In this issue, as in No 3, we are recycling a lot of material from Irish newspapers, and one in particular, the Sunday News. One of our Irish readers describes the Sunday News as ‘almost wholly Catholic..Nationalist … moderately Social Democratic Labour Party rather than moderately Republican.’ We have no way of checking the veracity … Read more
‘Rug merchants’ was the epithet former White House Chief of Staff Don Regan used to describe the Iranians who negotiated secret arms deals for nearly a year with senior officials of the Reagan Administration, including Oliver North of the National Security Council. Regan’s dismissive characterization hardly did justice to the sales skills of North’s Mideast … Read more
Notes From the Borderland Larry O’Hara now has his own journal, Notes from the Borderland, the first issue of which appeared in November last year. Like his previous pamphlets, this is full of fascinating information on the far right – the guts of the lead article on a charity scam being run in the UK … Read more
Bilderberged again Giles Radici’s Diaries 1980-2001 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004) isn’t terribly interesting but it does contain some snippets about Radici’s activities at the annual Anglo-German Konigswinter conference and one or two on his time at St Antony’s College (as a ‘parliamentary fellow’). There is also a section (pp. 336-7) on his attendance at … Read more
The Time of The Assassins: The Inside Story of the Plot to Kill the Pope Claire Sterling, Angus and Robertson, London 1984 The Plot to Kill the Pope Paul B. Henze, Croom Helm, London 1984 These two books cover the same ground, more or less, and have the same thesis: the KGB used the Bulgarians, … Read more
This is a slightly abridged version of part of chapter four of Mark Curtis’s book The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945 (Zed Press, 1995) reviewed below. In August 1953 a coup overthrew Iran’s nationalist government of Mohammed Musaddiq and installed the Shah in power. The Shah subsequently used widespread repression and torture … Read more
[…] anti-Semitic. Emigre groups, especially Ukrainians, are being allowed to broadcast their rewrite of WW2 in which they didn’t collaborate with the Nazis, didn’t participate in the mass murder of Jews in the Ukraine, and didn’t form a Ukrainian division in the SS, etc.. Anti-Semitism seems to be built into Ukrainian nationalism. This should be […]
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
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
One of many reasons why the lobbying industry attracts opprobrium is because Britain’s political system offers only limited public sector facility to those who wish to influence it but lack the funding and/or patronage to do so. ‘The lobbyists’ did not cause the injustice. It is up to government to come up with the solutions. … Read more
