After the bad times, New York clubland, but still plays prison gigs. B. B. King goes back to the grass roots, plays black audiences on the Mississippi trail.

The Life and Times of Blues Boy King by Charles M . SawyerOn November 20 American blues musician B. B. King inaugurates his second European tour with an appearance at the New Victoria Hall in London. King comes to London from Indianola, Missis­sippi by way of Memphis, Manhattan and Las Vegas, a journey which began in 1964 when he left his plantation job as a tractor driver. In recent years he has become enormously popular in the US. Before 1966 he was almost totally unknown among white Americans outside the Deep South. Now King hopes to extend his recent US success to Europe.

There was a time when B. B. King was better known in Europe than he was among white Americans. Blues was the blackest of the Black Arts and despite the huge success of several black jazz and rock and roll musicians, Middle America wasn’t interested. At the same time many Europeans, especially Britons, were keen enthusiasts of blues music. Yet even among Europeans B. B. King was far from being the best known blues artist. They tended to favour the earthier musicians, who were closer to their roots in the South, like Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson. B. B. was more urbane than earthy, more elegant than gutbucket.

British TeachersNow Americans are appreciating

blues with the same enthusiasm they once saved for rock and roll, and like so many things they have learned about their music, much of this comes from British musicians. The principal figures in the popularisation of blues in America are two Britons and three Americans: Eric Clapton, John Mayall, Chicagoans Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield; finally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, Elvin Bishop. The last three played together in the first Paul Butterfield-Blues Band. Mick Jagger andthe Rolling Stones, and Eric Burdon andthe Animals also brought some attention to -blues. Both Clapton andthe American guitarist Mike Bloomfield learned the rudiments of blues guitar from B. B. King’s recordings. When

America’s Youth idolized them they were quick to credit their mentor and soon audiences were eager to hear the original. That exposure together with the general rise of interest in all forms of blues allowed B. B. King and several other blues musicians to break the rigid colour lines that had circumscribed their careers.Nightclubs and Sophisticates

After American audiences discovered blues, B. B. King went on to enjoy a success far beyond that achieved by other blues artists. He has recently played in the luxury hotels in Miami Beach and Las Vegas; he was enormously popular in New York’s prestige night clubs. He makes frequent appearances on network variety shows.

There are two reasons for his unusual success: his depth as a musician, and the skill of his management. Musically, his sophistication and versatility far exceed that of his peers. This gives him the depth and breadth needed to please both aficionados and less learned listeners. And his management is the best available. His career is guided by show business professionals, old hands at building a performer’s popular appeal and then solidifying it so as to make the success permanently durable.

Rylie B. King was born in Itta Bena, Mississippi, the son of a black plantation hand and a black domestic servant. You cannot start any lower in the social hierarchy of American society. In his teens he worked on a plantation as a tractor driver — already at least one notch up the scale because his job involved a skill. When he was 21 he hitchhiked to Memphis, Tennessee, the j nearest outpost of the Urban North. In Memphis he located his older cousin, “Bukka” White, a well known blues singer who still lives in Memphis and records occasionally. For nearly a year he lived with Bukka who coached him in his growing skill at guitar playing. Later, King got a job on the first black-managed (white-owned) radio station in Memphis, WDIA, advertising a health tonic called Pepticon. He was known as the “Pepticon Boy!’ until he became a regular disc jockey and then was called “The Beale Street Blues Boy”. This was later- shortened to “Blues Boy” and soon to “B. B.”.

In 1949 his recording of “3 O’clock

Blues” hit the top of the national (black) charts and soon B. B. King was a celebrity. There followed fifteen years of harrowing travel on the chitlin’ circuit — the bars and taverns in the ghettoes and the coloured cafes and juke joints of the rural South. In 1956 he played 342 one-night stands.

Race Records and Rack Jobbers B. B. King is heir to a rich legacy of

the blues tradition which began its history as recorded music in 1920. The first blues recording by Mamie Smith called “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down” started the “Race Records” Business: white businessmen recording black artists for sale to an exclusively black market. This seamy business was especially hard on the artists and composers whose rights were routinely ignored. Most of these recordings were sold by “rack-jobbers” — small merchants such as grocers and chemists who sold records from a rack on their counters at outrageously low prices. B. B. King’s early recordings were made by such a company, Modern Records, run by three white brothers named Bihari.

B. B. King, his fretworks supreme.

Around 1960. B. B. switched to ABC Records where he was treated somewhat better. But he only got a truly fair contract (one that reflected his popularity and his importance as a musician) a few years ago. To B. B. the fact that his record company took him seriously was signalled by the purchase by ABC Records of a sizeable quantity of insurance on his life.

As heir to the blues legacy B. B. King stands at the centre of gravity of Afro-American music. Ultimately, all forms of Black American music have their roots in blues. In his youth B. B. was a local celebrity for his singing in church and his early experiences in ecstatic worship have had a strong impact on his musical style. Several older blues musicians influenced his musical development: Blind Lemmon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, Bukka White, and T-Bone Walker. Besides these blues artists B. B. has been strongly influenced by two famous jazz musicians: Django Reinhardt andCharlie Christian. From the blues men he learned the basic blues forms: the standard blues chord progresssions, the use of the guitar as a responsive compliment to the singer’s voice, the importance of techniques of picking and fretting, etc. From T-Bone Walker he learned the potential of the electric guitar for expressive blues. The Jazz artists, Christian and Reinhardt, taught B. B. the importance of single string runs (prior to Christian guitars were always used as fill-in instruments rather than independent voices in jazz groups) and a thorough knowledge of scales. B. B. knows the fretboard of his guitar as well as any contemporary guitarist. Besides these things B. B. has taken from jazz its emphasis on phrasing and its wide latitude of expression.

B. B. and his AudienceB. B.’s performances go far beyond

his recordings and even the ones recorded “live” only suggest the tremendous energy he can generate in an audience. He is extremely skillful at audience control. He “reads” each audience for its mood and emotional complexion and then adjusts his routine to suit the occasion. He works the crowd by applying carefully measured amounts of power supplied from his

amplifier and his seven piece road band. Like a Southern Sanctified Preacher, he stirs an energy in his listeners that is contagious and feeds on itself. While this energy is growing, B. B. guides the audiences to a climax that is finally resolved in a group catharsis.

Since white Americans have begun enjoying blues in large numbers, B. B. King’s gruelling schedule of one-night stands before all-black audiences in dingy bars and taverns has been replaced by an equally taxing schedule of one-night concerts on University campuses before predominately white audiences. This has made it more difficult for middle aged blacks to hear him perform in the clubs they patronize. Not impossible, though, since he hasn’t abandoned his loyal followers of many years standing.

Playing in PrisonsHe still swings through Mississippi at

least once a year, and in recent months has played for free in several American prisons. There are, of course, considerable benefits that accrue from these performances: he is assured of good exposure in the press, especially since Attica. But he plays prisons at least as much out of sympathy for the convicts as in response to the advice of his management. His recent success has been received with ambivalence by young blacks. Many identify with him as an important figure in their cultural heritage and admire him for triumphing over adversity. Yet many advocates of Black Nationalism reject him trafficking with the Man.Following his London appearance King goes to Bristol to play at Colston Hall on November 21. His Continental itinerary includes Stockholm, Copen­hagen, Paris, Amsterdam, Hamburg and Berlin.

Charles Sawyer is currently working on a book on B. B. King to be published in the Spring by November Books Ltd. — tentative title — The Arrival of B. B. King.

“B, B. King in London” a new album was released on November 5 by Probe Records (Probe SPB 1041) — and a single from the album, “Ain't Nobody Home” will be released on November 19.

18

7 Days 17 November 1971 ARTS

ARTS 7 Days 17 November 1971

'I am a disenchanted man

Francine Winham

Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian film director, is in England at the moment shooting a version of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. We went to Rye, in Kent, to talk to him about the film and about his present situation in Italian politics.

We found him, together with a large group of Italian film technicians, looking decidedly out of place in a small English country hotel. It was about 8 o'clock in the evening. The town had already been dead for several hours.

Pasolini was sitting at a table, decorated with bottles o f HP sauce and tomato ketchup, trying to order something to eat. The waiter addressed him as Mr Pas. having apparently given up trying to master the rest of his name. He communicated with Mr Pas in faltering French. Pasolini's well-known Anglophilia was taking a bit of a knock.

We asked him why he had decided to make a film of Chaucer, particularly since his last project had been Boccaccio’s Decameron and his next was to be the Arabian Nights. Why had he become interested in collections of stories and tales? Wasn’t this a rather archaic form? Both Chaucer and Boccaccio were fourteenth century writers and the Arabian Nights more distant still.There is never a ‘why’ in these cases. I

c o u l d give you any number of rationalisations. For example, films like this give you a range of up to two hundred characters so you get an opportunity to present a very broad slice of reality. At the same time, I can be very modern. This is a period of crisis for the ‘great novel’, the thousand-page novel like Tolstoy or Dickens. But the old tale has the same narrative cut as a newspaper story. If you open a newspaper, you can see that it is nothing more than a series of stories, just like Chaucer or Boccaccio.

A Disenchanted ManI connect these stories with the regret

I feel for the loss of the world of the past. I am a disenchanted man. I have always been at odds with society. I have fought with it, and it has persecuted me, but it has given me some success as well. Now I don’t like it any more. I don’t like its way of life, its quality of life, And so I regret the past. At my age, my point in life, I suppose it’s almost conventional.

The world of Chaucer and Boccaccio hadn’t yet experienced industrialisation. There wasn’t any consumer society, there weren’t any assembly lines. There was nothing in common with the society of today. Exept perhaps there was a kind of demand for sexual freedom owing to the beginning of a bourgeois revolution in the context of medieval society. There may be a parallel there. But periods of freedom like that are doomed to finish quickly. In his old age, Boccaccio became a bigot. That explosion of freedom only lasted a few years. The same is true of today; it will only last a few years.

Pasolini has selected mainly the stories about low life in Chaucer, rather than those with aristocratic subjects. We asked Pasolini why he had chosen this way and whether he saw a strong class aspect to the Canterbury Tales.I picked the stories which were realistic in a poetic sense rather than fantasic or mythological. Chaucer stands astride two epochs. There is something medieval and Gothic about him, the metaphysics of death. But often you get the feeling you could be reading Shakespeare or Rabelais or Cervantes. He is a realist, but he is also a moralist and a pedant and he has some extraordinary poetic insights into the

future. Of course, when I say ‘realist’, I don’t mean ‘naturalist’. I hope that’s clear.

A Bourgeois MoralistChaucer still has one foot in the

Middle Ages, but he is not ‘of the people’, even though he took his stories from the people. He is already a bourgeois. He looks forward to the Protestant Revolution and even to the Liberal Revolution, insofar as the two were combined in Cromwell. But whereas Boccaccio, for example, who was also a bourgeois, had a clear conscience, with Chaucer there is already a kind of unhappy feeling, an unhappy conscience.

Chaucer foresees all the victories and triumphs of the bourgeoisie, but he also foresees its rotten-ness. He is a moralist but he is ironic too. Boccaccio doesn’t foresee the future in this way. He catches the bourgeoisie at its moment of triumph, when it was being born. In Italy the bourgeoisie was blocked. There were the princely Courts and then there was the Counter-Reformation. There was no bourgeois revolution, as there was in England. This is what Gramsci described. The Italian bourgeoisie suddenly found itself in the modern world, after the end of Fascism, dragged there by the others.

Generally Pasolini uses non-profes­sionals as actors in his films, as example, in The Gospel According to St. Matthew. We asked him how he had set about casting the Canterbury Tales and what he was doing about the problems of language involved.I tried to do what I did with the Decameron. I set the whole of the Decameron in and around Naples and I make all the characters speak in the Neapolitan dialect of today. I could not use Chaucer’s English, so I have used the most simple vernacular possible, with some dialect elements. I’ve used Chaucer’s words but I’ve translated them into a modern idiom.

For instance, in the Pardoner's Tale, which is the one about the three boys on the margins of society, living on their wits, etc, I found three boys like that on the road. Completely by chance all three happened to be Scottish, so they will be talking with Scottish accents. I shall be shooting The Cook's Tale, the story of Peterkin, in the London docks, so that one will be in Cockney. I’m making it into a homage to Chaplin. And then when I was down near Bath and at Wells, I really liked the way people spoke down there, so some bits will be in a Somerset accent. I am using live language, with a lot of different dialects put together.

Humour class privilegeOne thing that surprised me about

the working class boys and the women who I’ve used for small parts here is that they don’t seem to have the same sense of humour as the privileged English bourgeoisie. Chaucer has the bourgeois qualities of moralism, pragmatism and a sense of humour. He is already a privileged English bourgeois in these respects. Perhaps humour is a class privilege in England. I didn’t realize that before I came here.

In Italy every paper or magazine has to have a direttore responsabile, a citizen of good standing who is legally responsible for the contents of the paper, a kind o f official fall-guy. Two of the previous holders of this post for the paper Lotta Continua, published by the revolutionary group of the same name, have already had to stand trial on charges o f subversion. One o f them, Pio Baldelli has several major trials pending or in appeal. As a gesture of solidarity a number of prominent intellectuals

accepted co-responsibility for issues of the paper. Among them was Pasolini. We asked him why he had chosen to run this risk and what he thought about being put on trial, not for the first time. I’m being put on trial because the Italian penal code is still the Fascist penal code, which was never changed after the War. There are still ‘thought-crimes’ as there were under the Fascist dictatorship. The code doesn’t allow any real freedom of the press. I put my name to Lotta Continua simply out of a sense of democracy. I don’t agree with them. In fact, there’s a lot of things I don’t agree with them about, but they have a right to their opinions. The trial is about ‘crimes of opinion’.

Crude LanguageThey have committed various kinds

of ‘outrage’ or ‘slander’. They have defamed the police and are accused of slandering the army. The paper used, crude language, which I wouldn’t have used myself, but they didn’t attack individuals, Captain X or Lieutenant Y. They only attacked the officer corps in general. In my view, anyone has the right to express their opinions about the army in whatever style they choose. So I gave them my support and in this I’m completely with them.

In 1968, I published my poem, II PCI ai giovani! (literally — the Italian CP to the youth) which made me terribly unpopular with the left in Italy for a time. I may have put things badly, but what I said turned out to be true, unfortunately, as we can see today. I had a rather hysterical impulse, a kind of crisis, an impatience with the grey mass of young rebels there were then, who in fact have now completely given up. They weren’t able to advance. It wasn’t directed against Lotta Continua. In fact, it specifically excluded them. It referred to other groups, who I’m with now, when the rest have given up. I have my position and they have theirs. Theirs may be different from mine, but there is something in common, so necessarily we had to come together in some way.

Now I’m on trial, there’s nothing intolerable about it. There’s no way round the problem. It’s not as bad as being a worker at Fiat or an immigrant from the South of Italy. People like me have a lot of other things to redeem us. I have done so much. My life is so full. But it isn’t for a poor worker from the South. What does a trial matter to me? I don’t care in the slightest if they put me in prison. I don’t care at all. It doesn’t make any difference to me, even from an economic point of view. If they put

me in prison, I’ll get a chance to read all the books I would never get round to otherwise.

Readers interested in Pasolini can refer to an interview edited by Oswald Stack published in 1969 by the Cinema One Series, entitled Pasolini on Pasolini. It is available in paperback at 75p or hardback at £1.50 from Seeker & Warburg.Pasolini’s major films include Accattone (’61), Mamma Roma (’62), La Riccotta (’62), The Gospel According to St. Matthew (’64), Uccellacci e Uccellini (’66), Oedipus Rex (’67), Theorem (’68), Pigsty (’69), Decameron (’70).

talking to PasolinibyRosamund Lomax and Oswald Stack

19

Key

ston

e.

Charlie Chaplin attending the first showing o f Modern Times’’ for 33 years, in Paris.

The cake has his bowler and stick on it.

The Abortion Action Group of the Women's Liberation Workshop

is calling a demonstration for abortion on demand

in common with groups in France, Germany, USA, Canada and New Zealand Meet 2.30 pm, Saturday November 20.

7 Days 17 November 1971

W ho helped the Partisans?by Stuart Häod

The Embattled Mountain "By F.W.D. Deakin.Oxford University Press £3.75

Why did Churchill back Tito and not Mihailovic, the Royalist gen­eral who claimed to be leading a resistance movement against the Germans, who had the support of the Yugoslav Government in exile in London and the propaganda of the BBC’s foreign-language broad­casts? That is one of the key questions to which Deakin pro­vides an answer in this important but indigestible book.

Churchill’s reasons were pragmatic. He had a theory that Southern Europe was the “soft underbelly of the Axis” ; he also hankered after a large scale diversion on the lines of his Gallipoli campaign of the First World War. There was fighting going on against the Ger­mans in Yugoslavia. Churchill, for his own reasons, would back whoever was fighting the Germans hardest. It was becoming clear by 1943, from reports sent back by British officers dropped into Yugoslavia, that Mihailovic, while collaborating with the Italians and Ger­mans, was concerned to eliminate the “partisans”. But who were the par­tisans? And who — if he existed at all — was Tito? One thing was clear to British operational intelligence: the German order of battle in the Balkans showed them to be engaged in large scale operations against some force, which could not be Mihailovic’s Cetnik bands. So it was decided to drop Deakin into the area of the fighting to find out what was happening and to make contact with Tito.

Partisan WarfareHe found himself in the midst of a

ferocious battle of encirclement. Tito was about to breakthrough the German

ring of troops taking with him thou­sands of sick and wounded. If left behind — as some had to be — they would be tracked down by the Germans or their collaborators and shot. To save the wounded was essential to morale. Deakin’s description of the break-out through the German encirclement is one of the best accounts of partisan warfare and is, in the epic nature of the incident described, paralleled only by some epi­sodes from the Long March of the Chinese Red Army.

The British missions dropped in Yugoslavia were generally politically innocent. They had the most curious ideas about the nature of revolutionary struggle and strange preconceptions about what a revoutionary leader would look like or behave like. It was this innocence that prevented Deakin and his companions from grasping the organ­isation of the partisan movement and the close interconnections between the General Staff and the political organs of the struggle. But they were speedily convinced that Tito was fighting the Germans and that Mihailovic was not. What is curious is that the Russians were at this very time encouraging Tito to collaborate with Mihailovic in the name of national unity and were seemingly incapable of under­standing the true situation. There were continued rumours that the Soviets were to drop a mission into Yugoslavia but it never arrived although in 1942 the partisans had waited several weeks for it. It was not until 1944 — a year after the main British, mission joined Tito’s HQ — that the Soviet military mission actually took off from Cairo, still believing that Mihailovic was the only resistance group of military signifi­cance.

Deakin’s book puts paid to the arguments, still being fed from Yugoslav exiles in America, that Mihailovic was a great resister. It also reminds us sadly that Tito, the man who hobnobs with Shahs and royalty, was once a great fighter and revolutionary force.

Anchors Aweigh for BBC N A V Y LA R K SThe BBC has been having what it describes as “long talks” with the Navy as the first step towards planning a new drama series for which the Navy will provide the facilities in the form of ships, planes and crews. The producer is to set out on a recce with the Navy in the New Year as a result of which a final decision will be made.

It is believed at a working level in the BBC that the recent episode of The Troubleshooters, which was shot on board an aircraft carrier Was looked on by the BBC as something in the nature of a dry run for the project. The tone of this particular episode was that of an undisguised plug for the Navy — a piece of special pleading for the retention of aircraft carriers, which are apparently useful for rescuing the crews of oil- tankers which go on fire in mid- Atlantic.

For The Troubleshooters the Navy put Ark Royal at the disposal of the BBC with its full complement of air­craft. The story, which was extremely thin, was in the familiar tradition of Sink the Bismarck full of cool gentle­manly officers taking cool gentlemanly decisions. There was nothing to suggest that the ordinary matelots might actually exist as human beings and not just be automatons. The new project will no doubt continue in the same hackneyed tradition.

Lovely ToysThe army, airforce and navy are only

too pleased to put the expensive toys the nation provides them with at the disposal of the television organisations. The producers and directors are de­lighted to have them to play with — the cost doesn’t figure in the programme budget, they are often visually exciting. The television authorities are happy to perform the function of PRO for the military; it is part of their function in our society. Next time the army turns up in Dr Who or the RAF flies a team from some children’s programme out to Singapore don’t wonder why it happens. One good turn deserves another. If the BBC doesn’t mind brainwashing its viewers into thinking that war-machines are (a) exciting (b) are worth paying for and (c ) harmlessly useful, why should the Ministry of Defence object?

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THE STUDENT CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT

The Student Christian Movement SCM is a diverse Christian body. It is involved in challenging Christian thinking, in 3rd World Research, radical community projects, assisting groups like Agitprop, whilst relating these to deep Christian commitment.We need a non-elitist general secretary to work in a committed team to keep communications alive between all these concerns and with the

world and church outside, and to take part in the donkey work involved in keeping a liberal moving to radical movement alive, Must cope with bureaucracy but not be dehumanised by it.

If you are he/she and willing to live in London for some time, write to:

Assistant General Secretary SCMAnnandale North End Road London NW11

Gentle provocationVeloso and other “Tropicalia” music­

ians have tried to create a new kind of music — one which relates to contem­porary Brazilian culture. Veloso has denied that he writes political songs, yet what he had written was sufficiently provocative to worry the colonels. One Brazilian described the impact of Veloso’s works in Rio as being similar to Dylan’s in Britain.

But he doesn’t fit naturally into the Ango-American musical categories the publicity men try to ascribe to him, despite the similarity of his voice to Paul Simon’s. The songs and the rhythms on his most recent album (Famous SEM 1002) have a strength that only appears when it is listened for, because it is rooted in a Third World culture, not in Dylan or the Beatles.

Two tracks stand out. ‘MariaBethania, ’ a tribute to his sister, a well-known Brazilian actress, and In The Hot Sun Of The Christmas Day which begins: ‘They are chasing me . . .’

The songs written about London are less impressive. Caetano Veloso seems overwhelmed by a city where policeman are actually pleased to give people directions. But there is enough on this album to suggest that he is capable of producing less wide-eyed commentaries on Britain if his enforced exile con­tinues.

Caetano Veloso has the by no means unique distinction of hav­ing spent two months in a Bra­zilian jail. He was arrested along with a number of other artists after the military coup in Decem­ber ’68, and although no charges were brought against him, the experience was enough to con­vince him that life under a mili­tary junta was not all roses.

So he came to London. And now his record company and management are launching him here as “Brazil’s Top Folk-Rock Star” with a Queen Eliza­beth Hall concert and a first L.P. in English. Veloso was a leading member of the Brazilian “Tropicalia” group, which included Gilberto Gil.

Ballroom dancing niceties.The “Tropicalia” musicians set out to

re-examine the forms of Brazilian music. In the hands of recording companies, the rhumba, samba and conga had become ballroom dancing niceties. Even the most recent expression of Brazilian music, the Bossa Nova, had its real energy and powerful rhythms greased flat for the Hit Parade. Who can easily forget such concoctions as Blame it on the Bossa Nova which topped the charts in the early Sixties.

2 0

Special FeatureIn the first fortnight of 1968 a group of some of the most influential men in the United States held a series of secret meetings in New York. The subject under discussion was the strategic future of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The men present included industrialists, career diplomats, bankers and academics. The reason for their sudden, and urgent conclave had been a series of shattering, and well publicised exposes of what the CIA had been up to. In its own phrase the CIA had been ‘blown’: ‘blown’ to a generation capable of indignation and out­rage at the thought of an organization covertly funding anything from radio programmes in Europe to counter-revolu­tions in central America.

The meetings were held by a “confidential discussion group” under the auspices of the American Council on Foreign Relations. This Council is a semi-official research body assisting long term US foreign policy planning.

At one of the group’s meetings, chaired by Banker Douglas Dillon on January 8, 1968, Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy’s former assistant, Allen Dulles, retired head of the CIA, and Julius Holmes, former US ambassador to Iran, were

among those who listened to Richard Bissell, who was head of CIA ‘plans’ during the bay' of Pigs invasion of Cuba, lead a discussion of intelligence operations and foreign policy.

The purpose of the secret meeting was to assess the future course of the CIA, in the light of the disclosures and public uproar. Over a whole series of leisurely dinners and late-night ruminations these men, in detached and breezy tones, talked their way through the problems of the spy business.

For three years the minutes of their conference remained secret. A week ago 7 DAYS obtained a memorandum of the clandestine meeting We think the memorandum is sufficiently important to publish almost in its entirety. The report is significant not merely because it reveals something of the CIA’s past, but also because, in many ironic ways, it is a heartening document. The men at the conference are revealed as foolish and forgetful; the problems the insoluble ones of any large corporation accounting for an enormous budget and thousands of career spies. Of course the heartening aspects of the report should not be overstressed, but it is helpful to be reminded that organizations such as the CIA are not invincible any more than they are invisible.

The CIA responded to the revelations of 1967 by a dual change: it has ridden, since then, the wave of publicity by admitting many of its

7 Days 17 November 1971

7 DAYS publishes Secret Papersactions, and encouraged the idea that it is everywhere as a means of confusing its apponents: CIA analysts writing for the China Quarterly since 1967 have stated that they are from the CIA; the open CIA funding of Munich-based Radio Free Europe has not impeded that outfit’s activities. Earlier this year Helms head of CIA, gave his first public lecture as CIA director. On the other hand, as the text states, it has had to go further underground: funding of front outfits is no longer so easy, and activities in the Sino-Soviet bloc are difficult. It has given itself a new face: partly more open, and partly more hidden.

Nixon has appointed CIA Director Richard Helms as the new overlord of all US intelligence operations, in a fresh attempt to reorganise the sprawling nine- organisation US spy system.

This change follows an internal shakeup after a series of intelligence blunders since Nixon came to power: last year the US Agency for International Development was shown to be a CIA front; in November US forces attacked Son Tay, near Hanoi, to “rescue” US POWs - and found none there. Then in March of this year the US launched the disastrous invasion of Laos — on the basis of false intelligence.

N ixon’s announcement of the changes on Friday November 5 was made “under circumstances strongly suggesting that it was designed to attract as little public attention as possible” (New York Times, November 7.)

Helms will be given the task of cutting the $6,000 million budget intelligence by about $1 billion. He will also head a new intelligence sub-committee below the National Security Council to revamp the collection of information. The other NSC sub-committee on intelligence, the “40 Committee”, is in charge of active counter-revolutionary work: its head is Kissinger, Helms’ link with Nixon.

The main aim of these changes will be to give Nixon greater control over the gathering of information — to avoid debacles like Son Tay and Laos. One US agent remarked recently: “We in intelligence work often know more about Soviet forces and capabilities than we do about our own”.

Another key aspect of the change is that domestic intelligence gathering by the FBI has been unable to handle the problems raised by the anti-war movement and its links with deserters and organisations outside of the US.

Helms’ promotion comes at a key time for the CIA and its spy associates; these changes in the arrangements at the top follow on from other changes that have taken place at the bottom.

The Chairman, Mr. Dillon, opened the meeting, noting that although this entire series of discussion was “off-the-record”, the subject of discussion for this particular meeting was especially sensitive and subject to the previously announced restrictions.

As the session’s discussion leader, Mr. Bissell offered a review and appraisal of covert operations in U.S. foreign policy.

Touching briefly upon the question of responsibility, of whether these agencies are instruments of national policy, Mr. Bissell remarked that, in such a group he needn’t elaborate on CIA’s responsiveness to national policy; that we could assume that, although CIA participates in policy making (as do other “action agencies,” such as AID, the military services and Departments, in addition to theDepartment of State), CIA was a responsible agency of national policy.

Covert OperationsCovert operations should, for some purposes, be

divided into two classifications: (1) Intelligence collection, primarily espionage, or the obtaining of intelligence by covert means; and (2) Covert action, attempting to influence the internal affairs of other nations — sometimes called“intervention” — by covert means.

Although these two categories of activity can be separated in theory, intelligence collection and covert action interact and overlap. Efforts have been made historically to separate the two functions but the result has usually been regarded as “a total disaster organizationally.”

Postwar U.S. reconnaissance operations began, historically, as “covert” operations, primarily a series of clandestine overflights of Communist territory in Eastern Europe, inaugurated in the early 1950s. These early efforts were followed by the U-2 project, which provided limited coverage but dramatic results.

Now we have reconnaissance satellites. Overhead reconnaissance is one of the most open of “secrets” in international affairs; it is no longer really a “covert activity,” and bureaucratic responsibility for it now resides in the Pentagon.

Classical espionage, in the early postwar years, was conducted with special intensity in West Germany, and before the Berlin wall, in that city, which was ideal for the moving of agents in both directions, providing a sizable flow of political and economic intelligence (especially from East Germany).

The Korean War provided an impetus for a buildup of espionage activities, based mainly in Japan. These, however, never attained the size (in

Richard Helms, newly promoted overlord o f all US intelligence. Helms is a model self-effacing spook. He started out as a journalist before the war, interviewing Hitler as U.P. ’s European correspond­ent. He moved on to become National Advertising director of the ‘Indianapolis Times'. From the launching pad of international reporting and public relations Helms joined the Navy and moved smartly into the Office of Strategic Services. In the

Lord of the SpiesU.P.I.

CIA ‘plans’ division from its inception in 1947, Helms’ career is suitably cloudy. I t ’s known that he handled Kremlin intelligence work, then made his name supervising what Time called the “covert US operations that kept the Congo out of Communist control’’. Promotion followed, during the storms over the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and Helms surfaced at the top o f the CIA in 1966. Now he is America’s Lord of the Spies.

numbers of people and dollars) or anywhere near the effectiveness of the European operations.

Throughout the period since the early fifties, of course, the Communist bloc, and more especially the USSR itself, has been recognized as the primary target for espionage activities. Circumstances have greatly limited the scale of operations that could be undertaken within the bloc so much of the effort has been directed at bloc nationals stationed in neutral or friendly areas, and at “third country” operations that seek to use the nationals of other non-Communist countries as sources of information on the Soviet bloc.

More recently there has been a shift in priorities for classical espionage toward targets in the underdeveloped world. Partly as a result of this change in priorities and partly because of other developments, the

scale of the classical espionage effort mounted in Europe has considerably diminished. The USSR remains a prime target but Communist China would today be given the same priority.

Espionage disappointingAs to the kinds of information that could be

obtained, espionage has been of declining relative importance as a means of learning about observable developments, such as new construc­tion, the characteristics of transportation systems the strength and deployment of military forces and the like because reconnaissance has become a far more effective collection technique and (except in China) travel is freer and far more extensive than some years ago. It had been hoped that espionage would contribute to the collection of intelligence on Soviet and East European

technology, since this is a body of information not readily observable (until embodied in operational systems). Another type of intelligence for which espionage would seem to be the only available technique is that concerning enemy intentions. In practice however espionage has been disappointing with respect to both these types of intelligence. They are for obvious reasons closely guarded and the task is just too difficult to permit results to be obtained with any dependability or regularity. With respect to the former category — technology — the published literature and direct professional contacts with the scientific community have been far richer sources.

As to friendly neutrals and allies, it is usually easier to learn what one wishes by overt contacts, human contacts o f overt members of the U.S. mission or private citizens. We don’t need espionage to learn British, or even French intentions.

The general conclusion is that against the Soviet bloc or other sophisticated societies, espionage is not a primary source of intelligence, although it has had occasional brilliant successes (like the Berlin Tunnel and several of the high level defectors). A basic reason is that espionage operates mainly through the recruitment of agents and it is enormously difficult to recruit high level agents. A low level agent, even assuming that he remained loyal and that there is some means of communicating with him simply cannot tell you much of what you want to know. The secrets we cannot find out by reconnaissance or from open sources are in the minds of scientists and senior policy makers and are not accessible to an ordinary citizen even of middle rank.

A world of opportunitiesIn contrast, the underdeveloped world presents

greater opportunities for covert intelligence collection, simply because governments are much less highly organized; there is less security consciousness; and there is apt to be more actual or potential diffusion of power among parties, localities, organizations, and individuals outside of the central governments. The primary purpose of espionage in these areas is to provide Washington with timely knowledge of the internal pow er. balance, a form of intelligence that is primarily of tactical significance.

Why is this relevant?Changes in the balance of power are extremely

difficult to discern except through frequent contact with power elements. Again and again we have been surprised at coups within the military; often, we have failed to talk to the junior officers or non-coms who are involved in the coups. The same problem applies to labour leaders, and others. Frequently we don’t know of power relationships, because power balances are murky and sometimes not well known even to the principal actors. continued on page 22

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Inside the C IA