‘The French say there’s only one good thing to come out of Belgium and that’s the train to Paris.’
There was a ripple of appreciative laughter.
That was the opening salvo launched by Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener (Stoneburgh Military Academy’s senior lecturer on politico-criminalistics) as I slipped into the lecture theatre with other latecomers and sought an empty seat at the rear of the aisle.
I observed that the lecture was well attended by top brass from Chatham House, supported by Intelligence specialists from associated Defence Staff Colleges and the Royal United Services Institute, who’d wedged in behind our NIGs (New Intake Group); it is a long-standing tradition that the IOC (Intelligence Operations Course) of their first semester kicks off with Weissener’s keynote address.
‘Consider this. Whether it’s Brussels or Liège or Molenbeek, from Zeebrugge to the Ardennes a comatose officialdom is perceived as tolerating a haven for paedophilia and child procuration in high places . . . in other words – for those initiates new to the arcana of countersubversion operations – this host country, in which Nato and the European Union have each planted their strategic headquarters, grants hostile intelligence services the optimum conditions needful for their ideal hunting grounds productive of subornation and sexual blackmail . . . specifically, the setting of honey-traps to ensnare corruptible prominent public officials privy to the secrets of the defence of the West.’
The darkened auditorium had grown silent. Inwardly, I registered a twinge of apprehension as I became aware that a decidedly unsavoury topic was to be essayed, which, to my certain knowledge, the professor had not hitherto broached for the IOC curriculum. I feared a challenge from the floor, and suddenly felt compelled to continue recording in my notebook his dark thoughts verbatim.
Necessity has no law.
And, yes, you’re right, I was thereby breaking the Chatham House Rule but, in my view, in this case, Necessitas non habet legem . . .
‘At such a grim prospect, it is our duty to reacquaint ourselves with the fundamentals of the Psychogeography of Espionage . . . because the dedicated agent in search of treachery would be wise to seek out those raffish haunts where the unwary rub shoulders with the demimonde: cafés, cocktail lounges, pubs, night clubs, private members’ drinking dens, shady second-rate hotels, Turkish baths, massage parlours, even the theatre crush bar . . . particularly the crush bar* . . . since it is precisely at these places the targets of the hostiles are known to be stalked.’
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| Blackmailers’ tawdry haunts. |
A safety-light on the dais glinted on the professor’s spectacles so we could not see his eyes.
Sybaritic Temptations on the Cheating Side of Town.
‘And don’t let us pretend we are unaware of the likely characteristics of the person of interest destined for an undercover sting. An embassy aide is invariably the most vulnerable candidate . . . from chargés d’affaires and junior attachés and cipher clerks to diplomatic couriers and the lower levels of office functionary, these are the opposition targets on our watch list – sheltered by the confidentiality of the diplomatic pouch – whose night-time pleasure-grounds secretly harbour the illicit activities that are their undoing.
‘Their own veniality is their downfall – and here’s a strange thing – there is an almost laughable predictability in the manner in which old hands in the diplomatic game will induct a new arrival – in his first foreign posting – with the customary guided tour of notorious fleshpots known for decades to generations of agents as a fledgling’s rite of passage on the Cheating Side of Town.
‘Few lines of enquiry are more fruitful than immersion in such a promising psychogeography, with the additional proviso that inclusion as a professed insider on the guest-lists of exclusive private parties – not to say orgiastic wild parties [nervous laughter] – will advance an agent’s penetration of a target’s private life more than any imposture as an habitué of louche nightspots ever will . . . soused or sober.’
There was a murmur of approval from the ranks. Any suggestion of a bar bill written off on expenses was reason enough for the half-attentive, drill-weary NIGs to snap alert and punch the air.
Party-goers with Outré Predilections.
Professor Weissener paused only to draw breath – and draw water from a carafe – before, undiscomposed, he sped on.
‘But if – as psychogeographers – we are to seek today for typical sites of such sexual predation, to uncover the hidden nexus between hostile agents and the emissaries of political power, then, in all candour, I must direct you to look at those monuments to anonymity built in the interwar years . . . cities-within-cities . . . I speak, of course, of the urban mansion blocks so fashionable in the 1930s – complexes of over one thousand self-contained apartments – built on the scale of ocean-going liners . . . and, like such luxury cruise ships – composed, as they are, of state rooms and steerage – these mammoth blocks of flats continue to afford infinite opportunities for clandestine pleasure-seekers to cross, unnoticed, the class divide and – figuratively speaking – mingle with the upper and the lower decks.’
The professor was now speaking without notes and had evidently hit his stride.
‘Coming nearer to our own day and current target locations I can find no better example than the monolithic Thames-side mansion blocks of London SW1. [Two visiting VIPs muttered with distinct unease.] Actors, playwrights, novelists, journalists, civil servants, peers, members of parliaments, call girls – and, indeed, certain intelligence personnel and nomenklatura from both sides of the Iron Curtain – have made these fortress-like communal dwelling places their home, addresses often known by us to be a magnet for discreet party-goers of more outré predilections, as well as politicians taking lodgings convenient for late-night sittings at Westminster . . . not to mention their convenience for nocturnal assignations involving certain other unnameable late-night recumbent attitudes.’ [Cue ill-repressed sniggers from the young NIGs.]
A brass hat harrumphed, and Colonel Rees-Sholter (director of T-FECS, the Task-Force for European Co-operation and Security) blew his nose with a theatrical flourish that made his displeasure unmistakably known.
‘I have no intention to moralise, but the fact that such places once harboured the traitor Lord Haw-Haw and fascist Oswald Moseley, and boasted as tenants the goodtime girls who precipitated the scandals that brought down Profumo – our Secretary of State for War, no less – is an illustration analogous to the evident threats our security services must confront in continental Europe.’
An eager young cadet raised his hand with the alacrity of a swot.
‘Wasn’t John Vassall – the naval spy, sir, who worked for the Soviets – arrested in that block at Apartment 807?’
‘Lamentably, that is correct, and my regret is intensified by the thought that in the very heart of London’s elite, expertly concealed in a secret drawer, was found not only a Praktina document-copying camera but a subminiature Minox with exposed 35mm cassettes recording over one-hundred-and-seventy classified Admiralty and Nato documents . . . the simple truth being that this clerical grade civil servant, who lived in high style on a modest pay rate while unaccountably possessed of wardrobes of bespoke Savile Row suits and made-to-measure gentleman’s silk shirts, had been sexually compromised by a Soviet provocateur when on the staff – may I remind you – of the Naval Attaché at the British embassy in Moscow. A classic blackmail fit-up of drunken revels with our dupe drugged and stripped and photographed in the naked embraces of homo-eroticists hired by the KGB.’
Another thunderous harrumph from a VIP was a hint with a crowbar that the professor studiously ignored.
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London’s Fortress of Anonymity 1938
‘State rooms and steerage.’ |
Potential for Extortion in Continental Europe.
‘So,’ Weissener continued grimly, ‘at a time of extraordinary upheaval in continental Europe and the prospect of mass movements of DPs [displaced persons], not unlike the crises of refugees and human trafficking at the close of two world wars, it can be here recorded as a fact of immense significance that such turbulent anarchic conditions are charged with the potential to sustain the unrestrained abuse of power, conditions which could become – if indeed they have not already become – the forcing-ground for child abduction and sex-slave rings and prostitution and extortion on a scale unseen since the first half of the last century.
‘There is no more insidious peril, in my own view, than that now menacing Europe’s supranational administrative institutions – located in the heartland of Belgium – and there is no more striking exemplification of that perilous state than the continuing historic recurrence of disturbingly characteristic crime scenes that define a unique psychogeography, a gravitational attraction that has warped a culture to contemplate unimaginable acts of sexual depravity, which over time have become symptomatic of a troubled nation . . . a nation tainted by multiple child kidnappings and the rape, torture, incarceration and serial murder of abducted young girls, a scandal of blackmail and sordid cover-ups allegedly implicating officials of the most senior rank at the highest levels of pan-European governance, judiciary and the political class.’
A brooding silence had descended on the gathering and Colonel Rees-Sholter** rose abruptly – his face had darkened, I noticed – and he withdrew hurriedly by the rear exit.
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| ‘. . . attracts them with the prospect of gaudy aperitifs and pastries.’ |
‘Institutionalised’ Tolerance of the Molestation of Underage Girls.
Professor Weissener, Stoneburgh Academy’s most respected authority on Soviet counter-espionage and subversion, riffled through his notes to the final page.
‘That such all-pervading corruption of the sexually-compromised can be exploited by adversaries hostile to Europe’s democratic rule of law is a demonstrable fact, as my earlier cited cases indicate, but allow me to call your attention to some past occurrences of crime black spots – in this case those crime scenes re-emergent in the city of Liège that may be seen to inform the recurrences in the national psyche I refer to.’
Professor Weissener fixed his eye pointedly on Rees-Sholter’s empty chair and his mouth tightened with a bitter resolve.
‘This is no place to provoke controversy but I intend to do no more than view the facts. Facts that reveal what I would call a civic society’s “institutionalised” tolerance of the molestation of underage girls, dating back almost a century.
‘And may I say I speak on the incontestable authority of a venerated master criminologist, Nobel Prize nominee, and member of Brussels’s Royal Academy of French Language and Literature, who in his recollections of his schooldays writes quite nonchalantly about the seduction of underage schoolgirls in the parish of Saint-Pholien in the Outremeuse district of Liège at the time of the First World War.
‘As a schoolboy, he was acquainted with a sinister matricidal, homicidal second-hand bookseller, ponce and blackmailer, under the protection of the kommandantur of the occupying Germans, who bought school textbooks from the schoolboy for resale to fellow pupils. This bookseller . . .
. . . used to stop young girls in the street and take them into his shop with its shutters closed . . . I can still hear the hoarse voice of a little girl, the daughter of a fruit and vegetable merchant: ‘You shouldn’t have let it happen!’ [With the response.] ‘He would have denounced me to the Germans . . .’ [At the same time in Liège, a pimp known to this memoirist . . . while renting] a small pied-à-terre not far from the Girls Middle School, looks out for the pupils at the exit and attracts them with the prospect of gaudy aperitifs and pastries.
‘Later, in the early 1920s, the German mark catastrophically falls, in the “dizzy period” of hyperinflation when, as this informant remembers, “you counted marks in millions and billions.”
‘The exchange rate of the mark and franc meant Belgians crossing the border on the “Swindlers’ trains” to Cologne on wild shopping sprees saw “the prices changed every hour while you shopped . . .”
The memoirist is unjudgemental when he records . . .
And the women! . . . And the lads who looked for you, near the [railway] stations, to introduce you to their little sister! [From this eminent Belgian writer there are no more agonies of exculpation than . . . ] Should we seek an explanation in the times? Are there periods of more intense ferment or moments when unhealthy trends are occurring? . . . It was a time, please remember, when they arrested all the pupils in a secondary school because a little girl was dead, a little girl who had been taken off somewhere by her brother with some boys and used by them all as a source of experiences . . . a time when not a day passed without the suicide of an adolescent . . . . Under the [German] occupation, had the [bookseller] been able to satisfy without fear his passion for not yet pubescent girls?. . . satisfying his libido . . . in the back of the shop . . . [Under the occupation] they taught us to cheat, swindle and lie . . . they taught us to take advantage of shady corners . . .
Weissener unfolded a large handkerchief and, as he mopped his brow, surreptitiously wiped a tear from his eye. As I have mentioned in my earlier despatches, the professor was formerly an agent for the German Federal Intelligence Service, and he had once told me his father’s family had lost a fortune in savings in the disastrous crash of devalued currency that followed the First World War.
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‘Should we seek an explanation in the times?
Are there periods of more intense ferment . . .’ |
A Little White Slave Trading.
‘So, in my own view,’ the professor’s voice was hoarse with suppressed emotion, ‘the conclusion is irresistible. Morally numbed by the decadence of post-war licentiousness, this Belgian Nobel Prize nominee as a witness to Belgian history is revealed as cooly unjudgemental in his regard for his friend, the pimp. For, as he concedes, the pimp in those amoral times was in the business of “a little white slave trading” and “capable of persuading a sentimental young girl to take a ship for the Americas . . . when all is said and done it’s all horribly banal.” ’
The safety light on the dais began to flicker urgently, and I saw the colonel making a ‘cut-throat’ gesture through the glass panel of the exit door. Weissener grimaced.
‘I am reminded that my allotted time is running away, so I shall hastily “fast forward” to the present day to ask the abrupt question, a question I continue to ask myself: “Is it true that there are, as our Belgian informant reminds us, unhealthy trends persisting that manifest themselves in the locus of a criminal psychogeography?*** And should we map those recurrences as an aid to our operations in counter-subversion?” You, as cautious and practical thinkers, will I am certain pursue the answer to this quandary calmly and dispassionately . . . for the persistence of a collective memory of degenerate criminality is one that warrants the most profound and extended study.
‘And I am uttering no special pleading with the false quantity of a shallow poignancy when I tell you now that, just a decade ago, in Liège, not more than a kilometer away, across the Meuse, from the church of Saint-Pholien – the neighbourhood of our Belgian belle-lettrist’s unprincipled reminiscences of prewar condoned child molestation – the bodies of two young schoolgirls no older than ten were discovered in a storm drain, raped and strangled.
‘Might I add, I have it on good authority that Belgians are rated the worst drivers in Europe. By extension, then, defiance of convention may well come easily to them. (Nervous laughter from the floor.)
‘As I outlined at the beginning of my address, our purpose as psychogeographers and criminal profilers today is to continue to identify and monitor such urban sites of sexual predation and blackmail, to uncover the hidden nexus between hostiles and their potential victims in our pursuance of unconditionally denying predators the least opportunity for the vile exploitation of female sexual subjugation.’
At which point Professor Weissener, clearly keyed up by his distressing subject matter, bowed and sat down to be greeted with a cautious scattering of applause.
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Stolen childhoods . . . adult toys from
Au Printemps Jouets 1916 |
The Stoneburgh Rule.
Only afterwards did I have certain reservations in defying the Stoneburgh Rule of Non-Disclosure with my intention to reproduce those unspoken passages of the professor’s notes that he had earlier asked me, as an NRG (Non Regular Personnel), to study for considerations of conformance to propriety, compassion and good taste.
On the penultimate page of his lecture notes, he wrote: ‘When you consider that the great-grandfather of the brother-in-law of Her Majesty the present Queen photographed prepubescent schoolgirls covertly in Kensington, catching them unawares with his sly 45-degree camera, and the implications of the legitimacy of his possessing an estimated 30,000 images, some got with dubious motive, I am ❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ . . . ’ [Redacted by SMA webmaster.]
For Professor Weissener’s recent increasingly jaundiced views on the political convulsions in continental Europe, see:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/stoneburgh-spy-campus-bar-please-burn.html
STOP-PRESS 28.02.2016 Professor Weissener has just telephoned me with news that London’s Sunday Times has today exposed the BND (Germany’s equivalent of MI6, their Federal Intelligence Service the Bundesnachrichtendienst) for placing one of Britain’s Privy Councillors (and the EU’s former foreign policy chief) under electronic surveillance. ‘Beware,’ Weissener cautions, ‘have a care when you throw out the trash; the snoops are delving into every garbage bin.’
STOP-PRESS 19.09.20
The Times reports Former British Diplomat Accused of Spying in Brussels: Belgium’s State Security Service warned of the threat stemming from foreign powers in the areas of interference and espionage. The report stated that because Belgium was home to both Nato’s headquarters and the EU ‘the scale of the threat is disproportionately big for a small country of barely 30,000 square kilometres and 11.5 million inhabitants.’
* A Bad Case (2015), page 95, Inducement, see below . . .
** Sister Morphine (2008), page 219, Red Coffee. A description of an encounter with Rees-Sholter is a candid snapshot: The colonel’s complexion was bibulous. The eyes that met and challenged hers were fierce and violet-blue but, fortunately, he preferred excessively young women so they got straight down to essentials brusquely. See below . . .
*** This reputation as a ‘locus of a criminal psychogeography‘ is actually reaffirmed by a recent Belgian-French ‘Simenonesque’ crime movie set in the environs of Liège, La Fille Inconnue (2016), directed by the Dardenne brothers, in which a Liégeois procures a teenaged girl, trafficked in Liège as a prostitute, to perform fellatio on his elderly father, a resident of a care home. So, evidently, even one hundred years after the events described by our Belgian belle-lettrist, in this particular quarter we sense there is no departure from a long-established pattern of everyday moral degradation.
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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)
