Earlier articles in Lobster (issues 39, 41, 43, 45, 49) have followed Malcolm Kennedy’s case. The human rights organisation, Liberty, took his complaint about interference with his communications and other forms of surveillance and harassment, to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the body set up under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) to … Read more
A Wapping mystery I noticed with some interest that Sunday Times editor, Andrew Neil, was described in the Guardian on May 27 as having been labour correspondent of the Economist in the 1970s. Was he, I thought, one of the correspondents recruited by MI5 in the big F branch expansion circa 1973-5? Did that explain … Read more
Peter Dale Scott Talk in Palo Alto, October 27, 2006 If I had an hour, I would talk to you about how the 9/11 Report failed to reconcile Dick Cheney’s conflicting accounts, which cannot all be true, of what he did on the morning of 9/11 in the bunker beneath the White House. But that … Read more
How perceptions have changed! In Leveller 51, March 1981, there was this snippet: ‘Why all the fuss about the Panorama programme on British Intelligence? Eventually there was just one cut — Gordon Winter, BOSS agent, former freelance journalist, in a pre-title sequence: “British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in … Read more
Giles Scott-Smith London: Routledge/PSA 2002, £55 This is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA-funded operation that ran for two decades after World War II of which Encounter magazine was the best-known British component. Giles Scott-Smith has added to the historical record well illuminated by Christopher … Read more
The Spy who came in from the Co-op David Burke Woodbridge: the Boydell Press, 2008, h/b, £18.99 The author was conducting a series of interviews with 87-year old Melita Norwood about her childhood among a group of pro-Soviet radical exiles in England in the 1920s and 30s, when it was revealed in the press, via … Read more
Part 1 Issue 24 of the Covert Action Information Bulletin (Summer 1985) is chiefly devoted to recent activities of U.S. government agents and agents provocateurs inside radical and labour organisations: the ‘sanctuary movement’, the Native American movement and one industrial dispute, are analysed as case studies. They are preceded by a long essay, “The New … Read more
Searchlight again In the Daniel Brandt essay in this issue there is a section on the scandal in the United States resulting from the discovery that the Jewish organisation, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), has been found to be collecting data on hundreds of political groups, both right and left, and trading data with agencies of … Read more
Phone-tapping Phone-tapping of CND (Observer 9 December 1984; Daily Telegraph 10 December.) Telegraph piece includes claim that people phoning CND office have been connected to Ministry of Defence and local police stations. Police Review (15 February 1985) quotes “a source inside British Telecom” on the question of warrants for taps: ‘When it is a police … Read more
Will the Illuminati arrive in black helicopters or Nazi-designed UFO’s? We are currently awash in dotty conspiracy theories. This is an interesting phenomenon even if the content of most of them is almost totally unreliable – at best. Some of this is the spin-off from the Oklahoma bombing and the media’s discovery of the militias. … Read more
