Philip Willan Constable, London, 1991, £20.00 Hats off. A British journalist, living in Italy, Willan has produced that synthesis of the Italian material on the “strategy of tension’ and related parapolitical activity which people like me, without Italian or access to the Italian press, have been waiting for. This is one of those books that … Read more
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 […]
[…] idiot would fail to question Jones’s bona fides. Even if we overlook his 201 file at the CIA and his strange association with Dan Mitrione (a notorious spook), it is a matter of fact that his life-work culminated in the violent deaths of more than 900 men, women and children of the Left.(4) That […]
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
On the jacket of his new book, reviewed in this issue, Steve Dorril writes there that he ‘is founder-editor of the widely respected journal’ Lobster. I invite you to look on the rear cover of this magazine and see who the editor is. That’s right: it’s not Steve Dorril. I have resisted going into detail … Read more
Despite ‘coalition’ forces now being engaged in a guerilla war (which no-one seems to have foreseen), analysis of the information war which accompanied the invasion of Iraq has begun to appear. Lieutenant-Colonel Steven Collins, head of PSYOPS in the Operations Division at NATO Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Mons, Belgium, had a think about … Read more
As Steve Dorril shows in his essay on Permindex, the lack of a satisfactory resolution to the assassination of Kennedy allowed Soviet intelligence to use the event to their own ends. The French also had a go with the pseudonymous book Farewell America which made public considerable information about the CIA’s activities while pretending to … Read more
Most of a talk given at Housman’s bookshop in March. The talks in this book (1) kind of parallel some of the things that I have been writing about elsewhere. I began publishing Lobster in 1983; and I also joined the Labour Party that year, partly, I confess, because it seemed a likely source of … Read more
