Tom Bower, Heinemann, London This is the biography of Dick White, the only man to have been head of both MI5 and MI6 (SIS) and it is a massive breach of the new Official Secrets Act. For Bower not only had access to White’s memoir of the period, with White to vouch for him, he … Read more
Volume 20 of Research in Political Economy, edited by Paul Zarembka, titled ‘Confronting 9-11, Ideologies of Race, and Eminent Economists,’ (JAI/Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, New York, Oxford, 2002) contains important essays on the current US administration’s foreign policy by Peter Dale Scott and David MacGregor. The abstract to Scott’s essay is : ‘The United States since … Read more
Introduction The ‘Gable memo’ reproduced below originally appeared as the subject matter of a long and extremely interesting article, ‘Destabilising the “decent people”‘ by Nick Anning, Duncan Campbell and Bruce Page in the New Statesman on February 15, 1980. This is still worth digging out, particularly for its detailed account of the context in which … Read more
John Armstrong Arlington, Texas: Quasar Ltd., 2003 $40, plus postage, from <www.jfkresearch.com/armstrong/> This is a major publishing event in the JFK assassination world. Parts of Armstrong’s work has been on the Net and he’s spoken at some of the big JFK conferences. His work-in-progress became spoken of as ‘the John Armstrong research’; and finally … Read more
Iraqi documents Iraq on the Record (<http://democrats.reform.house.gov/IraqOnTheRecord>) is a searchable collection of over 200 specific misleading statements made by Bush administration officials about the threat allegedly posed by Iraq. The collection would be even larger if it also included statements that appear mistaken only in hindsight. However, if a statement was ‘…an accurate reflection of … Read more
Last year, in the search for independent corroboration of some of Colin Wallace’s story, I talked to a number of ‘Irish hands’, journalists who had been in Northern Ireland while Wallace was working there. One was Kevin Dowling, the Sunday Mirror correspondent there from 1970-74. Dowling was reluctant to talk much about that period of … Read more
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. … Read more
Radio Enoch: the station you love to hate Radio Enoch (see Lobster 46) was one of a number of Free Radio stations operating illegally during the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike its more pop music oriented contemporaries, however, Radio Enoch’s output consisted solely of right wing political propaganda, albeit with a musical background. (1) Its origins … Read more
Veterans of a notorious Miami-based CIA dirty tricks team have boasted that they were helped by British Intelligence officers to sink an East German ship loaded with British-built Leyland buses. Three years after the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the MV Magdeburg was hit by a Japanese ship in the River Thames. When … Read more
The channels for US covert military aid to the Afghan mojahedin have been thrown into disarray by the death on August 17 [1988] of President Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan in an aircrash unexplained as we went to press. His death came at a particularly sensitive moment as the Soviet occupation forces prepared to withdraw and … Read more
