A man with Friends The Third Secret: the CIA, Solidarity and the KGB’s plot to kill the Pope Nigel West HarperCollins, London, 2000, £19.99 Let’s dispose of the ‘Third Secret’ nonsense. West claims that Pope John – the Polish Pope – was told the ‘third secret’ of the Fatima revelations; and that this ‘third secret’ … Read more
Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre Nashville (US):Nelson, 2005, Distributed in the UK by New Holland Publishers, London, at £14.99, h/b RFIDs are acoming. RFIDs are radio frequency identification or identifiers, little chips which can be fixed to, implanted in, built into almost anything from paper money to human beings; and which can then be … Read more
Noam Friedlander London: Conspiracy Books/Collins and Brown, 2005, p/bk, £8.99 Apart from being an anagram of Oedipus, Opus Dei is a Roman Catholic organisation, which has grown from beginnings in Spain in the 1920s, led by José Maria Escriva, to being an evangelising force within the Catholic Church, aimed as much at the lay … Read more
MI5 and the Wilson Plot The MI5 website (www.mi5.gov.uk) has a section called ‘myths and misunderstandings’, which features, among other things, ‘the Wilson Plot’. The paragraph it devotes to this episode is worth studying. It refers the reader to Spycatcher and Peter Wright’s allegation that ‘up to 30 members of the Service had plotted to … Read more
The funding of Blair Sometimes chronology implies causality and sometimes not. Consider the following sequence of events: in January 1994 Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary and career-long member of the Labour Friends of Israel, took a four day freebie trip to Israel, with his wife, at the expense of the Israeli government. Two months … Read more
Election fraud Further to ‘How to fix an Election’ in Lobster 43, more news on the gentle art of perfuming a skunk. First Pick Your Voters Some strong contenders here. But first out of the hat is the Labour Party for performance during the all-postal voting experiments that were tried across the country in the … Read more
MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations Stephen Dorril Fourth Estate, London, 2000, £25 A Life: A. J. Ayer Ben Rogers Chatto and Windus, London, 1999, £20 Many books on intelligence matters simply rehash old ‘facts’, adding a new twist to – a slightly different interpretation of – well-known, if not necessarily well-understood, events. If … Read more
Ah, the wonderful private sector In ‘Blair anti-corruption plan weakened by British firms’ in The Independent 2 September 2002, Geoffrey Lean reported: ‘Britain has the world’s most corrupt companies, and some of the weakest legislation among industrialised countries for dealing with them….Half of the 70 companies identified by the World Bank as so corrupt that … Read more
On the jacket of his new book, reviewed in this issue, Steve Dorril writes there that he ‘is founder-editor of the widely respected journal’ Lobster. I invite you to look on the rear cover of this magazine and see who the editor is. That’s right: it’s not Steve Dorril. I have resisted going into detail … Read more
