MI5 spied on Charlie Chaplin after FBI asked for help to banish him from US

Editor's Note: The most popular man in the silent film era made one of the most memorable spoken word speeches in film history:





Guardian
Richard Norton-Taylor

British agency concluded that actor – described by US counterparts as 'parlour Bolshevik' – was no security risk

Charlie Chaplin with his son Michael on the terrace at their home in Switzerland circa 1957.

MI5 opened a file on Charlie Chaplin while he was being hounded by J Edgar Hoover's FBI for alleged communist sympathies.

The FBI, which described the star of Modern Times and The Great Dictator as one of "Hollywood's parlour Bolsheviks", asked MI5 for information to help get him banned from the US. The results, including information gathered through eavesdropping, are contained in an extensive personal MI5 file released on Friday at the National Archives.

"Chaplin has given funds to communist front organisations … He has been involved in paternity and abortion cases," an MI5 liaison officer in Washington warned in October 1952.

MI5 noted that a decade earlier Chaplin had told the Los Angeles branch of the National Council of American Soviet Friendship: "There is a great deal of good in communism. We can use the good and segregate the bad."

Papers have been withheld from Chaplin's MI5 file to protect the names of informants though there are unexplained, probably inconsequential, references to Jimmy Reid, the communist Scottish trade unionist; Larry Adler, the harmonica virtuoso who left his native US where he was branded a communist and blacklisted; and Humphrey Lyttelton, the Eton-educated jazz musician who once described himself a "romantic socialist".

MI5 intercepted a telegram from Ivor Montagu, a film critic, producer and one-time Soviet spy, telling Chaplin how sorry he was to miss him in London when the star visited London in 1952.

The file also contains cuttings from newspapers and magazines. Noting that Chaplin had not taken American citizenship though he had lived in the US for more than 30 years, the Daily Worker welcomed him to London. "His films have lampooned the great and the dictators, raised up the common man against the rich," the paper said. "Now the world's bully threatens the world's clown."
The FBI, which amassed more than 2,000 pages on Chaplin, asked MI5 if he was going to meet any "highly placed persons" in London, and to establish any links he had with the Communist party there.
In particular, it wanted MI5 to find out where Chaplin was born and pursue suggestions that his real name was Israel Thornstein.

MI5 searched but to no avail. There was "'no evidence that Chaplin's name is or ever has been Israel Thornstein", it told the FBI. A suggestion that he "may have been born in France" came to nothing.
MI5 found no record of his birth in Somerset House, then the home of the register of British births. "It would seem that Chaplin was either not born in this country or that his name at birth was other than those mentioned," an MI5 report concluded. It told the US that there was "no trace in our records of Charlie Chaplin".

It had always been assumed that Chaplin was born in Walworth, south London, on 16 April 1889. Recently, however, a letter was discovered in family papers from Jack Hill, who told Chaplin in the 1970s that he had come into the world "in a caravan [that] belonged to the Gypsy Queen, who was my auntie. You were born on the Black Patch in Smethwick near Birmingham."

The newly released file shows that while communist sympathies were the determining factor for the FBI, for MI5 the issue was whether Chaplin ever presented a security risk. And in its view, it makes clear, he was not.

"We have no trace in our records of this man, nor are we satisfied that there are any reliable grounds for regarding him as a security risk," Sir Percy Sillitoe, then head of MI5, told the chief police commissioner in South Africa, where Chaplin was planning a visit.

MI5 suggested his name had been exploited in the interests of communism as "one of the victims of McCarthyism".

Files previously released at the National Archives reveal that shortly before his death in 1950, George Orwell handed a female friend working for an anti-communist propaganda unit in the Foreign Office a list of 35 names of people, including Chaplin, whom he considered "crypto-communists and fellow-travellers".

Chaplin's MI5 file, number PF710549, concludes: "It may be that Chaplin is a communist sympathiser but on the information before us he would appear to be no more than a 'progressive', or radical."
In 1953 the US prevented Chaplin from returning to America. He denied ever being a communist but decided not to contest the US ban and instead live in Switzerland. "I am a victim of lies and vicious propaganda," he said.

Chaplin died in his sleep in Vevey, Switzerland, on Christmas Day in 1977.

My Dad Helped the CIA Kill JFK!" Part 3

Truth Jihad
Kevin Barrett

Below is the lightly-edited transcript of part three of my interview with Saint John Hunt, recipient and custodian of father E. Howard Hunt's confession to participating in the LBJ-approved, CIA-orchestrated murder of JFK. (Go to Part 1.)  (Go to Part 2.) (Listen to the interview.) (Listen to my interview with James Douglass, author of the best single JFK

Kevin Barrett
Welcome back. This is Truth Jihad Radio. I'm Kevin Barrett, talking with Saint John Hunt. He's...well, he's done more to bring out the truth about the JFK assassination than just about anybody...in part because although the information has been brought out by others, it has never been brought out in the form of an actual full confession. And what the debunkers, the people who didn't want this information to be widely known, used to say, was: "If there were such a complex plot, wouldn't someone have confessed?" Well, actually, a lot of people have confessed. But the most important of all of these confessions is the confession of Howard Hunt, the CIA operative who helped kill President Kennedy as part of his work with the CIA. 

Saint John, we only have a few minutes left, so let's cover a few more of these points about who really did this. CIA assassin David Morales was also one of the people your father named, right?

Hunt

Yeah, that's right. David Morales was an interesting guy. He became involved in 1953 with the CIA's Executive Action plan, also known as Operation 40, which we were just discussing. He became one of their top assassins, and carried out a lot of their "wet work" as they say. In 1961, Bill Harvey, who was then Station Chief in Rome, whom my father called "a two-fisted gun-toting alcoholic psycho," who also hated Kennedy, brought David Morales to the secret  CIA station in Miami called JM WAVE. So this was the genesis of this plot (that killed JFK): You had David Morales there in Miami, you had Frank Sturgis, who was considered the mercenary - another guy who carried out wet work for the CIA, used to be a mob enforcer at the casinos for the American mafia, and a long-time friend of my father's.

My father testified that he had only met Sturgis in the early 70's. But he told me, and gave me documentation, that he had known Sturgis for many, many years, going all the way back to the pre-Bay of Pigs invasion. And so here you have this cadre of very angry CIA contract agents, assassins, and bigwig personnel that formed this circle in order to eliminate Kennedy. The initial assassination attempt was to have been in Miami, Florida. I don't know the details of how and why that was switched, but it was moved over to Dallas, probably because...they had several "assassins" lined up from what I understand, but certainly Oswald was one of the "assassins,"or actually the patsies, you know, the fall guys, to take the blame for this. And he of course was located in Texas. 

Barrett

They had another one in Chicago, supposedly. If Dallas didn't happen, they were going to do it in Chicago, right?*

Hunt

Yeah, I think there was the one on Miami, and if it didn't happen there they were going to hit him in Dallas, and if it didn't happen there they were going to hit him in Chicago. These guys were on a one-way track to getting this situation resolved: "We're going to neutralize JFK, get him out of the picture." Wherever and whenever. They had long-range plans, like you said. Chicago was the third attempt that was going to happen if the other two didn't, for some reason, come off. And they used different circles of assassins, and different patsies. So this is a multi-layered thing. But the conspiracy itself was very minimal. You have LBJ giving his nod of approval, and you have his cohort and long-term buddy and neighbor J. Edgar Hoover, who agreed to it - who was going to be forced into mandatory retirement within a year or so of 1963, and who headed the investigation, did all the investigating in the assassination. Of course we all know that most of that was horseshit, excuse my language. But after Kennedy died, Johnson gave Hoover the life term position of Head of the FBI, in exchange for his mounting this farce of an investigation (into JFK's death). They only investigated what they wanted to have turn out as having Oswald being the sole lone-nut gunman. They didn't investigate any of the other credible witnesses. In fact, the FBI apparently harassed and threatened many of the witnesses from Dealy Plaza who said they heard shots, saw smoke, and saw movement behind the Grassy Knoll on the fence. These people were told never to say (what they saw); they were browbeaten and harassed - much like some of the witnesses in the RFK assassination, when they saw a woman in a polka dot dress (shooting RFK). 

Contrived Treebomber Plot to Stampede Portland into FBI Takeover?

Media Monarchy

from kurt nimmo: Residents of Portland, Oregon, recently attended a forum on the question of whether the city should rejoin the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. The city withdrew its task force membership five years ago after the Justice Department turned down a city request for oversight over the JTTF. The decision followed revelations in 2002 that the FBI and the Portland Police kept thousands of “red squad” style police files on political activists. Since 1981, Oregon law has barred police surveillance of political groups in the absence of criminal activity... We Are Change Portland mentioned the first World Trade Center bombing during the forum with city officials and the FBI.

An op-ed published in The Oregonian last week argues in favor of a resumption of FBI JTTF activities in Portland. The obviously staged Christmas tree terror plot was mentioned: “The averted attack during Portland’s Christmas tree lighting ceremony has touched off a debate about the city’s decision, six years ago, to withdraw from the task force. That withdrawal was, clearly, unwise.” The FBI orchestrated event was cooked up not only as yet another sideshow in the never-ending war against manufactured terror, but also as a stunt to frighten the people of Portland into accepting the presence of the FBI. If the FBI is allowed back into Portland, the city’s residents can expect the agency – acting as America’s political police force – to resume its effort to attack the establishment’s political enemies. The FBI does not exist to combat kidnappers and bank robbers, as advertised. It exists to neutralize and destroy all political opposition, as its former director, J. Edgar Hoover, so famously said when COINTELPRO was rolled out fifty years ago.

flashback: treebomber brings homegrown terronoia to oregon

Martin Luther King Assassination: The Evidence You've Not Seen