A small section of this appeared in Lobster 12. Although this is incomplete and under researched, we thought it worth putting out now. The origins of IRD 1947 saw the creation of the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD). It is generally accepted that IRD was the brain-child of the then Labour M.P. Christopher Mayhew, … Read more
The funding of Blair Sometimes chronology implies causality and sometimes not. Consider the following sequence of events: in January 1994 Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary and career-long member of the Labour Friends of Israel, took a four day freebie trip to Israel, with his wife, at the expense of the Israeli government. Two months … Read more
Some recent JFK literature In front of me is a copy of Guth and Wrone’s The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Comprehensive Historical and Legal Bibliography 1983-1979 (1980), nearly 450 pages, running to some 5,134 entries covering books, magazine articles, records, TV programmes, and news items from both the New York Times and the … Read more
Introduction Intelligence officers who blow the whistle get attacked by their erstwhile employers. Agee, Stockwell, Marchetti,Wallace, Holroyd, Jock Kane, Cathy Massiter – they all have variously suffered for their decision to go public. Their allegations and their characters are rubbished; operations are mounted to discredit them and disrupt their lives – and worse. Gordon Winter … Read more
During the current farcical trial of Ali Agca a most interesting snippet appeared in the press which looks like finally seeing off the alleged ‘Bulgarian connection.’ Signor Giovanni Pandico, a jailed former member of the upper echelons of the Naples-based Camorra, claimed that it had played a part in convincing Agca to accept the role … Read more
In Lobster 17 we published two German intelligence reports on a covert propaganda group called the Pinay Circle. In this article we give background and investigate the Pinay Circle’s activities. Member of Parliament ‘G’: I don’t know if it (the Pinay Circle) has any political significance, but, in any case, it has little impact. For … Read more
Coroner to the Stars Thomas T. Noguchi (Corgi Books, London 1984) One of the things I asked Peter Dale Scott which didn’t go into the interview in Lobster 7 was why so little work had been done on the Robert Kennedy assassination. After all, at first glance, the ‘conspiracy angle’ was quite plain: the autopsy … Read more
Hitler’s spy chief: the Wilhelm Canaris mystery Richard Bassett London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2005, £20 This is a full and very well researched biography of one of the great enigmatic figures of the spy world in the 30s and 40s. The author, former foreign correspondent of The Times in Berlin and Prague, provides … Read more
SIS is dead – you read it first in Lobster – but the funeral has not been announced. Established in 1909, it will not make its centenary. SIS once offered a global brand operating in a market that had been previously divided along the lines of accepted cartels (market fixing). Its market-share, however, has been … Read more
The Sewer not the Sewage? David Mills, Berlusconi and New Labour Imagine that Robert Maxwell had become British Prime Minister. A similar situation actually obtains in Italy with the premiership of Silvio Berlusconi. I examine below one strand of Berlusconi’s activities, mainly through his relationship with one of his senior lawyers. Until recently, David McKenzie … Read more
