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
Mandy’s place in things On 12 June 1999 The News, Portugal’s weekly English-language paper, ran this comment on the Bilderberg meeting which had then just taken place in Portugal. The 47th Bilderberg Conference has come to an end. Members and one-off participants have departed as discreetly as they arrived. Lines of black limousines, unmarked except … Read more
The first of three essays in this issue are about New Labour and its origins. I put mine first because of its general, context-setting nature. The subsequent essays, on the Successor Generation and the operations in the British Unions, deepen and thicken the section towards the end of the opening essay which discusses New Labour’s … Read more
Michael Smith Gollancz, London,1996, £20 This is a curious and rather pointless book. In short chapters Smith attempts potted histories of MI5, SIS, signals and military intelligence. These are quite well done, but covering half a century in 20 pages, say, the chapters are barely more than sketches. (The Information Research Department gets a page!) … Read more
“The anomaly of going to war in your own country was not lost on Harry.” (Harry’s Game, Gerald Seymour, Fontana, London 1975) Airey Neave was killed in March 1979 by a bomb planted beneath his car just outside the Houses of Parliament. The then little known Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) soon claimed responsibility. The … Read more
A secret service? In the Guardian of 12 June 2000 David Leigh had an important piece on the relationship between our secret servants and the media. At the core of this was his account of the revelation, via a libel suit in London, of an MI6 operation to plant disinformation in the Sunday Telegraph about … Read more
The big news in this field is the announcement that the distinguished scientist, Dr Rosalie Bertell, is apparently involved, assembling data on microwave or electromagnetic harassment. This is on the Web at http://www.calweb.com/~welsh/bertell.htm Preliminary conclusions were due to be announced in September but I understand those in the study are extremely busy and the September … Read more
In this issue, as in No 3, we are recycling a lot of material from Irish newspapers, and one in particular, the Sunday News. One of our Irish readers describes the Sunday News as ‘almost wholly Catholic..Nationalist … moderately Social Democratic Labour Party rather than moderately Republican.’ We have no way of checking the veracity … Read more
Crime fighting? There must many candidates for the title ‘The most damaging thing I have read about this government’. My current candidate is a piece by Simon Jenkins, ‘A Keep Police off the Streets Strategy Unit’ (The Times 2 February 2002). After reminding the reader that in the UK the police are a local service, … Read more
