A Bilderberg Press Release I don’t think I’ve ever published a press release before, but this is unmistakably a press release from last year’s Bilderberg meeting.(1) There is the occasional oddity in this, possibly caused by e-mail transmission, which I’ve highlighted, and I’ve arranged the participants by country, rather than alphabetically as in the original. … Read more
The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners Seumas Milne London: Verso, 2004, p/back, £8 GB84 David Peace London: Faber & Faber, 2004, p/back, £12.99 On the 20th anniversary of the most significant power struggle in post war Britain, two very different books on the miners’ strike of 1984-85, read alongside each other, … Read more
In 1976 Mary Ferrell discovered a curious CIA document, a telegram that had been sent from the Agency office in London to headquarters in Langley on 23 November 1963, the day after JFK was assassinated. The telegram reads as follows (blacked-out(1) matter shown by brackets, with suppositions in italic): [Paragraph deleted in its entirety] EXPRESSIONS … Read more
Roundtable I get regular e-mail bulletins from an organisation called the roundtable – not the Round Table but somebody? some people? – trying to document the US ruling elite by the study of its organisations. Really they should be called Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) – because it is the CFR they mostly write about; … Read more
In this issue, as in No 3, we are recycling a lot of material from Irish newspapers, and one in particular, the Sunday News. One of our Irish readers describes the Sunday News as ‘almost wholly Catholic..Nationalist … moderately Social Democratic Labour Party rather than moderately Republican.’ We have no way of checking the veracity … Read more
From Anger to Apathy: the British Experience since 1975 Mark Garnett (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007) Dead Men Don’t Eat Lunch Geoffrey Gilson (self-published) Beyond Bullets Jules Boykoff’s AK Press, 2007: <www.akuk.com> Briefly Mark Garnett’s From Anger to Apathy: the British Experience since 1975 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007) has had some fairly sniffy reviews but I … Read more
MI6: Fifty years of Special Operations Stephen Dorril Fourth Estate, London, 2000, £25 hb Harold Smith As I can testify from personal experience, having in 1960 been summoned to Government House in Lagos, Nigeria, to have my death sentence pronounced by the Governor General, MI6 is brutal, cruel, merciless and totally unforgiving. Dorril’s courage, … Read more
Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA Jim Hougan (Random House, US 1984) Those who read Hougan’s last book Spooks will know that the arrival or a new one is something of an event. As expected, his latest has so many trails to follow, intriguing little titbits to ponder that one read is insufficient … Read more
The usual suspects Fascinating piece by Paul Webster in the Guardian (1 February, 1994) about the Dreyfus Affair. He quotes a book by the French historian Jean Doise who has examined French Army documents from the time. Doise has discovered that the affair developed because of French secret service attempts to disinform the Germans about … 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
