Parapolitics/Intelligence November 1984 – February 1985 The usual invaluable mixture of precis of stories from the world’s press plus reprints of some entire articles and the occasional original piece. November’s includes a long and excellent piece by Jonathan Marshall on the Strange career of Ronald Hedley Stark. PP/Intelligence subscriptions $20 payable to ADI at ADI, … Read more
Democracy building or democracy assistance, is a putative socio-economic policy solution, which, because of the extent of the political and economic forces impacting on it, has become a contemporary socio-economic problem. Democracy building’s institutional formation rests upon a reconfiguration of Cold War positions that retain, what Dr. Michael Pinto-Duschinsky termed ‘such interference,’(1)so as to continue … Read more
From: M. R. D. Foot Scott Newton’s footnote at the end of his piece on Hess, in your number tries to keep alive Dr Hugh Thomas’s tale that the pilot who reached Scotland could not have been Hess, because he bore no trace of the gunshot wound the real Hess had received in Roumania in … Read more
The Enemy Within Seamus Milne Verso, London, 1994 Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party Francis Beckett John Murray, London,1995 Seamus Milne has written a very good book, an essential book. Investigative journalism in this country is very hard to do, and Milne deserves great praise for this achievement.(1) The core … Read more
Ah, the wonderful private sector In ‘Blair anti-corruption plan weakened by British firms’ in The Independent 2 September 2002, Geoffrey Lean reported: ‘Britain has the world’s most corrupt companies, and some of the weakest legislation among industrialised countries for dealing with them….Half of the 70 companies identified by the World Bank as so corrupt that … Read more
“What would they want with me?” Lord Mountbatten had imperiously said to his secretary shortly before his death…… (1) Ulster Unionist M.P. Enoch Powell suggested that the CIA were involved in the murder of Earl Mountbatten of Burma in August 1979…”The Mountbatten murder was a high-level ‘job’ not unconnected with the nuclear strategy of the … Read more
A Wapping mystery I noticed with some interest that Sunday Times editor, Andrew Neil, was described in the Guardian on May 27 as having been labour correspondent of the Economist in the 1970s. Was he, I thought, one of the correspondents recruited by MI5 in the big F branch expansion circa 1973-5? Did that explain … Read more
Shorts Yorkshire Post (14 March ’92) reported the admission by the Ministry of Defence that in an operation called HORNBEAM, trawlers had been used during the first Cold War to spy on Soviet shipping. But the MOD spokesperson refused to confirm that some trawlers had carried intelligence officers. Statewatch Bulletin (Jan/Feb 1992) includes an important … Read more
Louis Kilzer Presidio Press, U.S., 2000, £18.99 (1) Louis Kilzer has won two Pulitzer Prizes and is the chief investigative writer of the Denver Rocky Mountain News. A couple of chapters into this book it became clear why Kenneth de Courcy sold so many newsletters in the American Mid-West. A low point – or … Read more
Blob of the month Hear the one about the supposedly spook-watching magazine whose editor misspelt the name of the head of MI5? Yep: Rimmington, I had in the last issue: Rimington it should have been. Searchlight News Their campaign against Larry O’Hara has reached new depths. In the March issue they published his picture and … Read more
