In 1978 I read a report of a speech on subversion by a Mr G. K. Young (‘GKY’) a former ‘deputy director’ of MI6. It said that he was a banker. I had been a student at LSE 1972-1975, my tutor was an expert on the Soviet Bloc and I had studied Soviet politics. Fears … Read more
Nicola Calipari’s death If the tragic death of ‘Nicola Calipari’, the international oper-ations chief of Italy’s military intelligence service, in March 2005, was, as has been alleged, a deliberate act rather than misadventure, it is one of the most recent examples of extreme PR ‘message management’ I can think of. ([1]) ‘Public relations’ is about … Read more
Harold Weisberg Harold Weisberg died at his home in Frederick, Maryland, on 21 February from a kidney ailment at the age of 88. He was one of the first generation of Warren Report critics along with Vincent Salandria, Ray Marcus, Mark Lane, Sylvia Meagher and others. He was a tireless critic of the Report and … Read more
See note 1. Introduction We were as surprised as anybody at the furore over Oliver Stone’s movie. When we published the Dean Andrews material and the analysis of the Clay Shaw U.K. contacts in Lobster 20, in November 1990, we did so in the certain knowledge that hardly anybody was still interested in the JFK … Read more
Of the many questions left unanswered from this summer’s so-called Lobbygate furore, one stands out: why did Prime Minister Tony Blair expend so much energy and political capital saving Roger Liddle, the Downing Street adviser who was caught by The Observer offering access through his former lobbyist business partner, Derek Draper? Loyalty cannot be an … Read more
Footy and me I did two things with Paul Foot. Over two days, he, Colin Wallace and I copy-edited the manuscript of what became Foot’s Who Framed Colin Wallace? Foot was impressively objective about his own writing, accepting editing suggestions on their merits. During a lunch break he said to me: ‘What’s a bright guy … Read more
American Friends: the Anti-CND Groups Steve Dorril In a memo leaked to the Washington Post (9th May 1982) on opposition to President Reagan’s defence policy, Eugene V. Rostow, Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, stated “there is participation on an increasing scale in the US of three groups whose potential impact should be … Read more
A current example of a conspiracy theory is the continuing attempt to paint Roger Hollis as a member of the so-called ‘Ring of Five’. There is, it should be said, not a shred of evidence that Hollis ever passed a single piece of information to the Soviets, nor that he had any contacts with Soviet … Read more
For almost two generations, researchers in the UFO field have suspected that there is a cover-up by US government agencies which prevents any meaningful progress in discovering the facts behind the UFO myth. The single most important factor supporting this view has been the alleged crash of a UFO at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. … Read more
The unspeakable Martin Kettle of The Guardian is a political journalist who has been pretty close to, and supportive of, New Labour since the 1990s. His article ‘The special relationship that squandered a noble cause’ (27 May 2006) opened with this: ‘The long arc of Tony Blair’s rise and decline has been punctuated by journeys … Read more
