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
Bernard Donoughue London: Jonathan Cape, £25, h/b Political diaries are among my favourite reading. In that genre this is an absolute belter; but not for the minutiae of policy formation, with which Donoughue was primarily preoccupied, or the account of the government’s handling of various incidents, interesting though they are; but for the picture … 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
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
(Or: I’m not paranoid, they really are out to get me) Armen Victorian On June 23, this year, after returning home with my children from their school, I noticed a red car parked in front of our house with two passengers, male and female, in it. After we entered, the male passenger, who was very … Read more
Kenneth De Courcy Kenneth de Courcy buffs will be pleased to know that they can now visit a website with some interesting further information about this maverick figure. The site can be found at < http:// www.pharo.com/intelligence >, and is run by the team which produced Double Standards, last year’s interesting study of the Hess … Read more
This may be a bit of a long-winded note but I think it is on an important topic and may have some things of interest for Lobster readers. Because of the nature of the subject it will have to rely, at least in part, on unattributable sources, but I’ll reference it as much as possible. … 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
The Information Research Department Andrew Defty Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2004, £23.99, p/b Thinking about this book, I wondered why people like me have been so interested in IRD for the last 30 years. There are two reasons, I think. The first is that way back in the 1970s, when information about the British … Read more
Definitions? Or Whoops! A paradigm An American magazine called Mondo 2000 ran an amusing piece called ‘The Conspiracy Top Ten’. In it ‘Zarkov’ offered this definition: ‘Conspiracies may be better understood as organizations pursuing their own ends, who desire no publicity as to their true objectives and methods.’ Which sounds interesting at first then dissolves … Read more
