At the end of July this year the struggle between Lonrho and the Al-Fayed family over the Al-Fayed purchase of the House of Fraser made the front page, lead story, of the Guardian (July 30 1988: see also Independent 1 August 1988). The occasion was the leaking of some reports, legal advice from Sir David … Read more
[…] is to stop them converting it all to disk? They could get their entire subversive collection onto a few CD-roms. Second, the reasons MI5 want the files suppressed has less to do with embarrassing past informers, than revealing the scale of its penetration of British politics. Colin Wallace’s MI5 briefing notes showed that MI5 […]
On 8 March 1985 an attempt was made to assassinate one of the founders of Hizbullah, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, by car bomb in Beirut. The attack failed in its objective, but there was some ‘collateral damage’. While Fadlallah was untouched, some eighty bystanders, men, women and children, were killed and over two hundred injured. … Read more
We understand that Lord Rothschild was badly shaken last year by the many innuendoes linking him to the Cambridge spy ring of the 1930s. A typical example was Anthony Glees’ book on ‘British intelligence and Communist Subversion’: “Rothschild (was) remarkably intimate with people subsequently proven to be secret Communists, and Blunt was a major Communist … Read more
[…] even its title remains a secret. (What could the committee have investigated so soon after its creation that was so sensitive that even its title has been suppressed by the government?) The rest have covered Sierra Leone, the Bali bombings, Iraq and WMDs, UK detainees in Guantanamo, the Security Service and organised crime and […]
The story of the Ulster Citizens’ Army (UCA for the rest of this essay) is a tiny fragment in the intricate history of Protestant politics in Northern Ireland in the mid 1970s – so tiny that none of the general accounts I have looked at even mention it. But the UCA lingers on: it is … Read more
Our masters: on his WebsiteConservative MEP Ashley Mote has a list of all 3000 plus of the EU’s hither-to unidentified committees, comprised of officials and ‘experts’. <www.ashley mote.co.uk/> Hamas and Israel:It has long been known, ‘understood’, that the Israeli state was involved in the formation of Hamas as a way of splintering the PLO … Read more
[…] be charged with political offences but only with their criminal activities. In this way the role of British-paid agents provocateurs in criminal violence in Eire could be suppressed. The deal that the three men finally struck was that Wyman and Crinnion (an Eire subject) would be allowed to leave Eire for the UK in […]
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
Conjuring Hitler: How the Western Elite Incubated Nazism – 1900-38 Guido Preparata US: University of Michigan Press, 2005; h/b, $90.00; p/b $28.95 UK: Pluto Press, 2005; h/b £60.00; p/b £17.99 I would like to introduce a recently published book that has been overlooked. Guido Preparata’s Conjuring Hitler: How the Western Elite Incubated Nazism-1900-38 reinterprets … Read more
