[PDF file]: […] those individuals as “Communists”, undermined their authority within their respective organisations and they were replaced by hardline militants. It is likely that those anti-Communist activities also helped to colour the population’s attitude to the incoming Labour Government, led by Harold Wilson, in February 1974, and hampered that Government’s political initiatives.’ 8 No such party existed.
[PDF file]: […] my copy. Apart from other subtle changes, specifically, the intelligence section was removed. It was too late, I had the genuine copy, verified by Colonel John Hughes- Wilson, formerly on the political staff at NATO headquarters in Brussels, he had examined and verified the authenticity of the CIA report. He was a senior British […]
[PDF file]: Scott Newton The Lost Peace How the West Failed to Prevent a Second Cold War Richard Sakwa New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023 Sovereign Internationalism Lobster readers may already be familiar with the work of Richard Sakwa, whose Frontline Ukraine was reviewed in the summer of 2019.1 That book discussed the growing tensions […]
A review of Lobster in the Sunday Herald, 17 August 2003.
[PDF file]: […] early credibility received a big boost in 1987 when Peter Wright’s Spycatcher was published and confirmed that elements within British Intelligence had been trying to destabilise the Wilson government in the Seventies. Lobster had been banging on about this for months, but it was only when a crusty old spook confirmed the accuracy of […]
[PDF file]: The crisis: an historical perspective Scott Newton Introduction A s a student at Cambridge in the mid-1970s I was fortunate enough to be taught by a great medieval historian – Walter Ullman. Ullman liked to say that the task of the historian was to explain ‘how and why we came to be where we are […]
[PDF file]: […] Hence the scandals and suspicions of scandals – ‘conspiracy theories’ – that plagued them in the inter-war years, from the ‘Cambridge Five’ fiasco to the alleged ‘ Wilson Plot’. One hopes they’ve learned their lesson by now. Our lives may depend upon it. Secrecy is also, of course, the enemy of the historian. It […]
[PDF file]: […] a meeting with my then MP, Roland Moyle, to discuss attempts by the Intelligence Services in Northern Ireland during 1974 to discredit various political figures, including Harold Wilson. The 1981 destruction of documents may also be significant. That was the year that three staff members, including the Tara leader, William McGrath, of the Kincora […]
[PDF file]: […] with much the same texture.) He quickly concluded that Arthur Scargill, at that time emerging as a leader of the miners, was ‘too egotistical and reckless’. Harold Wilson was ‘an unprincipled, slippery customer who was not to be trusted’. He took ‘the CIA tour’ of the USA with Neil Kinnock in 1975 soon after […]
[PDF file]: […] by revealing (minor) state secrets. Today we have Cameron and Clegg, imitations of Tony Blair, Thatcher’s successor, who hardly matter. Then, influenced by research on the ‘ Wilson plots’, the secret state seemed important and powerful. These days it doesn’t seem so significant. Would the average MP today be more afraid of the Daily […]
[PDF file]: […] work for the CIA. “I assured them”, Maheu recalled, “I intend to keep my word and maintain the secrecy of the mission.” Meanwhile, Assistant Attorney General Will Wilson was quickly assigned to review whatever the Justice Department might hold on the CIA-Mafia contacts. The Nixon White House, he would later tell Watergate investigators, was […]
