[…] (FARI). John Bruce Lockhart (Obituary, Independent 13 May 1995). SIS officer. Niall MacDermot (Obituary by David Leigh in the Guardian, 26 February 1996). War-time MI5 officer, later Labour MP and Minister in the first Wilson government, whose career was halted by MI5 ostensibly because of his wife’s links with Soviet officials, but probably because […]
[…] to Holroyd either, while writing his book The Dirty War from which Urban took the quotation. Hedging his bets as expertly as the MOD answering an inquisitive Labour MP, Urban concludes that his ‘own research has not produced any evidence to support the claim that the security forces colluded with loyalist death squads in […]
Searchlight At the beginning of the essay on the Blairites above, I discuss the concept of political contamination, the denigration of people on the left by association – real or fictitious – with ideas or people on the right. The most enthusiastic users of the contamination device in Britain today are found in Searchlight magazine. … Read more
[…] role of J. J. Angleton in fomenting right-wing discontent with the Wilson governments points to a CIA connection with the plots to destabilise the 1964-70 and 1974-79 Labour administrations (see Peter Wright, Spycatcher: the Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer, New York: Viking Penguin, 1987; and Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, Smear! Wilson […]
[…] leadership which will have to tell people some pretty unpalatable truths.” Owen as the Oswald Moseley of the 1990s? The parallels are quite interesting. Both quit the Labour Party with a ‘solution’ the party as a whole wouldn’t accept; both formed a new party; both talked of ‘leadership’ and ‘unpalatable truths’. Maybe the British […]
[…] that Kelly was a ‘KGB man’. You can see how the smear went: Agee went to the KGB (or can be said to have done so); Kelly is the leader of Agee’s defence committee in London, therefore Kelly is KGB. *Phil Kelly is now a Labour Councillor in Islington and chair of its Education Committee.
[…] is beyond dispute that elements of the far right put up Italian political refugees, there is no evidence that this fitted into an overall euro-fascist division of labour. The German connection In February 1983 three Germans, Gottfried Hepp, Walter Kexeland Ulrich Tillman, wanted in connection with bomb attacks there, were entertained by the self-styled […]
[…] the broadcasting regulations – yet another falsehood.’ I have no sympathy for Robin Cook who has turned out to be at least as useless as any other Labour Minister, but readers of this column may remember that in issue 36 I described how Pilger had sent me a long letter and demanded I publish […]
[…] In 1963 James Angleton, head of the CIA’s counter intelligence branch, following up the revelations of Anatoli Golitsyn, informed MI5 that Harold Wilson, then leader of the Labour Party, was a spy. After a few enquiries Sir Roger Hollis, MI5’s boss, told John McCone, then head of the CIA, ‘There is nothing in it’. […]
[…] the Tory Party in 1979. On the British non-Trotskyist Left its origins lie in the 1975-78 period, and the ‘national security’ scares that were run against the Labour Government — the Agee-Hosenball expulsions and the Aubery, Berry and Campbell (ABC) trial for example. And these were mostly triggered by the fall-out from Watergate and […]
