Should the FBI Be Believed About Hanssen?; The Real IRA; A Higher Authority?; Nobles & Savages
Celebrating a new century, I went on a pilgrimage to one of the dreariest of English provincial cities, Manchester. I came to pay homage to Homer, the Greek who taught Taki how to tell tall tales, and I also went to honor a great American, Donald R. Seawell, the founder and chairman of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. This imaginative and courageous man has, in the great tradition of American philanthropy, produced a theatrical marathon, called Tantalus, a cluster of 10 plays by John Barton inspired by the Greek myths and the Trojan Wars.
Jumbo jets crammed with chattering English drama critics had last fall hurtled toward Colorado for the First Night, and the more pusillanimous now went with me for the opening in Manchester. Barton is best known for his adaptation of Shakespeare's historical plays, The Wars of the Roses, and for his earlier adaptation of Euripides and other ancients in another 10-play cycle appropriately named The Greeks. Peter Hall is the brilliant director of Tantalus, and has considerately scheduled intervals so as to alleviate the risks that we now know passengers on long-distance flights incur in cramped seats.
In English literature the imitations, adaptations, translations and sequels of Homer have been continuous. Homer and the Greek myths are the foundation stone of Western civilization. Barton's Tantalus is in this noble tradition, and deserves our applause. This is especially so since today's television-addicted audiences don't know their Zeus from their Dr. Seuss or their Grecians from their Greeks. All those hours of strange myths and deities will to many seem like Wagner without the music.
After Manchester I needed a quickie and got one from Caryl Churchill, whose new play, Far Away, gives you just 50 minutes for your money. But every minute is one of subliminal terror in some imagined and imminent future. Like Edgar Allan Poe and Lafcadio Hearn, it would be a good choice for a first date. No one would want to sleep alone afterward.
I see there is another new book about one of Picasso's mistresses, Dora Maar, the "Screaming Woman" in many of his pictures. No other creative genius in history has been merchandised as has Picasso. His name now sells lipstick, jewelry, motorcars, pottery, books galore, and even the original canvas by the master himself. It cannot be long before McDonald's will serve Double Juicy Guernicas. The best book about Dora Maar was by James Lord, and it had the merit that the author had been a close friend of his subject for many years.
Dora, unlike the other Picasso poppets, had considerable artistic talent as a photographer, and was admired by her contemporaries like Man Ray, Georges Bataille, Andre Breton and Paul Eluard. In the 50s I was often a fellow guest with Dora at a house in the hills above Hyeres in the South of France. The estate bordered on that of Edith Wharton, and was then owned by an equally formidable lady, the legendary Marie-Laure de Noailles, a woman endowed with such a magnifico proboscis and hairdo that she resembled Louis XIV in drag. Her ancestors included the much-maligned Marquis de Sade, and her grandmother was Laure de Chevigny, one of the women Proust used as models for his Duchesse de Guermantes.
Readers will forgive this spate of unrelenting namedropping, since it sets the stage for a wonderful joke at the expense of Paul Eluard, the great poet who, like many of his ilk, adored Stalin. Marie-Laure mischievously prepared me for acting as Eluard's guide on a visit to the local nudist island, the Ile du Levant. As our ferry approached the pier I warned Eluard that the nudist colony managers were naturally concerned in case day-tourists were to manifest signs of arousal on encountering other islanders in the buff. As a precaution, we would have to pass through a kind of "customs clearance" where a pair of butch female nurses of great manual dexterity would reduce us to a state of quiescence. Eluard immediately fled to the mainland. The old Marxist preferred a good dinner at the Villa Noailles to joining a colony of Rousseau's "noble savages."
But the Stalinists got their revenge. One evening, after a bullfight in Frejus, I joined Picasso for dinner. He was amused at the idea of me, as an English barrister, appearing in court wearing a white wig and gown. Profiting from my open shirtfront, he rapidly drew a sketch of me in this outfit on my belly. He knew that any Picasso fan would be torn between the desire to remove the artwork by skin removal or never washing again. I should have had this drawing tattooed. With age and an expanding girth the small sketch would have grown to be a giant fresco. Sotheby's and Christie's would have courted me. "Come up and see my etching," would have been my opening line on any date.
The adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel The Possessed at the Volksbuhne in Berlin not only captures the original's musings on God, death and political reform, but is hilariously and intentionally funny. The creator is the brilliant young director Frank Castorf, a worthy successor to Max Reinhardt and Piscator in the same theater. But when did we ever go to Germany to laugh? A miracle!
Papa Hemingway once wrote that Mussolini was the biggest bluff in Europe. Well, I've got news for Papa, way up there in the wild blue yonder. There is a bigger bluff around Europe nowadays, and the name is Carla del Ponte, a Swiss woman who goes by the rather grandiloquent title of chief UN war crimes prosecutor. Mrs. del Ponte is based in the Netherlands, flies in private planes and on taxpayers' money, is received as almost a head of state wherever she goes, and regularly appears on European television denouncing mostly Slobodan Milosevic and his ilk.
Now there's nothing unusual about bureaucrats like del Ponte acting like maharajahs (before the Indian government took away their privileges), living high on the hog and at our expense. What is unusual is the fact that globalists like del Ponte have discovered a new way to lord it over us: global government.
If your eyes are already glazing over, please try to stay tuned. The creation of a global government is a Clinton-Blair type of scam. A global government regulates against the small entrepreneur while conferring correspondingly richer benefits to the monopolists. A global government strikes down the rights of states and local communities. A global government is?and this is the most important of all?anticapitalist, as capitalism is based on individual rights and is the only politico-economic system based on the doctrine of individual rights.
But back to del Ponte. As everyone who hasn't lived in Rwanda the last 50 years knows, legislators make their livings legislating. The more legislation, the more bureaucrats like del Ponte like it. It gives them legitimacy to drag people into court. Just before the great pardoner of crooks, drug dealers and frauds left his disgraced office, he managed to embarrass Uncle Sam yet again by signing a treaty that would create an international criminal court.
In Europe this is nothing new. We know that the scum we elect to office will try to do anything in their power to enrich themselves and get a better chokehold on the electorate. Still, we vote them in because of their demagoguery, a demagogue being an ancient Greek creation, and like all rogues, holding a favored place in a jaded continent's heart.
The trouble is that America is a new country, where demagogues may have flourished?just look at the scumbag and his senator wife? but are sooner or later found out and assigned to the rubbish bin of history. Americans also love their freedoms, and the creation of an international criminal court will?as sure as Clinton will beat the rap?curtail those freedoms, no ifs or buts about it.
Christopher Hitchens, a British gadfly and self-publicist par excellence, would put America's most eminent living statesman, Henry Kissinger, on trial. Hitchens got his pound of flesh by the ensuing publicity his very silly articles generated. Del Ponte, with far more power than Hitchens, is after Milosevic, admittedly not a good guy, but rather a nationalist who managed to dismember his country by trying through force of arms to preserve it.
Switzerland recently has held a plebiscite that ran almost 77 percent against joining the European Union. The main reason it was so one-sided was the EU's treatment of Austria last year. The wise Swiss realize that the EU is to double standards what the Clintons are to lying. Take for example Robert Mugabe, the brutal, corrupt and murderous dictator of Zimbabwe. Mugabe's country is falling apart, with the only people confident of avoiding starvation by the end of the year being Mugabe's cronies, who cling to power by intimidation and vote-rigging. Mugabe's slaughter of 20,000 Matabele tribespeople in the early 80s, his henchmen's murder of white farmers and his attacks on homosexuals qualify him as an international criminal and pariah far above the Milosevic scale. (Slobo at least had the excuse of war.) Yet only last week France's President Chirac rolled out the red carpet and warmly shook Mugabe's bloodstained hands. Ditto the prime minister of Belgium, Guy Verhostadt, whose country clamored most vociferously for the arrest and trial of the man who saved Chile, Gen. Pinochet.
What is going on here? one may ask. Well, I'll tell you. PC. It doesn't take a genius to work out that in their current state of racial paranoia, the self-loathing custodians of political correctness cannot bear to be seen pursuing a black hoodlum who has murdered white farmers (20,000 Matabele blacks, of course, don't count either). And there are no threats a la Milosevic made against Mugabe, no air strikes ordered, no troops dispatched.
International crime court supporters argue that a court is needed to deter genocide and war crimes. This is nonsense. Despots don't pause to weigh the legal ramifications before committing atrocities. Just look at North Korea, Sudan, Rwanda, Liberia, Nigeria, Congo, Sierra Leone, Burma or Zimbabwe. Or China, for that matter. Does anyone in his right mind believe that Carla del Ponte will one day fly into Beijing and fly out with the men who are responsible for imprisoning thousands and ordering the execution of I don't know how many because of their opposition to the Communist Party?
The ICC would be a bad joke if it hadn't been signed by as many countries as it has. The U.S. Constitution prevents the American government from allowing the enshrined rights of American citizens to be surrendered to higher authority. Otherwise, the first persons who should be arrested and tried are Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Madeleine Albright and the rest of the gang that waged war against the civilian populations of Serbia, Iraq and the Sudan. Milosevic should be tried in Serbia by the Serbs. Carla del Ponte should be refused the right to intervene in other countries' affairs in her never-ceasing quest for publicity and power. President Bush should immediately tell the unelected officials who are lecturing Uncle Sam to tell it to the Marines, and if need be, send the leathernecks to teach the Dutch-based busybodies a lesson.
At approximately 12:30 a.m. on Sunday, March 4, I was sitting in my study, idly surfing the Net, when I heard a noise that sounded like a gun going off. In Shepherd's Bush, where I live, it's not particularly uncommon to hear gunshots in the middle of the night, so I didn't think anything of it. The second bang, however, wasn't so easily dismissed. It came a few seconds later and, in addition to being at least four times louder, was powerful enough to send a jolt through my building. "That was a bomb," I thought. "And it was close."
I threw on a coat and ran downstairs to investigate, only to discover that my entire street had been cordoned off with police tape. Indeed, the whole surrounding area was teeming with police. There was no doubt about it: a bomb had exploded a few hundred yards from my flat. The following day it emerged that the Real IRA was responsible. The Irish terrorist organization had planted a 20-pound bomb in a London taxi outside BBC Television Centre on Wood Lane, the street that runs parallel to mine. Luckily no one was killed, though a London Transport worker was slightly injured. At 11:22 p.m.?68 minutes before the bomb went off?a London hospital received an anonymous tip, and the police were able to evacuate 70 journalists from the building and seal the area. The reason my street had been cordoned off was because it's one of the main access points to Wood Lane.
Living in London, it's easy to forget the "troubles" in Ulster, particularly now that the IRA has effectively laid down its arms following the 1998 "Good Friday Agreement," the power-sharing arrangement hammered out three years ago between the unionists and the republicans. Most British people are, frankly, bored rigid by anything in connection with Northern Ireland and automatically tune out whenever the subject comes up on the news. Last week's bomb was an unwelcome reminder that the so-called "peace process" hasn't actually resulted in a ceasefire.
The Real IRA is a hard-line republican faction that's totally opposed to any kind of cooperation with the British government. It's dedicated to the removal of British troops from the region and won't accept any form of compromise. It's one of several dissident republican groups that have emerged in the wake of the decision by Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, to participate in elections to the parliamentary assembly in Ulster set up by the British. Following Sinn Fein's acceptance of the Good Friday Agreement, support for the Real IRA has been growing rapidly, particularly in the light of its terrorist activities. Last year, for instance, the Real IRA was responsible for a mortar bomb attack on the headquarters of MI-6, the British equivalent of the CIA, as well as a bomb on a railway line in west London and one on Hammersmith Bridge. However, the Real IRA's most "successful" terrorist act to date was the bombing of Omagh town center in Northern Ireland in 1998, which resulted in the death of 29 civilians, including an 18-month-old child, and the injury of more than 100 innocent bystanders. It was the deadliest atrocity in the province in 30 years. The attack on the BBC is thought to be in retaliation for a current affairs program broadcast last October that named four of the suspects in the Omagh bombing, including one man identified as the "officer commanding the Real IRA." Since the program went out, none of the four men has been arrested, though police are believed to be building a case against them.
It's probably too much to hope that the Real IRA's decision to target the BBC will lead to a decline in its support in the U.S., particularly on the eve of the St. Patrick's Day parade. In my experience, American support for the cause of Irish republicanism is based less on sympathy for Northern Irish Catholics than hatred of the Brits. I remember making a television program myself in 1996 in which I went round New York on St. Patrick's Day asking the revelers a series of questions to find out just how much they knew about the "home country." Unfortunately, not one person could name the president of Ireland or the captain of the Irish soccer team, and only a tiny minority could identify Ireland on a map of the world. I was reminded of that episode of The Simpsons in which the residents of Springfield decide that they, too, are Irish and hold a St. Patrick's Day parade of their own.
The one fact I found myself repeating again and again to American republican sympathizers during my five years in the States was that the majority of people in Northern Ireland want to remain part of the UK. This is because a majority of Ulster residents are Protestants and feel a much greater affinity with Britain than they do with the Catholic south. If the British security forces pulled out tomorrow, there would be a civil war in which the Northern Irish Catholics would be slaughtered by their Protestant neighbors for the simple reason that they're the minority, just as the Muslims were in Bosnia and the Tutsis were in Rwanda. The Real IRA, which in spite of growing support still only has a few hundred members, would be wiped out in less than 24 hours. The fact is?and I've yet to meet a single American who's grasped this, whether they make a bogus claim to Irish ancestry or not?British troops in Ulster are there in large part to protect the Catholics, not to persecute them.
It is a safe assumption that almost everything we have been told about Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent charged with espionage, is untrue. Take the matter of his arrest. The FBI says it picked him up as he dropped off classified papers for his Russian handler at a park in Vienna, VA. For a man who supposedly was extraordinarily prudent, this would seem to be amazingly reckless behavior. The chances of being observed are high. Besides, aren't there easier ways to deliver top-secret documents? What about microfilms, computer disks, e-mail? Oddly enough, the FBI nabbed Hanssen but did not bother to wait for the Russian to show up. Wouldn't that have been conclusive proof of espionage, not to mention a spectacular propaganda coup at the expense of Vladimir Putin?
We have also been told that the information that alerted the U.S. government to Hanssen's treachery came from a CIA double agent working for Russian intelligence. It seems bizarre for us to be crowing about this. Aren't the Russians now likely to launch a mole-hunt to find the traitor in their midst? Sure enough, The Washington Post is already writing breathlessly: "The Russian government has launched an aggressive probe to determine who within its ranks may have provided the United States with the KGB case file that led to the arrest of FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen? Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, and other senior government officials in Moscow are involved in the investigation."
Now, a former KGB man like Putin would suspect that talk of a CIA double agent may just be a U.S. ruse to provoke the Russians into self-destructive recriminations. On the other hand, that may be exactly what the Americans want him to think. The point is, very little of what the FBI is putting out now should be believed.
The FBI claims that Hanssen betrayed the names of U.S. agents to the Russians. The men were arrested, tried and executed. Leave aside for the moment the question of whether we really know the fate of agents in Russia. It would not have made much sense for the Russians to respond to Hanssen's revelations in such a fashion. If you discover that one of your agents is in reality a double agent, you don't arrest him and thereby endanger your source. You use him to feed false information to your enemy.
And there were other absurd stories. Best of all was the one put out by both The New York Times and The Washington Post. Apparently Hanssen had revealed to the Russians a secret tunnel the U.S. government had built under their Washington Embassy so as to listen in on secret communications. Whether Hanssen did or did not reveal this to the Russians, it really does not matter. It is hard to think of a project more futile. Important communications between Moscow and the Embassy are coded. Encryption has ensured that coded messages today are completely indecipherable. Russian Embassy secretaries ordering lunch from the Chinese takeout would have been the only messages the U.S. intelligence services could have listened to.
According to a wild Miami Herald story, Hanssen "may have sold Russia information on how the United States tracks foreign submarines and sniffs out nuclear, chemical and biological weapons... The loss of such technical secrets could demolish a number of the nation's most important intelligence programs and wipe out more than a billion dollars in research and investment." This is ludicrous. At most, Hanssen may have revealed to the Russians something about how Americans spy on them over here. Yet these wild claims have a purpose: to fuel Washington hysteria about America's supposed vulnerability to terrorism and espionage. According to CIA Director George Tenet, "technology has enabled, driven, or magnified the threat to us? [A]ge-old resentments threaten to spill over into open violence; and?a growing perception of our so-called 'hegemony' has become a lightning rod for the disaffected."
Even before the Hanssen arrest, the FBI had been rapidly expanding its counterintelligence activities. Last year a congressional report by the National Commission on Terrorism criticized the CIA and FBI for being "overly risk averse" in investigating terrorist organizations. Last year, the Senate Appropriations Committee proposed spending $23 million to fund a new domestic counterterrorism "czar." Last year also, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill that would create a "Council of Terrorism Preparedness," to be chaired by the president.
Then in January, just two weeks before the end of his term, Bill Clinton issued a presidential directive, creating the office of "counterintelligence czar." The directive institutionalizes a program called "Counterintelligence 21," whose purpose is to facilitate cooperation between the FBI, the CIA and the Pentagon. The "counterintelligence czar" would be appointed by, and would be answerable to, a national counterintelligence board of directors consisting of the FBI director, the deputy director of the CIA, the deputy secretary of defense and a senior official from the Justice Dept. He would also attend to the needs of the corporate sector. According to the directive, the office of the "czar" "will conduct and coordinate CI [counterintelligence] vulnerability surveys throughout government, and with the private sector as appropriate? It will engage government and private sector entities to identify more clearly and completely what must be protected. The Office will conduct and coordinate CI community outreach programs in the government and private sector."
This program dwarfs Nixon's Huston Plan. Nothing like this had ever been implemented during the Cold War when the United States faced serious rivals. "Everyone who works this problem has quickly realized that the old paradigm of the threats to U.S. national security?hostile nations and their intelligence services?is far too narrow a definition in the post-Cold War era. There are countless potential bad guys capable of doing us significant harm," says John MacGaffin, a CIA and FBI consultant and one of the geniuses behind "Counterintelligence 21." Apparently, national security is no longer about protecting the military. It is about defending the banking system, the Internet and America's technologies.
"Counterintelligence 21" is sure to foster national paranoia, not to mention a massive expansion of the powers of government. President Bush has indicated that he intends to go ahead with it.