The Spy who came in from the Co-op David Burke Woodbridge: the Boydell Press, 2008, h/b, £18.99 The author was conducting a series of interviews with 87-year old Melita Norwood about her childhood among a group of pro-Soviet radical exiles in England in the 1920s and 30s, when it was revealed in the press, via … Read more
The big switch Keeping track of the developments in the JFK assassination is something like a full-time job and I don’t have the time. Plodding along years behind the buffs, I came across Walt Brown’s Treachery in Dallas (Carroll and Graf, New York, 1995), an interesting book, dotted with new (to me) bits and pieces. … Read more
Colin Wallace On the Colin Wallace front, the big event since issue 17 has been Paul Foot’s book, Who Framed Colin Wallace? (Macmillan, 1989). With this book Paul Foot has re-researched and synthesised all the previous work and produced what is likely to remain the definitive account of Wallace’s biography, his allegations and – most … Read more
The Observer is a pale shadow of what it once was but it still has a lively Business section. Every fortnight Business carries a column from the American investigative journalist Greg Palast who is about as good as it gets these days on the interface between corporate interests and politicians. (1) In that Business section … Read more
Mark Aarons and John Loftus Heinemann, London, 1991, £16.99 Mark Aarons, author of Sanctuary! Nazi Fugitives in Australia, was largely responsible for convincing the Australian government to reopen their war crimes investigations; John Loftus, author of The Belarus Secret is a former attorney for the US Justice Department Office of Special Investigations who investigated the … Read more
The following is extracted from the book Sniffing Planes, Extreme Right, Intelligence and J. Violet by Pierre Pean (Editions Fayard, France, 1984). This, in turn, is based on a secret report written by a West German intelligence official, Hans Langemann, which was published in 1980 by Der Spiegel. Langemann was, at the time he wrote … Read more
Edited by Anthony Gorst, Lewis Johnman and W. Scott Lucas. Pinter/Institute of Contemporary British History London, 1991, £35 Goodness only knows what “politics and the limits of policy’ in the subtitle is supposed to mean. This is just a collection of essays on recent British history and was initially of interest because of the essay … Read more
The parapolitical activities of Jean Violet go back to the 1930s, when Violet was supposedly involved with a violent quasi-Masonic movement going under the title of the Comite Secret pour l’Action Revolutionnaire, or CSAR. CSAR was part of a larger far-right phenomenon in pre-WW2 France, the conspiratorial members of which were referred to as Cagoulards, … Read more
HP source ‘The plot against Harold Wilson’, the drama-documentary broadcast on BBC 2 on 16 March, was a strange affair. It was really little more than a World in Action half hour from the late 1970s puffed-up, complete with redundant reconstruction of Wilson and Marcia Falkender meeting BBC journalists Penrose and Courtiour (Pencourt). Is the … Read more
Tribune 21/28 August 1987 JOHN WARE is an investigative reporter, widely regarded, by his peers, as one of the best television journalists working in this country. He worked with World in Action and is now with BBC’s Panorama. It was to John Ware that Panorama entrusted its investigation into the Wilson-MI5 plots after the BBC … Read more
