As the election for the new Pope began a fascinating US radio interview with a former senior CIA official was broadcast in which the name Michael Ledeen (See Lobsters 31, 45, 47) came up in connection with the forged Niger uranium documents cited by both the US and UK governments in the build-up to the … Read more
Mark Urban Faber and Faber London 1996 £16.99 The first sentence of Urban’s conclusion to this very interesting and rather important book is: ‘More than anything else, British intelligence is a system for repackaging information gathered by the USA.’ He might have added, ‘information gathered in large part at US bases in Britain’. Urban has … Read more
At the end of a very long and well publicised trial for corrruption, the former Deputy Leader of Liverpool City Council, Derek Hatton, was acquitted earlier this year. (See U.K. daily papers on 13 and 14 March 1993. The Independent of that date had as the heading to its second Hatton story, ‘Prosecution hung on … Read more
The story in The Guardian of 12 November, ‘Diplomat’s “slave” can stay in UK’, was the tip of an iceberg. The story concerned the allegations made that a Sudanese diplomat had kept a ‘slave’ in London. Allegations of slavery in the Sudan have been made – and denied – for years. (A summary of the … 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
The Trial of Saddam Hussein Abdul Haq Al-Ani, Clarity Press, Atlanta, GA., 2008 Abdul-Haq Al-Ani’s troubling manifesto on behalf of the murdered Iraqi leader exposes bloody doings of empire from a lucid political-juridical perspective. ‘Imperialism is a universal historical phenomenon, but it remains, nevertheless, evil’, he writes (p. 23). ‘I use the term European [imperialism] … Read more
The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Vol. 1 ed. Sarah Curtis London: Pan Books, 1998, £7.99 The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Vol. 2 ed. Sarah Curtis London: Macmillan, 1999, £25 The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Vol. 3 ed. Sarah Curtis London: Macmillan 2000, £25 Woodrow Wyatt’s diaries are quite remarkable. Any normal persons would have tried … Read more
One of the aims of this column is to open up new lines of enquiry for parapolitical specialists. It might seem very odd to start with the name of Reinhard Gehlen, long-since dead founder of the BND, the German Security Service. Reinhard Gehlen, to over-simplify a very complex tale, bought his way into the Western … Read more
Counter-insurgency in Rhodesia J. K. Villiers (Croom Helm, London, 1985) An expanded Masters thesis, full of descriptions of psychological operations by the Rhodesian forces (which failed utterly: and no wonder, they were useless), and rather less about pseudo-gang activities which, like their equivalents in the British operations in Kenya, were a success – i.e. they … Read more
Kim Besly Kim Besly died in July. A brief notice appeared in the Guardian on 30 July 1996. Besly was one of the pioneers in this country in the campaign to alert people to the dangers of electromagnetic technology. I met Besly only once but Harlan Girard knew her better and, in response to her … Read more
