[…] he was having an affair with the man’s wife”…”Senior UDA men revealed that Wallace had tipped them off that the man he wanted murdered was a communist agent trying to infiltrate Loyalist paramilitaries … Wallace has pretended to be a press man when ‘tipping them off that the Antrim teacher was the leader of […]
[…] laid etc etc. Along the way ‘West’ drops a number of tidbits: an intricate explanation, going back to pre-war days, of how Philby was really a triple agent; and a version of the ‘peace plotting’ circa 1940 by the British right which purports to demonstrate that the ‘plot’ was really a Soviet operation – […]
[…] Cause-funded Trade Union Centre for Education in Democratic Socialism in the mid-1970s; and that ‘Jack Hill’ and ‘David Williams’ were two pseudonyms of the same person, an agent for a Labour MP, now dead. But which one? Match me, Sydney! Vicky Woods in the Sunday Telegraph 30 November 1997: ‘I don’t understand why Jonathan […]
[…] Inside BOSS, South Africa’s Secret Police Gordon Winter (Penguin, London 1981) “BOSS assigned me to monitor the activities of Richard Gibson (exposed in 1969 as a CIA agent), who was a talented journalist then representing Negro Press International and ‘Tuesday’ magazine. I discovered that Mr Gibson, born in California in 1931, was an amazing […]
Chip Berlet This 63-page essay describes a wide range of contacts between what in a British context would be described as right-wing conspiracy theorists and the left. Berlet documents a range of contacts between the far-right Liberty Lobby, followers of LaRouche, Bo Gritz and the Populist Party, the Christic Institute, Radio Free America and a … Read more
Assassination or ‘targeted killings’? Joshua Raines of the University of Iowa College of Law argues that although assassination, ‘narrowly defined’ [sic], is illegal, ‘targeted killings’ could well be permissible under ‘just war’ criteria. The US should therefore pass legislation that allows for ‘…targeted killings under a very narrow range of circumstances with adequate checks built … Read more
The Spycatcher’s Encyclopedia of Espionage Peter Wright Heinemann, Australia, 1991 The cover-blurb says this is ‘the rest of the story’. It feels more like the out-takes from Spycatcher spiced with a few more fragments of interesting gossip. And I do mean fragments: the interesting bits of 260 pages — largish print and much white space … Read more
[…] do know something, there are some dumb mistakes. The Fluency Committee was not set up in Whitehall to examine the evidence that Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent (p.148); Colin Wallace has not ‘admitted putting out anti-Wilson material in an operation known as Clockwork Orange’ (p.149). Do such minor errors matter? I doubt it […]
Douglas Macleod Edinburgh: Birlinn; £9.99, p/b <www.birlinn.co.uk> Twenty years ago, before the current torrent of information about ‘the secret world of intelligence’, we were scratching about looking for clues to our secret history. One was given in the John Loftus book The Belarus Secret (Penguin 1983) which contained a single reference to the Scottish … Read more
[…] probably be against the civilian population of large cities. It can be well imagined the degree of consternation, as well as fear and apprehension, that such an agent would produce upon a large urban population.'(6) Hamilton made a number of proposals for the elimination of large populations, among them ‘fission product aerosols to subject […]
