Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA Jim Hougan (Random House, US 1984) Those who read Hougan’s last book Spooks will know that the arrival or a new one is something of an event. As expected, his latest has so many trails to follow, intriguing little titbits to ponder that one read is insufficient … Read more
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
[…] Later I mentioned the idea that the spooks fed material into novels to Fred Holroyd, and, to my surprise, he told me that one of Britain’s leading spy fiction writers had cheerfully confirmed that the spooks did indeed send him material they wanted planting in his books. The perceptible increase in this country of […]
[…] 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 […]
First off, a slight digression. There’s been much talk recently about just how many books have been published on the assassination. ‘Over 2000’ is the figure that has been thrown around and this may be traced to the very opening sentence of Gerald Posner’s egregious Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK … Read more
[…] in the Observer (24 Feb. 1985) on the Belgrano business: “It’s pretty obvious that the information the Government claim is secret is the position of the American spy satellites.” This may be a pretty educated guess. As Jim Hougan reveals in his Secret Agenda (reviewed in this issue), Woodward had a very important job […]
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
[…] threaten the emerging Lloyd George corporate/military state. Hoare sketches the background against which this unfolded. Theatrical, social and sexual mores are analysed, as are both the enemy spy hysteria of 1915 and the belief of the time in a unique German /Jewish form of decadence (cue Krafft-Ebing and Freud). The grind of a nation […]
[…] 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 […]
Charlie Bubbles One of Lobster’s contributors had dinner a few years ago with Charlie Falconer, the current Lord Chancellor, and reported that he was a fount of information on the B-sides of pop singles of the 1960s. Well, pop-pickers, our civil liberties are safe in his hands then. Or not. As New Labour prepares to … Read more
