Tim Tate

STATEMENT ON RESIGNATION FROM THE SOCIETY OF AUTHORS MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE

I have today resigned from the Management Committee of the Society of Authors.

The Society of Authors has recently been under an intense spotlight over allegations about Twitter posts by Joanne Harris. On Thursday, November 17, members overwhelmingly rejected a motion at the AGM, calling on Joanne to step down from her role as Chair of the Management Committee.

I can only speak of my experience in Management Committee meetings in the past year, but in these I have always found Joanne a courteous and professional Chair.  Likewise, I have always found the Society’s CEO, Nicola Solomon, assiduously attentive to the issues which the Management Committee tried to address.  I do not know either well enough to be called a friend, but our discussions have always been collegiate and respectful.

Unfortunately, my recent experience of the Management Committee itself has been rather less congenial.

I was honoured to be elected to the Committee one year ago. I had hoped to use my background, and the lessons learned during my 40+ year career, to serve the Society’s 12,000+ members.

It was for my experience as an investigative journalist that at the start of this month I was appointed to a subcommittee, set up to examine formal complaints made against Joanne and Nicola by five individuals.

Sadly, the impartiality and integrity of that investigation subcommittee has been undermined internal disputes. Today, these made it impossible for me to continue, in good conscience, to serve on the Management Committee.

As a journalist, author and film-maker I have campaigned for openness and transparency. I am therefore posting below the full text of my resignation letter, submitted today.

I have always been – and remain – a believer in the importance of trade unions. The Society of Authors is a trade union and its staff do extraordinary and vital work on behalf of all authors. I am profoundly saddened that recently the Society’s Management Committee has not conducted itself as well as those staff, and the creative community we all belong to, deserve.

Posted on November 18, 2022 by Tim Tate

A TORY MP, PARTYGATE AND A CURIOUSLY VANISHING INTEGRITY

Dr. Andrew Murrison MP takes “issues of integrity and wrongdoing in high places seriously”.

We know this because those are exactly the words he wrote in response to an email I sent him in the middle of January.

I had asked Dr. Murrison, as my constituency MP, what he intended to do about the emerging evidence of unlawful parties inside 10 Downing Street during the COVID lockdowns, and specifically if he would hold the Prime Minister to account for his involvement in them.

Dr. Murrison’s response was measured, but very clearly indicated an unwillingness to tolerate Boris Johnson’s antics.  But he was – then – waiting for the outcome of the Sue Gray and Metropolitan Police investigations and would not “pass judgement” until they had reported.

Nonetheless, Dr. Murrison was at pains to stress his record of standing up for integrity – and against the Prime Minister – during the then-recent Owen Patterson lobbying affair, in which Boris Johnson ordered his MPs to vote for a doomed Parliamentary motion which would have changed the rules by which Mr. Patterson – another Tory MP – had been found culpable of improper lobbying, and thus let him off the hook.

“You might have noticed from my reaction to the Owen Patterson lobbying scandal that I take issues of integrity and wrongdoing in high places very seriously, once the facts are established.

“In the Patterson case … my ex-colleague was found by the Independent Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to have engaged in paid lobbying for two businesses. I believed it was not right to change the rules on the hoof for a colleague. I therefore did not support the Government then. Many of the same rules and arguments apply now.”[1]

Curiously, however, within a fortnight Dr. Murrison’s commitment to “integrity” seemed to slide somewhat. After the interim Gray report was released, I wrote to him again, asking him what he intended to do about the Prime Minister in view of its findings.

Although he now viewed Boris Johnson’s actions – and those of his staff – “very seriously indeed”, this hand-wringing was couched in (and indeed preceded by) a ringing declaration of loyalty to the Prime Minister.

“I supported Mr. Johnson’s leadership bids in 2016 and 2019 and have continued to be strongly supportive of the policy direction of his government …

“Mr. Johnson has accepted the interim Gray Report, apologised and set out what he intends to do … Please be assured that I take what is alleged to have happened very seriously indeed. As MS. Gray observes and Mr. Johnson accepts, there were failures of leadership and judgment.

“However, I must also acknowledge that Mr. Johnson has delivered on Brexit when nobody else could, has generally make [sic] the right calls on Covid … that there are far more jobs in the economy than we thought possible eighteen months ago, and that of G7 members, the UK is leading the economic recovery from the pandemic in part because of the courageous decisions the government took at the start of the crisis and at the end of last year …”

Quite how all this – even if true (and there are multiple reasons for scepticism) – could excuse what Sue Gray’s interim report had revealed was unclear. Nor was Dr. Murrison yet ready to pronounce final judgment on the Prime Minister: that would have to wait for the full Gray report and the result of Metropolitan Police enquiries.

“To be honest, Ms. Gray’s update adds very little. Frustratingly for those wishing to inform their position with the anticipated full and objective statement of the facts, it will now be necessary to await the outcome of the Met investigation and Ms. Gray’s subsequent report …

“The situation remains dynamic. You can be assured that I will be watching developments like a hawk. At this stage I rule nothing in or out. However, I am bound to say that what continues to matter most to me is delivery by government and the betterment of the lived experience of those I have the privilege to represent. The position I adopt and the actions I will take will always be driven by an assessment of how that can best be served.”[2]

This email seemed to be backing away from Dr. Murrison’s previous celebration of his own record on matters of probity – a suggestion I put to him later the same day, but which he was quick to reject.

“No, I’ve been consistent. No softening at all. I think I would look pretty daft if I called for him to go and the Met then exonerated him.”[3]

Alas, for Boris Johnson – and presumably for Dr. Murrison – the police did not “exonerate” him. Instead they issued him with a Fixed Penalty Notice, making Johnson the first Prime Minister – ever – to be punished for an offence while in office.

Nor did Sue Gray’s final report provide any greater comfort. In May, it disclosed a succession of drink-fuelled parties inside Downing Street, where officials vomited on the walls, fought with each other, damaged property and verbally abused both police and cleaners within the building.

All of this took place in breach of the COVID lockdown rules which the Prime Minister had imposed on the entire country; and photographs showed the Prime Minister drinking toasts to his staff at some of the events. Unsurprisingly, Ms. Gray excoriated those at the head of the Government.

“I found … failures of leadership and judgment in No 10 and the Cabinet Office. The events that I investigated were attended by leaders in government. Many of these events should not have been allowed to happen. It is also the case that some of the more junior civil servants believed that their involvement in some of these events was permitted given the attendance of senior leaders. The senior leadership at the centre, both political and official, must bear responsibility for this culture.”[4]

On the day the Gray Report was published, Boris Johnson made a statement in the House of Commons. He described himself as “humbled” by the findings and promised that he had “learned my lesson”.

Strangely, however, one of these first “lessons” appeared to be his re-writing of the Ministerial Code to remove all its previous references to “honesty, integrity, transparency and accountability”, and to reduce the penalty for breaching the Code from automatic resignation to a temporary loss of pay and/or an apology.

Since this occurred while Johnson was – and is – facing investigation by the Parliamentary Privileges Committee for allegedly breaching the very same Code, this seemed to be a repeat of the Owen Patterson fiasco: an attempt, in Dr. Murrison’s own words, “to change the rules on the hoof” and protect “a colleague” – in this case the Prime Minister himself – from the consequences of his actions.

Last week I wrote again to Dr. Murrison, asking him in the light of all this, and of his commitment to issues of integrity and wrongdoing in high places, whether he now intended to submit a letter of no confidence in Boris Johnson: the answer is – apparently – ‘no’.

“In my view Sue Gray’s findings, whilst shocking, do not materially alter what we already knew or suspected. Consequently, my previous remarks on the matter are unchanged including those made online and in the national press”.[5]

The latter turned out to be an article by Dr. Murrison in the Guardian in which he described himself as a “serial Boris supporter”, praised “his brand of Brexity, one-nation Conservatism”, and indicated that the decision on whether to remove the Prime Minister would be based not on integrity, but rather on the pragmatics politics of whether Johnson was “an electoral asset or liability.”

If this pre-police fine and pre-Gray Report judgement was somewhat gnomic, Dr. Murrison is today even less willing to tell his constituents what he plans to do about the dominant and most urgent issue in British politics.

“I do not intend to comment further at this stage on Mr Johnson’s future or on any confidence issues relating to his status as leader of the Conservative party. However, I will continue to actively support the government in carrying forward the policies that flow from the manifesto on which I was elected in 2019.”[6]

Quite what happened to Dr. Murrison, the champion of integrity in political life, in the weeks since January is impossible to know: it seems to have vanished behind his veil of determined non-transparency and Tory real-politik.

Sadly, as the American writer, producer and political commentator Jon Stewart, once noted: “If you don’t stick to your values when they’re being tested, they’re not values: they’re hobbies.”

Quite.

[1] Email from Dr. Andrew Murrison MP (Conservative: South West Wiltshire), January 16, 2022.

[2] Email from Dr. Andrew Murrison MP, February 1, 2022.

[3] Second Email from Dr. Andrew Murrison MP, February 1, 2022

[4]   “Findings Of Second Permanent Secretary’s Investigation Into Alleged Gatherings On Government Premises During Covid Restrictions” (May 25, 2022): “Conclusions”, p.36

[5] Email from Dr. Andrew Murrison MP, May 30, 2022.

[6] Ibid.

Posted on June 2, 2022June 2, 2022 by Tim Tate

A VERY PECULIAR SENSITIVITY

MI5 and the curious case of Michał Goleniewski

Sixty years ago the most important Cold War spy the West had ever known defected at the US Consulate in West Berlin.

Lt. Col. Michał Goleniewski was a very senior officer in the Polish Intelligence Service, who simultaneously worked for the KGB. For almost three years, under the self-chosen cover name ‘Sniper’, he had risked his life to smuggle an unprecedented haul of Soviet Bloc intelligence documents to the West; when he defected, across divided Berlin in January 1961, he provided hundreds more microfilm frames and top secret documents.

In total – according to the CIA’s assessment report – he provided details of 1,693 spies and their handlers, burrowed into western governments and intelligence services throughout Europe and the United States. After his defection and safe housing in the United States, arrests, trials and convictions of Soviet bloc spies followed in Britain, France, Sweden, Germany and Israel – though, strangely, not the United States. Each was the direct result of Goleniewski’s information; in many cases, his intelligence was the vital factor

In the UK alone, Goleniewski’s information led to the arrest of the Portland Spy Ring, which had betrayed highly sensitive Admiralty secrets to Moscow, and the capture of George Blake – the KGB’s long term mole inside the Secret Intelligence Service MI6. In April 1961, the five Portland Spies were convicted at the Old Bailey and sentenced to between 15 and 25 years in prison; the following May Blake was sent down for 42 years.

Unsurprisingly, western governments were profoundly appreciative. The CIA deemed him “one of the West’s most valuable counter intelligence sources” and “the best defector the CIA ever had”. It sponsored the first of his (bigamous) marriage ceremonies in the US, as well as a private Bill in Congress which theoretically allowed him to apply for US citizenship.

In the same period, MI5 praised “the inestimable value” of his information and placed on record its profound gratitude for his “copious” and “invaluable” services on behalf of British national security. For good measure it sent him an antique silver tankard as a token of the nation’s gratitude.

All of which makes Goleniewski’s absence from the story of the Cold War somewhat peculiar. Whilst he does crop up as a shadowy figure, tentatively referred to in accounts of the Portland spies and Blake, by and large he has been airbrushed from history. Ostensibly this is – on the rare occasions it is explained – due to his unfortunate and entirely bogus claims, beginning in 1964, to be the (long-dead) Tsarevich Alexei Romanoff, only son of Tsar Nicholas and thus heir to the Russian Imperial Throne.

Some years ago I began researching Goleniewski’s remarkable story; I wanted to discover what drove an extraordinarily brave and devastatingly effective spy for the West to become a deranged Romanoff pretender. The result is my book, The Spy Who Was Left Out in the Cold, published today by Transworld/Penguin[1].

It proved to be surprisingly difficult to prise information out of the governments who had benefitted from his genuinely courageous efforts. After some Freedom of Information Act prompting, the CIA released a portion of its files; these led to other documents it had de-classified which yielded rather more (and more disturbing) records of the way the Agency handled its former star defector. These showed that it reneged on its commitments, starved him of money and plainly began harassing and discrediting him.

Unlike the CIA, MI5 is specifically insulated from Freedom of Information Act requests. Although a substantial number of its reports on Goleniewski’s information can be found in other historic de-classified files on the successful Security Service espionage cases which followed, today’s occupants of Thames House were regretfully unwilling to disclose anything further.

I wrote to MI5’s archivist asking whether it still held a file on Michał Goleniewski. To its very real credit, the Security Service responded (it is under no legal obligation to do so). It confirmed that a file on Goleniewski sits in its registry, but that “after careful consideration, we have concluded that we are unable to release it to TNA [The National Archives], due to the continuing sensitivity of the material contained within it.”

What could this “continuing sensitivity” possibly concern ? Goleniewski defected exactly 60 years ago, and the Soviet Bloc for which he worked collapsed three full decades ago. What information in his MI5 file could be current – let alone “sensitive” today ?

Speculation is generally anathema to the practice of good journalism. But in this case, documents I located in archives across the United States offer signposts to possible explanations. His own, previously unpublished letters, affidavits and detailed complaints show that he warned MI5 about a “middle-ranking” mole in its own midst: a spy, working for the KGB, who was never uncovered in a decade-long blundering internal investigation. Similarly, there is some evidence that he tried to persuade British intelligence to act against Kim Philby, months before Philby’s escape to Moscow.

Added to this, documentary evidence clearly shows that MI5 continued to consult – and pay – Goleniewski for more than a decade after the CIA abruptly severed ties with him on the basis that he had lost his mind. The Security Service was surprisingly untroubled by his entirely fraudulent claims to be Alexei Romanoff.

The continuing western secrecy surrounding the long strange case of Michał Goleniewski is all the more puzzling in the light of the release of his Polish intelligence service files – more than 1,100 pages in total. These dossiers, held at the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, reveal a much more nuanced, if even more disturbing, picture of the best spy the West ever had – then lost.

It is surely a sorry state of affairs when the records of the communist Polish Intelligence Services are more available than those of our own – especially since Goleniewski was ostensibly a traitor to his homeland but, initially at least, a hero to Britain and the United States.

But unless or until Britain’s deeply unsatisfactory Freedom of Information Act is tightened, MI5’s most peculiar “sensitivity” will continue to keep secret the full story of the debt this country – and its allies – owe to Michał Goleniewski.

[1] A US edition, titled “Agent Sniper” will be published in December by St. Martin’s Press

Posted on May 27, 2021 by Tim Tate

HOW MUCH IS THAT GIRL IN THE WINDOW ?

The true – but hidden – cost of ‘legal’ prostitution in the world’s most famous Red Light District.

In April 2018 I received an e-mail from two young Dutch women.

Anna Hendriks and Olivia Smit[1] were then 32; they had escaped from lengthy periods of sexual slavery in Amsterdam’s Red Light District – Anna had worked in the neon-lit windows for seven years, Olivia for five – and had recently helped bring to justice the vicious pimp who forced them into prostitution, and had kept them there with violence.

Would I, these young women asked, be willing to help them tell their story ?

As a documentary maker and an author I had previously investigated Holland’s legalised prostitution industry. In 2011, my Al Jazeera series on 21^st century slavery included a 30-minute film which showed that, contrary to claims that this ‘liberalisation’ helped women by ‘enabling’ them to sell their bodies willingly and safely, legalisation had, in fact, caused a significant increase in international sex trafficking of brutalised sexual slaves by organized crime gangs. (You can view the film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmMhDRJt0ek)

Two years earlier I had helped a British woman, Sarah Forsyth, tell her story of being tricked and trafficked from the north-east of England to Holland’s Red Light Districts. The resulting book, Slave Girl, has sold more than 700,000 copies worldwide.

And yet, when I opened the email from Anna and Olivia I was initially hesitant. Not because their stories seemed improbable – they were all too horribly familiar from my previous work – nor because there was no hard evidence to support them: on the contrary, the women provided me with copies of police reports and court judgments which unequivocally bore out their account. So why the reluctance ?

Both the Al Jazeera film and the Slave Girl book had provoked a backlash from pro-prostitution supporters or campaigners. Sometimes this turned personal and very, very nasty: Sarah Forsyth was accused of inventing her entire story (despite the fact – reported in the book – that her pimp was convicted in a British court of trafficking her), and I was denounced for helping her write it.

But meeting and interviewing Anna and Olivia, and carefully studying their documentary evidence, convinced me that their story was simply too important not to tell. As they quietly and with great dignity stressed, if two young middle-class girls from ordinary families can so easily be sucked in to the industrialised conveyor belt of paid-for sex and forced by violence to sell themselves in the world’s shop window of legalized prostitution without anyone intervening, the same could – and does – happen to anyone. As Anna and Olivia put it:

No child dreams of this life. No little girl grows up with the hope of one day renting her body to dozens of men, night in, night out, allowing them to penetrate her, careless of the damage they cause. Yet for thousands – tens of thousands – of women this is what happens. Six nights a week, we were two of them.

Once upon a time we were not really any different from most of you. Or your children. Or a young girl you know. We were not sexually exploited by our families or anyone in authority over us; nor were we drug addicts, driven to sell our bodies for the price of a fix. And yet at the age of 16 we were groomed and then forced into the commercial sex trade.  

When – at last – we escaped we were as different from you as it is possible to be. Sex work leaves an indelible mark on those who undertake it. Over the course of our years behind the windows what we experienced, what we endured and what we saw, changed us so fundamentally that compared to you we sometimes feel like aliens from another galaxy.

I am privileged to have been trusted by Anna and Olivia to write Body For Rent.   If it wasn’t an easy story to tell – and if it is profoundly shocking to read – that only re-enforces the years of pain, fear and abuse which these two brave young women endured for long long.

I am also very grateful to my indefatigable agent, Andrew Lownie, and to Orion Books. Both saw the importance of Anna and Olivia’s harrowing story. I hope you, as readers, find it as deeply affecting as we all do. And I hope that by telling it, the book gives pause for thought to the millions who travel to Amsterdam each year, and who view the Red Light District as harmless “fun” or “entertainment”.

It is not. It is a vastly-lucrative prison which makes fortunes for those who run it and who are willing to exploit the women held captive behind the glass windows.  Anna and Olivia were two of them. All they ask is that you listen.

[1] Because of the stigma attached to prostitution – even when it is forced – ‘Anna’ and ‘Olivia’ are pseudonyms to protect the women’s identities.

Posted on December 12, 2019 by Tim Tate

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

LEON BRITTAN AND THE INDEPENDENT INQUIRY INTO CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE

The much-delayed Independent Child Sexual Abuse Inquiry hearings into the Westminster paedophilia allegations finally began this morning with a lengthy opening statement by its lead counsel, Brian Altman QC.

Full disclosure: I provided a written submission to the Inquiry, which has now been issued to the Core Participants in the Westminster hearings. I have previously published my submission on this blog and do so again below.

Much of Mr. Altman’s opening speech was devoted to the historical context in which sensational claims, made in Parliament and in the media, led the Home Office to set up IICSA. This happened, as he noted, way back in March 2015 when Theresa May was still Home Secretary.

Although – in Mr. Altman’s own words – the Inquiry offers “an unprecedented opportunity to examine the extent to which institutions and organisations in England & Wales have taken seriously their responsibility to protect children”, he stressed that it would not “make findings as to whether individual allegations of child sexual abuse that have been made against Westminster figures are true. That is a matter for the police and for the courts.”  Instead, it would examine whether the various political and governmental organisations had handled the claims appropriately.

Not for the first time in the vexed history of government-ordered child sexual abuse enquiries, this poses a fundamental and logically insoluble problem. If no verdict is reached on whether the allegations were accurate, how can any sensible conclusion be reached on whether official responses to them were appropriate ?

The same conundrum affected – badly – the judge-led Inquiry into the 1987 Cleveland Child Abuse Crisis. Under the remit imposed on Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, this was forbidden from deciding whether any of the 121 children involved had been sexually abused; instead its £5 million investigations were tasked with reporting on how the allegations had been handled.

This is the stuff of madness: IICSA, like Butler-Sloss before it, is spending vast sums of taxpayers’ money on considering the probity of official responses to a substantial elephant in the room, whilst being prohibited from considering whether or not the elephant actually existed.

There is also a second and rather more specific problem. Since at least some of those “Westminster figures” about whom allegations have been – very publicly – made are now dead, there is absolutely no prospect of any police or judicial verdict on their guilt or innocence. IICSA is all there is. And that leads us on to the curious case of Leon Brittan, former occupant of Theresa May’s old desk at the Home Office.

Mr. Brittan was one of the central figures in the tangled and multiple skeins of media claims.   The most prominent of these were very loudly trumpeted by the now-defunct independent website, Exaro News and – in particular – its soi-disant “editor in Chief”, Mark Watts .  In December 2013 Exaro and Mr. Watts claimed that detectives from the Metropolitan Police’s twin operations Fairbank and Fernbridge had “seized a video that places a former Cabinet minister at one of several parties where boys were sexually abused by men … Exaro has also learned that police have ‘talked to’ the ex-minister about his attendance a the sex party”. [The original webpage for this Exaro story is no longer functioning].

The story was picked up and subsequently reported by rather more mainstream news organisations. Although Exaro did not name the ex-minister, it was common knowledge amongst journalists (and on social media) that the man identified and allegedly interviewed by detectives was Leon Brittan – then still alive.

In March 2014, Exaro and the Sunday Express followed this up with a further story.  They claimed hat in 1982 H.M. Customs and Excise had seized a videotape which showed “child abuse in the presence of a former cabinet minister”.   Once again, Mr. Brittan was not named , but every journalist and Twitter follower of what Mr. Watts called “undoubtedly, the biggest political scandal in post-war Britain” knew he was the politician allegedly involved.

I interviewed one of the senior officers in Operation Fairbank/Fernbridge after each of these stories broke. He insisted – vehemently – that neither was remotely true.   Instead he told me that his officers had gathered different – and potentially far more damning – information suggesting prime facie evidence that Leon Brittan had an interest in child sexual abuse. I published the story on these officer’s claims this blog on 4 August, 2015. [“The Politician, The Paedophiles & The Press: The Long Strange Saga of Leon Brittan”: it is still there to be read by those with the stamina to scroll back through the posts].

His evidence rested on two planks. The first was an interview the detective said his team had carried out with the Customs officer identified in the Exaro story. This man had told Fernbridge’s officers that the tapes seized in 1982 did not depict the former cabinet minister and that he had made this clear to the Exaro and Express journalists. A tape recording of that encounter, which I obtained, transcribed and published, bore him out.

However, he also volunteered to the officers that on another occasion he had stopped a man who he believed to be Leon Brittan at Dover customs and had seized child pornography from him.   He had reported this to his superiors and suggested that Fernbridge locate the Customs seizure logs. The detective I spoke to in 2014 told me that this line of enquiry was on-going.

The second thread of evidence relating to Mr. Brittan concerned Elm Guest House, the much-discussed B&B for gay men, closed after a police raid in 1982. According to the Fernbridge officer, a young boy had been found on the premises on the night of the raid and in an interview with a police officer and social worker had told them not to worry about the abuse he had suffered because “Uncle Leon” from “the Big House” would sort everything out.

Operation Fernbridge got this information – so the detective said – from the police officer, but was surprised to find that the boy’s (unsigned) written statement made no mention of “Uncle Leon”. The team then tracked down the boy – now in his early 40s; he initially agreed to speak to them, but subsequently refused to do so. Nonetheless, the senior officer who I interviewed told me that he was convinced Leon Brittan had an active sexual interest in children.

The opening statement today by Brian Altman QC incudes the following notable statement in its section on Elm Guest House.

“It appeared that one boy, aged 10, had been sexually abused on the premises. The boy made a statement to the police that he had been raped by adult males at the house. A social worker claimed that the boy made an allegation in relation to ‘Uncle Leon’.”

[Transcript; Page 8].

There is no follow-up to this remarkable passage in any of Mr. Altman’s published remarks. It is simply left there to dangle in the wind. And yet it seems to establish as a finding of fact at least one section of the story the Fernbridge detective told me.

I made clear in my published story that I had no means to establish the accuracy of what the senior Fernbridge officer said – though he seemed to have no motive to be making it up. However, in my submission to IICSA, which detailed all of his allegations, I urged the Inquiry to interview the detective and the Customs officer. I stressed that the latter was in his late 80s and in failing health and that therefore time was of the essence.  The published IICSA timetable for the first week of the Westminster hearings does not include either of their names. Nor does it include mine. Although I repeatedly asked to give oral evidence to support my lengthy written submission, its lawyers refused to allow me to do so. They also declined to give an explanation for this.

If the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse is serious in its ambition to establish facts of this highly-polarized controversy it must allow the evidence to be heard – and tested – in public. The Fernbridge detective and the Customs officer must be called to testify and their claims about Leon Brittan must be examined.

To do otherwise is to ignore the fundamental question about the elephant in the room. And that is fair neither to the public, which is footing the bill to find out the truth, or to now-deceased politicians such as Leon Brittan who cannot defend themselves.

Posted on March 4, 2019 by Tim Tate

CHILD SEXUAL OFFENDING – NEGLIGENCE ON AN INDUSTRIAL SCALE

CHILD SEXUAL OFFENDING – NEGLIGENCE ON AN INDUSTRIAL SCALE

“In too many cases in prisons, we found that little if anything was done to reduce the likelihood of reoffending …

[for] sexual offenders in the community … the overall assessment of sexual offenders was inadequate in a third of cases”.

HM Inspectorate of Probation: “Management & Supervision of men convicted of sexual offences”: 24 January 2019

Last autumn Waterside Press published an updated edition of the book I wrote in 1995 with the late Ray Wyre – Britain’s most effective expert on controlling the behaviour of paedophile offenders.

The Murder of Childhood recounted Ray’s ground breaking work with the child sex killer Robert Black, but – most importantly – placed this within the context of the chronic lack of understanding of sex offenders, and the shambolic official programs to prevent them abusing, or killing, more children.

Ray had developed pioneering and successful programmes to change the behaviour of offenders. Much of this took place within the Gracewell Clinic, then the only residential treatment facility for paedophiles outside prison; but a toxic combination of public ignorance and suspicion, worsened by governmental negligence caused Gracewell to be shut down just before the book was published.

For the new edition, ten years after Ray’s untimely death and a full quarter of a century after the original publication, I wanted to re-examine the issue which dominated his life and try to discover whether the warnings we set out in The Murder of Childhood had been heeded. What I found was depressing and infuriating in equal measure. As the introduction to the 2018 book reported:

“Changes in way convicted paedophiles are treated in prison, and monitored after their release, [have not] improved our ability to protect children from them.  

If anything, the sombre picture we painted in The Murder of Childhood is more disturbing and dangerous in 2018 than it was when the book was published in 1995.”

Ray’s most trenchant warning had always been that refusing to examine (much less understand) what leads – or enables – adult men to inflict sexual abuse on children prevented any coherent or effective work to stop them doing so again. This double failure, he argued, all but guaranteed that more and more children would be sexually assaulted, exploited or – in rare cases – murdered by men whose distorted belief systems had not been changed, even when they were – all too rarely – caught and imprisoned.

Fast forward 25 years and statistics showed an explosion in the number of victims of child sexual abuse and exploitation. Yet, despite Ray’s tireless public campaigning, I found that very little public money or effort had been expended on attempting to understand the pathology of these men – nor to work effectively inside prison or in the community to interrupt their cycle of offending.

The sole successor to his pioneering facility, the Wolvercote Residential Clinic, had been shut down in a depressing re-run of the Gracewell closure, abetted by either incompetence or negligence within the government department notionally responsible for policy on sex offenders – the Home Office – and the attempted sex offender treatment programs inside prison were so poorly designed that the Ministry of Justice’s own analysis showed that men who took part in them were slightly more likely to reoffend than those who did not.

To a degree, however, the evidence presented in the new chapter of the 2018 addition was necessarily anecdotal – the result of a failure of successive governments to assign funds for work evaluating the nature of, and threat posed by, paedophilia.

But today, H.M. Inspectorate of Probation released a report which confirms the anecdotal evidence – and shows that the systems in place to prevent sex offenders committing further offences are utterly inadequate. The Management and Supervision of Men Convicted of Sexual Offences says that offender treatment programs inside prison are ill-conceived and poorly delivered, with the inevitable result that:

“Work in prison with men convicted of sexual offences was poor overall …

in too many cases in prisons, we found that little if anything was done to reduce the likelihood of reoffending”.

Nor is the post-release position any better. The report found that:

“The overall assessment of sexual offenders [in the community] was inadequate in a third of cases …

in too many cases … the majority of sexual offenders did not have their risk levels and needs adequately reviewed.”

It gives me no pleasure to say that The Murder of Childhood was right in 1995 and again in 2018. The protection of children from men who would sexually abuse them was lacking then and remains so today.   There is no excuse for this. In 2015 (then) Prime Minister David Cameron wrung his hands at what he described as the “industrial scale” of child sexual abuse, and promised that it would henceforth be dealt with as “a national threat” akin to terrorism.

As with much else, Cameron’s honeyed words were never translated into action. The responsibility for that lies with the Home Office – a department which  is a repeat offender in public policy failures. Its political proprietor in 2015 has succeeded Cameron in Number 10. Theresa May has become adept in dodging the blame for Home Office scandals; but amid the chaos of Brexit (caused by Cameron and which she has exacerbated), today’s she should not be allowed to duck responsibility for the governmental negligence which today’s Probation Service report reveals. It should be hammered to her door until she is forced to deal with it.

Posted on January 24, 2019 by Tim Tate

SECRETS AND SPIES

“Revolution is to take place after the total loss of the Channel ports and defeat on the Western Front …

There would be a short civil war, the Government would leave first for Bristol and then for the Colonies,

General Ironside would become dictator and after things had settled down Germany could do as she liked with Britain.”

MI5 reports on Dr. Leigh Vaughan-Henry (above), May 1940.

Somewhere in the labyrinth of the Security Services archives are – or at least were – a series of documents detailing the names and aims of the British pro-Nazis plotting one of three armed fascist coup d’état during the dark days of spring 1940.

Evidence that Dr. Leigh Vaughan-Henry, a celebrated musicologist, conductor and ardent anti-Semite, had created a substantial organisation to lead this revolution is held in an otherwise obscure Treasury Solicitors’ file, open for inspection at the National Archives in Kew.

It contains extracts of reports from undercover MI5 agents who penetrated Vaughan-Henry’s innermost circles; these show that the self-proclaimed “Leader” was getting ready to replace the elected government with a pro-Hitler puppet régime just as soon as German troops landed in Britain.

To ensure the coup’s success, he was planning the “intimidation of certain people by threat and possible action against their wives and children; bumping off certain people (this to be organized with great care)”. He had established a network of safe houses and escape routes to Eire in case of trouble; he had also acquired a “large stock” of blank passports to be provided to his followers, and was in the process of buying an enormous arsenal of .303 rifles and ammunition for them.

But the details of exactly who belonged to the 18 “cells’ (each boasting 25 members), as well as the undercover agents’ full reports and the fate of the weapons cache are absent from the Treasury file. They are held instead in Vaughan-Henry’s MI5 dossier, originally listed as PF 42909 in the Security Service’s Registry. Yet that file – or rather files: it ran to at least three volumes – is missing. It has either been withheld from the National Archives or destroyed.   Nor is this unique.

To write Hitler’s British Traitors I examined scores of once-secret files – often running to several hundred pages each – on a remarkable (and remarkably large) stratum of men and women who spied, committed acts of sabotage and worked for Nazi Germany throughout the war.   70 were prosecuted, mostly in secret trials; four were sentenced to death, two were executed.   Beyond them several hundred more British fascists were interned under wartime defence regulations; their files show that MI5 accumulated concrete evidence against them.

It took between 60 and 70 years for the British Government to de-classify these dossiers and release them to the National Archives.   But buried within them are the reference numbers of files on numerous other pro-Nazi British fascists, mostly occupying elevated positions in politics or the aristocracy.   Most were – from the fragmentary evidence available in the de-classified files – involved in activities which sent less well-connected traitors to prison or the gallows; yet the evidence of their treachery remains locked in MI5 files which remain secret.

This is inexplicable. Not simply because there can be no threat to national security by releasing documents which were created almost eight decades ago, but because the fundamental issue they expose – the treachery by these British citizens (aristocratic or otherwise) – has already been disclosed in outline in the de-classified files. Nor can it be justified on strict legal grounds. Even by the absurdly over-secretive standards of the post-war 50 Year Rule, these folders should have been turned over to the people who paid for their creation – the British taxpayers – in the 1990s; and   beyond that, the Freedom of Information Act (2000) abolished any such waiting period.

But a loophole in that Act means that it is impossible to challenge the continuing secrecy. MI5 (let alone its sister intelligence service MI6, which also played some role in the investigation of Nazi spies and their British sub-agents) is specifically excluded from the provisions of FOIA (2000). Other than an appeal to the Security Service’s conscience, there is simply no mechanism for prising historic files from its grasp.

Other nations do not take such a close-mouthed approach. Even the United States, where the intelligence community guards its secrets with some vigour, both the FBI and the CIA are subject to FOIA legislation; in theory, and often in practise, their vaults can be pried open by persistent researchers.

For seven decades the story of Hitler’s British Traitors, and of the Security Service’s to catch them, was a close-guarded secret. The refusal by successive governments to reveal the truth ensured that academics and historians falsely argued that the so-called “Fifth Column” was a myth.

The files on Leigh Vaughan-Henry and hundreds of other wartime pro-Nazi spies, saboteurs and traitors show that it was all too real. But until all the records are open the full breadth of their treachery remains unclear.   It is high time to consign this secrecy to the dustbin of history.

Posted on September 10, 2018 by Tim Tate

OF KENNEDYS AND CONSPIRACIES

What’s the difference between a conspiracy theory and a conspiracy ?

At first glace the answer might seem self-evident – and to a degree it is. But lurking behind the obvious is something fundamentally troubling about the practice of modern journalism.

Today is the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. He had just won the California Democratic Primary a vital step in his campaign to become President.

Had he lived it is likely – though not guaranteed– that he would have beaten Richard Nixon in the in November 1968 general election. What is certain is that under a second President Kennedy, the United States would have been a very different country: it would have been spared the scarring scandal of Watergate and his determination to fight social, racial and economic injustice would have begun a long-overdue process of healing the divisions which blighted America then, and do so to this day.

Internationally, too, he promised change: withdrawal from Vietnam rather than Nixon’s escalation of the war (let alone its covert expansion into Laos and Cambodia) was his most immediate commitment, but his speeches throughout Latin America two years earlier made clear that he believed the United States should treat honestly and openly with its neighbours. It seems unlikely that Ronald Reagan’s adventures in Central America – the Iran-Contra scandal was but one of several – would have happened had RFK occupied the Oval Office before him.

For all those reasons, the shooting of Robert Kennedy in a kitchen pantry at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles was a seismic event. It warranted a thorough, honest and open inquiry by Los Angeles Police. It did not get one.  Los Angeles Police mounted only a simulacrum of an investigation and with the DA’s office constructed the criminal equivalent of a Potemkin village – a Hollywood-style set whose façade concealed the truth that evidence was overlooked, destroyed or suppressed, and witnesses were ignored or intimidated into silence. After which they locked the whole sorry saga away, hiding their mis-deeds and incompetence behind impenetrable walls of official secrecy for two full decades.

Independently and then in tandem, I and former CNN journalist Brad Johnson, have spent more than 25 years investigating the RFK assassination. I made a one hour documentary about for Channel 4 in 1992 (viewable on the films pages of this website), and Brad produced a film for the Discovery Times channel in 2007. Last week our book on the case – The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: Crime, Conspiracy and Cover-Up – was released; it was accompanied by a substantial serialization – five full pages over two separate days – in the Daily Mail.

The book, and our films before it, presented clear evidence that the man convicted of murdering Robert Kennedy – Sirhan Sirhan was arrested in the pantry with a smoking gun – could not have done so. The autopsy revealed that Kennedy was shot from behind at a distance of no more than three inches; all the eye-witness testimony evidence placed Sirhan and his gun in front of Kennedy, and never closer than three feet. Simply put, the physics were impossible. A man standing a yard in front of his supposed victim cannot shoot him from behind, three inches away; which means there was a second gunman.

The ballistic evidence, too, proved the existence of a second gun being fired in the pantry. Los Angeles Police, the FBI and the LA Sheriff’s Office found – and photographed – evidence of 14 bullets or bullet holes in the walls or woodwork. Since Sirhan’s revolver held on eight bullets and several of these were recovered from the other victims that night – someone else had to have fired a weapon: 14 into eight just does not go.

Brad also located the only recording to capture the assassination – an audio tape made by a freelance reporter called Stanislaw Pruszynski. He arranged for it to be analysed by three accredited audio experts: they found clear evidence of at least 13 shots being fired, and that some of those shots so too close together that it would have been impossible for a single gun to fire them.

The Pruszynski recording and all the ballistic, forensic and eyewitness testimony was collected by Los Angeles Police. Rather than investigate it, however, LAPD suppressed and then buried it for almost 20 years. Its records remained sealed until 1988 – which is when Brad and I separately began investigating. Those records – as well as the FBI files (also suppressed for almost two decades) are vast: 50,000 pages of LAPD documents (plus tens of thousands produced by federal investigators), hundreds of transcripts of eyewitness testimony, scores of audio and visual recordings as well as 990 photographs. In total the collection occupies 36 cubic feet at the California State Archives in Sacramento: little wonder, then reviewing, analysing and cross-referencing it took Brad and I so many years.

Today, newspapers and broadcast networks in America and Britain have carried reports on the 50^th anniversary of the shooting[1]. Almost all repeat the official narrative: that Sirhan Sirhan was a lone gunman, solely responsible for the murder. Where once the commercial media would have questioned and analysed this, now it feels no requirement to do so. It is easier and cheaper to trot out the official line and then move on. Even the doubts belatedly expressed by RFK’s son and namesake, Robert Kennedy Jnr – breaking the family’s half century of silence – are either ignored or, more troublingly, publicly denounced.

Which is where the ‘C word’ comes in: the vast mountain of evidence which disproves the conventional narrative are lazily dismissed as a “conspiracy theory”. Why “lazily” ? Because this fails to make the important distinnction between conspiracies and conspiracy theories.

The latter are exercises in speculation – hypotheses drawn out from events (real or supposed). By contrast, a genuine conspiracy is, at heart, no more than an agreement between two or more people to carry out an act that is, by implication, immoral or unlawful.

And genuine conspiracies happen. Watergate was a conspiracy, as was the selling of arms to Iran to generate unauthorized funding for Nicaraguan rebels; Al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington D.C. – 9/11 – were the product of a criminal conspiracy.   Whilst each of these may be still surrounded by claims and counter-claims – conspiracy theories – the facts show that the conspiracies themselves existed.

So, too, do the facts of the Robert Kennedy Assassination. Buried in the LAPD files are the details of three conspiracies reported to it in the immediate aftermath of June 5. Each was well-sourced – indeed one came from another police department; each named the alleged conspirators; each involved RFK’s sworn enemies in organised crime and the Teamster’s Union.   Our book reveals – for the first time – those alleged plots; it does so by reproducing exactly the LAPD file documents. It also shows what the police did with the information about those conspiracies: nothing.

Neither Brad nor I are “conspiracy theorists”. We are old-school, old fashioned journalists; When we began investigating we didn’t set out to prove a belief that it involved a conspiracy. Our approach was always to ascertain the facts – slowly, patiently and forensically – from documentary evidence and witness testimony, and to pursue those facts wherever they might lead.

Nor do we claim – unlike some other reporters – to have “solved” the case. Journalists don’t solve crimes: that job belongs to the police, prosecution authorities and the courts. Our role is to investigate, locate evidence – new or overlooked – and, where that shows that the historical record is wrong or deficient, to present it with a strong recommendation for the case in question to be re-opened.

Individually and in tandem, we have done our journalistic job for the past 25 years. We believe that the preponderance of evidence we (and others) have unearthed clearly indicates the presence of a second gunman in the Ambassador Hotel pantry – and that whilst Sirhan Sirhan wounded other people, an as-yet unidentified second shooter fired all the bullets that struck Bobby, one of which killed him.

We also believe that there are strong evidential grounds for the murder to have been the result of a conspiracy. We present that evidence and show that on the balance of probabilities – the standard used by prosecutors to determine whether any investigation should be pursued – it points to Robert Kennedy’s arch-enemies: organized crime and its allies in the Central Intelligence Agency. We also reproduce documentary evidence of the involvement of each.

Does our investigation prove unequivocally that the CIA and the Mafia murdered the man who was thought by many to be on his way to the White House ? No, it does not.  But dismissing genuine investigative journalism – without bothering to check whether it has a solid evidential basis – as “a conspiracy theory” is dangerous. It abrogates the fundamental job of journalism and paves the path for its antithesis – the mushrooming of bogus ‘fake news’ websites, paranoid conspiracy theorising masquerading as real investigation, and the toxic spread ill-informed opinion over facts.

On the 50^th anniversary of the shooting in the pantry – but also as the constant repetition of ‘alternative facts’ by today’s occupant of the Oval Office begins to sap the public’s ability and willingness to sift truth from lies – it is time to demand a new, honest and official enquiry into the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

[1] Kennedy actually died of his wounds in the early hours of June 6.

Posted on June 5, 2018 by Tim Tate

BBC AND THE MYTH OF COMPETITION

Amid the outrage – political and  – over the BBC’s revelation that it pays its male “stars” considerably more than their female counterparts a more fundamental problem has been completely overlooked.

The Corporation’s justification for paying eye-watering sums of public money to such “talent” as Chris Evans (£2.2 million), Gary Lineker (£1.75 million) and Jeremy Vine (£750,000) is that there is “a market” for such people, and that to compete the BBC must pay vast salaries.

This is pernicious and dangerous myth. The BBC’s charter contains no requirement for it to compete in any such market for presenters (and the vast salaries revealed yesterday are almost exclusively paid to presenters) or anyone else.   Nor did it used to do so.

I joined the BBC in 1983. I was hired – for the princely sum of £11,000 a year – as a researcher on Roger Cook’s Radio 4 investigative series, Checkpoint. Commercial broadcasters paid much higher salaries, but it was understood and accepted that because the BBC was paid for by licence payers it would not try to match them. There was, as a result, a career path, well-trodden by lowly production staff and stars alike, which led from the Beeb to ITV. My predecessor on Checkpoint had just availed himself of this, and three years later both Roger Cook and I were bought by Central Television for its new series “The Cook Report”. I have no idea what Roger’s fee was, but my salary almost doubled.

And no-one – inside the Corporation or without – questioned the principle behind this. The BBC was a Public Service: just as with the Civil Service, people then joined its ranks accepting that the quid pro quo for taxpayer funding was a duty to serve, not profiteer.

When and why did this change ? Step forward Margaret Thatcher and her disastrous belief that greed was not just good, but God. The keynote of her decade of economic and political vandalism was that the market – and only the market – should rule.  The old post-war consensus and the belief in public service were thrown on the scrapheap, replaced by the new creed of casino capitalism.

I detailed the damage this caused to the most essential element of British broadcasting – the programmes themselves – in my recent submission to the Government’s consultation on Channel 4  (blog posts passim). It is an uncomfortable fact that while both the range and quality of programmes has degenerated (as, not co-incidentally, have audience figures) the salaries paid to senior managers and the “stars” they hire have exploded. Put simply, these people are paid vastly more for achieving a great deal less.

The BBC salaries row will die down quickly. The public will shrug its  shoulders and get back to worrying about how to get by in today’s miserable economy. The press and media will sadly – not join the jots between the two issues.

I have spent the past year working on a new book which highlights how we got into the current mess. The book tells the story of one of the more unlikely alliances of the 1984-1985 miners’ strike: ,  in the middle of the most turbulent period of post-war Britain, and in what was the most bitterly fought industrial dispute for a generation,  a group of young and idealistic gay men and women made common cause with a very traditional community in the South Wales coalfield, and helped to keep them alive as Mrs. Thatcher’s government sought to starve mining families into submission.

The story of that seemingly unlikely alliance between Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and the coalfields of Dulais Valley was dramatised in the (very fine) feature film, Pride. My book[1] is a companion to that movie. To write it, I met and interviewed the men and women of both communities; doing so brought home the importance of ideals, integrity and service.

The Thatcher government set out to destroy all of those qualities: it is her creed – greed over need, the market ruling every aspect of our lives – which links the devastation wreaked on Britain’s coalfield communities and the obscene spectacle of the BBC paying Chris Evans £2.2 million to be a national irritant.

[1] Pride” The Inspiring True Story Behind the Hit Film.  John Blake Publishing – on sale August 10.

Posted on July 20, 2017 by Tim Tate

GIRLS HAVE BALLS; MEN TALK BALLS

In a week when the Chancellor of the Exchequer pronounced that driving a train is so easy “even a woman” could do it, and when the announcement of a female actor as the latest Dr. Who sent some male fans into paroxysms of angst, we should be grateful to Channel 4 for broadcasting a new documentary about the time when women playing soccer was deemed so outrageous that the (all male) Football Association outlawed the female game.

The struggle by women to be “allowed” to play football is a truly remarkable piece of social history – and it goes much further back than story of the most famous team – Dick, Kerr’s Ladies – whose success between 1916 and 1921 largely brought about the events portrayed in C4’s film.

In 2013 I published a book about the secret history of women’s football:

“Girls With Balls”[1] traced (amongst a great deal else) the origin of the game back to 1881: in May that year, newspapers carried reports of the the first-ever women’s matches between Scotland and England – and of the riots which ensued. The Nottinghamshire Guardian’s May 20 account was typical:

“… a few roughs broke into the enclosure, and as these were followed by hundred soon after, the players were roughly jostled and had prematurely to take refuge in the omnibus which had conveyed them to the ground. Their troubles, however, were not yet ended, for the crowd tore up the stakes and threw them at the departing vehicle and but for the presence of the police some bodily injury to the females might have occurred.”

For the next 30 years a unpleasant cycle would be repeated again and again. Women attempting to do nothing more than play a sport they loved were attacked – both physically and verbally – publicly denounced and repeatedly exploited. By whom ? By men.

Nevertheless – to borrow a disgraceful reprimand levied in February on a woman Senator by one of the most senior politicians in America – they persisted.  And by the middle years of World War One, they were needed. Hundreds of working-class women across Britain, formed teams and Leagues to played matches in aid of war charities. They raised staggeringly large sums of money and drew crowds which sometimes surpassed those of professional men’s clubs. In doing so, their fate was sealed.

In 1921 the Football Association banned women from playing matches at the grounds of any of its members clubs. It followed this by banning FA-registered referees from officiating. Inevitably the women’s game slowly withered and died.

Two books other than mine have told the remarkable story of the Dick, Kerr’s Ladies. Gail Newsham’s “In a League of Their Own” and Barbara Jacobs’ “The Dick Kerr Ladies” offer very detailed accounts of the team and its stars: I heartily commend both.

But for anyone wanting to understand the much longer struggle of women to play football, and how this  played a vital role in the fight for women’s rights, I unashamedly recommend my own book. It is both history and her-story – and the latter is a shamefully undervalued part of the story of all of us.  Yet, when even that bastion of mansplaining, The Daily Mail, publishes a review praising the book as “a fitting monument for all the intrepid women who turned out to play the beautiful game in the teeth of male scorn”, there may be hope.

Perhaps one day soon the stories of all the remarkable, brave women who battled male prejudice will make the journey from her-story to widely-known history.  And then, perhaps,  no future Chancellor of the Exchequer will so casually denigrate women, and the hiring of a female actor for an iconic role will not induce a spasm of wounded male outrage.

[1] For the paperback edition, released earlier this year, the publishers decided on the slightly less ‘challenging’ title: Women’s Football – The Secret History.

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Tim Tate