Policing London
No 13 July/August
Includes 6 pages on the miners, which compliments GLC report (see below); two page summary of recent police harassment of gays; summary of changes to date in Police and Criminal Evidence Bill. Still the best thing of its kind extant.
£1 per issue: from Police Committee Support Unit (DG/PCS/602) County Hall, London SE1 7BP
Police Computers and the Metropolitan Police
Chris Pounder
Written for the GLC Police Committee Support Unit, this is rather more than its title suggests, covering police use of computers in general – although the Met. is the focus. This is, in fact, the most up to date account of the UK police use of computers. Pounder is this country’s No 1 man in this field, and this book-length report is essential for any understanding of what the police are doing underneath the rhetoric of ‘community policing’. And this is free from
GLC Police Committee DG/PCS/602 County Hall, London SE1 7BP
Intelligence/Parapolitics
October 1984.
This Paris-based journal goes on getting better. (Mind you we’ve only seen a few editions). The mixture of detailed summaries of articles from the world’s press plus reprints of especially notable pieces is very useful. This latest edition includes the significant extracts from the Defence Attache article on 007, a two page review/article on Loftus’ The Belarus Secret, and precis on events in Italy, Peru, Africa, Mozambique, Iran, the General Collins trial mentioned in Lobster 1, (which has never been followed up in the UK press), Reagan, Laxalt and organised crime, and Nicaragua.
Subs. $20 per year, but how this converts to pounds sterling is an interesting question with the sterling/dollar/franc exchange rates behaving as they are. Best to send an initial letter to the publishers:
ADI 16 Rue des Ecoles, 75005, Paris.
State of Siege
Politics and Policing in the Coal Fields
Jim Coulter, Susan Miller, Martin Walker
This is the complete 3 part account. The first part was reviewed in Lobster 5, and if the rest is as good as that first part this is worth getting.
£4.20, cheque payable to ‘Greenwich Branch Nalgo’ to:
Basement, Borough Treasurers Department, Wellington Street, Woolwich, London SE 18
Social Science History
Vol 7 Spring 1983 (Sage Publishing, London)
The entire issue is devoted to essays on The American Corporate Network, edited by the distinguished American ‘elite sociologist’ William Domhoff.
Articles
Surveillance In the Academy
Sigmund Diamond, American Quarterly, Spring 1984.
“In 1927 Yale University secretly established an investigative apparatus for carrying out certain parietal functions. By the outbreak of WW2 that apparatus was adapted, no less secretly, to perform essentially political functions.”
The US, the German-Argentines and the Myth of the Fourth Reich
Donald C. Newton, Hispanic American Historical Review, Feb. 1984
With the increasing interest in things Nazi in this part of the world (Barbie et al), this might be of some interest. The author argues that the ‘Fourth Reich’ was a fraud, a device used to clobber German economic interests in Argentina, replacing them with US interests. His article only deals with the war-time and immediate post-war years, but, in that period he makes a convincing case.
Big Brother Becomes a Reality in West Germany
Chris Pounder, Computing 28 June
Very interesting (and rather alarming) account of where we are heading in this country. West Germany’s surveillance/computer network described in detail. Pounder is the man in this field in the country.
Books
Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organised Crime in Australia
Alfred McCoy (Harper Row, Australia 1980)
McCoy was the author of the seminal Politics of Heroin In South East Asia (US 1973) which documented US involvement in the opium traffic of the Golden Triangle and got McCoy into trouble with the CIA. But this volume is exactly what its title suggests, and is unlikely to be of too much interest to anyone with out a specialised interest in, or knowledge of, Australian social history.
There is a brief chapter on the links between Australia and the international heroin traffic, but this was written before the Nugan Hand/Task Force 157 episode appeared in the US press, and it appears to me to be unexceptional, although there are sections on the organised crime scene in Australia in which the Nugan Hand operations fitted. As the Australian crime/politics story unfolds this may turn out to be more interesting than it first appears. And let’s hope that McCoy, now living in Australia, is working on that material .
RR
Thatcher and Friends: The Anatomy of the Tory Party
Ian Ross (London 1983)
This might have been a very good book, but inclusion in Pluto’s ‘Arguments for Socialism’ series means: no index, no footnotes, and the scantiest of documentation. In some of this series this hasn’t mattered too much, but with a subject like this the results are pretty catastrophic. The most striking example concerns Joseph Ball, who founded the Conservative Research Department back in the 1930s, which was then, and may still be, the Tories’ covert ops./black propaganda operation. Ball is an interesting figure in the clandestine history of this country whose significance can be measured by the infrequency with which his name appears in print. Ross tells us that he is unsure whether or not Ball actually resigned from MI5 before going to work for the Tories, and announces that “John Ramsden, who researched this period …. considered it probable that Ball continued to work for MI5 during the whole time he was at Central Office.” But he gives no information on where this research by Ramsden is to be found (or even if it has, indeed, been published at all). Similar dead-ends litter the book.
Even so, as an introductory sketch of the Tory Party’s history, economic support and, in Ross’s view – this is his thesis – its long-term decline, this is worth a look. One can only hope that Ross is preparing a more thoroughly documented version of this outline for another publisher.
Incidentally, the one thing it conspicuously doesn’t do is detail Mrs Thatcher’s ‘friends’. That is just another typical Pluto ‘selling’ title.
RR
The New Right 1960-68: with epilogue 1969-80
Jonathan Kolky (London 1983)
In which author Kolky wakes up to discover that his PhD thesis can be tarted-up with a brief update and put out amongst all the rest of the books trying to explain why one of the most stupid men ever to appear on television is now the President of the United States.
The book consists almost entirely of quotations from the publications of the far-right – from the Liberty Lobby and the Birchers out (or back?) to the American Nazi Party, and all stops in between. As far as it goes it is quite interesting, initially rather amusing, to read the lunatic opinions of the far-right on almost everything from the Global Conspiracy to fluoride. But by about page 40 the succession of dotty prophets gets wearisome. The one section worth photocopying, perhaps, is that on the far-right’s reactions to the death of Kennedy – essentially relief that a ‘Marxist’ had been got for the dirty deed. For their journals show that they initially expected to get the blame for the murder and were afraid of the consequences.
What Kolky singularly fails to do is (a) explain who these people are – no sociology/psychology, and (b) account for their money. But its worth a quick squint, if only to remind yourself that, yes, they are just as crazy as you thought they are, despite their current quasi-respectability. And yes, Reagan figures quite a bit. He is one of theirs – or was, a little while back. These days other people seem to be writing his speeches (and his cheques). Unfortunately this book, like all the others, does not explain the Reagan phenomenon.
RR
Deadly Deceits
Ralph McGeehee (Sheridan Square Publications Inc. USA 1983)
Ralph McGeehee was a CIA agent for 25 years operating mainly in South East Asia. He is now a bitter opponent of his old firm and the anger comes through clearly in this slim volume of his experiences.
Unfortunately he signed the pledge and the book is now so sanitised by self-censorship and CIA weeders that little is left of interest. In fact the only interesting section is the appendix where he describes the CIA review of the book before publication. The bureaucratic wrangles are mind-numbing. It is an achievement for McGeehee just to get the book published.
SD
Information Wanted
A Lobster reader informs us – from first-hand experience – that even after UDI Rhodesian police officers were routinely attending the Bramhill Police College. South Africans were also there. Also, from a report in a newspaper, that a Commander in the Metropolitan Police had done a year’s full-time study at the Royal College of Defence Studies on “the way in which senior management works in a democratic society.”
Anyone got anything relating to either of these?