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
Some recent JFK literature In front of me is a copy of Guth and Wrone’s The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Comprehensive Historical and Legal Bibliography 1983-1979 (1980), nearly 450 pages, running to some 5,134 entries covering books, magazine articles, records, TV programmes, and news items from both the New York Times and the … Read more
The rise and fall of the Bulgarian Connection Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead (Sheridan Square Publications, New York, 1986) When the Turkish Grey Wolves hold rallies they howl collectively. So, at times, do journalists of the ‘free press’. In 1979 Edward Herman wrote After the Cataclysm with Noam Chomsky in which they shredded Western … Read more
Political activist Daniel Ellsberg and Professor Alfred McCoy have something special in common. Based on their actions and accomplishments of nearly thirty years ago, they have achieved the status of icons within the subculture of what passes for the New Left. Icon Ellsberg became a celebrity in 1971 after he leaked The Pentagon Papers, an … Read more
In 1997 Robert Henderson, a retired civil servant, wrote to the then leader of the Opposition Tony Blair to ask for his help. Eventually he wrote a dozen or so letters to Blair and Cherie Booth. Blair then tried to have him prosecuted but the legal authorities refused to act. Blair or someone close to … Read more
Radio Enoch: the station you love to hate Radio Enoch (see Lobster 46) was one of a number of Free Radio stations operating illegally during the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike its more pop music oriented contemporaries, however, Radio Enoch’s output consisted solely of right wing political propaganda, albeit with a musical background. (1) Its origins … Read more
Christopher Mayhew I.B. Tauris, London, 1998, (hb) £25. Christopher Mayhew died recently thinking he set up the Information Research Department. As I have shown elsewhere, he was thoroughly manipulated by the Foreign Office – just like his boss at the time, Ernest Bevin, come to that. This short (142 pages) book contains 47 pages of … Read more
From: M. R. D. Foot Scott Newton’s footnote at the end of his piece on Hess, in your number tries to keep alive Dr Hugh Thomas’s tale that the pilot who reached Scotland could not have been Hess, because he bore no trace of the gunshot wound the real Hess had received in Roumania in … Read more
Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones London: Yale University Press, 2002, £22.50 Know Your Enemy: How the Joint Intelligence Committee Saw the World Percy Craddock London: John Murray, 2002, £25 Jeffreys-Jones is Professor of American History at Edinburgh University and writes on the American intelligence services. His book’s subtitle … Read more
Free Ride Department Meanwhile the Rand Corporation (that liberal think tank in Santa Monica which helps decide which Russian cities should be atom-bombed) has declared that the federal government must continue to support an obscure military satellite system known as Global Positioning Network. Much beloved by high-tech hikers and rental car enthusiasts, the GPS supposedly … Read more
