[…] per se. The Kennedys had too many of their own secrets at risk. In 1963 the knowledge of John Kennedy’s sexual promiscuity was still largely an insider’s secret — as was the family’s various links to the mafia, from Joe Kennedy’s bootlegging days to the mob’s assistance in the election of 1960. A decent […]
[…] Middle Eastern oil and the need for the installation and maintenance of compliant domestic regimes? There is a strange non-sequitur in the first chapter where a ‘ secret’ official British policy document from 1958 relating to the Middle East is immediately followed by ‘Thus, shortly after the First World War, turning their eyes towards […]
[…] and drabs of official information — all sanitised and ‘weeded’ — being doled out to the handfuls of people who are interested in this country’s history. Top Secret: An Interim Guide to Recent Releases of Intelligence Records at the Public Record Office, by Louise Atherton, is rather a large drib — practically a torrent […]
[…] heart, you’re as thick as Des Wilson appears to be in taking them on board. Even Sir Robert Armstrong, one of the real pillars of this country’s secret state, is apparently in favour of more ‘open government’. Times 2 July. Another memoire, by ex MI5 Joan Miller, suppressed by the government. Sunday Times 29 […]
[PDF file]: […] on 18 November 1961, in the former East Germany (GDR).1 As an adult, he achieved his youthful ambition of serving as an officer in the communist regime’s secret police, the Stasi.2 Neitsch’s office defeated and silenced prominent local opponents of the GDR. The office’s operational zone included a long section of the Berlin Wall, […]
[PDF file]: The Black Door Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac London: William Collins, £30 T his new book by two respected academics has a lot to tell us about how Britain is run. We are told, for example, that at a CBI dinner in December 1971, the Labour Party […]
[PDF file]: Thatcher’s Secret War Subversion, Coercion, Secrecy and Government, 1974-90 Clive Bloom Stroud: The History Press, 2015, £20 (h/b) Robin Ramsay I was seriously interested when I got the publisher’s flyer about this book. To my knowledge no-one has tackled this subject in its entirety; and noone has even re-examined Thatcher’s rise to power, the […]
[PDF file]: Some Warren Commission stuff……… Anthony Frewin A CRUEL AND SHOCKING ACT The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination Philip Shenon New York: Henry Holt & Co, 2013 Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, 625 pps. The subtitle is misleading. It should read, more correctly, The Secret History of the Warren Commission. But hold on, that’s not […]
Thatcher’s Secret War Subversion, Coercion, Secrecy and Government, 1974-90 Clive Bloom Stroud: The History Press, 2015, £20 (h/b) I was seriously interested when I got the publisher’s flyer about this book. To my knowledge no-one has tackled this subject in its entirety; and no-one has even re-examined Thatcher’s rise to power, the 1974-79 period, […]
[PDF file]: The Devil’s Chessboard Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government David Talbot William Collins, London, 2015 HB, 686pp., illus., index, bib., refs., £25.00 This truly excellent biography is at least partly a biography of two men, Allen Dulles and his older brother John Foster. I write ‘at least partly’ because […]
