Secret Nazi Technology which could have changed the course of WWII Gary Hyland and Anton Gill, Headline Books, 1998, £18.99 Thirty years ago schoolboys built model aeroplanes. The most common and popular were, for the Airfix generation, the main combat types of the last great war – Spitfires, Me109s, Mustangs, Zeros, Lancasters, Flying Fortresses etc … Read more
Introduction The ‘Gable memo’ reproduced below originally appeared as the subject matter of a long and extremely interesting article, ‘Destabilising the “decent people”‘ by Nick Anning, Duncan Campbell and Bruce Page in the New Statesman on February 15, 1980. This is still worth digging out, particularly for its detailed account of the context in which … Read more
A stranger harvest The best single volume on the alien abduction connundrum I have come across is C.D. B. Bryan’s Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1995). In it Linda Moulton Howe, the American film-maker who made A Strange Harvest about the ‘cattle mutilation’ phenomenon in the United States, describes to … Read more
For some time, the world’s secret services have been making use of loose structures parallel to the official clandestine hierarchies for their more controversial activities. Fred Holroyd’s revelations have shown how the British state employed Loyalist paramilitaries for kidnap and assassination operations in Eire, whilst the Irangate hearings have exposed what is, so far, the … Read more
The Kennedys: The Conspiracy to Destroy a Dynasty Matthew Smith Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, h/b, £16.99, 2005 State Secrets: The Kent-Wolkoff Affair Bryan Clough Hove: Hideaway Publications, 2005, £15 (US $27.50) <www.statesecrets.co.uk/index.html> Matthew Smith has written several books covering the tribulations of the Kennedy family and is described on the book jacket as a screenwriter … Read more
The state in politics: Wallace, Holroyd and Lobster Colin Wallace’s 1980 conviction for the manslaughter of Jonathan Lewis was quashed on 9 October 1996. Considering the size of the political iceberg beneath that little tip, with the notable exceptions of the Guardian and Channel Four News, the response of the media on mainland UK was … Read more
Paul Lashmar and James Oliver Sutton Publishing, Stroud (UK) £25.00 hb This is a really interesting and important book – perhaps the most important book about the British secret state since Fitzgerald and Bloch’s British Intelligence and Covert Action in the early 1980s. The incremental uncovering of the Information Research Department (IRD) story has been … Read more
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
Introduction Greenwood Press in the USA have just published Anthony Frewin’s’ The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: An Annotated Film, TV and Videography, 1963-1992 (ISBN 0-313-28982-4). The book is divided into 12 chapters covering such subjects as Oswald in New Orleans, Dealey Plaza (some 40 entries, no less), Dallas post-assassination, TV programs and compilations, documentaries, … Read more
Just ten years ago the issues were so simple, the arguments so clean. The concept of hackers was cute and quaint, best understood through Hollywood thrillers like ‘War Games.’ The major media had yet to use the word ‘cyberspace,’ a term just then created by William Gibson in Neuromancer, his first masterpiece in a strange … Read more
