Showing posts with label MI6. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MI6. Show all posts

Friday 29 September 2017

Correction Notice : Soviet Weekly January 17 1946 . . . an ‘Exchange of Information’ Restored . . .

Owing to constraints of space, the following second-lead report on the front page of the Soviet Weekly for January 17 1946 was deficient of certain testimonies from demobilised soldiers returning from the Manchzhurskaya Strategicheskaya Nastupatelnaya Operaciya (Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation) of August of the previous year. You’ll note that, in the report, the demobbed soldiers from the front were asked ‘to explain when and how they won their decorations.’ 

Regrettably, though, the report of Comrade Belikov, far from recording the Soviet warriors’ colourful bellicosities, confines his account to valiantly immodest declarations from a number of Stakhanovist Workers — Heroes and Heroines of the Soviet Home Front – while his editor omits the Red Army squaddies’ eyewitness statements altogether.

We are pleased, therefore – albeit some seven decades later – to redress this deficiency and the words of Soviet soldiery, once unaccountably editorially spiked, are now faithfully recorded as an addendum to the original press story. See Addendum : the Testimony  of  Sergeant Leonid Volkovich, below:

ЗА ПОБЕДУ НАД ЯПОНИЕИ
FOR VICTORY OVER JAPAN

WHAT PEOPLE CAN DO

by V. Belikov.   

During my recent stay in the Siberian town of Barnaul, I attended an interesting meeting. A train arrived bringing demobilised soldiers from Manchuria, and the municipal authorities arranged a meeting between the soldiers and the local workers and collective farmers.

The ex-servicemen were showered with questions about their life at the front. They had to explain when and how they won their decorations. The soldiers in turn were interested in the changes that had taken place in the area since they were called up. 

One local worker after another got up and reported to the soldiers on what has been achieved.

Here is a short summary of what I heard. The first speaker was Elena Bogacheva, a weaver of the Barnaul Textile Mills, decorated for war work. She alone had produced 1,500,000 yards of cloth, enough for nearly 500,000 army uniforms. 

Semyon Piatnitsa, a well-known combine operator of the Budyonny Machine and Tractor Station, reported that he had harvested an area of 37,600 acres during the war years. The station agronomist added to this that it would take 4,712 people using 930 horses, 112 simple harvesters, 112 threshers, 112 winnowing machines and 115 sorting machines to do the job accomplished by Piatnitsa with his one combine-harvester. If no machinery were used, 9,424 people would be needed to do this work. The combine operator also saved 15 tons of fuel during the war.  

Felt boots for 1,563,890 soldiers were produced by a team of six women at the Gorky Factory at Barnaul. This information was revealed by Matrena Trimaskina, head of the team.

Ivan Balyuk, shepherd of the Siberian Merino Collective Farm since 1928, who also wore a Government decoration, had this to report : about 9,000 merino sheep raised since 1928, and 2,402 during the war (without a single loss, or case of sickness); the 30,000 lb. of wool shorn from his flock was sufficient for over 20,000 yards of fabrics, and, consequently, for 7,000 suits. This, too, was the result of the labour of one man. 

The ‘Exchange of Information’ continued, and Alexandra Moshchinskaya of the Tomsk  Railway asked for the floor.  She had transported more than 50,000 tons of freight (about 2,510 carloads) during the war, loading or unloading an average of two cars daily. In her one year of work at the Barnaul Sheepskin Coat Factory, Yekaterina Yushchenko, a young worker, dressed 273,000 skins, or 102,000 in excess of her quota, enough to make 19,000 coats. 

I will conclude with citing the facts revealed by Stepan Gostev, leader of a tractor team. His team exceeded the region’s average quota per wheel tractor (which is quite high) by seven times, every tractor employed by the team ploughing 6,280 acres.

Red propaganda laid on a bit too thick?

Addendum : the Testimony  of  Sergeant Leonid Volkovich.

[The Report resumes.] Rising to his feet – and to the occasion – Sergeant Leonid Volkovich was cheered to the echo by his comrades-in-arms as he began his own deposition. 

‘Comrade Elena,’ he addressed the weaver Elena Bogacheva in an insultingly mocking pitying tone, ‘my dear feeble-minded mousekin, the real, ferocious and merciless character of war is best hidden from you! Hahaha! But let it be known! Your half million uniforms are now steeped in the blood of the devilish barbarous makaki! [Pejorative: Japanese monkeys.] Not forgetting Matrena’s wonder-working pairs of boots (laughter), trampling on one hundred thousand corpses.’

(Both women shuddered.)

The sergeant then gave vent to a few inarticulate roars and lowered his head like a mad bull ready to attack the weaver, who drew back more in confusion than fear. ‘You have no head to imagine our night attacks – storming ladders and naked weapons, murder and conflagration – scorched earth to Sakhalin. 

‘Who could question our orders?  “Soldiers, the town is yours for three days,” they said. The slaughter begins; torch and bayonet perform their business you may be certain. In the streets streams of blood and wine. A splendid festival of our men fighting like tigers among the bleeding dying, smoking ruins, and beautiful, naked, weeping women dragged by their hair to the feet of their conquerors!’

The demobilised troops war-whooped with merriment at this vivid memory. The sergeant grinned wolfishly, revealing broken front teeth, then raised his hand for silence to continue:

‘Why take prisoners and waste time and strength for them? Madness! Grand and glorious days! What fights! Eye-to-eye with the makaki and hand-to-hand. Slaughter without cease for hours, till our cold-blooded, invincible fury brought victory. 

‘Cold-blooded, I say! Yes. Cold-bloodedness reigned.  An entire village – men, women, children, babes-in-arms – were chased into a river and drowned. Children belonging to a village headman had their brains dashed out before his face; after which we threw the mother into a river, and she was drowned. One raiding party obliged many young men to force their aged parents to that river, where they were drowned. Captured wives even assisted in hanging their husbands; and mothers compelled to cut the throats of their children.’

(Elena Bogacheva, at this point in the sergeant’s recital of events, visibly paled, gave a choked cry and ran from the assembly hall. The welcoming committee had grown restless, faces grim.)

Unperturbed, Volkovich hardly raised his voice as he approached his peroration.  

‘Bullets we rationed, of course, so this is the way of it. We’d compel a captured young man to kill his father, and then we’d immediately hang him. Or, after we’d done with a housewife, we’d force her to kill her husband, then oblige the son to kill her, and afterwards shoot him through the head. One bullet, see? Very often two thousand killed for the price of 500 bullets (Sergeant Volkovich winked) and unequalled in all state records for productivity!’

A crowd of ex-soldiers now flocked around the sergeant, considerably stirred by the gusto of his rhetoric. So aroused were they, it almost seemed they had fallen under the spell of a mass hallucination, as though they were still skirmishing, in the midst of havoc and death, in those remembered streets awash with blood and wine.

Suddenly, a giant Siberiak roared, straining every nerve to make himself heard: ‘More liquor now! Or we won’t trust ourselves! We will have blood!’ Very soon other voices from the demobbed soldiers took up the cry ‘We will have blood! Blood! Blood! We must have blood!’

Above the clamour, the harsher voice of the sergeant could be distinguished addressing the welcoming committee. ‘Give them liquor or this day we won’t answer for our deeds.’

(The meeting for the ‘Exchange of Information’ was swiftly brought to a close by the arrival of the local militia, who escorted the valorous returnees to the Refreshments tent without further incident.)

Да здравствует сталинская конституция!
Long Live the Stalinist Constitution!

‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’ 

If this belated addendum should strike the tender-hearted reader as too pitilessly cynical, it should not be forgotten that Olimpiy Kvitkin, the Chief Statistician in charge of the 1937 Census, which was devised to count every citizen in the Soviet Union, was shot on 28 September 1937 on the orders of Stalin, because Kvitkin’s census identified 6 million fewer persons than the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party had projected, an inadmissible shortfall due to the brutal purges and extermination by hunger directed by the Bolsheviks to crush dissent in allegedly rebellious elements of the population.


See also, Red Spies’ Century-Old Creeping Barrage into Woolwich Arsenal.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-8-red-spies.html

See also, Hushed Up Chekhov. In the centennial of Chekhov's death, this essay was published in the Jewish Chronicle (December 24 2004), in which is identified the anti-Semitic aspects of Chekhov's correspondence and writings and drama, airbrushed out of Soviet history books.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/hushed-up-chekhov.html



Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

Saturday 23 January 2016

Stoneburgh Spy Campus . . . B.A.R. . . . ‘Please Burn After Reading’ Rubs Out Accountability of Command. (Part 6.)

Earlier this week, passing through the parklands of Stoneburgh in the bright winter sunlight, under a cloudless sky, I was reminded of a former denizen of our garrison town  –  our celebrated double agent, Irina P. – striding along the selfsame path in her military double-breasted coat (cadet-issue, a special indulgence!). She, too, in those early years of our acquaintance, was truly enamoured of our historic military academy . . . as I recorded in my memoir, Red Coffee* . . . 
[Irina] could scarcely believe her good fortune. The six historic cannon evenly spaced along the South Terrace, the great Park, the ornamental Lake, the Piranesian vaulted library, all conspired to create a classically golden atmosphere of privilege and distinction in which she basked. The day was warm; the month was March; Shirt Sleeve Order was five weeks away. She sat at the lakeside and wrote an airmail to her sister.  Irina described Stoneburgh as a ‘time capsule’. In her own country Time and Change raced like the clouds reflected on the water. She could not conceal her yearning to ‘remain always in ancestral gardens, seated on soft grass, without thinking’. 
     So you can imagine I was brooding on the duplicities of our tradecraft and on its pervasion of even the most humdrum routines of domestic life, including the demands of my daily jog, when I spotted Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener lounging on a bench in the sunniest corner of the colonnade. (Prof. Weissener, as I have mentioned in my earlier despatches, was formerly an agent for the German Federal Intelligence Service, and is now Stoneburgh’s senior lecturer on politico-criminalistics, a respected authority on Soviet counter-espionage and subversion.)
     

‘Please Burn After Reading.’

Prof. Weissener put down his newspaper as I approached and pointed to a headline with his unlit briar pipe:
UK’S EU EXIT: ‘MEMORY-MEN’ CIVIL SERVANTS 
FOIL FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACTIVISTS

Speaking of the implications of preserving secrecy, as to the UK Government’s plans in the event of Britons voting Britain exit from the European Union, the former Senior Government Economist in the British Civil Service said today: ‘The Civil Service will have to do much preparatory work on trade and migration, so I think there’ll be a lot of highly classified work retained mentally. How much civil servants write down is a different question – that is one of the potential drawbacks of the world of Freedom of Information we live in – so, actually, if the Chancellor does not want anything written down [to avoid disclosure of plans to campaigners and journalists] then that is the way it will be.’   
     ‘Memory-men at Whitehall!’ His laugh was harsh. ‘Evidently one of the Mandarins has heeded my faculty Induction Lecture for the New Intake Group! Rule Number 9. It is extremely unwise to leave a paper trail if you intend to outpace the hostiles.’
     Sunlight glared on his spectacles so I could not see his eyes.
     He playfully wagged his finger to include me in the ranks of his favoured antagonists.
     ‘You more than most are familiar with the platitudinous exculpation of our spymasters: “Should you choose to accept this mission and you are captured or killed, the Government and the Service will disavow any knowledge of your actions.” 
     ‘You mean the St Catherine’s House Switcheroo?’
     (I should explain that the St Catherine’s House Record Office, near Aldwych in central London, was at one time the primary source of intelligence agents’ false identities; our agents themselves had, as a ghoulish test of initiative, the task of locating a death certificate of a child whose birthdate and forename was closest to their own. Armed with the dead child’s birth certificate and shared forename, the agent was then able to assume a new mask and build a complete ‘back-story’, including intimate knowledge of the locale where the child had lived and died.  It was by the integrity of this fake identity that the plausibility and confidence of an agent in the field was sustained. In addition, of course, all essential documentation – passport, driving licence, bank account and national insurance card – were issued in the dead child’s name.)
     ‘Agreed,’ I added. ‘No paper trail. No comebacks. Unless the paper trail’s a false one . . . and one that would certainly NOT lead back to our masters.’
     ‘B.A.R. Burn After Reading. All government agencies, including our Intelligence Services, have that ultimate recourse, of course, and there’s always the principal’s washroom for surreptitious briefings, with or without the facility of eidetic recall.’


Memory-Men Bumped Off.

Prof. Weissener laid his cane aside and, after some deft preliminaries, lit his pipe.
     ‘But what of Cicero,’ he mused, ‘and his memory-man?’ Weissener – our most senior expert in the art of cryptanalysis – sent out an unreadable smoke signal as he spoke. ‘Cicero retained a nomenclator.’
     ‘A what?
     ‘A Mnemonist. A Remembrancer or Prompter. A mnemonically gifted aide-de-camp. A nomenclator was often an astute polyglottic slave. Cicero’s man was charged to keep a roll call in his head of Cicero’s supporters together with a tally of all his master’s enemies. During his consulate, when Cicero declared martial law and upheld it by imposing the death penalty on conspirators against the Republic, I have no doubt that in the course of all those labyrinthine machinations his nomenclator was the repository of many of Cicero’s stratagems, an advantage that the Freedom of Information Act no longer permits our public officials here in Londinium, private email accounts notwithstanding!’ 
     ‘A human databank that walks and remains sober? An obvious security risk.
     ‘Too true. To be a nomenclator in Roman times could be dicey. Wasn’t it Claudius who threw his memory-man to the lions. Maybe the poor fellow knew too much.’
      ‘Yes, a memory-man bumped off with a head full of ciphers,’ I ventured. ‘Surely that was the climax of Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps?’
       ‘There you are then.’ Prof. Weissener rose and stretched and favoured me with a grin, a rare concession.


Here lie the bones
of Aristarchus, freedman,
nomenclator.
Roman sepulchral inscription, 1st century AD.


‘The Art of Covering Your Tracks.’

Stoneburgh’s Senior Lecturer in Politico-Criminalistics fell into step beside me as we walked to the Refectory for morning coffee.
     ‘You know, after Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington reviewed a number of our passing out parades here on this very quad; apart from attending our Commissioning Dinners.’
     Prof. Weissener knocked out his pipe on the wheel of a gun carriage.
     ‘Now he knew the Art of Covering Your Tracks. A cunning devil whose actions we could all learn by.’
      The keen eyes of Weissener were alert to judge my response. 
      ‘Funnily enough, I was told this tale by the Chelsea Hospital Commandant. And he’s straight as an arrow himself.  The way he told it, the duke’s battle plan was to rarely give orders verbally. If an order had to be conveyed to one of his commanders holding a distant terrain, he was obliged to write them down and entrust them to an ADC to deliver them for him on a charger.  But listen to this. The duke’s strategy to preserve the infallibility of his command as a tactician was absurdly simple.  His orders were not written on paper – no, far too fragile in such conditions – nor were his commands written with quill and ink obviously in the field. Far too precarious under fire.’
     Weissener cleared the dottle from his pipe with a ballpoint pen and replaced them in the breast pocket of his Norfolk jacket.
     ‘No. On the battlefield, Wellington carried a sheaf of specially-treated ass and goat skins.  About the size of cloakroom tickets. He could write on these with pencil and once the orders were read, the skins could be wiped clean, preparatory to writing a new set of orders. How devilishly simple! By this method he neatly sidestepped the accountability of command! The clever fellow was never caught out in error . . . ’
     ‘. . .  Because he never left a paper trail!’ I completed with amused complicity.  I had never before seen the professor with such a pronounced Machiavellian disposition.
      ‘We should take a leaf from his book!’ the Professor Weissener concluded with a flourish of his cane. ‘The Cabinet Office should bring back vellum!’
      ‘Or publish and be damned,I murmured.


We ought to have more of the Cavalry between the two
high roads.  That is to say three Brigades at least besides
the Brigades in observation on the Right . . .   


* Sister Morphine (2008) see below . . . 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

Friday 12 June 2015

Stoneburgh Spy Campus Archive . . . (Pt. 4) R.A.P.I.E.R. Birth of a Plausible Intriguer and Enterprising Rogue.

As outlined in the first of these occasional bulletins from the Archives of Stoneburgh Military Academy, the noted socialite ‘Barbara Ely’ had been seconded to the Applied Behavioural Science and Psychological Operations unit of military intelligence based at Stoneburgh; an outcome that was surely almost inevitable, given her close friendship with Anthony Blunt

As a psycho-scenarist of criminal rôle-play for lectures in state espionage, this dazzling socialite won a reputation within intelligence circles that was close to legendary, a reputation evidently strengthened by the corpus of training ‘featurettes’ she devised for the instruction of probationary intelligence agents. 

The scenarios range over a number of countersubversion activities encountered in the IOC (Intelligence Operations Course) taught at Stoneburgh, including Diplomatic Cover, Turnaround, Bona Fides, Rogue Agent, Stalking Horse, and the functions of a Useful Idiot.

For Turnaround see: 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-2-turnaround.html

Here (in an extract from Rogue Agent) is Barbara’s sketch of disaffected fifteen-year-old (a youth modelled we have no doubt on the formative years of the traitor George Blake, a warped Calvinist) which gives us a glimpse of the schooldays of the ‘justifed sinner’ Blake professed himself to be. The ‘featurette’ is in the confessional mode of a schoolboy diary.

See also Profiling MI6’s Predestined Mole:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-3-religio.html
‘Of course, Judas was reputedly a southpaw; medieval iconography invariably
depicts his bag of thirty pieces of silver clutched in his left hand.’
(Detail: Altar of the Holy Blood, lime-wood, Circa 1500, and arch traitor George Blake.
Note the Lacoste ‘Krokodil’ brand on Blake’s sports shirt; maybe his intended nod to 
Soviet political satire of Western capitalism. Krokodil – a satirical periodical published in
the USSR – ridiculed capitalist countries and attacked political, ethnic and
religious groups judged to oppose the Soviet system.)

Friday, September 5 : I was put ‘On Report’ last week because of my late submission of an essay demanded by the school chaplain. 
  Old Hopalong [Rev. H. W. F. Walmesley] was once a star track runner, a champ of the hundred yard dash until invalided out of the army. His faith, like that of my father’s, is of a doctrinaire brand of muscular Christianity, and he is no less stern in censure of a miscreant’s lapses from high conduct.
  So when this afternoon I was called out of class to report to his pastoral office in the school chapel I was pretty much prepared for any outburst of outraged godliness I may have provoked.
  I found him in the robing-room of the vestry; a thin, dry, raw-boned man, with a curiously lazy right eye, which causes his active eye to gleam with greater fixity on the penitents summoned before him. 
  I saw my essay lay on the shelf of the ambry where the sky pilot and the choristers hang their vestments.
  Old Hopalong was evidently in a tailspin. He sighed then huffed again on his spectacles to polish them.
  ‘I confess I am grievously displeased to see a debauchee so strayed from the path as to have wholly lost his way. I fear the clear light from the candle of the Lord no longer shines on your soul.’
  He limped to the shelf and leafed through my manuscript.
  ‘I agree, sir,’ I answered placidly, ‘my premise is a somewhat complicated and abstruse calculation.’
  Judas Iscariot: How the Twelfth Man Won the Match, my casuistical entry for the Divinity Prize Essay on the set topic of Predestination and the Betrayal Paradox, draws on the laws of cricket to examine the fulfilment of prophecy. I cited a recent notable county game in which the match was saved by a left-handed substitute player no less able than his fellows. (Three left-handed catches in two innings! A county record!) Of course, Judas was reputedly a southpaw; medieval iconography invariably depicts his bag of thirty pieces of silver clutched in his left hand.
  My contention, then, has been to reveal to my schoolmasters that Judas was not the villain-of-the-piece nor unusually wicked, and the lesson we can learn from Judas’s rôle as fate-conniving instrument in the drama of the Apostolate is that out of any twelve men chosen for the advancing of an enterprise – in fact, out of any twelve men assembled on a field of play, never mind the cricket pitch – one man probably is, or will be, a Judas.
  Old Hopalong pressed his hand to his forehead with all the febrility of a neurasthenic. Clearly he was impervious to reason, so I savoured all the more this unequal duel of brains.
  He snorted and examined me forbiddingly over misted specs. 
  Qui vult decipi, decipiatur. I am not among the gullible who wish to be deceived, young man, nor shall I be deceived. My faith is a true blade that cuts through deceit.’
  He pointed to an initialled comment scrawled in red pen on my essay’s title page.
  I nodded and smiled encouragingly.
  ‘I can’t pretend to say I understand you very well.’ 
  ‘R.A.P.I.E.R.!’ He roared. ‘The Ready Answer of a Plausible Intriguer and Enterprising Rogue!’  
  His face had darkened a shade. He eased the celluloid of his dog collar as tears gathered in his failing eyes . . .

Note: Kim Philby, the Third Man of the Cambridge Five spy ring, was an avid follower of cricket and occupied himself after his defection to the Soviet Union mostly by reading The Times sports pages.

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
(where the counterespionage operations of Stoneburgh may be read in Red Coffee)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

Monday 1 June 2015

Stoneburgh Spy Campus (Pt. 3): Religio-politico-criminalistics in Profiling MI6’s Predestined Mole

Joseph Stalin studied for the priesthood,’ remarked Professor Weissener (Stoneburgh Military Academy’s lecturer on politico-criminalistics). ‘Felix Dzerzhinsky, “the iron fist” and founder of the Cheka, considered becoming a Jesuit priest; likewise, MI6 double agent George Blake wanted to be a priest; and, not so incidentally, the Soviet spy Anthony Blunt was the grandson of an Anglican bishop . . . examples that should remind us that, when evaluating such zealots in thraldom to Communism, the dividing line between a political ideologue and a religious idealist can be blurred, especially when their New Testament insists they should sell their possessions and divide them among their poorer brethren, according to need. (Acts 2:45.)
      ‘Marx, as you know, said much the same thing: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
      But, in my own view, that is NOT the true thrust of the professor’s lecture on Elective Betrayal: Predestination in the Sociopathic Personality, since I believe that in his veering off to discuss a number of psychopathic personalities from recent newspaper headlines — thematically-linked by murder — Weissener was mounting a persuasive case for a more intense examination of those Intelligence personnel warranting enhanced security vetting, with a dutiful concern to identify signs of an active muscular religiosity hidden beneath the secret agent’s mask of cool reason.

The Embodiment of Composite Predictive Investigative Psychology
Composite portraiture by Francis Galton, made from 
multiple-exposure photographs of violent criminals.
(Curiously, this resultant composite is not unlike a craggy portrait
of Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener, if truth be told.)  

     By good fortune, I took at the time copious precise notes of Prof. Weissener’s lecture so the following text is, I believe, a faithful transcription of his thoughts. And, since it was a public discourse, I therefore do not accept I am in breach of the presumption of confidentiality or of legal privilege in regard to any information disclosed.

Three Murderers Hanging from a Single Thread.

[Prof. Weissener continues . . . ] In the Intelligence services, Composite Predictive Investigative Psychology (CPIP) teaches us to to look for behavioural patterns in certain classifications of dysfunctionality so we can better determine our analysis of the characteristics of a suspect. For example, the instructive crime pattern that emerges from study of the following cases – whose distinct commonality in sharing a CPIP profile has passed unremarked by forensic criminologists practising outside our own specialist field – can alert us to rogue agents suborned and bribed by foreign powers; agents compromised by fatal inherited weaknesses of extreme ideological beliefs that can remain undiscovered, even at the highest levels of security clearance.
       It was Sir Francis Galton FRS who in the late 19th Century introduced us to the technique of  ‘Composite Portraiture of Criminal Types’ by combining, through repeated exposure, photographs of many unrelated violent felons to produce a single blended image of the criminal archetype . . . a rudimentary, but effective, early analytical process we now regard as the personification of our CPIP methodology. 
      Composite Portraiture of Criminality? Composite Predictive Investigative Psychology? The doubters among you are correct in your demands for hard evidence of the theory in practice, although I am obviously prevented by confidentiality constraints from citing cases identified within the Service.
      And so I must refer you, correspondingly, to instances found in a number of true crimes of recent decades . . . for the connexions I identify here are profoundly disturbing should we discover this sinister behavioural pattern replicated in the personnel files of serving operatives . . .

1982 An ‘Angel of Death.’ A 46-year-old drifter from Aberdeen, Scotland, stalked a Hollywood film star, then, in broad daylight outside her home, stabbed her in the torso ten times with a 14 cm knife, nearly killing her. The perpetrator believed that he was on a divine ‘mission’ to kill the actress and take her ‘with [him] to the hearafter [sic], the better life, God’s kingdom.’ He served almost 14 years in prison for the assault. He was then extradited to the UK in 1996 to be tried for a 1966 robbery/murder. The accused, who saw himself as ‘the benevolent angel of death’, was found not guilty by diminished responsibility in 1997 and committed to a British psychiatric hospital, where he died of heart failure in 2004 at age 68.

2000 Loner Kills ‘Friend for Afterlife’. An Edinburgh-born university lecturer who battered a Cambridge graduate to death with a rolling pin because he wanted a ‘friend in the afterlife’ was convicted of the manslaughter of his victim. The lecturer, who said he had never had a girlfriend and was still a virgin, told  the court: ‘I didn’t want to be alone in the afterlife. I didn’t want to be alone . . . I thought I could have a positive relationship with [the victim] in the afterlife.’ He claimed he attempted to commit suicide by taking a drug overdose and slashing his wrists. He did not die but went on the run and was arrested 12 days later.

2001 Killer Wedded ‘Forever in Heaven’. A teacher, originally from Oban, Strathclyde, shot dead a 19-year-old Italian schoolgirl who had spurned him, before turning the gun on himself near Turin. He shot her three times in the back and twice in the head. He then leant against the back of her car, and shot himself in the mouth. In his suicide note to the schoolgirl’s mother, he stated that he was going to kill her daughter, and himself, because she was ‘leaving him forever’. Once dead, the two would remain ‘joined together forever in heaven’.

George Blake: The Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

[Prof. Weissener continues . . . ]  You ask: The common factors in these three cases?       
       (1) The killers are of Scottish origin; (2) Their victims were intended as Companions-in-Death in the Afterlife; (3) That these killers trusted they were to be spared divine punishment for this mortal sin suggests they also possessed a vestigial sense (or more) of the singularity of Calvinistic predestination, a belief not wholly dispelled within the Scottish Presbyterian tradition that holds to the theology of John Calvin.
       The purely Scottish notion of a ‘fey’ cast of mind applies, I believe, to the three murderers cited, insofar as the veil that separates this world from the next was to be effectively breached, by their reckoning, when they attempted to drag their elected companions-in-death with them through the celestial portal. 
       This certainty in the triumph of mortality over death is shared by a number of Scottish Calvinist-inclined sects who cleave to a belief in the Calvinistic Elect, the Chosen Ones singled out for Salvation. Similarly, it was this specific belief that sustained the murderous modus operandi of George Blake, master spy for the Soviets and a Colonel of Foreign Intelligence in their secret service. 
      Murderous?
      By Blake’s treachery it’s believed more than forty British agents in the field met their deaths, their names exposed in reports to his Russian masters. His sentence totalling 42 years imprisonment for espionage is said to reflect his remorseless betrayal of agents executed by the Stasi or the KGB.
      The title of this lecture is Elective Betrayal: Predestination in the Sociopathic Personality, and my intention is to show that the crime pattern of the three Scottish murderers can be seen to resemble that of George Blake who, like them, sought absolution through casuistry rooted in an apologist’s atavistic Calvinism. 
      Far fetched? 
      In his youth in Amsterdam, Blake wanted to be a priest in the strict Calvinist Church of the working class of the Netherlands. He came to believe that freewill is an illusion; that everything is preordained and sins themselves are part of God’s will. In a real sense he believed in the Judas Paradox.
In the religious system to which I adhered [wrote Blake, confined at Wormwood Scrubs prison] the doctrine of predestination occupied a central position and I had given this doctrine much thought. I had no difficulty in accepting it as it fitted in completely with my concept of God the Creator of Heaven and Earth, All-powerful, All-knowing, the King of the Universe, without whom not one sparrow falls to the ground and by whom the very hairs of our head are numbered (Matthew 10- 29, 30). There was no room in this system for such a thing as casualty or accident and, even less, freewill on the part of a human being . . . I believe our reaction to events is also predestined . . . Fatalism is not sitting back and accepting what has occurred. It is also the impulses which force you to act in a particular way. That is why I believe it is justified for someone to say, ‘You cannot punish me for my sins because my sins were put inside me and are not my fault.’
In 1966, Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison and fled to the USSR.

I.n.t.C.l.e.a.r. Revisited.

[Prof. Weissener continues . . . ]  In Intelligence analysis of potential operatives, the success of clandestine HumInt operations depends on psychometric character studies of the highest accuracy. The integrity of agents is determined by the Service’s established I.n.t.C.l.e.a.r. Intelligence Clearance criteria for operatives, a finely calibrated values scaling defined by the mnemonic, Ideology, Numeracy, Training, Culture, Languages, Experience, Adaptability, and Resourcefulness.
      Quite evidently, in the case of George Blake, the matrix descriptors Ideology and Culture escaped the net.
      It is my belief that deeply embedded ideology from a subject’s formative years can be awakened (or, in today’s terms, ‘radicalised’) by the very real hostile intent of enemy powers, so the greatest vigilance must be maintained to identify telltale signs or detect unguarded disclosures.
      Interestingly, according to one member of our consulting board of criminologists (a Highland Scot), Calvinistic Predestination is to be regarded as the Scottish ‘Super Ego’ (despite the fact that the total male membership of the Free Presbyterian Church numbers probably less than a hundred followers of scholastic Calvinism). However, his opinion is countered by another Scottish consulting member of our Intelligence board, a Medico-Legal Expert Witness and Consultant Psychiatrist accredited by the Mental Health Tribunal for Scotland. He states: ‘Very few Scottish people are Calvinists now – I  would doubt if it is 1 percent. Even in Scottish Presbyterian churches very few would claim to be Calvinists. The Justified Sinner of James Hogg does not exist now in Scotland as Calvinism is now dead here. I doubt if it did exist.’ 
      And yet, and yet . . . is not the ‘Scottish Super Ego’ a telling phrase for residual Calvinistic belief? Conversely, according to our Scottish consultants, the ‘Scottish Id’ is represented by a drunken philanderer, the Robert Burns of Burns Night (an occasion some believe to be a Dionysian travesty of a Presbyterian Communion Service).  
      Whatever you may conclude, in such notorious cases of pitiless betrayal – regardless of whether the sociopathic narcissist is a serial murderer or an enemy double agent – without doubt it is the Super Ego that takes charge of the deviant volition of the criminal, lured by the idealisation of his double moral standard.

Do what thou wilt.

[Prof. Weissener concludes . . . ]  I have chosen the case of the traitor George Blake to illustrate my thesis, but if you examine carefully our CPIP category of ‘Justified Sinner’ you will see the classification also embraces a criminal such as serial murderer John George Haigh, a convicted fraudster and suspected serial killer John Bodkin Adams, and an occultist and soi-disant secret agent for the British intelligence services Aleister Crowley. . . the commonality of the latter three evidenced by their childhoods when raised within ultra-religious fundamentalist families adherent to the Plymouth Brethren whose founder’s central tenet was belief in ‘predestination’ as the ‘eternal purpose of God’, a conviction that insisted only ‘God’s Elect’ should receive salvation because the Elect are ‘freely justified’.
      As the Great Tempter asserts in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg: ‘. . . is [there] not enough of merit in [the Saviour’s]  great atonement to annihilate all your sins, let them be as heinous and atrocious as they may? And, moreover, do you not acknowledge that God hath pre-ordained and decreed whatsoever comes to pass? Then, how is it that you should deem it in your power to eschew one action of your life, whether good or evil? . . . none of us knows what is pre-ordained, but whatever it is pre-ordained we must do, and none of these things will be laid to our charge.
      In other words, as Aleister Crowley has it: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.’ Because, apparently, the Instrument of Divine Retribution makes exceptions for the fireproof brethren of God’s Elect, even if you’re a treacherous British spy branded a double agent with blood on your hands working for the Soviet Union.

          John George Haigh                                   George Blake               
Betrayers of Trust: Predestined ‘Justified’ Sociopaths?    

So yes. Despite the Scottish nay-sayers on Stoneburgh’s consulting board of criminologists, a Calvinist Justified Sinner, still ideologically unassailable, actually continues to exist.
      Today, an impenitent George Blake, aged 92, lives in Russia with no regrets for his support of Communism, believing Communism was for him the practical opportunity to put Christian values into practice: ‘Looking back on my life, everything seems logical and natural . . . I felt I was on the wrong side . . .  that it would be better for humanity if the Communist system prevailed . . .’
      Heedless of his treason, the nonagenarian Cold War warrior continues to speak of a redemptive utopia in the austerest terms of Calvinistic righteousness: ‘The Communist ideal is too high to achieve . . . and there can only be nominal adherents to it in the end. But I am optimistic, that in time, and it may take thousands of years, that humanity will come to the viewpoint that it would be better to live in a Communist society where people were really equal.’ 
      [End of extract from Elective Betrayal: Predestination in the Sociopathic Personality by Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener.]


Hidden in Plain View . . . a Comrade-in-Death.

Thoughtful Professor Weissener’s thesis has merit: the Calvinist George Blake essentially affirms his fundamentalist belief in the conflation of Communism and Christianity; that is, by relinquishing your possessions to join the meek, who are deemed blessèd, you shall inherit the earth, for the meek are all equal before the Redeemer, and the Lord is maker of them all.
      But does this mean that, to accomplish this, one should set about a course of treason in the knowledge that betrayal of one’s comrades, and their resultant deaths, are to be considered the Elective Will of God and His Divine Plan of Predestination? 
      Are all those sacrificial victims of Blake’s treason considered by him to be his Companions-in-Death in the Afterlife?

From East Germany’s Stasi Files:
Evidence of George Blake’s Betrayal of the West.

     Did the treachery of Anthony Blunt, who unquestioningly put at hazard the lives of one hundred and seventy-five thousand Allied servicemen by betraying the secret of the D-Day landings to his Soviet masters, follow a similar course? For Blunt and his fellow leftwing bien pensants of the 1930s, in the desperate ideological battlefield of Communism versus Fascism, Marxism had become the new religion of the realpolitik, which fulfilled their callow Oedipal desire to kill God-the-Father, the Nobodaddy of Soviet ridicule. 
      In my latest book (A Bad Case, Salt 2014), I describe an East German ‘sleeper cell’ in New York at the height of the Cold War that takes advantage of the ideological camouflage afforded by a ‘God-fearing’ leafy quarter of one of the Five Boroughs that ‘seemed to boast a church on every street corner’.
Yet in no press account of the spy nest have I seen recorded the reasons underlying the choice of that neighborhood for the spy ring’s ‘sleeper agents’. Even now, I continue to speculate on the cunning of the ringleaders and their East German masters. It is my belief they chose for their spy cell a neighborhood that was already shielded from closer inquiry by a cultural stockade, defiant of the reach of federal intelligence bureaux whose pursuit of home-grown terrorism had led them to look the other way.
True then. True today. When national intelligence agencies ‘look the other way’, treasonous intrigue prospers in plain sight.
     Therefore, brethren, so we may make assurance doubly sure: ‘Hail Judas, Patron Saint of Traitors, pray for us sinners, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.’


(Postscript)  News Headline 27 October 2015 

Chess Grand Master rejected by GCHQ Intelligence because of his ‘devout’ Christianity and ‘loyalty to God over his country’.  A ‘devout’ science teacher who was rejected for a hush hush job at the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) plans to appeal against that decision at the European Court of Human Rights. The petitioner in the case, a computer forensics specialist and a World Chess Federation Grand Master, insists his admissions to scrutineers of adherence to religious scripture were behind his rejection for a highly prized job following a gruelling selection process at the GCHQ listening station in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. He was eventually turned down for the job for ‘national security’ reasons, and later lost an Employment Tribunal. A judgement had ruled that GCHQ were entitled to conclude that ‘the effect those beliefs might have on his behaviour and judgment in the workplace’ raised genuine concerns as to national security issues.
True. It's a tough process. Regulatory ‘Enhanced Positive Vetting’ can be daunting.
See: A Singular Answer: Memories of an Interview with the Grey Men.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html 


Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
(where the counterespionage operations of Stoneburgh may be read in Red Coffee)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html
(In the latter two volumes, Stoneburgh operatives feature in Lovesong in Invisible InkListen Close to Me and Inducement)
see also extracts from the Stoneburgh Files here:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/oreville-spy-campus-introduction-to.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-2-turnaround.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html
and for more insights on 
Anthony Blunt
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html