The attack on the USS Liberty The short piece in Lobster 45 on the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty was curiously timely. Soon after it appeared Captain Ward Boston, senior legal counsel for the Navy’s Court of Inquiry into the incident broke his silence and stated, inter alia: ‘There is no question in … Read more
[…] and The Lost Crusader touch on issues that return with each morning’s newspaper: is a foreign secret intelligence service bound by international conventions governing such matters as murder, illegal imprisonment and the overthrow of governments? Is the word of the Director of Central Intelligence to be believed? Is it proper for a foreign intelligence […]
Clippings The Lie Detector Story In the wake of the Prime case, US intelligence has made polygraph (lie detector) introduction into GCHQ at Cheltenham a condition of future GCHQ-NSA cooperation. “At a meeting in July with Civil Service union leaders, Sir Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, made it clear that Senior Whitehall officials were reluctant … Read more
[…] to the jury do appear to follow a tradition of exculpating the establishment at all costs. In the Jeremy Thorpe trial, Mr Justice Cantley described alleged potential murder victim Norman Scott as follows: ‘He is a fraud. He is a sponger. He is a whiner. He is a parasite. But, of course, he could […]
Inside the League Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson (Dodd, Mead and Co., New York 1986) This is the only book I know on the World Anti-Communist League. Most of it is new to me but the few bits I am familiar with look accurate, and it is reasonably well documented. It is really in … Read more
[…] Ray had managed to acquire the identities of four men in Toronto who all looked like him, but omitted any of the subsequent research on the King murder, such as that by John Edginton, the British TV producer, and particularly by Dr William Pepper. Godfrey Hodgson’s obit in the Independent (25 April 1998) was […]
MI5 and the Wilson Plot The MI5 website (www.mi5.gov.uk) has a section called ‘myths and misunderstandings’, which features, among other things, ‘the Wilson Plot’. The paragraph it devotes to this episode is worth studying. It refers the reader to Spycatcher and Peter Wright’s allegation that ‘up to 30 members of the Service had plotted to … Read more
[…] property developer Bill Harrison and a private detective Christopher More, who has since been jailed for assisting his son to flee from Britain and escape from a murder hunt. The plotters successfully conspired to steal the income tax records of their political opponents, a crime not previously recorded in the two hundred year history […]
Introduction The mid 1970s was not a good time to be a social democratic ally of the United States. In Britain we had “the Wilson plots’; in Australia Gough Whitlam, Jim Cairns and the Australian Labour Party got Governor Kerr and the CIA; in Germany Willi Brandt resigned after a “security scandal’; in New Zealand … Read more
Political activist Daniel Ellsberg and Professor Alfred McCoy have something special in common. Based on their actions and accomplishments of nearly thirty years ago, they have achieved the status of icons within the subculture of what passes for the New Left. Icon Ellsberg became a celebrity in 1971 after he leaked The Pentagon Papers, an … Read more
