Malcolm Kennedy believes his telephones, email and post are being interfered with. His attempts to obtain answers have met with brick walls, and his situation has been described as Kafkaesque. Soon his complaint will be one of the first to be heard by the recently established Investigatory Powers Tribunal. Background Last Summer, Lobster drew attention … Read more
The Spycatcher’s Encyclopedia of Espionage Peter Wright Heinemann, Australia, 1991 The cover-blurb says this is ‘the rest of the story’. It feels more like the out-takes from Spycatcher spiced with a few more fragments of interesting gossip. And I do mean fragments: the interesting bits of 260 pages — largish print and much white space … Read more
Terror Within: Terrorism and the Dream of a British RepublicClive Bloom Stroud, Glos.: Sutton, 2007, h/bk, 297 pages, h/b, £20.00 This sets out to provide a narrative describing the range of ‘attempts’ to set up a republic in Britain from the time of the French revolution until the present day. (Although the bulk of … Read more
Wishing and hoping I met Tony Benn only once, while researching Smear! He’s a lovely man with a big blind spot about the politics of the early 1980s in general and the Militant Tendency in particular. Here’s Benn in the course of an appreciation of Arthur Scargill on his standing down as President of … Read more
[…] probably be against the civilian population of large cities. It can be well imagined the degree of consternation, as well as fear and apprehension, that such an agent would produce upon a large urban population.'(6) Hamilton made a number of proposals for the elimination of large populations, among them ‘fission product aerosols to subject […]
The Christie File part 3, 1967-75 Stuart Christie p/back, £34 (inc. p and p) from <www.christiebooks.com> Like the first, reviewed in Lobster 44, this third volume (300 pages, indexed) in Christie’s autobiography is done on A4 pages with the central text bordered with photographs of the people and incidents concerned, newspaper clippings, posters, cartoons etc. … Read more
[…] book, like all the others, does not explain the Reagan phenomenon. RR Deadly Deceits Ralph McGeehee (Sheridan Square Publications Inc. USA 1983) Ralph McGeehee was a CIA agent for 25 years operating mainly in South East Asia. He is now a bitter opponent of his old firm and the anger comes through clearly in […]
Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy Phillip Willan Phillip Willan’s Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, (Constable, London, 1991) is a detailed and interesting book, dealing in a thorough (if partially flawed) way with a fascinating subject. It covers a wide array of interlocking subjects including the infamous P2 … Read more
Counter-insurgency in Rhodesia J. K. Villiers (Croom Helm, London, 1985) An expanded Masters thesis, full of descriptions of psychological operations by the Rhodesian forces (which failed utterly: and no wonder, they were useless), and rather less about pseudo-gang activities which, like their equivalents in the British operations in Kenya, were a success – i.e. they … Read more
[…] around in certain sections of the British Right for about 45 years since the late and unlamented Kenneth de Courcy first alleged that Rothschild was a Soviet agent. But apart from that – I basically don’t ‘get’ this book. If there is someone reading this with more knowledge – and more interest – in […]
