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
[…] is that it was (indirectly) linked to the forced retirement of over 2000 CIA employees which may have been a way of getting rid of a Soviet agent inside the CIA. (The Company, it appears, was extremely worried about a mole in the ‘W.H.’ – the White House or Western Hemisphere division of the […]
Crime fighting? There must many candidates for the title ‘The most damaging thing I have read about this government’. My current candidate is a piece by Simon Jenkins, ‘A Keep Police off the Streets Strategy Unit’ (The Times 2 February 2002). After reminding the reader that in the UK the police are a local service, … Read more
Is your journey really necessary? The Guardian ‘Weekend’ section of August 13, 1994, carried a piece called ‘The Seeds of Madness’, about Mark Purdey, the dairy farmer who has opposed the British agro-chemical industry, believing that the so-called ‘mad cow disease’, BSE, was the result of organo-phosphate poisoning. Life became complicated for him and the […]
[…] bus stops. This contradiction helped the Crown to establish a link between a training mission in Lisbon by a certain Mr E, in 1979, and the KGB agent, Victor Oschenko, appointed as Michael’s controller. For those who live in Oporto the crosses may be easily placed in places of tourist interest. And if you […]
Gemstone In Lobster 19, I noted the incremental addition of disinformation to the original Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File. As it turned out, the process was further down that road than I had imagined. From Owen Wilkes, New Zealand’s leading parapolitics researcher, comes the news that a version is in circulation there. Now described … Read more
Terror Within: Terrorism and the Dream of a British RepublicClive Bloom Stroud, Glos.: Sutton, 2007, h/bk, 297 pages, h/b, £20.00 This sets out to provide a narrative describing the range of ‘attempts’ to set up a republic in Britain from the time of the French revolution until the present day. (Although the bulk of … Read more
[…] the 1954-55 internal party battles ‘Dirty Work’, we get no idea just how murky this actually was. For example, we know that Gaitskell worked closely with National Agent Sara Barker, but we are told nothing on how she came by the detailed information on members she kept in her bulging files. Indeed, in the […]
[…] of activity around current political questions. The success of Brian Crozier (transnational security) has already been discussed.” Der Speigel (Spring 1982) noted that Crozier was a CIA agent for several years. Moreover, none of his activities are unknown to the agency in Langley. He is acquainted with most important former members of western intelligence […]
[…] with photocopied police and intelligence files on the IRA, and we have learned that the UDA’s ‘intelligence officer’ in the 1980s, Brian Nelson, was an Army Intelligence agent, this is a pretty stupid line to defend. Nonetheless this line is at the heart of both of the Bruce and Urban books. Urban is an […]
