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
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
Weird Web Professor Peter Dale Scott reported the following in March. ‘Four times today I have tried to go to www.counterpunch.org. And four times Netscape was unable to find it. This happens frequently on my computer to websites which share my opinions, or to which I am hotlinked. And when I searched for ‘Alex Cockburn’ … 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
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
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
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
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
Diana – the saga goes on and on..… Almost ten years after the fatal crash and the Diana industry still trundles along. In addition to her birthday concert(1) we are promised a slew of books(2)and a plethora of films and documentaries.(3) The main event, though, is sure to be the long-delayed but much anticipated inquest, … 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
