The missing NUM millions!

Anyone remember the millions of pounds that went missing (from the NUM) during the miners strike in the 1980s? Is it a true story? Was it ever recovered?

I think this relates to a story originally run by the Daily Mirror, though I recall the Mirror's then-editor Roy Greenslade writing an article in the Guardian stating that he had been fed erroneous information and that the story wasn't true.

Arthur Scargill, the NUM and the useful idiots

During the 1984-5 miners' strike, an elaborate plot was conceived by the authorities with the connivance of the media to villify the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and its elected officials, Michael McGahey and, in particular Arthur Scargill – Margaret Thatcher’s bete noire. The allegations against Scargill blackened his reputation from which he has yet to recover.

Seamus Milne’s investigation into the affair also highlighted the role of a British Pakistani, Muhammad Altaf Abbasi, who was among the group of prisoners released by the Pakistan authorities in the aftermath of the 1981 PIA hijacking carried out by the Al-Zulfikar paramilitary/terrorist group. On return to his family in Britain, Milne writes, “Abbasi was regarded by many of those active in Pakistani opposition politics in Britain as an agent of the Islamabad government or of British intelligence”. Abbasi started a ‘Geen Book Centre’ from which Gaddafy’s political tract could be disseminated. In 1984, Abbasi contacted the NUM and offered to serve as a middleman with Libya. In October 1984 Abbasi organized a meeting in Paris at which Salem Ibrahim, Gaddafy’s representative put a question to Scargill: “Would the miner’s leader go to Tripoli to explain the NUM’s position’? Scargill refused, saying if Libya wanted to help British miners, it should suspend the strikebreaking sales of oil to the United Kingdom”. Unbeknown to Scargill, Abassi then coaxed a weak reed within the NUM ranks, chief executive Roger Windsor to visit Tripoli. A photo of Windsor kissing Gaddafi on both cheeks rocked Britain and effectively demonized the NUM and Scargill, because public memory was still fresh with the killing of PC outside the Libyan embassy in London. The Sunday Times was able to publish the minutest details of the movements of Abbasi and Windsor in Tripoli – reportage which was to win The Sunday Times reporter Jon Swain the 1984 ‘Reporter of the Year’ award.

A misinformation campaign then alleged that Scargill and another NUM official Peter Heathfield had diverted funds from Libya to aid the strike effort to settle their personal home mortgages. Ten years after the event, Seamus Milne concluded that “every single one of the orginal claims proved to be untrue, unfounded, wildly misrepresented or so partial as to be virtually unrecognizable from any factual information…Nor, as the evidence now makes clear, could what in fact were simply ‘paper refinancings’ have ever been made with Libyan cash – because the fabled ‘Gaddafi money’ never even arrived in Britain until long after the transactions were carried out. The central allegation was a paper-thin lie, the by-product of a deliberate set-up…At every stage and in every aspect of the affair, the fingerprints of the intelligence services could be found like an unmistakable calling card. From the openly advertised intelligence contacts used in the original Sunday Times scoop on Roger Windsor’s 1984 Libyan trip, to the CIA’s tame Russian miners who helpfully called in the Fraud Squad….to the GCHQ leaks on secret-service manipulation of the Mirror-Cook Report stories, to Miles Copeland’s warnings to Scargill and Heathfield about an intelligence set-up, to Tam Dalyell’s Whitehall tip-offs about Windsor and Stella Remington…the intelligence connection ran like a poisoned thread”.

Abbasi himself denied dealing with the Security services, but went on the record stating that “I don’t think it is an unpleasant thing to be a member of an organization of a country of which I am a citizen. MI5 is there to look after the security of the country of which I am a citizen and there is no harm in working with it”. Abbasi’s hapless contact in the NUM, Roger Windsor also issued an open letter to the MI5 senior officer during the NUM crisis, Stella Remington [later MI5 Director General] that included the following bizarre passage, “Perhaps you would not welcome a public enquiry into all the events surrounding the NUM activities during and since the strike, as it might reveal that you were not as effective as you might have liked to have been, or as others would credit you” and concluded with reference to the ‘gross violations of civil liberties’ during the miners’ strike.

The NUM headquarters in Sheffield and the offices and homes of branch officials were bugged. Transcripts from these taps were sent to the National Reporting Centre at New Scotland Yard, which was responsible for deploying police officers in the coalfields, and to MI5's F2 Branch. MI5 sent intelligence reports to the Civil Contingencies Unit in the Cabinet Office. Undercover police and MI5 operatives masqueraded as miners during the strike, singling out miners for arrest or acting as agents provocateurs to provoke violent incidents. In June 1984, two plain-clothes policemen were caught red-handed in disguise at the Creswell Strike Centre in Derbyshire. Throughout the year-long dispute, the security services leased the building opposite the NUM's headquarters at St. James's House in Sheffield. Every single NUM branch and lodge secretary had their phones monitored, as well as sympathetic support group activists and trade unionists across the country.

MI5 was obsessed with Scargill, who even had his own classification, - “Unaffiliated Subversive”, said David Shayler. ‘Operatives covertly followed him, tapped his home and office telephones and recruited an agent inside NUM. When I saw his file it contained a massive forty volumes.

Defending the Realm by Mark Hoolingsworth and Nick Fielding, Andre Deutsch, 1999, pp77

[The Enemy Within – MI5, Maxwell and the Scargill Affair, by Seumas Milne, Verso, 1994; http://www.wakeupmag.co.uk/articles/sstate5.htm]

Last year, after years of mounting concern that I had been wrong about Scargill, I finally apologised to him for the Mirror's accusations. I had come to believe that the cloak-and-dagger tales I had published were untrue and that, just as Maxwell had suggested (probably disingenuously), we had been misled. One key witness changed his mind within a couple of weeks and another was ordered by the French courts to repay a debt to the NUM which he had previously accused Scargill of stealing.

The whole case against Arthur gradually unravelled and gave credence to the belief that we had been duped by a secret service plot. Despite his denials, our chief accuser Windsor was named in parliament as an MI5 agent - and I was doubly convinced when the former head of MI5 said so ambiguously that he "was never an agent in any sense of the word that you can possibly imagine".

Roy Greenslade writing in The Guardian, 8 May 2003 http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,951322,00.html

Thank you Carcrash - that's the article! Cheers