Lord Louis Mountbatten's very British coup

Background


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.

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.[1] Guardian journalist David Leigh, however, claims that Golitsyn was guessing.[citation needed] 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.

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..

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, parts of the RAF and a smatering of Royal Navy elimets 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'.

Once power was secure 5,000 people in various positions would be purged. The were mostly-
 * 40 mostly Labour MPs,
 * 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.

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

Labour's preparedness
Labour's defense minister and Foreign Office minister of the 1970s, Lord Chalfont, feared that the military was unreliable "fairly senior people" were planning a coup. The Police and TA were known to be on the government's side, while the bulk of the navy and the submariners as a whole wanted to stay neutral.

Supreme leader

 * 1) Lord Louis Mountbatten

The Junta

 * 1) The Earl of Cromartie
 * 2) "A group of Scottish aristocrats with SAS connections"
 * 3) Lord Cecil King

Other affiliates and collaborators

 * 1) Brian Crozier

Alleged cohorts

 * 1) James Goldmith
 * 2) Ross McWhirter
 * 3) Airey Neave
 * 4) Lord Lucan
 * 5) David Stirling
 * 6) John Aspinall
 * 7) "Senior MI5 figures"

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) General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte
 * 7) Operation Condor