[…] and thoroughly documented book is a history of the most important of those recent contests, from the debate in the 1970s over the scale of the Soviet missile ‘threat’ through to the invasion of Iraq.(2) Essentially, the CIA has been in an impossible position. Tasked with surveilling the entire planet, which can’t done, even […]
[…] Defence against which missiles? There is one section of the John Diamond book on the CIA, reviewed below, which deserves picking out. Diamond points out that the missile defence system which the US is deploying, apparently against ‘rogue states’, is not to defend the US against nuclear attack by ‘rogue states’ but to enable […]
[…] the work of other, more substantial, JFK researchers. CIA admits overestimating Soviet weapons Newly declassified documents in the US show that the CIA exaggerated the Soviet Unions missile programme. ‘The summary of a 1989 CIA internal review said every major intelligence assessment from 1974 to 1986 – a period covering at least three presidencies […]
[…] of Talbot’s account of this conflict with the US military, is Cuba. For the military it was straightforward: the US had the strategic nuclear advantage (the ‘ missile gap’ had been forgotten) and thus could and should invade Cuba. Never mind even pretending to the world that it was a Cuban insurrection – the […]
Clint Eastwood Movies Flags of Our Fathers, directed by Clint Eastwood and to be released in Britain in December 2006, is an example of post-9-11 PR. It tells the story of the 1945 battle for Iwo Jima and has been described as the first film in which the balance of combat and public relations has … Read more
[…] friend in the sixties of another CIA station Chief, Archie Roosevelt. (10) Both Brown and Gaitskell later received secret briefings from Cooper and Roosevelt on the Cuban Missile Crisis. This relationship with United States agencies developed when Brown accepted ‘one of the American Congressional Trusts which enabled me to spend six weeks in the […]
Covert Action: The Roots of Terrorism Edited by Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003, £14.95 The Politics of Anti-Semitism Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair Oakland (US) and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2003, £9.00/$12.95 The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century Scott … Read more
See note(1) By some standards, the loss of 269 souls aboard Korean Air Lines flight 007 on August 31, 1983, was a modest disaster. The Titanic, for example, claimed 1503 lives; the Lusitania 1198. But historians may come to believe that the political implications of the downing of the civilian 747 airliner by a Soviet … Read more
[…] bigger names, writes: “The authors not only endorse Soviet negotiating positions.. they endorse the official Warsaw Pact line almost in its entirety … (they) present recent Soviet missile deployments in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the GDR as legitimately defensive ” etc. A large (two page) piece on the murder of Hilda Murrell (the anti-nuclear campaigner) […]
The Imperial War Museum book of Modern Warfare: British and Commonwealth Forces at War 1945-2000 Edited by Major General Julian Thompson London: Pan Books, 2003, £8.99 This is the paperback edition of the book published by Sidgwick and Jackson a year ago. It contains 15 essays on conflicts that have involved British armed forces … Read more
