[…] 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: […]
[…] on Dorril’s part: his preface states that he intends to publish another volume on the roles of MI6 and MI5 with reference to counter-insurgency in the Th ird World. This will give more attention to South East Asia and Africa than was possible in the present volume. Fair enough. As the British Empire dissolved […]
[…] in Lobster 39. Further information can be had on the publisher’s Website at www.autonomedia.org The latest book from John Newsinger, author of the piece about Orwell and IRD in this issue, is a study of recent British comics: The Dredd Phenomenon: comics and contemporary society (Libertarian Education, 157 Wells, Road, Bristol, BS4 2BU; ISBN […]
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 […]
[…] War world is one of the best books on the UK’s intelligence services, up there with Stephen Dorril’s MI6 book, Paul Lashmar and James Oliver’s book on IRD and Richard Aldrich’s The Hidden Hand. Rereading it, I was struck by the following. Although we now know quite a lot about MI5’s recent history, almost […]
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 […]
