Captain Claud

Believe Nothing until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism by Patrick Cockburn. 320 pages, Verso. 2024.

How do you start an interview with Al Capone? The twenty-six-year-old Oxford-educated reporter Claud Cockburn was on his way to an audience with the archgangster at the Lexington Hotel in Chicago in June of 1930. His editors at the London Times had put just one caveat on whatever dispatches he might file: only stories “not unduly emphasizing crime.” The Times was no tabloid, but when Scarface himself offers to pencil you in, you go. Having clocked the goon with a submachine gun by the door, Cockburn began by asking about how Capone felt, at age thirty-one, to have survived into seniority as a gangster? “He took the question quite seriously,” Cockburn recounts in his memoirs. The business he had chosen was perilous, Capone agreed, but what pitiful fate might have befallen little Alphonse, “selling newspapers barefoot in the streets of Brooklyn,” if he had never entered the rackets to begin with? Stirred by this image, his interviewer began to remark what a tragedy it was that so many barefoot boys never have a chance. Capone cut him off. “Listen,” he said, “don’t you get the idea I’m one of these goddamn radicals.” Al Capone, it turned out, had the politics of a downstate poobah of the Elks Lodge. “This American system of ours . . . gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it.” Capone predicted that capitalism would survive the new Depression—and Cockburn, despite many hours in the socialist coffeehouses of Vienna and Budapest, had to agree.

If it was impossible to write about Chicago without writing about crime, it was equally hard to write about crime without also writing about politics—and vice versa. This insight animated Cockburn’s extraordinary career as a reporter in the 1930s, the decade when gangsterism, journalism, and political ideology combined in dramatic new permutations. Six years after their meeting at the Lexington Hotel, Capone was in Alcatraz, where another inmate stabbed him with a pair of scissors for refusing to join a work strike. Cockburn, meanwhile, was holding a gun in Alicante and Madrid as a soldier in the Spanish republican militia and a correspondent, not for the Times but for the communist Daily Worker.

Graham Greene reckoned that his old school chum Claud Cockburn (pronounced CO-burn) might be remembered as the greatest journalist of the twentieth century. Few reporters have put entire ruling classes on notice the way Cockburn did as editor of The Week, the newsletter he launched in 1933 to monitor the reactionary, Hitler-appeasing British establishment. Somebody had to do this job, and the Times, he realized, wasn’t up to it. So he left a career in respectable newspapers behind for the liberty and precarity of dissident journalism. Cockburn called The Week his “pirate craft,” maneuvering between the creaky galleons of Fleet Street to plunder the ascendant fascists and their well-heeled sympathizers. His most notorious scoops concerned the circle of politicians entertained at the Cliveden estate outside London by Lady Nancy Astor, the American-born, antisemitic Conservative MP whose family owned both the Times and the Observer. The “Cliveden Set” was not quite the crypto-fascist deep state that briefly captured the British public’s imagination, but Cockburn rendered a great service by illuminating the parlor-room deals by which consent for a Germanophilic foreign policy might be manufactured by “the Cliveden set” and their like.

The Nazis were not pleased. While serving as the Reich’s ambassador to Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop demanded the British Foreign Office suppress The Week on the grounds that it was the chief source of anti-Nazi propaganda in the Anglophone world. The paper continued until 1941, when it was banned temporarily as a wartime exigency (its last issue appeared in 1946), but for the rest of his life Cockburn could sleep tranquilly in the assurance that he had pissed off the right people. “I find myself warming to [Claud] Cockburn—I get The Week regularly,” Christopher Isherwood wrote in a letter in 1934, not long after saying goodbye to Berlin. “Misinformed or not, he does slash out at these crooks and murderers and he’s so inexhaustibly cocky and funny like a street-boy throwing stones at pompous windows.”

The significance of Cockburn’s promethean discovery of “the influence that can be wielded by the mimeographed news-sheet,” as Greene put it, is hard to overstate. His legacy extends not just to the alternative press of the 1960s but to a whole mode of independent, adversarial journalism whose buccaneers sail under many flags: Amy Goodman, Jeremy Scahill, Matt Drudge, and Julian Assange, to name a few. “He thought—and to a large degree proved through his own actions,” writes Cockburn’s son Patrick in a new biography of his father, “that a journalist without wealth or resources could fight and win in opposition to those who had great quantities of both.”

Herr Ribbentrop’s anxiety over the transatlantic reach of The Week was typical paranoia, even for a Nazi; one reason Cockburn is not better remembered today is that he was never much read in the United States. The exception was a potboiler, Beat the Devil, published under the pseudonym James Helvick in 1951 (a banner year for pen names, thanks to McCarthy’s blacklist). Cockburn wrote the initial screenplay for the film adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones, but John Huston canned it in favor of a rewrite by Truman Capote. Cockburn got his revenge on Hollywood via a grandchild he never got to meet: Olivia Wilde is the daughter of his second son, the Harper’s Washington, D.C., editor Andrew Cockburn and the award-winning investigative reporter and congressional candidate Leslie Cockburn.

Though Patrick Cockburn is too modest to draw much attention to his family, “Claud,” as he is known in this book, was the paterfamilias of a clan of Tenenbaumian accomplishment. There was also the late Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn; the lawyer and mystery novelist Sarah Caudwell; the disability rights activist Claudia Flanders; our biographer, perhaps the most respected Middle East correspondent of his generation; and granddaughters Stephanie Flanders, head of Bloomberg News Economics, and Laura Flanders, host of a venerable public affairs show. Claud’s cousin was Evelyn Waugh. Jean Ross, the inspiration for Isherwood’s ingenue Sally Bowles, was his companion and comrade in Spain, the mother of his daughter Sarah, and indispensable to the operations of The Week. This is all to say that Claud Cockburn is more present in the DNA of contemporary journalism, politics, and culture than we are used to noticing.

Patrick Cockburn tells us that much of the impetus to write this biography came from the discovery of his father’s MI5 file. Unlike many American writers surveilled by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Cockburn, with his high-level leaks and extensive foreign contacts, was treated by British intelligence as an authentic going concern. On the personal invitation of Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Cockburn began writing for the Daily Worker in 1934; a reporter of his talent would bring “reader appeal” to the paper, Pollitt hoped. Two years later, Cockburn agreed to be the Daily Worker’s man in Spain during the Civil War, the most consequential assignment of his life.

In Spain with Jean Ross, Cockburn decided to write and fight at the same time, as twinned expressions of a commitment to halt fascism by any means necessary. Later he would not pretend to have made an expert soldier. Patrick Cockburn recalls a favorite story of his father’s about the moment just before he rose to join “a doomed attack of heroic but untrained Republican militiamen,” when his belt suddenly snapped, causing him to trip on the trousers around his ankles and knock himself out cold on the ground. He was more useful to the Republic as a propagandist, a role he embraced on its own terms—or rather on the terms of Willi Münzenberg and Otto Katz, the Stalinist spin-doctors who were two of the era’s communications geniuses. The record is unambiguous: in Spain, Claud Cockburn exaggerated and even fabricated events to serve the Communist—meaning Stalinist—line. In the spring of 1937, notably, his stories ginned up suspicion and hatred of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), the gallant Catalonian revolutionaries at odds with Stalin’s designs on the Republic. “In the past,” reads a Cockburn dispatch typical of this period, “the leaders of the POUM have frequently sought to deny their complicity as agents of a Fascist cause against the People’s Front.” The idea that the POUM was a Francoist fifth column was horseshit, of course, and it egged on one of the more disgraceful episodes of leftist fratricide in the twentieth century, when members of the POUM were hunted in the streets of Barcelona and disappeared by their putative comrades.

The most audacious of Cockburn’s lies came at the insistence of the Comintern agent Katz, who encouraged him to write about the mutiny of fascist troops in Tétouan, in Franco-controlled Morocco:

Claud replied that he had never been in Tetuan and knew of no such revolt there. “Not the point,” replied an impatient Katz. “Nor have I heard of any such thing.”

The point was that a shipment of artillery for the Republicans was being held up on the French border due to the Popular Front government of Leon Blum’s fear of breaching the international non-intervention pact. But news of a thrilling mutiny might be just enough to convince the French officials to look the other way; Cockburn wrote the story, about a place he had never seen and a revolt that had never happened. The guns made it to Spain.

Around this time, there emerged from the chaparral another gangly English socialist stumbling around the Spanish front, picking lice off his balls. Eric Blair’s story of Spain, published under the name George Orwell, was about almost getting killed twice: the first time at the front, where he was shot by a fascist sniper in the throat, and the second in Barcelona, where he was one of the lucky members of the POUM to avoid liquidation. In the receipts-bearing back half of Homage to Catalonia, Orwell reserves special scorn for Claud Cockburn (whose Daily Worker byline was “Frank Pitcairn.”)

Patrick Cockburn allows that in this context Orwell had every reason to hate his father’s guts. To Orwell, those Daily Worker stories represented not just the dangerous elision of journalism and propaganda but the entire totalitarian corruption of plain truth—“ the truthful recording of facts,” as he put it in “The Prevention of Literature.” Cockburn didn’t have much time for Orwell’s sanctimony. “To hear people talking about the facts,” he once wrote, “you would think they lay about like pieces of gold ore in Yukon days, waiting to be picked up—arduously, it is true, but still definitely and visible—by strenuous prospectors whose subsequent problem was only how to get them to market.” Objectivity in journalism is a myth, but what should the reporter rely on instead? The vaunted right of the public to know the facts? “Who gave them such a right?” Cockburn replied in the depth of his commitment. “Perhaps when they have exerted themselves enough to alter the policy of their bloody government, and the Fascists are beaten in Spain, they will have such a right. This isn’t an abstract question. It’s a shooting war.”

Neither were distortion and propaganda altogether the allergens to Orwell that his reputation has left us to believe. At the end of the Forties he was happy to aid in the establishment of the clandestine Information Research Department (IRD), developed by the Foreign Office to spread anticommunist propaganda. It was on behalf of the IRD that Orwell prepared his infamous do-not-call list of writers and intellectuals he suspected were too pink to assist in such a noble enterprise. The absence of Cockburn’s name can probably be attributed to his having already decamped for Ireland, where he would die in 1981.

Claud Cockburn’s signal achievements may have been as an anti-fascist rather than a journalist, and that may recommend him in the final accounting. But he was “distressed,” if not contrite, remembers his wife Patricia Cockburn in her book The Years of The Week, about the misleading optimism of his stories from Spain. The two parts of the problem, impossible to separate, he said, were “the extent to which I myself totally believed what I said, and the extent to which I was, more or less consciously, trying to get other people to believe it.” The writer James Fenton observed a similar agitation in himself while covering the fall of Saigon in 1975, which he greeted with its North Vietnamese liberators from atop a Soviet-made T-54 tank. “I knew something about the thirties and I absolutely did not believe that one should, as a reporter, invent victories for the comrades,” he wrote a decade later in an extract published in Granta. The understandable—if “corrupting,” Fenton thought—allure of political opportunism is just that strong when the stakes are so high: “We saw the tanks arriving and we all wanted to associate ourselves, just a little bit, with victory.”

Readers, too, want to associate themselves with victory. Can you blame them, especially in a year of mass murder euphemized in passive voice, hasbara doublespeak, Palestinian reporters dying in darkness, wise men of the editorial pages explaining why a sociology major eating a granola bar in a tent is a greater offense to dignity than each new day’s Guernica?

In these circumstances the outlaws credit themselves just by being outlaws. “Public service is my motto,” Al Capone once declared. If you have followed the New York Times coverage of Gaza over the last year, I invite you to look me in the eye and tell me that that is any sillier than “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” The pirate’s methods can be coarse—some must walk the plank—but on balance his code is no worse than the codes of his enemies, who are imperialists and slavers after all. If propriety allowed, you would cheer him on as another captured ship is scuttled to the deep.