Lord Louis Mountbatten's very British coup

Overview
Ever since the mid-1970s, a variety of conspiracy theories have emerged regarding British Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1964 to 1970 and 1974 to 1976, winning four general elections. These range from Wilson having been a Soviet agent (a claim which MI5 investigated and found to be false), to Wilson being the victim of treasonous plots by conservative-leaning elements in MI5, claims which Wilson himself made.

Those making the allegations
Peter Wright, in his book Spycatcher, claimed that in 1967 Mountbatten attended a private meeting with press baron and MI5 agent Cecil King, and the Government's chief scientific adviser, Solly Zuckerman. King and Peter Wright were members of a group of 30 MI5 officers who wanted to stage a coup against the then crisis-stricken Labour Government of Harold Wilson, and King allegedly used the meeting to urge Mountbatten to become the leader of a government of national salvation. Solly Zuckerman pointed out that it was treason, and the idea came to nothing because of Mountbatten's reluctance to act.

In 2006, the BBC documentary The Plot Against Harold Wilson alleged that there had been another plot involving Mountbatten to oust Wilson during his second term in office (1974–76). The period was characterised by high inflation, increasing unemployment and widespread industrial unrest. The alleged plot revolved around right-wing former military figures who were supposedly building private armies to counter the perceived threat from trade unions and the Soviet Union. They believed that the Labour Party, which was (and still is) partly funded by affiliated trade unions, was unable and unwilling to counter these developments and that Wilson was either a Soviet agent or at the very least a Communist sympathiser – claims Wilson strongly denied. The documentary alleged that a coup was planned to overthrow Wilson and replace him with Mountbatten using the private armies and sympathisers in the military and MI5.

On the BBC television programme The Plot Against Harold Wilson, broadcast on 16 March 2006 on BBC2, it was claimed there were threats of a coup d'état against the Wilson government, which was corroborated by leading figures of the time on both the left and the right. Wilson told two BBC journalists, Roger Courtiour and Barrie Penrose, who recorded the meetings on a cassette tape recorder, that he feared he was being undermined by MI5. The first time was in the late 1960s after the Wilson Government devalued the pound sterling but the threat faded after Conservative leader Edward Heath won the election of 1970. However, after a coal miners' strike Heath decided to hold an election to renew his mandate to govern in February 1974 but lost narrowly to Wilson. There was again talk of a military coup, with rumours of Lord Mountbatten as head of an interregnal administration after Wilson had been deposed. In 1974 the Army occupied Heathrow Airport on the grounds of training for possible IRA terrorist action at the airport. However Baroness Falkender (a senior aide and close friend of Wilson) asserted that the operation was ordered as a practice run for a military takeover or as a show of strength, as the government itself was not informed of such an exercise based around a key point in the nation's transport infrastructure

The first official history of MI5, The Defence of the Realm published in 2009, tacitly confirmed that there was a plot against Wilson and that MI5 did have a file on him. Yet it also made clear that the plot was in no way official and that any activity centred on a small group of discontented officers. This much had already been confirmed by former cabinet secretary Lord Hunt, who concluded in a secret inquiry conducted in 1996 that "there is absolutely no doubt at all that a few, a very few, malcontents in MI5...a lot of them like Peter Wright who were rightwing, malicious and had serious personal grudges – gave vent to these and spread damaging malicious stories about that Labour government."

Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn is said to have told Alec MacDonald, who set up safe houses where Golitsyn could live, that Wilson was a KGB operative and that former Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell had been assassinated by the KGB to have the pro-US Gaitskell replaced as party leader by Wilson. Guardian journalist David Leigh, however, claims that Golitsyn was guessing. Christopher Andrew, the official historian for Britain's MI5, has described Golitsyn as an "unreliable conspiracy theorist".

In his controversial memoir Spycatcher (1987), former MI5 officer Peter Wright stated that the head of the CIA's Counterintelligence Division, James Angleton, told him that Wilson was a Soviet agent when Wilson was elected Prime Minister in 1964. Wright said that Angleton said he had heard this from a source (whom he did not name but who was probably Golitsyn). According to Wright, Angleton offered to provide further information on the condition that MI5 guarantee to keep the allegations from "political circles", but the management of MI5 declined to accept restrictions on the use of the information and Angleton told them nothing more.

At the end of the 1960s, Wright wrote, MI5 received information from two Czechoslovakian defectors, Josef Frolík and František August, who had fled to the West, alleging the Labour Party had "almost certainly" been penetrated by the Soviets. The two named a list of Labour MPs and trade unionists as Soviet agents.

MI5 maintained a file on Wilson, repeatedly investigating him over the course of several decades before officially concluding that Wilson had had no relationship with the KGB; nor had it ever found evidence of Soviet penetration of the Labour Party. Wilson claimed he was a staunch anti-Communist.

Background


These included the liberalisation of laws on censorship, divorce, homosexuality, immigration, and abortion; as well as the abolition of capital punishment, which was due in part to the initiatives of backbench MPs who had the support of Roy Jenkins during his time as Home Secretary. Overall, Wilson is seen to have managed a number of difficult political issues with considerable tactical skill, including such potentially divisive issues for his party as the role of public ownership, British membership of the European Community, and the Vietnam War, while continuing to maintain a costly military presence East of Suez.

Once the Cuban Missile Crisis was over, the 1960's were generally a good and happy era of fun and productivity; but leftist\anti-war riots, CND marches, urban moral decline and a growing number of strikes marred the end of the decade. Things were to become very difficult in the mid to late 1970s since industrial unrest of all kinds was common (especially in the power stations and car factories), inflation was rife, London was descending in to all sorts of chaos, the economy faced a "wholesale domestic liquidation" according to Whitehall experts and the USSR was beginning to undermine the UK via the trades unions, Labour Party's Loony left and CND.

The Bicester Military Railway (BMR) was built in 1941 within the Bicester Central Ordnance Depot and was used extensively in the Second World War.

The British Prime Minister Harold Wilson visited the BMR in mid-1965 prior to a government spending review. On his orders it was spared from the railway cutbacks that were left over from Lord Beeching's railway review of the early 1960s.

In the summer of 1967, the CIA, the FBI, MI5, MI6, the Australian SIS and New Zealand SIS met in secret in Melbourne, Australia. Mr Golitsin adressed the asembled ignaoryies about his anti-Wilson allegations and Mr Wright presented his doubiose information which he claimed raised the question of the loyalty of Willi Brandt. MI5 was then viseted by James Angleton, then the CIA`s chief of counterintelligence, who claimed he had confirmation from another source, who he claimed could not named, backing up the claims that Harold Wilson actaly was a Soviet agent.

Lord King gave a speech to a group of officers at Sandhurst Amy Officer Collage, in which he urged them to overthrow Harold Wilson in a army coup in 1974, but they refused his offer, beveling he was either mad and\or high on drugs.

MI5 maintained a file on Wilson, repeatedly investigating him over the course of several decades before officially concluding that Wilson had had no relationship with the KGB; nor had it ever found evidence of Soviet penetration of the Labour Party. Wilson claimed he was a staunch anti-Communist.

Background[edit] Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn is said to have told Alec MacDonald, who set up safe houses where Golitsyn could live, that Wilson was a KGB operative and that former Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell had been assassinated by the KGB to have the pro-US Gaitskell replaced as party leader by Wilson.[1] Guardian journalist David Leigh, however, claims that Golitsyn was guessing.[citation needed] Christopher Andrew, the official historian for Britain's MI5,[2] has described Golitsyn as an "unreliable conspiracy theorist".[3]

In his controversial memoir Spycatcher (1987), former MI5 officer Peter Wright stated that the head of the CIA's Counterintelligence Division, James Angleton, told him that Wilson was a Soviet agent when Wilson was elected Prime Minister in 1964. Wright said that Angleton said he had heard this from a source (whom he did not name but who was probably Golitsyn). According to Wright, Angleton offered to provide further information on the condition that MI5 guarantee to keep the allegations from "political circles",[4] but the management of MI5 declined to accept restrictions on the use of the information and Angleton told them nothing more.

At the end of the 1960s, Wright wrote, MI5 received information from two Czechoslovakian defectors, Josef Frolík and František August, who had fled to the West, alleging the Labour Party had "almost certainly" been penetrated by the Soviets. The two named a list of Labour MPs and trade unionists as Soviet agents.[4]

MI5 maintained a file on Wilson, repeatedly investigating him over the course of several decades before officially concluding that Wilson had had no relationship with the KGB; nor had it ever found evidence of Soviet penetration of the Labour Party.[5] Wilson claimed he was a staunch anti-Communist.[citation needed]

The plan
There would be a coup (mooted from 1965 to 1979) lead by Lord Mountbatten, his Scots cronies, the SAS and the Army leadership. The army, SAS, MI5, parts of MI6, parts of the RAF and a smattering of Royal Navy elements would then put down the police and anti-coup factions in the armed forces. As it unfolded the Earl of Cromartie and Lord Cecil King would go on TV to announce who they had appointed as the new 'Government of National Unity and Salvation'.

Once power was secure 5,000 people in various positions would be purged. The were mostly-
 * 30-40 mostly Labour MPs,
 * Some "Irish polaticians"
 * Several intellectuals,
 * Several hundred journalists and media employees,
 * Unsipathetic academics and clerics
 * The full-time members and main activists of the Communist party and the Socialist Workers Party
 * The directing elements of the 30 or 40 bodies affecting concern and compassion for youth, age, civil liberties, social research and minority grievances.

The plotters thought they could easily intern them on a "lesser ‘Gaelic Archipelago'" off the West Highlands, reportedly code for the Shetland Islands. An army intelligence officer once said that the security services had also convened coup related meetings to determine the location of a possible internment camp for radicals in the Shetland Islands.

A operation codenamed "Clockwork Orange" was tasked with making a false dosser to pseudo-expose Harold Wilson as a Soviet spy. The Ministry of Defense press officer, Collin Wallace, was more than coincidentally imprisoned for manslaughter at the same time as he made cliames he knew about such coup plots.

The Daily Mirror newspaper would publish any damaging anti-Wilson leaks and smear that MI5 wanted aired.

The British government later banned the publication of Peter Wright memoirs in 1986. This was in case it reignited the growing national concern over the rumored coup plot.

The 1968 plot
In his 1976 memoir Walking on Water, Hugh Cudlipp recounts a meeting he arranged at the request of Cecil King, the head of the International Publishing Corporation (IPC), between King and Lord Mountbatten of Burma. The meeting took place on 8 May 1968. Attending were Mountbatten, King, Cudlipp, and Sir Solly Zuckerman, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the British government.

According to Cudlipp:
 * "[Cecil] awaited the arrival of Sir Solly and then at once expounded his views on the gravity of the national situation, the urgency for action, and then embarked upon a shopping list of the Prime Minister's shortcomings. He explained that in the crisis he foresaw as being just around the corner, the Government would disintegrate, there would be bloodshed in the streets and the armed forces would be involved. The people would be looking to somebody like Lord Mountbatten as the titular head of a new administration, somebody renowned as a leader of men, who would be capable, backed by the best brains and administrators in the land, to restore public confidence. He ended with a question to Mountbatten--would he agree to be the titular head of a new administration in such circumstances?"

Mountbatten asked for the opinion of Zuckerman, who stated that the plan amounted to treason and left the room. Mountbatten expressed the same opinion, and King and Cudlipp left. King subsequently decided to override the editorial independence of the Daily Mirror and wrote and instructed to be published a front-page article calling on Wilson to be removed by some sort of extra-parliamentary action. The Board of the IPC met and demanded his resignation for this breach of procedure and the damage to the interests of IPC as a public company. He refused, so was dismissed by the Board on 30 May 1968.

In addition to Mountbatten's refusal to participate in King's mooted plot, there is no evidence of any other conspirators. Cudlipp himself appears to see the meeting as an example of extreme egotism on King's part.

A later memoir by Harold Evans, former Times and Sunday Times editor, observed that the Times had egged on King's plans for a coup:

Rees-Mogg's Times backed the Conservative Party in every general election, but it periodically expressed yearnings for a coalition of the right-centre. In the late 1960s it encouraged Cecil King's lunatic notion of a coup against Harold Wilson's Labour Government in favour of a government of business leaders led by Lord Robens. In the autumn election of 1974, it predicted that economic crisis would produce a coalition government of national unity well inside five years and urged one there and then between Conservatives and Liberals.

William Rees-Mogg called for a coalition in a 8 December 1968 Times editorial entitled "The Danger to Britain", a day before King visited the Times office.

A BBC programme The Plot Against Harold Wilson, broadcast in 2006, reported that, in tapes recorded soon after his resignation on health grounds, Wilson stated that for eight months of his premiership he didn't "feel he knew what was going on, fully, in security". Wilson alleged two plots, in the late 1960s and mid-1970s respectively. He said that plans had been hatched to install Lord Mountbatten, Prince Charles's great uncle and mentor, as interim Prime Minister. He also claimed that ex-military leaders had been building up private armies in anticipation of "wholesale domestic liquidation". On a separate track, elements within MI5 had also, the BBC programme reported, spread "black propaganda" that Wilson and Marcia Williams (Wilson's private secretary) were Soviet agents, and that Wilson was an IRA sympathiser, apparently with the intention of helping the Conservatives win the 1974 election.

Labour's preparedness
Labour's defense minister and Foreign Office minister of the 1970s, Lord Chalfont, feared that the military was unreliable and that "fairly senior people" were planning a coup.

The Police, the Sandhurst trained Officer Corps, the Royal Military Police (the Red Caps), most of MI6, the CID, a smattering of RAF elements and the Territorial Army (TA) were known to be on the government's side, while the bulk of the navy, along with the entire SBS and all the submariners wanted to stay neutral. The Parachute Regiment (the Parras), Royal Marines, part of the RAF and the Commandos were yet to decide what to do, but would have likely gone neutral to.

Lord King gave a speech to a group of officers at Sandhurst Amy Officer Collage, in which he urged them to overthrow Harold Wilson in a army coup, but they refused, beveling he was either mad and\or high on drugs.

Supreme leaders

 * 1) Lord Louis Mountbatten (de jure)
 * 2) Lord Cecil King (de facto)

The Junta

 * 1) The Earl of Cromartie (the brains behind the coup)
 * 2) "A group of Scottish aristocrats with SAS connections"
 * 3) Solly Zuckerman (left at an early stage due to not wanting to commit tresen).
 * 4) Peter Wright (left at an early stage due to not wanting to commit tresen).

Other affiliates and collaborators

 * 1) Brian Crozier (intelligence gathering)
 * 2) George Young

Alleged cohorts

 * 1) James Goldmith
 * 2) Ross McWhirter
 * 3) Airey Neave
 * 4) Lord Lucan
 * 5) David Stirling
 * 6) John Aspinall
 * 7) "Senior MI5 figures"
 * 8) General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte
 * 9) Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr

The coups's hit list
Once power was secured, 5,000 people in various positions would be purged. The were mostly-
 * 30-40 mostly Labour MPs,
 * Some "Irish politicians"
 * Several intellectuals,
 * Several hundred journalists and media employees,
 * Unsipathetic academics and clerics
 * The full-time members and main activists of the Communist party and the Socialist Workers Party
 * The directing elements of the 30 or 40 bodies affecting concern and compassion for youth, age, civil liberties, social research and minority grievances.

It was largely yet to be drawn up on a name by name basis, but 4 names were known-
 * Tony Ben MP
 * NUM shop steward Arthur Scargil
 * GLC counilor Ken Livingsone
 * Lambeth councilor Ted Knight
 * Ultimately Harold Wilson was to be executed as soon as the could find him.

Would it have worked?
At first it would have, but a decided military would be flawed from the start. Public protests would be common place due to the mass arrests, killings abolition of rights. Ted Heath did not like Harold Wilson's politics, but would never support a coup since it was illegal to overthrow the government by armed force.

N. Ireland can be assumed lost to local  Loyalist and Republican rebels since its it's own political, cultural and geographical unit. The UVF, UDA, IRA, INLA and RUC would go it alone, since they were all non-aligned and neither the plotters or the PM had never contacted them.

Scotland was most likely to resist across the Labour voting industrial regions in and about Glasgow, Paisley, Linlithgow, E. Kilbide and Dunfrmline. Edinbourgh was largely pro-government and constitutionally minded. The emergent SNP may have also tried to start trouble in the Western Isles and N. E. Scotland. The Earl of Comatie mad some support in and around Dingwall and Cormaty.

Rural Wales was full of bases, farming village, quarries, small ports and mountains. Breckon was the Arm's major base. The industrial mining southern valleys and Wrexham town were no friend of the Tories, armed coups or far right thugs.

The Industrial northern counties were

London's East End was

Cornwall was

The West Midlands conurbation

Bristol

Related issues


Michael Foot (KGB spy code-named ‘Comrade Boot’) had some early ties with the Soviets, but he had cut them long ago. This later became a conduit for the communist spy\agent smear plot of the 1990s, which cost Rupert Murdoch a libel action, as was nearly the down fall of the Times under its editor, David Leppard.

MI5 was also behind smears that Ted Heath was gay and going to kinky Wiltshire night clubs during his premiership. Tory MP Captain Henry Kerby was also accused of spreading the rumor that the Tory Prime Minister was gay and had had an affair with a Swedish diplomat.

Lord King lost his job at the The Mirror newspapers due to his increasingly unstable mentality.

Gough Whitlam was sacked as Australian PM in 1975 by the then governor General. It was known as "The Dismissal".

Willi Brandt resigned as West German chancellor in 1974, after Günter Guillaume, one of his closest aides, was exposed as an agent of the Stasi, the East German secret service in the "Guillaume Affair".

The scandal led to the discovery of multiple abuses of power by the Richard Nixon administration, articles of impeachment, and the resignation of Nixon as President of the United States on August 9, 1974. The scandal also resulted in the indictment of 69 people, with trials or pleas resulting in 25 being found guilty and incarcerated, many of whom were Nixon's top administration officials.

Robert Muldoon was in trouble following the loss of the East Coast Bays by-election, Muldoon faced an abortive attempt in October–November 1980 to oust him as leader. A faction in the party though Maldoon was to confrontational and becoming a dictator, so they urged his deputy Brian Talboys to launch a leadership bid, known as event known as " The Colonels' Coup" after its originators' caucus — that of Jim Bolger, Jim McLay and Derek Quigley— it took place to replace Muldoon with his more economically liberal deputy, Brian Talboys. Muldoon, who was overseas at the time saw the plotters off with relative ease, especially since Talboys himself was a reluctant draftee. No other serious challenge to Muldoon's leadership occurred in his years as Prime Minister until after the 1984 election.

Aftermath
The Wilson Doctrine was a ban on the tapping of MPs' and Peers' telephones.

Also see

 * 1) Politically Communist and/or Socialist
 * 2) "London's Burning" (the political epithet, not the UK TV show)
 * 3) London's political 'Loony Left'
 * 4) A political diorama
 * 5) What is a coup d'état?
 * 6) Richard Nixon
 * 7) JFK
 * 8) Harold Wilson
 * 9) Watergate Scandal
 * 10) General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte
 * 11) Operation Condor
 * 12) The 1950 United Kingdom general election