174 • ENDURANCE, HMS
highly detailed guide to the ‘‘Communist or Revolutionary Marxist
Press.’’ EntitledTracts beyond the Timesand distributed by the So-
cial Affairs Unit in 1983, it documents Britain’s far-left political
movements and their publications.This is the fundamental and irreconcilable difference between two kinds of
socialists. There are on the one hand those Social Democrats, for whom
the state can be neutral, for whom a class war or struggle is not inevitable
and whose policies can be reversed by a constitutional opposition. On the
other hand there are the Communists, or Revolutionary Marxists, for
whom the state cannot be neutral but must present either the working class
or the bourgeoisie (or capitalist or employing class) and for whom social-
ism can be achieved only when the former has utterly vanquished the latter
and when that victory has been consolidated by the exercise of workers’
power, the current euphemism for a dictatorship of the proletariat.During his retirement, Elwell followed with close interest the debate
over the loyalty of his former director-general,Sir Roger Hollis, and
in July 1984 wrote to theTimes, in what amounted to an attack on
his ex-colleagueArthur Martin, complaining that the proposition
that MI5 had suffered hostile penetration was unsupported by the ev-
idence. As a stern critic of Hollis’s performance, Elwell’s contribu-
tion was not without significance. He also wrote to theSunday Times
later the same year, criticizing Chapman Pincher for poor research.ENDURANCE, HMS.Ostensibly the Royal Navy’s only guard ship in
the South Atlantic, HMSEndurancewas a signals intelligence col-
lection platform based in theFalklands Islandsgathering Argentine
wireless traffic. When the British government’s Defence White Paper
in 1981 announced that the ship was to be scrapped and not replaced,
the Argentine junta, led by General Leopoldo Galtieri, assumed that
Britain effectively was abandoning its commitment to defend the is-
lands and their dependencies.Endurance’s commander, Captain
Nick Barker, mounted a fierce campaign to save his ship, which was
reprieved when Argentine forces seized and occupied the islands in
April 1982. After his retirement, Barker wroteBeyond Endurance,
which obliquely referred to the important intelligence role fulfilled
by his ship.
ENGLANDSPIEL.The German generic term for the successful pene-
tration and destruction of theSpecial Operations Executive(SOE)