Introduction There are a couple of interesting chapters in Chapman Pincher’s recent The Truth About Dirty Tricks, (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1991), especially the one about Harold Wilson’s ‘spymaster’, the late George Wigg; but, despite the usual shower of interesting fragments, mostly it is junk. Pincher’s primary strategy is clear enough. During the mid 1970s bureaucratic … Read more
Searchlight At the beginning of the essay on the Blairites above, I discuss the concept of political contamination, the denigration of people on the left by association – real or fictitious – with ideas or people on the right. The most enthusiastic users of the contamination device in Britain today are found in Searchlight magazine. … Read more
THE LOBSTER is a journal/newsletter about intelligence, parapolitics and so forth. This is an atypical issue. No 1, which covered British Intelligence operations in Northern Ireland, the work of the Round Table, recent events surrounding the Papacy etc. gives a better idea of what we’re interested in. We welcome clippings, articles, letters, reviews, on these … Read more
Robert Caro New York and London: Alfred Knopf, 2002, hb $35 (US) £35 (UK) (But in the UK only £22 from Amazon.com) This is the third volume in Caro’s biography of LBJ. The first two volumes are wonderful pieces of work, the best biographies I have read; and in many ways this is their … Read more
The Men with the Guns G.F. Newman (Sphere, London 1984) I’ve got a lot of time for G.F. Newman. He’s written some of the best, sharpest, things about contemporary Britain: the Law and Order series and the Terry Sneed novels are the obvious places to start. But this – perhaps because of the shift to … Read more
Brice is right? An ‘immoral’ government has undermined human rights in Northern Ireland and is threatening to do the same across the rest of the United Kingdom, argued Professor Brice Dickson, the then Chief Commissioner of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission,([1]) in an interview with ePolitix.com to mark Human Rights Day last December.([2])He claimed … Read more
[…] no reference to its employment of the agent provocateur William Rickard, who in 1917 framed a family of socialists (the Wheeldons) on trumped-up charges of plotting to assassinate Lloyd George. The Zinoviev Letter is mentioned, but not the fact that MI5 officers (notably Joseph Ball, who later became a Conservative Party official) were prime […]
Spy Wars: Moles, mysteries and deadly games Tennent H. Begley London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, h/b, £18.99 Begley was one of James Angleton’s allies in CIA counterintelligence and this book is the Angletonian view of the Nosenko case, one of the touchstones or causes célèbres of the CIA in the post-war … Read more
17. Vatican Connections Curious report in IHT (14th April 1983) that an Italian radical mag., Peace and War, had received photocopies of telegrams indicating that the US Ambassador to Italy had worked out a plan to link the Bulgarians to the shooting of the Pope. The US embassy says they’re fakes. It certainly sounds implausible … Read more
Harold Weisberg Harold Weisberg died at his home in Frederick, Maryland, on 21 February from a kidney ailment at the age of 88. He was one of the first generation of Warren Report critics along with Vincent Salandria, Ray Marcus, Mark Lane, Sylvia Meagher and others. He was a tireless critic of the Report and … Read more
