Into the Dark Johnston Brown Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2006, £22.99, h/b When Fred Holroyd first made his disclosures regarding the activities of SAS Captain Robert Nairac to Duncan Campbell of The New Statesman in 1984, they were credible because Holroyd was a loyal Army Intelligence Captain with absolutely no sympathies for IRA terrorism. … Read more
Parish Notices Thanks for material since the last Lobster to, Robin Whittaker (clipper-in-chief), Jane Affleck, Anthony Carew, Harry Irwin, Harlan Girard, Steve Wright and John Booth. Corrections I get surprisingly few anonymous or abusive letters but I got a corker after Lobster 34. The anonymous and abusive author pointed out that in my review of … Read more
When I began studying the Kennedy assassination, back in 1983, my naivety was considerable. It would be a few years before I fully hooked into the diffuse network of assassination researchers, and my hit-and-miss efforts to locate that fraternity produced some bizarre results during the 1985-87 period. Consulting periodical directories and other sources, I collected … Read more
Russ Kick (ed.), Disinformation, 2001, $19.95, ISBN 0-9664100-7-6. Available from http://store.disinfo.com. I once sat in on an interesting conversation between two well known writers on the underside of politics. At one point, one of them alluded disparagingly to one of the scruffier areas of the conspiracy fringe – UFOs, maybe. The other reacted immediately: ‘Oh, … Read more
The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina Uki Goni London: Granta Books, 2002, £20 If there was a category of work called Detective History, Uki Goni really ought to be awarded Book of the Year. Undeterred by the shredding and incineration of key documents, rebuffs from the supporters of Peron … Read more
Part 1 Issue 24 of the Covert Action Information Bulletin (Summer 1985) is chiefly devoted to recent activities of U.S. government agents and agents provocateurs inside radical and labour organisations: the ‘sanctuary movement’, the Native American movement and one industrial dispute, are analysed as case studies. They are preceded by a long essay, “The New … Read more
This piece by Daniel Brandt began as a short letter commenting on my review of Right Woos Left by Chip Berlet (Lobster 23 p. 34). I wrote back and asked if he would like to expand it. And so he did, writing almost the whole thing at one long sitting. Anyone who joined the U.S. … Read more
What our pols read on their hols This summer it was hard to avoid laudatory pieces about or extracts from the Drew Weston’s book The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.(1) Here, it was said, was the explanation of how George Bush beat the Democrats and – by … Read more
When Labour narrowly won the October 1964 election they were greeted by dismal balance of payments figures. An external deficit in the region of £800 million was forecast, twice what had been expected (although the actual figure has since been revised down to £372 million). The government attempted to manage the crisis by a package … Read more
On August 27th this year the British Channel Four TV programme ‘The Real X-Files’ gave a glimpse of the long history of US psychic research programs. As most of these programmes have been ‘black’, the true results and serious nature of the research have been concealed from the public and Congress. The triggering mechanism for … Read more
