A. J. Davies Little Brown and Co London, 1995, £20 Davies provides in equal measure a perceptive and comprehensive account of the modern Conservative Party which, hopefully, will lead to further reappraisals of Conservative history. In contrast to, for example, Lord Blake’s standard history of the Party over much the same period, We, The Nation … Read more
[…] 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 […]
[…] beginning of the book he describes the UCA as ‘a completely fictitious left-wing loyalist paramilitary organization invented by British intelligence’. By p. 71 he has changed his mind and says ‘the British Army may not have been the inventor of the UCA.’ In fact, as the Information Policy briefing on the UCA reproduced in […]
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
Inside Intelligence Anthony Cavendish Palu Publishing Ltd. 1987 Although many hundreds of books have been written on British Intelligence, very few have tackled post-war intelligence in any kind of depth or with any degree of reliability. By contrast, we tend to believe that we know quite a lot about the workings of the CIA. But … Read more
Ivan Molloy London: Pluto Press, 2001, £18.99/£55 In the 1980s the resurgent US military and neo-conservatives were in a bind: faced with a variety of challenges to the American economic empire, the enormous military power they possessed was constrained by PR considerations; American parents who didn’t want their children dying abroad (the so-called ‘Vietnam … Read more
Horses for courses? Labour MP Denis MacShane used the hospitality of The Observer extended by his old Oxford pal, editor Roger Alton, to proclaim the virtues of Nicolas Sarkozy and confide, a week before the second vote, that his success in the French presidential election was greatly desired in Downing Street. The prospect of a … Read more
[…] most subtle and successful conspiracies…….to embroil us in a foreign war’ But, unknown to Aaronovitch, there was such a conspiracy (though not the one Flynn had in mind) – and it involved not just Flynn’s hate figure, Roosevelt, but the British government. Part of the conspiracy was a series of covert operations in America […]
Steamshovel 11 The arrival of a new Steamshovel is an event. No matter that I am going to want to be picky about something in it, every issue contains items both substantial and intriguing – and much that would find a home nowhere else, that I can think of. (Except maybe Lobster. I wish I […]
