The 'Thomas Walker' Conspiracy

(Or the Fraudulent Famine Photo Affair).

Damned as a Hearst Stooge, But Was Walker More Probably a Soviet Patsy?

A Personal Hypothesis by Nigel Linsan Colley

[This is a Work-in-Progress Document - For Discussion Purposes Only and Not for Reprint - December 2006, with revisions April 2007. E. & O.E.]

Introduction

In January 1935, at the outset of Randolph Hearst's anti-Red campaign, Gareth wrote a series of three of the most heart-rending articles for the American Hearst press, which repeated his first-hand observations of Ukrainian famine. [CLICK HERE for the first article.] Unlike in March 1933, when Gareth exposed the Soviet famine and was infamously denigrated by Stalin Apologist, Walter Duranty in the columns of the New York Times, on this occasion there was strangely not even a 'muddying of the waters' murmur from the 'Friends of the Soviet Union'.

In February 1935, the Hearst press ran a further series of articles by one 'Thomas Walker', which documented his own observations of an on-going Ukrainian famine in the spring of 1934 and illustrated with photos taken secretly with his own camera.

Above are two reprints of Walker's Fraudulent February 1935 articles. Click HERE for a transcription of the front page from the above Chicago American article entitled "Six Million Perish in Soviet Famine" and Here for a second article (In due course I hope to have a full set of these articles transcribed) For legible images of more of Walker articles obtained to date, please Click Here

On the 13th March 1935, in an open letter to the American weekly, The Nation, Louis Fischer successfully exposed  Thomas Walker's articles and photos to be a fraud, alleging that it was part and parcel of Hearst's ant-red campaign, but without ever mentioning Gareth's earlier articles of January 1935. Gareth's Hearst articles were to remain lost for almost 70 years...

In fact, Thomas Walker was a real fraud.... In June 1935, he was deported from the UK and on arrival back in the USA was re-arrested for absconding from a Colorado prison in 1921 for forgery, under the name of Robert Green.

Though Thomas Walker / Robert Green was held up to be a pawn of Hearst, below I would like to put forward the hypothesis that he was more likely to have been a Soviet patsy, in their very successful propaganda of hiding the truth of a famine in Ukraine at any time in the 1930s, as Gareth's truthful observations were tarnished by the same brush.

Within four months of Fischer's letter to The Nation, Gareth would be mysteriously murdered and the Soviet Secret Police are now strongly suspected of culpability. With the tragic loss of Gareth, the 'whistle-blower' of the Holodomor was effectively silenced continuing to embarrass the Stalinist regime...

Background Timeline

June 1934 - Gareth Jones interviews Hearst at his Castle at St Donats, Cardiff, shortly before Hearst soon thereafter, meets Hitler and ties up a deal to promote Goebbels' propaganda within his papers. Hearst at some stage around this time decides to remove his support for the Bolsheviks in his personal feud with F. D. Roosevelt's New Deal policy.

July 1934 – Dr. Ewald Ammende (Secretary. General of the European Nationalities Congress, which represented 40,000,000 members of minority nations) and Dr. Dittloff (formerly of the German Drusag agricultural Concession in the USSR) were in Whitehall trying to get financial aid from the British Government for Soviet famine victims, but are unsuccessful due to Malcolm Muggeridge for some reason mistakenly informing Vyvyian of the Foreign Office that Ammende was in the pay of the Nazis, which in a single phrase allowed the British to take a wide berth of him and any support for his famine appeal on behalf of Cardinal Innitzer. [See Foreign Office and the Famine, 1988, Limestone Press, by Marco Carynnyk et al, P409.]

August 1934 – Series of articles appear in the Daily Express which bare a great resemblance in terms of copy and photographs to those used later by Thomas Walker. According to Martyn Houseden of Bradford University, Yorkshire, who is an academic specialising in Ammende’s role as head of the Minorities, who states in his opinion that that Ammende was never a Nazi, but was probably on a one-man crusade against Stalin, and therefore any enemy of Stalin was a friend of his – and thus the Nazis became useful bedfellows. It is possible that in his personal crusade, not only did Ammende cut corners with the provenance of his photos, but he was probably the source of bogus photos provided to the Nazis and also was responsible for these Daily Express articles – simply by virtue of his and Dittloff’s appearance in London just prior to their publication in early August 1934. However, these articles were never countered by the Soviets, who were presumably caught off guard and by the time they knew that they had been duped, the story was old news. It is my opinion that this is when Soviets came across the notion to repeat similar bogus stories and photos elsewhere at a later date, should the needs arise, but the next time would be to their advantage – but obviously this is merely conjecture. [Click Here for a link to a work-in-progress web page of legible copies of these Daily Express articles and photos.]

[The source of these fake photos may actually derivate from August 1933, when they are probably referenced by the Cardiff Western Mail, where the name of Dr. Otto Schiller (a German agricultural expert of Soviet agrarian conditions) is mentioned, but perhaps not un-coincidentally Ammende's name again appears in the same article. [CLICK HERE for a link to the aforementioned W.M. article.]

January 6th 1935 – Hearst kicks off his anti-Soviet campaign in his radio address across the USA.

January 12th 1935 – On New Years Day at Hearst's ranch of St. Simeon, California, Gareth was personally commissioned by Hearst (over an al fresco private lunch on the palatial terrace) to write series of three articles recounting his 1933 famine observations – which are in my personal opinion probably the most vitriolic and heart-rending article published against the Soviets in that year – they also used the term ‘man-made famine’ plus Gareth was probably the first westerner to conclude that the Soviet’s themselves assassinated Kirov on Dec 1, 1934, over which Gareth pondered that the ensuing reprisals marked the beginning of a new terror campaign – which we now know as the beginning of the Stalinist Purges.

These articles as far as I can ascertain were never directly countered by the Friends of the Soviet Union at the time – and were to remain ‘lost’ until by chance Siriol & Nigel Colley paid a visit to the UNA offices in Parsippany, NJ, where  Irene Jarosewich, the former Editor-in-chief of Svoboda had been given a scrap book of American 1930s articles relating to Ukrainian issues by one of their elderly readers, just one week before we arrived. Although Gareth's family were aware of this Hearst commission from a letter of Gareth’s to his parents, we had never seen copies of them. It was therefore not surprising that in the Douglas Tottle / Jim Mace controversy, neither of them referenced Gareth as being part of Hearst's anti-Soviet campaign – indeed, no academic in this field had ever heard of them either.[To read these three 1935 articles by Gareth for Hearst CLICK HERE.]

Mid January 1935 – Gareth departs from California for Tokyo and to save money stays in the Bunka apartments at the invitation of a fellow journalist, Günther Stein, of the London News Chronicle, who had arrived in Japan just before Gareth. Stein was coincidentally at the height of the Holodomor, the Moscow correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt – a paper for which Gareth was then commissioned to write articles in German by the editor, Paul Scheffer - who was also a close colleague. (FYI - the first foreign journalist to have been refused a re-entry visa from Moscow for his negative reporting of the Soviet agricultural conditions, back in 1929).

In later years Scheffer would feel the long arm of Soviet retribution (he was named in evidence at the 3rd Bukharin Moscow show trial as being a Nazi agent involved with grain sabotage, an accusation which after Pearl Harbor came back to haunt him , as on the tip-off of this allegation by another Soviet agent in the USA, resulted in him being locked up by J Edgar Hoover – though paradoxically, whilst he was interned, he was simultaneously working for General Bill Donovan, the head of the OSS, the fore-runner of the CIA!)

However, evidence now shows that Stein was a Soviet agent, allowing his apartments to be used by 'super-spy' Richard Sorge in February 1936 for covert radio broadcasts to Moscow. Stein would later be implicated in by the McCarthyite Commission in the 1950s. According to one biography of Sorge, he wanted Stein to be permitted to join his spy cell, but was refused by the powers that be, and the conclusion was drawn that Stein was on other special operations for Moscow.

When Fischer’s letter to The Nation was published on the 13th March – Gareth had conveniently just left Stein’s house and was effectively incommunicado, whilst he went island hopping as part of his fact Finding trip of the Far East - Perhaps just a coincidence, but unlike with Gareth entering the debate, like he did in his letter to the New York Times in 1933, on this occasion he would be silent…

Mid February / Early March 1935 – Walker’s has his five bogus articles published in the Hearst press. Many of these photos are used in the Daily Express articles as well as in Ammende’s 1936 book ‘Human Life in Russia’, Tottle comment’s that the ‘frog child' story is almost word for word taken from the Daily Express articles. [I have transcribed two of the five articles – but am struggling from the UK to get a full set of Walker's articles, as they only reside in New York Public Library on microfiche under the title The New York Journal  – I will put the ones I have online at some stage in the future.]

Though, I don’t yet have all of the Walker articles online, I do have links my two transcribed articles of Walker’s, but as yet without the photos – but here are links to my two web pages on Ammende’s photos from both his books, with cross-referencing comments in his English 1936 version to both the Daily Express articles:

Muss Russland Hungern - CLICK HERE

Human Life in Russia - CLICK HERE

For a provisional page of images from Walker's articles CLICK HERE

For a known forger, how did Walker come by such plausible stories and was armed with an array of seemingly genuine print quality photos? Indirectly, it was perhaps Ammende, if it were he who supplied the Daily Express? I also accept that Ammende was fully conversant with all anti-Soviet campaigns and even references Hearst’s radio broadcast of January 1935 appear in the English version of his 1936 book (again published after his death). But to me, it just does not add up in conjunction with Fischer’s letter to The Nation below, with his information happily supplied post haste by the Soviets:

March 13th, 1935 - Fisher exposes Walker as a fraud in his open letter to Hearst in the left-wing weekly, The Nation, and effectively concludes that Western Press had been exposed as liars about a non-existent 1934 famine, indeed, the conservative have always been lying about any famine in the USSR during the 1930s…[For a link to a complete transcription of Fischer's letter CLICK HERE.]

Fisher was easily able to show the photos came from different seasons and according to information supplied to him by the Soviets (and pray tell me on which other occasion have we ever accepted their version of the truth without question?) – Walker arrived in the Moscow in the autumn of 1934 (after the Daily Express articles were published) spent a few days in Moscow and left by the Trans Siberian Express via Vladivostok.

In context, it should be considered how many people would have been aware of Fischer's complete damnation of Walker's articles? Certainly the power of Hearst's 'Yellow' Journalism' would have completely eclipsed the ripples of Fischer's letter to the low circulation of  the left-wing weekly, The Nation. One can probably assume that intellectuals and especially supporters of Socialism would have been aware of Walker's fraud.

However, one can assume that the population at large were also aware, since for example, there was a protest against Hearst was organised by pro-Stalin activists and on February 26, 15,000 people gathered in Madison Square Gardens in New York to protest with the “Friends of the Soviet Union” against the collapse of debt negotiations between U.S.S.R. and the United States.  Randolph Hearst was assailed for the damning editorial attitude of his newspapers against the Soviet cause.  Frank Palmer of the Federated Press wrote said,  “We know the man who had the utmost influence in causing the collapse of the negotiations.”[i]  The American Communists continued to condemn Hearst and William F. Dunne[ii] wrote three open and vitriolic letters to Hearst, addressing his letter,  “At Your Fortress Castle” and entitled, “Why Hearst Lies about Communism.”[iii]

-----

Irrespective, there is one very curious piece of circumstantial evidence which I have noted, within the seemingly innocuous postscript to Fischer’s open letter to Hearst (which I will refer to again later):

“P.S. Would the Hearst press oblige with a photograph of Mr. Thomas Walker, and with facsimiles of his United States passport and of the Soviet visa stamped upon it?”

29 May 1935 – [Added for completeness, though not relevant to this argument.] 

In the interim, the former Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, W H Chamberlain (who met Gareth in Tokyo in March 1935, just before Gareth subsequently went incommunicado 'island-hopping' around the Far East) had his own letter published in The Nation, but to no real avail, where he stated:

“I agree with Mr. Fischer, it is reprehensible to invent tales of non-existent famines and massacres in Russia in order to bolster up one set of political and economic theories. I also believe it is open to criticism to ignore, or to refer in misleading euphemistic terms, to one of the greatest human catastrophes since the World War, even if the motive is to create faith in and enthusiasm for a different set of political and economic theories.” ]

June 1935 - Walker deported from UK

Photo below is from the British Public Records Office at Kew, London records of deportation orders for 1935 (which I researched in 2006) shows that Walker's extradition from the UK on 22 June 1935, though no indication of when he was originally arrested or on what grounds... [It is noted from his Deportation record that his 'D.O.' (deportation order) was never subsequently revoked! More pertinently, on deportation the British were not seemingly aware that he was on a fake passport.]

From the photo above, it should be noted he was deported under the name of Walker, not Green, so was he extradited for another crime? Unfortunately, records available do not show why he was deported. More importantly, one might wonder who conveniently tipped-off the British authorities or was it just bad luck?

Notwithstanding, Walker seems to have been a very well-travelled man – going around the world in 1934/5 to be back in London for his arrest – And who paid for such an expensive trip, if indeed he went anywhere as far as he appears to have done?

Does it not appear rather suspicious, that Fischer 'seems' to have had more than an inkling of Walker’s forged passport three months before he was arrested (and no prizes here, for who might have told him!).

July 1935 - Walker arrives back in the US is immediately arrested, put on trial for passport fraud as well as for absconding jail; then according to reports of his trial in the New York Times.:

    Passport Fraud Charged’, New York Times, July 13, 1935

    ‘Indicted Writer Also Accused as Escaped Convict’...

    “Robert Green, a writer of newspaper articles describing famine conditions in the Ukraine, was indicted yesterday …on the charge that he had made false statements obtaining in a passport. George Pfann, Attorney, alleged that Green, who wrote under the pen name, Thomas Walker, was a fugitive from Colorado prison where he escaped in 1921 while serving a sentence for forgery. After escaping from Prison Mr. Pfann said, Green went to Canada, learned chemical engineering and got a job with an exporting Company as its German representative …”

According to a quote attributed to The Daily Worker from Tottle’s book and they are certainly not part of the Conservative press:

    “Evidence at trial revealed he [Walker] had made a previous visit to the Soviet Union in 1930, under the name Thomas J. Burke” and was “expelled for attempting to smuggle out a ‘whiteguard’ out of the country”.

Now the crux of my argument of whether Walker was a patsy for the Soviets revolves around the fact that only someone who is clearly very, very stupid indeed, would even dare risk re-entering the USSR, albeit under a different name, especially after having been supposedly deported four years before! Furthermore, can one really believe that the 'kind' Soviets would merely deport him for such a misdemeanor?

In The London Times (p6) 20 November 2006 in their reporting of the. Alex Litvinenko murder, the former London KGB defecting Station Head, Oleg Gordievsky stated “the KGB has recruited agents in prison since the 1930s. That’s how they work.”

So,one should perhaps ask, where exactly was Walker, whilst on his 14 years on run from Colorado prison; in a Soviet prison? Maybe, he was given a 'no-brainer' of a decision of duping Hearst by the Soviets, in exchange for his (short-found) freedom, which led to embarrassing Hearst’s reputation and his paper's claims of a famine?

Even if one does not fully believe the above hypothesis – then according to Walter Krivitsky, the 1938 NKVD defector who was later ‘mysteriously’ shot outside a Washington hotel in 1941 (and presumably by the NKVD), who stated that the USSR were the biggest employer of forgers in the world at that time – whether it be for the numerous false passports for Soviet agents needed to confuse their whereabouts to Western security agencies or even for the production of instant hard currency in the guise of counterfeit bank notes, this would also help explain why Walker evaded re-arrest. One should also consider that going to California in order to dupe Hearst (and we don’t know how this occurred) would have put Walker in danger of being rearrested – surely he would have been better off in Canada or even the UK?

How this all fits into the bigger Gareth Jones' picture of things and eventually the Wostwag (NKVD) kidnapping conspiracy, then I am afraid to say, I don’t yet completely know, but I am convinced it certainly does – and I haven’t even mentioned the then non-existent Jap-Nazi entente cordiale pact, that Marxist, Claud Cockburn peddled in London right after Gareth’s murder, which ultimately prevented any further Japanese territorial expansion in Northern China until 1937 at the ‘Rape of Nanking’ which arguably marked the beginning of WW2, well at least from a Chinese prospective…

From my research, I can now prove unreservedly that even though the British Foreign Office in their 500-page investigation into Gareth’s murder did not ever consider Soviet culpability, unbeknown to them MI5 had known six years earlier that Wostwag were a financial front to the NKVD and also that they had had an open dossier on  Gareth’s co-captive colleague, Dr Herbert Mueller since 1917, detailing his Communist activities – so another question is what might have happened if MI5/6 and the Foreign Office had have liaised, then maybe the Soviets would have be in the frame for Gareth's murder, but as it was, both Gareth and the Holodomor were almost airbrushed out of history for almost half a century

At the end of the day, the facts show that Gareth was not publicly denigrated for his Hearst articles, nor were the Daily Express articles exposed in 1934, but Fischer knew a lot of stuff about Walker that would have required influential Soviet help, such as his precise itinerary, added to which Gareth was completely airbrushed from that time on, not only by Fischer, but in famine debate in the 1960s and through to Tottle, which is somewhat strange to say the least…Why didn’t Fischer go the whole hog and expose Walker as being on a passport fraud (Not forgetting Colorado prison absconder) in his letter to The Nation, unless of course it was all part of the Soviet conspiracy? If he knew this fact back in March of 1935, then why he did not expose it then, rather than let proceedings take their due course….

---

Tottle Book Download

To download the complete Tottle book, "Famine, Fraud and Genocide" in PDF format - Right click the link below  and click 'save target as' then save to your hard disk.

NB it is a 17Mb download, and may be quite slow off my personal web server:

TOTTLE

---

To cross-reference with Walker's articles for Hearst, please CLICK HERE

To cross-reference with photos from Ammende's Muss Russland Hungern?, please CLICK HERE

To cross-reference with photos appearing in August 1934 in The Daily Express, please CLICK HERE

To cross-reference with Ammende's photos in his Human Life In Russia, please CLICK HERE