Steamshovel 11
The arrival of a new Steamshovel is an event. No matter that I am going to want to be picky about something in it, every issue contains items both substantial and intriguing – and much that would find a home nowhere else, that I can think of. (Except maybe Lobster. I wish I had the courage of my eclecticism the way Steamshovel’s Kenn Thomas does. Who could not like a magazine which is dedicated to the memory of the late, great, Bill Hicks?)
Steamshovel 11 contains part 3 of G. J. Krupey’s piece on JFK, LSD and the CIA; an interview with Alan Cantwell, one of the AIDS heretics of America and author of Queer Blood; a piece about Clinton, Mena and the whole Arkansas mafia/CIA story partially dealt with in Terry Reed’s Compromised, discussed by Martin Cannon in this issue of Lobster; and a shoal of interesting book reviews and snippets on everything from Jack Nicholson qua Reichian to the latest on the on-going alien abduction story in the USA.
Most important, I think, are two pieces about the Kennedy assassination. The first is an interview with the Chicago researcher Sherman Skolnick – with fascinating material on the fuzzy alleged 1963 assassination attempt on JFK planned for Chicago, and the role in exposing it of the black Secret Service agent, Abraham Bolden. Every time I come across Bolden I am reminded what a great story this is. First black Secret Service agent; after the assassination, seeking to testify to the Warren Commission about the lax security practices of the Secret Service, he is framed by his erstwhile colleagues and dumped in a mental asylum. (Bolden and the Chicago incident are discussed at length in Vincent Palamara’s The Third Alternative – Survivor’s Guilt: the Secret Service and the JFK Murder. See Lobster 27 pp 26 and 31 for how to obtain this. Palamara’s work, though badly organised, deserves a much wider audience.)
The second JFK piece is a discussion by renowned JFK photographic expert, Jack White, of L. Fletcher Prouty’s identification of General Edward Lansdale in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Prouty identifies Lansdale and another CIA officer, Lucien Conein, in photographs taken in Dallas that day. These photographs, along with some of Prouty’s comments, are in the White piece. The Conein identification can be ignored: the photographs are too indistinct to be of any use. But the Lansdale one is of more interest. In one of the famous ‘tramp’ pictures taken just after the assassination in Dallas, a white male, in what looks like late middle age, or more, is passing the tramps. The picture shows the back and left rear side of his head, his left ear, and no more. This, says Prouty, he immediately recognised as Edward Lansdale. Well, maybe. Prouty is to be taken seriously, but I’m sceptical. Why has this taken so long to emerge? On the other hand this is the first, remotely plausible, visual identification of a senior CIA officer in Dallas close to the assassination. This one will run and run. Anybody got a picture of the left rear half of Edward Lansdale’s head?
Steamshovel is $26.00 for four issues outside the USA, to POB 23715, St. Louis, MO 63121, USA.
Punk parapolitics?
Wake Up 11
This is a very interesting thing. 212, A-4 pages, this weighs in at a fraction under 2 lbs. We’re talking heavy, 100 gm plus, glossy paper, several photographs on every page; and it’s ‘perfect’ bound – bound with glue, not just stapled. In other words, this is one large, expensive-to-produce piece of print. It carries no advertisements and it announces that ‘all proceeds go to Anti Fascist Action’.
Its content is part articles about rock bands in Britain I never heard of, part poetry (seriously naff poetry), part rock culture trivia, and three huge pieces; ‘The CIA’s manipulation of the Labour Party’, ‘The FBI’s secret war against the American Indians’ and ‘British intelligence and covert action: how the British state supports international terrorism’. It’s a funny mixture. Page 181 is a cartoon strip which depicts Arnold Swarzenegger as Jesus Christ III and on page 185 there’s a photograph of what I think is the late George Kennedy Young’s election manifesto, illustrating a story called ‘The Plot to Murder Gerry Gable’!
The incorporation of the Bloch and Fitzgerald book title, ‘British intelligence and covert action’ in one of the pieces should have given the game away. Yes, Wake Up 11 has read, digested and regurgitated a substantial amount of the British parapolitical cannon. Regurgitated is the correct verb, for while impressive in volume, as soon as I started on the text, the favourable impression disappeared rapidly. In the first place, not a line of this – maybe a hundred pages in all through the three parapolitical essays; 36 pages on the Cointelpro, the FBI and the American Indian, for example – appears to be attributed.
In the digestion process, bits have got scrambled. On page 67, for example (the first page I tried to read) we are told of a ‘merger’ between the Information Research Department (IRD) and the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC). A ‘merger’? Not as far as I knew. I looked up Bloch and Fitzgerald from whom I guessed this section had been lifted. Yes, there was the material on page 98. Bloch and Fitzgerald had this:
‘The staff of IRD was down to 100 and it was eventually closed, and its demise seemed imminent. The primary reason for the department’s eventual closure was its relationship with the Institute for the Study of Conflict.’
Wake Up has it thus:
‘By now the staff of IRD was down to 100 and it was eventually closed, due to its merger with the Institute for the Study of Conflict’ (emphases added).
On the second last page, under ‘Further Reading’, Wake Up cites Bloch and Fitzgerald and comments, ‘This has been deleted (banned more like) and the publisher refuses to reprint.’ Well, what is it? Is it banned? Is the publisher refusing to reprint it? Or is it just out of print?
The announcement that ‘all proceeds go to Anti-Fascist Action’ may also be a clue. Page 161 is devoted to magazines Wake Up approves of. One is Searchlight, of which it is said: ‘Strangely, it appears to have been the subject of a disinformation campaign recently to discredit Gerry Gable. Well, we’re all wise to who practises those sort of tactics.’ Well, I wish I was so wise. What is being hinted at here?
Let me finish this review with the first four lines of one of the many poems in Wake Up. I picked this at random (really, at random). This is from ‘Why Can’t You See the Rainbow?’ by Cie.
As the people shuffle along the road
Their hands welded into their pockets
With embedded frowns
And mental weights on their shoulders
That and a large chunk of Brian Crozier’s memoirs in the same volume? Is this post-modernism or what?
Available at £5.00 (including p and p) from Wake Up, PO Box 34, Oulton, Lowestoft, Suffolk, NR33 9QG
Namebase/Namebase Newsline
Newsline is the newsletter distributed to subscribers to Daniel Brandt’s Namebase. No 7, October-December 1994, contains a long, fascinating piece by Brandt, ‘The Information Super Highway and its Discontents’, the best thing I have read on this subject. A couple of dollar bills to Brandt at PO Box 680635, San Antonio, TX 78268, USA, should secure a photocopy.
I have recently acquired a copy of Brandt’s Namebase. Preparing this issue, I haven;t had much chance to explore it. But even on a quick whizz round it is clear that it is the stupendous research tool I had assumed it would be. For the last who-knows-how-long, Brandt has been reading parapolitical books, newspapers, journals and directories. He then indexes them. (He explains all this at the end of the article of his cited immediately above this.) He now has 70,000 plus names. You can access this information in several ways but by name is probably the one most people will use. The data base records the name and the source of citations. For a modest charge Brandt supplies photocopies – by mail or fax – of the cited source material. (Is that right, Daniel? More or less.) It’s mostly about America – and its post-war empire – though there are odd bits and pieces about other areas.
Nobody interested in the US intelligence agencies, the US transnational elite structure, or the current agenda of parapolitics should be without it. Inquiries to the address above.
Unclassified
Unclassified is the ‘Magazine of the Association of National Security Alumni’, now in its fifth year. I’ve seen it occasionally but recently received four issues. Re-entering it is a bit like it must be reading Lobster for the first time – or after a break. There are a limited number of people writing for it, pursuing a number of ongoing themes or subjects. In that sense, like Lobster, it is partly a newsletter, in a continuous process of up-dating the reader.
One of those themes is the survey of legislation and politics in the US spook world. But as well as the fairly dry details of bills, appropriations and Congressional debates, it covers the major parapolitical themes. So, for example, in the issue October-November 1993, there is a piece called ‘INSLAW strikes back’. ‘INSLAW’ has become short-hand for a cluster of themes, chiefly the death of journalist Danny Casolaro and the PROMIS software story, around which adheres a large number of more or less related stories. I thought I vaguely understood it – until I read this piece. Since I last looked at it the thing has become enormously complex. The same is true of the on-going attempt to identify the perpetrator of the La Penca bombing, also explored at length in this issue. The last few issues have also covered JFK and Vietnam, the National Endowment for Democracy, US intelligence links to Haiti, the exhumation of Frank Olsen and the Aldrich Ames case.
Now that Covert Action Information Bulletin has become Covert Action Quarterly, and widened its scope somewhat, Unclassified appears to be the most important critical survey of the US intelligence scene and its related politics and parapolitics.
Outside the US subs are $25 for six issues (in the US $20) to Verne Lyon, 921 Pleasant St., Des Moines, IA 50309, USA.
PS Isn’t it about time someone started a UK version (chapter?) of the Association of National Security Alumni?
Aura-Z: an illustrated quarterly journal of ufological and paranormal phenomena
This one’s published in Russia – in English – and it is rather like Nexus (see Lobster 27) except all the people and activities described in it are Russian or in other bits of the former Soviet Union. From the evidence shown here, Russia and many of the countries which used to make up the Soviet Union are dotted with healers, psychics, UFO buffs and institutes devoted to the study of such phenomena. This might seem surprising to those whose understanding of these countries had been acquired via a Western mass media based in Moscow; and who have thus assumed that the Soviet Union was just a drab, monolithic Marxist-Leninist nightmare. This notion was shattered in 1970 with the publication of the book Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, which introduced many of us to Kirlian photography for the first time and showed anecdotal but nonetheless substantial evidence of a vast hinterland of psi research and phenomena in the Soviet Union. (This is where I – and, I suspect John Alexander – came in.)
Apparently as a result of the lumpen materialist notions then dominant in the Soviet Union, upon discovering people who could produce, say, simple PK effects, rather than dismissing such reports as a priori false – occult – the way science in the West has mostly done, Soviet science said ‘that’s interesting’ and got the state – usually, I suspect the military – to provide some money.
Aura-Z is a kind of shopping catalogue of psychics, healers, UFO freaks etc in the former Soviet Union. No. 3 includes material on a Congress of Folk Medicine; the UMMO UFO case; and on studying and measuring the human electromagnetic aura. Most striking – mind-boggling, if true – is an account of the work of a ‘Dr Chiang’ on ‘biomicrowave communications’ – the piece headed ‘An alternative to genetic engineering’.
Issue no. 4 includes photographs of what is alleged to be a UFO taken in Sevastopol; an account of a ’17th century flying saucer’; a piece by a Russian engineer claiming to have designed UFAs – unconventional flying apparatuses; an essay on the Soviet musician and inventor Lev Termen; a not very interesting interview with a former KGB officer; an interview with someone who practices ‘sculptural psychotherapy’; and articles claiming a physical basis for possession, on dowsing, and on ‘torsion fields’.
Interesting though much of this is, it’s pitched at something akin to the level of the Reader’s Digest – short articles, big print. Enquiries to: (UK) Post International Inc, 44 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1M 5PS; (USA) Post International Inc, 666 Fifth Avenue, Suite 572, New York NY 10103; or direct to Aura-Z, PO Box 224, Moscow, 117463, Russia. (Wait ’til someone on the crazy Christian Right notices that ‘666’ New York address….)
Rimmer and McClure
While we’re out here on the further reaches of what is regarded as suitable material for grown-ups to be interested in…………… congratulations to editor and main spring, John Rimmer, on Magonia reaching its fiftieth issue. Magonia is very hard to describe. It began as a UFO magazine, then Rimmer ceased to believe in the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis (ETH). But if there are no UFOs, what is going on? Because something is going on. As a result, Rimmer and co. are in territory bounded by the world of folk-lore on one side and Jungian psychology on the other. The result is a magazine which consistently stimulates and surprises.
As do the publications of Kevin McClure. There used to be two – then they both stopped. (Time out for life repairs, it seems.) Now we have the appearance of the first edition of his Promises and Disappointments, sub-titled the ‘Successor to The Wild Places and Alien Scripture’ his previous two). Without quoting at great length, it is difficult to convey just how purely interesting are the likes of Magonia and PaD. A regular feature of McClure’s publications has been his review, News From the Front, – with addresses and subscription details – of some of the other magazines in the field(s). In this issue there is almost 8,000 words on 76 magazines ranging alphabetically from AFU Newsletter – Swedish UFO case reports, in English – to Would You Believe. McClure describes the latter as ‘Another delightful mix of obscure and worthwhile and new material. Crop circles, Harold T. Wilkins, Lethal Lakes and Disappearing Children, Velikovsky, Roswell, the Great Pyramid and plenty more’.
Notice McClure says ‘delightful’. Not true – or plausible. I suspect that Magonia, though similar in feel to McClure in some ways, sharing some of the same authors, would not have described this like that. McClure has a witty essay by Martin Kottmeyer, who is also in Magonia 49 and 50, on alien abduction tales, their features in common – and, in this one, their differences. That this one’s called ‘The Curse of the Space Mummies’ says quite a bit about Kottmeyer.
If you can’t find something of interest in Magonia and PaD you’re probably dead.
- Magonia is £5 for four issues from John Rimmer, 5 James Terrace, Mortlake Churchyard, London SW14 8HB. (Outside the UK, best to inquire first.)
- Promises and Disappointments is: UK – £2.00 for a single copy in the UK; a four issue sub is £7.50; Europe – single issue £2.50, £9.00 for a subscription; USA, Canada and elsewhere, single issue $5.00, sub. $18.00.