Kermit unmasked?

There's whole hop of Kermits, stemming from the marriage of (later President) Teddy Roosevelt's second marriage to Edith Kermit Carow.

The first in the line was Kermit Roosevelt I, a brilliant linguist who served as a Captain, and won a Militiary Cross, in the British Machine Gun Corps.

Posted to the Mesopotamia campaign as a transport officer (the War Office wanting to keep such a sensitive "asset" out of the front line) he learned Arabic within four months, and became the recognised translator.

[The wikipedia illustration, left, is identified as " John Singer Sargent's sketch from the cover of his book on his wartime experiences in Mesopotamia called War in the Garden of Eden." This is somewhat confusing. The book is Kermit's own 1919 memoir; and the sketch is dated "July 8th 1917", so was probably done while Sargent was in the US].

Therein started a continuing link between Kermits and "Mesopotamia".

Meanwhile, Malcolm pauses to note that brother Brigadier General "Teddy" Roosevelt, commander of the 26th Infantry at Utah Beach, recipient of the Medal of Honor, is buried at Coleville Military Cemetery (but see important correction in comments to this post). His grave is next to that of his youngest brother, Quentin, who was shot down in July 1918.

Kermit I turned to the demon drink, having once again volunteered for service with the British Army (in the "Winter War" in Finland, no less), from which he was discharged in 1941. The family then prevailed upon cousin FDR to find Kermit a commission in the US Army, who posted him to Alaska, where in 1943, he shot himself. He is memorialised in the naming of a ghost town in Roosevelt County, New Mexico, a small town across the state line in Winkler County, Texas, and a very short road in Maplewood, New Jersey (UK customs officials always seem to doubt that address when it is given for reclaiming the payment of VAT: strange that).

Meanwhile, the focus shifts to his son, Kermit, Jr (right, in 1950).

In 1953 MI6 and the CIA ran Operation Ajax to oust Persian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and any vestige of democracy, so to establishing a Iranian régime more friendly to the West (and to western oil interests). The plot was largely managed and engineered by "James Lockridge"(a.k.a. Kermit Roosevelt). This gives us a shibboleth to determine a historian's bias: did Roosevelt, by queering the pitch of Mossadegh, save Iran from Communism, or, by restoring the Shah, guarantee a tyranny which led to the 1979 Khomeini Revoution?

Today's Washington Post, and other journals of repute, are noticing an A.P. story that the US National Archives now have three-quarters of a million pages of documentation, from the OSS records of the 1940s, naming 24,000 names of former agents. Quelle surprise! Or not. Our Kermit's name is, indeed, one of them.

The dynasty continues. Since 2007, the Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, with specialisms in constitutional law and conflicty of laws is ... Kermit Roosevelt.

"Kermit", a decent Scottish fore-name, which the books tell Malcolm is corrupted from Macdiarmuid, fell from popularity as the Green One's proportionately rose. That most famed of the Kermits was named for a friend, Kermit Scott, from Jim Henson's childhood home in Leland, Mississippi.

The town still trades on the connection, "spawned in Henson's mind" (see left). Sphere: Related Content

Special blanch


The BBC website has a quite extraordinary take on London's Vietnam demonstrations of 1968, which it now attaches to its preview of the programme on bluenose (though now, more positively, redesignated as "filthbuster") Mary Whitehouse.

He'll get to that in a while, but, for a start, Malcolm was somewhat surprised by this:

The anti-Vietnam war demonstration of March 1968 was a turning point in post-war politics: it turned violent right in front of the world's media; the police were shown throwing punches into the faces of already arrested students, and in general losing control. The police files from that event are considered too sensitive to release.

There's a lot about that period that will remain hidden as long as blue-pencils, with-holding orders and document-shredders exist.

We might start with Peter Wright's formidable testimony:

And we did have fun. For five years we bugged and burgled our way across London at the State's behest, while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way.

Clearly, as Wright implies, a main thrust of MI5 at this time was against student militancy:

student militancy in the 1960s gave way to industrial militancy in the 1970s ... intelligence on domestic subversion became the overriding priority.

David Shayler, not necessarily a wholly discredited witness:

was charged with passing documents and information to the Mail on Sunday. On August 24 1997, a year after he left MI5, it published his allegations that MI5 held files on Peter Mandelson, Jack Straw, John Lennon and others it once considered to be subversive.

The other "subversives" included -- gulp, swallow, choke of incredulity -- Harriet Harman.

Piles of files

With supreme irony, it was Jack Straw as Home Secretary who gave a written reply on 29th July, 1998. Spookhunters, if they do not already have it by heart, should refer to its entirety. For now:

The Security Service currently holds in total about 440,000 files which have been opened at some time since its establishment in 1909. Of these, approximately 35,000 files relate to Service administration, policy and staff. A further 40,000 concern subjects and organisations studied by the Service. About 75,000 files relate to people or groups of people who have never been investigated by the Service, such as those who have received protective security advice. This leaves about 290,000 files relating to individuals who, at some time during the last 90 years, may have been the subject of Security Service inquiry or investigation. Of this 290,000, some 40,000 have been reduced to microfilm and placed in a restricted category to which Security Service staff have access only for specific research purposes...

To place it in context, this compares with about 5.7 million records on individuals on the Police National Computer...

It has long been the policy of the Security Service to review its file holdings and to destroy those files which it no longer requires for operational purposes and which do not merit retention on grounds of historical interest. In the period between its formation in 1909 and the early 1970s, the Service destroyed well over 175,000 files. The destruction programme was then halted in response to concern that it had impeded investigations into espionage cases. In the early 1990s, following the collapse of Soviet communism and the associated decline in the threat from subversion, the review and destruction programme was reinstated. Since then, more than 110,000 files have been destroyed or have been earmarked for destruction.

That's worth recapitulation:

• 290,000 files which, in 1998, were sufficiently valid to be "active" or retained.
• A further quarter-million-plus which had been shredded (either for their irrelevance or embarrasment factor) during purges.
• A passing, and deliberately confusing reference to the Police having separate files on a tenth of the population. Anybody who has written multiple-choice exam papers will know the "distractor".
  

Going on the "offensive"

Malcolm, like others on the Left, was only too conscious of the tendrils of the state apparatus. It was quite remarkable how, for any employment in the public sector (and indeed, by reputation, with the major industrial concerns), interviews took strange turns.

So, back to the original point at issue, and for something new, different and very, very shocking:

Newsnight has obtained, under Freedom of Information, a stack of police files relating to the much bigger anti-war demonstration of October that year... they tell a story of rising panic in the establishment: the creation of Britain's first bomb squad; an intelligence feedback loop between Special Branch and the press that ramped up the tension; and, farcically, the rock group The Doors being mistaken for a group of foreign revolutionaries...

... we now know, from the Secret files, that the London Division of the British Army offered to assist the Met during the so called "Autumn Offensive". An offer that was declined, though it was discussed also at Cabinet level.

In the run up to the demo panic was sparked by press reports that demonstrators were planning to seize key buildings in London, defend them with Molotov cocktails, paralyse London, bringing about the total downfall of law and order and the subsequent collapse of Britain as a financial centre...

Enter the gentlemen of the fourth estate: newspaper articles appeared which gave credence to the prospect of a violent seizure of key installations; the list of "targets" grew - from the BBC, to MI5, the Telecoms tower and even the Playboy Club. When the Times reported the prospect of a violent seizure, Home Secretary Jim Callaghan was grilled in the Commons. The police, reviewing the press reports, concluded privately that they were over the top, a "carefully constructed pastiche of information" based on inspired guesswork and with no proof whatsoever.

Whole sections of the documents were redacted when the Met released them to us this year - so we don't know what they thought were the source of the information. But we now know exactly where it came from. Brian Cashinella, crime reporter on the Times, told [Paul Mason] the whole story had been briefed to him by Special Branch; "not any old plod but a senior fellow; he met us two or three times a week for three weeks". Cashinella says that, after a meeting with Jim Callaghan, his then editor William Rees Mogg assured him that the stories were genuine.

We now have all the little ducks in a neat line: the Met Police and Special Branch, MI5, The Times, and, inevitably, "Mystic" Smug.

Which leaves only two questions:

• Why is the BBC soft-pedalling this hard-core story under a "plain cover" of The Doors and the ineffable Mrs Mary Whitehouse?
• Both then and now, cui bono?
  

Sphere: Related Content

X324FEV

That could be a State secret.

Malcolm, at home base after a time in Yorkshire, watched Cameron 4 News ... sorry, simple mistake: Channel 4 News.

As usual Jon Snow was in the bricks-without-straw game, making "news" out of something recycled. Inevitably, it was the great "missing data disks" saga. This revealed ... precisely nothing that hadn't been in the papers already. (Malcolm's recent reading has been the Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph and--drum roll--the Yorkshire Post.)

It was cross-cut with a YouGov poll (as in "What do you want us to find, Guv?"). Well, inevitably there was a blurring of who did the polling, because one minute it's YouGov, but the next it's Cathy Newman insisting (on behalf of C4 News, presumably) that "We asked 1,600 people ..."

Who asked, Cathy? Was it you and C4, or an "independent" polling organisation? The confusion must be deliberate, because you are then saying the Tories now enjoy "the biggest lead Channel 4 pollsters have given" them. So, again, one must ask: are these figures reliable and independent, or are they what you contracted them to find?

But that isn't Malcolm's gripe.

This was an item appended to a major issue of data security. So, why, twice (once at the 7pm showing, then again at the hour-later repeat just to make sure), did Channnel 4 publicise the registration number of the Prime Minister's official car? Al-Qaeda operatives, please note: Channel 4 News need a headline story for next week.

All passion spent

The best piece on the "missing disks" yet is from Anatole Kaletsky in today's Times.

It is good because it is the first successful attempt to keep a cool head, be objective, and dispassionately apportion responsibility. Unlike Channel 4 News and the thundering herd of the Tory press, Kaletsky isn't just making hay.

He starts by setting out his stall:

What lessons should be drawn from the string of disasters suddenly befalling Gordon Brown and his unlucky successor as Chancellor, disasters that have demolished in two months the reputation for economic competence that the previous Blair-Brown Government took ten years to build up? I can think of four. The first is about proportionality. The second is about responsibility. The third is about focus and priorities. The fourth is about politics and a fatal flaw in Gordon Brown's personality that many people suspected all along.

The proportionality bit is a simple comparison; does the ordinary gal or guy get better service from an official or a commercial source. His opinion is that the UK Government's:

bureaucracies are now working more smoothly and dealing with customers more quickly than in the days before computerisation. They are generally more efficient and easier to deal with than similar agencies in America, Germany or France.

Moreover, they now compare quite well with comparable private sector bureaucracies such as telephone companies, utilities, banks or airlines. A phone call to the HMRC or the Passport Agency is probably as likely to be answered promptly — and by an employee who is both courteous and can offer a useful answer — as a similar call to a utility or bank.

Malcolm, with some scars to show for it, would wholly concur. He would also add that it's a heck of a lot cheaper to deal with Government than with the premium rate numbers used by business and commerce. Or those wicked 0844 numbers one now needs to telephone for a GP's appointment.

Kaletsky's second point is:

responsibility. A junior official at HMRC may have been directly culpable in the case of the missing discs, but true responsibility is clearly located farther up the hierarchy. What ought to be challenged is not the principle of computerising information, nor the decision to merge Revenue and Customs, nor the cuts in staff. The obvious problem lay in the way that HMRC computers were designed and managed, which would seem to pin the blame primarily on the computer boffins, many of them working for private consultants, rather than civil servants themselves.

The sad truth is that is a chronic failure, and one on which the columnists of Private Eye have been dining out for years (in the current issue, number 1198, four paragraphs on the NHS's IT on page 12, and a half-a-dozen on EDS and the NAO on page 27). Kaletsky's valid point is that the heads on the block should be the Civil Service's advisers on IT, and the contractors themselves.

He expands on the theme of responsibility, and makes it his third point "focus", with one of the most pertinent observations Malcolm has seen in a long while:

people and social institutions, including even bureaucracies such as the HMRC or the FSA, will only accept a certain amount of regulation and government interference. If attempts to interfere with everyday life pass beyond this threshold, then intelligent regulation can quickly degenerate into mindless box-ticking, which only distracts attention from real dangers.

This reminded Malcolm of a time, perhaps thirty years back, witnessing two older heads discussing a work problem. She explained to him how to circumvent a fire-wall in the organisation's computer system. They were both of mature years, nearing retirement. They were both employed by ... the Ministry of Defence. So the quotation immediately above should be enshrined as "Kaletsky's Law", for it explains all that is wrong with the National Curriculum, among much else.

Finally, Kaletsky turns to the politics of the whole caboodle, and addresses what he sees as:

Gordon Brown's fatal flaw. Instead of making big decisions about the essential functions of government — foreign policy, law and order, energy and environment — Mr Brown seems to have an irresistible urge for fidgety interventions in every aspect of everyday life — banning plastic bags, creating tax subsidies for cycle commuters, introducing identity cards, saving jobs at Northern Rock.

The more Mr Brown engages in such micro-management, the more he will be sucked into one fiasco after another. That way lies ridicule and political defeat.

That seems to Malcolm to cover much of the ground. The pity is that the media want a scapegoat for every eventuality. And it is clear whom, for the time being, they have nominated for the position. That is, until, the great soap-opera of British politics moves on ... Sphere: Related Content