Elite Jottings Fascinating letter in the Daily Telegraph (see 4 January and 9 January 1985) on the career of Dom Mintoff, recently retired as Prime Minister of Malta. Mintoff was a Rhodes Scholar (1939-41) and the 4 January letter informs us that “in the flush of the George Cross award (to Malta) he wanted integration … Read more
In the collection, Contemporary British History 1931-61, reviewed in this issue, there is an essay by Richard Aldrich of Salford University, one of the small but growing numbers of British academics trying to incorporate the activities of the intelligence and security services into post-war British history. In his essay on the Special Operations Executive (SOE) … Read more
CIA set for Pentagon buyout? Lester Coleman, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) man who co-authored Trail of the Octopus (about CIA drug-channel involvement in the Lockerbie bombing) writes in the latest Unclassified (quarterly publication of the Association of Former National Security Alumni, no. 34, Fall 1995), that the CIA feels itself threatened by a DIA … Read more
Boundaries to Freedom: the cultural cold war in Western Europe 1945-1960 A conference at the Roosevelt Study Centre, Middelburg, The Netherlands, 18-19 October 2001. See note (1) The impulse for this event came from Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid The Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, and the media coverage that it received … Read more
An Anglo-American Conflict? A Sunday Times article by York Membery of January 17 1999 claimed that during the 1920s and 1930s the US military had a contingency plan for war against Britain. Called ‘War Plan Red’, this included the landing of an expeditionary force in Ireland, to be executed as a response to a British … Read more
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing Stephen Marshall (Guerilla News Network, $13.22. Available from <> and <amazon.co.uk>) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism Naomi Klein, (London: Allen Lane, £25.00) ‘When new (forms of capitalism) emerged in the past …they sparked a flood of analysis and debate about how such seismic shifts in the production … Read more
The story in The Guardian of 12 November, ‘Diplomat’s “slave” can stay in UK’, was the tip of an iceberg. The story concerned the allegations made that a Sudanese diplomat had kept a ‘slave’ in London. Allegations of slavery in the Sudan have been made – and denied – for years. (A summary of the … Read more
Echelon The piece below arrived, through the magic of e-mail forwarding, via the following: Jane Affleck, Terry Hanstock, and Julian Assange. The report referred to is a companion to Nicky Hager’s book Secret Power (review in Lobster 32 at p. 47). See also ‘The Technology of Political Control’, Robin Ballantyne, in Covert Action Quarterly, Spring … Read more
Greg Palast New York: Dutton, 2006, $25.95, h/b Another whizzer from Palast. It’s content is similar in a general sense to his previous one, The Best Democracy That Money Can Buy: the corruption and power of the global corporations; the venality of politicians (and the incompetence and cowardice of the Democrats in particular); ‘the … Read more
A. J. Davies Little Brown and Co London, 1995, £20 Davies provides in equal measure a perceptive and comprehensive account of the modern Conservative Party which, hopefully, will lead to further reappraisals of Conservative history. In contrast to, for example, Lord Blake’s standard history of the Party over much the same period, We, The Nation … Read more
