The Post Bag: Letters To Squall

Larry O’Book Plug

Squall 14, Autumn 1996, pg. 69.

Dear Squall,

In April 1993, I co-wrote a booklet ‘A Lie Too Far’, in which I speculated, based on the activities of a self-confessed MI5 asset, Tim Hepple, that “as countering militant animal rights activism is seen as an ‘anti-terrorist activity’, responsibility is held by MI5 overall”. I followed up this assertion by further research published in At War With the Truth covering this aspect (amongst others) of this assets activity and those of his part-controllers, the MI5 disinformation-conduit Searchlight magazine. I further elaborated on MI5’s interest in the Green Movement in ‘Turning Up the Heat: M15 After the Cold War’. This theme has subsequently been returned to by me in the magazines Head (issue 6) and Frontline (issue 3). In this last piece I give constructive suggestions to anti-roads activists as to how to counter such malign intervention.

With this background in mind, I (almost) found amusing the two pieces in Squall 13 on such matters: the first by Jim Carey even takes the title of my book, and passages of it seemed familiar, very familiar indeed to me. I am well-used, however, to unacknowledged plagiarism of my research. For while part of my message is palatable indeed to the ‘radical intelligensia’, the rest of it is very uncomfortable.

I refer to the fact that MI5 (and Special Branch) intervention in the Green Movement, including the use of agents provocateur is not so much a thing for the future as something that is already happening. Of course tame journalistic collaborators of the secret state, sometimes acting in good faith, will either not know (because they haven’t been told!) or not admit such. The logic goes, because the activities of Tim Hepple and Stuart McCullough (to name but two) were thwarted, in part by my own role, then the spectacular court cases that were meant to occur either didn’t, or produced the wrong result from the state’s point of view (eg. the framing of Nina Wilson in Belfast).

Thus what the bourgeois media chooses to regard as ‘proof’ (court cases or self-admissions by the agencies concerned) has not been forthcoming. That does not excuse, however, the lack of mention of the very heavy conspiracy cases involving animal rights activists and Green Anarchist (targeted initially by Hepple & Co) that are still on-going.

It really is absurd for Neil Goodwin to merely see American style dirty tricks ‘on the horizon’. If he lowers his gaze, he will see such is going on now: if he cares to look in the right places, and ask the right questions of the right people.

Larry O’Hara

Neil Goodwin replies:
If, as O’Hara suggests, I lower my gaze I simply see environmental activists getting on with it rather than getting bogged down in ultimately disempowering conspiracy theories. O’Hara’s reference to dirty tricks ‘going on now’ no doubt includes recent raids on Green Anarchist, a newspaper O’Hara has well-known associations with. As the central purpose of my article was to counter creeping notions of abandoning NVDA in favour of violence by demonstrating the processes by which the State is attempting to shoehorn the movement into that untenable and alienating position, and how such a shift would serve its purposes and not ours, would it not muddy the water somewhat to cite Green Anarchist as an innocent recipient of big brother’s dirty tricks given that paper’s flirtation with the fantasy of violent revolution?

Jim Carey replies:
Larry O’Hara must be used to unacknowledged plagiarism if he includes articles like mine in that bracket. For I have never read any of his books.