Body of Secrets: How America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World James Bamford, London: Century, 2001, £20 Report on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system) Rapporteur: Gerhard Schmid European Parliament, 11 July 2001 [Online in Adobe Acrobat PDF Format ~1Mb] In … Read more
According to the Dublin magazine Magill (August 1984), Frank Terpil was ‘kicked out’ of the CIA in 1972. He apparently admitted this while visiting Beirut in the autumn of 1980. He also claimed to have worked for the UN in New York and to have been Idi Amin’s advisor there. These ‘revelations’ were made at … Read more
From David Guyatt: David Hambling’s comments in Lobster 39 (Feedback) underscore the extreme difficulties involved in firstly accessing, then corroborating and, finally, reporting stories that are as obviously sensitive as Operation Black Cat and Operation Black Dog. It is easy to raise what appear to be realistic technical objections, but the Black Dog story consumed … Read more
The story of the Ulster Citizens’ Army (UCA for the rest of this essay) is a tiny fragment in the intricate history of Protestant politics in Northern Ireland in the mid 1970s – so tiny that none of the general accounts I have looked at even mention it. But the UCA lingers on: it is … Read more
Tony Blair will be remembered not just for the slaughter in Iraq, and the subsequent collapse of Labour in Scotland in face of a resurgent SNP, but as the Labour leader who could have forged common links across Europe but chose to side with one of the continent’s most despised figures. Charles Clarke, one of … Read more
The Time of The Assassins: The Inside Story of the Plot to Kill the Pope Claire Sterling, Angus and Robertson, London 1984 The Plot to Kill the Pope Paul B. Henze, Croom Helm, London 1984 These two books cover the same ground, more or less, and have the same thesis: the KGB used the Bulgarians, … Read more
One neglected aspect of the plotting against Harold Wilson and the Labour Governments of the 1970s was the fact that it took place while the social democrat governments of Australia, New Zealand and West Germany — and possibly Canada — were also being subjected to destabilisation campaigns, with the some of the same characters playing … Read more
With the decline of the revolutionary socialist Left the Right has turned to the anarchists for a law-and-order bogeyman – and a stick to beat the Left with. One journalist involved is Jamie Dettmer. Having worked for Tribune for a while, Dettmer migrated to the Sunday Telegraph (for whom his first article was an ‘expose’ … Read more
