Abstract The Tribunal established to investigate complaints about phone-tapping and the activities of the intelligence agencies has, at its first ever public hearing, quashed rules made by the Home Secretary forcing the tribunal to hold all its hearings in secret. However, the Tribunal procedure remains too secret, and its decisions cannot be appealed. Malcolm Kennedy’s … Read more
I have been scrutinising in some detail the Curry Report, The Security Service: its problems and organisational adjustments 1908-1945 –– the in-house history of MI5 which was written by John Court (‘Jack’) Curry (1887-?), a senior MI5 officer, during 1944-6. In so doing I have solved one of the great mysteries about Maxwell Knight. Anthony … Read more
Mobile phones cause cancer, and other modern horror stories It appears that the facts about the medical hazards of electromagnetic fields and mobile phones and their masts are breaking into the mainstream consciousness in this country. Who now wants to live near a mobile phone mast? There are major protests all over the world about … Read more
Philip Willan Constable, London, 1991, £20.00 Hats off. A British journalist, living in Italy, Willan has produced that synthesis of the Italian material on the “strategy of tension’ and related parapolitical activity which people like me, without Italian or access to the Italian press, have been waiting for. This is one of those books that … Read more
Nexus: postmodernism or what? I wonder what posterity will make of Nexus magazine. It continues to be just about the most fascinating and the most infuriating thing which plops through my letter-box. Take the April-May 2000 issue. On the positive side there is a very interesting and maybe very important piece on the soya bean, … Read more
House of Bush, House of Saud Craig Unger New York: Scribner, 2004, h/back, $26.00 I bought this because it was reported in the UK that the book couldn’t be published here due to our ‘stricter’ libel laws. Naturally, I wondered who among the Bushes and the Saudis might consider themselves libelled. The book is … 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
Ten Days that Saved the West John Costello Bantam Press 1991 John Costello has set out to provide, in the words of the publisher’s blurb, “the first behind the scenes account of the agonizing history of 1940′. His aim is to debunk the Churchillian myth that in 1940 Britain was united in its determination to … Read more
Nick Cook is a defence journalist of high repute, having been an Aviation Editor for the authoritative Jane’s Defence Weekly for fourteen years. When he says that UFO reports conceal a new technology with the potential to change the world, a technology kept secret by the US military-industrial complex for decades, he should be worth … Read more
Anthony Glees, Philip J. Davies, and John N. L. Morrison London: The Social Affairs Unit, 2006, £20, h/b The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) is a recent addition to the roster of Whitehall bodies; the motives of those who created it, as the authors show, are obscure and its role to some extent remains … Read more
