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
Radio Enoch: the station you love to hate Radio Enoch (see Lobster 46) was one of a number of Free Radio stations operating illegally during the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike its more pop music oriented contemporaries, however, Radio Enoch’s output consisted solely of right wing political propaganda, albeit with a musical background. (1) Its origins … Read more
Lamar Waldron with Thom Hartmann New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005, h/b, $33.00 <www.ultimatesacrificethebook.com> There is 900 pages of this, in the first 250 or so of which the authors demonstrate that there was a Kennedy brothers plan to create an internal coup in Cuba, which was set to go on 1 December 1963. … 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
Trimble Henry McDonald, London: Bloomsbury, 2000, £16.99 The Dublin and Monaghan Bombings Don Mullan, Dublin:Wolfhound Press, 2000, £9.99 David Trimble’s first political involvement began in 1972 when, as a young law lecturer at Queens University, Belfast, he joined William Craig’s Vanguard movement, a hard line right-wing Protestant supremacist organisation that made clear it was ready … 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 […]
A man with Friends The Third Secret: the CIA, Solidarity and the KGB’s plot to kill the Pope Nigel West HarperCollins, London, 2000, £19.99 Let’s dispose of the ‘Third Secret’ nonsense. West claims that Pope John – the Polish Pope – was told the ‘third secret’ of the Fatima revelations; and that this ‘third secret’ … Read more
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
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
