For over 3 years I passed Sandy Hook Elementary School on my way to work. Exit 11 off of I-84 has a rather sharp right hand turn where Tractor Trailers tip over on a regular basis. Then you have the choice of going left up toward where Fairfield Hills Mental Hospital used to be or turning right past the back of the School to Rt. 34 which I did because my ultimate destination was on Church Hill Rd.

At the time there was a Deli and Convenience Store at the intersection that I’d go to every day and get a Pepperoni and Provolone with Sweet Onion and Brown Mustard on a Kaiser for lunch. It was a great sandwich, had about a third of a pound of Pepperoni in it. I did it so often they named it after me- the ek. Across Church Hill Rd. there was a little pocket Park next to the Pootatuck River (more a creek actually) and if the weather was nice I’d sit on a bench and eat it there.

I know this place. You could go today and find it exactly as I describe it except the Deli has been replaced by a restaurant.

You won’t find Sandy Hook Elementary School either. They bulldozed it after Adam Lanza killed 26 people there, mostly children 6 or 7 years old. That was in 2012, just 6 years ago.

I also know people in Emergency Services, EMTs and stuff, and I know the kind of training they participate in. Heck, I’ve had a fair dose of it myself. I was a professional Life Guard for like 8 years or so and I did what we just called Drills about once a month. Someone would pretend to hit the Diving Board and break their back or neck, or slip on the deck and break their leg, or have a Heart Attack, or Drown in various gruesome ways (those were always tough because the “victim” was usually the supervisor and they’d work out their frustrations by actually trying to kill you).

Sometimes I was the “victim” which was cool because you don’t have to do much other than memorize your symptoms and moan and groan.

I was a “Crisis Actor”.

Where the ‘Crisis Actor’ Conspiracy Theory Comes From
by Jason Koebler, Motherboard
Feb 22 2018, 2:30pm

The term ‘crisis actor’ has been in the news a lot lately, because conspiracy theorists have accused survivors of the Douglas High School mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, of being actors—people paid to pretend they witnessed a horrible tragedy that actually never happened and was instead staged by the government in order to garner the political will necessary to ban guns.

To be clear, there is no evidence this is actually the case. Conspiracy theorists have questioned the legitimacy of people who lived through a horrific shooting—watched their friends and classmates slaughtered—in an attempt to harass and silence their political activism. “Crisis acting” is now a term that’s constantly bandied about by the Alex Joneses of the world and has been used to explain away terrorist attacks such as the Boston Marathon bombing and the Bataclan Nightclub shooting, as well as most mass shooting events in the United States. It has become just as important as “false flag” in the conspiracy theory lexicon.

It wasn’t until relatively recently that conspiracy theorists were audacious enough to suggest that terrorist attacks and mass shootings actually didn’t happen at all.

Wednesday, a video claiming that shooting survivor David Hogg was an “actor” briefly became the top trending video on YouTube before the company deleted it. The conspiracy is now so mainstream that Jimmy Kimmel addressed the stupidity of it on his show this week.

The resurgence of this conspiracy theory led me to attempt to track down the origins of the term “crisis actor.” I spoke to an emergency response trainer who has used “role players” to simulate crises for 40 years and went down the rabbit hole to find its origins as a completely unfounded conspiracy theory. It turns out that “crisis actor” is a relatively new phrase for a relatively new conspiracy.

“A new group of actors is now available nationwide for active shooter drills and mall shooting full-scale exercises,” a press release from October 31, 2012 published by a Colorado-based professional acting studio called Visionbox reads. “Visionbox Crisis Actors are trained in criminal and victim behavior, and bring intense realism to simulated mass casualty incidents in public places.”

The release, which is the first instance of the term “crisis actor” that I could find, says that the actors’ experience in performing Shakespeare and other plays allows them to “improvise scenes of extreme stress while strictly following official exercise scenarios.” For a mall shooting simulation, “the actors can play the part of the shooters, mall employees, shoppers in the mall, shoppers who continue to arrive at the mall, media reporters and others rushing to the mall, and persons in motor vehicles around the mall.”

I know actors too. Lots of them. And they all have day jobs and they’re always looking for gigs.

Though the term “crisis actor” wasn’t coined by conspiracy theorists, it was almost instantly co-opted by them. Less than two months after Visionbox’s press release was published, Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 26 people, many of them children.
…
“After such a harrowing event why are select would-be family members and students lingering in the area and repeatedly offering themselves for interviews? A possible reason is that they are trained actors working under the direction of state and federal authorities and in coordination with cable and broadcast network talent to provide tailor-made crisis acting that realistically drives home the event’s tragic features,” he wrote.

Crucially, Tracy (James Tracy, former professor of communications at Florida Atlantic University and publisher of Memory Hole Blog) specifically cites VisionBox’s Crisis Actors press release and suggests that maybe a government agency hired the company for the job. The group—and its “Crisis Actors” have become patient zero for the larger crisis acting conspiracy. Its old website, www.crisisactors.org and the photos posted there are often used by conspiracy theorists in memes created to “prove” a theory.
…
While Tracy popularized the Sandy Hook crisis actors narrative, he did not invent it. On Christmas, someone calling themselves Travis J. Walker published a post called “The Newest Reality TV Hit Show: Sandy Hook” on a WordPress blog called The R.A.W.W. Scoop. The post notes that “the families seemed to be acting out of character for people who were supposed to be grieving a lost loved one. They seemed to be reciting a rehearsed script in these interviews.” The post goes on to outline the broad script that Tracy would later popularize, and also cites VisionBox’s Crisis Actors: “If an agency like this exists that almost guarantees realism, is it that far out of the realm of possibility to think that this could be staged?”

The plot was further suggested in a truly bizarre post December 29 called “Sandy Hook: AI, Sleeper Activations and Time Stream Manipulations” on a site called OffPlanetRadio (now OffPlanetMedia), which suggests both time manipulation at Aurora, Colorado massacre and Sandy Hook and a “triangulation of Sandy Hook in three separate, seemingly unrelated high profile events:” Aurora, Sandy Hook, and Hurricane Sandy. The post said that Sandy Hook was a drill alongside the suggestion that “the time stream aspect is more compelling given the interval of 7 days prior to the December 21, 2012 solstice. Ritual blood-letting is the cabal’s method of intoning power prior to key time events, especially when coordinated to lunar and solar-based events.” The post ends with the suggestion that conspiracies are mapped using artificial intelligence and “time stream manipulations … such events are holographic in their execution, compartmentalized in commission, and thematically woven into dream time neuropathy.”

A follow up post on December 31 called “Behind the Scenes (literally) at Sandy Hook: Crisis Actors,” drops the time and hologram stuff to focus on VisionBox.

What Tracy did, then, was signal boost a theory being espoused alongside those of mind control and time manipulation. Because Tracy was a university professor and not a random person on the internet, his theories were discussed by Alex Jones on InfoWars and gained traction in conspiracy circles. Fort Lauderdale’s Sun Sentinel was the first mainstream outlet to cover Tracy’s posts, forever enshrining “crisis actors” in our mainstream national lexicon; Tracy’s posts ultimately became a national controversy that was discussed by Anderson Cooper on CNN.

Ok, the link above leads to a Neo Nazi/KKK Conspiracy Theory Mashup, so- don’t bother. The link to Anderson Cooper’s AC360 Blog goes here, but I can’t get the video to embed or even see it for that matter. This video is one I dug up on YouTube myself at the last minute and great expense and also appears to be from some Neo Nazi/KKK Conspiracy Theory Gun Nut but at least has the virtue of being all CNN.

There are several others, all Neo Nazi/KKK Conspiracy Theory Gun Nuts as near as I can determine and I did watch as much as I could stomach. As always I claim no particular expertise, you can duplicate my experimental results if you want but I warn you you’ll junk up your YouTube feed with this crap for months (still trying to get rid of World of Warships videos). To continue-

…
Since then, anytime there is a shooting, terrorist event, or other mass casualty event, conspiracy theorists suggest that crisis actors are part of a government false flag operation, which more or less brings us to today, where YouTubers, InfoWars, and many on the far right doubting whether or not the Douglas High School shooting actually happened. A search on Google Trends aligns with this timeline; searches for “crisis actor” only register on the site after Tracy’s blog post, and regularly spike after any tragedy post-Newtown.

Like any conspiracy theory, this all started with at least a shred of truth that was stretched way too far. There are people who act out moments of crisis for training purposes, but they weren’t called “crisis actors” until VisionBox posted its press release and Tracy did his blog post. And real crisis actors—called “role players” in the emergency training industry—are an integral part of disaster response training.

“Until the last three or four days, I hadn’t heard the term ‘crisis actors,’” Michael Fagel, who has spent much of the last 40 years using actors to help simulate mass casualty events and other emergencies, told me. “We call them ‘role players.’ A well-trained role player is an integral part of a well-thought-out training system.”

There is a well-established body of research on the use of role players during emergency training exercises. A 2004 paper published in the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management found that using “citizen volunteers” during emergency exercises “enhanced perceptions of response knowledge and teamwork” for police officers, firefighters, and even the volunteers themselves.
…
He leads Aurora Safety, a company that designs training exercises for first responders, designs trainings for the Department of Homeland Security, and teaches homeland security at Louisiana State University. He says that the use of role players was one of the first things he was taught when he got into emergency response in the 1970s: “It wasn’t new then, either.”

According to Fagel, role players are often hired from drama troupes or are played by paramedics, med school students, or first responders.

“We’re not grabbing a person off the street and throwing them under a bus, literally,” he said. “We usually brief you the day before, and we use people who are trained.”

Fagel’s role players hold 3.5-inch index cards that list their symptoms and they are given scripts to respond to paramedics and first responders in a realistic fashion. Often, they are put in “moulage,” or makeup: “torn clothes, bone fragments … a more realistic training exercise gives you better training,” he said.

“If someone is simulating a heart attack, we can’t actually make you have one. So when the paramedic comes to you, you’ll say ‘Wow, my left arm hurts, I have a tingling feeling,” Fagel said. “Maybe you don’t make eye contact, or if you squeeze their hands, you don’t have full grip, suggesting a neurodeficit. If I’m doing a good job training you as a role player, you become more of a realistic tool for the people in the training.”

As you might expect, Fagel says that conspiracy theorists are severely misguided and put his type of work at risk.

“I had a student tell me she thought FEMA had blown up the [New Orleans] levees and that the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks were inside jobs,” he said. “I was at those missions. We were doing our best to do rescue and recovery. These are not Hollywood setups. I’m a realist, I guess.”

And so a legitimate safety training tool has been co-opted by conspiracy theorists with no evidence, and no proof. People who have suffered great tragedy are harassed and doubted because a couple conspiracy theory bloggers went off the deep end after Sandy Hook, and now here we are.

Now we didn’t have the budget for make-up or other methods to increase the realism of the training experience (though the drowning part got real enough) so it was all pretty fake and the truth of the matter is that in all my years of Life Guarding I never had to do anything more than slap on a bandage and some ointment for a scrape even though I Life Guarded in some really scary places where you could seriously injure youself quite easily.

And I’ll mention that even though the Deli is gone (I have no idea what the restaurant is like that replaced it) if you go further up Church Hill Rd. to Exit 10 (I don’t like getting off there, it’s ugly and commercial) or you’re coming down from Newtown proper you can eat at the Blue Colony which is a typical Greek Diner that boasts they have the best Pancakes and Waffles in Connecticut but really doesn’t (although they are open 24/7 and have a full Bar) or across the street at Newtown Pizza Palace which has a genuinely good Pan Crust pie.

I know this place. You could go today and find it exactly as I describe it.

Gilmore Girls Hate

I really think people are too tough on Rory. You don’t have to make all your life choices before you’re 32 and some things that seem to be huge mistakes eventually lead you to a place that’s better than you could ever have imagined.

Oh, and lots of spoilers if you haven’t watched A Year In The Life yet.

Critique from a guy who only watched Episode 1 of A Year In The Life

10 Things We Hated- #9, Not Enough Lane

10 Things We Loved- #9, More Kirk

Seasons 1 – 7 is the Book from Year In The Life and it’s just like the the Roseanne finale.

Ok, my cousin who is a New York Times best selling author (it’s true enough)? All of her books are thinly disguised Autobiographies, you write what you know. I do think it rather shallow that all modern “serious” fiction is a thinly disguised Autobiography set in New York though.

Oh, and Sean Gunn is Kraglin and On-Set Rocket in Guardians of the Galaxy 1 & 2. Told you there were spoilers.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

George Washington, America’s first president, is born; Iraqi insurgents destroy a Shiite shrine’s golden dome; the ‘Miracle on Ice’ during the 1980 Winter Olympics; Pop artist Andy Warhol dies.

Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world. Harriet Tubman

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Follow the money. Yeah, Javanka’s going down.

In the fight that he will probably win, because John Kelly is not the daughter Trump wants to boink, Kelly is moving to tighten up on temporary security clearances and include Jared Kushner in the process.

Objectively there’s no excuse for it have gone this far. You don’t get those for a reason and I’m sure I’d be disqualified because of things and stuff. Kelly despises Jared and kept Rob Porter around so long because he was an ally in that fight.

But he won’t win that battle, Kelly is more likely to leave than Kushner is, Trump doesn’t like him personally either and considers him a wet blanket cramping his style.

But Jared is going down anyway, in the maw of 666 Fifth Av. at the hand of Mueller (also in the Library, with the Candlestick, by Professor Plum).

Jared Kushner-Qatar Redux: Robert Mueller Enters the Fray
by Ryan Grim and Clayton Swisher, The Intercept
2018-02-21

The property that is now tied up in Mueller’s probe, as well as linked to a diplomatic crisis in the Middle East, sits at 666 Fifth Ave., and was bought by Kushner at the height of the housing bubble for what was even then considered an inflated price of $1.8 billion.

The building is now severely underwater and if Kushner can’t find refinancing sometime in 2018, the property risks blowing a hole in the family balance sheet. Kushner has worked doggedly to fend off that reckoning, talking with prospective investors around the globe.

As The Intercept reported last July, Charles Kushner solicited funds from Qatar’s former Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim, known as HBJ, who now runs the investment firm Al Mirqab Capital. The Qatari businessman pledged to provide Charles Kushner, then heading Kushner Companies in Jared’s place, with $500 million in capital provided Kushner was able to raise the rest of the multibillion-dollar refinancing elsewhere. Charles Kushner reportedly turned to China’s Anbang Insurance Group for an additional $400 million, but the holding company pulled out of the deal in March 2017 following conflict of interest claims. Left in the lurch, we now know that Jared Kushner just weeks later devised a plan with Saudi Arabia to form a coalition with the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Bahrain to jump Qatar, an unexpected move given the Qatari emir had joined Trump in Riyadh just weeks before the blockade started, where no issues were raised with Qatar about any of its policies or relationships.

Trump publicly took credit for the diplomatic attack on Qatar, and when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson tried to walk it back, Trump doubled down, issuing an additional aggressive statement that Tillerson would later say he suspected was the work of Kushner and his regional ally, Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE ambassador to the United States.

CNN reported that the special counsel has not requested documents or records related to the hunt for cash for 666 Fifth Ave., a claim repeated to The Intercept by a source at Kushner Companies. Abbe Lowell, an attorney for Kushner, dismissed the CNN report. “Another anonymous source with questionable motives now contradicts the facts — in all of Mr Kushner’s extensive cooperation with all inquiries, there has not been a single question asked nor document sought on the 666 building or Kushner Co deals. Nor would there be any reason to question these regular business transactions,” Lowell said in a statement.

But that could hardly be evidence that Mueller is not taking action, given he would be unlikely to telegraph his pivot toward the company’s activities in the open. As indicated by last week’s indictment of 13 Russian nationals accused of sowing information warfare to help get Trump elected shows, the special counsel is carrying out his investigation discreetly and is making surprise moves.
…
Kushner’s hand in Middle Eastern affairs hasn’t worked out well for the United States or for the countries that took on Qatar by severing diplomatic ties in June. Saudi Arabia and its allies relied on a website hack and a smear campaign about Qatar’s warming relationship to regional foe Iran to justify the escalation. The Washington Post reported that the hack had been carried out at the direction of the United Arab Emirates, citing U.S. intelligence officials. Isolated by its neighbors, Qatar turned to Iran and Turkey to survive a monthslong air, land, and sea blockade. The kingdom’s claim that Qatar was fomenting extremism was roundly mocked in Washington. Now, the United States — ironically, the very country that enabled the fracas — appears to be re-aligning itself with the isolated Gulf nation. Just weeks ago, Trump praised Qatar for fighting terror, while Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis kicked off the inaugural United States-Qatar Strategic Dialogue.
…
Bannon reportedly met Mueller and FBI agents several times last week. It is widely known that Bannon had a particular hatred of “Javanka,” the portmanteau for Jared Kushner and Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump. If Bannon has any information that would incriminate Kushner’s or Trump’s families, some of whom he described as “treasonous” in “Fire and Fury,” there’s little reason to think he’d sit on it.

That could plainly be of worry for Trump, but Kushner too. Given the failure of the siege against Qatar and the bizarre moves by its Gulf Arab protagonists — including Saudi’s hostage taking of Lebanon’s prime minister — well-placed sources said Trump has largely sidelined his son-in-law, who conducted most of his disastrous diplomacy in secret with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Wolff’s recent tell-all disclosed that it was Trump’s innermost circle, including Bannon and Kushner, who devised the early summer 2017 foreign policy coup in the Arab Gulf to “change the conversation” away from Mueller’s probe into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Since last June, MBS has brutally kneecapped internal opposition to consolidate power, while encouraging the prolonged travel and trade isolation of Qatar.

Not all is falling apart for Kushner, however. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly recently sent a memo signaling that anybody working in the building without a permanent security clearance needed to get one soon or move on. But that, he has since clarified, doesn’t apply to Kushner.

“I will not comment on anybody’s specific security clearance situation or go beyond the memo released last week,” Kelly said in a statement first reported by The Intercept. “As I told Jared days ago, I have full confidence in his ability to continue performing his duties in his foreign policy portfolio including overseeing our Israeli-Palestinian peace effort and serving as an integral part of our relationship with Mexico. Everyone in the White House is grateful for these valuable contributions to furthering the President’s agenda. There is no truth to any suggestion otherwise.”

When a police officer shoots an unarmed man you blame the police officer. When a horrific school massacre occurs, you blame the gun. Please explain this logic. Tomi Lahren, 18 Feb 2018, 9:57 am, via twit

I should be better than this, but you know what? I’m not.

Dear Tomi,

When a Police Officer shoots an unarmed man he is at fault because in our society (and other countries do it differently, in Britain they do the same job with only a whistle, a radio, and a baton) the gun is given to the Police Officer to enable them to confront armed criminals, not to kill random (but mostly Black) individuals who happen to be mentally ill, or spit on the sidewalk, or even call the Police Officer’s Mother heinous names.

That’s the law.

In horrific massacres (of any type, say the kind that take place at Country Music Concerts in Las Vegas) we have factual evidence that the criminal (he just murdered 59 people and injured 851 more, it’s a crime) would not have been able to kill so many so fast (10 minutes) at such a great distance (490 yards) if he had been armed with a Bow and Arrow or a Knife, even a really big Knife, instead of a gun.

I hope this solves your puzzle.

Sincerely,
ek hornbeck

Look, I feel I’m being totally polite, even Brooksian. I have provided information that I think directly responsive to the question posed without condescension.

Ok. Maybe a little condescension.

(h/t Doktor Zoom @ Wonkette)

If you are of a certain age (and it’s not my age, I’m 120+) you remember Cracked Magazine as kind of a down rent knockoff version of Mad (What? Me worry?).

Well, it ain’t that anymore.

It’s kind of this GenX/Millennial mix of Pop Culture, Humor, News, Philosophy, and Politics in both print and video. I know I’ve already highlighted their text piece on why a Scrooge McDuck Economy would be terrible.

This is about Guns.

Why The NRA Is Even Terrible For Gun-Owners

Why We Constantly Avoid Talking About Gun Control

How to Solve the Country’s Gun Problem

How Gun Control Made Australia Safer Than America

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Malcolm X assassinated; President Richard Nixon visits China; Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart makes a tearful confession; Steve Fossett is the first to fly across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon.

When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something.

John Lewis

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Sorry to revisit this so soon but when I started writing my last piece he hadn’t pled guilty yet and accepted a deal to testify.

I see a lot of commentary on how this is just “deterrence”, you better not lie to Mueller and his FBI interrogators or we’ll send you to prison (though it does that of course). I think it has a deeper implications.

Attorney/Client privilege does not apply to criminal conspiracies. Attorneys are not allowed to advise their clients how to commit crimes without getting caught. Van der Zwaan is going to be forced to disclose everything he talked about with Manafort and Gates (if he hasn’t already). Gates has flipped already (probably) and he was a part of the campaign from beginning to end and the transition too, in fact it’s Gates’ testimony that most likely convicted Van der Zwaan.

Manafort seems reluctant to turn but this makes his position almost untenable. He’ll roll or he’ll rot in jail and his testimony probably doesn’t matter anyway at this point. Mueller has it all.

Manafort’s daughter, Andrea, was also an Associate at Skadden Arps, Slate, Meagher, and Flom, hired 1 month after they produced a report called the “Tymoshenko Report” (as in Yulia, a pro-Western and duly elected Prime Minister of Ukraine who was also spectacularly corrupt, as are they all). This “independent” report was supposedly produced for a mere $15,000 which put it below the level of expenditure that required Parliamentary approval. Later Skadden Arps, Slate, Meagher, and Flom was forced to return $500,000 to the Ukrainian Government and reliable reports indicate that they actually billed $4 Million.

The Ukrainian Government and Skadden Arps, Slate, Meagher, and Flom have both filed lawsuits for libel against Buzzfeed and Christopher Steele over the infamous “Steele Dossier” and Buzzfeed at least has countersued both of them and also the Democratic National Committee (to turn over documents that relate to the Dossier).

Manafort is cooked at this point. He’s 70 years old and will die in prison. The point is it will be interesting to see if he’s as willing to throw his daughter under the bus as Trump evidently is to throw Don Jr., Eric, and Javanka.

“Deterrence”? “Signalling”? Make no mistake, this is a direct attack of devastating proportions and anyone at the White House who’s not pissing their pants tonight is an idiot.

Of course they are idiots too. Think this will be on Maddow?

While you are considering Mueller’s Friday indictments of 13 Russian Nationals and 3 Russian Companies, and today’s charges against Alex van der Zwaan, attorney to Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, former employee of prominent U.S. law firm Skadden Arps, Slate, Meagher, and Flom, and son-in-law of one of Russia’s richest Oligarchs, German Khan, founder of the privately-owned Alfa Bank, you might find it interesting to know that last Thursday Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the British Labour Party was accused by The Sun, a Murdoch owned tabloid, of being a “Commie Spy”. This story was based on allegations by Ján Sarkocy, a former agent of the Státní Bezpečnost–

(A) plainclothes secret (political) police force in former Czechoslovakia from 1945 to its dissolution in 1990. Serving as an intelligence and counter-intelligence agency, it dealt with any activity that could possibly be considered anti-state or western influence.

The basis of Sarkocy’s claim is that he met with Corbyn in the House of Commons during the 80s and it’s reinforced by the fact Sarkocy listed him as an “Intelligence Contact” in some of his reports. In reality “Intelligence Contact” means about as much as one of Tom Friedman’s mythical cab drivers, just some guy you met and talked to. Sarkocy says he paid Corbyn and other Labour figures sums between £1,000 and £15,000 for information.

Unfortunately there’s no evidence of that at all.

No evidence Corbyn was a communist spy, say intelligence experts
by Robert Tait, Luke Harding, and Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian
Tue 20 Feb 2018

Communist-era files from the intelligence agency of Czechoslovakia provide no evidence that Jeremy Corbyn was ever a spy or agent of influence, experts and academic researchers who have reviewed the papers said on Tuesday.

Radek Schovánek, an analyst with the defence ministry of the Czech Republic – which emerged, along with Slovakia, from the peaceful breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1993 – has spent 25 years researching documents filed by the now-defunct spy service. He told the Guardian the suspicions against Corbyn were unfounded, and the claims of Ján Sarkocy, a former intelligence officer expelled from Britain in 1989, to have signed the Labour leader up were false.

Schovánek also poured scorn on Sarkocy’s boast that he used 10 to 15 other Labour politicians in the 1980s as sources, including the current shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, and Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London.
…
Schovánek said Sarkocy’s assertions were at odds with the security files, which represented the definitive record on agents and contacts, and made no reference to Corbyn as a recruited agent, or to McDonnell or Livingstone.

Asked if he was calling the ex-intelligence officer, now living near the Slovakian capital Bratislava, a liar, Schovánek said: “When you compare the documents which he had written and signed himself with what he is saying today, based on that he is a liar. He signed a list of documents in the UK which said Corbyn was an intelligence contact, not an agent.”

The term “intelligence contact” in reality meant little, Schovánek said. Czechoslovakian intelligence officers could have many such contacts, who provided little, if any information.

Schovánek, 54, who secretly smuggled banned books from the west into Czechoslovakia during the cold war, said he felt compelled to speak out on Corbyn’s behalf, despite strongly disagreeing with the Labour leader’s leftwing politics. “I personally don’t like Corbyn. I’m Roman Catholic and conservative, but I think we have to defend people against a lie,” he said.

Daniela Richterová, a politics and international studies researcher at the University of Warwick, said the files showed the Labour leader was never a “witting source”. “We know how the process of arranging a collaboration works,” she said. There was “no evidence” Corbyn was recruited during four meetings with Sarcozy, she added.
…
For recruited agents, Prague’s intelligence services would include how a contact was recruited, handled and developed as a spy. None of this is described in the Corbyn records. The archive indicates that when meeting Corbyn, Sarkocy – who posed as a diplomat – was instructed “not to raise suspicion” and to keep his true identity secret.

Corbyn first appeared in state security records in August 1977, after he toured Czechoslovakia on a motorbike holiday. Fellow MP Diane Abbott, who accompanied him on a similar holiday to East Germany, was not with him on that trip.

Labour party members active in the 1980s who knew Corbyn at the time said his political leanings were not towards the Soviet Union.
…
Richterová said the Corbyn records were in contrast to the files on British MPs from an earlier generation, whom Czechoslovakian intelligence actually recruited. In the 1950s and 1960s, the StB succeeded in co-opting two Labour MPs – John Stonehouse and William Owen – and one Tory MP, Raymond Mawby. The relationship lasted a decade, and in Owen’s case, for nearly 15 years.

All three MPs were fully recruited StB agents, with their file category marked up as “Agent” or “A”. Their files comprise thousands of pages of documents. These feature strategies for recruitment and development, minutes of meetings with agents, assessments of their performance, and tasking plans, Richterová said, plus details of communications and counter-surveillance.

To begin with, Mawby and Owen believed they were passing information to Prague’s foreign affairs ministry. Gradually, however, they were made explicitly aware that they were indeed collaborating with communist intelligence, Richterová said. Prague paid Owen about £5,000. His nickname inside the StB was “Greedy Bastard”.

Running high-profile British agents was a complicated and often frustrating endeavour, she added. Stonehouse turned out to be evasive and overly cautious, Owen not well-suited to be a spy, and Mawby notoriously unreliable. Remarkably, the files reveal that MI5 were aware of Stonehouse and Mawby’s repeated contacts with Czechoslovakian “diplomats”.

You may ask how we know all this in such excruciating detail. Well, when the Warsaw Pact fell apart in the early 90s all the Secret Intelligence files got turned over to the non-Communist successor regimes, most of whom made them available to Historians like Radek Schovánek and Daniela Richterová.

It’s really not news that those on the Right would accuse those on the Left of being Communist spys, more a dog bites man kind of thing. It is sort of unusual to have it refuted so thoroughly so quickly.

Still, I think the contrast to our current situation is instructive and I encourage you to read the works of John le Carré.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

No Spoilers.

There. Now you’re all caught up.