[…] source of nothing but misinformation. (I should say I haven’t yet read Pincher’s book.) This claim about the tunnel is also made by the US writer of spook fiction, Charles McCarry, in his 1984 The Last Supper. That book is virtually a thinly disguised history of the CIA – or, at any rate, bits […]
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 […]
Compromised Reporting Taking its cue from a powerful network of far-right radio commentators, the American press insists on noting only those financial scandals which don’t sully ultra-conservative politicians. Of either party. For example: Rush Limbaugh, who has become the Republican Party’s Goebbels, loudly applauded Clinton’s appointment of Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, an appalling Texas (Democrat) […]
Dangerous Liaison Between EU Institutions and Industry This is the first publication of Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), an Amsterdam-based foundation which will ‘monitor and report on the activities of European corporations and their lobby groups’. Very nicely produced and illustrated, this is 72 A-4 pages and costs £5.00 in the U.K. and US $10.00 in […]
William Blum Monroe, Maine (USA): Common Courage Press, 2005, $18.95, p/b Blum is a grey-bearded, spook-wise, American lefty who was radicalised by the Vietnam War. He wants to look the beast in the eye with as much information as possible. He isn’t concerned with theoretical questions but he knows imperialism, atrocity and bullshit when […]
On Friday 7 August I was told by a journalist at another paper that the Mail on Sunday had a story that Cabinet Minister Peter Mandelson had worked for the spooks – though which branch was not clear. ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ I said, and described Mandelson’s 1978 Foreign Office (or SIS?)-funded trip to Cuba. … Read more
Who was who? The newly published Oxford Dictionary of National Biography not only surveys the lives of the great and the good, but also includes accounts of individuals in the murkier fields of human endeavour. Over fifty spies are listed, for example, including historical figures such as ‘Parliament Joan’ (c1600-1655?) and ‘Pickle the Spy’ (c1725-1761). … Read more
[…] definitely not the invention of ‘British intelligence’. It just looks like one. His use of the term ‘British intelligence’ is revealing. Only those still ignorant of the spook dimension to recent history use that expression. Knowledge entails disaggregation. Bruce’s index includes a reference to a tiny Scottish Protestant group, the Young Cowdenbeath Volunteers, but […]
