On Friday 7 August I was told by a journalist at another paper that the Mail on Sunday had a story that Cabinet Minister Peter Mandelson had worked for the spooks – though which branch was not clear. ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ I said, and described Mandelson’s 1978 Foreign Office (or SIS?)-funded trip to Cuba. … Read more
[…] definitely not the invention of ‘British intelligence’. It just looks like one. His use of the term ‘British intelligence’ is revealing. Only those still ignorant of the spook dimension to recent history use that expression. Knowledge entails disaggregation. Bruce’s index includes a reference to a tiny Scottish Protestant group, the Young Cowdenbeath Volunteers, but […]
Weird Web Professor Peter Dale Scott reported the following in March. ‘Four times today I have tried to go to www.counterpunch.org. And four times Netscape was unable to find it. This happens frequently on my computer to websites which share my opinions, or to which I am hotlinked. And when I searched for ‘Alex Cockburn’ […]
[…] Political Economy to 9/11.() As for me, I have to admit to still being puzzled as to why WTC7 collapsed despite not being struck by a plane.() Spook histories Keith Jeffery, Professor of British History at Queen’s University Belfast, has been signed up to write the first official history of the Secret Intelligence Service. […]
Blob of the month Hear the one about the supposedly spook-watching magazine whose editor misspelt the name of the head of MI5? Yep: Rimmington, I had in the last issue: Rimington it should have been. Searchlight News Their campaign against Larry O’Hara has reached new depths. In the March issue they published his picture and […]
Compromised Reporting Taking its cue from a powerful network of far-right radio commentators, the American press insists on noting only those financial scandals which don’t sully ultra-conservative politicians. Of either party. For example: Rush Limbaugh, who has become the Republican Party’s Goebbels, loudly applauded Clinton’s appointment of Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, an appalling Texas (Democrat) […]
[…] father had been active in the wartime resistance. MI5 thought the situation so obvious as to be hardly worth arguing about. In short, I was a Soviet spook. At the time, I knew nothing of the background. When Pat had burst into tears early in the relationship, asking me where I met my Soviet […]
Hugh Wilford London: Frank Cass, 2003; £22.99, h/b This book is a striking example of how far we have come. A senior British academic writing a book with this title was inconceivable 20, even 10 years ago. But there is now a group of British academics, historians mostly, who are working on the history […]
A Hack’s Progress Phillip Knightley Jonathan Cape, 1997, £17.99 This is a highly enjoyable and very well written memoir by one of our senior investigative journalists. As a young-Aussie-leaves-home-and-sees-the-world tale this is nearly as entertaining as the celebrated Clive James version (and with fewer forced jokes). Any journalist’s memoirs are welcome: it’s always interesting to … Read more
Introduction I began writing this in the early 1980s. If you were then reading the Guardian or the Observer, and knew a little, simple economics, it didn’t take genius to notice that while the UK’s manufacturing economy was being decimated by Conservative Party economic policy, the City of London was booming. More interestingly, and less … Read more
