The intercommunication afforded by satellites had made the world a debating forum in which a nation's domestic squabbles could suddenly become a part of international affairs. The capacity of Africa to reach into the broadcasting system of the West had long been a source of anger in the United States, where the CNN satellite launched over Egypt presented an alternative view of world affairs that was readily accessible to much of the American public. In Europe it had first become apparent with the violation of the 2-minute silence at the Cenotaph.505Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡwjxIkSm8tp
MI5 and other British law enforcement agencies regarded intrusions on to Britain's domestic airwaves as a kind of cultural aggression which had to be prevented; but how? The answer as that in the present state of international law, and with the present proliferation of DBS (direct broadcasting via satellite), CTV (cable television) and VCR (video cassette recorders) there was nothing that could be done to stop access to British TV screens by African propagandists. The war of the airwaves had begun; a war in which the West, with its burgeoning network of communications, was far more vulnerable than Africa, with is relative paucity of both transmitters and receivers. Africa also had the advantage that the great majority of the ground stations that fed the satellites with programs were situated in the equatorial belt.
All of this was well known to ex-Signals Major Ayotunde in Lagos as he chaired the first meeting of the SoP committee for Africa. Ayotunde had decided that SoP was not tough enough for Africa, faced with a brutal, powerful anti-black regime in the south; nor was it efficient enough to deal with the sophisticated regimes in the north. After the Central African Republic meeting he had therefore carefully worked out his own plans in preparation for this more executive session in his own region. He had little difficult in imposing on them a thoroughly muddled and rather frightened group of African leaders who had suddenly found themselves, as they had so long ago demanded, totally de-linked from Europe, but facing a hostile and aggressive South African now militarily linked to Europe and the U.S.
Ayotunde was frank about the economic disaster that de-linking had produced for Africa, which was what he had expected and was why he had ordered Nigeria to abstain on the Central African Republic's resolution originally. The industries of Africa were essentially a living part of the Western economy and could not survive separation from it. The rural areas, he said, had gradually been successfully reverting to the ancient tribal ways in farming, medicine, education and local government. They were doing quite well, though overstraining Africa's fragile soil by their efforts, yet they could not feed all the new mouths that had drifted to the cities, and they surely could not--would not---feed the cities at the prices governments fixed for their produce. "The result is extremely destabilizing, especially for governments that exist in cities, as most do. This past year alone, there have been food riots in ten African cities, including here in Lagos; there are epidemics of cholera and other killer diseases in almost every town of any size. If something is not done this continent will become ungovernable by civil or military authority.
"That must be prevented at all costs or we will have the old colonialists back, or, worse, the racist regime in the south taking us over in its renewed alliance with Great Britain. What we must do is clear. We must at once get to our cities food, medical supplies and later, spare parts for our industries. I have consulted with Latin American and Asian governments, but there is only one source of surplus grain--Argentina--and they have insisted that it is not for sale to we Africans. Thus we must look to Europe and North America, and first of all it must be to Europe because of nearness in distance and history. That is a very unpleasant, unwelcome conclusions but it is a fact we must face, and I believe we can face it successfully.
He explained this self-confidence by telling how he had been studying European public opinion----and finding it remarkably divided: "During the last few weeks since our High Commissioner was withdrawn from London, I have arranged to get selections from the news output of Eurotelevision and particularly the BBC. I must tell you that I feel infinitely better informed about British opinion than I did when I relied on our Foreign Office telegrams. And it is British opinion that is the key to any solution, as it was the Court of St. James that above all created the breach between the West and Africa. They had no difficulty in persuading the Americans to be partners in this, but they found the Europeans less willing to go along with them. I believe it will be possible for us to force the British to change and eventually abandon their policy."
The Zambian minister asked what Ayotunde meant by "forcing" the British.
"I have no intention," the President replied, "of making the mistake of the Irish Republican Army in trying to shoot our way to our objectives. I lived in England for two years, down in Dorset, where the Signals College is, and I think I have some ideas of what makes the Englishman tick. He is more easily moved by pity than terror; he will do more to avoid inconvenience than to escape danger.
"I've been watching the televised debates in the House of Lords, and the reactions of the City of London to the Government's imperialism; there is no doubt that British opinion is deeply divided on this issue. Other European nations, particularly France and Spain, are also distrustful of British leadership and policies, which they have denounced in their Europarliament.
"We must therefore appeal to the British people's sense of fair play and compassion for the poor and hungry; but we should back this up by showing that we are not negligible because we are poor, and that disastrous consequences flow from any attempt to cut off one's country or race from the poor majority of mankind.
"We must make this appeal to the British and European community through the eyes and ears of the modern community---its TV and radio. We have already shown that we can intervene directly in the British television service---which is what we did at the Cenotaph parade a few days ago. There are now plans to follow this up on a major scale through direct satellite broadcasts, using the ground transmitter in our neighbor Gabon which will operate through the French satellite on a spare channel that was especially and covertly modified for us before the Guianans launched it last month."
President Ayotunde then briefly outline the programs that he intended to use in the immediate future: the first series of broadcasts would be on the collapse of the modern sector, the one proud moment of European settlement in Africa. In addition to this appeal to shame there would be an appeal to pity for the multitudes starving in the cities.
The second series would be an appeal to the Green parties and conservationists. This series was not intended to arouse pity for the starving, but to arouse fear among the survivors, especially in the West, that they inherit a bankrupt Africa because the pressure of poverty was destroying the land, the forests, the rivers, the wildlife, and ultimately, the human beings who lived on it.
Each program in each series, according to Ayotunde's military style, would have a specific appeal for appropriate assistance to relieve some part of the disaster that had just been displayed. This assistance would be requested as a right from fellow human beings; there would be no promises of thanks or gratitude, but some hint of retribution if obligations were not met. "The discipline of the lifeboat must be maintained."
This brought the President to the sharp end of his proposals: if the persuasion of pity were not enough, some use of force or fear would be needed. Ayotunde immediately made it clear that he fully expected to have to use some measure of terror, but he had already concluded that in Europe, and especially in England, the IRA style of assassination and gun-toting terror was totally counterproductive. Such measures would be used only when all else failed---as it surely would fail when dealing with the Republic of South Africa.
"I believe we can introduce a new inducement which I will "inconvenience terror." This will demonstrate that the well-organized, computerized, automatized world of the urban West cannot run smoothly while ignoring and repressing the starving people of the world's largest continent. This will be particularly effective in England.
"But the organization of the necessary form of underground to carry out any kind of terror is a highly skilled and dangerous job. For this I have selected Captain Mayo, my Chief of Staff, who has trained with underground movements in Namibia and the Arab world. He reports to me as Commander-in-Chief, not as Head of State, and is independent of the checks and balances of civil government. The Black Hand commando which he leads is not under civil law. Captain Mayo's loyalty is not to the government of the day, nor solely to Nigeria, but to Africans everywhere, the new world's proletariat, the true solidarity of the poor.
"I shall ask him to speak to each of you, especially the front-line states on the borders of South Africa, and I hope he will work out wiht you how the Black Hand can be organized in each of your states so that we can take on and defeat by appropriate means our enemies in the West and their even more formidable and brutal allies occupying the southern tip of our continent.
"Can we truly perform this task? The answer is, fortunately, yes. In America there are 15 million citizens of African descent, in Britain, 2 to 3 million; and today we have the technical means as never before of mobilizing this force and forging awkward brigades, under the command and instruction of experts, to defy and discommode that white elite which has for so long imposed its will on 4/5 of the world's population.
Ayotunde admitted that the Republic of South Africa was a much harder nut to crack. No one could doubt that its response to any subversion would be nasty, brutal, and prompt. But, numerically the blacks outnumbered whites by 4 to 1 in the Republic; and only about 1/4 of the whites were fitted to fight for their country. Even these few were strung out thinly along the borders to repel invaders. The Black Hand would focus on building a powerful guerilla army within those borders, armed with the most modern weapons from around the world. The racists could be destroy from within by Africans alone, without any outside help.
This dream fulfilment was the climax of the meeting, and it left most of the Africans feeling that at last they had found a leader who could stand up to the whites in the South and in the West. There was still some doubt about whether the half-traditional, half modern African economies would survive, but there was much less doubt that in the Black Hand they had the potential of a strong, continent-wide organization that could strike fear into the heart of the racist regime.
Ayotunde's explanation of the so-called inconvenience terror directed against the British and the Europeans was heard with somewhat less interest. The worst thing about the British in the Nigerians' eyes was surely not their colonialism, it was their present naval alliance with the Republic of South Africa: would the inconvenience terror break up that alliance? Most of the Africans round the table thought not and so they responded to the proposed measures against Britain and in aid of their kith and kin in Brixton or Toxteth with the modified enthusiasm of a Sunday school class subscribing to overseas missions.
But they were impressed by the account that Captain Mayo gave of the secret communication system that he'd already set up with black immigrants resident in Europe. They didn't fully understand what he told them about short-burst messages across the 3,000 miles that separated them from London, but they could surely visualize cool young blacks walking around London or Liverpool listening on their Walkman cassette players to messages from the Black Hand telling them what to do to inconvenience and humiliate the proud and now unfriendly British.
Ayotunde's strategy depended on his ability to command secretly his 'overseas army'---the black immigrants in Europe and especially in Britain. This was done by means of the short-burst radio transmissions, about which Mayo had learned something at the Signals College in Dorset and which had been perfected by the U.S. Army. Through the Black Hand's connections with American members of ARM Mayo had obtained the very sophisticated trans-oceanic system that he needed. Essentially, this system enabled radio messages, usually digitized, to be transmitted at immense speed---1,000 words could be sent in a single burst of some thirty seconds. These transmissions were therefore almost impossible to monitor or trace by random search. The intended recipient would record the short burst on a floppy disc or tape which in turn could be fed at more normal speeds through a computer or word processor for a printout. Obtaining the printout was no problem since Britain had more personal computers per head of the population than any other European country, and the authorities would find it extremely hard to trace the written messages. They were then usually transmitted onwards by means of regular pop music cassettes bearing ordinary rock, jazz or American country labels and indistinguishable from the millions of such tapes listened to on portable players, their miniaturized headphones as perfect protection from unwelcome eavesdropping. The cassettes were manufactured in India and distributed to the Black Hand's rank and file in the UK over the counter of hundreds of music stores. The unsuspecting pop music industry thus became Black Hand's distribution system. The whole idea derived from Captain Mayo's experience with the Arab underground where he had seen the results of the Ayatollah Khomeini's distribution of cassettes to the mullahs---the Muslim equivalent of a pop singer.
A second and crucial part of Mayo's plan was manipulating television satellites. It was here that India provided invaluable technical assistance to the Africans, drawn from a decade of operating satellites over that country. It was an Indian-trained technician, for instant, that arranged that the satellite launched from French Guiana had a double-strength relay in the channel used by the Black Hand; once the satellite was launch nobody could alter the penetrating power of any of its channels.
The most important contribution to the Black Hand's strategy came from Africa's other Oriental ally, China, in the form of technical advice on how to interfere with computer systems---which was ultimately the basis of the inconvenience terror. The United States government had decided in the early 1980s to withhold modern sophisticated computer technology from Red China and thus ensured that China alone built its own computers. To do that the Chinese had studied all the Western systems meticulously in a little known institute devoted to comparative computer technology.
It was to this discreet building in Baoping in remote Manchuria that Captain Mayo's suggestion that two black computer programmers, thrown out of work in Britain by the new employment rules, traveled for a crash course in the art of computer manipulation. The art had first grabbed public attention in the 1970s when American phone freaks discovered how to call all over the globe without ever paying one red cent, or, more mischievously, how to tie up the vast Los Angeles telephone system for hours on end. Then they graduated to using the telephone and a modem (MOdulator-DE-Modulator, which translates telephonic numerical commands into binary code) to break into thousands of computer mainframes.
This was usually done just for kicks, but in 1983 (one year before the African-Western hostilities began) the film War Games drew public attention to the dramatic dangers of a situation in which a teenager might break into the computerized command system of America's nuclear deterrent forces. As a result, more and more sophisticated electronic locks on computer mainframes were devised and installed, providing the Chinese with ever new challenges, to most of which their quite remarkable expertise was equal. On their last day at the Chinese institute the two graduates were taught how, from any phone in the world (not just Africa), they could tap into the master computer at Baoping to get advice or enlightenment on matters to do with computer manipulation.
Despite the bearded portrait over the entrance to the building it was much more like Buddhism than Marxism.505Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡm8h0SdUe61
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The TV blitzkrieg, or Battle of the Airwaves, began soon after the violation of the 2-minute silence at the Cenotaph with disjointed interruptions of national programs which served notice that Africa existed out there and had something to say. After a few days they settled down into a series of one-minute spots, still inserted into national programs, which very briefly told of some deprivation of Africa and then altered viewers to the more extensive coverage obtainable via Africa's own satellite.
This, naturally, led to a flurry of activity by governments to see if they could prevent broadcasts from being generally received. The British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, asked the Director-General of GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) and the Chairman of the BBC Board of Governors urgently to report on how these intrusions were being made and how they could be prevented. The BBC, with its nose for political advantage, replied promptly to PM Thatcher, while GCHQ was mired in a morass of red tape. International law on this subject was quite clear, however; governments had no right to prevent international broadcasts from being received from space though they might control their onward passage by terrestrial broadcasting. What this meant in practice was that in Britain, for instance, Parliament could try to dissuade and as a last resort forbid the BBC and ITV from carrying the broadcasts, but they could not prevent them from being received direct by anyone with a suitable dish aerial, or being carried by anyone with a cable TV franchise, or being circulated to individuals on videocassettes. Very early on the European associates of SCAN announced that they could carry a selection of the African broadcasts over their worldwide system, just as the headquarters in Los Angeles had long provided excerpts from the CNN satellite over the Central African Republic.
In the long run no Western European government ever attempted to ban the broadcasts, but the unfounded rumors that they might do so surely helped to promote interest in them. The European public wasn't disappointed when in mid-November of 1985 a series of 'Reports from Africa' began to appear on Channel 3 of the French satellite. Technically there was some roughness, but Africans have always had a natural aptitude for photography and now that they were supplied (by China) with first-class equipment and unlimited film stock after years of shortage, their genius flourished. They soon reached the hearts and minds of Europeans with pictures of the melancholy, savage, and often repellent beauty of the decaying modern world incongruously set down in Africa. The beauty and skill of the photography drove home the force of the message that was, as President Ayotunde had ordained, an appeal for assistance asked for as a right from fellow human beings.
The first week of the series concentrated on the urban scene throughout Africa and drove home the point that the exploding cities were not truly a proper part of indigenous tribal Africa, but rather abandoned offshoots of the modern international trading world. Cut off from that world they were like beached whales, quickly endangering the environment as they rotted.
The first program, which was brutally honest about the failure of the African authorities, showed scenes from Nairobi and Lagos---two cities many Europeans knew well---depicting the collapse of the essential services of a 20th century city. As in most other African cities the whole credit system had collapsed and trade was largely reduced to local barter. Modern machinery could not be properly serviced and elevators were not working in 20-story buildings; computerized banks were reverting to the abacus and to account books painstakingly filled in by pen; and little messenger boys on bicycles were replacing the collapsing telephone and postal systems. The power grid worked for only a few hours a day (owing to the breakdown of badly maintained generation machinery) and this resulted in all modern water and sewerage plants proving utterly undependable. It was made horribly apparent that the more modern a city was the worse it fared; in contrast, the villages lived in an orderly traditional manner---on the brink of starvation. In the cities, malnutrition due to the lack of food supplies from either the countryside or abroad was made infinitely worse by the dysentery carried in polluted water.
At the end of each program there was an appeal for assistance delivered with any begging whine, indeed with an eerie undertone of menace. The demands were clear and easy to understand: for food, particularly temperate zone products like wheat; and for spare parts to restore some basic services---lists of requirements would be made available through UN channels right away. The closing words of the unseen narrator were always the same: Those who will not respond to our pleas must learn the hard way what we Africans know all too well." A cryptic but bone-chilling epilogue.
By the end of the first week the impact of the programs in Europe was quite apparent. Everyone who wasn't a hermit had seen at least one; they were the topic of conversation wherever two or three people were gathered together. How to respond to the appeal became the central political argument of the day.
At this time Compoll showed remarkably high viewing figures all over Europe and wide variations in popular response to the appeal---but no country showed less than 30% in favor of some kind of assistance to Africa; this figure rose to 70% in Scandinavia and Spain. Britain, the main target of the campaign, was split right down the middle with 45% favoring some non-governmental assistance, 47% against, and 8% openly neutral. The British Parliament, after consulting with the U.S., was the first to respond officially. In answer to a private notice question in the House of Commons, the Chancellor reaffirmed the rule that goods could not be exported to any defaulting country unless the Exchequer gave a certificate that it had been paid for with 'new money', i.e. earned by that country since the default. He was not prepared to bend this agreed rule. The next day, in reply to a Parliamentary question, Mrs. Thatcher refused to yield an inch, adding that it was "most inappropriate for a net food importing country like (Great Britain) to be exporting food to Africa."
France responded skillfully with a speech in the European Parliament which disclosed how much the metropolitan country was already doing for its Francophone partners (i.e., its former African colonies) and went on to say that France would gladly play her part in any action, however belated, by other nations.
Spain made it clear that its sympathy was entirely with Africa, but admonished its former Hispanic colonies in the Western Hemisphere to use their slender resources to help them. The Scandinavians, very practically, set about arranging with the Dutch for adequate shipping to carry food to Africa from the EEC surpluses.
West Germany was the last to respond because it was so divided on the issue, with the churches vociferously demanding 'bread for the poor' and the Christian Democrat government opposing any relief supplies to Africa out of loyalty to their Anglo-Saxon partners and their agreed tough strategy of forcing an economic, unconditional surrender as soon as possible on Africa. Eventually the West German Economics Minister told the Bundestag that the government was not ready to give special assistance to governments which had so mismanaged their economies and had recently withdrawn from the world's financial system. There was a virtual riot in the Bundestag but still he did not yield.
Recordings of all these hard-nosed answers were re-broadcast back to Europe by the African satellite, accompanied by the vague warning that the UK and West Germany in particular would soon have to "learn the hard way." Meanwhile, in Britain and West Germany, the churches and charities steadily built up large funds earmarked for African relief but frozen by their governments.
With considerable political acuity the Black Hand put out a special hour-long program---with German subtitles---to appeal to the conservationists and internationalists all over Europe. It was another brilliantly conceived and executed photographic essay. It used a great deal of the GEMS (Global Environmental Monitoring System) material from the United Nations Environment Program in Nairobi, which had for years been photographically surveying big areas of Africa, from three levels: satellite, aircraft, and fixed points on the continent's terrain. By running a sequence of photographs from the same area, taken at monthly intervals, the viewer was given in a matter of minutes a god's eyes view of the spread of desertification in one year; then by cutting to a man's eye level, it was possible to see by a similar sequence what this meant to a farmer's field and how it had been brought on by the relentless pressure of poverty and hunger on the overworked soil: "This farmland is lost forever, nothing will ever grow here again."
One of the most vivid sequences started with a picture of the earth taken from the moon, which then slowly zoomed in to a stationary satellite picture of Mt. Kilimanjaro. An Arab-accented voice began to explain: "This is the great Kilimanjaro water machine which since the dawn of time has brought life to the millions of mankind who live in East Africa. For millennia the great snowy peaks have stored their waters as snowdrifts till in summer it is gradually released and flows through the forests, which slow down the torrents and fall again as the great rains, which gently fertilize the whole region and replenish the snow above the timber line. Today more than hundreds of thousands of people are dependent on this carefully balanced life-giving cycle. But for how long will the mighty Kilimanjaro give life to us? As deforestation continues, we are seeing more and more death-dealing floods. In July the Thika Dam in the foothills of Kilimanjaro burst, drowning over 5,000 people and rendering hundreds of thousands homeless and landless as the flood waters wept away huts and irreplaceable topsoil. And the Thika Dam was only a fairly small dam."
The screen seemed to liquify as the camera showed the melting snowfields and their waters flowed into the rivers Kerio, Turkwel, Nzoia, Yala, Sondu/Miriu, Mara, Ewaso Ngiro, Nairobi, Thiba, Tana, Savo, Malewa, and Umba. Then coming down to earth, mountain streams were shown flowing in deep beds between woods and carefully contour-ploughed fields. Again the development of a decade or more was shown in five minutes of photographic record: the woods cut down by households needing fuel or more land for their kids to farm; the soil, no longer fed by fallen leaves or restrained by the forest root system, gradually being washed away; this erosion being hastened by the desperate attempts of the farmer to feed his family from less and less fertile soil; the land upstream becoming bare and the rainwater plunging more fiercely into the stream, which sweeps ever more soil down Mt. Kilimanjaro until what was a farm feeding a family had become a barren rockface. "It will take 400 years for to replace that topsoil; the peoples of Africa may not survive that long."
The camera then followed a great patch of ochre-colored water carrying that topsoil down the valley into one of the rivers, where it clogged the old irrigation systems, thus increasing the volume of water until a great tidal wave swept across a lake towards a newly-built dam. The camera lifted its eye to show a sign: "The Thika Dam." Then a monstrous sound of crashing masonry and rushing water and the camera came back into focus on the ruins of the dam and water cascading down the valley, carrying away whole villages, the bloated bodies of men and animals swirling along in its fierce tide.
The Arab's voice took up the story again: "That cataclysm was noticed around the world because it was sudden, violent, and vast. But gradually, quietly and unnoticed the power to Kilimanjaro's water machine is failing, and one million or so people stand in jeopardy. What does it matter to you in the affluent world that the poverty of thousands--millions---is destroying their beloved land?
"Nothing, I am sure. But be warned----there is only one world for us all to share and pass on to our children---Asians, Latins, and Europeans, too---of which Africa comprises a large part. Will you let Africa be destroyed without raising your voice in protest?"
This program had a more profound and long-term impact throughout Europe than the appeals to pity. Thousands of people who had never fully appreciated the extent to which the twin ravening lions of flood and desert were destroying Africa were moved to demonstrate against governments that were prepared to let it happen. But the program had been particularly intended to influence the German Bundestag, where the power balance seemed most likely to be shifted by appeals to Christian charity and nature conservation. The Catholic Church arranged for the film to be shown in their regular Sunday evening slot on Channel 2 of the German television network. It succeeded far better than they dared hope by its appeal to the sense of guilt among the older generation, and to the sense of self-righteousness among the young environmentalists. The next day in the Bundestag the Greens, with wide support from both the SDP and the CDU, forced an emergency debate on this issue. Intervening early in the debate, a rather junior spokesman for the government tried to make it appear that it was taking the initiative by formally permitting the churches and charities to send humanitarian aid to Africa and by actually making a government contribution. No one was fooled; the Greens had one with massive public support.
The British Parliament felt sorely let down by the Germans' U-turn, and anxiously prepared to face whatever the Africans had in mind to make them 'learn the hard way.' But the first blow came from Europe itself, though ironically it was delivered by way of the voice of the Africans. The Good Morning Europe early morning show was proceeding as usual one Monday morning on Eurostat 1 when it was interrupted by the now familiar arrogant tones of the Voice of Africa breaking in apologetically to say rather breathlessly that he had important news: "The European Court has ruled in favor of the two Nigerian deportees and against the British government whose massive deportation orders are held to be in breach of the Human Rights Convention..."
Some two hours later the court did rule so publicly. It was a grim Monday for the Government; indeed most white Britons, whether they approved of the government's policy or not, felt isolated, pilloried and wronged.
The inconvenience terror now began to spread all over Britain and into all aspects of its modern society. It almost seemed as if the breakdown in the cities of Africa was an infection carried by television and afflicting the most up-to-date parts of contemporary Britain. The symptoms began outside London in the bigger provincial cities. Quite erratically but with monotonous repetition the checkout counters at big stores and supermarkets went haywire; the bar-code readers, which itemized and priced what was sold to a customer, made ludicrously false readings, charging some unsuspecting housewife L300 for her meager weekend groceries, or turning down the local millionaire's wife because she had no credit left on her card. Every such incident meant a hold-up in that line of anything up to thirty minutes, by which time the malfunction had often spread to linked computers. the end result was usually a bad-tempered mini-riot, with a good deal of small-scale looting of the unfortunate store. Since the customers couldn't quite understand what had caused the trouble, the simplest answer was to blame the cashiers, very many of whom, in the developed world particularly, were immigrants. Under the new laws it was quite easy to shift them from their jobs, but the troubles continued unabated.
Before long the electronic fraud squad (set up after a recent string of bank robberies that had plagued the British Isles) discovered that the checkout machines were being tampered with by external commands, delivered either over the cable linking system, or by electronic signals directed into the machine itself from a pocket-sized transmitter like a cordless telephone held nearby. In spite of careful security nobody was ever convicted in a court of law, although several suspect blacks were placed in "protective custody" under the emergency regulations. Electronic signals do not leave much evidence behind, nor do telephones when they are directly locked into a computer.
It was soon made clear by the pirate broadcasts, as the satellite interventions were called by Parliament, that the inconvenience suffered at the check-out counters was designed to demonstrate to the British people what it was like to live in a collapsing technocratic society, and to show how vulnerable such societies are to the withdrawal of cooperation by any section of the community.
The inconvenience terror in Britain didn't involve guns or violence (unlike the battles with illegal African immigrants taking place in America at this time), but many British citizens were scared to see the firm ground of established practice shifting beneath their feet. The building society passbook, which was as solid as the Bank of England for many middle-class households, suddenly needed to be checked and rechecked as the computer on which members' savings accounts were recorded began to be mysteriously interfered with. This was hushed up as far as possible so as not to cause panic, but inevitably the news leaked out and, indeed, was exaggerated. The one bright spot for some families was that all those accounts made redundant in the previous years of computerization were called back by the building societies, the credit card companies, the banks and the co-ops to watch over the output of the computers and make spot checks to see if they had been tampered with electronically.
Throughout November 1985 the Black Hand ramped up pressure on British nerves, always linking the inconveniences to the particular aspect of collapsing society in African cities being illustrated by the pirate broadcasts. Thus, the night after a film showing the effect of Tanzania's defunct power grid there were a series of major disruptions to power supplies in Newcastle, Bristol, Leicester, and London. In each case the computer governing the electricity output had been penetrated so that it permitted a short surge which blew tens of thousands of fuses, hundreds of transformers, and wrecked thousands of appliances, including expensive TVs and VCRs. Perhaps the worst thing about this episode was that the electricity boards could give no guarantee to frightened customers (or frightened insurance companies) that it would not happen again at any of one of the thousands of power stations. Like so much of the inconvenience terror it really did scare people. In fact, scared them so much that it led to hatred of the alleged culprits of the terrorist acts---the blacks---and to insistent demands that they should be segregated and not permitted to come near sensitive points such as power stations, bank computers, supermarkets, or respectable white neighborhoods.
So 'private initiative and common sense' was brought to bear, as Parliament had suggested, and the division of Britain into black and white areas became that much more rigid. Without any publicity, Parliament opened a series of 'transit camps'---known to blacks as concentration camps---for any illegal immigrants they could find (most had gone to ground). They were eventually filled up with legal black immigrants who had lost their jobs and their homes, or whose homes "private initiative and common sense" had decreed were unsuitable for blacks. As a measure of protection against electronic sabotage all this shifting of people was utterly useless, however. The information network was by now so complete that it was possible to tap into it at nearly any point and ride an electronic expressway to any other point in the globe.
No telephone company in the world had devised an electronic lock that could not be picked by an expert, and British Telecom was a prime target for the Black Hand. They used their power over it to stop newspaper presses. This was done by the same tactics that had closed the Westminster and Whitehall telephone exchanges, applied on this occasion to the lines of communication between the Fleet Street offices of the London newspapers and their printing plants outside the London metro. Meticulously next day Black Hand apologized on its TV satellite to readers who had not got their newspapers, but reminded them that there were virtually no newspapers in Africa because there was no newsprint.
According to Compoll, almost 90% of the British population had watched some of the pirate broadcasts and expected to continue to do so because they gave useful information "about the kind of people Britain is up against, and what they'll do to us next." These broadcasts had indeed become the only early warning system of what the enemy's intentions were and so were treated with grave seriousness by the Government. The Secretary of the Cabinet had ominously begun to hold meetings of the Defense Transition Committee, the traditional method of preparing the transition to open hostilities. All departmental permanent secretaries were asked to attend under the chairmanship of the Cabinet Secretary, who was accompanied by the Prime Minister's Press Secretary, to give an analysis of the enemy's intentions.
Press Secretary Ingham pointed out at one of the first meetings that there was a growing emphasis in the broadcasts on the lack of medical supplies in Africa. It seemed likely, therefore, that the next atrocities by Black Hand would be in the form of biological warfare, probably spreading disease through the British water supply system which was not equipped to deal with tropical waterborne germs. It would be necessary to take precautions accordingly.
The prospect of biological warfare with a continent that used to be known as the "white man's grave" brought a chill to the meeting; but before discussion could be followed it was diverted by the Patrick Jenkin, then Permanent Secretary to the Department of the Environment who defensively stressed that the DoE had created the most modern, most efficient, and most cost-efficient water service in the world. It could only go wrong if some foreign body were artificially introduced into the purified water during the time it was standing in the aerating pool before re-entering the pipe system. He therefore needed help in guarding these aerating pools, since the water authorities didn't have surplus labor standing around with nothing to do. The request was accepted and arrangements made at once to guard the areas where purified water was briefly open to the skies and thus to deliberate contamination.
At first it seemed as if these precautions were sufficient, or that the Black Hand was not tampering with the water service. There was, indeed, some biological warfare but of a most unusual kind: tampering with drugs in a manner reminiscent of the American Tylenol case, but instead of introducing a cyanide killer into a pain-reliever, this case was simply one of mislabeling the bottles of fifty white tablets which pass across the counters of drug stores in their millions every day. Aspirin was labeled cascara and, much more awkwardly, cascara was labeled as non-prescription sleeping pills. No one was killed but it did have a devastating effect on people's confidence in what they got from the pharmacist or the hospital. It was presumably as part of the same exercise that a laxative salt instead of pure salt was put into the central kitchens for preparing school meals in half a dozen cities from Southampton to Carlisle. This was tied in with some of the Black Hand films about infant mortality due to waterborne diarrhea, but it was a wholly ineffective method of arousing pity and very successful in rousing anger and protest at cruelty to children.
Even more counter-productive was the great rabies scare. One week five boarding kennels almost simultaneously reported the appearance of the typical mad dog symptoms of a rabies epidemic. On government orders some 1,100 dogs were destroyed by the veterinarians and their carcasses burned. Then, days later, in the fumigation and clearing up process, the keepers discovered at several central points in each of the kennels minute audio devices which were programmed to emit an intermittent wailing soundwave far above the range of the human ear designed very effectively to drive dogs hysterical in a matter of minutes.
Though the Black Hand never claimed responsibility for this it was universally blamed on them and led to more ill will than all the acts of terrorism against human beings.
In the midst of this growing public hysteria came the news which had been dreaded for so long---an outbreak of dysentery in Sheffield, then in Worcester, then in Norwich, and finally in 35 medium-sized towns in Britain. About 3,000 people had to be admitted to the hospital by the end of the week, and eventually there were almost 50 deaths attributable to this cause. There was, of course, a public outcry, and Kenneth Baker, the elderly and ambitious Minister of the Environment, bore down on his civil servants to give him satisfactory answers to a flood of Parliamentary questions. They did their best, but all enquires revealed the no bacteria had been surreptitiously introduced into the water by enemy agents; what had happened was that the most automated, computerized water purifiers had been tampered with from a distance and had allowed unpurified sewage (in admittedly tiny quantities) to mix with purified water.
By this time, with everybody in Britain boiling their tap water, the Minister of the Environment offered his resignation. It was refused on the implied condition that if he wanted to have a political future he must take charge of the UK's internal communications security and from their defeat the black terror, which had ceased to be an inconvenience and had become a menace.
Baker set about this with a will, starting with the realization (that had escaped most of his colleagues) that the threat had to be evaluated and met at the scientific level rather than by stricter law enforcement, or by simply isolating the blacks. He chose as his Chief of Staff a youngish general, Zain Ward, who was just finishing as Commandant of the Signal Corps Staff College. He was asked to report to the minister on the present stage of Britain's electronic security and what needed to be done to improve it. Could he do so in one week?
"Yes," Ward replied, "if I can have an office at GCHQ in Cheltenham and direct access to my American counterpart."
At the end of the week General Ward brought the minister his report: a neat 10-page document with a 1-page summary which made very scary reading:
(1) We have to report that there is a clear and present threat of major proportions to the nation's economy and even to its political stability, posed by our opponent's ability to sabotage the electronic networks, which have become the never center of the modern state. This is not a threat for which we have any ready military response or recourse; the nuclear deterrent is irrelevant, and it is hard to see what graduated response there can be to an enemy without a known or knowable base, who needs merely a telephone as his launching pad.
(2) We are faced by an international ring linked electronically from the Americas to Africa, and able, without any visible presence, to enter and interfere with the innermost workings of this country's transport, finance, business and public or private communications. The enemy may of course benefit from its fifth column in this country, but even if they were all removed or incarcerated, the enemy cold still penetrate our networks without having a man on our soil, by means of either the global network of landlines, or the plethora of satellites now in orbit. We are in danger of being strangled by our own lines of communication.
(3) There are means of putting an electronic "padlock" on computers but they are extremely complex and costly if they are to be truly effective; in the final resort they are only as secure as the computers on which they are created. Another computer can eventually break the code and gain access.
(4) I recommend that forthwith we give maximum possible security to the four top-priority systems.
(a)the defense system, including the early warning system of nuclear attack, with which is connected the independent nuclear deterrent and the whole of the NATO complex.505Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡn8jAwvSyWh
(b) the international banking system as based in the City of London, and such parts of the national banking system as can be effectively safeguarded in spite of their big number of input points.505Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡmQ4Xxnj3lf
(c)the Inland Revenue computer system which contains basically the national income record.505Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡMlVykml3x3
(d)the Department of Health and Social Security Services system, which contains essentially the nominal roll of the nation and the state's outgoing obligations.
(5) For all other systems we should strengthen our defenses against easy penetration, and increase our monitoring to ensure that destructive commands are not obeyed for any length of time. There is no way we can cut ourselves off from outside intrusion.
(6) Finally, it is for ministers to consider whether British security can be maintained in a divided world by reliance on an information technology that is globally integrated and not under our sole control.
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Baker read through the summer and asked the General: "If sought, what would your advice be to ministers on this final paragraph."
"I would advise them to take all steps necessary to reunite the divided world."
"And would your American colleague agree with that?"
"Yes; but his Government would not agree---either."
There was a long pause, eventually broken by the General: "May I have your permission, Sir to go at once to the United States for a day. They have the beginnings of a technical solution to some of our problems, and they have the same troubles as we have. We could both learn from each other at this very late hour."505Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡEkXvwZTDom
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To: Prime Minister505Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡS6lhgzIz8Q
From: Chairman of the BBC Board of Governors
Your telephone call to me yesterday morning asked me "To find out what the Africans were doing to our airwaves, and how we could stop them?" This morning I received through channels a 4-page memo asking the same question.
Having consulted with my Director of Engineering, with the Head of the World Service, and the Director of Satellite Broadcasting, as well as the whole Board of Management, I can give you this response which I am copying to the Home Secretary:
1: The interruption to the BBCs coverage of the Armistice Day Service seems to have been caused by a private transmitter in the vicinity of Tottenham Court Road. Normally BBC signals from the Cenotaph (and other places used on a regular basis) are sent by underground cable, partly for security reasons. However, industrial disputes by British Telecom engineers, in connection with the current political situation, had made the cable inoperable. Therefore, we used an ordinary radio relay. The signal was transmitted in the 1GHz band at about 8 watts. The pirate transmitter sent a signal at the same frequency and at much greater power, thus knocking out the BBC signal and substituting its own.
The BBC sound engineer at Westminster had no means of knowing whether or not his own signal was being properly received (nor, indeed, the authority to take any action). The BBC engineers ad the sound switching center were able to take evasive action, but did not get clearance to do so before the 2 minutes' silence had finished.505Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ5emGW1qWYI
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2. The interruption to BBC-1's late news bulletin had the same origins. The pirate transmitter sent a powerful signal to the Post Office tower. Although the area suspected after the Cenotaph incident was fully covered by police and Home Office officials, it appears that the operators found another spot from which to direct their signal.
As a result of these incidents the Board has instructed the Director of Engineering to ensure that as soon as possible all program signals are to be transmitted by land-lines. British Telecom is assisting in the switchover. We stress that this limitation will affect the contents and topicality of our news bulletins, and will greatly inhibit live outside coverage of events. We should not wish this exceptional state of affairs to continue for longer than needed.
Since dictating the above I have seen the new intrusions into our satellite transmissions, and have received another urgent "hurry-up" message from your office. My preliminary response follows, but I must say at the outset that this interference between satellites seems to me as a layman a far more serious matter than anything that has gone before.505Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡXsLRLlvCNh
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3. The interruption to BBC-3 (the satellite transmission) had very different origins. The signal is being transmitted in the 12 GHz band, a frequency used only by satellites. We believe the interference to be by the L-Sat, designed by the European Space Agency, and launched on the ESA'S Ariane rocket at the ESA's launch site in Kourou, French Guiana, in October (most European satellites, including Britain's, are launched at Kourou which, like NASA's Cape Kennedy, is conveniently close to the equator). The L-Sat is one of the world's most powerful satellites. However, our engineers are not sure how the signals can be strong enough to block out and replace the BBC's own DBS signals. One possibility is that the engineers in Kourou interfered with the satellite and switched its whole 7 watts of DC power, which was designed to feed two TV channels, into the one single channel. In comparison, the slightly smaller Unisat satellite used by the BBC has 5 watts to be shared between three TV channels and some tele-communication services. Once launched, the solar arrays and power circuits cannot be changed, and the BBC services will therefore remain vulnerable until some other remedy is sought.
We note that HMG is a member of ESA and therefore a co-owner, through Euelsat, of the L-Sat. However, you will appreciate that, even in better circumstances, the legal status of a spacecraft 23,000 miles above the equator is not clear cut.505Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡiMvJST5zCk
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4. The African programs that you mentioned have been received irregularly in the south of England and are known to originate in Gabon which uses its Intelsat ground transmitter to send a signal up to the French satellite, TdF-1. This was launched last year, and has three TV channels. Two satellite channels (nos. 1 and 5 on the European dial) are used to relay the two French national networks. The third channel (no. 9) is spare (both Presidents Giscard d'Estaing and President Mitterrand resisted proposals to set up a new commercial organization to operate this 3rd service, because they had preferred to try to keep control of what they had). It's a simple matter to transmit a signal on this empty channel so that it is automatically re-transmitted to Earth. The signal can be picked up by small (90cm) rooftop receivers in the south of England and by cable systems throughout the UK. In a few cases the use of the French color system (SECAM0 which is incompatible with the British system (PAL) may inhibit reception. But the growth of the number of multistandard sets in recent years (since the EEC directive in 1984, all sets have had to be multistandard) to allow legitimate multinational viewing, has meant that this incompatibility, like different polarization, is not the obstacle that it was thought to be. It's impossible under international law for HMG to prevent these signals being distributed to the UK. Different circumstances apply for their redistribution by terrestrial transmitters and cable systems but the UK's support since 1945 of such international agreements as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights (which is legally enforceable) severely inhibits our influence. Moreover, UK broadcasting policy since the 1982 Hunt report has stressed the desirability of allowing the public to receive foreign TV signals.505Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ8FllQFSrei
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5. We have no comment on communications within Africa. We are in touch (via the European Broadcasting Union and the Conference Europeene des administrations des postes et telecommunications) with colleagues in the equivalent African organization, but no real progress is envisaged.
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6. Didn't you ask me about secret communications between Africa and their nationals here, and amongst our black communities? No, we cannot monitor transmissions on shortwave except when the transmissions are regular and fairly lengthy. It simply is not possible. The same goes for citizens' band conversations. CB radio was invented in America to allow lorry drivers (what the Yanks call "truckers") to check on police movements, especially when the police were doing checks on speeding. It is virtually impossible to trace a CB call. Back in 1981 the Home Office and the police had great difficulty in detecting ownership abuse of (then illegal) sets. Now that ownership and their use is legal, it is really not feasible to discover the source or destination of individual calls.505Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ4ILsk2kJil
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7. The use of cassettes to distribute information is almost impossible to stop. We understand the technique was first widely used by the Islamic fundamentalists in 1978 and that the Shah's attempts to confiscate the cassettes had no impact. We therefore suggest that several steps be taken to trace the source of the material. Serial numbers could be checked, and a spectrum analysis of waveforms could allow the recording equipment to be identified. All BBC departments have instructions to send all such rogue cassettes immediately to the BBC Research Center at Kingswood Warren for this and other treatment, and we are liaising closely with the IBA at Crawley Court. However, we are not optimistic about the results.505Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ5wZk8xhHTH
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