Photo: ANDREW WIARD (Report *Liberal England' staggered one step further towards its grave last week. Home Secretary Merlyn Rees, giving the green light to the Orange assassins of Maire Drumm in northern Ireland, Philip Agee and American-born journalist Mark Hosenball Apparently they are a threat to the security of the British state.
excuse fabrication that not a single shred of evidence has been produced to support it. Indeed the law involved, Section 3(5)(b) of the 1971 Immigration Act, doesn't require it. All the stooges of the secret service need do is whisper to Merlyn the MagiCIAn and out they go.
Oh yes, they can 'make representations" to a tribunal of three civil servants - but they'll never know the charges against them, will have no lawyers, and no chance to challenge evidence or witnesses. As usual, bnusa standaras of jusuce will prevail.
ORGY as to the reasons for the deportations has ensued in the British press. Did Hosenball s exposure or me sourn Alricar security police in Britain seal his fate? Or was it what British intelligence was up to in Angola and Uganda?
head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, blew a fuse on reading in Time Out in January that he had apparently resigned over the shelving of plans National Security Agency - plans which would have combined army and police fresh back from exposure as a CIA front.
serious consequences.
Cuban Embassy proves such a transparent POINT agents are due to be Not surprisingly, an orgy of speculation Perhaps Sir Maurice Oldfield, one time abroad.
marched through central London last Sundav in resoonse to the Labour Party and TUC call for a demonstration against racism. Hundreds of union, immigrant and anti-fascist banners were on show. About a third of the The demonstration was a tremendous response to the growing threat of racism and fascism. That the Labour bureaucracy had called it at all was a tribute to the pressure put on the labour movement by the upsurge of black youth this summer. So it was all the more sick that an Uncle Tom like Lord Pitt was to 'represent' black people. His particular brand of reaction was an appeal for black people to join the intelligence files with the services of Britain's spy-masters. Then, of course, there was the hasty departure of Forum World Features from these shores following its The allegations levelled against Agee would be comical but for their deadly Apparently going to the cultural affairs department of the your collusion with enemy agents. And if you talk to a Russian journalist in a Kensington restaurant about the publication of a book in the Soviet Union that is already available in 17 other countries, then you just have to be working for the KGB.
More to the point may be Agee's hugely successful recent visit to Jamaica, during the course of which he named nine CIA agents. 150,000 leaflets carrying their names, addresses and even car registra tion numbers were distributed. CIA attempis to destabinse tne Island were themselves destabilised with the hasty departure of three agents. Another 500 TaTe MACES forthcoming book on the CIA in Europe.
Hatred for Agee has been developing in spook circles for years. His declared aim, as he wrote in the American magazine Counterspy, is to disrupt the work of the CIA through the identification, exposure and neutralisation of its people working oreers The timing is best explained by the arri val in London of a new CIA station chief, Dr Edward Proctor, and Merlyn Rees' appearance at the Home Office - fresh from a round of repression in the north of It was left to the Sunday Telegraph to expose unwittingly the real reasons for the deportation orders. ine technology spying is now so highly developed that there is "hardly such a thing as a military secret left. Instead the real secrets now are in the minds of people. And the most dangerous inreats to security aren "Agents of Influence", the men and women who set out to break down a nation's morale, and destroy a people's will to resist."
In fact Agee and Hosenball, in their own particular way, are doing exactly the opposite - developing the will to resist an ever increasing encroachment on persona liberties and basic democratic rights. The only difference between them and us is that they are American and can be deported. Now that the thought police are arriving, what fate awaits us Agents o Influence' at home?
MICK GOSLING Both Agee and Hosenball are members of the National Union of Journalists, whose leadership were meetina on Tuesda discuss action on the case. Meanwhile the union's Magazine Montay monto gemane. withdrawal o support for the Government by all Labour MPs in the NUJ unless are lifted. the • NÜJ to *rom all talks on a cress cherter unies. all parties agree to protest at the deporTarons, a one day natond sloppage o union members to coincide with "appeal' on 29 November.
----- pull-quotes -----
2 GENERAL- pON CHir