David Black, Vision, London, 1998, £9.99 pb I enjoyed this book hugely, and I’d recommend it to anyone remotely interested in the politics of psychedelia – apart from anything else, there are stories here you almost certainly won’t have heard. However, overall it aspires to more than it can deliver. As the title implies, the … Read more
Political debris continues to fall from the bombing of the Pan-Am flight 103 on 21 December 1988, which killed 270 people. Fallout from Lockerbie has begun to reveal one of the ugliest political corruptions of recent times. This Byzantine tale is further evidence of just how powerful and ruthless the American-led international security apparatus — … Read more
Barry and the boys The CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History Daniel Hopsicker Venice (Florida): The Madcow Press, 2006, $19.95, p/b Barry is Barry Seal and ‘the boys’ are the CIA. There is a decent Wiki entry for Seal which conveys the outlines of his extraordinary life as a pilot, large-scale drug smuggler and, … 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
Gecas and Special Branch A wonderful example of the reach and power of intelligence connections was provided in January. Why did the British state refuse to extradite Anton Gecas, the WW2 Lithuanian war criminal, to the Soviet Union in 1976? Turns out not only had Gecas worked for SIS at the end of WW2, he’d … Read more
This essay has been written using recently declassified records on Project Pandora released on 19 December 1994 to the author after a Freedom of Information Act appeal filed three years ago. The aim of Project Pandora was to study the microwave frequencies targeted on the US Embassy in Moscow by the Soviets during the 1960s … Read more
Dominic Streatfeild London: Hodder and Stoughton 2006, £20, h/b One of the gaps in the parapolitical library has been a great pull-together of the material on ‘mind control’. And Streatfield has done it, and done it rather well. He is a documentary film-maker and some of the chapters here read rather like scripts. All … 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
Yesterday’s loony tunes become today’s reality. Here are some recent examples. Gulf war syndrome, whose existence has been denied by the Ministry of Defence for over a decade, is now being admitted. As the Telegraph’s version of the story put it: ‘Soldiers sent to the 1991 Gulf war were given a combination of vaccines that … Read more
Election time! Ah, the roar of the hustings; the pulse of democracy is about to be taken. The enduring worthiness of our political system is about to be proven yet again. But what’s that you say? Something’s not quite right with the result? You smell a rat? Be quiet. Such things only happen in tin-pot … Read more
