[…] with the dark side of American history will be missed by senior colleagues and younger protégés alike. Yes, ‘colorful’ and ‘unforgettable’ are words that come instantly to mind, but ‘committed’ is more important, and ‘permanent state of indignation’ is best of all. Ace Hayes was a whirlwind, and his moral outrage could suck you […]
[…] Still very much in the land of the living is an old political associate of both departed peers, Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee. A teasing thought crossed my mind during the phoney leadership war in the days before the Labour Party conference when Toynbee switched her allegiance to David Miliband from Gordon Brown. (We are […]
[…] of ’63. RR: Bobby was an election winner. PDS: Put it this way: Johnson was an election loser. And the way the American system works they don’t mind if somebody’s going to lose because they usually control the other guy too. But the Kennedys were never exactly controllable because they had so much money […]
[…] which safeguarded the route to India. It was at this point that Britain’s Liberal government decided on intervention. It hoped for French support, which would, in Gladstone’s mind at least have helped to preserve some element of international respectability about the enterprise – but none was forthcoming. So a unilateral British invasion occurred. Arabi’s […]
[…] ‘community policing’. And this is free from GLC Police Committee DG/PCS/602 County Hall, London SE1 7BP Intelligence/Parapolitics October 1984. This Paris-based journal goes on getting better. ( Mind you we’ve only seen a few editions). The mixture of detailed summaries of articles from the world’s press plus reprints of especially notable pieces is very […]
[…] of it and did not realise the shallowness of the exercise of which he was principal architect. I say ‘shallowness’ because commerce, when it has branding in mind, looks outwards and downwards; whereas David Spedding made the fatal error of only looking outwards. It is easy, but no less unforgiveable, to see how this […]
[…] couple of tales I picked up during my ill-advised research into MK-ULTRA. In 1989, I spoke to one claimed former Navy SEAL who related, rather convincingly, that mind control (specifically hypnosis) was used on individuals sent behind enemy lines on assassination missions during the Vietnam war. This source also spoke of ‘programmed’ soldiers being […]
[…] – and the rest of us – are all likely to be heading. Some years ago Armen Victorian and I discussed assembling all the documents on surveillance, mind control, non-lethal weapons and so on he had accumulated over his years of bombarding the U.S. FOIA system with thousands of requests. We made a few […]
Since the storming of the Iranian Embassy in London on 5 May 1980, the Special Air Service (SAS) has become a cultural phenomenon as much as a military one; has become, in the words of its former Director, Peter de la Billiere, ‘a living embodiment of the individualism of the British’. Their heroic exploits have … Read more
I met Paul Routledge, the biographer of Gordon Brown, a couple of years ago. ‘Does Brown understand economics?’ I asked him. ‘Well, he reads lots of big books,’ said Routledge. ‘This is not the same thing.’ Of course I asked the wrong question. What I should have asked was: does Gordon Brown understand British economic … Read more
