Jim F.
On Sun, 20 Feb 2000 03:39:43 -0800 Michael Pugliese <debsian at pacbell.net>
writes:
> Lennon funded terrorists and Trotskyists [Free Republic]Lennon funded
> terrorists and Trotskyists
>
> Foreign Affairs News Keywords: LEFT WING TERRORISTS
> Source: The Sunday Times of London
> Published: February 20 2000 Author: Unattributed
> Posted on 02/20/2000 01:22:44 PST by SamKeck
> THE secrets of how MI5 spied on John Lennon are to be revealed after
> a
> ruling by a Los Angeles federal court cleared the way for the
> release of
> British intelligence reports held by the FBI, write John Harlow and
> Nicholas
> Rufford.
> The 10 packages of documents, which are held at Washington's FBI
> headquarters, are believed to expose how Lennon gave money to the
> Irish
> Republican Army before its split between the Official and
> Provisional wings.
> They also show that he paid £46,000 to left-wing groups including the
> Trotskyist Workers' Revolutionary party (WRP) and Red Mole, a Marxist
> magazine edited by Tariq Ali, the student protest leader.
> Some of the information came from an MI5 "deep throat" inside the
> WRP who
> passed on details of Lennon's donations to the Americans and,
> bizarrely, a
> handwritten transcript of the lyrics to Lennon's song Working Class
> Hero,
> which he is thought to have sent to the WRP as a gift.
> The WRP achieved fame through its leading lights, the actors Vanessa
> and
> Corin Redgrave, but the movement has since fallen apart as a result
> of of
> internal rows.
> MI5 passed material from its own files to the FBI in the early 1970s
> after
> Lennon moved to America and began campaigning against the Vietnam
> war.
> Advisers to Richard Nixon, the former American president, ordered J
> Edgar
> Hoover, then director of the FBI, to find information to help deport
> Lennon.
> Following receipt of the MI5 intelligence, the FBI stepped up its
> surveillance of the singer. Lennon and Yoko Ono, his wife, were
> followed to
> Irish bars in New York that were fundraising for the IRA. The FBI
> even
> transcribed the lyrics of songs that Lennon performed at
> demonstrations.
> It is thought that Lennon's attraction to the republican cause dated
> back to
> his Liverpudlian roots, where he was surrounded by Irish expatriates.
> In 1971, when internment without trial was introduced in Northern
> Ireland,
> he held a sign at a London rally that read "Victory for the IRA
> against
> British imperialism". After the 1972 Bloody Sunday shootings, he
> proclaimed:
> "If it's a choice between the IRA and the British Army, I'm with the
> IRA."
> The FBI and CIA have released hundreds of pages of highly censored
> versions
> of documents relating to their own investigations but they have
> refused to
> make public papers passed to them by MI5 without permission from
> Britain.
> MI5 held back some information from the FBI, fearing - correctly -
> that it
> would eventually become public.
> Yesterday's court ruling makes it difficult for the American
> government to
> resist a further request for the release of the British files. The
> decision
> follows a 20-year campaign by Jon Wiener, a history professor at the
> University of California and author of a new book about the Lennon
> files,
> Gimme Some Truth.
> Wiener first applied for the files to be released only a few weeks
> after
> Lennon was murdered in New York in December 1980.
> "I find it disappointing that Tony Blair's government, with its
> commitment
> to freedom of information, continues to block 30-year-old
> information about
> a dead rock star," Wiener said.
> Rupert Allason, the former Conservative MP and espionage historian,
> said
> yesterday that he was not surprised by the reluctance of the British
> government to release such documents. "Tony Blair is as trapped by
> institutional secrecy as his predecessors," he said.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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