Lost plot After Lobster 35 I received a long letter from John Pilger, followed by a revised version of it, complaining about my review of his recent book, Hidden Agendas in 35. With the second version came a note asking me to publish his letter without comment. I replied that I was happy to publish […]
Colin Wallace On the Colin Wallace front, the big event since issue 17 has been Paul Foot’s book, Who Framed Colin Wallace? (Macmillan, 1989). With this book Paul Foot has re-researched and synthesised all the previous work and produced what is likely to remain the definitive account of Wallace’s biography, his allegations and – most […]
[…] of the opposition. Oldfield and Thatcher became firm friends. The day after her election as Prime Minister she requested the head of MI6 and the Director of MI5, Arthur Franks and Howard Smith, to brief her on intelligence matters. The briefing “followed the same pattern as that given to her predecessor when he came […]
[…] as his one of his sub-agents. When Makgill died in October 1926, the agency was reorganised under the control of Baker White – and then incorporated into MI5 in 1931. There is plenty of archival evidence to show that under both Makgill and Baker White the IIB was used to undertake work and recruit […]
Web update Jane Affleck Thanks to Terry Hanstock and David Turner for contributions. Comments and details of interesting websites are welcome: my email address is 101521.3515 @compuserve.com Freedom Of Information Campaign for Freedom of Information http://www.cfoi.org.uk ‘The Campaign for Freedom of Information campaigns against unnecessary secrecy and for greater public access to official and other […]
Ken Silverstein Verso, London (£19.00) and New York ($25.00), 2000 Ken Silverstein is co-editor of CounterPunch, a very good radical – left radical – newsletter in Washington (http://www. counterpunch.org/). This book is a group of essays centred round a central theme rather than an attempt to encompass the whole area of the relationship between the […]
Edward Pearce London: Little, Brown, 2002, £25, h/b. Compared to the present crop of media-trained, PR-conscious, line-following, careerist pigmies who comprise the current Labour Cabinet, Denis Healey looks like a giant from a golden age. Before his well known roles as Minister of Defence and Chancellor of the Exchequer (during the Tory-induced inflation of […]
See also: Part 1: British Fascism 1974-92 (Lobster 23) Part 2: British Fascism 1974-92 (II) (Lobster 24) Part 4: British Fascism 1983-6 (II) (Lobster 26) The 1986 National Front Split (Lobster 29) ‘Let a thousand initiatives bloom…’ While the piece in Lobster 24 was a (necessary) digression, treating of individual careers and various lurid allegations, […]
[…] Africans, his is the first such memoir I have seen in which the covert world is shown to play a significant part in colonial life. Smith portrays MI5 working with the Colonial Office, bugging, tapping, intercepting mail — as well as producing inept anti-communist propaganda. Then as independence loomed, the Colonial Office/MI5 team were […]
[…] services to monitor that.” ….The British official said: “The Americans run their own assets in the Pakistani community; they get their own intelligence. There’s close cooperation with MI5 but they don’t tell us the names of all their sources. Around 40 per cent of CIA activity on homeland threats is now in the UK. […]
