A guided democracy The following appeared in the Daily Telegraph 23 June 2003. ‘Edward Heath created a secret government propaganda unit to persuade the British people to accept the Common Market. Civil servants were engaged in a dirty tricks department of the Foreign Office to cover up the threat to sovereignty and provide rapid rebuttal … Read more
Maggie, Maggie, Maggie Giles Scott-Smith,(1) who wrote about the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Lobster 36 and 38, has written a very interesting study of Margaret Thatcher’s first visit to America in 1967.(2) Scott-Smith shows that Thatcher, then a junior shadow spokesperson in the Tory Party, was talent-spotted by the State Department’s man in the … Read more
[…] that an effective analysis of the use of power “should refrain from posing the labyrinthine and unanswerable question who then has power and what has he in mind?” Instead, it is a case of studying power at the point where its intention, if it has one, is completely investigated in its real and effective […]
[…] posing outside a synagogue.’ And so forth. (No wonder I got muddled….) In Lobster 25, (p. 11) I stated that some of the material for Julianne McKinney’s mind control report had come from Harlan Girard. Ms McKinney denies this. Harlan Girard says it’s true. I can’t tell which of them is telling the truth […]
Ivan Molloy London: Pluto Press, 2001, £18.99/£55 In the 1980s the resurgent US military and neo-conservatives were in a bind: faced with a variety of challenges to the American economic empire, the enormous military power they possessed was constrained by PR considerations; American parents who didn’t want their children dying abroad (the so-called ‘Vietnam … Read more
Ian Macgregor, Lazards, Pearsons, and Amax PART 1 See also Part 2 in Lobster 6 Summary This article attempts to show that the present chairman of the National Coal Board, Ian MacGregor, is far more than the “right man for the job” imported from the U.S. by a Government set simply on technical efficiency. Macgregor’s … Read more
Horses for courses? Labour MP Denis MacShane used the hospitality of The Observer extended by his old Oxford pal, editor Roger Alton, to proclaim the virtues of Nicolas Sarkozy and confide, a week before the second vote, that his success in the French presidential election was greatly desired in Downing Street. The prospect of a … Read more
[…] Clinton and Arkansas.(8) My faith in the author, Nicholas A. Guarino, is not heightened by the bizarre autobiographical spiel about him prefacing the piece. Headlined ‘The Fastest Mind on Wall Street’, this begins by telling us that he got a speeding ticket at the age of seven, has an IQ of over 200, and […]
[…] a ghastly, brutal, shambles, about as threatening to NATO as the CPGB is to the British state. This, clearly, wasn’t quite what his intelligence mentors had in mind at that stage of the re-launched cold war, and ‘Suvorov’ (or, perhaps, some wise-guys somewhere in the British state) quickly put out another book, Inside the […]
[…] Cold War there have been occasions when the intelligence services, the CIA and SIS for example, actually did provide intelligence of substance. The first that springs to mind was the Cuban missile crisis, when the information from the Soviet intelligence officer Penkofsky about the actual accuracy of Soviet missiles did appear to play a […]
