Blob of the month
Hear the one about the supposedly spook-watching magazine whose editor misspelt the name of the head of MI5? Yep: Rimmington, I had in the last issue: Rimington it should have been.
Searchlight News
Their campaign against Larry O’Hara has reached new depths. In the March issue they published his picture and described where they think he works and lives. Is this not conspiracy to cause actual bodily harm (or worse) to O’Hara? Since Larry will ignore the threat, what next for Searchlight? Larry’s address? A map?
The London Left and anti-fascist movements have so far said and done – not-a-thing. What a surprise…..
In April the Searchlight editorial announced that ‘three years of persistent campaigning against the nazi terror group Combat 18 may at last have paid off. Early in March police headquarters in London announced that a squad of officers who usually look into organised and international crime was to target Combat 18’. But in the same column Searchlight announced that Combat 18 was an MI5 ‘honey trap on the far right’; that one of its founders, the American Harold Covington, ‘had known links to the intelligence services’ and was a ‘long-time asset of the FBI’; and that its creation by MI5 was ‘understandable and possibly justifiable at the time’.
I kid you not: Searchlight, April 1995, p. 2. They appear to be saying that for the last three years they have been wittingly amplifying the Combat 18 ‘threat’, knowing that it was a state operation. So tell me, pray, why do we have a police squad targetting an MI5 operation?
Wilson Plots
- The sound of marching feet. ‘Captains of industry’ sometimes write books in the ‘How To Save Britain’ sub-genre. (I remember an anthology in the late 1970s rather wittily titled The Future of Britain’s Crisis.) No-one takes any notice, of course. The latest is from the former Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry, John Banham, called The Anatomy of Change. (Sizzling title! Give that editor a prize!) The book opens with Mr Banham coming back to the UK in the spring of 1975 after some years working in the United States . He had heard in the States that Britain was having ‘difficult times’, but he was ‘not prepared for the talk on the BOAC flight about the possibility of a military coup; vigilantes were said to be drilling on the South Downs.’
- Special Forces Club. David Leigh, in his The Wilson Plot, first raised the activities of the Special Forces Club in this context. This tantalising paragraph appeared in the recent biography of Colin Gubbins, the founder of SOE, Gubbins and SOE, by Peter Wilkinson and John Bright Astley (Leo Cooper, London 1993).
‘Much of [Gubbins’] spare time was spent in setting up a Special Forces Club… Apart from the social and benevolent functions of the Club, a secondary objective was never far from his mind. This was the need to maintain a worldwide network which could be activated in the event of a future war and provide the nucleus of national resistance which experience had taught him would otherwise take years to develop.’ (p. 239, emphasis added)
Pergau
The Pergau Dam affair revealed the shape of the new Tory corporatism. Companies fund the Tory Party; Tory government bribes (sorry: gives aid to) the Malasian government which gives orders to….. the British companies who give money to the Tory Party. This is simply a complicated scheme to defraud the British tax-payer. Re-reading some of the cuttings, a little bell rang in my brain: I’d seen something like this in Anthony Verrier’s book. There it is on p. 255. Describing the British ‘attempt to sustain counter-revolution in Arabia’, Verrier notes that SIS opposed it ‘because, all other factors apart, it degenerated into a matter of bribes to the wrong people – 30 million, to be exact, laundered through the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts, then handed out to tribal rulers on both sides of the border [between South Arabia and Yemen].’ (Through the Looking Glass, Macmillan, 1983.)
30 million in 1962 is about 300 million today.
Red Action
Red Action 70 reviewed Larry O’Hara’s new book (reviewed in Lobster 28). They start by accusing O’Hara of being a conspiracy theorist. They then take him to task for not taking at face value the role of Red Action members in support of the IRA.
‘From O’Hara’s standpoint it is preferable to invent a mythical third party to which the shooting can be attributed, rather than wrestle with the uncomfortable reality of the two English-born defendants and the smoking gun?’ (The question mark is there in the original, but it actually is not a question.)
Larry is – this is a new concept to me – an ‘ultra-liberal’. (Reminds me a bit of that Russ Meyer movie, Beneath the Valley of the The Ultraliberals was it?) I guess I am one, too, for it seems to mean someone who does not generally approve of blowing people up. But then it’s probably people like me Red Action have in mind when the unnamed reviewer writes of ‘the British left’s….carefully nurtured tradition of essentially harmless eccentricity.’
In Lobster 28 I wondered if there was any evidence for their claim that the IPLO was a British state pseudo-gang. In this issue Red Action replied that such evidence was ‘about as thin on the ground as a Brit security expert with the ability to spot one’. Which I think is their way of saying, ‘You’re right, we’ve got no evidence.’
Larry is more to their taste. Their review of his book ends, Recommended with reservations.
Is being recommended by Red Action good news or bad news?
RIP
Antoine Pinay, former French Prime Minister and politician. His long obituary in the Guardian (December 14 1995) did not mention the Pinay Circle.
Lord Kagan, friend of Harold Wilson and inventor of the Gannex mac. His obituary in the Telegraph (January 19 1995) re-ran Kagan’s chess-playing with the Soviet intelligence officer Richardas Vaigaukus, and commented that ‘at times Kagan seemed a sinister figure’. Come now……
Oleg Lyalin, Soviet defector whose information led to the famous expulsion of 105 Soviet spies from London. See Richard Norton-Taylor’s obituary in the Guardian 28 February 1995.
Peter Wright, of Spycatcher fame. Scott Newton reports that Teletext, on Independent Television, devoted eight pages to him, and said he had been suffering from diabetes, heart trouble and pneumonia. Ceefax, on the other hand, the service broadcast by the BBC, devoted only one page, and announced he had been suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. MI5 still in the building by any chance, Mr Birt?
Who killed WPC Evonne Fletcher?
The Libyans, did, didn’t they? Innocent police person on duty at an anti-Ghaddafi demonstration outside the Libyan ‘Peoples’ Bureau’ in London; some dingbat inside the Bureau opened fire on the crowd, killing Fletcher. What could be more straightforward? So everyone assumes. Everyone, that is, bar Joe Vialls.
Joe Who? Joe Vialls was the subject of the postscript to Tony Collins’ book on the mysterious deaths of scientists in the British military sector, Open Secret (Sphere, London 1990). Vialls, a former petroleum engineer, had been the victim of some kind of mind control programme. He abandoned his career and holed-up in Australia with his computer. A couple of years ago he began expressing an interest to me in the death of PC Fletcher. I didn’t know why. Then, in a letter he hinted that his interest lay in his fear that he had shot her. Joe’s story is carried, in fictionalised form, in the re-write of Bowart’s Operation Mind Control (reviewed below). Vialls now believes that, programmed in some fashion, he shot Fletcher from an office of the Hughes Tool Company close to the Libyan Embassy. (Hughes Tool has been a cover for CIA.)
The death of Penkofsky: a modern myth continues
In Lobster 27 I commented on the developing myth surrounding the death of Oleg Penkofsky, generally assumed to have been shot after his trial in the Soviet Union. I noted that the Sunday Telegraph was recycling a story from the Soviet defector Suvorov that Penkofsky had been fed, alive, into a furnace. Amidst the PR for Gordievsky’s memoir, this myth has been developed a bit more. Murray Smith tells us in the Evening Standard of 30 March 1995 that Gordievsky had spoken to some of those who watched Penkofsky die, and he had been ‘skewered on a meat hook and lowered alive into a cauldron of molten metal’.
This, of course, is not included in Mr G’s memoir.
Keston College is not mentioned by Mr G either, even though keeping an eye on its activities was one of his jobs while working for the KGB in London. Keston College is the Centre for the Study of Religion and Communism. It was mentioned occasionally, for example in Richard Deacon’s The Truth Twisters, and the anthology Brian Crozier edited, We Will Bury You, and its publications were prominently listed in the material available through Geoffrey Stewart-Smith’s group in the 1970s.
Perhaps Mr G did not think it important enough. Perhaps, on the other hand, the omission of Keston was deliberate; perhaps SIS was working with the churches in the Soviet bloc as the plot of the current Len Deighton series – soon to be a trilogy of trilogies! – tells us. Try Spy Line or Spy Sinker.
Quigley again
Pat Robertson, the evangelical Christian politician, erstwhile Presidential candidate, wrote a book expounding his world views, The New World Order. It was reviewed by Michael Lind in the New York Review of Books on February 2 1995.[Thanks to RW for the cuttings.] It sounds like a mishmash of the US far Right’s key themes: One Worldism, the Illuminati etc., – the usual crap. But to support his views Robertson (or someone on his staff) was canny enough to cite Carroll Quigley. In the course of a second excellent analysis of Robertson’s beliefs in the New York Review of Books, 20 April 1995, author Michael Lind said this on Robertson’s citation of Quigley: ‘Quigley’s attempt to explain twentieth-century US foreign policy as being dominated by a secret Anglo-American conspiracy, including the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, has been discredited by diplomatic historians even as it has been taken up by the right-wing lunatic fringe.’ (Emphasis added.)
Where? When? By whom? Details, anyone?
Mind control news
Walter Bowart’s re-written and expanded Operation Mind Control is reviewed in this issue by Alex Cox. As a courtesy, Cox sent Bowart a copy of his review. Bowart did not like the review and posted it, and a reply to it, on the Internet – without asking Alex Cox (or me, for that matter). No copyright laws on the Net, yet.
In this reply Bowart writes, ‘Sorry to scoop you Lobster‘. You didn’t scoop me, Walter, you stole from Alex and me. I should not have been surprised. Bowart had already listed Armen Victorian on his Freedom of Thought Foundation’s Advisory Board without asking Victorian if he wanted to be so listed. (He didn’t; and now isn’t.)
Bowart’s Freedom Of Thought Foundation, produces a newsletter, Free Thinking, for its members. I have seen Vol. 1 No. 2. which is four A4 pages, with brief clips on Fletcher Prouty, Gordon Thomas, and Robert Naeslund, the Swedish researcher into brain implants, as well as other addresses and starting points.
The Foundation can be contacted at POB 35072, Tucson, Az. 85740-5072, USA.
Robert Naeslund can be contacted at Slipgaten 12, 117-39, Stockholm, Sweden.