Mr Tony was a spook? Issue 7 of Larry O’Hara’s Note from the Borderland () includes a section from the Anne Machon and David Shayler book, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers (reviewed in Lobster 49), which was apparently dropped by the publisher. The key section is this, from an unnamed MI5 officer: ‘Blair was recruited […]
[…] campaign is being run by the spooks, then Roger Windsor, the former NUM official who laid the (now forgotten) original allegations of Libyan money, must be a spook. Evidence as yet there is none. However there is a hint. Before joining the NUM Windsor had been employed by the transnational union organisation, Public Services […]
I invited David Turner to begin writing a regular column for Lobster. He agreed then rang to tell me his computer had been attacked by a virus and could not meet my deadline. (He is the second contributor to this issue to have been virused recently.) But I had on file this splendid polemic written […]
Hollis again What with the opening of the KGB archives and the testimony of Oleg Gordievsky, you might be forgiven for thinking that the question, Was MI5 Director-General Roger Hollis a Soviet spy? had been answered conclusively and resoundingly ‘No’. You would be wrong – or so says the doyen of British espionage writers, Chapman … Read more
Patriots not sneaks After a year of New Labour I feel beholden to write something on this subject, but what is there worth saying that isn’t blindingly and depressingly obvious and predictable? Jack Straw, who took over as Home Secretary, and thus formally as the boss of MI5, is determined to sedate any sleeping dogs … Read more
The CIA In a recent ‘Witness Seminar’ on the 1975 British referendum on entry into the European Economic Community (EEC), the Conservative MP, Sir Richard Body, who in 1975 was co-chair of the anti-EEC National Referendum Campaign, had this to say: ‘At the very beginning of the campaign two CIA agents came to see me … Read more
Introduction What follows is an interim report about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. In so far as it has a central thesis, it is that Jones initiated the Jonestown massacre because he feared that Congressman Leo Ryan’s investigation would disgrace him. Specifically, Jones feared that Ryan and the press would uncover evidence that the … Read more
A history of ASIO and National Surveillance Frank Cain Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009, p/b, $39.95. ISBN 978 1 921509 322 Frank Cain was just a name to me but a little googling showed that he is Australia’s leading academic historian of intelligence and security history. This history of ASIO and its antecedents – more … Read more
[…] of what could happen to them too …….. I am astonished that, in the British press, so far as I am aware, none of the specialist ‘ spook’ journalists commented on ‘Nicola Calipari’s’ death. In PR terms, if the shooting was deliberate, it could come under the heading ‘event management’, with all this implies. […]
[…] With Wilson dead, we only have Joe Haines’ word for this. Should we believe Joe Haines? Why do I always get the feeling that Haines was a spook? What with the new book, Rinkagate, and the ‘Secret Lives’ programme on Channel 4 in November on Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott, this is deja vue, […]
