Talk:Peter Blaker

In March 1987, Minister of Defence Michael Heseltine set up a special counter-propaganda unit called Defence Secretariat 19 (DS19) to write anti-CND material. DS19 liaised with MI5, who illegally tapped the phone of CND vice-president John Cox and other members of the organisation.

MI5 officer Cathy Massiter was instructed to carry out the phone-tapping operation by Tony Crasweller, who also supervised the agency's F4 and F6 sections, which ran agents inside political parties and organisations. At the same time, CND member Stanley Bonnett, a former editor of the CND magazine Sanity, was recruited as an informant by Special Branch, on the instructions of MI5. Bonnett gave the intelligence services minutes of meetings and lists of CND activists throughout the country - lists which the officers told him "would be used for political purposes."

Cathy Massiter gathered material on any left-wing affiliations of CND's leaders. A report was then passed to civil servant John Ledlie, who was seconded to DS19, and he passed it on to Michael Heseltine and Sir Peter Blaker MP, Heseltine's lieutenant in the propaganda campaign. Blaker, in turn, passed the information on to the local Conservative Association of Ray Whitney, former head of the Information Research Department.

As the general election campaign was getting under way, the Blaker/Whitney letter was circulated to prospective Tory candidates. The Daily Mail ran an article entitled CND Is Branded a Tool of the Kremlin, which drew from MI5 smears of the organisation and included allegations attributed to Stanley Bennett. In the same period, the private anti-Communist propaganda group Common Cause, which monitors subversion in industry and the unions, published a pamphlet, The Communist Influence on CND, which had been written under the direction of Charles Elwell, head of MI5's F Branch. Elwell was also responsible for targeting the National Council of Civil Liberties (NCCL) as a subversive group. http://www.bilderberg.org/bap.htm

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http://www.thegrenadarevolutiononline.com/independence.html

Maurice bishop affair new jewel party 9didn't MB go missing was'nt there a destabilising op against New jewel? Blaker rep of HMG

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THCR 2/6/1/82 Defence briefings and other papers, June-ca. December 1977 (1 folder) Includes MT's correspondence with Peter Blaker MP (enclosing a record of his meeting with Alan Reich, Assistant First Secretary US Department of Commerce, 28 July 1977), Winston Churchill MP (attaching a copy of his paper, “Britain's nuclear deterrence”, ca. June 1977) and Patrick Cosgrave (Special Adviser to MT), attaching a copy of a paper on “U.S. overseas bases: problems of projecting U.S. military power abroad” by Thomas Moorer and Alvin Cottrell), ca. 1977 Also includes detailed briefing notes by the Conservative Research Department for MT's visit to the USA, September 1977

THCR 2/6/1/213 Papers relating to the crisis in Rhodesia, March 1976-December 1978 (1 folder) Includes correspondence with Peter Blaker MP, Eldon Griffiths MP (including notes of his interviews with Prime Minister (Ian) Smith of Rhodesia, Prime Minister (John) Vorster of South Africa, President (Kenneth) Kaunda of Zambia and Joshua Nkomo, all March 1976), Reginald Maudling MP, Sir Victor Raikes, Christopher Tugendhat, Patrick Wall MP and Michael Young (Consolidated Goldfields)