standing by the roadside waving his machine-gun trying to flag us down. Brenda and I were in the back, horrified, waiting to die, like Blanche and Buck in the film Bonnie and Clyde, as bullets riddled the back of the car. After a few moments, when I had a chance to recover my composure and realised the Carabinieri were not in hot pursuit, Jean-Pierre told me that cars with foreign number plates were not subject to road checks. But there was always a first time, I thought to myself. I had also noticed a fair number of crosses and makeshift shrines with flowers and photographs of young men by the roadside. These, it turned out, marked the sites where people had been shot by the Carabinieri, either intentionally or by accident, but mostly for not stopping at Carabinieri checkpoints! We continued down the 129 from Nuoro through Dorgali, passing only the occasional isolated house, and then, a few miles further on through palms and oleanders to a pine forest until we halted by the edge of a blindingly white sandy beach and the bluest sea I had ever seen. It was the Golfo di Orosei. After we arrived the campsite and had greeted the others, they insisted we went for a swim to cool off after our long journey. It was a hot August day and the temperature of the water must have been about 75°F. The beach was deserted apart from us, so we didn’t bother with swimming costumes. When we emerged from the sea I lay down to relax and soak up the sun while the others kicked a ball around on the beach, naked — three men and four women. Suddenly I became aware of something moving in the macchia on the embankment behind me. I looked up to see a machine-gun barrel disappearing into the undergrowth. I shouted to the others who ran up to find out what was happening. I explained what I had seen, and we clambered up the slope and cautiously advanced in line into the forest — all stark naked. I can’t imagine what we were thinking of. We had no protection against anyone with a gun, but I suppose at least we wanted to see them. If they were the famous Sardinian bandits, they might be amenable to reason. They wouldn’t get much of a ransom for us; in fact, in my own case they might have got an ‘unransom’ to keep me! Not far into the forest we uncovered two red-faced Carabinieri, each armed with a Beretta sub-machine gun and a pistol. As we advanced on them they retreated, evidently quite embarrassed at being surrounded by a gang of naked men and

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NATO’s Gladio

women. Fortunately, one of them suddenly saw the funny side and collapsed to the ground in hysterical laughter. His red-faced companion tried to explain that it was illegal for us to be camping there. We explained by signs that none of us spoke Italian or understood any of the other pidgin translations they attempted — which had the usual effect of making them speak louder and slower. With a final admonition that we should not start any fires they left. None of us read anything sinister into this encounter at the time, or when they showed up subsequently at regular intervals. Later, we discovered that there had been at least four other similar cases in Italy of anarchists on camping holidays being watched and even arrested by the Carabinieri and police. But our encounter proved to be not so innocent after all. Even in beautiful Sardinia the sinister shadow of Italian parapolitics hung over us. What we did not know — and only found out years later through sympathetic investigative journalist friends, was that my movements in Italy were being closely monitored by both Inspector Luigi Calabresi, the Divisione Investigazioni Generali e Operazioni Speciali (Digos — General Investigations and Special Operations) of the Milan Questure (file and warrant signed by Luigi Calabresi dated 1971), and by the Italian Security Service, the SID (Servizio Informazioni Difesa) under Admiral Eugenio Henke. The previous summer, the ‘long hot summer of ’68’, in the wake of May ’68 in France, the Italian general staff, working with the Americans, had established a secret base near Alghero to train members of the neo-fascist (pro-Mussolini) Avanguardia Nazionale, headed by Stefano delle Chiaie, and Pino Rauti’s neoNazi (Hitlerite) Ordine Nuovo. Both delle Chiaie and Rauti were also agents of Federico D’Amato’s Confidential Affairs Bureau and Admiral Henke’s SID. It was in Sardinia that the neo-fascists received CIA-sponsored training in terrorism, black propaganda and ideological indoctrination. All of this was under the auspices of the NATO Gladio plan. The CIA-funded and coordinated Gladio plan — formally set up in Italy in 1956 by the bitterly anti-communist Paolo Emilio Taviani, the Christian Democrat who headed the defence and security ministries — required NATO states to recruit and maintain a clandestine civilian network of ‘stay-behind’ fighters to resist a Warsaw Pact invasion. More importantly, in the Italian context, its role was to ensure that the powerful Italian Communist Party did not come to power, something seen by both the Christian Democrats and the extreme right in Italy — and the Americans — as a real possibility that summer. Regional tensions had been made worse in September 1969 by Colonel Gaddafi’s overthrow of the Libyan monarchy. His first target had been the US Air Force base in Libya. Two days after he came to power the Americans were ordered out, as were the British from the Tobruk naval base. Coupled with the appearance of a Soviet fleet in the Mediterranean and the Soviet Union’s close relationship with President Nasser of Egypt, President Nixon’s administration was all the more anxious to secure and expand the US’s existing military facilities in the Med, especially in Italy and in the Greece of the colonels.

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Gladio founder: Paolo Emilio Taviani

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

La Maddalena, Sardinia

The neo-fascists were recruited on the basis of their anti-communist zeal — something which had stood an earlier generation in good stead — and the fact that their leaders were agents of the Italian security services. The US Southern Land Forces base just a few kilometres up the Sardinian coast at nearby La Maddalena, also a CIA base, was used for training this neo-fascist parallel force. It is estimated that over a period of 4 years up to 4,000 people underwent training in terrorist warfare at these bases. Gladio’s links to the strategy of tension and right-wing terrorism emerged in 1973 when Venetian examining magistrate Carlo Mastellono determined that an Argo-16 aircraft which exploded in flight near Venice was being used to shuttle trainees and munitions between the US Maddalena base and Gladio sites in north-east Italy. But we didn’t know that at the time and assumed the Carabinieri patrols were looking for bandits — not for the likes of us. Later, after the excitement of that first day, I unpacked our tent only to discover that I had left the poles in the boot of the car of the friend who had driven us to Victoria Station. To make matters worse, there was a massive electrical storm that night. We had to make do as best we could. For some inexplicable reason I had a pair of braces in my Bergen which I was able to stretch between two trees and hang the tent from, weighting down the sides with boulders. It didn’t help. By morning we were soaked. Fortunately, when we explained our misadventures to the patron of a nearby cafe-restaurant-store — the only house in the vicinity in fact — he threw up his arms and insisted we use his villa — free — and immediately escorted us there. It wasn’t far from our beach campsite, close to the lower mountain slopes. Our host was typical of the Sards we met — warm, generous and exceptionally trusting. The ‘villa,’ he explained, was his base and shelter when hunting and working in the fields. In normal circumstances I wouldn’t have described it as a villa, more of a steading or barn, but at that moment it was a palace. He opened the shutters to air the empty room, removed a poisonous salamander snoozing on the mantelpiece — showing us at the same time how to hold the creature and avoid being pricked by its spines — swept the floor and collected some firewood for us. The villa was our base for the rest of August and the first week of September. The second week we ran out of cash and had to drive the 30 kilometres or so to Nuoro to find a bank. All the banks and post offices were on strike, and would remain closed for at least a week or ten days. Being stranded in the fastness of Sardinia without money was a daunting prospect. We didn’t order our usual meals and wine that evening and were lingering awkwardly over cups of coffee when the patron finally asked us what we wanted to eat. When we explained our plight he laughed and insisted there was no problem. We could have food, wine, spirits, coffee, cigarettes, everything we needed — and we could pay him when the strike was over. It showed extraordinary trust and memorable generosity to people he had never met before that summer. The only thing he asked of us was for Jean-Pierre to drive him occasionally to Nuoro or to the nearby market town of Orosei, as he had no transport of his own. We

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Bandits And Fascists

spent a lot of time over the next couple of weeks with him and his family. The little girl of the house taught us to clean and eat the prickly pears to be found all around us. She also introduced us to her pet, a wild boar. The only regular evening visitors to our patron’s establishment was a Nuorese bandit who came down from the mountains every couple of days to collect provisions. Often he would stay for a drink, a chat and a game of cards with the patron and us. We only discovered he was a bandit when the Carabinieri — who were all Italian and hated by the locals — came looking for him, but always without success. Our host had signalled to us to say nothing about our card-playing friend. No Sard would betray another Sard. The frustrated Carabinieri would swoop on the village late at night, close off the roads in the vicinity and burst into the cafe waving their guns. But no matter how many times they pulled this stunt, our new-found friend always seemed to know in advance. One minute he would be studying his hand of cards, and then he’d look up as though someone had whispered silently in his ear, throw down his hand and disappear into the darkness of the night, back to the shelter of the mountains. Sardinian bandits, particularly the Nuorese Sards, were not the murderous villains the press made them out to be. They were certainly not to be compared to the Sicilian and Calabrian Mafia or the Union Corse of neighbouring Corsica. In fact they are not really bandits at all, or Mafiosi. They were simply fuori legge — outlaws: men, often shepherds, forced by unfortunate or desperate circumstances to leave their community and take to the mountains. Our bandit was cheery and generous — and much more courteous than any policeman I ever met. It is no doubt easy to romanticise the bandits. But they were only journeymen of small-time crime, and none of them did anything that would compromise themselves in the eyes of their neighbours or former neighbours. Had one of them done so, he would never have been able to survive. We returned to the mainland via Olbia and Civitavecchia, near Rome, and went directly to Milan to catch up on the latest developments. Tension was building over the anarchists framed for the Milan Trade Fair bombing, and the Black Cross held regular demonstrations outside San Vittorio prison where most of the six comrades were being held. We took part in one of these, a fact that was also recorded by Calabresi. Pinelli believed the fascist plot was gaining momentum. The number of bombings for which anarchists were blamed jumped from 140 the previous year to almost 400. The Milanese anarchists weren’t particularly worried about the prospect of a coup, which they thought unlikely to succeed, and would be strongly resisted, but the bombings and anti-anarchist propaganda did cause them concern. That was the last time I saw Pinelli, standing outside San Vittorio prison, where the six comrades framed for the Milan Trade Fair bombing were being held. He might have been a key figure in that resistance to that coup had it taken place. As it turned out, it was Pinelli who prevented the coup, but literally over his dead body.

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The CNA Bulletin became Rivista A in early 1971 Anarchist centre, Via Scaldasole

Solidarity demonstration

Giuseppe Pinelli

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Anarchist centre, Ponte Della Ghisolfa

12 December, 1969: fascist-statist bomb in the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura, Piazza Fontanta, Milan, claims 16 lives

It wasn’t until December that the extraordinary scenario that had been unfolding in Italy since the previous year began to make sense. Leslie Finer, a former Greek correspondent of the Observer had published extracts from an extraordinary secret document obtained from his contacts among exiled Greek opponents of the colonels. This dossier had been compiled in May 1969 by an Italian-based Greek secret service agent of the KYP (the Central Service of Information). Sent originally to Giorgio Papadopolous, then president of the Greek council of ministers (and a CIA asset), the memo reported on the results of the Greek-funded terrorist campaign mounted in Italy in 1968 with the assistance of various Italian fascist organisations along with ‘some representatives from the Army and the Carabinieri.’ On 15 May Michail Kottakis, head of the diplomatic office of the Greek foreign ministry forwarded a copy of the document to Pampuras, Greece’s ambassador in Rome. The report speculated on the chances of success of a right-wing coup d’état as a result of the escalation of the ongoing terrorist campaign. It also assessed the activities of Luigi Turchi, an MSI (fascist) deputy and a Mr P, possibly Pino Rauti, but, more sensationally, it referred to the problems they had faced with regard to the bombings at the FIAT stand at the Milan Trade Fair and the central station and why they had been unable to do anything prior to 25 April. It was as clear an admission of guilt as one could hope for. It also referred to a major escalation of terrorist actions should Greece be expelled from the Council of Europe. The contents of this dossier were obviously of great interest to the Italian Black Cross for the defence case of the six anarchists charged with these offences in San Vittorio prison. Leslie Finer gave me a copy of the entire Greek dossier which I forwarded immediately to Pinelli in Milan. But the magistrate, Antonio Amati, refused to admit the dossier as evidence in the case and the six remained banged up until they were finally acquitted on 28 May 1971 — two full years after their arrest. The real perpetrators of the 25 April bombings — and the August 1969 railway bombings — were Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura, two neo-fascists and Italian secret service agents who were finally sentenced in 1981. They each received 15-year prison sentences for their part in planning and carrying out the bombings. On Friday, 12 December, four bombs exploded in Rome and Milan. One of these, planted in the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in the Piazza Fontana in Milan, exploded a little after 4.30pm, claiming the lives of 16 people and wounding 100. Another, in the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro in Rome, injured 14, while two planted at the cenotaph in the Piazza Venezia wounded 4. It was a day of massacre — a state massacre as it turned out. For Inspector Luigi Calabresi of the Milan Questura and his boss Antonio Allegra there was, again, no doubt that anarchists were responsible. Of the 100 or so anarchists arrested that night and the following day, 27 were taken to San Vittorio prison, the rest being held for interrogation in Milan police headquarters in the Via Fatebenefratelli. Among those held were a number of

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Anarchist Black Cross (CNA) members, including its secretary, Giuseppe Pinelli. After more than 48 hours in police custody the 41-year old railwayman was taken to Calabresi’s room for questioning late in the evening of 15 December. The police officers present were Luigi Calabresi, Vito Panessa, Giuseppe Caracuta, Carlo Mainardi, Pietro Mucilli and Carabinieri lieutenant Savino Lograno. Around midnight, Aldo Palumbo, a journalist from ‘Calabresi, Assassino’ L’Unita was having a smoke in the courtyard when he heard a series of thuds. Something was bouncing off the cornices as it fell from the fourth floor. He raced over to find the body of Pinelli sprawled in the flower bed. According to the duty doctor Nazzareno Fiorenzano he had suffered ‘horrific abdominal injuries and a series of gashes on the head.’ The autopsy showed that he was either dead or unconscious before he hit the ground. A bruise very much like that caused by a karate blow was found on his neck. Pinelli: Illustration by Flavio Costantini No one was ever brought to trial for Pinelli’s death, the ramifications of which shake the Italian political scene to this day. The Milan magistrate, Gerardo D’Ambrosio, closed the official file on Pinelli in 1975. According to the finding, the anarchist died as the result of ‘active misfortune,’ the ‘misfortune’ being his having ‘fallen’ from a window. All the policemen indicted for his death were absolved. Luigi Calabresi, the political policeman leading Pinelli’s interrogation, was shot by an assassin on 17 May 1972. Perhaps he knew too much and had become a living embarrassment to the Italian right. On 13 March 1995, after more than 25 years and countless court cases and appeal hearings, Judge Salvini Pinelli’s funeral indicted 26 Italian neo-fascists and secret service officers for their involvement in the Piazza Fontana massacre.

Milan police HQ and the window from which Pinelli (inset) was thrown

‘“Accidental” Death Of An Anarchist’

Investigators examine scene of Pinelli’s death

Licia Pinelli

I faced the usual hassle on returning to England. At the Hoverport in Pegwell Bay, Kent, the Special Branch duty officer got quite uppity when I produced my passport and questioned my identity, accusing me of travelling on a false passport. I hadn’t shaved or washed for several days — we’d lost our luggage on the way back — and we looked like hippies. This particular officer had been posted to Pegwell Bay the previous year, but no one had bothered to inform him that I had grown my hair long in the interim. So far as he was concerned he wasn’t having

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17 May, 1972: scene of Calabresi’s murder

Meanwhile, back in Britain

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Pinelli’s funeral: Amedeo Bertolo

20 December, 1969: Pinelli’s 3,000-strong funeral cortège

Sir William Walker (Brando) arrives on Queimada

any hippie-looking character turning up at the frontier and claiming my identity. I finally persuaded him that the last person I’d pretend to be was myself. After searching our remaining luggage and making a song and dance over a starting pistol I had (which he gave me back on condition I didn’t start anything with it) he let us go, just in time to miss the last bus. Fortunately, as is not usual on such occasions, he drove us to the railway station some miles away as recompense for having delayed us. He even apologised. The poor man was bored out of his skull in Pegwell Bay and missed the excitement of political raids, surveillance on trade unionists and so on. Why, out there in the sticks, he couldn’t even get to a left-wing bookshop and buy an anarchist paper! Gillo Pontecorvo’s film Queimada! or Burn! came out that autumn. It was probably the most revolutionary and courageous film of the 1960s and 1970s. Set in the Caribbean of the 1840s, Marlon Brando plays the part of Sir William Walker, a British agent serving the interests of the Royal Sugar company to a Portuguese island named Queimada. His task is to subvert Portuguese colonial rule and turn the island into a British colony. Walker identifies and recruits the potential resistance leader, a bolshy dock porter by the name of José Dolores, arms him and his band of oppressed peasants who rob the Bank of Portugal, then go on to overthrow the Portuguese. Easy peasy! It’s a complex story, but Burn! raises the fundamental and rarely addressed question (for anarchists) of the compromising and corrupting nature of power and what happens to revolutionary organizations and revolutionaries who acquire institutional authority(as opposed to moral authority) and political control. I had never seen a film as uncompromising about the corrupting nature of power and the workings of imperialism, nor one which identified so explicitly with the victims of global capitalism. The film was such an incendiary paean to the moral imperatives of revolution and a thinly veiled attack on America’s war in Vietnam, that it was amazing it had been made at all. Little wonder then that the film’s US distributor, United Artists, quickly and effectively buried it by failing to promote or distribute it effectively. Much the same had happened with Pontecorvo’s earlier film, Battle of Algiers. United Artists changed the English title of the film from the imperative ‘Burn!’ rather than the correct translation, ‘Burnt,’ which states the inexorable fact of the colonialists’ scorched earth tactics, implying Pontecorvo’s endorsement of the tragedy the film depicts. One idea that Pontecorvo explored effectively in Queimada! is the thesis developed by the Martinique-born anti-colonial writer Frantz Fanon, that the only way the long-oppressed can discard their passivity and recover their selfrespect and autonomy is through the violent overthrow of their oppressors and abusers. The closing scene of the film was inspiringly optimistic. It was an ending which immediately pulled everyone in the cinema that night out of their seats to jump up and cheer — and go out into the neon-lit darkness of London’s West End with smiles on their faces and hope in their hearts!

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In Which The Anti-Colonial Struggle Erupts Once More In Ulster

Chapter 5 — 1969-1970 BACK FROM ITALY, Brenda and I moved from Crouch End to Muswell Hill. The flat in Fairfield Gardens had never recovered from the probing the police gave it the morning they found the agitprop dollar bills. Also, now the police knew where I was living it was time to move on. Our next stop was a flat on the Colney Hatch side of Muswell Hill, close to the famous mental hospital. Everywhere that summer and autumn there was anger and tension: strikes, anti-Vietnam War protests, trouble building in Ulster, factory occupations, and spreading frustration with formal politics. Someone said at the time that it felt like Germany in the 1930s. As well as the material bases for protest, there were also powerful ethical and anti-authoritarian ones, mainly as a result of the Vietnam War, but rejection of authority and frustration with the theatrical shenanigans and systematic political chicanery of politicians went far beyond the most obvious targets. The bitter fight for improved working conditions and for greater control over the workplace led to official and unofficial strikes and workplace occupations. The first six months of Heath’s government saw more strikes than at any time since the General Strike in 1926. For us, to remain silent and stand back in the face of this onslaught of reaction was to give comfort to the politicians, and be complicit in their crimes and injustices. It was also a time of fermenting ideas to do with fairness and justice. If we couldn’t have revolutionary change, then at least we could push back the boundaries of repression and reaction. The period also saw the birth of a bewildering number of revolutionary and new left groups throughout Europe: Potere Operaio, Servire il Popolo and Lotta Continua. In May the Red Army Fraktion appeared and, in November, the Red Brigades. In Ulster, as in the anti-colonial struggle against the French in Algeria nine years earlier, momentum was building in the Civil Rights movement. Strikes, demonstrations and marches against anti-Catholic discrimination in jobs and housing were taking place throughout the province. Again, there were remarkable similarities between the failed IRA armed initiative of the mid 1950s and the failed FLN insurrection in Algiers between 1954 and 1957. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) was attacking demonstrators with clubs and water cannon. By the autumn seven thousand British soldiers had been called in as anger in the Nationalist community turned increasingly to violence. The question of armed resistance to RUC and British Army violence finally led the IRA to split into ‘Officials’ and ‘Provisionals.’ The brutal treatment of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights marchers and Ulster Catholics by the RUC led to a massive groundswell of support for the movement in Britain. Solidarity organisations were set up and protest demonstrations became a regular feature of British political life. On 12 August the

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12 August, Derry

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Chicago 3 May 1886: Flavio Costantini

The Chicago Martyrs: hung for their beliefs

RUC had attacked residents of the largely Catholic-populated Bogside in Derry, leading to the death of two Catholics and 112 being hospitalised. Four days later the home of Tory MP Duncan Sandys, shadow defence secretary and outspoken defender of the police action, was firebombed. The following day Ian Purdie, a young Scottish anarchist, was arrested and jailed for firebombing the Ulster Office in Central London. Things were also heating up in West Germany. President Nixon’s visit to West Berlin was marked by massive anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and an unsuccessful bomb attempt on his motorcade — with explosives thoughtfully provided by a German secret police agent, Peter Urbach. Government offices throughout the country were targets for bomb attacks. That autumn Germany’s first so-called ‘urban guerrilla’ group was formed — the Tupamaros West Berlin (TW). [Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian revolutionary, had published his booklet on the strategy and tactics of armed resistance, the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla that summer, focusing the liberation struggles towards the cities.] Their name was inspired by the Uruguayan libertarian ‘Movement for National Liberation’ (MLN) — or Tupamaros — who had taken over the town of Pando, only 25 kilometres from the capital, Montevideo, robbing the banks and the supermarkets and giving the money and the food to the poor. In a Uruguayan poll, 59 per cent believed that the Tupamaros were pursuing social justice. In the USA, an activist offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) played a decisive part in the massive resistance to the Vietnam War including, not least, promoting draftdodging. In October 1969, vowing to ‘bring the war home,’ the Weathermen took to the streets of Chicago to demonstrate against the war in Vietnam. They hoped that tens of thousands of youths would descend on the Windy City and totally disrupt civic life. But, October’s ‘Days of Rage,’ attracted only a few hundred activists with helmets and clubs, rampaging through the streets, attacking the buildings of the big corporate multinationals and clashing with the police. The Weathermen succeeded in bombing the Haymarket police statue commemorating the policemen killed by a bomb thrown during a rally in support of strikers at the McCormack agricultural machinery factory in May 1886. Four anarchists were convicted of having incited the 1886 bombing and were executed in 1887, a fifth having committing suicide. By the time the ‘Days of Rage’ had ended, 284 people had been arrested and 57 police officers hospitalised, and over $1 million’s worth of damage done. At a Weatherman ‘council of war’ to draw lessons from the Days of Rage, the participants concluded that building a large-scale white revolutionary movement was impossible and that street-fighting tactics were too costly for the organisation. Instead, the Weathermen decided to go underground and engage in a clandestine, armed struggle. An explosion in a Greenwich Village house in early March, which killed three Weathermen, signalled the start of an armed protest campaign against their own rogue state. Within a couple of months most of the militant Weathermen — now calling themselves the ‘Weather Underground’— had

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem

gone underground and formed small armed cells of three to five people. Back in England, the largely anarchist-inspired squatters’ movement, had begun with the seizure of an empty block of flats called Arbour House in Stepney, East London, in the October of 1968. Initially the plan had been to rehouse homeless families in properties made empty under council planning orders, but the movement soon spread throughout London, including the posh West End. In September a high-profile police raid evicted 250 squatters occupying an empty 100-room mansion at 144 Piccadilly. The Piccadilly squat had been organised by Phil Cohen. Industrial militancy was also at a high; to curb it the Labour government had, earlier in the year, proposed to bring in antistrike laws and procedures, but was forced to back down in the face of opposition from the entire the trade union movement from the TUC top brass downwards. In November, the American journalist Seymour Hersh broke the news that the US army had tried to keep secret — that Lieutenant William Calley had led his platoon into the Vietnamese village of My Lai where he and his men opened fire on defenceless women and children, massacring 109 people, including a twoyear-old child. The impact of this story on American public opinion was enormous, and was a major contributory factor in eroding support for the war. That same month Salvador Allende was sworn in as Chile’s new president, promising, to the US Administration’s horror — ‘socialism within liberty’. The thicker nobs were upset and worried by the portents. Daily Mail and Daily Express readers were subjected to relentless self-pitying and indignant propaganda as to what a martyred body of people they were, and how wrong it was of others to envy them their possessions and privileges. After all, weren’t the views of the middle-aged middle-classes really those of every decent person? They were a beleaguered minority; pornography was sweeping away their Christian heritage and anarchy menacing the very gnomes in their gardens. But it wasn’t only the upper and middle classes The Second Coming TURNING and turning in the widening gyre who felt threatened. The National Front was leading the The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; lumpenproletarian Millwall supporters among the Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere Powellite dockers and the Moseleyite meat porters The ceremony of innocence is drowned; straight to fascism. The Second Coming was at hand. The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. What rough beast, its hour come round at last, was WB Yeats slouching towards Bethlehem to be born?

The ‘Brolly Brigade’ This newspaper campaign of fear was having an effect — at least according to the newspapers. Fear of the mobilised left had provoked an authoritarian rightwing backlash. It was the time of the ‘Brolly Brigade,’ the name given by the press to angry middle-class commuters who poked railwaymen with their umbrellas during the railway go-slows and strikes. At a time when rail workers were endeavouring to boost their wages by industrial action, city gents were

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144 Piccadilly

Lt. William Calley — responsible for murdering 109 unarmed Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai (below)

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being encouraged by the press to attack them. This was considered great stuff — ‘the middle-class backlash’, the ‘right-wing backlash’ were heard over and over again. The papers reported with great glee, making much out of nothing, when railwaymen — usually, those still going about their duties — were attacked and abused by stockbrokers.

3 May, 1970: National Guard soldiers — many of whom joined to avoid the draft and being sent to Vietnam — occupy the campus of Kent State University, Ohio during demonstrations against the US’s invasion of Cambodia

But there was no revolution in 1969 either. By the end of what the press was calling the ’hot autumn’ of 1969 the wave of revolution expected to be triggered by May ‘68 proved non-existent. Much of the seething public ferment simply died away. For many, the optimism had gone and the high expectations that had nourished idealism since the mid 1950s had turned to self-interest and cynicism. Those with impossibly high expectations of what was possible at the time narrowed their horizons and turned to expediency rather than fundamental principles. For me, Mr Cheery, the eternal optimist, it was more a case of expect the worst, and hope for the best. If in doubt, do the tango. What had happened that could explain this change in mores? The protests against the war in Vietnam continued to grow, but in spite of the high profile debates and militant demonstrations, most of society remained untouched by what was to many thousands of militants a highly charged political atmosphere. Traditional loyalties to the Labour Party and the unions had never been completely swept aside, anti-capitalist consciousness didn’t take off and political apathy ebbed back into everyday life. The old left reasserted themselves and regrouped. Others — including ‘revolutionaries’ — accepted the state and the system for what it was and chose ‘pragmatism’, to work with or within it — some for genuine, albeit piecemeal, reform; others notably for self-advancement. Revolutionaries can be opportunists and careerists, too. Position and tenure are big motives everywhere — look at Marxism. There are also untold millions who prefer to be underlings. The student movement, which had provided much of the New Left’s dynamic, had peaked with the events of May 1968. Most students were satisfied with the levels of democracy offered them in the form of student assemblies and representation in educational institutions; others imploded into the alternative culture of the ‘underground’. The movement, if it can be called that, had nowhere left to go but down. Morale declined as activists became burnt-out or cynical about the possibilities for change. For them the conflict and the sense of failure were dispiriting. What we thought was prologue turned out to be a short and unsatisfactory one-act Play for Today. The bubble just burst. The New Left’s cohesion had started to crumble from late 1968 onwards, gathering pace after the US invasion of Cambodia and the killing of white students at Kent State University by the US National Guard in May 1970 and two black students at Jackson State University in Mississippi. The beatniks, hippies and week-end dropouts of the ‘alternative society,’ the ‘counterculture’ and the ‘underground scene’ who had identified with the radical movement

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Back To The Garden

turned instead to the ‘cultural revolution’ of psychedelic acid rock, the maharishi and spiritual enlightenment, hash, LSD and freak-outs at UFO. They simply gave up on radical politics, not necessarily because they were afraid of the increasing violence, but because they thought their protests were going unheard and they were banging their heads against a political brick wall. If you can’t beat them, turn on and drop out. This was the ‘Woodstock’ generation, the event that identified a decade even though only 400,000 made it to Max Yasgur’s farm in New York State that mid-August weekend. The main item on their political agenda was the legalising of cannabis.

The New Left

August 1970: Woodstock

What was left of a genuinely libertarian and spontaneous movement of young workers and students was now distinctly Leninist, in the Trotskyist sense, i.e., elitist and authoritarian, and had been co-opted into the International Socialists (IS, later the SWP) and the International Marxist Group (IMG). Political activity centred on paper-selling, party-building, placard-wielding and the constant jargon and analysis mongering as each group sought to establish the ultimate political correctness and ideological supremacy of its own Trotskyist line — and purity of descent — over all others. This theological wrangling was entirely in keeping, of course, with the orthodox Marxist belief that the workers left to their own devices can never become revolutionaries, but require the quasi-theocratic leadership of disaffected bourgeois who are the only ones capable of correctly interpreting the truths revealed by the prophets (ie Marx, Lenin and Trostky). The New Left, even in its most ‘positive phase,’ had never been free of authoritarianism. This was because it was born primarily in the Marxist section of the Labour Party and the Communist Party, and most in it never sought the decentralisation of politics. Its dominant personalities were the new generation of competitive and authoritarian leaders from the old left: Under the guise of providing ‘leadership’, they fostered oligarchies at the expense of individual initiative and all that was new, dynamic and radical in the movement. Basically, they were people who saw others as means, not ends. All careerists need a constituency; those at the right of centre find it on the far right; those on the left of centre acquire theirs on the far left. It didn’t take long before the ‘responsible’ student leaders joined the system: David Triesman, Jack Straw, Kim Howell and Peter Hain to name but a few. Divisions were further aggravated by the fragmentation of the movement into more exclusive black power, feminist and other single-issue political organisations. Between the autumn of 1968 and 1969 the Trotksyists had certainly attracted a significant number of workers to their ideas, but part of the attraction may have been due to the disappointment and frustration felt by many on the left that the real possibility of revolution, as exemplified by France in ‘68, had slipped through their fingers due to lack of coordination and the

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collaborationist role of the CP. May 1968 had been the hinge moment of the post-World War Two period; but unfortunately, for those of us hoping for something more profound to happen, it hinged the wrong way. But it wasn’t all negative. Certainly there were some gains from May ‘68. I do believe that for a lot of people it led them to live more wisely and with greater concern for others, and with a greater confidence in what shop floor activity could achieve. Perhaps, too, it promulgated a key anarchist idea – distrust whoever seeks power. I’m glad to say we’ve never quite recovered from that. But also, instead of marking the beginning of a revolutionary process, May ‘68 turned out to be just a subversive blip on a different trajectory, one which was moving many towards the self-serving values of the possessive individualism ultimately championed by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. It was a movement for the self-obsessed which even had its own hit single that year — Frank Sinatra’s My Way. As for me and many of my friends, although 1968 and 1969 had been an exciting and illuminating time, it was now time to move on, albeit in smaller battalions. There were more ways through the woods than one!

AFB Liverpool Conference

Anarchist Congress, Liverpool 1969: John Rety, Monica Foot and Stuart Christie

Vernon Richards: publisher of Freedom

At the end of September 1969 I attended an Anarchist Federation of Britain conference in Liverpool — along with representatives of around 100 other anarchist groups from across the country. Disappointment with the failure of May 1968 to fulfil people’s expectations had led to calls for a more tightly organised anarchist movement. Presumably they saw May 68’s collapse in terms of a failure of ‘leadership’ and organisation. This ultimately led to the setting up of a semi-Trotskyist ‘Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists.’ Concerned about the non-combative editorial line being taken by Freedom, the long-running anarchist weekly newspaper, Albert and I announced our plans to set up another anarchist paper— Black Flag — which would be an extension of the Bulletin of the Anarchist Black Cross. Freedom, then edited by a group who were mainly pacifists, was controlled financially by Vernon Richards who ran the paper with an autocratic oversight which belied its allegedly anarchist principles. Albert and Richards had a bit of a history, to say the least, so there was no chance of a reconciliation between them or of reaching an accommodation with the other Freedom editors. Through Black Flag we hoped to define our view of anarchism as a class- and solidarity-based way of creating the building blocks of a radically decentralized society, doing what we could, when we could and as the circumstances presented. The methods we advocated were based on individual empowerment and the need to defend ourselves against arbitrary power and injustice. Anarchists, to us, were people who worked towards creating alternative democratic and libertarian structures and making people independent of the state. We also sought to intensify the class struggle in order to weaken and destroy the means of economic exploitation. For us it was simple: anti-statism and class struggle. We were also committed to the principle

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Birth of Black Flag – 1970

of direct action and working with people on the basis of their beliefs and actions rather than on the labels they gave themselves or were given by others.

Aim of anarchism The ultimate aim of anarchism is a society based on principles of voluntary cooperation and without class divisions or imposed authority. At its core is the belief that the central problem of the human condition is power and the pursuit of power. As the main centre of power lies in the state and government, these institutions should, therefore, be sidelined or abolished. A corollary of anarchism is to distrust the motives of anyone who seeks power, influence and authority in any human institution or organisation. The likelihood is that anyone who seeks to dominate, manipulate and exploit others, even for apparently selfless and idealistic reasons, will ultimately seek to hang on to that power for the privileges it brings. This principle of the self-perpetuating nature of power is immutable and applies to anyone and everyone within all organisations, even among those claiming to be anarchists. Anyone with power should be constantly obliged to explain and justify their actions. Nobody can say how an anarchist society might come about in such a complex post-industrial society as that of today. All anyone can do to help bring about radical change is to keep their objectives high and expectations low: outline the basic principles such a society should encompass and try to make people aware as to what might be possible. Despite the words of the Internationale, there is no ‘final struggle,’ the struggle to be free is forever. But no matter what the odds are against us being able extricate ourselves from the political and social morass in which we find ourselves, we are bound, as human beings, to work for a better world and to continue the fight for individual freedom and justice. These, then, were the general aims and principles that gave rise to the birth of Black Flag in 1970. My friend Miguel Garcia Garcia was released from Soria prison in Spain in October 1969, shortly after the Liverpool conference. Miguel had served a sentence of twenty years and a day. This term was the legal limit for a consecutive sentence in Spain, but that had never counted for much with the Francoist authorities. He intended staying in Spain once he was free, but I helped talk him out of the idea. We needed him for the Anarchist Black Cross. They would soon have had him back inside had he remained in Spain for any length of time. Miguel felt that at sixty-five it was too late for him to begin again in a foreign country, but he soon relented and came to stay with us in Muswell Hill. Arrested in 1949 and sentenced to death on a charge of ‘Banditry and Terrorism,’ for his part in the anti-Francoist Resistance, Miguel’s sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment. I had kept in regular contact with Miguel and Luis Andrés Edo in Soria since my release, and it was through them and contacts in other prisons that I had been feeding stories to the press about conditions inside Franco’s jails. Particularly embarrassing for the regime had

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Miguel Garcia Garcia: Franco’s Prisoner

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Left to right: Luis Andrés Edo, Juan Salcedo, David Urbano and Jaime Pozas, Soria Prison, 1968

been the information about the 1968 hunger strikes throughout the Spanish prison system. When the strikes were over and punishments were being meted out we were also able to raise the illegal actions of Franco’s ministry of justice during an international conference of jurists in Rome at the time. The unexpected presentation of a petition signed by all the political prisoners in Soria penitentiary proved a serious embarrassment to the Francoist delegates who were, like the lepers’ clapper, something to be avoided. In fact, it was so embarrassing to the regime that it abandoned its strategy of concentrating all its ‘politicals’ in one jail and dispersed them around the peninsula. Many were sent to the old prison fortress of Segovia, Spain’s equivalent of the Tower of London — a story we managed to get published in the national broadsheets within days of the dispersal order being made. We also managed to break the news of the death in Segovia prison of a 44-year old Asturian miner by the name of Diego Capote. The impact of life on the outside for Miguel was traumatic. Within days of his release he had completely lost his voice. It took him a good couple of months to recover fully. Perhaps it was psychosomatic. I suggested to him by letter that he stop off in Liège, on his way to England, to meet Octavio Alberola who would brief him on the recent demise of the FIJL (to which Miguel had belonged as a young man) — another victim of the post May ‘68 depression — and the consequent reorganisation of the First of May Group which had taken up the new generation of resistance fighters. Miguel had made it clear to me in jail and in his letters that his Resistance days were far from over. Octavio also arranged for him to see a throat specialist about the loss of his voice.

Miguel in London

Miguel García García with Albert Meltzer

Miguel arrived in London early in December, 1969. I was amazed at how well he looked for a man of 65. He was tall, well-built, apparently as fit as a butcher’s dog — apart from an occasional shortness of breath (due to TB as we discovered much later), jet black hair, tinged with grey round the temple, square-jawed and a flawless complexion. He claimed his clear skin was down to using lemon juice as after-shave for twenty years. I tried this for a few days, but it was a bit too nippy and sticky for my liking. It also brought me up in a roseola rash which made me look like an Orcadian farmer. Twenty years of prison beds had also affected his back to the extent that he couldn’t sleep on a sprung mattress. He kipped on the floor until we were able to get hold of a wooden board that he could place on his bed at night. Miguel’s spoken English was extraordinarily good for someone completely self-taught and who had never been to an Englishspeaking country in his life. He had gleaned it entirely from books and patio conversations with people like me. He was ideal for the role of international secretary of the ABC and immediately plunged himself into the task of helping the prisoners he had left behind. His contribution was invaluable. Charismatic and — when he recovered his voice — a natural public speaker, he gave talks on the anti-

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A Chance Meeting In Angel Alley

Francoist resistance and his experiences in prison that were received enthusiastically by packed audiences up and down the country. One of these meetings was held at the Freedom Press meeting hall in Whitechapel. Miguel’s voice still hadn’t fully recovered so I translated for him. It was a highly emotional occasion — and the audience listened, spellbound, as Miguel recounted his struggle then and his struggle now. By the end of the evening, the Spanish Civil War was no longer an abstract historical event to most of Miguel’s captivated audience. Here was an experienced urban guerrilla and activist who had spent the best part of his adult life in Francoist jails, a man still deeply involved in the revolutionary struggle, whose belief had never dimmed. He also spoke of the activities of the First of May Group which had developed out of the anti-Francoist movement and was now carrying out daring international direct actions targeting the diplomatic and business interests of fascist and extreme right wing regimes. Among the hundred or so people who came to meet and hear Miguel speak that night in February 1970 was a group from Powis Square in Notting Hill. These young people had been involved in a number of self-help community groups, such as the East London Squatters’ Movement, the Claimants’ Union and the Notting Hill Peoples’ Association which had been heavily involved the previous year in the opening up of the local squares around W11. Until then the private landlords had controlled the squares with big wire fences preventing non-residents getting into them. One guy who played an important but never recognised part in that campaign was the mercurial John Grevelle, an anarchist and a born schoolteacher who had the most wonderful way with kids. At the end of the small and as yet uncommercialised Notting Hill Carnival of 1970, Greville, the Pied Piper of Notting Hill, dressed up in a gorilla costume and marched through the back streets of W11, down Portobello Road and into Powis Square, with a boltcutter, a pantomime horse and followed by hundreds and hundreds of kids, all singing, dancing and cheering. By the end of the day the wire fences around all the private squares had been pulled down, and have remained open communal playgrounds ever since.)

Arguing the case for anarchism After the meeting two of the Powis Square group, John Barker and Hilary Creek, approached me and Miguel, wanting to know more. They had been impressed by the way the Anarchist Black Cross was not only organising assistance and solidarity for political prisoners throughout Europe, but also connecting it to the wider international and domestic struggles that were going on at the time. They agreed with our ideas and arguments and had no truck with conventional politics — or even the bohemianism of the Situationist International, though John Barker in particular was taken with the arguments of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle — but no way would they describe themselves as anarchists — more libertarian socialists.

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Miguel Garcia Garcia: International Secretary of the Anarchist Black Cross

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Powis Square, Notting Hill

Jim Greenfield

Like lots of others, they didn’t believe that anarchism had any roots in the working-class struggle in Britain. I argued that the opposite was the case. Up until the late forties and early 1950s, the anarchist movement in Britain had been primarily working-class and dynamic. It had been sidelined partly by post-war apathy, and partly by the fact that in 1946 the main weekly anarchist newspaper, Freedom, came under the control of Vernon Richards and his coterie of Tolstoyan and Ghandi-influenced middle-class pacifists and academics: people like George Woodcock, Reg Reynolds, Ethel Mannin and Herbert Read, who used the paper to argue the case for permanent protest — as opposed to class struggle — and who believed the idea of revolution ‘outdated.’ The readership they attracted tended to be middle-class, liberal and arty. When Herbert Read accepted a knighthood for ‘Services to Literature’ in 1953, the editors of Freedom published an ‘explanation’ of Read’s action, but this proved too much for one working class anarchist, Glaswegian Frank Leech, who dropped dead of a heart attack after reading the article, aged only 53. The Powis Square people were also critical of many of the anarchist groups and individuals they had come across. John and the others’ ideas at the time were strongly influenced by Jo Freeman’s article ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness,’ a women’s liberation movement text highlighting the undemocratic nature of many informal leaderships. Another important influence on them was the analysis and theory that was coming out of the Italian workers’ movement, particularly Potere Operaio.

Anarchist — or libertarian communist?

John Barker

John Barker and Hilary Creek

The bottom line was that based on what they had seen and heard that night the Anarchist Black Cross was the only group they had come across which defined anarchism — as they understood it. Like countless others they were fed-up and frustrated with routine anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in which only the protestors got hurt and which made absolutely no impact on the US government’s aggression in South East Asia. In fact, Washington’s response to these mass demonstrations was to escalate the war. The question was, how to hurt the bad guys in government and the big multinational corporations without being hurt ourselves. John and Hilary were also convinced of the absolute importance of a mass movement, but they were part of that post-’68 milieu which preferred to avoid describing itself as anarchist, choosing instead the vaguer term libertarian communist. They were variously involved in the East End squatting movement and the recently formed Claimants’ Union. There was also some connection in Notting Hill with King Mob — Christopher Gray’s and Charles Radcliffe’s influential paper. This was a Dadaist-Situationist type publication, although neither was a member of the Situationist International, Gray having been excluded by Guy Debord and Radcliffe having resigned. John Greville, the ‘gorilla of Powis Square,’ also worked closely with King Mob. I felt an immediate empathy with John Barker, who reminded me of Roxy

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Giddy Fortune’s Furious Fickle Wheel

music singer Brian Ferry, with his dark hair constantly flopping over his eyes which he kept pushing back. He was well-read, confident, and articulate with a wry sense of humour, similar to my own. He and Hilary were then living in a basement flat at 25 Powis Square, Notting Hill. This was after he came down from Cambridge University where he had been active politically — but not in the Kim Philby Dining Club, as has been alleged. As John said, if this club existed, it must have been after his time, and he would certainly not have belonged to anything attached to the name of that old bolshevik. John, the son of a journalist from Willesden, had a student grant to read English at Clare College. He had moved from supporting the Labour Party in the 1964 elections to libertarian socialism. Like the Nanterre students, he was concerned by the roles in the outside world for which students were being groomed. At Cambridge, John became friendly with Jim Greenfield from Widnes, Lancashire. Jim, the son of a long-distance lorry driver, was ginger-haired, pale-and freckled face with intense, piercing, eyes. He struck me as a bit moody — by turns pensive, nervous, mercurial and abrupt. Originally, Jim went to Trinity to read medicine, arriving there on the same day as Prince Charles, but he switched to economics when he found he couldn’t get on with the aggressively conservative medical students. In Cambridge Jim and John were involved in radical street theatre and the Campaign Against Assessment, and both had walked out of their final exams — having first ripped up their exam papers in a gesture of protest against the elitist nature of the system, of which Cambridge liked to see itself as the pinnacle. Hilary Creek had been living with John since early 1970. She had gone to Essex University from Watford Grammar School to read Economics. After a month she changed to Russian, which she studied for two years. Hilary was a classic beauty with a slim and petite figure, short dark auburnhair framing a cherubic face. Her doe eyes were quick and alert, and her smile ironic. Her Welshness showed in her reserved and occasionally flinty character. She had met John and Jim while working with homeless families in London’s depressed East End. Apart from the squatters’ movement, Hilary was active in the Women’s movement, and in the antivoting campaign in the run-up to the elections of June 1970. In the meantime, Jim Greenfield, who had broken up with his then girlfriend, Rosemary Fiore, had formed a relationship with Anna Mendelson, a friend of Hilary from Essex University. Anna, a former head girl at Stockport High School, had studied literature and history at Essex. She was from a solid Mancunian Jewish working-class background. Her dad was a Labour councillor and a market stall trader. Anna was tall and dramatically beautiful with a wide smile. She looked as though she had materialised from an Edward Burne-Jones painting. Unlike Hilary, who was clipped and wary, Anna was

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Hilary Creek

Anna Mendelson

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Thomas Weissbecker, German Anarchist Black Cross

guileless, outward-going and demonstrative. Maternal, warlike, proud, all she lacked to be the embodiment of Marianne, the symbol of revolution, was a Phrygian bonnet. Jim and Anna had met in Hoxton where Anna had joined Hilary and others to protect a black single mother with three kids and a heart condition, who were being attacked by racists with petrol bombs. Hilary and Anna had also grown disillusioned with the superficiality of university life and values and left without completing their degrees. One of their friends, Ian Purdie, a Scot, had just been sentenced on 10 February to nine months for petrol bombing the Ulster Office in Saville Row. Their seriousness, integrity and unambiguous opposition to capitalism impressed me. But we didn't know just how important that first chance encounter in Angel Alley in Whitechapel was to be to later events and the police conspiracy theory that would be constructed around us. Like all the ‘ifs’ of history and social interaction, ours was a random meeting — fortuitous and unforeseen — which, had it never occurred, might have had a dizzying range of alternative outcomes.

Meanwhile, elsewhere...

Georg von Rauch, German Anarchist Black Cross

Michael ‘Bommi’ Bauman, German Anarchist Black Cross

Around the same time as I was meeting up with Jim, Hilary, John and Anna in London, in West Berlin, German Anarchist Black Cross activists Thomas Weissbecker, George von Rauch and Michael ‘Bommi’ Baumann, were being arrested for beating up the right-wing journalist Horst Rieck for his scurrilous stories attacking the left in the Springer Press. Separately, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Astrid Proll, the future core members of the Red Army Fraktion (RAF) had decided not to answer bail on charges of firebombing a Frankfurt department store and to go ‘underground.’ The Bulletin of the Anarchist Black Cross became Black Flag in 1970. It still served as the organ of the Black Cross, but it also presented the views of the ad hoc Black Flag Group which — under various names — had existed for some time around Albert Meltzer. This was essentially the continuation of the same grouping that had run the magazines Ludd and Cuddon’s Cosmopolitan Review since the mid-1960s. Ludd, a one-page broadsheet, created a bit of a furore around the time of the seamen’s strike in the summer of 1966. This was the first national strike organised by the National Union of Seamen (NUS) since 1911. Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Ray Gunter, his hard-line anti-Communist Minister of Labour, had been obsessed with Communist-Trotskyist and anarchist agitators who were ‘stirring things up.’ In June 1966, Wilson made what turned out to be one of his most infamous McCarthyite speeches, claiming the seamen were being manipulated by a ‘tightly knit group of politically motivated men.’ The strike had been forced on the NUS by its rank and file members. Anarchists were active in the Seamen’s union and in the British merchant fleet, but none were sympathetic to the NUS leadership, which was referred to

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Seamen’s Mission

disparagingly as the National Union of Shipowners. One of these anarchists, George Foulser, who was a regular contributor to Ludd and who played an important part in the seamen’s strikes of the 1950s and 1960s wrote: ‘The general run of merchant seamen are dominated by a rat organisation with members of the capitalist-class as its so called officials, and voting-rules which make sure that no seamen will ever get official positions in the National Union of Seamen. Since I was born the N.U.S. has never had a single instance where the union officials have taken action against the shipowners. It was for the genuine seamen, the rank and file without a voice in their own trade union, to take action in order to retain the good name of British Seamen…The N.U.S. is often referred to as the National Union of Shipowners; and sometimes as the National Union of Scabs. It is because the N.U.S. follows the shipowners’ aims that it fights tooth and nail against ships’ committees for NUS members. ‘In Australia, new Zealand, Canada, the USA, Holland, Norway, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, the Republic of Ireland, and in all the communist countries, merchant seamen have had legally recognized union representation aboard ship for years…Now that seamen have realised the value of their rank and file movement, I think that we shall obtain our freedom and our legal ships’ committees-but no thanks to the British government whether Labour or Tory. And certainly no thanks…to the shipowners and their N.U.S. lapdogs.’ Foulser, G. (1961) Seaman’s Voice London: MacGibbon and Kee

Muswell Hill interlude Until 1970 the police apparently were unaware that I had moved to Muswell Hill, but they did know where I worked. One day, in the early part of 1970, my site manager, who had driven out especially to the site where I was working as charge-hand, told me that I was wanted back at the unit office by the area supervisor. When I got to the office he told me that he had received a telephone call from the secretary of the William Press company (whose head office was, at the time, next door to MI5 at Queen Anne’s Gate) saying someone was coming to see me that evening at five-thirty. ‘Is it someone from Special Branch?’ I asked. ‘I'm afraid so.’ I said that it would be a wasted journey, as I wouldn’t speak to them. It was also an enormous impudence, especially arranging to see me in the firm’s office and on their time. Supposing I’d been an ‘old lag’ trying to go straight? But, intrigued as to what they wanted, I agreed to meet them at a pub close to work, the Timber Carriage. I didn’t want to trail all the way into the City to meet them at Birnberg’s. Back on site I asked one of my fitters if he would come with me as an independent witness. ‘What is it — CID?’ he asked. ‘No,” I said. “Special Branch — the political police.’ ‘Look, Stuart,’ he said, ‘You're a nice lad, but you've been reading too many bloody James Bond stories. That sort of thing might happen in Russia or Spain. You’re being had.’

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Ludd, June 1966

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‘OK, Jim, come and see.’ Later that evening, when we got to the saloon bar of the Timber Carriage, there waiting for us was the ubiquitous Detective Sergeant Roy Cremer. With him was a more senior Special Branch officer, Detective Chief Inspector Victor Harris. I told them that I would be making a formal complaint about their visit both to the Commissioner of Police and the Home Secretary — and that mine was a pint and a large Grouse and whatever Jim was having. When he returned with the drinks Cremer apologised for contacting me through my work.’But it’s matter of some urgency and we didn’t know where else to find you. We could have avoided all this if you’d only let us know where you were living.’ I was intending to walk out after I’d finished my drink and made my protest. Jim was looking absolutely astounded. But Harris insisted that he really did have an important matter to discuss and was only trying to help. I was curious as to what could be so important to bring a senior Special Branch officer out to the wilderness of outer London. As Coleridge pointed out, even far distant tribal people drink not with the victim into whose breast they mean to plunge the sword. He should have stuck to ancient mariners; it was obvious there were no police, Metropolitan or Special Branch in Coleridge’s day. Every word DCI Harris said to me, together with my replies, was taken down and used later in evidence against me. Not that I said a great deal, but I was later refused bail for sixteen months because of Harris’s sworn statement concerning my so-called ‘international connections.’ According to Harris, Interpol had received a tip-off from the Italian Ministry of the Interior that what he described as ‘a Latin commando group’ would shortly arrive in this country ‘to cause trouble.’ Latin Commandos? The last I ones had heard of were led by Julius Caesar. They did not want particulars and weren’t asking me to inform on them, he explained. But they did want me to pass on to ‘these people’ through my ‘contacts abroad’ that Scotland Yard would be waiting for them if and when they did turn up. I was being asked ‘to use my influence’ to avoid any incidents and arrests. ‘A helpful warning, that’s all,’ he pointed out. ‘Mmm,’ I said. It was also a totally mystifying one. What was their motive? As a rule of thumb, the Special Branch doesn’t collect interviews or pass on information for a hobby. I contacted the Croce Nera Anarchica in Italy to make them aware of this story, but the warning equally bemused them. What they did tell me was that someone ‘with what sounded like a Scottish name’ was going around Turin claiming to be a friend of mine, and trying to buy arms and ammunition. Shortly after this incident the Italian weekly Oggi reported that an agent of ‘British intelligence’ had been responsible for the arrest of a Genoese revolutionary — though not anarchist —group, Gruppo d’Azione Partigiano. I certainly resented the use of my name to gain introductions, even though nobody apparently fell for the ploy.

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Latin Commandos?

This incident may have had something to do with the principal SIS agent runner in Italy at the time, John McCaffery, a Hambros-appointed director of Michele Sindona’s Banca Privata Finanziaria and zealous anti-leftist. He was deeply compromised in the strategy of tension and a close associate of some of the key conspirators of the so-called ‘Rose of the Winds’ military and rightist plot to overthrow the Italian government in 1971. During the war, McCaffery (code-name ‘Rossi’)had been MI6’s man in Berne, where he operated under the cover of ‘assistant press attaché’ at the British Legation, and worked closely with Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and, later, head of the CIA. Before he died in February 1981 McCaffery swore an affidavit confessing to his involvement in this plot with, among others Sindona and Edgardo Sogno.

Harassment, what harassment? As far as the Anarchist Black Cross was concerned, we couldn’t do anything but protest against this casual police intimidation, if only for the sake of going through the defensive motions. The mere fact of talking civilly to the Special Branch was in itself compromising, and I didn’t want a symbiotic relationship developing between us. If someone like me, presumed to be sensitive to political matters and conscious of civil rights, didn’t get up and complain, then who would? Albert Meltzer prepared a statement about the harassment inflicted on me and sent it on behalf of the Black Cross to the then Home Secretary, Jim Callaghan. The legendary ‘independent detective’ came to interview Albert at length. He took extensive notes and reported back to the Home Secretary. Callaghan then wrote to Albert denying that there had been any harassment and said I hadn’t made any complaint on that particular occasion, leaving it to be inferred that I had enjoyed it. To emphasise Callaghan’s bland, courteous letter, the very day it arrived six detectives turned up at Albert’s house in his absence, turned everything upside down, left books and papers scattered all over the place, ransacked his belongings — and left without taking anything or troubling to make an appointment to see him. Outside the house they met his elderly aunt who asked what they were up to. They wanted to accompany her back to her home but she protested — somewhat incautiously in expression — that she had to go and collect drugs for a friend. One of them therefore accompanied her, eagerly, to find she was going to the local chemist to collect the prescription for another elderly lady suffering from cancer. Disappointed, he then went home with her and the six turned her room over. No woman police officer was present during the raid and she was quite terrified. They left with the cynical remark, ‘I suppose we’ll get the usual moan.’ About this time, too, other people within our friendship network were being subjected to political police raids, including a number of business firms

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whose stock was turned over because they happened to have rooms in the same building whose landlord had let rooms to the Black Cross. One Irish bookseller in the basement was so overcome at seeing the police rush in that he shouted ‘I paid my rates last week!’ The photographer on the first floor began protesting immediately as they came in that his nudes were artistic and not pornographic. Knock, indeed, on any door… The police, meanwhile, had discovered our address in Muswell Hill, and following a ‘friendly’ visit from the Special Branch, we had to cope with a hysterical landlady, Mrs Rose Branch, who at first perhaps thought distant and long-lost family members were visiting her. After their visit she asked us to leave. In spite of my sunny and affable nature, she was already convinced I was a bit suspect. The number of sinister-looking foreigners who turned up on her doorstep or appeared at her kitchen window, usually at night, no doubt compounded this view. I did notice that for a week or so before she told us to leave us she had been engrossed in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. I wondered to myself if that had coloured her judgement of us. Was I some reallife ‘Comrade Ossipon’, ‘Michaelis,’ ‘Professor X’ — or ‘Stevie’, the half-wit? Miguel Garcia, one of the ‘sinister foreigners’ who had turned up at the door one winter evening — and stayed — was undoubtedly ‘Karl Yundt.’

Finsbury Park

Taking the air in Finsbury Park: Brimstone (our cat) and Miguel García García

Franco’s Prisoner, Rupert HartDavis, London, 1972

Brenda and I moved to a larger and more convenient flat in Fonthill Road, Finsbury Park, while Miguel moved to Suffolk to stay with some comrades, Ben and Libertad Gosling, who had been sending him food parcels and money when he was inside. But the English countryside proved too quiet for Miguel who soon returned to London, taking a flat of his own close to us in Upper Tollington Park, close to Finsbury Park, where, with Albert, he began writing the book on his experiences in Spanish jails — Franco’s Prisoner. Albert moved in with him shortly after. They made an odd couple indeed, but a great double act. While Miguel and Albert were writing Franco’s Prisoner in 1970, the First of May Group — which had been more or less inactive throughout 1969, apart from Alan and Phil’s arrest and the 25 May bombing of the Spanish Embassy in Bonn — had regrouped in the wake of the collapse of the FIJL. By January 1970 it had launched a fresh series of actions to draw the world’s attention to the on-going repression in Spain and Franco’s forgotten political prisoners. These attacks were organised on an international scale, the main targets being Spanish banks, diplomatic centres and Iberia Airlines, the Spanish state airline. They were to be a statement to the world that while Franco remained in power, protests would be heard everywhere. But, unfortunately, they did nothing to halt the ever-growing wave of economically important tourists to the beaches of Franco’s Spain. On 3 March, 1970, three First of May Group members (Juan Garcia Macarena, 24; José Cabal Riera, 21; and José Canizares Varella, 35) were

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Storm Clouds Brood

Franco’s Patrician: Antonio Garrigues y Díaz-Caabate

arrested in France charged with consipring to kidnap Spain’s permanent delegate to Unesco, while in April an Italian anarchist, Ivo della Savia, had been arrested in Belgium on an arrest warrant issued by the Italian government on charges of involvement with First of May Group actions in Italy. A few days later in New York, a bomb accidentally exploded in a Greenwich Village town house, totally destroying it and killing three young American radicals — Ted Gould, Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins. This was the first indication that the Weather Underground had reached their limits of acceptable protest and moved to more violent protest actions against the Vietnam war and the American State. The simmering frustration over US involvement in Vietnam continued to build to anger among the youth of America following the US invasion of Cambodia. By May, things had heated up considerably. Four students demonstrating peacefully in the grounds of Kent State University in Ohio against the US invasion of Cambodia were shot dead when National Guardsmen fired into the crowd. Eleven other demonstrators were injured in the attack. In Jackson State University in Mississippi two black students were also shot dead during the anti-war protests. Mealy-mouthed President Nixon showed his complete lack of moral leadership and excused the killings by the National Guardsmen with the banal observation that ‘When dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy.’ On 10 May, small firebombs ignited on a number of aeroplanes of the Francoist airline Iberia at different airports throughout Europe. These coordinated actions were carried out by the First of May Group. Scary, but not lethal, the devices were not intended to endanger the safety of passengers, nor indeed of the plane itself, something which singularly distinguished it from nationalist or state-sponsored terrorist attacks such as the Lockerbie bombing or those launched by the Black September Group, or by the later ETA or Provisional IRA. Donald Lidstone, a senior member of the Home Office Explosives Department at Woolwich Arsenal, described the firebomb as follows: ‘…after giving off an intensely hot flame for a second and a half, it then gave off a large amount of black smoke —

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30 April 1970: President Nixon authorises bombing of Cambodia

Monday, 4 May, 1970: National Guard soldiers fire on peaceful anti-war demonstrators killing six students, two of them women. In the 1960s and 1970s, the children of the rich and powerful found a way of joining the National Guard to avoid going to Vietnam. They may not have been prepared to fire at the armed Vietnamese people, but they did fire on unarmed students

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Paddington Green: London’s new high security police station

enough to impair the pilot’s vision.’ All airlines and airports were notified of the bombs before they took off. The police ‘leaked’ a story to the Daily Express. The man responsible, according to ‘police sources,’ was a person readily identifiable as yours truly. Unfortunately, libel actions are only a rich man’s way of getting richer. Had I been Randolph Churchill I could have walked off with enough money to live without working for the rest of my life. As it was, I continued converting the Home Counties — to Natural Gas — and limited my response to a statement issued through my lawyer, Ben Birnberg, denying any involvement in the actions. On the afternoon in question, I had been at a garden party at the home of two close friends up Crouch Hill, Valerie and Graham Packham. One of my ‘alibis’ was a senior police officer who lived next door. Almost a fortnight after the attacks on the Iberia planes another incident occurred on 22 May that was to mark the emergence of what was to become known as the ‘Angry Brigade.’ It was the discovery of a small explosive device with a timing device on the building site of the high security police station in Paddington. Coincidentally, the previous week had seen the spectacular escape of Andreas Baader from Tegel Prison in West Germany. This was the birth of the ‘Red Army Fraktion,’ the RAF. If astrology was involved in this conjuncture — which also saw first Weather Underground communiqué in the States and their bombing of New York City’s Police Headquarters — the people in these groups must have been born on very different cusps, as they were to evolve in very different ways. Things began to heat up in the early summer of 1970. On my way home from Harrow on the Hill one evening— it was in the run up to the June elections — I became aware that I was being followed in what appeared to be a fairly substantial surveillance operation either by the police or MI5’s ‘Watchers’ from Euston Tower in Gower Street. Knowing I was being shadowed made it relatively easy for me to lose them around the back streets of Wembley and Willesden, and I didn’t think much more of it — until the same thing happened the following day. While driving out of the North Thames Gas Board yard at Harrow-on-theHill, I noticed a green car following me. My normal route took me through the back doubles of North London to get home to Finsbury Park. This routine was to avoid the rush-hour traffic rather than MI5’s cloak and dagger men from Gower Street. I knew this part of London like the back of my hand, having converted most of it to Natural Gas so I took my followers on a Cook’s tour of the Betjemanesque suburbs, during the course of which I discovered that I had at least three cars and two motorcyclists tailing me. Wherever I went the lambs were sure to follow. Failing to shake them, I eventually ended up driving along Finchley Road at a mere fifteen miles an hour, with the surveillance cars and motorcycles following me like a funeral procession with outriders. If I had had a passenger I would have got him to walk in front of the car, hat in hand.

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The Long Trail, The Old Trail...

When we got to Highgate Hill the traffic into London from the A1 and M1 motorway had built up. Suddenly the Devil made me pull out and accelerate into the oncoming northbound traffic, pulling into the correct lane when a gap presented itself, or forced to by big lorries heading straight for me. The Hillman Hunters decided not to pursue me. A few minutes later I was in the back streets of Archway and heading for home, taking care to park my car streets away from our flat. My official address was the old office of the Anarchist Black Cross, which we had given up, but I still had a key and collected our mail every other day. The next day when I arrived at work, a cavalcade of cars and vans were parked all around my sector. I thought at first that it might have something to do with the election, but no — it was the ‘watchers.’

Special Branch men take away Chinese One day I cracked a joke or made some comment to my shop steward and unit manager about the increased surveillance, but they didn’t believe me — at first. Then they checked for themselves and reported back on the two-way radio that they had counted six parked Hillman Hunters and Minxes with similarly sequenced registration plates on my conversion sector, occupied by what were obviously plainclothes policemen or spooks. There were also two motorcyclists in the area — with green army bikes, green army issue crash helmets and heavy-duty military raincoats. Gerry, my foreman, laughed and said that I was being paranoid. Jokingly I suggested we swap cars for the night. It was Monday and the sector was not a particularly difficult one, so I left early and managed to drive off in Gerry’s car without being spotted by the waiting column of undercover cars. Gerry returned to the Harrow base in my car and then went on to a pub. Surprise, surprise — he found he was being followed. This time the procession was tailing him. First they waited outside the pub, from there they followed him to the Chinese restaurant and waited outside until he finally went home — at one in the morning. For three weeks after that I used up every trick ever seen in a B film, including lying on the floor of the William Press van and being driven to my car which had been parked up in a helpful lady’s garage four or five miles away (I had converted her appliances on a previous sector) and more fast car chases around the North Circular Road. Every Gas Board contractor in Harrow on the Hill — and there were hundreds of us — knew the men in the Hillman Hunters and, occasionally, to be different, a Triumph Vitesse, were policemen and would constantly wind them up by asking for the time, ‘officer’. They had the time all right. What they didn’t have — for a while — was the opportunity. They finally brought in a van with mirrored one-way windows and observation vents side and top, which they parked in front of

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D28: my William Press van

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

my van. When this arrived I promptly turned my van round so they could only see our rear. Even so, all they could have learned was how to convert gas appliances, play poker and tell jokes. It may seem incredible to the seasoned reporter, though readily acceptable to the general reader, that the First of May Group had no plans to blow up Harrow School, and the police had no reason to watch me at work on a William Press’s conversion van. One thing that drove the police crazy at this time was that after a week of following the Corsair, I started turning up for work every Monday morning in a brand new car. Sometimes I changed my car twice or three times in a week. The police couldn’t understand what was going on. What had happened was that a friend — a member of the People Show, an improvising radical theatre troupe — had a day job managing the Hertz Rental office at Luton airport, and he was providing my car fleet. The police went to Luton to question my friend as to who was renting these cars, claiming they had been used in a spate of bank robberies in the London area, but he refused to tell them anything unless they provided a court order, which they never did. It took them almost six weeks to discover where I lived. They watched and waited until I left for work one morning, then they made their move. Having watched me leave, they sent a woman detective to ring the doorbell. Brenda, who was still in bed at the time, got up and went to the window to see who it was. ‘Please, Brenda, let me in… it’s urgent … I’m in terrible trouble. I want to see Stuart.’ Brenda threw on her dressing gown and rushed downstairs to open the door. As she did, a dozen male detectives who had been hiding round the corner pushed her roughly to one side. ‘Check and re-check the warrants of police,’ states a current police circular to people bothered by phoney policemen. I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have one of them than a real one. They dragged Brenda up the stairs and barged straight into the flat, ransacking our belongings, smashing open doors and cupboards, including the electric meter. Brenda protested. ‘What are you worrying about, love?’ jeered one police thug, a Scotsman. ‘You’re not going to see the fucking thing for twenty years.’ They tossed the furniture about, threw books and papers, and sniggered as they rummaged around Brenda’s underwear drawer. They didn’t even allow Brenda to get dressed in private but stood watching while she did so — the woman detective having disappeared at this juncture. They even stood at the open door when she went to the toilet. But Brenda did manage to get to a phone and rang her friend Vaz. “It’s me, Bren, help!” was as far as she got. They slammed the phone down. Vaz, who lived nearby on the top of Crouch Hill, was at our flat within minutes. As she drew up outside the flat, Bren shouted to her through the open window that she was being raided and that she should call Birnberg. She had hardly finished when the previously mentioned Glasgow police thug slammed the window down on her hand and threw her across the room. Vaz ran up the stairs but they wouldn’t let her speak to Brenda. In fact, she

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The Blue Meanie From West Drayton

then discovered there was a warrant for her house, too, where they later managed to smash a few of her best pieces of furniture. Our upstairs neighbours had heard the commotion and rushed down to investigate. One of them, Peter, thought gangsters were attacking us when he saw all the men and Bren looking upset. He wasn’t too far off the mark. ‘Are you all right, Bren?’ he asked. The woman detective grabbed Brenda by the arm and led her into the other room as the police officer in charge produced a warrant card. ‘She’s in a lot of trouble,’ he said. ‘I don’t give a damn about that,’ Peter said. ‘I like the girl and you are obviously terrorising her. I want to see what’s going to happen.’ The detective told Peter to go up the stairs and not to leave the house. ‘As you’ve witnessed us in the middle of a raid you’ve put us in a spot. We can’t let you leave in case you contact anyone. Have you a telephone?’ ‘No.’ The Glaswegian waved his fist in Peter’s face. ‘You stay out of this, boy, right?’ How insulting the word ‘boy’can sound. This man was doing his best to show the iron fist. Our two cats, little Fire and big Brimstone, came through the back window to be fed. Finding the house full of strangers, Fire, with her usual lack of perception, took this fellow citizen of mine (Christ help us) for a human being and tried to jump on his lap, for which she received a vicious kick for her pains. The police followed Peter up the stairs and went berserk when they saw a telephone. But it had been long since disconnected. Val, Pete’s wife, took Brenda a cup of tea, but they refused to let her have it. After they had vandalised the flat to their satisfaction, they took Brenda to West Drayton Police Station, where they kept her in solitary confinement for most of the day, trying to pressure her into making a statement against me. They may order these things more efficiently abroad, but it is purely a question of degree. She was treated so brutally by her interrogators that even the woman detective seemed to begin to feel sorry for her. Finally, Brenda managed to get in touch with her solicitor, who had not been able to discover where she had been taken, let alone why. But by late afternoon a breathless representative arrived from Birnberg’s office and they were forced to release her, without charge. The whole thrust of their interrogation had been to try to force her through fear to make a statement against me. And me? I came back from work that night, blissfully unaware of what Bren had been subjected to that day. I parked the car a few streets away near Stroud Green Road as usual, and walked to our flat in Fonthill Road. As I came to the corner of Lennox Road, opposite to where we lived, I saw Brenda sitting in Vaz’s car looking across to our flat where another friend was ringing our doorbell. Always the joker, I crept up behind Bren, stuck my forefinger in her back like a gun and shouted Gotcha! Wrong thing to do, in the circumstances, Harassment? The Home Office could not accept such an allegation against police officers doing their duty. Humiliation? There was a woman police officer

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Detective Sergeant Roy Cremer, Metropolitan Police Special Branch

present. Ill-treatment? That was going altogether too far. Unlawful arrest? The lady had merely been asked to accompany the officers to the station to assist them with their ‘enquiries.’ A few days later the officer who led the raid, Detective Inspector Wheeler, told Birnberg that he wanted to interview me. We agreed on a round table conference in the Solicitor’s office, with Bren and me on one side, with Birnberg, and the two police officers on the other. ‘We are investigating a bomb that was placed on Iberia flight 423 at London Airport on 10 May 1970. Do you know anything about it?’ ‘Only what I read in the papers.’ Did I know anyone at a certain address in Fulham? I didn’t. Did I know they had searched my premises? I did. ‘We found nothing positive from the examination to connect you with the incident, but in your living room we found a live 7.65 calibre bullet.’ They had gone as far as vacuum cleaning the flat. The bullet, I said, was a souvenir like a number of others floating around London. If they claimed it was illegal, I would disclaim ownership. Everyone was then happy. I little knew another point was being stored up for the future. ‘Why do you have these fuses in the house?’ ‘They are cold weather fuses for our diesel generators. I use them at work when it is too cold to start the generators by hand. They are here probably because they were in my overalls.’ The police agreed they would return all the papers and documents they had taken from the flat, but they would keep the bullet. I took the opportunity of complaining about the behaviour of Wheeler’s officers, and that of the Glasgow thug in particular. Tolerant smiles. Why, they weren’t even going to charge me, and there I was complaining like Oliver Twist before the beadles! They didn’t even tell me what the crime was I wasn’t being charged with. But it was made very clear that my anarchist beliefs made me persona non grata. DS Roy Cremer underlined this in one of his many visits to John Rety. Surveillance was intensified. DS Cremer was now a frequent visitor at Susan Johns’ and John Rety’s shop in Camden High Street, presumably for the same reason that people climb Everest — because it’s there. John was easy to get at in Susan’s antique shop, and he was a very sociable and friendly guy. John was also a well-known ‘face’ in the London anarchist movement and it was Cremer’s job as a skilled ‘speciality’ officer to establish a friendly and sympathetic relationship with the people the Branch was targeting — in this case the anarchists. Cremer would pop in unannounced and suggest a game of chess. He had played, it was said, against the Russian spy Gordon Lonsdale, after his arrest, presumably in the hope of getting him to talk. This was his job — to appear sympathetic to the cause he was monitoring and try to gain the trust of his contacts. Cremer explained to John that the police really had nothing against me except my libertarian views. ‘I don’t think myself the anarchists are as black

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A Game Of Chess

as they’re painted,’ he said between pondering over a bishop and a rook. ‘I think they are honourable, idealistic and reasonable people … but the sort of things that are going on are giving them a bad name in the view of people higher up.’ He pronounced ‘higher up’ as though this was not a view he shared. Cremer had demonstrated his ‘defiance’ of ‘higher authority’ by sitting down at a chess table with John Rety and chatting to him about people John knew in Hungary, which he had left behind years ago, including his mother — the psychological equivalent of a publican handing out free drinks from stock. The news that anarchists were not regarded in high esteem by people ‘higher up’ was really no more surprising than learning of the bad name the National Secular Society used to have in Vatican circles. However, I seemed to have the worst name of the lot: our flat was now under 24-hour surveillance. I used to invite photographer friends around to take pictures of the watchers. If the invitation was issued over the phone, they vanished. Once I phoned the local police to say a suspicious looking car was parked outside. It looked as if they were going to raid the Indian greengrocer on the corner. The occupants of the car, a Hillman Hunter (it was a batch purchase, obviously) looked a bad bunch of villains. Eventually a patrol car came by only to go away sheepishly when they learned the identity of the villains.

The man with the crystal ball The week after the interview with Wheeler, I had a telephone call from the aptly named Commander Dix, head of X Division, which included Heathrow Airport. The voice sounded remarkably like that of the Scottish comedian Chic Murray and I thought at first it was some mates winding me up. ‘Ah, Mr. Christie, my name is Commander Dix and I’d like to have a wee word with you as a man of the world — and a fellow Glaswegian.’ I half expected him to say next that this was a spot check and would I admit to two pimples and a boil? But he wasn’t Chic Murray and his faux bonhomie and cynical compatriotism wasn’t much of a recommendation, bearing in mind my other compatriot who had assaulted Brenda. Despite its civic motto, ‘Let Glasgow Flourish By The Preaching of the Word,’ a lot more flourished in Glasgow beyond preaching. ‘We’re both men of the world and I think we can understand each other,’ he continued. ‘Anyway, I have a crystal ball in front of me and it tells me that tomorrow I’m going to receive some funny telephone calls here. Just a wee word of advice — I don’t like my time being wasted — nor do I like the time of my men being wasted.

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‘Look,’ I said, ‘I don’t know anything about your funny telephone calls, any more than I do about your funny handshakes’ — a dig at his likely membership of the freemasons — ‘but I certainly don’t like my partner being beaten up by your thugs. You’d better peer into your wee crystal ball to find out what lies you will be telling to the Commissioner of Police when my complaint goes through.’ I never did find out about the funny telephone calls. But presumably he was referring to an intensification of the First of May Group’s attacks against high profile Francoist targets such as Iberia Airlines — attacks which attracted a lot more attention to the Anarchist Black Cross. Unsurprisingly, given the shared aims and common roots of the ABC and the First of May Group, it was hardly surprising the police were convinced our activities on behalf of anarchist prisoners was a front for the First of May Group. But there’s little doubt the ABC’s practical and propaganda work for Franco’s political prisoners not only helped boost their morale, but also did much to widen and internationalise the struggle — as well as leading to greater bursts of activity against the regime, both inside and outside Spain. The First of May Group again hit out at Francoist institutions throughout Europe. In London they planted a small bomb in the offices of Iberia Airlines. Shortly after the Commander Dix call I received a further request from the police for an interview, again chaired by Ben Birnberg. It was from another Scotsman, Detective Inspector Macadam with Detective Sergeant Jessico taking notes. The dialogue was predictable: ‘Was it you?’ ‘No.’ I wondered to myself what the effect would have been if I said ‘Yes’. However, I controlled the impulse and Macadam went on. ‘A letter was received at the Times two or three days after the incident purporting to come from the First of May Group and claiming responsibility. Can you tell me anything about that?’ ‘I understand them to be opposed to the present regime in Spain.’ He was not amused.

More questions than answers The Guardian, 18 August 1970

The Guardian, 19 August 1970

I was travelling abroad a lot and, consequently, being interviewed by the police with increasing frequency. They were now parading before me one after the other as if I were a minister of police. I could close my eyes at night and see them jumping over fences. Ever persistent, ever in the background — in the foreground even — was the cadaverous DS Cremer, who was, in my mind, taking on the persona of Victor Hugo’s Inspector Javert to my Jean Valjean. He told Albert on one occasion that he was one of the first people to buy our book Floodgates of Anarchy, having queued up at Collett’s bookshop on publication day. An interview with DI Palmer-Hall and DS Balmain from the Special Branch in September 1970 appeared on the surface more or less typical, but from their probing there were things they weren’t telling me — and they didn’t have anything to do with Franco.

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The Wild Bunch

DI Palmer-Hall produced a well-thumbed copy of Floodgates of Anarchy from his briefcase. It fell open at one page in particular, like an early 1960s copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Obviously he’d spent a few sleepless nights over that chapter and he wanted to question me on some passages. Whatever it was he wanted to know I knew it wasn’t sought entirely in the spirit of a genuine search for truth and understanding. I didn’t see the point of an open-ended debate with him about selectively chosen passages, taken out of context. No matter what I said it would be undoubtedly used against me so I referred him to my co-author who enjoyed nothing better than debating the exact number of angels who could dance through the eye of a needle. Albert had had lots of experience in dealing with awkward questioners from the floor. The well-heeled secret policeman moved on to question me about what I knew about bombs that had exploded on Sunday, 27 September, at Heathrow, Le Bourget and Le Touquet. ‘Nothing.’ Did I have a car? I had the use of Mr. Meltzer’s Corsair. Fortunately, he didn’t ask me if I had a licence to drive it. Why had I gone to Brussels, Liege and Namur recently and whom had I seen? I did not know the people I met there well enough to put names to their faces, nor did I know where they lived. They knew perfectly well I had gone to meet with Salvador Gurruchari in Brussels and Octavio Alberola in Namur, but why should I tell them anything. They would only use it against me, and perhaps against them. Did I remember the night of 29-30 August 1970 — a Friday night? Did I know the Roehampton area? I didn’t and wasn’t quite certain where Roehampton was. How about 7-8 September 1970? I didn’t keep a diary. ‘There was an explosion that night in the South West area.’ These things happen all the time. ‘What do the names The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid mean to you?’ ‘Great films. All about honour and redemption, friendship — and sticking it to the bad guys.’ When the interview ended I told him that, like Frank Sinatra, it was the last one I would give. Already the management at William Press were complaining that I spent more time being interviewed by police than I did working. In future they would have to charge me with something. They also asked Albert about the Brussels trip. ‘Is it a coincidence that a few weeks after your last trip to Brussels a series of bombing incidents took place?’ ‘A few weeks after my first trip to Brussels the Second World War broke out, but as far as I know there was no direct connection.’ Dealing with awkward customers from the platform? At one time he even wrote scripts for music hall comics. Albert was in great form. Palmer-Hall produced his pièce de resistance — page 144 of Floodgates of Anarchy.

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Floodgates of Anarchy, Kahn and Averill, 1970

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30 August 1970: bomb attack on the home of Sir John Waldron, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner; (right) note sent to the press

8 September 1970: note sent following bomb attack on the Chelsea home of Sir Peter Rawlinson, Edward Heath’s Attorney-General

‘Do you believe in violence?’ This was the feed Albert had been waiting thirty-odd years for. ‘Of course not, but what would you do if someone tried to rape your sister?’ David Palmer-Hall was taken aback. ‘What an extraordinary question. How could I possibly know what I would do in a situation like that? I’ve no idea how I would react.’ The interview ended with a plea from DI Palmer-Hall to Albert to ‘try to cool these matters ... use your influence to see that nobody gets hurt.’ What matters? He had referred to ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ and the ‘Wild Bunch.’ Who were they? They were the names used on communiqués received following unreported bomb attacks on the homes of both the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Waldron — 30 August — and, a week later, that of the Tory Attorney General, Sir Peter Rawlinson. These were not cases the press could be allowed to publicise. Black Flag had received information about these attacks, but we decided not to publish the information until the story broke in the national press. Had we printed the story it would simply have triggered more extensive raids, searches and serious disruption in the form of the police removing our printing equipment and our files. More attacks on Establishment figures occurred in the following months: Attorney General Rawlinson’s house 20 November 1970: BBC TV Outside was bombed again in October; there were simultaneous Broadcast Van outside Royal Albert Hall during Miss World Contest and co-ordinated attacks on Italian government offices in London, Manchester, Birmingham and Paris — all claimed by groups calling themselves variously, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Wild Bunch, the International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement, and Lotta Continua, the latter on behalf of the murdered Italian ABC Secretary, Giuseppe Pinelli; a bomb exploded in the offices of Greenford Cleansing Department during an industrial dispute; another blew up a BBC Outside Broadcast van covering the Bob Hopecompered Miss World Contest at the Albert Hall; the Spanish Embassy was machine-gunned when international demonstrations of solidarity with six Basque nationalists on trial in Franco’s courts were taking place. In fact, these were all the actions of a group of people who later came to be known collectively by the press and the police as the Angry Brigade.

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Privates In The Awkward Squad

Who they were and how many people were involved is unlikely ever to be known. I certainly am in no position to say. What I can surmise is that those involved were a relatively disparate group in their early-to-mid twenties who had reached the imposed limits of protest. The sense of anger, frustration and outrage everyone felt at the time, wasn’t unique to Britain. Much the same degree of angry militancy was being reached all over the world around the same time: the Weather Underground in the States, the 2nd June and Red Army Fraktion groups in Germany, the GARI and MIL in France and Spain, the Partisan Action Groups and nascent Red Brigades in Italy, and do on. Unlike Pallas Athene, this network of young radicals who came to be known as the Angry Brigade did not spring forth in 1970, fully armed from the cloven head of some sinister Zeus. The Angry Brigade was a creation of its time, an ad hoc constellation of young people who, politicised by America’s war in Vietnam, May ‘68, and the aggressive anti-working class bias and anti trade union policies of the Conservative government of Ted Heath felt that the failure of the parliamentary and party political system left them no options to make their point than by exemplary direct actions. The strategy was not one of preemptive regime change. It was a signal that lines were being drawn in the sand, and that at least some people were angry about what was happening in the world and were prepared to highlight the wrongs and injustices through the psychological impact of victimless symbolic attacks. Their immediate aim was not revolution — although they all considered themselves revolutionaries — but to act as a spur, pushing back the boundaries of illegitimate state power by a more combative approach to protest. Apart from wanting greater political accountability and democratic control over their lives and what was being done in their name by the permanent government, in their sights were all the concentrated weaknesses and flaws in society, including predatory capitalism, anti-working class legislation, racism, sexism, colonialism, the consumer society, the nuclear state and US and Soviet imperialism — to name but a few.

Communiqué 1, The Angry Brigade Early in December 1970, a widely-publicised court martial of six Basque nationalists opened in Burgos in Franco’s Spain. The military prosecutor was demanding the death sentence for all six men. Pickets, petitions, angry demonstrations, violent protests and solidarity actions were organised against Francoist embassies and Spanish institutions throughout the civilized world. In London, on 3 December, some people in a car drove past the Spanish Embassy in Belgrave Square in Knightsbridge and opened fire at its portico doorway and windows with a machine-gun. The day after the shooting at the Spanish Embassy, the main newspapers received the following brief hand-written note, stamped with a John Bull

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2 June Group ‘Wanted’ poster

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

printing kit: ‘Communiqué 1, The Angry Brigade: ‘Fascism and oppression will be smashed. Embassies, High Pigs, Spectacles, Judges, Property (Spanish Embassy machine-gunned Thursday)’ This was the very first use of the name Angry Brigade. The bullets from the machine-gun used in the attack tied it in forensically with the First of May Group attacks in 1967 on Spanish Embassy cars and on the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. But what did the references to ‘High Pigs,’ ‘Spectacles’ and ‘Judges’ mean? Six days later, on 9 December, the Department of Employment and Productivity in St James’ Square — the ministry responsible for the about-to-bepassed and much hated Industrial Relations Bill — was bombed. The explosion occurred just after the police had completed a search of the building. This action was clearly a response to the threat of the Industrial Relations Bill. Jumpin’ Jack Flash I was born in a cross-fire hurricane Communiqué number two from the Angry Brigade was sent to the And I howled at my ma in the driving rain, But it’s all right now, in fact, it’s a gas! underground newspaper, the International Times, where it was published But it’s all right. I’m Jumpin’ Jack Flash, in its issue No.93. Again, short and to the point it said, simply: ‘Success. It’s a gas! Gas! Gas! I was raised by a toothless, bearded hag, I was schooled with a strap right across my back, Min. E & Prod.’ It was stamped, ‘Communiqué 2, The Angry Brigade,’ But it’s all right now, in fact, it’s a gas! with the now familiar John Bull printing kit. A third communiqué was But it’s all right, I’m Jumpin’ Jack Flash, sent to IT, extracts from which were published in IT 94 and IT 95. The It’s a gas! Gas! Gas! I was drowned, I was washed up and left for dead. note described the bombing of the Department of Employment as part I fell down to my feet and I saw they bled. I frowned at the crumbs of a crust of bread. of ‘a planned series of attacks on capitalist and government property.’ It Yeah, yeah, yeah ended ‘We will answer their force with our class violence.’ I was crowned with a spike right thru my head. But it’s all right now, in fact, it’s a gas! Who were ‘Butch Cassidy’ — was it an Irish lesbian group? — the But it’s all right, I’m Jumpin’ Jack Flash, It’s a gas! Gas! Gas! ‘Wild Bunch’ and, lastly, the ‘Angry Brigade’?

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I Saw Heath The Other Day — He Had A Mask Like Castlereagh

Chapter 6 — 1970-1971 (Écrasez L’Infâme!) THE SIX-YEAR OLD Labour government was finally overthrown in June 1970 after its disastrous In Place of Strife White paper had brought it into conflict with the Trades Union movement. At its core was the reform of the trade union movement and curbing workers’ rights to strike. The Wilson government had been having a hard time of it with workers outside the control of the TU leadership calling unofficial ‘wildcat’ strikes. The anti-working class legislation, conjured up by Barbara Castle, then Minister of Transport and close confidant of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, recommended fining trade unions which refused to hold strike ballots or agree to a 28-day cooling-off period before a strike took place. This tension added to the ongoing disputes between the Labour government and the unions and undoubtedly contributed to Wilson’s defeat in the 1970 General Election. But the rift had been there ever since the middle-class Fabians had seized control of the Labour Party and transformed it into a Christian bolshevik organisation. Enthusiastic radicals no longer turned to the Labour Party, which was now the home of the enthusiastic careerist. In fact, it was probably only the Trotskyists who kept the Labour Party alive among the young in the hopes that they might, in turn, succeed the Fabians to leadership.

19 June 1970: Selsdon Man comes to power Read no more odes, my son, read timetables: they’re to the point. And roll the sea-charts out before it’s too late. Be watchful, do not sing, for once again the day is clearly coming when they will brand refusers on the chest and nail up lists of names on people’s doors. Learn how to go unknown, learn more than me: to change your face, your documents, your country. Become adept at every petty treason, the sly escape each day and any season. For lighting fires encyclicals are good: and the defenceless can always put to use, as butter-wrappers, party manifestoes. Anger and persistence will be required to blow into the lungs of power the dust choking, insidious, ground out by those who storing experience, stay scrupulous: by you. Hans Magnus Enzensberger

And so it begins... THE EMERGENCE OF the Angry Brigade in Britain in the summer of 1970 can be directly linked to the election of Edward Heath and his conservative government in June of that year. Edward Heath and his ministers made a lot of people very angry indeed. Hints of what to expect had emerged earlier that year when the Tory leadership unveiled the draft manifesto of their policies at the Selsdon Park Hotel in Croydon. The Conservative Party’s election programme was brutish, primitive and reactionary. It focused on repressive anti-union legislation, greater police powers, tax cuts for the rich, cut-backs in social security and state benefits. The incumbent Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson dismissed the Tory ideas as appealing to Selsdon Man, a socio-political cave-dweller whose appearance marked a major shift in the political zeitgeist. In Selsdon Man’s world, the ideology of ‘beneficial’ market-forces and self-interest ruled supreme. The market would be left to its own devices without any social interference. Only the strong, ruthless and the profitable would survive the rigours of capitalism. Everyone had been predicting an easy return to power for Labour despite its growing unpopularity and so it was a surprise when the Tories won the election with a 31 seat majority. On 19 June, the outwardly genial Edward Heath moved into 10 Downing Street as Conservative prime minister. He believed the country was fully behind his new hard-line, market-driven government. In fact, the election results had as much to do with apathy and disillusion with the Labour Party as with any positive endorsement of the Conservatives. But as far as Heath was concerned, he had been given a mandate to unleash the dogs of class war.

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Edward Heath and his front benchers

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His government was one perceived to be propelled by open class interest. The social atmosphere which shaped our understanding and our behaviour had changed from one of hope and optimism, to one of ongoing conflict and anxiety. Resentment was growing at what was widely seen as a Tory-led onslaught on working-class wages, rights and working conditions. This aggression and obsession with control coincided with a right-wing offensive in the media and parliament. Heath’s victory, incidentally, was won in the first election in which 18-year olds were allowed to vote, but how, or if, this contributed to his success I don’t know.

No cheery cove an’ sunburnt he

Edward Heath: the man who helped make callousness and greed acceptable

Heath was far from being the cheery and sunburned cove he made himself out to be. He proved to be a behind-the-scenes control freak whose Cabinet immediately entered into four years of confrontation with the trade union and labour movement, picking up the anti-working class dagger that Labour's Barbara Castle had fashioned and then been afraid to use. Conservative journalist Peregrine Worsthorne later remarked that the Heath obsession might have led to civil war. These intimations of civil unrest troubled the Cabinet Office and their advisers. The political twilight world inhabited by Thistlethwaite’s branch of MI5 and Ferguson Smith’s Special Branch encouraged notions of conspiracy. The threat no longer came from Smiley’s Moscow centre. No Moscow gold was involved and no Maoist conspiracy either. This was a working-class movement, not a middle-class one. It was home-grown. Attention began to focus on an anarchist conspiracy. As for me, I recognised the signs of political discontent no better nor worse than anyone else with my background. The sudden spate of attacks on government buildings, institutions and piratical employers that followed Heath’s election were clearly not actions intended to kill or injure people, or to negotiate for political ends, or even bypass the democratic process. They were actions which complemented the very real class struggle taking place at the time by dramatically articulating the anger felt by many working class people at how the system was geared against them, the chicanery of politicians, and their apparent powerlessness in the face of so many assaults on their standards of living, their dignity and sense of fairness.

Heath — a man obsessed Heath’s new Conservative government began acting as though it had a divine right to confrontation: passing stronger laws against the workers who, in turn, were no longer held back by the considerations which prevailed when the Labour Party was in office. The government developed an Industrial Relations Bill, under Secretary Robert Carr, that like Wilson’s In Place of Strife White paper, placed punitive restrictions on trade union rights. The result was enormous demonstrations throughout the industrial centres of Britain, with the highest number of walkouts since the general strike of 1926, particularly in

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A Bacillus Which Can Infect A Whole Nation

the docks, local authorities and electricity. Prime Minister Heath, a still unrecognised control freak, responded by declaring states of emergency. More and more in the press we heard stories of the righteous indignation of the ‘silent majority’ and the violent antics of the ‘Brolly Brigade,’ the posse comitatus of the beleaguered middle-classes. Both sides seemed to have declared war. Heath and his Cabinet continued with their long-term contingency plans for what was, in effect, open class war — one in which, at least according to the views expressed by Brigadier Frank Kitson in his book Low Intensity Operations, they were fully prepared to respond with every weapon in the State’s armoury. Heath was so obsessed with ‘the threat from within,’ that he personally ordered Martin Furnival-Jones — against normal practice — to allow MI5 officers to brief senior industrialists and major employers about ‘subversives’ who might try to infiltrate their workplaces, i.e. look for a job. As if it wasn’t bad enough for would-be employees to have to deal with the ‘blacklisting’ racketeering of the para-governmental Economic League and Aims of Industry — now they had to cope with MI5 briefing against them, and pay for the privilege out of their own taxes. The right and the Establishment were also concerned about the continued erosion of deference to established authority, and the steady rise in political violence. They couldn’t — or wouldn’t — relate it to the collapse in trust in parliamentary politics and politicians. The relevant Cabinet Office committees and security strategists recognised that the ongoing domestic economic and industrial crises, widespread frustration with the unchecked rise and rise of America to rogue state status, its aggression throughout South East Asia, the Civil Rights confrontations in Northern Ireland and the US, coupled with the idealisation of the urban and rural guerrilla — as exemplified by the ubiquitous iconic images of Ché Guevara, and the derring-do exploits of anticolonialist, nationalist and anti-fascist resistance movements — could percolate through into the wider youth movement. This was ‘a bacillus which can infect a whole nation,’ as one security chief of the time put it.

Our man in Fleet Street Peter Gladstone Smith, the crime correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph — wellconnected in police and security circles and, with me at least, one of the very few journalists without a knife flashing behind their back (or if he had one I certainly couldn’t see it) — told me the authorities regarded me as a potential ‘conduit’ between the anti-Franco Resistance and this wider youth movement. While he might have been a silver tongued flatterer, the always immaculately turned out and well-spoken Peter was also an ‘unlikely’ friend and sympathiser, and a valuable source of information until a few years later when he died of a heart attack in the main entrance to the Telegraph offices in Fleet Street. But it was obvious even at that stage that violence would percolate through to the disaffected youth movements, not from libertarian sources, but from nationalist

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Edward Heath Made Me Angry

and Marxist ones such as the Provisional IRA, the Basque separatist movement ETA, the French Canadian FLQ, the Red Army Fraktion, and the Red Brigades. It came as a surprise to many, including most journalists, to realise that the long confrontation with the workers was reaching such a pitch. But not to Heath. Addressing the UN General Assembly just after he came to power, he warned: ‘Today we must recognise a new threat to the peace of nations, indeed to the very fabric of society. We have seen, in the last few years, the growth of the cult of political violence, preached and practised not so much between states as within them. It is a sombre thought, but it may be that in the 1970s, the decade which faces us, civil war, rather than between nations, will be the main danger we face.’ The Heath government’s confrontational response to genuine social discontent was to turn his prediction into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Making greed respectable

(Top) Manchester, 12 January, 1971: left to right: Chris Bott, Kate McLean, John Barker and Hilary Creek. (Bottom) — London demonstration against Heath’s IRB

But nothing was more conducive to all-out confrontation than the Tory attack on the trade union movement. Despite all its acknowledged faults it was still the sacred cow of British workers. I doubt if the leaders of British industry wanted so headlong a clash; they knew from their own experience how much safer and easier it was to buy trade union leaders and to incorporate them into the establishment. Behind the new Tory Government, however, other forces were at work, representing a new trend — government not by the profit-making capitalists, but by accountants, lawyers and the people who lectured on the ideology of self-interest and the need for profit-making capitalism. They were academics and theorists rather than practitioners. Consequently they opted for the easy solution: go for the militants, what they called the ‘far and wide left.’ But the trade union leaders knew only too well the principle so well established in Nazi Germany, that if everyone to your left is shot then you end up the extremist. They had their conflicts with the shop floor all right, but it was they who bore the brunt in any conflict. What would happen if they no longer existed? The Industrial Relations Act was supposed to be directed against the people the trade union bureaucracy could not control. But they too had their ways of buying people over — ways that had worked well enough for them in the past. It was in

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Setting Barnet Ablaze

their interests to go along with the naturally militant clamour against the Act. Thus, the Tory government was faced with what seemed a united working class movement against the Industrial Relations Act; from one extreme to another. Superficially, there was a complete class confrontation, and the first demonstration against the Bill was marked by massive turnouts throughout the industrial centres of Britain.

12 January 1971 ‘Trouble! Oh, we got trouble! Right here in River City!’ (The Music Man)

The large-scale nationwide demonstrations on 12 January 1971 were good indicators of the level of popular opposition to Robert Carr’s Industrial Relations Bill. Most politically conscious people on the left saw the Bill as the cornerstone of a new corporate state and the Tory plans for the repression of militancy as being targeted specifically against themselves. Older trade unionists and Marxist students saw this was a matter for loud protest. For others it was a matter for action. In the late evening of the day that the Industrial Relations Bill became law, two bombs exploded outside the Barnet home of Robert Carr, then Secretary of State for Employment in the government of Prime Minister Edward Heath — the man responsible for the Bill. No senior police officer from the Metropolitan Police HQ in Scotland Yard was available that night. They were all at the pictures with their wives, watching the cinematic version of the necrophilic murders committed by my Tory namesake, John Christie, at his home in Ten Rillington Place! One officer not invited to the pictures that night was the newly-appointed head of the Barnet police division, Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Habershon. A man in his mid-fifties, Roy Habershon Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Habershon looked like Eric Morecambe morphed into Adolf Eichmann and was forever adjusting his thickframed Buddy Holly glasses in the same way as his comedian doppelganger. However, when Habershon said ‘Now get out of that without moving’ he was talking about handcuffs, not a comedic riposte. He had a dour jowly face and the blotchy, florid, complexion of a stressed-out gamekeeper. The gamekeeper analogy suited Habershon well: he was an organisation man who obeyed orders and deferred to his superiors all his working life. When

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Bad Moon Rising I see the bad moon arising. I see trouble on the way. I see earthquakes and lightnin'. I see bad times today. Don’t go around tonight, Well, it’s bound to take your life, There’s a bad moon on the rise. I hear hurricanes ablowing. I know the end is coming soon. I fear rivers over flowing. I hear the voice of rage and ruin. Hope you got your things together. Hope you are quite prepared to die. Looks like we’re in for nasty weather. One eye is taken for an eye. Creedence Clearwater Revival

The Rt. Hon Robert Carr MP

Carr’s Bentley (top) and side door (bottom)

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Carr’s home, Hadleigh Green, Barnet ‘It is easy to fly into a passion, anyone can do that; but to be angry with the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, the right way, with the right aim; that is not easy.’ Aristotle

he saw the damage to the ‘large comfortable home’ of the employment secretary he believed it was a case of attempted murder of a Cabinet Minister. Habershon was truly outraged by the affair and his patriotic sensibilities aroused. Lacking both empathy and political nous — in spite of the fact there had been tens of thousands of angry demonstrators out that day demonstrating against the Industrial Relations Bill — he simply could not comprehend why anyone would want to attack a Cabinet Minister — until one of his Special Branch advisers explained anarchism to him — the Daily Mail version. Who was responsible? Throughout that evening and into the following day television, radio and the press reported who was not responsible, as one after another of those who claimed to be leading the attack on Robert Carr’s Bill queued up to deny it. Someone went so far as to say that no trade unionist could have had anything to do with it. The Trotskyists were especially embittered — and embarrassed. Had it happened in Bolivia they could have taken some of the credit — but not in Barnet. The heroism of guerrillas in Bolivia becomes reckless adventurism in Barnet. If they applauded the action, they put themselves firmly in the frame. So they attacked the whole thing. It was a ‘fascist provocation’… It was even said by one crazy person that Robert Carr had engineered it himself, and compared it with the Reichstag burning. I had been working in North Ruislip that day since eight in the morning and had been there until shortly after nine that night. It had been a difficult sector with nothing but problems all day. As I was Swarfega-ing up to go home, a new converter came to tell me he was having trouble re-assembling a cooker. He had also found a gas leak. I went back to the house with him, stripped the cooker down again, found the leak, and then re-assembled it, finishing the job sometime after 9pm. Then my car wouldn’t start so I had to get a push start, eventually getting home a few minutes after ten. Brenda had dinner ready and I was sitting down to it when a news flash appeared on the television saying that a bomb had exploded at the home of Robert Carr. ‘Serves him right,’ I said. ‘Who do you think will get the blame?’ said Brenda. I nearly choked. Our upstairs neighbours Pete and Val came down later to share a few bottles of cider and asked if we had heard the news. ‘Oh well, maybe you won’t be the fall guy,’ said Pete. ‘They only blame you for things to do with Franco, don’t they?’ Next morning the press published a note sent to the Times, postmarked Barnet, claiming responsibility for the explosion. It was a ‘We know where you live, pal!’ letter which said simply: Robert Carr got it tonight. We’re getting closer.’ It was signed Communiqué 4, The Angry Brigade. The name fitted neatly into the conspiracy theory. ‘The Angry Brigade’! No doubt with Brigadiers, Colonels, Adjutants, Majors, Captains, NCOs and soldiers — all with anger-management issues. A red IRA? A tightly knit body of conspirators with a carefully prepared military plan, probably with a secret

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Waldron Makes It Personal

HQ, funded from abroad? All that was to be seriously stated, right down to the paranoid imaginings that it might be connected with the IRA, the UDA, the Palestinians, the Stern Gang, the Basque Nationalists, the Ustashi and anyone else who posed a threat of violence — a potpourri of dissent. According to the police, the Carr bombings constituted the eighteenth in a series of 25 small-scale high-profile bombings claimed by a group or groups which had identified itself first as The First of May Group then by a variety of tongue-in-cheek names inspired by current outlaw-friendly films such as Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, the Wild Bunch and, on this occasion, the ‘Angry Brigade.’ I am told that prior to the Tory election victory, they had considered calling themselves ‘The Red Rankers’ in deference to the ‘rhotic defect’ suffered by ‘Woy’ Jenkins, the then Labour Home Secretary.

Baptism of fire What was loosely called the ‘Angry Brigade’ had received its baptism on 22 May the previous year with the discovery of a bomb in the foundations of the new high security police station in Paddington. This had been followed on 30 August by a bomb at the Putney home of Sir John Waldron, the Commissioner of Police. Following the bomb attack on his home, Sir John had made it the top priority to capture those responsible, and ordered a complete reorganisation of the Special Branch. Ferguson Smith, the head of Special Branch, was promoted to the rank of Deputy Assistant Commissioner, and the heads of its three main sections — Operations, Ports and Administration — to Commander. For Waldron it was now something personal. I now knew why Palmer-Hall had asked such apparently irrelevant questions when he was interviewing me about the First of May Group attacks on Iberia Airlines at Heathrow. He had mentioned Roehampton and the West End, places nowhere near Heathrow. On 8 September, a week after Waldron’s house had been targeted, the Chelsea home of the new Conservative Attorney General, Sir Peter Rawlinson QC, had also been bombed. He, too, had been successful in suppressing the news. It was Rawlinson who had defined the Tory no-holds barred policy on ‘law and order’ in a pre-election speech to the Society of Conservative Lawyers. His speech was the opening engagement of a new class war — the Tory equivalent of the Confederate forces firing on Fort Sumter on 12 April 1861. One can understand why Robert Carr might have been bitter. This was where ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ came in. They were the signatories on the letter claiming responsibility for the attack on his house. Rawlinson’s bomb had been claimed by the ‘Wild Bunch.’ Albert Meltzer had also been asked why people would use those names when carrying out ‘outrages.’ ‘What names should they use — their own?’ he replied. Before Carr’s house was bombed, only the police and a few news editors had heard of the Angry Brigade. But the name had been used a month earlier in a note to the underground newspaper International Times (IT) claiming

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Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Beretta M1938-42

responsibility for a machine-gun attack on the Spanish Embassy on the night of 4 December. The machine-gun used, a Beretta M1938-42, was later shown to have been the same one used in the First of May Group attack on the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square three years earlier. Overnight, the ‘Angry Brigade’ had become headline news — and every pundit had his own explanation as to its origin. How the name ‘The Angry Brigade’ came about, will probably never be known with certainty. It doesn’t really matter. Fiction writers and academics have tried to slot in the Angry Brigade with the student movement or middleclass dropout hippies. One writer wrote a fantasy novel called The Angry Brigade, which he claimed was written from taped interviews with them, which he later destroyed. He, too, portrayed the Angry Brigade as student dropouts — caricatures of the caricatures. On top of this they were all on drugs. The names ‘Angry Brigade,’ like ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’ and the ‘Wild Bunch’ were intended to be light-heartedly ironic. They could equally have used ‘William Brown and the Outlaws.’ The names were chosen, presumably, in an attempt to avoid the quasi-military or political pretentiousness of those used by other action-oriented groups of the times. And although I was never present when any of the communiqués were written, I always imagined the surreal telegraphese of the language of the communiqués to have been inspired by the Jack the Ripper ‘Dear Boss’ letters, and written in surroundings similar to that depicted in Ilya Repin’s famous painting of the Zaporozhie Cossacks Writing a Mocking Letter to the Turkish Sultan. The Carr bombing brought massive pressure to bear on Scotland Yard from the Cabinet Office. The investigation, led by Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Habershon under his regional senior officer, Commander Dace, was given top priority. With this new authority, Habershon immediately recruited a team of around 30 officers from the Flying Squad and the Special Branch, a group which soon became known as the ‘Bomb Squad.’ The Zaporozhie Cossacks replied thus to a demand for surrender from the Turkish Sultan Mahomet III. Omitting the unprintable words, this early diplomatic note quoted it as follows: ‘You, Sultan, Turkish Devil and brother and comrade of the cursed devil and secretary of Lucifer himself! How in hell can you call yourself a warrior when you can’t even …. An ass’s …. Let the Devil take you away and gobble up your army. You son-ofa-bitch, you have no right to be the guardian of Christian sons; we aren’t afraid of your army. We will lick you on land and sea, you hostile son-of-abitch. Go… your mother, You Alexandrian goatherd, you Babylonian cook, you Macedonian wagon-maker, Jerusalem’s traitor, Kamchatka cat, Podolian villain, swindler of the world, and evildoer of the underworld. Nephew of the asp himself, you are the … of our…, a piece of pig…, a ,a little mare’s…, the snout of a dog, an unbaptised bastard. Go… your mother and go graze the Christian swine. Now we finish. We do not know the date as we have no calendar; we live by the moon. The year may be in the calendar but the day is the same as yours. Kiss our…’ Signed Ivan Sirko and his Zaporozhie Band

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Fear And Loathing in Fleet Street And Westminster

The morning after the night before The morning after the Carr bombing everyone at work was joking about the previous night’s events. There was no sense of shock or awe around the yard, just schadenfreude. After the long expensive comedy of surrounding the North London Gas Board yard where we were based with athletic-looking types in flared jeans, or smart but casual blue mohair suits sitting together in cars, it did seem a little like a long odds starter coming rattling up the field at the last minute. Everyone assured me that I’d be ‘done over’ so cheerfully that even I came to think of it as a joke. I didn't think so when I later heard that Habershon was being assisted in finding the bombers — now described as Public Enemy Number One — by DI David Palmer-Hall and the ubiquitous DS Roy Cremer, the Yard's dialectician of dissent. As the acknowledged Special Branch expert on anarchists and anarchism, Cremer had been called in to brief everyone from the Home Secretary and the Police Commissioner downwards that they were not now dealing with ordinary criminals, but with a different breed of animal altogether. Unlike his 19th century predecessor, Chief Inspector Melville, Cremer did not dislike anarchists, but he was curious as to what made them tick. After the Robert Carr bomb, however, he changed his mind as to the threat they posed: ‘Someone has to keep an eye on political extremists and someone has to know how they’re divided up, and I was part of the team that did that. My colleagues and I were called in when the Angry Brigade started their activities. We were asked who are these people, and where do they come from politically? And, of course, we had to know. ‘The Robert Carr bomb was the crucial one. It caused a furore because he was a cabinet minister. Unpopular with some on the left because of his position, the Angry Brigade decided to blow up Carr’s house. The local police who had to look into it were baffled. We’ll have to form a squad, they said. We’ll come down to the Yard with our local officers and try and thrash this out. Find out who it is. ‘There had been a lot of activity before — some time before — and it was not immediately apparent that this was connected with the First of May Group, and various other anarchist groups. That didn’t emerge until the scientists analyzed all the bombs and concluded they were all made by same people — and therefore must be connected with the previous bombs. I think we knew in our heart of hearts who it was; we could point to the people, but had no evidence. So the Angry Brigade investigation had to start from the basis that it was those people — but obviously we couldn’t prove that straight away.’ Cremer continued: ‘We had no idea, frankly. We kept observation on the First of May group, but they were aware of this so they were not going to do anything. Things were progressing, although we couldn’t actually pinpoint the people who were doing it. It was a problem. Another way of tackling it would have been to work out where they would strike next, and that was even more difficult because when you look at the targets they were bizarrely different. There was no pattern to it. ‘

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A three-pipe problem: Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Habershon, head of Barnet CID

Detective Sergeant Roy Cremer, Metropolitan Police Special Branch

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Communiqué No 5 of the Angry Brigade defined its targeting strategy: ‘We are not mercenaries. We attack property, not people! Carr, Rawlinson, Waldron, would all have been dead if we had wished. Fascists and government agents are the only ones who attack the public — the fire-bombing of the West Indian party in South London, the West End cinema bomb [references to two serious bombings that had killed two people and injured many more]. British democracy is based on more blood, terror, and exploitation than any empire in history. It has a brutal police force whose crimes against the people the media will not report. Now its government has declared vicious class war. Carr’s Industrial Relations Bill aims to make it a onesided war. We have started the fight back, and the war will be won by the organised working class with bombs.’ Cremer knew the authorities were dealing with a new form of political protest in which, as he described it, bombs were being used as exclamation marks, but that didn’t cut much ice with his superiors and colleagues who viewed it as pure villainy. To have said that at the time, as he pointed out was almost like saying whose side are you on? No one would have listened to him. The sense of outrage felt by the police and politicians at the attacks on cabinet ministers was voiced in the press, not the most independent-minded in the world. They expressed due disgust and loathing at the enormity of the crime, quite the worst they had ever heard of. There were no patronising charges then of these actions being the work of bizarre and quintessentially English amateur bunglers, as were made retrospectively. To put the wind up a Cabinet Minister was far worse than the routine murders, poisonings and racially inspired firebomb attacks on immigrant families the police normally dealt with, whereas mass murders such as the bombing of Dresden or Hanoi were not crimes at all but the highest patriotism. The Daily Mirror offered a reward of £10,000 to any person providing information leading to the arrest of the culprits. Would-be sleuths were assisted by the Beaverbrook Press, mindful of its old vendetta, which supplied helpful clues as to the ‘identity’ of the Scotsman concerned.

The mysterious Scot The man the police were looking for was identified in the Evening Standard of 14 January. It had all the sophistication of a Sunday Post crossword clue — ‘a young Scottish anarchist,’ experienced in explosives and who had been imprisoned in Spain. Who could they have meant? The national press took up the story with glee. The Scottish Daily Express led the tally-ho with the headline ‘Carr Bombs, Hunt for Scot.’ It could hardly have been me they meant. I was working, unmolested, twelve hours a day in Ruislip, converting gas cookers and other sundry appliances. Nor was I the only Scottish anarchist, as the Beaverbrook Press would have been quick to assure a court had I been wealthy enough to sustain a libel action. And Spain had lots of anarchist prisoners, though admittedly the Scottish ones might be a little thin on the ground — but again, what reputation did I have to lose anyway…?

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Flush The Bastards Out!

‘Nationwide police checks were being made last night to flush out a known bomb anarchist — a Scot in his early twenties whom the Special Branch have put at the top of their wanted list in connection with the double bombing of Employment Minister, Mr. Robert Carr. ‘Suspect Number 1, who has haunts in Glasgow and London, is thought to have been behind a bomb blast at the London offices of the Spanish Iberia Airlines last August and also the planting of a device — it did not explode — on an Iberia Airliner at Heathrow.’ Haunts? Did they think I was a ghost or was I merely spectral? The ‘mysterious Scot’ was dealt with at great length all week. He was the ‘mastermind’ able to ‘command private planes and unlimited private funds.’ Once the Times dreamed that one up, the others copied it. The Christie-hunting industry acquired its own dynamic. Intriguingly, while the police were searching for this mysterious Scot with his private planes and unlimited funds, the long line of Hillman Hunters, Hillman Minxes and military motorcycles disappeared from around the North Thames Gas Board base at Harrow and the surveillance on my flat in Crouch End was withdrawn. They could hardly monitor my comings and goings if they were giving out the story that I was missing. The police story was so convincing that journalists could not believe their own eyes and ears. Albert’s long hours were different from mine. Sometimes I popped in at the back door of the Sketch where he worked to see him. We would go off for a drink during his break to discuss the next issue of Black Flag, or Anarchist Black Cross matters. Through Albert I came to know several of his work colleagues at the Sketch, though I did not know any of the journalists. Maureen Tomlinson, the paper’s then political correspondent, had attended one of the chatty ‘Bomb Squad’ press briefings and had told Albert that the police were looking for me, did he know where I was? In fact, like Elvis Presley, I had just left the building. She was incredulous. The others agreed. She could hardly, as a trained journalist with an NUJ card, be expected to take the words of a few NATSOPA (the printers’ union) people over a Metropolitan Police briefing at Scotland Yard. So the Sketch, too, echoed the story. One of the Sketch’s copytakers who’d seen me passing through, took the copy about the missing Scot with just a cryptic note beneath to the subs: ‘as given.’ Of course, in deference to the law of libel no name was given to the ‘mysterious Scot.’ But the height of insolence came later that week, when a national newspaper offered a £20,000 reward for anyone who could trace the whereabouts of the Nazi mass murderer Dr. Mengele, thought to be somewhere in the Paraguayan jungle, protected by SS men and the Paraguayan police. The mysterious ‘Scot’ was put on a par with the vicious mass exterminator. On a par? To get the Scot you only had to follow up the Beaverbrook clues and look him up in the phone book. But to get Dr. Mengele you had first to get to South America, travel through infested swamps and jungles, face dangerous insects,

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animals and people — then having escaped disease and sudden death, and found the camp — overpower his well-armed bodyguards. Then, defying the Paraguayan courts, police, Army and Air Force, you had to get him safely across the world to Israel without him shouting ‘I’m a Nazi — Get me out of here.’ As I said, there were easier ways to earn £10,000. What do you do when you find the entire national press, apart from the Daily Telegraph, is screaming for your blood? Even inciting to perjury? As I said, the rich have an answer in libel laws. My only solution was to play it cool and to counter the hate campaign as best I could. It was apparent that the police and security services were being well and truly bollocked by their Cabinet Office masters who were more and more worried by the spread of what they described as ‘domestic amateur revolutionary groups and the eruption of international terrorism.’ What were things coming to if members of the government could be held personally responsible for what they did? Governments could attack people, but if people were going to retaliate by attacking Ministers, well, as the Prime Minister of the day probably said, ‘neow really.’ Honours and perhaps even promotions were shaking visibly in the breeze. As the press put it, members of the Angry Brigade were to be flushed out and prosecuted as soon as possible. I was now, effectively, Britain’s undeclared Public Enemy Number One. It was a title that was obviously going to bring me a great deal more state attention than I had received up until then. ‘Scotland Yard and security officials are becoming increasingly embarrassed and annoyed by the activities of the Angry Brigade,’ said the Times. ‘They cannot now be dismissed as a group of cranks. Some senior officers credit the group with a degree of professional skill that has seldom been experienced.’ The police were embarrassed. While the Angry Brigade could not be dismissed as a group of cranks, it did not follow that they were a group of non-cranks. Nor did it follow that the various incidents were at all related. The Trotskyist and neo-Marxist pundits began to find contradictions in the Brigade's intentionally flippant communiqués. It was typical of the police and the press to talk of ‘professional skills.’ Professional in what way? There is no way you can earn a living by frightening Cabinet Ministers. Professional dynamiters? That is to say soldiers, demolition workers or criminals? Professional agitators, perhaps! Unfortunately, no one pays for agitation except professional politicians, the security and intelligence service, PR consultancies and ‘spin’ doctors. Here again one sees the wish to believe the conspiracy theory. The police wanted to portray professional conspirators. It was the Habershon theory against the Cremer dialectics that prevailed at the time. So many investigations and so much attention and surveillance had been expended on me that it was inevitable the police had little choice but to frame me. Perhaps not under deliberate order, but some day an overzealous policeman would do so firmly believing he was only doing his duty. After all, everyone ‘on message’ understood it was necessary to bend facts a little at times to convince obdurate juries.

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Rewards And Incentives

One journalist who wanted an interview was Nicola Tyrer. She had recently been appointed educational correspondent of the Evening News and had approached Albert, who worked in the same building, saying she wanted to do a series on young people and thought I might make a good subject. Albert arranged for us to meet in a Crouch End restaurant that Thursday evening. Coincidentally, that same day, Paul Foot blew the whole Fleet Street saga about me sky-high in his Private Eye column ‘Footnotes.' He debunked the press campaign with its stories of the international police hunt for the ‘mysterious’ missing Scot. Unfortunately, by naming me, Foot’s story meant the others could also now name me. Within hours of Private Eye appearing, reporters from every national daily and Sunday paper converged on Harrow-on-the-Hill to besiege the North Thames Gas Board yard where I was based. I was out on sector at the time. The yard supervisor chased them out, but they congregated outside like hungry scavengers waiting for my return. Meanwhile, Special Branch had contacted the head office of William Press to ask that I be prevented from speaking to the press until the police had had a chance to interview me. The Private Eye story had forced their hand. I, however, had already said that I would have no further interviews with the police unless they charged me with a criminal offence. Apart from that, I was the foreman and half my crew were off work with colds. It was the middle of winter, and people needed their gas turned back on as soon as possible. All the houses in this particular sector were gas centrally heated. These gas boilers were all complicated jobs tucked away in small cupboards, and I was the only one on the van with any experience of them. Had I left the job to return to the yard at the whim of the police just then, there would be riots when people got home in the evening and found their houses without heating. They'd had long enough to see me when I was flying around in my private plane.

Let Harrow freeze My defiance fell on stony ground. The police and the Company Secretary insisted I was pulled off the job. You never know what little human dramas there are behind a plumber failing to turn up or missing buses! Harrow froze as I obeyed orders. But I still refused to wait to see the police. As a compromise I agreed to take a week’s holiday due to me and I was driven out of the yard the same way as I’d been driven in — under a blanket. That evening I met Nicola Tyrer as arranged and her first assignment as educational correspondent of the Evening News turned out to be a front-page scoop for her paper over the Evening Standard. The Evening News put out a special newsagent’s bill and crowed over its headlines ‘Christie — Bombs, I Deny It!’, while the Evening Standard was ignominiously reduced to quoting from its rival. True to her word, Nicola Tyrer printed the story of police harassment and my fear that I was being prepared for a police frame-up. The rest of the press

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stewed in their own clumsiness. The Express, while giving my retort to the collective lie, also ingeniously killed its own story with the delightful little explanation that the mysterious twenty-five year old Scottish anarchist who had served in Spanish prisons had hopped on his ‘private aircraft’ and gone to Paris where, having heard nothing to the contrary, he is no doubt even now still living on his ‘unlimited private funds.’ Among the aspirants for the £10,000 reward offered by the Daily Mirror was an American citizen by the name of Lisa Byer. Separated from her husband, she had been left with children on her hands, both from that and previous marriages. She was in arrears with her rent and short of money. In her work as a barmaid at our local pub she had heard the Press conversion workers talking about the police harassment of me, and the amount of surveillance to which I was subjected. We chatted and became friendly and, eventually, my mate Ross, who was having serious domestic problems, moved in with her. Occasionally, after work, we would all go out for a meal to a nearby Chinese restaurant. Shortly after the Carr bombing, Ross came to my van one lunch time to tell me that the police, including DI David Palmer-Hall, had been at the pub asking Lisa questions about me and that she had made a statement to DS Habershon. This came so close on the heels of the Daily Mirror reward offer that I immediately suspected what she wanted. On reflection, one could hardly blame her, the reward was so enormous for the little amount of work involved. Our occasional outings were later expanded by her into ‘numerous’ occasions, and to different restaurants throughout London. I discovered later that she had approached the police, and made a statement telling them exactly what they wanted to hear. She told them I had confessed to her that I had been involved in multiple bombings, asked her for an alibi and that she had seen the arms and ammunition I regularly carried in my car. Habershon — ‘he's a sweetie,’ she said of him — took her evidence, but as he knew it would never stand up in court so soon after the Mirror reward offer, he saved it. It was later to become the main piece of evidence against me. After the Evening News story appeared Habershon — in a bland howpreposterous-for-Mr.-Christie-to-think-otherwise statement — announced he had ‘no special interest’ in me. But the harassment was only just beginning in earnest, though not without a little wheeling and dealing. It was even suggested that if only Black Flag came out and denounced the Angry Brigade it might be possible to cross Mr. Christie off the list of possible suspects.

Barnet Brigade raid Ross On 24 January, Ross Flett and his wife, were woken at 6 o’clock in the morning by a loud banging on the door of their basement flat. In trooped a platoon of the ‘Barnet Brigade’ led by DI Palmer-Hall with a warrant to search the premises under the Explosives Act. They found it doubly suspicious when they found Phil Carver, my old flat-mate from Fairfield Gardens living there as well. Phil had received a 12-month suspended sentence in July 1969 for his part in the

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An Interview With Habershon

March 1969 attack on the Covent Garden branch of the Banco de Bilbao. A woman police officer was also in attendance, plus a golden labrador specially trained to sniff out explosives. The police occupied themselves taking and breaking the usual paraphernalia, talcum powder, felt-tip pens, a cheque book, a half-empty book of stamps, a magazine. The mere possession of a cheque book was suspicious, but why this should be so was a mystery until a bit later. The specially trained dog proved a great disappointment. Not only did he sniff out no explosives, he sniffed out nothing other than the fact that Ross’s bitch was in heat, and kept trying to mount her, to the embarrassment of the lady police officer. Finally, when they locked away the bitch, the dog sniffed its way to the hostess’s Kennomeat and wolfed the lot, then promptly fell asleep on the carpet. It is nice to know that even if the police are not always able to remain human, their four-legged colleagues can remain canine. The poor dumb animal did not try to intimidate, let alone to plant anything. Ross and Phil were taken to Barnet Police Station to be interviewed by Habershon. Apart from unintentionally leading astray a police dog in the course of duty, they had done nothing, and were accused of nothing beyond being friends of mine. The interview proved difficult for Habershon. His red mottled complexion betrayed the fact he was not a particularly patient man with high blood pressure, and one used to having his own way. In company such as Habershon’s, Ross is a slow-talking, monosyllabic, laconic Scot of the sort caricatured by P.G. Wodehouse as only ever saying ‘mphm.’ Habershon was angry because he was only able to elicit from Ross the fact that he had been to the Queen’s the previous night. But when he was asked what he was doing there, he pondered deeply and said, truthfully, ‘drinking.’ Habershon quivered with indignation. ‘Who were you talking to?’ ‘Friends,’ said Ross. ‘What friends?’ roared Habershon. Ross slowly reeled off a list of first names and at the end added ‘Stuart.’ Someone had obviously been keeking in the pub the night before. ‘Why are you afraid to say his name, you were talking to Stuart Christie,’ Habershon shouted as though he were being passed off with another and inferior Stuart. ‘You types make me fucking sick. You were talking to Christie. I can get Christie any time I want to.’ What Habershon did get was my address book. Knowing how much the Special Branch wanted to get their hands on it Ross kept it in his locked toolbox in his work van, but the police searched that as well. It took me eighteen months to get it back. Habershon crowingly described it as ‘A Glossary of International Revolutionaries,’ a description that hardly fitted Malcolm Muggeridge whose name was one of those listed. It also listed the name Giuseppe Pinelli. He might have been described as an ‘international revolutionary,’ but he was dead and out of the frame, even though the Italian police were still trying to pin the Piazza Fontana bombing on him.

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Habershon’s bogeyman: Ian Purdie

When Ross and Phil were released later that afternoon I was waiting for them outside Barnet Police Station. After the police had taken Ross and Phil, Ross’s wife, Janet, rushed to tell us the news. I immediately telephoned Birnberg who sent one of his clerks to go with me to Barnet Police Station. But when we got there Habershon refused the solicitor access to either of his clients. They had not been arrested, they were only helping with inquiries. The semi-official leaks to the press ceased and a new phase in the investigation began. Habershon backed off from me, at least publicly, and began focusing on other suspects with a similar MO — modus operandi. At least that is the story. The name he came up with — and remarkably quickly — was that of Ian Purdie, also — and conveniently — a Scot, but someone unknown to me and not listed in my address book. Ian had been released from Albany prison on the Isle of Wight the previous June after serving a nine month sentence for petrol bombing the Ulster Office in London in August 1969. In Habershon’s view, he was an ‘ideal candidate.’ Purdie’s flat in Bedford Gardens had been raided by the ‘Bomb Squad’ just three days after the Carr bombs, but he was in Edinburgh at the time — and had been there, and in Manchester, since the day of the bombing. He returned to London on 18 January and gave a voluntary statement two days later to DI Palmer Hall Coincidentally, the day Purdie gave his statement, 20 January, two uniformed policemen patrolling Notting Hill’s Talbot Road arrested a man they claimed had been walking in an unsteady manner. When they searched him back at the station they found some cannabis resin — and three stolen cheque books. The man’s name was Jake Prescott, with previous convictions for burglary and possession of a gun. Prescott was remanded in custody to Brixton Prison to await a magistrate’s hearing. He had been out of jail only four months. Like Purdie, he too had recently been paroled from Albany Prison.

Three men in a cell

The man who talked: Jake Prescott

In Brixton, Prescott was banged up first with one other prisoner, Mr ‘B’, then, two days later, a third prisoner, Mr ‘A.’ His cellmates were a couple lowlifes with whom Prescott established a rapport. Like Prescott, they were in for dishonest handling and other petty offences. Prescott proved a talkative cellmate! In the week they were together he opened up to his new friends about his changed lifestyle and the revolutionary circles in which he was now mixing. He also told his cellmates — in considerable detail — about how he had been involved with another man, whom he identified by name, and two women in the Carr bomb, as well as the earlier bombings at the Department of Employment — and the Miss World contest. He told them he had addressed the envelopes in which the communiqués had been sent. Prescott also apparently talked about me, saying I had been told to ‘get out of the way’ on a couple of occasions, presumably to establish an alibi. He also admitted never having met

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The House In Grosvenor Avenue

me. Unfortunately for Prescott — and for everyone connected with him, directly and indirectly — Mr ‘A’ was a registered police informer working for a local Brixton CID officer, DI Peck. Sensing remission and the £10,000 reward on offered from the Daily Mirror, Mr ‘A’ contacted Peck who, in turn, telephoned DCS Habershon who arranged to meet Peck’s informer at Clerkenwell Magistrates’ Court during his remand hearing on 2 February. Habershon was impressed by what Mr ‘A’ had to say and asked for Prescott’s personal belongings to be sent from Brixton to Barnet to be examined by forensic scientists. Prescott’s address book proved to be Habershon’s crock of gold, Rosetta Stone and Enigma machine rolled into one — much more so than my address book, now in Habershon’s possession, which had few, if any, compromising names and addresses in this country. The handwriting identified Prescott as having addressed the envelopes containing the Angry Brigade communiqués sent after the Carr bombing. More importantly, it provided Habershon’s team with a first circle of suspects. The following day, 3 February, Habershon withdrew police opposition to bail and Prescott was released — and placed under 24-hour surveillance. A bit hard on cabinet ministers? Not at all, he might lead the police to the real man … But Mr ‘A’ had already provided the core evidence Habershon needed to link Purdie and his friendship circle to the Angry Brigade. As with so many other urban guerrilla groups sucked into clandestinity and criminality, it was the Angry Brigade’s criminal associates and activities that provided the initial and crucial breakthrough the police needed. And it was all down to Prescott telling someone he had never seen in his life before that he had been involved in crimes that could get him anything from twenty years to life. There was also the question the £10,000 reward floating around. This was the sort of money that has been known to make horses limp, but given Jake Prescott’s subsequent statements and behaviour it was unlikely he had been ‘verballed’ by the informer, something incidentally he never alleged during his trial. Through Prisoner ‘A’s statement, Habershon knew of Prescott’s close Albany Prison connection with Ian Purdie. Who were the others in Prescott’s friendship network? Much of his time centred around the ‘commune’ at 29 Grosvenor Avenue, a large four-storied house in Highbury, Islington, squatted, by, among others, an anarchist printer called Chris Broad and his partner Charlotte Baggins. Grosvenor Avenue had been Prescott’s first port of call after his release on bail from Brixton. Ian Purdie had also lived there for a time. The Broads’ squat had developed into a commune around which a lot of young and rootless pot-smoking radicals gravitated. Chris was a nice, wellmannered guy who had been left money by his parents and who wanted to contribute something. His way of doing that was to set up a radical print shop in the basement of No 29 Grosvenor Avenue. The Broads and their friends hoped the ‘commune’ would provide an alternative model of collective behaviour. That was the theory. The place was an ideologically-driven

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Chris Broad

madhouse and as far removed from an anarchist commune or practice as was possible to get. There was no privacy, no doors on the toilets and no bannisters on the stairs. There was also a failure of care to the children who lived there that verged on the criminal. On one occasion the house teemed with unmonitored babies, unchecked toddlers and children left to their own devices. It was a strong Women’s Liberation movement base. In fact, most of the people who hung around Grosvenor Avenue irritated the shit out of me and I avoided the place wherever possible. If I did have to see Chris, who printed Black Flag for us, I would be in and out quicker than greased lightning. Prescott was one of the regular Grosvenor Avenue ‘hangers-on.’ Fortunately, he was one of the many I never met. But for Habershon, the convergence of both Prescott’s connection and mine with Grosvenor Avenue was a plus. The names in Prescott’s address book were cross-checked against mine — as were all his movements and associates.

No more Mr Nice Guy!

11 February 1971: police raid 29 Grosvenor Avenue

Habershon’s next move was to raid Grosvenor Avenue, which he did on the afternoon of 11 February, almost exactly a month after the Carr bombing. It was also the day when three of the women who lived at Grosvenor Avenue were due to appear at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court charged with the previous November’s disruption of the Miss World contest at the Albert Hall, the day the BBC Outside Broadcast van was blown up. Before raiding Grosvenor Avenue, Habershon first went to Bow Street where he interrupted the hearing and arrested four women in the precincts of the Court: Jane Grant, Sarah Wilson, Sarah Martin and Sue Bruley and had them taken to Barnet for questioning. Habershon then returned to Grosvenor Avenue where the raid was already underway. Prescott and a Dutchmen, Jan Oudenaarden — who had been observed leaving Grosvenor Avenue and arrested earlier coming out of a nearby pub — were already at Barnet Police Station. All were denied access to their solicitors. When confronted about his cavalier attitude to defendants’ rights, ie, pulling people out of court, Habershon made his famous remark: ‘I am not concerned with legal niceties’. In his deposition Habershon stated: ‘Large quantities of revolutionary leaflets and pamphlets were evidently issuing from the well-equipped printing press which occupied the front basement room. From my examination of the premises it was obvious that they were the living and business quarters of some dozen or so persons who were wholly occupied in promulgating revolutionary ideas, including that of the Claimants’ Union.’ Habershon’s interrogation of the women confirmed that both Purdie and Prescott had indeed been staying at Grosvenor Avenue. In spite of his previous criminal run-ins with the law, Prescott was no match for Habershon. According to the police statements, he was at one point close to saying ‘It’s a fair cop, guv.’ He did finally admit to addressing the three envelopes, but claimed ignorance as to their contents. The stolen cheque books

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Suspect Numero Uno

he had used, he said, the day after the Carr bombing, to buy a ticket to Wivenhoe for Anna Mendelson and three return tickets to Manchester, where he claimed he had stayed in a house in Cannock Street, in Moss Side for a couple of days. He could only remember the Christian names of the people who lived there — Jim, John, Chris and Hilary. Big help! All four deny that Jake Prescott ever stayed in Cannock Street, and Hilary Creek certainly never met him. Habershon immediately arranged for the local Drug Squad/ Special Branch to raid it on a drugs or explosives charge, whichever was easier, to discover the political sympathies of the occupants. It proved a fruitful strategy. In the house at Cannock Street there lived John Barker, Hilary Creek, Kate McLean, Chris Bott and three others. All were marked down as the sort of literate young militants who might well be involved. Nothing of direct relevance to the Carr bombing was found and nobody was charged, but address books, letters, newspapers, magazines and a typewriter, were taken away for closer scrutiny. The house and its occupants — John, Hilary, Kate and Chris — were placed under police surveillance. Habershon’s aim in all this was to establish their personal sympathies through what they read and wrote, and then examine their friendship circles through their address books, thus narrowing, or widening, the list of suspects. Ultimately it was to narrow down to the two main suspects: Purdie and me. The link between us was John Barker. So disturbed were the lawyers about Habershon’s arrogant disregard for constitutional practice that they invoked Habeas Corpus to get Prescott and the Dutchman charged or set free. Oudenaarden was released after three days. He later told the press it was ‘the most frightening experience of my life.’ Habershon felt he had enough to go on and, on 13 February, Jake Prescott was charged under the 1883 Explosive Substances Act with conspiracy to cause explosions; a charge which carried a twenty-year prison sentence.

Prescott at Barnet Police Station

The Lavender Hill Mob The raids throughout London and the provinces increased in intensity. Habershon still had a Scottish bee in his bonnet and began targeting addresses as far afield as Edinburgh. There hadn’t been such harassment of Scotsmen since the Highland Clearances. Ian Purdie, Prescott’s political mentor in Albany Prison, the man he had turned to on his release and who had introduced him into his friendship circle — and Grosvenor Avenue — was now Habershon’s suspect numero uno for the Carr bomb and a number of the other attacks as well. But there was also the question of the cheque frauds which appeared to be supporting the life style of a number of the radical ‘communards,’ as the Bomb Squad now called their target suspects. It had been Habershon’s ‘fishing trips’ among ‘these people,’ that had brought these frauds to light. Dud cheques are normally associated with the Right rather than the Left, but because stolen cheque books were turning up in the homes of so many of the main suspects,

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Cannock Street suspect: Kate McLean

Cannock Street suspect: Chris Bott

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6 March 1971: arrest of Ian Purdie

Habershon, the former Fraud Squad officer, was convinced that if he could crack the cheque-kiting operation he could break the Angry Brigade, which it appeared to be financing. As far as he was concerned, the key to the case was the cheque-fraud and the Special Branch were relegated to the role of collating information on leads and suspects. It was now a parallel investigation. Prescott had already been arrested on cheque charges, and Purdie was a strong suspect with regard to both the cheques and the bombings. But there was one puzzling gap for the police in the conspiracy chain — me! Where did I fit in? I was clearly not involved in any cheque-kiting, was holding down a responsible job, working long hours from early morning until late at night, didn’t live in a commune and didn’t smoke dope. And, although Purdie was both Scottish and an anarchist, we moved in different albeit concentric circles. The link between us was John. The idea that lay behind every Angry Brigade action was that politicians and business leaders were personally responsible for their actions. Gone were the days when a Tory absentee landlord could write defiantly to his Irish tenants that they little knew his mettle if they thought to intimidate him by shooting his bailiff. What concerned the establishment about the Angry Brigade was the fact that they pursued somewhat less circuitous tactics of intimidation. The press and the governors of the nation upped the pressure on the police to ‘find the leaders.’ But there were no leaders to find. The Angry Brigade was an ad hoc affinity group of likeminded individuals without a leadership structure, and where hierarchy had been replaced by trust, albeit a misplaced trust as it turned out in the case of Prescott. He was the only participant in what was a relatively large circle of people to talk either then or subsequently. The Angry Brigade’s loose-knit structure was altogether too nebulous for the liking of the authorities, who reasoned that on such an organisational basis, it would be difficult to find enough proof to make any charges stick — if indeed they ever caught anyone. The only way they could get convictions was by formulating a conspiracy and catching someone around whom they could build a scaffold of ‘likely candidates.’ But for Habershon and his team I was still firmly in the frame, even though they had no evidence. In the police theory, the Angry Brigade was a British section of the First of May Group — and I was the facilitator. The conspiracy they had constructed began even before my return to Britain in 1967, before most of their other suspects had left school or university. At last on 6 March Habershon arrested Ian Purdie at a house in Lavender Hill, South London. Could Ian, had he been guilty, have resisted using the name ‘Lavender Hill Mob’ in place of ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ or, if he had lived further south, ‘The Tooting Popular Front’? Well, perhaps so. In justification for the raid and Ian’s arrest, Habershon said later, ‘it was to find Ian Purdie and explosives. They are synonymous as far as I am concerned.’ He was prone to quotable remarks like that. At any rate he found plenty of Ian Purdie, but nothing whatever of explosives. However, as they were synonymous, Habershon was obviously on the right track!

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In Which Edward Heath Declares Class War

Chapter 7 — 1971 (Winter-Spring) ON 19 FEBRUARY 1971, less than a week after Jake Prescott was charged with conspiracy, the Times published communiqué 6 which they had received through the post from the Angry Brigade. It was probably the Angry Brigade’s most important statement defining its ultimate objectives as revolutionary rather than merely political: Fellow Revolutionaries… We have sat quietly and suffered the violence of the system for too long. We are being attacked daily. Violence does not exist only in the army, the police and the prisons; it exists in the shoddy alienating culture pushed out on TV, films and magazines — it exists in the ugly sterility of urban life. It exists in the daily exploitation of our labour ... The system will never collapse or capitulate by itself. More and more workers now realise this and are transforming union consciousness into offensive political militancy ... Our role is to deepen the political contradictions at every level. We will not achieve this by concentrating on “issues” or by using watered-down socialist platitudes.... Our attack is violent — our attack is organised. The question is not whether the revolution will be violent. Organised militant struggle and organised terrorism go side by side. These are the tactics of the revolutionary class movement.... until the revolutionary working class overthrows the capitalist system.’ No-one with a traditional anarchist background would have expressed these ideas in quite this way, but the writers were clearly libertarian socialist. (The defining thing about the politics of the Angry Brigade was a scrupulous avoidance of all sectarian and institutional labels — anarchist, Marxist, and particularly Situationist.) And clearly The Angry Brigade, like the First of May Group, was moving from the political to the revolutionary, from simple antifascist solidarity to class-war solidarity, and therefore to confronting the state. The idea behind every Angry Brigade action was that politicians, industrialists and financiers were personally responsible for their actions. The Angry Brigade attacks were not intended to kill or injure people. The picture of the bombings has become distorted by the way similar devices were used with very different objectives by the Irish, Basque and Islamic jihadist groups in subsequent years. When the Irish campaign moved to mainland Britain not long after this, it struck blindly at ‘the enemy’, conducting an irregular version of ‘total war’— a strategy only different in scale from that of Al Quaida in targeting New York’s Twin Towers using civilian aeroplanes. The Irish nationalists and Jihad warriors failed to see that their cause would have been much better served by targeting not the ‘innocent’, but that term’s implied correlative, the ‘guilty.’ The Angry Brigade and those who acted in its name tried to pinpoint the ‘guilty’ very clearly, and limited their actions to them, without taking life (although clearly not without the implication that they could if they decided to). Nor was the purpose to negotiate for specific political ends, bypass the democratic process, or even launch an urban guerrilla campaign in the hope it would lead to an insurrection. The constituency or community needed for a successful urban guerrilla campaign simply didn’t exist, and certainly couldn’t

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Middle-class warrior

be created artificially. The Angry Brigade’s actions were intended purely to complement the social struggle of the time by dramatically articulating the anger felt by many at the injustices of the system, the chicanery of politicians, and the people’s apparent powerlessness in the face of so many assaults on their standards of living, their dignity and sense of fairness. By articulating this anger, they believed that other voices would join theirs. Prime Minister Edward Heath was far from being the patrician old school Tory leader he appeared to be. Heath and his Cabinet were fully aware that the widespread deterioration in living conditions and the resulting industrial and social confrontations were going to get significantly worse. Despite this, he persisted in upping the ante in his battles to break organised labour.

Heath’s ‘Committee on the Present Danger’ In February 1971 Heath set up a special committee to coordinate police and troops in the event of a general strike, a regional insurrection — or a revolution. The members of this committee included Sir Robert Mark, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (and Commissioner in waiting) and other senior Home Office, Ministry of Defence, intelligence and security agency officials. Another important indicator of the time was the publication that year of Brigadier Frank Kitson’s book on how the ruling elite could keep the lid on civil unrest: Low intensity operations: subversion, insurgency, peacekeeping. The book covered every aspect of repression with the notable exception of the gory details of interrogation and ‘wetwork’ (the torture and disposal of captives). The Heath government, in addition to its anti-working class legislation, had just posted unemployment figures of 814,819, the highest since May 1940. Discontented people up and down the land were responding to the Angry Brigade’s offensive by attacking Tory Party, government and Army Recruitment offices and following up with communiqués, letters and telephone calls. According to one newspaper report, in January 1971 alone there had been 30 unpublicised attacks on Establishment properties, banks, various Conservative Party offices — and the home of Conservative MP Duncan Sandys. These were obviously not coming from one group. In fact, even the idea of a ‘group’ — let alone the idea of a leader — was becoming hazy. People were acting spontaneously, from similar sets of ideas. This drove the police into a confused frenzy — they were trying to find an organisation that increasingly appeared not to exist, but because they lacked any other understanding about how society might work, they were force to continue searching for a traditional organization, with a leader, a membership and fixed plans. And in the end they had to make one. Habershon’s excesses were bringing down on him a lot of hostile press comment, particularly in The Guardian. He later admitted extreme annoyance at the attacks on his integrity in the liberal and left-wing press. Criticism of his apparent lack of results must also have hurt him. There is nothing worse than

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I’ve got a little list — I’ve got a little list...

being a failed zealot — except, perhaps, a successful one. Even though there was little if any evidence against Purdie other than that of association, Habershon hated Purdie, who had become his personal bogeyman. Unlike Prescott, Purdie gave nothing away during interrogation. Totally unco-operative throughout the questioning his replies ranged from: ‘No comment,’ to ‘Work it out for yourself,’ ‘When are you going to charge me instead of giving me all this shit.’ ‘Haven’t you heard of Judge’s Rules?’

Habershon’s dirty dozen Purdie’s arrest was a striking victory in the internecine point-scoring games between Habershon’s CID and Ferguson Smith’s Special Branch — which had placed its money, or rather, large amounts of the taxpayers’ money, on Christie. If it led to a conviction, it would completely justify his Fraud Squad approach. Habershon showed that he meant business. ‘I am going to get twelve,’ he told the people he raided, with Prescott cast as ‘fall guy number two.’ Both Prescott and Purdie were remanded in custody in Brixton as ‘category A’ prisoners to await committal proceedings at Barnet Magistrates’ Court. Humiliatingly for Habershon, a week after Purdie’s arrest there was a major explosion at the main offices of the Ford Motor Company at Gants Hill, Ilford, Essex. Again, no one was hurt. The explosion, which occurred during a major strike at the Ford works, was accompanied by a thousand-word communiqué commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Paris Commune: ‘… Our Revolution is autonomous rank-and-file action — we create it ourselves. We have confidence now ... we don't have to wait for them to dangle something tempting like a [Enoch] Powell, a Bill, or a bad apple in front of our faces, before we jump like rabbits. We don't clutch desperately at the illusion of Freedom. Our strategy is clear: How can we smash the system? How can the people take power? ‘... We must attack, we cannot delegate our desire to take the offensive, Sabotage is reality, getting out of the factory is not the only way to strike ... stay in and take over. We are against any external structure, whether it is called Carr, Jackson [Tom], IS [International Socialists], CP [Communist Party]or SLL [Socialist Labour League]is irrelevant — they are all one and the same …’ Communiqué 7, The Angry Brigade

Powis Square — where art and life met The Ford bombing sparked more raids on Purdie's friends and associates, and other known anarchists. During the course of one of these raids on John and Hilary’s basement flat at 25 Powis Square, the ubiquitous DS Cremer found, not indeed explosives, but a heavily annotated book on Situationism — all in the handwriting of John Barker. Cremer felt an intuitive thrill. The author of the notes, he was sure, was responsible for drafting the Angry Brigade communiqués. Marginal jottings in a book was hardly evidence, but it was

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Ko-Ko’s Song (Chorus) ‘He’s got ‘em on the list — he’s got ‘em on the list; And they’ll none of ‘em be missed — they’ll none of ‘em be missed.” Sir W S Gilbert

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Sergeant Cremer: the yard’s eclectic dialectician

another link in the chain. (Incidentally, 25 Powis Square was used as the external location for Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s cult film Perfomance, with Mick Jagger as the shaggy-haired drug addled rock star Turner Purple. The film was not released until 1971. It was probably one of the few times when the rock ‘n’ roll 1960s/70s impinged on the radical movement of the time.) John Barker’s circle afforded a chance to synthesise the two rival theories as to the provenance of the milieu known as the Angry Brigade. They were young and in revolt against what they called ‘the work ethic’ and bourgeois convention. They lived in communes and slept until the afternoon. They embodied everything that was repellent to anally retentive detectives who were more used to dealing with security van robbers and crooked bowler-hatted businessmen. Now the investigators found themselves in the parallel universe of the ‘alternative’ culture. Yet, these young people were no political dropouts. They were active in the squatting and claimants' movement, though they were outside the institutional trades union movement, through the lack of employment as well as desire. But it was the stolen chequebooks found in the flats of some of Habershon’s suspects that excited most curiosity. What were these leftists doing mixed up in that sort of thing? The raids became more frequent as the ripples spread and more addresses became known. Habershon’s investigation received an unexpected bonus when the French magazine, Politique Hebdo, published an article ostensibly from its London correspondent ‘Guy McCoy,’ who was in reality a London-based Frenchman called Marcel Bonnans. The seemingly informed story claimed that Carr’s house had been bombed by a Scot who had served time in a Spanish prison. Other commentators bandied around stories that Robert Carr had been the object of attack by Arab nationalists, the British Secret Intelligence Service, the CIA, the IRA or the trade unions, while union leader Richard Briginshaw even went as far as to accuse the minister of blowing up his own home. But there was presumably something else in Bonnan’s mind. What this was became clear on 16 February 1971. The International Marxist Group, the Trotskyist faction which was most student-oriented and most infatuated with the Communist Party line of the nineteen-twenties (especially in Germany), confrontation on the streets, printed, in its paper Red Mole, a similar statement. It was addressed to ‘All members of the Angry Brigade’ and suggested that they, the International Marxist Group, were privy to information that the ‘members’ of the Brigade did not possess. ‘The man known to you as Duncan is a pig. The man who went to Manchester before 12 January is a pig. Ask yourselves, are you being used by the pigs?’ For the uninitiated, the pigs were the police, who — aside from the uncomplimentary reference — must have been highly flattered at being accused of running the Angry Brigade at a time when they were sweating their balls off on overtime to find them.

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The man referred to as ‘Duncan’ was an anarchist active in the squatting movement, who to the best of my knowledge had no connection with the Angry Brigade and who never appears in the picture again. ‘The man who went to Manchester’ (for a Claimants’ Union conference) was Ian Purdie. Unsurprisingly, the increased police pressure and hostile media attention led to much of hippiedom and the political left openly condemning the Angry Brigade. For the ‘alternative press’ hippies the raids meant arrests for possession and losing — or having to flush away — their drug stashes. As for the Trotskyists and the other 57 cliques of Marxist-Leninists, power might grow out of the barrel of a gun in Vietnam and Bolivia — but not in Barnet. What they hailed as heroic urban guerrilla action in Peru or Uruguay was counter-revolutionary bourgeois adventurism in Tooting. Their reasoning was simple. They could take ideological credit for their faction for anything that happened far enough away in space or time. But direct actions on their doorstep were too near for comfort. They either had to admit that they didn’t lead the movement, that events were taking place with which they couldn’t catch up or keep quiet, which is an almost impossible situation for any aspiring political leaders — or alternatively, denounce. So denounce they did. The pressure also had the effect of frightening off others on the periphery of the Brigade activists. One of these, the son of a fairly prominent couple, disappeared from view so suddenly — and just before the final arrests — that we can only infer that he had been advised, either by his father or mother, that his links with key Angry Brigade suspects were known, and that he should leave the country immediately to avoid arrest. Meanwhile, the police were trying to prolong the case against Ian and Jake in order to get the other ten Habershon had been promising. Defence barristers wanted evidence of arrest to be produced, and were told it couldn’t be done without permission of the Attorney General. Bail of ten thousand pounds was put together, no mean feat, but refused by the Barnet Magistrate. Jake’s defence lawyer, Arnold Rosen said ‘Words fail me to describe the outrageous use of police power.’ The case against Prescott and Purdie was postponed and postponed, against the furious protest of human rights lawyers, until, at last, on 22 April, it was impossible for the police to procrastinate any longer. The evidence presented at the six-week committal proceedings was extremely flimsy — non-existent in Purdie’s case — but eventually the two were committed for trial at the Old Bailey. Among the ten other suspects Habershon had in the frame for the Angry Brigade were Jim Greenfield and Anna Mendelson. Their names, along with those of John Barker, Hilary Creek and Chris Bott had risen to the top of his list during the Prescott interrogation. Bott, who grew up in Sutton Coldfield in the Midlands, went to Essex in 1968-69 as a graduate student from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. He had been doing an MA course in Latin American government but failed his

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exams and left at the end of the one-year course. Habershon decided to increase the pressure and ordered a second raid on the house in Cannock Street in Manchester, where they arrested Chris Bott, and brought him to London where he was charged with fraud. Bott was remanded in custody to Brixton Prison, then released on bail soon after. As with Prescott after his admissions to Mr. ‘A’ and Mr. ‘B’, the police wanted to see where Bott would lead them.

Fingerprints and footprints

1 May, 1971: a small bomb explodes in Barbara Hulanicki’s trendy Biba boutique. It is accompanied by Angry Brigade Communiqué 8 attacking consumer capitalism and the employment conditions of the sales girls and the seamstresses

John Barker and Hilary Creek had been arrested during the first raid on Cannock Street and charged with receiving stolen property. Fingerprints and footprints were take from John and Hilary, and when the latter refused to sign a prepared ‘confession,’ she was beaten black and blue. Police opposition to bail — they wanted to question the two ‘in relation to other matters’ — was dropped when Hilary threatened to remove her shirt to show the Magistrates her bruises. The case against them was thrown out three weeks later due to lack of evidence. The ‘confession,’ written by a Manchester CID officer, acquired importance later when prosecution handwriting ‘experts’ used it as a sample of her handwriting, which discredited them from the start. Jim and Anna weren’t in the house in Manchester when the police called and as a result their details and descriptions were circulated in the Police Gazette. Unfortunately, as this was not on Jim or Anna’s must-read list they were unaware that they had been identified as suspects. By now Habershon had collated a fair amount of information. He had just about everything he needed except the final key that would give him a case he could take to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). Habershon’s methods had provided him with what he believed was a reasonable picture as to how this particular friendship network functioned. As a bonus, he had picked up interesting leads on a series of cheque frauds. Nevertheless, he still had no hard evidence that would convict any of his suspects of being members of the Angry Brigade. By this time Habershon had become a magnet of ridicule in the left papers, criticised in the liberal ones, and snubbed by the snobbish Security Service (MI5), who apparently listened to no one under the rank of Assistant Commissioner and who had no interest in the information he had acquired.

Biba bombed On 1 May 1971 another bomb went off. This time it was in the trendy Biba boutique in Kensington. This and the Miss World bombing were perhaps the only two truly Situationist or anti-alienation type bombings carried out by the Angry Brigade. Biba had a long tradition of exploitation of their young shop assistants, who were paid miserable wages, as were their cutters, but the Angry Brigade intended it also as an

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attack on trendy consumer capitalism: ‘In fashion as in everything else, Capitalism can only go backwards — they’re dead. The future is ours ... The only thing you can do with modern slave houses called boutiques is wreck them. You can’t reform capitalism and inhumanity. Just kick it till it breaks.’ Communiqué 8, The Angry Brigade On 4 May, shortly after the Biba bombing another bomb was found attached to the chassis of a car belonging to Lady Beaverbrook, but it was never attributed to the Angry Brigade, either by themselves or by the police. Perhaps whoever did it thought Lord Beaverbrook was still alive, or that his son had taken over the title. The Beaverbrook barony hadn’t been taken up, though the former press lord’s son, Sir Max Aitkin, was running the Beaverbrook Press. Everyone wondered what Lady Beaverbrook had to do with the establishment. I think her little shock was due to someone’s lack of familiarity with court circulars. The only people who really had cause to object to the lady in question were a series of discarded mistresses of her late husband.

Tintagel House‚ ‘We’re getting closer!’ Two weeks later, on 22 May, the Press Association received a telephone call: ‘This is the Angry Brigade. We’ve just done the police computer. We’re getting closer.’ The computer in question was the police computer at Tintagel House on the South Bank of the Thames, a device whose full potential and importance were just beginning to be realised. The explanation for the attack came in a slightly more surreal Communiqué 9: ‘We are getting closer. We are slowly destroying the long tentacles of the oppressive State machine… secret files in the universities, work study in the factories, the census at home, social security files, computers, TV, Giro, passports, work permits, insurance cards. Bureaucracy and technology used against the people... to slow up our work.. to slow down our minds and action ... to obliterate the truth. Police computers cannot tell the truth. They just record our “crimes”. The pig murders go unrecorded. Stephen McCarthy, Peter Savva, David Oluwale. The murder of these brothers is not recorded on any card. We will avenge our brothers. If they murder another brother or sister, pig blood will flow in the streets. 168 explosions last year, hundreds of threatening phone calls to government, bosses, leaders. ‘The Angry Brigade is the man or woman sitting next to you. They have guns in their pockets and hatred in their minds. We are getting closer. Off the system and its property. Power to the people.’ Communiqué 9, The Angry Brigade That same May night there were simultaneous explosions in Paris at British Rail HQ and the showrooms of two prestigious British car firms — Rolls Royce and Rover. The Paris bombings were accompanied by a communiqué in the form of an open letter to Prime Minister Heath, then visiting Paris to develop and consolidate Britain’s role in the Common Market. The communiqué also protested against the arrests of Ian Purdie and Jake Prescott and was collectively signed by the Angry Brigade, Group Commune 71, Groupe Marius

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22 May 1971: Angry Brigade bomb Scotland Yard Computer room at Tintagel House

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

22 May 1971: Angry Brigade/First of May Group attack British Rail and RollsRoyce offices in Paris

23 June 1971: Commander X — Ernest Radcliffe Bond — is officially appointed head of the ‘Bomb Squad’

Jacob and the International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement — the latter being the umbrella name for the European anarchist action groups, including the First of May Group. Tintagel House was not only the location of the Scotland Yard computer, it was also the new home base of the recently formed — and still secret — ‘Bomb Squad.’ Tory Home Secretary Reginald Maudling had ordered Sir John Waldron, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, to put an end to the Angry Brigade — Public Enemy No 1 — once and for all. He also insisted that he be kept in touch with the investigation through day and night reports. After the bombing of his own house and that of Peter Rawlinson, Sir John had ordered an immediate increase in the ‘Bomb Squad’ to 30 officers, relocated it from Barnet to Tintagel House, and given it a new permanent Commander to ensure it had the necessary precedence and clout. The name of this Commander was to be kept secret; he was to be referred to as ‘Commander X.’ Commander X’s identity wasn’t much of a secret. I learned his name through journalist sources within days of his appointment. The mysterious Commander was Ernest Radcliffe Bond who, although officially appointed to head the investigation on 23 June 1971, had been involved in the case for some time — since 8 September the previous year in fact, after the bombing of Waldron’s house. He had also been present during the interrogation of Jake Prescott in Barnet in February. But the Metropolitan Police needed some good press and this was one way of regaining the PR initiative. In fact, the real reason for Bond’s identity being kept secret was to avoid the embarrassment of his home being bombed, like that of the Police Commissioner and the Attorney General. I was then 25-years-old. Ernest Radcliffe Bond, a 52-year old Cumbrian from Barrow-in-Furness, had been in the Metropolitan Police for my entire lifetime. Mind-numbing thought. He had joined the Met in 1946, the year I was born, after an ill-starred army career — four years of which were spent behind bars. Bond signed up for the Scots Guards in 1935 and was sent to Palestine to suppress the Arab Revolt against the wave of Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe. In 1940 he had taken part in the ill-judged

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Allied landings in Norway. These had been intended to forestall a German invasion, but, as Burns said, the best laid schemes of mice and men ‘gang aft agley,’ and in the event our man helped precipitate the fall of Norway to the Nazis. Surely another problem for his conscience. On his return to the UK — still searching for excitement — Bond joined No 8 (Guards) Commando, part of the Layforce brigade of special service units sent to the Middle East in 1941 under the command of then Colonel Robert Laycock. When this unit disbanded, Sergeant Bond, as he now was, rejoined the 2nd Scots Guards with the Eighth Army and was recruited by Colonel David Stirling into ‘L Detachment’ of his recently-formed Special Air Service Regiment (SAS). (Stirling, his old pal, incidentally was an important but shadowy operator in the mercenary and parallel security world in the 1960s. In the mid-1970s, he was to become a key player in various international and domestic right-wing intrigues, including a plot to overthrow British democracy — GB75.) In November 1941 Bond underwent a course in applied terrorism — at least this is how Hitler’s legal system described SAS and Commando activities — and was sent to blow up Rommel’s North African airfields at Gazala and Tmimi. Unfortunately, Bond’s plane crash-landed in the desert where he, the only survivor, was captured and spent the remaining four years of the war in prison. Like many ex-soldiers, including his notorious regimental and police colleague (from West End Central police station), and friend, Detective Sergeant Harold ‘Tanky’ Challenor — who, in 1963, was to plant a brick in the pocket of anarchist cartoonist Donald Rooum during a demonstration in London against the King and Queen of Greece — Bond joined the Met, and the freemasons, to which he dedicated his life. He was one of those who firmly believed freemasonry was the best hope of bringing enlightenment to a stygian world. After a two-year spell on the beat in Southwark and Peckham, Bond made Detective Constable at Kings Cross and in 1955 was promoted to Detective Sergeant, attached first to the Fraud Squad, and then to the notoriously corrupt Flying Squad whose grip on organised crime in London was legend. By 1963 he had been promoted to Detective Inspector on the Murder Squad, and from then on his rise through the ranks had been, unlike that of Arturo Ui, irresistible. He was appointed Commander in 1969.

23 June, 1971: Daily Telegraph

Changing targets As the Angry Brigade’s attacks moved away from targeting the repressive symbols of the state and Franco’s embassy to industrial targets in dispute, its social revolutionary stance became clearer. Its actions spoke more precisely than any communiqué. Throughout that summer, the management at Ford’s Halewood plant in Liverpool had been victimising John Dillon, one of the more militant shop stewards, for his activities. On 22 July the Essex home of its uncompromising and hardline anti-trade union managing director, William Batty, was bombed — as was one of the transformers at the firm’s Dagenham plant. The explosion

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22 June 1971: the same night as the attack on the home of Ford’s managing director, William Batty a bomb damaged a transformer at Ford’s Dagenham plant

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

23 June, 1971: The Guardian

23 June, 1971: The Times

‘Raging Reggie’ Maudling: Heath’s home secretary who was forced to resign in July 1972 because of his connections with the corrupt businessman John Poulson

at Batty’s home blew out the French windows of his study at 2 am, while he and his wife were asleep in the bedroom upstairs. Both were unharmed. Prime Minister Heath, Home Secretary Maudling, the Cabinet and the press were outraged. One could truly say they went batty! ‘The police have been ordered to treat the Angry Brigade as Public Enemy Number One,’ stated The Sunday Telegraph. Following a meeting between Prime Minister Heath and Home Secretary Reginald Maudling — the MP for Barnet — it was stated that ‘The Angry Brigade must be found and smashed.’ Increasingly, the literary style of the newspapers and police were converging with that of the Angry Brigade communiqués,. What they perhaps had in mind when they said this was that they had already been assured by Habershon and Bond that the ringleaders of the Angry Brigade had been found, and even at that moment were languishing in a top security jail awaiting trial. Where then was the ‘ring’ they were presumed to be ‘leading’? My friend and informant, Peter Gladstone Smith, the Sunday Telegraph’s well-connected crime correspondent wrote: ‘Yard Will Get Angry Brigade.’ Given world enough, and time and resources, a safe prophecy. ‘A special team of twenty hand-picked detectives from the Flying Squad and the Special Branch, working with army bomb disposal experts and Home Office Scientists were to be engaged in the task. ‘Their leader, a Commander, whose name is being kept secret for his own safety, is known to be rough and ready. The squad is taking a tough line. It will raid hippie communes, question avowed members of the ‘underground’, and build up a complete file on the subculture that threatens the social order.’ This was a new development within British police practice. It had nothing to do with the Angry Brigade. Nobody had established what exactly this ‘underground’ was, referring to it as if it were criminal. What was an ‘avowed member’ — someone with long hair and embroidered flared denims who smoked pot? Following the classic political police tactic, they were not seeking the persons who had committed the alleged offences. They were attacking something that politicians and civil servants had decided ‘threatened’ the social order. Had the Home Secretary been a left-wing socialist and as authoritarian as Reginald Maudling, and had there been a fascist campaign against immigrants resulting in arson, beatings and death, there would have been a storm of indignation from the press quite equal to that aroused by attacks upon wealthy businessmen, society ladies, military organisations, and so on. In fact, there had been such a fascist campaign that extended through the Conservative period to the rule of a Labour Home Secretary. But, fortunately for the fascists, he was, although an authoritarian, a man of the centre rather than of the left, who appreciated the appropriateness of different treatments for those who attacked the poor and powerless — and those who attacked the rich and powerful.

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Order-Of-Magnitude Distinctions

The Angry Brigade attacks on property targets were a visible but small part of the confrontation between the government and the people that was taking place all over the country. The actions were denounced by the leaders of every party and every public pundit, but the mass of the working class who were most hard hit by the government’s oppressive legislation felt very differently. In fact, the ‘public’ — at least the working class — and the Angry Brigade were on the same side, a proposition confirmed by the next bombing. In July 1971, John Davies MP, Edward Heath’s Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, announced the closure of the Clydebank and Scotstoun yards of the heavily state-subsidised Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, and the mass layoff of almost nine thousand workers. A third shipyard in the UCS consortium was to be operated with a greatly reduced workforce that was being forced to take a reduction in pay and benefits. This was a deliberately provocative move by the Heath government to attack the union movement. Despite close police protection on all of Heath’s Cabinet Ministers, the door of Davies’s Putney flat was damaged by a bomb blast on 31 July and reported extensively in the national press. This attack was accompanied by Angry Brigade communiqué 11. The following day, 1 August 1971, the workers of Upper Clyde Shipyards began a protest occupation of the yards that was to last almost two months. I was in Glasgow at the time, having gone up to visit my mum and my dad who were now reunited, after the unexpected reappearance of the latter after 20 years. Mum had written to him asking for a divorce and he turned up on the door one day in Blantyre suggesting that they ‘Mak a kirk or a mill o’ things,’ meaning should they give the marriage another go. Mum thought, why not? and that was that. Dad had been living with another woman in Aberdeen for some time, but that relationship had ended for some reason. I never asked him why. Personally, I think he had come home to die as it was around this time he was diagnosed with cancer of the bowel, but he didn’t tell anyone about his condition until closer to the end. The atmosphere in the Glasgow shipyards was loaded. Trade union and Stalinist Communist Party spokesmen who had publicly denounced the Angry Brigade’s ‘irresponsible’ act during their negotiations were howled down when brought face to face with the shipyard workers. They had opposed any attempt to link the struggle to defend jobs with the fight to bring down the Tory government, even going as far as to instruct the workers not to display anti-Tory placards. Davies — surrounded by his armed bodyguard — received what by no stretch of the imagination could be described as sympathy for his ordeal. After that, the so-called ‘socialist’ orators toned down their sycophantic apologies. After all, nobody would blame them. By the end of September, the Tories set up a new company to take over what remained of the bankrupt shipyard. The ‘pragmatic’ Upper Clydeside

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31 July 1971: Angry Brigade attack the home of John Davies, the man responsible for closing the Clydebank shipyards

Dad (on board the Scotia), 1970

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

union leaders finally accepted a deal which saddled the Glasgow workers with a four-year no-strike agreement that led to the loss of thousands of jobs — and not one concession. The trial of Purdie and Prescott could no longer be delayed. It was finally set for 7 September and someone had to be in there with them. Results were needed fast. The offices and supporters of the Prescott/ Purdie Defence Group were raided regularly. So, when Commander Bond publicly took over the investigation on 23 June 1971, this is how things stood: Prescott and Purdie, in custody awaiting trial, Chris Bott, on bail, Christie, publicly if not legally cleared by the backfiring of the police’s ‘whispering’ media campaign. A long way off Habershon’s ‘twelve.’ On the other hand, Bond was holding a ‘statement’ given by one Miss Byers, a barmaid, and the bullet discovered in my flat two years previously. He also had the names of John Barker, Hilary Creek, Jim Greenfield, and Anna Mendelson. Where they were and how they fitted in the police did not know.

The noose tightens

Guy Debord

I had been in regular but discreet contact with John Barker since the Freedom Press meeting the previous year, keeping him and the others in touch with the work of the Anarchist Black Cross and the literature we were producing. The ongoing harassment from the Manchester police had persuaded them to move back to London, to a flat in Stamford Hill. By now the police knew where I was living in Fonthill Road and the constant police surveillance and the daily expectation of a raid or possible arrest were also having an effect both on Brenda and on me. We decided to move to somewhere we couldn’t easily be found. Our upstairs neighbours and friends, Val and Pete, had moved recently to a small cottage in Drift, outside Penzance, on the road to Lands End. We rented a cottage nearby and Brenda moved down, with the two cats and all their offspring, in a journey enlivened by Brimstone’s deciding to have another litter halfway. My intention was to move to Cornwall permanently as soon as the gas conversion contract opened up in the West Country. In the meantime, I moved, with Ross, into a room in a flat in Nightingale Lane, Hornsey. The lease on this flat was held by an Irish mate and his girl friend. John Barker was an occasional visitor to my Nightingale Lane flat. On one occasion he came to borrow a drill, and to let me know they were moving from Stamford Hill to Amhurst Road in Stoke Newington. He was also going to France for a short break and wanted to contact Guy Debord, the French Situationist, with a view to translating some of his work into English. I gave him some addresses in Paris where he might make contact through mutual friends, and told him to let me know how he got on when he returned. Not that I was particularly interested in Debord who certainly had some insightful cultural and analytical ideas, but the man was a total arsehole in

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Amhurst Road, Stoke Newington

his everyday relationships, like Karl Marx, and I am more comfortable with those people who show some degree of proportionality between their thoughts and actions. In Paris, John and Hilary made contact with a friend of mine, ‘Alexis’, who was interested in producing a French version of the paper Strike! which John and the others were involved in setting up at the time. They also discussed setting up a French Claimants’ Union and an international news agency to facilitate the transfer of news and ideas of local groups and tenants’ organisations. ‘Alexis’ told John that because of police interest I should be referred to in all correspondence and communications as ‘Edy,’ and not by my real name. Throughout this period I was rushing around like a demented man on Benzedrine. I had been made foreman on a new North Sea gas conversion contract and was travelling a hundred miles a day driving backwards and forwards between Hornsey and Letchworth. There was frantic activity on the Anarchist Black Cross front as well. In Italy the truth was emerging as to the true authors of the 25 April, the August train and Piazza Fontana bombings, for which Pinelli had paid with his life. The Treviso Examining Magistrate had issued arrest warrants for three Venetian neo-fascists: Giovanni Ventura, Franco Freda and Aldo Trinco, and the six anarchists charged with these offences had finally been released. In Spain the Francoist repression worsened following bomb attacks by a Catalan anarchist group on Barcelona’s Palace of Justice, the headquarters of the Falangist Party and a Capuchin monastery. In Germany, the Anarchist Black Cross activists Thomas Weissbecker and Georg von Rauch had been arrested for assaulting a Springer press journalist, but both managed to escape and go underground. I was also doing my best, with Albert, to bring out Black Flag once a month. My weekends were spent driving down on a Friday night to see Brenda in Cornwall, working all hours on the house there, and then driving back again for work in Letchworth by 8 am on Monday morning. I didn’t see John again until 28 July, when I returned from Cornwall and took him, among other publications, Miguel García García’s Looking Back After Twenty Years in Jail, and Miguel and Luis Portillo’s account of Unamuno’s Last Lecture. (Luis was the father of Michael Portillo, the Conservative MP and Maggie Thatcher’s protégé.) I did not stay long at Amhurst Road. We went to our usual rendezvous in a pub in Stoke Newington High Street where John told me he had heard on the grapevine that some people had been considering a kidnapping in the name of the Angry Brigade should Prescott and Purdie be convicted. John did not take the kidnapping idea too seriously. He mentioned that Hilary was in Paris for a few days. and he was going to France on the morning of 19 August — together with a woman from the Angry Brigade. Both John and the other woman returned late that night, as did Hilary —

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3 July 1971: John, Hilary, Jim and Anna move to 359 Amhurst Road, Stoke Newington

Thomas Weissbecker

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

11 August 1971: Northern Ireland government introduces internment without trial of suspected IRA members and members of People’s Democracy .

15 August, 1971: Angry Brigade bomb army recruiting centre in Holloway Road

separately. On 11 August, the Northern Ireland government introduced internment without trial in the Six Counties and arrested 450 suspected republicans and members of the socialist People’s Democracy group. The government’s action provoked an immediate outcry and protest demonstrations throughout the UK. The response of the Angry Brigade came four days later when it bombed the Army Recruiting office in London’s Holloway Road. It was followed by a communiqué signed ‘Angry Brigade, Moonlighter’s Cell.’ Meanwhile, on Wednesday 18 August, the Bomb Squad received information from someone that Anna and Jim were living at 359 Amhurst Road, and that other Angry Brigade suspects were probably there as well. Jim and Anna’s photographs had been published in the Police Gazette as being wanted, ostensibly for questioning in relation to the cheque fraud. Jim was now their major suspect for the Angry Brigade. I had been round earlier in the week to warn them of the Police Gazette development — which I had been told about by a source — but there wasn’t anything they could do about this in the short term. It’s all very well saying ‘Flee, all is discovered!’ — but where to? It is strange, however, that no watch was placed on Amhurst Road until the Friday morning of 20 August — two days after the police had received information that at least two of their major suspects were living there.

Figures in a McCrumb landscape John, Hilary, Jim and Anna had known for some time that they were the principal focus of the Angry Brigade investigation, hence their more or less clandestine existence, but by this time their lives had acquired the quality of fatefulness you might find among radical fugitives in a Robert McCrumb comic. They had lost the advantage of anonymity — and yet they went on. As a middle-aged John Barker subsequently observed: ‘…it was fucking madness. We continued out of stubbornness, the Angry Brigade having a dynamic of its own, and most of all from a naïve, romantic sense of loyalty. Two comrades who had been arrested should not be deserted, left on their own, even though our addresses or names had been in a captured address book. Continuing in these circumstances was not being serious taken to a new level, it was foolhardy; the youthful feeling that nothing very terrible could happen to us and fuck them, we’ll show them.’ On Thursday 19 August, I spoke to Clive Borrell, a crime correspondent of the Times, in the hope of finding out what the latest developments were in the Angry Brigade investigation. I had a distinct feeling that ‘the game was afoot,’ but I also had something else in mind as well. The British Ambassador in Uruguay, Geoffrey Jackson, was being held hostage at the time by the Tupamaro guerrillas who wanted to trade Jackson for their own political prisoners held by the Montevideo government. I had connections with the groups in the region through respected anarchist

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Madder Music, Stronger Wine

comrades in the Bolivian labour union, the Central Obrero Boliviano (COB), the various Libertarian Youth groups scattered throughout Latin America, and the exiled anarchist groups in Paris. It seemed to me appropriate work for the Anarchist Black Cross. Albert was particularly enthusiastic about it. He felt it showed we could help prisoners far from our own ideological point of view, and we might, as a spin-off, get the Tupamaros to throw in Purdie and Prescott as brokerage. (After all, there was only self-incriminating evidence against Prescott and nothing at all against Purdie.)

The Swingin Sporran Taking Ross along as my witness, we met in the ‘Swinging Sporran’ in Islington. Borrell of the Times was there with his witness, Edward Vale of the Daily Mirror, a team representing British hackery at its most majestic. An unlikely combination. They were both eager to know about the Angry Brigade and whether it would turn to kidnapping. It could, I said, speculating wildly and without any authority or foreknowledge, hoping to bring Jackson into the discussion. They might kidnap someone in Paris. Christopher Soames, for instance, was an obvious target. The two reporters didn’t seem particularly outraged or even intrigued by the suggestion. I had copies of the latest Black Flag in Albert’s car, which they came out to collect. Both reporters claimed they wanted to subscribe as it carried interesting commentaries on the Angry Brigade as well as news the press agencies never carried on the international radical milieu. The boot of my car was a tip. It contained a jumble of papers, rubbish, tools — and a bundle of multi-coloured electric cable. The reporters made no comment at the time, but the electric cable — or so they said later in evidence — immediately made them conclude there could have been detonators in the car. The words ‘could have been’ were associated with the cable. In fact, the wiring was used to jump the uncertain starter motor of the Corsair. We met at the same time and at the same place on the Friday. Again Ross came with me. This time I put to them directly the possibility of exchanging Geoffrey Jackson for the release of some Uruguayan prisoners and Prescott and Purdie. After all, the committal proceedings showed the evidence against these two was hardly likely to convince any jury, and the only reason for going ahead with the trial was the hope that something else might turn up. I suggested they contact the Foreign Office and test the reaction. I meant Borrell of course, who was obviously working for the security and intelligence services. What could Vale get for his paper that would be of interest to them? That question remained unanswered. In the middle of our conversation Vale excused himself saying he had to check in with his office. He returned excited, but secretive. When I asked what was up the lying bastard said the Angry Brigade had threatened to blow up a police station in London. It seemed a lot to get excited about.

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Bomb Squad: (Left to right) Commander Robert Huntley (with back to camera), Commander Ernest Bond, Detective Inspector George Mould (with device) and Detective Constable Ron Smith.

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Given his state of excitement I felt there was more to his news than met the eye. In fact, he had been told that the Angry Brigade had been arrested at 359 Amhurst Road. Had I known, I would have acted somewhat differently the next day, and would have been saved a year-and-a-half in prison. Financially speaking, the taxpayer would have been saved something like fifty thousand pounds, and I somewhat less, but little as it was, it was all I had.

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August Is A Wicked Month

Chapter 8 — 1971 (Summer) Arrest! THE ‘BOMB SQUAD’ raided 359 Amhurst Road at 4:30 in the afternoon of Friday 20 August. Habershon was not present during the raid or the subsequent interrogations. He and his wife had gone on holiday earlier that week and he — or she — decided not to interrupt their summer break for the denouement, which was left to Commander Bond to handle. This was the news that had set Edward Vale’s ears tingling the previous evening: four people had been arrested in a flat at 359 Amhurst Road, Stoke Newington and the police had hit the jackpot, claiming to have found two sub-machine guns, an automatic pistol, ammunition, 13 detonators — the number turned out to be important — and explosives. They also found documents and other paraphernalia, including a John Bull printing set — all relevant to the investigation. Habershon’s men had not only found Jim Greenfield and Anna, but also John Barker and Hilary Creek. And, according to them, a bloody great haul of arms; documents, too, such as they had found a dozen times before, all attacking the government. They had what they believed to be the core of the Angry Brigade. Except one. The ‘Bomb Squad’ had stormed into the flat that afternoon under the command of Detective Sergeant Andrew Gilham with all the grace of Oliver Cromwell entering Drogheda. It was not until much later that night that the senior ranking officers came to survey the alleged ‘find.’ At the police station, the four people arrested were told, individually, that they were the leaders or indeed the entire personnel of the Angry Brigade. They retorted with incredulous abuse, countered by obscenities from the officials at their barefaced audacity in denying the obvious. Both men were badly beaten up by DS Gilham’s two young detective constables, Sivell and Ashenden. The beating was not an attempt to extract a confession from the two men; it was the vigilante mentality of the two young officers which led them to punish them for what they thought they had done, or maybe it was them just venting their anger at John and Jim for what they represented. As they were being beaten John and Jim were told that when they were finished they were going to the women’s cells to beat up Anna and Hilary. Neither of the women were beaten up, but they were humiliated by being stripped naked, their clothes removed and given an old blanket to wear all the time they were there. Nor were they given any food or water. The only specific charge against Hilary was that the police claimed to have found a pair of gloves with traces of gelignite in the pocket of her trousers, when arrested. Unfortunately for the police, Hilary’s trousers had no pockets as she was later able to prove in court. That night Albert Meltzer was finishing his cup of tea at Mick’s cafe in Fleet Street. He had just come off the late shift when a friend of his, a printworker from the Daily Mirror, came in and sat beside him.

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20 August 1971: police raid Amhurst Road and ‘discover’ what they were looking for...

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

20 August 1971: I never made it up West

‘See they got the Angry Brigade,’ he said. It meant nothing to Albert that four people had been arrested in Amhurst Road, Stoke Newington. My closest anarchist collaborator did not recognise the address or the names of the people who were later to be described as my ‘fellow conspirators’ in an anarchist revolution. He was more concerned with grabbing a few hours sleep before heading off for a weekend in Wales — thinking I would return his car in a few hours. He made a mental note to ask me if I knew anything about the four. For me, that Saturday had been one of those days when nothing seemed to go right. It began with trouble and worked its way up to disaster. After leaving the journalists the previous night I had gone from the ‘Swinging Sporran’ to my local, the ‘Queen’s’ in Crouch End Broadway. My sister, Olivia, was down from Glasgow and I planned to take her around Soho and the West End. There were about six of us in all. Someone said he knew a West End club manager who would let everyone in free as he owed him a favour. Olivia hadn’t been to a West End nightspot before — nor for that matter had I — so I agreed. I never made it to the West End. On the way into town I crashed Albert’s prized Corsair Grand Tourism into the back of a van. The others all went off in a taxi leaving me behind to contemplate the damage. I thought of him snoring away, dreaming cherubically of his weekend in Wales. Not only did his car look a mess with mangled headlights, and crumpled hood and damaged radiator— but also its once-powerful engine was dead. I had been working fewer hours since I started at Letchworth. I also had payments to make on my new pride and joy — an Austin Champ that I used for running around. Brenda was down in Cornwall with two cats and innumerable kittens waiting for money to feed them, pay the rent and phone bill. Now I had gone and crashed Albert’s car. The impact had jammed the hood between the bodywork and the radiator — something that would later take on great importance. I levered the hood open with a couple of screwdrivers I had in the boot, but once I looked inside I knew it was hopeless trying to get it started and decided to leave the car where it was and go home to bed. I was wakened early by the clatter and chatter of my sister and her friends returning from their night out West. It turned out they had been robbed at the nightclub. Ross’s wages had been stolen as had Olivia’s holiday money, valuables and keys. They ended up having to pay an extortionate entrance fee, and somehow they had fallen asleep — or been drugged — during the floorshow! But I was in a hurry and had my own problems to sort out. I needed the car working and in a presentable state before handing it over to Albert by ten o’clock. The AA said they would send someone to have a look at it, but when I got to the car, I somehow managed to get it going and drove back to the flat. Ross was awake by this time, but the flat’s communal post office book from which I’d hoped to borrow some money had been stolen along with everything else. My next problem was to find a panel beater to give me a reasonable quote

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The Time And The Place

for the job — and get it done by 10 am. Eventually I found one, but I still had to pay him and didn’t have the money. Everyone in the flat was skint. My only hope was to borrow some cash from John Barker in nearby Stoke Newington. At the back of my mind was the thought that I was at least postponing the evil hour when I had to go to my friend and confess I’d smashed up his car and ruined his weekend break in Wales. It was still drivable — just — albeit in a sorry-looking state. I remember the car radio was playing R Dean Taylor’s song Indiana Wants Me as `I drove. I hummed along and joined in the chorus. I didn’t appreciate the irony of the music until later. Out of habit, I parked the battered Corsair several streets away from Amhurst Road and walked up the row of terraced Victorian houses to number 359, the very last house in the street. The front door was ajar, but thinking nothing of it I ran up the three flights of stairs to the top flat and was slightly taken aback to find that door too was open. I walked through the hallway and into the front room, shouting ‘anyone in?’ I looked around. What had been a lived-in room a few days earlier had been stripped bare of furniture. Suddenly, I became aware of a man stretched out at the far end of the room, below the two sash windows, which were fully open. In spite of my shout, the man was still fast asleep and snoring, with a copy of the Daily Express spread over his chest and his feet up on one of the remaining chairs. What larks, Pip! Here I was coming to get a loan and they had the bloody bailiffs in! I walked over and shook the sleeper awake. ‘What’s going on here?’ I demanded. He spluttered and nearly fell off the chair with surprise. With a sinking heart I saw hanging above him on the wall a two-way police radio. It crackled into life with voices, static and white noise. A creaking sound behind me made me turn round. For the first time I felt a spasm of anxiety. There, framed in the doorway, stood Detective Constable Claude Jeal, a Special Branch officer who had been on my case for some years. DC Jeal smiled with barely concealed delight. The time... the place... and a prime suspect. I’d walked into a trap. A quarter of a million pounds worth of Special Branch expenditures was about to be justified.

Arrest

Indiana Wants Me Indiana wants me Lord I can’t go back there. Indiana wants me Lord I can’t go back there I wish I had you to talk to. If a man ever needed dyin’ He did no one had the right To say what he said about you It’s so cold and lonely here Without you. Out there the law’s a-comin’ I’m gettin’ so tired of runnin’ Indiana wants me Lord I can’t go back there. Indiana wants me Lord I can’t go back there. I wish I had you to talk to. It hurts to see the man that I’ve become And to know I’ll never see the morning Sunshine on the land I’ll never see your smiling face Or touch your hand. If just once more I could see you Our home and our little baby. I hope this letter finds its way to you Forgive me love for the shame I put you through and all the tears Hang on love to the mem’ries Of those happy years. Red lights are flashin’ around me Yeah love it looks like they found me. Indiana wants me...

I parked the car in Sydner Road and walked round to the Amhurst Road flat

The snoozing policeman quickly regained his composure and produced his warrant card in reply to my question. Produced it? He practically shoved it down my throat. It was Detective Constable Daniels of the Special Branch. He asked me why I had come to that address. Not being certain what exactly had happened, the wisest thing was not to answer any questions — not even to confirm my name, despite the fact that Jeal and Daniels knew perfectly well who I was. Daniels then arrested me in connection with what he described as property removed from the flat the previous night by police officers. I said I

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Edward Heath Made Me Angry

They’re coming to take me away

thought it a bit over the top to charge me over what had gone before I got there. But at the same time I was wondering what sort of Kafkaesque labyrinth I had stumbled into, and how long it would be before I got out — if I got out! There was also the worry about sending money to Brenda in Cornwall — and what sort of apoplectic state Albert would be working himself into as he paced up and down outside his front door waiting for me with his car. My captors radioed nearby Stoke Newington Police Station for a van to take me away. The atmosphere in the flat was politely strained as we waited, with me in handcuffs. Neither Jeal nor Daniels asked any questions and we didn’t talk about the weather. We didn’t have long to wait. When the Black Maria screeched to a halt in the road outside, DC Jeal escorted me downstairs and then it was off round the corner to the local nick. In the charge room at Stoke Newington Police Station they removed all my possessions, including the car keys. They even took my cigarettes, though Jeal did give me a few of his own in compensation. I asked him to buy me some more out of the money I had on me — which he did. August! Not my lucky month. I had been arrested in Spain around the same date seven years earlier.

Banged-up

23 August 1971: John Barker leaves Clerkenwell Magistrates’ Court

Hilary Creek

Anna Mendelson

Not normally given to displays of emotion, once that cell door banged shut behind me with its ominous reverberation, my usual sangfroid boiled up and over. All the frustration and anger that had built up in me because of the consequences of the previous night’s accident, which had led me to 359 Amhurst Road — and who knew what came out! Suddenly, I started kicking the cell door and shouting for my solicitor. Eventually, the face of the station inspector appeared in the door’s Judas hole and told me politely that unfortunately I couldn’t see a solicitor until after I had been interviewed. I felt I had to say something so I demanded food instead — one or the other. I am not sure what the logic behind that was, but I hadn’t had any breakfast that morning and was quite hungry. ‘If you are going to lock up an innocent man you should at least have the decency to feed him,’ I shouted — illogically — as I continued kicking the cell door. Then a policewoman came by and told me to be quiet. I was so taken aback at her impudence that I gave her a mouthful of obscenities in return, something quite unusual for me. At that moment the door was thrown open and two young CID Detective Constables attached to the ‘Bomb Squad’, DC Terence Ashenden and DC Bernard Sivell — both dressed like trainee estate agents — charged in with exaggerated anger in an attempt to disorient and intimidate me. It worked. They grabbed my arms, doubling them behind my back, and frog-marched me through the charge room into the yard to a waiting police car. ‘I am quite capable of walking,’ I shouted. ‘There’s no need for melodrama.’ Evidently they felt there was a need — at least for my psychological benefit. Unlike the impeccably polite behaviour of Special Branch, these guys were

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Touch Of Evil

immutably malevolent and highly abusive, calling me all the fucking cunts under the sun, as though they had arrested my namesake, John Christie of Ten Rillington Place — the man with a predilection for having sex with his dead victims — though probably he got more sympathetic treatment as he was one of their own, being a Special Constable. As I was being manhandled past the police garage in the yard, I noticed the Corsair parked there with a large sign in front ‘Wanted for Fingerprinting. Do Not Touch.’ As we passed it Ashenden said, ‘Right you bastard, you're going to go down for twenty years for this little lot.’ All the time they kept telling me with relish how much evidence they had taken away from Amhurst Road. I was pushed into the back seat of a police car with Ashenden and Sivell on either side of me and a police driver in the front. While we were in the yard Ashenden and Sivell kept making pointed references to the fact that they had my car — in spite of what they claimed, rightly in fact, had been my attempts to ‘hide’ it. As if to emphasise the point they told the driver to reverse back to within a matter of feet from the poor old Corsair to make sure I didn’t miss it. ‘We’ve got your car,’ said Sivell sharing a knowing smile with Ashenden. They wore the smug grins of men who share a secret. I knew instinctively that could only mean they had planted something in the car. They had, but I didn’t find out what until that evening. We were joined in the car by the senior officer who had orchestrated the raid the night before, Detective Sergeant Gilham. He had cast himself in the role of the ‘soft’ cop against the other two’s ‘hard cops’ routines. He was in fact a smoothly malicious cop whose role model appears to have been the redneck Captain Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil. The other two were Satan’s unappealing little helpers. I asked Gilham for one of my own cigarettes, now carefully sealed in an evidence bag. He told Ashenden to give me one, which the latter did with bad grace, threatening me all the way to Albany Street Police Station, the field HQ of the hunt for the Angry Brigade where Commander Bond had set up his travelling forensic circus. In the course of the needling from Sivell and Ashenden, I gleaned that I had been arrested because I was the ‘leader’ of the Angry Brigade, and that they had found an arsenal in Amhurst Road with all ‘the evidence’ they needed to put me away for years. I didn’t rise to the bait. DS Gilham finally told them to be quiet, and for the rest of the journey we travelled in moody, ominous, silence. At Albany Street it struck me that if all this show of power came into operation just to deal with a minuscule outfit like the Angry Brigade, what would British democracy be like if it was confronted with an insurrection? I wasn’t expecting an answer to this mental and metaphorical question, but it came a year or so later, postmarked Belfast. The charge room was as busy as a Saturday afternoon in Sauchiehall Street. The crowd of inquisitive uniformed and plain-clothes police officers parted to make way for my escort and me. I was booked in and taken to the cell block in the basement. Spooling through my head was the newsreel image of Lee

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23 August 1971: Jim Greenfield escorted from Clerkenwell Magistrates’ Court

23 August 1971: author leaving Clerkenwell Magistrates’ Court giving the evil eye to DS Gilham, the police officer who planted the incriminationg detonators

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Harvey Oswald in the basement of Dallas Police HQ on 24 November 1963. Fortunately, there was no equivalent of Jack Ruby among the crowd. Much later in the afternoon when things had quietened down, I heard John’s voice shout, ‘You all right, Jim?’ A grunt in the affirmative came from Jim’s cell, which turned out to be two up from my own. John went on, ‘Did you hear they brought Stuart in?’ ‘Stuart who?’ said Jim. ‘I haven’t heard anything.’ ‘They did!’ I shouted. They had also arrested Chris Bott when he called at the Stoke Newington flat later that day and he, too, was brought down to the cells. We couldn’t sustain much useful conversation shouting along a darkened Christopher Bott corridor where anyone could have been listening. The atmosphere must have been like that in the steerage dormitory of the Titanic as it was going down. To cheer us up a bit I began a singsong. Any Christian police officers listening might have hoped for Guide Me Thou, Oh Great Redeemer, but what they in fact got was a rousing but discordant rendition of Marlene Dietrich’s song from Destry Rides Again: We had ourselves our own Brechtian opera. But in the cells of Albany Street Police Station no one can hear you scream, and no one took the hint to bring us a cup of tea. We continued with a medley of whatever revolutionary songs we could remember, concluding with a couple of choruses of Avanti Popolo, which got a bit repetitive as none of us knew all the words. But psychologically it was an improvement on For Those in Peril on the Sea. After the singing died down and in between the sporadic, surreal, one-liners that passed for conversation, every so often we’d hear the sound of a cell door being unlocked then banged shut and steps echoing along the corridor. Someone was being taken away for interrogation. After an hour or so they would return and someone else would be taken away. They came for me at about 7:15 pm. I was escorted to an office on the second floor by Detective Sergeant See what the boys in the backroom will have Davies, a big fat cop with a round chubby face and a thick black droopy And tell them I’m having the same Go see what the boys in the backroom will have bandido moustache. A rugby player run to fat. He chatted on the way up And give them the poison they name that he had been out watching me the previous week at our North Sea Gas And when I die don’t spend my money conversion sector in Enfield. I said, jokingly, ‘I hope you’re not planning to On flowers and my picture in a frame charge me with conspiracy to rob the small arms factory there!’ I was about Just see what the boys in the backroom will have And tell them I sighed and tell them I cried to add that it had been the sole reason I joined the conversion unit when I And tell them I died of the same saw the familiar figure of DS Roy Cremer come out of the office. As we And when I die don’t buy a casket of silver passed, he gave me a friendly smile in his inimitable manner, as if to say With the candles all aflame simultaneously that he was sorry to see me there, that it was really nothing Just see what the boys in the backroom will have to do with him, and he looked forward to many more pleasant chats. And tell them I sighed and tell them I cried And tell them I died of the same Davies looked back at him as he disappeared down the corridor. “Bloody And when I die don’t pay the preacher Special Branch!” he said. I breathed again. He sounded almost as though For speaking of my glory and my fame we had something in common — a dislike of the political police. Just see what the boys in the backroom will have And tell them I sighed and tell them I cried And tell them I died of the same

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My Name is Bond, Commander Bond

More questions than answers... The interrogation room was painted institutional cream and was brightly lit with fluorescent tubes. Davies joined three other men seated at a table against the wall. Two sat on the right of the table and another officer on the left. I was in the middle. Davies made the introductions. On my left was DC Michael Doyle. On my right was DCI Riby Wilson of the Special Branch and my interrogator-inchief, Commander Ernest ‘Ernie’ Bond. A stockily-built thick-necked man in his early fifties, Bond was smartlydressed in a chocolate brown pin-stripe suit, brown shoes and matching tie. His skimpy, thinning brilliantined hair was slicked-back from a broad forehead. A bulbous nose, thin lips and high cheekbones drew attention to his deep-set stony-eyes, and boxers’ ears. His appearance suggested an aging Buenos Aires tango dancer. Next to him, leaning with his chair against the wall, was DCI Riby Wilson of the Special Branch. Smaller in build, he appeared more affable than Bond. Also in his fifties, DCI Wilson was dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and dark tie. He reminded me of Edgar Lustgarten, presenter of the 1950s Annals of Scotland Yard and Scales of Justice . DS Davies, seated on my left, took notes. DC Michael Doyle was the exhibits officer. The exhibits — documents, cheque books, passports, driving licences, sub-machine guns, an automatic pistol, ammunition, sticks of dynamite, and a box of detonators, all allegedly removed from Amhurst Road and my Corsair — were stacked high on the table in front of me. Bond looked at me. His eyes dilated for a just a moment. I tried to read his face; it was inscrutable. There was no hint of triumphalism, or even bullish hubris. Then he spoke. The tone of his voice was monotonous as he launched into a set-piece monologue. He began with the time-honoured formula, used since at least the time of the Spanish Inquisition to catch out backsliding ‘converted’ Jews: ‘I presume you understand why you have been brought here?’ It was a rhetorical question, but I answered just the same. ‘No,’ I replied ‘you presume wrong, I have no idea.’ Apart from a few abusive remarks made by his subordinates I had been told nothing. I reminded him that it was on record that I would not give any more interviews to the police, not even in the presence of my solicitor, and it seemed to me that even for them this was going a bit far in investigating political activities. Bond agreed that I was not obliged to assist the police with their inquiries, but insisted there were still a number of questions he needed to put to me. I said he could do so, but I would prefer to have my solicitor present. There was one thing I would say, however — at this all ears stood up — and that was a criticism of the outrageous lack of amenities in the police station. I had been held eight hours without a bite to eat and the very least they could do was provide us with a regular cup of tea and something to eat now and again. I made the point that

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Interrogator: Commander Bond Exhibits Officer: DC Michael Doyle

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Geoffrey Jackson was probably getting far better treatment in his improvised jail in Montevideo than I was getting here in the heart of London. Bond turned to Riby Wilson and asked if he could arrange for me to have a regular cup of tea. He then cautioned me and then started rummaging through the property stacked on the desk which he said came from Amhurst Road. To everything that was put to me I either made no reply or asked for my solicitor. Bond then explained that he was making inquiries about the Angry Brigade. ‘What we have found, leads me to believe that those connected with the flat are associated with the Angry Brigade,’ he said. This then was their way out of the definitional problem of who was in the Angry Brigade — they had determined that the Angry Brigade would be those people found with explosives. ‘Look at these [Free Prescott and Purdie] posters found in your car.’ ‘I didn’t know possession of posters was a crime. I would like to consult with my solicitor on that fact.’ ‘This Time Out magazine is yours — do you sympathise with the Angry Brigade? There’s a picture in it which refers to them.’’ ‘I don’t edit Time Out. My sympathies are my own.’ ‘You have publicly admitted being an anarchist, haven’t you? ‘ Inside, I mused fleetingly ‘If I thought it would get me out of this mess I’d admit to being a fucking Jehovah’s Witness,’ — but I didn’t. I replied ‘Yes, I have. My solicitor can tell you all about it.’ Bond rummaged through the large pile of plastic bags on the desk and produced one they said contained what had been taken from my car. I was asked to separate what was mine from what was Albert’s. I sorted through the bagged pile — which included a white Masonic glove which Albert had for some unknown reason — and indicated what was mine.

The fit-up

Detonators: We saved a few for later

A thought crossed my mind of saying I was only ‘a poor widow’s son,’ a Masonic recognition signal, but I doubt if Bond, a Master Mason, would have seen the humour. After all, authority depends on no one laughing at the wrong time. Bending down, Bond produced a little cardboard box from his desk drawer — not from the pile on his desk — with two detonators sticking out from a bed of cotton-wool. Here was the magician producing the rabbit from his hat. ‘In the boot of your car police officers found these two detonators. What have you to say about these?’ His face was expressionless. I stared in disbelief at the detonators and looked at Bond, aghast at his brazen effrontery. For some reason I couldn’t believe they would be so crude as to plant detonators on me, or anything else so obvious. It seemed that this was their card that trumped my ace. It was now for a jury to decide whether it had come out of Bond’s sleeve or the boot of the Corsair. I began to see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel — they had pushed the evidence bag that bit too far. The wheel — of fate, not the Corsair — had just turned in my favour. I had been in custody for nine hours and throughout that time nothing had

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‘Contre Nous de la Tyrannie’

been said officially until this interview that I had been arrested because of alleged involvement in the Angry Brigade. Now, after 45 minutes and twenty-or so banal questions this was the first reference to the evidence against me: my possession of detonators or explosive substances. The first time I had seen these was when Bond produced them from his drawer. Nor was it my car. If you were stopped while driving someone else’s car, and something were found in the boot of which you denied knowledge, would you not expect the person who lent you the car to be at least questioned, if not suspected? This did not happen. Albert was not in the frame. They were sure the detonators were mine. How could they be so sure? I pushed my chair back from the table, stood up and said with all the vehemence I could muster: ‘Those detonators weren’t in the car and you know it.’ I was so taken aback by the guy’s audacity I forgot to add the bit about wanting to see a solicitor. Bond avoided my eyes, said nothing and put them away, hurriedly moving on to the next question. ‘How about these wires?’ ‘They might have been in the car, but not the detonators.’ ‘The screwdrivers and the glove were in the car, weren’t they?’ ‘Yes, they were, but not the detonators.’ He moved on to some newspapers that had been in the car and we got back to playing the game of his producing documents and my replying that the law allows legal representation. He finally agreed that he would telephone Birnberg that evening. ‘You’ve said that you don’t want to see any of the property and documents police found in the flat, but so that you can realise how serious the matter is, I am going to show you certain items.’ ‘I understand how serious it is all right,’ I assured him. I understood so well that I wasn’t planning to help him place the noose around my neck. However, we carried on to the bitter end, and I was shown all the posters, letters and documents allegedly taken from the flat. Had I seen them before? I wasn’t going to answer that. Seen them or similar ones? In a hundred, two hundred, three hundred different homes. The only thing that made this haul distinguishable from any other, and well they knew it, was the fact that they claimed to have found guns and explosives. Come to think of it, they said they had found detonators in my car as well. At the end of the interrogation, just as I stood up to go, the music of La Marseillaise blasted loudly from the street outside. Wilson and Bond pushed away their chairs and rushed to the window to see what was happening outside. It was an ice-cream van. Riby Wilson turned to me with a nervous laugh, saying that for a moment he thought French revolutionaries had come to rescue me. If only! Even the best-prepared French revolutionaries could hardly have organised a trip to London’s Regents Park within a few hours to lay siege to a police station — complete with a marching band. Had they been British, the band would have been playing ‘Hold the fort for we are coming...’

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DS Cremer: fags and a lecture

I was the last to be interrogated that night, and left the room with assurances from Riby Wilson of regular cups of tea and a promise to let Brenda know I was all right. I was returned to the freezing bowels of the earth to catcalls from my fellow suspects of ‘What took you so long?’ and ‘Have you been out to dinner?’ My musings were interrupted by DS Cremer who appeared at the hatch to ask if I was all right. Silly question ... Nevertheless, I said I was fine, I even had the cigarettes Jeal had given me, but they were running out fast. Cremer gave me some of his and I asked if he would give some to the others. He surprised me with a morality lecture, saying he respected me and would give me cigarettes any time, but not the others. I couldn’t quite understand how or why he chose to differentiate between us, but the duty cells’ officer came by shortly after to check that we hadn’t all committed suicide or ‘tripped up our cells’ as they euphemistically put it, and he passed the cigarettes to the others. He also brought some blankets and a pillow and suggested we get our heads down. I lit a cigarette and stretched out on the hard bed, blowing smoke rings into the air trying to work out what had happened and what might happen next. Was there an informer? And what about Bond’s conduct of the interrogation? Clearly, he had not been looking for a confession. He was simply going through the motions for the Court. He was telling me ‘like it was.’ It was a thoughtstream that could drive you mad. But there was nothing to be gained by worrying about things over which I had no control so, I drifted off into the escape tunnel of deep sleep. Ben Birnberg came to my cell early next morning, his hand raised in greeting, looking for any tell-tale sign of ill treatment. I was relieved to see him and get some perspective on how things were likely to develop and some insight into how to proceed. Those with no experience of criminal law will find it hard to believe that many solicitors work with the police, and against the interests of their clients. This is not evident, but it is a hard reality in political cases. I trusted Ben absolutely. He was one of those courageous and selfless lawyers who, in so many countries, support radical causes and fight injustice with scant recompense and often at great danger to themselves. Ben agreed with my decision not to give a statement, but he did suggest I co-operate in giving a handwriting sample and to allow them to take swabs from my hands to verify whether I had handled explosives recently. I agreed to this if an independent chemist were allowed in — I had the Challenor case in mind. Bond said this was impossible, but that Woolwich Arsenal was independent of the police. That’s all very well, I thought, but they’re more on your side than mine. I also provided a handwriting sample, checking carefully to see there was no carbon paper or other sheet under the paper which could later be used to replicate my signature. The forensic chemist from Woolwich also took swabs from my hands, giving a separate sealed set to Birnberg. Later that afternoon I was taken upstairs for another brief interview with Bond. The thrust of this session was about the names in my impounded address book — ‘found’ in Ross’s van. Bond pointed out the sinister significance of

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A Commissioner Calls

Barker, J., and Chris B (which in fact was Chris Broad, not Bott). I referred him to the not-so-sinister Muggeridge, M., who was also in my wee blue book. That evening, in the cells Sir John Waldron, the Police Commissioner himself, came to gloat with a posse of high-ranking police officers and unidentified civilians. For a few seconds he and the others took turns peering at me, silent and expressionless, through the hatch in the cell door then walked down the corridor to look at the others. Monday morning was my second morning in captivity, and the third for the others. One by one the four of us were marched out to the charge room where there was a small sink where we were allowed to have a quick freshen-up with cold water, surrounded by half a dozen policemen. We were then taken outside to the high-walled police car park for a brisk twice-around-the-yard walk. It felt like being a prisoner in Fort Apache with all the cops on the roof and the guards on the door. This was so we couldn’t say we hadn’t had any fresh air. Anna and Hilary, who were still without clothes, were kept locked up until finally some old prison uniforms were provided in order for them to be brought into the charge room. We were then all marched into the charge room and lined up. This was the first sight I had had of the others since our arrest. Jim and John were bruised on the face from their beatings by Sivell and Ashenden. Anna and Hilary both looked tired but cheered up enormously on seeing John and Jim.

Charges We were lined up according to the severity of the charges against us, which corresponded to the incriminating evidence they had managed to bring together. Jim and Anna were first on the list, then John and Hilary. Chris Bott and I brought up the rear. I whispered to him that it was rather like a double wedding with us as best men. Our solicitors stood to one side, like the congregation, while the Station Inspector sat at a table in front of us like the officiating clergyman. It wasn’t much of a joke. But even so it was a better one than the one played by the law. If it had been a double wedding ceremony then it is unlikely that Anna and Hilary could have been convicted of conspiring with their husbands. The room was packed with policemen, lowly and senior. It was obviously an historic occasion. The Station Inspector began the ceremony, but instead of saying ‘Dearly Beloved,’ he read out the charges against us one by one. When he came to my name I shouted that I had been framed. Everyone looked at me, slightly embarrassed. It was as though someone objected to the wedding. The Inspector, nonplussed, noted my objection then read out the property sheets. My list included the two planted detonators which I refused to sign. This created a problem and the Inspector didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to have to type out the list again. Bond stepped in at this point and saved the day by initialling the two offending items. They formed a striking contrast to the other rubbish in the car, which included a half-eaten bag of peanuts. By this time I was acclimatizing myself to the starkness of my Albany Street

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Sir John Waldron: come to gloat

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

police cell. The silence allowed me to think through the possible consequences of my arrest. Sivell and Ashenden had stopped beating up Jim and John, presumably on Bond’s orders. We could only make the best of our situation before whatever banal horrors HMP Brixton had in store for us. At ten o’clock that Monday night, as I was settling down to sleep, the cell door flew open and I was dragged from my bunk by a flurry of uniformed policemen, handcuffed and quickly frogmarched through the police station and bundled into one of five Black Marias waiting in the yard, one for each of us. I still couldn’t shake the words and music of Indiana Wants Me from looping around in my head. Our police escort had been told not to speak to us so we didn’t know where we were being driven at such high speed through the night. Our destination turned out to be the police cells at Clerkenwell Magistrates’ Court where we were going to be remanded in custody the following day. The move was a security measure to make sure the ‘International Anarchist Conspirators’ couldn’t find our whereabouts and break us out in the dead of night. The IAC must have been having the night off. The vans weren’t ambushed, and we spent an uncomfortable night in a particularly inhospitable and strange police station. It had the feel of the dungeons of Franco’s secret police headquarters in Madrid. After a tasteless breakfast of tea and porridge, we were marched into the adjacent courtroom. The dock was so small we couldn’t all squeeze in, so Chris Bott and I had to stand at the side. I looked around at the equally packed public gallery; friends and comrades who had braved the intimidating police pressure and searches to crush in. I was elated to see Brenda waving reassuringly from the scrum. I signalled to her to go to the back of the court for a visit afterwards, then turned to hear what the magistrate had to say. The magistrate wasted no time listening to protestations of innocence. He was, as he put it, ‘small fry.’ The police had been sufficiently convinced of our guilt to charge us and bring us before the court. All he could do was legalise our being locked up until we could prove our innocence before a judge and jury. That we were not to be given the opportunity until a year and a half later had nothing to do with him. It was not his problem. It only needed a centurion to bring him a bowl of water to wash his hands, but there was nothing so hygenic in Clerkenwell Magistrates’ Court.

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Now Is The Winter Of Our Discontent

Chapter 9 — 1971 (Autumn-Winter)Brixton I HAD AN overwhelming sense of déjà vu. After a hairraising high-speed blues-and twos race from Clerkenwell, our convoy sped up Brixton Hill, turned right into Jebb Avenue and up to the already opening mouth of the mock-Gothic gates of Brixton Prison. Anna and Hilary were sent to Holloway; we had arrived at Melvyn Peake’s decaying castle Gormenghast. It was the middle of the afternoon. Once through the double-gated entrance into the bleak cobbled Victorian yard, our police escorts took back their handcuffs and passed us on to our new captors — the black-uniformed and highpeaked cap officers of Her Majesty’s Prison Service. Minutes later we were being initiated as Entered Apprentices into the First Degree of English prison life — Reception — but with a couple of dour-faced army rejects as Cowans instead of a friendly coincierge. We were ushered into a dimly-lit cell with a bench which ran round three walls. Waiting around aimlessly is an important part of prison induction. The four of us, Jim, John, Chris and I squeezed around the large table that took up all the available space in the cell. It was the first time we’d all been alone together since our arrests so we had a lot to talk about, but we were also wary about saying too much in case the cell was bugged. We wondered how Anna and Hilary were being treated in Holloway women’s prison. It had a worse reputation than Brixton. The bruising on Jim’s and John’s faces from the beatings they had received from DCs Sivell and Ashenden was noticeable, but they just laughed it off with a joke about falling over in the police cells. After what seemed a long time the door was unlocked and a trusty prisoner, our very own Steerpike (Gormenghast’s sinister kitchen boy), wearing a red armband silently handed each of us a spoon and a moulded metal tray with Dickensian-looking slops in each of its various pressed-out sections. We could only guess from the colour and texture what was the main meal and what was dessert. More time passed. Finally, we were taken out, one by one. Apart from the language, I could have been back in Carabanchel Prison. The reception screw asked if I had ever been in prison before. ‘I have never been in a British jail in my life,’ I said, Jesuitically. ‘You’re the fucker who was sentenced to twenty years in Spain,’ I was told. ‘But that was a conviction by a fascist court-martial. You don’t count British courtsmartial as evidence of a criminal record, why do you count Spanish ones? Do

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23 August 1971: police convoy leaving Clerkenwell Magistrates’ Court for HMP Brixton

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Exercise Yard

‘A’ Wing, HMP Brixton Prison, Jebb Avenue

you think they are fairer?’ ‘Smart arse! You were convicted fairly all right, my old son,’ my jailor replied. He marked me down as a recidivist category ‘A’ maximum-security prisoner and marched me off on the next stage of my journey of discovery. When the required details had been recorded, I was taken down more passageways and into a large room with another couple of prison officers dressed in white medical orderlies jacket. I was ordered to empty my pockets and strip. The few possessions the police had allowed me to keep were taken, and the details of these and my clothes entered in a massive ledger. Not content with taking our liberty, they wanted our Timexes as well. The conversation went something like this: ‘Coat, one, grey, plain; jumper, one, brown, worn…’ As the items were written down a ‘redband,’ or ‘trusty’ prisoner packed them into a large cardboard box, which was then filed away for collection every time I was taken from the nick. I was now naked. A Principal Officer handed me a sheet to wrap around myself, and told me to stand on the scales to be weighed — presumably to see if I would be found wanting. I was then handed prison issue gear and marched into the adjoining cubicled bathhouse. The place reminded me of a Glasgow Municipal swimming pool and ‘steamie.’ But that bath in Brixton was the high point of my day. I lay back in my fourinch ration of hot water, gave myself a desultory rub over with the carbolic soap, let my mind go blank, and tried to relax after the stresses of what had been an eventful four days. As the water cooled, I returned to the harsh reality of the soulless cubicle. I stepped out, towelled myself dry as best I could with what passed for a towel in Brixton, and put on my new clothes. Prison issue clothing consisted of a blue and white striped shirt, a grey pullover, brown horsehair trousers with a low crotch and short legs, and a lapel-less jacket, elastic-sided boots and shapeless socks. Man at C&A it wasn’t. I had also been given an off-whitish sheet with creamy Rorschach test motifs, a ‘F’ Wing pillowcase, and a comb and toothbrush. My sad-looking sheet looked as though it was the one used by Ronnie Biggs when he went over the wall at Wandsworth six years earlier. Next stop was the doctor's office. He was not available so I was banged up in what looked and felt like a broom cupboard, with hardly room enough to turn round. After what seemed like hours, a screw unlocked me to take me to the doctor. He was a real live Dr Prunesquallor, Gormenghast’s castle physician. He may well have been astute, I didn’t get to know him, but he was certainly a slave to Brixton’s traditions. Without looking up he asked my name and

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In A Dreary Brixton Prison...

‘A’ Wing, HMP Brixton Prison, Jebb Avenue

whether or not I suffered from any complaints. ‘Flat feet, claustrophobia and paranoia’, I replied, in the hope it would win me some privileges, but he ignored this and passed me as fit. Next stop was a small building in ‘D’ wing, where I was photographed, then back through Reception, down another long corridor, through two sets of barred gates into the middle of ‘B’ wing, a depressing tall and gloomy gallery which looked as though it had inspired Albert Durer’s etching, Melancholy. This was where the psychiatric and geriatric cases were held. We wheeled left toward ‘A’-wing, which is separated from ‘B’ wing by the communications centre. ‘A’-wing’s doors could only be opened from the inside. This was my new home; the hub of my universe for the next eighteen months. The escort handed my white cell card to the wing screw, who copied out my details in his ledger. Cell cards, colour-coded according to religion, are posted outside your cell door throughout your time in jail and carry your name, age, and sentence. Although I had told them I was an agnostic and the name was Christie, not Christian, as far as Her Majesty’s Prison service was concerned I was now Church of England — along with all the other non-believers. The wing screw wrote up my details in his ledger, while I looked around the four-storey gallery, comparing them in my mind with Carabanchel — and wished I were back there.

‘A’ Wing, Brixton Brixton was a grey and depressing collection of tall Victorian buildings. One thing that did bode well was that at least the duty wing screw appeared to be a cheerful cove. From the wing office, I was escorted up the central iron staircase to the third landing, the ‘threes,’ where I was booked in again with the landing screw. I was now officially a top-level category ‘A’ prisoner, with all the restrictions that went with that classification. But again, my landing screw seemed quite cheery, unlike the miserable peaked-cap gits who had processed us through Reception. I felt relieved. Albert Meltzer later raised this arbitrary classification with the Home Office minister, Mark Carlisle, the then Under-Secretary of State. Carlisle confirmed my recidivism, but found himself obliged to retract this later when challenged on the point of courts-martial and asked whether convictions by Nazi, Russian or Chinese courts would also be held as evidence of a criminal record. I was no longer officially a recidivist, but I remained a security risk nonetheless, and was kept in ‘A’ wing’s category ‘A’ cells on the third landing. Carlisle or his superior, Reggie Maudling, had decided they were not taking any chances. John, Jim and Chris were below me on the ‘twos,’ at least for a couple of weeks. We came back from a remand appearance at Clerkenwell one day and instead of ‘A’ wing, they found themselves across the yard on ‘F’ wing, something they

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Edward Heath Made Me Angry

‘Happy’ Landings

were none too happy about. In ‘A’ wing we had been in single cells, but in ‘F’wing the cells were all two and three to a cell, something not conducive to concentration or contemplation, especially if you were banged up with a fool, low-life gas-meter bandit, hare-brained hippy or upper class cheque-kiter. My cell was approximately twelve feet long by seven feet wide and ten feet high. The furniture was B-Plan minimalist melamine and wood consisting of a small table, a chair, a pine three-legged corner wash stand with a formally laid out plastic knife, fork, and spoon, a white and yellow melamine water jug, washbowl with two thick plastic plates, a matching mug, and an opaque melamine plastic piss-pot finely coated with Vim. The stench of bleach and urine was overwhelming and added to the sense of clinical desolation. Beneath the barred rectangular window high on the wall was a metal-framed bed with a thin foam mattress, a pillow and a precisely folded horsehair blanket at the end of the bed. A three by five foot woven plastic floor mat by the bedside was the only concession to homeliness. Within these walls I was to spend the equivalent of a two-year prison sentence — less remission — before the jury decided I was innocent.

Habeus Corpus

View from the door

Views from the bed

HMP Brixton was the main remand prison for London and the south east of England and held almost 1000 inmates. Belmarsh hadn’t been built yet. Most prisoners here were waiting to be tried in various places from the Old Bailey to Lewes and Cheltenham crown courts. We were no different. We were on what they called ‘Production’ which meant over three months of grueling weekly journeys between Brixton and Clerkenwell Magistrate’s Court to prove we were still alive. It also meant going through the same routine every time. This meant getting up before sparrow fart in the morning, gulping down a melamine mug of grey-brown liquid, collecting everything we possessed from Reception — in the unlikely event we were granted bail — being handcuffed and waiting for our police escort to arrive. When the Hillman Hunters arrived we’d file into the yard and be locked into the back of a green prison transit van, then be driven at high speed across London, in a convoy, back to Clerkenwell Magistrates’ Court where we would file into court before the Magistrates where they would pretend to ask for bail applications, and then deny them. These weekly processions began as huge productions when the police still suspected a rescue attempt would be made for us, but then obtained a blander tone as time wore on. They cut back on our escort budget and we had to make do with the normal prison-court cellular van transport, which took forever. We’d spend up to three or four hours a day confined in these vertical coffins while making the grand tour of every magistrates’ court between Clerkenwell and Brixton. It was the same procedure in reverse in the afternoons — only longer. Our weekly remand hearing was a formality. In normal circumstances we would be collected from the court by 2:30pm and not get back to Brixton until well after 7 in the evening.

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Defining Limits

Our return journey would usually be broken at Rochester Row police station in whose Dickensian holding cells cons were dropped off to be collected and dispersed to prisons throughout London and the southeast. By the time we got back to Brixton and our overtime-hungry screws decided to collect us from our tiny cells in Reception and we had been ‘checked over’ by Brixton’s Dr Prunesquallor, we rarely got to our cells until after 11 pm at night. The reason for this extra punishment — on top of the routine of a normal prisoner’s life — was not any desire to be more vindictive to those not convicted of any offence than to those who had been. On the contrary, it was based on one of the great glories of the English legal system — habeas corpus — about which it boasts to the world. Nobody can be kept imprisoned without coming before the court. So people have to keep coming back and back and back to court under exhausting conditions until finally the authorities decide they had scraped together all the evidence they are likely to need to proceed with the case or — as in our case — until they have conjured up enough deductions out of the original allegations to hope they might get the case past a jury. At least it prevented us joining the ranks of the ‘disappeared.’ The right of habeas corpus sounds so grand that generation after generation is fooled into thinking it is a victory for justice and a stringent curb on tyranny. It is, most definitely, but in the hands of a complacent magistrate it becomes another form of internment — which seemed to be perfectly able to flourish alongside habeas corpus. Like all laws, it defines limits but it never gives freedom. All the allegations against us were predicated on the possession charge. In my case it was the alleged possession of two planted detonators; in the case of the four from Amhurst Road, the alleged possession of arms — and in the case of Chris Bott, nothing at all apart from ‘possession of the explosives and guns’ allegedly found in Amhurst Road, and which weren’t even in the flat when he was arrested there, like me, on the Saturday — if they were ever there in the first place. I had a pleasant surprise that first night in Brixton. The landing orderly, a young Cypriot, not only brought me some tattered copies of Playboy and Penthouse but, amazingly, a copy of Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist. I was taken aback to be handed this on my first day in prison, and to know that the work of the famous Russian anarchist philosopher was being read, quite avidly it seemed from the state of the book, by other prisoners. From the flyleaf I saw that it had belonged to Jake Prescott who, with Ian Purdie, had been hurriedly transferred to ‘D’ wing when the prison authorities learned of our imminent arrival. It didn’t do to have too many troublemakers together in one wing. I was engrossed in Kropotkin’s book on my next trip

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Another view from the bed

Searches: Clerkenwell Magistrates’ Court

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when a Trotskyist screw (yes, there are such things, unsurprisingly!) looked at it and asked if I had read Kropotkin’s In Russian and French Prisons. In fact, I hadn’t. It was a rare item because the Tsarist authorities had bought up edition after edition of the book when it first appeared, to prevent it being known, but it has been reprinted since then. ‘You ought to write In Spanish and English Prisons one day,’ he said, half jokingly. He took it for granted — as did many of my friends — that the Spanish prisons would be much worse. But it is a sad commentary on English liberalism that this just wasn’t true. It never was true, in fact, that the do-gooders who built Britain’s soulless prisons had an edge on anyone else — even the most tyrannical regimes. Reading Kropotkin’s description of life in French prisons over a hundred years earlier makes you shudder to think how today’s parliamentarians and press would react if it were proposed that: ‘…each prisoner incarcerated for the first time may hire a pistole during his interrogation, and thus avoid living in the cells. The pistole is also a cell, but it is somewhat wider and much cleaner than the cells proper. A deep window under the ceiling gives enough of the light, and six or seven paces may be measured on its stone pavement, from one corner to the opposite one. It has a clean bed and a small iron stove heated with coke, and for one who is occupied and is accustomed to solitude it is a tolerably comfortable dwelling place — provided the incarceration does not last too long. ‘We kept our own dress, we were not compelled to be shaved, and we could smoke. We occupied three spacious rooms, with a separate small room for myself and we had a little garden, some fifty yards long and ten yards wide, where we did some gardening on a narrow strip of earth along the wall, and could appreciate from our own experience, the benefits of an intensive culture.’ Even the lice-ridden prisons of Russia and France of a hundred years ago had more humanity and soul than the sanitary and cold prisons of Britain. In Spain it was much easier to land in jail. Offences existed that were unknown in any other European country, such as ‘illegal association.’ You could be tortured in Franco’s police stations, but on the whole once in jail the situation was different. The prison authorities have to live for long periods with those in their charge, therefore they cannot keep torturing them. I discussed this difference in prisons with Miguel García García, my former fellow prisoner. He agreed with me that it was the soullessness of British prisons that made them outstanding in the history of penology. National characteristics come into it as well. Cold cabbage, muddy fishcakes, soggy sponge with lumpy custard and gnats’ piss for tea would be considered a provocation diet in Spain. The authorities offering it would be expecting a riot. British prisoners have probably been conditioned by years of factory canteens, greasy spoon cafes and now McDonalds where it is usual to accept such rubbish as normal food and merely grumble. But there was another striking difference between the two countries: British jails were run on a system of state socialism, where you get what you are given.

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A Rendezvous With Justice In Some Disputed Dock

(‘Incentives’ and ‘earned privileges’ are now the system.) Spanish jails in Franco’s time were run along on much more humane lines inasmuch as there was some degree of choice involved. You could work and earn more, or — and this is a punishment — not work and scrape by if you were prepared to do without things like fags and Serrano ham sandwiches. You could have money sent in from outside and spend it in a canteen or the prison restaurant. Thus responsibility for the individual’s quality of life in prison became his own, that of his comrades or his family. Like money everywhere, its circulation in jail leads to corruption, but it is also the one thing that eases tyranny. Corruption certainly exists in English jails — albeit fitfully. In Spain it was built into the system. But for those who have illusions as to what can be achieved by the parliamentary system, a comparison of Spanish and English prisons would be interesting. Some might think this flattering for Francoist jails. Not at all. Ultimately conditions in all prisons come down to what a government feels it can get away with. In Franco’s Spain they had had more or less the whole nation locked up at one time or another. Franco’s jails were as detestable as Belsen, in that many of the inmates were taken out and murdered. But as the jails there gradually settled into becoming part of the furniture of the regime they became less unbearable, simply in order to avoid the constant tension and cycle of reprisals. If people spent Francoistlength sentences in Brixton or Belmarsh under Home Office rules, the place would be ripped apart.

The struggle continues... Habershon returned from his holiday on 6 September, the day before Prescott’s and Purdie’s trial had been due to open at the Old Bailey. Now, with another six of us behind bars, the prosecution tried to have their trial joined to ours, but without success. It had been six months since Prescott’s arrest, and five since Purdie’s capture so any deferment of their trial would mean their remaining in prison for at least a year before standing trial. A new trial date was set for Prescott and Purdie alone — 10 November 1971. Albert wrote an article in Black Flag comparing the Heath government’s attitude to that of Abdul Hammid II, ‘Abdul the Damned’ of Turkey. When he wanted to punish political upheaval, he massacred some Armenians. This had the effect of cooling the situation, or at least of diverting attention from it. Obviously somebody had to be punished to show the might of the state. Late in life Abdul was introduced to the works of Conan Doyle, which were specially translated for him. He was fascinated by the character of Sherlock Holmes who, for some inscrutable occidental reason, took immense pains to find out who exactly it was that did anything — a long drawn out and inconvenient, if interesting, method that would never have suited the Imperial Ottoman Police. One of the claims made by the police was that the Angry Brigade was now ‘smashed.’ Unfortunately for them, on 24 September, a month after our arrest,

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19 October, 1971: Chris Bryant bombing

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30 October, 1971: PO Tower bombed

Chris Allen

Albany Street barracks which was only a few yards from the police station where we had been held, was bombed. No communiqué was issued that I was aware of, but the Angry Brigade did claim responsibility in calls to the press. Another bombing carried out by the Angry Brigade on 19 October 1971, three months after our arrests, was that against the home of Chris Bryant, one of the Midland’s biggest lump employers (a lump employer is one whose employees are selfemployed, pay no taxes or National Insurance contributions and get no protection in terms of health, security or safety) who was then in the middle of a major industrial dispute. It was accompanied by communiqué 13 which, apart from explaining in some detail the background to the Bryant bombing, stated that those of us then in custody were political prisoners in the ongoing class war. It added: ‘We are not in a position to say whether any one person is or isn’t a member of the Brigade. All we say is: the Brigade is everywhere… Let ten men and women meet who are resolved on the lightening of violence rather than the long agony of survival; from this moment despair ends and tactics begin.’ Later attacks targeted Chelsea Bridge opposite the barracks, Everton Street Army Tank HQ, Dartmoor Prison Officers’ mess, the Post Office Tower. British government offices and institutions in Amsterdam, Basle, Barcelona, Rome and Paris were also bombed and the attacks claimed on behalf of the Angry Brigade, and in support of those of Ian and Jake and those of us arrested subsequently. As far as I am aware neither the Angry Brigade or First of May Group were involved in the spate of letter bombs that were being sent at this time. The final Angry Brigade Communiqué 14, Geronimo Cell, was published in International Times (No 144) on 14 December 1971: ‘…Friends…it’s time to weigh the balance between revolutionary advances and the gains of repression… No revolutionary group can carry on regardless. We are not military generals or a ruthless elite. If the more the Angry Brigade bombs, the more innocent people are framed, then revolutionary solidarity demands second thoughts and different actions. THE WORKING CLASS HAS MANY WEAPONS MORE POWERFUL THAN BOMBS. By halting the bombing we threaten something worse. Our worse will always be aimed where it hurts the bosses most, their precious property. ‘We have shaken the bosses and scared cabinet ministers. We have given them a small dose of their own medicine, a little taste of their own violence. But now is the time to silence capitalist cynics and revolutionary fools. The present spate of letter bombs has absolutely nothing to do with the People’s movement, or any cells of the brigade. Letter bombs are a desperate tactic, the product of frustration and impatience. We condemn those who use bombs against civilians, fanatics who care little for human life. Zionism will not be destroyed by killing a few businessmen. We feel for the Arab movement, we support their aims to liberate the Middle East, byt the present campaigb is indiscriminate and unproductive. ‘Again, we totally support the liberation struggle of the Irish people. But do not believe that the Provisional IRA are its best supporters. THOSE WHO BOMB WORKERS BOMB THEIR OWN ARMY… This communiqué is addressed to all

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Communiqué 14

our comrades in Ireland… The Angry Brigade suggests that the Irish people make it clear to the Provisionals that, apart from our class enemies LIFE IS NOT EXPENDABLE. Random terror is the rule of law and order. In the name of socialism, we deny any connection with those who commit inhuman acts. ‘ALL ANGRY BRIGADE ATTACKS HAVE AND WILL BE DIRECTED AT RULING CLASS PROPERTY… WE ARE NOT MERCENARIES, WE ATTACK PROPERTY NOT PEOPLE…’ These bombings did not challenge the police definition of the Angry Brigade. They described all subsequent events as ‘copy-cat’ actions, or perhaps the work of sympathisers. In fact, the people who carried out these actions were as much (and in my case much more) a part of the Angry Brigade as the people locked up. As the saying goes, you can’t imprison an idea.

Angela Weir

Making up the numbers DCS Habershon, now fully back in control of the day-to-day investigation, ordered more arrests through November and December: Angela Weir, a Marxist, Chris Allen, Pauline Conroy and finally Kate McLean. He had promised twelve arrests and with Prescott and Purdie that figure had now been reached. The ten in our case was a neat figure — five men and five women, though not in couples. It was a pity to disturb such fearful symmetry with the fact that the bombings continued before the committal proceedings, after our first spell of waiting in Brixton and Holloway prisons. Brixton I looked upon as an enforced sabbatical. My days and nights were spent reading, writing and thinking — pacing up and down or lying on my bunk, chain-smoking the pungent Boyar cigarettes Brenda brought in for me. Anything to ease the existential or psychological sense of the infinitely slow passage of the hours and the minutes. I suppose a reason watches aren’t permitted in prison is that they exaggerate the perception of time in such situations. If it didn’t rain we were banged up for twenty-three hours a day, with half an hour’s exercise in the morning and afternoon, doing the Brixton shuffle around the figure of eight path in the small grassy compound outside ‘A’ wing. If it rained, we were locked up all day. I read on average two books a day throughout the eighteen months I was there, fiction mainly. I devoured the complete oeuvre of H.P. Lovecraft and that of all his necromantic acolytes — August Derleth, Robert Bloch and so on. One novel that sticks out was John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, a parody of historical fiction about the lives of flaky characters in colonial America. It was apparently based on the adventures of Ebeneezer Cooke who became the poet laureate of Maryland. Apart from being a thick book, it was hilariously funny and so unpredictable it makes your head spin. The ideal present for any prisoner, the excruciatingly boring hours locked in a cell simply melt away. I also caught up on my anarchist reading as well, but these had all to be cleared by the cultural mandarins at the Home Office. One parcel of books from well-wishers at Freedom Press contained copies of a new series of reprints by

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Kate McLean

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Antonio Tellez

New York publisher, Dover, of classic works by Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Emma Goldman was impounded by the governor and sent to Queen Anne’s Gate for clearance. They were eventually released, but on the strict instructions that I did not loan them out to other prisoners. They were more than happy for the cons to read the most debased reading material imaginable, but Mutual Aid and What is Property? — I don’t think so! An old comrade in Paris, Antonio Tellez, a former anti-Francoist guerrilla fighter, sent me the proofs of his new book, La Guerrilla Urbana En España — Sabaté. It was a biography of one of the last of the anti-Francoist urban guerrillas. Well, the last of the generation before Defensa Interior and the First of May Group. I found the story so riveting I decided to translate it into English, both to keep my mind active and my Spanish up to scratch.

Toughs, toffs and beguilers

Con Man Extraordinaire: ‘Bang-Bang’ Charlie Cowden:

As in Carabanchel, it was fascinating to chat to my fellow prisoners and find out how they had got there. A regular companion on the ‘A’ wing shuffle was ‘Bang-Bang’ Charlie Cowden. Charlie was a fellow Glaswegian, a distinguished-looking one at that, with his mane of silver hair and patrician good looks. He looked every inch a Guards officer with his camelhair coat, Saville Row suit and highly-polished tasseled loafers. He reminded me of Miguel García García. Anyone seeing him walking around the exercise yard with the other cons could easily have mistaken him for the Governor doing his rounds. It was a treat to find someone you could have a real laugh with, even though he had sold his soul to the Devil. Exercise time passed faster with Charlie telling his stories of his glory days as a global scam merchant in his affected Kelvinside accent. A beguiler of the self-important, the greedy and the gullible with the most plausibly outlandish stories, Charlie was a cross between Baron Munchaussen and ‘that’ soldier in the Wink Martindale song who was caught playing cards in church and managed to convince the Provost Marshall that his deck was in fact his personal illustrated bible. Charlie had been an armed robber forced by ill-health into a life of flim-flam, charlatantry and confidence frauds. But he obviously wasn’t very successful in his chosen life of crime, having been arrested goodness knows how many times, and notched up almost 600 offences. On this occasion he was inside for bigamy. The extraordinary thing was that both wives were still bringing him food hampers every week, one from Harrods and the other from Fortnum and Mason, delivered in RollsRoyces. Brenda used to chat with both the wives in the waiting room. A couple of guys on my landing had probably escaped hanging only because there was no longer a death penalty. There were toughs, toffs, Fritz the Cat drug-dealing hippies as well as genteel middle-class fraudsters and working-class conmen. Most of ‘A’ wing prisoners were serious hard-men, professional robbers of security vans, banks, post offices and building societies. They faced long prison sentences. Mind you, so did we.

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Strange Bedfellows

The ‘glory days’ of the old-time East End gangsters were over by the time we arrived in Brixton. They had shared the same values and morality as the Metropolitan CID who pursued them, coppers like Commander Bond. The two sides were parasites who lived off each other, particularly what was then the Flying Squad. They were opposite sides of the counter, but it was the same shop. Usually they were Tories, whose cell walls were decorated with Union Jacks and photographs of the Queen. By the early 1970s the new serious criminal tended to be younger and more independently minded — Guardian readers with no respect for ‘Law and Order’ as an abstraction and part of the natural order of things. They understood that the lifestyle of a substantial part of the CID depended to a large extent on creaming off the proceeds of their crimes, and that while police forces justified their existence by saying they were there to defend your property in the sense of your home, treasured possessions and gas meter, in fact what they defended was the abstraction of property accumulated by force, fraud and speculation: the legalised theft of bourgeois society. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the steady erosion of popular trust in the institutes of State, party politicians, business leaders and public life in general had led to the end of the age of deference. By 1971, if there were political photographs on the walls, they were more likely to be of Ché Guevara than the Queen. Brixton’s screws, as in most British prisons, were recruited mostly from the North of England. The job offered security and a roof over their heads. Mostly they were reasonable people. They didn’t bother us if we didn’t bother them. All they wanted was a quiet life, and the few like Porridge’s Mr Barraclough who had taken the job thinking they could help people — and imagining it to consist of more than turning keys had long since slumped into apathy. But there was also a less likeable hard core of fascists who wanted to run the place under a NationalFront dominated Prison Officers’ Association controlled regime and did what they could to make life unbearable for prisoners in general, and for us in particular. They had their little moments of power, but also their time of downfall! There have been lots of published commentaries on prison life. Presumably they are read for pure titillation, for the reforms over the last hundred and even fifty years have been negligible. Possibly the prisons have got worse, and certainly the same ones have got older. I was better off than most, since Brenda was able to work half-days and visit me with meals and cigarettes. Still, she couldn’t have done it without a lot of help. The Anarchist Black Cross had set up a defence fund for us, but it could never have managed to raise enough to keep Brenda going while she spent so much time and money visiting me. When I came out I had a look at the books and found someone had been putting a fiver a week in and even more. I couldn’t find out who it was. For some time I suspected a deep ruse of the Special Branch, as Albert in his usual self-effacing way said it was anonymous, until he finally confessed he was the donor. Of course my gratitude for both of these acts of support cannot be expressed.

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Pataphysician: Simon Watson Taylor

DPP 1964-1977: Sir Norman Skelhorn

Another regular visitor with expensive food parcels was Simon Watson Taylor, an exotic survivor of the old London Anarchist Group, secretary of the London Surrealist Group in the 1940s and translator of Alfred Jarry’s The Ubu Plays. Simon had the soul of a hippie and the elegance and bearing of a Regency dandy. He carried a silver-topped walking cane on which his name was engraved. Asked by the screws to identify himself as he handed in his Fortnum hamper, Simon whacked his cane down on the desk and said ‘Take it from there, my man!’ Wrong attitude! The screws got their own back — on me — by dumping all the expensive food on to one plate and covering it in custard, which was in fact Advocaat. George Melly, who had been looking after Simon’s unique collection of surrealist paintings while the latter was on his travels to India in the 1960s, sold one of these at Simon’s request to raise money for the Stoke Newington 8 Defence Committee. It raised about £10,000. They wouldn’t allow me out of ‘A’ wing, so after a lot of argy-bargy with the Governor (our very own Lord Groan of Gormenghast) and the Home Office, Jim, John and Chris were transferred to ‘A’ wing, so we could prepare our joint defence. After more pressure we were able to organise a couple of round-table conferences with Hilary and Anna being brought over from Holloway. No one interfered with our notes during these conferences, but Anna and Hilary had all their papers taken away and read by the authorities every night they got back. I had no idea as whether or not my co-defendants were guilty either of possession, conspiracy or of the specific bombings: I didn’t ask and I didn’t care. We were, however, on the same side and in the same dock. If we were to stand any chance of acquittal we had at least not to allow ourselves to be divided against each other. It was a case of hanging together, or hanging separately. The defence case of the four comrades from Amhurst Road was necessarily different to the way we ran our defence. From the start we agreed we should at least not be divided against each other — but neither should we be subjoined to the point where conspiracy was easy to prove. The mere fact that the police and the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) insisted we were all in the dock together facing the same conspiracy charges was something over which we had no control. It had been fortunate for Purdie that his solicitors insisted on a separate trial for him and Prescott, otherwise he would have been in the dock beside us. We had before us not only the Challenor case (in which Commander Bond’s colleague and former SAS comrade, a Sergeant from London’s West End Central planted a brick on a demonstrator), but also the immediate experience of the Mangrove trial, which arose out of a police raid on a Black restaurant in Notting Hill, and the Greek Embassy demonstration. At the time of the occupation of the Greek Embassy, the police had arrested two vanloads of people protesting against the Greek coup and charged them with conspiracy. To be precise, they had arrested three vanloads, but when a quick-thinking comrade sitting near the door in the third police van discovered

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‘McKenzie’ helpers

that his captors had forgotten to lock it when the van pulled up in the police yard, the entire vanload disappeared in a matter of seconds. The other two lots of people who were sent for trial charged with conspiracy joined together in their defence. In that case a deal was made by some of the lawyers, which sacrificed a few of them since it would have taken so long to deal with each case individually. The pitfalls of the conspiracy laws under which we were charged became clearer. The prosecution didn’t need to prove that we all had had possession of weapons, or that we had any direct link to the bombings – just that there was probably an ‘agreement’ and if we knew what that ‘agreement’ was we were conspirators. It didn’t even need any explanation or exchange of words, the ‘agreement’ could be effected by a ‘wink or a nod.’ Kafkaesque or what!

Preparing our defence We agreed we would all act individually, with separate counsels. John, Anna and Hilary chose to defend themselves. After legal arguments they succeeded in having ‘McKenzie’ helpers introduced into the Central Criminal Court system. This was as a result of referring back to the 1970 Court of Appeals decision in the case of McKenzie v McKenzie that any person, whether professionally qualified or not, could attend a trial as a friend of the defendant to take notes, make suggestions and generally give advice. The decision set an important legal precedent in subsequent politically motivated trials in England. Jim, Chris. Kate and Angie and myself, opted to have a barrister to act for us. This way we hoped to force the prosecution to spell out its charges, and in the cold light of repetition hoped that their case would come over as less and less plausible. We all knew only too well that the prosecution would drag in my Spanish experience and contacts as part of the conspiracy charge against me, and this would form the basis of the case against everyone else. We each had different firms of solicitors — progressive firms with a reputation for integrity, who could handle radical cases with sympathy and understanding. This upset the police, especially as some of our lawyers were Jewish. Commander Bond, whose prejudices were well-rooted in the Edwardian period, was heard to pronounce some of the names with the full Germanic intonation of the original, so that his hearers could be in no doubt about their origins. Ben Birnberg appointed Kevin Winstain as my barrister. At first I thought it an odd choice. Kevin was very different to the other young barristers who were launching their radicals careers on the back of our case: Mike Mansfield and Iain McDonald. Kevin’s manner appeared downright reactionary and sexist, which didn’t go down at all well with Hilary and most of the feminists around the defence committee. I was mistaken. Not only had Kevin a brilliant mind, his arrogance and cutting wit was a defensive armour plating hiding one of the kindest and most sympathetic human beings imaginable. At one point, because of the lack of Queen’s Counsels among the defence barristers, the press

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Welcome visitor: a young Juan Busquets

suggested that the leading silks were boycotting us. I don’t know that any of us wanted any, but we were guided in the matter by our solicitors. In the end there was only one QC on the team, Lawton Scott, who acted for Chris Bott. For three months we travelled back and forth to Clerkenwell Court proving what a wonderful thing habeas corpus was. Every week the police said they were continuing their inquires, but we were too dangerous to let loose. One day, after a remand hearing, I was in the cells at Clerkenwell awaiting transfer to Brixton when Brenda came to visit. With her she brought a dear old friend I hadn’t seen since Carabanchel — Juan Busquets Vergés. He had gone into prison on the same day as Miguel García García in 1949 — an eighteen year old, like me — and had come out a few days before, having spent twenty years in jail. He walked with a noticeable limp, his leg having been broken while trying to escape and he had received no medical attention until it was too late. When they found him lying helpless on the ground, the Guardia Civil had smashed his face in with their rifle butts. When the Bomb Squad officer on duty at the end of the corridor saw Busquets, who was dressed in a white trench coat with a turned-up collar, with his lapis lazuli blue eyes, swarthy complexion, broken nose, scars and stocky build, he immediately thought he was a Mediterranean gunman — which I suppose he was, or had been in his day — and sounded the alarm. A group of detectives appeared at either end of the corridor. Those who were armed fiddled nervously with their holsters while I burbled on enthusiastically with my old friend. The detectives moved closer and closer to Brenda and Busquets until they were surrounded by eight detectives. Cremer asked who he was, and Juan, who spoke no English and assumed he was being asked for his ID card went for his inside pocket. As soon as Busquets made this move the eight detectives almost fell to the floor, thinking he was about to take them all out. But before anyone had a chance to shoot, Busquets was waving his Spanish identity card and smiling broadly. Brenda said she hadn’t laughed so much in years. Cremer noted his details and when Busquets returned to Toulouse the following day, his flat was raided by the French police. He spent two days in the local police station, where he was asked to explain his relationship with Christie, La Brigade de Colére and Le Groupe du Premier Mai. How could they understand that Busquets and another friend who came over from Germany, both anti-fascists and comrades, felt sufficiently strongly to make that journey just to show friendship and solidarity? If they had understood, perhaps they would not have been policemen. John and Jim looked forward to the Clerkenwell appearances, because there at least they met Hilary and Anna. They embraced and came into the dock together, taking the opportunity to exchange a few words. It was the only chance they had. Brenda and I were always separated by glass. But at the end of each day Anna and Hilary had to go back to the penal cesspit that was Holloway. At least I had the satisfaction of knowing that Brenda was outside helping me.

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‘Jack The Rat’

In all prisons there are those who manage to acquire a little power. In Brixton’s ‘A’ wing that man was a petty crook and ‘long-firm fraud merchant’ known as ‘Jack the Rat.’ A rumour circulated that there was a contract out to have him killed. He had a cell on the ground floor, from which he rarely ventured on to the ‘twos,’ ‘threes,’ or ‘fours,’ in case he ‘slipped and fell’ over the railings. He had turned queen’s evidence on a gang then serving sentences in different prisons, and it was his evidence that had helped put them away. Apparently quite a few others were in the same boat. He had turned up one day at Tintagel House with all the documentation he had collected on his partners in crime. By blaming them he hoped to avoid prosecution himself, but the best laid schemes and all that. He was later sentenced to nine years, and those he had informed on all received light sentences. ‘Jack the Rat’ – Jack Tierney — was known later in HMP Long Lartin as ‘Bullet Proof Jack,’ because he had survived an assassination attempt by some of the people he had betrayed. The Bomb Squad used him in 1973 as an agent provocateur against Andy Ellesmere and Pauline Conroy. Tierney offered (actually insisted) to sell them guns ‘for the Angry Brigade.’ Ellesmere and Conroy declined, but that didn’t stop the Bomb Squad from prosecuting them. It later transpired that Tierney had been an informer for Sergeant Meyrick of the Flying Squad for the previous five years. (See Tony Bunyan, The Political Police In Britain, p. 222-225.) As we were likely to be stuck there for some time, as it seemed we were, we felt we owed it to ourselves to make prison life a bit more bearable. If the authorities wanted to arrest ‘troublemakers’, the least we could do was to make a bit of trouble for them. There was plenty of scope for it in Brixton. The ‘ones’ on the ground floor were for the elderly and infirm prisoners in low security classifications — or informers whose lives would be in danger if they mixed freely with the others. The ‘twos’ were slightly higher in security classification, mostly petty criminals and recidivists. The ‘threes’ were the headline bandits, reckoned to be the blackguards and villains. On closer inspection most of them seemed to be no different from anyone else. Also on the ‘threes’ were the ‘escapees,’ men who had either escaped or attempted to escape. These men were dressed in faded old dungarees with a large yellow stripe running down the seams of the legs and on the back of their jackets. When I saw these, I had a strong sense of Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Europe being forced to wear the yellow star. Yellow stripes were only allowed out of their cells accompanied by two screws, who carried a book recording all their movements. At night they were obliged to strip and leave their clothes on a chair outside their cell. Their clothes were returned to them in the morning. The ‘fours’ where I was sent, after my time on the ‘threes,’ were mostly high security risks and recidivists. It was to this elevated company that the Home Secretary Reggie Maudling had allocated me, at first because I ought to have been a recidivist, and on second thoughts because he just felt I ought to be there even if I wasn’t.

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Visiting time in Brixto

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Translucent glass in the windows permitted a little light into the gloom. The conditions in which we were locked up would probably never be tolerated in a zoo: lack of exercise, confinement among one’s own defecations, the deprivation of recreation, poor hygiene and bad food would have killed off any member of the animal kingdom, except perhaps the fleas which thrived quite happily in our blankets. The people I mixed with were all remand prisoners. This meant they had not yet been found guilty — and a great many never would be, despite the long months and sometimes years they would spend behind bars waiting for their trial. But banged up in Brixton they were guilty until proven otherwise.

A summer of protests The air of discontent in British society had permeated even the walls of HMP Brixton. The spring and summer of 1972 were hot. As the temperature rose, so to did the tension among the remand prisoners. A riot situation was building up. There had been reports of sit-downs and rooftop protests in other prisons. All it needed was one screw to say the wrong thing to the wrong prisoner and the place would go up like a Californian forest fire. I can’t remember what exactly triggered the first sit-down protest that summer, but I have strong recollections of walking round and round the figure of-eight path with an angry prisoner who was getting more and more wound up about the fact that the magistrates hearing his case were continually rubber-stamping the police’s objections to bail. This amounted, in effect, to internment. The physical conditions in which we were being held — untried, unsentenced, and deprived of all rights — was shameful. It amounted to illegitimate punishment and was making everyone angry. There had been general talk of some sort of a protest, but nothing concrete until one day when the guy I was chatting to suddenly said, ‘Right, that’s it. I’ll give them something to think about.’ He ran to the side of ‘A’ wing and was up the drainpipe and on the roof like the proverbial ‘rat up a drainpipe.’ (This guy was big and burly.) Everyone stood gobsmacked watching this big gorilla of a guy climb so effortlessly to the top. When he had straddled the hip of the roof he waved down to us, we all cheered and promptly sat down on the grass in the afternoon sunshine — in clear defiance of GOD, Good Order and Discipline. After a few minutes of consternation by the yard duty POs, the wing officer came out to tell us to return to our cells. Someone shouted that we weren’t going back until we had seen the governor, our very own Earl of Gormenghast. A short time later the governor appeared accompanied by a posse of deputies and chief POs. He tried to jolly us into playing the game.Our leaders were to come and speak to him about our complaints. But we had no leaders we said, a good anarchistic response agreed to by everyone beforehand. We knew that anyone selected as spokesman would become the scapegoat. Finally I stood up, as did a couple of the others, and we outlined our main grievances. It was a bit like the hillside scene in Spartacus after the Roman

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‘Parity With The Scrubs’

centurion asked which one was the troublesome ex-gladiator with the dimpled chin. You could almost hear the sharp intake of breath. Shaking his head, he said he sympathised with our situation, but prison reform, he intoned, was a long and slow process, and much of what we wanted would not be seen in our lifetime. We didn’t have that amount of time to wait. We said that if we didn’t have an answer in forty-eight hours we would sit down again and stay there. We then filed in, but matey on the roof was having none of it. He was staying where he was until they gave him bail. The next morning ‘F’ Wing — where John, Jim and Chris were at the time — sat down. This time they stayed out all day and all night. Those of us in cells on the yard side of ‘A’ wing helped by throwing blankets and any sweets we had out of the window. They went back in the next morning to let us out for exercise, and we sat down, and stayed there all day. The governor came out late in the afternoon to tell us that he had spent most of the day at the Prison Department of the Home Office, and they were looking into our complaints. Something would be done, but he could not say when. ‘These things take time,’ he said. ‘Time’s what we’re doing — and we’ve plenty of it,’ someone shouted. We knew that if we did not maintain the strike this time they would simply transfer and isolate the troublemakers. This would have solved nothing immediately; but it would ultimately result in other prisons becoming involved in the strikes. We stayed put. At last, after a discussion with the Wing Governors and the Home Office, the governor invited a few of us to his office to discuss the matter. After some discussion among ourselves we agreed, provided we had his assurance the men would not be victimised afterwards. I was among those delegated to attend the meeting. While we had been sitting down the previous day, I had been asked by some of the other prisoners to draw up a list of our main complaints, which I also managed to smuggle out for the press: ‘The main grievance shared by most of the remand prisoners is that we find ourselves suffering worse conditions than convicted prisoners. Facilities are far worse than those of many of the so-called backward penal establishments in Europe. [This was known as the ‘parity with the Scrubs’ clause among the prisoners]. We demand better recreation facilities, more association, television and films, and to be allowed to have our own transistor radios in our cells.’ We suggested that bulk buying would help improve the quality and variety of food. I quoted a recent newspaper article describing a typical menu on a Royal Navy ship where the crew had a choice of food which included T-bone steaks, roast beef and so on— all this on an allowance of thirty-one pence per man per day. Whatever the Home Office allowance was for each prisoner, surely it could not fall much below that of the Ministry of Defence. Another important grievance concerned the lack of proper visiting facilities. The strain on prisoners and families seeing their loved ones in a tiny cubicle separated by glass is often difficult to bear, and can and does lead to broken marriages and relationships. Again the governor sympathised with us, but

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Mike Callinan

countered neatly by telling us that it would cost the Home Office something in the region of ten thousand pounds to correct this. I replied that this was a drop in the ocean compared with the vast sums being spent by the Home Office on building cages within cages for human beings and running barbed wire around the perimeter of the prisons, costing at least two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. I said that the money would be better spent in eradicating the tension and alienation inside the prison. The governor made no reply. I was getting into my swing at this point and raised the question of Home Office censorship of mail on moral and political grounds. They might argue that censorship was necessary for reasons of security, but to return mail on moral or political grounds was reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia or Franco’s Spain. (The Home Office, where our mail was censored, had returned my mail on a number of occasions). We then came to the main reason for the demonstration — the bail system. We knew this was had nothing to do with the Prison Department, but it certainly was the responsibility of the Home Office — and they shared the same master. Remand prisoners in London could be banged-up for up to two years pending trial. The average period spent on remand in ‘A’ wing at that particular time was nine to twelve months. And from our conditions in Brixton we could only assume that we had been declared guilty a priori. The police objected to bail on the flimsiest of excuses, and these objections were likely to be upheld unquestioningly in both the Magistrates’ Court and in the High Courts. In the majority of serious cases, the only way bail could be obtained was by bribing the police. One example I mentioned was the infamous Baker Street robbery that netted over £300,000 — yet all the men involved were out on bail. Countless similar cases had been brought to the attention of the Director of Public Prosecutions concerning this practice, yet he consistently ignored all complaints. The one demand that was insisted upon by all the prisoners, concerned the classification of category ‘A’ and ‘E’ prisoners — top security and escapers. We insisted that at the very least they should at least be allowed association among themselves — and radios. There was also the question of the three Irish Republican prisoners in solitary confinement on the ‘threes,’ (one of whom, Mike Callinan, was an old friend from the anarcho-syndicalist Syndicalist Workers’ Federation, a connection I didn’t mention). At the same time, there was another group of Irish prisoners in ‘A’ wing; loyalists, protestant paramilitaries, led by Charles Harding-Smith, none of whom were subject to close confinement or surveillance. The charges against them were identical. Was it that the authorities felt more in sympathy with the Orangemen? In fairness to the latter, one should add that in prison the Orangemen and Republicans were indistinguishable, not only as regards their integrity and militancy, but also in their working-class approach to social problems and realisation of the need for social revolution in Ulster. However, that was something Harding-Smith was unlikely to admit to outside prison walls. Harding-Smith was not the only one. Phil Ruff, another Black Flag group member serving a prison sentence in Long Lartin, told me that

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Singing In The Rain

John Gadd, a member of the Ulster Defence Association who was also a member of the Freedom Association and the National Front, held similar views. It was impossible to tell if our meeting had been successful. The governor made all the right noises, promising to raise our demands with the Prison Department the following day. We returned to where the men were relaxing in the summer afternoon, and decided to shift as ‘F’ wing, who used the same yard, had had no exercise at all that day because of our sit-down. With ‘A’ wing safely banged up again behind locked doors, F wing filed out for morning exercise and promptly sat down. The situation was getting out of hand with hearty singing of Que Sera, Sera and You’ll Never Walk Alone. ‘F’ wing prisoners were out to stay and stay they did, all night and most of the following day. They had prepared this time by bringing their own blankets and food. Again we helped reinforce solidarity by throwing what we could out of our cell windows. When teatime came and we were unlocked to collect our food from the hotplates we refused to return to our cells and sat down with our food along the length of the gallery and on the stairwell. The screws finally withdrew to leave us to our own devices for the night. While the governor supposedly ‘considered’ our demands, reinforcements were called in from the other London prisons and within a few hours the place took on the atmosphere of a besieged medieval citadel, which in truth it was. We were on the inside chatting and debating where to go from here while ‘F’-wing’s prisoners, all in tip-top spirits, stayed outside throughout the night in spite of heavy rain, singing and dancing in the emergency floodlights set up around the yard. Matey, still on the roof had now been joined by a couple of others who wanted a change of scenery. It was hell for the officers who lived in the grim Victorian tenements overlooking the prison. When they came home the following morning their wives apparently bawled them out for not lashing into us and letting them get to sleep. But give them their due, the screws did not overreact and try to cart the men away. One small incident and all the good humour would have gone in a flash. These were tough men with long sentences ahead of them and they were not to be intimidated without impunity. The governor let them sing and prance around. It felt euphoric to be an individual again with some choices and control and not be a number, even if only for a short time. The only unpleasant side of it was the fact that some of the short-term prisoners had thrown in their lot with the screws in breaking the protest which had spread to the one convicted wing in Brixton. The cons had a lot more to lose than the remand prisoners: remission, earnings and visits. Reassuringly, it was only a handful who behaved like this — and it’s unlikely they would have behaved like that in a regular prison. The governor appeared next morning. This time he was mob-handed with heavies from the prison riot squad. After some discussion, the consensus was to return to our cells. We had made our point and felt that things would improve. It had been an opening skirmish — more would certainly follow. We made our way back to our cells one by one between lines of abusive

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screws pushing us along. Later that day my cell door was unbolted and three warders rushed in and grabbed me saying I was on Governor’s Report. Held on either side by the arms and the wrists, one screw in front and another behind, I was frogmarched along the landing and down the stairwell to the medical officer’s room on the ground floor. Orders were barked by a peak-capped PO who bore a remarkable resemblance to Mr McKay in Porridge and I was marched into the office between two POs who appeared to think they were in the Brigade of Guards. My two guards snapped to attention in front of the governor who was seated at a desk surrounded by various characters, mostly in civvies, then they turned, facing me with their arms outstretched forming a barrier in front of me. My prison number 100483 was read out and I was asked what I had to say. Not a lot I could say in the circumstances, other than comment on the fact that we had legitimate complaints as remand prisoners deprived of our basic human rights. The white-haired patrician governor and his cohorts from the Gormenghast court around the table weren’t quite the pipe-smoking liberals they appeared when we met them the previous day. I received a warning. They couldn’t do much to us. We were remand prisoners involved in a highly sensitive political trial, and with a high profile and very active defence group on the outside looking after our interests. The important thing was that our protests and sit-ins proved successful. The food improved, for a while, anyway; we were allowed radios within a matter of days; longer periods of exercise in the morning and afternoon, more regular open visits and longer ones, too, and baths when we wanted them. It also marked the beginning of an active prisoners’ rights movement which spread like wildfire throughout British prisons. But this prisoners’ movement wasn’t down to us; intolerable conditions provoke anger, protest and — usually — violence. What else could the authorities expect by depriving people of their dignity and basic human rights at a time when their democratic expectations were so high? In spite of the fact that in Spain I had opted to go to a political wing and be treated as a political prisoner, I remained ambivalent about special categories for political prisoners. By accepting a more comfortable existence the political prisoner falls into a trap. Throughout history and in countries where the authorities did things differently, political prisoners were so labelled in order that he or she should get worse treatment, and so that prison reform need not touch the enemies of the state. The British state denies holding any political prisoners. The German state, pressed to reveal how many political prisoners it had, coyly admitted to one in its history — Rudolph Hess! In their definition, there is no such thing as a political prisoner, just criminals. But a political prisoner is never distinct from a criminal. Everywhere prisoners are arrested, tortured, intimidated and imprisoned because they have broken the law of the land. In Nazi Germany, Spain, Russia, Greece, Brazil, Turkey, Baghdad, Tehran, and Guantanamo Bay, political prisoners are there because they have broken the law of the land. The state is the arbiter of what is and what is not legal — therefore by definition

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Political Prisoners

those who oppose it are criminals either ‘legally’ or by government decree. Some states, though, are smarter than others, and recognize that they should separate political activists from unpoliticised prisoners who are already disgruntled with the unfair distribution of wealth and class justice. In prison you have a fertile breeding ground for radical ideas. The Tsarist government understood this very well, as did the Franco government. It is the state that makes the political classification in order to divide the politicals from the disgruntled. It is curious that one aspect of hypocrisy has defeated another. The insistence that there were no political prisoners in this country, despite the existence of a political police force such as the Special Branch and the domestic surveillance activities of MI5’s F-branch, not to mention political offences, contributed to the defeat of what would have been the usual Establishmenttype reform. It was a reform which was, indeed, later granted in Northern Ireland: a meaningless classification into political and non-political, thus dividing the struggle. They had welfare officers, so-called, who were the most useless people I have ever come across. It took a sit-down to get permission for us to have transistor radios, if we paid for them ourselves. In Spain welfare officers were unheard of, but the screws would go out into the market or the docks to see if they could buy transistor radios tax free so as to flog them to the prisoners against hard cash. No doubt there were prisoners who got kicks out of telling lengthy case histories to bored and rude welfare officers, a job taken on in Spain by the priest. But personally, once we got the radios, I preferred listening to the Navy Lark. If I hadn’t my whole personal history might have changed radically. One grey and wet Sunday lunchtime, my cell door was unlocked for the tea orderly on his rounds with the large metal container with the grey-brown insipid-tasting liquid that passed for tea in Brixton. The screw who unlocked the door had moved on to open the next cell; the one following behind was still closing cells further down the landing. Looking around the orderly whispered that he had an important message for me from a mate I spent some time with on exercise, a security van robber, to make sure I saw him in the yard during afternoon exercise. When exercise time came round and the doors unlocked, the Navy Lark was just starting so I decided to stay in to listen to what was one of my favourite programmes. I couldn’t be bothered to traipse around in the rain, thinking that whatever my friend wanted it could wait. Later, that afternoon, after evening tea, I heard a commotion, shouts, doors being unlocked, scuffles and the echoing sound of feet running down the iron stairwell. Suddenly there was a tremendous cheer from the cells ... it was a breakout! The whole wing erupted: radios were turned up full blast. At the time I had my radio tuned into Radio Albania. My choice of listening had nothing to do with that station’s editorial content, it was purely to hear the station’s signature tune — The Internationale. Turning up the volume full blast to hear the Red Army choir echo throughout the wing was a wonderfully exhilarating wind-up.

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I was given a blow-by-blow account of the escape next day from one of those who failed to get over the wall, but had managed to get back to his cell and bang himself up before he was discovered. The plan was to go to Spain and, because of my contacts and knowledge of the language, they wanted me to go with them. And there was I, contentedly listening to the Navy Lark! The two screws on evening slop-out duty had been tied up and locked in the cell. They opened the cell doors on the ‘fours’ of those involved in the escape then ran to the wing door to wait for another screw to come through from the centre. When one came through, the prisoners jumped on him, removed his keys and made for the control room where they smashed up the radio and alarm system. From there they unlocked the kitchen door where a ladder was padlocked to the wall. I heard the rest of the story later. As the prisoners ran into the yard from the kitchen carrying the long ladder with them like characters out of a Keystone Cops movie, they ran straight into a screw having a quiet smoke behind the toilets. As he drew his truncheon they advanced. The one in front shouted, ‘Here’s a screw — you got the gun Charlie? — let him have it!’ The screw ran back into the toilets. The prisoners ran to the outside wall, placed the ladder against it, discovered it was too small and then had to pull each other up over the top, then drop down the other side. The drop was high and all of them sprained their ankles in the process. As they legged it to the far end of Jebb Avenue, they ran straight into an elderly couple unpacking their Mini, having just returned from their holidays. The couple were forced to hand over their keys and the escapees piled into the Mini and drove off. The elderly couple made their way to the prison officers’ mess to raise the alarm, but nobody would believe them. At last, when they could not get through to Brixton by phone, they rang the local nick who discovered the couple were telling the truth. For the next month or so the press was full of stories about ‘hobbling bandits’ limping gingerly into banks, post offices and building societies with walking sticks, grabbing cash and hobbling out again. We had no doubts who they were, and within a couple of months they were back inside, on the ‘fours,’ charged with additional offences of escaping and armed robbery. They were arrested the very day they were due to fly out to Spain. One of the gang was a bit on the flash side and had taken to driving around town in a Jaguar E-type. On the fateful day, he’d been driving down Charing Cross Road when the plaster cast on his foot caught on the accelerator and he plunged straight into the front of the Hippodrome. No one was hurt, but he was arrested and the whereabouts of the others discovered. ‘Look how useful you’d have been Stuart, if you’d come with us,’ he said. ‘We would have needed someone who could speak the language.’ I am sure that my return to Franco’s Spain with a mob of armed bandits would not have been the wisest of moves. Thank goodness for the Navy Lark!

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Trials And Tribulations

Chapter 10 — 1972 IN BOTH THE Prescott and Purdie case and our own the prosecution insisted they were not ready to proceed. What prevented them? A strike by the legal profession? Lack of room in the courts? The fact was that they did not have a good enough case and needed time to prepare something plausible. But at the same time, the police insisted that in no circumstances would they agree to such dangerous criminals being released on bail. I managed to raise over £100,000 in sureties, including £25,000 from Malcolm Muggeridge, but the police opposed bail for me, or any of us, at any price. The magistrate was a man of straw. Our undeniable rights under habeas corpus meant we had to turn up week after week to hear that we would be refused bail on police say-so and locked up for another week. When one of the barristers still nobly came after all the others had given up in despair, the magistrate rebuked her for doing so on legal aid. ‘There's nothing you can do for your clients now,’ he said. ‘I'm only concerned with the waste of public money.’ The abuse of our human rights and waste of our lives and freedom didn’t enter the equation. So long did the authorities delay our trial trying to prove somehow that we were part of a conspiracy that the pressure on the Prescott/Purdie case became too much for them to withstand. They were still habeas corpusing them, but eventually the time came when they had to be tried. They fought hard to be tried separately from us, for in that case there was nothing against Purdie and little against Prescott. The entire rationale, the web of the conspiracy charge — which dated from 1 January 1968 to 20 August 1971 — was predicated upon my being the spider, and yet Prescott and Purdie went to trial while I was still innocent until proven guilty – and shut up in Brixton Prison to prove it. The prosecution’s decision to try the two cases separately proved a mistake for them. They were not to know how the case against me would develop. Prescott and Purdie’s trial opened on 10 November 1971 at London’s Central Criminal Court, better known as the ‘Old Bailey.’ It lasted almost three weeks. The presiding judge was Mr. Justice Melford Stevenson. I write the word ‘Justice’ before his name in the strictest, technical, legal sense. He was a ‘hanging’ judge who had renamed his house in Rye ‘Truncheons.’ He had also been threatened by the Angry Brigade, and was a favourite object of attack because of his extreme right-wing views and prejudiced decisions. According to the legal code he should never have participated in the case, other than as a witness. Prosecuting council for the Crown was John Matthew QC. Melford Stevenson insisted that he was not holding a political trial. Political trials, he claimed, were unknown in the United Kingdom — a legal quibble which means that the judge and prosecution are entitled to slam away at those

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Ian Purdie

Jake Prescott

Melford Stevenson

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

in the dock as a result of evidence introduced by the political police, where it is intended to harm the defendants, but they are not allowed to answer back in terms of their politics, which might be favourably received by the jury. On the very first day of their trial, the defence lawyers Duncan (for Prescott) and Shindler (for Purdie) accepted without one word of dissent, an amendment to the conspiracy charge against them to include the names of John, Hilary, Jim, Anna, Chris and yours truly — who hadn’t yet been tried. This meant that John Matthew QC, the state prosecutor, was able to weave them into the overall conspiracy web and cite at length unchallenged evidence together with every detail of all the 27 ‘outrages,’ even though Prescott and Purdie were only alleged to have been involved in the conspiracy for a few months. Jake Prescott was charged, on his own, with the specific bomb attacks at the offices of the Department of Productivity in St James’ Square and the Barnet home of Robert Carr, Heath’s cabinet minister. Ian Purdie took the wise decision — which may have needed long deliberation, considering the possible interpretation placed upon it — of not giving evidence in his own defence. This had the effect of making the prosecution case stand or fall on the lack of evidence they had against him. All they did have against him was the fact that DCS Roy Habershon had long since decided Purdie was a central figure in the conspiracy, a ‘likely candidate’: that he was a close friend of Prescott, he was an anarchist, and that he’d run away when the police came to arrest him. Other than this, they had nothing — apart from the fact he was a Scot! Nothing? This may seem incredible to the public, since the press talked so extensively of ‘Angry Brigade’ trials, of ‘Angry Brigade’ members being brought to justice and smashed. Many commentators, novelists and journalists have added their own ha’pence worth of interpretation since — but there was nothing. He did not deny being a revolutionary. But what had that to do with the specific acts carried out by the Angry Brigade? It was for the prosecution to prove this, something they could not do, even after spending thousands of pounds of the taxpayers' money on Habershon's prejudices. Instead, they accused him of everything they could politically — of being a dangerous anarchist, revolutionary and so on. The prosecutor John Matthew QC overdid it a bit, as the jury obviously didn't have too much sympathy with the Tory Ministers who had suffered, and failed to react in the manner expected. The case against Prescott was based on two strands of evidence. He had confessed all to two prisoners who had shared his cell for a week in Brixton, Mr. ‘A’ and Mr. ‘B’, neither of whom was named or whose evidence convinced the jury. Mr. Justice Melford Stevenson, wallowing in the luxury of sitting in judgment on his own case, instructed the jury that these anonymous informers had to be believed, or else it must be admitted that they had conducted ‘a really wicked conspiracy with the police.’ Perish the thought. Which is precisely what the jury believed given that Prescott was cleared of all charges relating to specific acts of bombing, the only evidence being the statements of the two police agents.

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‘What Are The Bugles Blowin’ for’ said Files-on-Parade

The most damaging pieces of evidence were three envelopes which had carried Angry Brigade communiqués to the press after the Carr bomb attack – with Prescott’s fingerprints. These were the ones posted at 10.45pm to the Times, Daily Mirror and the Guardian from Barnet on the night of the bombing. The prosecution produced a graphologist who gave evidence that the handwriting on the envelopes was Jake Prescott’s, and there was obviously going to be graphological evidence against some of the others when our trial came to court. Prescott, however, did not deny addressing the envelopes. He claimed at the time that he did not know what they had been used for — if indeed they had been used at all. The jury appeared well-disposed towards Prescott, but the prosecution was venomous, and Mr. Justice Melford Stevenson made it absolutely clear that this case involved the forces of conservatism versus those of revolution — so much so that they were inclined to be as sympathetic as they could without coming up against the law themselves.

Purdie and Prescott — verdicts and sentence Concluding his case for the Crown on 25 November, Matthew told the jury: ‘Therefore, if you find the evidence is overwhelming that those six persons arrested in August [us] were some of the persons responsible in any way for these bombings, then it becomes important, does it not, to see what, if any connection these two defendants had with any one or more of those six persons while they were at liberty over the period of the alleged conspiracy… ‘And what you have to do is this: one has to look and see the way their minds were working at the time, and consider in the context of the question of association with others who were clearly guilty [!], whether Prescott and Purdie held such revolutionary beliefs that this confirms the other evidence that there may be of participation.’ Melford Stevenson swooped on Prescott’s admission of addressing the envelopes like the old buzzard he was. He directed the jury that if Jake had handled or addressed the envelopes, then he was guilty of conspiracy. The jury followed the direction of the judge, though in my view it was a highly dubious piece of reasoning, but explicable when one considers Mr. Justice Melford Stevenson’s role as a possible victim in the case. In his 35-minute summing up of the case against Purdie, Melford Stevenson referred to the prosecution case eleven times, and the defence once — and that in relation to his decision not to go into the witness box. The case against Prescott took the rest of the day. At 7.46 pm on 1 December the jury returned with their verdicts: Ian Purdie, not guilty on all charges; Jake Prescott, guilty of conspiracy, but not guilty on the two specific counts as allegedly admitted to Mr A and Mr B. In other words he was guilty, but not of doing anything about it, conspiring in other words to do that which he did not do. It was hardly believable. Jake Prescott was sentenced to fifteen years for addressing three envelopes. Ian Purdie, acquitted on all charges in the Angry Brigade case was sent back

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The severity of Prescott’s 15-year sentence provoked outrage

to prison, having been refused bail, to await trial for forging a cheque for £240.00. He eventually was granted bail on 23 December, after almost four weeks, pending the trial of the others named on that indictment: Bott, Prescott, Wolf Seeberg, Martin Housden, Peter Truman, Christine Haisall, Rosemary Fiore, and other ‘persons unknown.’ When our case subsequently came to trial, the press had cast Prescott as the villain — simply because of the enormity of his sentence. They spoke of his ‘vanity’, which had brought the ‘others’ to trial — ‘others’, like me, who had never heard of him before and whom he did not know! — because he had ‘told all’ to Mr. ‘A’ and Mr. ‘B’ to demonstrate what a great guy he was — a ‘confession’ rejected by the jury. Perhaps they had given him the benefit of the doubt, refusing to believe that anybody in their right mind would have admitted culpability to such obvious plants. (After Prescott left prison, having completed his sentence, reduced to 10years after the Stoke Newington 8 trial, he wrote to Robert Carr and his family apologising for his involvement in the bombing of their house, an apology that Carr accepted.)

Committal proceedings

Ian Purdie

Jake Prescott

Habershon’s obsession with numbers had led him add another four names to the conspiracy charge. He was aware of the public sympathy for the Angry Brigade and he hoped by adding to the numbers on our indictment, at least his core six ‘likely candidates’ would be more likely to be convicted. Angela Weir, a teacher in her mid-twenties, was arrested on 11 November; Chris Allen, a Notting Hill play leader and Pauline Conroy, a university lecturer were arrested a week later; and finally, on 18 December 1971, so was Kate McLean a twenty-one year old former art student from a small village in Kent, then living at 29 Grosvenor Avenue where she worked in Chris Broad’s printshop. Kate’s dad, Tony McLean, had fought in Spain with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War in 1936-1937. And so, on 3 January 1972, just over a month after the end of the PrescottPurdie trial and almost six months since the Amhurst Road arrests, ten of us went forward to the Crown committal proceedings at a new venue in Lambeth Magistrates Court. But there was a big surprise — for us and for Habershon. On the first day we learned that charges against Pauline Conroy and Chris Allen, were to be dropped on grounds of ‘insufficient evidence.’ Pauline Conroy had been on bail because she had a baby to look after — and she had to fight tooth and nail to get that concession — while Chris Allen had been in Brixton with us. Now at last, the prosecution — the first to deny bail — which had been waiting so patiently at its own convenience until it had enough evidence, formally admitted that there was no evidence against the two. Their counsel had been instructed to say that there was no case to answer. But there was no case to put forward, despite Habershon’s prejudices and the huge mass of evidence collected and collated.

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A Finely Graded Conspiracy

The crown committal proceedings meant we, the accused, could at last see the prosecution case against us. Conversely, it gave the prosecution an opportunity to finetune its case, hence the Amhurst Road four’s refusal to raise the matter of the police planting the arms and explosives in the flat. The magistrate, Mr. Herbert Christopher Beaumont MBE, did not go as far as to say that this was not a political case, but he did say that the role of the political police must not be discussed. He did not want the fiction that we had no political police exposed and directed the Special Branch officers not to answer questions on their activities or the interests of their organisation put by any of the defence counsel. DS Roy Habershon; DI George Mould and (right) DI Riby Wilson (Special Branch) Without an understanding of the role of the Special Branch the trial would be meaningless. It would not just be Hamlet without the ghost, it would be Hamlet with no reference to the murder of Hamlet’s father in case it embarrassed the King of Denmark. The outcome of the trial therefore depended on how far counsel and those defending themselves could outwit this stratagem. The committal outlined a finely graded conspiracy in which I was cast in the pivotal role. It went back to a period when my co-defendants were still at school in some cases, or just starting at university in others. It began, indeed, in August 1967 with me tucked up safely in a Spanish jail, when the US Embassy in London was machine-gunned by members of the First of May Group. This selfsame machine-gun was alleged to have reappeared in the Amhurst Road flat four years later. I had apparently cast my net wide, and linked the First of May Group with the people in the dock, whom the prosecution claimed constituted — or in part constituted — the Angry Brigade. As the inconsistencies in the case became apparent during the committal — which was in effect a dress rehearsal for the trial — they were ironed out and alternative explanations given. A great deal still remained in the realm of ‘probability.’ ‘Probably’ I was the facilitator… ‘probably’ I had been involved because of my knowledge of explosives... ‘probably’ when this person went to Paris he or she contacted friends of mine who were members of the Spanish resistance ... our views were such that we ‘no doubt’ approved of the acts committed, and so on. Our dilemma was that none of us wished to disown the actions of the Angry Brigade. Had we done so, all those who represented what we most despised politically would have been delighted, and I’m not sure that the sentences wouldn’t have been greater than they were. Certainly we were revolutionaries. Among those in the dock, Kate McLean, a member of the Anarchy collective, and myself were the only ones who defined ourselves as anarchists, the others described themselves as libertarian socialists. Our common ground was self-

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management, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism and, most importantly, a belief in direct action. We believed people should not submit passively to oppression and injustice, and should respond appropriately to confrontation. It was pointless to deny this, anyway, because everyone knew what we stood for, and we didn’t want to get up there and lie. Part of our defence was that these were the very reasons we had been charged — but that did not mean we were guilty. It was rather as if a police spy of an occupying power had gone round to a public meeting and asked an agitator — who might be an anarchist or maybe just a nationalist — whether it was alright to obey the state. If the person said yes he was exposed to the crowd as a phony, if he said no he would be arrested. You would have to be as clever as Christ, literally. We had the added disadvantage that if we tried any Christ-like tricks with the images on Caesarian coins our trial judge was there to rule them out of order. Then the trial proper began. Just after 7 am on the morning of Wednesday 31 May 1971 my cell door was unlocked and I was escorted by screws to Reception where John, Jim and Chris were already waiting. Our trial was scheduled to begin at 10 o’clock that morning in Number One Court of the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey. After a hurried plastic mug of tea and porridge, we were cuffed-up and squeezed into a green Bedford van with barred and darkened windows. Accompanying us was an affable middle-aged pipe-smoking Northern screw who would be with us for the trial as principal Dock Officer. Emerging from the enormous wooden gates of HMP Brixton, we pulled in briefly for our driver to liaise with the police escort waiting outside as to the route and which radio channel to use. Lined up along Jebb Avenue were four Hillman Hunters, two in front and two behind. Our convoy also had two Metropolitan Police motorcycle outriders to clear our way through any red traffic lights we might come across. We took off at high speed, racing along Jebb Avenue, down Brixton Hill and through Camberwell, headlights flashing and wailing two-tone sirens announcing our passage across town to the City of London. Crossing Blackfriars Bridge our convoy drove like the clappers up Farringdon Road, turned right just past Holborn Viaduct and up Snow Hill into Newgate Street. Peering through the dark glass I saw our destination — the Old Bailey.

Old Bailey from Snow Hill

Perched triumphantly on the copper which caps the Old Bailey dome — mirroring the nearby dome of St Paul’s Cathedral — stood the iconic bronze figure of Blind Justice, wielding a sword in one hand and scales in the other. She — for the figure of Justice is a she — overlooks the site where condemned prisoners were once flogged, mutilated, ‘pressed’, burnt at the stake or hanged. Maybe that’s why she was blindfolded. Maybe she couldn’t see the truth of what was really going on and it was all a matter of blind fucking chance! The Edwardian baroque façade of the Central Criminal Court, or Old Bailey, had been rebuilt in

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Number One Court

1907 from the stones of the notorious Newgate Prison, a sink of human misery for hundreds of years, which was only demolished in 1902. It had been the setting for the most infamous cases in world criminal history. Looming ominously over the steep-stepped threshold hung a sculpted group in white marble representing the Recording Angel supported by two hangers-on, Fortitude and Truth. No grand entrance for us, though. Around 9 o’clock in the morning we arrived by cellular van through the prisoners’ entrance, round the back and down the ramp into what looked like a supermarket loading bay. We filed out in handcuffs, one by one, and were escorted by screws through barred gates and down a fluorescent-lit corridor of highly-glazed shit-brown and institutional cream bricks into a row of cells that ran along one side. All that was in my cell was a small pine table, the size of a school desk, and a chair. It smelled of Dettol, like a recently hosed-down urinal. At around 9.45, we were taken from our cells and led through labyrinthine passages, up a short flight of stairs and into a small oak-panelled room containing a bench and a narrow and steeply-inclined wooden staircase, such as you might expect to find in an arms-dealer’s yacht. This staircase led into the dock of Number One Court. We were about to follow in the footsteps of defendants in the most publicised criminal cases in English history — some appalling, some tragic, and some political: Daniel Defoe, Oscar Wilde, Dr Crippin, Lord ‘Haw-Haw’ (William Joyce), John Haigh, Derek Bentley, Timothy Evans, my namesake John Reginald Christie, Ruth Ellis, George Blake, James Hanratty, the publishers of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the Kray twins….

In the dock The dock of Number One Court at the Old Bailey could just about hold the eight of us, along with two male and two female dock-officers, escort screws — twelve in all. We were on the same eye-level as the judge who sat directly across the well of the court. We were surrounded on three sides by a glass screen, presumably to minimize our chances of escape or assassination. On our left, by the main public doors from the Great Hall into the courtroom, was the jury box with two stepped rows of benches for twelve men and women. Between the jury and the judge was the witness box. Directly below the jury was the court reporters’ box, with room for perhaps half a dozen hacks. In the centre was the well of the court with the tables and chairs for the Clerk of the Court, his bewigged and black-gowned officers and ushers, senior police officers and the McKenzie helpers. The stenographers who recorded every word spoken in court had a separate table. In the first row of stepped benches to our right sat the Crown prosecution team and defence QCs, behind whom sat their junior barristers, solicitors and their clerks. Behind the barristers was a gloaters’ box, slightly smaller than that in which the jury sat. This was reserved for Very Important Persons, guests of the judges and the Corporation of London who ran the Old Bailey on behalf of the

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Blind Justice

Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey, London

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Main entrance to Old Bailey

Establishment. Above the VIPs was the steeply raked public gallery where friends and interested members of the public could watch the mills of British justice grind slow and small. Directly behind the dock was the area reserved for family members of the accused Across the well of the court from us was the Bench, the judicial equivalent of a ship’s bridge, where the judge presided. On special days in the legal calendar of the Corporation of the City of London, Old Bailey judges carry small nosegays of flowers as a smelly reminder of the times when they could hang, draw, quarter, disembowel and burn the entrails of people like us. (The last man to be hanged and beheaded for treason was Colonel Despard in 1803. The authorities remitted the disemboweling and the rest purely to prevent an insurrection among his prodemocracy supporters in post-French Revolution Europe.) The flowers masked the stench of death, disease and decay of Stewart, Hanoverian and Victorian London. This was one of those days — 31 May 1972.

The Court will rise! Whose Conspiracy?: welcoming graffiti

Mr Justice James Architects of reaction: Heath, Thatcher and Lord Hailsham, the Lord Chancellor who appointed Justice James

The Clerk of the Court told everyone to rise, which we did. The buzz of conversation died away and the room fell silent. From the door on the righthand side of the judicial stage emerged a procession of men in ornate fur hats, wigs, ermine-collared crimson robes, gowns and gaiters, in single file. They were led by a clerk wielding an enormous ceremonial sword, which he proceeded to hang on the wall behind the judge’s bench like a sword of Damocles. The medieval flummery came as a surprise to us in the dock and it took me all my time not to laugh out loud. Presumably, it was a procedure intended to intimidate, but it looked to us like an parade of pantomime villains come on to take a bow. Here was the power of the body politic in its fanciest frocks, as though it was anxious to show that every trial was a political trial. The line-up on the judicial bench consisted of the Lord Mayor of the City of London and his acolytes; the Recorder, the principal legal officer of the City; the Common Sergeant, the legal adviser to the Court of the Common Council , various aldermen — and our trial judge, Mr Justice James. Judge James had been personally selected for our trial by Lord Chief Justice Parker and Edward Heath’s Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham. He had been chosen with care and foresight. If our trial had been presided over by too blatantly a right-wing judge, such as Mr Justice Melford Stevenson, a man incapable of hiding his prejudices, it would have been seen as a clear provocation. No, what was required was a skilful judge who could present a public façade of reason and objectivity. The Lord Mayor took what appeared to be the best seat in the house, under a wooden canopy, with the presiding judge seated at an unpretentious desk to his right. The Recorder, the Common Sergeant, his City colleagues and the Sheriff sat to the left of the judge. Once the great and the good of the City of London had taken their seats it was

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Challenging Jurors

time for us to be arraigned. The Clerk of the Court stood up an read out the charges in the case Regina v Greenfield and others. When he came to my name, the first charge was read out: ‘On or about 20 August 1971, at Sydnor Road [where I had parked the Corsair], knowingly had in his possession or under his control certain explosive substances, namely two detonators and a screwdriver, in such circumstances as to give rise to a reasonable suspicion that he did not have them in his possession or under his control for a lawful object.’ As soon as this charge was read out, I shouted my innocence and that the detonators had been planted on me by police officers acting under the instructions of Commander Bond. The Clerk politely told me to shut up, and that my defence would be heard in due course. After the arraignments, we sat down and the trial began.

The indictment

Selecting our jury The first job was to empanel our jury, the twelve men and women on whose verdict the outcome of our trial depended. Although we couldn’t choose our judge — that was left to our enemies, not that it would have done us much good if we could — we did have a right of veto over jurors. Not a lot of people knew that at the time. For years people had been charged with political offences and faced a jury bound by its class nature to be hostile to them. Now, however, the selection of juries had been widened, and each of us in the dock had seven refusals — making a total of 56 people in all whom we could challenge. This gave us virtually a free hand in rejecting anyone we considered might possibly be prejudiced. We tossed them all out one by one, the middle class, the trendy liberals and focused on trying to empanel a solidly working class jury. In an unprecedented challenge to the political bias of the courts, we even managed to oblige Mr. Justice James to ask jurors if they were members of the Conservative Party, or if they had a relative who was serving in Northern Ireland, a police officer, a member of the judiciary, an employee of Securicor or were prejudiced against anarchism — if so, this might meant they could not give the defendants a fair trial. In total we challenged fifty-four would-be jurors. Seventeen admitted they were biased and thirty-seven were challenged through defence questioning. The prosecution challenged two. Our challenges were purely intuitive, based on their addresses, occupations and appearances, which were all we had to go on. It was impossible to tell if some of the chic-looking ones were radicals or if the friendlylooking housewives were prejudiced or not. But we were not taking any chances. We did not think we could get a jury that agreed 100 per cent with us, but in the end we got more or less the sort of working class jury that we hoped for, one that we hoped would look at the case from our point of view. When the jury was finally empanelled, John Barker, one of the three defending themselves from the dock, invited them to ask questions directly of the defendants. Mr Justice James

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Number One Court (old print)

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In the dock: the accused as seen by Oz (No.45, November 1972

nearly had a fit at this attempt to short-circuit the system and ruled against it, insisting that all questions from the jury be passed through him. The prosecution case revolved around our politics. None of us was prepared to disown the Angry Brigade, which, we believed, was at least doing something — however gestural — to fight back against the tide of reaction and repression that had been sweeping the world since at least the mid-1950s. On the other hand we didn’t want to admit responsibility, just because the police had selected us as ‘likely candidates’ for guilt and fabricated their case accordingly. That was why jury selection was so important. It took all of the first morning and most of the afternoon. Our strategy, from the start, was to challenge everything the prosecution said and not allow the jury to be dissuaded from the presumption of innocence justice demanded. It was, after all, a class war situation and, as Brigadier Frank Kitson had pointed out in his recently published work Low Intensity Operations: ‘The Law should be used as just another weapon in the government’s arsenal, and in this case it becomes little more than propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public. For this to happen efficiently, the activities of the legal service have to be tied into the war effort in as discreet a way as possible...’ Appearing for the Crown was John Matthew QC, the barrister who led the prosecution in the Purdie-Prescott case. Slim and charismatic with his black robes, black suit and a rugged saturnine face the colour of a strawberry Mivvi, Matthew’s features, mannerisms and demeanour reminded me strongly of Peter Cushing in the role of Professor Abraham van Helsing, the indefatigable vampire hunter in Dracula. Perhaps the metaphor was an apt one; wasn’t Van Helsing the fearless leader in the hunt to expose Dracula and bring him to justice? Wasn’t he the man through whom Bram Stoker, the author, presents the arcana of vampire lore and explains what it is that predisposes a person to become a vampire, what the strengths and limitations of vampires are, and how to destroy the creatures? Number One Court at the Old Bailey was about to provide the backdrop to a modern day morality tale in which the forces of light overcome the powers of darkness, the ancient struggle between good and evil. The question was —who were the vampires?

The prosecution case The trial began at 10 the next morning, 1 June 1972, when the prosecuting barrister and Senior Treasury Counsel John Matthew QC rose to give his opening speech. ‘Now members of the jury, the allegation in this case is that these defendants, these eight defendants, calling themselves revolutionaries and anarchists, under various names, sought to disrupt and attack the democratic society of this country, with whose structure and politics they apparently disagree, to disrupt it by a wave of violent attacks over quite a lengthy period, that is, by causing explosions aimed at the property of those whom they considered to be their political or social opponents. ‘Now, members of the jury, I am going back four years or more — between March of 1968 and August of 1971, a period of over three years, on no fewer than nineteen

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Charting A Conspiracy

occasions, explosions were caused by home-made bombs, which damaged buildings, mostly in the London area, some in Birmingham and Manchester, and on a further six occasions, attempts were made to cause explosions against property, the bombs either failing to explode or being discovered before they could detonate. ‘There were two other acts of a different nature which also took place. Namely, on two occasions, shots were fired from a sub-machine gun at the Spanish and American Embassy Buildings in London, and it is the case for the Crown that these twenty-five incidents, involving bombs and two shootings, are all linked, in that they have so many common factors, that they are all clearly associated, and therefore the responsibility for them can be shown to emanate from a common source. ‘All the defendants, it is alleged, were part or parties to that common source. Well, members of the jury, it may be that a number of persons other than these defendants were involved in one or more of these incidents, and a man called Prescott was certainly one of those persons who was involved, but it is specifically alleged, and the Crown will seek to prove, that anyway over part of this period of three years, during which these serious explosions took place, these defendants were parties to this conspiracy of violence, although it is not alleged that necessarily all of them were parties over the whole period.’ The reference to Jake, and an earlier reference to Purdie, were to be the first

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Conspiracy chart: the Home Office’s correlation of the bombings and actions conveniently begins with the author’s release from a Francoist prison

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John Matthew referring to police interview with Chris Bott (Evening News 1 June, 1972)

Ian McDonald: Jim Greenfield’s barrister

of many, and although in the first instance Ian’s acquittal was mentioned, there followed sinister references to Purdie and Prescott throughout Matthew’s opening speech and the rest of the trial. Another thing that troubled us was the fact that the Chief Superintendent Habershon, a potential witness in the case, remained ensconced in the well of the court. Throughout the trial, he annoyed the life out of John Matthew, the prosecuting counsel, by constantly passing him notes and grabbing at his sleeve. Because Habershon was a witness we made an application to get him out of court, a move which seemed to relieve Matthew as much as us. Finally, the judge ruled he could stay, at which point we staged a token walk-out and remained downstairs for about ten minutes before we decided to return to the dock. Matthew’s opening speech lasted eight hours, only 45 minutes of which were reserved for Angela Weir and Kate McLean, and even less for Chris Bott. Apart from the cheque fraud, the evidence against him consisted of what the police claimed he had said during his interrogation, that he knew all about the Angry Brigade. It was as clear at the start as it was six months later that Chris Bott was a makeweight. The idea behind having three people in the dock with absolutely no verifiable evidence against them was so that in the event of a hung jury, a compromise could be reached between those for a guilty verdict and those against. It would be a balm for their consciences. John Barker, Hilary Creek and Anna Mendelson defended themselves from the dock. Jim Greenfield, the first on the indictment, was represented by Ian McDonald. Kevin Winstain and Patrick Mullen acted for me. Ted Glasgow and Joe Harper appeared for Kate McLean, Mike Mansfield for Angela Weir and Lawton Scott QC for Chris Bott. The case, as outlined by John Matthew QC, was one of a far-reaching conspiracy, one that placed me slap bang in the centre — the agent of international anarchism, and the ‘man of confidence’ of Octavio Alberola, the Mexican mastermind of global revolution. This conspiracy went back to a period when none of the other defendants could possibly have been involved, as they were either at school or just beginning university, and when I myself was safely locked up in a Spanish jail. It extended to the day in Stoke Newington when the arsenal and the plans of the Angry Brigade were allegedly found. Everything was dovetailed to fit a neat conspiracy model in which I was the ringleader. The press gave great publicity to John Matthew’s opening remarks as he outlined this grand plan. Subsequently, a blanket of press silence fell, as Matthew called witness after witness, each one of whom was torn to shreds either by the cross-examination, or, in some cases, was seen to be frankly siding with the defence. Saddest of all were the antics of the so-called ‘expert’ witnesses from the Home Office Laboratory at Woolwich, Howard Yallop and Donald Lidstone among others, and their attempts to prove that they were in fact objective

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The Silence of The Hacks

scientists just out to reinforce the prosecution case. It was rumoured that the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, had given personal instructions to the press for the silence that fell over the case once John Matthew’s allegations had been made, thus saving the Special Branch and the Bomb Squad from a searching examination. If this was so, Mr. Maudling was amply repaid. He dug a pit and promptly fell into it. Deprived of one sensation, the press fell for another, and it happened to be Mr. Maudling’s private business dealings that came under public scrutiny. The normal publicity of the trial would have attracted press attention during the prosecution case, and he might have avoided his exposure. Had it not been for that, he would most likely have succeeded Edward Heath after the defeat of the Conservatives.

Let them eat cake The press silence after the first day was deafening. Media coverage in favour of the defence was only lifted when Alex Comfort, anarchist poet and scientist, challenged the Guardian as to the reasons for the silence, a challenge that was taken up by radio and TV. It was broken again with the presentation of a birthday cake to Anna by one of the barristers, an event far too significant for the press to miss out on, even if they could afford not to report that the prosecution case was being bowled over like ninepins — while all the country was assuming that ‘the Angry Brigade have been caught... they will all get twenty years... they ought to get life’ or not, as the case may be. The cake took on an important role in the case. The Holloway prison authorities refused permission for Anna to receive the cake in case it had file in it (they didn’t like irony), so Joe Harper, one of the defence barristers, suddenly produced it in court and asked Mr. Justice James for permission to let her have it. Judge James replied testily, ‘We won’t have a demonstration of the cake. Put the cake away please. This is a criminal court.’ ‘Funny,’ John murmured audibly from the dock, ‘I thought it was supposed to be a court of justice.’ But Mr. Justice James, who was as canny a performer as they come, quickly realised that this display of judicial bad temper had not gone down well with the jury. He added, smoothly, ‘It is not for me to grant permission. It is merely for me to say that it would meet with my approval providing the prison authorities are willing to receive it. I think it is a very nice gesture.’ Joe Harper managed to get another dig in at the pompous explosives expert, Lidstone, who had taken great pride in explaining to the court how he had personally developed a test which laid bare to the scientific eye the constituent elements in explosives traces — the Lidstone Test. ‘I can assure your Lordship there is nothing secreted in it,’ said Harper. ‘Would you like to apply the Lidstone Test to it?’ Judge James, quick as a flash, replied, ‘I have no objections.’ But the cake had been an important point, just as Kevin Winstain’s gesture had been in handing sweets to us in the dock during the committal proceedings. The magistrate had testily told him to put them away. ‘They’re

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nearly all finished anyway,’ he had remarked, handing out the balance. But it was, if not an acid, at least an acid-drop commentary on the — for the time — absurd degree of precautions taken both inside and outside the court. Originally people were frisked as they came in, armed police patrolled the perimeter of the court with walkie-talkies and security in general was absurdly tight. Gradually over the months, with this type of erosion, it was dropped. The birthday cake was a reply to the press publicity which had asserted, keeping only just within the bounds of propriety, that here was a violence fetishist: there were headlines such as ‘Gun Girl Sleeps Beside Arsenal.’ When members of the public cared enough to send her a birthday cake, the press propaganda was devalued, and by a gesture it could not resist publicising. As the case proceeded, John Matthew continued to present me as the eminence gris. But the evidence before the court was little enough, and what there was of it withered away and died during the prosecution case. There were no substantive charges against me for causing explosions. None of the forensic evidence fitted and neither was there any handwriting or fingerprint evidence. The prosecution had cast me in the role of Mr. Big. When Jim Greenfield was being beaten up shortly after his arrest, DC Sivell had said to him ‘You seem to be more frightened of Christie than you are of us, that’s why you won’t talk.’ But still they could not make the case fit the charges. Jim was cast in the role of technical expert — the bomb-maker; John Barker was the ideologist. This was on the basis that during a raid on his old Powis Square flat, DS Cremer had discovered a copy of Guy Debord’s 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, with annotations in John Barker’s handwriting in the margins. Anna, for want of anything better against her, was Jim’s moll. Indeed, had she been his legal wife, they would have had to acquit her; a husband and wife cannot be guilty of conspiring together. Hilary they had down as a courier, since it could be proved that she went to France and therefore she must have brought the explosives back with her. Why she had not been stopped at the Customs was for them to answer. In the eyes of the prosecution, the women were never seen as activists in their own right, they were secondary players without any autonomous political identity. The procession of alleged experts for the Crown did not affect my position at all, except for the causal link alleged to exist, which stated that various explosions were linked by similar materials and methods. Consequently they were part of one and the same continuing conspiracy. These experts thought very highly of themselves and were annoyed when their integrity was questioned. Donald Lidstone in particular was often irate and humpy during the ten or so days he was in the witness box. ‘We are known and respected throughout the world… I take great exception…’ This continued throughout his evidence until at last Ian MacDonald, Jim’s barrister, put it to him bluntly: ‘I am not suggesting that you are wrong or are careless, Mr. Lidstone. I am suggesting you are lying.’ Had Lidstone not been prepared to act in defence of what his employers,

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August Is A Wicked Month

ultimately the Home Office, considered their interests, he would have been afraid to give evidence for fear his living would have been jeopardised. But to have this pointed out in open court was intolerable. Needless to say, it never made the press, which had for the time being exhausted itself in reporting John Matthew’ s opening allegations, to the surprise of the general reader, when it was found the jury did not accept them. In response we called our own scientific witnesses to contest virtually every statement and finding of the police sycophants. So angry was the Explosives Laboratory at Woolwich Arsenal over the questioning of its experts, that its senior civil servants pulled out every stop to ensure that our explosives witness, Lieutenant Colonel Shaw, a lecturer in explosives, and a man who spent his life studying explosives, was prevented thereafter from continuing his lectures throughout the country at universities, colleges, training schools and Ministry of Defence establishments. So effective was the defence case in challenging the prosecution’s scientific evidence that in the end Matthew more or less gave up on it and told the jury to rely on common sense instead.

We’re not going on a summer holiday Once we had ploughed our way through the prosecution case, it was almost time for the judge’s summer holiday. He was looking forward to a rest among his beloved roses and a sea cruise in warmer climes. Bewigged, red-robed and ermine-collared, he looked around the courtroom benignly and announced that everyone needed a rest. Even those of us in the dock were politely asked what we thought, despite the fact that we were the star performers and that for us a holiday was not on the cards. We agreed to it, not that we had much choice. Personally, I was most in favour because I felt August was never my lucky month. However, we were all fed up with the routine — getting up in the morning at seven a.m., washing, shaving, slopping out the piss-pots, going straight from the cells at eight to the Old Bailey, and getting no exercise nor any fresh air throughout the week — week after week. We also had to cart around with us all our worldly goods: books, papers and a mountain of legal depositions, while handcuffed to someone else. This went on for six months. A change is said to be as good as a rest, so a few weeks in god-forsaken Brixton, without going to the Old Bailey each day, came like a month’s holiday in Spain ... certainly the way I remembered it. During our first full week back in the Brixton routine we found that a lot of the earlier reforms we thought we had achieved had either been eroded or not implemented. It was time for more demonstrations. We chose a Sunday as there would be no visits that day which could give the screws the leverage they needed to break the protest. Nor would there be any court appearances on Sunday. So, instead of having a sit-down outside in the yard, we decided to occupy ‘A’ Wing. When the time came for us to collect our meals from the hotplates and take them back to our cells, everyone collected their food and then sat down in the hall. Just before lunch Jim, John, Chris and I were called to

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Well, we got no choice All the girls and boys Makin’ all that noise ‘Cause they found new toys Well, we can’t salute ya Can’t find a flag If that don’t suit ya That’s a drag School’s out for summer School’s out forever School’s been blown to pieces No more pencils No more books No more teacher’s dirty looks

Well you can bump and grind If it’s good for your mind Well you can twist and shout Let it all hang out But you won’t fool the children of the revolution No you won’t fool the children of the revolution No no no Well you can tear a plane In the falling rain I drive a Rolls Royce ‘Cos its good for my voice

collect some food that had been sent in to us. By the time we got back to the wing the sit-down was in full swing. As we had our food on plates brought in from outside we had no need to go back to our cells, so we sat down to a banquet and a satisfying floorshow. By now the occupants of two landings were sitting down on the floor of ‘A’ Wing chatting away, with the new radios blaring away the latest top of the pops: Alice Cooper’s School’s Out for Summer — Amazingly, the screws continued to call people down to collect their food — including the category ‘A’ prisoners and the Escapers — who promptly sat down beside us. Finally the governor arrived and surveyed the scene with a majestic eye, thinking perhaps he could quell it with an icy look. We didn’t want to speak to him. We wanted the Inspector of Prisons. He left with what dignity he could muster, ordering the screws to withdraw from the wing. We then settled down on the floor to make ourselves as comfortable as we could for the night while other prisoners roamed around, dancing, singing, and playing cards and chatting. It was a curious feeling; a taste of freedom inside jail. We were butterflies inside a locked room. Fearing a mass breakout, screws and police surrounded the prison and searchlights played on the walls as if it were Colditz Castle. The off-duty screws were furious at being called in on their free day and let everyone know it. In the morning, around 6 am, the wing doors were thrown open and a regiment of screws marched in two by two. It was the military Tattoo at Edinburgh Castle, minus the pipes and drums. They filed in and took up positions along the sides of the gallery, up the stairs and along the landings. Ours was planned as a peaceful demonstration so no one resisted and we returned to our cells under the hostile looks and muttered abuse of the screws. Shortly after my cell door had been banged behind me, it was thrown open again and I was wheeched out of the cell by two burly no-necked screws with high-peaked caps who told me that I was on governor’s report for offences against GOD — good order and discipline. Again! The procedure was the same as before. I was marched downstairs military style and into an admin room on the ground floor where the two screws snapped to attention in front of the governor seated at a table with the wing governor and assistant governors beside him. The senior screw told me to identify myself by giving my name and prison number. Both officers then pivoted round to face me while I remained facing the governor. There wasn’t a lot they could do given that I was in the middle of a major trial and the focus of a considerable amount of press attention. Any serious punishment he meted out would have added to the already tense atmosphere in the nick and perhaps have triggered a serious riot. I explained why we had felt obliged to protest in the way we did and was told my comments would be noted. I was then officially reprimanded, whatever that meant in my situation, and marched back to my cell. The next morning our cells were opened for slopping out at the usual time and life continued as though nothing untoward had happened the previous day.

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The Blast

The defence case Returning to the Old Bailey after our five-week long holiday was like returning to school for a new term, with all the old familiar faces; the banter among ourselves as to how this juror and that juror was taking it, and jokes about the judge and persecution team. But the exams were upon us instantly — it was our turn to make our case. From the very beginning we had established an ‘in and out of the dock’ pattern based on alleged toilet necessity. To save endless notes backwards and forwards to the judge asking his permission to leave the court to go to the toilet, a time-consuming process, he had made an unofficial ruling that we could go downstairs whenever the need arose. So, whenever the boredom became overwhelming, we would pop downstairs to the narrow panelled corridor that runs underneath the dock of Number One Court and have a smoke, chat or read the morning paper. Another entertainment was putting names to the faces of the visitors in the VIP gallery, on the right hand side of the court, facing the jury. One regular was Lord Cohen of Tesco’s. I imagine his main reason for coming was to make sure that none of us ever served on one of his tills. John, Hilary, Jim and Anna’s defence was that the explosives and weapons in the Amhurst Road flat had been planted by the police. They argued that these had been acquired elsewhere during one of Habershon’s many earlier ‘fishing expedition’ raids and kept for future use until the ‘likeliest candidates’ had been arrested. The defence’s crossexamination of the police witnesses delved deep into their motives for lying, the psychology of the bomb squad — and underscored the fact that innocence or guilt had no bearing whatsoever on the results of a police investigation which had been ordered at Cabinet Office level to get results. A conspiracy had existed, they told the jury, but one that had taken place in smoke-filled backrooms in Whitehall with the object of finding the most ‘likely candidates’ and getting them into the dock. John Barker questioned all the police witnesses about similar cases of planting explosives, referring in particular to the collapse that June of the highprofile Saor Eire arms trial at the Old Bailey. The case had been based on a police plot to plant firearms and explosives on five Irishmen using a serving Special

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Historic precedents: old prints of No 1 Court trials

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Branch officer, David Lee, and his agent, John Parker. The case was thrown out of court and everyone acquitted when the provocateur role of the Special Branch became known. Every time John mentioned this trial Mr Justice James, our very own Assyrian, came down on him like the wolf on the fold, telling the jury to disregard what they heard. The mention of another similar case was quickly stamped on: that of a Metropolitan Police officer, DI Hales, who had just been charged with blackmail and possession of explosives. Unlike us, however, he had been released on £10,000 bail. Policemen with explosives don’t present such a serious threat to the Establishment. But these references to specific cases of police corruption in the defence’s cross-examination more often that not caught the police witnesses unawares, making them come across as decidedly flaky. John, Hilary and Anna successfully opened up to the jury about their lives and their politics, about their work in the Claimants’ Union and the squatting movement and their research into the activities of property tycoons such as Freshwater. So effective was this approach that John Matthew made the point to the jury in his summing up that they should disregard any feelings they might have about ‘capitalist landlords’ and stick strictly to the law. They also put the question of violence into perspective by comparing the damage done to Robert Carr’s kitchen with the fact that 529 building workers died on building sites every year, yet these deaths are neatly reclassified as ‘industrial accidents’ and buried far from the front pages of the national press and rarely mentioned on the radio or television news. A large part of the case against me relied on the perjured testimony of a friend of Ross’s called Lisa Byers. She had responded to a newspaper’s promise of £10,000 for evidence against the Angry Brigade, and had told Habershon that she had found a machine gun magazine in the glove compartment of my car (actually Albert’s car). She thought might have fitted one of the machine guns the police showed her. As a member of the jury pointed out, ‘I’ve been in the Army and I couldn’t recognise what clips fitted that gun. How could that woman recognise them?’ She was lying anyway. The judge grew testy — as he did increasingly as the trial dragged on — sorry he had allowed the question. ‘Miss Byers comes from Seattle,’ he said. The judge’s remark rather shocked the worthy burghers of that town, who (after being prompted by an anarchist lady not usually noted for her defence of bourgeois complacency), wrote to Mr. Justice James complaining of this slur on their fair city. The second thread in the prosecution case against me were plans I had for Europe-wide Anarchist Black Cross sponsored rock and folk concerts. These were to be fund- and awareness-raising events on behalf of the political prisoners rotting in Franco’s jails. The police had found a letter in Amhurst Road, written in Spanish and signed ‘Edy.’ I was Edy. Through their sources, whoever they may have been, the police had learned I was referred to and used the code name Edy in correspondence. The police interpretation of this letter was that Edy was preparing a series of attacks against Francoist buildings and

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The Magic Bullet

institutions throughout Europe, including Spain. For the prosecution, this was the modern-day equivalent of the ‘Spartacus-Cato’ correspondence between the key conspirators of the 18th century Bavarian Illuminati, with me, presumably, as the ‘Scotch Knight.’ Finally, there was the question of the single bullet found in my flat in Fonthill Road, over a year earlier. I hadn’t paid much attention to this piece of evidence at the time, thinking nothing of it in fact. I assumed it had been thrown in as general incriminatory makeweight evidence. Not at all. What the bastards had done was take the unfired bullet from my flat in June 1970, load it into the chamber of the Browning 7.65 automatic allegedly taken from Amhurst Road in August 1971 — and then eject the unfired and previously pristine bullet, thereby providing an invaluable forensic link between the bullet, the gun — and me. When I heard this I almost choked. The brazen-ness of the fit up quite took my breath away, and I made the point quite forcefully from the witness box. But I think Matthew was also embarrassed and realised how questionable this piece of evidence was as he didn’t pursue the matter and made only a passing reference to it in his summing up of the case against me. In addition to the eight of us in the dock, there were also two male and two female prison warders. Within the courtroom itself, and in the precincts outside the court there were Bomb Squad and the Special Branch officers monitoring people in the public gallery, the hall and stairs outside the courtroom and in the section reserved for close relatives of the accused: John’s mum and sister, Jim’s dad, Anna’s mum and dad, Kate McLean’s mum and dad, people related to Angie Weir and Chris Bott, and of course Brenda. My mum and sister didn’t come down for the trial as I specifically asked them not to, as had Hilary whose parents were pensioners living in Wales. We’d have an official break around 11-ish when the judge rose and the jury shuffled off for a cup of tea and a bun. No tea and buns for us, but we would troop downstairs for a cigarette and a joint conference with our defence counsel. The Court adjourned for lunch at one o’clock when, amid the scraping of chairs and the bustle of shouted messages and requests for fags to friends and family in the court, we would file down again into the bowels of the Old Bailey, each to our own narrow brown-tiled cells to wait for the soggy re-heated slops that passed for meals. If the duty screw remembered, he would bring us sugarless over-milked tea, but more often than not we went without. After lunch we would be unlocked and escorted to the conference rooms where our barristers, solicitors, clerks and McKenzie helpers would be waiting to discuss how the day had gone so far and

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Central Criminal Court: Old Bailey

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what the afternoon held in store. This was a vast improvement on spending a whole hour banged up in the depressing Victorian-tiled-cells of the Old Bailey. McKenzie helpers got their name from a Court of Appeal ruling in the case McKenzie v. McKenzie in 1970. The court held that any person — whether professionally qualified or not — could attend a trial as a friend of the defendant and take notes, offer suggestions and give advice. The great advantage of these McKenzies was that because they were not lawyers, they could get away with an awful lot, and all of them were recruited from our Stoke Newington 8 Defence Group. I had a legal team so I didn’t have a McKenzie. Habershon, Bond and their team hated the McKenzies, looking upon them as Angry Brigade co-conspirators and monitoring their every move. At two in the afternoon the chief prison officer would escort us back upstairs to the dock, to await the arrival of the judge and jury. Apart from the brief appearance of Lisa Byers and the policeman who had translated the Edy letter, the case for me at least, was immeasurably boring, consisting of weeks and months of forensic evidence from the alleged experts. At last it was my turn to take the witness stand. I was fifth on the indictment. Despite the fact that I had sat in the dock for almost five months and watched hundreds of people troop in and out, I was still nervous. The nearest people to me now were the judge on my left (who looked markedly less benevolent close up) and the foreman of the jury on my right. They looked at me curiously and I returned their curiosity, wondering what they were thinking as I gave my evidence. Kevin, my counsel, took me through my life history in the hope that this would allow the jury to see that the motives which had governed all my actions, including my trip into Spain, had been honourable ones. Most accused people avoid mentioning previous convictions when taking the stand; I had thought it best to make my involvement in the Spanish Resistance clear from the start — and the fact that I had been convicted for my part in a plot against Franco’s life. I hoped it would give them a clearer idea as to why the police had constructed the parameters of the conspiracy the way they had, and why they were so determined to get a conviction in my case. I told the court of my life since returning from Spain — under constant surveillance by the police (a fact accepted by the judge and the prosecution alike) and working extremely long hours on the gas conversion contract in North London and the Home Counties. My argument was that it was unlikely that a person such as myself — well known to and closely watched by the police — would have much opportunity, let alone inclination, to do what was alleged by the police. To my mind, the jury appeared reasonably sympathetic and interested as I gave my evidence, but it was impossible to try to plumb the depths of the jury’s minds until they had finally delivered their verdict. The prosecution case against me began to crumble from the moment I took the stand. The evidence against me consisted of Lisa Byer’s statement that she

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The Concerts Of Europe

suspected I was involved with the Angry Brigade in some way, and that I had ‘magazines in my car.’ Her evidence was taken, as Kevin explained it to the jury, with a great pinch of salt and ‘smacked of sour grapes on her part.’ Fellow workers and managers from William Press came to the stand in succession to say that they travelled in my car regularly and that they had never seen anything remotely resembling guns, detonators or magazine clips. They also testified to police harassment — comments which were quickly slapped down by the judge — and gave me character references that would have got me into heaven, had they been taken at face value.

For Edy The most difficult part of the case against me was a letter found at Amhurst Road, written by me in Spanish and signed Edy. The prosecution wanted to know why I would use a pseudonym, and what the other acronyms, abbreviations and coded references used referred to. I explained that the letter dealt with matters relating to the anti-Francoist Resistance and were I to give this information in court, Scotland Yard would have passed them on within hours to their colleagues in the Directorate General of Security in Madrid. The people concerned would have been immediately arrested, tortured — and possibly even executed. But I stressed that the letter had to do with the antiFrancoist resistance, and had nothing to do with bombing campaigns. Karl Dallas, a well-known concert promoter and manager of musicians, was called as a witness in my defence to confirm that I was indeed involved in ongoing discussion to set up Europe-wide concerts in support of the victims of Francoism. How the letter came to be in Amhurst Road, I couldn’t explain, but if it wasn’t taken there by the police, then it must have been among papers which I had given John Barker on some earlier occasion. Despite the judge’s raised eyebrow and prosecutor John Matthew pouring scorn on the possibility or likelihood of pop concerts and concerted propaganda actions in Barcelona and Madrid, the jury accepted my explanation of the contents of the letter. The detonators had been planted in the car I shared with Albert Meltzer by the police; a fact I had stressed from the moment Commander Bond produced them from his desk drawer, 45 minutes into his interview with me. This protest had been faithfully recorded in the police notes of my interview with Bond. What appears to have happened came out during John Barker’s crossexamination of the exhibits officer, DC Doyle, when he said originally 13 detonators had been ‘found’ in Amhurst Road. Yet, later it emerged that 11 were ‘recovered’ from the flat, and one of those was on the floor. When Kevin Winstain, my barrister, put the matter of this discrepancy in the number of detonators to Sergeant Gilham who had led the raid on Amhurst Road. He replied he had ‘no idea.’ Winstain then asked: ‘Human beings are often subject to temptation, are they not? And isn’t it right that you pocketed two detonators? For a later time, against another suspect who might not have incriminating material in his possession or in his home?’

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‘Not at all,’ replied Gilham. ‘And,’ continued Winstain, ‘with that little touch of nervousness that such an enterprise might induce in a person, you dropped the eleventh, having picked up three.’ ‘I did not, sir.’ ‘And that’s how it dropped on the floor?’ ‘No, sir.’ Winstain then accused Gilham outright of either planting the detonators himself in the boot of my Ford Corsair, or getting his two junior officers DCs Ashendon or Sivell to plant them in the car. Gilham denied doing any such thing. It was down to the jury to decide whom they believed, Gilham, Ashenden, Sivell — or me. The other piece of evidence that the police hoped would be the straw to break the camel’s back was a screwdriver, with traces of explosives conveniently found on the end of it. This would clinch the allegation that my tools and I had been involved in preparing the explosives. There was no way the screwdriver could have come into contact with the explosives in the boot of my car, so either my screwdriver had been used by me to prepare a stick of explosive for inserting a detonator — or it had been contaminated deliberately by the police officers under the command of DS Gilham who found my car. It was my word against that of the police. Only the jury could decide whom to believe. At last, my defence counsel finished taking me through my evidence-inchief. Now it was the turn of the Crown. Matthew’s questions were delivered in a very low-keyed manner, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes deadpan, but always serpentine. He could modulate the sense of tension simply by the intonation of his voice. He began by describing my anti-Francoist activities in Spain, then examined me on my friendships with Spanish anarchists. These questions had been prepared by Habershon with information provided by the Francoist secret police; the implication being that my association with these men was a crime in itself. The point he was making was that I had done this sort of thing before, and therefore even if not actually guilty of the alleged charges, I was still the sort of character who would have done such things — and should therefore be put away for a considerable period of time for the probability. A priori culpability I think they call it. He asked about my friendship with Alain Pecunia, a French anarchist. I replied he was a good friend. ‘On 6 April 1963 he was responsible for placing a bomb on a ferry going between Barcelona and Majorca.’ ‘There were three Frenchmen arrested at that time,’ I replied, ‘Bernard Ferry, Alain Pecunia and Guy Batoux. I was under the impression that Alain had been sentenced for blowing up Franco’s monument to the fallen in the Valle de los Caidos.’ Matthew went off on another track. ‘With regard to Alberola, the Spanish

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The Counterblast Ironical

police have stated that he was the leader of the First of May Group.’ ‘This is something I am unaware of’ I said, though of course I knew that as far as the Francoist secret police were concerned, they would have accused him of instigating the revolt of the angels if theology had permitted. ‘Didn’t the First of May Group start from a matter in Italy in 1966?’ he asked. I agreed. He picked up a copy of Black Flag lying on the table in front of him. ‘I am looking at an article in your paper which deals with this matter… “another example of their success, is the kidnapping in Rome on 1 May 1966. From this action the First of May Group took its name.” Why then, when giving your evidence-in-chief [my initial statement from the witness box to my barrister, Kevin Winstain] did you refer to the First of May Group in Chicago?’ ‘I was referring to the origins of the First of May in Chicago in 1886 as a day of class solidarity. The name of the particular group which carried out Alainworking Pecunia the kidnapping in Rome came from that date.’ It was a bit of working class history he had overlooked. ‘I am suggesting in 1964 you were party to the use of violence and I suggest that you did not praise the actions of these people for nothing and are still aiding these people to carry out acts of violence,’ he said. ‘That is not true. There is a difference between acts of resistance against a fascist and oppressive government, such as in Spain, and these I would classify as quite justifiable. All government is based on consent. In representative democracies such as Britain this consent is obtained through persuasion, usually through the media and our upbringing — and is looked on as a form of compromise between labour and capital. In an openly police state, such as Spain, this consent is obtained by coercion, torture, murder and genocide. Resistance is being able to defend one’s class interests against the power of the state. At the moment this does not apply in Britain and my activities in the Anarchist Black Cross were concerned solely with aiding anarchist and libertarian political prisoners in Spain and elsewhere.’ He turned again to the copy of Black Flag: ‘Aiding practical activists in their activities?’ ‘That refers to my earlier evidence when I mentioned aiding the Spanish Resistance. You can get some idea of what is involved from the Edy letter.’ He came back with what he hoped was the coup de grace: ‘Mr. Christie, I suggest that when you were released from prison in Spain you continued your activities, as an organiser rather than as a participator.’ ‘That is not true.’ ‘Did you have any connection with the First of May Group?’ ‘No, I had nothing to do with the First of May Group. The First of May referred to on the dollar bills, referred to the date of a working class anti-fascist demonstration.’ He wasn’t getting involved in that again. He asked about Pinelli. ‘Guiseppe Pinelli organised the Anarchist Black Cross in Italy. You could

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Chicago 3 May 1886 (Flavio Costantini): on 3 May 1886 Chicago police fired into a crowd of striking workers at the McCormick Reaper Works, killing and wounding several men. The following evening, anarchists and socialists organised a meeting to denounce the police attack and urge workers to intensify their struggle for the eight-hour day. As the police moved in to break up the meeting someone threw a bomb into the police ranks, killing one officer and injuring others. Shots were fired and seven policemen were killed. In spite of the fact that there was no evidence to link any of the arrested anarchists, on November 11, 1887, Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer (below) were hanged. Louis Lingg escaped the hangman’s noose by committing suicide in his cell the day before he was scheduled to climb the scaffold.

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Giuseppe Pinelli with his daughters

describe him as my Italian counterpart and, in answer to your question, he did not, to my knowledge condone violence of the sort he was arrested for, and from my discussions with him I would have said that he suspected from the start the Italian bombings were the work of the Italian neo-fascists. At the time of his death he was investigating the link between the Italian Special Branch in Milan, the Greek Secret Service and the Italian Fascist movement. I believe this is what caused his death.’ ‘We are not concerned with his death, but with the fact that bombing in England in the name of Pinelli was vengeance, wasn’t it?’ said Matthew, in the understatement of the year. This was a reference to three bombings in the UK, in London, Manchester and Birmingham, and one in Paris in which Italian government and commercial centres were targeted. ‘Yes.’ ‘Why were there bombings in London?’ ‘I have no idea. The only light I can throw on the matter is that some time previously I was approached by Detective Sergeant Cremer and Chief Inspector Harris who told me that an Italian commando group was coming to London to commit outrages. That is all I know about the subject.’ After questioning me about my acquaintance with Jim Greenfield and Lisa Byers, Matthew moved on to another piece of evidence, a map of Barnet and North London found in my car. ‘How did marking Barnet Police Station on this map help you, Mr. Christie?’ This map had just been pushed onto Matthew by Habershon who was sitting in the well of the court just in front of him. I picked up that Matthew was loath to bring it up, but Habershon kept pushing it at him. ‘I was afraid of being stopped for a traffic offence in the Barnet area where Mr. Carr’s house is located.’ ‘There is a mark very near Mr. Carr’s house.’ ‘Yes. I marked it for the same reason I marked Barnet Police Station.’ ‘How could this possibly help?’ ‘I know this may sound silly, but I marked it in order to avoid it. On a number of occasions, coming back from work in Letchworth I found myself driving straight past Barnet Police Station. I also marked the sub post offices you see on the map. I marked them because a number of men on my van lived outside the London area and had to send money home to their families, hence my reason for knowing where all the post offices were in the area.’ The clear implication was that we were preparing to rob post offices. After picking up on a few points from my evidence-in-chief, Matthew moved on to question me closely about the Edy letter. One cause of confusion over this letter was the fact that I had not challenged the literal translation and interpretation of the Edy letter by the Special Branch. It was correct in most details, but I did not accept the interpretation put on it by the prosecution. Albert, who was called as a prosecution witness in the early

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In The Witness Box

part of the case, had been asked about this letter as he had some knowledge of the background to the concerts. Unfortunately, he became somewhat confused and confusing about it in his evidence. This letter appeared to be the clincher as far as Matthew was concerned, and only when he felt sufficiently satisfied that he had pushed this particular piece of evidence as far as it would go, did he move on to the events leading up to my arrest — in particular my relationship with John Barker. ‘I met John Barker on a number of occasions in 1970. I cannot remember how many, but I did not know him all that well. I was hard up that summer and incurred a few debts owing to the cutbacks in the hours we were working. I also had to send money to my partner in Cornwall, plus pay my living expenses in London. On the Friday night prior to my arrest I had forty-five pounds in my pocket, but after the crash, living quite near Amhurst Road, I popped in there in the hope that I might borrow the extra money I needed to pay for the repair to Albert’s car. Albert did not know about the car and I was on my way round there to tell him, when I was arrested.’ ‘But you knew the car was insured, but you had not told the owner, so why did you go round to try to borrow money?’ ‘I was in the area having seen a panel beater, a friend of my sister, to get an estimate of how much it would cost to fix the damage. He told me it would cost eighty pounds so as I was passing, I decided to pop in to Barker’s place.’ ‘So your first reaction was to go and try to borrow money from John Barker who would get it by busking?’ God knows where John Matthew got the idea that John had been a busker. It was a new one on me. ‘I was hoping to. I did not think I would get all I required, nor did I know that John earned his living by busking.’ ‘Or did you go round there because you knew there had been an interesting delivery?’ he countered. ‘No.’ ‘With regard to the screwdrivers. They were found at the back of the parcel shelf.’ ‘I haven’t the foggiest idea where they were. I would have thought, however, that they would have been in the parcel shelf. The detonators were not in the car. As you say, Mr. Matthew, detonators are quite small and if they were not in a box they could get lost in any nook or cranny.’ ‘Do you deny the conversation that took place between yourself, Gilham, Ashenden and Sivell?’ (A conversation supposed to have taken place in the car as I was being taken to Albany Street Station). ‘Every word of it. It is a complete fabrication.’ ‘Do you deny the conversation between Commander Bond and yourself?’ ‘Not at all. As far as I can remember it seems to have been faithfully recorded.’ Matthew sat down; he was finished with me. I was quite surprised. He had not been as hard on me or as sarcastic as he had been with the others. In fact he

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had been extremely straightforward. The only time he had pushed was during the cross-examination of the Edy letter. The wording was clearly suspicious, and Albert’s confused explanation had made it sound even more conspiratorial. Apart from his momentary excitement over the marked map Habershon sat strangely impassive throughout the rest of my cross-examination. Every time I looked towards John Matthew to reply to his questions all I could see was Habershon’s egg-shaped face staring up at me from the well of the court. He looked slightly out of place among the black robes and stony grey wigs in his green tweed suit. Occasionally he would fiddle with his glasses, raising them slightly off his nose in a mannerism that reminded me of Eric Morecambe. After two and a half days in the witness box I was asked to stand down, which I did with a sense of relief. It was over, for better or worse. As I came down the steps I looked at Habershon. As our eyes met I wondered what thoughts were going through his brain at that moment. His face was inscrutable, but I had a feeling he knew then that he’d lost the jury in my case.

John Barker‚ a modern Tom Paine — or Adam Weishaupt? DCS Roy Habershon

Chris Bott (Drawing by Roy Knipe)

During the time I was in the witness box I had been kept apart from everyone else, both in Brixton and in the Old Bailey, so there could be no ‘collusion’ between the defendants, though what the purpose of this was after our long, enforced intimacy was hard to say. Being up there had been like being centre stage. Now my own part was over. My witnesses came on: friends, workmates and acquaintances who could corroborate my defence case. Chris Bott, like Ian Purdie, did not take the stand. It had already been submitted for him that there was no case to answer, and no evidence to suggest he was in any way involved other than his friendship with John and the fact that he had turned up at the Amhurst Road the morning after the raid. There was even less evidence against Kate McLean so she too did not go into the witness box. All the police had against her was the evidence of the graphologist, whose very art was suspect and whose trade was once a fairground attraction. Initially harassed by the police he was now vaunted by them as a scientific expert. Angela Weir did go into the witness box and produced evidence to the effect that she was not the person who had accompanied John Barker to France the day before the raid. She had been in London attending a Gay Liberation demonstration in Fleet Street. Anna Mendelson was the first of the self-defendants to address the jury. Tired and ill, she had to take several breaks during her closing remarks to the jury, the thrust of which was to refute all the charges against her. John Barker’s summing up of his case for the defence was a truly brilliant piece of advocacy worthy of Tom Paine. Although defending himself, he brilliantly argued the political defence for all eight of us in the dock. Everyone commented admiringly on the way he handled his case. One lawyer observed that people were paid a king’s ransom for making cross-examinations and closing speeches like his.

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John Barker Sums Up

John first challenged the absurd idea — central to the prosecution’s case — that associating with people who might be involved with the Angry Brigade meant that you were conspiring with them. What John and his flatmates had been involved in was research into the power structure of Britain. The prosecution had adduced these documents as evidence of their political activity. But the documents themselves were irrelevant without the explosives, which is why the police planted them. In reply to Matthew’s question as to why the question of the police planting the explosives had not been mentioned before the trial, John said: ‘If you make allegations in a magistrates’ court, the response is “that it is for the jury to decide,” and that is absolutely right. It is for you to decide and not for anyone else. And that is why I have waited, sometimes patiently, to put my side of things to the people who matter. You are the twelve independent people who live in the real world. And you are the people with the power. You are the first people I have come across in any of the courts who have the power to acquit or convict. So the question of a plant is for you.’ John Barker went on to suggest that Bond and Habershon made sure they were not there at the time of the raid because they wanted to distance themselves from the plant. During my own interrogation, the speed with which Bond passed over the detonators I was accused of having in my car, left me with the distinct impression he wanted to distance himself from what both of us knew was a plant. Why, continued John, did the authorities resort to such desperate measures? Because of political pressure from the Cabinet Office to ‘get’ the Angry Brigade: ‘The appearance of arresting people is as important, if not more important, than actually smashing the Angry Brigade itself. It’s the whole question of setting an example. Showing people that they can’t get away with it. But of course, if that is the case, they may still be worried about the real Angry Brigade, perhaps they are still looking for it. They still have a large Bomb Squad which doesn’t seem to have changed much in size from when we were arrested.’ Answering Matthew’s charge that the bombings had stopped since our arrest (which in fact they hadn’t), John Barker argued that perhaps the Angry Brigade had decided that it was not worth continuing if the price of bombing was the arrest of eight innocent people. Maybe the Angry Brigade had decided that bombings were no longer relevant or appropriate, especially with the miners’ strike and the dockers’ actions around the Industrial Relations Bill: ‘Perhaps they now feel that bombs are completely irrelevant, and that the class war is being fought, and that the Angry Brigade doesn’t have to make symbolic gestures with bombs to make it real — because it is real!’ Angry Brigade attacks on property continued after our arrests: Edinburgh Castle barracks were bombed on 29 August; a bomb was discovered in the officers’ mess in HMP Dartmoor on 16 September; on 24 September the Albany Street Army barracks close to the Bomb Squad operational base was bombed in protest against British Army actions in Northern Ireland; the home of Chris Bryant, the boss of a major Midlands building firm whose workers were on strike, was

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Anna Mendleson (Drawn by Roy Knipe)

John Barker (Drawn by Roy Knipe)

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Hilary Creek (Drawn by Roy Knipe)

bombed on 20 October; on 30 October the Post Office Tower was bombed, and on 1 November the British Army’s Tank HQ in Everton Street, London, was also bombed by the Angry Brigade. Attacks on property claimed by the Angry Brigade continued all over Britain through the 1970s and into the early 1980s. Not being a tight-knit clandestine organisation the Angry Brigade became the stuff of mythology. They were never captured; like Barbarossa, they are asleep in a cave, somewhere in the Mendips and will return to irritate the enemies. Or, as the peasants assembled around the dead body of Emiliano Zapata mutter, in Eli Kazan’s film Viva Zapata! the body before them is that of an impostor. Zapata could not and would not die! He was too smart to be killed in an ambush. Hadn’t Zapata’s white horse been seen on top of the mountain? Everyone in the valley of Morelos believes to this day that Zapata is still alive. Hilary Creek then made her final address to the jury. She talked about other aspects of the inconsistencies in the police case and the fact that most of the materials they claimed were evidence of conspiracy such as notebooks with names and addresses, directories and information from Companies House were only materials used to research the nature of power. It was this research work that the prosecution claimed amounted to conspiracy. The problem was, she pointed out, that the onus was on the defendants to prove their innocence rather than on the prosecution to prove their guilt. She spoke to the jury as human beings, rather than as functionaries of the state, concluding: ‘We have all been sitting here for six months, and I think you know us. We have talked about ourselves, our politics, and how we carried them out. We told you that that was not by bombing. You have seen us react to questioning. You have heard me speak. I am not an actress. If I am, then I must be the finest in the world and am due for an Oscar to have done what I have done for the past six months. You see, the Bomb Squad is still in existence — the same as it was sixteen months ago. It is also admitted that they are still looking for four people. Although they might have been getting close with us, the fact still remains they got the wrong people — and that’s not good enough.’

Summing up Finally Mr. Justice James began his summing up. He started by telling the jury to forget the opening remarks of Ian MacDonald, Jim’s counsel, who had said this was obviously no ordinary trial. There were not many trials where political motive was something of importance, and it obviously was in this case: ‘Finding people with the right political motives has been one of the main focuses of the police investigation in the Angry Brigade bombings.’ ‘This is not a political trial,’ said Mr Justice James. ‘I direct you to have none of it.’ He also tossed aside the hamfisted allegations of the prosecution, that in some mysterious way, the accused had tried to impose their views by force and instead brought in the accusation that they tried to do so by ‘causing explosions aimed at the property of those they considered to be their political opponents.’ He denied the charges had been brought because of the political decision by the

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‘Two Hats’ Rawlinson

legal adviser of the government, who had been a victim of the Angry Brigade. ‘The Attorney General wears two different hats, one of them political. Parliament had provided that an individual should not be prosecuted unless the Attorney General had consented. He did not advise the government to bring charges, but on occasion he could stop them being brought against an individual. In this respect he was wearing his non-political hat.’ In reference to the defence case that the police had planted guns, ammunition and explosives, and had lied throughout their testimony, Judge James said: ‘It is true that in such a large organisation as the Metropolitan Police there are bound to be a few black sheep. But, the vital question for you, members of the jury, is: did what is alleged to have happened happen in this case? You will make up your minds on the evidence taking into account your assessment of the witnesses involved.’ Judge James then tried to undermine the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Shaw, our defence witness on the explosives and chemical evidence. All that could be said Justice James with Attorney-General Sir Peter Rawlinson QC in his ‘two against Shaw’s evidence by the Judge was that ‘Colonel hats’ — one as legal adviser to the Heath government, the other as head of British criminal law (drawn by Roy Knipe) Shaw never visited the government establishment.’ This was quite unfair as Shaw had no need to visit the place to criticise the findings. He had studied the laboratory report sheets concerning the explosions and everything was laid out in full there for anyone to comment on. As to the connections of the eight people in the dock with each other and the conspiracy alleged, the Judge said that it was up to the jury to decide whether the ‘Crown had failed lamentably’ to prove a constant association between them — whether one had been proved, or whether the answer was somewhere in the middle. They were told to weigh carefully the allegations of brutality by the police. It was up to the jury to decide whether in fact Jim Greenfield had been grabbed by the testicles by Ashenden, bounced from wall to wall and given a black eye and bleeding nose. They had to decide if it were true that John Barker had been suspended upside down in a toilet while the other police officers punched and kicked him in the cells at Albany Street. At last he came to the core of the trial: the conspiracy. The offence, he said, lay in the agreement. Even if the agreement was not put into effect, it remained an offence. The Crown did not have to prove that any of the eight of us actually caused any of the explosions, simply that they agreed to: ‘You have to be satisfied that the prosecution has proved that there was one agreement to cause explosions, to which each of the accused had made himself a party, to return a verdict of guilty on that charge.’ ‘As long as you know what the agreement is, then you are a conspirator. You needn’t necessarily know your fellow conspirators, nor need you always be active in

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the conspiracy. All you need to know is the agreement. It can be effected by a wink or a nod, without a word being exchanged. It need have no particular time limit, no particular form, no boundaries.’ James noticeably avoided any reference to a shake of the hand, presumably to avoid upsetting the freemasons present such as Bond, who appeared to be shifting uncomfortably in his seat at this definition of conspiracy.

Conspiratorial pic ‘n’ mix

Angela Weir (Drawn by Roy Knipe)

In fact, the prosecution had radically changed its idea of the conspiracy after its attempt to pin me down, when it realised too late it had cast its net far too widely. At the beginning of the case it was claimed that the alleged conspiracy took place between January 1968, when most of the others were still at school, and August 1971. Now the prosecution was saying to the jury take your pick from the bran tub and see what comes out. Having realised during the course of the trial that it was going to be well nigh impossible to prove an allencompassing conspiracy from that early date, the prosecution changed its tack and went all out to prove just an Angry Brigade Conspiracy from 1970 to 1971. Mr. Justice James said that the longer the conspiracy was alleged to have lasted, the more important it was for the jury to be sure that there was one conspiracy and not more than one during that period. In one conspiracy it was possible to have more than one different purpose or motive for joining. If the jury found that the agreement was proved to have existed from the start and to have covered all the incidents then the Crown would have done what it set out to do. If, on the other hand, the Crown had proved that there was an agreement and that each of the accused had joined that agreement for part of the time, or maybe the whole time, or maybe for a short time, or a long time, then the Crown had discharged its duties by proving that each of the accused was guilty of agreement to cause explosions within that period. (Work that one out!) Proof of the allegation of agreement would not be invalidated if the jury found that the agreement had existed over a shorter period of time than alleged, but the jury must be satisfied that there was one agreement, not more than one agreement, in respect of each of the accused, to which he had made himself a party. The judge seems to have drawn his predilection for riddle setting from Tolkien’s Gollum. Bilbo Baggins would have had a hard time trying to get the better of Mr. Justice James had he met him in the caverns of Lonely Mountain. The Spanish element, which the prosecution had began by making so much of, was dropped. James concluded his summing up on Monday 4 December 1972 after eight days and an estimated quarter of a million words. As he covered the evidence of the witnesses who were with Angie Weir on the day she was alleged to have gone to France with John Barker to collect explosives, there were cries of protest from the dock and the public gallery at one unfortunate remark. Angie had produced seven alibi witnesses for that day, all from the Gay Liberation Front (GLF).

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Proofs Of A Conspiracy

‘Members of the jury, you should not hold it against these alibi witnesses that they were not in other people’s eyes the “usual” members of society.’ All hell broke loose when he made these remarks with shouts of protest from the public gallery where he was hissed and booed. Judge James was upset by this and explained, weakly, ‘I am only trying to help the defence.’ Then, recovering his composure slightly he turned to the jury with an air of pomposity and told them, ‘You are entitled to take into consideration all that you see and hear in this court.’

The longest trial By now, our trial had entered the Guinness Book of Records as the longest trial of the twentieth century. Before the jury filed out to their room at lunchtime to consider the 109 days of evidence and the millions of words spoken in the court during that period, Judge James’ last words to them were, ‘your verdict should be unanimous. There would be no question of a majority verdict until I give you further instructions.’ We were ushered out of the dock to await, with growing anticipation and anxiety, their verdict. This was it. Freedom, or years in jail! By four-thirty the jury still had not reached a conclusion so the judge arranged for them to be taken to The Great Eastern Hotel with four special jury bailiffs and police guards where they were to remain until the following morning when the court would sit again. Back in Brixton, I spent most of that sleepless night pacing up and down in my cell wondering what verdict the jury would reach. What would be the consequences of a guilty verdict — to me and those I loved? A second twenty-year sentence would not be so easy to get through. If I were found guilty, how could I prove the detonators had been planted by the police? The rest of the evidence was circumstantial and conjectural, but not the detonators. I continued in this frame of mind until I became aware of birdsong and the lightening sky. Emotionally exhausted and filled with trepidation, we filed up the stairs into the dock of Number One Court at 10 am the following morning. We all wondered if this would be the last day of the trial — and the first day of the rest of our lives. The jury still had not reached a verdict and yet again we were packed off downstairs to while away the time, chatting, playing cards, but all the time thinking of what the future held.... Eventually, twenty-two hours after retiring the jury returned to the court with a question for the judge. They wanted to know why the area of Amhurst Road had not been evacuated during the police search, a telling question indeed. By late afternoon the jury still had not been able to reach a verdict. It meant, yet again, another sleepless night in Brixton. As the pre-dawn flush appeared through my barred window, I ruminated. Was that a bright future, or a false dawn — or perhaps even the Old Bailey in flames?

12 Angry Men The film shown on television that night was one of the all-time great courtroom dramas — 12 Angry Men. It was a powerful drama about a jury’s deliberations

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BBC provocateurs at work?: 12 Angry Men

in an apparently open-and-shut murder case, one in which the defendant has a weak alibi. Eleven of the jurors immediately vote for a guilty verdict, but one juror — Henry Fonda — refuses to accept the prosecution case at face value and holds out for a not guilty verdict, gradually persuading the others to vote likewise. Habershon, Bond and the Bomb Squad rank and file were apoplectic the next day. They were convinced this film had been deliberately dropped into the broadcasting schedules at the last moment by Angry Brigade sympathisers in the BBC to sway the jury against the police case. If only! But it was certainly fortuitous from our point of view, and no doubt it added something to the unfolding deliberations in the jury room. Whoever the Henry Fonda character was on our jury, he or she clearly hadn’t been able to work their persuasive magic because by the following morning the jury still hadn’t reached a unanimous verdict. The judge called the jurors in from the jury room and said, ‘You have spent a long time giving your consideration to this matter. When I asked you to retire to consider your verdict I told you to return a unanimous verdict. Having regard to the passage of time, will you please retire again and seek to arrive at verdicts in respect of those counts upon which at least ten of you can agree.’ The jurors were sent back to their room and we were returned to the dungeons of the Old Bailey. Thoughts of a hung jury and another six-month retrial flashed through my mind. Not a pleasant prospect. As the afternoon wore on, we grew quiet and introspective. Late in the afternoon Judge James assembled the court and told the jury that he would not be sending them to a hotel that night. It was a crude attempt to pressure them into reaching a decision. The court would sit until a verdict was decided. He probably felt that this would force those pushing for acquittal to compromise their position in relation to all the accused. A second trial might not have quite so favourable a jury. The same probably also applied to those who were pushing for conviction. The jury went back to their room again, visibly tired from their wrangling. We went downstairs for our daily visits. I had just sat down to try to reassure Brenda when one of the prison officers tapped me on the back and said we had to go back into court — the jury was coming back with its verdict. This was it.

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Verdicts And Aftermaths

Chapter 11 — 1972 UNTIL THE MOMENT I went into the witness box, most of the barristers and solicitors present, with the exception of Kevin and Birnberg’s team, thought I was certain to go down. Even after that anti-climactic prosecution case, a guilty verdict was always a possibility, but I felt optimistic about my prospects. The police witnesses account of finding the two detonators in the Corsair was flaky, to say the least. The dates they had concocted for the conspiracy charge started immediately after my return from Spain — a haste which would have bespoken a man even crazier than the one they saw before them — and during which time most of the others in the dock were still at school. Hack journalists conjured up stories featuring yours truly as the loadbearing element in the conspiracy. During the trial one of these, Richard Herd of the Daily Mail, had gone to Liège where Octavio Alberola had been held under house arrest by the Belgians. Herd told him that because I had helped Spanish prisoners through the Anarchist Black Cross, it was down to Octavio to help me — somewhat comparable with getting the Pope to campaign for Christian morality. If Alberola told all to the Daily Mail, its quid pro quo would be to campaign for my acquittal. A likely story indeed. Octavio told him to fuck off — in French. Herd was close to Habershon and Bond, from whom he had obtained the information as to Alberola’s whereabouts in Belgium. The thesis Herd wanted to develop paralleled that which the prosecution was trying to prove — that the Angry Brigade was closely linked with the anti-Francoist resistance movement. This was the Daily Mail theory. They also later claimed that Alberola was the brains behind the IRA! But after a strangely muted prosecution case, in which John Matthew appeared to pull his punches — perhaps he didn’t want to appear over-zealous to the jury — my evidence and demeanour in the witness box, and the stream of workmates and ordinary non-political people who spoke on my behalf, the odds on my acquittal had improved considerably. I was no longer a long-haired hippie in the dock. The police wanted to paint me as an evil mastermind; but for six months they had seen an average working class youth, who worked long hours with very ordinary working-class mates, and who was being persecuted for the ideas he held about a fascist dictator and the way society could be better. This caused considerable annoyance to the Bomb Squad and the toadying reporters of the tabloid and right-wing broadsheet press who had staked their shirts on a general blanket conviction. After I had given my evidence there was a clear shift in the emphasis of the prosecution case. Now, halfway through the trial, they came up with an alternative conspiracy theory, one which excluded the whole Spanish association of which so much had been made. The alternative — but circumscribed — conspiracy now had the Angry Brigade down as a much smaller group consisting of the first four on the charge sheet. Nobody took this alternative theory seriously at first. It was a face-saving alibi for the prosecution to justify going to such lengths to get nothing. It was early evening when we climbed the steep, dark rickety flight of stairs

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Octavio Alberola

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

to the dock to await the jury’s return and their verdict. The court was packed. The press benches — which had remained empty for so long apart from the Press Association man, David May of Time Out, Bea Campbell of the Morning Star and Guardian reporter, Jackie Leishman — were full of reporters already working out the following day’s headlines. One agency reporter — agencies are supposed to supply factual and unbiased information to the press — was overheard saying ‘I hope they all go down.’ The public gallery was overflowing — as was the area behind us reserved for relatives, all nervously waiting to hear what the jury had decided.

Compromise verdicts Finally, the wood-panelled door leading to the jury room opened and the twelve men and women edged their way to their benches. It was 5.15 pm on 6 December. The foreman, seated closest to the judge was the last to take his place. They looked haggard as they sat down and appeared to be avoiding our eyes. We scanned their faces, anxious for some hint as to the verdicts they had reached. Their faces were inscrutable — but it didn’t look good. The judge asked them if they had reached a verdict. The foreman, a middle-aged workingclass man still in his shirtsleeves, self-consciously answered ‘Yes.’ The Old Bailey’s Chief Administrator and Mr Fix-it, Leslie Boyd, took him through each charge and each name on the indictment. The first and most important charge was that of conspiracy to cause explosions. The atmosphere was electric. We could hear and feel our hearts pumping. Then came the verdicts. We strained to hear every quietly spoken word. ‘James Greenfield — guilty of conspiring to cause explosions; Anna Mendelson — guilty of conspiring to cause explosions; John Barker — guilty of conspiring to cause explosions; Hilary Creek — guilty of conspiring to cause explosions.’ Then it was my turn. I steeled myself as the Judge asked the foreman how they had found against me. ‘Not guilty, your honour.’ My first thought was that I hadn’t heard correctly and was in some altered state of consciousness. I could hardly believe it. Apart from the planted detonators all the evidence against me was circumstantial, but it was still pretty damning evidence all the same; evidence which I could not refute other than making it clear that it was my word against Detective Sergeant Gilham’s. The jury had believed me. Either that or they were not prepared to believe Gilham, who knows? The rest was unreal. It was as though a great weight had been taken from me. I only just registered, peripherally almost, that Chris, Angie, and Kate had also been acquitted. The odds against proving the police had planted the guns and explosives in Amhurst Road had been enormous, yet the defence had succeeded in splitting the jury down the middle. For three days the jury had been divided seven to

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The Habershon Law Of Unintended Consequences

five — five for acquittal on all charges. In the end, a majority verdict had led to a squalid compromise. But despite the guilty verdict, it had still been a victory for those who had defended themselves. Relying on lawyers alone would never have got us as close as we did to a spectacular victory against the state. They had made a powerful and moving case against the system, without using the tools of the system itself, and had come as close as they ever could to being acquitted. They had succeeded in showing that the police had both the motive and the opportunity to plant the incriminating evidence in Amhurst Road. Whether they did or not is not for me to answer, but the jury certainly believed the police had planted and manipulated the evidence in my case. The feelings of euphoria I experienced were tempered by the desolate faces of John, Anna, Jim and Hilary. For them it had been a defeat, tempered by a little victory. But it could so easily have gone their way. However, they would not be leaving the courtroom that day as I would, through the front portals into the real world. Their exit would be in handcuffs, through the back gate in a cellular prison van and driven through the sodium-lit streets of London to Holloway Jail and Wormwood Scrubs for who knew how many years.

The Guardian

Jurors plead for leniency Habershon’s deliberate introduction of my Spanish conviction into the evidence proved as counter-productive a strategy as it had been in Purdie’s case. The jury had decided that the police wanted to ‘fit me up’ after my Spanish experience. Habershon’s blatantly right-wing zealotry and the decision — whoever took it — to plant the detonators and the explosives-tainted screwdriver in my car created an unexpected backlash. It was a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences. The jury could well understand why someone would want to blow up Franco — and why, in that case, he would be a target for conservative-minded policemen pursuing a right-wing agenda at the behest of Edward Heath’s Cabinet Office. After delivering the thirty-one verdicts, the foreman was so overcome with the emotion of the moment that he had to sit down, having been given a glass of water by the usher. Recovering his composure, the foreman stood up again and turned to Judge James to make a courageous plea: ‘Us members of the jury would like to ask your lordship for — I believe the word is leniency, or clemency — but that is what we would like to ask.’ I was still uncertain as to the verdict on the other lesser charges against me, and looked queryingly at Kevin Winstain, my barrister. He sent up a note to the dock that I had been acquitted on all the other charges as well — as had Chris Bott, Angie Weir and Kate McLean. It was a ten-to-two majority verdict. The mainly working-class jury initially failed to agree on convicting the first four. In the end they reached a compromise. Ten jurors wanted to convict the first four — but only if the others were acquitted on all charges. Two of them stuck out for a complete acquittal of all eight of us, but were over-ruled by the other ten. One of the latter two we

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The Daily Telegraph

Hackney Gazette

The Daily Telegraph

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

had given up on early in the trial, completely mis-reading his obvious disinterest in the prosecution case as a prejudgment of our guilt. In fact, exactly the opposite was the case. Three others had been sympathetic to all of us while seven had been prepared to convict everyone, on all charges. As the judge stressed, to acquit everyone meant that the police had been lying and we had been cold-bloodedly framed. The jury had accepted that this was what had happened in my case. But, the argument advanced by one of the hostile jurors was that because the police had framed me it did not follow everyone else had been framed — and they had to be ‘fair.’ This argument helped sway ten of the jury. Still, they had been very impressed with all eight defendants. As in Tolstoy’s Resurrection, the only way out of the impasse had been a compromise with the three ‘waverers’: four acquittals in exchange for four convictions — and an attempt to mitigate their decision with a strong plea for clemency. Kevin Winstain, my barrister, had been so overcome with the courtroom tension he disappeared before the verdict, on the pretext of sorting out another case, but more likely it was to the bar. Everything he had — intellectually, emotionally and physically — he had put into this case, to good effect, as it turned out. Judge James told the four of us who had been acquitted — Chris Bott, Angie Weir, Kate MacLean and myself — we could leave the dock. We had all been standing to hear the verdicts. John, Jim, Hilary and Anna turned to embrace us and make our farewells before we were taken downstairs for the last time. They had to remain behind to hear their sentences. It was an emotional moment. My heart thumped with happiness at my imminent freedom and my gut churned with guilt at leaving them to their fate. This was no play — it was for real. The curtain would not come down and rise later with these four people walking happily out hand in hand, as they had walked in, or taking a bow before an applauding audience. During the interval which followed they would be locked away in cells and grow older, their young lives drained in sacrifice to the state. Jim Greenfield:(Drawn by Roy Knipe)

‘A warped understanding of sociology’ Still defiant toward the court, the four convicted offered no mitigation in their defence. They put on a brave face and managed sardonic smiles as Justice James launched into his sentencing speech, saying how sorry he was to see ‘educated people’ in their situation. Perhaps it wouldn't have mattered so much about me! He added that ‘undoubtedly a warped understanding of sociology’ had brought them to their present state, leaving it unclear whether he was reproaching them for inattention to their studies or blaming their political views, which he had earlier said had nothing to do with the case — though it wasn't difficult to guess which he had in mind: ‘The conspiracy of which you have been convicted had as its object the intention of disrupting and attacking the democratic society of this country. That was the way it was put by the Crown, and that is the way it has been proved to the satisfaction

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A Day Mournful And Overcast

of the jury once the suggestion of planting of evidence had been got rid of on overwhelming evidence. ‘The philosophies which you subscribe to are those which are set out in the various Angry Brigade communiqués. This conspiracy was alleged to have extended from 1968 until August 1971, but it is clear that the evidence was stronger against each of you in respect of the latter stages of that period than it was in respect of the earlier stages. ‘For the purposes of sentence, I propose to disregard any of the incidents which occurred before responsibility is claimed by the Angry Brigade communiqués. That shortens the period and reduces the number of explosions.’ Judge James continued: ‘The means you adopted could have been even more lethal than they were, but I am satisfied on the evidence that the devices you used were not deliberately designed to cause death or serious injury, but rather damage to property.... Your participation arose because you objected to the orderly way of society. One of the most precious rights is that an individual should hold his opinions and be able to express them and be able to protest, and when one finds others who set out to dominate by exercising their opinions to the extent of enforcing them with violence it undermines that precious right.... Undoubtedly, you have in many of your interests sought to do good, and have done good, and I count that in your favour. But when all is said and done the public is entitled to protection... I am going to reduce the totality of the sentences, by reasons of the jury’s recommendation, by five years.’ He then proceeded to weigh off all four to various sentences on the different charges of conspiracy and possession. As he went through them the years started to mount up — fives, eights and tens. At the end he added the crucial word — concurrent — making a total of ten years. With remission for good behaviour they could be out in seven years. As John Barker later reflected, in his case, ‘they had framed a guilty man — and there were plenty holes in the frame.’ Anna was the first to speak before leaving the dock. She thanked the two jury members, whoever they were, who had consistently held out for an acquittal. Some looked her in the eyes, while others stared thoughtfully into the middle distance — that is, into their their own hearts and minds. Jim, John and Hilary added their voices to this sentiment before they too were led downstairs to the prison vans waiting to take the men to Wormwood Scrubs, the allocation jail for first-timers, and Hilary and Anna back to Holloway. The Judge too thanked the jury before discharging them, but it was with a cold heart. I wonder how the jurors felt when they left the Old Bailey for the last time. Did they momentarily look skyward before melting into the crowd, feeling both a little lighter for having acquitted four people, and a little weightier for knowing they had played their part in changing the lives of all eight forever? Did the two who held out for acquittal, like Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men, stop to check the weather or look up at the figure of justice, as they rejoined the society whose principles they had so nobly upheld?

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Anna Mendeleson

Hilary Creek

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

The trial had lasted 109 days, involved more than 200 witnesses, 688 exhibits and more than 1000 pages of depositions and statements. The judge’s summing up alone ran to 250,000 words. After seven months of debate, the verdict, the judges remarks and sentencing took only 45 minutes. Jim and Anna were the only two in the dock charged with causing explosions, one at Paddington Green Police Station and another at the Italian Consulate in Manchester, but the jury acquitted them in both cases. But all four were found guilty on the possession charges and, like Jake Prescott, they were all convicted on the main count of conspiracy. This well-worn law reeking of medieval prejudice is reminiscent of gunpowder, treason and plots. According to Mr Justice James, all that was required for proof was a nod, a wink, a state of mind, an opinion, a secret thought.... On this basis they could have arrested and charged hundreds if not thousands at the time. It was a judgment against the whole radical movement – everyone was a conspirator. I heard later from a friendly journalist that Mark Carlisle MP, the Undersecretary of State at the Home Office, and another senior lawyer read of my acquittal on the House of Commons ticker tape. He apparently said ‘This is absolutely disastrous,’ but maybe he had his political hat on at the time.

Standing on corpses Gloaters: Bond (left) and Habershon share a joke with reporters at the post-trial Scotland Yard press conference

The evening the sentences were passed Bond and his bespectacled acolyte Habershon held a forty-minute press conference at Scotland Yard. One observer aptly described it as ‘the police equivalent of standing on the corpse’ — a public relations operation to justify all their illegal and questionable actions prior to the trial and to seek a public ‘mandate’ for the stepping up of their onslaught on civil liberties. Tony Smythe, General Secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), described their aim as an attempt ‘to exploit the aftermath of the trial in a way likely to encourage unnecessary public alarm.’ Crime reporters from the national press were welcomed as long-lost friends. The affection with which DS Habershon greeted Daily Mirror crime hack Tom Tullet was cringe-making. ‘Good to see you, Tom,’ said Habershon, vigorously pumping his hand and smiling. No thoughtful, in-depth pieces from the Daily Mirror then. Bond and Habershon named two more people they wanted to interview in connection with Angry Brigade bombings while we were inside: Gerry Osner and Sarah Poulikakou, both of whom were living abroad at the time. In spite of the jury’s verdicts, Habershon and Bond remained adamant that everyone who had stood in the dock was guilty. As evil Sheriff Little Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s classic western, Unforgiven, says of another of his many innocent victims — ‘Innocent of what?’ In reply to a protest by one of the journalists, Bond said: ‘How do we know that the eight did not do it?’ He made various unflattering comments about the eight of us as a whole, and a pointed reference about me in particular: ‘The evidence presented during the trial showed quite clearly the defendant’s

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Lessons To Be Learned

international links. The explosives came from France and Christie had contacts there and in Spain ... Christie has admitted being an anarchist.’ Someone interjected: ‘But that is not the same as being a member of the Angry Brigade.’ Bond answered, ‘What’s the difference?’ As far as he was concerned, all the eight people charged were militant members of the Angry Brigade, including me. And in a way he was right. The construction the judge had put on conspiracy meant that everyone was guilty. A.T. Sandrock, a Daily Telegraph crime correspondent immediately suggested the remark should be off the record. ‘I am sure we can’t quote you on that, Ernie!’ Bond took the hint and agreed. But for the rest of his life Bond continued to make similar comments and harboured a deep resentment towards us. Interviewed in 2002 by Martin Bright of The Observer he recalled: ‘They were a cunning lot, the Angry Brigade, well wrapped up in that anarchist movement. They were belligerent and very “anti” and there was no sense that they were sorry for what they had done. Right from the start there were allegations that we’d planted this and planted that. It was the most disgraceful trial I’ve ever seen in my experience.’ Methinks Ernie protested too much! There was no victory for either side, and no defeat either. The only victory was for the jury system itself. The jury had carried the day by showing that trials are about justice as well as law. By rejecting much of the prosecution case the jury had shown that the conduct of Bond and Habershon’s officers had left something to be desired. The judges and the politico-legal establishment were appalled at just how close all of us in the dock had come to being acquitted — in their view, in defiance of the law and in blatant disregard of the evidence. That would have been disastrous. The jury — as John Barker described it, ‘the critically intelligent citizenry in action’ — had responded positively by acquitting half of us, and asking for clemency for the remaining four. Our trial also put getting rid of juries altogether firmly on the state’s agenda The Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, ordered an immediate post-trial inquiry — which took place between 14 December 1972 and 17 January 1973 — to ‘learn the lessons of the case and to prevent a similar outcome arising in future,’ particularly with regard to jury selection (Public Records Office PREM15/1735). It was another governmental nail in the coffin of the jury system. Never again would defendants be allowed to choose a jury of their peers. Also thereafter, most major trials of a political nature were held outside London, in places such as the commuter belt of Winchester, where the Crown could be reasonably certain of a comfortably middle-class jury list to ensure the conviction of the enemies of the state. Winchester Crown Court happens to be the only Crown Court in England where the majority of the population is employed by the Ministry of Defence. The most famous example being the 1973 trial of the Winchester Eight — Dolours and

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Bitter to the end: Ernest Bond — 1919-2003

Keeping the Establishment’s head above water: The Lord Chancellor, the Rt. Hon Quintin Hogg, 2nd Viscount Hailsham

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

‘And I said to him ”We found this in your car, Mr Christie“ ‘: Ernie Bond in 1976 with the gun reputedly used by Hitler to commit suicide. The man beside Bond is ‘Dare’ Newell, SAS Regimental Association Secretary and editor of the SAS Regimental magazine Mars and Minerva

New Broom: Sir Robert Mark, Commissioner, Metropolitan Police

Marian Price, Gerry Kelly, Hugh Feeney and four others. The eight IRA members were sentenced to life imprisonment, plus twenty years, for the Old Bailey and Great Scotland Yard Police Station bombings in Whitehall in March 1973. One person died and around 200 were injured in the Old Bailey blast. The last trial in Winchester that I recall was that of three IRA members charged in 1988 with the attempted murder of Tom King, the then Minister of Defence. Looking at the Angry Brigade case in context, apart from cheering up the powerless with dramatic — and for some, feel-good — gestures against the ‘sword and scourge’ protagonists of Heath’s hard-line free-market capitalism, the six-month trial was probably its most enduring achievement. Apart from being a vindication of the jury system, the trial provided an extraordinary public forum that allowed us — particularly John, Hilary and Anna who defended themselves — to speak directly to twelve ordinary men and women about ourselves, our ideas and our motives. We were people who didn’t want to see the planet run forever unchallenged by fools and knaves — yet at the same time showing that these were the only ones who wanted to govern it. But there were other spin-offs. The defence strategy with its use of ‘McKenzie helpers’ and the model provided by the Stoke Newington Eight Defence Campaign (helped enormously by Paddy Greville and Jonathan Treasure of Compendium Bookshop in Camden Town) certainly influenced later campaigns such as PROP (Preservation of the Rights of Prisoners), the Free George Ince Campaign, ‘One Bad Appleing’ (the exposure of police corruption) and, most directly, the ‘Up Against The Law Collective.’ It also had an impact on the women’s movement. Journalist Rosie Boycott, a co-founder of Spare Rib with Marsha Rowe, says that it was the women’s issue of Frendz, produced by Hilary and Anna in 1971 that launched the meetings of the women in the underground that went on to produce Spare Rib — ‘so you could actually say that the Angry Brigade were responsible for Spare Rib.’ Our case concluded, Edward Heath and his Cabinet handed out the glittering prizes to their good and faithful servants. Mr. Justice James was appointed a Lord Justice of Appeal, Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Habershon — who wept in court on being commended for his loyal service to the Crown by Judge James — was promoted to Commander and seconded to the Home Office’s Research and Planning Office in 1973. In 1974, he headed the investigation into the police murder of Warwick University student Kevin Gateley in Red Lion Square on 5 June 1974. His report absolved the police of all responsibility. In April 1975, Commander Habershon replaced Robert Huntley as head of the Bomb Squad. Commander X did well. Bond was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal and made Deputy Assistant Commissioner, responsible for all CID operations for the whole of the Metropolitan Police, retiring in 1976 to pursue his hobbies of freemasonry and DIY. The Home Office, too, had drawn lessons from this important political trial. Sir John Waldron had been retired as Metropolitan Police Commissioner in

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An Uneasy Verdict

April 1972 and his place taken by Heath appointee Sir Robert Mark, a new broom for the Yard. Mark immediately authorised the expansion of the Special Branch to around 500 detectives. He also appointed a new Head of the Branch to take over from Ferguson-Smith, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Victor Gilbert. The security service also had an urgent makeover. Sir Martin Furnival-Jones was stood down as head of MI5 and his place taken by another Heath appointee, the ultra-reactionary Sir Michael ‘Jumbo’ Hanley, chosen in preference to the more liberal Home Office candidate James Waddell. MI5’s F Branch, responsible for domestic counter-subversion became the pre-eminent department within the security service with Hanley pouring in men and resources to root out, as he described them, the ‘far and wide left.’ Hanley’s new deputy was John Jones, a Welsh miner’s son. In the pecking order class treachery doesn’t come any higher. Charles Elwell took over F Branch from Dick Thistlethwaite and a new antiterrorist section, F3, was set up to deal with the new threat from groups such as the Angry Brigade. Another F Branch section, FX, was another MI5 section set up under Barry Russell-Jones to infiltrate and run informers to identify and monitor radicals in the trade unions, the universities, extra-parliamentary pressure groups and the media. K Branch, the department responsible for monitoring the state’s former public demons — Soviet spies and Comintern fifth columnists in government — was downgraded, sidelined and hung out to dry. We — the new enemy within — were both the red menace and yellow peril rolled into one — an offensive orange, perhaps?

Free again Free again and outside the court I was happily reunited with my partner Brenda. With Kevin Winstain, Ben Birnberg and Jenny (my solicitor’s clerk who had done most of the foot-slogging legal work in my defence case) we hailed a taxi and headed for the King’s Cross offices of Time Out where the Stoke Newington Eight Defence Committee had organised a press conference and to announce a demonstration to Holloway Jail the following day. Tony Elliott, the publisher of the London weekly Time Out, and David May, its news editor, had been consistently supportive of the Stoke Newington Eight Defence Group since our arrest, and had laid on champagne for the four acquitted and the SN8 defence group. After Chris Bott, Angela Weir, Kate McLean and I answered the media’s mostly obvious questions, Brenda and I took off to spend the first night of my regained freedom in a nearby hotel. When I looked out of the room window, savouring a glass of Glenmorangie,

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Time Out Press Conference: Kate, Angie, Stuart, Brenda. Ben Birnberg (standing, second from right between Chris Broad and Jenny, Ben’s articled clerk)

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Solidarity with the Stoke Newington 5

I nearly choked. After eighteen months I was back where I started, directly overlooking the side entrance to Clerkenwell Magistrate’s Court, where I had spent nearly six months on weekly remand. That night I slept for the first time in 16 months between fresh cotton sheets on a sprung mattress. I had my very own bedside light, a television and a cup of tea obligingly sent up by room service — much more appreciated than the eight o’clock dishwater provided in Brixton. Besides, it was sweetened by freedom! Metaphorically speaking, we had left the corpses of our comrades Jim, John, Hilary and Anna, lying on the battlefield. As I was exploring the mini-bar, Jim and John were being inducted into the dour surroundings of Wormwood Scrubs’ C/A Wing, and Hilary and Anna were trying to come to terms with who knows how many years in even worse women’s prisons up and down the country. Now it was the turn of the vultures. The scavengers of Fleet Street screeched around to pick the bones not only of the fallen, but — in an unprecedented attack of spite — of the survivors as well. With my acquittal the whole international conspiracy element collapsed and along with it most of the projected stories on the Angry Brigade. The only mass circulation newspaper that tried to put the Angry Brigade into some sort of political context was the London Evening Standard. In an article headlined ‘The Red Badge of Revolution that is creeping Across Britain,’ its leader writer wrote: ‘These guerrillas are the violent activists of a revolution comprising workers, students, teachers, trade unionists, homosexuals, unemployed and women striving for liberation. They are all angry… Whenever you see a demonstration, whenever you see a queue for strike pay, every public library with a stock of socialist literature… anywhere would be a good place to look. In short, there is no telling where they are.’ I couldn’t have put it better myself. Rupert Murdoch’s version of Der Stürmer, the Sun, had clearly prepared its story in advance on the assumption that we would all be found guilty. Its treatment of the four who were convicted was only to be expected from that politico-pornographic tabloid trying to demonise the four condemned young people. It claimed that the house in which they had lived in Wivenhoe, Essex, years before had been used for drugs, sex and orgies. They squawked ‘most revolting of all their activities was ritual slaughter. Turkeys stolen from a local farm were torn and slashed to pieces.... Afterwards the revellers, drugged, drunk and exhausted, collapsed on the kitchen floor to sleep off their orgy in a ghastly mess of blood and fragmented flesh.’ The reality was more prosaic. One year Jim Greenfield stole a turkey for their Christmas dinner and was arrested by the local police, who followed the trail of feathers from the still-squawking bird from the nearby farm to their cottage.

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The Pundits Pontificate

Another claim — totally fabricated — was that Hilary, while briefly out on bail at her parents’ home in Wales, had allegedly sunbathed — in February and March — without her bikini top — ‘The topless wonder of the Welsh village.’ Mind you, those were the sort of headlines that sold Murdoch newspapers. The Sun also threw in a potted Fleet Street version of my past, including the guest list at my twenty-first birthday party in Alcalá de Henares. ‘Guests included one murderer, two drug addicts and one bank robber.’ Who else did they expected me to meet in a maximum security prison? ‘The assassin’s apprentice [moi!?] was let out after a heartfelt plea from his mother, Mrs. Olive Christie, by then a widow [more lies]. Widow Christie’s dignity and motherhood were let down by the son she had rescued from a foreign jail. When mother and son flew into London’s Heathrow Airport, they were greeted by a cheering mob of long-haired anarchists.’ (Never mind that this ‘mob’ was there to protect me from a more evil mob of short-haired thugs from the less dignified reaches of Fleet Street.) My solicitor complained to the editor of the Sun about this last piece, which was a harmful and sinister lie, and eventually received a reply from him admitting that it was in fact untrue. The Daily Express was equally vicious in its appraisal of the trial and the four condemned young people. But they were, however, slightly more cautious in dealing with those of us who were acquitted. The better class of papers, such as the Daily Telegraph, went for a more sophisticated version of this rubbish. The Tory broadsheet was scornful of the fact that the Angry Brigade had killed or injured nobody. This made them a ‘pale imitation’ of the anarchists they admired — ‘figures like Ravaschol [sic] or Hosea [sic] Garcia Oliver — who may have had psychopathic tendencies and have found pleasure in their violence,’ said Maurice Weaver of the Daily Telegraph, quoting a professor — Dr. Anthony Polonsky — who held the chair of political history at the London School of Economics, having obviously got the post on a minimal knowledge of history. Presumably believing that Juan Garcia Oliver was some long-dead anarchist and not alive and living in Mexico City and capable of legal action (I sent him a copy of the Daily Telegraph) — he went on to say that ‘Hosea’ Garcia Oliver had ‘boasted’ that his was the hand that killed 253 men. This number of presumably unsolved murders could have made the Guinness Book of Records, but the only conceivable occasion when they could have been committed was during the Civil War, when the Daily Telegraph was publishing manufactured pro-Francoist stories about alleged Republican atrocities, and Mr. Polonsky was perhaps peddling them from a pushcart. Unfortunately, at the time Garcia Oliver had defected from the anarchist movement as such and was a Minister of Justice. His henchmen may well have been policemen, and the killings, if they occurred, totally legal. But the press could not forgive the moderation of the Angry Brigade, protesting vigorously that they were amateurs — and not a patch on the ‘old anarchists.’ Another example of the pseudo-sociological rubbish they published

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Juan Garcia Oliver

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Back in Blantyre, Hogmanay 1972

at the time was the story: ‘Angry Brigade is Classic Case for Sociologists.’ Again written by Maurice Weaver, he was helped by another middle-class academic pundit by the name of Professor Gould, a Professor of Psychology at Nottingham University, ‘which has carried out research into student attitudes.’ ‘Sociologists, psychologists and psychiatrists see the saga of the youngsters with such ordinary domestic pedigrees who suddenly turned to anarchist extremism as one with relevance to the wider picture of student unrest.... The divergent but essentially unremarkable backgrounds of the quartet make the search for any common factor which might have influenced their development a difficult one.’ The crass arrogance and stupidity of these comments was not at all remarkable among journalists, academics and politicians of the time. Another equally facile statement was made by a Dr. J. C. Gunn of the London University Institute of Psychology, who ‘felt it would be unwise’ to label the convicted four in any medical category: ‘The pattern of pressures which have been affecting their actions will obviously be studied and re-studied. One of the factors that must be taken into account is the way they were affected by their exposure to university life. The broader stratum of society now attending and mixing in universities is creating an entirely new sociological picture.’ A ‘senior London psychiatrist’ commented on Jim Greenfield going to Cambridge and ‘changing from a very reserved and politically uninterested young boy to a rebel’... so he fitted the picture of a ‘vulnerable young mind.’ ‘The wider publicity that is given to the wrongs and injustices of the world, together with the effect of mixing with other people from a broad range of society, do have a highly dramatic effect on some undergraduates’ — silly young things! ‘The basic arrogance that is demonstrated by these people in their attempts to change the world by violence, often goes side by side with a basic immaturity and an unreadiness to accept affection and worldly realities.’ These statements need no additional commentary, but it would be interesting to hear these undoubtedly eminent psychiatrists’ views on our statesmen, civil servants, politicians, generals and police officers. Even the local rag in Blantyre had a go at me. Brenda and I had gone to Blantyre to see my mum and put the final changes to my translation of Sabaté: Guerrilla Extraordinary. A few days after we arrived, a copy of a new local free advertising sheet with pretensions to being a newspaper — The Blantyre Advertiser — was pushed through my mum’s letterbox. The lead article — in fact it looked like the only article — carried the banner headline that read ‘Christie in Blantyre.’ The tone of the article was that of ‘Dracula back in the Carpathians.’ The article started quite inoffensively: ‘Stuart Christie will be coming home to Blantyre this weekend, after being acquitted of all charges against him in the Angry Brigade trial.’ Then the writer started getting carried away with pseudoliberal sactimony… ‘all have a right to voice protest against society but not endanger lives and damage property simply because they don’t agree with the way society is being governed…’ The article concluded with a challenge to me!: ‘If Mr Christie, self-confessed anarchist, believed that this method of protest

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Overtaken By Events

could have any effect on the ordinary man in the street, other than total repulse, then he really wants to grow up and think again. The Advertiser is willing to give Mr. Christie the opportunity to defend his reactionary ideas in print.’ I didn’t take them up on their offer. Anyone deluded enough to believe their guff must have remained under the illusion that I wanted people to accept freedom from government by obliging them to do so under force of arms. I had never believed or argued in any way at any time in any publication that violence was an effective way to change society. The only groups consistently using coercion, violence, weapons and explosives to impose their will or as a form of political argument are those allied to government or other forms of power or authority structure. While anarchists may consider killing a tyrant and those who serve him with their brutality — and have done so — and resist illegitimate authority by violent means, no anarchist would dream of using violence to impose views which are based upon voluntary cooperation. In fact, most anarchists I know who have been in prison have done so in punishment for nonviolent protest against their rulers’ resort to violence, in particular the bomb as a form of political argument. Without exception, all the papers had raised an eyebrow at my acquittal. They felt sure this would excite much comment. Nobody actually used the headline ‘Scot Free’ but it was what a lot of them were thinking. It seemed logical that after the ten-year sentences passed on John, Jim, Hilary and Anna, Jake Prescott should have been released on appeal. This was not the case. The Appeal Court eventually did reduce Jake’s sentence from fifteen years to ten. But had I been convicted the sentences would probably have been as high as 20 years, given that First of May Group actions which preceded those of the Angry Brigade occurred before most off the others had left school. Several of those acquitted still had to face pending cheque-kiting charges. But as they had already served more than enough time for such relatively minor offences, they were released on conviction. The only outstanding charge against me was one of driving a car without a full driving licence — and crossing the grass verge between two motorway lanes. The campaign against me, which had begun with the melodramatic police search by land, sea and air, fizzled out in a fine under the Traffic Acts for an offence that was over three years old. The Angry Brigade was a creature of its time. To quite a few people at the time, its emergence appeared to be a natural and spontaneous reaction to the institutionalised violence that Edward Heath’s government had pursued in its desire for class confrontation. The Angry Brigade had also succeeded in one of its aims — to make some political and Establishment leaders personally nervous and uncomfortable. It had also struck a chord, in spite of all the blustering in the media. Up and down the country thousands of people were wearing Angry Brigade badges on anti-Tory and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. The Angry Brigade itself was overtaken by events — ‘Events, dear boy, events’ — that crowded in on all of us, by which I mean the entire radical working-class movement. The confrontation sought by Heath’s Cabinet reached

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Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972: two of the thirteen civil rights marchers killed in Derry by soldiers of the Support Company of the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment

IRA launches bomb campaign in London: Old Bailey and Ministry of Agriculture, 3 March 1973

17 June, 1974: IRA bomb Westminster Hall

its climax in Northern Ireland where nationalist anger had escalated enormously as a result of the use of internment, torture and cold-blooded murder by the British Army, provoking a violence far beyond anything conceived by the Angry Brigade. On 9 August 1971, ten days before our arrest, the British government imprisoned without trial 342 people in Northern Ireland — not because they had committed a crime, but because of their background, friends or likelihood of political resistance to the government. This had provoked one of the last Angry Brigade actions before our arrest, the bombing of a British Army recruiting office in the Holloway Road. Six months later, 13 citizens of Derry were murdered by British paratroopers during a peaceful Civil Rights demonstration. The effect of this was to trigger a serious ongoing Provisional IRA bombing and murder campaign over many years in which countless numbers of innocent people would be killed, suffer serious injury, or be subjected to grief and bereavement. Nationalists and religious zealots do not discriminate between those they oppose. Everyone — capitalists, generals, princes or workers alike — is ‘the enemy,’ and as there are more of the last it is mostly them who are hit. Libertarian reaction to the institutionalised violence of the state is quite different. Anarchists have a ‘bad name’ in the media, not because they can point to one indiscriminate massacre by anarchists — because there have been none — but because the one thing holders of power fear is that they, personally, should be held responsible for their own actions. Following the Angry Brigade trial, the police cast all pretence of due process to the winds, particularly in cases involving the IRA which began stepping up its mainland bombing campaign in March with two large car bombs, one at the Old Bailey itself and the other outside the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in Whitehall Place. As Detective Superintendent Habershon had demonstrated with his methods during the Angry Brigade investigation, the police were now ‘prepared to cut corners.’ This was a polite euphemism for throwing the Judges’ Rules out the window: the Winchester Eight, for example, were kept naked in their cells for days with no access to a lawyer while they were being interrogated. The men who wrote the interrogation rule books for Abu Ghraib, Bagram Airbase and Guantanamo Bay prisons in the 21st century had a long tradition of expertise to draw on. Henceforth Europe’s police forces co-operated openly and without concern for public opinion. After all, there had been no outrage expressed about the use of the conspiracy laws in our case. It had been accepted without a murmur, just as easily as people had accepted — the very same month as our arrest — internment and sensory deprivation in Northern Ireland, and later the use of tanks and British troops in a policing role on the streets of Britain. The last pretence that Interpol and Scotland Yard did not concern themselves with political affairs had been brushed aside.

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But I Have Promises to Keep, And Miles To Go Before I Sleep...

Chapter 12 — 1972-1975 (End of an Era) WITH THE END of the Angry Brigade trial at the Old Bailey the curtain had fallen on another act in my life, not without its moments of light relief, in which the drama might well have reached greater heights. In the interval between acts people loved, lived, worked, died, and the four who were sentenced when the other three and myself were acquitted, joined Jake Prescott and spent that long interval behind locked cell doors and barred windows. Prison took a far greater physical and psychological toll on the women than the men. Anna Mendelson was the first to be released, on parole, on completion of the obligatory six years of her sentence in 1977. There was a great outcry in the media ‘They are releasing the Angry Brigade.’ The press swooped on her as soon as the news broke. The story, having broken over Anna, ceased to be newsworthy and the others came out one by one. Hilary, the youngest, was released six months after Anna, her eyes permanently weakened by a six month spell in a permanently-lit underground isolation cell. John and Jim, who both refused to apply for parole, came out in 1978, and Jake Prescott, first in, last out, early in 1979. After the euphoria of acquittal came the dustcart of everyday life. It was going to be hard to pick up the pieces, but with an officially cleared character, a blaze of publicity and £2.50 in cash, I had to make plans and reinvent myself. I contacted William Press’s personnel manager to ask for my old job back. After a few weeks I received an official reply saying: ‘Due to a change in programme we have now suspended all recruitment on the central London contract.’ No surprise there then, but I had to make the effort. The North Thames Gas Board, the main contractors, had been trying to get rid of me for some time when they discovered who I was, but it was difficult to sack me because of the support I had from the other union members and shop stewards on the contract. The contract engineers and supervisors who ran the job were also on my side, but they didn’t call the shots. Having been out of circulation for eighteen months, no matter how much I might protest my innocence and that I'd been framed, I couldn’t get my old job back. I tried other jobs, but as soon as the prospective employers heard my name and remembered in what context they’d heard it before, all doors politely closed on me. There was also the question of previous employment. What had I been doing for the past eighteen months? — time, for allegedly trying to pick off the entire Cabinet, one by one. After spending a couple of weeks in Blantyre with my mum and dad, Brenda and I moved back to London, to a small flat in Wimbledon — Allington Close at the top of Wimbledon Hill. It had been Brenda’s granny’s flat in an ostlers tenement attached to nearby stables. Although I was jobless, I wasn’t idle. As well as applying for work everywhere I could, I had finished a translation of a biography of Francisco Sabaté Llopart — Sabaté: Guerrilla Extraordinary, who had been killed in a

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January 1973: ‘gie’s ma job back’

Mum, dad, Aunt Eileen and sister Olivia

Barcelona, 1955: Francisco Sabaté with the home-made mortar he used for launching anti-Francoist propaganda

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Octavio Alberola and Stuart Christie, Liège 1973

Francoist repression increases

Salvador Puig Antich, arrested in Barcelona on 22 September 1973

dramatic ambush by Franco’s Civil Guard on 5 January 1960. I was doing the rounds of London publishers trying to interest them in the book, but I was having no success. Books on anarchism were being published, but only if they were written by academics — or reprints of out of copyright classics. This rejection first put the germ of the idea into my head of setting up an anarchist publishing house and breaking through the censorship barriers that way. It was a Mickey Rooney moment. Everyone is down in the dumps when the wee man suddenly jumps up and says to Judy Garland and their mates: ‘Hey, Gang, I've got a barn. We can sing and dance. Let’s put on a show — right here!’ Except I didn’t have a barn, but I could get my hands on an IBM Selectronic golfball typesetter! The idea for the publishing house took firm root during the summer of 1973. After being cooped up for 18 months in Brixton I was in desperate need of exotic food in interesting places with old and new friends. Brenda and I arranged to spend July and August travelling through Europe, camping and staying with old friends and comrades. Before heading off on our travels, I visited Octavio Alberola in Liège to discuss developments in Franco’s Spain and the new campaign of armed struggle that was getting under way there, under the aegis of the Autonomous Combat Groups of the Iberian Liberation Movement (MIL/GAC). These were a new generation of action groups that had grown out of the First of May Group following a severe escalation of the Francoist repression in Spain. The trigger was the violent police response to the April 1970 strike at engineering/car parts importers and distributors Harry Walker in Barcelona. Inspired by ‘Quico’ Sabaté, who had carried out similar actions throughout the 1950s until his death in 1960, the French and Catalan youths of the MIL/GAC carried out a series of over twenty spectacular robberies of Savings Banks throughout Catalonia — getting away with millions of pesetas, much of which they donated to strike funds inside Spain. Each time they left a bank they scattered anarchist and anti-Francoist leaflets. They also stole a printing press which they reassembled in a farmhouse in the French Pyrenees, near Pau, and were using it to run off anarchist and anti-Francoist leaflets and books. Unfortunately, the French police raided the empty farmhouse on 9 September 1972 and removed the press. Three months later, on 13 Deecember, the police warehouse in which the press was being stored was broken into by MIL activists and the machine ‘reappropriated.’ I had no direct knowledge about these developments, other than snippets recounted by Albert Meltzer and Miguel García García on their prison visits. Most of it had happened during the final stages of our trial. Many of the MIL/GAC activists were frequent visitors to London and the Centro Iberico/International Libertarian Centre run by Albert and Miguel in Haverstock Hill. Salvador Puig Antich was one of the MIL/GAC activists who

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We travel not for trafficking alone

stayed with Albert and Miguel at their North London basement flat in Finsbury Park and accompanied them on their anti-Francoist speaking tours of Britain. Another who passed through the Centro Iberico was Ignacio Perez Beotegui, known to us as ‘Wilson’, an ETA member who was sympathetic to anarchism. ‘Wilson’ was later accused of being a key figure in the spectacular December 1973 assassination of Franco’s prime minister, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. The Anarchist Black Cross had been hit badly by the Europe-wide repression of the previous year, mainly in Germany where Berufsverbote, the witch-hunt depriving socialists of their professional employment, had reached almost McCarthyite proportions. Georg von Rauch, founder of the Anarchist Black Cross in Germany, had been shot dead by West Berlin police in December 1971. He was unarmed and had his arms in the air. Two months later Tommy Weissbecker, the Anarchist Black Cross’s 23-year old secretary was also shot dead by police in an Augsburg street while producing his ID card. He had been under surveillance for some time. But it wasn’t entirely a one-way process. In May, Milan police inspector Luigi Calabresi — the man widely believed to have been responsible for the murder of Italian Black Cross secretary, Giuseppe Pinelli — had been shot dead outside police headquarters. Not by an anarchist, but by a member of the Marxist Lotta Continua group, a group he had been suing for defamation of character. There was also the suggestion that this killing had been manipulated by the right, or the secret services who might also have wanted Calabresi silenced.

Sicilian interlude

December 1971: Georg von Rauch, founder of German Anarchist Black Cross. Shot dead by German police.

We needed a holiday. That summer of 1972 we drove with friends to Provence, to Toulouse and Perpignan, then back along the Mediterranean coast to Genoa, Milan, Carrara and Rome where we parted company. Brenda and I took the train to Naples, then across the Appenines to Bari, Brindisi and then south to Lecce, on the heel of Italy. Our most southerly destination was Lecce Penitentiary where I hoped to visit my old friend from Carabanchel, Goliardo Fiaschi. Then aged 43, Goliardo had already spent 10 years in a Francoist jail and a further nine in various Italian penitentiaries, ending up in one of its most notorious jails in Lecce. He had been arrested in a Civil Guard ambush outside Barcelona in 1957 with the Spanish urban guerrilla fighter Jose Lluís Facerias. Facerias was shot and killed, and the 27-year-old Goliardo had been sentenced to twenty-years imprisonment. Repatriated back to Italy in 1966, Goliardo was immediately re-arrested. He had been sentenced to ten years imprisonment by an Italian court — in absentia, without his knowledge, without any notification of the charges and without any representation in court — for alleged involvement in a bank robbery in Monferrato with Facerias in 1957. When we arrived at Lecce prison, the governor refused us permission to visit Goliardo. After a heated discussion with various officious functionaries, I was eventually allowed to leave him a note to say we had called. It was

Goliardo Fiaschi, Lecce Penitentiary, 1973

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Goliardo Fiaschi as a young man

Trullis of Puglia

frustrating. Having travelled all that way and getting within shouting distance, but not to see him. I promised myself we would redouble our efforts to secure his release, or at least cause major embarrassment to the Italian government in the process. In fact, as soon as we were back in London in September, Albert Meltzer and I met with the Italian Ambassador to raise Goliardo’s case with him. I told him that unless we received a satisfactory response from the Italian government, the Anarchist Black Cross would be organising regular pickets and protest demonstrations — with war veterans and the British Legion. The British Legion didn’t know about this, but it sounded a useful lever at the time. After all, Goliardo had been one of the youngest of the wartime partisans in the Modena region. He had entered Modena as the standard bearer of the Costrignano Brigade on its liberation in 1945. The ambassador promised he would do what he could. Goliardo was released six months later in March 1974. From Lecce our next stop was Ragusa in southern Sicily. The journey took us through some of the strangest and most sinister landscapes of unspoiled Italy. Lifts were regular, fortunately, and the drivers friendly. As we drove through a lightly undulating forested hills of vines, olive trees, orange, lemon and almond trees loaded with fruit we began to notice what appeared to be whitewashed villages of miniature Russian orthodox churches or Central Asian caravanserais, their white facades peeping through the gnarled trunks and branches of olive and fruit trees. Some stood close to each other, others stood alone. These were among the most unusual buildings in Italy — ‘Trullis,’ said our driver as we passed. He asked if we would like to see inside one. ‘Yes, please.’ we replied. We stopped at a trulli just off the main road, the home of a friend of our driver. It was like a small belltower. Built with local stone, its walls were more than three feet thick. Apart from the bathroom, the trulli had no doors inside, only stone pillars with curtains separating the rooms. The walls were whitewashed every year, right up to the high cone-shaped roof, which was their most unique feature. Trullis served as barns in the past, with families and animals living under the same roof. Above the cupolas, the pinnacles were crowned with ornamental white stones laid out in holy, magical, astronomical, or planetary symbols, sometimes in the shape of cones or horizontal discs, representing the earth or the two-dimensional sun. There were also pyramids with four or five facets, which, we were told, symbolised the holy stone of Baitulos — a cult followed by oriental tribes, part of which included fertility symbols. Later trullis had Christian crosses, Eucharist cups or radiant altarbread. Others had pagan symbols such as cockerels, snakes, horseshoes and bull horns — or their owner’s initials. The difference in the landscape between Basilicata and Calabria was dramatic. Suddenly the roads were potholed and scattered with rocks from uncleared landslides. An almost tangible sense of oppression descended on us as we drove deeper into Calabria. Our lift dropped us off at dusk on the

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Trulli, Madly, Deeply

outskirts of Sibari, at the southern end of the Gulf of Taranto. Nothing passed by for what seemed like hours, then, out of the darkness a car emerged, illuminating us in its headlights. It stopped suddenly a little way up the road and reversed back. The driver opened his window and spoke in some unknown tongue. Assuming he was asking where we wanted to go, I said ‘Cosenza, allora Sicilia.’ Someone got out the back and indicated that we should get into the car. It already had four passengers, a young driver, his mother and two more young men in the back. I thanked them for stopping, but nobody could speak English and what little Italian I had they didn’t seem to understand, no matter how slowly I spoke. It was a strange dialect and I could only make out the odd word as they chatted between themselves. We turned off the main road and drove into the mountains which we could see ahead of us, silhouetted against the clear moonlit sky. I was a bit concerned at this point, with thoughts of Alexander ‘Sawney’ Bean and his cannibal family who attacked and ate unwary travellers who passed by their cave in Galloway. After traversing narrow sharply bending roads which seemed to wind forever upwards we drove onto a town, Spezzano Albanese. The car pulled up and the young driver signalled to us to get out, pointing to a cave that he claimed was a ‘Ristorante.’ But what — or who — is on the menu, I thought. He came into the cave with us, said a few words to the owner then indicated he would be back ‘dopo mangiare.’ Being a cave it was primitive. Hell’s kitchen was a better description. Flames from the open Pizza oven gave the place and the people an eerie orange hue. Only men sat at the tables — no women — and rough, tough looking mustachioed and bearded coves at that. They had been playing cards when we entered, but everything stopped as we were ushered to a table at the back of the cave. The room was now completely silent and heads followed us slowly as we passed by. All of them appeared to have enormous daggers stuck in their belts. Wherever we were, it wasn’t the local Salvation Army hall. A handwritten menu was produced and we chose the only thing we understood — spaghetti agli oglio (spaghetti with garlic oil). Interest in us appeared to melt away quickly after that and the men turned back to their cards and conversations. Our lift returned an hour or so later. He had friends with him, one of whom spoke a little English. He explained they were going to take us down the mountain to the main road to the south. We paid for our meal and followed the driver out of the cave through the back streets until we came to the main thoroughfare. It was the hour of the paseo, when all traffic was halted and young and old men and women strolled up and down the main street, meeting and greeting old and new friends. The crowds parted and grew silent as we walked through with our escorts, two in front and two behind. All the men seemed to have knives stuck in their waistbands. I wasn’t thinking so much now of ‘Sawney’ Bean now as Sergeant Neil Howie in the film The Wicker Man, which we’d just seen before we left London. Was this the Calabrian equivalent

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of Summerisle? It felt like it. The words ‘Flesh to touch...Flesh to burn! Don't keep the Wicker Man waiting!’ kept running through my head. Our car was waiting at the far end of the street, where it had been blocked off for the paseo. Brenda and I got in the back, then three more young guys squeezed in beside us, and two more beside the driver in the front. It was nerve-wracking. What was the SP here? What were they planning to do? Brenda and I exchanged worried glances as we drove into the black leather night of the Calabrian highlands. The driver and his friends were having an increasingly heated conversation, but about what we could only guess. Obviously it was about us and what they were going to do to us when the time was right. After about five miles, the car pulled to a halt and everyone got out. We appeared to be halfway down a mountainside , with no lights to be seen anywhere. I drew a deep breath and looked at Brenda. There was nowhere to run: steep cliffs up one side of the road and a sheer drop on the other. Our companions were muttering quietly among themselves, then the Englishspeaking guy spoke, saying that this was ‘the end of the line.’ There wasn’t much petrol left in the car so they would have to leave us here, but just round the next bend further down the hill we’d find the main road south. Each of them shook our hands, wished us good luck, then got back into the car and drove back up to Spezzano Albanese. Brenda and I stood looking at each other — then burst out laughing. Our next lift took us straight to Villa San Giovanni where we caught the ferry for the short crossing to Messina and then travelled by bus along the coast directly beneath the smoking volcanic summit of Mount Etna to Catania, where we were to stay with some comrades.

Franco Leggio — the intractable Sicilian

On Mt Etna (just before it erupted)

After a few days in Catania — during which Etna erupted! — we were picked up early one morning by a taxi-bus and drove south through the wilderness of bare limestone mountains of southern Sicily to the small town of Ragusa. Ragusa straddles a crease, as it were, on the lower slopes of Monti Renna. Both sides of the town are linked by a bridge and one main street which runs through the town, from east to west. Off this main thoroughfare other smaller, narrower cobbled streets branched off, sloping either up or down. The pastel-blue houses had balconies with swan-neck iron railings from which clotheslines with washing crisscrossed between the houses. Bunches of myrtle hung on the walls of many of the houses to bring good fortune. Many carried a patchwork quilt of blackbordered funerary notices with portraits of the departed. Many doors had diagonal black strips across the centre, with the words Per mia madre or padre or something like that, depending on who had died. The vista up these busy narrowing streets where the buildings closed in on each other was a peek into a world where life was lived outside. Men and women sat at tables outside their houses while noisy children and dogs

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The Good Sicilian Svejk

swarmed around them. Elderly widows wore the long black skirts, cardigans and headscarves of mourning while the widowers wore black caps and black strips on their jacket lapels. As we walked through the narrow streets women seeing Brenda dressed in a long colourful skirt hurriedly genuflected and crossed the road, avoiding her quizzical look. If the woman had a child with her she would pull it behind her. Later we discovered why. Only gypsies wore colourful skirts like hers in Ragusa, and they had the evil eye. Ragusa was also, we were told, one of the few towns or villages in Sicily not under the pervasive control of the Mafia. We made our way to Via San Francesco to find the house of Franco Leggio, who had invited us to Sicily. I had first met Franco in Carrara in 1968. He was an extraordinary man — a veteran of the Sicilian-Italian anarchist and antiFrancoist resistance movements and one of the protagonists of the short-lived insurrectionary Ragusa Commune of 1946. Short and wiry, he cut a striking figure with his long greying hair, olive complexion and slightly Asiatic appearance, a look that was enhanced by a Genghis Khan moustache that would have made Jack Palance green with envy. Franco — then in his mid-forties — was a well-known and popular figure in Ragusa. Everyone we asked directions of knew him and appeared to think highly, or at least approvingly, of him. When we found his house it was already evening, but Franco was not at home. Panicking a bit and not knowing what to do or where else to go, we knocked on his neighbour’s door to ask when he would be back. The neighbour, a fat jolly man, welcomed us and said that Franco had been expecting us, but had had to go up to the mountains that day and would not be back until the following morning. Not to worry, he said, the door was open and there was food in the larder and our beds were made up waiting for us. We slept like logs on the camp beds in the small front room and were woken early the next morning by Franco, grinning broadly and greeting us with a bowl of milky coffee and freshly-made bread. Franco was a native Sicilian, a people considered by Neapolitans to be the oldest and most intractable people on earth, ‘older than the Roman Empire and the Caesars, older even than the Etruscans or Minoans, so old that their ways and ideas were incomprehensible to anyone but the Devil himself.’ This view was no doubt shared by the German military during World War II. Franco had played his own small part in Mussolini’s downfall. During the war he served in the Italian navy, patrolling the Mediterranean, ostensibly looking for Allied shipping. So unsuccessful were they in locating and sinking enemy ships — probably deliberately so — that the German high command finally felt obliged to put their own officers on board Mussolini’s ships to shadow Italian officers and gunners. Franco’s strategy was inspired by that of the Good Soldier Svejk, the anti-militarist character created by Czech anarchist Jaroslav Hasek. With these German naval officers, Franco turned into the idiot of the gunnery deck, deliberately mishearing or misunderstanding their

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Via San Francesco, Ragusa

Ragusa

Franco Leggio

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Via San Francesco, Ragusa

instructions and orders. Among his achievements he counted the loss of three ships — all his own. Whenever an Allied vessel was located the German officer would give target commands, in pidgin Italian, which gunner Leggio deliberately misconstrued, fixing the exasperated Teuton with an amiable smile and a sweet and pleasant manner. By the time the angry German had pushed Franco out of the way to do his job for him, the Allied ship would have disappeared or would have blown their ship out of the water. As I said, Franco ended up in the Mediterranean three times. Franco gave the lie to the Italians’ ‘acquired reputation’ of cowardice during war. Most simply did not want to serve fascism — nor for that matter probably any other ‘ism.’ When forced, many did their best to do as little fighting and as much sabotage as possible. Apart from being imprisoned by the fascists toward the end of the war, Franco was also arrested and imprisoned by the Allies in 1946 for his role in the little-known anarchist-inspired insurrection in his home town known as ‘the Commune of Ragusa,’ when Ragusans declared the place a free city and held off the combined Allied and Italian forces for over a week. This was at a time when the whole of Sicily was in a state of critical political turmoil, with the armed separatist (pro-union with America) bands under the control of the mafia-protected Salvatore Giuliano in the West and Concetto Gallo in Catania province in the East.

Cienfuegos Press

Camilo Cienfuegos,1932-1959: libertarian and revolutionary. (Below) Camilo Cienfuegos (waving) enters Havana, 1959

It was being in Europe again, and conversations with those still suffering the consequences of General Franco’s rule that restored my energy after the Angry Brigade trial. That gave me the impetus and inspiration to launch an anarchist publishing venture in Britain. For years Franco Leggio’s one-man anarchist publishing house, La Fiaccola, had been relentlessly churning out anarchist pamphlets, books and newspapers. These publications had made a considerable impact — not only on quite a few young people in the town but elsewhere throughout Italy. And on me. If Franco could do what he was doing in Sicily, against tremendous odds, working half the year as an agricultural labourer — or whatever else he was doing, I didn’t inquire too deeply — to provide the necessary finance for his publishing house, I thought I could do the same. It was unlikely I would find suitable employment elsewhere for some time to come, so why not kill two birds with one stone — provide myself with work I enjoyed, and at the same time establish a much-needed anarchist presence in the publishing world? I also had the experience of Albert Meltzer to draw upon. Albert had been doing much the same as Franco in London, also against all the odds, but specialising mainly in duplicated pamphlets and papers. He too had lots of experience to draw upon, especially when it came to the uncertain financial times — and there were lots of those to come. Without Albert our publishing project could never have survived as long as we did. Returning to Britain that September there was a letter waiting for me from

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Say Not The Struggle Nought Availeth

the London publisher Reg Davis-Poynter who wanted to publish a hardback edition of my translation of Tellez’s book Sabaté: Guerrilla Extraordinary. DavisPoynter was sympathetic to the subject and in fact had been considering the idea since Sabaté’s death in 1960 — and since Fred Zinneman’s 1964 film Behold a Pale Horse in which Gregory Peck played the role of Sabaté. Reg was happy for me to do a limited edition paperback of my own. I decided to call the imprint Cienfuegos Press, after Camilo Cienfuegos, the popular libertarian Cuban revolutionary who died in mysterious circumstances on 28 October 1959. (See My Granny Made Me An Anarchist, p164) Around the same time an elderly Rumanian-American anarchist, Marcus Graham, with whom I corresponded, said he wanted to publish an anthology of writings from the archives of his anarchist paper MAN! Marcus, then eightyone, had been the editor and publisher of MAN! from January 1933 through to April 1940, when the last issue was closed down by the US government. MAN! had been an important link between different strands of the North American anarchist movement and had published articles covering the whole range of anarchist thought, the politics of Roosevelt’s America, crime, fascism, religion, resistance, art, poetry, literature and anarchist profiles. It was a real snapshot of life and anarchism throughout most of the Thirties. Marcus offered to pay all the costs of publishing what turned out to be a 700-page book. So I went out and leased an IBM Selectronic typesetting machine and reinvented myself as a publisher. Apart from Cienfuegos Press’s books, the IBM machine also meant we could now typeset Black Flag and transform it from a short-run shabby roneoed or duplicated publication printed on rough grey paper and held together by staples, to a smartly produced re-designed newspaper with clear photographs and sharp text set in Bold, Medium and Roman Helvetica — the only set of IBM golfballs we had — and printed on Albert’s new Gestelith offset-litho on crisp white paper. By 1974 the Black Flag editorial group consisted of a core group of around a dozen or so people based in London. Apart from myself there were: Albert Meltzer, Miguel García García, Ted Kavanagh, Lyn Hudelist, Iris Mills, Graham Rua, John Olday, Ross Flett and Phil Ruff. Jean Weir, another member, had moved to Paris in 1973 with her partner Nick Heath. Jean, a trained nurse from Edinburgh, had worked for a time as a personal assistant for Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones drummer. She became interested in anarchism as a mature student at Sussex University and was active in the Brighton Anarchist group as well as Black Flag before moving to Paris. A strikingly handsome woman, Jean was to run the gauntlet of governments and police forces all over Europe for a further two decades — and more. We also drew on a much wider national and international circle of contributors and supporters. One of these was Belfast-born John McGuffin, who lived in Derry for many years. McGuffin, a fine writer and indefatigable activist, had been interned in August 1971, probably the only Protestant lifted in the first swoop, and wrote what was probably the definitive book on

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Marcus Graham Editor of Man!, 1933-1940

A number of Cienfuegos Press titles had cover illustrations by Flavio Costantini

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John McGuffin

internment — Internment. He also wrote The Guineapigs, (Penguin Special, 1974), In Praise of Poteen, The Hairs of the Dog and, Last Orders, Please! In November 1970, after causing trouble on David Frost’s television show and insulting the host, the American pot-head radical Jerry Rubin travelled to Belfast to visit the ‘troublespots.’ Here he met McGuffin, who, together with his journalist friend Eamonn McCann, drove him to Dublin after being expelled from Ulster. A mile or so out of Newry, McGuffin explained to the fabled member of the Chicago Seven that the town they were approaching was in the grip of revolution. The risen people had turned en masse to anarchism and they had better barrel on through. McGuffin said that it would be too dangerous to stop, even for a moment, for fear of being engulfed by the fevered proletariat. In fact Down were in the All-Ireland final that weekend so every house, lamppost and telegraph pole was festooned with red-and-black flags. Rubin was agog, levitating almost, according to McCann when they passed under banners strung across the streets, reading, ‘Up Down!’ ‘These people really got the revolutionary ethic,’ enthused the ecstatic Rubin. ‘As much as yourself, comrade,’ allowed the gracious McGuffin.

Bad moon rising...

11 September, 1973: Chile’s democratically elected President Salvador Allende is murdered in USsponsored military coup

MIL activist: Oriol Solé Sugranyes

We had much to write about in Black Flag that autumn. In Bristol, two young anarchists Dafydd Ladd and Michael Tristam had been arrested and charged on 14 September with bomb attacks on fascist Portugal’s vice consulates in Bristol and Cardiff, and the British Army’s officers’ club in Aldershot. They were sentenced to seven years and six years respectively the following February. And in December Edward Heath had introduced the three-day working week. On a more serious level of brutality, Chile’s President Allende had been killed in a US-backed coup and at least 5,000 leftists and liberals had been arrested, tortured and killed — ‘disappeared’ in the repression that followed. Over a million Chileans had gone into exile. In Spain, things were also taking a turn for the worse. That August, the MIL, the Iberian Liberation Movement, decided to disband as a political-military organisation. Its members had recognised the danger they faced of slipping into permanent clandestinity and gangsterism, robbing for its own sake — as opposed to pursuing specific political or propagandistic objectives. But before they disbanded to continue what they called the ‘permanent civil war’ in small individual groups, they decided on one last robbery — at the Savings Bank in Bellver de Cerdanya in northern Catalonia. The hold-up was a success, but the Civil Guard was waiting for them as they tried to cross back into France later that day— 16 September 1973. After a short gunfight, two MIL members were arrested as they crossed back into France: 25-year old printer Oriol Solé Sugranyes — another Centro Iberico/Anarchist Black Cross activist — and 17-year old student José Lluís Pons Llobet. (Oriol Solé Sugranyes was shot dead escaping from Segovia jail on

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Carrero’s Ascension

9 April 1976.) Other arrests followed and the organisation started to disintegrate. Three more MIL members were arrested on 24 September in a police ambush in Barcelona’s Calle Gerona: Santiago Soler Amigó, Francisco Xavier Garriga Paituví and our comrade from the Centro Iberico/Anarchist Black Cross, the 26-year old Salvador Puig Antich. Salvador, who had only just returned to Spain from London, had allegedly opened fire on his would-be captors attempting to escape and killed an inspector of Franco’s fascist secret police, the Brigada Politico Social. The autopsy revealed that at Scapegoat: Salvador Puig Antich least two of the five bullets in the inspector’s body had been fired by the guns of his own colleagues. His defence was that he was beaten to the ground in a state of semi-consciousness and his gun had gone off accidentally. The three anarchists now faced a summary council of war and possible death penalties.

Salvador Puig Antich

Death of an admiral But any prospects of a fair trial disappeared altogether on 20 December when Franco’s prime minister, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco was killed in his car in a Madrid street by an ETA commando with a massive culvert bomb. The blast was so enormous it blew his car over the roof of the church where he had just attended mass. ETA had chosen their target well. Carrero Blanco had been pivotal in Franco’s plans for the succession and continuity of his regime and the tyrant never fully recovered from Carrero’s death. The hard-liners were beside themselves with rage and almost lost the plot completely. Carlos Iniesta, the fundamentalist Director General of the Civil Guard, immediately ordered his men ‘to repress subversives and demonstrators energetically without restrictions on the use of firearms.’ He instructed them to maintain order in the urban centres, something that had previously been completely outside Civil Guard jurisdiction. Carrero Blanco’s place as prime minister was taken by Carlos Arias Navarro — the man responsible for the mass summary executions in Malagá in early 1937 — and my old Nemesis. He wanted more blood.

Franco’s right hand: Carrero Blanco

Death of Puig Antich 20 December 1973: ETA kill Franco’s prime minister, Admiral Carrero Blanco

The court martial of the three anarchists was held on 9 January 1974 and all were sentenced to death, pending Franco’s signature. It wasn’t long in coming

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The butcher of Málaga: Carlos Arias Navarro

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The garrote-vil: Carabanchel

Pueblo, 22 March 1974

Le Monde, 23 March 1974

in the case of Salvador Puig Antich. He was garroted at dawn on 2 March 1974 in the patio of Barcelona’s Model Prison. It was a horrific sensation that morning when I heard the news of his judicial murder, and the manner of his death. I kept running and re-running the whole scene in my mind’s eye like the courtyard execution scene of the Algerian patriot in Gilo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers. Franco had been thirsting for blood after the assassination of Carrero Blanco. Puig Antich was the scapegoat. The fate of the Barcelona prison other two now lay in the hands of Franco and Carlos Arias Navarro, the butcher of Malaga and former Director-General of Security when I was arrested in 1964. The response of anti-fascists around Europe was immediate — with protest marches, pickets, petitions, and bomb attacks on Francoist institutions around the world and railway lines into Spain blocked or sabotaged by protestors. A main target was the MadridParis express. More arrests followed. Two MIL members, Miguel Moreno and Jean-Claude Torres, were picked up in France, and at least twenty-two more in Spain. By April 1974 there were sixty anarchists awaiting trial in Franco’s public order courts (Tribunal de Orden Publico), and fourteen facing a military tribunal and possible death penalties. With the disappearance of the MIL, its role as the principle armed resistance movement inside Franco’s Spain had been immediately taken by other autonomous groups, the Grupos Autónomos de Intervención (GAI) — led by, among others, ex-MIL militant Jean Marc Rouillan. The prime objective of these five-person groups was to prevent the execution of the two remaining MIL members. The GAI soon merged into another more enduring resistance organisation called the Grupos de Acción Revolucionaria Internacionalistas (GARI). This was, essentially, the First of May Group by another name. The GARI was described in the indictment drawn up four years later by M. Pinsseau, the examining magistrate, as ‘an internationally structured coming together of various anarchist grouplets coordinating their activities with a view to mounting a series of spectacular attacks designed to support the struggle against the Franco regime, and on behalf of Spanish political prisoners.’

Ariane Gransac Sadori and Octavio Alberola

A garroting

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Driving Miss Sadori

The Suárez affair The question was what to do to prevent these further executions. I went to Paris and Brussels a couple of times to discuss the matter with Octavio Alberola and other close comrades. It was a situation that demanded urgent and drastic action. The police in France and Belgium kept me under close surveillance whenever I travelled abroad. The activities of the action groups in Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland, Italy and Spain, meant my movements and connections were a matter of interest to the authorities. My mail and telephone were closely monitored and I was under similar scrutiny from the ‘watchers’ in Britain. In January, shortly after the Barcelona Council of War that condemned the three young anarchists to death, Octavio’s partner, Ariane Gransac, an artist, came to London to discuss tactics and strategy for the defence campaign. She arrived at Folkestone and caught the train to Charing Cross. I met her on the station concourse and we left by the side stairs into Villiers Street where my car was parked. As I pulled out I checked in my windscreen mirror and, sure enough, a Hillman Hunter pulled out behind me with two men. My problem was how to get rid of them; it could take hours. I explained what was happening to Ariane, who was no stranger to this type of situation, and we drove twice around Trafalgar Square to make sure I wasn’t being paranoid. No, I wasn’t. They were really out to get me. They were good, very good, and no matter what I did I simply couldn’t shake them off. Eventually I got really pissed off. I had driven through the back streets of Soho, along Oxford Street, down Park Lane, around Hyde Park Corner and back along Piccadilly — and they were still sticking behind me. We were now heading towards Piccadilly Circus in the middle of the rush hour. Stopping at a set of traffic lights, with my ‘watchers’ in the car behind me, I noticed a street to my left. In the nanosecond when the lights turned to red and orange, I stuck my foot down — it was the Corsair GT 2000 and it could move — and with a squealing of tyres I was round the corner and halfway up the street before I realised it was one-way — and I was going the wrong way. Fortunately, the posse behind me realised they weren’t going to get anywhere with me that night so they gave up their pursuit. They stopped where they were and watched me disappear up the street, swerving to avoid the oncoming traffic, then round the corner into Curzon Street past the MI5 Registry building into Berkeley Square, and then off into the night. The anarchist response to the possible imminent execution of 25-year old Oriol Solé Sugranyes and 17-year old Josep Lluís Pons Llobet, the two remaining MIL members in Francoist custody came on Friday 3 May 1974 when Angel Baltasar Suárez, the 43-year old manager of the Paris branch of the Banco de Bilbao, one of the most important international Spanish banks, was kidnapped in Paris. That particular Friday was chosen because he had given his driver the

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High jinks in Highgate Cemetery: with Ariane Gransac Sadori, Jean Weir and (below) a French comrade, Claude

Portraits of the artist (Ariane) and sitter

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morning off. As the banker opened the door to his car to take his 17-year old son and 14-year old daughter to school, he was approached by three young masked men with handguns outside the garage of his home at 41 boulevard de Chateau in Neuilly, Paris. Suรกrez was blindfolded and tied up as were his two children. Their mouths were taped and they were placed behind the bin area in the garages. The teenagers were told not to call the police and that all communications would be made through the embassy. Suรกrez was then forced to drink a previously prepared sleeping draught and bundled into the boot of his DS21. They drove for a quarter of an hour or so to a storeroom on the seventh floor of a high-rise car park where another team was waiting for him, a French couple. He was then ordered to climb inside a wicker basket and was then loaded into another van and driven elsewhere, this time to an apartment on the second floor. Inside the apartment the banker was told, in Spanish, that his captors intended him no harm, but as a director of the Banco de Bilbao, a mainstay of the Franco regime, he was an important symbol of Francoism. Suรกrez was stripped of his clothes, given some blue pyjamas and locked in

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A Room Without A View

a specially prepared room. He described it later in his police statement: ‘The partition walls were made of conglomerate and covered with sacking. The walls were soundproofed with egg boxes to depth of around 50 centimetres. The prefabricated ceiling was low, about 1.20 metres high, and made of cork, as was the floor. One of the partition walls was covered by a multicoloured cloth.’ Later, Suárez made no complaints about the quality of food or the Rioja wines and reading material with which he was kept supplied by his masked captors — three men and a woman.

A traitor is exposed But there was a spy in the group. Franco’s cunning old spymaster, General Eduardo Blanco, had his own agent inside the group, manipulating many of the moves. The Brigada Politico Social agent was Inocencio Martínez, a treacherous character who had been at the heart of First of May Group activities since the early 1960s, and who was possibly the one responsible for my arrest in 1964. Certainly, in 1966 he had been the Francoist police agent responsible for the arrest of Luis Andrés Edo’s First of May Group unit preparing to kidnap the Commander-in-Chief of US forces in Spain: Rear-Admiral Norman G Gillette. What was disturbing was that Octavio continued to trust Martínez — the only one to escape the police trap — after the arrests of the group members. The French authorities knew something was afoot and had arrested Octavio in Paris on 17 April, a fortnight before the kidnapping, and deported him to Belgium. This was presumably why they also knew Ariane was coming to meet me in London a few weeks earlier. In fact, the Francoists’ secret agent Martínez had been one of the team that actually kidnapped Suárez. On the day of the kidnapping, 3 May, a file from the French political police, the Direction Centrale des Renseignements Généraux (DCRG), compiled on the basis of intelligence received from Franco’s Security HQ in Madrid and identifying Alberola as the organiser of the kidnapping, reached the desk of the Police Judiciaire investigating officer, Commissionaire Pierre Ottavioli. Alberola’s name was also leaked to the French press and appeared on 5 May in the right-wing Journal du Dimanche. That same day others involved in the three kidnap teams discovered that their identities were also known, and they too were being tailed.

Demands

Franco’s spymaster: General Eduardo Blanco

Journal du Dimanche, 5 May 1974

L’Aurore, 6 May 1974

The public heard nothing more from the kidnappers until 7 May, when the Grupos de Acción Revolucionario Internacionalista (GARI) issued a press release in Barcelona saying that they were holding Suárez. Another GARI communiqué, sent to Agence France Press postmarked Lyon, explained that Suárez had been chosen because the Banco de Bilbao was a high profile representative of both the Franco regime and international capitalism. The group’s demands were the release of all MIL prisoners and that the Francoist

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ABC (Madrid), 7 May 1974

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Kidnapee: banker Angel Baltasar Suárez Sunday Mirror, 12 May 1974

government apply its own law of conditional liberty (parole) to its political prisoners. This would have meant the immediate release of over one hundred political prisoners being held unlawfully. There was also another, unpublicised, demand: the repayment of the majority trade union (CNT) funds seized in 1939 by the trigger-happy Francoist generals and their supporters and beneficiaries, including the Banco de Bilbao. By 11 May, Alberola — who had been arrested in Paris and deported to Belgium only a fortnight before — had been located in a small village in La Bernerie en Retz in Brittany, with his partner, Ariane. Their movements and telephone calls were monitored continuously until their arrest eleven days later. On Sunday 12 May, the Sunday Mirror in London published a ‘world exclusive’— a photograph of Angel Suárez in captivity and his residence permit. Next day, David May, the news editor of Time Out, the then radical London news and listings magazine, was arrested and charged by Special Branch officers with illegal possession of stolen goods — Suárez’s ID document. David had been a pivotal figure in radical investigative journalism in London and was largely responsible for turning Time Out from just being a listings weekly of the ‘alternative/bohemian’ society into a must-read news and comment magazine which spoke for the time. David said he had been given the photograph and document by someone in London as proof that Suárez was still alive, and he had passed these on to the Sunday Mirror. It was precisely because he refused to name the contact who had given him these photographs and identity documents that David was charged with possession of stolen goods. As far as he was concerned he was defending the right to use documents other than those obtained through official channels. Also, as David said, it seemed to him that the police were not really concerned with Suárez’s safety, but with wiping out all those who supported the anti-Francoist resistance movement outside of Spain. Phil Ruff

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The Mirror Speaks

David May, News Editor, Time Out, 1974

The real leaders of this investigation who were supplying the leads to the French police in their hunt for kidnappers — and to the British police in their hunt for the linkman in London — were in fact a special team of Spanish secret police based at the Spanish Embassy in Paris, liaising with Madrid and their agent in the group. David refused to reveal his source and was released on police bail of one hundred pounds, but he did say his source had identified the kidnappers as members of the ‘Grupos de Acción Revolucionario Internacionalista.’

Suárez released The instructions for delivering the ransom were telephoned through to the manager of the Lyon branch of the Banco de Bilbao on Friday 17 May. The money was to be paid in German marks, Swiss francs and Spanish pesetas, all in non-sequential bills in a brown suitcase, and delivered in a black car without any radio aerial. The following day police from the Criminal Investigation and Intervention Squad, from the Central Bureau for the Eradication of Banditry, and from the Police Judiciare Directorate had Alberola’s main meeting places staked out. The ransom was delivered, but until the banker was freed nothing could be done. The BPS agent Martínez knew everything except the apartment where Suárez was being held. On 21 May Radio Luxembourg broadcast an audio tape with a personal message recorded by Suárez on the 16th to his family, reassuring them he was safe. The banker’s release was coordinated through French journalist Claude Marie Vadrot of the French daily L’Aurore. Vadrot received a phone call just before midnight on 22 May telling him to set his alarm for 5 am the following morning and await instructions. He found these slipped under his front door. The typewritten note said he would find Suárez at a lakeside chalet in Vincennes forest, on the eastern outskirts of the capital. And that was where he found him, unharmed, a few hours later, at 7 am on 23 May. He had been held for twenty days. The police moved in immediately Suárez’s release was confirmed, and arrested seven anarchists — four men and three women. They also recovered a substantial part of the three million French Francs (£300,000) repayment of union funds paid to the kidnappers. The seven anarchists who appeared before French examining magistrate Alain Bernard on 24 May 1974 were Octavio Alberola Surinach (Spanish, 46); Ariane Gransac Sadori (French, 32); Jean Helen Weir (Scottish, 29); Georges Riviere (French, 25); Annie Plazen (Spanish, 24); Lucio Urtubia (Spanish, 44); Annie Garnier (French, 32). Octavio, Ariane and Jean had been arrested in Avignon with the ransom money on the Wednesday morning. Another couple, Pierre Guilbert (French, 27) and Danièle Huas (French, 21) had been arrested with more of the ransom in the Aude district of France. Another two comrades were arrested within days, Arnaud and Chantal Chastel (French, 29 and 34).

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La Vanguardia Espanola, 23 May 1974

L’Aurore, 25 May 1974 France-Soir, 25 May 1974: ‘The kidnappers appear before the judicial authorities’

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Jean Weir

La Vanguardia Española, 7 July 1974: Barcelona police arrest eight people implicated in the kidnapping of the Banco de Bilbao director

France-Soir, 17 January 1974: GARI — the French Angry Brigade

The police claimed Suárez had been held in the Chastel’s flat, but the Chastel’s had been in Sicily throughout the kidnapping. As in Madrid in 1966, Innocencio Martínez was the only one to escape, taking with him the balance of the ransom money. He and his family disappeared from their home in Alès and were never seen again. The investigation was handled in the Quai des Orfèvres in Paris by commissaire Pierre Ottavioli working with members of the Francoist Brigada Politico Social and the Metropolitan Police Special Branch. Chief Superintendent Ronald Page was called in to interrogate the Scottish nurse Jean Weir, a Black Flag and Anarchist Black Cross associate. Needless to say, ABC groups across the world — from Australia to the States and all the many European countries where there were groups — immediately launched a campaign on behalf of those arrested in Paris. Protests were mounted everywhere, with those in France and Belgium becoming particularly violent with high explosive and petrol-bombings of Francoist targets becoming a regular occurrence throughout the summer and autumn of 1974. The Birmingham Anarchist Black Cross organised a national protest march to the French Embassy in London on 27 July 1974 at which I handed in a letter of protest. There never had been any reluctance over the co-operation between Spanish and French police. If Alberola had been arrested they felt I must be somewhere in the background too. My details were found in Alberola’s, Ariane’s and Jean Weir’s address book — in code. They also claimed to have intercepted calls to London from a phone box close to where Octavio, Ariane and Jean had been staying near Avignon. Their thesis was that I been involved in the kidnapping and was presumably the person who provided David May with Suárez’s documents. The French Examining Magistrate, Alain Bernard, came himself to London, accompanied by a senior French policeman, a M. Dupont, to investigate from that end. It had been dad’s birthday on 15 May so I was up in Scotland at the time, visiting him in Hairmyres hospital. He was 59 and dying of cancer of the bowel. It was an understatement to say dad was monosyllabic. It was always difficult to engage him in conversation, even when he wasn’t sedated in hospital, as he pondered deeply and long — sometimes as long as five or ten minutes — before replying to most questions. He was extraordinarily philosophical about life and death. Maybe that had something to do with a life lived on and close to the sea, and the tradition of generations of fishermen for whom danger and death were commonplace. We never spoke about our missing years, and he never apologized for not being there, but we had a comfortable relationship at the end. As I left for the last time, I kissed him on the brow. His last words to me were ‘Never fear, the sun will shine 1972: dad on his last boat, the Scotia

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GARI

again tomorrow.’ A true fisherman, his spirit left with the outgoing tide. So Brenda was alone in the Wimbledon flat when Chief Superintendent Ronald Page visited with an extremely aggressive French investigating magistrate. She refused to answer any questions on my behalf and they left empty-handed. Alain Bernard’s investigation soon ran into political and diplomatic problems. Unable to pursue the Suárez case without providing Franco’s police with sensitive information and a pretext for the Brigada Politico Social to arrest and torture any anti-Francoist militant he named, he was soon being vilified in the French press as an agent in the service of a dying but still ferociously fascistic regime.

Francoist repression deepens As anti-Francoist militancy intensified inside Spain itself throughout 1974, the repression of workers and students was growing harsher. The regime felt under siege. On 13 September 1974, a bomb in the Café Rolando in the Puerta del Sol, a meeting place for BPS officers from the security headquarters killed 12 people and injured 70 more. This was the same café where I had sat contemplating the facade of Franco’s security headquarters just over ten years earlier, minutes before my arrest. It was the favoured watering hole of the Brigada Politico Social (BPS) attached to the Dirección General de Seguridad. No one ever claimed responsibility for the bomb. Bernard’s situation was not helped by the fact that Salvador Puig Antich’s two comrades — Oriol Solé Sugranyes and Jose Lluís Pons Llobet were still threatened with execution by garrote. (Whether or not the kidnapping worked no one knows, but the two anarchists were not executed. They were sentenced on 24 July to 48 years and 21 years respectively.) The French magistrate had asked the Security Directorate in Madrid for information on specific named anarchists in Spain and within a week the eight anti-Francoists he named were arrested in Barcelona and charged with illegal propaganda. When the secret police raided their apartments they didn’t find any weapons or proof of any involvement in the French kidnapping, but they did find anarchist literature, which was enough to have them charged and imprisoned. These included my old cell companion Luis Andrés Edo, David Urbano, Juan Ferrer and Luis Burro. They were to pay heavily for the collusion between French and Francoist ‘justice.’ The political repercussions in France of the new wave of repression in Franco’s Spain led to Bernard’s case collapsing around him. On 16 August Pierre Guilbert, Annie Plazen and Danièle Huas were released on provisional liberty; the Chastels followed on 30 August and Lucio Urtubia, the forger, on 18 September. Ariane and Jean were freed on 3 December and Octavio on 13

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France-Soir, 24 May 1974: Suarez’s kidnappers were known to the police beforehand

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Lucio Urtubia

Luis Andrés Edo

Laureano Cerrada Santos

February 1975. He was the last to be released. Unluckier were those arrested in Barcelona at the request of the French magistrate. Luis Andres Edo was sentenced to 5 years; David Urbano Bermudez, 5 years; Juan Ferren Serafini, 3 years and Luis Burro Molina, 5 years. GARI quickly evolved into the French equivalent of the Angry Brigade. Its actions continued throughout 1974 and 1975 and led to bomb attacks on the Palais de Justice in Paris and police headquarters in Le Parisien, 14 March 1976: Robert Touati (right) and Clermont Ferrand, and an alleged attempt on the life Juan Duran Escribano. Killed by their own bomb of the French Minister of the Interior Michel Poniatowski. Two GARI members were killed in this action in 9 May 1976. It happened in the grounds of the Toulouse-Rangueill University when a bomb they were carrying exploded prematurely. One of the dead was Robert Touati, a 24-year old French-Algerian, and the other Juan Duran Escribano, a 23-year old Spaniard. Both were veterans of the Centro Iberico/Anarchist Black Cross Centre in Haverstock Hill, London. They hadn’t been intending to kill anyone. Their intention was to protest against a visit the following morning by Poniatowski to the local barracks of the French paramilitary police, the CRS. The interior minister had been due to attend the funeral of a CRS man killed in a confrontation with local wine growers. The two anarchists were killed when the bomb exploded as they were lowering it over the barrack walls. Laureano Cerrada Santos was another veteran anarchist who died that year. He was gunned down in October 1975 as he was leaving a bar in the Boulevard Belleville, a working class suburb of Paris. He had only recently been released after serving four years in a French prison. His murderer was Ramon Benicho Canuda, alias Ramon Leriles, a Francoist police infiltrator into the exiled CNT. Benicho Canuda later escaped to Canada — with the support and connivance of the both the French and Canadian police. Seventy-year-old Laureano Cerrada Santos had been one of the last of the old guard anarchist activists. A founder of the CNT’s railway union he had been a pupil of Octavio Alberola’s father at Francisco Ferrer Guardia’s Modern School in Barcelona and had fought in the Civil War, and later in the Resistance in Spain and France. Because of his involvement in the black market in Nazi-occupied France and his criminal connections, Laureano had upset some of the more puritanical members of the CNT during and after the war. He was a master forger and even although he supplied the organisation — and the First of May Group — with funds, false IDs and documents and passports, some anarchists felt strongly that forgery and robbery, even in a good cause, gave the movement a bad name. Naively, they seemed unable to comprehend that the fascist state could only

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maintain its pervasive influence, in part, by the control it had over rationing, money, and identity documents. The line between criminality and anarchist idealism is a fluid and difficult one, but there is absolutely no doubt Cerrada’s financial support helped keep the movement and the Resistance alive throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Laureano’s plan to flood Franco’s Spain with counterfeit currency was discovered in 1951 when he was arrested for his role in the abortive airborne attack on Franco in San Sebastian bay in 1948. Laureano had bought and paid for the plane.

Noel and Marie Murray In Britain, despite the fact that the Angry Brigade was allegedly no more and its key members were safely behind bars, bombings and attacks on industrial and rightwing political targets, particularly conservative clubs, had continued up and down the country. In Ireland, outrage at the brutal repression in Spain triggered a solidarity movement whose actions ultimately led to the arrest of a group of Dublin anarchists who were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. Two of this group, Noel and Marie Murray, who were founders of the Anarchist Black Cross in Ireland, managed to escape and went on the run. They were not recaptured until 9 October 1975, following a bank robbery in which an Irish policeman, Garda Reynolds, was shot dead. Having successfully robbed the bank they were noticed leaving the scene by a suspicious off-duty policeman who then pursued them through Dublin first by car, then on foot. THE ANARCHIST MOVEMENT IN IRELAND (BY AN ‘ACTIVE MEMBER’ OF THE DUBLIN ANARCHIST GROUP): It’s difficult today when looking at southern Ireland to imagine that less than 30 years ago it was counted along side Franco’s Spain as one of the economic backwaters of Europe. In the 1960s its main export was people. The boat to Holyhead was always full, in one direction only. The main cities, Dublin and Cork were in a terrible state of neglect. It was not an unusual sight to see many inner city buildings and tenements held up by timber stanchions nor was it big news for such building to collapse into the street killing both it’s tenants and any luckless passer by. The unemployed made up almost a quarter of the entire workforce. Unemployment benefits were so low that many families depended on the assistance of Catholic charities to get them through the week. A charity which was only given once the family had adhered to the strict moral code of the Catholic lay bigots who administrated these charities. As for the political situation, the country was in the iron grip of two parties: Fianna Fail — right-wing, Catholic and rural and Fine Gale — Catholic, rural and right-wing. They took turns in controlling the country since its independence in 1922. If neither party could muster enough seats in parliament, they could always turn to the Irish Labour Party for help. A totally opportunist group who controlled a few inner city MP’s, they could always be relied upon to support any government no matter how reactionary so long as it paid them off with a few minor ministries. Needless to say these were good times for racketeer landlords, property developers, sweatshop employers, union busters, etc. The political left were in a sorry state. The Irish Workers Party (Moscow line Communists), were a tiny sect of Stalinists, unable and unwilling to radicalise themselves. The few organised Trotskyist grouplets were nothing more than overseas branches of British parties. Their masters across the water were totally puzzled as to why Irish workers would not embrace a British led party. However, most political radicals were members of one or other front organisations of Sinn Fein. A very broad Republican movement, Sinn Fein had in its long history seen many splits and divisions. Most political groups in Ireland could trace some history back to Sinn Fein; in fact both main government parties were founded by former Sinn Fein members. And the Irish Civil War (1921-23) was fought not between Catholics and Protestants, but by two opposing wing of Sinn Fein. It is therefore not too surprising that in the late 1960s any young Irish person coming to anarchism for the first time would have passed through the ranks of Sinn Fein or one of its front organisations. Though Ireland has a long history of revolutionary and radical thought going back to the French Revolution, its size, geographical position and lack of industrialisation kept it free from the main stream radical political ideas of Marxism, anarchism and fascism. The Irish Diaspora especially in the United States, Britain and other outposts of the Anglo-Saxon world were actively involved in radical labour politics. Many Irish were founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the USA, Australia and South Africa. Nevertheless, it was not until the late 1960s that Ireland, north or south was to witness any development in anarchist thought or organisation. The radicalisation of western youth throughout the 1960s brought on by the anti-colonial wars in Vietnam and Algiers, plus events in Cuba, France and the United States effected Ireland far more than any other Western country. The standard

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Marie Murray (top), Noel Murray (below)

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Miguel García García

The policeman caught up with them in a park and grabbed hold of Noel. Marie pointed a pistol at the policeman and screamed at him, ‘let go of my man!’ The cop refused to let go or back off, so Marie shot him dead. Both Noel and Marie got clear of the area and went into hiding. It wasn’t until a good while later that a special Garda task force (known in Dublin as ‘the heavy mob’) discovered where they were living and arrested them. Noel and Marie came home from walking the dog one day and were jumped on and arrested as they entered their house. Neither of them knew the man chasing them in civilian clothes was a policeman. The Murrays were sentenced to death by hanging and were only saved from the death penalty by a massive campaign of international solidarity launched by Miguel García García and Albert Meltzer.

John Olday Another long-forgotten, cadaverous face turned up in 1974 — after an absence of thirty years — to help us with Black Flag and the Anarchist Black Cross — John Olday. Olday, born Arthur William Olday, was born in London in 1905, the illegitimate son of a German mother and a Scotsman. The first eight years of his life he spent in New York before moving to Hamburg where he was brought up, like me, by his granny. She probably made him an anarchist as well. John had had a colourful life and loved hanging around the sailors in Hamburg harbour. Republican joke at the time was, "with a coconut colony in the north and a banana republic in the south, we were truly are a third world country in need of liberation". Since the end of the Civil War in 1923, Sinn Fein opposed all armed political action in southern Ireland. This led over the years to various splits from its armed wing, the Irish Republican Army, but none of these armed groups lasted more than a few years. However one group, Saor Eire (Free Ireland), was to change the political scene in southern Ireland for much of the 1960s and early 70s. Saor Eire was born out of a farcical incident, which the local wags called ‘the Glen Cree Martyrs’ case. An armed unit of the IRA out training in the Wicklow Mountains was surprised by an unarmed police unit, who arrested the IRA men without a shot being fired. For the IRA it was a perfect example of how disciplined their men were in obeying the IRA Army Council orders never to use arms in Southern Ireland. But for the handful who had the good sense to run away it was to leave a very nasty taste, especially when the IRA Army Council court-martialed those who fled the scene. In the years that followed, Saor Eire was to evolve into an armed combat group organised into cells. Its base was Dublin, and it felt more at home in this urban environment than in the traditional rural setting which the IRA preferred. A series of armed robberies brought the group the funds to purchase arms and explosives abroad. A spectacular armed raid on a village outside Dublin, in which the village was cut-off and three banks were robbed brought the group to the attention of the general public. However, those who made up the ranks of its membership contained an amazing mix of socialists, nationalists, libertarians, Stalinists and Trotskyists; a mix that could not hold, especially now that the time-bomb that was Northern Ireland had exploded. Northern Ireland was a protestant statelet run with the active support and permission of the British government. It was self-governing, having its own armed police force and fully armed paramilitary police reserve, all Protestant. However one third of the population was Catholic, and like the Blacks in the United States they were seriously discriminated against. The mid 1960s were to witness the start of many large scale civil rights protests by the Catholic minority. It was not long before a Catholic demonstration confronted by a Protestant police force would turn to violence. With the world’s press watching these events and civil rights marches happening almost on a weekly basis it was not long before many European anarchists were making their way to Northern Ireland. In the city of Derry in 1969, one such civil rights demonstration turned into a week of street fighting, with a fair few French, Italian, Dutch and German anarchists present, most experienced street fighters. Not only was Northern Ireland never to be the same again but politics in Ireland was to change forever. Now Irish youth were coming into contact with what was for them very new and radical ideas. In the South, young radicals, inspired by events in Northern Ireland, by the social struggle of Sinn Fein, and by the armed actions of Saor Eire, began to seek each other out. Irish workers who had become radicalised in Britain were now returning to Ireland. Some of these were already anarchists. Some were already in contact with various European anarchist groups. But for any radical wishing to make contact with like minded comrades, returning to any country without an organised anarchist group is not an easy matter. Under such circumstances joining the ranks of a radical political party is not a betrayal of anarchist principles, just down right common sense. Around this time many anarchists, libertarian communists and revolutionary syndicalists came into the ranks of Sinn Fein. It was not long before such likeminded comrades met. However Sinn Fein, which itself was going through its own internal struggles (soon to be split apart into Provisional Sinn Fein and the so-called ‘Official’ Sinn Fein, later to be renamed the Workers Party — a Moscow line front), were not too pleased to have such comrades within its ranks. As the anarchists

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John Olday And Hilda Monte

I was originally impressed with John, he told a good yarn, but it didn’t take me long to realise that much of what he said was fantasy and invention. The problem was separating fact from fiction. Some of it was true, much of it was fabrication. As an 11-year old street kid he claimed to have witnessed the 1916 Hamburg hunger riots and to have taken part in the Spartacist sailors’ mutiny and workers’ uprising two years later. His job had been to fetch ammunition for a mutineer’s machine-gun emplacement. The October 1923 workers’ uprising and the revolutionary events of the following year in the French-occupied industrial Ruhr-Gebiet region were other events in which he claimed to have been involved. John withdrew from active political struggle from 1925 until the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933, during which time he devoted his energies to art, theatre and music — particularly the Hamburg cabaret scene. From 1933 he was involved in anti-Nazi propaganda, his drawings and cartoons being used to dramatic effect in leaflets and posters. At the same time, he was also playing the role of the eccentric homosexual artist, which gave him access to the highest circles of the Hamburg Nazi party, picking up useful information that he passed on to the anti-Nazi Resistance. That much appears began to organise themselves, first within the more socially radical Official Sinn Fein, some of them became marked men. Using their wing of the IRA (which had itself split into two factions — Provisional IRA and the Official IRA, now defunct ) the ‘Officials’ sent out gunmen to intimidate any anarchist who might be considering organising themselves into an active groups. Potential recruits to the anarchist cause were either frightened off or bribed — the nature of the bribe being membership of the ‘Official’ IRA, or not getting beaten up. Though the Dublin Anarchist Group (DAG) was small it acquired an ability to turn any street demonstration violent. Official Sinn Fein, through their network of informers and spies, quickly became aware of this and several secret meetings were held to discuss how to counter the anarchists, especially their ability to recruit the more active and radical comrades from within the ranks of the party. The DAG quickly realised the dangerous position they were in, Most of its leading members were known to the Official IRA. A political consensus within the ranks of the DAG was for the group to go underground. This was not out of fear of the ‘Official’ IRA. By this time most comrades had left Sinn Fein, but as anarchists they believed that the only way political change could come about in the south of Ireland was to actively challenge the smooth running of the state through armed action. The government must be made to realise that the Irish people were no long going to quietly get on the boat to Britain, and respectfully send home the paycheque at the end of the month to keep the Irish economy ticking over while the government and its cronies made a rich living for themselves. The DAG also needed to establish its position as an open political group, agitating on social issues. Through the activities of such groups as the Frank Keane Defence Committee (working on behalf of an alleged Saor Eire member, accused of shooting a policeman), DAG members came into contact with left-socialist elements of Saor Eire. This was a useful connection as it enabled the DAG to acquire extra firearms. It also brought some highly experienced armed fighters into the ranks of the DAG. The DAG was now large enough to form itself into several cells, each carrying out armed political actions independent of one another. Up to this time acts of international solidarity were unheard of in Ireland, with the exception of the shooting of US sailors by Saor Eire, in protest at the war in Vietnam. All armed actions related to events in Ireland itself. The anarchists, with their firm understanding of international politics, their close connections with overseas anarchist groups and their total commitment to world-wide revolutionary solidarity, made many armed attacks on symbols of multinational capitalism and authoritarian government. In the early 1970s a second anarchist group was formed in Dublin, calling themselves the ‘New Earth’ Group. This was a non-armed propaganda group who had no connection with the DAG. However a meeting was arranged between comrades from both groups. It was agreed that the ‘New Earth’ group would continue is propaganda work and that no attempt would be made to merge the two groups, but where possible they would assist one another. The first time the New Earth people got to know that the DAG was armed was when they read of the raids and arrests of DAG members. An attempt to expand the armed struggle into other areas outside Dublin, by contacting some independent nonlibertarian radicals, was to prove a disaster for the DAG. One group based in Cork, and apparently unknown to the person who acted as the middle man, was an ultra-nationalist grouplet led by a pair of criminally inclined brothers. After several heated meetings, an armed clash in the centre of Dublin between members of the DAG and the Cork group appeared to have alerted the Special Branch to the activities of certain members of the DAG. Within the following months members of the DAG who had remained anonymous until then found themselves either detained for questioning or trailed by Special Branch police. It was only a matter of time before a series of raids and arrests would break the DAG.

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John Olday, Australia 1957

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Cabaret artist, Centro Iberico, 1974: John Olday entertains (the poster on the wall was by John

to have been true. He had been particularly close to the so-called socialist Nazis of the SA, or the ‘Brown Shirts,’ who had been sidelined in the 1934 Night of the Long Knives. John continued to play this dubious role until 1938 when it became clear that political, intellectual and sexual repression was increasing. It was time to leave. Things were getting too dangerous for him and one of his friends, the council communist and German Jewess Hilda Meisel, better known as Hilda Monte (1914-1945). John, a British subject, married Monte in a marriage of convenience in September 1938 to provide her with the protection of British citizenship. The marriage was never consummated. In London John published an illustrated account of his years in Germany called Kingdom of Rags. Monte did some broadcasting for the BBC and, like John, continued her commitment to the antiNazi Resistance from London, keeping up their contacts in Holland and France. Her activities and associates brought her to the attention of MI5 and MI6 (SIS), and when the Second World War broke out both agencies vetoed her employment on intelligence work and refused to have anything to do with her networks in occupied Europe. But they did note in her file that she was vehemently anti-Nazi, though whether they thought this was a plus or a minus is another thing altogether. Special Operations Executive (SOE) had no such scruples. They were not going to give up the chance of recruiting such a talented and intelligent woman, even though she was a revolutionary socialist, a German and a Jewess. First and foremost she was a committed anti-Nazi. SOE sent her to Lisbon in 1941, a major centre of espionage. After this date she disappeared from the British record, and there is no mention of her in the SOE Iberia War Diary for 1942-1945 nor the more relevant war diary for 1940-1941, which is missing from the National Archives of the Public Record Office in Kew. Monte wrote a remarkably prescient book, published in 1943, about the future of post-war Europe, The Unity of Europe (Victor Gollancz). In it she accurately predicted the rise and structure of the European Community. Monte ended up working for Allen Dulles’s American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Switzerland. She died at the hands of the SS who captured and shot her during a mission into Austria in the very last days of the war in April 1945. I often wondered if she had been betrayed to the SS by either Dulles or perhaps by the right-wing Berne-based SIS conspirator John McCaffery. Her usefulness as an agent was coming to an end, and as an intelligent revolutionary, with unimpeachable integrity, she would have been a serious liability in the post-war war Europe both men were planning and preparing for. Among his many wonderful stories, John told me he had been involved in blowing up a German munitions ship off the coast of Holland and the assassination of a Jewish Nazi collaborator in Antwerp. He and Monte had also been involved in the failed 1938 Munich beer hall bomb attempt against Hitler. In London John worked closely with the anarchist paper War Commentary (previously Spain and the World and later to become

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The Black Flag Collective

Freedom), becoming its cartoonist, and in 1945 published a collection of his macabre and morbid political drawings entitled The March to Death. In 1945 John was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment for possessing an allegedly stolen typewriter and a false ID card. Refusing to give evidence on his own behalf he ended up in the Old Bailey where he was given two years for desertion. However, the intellectuals associated with War Commentary, Herbert Read, George Orwell and George Woodcock came to his defence and organised a substantial press campaign and John was released after three months. Dropping out of politics completely after the war, John moved to Melbourne, Australia in 1950 where he became an early gay rights activist and a cabaret singer. An LP of his songs, Roses and Gallows, won some critical acclaim. He moved to Sydney in the late 1960s where he opened the ‘Café la Bohème’ with ‘Genius Corner,’ a Cabaret, in the basement. A knife attack on him and his son in the early 1970s prompted John to leave Australia at the age of 65 and return to London. This was when he turned up at the Centro Iberico/Anarchist Black Cross premises to set up a regular cabaret evening — and to try to convince me to learn to play the piano-accordion. No chance. When Black Flag stopped publishing John’s flights of fantasy about what was happening in Germany in the mid-1970s with the various action groups, particularly the Red Army Fraktion (RAF), he set up his own newsletter Mit Teilung, which he filled with even more unbelievable nonsense. Certainly, the RAF thought he was mad — and dangerous. A woman from the RAF came to the Centro Iberico/Anarchist Black Cross centre on one occasion and asked Phil Ruff, the Black Flag cartoonist, about the source of the information in Mit Teilung. When Phil told her it was John Olday, she rolled her eyes and said ‘Oh, the crazy old guy upstairs with the statue of Kali in his bedroom.’ She had a quiet word with John, probably his first contact with anyone from that group. After she left, Mit Teilung never mentioned the German action groups again. It was telling that the only real fan and supporter John Olday ever acquired for Mit Teilung was Gary Jewell, the self-appointed secretary of the Toronto-based Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) ‘General Defence Committee,’ who was later revealed to have been a Strasserite Nazi — and who knows what else. Phil Ruff, who had moved to London from Birmingham in the summer of 1974 to join the Black Flag collective, was one of the young working class rebels who had cheered at the news of the attack on Robert Carr, following the introduction of his anti-working class legislation in January 1971. A member of the International Socialist group at the time, he didn’t call himself an anarchist until much later that year when he became friendly with Dave Campbell, the anarchist son of Ian Campbell, the Aberdonian folk singer and card-carrying member of the Communist Party. By the end of 1972 , Phil and Dave had formed the Birmingham anarchist group, through which they came into contact with Black Flag and the work of the Anarchist Black Cross. Phil and Dave had been particularly active in

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Michel Camilleri (top) 22, and Mario Inés Torres (below) 20, arrested in Toulouse on 14 September 1974 and charged with 17 anti-Francoist bombings and 5 armed robberies from Rosellén to Belgium. Both men were accused of membership of both the MIL and the GARI.

5 December, 1974: Jean Marc Rouillan, a 23-year old anarchist, one of three GARI members arrested in Paris charged with illegal possession of arms and explosives

SC, Dave Campbell and Phil Ruff

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

organising solidarity to try to prevent the judicial murder of Salvador Puig Antich and the other two comrades of Iberian Liberation Movement (MIL).

Heath’s end

Miners’ wives join protest against Heath government The Solution After the uprising of the 17th June The Secretary of the Writers’ Union Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee Stating that the people Had forfeited the confidence of the government And could win it back only By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another? Bertolt Brecht

Guess who’s back!: Wilson returns to Downing Street on 4 March 1974

January and February 1974 had been the dying days of the paranoid Heath government. Following a four-month state of emergency — the fifth of his government — Heath had had enough. He called a snap election and went to the polls on 28 February with the slogan — ‘Who runs Britain — the government or the miners?’ He had gone too far. His strategy of demanding a mandate for all-out confrontation between the state and the unions backfired and he was defeated at the polls. But even so he still refused to relinquish power and tried, unsuccessfully, to negotiate a deal with Jeremy Thorpe for Liberal support. Only on 4 March did Heath finally accept his rejection by an ungrateful electorate and turn his face to the proverbial wall to make way again for Harold Wilson. To some cold war establishment movers and shakers, Wilson back in Downing Street was like having Stalin back in the Kremlin. Britain under Labour meant either bloody revolution or invasion by Russians with snow on their boots. Unemployment was rising and by April 1975 it had passed the million mark, with the biggest monthly increase since the Second World War. Despite the dire economic situation, Wilson was re-elected in October — but this time with the tiniest of majorities. Labour Home Secretary Roy ‘Woy’ Jenkins was unable to control the security services and even his Defence Secretary Roy Mason found it difficult to get the army to implement Labour policy in Northern Ireland with senior officers claiming it was not prepared to break what was effectively an insurrectionist strike by Protestant loyalists in Ulster. Shortly after Labour’s second election victory, prime minister Harold Wilson’s home was burgled, a move widely believed to have been the work of MI5. A form of mass paranoia about Wilson appears to have reigned within the upper echelons of the security service and the military at the time. Senior officers in Sir Michael Hanley’s totally unaccountable MI5, led by Peter Wright and his CIA mentor, the counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton — the person on whom ‘smoking man’ in the X Files is basd — were convinced Wilson was a soviet agent. Not only that, they believed that his predecessor Hugh Gaitskell had been bumped off by the KGB to get Wilson into power. Wilson’s ‘enemies within’ extended well beyond the security service to a whole cabal of Tory and neo-fascist ne’er-do-wells around the Carlton Club and the Special Forces Club at 8 Herbert Crescent, Knightsbridge. All these people believed Wilson was a traitor and that their loyalty to the Queen meant getting him out, by hook or by crook. The means by which they hoped to achieve this coup was by the ‘Unison Committee for Action’ group, headed by the former

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A Question Of Governability

senior MI6 officer George Kennedy Young and retired General Sir Walter Walker, KCB CBE DSO, former NATO Commander-in-Chief Allied Forces Northern Europe.

Conspirators wanting to be right This was highly unprofessional behaviour for any intelligence organisation, albeit very human. By allowing their class prejudices and political obsessions precedence over the basic rules of their job they became policy advocates and, in so doing, sacrificed — or at least impaired — any critical faculties they may have had. They wanted to be right. As advocates of a particular conspiratorial worldview, people like that are always tempted to find evidence to support their viewpoint, and ignore evidence that might disprove it. (Intelligence should always aspire to maximum objectivity, and try to look at the world through the eyes of all the players. Once an intelligence officer gets off the fence and start suggesting strategies for defeating one side or another means their judgment is suspect. Their job was to figure out what the ‘bad guys’ were going to do — whether they knew it or not — and explain this to their political masters.) Another conspiratorial parapolitical organisation of former and serving spooks, army officers, civil servants and policemen was David Stirling’s Great Britain 1975 Organisation (GB75). This was a ‘volunteer army’ of strikebreakers and right-wing conservative vigilantes brought together as a contingency measure for the government of Britain, in the event of its collapse — which they predicted would take place in December 1975. This ‘parallel’ government had been built on the back of Stirling’s Better Britain Society and Greater Britain League, anti-trades unions and anti-leftist organisations. Stirling had formed the latter after Wilson was returned to power in 1974. (Ernie Bond, incidentally, was a close friend of David Stirling from the early days of the SAS and through the SAS Regimental Association, but whether or not he was one of the sinister group of shadowy intriguers clustered around Stirling is a matter for conjecture.) But this near hysteria was not confined to the extremists of the far-right. Fear of a General Strike, the collapse of law and order and possible insurrection had also permeated the extremists of the centre and the whole of establishment culture. In April 1974 a major conference on ‘Revolutionary Warfare’ was held at Lancaster University with twenty-six senior army officers, including the GOC Commanding North-West District, nine senior police officers, including three Chief Constables, two Royal Navy and four Royal Air Force officers, six professors and five more academics. 1974 was also the year that the Trilateral Commission’s Task Force Report on the Governability of Democracies was commissioned. So concerned were the global elites about the ongoing crisis of capitalism and the threat to the governability and stability that they tasked the Trilateral Commission, an adhoc para-governmental cabal of international cold-war academics from the ‘advanced industrial societies’ (the US, Western Europe and Japan) to set up a

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David Stirling (third from right, standing) with Ernest Bond (right, standing) with members of the SAS Regimental Association. David Stirling (below)

Deference point: report on the governability of democracies to the Trilateral Commission, May 1975

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think tank of academics under the directorship of Zbigniew Brzezinski to suggest ways and means to roll-back the radical pressures on governments, and to reduce the democratic expectations of highly politicised and educated youth. Its answer, basically, was to cut back on higher education. History was repeating itself. As in 1968, the smoke-filled backrooms were buzzing with talk of a coup and ‘pre-emptive’ action. Unfortunately, as far as these people were concerned I was one of what MI5 chief Sir Michael Hanley called the ‘broad and far left’ — one of the ‘enemies within.’ The minuscule British anarchist movement had topped that year’s target list of domestic subversives.

Move on, pilgrim!

Honley, West Riding of Yorkshire (south part)

1975, Luddite country: Exchange Square, Honley (Nr Huddersfield), Yorkshire

Cienfuegos Press office (interior)

Exterior

In the spring of 1975. Brenda and I were still in Wimbledon when there was knock on the door of our small second storey flat. An inspector called — a police inspector — who must remain nameless. It was a ‘friendly’ visit. The reason for his concern was to advise me — in the strongest possible terms — that what he described as ‘a number of people’ were extremely annoyed that I had ‘slipped the net’ as it were and it would only be a matter of time before they managed to put me ‘back in the frame.’ I would be well advised to get out of town. The implication being that the next time I went down it would be for a long time — or perhaps worse! Who could refuse advice like that? So, sensing that in this case discretion was the better part of valour, there wasn’t much point hanging around for the convenience of Scotland Yard or Leconfield House, and so we decided to move out of London. He who fights and runs away and all that, or a strategic withdrawal as the political-military euphemism has it. But it wasn’t just the Special Branch or MI5 threat. Brenda and I had been thinking for some time that it would be nice to move out of London to somewhere green and leafy — where sheep could safely graze as it were. Brenda’s best friend, Valerie Packham (née Clark), had separated from her husband and moved to Slaithwaite in the Colne Valley, on the outskirts of Huddersfield in West Yorkshire. We visited Val to explore the area and check out the housing situation. It was different from London, pleasantly different. It didn’t take us long to find the ideal home in the village of Honley, in the Holme Valley about five miles from Huddersfield. The place we decided on, 1 Exchange Square, Honley, wasn’t really a house; its last occupant had been the local Registrar who had turned it into his office and it was on the market. We bought the house for £1000. Honley is an old textile village on the woolpack road to Lancashire, with the Pennines on the skyline, on the edge of unspoiled wooded valleys and moorland — and just across the valley from Valerie. Built in 1751 the house, part of a terrace of connected weavers’ cottages, directly opposite St Mary’s Parish Church, had plenty of character — as the estate agents say, with an original Adams fireplace for good measure.

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Luddites

It was in the attic of this very house that a group of Huddersfield Luddites had hidden in April 1812, after shooting and fatally wounding William Horsfall, a mill owner and member of the hated Manufacturers Committee Against the Luddites — a 19th century employers’ posse comitatus. Three young Huddersfield men, George Mellor, William Thorpe and Thomas Smith were hung for this murder on Friday 8 January 1813. Luddism was an ad hoc movement of radical textile workers whose roots of protests began in the 1790s with the introduction of new industrial technology that threatened their livelihoods and a reactionary government and employer class who ignored all demands for job security, a shorter working day and better wages. The Luddites were a sort of 19th century equivalent of the Angry Brigade. They appeared on the scene following the introduction of the anti-labour Combination Acts of 1799 that made any working class meeting illegal. The anti-Labour thrust of these Acts was similar in intent in many ways with the reactionary anti-working class and law and order policies introduced by the Heath government that came to power in June 1970. In the early years, the Luddites confined their actions to destroying only the new cropping frames, machines and buildings of those who had taken jobs from the workers. However, as the violence of the manufacturers’ militia escalated so too did the workers’ response, and they started targeting the worst employers. The name itself came from the signed communiqués they left behind: ‘Ned Ludd’ or ‘General Ludd’ — as opposed to ‘Butch Cassidy’ or ‘The Angry Brigade.’ It was as though divine providence had led us to the house. Unseen forces were at work here.

Honley: bringing in the sheaves

Vaz — Yorkshire

Bren

Huddersfield anarchists Black Flag and the Cienfuegos Press publications were published from Honley. Brenda and I did the typesetting and handled the day-to-day correspondence — bills, prisoners and contributors — while Albert, Miguel and Phil Ruff did the bulk of the editorial work in London. I was beginning to understand the financial complexities of running a publishing house. It wasn’t just about finding and publishing interesting books, then repeating the process, with one book paying for the next. They also had to be marketed and sold, something I hadn’t really thought through. We made some pretty horrendous and expensive mistakes, running up enormous bills in the process. In spite of these set-backs, we managed to stagger along from — and through — one financial crisis after another. Two other members of the London Black Flag/Anarchist Black Cross group, New Zealanders Graham Rua and Iris Mills joined us in Huddersfield after a couple of visits to Yorkshire. They had not been in England long. Graham and

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Iris Mills

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Graham Rua, Phil Ruff and Stuart Christie, Honley, 1974

Ronan Bennett

Iris had met in a New Zealand Court-room following his arrest at an antiVietnam War demonstration. Iris had been his probation officer. Graham and Iris had been Black Flag subscribers in New Zealand, hence their making contact when they arrived in London. They bought a house in Huddersfield itself and, before long, we had an active group in the town, with our own premises. Prisoners from all over the world were writing to us — as the Anarchist Black Cross — about their cases, their treatment and the conditions in which they were being held. A number of these came from the notorious Long Kesh prison in Northern Ireland. Among our correspondents was Ronan Bennett, a young Irish Republican brought up in Belfast, though born in England of an English father. As a teenager, Ronan had gravitated to the ‘Stickies,’ or ‘Official’ wing of the Republican movement. Arrested and charged with the murder of a Royal Ulster Constabulary inspector during an armed robbery in Belfast in September 1974, Ronan was convicted in May 1975 — on very shaky identification evidence of a Loyalist woman who changed her story three times — to ten years for the robbery and ‘life’ for the police killing. He was eighteen years old. The ‘Stickies’ split while Ronan was in Long Kesh prison and a shooting war erupted outside between the Official IRA and breakaway members who set themselves up as the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), and its ‘political’ wing, the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP). Inside Long Kesh Ronan went with the IRSP. Ronan had appealed against his sentence and, unexpectedly, his sentence was overturned and he was released. The woman on whose evidence he had been convicted changed her mind again and admitted she wasn’t sure if Ronan was the man she had seen or not. He was released in December 1975. Unable to remain in Ulster where his life was threatened by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and protestant paramilitaries, Ronan came to Huddersfield to live, moving in with Iris and Graham, with whom he had been corresponding. Needless to say, the Irish connection did not pass unnoticed by the F4 Division of the Police Department of the Home Office who briefed both Scotland Yard’s Special Branch and MI5’s ‘F ‘ Branch (Counter-Subversion), and before long the provincial Special Branch were taking a close interest in the newly formed Huddersfield anarchist group.

Persona non grata I was soon to find out that the doors of a number of countries were closing against me. The German Trade Union organisation invited me to attend an international anti-fascist rally in Offenbach. It was to be a big gathering, made doubly important by the fact that the internationally acclaimed poet and folk singer, Wolf Bierman, was going to be allowed to make his first public appearance outside East Germany since 1965. I was broke at the time, but had just sufficient money to cover my travel expenses and get to Frankfurt station

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An Enemy Of The State

where I was to be met by friends, my expenses refunded, and driven to the rally. I didn’t even have enough money to pay for a sandwich on the train. Stopping off in Amsterdam, to meet Bas Moreel, the Dutch distributor of Cienfuegos Press titles, Bas drove me to his home in Arnhem, near the German border. We had a meal and later that afternoon he drove me to the station where I caught the express to Frankfurt. It was like a scene from the film Pimpernel Smith, except I didn’t have Leslie Howard in the carriage with me. The train stopped at the West German border and the green-uniformed Bundesgrenzschutz (BGS) boarded the train to check passports. They knew I was coming. As soon as the official opened my passport and saw my name he checked his big grey book of ‘undesirables.’ He nodded to his colleagues and I was impolitely escorted out of the compartment and bundled into a compartment at the rear of the carriage, where I sat squashed between two guards until we reached the first station inside Germany. I was then taken off the train to the German police barracks and held in a locked room without seeing anyone for almost two hours. Eventually an officer from Grenzschutzgruppe 9 (GSG 9), the Federal paramilitary political police came to question me as to my destination and who had arranged my visit. Then they discovered I had no money other than a few Dutch coins. I explained my trip was perfectly legal, having been invited by the West German trade union movement, and was to be met by friends at Frankfurt station with money. The stoney-faced policeman wasn’t interested. He stood up abruptly and told me I was being refused permission to enter German territory as I had insufficient funds to pay for my stay. I waited for him to click his heels, raise his arm and shout Heil Hitler, but he didn’t. He turned and left the room. I was bundled into a cell to await the last train back to Holland. This was becoming Kafkaesque. I had visions of spending the rest of my life being shuttled backwards and forwards between Arnhem and Emmerich in Germany, just like Charlie in the Kingston Trio’s satirical song of The Man Who Never Returned and who spent the rest of his life riding the city’s subways because he was a nickel short of having enough money for his fare. One verse is about his wife throwing him a sandwich through the window as the train thunders by a station platform. And the chorus echoed: ‘Did he ever return? No, he never returned and his fate is still unlearned. He may ride forever ‘neath the streets of Boston. He’s the man who never returned.’ In spite of my indignant protests at my treatment by the Dutch authorities, I was banged up in a cell for about two hours and all my belongings removed. In my capacity as a free citizen of the Common Market caught in the act of flagrantly crossing a frontier, I was visited in my cell by a man in plain clothes who questioned me about my visit. He didn’t get any of the information he wanted. Eventually I was told I would be released into the custody of a Dutch

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Arrest of Andreas Baader

Arrest of Holger Meinz

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Some Cienfuegos Press titles

The March on Bayonne (1975). the last major international antiFrancoist demonstration to protest against the execution of 13 anti-fascists (Octavio Alberola is on the left)

citizen, Bas Moreel, the European distributor for Cienfuegos titles, the friend with whom I had lunched earlier that day. I rang Brenda from Bas’s home to tell her what had happened. She had been worried. The German comrades waiting at Frankfurt station had telephoned wondering why I wasn’t on that train or the next one. I then rang the German comrades who immediately sent a car to pick me from Bas’s home, with sufficient funds. Two comrades arrived in Arnhem in the early hours of the morning with £200 in cash — a lot of money in those days — and we set off for the German border. At the frontier post we handed over our passports to the guard and the official keyed the information into his computer terminal. Checking his screen, he pressed a button on his console, stepped outside and indicated to the driver to lower his window. He then whipped out a pistol and beckoned us to pull over into the adjoining barrack compound. Suddenly, from nowhere we were surrounded by Grenzschutzgruppe 9 men in camouflage brandishing sub-machine guns. We were pulled out of the car and marched into the barracks office where they took our passports and started stripping the car. I was the object of their attentions. Little was said to the others. The same GSG 9 officer I had seen earlier arrived to remind me that my passport had been stamped ‘refused entry’ due to lack of funds. Not now, I replied. I had more than sufficient money to cover my stay in Germany and waved the wad of Deutsche marks at him. Perplexed at this turnabout, the GSG9 man returned to his telephone for further instructions from Wiesbaden. Finally, after hanging around for almost three hours in the waiting room under armed guard and surrounded by Red Army Fraktion wanted posters with big red crosses across the photographs of those the GSG9 had killed, the officer returned with our passports. His orders came directly from the Ministry of the Interior. I had been declared an ‘enemy of the state’ and they stamped my passport accordingly, and annotated it in fine Gothic script. The comrades drove me back to Arnhem station where I said cheerio to Bas and caught the train to Amsterdam and then home. But I wasn’t the only one who had had problems that day. In East Germany the Communist authorities decided at the last moment that it would not take the chance of allowing its best known and loved singer— and one of its fiercest critics — to attend the Offenbach rally, and his exit permit was withdrawn. The West German press made a great deal of propaganda about this act of Communist tyranny, but there was not one mention that the ‘democratic’ West German and Dutch states had done exactly the same with me.

Unmerciful to the end By the end of the summer and early autumn of 1975 the Franco regime was in Alamo mode. Between 28 August and 17 September, drumhead Francoist courts martial had passed death sentences on five members of the Basque separatist group ETA and eight members of the Maoist Frente Revolucionario Antifascista y Patriotica (FRAP).

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‘Do You Know That The Stucco Is Peeling?’

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1939: official poster celebrating Franco’s victory

Hendaye 1940: Franco meets Hitler to thank him for his military support during the Civil War and to seek entry into the Axis (on the fall of France). The meeting was delayed as a result of an attempt on Franco’s life by anarchists who attempted to ambush the Caudilllo’s train with a hand grenade attack on route to the meeting with Hitler.

Montpellier 1940: Franco meets Pétain and Admiral François Darlan 1971: Franco and Juan Carlos

1959: new pals. Franco welcomes Eisenhower

Bordighera 1940: Franco and Serrano Suñer meet Mussolini to thank him for his military aid, to offer Spain’s support in the war and their faith in an ultimate Axis victory

1970: Franco and Nixon

1939: The man on the white horse

Franco was indignant in the face of appeals for clemency which flooded in from around the world, including Pope Paul VI, all the Spanish bishops and even Don Juan, the king in exile, through his son, the king-inwaiting. As far as Franco was concerned, world opinion with regard to his governance was manipulated by leftwing masonic conspirators working in indecent concubinage with Communist-terrorist subversives. And so, a bitter and vengeful Franco, ignoring all pleas for mercy, confirmed five of the death sentences — three members of FRAP and two Basque members of ETA — who were executed by firing squad on 27 September. Their deaths were further revenge for the killing of Carrero Blanco. The executions provoked outrage and triggered the greatest wave of protests against the regime since Franco’s victory in April 1939. Fifteen European governments recalled their ambassadors, including France. The case against the 11 anarchists in the Suárez kidnapping was severely weakened. Franco’s embassies throughout the world were subject to angry demonstrations and violent attacks. In Holland the Spanish Embassy was set on fire and a bomb exploded outside the Embassy in Ankara. The President of Mexico even called for Spain’s expulsion from the UN and Sweden’s Prime Minister Olaf Palme denounced the Franco government as bloody murderers. But Franco’s days were numbered. He began to die on 1 October 1975. His death was hastened by the cold autumnal winds that blew down from the Guadarrama Mountains, during what turned out to be his last public appearance at the Palacio del Oriente. It was presaged by a series of minor heart attacks on the 15th, 20th and 24th of October. By 30 October his health had deteriorated to the extent that his appointed successor, Don Juan Carlos Borbón y Borbón, was named provisional head of state. Within days it seemed as though all the innocent blood he had shed during his 37 years in power had returned to haunt him. On 2 November he suffered an intestinal haemorrhage drenching his bed, carpet and parts of the wall in blood — his own this time. As Lady M says in the Scottish play: ‘Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?’

Edward Heath Made Me Angry

Hooked up to banks of life-support machines he was kept alive — and in pain — for 17 more days. Every so often he would recover consciousness muttering how hard it was to die. Jesus obviously didn’t even want him as a sunbeam. Legend has it that as he lay dying his wife, Doña Carmen Polo, opened the curtains of his darkened room then whispered to him that thousands of Spaniards had come to the forecourt of the Palacio de Oriente to say goodbye. Franco slowly raised himself up and asked: ‘Why? Where are they going?’ Like Tony Blair and George W Bush, and most other political leaders throughout history, Franco was convinced he had God on his Side.

Death of a tyrant With God On Our Side ‘Oh the First World War, boys It closed out its fate The reason for fighting I never got straight But I learned to accept it Accept it with pride For you don’t count the dead When God’s on your side. When the Second World War Came to an end We forgave the Germans And we were friends Though they murdered six million In the ovens they fried The Germans now too Have God on their side.’ Bob Dylan

End of days

On 19 November 1975, Franco’s daughter Nenuca decided he be allowed to die and at 11.15 pm the tubes and wires keeping him alive were disconnected. This once mythically evil but now shabby figure of a man died shortly afterwards, in the early hours of 20 November. The first official duty of the new king, Juan Carlos Borbón y Borbón, was to preside over Franco’s burial in the Valle de los Caidos, the mausoleum he had commanded to be hewn out the mountain by slave labour. The only other head of state present at the funeral was Chile’s General Agustin Pinochet. The oration was read by Prime Minister Carlos Arias Navarro, the butcher of Malága and architect of Francoist repression since the 1960s. He read out Franco’s political testament calling on the Spanish people to offer his successor the same affection and loyalty he had enjoyed — and to be constantly vigilant against the ever-alert enemies of Spain and Christian civilisation. The transfer of political power was seamless. Not one of Franco’s enforcers, such as General Eduardo Blanco, my nemesis and the head of the tyrant’s secret police, or any of the countless thousands of people responsible for the barbarous and legal spoliation of Spain and its people since 1939, was ever brought to justice. It is only now, 30 years after the dictator’s death, that the crimes of the Franco regime are beginning to be addressed in Spain with the exhumations of the unmarked mass graves of its victims, ‘the disappeared.’ Far away in Honley that late November evening, the ‘enemies’ of Franco’s Spain conga’d down to the local off-licence and bought an enormous carry-out; 1975 had been a momentous year and it was time for a party to mark some kind of closure. We had much to celebrate: the defeat of the Americans; the end of the Vietnam War, and now a long overdue death. It was to be a wake for the

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‘Evil is unspectacular and always human...’

tens of thousands of brave men and women who fought, suffered, died and lost loved ones in the cause of resisting the reactionary priest-ridden, gun-andprison backed regime that had been Francoism. The ghosts to whom we raised our glasses were the forgotten dead of a previous generation to whom my generation at least owed a profound obligation of remembrance and a duty of commemoration. As the delicate warmth of Glenmorangie spread through my being, I reflected with a profound sense of relief and satisfaction on the fact that I at least had no one’s blood or life on my conscience — not even Franco’s.

Franco’s monument in the Valle de los Caídos: ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

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The Angry Decade

The ‘Angry Decade’ January 1966 to December 1975 UNLIKE PALLAS ATHENE, the network of young radicals who came to be known as the ‘Angry Brigade’ did not spring forth in 1970, fully armed from the cloven head of Zeus. The group was a creation of its time, a disparate and ad hoc milieu of politically dissatisfied young people who were moved to exemplary direct actions by the inability of the parliamentary and party systems to check the governmental violence of the United States and its murderous surrogates seeking to impose their will in the Third World countries of South East Asia, Africa, and Latin America — as well as in Greece and Spain. On the other side of the Cold War fence, the Soviet Union was trying to impose its hegemony through its equally murderous client states. There were also the domestic social and economic problems caused by racism, unemployment, poor housing and social benefits, and an anti-trade union legislation which was clearly perceived in terms of class-biased law. Another factor fuelling popular discontent was the violent repression of the Civil Rights movement in Northern Ireland. It was also a time of fermenting ideas to do with fairness, justice, participant democracy, extra-parliamentary organisation, self-management and accountability. The following chronology is selective and arbitrary, but it helps place the Angry Brigade and the First of May Group in their historical, political and social context. These are just some of the events, incidents, conflicts, people and ideas that helped form the attitudes of some of that generation of radical youth who sought to highlight the wrongs and injustices of the time through the psychological impact of victimless ‘shock’ tactics. Theirs was not a strategy of ‘regime change’; it was a signal that lines were being drawn in the sand and that at least one small section of society was angry about what was happening in the world, in their name. Their broad aim was not necessarily revolution, but to push back the boundaries of the state by a more combative approach to civil liberties and demands for greater democracy and accountability — as well as challenging, among other things, institutional racism, sexism, colonialism, the consumer society, the nuclear state and US and Soviet militaristic imperialism. 1966 January 3-10: Havana — First meeting of the Soviet- and Chinese Communistbacked TriContinental Congress, described as ‘the first solidarity conference of the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America’. It is seen as a threat to US interests. Italy — Italian neo-fascist and secret service agent Stefano Delle Chiaie dissolves Avanguardia Nazionale (AN) and its hard-line members vanish from circulation or reappear within the MSI, Italy’s mainline fascist party. Delle Chiaie himself goes underground to coordinate the campaign of infiltrating target leftist organisations on behalf of the Interior Ministry’s Bureau of Confidential Affairs, the UAR (ufficio affari riservati del Viminale). Within these organisations the neofascists play the role of informers and agents provocateurs, urging and organising bombings and contriving confrontations with the police. During this period of clandestinity, AN member Mario Merlino claims he planted a bomb in the South Vietnamese embassy in Rome with the intention of ‘blaming the left’. 8 January: Vietnam — US troops launch biggest offensive of war to date. It is the first entirely US-led assault in the war and involved 8,000 US troops and a barrage from B-52 bombers and artillery. February: Spain — Franco tells his cabinet that the British will never concede sovereignty over Gibraltar. 23 February: Italy — Premier Aldo Moro forms a new cabinet. March: Holland — Princess Beatrix marries former Hitler Youth member Claus von Amsberg. Provos open a bank account to collect donations for an antiwedding present. Wild rumours spread through Amsterdam as to the intentions of the Provos: they are planning to dump LSD in the city water supply, build a giant gun to attack the wedding procession and that they are collecting manure to spread along the route of the parade. Dressed as ordinary citizens, the Provos manage to sneak past the police lines and set off lots of smoke bombs behind the palace as the procession begins and the wedding turns into a public relations disaster. 1 April: UK — Labour re-elected to power under leadership of Harold Wilson. April: France — International get-together of young anarchists in Paris. Foundation of the Trotskyist Jeunnesse Communiste Revolutionnaire (JCR). 12 April: USA — US Secretary of State Dean Rusk says France is not vital to NATO. 30 April: Rome — Monseigneur Marcos Ussia, Ecclesiastical attaché at the Spanish Embassy to the Vatican is kidnapped. News of the operation is announced simultaneously by Luis Andrés Edo in Madrid and the First of May Group kidnappers in Rome. May: USA — University sit-ins in protest against the Vietnam War; US soldiers begin to disobey orders. May: France — Situationists take control of the Strasbourg Students’ Union. 11 May: Spain — Francoist police beat up 100 priests protesting against police brutality. 12 May: Rome — Mgr. Ussia is released unharmed and the First of May Group announces it will continue its activities in support of Franco's political prisoners. 15 May: UK — First issue of Ludd, an anarchist broadsheet, published by Cuddon’s Cosmopolitan Review team (an occasional anarchist journal edited by Ted Kavanagh and Albert Meltzer), to coincide with the National Union of Seamen (NUS) strike. Interestingly, Ludd is one of the first of the ‘alternative’ press to be printed on the innovative small offset Lithograph machines with text

set using the new non hot-metal typesetting technology, a do-it-yourself process which revolutionises the printing of radical publications and turbocharges the spread of radical ideas; fake US dollars carrying slogans against the Vietnam War circulate in London. USA: — 8,000 anti-Vietnam war protestors surround the White House for two hours. June: US — ‘Black Power’ enters the popular vocabulary when Stokely Carmichael (leader of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee – SNCC) defines it as the ‘acquisition of economic and political power at local level’ by black people. This signals the end of a commitment to the tactic of ‘nonviolence’ in the SNCC and more stress on the building of an all-black organisation and a move towards the exclusion of white organisers. Carmichael begins his march to the right, ending up as one of Nkrumah’s henchmen. Martin Luther King counters that he believes in “striped power”. 6 June: UK — UK premier Harold Wilson names communists whom, he claims, are using the seamen’s strike to gain power in the NUS. 30 June: France — France formally leaves NATO. Vietnam: — US bombs Hanoi for the first time. 3 July: UK — 31 people are arrested during anti-Vietnam War protests outside US Embassy in London. 31 July: USA — Race riots erupt across the US. Summer: Holland — Repression in Holland increases with hundreds of protestors being arrested every week for disturbing the peace at ‘happenings’ and anti-Vietnam War rallies. A police ban on demonstrations leads to bigger demonstrations. Hans Tuynmann is made a martyr after being sentenced to 3 months imprisonment for whispering the word ‘image’ at a ‘happening’. At the same time, a Dutch Nazi collaborator, a war criminal responsible for deporting Jews to the death camps, is released from prison and a student fraternity member is given a small fine for manslaughter. Summer: Britain — Publication of the first issue of Heatwave, an influential libertarian, surrealist and pro Situationist International publication edited by Chris Gray and Charles Radcliffe. (Re-launched the following year as King Mob). Also around this time we have the earliest references to the word ‘subculture’ and organised attempts to legalise cannabis. Wooden Shoe Bookshop (anarchist) opens in central London. Summer: Italy — 2,000 Italian army officers receive a leaflet from an organisation called the Nuclei di Difesa dello Stato (NDS) calling on ‘loyal’ officers to form NDS units and to ‘join the victorious struggle against subversion’. The authors of this leaflet are Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura, two of Stefano Delle Chiaie’s men and key protagonists in the terrorist ‘strategy of tension’. 13 August: China — Chairman Mao proclaims his ‘Cultural Revolution’. Autumn: Strasbourg University — Situationist pamphlet published under the auspices of the Students’ Union appears entitled ‘Of student poverty considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual and particularly intellectual aspects and a modest proposal for their remedy’. It points out to the new generation of students that their lives are beyond their control. The authors stress that away from student life, the rest of youth is beginning to revolt against the boredom of everyday existence… ‘The dead life’ that was still the essential product of modern capitalism.

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1966-1967 ‘Unconsciously, the new breed of delinquent, the vandal, the young thug, use violence to express their rejection of society. They embody the first side effects of “consensus” politics, the disintegration of values…This kind of youth despises work, but accepts the goods; they want what the “Spectacle” (as the authors describe consumer capitalism) offers, but with no down payment…In the end, the contradiction proves too strong (to this end, to recuperate him, clothes, records, motor scooters, transistors, purple hearts, all beckon him to the land of the consumer) or else they are forced to attack the laws of society itself, either by stealing or by moving towards revolutionary consciousness.' The last fling of depth-psychology-denying Marxism.“ The university authorities respond by closing the Students’ Union and suspending the five students involved. The judge’s summing up underlines the inability of the political establishment to understand the deep dissatisfaction felt by the privileged young people with university places — the principal beneficiaries of economic growth and extended educational opportunities — with ‘consensus’ politics. ‘One has only to read what the accused have written for it to be obvious that these five students, scarcely more than adolescents, lacking all experience of real life, their minds confused by ill-digested philosophical, social, political and economic theories, and perplexed by the drab monotony of their everyday lives, made the empty, arrogant and pathetic claim to pass definitive judgements, sinking to outright abuse, on their fellow students, their teachers, God, religion and the clergy, the government and political systems of the whole world. Rejecting all morality these cynics do not hesitate to condone theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion, and a worldwide proletarian revolution, with unlicensed pleasure as its only goal.’ Although the ‘Situationists’ and members of other revolutionary groups of the period constitute a tiny minority, their rejection of paternalistic ‘consensus’ politics and re-affirmation of democratic ideals undoubtedly captures the mood of the time and mobilises a wider circle of people. The chief ideas thrown up are those of direct action, self-management and regional autonomy. These provide much more satisfactory and politically fulfilling alternatives to the neutered morality and half measures of the highly compromised and virtually indistinguishable corporatist and bureaucratic industrial societies of East and West. American student leader (SDS) Carl Oglesby observes: ‘Capitalism and socialism are different means for pursuing the common and general aims of industrialisation’. August: USA — Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) hold a National Convention at Clear Lake, Iowa, calling for a strategy of ‘student power’ and reemphasising the need to do political work on the campuses. 6 September: South Africa — Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, architect of apartheid is knifed and assassinated. 20 October: UK — Unemployment figures stand at 437,229 — up 100,000 on the previous month. 25 October: Madrid — Five anarchists arrested: Antonio Cañete Rodríguez, Alicia Mur Sin, Jesús Andrés Rodriguez Piney, Alfredo Herrera Dativo and Paris FIJL secretary Luis Andrés Edo, accused of preparing to kidnap Norman Gillette, the US Commander in Chief in Spain, and the Argentinian exile General Peron. November: France — Anarchist influence in Nanterre increases with the Liaison des Etudiants Anarchistes (LEA) forming the ‘Federalist Revolutionary Syndicalist Tendency’ (TSFR), the forerunner of the 22 March Group (who also distribute the surreal cartoon strip ‘The Return of the Durruti Column’ which uses the figure of Durruti as an exemplary revolutionary role model, recently published by Situationist students in Strasbourg). October: Britain — First issue of International Times appears, the fortnightly voice of the new British ‘hippy-libertine counterculture’. Committee of 100 members, Pat Pottle and Mike Randle, help Soviet spy George Blake (whom they had befriended during an earlier sentence for anti-militarist demonstrations) escape from Wormwood Scrubs. 2 October: Britain — Nine libertarian and anarchist anti-militarist objectors are arrested and imprisoned for interrupting Foreign Secretary George Brown and Prime Minister Harold Wilson while reading the lessons during a pre-Labour Party conference religious service in Brighton. The demonstrators are protesting against the hypocrisy of politicians reading the lesson ‘Nation shall not lift sword against nation — neither shall they learn war any more’ — while providing unconditional support for the continuing American atrocities and genocide in Vietnam. October: Germany — The beginnings of the German radical student / youth movement. 24 November: UK — Unemployment up from 437,229 to 531,585. December: USA — SDS pushes for radical draft resistance and calls on campus groups to protest against and disrupt visits and presentations by representatives of the military-industrial complex.

8 December: New York — First of May Group spokesman Octavio Alberola gives a press conference explaining the reasons behind the failed kidnap attempt in Madrid and distributes copies of the communiqué which Luis Andrés Edo was to have distributed once the operation had been carried out successfully. Autumn-Winter: Italy — Major Amos Spiazza, officer in charge of the Italian army’s Intelligence Bureau in Verona is tasked by his superiors to ‘shadow’ the NATO Gladio structure. He is also informed that three-man partisan teams are being set in place throughout Italy. He later tells investigators into the ‘strategy of tension’ and the attempted coup d’état of 7 December 1970 that he was personally responsible for the 5th Legion, with 50 hand-picked people and that everything he did was known and agreed to by his superiors in the Intelligence Bureau and the FTASE (NATO Intelligence). 1967 9 January: China — Open rebellion breaks out against Chairman Mao in Shanghai. 27 January: Spain — Workers and students demonstrate in Madrid. Franco argues that aggressive anti-British propaganda over Gibraltar is a mistake and that it is pointless to try to humiliate the British, and quashes Castiella’s proposal to fly barrage balloons around Gibraltar to obstruct British access to the Rock. In spite of UN resolutions demanding an end to Gibraltar’s colonial status, Franco admits that nothing can be done without first convincing British public opinion that the Rock belongs to Spain. February: France — ‘Happening’ at Nanterre University organised by performance artist Jean-Jacques Lebel. Guy Debord, a vicious paranoid megalomaniac, but with some interesting ideas on art publishes his book, The Society of the Spectacle. Debord’s main thesis is that everywhere reality is being replaced by images which, in turn, themselves become reality. His theory begins as a critique of alienation and what he calls the ‘spectacle’ — the idea being that capitalism has reduced the world to mere spectacle. ‘All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. All real activity has been channelled into the global construction of the spectacle.’ The objective of the Situationist International (SI) is to create situations aimed at constantly wrongfooting the enemy. An important part of Debord’s ideas is that of recuperation, the way in which even the most radical gesture is ultimately commodified and turned into an item of leisure interest by the ‘Spectacle’, such as Che Guevara Tshirts. February: Athens — US Ambassador Talbot recommends that the CIA undertake extra-parliamentary political action to defeat the candidacy of Papandreou in Greek general elections. 26 February: Vietnam — US troops launch the biggest assault of the war when more than 25,000 soldiers attack a Viet Cong stronghold near the Cambodian border 1 March: Aden — British troops open fire on anti-colonialist demonstrators. 13 March: London — First British student occupation (at the London School of Economics). It lasts six days and involves more than 2,000 students. 10 March: South East Asia — US aircraft bomb major industrial installation in North Vietnam for the first time. Easter: Italy — International conference of young anarchists in Milan. 1 April: London — First of May Group kidnap and hold hostage for a few hours the First Secretary and legal attaché of the Spanish Embassy in London demanding that the trial of Luis Andrés Edo and four other anarchists arrested the previous October in Madrid be held under the aegis of the civilian Tribunal de Orden Publico (TOP) rather than a military consejo de guerra. (The Spanish military court relinquishes its right to try Edo and the others who are tried by the TOP two months later.) 3 April: Aden — Three Arabs die as British troops clash with 1,200 demonstrators protesting against British rule. 7 April: Paris — 129 people arrested during anti-Vietnam War protest against State visit of US vice-president Hubert Humphrey. 15 April: USA — More than 200,000 protestors take to the streets in New York and San Francisco in anti-Vietnam war demonstrations. 21 April: Athens — Right-wing military coup in Greece. Following a period of political instability and acts of terrorism which follow closely the pattern of the ‘strategy of tension’ as set out by the extreme right in Italy during the Parco dei Principe conference and people with whom they are in close regular contact. Greek army colonels, supported by the KYP (Central Service of Information), National Security Service (Asphaleia), the National Military Security (ESA), the army, navy and air force, order the deployment of three hundred troops of the US-trained and NATO-controlled Mountain Assault Brigade to seize the Greek parliament building and implement ‘Plan Prometheus, a NATO contingency

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1967-1968 operation, and topple the democratically elected government. Brutal repression and torture of the regime’s enemies follows. Pino Rauti, Italian Ordine Nuovo leader and one of the organisers of the Parco dei Principe conference, is among the very first official guests of the Junta. Among those with whom Rauti has meetings is Dimitrios Ionnidis, the new head of Greece’s military police, Colonel Ioannis Ladas of the Ministry of Public Order and Kostas Plevris, an officer of the KYP, the Greek intelligence service. During the next few months Rauti and Delle Chiaie organise a series of semi-official trips to Greece of handpicked right-wing Greek students studying in Italy and around 50 selected members of Ordine Nuevo and Avanguardia Nazionale. Officially described as ‘cultural exchanges’, the trips are in fact sponsored by General Enza Viola of the Italian General Staff and the Greek intelligence service. These students, mostly died-in-thewool fascists, undergo mass ‘Damascus road’ conversions and return to Italy as convinced ‘socialists’, ‘communists’, ‘Maoists’ and ‘anarchists’. Mario Merlino, Stefano Delle Chiaie’s close friend and comrade, forms the XXII March Group on his return from Athens, in 1968, taking the name from the group of young anarchists from Nanterre University, the group that spark the May events in Paris that year. The XXII March Group is dissolved after a month and Merlino makes overtures first to the Maoist Avanguardia Proletaria then to the Maoist Partita Comunista d’Italia (Linea Rossa), where he is unknown. He does not move back into anarchist circles until September 1969, three months prior to the Piazza Fontana massacre in Milan. International demonstrations organised outside Greek embassies. May: Amsterdam — Provos dissolve unexpectedly after achieving their demands to sack Amsterdam’s Mayor and police chief and the acceptance and incorporation of some Provo VIPs into the Dutch establishment. 1 May: Mexico City — José Alberola Navarra, anarchist teacher, FAI member and father of First of May Group spokesman Octavio Alberola is tortured and murdered in his flat by five men. 1 May: Spain — Students demonstrate against clerical-fascist control of Spain’s universities. Police arrest and charge over 100 students in Madrid alone. 2 May: London — Prime Minister Harold Wilson announces Britain will apply to join the Common Market. 16 May: Spain — Three Madrid University students are arrested during protest demonstrations. This triggers more major disturbances and the office of the Dean of the faculty of sciences is attacked. From this incident emerge the new generation of student anarchists in Spain — the ‘acratas’. 21 May: France — Nanterre students occupy the women’s halls of residence; anarchist students distribute ‘The Poverty of Student Life’ during lectures by Henry Lefebvre. 2 June: Berlin — Student demonstrator Benno Ohnesorg is shot dead by German police during a protest against the state visit of the Shah of Iran. (It is from this murder the anarchist urban guerrilla 2 June Group take their name) Berlin — An hysterical Springer press demonises anarchist-hippy Fritz Teufel of Kommune: K-1 and student leader Rudi Dutschke, calling on the authorities to detain them indefinitely for their subversive activities. 5-10 June: Middle East — Israel launches Six-day war with its Arab neighbours, US military facilities in Greece and Turkey become essential for the defence of Israel and NATO. Israel halts its 12-mile military advance into Syria, having taken Arab territory many times larger than Israel and driven out many Arabs into refugee camps. Summer: USA — Further black riots and protests against the Vietnam War; formation of Black Panther Party (‘revolutionary nationalists’) which, by this time is no longer a continuation of the Civil Rights movement, but a completely different body with a largely new leadership and social base 1 July: Algeria — African (Congolese) leader Moise Tshombe's plane is hijacked to Algiers on a flight from Ibiza to Majorca. 3 July: Aden — Fierce gun-battle between the Argylle and Sutherland Highlanders and the National Liberation Front of Aden. 4 July: Madrid — Trial of Luis Andrés Edo’s group by the Madrid Tribunal de Orden Publico (TOP). Edo is sentenced to 9 years while the others receive considerably shorter sentences. 5 July: Israel — Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan announces annexation of Gaza. 15-29 July: London — International Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation at the Roundhouse, Camden Town. Speakers include: Lucian Goldman, Herbert Marcuse, Ernest Mandel, Stokely Carmichael, and RD Laing in an attempt to ‘demistify violence in all its forms.’ This event is seen as an important event in the development of the British Hippy counterculture. 20 July: UK — Highest summer unemployment figures for twenty-seven years realeased – over half a million out of work. 27 July: US — Race riots sweep through US cities.

20 August: London — First of May Group members machine-gun cars of two Spanish diplomats. US Embassy is raked with machinegun fire by First of May Group in protest against US's role in supporting the Franco regime, the Vietnam War and in other Third World countries. It also ties in with the Madrid trial of Luis Andrés Edo and his four colleagues. September-October: France — Sociology and psychology students rally round the Nanterre anarchist group (LEA) in protest against the inadequacies of the traditional students union. Protests soon extend to challenging the content and methodology of university lectures. As the agitation becomes more politicised it extends into a wider libertarian critique of the state and society. 10 September: Madrid — Even after the plebiscite organised by the British in which Gibraltarians vote nearly unanimously to remain British, Franco remains adamant that an aggressive stance by Spain will be counterproductive 21 September: Spain — Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco is appointed vicepresident of Franco’s Council of Ministers. Stuart Christie is freed from jail by personal pardon from General Franco. 10 October: Spain — FIJL member Julio Millán Hernández is arrested in Barcelona charged with membership of an illegal organisation (the FIJL). 21 October: Washington — Massive anti-Vietnam war march on the Pentagon turns violent when 50,000 demonstrators are attacked by soldiers and federal marshals with rifle butts and truncheons. 23 October: — International day of demonstrations against Vietnam War. In London the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign marches to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square; 5,000 demonstrators fight with the police when refused permission to deliver a protest note to the US Ambassador. November-December: France — Large demonstrations in Paris’s Latin Quarter with up to 100,000 striking workers and students. 12 November: Bolivia — Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto 'Che' Guevara is ambushed and killed by Bolivian soldiers and US rangers. His body is put on public display to journalists at Villa Grande in Bolivia. Germany, Italy, Holland: — Simultaneous bomb attacks on Greek, Bolivian and Spanish Embassies in Bonn and the Venezuelan Embassy in Rome. Actions are claimed by the First of May Group in solidarity with Latin American guerrillas and against the fascist regimes in Europe. That same evening bombs also explode at the Spanish Tourist Office in Milan and at the Spanish, Greek and American Embassies in The Hague, Holland. 14 November: Washington — US secretary of State Dean Rusk states that the US’s escalation of the Vietnam War cannot be avoided. 21 November: South East Asia — In spite of growing protests in the US and worldwide against the war in Vietnam, US warplanes attack North Vietnam with increased ferocity. B-52 heavy bombers based in Thailand bomb Hanoi and Haiphong causing heavy civilian casualties. Elsewhere US aircraft support US troops in the Central Highlands near the Cambodian border using napalm, bombs and machine-gun fire. 30 November: Aden — Local Arabs surge into port city of Aden to celebrate the end of 128 years of colonial rule and the formation of the new People's Republic of South Yemen. 14 December: Spain — Franco holds referendum on his Ley Orgánica. The vote is expressed in terms of a vote of confidence for Franco (‘Franco Si’). Eightyeight per cent of the possible electorate vote in the referendum with less that two per cent voting 'no'. Voting stations have armed policemen, unfolded voting slips in glass urns, no envelopes or cubicles. Some voting stations record a vote of 120 per cent of the local electorate (a figure that is put down to transient voters). 26 December: South East Asia — North Vietnamese attack Laos. Spain — FIJL member David Urbano Bermúdez is arrested on his arrival in Madrid on charges of being a member of the First of May Group. The guerrilla struggle in Latin America, Third World Liberation movements, the US Civil Rights movement and the rising tide of student protests on European, American and Asian university campuses — all following each other in quick succession — contribute to the radicalisation of many young people who reject society’s repressive structure. This radicalisation clearly takes many different forms but through their now extensive Europe-wide contacts the anarchist First of May Group seeks to channel this widespread sense of revolutionary urgency and solidarity to launch joint actions with other European activist groups. 1968 Discontent and frustration with the poor moral and ethical quality of people’s lives grows exponentially, particularly among students. People react against the duplicity of a mechanistic society that is geared to production and consumption

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1968 and shows little regard for more social human values — to say nothing of the cant and hypocrisy of politicians who are either unable or unwilling to confront the moral contradictions of liberal-democracy. This distaste expresses itself increasingly forcefully in the spontaneous direct-action oriented anti-Vietnam War, anti-racist and self-management movements. These actions, marches and demonstrations are not simply negative expressions of social alienation, but an affirmation of a newly rediscovered morality in political life, values that are based on participatory democracy, solidarity and mutual aid. They provide the synthesis for a new community-oriented counter-culture that seeks to challenge nascent corporate globalism and re-assert the rights of the individual and smaller communities. The traditional political parties are rejected and the young turn to direct action to resolve the problems of the day. As far as they are concerned, no matter who you vote for, the government always gets in. The homeless turn to squatting; the unemployed and underprivileged form Claimants’ Unions to overcome the obstacles placed in their way by the Welfare State; women, consumers, tenants, racial groups, students and all sorts of other minority groups begin to organise to assert their identities in a society in which all traditional ideological roads lead back to the same faceless and bureaucratic state. 3 January: London — A mortar device is discovered facing the UK Embassy of the Greek military junta. 9 January: France — Daniel Cohn-Bendit (23-year old student at Nanterre) confronts and denounces French Minister of Youth and Sports François Missofe over French government education policies. Strikes, demonstrations and student protests escalate throughout France. 30 January: Saigon — Viet Cong (National Liberation Front) launch coordinated series of guerrilla attacks in Tet offensive against most of the major cities in South Vietnam. It ends one month later when the city of Hue is finally recaptured by US marines in some of the fiercest fighting seen in the Vietnam War. 8 February: Brussels — Spanish anarchist Octavio Alberola is arrested during preliminary negotiations for Spain's admission into Common Market (EC/EU). Alberola had been preparing a press conference to denounce this manoeuvre and bring the plight of Franco’s political prisoners to the attention of the world. 13 February: France — Major anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. 24 February: Saigon — South Vietnamese army General Loan is photographed shooting a manacled Viet Cong prisoner through the head in cold blood. 27 February: London — Crouch End home of Stuart Christie is raided by police from West End Central police station with warrant to search for explosives. Metropolitan Police Special Branch officer, Det. Sgt. Roy Cremer, accompanies CID detectives. The warrant for the raid is issued in connection with the mortar device discovered outside the Greek Embassy. They also have information (from an informer) that bomb attacks by the First of May Group are imminent in London and elsewhere. 3 March: London, The Hague, Turin — Six bombs damage buildings of diplomatic missions in Europe: the Spanish Embassy and the American Officers Club in London; the Spanish, Greek and Portuguese Embassies in the Hague, and at the US Consulate in Turin. These actions are claimed by the First of May Group. 6 March: West Berlin — Incendiary device ignites in Moabit Criminal Court. This is carried out by the group which later adopts the name Red Army Fraction. 7 March: Spain — Student disturbances leads to closure of Madrid University’s Faculty of Sciences. 8 March: Poland — Police clash with students demanding greater freedom. 10-11 March: International — Violent confrontations between police and demonstrators at anti-Vietnam War demonstrations from Warsaw to Tokyo. 12 March: Poland — 300 students arrested in Warsaw during demonstrations. 13 March: Czechoslovakia — Dubcek relaxes press censorship and arrests former head of the Czechoslovak secret police. 16 March: Washington — US President Lyndon Johnson announces he is to send between 35,000 and 50,000 more troops to Vietnam. 15-16 March: International — More anti-war demonstrations in Rome, Paris, Berlin, Algeria. US offices bombed in various cities. 17 March: London — The ad-hoc Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) organises an anti-Vietnam War march to the US Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square. Despite the fact that the march is denounced by the traditional partyoriented left, the Communist and Labour parties, nor is it supported by the Trades Union movement or the pacifists. the VSC demo is well attended with at least 15,000 and perhaps as many as 80,000 demonstrators. Because of its confrontational and combative nature, the event proves to be

one of the most significant, effective and widely publicised demonstrations of the1960s — and one of the bloodiest — with over 300 arrests. It also changes the nature of protest in the UK and brings home to the civil service mandarins in the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Defence, Scotland Yard and Leconsfield House (MI5) and reactionary businessmen and retired army officers that for the first time in hundreds of years there is a real threat of revolutionary civil disorder on the streets of London. Special Branch officers are ordered to shift their attention away from industrial activists and plant agents and cultivate informers in the groups on the extra-parliamentary left and in the anti-Vietnam War movement. Perhaps the best analysis appears in New Society (21/3/1968): ‘The demonstration was something new, something that indicates the pattern of major protests we shall have in the future… things cannot be the same again after Sunday. The time of the orderly peace-platform marchers are gone’. The departure from orthodox CND type marches could be seen in the demonstration’s ‘method of moving down streets, in its reaction to the police, in its speakers and in its platform’… The 17 March demonstration ‘had become street occupation… the idea was to seize the area, not march on the side of the road… the aim was maximum disruption’. The main lesson was that ‘the British tradition of polite politics is past’. For the thousands who took part in the Grosvenor Square confrontation with the police things will never be quite the same again. The extensive media coverage of the Vietnam War over the previous months brings home the full horror of the Vietnam War into more and more people’s consciousness and provokes widespread anger against Britain's support for US war aims in South East Asia. People openly admire the fact that the most technologically advanced global military power is unable to defeat the resistance of a predominantly peasant people. 18 March: Paris — Bomb attacks on offices of three US multinationals: Chase Manhattan Bank, the Bank of America and Transworld Airlines. 20 March: France — Students from the Sorbonne and Nanterre occupy the American Express office in Paris 22 March: Nanterre — Following a confrontation with the University authorities, a group of around 140 students (anarchists and Trotskyists from the Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionnaire (JCR) occupy Nanterre’s administration block around midnight. University authorities respond by sending police onto the campus and locking the students out, automatically turning it into a major media event. 25 March: Madrid — First of May Group bomb US Embassy. 31 March: Washington — President Lyndon B Johnson announces he will not run as for re-election as president in 1968. 2 April: Frankfurt — Incendiary devices placed by members of the group later to become known as the Red Army Fraction start a fire in a major department store in protest against US napalm bomb attacks in Vietnam. Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin are among the four people arrested. 9 April: Memphis — Martin Luther King is assassinated. 11 April: West Germany — Rudi Dutschke, the SDS student activist demonised in Axel Springer newspaper editorials and reports is shot and wounded in the head by right-wing gunman. The attack triggers riots and demonstrations against Springer newspaper group offices (considered responsible for creating the climate of intolerance that made the shooting inevitable) in Italy, Holland and the UK. 14 April: West Germany — Arson attacks on Springer Press offices and delivery trucks across West Germany. 15 April: London — 25,000 attend CND rally in Trafalgar Square at the end of the annual Aldermaston march. A spontaneous breakaway demonstration marches on the offices of the German Springer press office in the IPC building in Holborn, in protest against the shooting of Rudi Dutschke. 20 April: Birmingham, UK — 'As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.' With this inflammatory classical quotation Tory Shadow Minister of Defence Enoch Powell sparks racist demonstrations and violence throughout the UK. 29 April: France — Protest meetings and demonstrations against the arrest of 22 March Group member Dany Cohn-Bendit for allegedly causing ‘public disorder’. April-May: USA — Black and white students occupy Columbia University. Demonstrators close the campus in protest against the University’s expansion into the black community of Harlem and CIA-funded and supported research institutes and programmes. Mark Rudd, later to emerge as a major figure in the US urban guerrilla group, the Weathermen, becomes nationally prominent for his role in the Columbia revolt. Major student protests also take place at University of California, Berkeley.

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1968 Industrialised democracies: — Opposition to the Vietnam War provides a focal point for the growing political tensions which appear to be reaching critical mass throughout the industrialised world. Protestors and dissidents take to the streets in angry confrontations with the forces of public order; universities and colleges of higher education are occupied; popular demands grow for greater democratic controls, wage and pension increases leading to strikes; factory occupations and direct actions become daily events affecting every facet of public life. 1 May: International — Traditional labour day demonstrations. Few confrontations. Launch issue of Black Dwarf, a radical newspaper which becomes the platform for the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and the intellectuals associated with the New Left Review. 2 May: France, Thursday — To prevent the situation in the university campus deteriorating even further Nanterre’s Dean Grappin instructs the police to shut down the Faculty of Letters. Five hundreds students are arrested and he summons five students from Nanterre, two anarchists, Jean-Pierre Duteuil and three Trotskyists, to appear the on the 6th before the University of Paris’s disciplinary panel, thereby bringing the Paris Sorbonne students into the equation. 3 May: France, Friday — A meeting is called in the Sorbonne courtyard to protest against the closure of the Nanterre faculty and the carpeting of the Nanterre students. In response Sorbonne rector Paul Roche calls in the French riot police, the CRS, and has the activists arrested for trespass. The students, evicted from the university, take to the streets demanding the liberation of their comrades who have been beaten up and summarily convicted, the re-opening of the university faculties and the withdrawal of the police. This, in turn, leads to the first major street fighting in the Latin Quarter. Until now the confrontation has been exclusively university-oriented; but over the next 24 hours it develops into a much wider social and industrial struggle. 5 May: Paris — Paris is the scene of the worst street fighting since the Liberation in 1944. Up to 30,000 students take to the streets, having been locked out of their campuses by Sorbonne rector Paul Roche. 6 May: France — CRS riot police occupy the Latin Quarter over the weekend to break up the 20,000-strong students march from Denfert Rochereau to St Germain des Prés who are calling for the release of all arrested demonstrators. Police attack the demonstrators, resulting in 422 arrests and 800 wounded. Demonstrations, strikes and factory occupations spread like wildfire to other French towns and cities. 7 May: France — 50,000 students and teachers march through the streets of Paris behind a single banner: ‘Vive la Commune’ and sing the ‘Internationale’ at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Essex: — Police with dogs called to Essex University after students break up a meeting addressed by a chemical warfare expert. 8 May: France — The Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) — which has previously denounced the students as ‘groupuscules’ and ‘provocateurs’ made up of children of the high bourgeoisie serving Gaullist objectives — changes tack and claims to support the students. 10-11 May: France — Demonstrations and campus occupations extend to secondary schools and colleges. Students and teachers occupy the Latin Quarter en masse. Interior Minister Fouchet and Deputy Premier Foux orders Paris police chief Grimoud to clear the streets which leads to the gas-masked CRS baton charging their way down the Latin Quarter’s rue Gay-Lussac and the infamous ‘night of the barricades’ in which over 1000 are wounded and at least 500 are arrested. The events of the night of 10-11 May capture the admiration, imagination and solidarity of radicals and trades-unionists throughout France and the rest of the world. The events of that night also strike fear into the authorities. Many average militants cease being obstreperous students and perceive themselves as active revolutionaries. The streetfighting and the tactical and strategic debates which go on throughout Paris give the participants — and observers — a practical and theoretical sense that dramatic revolutionary change is possible, if the momentum can be maintained and the envelope pushed that bit further. London: — Cecil King, right-wing plotter, Daily Mirror publisher and director of the Bank of England calls on Prime Minister Harold Wilson to resign in front page Daily Mirror article referring to a grave financial crisis facing the country. 13 May: France — Over one million French workers and students demonstrate in Paris. The 22 March Group declares that the ‘struggle against repression’ has turned into ‘the struggle against the State’. The CRS withdraw from the Sorbonne and the students move in to occupy the buildings, a move which is followed by an unprecedented intellectual explosion with every lecture theatre packed out, day and night, with students enthusiastically debating all the possibilities and every conceivable political, cultural and social idea. The Hague — First of May group bombs Spanish ambassador’s residence

14-21 May: France — The country’s industry and commerce is at a virtual standstill with up to ten million striking workers supporting the students. First factory occupation takes place as workers take over Sud Aviation in Nantes. 15 May: France — Workers occupy the Renault car factory in Cléon and students occupy the Odeón. The strike movement acquires greater momentum with more than 122 factories throughout France occupied by workers. 20 May: France — The entire country is on the verge of revolution and the Communist Party warns its members against anarchist ‘provocations’. 25 May: Bonn — First of May Group bombs Spanish Embassy. 28 May: London — Hornsey College of Art occupied by students protesting against the victimisation of progressive members of staff. Occupation lasts seven weeks. 30 May: France — President de Gaulle announces he will not resign and claims that France is threatened by a Communist dictatorship. He dissolves the National Assembly, calls a general election and authorises Prefects as 'Commissioners of the Republic' to suppress subversion with all available means. He calls for a public show of strength on behalf of the Gaullists and more than 1 million Gaullists take to the streets in support of the president. The ‘Events of May’ are over, but the memory lingers on. June: Italy — Tens of thousands of pro-Chinese flyposters and graffiti appear on the walls of Italian cities. These turn out to be the work of neo-fascists not Maoists. The black propaganda campaign is the brainchild of Federico Umberto D’Amato, head of the Bureau of Confidential Affairs (UAR) at the Italian Ministry of the Interior and Stefano Delle Chiaie’s paymaster and boss, as part of the ‘strategy of tension’ of which he is the puppetmaster. 11 July: Moscow — Pravda expresses alarm at process of liberalisation in Czecholsovakia where Alexander Dubcek is introducing ‘socialism with a human face’ and economic reforms. 21 July: London — 15,000 demonstrators march in solidarity with the Vietnamese NLF. 22 July: Middle East — The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) launch their international campaign by hijacking an El-Al airliner. Summer: Alghero, Sardinia — Italian general staff establish training camp in Western Sardinia where Stefano Delle Chiaie’s Avanguardia Nazionale (AN) members receive CIA-sponsored training in terrorism and ideological indoctrination under the auspices of the NATO ‘Gladio’ plan which required member states to establish a national security authority to fight Communism and other perceived enemies of the status quo by means of clandestine citizen cadres. The nearby HQ of the US Army’s Southern Land Forces at La Maddalena in northern Sardinia is one of the many camps used for the training and coordination of ‘parallel’ forces. Gladio consists of 40 main groups divided into independent cells specialising in different fields of clandestine activity: 10 in sabotage, 6 each in intelligence gathering, propaganda, evasion and escape tactics and 12 in guerrilla activities. Another division handles the training of agents and special forces with access to secret arms caches which include handguns, automatic weapons, grenades, high-tech explosives, 60-millimetres mortars, 57-millimetres machine guns and sniper rifles. Within 4 years more than 4,000 people (predominantly right-wingers and neo-fascists) will have undergone training in Sardinia with control over at least 139 arms and munitions caches in different parts of Italy — all part of a NATO/US obsession with preventing a Communist or ‘Leftist’ ‘takeover’ of Italy either through insurrection or the ballot box. The number of terrorist actions reach 147 in 1968, rising to 398 in 1969, and to a peak of 2,498 in 1978 before tapering off. Conclusive ‘Gladio’ links to the strategy of tension and right-wing terrorism came to light in November 1973 when Venetian examining magistrate Carlo Mastelloni determined that the Argo-16 aircraft which exploded in flight near Venice was being used to shuttle trainees and munitions between the US base in Sardinia and ‘Gladio’ sites in north-east Italy. Summer: Madrid — Infuriated by the student disturbances that have spread to Spain from France and elsewhere in Europe, Franco is convinced that university unrest is the work of foreign agitators and that the growing number of younger priests involved in supporting the labour and regionalist opposition to the regime are disguised Communists. Franco authorises his Minister of Justice, Antonio Maria Oriol, to set up a special prison for priests at Zamora where more than 50 priests are imprisoned. The extreme right within the Francoist coalition respond to this leftward shift of the clergy with the emergence of an ultra-right wing anticlericalism which is strongest in Blas Piñar's neo-nazi political association Fuerza Nueva and its armed terror squads, the Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey (the warriors of Christ the King) who are closely linked to General Eduardo Blanco’s security services (DGS/BPS) and Stefano delle Chiaie’s Italian terror network Avanguardia Nazionale (AN).

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1968-1969 August: Italy — International Anarchist Congress held in Carrara. 12 August: London — Time Out launch issue. Its ‘Agitprop’ and ‘Seven Days’ news sections become important reference points for radical London. 20-27 August: Czechoslovakia: — Tanks from Russia, Poland, Hungary and East Germany invade in the early hours. Workers and students offer passive resistance, telling tank crews to go home; some are set ablaze. Dubcek spends a week in Moscow accused of right-wing revisionism before returning looking worn-out and tired. Czechoslovakia remains occupied until the situation is ‘normalised’. Czech Communist Party hardliners are established in power. 28 August: Chicago — Mayor Daley’s police units violently attack young demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention. 10 September: Spain — Seven young anarchists arrested accused of conspiring with First of May Group and of having participated in a number of actions in the Valencia region, including charges of ‘preparing’ bank robbery. The information leading to their arrests is provided by Scotland Yard’s Metropolitan Police Special Branch. 3 October: Ulster — March organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association against anti-Catholic discrimination in jobs and housing is banned by William Craig, the right-wing N.I. Minister for Home Affairs. 5 October: Derry — Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers attack civil rights demonstrators with clubs and water cannons; thirty people are taken to hospital. The RUC go into the Bogside the next day, breaking into houses and attacking Catholics. Twenty people are admitted to hospital, two of whom later die. 15 October: London — The Imperial War Museum in London is firebombed. 27 October: London — 100,000 people march past barricaded shops and offices from the Embankment to Hyde Park Corner. This is the biggest demonstration yet in the UK against the Vietnam War. A breakaway group, mainly of anarchists, skirmish with police in Grosvenor Square. 28 October: Czechoslovakia — Tens of thousands of Czechs take to the streets of Prague to protest against the Soviet occupation. 4 November: West Berlin — West German Foreign Ministry is firebombed. 6 November: Washington — Richard Nixon is elected President of the United States. 17-19 November: Derry — Civil rights strikes and demonstrations by Derry workers against police brutality and victimisation of Catholics. 30 November: Northern Ireland — Protestant extremists occupy the centre of Armagh. December: USA — Activists from the Chicago Region of the SDS pass the radical resolution called ‘Towards a Revolutionary Youth Movement’ (RYM). The resolution is supported by a number of people who are later to set up the Weather Underground, including Bernardine Dohrn, Jim Mellen, Mark Rudd, Bill Ayers, John Jacobs, and Howie Machtinger. 1 December: London — Squatters launch campaign to house homeless families with occupation of roof of half-empty block of luxury flats at Snaresbrook. 2 December: USA — Nixon names Henry Kissinger as national security adviser. 5-16 December: Bristol — Bristol University sit-in with 800 students occupying the Senate building. Their demands include calls for the expansion of the student union facilities and access for students from the neighbouring art and technical colleges. 19 December: West Berlin — Rectorate of West Berlin’s Free University is firebombed.

to December 1969, which culminates in the killing of Giuseppe Pinelli by the Milan secret police, shifts the focus of ABC activity away from anti-Francoist activity towards support for the Italian anarchist prisoners targeted and framed by the Italian and NATO secret services, in their violent and amoral attempts to demonise and marginalise the radical, the Communist and the extraparliamentary left in Italian politics. The ABC/CNA was to play a crucial counter-information role in focusing Italian public opinion on the part played by the state in the right-wing terror campaign which successfully manipulated Italian politics between 1945 and 1980. 9 March: West Berlin — JF Kennedy library is firebombed causing £12,000 worth of damage. 15 March: London — Two anarchists, Alan Barlow and Phil Carver, are arrested immediately following an explosion at the Banco de Bilbao in Covent Garden. Found in their possession is a letter claiming the action on behalf of the First of May Group. 18 April: Northern Ireland — Civil rights activist Bernadette Devlin is elected as Westminster MP for the Mid-Ulster constituency. 19 April: France — Dany Cohn-Bendit is deported to West Germany. Northern Ireland — Riots as Derry RUC invade Catholic Bogside 20 April: Northern Ireland — British troops called in to guard key installations as violence intensifies in the province. 24 April: Vietnam — US death toll rises to 33,641, exceeding the number killed in the Korean war. 28 April: Northern Ireland — Major James Chichester-Clark succeeds Captain Terence O’Neill as Northern Ireland Prime Minister. 25 April: Italy — Two bombs explode in Milan: one at the FIAT stand at the Trade Fair and another at the bureau de change in the Banca Nazionale delle Communicazione at Central Station. Dozens are injured, but none seriously. 2 May: Italy — Six anarchists — Eliane Vincileone, Giovanni Corradini, Paolo Braschi, Paolo Faccioli, Angelo Piero Della Savia and Tito Pulsinelli are arrested and charged with responsibility for fifteen bomb attacks on Francoist buildings and the attack in the Milan Trade Fair, an action which is proved to be the work of fascists. USA : — Two New York university campuses are closed due to student rioting. 25 May: — West Germany — Bomb explodes in the Spanish Embassy. It is claimed on behalf of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) in solidarity with the Spanish workers expelled from Germany at the request of the Spanish Embassy in the country. June: Brazil — Publication of Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla which shifts the focus of the liberation struggles towards the cities rather than the rural strategies of Che, Mao and Debray. Marighella had left the Brazilian Communist Party for being too reformist and taken up armed struggle against the fascist/military government. The Minimanual’s opening sentence states: ‘Anyone who opposes the military dictatorship and wants to fight against it can do something, however little’. He defines terrorism as the use of bomb attacks and the looting of stocks of food for the benefit of the people. He states that terrorism alone will not win power, but it ‘could demoralise the authorities’. He also insists that terrorist acts are ‘not designed to kill the common people, or to upset or intimidate them in any way.’ Summer: West Germany — The Central Committee of the Roaming Hash Rebels — the ‘militant kernel of Berlin’s counter-culture’ — is formed. 15 July: West Germany — Local government office in Bamberg badly damaged in bomb attack. Blank ID cards are stolen. Summer: USA — SDS summer projects in Michigan and Ohio develop as 1969 prototype Weather Underground collectives. 9 August: Italy — Ten bombs are planted by fascists (acting on instructions from 3 January: Northern Ireland — Violence flares in Derry at the end of the 73-mile civil rights march from Belfast. Ulster Catholics want ‘one man, one vote’ in the agents of the Ministry of the Interior) on as many trains. Eight explode and 12 province. people are injured. 6 January: Northern Ireland — The NI government uses ‘B’ Specials (Ulster 3 August: Northern Ireland — British Army armoured cars crush barricades in Special Constabulary) to aid the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Catholic communities. 3 February: London — Unexploded First of May Group bombs are discovered on 12 August: Northern Ireland — 112 people are treated in hospital following the premises of the Bank of Bilbao and the Bank of Spain. siege of Bogside by Derry RUC. 9 February: Liverpool — First of May Group bomb Bank of Spain. 14 August: Northern Ireland — Rioting in Belfast; ten civilians killed. 27 February: West Berlin — Visit of US President Richard Nixon triggers 16 August: London — Home of Duncan Sandys, Tory MP, fire-bombed. demonstrations and an unsuccessful bomb attempt on his motorcade. Following the Northern Ireland: UK troops begin patrolling the Falls Road and Ardoyne areas of visit, German secret police raid a number of Berlin communes where they discover Belfast. 17 August: London — Ulster Office is firebombed. Ian Purdie arrested. explosives. The police arrest two men, Dieter Kunel and Rainer Longhans. The 19 August: Brighton — Bomb thrown into army recruiting office. explosives had been supplied by the German secret pollice through their agent Autumn: West Berlin — Formation of the Tupamaros West Berlin (TW), West provocateur, Peter Urbach. March: Italy — The Committee of the Croce Nera Anarchica (CNA — Anarchist Germany’s first urban guerrilla group. Within a few months a similar group is formed Black Cross) is set up in Milan by Amedeo Bertolo, Umberto del Grande and in Munich, Tupamaros, Munich (TM). September: USA — Weatherman action in Pittsburg, organised and led by Giuseppe Pinelli. Initially intended to provide an autonomous vehicle for support of Spanish political prisoners, the ‘strategy of tension’ which unfolds from April through women.

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1969-1970 10 September: Northern Ireland — There are now 7,000 British troops in the province. 12 September: USA — Richard Nixon orders B-52 bombing raids of North Vietnam to continue. 16 Sept: UK — Barbara Hulanicki opens Biba boutique in Kensington High St. 21 September: UK — Police storm squat at 144 Piccadilly evicting 250 hippie squatters and ending the week-long occupation of 100-room mansion. 24 September: USA — The ‘Conspiracy 8’ trial opens in Chicago. A ‘Weatherman’ action outside the courthouse results in the arrest of 19 members of the ‘Weather Underground’ October: Uruguay — Tupamaros (The Movement for National Liberation — MLN) occupy the town of Pando (25 kilometres from Montivideo) and carry out expropriations and food re-distributions. In a poll, around 59 per cent of the population think the Tupamaros are pursuing social justice. 8-11 October: USA — SDS National Action takes place in Chicago. The Weatherman ‘Days of Rage’ result in the arrest of activists and major felony charges, local and federal, against Weatherman leaders. 9 October: London — Petrol bombs discovered in left luggage locker. USA: — Millions of Americans demonstrate against the war in Vietnam. They march, hold rallies and read aloud the roll of the 40,000 American dead. 10 October: Northern Ireland — B Specials (Protestant police auxilliaries) disbanded, to be replaced by the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). 29 October: USA — Bobby Seale is gagged during the ‘Conspiracy 8’ trial. Nov-Dec: West Germany — Six bomb attacks in West Berlin. November: Northern Ireland — IRA splits into ‘Official,’ and ‘Provisionals’. 4 November: Brazil — Carlos Marighela is shot dead by police. 19 November: USA — Sergeant Paul Meadlo announces on television that his platoon, led by Lieutenant William Calley fired into a group of Vietnamese women and children in the village of Mylai, massacring 109 people, including a two-year old child. 4 December: USA — Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark are murdered by Chicago police. 7 December: Italy — Anarchists Giovanni Corradini and Eliane Vincileone are released from jail for lack of evidence. 12 December: Italy — Four bombs explode almost simultaenously in the late afternoon. One planted in the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in the Piazza Fontana in Milan claims 16 lives and wounds another hundred people. In Rome a bomb goes off at the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, killing two people and wounding 14, and two devices go off at the cenotaph in the Piazza Venezia, wounding 4. Another bomb is discovered, unexploded, at the Banca Commerciale in the Piazza della Scala in Milan. Four hours later, ordinance officers blow it up, eliminating the most crucial evidence in the whole case. Numerous arrests are made, chiefly of anarchists. Among those arrested is the anarchist railway worker Giuseppe Pinelli. The bombings are the work of agents of the Italian Ministry of the Interior in pursuit of the ‘Strategy of Tension’. Inspector Calabresi, with the Milan Questura insists that they have to look at the role of the anarchists. 15 December: Italy — The anarchist Pietro Valpreda is arrested at the courthouse in Milan and taken to Rome that evening. Around midnight, Anarchist Black Cross co-founder Pinelli ‘falls’ from the fourth floor at police headquarters in Milan. In Vittorio Veneto, Guido Lorenzon visits lawyer Alberto Steccanella to report that a friend, Giovanni Ventura, may have been implicated in the 12 December bomb outrages. 16 December: Italy — Taxi-driver Cornelio Rolandi identifies Valpreda as the passenger he ferried close to the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in the Piazza Fontana on the afternoon of 12 December. West Germany — The first arrest arrest warrants are issued for three people suspected of involvement in political bombings. The three suspects — Bernard Braun, Michael ‘Bommi’ Baumann, and an unidentified Dutchman, go underground. 17 December: Italy — Press conference by the Milan anarchists at the Circolo Ponte della Ghisolfa where they describe the Piazza Fontana outrage as a ‘State massacre’. 20 December: Italy — Nearly 3,000 people attend Pinelli’s funeral. 27-30 December: USA — Weatherman ‘National War Council’ takes place in Flint, Michigan.

decide not to answer bail and choose to go underground. 10 February: London — Ian Purdie is sentenced to 9 months for throwing a petrol bomb at the Ulster Office in Saville Row during an Irish Civil Rights Campaign march. 20 February: London — Three students arrested as they attempt to firebomb a Barclays Bank. 28 February: Paris — First of May Group bombs Bank of Bilbao and the office of Spanish State Railways. 3 March: France — Three Spanish anarchists are arrested trying to kidnap Spain’s permanent delegates to UNESCO: Juan Garcia Macarena, 24; José Cabal Riera, 21; and José Canizares Varella, 35. 6 March: USA — Explosion in a Greenwich Village (New York) house in which Weatherman activists Ted Gold, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins are killed. March: West Germany — Horst Mahler is convicted following an anti-Springer press demonstration and receives a 6 month suspended sentence. 22 March: Cambodia — Phnom Penh appeals to Britain and the USSR to halt the invasion of its territory. 28 March: London — Bomb discovered at Waterloo Station. 1-2 April: Northern Ireland — Clashes between British Army and Catholics of Ballymurphy Estate, Belfast. 3 April: USA — Twelve Weatherman are indicted by a federal grand jury on 13 counts (one count each for crossing state lines intending to incite riot, and one count of conspiring to do the above. 4 April: Germany — Andreas Baader is arrested and imprisoned in West Berlin when arrested driving without a licence. 15 April: Italy — Inspector Luigi Calabresi begins proceedings against Pio Baldelli, the director of the weekly Lotta Continua who had accused him of responsibility for Pinelli’s death. USA: — FBI arrest Weatherman activists Linda Evans and Dianne Donghi 22 April: Belgium — Italian anarchist Ivo della Savia arrested in Brussels on an Italian extradition warrant. He is accused by the Italian authorities of being a member both of the 22 March and First of May Groups. 30 April: USA — President Nixon orders US combat troops to invade Cambodia. 4 May: USA — Four students, two of them women, are shot dead by National Guard soldiers at Kent State University in Ohio during a demonstration against against the sending of US troops into Cambodia. The Guard shoot into a crowd of peaceful anti-war demonstrators injuring 11. Two black students are also shot dead at Jackson State University in Mississipi. Nixon says: ‘when dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy’. London — US Embassy firebombed. 10 May: London — Following telephone warnings incendiary devices are discovered aboard Iberia (Spanish state airline) aeroplanes at Heathrow and other European airports. 14 May: West Germany — Andreas Baader is broken out of the Tegel Prison by armed friends, including Ulrike Meinhof. An elderly guard, Mr Linke, is badly wounded in the escape which marks the beginning of the Red Army Fraction (RAF). 19 May: London — Wembley Conservative Association firebombed. 21 May: USA — The Weather Underground issues its first communiqué. 22 May: London — Bomb discovered at a new high security police station in Paddington. This is later claimed by the prosecution in the trial of the Stoke Newington Eight to be the first action undertaken by `The Angry Brigade'. 21 May: Italy — Milan examining magistrate Giovanni Caizzi asks that the file on Pinelli’s death be closed and that it be recorded as an accidental death. 8 June: Argentina — President Juan Carlos Ongania overthrown in a USbacked military coup. 9 June: USA — Weather Underground bomb New York City police HQ. 10 June: London — Brixton Conservative Association firebombed. 11 June: London — Stuart Christie’s Finsbury Park home raided under an explosives warrant. 18 June: London — Lambeth Court firebombed. 19 June: London — Edward Heath becomes Conservative prime minister. 27 June: Northern Ireland — Catholic-Protestant clashes throughout Belfast. Protestants shot in battle of St Matthews’ Church. 1970 30 June: London — Army depot in Kimber Road firebombed; Ian Purdie is 28 January: Paris — First of May Group bomb office of Spanish Cultural attaché. released from Albany prison (Isle of Wight). February: West Berlin — Several anarchists — including Michael Baumann, 2-5 Julyl: Northern Ireland — British Army curfew in Falls Road district, Thomas Weisbecker and Georg Von Rauch — are arrested while beating up right Belfast. wing journalist (Quick) Horst Rieck in his Berlin apartment. Rieck had recently 3 July: Paris and London — Simultaneous bomb attacks against Spanish State published scandalous stories about the Left in Berlin. Baader, Ensslin and Astrid Proll Tourist offices, and the Spanish and Greek Embassies.

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1970-1971 Italy — Antonio Amati, head of the investigation bureau in Milan agrees to Caizzi’s request that the file on Pinelli’s death be closed. 7 July: London — Army recruiting office in South London is firebombed as is the Army Officer Training Centre in Holborn. 8 July: Germany — 24-year old Georg Von Rauch, one of the founders of the German Anarchist Black Cross, escapes from Moabit Criminal Court aided by his co-accused Thomas Weissbecker and Michael ‘Bommi’ Baumann. Together they form the June 2nd Group, taking the name from the date in 1967 when the student Benno Ohnesorg was murdered by a German policeman (Karl Heinz Kurras) for demonstrating against the Shah of Iran. The group finances itself from breaking open cigarette machines and bank robberies. 10 July: London — Home of a retired Stoke Newington policeman is firebombed. 16 July: UK — Edward Heath declares a state of emergency as dockers stage their first national strike. Troops on standby to keep docks open. 22 July: Italy — Fascist secret service agents plant bomb on ‘Southern Arrow’ train, killing 6 and injuring 139. 23 July: USA — Thirteen Weather Underground members are indicted by federal grand jury on charges of conspiring to engage in acts of terrorism and sabotage against police stations and other institutions. 26 July: USA — Weather Underground issues communiqué 3 in response to the Justice department indictment against its members. 27 July: USA — Weather Underground bomb a New York branch of the Bank of America. Portugal: — Death of dictator Antonio de Oliveira de Salazar. August: West Germany — Red Army Fraction activities begin. 2 August: Northern Ireland — British army uses rubber bullets on demonstrators for the first time. 18 August: London — Iberia Airlines office is bombed. 30 August: London — The home of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Waldron, is damaged by a bomb blast. The bombing is not reported in the national press. 4 September: Chile — Socialist leader Salvador Allende is elected president. (In 1973 it emerged that the CIA under instructions from its then director, William Broe, and the president of International Telephone and Telegraph, [ITT] Harold Geneen conspired to stop his election and destabilise his government.) 8 September: London — The Chelsea home of the Attorney General, Sir Peter Rawlinson is bombed. This also goes unreported. 12 September: Jordan — Members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) blow up three British, Swiss and US aeroplanes after releasing all but 56 of the passengers who are held as hostages for the return of PFLP activist Leila Khaled, then being held in Britain. 17 September: Isle of Wight — Jake Prescott paroled from Albany Prison. 21 September: London — Wimbledon Conservative Association firebombed. 26 September: London — Hampstead Conservative Association firebombed; bomb explodes outside Barclays Bank, Heathrow; First of May Group carries out simultaneous bomb attacks against Iberia Airlines in Geneva, Frankfurt, Paris and London airports. 29 September: Germany — RAF attacks three banks in West Berlin within minutes of each other. They escape with 217, 469.50 DMarks (£26,500). 30 September: UK — PFLP activist Leila Khaled released and flown to Beirut. 5 October: Canada — French Canadian separatists of the Front de Liberation Quebequois kidnap British diplomat James Cross. 7 October: London — Booby-trapped hand-grenade discovered at BOAC’s Victoria Air terminal. 8 October: London — Second explosion at Attorney General Rawlinson’s home. West Berlin: — Acting on a tip-off, German police raid an RAF meeting at Knesebkstrasse 8 where they arrest Horst Mahler, Irene Geogens, Ingrid Schubert, Monika Berberich and Brigitte Asdonk. 9 October: London, Manchester, Birmingham and Paris — Italian Trade Centre, Exhibition Building, Cork Street, bombed. Simultaneous attacks against Italian government in Manchester, Birmingham and Paris. The actions are claimed on behalf of Giuseppe Pinelli, the Italian anarchist murdered by the Milan police in December 1969. Italy — The Calabresi-Lotta Continua case opens. The court is chaired by Aldo Biotti, with Michele Lener representing Calabresi. Baldelli’s lawyers are Marcello Gentili and Bianca Guidetti Serra. The prosecution counsel is Emilio Guicciardi. 10 October: Canada — Two men kidnap and kill Quebec Labour and Immigration Minister, Pierre Laporte (his body is discovered on the 18th). 22 October: Chile — A state of emergency is declared following a CIA-backed

plot to assassinate Salvador Allende’s army chief, General Schneider. 24 October: London — Bomb explodes in the head office of the cleansing department in Greenford during a council workers’ strike. 26 October: Keele and London — Keele University administration building firebombed and Barclays Bank in Stoke Newington firebombed. Newspaper report says: `Police are investigating several similar incidents at other branches'. November: Italy — First recorded violent actions of the Marxist Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) with armed robberies and the firebombing of cars and theatres. It is quite possible that the BR were infiltrated and manipulated from very early on by elements of the Italian Ministry of the Interior (Confidential Affairs Bureau) and/or individuals such as Captain David Carrett, attached to NATO’s Southern Command (FTASE) in Verona from 1969 to 1974, and his successor, Captain Theodore Richards, based in Vicenza from 1974 to 1978. Another US citizen involved in the clandestine machinations of the time, including the right-wing coup attempts, was Hung Fendwich who operated out of the offices of the Selenia company (part of the STET-IRI group) in Rome’s Via Tiburtina. 3 November: Chile — Allende is sworn in as president; he promises ‘socialism within liberty’. 16 November: Germany — Neustadt Town Hall broken into and 31 official stamps, fifteen pasports and one ID card stolen. 20 November: London — Bombing of a BBC Outside Broadcast van covering the Miss World contest at the Albert Hall in London. The police allege that Jake Prescott is responsible for this explosion, but witnesses later vouch that Prescott was in fact in Edinburgh at the time and they are forced to drop this charge. 26 November: UK — The first year of the Heath government is marked by more strikes than at any time since the General Strike of 1926. 3 December: London — Spanish Embassy in London machine-gunned in one of the many international protests against the trial of the Basque nationalists, the Burgos Six. The incident is not reported at the time. London: — Publication of the Industrial Relations Bill (IRB). Canada: — The FLQ free kidnapped British diplomat James Cross. 7 December: Italy — Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, leader of the Fronte Nazionale with Stefano Delle Chiaie (aided by people directly linked to Interior Ministry chief Federico D’Amato), lead an attempted coup d’etat. Licio Gelli, head of the P2 masonic lodge, is in charge of kidnapping the president of the republic, Giuseppe Saragat. The plotters were not arrested and most of the leaders fled to Franco’s Spain. A seminal document in regard to this incident, which was not mentioned in the press until 3 months after the event, was the 132-page ‘Supplement B’ of the US Army’s Field Manual, published that same year. Taking its cue from earlier CIA and NSC documents, the manual states that if a country is not sufficiently anti-communist, ‘serious attention must be given to possible modifications of the structure. If that country does not react with sufficient vigour’, the document continues, ‘groups acting under US Army intelligence control should be used to launch violent or non-violent actions according to the nature of the case.’ 8 December: UK — Day of major national demonstrations against the Conservative government's Industrial Relations Bill (IRB). 9 December: London — Bombing of the Department of Employment and Productivity in St James Square, London. The police had just completed a search of the building when the bomb exploded. The action is claimed by the Angry Brigade. 12 December: Italy — Demonstrations in Milan on the first anniversary of the Piazza Fontana massacre. Fierce clashes between police and demonstrators. Student Enzo Santarelli dies when struck in the chest by a tear-gas canister fired by the police. 1971 8 January: Uruguay — Tupamaro guerrillas kidnap British Ambassador in Montevideo, Geoffrey Jackson. 12 January: UK — Thousands of people strike and march against the Industrial Relations Bill. That evening the Barnet home of Robert Carr, Edward Heath’s Minister of Employment, is bombed twice. The first explosion occurs at 10:05 pm, the second at 10:20 pm. The action is claimed by the Angry Brigade. According to The Times: ‘One man the police particularly want... is a Scot in his twenties who is suspected of being involved in the bomb attack at the Iberia Airlines office in London last August. This man was believed to be in Paris yesterday.’ This thinly disguised reference to Stuart Christie now identifies him as the likely `candidate for outrage'. His anarchist history and his involvement with the anti-Francoist resistance movement in Spain also makes him an ideal candidate for a police ‘fit-up’. Police searches extend over the whole of the London area and many people are taken to Barnet Police Station for questioning.

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1971 It is reported that Special Branch are watching ‘members of a group believed to be connected with the explosions’. All those questioned at Barnet in the early part of the week are released, apart from a man and a woman who were handed over to the police in other parts of London in connection with other offences. In the week following the Carr bomb a police guard is provided for Justice Melford Stevenson after he received a phone call saying that a bomb was to be placed in his house. This is ‘the hanging judge’ of the time who is later to sentence Jake Prescott to 15 years. Orders are issued to police and security services by the Cabinet Office that the ‘Angry Brigade’ must be flushed out as a matter of top priority. An undercover squad of Special Branch officers is formed to pursue full-time investigation into the group. Full-time guards are provided for all Cabinet Ministers. These are angry times... Peter Walker (environment Minister), Melford Stevenson, Tory MP Hugh Fraser, Tory Prime Minister Heath and many others have received threatening calls. A communique sent to the Express newspaper says: "THE ANGRY BRIGADE IS AFTER HEATH NOW. WE'RE GETTING CLOSER". 18 January: Glasgow — South African Airways office is firebombed. 19 January: London — Jake Prescott is arrested in Notting Hill on charges of handling a stolen cheque book. 20 January: London — Prescott appears at Marylebone Court, where he is questioned by Chief Superintendent Roy Habershon in charge of the Carr bomb inquiry. While he is held on remand, he is placed in a cell with informers Messrs A, B and C. Habershon interviews Mr A at Camberwell Court, which he follows up again on February 9. Mr A makes a statement that Jake has ‘admitted the bombings at the DEP, Carr's home and the Miss World Contest’... Unfortunately for Habershon, the jury at Prescott’s trial are not prepared to believe the police witness (perhaps they had in mind the £10,000 reward that had been offered by the Daily Mirror for police informants)... This part of the police evidence is later rejected. The police are given full rein to do what they like. In the middle of the hysteria generated by the idea that the opposition might be armed after a cabinet minister has his side door blown off, a manhunt takes place intended to `leave no stone unturned'. Stuart Christie is a particular victim of this. The London evening newspapers trumpet day after day about the `young Scottish anarchist recently returned from Spain', whom they had branded as the most likely... people disappear off the streets for questioning. Police raid offices of leading newspapers and take photographers to Barnet to identify people from photographs taken outside Carr’s house on the night of the January 12 bombing. In the weeks following the Carr bombing, the Barnet Brigade, headed by Chief Superintendent Roy Habershon, Commander Bond and Commander Dace, raid houses of 'known left wing extremists' all over London with sniffer dogs and photographers. Their concern (as is clear from the number of address books, magazines, letters, etc that they take) is to draw up a picture of the extraparliamentary left, whose activities they are now forced to take seriously, and of whose structures they were more or less ignorant. The raids include: January 13: Chris Reed, Huddleston Road, London, N7 January 14: Stuart Roche, Schools Union activist. January 15: Ian Purdie’s brother, Robert is taken to Barnet and questioned. The police are looking for Ian. January 17: The house of Ann Lamche (Cinema Action) is raided. Two people are taken off for questioning. The Agitprop house in Muswell Hill (which the police were eager to look round) address book copied. January 19: 4 known raids in which nothing is found. Joe Keith and Tony Swash questioned by Habershon. January 20: Ian Purdie questioned by Palmer-Hall at Bedford Gardens. January 21: Paul Lewis of International Times is questioned by Habershon. Office and home searched. January 22: Chris Allen is questioned by Edinburgh CID. Habershon goes to Edinburgh for three days. January 23: Another raid in Edinburgh. January 24: Police raid a house in London and two men, Ross Flett and Phil Carver are dragged off to Barnet for questioning. Habershon refuses them access to a lawyer who was present outside the station. The papers start to talk of a Scottish anarchist. 25 January: Glasgow — Home of the Lord Provost bombed. 27 January: London — Communiqué 5 received by the Press Association. The police are forced to admit that earlier bombings (which they had covered up) had taken place,but impose a press blackout on the course of the investigations. At the same time the Daily Mirror offers a £10,000 reward to anybody providing information leading to a conviction. 29 January: London — The Times reports: ‘Scotland Yard and security officials

are becoming increasingly embarrassed and annoyed by the activities of the Angry Brigade, who cannot now be dismissed as a group of cranks. Some senior officers credit the group with a degree of professional skill that has seldom been experienced’. Two men are seized by police in London and taken to Barnet for questioning concerning `about 30 unpublicised attacks on Establishment property' including banks, the home of Conservative MP Duncan Sandys and various Conservative Party offices. The Evening News reports that: ‘... in the latest report of HM Inspector of Explosives, ”there was again a substantial increase in the number of cases involving homemade devices. There is evidence of the increasing use of such devices in the furtherance of political activities” ‘. 30 January: Slough — Conservative Office firebombed. 3 February: London — Jake Prescott is released on bail. Ian Purdie is in court at the time, as he had been for Jake's previous remands. 6 February: Northern Ireland — Gunner Curtis shot in Belfast, first British soldier to die in current troubles. 9 February: Jersey — The home of a local businessman is firebombed. 10 February Germany: — Exchange of gunfire between Manfred Grashof, Astrid Proll and the police. 11 February: London — Jake Prescott and a Dutch friend are arrested in a North London pub and taken to Barnet Police Station where they are refused access to lawyers for two days. Jake is interrogated by Habershon and Allard for hours. The house in Grosvenor Avenue, Islington, where Jake Prescott had been staying, is raided and searched for explosives. Diaries, address books, newspapers and other articles are removed, despite protests that this does not come under the terms of the police warrants. Press reports make Grosvenor Avenue the centre of the conspiracy. Earlier that same day Habershon and his men disrupted the trial of the people involved in the demonstration at the Miss World contest in November 1970. Four of the defence witnesses who were due to give evidence in the trial were taken to Barnet where they were questioned and denied access to legal representation. Habershon makes his historic statement: ‘I am not concerned with legal niceties’. Charges are brought against Scotland Yard for assault (of those dragged away from Bow Street) and for wrongful arrest and imprisonment.The Special Branch were present at the Miss World trial. 12 February: London — Prescott’s defence counsel prepares a writ of habeas corpus which requires the police to either charge him or release him. 13 February: London — Jan Oudenaarden, the Dutchman, is released after what he describes as the most frightening experience of his life. Jake Prescott is charged with conspiracy to cause explosions between July 30 1970 and December 1971, and with the specific bombings of Carr's home, the Dept of Employment and the Miss World contest. Prescott and Oudenaarden had been `detained for questioning' for 3 days. In the court at Barnet, Habershon is challenged to produce `grounds for arrest' and is threatened with legal action. It is claimed that he tried to persuade Prescott to change his lawyer. The homes of Hilary Creek, John Barker, Kate MacLean, Chris Allen and others are searched. Laos: — South Vietnamese troops backed by US warplanes and artillery invade Laos. 15 February: Manchester — Cannock Street is raided again. 19 February: Edinburgh — Habershon goes to Edinburgh. Two houses are raided and Jane and Chris Allen are questioned. That same day The Times prints Communiqué 6 from the Angry Brigade. There is also a telephone call from an Angry Brigade spokesman to the Havering Recorder in Essex, saying that from Saturday next a campaign of violence would be conducted against Conservative Party policies in South Africa. 20 February: Mike Kane's house is raided in Angry Brigade investigation. 1 March: UK — 1.5 million workers stage a one-day strike in protest against the Industrial Relations Bill. 5 March: London — House in Talbot Road, Notting Hill raided. 6 March: London — 12 midnight, house in Tyneham Road, SW11 is raided and Ian Purdie arrested. Habershon states at Barnet that ‘the raid was to find explosives and Ian Purdie. They are synonymous as far as I am concerned.’ He admits in court that he ordered Purdie’s arrest for questioning, an illegal act. 7 March: London — Ian Purdie is charged with Jake Prescott with two Angry Brigade bombings. They are remanded in custody to the top security wing at Brixton Prison — as Category A prisoners — and are kept in their cells for 23 hours a day. 10 March: London — The Guardian reports on police excesses in the Angry Brigade investigations. 18 March: Ilford — During a major strike of Ford workers the main office of the Ford Motor Company at Gants Hill, Ilford, on the outskirts of London, is

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1971 wrecked by a powerful explosion. A thousand word communiqué (Communiqué no 7) is delivered shortly after. The bomb at Fords sparks off another wave of raids. UK: — 1.5 million workers stage second one day strike against IRB. 20 March: London — Flats in Notting Hill are raided and defence documents seized. 23 March: London — Grosvenor Avenue raided for the second time. Dogs and ten police officers. Argentina: — In Buenos Aires, President Roberto Levingstone is overthrown by the military in a coup. 23 March: Northern Ireland — Brian Faulkener — a former Minister of Home Affairs in 1959 and responsible for the introduction then of internment — is named Prime Minister of N.I. The issue now is not whether internment is to come, but when and on what scale. His premiership is to be the shortest in Northern Ireland’s chequered history — 12 months to the day. 24 March: London — Two houses in East London raided under explosives warrants by Special Branch Detective Sergeant Cremer and DC Bentley. First, Ron Bailey's with explosives warrant where typewriter impressions are taken. Second, Digger Walsh’s 1 April: London — Two flats in Notting Hill raided and more defence files are seized. Since their arrest, Purdie and Prescott have been kept in solitary in Brixton Prison, allowed out for only one hour each day. Their defence lawyers can only gain access to them with permission with Habershon. When the defence counsel asks for evidence of arrests to be produced, he is told this can't be done without the permission of the Attorney General. In addition £10,000 bail for each of the defendants is refused by the Barnet magistrate. The home of the headmaster of Roydale School is firebombed. 5 April: Gosport — Arson attempt at Gosport Tory Club. (The Evening Standard says ‘this is the latest in a series of incidents involving this club in the last six months.’) Bomb found in Leicester Square. 13 April: Italy — Treviso examining magistrate Giancarlo Stiz issues warrants for the arrest of three Venetian Nazi-fascists: Giovanni Ventura, Franco Freda and Aldo Trinco. The offences alleged against them are: conspiracy to subvert, procurement of weapons of war and attacks in Turin in April 1969 and on trains that August. 19 April: UK — Unemployment figures given as 814, 819, the highest since May 1940. 22 April: London — Committal proceedings for Prescott and Purdie start at Barnet Court. The committal is to decide whether or not the magistrate feels there is sufficient evidence against both men for a trial date to be set at the Old Bailey. There is no doubt that he will find so, but nevertheless proceedings proceed... interminably... until May 27. Jake had been presented (April 15) with three more charges: having conspired with Ian to cause explosions `with others' between July 1970 and March 1971 and having actually caused the Miss World and DEP bombings. Arson at Whitechapel branch of Barclays Bank. 23 April: London — Incendiary envelope posted to MP at House of Commons. 24 April: Wivenhoe, Essex — Second police drug raid. Those charged are shown photos of Jim Greenfield and Anna Mendelson and 2 others. 26 April: Manchester — 3rd raid on Cannock Street. 28 April: London — The Times receives a liquid bomb through the post with the message: ‘From the Vengeance Squad, the Angry Brigade, The People's Army. We will use these. Many of them in June and July. Revolution now." 29 April: Gloucester — Sabotage at Nuclear Power Station, Berkeley, Gloucester (3rd such incident within three months). Police raids on International Socialist printshop and leading IS members. 1 May: London — A bomb explodes in the trendy Biba boutique in Kensington. It is accompanied by Communiqué 8 attacking consumer capitalism and the conditions of the sales girls and seamstresses. 4 May: UK — Bomb found strapped to the underside of Lady Beaverbrook’s car. Inquiries range through Kent, Essex and Oxfordshire. Four home-made bombs are found near the Sidcup and Chislehurst Grammar School, where Prime Minister Heath received the Freedom of Bexley on Friday. 5 May: Spain — Bomb attacks in Barcelona on the Palace of Justice, the HQ of the Falangist Party and a Capuchin monastery. The attacks are claimed by the Catalan anarchist group ‘Libertad’. 6 May: Germany — RAF member Astrid Proll arrested. 18 May: Germany — Horst Mahler acquitted of involvement in the freeing of Andreas Baader. Ingrid Schubert receives 6 years, and Irene Georgens 4 years for their involvement in Baaders’s escape. However, Horst Mahler is detained in prison under paragraph 129 relating to membership of an illegal organisation, the RAF.

22 May: London — Bomb attack on Scotland Yard Computer Room at Tintagel House, London. This is accompanied by simultaneous attacks by the Angry Brigade, the International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement (IRSM), and the Marius Jacob group against British Rail, Rolls Royce and Rover offices in Paris. Harris Gleckman, Alan Barlow, and Smith raided for the second time at Agitprop, Muswell Hill. 28 May: Italy — The anarchists tried in connection with the bombs in Milan on 25 April 1969 are acquitted. However, some are convicted of minor offences: Della Savia is sentenced to eight years, Braschi to six years and ten months, Faccioli to three years and six months. Tito Pulsinelli is cleared on all counts. They are all freed from jail. Spain: — Spanish police announce the arrest of 9 members of the Catalan Liberation Front. Charges against them include sabotage of TV stations, the state prosecutor’s office and the right-wing newspaper La Vanguardia. 1 June: London — A letter to The Times states: ‘If Heath and Rippon contrive to enter the Common Market without seeking the opinion of the British people they will be on the receiving end of a bullet. This is no idle threat. Signed: The Angry Brigade.’ 8 July: Germany — Thomas Weissbecker and Georg Von Rauch, both members of the Anarchist Black Cross, are tried for assaulting a journalist on the Springer magazine Quick. Georg is convicted and Tommy acquitted, but the police, press and court officials have confused them both from the beginning of the case and, after the verdicts have been handed down, they assume each others’ identity. Georg disappears underground, and Tommy has to be released. 15 July: Germany — Petra Schelm is shot dead at a police road block in Hamburg. Werner Hoppe is arrested and charged with the attempted murder of a policeman. 16 July: Italy — Death of taxi-driver Rolandi, the sole witness against Valpreda. 19 July: — Factory at Dordan damaged by several fires started by incendiary devices. 22 July: Essex — During a dispute between Ford management and the militant shop steward John Dillon, in the Ford Liverpool plant, the Angry Brigade blow up the home of Ford's managing director, William Batty, in Essex. The same night a bomb damages a transformer at the Dagenham plant of the Ford Motor Company. Scotland Yard is now hopping mad. Sir John Waldron holds a conference with senior police officers who are told that an order has come from the Prime Minister, via Home Secretary Maudling, that ‘The Angry Brigade must be found and smashed’... ‘We have been ordered to treat the Angry Brigade as Public Enemy Number 1. This is a top priority job.’ According to the Sunday Telegraph: ‘YARD WILL GET THE ANGRY BRIGADE.... A special team of 20 hand-picked detectives from the Flying Squad and Special Branch, working with army bomb disposal experts and Home Office scientists. Their leader, a commander, whose name is being kept secret for his own safety... is known as rough and ready... The squad is taking a tough line. It will raid hippy communes, question avowed members of the `underground' and build up a complete file on the sub-culture that threatens the present social order.’ 20 July: Germany — Dieter Kunzelmann is arrested for allegedly planting a bomb at a major lawyers’ ball and charged with attempted murder. 24 July: Germany — The Heidleberg Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK) is raided by the police on the pretext of connections with the RAF. (The SPK is the first self-organised group of mental patients. It links mental illness to capitalist society.) 300 armed police force their way into the SPK building and the apartments of 20 patients. 11 SPK members are sent to 10 different prisons and 6 are detained on remand. 25 July: London — Intimidation of a claimant in North London when police with explosives warrant smash door in. 26 July: London — Ian Purdie is refused bail of £17,500 by Judge Melford Stevenson. 31 July: London — Despite close police protection the home of the John Davies, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, is badly damaged by a powerful explosion in London. This action follows close on Davies’ announcement of his intention to close Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, throwing thousands of men out of work. This is accompanied by Communiqué 11 from the Angry Brigade. 2 August: Essex — Two houses searched under an explosives warrant. Judge Argyll of the OZ trial is threatened in his Midlands home. The trial date for Jake Prescott and Ian Purdie is set for September 7. A number of houses are raided and material and addresses related to the Prescott and Purdie defence case is seized. One of the places raided is the Agitprop collective in Bethnal Green, London.

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1971-1972 4 August: London — MPs approve Industrial Relations Bill. 8 August : Northern Ireland — Renewed rioting in Belfast. 11 August: Northern Ireland — NI government introduces internment without trial and warrants for the arrest of 450 suspected IRA members and activists of the left-wing socialist People’s Democracy group are issued. Of the 450 named only 342 are taken from their beds in 4.00 am raid by the army and police. These men are eventually taken to Magilligan and Ballykinler Army camps and Girdwood Barracks in Belfast where a selected number are subjected to brutal treatment and ‘sensory deprivation’ from August until October 1971, 15 August: London — More raids: Hungerford Road, Dave Garfinkel taken for questioning. Beresford Terrace, N5, documents seized. Crystal Palace, Sally Keith’s house, floorboards ripped up. Following the announcement by the British Government that internment is to be introduced in Northern Ireland, there is a powerful explosion at the Army recruiting centre in Holloway Road, North London. This is accompanied by a Communiqué signed `Angry Brigade Moonlighters Cell'. 16 August: London — Agitprop, Bethnal Green again raided under an explosives warrant. 17 August: London — Special Branch DCI Riby Wilson and Chief Suprintendent Roy Habershon raid house in Talbot Road, Notting Hill, with warrant for stolen goods. 20 August: London — Flat in Amhurst Road, Stoke Newington, raided by Special Branch and CID. Jim Greenfield, Anna Mendelson, John Barker and Hilary Creek are arrested. The four are taken to the `Bomb Squad' HQ in Albany Street, London, where the two men are subjected to a brutal beating in an attempt to extract confessions. The police claim they found an arsenal of weapons and explosives in the Amhurst Road flat. 21 August: London — Stuart Christie is arrested visiting Amhurst Road. One hour later Chris Bott is also arrested at the same place. Both are taken to join the others at Albany Street Police Station. Incriminating evidence in the form of two detonators is planted by police officers in Christie’s car. 22 August: Bolivia — Military officers seize power in right-wing coup. 23 August: London — All 6 are charged at Albany Street Police Station with: 1. Conspiring to cause explosions between January 1 1968 and August 21 1971. 2. Possessing explosive substances for an unlawful purpose. 3. Possessing a pistol without a firearms certificate. 4. Possessing eight rounds of ammunition without a firearms certificate. 5. Possessing two machine guns without the authority of the Secretary of State. 6. Possessing 36 rounds of ammunition without a firearms certificate. 7. Jim: attempting to cause an explosion in May 1970. 8. Anna and Jim: attempting to cause an explosion in Manchester, October 1970. 9. Stuart: possessing one round of ammunition without a firearm certificate. (This was dated back 2 years when a bullet was taken from his flat. No charges were preferred against him at the time.) 10. John, Jim and Stuart: possessing explosive substances. 11. Jim, John and Hilary: receiving stolen vehicle. 12. Stuart: possessing explosive substances. (The two detonators planted by DS Gilham and DC Sivell). All are refused bail and remanded in custody to await trial. 25 August: Northern Ireland — One killed and 35 injured by bomb at Electricity Board offices in Belfast. 29 August: Edinburgh — Barracks in Edinburgh Castle bombed. 9 September: Uruguay — British ambassador Geoffrey Jackson released by his captors, the Tupamaro guerrillas. 10 September: Ipswich — Courthouse bombed. 16 September: HMP Dartmoor Prison — Bomb discovered in officers’ mess. (News not released for two weeks). 20 September: London — Chelsea Bridge (opposite army barracks) bombed. (Blast heard three miles away.) 24 September: London — Despite the fact that the police claim to have arrested all the Angry Brigade, the Albany Street Army Barracks (near the Bomb Squad HQ) is bombed by the Angry Brigade in protest against the actions of the British Army in Northern Ireland. 4 October: Italy — A fresh inquest into Pinelli’s death is held as a result of a complaint brought by his widow Licia Rognini. Milan-based examining magistrate Gerardo D’Ambrosio brings voluntary homicide chargers against Inspector Calabresi, police officers Vito Panessa, Giuseppe Caracuta, Carlo Mainardi, Piero Mucilli, and carabiniere Lieutenant Savino Lograno.

7 October: Northern Ireland — 1,500 more British troops sent to the province. 15 October: Glasgow — Maryhill Barracks Army HQ, firebombed. 20 October: Birmingham — Home of Bryant, a major Midlands builder, is bombed while his workers are on strike. Communiqué issued by the Angry Brigade. 21 October: Italy — Judge D’Ambrosio has Pinelli’s corpse exhumed. Germany: — German policeman Norbert Schmid is killed in a gun-battle, allegedly by Margit Schiller who is charged with his murder. 30 October: London — Post Office Tower is bombed by the Angry Brigade. ‘The Cunning Man’ Pub in Reading, which refused to serve workers from the M4 site, is bombed. 1 November: London — Army Tank HQ in Everton Street is bombed by the Angry Brigade. 6 November: Amsterdam — Bomb attacks on Lloyds Bank; Basle: Italian Consulate attacked; Rome: British Embassy attacked; Barcelona: British Embassy attacked. All in support of the `Stoke Newington Eight' and Italian anarchists imprisoned on trumped-up charges of 'conspiracy' and subversion. 11 November: London — Haverstock Street, Islington, raided. Angela Weir is arrested and taken to Albany Street Police Station and charged with conspiracy to cause explosions. 16 November: Northern Ireland — A government committee admits ‘illtreatment’ of internees by security forces in Ulster.. 17 November: London — 89 Talbot Road raided and Chris Allen is arrested and charged with conspiracy to cause explosions. 26 November: London — Pauline Conroy is arrested in her Powis Square flat and charged. 29 November: Broadstairs — Courthouse firebombed. December: Barcelona — Formation of the anarchist Movimiento Ibérico de Liberación — Grupos Autonomos de Combate (MIL-GAC) to combat the growing police terror in the final years of the Francoist dictatorship. 1 December: London — Trial of Ian Purdie and Jake Prescott at the Old Bailey (Central Criminal Court) ends. Ian Purdie is found not guilty on all charges. Jake Prescott is found not guilty of specific bombings, but guilty of conspiracy to cause bombings on the basis of having written three envelopes. He is sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment. 4 December: Berlin — German Anarchist Black Cross and June 2nd founder Georg Von Rauch is shot dead by police in West Berlin. He is unarmed and is shot in the head after he had raised his arms. Between 5,000 and 7,000 people turn out the following day to protest against the police’s strategy of murder. 15 December: London — Jordanian Ambassador to London is machinegunned in his car. 18 December: London — Kate McLean is arrested and charged together with Angela Weir, Chris Allen and Pauline Conroy of having conspired with the six people already the held on conspiracy charges. Shortly before the opening of Committal proceedings against the ten militants the Attorney General, Sir Peter Rawlinson, the victim of one of the Angry Brigade attacks, rules there is insufficient evidence for the case against Pauline Conroy and Chris Allen, and both are released from custody. 22 December: Germany — Kaiserslautern bank is robbed of £16,750 and a policeman, Herbert Schoner is killed. There is no evidence that this robbery had anything to do with the RAF, but the Springer press launch a major media campaign blaming the ‘Baader-Meinhof Group’. Heinrich Boll, the world-famous novelist publicly berates the Springer press for the hysteria it is stirring up against the left. Also, Peter Bruckner, a radical psychologist suspected of providing sanctuary for RAF members, is suspended from teaching at Hanover University. His suspension is followed by a massive show of solidarity from his students. 24 December: Italy — Giovanni Leone is elected president of Italy. 25 December: Switzerland — Attack on Zurich’s Central Police Station. Swiss police name an anarchist they wish to interview, but cannot locate. 1972 January: Spain — The first actions of the MIL-GAC take place in Barcelona. Salvador Puig Antich, who had been active in the Anarchist Black Cross and Centro Iberico in London returns to Barcelona. January: West Germany — The introduction of the Berufsverbote ‘anti-radical measures’ precipitate ‘orders in council’ requiring all persons working on any level of the governmental payroll to ‘actively uphold and maintain, both on and off-duty, the basic principles of the West German Constitution.’ A nation-wide witch hunt of leftists and liberals follows and non-compliers are blacklisted.

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1972 9 January: UK — Miners’ strike begins. Government declares a state of emergency. 20 January: UK — Unemployment rises above 1 million. 22 January: London — Explosive device sent to MP at House of Commons. 30 January: Northern Ireland — ‘Bloody Sunday’. Soldiers of the First Brigade of British Army’s Parachute Regiment open fire on unarmed people following a civil rights march in Derry’s Bogside killing 13 men and boys, and injuring a further 17. 1 February: London — Rhodesia House is firebombed. 2 February: West Germany — The June 2nd Movement bombs the British Yacht Club in Kladow accidentally killing a 66-year old German boatbuilder, Irwin Beelitz. 3 February: Huddersfield — Kirkgate Army Recruiting Office is destroyed by firebombs. 13 February: Vietnam — Intensive bombing campaign by US Air Force. 17 February: London — Bonhill Street Social Security Office is firebombed and the Liverpool Army HQ in Edge Lane is severely damaged in a bomb attack. 22 February: Aldershot — Official IRA bomb Parachute Regiment HQ — 7 killed. 17 February: Italy — Giulio Andreotti forms his first government made up exclusively of Christian Democrats. 23 February: Italy — The Piazza Fontana massacre trial opens in the Court of Assizes in Rome. Judge Orlando Falco presides. The prosecution counsel is Vittorio Occorsio. The accused are Pietro Valpreda, Emilio Bagnoli, Roberto Gargamelli, Enrico Di Cola, Ivo Della Savia, Mario Merlino, Ele Lovati Valpreda, Maddalena Valpreda, Rachele Torri, Olimpia Torri Lovati and Stefano Delle Chiaie. After a few hearings the court declares that it is not competent to hear to hear the case. March: Scotland — Four members of the Workers' Party of Scotland sentenced to a total of 81 years as a result of an expropriation carried out against the Bank of Scotland in June, 1971. The men, who defended their actions politically in court, were dealt the highest sentences ever by a Scottish court for robbery: William McPherson, 26 years; Matt Lygate, 25 years; Ian Doran, 25 years. 2 March: Germany — 23-year old Thomas Weissbecker (ABC-June 2nd Movement) is shot dead in the middle of a street in Augsburg when asked to produce his ID card. Although armed, Weissbecker did not draw his gun. The police had the apartment where he was living under surveillance, but they had no idea who they had killed until after the incident. Carmen Roll, with Thomas at the time when the incident occurred, is arrested. 3 March: Germany — Police raid a flat in Hamburg and open fire on Manfred Grashof and Wolfgang Grundmann. In the gun-battle which follows, Grashof is seriously wounded and a police inspector receives wounds from which he later dies. In spite of the serious nature of injury, the judge in charge of the case, Buddenberg, orders Grashof’s removal from the prison hospital to a high security cell where he is obliged to administer his own medical treatment. 4 March: Italy — Treviso magistrates Stiz and Calogero have Pino Rauti, the founder of Ordine Nuovo and journalist with the Rome daily Il Tempo, arrested on charges of involvement in the subversive activities of Freda and Ventura. 6 March: Italy — The Piazza Fontana trial is relocated to Milan. 10 March: London — South African Airways office firebombed. 15 March: London — Prison officer shot outside Wandsworth Prison. Italy — Death of publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. His bomb-mangled body is discovered at the foot of an electricity pylon in Segrate, Milan. 20 March: Slough — Two shots fired through the front of the Army Recruiting Office. 22 March: Italy — Fascists and Interior Ministry agents Freda and Ventura are indicted by Venetian magistrates Stiz and Calogero for the Piazza Fontana massacre in Milan. 24 March: Belgium — Bomb threat received by British Embassy in Brussels. 25 March: Northern Ireland — Britain imposes direct rule for Ulster. 27 March: El Salvador — 100 feared dead in failed revolt against government. 30 March: Scotland — Bomb containing 13 sticks of gelignite planted on railway line used by the Army to transport men and equipment to the Stranraer ferry for N. Ireland. April: Germany — Horst Mahler’s not guilty verdict is overturned after an appeal by the prosecution and a retrial on all charges is ordered. 6 April: Scotland — 2nd bomb (13 sticks) planted on Stranraer rail-line. 14 April: Vietnam — Nixon orders massive bombing raids on North Vietnam with B-52 Strato-Fortresses 19 April: West Berlin — Four hundred police raid the ‘Georg Von Rauch Haus’, a commune in the Kreuzberg which had been squatted since December 1971.

Evidence linking the squat to the 2nd June Movement (Bewegung Zwei Juni, or BzJ) is found, but none of the wanted anarchists are in the house at the time. Twenty-seven people are taken in for questioning. 24 April: Lincolnshire — Bomb planted at Sleaford police headquarters. Italy — Judge D’Ambrosio frees Pino Rauti for lack of evidence. 26 April: Essex — Bomb blast and fire at Tory HQ, Billericay. 11 May: Germany: — Bomb destroys officers club in US Army HQ in Frankfurt. A US army colonel is killed and 13 other officers wounded. A RAF communique issued shortly after states the attack was a response to the escalation in US aggression in Vietnam. 12 May: Germany — RAF bomb both the Augsburg police HQ, where Tommy Weissbecker was shot dead, and the headquarters of the Bavarian police in Munich, causing thousands of pounds worth of damage. 15 May: Germany — Bomb explodes under the car of Judge Wolfgang Buddenberg (the investigating judge responsible for all RAF cases) badly injuring his wife who is driving alone at the time. RAF claim responsibility for the action. 17 May: Italy — Inspector Calabresi is shot dead in Milan. 19 May: Germany — Two bombs explode inside the Springer Press building in Hamburg injuring 17 people. Three telephone warnings hd been made, two to the Springer building itself and one to the police. All are ignored. Five other bombs fail to explode. Altogether the bombs contain 80 kilos of TNT. 20 May: Spain — Police open fire on students in Madrid, seriously wounding one. Students respond with Molotov Cocktails. 24 May: West Germany — RAF blow up US Army HQ in Heidleberg. A captain and two sergeants are killed, five others are wounded. 26 May: France/Germany — First of May Group bomb US Consulate and American Legion building in Paris, and the Spanish Consulate in Stuttgart. 30 May: London — Trial of `Stoke Newington Eight' accused of conspiracy to cause Angry Brigade bombings, begins in No 1 Court at the Old Bailey in London. This is to become the longest trial in the history of the British criminal legal system. 1 June: Frankfurt — Andreas Baader, Holger Meins and Jan-Carl Raspe are wounded and arrested following a shoot-out with 250 police armed with machine pistols, tear gas, and a tank. 4 June: USA — Black militant Angela Davis acquitted on charges of kidnapping, murder and conspiracy. 7 June: Hamburg — Gudrun Ensslin is arrested in a boutique after a shop assistant spots her gun. 9 June: West Berlin — RAF members Bernhard Braun and Brigitte Monhaupt are arrested. 12 June: Munich — Bomb explodes in Spanish Consulate. 15 June; Hannover — Ulrike Meinhof and Gerhard Moller are arrested in their safe house following a tip-off from a tip-off from a ‘left-wing’ trade unionist living in the same apartment block. 17 June: USA — Five of Nixon’s men are arrested burgling the Watergate offices of the National Committee of the Democratic Party.. 18 July: Sweden — Bomb wrecks Spanish Tourist Office in Stockholm on the 34th anniversary of Franco’s victory. UK: — Home Secretary Reginald Maudling resigns in corruption scandal. 11 August: Vietnam — Last US ground troops withdraw from Vietnam. But B52 Strato-Fortresses continue to bomb the country. 14 August: France — Printing equipment and material worth more than 1 million pesetas taken from a Toulouse printshop by the Iberian Liberation Movement (MIL). 9 September: France — Police raid an isolated farmhouse in Bessieres, near Toulouse, and discover an anarchist (MIL) arms dump, printshop and large amounts of anarchist literature. 13 September: Spain — MIL activists involved in a failed robbery at the Savings Bank of Igualada in Salou, Tarragona, 50 kilometres from Barcelona. 15 September: Spain — MIL activists rob the Savings Bank of Bellver de Cardana in Lerida, netting the group over 1 million pesetas. 17-18 September: France — French police roadblock halts a Renault 16 near Pau and police identify two of the occupants as responsible for the renting of the Bessieres farmhouse. A police raid in Toulouse later that morning leads to the arrest of two MIL militants, Oriol Sole and Jean Claude Torres (who is released due to a lack of evidence). A third man manages to escape. 13 October: Italy — The Court of Cassation transfers the Piazza Fontana case to the Catanzaro jurisdiction. 21 October: Spain — MIL activists rob the Layetana Savings Bank in Mataro of over 1 million pesetas. 3 November: Chile — Salvador Allende forms new government to end wave of strikes.

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1972-1974 7 November: USA: — Richard Nixon re-elected US president. Nixon continues with his strategy of trying to bomb the North Vietnamese back to the conference table. 18 November: Spain — MIL activists armed with Sten sub-machineguns rob the Barcelona Savings Bank of 200,000 pesetas. 20 November: Spain — MIL activists rob the Central Bank of Barcelona of 1 million pesetas. They leave a communique signed by the ‘Autonomous Combat Groups of the Iberian Liberation Movement (MIL/GAC) 24 November: London — During his summing up in the Angry Brigade trial Mr Justice James directs the jury to ignore the defence's protestations that it was a political trial. He said: ‘It is not (a political trial) and I direct you to have none of it. Political trials are trials of people for their political views. We do not have them in this country.’ 6 December: London — The Angry Brigade trial ends. In spite of the jury’s pleas for clemency and a majority verdict, Jim Greenfield, Anna Mendelson, Hilary Creek and John Barker are sentenced to 10 years for `conspiracy to cause explosions'. The other four charged are acquitted, and the sentence of Jake Prescott is reduced to 10 years. 7 December: London — Following the sentencing of the four convicted in the Angry Brigade case the previous day, Scotland Yard names two more people they want in connection with the bombings: Gerry Osner and Sarah Poulikakou, both living abroad at the time. 300 people march in protest to Holloway Prison. In all, 12 people had been arrested and charged, 2 had the charges against them withdrawn, 5 were acquitted, five were convicted and imprisoned for conspiracy. Following the trial Commander Bond is promoted to Deputy Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard and Det. Chief Superintendent Habershon is made Commander and in 1973 is seconded to the Home Office’s Research and Planning Office. In June 1974 he is appointed head of the police investigation into the killing of Kevin Gateley, the Warwick University student, in Red Lion Square on June 5th 1974. His report absolves the police of all responsibility in Gately’s death. In April 1975 Commander Habershon replaces Robert Huntley as head of the Bomb Squad. 13 December: France — The printshop and material removed by the police from the Bessieres farmhouse is stolen from the police warehouse by MIL activists. 15 December: Italy — Parliament passes Law No 733, known also as the ‘Valpreda Law’. 18 December: Vietnam — Massive bombing of Hanoi by B-52s 29 December: Spain — MIL activists rob the Layetana Savings Bank of 800,000 pesetas. They leave a communique commemorating the memory of Spanish anarchist guerrilla Francisco Sabaté Llopart. 30 December: Italy — Valpreda and the other anarchists from Rome’s Circolo 22 Marzo still in custody, including Gargamelli and Merlino (fascist provocateur) are released. 1973 15 January: Italy — Fascist bomb-plotter Marco Pozzan, a Freda loyalist, is smuggled out of the country by the Italian Secret Service (SID). Nixon orders a halt to to the bombing of Vietnam. 9 April: Italy — Piazza Fontana bomb-plotter Guido Giannettini (Agent Zeta) is smuggled out of the country by the Italian Secret Service (SID). 16 April: Laos — Nixon orders resumption of bombing campaign. 1 May: UK — 1.6 million join May Day strike in protest against government policies. 17 May: Italy — Individualist anarchist Gianfranco Bertoli throws a bomb at Milan police headquarters: 4 bystanders are killed and nearly 40 are injured. 1 June: Greece — Greek government abolishes the monarchy and proclaims a republic. 8 June: Spain — Franco appoints Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco as president, after ruling Spain alone for 34 years. 29 June: Chile — Revolt against President Allende crushed. 25 July: USA — New York court rules that US must halt illegal bombing of Cambodia. 13 August: Ireland — Convicted bank robber Kenneth Littlejohn states he was employed by MI6 to plant bombs in Dublin. 11 September: Chile — President Salvador Allende is killed during a US-backed military coup led by the army and the paramilitary police. The coup marks the climax of three years of plotting by the right, centre right and the CIA against the Allende government. 14 August: Cambodia — US bombing campaign officially ends. 14 September: Bristol — Anarchists Dafydd Ladd and Michael Tristam are arrested and charged with three attacks on Portuguese vice-consulates in Bristol and Cardiff, and the British Officers’ Club in Aldershot.

22 September: Barcelona — Salvador Puig Antich arrested by Franco’s secret police, the Brigada Politico Social (BPS). 28 September: Italy — Enrico Berlinguer, head of the Italian Communist Party, publishes his first article in the communist weekly Rinascita broaching the ‘historic compromise”, the ‘opening to the left’ which will ultimately led to the murder of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades (BR) under manipulation from NATO (FTASE) and Italian Interior Ministry (Federico Umberto D’Amato’s Bureau of Confidential Affairs), agents. 11 October: Chile — At least 2,000 people feared dead in the repression which followed the success of the military coup. 1 November: UK — Last issue of the underground paper Oz! 25 November: Greece — Greek officers seize power and overthrow the government of George Papadopolous. 17 December: UK — Edward Heath’s government imposes a three-day week. 20 December: Spain — Franco’s prime minister Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco is assassinated when a massive culvert bomb hurls his car over the roof of the 65foot tall church where he had just been celebrating Mass. 1974 February: Bristol — The anarchists Dafydd Ladd and Michael Tristam are sentenced to seven years and six years respectively. 5 March: USA — Patty Hearst is abducted from her San Francisco apartment by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) 2 March: Barcelona — Salvador Puig Antich garroted in Barcelona jail. Spanish state offices are targeted throughout Europe. 15 April: USA — Patty Hearst joins forces with her captors and is involved in robbing a San Francisco bank. 20 April: USA — Concerned by apparent crisis of capitalism and the threats to the governability and stability of the advanced industrial societies, the Trilateral Commision, under the directorship of Zbigniew Brzezinski, sets up a ‘Task Force on the Governability of Democracies’ with three rapporteurs: Michael Crozier (Western Europe), Joji Watanuki (Japan), and Samuel P Huntington (USA). The objective of the Task Force is to suggest ways and means to roll-back the radical pressures on Western governments and reduce the democratic expectations of politicised and educated youth. 25 April: Portugal — Army officers topple the dictatorship of Dr Caetano, Salazar’s successor. 3 May: Paris — Spanish banker Balthasar Suárez is kidnapped by the anarchist Grupos de Acción Revolucionario Internacional (GARI) in an action aimed at securing the release of 100 Spanish political prsioners (who should already have been free under Francoist law). The kidnappers also demand repayment of part of funds of the anarcho-syndicalist labour union the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) seized by the Franco regime. Suárez is released unharmed following the payment of an undisclosed sum as ransom after ten days and the police immediately arrest nine Spanish, French, English and Scottish anarchists in Paris and in the south of France. 28 May: Italy — In the Piazza della Loggia in Brescia a bomb explodes during a demonstration organised by the United Antifascist Committee and the trade unions: 8 people are killed and almost 100 injured. 30 May: Italy — Arch conspirator and architect of the ‘Strategy of Tension’ Federico Umberto D’Amato is replaced as head of the Bureau of Confidential Affairs at the Interior Ministry. 4 June: West Germany — June 2nd Movement member Ulrich Schmuecker is assassinated, allegedly for informing on the group. 15 June: UK — 21-year old Warwick University maths sudent Kevin Gately is killed during an anti-National Front demonstration in Red Lion Square. Gately is the first person to be killed in a British demonstration in 55 years. 20 June: Italy — Giulio Andreotti, Minister of Defence, reveals in an interview with Il Mondo that fascist provocateur Giannettini is an agent of the SID, and Corriere della Sera reporter Giorgio Zicari is an informant. 30 July: Greece — Seven years of military rule by the Colonels ends with the announcement that ex-Premier Constantine Karamanlis is returning from exile to form a new government. 4 August: Bologna — A bomb placed by neo-fascists and Italian secret service agents explodes on board the Italicus train on the Rome-Munich line as it passes through the San Benedetto Val di Sambro (Bologna) tunnel, killing 12 people and wounding 48. 8 August: Argentina — Italian secret service agent and ‘Strategy of Tension’ plotter Guido Giannettini surrenders himself to the Italian Embassy in Buenos Aires. 8 August: USA — Richard Nixon resigns as President of the USA. Gerald Ford is sworn in as the new US president.

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1974-1975 23 August: UK — SAS founder Colonel David Stirling launches right wing anti-strike militia and discusses plans for a military coup. 1 September: Nicaragua — General Somoza appointed President. 11 October: UK — Labour government re-elected under Harold Wilson. 22 October: UK — Bomb explodes close to Edward Heath in Central London. 28 October: UK — Bomb explodes under car of Sports Minister Denis Howell. 9 November: West Germany — Imprisoned RAF hunger-striker Holger Meins dies after a two-month hunger protest against harsh prison conditions. Demonstrations follow throughout West Germany. 10 November: West Germany — 2nd June Group members assasinate the president of West Berlin’s highest court Guenter Von Drenkman. 22 November: Italy — Aldo Moro forms a DC-PRI coalition government. Earlier in the year, as Foreign Secretary, Moro was reportedly dressed down severely by US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (and later by an unnamed intelligence officer). During the inquiry into his murder in 1978, Moro’s widow tells investigators that he was told ‘You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration... or you will pay dearly for it.’ Moro was so shaken by these threats, according to an aide, that he became ill the next day and cut short his US visit, saying he was through with politics. US Senator Henry Jackson issued a similar warning to Moro in an interview published two years later in the Italian press. 29 November: West Germany — Ulrike Meinhof is sentenced to 8 years imprisonment. 1975 4 January: UK — Edward Heath resigns as Tory leader after surprise victory of Margaret Thatcher in ballot of Conservative Party MPs. 27 January: Italy — The Piazza Fontana case opens before the Court of Assizes in Catanzaro. The accused are Franco Freda, Giovanni Ventura, Marco Pozzan, Antonio Massari, Angelo Ventura, Luigi Ventura, Franco Comacchio, Giancarlo Marchesin, Ida Zanon, Ruggero Pan, Claudio Orsi, Claudio Mutti, Pietro Loredan, Gianadelio Maletti, Antonio Labruna, Guido Giannettini, Gaetano Tanzilli, Stefano Serpieri, Stefano Delle Chiaie, Udo Lemke, Pietro Valpreda, Mario Merlino, Emilio Bagnoli, Roberto Gargamelli, Ivo Della Savia, Enrico Di Cola, Maddalena Valpreda, Ele Lovati Valpreda, Rachele Torri and Olimpia Torri Lovati. 27 February: West Berlin — Three days before the elections, Peter Lorenz, CDU candidate for Mayor of West Berlin, is kidnapped by the 2nd June Movement. The 2nd June group demands the release of 6 comrades: Rolf Pohl, Rolf Heissler, Gabriel Kroecher-Tiedman, Horst Mahler, Ina Siepman and Verena Becher. 1 March: Italy — Bertoli is sentenced to life imprisonment for the 17 March 1973 bomb attack outside police headquarters in Milan. This sentence is upheld on appeal on 9 March 1976. 3 March: West Berlin — Four of the West German urban guerrillas are released and flown to Frankfurt with Heinrich Albertz, former Mayor of West Berlin, as hostage. The fifth, Gabriel Kroecher-Tiedman, joins them after deciding to accept the release. Horst Mahler refuses to be exchanged. 4 March: West Germany — Peter Lorenz is released unharmed by the 2nd June Movement, He receives 43 per cent of the vote in the mayoral election, which is held during his captivity. 29 March: Vietnam — Key Vietnamese cities fall to the Viet Cong. 17 April: Cambodia — Cambodia falls under the control of the Khmer Rouge. 25 April: Sweden — Six heavily armed members of the Holger Meins Commando (former members of the Socialist Patients’ Collective - SPK) take over the West German embassy in Stockholm. They demand the release of 26 political prisoners, including RAF members held in Stammheim prison. The German government refuses to negotiate. The guerrillas execute the West German military and economic attaches. The occupation is ended when the guerrillas’ arsenal explodes accidentally killing one guerrilla and one hostage. 30 April: West Germany — Four suspects in the Peter Lorenz kidnapping are arrested: Ronald Fritzsch, Gerald Kloepper, Henrik Reindeers and Paul Reverman.

31 April: Vietnam — The war in Vietnam ends with the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese. 31 May: Japan — The final draft of the Trilateral Commision’s ‘Task Force on the Governability of Democracies’ is presented in Kyoto. Its conclusions include the following statement: ‘(1) The pursuit of the democratic virtues of equality and individualism has led to the deligitimation of authority generally and the loss of trust in leadership. (2) The democratic expansion of political participation and involvement has created an ‘overload’ on govenment and the imbalanced expansion of governmental activities, exacerbating inflationary tendencies in the economy... a pervasive spirit of democracy may pose an intrinsic threat and undermine all forms of association, weakening the social bonds which hold together family, enterprise, and community. Every social organisation requires, in some measure, inequalities in authority and distinctions in function. To the extent that the spread of the democratic temper corrodes all of these, exercising a levelling and an homogenizing influence, it destroys the bases of trust and cooperation among citizens and creates obstacles to collaboration for any common purpose.’ One key problem as the Task Force rapporteurs saw it was an ‘over-educated’ youth: ‘The 1960s saw a tremendous expansion in higher education throughout the Trilateral societies... The result of this expansion, however, can be the overproduction of people with university education in relation to the jobs available for them, the expenditure of substantial sums of scarce public monies and the imposition on the lower classes of taxes to pay for the free public education of the children of the middle and upper classes... What seems needed, however, is to relate educational planning to economic and political goals. Should a college education be provided generally because of its contribution to the overall cultural level of the populace and its possible relation to the constructive discharge of the responsibilities of citizenship? If this question is answered in the affirmative, a programme is then necessary to lower the job expectations of those who receive a college education’. Their solution is ‘educational retrenchment’, a policy in which educational institutions are linked to economic output and economic performance rather than the need to give every individual an opportunity to participate in the political process.. 6 June: West Berlin — Till Meyer is wounded and arrested in shootout with West Berlin police. 9 September: West Germany — Ralf Reindeers, Inge Viett and Julianne Plambeck are arrested. All three are suspects in the Lorenz kidnapping while Reindeers is also wanted in connection with the Von Drenkman assassination. 28 September: Spain — Demonstrations throughout Europe following the execution of 5 Basque members of ETA. The Spanish Embassy in the Hague is set on fire and bombs explode outside the Spanish Embassy in Ankara. 9 October: Dublin — Irish anarchists Noel and Marie Murray (founders of the Irish ABC) are arrested and charged with shooting dead an Irish policeman. 27 October: Italy — Milan magistrate D’Ambrosio closes the file on the Pinelli death. According to the finding, the anarchist died as the result of ‘active misfortune’. Meaning that misfortune resulted in his falling out of the window. All of those indicted for his death are absolved. 20 November: Madrid — Death of General Franco (and birth of widespread rejoicing). As he lies dying his wife whispers to him that thousands of Spanish fascists had come to say goodbye. He then immediately sat up and asked: ‘Why? Where are they going?’ USA: Washington — Senator Church’s report on the CIA and assasination attempts abroad confirms CIA involvement in plots to kill Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo, Ngo Dinh Diem and Chile’s General Schneider. 24 November: Munich — Trikont Verlag, the West German publishers of Michael Baumann’s autobiography Wie Alles Anfing (‘How It All Began’) is raided by 40 armed police who confiscate all the publishing house’s stock as well as its fixtures and fittings. 6 December: UK — IRA Active Service Unit take a married couple hostage in Balcombe Street, London. The siege ends after six days. 22 December: Austria — Pro-Palestinian activists seize 70 hostages, including 11 oil ministers at the Vienna headquarters of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

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Index 1 May, 1967 39 10 March, 1968 (Sunday Telegraph) 33 11 August 1971 (internment) 168 11 May, 1968 46 12 Angry Men 236 12 August, 1970 (Derry) 107 12 December, 1969 104 12 January 1971 139 144 Piccadilly (Squat) 109, 292 1649 — Diggers and Levellers 36 17 March, 1968 42, 50 17 May, 1972 (Calabresi's murder) 105 1959 Obscene Publications Act 11 2 June Group 16, 133, 165, 288-289, 297-298 20 March, 1968 43 22 June 1971 163 22 March Movement 43, 46, 59-60, 99, 287, 290, 292 22 March, 1968 43, 292 22 May 1971 162 25 April bomb trial 96 25 April bombing 167 25 Powis Square 117 27 October, 1968 62, 70 29 March, 1968 44 2nd June Group 133 2nd Scots Guards 163 39th Infantry Brigade 73 6 May, 1968 45 8 (Guards) Commando 163 8 May, 1968 46 9 August, 1969 bombs 98 A Las Barricadas 91 ‘A’, Mr 150, 160, 206, 208, 294 Abarca, Francisco 40 Abdul Hammid II 189 Abu Ghraib 250 Accidental Death of an Anarchist 39 Acharya, MPT 21 acratas 57, 288-289 ‘active misfortune’ 105 Agence France Press 265 Aims of Industry 19, 137 Aitkin, Sir Max 161 Al Quaida 155, 165 Albany Prison 153 Albany Street Army barracks 190, 232 Albany Street Police Station 175-176 Alberola Navarra, José 39, 270, 288-289 Alberola Surinach, Octavio 18, 25, 34-35, 37-39, 66, 83, 114, 131, 216, 237, 252, 262-263, 265, 267, 270, 287-289, 290 Albertz, Heinrich 299 Albion pub 95 Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) 77 Algerian war 47 Alghero (Gladio base) 101 Ali, Tariq 56, 66, 69 Alice in Wonderland 27 Allegra, Antonio 96, 104 Allen, Chris 190-191, 208, 294, 296 Allen, Jane 294 Allende, President Salvador 190, 260, 297-298 ‘alternative’ society 9 Amati, Judge Antonio 96, 104, 293 American Embassy 215 Amhurst Road (359) 168, 170-171, 187, 229 Amnesty International 22 AN (Avanguardia Nazionale) 61, 97, 101, 286, 290 Anarchist Black Cross 19, 21, 25, 29, 36, 39-40, 57, 59, 61, 67, 77, 83-84, 95--97, 103, 113, 115-116, 121, 125, 130, 145, 167-169, 193, 222, 227-228, 237, 253254, 260, 268, 270-272, 275-276, 280 Anarchist Black Cross, Italian (see Croce Nera Anarchica) 97- 98, 105, 120 Anarchist Federation of Britain (AFB)19, 57, 59, 112 Anarchy collective, 209 Anderson, Lindsay 77 Andreotti, Giulio 297-298 Andrés Edo, Luis 13, 87, 113-114, 265, 269-270, 286-288 Andrés Rodriguez Piney, Jesús 287 Angleton, James Jesus 18, 276 Angry Brigade 132-133, 140-142, 146, 154-156, 162, 165, 168-171, 178-189, 191, 205, 214, 231, 237, 244, 246-247, 251, 258 Angry Brigade, Moonlighter’s Cell 168 Angry Brigade, The (novel) 142 Annals of Scotland Yard 177 Aran Valley 84 Arbour House (squat) 109

ARC (Anarchist Red Cross) 23 Arias Navarro, Carlos 261-262, 284 Arturo Ui 163 Asdonk, Brigitte 293 Asphaleia (Greek National Security Service) 287 Ashenden, DC Terence 171, 174-175, 181, 183, 226, 229, 233 Associated Television (ATV) 19 Association of Cinematographic Television and Technical Staff (ACTT) 19 Ataturk, Kemal 60 Aussaresses, General Paul 77 Avanguardia Proletaria 288 Ayers, Bill 291 B Specials 292 ‘B’, Mr 150, 160, 206, 208, 294 Baader, Andreas 118, 124, 281, 289, 292, 295, 297 Baggins, Charlotte 151 Bagnoli, Emilio 297, 299 Bagram Airbase 250 Bailey, Ron 295 Bakunin, Michael 74, 192 Baldelli, Giovanni 28 Baldelli, Pio 292 Ballad of Reading Jail, The 27 Balmain, Detective Sergeant 130 Banca Commerciale 292 Banca Nazionale del Lavoro 104 Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura 104, 292 Banca Nazionale delle Communicazione 96, 291 Banca Nazionale del Lavoro 292 Banca Privata Finanziaria 121 Banco de Bilbao 89, 92-93, 149, 263, 266-267, 291 Banco Español en Londres 92 Bank of America 38 Barker, John 1, 115, 116, 117, 138, 153, 158, 160, 166-167, 169, 171, 173-174, 176, 181, 183, 185, 194-196, 199, 206, 210, 213, 216, 218, 220-222, 225, 229231, 233, 238-239, 241, 243-244, 246, 249, 251, 294, 296, 298 Barlow, Alan 69, 83, 89-90, 93-94, 122, 291, 293 Barnet Magistrates’ Court 157 Barnet Police Station 150, 152 Barr, Brian 12 Barrow, Clyde 33 Barth, John 191 Bassetts 14 Batoux, Guy 226 Battle of Algiers, The 76-77, 106, 262 Batty, William 163-164, 295 Baumann, Michael ‘Bommi’ 118, 292-293 Beale, Detective Sergeant Terry 11 Bean, ‘Sawney’ 255 Beatrix, Princess 286 Beatty. Warren 33 Beaumont MBE, Herbert Christopher 209 Beaverbrook Press 85, 144, 161 Beaverbrook, Lady 161 Becher, Verena 299 Beeching, Lord 19 Beelitz, Irwin 297 Behold a Pale Horse 259 Belgian Embassy 39 Bellver de Cerdanya 260 Belmont Road 14 Bennett, Ronan 280 Bentley, Derek 54, 211 Bentley, Detective Constable 295 Berberich, Monika 293 Beretta M1938-42 142 Berkman, Alexander 22 Berlin, Austin 69 Berlinguer, Enrico 298 Bernard, Alain 267, 268 Bertoli, Gianfranco 298-299 Bertolo, Amedeo 61, 97-98, 291 Berufsverbote 253 Better Britain Society 277 Biba (boutique) 161, 292, 295 Biddle Duke, Angler 25 Bierman, Wolf 281 Biggs, Ronnie 184 Billancourt 50 Birnberg, Benedict (solicitor) 2, 5, 38, 91-92, 124, 126-127, 130, 179, 180, 195, 237, 245 Black Dwarf 290, 292 Black Flag 64, 77, 112-113, 118, 132, 145, 148, 152, 168-169, 189, 227, 259-260, 268, 272, 275-276, 279 Black Panther Party 288

300

Index Black September Group 123 Blair, Tony 112, 284 Blake, George 211, 287 Blanco, General Eduardo 265, 284 Blantyre Advertiser, The 248, 249 Blas Piñar 290, 293 Bloch, Robert 191 Bloody Sunday (30 January 1972) 250 Boll, Heinrich 296, 298 Bomb Squad 142, 145, 150, 153, 162-164, 166, 171, 196-197, 217 Bond, Cdr. Ernest Radcliffe 162, 163, 164, 166, 168-169, 171, 175, 177-179, 181, 193-195, 197, 213, 224-225, 230, 237, 242-244, 277, 294 Bonnans, Marcel 158 Bonnie and Clyde 100 Borbón y Borbón, Don Juan Carlos 283-284 Borghese, Prince Junio Valerio 293 Borrell, Clive 62-63, 65, 71, 169-170 Bott, Chris 138, 153, 160, 166, 176, 181-183, 185, 187, 194, 196, 199, 206, 208, 210, 216, 220, 223, 230, 238-240, 245, 296 Bow Street Magistrates’ Court 152 Boycott, Rosie 244 Boyd, Leslie 238 BPS (Brigada Politico Social) 34, 261, 265, 268, 269, 298 Brabin, Mr Justice 30 Branch, Rose 122 Brando, Marlon 106 Braschi, Paolo 96, 291, 295 Braun, Bernhard 292, 297 Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) 293 Bright, Martin 243 Briginshaw, Richard 158 British Legion, The 254 British National Party 15 British Political Fringe, The 24 British Rail (Paris) 161-162 Broad, Chris 151-152, 181, 208 Broe, William 293 Brolly Brigade, The 109, 137 Brossard, Georges 42 Bruckner, Peter 296 Brown, George 19, 287 Brown, Olivia (sister) 6, 172, 251 Browning 7.65 223 Bruce, David (US Ambassador) 19 Bruley, Sue 152 Bryant, Chris 189, 232, 296 Brzezinski, Zbigniew 278, 298 Buddenberg, Wolfgang 297 Bulgarian Anarchist Federation 28 Bulletin of the Anarchist Black Cross 22, 96, 112, 118 Bundesgrenzschutz (BGS) 281 Bunyan, Tony 197 Bureau of Confidential Affairs (Ufficio Affari Riservati) 97, 101, 286, 290, 293, 298 Burgos Six (trial) 133 Burn! (Queimada!) 106 Burne-Jones, Edward 118 Burro Molina, Luis 269-270 Burroughs, William 11 Bush, George W 284 Busquets Vergés, Juan 13, 196 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 1, 99, 131-132, 141-142, 154, 279 Byer, Lisa 148, 166, 222, 224-225, 228 Cabal Riera, José 122, 292 Cabinet Office 24, 52, 62, 64, 137, 142, 146, 221, 231, 239 Caetano, Dr 298 Café Rolando 269 Caine, Michael 58 Caizzi, Giovanni 292 Calabresi, Inspector Luigi 96, 103, 104, 105, 253 Callaghan, James 19, 51, 62--63, 72, 93, 121, 292-293, 296-297 Calley, Lieutenant William 109 Callinan, Mike 200 Cambodia (bombing/invasion of) 123 Camilleri, Michel 275 Cammel, Donald 158 Campaign Against Assessment (Cambridge University) 117 Campbell, Dave 275 Campbell, Ian 275 Cañete Rodríguez, Antonio 287 Canizares Varella, José 122, 292 Cannock Street, Moss Side (Manchester) 153, 160 Canuda, Ramon Benicho 270 Caracuta, Giuseppe 105, 296 Carballo Blanco, Francisco 21

Cardwell, Detective Constable (Special Branch) 77 Carlisle MP, Mark 185, 242 Carlton Club 276 Carmichael, Stokely 286, 288 Carr MP, Rt. Hon Robert 136, 139-141, 144, 157-158, 208, 222, 228, 275, 293294 Carrara 57- 59 Carrara congress 28, 96 Carrero Blanco, Admiral Luis 253, 261, 283, 288, 298 Carrett, Captain David 293 Carver, General Sir Michael 73 Carver, Phil 69, 83, 89-90, 94, 122, 148-149, 291, 294 Cashinella, Brian 62-65, 71 Cassidy, Dennis 2, 5-6, 8, 31 Castle, Barbara 135-136 Castro, Fidel 56, 299 Central Bureau for the Eradication of Banditry 267 Central Criminal Court (Old Bailey) 38, 54, 195, 210-211, 223 Central Obrero Boliviano (COB) 169 Centro Iberico 252, 260-261, 270, 275 Cerrada Santos, Laureano 270, 271 CFDT (French trade union) 48-49 CGT (French trade union) 48-50 Challenor, Detective Sergeant Harold ’Tanky' 30, 163, 180, 194 Chamberlain, Neville 91 Chase Manhattan Bank 38 Chastel, Chantal and Arnaud 268, 270 Chiappe, M. 75 Chicago Martyrs, The 56, 108 Chicago Seven 260 Chichester-Clark, Major James 291 Christie, Albert 251, 268 Christie, John Reginald 139, 175, 211 Christie, Olive 251 Christie-Carballo Committee 3, 20 Church Senate Report 299 Churchill, Randolph 124 CIA 60, 121 Cienfuegos Press 259, 279, 281 Cienfuegos, Camilo 259 Cinema Action 294 Citroën 50 Claimants’ Union 115, 116, 152, 159, 222 Clark, Mark 292 Clark, Valerie (Vaz) 69, 124, 126 Clerkenwell Magistrates’ Court 151, 182, 186-187, 246 CNA (Croce Nera Anarchica) 97- 98, 105, 120 CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) 41, 291 CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) 25, 59, 91, 266, 298 Coffee Houses of Old London, The 27 Cohen, Lord 221 Cohen, Mike 69 Cohen, Phil 109 Cohn-Bendit, Dany 42-44, 47, 58, 60, 77, 99, 289-291 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 120 Collett’s bookshop 130 Comacchio, Franco 299 Combination Acts of 1799 279 Comfort, Alex 217 Commander ‘X’ (see Ernest Bond) Common Cause 19 Common Sergeant 212 Communiqué 1, (Angry Brigade) 134 Communiqué 2.(Angry Brigade) 134 Communiqué 4 (Angry Brigade) 140 Communiqué 5 (Angry Brigade) 144 Communiqué 6 (Angry Brigade) 155 Communiqué 7 (Angry Brigade) 157 Communiqué 8 (Angry Brigade) 161 Communiqué 9 (Angry Brigade) 161 Communiqué 11 (Angry Brigade) 166 Communiqué 13 (Angry Brigade) 190 Communiqué 14 (Geronimo Cell) 190 Communist Party 166 Compendium Bookshop 244 Conan Doyle, Arthur 189 Conrad, Joseph 122 Conroy, Pauline 191, 197, 208, 296 Conspiracy chart 215 Conversion Unit Number 8 (William Press) 79 Cook, Peter 31 Cooke, Ebeneezer 191 Cool Hand Luke 32 Coptic Press 27 Coptic Street bookshop 19, 21

301

Index Duteuil, Jean-Pierre 42-44, 60, 99-100, 102, 290 Dutschke, Rudi 16, 43, 288-289, 291 East London Squatters’ Movement 115 Eastwood, Clint 242 Economic League, The 19, 137 Edinburgh Castle barracks 232 Edy letter 222, 224, 227, 229 EI Vino’s 29 Eighth Army 163 Ellesmere, Andy 197 Elliott, Tony 53, 245 Ellis, Ruth 54, 211 Elwell, Charles (MI5 'F' Branch) 245 Engel, George 227 Ensslin, Gudrun 118, 289, 292, 297 ESA (Greek National Military Security) 287 Escribano, Juan Duran 270 Esgleas, Germinal 59-60 Essex University 117 ETA (Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna) 123, 138, 253, 261, 283, 299 Evans, Harold 51 Evans, Linda 292 Evans, Timothy 211 Evening News 62-63, 147-148, 294 Evening Standard 85, 144, 147, 295 Everton Street Army Tank HQ 190 Explosive Substances Act (1883) 148, 153 F Branch (MI5) 23, 245, 280 F3 (MI5 anti-terrorist section) 245 F4 Division (Home Office) 280 Faber & Faber 73 Faccioli, Paolo 96, 291, 295 Facerías, José Lluis 58, 253 FAI (Federazione Anarchica Italiana ) 59 FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica) 25, 39, 291 Failla, Alfonso 58 Fairfield Gardens (2a) 26, 83-89 Falco, Judge Orlando 297 Falkender, Lady 51 Fanon, Frantz 106 Farmer, Hugh 6, 7, 8, 31 Faulkener, Brian 295 Federalist Revolutionary Syndicalist Tendency’ (TSFR) 287 Feeney, Hugh 244 Feltrinelli, Giangiacomo 97, 297 Fendwich, Hung 293 Ferguson Smith, Commander 23 Ferguson, Detective Sergeant Ian 33-36, 38, 54 Ferrer Guardia, Francisco 270 Ferrer Serafini, Juan 269 Ferry, Bernard 226 Ferry, Brian 117 Fiaccola, La 258 Fianna Fail 271 Fiaschi, Goliardo 58, 253 FIJL (Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias) 59-60, 114, 122 Fine Gale 271 Finer, Leslie 104 Finnegan, ‘Big Jack’ 69 Fiore, Rosemary 117, 208 Fiorenzano, Nazzareno 105 First International (1864–76) 58 First of May Group (International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement) 1718, 25, 33-35, 37-38, 56, 89, 92, 114-115, 122-123, 126, 130, 132, 134, 14142, 154-155, 162, 190, 192, 209, 227, 249, 252, 265, 270, 286-291, 297 Fischer, Adolph 227 Flett, Ross 15, 25, 55, 69, 79, 148, 149, 167, 170, 181, 222, 259, 294 FLN (Front de libération national — Algerian) 77, 107 Floodgates of Anarchy, The 94, 130-131 FLQ (Front de libération quebecois) 138, 293 Flying Squad 142, 163 Fo, Dario 39 Fonda, Henry 236 Fonthill Road 122 Foot, Monica 72, 74, 112 Foot, Paul 30-31, 53, 147 Force Ouvrière 48 Ford, Gerald 298 Ford Motor Company 157, 294 Forgery Act 1913, section 9(z) of the 36 Fouchet, Christian (Minister of Interior) 46, 290 Foulser, George 119 Foux (deputy prime minister) 46, 290 Franck, Louis 19 Franco’s Prisoner 74, 122

Corradini, Giovanni 96, 291-292 Corriere della Sera 298 Corsair (car) 131, 170 Costantini, Flavio 30, 105, 108, 259 Costrignano Brigade 254 Coull, Dave 14 Council of Europe (Greece’s expulsion from) 104 ‘counterculture’ 11 Cowden, Bang-Bang’ Charlie 192 Creek, Hilary 115, 116, 117, 138, 153, 160, 166, 167, 168, 171, 174, 181, 183, 194-195, 206, 216, 218, 221-223, 232, 238-241, 244, 246-247, 249, 251, 294, 296, 298 Cremer, Detective S ergeant Roy 34-36, 40, 120, 128, 130, 143, 158, 176, 180, 196, 218, 228, 289, 295 Crime in Britain Today 65 Criminal Investigation and Intervention Squad 267 Crippin, Dr 211 Crouch End (Hornsey) 26 Crozier, Michael 298 CRS (Compagnie Républicaine de Securité) 44-45, 50, 270 Cuddon’s Cosmopolitan Review 118, 286 Cudlipp, Hugh 19, 51 Cunningham, Adrian 73 Cunning Man, The (pub) 296 Curragh Mutiny 18 Cushing, Peter 214 D’Amato, Federico Umberto 97, 101, 290, 293, 298 D’Ambrosio, Gerardo (Magistrate) 105, 299, 296-297, 299 Dace, Commander 142, 294 Daggett, Sheriff Little Bill 242 Daily Express 67, 85, 109, 124, 148, 173, 247 Daily Mail 57, 109, 140, 237 Daily Mirror 43, 50-51, 66, 144, 148, 151, 169, 171, 207, 242, 294 Daily Sketch 145 Daily Telegraph 3, 67, 76, 94, 137, 146, 239, 247 Dallas, Karl 225 Daniels, Detective Constable 173, 174 Davies MP, John 165-166, 295 Davies, Detective Sergeant 176-177 Davis, Angela 297 Davis-Poynter, Reg 259 Dayan, Moshe 288 ‘Days of Rage’ 108, 292 DCRG (Direction Centrale des Renseignements Généraux) 265 De Gaulle, General 45, 49-50, 290, 292 Dean Taylor, R 173 Debord, Guy 46-47, 115, 117, 126, 167, 218, 287 Defoe, Daniel 211 Del Grande, Umberto 61, 97, 291 della Savia, Angelo Piero 96, 291 della Savia, Ivo 123, 297, 299 delle Chiaie, Stefano 61, 101, 286-288, 290, 293, 299 Department of Employment and Productivity (bombing) 134 Derbyshire, Adrian 25 Derleth, August 191 Despard, Colonel 212 Destry Rides Again 176 Devlin, Bernadette 291 DGS (Dirección General de Seguridad) 225, 269 DI (Defensa Interior) 25, 192 Di Cola, Enrico 297, 299 Diego Capote 114 Dietrich, Marlene 176 Diggers and Levellers 36 DIGOS (Divisione Investigazioni Generali e Operazioni Speciali) 101 Dillon, John 164, 295 Dinh Diem, Ngo 299 Dix, Commander 129-130 Dohrn, Bernardine 291 Dolores, José 106 Donghi, Dianne 292 Doran, Ian 297 Dorril, Stephen 51 Doyle, Detective Constable Michael 177, 225 DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions) 160, 194, 200 Dracula 214 Dubcek, Alexander 290 Dublin Anarchist Group (DAG) 273 Duddy, John 14 Duke, Jim 25 Dulles, Allen 121, 274 Duncan 206 Dupont, M. 268 Durer, Albert 185 Durruti. Buenaventura 76

302

Index Gray, Christopher 116, 286 Great Scotland Yard (Police Station) 244 Greater Britain League 277 Greece, King and Queen of 163 Greek Colonels 16 Greenfield, James Greenfield, Jim 116-117, 160, 166, 171, 176, 181-183, 185, 194-196, 199, 206, 210, 216, 218, 220-221, 228, 238-240, 242, 246, 248-249, 251, 295-296, 298 Greenford Cleansing Department dispute 132 Grenelle Accords 50 Greville, John 115, 117 Greville, Paddy 244 Grimoud (Paris Chief of Police) 46, 290 Grosvenor Avenue (29) 151 Grosvenor Square (17 March '68) 42 Group Commune 71 162 Groupe Marius Jacob 162, 295 Grundmann, Wolfgang 297 GSG-9 (Grenzschutzgruppe 9) 281-282 Guantanamo Bay 250 Guardian, The 14, 29, 193, 157, 207, 217, 294 Guerrilla Urbana En España — Sabaté, La 192 Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey 290 Guevara, Ernesto ‘Ché’ 18, 193, 287-288 Guicciardi, Emilio 293 Guilbert, Pierre 267, 270 Guineapigs, The 260 Guinness Book of Records 235, 247 Gunn, Dr. J. C. 248 Gunter, Ray 118 Gurruchari, Salvador 131 Guttenberg, Johann 27 habeas corpus 187, 196 Habershon, Detective Chief Superintendent Roy 1, 139, 142-143, 146, 148149, 151-154, 157-158, 160, 164, 166, 171, 189, 191, 193, 197, 206, 208-209, 216, 221-222, 224, 228, 230-231, 237, 239, 242-244, 250, 294, 296, 298 Haigh, John 211 Hailsham, Lord 212, 243 Hain, Peter 111 Hairs of the Dog, The 260 Haisall, Christine 208 Hales, Detective Inspector 222 Hambros Bank 121 Hamer, Frank 33 Hampton, Fred 292 Hanley, Sir Michael ‘Jumbo’ (MI5) 245, 276, 278 Hanratty, James 211 Harding, Field Marshall Lord 19 Harding-Smith, Mike 200 Harper, Joe 216, 217 Harris, Detective Chief Inspector Victor 120, 228 Harry (Queen’s landlord) 68, 70 Harry Walker strike 252 Hasek, Jaroslav 257 Havering Recorder 294 Hawks and Hawking 27 Haymarket police statue bombing 108 Heath, Edward 133, 135-136, 139, 156, 162, 164, 212, 244, 249, 260, 276, 299 Hearst, Patty 298 Heath, Nick 259 Heatwave 285 Heissler, Rolf 299 Hendy, Mark 3 Henke, Admiral Eugenio 101 Herd, Richard 237 Herrera Dativo, Alfredo 287 Hersh, Seymour 109 Hess, Rudolph 202 Hicks, Wynford 73 High Noon 53 Highgate Magistrates’ Court 36, 38, 70 Hijos del Pueblo 91 HMP Brixton 183, 198, 210 HMP Dartmoor 232 HMP Holloway 239, 241 HMP Long Lartin 197 HMP Wormwood Scrubs 239, 241, 246 Ho Chi Minh 56, 62 hobbling bandits, The 204 Hogg, Quintin 243 Honley (Yorkshire) 278 Hoppe, Werner 295 ‘Hornsey Guerrillas’ 68, 70 Hornsey College of Art (occupation) 290 ‘hot autumn’ (1969) 110

Franco, Doña Carmen Polo 284 Franco, General (death of) 299 Franco, Nenuca 284 Frank Keane Defence Committee 273 Frankfurt School 26 FRAP (Frente Revolucionario Antifascista y Patriotica ) 283 Fraser MP, Hugh 294 Fraud Squad 154, 163 Freda, Franco 104, 167, 286, 297-299 Free George Ince Campaign 244 Freedom 20, 35, 92, 112, 116, 166, 191, 275 Freeman, Jo 116 freemasonry 163 French Communist Party (PCF) 290 Frendz 244 Freshwater 222 Fritzsch, Ronald 299 Frost, David 260 FTASE (NATO intelligence service) 287, 291, 293 Fuerza Nueva 290 Furnival-Jones, Sir Martin (MI5) 23, 51-52, 137, 245 FX (MI5 trade unions, etc) 245 GAC (Autonomous Combat Groups) 252 Gadd, John, 201 Gaddafi, Colonel (coup) 101 GAI (Grupos Autónomos de Intervención) 262 Gaitskell, Hugh 18, 276 Gallo, Concetto 258 GAP (Gruppo d’Azione Partigiano) 120 García García, Miguel 9, 13, 72-74, 113-115, 122, 168, 188, 192, 196, 252, 259, 272, 279 Garcia Macarena, Juan 122, 292 Garcia Oliver, Juan 247 Garfinkel, Dave 296 Gargamelli, Roberto 297-299 GARI (Grupos de Acción Revolucionaria Internacional) 133, 262, 265, 267, 270, 298 Garland, Judy 252 Garnier, Annie 267 Garriga Paituví, Francisco Xavier 261 Garrigues y Díaz-Caabate, Antonio 34, 39, 123 Gateley, Kevin 244, 298 GB75 (Great Britain 1975 Organisation) 163, 277 GCR (Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey) 293 Gelli, Licio 293 General Defence Committee, (IWW-Industrial Workers of the World), 275 Gentili, Marcello 293 Georgens, Irene 293, 295 Georges-Clouzet, Henri 77 Georgiev, Elysée 42 Georgiev, Lydia 42 Gestetner (duplicators) 26 Giannettini, Guido 298-299 Gilbert, Deputy Assistant C ommissioner Victor (Special Branch) 245 Gilham, Detective Sergeant Andrew 171, 175, 225-226, 229, 238 Gillette, Rear-Admiral Norman G 25, 265 Gilpin, Jimmy 68-70 Gilpin, Peter 68, 70 Gilpin, Sheila 69-70 Girdwood Barracks 296 Giuliano, Salvatore 258 Gladio 53, 101-102, 287-290 Gladstone Smith, Peter 137, 164 Glasgow News 12 Glasgow, Ted 216 Gleckman, Harris 295 Glen Cree Martyrs 272 GLF (Gay Liberation Front) 235 Gnomefam 31 God on our Side 284 Gold Hat 90 Gold, Ted 292 Goldman, Emma 30, 192 Goldsmith-White, Sir Dick (MI6-SIS) 24-25 Gormenghast 183 Gosling, Ben and Libertad 122 Gould, Professor 248 Gould, Ted 123 Graham, Marcus 259 Granny (Agnes Ring) 89 Gransac Sadori, Ariane 34, 39, 262, 263, 266, 267, 270 Grant, Jane 152 Grappin, Dean 290 Grashof, Manfred 294, 297 Grateful Dead, The 9, 12

303

Index Houndsditch affair (1911) 93 Housden, Martin 208 Howard, Leslie 281 Howell, Denis 299 Howell, Kim 111 Howie, Police Sergeant Neil 255 Huas, Danièle 268 Hudelist, Lyn 259 Hulanicki, Barbara 292 Humphrey, Hubert 287 Humphries, Mr Justice Christmas 54-56 Huntington. Samuel P 298 Huntley, Commander Robert 169, 244, 298 Huston, John 90 Hyde Park Diggers 11 Hyme, Mike 69, 70 I, Jan Cremer 11 Iberia Airlines 40, 122,-124, 128, 130, 141 Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (see FIJL) 59-60, 114, 122 IBM Selectronic golfball typewriter 26 ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) 10 ICI 19 If (film) 77-78 Il Tempo 297 IMG (International Marxist Group) 56, 62, 111, 158 Imperial Ottoman Police 189 Imperial War Museum 291 In Place of Strife 135, 136 In Praise of Poteen 260 In Russian and French Prisons 188 In Spanish and English Prisons 188 Indiana Wants Me 173, 182 Industrial Relations Act (Bill) 134, 138-140, 293, 296 Iniesta, Carlos 261 INLA (Irish National Liberation Army) 280 Institute of Psychology (London University) 248 Intelligence Bureau 287 Intercontinental Secretariat (CNT-FAI) 28 International Anarchist Commission (IAC) 28 International Anarchist Congress 57 International Brigades 208 International Libertarian Centre (Haverstock Hill) 252 International Publishing Corporation (IPC) 51 International Red Cross 23 International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement (see First of May Group) IS/Socialist Workers’ Party (International Socialists) 111, 157, 275 International Times (IT) 10, 134, 141, 190, 287, 294 Internationale, The 204 Internment (9 August 1971) 168, 250, 260 Interpol 39, 120 ‘Invaluable’ (War Book exercise) 52, 62 IRA 107, 141, 237, 250, 272, 292 ; (Provisional) 123, 138, 273, 286; (Army Council) 272; (Official) 273, 280 Iran, Shah and Empress of 16 IRSP (Irish Republican Socialist Party) 280 Italian Consulate, Manchester 242 IWP (Irish Workers Party) 271 IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) 271, 275 ‘Jack the Rat’ 197 ‘Jack the Ripper’ 142 Jack, Detective Inspector 90-92 Jack, Finnigan 69 Jackson, Geoffrey 169, 170, 178, 293, 296 Jackson, Senator Henry 299 Jackson State University 110, 123, 292 Jackson, Tom 157 Jacobs, John 291 Jagger, Mick 158 Jamaica Gleaner 86 James, MR 4 James, Mr Justice James, Mr Justice 212-213, 217, 222, 232- 236, 239-240, 244, 298 Jarry, Alfred 194 Javert, Inspector 130 JCR (Jeunnesse Communiste Revolutionnaire) 42, 286, 289 Jeal, Detective Constable Claude 173-174, 180 Jefferson Airplane 9, 12 Jenkins, Roy 10, 276 Jessico, Detective Sergeant 130 Jewell, Gary 275 Johns, Emily 92 Johns, Susan 92, 128 Johnson, Lucas 32 Johnson, President Lyndon 41, 289 Johnson, Vincent 73

Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) 23, 52 Jones, John (MI5) 245 Jones, Ray 69 Journal du Dimanche 265 ‘Juan el largo’ (see also Octavio Alberola) 38 K Branch (MI5 anti-Soviet section) 245 Kahn & Averill 94 Kahn, Morris 94 Kaliszewski, Iain 5 Kane, Mike 294 Karamanlis, Constantine 298 Kavanagh, Ted 25, 27, 259, 286 Kazan, Eli 232 Keith, Joe 294 Keith, Sally 296 Keller, Brooks T. (US Secret Service) 55 Kelly, Gerry 244 Kennedy Young, George 51 Kent State University 110, 123, 292 Khaled, Leila 293 Khayati, Mustapha 47 Kim Philby Dining Club 117 King Mob 116, 286 King, Cecil 19, 50, 51, 290 King, Tom 244 Kingdom of Rags 274 Kingston Trio 281 Kissinger, Henry 291, 299 Kitson, Brigadier Frank 71, 73, 137, 156 Kloepper, Gerald 299 Kommune: K-1 16, 288 Kray, Ronnie and Reggie 211 Krivine, Alain 42 Kroecher-Tiedman, Gabriel 299 Kropotkin, Peter 22, 35, 187-188, 192 Kunel, Dieter 291 Kunzelmann, Dieter 295 KYP (Greek Central Service of Information) 104, 287 L’Aurore 38, 267 L’Express 38 L’Unita 105 La Pointe, Ali 77 La Vanguardia 295 Labruna, Antonio 299 Ladas, Colonel Ioannis 288 Ladd, Dafydd 260, 298 Laing, RD 288 Lamche, Ann 294 Last Lecture (Unamuno) 168 Last Orders, Please! 260 Lavender Hill Mob 154 Laycock, Colonel Robert 163 Layforce brigade 163 League of Empire Loyalists 15 LEAN (Liaison des étudiants anarchistes de Nanterre) 42, 99, 288 Lebel, Jean-Jacques 287 Lecce (Penitentiary) 253 Lee, David 222 Leech, Frank 116 Leggio, Franco 257, 258 Lemke, Udo 299 Leone, Giovanni 296 Leriles, Ramon 270 Levingstone, President Roberto 295 Lewis, Paul 294 Libertad (group) 295 Lidstone, Donald 123, 216, 217, 218, 219 Lily the Pink 78 Linke, Mr 292 Lipmann, Walter 63 Littlejohn, Kenneth 298 Lloyd, Gary 60, 63 Lloyds Bank 19 Loan, General 289 Lograno, Savino (Lieutenant) 105, 296 London Anarchist Group 194 London Gazette, The 9 London School of Economic (LSE) 15 London Surrealist Group 194 Long Kesh 280 Lonsdale, Gordon 128 Looking Back After Twenty Years in Jail 168 Lord Mayor of the City of London 212 Lord of the Rings 97 Loredan, Pietro 299

304

Index Merlino, Mario 61, 98, 286, 288, 297-299 Metzger, Gustav 10 Meunier, Theodule 30 Meyer, Till 299 Meyrick, Detective Sergeant 197 MI5 18, 24, 119, 124, 137, 160, 274, 276; ( F-branch) 203; (subversion threat, 1968) 52 MI6 (SIS) 121 MIL (Movimiento Ibérico de Liberación) 133, 252, 260-263, 266, 276, 296 MIL-GAC (Grupos Autonomos de Combate) 296, 297, 298 Milan Trade Fair (bombs) 96, 98, 103, 104, 291 Military Reconnaissance Force (MRF) 72 Millán Hernández, Julio 288 Mills, Iris 259, 279-280 Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla 108, 291 Mirror newspaper group 19 Miss World Contest 132, 161, 294 Missa Luba 78 Missof, Françoise 42 Mit Teilung 275 MLCE (Movimiento Libertario Cubano en Exilio), 60 MLN (Moviminiento de Liberación Nacional — Tupamaros) 108, 292 Modern School 270 Moller, Gerhard 297 Monday Club 51 Monhaupt, Brigitte 297 Montague, Samuel 19 Monte, Hilda 274, 275 Montseny, Federica 59, 60 Morecambe, Eric 230 Moreel, Bas 281, 282 Moreno, Miguel 262 Moro, Aldo 25, 298-299 Mosley, Sir Oswald 110 Mould, Detective Inspector George 169, 209 Mount Etna 256 Mountain Assault Brigade 287 Mountbatten, Lord Louis 51 Mucilli, Pietro 105 Mucilli, Piero 296 Muggeridge, Malcolm 73, 149, 181, 205 Mullen, Patrick 216 Munich beer hall (bomb attempt on Hitler) 275 Mur Sin, Alicia 287 Murder Squad 163 Murdoch, Rupert 60 Murray, Marie 271-272, 299 Murray, Noel 271-272, 299 Mussolini, Benito 257 Mutti, Claudio 299 Mutual Aid 192 MyLai 71, 109, 292 Nairn, Charles 60 Naked Lunch 11 Nasser, President 101 National-Front 193 NATO 25, 53 NATSOPA 145 Navy Lark, The 203, 204 NCCL (National Council for Civil Liberties) 242 NDS (Nuclei di Difesa dello Stato) 286 New Earth Group 273 New Left Review 290 New Society 42, 289 Newell, ‘Dare’ 244 Newman, Paul 32 News of the World 57 NF (National Front) 15, 109-110, 201 Night of the Demon 4 Nixon, President Richard 54, 101, 108, 123, 291, 292, 297-298 Nkrumah 286 NLF (National Liberation Front of South Vietnam) 56 North London Gas Board 143 North Sea gas 79 North Thames Gas Board 147, 251 Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) 107 Notting Hill Carnival 115 Notting Hill Peoples’ Association 115 NSC1 53 (National Security Council Memorandum 1 53) NSS (National Secular Society) 129 NUJ (National Union of Journalists) 145 NUS (National Union of Seamen) 118 obscene publications squad 10 Observer, The 67, 71, 104, 243 Occorsio, Vittorio 297

Lorenz, Peter 299 Lorenzon, Guido 292 Lotta Continua 107, 132, 253, 292 Louis, Lingg 227 Lovecraft, Howard Phillips 54, 191 Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency & Peacekeeping 72, 156 Lucetti, Gino 58 Ludd 118, 119, 286 Ludd, General/Ned (Luddism) 279 Lumumba, Patrice 299 Lustgarten, Edgar 177 Luther King, Martin 286, 289 Lygate, Matt 297 Machtinger, Howie 291 Maddalena, La 102 Mahler, Horst 292-293, 295, 297, 299 Mainardi, Carlo 105, 296 Makarezo, N 61 Makhno, Nestor 23 Maletti, Gianadelio 299 Man Who Never Returned, The 281 MAN! 259 Mannin, Ethel 116 Mansfield, Mike 195, 216 Manufacturers Committee Against the Luddites 279 Mao, Chairman 16 March to Death, The 275 Marchesin, Giancarlo 299 Marcuse, Herbert 26, 47, 288 Marighella, Carlos 108, 291-292 Marina di Carrara 60 Mark, Sir Robert 156, 244-245 Marnham, Patrick 94 Mars and Minerva 244 Marseillaise, La 179 Martin, Sarah 152 Martin, Strother 32 Martindale, Wink 192 Martine, Dominique 42, 99 Martínez, Inocencio 265, 267-268 Marx, Karl 167 Marzocchi, Umberto 59 Mason, Roy 276 Massari, Antonio 299 Massu, General Jacques 49, 77 Mastellono, Carlo 102 Mathieu, Colonel Philippe 77 Matthew QC, John 205-207, 214, 216, 218, 222, 225-231 Maudling MP, Reginald 162, 164, 198, 217, 295, 297 May 1968 (Events of) 45, 47-48, 50 May, David 245, 266, 268 McCaffery, John 121, 274 McCann, Eamonn 260 McCarthy, Stephen 161 McCormack agricultural machinery factory 108 McCoy, Guy 158 McCrumb, Robert 169 McDonald, Ian 216, 218, 232 McDonald, Kevin 195 McGuffin, John 259-260 McGuinness, Paddy 20 McKay, Ron 12 McKenzie helpers 224, 244 McKenzie v McKenzie 195, 224 McKenzie, Scott 5 McLean, Kate (Catherine) 138, 153, 191, 208-209, 216, 223, 230, 238-240, 245, 294, 296 McLean, Tony 208 McPherson, William 297 Meadlo, Sergeant Paul 292 Meinhof, Ulrike 292, 297, 299 Meins, Holger 281, 297, 299 Meisel, Hilda (see also Monte) 274 Mellen, Jim 291 Mellor, George 279 Melly, George 194 Meltzer, Albert 3, 5, 19, 21, 25-27, 31, 36, 38, 54-55, 61, 94-95, 112, 114, 121, 131, 141, 145, 171, 185, 189, 193, 222, 225, 229, 252, 254, 258-259, 272, 279, 286 Melville, William (Chief Inspector) 30 Memoirs of a Revolutionist 187 Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer 11 Mendelson, Anna 4, 17, 117, 153, 160, 166, 171, 181, 183, 194-195, 206, 216217, 221-222, 230-231, 238-242, 244, 246, 249, 251, 295-296, 298 Mengele, Dr 145

305

Index Oceania 15 ‘October Revolution’ (1968) 62 Odeón Theatre 48 Oggi 120 Oglesby, Carl 287 Ohnesorg, Benno 16, 288 Old Bailey 79, 210-211, 221, 235, 275 Olday, Arthur William 259, 272-273, 275 Oluwale, David 161 Ongania, President Juan Carlos 292 One Dimensional Man 47 OPEC 299 ORA (Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists) 112 Ordine Nuovo 61, 97, 101, 288 Oriol, Antonio Maria 290 Orsi, Claudio 299 Orwell, George 15, 275 Osner, Gerry 242, 298 OSS (Office of Strategic Services) 121, 274 Oswald, Lee Harvey 175 Ottavioli, Commissionaire Pierre 265, 286 Oudenaarden, Jan 152-153, 294 Oughton, Diana 123, 292 Oz 11, 295, 298 Packham, Graham 68, 124 Packham, Valerie 278 Paddington Green (high security) Police Station 124, 141 Page, Detective Chief Superintendent Ronald 268, 269 Page, Martin 27 Paine, Tom 231 Palme, Olaf 283 Palmer-Hall, Detective Inspector David 94-95, 130, 132, 141, 143, 148, 150, 294 Palumbo, Aldo 105 Pan, Ruggero 299 Panessa, Vito 105, 296 Papadopolous, Giorgio 61, 104 Papandreou 287 Papon, Maurice 48 Parachute Regiment (Support Company of the 1st Battalion) 250 Parachute Regiment 62 Paris Commune 48, 58, 157 Parker, John 222 Parker, Lord Chief Justice 212 Parsons, Albert 227 Partisan Action Groups 133 Partita Comunista d’Italia (Linea Rossa) 288Juan Paul VI, Pope 283 PCF (Parti Communiste Français) 45, 48, 50 Peake, Melvyn 183 Peasants Revolt 67 Peck, Detective Inspector 151 Peck, Gregory 259 Peck, Sir Edward 51 Pecunia, Alain 226-227 Penthouse 187 People Show, The 126 People’s Democracy 168 People, The (newspaper) 5, 7-9, 20, 30-31 Perez Beotegui, Ignacio (‘Wilson’) 253 Perfomance 158 Peron, General 287 Peugeot 50 peur, La Salaire de la 77 PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) 290, 293 Phillips, Det. Chief Inspector. 91-92 Phillips, Sergeant 69 Piazza Fontana 104-105, 149, 167 Picarda, Noel 74 Pimpernel Smith 281 Pinelli, Giuseppe 39, 61, 97-98, 103, 105, 132, 149, 167, 228, 253, 291-293, 296, 299 Pinochet, General Agustin 284 Pinsseau, M. 262 Plambeck, Julianne 299 Plan Prometheus 287 Playboy 187 Plazen, Annie 267, 270 Plessey 19 Plevris, Kostas 288 Pohl, Rolf 299 Police Gazette 160, 168 Police Judiciare 267 Political Police In Britain, The, 197 Political Red Cross 22 Politique Hebdo 158

Polonsky, Dr. Anthony 247 Pompidou, Georges 46 Poniatowski, Michel 270 Pons Llobet, José Lluís 260, 263, 269 Ponte della Ghisolfa group 61, 97, 104, 292 Pontecorvo, Gillo 76-77, 106, 262 Popular Front 48 Porridge 193 Portillo, Luis 168 Portillo, Michael 168 Post Office Tower 190, 232 Potere Operaio 107, 116 Pottle, Pat 287 Poulikakou, Sarah 242, 298 Poverty of Student Life, On The 47, 286, 288 Powell MP, Enoch 110, 157, 289 Powis Square (25) 115-116, 158 Pozas, Jaime 114 Pozzan, Marco 298-299 Prague Spring 41 Pravda 290 Prescott, Jake Prescott, Jake 150-152, 154-155, 157, 159, 162, 166, 168-170, 187, 189, 190-191, 205-208, 242, 249, 251, 293-296 Press Association 161, 294 Price, Dolours 244 Price, Marian 244 Prison Officers’ Association 193 Pritchard, Ross 68 Private Eye 30-31, 53, 55, 147 Proll, Astrid 118. 292, 294-295 PROP (Preservation of the Rights of Prisoners) 244 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph 192 Provo movement 286 Prunesquallor, Dr 184 Puig Antich, Salvador 252, 261, 262, 276, 296 Pulsinelli, Tito 96, 291, 295, 298 Purdie, Ian 108, 118, 150-151, 153-154, 157, 159, 162, 166, 168-170, 187, 189, 191, 205-208, 216, 230, 291-292, 294-296 Purdie, Robert 294 Purple, Turner 158 Queen’s (Hornsey pub) 69, 89, 172 Queimada! (Burn!) 106 Quick 295 Quinlan, Captain Hank 175 Radcliffe, Charles 116, 286 Radio Albania 203 Radio Times 83 RAF (Red Army Fraktion) 107, 118, 124, 133, 138, 275, 282, 292, 295-296 Ragusa 254, 256-258 Ramsay, Robin 51 Randle, Michael 287 Raspe, Jan-Carl 297 Rauti, Pino 61, 101, 104, 288, 297 Ravachol 247 Rawle, Sid 11 Rawlinson QC, Sir Peter 132, 141, 144, 162, 293, 296 Read, Herbert 116, 275 Red Army 23 Red Army choir 204 Red Brigades (BR) 107, 133, 138, 298 Red Mole 158 Red Rankers, The 141 Reed, Chris 294 Rees-Mogg, William 51, 64 Reindeers, Henrik 299 Renault 50 Repin, Ilya 142 Resurrection, 240 Return of the Durruti Column, The 287 Rety, John 3- 4, 73, 92, 112, 128 Reverman, Paul 299 révolte étudiante, La 47 Revolution of Everyday Life 46 Revolutionary Warfare 277 Towards a Revolutionary Youth Movemnent (RYM) 291 Reynolds, Garda 272 Reynolds. Reg 116 Rhodiaceta 50 Richards, Vernon 20, 112, 116 Richards, Captain Theodore 29 Rieck, Horst 292 Rinascita 298 Riviere, Georges 267 Roaming Hash Rebels 291 Robbins, Terry 123, 292

306

Index Robens, Lord 51 Robert Fraser Gallery 10 Roche, Paul 44, 290 Roche, Stuart 294 Rockefeller, John D 23 Roebuck, The (pub) 76 Roeg, Nicolas 158 Rognin, Licia (Pinelli widow) 296 Rolandi, Cornelio 292, 295 Rolls-Royce (Paris) 161-162 Rooney, Mickey 252 Rooum, Donald 163 Rose of the Winds (conspiracy) 121 Rosen, Arnold 159 Roses and Gallows 275 Rosselson, Leon 36 ‘Rossi’ (see also John McCaffery) 121 Rouillan, Jean Marc 262, 275 Rowe, Marsha 244 Royal Courts of Justice 8, 31 Royal Green Jackets 72 Rua, Graham 259, 280 Rubin, Jerry 260 RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) 107, 280, 291 Rudd, Mark 289, 291 Ruff, Phil 259, 275, 279-280 Rusk, Dean 288, 290 Russell, Wilson (‘Stashy Dan’) 2, 6 Sabaté Llopart, Francisco 251, 252, 298 Sabaté: Guerrilla Extraordinary 248, 251, 259 Salazar, Antonio de Oliveira de 293 Salcedo, Juan 114 Salvini, Judge 105 San Francisco (song) 5 San Vittorio prison 103, 104 Sanctus 77 Sandell, Roger 25 Sanders, Kate 74 Sandrock, A.T. 243 Sandys MP, Duncan 156, 291, 294 Sannachan, Alex 79 Santarelli, Enzo 293 Saragat, Giuseppe 293 Saor Eire (Free Ireland) 221, 272, 273 Sartre, Jean Paul 48 SAS Regimental Association 277 Savva, Peter 161 Scaffold, The 78 Scales of Justice 177 Schelm, Petra 295 Schmuecker, Ulrich 298 Schneider, General 293, 299 Schubert, Ingrid 293, 295 Scotland Yard 24 Scott QC, Lawton 196, 216 Scottish Daily Express 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 13, 144 SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) 108, 287, 291 Seale, Bobby 292 Seaman’s Voice 119 Second Coming, The 109 Secret Agent, The 122 Secret Intelligence Service (SIS- MI6) 24, 121, 274 Seeberg, Wolf 208 Selenia Co. 293 Selsdon Park Hotel 135 Serpieri, Stefano 299 Serra, Bianca Guidetti 293 Servire il Popolo 107 Shah of Iran 293 Shaw, Lieutenant Colonel 219, 233 Shindler 206 SID (Servizio Informazioni Difesa) 101 Siege of Sidney Street Appreciation Society, The 83, 92-93 Siepman, Ina 299 Simpson, Sir Joseph (Police Commissioner) 10, 11, 24, 42, 52 Sinatra, Frank 112 Sindona, Michele 121 Sinn Fein 271, 272-273 Situationist International 115, 117, 286 Situationists 46, 155, 286-287 Sivell, Detective Constable Bernard 171, 174-175, 181, 183, 218, 226, 229, 298 Skelhorn, Sir Norman 10, 34, 36, 194 SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army) 298 SLL (Socialist Labour League) 157 Smear! Wilson and the Secret State 51

Smith, Colin 67 Smith, Deputy Assistant C ommissioner Ferguson 52, 141, 157 Smith, DC Ron 169 Smith, Thomas 279 Smythe, Tony 242 SNCC (Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee) 286 Snowdon, Lord 31 Soames, Christopher 169 Social Anarchism 28 Society of the Spectacle, The 46-47, 115, 218, 287 SOE (Special Operations Executive) 274 Sogno, Edgardo 121 Soldier of Fortune 94 Soler Amigó, Santiago 261 Solidarios, los 22 Solidarity 14, 25 Somoza, General 299 Sorbonne (occupation of) 46 Soria penitentiary 114 Sot-Weed Factor, The 191 Spain and the World 275 Spanish Embassy (London) 92, 132, 215; machine gunning, 133, 142 Spanish National Tourist Office 93-94 Spare Rib 244 Spartacist rising 273 Spartacus 199 Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) 163 Special Branch, Metropolitan Police 23-24; Special Irish Branch (SIB) 30, 291 Special Forces Club 277 Spezzano Albanese 255 Spiazza, Major Amos 287 Spies, August 227 SPK (Heidleberg Socialist Patients’ Collective) 295, 299 Springer Press 16, 43, 118 Springer, Axel 289 Stamford Hill 167 Stammheim prison 299 Stanger, Nina 70 Steccanella, Alberto 292 Stern Gang 141 Stevenson, Mr. Justice Melford 205-207, 212, 294-295 Stickies (Official IRA) 280 Stirling, Colonel David 163, 277, 299 Stiz, Giancarlo 295, 297 Stockport High School 117 Stoke Newington Eight Defence Campaign 194, 244-245 Stoke Newington Police Station 174 Stoker, Bram 214 Strasbourg Students’ Union 286 strategy of tension (Italy) 97, 102, 121, 165, 290 Straw, Jack 111 Strike! 167 Struggle For Equality, The 21 Stürmer, Der 246 STV (Scottish Television) 7 Stylianos, Pattakos 61 Suárez, Angel Baltasar 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 283, 298 Sud-Aviation 48,50 Sugranyes, Oriol Solé 260-261, 263, 269, 297 Sun 74, 246-247 Sunday Mirror 266 Sunday Post 144 Sunday Telegraph 94, 137, 164, 295 Sunday Times 31 Sunday Times Magazine 31 Sutherland, Ken 26 Svejk, The Good Soldier 257 Swash, Tony 294 SWF (Syndicalist Workers’ Federation) 14, 20, 200 Swinging Sporran (pub) 169 Talbot, US Ambassador 16, 287 Tanzilli, Gaetano 299 Task Force Report on the Governability of Democracies 277 Tate Gallery, The 10 Taviani, Paolo Emilio 101 Teatro Degli Animosi 61 Tegel Prison 124 Tellez, Antonio 192, 259 Ten Rillington Place 139 Tet offensive 289 Teufel, Fritz 16, 288 Thatcher, Margaret 112, 168, 212 Thayer, George 24 Thistlethwaite, Dick (MI5) 23, 52, 136, 245

307

Index Ventura, Luigi 299 Via San Francesco 257 Via Scaldasole group 103 Vietnam war 56 Viett, Inge 299 Vincileone, Eliane 96, 291-29 Vine, Ian 74 Viola, General Enza 288 Violence (positions on) 74-75 Viva Zapata! 232 von Amsberg, Claus 286 Von Drenkman, Guenter 299 von Rauch, Georg 118, 168, 253, 292- 296 VSC (Vietnam Solidarity Campaign) 41, 53, 56, 62, 65, 288-289 Waddell, James 23, 51, 245 Wages of Fear 76 Walden 11 Waldron, Sir John 52, 62, 64, 132, 141, 144, 162, 181, 293, 295 Walker, Peter 294 Walker, KCB CBE DSO, General Sir Walter 277 Walker, Sir William 106 Walsh, Mike ‘Digger’ 25, 31, 295 War Commentary 275 War Diary, SOE Iberia 274 Warsaw Pact 101 Watanuki, Joji 298 ‘Watchers’, The 124 Watkinson, Lord 19 Watson Taylor, Simon 193-194 Watts, Charlie 259 Weather Underground 108, 123-124, 133, 291, 289, 291-292 Weaver, Maurice 247, 248 Weekend Telegraph 94 Weir, Angela 191, 208, 216, 223, 230, 235, 238-240, 245, 296 Weir, Jean Helen 259, 263, 267-268, 270 Weissbecker, Thomas 118, 168, 253, 292-293, 295, 297 West Drayton Police Station 35, 127 What is Property? 192 Wheeler, Detective Inspector 128-129 Why Violence? (TV programme) 74 Wicker Man, The 255 Wie Alles Anfing 299 Wild Bunch, The 131-132, 141-142 Wilde, Oscar 33, 211 William Brown and the Outlaws 142 William Press Ltd 55, 61, 79, 83, 119, 125, 131, 147, 225, 251 Willy Lotts’ Cottage 81 Wilson, Charlotte 35 Wilson, Detective Chief Inspector Riby 177-178, 209, 296 Wilson, Harold 15, 18-19, 51, 118, 135, 276, 287, 290 Wilson, Sarah 152 Winchester Crown Court 243 Winchester Eight 244, 250 Winstain, Kevin (barrister) 195, 216, 217, 224--227, 237, 239-240, 245 Wodehouse, P.G. 149 Women’s movement 117 Woodcock, George 116, 275 Wooden Shoe Bookshop 286 Woodstock 111 Woolwich Arsenal 123, 180, 219 Workers Party 272 Workers' Party of Scotland 29 World Turned Upside Down, The 36 Worsthorne, Peregrine 136 Wright, Peter 276 XXII March Group 288 Yallop, Howard 216 Yasgur, Max 111 Yelensky, Boris 21 Young, George Kennedy 277 Zanon, Ida 299 Zapata, Emiliano 232 Zaporozhie Cossacks Writing a Mocking Letter to the Turkish Sultan 142 Zicari, Giorgio 298 Zinneman, Fred 259 Zulu! 58 Zanon, Ida 299 Zeta, Agent 298

Thoreau, Henry David 11 Thorpe, Jeremy 276 Thorpe, William 279 Tierney, Jack 197 Timber Carriage (pub) 119 Time Out 53, 178, 245, 266, 291 Times, The 37, 38, 51, 60, 62, 64-65, 71, 130, 140, 145, 169, 207, 294 Tintagel House 161-162 Tobruk naval base 101 Tolkien, Professor 97 Tolstoy, Leo 240 Tomlinson, Maureen 145 Tooting Popular Front 154 TOP (Tribunal de Orden Público) 262, 287 Torrejón (US Airforce Base) 33 Torres, Jean-Claude 262, 297 Torres, Mario Inés 275 Torri Lovati, Olimpia 299 Torri, Rachele 297, 299 Touati, Robert 270 Touch of Evil 175 Tourneur, Jacques 4 TransWorld Airlines 38 Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The 90 Treasure, Jonathan 244 Tresca, Carlo 39 Triesman, David 74, 111 Trikont Verlag 299 Trilateral Commission 277, 299 Trinco, Aldo 167, 295 Tristam, Michael 260, 298 Trujillo, Rafael 299 Trullis 254 Truman, Peter 208 Tshombe, Moise 288 Tullet, Tom 242 Tupamaros (MLN) 108. 169, 292 Tupamaros West Berlin (TW) 108, 291 Turchi, Luigi 104 Tuynmann, Hans 286 Tyranny of Structurelessness, The 116 Tyrer, Nicola 147 Ubu Plays, The 194 UCS (Upper Clyde Shipbuilders) 165-166, 295 UDA (Ulster Defence Association) 141, 201 UDR (Ulster Defence Regiment) 292 Ulster Office (bomb) 118 UN General Assembly 138, 156 Unamuno, Miguel de 168 Unesco 123 Unforgiven 242 Union Corse 103 Unison Committee for Action 277 United Artists 106 United Antifascist Committee 298 Unity of Europe, The 274 Up Against The Law Collective 244 Upper Tollington Park 122 Urbach, Peter 108, 291 Urbano Bermúdez, David 114, 269, 288 Urtubia, Lucio 267, 270 US Embassy (London) 17, 41, 134 US Officers’ Club 37 US Secret Service 55 US Sixth Fleet 53 US Southern Land Forces 102 Ussia, Mgr Marcos 17, 25, 286 Ustashi 141 Vadrot, Claude Marie 267 Vale, Edward 169-171 Valjean, Jean 130 Valle de los Caidos 284 Valpreda, Ele Lovati 297, 299 Valpreda, Maddalena 297, 299 Valpreda, Pietro Valpreda, Pietro 292, 297-299 van Helsing, Professor Abraham 214 Vaneigem, Raoul 46 Ventura, Angelo 299 Ventura, Giovanni 104, 167, 286, 292, 295, 297, 299

308