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CHAPTER 1

A Russian Writes

My concern for the preservation of peace came out of my writing. Over the years, besides creating four schools that employ 320 staff and allow a rural family life I have toiled at my study desk and accumulated literary, historical and philosophical works, and have delved into current affairs and international politics and statecraft. I am the author of more than 40 books, and my Universalist approach has led me to write within seven disciplines. Within the social stability of an English institutional life I have made daily forays into solitude and, like a stag that roams the woods with seven-branched antlers that are always with him, I take my books with me wherever I am asked to go.

Conscious TV

Soon after My Double Life 1: This Dark Wood and My Double Life 2: A Rainbow over the Hills came out I was interviewed on Conscious TV at Battersea Studios in South London. On 20 March 2015 I sat on a plum couch against a black background in the ramshackle studio and for an hour talked before three cameras about my life and my writing, how my works and Universalism came out of my life as I described in My Double Life 1 and 2.

My interviewer, Iain McNay, was especially interested in my mystical experiences: how I first glimpsed the Light in Japan and then, despite being routinely followed by surveillance squads on the London streets when I was doing my secret work, how I had a full experience of illumination at 13 Egerton Gardens, SW3. He asked me to read a poem about the experience. I read 'Visions: Golden Flower, Celestial Curtain', which sees the Light as "a gold-white flower" that "changed into a celestial curtain".

Chart and civilizations

I passed on to my philosophy of history and held up the seven-foot-long chart that accompanied The Fire and the Stones (1991).

The chart summarises my view of history. It shows 25 civilizations each going through 61 parallel stages (see rainbow chart in Appendix 2). Prepared in 1989, it shows the European civilization passing into a union (later the European Union), a United States of Europe, in stage 43; and the Soviet Union (stage 43) passing into a federation (later the Russian Federation) in stage 46.

On my wall in Essex is a framed copy of the chart behind glass. It used to be on a first-floor landing wall in Otley Hall in Suffolk, a Tudor Hall with guides that I ran for seven years. We had 40,000 people round, many of whom came on coach tours and on Open Days, and there was always a small crowd round the chart. I often stood before it, both in company and alone, and contemplated the sweep of civilizations.

Each civilization rises through a metaphysical vision and declines when the metaphysical vision turns secular. The European civilization rose through a vision of the 'divine' Light shown as a halo in art, the illumination of Christ's transfiguration which passed into the New Testament and into the European civilization's stage 1. The European civilization has turned secular within the EU conglomerate and is in decline.

The Arab civilization rose through Mohammed's metaphysical vision of the 'divine' Fire in the cave of Hira near Mecca c.610 – in his first vision Mohammed saw the opening passage of the Koran in letters of fire written on cloth – and its political unification (stage 11) began with Mohammed's founding of the ummah, the Muslim community, in 622. The Arab civilization has turned secular but a faction has reached stage 45 when there is a yearning for a lost past and a revival of cultural purity – the Muslim revival of fundamentalist Islamic values under Islamic State (IS).

The Arab civilization's fundamentalist strain, which is expressed in a number of groups including IS, has retained its metaphysical vision. But it is a further stage in the process of the Arab civilization's decline.

When a civilization ends in stage 61 it passes into another civilization just as the Egyptian civilization passed into the Arab civilization in 642 when its gods, such as Ra, were absorbed within the new Allah-worshipping Arab civilization.

My chart shows each civilization's progress as it passes through 61 stages. The most recent civilization, the North-American civilization, began with the metaphysical vision brought by Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans and was consolidated by the establishment of the Jamestown Settlement of 1607, which was the basis of the 400th anniversary of America's founding that was celebrated in 2007. The Jamestown Settlement is thought to have been planned in the Great Hall at Otley Hall, where I often sat. The North-American civilization has reached stage 15 and is in the same stage that the Roman civilization was in when the Roman Empire was being established in the 3rd century BC at the time of the two Punic Wars which facilitated the Roman civilization's expanding influence just as the European civilization's First and Second World Wars facilitated the North-American civilization's expanding influence.

My chart shows that most living civilizations are now in stage 43 (union) or stage 46 (federalism). The chart does not show a World State because there has never been one, although there have been several attempts from the time of Alexander the Great to the time of Adolf Hitler, our time, to found one by conquest.

The chart shows that stage 15 of all civilizations, the imperial stage of the Roman civilization which included the Roman Empire, covers a large part of the known world and effectively introduces a World State by force. According to the pattern of history in my chart some sort of a World State will be created by the North-American civilization in the course of its stage 15.

World State by consent

I have come to wonder if a World State can be created by consent rather than conquest, by all the civilizations coming together and creating a partly-supranational state into which their stages 43 and 46 can flow for a while before eventually resuming their progress towards their final, terminal, stage 61. It is not impossible that the North-American civilization could act as a philanthropic midwife to assist the birth of such a World State. Such a development would break the mould of my pattern of history (or 'law of history', as Ted Hughes called it), which shows civilizations' empires as being conducted on the basis of their self-interest rather than philanthropy.

I have said (see p.xvii) that I believe I am the only Western literary author continuing the tradition of those who in the 20th century dreamt of, and advocated, a democratic World State and world government with the power to abolish war: Winston Churchill, President Truman, Albert Einstein, President Eisenhower, Bertrand Russell, Mahatma Gandhi, President John F. Kennedy and President Mikhail Gorbachev. I long for a solution to the world's intransigent problems and yearn for a universal government that can resolve all issues and benefit humankind. As we have just seen, in recent years I have seen beyond the pattern on my chart of rising and falling civilizations. I have taken account of globalism, air and digital communications and the internet, and, having foreseen a democratic World State, I knew I should do something to help bring it in.

Visit to Asa Briggs

Soon after my interview on Conscious TV, on 24 April 2015, I visited Lord Asa Briggs in Lewes, Sussex. He was Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, after I was there, and he spoke at the launch of my book The Fire and the Stones – and of the chart – in the Museum of London in April 1991. At a gaudy (reunion) at my College in 1978 he had had a long discussion with me in the Buttery and urged me to write down my experiences as a British intelligence agent in Libya and then in London. He followed up this discussion with a letter that again urged me to write my experiences down. (It took me thirty-five years to do it as I knew it would be prudent to wait until Gaddafi was dead.) Without his encouragement I might not have written My Double Life 1 and 2, and I sent him signed copies.

I arrived at his large house, The Caprons, in Lewes and was admitted by his carer and shown through to the kitchen. I sat opposite him at the large kitchen table. He was ninety-three and looked as if he had put a sweater over his pyjamas. He sat with his back to bookshelves and said, "I'm completely immobile, by land, sea and air." He said, "I've been reading your book, My Double Life 1. You've had such a range of experience and met so many varied people." I thanked him for urging me to write it.

I had brought his Secret Days, which came out when he was ninety, about his involvement in Bletchley Park from 1943 to 1945, when he worked with Alan Turing. We discussed what he did in Hut 6 and his decoding. He talked about his predecessor at Worcester College, the Provost when I was there, Sir John Masterman, who had chaired the Twenty Committee (XX or Double-Cross Committee) that misinformed the Germans as to where the D-Day landings would be – the man who had spotted me as a potential intelligence agent. Briggs told me, "He was the only person I've ever been able to discuss my intelligence work with, apart from you now." He inscribed my copy of Secret Days, "For Nicholas Hagger, on a very special visit to Lewes, 24/4/15."

Before I left I told him I would now be starting the third book in my "Secret American" trilogy. The Secret Founding of America and The Secret American Dream had already appeared, and I now had The Secret American Destiny in mind. I told him it would be about the reunification of world culture in seven disciplines as a preparation for an impending World State and universal peace. I started the book the next day.

Baltic cruise

On my wife Ann's prompting in late March I had booked a cruise to the Baltic from 25 May. There would be a couple of days' visiting St Petersburg, and there would be a security expert aboard. Ann reckoned that I would be safe under his care even though my intelligence background could be accessed on the internet.

Igor Kondrashin and the World Philosophical Forum

A week before we were due to leave, on 19 May, I received an email out of the blue from a Russian, Igor Kondrashin, President of the World Philosophical Forum. He said that he was a Universalist (or Transuniversalist), and that as I am a Universalist I might consider attending a conference of philosophers to set up a World State in Athens in early October. He attached a draft Constitution for a World State, 'the Universal State of the Earth', which he had just finished, and a paper on Transuniversalism that was written in 2014.

I Googled the World Philosophical Forum and discovered it is like the World Economic Forum that has met at Davos since 1971. The World Philosophical Forum was founded six years previously, in 2009, and had met in Athens for six years.

I love Greece and realised we would be meeting within a mile or two of Plato's Academy, and with Plato's Republic in mind I thought I might indeed consider founding a new World State in Athens, an ideal state that would be a latter-day equivalent of Plato's Republic. I printed off the two attachments and packed them to read during the cruise.

I was wary, for why had he sent the draft Constitution to me when he had only just finished it, and why had it landed a week before I was going to St Petersburg? Was he just a Russian philosopher who had found my books The World Government and The New Philosophy of Universalism online and was understandably exploring if there was common ground? Or could this be an approach by pro-Putin Russians who had seen My Double Life 1? Though I was wary I was interested.

Nigel West

During the afternoon of my birthday, on 22 May 2015, I was rung by an expert writer on intelligence, Nigel West (pen-name for Rupert Allason MP). He had been asked to review My Double Life 1 for the online International Journal of Intelligence and Counter Intelligence. He spoke with me for half an hour. He said, "You were a case officer's nightmare, you've got all the times of all the meetings. Did they know you were keeping a diary? You were 'a diarist spy'."

I said I used to write an ongoing diary for them but kept a skeleton of dates and times for my own reference.

He said, "My Double Life 1 is unique. There are books by case officers, intelligence officers, but no agent has written such an account, not since the Second World War, not since the First World War, not ever."

He asked me a number of questions and said at the end, "You might like to know the CIA asked me to write my review. They spotted your book and asked me to check whether the book is a fake, whether I found it genuine. I told them, 'It's genuine.' Some of the things you say are very recognisable. You come across as transparently honest."

He emailed me a draft of his review, which he titled 'The Diarist Spy', and told me it would appear in the Journal "within a few months". It appeared more than a year later, on 16 June 2016.

My work in the Cold War: Philby, the Tehran Agreement

In the two days before I left for the cruise, aware of my impending visit to St Petersburg I reflected on my work in the Cold War for MI6. It began in Libya and I saw myself as a literary spy in the footsteps of Daniel Defoe, T.E. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene. In London I was told that I had been appointed an 'unofficial Ambassador' for the African liberation movements to Prime Minister Edward Heath. I wrote articles on Africa for The Times, interviewed many freedom-fighters and visited Tanzania in 1972, where I saw the Chinese building the Tanzam Railway. I spent a night in a mud hut in the Chinese camp near Mlimba.

I reflected that my case officer told me that the Soviet spy Kim Philby knew of my secret work and was expected to name me as a British agent in a newspaper interview during the following weekend in 1971. In interviews in Pravda and Izvestia on 1 and 2 October 1971 Philby named a few British agents, and in the Estonian Kodumaa on 13 October 1971 he named 21 British agents, but for some reason I was not one of them. Nevertheless, I was told, the Russians knew what I was doing. For the last two years I operated openly, at (I was told) considerable personal risk.

I came to the Russians' attention again in 1986. As a sideline I had become a small publisher to promulgate books on Western political themes at the height of the Cold War. I brought out a book about the Hungarian Revolution, Budapest Betrayed, the 'betrayal' being of the 45 Western intelligence agents Philby named who were later executed by the pro-Russian Hungarian regime.

My author Paul Gorka had been a political prisoner in a Hungarian prison from 1950 to 1956, having been recruited into the British intelligence service in 1950 to report on the Russian occupying forces in Hungary. He had been betrayed by the Soviet spy, Kim Philby. One of the 45 betrayed Western intelligence agents, Béla Bajomi, the leader of his resistance group, occupied a nearby cell and was hanged in the execution yard outside Paul's cell on 24 April 1951. Paul clambered on top of the bunk-bed, pressed an ear to a ventilation hole and heard the prosecutor read a statement from the President refusing Bajomi's appeal. Paul heard Bajomi say firmly, calm and composed, "I die for my country. Christ help me." Paul heard a squeaking noise and then silence.

I held a launch for the book in the Palace of Westminster on 4 November 1986. There were several dozen present in the Jubilee Room, including several MPs. There were two bearded Afghans who were fighting the occupying Soviet Russians. I shook their hands and wished them well in their quest to obtain arms. One of them looked like the young Osama bin Laden who was a character in my poetic epic Armageddon. In fact Osama bin Laden and his half-brother Salem had visited London in mid-1986 to buy anti-aircraft missiles, and stayed at the Dorchester Hotel.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Peace for our Time"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Nicholas Hagger.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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