Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by the U.S. House of Representatives 1978
L.M.P. Systems
10420 Plano Road, Suite 101
Dallas, Texas 75238, USA
In the last issue of Lobster while re-viewing two JFK-related CD-ROMS I half jokingly suggested that the Warren Commission Hearing and Exhibits and the House Select Committee evidentiary volumes would soon be available on these magic little 120 mm discs. Well, no sooner had Lobster been published than the above CD-ROM arrived in the post. It includes the whole of the House Select Committee Report and all the twelve volumes of hearings and exhibits, including the photographs, pictures and facsimile documents of the original publication. All this for only 35 bucks.
The software programming is less than it should have been and is DOS-based rather than WINDOWS-based. This produced problems on my 486 DX2 machine and prevented me from viewing the graphic (PCX) files directly – I had to export them to Paintshop Pro and even then about 10% of the material resolutely refused to show.
The twelve volumes and the Report were never published with indexes, only contents pages, so the powerful SEARCH options at the front end made it a smarter choice to have the electronic rather than the original hard copy. The options available are: single word, wild cat, OR (same page), EXCLUSIVE OR, NOT, together with proximity and phrase searches. Nothing in these thirteen monumental volumes is now more than a few milliseconds away.
In the last issue of Lobster I mentioned the problem of page references when using material scanned on to a CD-ROM – namely, there aren’t any. L.M.P., however, have attempted to preserve the paging of the original, though this does sometimes wander a few pages one way or the other. Nevertheless, this is a start.
The late Larry Howard of the JFK Assassination Centre in Dallas seems to have been the progenitor of this project. It is a fitting tribute to him.
NOTE: if you are outside the USA the Investigation can easily be obtained from Andy Winiarczyk at the Last Hurrah Bookshop, 937 Memorial Avenue, Williamsport, PA 17701, USA. Telephone (717) 327 9338. Andy accepts VISA and is used to shipping to addresses beyond the Republic.
Anthony Frewin
Prevailing Winds
Initially a catalogue, this is now a magazine and catalogue combined. Put together by Martin Cannon, the magazine section is 64 pages of articles of very high quality, with articles from Cannon himself and Michael Parenti, Dick Russell on non-lethal weapons, Peter Dale Scott demolishing Posner’s Case Closed (it’s worth getting just for that); plus material on Area 51, Pat Robertson, and the mysterious shooting at the CIA.
This would been a cracking good issue at any time; to do this first time out is tremendously impressive.
As well as the articles there are 40 pages of the PWR catalogue of articles, magazines, audio and video tapes for purchase.
Unreservedly recommended.
Contact them at the Centre for the Preservation of Modern History, PO Box 23511, California 93121; tel 805 899 3433; fax 805 899 4773.
US subs are $25 for 4 issues; better inquire for subs outside the US.
Surveillant
Subtitled ‘Acquisition and Commentary for Intelligence and Security Professionals’, this is the best, most informative magazine about other sources on spooks, their techniques, history and related areas. It is now just starting its fourth volume, so it is still possible to get on board early on. A typical issue contains gossip, books forthcoming, and reviews of books, journals, manuals, and government reports. And not just in English, though English predominates; and not just those which support established orders, though those predominate. Surveillant’s politics are pretty right-wing – a couple of the people involved in it are ex-CIA – but the ideology intrudes rarely and can be ignored when it does.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that Surveillant is expensive. Bi-monthly, an annual subscription is $96 (US), $104 (Canada) and $114 (elsewhere). It says ‘Inquire for single issues’.
Lock Box Mail Unit 18757, Washington DC 20036; telephone 202 785-4334; by E-mail via MCI Mail:NIBC
Resonance: Newsletter of the Bioelectromagnetics SIG
SIG means Special Interest Group, and in this case the parent body is American Mensa. Do not be put off by that, if, like me, Mensa in the UK has hitherto struck you as a bunch of half-smart tossers. For this an extremely interesting little journal. Resonance, is quarterly, now up to issue 28, a digest of (mostly) scientific literature on all things to do with ‘the interaction between electric and/or magnetic fields and living organisms, and related topics’. In other words, if you are remotely interested in the whole area of mind control technology, ELF, psychotronic weapons etc., and want to keep abreast of the literature, this is the place to start.
Issue 28, for example, contains the tenth and eleventh (!) parts of a long series which first appeared in a local newspaper in California on mind control; an essay on ‘non-hertzian waves and microwave nonlethality’; a long review of patent number 4,889,526, ‘Non-invasive method and apparatus for modulating brain signals through an external magnetic or electric field to reduce pain’; an essay, complete with scientific documentation, on ‘synthetic telepathy’; and a six-page summary of known attempts to develop electro-magnetic weapons, starting in 1934!
If you have never got beyond the fragments on this subject in Lobster, this issue alone contains enough information to boggle the mind and keep you going in the library for at least a year.
Subscriptions in US are $12.00 for 4 issues; outside US $15.00 for 4 issues. But please note that Resonance is A5 (UK) format, with very small, photo-reduced print. If you want the full-size (8″ by 11″; i.e. A4) version add $2.00.
Make cheques payable to editor Judy Wall, and send them to her at 684, CR 535, Sumterville, FL 33585, USA.
Beyond our Ken
Academics reading this may be unaware of the Security and Intelligence Studies Group, a sub-section of the UK Political Studies Association. SISG produces a little newsletter, edited by Dr. Ken Robertson who subscribed to Lobster until I wrote and pointed out the spook pedigree of some of the people he was mixing with. Oops! End of subscription.
Lefty librarians?
A number of Lobster subscribers are in the information business, some in libraries. They might take a look at a new journal with the nostalgic-sounding title, Information for Social Change. Thirty four pages, nicely produced and desk-topped, this will appear twice a year and subs. are £5.00 in the UK (overseas subscribers, please inquire first) with institutions charged at £15.00 per annum.
Cheques payable to C.F. Atton to Information for Social Change, 14 Hugh Miller Place, Edinburgh, EH3 5JG, Scotland.
Lefty Lawyers?
The Law is a new, quarterly ‘radical legal newspaper’. The first 32 page issue, tabloid newspaper format, appeared at the end of April. It contained articles on the McLibel 2, the Criminal Justice Bill, critiques of prison policy etc – pretty much what you would imagine a radical, British legal magazine would contain in 1995.
Professionally produced, this is being distributed free in London. Outside the Big Nowhere you will have to subscribe, £4.00 for four issues to PO Box 3878, London SW2 5BX.
Its slogan is ‘Progressive but Interesting’. When did you last see the word ‘progressive’ used in this fashion?
Keys of Peter
KOP now has the best mail order book list in the UK for things conspiratorial, Masonic, oligarchic, elite-wise etc. Who else in the UK offers Proofs of a Conspiracy by John Robison (originally printed 1798) at 10, Nesta Webster’s best known three books, and Who Are The Trilaterals? by KOP editor, Ronald King, at 0.15p? (I almost fell for the delicious-sounding Fatima and the Great Conspiracy by Deirdre Manifold – but at £8.00?) KOP represents – my ignorance of organised religion is showing here – some kind of traditional Catholicism, with interesting biases against the money-lenders, against the Masons (under the heading ‘Organised Naturalism’, which sounds like nudism to me), and against the ruling elites.
Keys of Peter, 157 Vicarage Rd, London, E10 5DU.
The CIA and British trade unions
An important piece appeared in issue 9 of Perspectives. Peter E. Newell writes (albeit briefly) of his experience in the 1960s producing anti-communist prop-agenda for the journal of the Union of Post Office Workers, and his concomitant contact with personnel from IRIS, the CIA and the ICFTU.
Perspectives is a curious journal, sort of politely nationalistic, produced by, inter alia, a former big cheese in the National Front, Richard Lawson, using a pseudonym. These days the old racist agenda is pretty well buried, but still there. In this issue there is a long and rather interesting appreciation of E. P. Thompson. Then on the third page, describing a debate between Thompson and the sociologist Stuart Hall, the author writes, ‘Then a West Indian, Stuart Hall…’. Well, yes, I think Hall is of West Indian descent, but why would that be worthy of mention? A couple of pages later we find that the author thinks that Thompson had a ‘powerful message for regionalists’. Regionalists? Finally, on the last page we read of ‘Those of us who are engaged in a struggle against the cultural and economic dominance of cosmopolitan capitalism.’ (Emphasis added.) And there it is, the old code-word for Jews.
Still, Newell’s piece is important.
Single copies, including postage, £2.86 (UK), £3.20 (Europe). Perspectives, BM 6682, London WC1N 3XX.
IRIS
The New Statesman and Society, 10 January 1995, had a crack at the IRIS conundrum after the revelation in the newspapers that IRIS had received 40,000 from the Tory government in 1963. Unfortunately, seeing the name Walter Marshall on the IRIS board in the seventies, author David Osler assumed it to be the Walter Marshall, now Lord Marshall, erstwhile head of the Central Electricity Generating Board. In fact it was a Walter Marshall of Hull. For unless we had the CEGB Chairman living incognito on a post-war estate of semis in Hull, Osler got the wrong guy.
Archives on Audio
I have been reminded of the existence of Dave Emory Archive Tapes. Emory hosts a radio show in which he, with friends, discusses parapolitics, assassinations etc. The shows are recorded and the tapes sold. Looking at the current catalogue of tapes I see: ‘The Fascist “3rd Position”‘, ‘The Far Right and Their Attempt to Co-opt Progressive Forces’, ‘KKK, The Fehme and the Founding of the Nazi Party’, and items on AIDS, WACL, CIA and drugs /mind control, assassinations etc etc. (This is roughly the same agenda as the late Mae Brussel but more intelligently handled.)
They solve the problem of how to provide evidence on the air by reading from books, newspapers etc., something I found unsatisfactory. Like video, audio tape is simply not a medium for storing information: accessing it is just too difficult. But why take my word?
Programme listing from Archives on Audio, PO Box 170023, San Francisco, CA 94117-0023, USA.
An Oldie But a Goodie
Covert Action Quarterly has now passed 50 issues and continues to provide very high quality articles on parapolitics, intelligence and related issues. Two recent essays particularly struck me. The first is in Number 51, Winter 1994, ‘Canadian Intelligence Service Abets Neo-Nazis’, describing how the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service was running an agent who founded what became Canada’s largest current neo-Nazi group, the Heritage Front. (Sound familiar?) The second was in issue 52, Spring 1995, ‘The Rise of the Militias’, which described the rise of the armed, white, conspiracy theory-driven, lunatic fringe in America. Appearing just before the Oklahoma bombing, this was prescient indeed.
Covert Action’s content is changing. Recent issues have included pieces on human radiation experiments, the Internet and the Groom Lake USAF base (Area 51).
Subs are $33 for four issues in Europe; from 1500 Massachusetts Avenue NW, number 732, Washington DC 20005, USA.
EXTRA!
Extra! is the magazine of FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, one of the handful of left-wing magazines in the US trying to stem the conservative tide. It is exclusively concerned with US events and rarely means much to UK readers who have not seen the media to which it refers. However the issue of March/April 1985 is devoted to the ‘The Right-wing Media Machine’, and is the best short account of the conservative/Republican media networks and their sources of finance that I am aware of.
130 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001, USA; tel. 212 633 6700.
Intelligence Newsletter
I haven’t seen the Paris-based Intelligence Newsletter for a while. I used to get it free, then it stopped and I can’t afford it. (It is £335 a year.) It began in 1980 as a digest of articles from the world’s media on intelligence and related areas. This was a wonderful service, and pretty cheap, too. Then it stopped being a news digest, began printing original articles, and became very expensive. The problem for me was the fact that the articles were all anonymous. They all sound very authoritative, and substantial people – the team at Surveillant for example – treat it as more or less authoritative. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t take anonymous material very seriously.
Anyway, it is now available as an on-line service, and a free sample of the hard copy is available on request from Olivier Schmidt in Paris on tel/ fax 33 1 40.51.85.19.
Exposed! The Mackenzie Institute for the Study of Terrorism, Revolution and Propaganda
Watch – the Right Pamphlet Number One
This is an anonymous, 40 page, A5 pamphlet which analyses the Mackenzie personnel, their affiliations and some of its work. Mackenzie is a sort of Canadian version of the British Research Institute for the Study of Conflict – in other words, a psy-war outfit in light drag as a quasi-academic institute. One of Mackenzie’s founders was retired Brigadier Maurice Tugwell, former head of the British Army’s Information Policy unit in Northern Ireland.
This is not a field I know much about and I am not happy with anonymous material, but this appears to be solidly researched, is well documented, and is a useful addition to our knowledge of the psy-war apparatus of NATO members.
It is available for $3.00 Canadian, from Marginal Distribution, 277 George St. North, Unit 103, Peter-borough, Ontario, K9J 3G9, Canada.
EIR on WWF
The journalist Kevin Dowling, author of the novel Interface Ireland (see Lobster 17) which portrayed Colin Wallace and Information Policy as fiction, has been researching the history, origins and parapolitics of the conservation movement from the turn of the century onwards. Some of the more contemporary aspects of this research turns up in Executive Intelligence Review (October 28, 1994; EIR, PO Box 17390, Washington D.C. 20041-0390), focusing on the World Wildlife Fund and its machinations in Africa.
Dowling had no idea who EIR were when he agreed to let them use his material and is not responsible for its use here. The problem with this 50 page chunk is separating the Dowling wheat from the La Rouche chaff.
Trippy squaddies
In the New Statesman and Society of 14 October 1994, Rob Evans had a piece ‘Our Lads on LSD’, exploring roughly the same ground as Armen Victorian’s piece on LSD testing in Lobster 26.
The same river twice
John Hope had an interesting piece in Intelligence and National Security Vol. 9 No. 4 (1994), called ‘Surveillance or Collusion? Maxwell Knight, MI5 and the British Fascisti’. This bears a striking resemblance to the Knight sections of Hope’s piece in Lobster 22, ‘Fascism, the Security Service and the Curious Careers of Maxwell Knight and James McGuirk Hughes’.
In Lobster 22 the opening sentence of the introduction is, ‘The idea that the Security Service, MI5, colluded with British fascism in the inter-war years is not to be found in the existing literature on the subject.’ In the more recent version we find this: ‘To suggest that MI5 may have engaged in some form of collusion with the forces of Fascism in Britain between the wars may appear, at first sight, to have little to recommend it.’ And so on.
The same phenomenon can be seen in the two pieces on the Economic League by Arthur McIvor. The version for the Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, Spring 1988, is titled ‘Political blacklisting and anti-socialist activity between the wars.’ But for the Journal of Contemporary History Vol 23, 1988, it became ‘A Crusade for Capitalism; the Economic League, 1919-39’.
Other examples of this kind of ideological ‘tailoring’ of existing published work for re-publication in these fields would be welcome.
Business as usual
Patrick Hughes in Canada sent me some information on a campaigning group in the USA called S.O.A. Watch. The S.O.A. is the US Army School of the Americas at which Latin American personnel are taught to be interrogators, torturers, counter-insurgents etc.
Further information from SOA Watch at PO Box 3330, Columbus, GA 31903, USA.
An insider’s view
Students of the British intelligence and security services and their activities overseas will want a copy of the paper ‘Arabizing the Omani Intelligence Services: Clash of Cultures?’ by Dale F. Eickelman and M. G. Dennison in International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Spring 1994. pp 1-28. Dennison was Director of Intelligence for the Sultanate in the 1970s and the essay surveys the subject – coups, SAS et al – from the mid 1950s onwards in considerable detail.
Promises and Disappointments
In the previous issue I wrote a positive review of this, the latest journal from Kevin McClure. However I forgot to mention two things: the first is that I contribute a small piece to it (my declaration of interest); and the second was McClure’s address! It is: 42 Victoria Road, St. Austell, PL25 4QD.