andy bell

The senior British intelligence officer who helped overthrow the Iranian government in 1953 and went on to plan for a military coup in Britain.

The call by former Foreign Secretary David Owen yesterday that Britain should acknowledge its role in the 1953 coup against the democratic government of Iran, brings to mind the central role played in the coup by a far-right British intelligence officer who went on to become a significant player in the growth of the extreme right in and out of the Conservative Party in the 1970s.

That man was George Kennedy (GK) Young, at the time of the coup head of MI6 (SIS) Operations in the middle east. A former left winger and journalist as a young man, he had moved sharply to the right, it was said, under the influence of his wife, Geryke, a virulent racist and anti-semite whom he married in 1939. Young joined SIS during the second world war and after a period as head of station in Vienna, was put in charge of middle east operations in 1951. In that capacity he headed up the British contribution to the 1953 coup, which was jointly carried out by the UK, where it was codenamed Operation Boot, and the US, where it was Operation Ajax.

The Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh had wanted to audit the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC – now part of BP) to check Iran was being paid all the oil royalties it was due, and to reduce the company’s control over Iran’s oil reserves generally.  When AIOC refused to be audited, the Iranian parliament voted to nationalize the country’s oil industry.  Britain and the US were not prepared to stand idly by and watch that happen so, to protect the interests of their Iranian companies, they engineered a coup d’etat which overthrew the Mosaddegh government and installed the dictatorship of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, which survived for the next 26 years.

Young went on to become Deputy Director of MI6 but resigned in 1961, angry at the decolonisation policies of Harold MacMillan, and joined Kleinwort Benson, the merchant bank. But more significantly, he hooked up with the racist wing of the Conservative Party, then busy in the Monday Club.

The Club’s membership, in those early days at least, was quite mixed, ranging from the relatively liberal Geoffrey Rippon, who went on to hold several senior cabinet positions, to the unashamedly racist Ronald Bell. Names which were to feature prominently included Harvey Proctor, Julian Amery, Gerald Howarth, Neil Hamilton, John Biggs Davidson and Harold Soref.

But over time, the Club evolved into a bridge between the Conservative Party and much more unsavoury elements on the extreme right, and in the early 1970s there was a systematic campaign of “entryism” by members of the National Front.

Immigration was always central to the Club’s obsessions and in 1969 Young set out a manifesto for repatriation in his Monday Club booklet “Who Goes Home? Immigration and Repatriation”. He was instrumental in setting up an Immigration Committee within the Club, and loudly supported Enoch Powell and his opposition to Commonwealth immigration.

It all came to an ugly head in 1972 when Uganda’s President Idi Amin announced the expulsion of over 50,000 East African Asians as part of his “Africanisation” policy. They were given just one month to leave. Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath, to his credit, accepted that the UK had a moral obligation to accept these refugees from another Commonwealth country and promptly established the Uganda Resettlement Board to manage the thousands of expected arrivals. In the event, around half of those expelled came to the UK.

GK Young and his far-right Monday Club chums were speechless with fury. They responded with a full-throated racist roar at a well-attended rally in Westminster Central Hall in September 1972. Ronald Bell, John Biggs-Davidson and Harold Soref were amongst the speakers. The theme was “Halt Immigration Now!” but the demands did not stop there – they also wanted Heath’s government to repeal the Race Relations Act and launch an immediate policy of compulsory repatriation of “coloured” immigrants. After the rally, a delegation marched down to Downing Street with a petition pressing their demands. At the head of the delegation was G K Young.

The Downing St delegation: LtoR: Bee Carthew, Powellight Association; Harvey Proctor MP; Joy Page, Immigration Control Association; George Kennedy Young. Photo by the legendary Searchlight photographer, Mike Cohen.

Over the next couple of years, the Club was wracked by an internal feud, and GK Young was at its heart. The National Front launched a determined effort to infiltrate it and take it over, a campaign so successful that the NF claimed there was not a single Monday Club branch in the country without NF infiltrators.  In 1973, when G K Young announced he was going to challenge Jonathan Guinness for the chair of the Club, the NF declared him their favoured candidate. The battle lines were drawn: the far right of the Tory party versus the extreme far right and its neo-Nazi allies. Guinness won the election but not after a bloody campaign involving dirty tricks on both sides. His victory led to a number of resignations, including some MPs.

During the feud a Searchlight informant, Les Wooler, himself from a military background and highly respected in the Club, helped the more moderate faction led by Guinness and from Searchlight’s files was able to help identify NF infiltrators whom Guiness then expelled. A booklet, The Monday Club, A Danger to British Democracy, containing much inside and allegedly defamatory information about activities in the Club was published anonymously and distributed to all MPs and major media outlets. It has since been widely claimed that Searchlight was behind this…

The 1953 coup represented an approach to politics which Young later sought to introduce to Britain to deal with the problem, as he saw it, of a communist Prime Minister in Labour’s Harold Wilson, elected in 1974. In the mid-1970s Young was up to his elbows in attempts to set up private armies which would, if necessary, overthrow Wilson’s government and establish a military dictatorship and internment of “enemies of the state”.

Young famously set out his manifesto for a coup thus:

“…a security counter-action need cover no more than 5,000 persons, including some 40 MPs, not all of them Labour; several hundred journalists and media employees, plus their supporting academics and clerics; the full-time members and main activists of the CPGB and the Socialist Workers Party. and the directing elements of the 30 or 40 bodies affecting concern and compassion for youth, age, civil liberties, social research, and minority grievances.”

1975 saw two separate attempts to establish such private armies: GB 75 set up by SAS founder David Stirling and UNISON, later renamed Civil Assistance, founded by General Sir Walter Walker. In both cases, those in the know identified Young as “the power behind the throne”.

George Kennedy Young was as nasty a piece of work as you will find anywhere on the far-right fringes.

But Britain’s dirty involvement in Iran’s affairs did not end when its client the Shah was overthrown in 1979 and replaced by the Islamic Republic. In 1982, a Tehran-based KGB officer called Vladimir Kuzichkin defected to the UK, bringing with him a list of Communist Party members and sympathisers in the Iranian armed forces and civil service. The British obligingly handed the list over to the Ayatollahs who promptly executed everyone on it.