BRIXMIS: The best untold story of the Cold War?

Sometimes, I think I’m the only one who’s ever heard of BRIXMIS. Often I talk to people who think they know a lot about covert operations and secret missions of the Cold War, but find they’ve never heard of it. It’s nice to know there is someone else, at least, out there who knows about it.

I suppose at this point I should explain, for the benefit of readers other than the one who posted the question, what BRIXMIS was and why it is one of the best stories of the Cold War that (almost) nobody knows.

As everybody does know, Germany was carved up between the Britain, France , the USA and the Soviet Union after the Second World. Whilst relationships between the western allies and the Soviet block were still relatively friendly, an agreement was reached whereby each party would be allowed a small military mission in the others territory. These missions would have quasi-diplomatic status, meaning they could move around unhindered by the military or civilian police.

The British mission, BRIXMIS, was set up first and was the largest. The other three were considerably smaller. The Soviet Union used their mission, SOXMIS, to run secret agents. The western allies also used their to spy, but did so very differently.

Being bigger, BRIXMIS ran three-man teams. The French and Americans used two man teams, which were less effective. They wore military uniforms and drove western cars, but were able to move freely around East Germany. There were, officially, some restrictions on where they could go, but they were usually ignored.

As a result BRIXMIS teams were able to see first hand the Warsaw Pact in action. When Soviet armoured divisions mobilised in radio silence and deployed on the West German border, BRIXMIS watched. When four Russian divisions were mobilised in four days to surround West Berlin, BRIXMIS was there.

They also did a lot more than just observe. By the 1980s a stand MO had been worked out for BRIXMIS. An Intelligence Corps Officer was in command, a Royal Corps of Transport driver was at the wheel, and the third person on the team was usually seconded from the SAS. Tours would last several days, with the teams sleeping in the woods, often in the middle of huge formations of Soviet troops.

(You see why this is such a great story? Everyone remembers the SAS in Malaya and Borneo and Oman and the Falklands, but who lists East Germany as one of their Cold War deployments?)

At the start of the eighties the teams drove Range Rovers or special four wheel drive Opel Senators, but by the end they were given Mercedes G Wagons. This was important because, as each BRIXMIS team deployed, it would be given a Stasi escort. However, the poor old secret police in their Trabants or Wartburgs had no chance against a RCT driver at the wheel of a high powered 4x4. Once free of their chaperone, the BRIXMIS teams could start their work. Usually this would mean getting out of the vehicle and having a scout around on foot to see what could be found.

The intelligence coups of BRXMIS were quite significant. Rooting around in a dustbin after a Warsaw Pact exercise one team uncovered a guide to all the Soviet weapon systems, with special mention of all their defects. On another occasion a key to the top hatch of a T-64 tank was fashioned from a photograph, and so when one of these brand new tanks was found parked up and unguarded the team were able to unlock it, pop inside and take some photos of a vehicle many Soviet officers didn’t even know existed.

Sometimes the team would take some trophies home with them. These included empty shell casing from the new AK-74 assault rifle, a sample of reactive armour, and even the radar and engines from a crashed Yak-28.

The BRIXMIS teams also got to observe the Soviet military in operation at close hand. If the Cold War turned hot the SAS would operate as stay-behind parties, sabotaging the Soviet logistics. The SAS who deployed with BRIXMIS were therefore interested to find that very few Warsaw Pact officers were ever given maps, and that the movement of Russian units depended on teams going out to put up road signs beforehand. The SAS were therefore briefed that these people would be a priority target in wartime.

Save to say the Soviet and East German authorities didn’t take too kindly to this sort of snooping. They couldn’t actually stop BRIXMIS without also losing SOXMIS, and that was too valuable for them to do this. Instead, they could make life as hard as possible, whilst arranging the occasional little ‘accident’.

Teams found where they shouldn’t be could be detained for a few hours. Anyone who went too far, like the American team which refused to stop at a checkpoint and ran over a Soviet guard, could be declared persona non grata and sent home.

The ‘accidents’ though, were another matter. These usually involved lorries which swerved across the road to take out a BRIXMIS vehicle. The photo on the right shows what happened to a French team. One photo taken by BRIXMIS shows a heavy Soviet tractor unit, hastily detached from the pontoon it had been towing, charging like a raging bull towards them across a dusty plain, still training wires and other bits of bridge. Several missions vehicles were lost in this way, and others in more ordinary accidents.

Other ways of dealing with the missions were even more direct. BRIXMIS teams were sometimes shot at, but never hit. However, on 24 March 1985 Major Arthur ‘Nick’ Nicholson of American USMLM was shot by a guard at a Russian tank storage facility. Major Nicholson died several hours later after being refused medical attention. The resulting diplomatic freeze saw the US boycott a planned joint celebration of the 40th anniversary of the ending of the Second World War.

But back to the original question, why doesn’t BRIXMIS get the recognition it deserves? I really have no idea. There is a good book on them, and it’s by Tony Geraghty whose Who Dares Wins was required reading for teenage boys when I was growing up. I’m surprised more people haven’t read his BRIXMIS.

I’m also surprised it doesn’t appear in more books about the SAS. I first learnt about BRIXMIS in Ken Connor’s book about the Regiment. However, Connor’s book is a factual account of the history of the SAS, whereas most books on the subject are mostly fiction. You can add imaginary firefights in Iraq quite easily, but I guess you couldn’t really get away with making up shootouts in Cold War East Germany.

This is all a pity because it’s a great story. This is Major General P G Williams CMG OBE, a BRIXMIS tour commander in the 1980s:

“It is already impossible to recreate a true impression of the fantastic atmosphere of professionalism, enthusiasm and camaraderie that characterised life in BRIXMIS. The job itself was exhilarating, not infrequently dangerous and undoubtedly addictive; it really was the ‘Great Game’ of the Cold War, played out in the forests and farmland of regions with evocative names like Mecklenburg, Brandenburg and Saxony.”

I suspect BRIXMIS will remain a secret until such a time as someone makes a film or a TV series about it. The story is there to be told, we just need someone to tell it.

Sources:

Tony Geraghty (1996). Brixmis: The Untold Exploits of Britain's Most Daring Cold War Spy Mission

Major General P G Williams BRIXMIS in the 1980s: The Cold War's Great Game

Museums:

There is a BRIXMIS Opel Senator in the Cold War Museum at RAF Cosford.

Iran versus the USA

Sabres are being rattled in the Persian Gulf again, and serious people are wondering whether US National Security Adviser John Bolton is trying to provoke a war between the USA and Iran. These showdowns have been happening on a regular basis over the last thirty years and they don't generally end very well - for the USA.

"Thank God for the sandstorm"

The Iranian revolution which swept away the massively unpopular Shah or Iran in 1979 was no surprise to anyone, except US intelligence. The American spooks had used the country to keep an eye on the strategically important Persian Gulf, but had neglected to keep an eye on the country itself.

Overnight the US lost it's key regional alley. It also lost its embassy, which was seized by young Islamists. Rather ironically, Iran was to have its own embassy in London taken over by terrorists a year later. In the UK the SAS soon cleared them out in one of its most famous operations. However, in Tehran the mullah's had no such intention. If the hostages were to be rescued, the US special forces would need to do the job themselves.

America had, by this time, it's own elite team based on the British SAS; Delta Force. However, whilst the SAS drove to Prince's Gate in their Range Rovers, Delta Force would need to take a more complicated route to the US embassy in Tehran. The plan they came up with was one of the most ambitious in history. Or, if you prefer, one of the most insane. 

The operation was to begin with a night rendezvous between eight helicopters and six transport planes at a secret location in Iran called Desert One. The choppers would then fly the assault force another 200 miles to Desert Two, which was about fifty miles from Tehran. The CIA would then help the assault drive into town, where they would rescue the hostages, bus them across the city to a sports stadium, where they would be picked up by the choppers again, flown another 400 miles to an Iranian air base, which had hopefully been captured by paratroopers,and then finally fly home.

The Iranians were, presumably, just going to stand by and watch. 

In the end it all went wrong very quickly, which was probably fortunate. Desert One wasn't quite the remote spot it was supposed to be and the first thing the US special forces had to do was detain a bus load of Iranians who'd been driving past. The bus was followed by another lorry which refused to stop. The Americans decided to stop it anyway by firing an anti-tank rocket at it. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a petrol tanker and the resulting explosion lit up the desert from horizon to horizon. The driver, a smuggler probably, miraculously survived and legged it into the desert.

Undaunted the team planned to carry on, but they were already two helicopters down due to mechanical failure and the pilots, having flown through a sand storm at ultra low level, were bushed. They all agreed to call it a day, but as one of the choppers took off it stuck a tanker plane resulting in another huge explosion and the death of eight men. The surviving Americans quickly skedaddled in the surviving aircraft leaving debris scattered across the desert, and a party of extremely confused bus passengers.

Had it not all gone horribly wrong so early, the assault on the airbase would probably have gone all right, although the Rangers were to struggle to carry out a similar operation in the rather more benign military environment of Grenada three years later. The rest of the mission though was just suicide. Assuming the Iranian police weren’t suspicious of several truck loads of white guys cruising round downtown Tehran, the assault on the Embassy might well have worked, although it probably wouldn’t have been either swift or surgical.

The plan of trucks in and helicopters out though was seriously flawed. It was in fact very similar to that attempted in Mogadishu in the ’Black Hawk Down’ incident. That was a smaller operation, in a similar urban environment, but was carried out much closer to the US base, used choppers much more suited to the task, and was supported by light attack helicopters and, in the end, mechanised infantry forces. It was also against an irregular opponent, not the military forces of a medium sized state.

The most likely outcome of the mission would be the complete loss of the Delta Force team and all the helicopters, significant casualties amongst the Rangers, very significant civilian casualties and huge propaganda boost for the Iranian Revolution.

That’s my opinion, but that of those of those who would have been rescued was not favourable either. One hostage, when told of the plan after his eventual release, remarked "Thank God for the sandstorm."

"I will never apologise for the United States"

Hoping the country was too distracted by its revolution to put up much resistance, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in September 1980. Like pretty much everything else Saddam did, he messed it up, and rather than a quick victory, the war turned into a prolonged bloodbath. Rather remarkably, given what was to happen in the future, the USA backed Iraq. US military aid couldn't give Saddam victory, but it did stop him losing. 

Unable to win the ground war, Iran decided to play its trump card, by launching attacks on shipping passing through the Straits of Hormuz. Faced with the prospect of having the world's oil supply choked off the US Navy went into action and in a series of operation they sank pretty much anything the Iranians put to see larger than a rowing boat. Iraq's contribution to this was to hit the US frigate Stark with an Exocet missile, but they were allowed to get away with that as they were the 'good guys'. 

Unfortunately, being the USA, they didn't stop there. in April 1988 the cruiser USS Vincennes was deployed to the Persian Gulf. In a few months of operations it gained the nickname 'Robocruiser' for its willingness to engage the Iranian Navy. Unfortunately, it's aggression was not matched by its competence. On 3 July 1988 it was pursuing Iranian gunboats into Iranian waters when its radar operators completely lost track of the air picture. Mistaking a scheduled Iran Air Airbus for an attacking F14 fighter plane the Vincennes shot down the civilian airliner and killed 290 people. 

Despite gung-ho coverage of the tragedy in the US media, the rest of the world was quite clear who was responsible, and the USA ended up paying $132 million in compensation, although significantly there was no apology. 

"Terrible, uncertain, chaotic, bloody business"

In 2002 the War on Terror had only got as far as Afghanistan, but the USA was already casting around for other enemies. With this background the US military decide to carry out a wargame called Millennium Challenge 2002, in which an American, 'Blue', force attacked that of an unknown Middle Eastern enemy. Called 'Blue' force, they were without doubt meant to be Iran. 

To command the 'Red' force they dragged out of retirement Marine General Paul K Van Ripper. General Ripper sounds like a joke name, and to be honest he sounds like a joke general. Wounded in Vietnam whilst attacking an enemy machine gun, he eventually ended up an honorary member of the Provost Marshal's office, during which time he'd spend his lunch breaks giving out speeding tickets. 

Millennium Challenge was to show that Ripper was either a military genius, or a neo-Luddite who hated technology, or possibly both. He certainly had a pragmatic attitude to war, which he described as a "terrible, uncertain, chaotic, bloody business." It certainly was to turn out to be that for 'Blue'. 

Facing an opponent with a much greater ability to wage electronic warfare, Ripper used motorcycle couriers to pass orders, and signal lamps to launch aircraft. When Blue issued its ultimatum to Red, Ripper used this to guess where the Blue fleet was and sent out small boats to find them. Preempting Blue's preemptive strike, he overwhelmed their fleet with a barrage of missiles launched from land, commercial ship and aircraft flying in radio silence. He followed this up with waves of kamikaze boats filled with explosives. "The whole thing was over in five, maybe ten minutes," said Van Ripper. Blue lost nineteen ships including an aircraft carrier, several cruisers and five amphibious ships. 20,000 - fortunately imaginary - sailors died. The aftermath, Van Ripper said, was "an eerie silence. Like people really didn't know what to do next."

Faced with a $250 million exercise scheduled to last two weeks being over in less than a quarter of an hour, the make believe ships were re-floated and the exercise continued, although Van Ripper was now told to stick to the script. 

It's difficult to know what lessons the US military learnt from MC '02, as the next year they launched a very different sort of attack on, not Iran, but Iraq, which turned out to be a very different sort of disaster. 

Top Five Films About Eighties Britain

After the swinging sixties and the sad seventies, the selfish eighties is a decade best forgotten. At home Margaret Thatcher, egged on by Rupert Murdoch's gutter press, deployed a militarised police force to crush the miners and the Travellers. She rewarded the bankers, devastated the post-Industrial north and privatised anything that wasn't nailed down. Britain was a divided, racist, homophobic place in the 1980s, and by the end of the decade socialism, indeed society, seemed to be a thing of the past.

Or so it seemed at the time. But that's not how the decade looks now. The Iron Lady still has her fans, but never have her ideas been so unpopular. Who now thinks we should reward the bankers or privatise the public sector? Culturally, the right may have won the battle, but it seems to have lost the war, and the way the decade is remembered in film reflects that.

Here is my top five list of films that characterise the decade.

5. Billy Elliott (2000)

Even though it contains a song hoping for the death of Margaret Thatcher, I think I probably better just admit that Billy Elliott just isn't my type of film, which is why it's only at number five. It's not that it isn't well written, well acted and well made. It certainly is. It's not just that Billy's dad is shown as the sort of wife-beating, son-beating, ignorant, male working class stereotype that The Sun spent its time trying to cultivate. The problem is something else.

The very gritty politics of the era is realistically shown, and makes a very poignant background to the story. It's also completely clear which side of the political fence the film sits on. But keeping a political event of the magnitude of the Miners Strike in the background just doesn't seem right. Okay, it's not as bad as slavery being the background to a cheesy love story in Gone With The Wind, but almost. The happy ending, when a grown up Billy is seen on stage, should have been followed by a look at what was happening in Durham at the time: the unemployment, the drugs and the utter despair of anyone who lacks the skills to move to London.


4. Hidden Agenda 

Perhaps the most important thing about Hidden Agenda is that it relaunched the film career of Ken Loach. He'd put himself on the cultural map in the sixties with Cathy Come Home and Kes, but had spent the next twenty years making acclaimed, but largely ignored, documentaries. Hidden Agenda though started a run of amazing films that continues with Riff Raff, through Land and Freedom and The Wind That Shakes The Barley, to the best film of recent years, I, Daniel Blake.

If Billy Elliott shows the effect of Thatcherism at home, Hidden Agenda deals with the 'near abroad', the long running Troubles in Northern Ireland. We know now that the eighties were the time when the IRA was making the first moves towards peace, signals the British government either couldn't, or wouldn't, hear. Instead the Troubles in the eighties were a time of IRA insurgency and British government response, which allegedly included a policy of 'shoot to kill'.

Thatcher's Britain was always a secret state. From dirty tricks against real striking miners to the Chevaline and Zircon affairs, to Spycatcher and the Al Yamamah arms deal, there was a lot going on we didn't know about.  Hidden Agenda takes as its main inspiration John Stalker's investigation into the deaths of six Republican paramilitaries at the hands of the RUC Headquarters Mobile Support Unit, but then expands it into the area that is known collectively as the 'Colin Wallace affair'.

It's all very well done, very convincingly argued and, worryingly, very believable. 

3. Trainspotting (1996)

However most of the bad behaviour in the eighties didn't go on in secret, and most of the violence was not in  Northern Ireland. The real story of the decade is that of post-industrial decline and the retreat of the welfare state.

It's not completely clear if Trainspotting is a film about the eighties. The soundtrack certainly roots it in the dance and Britpop era of the nineties, but the book it was based on is very clearly set in the late eighties. The themes in the film, rising heroine use and fear of AIDS, against a background of unemployment and social decay, are also clearly those of the eighties. Indeed, the film is such a trawl though the decade's cliches, from skinheads with pit bulls in the park, to druggies nicking TVs off old people, that it's pretty close to being a parody.

However, just as it surfs the fine line between glamorising bad behaviour or making the main characters too obnoxious to be sympathetic, it gets away with it. We'd see a lot more of Danny Boyle over the next couple of decades, culminating in 2012 when, along with Trainspotting musical collaborators Underworld, he contrasted his nightmare vision of Britain in this film with a look at all that is best in out society in his London Olympics Opening Ceremony.

2. The Long Good Friday (1981)

Made in 1979, only a delay in release actually made this an eighties film at all. However when you look at what it is about, it's perhaps the most eighties film of all. Bob Hoskins is Harold Shand, a gangster who wants to turn his back on his Sweeney world of petty crime and go legit. His plans are a merger with bigger American outfit and, get this, rejuvenate London's docklands with a view to holding the Olympic Games there. Yes, this really was a 1979 film.

Of course the main reason to watch the film is to see Bob Hoskins spectacularly losing it, and the screen debut - in a non-speaking role - of Pierce Brosnan. He was playing an IRA assassin, which suggests a bit of a theme here.

1. Pride (2014)

So yes, the eighties were a very grim time indeed. Bigotry and intolerance, government malice and indifference, crime and social decay were all around. But there were also people doing something about it. And that's why this film is top of my list.

We'll forget about the fact that in real life the NUM  didn't actually refuse to accept Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners' donation. They couldn't accept it as their bank account had been frozen and so the group, like every other miners support group, was told to send their money straight to a mining community. There was also almost no prejudice from the miners when the activists eventually arrived in Dulais, but that wouldn't make such a great story so we'll forget about that too. Instead, let's just think how wonderful it is that a bunch of communists who wanted to overthrow the government had a mainstream film made about them, and that it was a stunning success.

They took a few liberties in making the film, but not very many. There is a documentary about the LGSM story, called Dancing in Dulais, and watching it after Pride you can tell exactly who is who, even if most of the actors don't look a bit like the people they were playing.

This is very much a film about activism and activists. The Miners Strike was a disaster for the Left, but as the amazing final scene shows, for activists what really matters is the solidarity. As the police officer says, the miners lost the battle, but as the end credits show the larger war was won: gay and lesbians won their civil rights. I didn't cry in Ghost or Titanic, and only a little bit in Notting Hill, but this scene always brings a tear to my eye: this scene and the one where Bronwen Lewis sings Bread and Roses. Yes, I'm blubbing just typing this. This is exactly what being an activist is all about.

And it's the activists who are now remembered. Looking back on the eighties, the Left lost the political battles, but in the long term we won the war. The man most people under 65 want to be the next Prime Minister spent the decade campaigning for the miners, for peace in Northern Ireland and gay rights. We may all live in the world Thatcher created, but nobody seems very keen on making a film to celebrate that.

The Hard Hat Riot: The Birth of 'Trumpism'?

American Carnage

On 8 May 1970 200 construction workers in New York City went on the rampage. They attacked students and anti-war protesters whilst the police looked on and did nothing. A little over two weeks later union leaders from the construction industry met President Nixon, gifting him a hard hat and promising him the support that would see him re-elected to office in 1972.

The 'Hard Hat Riot' is now largely forgotten, but it's hard not to see the parallels with today. A reactionary white working class had come onto the streets to violently oppose an unpatriotic 'liberal elite', and to lend their support to a corrupt, and soon to be impeached, right wing president.

So what was it all about?

Fire and Fury

On 30 April 1970 President Nixon had sent the South Vietnamese Army, backed by US air power, over the Vietnamese border into Cambodia.

The Vietnam War was already unpopular, and had already split America, but this escalation in the fighting galvanised the anti-war movement and sparked a new wave of protests. Amongst the campuses where activists mobilised was Kent State University in Ohio.

But Kent State wasn't Berkeley. It was a quiet sort of place and protests here had been peaceful affairs. However after rioting in downtown Kent following a demostration further protests were banned. The National Guard was called in, and 1000 soldiers put the university under military occupation. On 4 May students, joined by anti-war protesters from elsewhere, defied the ban. When the National Guard failed to get them to disperse, 28 guardsmen opened fire, killing four, leaving another paralysed for life, and wounding eight others.

John Filo's photograph of Mary Vecchio's scream, as she knelt next to the body of Jeffrey Miller, became the defining image of the day, and one of the most iconic of the entire era.

Very Fine People On Both Sides

The massacre shocked the nation, but perhaps not in the way you'd expect. True, the USA's only ever nation-wide student strike took place immediately afterwards, with four million students boycotting lessons. However a Gallup Poll revealed that only 11% of respondents blamed the National Guard for the deaths, and 58% blamed the students.

A huge anti-war rally was planned in New York for 9 May, and in the morning on the day before the about a thousand protesters gathered outside the stock exchange on Wall Street to mourn the dead students, and demand an end to the war.

Just before midday a couple of hundred construction workers carrying American flags turned up to heckle, soon joined by others. Many had armed themselves, and they soon broke through the half hearted police line and attacked the protesters. With the police doing nothing it was, rather bizarrely, stock exchange workers from Wall Street that tried to protect the students.

Susan Harman, then 29, tried save a student being attacked by three men, one armed with a pair of iron clippers, beating up one student. "Don't", she said. "Let go of my jacket, bitch" was the reply, followed by “If you want to be treated like an equal, we’ll treat you like one" and the three men beat her to the ground.

Soon the peaceful demo was scattered and the students were pursued down Wall Street by the hard hats. Anyone who looked like a hippy was attacked.

The mob then descended on City Hall, where the flag was flying at half mast in response to the
massacre. Construction workers broke in and raised it at its full height.

They spent the rest of the day causing mayhem in the local area. Trinity Church, which had become a makeshift field hospital, was attacked and a Red Cross flag torn down, possibly because someone thought it looked communist. Windows where smashed at Pace University. The final casualty toll was 70 injured, most of whom required hospital treatment.

The story was that working class patriots, outraged by the desecration of the flag and the lack of loyalty from middle class students, had decided to take matters into their own hands. The 'silent majority' had spoken out. Republican politicians, who had spent most of the last decade condemning student activism of any kind, spoke out to congratulate the hard hats.Vice-President Spiro Agnew sent a message to union leader Peter Brennan congratulating him on "the impressive display in patriotism–and a spirit of pride in country that seems to have become unfashionable in recent years."

Alternative Facts

But what was the truth?

Well, for a start the protest was certainly not spontaneous. The hard hats weren't AWOL from work for a start. They were encouraged to leave their sites by their shop stewards, and promised they would still be paid. Some were reportedly offered a bonus. One witness inside Wall Street claimed to have seen two men in suits organising the attacks.

However the workers don't appear to have needed asking twice, and enthusiastically got stuck into bashing the hippies. But did that mean the working class supported the war?

Well, some clearly did, but polls throughout the period consistently show support for the US intervention was highest amongst the top wage earners, the parents of the protesting students, and lowest amongst those who actually went to fight and die in Vietnam, the working class, including the white working class.

The anti-war movement was certainly started by middle class students, but by 1970 it was far broader than that. Students for a Democratic Society, the group behind the big rallies in Berkeley and elsewhere, had fallen apart in 1969. The face of protest in the seventies was as likely to be a veteran from the Bronx throwing his medals away as a hippy from Haight-Ashbury making the peace sign. 

Make America Great Again

But the Vietnam War was not the only drama in sixties America. Alongside ran the story of Civil
Rights movement.

The construction industry, heavily unionised and with relatively good pay and conditions, had traditionally been a whites-only job. However, in the 1960s this had changed. The parity index is a way of expressing the number of workers from a minority in a particular field with 100% meaning that the proportion was exactly the same as the general population. After a decade of affirmative action programs the parity index for construction work in New York in 1970 was 95%, meaning a very high level of integration.

However this had not gone down well with the unions. In March 1970 a proposal was put forward by Peter Brennan, President of the Construction Trades Council, that a separate apprenticeship centre be created for black workers, with the catch that neither Trade Union membership, nor a job, was on offer at the end of it. As a result of such intransigence, ten years after the Hard Hat Riot the parity index in the New York construction industry had fallen to 72%.

It is impossible to know how much, either consciously or unconsciously, race contributed to the events of 4 May 1970. But it looks likely that the riot was as much about defending white privilege at home as US imperialism abroad.

Violence On Many Sides

The events at City Hall were overshadowed the very next day by the arrival of 100,000 anti-war protesters. The events of Kent State shootings, plus the military failure of Nixon's invasion, had changed the nations view of the war, and for the first time more people opposed it than supported it. Three years later US troops would return home.

Before that happened Richard Nixon would be returned to the White House by a landslide. Nixon never had majority working class support. No modern Republican ever has, but with Republican voters remaining loyal even as crisis and scandal started to envelop him, even a small loss of traditional Democrat voters gave him the victory.

In the aftermath of the Hard Hat Riot, construction union leaders went to the White House and were warmly received. Peter Brennan became Nixon's Labor Secretary.

Fake News

The narrative of the Hard Hat Riot, of a white working class willing to fight for their country, and a
smug middle class who weren't, has certainly stuck. Just think of how Vietnam is portrayed in popular culture: Rambo is working class, 'Hawkeye' Pierce (literally in Korea, but metaphorically in Vietnam) is middle class.

But in real life it was the Donald Trumps of the world who supported Vietnam, whilst dodging the draft themselves on spurious grounds, and the likes of Ron Kovic (Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July) who opposed it. The student protesters, like the hard hatted rioters, were remarkable in that they acted out of character.

In the end though normal services were resumed. Brennan had to leave government after Watergate. He returned to his roll with the union, but the next Republican elected to President was not as kind to him as Nixon. Reagan's war on organised labour saw 100,000 non-unionised contractors enter the construction market.

America First

It's never worth wasting too much time going in debating the ideology of fascism. At its core fascism is just about defending privilege, but what makes a fascist different to a mere authoritarian is the use of violence.

Despite the many similarities, one thing that distinguishes Trump, and Nixon, from Hitler is they did not have an army of street thugs at their disposal.

However the Hard Hat Riot showed that such a force was there if Nixon had wanted to use it. Events in Charlottesberg show that Trump has such an army too. His refusal to condemn the murder of Heather Hayer shows he does not necesarily rule this out. If so, let's be quite clear what this would be: American fascism born, not on the 4th of July, but on 8th May 1970.

Construction Workers U.S.A. by Herbert A. Applebaum
The Seventies Unplugged by Gerrad DeGroot 

Eight Decades of the Soviet Union

Twenty five years ago today the world lost a superpower. That sort of thing doesn't happen very often.

To those of us on this side of the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union was usually presented as this grey monolith that never changed. Over here the Roaring Twenties became the Great Depression, the Atomic Age became the Space Age, but over there it was always the age of grey cabbage.

Not so.

The reality was that the Soviet Union never stood still. Instead it lurched from crisis to disaster, from oppression to invasion, and back again. When people looked back nostalgically from the grim years of Disaster Capitalism that followed, they remembered only a short, brief interlude in the seventies when things were dull, but stable; when life was grim, but tolerable.

1920s Civil War

The Russian Revolution was bloodless. More people were killed in the reenactment of the Storming of the Winter Palace for Evreniov's film than died in the real event. The civil war that followed though was anything but, as Red fought White, with almost every Imperialist nation lending a hand.

The Red Army, under the leadership of Leon Trotsky, was able to defeat the disparate and divided White forces, but in truth the Revolution was itself a very diverse affair. The urban proletariat of the Russian Empire had been tiny, and the use of a brutal War Communism had hardly made the Bolsheviks popular. So when the sailors on the island base of Kronstadt rebelled, it looked like it was all over. Had the Russian people been given a vote at this point, Lenin would have lost. Instead the Red Army, under the leadership one Leon Trotsky, was sent in to crush the revolt.

The next few years though were one of hope and a fair amount of freedom. Music and literature, Russia's great contribution to European culture, thrived. The country was ruined by war, but best economic minds were drafted in to devise the Five Year Plan. A planned economy would rise from the ruins of war.

In 1924, the man who had led this daring experiment, Vladamir Ilyrich Lenin, died. He was a difficult man to judge. Whilst genuinely committed to progressive ends, no means were too brutal to achieve them. A man who believed that history was inevitable, he'd done more than any person in the twentieth century to change it..

His death led to the rise of Joseph Stalin. An utterly charismatic man, he rose to power through the secret committees of the Communist Party, underestimated by everyone until it was too late. Trotsky was expelled from the party in 1927, and exiled from the Soviet Union two years later. Thousands of other party members followed him.

Then in 1928 their was a shortfall in grain production. Stalin threw the Five Year Plan out of the window and embarked on a massive program of collectivisation.

1930s Repression

Collectivisation failed.

Stalin blamed hoarding by kulaks - wealthy farmers - and so the process was speeded up. This turned failure into disaster, with up to 10 million people starving to death.

However starvation and counter-revolutionary 'kulaks' were not all that the people of the Soviet Union had to fear. In 1934 the popular mayor of Leningrad was assassinated, apparently by a 'fascist plot'. Over the next few years the Soviet people enjoyed the bizarre spectacle of dozens of senior communists, including every Old Bolshevik except Stalin and the exiled Trotsky, being paraded through court and confessing to being part of conspiracy to bring down the very revolution they had fought for.

These people though were just the tip of a very large iceberg of repression. Thousands of intellectuals, and hundreds of thousands of 'kulaks', Poles and others, were arrested by the Secret Police, and executed, tortured or exiled to the gulags in Siberia. In all, maybe a million people died. The final victim was the head of the Secret Police himself, Nikolai Yezhov.

The purge had also removed most of the senior military commander. When the Soviet Union went to war with Finland in 1939 the army suffered disaster after disaster.

If this wasn't enough dramatic change for a decade, in August the people learnt the world's only communist state had just entered into a pact with the world's only Nazi state. Within months the two strange bedfellows were carving up Poland between them.

1940s War

But the Nazi-Soviet pact failed to keep Hitler out. In 1941 he launched Operation Barbarossa. The result was the deadliest conflict in human history, with 30 million deaths. The Soviet Union survived - just - and eventually advanced into Germany and laid waste to Berlin, killing and raping as it went. Six million soldiers had died in battle and over three million had died after being taken prisoner.

The country was ruined by the war, but it also now occupied the whole of eastern Europe and part of Germany. The Iron Curtain came down across Europe and the Cold War began. The allies of the war years were now enemies.

1950s Thaw

Then in 1953 Stalin died. Disabled by a stroke, he was probably finished off by his doctor. By the end he admitted he didn't even trust himself. He was replaced by Nikita Khrushchev.

All the senior Soviet leaders were gangsters, but Khrushchev was a gangster who wanted to be a social scientist. Slowly he introduced reforms and reduced the oppression. Gradually intellectuals began to think again, and some people even began to dream.

It wasn't all peace and love though. In 1956 popular protests toppled the communist government of Hungary. Fears the country would leave the Warsaw Pact, and open a way for NATO to attack Russia, led Khrushchev to order in Soviet tanks to restore order. 200,000 Hungarians became refugees and 2500 died, as did 700 Soviet soldiers, many shot by their own officers for refusing to obey orders.

Russia had developed its own atomic bombs under Stalin, now under Khrushchev they built missiles to carry them. Along the way they also managed to launch the first artificial satellite into orbit. Sputnik One took off on 4 October 1957. It's signal could be picked up on an ordinary radio set, the beeping signal a dramatic statement of the potential of the Soviet Union.

Then in 1959 Khrushchev visited the United States of America. He was charming, he cracked jokes and he loved America. From it's hot dogs to its mass produced cars, this was a world he thought he could remake in the USSR. Stalin had been an aberration, the world of plenty promised by the communist revolution was still possible.

1960s Hope

Khrushchev's foreign policy missteps almost led to nuclear war with the USA over Cuba in 1962.
Disaster was averted, but things weren't much better on the home front.

Armed with the second best computers available (the best were working a missile defence system around Moscow) the Soviet planners were trying to finally make the planned economy work. A new system of prices was introduced, with the rates set by a complex algorithm. Logic would replace the market and the planned economy would deliver the workers paradise that had been promised for forty years.

The first result was that the cost of meat and butter shot up 25%. On top of other problems, this led to a minor revolt in Southern Russia. Twenty two people were killed, seven executed, and the authorities panicked. There were to be no more economic reforms.

Khrushchev had also tried, and failed, to improve agricultural production. Worse, he had started to take away the privileges of senior party members and talked about running multi-candidate elections. The party decided he had to go. In 1964 he was removed from power and exiled to his dacha. There he regaled passers by with his opinions of what had gone wrong, and wondered what sort of paradise this was that had to keep its people in chains.

He was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, who brought back repression. In 1968 Czechoslovakia decided it wanted 'communism with a human face', but instead it received Soviet tanks.  Back at home the arts and the sciences had to follow the party line.

The economy, already stuttering, went into terminal decline. Instead of taking raw materials and turning them into useful things - adding value - the Soviet economy did exactly the opposite. It dug valuable natural resources out of the ground, and turned them into things nobody wanted.

The only reason the whole thing limped on into the seventies was that in 1961 they had struck oil in Siberia. The USSR used the money to buy computers from IBM = killing off their own research program - and an entire car factory from Italy. There they made their own version of an old Fiat design, the crude but tough car that they would export to the world as the Lada.

1970s Stagnation

Kept afloat on oil money the Soviet Union crawled through the one and only decade in its history in which nothing of any significance happened.

To western visitors there were attractions to the country. Moscow and Leningrad were beautiful cities, with streets free of traffic jams, advertising billboards and beggars. The opera and the ballet were cheap and first class.

However by 1979 there were problems on the eastern frontiers. Afghanistan was a friendly communist country. However the repressive regime was not popular and soon large parts of the country were in open rebellion, with the rebels receiving support from the CIA. A palace coup removed the Soviet Union's man and so Soviet paratroopers moved in to remove his replacement.

Initially all went well, and it seemed a re-run of Budapest in 1956 or Prague in '68. But this was deceptive. Afghanistan was to be very different.

1980s Chaos

The 1980s started with the flamboyance of the Moscow Olympic games. Brezhnev died in 1982 and his next two successors were both old, ill and dead within two years of taking office. The communist party leadership realised that a change was needed. The new leader was Mikael Gorbachev, the youngest member of the Politburo and the first Soviet leader to have been born after the revolution.

By this time the war in Afghanistan was going badly. Gorbachev wanted to pull the troops out, but rightly feared the forces that would be unleashed if he did so. Desperately he tried to negotiate with President Reagan to end the cold War, but instead the USA launched a new arms race, and supplied the Afghan insurgents with more and more advanced weaponry, some of which would later be turned on their own troops.

At home Gorbachev introduced restructuring - perestroika - and freedom - glasnost. To the West he was a hero, but to those who had to live through his reforms he was more like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, someone who could not control the forces he had unleashed. His aim of a more democratic communism, combined with a planned economy, was similar to Khrushchev's, and the outcome was similar too: economic chaos and food shortages. However whilst a high oil price had bailed the country out before, now a low one doomed it.

In eastern Europe the Brezhnev Doctrine, of military intervention in any communist country that turned capitalist, was replaced by the 'Sinatra Doctrine', meaning everyone was free to chose My Way. By 1989 the old, out-of-touch leadership of the Soviet satellite nations were facing open revolt on the streets. When Gorbachev made it clear Soviet tanks were not coming to help this time, the Berlin Wall came down, followed by the rest of the Iron Curtain.

1990s Collapse

Eastern Europe had now gone, but Gorbachev's problems hadn't.

The Soviet Union was actually a federation of 15 Republics, although a very centralised one. Many of these states were formed in territories added to the Czarist Empire only in the late nineteenth century. Most were artificial constructions based around the predominant ethnicity. With the economy in crisis, there were fears that many would try to ceded.

In the end it was actually Russia that started to break away first, passing a declaration of semi-independence from the Soviet Union. Hard liners saw the writing on the wall and launched a coup. Soviet coups had been in terminal decline for a while. Budapest and Prague had gone all write, but in Afghanistan it had taken four gos before they managed to bump of President Amin. This one was even worse, lasting barely two days.

After that the Soviet Republics didn't plan on hanging around to see if the hardliners would try again, and one by one they declared independence. Gorbachev was faced with a choice, send in the tanks or let them go. Once again he chose peace, and so on 21 December 1991 the Soviet Union was replaced by the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The world's first Soviet socialist republic had come to an end. There had been moments of hope, but most;y it had been a story of repression rather than freedom, of scarcity rather than plenty. The revolution had failed, and in the end the leadership accepted it had failed and let the Soviet Union die peacefully in its bed. To paraphrase Shakespeare, nothing it did in its life so became it as the leaving it.

It seems unlikely that the kleptocratic leaders of the fascistic gangster states that replaced the Soviet Union will leave power quite so gracefully.

References

I'm extremely grateful for the lectures given to the Glossop Guild by Chris Bins
Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives by Alan Bullock
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

SYRIZA: A guide for Brits who hope.

Greece solidarity demonstration, London, 11 Feb 2015

Imagine a small political party, polling only a few percent in elections and made up of assortment of colourful characters from the progressive fringe of politics, seemingly unable to agree on lunch let alone policy. Imagine then that this party suddenly becomes the only anti-austerity party in town and starts to build up an irresistible level of support from those disillusioned by mainstream politics. It stands in a General Election and becomes the government.

Over here the Green Party in England and Wales must be dreaming of such a result, but this really is the story of SYRIZA in Greece, the only country in the world where the citizens voluntarily attend pro-government rallies. But what does it mean for those of us in Blighty hoping that the recent surge in support for the Greens mean Natalie Bennett will be our Alex Tsipras?

It's all Greek to me

Syntagma Square, Athens, 11 Feb 2015

The first thing to say about politics in the Hellenic Republic is, it's complicated. I've been trying to follow it for twenty five years ago and I'm as confused as ever. The second thing to say is when we speak of a war between Left and Right in the UK we are speaking metaphorically. In Greece it's literal.

The story could begin in 1924 with the formation of the Greek Communist Party (KKE), or in 1936 when the fascist Metaxas, a charming man who liked strapping opponents to blocks of ice, suspended parliament, but instead we'll start with the end of the Second World War

Athens 1944, Photograph: Dmitri Kessel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

In Britain 1945 saw a victory at the ballot box for the centre-left Labour Party, but Greece it was the far left guerrillas of the ELAS who appeared to have the upper hand. However before they could form a government Churchill rearmed the Nazi Security Battalions with British guns and turned them on their fellow countrymen.

The Greek Civil War that followed was a confused and bloody business. Often as not it saw neighbouring villages settling scores with only a pretence to political motives, but for the Greek Left it was a catharsis. Defeated and then brutally suppressed in the 'democratic' post-war Hellenic Republic, the Left spent the fifties either in hiding or exiled to island gulags. Even the hint of a return to power in the late sixties was enough to provoke a military coup and worse repression.

Athens Polytechnic 1973, tanks getting ready to attack students.

When the youth of Greece eventually rebelled in the seventies it wasn't, like over here, against the imagined inequity of their parents, but the very real oppression of the Colonels. Their 1973 uprising was a bloody failure, but democracy did return a year later in the form of the centre-right New Democracy Party.

The KKE became legal again, but this didn't actually help them very much as, in the time honoured tradition of the Left, it was time for a split. Events in Paris and Prague in the spring of 1968 had shaken communist parties across the continent. The British Communist Party had almost ceased to exist by this point, but elsewhere the Eurocommunists were ousting the old guard. Embracing democracy they thrust themselves to the forefront of the liberation struggles of the decade.

It was this split that would ultimately lead to the Eurocommunists joining SYRIZA, but for now it was the pro-Moscow grouping that was the larger faction. Partly because of the historical wartime struggle against the Nazis, partly because of the contemporary struggle against military rule and no doubt partly because Greeks are just permanently contrary. The main effect of the in-fighting though was to leave the popularist Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) effectively unchallenged on the left of Greek politics.

When the seventies turned into the eighties Britain and Greece went in very different directions. Here the selfish hedonism of the sixties turned into the selfish monetarism of the eighties, but in Greece the youth who'd rebelled by listening to Greek bands playing Western rock music under the dictatorship helped to elect the country's first post-war left wing government. Andreas Papandreo's PASOK swept into office with the rallying cry "Change". A National Health Service was created, former Communist guerrillas were given pensions, the exiles returned and the generation excluded from society by The Colonels was rewarded with easy jobs in the public sector.

Athens Polytechnic 1995, riot police get ready to attack students

The 1990s in Greece saw a new wave of student radicalism and anarchists, who I've not really had time to mention yet, made most of the running. Murray Bookchin used to read Aristotle and Greek anarchists read Bookchin, so in a sense Social Ecology was coming home.

In Britain we occupied trees to stop roads, in Greece they occupied schools and universities. The Greek police were once again their usual liberal selves and there was a non-negligable body count in these actions. It was also not uncommon to see lorry loads of machine gun wielding coppers parked up in anarchist parts of Athens. It all came to a head in 1995 when 3000 people occupied the Polytechnic. (Just to confuse Brits who remember polytechnics as cut price higher education, the Athens Polytechnic is one of their top universities). The police moved in, the media, who often ended up being attacked by anarchists at demos and so weren't minded to give them good press, had a field day and when it was all over the movement was effectively dead.

Anti-war graffiti on NATO vehicles, Greece 1999

In 1999 the brief war between NATO and Serbia gave the Left another cause. Meanwhile the Battle of Seattle had opened a new front against Capitalism, and as the Eurocommunists and other far left groups prepared for the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa they decided to decided to form something they initially called Space for Dialogue for the Unity and Common Action of the Left, but which became SYRIZA three years later.

The PASOK government  meanwhile, having employed Goldman Sachs to cook the books, had been allowed to join the Eurozone. The ruse appeared to be paying off and the country was on the up for most of the noughties. Then the Credit Crunch hit, and the Eurozone economies crashed. The centre-right New Democracy Party was in power by this time. They were unsurprisingly booted out in 2009 when George (son of Andreas) Papandreo's PASOK ran against under the slogan "there is money". Unfortunately nobody had told him there wasn't.

In Britain the centre-left had been in power when the Credit Crunch hit but left the austerity to the opposition, in Greece it was the other way round. In Britain the damage was serious. In Greece it was fatal. In the 2015 elections PASOK came seventh, behind both the far-right fascists of the Golden Dawn and the ultra-left communists of the KKE.

Unlike in Britain, the far left was still alive and well. The Hellenic Republic had its equivalent of Occupy in the Squares Movement, but the Left had shown its power three years early, in December 2008. When the Greek police shot dead Andreas Grigoropoulos, a fifteen year old boy out celebrating his name day, the resulting riots were the worst since the fall of the Colonels. Just like in 1974 students were central to the revolt, but this time the reasons were more obscure.

Protest in front of Greek parliament, May 2011

Greece had problems of corruption, youth unemployment and inequality, but at that time no worse than many other European countries. The anger of its young people seemed to be directed at the Neoliberal world generally rather than the Hellenic Republic in particular. It was if, as before, Greece was a decade behind the times and it was fighting the Battle of Seattle all over again.

The KKE though had nothing to do with this. For them nothing short of a Revolution would do and they denounced the Squares Movement as nothing less than a "mechanism of the ruling class". When you see Occupy as too reactionary you are seriously left! This retreat from reality opened the door for SYRIZA who started their march to power with the anti-austerity campaigners in Syntagma Square.

Christodoulos Xeros

If you think with the KKE we're reached the edge of Greek progressive politics, you'd be wrong. If you want further proof that the Hellenic Republic really is stuck in a seventies time warp there are the terrorists. Yes, some on the Greek Left really are still trying to bomb their way to a Revolution forty years after our own Angry Brigade stopped blowing up fashion boutiques and went off to do more useful things. Indeed, recently rearrested terrorist Christodoulos Xeros even looks like he should be fronting his own Prog. Rock band. To understand Greek politics you have to realise that for some these people do almost have pop star status. When the New Democracy HQ was bombed during the recent election campaign, SYRIZA supporters celebrated online.

SYRIZA then has sprung from a very different political landscape to our Green Party. Here, the
Second World War united the country not split it apart and in the sixties our Left was moderated by being in power not radicalised by oppression, and I guess that's nothing to complain about.

SYRIZA may be a new party, but the continuity of the Greek Left is contained within it. When Tsipras lays a wreath at a memorial to Greeks killed by the Nazis it links the present crisis to a historical struggle whilst Caroline Lucas visiting a wind farm doesn't.

Manolis Glezos, still fighting at 91

This continuity is illustrated by the remarkable Manolis Glezos. As a teenager he snuck onto the Acropolis via a cave sacred to the ancient god Pan and tore down the Swastika flying over the Parthenon. As part of the Greek resistance he once nearly blew up Winston Churchill.  The post-war government sentenced him to death but he was reprieved. He was elected to parliament whilst in prison and released after going on hunger strike. He was imprisoned again under the Colonels then on release he became a PASOK MEP. He now sits in the Greek parliament for SYRIZA when he's not protesting on the streets. So much for becoming more right wing as you get older.

SYRIZA obviously owes its election to government to the scale of the disaster that overtook Greece after the Credit Crunch. Britain may not have lost 25% of its GDP since 2008, nor do we have to bring your own drugs when we go to hospital, but the same factors that have pushed mainstream voters into the arms for the far left are playing out here; the descent of the underclass into utter poverty, the collapse of the Middle Class into working poor, the destruction of the public sector and the flight of the lucky 1% who can afford it out of the big cities, and into their gilded cages of private schools and hospitals. It's all our happening here too, just a little slower.

But whilst SYRIZA may well be the response to this in Greece, but we mustn't jump the gun in assuming it's the solution. Tsipras sometimes sounds like he's the next of the Papandreo dynasty. "Change" or "there is money" could have been his mottos this time around, and the reason PASOK has been wiped out is because the riposte to both was "there wasn't". SYRIZA's Green credentials are also rather thin. A belated change of policy to Eldorado mine project and some warm words on Climate Change and ecosocialism, but that's it.

Despite that they are clearly better than the alternatives though. However if we think a British SYRIZA is inevitable we may be disappointed. The Greek Left isn't back so much as it never went away. In the UK it was buried years ago.

Britain, Europe and indeed the world need an alternative to rapacious capitalism, unsustainable consumerism and unjust austerity, but ultimately liberation is something each country must build for itself, not a franchise we can buy into.