[…] writing the Security Service had not quite taken over all the areas they have set their minds on. Apparently with the model of the FBI’s franchise in mind – subversion, terrorism, espionage and federal crime – Mrs Rimington is pitching to take over part of the police’s crime franchise. She offers MI5’s ‘distinctive role…..the […]
[…] conspiracy fringe – UFOs, maybe. The other reacted immediately: ‘Oh, you don’t want to go there!’ The first agreed enthusiastically, and a kind of double-act developed: ‘ Mind control?’ ‘Don’t want to go there!’ ‘Remote viewing?’ ‘Don’t want to go there!’ ‘Hilda Murrell?’ ‘Don’t want to go there!’ After a couple of minutes of […]
[…] to an interview with Jonathan Vankin, author of what sounds like a kind of compendium of conspiracies and conspiracy theories, Conspiracies, Cover-ups and Crimes: Political Manipulation and Mind Control in America (Paragon Books). Vankin offered this: ‘The accepted paradigm — the established view that the conspiracy theorists are struggling to overthrow — might be […]
[…] breakthrough piece chronicling the links between the CIA; the Contras and the crack cocaine explosion in Los Angeles; through the CIA’s use of psychedelics, ex-Nazi scientists and mind control, into the murky worlds of Indo-China; and then, via a chapter on Afghanistan, back to the United States and the cocaine connections to Arkansas and […]
[…] new member of a very small category, the geopolitical conspiracy theory satire. (Only Report from Iron Mountain and the various books by Robert Anton Wilson spring to mind in this area.) For this reason alone it is worth getting. (How effective a piece of satire, and how good a piece of writing, is a […]
[…] proposal and submit it to them. When I inquired about some landing reports, I was asked to specify the date of the particular cases I had in mind. Although this is a component of the MOD, it is not situated in Whitehall. Neither is it Defence Intelligence 55 (DI55), though sources within DI55 have […]
A guided democracy The following appeared in the Daily Telegraph 23 June 2003. ‘Edward Heath created a secret government propaganda unit to persuade the British people to accept the Common Market. Civil servants were engaged in a dirty tricks department of the Foreign Office to cover up the threat to sovereignty and provide rapid rebuttal … Read more
Maggie, Maggie, Maggie Giles Scott-Smith,(1) who wrote about the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Lobster 36 and 38, has written a very interesting study of Margaret Thatcher’s first visit to America in 1967.(2) Scott-Smith shows that Thatcher, then a junior shadow spokesperson in the Tory Party, was talent-spotted by the State Department’s man in the … Read more
edited by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and Christopher Andrew Frank Cass, London/Portland, Oregon, 1997, £15.00 pb There are two kinds of books about the CIA: there are those like William Blum’s, advertised in this issue, which see the CIA simply as part of the US post-war empire, the sharp end of imperial enforcement, somewhere between the […]
Annie Machon Lewes (East Sussex): Book Guild, 2005, h/b, £17.95 It is hard to ‘see’ this book because a lot of the material, especially in the first half, is familiar, half-remembered from the press reporting of the Shayler-Machon drama and the book Defending the Realm by Nick Fielding and Mark Hollingsworth. Nonetheless, familiar or […]
