“Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives.”
— A. Sachs
Regarding the recent death of our founder, we have two offerings. The first was an article in the Globe and Mail, the second is the remarks made by the Institute’s president at his memorial service.
Special to The Globe and Mail – November 17, 2010…
From the Second World War to al-Qaeda: British-born authority on revolutionary propaganda considered bin Laden a new breed of terrorist
— RON CSILLAG
Maurice Tugwell was one of the world’s leading experts on, as one former colleague put it, “that murky place” where politics, ideology, psychology and soldiering collide. His life may have also made a ripping big screen epic directed by David Lean.
As a young officer in the 8th Battalion Parachute Regiment of the British Army, he jumped across the Rhine into Germany in Operation Varsity, the last great European Allied offensive of the Second World War. Exotic postings followed for the career soldier: to Palestine during the struggle for Israel’s statehood; to Malaya to put down a communist insurgency; to Cyprus to help calm violence between ethnic Turks and Greeks; to Northern Ireland during the worst of The Troubles between Catholics and Protestants; and to Tehran during the reign of Iran’s Shah.
Tugwell, who died in Victoria on Oct. 10 at the age of 85, was known chiefly as an authority on revolutionary propaganda as employed by radical and terrorist groups. In Canada, where he immigrated in 1978, he co-founded the Centre for Conflict Studies at the University of New Brunswick, and later established the Mackenzie Institute for the Study of Terrorism, Revolution and Propaganda, a right-leaning Toronto think tank.
His interests were “everything beyond organized crime but short of conventional war,” said David Charters, another co-founder of UNB’s Centre for Conflict Studies. “That included insurgency, terrorism, guerrilla warfare, civil wars, ethnic conflicts … things that fall short of big conventional wars between the standing armies of recognized states.”
Once described as a “frightening mixture of Cold War militarism and expertise in propaganda,” Tugwell firmly believed that Canada’s intelligentsia had been infiltrated by Soviet taskmasters. He wrote many articles and four books on military strategy, policy and history (and one titled Skiing for Beginners).
“He understood more about terrorism, psychological warfare and the way ideologues think than most people ever will,” said John Thompson, who succeeded Tugwell as head of the Mackenzie Institute and considered him a mentor.
Despite the commonly held view in the West that terrorism cannot succeed against a modern democracy, Tugwell believed that, in fact, “history demonstrates terrorism frequently does succeed, at least to a limited degree, by forcing the target regime to accept some compromise settlement demanded by the terrorists,” he wrote in the Ottawa Citizen six weeks after the 9/11 attacks. “The former colonial powers know this, and al-Qaeda’s front man reminded the world that the United States had been ‘defeated’ in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia.”
Terrorism and counterterrorism experts said it only grudgingly, but Osama bin Laden and his followers won respect. “I hate to admit it,” Tugwell confided, “but you have to concede the attack on the World Trade Center was a brilliantly successful operation. No one thought [the attackers] were capable of such a thing.”
And while Canada is an “extraordinarily peaceful” country, owing partly to its sparse population and to the fact that social violence is relatively rare in cold climates, it is not immune from domestic terrorism, Tugwell told The Globe and Mail in 1980. He believed political terrorism could reoccur in Quebec but that it would be more likely to surface among the country’s native peoples.
“The native peoples’ aspirations have been aroused but not fulfilled,” he said. “They feel a sense of deprivation relative to the whole. They have a sense of nationalism and a political organization. They feel alienated, neglected and poorly treated by the rest of the country.”
Canadians, he rued, “have a habit of talking, doing very little and hoping the problem will go away or resolve itself.” Americans, by contrast, “are great problem solvers, wanting to resolve everything by yesterday.”
Maurice Arthur John Tugwell was born on the Isle of Wight, off Britain’s southern coast, on June 24, 1925. His father, William Tugwell, had been a lieutenant-colonel in India’s colonial army. Maurice was 18 when he enlisted in 1943, and was granted an “emergency commission” as a second lieutenant a year later.
He earned his intelligence stripes after the war in the British Empire’s far-flung reaches, working as an intelligence officer in Mandate Palestine (where he was slightly wounded; his service record does not say how) and later in “counterinsurgency ops” in Cyprus, where he would return years later as part of a UN peacekeeping force.
Promoted to lieutenant-colonel in 1968, his next posting was a challenge, to say the least: head of the Information Policy unit (some have said “propagandist”) at British Army headquarters in Northern Ireland. It was there he got caught up in the Bloody Sunday massacre in Londonderry on Jan. 30, 1972, when British paratroopers shot dead 13 unarmed civilians.
In a radio interview the day after the shootings, Tugwell said four of the victims had been wanted members of the Irish Republican Army. It was raw, street-level information – and false. But a news blackout prevented a correction.
Appearing before the Saville Inquiry into the shootings in 2002, a contrite Tugwell admitted he had spoken too hastily in the radio interview. He called his 1972 remarks “an honest mistake,”; adding, “I apologize for this error.” Despite the gaffe, in 1973 he was made a Commander of the British Empire for his service in Northern Ireland.
Though he cut a dashing figure in uniform, he retired from the military with the rank of brigadier in 1978 and earned a PhD from the Department of War Studies at the University of London’s King’s College in 1979 for his thesis on Revolutionary Propaganda and Possible Countermeasures.
Propaganda and terrorism are “identical,” he wrote in 1986, “insofar as they both seek to influence a mass audience in a way that is intended to benefit the sponsor. Yet while terror has a singular purpose – inducing fear and uncertainty – propaganda can and does serve every imaginable purpose from religion to politics to commerce.” Terrorism, he said, quoting 19-century anarchists, is simply “propaganda by deed.”
But post-9/11 terrorists seem to be a different breed. These are fanatics who kill with no apparent goal other than hatred. As a result, a key component of the terrorism definition – to effect political change – has been lost.
“It is quite remarkable, the change,” Tugwell told the Citizen in 2002. “With the old nationalist groups like the IRA … because there was a political objective, the violence could eventually give way to a political solution. Terrorism was simply a means to an end. With bin Laden and al-Qaeda, it is difficult to see the political objective.”
What bothered Tugwell was bin Laden’s gloating. “This is rather exceptional. In the past, terrorists used violence to embarrass the government, or strike fear. I can’t recall them gloating.”
In any case, he chastised the media for playing into terrorists’ hands by giving them needless publicity.
Thompson, of the Mackenzie Institute, scoffed at allegations in some camps that Tugwell had been a British spy and was cozy with the Shah of Iran during a posting in 1974-75 at the National Defence University in Tehran.
“Conspiracy theory is rife out there. No, he was not a spy. He had been an intelligence officer in the military, among other things, but that does not make you a spy.”In Iran,” it was a retirement posting. He was getting ready to wind his career down. As for helping the Shah or [Iran’s] secret police, that’s ridiculous.”
Among Tugwell’s better-known books was 1988’s Peace with Freedom, which described in detail how Canada’s “new class” – academics, politicians, artists, journalists, retired generals and union leaders – had been infiltrated by Soviet agents and sympathizers. The Globe called the book “very disturbing,” as it would shatter Canadians’ complacency about Soviet misdeeds.
In his review, peace activist Gideon Forman blasted Tugwell for saying the peace movement has “disdain for freedom and human rights” and for calling it an “internal threat” to Canada’s freedom. Other peace activists have charged that Tugwell advised corporations on how to deal with pesky environmentalists.
His post-9/11 ambition was to urge U.S. leaders to drop all references to the “war on terror” and speak instead of “bin Laden’s war” adding, “upon that guilty head I would heap the blame for all the misery he has inflicted upon this suffering world.”
Tugwell leaves his wife Claire, their children Andrew and Julia, and his children Belinda, Justin and Gail from a previous marriage.
Remarks on Brigadier Maurice Arthur John Tugwell, PhD, CBE
Remarks at the October 18th 2010 Memorial Service by John Thompson, President of the Mackenzie Institute
It seems odd to start talking about Maurice by recalling the story of the Emperor’s New Clothing. But, for those who forget the story, there was a gullible emperor who two fraudsters decided to con. They put out the story that they made the finest and most splendid clothing imaginable, but that only the brightest and most intellectual could see it. Summoned to court, they repeated the story and went through the motions of showing off their product. Naturally everyone pretended to see it and the emperor promptly commissioned a brand new wardrobe.
The two con-men acted like they were stitching and sewing real clothing and even got the emperor to pose naked in front of a mirror while they ‘tailored’ his magnificent new apparel. As nobody in court wanted to appear stupid or dull, they all outdid their previous praise and gushed over the sumptuous suits. At length, even the citizens in the capital were clamouring to see this marvelous new clothing (and so demonstrate that they too were clever and wise), so the emperor deigned to participate in a grand procession. The parade came to a crashing halt when a small boy announced that the emperor was totally naked, ending the charade.
This is a children’s story. In real life, people are quite capable of actually believing the emperor really is wonderfully dressed. Maurice, however, had a habit of seeing through charades and declaring that some wonderful new truth was running around stark naked. It is not easy to provide this public service.
In some ways, Maurice was easy to know. In terms of personality, what you saw was pretty much what he was, but his modesty often occluded many details of the man. I was fascinated to learn he had been a Parachute Regiment officer during the Second World War. It takes courage to go into battle, but even more to do so by stepping out of a door 600 feet in the air, over ground that is even more unfriendly than gravity alone can make it.
When I asked him about the day in March 1945 when he jumped across the Rhine with the 3rd Brigade of the 6thAirborne Division, I got no details of his own experiences. It is a matter of history that the paratroopers landed next to intact German positions which had plenty of artillery; and that they took heavy casualties as they shattered Germany’s last defensive barrier. Typically, Maurice told me nothing of his own deeds, but I got the sense there was at least one because of a souvenir German submachine-gun he carried over the next six years.
After surging across Germany, his brigade was sent to India to prepare for battle against the Japanese. Once there, the atom bombs forced Japan’s surrender and he and his paratroopers instead went off to liberate Allied prisoners and accept the surrender of Japanese troops. Within a few months of that, they were bundled off to Palestine where the uneasy peace of the Arabs and Jews was rapidly unraveling and the British were caught between the two.
A few years ago, I was visiting the Israeli National Police Force counter-terror team at a police station in Herzliya. Maurice had a cheerful memory of the same station – being blasted out of bed into a gunfight when the Stern Gang raided the place.
When the Palmach decided to open hostilities against the British they began by strewing booby-traps and time bombs all around Tel Aviv. Maurice, then the Battalion intelligence officer, got one of those orders that really made the British Army what it was… “Maurice, you just took the mine and booby-trap course, and remember all those odd Jerry tricks. Get out there and take care of things, would you?” Dismantling dozens of explosive devices did not constitute one of his favorite memories.
I had to learn about his encounter with an angry lynch mob from another source. Somebody dressed as a Parachute Regiment officer driving a jeep with his battalion markings had just dropped off a bomb in an Arab neighbourhood and there were considerable casualties. Up comes Maurice, a young Parachute Regiment Officer alone in a jeep to investigate… It takes a lot of self-confidence and nerve to stare down a mob intent on stringing you up the nearest lamppost.
Next came the campaign against the Communist terrorists in Malaysia. Maurice had a cautionary tale about the dangers of drink and bad companions, he got lured into a poker game and ended up losing the German submachine gun he’d been using as his personal weapon since March 1945. Replacing it with an American M1 carbine was not a good idea either, when weeks of work resulted in a successful ambush, he hit his target – seeing the puff of dust on the jacket – but the little SOB still managed to run off into the jungle.
After a couple more years of peaceful soldiering he was sent to Cyprus where Georgios Grivas and the EOKA terrorists were murdering British personnel. The hunt for Grivas was frustrating, particularly when trying to develop intelligence from civilians who preferred to hide Grivas. For Maurice, this was a lesson in patience and understanding even more about the power of an ideology to sway thinking.
There were other moments: His first marriage and its children Belinda, Justin and Gail, and the hazards of peacetime soldiering with the Parachute Regiment. Boxing is a strong part of the regiment’s culture and while winning is not required, participation is. Maurice, fit and active as he was, was still no Mike Tyson or George Foreman. At least when commanding his battalion he was in the ring more often as a referee than a pugilist. There were deployments to Bahrain (part of Britain’s successful deterrence of an Iraqi take-over of Kuwait) and to Aden – which was not a peaceful deployment.
Then came Ulster. Maurice was one of the British Army’s experts on that point where ideology, counter-terrorism, counter propaganda and intelligence all meld. This wasn’t easy work, but there were some satisfactions. For all their folderol about being Catholic nationalists, the real inspiration to the Provisional Wing of the IRA was that legendary Irish hero – Leon O’Trotsky.
The work Maurice did in Ulster earned the award of Commander of the British Empire (which he seldom mentioned) and the abiding dislike of Trotskyites the world over. This caused some irritations later in his life, but the real measure of the good in any man is the hatred he has earned from bad people.
After Ulster came a new marriage and a posting to Iran, where Maurice sniffed trouble in the air for the Shah several years before the Islamic Revolution occurred. It also brought new achievements as an author, his PhD in War-Studies, retirement from the Army and a move to Canada. Then came Andrew and Julia, the Centre for Conflict Studies and the Mackenzie Institute.
I first met Maurice in 1986 when he founded the Institute, although I still haven’t forgiven him for calling it the Mackenzie Institute for the Study of Terrorism, Revolution and Propaganda. It’s not easy to fill out forms with a name that long, there often isn’t enough space. This became my problem when he brought me on board in 1990.
Working with Maurice was an education. When studying terrorists or ideologues there is no good reason to denigrating them (any more than you have to). Maurice had long grasped the principal that one should hate the sin and not the sinner. The ideologue is to be pitied, but never trusted because somebody who has surrendered so much of themselves to a cause is dangerous.
Maurice strongly believed that family life was a private matter, but like many a father he was highly protective of his young daughter and sometimes baffled by her as a teenager… but Julia can relax, he never related any embarrassing anecdotes. However, as somebody who implicitly understood the dangers of ideologies, he was horrified by what she was being taught in school in Toronto.
He firmly believed that every simple situation had hidden complexities and every complex one contained some simple truths. I still marvel at his simple description of the essential nature of psychological warfare – two competing identical trinities: “We’re the good guys. They’re the bad guys. We’re going to win.” Nobody else has such a simple and yet all-encompassing definition.
An accurate definition of terrorism has yet to appear anywhere in the last 50 years. Maurice gave up that quest long ago and instead framed it with a set of characteristics – more simply, where everybody was trying to cram a complex activity into a simple box, Maurice built a bigger box.
He never allowed himself to be constrained by fashionable opinion, particularly when it came to the dying days of the Soviet Union. Yet at the same time, there was also a delight in having new things to think about, on encountering something for the first time. He had a relentless curiosity and an honest interest in any honestly held opinion.
This is all very intellectual, but I still remember him grinning like a schoolboy when he hitched a ride to a conference in Windsor in a crowded Honda Civic with several young officers (including me). There was a massive traffic snarl on the 401 past London, thanks to a flipped truck jammed underneath a bridge. Faced with a multi-hour wait, we resorted to our military training and a pair of wirecutters to drive off the highway, through a hole we cut in a fence, onto a muddy farm track and thence to a concession road… The cars that tried to follow us all got bogged down, not knowing a thing about off-road driving. Maurice loved seeing junior officers with initiative and a willingness to break some rules.
There was the dry sardonic Maurice. On the roof of the health club across the street from our office, some promotion was underway with a variety of plastic “tropical huts’, a bar, and an overly loud sound system. He took one look and drawled “Tell the District Commissioner to bring up the Gatling Gun, would you? I think the natives are restless.”
Maurice could also put more intonations into the word ‘yes’ than anyone else on the planet. ‘Yaaasss’ could mean “Hmm, I’d never thought of it that way before;” or it could mean “Sure, sure, whatever, would you mind leaving my office?” Or it could mean “This is fascinating, but you’re nuts.” Context was everything, with proximity to a pint coming in close second to narrowing down likely interpretations.
There was also his delight at something new, something never encountered before or something new to think about. But Maurice was never was one to conform to the opinion of the moment, and he could see through any charade.
In the tale of the Emperor’s new clothing, we understand that the clothing was not there, but that people pretended to see it lest they be thought of as fools. As we say goodbye to Maurice (although I really prefer ‘See you later’), he remains wrapped in dignity, courage and wisdom. He wore them well in life and wears them still. We know we cannot see these garments, but understand they are nonetheless there. Only a fool would believe otherwise.
