Thatchergate was the colloquial title of a hoax perpetrated by members of the anarcho-punk band Crass during the aftermath of the 1982 Falklands War. Using excerpts from speeches by Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Margaret Thatcher and President of the United States Ronald Reagan, a recording was spliced together which purported to be a telephone conversation between the two leaders. During the course of the tape, Reagan seems to state his intention to use Europe as a battle front to show the Soviet leaders the US's resolve in a nuclear conflict, whilst Thatcher appears to imply that HMS Sheffield was deliberately sacrificed to escalate the Falklands War.
When the recording first surfaced into the public domain in 1983, the United States Department of State considered it to be propaganda produced by the Soviet KGB, a story reported by both the San Francisco Chronicle [1] and The Sunday Times . [2] However, coverage of the tape by the UK broadsheet The Observer in January 1984 identified the true source as Crass. [3] Crass have stated that great care was taken to ensure their anonymity, and that to this day it is a mystery as to how Observer journalists traced the hoax back to them. [4]
In January 2014, official government documents were released to the National Archives revealing the concerns of the UK's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). A Foreign Office adviser's letter to Thatcher said: "This looks like a rather clumsy operation. We have no evidence so far about who is responsible. ...SIS doubt whether this is a Soviet operation. It is possible that one of the Argentine intelligence services might have been behind it; or alternatively it might be the work of left-wing groups in this country." [5]
Excerpts of the recording can be heard in the Crass track "Powerless with a Guitar" on the compilation LP Devastate to Liberate (Yangki - 1985 - Yangki 1). The full recording was later released on the expanded Crassical Collection edition of the group's best of album Best Before 1984 .
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was a British stateswoman and Conservative politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century and the first woman to hold the position. As prime minister, she implemented economic policies known as Thatcherism. A Soviet journalist dubbed her the "Iron Lady", a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style.
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov was a Soviet politician who was the sixth leader of the Soviet Union and the fourth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, taking office in late 1982 and serving until his death in 1984.
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Best Before 1984 is a compilation of Crass' singles and other tracks, released in 1986, including lyrics and a booklet which details the history of the band in their own words. The album was named in reference to the notion that 1984 was the band's "'sell by date", the year that they had often publicly stated that they would split up. Indeed, the band ceased gigging and recording in that year.
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Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, codenamed Hero and Yoga was a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) colonel during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Penkovsky informed the United States and the United Kingdom about Soviet military secrets, including the appearance and footprint of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missile installations and the weakness of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program. This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba before most of them were operational. It also gave US President John F. Kennedy, during the Cuban Missile Crisis that followed, valuable information about Soviet weakness that allowed him to face down Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and resolve the crisis without a nuclear war.
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Able Archer 83 was a military exercise conducted by NATO that took place in November 1983, as part of an annual exercise conducted in November 1983. It simulated a period of heightened nuclear tensions between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, leading to concerns that it could have been mistaken for a real attack by the Soviet Union. The exercise is considered by some to be one of the closest moments the world came to nuclear war during the Cold War. The purpose of the exercise, like previous years, was to simulate a period of conflict escalation, culminating in the U.S. military attaining a simulated DEFCON 1 coordinated nuclear attack. The five-day exercise, which involved NATO commands throughout Western Europe, was coordinated from the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) headquarters in Casteau, Belgium.
This is an overview of the Crass Records discography. (NB, dates refer to initial UK releases, many of these records have since been re-issued in CD format)
Crass were an English art collective and punk rock band formed in Epping, Essex in 1977 who promoted anarchism as a political ideology, a lifestyle and a resistance movement. Crass popularised the anarcho-punk movement of the punk subculture, advocating direct action, animal rights, feminism, anti-fascism and environmentalism. The band employed and advocated a DIY ethic in its albums, sound collages, leaflets and films.
The cultural impact of the Falklands War spanned several media in both Britain and Argentina. A number of films and television productions emerged from the conflict. The first Argentine film about the war was Los chicos de la guerra in 1984. The BBC drama Tumbledown (1988) tells the story of a British officer paralysed from a bullet wound. The computer game Harrier Attack (1983) and the naval strategy game Strike Fleet (1987) are two examples of Falklands-related games. A number of fictional works were set during the Falklands War, including in Stephen King's novella The Langoliers (1990), in which the character Nick Hopewell is a Falklands veteran. The war provided a wealth of material for non-fiction writers; in the United Kingdom (UK) an important account became Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins' The Battle for the Falklands.
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Reagan is a 2024 American biographical drama film directed by Sean McNamara and written by Howard Klausner, based on Paul Kengor's 2006 book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. The film stars Dennis Quaid as President Ronald Reagan alongside Penelope Ann Miller and Jon Voight, with Robert Davi and Lesley-Anne Down in supporting roles.
We were overcome with a mixture of fear and elation, should we or should we not expose the hoax? Our indecision was resolved when a journalist from The Observer contacted us in relation to 'a certain tape'. At first we denied knowledge, but eventually decided to admit responsibility. We had been meticulously careful in the production and distribution of the tape to ensure that no one knew about our involvement. How The Observer got hold of information that led to us is a complete mystery. It acted as a substantial warning, if walls did indeed have ears, how much more was known of our activities?
