KEY DOCUMENTS REMOVED FROM BRITISH ARCHIVES

This story is so strange that I have to do my usual high octane speculations about it. Ms. K.B. and Mr. V.T. and Mr. F.L.M.  all shared this story, and with all the strangeness going on in the southern hemisphere, from missing Argentine submarines to Israelis buying up land in Patagonia and Terra del Fuego, I have to wonder just what is going on. Here's the two versions of the story, though we'll be concentrating on The Guardian's version for reasons that will become apparent:

What files? Thousands of govt papers on Falklands & Troubles vanish from National Archives

Government admits 'losing' thousands of papers from National Archives

Now, if one looks at the Guardian's version of this story, a number of questions arise:

Thousands of government papers detailing some of the most controversial episodes in 20th-century British history have vanished after civil servants removed them from the country’s National Archives and then reported them as lost.

Documents concerning the Falklands war, Northern Ireland’s Troubles and the infamous Zinoviev letter – in which MI6 officers plotted to bring about the downfall of the first Labour government - are all said to have been misplaced.

Other missing files concern the British colonial administration in Palestine, tests on polio vaccines and long-running territorial disputes between the UK and Argentina.

Almost 1,000 files, each thought to contain dozens of papers, are affected. In most instances the entire file is said to have been mislaid after being removed from public view at the archives and taken back to Whitehall. (Emphasis added)

Shades of the JFK files... If you're like me, any time a government reports that it is missing files, it means that said government, for whatever reason, is hiding something. The idea of simply "losing" or mislaying files doesn't wash in my book. But then the story takes a weird twist:

The Foreign Office subsequently told the National Archives that the papers taken were nowhere to be found.

After being questioned by the Guardian, it said it had managed to locate most of the papers and return them to the archives. A couple, however, are still missing. The FO declined to say why it had taken the papers, or whether it had copies.

Other files the National Archives has listed as “misplaced while on loan to government department” include one concerning the activities of the Communist party of Great Britain at the height of the cold war; another detailing the way in which the British government took possession of Russian government funds held in British banks after the 1917 revolution; an assessment for government ministers on the security situation in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s; and three files about defence agreements between the UK and newly independent Malaya in the late 1950s, shortly before the two countries went to war with Indonesia.

The disappearances highlight the ease with which government departments can commandeer official papers long after they have been declassified and made available to historians and the public at the archives at Kew, south-west London. (Emphasis added)

In other words, these files were already public, and then removed from view, and most of them then returned.

Given the recurrence of references to "territorial disputes with Argentina", the Falklands war, and British administration, I cannot help but wonder if this sudden "removal and return" might somehow be related to the strange story that emerged at the end of last year about Israeli real estate purchases in southern Argentina, the missing Argentine submarine, and so on. Why remove and then return documents? Something must have caused some concerns, and of all the things being listed, the Argentine aspect of the documents missing seems to be a thread winding through it all. Indeed, if one were concerned that some sensitive detail might have escaped the censors vetting documents for declassification, one might create false leads and trails by removing documents relating to Zinoviev, or Northern Ireland, and so on. (The confiscation and seizure of Russian assets after the Bolshevik revolution - given the current state of emerging financial warfare between the West and that country, does have relevance.) Given the associations of southern Argentina with prominent post-war Nazi installations in that part of that country, the visits of US presidents to the same region, the presence of the Chinese there, Israel's presence there raises eyebrows, and surely would cause British intelligence and security to make "discrete inquiries".

This may be, of course, a "nothing story," but documents are not removed, and then partially returned, with some reason. My bet is that it has something to do with what is going on down there, and with some very old stories dating from the end of the war, and possibly with missing Argentine submarines and new Israeli real estate interests in the region.

See you on the flip side...

Posted in

Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and "strange stuff". His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into "alternative history and science".

14 Comments

  1. Pierre on January 9, 2018 at 8:39 pm

    or Nazi Antartica bases…Tesla experiment goes wrong, it snows in the Sahara and blows down 90,000 acres of … sand.
    really cynics, I have documentary proof that the governments never lie to us to cover up their crimes… ahhh…. ohhh, it all seems to have gone missing… and my memory is failing me.
    here is a found document if you havent heard of it (I got it last night listening to a 1997 Maxwell on Rense program). written 1862 published 1994.
    Jules Verne Paris in the 20th Century.
    http://www.exodusbooks.com/paris-in-the-twentieth-century/verne/53526/



  2. Westcoaster on January 8, 2018 at 10:54 pm

    There are many forces actively at work trying to change history. It has always been so.



  3. paraschtick on January 8, 2018 at 3:44 pm

    Who knows if they were even there in the first place? Maybe they taken out years ago, and someone is just whistleblowing now. Maybe, someone is trying to tell us to look at certain things now?

    I suspect that we know very little about the actual reality of history. So many books have been burned, papers lost (accidentally, of course … soooo many incompetents around), videos taped over in this part of our history, maybe we will never know what really went on in any time in history.

    Although there is the … chronoscope …



  4. goshawks on January 7, 2018 at 11:51 pm

    First, this sounds like the Baghdad Museum op. Take plenty of material, and then have three-quarters rescued. Mission accomplished. No one will ever notice the few absolutely critical objects/tablets that were never found…

    Second, documents should never leave the archival sections. If another agency wants to look at a particular document, they get a copy or a scan. The original stays put. ‘Losing’ original material like mentioned in the article is unforgivably poor document-management. Obviously, some papers needed to be ‘vanished’…



  5. DownunderET on January 7, 2018 at 3:09 pm

    Nah, government officials don’t lie to the people, they are honest serving government people who act in the best interests of the people.
    I can’t think of a government official I met who I didn’t like………..what a lot of malarky!!



  6. Robert Barricklow on January 7, 2018 at 11:46 am

    As if they existed?
    But, at least in an “official” capacity,
    we have agreed upon fables.



  7. Jamie on January 7, 2018 at 11:33 am

    I was born the year of the Falklands war. I spent my childhood hearing nothing but bad things about Argentinian people from older people in my family…not too dissimilar of what people in the street now say about Russia and mr Putin. A lot of spin from the lame stream media. But all in all most Brits struggle to fathom why we spend so much tax payers money on such a tiny remote island when we cannot pay nurses enough money and have no spare beds at hospitals. I have a friend who is paid far over and above the norm to teach in the Falklands….in fact most adult people are paid by the British tax payer to work and live in a little remote bubble of perfection…as there must be enough on the island to convince a lot of people to live and work so far away from their families. But it doesn’t really make sense from an economical point of view for two countries to fight over it..or for the UK to spend so much protecting it…when we struggle to stop terrorists maiming people on our own streets….except oil…we hear a lot about oil being found off the Falklands….except they spun this with Iraq…..my guess is the play for Antarctica when they get to the real stuff under the ice



    • LSM on January 7, 2018 at 3:58 pm

      oil is no longer a concept; look at the vast researves under the American Dakotas + Montana + in Venezuela- and the puny Falklands were fought over due to oil?



  8. LSM on January 7, 2018 at 10:33 am

    I think all of this goes back much farther than the disappearance of the Argentine submarine;

    what is to me not clear is: was the disapperead Argentine submarine near the Falklands before it subsequently disappeared?

    the Falklands War (or should we call it “crisis”) simply could not have been waged simply upon “national sovereignty” (how silly) of these islands; there had to have been something there that the Brits and the West wanted to get their grubby hands on-

    and does one remember (one should) the senseless torpedoing of the Argentine battleship “General Belgrano” (an old ship bought from the US navy) which was on the RUN from the Falklands sea battlefield (thanks, Margaret Thatcher gov’t) and ca. 400 sailors lost their lives- so what was that ship maybe carrying back to Argentina that might’ve been a threat to someone somewhere?-

    even though that was awhile ago history definitely repeats itself and I believe all of this has been interconnected (talk about high octane speculation)-

    Larry in Germany



    • LSM on January 7, 2018 at 11:00 am

      and if I may go into more high octane speculation, supposedely the Albert Pike letter (if it truly existed) to Giuseppe Manzzini has also been removed from the British Museum; seems like the Brits are the masterminds of removing historical info- my, my…



    • Katie B on January 7, 2018 at 6:50 pm

      Yes we probably want to get our grubby hands on it due to the grubby Nazi bases in Argentina Larry from Germany. K.B. from England.



  9. anakephalaiosis on January 7, 2018 at 7:58 am

    Fishing in MI6 memory hole is a matter of bait, and having civil servant Wormwood by hook, line and sinker.

    Screwtape’s missing “documents” have been retrieved, and can be found here:
    https://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~roehner/oci.pdf

    Turn a stone, and civil servants run in all directions like creepy-crawlies.



  10. DanaThomas on January 7, 2018 at 6:45 am

    In the digital era there is no need to remove files just to read them. I hope that historians, academics and the public will not shrug this off as just a bizarre but unsurprising bureaucratic folly. As for the Palestine papers, there must be a lot of inter-generational connections there. Ulster? Lots of mind control and financial things going on, with “Atlantic” connections. The Falklands… ah, yes, that staging post for Antarctica and, according to some, connected with some weird technology. Somebody in the power structure is, for some reason, suddenly trying to “cover tracks”. A little late, though.



    • Lost on January 7, 2018 at 10:14 am

      DT:

      Why would any of the files from the 1920s or the 1980s be digital? There are huge libraries basically full of paper government files going back more than 100 years in the USA, just by way of example.

      No one is going to digitally scan any more than a very tiny percent any time in the near future. And said scans, though easier to copy in quantity, would just be photos.

      As purely hypothetical: Want the construction/engineering files from for the Boston public library (put up in the later 1960s or early 1970s): those are all paper blueprints, and paper supporting documentation, work orders, permits, payment schedules, materials lists.



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