FOR THIRTY-FIVE years author David Irving has kept a private diary. It has proven useful in countless actions. For the information of his many supporters he publishes an edited text in his irregular newsletter ACTION REPORT.

 

 

ugust 1999
London, England

 

 

I leave Key West for London, having been away from home for three months.

At the British Airways desk, a snooty ticketing official declares my trunks overweight. I fish a big box out of one, rearrange the others, and remark audibly to other passengers who have the same problem, that Virgin Atlantic has never asked me to redo bags.

Overheard, evidently, because the official announces grandly that he is upgrading me to Business Class, and no sir, there will be no charge at all for the excess baggage. I am properly effusive and grovelling with my thanks.

So: in poverty, style, and comfort back to London.

 

Back at Duke Street. A Dr Norden, of Vienna, Austria, has phoned from his London hotel suite, wanting fifteen minutes of my time. Benté calls him back; the hotel says the room is booked to the firm of Goldstein and Blumstock. Uh-huh. He does not return our call.

I take Jessica to school, looking very smart in her new grey winter uniform, straw hat, etc. Wish the camera had film.

More documents come from Mishcon de Reya, Lipstadt's lawyers, for tomorrow's hearing. They start faxing through a 26-page Order, but I switch off the machine; they are not allowed to fax to me, as a litigant in person. The hard copy arrives by courier at six p.m. Their new Discovery shows Lipstadt did get most of her smears from the ADL.

I sit outside the Spaghetti House perusing the documents and reading up in Gatley [the standard textbook on libel actions].

Work until two a.m. Then up early again, and to High Court.

10:30 a.m. At the High Court in the Strand. It is a half-hearted attempt by Lipstadt to get my entire list of documents thrown out, inflicting on me the burden of producing a new list.

I do not believe I have met her lawyer the famous Anthony Julius before. He has the manners of a hod-carrier, tho' I doubt this sneering gentleman has carried a hod in his life.

Julius begins by addressing the Court on The Law -- "GCSE-Discovery," as he contemptuously calls it, "for Mr Irving's benefit." Master Trench however is well briefed.

He reminds us -- I had forgotten -- that I was before him in my breach of contract action [not yet posted on this Website] against The Sunday Times; and he adds, as his eye lights on a 1963 news clipping about Gerald Gable's conviction for breaking into my home on behalf of Searchlight, that he also had Gable before him, as a defendant in the libel action brought by Alexander Baron, no less. El mundo es un pañuelo, as the Spanish say.

Baron and Gable are two hate-mongers between whom I have as much difficulty in choosing as between the evil Swiss bankers and their scarcely more likeable opponents, the WJC.

Master Trench mentions affably that he sees I knew Leo Gradwell, the Marlboro' Street magistrate in the 1960s (when Mr Julius was no doubt still pooing his diapers, which we should not hold against him of course).

"I used to appear before Gradwell," he reminisces -- explaining that at that time he prosecuted shoplifters.

I interviewed Gradwell, a war hero, many times: like my father he was in the Navy; in the disastrous Arctic Convoy PQ.17 in July 1942, Gradwell commanded a minesweeper, a converted fishing trawler, with an RNVR crew.

When Tirpitz was believed to be just over the horizon, he ordered his crew to stack all available explosives in her fo'c'sle, and announced that they would ram the mighty battleship if she hove in sight.

I wonder how much mercy he gave shoplifters. Or what he would think of the country that England has now become.

Perhaps I should wonder too if he had his hidden hoard of Gold stacked away in a Swiss bank.

I know my father, a veteran of Jutland, didn't have much time to stop off at his local branch of the Credit Suisse as he commanded a gun-turret in, I believe, HMS Edinburgh.

In my opening observations I refer pointedly to Mr Julius's other hat -- as lawyer for the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who have admitted doing all they can for thirty years to "monitor" my actions, and who are still beavering to destroy my legitimacy as an historian.

I ask Master Trench to bear this in mind each time he considers Julius's requests to see my documents, because -- well, what I really want to say is that Mr Julius's other clients are a bunch of crooks who will stop at nothing, including organised violence, hatred, lies, and commissioning burglary, to get what they want.

Julius's tactics are ingratiating at first; he suggests to Master Trench that he hopes to shorten the proceedings enough for the two of them to have time for a game of Scrabble. (Presumably his million-dollar research has identified this as a weakness).

More worryingly, he develops the ploy of steamrolling decisions: "Well, that's agreed then. Now to item number . . ."

Although the judge is wise to these tactics, once I do interrupt and suggest, "It is not agreed yet. I think we ought to allow Master Trench to make the decisions."

They succeed early on in removing from my list papers identifying the nature of Louis Farrakhan, the Hizbollah terrorist leaders, and the Hamas (with whom Lipstadt has accused me of consorting).

Frantically trawling for evidence -- the famous method, for which no doubt there is some Latin tag, of "No, we can't prove her lies, but we're hoping that if we prise open your private papers we may stumble across something really stinky about you" -- they come across my correspondence with the historians Hugh Trevor Roper, Norman Stone, Gordon Craig and others.

I mock that Julius will no doubt describe these fine people, and Gradwell too if he can, as more of my "neo-Nazi friends". When I refer to historian Raul Hilberg as a colleague with whom I conducted correspondence years ago on the Hitler Order, Julius snaps that Hilberg is certainly no colleague of mine.

Well, let us have Mr Hilberg in Court then. It is an embarrassment to their case that so many famous historians treated me as an equal, corresponded with me freely, exchanged documents with me on a collegial basis, and ventilated opinions.

Back home, I receive e-mails from Oregonians conducting researches into the infamous local ex-skinhead and mobspitter gangleader Jonathan Mozzochi, upon whom Mr Julius is relying.

 

In court again for day two from 10:30 a.m. Outside the judge's chambers I approach Julius and his huddle of fellow-lawyers -- or should I say coven, as some of them are female? -- and inquire if the jurat to their witness Jonathan Mozzochi's affidavit arrived overnight from Seattle. It has.

I ask the judge however if I may make submissions as to its admissibility, as it is deficient in significant respects; since, if I may quote Julius, his is a firm experienced in litigation, I am entitled to point to them.

Master Trench says: "Well, it did strike me as odd too."

I point out that Mozzochi has withheld details of his residence, describing himself merely as one "who can be contacted through the Coalition for Human Dignity in Seattle, Washington."

Trench pulls out the White Book to check: sure enough, under the rules Mozzochi has to identify his permanent or business address, and he has not. Before the Court can rule, Julius says: "It doesn't matter, we will withdraw the Affidavit then." He also agrees to notify me of Mozzochi's address. Ho!: I suspect he has also discovered what my "neo-Nazi" friends on the West Coast have now found out about his chosen witness's police record.

When they demand to see all of the Goebbels Diaries which I brought back from Moscow in 1992, I argue that I have invested in retrieving those Goebbels Diaries from the KGB archives the expertise of thirty-five years' work as an historian. Shall the enemy be able to lay hold of them just by saying, "show 'em."

Trench agrees: Julius and his experts must give strict undertakings not to make any use of the diaries for their own purposes.

All this serves to concentrate minds on broader issues than Julius's one-track parroting of smears about "neo-Nazis."

He even complains that in my affidavit I write, "Since the topic of gas chambers in Nazi Germany will be ventilated. . ." He takes the word ventilated to be deliberately insensitive, which of course it is not.

God -- these people are so sensitive, it is a wonder they're not covered in a permanent and unsightly rash.

Yet they ruthlessly smear others who get in their way. He describes Fred Leuchter and others as "masquerading" as engineers, experts etc. I remark, "Rather like lawyers masquerading as historians."

The fresh Discovery now required of me will impose a crippling burden on my work schedule: I must produce all my own diaries, all telephone logs, correspondence, etc. I have nothing to conceal, but it is an immense time problem.

 

I notice today that there is a quiet young man taking notes behind us. He is representing Lipstadt's unfortunate English publishers Penguin Ltd, whom she has dragged into this mess by peddling her reckless smears against me. He now admits that Penguin did not have her book checked for libel before publishing it over here: the architects of their own misfortune, as a judge said of them a year ago.

I discuss this with my lawyer friends -- more "neo-Nazis" -- in the evening. They say that Anthony Julius is hated within the profession: a pompous ass with an overbearing ego. Of course if anybody were say that, he would whimper: "Antisemites." In my case, it is not. I always though Antisemite was a spectacular National Forest somewhere.

As for Mr Julius, he is handsome, admirable, and no doubt endlessly kind to animals: a clever lawyer, funded by millionaires, defending a worthless hired charlatan.

 [Picture below: David Irving with his oldest daughter
who has bravely battled illness for twenty years]

After phoning my legal friends, I type this letter to Penguin's lawyers:

This action has now been progressing for two years. Today as you will know there was a lengthy hearing before Master Trench, and I spoke with a representative of your firm.

It is quite apparent to me that your client does not share the bitter hostility of Ms Lipstadt and Mr Julius. I would be willing to settle with Penguin separately quite independently of Ms Lipstadt on the following terms:-

Your clients would write me an open letter withdrawing the allegations made in the book by Deborah Lipstadt. . .

I would further ask your client as a token of apology to pay the sum of £500 to the British Limbless ex-Servicemen's Association in the name of my daughter. . . If your clients would agree to such a settlement I would suggest that there should be no order as to costs between us. . .

For the avoidance of any possible doubt as to the position between myself and Ms Lipstadt the terms of this settlement would have to be put into Tomlin form specifically reserving my right to continue the action against Ms Lipstadt.

I write up a diary account of the two days' Court hearings to post on the Internet; I am advised that I must get Master Trench's permission, as the hearing was in chambers.

 

Jessica is an absolute joy as always, pattering around, drawing, questioning, writing.

I write an OpEd piece on the Clinton scandal, which I post on the Website. The site has come under electronic attack during the last week, particularly over the weekend, with somebody trying endless jiggery pokery to find the passwords. Several neighbouring sites have been corrupted beyond repair, and the server has shifted mine to a location with better firewalls. Quite an eye-opener.

In the morning the affidavit arrives from Portland, sworn by the wife of a Prof. of accounting law at the university's business school, testifying that it is she who organised my Portland meeting and not the unruly characters, whom I have never met, named by Anthony Julius's star witness Mozzochi.

She encloses an inter-office memorandum from the Bureau of Police, Portland, Oregon, about Mozzochi, identifying him most satisfyingly:

Officer stops and questions two individuals reportedly yelling threats in downtown Portland. Both subjects are known sharp skinhead associates.

One is named as Mozzochi, the other as Michael Shawn Stogner, stated to have a violent criminal record. And Mozzochi is the gentleman who alleges, on Lipstadt's behalf, that my talks are organised, attended, and guarded by Skinheads. Ho! I hear a flapping of wings, as chickens come home to roost.

At 3:30 p.m. back at the High Court. Mr Julius himself is away in New York, perhaps seeking further smear-dossiers, ahem, evidence, from the ADL. I ask that the first affidavit submitted by Mozzochi, on which their arguments last week hinged, also be ruled as deficient, since it too is bereft of any kind of residential address for that gentleman; Lipstadt's lawyers meekly agree.

The Order drafted by them is also found to be defective, since it does not include the court's rulings protecting my rights to the Goebbels Diaries which I retrieved from Moscow. This is small beer however.

The formal business is dealt with swiftly, since I have told Lipstadt's representatives that I am in broad agreement with their proposed timetable. Representing Prof. Lipstadt, Harriet Benson, of counsel, makes the usual plea, about the agony that her client is suffering, and that this should be curtailed; one wonders how many innocent people are suffering because of the reckless lying in her client's book, Denying the Holocaust, which is required reading on many university campuses.

His head cocked, Master Trench listens to arguments from both sides, and fixes the ultimate date for exchange of witness statements in April 1999.

[The exchange has still not taken place by July 1999].

I do hope that Mr Julius's millionaire friends don't run out of steam before then; the death of tax-fraudster Octav Botnar in his self-imposed Swiss exile may have shaken their financial strategies.

Ms. Benson calls for sanctions against me for reporting the interlocutory hearings in chambers, and for having posted indelicate references to herself and her client in my action report pages -- I called her "a real ***" in one passage of this Diary last year.

Today (see below) Ms Benson is the soul of wit, charm, and fragrance (though still alien to the common courtesy of shaking hands). She makes much of Hodgson vs. Imperial Tobacco Co., 1998 1 WLR 1056. Several quite ugly words are bandied about: contempt of Court, injunctions, even prison. I say that the advice tendered to me is that it is open to the Court to permit me to report on the proceedings to my worldwide supporters, and indeed to the public at large.

Ms. Benson protests that every single document they serve on me is immediately posted on my Website. This is true. In interlocutory hearings, she pleads, solicitors are accustomed to dealing with opposing solicitors who understand the tacit rules of behaviour; in Mr. Irving, they are facing --

"-- A loose cannon?", I volunteer.

Master Trench dictates a careful decision: The Plaintiff -- that is I -- has prepared a diary description which purports to describe what took place, and he is bound to state that I have described those two days "not inaccurately." I have used however "somewhat extreme language," and the defendants are objecting to that. "It is not my function to decide what is good or bad," he dictates, "but whether I have the jurisdiction to do anything about it."

He has has consulted written authorities. Formerly, he reminds us, the position was that any publication of these proceedings could be held to be a contempt. The position is however "not as heretofore." Reaching for the law books, he finds, what Ms. Benson did not, that recent European rulings take precedence over Hodgson.

Reading from a new judgement by the Master of the Rolls, he finds that while the public has no right to attend such hearings, what happens at them is no longer confidential, and that to disclose the goings-on in chambers does not constitute a contempt -- so long as the comment does not prejudice the administration of Justice.

It is of course open to Lipstadt to appeal to a higher Court.

 

How these people hate the Internet and the freedom of speech it allows!

We all troop out at 4:30 p.m., the lawyers for Prof. Lipstadt looking rather chastened. Penguin Ltd turn down my proposal.

I am left with the problem of how to describe Harriet Benson today -- to do otherwise would be cowardice in face of the enemy. (See above).

I am reminded of a trawler skipper who told his bosun he didn't want to find once more in the ship's log that the captain was drunk again; stomping onto the bridge the next day, he opened the log and found the entry: "Today the cap'n is sober."

Up at 7:30 a.m. to begin searching for the new Discovery items for Lipstadt. Then off to Mishcon's for the second round of inspection of her secret documents. These results: [. . .]

[I am not allowed yet to publish the content of Lipstadt's Discovery documents; I describe them in general terms as shocking, for the world wide conspiracy to defame and destroy me which they reveal.]

Letters come from Lovell White & Durrant, defending Gitta Sereny in my other action, demanding that I remove from the Website references to their letter approaching me about a settlement; I do it painlessly within five minutes.

click for continuation