[…] the British intelligence and security services – far more interesting and surprising to me than the details of operations given here. The expression mind-boggling idiocy comes to mind. And this nonsense had the same consequences in SIS as it has elsewhere in the public sector: faced with career-breaking targets and quotas, people fake them […]
[…] even more in her determination to demonstrate the “persistence of illusions about Britain’s place in the world.” (1) This version of events is attractive to the liberal mind because it looks like an exemplary demonstration of the cockup theory of history, and it is that which passes for political sophistication in most of respectable […]
[…] Daniel Brandt continues to produce some of the best writing in the fields Lobster covers in NameBase Newsline. Issue 12 has a long essay by Brandt, ‘ Mind Control and the Secret State’, about as good a short survey of the subject as exists. Back issues of Newsline in printed form are $3.00 each; […]
Parapolitics/Intelligence November 1984 – February 1985 The usual invaluable mixture of precis of stories from the world’s press plus reprints of some entire articles and the occasional original piece. November’s includes a long and excellent piece by Jonathan Marshall on the Strange career of Ronald Hedley Stark. PP/Intelligence subscriptions $20 payable to ADI at ADI, […]
[…] advice which, looking back, I should not have taken. I was right to shoulder the political responsibility …… I could not have soldiered on with an easy mind.’ He was a sensitive person who placed a great deal on personal integrity and loyalty. At the moment of crisis “government officials and even Ministers, hastened […]
David Black, Vision, London, 1998, £9.99 pb I enjoyed this book hugely, and I’d recommend it to anyone remotely interested in the politics of psychedelia – apart from anything else, there are stories here you almost certainly won’t have heard. However, overall it aspires to more than it can deliver. As the title implies, the […]
[…] suspect is named on net’, Sunday Times 11 February. ) Having either been given access to Cryptome’s logfiles or hacked into them, the MoD then changed its mind and, quoting the spurious 233 figure, declared this not widely in the public domain, and threatened the newspapers with an injunction if they published the name. […]
[…] Russians. The KGB did the same with Russian students. The intelligence value was nil. In the early sixties the CIA placed a lot of hopes on ‘ mind control’, experimenting with drugs, hypnosis and programming a la ‘Manchurian Candidate’. The most bizarre episode in Beck’s book concerns an attempt by a CIA shrink to […]
[…] (p. 222) (emphasis added) ‘Hollis had set up the entire operation, without the knowledge of his staff’ (p. 255) A one-man Hollis operation? Hollis the Superman? The mind boggles. According to West, ‘The only conclusion possible from all of this is that Hollis was personally responsible for the Profumo debacle from start to finish. […]
[…] For the military it was straightforward: the US had the strategic nuclear advantage (the ‘missile gap’ had been forgotten) and thus could and should invade Cuba. Never mind even pretending to the world that it was a Cuban insurrection – the dumb little plan behind the Bay of Pigs invasion. As if the cover […]
