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

 

See also The Humbert in the Park, for further amateur literary sleuthing: 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/the-humbert-in-park-more-palimpsestic.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, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

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

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

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.

•

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)

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/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

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)

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

Oreville Spy Campus: An Introduction to Stoneburgh Military Academy (Pt. 1)

Familiarly codenamed ‘Oreville’ by certain analysts in our spying fraternity, Stoneburgh Military Academy is the elite alma mater for generations of British Intelligence operatives who have graduated as commissioned adepts in cryptography, code-breaking, counterespionage, covert communications, disguise, forgery, infiltration, subversion, surreptitious entry, surveillance and sabotage, not forgetting the duplicities of PsyOps. For our intelligence community it delivers a unique curriculum whose content remains sensitive and highly classified so unsurprisingly its astonishing scope has never been openly itemised

Nonetheless, the unfolding Stoneburgh Chronicles (see Catherine Eisner’s collections, Sister Morphine 2008, Listen Close to Me 2011, and A Bad Case 2014) from time to time reward spy-watchers with teasing glimpses of the Stoneburgh cadre, so for the uninitiated a number of key passages are quoted here as prompts for further study.

Perhaps the most instructive introduction to Stoneburgh may be read in the section, Red Coffee, in Sister Morphine, which acquaints us with the young Russian legation interpreter Irina P., seconded to T-FECS – the Task-Force for European Co-operation and Security – to assist in the drafting of the Redistribution Plan under the direction of Brigadier Wingfield, chief of the FFES, the Forum for Federated European Security. Here are Irina’s first impressions (note: Irina does not disclose her difficulties in locating the academy since for security reasons the approach roads are unsignposted).

••••••••••••

The approach to Stoneburgh Military Academy was through the garrison’s camps, on a concrete road flanked by gorse thickets and wild heathland churned by tank tracks. 
‘The English soil,’ she thought fondly.
For she could not deny that in her long-dreamt-of assignment to the foreign fields of England, after all those oppressive years of diligent study in Moscow, her soul had recognised what her masters would condemn as the delusions of a spiritual home-coming.
When she arrived at the guardpost she saw a soldier remove a black disc from a hook and hang an orange disc in its place on the message-board. 
‘Security state raised to Condition Orange,’ Irina thought, suppressing an impulse to laugh, ‘but surely I alone can’t be the cause of their heightened threat alert!’ 
The Ministry of Defence guards inspected her Cyrillic passport, unsmiling. Not until Colonel Rees-Sholter rang the gate-house was the barrier raised. 
Irina drove the hired car cautiously; nerving herself to remember the rule of the left hand lane.
Where two broad avenues met she halted before a huge, black eighteenth century mortar with a mouth wide enough to fire a Landseer lion.
The Palladian façade, she observed with a pang of disappointment, was disfigured where the portico pilasters were parcelled up in green plastic for restoration.  She felt deprived of her proper due.
The guards had directed her to ‘K’ section. The college blocks for the gentlemen cadets and the great park of over six hundred acres had been laid out in tribute to beleaguered forts, border disputes and skirmishes in the Indian and Afghan Wars of the nineteenth century. An entire square mile was divided alphabetically into twenty-six sectors, ranging from Alipur and Berar, through Charasia to Zulfikar. Irina was detailed to ‘K’ sector (the siege of Kotah, 1858) which adjoined the Residency of the Lieutenant Governor.
A cadet platoon, selected from the New Intake Group of that momentous year, jogged by with war-whoops, thighs sweating like champion gladiators.
As she parked her car, a soldier-cyclist rode up and blew the midday lunch recess on his buglet.

 ••••••••••••

Entente uncordiale.

In the light of current political commentary (21.04.15) on the crisis of Europe’s frontline nations under Nato, and doubts – for example – as to the defence of a former Soviet republic with a border only 100 miles from St Petersburg, Irina’s hush-hush project at Stoneburgh (her account to me was written in 1997) now seems astonishingly far-sighted. Her presence at Stoneburgh at the time reflected Nato’s accommodations with Russia in so far that the signing with Russia of a ‘Founding Act’ (1997) promised no combat units would be permanently deployed on the territory of any new members of the alliance.

Today, instead of answering demands within the alliance to deter Russia by permanently stationing at least a brigade in the Baltic states, Nato is reliant on its strategy of the provision of a very high-readiness task force of 5,000 troops for rapid deployment to the Russian border. (See Irina’s reference in 1997 to rapid MSRs below.)

 ••••••••••••

In Red Coffee, Irina was privy to the ramifications of that trade-off, which Colonel Rees-Sholter had outlined to her on her arrival, a trade-off that demanded new nonbelligerent uses for the demilitarised zone.

From Day One of her induction, Irina had been determined to honour the supreme trust the Academy had invested in her. In those early weeks she 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’. 
Privately, the colonel had told her she had ‘made a hit’ in K section; Duncan had referred to her as ‘the lady of the regiment’.
She had almost completed the blue features on her map. The scheme was classified ‘Most Secret’. 
Under the auspices of the IRP – the International Redistribution Plan – the conversion of military bases was proposed on a vast Central European demilitarised zone where three state frontiers met. This forested land-mass cradled more lakes than Finland. 
The trade-off was two-fold: admission of the former satellite states to an Entente with the Powers, and development of the infrastructure for new rapid MSRs – Main Supply Routes – to their borders, in return for cutbacks in front-line military establishments. 
The MSRs had been carefully assessed for vehicle choke points

 ••••••••••••

Wingfield’s Redistibution Plan was to integrate a series of foreign equity-funded water sedimentation plants to yield highly mineralised compounds for fertilizers and animal foodstuffs. Fifty lakes taken together contained more than five hundred million tons of sapropel, it was estimated, based on optimal utilisation of the natural resources beneath waters surrounded by the largest undisturbed ancient forest in Europe.
The Report’s centre-fold map summarised the Industrial Reclamation Plan with a legend keyed to Irina’s own symbols.  
Lakes containing sapropel were marked with a gold leaf.
Formed by broadleaf and coniferous forests, sapropel organic matter is an aquatic carbonaceous nutrient lying in ooze on the lakebeds.

 ••••••••••••

But Irina’s earnest desire to be an instrument of European rapprochement is thwarted by a powerful puppet-master emerging, still active, from the crucible of a dismembered USSR transmuted by its desperate ideological reconstitution. Very soon not-so-subtle pressure to betray her new comrades is exerted on Irina by dark forces from her Soviet past.

Irina’s boss, General Yegor Bolkashin was the former Chief of Intelligence in the republic where she was born. They had met in the state capital where he chaired the powerful, post-separatist Land Utilisation Policy Commission whose delegates pulled the strings of puppet states still in thrall to Soviet centralism.
The general zeroed in and expertly squeezed Irina’s well-shaped knee.
‘Irinka. Your knees are the property of the republic. So is sapropel. You should think carefully about what you are doing.’  

 ••••••••••••

However, Colonel Rees-Sholter at Stoneburgh is more gallant in his appreciation of Irina’s zeal.

Irina’s efficient progress with her Report for T-FECS – the Task-Force for European Co-operation and Security – pleased Colonel Rees-Sholter.

His trusty workhorse he called her.
‘Don’t think for that I am all horseflesh!’ she sparked up. 
‘Nor you are, my dear,’ brayed the colonel amiably.

 ••••••••••••

The emergence of ex-Soviet ‘placemen’ in the West, identified in Red Coffee, is highlighted in a more recent Stoneburgh instalment, Turnaround, in which my anonymous correspondent – a novice codebreaker in Stoneburgh’s exclusive cryptanalysis sorority – makes clear the continuing threat. 

Hans-Jürgen Weissener, a former agent for the German Federal Intelligence Service, and respected authority on Soviet counter-espionage and subversion, taught politico-criminalistics at Stoneburgh. 
Klara Weissener was the only daughter of this eminent spy-catcher and master intelligence analyst whose lectures had been a memorable feature of our first year’s cadetship at Stoneburgh.
I remember so clearly his visionary conspectus of the Anno Jericho emergency – the collapse of the Berlin wall – and how, in his own words, ‘surveillance of Tumbleweeds from the Badlands’ should be classified as an immediate Heightened Alert Condition. By the label, ‘The Badlands’, he denounced the entire Eastern Bloc. 
Attendance at his acclaimed lecture on Soviet Sleepers was compulsory.
He spoke English correctly but slowly. ‘Do not doubt,’ he cautioned, ‘when I tell you that any number of placemen in the West are still in position feeding secrets to the Soviets. Beware of Latebloomers!’ A disarming smile had flickered for a moment. ‘I speak horticulturally. My subject is Badlands fauna but my metaphor is drawn from flora. (There had been a scattering of knowing laughter.)

 ••••••••••••

This continuing global threat shapes the academy’s strategies for spycraft that must answer to constant vigilance, the watchword of the Stoneburgh cadre. Of course, the academy’s more colourful personnel will become known to you in time, but a résumé is not out of place in this brief introduction, together with one or two directions as to where principal characters may be encountered in these occasional chronicles.

Dramatis Personae 

Current notable Stoneburghians 

(From Red Coffee and Turnaround and Lovesong in Invisible Ink
and In Search of the Fourth Man)
Brigadier Wingfield: chief of the FFES, the Forum for Federated European Security.
Colonel Rees-Sholter: director of T-FECS – the Task-Force for European Co-operation and Security, with special responsibility for the IRP – the International Redistribution Plan. 
Major Roland ‘Rollo’ Poultney: a ‘Green Fly’ from Intelligence seconded to the Task-Force as the colonel’s ADC.
Lieutenant Duncan Pym: administers the Surreptitious Entry Unit and Special Surveillance Teams for his mentor, the colonel. (Poultney’s opinion of Duncan? ‘Mission creep? He was Mission Creep!’)
Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener: former agent for the German Federal Intelligence Service, respected authority on Soviet counter-espionage and subversion, lecturer on politico-criminalistics. 
Klara ‘Flags’ Weissener: brilliant daughter of the professor and leader of Stoneburgh’s Cryptocomms, an exclusive cryptanalysis sorority.
Hilary Challis: youngest daughter of Stoneburgh’s Custodian-Marshall, on non-regular assignment to Klara’s Decrypt section. A mathematical prodigy, a fixated numerologist, she is a hyper-systemised teenage savant with eidetic recall. 
Mrs Greenham: only representative of non-regular personnel at top-brass level. She is Colonel Rees-Sholter’s secretary. (‘Wretched name for the unfortunate woman,’ the colonel would often confide to newcomers.) She is sometimes retained as an innocuous-seeming ‘handler’ in sensitive cases involving compromised women.
‘Barbara Ely’: Establishment socialite and co-opted to work with Stoneburgh’s psychological operations unit as a psycho-scenarist of criminal rôle-play for lectures in state espionage. 
Major Vivian X: Intelligence officer and undercover operative in ‘Paddyland’.

Off-site deep-cover operatives.

(From Inducement and A Singular Answer: Memories of an Interview with the Grey Men)
Edward Faucon: manages a ‘shop window’, the Faucon Detective Agency, a bureau for commercial surveillance operations under a cloak of legitimacy.
Verity Y: Successful divorce lawyer, working as a ‘talent spotter’ in the recruitment and vetting of potential intelligence operatives. 
See
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html

Hostiles

(From Red Coffee)
General Yegor Bolkashin: ex-Chief of Intelligence, semi-retired career intelligence officer in the Soviet military security service; chairs the powerful, post-separatist Land Utilisation Policy Commission whose delegates pull the strings of puppet states still in thrall to Soviet centralism; founder of his Institute for Security Affairs.
Konrad W: operates his own press agency in Warsaw – Biuro K – and exchanges communiqués with Yegor’s outfit in the neighbouring republic.
Stefan Mikhailovich Kazimirov:  Intelligence officer with diplomatic cover as a geologist; sub-section chief at his trade mission attached to the Russian Embassy in London.

Classified Operatives – Access Denied (Highest Level SC accreditation required)

(From Red Coffee and Turnaround and A Room to the End of Fall and Inducement and The Cheated Eye and Listen Close to Me)
Irina P: Rôle classified.
Frieda Tace: Rôle classified.
Dr. Walther T. Reindorf: Rôle classified.
Anneliese Hildegard Wintermann: Rôle classified. 
Constance Bryde: Rôle classified.
Nadezhda Stepanovna Cheremisovna: Rôle classified. 
Professor ‘Pappi’ and his nephew Vernon: Associate Lecturer in Cognitive Robotics in the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Applied Neural Computation, and wunderkind astrophysicist/roboticist, respectively; both non-regular Stoneburghians. Rôles classified. 

Lost in Translation . . . the Desire for Union.

Irina P is not alone in permitting me to share a number of Stoneburgh’s intelligence insights revealed in despatches from prescient informants, often at great personal risk. As long ago as 2004 I related the conclusions of another Stoneburgh insider (see Elegy from a Locked Drawer): ‘Espionage specialists and security experts have known for almost a century that police bureaux in communist bloc countries have penetrated international academia by deploying suborned academics, awarded spurious honorifics and doctorates, to provide their political masters with local intelligence concerning the underground activities of émigrés around the world.’  

Any overtures to establish closer ties with the West are so often subverted by the ‘placemen’ and ‘placewomen’ Professor Weissener identifies in his seminal monograph, Red Whitewash. It’s pretty evident that Stefan Kazimirov (Inducement) was not the geologist he claimed to be. More than this, is it not curious that Stefan’s London address was Chesterfield House, Mayfair W1, just a stone’s throw from MI5 operatives’ quarters in South Audley Street? Did Stefan follow the first rule of concealment?  He Who Wants to Hide a Leaf should put it in a forest.

No. Our differences are irreconcilable, if Irina P is to be believed, 

(The Custodian-Marshall gave Irina P licence to explore the stacks at Stoneburgh’s extensive library.) On the shelves labelled  ‘Anthropometry’ she found an early monograph on Slavonians. ‘The tribe of Slavons is characterised by darker hair and eyes than the Saxon.’  There was an engraving of a house set far apart from others. ‘An Anglo-Saxon, if possible, always stands detached.’

Even a well intentioned olive branch can be misconstrued. Irina P laconically once noted a passage in her copy of Varieties of Topical Interpretation by I. S. Slovenko (Moscow 1993): ‘A false transcription by an interpreter rendered President Carter’s words on his arrival in Poland, in 1978, as “I desire the Poles carnally.” ’

Maxie’s . . . Come Again Soon!

Yes. Our best diplomatic endeavours can be so very easily lost in translation. A thought not unconnected with the fact that those two Russian interpreters of my acquaintance, Irina P and Nadezhda Cheremisovna, may well have successfully deceived with ease their assigned intelligence targets but in their own amours they are as likely as any lovelorn temptress to deceive themselves. Curiously, I notice only now in these reflections that, significantly, the nexus of their assignations was Maxie’s cocktail bar, Knightsbridge – the works canteen for certain active hostiles – just a short constitutional stroll from the Russian embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens . . . and their love potion du jour? Fact. Honey Dew Screwdrivers. Vodka, Orange Juice and Melon Liqueur.  

As the exhortation on Maxie’s bar check reminds us: Come Again Soon. So maybe, if we remain vigilant at this intriguing watering-hole –  who knows? – before very long we’ll encounter these femmes fatales once more. If not, be assured, the cocktails are delightfully inventive.

For Part 2 of the Stoneburgh Files (the instructive text for probationer agents, Turnaround) see  http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-2-turnaround.html
and for Part 3, which reacquaints us with the criminological theories of Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-3-religio.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)

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

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