[…] also John Marks, The Search For The Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control (New York 1988). See John McGuffin, The Guineapigs (London 1974) Peter Grose, Gentlemen Spy: The Life and Times of Allen Dulles (Amherst 1994) p. 393. McCoy, A Question of Torture, (see note 5) pp. 28, 29, 33, 44-45, 49. (On […]
How perceptions have changed! In Leveller 51, March 1981, there was this snippet: ‘Why all the fuss about the Panorama programme on British Intelligence? Eventually there was just one cut — Gordon Winter, BOSS agent, former freelance journalist, in a pre-title sequence: “British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in […]
The collapse of Polly Peck in 1990 remains perhaps the single greatest British corporate mystery of modern times.(1) How did a multi-billion pound international conglomerate, which had risen from East End obscurity to become the exemplar of eighties British Capitalism, collapse within a period of weeks? How did a favoured son of the London Stock … Read more
[…] Patrick Wintour, ‘Getty money “helped finance breakaway miners” ‘, The Guardian, 23 September 1985. Martin Wainwright, ‘Families appeal heading for £500,000’, The Guardian 15 December 1984. Iris spy? There’s been a degree of scoffing by certain members of the literati at A. N. Wilson’s passing mention in his recent memoir that Iris Murdoch fed […]
Apartheid’s friends: The rise and fall of South Africa’s secret service James Sanders London: John Murray, 2006, £11.99, p/b This is a tremendously impressive piece of work; and it’s big: 395 pages of text, another 100 pages of notes and sources and a decent index. I imagine that most of it will be new … Read more
[…] mighty screed finally ends, Roberts takes us on an even stranger interlude: ‘EDITOR’S NOTE: This is all Joanie gave us on that date. However, we had a spy hiding behind a moosehead and he tells us that the psychiatrist came back into the room and Joanie handed him the notes quoted above and the […]
[…] fact sheet on sovereignty was suppressed rather than admit that Parliament would have to accept European regulations that conflicted with its own statutes. Officials were encouraged to spy on the Labour Party’s plans to oppose the terms of entry and even drafted speeches for pro-European Labour frontbenchers to deliver at their party conference. The […]
[…] of MI5, Peter Walker, which I don’t think has appeared elsewhere in the British media: “(he) served in Ireland in the early ’80s as second-in-command to Britain’s spy chief, David Ramsen. He posed as a ‘political officer’ and was a frequent visitor to Dublin, where he became a familiar face at the Horseshoe Bar, […]
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
[…] London, 1984, p131). The most famous of these, of course, was the Gary Powers U-2 on May 1st 1960 and Khrushchev was quick to exploit the ‘ spy’ Powers, forcing Eisenhower to forswear further aerial reconnaissance over the Soviet Union at the Paris summit that year (Klass p50). The use of satellites was only […]
