EXCLUSIVE: THE OTHER SIDE OF GERRY GABLE – Praised by the Tory Press & the Morning Star for his ‘Anti-Fascism’ They Omit His Support for Zionism & Israeli Apartheid

The Death of Searchlight’s Gable Represents the Death of Bourgeois Anti-Fascism

Gerry Gable, the Editor of Searchlight Anti-Fascist Magazine from 1981 onwards, died recently. What is remarkable is that all the obituaries, from the Morning Star to The Telegraph and Times were both completely uncritical and almost identical.

According to Andrew Bell, a former Searchlight Editor in the Guardian Gable

was one of the most formidable and persistent figures in the postwar fight against fascism and the extreme right in the UK.

The genocide supporting, anti-Palestinian Jewish Chronicle said that Gable

remained consistent in his efforts to defend democracy and expose the dangers of far-right extremism.’

According to Steve Silver, former Campaigns Officer for the Israeli funded Union of Jewish Students, in the Communist Morning Star, Gable was ‘the most tenacious post-war anti-fascist Britain ever produced’.

The Telegraph described Gable as having ‘waged a 50-year war on British neo-Nazis’.

It is not often that someone can receive almost identical praise from the papers of the Communist Party and the Tory Party. And still they got it wrong. Not a hint of the criticism Gable received found a space in their eulogies. Although one must not speak ill of the dead it is also important to speak the truth.

Perhaps the reason for their praise is that Gable’s work against Britain’s neo-Nazi right not only posed no challenge to the British state but was often carried out in collaboration with it. These tributes tell one side of the story. There is another, darker and murkier side.

Part of the reason is that Gable was a racist not an anti-racist, a Zionist not an anti-Zionist. The real credit for Searchlight’s work during the 1970s when it played a key role in destroying the National Front as a political force should go to Maurice Ludmer, its Editor between 1975 and 1981, and not Gable. Unfortunately Ludmer died an untimely death in 1981 at the age of only 54 leaving Gable to align Searchlight’s political direction with his own.

Maurice Ludmer, unlike Gable, was an anti-imperialist

Whereas Ludmer resigned from the Communist Party because it was not sufficiently devoted to the fight against racism in the working class Gable resigned in 1962 because ‘it had begun to adopt an anti-Israel line’ [Jewish Chronicle 23.10.87]. Gable explained that:

Israel was a democracy and these (Arab) countries were not. I have always supported Israel on those grounds first and foremost because I have always been a Jewish trade unionist.

Therein lies the difference between Ludmer and Gable. According to David Edgar’s obituary for Ludmer

Maurice believed passionately that fascism could not be effectively fought without attacking racism as well; he believed, too, that black workers must play their full part in the struggle against the most extreme and virulent form of racism, the National Front and its allies.

Gable’s lack of socialist politics led to his collaboration with a British state that was racist to the core. This was also why the Anti-Fascist movement lost its trust in him.

Gable’s relationship with the British state and his trading information on neo-Nazis with Special Branch and MI5 in exchange for information on the Left led to a breakdown in relations.

Gable’s Memorandum to London Weekend Television

In 1977 Labour Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees proposed deporting American journalist Mark Hosenball and ex-CIA agent Phil Agee. Agee and Hosenball were targeted because they were exposing CIA activities and the existence of Britain’s electronic intelligence agency, GCHQ, which was then a secret.

From Left to Right - Campbell, Aubrey and Berry

While researching to defend Agee and Hosenball against deportation, Time Out journalists Crispin Aubrey and Duncan Campbell met with John Berry, a former Signals Intelligence employee, a whistleblower, to discuss the operations of GCHQ.

Hosenball and Campbell, had co-written an article for Time Out magazine titled "The Eavesdroppers" which detailed the work of GCHQ. This, along with Agee's work, led to them being deemed threats to national security.

The ABC trial  arose from the government's attempt to silence investigations into its intelligence activities. Aubrey, Berry and Campbell (ABC) were arrested on February 20, 1977, days after the deportation order was finalised, under the Official Secrets Act for collecting and passing on information regarding signals intelligence.

In November 1978 this trial collapsed with token sentences being handed out. During the trial and the campaign that preceded it, the security services had done their best to poison the media via corrupt and tame journalists. One such was Gerry Gable, a researcher with London Weekend Television.

On 2 May 1977, Gable sent a memo to his superiors at LWT regarding Phil Kelly who was active in the campaign to support the ABC defendants. Kelly later became editor of Tribune and an Islington Labour councillor.

The memo confirmed that Gable was working hand in glove with the British and Israeli secret services to smear the campaign to support Hosenball and Agee.

Gable alleged that Kelly had taken part in a PLO terrorist training camp. There was no truth in this allegation but lies came easily to Gable. According to the New Statesman (15.2.80):

The wording of Mr Gable's memo suggests clearly that he was engaged in a 2-way transaction with his security sources... The nature of the official material received and recorded by him suggests that much of it was coloured by phone-tap info and informer reports.  

As Time Out observed, the memo caused those who Gable mentioned, like Hosenball, who had previously considered Gable as a friend, to feel betrayed. (22.2.80)

It is something that people in anti-fascist politics have also experienced.  There is reason to believe that Campbell was also being monitored by Gable.

Brian Gentleman

Nine years later and Gable was up to his old tricks, this time for Channel 4's 20/20 Vision. Gable befriended, and took advantage of, a lonely low-level civil servant in the DTI, Brian Gentleman.  One day Gentleman found himself accused, live on TV, of being a Czech agent.

However the Police refused to prosecute. Gentleman was considered a Walter Mitty character whom Gable had entrapped. The Broadcasting Complaints Commission delivered a stern rebuke. It was also the subject of a question in the House of Commons from Gerald Howarth MP.

The Role of Searchlight

Searchlight Magazine played a crucial role in exposing the National Front in the 70s as a neo-Nazi organisation. Under Ludmer it was an effective weapon for the anti-fascist  movement. In the words of Unmesh Desai, now a right-wing Labour councillor but at the time an anti-fascist activist, ‘Searchlight was our bible’.

Once Ludmer had died Gable took the magazine in an overtly pro-imperialist direction. For years I helped sell the magazine but I stopped doing so when it became overtly pro-Zionist. One particularly absurd front page was the September 1987 issue ‘The New Axis’ featuring Ghadffi, Khomeini, Patrick Harrington and Louis Farrakhan. It was a precursor of George Bush’s ‘evil axis’.

This was followed up by the January 1989 issue ‘The Year of the Mad Dogs’ featuring Ghadaffi again. This fitted in with Reagan’s rhetoric against the Libyan regime. An equally demented graphic on the State of the British Right in January 1989 included Muslim fundamentalists, Black British activists, Arabs a plenty but curiously no mention of Zionist organisations such as the Jewish Defence League.

Searchlight had became a pro-Zionist rag and a mouthpiece for British Intelligence. It is little wonder that the Telegraph, not normally sympathetic to the fight against fascism or racism, gave such an adulatory obituary to Gable.

Anti-Fascist Action (AFA)

It is in his effect on the anti-fascist movement that Gable and Searchlight were most destructive. AFA was formed in February 1985 to take on a resurgence of violent fascism and groups like Blood & Honour, C18 and the British Movement.

Not only was Searchlight trading information with MI5/Special Branch but it was actively trying to split and destabilise the anti-fascist movement. When Zionist Board of Deputies attacked the newly formed Anti-Nazi League [ANL] Ludmer didn’t hold back in  attacking the BOD:

‘In the face of mounting attacks against the Jewish community, both ideologically and physically, we have the amazing sight of the Jewish Board of Deputies launching an attack on the Anti-Nazi League with all the fervour of Kamikaze pilots.’  [Searchlight November 1978]

Guardian journalist David Rose, described by Larry O’Hara as a ‘journalistic mouthpiece’ for the Met Police and Searchlight, smeared Class War as a fascist organisation. Allegations were made by Gable that their leadership, in particular Ian Bone, were supporters of the NF, that racism was endemic in CW, that they were police agent-provocateurs on demonstrations and that the NF & CW jointly planned the Stop the City demonstrations targeting Jewish businesses.

CW were never popular on the Left, their paper was often crude politically but no one doubted that they were anti-fascists. They attracted a young, punk periphery. They also appealed to a section of the working class including many miners during the 1984-5 strike. They were the perfect foil for Gable and MI5.  

At its Manchester conference in 1986, AFA narrowly took a decision to suspend CW from membership until an Inquiry looked into Searchlight’s allegations. When the Inquiry asked for evidence 

Searchlight was unable to supply any to support its allegations.

At this, AFA’s second conference I was elected onto AFA’s Executive. When a Commission of Enquiry reported, CW were exonerated but the damage to AFA had been done. The 1986 AGM nearly broke up in turmoil as a result of the allegations.

As the AFA Report into Searchlight Allegations Against Class War concluded:

Despite the leading role of Searchlight magazine in the affair, and despite many approaches to the magazine for evidence, the sum total of material from Searchlight to the enquiry was nil.  We are bemused by Searchlight's role in this affair.

In the course of the inquiry Gable had admitted to monitoring anarchists. For whom he didn't say. He had engaged in the destabilisation of AFA on behalf of the British state and his Special Branch and MI5 friends. None of his obituaries have even mentioned Gabel’s role as an informer for the British state.

See also my article for the Newsletter of Palestine Solidarity Campaign Undermining Anti-Fascists, Defending Zionism. I was heavily involved in the Anti-Fascist movement from the mid-70’s onwards. See my 2012 book on the History of Fighting fascism in Brighton and the South Coast.

Brighton AFA Letter to AFA Groups (24.6.93) and to Gable (16.7.93) and Gable Letter to Greenstein (13.7.93)

On 24 June 1993 I wrote on behalf of Brighton AFA to other AFA groups warning them about Gable and Searchlight. I referred to his targeting of Malcolm Astells, a member of Midlands AFA as a neo-Nazi infiltrator on the basis that:

‘every time he takes charge something goes wrong: either people get arrested or are led away from confronting the nazis on wild-goose chase.’

I referenced similar allegations against Class War and made the point that when false allegations are made against people

the result can only be to sow confusion and suspicion in our ranks. lt is a classic tactic of the secret state, the purpose of which is to destabilise and demoralise its enemies. It also means... that it is that much easier for genuine fascists to infiltrate our ranks.’

My letter stung Gable into sending me a rebuttal on 13 July 1993. Gable disguised his real reason for writing with the pretence that I  owed Searchlight money for copies of Searchlight that he had sent me to distribute. In fact I never heard again of his legal threats.

The rest of his letter was mere bluster, repeating claims that he had supplied evidence to AFA’s CW Inquiry. In the course of his rant, Gable accused me of being a ‘self-hating Jew’. Gable, also resented my comparison to Maurice Ludmer who had always taken the position that the issue of Zionism should not be allowed to divide the anti-fascist movement.

This was a time when some supporter of Israel, such as Miriam Karlin and Professor Geoffrey Alderman, had broken ranks with the Board of Deputies to sponsor the Anti-Nazi League. Today when the Zionists are holding hands with Tommy Robinson and supporting Genocide, such a position is clearly untenable.

In my response three days later I explained that the term ‘self-hater’ has a Nazi lineage. That was what anti-fascist Germans were accused of before going on to make the point that:

I have always found it difficult to oppose racism and fascism in Britain and then turn a blind eye to racism and fascism directed against Palestinians simply because the perpetrators are Jewish. You have no such qualms. Therein lies the reason for your political degeneration.

Black Activists Challenge Searchlight’s Racism

In July 1991, a coalition of black-led anti-racist groups published an OpenLetter in Labour Briefing that publicly criticised Searchlight. Searchlight of course had refused to print the letter.

This letter was driven by a series of long-standing disagreements, culminating in allegations of racist treatment of black anti-racists at an Ilford synagogue meeting. 

At the meeting Black attendees, were banned, searched, and physically intimidated by security guards. Newham Monitoring Group Secretary, Jasbir Singh, reported being subjected to a body search. All this was directed by Gerry Gable.

The letter represented a major public rift between Searchlight and Black anti-racist groups. It led to the formation of the Anti-Racist Alliance in November of that year.

Black activists questioned the magazine's methods and its collaboration with the state. This highlighted a rift between Searchlight and grassroots Black-led groups, such as NMP.

The Briefing letter alleged that Searchlight had fostered a hostile environment for black activists. Whilst Searchlight worked with the Police Black people were suffering from police racism. Searchlight was seen as the right-wing of the movement.

These tensions were exacerbated by the association with Herut, the political party that founded Israel’s Likud party led by Netanyahu. Although the letter said that their main differences were not over the Middle East it was inevitable that Searchlight’s support for Zionism had an effect on relations with Black activists.

The letter’s authors took issue with Searchlight’s approach to racism which emphasised cultural differences rather than seeing economic and political discrimination as being at the heart of state racism, a term that Searchlight barely recognised.

The signatories also took issue with the equation by Searchlight of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism given that many Black people oppose Zionism because it is an apartheid ideology. Most prominent Black anti-racist groups in Britain signed this letter.

There followed a heated correspondence in Briefing itself. This clearly angered Searchlight which had always taken care not to print critical letters in the Magazine.

When the Campaign Against Racism & Fascism [CARF], which had produced its own separate section in Searchlight from 1979 until 1990 split over political differences such as the magazine’s pro-Israel stance and its prioritisation of anti-Semitism over state racism and its pro-imperialist politics, they sent in a letter explaining why they were parting. Searchlight refused to print it despite CARF having produced a section of the magazine for 11 years. See Powerbase for a timeline of the split.

Searchlight however could not ignore the letter that was printed in Labour Briefing given the support it had in the Labour Movement and from several MPs like Corbyn and McDonnell. Searchlight acolytes had no option but to defend it but Gable stayed silent.

In the September 1991 issue Ray Hill, a former Searchlight mole in the British Movement, who had become Deputy Leader, penned a letter which avoided virtually all the accusations. He did though insult the Black organisations who had signed the letter as ‘three men and a dog’. Daphne Liddell, of the New Communist Party, contributed a more emollient letter.

In the October issue Larry O’Hara, an independent anti-fascist researcher penned an article which I am told made Gerry Gable spit blood. O’Hara rehearsed all the allegations of Searchlight’s links and work for the secret State. O’Hara, although he didn’t always get things right, had been a thorn in Searchlight’s side for years. Gable had become obsessed with him.

In the February 1992 issue Graeme Atkinson, Searchlight’s European Editor, contributed an article but added little that was new, referring to the ‘hoary old 1977 ‘Gable Memorandum’. That was the best he could do because it was difficult to explain Gable’s admission of working for the security services. Graeme accused Briefing of using ‘knife in the back’ tactics in printing O’Hara’s article. Graeme has since broken with Searchlight.

Finally in March 1992 I had a long letter in Briefing responding to Atkinson and also explaining the political problems that anti-racists and anti-fascists now had with Searchlight. The full correspondence can be found here.

Winter 2015 Searchlight Suggests that the Labour Party expel 'Jew hater' Tony Greenstein

Searchlight Support for the Labour Party ‘Anti-Semitism’ Witchhunt

It was not therefore surprising that Searchlight and Gable would lend their support to the ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt of socialists and anti-Zionists in the Labour Party. In its Winter 2015 issue there was an item ‘Anti-Semitism’ which asked

‘How is it that nobody appears to have looked into the background of Tony Greenstein, a Brighton antifascist and pro-Palestinian activist’ before going on to call me a ‘Jewish Hater’.

In fact I was suspended in March 2016 and I was the first Jew to be suspended and then expelled from the Labour Party as part of the ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt. The article makes it clear that it thoroughly approved of this right-wing attack on socialists and anti-Zionists in the Labour Party. 

Below are links to a number of documents referred to in this blog.

Tony Greenstein

AFA Report into Searchlight Allegations Against Class War

Black activists challenge Searchlight July 91 and here

Gerry Gable Again – Black Flag – the Brian Gentlemen Affair and here

Spy Trial By Television and here

The Eavesdroppers – Duncan Campbell and Mark Hosenball, Time Out  and here

Powerbase Article on Searchlight

Searchlight 'anti-fascist magazine joins forces with Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt

The Death Agony of Searchlight Anti-Fascist Magazine

Searchlight & the State – Kate Sharpley

Destabilising the Decent People – Duncan Campbell, Bruce Page, Nick Anning

Searchlight Obituary for Gerry Gable

Jewish News Frazer Article

Morning Star Obituary for Gable

Jewish News  Obituary

Gable Memorandum transcript

Our Searchlight Problem – Lobster Magazine

Letter – Tony Greenstein, Brighton AFA to supporters 24 June 1993

Letter – Gerry Gable to Tony Greenstein 13 July 1993

Letter -Tony Greenstein to Gerry Gable 16 July 1993

Obituary -:Gerry Gable (1937-2026), architect of modern British anti-fascism – Andy Bell

Searchlight 'anti-fascist magazine joins forces with Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt

Searchlight Magazine – the Racist ‘Anti-fascist’ Magazine

Searchlight Magazine, under Gerry Gable, has a long history of attacking the Palestine solidarity movement and the Palestinians.  It also has a record of never attacking or criticising Israeli Apartheid.

Searchlight's racism quickly alienated Black organisations in Britain

Searchlight's libellous editorial

In its current edition, quite bizarrely, out of the blue in an editorial, it describes me both as an anti-fascist, a Palestine solidarity activist and a ‘Jew hater’. Clearly the statement is actionable.

What has prompted its editor, Gerry Gable, to this outburst he doesn’t say.  I can only presume it is the accumulation of various resentments built up over the years.  It is probably a result of criticisms I have made over the years about Searchlight’s Zionist politics, its destabilisation of the anti-fascist movement and its spying on anti-fascists and anarchists on behalf of the secret state see e.g. The Death Agony of Searchlight Anti-Fascist Magazine - How Gerry Gable endedup defending racism in the name of anti-fascism   Gable has certainly proved sensitive in correspondence to the comparisons I drew between him and his illustrious predecessor, Maurice Ludmer.

Gable and friend

When Apartheid existed in South Africa, Searchlight didn’t hesitate to criticise the actions of the Apartheid Government, although it never mentioned the close diplomatic, economic and military relations between the two governments.

Gables memorandum to his bosses boasting of intelligence contacts and how he spied on the Left and Anarchists

When it comes to Israel Gable, whose magazine only comes out every 3 months now, since the cash cow that Hope not Hate and Nick Lowles represented have departed, sees no evil, hears no evil and says no evil.  The injunction by hundreds of Israeli rabbis that Jews should not rent apartments to Arabs is not mentioned.  [Dozens of Top Israeli Rabbis Sign Ruling to Forbid Rental of Homes to Arabs, ]  Neither the demolition of hundreds of Palestinian homes, Jewish roads in the West Bank, the official Apartheid in the West Bank (2 separate legal systems for settlers and Palestinians) or the segregated schools are worthy of mention.  No mention either of the Judaisation programmes within Israel, which bear a market similarity to the deJewification program of the Nazi party. 

Gable and his wife Sonia

In a profile of Gable he explained that he left the Communist Party in 1961 "because the party had begun to adopt an anti-Israeli line." (Jewish Chronicle  23.10.87).  This is in contrast to the previous editor of Searchlight, Maurice Ludmer, who was President of Birmingham Trades Council and a stalwart of the trade union movement.  Ludmer left the CP in 1968, because of its lack of commitment to anti-fascism and anti-racism.

Searchlight fantasy about an international fascist axis - drawn from Israeli paranoia

Despite this, Searchlight has a fondness for Stalinist politics.  How else can one explain the racist justification of Stalin's expulsion of the Tatar people because a minority of them collaborated?

During the Labour Government of 1974-80, the security establishment persuaded Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees into deporting journalist Mark Hosenball and ex-CIA agent Phil Agee.  Duncan Campbell of the New Statesman, was investigating GCHQ (then a secret installation) with Hosenball and the result was the ABC trial (Aubrey, Berry and Campbell) under the Official Secrets Act.  In November 1978 this trial collapsed with token sentences being handed out.  During the trial and the campaign that preceded it, the security services had done their best to poison the media via corrupt and tame journalists.  One such was Gerry Gable, a researcher with London Weekend Television.

In May 1977, Gable wrote one of a number of reports to his superiors at London Weekend Television regarding Phil Kelly, who became editor of Tribune and an Islington Labour councillor, was then active in the ABC Defence campaign.

Maurice Ludmer - first editor of Searchlight - an anti-imperialist unlike his successor

"He was also seen frequently... at the offices of the Vietnam Sollidarity   Campaign.  It was suggested that in either late '67 or early '68 he travelled to Cuba and was trained as was 'Carlos...  in Guerilla warfare and Espionage by the KGB."  In 1969, "Kelly went to Jordan, not, as he told people, to see the refugee amps... but to a proper Fatah training camp.  Members of the Baader Meinhoff group also attended these camps."  On a demo in London "he was seen to kick a policeman... Reports from left watchers state that he has been to Cuba, America, East Germany, Jordan, Sofia in Bulgaria...

“The arrest of Campbell, Berry and Aubrey has caused a civil rights row, but according to my top level security service sources, they inform me in the strictest confidence.. Kelly is suspected of being the KGB man who reaps the goodies...I have now given the names I have acquired to be checked out by British/French security services especially the French and German connections and the south  American stuff is being checked by Geoffrey Stewart-Smith's Institute.  He has strong CIA links (and links with WACL - a fascist group - TG). I may try somebody in the Israeli Foreign Office that I know for some checks on Kelly..." 

Searchlight Conference with Zionist pressure group, the Islamaphobic Campaign Against Anti-Semitim

According to the New Statesman (15.2.80): "The wording of Mr  Gable's memo suggests clearly that he was engaged in a 2-way transaction with his security sources... The nature of the official material received and recorded by him suggests that much of it was coloured by phone-tap info and informer reports."  As Time Out remarked, the  memo caused those who Gable mentioned, like Hosenball, who had previously considered Gable as a friend, to feel betrayed" (22.2.80)  It is something that people in anti-fascist politics have also experienced.  There is reason to believe that Campbell was also being monitored by Gable.

Nine years later and Gable was up to his old tricks, this time for Channel 4's 20/20 Vision.  Gable befriended, and took advantage of, a lonely low-level civil servant in the DTI, Brian Gentleman.  One day he found himself accused, live on TV, of being a Czech agent.  However the Police refused to prosecute. Gentleman was considered a Walter Mitty character whom Gable had entrapped. The Broadcasting Complaints Commission delivered a stern rebuke. 

But it is in his effect on the anti-fascist movement that Gable and Searchlight has been most destructive, precisely because it is here that their reputations have been established. Anti Fascist Action was formed in February 1985.  Almost immediately via Searchlight/Guardian journalist David Rose a controversy was sparked over an anarchist group, Class War.

CW were never popular on the Left, their paper was particularly crude. They attracted a young, punk periphery with a low political awareness. They were the perfect foil for Gable and his security service chums. Allegations were made that their leadership were NF'ers, that racism was  endemic in CW, that they were police agent-provocateurs on demonstrations and that the NF & CW jointly planned the Stop the City demonstrations as an anti-Jewish pogrom.  CW were immediately suspended.  When a Commission of Enquiry reported, CW were exonerated but the damage to AFA had been done.  The 1976 AGM nearly broke up in turmoil.  AFA’s Report stated that "Despite the leading role of Searchlight magazine in the affair, and despite many approaches to the magazine for evidence, the sum total of material from Searchlight to the enquiry was nil.  We are bemused by Searchlight's role in this affair."  In the course of the inquiry Gable had admitted to monitoring anarchists.  For whom he didn't say.

Gables Memorandum to his bosses at London Weekend Television

From:  Gerry Gable

Date:  2 May 1977

About: Agencies

To:    Julian/Mike Braham/Barry Cox (Please keep these reports secure)

Phil Kelly was a member of the Young Liberals who in the sixties joined what was known as 'the Red Guard'. Young Liberals like Peter Hain and Peter Hellyer went against the traditional Liberal line and started campaigning along lines more akin to the Radical left. They stood out against the Vietnam War/Apartheid and for the Palestinians against the Israelis. At home they were for direct action on housing and other evils in our society.

In the first place, as I understand it, Kelly was an odd fish in the rather middle class Young Lib circles, he had a strictly working class background. He was up to his neck in various campaigns in 1967. The Biafra aid set up was one of them. He was also seen frequently during that year at the offices of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. It was suggested that in either late '67 or early '68 he travelled to Cuba and was trained as was 'Carlos' during the same period. Certainly Cuba held a Tri-Continental conference at that time involving many third world and Latin American states where Cuba was active in spreading their own brand of revolution. It is suggested that parallel to the conference, an extensive course of training in Guerilla warfare and Espionage took place. If the latter is true, then certainly Cuba's own Secret Service would have been aided by the KGB on the espionage side of the courses. In the early part of 1969 Kelly was seen at the Soviet Trade Mission in London.

I think that around this time he worked on the Hornsey Journal or another paper in that area, then he moved to work in the new radical press -- being a familiar face at Black Dwarf/Seven Days and later Time Out. Hellyer and some other Young Liberals got very involved with the Palestinians around this time and in the summer of 1969 Kelly went to Jordan, not, as he told people, to see the refugee camps, schools and medical aid groups, but to a proper Fatah training camp. Members of the Baader Meinhof group also attended these camps and learnt their bombing and killing skills in them. Kelly was taught firearms/explosives and went out on some treks to the Israeli border with Fatah patrols.

Around this time, after returning to London, Kelly acted as a cheer leader on several Arab demonstrations in London and during fighting in one of them he was seen to kick a policeman.

But although he seemed firmly in the left camp, a number of odd things about his attitude towards a person he knew to be hostile to the left are rather strange, on several occasions he could have blown the cover of a man who had infiltrated the Palestinians and some left groups. This man ran into him time and time again, including once at a function organised by the Cuban embassy in London. Kelly was seen on Irish Rights marches the night the Ulster office was attacked, medical aid for Vietnam, Portugese meetings and even a demo over Anguilla.

Wherever he worked on left journals he always seem to get into a position [section illegible, but probably 'had access to the'] names and address of subscribers. Reports from left watchers state that he has been to Cuba, America, East Germany, Jordan and Sofia in Bulgaria for a Peace Conference. In the early seventies he went to work in West Germany and was away for around two years, I understand that he worked as a sports reporter (he was there at the time of the Munich massacre). He also had a German girl friend whose name is either Gerde Jager, or Jaegar, the daughter of a rich lawyer. She is said to be close to SWAPO operations in Western Europe and tied up with something named 'Informist'?

Back in Britain Kelly worked at Time Out and was instrumental in introducing Mark Hosenball to stories that are part or even all of the reason for his deportation order. Around Time Out a group of Americans, Kelly, Duncan Campbell (the technology freak), plus Crispin Aubrey and John Berry (not just a former Army signals clerk, but a former member of British Military Intelligence) began to operate.

More than a year ago Kelly started to work for Interpress Services, a press agency of which he appears to be the sole employee in this country.

Even some of the left watchers here thought that this agency was set up at the time of a Third World Conference held in Colombo in Sri Lanka a couple of years ago and that in some way it is connected with the Yugoslav State Press Agency. However our checks reveal that it was set up in Italy in 1968 as a press co-operative and the directors are South Americans an Italians, one of the original people before Kelly at this end was John Rettie -- a man I still have to check out but was in some KGB scandal in Moscow some years ago.

The last return made by the co-op shows an annual turn-over of a quarter of a million pounds sterling, although it precedes Kelly's joining them (at least officially) salaries are shown as only two thousand per annum.

Hosenball, who to my knowledge was always keen to meet any new contacts, told me that he had refused to meet Kelly's contacts in Germany but would say no more. He was also prepared to tell me that the co-op was, as he understood it, set up by some Chilean Christian Democrats who in more recent times dropped out to be replaced by the Iraquis, although no signs of this appear on the company house records. Hosenball is frightened to tell me more about Kelly and it is almost certain that Kelly could blackmail Hosenball to keep silent. Since the Agee/Hosenball expulsion notices were issued, Kelly is often being seen more and more running round organising things. When Hosenball made it clear that he did not wish to be used as political cannon fodder, Kelly wrote an attack on him that appeared in the 'Leveller', a radical magazine.

This is not all that Kelly has done for the 'Leveller', he has also produced material on West Germany for them about the trials of the Terrorist groups.

The arrest of Campbell/Berry and Aubrey has caused a civil rights row, but according to my top level security service sources, they inform me in the strictest confidence that for about four years Campbell, Berry and Kelly and others have been systematically gathering top level security material. Campbell, who claims to have only an interest in technological matters in as far as the state is involved, had done four years detailed research into the whole structure of the other side of not only our Intelligence services but those of other NATO countries. He has also gone to people who work on top security contracts and started off by asking them about open commercial work their companies do and then gradually asked them for information on top secret work, including that on under-water detection hardware, which he clearly knows is beyond the pale.

Politically it appears that the group have no one political guiding light or line, but Kelly is suspected of being the KGB man who reaps the goodies gathered by people who are possibly as disapproving of the KGB as they are of the CIA. [Two words illegible but probably 'Other teams'] like this have been operating in France and Sweden. (Agee has been in contact with the Swedish set up.) The security services feel that once the real nature of this case begins to emerge they expect people like Jonathan Aitken will fade away fast. The security service accepts that a number of decent people have been signed up to support these people on civil rights grounds and they also unofficially accept all the short-comings of the act that they have been held under, but they say they are sure this has gone well beyond the bounds of Press Investigation.

Hosenball, although supposedly having his differences with Kelly, was party to a strange chat between Kelly and Steve Weisman at Granada's Christmas party. They were going through a list of contacts and what Hosenball's reaction would be be if he were asked about them. I could not catch the names but when one name came up all three of them seemed very keen to keep it out of the hearing.

Hosenball got extremely angry with Malcolm Southam of World In Action when asked about a man named Karl Von Metre, thought to be an American living in Paris, and would not talk about him Hosenball's Paris trips are a mystery.

He told me two years ago that the reasons for his Paris visits were to go through files taken from a Portugese office of an extreme right wing group that used a press agency as a cover. At the time of the army take over in Portugal they had been seized and taken to Paris. However, my own investigation showed that the files were not in Paris at all had had never been taken out of Portugal, so why lie? His contact in Paris is Frederick Laurent, a young man who works for the left wing paper 'Liberation' and who lives in very grand style in a huge Paris apartment.

When Hosenball and Kelly had hold of the Crozier material they were very keen not to check out right wing connections but to trace phone numbers they felt belonged to Secret Service establishments etc. Hosenball also went to Spain, I think to track down one of the people mentioned in the Robert Moss letters, but despite all this research most of what they got was not appearing in print anyway. Kelly was not happy about Searchlight using the documents and I think Hosenball, who had done work for Searchlight on various occasions, felt embarassed by his attitude.

Kelly's current girl friend is Dorothy Jones who works for the People's Press Service or News Service, a sort of Agitprop outfit. Kelly moved into a house in Hemmingford Road, Islington, some time last winter. He shares it with Richard Fletcher who is on the London Co-op Education Committee, (strong links with East Germany) this is at 104 Hemmingford Road, N7.

I went to the house one dark winter night just after they had moved in. I was with Mark Hosenball and the reason for our visit was to get some more photocopies of the Moss letters.

When we arrived, a man who I thought must Fletcher came to the door. The building is a shop, basement and upper part, it was in a bad state of disrepair and the man was plastering or something like that. He said to Mark 'there is a caucus meeting, Phil's up top'. Mark told me to hang on and ran upstairs to the top floor. Being a nosey bugger I followed and in the top floor front room were about seven or eight men, no women, all seated on cushions on the floor with no centre light.

They were a mixed age group. I didn't recognise any of them and they did not seem to know me. Kelly looked at me staring in over Hosenball's shoulder and leapt up and pushed us out of the room. He said to Mark in a low voice 'Why did you bring him here?' and Mark waffled on about not being able to contact him in advance and I needed the letters that very night as Searchlight was going to press on the next day. Kelly took us to the basement and produced the papers and then ushered us out as quickly as possible.

I have now given the names I have acquired to be checked out by British/French security services, especially the French and German connections and the South American stuff is being checked by Geoffrey Stewart-Smith's institute. He has strong CIA links. I may try somebody in the Israeli Foreign Office that I know for some checks on Kelly. It is now a time of waiting for feed-back and also further checks here.

I have attached a number of documents including a transcript of Kelly's interview with World in Action. It goes without saying that I would like this kept strictly secret.

GERRY GABLE