[PDF file]: […] interest a television news report by the BBC’s John Simpson on the fall of Kabul in Afghanistan. One part of that report has particularly stayed in my mind. For a brief moment in the video, sacks of currency – Simpson called them ‘bales of banknotes’ – were seen on the floor of a helicopter. […]
[…] always easy meat for the orthodoxy of the City.) What was inflation between 1945 and 1970, 2-4% per annum on average? Who, in his or her right mind, would not trade off 4% inflation for full employment and 2% growth? Vaisey’s vision Another version of the same basic perception that a great watershed had […]
[…] past 30 years or so.3 He quotes a South African report from 1991 describing it as ‘an informal forum of influential representatives of a “conservative cast of mind“’ – which is what Pinay/Le Cercle was and remains. Among recent British participants are former Conservative MPs Norman Lamont, Rory Stewart and Jonathan Aitken.4 Three pages […]
[PDF file]: […] by a German neo-Nazi intent on killing German Jews. Mrs Frank, now 63 and living in Shropshire, thinks the Drummer Girl–derived plan may have originated in the mind of her mentor, the British-born Israeli spymaster David Kimche, known in Israel for secret diplomacy as ‘the man with the suitcase’.9 The Hollywood version of The […]
[PDF file]: […] at Halfpenny Green Airfield, Staffordshire. Thirty seconds after takeoff, witnesses saw the prince’s plane ‘drop out of the sky’ and explode on 8 It is to my mind plausible that the disease itself is the actual origin and ‘calling card’ of European royal houses (royals being jocularly known in Britain as having ‘blue blood’), […]
[PDF file]: […] Cold War there have been occasions when the intelligence services, the CIA and SIS for example, actually did provide intelligence of substance. The first that springs to mind was the Cuban missile crisis, when the information from the Soviet intelligence officer Penkofsky about the actual accuracy of Soviet missiles did appear to play a […]
The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay As always, thanks to Nick Must and Garrick Alder for editorial help with Lobster. *new* Oh-oh By some distance the biggest story I have seen recently is that told on ABC’s 60 Minutes series recently, Scott Pelley’s ‘Havana Syndrome mystery continues as a lead military investigator says bar […]
[PDF file]: […] (George Robertson was selected and elected instead) and also declined Leith when a last minute vacancy arose in February 1979 (he was unable to make up his mind). The seat went instead to Ron Brown.9 With hindsight these were clearly significant miscalculations. Although Callaghan duly took Labour down to an arguably unnecessary defeat by […]
[PDF file]: […] threats to the m-i-c were the attempts by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy to reduce tension with the Soviet bloc and thus cut military expenditure. With this in mind Eisenhower planned a big pow-wow with Khruschev in Paris in 1960. What happened? The authors write: 1 America’s Cold War ‘Against all odds?’ They tell us […]
