[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 […]
[PDF file]: The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s secret relationship with apartheid South Africa Sasha Polakow-Suransky London: Vintage Books, 2011, £16.00 O ne of the striking features of the apartheid years was the courageous determination of many South African Jews to bring down a regime significantly sustained through close alliance with Israel. In part this was a relationship […]
[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 […]
[PDF file]: Blacklisted The Secret War between Big Business and Union Activists Dave Smith and Phil Chamberlain O ne of the co-authors, Phil Chamberlain, wrote an early sketch of this material in Lobster 58 (which is on-line 1 ) and the subtitle of that piece, ‘How the Economic League lived on’ might have been the subtitle […]
[PDF file]: Area 51 An uncensored history of America’s top secret military base Annie Jacobsen London: Orion: 2011, £20, h/b Built round interviews with participants, journalist Jacobson has written an account – not quite a history, really – of the U2 and Blackbird surveillance planes, and their significant role in the Cold War. There are lots […]
[…] he duly reported without comment. I have been told by a woman who knew Shaw very well throughout the 1950s and 60’s that Shaw’s homosexuality was no secret in his social circle. But while his friends might know he was gay New Orleans as a town did not. If I underscore his homosexuality it […]
Richard J. Aldrich London: John Murray, 2001, £25 Another huge book, 645 pages of text and 70 pages of index, bibliographies and notes. How do you review something this size? I simply don’t know. Short of doing a London Review of Books-sized job and working through it chapter by chapter, all I can really … Read more
[…] Chancellor Julius Raabe, the prerequisites for the Governmental Agreement were made public, BIS did everything possible to discredit Raabe. During the 1950s the BIS created a very secret department which was named Special Political Actions (SPA). The range of problems presented to the SPA was very broad. I’d like to give an excerpt from […]
Kimberley Cornish London: Arrow, 1999, £7.99 On p. 86 of this enthralling book Kimberley Cornish invites readers to complete the following sentence: ‘Wittgenstein was offered the Chair in Philosophy at Lenin’s university [Kazan] in 1935 because…’ What possible reason can there be except that he was serving the Soviet regime? Cornish contends that Wittgenstein recruited … Read more
[…] a bill under which it would become illegal to claim that any individual is an officer or agent of either the Security Service (MI5) or of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). It was also made known that the publication of British Intelligence and Covert Action last year was considered provocative in this respect. The […]
