- 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 him whether 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 when he had come to power for the first time.
The pretext appears in all of its irony when we recall that Lord 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 purveyor of the argument that Wilson was a Soviet asset was James Jesus
Angleton, like Bush a Yale graduate. Angleton had been the counterintelligence director
of the CIA until 1975, but 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 in 1964 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 becoming an international succes de scandale that allowed Lord Victor to die a