Catherine Eisner

Tuesday, 7 July 2015

Stoneburgh Spy Campus (Pt. 5): Tyrants, Ideologues and Spies are ‘Stronger by Treachery’ says Weisse

‘Bones are strongest at their broken places,’ declared Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener (Stoneburgh Military Academy’s lecturer on politico-criminalistics), as he commenced his second lecture on Day Two of the Psychodynamics of Espionage conference, though, in my own view, his choice of expository text seemed to condemn his listeners to the aridities of a secular sermon.
But, surprisingly, the Prof then darted off on a tangent to illustrate how his text provided a precise metonym for current breaches of border security by insurgents, namely the strengthening of incursion tactics at Calais, the point of Britain’s weakest offshore defences .
‘The bones of a born survivor heal from a break,’ he explained. ‘They are strongest in the place where they were once broken.’
He then planked down a pair of wire-cutters on the lectern with a rhetorical flourish.
‘Similarly, the clandestines camped in Calais (whose political allegiances are of the most troubling dubiety) are now known to be surpassingly inventive in exploiting a chink in the armour of UK-bound hauliers – in this case, literally – and it is by this weakness that they strengthen their tactics to traffick hostiles into Britain.’
Weissener paused and flipped a switch.
At once an x-ray view was projected on to the screen behind him, revealing a cargo of trafficked illegals, massed inside a curtainsider truck. (They were so crammed together that some unfortunates among the human freight had been forced to stand.)

‘I don’t think it has yet been observed by the international Press,’ Weissener continued, ‘that the desperate conditions in the illegal camps at Calais resemble in many ways the PoW camps of two world wars insofar as latterday camp inmates are driven to attempt astonishing feats of ingenuity in their pursuit of new means of escape.’

He produced a length of cable and invited a conference delegate from the assembly to – stooge-like with a sickly grin – snip it with the wire-cutters.

‘Zapp! And that is how easy it is to get under the wire,’ Weissener told us grimly. ‘The wire in question is the high-tensile TIR cable [Transports Internationaux Routiers standard] that secures the curtainsider trucks transporting goods through the Channel Tunnel.

‘Yes, anti-slash armoured curtains may well be up to spec, and double padlocks clearly in evidence, BUT these are to no avail if would-be clandestine entrants to the United Kingdom have clipped the security cable and RECONNECTED IT WITH SUPER GLUE once they have penetrated the cargo space. This ploy means that – though the TIR cable is seen to pass through all fastening points and remains taut – the glued severed ends are actually concealed behind the curtainsider’s strap fasteners.

‘And, yes, the vigilant driver may well re-test the tension of the cable, say, after he’s been occupied at the pumps, YET – to return to my original proposition – the vehicle’s defences “are strongest at their broken places.” Or “strongest” certainly in the opinion of those clandestines whose deceptions have gained them admission to their free ride out of continental Europe.

‘Another thing. It is even known that padlocks are sheared off the tensioned TIR line then reassembled with super glue . . . the more easily later to prise them silently apart undetected.’

Pregnable Embassies

‘Notwithstanding this . . .’ again the lightning of the Prof ’s darting mind seized on another aside, ‘. . . there is a complacency prevailing in the haulage industry that’s very similar to the reliance placed by security agencies on the impregnability of those impressively substantial, antiquated, square-cornered, steel-plated safes in which our embassies overseas continue to hoard classified documents.

‘Fact. The seams of such safes can be easily detected and forced open with basic workmen’s tools such as a heavy hammer and cold chisel . . . even the best examples of this Victorian construction can be ripped open by driving a wedge or chisel into the riveted seams, usually found at one of the top corners. Once the rivets are popped, the corners can be peeled back . . . however, forgive me, for those safe-crackers among you I am anticipating the instruction you’ll receive for the next addition to your crime sheet . . . your Advanced Peterman Course this afternoon.’ [Polite laughter]

Outlawry Strengthened by Broken Pledges

At which point, I truly believed Stoneburgh’s most eminent theoretician had veered so far from his subject that he would find no way back.

I was wrong.

‘And now, you may ask, to what purpose do I mention these breached defences so easily penetrated by the exigent guile of self-taught outlaws “riding the rails” to Dover?
‘The lesson I adduce and which I wish our counterespionage agencies to take most to heart is: A successful law-breaker is strengthened by transgressive acts.
‘Being outside the rule of law, the “incursionists” crossing borders bound for this nation have no code of conduct to observe and the ease with which they evade international law-enforcers makes them stronger in their defiance of the polities of our hard-won democratic way of life.’
The effort of this peroration caused Professor Weissener to pause and reach for a glass of water. He was clearly troubled by the extreme complexity of his own circuitous argument.
He wiped his forehead and resumed, wandering off the point (judging by the response of his listeners) to cite any number of political and martial acts of treachery to substantiate his views.
‘The future historian will, no doubt, describe the present-day incursions upon Britain in an allegorical vein, and it’s true that no more striking example of deception by would-be insurgents is the sublime instance of the Trojan Horse, the symbol of a broken pledge since the ‘gift’ to the Trojans was dissembled as the Greeks’ offering of atonement to the goddess Athena.
‘Some of you may take this interpretation to be visionary, but the insidious peril I am combating is an actuality and one that may turn a foot soldier into a rebel leader, and make a declarant of broken promises stronger by treachery.
‘Hence arises a grave mischief.
‘Tyrants, ideologues and spies are stronger by treachery.
‘Modern history is replete with examples: Hitler and the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (by his treacherous invasion of the Soviet Union Hitler reclaimed territories gained by the Soviets); Churchill and the forced repatriation – at the end of WW2 – of Cossacks (including women and children) to the USSR and their certain execution (an act of betrayal that has not tarnished Churchill’s reputation as revered ‘Saviour of the Nation’); the ambiguity of de Gaulle’s seeming promise to Algeria’s pieds noirs – “Je vous ai compris!”– and his subsequent u-turn did nothing to constrain his high-handed presidentialism during the succeeding decade of his politique de grandeur; Horatio Nelson’s betrayal of Neapolitan revolutionaries in 1799 in violation of the terms of an armistice has not toppled the admiral of ‘Immortal Memory’ from his pedestal nor impugned his gentleman’s ‘code of honour’; the posting to Washington of the master-spy Kim Philby as chief British intelligence officer at the capital served only to raise his espionage activities to a new level of treachery and strengthen his hand . . . and so on . . .’

A Trojan Horse Assumes Many Guises.

Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener glanced at his watch and gathered together his lecture notes.
‘But here I must end my illustrations. My subject is treachery. Your job is counterespionage. Major problems of vital national security continue to confront us and your goal is to identify those who break the sacred bond of trust before they assume the false integrity that can make them seem unassailable despite the denunciations of whistleblowers, as was the case with that arch traitor and double agent, the odious dipsomaniacal snake in the grass Kim Philby.’
I smiled to myself, and such was the sustained impression of a secular sermon that I expected him to add, ‘Here endeth today’s lesson,’ but, instead, Weissener again flipped a switch and a final image was projected on to the conference screen above him.
‘Before I close I would earnestly impress upon you particularly the notion that a Trojan Horse can assume many guises, and we should heed those doubters who, like the seer Cassandra, saw through the incursionist deceptions that threatened Troy but were ignored, and hence had to face defeat and submission to a hostile occupation.’

Re. The trafficking of ‘incursionists’.
‘I would earnestly impress upon you particularly the notion
that a Trojan Horse can assume many guises.’
Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener
(The limitless ingenuity of bootleggers in the Prohibition Era.)

•

Calais Stowaways:

Penalties for hauliers caught with clandestines on board are variable, according to levels of negligence, with a maximum level of £2000 per stowaway.

•

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

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

Tuesday, 23 June 2015

A Great Poet’s Disarming Admission: W.D. Snodgrass and the de Witts

I’ve deeply admired the distinguished American poet, W.D. Snodgrass, ever since the day Oxford University Press published After Experience* in the States; I attended the launch of this volume in New York in 1968.
      In particular, the superb title poem, “After Experience Taught Me . . .”, resonated with me because at once I recognised the quotation from the little Guide to Spinoza bequeathed to me by my father. It is Spinoza’s* Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect that provides Snodgrass with the poem’s schematic thesis (‘After experience had taught me that all things which frequently take place in ordinary life are vain and futile ... etc.’ ) against which he counterpoints antithetical couplets of martial brutishness devised to reduce the enlightened lens-grinder to a dehumanised husk.
      My father, an eye-witness at the Nuremberg Trials, served in SHAEF under U.S. General Eisenhower from late 1943 until the end of WW2. I believe Father would have had a profound understanding of Snodgrass’s After Experience since listening at first hand to harrowing evidence of Nazi atrocities had been his daily lot.
  (See: Rates of Exchange: ‘Ici. Français assassinés par les Boches.’
  http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/rates-of-exchange-ici-francais.html  )
      But it was not until I learned much later the truth of the baptismal names masked by the initials W.D. – they actually stood for William De Witt and, therefore, he appeared to be of Dutch extraction – that it occurred to me to summon the courage to write to the poet.
      Was it too fanciful, I asked myself, to view Snodgrass’s cathartic work eviscerating the agents of the Holocaust (The Führer Bunker Cycle of Poems) as an act of reparation on behalf of his ancestors, the patrician de Witt brothers, murdered and disembowelled in 1672 in the Hague, in whose suburb, Voorburg, Spinoza resided.

      As I eventually wrote in my letter to W.D. Snodgrass: ‘I’m told that Spinoza, a Sephardic Jew, had developed an intimate friendship with Jan de Witt and his brother so the controversial philosopher had to be forcibly restrained from going into the streets to publicly denounce the murder. The two de Witts had been mistakenly identified as traitors by a Dutch mob that lynched them and mutilated their bodies, believing the brothers had been responsible for the defeat of the Dutch troops by the French in 1672.’
(It is said that Spinoza was moved to attend the scene of the crime with a notice inscribed Ultimi Barbarorum – Basest of Barbarians – until dissuaded by van der Spyk, the painter.)
      Ten generations or so later, I asked the poet, did latterday De Witt owe Spinoza a debt of honour?
       Some weeks later an airmail from Erieville NY arrived, which went some way to solve the riddle. W.D. Snodgrass wrote:

Thanks for your very kind letter . . . Your question about Spinoza, the de Witt brothers and my poems about the Third Reich is fascinating – downright ingenious – but I’m afraid my answer will have to be disappointing. I was always curious about where my middle name came from (that is, previous to my father, who was Bruce DeWitt Snodgrass). My family was always very vague about this, saying that we were mostly Scots, with a little Irish thrown in, but they thought we’d had an ancestor who was “German or something.” I was surprised, then, to find, on a trip to Belgium, and again on a later visit to Holland, that the name appeared frequently, often on store windows in the spelling “deWitte.” This amused and further puzzled me because, when I attended a high school reunion, I’d been surprised to ﬁnd that everyone addressed me as “DEwitt,” a name which seemed to imply the removal of someone’s intelligence. (I still believe that when I was actually in School, friends called me “De,” the same nickname my father went by, and I still do.)
This puzzle was solved for me by Philip Hoy, the literary critic and publisher who came here from London to interview me about 10 years ago. When I asked where he’d got his Dutch name (there were several Hoys in my home town), he said it was just where I’d got mine — many Dutch Covenanters had ﬂed to Scotland or England before emigrating on with their fellow-believers to the U.S. As a matter of fact, there was a Covenanter college (Geneva) only a block from my home in Beaver Falls, PA, but they are Reformed Presbyterians while my family were all United Presbyterians and considerably less stringent and hide-bound.
I once had known of the de Witt brothers and their relation with Spinoza, but had forgotten about it. Thanks for reminding me – it gives me a sense of closer relation with Spinoza than I can probably claim with justice. I hope this will give you the information you need.
With best wishes,
W. D. Snodgrass

His signature and handwriting had a crispness and flow that reflected the agility of a questing mind. (The letter was dated April 10 2004, some five years before his death, aged 82.)

Ultimi Barbarorum

It is my belief that Ultimi Barbarorum would make a fitting epigraph to this meditation on “After Experience Taught Me . . .” or even, perhaps, this stanza (from the The Führer Bunker Cycle, in the mouth of Joseph Goebbels):

                     Pray, children, pray.
                      Our Father who art in Nihil
                              We thank Thee for this day of trial
                              And for the loss that teaches self-denial.
                              Amen.


The mutilated bodies of the Brothers de Witte by Jan de Baen

Postscript.

To pursue the resonances of W.D. Snodgrass’s name to a point of supererogation, I should add, for the benefit of non-British readers of this text, that WD indicates ‘War Department’ in common notation in the UK, and can often warn civilians of sites of unexploded bombs.

* For another literary title derived from Spinoza’s works, see Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (The Ethics – Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, Part IV: Of Human Bondage).

For After Experience, see:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171513

For an intimate insight into the psyche of a committed Nazi, whose Anglophobic thoughts are preserved within the covers of Goethe’s Faust, see:
Between life and death . . . January 14 1944 . . . Franz Lüdtke’s ‘Ostvisionen’ for Colonisation to the Baltic Coast

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/between-life-and-death-january-14-1944.html

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 a 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.

•

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

(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.’

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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

•

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

(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 Ink, Listen 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