Christopher Harvie Hamish Hamilton, London, 1994 This is nominally the book of the Channel 4 TV series on NSO. TV is an entertainment medium, almost wholly useless for conveying detail or arguments. (An hour’s documentary viewing covers what you might read in ten minutes – or less.) So the TV series was interesting in small … Read more
[…] an endorsement better than that, thanks very much. And if ‘the Establishment’ was cross with ‘West’ it didn’t stop him becoming a Conservative MP; and under Margaret Thatcher, who hated dishers of dirt and secrets. So, for me, ‘West’ has always been a puzzle: a conservative (and Conservative) historian of spookery with ambiguous relations […]
[…] America attacked the Round Table’s various front organisations in the late 1940s, thinking they were attacking the ‘international communist conspiracy’. (15) More recently both Nixon and Mrs Thatcher have explicitly set themselves up as the enemies of the foreign policy ‘establishment’ without ever showing the slightest signs of understanding who it is they are […]
[…] therefore be concluded that MI6 is fully aware of, if not indeed one of the main sponsors of, the anonymous security group. Also closely connected with Mrs Thatcher and Mr Franks is the prominent journalist Robert Moss, who, together with Fred Luchsinger editor of Neuen Zuricher Zeitung, Dr Cux of the Swiss Intelligence Service […]
[…] and journalists. Those who read them could keep in mind a throwaway comment (1997) by Sir Percy Cradock, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee under Prime Ministers Thatcher and Major: ‘The bulk of the records of its outposts, principally JIC (Germany), JIC (Middle East) and JIC (Far East) have disappeared.’ (24) That they have […]
[…] Fred Holroyd and Colin Wallace. A few months later I wrote the first attempt to explain Wallace’s claims in Lobster 11, ‘Wilson, MI5 and the rise of Thatcher’. This was 50 A4 pages, with an introduction by my MP, the late Kevin McNamara. He was a Catholic of Irish extraction, had knowledge of events […]
W. D. Rubinstein (Second edition, revised and updated) London: Social Affairs Unit, 2006, pp., £20 Did you know that, on his death in 2001, former Beatle, George Harrison, left the second largest fortune in the UK (£98,916,000)? If you like facts like this, you will enjoy this book, and you will be in good … Read more
[…] Ministers on what insiders call ‘reality’ as opposed to ‘gossip’ in the Party’s document.” (More Hennessy ‘gossip’ .) 4. Secret Intelligence (Richard Norton-Taylor, G., June 6th 1983) Thatcher Advisers Refuse To Face M.P.’s Questions. (Peter Hennessy T. April 21 1983) The new Select Committees attempted to monitor the intelligence services and question the criteria […]
[…] of the Atlantic the professional diplomats and the rational core of the intelligence community are slowly throwing off some of the vile nonsense perpetrated in the Reagan-Bush- Thatcher years? The release of various official US documents which could easily have been withheld on national security grounds – eg on the CIA’s role in Guatemala […]
[…] with, she tells us, through her ‘employment law work’. This is a complete travesty. The strike was deliberately provoked by Murdoch, with the full support of the Thatcher government, in order to deny the workers their redundancy payments. She must have known this at the time through, as she puts it, her ‘employment law […]
