[Marxism] In From the Cold: He Was a Communist For Dutch Intelligence

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

People in the United States who grew up in the 1950s
might remember a strange television series called 
I LED THREE LIVES, or a radio serial by the name of
I WAS A COMMUNIST FOR THE FBI. Most who watched or
listened to these problems didn't take them terribly
seriously, unless they'd been on the receiving end of
such U.S. government disruption efforts which were
being proudly advertised for such disruption efforts.

More than a few of the strange political stunts that
left organizations have engaged in over the years can
be traced to the idiosyncracies of specific groups or
oddball individuals. 

Back in the old days of the 1970s I wondered about
a group we ran into in Los Angeles called the CPUSA-ML,
which we liked to facetiously refer to as the CPUSA,
Michael Laski because of its remarkable central leader.
I have no idea, of course, about the real nature and
origins of the CPUSA-ML, but it vanished after a few
years issuing quite a few triumphalist declarations...

It's no secret, of course, that capitalist governments
have long engaged in political infiltration, deception
and manipulation, as we learned in COINTELPRO and the
various lawsuits against it. The Socialist Workers 
Party of the United States, to which I belonged, the
Communist Party USA, the Black Panther Party and many
others on the left have all been victims of calculated
and deliberate political mischief, as we can read in the
following story from Friday's Wall Street Journal. 

Now one of these so-called "intelligence" operations 
conducted against the political left has finally come to
light in the Netherlands. The target of all this was 
the left and progressive movements, and, according to
this Wall Street Journal report, it was successful.

We don't yet know how much money the government of a 
country like the Netherlands must have spent on all of
the political infiltration, spying and disruptions we
see described in this WALL STREET JOURNAL report. But
one can only wonder and hope that some of the truth is
finally unveiled. I doubt that it will be easy to pry
the full story loose from the responsible agencies.

Considering what we can now see having been actually 
done by a relatively small government like that of the
Netherlands, can you imagine how much money the U.S. 
has been spending to try to destabilize, to disrupt,
and to overthrow the Cuban system?  We know about the
recent INCREASED funding of $59 million ADDITIONAL
U.S. dollars, just since May 2004 under the Commission
for Assistance to a Free Cuba which was unveiled after
SIX MONTHS OF COMPLETELY SECRET PLANNING MEETINGS.

Someday, let's hope, we will get access to the archives
of the U.S., the Los Angeles, and then the rest of the
various governmental spy agencies which have been a
tool of the government in spying on, manipulating and
fomenting political division among groups on the left
and in the progressive movements as a whole. 

Many lessons can surely be learned, and reinforced as
we learn the extent to which the governments of the so-
called "free world" will go to protect the private
property system. Is it any surprise, then that Cuba
and others have to take measures to defend its social
gains and system as we see what kinds of resources have 
been used against them in the kinds of efforts we see 
described here? As they say in Cuba, "It isn't easy."


Walter Lippmann, CubaNews
http://www.walterlippmann.com
=====================================================

December 3, 2004 
PAGE ONE  
 
In From the Cold:
He Was a Communist
For Dutch Intelligence

Comrade 'Chris Petersen' Was
Big in China and Albania;
'Project Mongol' Tell-All
By ANDREW HIGGINS 
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
December 3, 2004; Page A1

ZANDVOORT, Netherlands -- As secretary-general of the
Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands, Chris Petersen
traveled the globe during the Cold War, wowing Communist
leaders with his revolutionary zeal and anticapitalist
diatribes.

"I could make speeches for hours and you would think that
Mao Tse-tung himself had been my teacher," recalls the
now-retired party chief.

The Chinese Communist Party was so impressed, it regularly
gave the ranting Dutchman the full red-carpet treatment in
Beijing: banquets in the Great Hall of the People, an
audience with Mao, envelopes stuffed with cash and tributes
in the People's Daily. Albania's Communists were also big
fans.

Now, with communism all but dead, the Dutchman has decided
to come clean: Both he and his party were a sham.

He says he was never a Maoist but an opera-loving math
teacher moonlighting for Dutch intelligence. His name, his
politics and his party, he says, all were concocted in a
plot to penetrate militant Marxist subculture.

"Nothing was real," says the ex-Mr. Petersen, who now lives
under his real name, Pieter Boevé, here in Zandvoort, a
seaside resort town west of Amsterdam. The only genuine
part of a revolutionary career that lasted decades, he
says, was a fondness for Chinese food: The Chinese
Communist Party, Mr. Boevé recalls, had excellent cooks.

The Central Intelligence Agency, which got regular updates
on the mock Maoist movement, dubbed it "Operation Red
Herring," according to Dutch intelligence. (The CIA won't
comment.) The Dutch called it "Project Mongol."

The unmasking comes at an uncomfortable time for Dutch
security services, now under fire for post-Communist
bungling. Having infiltrated Maoist groups with gusto, they
lost track of an Islamic radical blamed for the murder last
month of filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

Mr. Boevé, who appeared on television in a recent
documentary about the Dutch secret service while wearing a
fake beard and Groucho Marx plastic nose and glasses, says
his past exploits provide tips that could help con Islamist
extremists, but he doesn't envy anyone who might try: "It's
very dangerous," he says.

In a country where erstwhile Maoists and other radicals
have become pillars of the establishment, the exposure of
the phony Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands, or
MLPN, has caused dismay and embarrassment. Frits Hoekstra,
a former high-ranking security official, shocked former
colleagues in September by publishing a book that described
Project Mongol and other escapades. The interior minister
ordered an investigation into whether state secrets were
divulged. Former Maoists are aghast.

"I totally wasted 12 years of my life," says Paul Wartena,
an ex-MLPN member who was so dedicated to the cause he used
to donate 20% of his salary to the fake party. He says he
"had some doubts now and then" about the MLPN but stayed
loyal because "I was very naive and Mr. Boevé was such a
good actor." Now a researcher at a university in Utrecht,
Mr. Wartena wants Dutch intelligence to pay him back for
all his donations.

Mr. Boevé, now 74, scoffs at his acolyte: "He was an
idiot."

Mr. Boevé says he, too, is upset that his caper leaked but
that Mr. Hoekstra's book forced him in from the cold.

Conning so many people, says Mr. Boevé, was "not the most
beautiful thing," but it was a great adventure. He visited
China about 25 times, made frequent trips to Albania and
duped radical leaders in the West. After each journey, he
went to a safe house in Amsterdam to pass on tidbits of
information.

Set up and run by spooks in 1969, his party, the MLPN, had
its own newspaper, De Kommunist, written and edited by the
secret service. As well as Mr. Boevé playing Chris
Petersen, the secretary-general, it had a chairman (another
fraud) and a Central Committee stacked with secret agents.
To add authenticity, the party let Mr. Wartena and a
handful of other true believers join its otherwise
nonexistent ranks, telling them that they were part of a
network of underground cells.

Mr. Boevé first started working as an informant for the
Dutch secret service, then known as the BVD, in the late
1950s and started using a fake name. Invited to Moscow for
a youth festival in 1957, he attended a reception hosted by
Nikita Khrushchev and briefed Dutch intelligence.

Mr. Hoekstra, a former head of counterintelligence against
Soviet-bloc countries and author of the recent book, says
Mr. Boevé's recruitment wasn't at first seen as a big deal,
but, rather, as part of routine tracking of local
Communists.

Shortly after the Moscow festival, however, Mr. Boevé got
an invitation to China, then still aligned with the Soviet
Union. While in China, he kept hearing Chinese officials
curse Moscow, which had just cut funding to Beijing. The
move marked the start of the Sino-Soviet split -- and of
Mr. Boevé's role as an unlikely prize agent.

Desperate for allies against Moscow, China searched out
Communists in Europe and elsewhere. Mr. Boevé, encouraged
by the BVD, offered his services. He visited China in the
early 1960s for a six-week course on Mao Tse-tung Thought.
He says he got good at mimicking Chinese propaganda. The
main difficulty, he says, was keeping up with the wild
zigzags of Chinese politics: his hosts kept getting purged.

Chinese diplomats in Holland invited the man they knew as
Chris Petersen to their mission in The Hague and gave money
to help finance a Maoist newspaper secretly edited by the
BVD. The result was De Kommunist. Mr. Hoekstra, the former
spy and now a business consultant, says he once wrote a
screed against the Dutch government. "As a civil servant,
it was very satisfying," he says.

After a year, De Kommunist announced with fanfare in 1969
the foundation of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the
Netherlands. "In order to limit as far as possible the
danger of penetration by enemy elements," it explained,
"the MLPN organization shall be based largely on the cell
system, obliging all members to the greatest possible
secrecy."

For the next decade, the fake party helped the Dutch secret
police divide Holland's legitimate Communist movement, keep
tabs on Maoist groups and gain access to China's elite.
"Petersen" issued regular communiques -- all drafted by the
BVD -- denouncing real Communists as sellouts and urging
voters to reject them.

Mr. Hoekstra, the former intelligence officer, said the
facade of Maoist fervor did sometimes wobble. On one
occasion, he says, "Petersen" started talking in public
about how to take advantage of tax deductions, not
something a Maoist is supposed to worry about. He says
there was concern the Chinese might smell a rat, but that
faded. The Dutch, he says, had the Chinese embassy bugged
and heard diplomats singing "Petersen's" praises. "We could
hear everything," says Mr. Hoekstra.

By the 1980s, purges and ideological U-turns had exhausted
most Maoists in Europe, and the BVD began to lose interest
in the ruse. China was no longer an enemy but a big trading
partner. De Kommunist shut down. The MLPN fizzled.

Mr. Boevé, though, kept going. In 1989, when troops shot
dead hundreds of protesters around Tiananmen Square, he
issued a statement praising the resolve of the Communist
Party in restoring order. Shortly afterward, he was back in
Beijing, hailing the party and its leaders.

In a small apartment crowded with an electric organ and
piles of books, Mr. Boevé rustles through plastic shopping
bags full of yellowing MLPN tracts and other mementos. One
is a copy of a photograph of himself meeting Enver Hoxha,
Albania's Communist dictator from 1944 until his death in
1985.

Advancing age has finally slowed Mr. Boevé down. He walks
with a cane and can't climb stairs. His involvement with
China is limited to visits to a local Chinese restaurant.
He draws giggles by humming the "East is Red," a Maoist
anthem. "It's a very nice tune," he says.

His political horizons have shrunk to Zandvoort. He sits 
on the local council and lobbies for better housing for 
the elderly. He has even set up yet another party: It
represents old people. It doesn't have many members, 
but, says Mr. Boevé, "This time they are all real."





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