A great flood of books about Italian politics recently, and almost none of them willing to answer the question “Why Italy? Why is Italy’s political culture so firmly based on conspiracy and secrecy? A part of that answer must be Italy’s role as the premier European site of the conflict between indigenous left-wing forces and … Read more
Anthony Summers Gollancz, London, £18.99 Summers and his team of researchers have proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Hoover was gay and that he had been bought off and blackmailed by the Mob into ignoring organised crime. (I am less convinced by the evidence supporting the secondary allegations that Hoover was a transvestite.) Hoover, in … Read more
Richard M Bennett London: Virgin Books, 2003 £20 hardback This is 350 pages of summaries of political and historical conspiracies. It starts in 2330 BC but the first 2007 years take up only 84 pages. The content is mostly Anglo-American, especially after WW2. It is done chronologically, so you get odd sequences of subjects: … Read more
Spectre In the last Lobster 35 I reported on the new anti-EU magazine Spectre and wondered about its political orientation. In response, the editor, Steve McGiffen, sent an exemplary piece of candour from which here are some extracts. ‘….. Our original statement, sent out very widely, made it clear that we are minimalist to a … Read more
Never mind Peter Wright, he was obviously lying in Spycatcher anyway. Wallace is a vastly more important source: he doesn’t tell lies, for one thing; and he’s got bits of paper, evidence, some of which concerns his dealings with the late Airey Neave after he was thrown out of government service. At the time Neave … Read more
[…] 186) ‘Within British Army HQ…….. groups… employed loyalists terrorists and targeted members of the IRA for assassination….. covert units…….. were trained by the SAS to gather intelligence, assassinate terrorists and run loyalist agents. Loyalist paramilitaries were supplied with intelligence files on members of the IRA to enable them to kill people considered a threat […]
Editorially Sorry this is late but the schedule we set ourselves of an issue every two months. A number of reasons for this – the summer holidays, a typewriter breakdown – but mainly (a) just a lot of pressure from other areas, and (b) an enormous mountain of copy to be handled. In effect Nos … Read more
Peter Levenda Waterville (Oregon); TrineDay; 2005, h/b, $29.95 This has a foreword by Jim Hougan who describes it as ‘one of the darkest and most provocative books that you are likely to read’. I’m a big fan of Hougan’s but I didn’t get this book. Not that it isn’t an interesting read: it is. … Read more
[…] Nov. 1, 1963 — and Onassis didn’t get JFK’s liver until 3 weeks later at Dallas, via Maheu (who was still smarting from his earlier failure to assassinate Castro for the CIA Onassis branch) — and he was so hungry he ate the whole thing.’ No doubt he did so with fava beans and […]
Do they talk like this? At < www.lewrockwell.com/cummings/cummings29.html > there is a very interesting piece by Richard Cummings about the CIA and publishing; agents and operations are named. At the top of the article is this quote. ‘We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine, and other great publications whose … Read more
