Since the storming of the Iranian Embassy in London on 5 May 1980, the Special Air Service (SAS) has become a cultural phenomenon as much as a military one; has become, in the words of its former Director, Peter de la Billiere, ‘a living embodiment of the individualism of the British’. Their heroic exploits have … Read more
Phoenix: Policing the Shadows Jack Holland and Susan Phoenix Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1996 The Origins of the Present Troubles in Northern Ireland Caroline Kennedy-Piper Longman, London, 1997 The war in Northern Ireland is apparently in its closing stages. There is still some way to go before it is all over, however, and undoubtedly there … Read more
Critique, mentioned in these columns before (Lobster 8), is a California-based “Journal of Conspiracies and Metaphysics”. It’s editor, Bob Banner, has had the good taste to reprint pieces from Lobster. Critique’s slogan – now available on T-shirts! – is; Question consensus reality. Well, amen to that. However, the bit of “consensus reality” – and Banner … Read more
The funding of Blair Sometimes chronology implies causality and sometimes not. Consider the following sequence of events: in January 1994 Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary and career-long member of the Labour Friends of Israel, took a four day freebie trip to Israel, with his wife, at the expense of the Israeli government. Two months … Read more
When Labour narrowly won the October 1964 election they were greeted by dismal balance of payments figures. An external deficit in the region of £800 million was forecast, twice what had been expected (although the actual figure has since been revised down to £372 million). The government attempted to manage the crisis by a package … Read more
Why is a Portuguese journalist writing a book about an almost unknown British spy? Recently I had to answer this same question from Igor Prelin, my favourite ex-KGB officer whom I first meet in Cannes, France, during the Television Market Fair of April 1994. After I met Igor Prelin in Cannes, I travelled to Moscow … Read more
Harold Pinter defined American foreign policy thus: ‘Kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in.’ William Blum counts the heads that have been kicked. United States foreign policy In 1975, there was a committee of the US congress called the Pike Committee, named after its chairman Otis Pike. This committee investigated the covert … Read more
Feedback Mark Taha (see Lobster 21, p. 25) wrote. ‘As someone who never joined any of the groups Larry O’Hara deals with [Lobster 23] but has attended their meetings, reads their publications, once nearly joined, and describes himself as a Libertarian Conservative Nationalist, (sic!) I read his article with interested. I noticed a few errors. … Read more
Seymour M. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston: Little Brown, 1997) Seymour Hersh is one of those figures with no real equivalent in British journalism. For one thing, the budgets, the armies of fact-checkers and, indeed, the market for this sort of extended politico-analytical foray just does not exist over here. Writing from a … Read more
The channels for US covert military aid to the Afghan mojahedin have been thrown into disarray by the death on August 17 [1988] of President Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan in an aircrash unexplained as we went to press. His death came at a particularly sensitive moment as the Soviet occupation forces prepared to withdraw and … Read more
