Some of the spook recruitment pitches in the media of the last two years have gone out of their way to impress upon prospective candidates the family-friendly credentials of the major state spook employers.(1) But such measures, no matter how sincere and/or necessary, are for the most part aimed at a parent’s convenience – and … Read more
[…] staff we would be interested to hear from you. * * * In his Tribune attack on me (item 10 above) Ware says I called him an agent of the state in a letter sent to The Listener. Actually I didn’t, and have no reason to think this. Ware’s behaviour can be explained quite […]
In their recent history of the Information Research Department (IRD), Paul Lashmar and James Oliver discuss George Orwell’s decision to collaborate with that organisation’s anti-Communist propaganda operations. They write that ‘George Orwell’s reputation as a left-wing icon took a body blow from which it may never recover when it was revealed in 1996 that he … Read more
James Adams Hutchinson, London, 1994. I first noticed James Adams when he began running some of the MOD’s disinformation lines about Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd in 19867. For a while I collected articles by him which seemed to show the traces of Whitehall briefings. Then I stopped: what was I going to do with […]
[…] of a President. HOSTY, James P., Jr. (with Thomas Hosty). Assignment: Oswald. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996. viii + 328 pps. Illustrated, index. Hosty, the Dallas FBI agent who destroyed a note from Lee Harvey Oswald on the orders of SAG Gordon Shanklin, here tells his story. Few surprises, good on FBI procedure and […]
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
[…] can be judged from John Buchan’s famous novel The Thirty Nine Steps, published in 1920. In the first chapter, set in early 1914, Colonel Scudder, the secret agent, explains that behind every major company in Europe is “a Jew in a wheelchair with eyes like a rattlesnake”, and that the cause of the coming […]
[…] one finds a review of a pro-Warren Commission book, The Scavengers: Critics and the Warren Report, by Richard Warren Lewis and Lawrence Schiller. The reviewer, former FBI agent and Ramparts contributor, William Turner, is particularly annoyed (p. 163) over the way Lewis and Schiller take a cheap shot at Sylvia Meagher by pointing out […]
The Last Investigation Gaeton Fonzi Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 1993 Deep Politics and the Death of JFK Peter Dale Scott University of California Press London and Berkeley, 1993 With Dick Russell’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, reviewed above by Alex Cox, these books are the best of the post Oliver Stone wave that … Read more
[…] papers kept in locked metal boxes. Not so, writes David Northmore, referring us to the piece in the Independent (20 August ’88). From being a local election agent, I know that Winter’s account of the votes being put into bundles by party is true. But at the vote counting the ballot papers were put […]
