Dual loyalties hit the headlines

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, 15 March 2006 18:36.

My thanks go to Geoff for pointing me in the direction of this Guardian article.

Britain secretly supplied Israel with plutonium during the 1960s despite a warning from military intelligence that it could help the Israelis to develop a nuclear bomb, it was disclosed last night. The deal, made during Harold Wilson’s Labour government, is revealed in classified documents released under the Freedom of Information Act and obtained by BBC2’s Newsnight programme.

The documents also show how Britain made hundreds of shipments to Israel of material which could have helped in its nuclear weapons programme, including compounds of uranium, lithium, beryllium and tritium, as well as heavy water.

Israel asked Britain in 1966 to supply 10mg of plutonium. Israel would have required almost 5kg of plutonium to build an atomic bomb, but British defence intelligence officials warned that 10mg had “significant military value” and could enable the Jewish state to carry out important experimental work to speed up its nuclear weapons programme.

Documents show that the decision to sell plutonium to Israel in 1966 was blocked by officials in both the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office, who said: “It is HMG’s policy not to do anything which would assist Israel in the production of nuclear weapons.” But the deal was forced through by a Jewish civil servant, Michael Michaels, in Tony Benn’s Ministry of Technology, which was responsible for trade in nuclear material, according to Newsnight.

Peter Kelly, who was British defence intelligence’s expert on the Israeli nuclear weapons programme, knew Mr Michaels. He told Newsnight he believed Mr Michaels knew that Israel was trying to build an atomic bomb, but that he had dual loyalties to Britain and Israel.

Mr Benn told the programme that civil servants in his department kept the deals secret from him and his predecessor, Frank Cousins.

He had always suspected that civil servants were doing deals behind his back, but he never thought they would sell plutonium to Israel. He told Newsnight: “I’m not only surprised, I’m shocked. It never occurred to me they would authorise something so totally against the policy of the government.

“Michaels lied to me, I learned by bitter experience that the nuclear industry lied to me again and again.”

We’ve been here before ... quite recently, in fact. A Newsnight programme last December made the claim that:-

... government papers held at the National Archive showed Britain shipped 20 tons of heavy water to Israel in 1959.

The program said the water was vital for the production of plutonium at Israel’s top secret Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev desert. Newsnight said British officials did not impose any conditions on the sale, such as it being used for peaceful purposes, and in one of the documents, a British Foreign Office official cautioned against informing the United States of the sale.

The revelation is potentially embarrassing for the British government at a time when London is heavily engaged with its European Union partners in trying to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions.

But there’s no need to worry about Iran, because we ever generous and even-handed Brits haven’t forgotten them.

British officials have approved the export of key components needed to make nuclear weapons to Iran and other countries known to be developing such weapons.

An investigation by BBC Radio 4 programme File on Four will disclose that the Department of Trade and Industry allowed a quantity of the metal, Beryllium, to be sold to Iran last year.

That metal is needed to make nuclear bombs.

Britain has had an arms embargo to Iran since 1993 and has signed up to an international protocol which bans the sale of Beryllium to named countries, including Iran.

Based on all that, and on the high probability that there wasn’t an Iranian “Briton” beavering away for his EGI in the bowels of the civil service, I conclude that Tony Benn is right. The nuclear industry is very often deceitful, and not above putting its own expansion and its profits above national interest, national security and moral principle.

That said, there is the ethnic angle. There is always the ethnic angle. Michaels is one of a long line of Jewish cold warriors and “alleged” Zionist sympathisers working in the corridors of Western power for the furtherence of the ethny. Where would the Israeli military be without such helping hands? Non-nuclear, it must be presumed.

I don’t harbour much hope that those ethnically British mandarins at the top of the DTI and MOD will draw any conclusion whatsoever from this squalid and repetitious occurence. Obviously, the sharing of a room back in one’s Balliol days and an after-dinner nip of Louis Royer at Boodles far outweighs gross considerations such as race. Dual loyalties? Good Lord, what a grotesque suggestion. Utter nonsense. Why, I’ve known Dickie since ...

Tags: That Question Again

Comments:

Posted by Amalek on Wed, 15 Mar 2006 21:44 | #

Harold Wilson himself was surrounded by Jews—had been since his days at the Board of Trade after WW2, when as minister for movies he schmoozed with the British intelligence asset Alexander Korda.

Out of office from 1951 till 1964, Wilson was well paid as a trade consultant to Monty Meyer, the timber importer, for whom he often visited the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries. Meyer had got rich buying up trees in Africa felled for Labour’s ill-fated Groundnuts Scheme.

In these years Wilson met such Zionist prominenti and drinkers at the fount of honour as Rudi Sternberg (‘Lord Plurenden’, who had ‘Soviet agent of influence’ written all over him, so much so that he had probably been turned by MI5). Joe Kagan, Eric Miller, Jimmy Goldsmith and of course Arnold Goodman. In opposition, some of these plutocrats coughed up for Wilson’s private office. Robert Maxwell, aka Labji Hoch, became a Labour MP in 1964 after getting to know Wilson, whose sudden rise to the leadership of the party followed Gaitskell’s mysterious death and the splitting of the vote for the favourite, George Brown, when Jim Callaghan (a known security-services contact within the party) entered the race.

Golitsyn, the defecting Soviet spy, said that Gaitskell was assassinated by the Russians who thought that Wilson would be less of a pro-American Cold Warrior. (He did in fact refuse to send troops to Vietnam, unlike Australia.) James Jesus Angleton of the CIA commissioned a report for Pres. Johnson in 1965 which argued that the Labour government was so riddled with Soviet influences that Britain should be treated like a non-aligned nation for US spying purposes.

It may all sound a bit Lobster or Private Eye, but there were enough strands linking Wilson and his circle to the KGB and/or Mossad for the security services to be amply justified in showing a keener interest in the PM than normal. Wilson was a poor judge of character: several of his Jewish business pals came to grief. He was also, behind the phlegmatic exterior, extraordinarily suspicious and conspiracist himself, seeing South African BOSS machinations behind much of what went wrong for him. Maybe the spooks were infected by his jitters, but one feels there is a lot more to be uncovered. Soviet archives?

Posted by Al Ross on Wed, 15 Mar 2006 22:13 | #

Benn shouldnt whine about being lied to (prepositionally speaking) whilst describing typical Jewish conduct. The patent absurdity of expecting a Jew to act in the interests of the stupid people who gave him (or one of his forebears) a British passport is worthy of Moliere. There is no ‘dual loyalty’ dichotomy for the Chosen People and the ovine credulity of those who believe otherwise beggars belief.

Posted by Phil on Wed, 15 Mar 2006 22:15 | #

Robert Maxwell, aka Labji Hoch

I believe that’s LUDVIC HOCH

Posted by Phil on Wed, 15 Mar 2006 22:18 | #

Actually Jan Ludvik Hoch

Posted by Geoff Beck on Fri, 17 Mar 2006 06:13 | #

E.M. Forster? If someone is curious they ought to see what V.S. Naipaul had to say about that guy. Then it may make you wonder what sort of friend Mr. Forster had in mind.

Posted by Amalek on Fri, 17 Mar 2006 12:37 | #

William Rees-Mogg, as editor of The Times, once argued that homosexuals such as Keynes were untrustworthy steerers of the economy because their lack of interest in posterity tempted them to debauch the currency and live now, pay later.

It might also be mooted, with Forster in mind, that homosexuals set less store by patriotism, since it is an extension and sublimation of love for one’s own father and remoter ancestors. Homosexuals are so often the victims of psychological conflicts with absent or defaulting fathers, complemented by unhealthily clinging mothers.

Consider how pervasive homoeroticism was among those who betrayed British interests to Stalin, and among the Nazis (the idea that they systematically persecuted queers is one of the Big Lies of the postwar years). One might hazard that homosexuals are readier to entertain anti-national, universalist pipedreams than family men rooted in a particular bit of England, where they make a home and bring up the next generation. Remember that National Socialism was a neurotic and pseudo-scientific ideology propagated by an Austrian interloper in an artificially united Reich—not a genuine expression of Germanic patriotism but a hamfirsted modification of Judaeo-Bolshevism.

Patriotism seldom begins with allegiance to abstract ideals, but with a determination to defend one’s own. Homosexuals have no ‘own’ but the latest boyfriend. The so-called homosexual community is united by tastes in pleasure, not by local loyalties and duties: it is ‘virtual’, if not virtuous.

The inability of Forster’s type to form abiding relationships even with men of their own age, class and country (‘Maurice’ was a wistful fantasy) suggests that they *had* to go into the lower depths, preferably abroad, for satisfaction. They were another kind of rootless cosmopolitan. No wonder that in more robust days they were deemed an automatic security risk.

Posted by ben tillman on Fri, 17 Mar 2006 18:09 | #

“In the long run, we’re all dead.”—John Maynard Keynes, homosexual economist

Posted by Desmond Jones on Fri, 17 Mar 2006 19:55 | #

Dual loyalties in Black America gets Michelle Malkin all shook up…I wonder why?

“I pledge allegiance to my black people.”