and they'd sort of heard of the Beatles, but when it came to the niceities[sic] of the business, LSE needed an expert opinion, in this case, me. The Board wanted to know if the Stones had any future, and I was able to say I thought so, based on what I was seeing. Would they be a good risk? “Er—yes,” quoth the expert. So, Mick got some grant money from LSE which he bought gear with, after which he gave LSE the salute, and took off for the sky. (Stevens, 2011)
Apocrypha or not, the Stones became the biggest band in the world, after the Beatles, and Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull became one of the most famous couples in rock and roll. Jagger also came to stay with Faithfull at Braziers Park, after his release from prison in 1967.
If more evidence is required of the implicate order of popular culture, intelligence operations, and politics, Mick Jagger was associated for a period with the Labour MP and alleged MI5 (and possibly KGB, and even Church of Scientology2) informant, Tom Driberg. Driberg was impressed with Jagger, having been introduced to him in 1965, and tried unsuccessfully over a number of years to persuade him to take up active Labour politics. Driberg belonged to one or more of the same groups my grandfather belonged to, fraternized with Richard Acland, and was even briefly earmarked by Aleister Crowley as his natural successor for world teacher! Nothing came of the proposal, though the two continued to meet.
Even more ominously, Driberg (who fully embraced the social and cultural freedoms of the ’60s) enjoyed a lengthy friendship with the Kray twins, and in July 1964, both he and Lord Boothby (a well-known Conservative peer) were alleged to have been sexually propositioning males at a dog track and to be involved with a criminal underworld scene. Driberg and Boothby attended parties at the Krays’ flat where “rough but compliant East End lads were served like so many canapés,” according to Driberg's biographer Francis Wheen (1992, p. 350). While Driberg avoided publicity, Boothby was hounded by the press and forced to issue a series of denials. After the twins had been convicted of murder in 1969, Driberg frequently lobbied the Home Office about their prison conditions, requesting that they be given more visits and allowed regular reunions. In passing, I note that the author and psychotherapist Anthony Storr described Driberg “as the only person he ever met who could truly be called ‘evil’” (Baker, 2009). Even more tantalizingly, author Robin Bryans noted that “Many of Driberg's Oxford friends enjoyed the black mass” (1992, p. 482; we will hear more from Bryans in Part II; Driberg started at Oxford in 1924, around the time Alec graduated).
When he wasn't participating in satanic rituals—or perhaps simultaneously—Driberg belonged to the aforementioned 1941 Committee, which besides Acland and Astor also recruited Julian Huxley (Aldous's older brother, a eugenicist and social engineer), and probable MI5-asset Christopher Mayhew (who became the under-secretary of state of the Foreign Office in 1945 and formed The Information Research Department to counter Soviet propaganda and infiltration). This was the same period that the CIA was embarking on its MKULTRA mind control program (with the help of those paper-clipped Nazis), which included the early use of psychedelics, and in 1955, Mayhew took part in his own experiment with psychotropics. Ostensibly intended as part of a Panorama special for the BBC but never broadcast, under the guidance of his friend Dr. Humphry Osmond, Mayhew ingested 400 mg of mescaline hydrochloride and allowed himself to be filmed for the duration of the trip (Drokhole, 2013). Part of the footage was included in the BBC documentary “LSD—The Beyond Within,” released in 1986. Dr. Humphry Osmond gave Aldous Huxley mescaline the following year (1952), which led to Huxley's countercultural bible, The Doors of Perception.
Since my grandfather was also on the 1941 Committee (according to LSE Marxist historian, John Saville), was he also ingesting mescaline on the frontline of the psychedelic revolution? If so, I had no clue about any of this while growing up. Yet hallucinogen-ingestion apparently was a central element in the Fabian experience: over fifty years before Huxley made mescaline famous, Havelock Ellis wrote an article called “Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise,” for The Contemporary Review, January 1898, making him one of the very first Western experimenters with “entheogens.”
Once again, my brother continued this tradition in both exact and inverse ways: he wrote an article for The Observer (formerly edited by MI6-asset David Astor) about his Ibogaine experience, called “Trip of a Lifetime” (Horsley, 2004; I am even mentioned in it, though not by name). More famously, he wrote lovingly of his heroin addiction in various places, and on his self-designed death-coat of arms he included syringes, as well as skulls. He wore with pride the weapons of his self-destruction.
The creation of cultural figures through applied extremity inevitably gives rise to some kamikaze models.
CHAPTER VII
Food control, world control: Suez Crisis, Northern Dairies, Marks & Spencer
“You needn't carry a card or even have heard the name Fabian to follow the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing flag. Fabianism is mainly a value-system with progressive objectives. Its social club aspect isn't for coalminers, farmers, or steam-fitters. We've all been exposed to many details of the Fabian program without realizing it. In the United States, some organizations heavily influenced by Fabianism are the Ford Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Stanford Research Institute, the Carnegie Endowments, the Aspen Institute, the Wharton School, and RAND. And this short list is illustrative, not complete.”
—John Taylor Gatto, Underground History of American Education
In the early 1950s, Northern Dairies was approached about going public and the firm was approved by the aforementioned Lord Piercy, who then approached Labour MP and Fabian Society member Ian Mikardo. Mackintosh was also represented in the Northern Dairies board, and Alec was “reasonably certain of a successful issue in 1956” (Ounsworth, 1987, p. 10). It was at this point that Alec was approached by the Orthodox Church of Russia to take a team of churchmen to the Soviet Union. “Then came the Northern Dairies share issues in 1956,” Alec writes in his short memoir, “and happily, providence decided that General Nasser would nationalize the Suez Canal on that very day, so demand was not high” (ibid.). I am not well-versed in stock-talk (despite being myself a major shareholder in Northern Foods from the age of eighteen to twenty-four), but what I deduce from this is that, because of the timing of the company going public with an international crisis, there was a flurry of insider trading while the price of shares remained low. “Although all shares were taken up the price hovered around…the same price that our friends and customers the Mackintosh Group had acquired theirs.” Alec adds that “several members of the Mackintosh family actually bought significant quantities of our shares, and a happy relationship has continued to this day” (ibid.).
When I first began this exploration of my family history, I had not even heard of the Suez Crisis, but I soon discovered that it was a major turning point in global politics. For one thing, it spelled the end of the then British Prime Minister Anthony Eden's career, due to a combination of failing health and a seriously compromised reputation. For another, it is on record as heralding the end of British predominance in the Middle East (once the US refused to back Eden's government in trying to kill Nasser and retake the canal)—which is not far from saying the end of the British Empire. (The canal was of major importance to European industry due to the fact that two-thirds of oil supplies to Europe passed through it.) So in 1956, on the very same day that Northern Dairies was going public, General Nasser, the president of Egypt, seized the canal in response to the withdrawal of Anglo-American funding for the Aswan Dam.1 As a result of this act of “providence,” Alec and his buddies were able to make a big business score. Considering Alec's close relationship to power, it begs the question as to just how “providential” this timing was.
Also
