Archive

October 2000

Watching the Watchers

Eight amazing secret documents from the archives of Soviet Naval Intelligence reveal just how much the Russians knew about spying by British fishing trawlers.

In 1998 the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) grudgingly admitted for the first and only time that the UK’s trawler fleet had been used during the Cold War to collect intelligence on the Soviet Navy’s Northern Fleet.

This elaborate operation - often referred to by its code-name "Hornbeam" - may have been kept secret from the British public, but the Soviets knew all about it from the early days in the 1950s. Just how much they knew and suspected is shown by a selection of documents from Soviet naval records in the 1950s obtained by OffMSG.

The documents include a top-level report from senior Soviet Naval staff to Stalin’s Defence Minister Bulganin, detailed observation reports about the movements of named Hull and Grimsby trawlers and suspicions that vessels from the Royal Navy’s Fishery Patrol may have carried out "close approach" operations involving agents. The Soviets even managed - via radio intercepts or possibly an Admiralty "mole" - to obtain a copy of a Top Secret Royal Navy Special Order giving a shopping list to all Fleet captains of the exact intelligence data required on the ships of the Northern Fleet they might observe on sea-exercises.

A long-standing treaty with the USSR permitted UK trawlers on the Arctic "White Sea Run" to fish in the Barents Sea all along the Kola Peninsula and its Murmansk Shore as far as the entrance to the White Sea. By the 1950s this whole area had become the backyard of the Northern Fleet, based at Severomorsk in Kola Sound, just north of the city of Murmansk. For the Royal Navy’s NID (Naval Intelligence Department) it was too good an opportunity to ignore.

Operation Hornbeam may never have been officially acknowledged at the time, but the fishing communities in ports like Hull accepted privately that it was going on - and accepted the possible risks involved. It was only after the loss of the "Gaul" in the Barents Sea in 1974 that the murmurings about "spyships" became more insistent. Now, with the end of the Cold War, a little more of the truth has begun to come out.

Read the translations of the documents and see the originals in the...

OffMSG Gaul Archive

The curse of Friday 13th has hit a seminar focused on "ritual" (ie satanic) child abuse, forcing it to be cancelled at the last minute.

The high-profile training workshop organised by Lee Moore (above) and scheduled for the 13^th has been scrapped for lack of support. It’s demise is as a serious blow to the often-lucrative "child abuse industry". The event -- initially entitled "Professional Perspectives on Ritual Abuse" but curiously toned down to "Professional Perspectives on an Aspect of Abuse" (our emphasis) -- was aimed at lawyers, social workers, police officers, psychologists, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Home Office and the Department of Health.

At a cool £287 for a one-day session at London's ritzy Painters Hall it seems the professionals decided to keep their wallets in their pockets and their bums on their Staples office-chairs -- despite the fact that the event had some prominent speakers lined up under the chairmanship of Richard Monk, a former Metropolitan Police Commander now with the UN. (Monk was responsible for setting up the UK’s first paedophile unit.)

The "aspect of child abuse" to be considered at the seminar was none other than "ritual" abuse -- what used to be called "satanic abuse" until the term became discredited and ridiculed.

Sponsored by the leading medical publisher Butterworth and Lexis Direct, the seminar was organised by the Association of Child Abuse Lawyers (ACAL), brainchild of former barrister Lee Moore -- of whom TV viewers have seen quite a lot recently (she appeared in the discussion group on BBC1 following the screening of "Care" on 8 October).

In a letter touting the doomed seminar, Lee Moore states baldly that "victims of ritual abuse are frequently seen in the family courts, the criminal courts and more recently in the civil courts - as personal injury claims for compensation are presented".

The cancellation of the event, though, is good news for UK tax-payers who are estimated to have lost some £20M on investigations and enquiries into spurious allegations of "satanic abuse" over the last ten years. And that figure fails to value the emotional trauma suffered by innocent families at the hands of an unholy alliance of evangelical priests, bandwagon-hopping social workers, cynical hacks, radical feminists, sad psychiatrists and campaigning middle-aged mums. Are we now facing the possibility that the public purse will be expected to shell out even more on spurious retrospective damages claims from self-styled satanic abuse survivors?

Lee Moore, according to a CV at her website, was called to the Bar in 1973. It’s thought she was a specialist in maritime law for a while. "She is a survivor of abuse and therefore is ideally placed to provide an experiential and professional perspective," the site confides. Another CV printed on a conference programme from 1998 describes her as: "a non-practising barrister and specialist adviser to the legal profession on matters concerning child sexual abuse. She is also a survivor and parent of an abused child..."

In a radio interview earlier this year Moore even claimed she had been the victim of "satanic abuse", though a Times Educational Supplement profile of her in early 1999 says simply that she had been abused by relatives between the ages of three and fifteen. She ceased to practise as a barrister in 1993.

If there’s any doubt that Moore believes in satanic abuse, her ACAL web-site lists as one of its standard offerings a seminar titled: "Ritual and Satanic Abuse: Introductory Course". Now, it seems, she has seen the opportunity to go for compensation from public funds, but first she has to convince the courts that there really is such a thing as ritual or satanic abuse.

Also believed to be closely associated with ACAL is Sue Richardson. Richardson was one of the social workers heavily criticised for her rôle in the Cleveland scandal back in the 1980s. In spite of that, she was co-editor of a revisionist collection of articles published in 1991 and entitled "Child Sexual Abuse - Whose Problem? Reflections on Cleveland". Subsequently, she ended up working for NCH in Scotland, but parted company from them after "speaking out" on Cleveland in the Channel 4 1998 series Death Of Childhood. She now describes herself as a family therapist and psychotherapist. She is also a founder member of the UK study group of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation (ISSD) and of the European Network for Backlash Research (ENBAR). Describing herself as "an independent attachment-based psychotherapist", Richardson presented a lecture at the 5th International Conference of ISSD in Manchester in May 1999.

The first speaker at the cancelled London seminar was to have been psychiatrist Valerie Sinason. ACAL’s embarrassment comes on the heels of the drubbing received by Sinason from the media (BBC Radio 4 and The Independent excepted) over her Department of Health-funded report on ritual abuse. According to a source close to the DoH, Sinason got her £22,000 "...because she made the most noise following the publication of Professor Jean LaFontaine’s official report rubbishing the idea of satanic ritual abuse".

Purporting to draw on an unspecified number of unidentified cases, Sinason’s research has still not been published (the DoH says it is currently going through peer review after three earlier re-drafts). That didn’t stop diehard evangelical Christian Andrew Boyd from running a remarkable front page splash in The Christian Herald in 1996 in which he announced Sinason’s findings before she’d even started her research. At this point, the DoH could have cancelled Sinason’s funding and distributed Boyd’s article instead. Even OffMSG could have predicted what Sinason’s report would conclude.

Same old rubbish: human sacrifice, satanic "covens", demonic rites and teenage "brood mares" producing unregistered babies for bloody slaughter. Sinason and her cohorts have never been able to provide any evidence for what is little more than an urban myth. Nor have there been any convictions for such offences in Britain since the nonsense was first imported from the United States by television producer Tim Tate in the 1980s.

Discover how it all began. Read the JET Report in OffMSG’s Broxtowe Files].