Richard M Bennett London: Virgin Books, 2003 £20 hardback This is 350 pages of summaries of political and historical conspiracies. It starts in 2330 BC but the first 2007 years take up only 84 pages. The content is mostly Anglo-American, especially after WW2. It is done chronologically, so you get odd sequences of subjects: … Read more
From: M. R. D. Foot Scott Newton’s footnote at the end of his piece on Hess, in your number tries to keep alive Dr Hugh Thomas’s tale that the pilot who reached Scotland could not have been Hess, because he bore no trace of the gunshot wound the real Hess had received in Roumania in … Read more
[…] intelligence – even one on the CIA’s study of itself. In the essay on the CIA and science authors Doel and Needell skirt the Agency’s part in MKULTRA and similar projects and timidly conclude, ‘the ethical lapses of CIA medical specialists in ‘Artichoke’ and ‘MKULTRA’ mind-control experiments ranked among the Agency’s most troubling violations […]
Unfree press A recent release of previously undisclosed documents reveals that J. Edgar Hoover ordered the FBI to carry out the illegal surveillance of newspaper labour activists during the 1940s. Also revealed is the fact that informants included journalists who wanted Communists removing from the leadership of the Newspaper Guild.(1) Only following orders Psychologist Stanley … Read more
[…] circle”‘, one of those who liaised between organised crime and the US bureaucracy in the post-war world. He also acted as liaison in the early days of MKUltra and its predecessors. It seems likely that White’s actual job was to steer the committee away not only from the Mob’s involvement in narcotics but also […]
[…] What is new is some material on the activities of Steve Abrams, one of the co-founders of SOMA, who had been an unwitting part of the CIA’s MKUltra programme while a post-grad student at Oxford; and the section on the mysterious Ronald Stark, LSD entrepreneur and apparent American intelligence asset, has been elaborated. Most […]
By Robin Ramsay See also: Lobster (magazine) at Wikipedia. Updated June 2022 The first issue of Lobster appeared in 1983. It was written by Stephen Dorril and myself. We met through the late Harry Irwin, who lived in Northern Ireland and was what Americans call a book scout: he bought and sold rare books. But … Read more
Snitch Culture: How the citizens are turned into the eyes and ears of the state Jim Redden, Feral House, U.S., 2000, $16.95 (pb) Earth Rising: The Revolution, Toward a Thousand Years of Peace Dr Nick Begich and James Roderick Earthpulse Press, Ancorage, Alaska $17.95, 2000 (pb) (available through Flatland) ‘We live in a society driven … Read more
MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations Stephen Dorril Fourth Estate, London, 2000, £25 A Life: A. J. Ayer Ben Rogers Chatto and Windus, London, 1999, £20 Many books on intelligence matters simply rehash old ‘facts’, adding a new twist to – a slightly different interpretation of – well-known, if not necessarily well-understood, events. If … Read more
Introduction What follows is an interim report about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. In so far as it has a central thesis, it is that Jones initiated the Jonestown massacre because he feared that Congressman Leo Ryan’s investigation would disgrace him. Specifically, Jones feared that Ryan and the press would uncover evidence that the … Read more
