February 14, 2003 (Friday),
London

I DRIVE Jessica to school; she recites to me Shakespeare's sonnet, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day? Today is Poetry Day at school.

In the evening I take her to the Spaghetti House as my Valentine "date".

February 15, 2003 (Saturday),
London -- Illinois

MAJOR crowds at Heathrow airport, I get on the plane with five minutes to spare. Arrive at Chicago, O'Hare, two p.m. local time. Pick up a rental car at National, and set off south. Bitterly cold, about ten below zero and fierce wind and snow.

February 18, 2003 (Tuesday),
Cincinnati, Ohio

8:30, A CALL from Edward Cumming of Cambridge Union with the inevitable news that they have this morning rescinded the invitation to me to lead the Debate on April 24. Two members of their executive committee, characterised by Cumming as "members of the traditional enemy" apparently held out against the invitation he had extended, and he was outvoted. I listen politely, and suggest that the opponents should be invited to state the reasons for their wanting to silence me on the floor of the Union, which is precisely what the debate is about.

Cumming emails: "Further to our conversation earlier, I am very sorry that I have been forced to do this. From a personal point of view I truly believe that the only way to resolve this is to have a fair and open debate. Unfortunately it is out of my hands. Although it must be scant consolation, I will ensure that the debate itself will still go ahead. Once again I am truly sorry that I have to do this."

February 19, 2003 (Wednesday),
Louisville, Kentucky

UP at seven and send this to K.: "You are getting into the swing of things well. Note our style of doing lists. You will find clean 'housekeeping' vital in archive work. Take a pad of paper with you and pencils next time and copy shorter extracts from documents, always noting the file number (CAB.123/1234) and document reference (e.g. GRGG.1234) and date. I am going to use my free day in Washington next week looking at the OSS file on Himmler, which has rich pickings, I remember. Interrogations of family etc."

At 3:47 pm a further email to K: "The Lord Halifax diary is extracted in FO.371/20736. You might have a look at a few files before and after this one in sequence; look for reports by Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador, on his talks with top Nazis, especially at the Nuremberg rally in September 1936, 1937, 1938." :

February 20, 2003 (Thursday),
Louisville, Kentucky

TO K. I send an audible America-Online "southern howdy" and this: "Hope you had a good day at the Public Record Office. It is always fun, you never know what you are going to find, and gradually the heavily pixellated image starts to emerge from the snow and noise."

12 -- 6 p.m. at the Kentucky Exposition fairground. ... At St Catherine's School, spoke from 8 to 10 p.m. to packed little audience.

February 21 2003 (Friday),
Louisville, Kentucky

PHONED Steve B. in New Jersey (or was it yesterday? He was a US Army interrogator at Nuremberg, who pocketed from Emil Maurice and others large quantities of original Himmler items that he has volunteered to let me see); only the second phone number works, it is his nursing-home number. He has been in it since his fall in May 2001. He knows at once who I am, is eager for me to come and see him when he is better, all his relics are however "in storage" at present.

A bad nightclub fire in Rhode Island has killed nearly one hundred party-goers, while a cameraman filmed the blaze beginning.

February 22, 2003 (Saturday),
London

AT Kentucky Expo hall at 9:30 a.m. The vast parking lots are packed, it turns out there is a Gun Show in next hall. I carry another fifty pounds of books into the hall, around a mile: arrive gasping and panting!

February 23, 2003 (Sunday),
Louisville

SNOWFALL during the night again, and hard frost this morning. Far below zero. I have to scrape the car clean before loading it in a bitterly cold wind.

February 24, 2003 (Monday),
Cincinnati

E-MAIL from lawyer Peter Laskey who reports: "The permission application is currently on hold pending the obtaining of a sealed Order of Gray J. from 14 January."

I reply: "Glad the Gray J. thing is in process. Deep, deep snow here, and another foot fell during the night. Ohio under snow, and I have 300 miles to drive tomorrow and 600 the next day. I wonder if the audiences will bother to turn up."

February 25, 2003 (Tuesday),
Columbus

SORRY to hear that Johannes Göhler died a few days ago. He was Hermann Fegelein's adjutant, and involved through his wife Ursula in the 1945 Robert A Gutierrez mystery -- the missing Eva Braun diaries and her letters from Hitler. Ken Alford told me at the Louisville show a few days ago that everybody is waiting for Robert A Gutierrez to die, so they can approach his son about this trove of missing papers…

THE Pentagon has begun "predicting" that Saddam Hussein will station civilians around his key military installations in an attempt to prevent their bombardment by the Americans (who have not historically shown themselves much disconcerted by civilian casualties, provided they are not their own.) Television commentators obediently recall, "Hussein did this in the last Gulf War: he put a military headquarters beneath a civilian air raid shelter in which over a hundred Iraqis were killed by a US missile strike." In fact 407 Iraqis were killed in the shelter, and a museum has just been erected at the site of this holocaust.

This kind of Pentagon propaganda is puerile. Adolf Hitler, somewhere, may be kicking himself for not having thought of it too: "Mr Churchill has willfully stationed civilians in Coventry, in the hope of protecting his aero-engine factories surrounding the city."

Come to that, Winston Churchill might afterwards have apologized, "Hitler deliberately moved two million refugees into Dresden, in case I decided to drop 650,000 fire bombs on the city in the space of an hour. So Hitler himself is to blame for the carnage there."

Pleasant drive across the snow covered plains, temperature around -10 degrees C all day, arriving at the Columbus location at 4 p.m., which gives me two hours for a leisurely set-up. Good evening. Organizer Iantha B. and her husband Jon have done a good job. Around forty guests at the dinner including many friends from across Ohio.

February 26, 2003 (Wednesday),
Columbus -- Arlington

I SEND this to Benté in London: "I am spending the night about 50 miles east of Columbus, driving to Washington DC later today (Wednesday), about 600 miles."

Lawyer Peter Laskey reports: "We should have the sealed Order in a few days, and will then file it at the Court of Appeal office so that the permission application can be reactivated."

This comes from Peter G. in Washington: "If you haven't heard by now, we're getting three to six inches of snow today ... maybe more tomorrow. By Washington weather standards, it's a blizzard." He suggests cancelling tomorrow's Arlington function.

I respond: "I have never cancelled an event. I always turn up. I am heading over to DC this morning."

Depart from east of Columbus around midday, and drive all afternoon towards Washington DC, snow falling much of the way.

February 23, 2003 (Sunday),
Washington -- Baltimore

OFF to the National Archives building in College Park, and work until 3 p.m. on the Himmler files they hold: OSS, CIC and CIA. John Taylor is still there, aged 84 now; he was there when I first came in 1965! What will the Archives do when he retires -- he is a vast human repository of information.

As I drive round the Beltway to Arlington, heavy snow begins to fall. The meeting is in a little church hall, it seems, with no heating and certainly no restaurant for the people to eat. By 7 or 8 p.m. some 30 or 40 have struggled through the thickening snow blizzard and filled all the chairs.

February 28, 2003 (Friday),
Arlington -- New York -- New Jersey

I REPORT to K.; he has been working for me in the London archives. "The weather gods have blitzed the latter part of my tour, but people still struggle through. Yesterday we had a two-foot snow blanket all over Washington. I drove all the previous day up from Columbus, Ohio through snow storms. When I emerged from the hall last night the car had vanished under another ten inch blanket of soft powdery snow. I had had the presence of mind to park on top of a hill with a clear get away run, so I ... got away; but traffic up to here (Baltimore) crawled at below 20 mph, it took two hours to cover the 30 miles, I got to bed around 2:30 a.m. This morning I continue the haul up to New York. Snow again forecast. . . I spent yesterday in the National Archives, copied the CIA and Fort Meade (US Army Intelligence) files on Himmler: interrogations of his brother etc."

Drive to New York, arriving 3 p.m. Coffee in the usual Cuban café. I phone Robert John, he says simply, "The usual happened, at 3 p.m. this afternoon," -- we have lost the hall -- and he has found an alternative location. He will redirect all comers. How irritating. I suppose one of the callers I had in the last few days is to blame for this.

The function moves to Holy Trinity Episcopal church. A good warm hall with enough chairs and good acoustics, rapidly filled by about 90 people. No disturbances except for the gentleman who sent an e-mail criticising the Black professor Tony Martin for speaking at my Real History function in Cincinnati in 2001; he turns up, visibly Jewish, in a baseball cap and Bill-Gates glasses, and is belligerent for a while; he comes alive again during question time, being obsessed with the Holocaust. I say that the topic bores me and I have never written on it.

March 1, 2003 (Saturday),
New York - Niagara Falls

I WRITE to Ken Alford: "Thanks for the photos [of Odilo Globocnik] which I have now been able to download and peep at; very good. You will get the credit. Please sell the original to me when you're tired of drooling over it." I continue: "I visited John Taylor at the National Archives two days ago; now 84, what an extraordinary old man! Almost touching in his solicitude, kept coming into the research room and asking if there was anything else he could do for me. Last of the old guard. I asked about John Mendelssohn: "He died ten years ago." Robert Wagner: retired years ago. Robert Wolfe: ditto. I shall return in a few weeks to College Park and I hope to find him still there. He mentioned you had spoken with him recently, and talks well of you."

Set out at 11:30 a.m., drive all afternoon and evening to Niagara Falls. The ice and snow are vanishing, except in the mountains.

From 2 to 6 p.m. a good function at the hotel. Only about 25 have struggled through the ice and snow, it seems. Temperature has fallen to 17 degrees F when we emerge, i.e. about -10C. Bitterly cold wind.

March 3, 2003 (Monday),
Niagara Falls - Buffalo -- Key West

UP at 6 a.m. It is now around -1 degree F (or -18 C). I load the car and drive to the airport. $160 charge for the excess baggage, inevitable. They also make me remove two pounds from the case as it is that much overweight. Yes, two pounds. Email from one person stopped by INS Border officials from attending yesterday's function., and I know there were more.

Buffalo airport to Newark, heading down to Key West to retrieve my mail. The New York Times today reports that a Cuban gunboat, flying the Cuban flag, sailed unhindered into Key West (the Hyatt marina) yesterday and tied up right next to the US Customs dock, its crew marching off down Duval Street complete with loaded AK47s, looking for somebody to surrender to. So much for Homeland Security.

Arrive at Key West's little airport 6 p.m. Juan Trippe's bust still on his pedestal outside.

I have checked into a cheap houseboat motel for three days. Unpacking the baggage, I find that all four items have been opened and searched by Tom Ridge's security authorities, no doubt at Buffalo, and shoddily resealed with ordinary Scotch tape. ("Your items have been selected for searching…" -- no doubt randomly, ho-hum). A red-white-and-blue printed leaflet is left in each bag to tell me that it has been searched, and that if it has been necessary to smash the locks to gain access I have no claim for compensation against them. But I never have any valuables, and the cases are unlocked anyway.

One or two items inside have been damaged in the repacking. Heigh-ho. So much for Homeland Security, as said: the border with Canada is secure, so that visitors to a lecture on WWII history are turned back; our baggage is searched, our shoes are taken off and X-rayed; but Fidel Castro's gunboat can sail right into a naval base unstopped.

March 5, 2003 (Wednesday),
Key West

Today's Miami Herald reports that the FBI have closed down eleven "removal firms" in the Miami area, and arrested their directors for fraud: They had been offering cheap removals, often on the Internet, then held customers' possessions to ransom for thousands of dollars more than the agreed price. The police found warehouses full of goods that people could no longer afford to retrieve from these "removers".

What a nightmare -- most of the victims are elderly folks moving to Florida for the autumn of their lives. The arrests followed two years of detective work and elaborate sting operations. Most of the villains, the newspaper reports, are Israelis, and some had the -- what is the word, chutzpah? -- to protest that they had been picked on because of their Middle East origins.

The story catches my attention only because of my interest in the origins of global anti-Semitism, and my suspicion that they are often the victims of their own villainy.

March 6, 2003 (Thursday),
Key West

THE capture a few days ago of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Rawalpindi, Pakistan -- seemingly on March 1, 2003 -- baffles me and attracts my general skepticism. To me it seems evident that the news has been manufactured just in time to mask the stunning reverse that American war plans have suffered at the hands of the democratic Parliament in Turkey.

A correspondent informs me that Porter Goss, the Republican chairman of the US House Intelligence Committee, has even proclaimed, "This is equal to the liberation of Paris in the Second World War." [see AP, March 2] "But it's not that simple," suggests my friend. "Frankly, the official story of his arrest is a mass of lies, cover-ups and contradictions. It is highly likely Mohammed was not arrested on that day. What exactly did happen when is unclear, but the details of his arrest suggest something very disturbing is going on."

News manipulation, that's what: with the mainstream news media just gobbling up the propaganda-spaghetti, one strand at a time.

THIS evening Tom Brocaw announces on NBC Television news that the Pentagon has "learned" that Saddam Hussein has obtained US and British Army uniforms, and they predict that he intends to dress up his soldiers in them to commit atrocities against civilians which he will then blame on the invading American forces. In the old days, of course, nobody could mistake an Iraqi for an Englishman, whether in uniform or not. This propaganda Erguss is getting too infantile for words, and it speaks volumes for the intelligence of NBC viewers if they will believe it.

Ananonova webpage (June, 2002) on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's location