[…] figure who happened to bump into Parsons and his colleagues with predictable consequences. He could have been a simple confidence trickster. Equally he could have been a spook ensuring that Parsons was (a) investigated at close range, (b) financially ruined and (c) eased out of rocket research. Or he could have been a combination […]
Geoffrey Goodman London: Pluto Press, 2003 hb £18.99 As a conventional political memoir, this is quite an interesting read. The big figures march by: Bevan, Wilson, Callaghan, Healey, Robert Maxwell; and there are interesting stories about all of them. The best anecdote has Denis Healey, as Chancellor in the House of Commons in 1976, … Read more
[…] on that subject. His latest piece of research on the Remote Viewing programme (p. 23) has massively broadened and thickened our knowledge of this fascinating piece of spook history. With another transatlantic missive from Brother Alex Cox, surveying the madhouse called America from his monastery cell in Venice, California, bits and pieces from me […]
Books Secret Contenders Melvin Beck (Sheridan Square Publications, US 1984) The CIA Christmas party of 1958 found 48 year old all-American boy, Melvin Beck, getting the offer of overseas work with Clandestine Services. He “struck like a hungry bass” and landed in Havana in 1959, just as the first Russian freighter was arriving. Fairly early … Read more
[…] googled the names and terms above in a single search. This led me to . This is very suggestive and worth a look. But if our anonymous spook is a fake, he simply paraphrased the story in the Baltimore Chronicle (which is a 7,000 circulation radical magazine). On the same subject former Democratic Governor […]
Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding London: Andre Deutsch, 2003, p/b £8.99 An updated and expanded version of Defending the Realm: MI5 and the Shayler Affair which was reviewed in Lobster 38, this account of MI5’s adjustment to the post Cold War world is one of the best books on the UK’s intelligence services, up … Read more
The spectre of technofascism haunts the democratic nations. All the powers of the espionage empire and the scientific establishment have entered into an unholy alliance to evoke this spectre: psychiatrist and spy, Dulles and Delgado, microwave specialists and clandestine operators. Substantial evidence exists linking members of the American intelligence community — including the Central Intelligence […]
Kevin Coogan is the author of the study of the American fascist Francis Parker Yockey, Dreamer of the Day, reviewed in Lobster 39. He sent me an essay primarily about the American far-right group the Defenders of the American Constitution. The essay, while fascinating, is too big (about 20 pages) for these columns. However within … Read more
[…] reports the opinions of a number of (anonymous) journalists on the unreliable, frequently intelligence-sourced nature of the Sunday Times’ recent reporting on Northern Ireland. In fact the spook fix was in at least seven years ago when James Adams became the Sunday Times’ defence correspondent and began running interference for MI5 at the Wapping […]
MI5 and the threat from the left in the 1970s In ‘MI5 feared militant left could destabilise Britain’ Jimmy Burns reported in The Financial Times 29 December 2006 on a contingency paper by MI5, presented to the Joint Intelligence Committee on April 9 1976. That paper included this: `Throughout the seventies there has been a […]
