Dodgy dossiers Steven Kettell, author of Dirty politics? New Labour, British democracy and the invasion of Iraq (London: Zed Books, 2006), argues that New Labour wanted regime change in Iraq before Bush and before 9/11 and that the production of the WMD Dossier was one of the key components of a broader political strategy designed … Read more
[…] instincts are cautiously tolerant, are presented with ‘facts’ that constantly imply an enemy within. But is there more to this than meets the eye? The French ‘ spook’ trade newsletter, Intelligence Online (edition 531, 10 September) contained details of increases expected in European R&D expenditures in the security sector. There was an odd entry […]
Politics and Paranoia I wrote this for Picnic Publishing’s website. Talks, 1986-2004 Robin Ramsay Picnic Publishing, 297 pages, index, £9.99, ISBN 9780955610547 There are a number of talks in Politics and Paranoia about Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd. (Holroyd had been in the British Army Special Military Intelligence Unit and Wallace had been a Senior … Read more
From Mark Hollingsworth As the journalist, along with Nick Fielding, who first reported David Shayler’s revelations about MI5 in the Mail on Sunday in 1997, I would like to set the record straight on your piece in Lobster 36 (‘Peter’s Friends’?) I have remained close to David Shayler and Annie Machon, his girlfriend and also … Read more
NB This issue of Lobster went to the printer in late May. At that stage no Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’ had been found by the ‘coalition’ forces. Before the furore over the British government’s ‘dodgy dossier’ in February, in truth I hadn’t been really paying much too attention to the then impending assault on … Read more
[…] it is partly a newsletter, in a continuous process of up-dating the reader. One of those themes is the survey of legislation and politics in the US spook world. But as well as the fairly dry details of bills, appropriations and Congressional debates, it covers the major parapolitical themes. So, for example, in the […]
John Smith: Old Labour’s lost leader? In non-New Labour Labour Party circles the late John Smith is remembered with great reverence.(1) Quite what this is based on escapes me. All I can identify is his dislike of Peter Mandelson: Smith kept him at bay therefore Smith was a good man seems to be the argument. … Read more
[…] some of the claims contained in the book A Man Called Intrepid. The rest consists of another couple of now redundant bits from the team of Andrews/ Gordievsky, and a couple of pseudo-theoretical essays which I found very hard going and not worth the effort. What the world does not need know is spook theory.
Peter Levenda Waterville (Oregon); TrineDay; 2005, h/b, $29.95 This has a foreword by Jim Hougan who describes it as ‘one of the darkest and most provocative books that you are likely to read’. I’m a big fan of Hougan’s but I didn’t get this book. Not that it isn’t an interesting read: it is. … Read more
[…] googled the names and terms above in a single search. This led me to . This is very suggestive and worth a look. But if our anonymous spook is a fake, he simply paraphrased the story in the Baltimore Chronicle (which is a 7,000 circulation radical magazine). On the same subject former Democratic Governor […]
