MI5 and the Wilson Plot The MI5 website (www.mi5.gov.uk) has a section called ‘myths and misunderstandings’, which features, among other things, ‘the Wilson Plot’. The paragraph it devotes to this episode is worth studying. It refers the reader to Spycatcher and Peter Wright’s allegation that ‘up to 30 members of the Service had plotted to … Read more
Introduction The mid 1970s was not a good time to be a social democratic ally of the United States. In Britain we had “the Wilson plots’; in Australia Gough Whitlam, Jim Cairns and the Australian Labour Party got Governor Kerr and the CIA; in Germany Willi Brandt resigned after a “security scandal’; in New Zealand … Read more
[…] 5 On things Italian, there was a very interesting ‘Diary’ by Tobias Jones in the London Review of Books, 8 March 2001, which discussed, inter alia, the murder of left-wing journalist Mauro de Mauro in 1970. Jones tells us that the study of the covert operations in Italy in the 1970s is now described […]
Political activist Daniel Ellsberg and Professor Alfred McCoy have something special in common. Based on their actions and accomplishments of nearly thirty years ago, they have achieved the status of icons within the subculture of what passes for the New Left. Icon Ellsberg became a celebrity in 1971 after he leaked The Pentagon Papers, an … Read more
[…] could sit easily with a eugenicist agenda for a pure race. Most extreme among those on the organic movement’s fringes were Ludovici, who recommended incest and mass murder, and Dr. Alexis Carrel, who thought that painless lethal chambers would help rid the white races of their ‘degenerates’. Ludovici condemned the organicists for concentrating on […]
[…] surveillance activities in Europe must be subject to rigorous oversight, and guarantees must be provided to safeguard against abuse’. Alan A. Block, ‘The National Intelligence Service murder and mayhem: a historical document’, Crime, Law and Social Change, 38 (2) (September 2002) pp. 89-136. Frank J. Cilluffo, Ronald A. Marks, and George C. Salmoiraghi, […]
The rise and fall of the Bulgarian Connection Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead (Sheridan Square Publications, New York, 1986) When the Turkish Grey Wolves hold rallies they howl collectively. So, at times, do journalists of the ‘free press’. In 1979 Edward Herman wrote After the Cataclysm with Noam Chomsky in which they shredded Western … Read more
Miscellaneous Publications Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’, The CIA and American Democracy, (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1989, price not stated) is, with Blum’s The CIA: a Forgotten History, the best single volume on the CIA. Of particular interest is the author’s account of the political system’s response to the revelations of CIA archives in the … Read more
[…] it appears to have been loyal to the elected government. The police force, however, is widely held to be corrupt and is probably implicated in the recent murder of the island’s senior Red Cross representative, the person who negotiated the release of hostages after the Speight coup, and was thought to have learned too […]
[…] 23 by Christina Lamb, ‘Diplomatic Correspondent’ – a title once held by Coughlin – which claimed that Saddam Hussein had sent belly dancing assassins to London to murder his opponents there. Lamb sourced this to ‘a Foreign Office official’.(4) Where are they now? Skimming through the e-newsletter NewsmakingNews of 18 September I had […]
