Review of the Year 2019

January

First campaign of the year: single use plastic. Perhaps not the most important issue in the world right now, nor the most urgent, but the one that it's currently easiest to make progress on. Greenpeace made a list of the worst offenders and Sainsbury's came last, as usual, so that's where we pitched up on the third Saturday of the year.

The manager of Salford branch didn't take very kindly to us, and we were asked to leave. We went off to campaign somewhere friendlier, but marked the place down for a return visit.

February

Weird weather arrived in February and Glossop looked like it was supposed to do in the Peak District tourist brochure, or at least what it would look like if Glossop had replied to the email and was actually in the brochure.

A few days later though I was sat in the sunshine by the river in Ashford-on-the-Water in a t-shirt with my feet in snow. Global Weirding indeed.Te chnically it's an unstable polar vortex caused by climate change, but 'weirding' is a much better description.

Our plastic campaign continued, and got a bit more 'secret squirrel', which was fun. The supermarket managers we met varied from the angry to the actually supportive. We made a point of marking the nasty ones for a return visit and leaving the nice ones alone in the future.

Also in February I found myself custodian of the Greenwire Social Media Activists Group, a bit of a shock to a neo-Luddite like me. Basically I just posted up stuff from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex on how to use Twitter. She knew her stuff at least.

March

The High Peak Green Party organised a showing of the Bruce Parry film Tawai, and then didn't mind not being mentioned in the publicity, which was nice of them. The film was interesting, but Bruce Parry's spiritual take on the loss of the rainforest didn't really cut it with me: no, we are not all responsible, some people are very, very guilty indeed.

Our next campaign was climate change. To start things off we took Sami, our climate change fighting polar bear, for a night out in Manchester. People in Manchester are usually friendly, but when you have a large, cuddly bear with you they are even friendlier. The Hen Party were particularly welcoming to him.

March was also Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham's second Green Summit. This time we got some details on what he was actually planning, and it was both startlingly radical and also considerably less than what's needed. Chris Boardman was a revelation in his commitment to making Manchester a cycling city. I also learnt a lot about electric cars.

April

Our plastic campaign continued, and the 'secret squirrels' of Manchester Greenpeace decided to visit the Salford Sainbury's store in the early hours.

Also in April I finally got to see Kate Rowarth, the author of Doughnut Economics, speak. She was addressing a bunch of geography teachers, and perhaps the most interesting aspect of the evening was hearing them introduce her by saying the "current economic system is not fit for purpose", which is not the way geography teachers used to speak. We also had drinks afterwards amongst the dinosaurs in the Manchester Museum, which was fun.

In April 2019 it was 87 years since grandad Porter went on the Kinder Scout Mass trespass. The previous year Jordan Carroll of WellRedFilms made a short documentary about the trespass, and included me in it. Thanks to a student nurse from Sheffield, the Manchester Greenpeace group was persuaded to organise another walk to commemorate it. The weather was absolutely atrocious, with non-stop heavy rain. However, people turned out including a pregnant Social Worker and the Derbyshire badger cull saboteurs, so it was worth it.

The Greenpeace ship Esperanza came to London in April, possibly for almost the last time, as she's getting on a bit and has been a Greenpeace ship for 19 years. I volunteered my services as a tour guide for a day and had fun showing people around the former Soviet naval tug boat. She was about to set off on an epic journey from the Arctic to the Antarctic as part of Greenpeace's next campaign, which is to make 30% of the world's oceans marine protected areas by 2030.

Once the public have had their look we got a peak about, and then went off for a drink with some of the crew. I headed back to Glossop, and work, just as Extinction Rebellion were arriving in town. They were to have a lot of fun.

May

In May I went to my first Youth Strike for Climate. I travelled into Manchester in an environmentally friendly way, and ended up staying longer than I planned as Northern Rail had messed up their trains again. It was wonderful to meet so many enthusiastic young people, even if it did make me feel old, not only because I was three times the age of the organisers, but that this was a new movement I had no connection with at all. Even XR I felt slightly attached to, as many people I've know from Earth First! and Climate Camp were part of it, but this was properly a new generation. Sami came with me, and got to meet Andy Burnham. 

The next day it was Envirolution, Manchester's best free day out. Once again we had sunshine and a great day out. Extinction Rebellion were the stars of the show, but Sami also had his fans. We were now pushing the Ocean Treaty campaign, which was a fairly easy ask in the circumstances. The food, music and general ambiance were again excellent, and for a day we all felt like we really could change the world.


June

In June it was Download Festival. Greenpeave was once again running the eco-field, and I was on the team again. Whereas last year had been fun in the sun, 2019 was a bit more of a challenge. On day two my new tent had sprung a leak and my bed was afloat. That evening Jeff and I were at the bar, standing with the mud up to the top of our wellies, looking at the empty field and wondering when it would start to be fun.

Well, it did become fun. The sun came out, the mud turned to a sort of sticky glue, and Def Leppard were on stage on the Friday evening. They were the top British band of the late eighties, and whilst the others of that era: Thunder, Almighty, Little Angels, all played Leicester University whilst I was there, Def Leppard were too famous so I didn't see them live. Anthrax, Smashing Pumpkins, Slipknot and Slayer, playing their last ever UK gig, were all great, but stars of the show for me were prog metal act Tool. Listening to their song individually just does not prepare you for a Tool set. Being part of the Greenpeace crew was also fun and, come Monday morning, the eco-field was once again the cleanest part of the site.

In June I also got to visit the Houses of Parliament. The occasion was a Greenpeace lobbying day on the issue of microplastics in rivers, but my local MP, Ruth George, invited me down to make a day of it. I took Number One Son, as a reward for surviving his GCSEs, and he enjoyed being whisked past security and allowed to watch Prime Ministers Questions from in front of the security screen. There is a ban on clothing with political messages in the Palace of Westminster, but I got round it by wearing a t-shirt with a message in Russian as I watched the Teresa and Jeremy show.

July

For July it was back to the Oceans Campaign. We needed a picture of ourselves painted blue at a suitable Manchester location. The Manchester weather made this difficult, but we ended up in the Science and Industry Museum in front of Stevenson's Rocket, which had just arrived.

July was also the month of the New Mills One World Festival, which I hadn't been to for a few years. Greenpeace had a stall and I was a speaker. The weather was excellent and I popped off to camp in the woods afterwards.

August

The Climate Emergency came a little closer to home in August. I was on holiday in Wiltshire, enjoying the sunshine, when I was phoned by the Derbyshire Emergency Planning Team to say I was needed. Rain of Biblical proportions had fallen back home in High Peak and the 188 Toddbrook Dam, above the little town of Whaley Bridge, was about to collapse.

In the end it held, thanks to hundreds of volunteers and council staff and an RAF helicopter, but it was a close run thing. Although the locals were a little put out by being given fifteen minutes to leave their homes, nobody died.

September

September was Wigan Diggers festival. Last year we nearly drowned, but this year the weather was very reasonable. It was a gathering of lefties, so an easy audience, but most of the other stalls appeared to be Lexit people, which was not a good sign. When the far left is campaigning for the main policy of the far right things are not looking good.

In September there was another Global Youth Strike for Climate. I predicted in the Morning Star that it would be a big one, and fortunately I was right.

Sami the polar bear had a fun day photo bombing. He ended up everywhere from The Sun to RTE in Ireland. The stars of the show though were the young people, who once again swarmed by in their thousands. Andy Burnham, always game for these sort of gigs, allowed himself to be grilled on stage by twelve year old Lalia, who gave him a bit of a hard time.

The next day a few of these youngsters joined us for our World Cleanup Day litter pick on the canal.
This ended up being Manchester Greenpeace's best attended event of the year with about eighty people collecting on land, and a couple of canoes in the water. We bagged and tagged the rubbish, and chief culprit turned out to be McDonalds. Surprise, surprise.

You don't change the world by picking up multinational company's crap for them, but litter picks, or community cleans as Greenpeace calls them, are a great way into real activism. Also, unlike a lot of campaigning, there is some tangible evidence you have made a difference afterwards.

October

In October Manchester hosted the Greenpeace Local Groups Northwest Area conference. We were in Bridge 5 Mill in Ancoats, so the delegates were able to see an authentic bit of Industrial Manchester. As we walked to the venue we passed injecting drug users by the canal, so they saw some authentic post-Industrial Manchester too.

We were briefed on what was coming next, shared a few skills, and hopefully inspired the volunteers to get more involved. We also did a quick Burger King protest afterwards, and then drank until some of us were ill.

I had recovered enough by the following Saturday to get up very early in the morning to go on a coach to London with the Manchester People's Vote people. It's one of the biggest rallies in UK history. As a result I don't bother going on the march and just hang around in Parliament Square with Tony from XR. Talking of which I bump into the living legend that is Broccoli Man. There is a vote in parliament on Johnson's deal so we watch Parliament TV on the big screens. I've never done live politics before. The People's Vote people are very nic, but mostly they seem to be LibDem voters who hate Corbyn more than Johnson, and just wish everything was like it was before the Brexit Vote, if not the Credit Crunch. I can't see any of their arguments going down at all well north of Watford.

Monday though as I was back in Lancashire for a visit to Cuadrilla Resource's Preston New Road fracking site. I was the 101st, and hopefully last, Green Monday speaker. Sami came along for moral support. In the past speakers have included Kate Raworth and George Monbiot, but fracking in Lancashire was now in such dire straights that noone famous can even be bothered to go up there to oppose it, so they had to have me. This is what I said.

With fracking once again suspended due to earth tremors, and no sign the government was willing to spend any more political capital on fracking, the fat lady was clearing her throat in Blackpool. It's been a long, hard struggle, and Manchester played its part with the Barton Moss campaign. These things rarely have neat resolutions, unfortunately, but things looked a lot better for us than for the frackers.

Also in October came the welcome news that Sainsbury's had thrown in the towel on plastics, just like they always do when we campaign against them. As well as a fairly reasonable commitment to reduce single use plastic, they were also polite about Greenpeace in a documentary that was made about them.

November

Meanwhile the Amazon rainforest has been being burnt by Brazilian president Bolsonaro and his rancher chums. The world's voracious appetite for meat is to blame and so Greenpeace UK embarked on its first campaign to encourage people to eat less of the stuff.

Burger King in are target in England. They're a pretty tough target, and our campaign gets off to a rather damp start in Manchester. Well done to the team for continuing through a torrential downpour, and to the people of Manchester for stopping to talk to some soggy activists on the streets.

Just as we're getting going on the campaign though some idiot calls a general election election. Not great timing for a number of reasons, but I volunteer my services to local Labour Party anyway. Unfortunately, the High Peak Green Party don't take the hint and still stand a candidate.

December

General election campaigning continued. Basically this involved knocking on doors whilst old people said racist things to me.

Ruth George put a good team together. The picture on the left, which was taken on election day, shows less than half the volunteers who were in Glossop alone that day.

In the end though it was all for nothing. Real people and real issues didn't really count and Labour lost the country and the High Peak, the latter by half the Green vote.

As I prefer to get even rather than get mad, we plunge back into the Amazon campaign, and the Manchester 'secret squirrel' club pay Burger King an early morning visit.

Burger King though were stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that they were even being campaigned again, let alone that they were benefiting from rainforest destruction. Meanwhile, the Amazon fires were forgotten as the Australian fires took hold.

So that was 2019. Another win on plastics and commercial fracking was looking a very iffy prospect, but it would be very hard to argue the world ended the year, or the decade, in a better condition than it began either.

We'll just have to do better in 2020 then.

Speech to 101st Green Monday at Preston New Road

I was priviledged to be invited to speak to the 101st, and possibly last, Green Monday at the Cuadrilla fracking site on Prestn New Road, just outside Blackpool, Lancashire, on 21st October 2019. I ad libbed a bit, but this is what I meant to say.

Tina Louise filmed and you can watch her footage here.

Hello Blackpool. We bring you greetings from Manchester, and apologies for Morrissey.

I’m Martin, one of the coordinators of the Manchester Greenpeace Group. We have some other Greenpeace local groups here, as well as Frack Free Greater Manchester. I used to help them too, so I’m not sure exactly which hat I’m speaking through today.

Well, here we are in Blackpool again, where it all began. There are two annual traditions that bring us up here. One is the Illuminations, and the other is Cuadrilla removing it’s equipment from Preston New Road. And, like the playing of Christmas music in the shops, it gets earlier every year.

So we’re here for a sort of ‘almost victory’ celebration. Fracking clearing isn’t going anywhere, but it’s not gone yet. Instead we have a zombie industry that’s not doing anything, just hanging around. As a result, this could be the last Green Monday at Preston New Road. In the past you’ve had George Monbiot and Kate Rowarth, and today you’ve got me, which I think just shows how fracking has just fizzled out and died up here. Cuadrilla now can’t even get anyone famous to oppose them.

It’s been quite a story how we got to here, but you already know it so I’m not going to tell it you again. Instead I’m going to tell you the story of what happened when the frackers came to Manchester.

Barton Moss really is the edge of town. On one side is the great Manchester, Salford and Stockport urban conglomeration. On the other it is countryside as far as Warrington. Historically, Stephenson’s Rocket once ran along the nearby railway. It has the first canal in Britain, the Bridgewater, and also the last, the Manchester Ship Canal. In 2013 it became the site of test drilling by IGas.

Earlier in the year direct action against fracking had started at Balcombe in Sussex. The media lapped it up. The weather was good and the journalists could be back in London for gin and tonics by sundown. Barton Moss was different matter. The weather was, well, Manchester, and as far as the press were concerned, we were off the edge of the Known World. Even the Guardian, who were sympathetic, didn’t cover us as their only journalist north of Watford Gap was covering the Ken Loach trial.

There was a camp, there were protectors, and every working day for five months they stood in front of the daily convoy and walked them in and out of the site, with the occasional lock-on. And, of course, there were arrests, about two hundred of them in all. Usually five people were arrested every day. No more, no less, giving a new meaning to getting your ‘Five a Day’.  

At first these were for Obstruction of the Public Highway, until a judge ruled that Barton Moss Road was a private road, and not a public highway. 

After that people were usually arrested for Aggravated Trespass. It’s a pretty catch-all offense, but it does require people to be actually trespassing, and we were all fairly sure that Barton Moss Road was a Public Footpath. There was a little bit of doubt though, as about half way through the campaign someone nicked the Public Footpath sign from the top of the road. We did get a look at the suspects through. They were wearing dark blue trousers, high-viz jackets and they loaded the sign into a white van with blue lights on the roof. If you see anyone matching this description, please let me know.

But we were not completely forgotten. The anti-fracking campaigners of Lancashire came to support us. I think I met most of you down there before I met you up here. Thanks to your support we organised what where the biggest environmental protests Manchester had ever seen.

My role was media coordinator. IGas were claiming the Protectors were disrupting local people whilst the media was clearly showing local people disrupting Igas. After a few weeks IGas pretty much gave up on that front and Greater Manchester Police took over the PR campaign. By Christmas we were starting to get noticed in the press, mainly thanks to Reclaim the Power, who had Father Christmas drop a wind turbine blade at the gates. Greater Manchester Police then gave us another huge publicity boost with Flaregate.

The flare allegedly fired at a police helicopter. It missed the helicopter, it was also missed by everyone in the camp, everyone at the airport, the cameras on the M62, the cameras on the secure unit and the entire population of Irlam and Cadishead. However, it wasn’t missed by the press, and after that a lot more of my press releases got published.

I don’t know what effect this had on the campaign here in Lancashire. You were all busy lobbying your local counsellors to oppose this development here, but as you were doing that inglorious work the politicians were see us on TV, listening to us on the radio and reading about us in their papers. I don’t know what effect it had on them, but it changed public opinion in Manchester from 43% of Mancunians supported fracking, to 73% now opposing the process four months later. When we voted for our first Greater Manchester Mayor in 2017 all four of the main candidates: Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green and Conservative, opposed fracking.

Well, the Barton Moss campaign ended, we had a party, cleaned up the site and left. The focus of opposition to fracking moved north. A year after IGAs left Manchester, Lancashire became the first county council to reject a fracking application. It wasn’t the end, unfortunately, but it was significant. It meant that Cuadrilla, when they arrived, did not have a social license for what they were doing, and they still don’t.

Opposition to fracking always existed on two levels, the local and the global. It causes localised pollution and globalise warming. Stopping fracking is about both local democracy and global responsibility. Here in Lancashire it must seem that every day is the same, but in the wider word things have changed. Since we drove IGas out of Barton Moss, Greenpeace have driven Shell out of the Arctic. We’ve had the Paris Conference and Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg and the School Strike for Climate. Fracking was always a toxic industry, but fossil fuels in general are now a toxic brand. No New Oil has been a campaign slogan for a while, but maybe, after the abject failure of fracking in Lancashire, there really will be no new oil.

Fracking was always the last gasp of the fossil fuel dinosaurs. Now extinction is a very real possibility, and they know it. Few people in this country had heard of fracking before the earthquakes in Lancashire in 2011, and after this year I imagine very few people will hear about it again. Cuadrilla will be forgotten, as they should be. But you people, the campaigners from Manchester, and Lancashire, as well as those in Yorkshire, and Sussex and everywhere else, will not be forgotten. Barton Moss was the ‘rise of the resistance’. Here was where is reached its peak. Here is where you won. Here is where we said the final ‘frack off’. Well done.

Top Five Songs inspired by the Space Race

It's fifty years since the Space Race ended. America had won, and that was all that counted. Nobody was interested in what happened next. As if to prove the point, the original series of Star Trek was canned a full month before Apollo 11 touched down.

The Space Race was only ever really a proxy for the Cold War. Rockets that could carry people into space could also, obviously, carry atomic bombs back down to earth. The main reason the Russians held their early lead in the race was because their nuclear warheads were bigger and heavier and so their rockets needed to be more powerful.

However, whilst the technical legacy of space race is mixed - and before anyone says it Teflon was patented in 1945 and was not developed by NASA - it's musical legacy is much richer. Picking just five songs to represent it was difficult, but here I go.

Click on the heading to listen to the song.

5. Telestar by The Tornados 

Dylan aside, not many songs from the early sixties, the era of the Clean Cut Crooner, have stood the test of time, and it's arguable really if this one has. However, people remember it fondly and it turns up on various compilation albums.

The song is now more famous than the satellite, which is a bit of a pity as the original Telstar 1, launched in July 1962, was the world's first communication satellite. It wasn't in geostationary orbit, so it didn't exactly fulfil the roll that Arthur C Clarke had predicted back in 1945, but it was able to provide the first live trans-Atlantic link.

Communication satellites have changed the world far more than walking on the moon ever did, so it's only fair to remember the original.

4. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Richard Strauss

This piece of music was not written for the space race.It was in fact written in 1896 by Strauss, a composer with unfortunate Nazi connections, inspired by a book by Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher with unfortunate Nazi connections. However, the only part of the hour long piece that most people know is the opening section called Sunrise, and that's because of it's use in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Until pictures of the real thing came back a year later, this film was what people thought exploring the moon looked like. In fact, there's a strong argument for saying that Kubrick's film is better than the real thing; it's both more poetic, but also a lot more troubling. Utterly incomprehensible to most people who first see it, a re-watching shows 2001 to be a fascinating and complex critique of the culture that put man-on-the-moon. From the scene above which links the ape creatures to the near future (as 2001 was in 1968), when the leader's bone weapon thrown in the air turns into an orbiting nuclear missile, to the complete lack of emotion in the space station scenes, to the murderous-but-honest computer HAL, to the acid-trip ending; Stanley Kubrick took Arthur C Clarke's hard sci-fi tale of First Contact and subtlety turned it on its head.

Real astronauts watched the film too, and the crew of Apollo 13, who named their command module Odyssey, were listening to this piece of music just before the explosion that suddenly made the space race interesting again.

3. Whitey On The Moon by Gil Scott-Heron

Armstrong and Aldrin's successful trip to the moon and back inspired a number of pop songs, most fairly trivial offerings. Scott-Heron's spoken word piece though is not. A jazz poet from Chicago, he was very much aware that billions of dollars had been spent on putting two white guys on the moon, whilst millions of his fellow people of colour still lived in poverty.

One particular beef of his, as you can tell from the lyrics, was the lack of affordable healthcare. Still a live issue today, but in 1969, when most working class men would be in the type of job that still came with health insurance, one that was even more racially divisive than today.

Other songs on a similar vein were to be made in the years to come, with Hawkwind's Uncle Sam's On Mars, which compares the destruction of the environment here on earth with the delusions of space exploration, being one of my favourites. This song was the original though, and Hawkwind's knowing riff on the same theme. For it's power and relevance Scott-Heron is the perfect response to Apollo 11.

2. Go! by Public Service Broadcasting

The Apollo moon landings, of course, came with their own soundtrack, and musicians have been sampling the recordings of the astronauts speaking to mission control ever since they were made, but nobody has made such good use of them as Public Sector Broadcasting.

Part of their album The Race For Space, which is made up entirely of sample audio set to music, Go! tells the story of Apollo 11 from the point of view of the folks at Mission Control. As the tension builds we are intruded to the people who will ultimately decide is the eagle lands or not, the Mission Controllers. Under the super-cool direction of Flight Director Gene Kranz, we are introduced to the laconic FIDO (which stands for Flight Dynamics Officer), the excitable Guidance and the rest of the chorus.

The original recordings are out there to be listened to if you want to, although it's not terribly exciting. "The eagle has landed", for example, was said for the press and the actual moment of reaching the moon was marked by Aldrin simply saying "Contact light". Even the very real drama of that did occur during the landing is underplayed.

In the song you can Armstrong call "1202 alarm" as the Eagle descends. This indicated that the spaceships navigation computer, which probably had less processing power than your washing machine, was overloaded with data and was rebooting itself. Kranz turned to 25 year old NASA engineer Jack Garman to make the decision. Abort the mission and America may not achieve Kennedy's dream of landing on the moon before the decade was out. Fail to abort and Armstrong and Aldrin's trip could be one way. In the end Garman called "Go", trusting his programming to keep the computer prioritising the landing. It was the right call.

The young people at Mission Control may not have taken the same risks as the astronauts, but it was their cool that got the fly-boys to the moon.

1. Space Oddity by David Bowie

Well, obviously Bowie was going to be Number One.

Coming out nine days before that 'giant leap for mankind', Bowie has been the soundtrack for the moon landings for almost fifty years. I say 'almost' because the track only reached number 5 in the UK charts in 1969, and most people didn't hear of Bowie again until he reappeared as Ziggy Stardust three years later. Space Oddity was re-released in 1975 and finally became the number one it should have been in '69.

There's nothing I can say about this song that's not already been said. What's interesting to me though, firstly, is how the lyrics owe more to Dan Dare than Neil Armstrong. We have 'countdown' rather than 'launch sequence', 'ground control' rather than 'mission control', 'capsule' rather than 'command module' and so on.

It's also a very maudlin song, a eulogy to the Space Race. The space fantasies of the comic book of the fifties had finally come to pass, and they were frankly a bit disappointing. All this comes across in the character of Major Tom. A remarkably English type of astronaut, he seems to take a jaundiced view of the fame that comes with space travel. And this, don't forget, was a song that came out a week before Apollo 11 took off. Genius.

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.

The San Juan Pig War: the silliest war in history?

The San Juan Pig War of 1859 was pretty ridiculous. The only casualty was the pig, which I suppose in some ways makes it less silly than the numerous wars where people got killed, but the fact that the late porker almost caused the USA to go to war with the British Empire is very, very silly.

The issue was the island of San Juan, which lies between Vancouver Island and the mainland. Nobody was sure if it was in the USA or Canada. In 1859 it was home to nineteen Americans and sixteen Brits. Sovereignty was an academic issue until 15 June that year when American farmer Lyman Cutlar shot a pig belonging to an Irishman who worked for the Hudson Bay Company. The British authorities tried to arrest Cutlar, who demanded protection from the US government. America sent in the army and Britain sent in the marines. By the middle of August 450 US troops with 14 cannon faced 5 British warships with 70 cannon and over 2000 crew.

The Americans were under the command of one General William S Harvey, a famous Indian fighter with a notoriously short fuse. This man had previously been court marshalled for invading Mexico without orders. Some said he had political ambitions, others that he was insane. Either way he was hardly the ideal commander for such a sensitive mission.

Sabres were rattled, threats were made, but fortunately no more than insults were exchanged. The situation eventually settled down to a cold war that lasted for thirteen years. The Civil War came and went, Canada gained it’s independence, but the standoff continued. The Americans built themselves a nice stockade, whilst the British constructed something a little more Imperial, with tennis courts and, for the commanding officer, a grand house with a ballroom and a billiard room.

During this time the two sides got quite friendly. There were race meetings and picnics for the officers. In the end the King of Germany was asked to arbitrate, and he decided the island was American. The Royal Navy hauled down the flag and sailed away. The Americans chopped up the flagpole and used it for firewood.

Historically the war is significant only in that the British Empire backed down without a fight and voluntarily gave up territory. That didn’t happen again until the flag was lowered in India in 1947.

Source: Heaven’s Command by Jan Morris

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. 

Electric Rallycross

Is one of the world’s top motorsport series about to go electric? Quite possibly, and we’re not talking Scalextric here, but real motorsport. This is going to be big news, or at least it will be if it happens. This is the story.

The FIA, which stands for International Automobile Federation, only in French, currently licenses four motorsport world championships. These are Formula One, Rallying, Endurance Cars and the World Rallycross Championship. The Americans may dispute this, but these four series are the pinnacle of motorsport. And guess what? One of them, Rallycross, has announced it’s to go electric. All electric. They’re not just going to allow electric cars, like several other series are doing so, nor are they going to run a parallel series, like Formula E, but the whole series is to go electric. If all goes to plan, when the cars line up for the start of the first race of the 2021 World RX Championship, every single one will be an EV.

So how did we get here? Well, rallycross was a British invention, making it one of the few branches of motorsport that was not initially in French. It is a cross between rallying and circuit racing. Cars would race together round a short circuit that was half tarmac and half gravel. The inaugural event was at Lydden Hill in Kent in 1967 and was shown on World of Sport.

That the first event was televised was no coincidence. Rallycross was pretty much designed to make

it watchable. Formula One costs a fortune and nobody overtakes, rallying takes place in the middle of nowhere and endurance racing goes on forever. With rallycross though you can sit yourself down in the grandstand and watch every moment of a day of close racing. As in rallying, the cars look like ordinary cars, but they are four-wheel drive, turbocharged and very, very fast. An event consists of a number of races. Each race lasts no more than five minutes so they’re short enough to be shared in an email. To spice things up a bit more a recent innovation is the Joker Lap, which adds a bit of tactics to the mix.

Rallycross was a staple of Saturday TV when I was growing up in the seventies and my first Scalextric Set that I would was called the Mini Rallycross. However, outside of my bedroom, rallycross in the UK never quite made it to the first tier of motorsport. There was a European Championship, but the only people who took it seriously were the Scandinavians. However, all that changed in 2014, when the FIA made rallycross the fourth of its world series. Big names from the world of rallying and racing signed up and the car manufacturers chipped in money and expertise. World RX was off the starting line and quickly became the most exciting motorsport on the planet.

None of that is likely to get the average Greenpeacer too excited though. However, the news that came out at the start of last year might: rallycross would go all electric in 2020. This was a major announcement. It meant that every single rallycross car currently being used would be obsolete. Everyone would need new vehicles. Although it’s the teams with manufacturer backing that usually win the races, most of the field in rallycross is smaller, private teams. They would be allowed to make their own electric cars, but realistically they’d be looking to buy them. The FIA therefore needed to know that there were enough manufacturers interested both to make sure the season had enough works and private teams to make it interesting. The date of the changeover was initially 2020, then 2021, but the FIA said it had four companies interested and that it would definitely be happening. Prototypes of the cars have been built and they are at least as powerful as the current supercars, which means 500bhp plus and 0-100kmh in two seconds.

Then, in summer 2018, the wheels started to come off the wagon. Why this happened is still being debated, but over the course of the second half of the year the big manufacturers dropped out of the sport one by one. In their wake several of the big-name drivers moved on. Increasing costs, the general direness of the world economy and the domination of the championship by one team (VW) have all been cited as reasons, plus the fact the rallycross, as the new kid on the block, doesn’t have the resilience of other series to survive these sorts of setbacks. As things stand, we know the 2019 series will be going ahead in April, but we don’t know who’ll be in it. Many of the regular drivers are still trying to find cars, or money, or both.

So where does this lead the FIAs electric dreams? Officially the plans are still going ahead. Unofficially the fear is that with a diminished series, audiences and sponsors will depart, and that the manufacturers will reconsider splashing out big money on electric supercars. More optimistic voices think this could be a blessing in disguise, that rallycross will become more interesting now more teams will have a chance of winning.

So as things stand the 2012 World Rallycross Championship will certainly sound very different, although what it will look is still uncertain. Making the car on the track electric in itself won’t reduce the carbon footprint of the sport much, as most of the emissions for an event are from the spectators. However, as anyone who’s been to watch motorsport knows, road going versions of the cars on the track very quickly become the desirable cars in the car park. So, if it happens, rallycross going electric should be great news for both eco-warriors and petrolheads, if you’ll be able to still call them that.

To get a flavour of what World RX is like click here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFD78OTzB27H5HD4cjMp2JQ

Here is a test of an electric rallycross car here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIeD56BnI-o