This is a slightly abridged version of part of chapter four of Mark Curtis’s book The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945 (Zed Press, 1995) reviewed below. In August 1953 a coup overthrew Iran’s nationalist government of Mohammed Musaddiq and installed the Shah in power. The Shah subsequently used widespread repression and torture … Read more
Inside the League Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson (Dodd, Mead and Co., New York 1986) This is the only book I know on the World Anti-Communist League. Most of it is new to me but the few bits I am familiar with look accurate, and it is reasonably well documented. It is really in … Read more
[…] Ray had managed to acquire the identities of four men in Toronto who all looked like him, but omitted any of the subsequent research on the King murder, such as that by John Edginton, the British TV producer, and particularly by Dr William Pepper. Godfrey Hodgson’s obit in the Independent (25 April 1998) was […]
MI5 and the Wilson Plot The MI5 website (www.mi5.gov.uk) has a section called ‘myths and misunderstandings’, which features, among other things, ‘the Wilson Plot’. The paragraph it devotes to this episode is worth studying. It refers the reader to Spycatcher and Peter Wright’s allegation that ‘up to 30 members of the Service had plotted to … Read more
Clippings The Lie Detector Story In the wake of the Prime case, US intelligence has made polygraph (lie detector) introduction into GCHQ at Cheltenham a condition of future GCHQ-NSA cooperation. “At a meeting in July with Civil Service union leaders, Sir Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, made it clear that Senior Whitehall officials were reluctant … Read more
[…] correct, there were sections of the US military who had decided by 1968 that the domestic situation could not be left to the politicians and sanctioned the murder of the leading black opponent of their war in Vietnam. There’s a bigger story yet: the growth of the power of the US military in post-war […]
[PDF file]: […] publisher on the eve of its appearance. I am grateful to Lobster for reviving “Transnationalised Repression”. Though the essay starts from events of the seventies (Watergate, the murder of Orlando Letelier in Washington, the Nixon war on drugs) which have since passed into history, the essay also builds to a general overview of transnationalised […]
[PDF file]: […] as a copycat crime, carried out by unconnected criminals. It took nearly four months for the LAPD to arrest and indict Manson and co. for the two murder sprees. O’Neill sets out to prove that the powers-that-be of the LAPD knew early on that Manson and the Family were the murderers; which leads to […]
[…] He eventually died in 2020 from renal failure. 34 Biletsky had been released from prison the previous month, having been convicted in 2013 of involvement in a murder committed in 2011. His premature release was the result of a national amnesty for political prisoners. 35 14 ‘sounds somewhat absurd’, and remarked dismissively that ‘love […]
[…] He eventually died in 2020 from renal failure. 34 Biletsky had been released from prison the previous month, having been convicted in 2013 of involvement in a murder committed in 2011. His premature release was the result of a national amnesty for political prisoners. 35 14 shooting but has said it ‘sounds somewhat absurd’, […]
