STAYING with friends in the West country over Christmas, I noticed, fixing the phone in their cottage, a bulky telephone engineer, or was he?

January 5, 2007 (Friday)
London (England)

I HAVE at last been able to download the pictures that were taken after my arrival in Vienna fourteen months ago -- an hour or two before the Stapo arrested me in my car at gunpoint (or guns -- eight stovepipe black automatics -- to be precise, nine-millimetre Glocks out of their holsters and pointed at my head) in November 2005.

Writing History is getting to be a risky business. If I'd picked up the metal tape recorder off the seat beside me, there's no knowing what they might have done, and claimed afterwards, posthumously so to speak, that they'd thought I was carrying a gun.

My student hosts took one picture of me on the Goethe memorial; and one at the famous Cafe Landtmann where by chance I was arrested in 1984 and thrown out of Austria -- and a very costly move for Austria that proved to be, as we sued their minister Karl Blecha for wrongful actions, and he had to pay substantial damages: none of which I ever saw, as they went into my then lawyer's purse.

As I said at the time, if one of us two, Blecha or I, is a criminal, it is not I. He subsequently got mired in a scandal involving his participation in an insurance scam on the non-existent cargo of a rustbucket of a freighter which went down in mid-ocean with all hands. Nice folks, my enemies. The maxim Viel Feind, viel Ehr' does not really seem to apply in cases involving scum like him.

Hearing I'd been driving all night from Basle, my student hosts in Vienna put a cell phone call through to their building where I was to speak that night, to arrange for a room for me to take a nap before my lecture. "We'll be there at 1:30 pm," they said, and I thought, "Mensch, who are you calling!" (For a start, the European phone system now automatically voice-prints every call and matches it against Interpol voice-print files.)

At 1:30 pm they -- the Viennese Stapo -- were already waiting on the steps as I arrived. (I still got away, but that's an other story).

STAYING with friends in the West country over Christmas, I noticed, fixing the phone in their cottage, a bulky telephone engineer, or was he? He had turned up unannounced, and he stayed four hours running new wires and cables. "There's been a complaint of interference on the line -- noise," said the obliging fellow. "Yesterday," he added.

The phone guys around here really seemed most efficient. I chatted with him, and asked what voltage the system now runs on. "Fifty," he said; "and eighty when it rings." He had all the right tools too.

I was reminded of that episode forty three years ago when a Jewish gang headed up by Gerald Gable, no less, raided my apartment disguised as telephone engineers -- complete with ID cards, professional tools and, oddly, a length of hangman's rope. It was 1963 and I had just published my book on the Dresden raid.

I quietly asked my hosts, "Did you check his ID?" "Well, yes," they said, "because there's still something odd about it. We never use that line. There's no phone on it. There can't have been any report of noise on it."

A call was put through to the local area office. After a few minutes on their computer they confirmed that the call-out was one of theirs (they did not actually say kosher). "We had a complaint of noise," said the local manager. "On December 31," and then they added the clincher: "-- from that number."

An inquiry of the three occupants of the houshold elicited the obvious fact that nobody had reported a fault. It all seemed rather flatfooted, if our own Stapo will forgive the allusions to their feet.

Today somebody sends me a report from a Jewish news service (I don't normally waste my time on such things). Our much-loved Labour government's Minister for Police and Security (right) is quoted -- perhaps misquoted -- as saying to these nice folks: "David Irving is one to watch."

Ah. Things begin to click into place. Tony Blair's lot probably regret that I cannot be deported.

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Suggestion: Should British security authorities be keeping watch on British historians at the request of Jewish bodies?...

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David Irving arrest in Vienna (dossier)