destabilizing and weakening allied governments and the political forces that constituted those
governments.
Those who have witnessed the ghoulish public love affair between George Bush and the fascist
"Iron Lady" of Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher, may be interested in indications that CIA Director
Bush helped to bring Mrs. Thatcher to power. At the beginning of Bush's tenure, the British Prime
Minister was Harold Wilson of the Labor Party, who had won two general elections during 1974and whose term would normally have ended in 1978. But Wilson was destabilized and forced out of (^)
office. Although his immediate successor was James Callaghan, also of the Labor Party,
Callaghan's cabinet was merely the prelude to the advent of Thatcher, who would remain in power
for more than 11 years, until late in 1990. [fn 43]
Bush's implication in the matter is beyond any doubt. Shortly after Bush had arrived at Langley,
Prime Minister Wilson despatched his close friend Lord Weidenfeld to the United States with a
confidential letter to be given to Senator Hubert Humphrey. Wilson and Weidenfeld met on
February 10, 1976. The letter enumerated the names of a number of MI-5 and MI-6 officers of
whom Wilson was suspicious. Wilson's letter requested that Humphrey go to Bush and aks himwhether the CIA knew anything about these British counter-intelligence and intelligence officers. (^)
Was it possible, Wilson wanted to know, that those named in the letter were actually working with
or for the CIA? Were the British officials in league with a CIA faction that was carrying out
eletronic or other surveillance of Wilson, including in his office in 10 Downing Street? Implied was
the further question: was the CIA part of an operation to destabilize Wilson and bring him down?
It is known that Bush took Wilson's letter quite seriously, so seriously that he flew to London to talk
to Wilson and assured him that the CIA had not been responsible for any surveillance of the PM.
But by the time Bush reached London, Wilson had already resigned in a surprise announcement
made on March 16, 1976. What role had the CIA actually played?
The transition from Harold Wilson to Margaret Thatcher amounts to the replacement of Lord Victor
Rothschild's favorite puppet politician of the 1960's with Lord Victor Rothschild's preferred choice
for the 1980's. The pretext used to harrass Wilson out of office was Wilson's well-known close ties
to communists and to the Soviet block, but all of that had been well known back in 1964 whad come to power for the first time. The pretext appears in all of its irony when we recall that Lordhen he (^)
Victor Rothschild was himself the leading candidate to be named as the legendary "Fifth Man" of
the KGB-SIS spy team of Philby, Maclean, Burgess, and Blunt.
A leading purveBush a Yale graduate. Angleton had been the counterintelligence director of the CIA until 1975, butyor of the argument that Wilson was a Soviet asset was James Jesus Angleton, like (^)
he had not been very successful. Angleton had always been obsessed by the presence of high-level
CIA moles in the US government and his own agency. Angleton was in touch with Peter Wright of
MI-5. Wright was also bitterly opposed to Wilson, whom he characterized as a "Soviet-Zionist
agent," which was perfectly accurate as far as it went. But again, all that had been clear back in1964 and even much earlier. Wright had provided Chapman Pincher, a right-wing British journalist (^)
and also an asset of Lord Victor, with the material for the book Their Trade is Treachery, a "limited
hangout" which provided many interesting facts about the Soviet pentration of British intelligence,
but which was mainly designed to keep Lord Victor out of the spotlight. Later Wright's own book,
Spycatcher, succeeded even better in protecting Lord Victor by bescandale that allowed Lord Victor to die a natural death without ever having been apprehended bycoming an international succes de
British authorities. The crowning irony is that Philby's old pal Lord Victor, Wright, and the
obsessive Angleton were all in a strange united front to villify Wilson for his links to Soviet
intelligence, which were of course massive but which had been well known all along.