Frost/Nixon Or, a load of old dick When Frost/Nixon first appeared at the Donmar Warehouse theatre in London back in 2006 I wondered why on earth anyone would want to stage, to recreate, what was, essentially, a non-event. Why indeed? One can imagine mere actors relishing the opportunity to ‘interpret’ Frost and Nixon but who … Read more
The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America 1947-2000 Sally Denton and Roger Morris London: Pimlico, 2002, pb, £15 John Burnes It’s hardly news that Las Vegas was a city run by the Mob. Or that it was fuelled by financial corruption. Or that both of these … Read more
This began as a review of Deacon’s Truth Twisters by David Teacher, and grew as we both saw bits and pieces we could add to it. Richard Deacon’s The Truth Twisters (McDonald, London 1987: Futura, London 1988) is a classic of Western disinformation purporting to describe Soviet disinformation. Deacon lines up all our favourite state … 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
As a number of people have pointed out, in the first 5 Lobsters – something like 100,000 words – there has been hardly a mention of the Soviet and Soviet satellite intelligence activities. There are reasons. No-one has offered us anything on this subject, and neither of us (ie Ramsay/Dorril) know much about it. What … Read more
The final testimony of George Kennedy Young Introduction When this was published we believed that it had been written by a close friend of his. Subsequently we learned that it had been written by Young himself. As far as we were able to judge, it is accurate. But this is by no means the whole … Read more
CIA set for Pentagon buyout? Lester Coleman, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) man who co-authored Trail of the Octopus (about CIA drug-channel involvement in the Lockerbie bombing) writes in the latest Unclassified (quarterly publication of the Association of Former National Security Alumni, no. 34, Fall 1995), that the CIA feels itself threatened by a DIA … Read more
STANLEY MAYNE A Socialist Caucus pamphlet put out in June 1984, Cold War and Class Collaboration: Red Baiting and Witch-Hunts in the Civil Service Unions suggested that ‘A rather mysterious affair occurred in the IPCS (Institute of Professional Civil Servants). Its General Secretary, Richard Nunn, who had in April 1962 correctly realised that the Radcliffe … Read more
John Nott London: Politico’s, 2002, £20 John Nott was a junior minister in the Edward Heath government of 1970-74 and a not quite senior minister in the first Thatcher regime. He has written a rather interesting, occasionally amusing and unconsciously revealing memoir. There is an account of the City, in which he worked in the … Read more
Peddlars Of Crisis Jerry W. Sanders (Pluto, London 1983) With this book research into clandestinism and Cold War revisionism take another big step towards meeting. It is the story of the Committee on the Present Danger, the Cold War think-tank that prepared the way for the election of Reagan and provided the administration with Jeanne … Read more
