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Gable’s Fables 1: The “Nazi Army Trained by Nato”
In 1975, Searchlight had its first major story exposing what it announced to the world as “Column 88.” This was, according to Searchlight, a “neo-Nazi terror group, intent on having its members in places of influence across the whole spectrum of the Right, from the Monday Club to the National Front" ('Searchlight' May 1975, p5). Gable then used a tactic which has since become commonplace for Searchlight: he put one of his agent provocateurs into place to generate the “facts” and Bob’s Your Uncle, he had a story! By April 1976, Gable had managed to place one of his agents, the Communist Party of
Great Britain member Dave Roberts, into some small fringe group which liked to dress up in military fatigues and run around on Salisbury Plain. Despite the fact that the Searchlight agent was the leading light in this otherwise freakish miniscule operation, Gable blew up the story out of all proportion, claiming that they were carrying out “joint operations with the Territorial Army”! Not happy with this utterly delusional outburst, Gable followed up what he called “Searchlight's research into the extreme right Column 88" by saying that "C88 is a private army. It is illegal. There is no legitimate reason why it should be allowed to continue", ('Searchlight' May 1976, p3-4). Not too surprisingly, the Territorial Army found no trace of Gable’s fantasy “Nazi army” and dismissed the allegations for what they were – the ravings of a crank. Never one not to flog a dead horse, Gable raved on about C88 for years. In 1991, Searchlight still referred to C88 as "the Nazi underground paramilitary and intelligence cell" (No 187 January 1991, p3). This same issue spoke of the role of the SAS and MI6 as "a training arm for guerrilla warfare and sabotage" for the British Section of the GLADIO network, the secret NATO anti-Communist organisation." (ibid p6). By 1995, almost everyone knew that Gable was lying about C88, but he could not resist raising the story once more: in the April 1995 edition of Searchlight, Gable retracted all of his allegations made over the previous 20 years (!) and said that “C88 was a honey trap operation set up by British intelligence", and furthermore were involved in GLADIO, ('Searchlight' No 238 April 1995, p2), and "should not be counted as a genuine far-right or racist group", ('Community Handbook', Sect 2.2-2). Of course, the reality was that “Column 88” never actually existed in any serious degree outside of Gable’s fertile imagination, much less as a “NATO-created anti-Communist organisation!” The fact that Gable could have even printed such a laughable, ludicrous, allegation that NATO was actively recruiting “neo-Nazis” to “fight Communists” is possibly one of the best indicators of the utterly bizarre and outrageously fictional world in which Gable and Searchlight live – but, sadly, it is not their only example. What is even more incredible is to think that newspapers and media sources take this crowd of delusional paranoids seriously! One can rightly wonder who is more delusional: Gable and company, or the media who quote them! *
As an aside, yet an interesting insight into how far Gable’s agent
provocateurs will go in order to manufacture stories, Dave Roberts was first
exposed as a Searchlight agent when he was convicted in March 1976 for
attempted assault following a failed arson attack on Communist Party
premises in Birmingham, which doubtless would have been blamed on C88, as
were attacks on left-wing bookshops at that time. |
Gable’s
shocking journalistic abilities and bizarre imagination (he was once
famously described in the Observer newspaper as being able to see “Nazi
architecture in kids' sand boxes” and, what can only be generously
described as malicious lying, has landed this incompetent would-be
‘authority’ in trouble time and time again.