Paddy the spook Since the last issue I have skimmed Paddy Ashdown’s two volumes of diaries. While dominated by his attempt to do a deal with the Blair-led Labour Party, there are some other interesting snippets; and, through Ashdown’s eyes, there is a detailed portrait of Tony Blair which suggests that Rory Bremner’s impersonation of … Read more
Wishing and hoping I met Tony Benn only once, while researching Smear! He’s a lovely man with a big blind spot about the politics of the early 1980s in general and the Militant Tendency in particular. Here’s Benn in the course of an appreciation of Arthur Scargill on his standing down as President of … Read more
As Steve Dorril shows in his essay on Permindex, the lack of a satisfactory resolution to the assassination of Kennedy allowed Soviet intelligence to use the event to their own ends. The French also had a go with the pseudonymous book Farewell America which made public considerable information about the CIA’s activities while pretending to … Read more
Introduction Despite their reputation for ’empiricism’, British academics have tended to treat political power by means of abstract concepts rather than empirical information about the actions of determinate individuals and groups (e.g. Giddens, 1984, 1985; Scott, 1986). After a brief efflorescence of empirical studies of the so-called ‘Establishment’ in the early 1960s, sociologists in Britain … Read more
This is an extract from a chapter called ‘Continuities of Empire’ from Pieterse’s forthcoming book Empire and Emancipation to be published by Praeger, New York. If the rest of the book is as good as this is, we are in for a treat. “So marked was the Anglo-American rapprochement that many informed people suspected a … Read more
Brian Crozier HarperCollins, London, 1993 This is a very interesting book which greatly adds to our knowledge of the clandestine shaping of British politics in the 1970s and 80s. It is also a book which, like Chapman Pincher’s Inside Story, will repay repeated re-reading. But amidst all the new material a surprising amount of these … Read more
James Jesus Angleton and the ‘Third Way’ The CIA counter-intelligence expert James Angleton has for years been regarded as one of the keenest of cold warriors, who turned the CIA inside out in the search for Soviet ‘moles’ and ultimately had to be retired to prevent further damage to the Agency. But interesting current research … Read more
Paul Lashmar and James Oliver Sutton Publishing, Stroud (UK) £25.00 hb This is a really interesting and important book – perhaps the most important book about the British secret state since Fitzgerald and Bloch’s British Intelligence and Covert Action in the early 1980s. The incremental uncovering of the Information Research Department (IRD) story has been … Read more
Christopher Mayhew I.B. Tauris, London, 1998, (hb) £25. Christopher Mayhew died recently thinking he set up the Information Research Department. As I have shown elsewhere, he was thoroughly manipulated by the Foreign Office – just like his boss at the time, Ernest Bevin, come to that. This short (142 pages) book contains 47 pages of … Read more
Yesterday’s loony tunes become today’s reality. Here are some recent examples. Gulf war syndrome, whose existence has been denied by the Ministry of Defence for over a decade, is now being admitted. As the Telegraph’s version of the story put it: ‘Soldiers sent to the 1991 Gulf war were given a combination of vaccines that … Read more
