PIE and the Home Office: Three+ members/supporters on inside, funded, magazine printed and phone line

The extent to which the Paedophile Information Exchange established a thorough presence at the Home Office in the late 1970s and early 1980s is now becoming clear as more information becomes available. What transpires is alarming:

(a) According to a whistleblower who worked under senior civil servant (Assistant Secretary) Clifford Hindley, Hindley dismissed the objections of another member of staff to government money going to PIE, who received a total of £70 000 between 1977 and 1980. A recent report has quoted the whistleblower saying this funding was at the request of Special Branch, who may have been pursuing some undercover operation to monitor paedophiles; late former Home Office Minister Tim Raison must, according to the whistleblower, have approved the application. After early retirement in 1983, Hindley published a series of pro-pederastic articles on music and classical Greece in scholarly journals. whose arguments were scarcely-disguised PIE propaganda.

(b) PIE chair Steven Adrian Smith (who replaced Tom O’Carroll), also known as Steven Freeman, used a telephone number at the Home Office as the contact point for PIE, whilst he was working there as an electrical contractor, on behalf of firm Complete Maintenance Ltd. According to his own account, Smith stored file material in cabinets at the Home Office and received full security clearance from Scotland Yard, (Keith Dovkants, ‘Child sex ring’s ‘Home Office Link’, Standard, November 7th, 1984; Alex Marunchak, ‘Child-Sex Boss in Whitehall Shock’, The Sun, August 15th, 1982; Steven A. Smith, ‘PIE, from 1980 Until its Demise in 1985’, in The Betrayal of Youth: Radical Perspectives on Childhood Sexuality, Intergenerational Sex, and the Social Oppression of Children and Young People, edited Warren Middleton (London: CL Publications, 1986), pp. 215-245). Smith claims he was provided with a furnished office as part of his contract, from which he could use the phone line, but another source connected to the Home Office informs me that it was unthinkable that such a contractor would be given access to a Home Office phone line. Smith was later said in court probably to have actually published the PIE magazine (which would then have been Minor Problems) in the Home Office itself (Sue Clough, ‘Paedophile jailed over child porn material’, Press Association, December 16th, 1991).

(c) PIE Secretary and Treasurer Barry Cutler was also employed in the Home Office in the early 1980s, until being discovered by the News of the World, whereupon he was sacked (Michael Parker, Stuart White and Alex Marunchak, ‘The Nasty Nine: Bosses who mastermind the secret web of filth’, News of the World, August 28th, 1983). Cutler was also highly active in the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, acting in 1999 as a spokesperson for the organisation on the abolition of Clause 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act (Graeme Wilson, ‘Fury at move to drop schools’ gay propaganda ban’, Daily Mail, August 23rd, 1999), and remaining on their Executive Committee at least as late as 2010.

(d) A Whitehall civil servant received a series of slides with images of abuse of young boys and obscene letters delivered to his departmental address. When this was discovered, one colleague’s protests that these materials should be handed over to the police were ignored, and it was treated as a purely internal matter (‘Two-year cover-up on dirty pictures’, Daily Express, November 25th, 1983). It is not known whether this was one of the three individuals above.

(e) Adrian Fulford (now Lord Justice Fulford), who was named last week in the Mail on Sunday as a key organiser of the so-called Conspiracy Against Public Morals to support key PIE figures, and wrote an article defending PIE (Martin Beckford, ‘High Court judge and the child sex ring: Adviser to Queen was founder of paedophile support group to keep offenders out of jail’, Mail on Sunday, March 9th, 2014), also acted as Smith’s defence barrister in a court case concerning publishing obscene material featuring children in 1991. Smith had previously fled to the Netherlands to avoid trial, and was tried after being deported by Dutch authorities (Sue Clough, ‘Paedophile jailed over child porn material’, Press Association, December 16th, 1991).

The Prime Minister or at least the Home Secretary need to make a statement about this level of PIE infiltration (involving three, possibly four individuals directly linked to the organisation) into the very government department responsible for law and order. Also, to answer the following questions:

(i) who was responsible for their employment (and dismissal or delay thereof) these individuals?
(ii) which ministers (Labour and/or Conservative) would have been aware of these individuals’s presence in the department?
(iii) which would have authorised the payments to PIE?

During the period of PIE’s official existence, 1974-1984, the Home Secretaries were Roy Jenkins (1974-1976), Merlyn Rees (1976-1979), William Whitelaw (1979-1983) and Leon Brittan (1983-1985); Ministers for Home Affairs were Lord Harris (1974-1979), Alex Lyon (1974-1976), Brynmor John (1976-1979), Lord Boston (Jan-May 1979), Leon Brittan (1979-1981), Timothy Raison (1979-1983), Patrick Mayhew (1981-1983), and David Waddington (1983-1987); Junior Ministers and Parliamentary Private Secretaries were Shirley Summerskill (1974-1979), Lord Belstead (1979-1982), Lord Elston (1982-1984), David Mellor (1983-1986) and Lord Glenarthur (1984-1986).

We also know that senior diplomat and MI6 officer Peter Hayman was an active member of PIE, and that members of PIE (including Smith – see above) received active political and legal support from a current High Court Judge (see Beckford, ‘High Court judge’, above); a further judge, now Chief Coroner, Peter Thornton, was also involved with the provision such support (Martin Beckford, ‘Now Chief Coroner is exposed as paedophile apologist who wanted age of consent to be 14’, Daily Mail, March 16th, 2014). Leading PIE member Peter Righton managed to wean his way into the whole social work and child protection world, occupying senior and influential positions (see a whole range of articles here), and his name has been linked to networks operating in public schools (see Eileen Fairweather, ‘Paedophile ring alleged at top public schools’, Standard, September 19th, 1996) and children’s homes. Not to mention PIE being affiliated to NCCL, who would take out adverts in two different PIE publications, Understanding Paedophilia and Magpie; current senior Labour politicians, including Deputy Leader Harriet Harman and Shadow Minister for Policing Jack Dromey were involved at the heart of NCCL at this time. The names of other senior politicians, including late MPs Peter Morrison (Conservative) and Cyril Smith (Liberal Democrat) have also been publicly linked to organised abuse involving young children in homes.

This is an extremely serious situation which demonstrates that the PIE network was able to infiltrate some of the upper echelons of British government and society in the 1970s and 1980s, This needs to be thoroughly investigated with proper resources and funding.

I also have clear information on the extent to which PIE members or sympathisers were very influential in different branches of academia – sociology, social work, child protection and the study of child abuse, criminology, music and the arts, and gender and sexuality studies. Some of their work was published by reputable scholarly journals (as I have detailed in the case of Hindley), and many obtained senior positions in leading universities. Various of their students continued to develop their ideas. To this day, some of their publications are still cited or otherwise used as if they were reliable and trustworthy, to such an extent that I believe elements of these professions have been corrupted.

Clear documentary evidence points to a highly-organised network with PIE at its centre; a network responsible not simply for the advocacy of paedophilia, but the organisation international rings of abusers and for the trafficking in child pornography. The seriousness of this cannot be underestimated. All politicians should be supporting the work of Tom Watson MP in trying to bring to light this awful network (which cannot be assumed to be merely ‘historic’), and address honestly the ways in which its activities and ideologies may have infiltrated their own parties.

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