LIEUTENANT COLONEL JOHN LASH, M.B.E.
24th January, 2004
In January this year, 2004, I lost a true friend, mentor, tutor and taskmaster.
My own story in the context of our association had begun much earlier,
in 1952, when I entered Sandhurst, which had now evolved from the pre-war
Royal Military College to become the Royal Military Academy. Astonishingly,
on reflection today, this was no more than seven years after the end of
Second World War. Many of the much-decorated officers and senior ranks
went on to greater things. Those who had sur-vived a major war in which
they had seen action, and friends killed, maimed and wounded, were somehow
different, generally quietly endowed with a mature reflective detachment
and depth of character. Sadly, only later campaigns such as Korea, Malaya,
Borneo or the Falklands have seemed able to recreate their kind. It was
an environment quite different to that created today by the simplistic,
superficial, sixth-form schoolboy idealism characterised by the aptly
nick-named British Prime Minister "Bambi" Blair. These were
real men. John Lash was one such.
My first meeting with John Lash came much later,
in the Autumn of 1988. I had already made the acquaintance of the late
Dr Kitty Little, a retired scientist, a few months before. Once every
two or three months she invited a few like-minded individuals, who were
deeply concerned for Queen and Country, to spend the day in discussion
at her flat in Oxford. So it was that one day I found myself sitting
on a sofa next to a quiet, keen-eyed man in his late 60s; greying hair,
compactly built, slightly under medium height. Kitty had come across
his name at a meeting of the Military Commentators' Circle, in London,
and persuaded him to travel to Oxford from his home near Cheltenham.
One suspects he had gone there, a professional amongst amateurs, rather
against his better judgement, and I recall that it was the only occasion
that he attended. As the conversation veered round to the Middle East
and the influence of Political Zionism, he leaned across and said quietly
"I think we had better get together some time". Soon afterwards
he met me, in his little blue Ford Escort, on a traffic island above
the M5 Motorway. From there he guided me to a sec-luded cottage on a
hillside on the outskirts of Cheltenham. Walled gardens sprawled organically
and pleasantly beneath the trees. In the garage stood the red E-type
Jaguar that he no longer drove; symbolic of an earlier exis-tence. Thus
began a long friendship and an even longer learning curve, during which
John Lash would often refer to me with a twinkle in his eye as "Bluebell",
the radio code for the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers
from which I was now retired.
John Noel de Warenne Lash was born in Sydenham, Kent, on the 28th December,
1917. After the 1914 1918 War his father became an official in the Palestine
Administration, which functioned under a Mandate from the League of
Nations of 1923. The young Lash was brought up in the biblical lands
amongst both Arab and Jewish contemporaries. Even at such an tender
age he acquired an early interest in the history and conflicts around
him, of the subtle machinations of individuals like the Attorney-General,
Norman Bentwich, O.B.E., M.C., towards the ultimate objective of an
Israeli "State"; something, like the treatment of his father,
he always remembered, because changes in the Administration, which John
Lash later saw as all part of this process, curtailed his father's employment
in Pales-tine and cut short John's public school education. He often
reflected hum-orously that he and his headmaster had both concluded
that he had been born to "kill", so the problem was resolved
when he was accepted for the Royal Military College, Sandhurst! Commissioned
into the South Staff-ordshire Regiment in October, 1939, he found himself
on a rather seden-tary tour in Northern Ireland with the prospect of
a regimental move from Ireland sometime in the future to an even quieter
location in the far North. His personal drive and "get-up-and-go"
personality did not take easily to life in a regiment still geared to
an earlier war, to the leisurely formalities; to "brown boots and
battledress" as he called this old style regimental soldiering.
After the military shambles in France, in 1940, and the evacuation from
Dunkirk, Prime Minister Winston Churchill had decided that the British
Army must be placed on a harder, more professional footing, which was
the beginning of a new phase in the career of John Lash. He soon seized
the opportunity to volunteer for the newly formed Independent Companies
that pre-dated the Commandos, and was trained at the original S.T.C.
Lochailort, before the main Commando training depot opened at Achnacarry.
It was also to sever close ties with his regiment, which was to prove
costly in later years. So it was that John Lash became one of the first
new Army Commandos - as opposed to the Royal Marine Commandos with their
well-established operational links with the Royal Navy.
In 1942 John Lash joined Durnford Slater's 53 Commando after they returned
from their successful part in the Dieppe Raid. Brigadier Peter Young,
the military historian, also in 3 Commando became a friend and influence
that John Lash never forgot. During the Allied assault on Sicily in
July, 1943, John Lash proved himself at an early stage to be a determined
Commando officer, but then became a prisoner of war during the attempt
to capture what would become known as "3 Commando Bridge".
Taken to Northern Italy, he soon escaped and after numerous esc-apades
found himself with a large party of other escapees by the southern coast
of the Adriatic, about to be handed back to the Germans by the local
Carabinieri. The Italian Armistice was imminent but the Captain of Cara-binieri
remained fearful of German punishment or worse it he failed in his duty.
John Lash informed him that the British would certainly shoot him if
he did not fail. A boat was found for the party finally to escape to
safety behind Allied lines, for which initiative John Lash was awarded
the M.B.E. for gallantry. In fact John Lash was captured and escaped
three time over this period. He told an amusing story about how he drank
the Gestapo off-icers, who had arrived to interrogate him, under the
table. On another occa-sion, shortly after being captured, he was sitting
with three German Army officers, talking, when he learned of another
of their number whom he knew well since they had been at school together
in Palestine. They also told him that they could not understand why
Great Britain had gone to war in the way it had, which was an interesting
reflection on the subsequent fate of Europe, after 1945.
Seething with frustration back in the operational
holding Comman-do at Wrexham, he was found by the Commanding Officer
of 41 Royal Marine Commando, who was looking for replacement officers
after the many casualties of D Day, and so became the Adjutant of 41
Royal Marine Commando for the assault on Walcheren in December 1944.
For some reason the Royal Marines called John Lash, an Army Commando
amongst their number, "Nero". In later years, they always
greatly welcomed this Army officer to many post-war Royal Marine reunions
He was also given one of the few places allocated to the Royal Marines
at the British Army Staff College, in Camberley, Surrey. This was a
rare distinction, but there his fortunes appeared to change. He told
the story of a Directing Staff whose philosophy was embedded in the
pre-1939 era. John Lash had lately returned from the battlefront. There,
ground-air cooperation had been honed to a fine art in the later stages
of the war. Air support had been avail-able over the radio in minutes,
if not seconds, from the flying circus overhead. He recalled that the
teaching at Camberley was more redolent of dropping a message in a bottle
over the side of a bi-plane. This clash of philosophies was said to
have played a part in John's demise at the Staff College. The more colourful
version was that this had followed a marked disagreement with one of
the Directing Staff, apparently exacerbated by the use of an empty bottle.
There was probably truth in both versions, or per-haps one led to the
other. Who knows!
Life back with the South Staffordshire Regiment in the early post-war
era seemed even less attractive than before. Besides, since John had
quit the Regiment for the Army Commandos, he was regarded as having
"defected", which meant that he had forfeited any serious
chance of future command. Such is the tribal system. Consequently, as
John put it, they couldn't make up their minds what to do with him.
Then the opportunity arose to study Russian at St John's College, Cambridge,
where his tutor was the eminent Elizabeth Hill. This laid the foundations
for what were eventually to become many years of a unique career as
a serving army officer in the intelligence community. First, there were
one or two obsta-cles. An early tour for this expensively trained Russian-speaking
officer was in the Gold Coast. Even so, this enabled him to widen his
horizons. The African colonies were fast approaching premature independence
under the "winds of change" doctrine brought about by pressure
from across the Atlantic. The consequences of this we know only too
well, but then it was possible to discuss the implications of coming
events rationally with tribal leaders. Then came a tour with a Staffordshire
Territorial Army Battalion to become, as I recall, the Regular Army
Second-in-Command. These were the halcyon days that preceded the later
nuclear doctrine of the Cold War. It was still "1945"; many
Territorials had served through the War, and decorations for gallantry
abounded much as they had done amongst the staff at Sandhurst. The serious
training for the new era had yet to evolve and it was much a matter
of old comrades simply keeping their hands in. John Lash soon discovered
that certain hands had also been in the till when he spotted the impossible
mathematics of training day accounts. Discreet consultation with a Special
Investigation Branch contact in Chester resulted in John Lash assuming
command of the Battalion, whilst the noble Lord whom he temporarily
replaced simply signed a large cheque. Honour was thus restored without
any scandal but, whereas John's predecessor who had condoned the situation
had been seen off with a armful of silver from a grateful Battalion,
John left in his turn with no more than a small silver salver to mark
the occasion.
Thereafter John Lash became more and more immersed
in the field of Intelligence, and for the latter part of what was to
become a unique career worked alongside the Government Communications
Headquarters (G.C. H.Q.), in Cheltenham. By the time he retired, in
1983, he had provi-ded considerable input to papers considered by the
Joint Intelligence Com-mittee and earned great respect both in London
and in Washington. His thirty six years in the intelligence community
had given him a deep under-standing of his subject and unerring skill
for seeing into the cause of events. He was a skilful if unorthodox
intelligence officer who was impa-tient with incompetence and lack of
intellectual penetration and analytical thought. His boisterous jollity
and fund of anecdotes never detracted from a serious determination to
pass on his knowledge and experience to those prepared to listen and
debate. Nor did it detract from a meticulous, syst-ematic and highly
disciplined approach to his work. Had he still been serving today he
would probably have been able to prevent the recent con-fusion between
the Intelligence Committee and the Prime Minister's Office about so-called
Weapons of Mass Destruction, and I shudder to think what his comments
would have been on the "45" minute statement in the doss-ier.
It was interesting during John's retirement years that, when Chapman
Pincher, the prolific author on espionage with books such as Their Trade
Is Treachery, met John, it was Pincher who had made the request and
called on John at his Cheltenham home; not the other way round!
John Lash's particular skill was in the examination and interpreta-tion
of Marxist Leninist philosophy, and the organisation and operation of
the Soviet Politico-Military System. At the outset he recognised that
it was essential to understand intelligence that came to hand in the
course of his work, the thinking behind it, and to undertake the essential
analysis, rather than just pass on translations cold for others to interpret.
As he confirmed in later years in conversation with university academics,
it was clear to him that purely linguistic skills in the Russian language
were wholly inadequate for the task. The spoken and written word of
Soviet Politico-Military Doctrine was quite different. The terminology
and expression were so convoluted that it had to be interpreted in a
quite different way from the literal Russian. His life long interest
in history greatly helped him as he applied detailed research into how
and why the Soviet Politico-Military System thought and operated with
marked differences to Governments and Armed Forces in the West. To enable
him to penetrate the mind of his adversary he set about learning and
analysing the history of Marxist philosophy, its roots in the 18th Century
Revolution in France, through the Dekabrist uprising in Russia in the
1820s, the Europan Revolutions of 1848, the insurrection in Paris in
1870, through to the Bolshevik Revolu-tion of 1917 and the Stalinist
developments in its aftermath. At the same time he demanded absolute
professionalism from his small military contin-gent, including knowledge
of the detailed organisation, deployment and operation of the Soviet
Armed forces upon which much of their work had to be based. He also
took pains to help Intelligence Officers without mili-tary experience
to understand the peculiarities of the Soviet Politico-Military System,
so it was not surprising that others were sent down to Cheltenham to
learn these intricacies.
In his dry, cultured military tones John would occasionally express
his profound dislike of civilians, invariably chortling as he said so,
but he had a great understanding of ordinary people, and he was well-liked
by those civilians with whom he worked, who were fascinated by his person-ality.
He voiced profound disapproval of the lack of military control over
Intelligence, just as he was contemptuous of the organisation and control
of Intelligence within the structure of the Armed Forces. This reflected
his advanced thinking and impatience with the lack of professionalism
in the military establishment as a whole. It also revealed his general
dislike of the Civil Service. Not without reason. When he and other
escaped prison-ers of war were greeted in London, they were also informed
that those who had held only acting rank whilst in captivity would only
receive pay of their substantive rank for the period. Little has changed!
In retirement, from the first floor study overlooking the gardens of
his cottage, John discreetly maintained his Intelligence contacts at
home and abroad. But, although I learned much in conversation with him,
he was always acutely conscious of the absolute confidentiality of his
earlier work as a profes-sional. Retirement enabled him to continue
his research into the history of revolution and conflict, and the continuity
of the conspiracy and subversive forces behind it to the present day.
So it was, after our meeting in late 1988, that my own education at
the feet of the Master began - I did sit on the floor once or twice.
I listened and made notes during regular visits to Cheltenham. My draft
papers were returned in the post, or handed over, liberally endorsed
with comments and corrections in the familiar blue ink, underlined in
red. The elusive convolutions of Soviet Doctrine could be endlessly
frustrating: "Yes, but it's not quite like this" . . . "Before
that, you must study this". And so it went. All the while John's
loyally humor-ous wife, Pamela, would ply us with coffee and occasional
throwaway comments to me such as "If you don't like it, you shouldn't
have joined!" Then would come a welcome drink, followed by a leisurely
lunch, and then more study. As the day passed, cats would roam in and
out of the room; the regal ginger Tom, Sigfried, would pose before the
electric fire; the haughty Persian, Prudence, would jump up on to John's
desk and scatter the papers. Later there would be the faithful Thomas,
and Cholmondeley. With the collapse of the Soviet Union from 1989 and
the illusion that Communism was "dead and gone", such studies
tended to be seen as irrele-vant. With unerring perception, John turned
his attention to the Middle East. He also saw that the Intelligence
effort, inspired from the United States, was being diverted profitably
to financial and commercial ends. He foresaw clearly the serious deficiencies
that would inevitably arise with the run-down of the formal intelligence
structure, as we have since seen in the case of Afghanistan and the
Middle East.
In Summer, John and I might sit out under the trees for a lunch of fresh
bread and cheese with a glass of wine. As we looked out over the adjoining
fields he would discourse on the ravages of chemicals on the environment.
Another of his interests was the nature of society generally and the
shaping of attitudes reflected by television soaps. Shamelessly exploiting
Pamela's hospitality, I brought a succession of like-minded individuals
to meet John. Without exception they listened transfixed. Dis-cussion
flowed. Questions on any issue were answered with John's almost mechanical
logic and insight. The benefits of these encounters were never wasted,
or forgotten. At about the time I met him, John had been called on by
those inveterate door-knockers, the Jehovah's Witnesses. Having pol-itely
seen off his visitors, John asked them to send their "first eleven".
They duly arrived but after John had shown them the fallaciousness of
their arguments, the visits ceased. On one occasion I took David Icke
to meet John in the days before Icke's lecture tours became something
of a circus. In spite of the publicity David is a surprisingly normal,
rational and courteous individual. After listening as David expounded
his spiritual and theological theories, John excused himself. When he
returned he placed some eight large volumes on the table and said quietly
"When you've studied those you'll understand what it is all about".
John was experiencing increasing deafness as
a consequence of his war service. In his late seventies he began to
suffer from progressive spinal arthritis. As he and Pamela grew increasingly
concerned by animal welfare questions, John also concentrated his efforts
into research on the religions. As well as being one of the very few
genuine authorities on Soviet Politico-Military Doctrine, he now acquired
an astonishing know-ledge of the history of religion going back to the
beginning of recorded time. When I had checked the military records
I discovered that John Lash had not been promoted Lieutenant Colonel
until his late forties. The normal age is about 38 - 42. But for regimental
taboos and his later specialisation I have no doubt that he would have
been promoted much earlier and risen much higher in rank. It had been
a short-sighted and scandalous waste. As he passed the age of eighty
the deafness worsened and the arthritis tightened its grip. For the
last two years of his life communication became extremely difficult.
Towards the end of 2003 his condition worsened and he was taken to hospital.
On the 15th January, 2004, this truly remarkable and seriously underrated
and under-recognised man simply faded away.
Barry Turner
Magnos homines virtute metimur, non fortuna
- We estimate great men by their virtues, not by their fortunes.
Cornelius Nepos
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