Britain's most important signals intelligence partner, before and during WWII, was Sweden. Most people do not know this and Americans are usually completely unable to process the fact.
It would be interesting to know if Starnes had any awareness of the Swedish programme to read diplomatic cyphers.
His biography may shed some light on this but it's been a while since I read it and only up to the McDonald Commission Hearings. I will need to reread it when I can and if I come across anything I can let you know. He did work in London early on in his career and mentioned a Norwegian contact (member of SOE) but I don't recall anything about Sweden.
The name of his Biography is Closely Guarded: A Life in Canadian Security and Intelligence by John Starnes. It's become ridiculously expensive but some sites are more reasonably priced than others, if you're interested.
The U of T E-Book PDF is priced at the absurd amount of $70.00 CAD. This is new. Previously there was only a print version (when I bought it) and the price was reasonable at that time: https://utorontopress.com/9781442673021/closely-guarded/
Until the Blair government concentrated economic decision-making in Downing Street (no 10 & no11), the long-established post of "President of the Board of Trade" was a cabinet post of pretty much equal rank to Minister of Defence, which was pretty new in the post-war period, each armed service prior to WWII having its own ministry (and vote in cabinet!)
That was almost certainly why the Matchbox screening boards were set up by the Board of Trade. The emphasis on aviation was not an accident: this was the only field where British experts thought that German experts had anything of consequence to offer; their bioscientists and rocket scientists, eagerly sought by America and Russia, mostly being charlatans: none of the human experiments conducted in German and Japanese deaths camps (like camp 731, which was the worst place on Earth) yielded any scientific information which was not already known, published and in the public domain, from ethical trials and experiments conducted prior to WWII. Britain was the only major power to realise this truth!
NASA depended more on General Dornberger (whom the British thought, rather deeply, about hanging) than on Von Braun, whose record wasn't quite so dire. And the Space Shuttle was Dornberger's COPY of the original British "MUSTARD" concept. The only "NAZI" scientist who was NOT a con-artist turned out to be Gustav Lachman, whom the Board of Trade snaffled to work at Handley Page on what became the Victor Bomber: by a long way the most aerodynamically efficient of all cold war military aircraft; Lachman and his assistant started by designing a wing, every part of which had the same critical mach number, and then tweaked the rest of the airframe to that number, resulting in an aircraft that needed an automatic throttle-puller to stop it accidentally exceeding the speed of sound as it levelled out from a climb. (This had happened over Watford Town Centre on a market day, which added a bit of impetus to efforts to address the issue!)
Not only was Dornberger thought a war-criminal by virtue of the purpose of the V-weapons programme: he and Von Braun were responsible for the massive use of slave labour to produce those weapons and create some of the V-weapons production and launch sites. Forced labour under NAZI rule was a form of execution, because people were deliberately worked to death, on Himmler's orders, which Dornberger put into action with Von Braun's help.
If the history of Camp 731 in Manchuria were ever to be researched and publicised with the same energy as that of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the world would be amazed and appalled. Both the US government and the Chinese Communist Party have a vested interest in burying the truth, however. Even the Soviets ignored the use of Russian women and children in experiments at Camp 731 (Japan hadn't even been at war with the USSR at the time!) for the sake of getting access to the meaningless results of the completely unscientific experiments.
You always give the most interesting insights into what I write. Thank you so much M!
Re your comment: "none of the human experiments conducted in German and Japanese deaths camps (like camp 731, which was the worst place on Earth) yielded any scientific information which was not already known, published and in the public domain, from ethical trials and experiments conducted prior to WWII."
This is pretty much the same as the Starnes/Reitman cult. They haven't produced anything new and their approach is unscientific. The focus is more on sadistic abuse and cruelty rather any objective scientific method. Typical of psychopaths and sociopaths.
In addition, it's all been done from assassination drugs (which actually work) to social and behavioural engineering and control. GCHQ - UK's JTRIG program and the CIAs SV40 Cancer drug are just the most well-known examples. Although the trials that produced the CIAs SV40 Cancer drug after WWII weren't ethical. The West seemed to be taking a page out of the Nazi playbook after WWII. At least the US did. I can't comment on the UK because I simply don't know.
IMO, the Starnes/Reitman cult "experiments" (including the one with Ewen Cameron) are no more scientific than Serial Killers, Leonard Lake and Charles Ngs' "Project Miranda" "experiment" was.
Britain's most important signals intelligence partner, before and during WWII, was Sweden. Most people do not know this and Americans are usually completely unable to process the fact.
It would be interesting to know if Starnes had any awareness of the Swedish programme to read diplomatic cyphers.
His biography may shed some light on this but it's been a while since I read it and only up to the McDonald Commission Hearings. I will need to reread it when I can and if I come across anything I can let you know. He did work in London early on in his career and mentioned a Norwegian contact (member of SOE) but I don't recall anything about Sweden.
The name of his Biography is Closely Guarded: A Life in Canadian Security and Intelligence by John Starnes. It's become ridiculously expensive but some sites are more reasonably priced than others, if you're interested.
The U of T E-Book PDF is priced at the absurd amount of $70.00 CAD. This is new. Previously there was only a print version (when I bought it) and the price was reasonable at that time: https://utorontopress.com/9781442673021/closely-guarded/
Until the Blair government concentrated economic decision-making in Downing Street (no 10 & no11), the long-established post of "President of the Board of Trade" was a cabinet post of pretty much equal rank to Minister of Defence, which was pretty new in the post-war period, each armed service prior to WWII having its own ministry (and vote in cabinet!)
That was almost certainly why the Matchbox screening boards were set up by the Board of Trade. The emphasis on aviation was not an accident: this was the only field where British experts thought that German experts had anything of consequence to offer; their bioscientists and rocket scientists, eagerly sought by America and Russia, mostly being charlatans: none of the human experiments conducted in German and Japanese deaths camps (like camp 731, which was the worst place on Earth) yielded any scientific information which was not already known, published and in the public domain, from ethical trials and experiments conducted prior to WWII. Britain was the only major power to realise this truth!
NASA depended more on General Dornberger (whom the British thought, rather deeply, about hanging) than on Von Braun, whose record wasn't quite so dire. And the Space Shuttle was Dornberger's COPY of the original British "MUSTARD" concept. The only "NAZI" scientist who was NOT a con-artist turned out to be Gustav Lachman, whom the Board of Trade snaffled to work at Handley Page on what became the Victor Bomber: by a long way the most aerodynamically efficient of all cold war military aircraft; Lachman and his assistant started by designing a wing, every part of which had the same critical mach number, and then tweaked the rest of the airframe to that number, resulting in an aircraft that needed an automatic throttle-puller to stop it accidentally exceeding the speed of sound as it levelled out from a climb. (This had happened over Watford Town Centre on a market day, which added a bit of impetus to efforts to address the issue!)
Not only was Dornberger thought a war-criminal by virtue of the purpose of the V-weapons programme: he and Von Braun were responsible for the massive use of slave labour to produce those weapons and create some of the V-weapons production and launch sites. Forced labour under NAZI rule was a form of execution, because people were deliberately worked to death, on Himmler's orders, which Dornberger put into action with Von Braun's help.
If the history of Camp 731 in Manchuria were ever to be researched and publicised with the same energy as that of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the world would be amazed and appalled. Both the US government and the Chinese Communist Party have a vested interest in burying the truth, however. Even the Soviets ignored the use of Russian women and children in experiments at Camp 731 (Japan hadn't even been at war with the USSR at the time!) for the sake of getting access to the meaningless results of the completely unscientific experiments.
You always give the most interesting insights into what I write. Thank you so much M!
Re your comment: "none of the human experiments conducted in German and Japanese deaths camps (like camp 731, which was the worst place on Earth) yielded any scientific information which was not already known, published and in the public domain, from ethical trials and experiments conducted prior to WWII."
This is pretty much the same as the Starnes/Reitman cult. They haven't produced anything new and their approach is unscientific. The focus is more on sadistic abuse and cruelty rather any objective scientific method. Typical of psychopaths and sociopaths.
In addition, it's all been done from assassination drugs (which actually work) to social and behavioural engineering and control. GCHQ - UK's JTRIG program and the CIAs SV40 Cancer drug are just the most well-known examples. Although the trials that produced the CIAs SV40 Cancer drug after WWII weren't ethical. The West seemed to be taking a page out of the Nazi playbook after WWII. At least the US did. I can't comment on the UK because I simply don't know.
IMO, the Starnes/Reitman cult "experiments" (including the one with Ewen Cameron) are no more scientific than Serial Killers, Leonard Lake and Charles Ngs' "Project Miranda" "experiment" was.