How often does the conspiracy buff/ parapolitics connoisseur stumble upon a new, all-colour, glossy parapolitics magazine at W. H. Smith’s at Euston Station?
Not that often. When I called Private Eye to mail order a copy of Paul Foot’s fascinating report on the Lockerbie trial, I was assured that I could buy a copy at any branch of Smith’s. ‘Oh, go on,’ I said, recalling the Eye’s long battle against W. H. Smug’s and knowing that there were no Lockerbie mags on sale in any Smug’s I’d visited. ‘No!’ the poor fellow insisted, ‘We’re paying them to display them!’
Sorry to disappoint, but there were no Lockerbie reports visible at Euston (or at Heathrow, or at Liverpool Lime Street). But there was a 116-page glossy mag called EYE SPY! prominently displayed and, rather cheekily, using the same typeface as Private Eye on its cover. So I bought it. At £2.99 for all 116 pages, it was potentially a bargain.
Was it? Well, no. Information-wise, it is almost useless, though there were one or two nice pictures. It was mostly bits and bobs of spy- or intelligenceish news, recycled from newspapers. MI5 lost laptops! Le Carre was a spy! ETA are bad! Star Wars hack Donald Rumsford has ‘vast political experience’ and his credibility is ‘sky high!’ FBI spy Robert Hanssen was bad! (But no info about his specific badness, and no mention of the tunnel the Americans dug under the Russian embassy, or vice versa). Never mind! Bin Laden bad!
The longer articles similarly crash on the rocks of recycled press reports. ‘Peru is a nation not usually associated with spy dramas’ begins an article about Fujimori and Montesinos. Since when? Peru has been the imperial centre of South America since the Incas; its state spying and social control networks are legendary. We are told Montesinos ‘breached army regulations’ prior to 1977; we are not told he was put on trial by the leftist Velasco regime as a CIA agent. EYE SPY! reports that, ‘ironically, the camera that recorded [Montesinos’ downfall] was one of his own’: there is no speculation as to how the spymaster’s super-secret videotapes reached the press, no reference to Fujimori’s opposition to the USA’s Plan Colombia as a factor in his sudden downfall.
In other words, the stuff you could read in the Independent, the Guardian, or the Sunday Times, and have already read there.
America good! Bin Laden bad! Stella Rimington a bold rebel! Carlos the Jackal bad! Look at this picture of the MI6 building! Look at another picture of the gates of same! On pp. 20-21 an unnamed EYE SPY! reporter attends a (paid!) press conference of Sir Steven Lander, Director-General of MI5. Our fearless journalist reports that ‘Sir Steven had clearly been shaken by cruel and untimely remarks made by Tom King, chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee.’ Poor baby! How fortunate that EYE SPY! was there to sympathise. Unnamed fearless reporter continues: ‘The Director-General should never have been put in this position.’
Quite so! Rah! Rah! Christchurch? Or Balliol? GCHQ doughnut good!
The pages turn. More recycled stuff about so-called ‘secret’ archives and spy expulsions. ‘Many in Britain sympathise with MI6’ we are told, ‘saying that they have no option but to try and silence [Richard] Tomlinson……’ Oh yeah? Who are these many? In what poll? What was the question?
Stumbling on, this EYE avows that ‘Animal Activists Aim to Kill!’ and ‘Managing Director Brutally Attacked by Extremists!’ Unlike Covert Action Quarterly, EYE SPY! is a little short on reports of peasants brutally murdered by oil company or sweatshop goons. But Managing Directors in Danger? Horror of horrors!
There appears to be a gratuitous and actionable libel against the hapless Prof. Wen Ho Lee, who is described as a ‘renegade Los Alamos scientist……the FBI are still not certain he is telling the truth.’ Since the federal court case against Mr Lee collapsed and the said scientist is now a free man, he presumably has a reasonable expectation not to be libelled in an English magazine.
My favourite piece is a blundering puff for the Boeing Corporation, which claims that the American company has come up with a ‘super plane’ which will beat the European Airbus A380 double-decker. The new aircraft is described as a blended wing-body ‘flying wing.’ The article is illustrated by photos of North-rop and Horten flying wings from the 1940s, and is a lovely trip down memory lane. As it certainly should be: it is recycled from a Popular Science cover story about blended wing-body aircraft published in 1993 — but with an added anti-Airbus slant. And it is also a fantasy, since Boeing are in fact promoting a much smaller, conventionally-winged subsonic plane.
EYE SPY!
Box 10, Skipton, North
Yorkshire, BD23 5US, UK
www.eyespymag.com