Russell Holden Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002, hb, £47.50 The author is an enthusiastic supporter of the ‘reforms’ of the Labour Party and a Senior Lecturer in European Studies. His thesis is that the changes in Labour’s policy from anti- to pro-EU membership are the core of the ‘reforming’ of Labour in the 1980s and 90s … Read more
Gerald D. McKnight Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2005, 478pps, $29.95. The commonly accepted view is that the Warren Commission was a prisoner of its sources (i.e. the FBI) and that, coupled with a notable lack of general curiosity (‘We’re supposed to closing doors around here, not opening them,’ quoth Wesley J. Liebler), … Read more
Paul Lashmar and James Oliver Sutton Publishing, Stroud (UK) £25.00 hb This is a really interesting and important book – perhaps the most important book about the British secret state since Fitzgerald and Bloch’s British Intelligence and Covert Action in the early 1980s. The incremental uncovering of the Information Research Department (IRD) story has been … Read more
Espionage is two things – a career and a lifestyle. Both can be wildly exciting. Those who deny this have never been spies. Children born to SIS agents enjoy this lifestyle which can have many advantages. The home environment is usually stimulating, cosmopolitan and informed. There can also be one-off bonus such as acquisition of … Read more
Who’s kidding whom? The September issue of Fortean Times carried a five page article by Robert Irving, ‘The Henry X File’, about Armen Victorian. It was a very strange article, part profile, part smear job. Armen was ‘twice reportedly seen in the back of a Soviet embassy limousine in Ottowa… rumours associated [him] with the … Read more
The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs Douglas Valentine London/New York: Verso, 2004, h/back, £20 This comes garlanded with praise from Jim Hougan and Anthony Summers. The praise is justified: this is, as Hougan says, ‘a ground-breaking work of investigative reporting’; and it is, as Summers says, ‘a … Read more
The former deputy Labour leader of Preston has been given legal aid to sue the Inland Revenue, two chief constables, two former Tory government ministers, two millionaires and a former fish and chip shop owner, for conspiring to steal his tax records. Frank McGrath was swept out of power in a Labour Party purge after … Read more
See also Part 1 in Lobster 5 Ian Macgregor and AMAX We have followed one of Macgregor’s leads into the British Establishment; now we return to the man himself. He was born in 1912 in Kinlochleven and graduated from Glasgow University with a BSc in metallurgical engineering. He was a trainee manager at the British … Read more
The Robert Henderson/Tony Blair story. Having failed to persuade any section of the British political class then in power to do anything about a wrong he had suffered at the hands of the media, Robert Henderson wrote letters to the then Leader of the Opposition, Tony Blair – 13 letters in all. This is Henderson’s … Read more
W. H. Bowart, Self-published, Tucson, Arizona, 1994. Operation Mind Control was originally published in 1978 by Dell Paperbacks. It came out around the same time as John Marks’ The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a rather anodyne book which, after dealing with CIA and military LSD experiments which caused at least one unwitting victim to … Read more
