[…] ‘He’s rattling the Americans’ cage,’ he said. A month later – it’s goodbye Tom Spencer MEP when the Customs just happened to search his bag and find drugs and porno in it. See ‘Named but not shamed’ by John Sweeney, The Observer Review 14 February, the only report of Spencer’s demise which even hints […]
Introduction What follows is an interim report about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. In so far as it has a central thesis, it is that Jones initiated the Jonestown massacre because he feared that Congressman Leo Ryan’s investigation would disgrace him. Specifically, Jones feared that Ryan and the press would uncover evidence that the … Read more
The idea that the Security Service, MI5, colluded with British fascism in the inter-war years is not to be found in the existing literature on the subject. On the contrary the fascists are depicted as the victims, rather than the beneficiaries of MI5’s attentions. MI5, it is generally argued, viewed fascism as a potential danger … Read more
Wishing and hoping I met Tony Benn only once, while researching Smear! He’s a lovely man with a big blind spot about the politics of the early 1980s in general and the Militant Tendency in particular. Here’s Benn in the course of an appreciation of Arthur Scargill on his standing down as President of … Read more
[…] California; and a little petty crime. This is the ‘alternative society’ of the time – or a version of it – but Blum’s obsessions are politics not drugs or rock music. Somehow Blum got a nasty – on the evidence of this book – a terminal dose of the desire to look the reality […]
Policing London No 13 July/August Includes 6 pages on the miners, which compliments GLC report (see below); two page summary of recent police harassment of gays; summary of changes to date in Police and Criminal Evidence Bill. Still the best thing of its kind extant. £1 per issue: from Police Committee Support Unit (DG/PCS/602) County … Read more
[…] a picture of him with Oliver North. I mean, he got very involved with us at one time. He liked the fast life. He liked to do drugs. He was big into racing cars. He liked women and he raised money for us among loyal Tories in England. That money would then get funnelled […]
[…] of his studies based on his participation in programmes carried out in 1950s.(23) He described biological and hypothetical possibilities regarding psi and also underlined the effects of drugs – consistent with the CIA’s mind control programs and findings of that era.(24) Puharich had a keen interest in parapsychology. In 1956, he brought Peter Horkus, […]
Police use of computers Unreported in the daily papers in this country, Merseyside County Council recently decided to refuse the funding for Merseyside Police’s criminal intelligence computer. (Detailed account in Computing 13th September 1984) This is the most significant step to date in the struggle to get some kind of control established over policing methods. … Read more
edited by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and Christopher Andrew Frank Cass, London/Portland, Oregon, 1997, £15.00 pb There are two kinds of books about the CIA: there are those like William Blum’s, advertised in this issue, which see the CIA simply as part of the US post-war empire, the sharp end of imperial enforcement, somewhere between the … Read more
