Paddy the spook Since the last issue I have skimmed Paddy Ashdown’s two volumes of diaries. While dominated by his attempt to do a deal with the Blair-led Labour Party, there are some other interesting snippets; and, through Ashdown’s eyes, there is a detailed portrait of Tony Blair which suggests that Rory Bremner’s impersonation of […]
Parish Notices Thanks to Robin Whittaker (in particular), Terry Hanstock, Simon Matthews, Grattan Healey, David Turner, Jane Affleck, Harlan Girard, Anthony Frewin and Tom Easton for cuttings and other material since the last issue. Two years into New Labour and the loudest sound is the sound of surprise being expressed by people who ought to […]
[…] job was to co-ordinate the various police and intelligence services (SDECE, DST, Surete, RG.) (15) It was rumoured that he was associated with Radio Free Europe (a CIA project) and the U.S. Air Force’s think-tank, Rand Corporation. Melnik had joined the Rassemblement des Gauches Republicaines whose secretary general, Jean-Louis David, was founder of the […]
[…] handed to them by the US. ‘The UK has no intelligence assets in central Asia. We are dependent on information given to us by the United States’ CIA and NSA.’ The British overseas lobby in Whitehall – like Tony Blair – still dreams of being a ‘world player’. But it doesn’t have the tax […]
[…] distributors in the USA, with pieces on the Finders (an interview with the founder in which he blandly and not unconvincingly bats away all the talk of CIA); Project Mind Control (a not terribly interesting rehash of the mind control assassin thesis); UFOs, and an interview with the charlatan, John Coleman. POB 23715, St. […]
Dirty Tricks Nixon, Watergate, and the CIA Shane O’Sullivan1 New York: Skyhorse Books, 2018; £20.00 h/b; 536 pages, notes, index Robin Ramsay So what can a major reappraisal of Watergate tell us in 2018 that we didn’t know before? Surprisingly little about the major events. But this isn’t the fault of the author, who […]
[…] is further underlined by Henry Patterson (Ulster University, Jordanstown) in the most important book ever written on Irish republicanism: The Politics of Illusion (Radius, Hutchinson, 1989). Declassified CIA documents, reprinted in the Irish Socialist Party publication, The Voice, revealed that the CIA also welcomed the formation of the Provos because they were ‘nationalist rather […]
[…] political fixers and finan cial manipulators’. More to the point, he also traces the history of the complicated entanglement of the US government, or more specifically the CIA, with the Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed virtually non-stop from when Japan regained its independence in 1952 until the present day. The CIA was still […]
[…] the general public uneasiness about the current aims of government due primarily to the harm done to the moral standing of the western democracies by Watergate and CIA activity the ultra-left (sic) have been quick to capitalise on the discontent and sensationalised reports against the security establishment and in particular the police, the intelligence […]
[…] operations in the immediate post-war period; giant political slush funds were created under the control of……well, this isn’t clear. At one point we are talking about the CIA; and then we are told that Richard Nixon, a politician, gave control of the biggest of the funds to the Japanese Prime Minister. (We are talking […]
