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
Charles F. Reske Alpha Publications, Sharon Center, Ohio, USA. For Vietnam War buffs — and no particular political persuasion is necessary to be fascinated by the surreal, epic quality of that conflict — the holiest of holies is probably the Special Operations Group (SOG). One of the most shadowy organizations ever formed by the Pentagon, … Read more
Policing (a) and the miners 3 page overview in Labour Research (September) Officers being sent straight from training school (Guardian 20 November) Police installing alarms in homes of (some) working miners. (Guardian 27 November) Police officers being charged a ‘fee’ of a bottle of whisky to get on lucrative picket duty. (Daily Telegraph 25 October) … Read more
eds. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and Andrew Lownie Edinburgh University Press, 1992. This worthy, but expensive, anthology of ten essays ranges widely from the obscure ‘secret operations of Spanish consular officials within Canada during the Spanish-American war’ to the useful account of the ‘birth of the Defense Intelligence Agency’. In between are a number of good essays … Read more
Clippings The Lie Detector Story In the wake of the Prime case, US intelligence has made polygraph (lie detector) introduction into GCHQ at Cheltenham a condition of future GCHQ-NSA cooperation. “At a meeting in July with Civil Service union leaders, Sir Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, made it clear that Senior Whitehall officials were reluctant … Read more
Say it ain’t so, Joe Joe Haines’ 2003 Glimmers of Twilight (London: Politicos, 2003) got a fair bit of attention when it appeared, most of the comments noting either former Harold Wilson press officer Haines’ allegation that Marcia Falkender claimed to have had an affair with Wilson in the 1950s, or the claim (supported by … Read more
Colin Wallace and ‘Clockwork Orange 2’ In 1974, while working for the British Army’s Northern Ireland psy-ops unit, Information Policy, Wallace was asked (told) by an MI5 officer to work on a psy-ops project, ‘Clockwork Orange 2’. Wallace’s job spec. for CO2 was to produce a document, a first-hand narrative, apparently written by a supporter … Read more
The recent celebrations of the Europeans’ discovery of Australia gave John Pilger the excuse to put out his version of the overthrowing of the Gough Whitlam government. The most interesting point he made was that the UK intelligence services were involved with the CIA. Extraordinary though this now seems, this had never struck me. The … Read more
Mark Perry William Morrow and Co, New York, 1992 I’m not even sure if this has actually been published in the U.K.: I’d never heard of it until this copy turned up in my local library with a UK price stuck over the dollar price, suggesting a few were imported. This should have been sub-titled … Read more
Alien Liaison Timothy Good Century, London, 1991 Please note: all the telephone conversations referred to by the author in this essay have been tape-recorded. Published in May 1991, the thesis in Good’s book is (a) that alien space craft have landed and/or crashed on earth; and (b) that the U.S. government is concealing this fact … Read more
