(c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 43)  | |||
| Summer 2002 |
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Issue 43 | |
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Obituaries
Morris Riley, writer on espionage and occasional Lobster contributor,died around 16 June 2001. I never entirely trusted Morris: he gossiped to me about things he should have kept to himself and for the most part I blanked his questions about Lobster and the people I was talking to. Under a pseudonym Morris wrote a couple of prescient articles in the early 1980s about the anti-subversion crowd which had gathered round Brian Crozier and ISC. It is those which should be remembered rather than his uninteresting book about Philby.
John McGuffin died in April. I came across McGuffin as the author and distributor of a fascinating e-mail newsletter about Irish politics, Dispatches. McGuffin was the author of The Guineapigs (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) an account of the British state's maltreatment and torture of republican suspects in Northern Ireland - something he had experienced first-hand. The Guineapigs was withdrawn by the publisher after legal threats by the government and became very hard to find.
General Sir Walter Walker died in August 2001. A long obituary in the Daily Telegraph 13 August 2001 repeated the misinformation that Walker had founded Unison in 1974 before renaming it as Civil Assistance. In fact Unison was the creation of the late George Kennedy Young and Civil Assistance began as the civil assistance wing of Unison. Walker left Unison because, as he told me in a letter, he didn't trust Young because he was secretive and he didn't know what Young's objectives were.
L. Fletcher Prouty died on 5 June 2001. Most of the obits noted that Prouty had served as the model for 'Mr. X', the character played by Donald Sutherland in the most risible scene in Oliver Stone's JFK. Although he was occasionally inclined to unsupported conspiracy theorising towards the end of his life, Prouty was the author of one of the best books about the CIA, The Secret Team. A senior military officer with years of experience liaising with the CIA for the Pentagon, Prouty wrote a full-bore assault on the Agency. It was a major piece of whistle-blowing as well as a remarkable event in American political life; and in the normal run of events, would have been a sensation. Unfortunately it appeared during the Watergate affair and got buried by it. A flavour of Prouty's life and writing can be found at his Web site http://www.prouty.org/
William Cooper, author Behold a Pale Horse, died on 6 November 2001 after a shoot-out with police officers. Cooper has been taken seriously by people who ought to know better. Robert Morningstar, for example, posted a notice about Cooper which included this:
'Cooper......revealed to this writer the arcane symbolism. significance and meaning of the architecture of Dealey Plaza in his own words, "an open-air temple to the foundations of Freemasonry in America." 'Cooper was a shyster or a nutter who muddied the waters of every pond into which he strayed.
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