Between 1948 and 1954 hundreds of thousands of people were arrested and interrogated, often under torture, by the secret police in the countries of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. There were show trials and executions. The victims were members of the ruling ‘communist’ parties, including quite a few in prominent positions. In Czechoslovakia alone nearly 170,000 party members were arrested, almost causing the economy to collapse. 

Stalin himself presided over these purges. After Tito’s Yugoslavia broke away from the bloc, he feared that the ‘Titoist’ contagion would spread and other countries would follow Yugoslavia’s example. He was also determined to destroy ‘fifth columns’ in preparation for a possible war with the Western powers. 

However, as George Hodos, a rare survivor of the Rajk trials in Hungary, stresses in his book Show Trials: Stalinist Purges in Eastern Europe (Praeger 1987), most victims were actually loyal Stalinists. Only a few, such as Gomulka in Poland, really had ‘Titoist’ tendencies. If this point is accepted, an explanation of the vast scale of the purges has to rely on a single factor – Stalin’s well-known paranoia.

Or was that paranoia perhaps deliberately exploited by an outside player? Is it possible that while Stalin presided over the purges someone else actually started them? After all, it would not have been the first such provocation. It was disinformation spread by agents of Nazi Germany that triggered Stalin’s disastrous purge of the Red Army’s officer corps in 1937. Could Western secret services have played a similar game at the end of the 1940s?

I first came across this idea in Jo Langer’s memoir Convictions: Memories of a life shared with a good communist (Andre Deutsch, 1979). The ‘good communist’ to whom the author was married was Oscar Langer, who worked as an economist for the Central Committee in postwar Czechoslovakia. The illustration shows the book cover with a photo of the couple. As the purge gathered pace, Oscar tried to warn ‘his friends in the inner circles’ of the harm it was doing:

He hinted at the possibility that the class enemy himself found a field of activity in the very heart of the organization created as a shield. In that case the real saboteurs were those who were arresting good men in key positions to wreck the economy and thereby undermine the confidence of the masses.

Jo Langer

Langer’s warnings fell on deaf ears. He himself was arrested in August 1951 and not released until 1961. He died shortly thereafter.

When I read this I thought it was a clever argument to use, but did not take it very seriously. Recently, however, I read David Talbot’s in-depth personal and political biography of Allen Dulles, who headed the Central Intelligence Agency from 1952 to 1961 and continued to influence its personnel even after his resignation (The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, HarperCollins Publishers, 2015). Talbot reveals that Langer’s suspicions were fully justified.

Operation Splinter Factor

The CIA’s Operation Splinter Factor began in 1949 when Noel Field, a Quaker relief worker whom Dulles had known during the war, was offered a university teaching position in Prague. He went to Czechoslovakia. Time passed and nothing was heard from him. So his worried wife Herta and brother Hermann went looking for him. They too vanished. In 1950 the Fields’ adoptive daughter, Erica Glaser Wallach, went to make inquiries about them at party headquarters in East Berlin. She vanished in her turn. 

All four had been arrested. Their interrogators demanded to know what connection they had with Allen Dulles and what mission he had given them. They could make no sense of the questions. Unbeknownst to them, the CIA had instructed a double agent high up in the Polish security service to spread the word that Dulles had sent them on secret missions to recruit old acquaintances into a pro-Western spy network. 

The ploy worked beyond the CIA’s wildest dreams. Dulles’ colleague Frank Wisner gleefully reported: 

The comrades are merrily sticking knives in each others’ backs and doing our dirty work for us. 

Talbot

The ‘dirty work’ was to weaken ‘communism’ by sowing suspicion and disarray into the party ranks. 

In 1954, after Stalin’s death, Soviet and East European secret police officials realized that they had been tricked. They apologized to the Fields and sent them home. 

Dulles viewed the naïve people whom he manipulated with withering contempt. He once confided to his sex-partner Mary Bancroft:

I like to watch the little mice sniffing at the cheese just before they venture into the little trap. I like to see their expressions when it snaps shut, breaking their little necks.

Talbot

No doubt Stalin and Beria indulged in similar pleasurable feelings.

‘Communism’ and ‘anti-communism’

The CIA’s ‘dirty work’ was done in the name of the fight against ‘communism.’ For Dulles, as for Lenin and all his successors, supposedly noble ends justified all and any means. 

But what was ‘communism’? What were the key features that made it odious? What ideals inspired its enemies? Which developments within ‘communism’ and in its relations with the outside world were to be regarded as positive and which as negative?

Once we inquire into these questions, we quickly discover concepts of ‘communism’ and ‘anti-communism’ that do not just diverge from but sharply conflict with one another. In particular, we find a chasm between the concepts that actually guide secret agents like Dulles and the concepts that those same agents use in propaganda for the general public. 

In the propaganda the key features that make ‘communism’ odious are the arbitrary power of a dictator or narrow ruling group and the denial of freedom (of speech, association, religion, travel, etc.). The propaganda therefore equates ‘anti-communism’ is with democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. 

This contrast is a superficially plausible — but only if we confine our focus to Europe since 1945, overlooking the experience of fascism as well as such episodes as the ‘regime of the colonels’ in Greece (1967–74). Once we turn our gaze to other parts of the world, we find numerous instances of the CIA overthrowing democracies and replacing them with military or royal dictatorships. Dulles and his cronies soon graduated from playing with ‘mice’ in Eastern Europe to overthrowing the democratically elected governments of Mossadegh in Iran (1953), Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), and Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1960) – all three operations described in detail by Talbot. Later it would be the turn of many other countries, including Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Ghana (1966), Chile (1973), and Haiti (2004).

For capitalist functionaries like Dulles, the key feature that makes ‘communism’ hateful is its disrespect for the property rights of the wealthy, especially when Americans are affected. This is the sole issue they really care about. That is why they lump together all advocates of dispossessing the wealthy as ‘radical’ or ‘extreme’ leftists, ignoring the huge differences with regard to the kind of new society to be created. Any future in which they themselves no longer occupy a privileged position is of no interest to them.   

Thus, in contrast to the ‘mice’ with their naive belief in democracy and human rights, CIA agents did not welcome the prospect of greater autonomy for the countries of Eastern Europe or de-Stalinization in general. Nor would they welcome Dubcek’s ‘socialism with a human face’ or Gorbachev’s perestroika and ‘new political thinking.’ As Talbot notes, they took a negative view of any development that might have made ‘communism’ less unpopular and therefore stronger and more stable. In practice, they aligned themselves with the Stalinists. 

Conclusion 

That the CIA played a significant role in the Stalinist purges in Eastern Europe seems to me beyond reasonable doubt, even though we are not – and never may be — in a position to assess just how significant, due to the paucity of accessible sources. It is unfortunate that Erica Wallach’s memoir (Light at Midnight, Doubleday 1967) is almost out of print. 

Unfortunately, Operation Splinter Factor has not been incorporated into standard historical accounts of the period. Few specialists in the history of Eastern Europe are also familiar with the history of the CIA. Anyway, it is not exactly ‘respectable’ for an academic historian to drag dirty secrets of Western intelligence into the light of day. 

So anyone who values historical truth owes a great debt to David Talbot. 

Stephen Shenfield

Prof Petteri Taalas, the  UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) secretary general, said: “Our climate is changing before our eyes. Human-induced greenhouse gases will warm the planet for many generations to come. Some glaciers have reached the point of no return and this will have long-term repercussions in a world in which more than 2 billion people already experience water stress.

“Extreme weather has the most immediate impact on our daily lives,” he said. “We are seeing a drought emergency unfolding in the Horn of Africa, recent deadly flooding in South Africa and the extreme heat in India and Pakistan. Early warning systems are critically required to save lives yet these are only available in less than half of WMO’s 187 member nations.” 

The world’s oceans absorb more than 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases and 2021 set a record. The increasing warmth in the ocean, which is irreversible over timescales of centuries to millennia, has been especially strong in the last 20 years. Much of the ocean experienced at least one strong marine heatwave in 2021, the WMO said. The global sea level also reached a new record high in 2021. It has increased by 10cm since 1993 and the rise is accelerating, driven by the melting of ice sheets and glaciers and the thermal expansion of the ocean. The rise imperils hundreds of millions of coastal dwellers, the WMO said, and increases the damage caused by hurricanes and cyclones. Almost a quarter of CO2 emissions are absorbed by the oceans, but this causes them to become more acidic. This threatens shell-forming wildlife and corals and therefore food security, tourism and coastal protection, the WMO said. The oceans are now more acidic than for at least 26,000 years. CO2 and methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, are at record levels, with CO2 concentration 50% higher than before the Industrial Revolution sparked the mass burning of fossil fuels. The global temperature in 2021 was 1.1C above the pre-industrial average, moving closer towards the 1.5C limit agreed by the world’s nations to avoid the worst climate impacts.

The WMO noted exceptional heatwaves in 2021 in western North America and the Mediterranean, deadly flooding in Henan, China, and western Europe, and rain being recorded for the first time on the summit of Greenland’s ice sheet. The agency warned eastern Africa is facing a high risk of rains failing for a fourth consecutive season, meaning the worst drought in 40 years.

“Today’s State of the Climate report is a dismal litany of humanity’s failure to tackle climate disruption. Fossil fuels are a dead end – environmentally and economically,” said António Guterres, the secretary general of the UN. “The only sustainable future is a renewable one…”

Prof James Hansen, said this week, there was “a spectacular, continuing failure of governments to adopt effective long-term energy and climate policies.

“We must all be aware that demands for effective policies will yield only superficial change as long as the role of special interests in government remains unaddressed.”

Critical climate indicators broke records in 2021, says UN | Climate crisis | The Guardian

 Climate change makes record-breaking heatwaves in northwest India and Pakistan 100 times more likely, a Met Office study finds.

The United States is the world’s leading perpetrator of financial secrecy, citing the country’s refusal to share key information with the tax authorities of other nations and its status as a generous tax haven for foreign oligarchs, rich executives, and other elites.

The Tax Justice Network (TJN) found that “the U.S. now fuels more global financial secrecy than Switzerland, Cayman, and Bermuda combined.”

Despite U.S. President Joe Biden’s campaign pledge to “bring transparency to the global financial system, go after illicit tax havens, seize stolen assets, and make it more difficult for leaders who steal from their people to hide behind anonymous front companies, “Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen conceded, “There’s a good argument that, right now, the best place to hide and launder ill-gotten gains is actually the United States.”

TJN stressed that the shell company law enacted in January 2021 is riddled with loopholes such as “limited definitions of which legal entities and beneficial owners must register, 23 baked-in exemptions to registration, and an absence of requirements on all trusts.”

TJN researcher Moran Harari explained that “once again, a small club of rich countries setting global rules on finance and tax are found to be the ones most responsible for facilitating financial secrecy and tax abuses.”

“For decades, rich G7 countries courted billionaires, oligarchs, and corporate giants with secrecy loopholes and eyes-wide-shut-regulations,” said Harari. “The regulations they imposed facilitated the robbing of billions from poorer countries’ public purses. And now those same regulations are making it nearly impossible for G7 countries themselves to track down the billions held offshore by sanctioned Russian oligarchs.”

‘A Shameful Distinction’: US Ranked World’s Biggest Perpetrator of Financial Secrecy (commondreams.org)

 Choice

It is not by force of arms or terror

That this benighted world can be remade,

There’s no infallible elite to aid

This process, nor leader without error.

Reforms have not brought such change by stealth,

Reformers fail, whatever their intent,

Career politicians are mouths for rent

By those rich enough to safeguard their wealth.

All can be transformed through the power of choice,

A new world without money, war and greed,

Commonwealth arranged to satisfy need

And all achieved through the popular voice.

World without borders, no national schism:

True democrats demand socialism.

D. A.

 Globally, 1 in 5 deaths among children under the age of 5 is attributed to severe wasting – also known as severe acute malnutrition – making it one of the top threats to child survival, robbing the lives of more than 1 million children each year.

 Carmakers around the world are racing to introduce new cars with zero exhaust emissions of carbon, and almost every big brand plans to move to battery electric technology. However, at the same time manufacturers are trying to keep selling their highly profitable diesel and petrol cars.

Tesla and Mercedes-Benz are the only firms out of 12 big manufacturers who are on course to shift to zero-emissions vehicles at a rate in line with climate goals. The carmakers that plan the slowest adoption of zero-emissions technology are the three biggest Japanese producers – Toyota, Honda and Nissan – while other laggards included South Korea’s Hyundai and General Motors in the US.

The shift to zero-emissions vehicles is seen as crucial for the world’s transition away from polluting fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency, a watchdog respected by industry and campaigners, has calculated that 57.5% of global car sales must be zero-emission vehicles by 2030 (equivalent to 52% by 2029) if global heating is to be limited to only 1.5C. Should the world go beyond that target, agreed at the 2015 Paris climate conference, the scientific consensus is that increasing proportions of the globe will become unliveable.

Big carmakers stuck in slow lane over switch to zero emissions, study shows | Automotive industry | The Guardian

The global tobacco industry, valued at $850billion (2021) with the 6 largest companies earning $55billion in profit (2015), is profiting off the backs of an estimated 1.3 million children involved in tobacco production worldwide. Tobacco leaf is grown in more than 120 countries, but the incidence of child labor is under reported. In 2020, the US Department of Labor listed 19 countries which use child and forced labour in tobacco production is present.

For many farming households in low-income countries, growing tobacco offers only a precarious livelihood, overshadowed by debt and the threat of poverty, in stark contrast to the profits of the big tobacco companies. Many smallholder farmers – who produce much of the world’s tobacco leaf – feel they have little choice but to enlist their children to work.

According to the global tobacco industry watch, STOP, tobacco companies have the power and resources to determine the level of wages and price of agricultural inputs, and can control the salaries that suppliers or contractors pay. However, their practices worsen children’s plight. They use layers of contracts to avoid direct responsibility for growers and workers, keep leaf prices low, and provide loans that keep farmers dependent. To obscure the real problem, they use agricultural front groups, and partnerships with renowned organizations to undertake token community activities. All these effectively suppress progress towards diversification of strategies that would remove children from tobacco farming.

Child labor in tobacco falls under “worst forms of child labor” due to the hazardous nature of handling tobacco. This mainly occurs in the tobacco fields and bidi factories, but can also occur throughout the whole tobacco cycle, for example, children selling cigarettes.

Children working with tobacco are placed at high risk of injury and illness, for example ‘Green Tobacco Sickness’ caused by nicotine poisoning through the skin. The absorption of nicotine causes symptoms which include nausea, weakness, dizziness, headaches and breathing difficulties. They are also exposed to large and frequent applications of pesticides, herbicides and fumigants that leads to a range of risks.

Child tobacco workers often labor 50 or 60 hours a week in extreme heat, use sharp and dangerous tools, lift heavy loads, and climb into the rafters of barns, risking serious injuries and falls.

In sub-Saharan Africa, 28% of children working in agriculture in general do not attend school at all, a blow to their best chance of avoiding the generational poverty trap.

Meanwhile, tobacco industry corporate social responsibility (CSR) obscures the plight of children in low- and middle- income countries (LMICs). Tobacco industry-backed publicity includes information of how 204,000 children were removed or kept away from child labor detracting from the legal and human rights of children exploited or the just compensation required to undo decades of harm. Some governments have yet to resist so-called CSR of tobacco companies and realize that the tobacco industry is the problem and not partners in the elimination of child labor. 

The Eliminating Child Labour in Tobacco Growing (ECLT) Foundation, sponsored by big tobacco companies influence the anti-child labor narrative across the world. Through the ECLT, tobacco companies partnered with and funded the ILO and governments to position themselves as safeguarding the rights of child worker and “being part of the solution”.

While ECLT achieved little in reducing child labor, it added to the glossy sustainability reports of tobacco companies designed to attract more investors.

After coming to the conclusion that tobacco industry sponsorship has not led to much progress in eliminating child labor, in 2018 ILO announced it will not renew ECLT and tobacco industry funding. However, links between the ILO and the ECLT remains.

Child Labour: No Quick End to Children Trapped in Tobacco Production | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

Pollution is killing 9 million people a year, a review has found, making it responsible for one in six of all deaths. Air pollution caused almost 75% of the 9 million pollution deaths. Toxic chemicals resulted in 1.8 million deaths, including 900,000 deaths from lead pollution, which is more than from HIV/Aids. Lead poisoning could significantly reduce intelligence across large populations.

The number of deaths from chemical pollutants was likely to be an underestimate, the scientists said, as only a small proportion of the 350,000 synthetic chemicals in use had been adequately tested for safety. The cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet has passed the safe limit for the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends, researchers reported in January.

Unsafe water causes 1.4 million early deaths a year. More than 2 billion people still do not have access to clean drinking water.

Toxic air and contaminated water and soil “is an existential threat to human health and planetary health, and jeopardises the sustainability of modern societies”, the review concluded.

The researchers said pollution, the climate crisis and the destruction of wildlife and nature “are the key global environmental issues of our time. These issues are intricately linked and solutions to each will benefit the others. But we cannot continue to ignore pollution. We are going backwards.”

The death toll from pollution dwarfs that from road traffic deaths, HIV/Aids, malaria and TB combined, or from drug and alcohol misuse. The researchers calculated the economic impact of pollution deaths at $4.6tn (£3.7tn), about $9m a minute.

Prevention was largely overlooked in the international development agenda, the researchers said, with funding increasing only minimally since 2015.

Deaths from toxic air and chemicals have risen by 66% since 2000, driven by increased fossil fuel burning, rising population numbers and unplanned urbanisation. This rise was offset by improvements in the “ancient scourges” of water polluted by pathogens and poor sanitation and indoor smoke from cooking fires.

Prof Philip Landrigan, at Boston College in the US and a lead author of the analysis, said: “Pollution is still the largest existential threat to human and planetary health. Preventing pollution can also slow climate change – achieving a double benefit for planetary health – and our report calls for a massive, rapid transition away from all fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy.”

More than 90% of pollution deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, such as India and Nigeria. While high-income countries, such as the US and members of the EU, had controlled the worst forms of pollution, the researchers said, few less affluent nations had been able to make pollution a priority.

“Pollution has typically been viewed as a local issue,” said Rachael Kupka, at Global Alliance on Health and Pollution (GAHP), which includes the UN Environment Programme and the World Bank. “However, it is clear that pollution is a planetary threat. Global action on all major modern pollutants is needed.”

Pollution also crossed international borders, carried on winds or in food exports, said Richard Fuller, at GAHP in Switzerland, another lead author. “If we’re going to keep everyone safe, we need to help countries that have these toxic problems to stop the pollution at the source.”

 Hard-up families are skipping meals, wearing coats indoors to stay warm, and living in the dark because they can’t afford to switch on the lights, according to the leading children’s charity, Action for Children.

Current levels of severe and persistent hardship among families supported by the charity’s children’s centres, triggered by cuts to universal credit and rising energy bills, were among the worst it could remember, said Action for Children’s director of policy, Imran Hussain.

“The worst pain and misery of the cost of living crisis is being felt by children in low-income families, yet the government is refusing to target help for these children or accept that it needs to rethink its huge cut to universal credit,” he said.

A children’s hardship fund set up by the charity two years ago to provide one-off help to struggling families during the pandemic has evolved into a “permanent crisis fund” helping thousands of families. Analysis of the crisis fund showed that half of families accessing it for help reported stress, anxiety or mental health concerns among the adults or children. One in five applications highlighted the £20 cut in universal credit last October as a trigger for the families’ difficulties.

Poor families skipping meals and unable to afford heating, charity says | Poverty | The Guardian