[…] figure who happened to bump into Parsons and his colleagues with predictable consequences. He could have been a simple confidence trickster. Equally he could have been a spook ensuring that Parsons was (a) investigated at close range, (b) financially ruined and (c) eased out of rocket research. Or he could have been a combination […]
Richard M Bennett London: Virgin Books, 2003 £20 hardback This is 350 pages of summaries of political and historical conspiracies. It starts in 2330 BC but the first 2007 years take up only 84 pages. The content is mostly Anglo-American, especially after WW2. It is done chronologically, so you get odd sequences of subjects: … Read more
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh New York and London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006 $75.00 (US), £37.99 (UK), h/b This is an interesting and timely book and it is a great pity it is so expensive. Put out as a paperback and maybe with a less academic-sounding title, this would sell. Little of it is intellectually taxing and any … Read more
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
The spectre of technofascism haunts the democratic nations. All the powers of the espionage empire and the scientific establishment have entered into an unholy alliance to evoke this spectre: psychiatrist and spy, Dulles and Delgado, microwave specialists and clandestine operators. Substantial evidence exists linking members of the American intelligence community — including the Central Intelligence […]
Geoffrey Goodman London: Pluto Press, 2003 hb £18.99 As a conventional political memoir, this is quite an interesting read. The big figures march by: Bevan, Wilson, Callaghan, Healey, Robert Maxwell; and there are interesting stories about all of them. The best anecdote has Denis Healey, as Chancellor in the House of Commons in 1976, … Read more
[…] reports the opinions of a number of (anonymous) journalists on the unreliable, frequently intelligence-sourced nature of the Sunday Times’ recent reporting on Northern Ireland. In fact the spook fix was in at least seven years ago when James Adams became the Sunday Times’ defence correspondent and began running interference for MI5 at the Wapping […]
Philip Willan Constable, London, 1991, £20.00 Hats off. A British journalist, living in Italy, Willan has produced that synthesis of the Italian material on the “strategy of tension’ and related parapolitical activity which people like me, without Italian or access to the Italian press, have been waiting for. This is one of those books that … Read more
Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding London: Andre Deutsch, 2003, p/b £8.99 An updated and expanded version of Defending the Realm: MI5 and the Shayler Affair which was reviewed in Lobster 38, this account of MI5’s adjustment to the post Cold War world is one of the best books on the UK’s intelligence services, up … Read more
[PDF file]: […] is in decline because, with the exception of Washington, everybody else recognised the environment debate, so too has ‘big’ espionage collapsed. The last of the Cold War spook agencies with leading brand status to topple in ignominy like the rest of them was SIS: in its case because of the illegal and immoral invasion […]
