November 14, 2002 (Thursday),
London

TOM S., a newcomer, offers: "If you need a web site or E-mail in the U.S. please advise, it is also secure. -- P.S. We can still question here without being thrown in jail!"

All of this has me thinking ahead to the time when "European" policemen may come hammering on my door in the small hours, and shutting down the "revisionist" side of things.

A Mr Barlament asks some impertinent questions but gets a measured response:

IT IS ten years to the day since I arrived back in London after my last visit to Canada: the night before I had been escorted in handcuffs to an Air Canada flight in Toronto, after an Immigration Adjudicator had reached a totally perverse decision, flying in the face of all our sworn witnesses and sworn affidavits. November 14, 1992. From London airport, I phoned Benté, who had flown down to Key West the previous day to meet me. "I am in London," I said.

That drama had begun on October 28, 1992, when I spoke at a restaurant in Victoria, B.C. -- ironically on the subject of freedom of speech. Unknown to myself or the audience, the restaurant was surrounded by armed police and Mounties, a dozen burst in as I was signing books after the dinner (I had just received the George Orwell Freedom of Speech prize), and took me in manacles to a prison van (left). I was released temporarily the next day, and an American I had never met before that day (Brian Fisher) drove me over the border into the United States for two hours to authenticate and sign some genuine Konrad Kujau fakes for him. Then back to British Columbia, a cross country flight to Ontario, and the beginning of the harrowing two-week court drama that ended with my expulsion from Canada.

The expulsion hinged on the edict of an immigration adjudicator, Mr Kenneth Thompson, who purported not to know that the American immigration computer in Blaine, Washington state, kept EST time, three hours behind Pacific Time. Our times were three hours different from those established from the American computer by his officials, so he accused me and my sworn witnesses of perjury.

The background to the whole affair was a complete mystery to me, until Barbara Kulaszka, Doug Christie's highly able and indefatigable instructing solicitor, started researching into government files using Canada's Access to Information Act.

Several things then came to light, none of them very attractive for Canada. In the Victoria police files, we found a copy of the fax that I had sent to Doug Christie from Los Angeles on about October 24, with my writing on it: so the police were routinely bugging this lawyer's telephones. Not very nice in a free society.

Then we found that in June 1992 some unknown hand had inserted into Canada Immigration files libelous documents about me, purporting to be Intelligence reports on my background: I had married a Spanish lady, said this report, who was the daughter of one of Generalisimo Francisco Franco's generals, in order to ingratiate myself with Franco and his fascist regime (I checked this up with my ex- wife, who was well placed to know: she said that her late father had in fact been a Republican, an industrial chemist, and his close relatives had been murdered by Franco's gunmen); I was living too opulently to be possible on a mere author's income -- the truth was, the report suggested, that I was getting regular cheques from old Nazis in South America. And more of the same.

Who planted that lying document in Canadian government files? It took two more years to get an answer as Canada Immigration refused to release the whole of the covering letter in their files -- it turned out to be the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who had obtained the document from the Board of Deputies of British Jews. The BoD were later forced to admit this in an affidavit when I started libel action against them.

Obligingly for them, the Canadian officials had cut the top off the covering letter before copying it for Miss Kulaszka, so that we could not identify the body that had supplied it.

It seems to be a river that flows only one way in Canada: disadvantageous to those who are not members of the community, but richly rewarding for those who are; I was disadvantaging their interests, and had to be put down -- I was "particularly dangerous," to use the word that Deborah Lipstadt applied to me in her turgid tome. I had to have my "legitimacy" destroyed, as the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Toronto secretly advised her.

It has been a ten year battle, in Canada alone. A country I first visited in 1967, as a special guest on the famous television programme Front Page Challenge, and scores of times after that: but not for the last ten years, thanks to the furtive, greasy activities of the traditional enemies of free speech.

I WORK all day until seven p.m. in the Public Record Office. While waiting for fresh Cabinet Office files to be produced in this magnificent archive building, one of the finest in the world, if not indeed the finest, I idly check the list of the latest secret file-releases to the public domain. There is only one wartime file in this new batch, begun in 1943 and ended in 1972: the file's last item is dated June 1972, and the requisite Thirty Years have passed. It is the Chief of Air Staff's secret file on the 1943 death of the Polish prime minister, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, and the subsequent internal government controversy.

Twenty minutes later the file is lying in front of me. An inch or more thick, it makes astonishing, and totally unexpected, reading -- it is chockablock with proof of the British Establishment's efforts to destroy me once and for all in the 1970s, because of the first books I wrote. Tomorrow I shall post its main contents on this website.

 [Previous Radical's Diary]

on this website:

 British release Ministry of Defence file on the General Sikorski controversy | Mr Irving's summary

  "Churchill's War", vol. ii: "Triumph in Adversity": Appendix on death of General Sikorski, the contents of a Harold Wilson file (pdf format)

 Events in Canada

 Brian Fisher's sworn statement

 David Irving: Accident, the Death of General Sikorski. Free download