MI5 tracked Robeson amid communist fears

[emad]

MI5 tracked Robeson amid communist fears Mar 2 2005
Darren Devine, Western Mail


AMERICAN singer and Welsh miners' hero Paul Robeson was closely monitored by British intelligence services throughout the 1940s and into the Cold War years, secret documents published yesterday reveal.

The performer, famed for his trademark song Ol' Man River, first came to the attention of MI5 through his close ties with left-wing and civil rights movements.

From 1924 Robeson shuttled between Britain and America to star in films from The Emperor Jones to Show Boat. But his favourite film remained Proud Valley, the 1940 tribute to South Wales miners. He said Wales taught him he was working class.

Now documents released at the National Archives reveal authorities always suspected, but never proved, Robeson, the son of a former slave, was a Communist Party member.

http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0200wales/tm_objectid=15246932&method=full&siteid=50082&headline=mi5-tracked-robeson-amid-communist-fears-name_page.html

[davidinalameda]

1. I thought he was open about his membership in the Communist Party

and he was black listed for it

[CanuckAmok]

2. My inlaws...

...saw him perform at the Peace Arch border crossing between WA and BC. He couldn't leave the US, because he had been told that if he left, he wouldn't ba allowed back in.

[Swamp Rat]

3. Paul Robeson - a great singer, a great humanitarian, and a great American

... and a hero of mine. :)

[leveymg]

4. The things they leave out of these psuedo "tell-all" stories.

For example, the following article written by Robeson's son.

In The Nation, Dec. 20, 1999, Paul Robeson Jr. recounted the circumstances of the depression that seized his father, leading to Robeson's suicide:

http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Articles/Robeson,%20Nation.html

<SNIP>

In this context, the fact that Richard Helms was CIA chief of operations at the time of my father’s 1961 “suicide attempt” has sinister implications. Helms was also responsible for the MK-ULTRA program. In 1967 a former CIA agent to whom I promised anonymity told me in a private conversation that my father was the subject of high-level concern and that Helms and Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles discussed him in a meeting in 1955.


The events leading to my father’s “suicide attempt” began when, alarmed by intense surveillance in London, he departed abruptly for Moscow alone. His intention was to visit Havana at Fidel Castro’s personal invitation and return home to join the civil rights movement. Since the date set by the CIA for the Bay of Pigs invasion fell only four weeks after his arrival in Moscow, the CIA had a strong motive for preventing his travel to Havana.


My father manifested no depressive symptoms at the time, and when my mother and I spoke to him in the hospital soon after his “suicide” attempt, he was lucid and able to recount his experience clearly. The party in his suite had been imposed on him under false pretenses, by people he knew but without the knowledge of his official hosts. By the time he realized this, his suite had been invaded by a variety of anti-Soviet people whose behavior had become so raucous that he locked himself in his bedroom. His description of that setting, I later came to learn, matched the conditions prescribed by the CIA for drugging an unsuspecting victim, and the physical psychological symptoms he experienced matched those of an LSD trip.


<SNIP>

By the time I returned to New York in early June, my father appeared to me to be fully recovered. However, when my parents returned to London several weeks later, my father became anxious, and he and my mother returned to Moscow. There his wellbeing was again restored, and in September they once more went back to London, where my father almost immediately suffered a relapse. My mother, acting on the ill-considered advice of a close family friend, allowed a hastily recommended English physician to sign my father into the Priory psychiatric hospital near London.


My father’s records from the Priory, which I obtained only recently, raise the suspicion that he may have been subjected to the CIA’s MK-ULTRA “mind depatterning” technique, which combined massive electroconvulsive therapy with drug therapy. On the day of his admission, my mother was pressured into consenting to ECT, and the treatment began just thirty-six hours later. In May 1963 1 learned that my father had received fifty four ECT treatments, and I arranged his transfer to a clinic in East Berlin.


Certain key CIA documents that have been withheld, in whole or in part, would probably shed additional light on these events. <SNIP>


Clearly, these National Archives papers shed no additional light, at least as they are reported here. Wonder when and if the relevant documents will ever be released, if in fact they still exist.

[David__77]

5. Robeson: civil rights fighter, outstanding performer, communist.

He was on the front lines against the McCarthyite, racist political offensive that gripped the country starting under the Truman administration, which turned its back on the left unity of the Roosevelt years. The anti-communist witchhunt went hand in hand with the Southern segregationists, Dixiecrats, McCarthyites, Klanners and others who were determined to keep Black people "in their place." Robeson should be honored as a national hero.