[…] Home Affairs correspondent when it still was the voice of the ‘British establishment’. Evans knew MI5 people and got material from them. He also got material from IRD (unidentified by Evans) but these IRD briefings were ‘too right-wing’ to be used. Then MI5 tried to recruit him as an informant and he declined the […]
[…] spotted over the last eighteen months. Full biographical details will be published in an updated Spooks Who’s Who. (C) = controversial. Assessment based on career details. ( IRD) = Information Research Department, usually listed in diplomatic lists of the period. Margaret Bradfield: MI6 Chief of Stockholm 1989 (Intelligence Newsletter 6 December 1989). John Quine: […]
The big switch Keeping track of the developments in the JFK assassination is something like a full-time job and I don’t have the time. Plodding along years behind the buffs, I came across Walt Brown’s Treachery in Dallas (Carroll and Graf, New York, 1995), an interesting book, dotted with new (to me) bits and pieces. […]
[…] the operations block at Thiepval Barracks in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. According to Holroyd the propaganda was carefully controlled and directed from London, run by a section of IRD, the Information and Research Department, formed in the days of the cold war as a propaganda unit. It was directly linked to MI6. One of those […]
On reaching 50 Reaching 50 issues is something. More or less than I hoped? Obviously, it never occurred to me twenty plus years ago that I would still be doing this now. But I never had any hopes beyond simply selling enough copies to keep producing it (and maybe, one day, producing an issue which […]
[…] 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 Th ird 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 […]
Edward Pearce London: Little, Brown, 2002, £25, h/b. Compared to the present crop of media-trained, PR-conscious, line-following, careerist pigmies who comprise the current Labour Cabinet, Denis Healey looks like a giant from a golden age. Before his well known roles as Minister of Defence and Chancellor of the Exchequer (during the Tory-induced inflation of […]
[…] the original members. In the 1940s the British political elite, although supportive of European co-operation, opted to pursue an independent strategy by projecting Britain as a ‘Th ird Force’ between the Soviet Union and U.S.. By the 1950s, however, this strategy was perceived to be untenable and a new policy of ‘limited liability’, supporting […]
[…] of political reality; and maybe a big part – certainly a bigger part than orthodox historians and political scientists would have us believe. Denounced by a former IRD head I’m here because I have been publishing a little magazine called Lobster for 17 years, part of whose content has been information about, and critical […]
From David Guyatt: David Hambling’s comments in Lobster 39 (Feedback) underscore the extreme difficulties involved in firstly accessing, then corroborating and, finally, reporting stories that are as obviously sensitive as Operation Black Cat and Operation Black Dog. It is easy to raise what appear to be realistic technical objections, but the Black Dog story consumed […]
