Regional Seat of Government Number 6


... The trespassers called themselves the Spies for Peace - a sort of joke, one of them said later, after such groups as Doctors for Peace and Musicians for Peace. They were young, and they knew they risked long prison sentences. Even 40 years after the event, fearing that they could still be open to prosecution for criminal conspiracy, they wish to remain anonymous.

In the long winter that froze the early months of 1963 - one of the coldest of the 20th century - a few people were fanning flames of rebellion. They were peace activists - and anarchists and socialists - who wanted to challenge the power of the military state but to go beyond yet another mass march or yet another sit-down. They had heard through various contacts about a secret government bunker that was supposed to lie somewhere off the A4 near Reading. They set off in search of it in February 1963

Although it had long been common knowledge among the elite that there was a secret system for wartime government survival, it came as a shock to ordinary people that their rulers were making detailed plans to fight a nuclear war and to ensure the survival only of the politicians and civil servants, without any democratic consent.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200205200017

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Great story, too romantic, no parapolitical analysis? Hmm. Come to think of it many of us do the same thing everyday, if not rifling thru exotic online caches then at least turning at the mimeograph machines. There are important differences, namely, the press and the people who were outraged in their day would today cover it up, pull videos, and purge sites.

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To many readers of The Independent, Nicolas Walter will be best known for his letters to the newspaper. His passion for accuracy and his loathing of waffle led him to fire off vast numbers of letters to the press; a few years ago, he estimated that he had had over 2,000 published.
He also used distinctive pseudonyms, and certain shadowy figures such as Jean Raison and Arthur Freeman will make no more appearances on the letters pages. But his life as an activist and a writer went way beyond those inimitable contributions.

One story of his life has never been fully told, and that was his role in the direct action group called Spies for Peace.

http://www.rationalist.org.uk/press/000321.shtml

Posted: Thu - March 1, 2007 at 12:02 AM            

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