‘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.
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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.
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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?
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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.’
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(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
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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)
(where the counterespionage operations of Stoneburgh may be read in Red Coffee)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
