ed. ‘Nigel West’ Faber and Faber, London, 1993 The title isn’t to be taken seriously. This is 610 pages of short extracts from some of the books written by British MI5 and MI6 personnel, with short biographical sections by ‘West’. Some of this is quite interesting — lots of it was new to me — … Read more
[…] book such as this invites readers to construct their own wish-list of topics that really should have been included. I would probably include a wider selection of secret and security services and their misdeeds, including South Africa’s apartheid era BOSS and the French sinkers of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior; an investigation into the murky world […]
[…] merely an account of a psychologist spectating on her own break-down. But this is strikingly similar to the experience of Girard. (And those who have read Open Secret, Tony Collins’ account of the strange deaths of a number of British scientists, will hear in this certain obvious resonances with some of the “suicides’ in […]
[…] an Italian periodical, reported that Silone was ‘between 1928 and 1930, not just a leader of the CP in Italy, but a reliable collaborator of the fascist secret police OVRA’. I have seen no reference to this in Britain. Some of Laurens Otter’s comments on the Common Wealth Party in Feedback (Lobster 36) were […]
[…] This second has multiple, named sources and is more likely to be true. If it is true, how dumb of the Iraqis to try all this in secret! Had they gone to the United Nations and said this – who knows? And did Prime Minister Blair know of these offers? It would rather awkward […]
[…] about Special Branch activity against the party’,(47) and Griffin in particular concentrated throughout this period on writing detailed and hostile stories covering the nefarious activities of the secret state and political police.(48) Theoretical articles are one thing, but in this case there were practical consequences arising from this concern about ‘state repression’. For a […]
Diana – the saga goes on and on..… Almost ten years after the fatal crash and the Diana industry still trundles along. In addition to her birthday concert(1) we are promised a slew of books(2)and a plethora of films and documentaries.(3) The main event, though, is sure to be the long-delayed but much anticipated inquest, … Read more
[…] to history is something that we may have to wait years to discover. Watching the Watchers The State Department’s National Intelligence Council is drawing up a ‘ secret’ watch-list of 25 countries ‘where instability might precipitate US intervention’. The intentions were announced at a conference organised by the US Institute of Peace, full of […]
[…] didn’t get any attention in Lobster: I read it for the publisher months before it was published in the U.K.. Although largely based on Jim Hougan’s 1984 Secret Agenda (reviewed in Lobster 8), Colodny and Gettlin have done an impressive research job which results in these central claims: As Hougan argued, the break-in which […]
[…] 3 Peter Wright, Spycatcher (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987); Paul Foot, Who Framed Colin Wallace? (London: Macmillan, 1988); Robin Ramsay and Stephen Dorril, Smear! Wilson and the Secret State (London: Fourth Estate, 1991). 4 David Stirling, ‘The Great Britain 75 Organization’, Peace News Special Issue 23 August 1974. 5 Kenneth O. Morgan’s The People’s […]
