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
[…] that the KGB was indeed behind the papal plot, prompting Casey in 1985 to order Robert Gates to commission Text No. 7, tendentiously entitled “Agca’s Attempt to Kill the Pope: the Case for Soviet Involvement”. Text No. 7, said by Gates in a cover memorandum to be the “CIA’s first comprehensive examination of evidence […]
The story of the Ulster Citizens’ Army (UCA for the rest of this essay) is a tiny fragment in the intricate history of Protestant politics in Northern Ireland in the mid 1970s – so tiny that none of the general accounts I have looked at even mention it. But the UCA lingers on: it is … Read more
[…] numbers of Kenyans. Figures vary but maybe more than 30,000 died. (Ferudi is unable to completely conceal this from his reader and notes that in 1956 “the kill rate remained high’.) Secondly, he has nothing at all to say about the British secret state’s attempts to contain and deflect Kenyan nationalism. In other words: […]
Turning up the Heat: MI5 after the Cold War Larry O’Hara Phoenix Press, London, 1994, £6 (p and p included) from BM Box 4769, London WC1N 3XX; cheques payable to Larry O’Hara. Since 1945 MI5 has had three main domestic targets: Soviet bloc espionage, the British Left and the IRA. With the Soviet target gone, … Read more
[…] out early, as if they had known in advance that the rescue mission would “fail.” Iran’s police and military had also been pre-alerted, and were waiting to kill all American hostages, agents and diplomats had the operation gone forward (Rebel, Jan. 1984). The Rev. Charles Moore, then of Houston, Texas, was in Tehran at […]
Olivier Schmidt Atlanta (USA): Clarity Press, 2005, $14.95, p/b www.bookmasters.com/clarity/currenttitles.htm Here’s a new name to me, the publisher Clarity; and a familiar one, Olivier Schmidt. In the 1980s Schmidt was producing a very good newsletter in Paris, Intelligence and Parapolitics. This got expensive, professionalised and eventually went on-line for subscribers as Intelligence.(1) This is … Read more
[…] the Reagan administration of an embarrassing individual – Larry McDonald. (The source of the embarrassment is detailed below.) Flynt’s hypothesis seems implausible (there are easier ways to kill people) but, as Flynt points out, Howard Hunt’s wife, Dorothy, was killed in a plane crash during the Watergate mess in very peculiar circumstances. (On this […]
NB This issue of Lobster went to the printer in late May. At that stage no Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’ had been found by the ‘coalition’ forces. Before the furore over the British government’s ‘dodgy dossier’ in February, in truth I hadn’t been really paying much too attention to the then impending assault on … Read more
[…] St Peter’s Square. While it was known almost immediately that the would-be assassin was a Turkish fascist, Mehmet Ali Agca, a Reader’s Digest article, ‘The Plot to Kill the Pope’, a little later marked the start of a concerted US-based publicity effort to blame the outrage on the KGB through the so-called Bulgarian Connection. […]
