US involvement in the Fiji coup d’etat This article presents an analy sis of United States involvement in the coup in Fiji. The authors support the demands made in Washington by deposed Fijian Prime Minister, Dr Bavadra, for a Congressional investigation of American involvement. Published by Wellington Confidential, PO. Box 9034, Wellington, New Zealand […]
[…] been quoted as saying that Retinger was ‘suspected of being in close touch not so much with British politics as with certain of its discrete institutions’. Presumably SIS. See Korbonski p. 20. Later American participants included Robert MacNamara, US Secretary of Defence under Kennedy and Johnson (earlier chair of the Ford Motor Company, and […]
[…] Egyptians who had planned to turn the Middle East over to the ‘commies’. His voice trailing off, he finally sank in his chair and passed out.” (empha sis added). Perhaps these ‘teams’ were part of the complicated plot which Anthony Verrier talks of in his Through the Looking Glass (London 1983). According to Verrier, […]
Iraqi documents Iraq on the Record () is a searchable collection of over 200 specific misleading statements made by Bush administration officials about the threat allegedly posed by Iraq. The collection would be even larger if it also included statements that appear mistaken only in hindsight. However, if a statement was ‘…an accurate reflection of […]
I don’t agree with the BassettMatthews line (‘War and peace plots’, Lobster 51) on (i) Chamberlain’s flight to see Hitler in the Munich cri sis (it was to avert a war, not a coup) and (ii) Philby’s criminal responsibility for prolonging World War Two. The latter point credits far too much influence to one […]
I have been scrutinising in some detail the Curry Report, The Security Service: its problems and organisational adjustments 1908-1945 –– the in-house history of MI5 which was written by John Court (‘Jack’) Curry (1887-?), a senior MI5 officer, during 1944-6. In so doing I have solved one of the great mysteries about Maxwell Knight. Anthony … Read more
[…] Islamic Fighting Group, our former enemy’s enemy, is our enemy. Libya’s new status as ‘friend’ is visible elsewhere. Con Coughlin, often a guide to the thinking within SIS, commented in The Sunday Telegraph, ‘Ratcheting up to the next war’ on 9 October, on the British policy of ‘kow-towing to the Iranians’. Wrote Coughlin: ‘As […]
[…] I’d seen something like this in Anthony Verrier’s book. There it is on p. 255. Describing the British ‘attempt to sustain counter-revolution in Arabia’, Verrier notes that SIS opposed it ‘because, all other factors apart, it degenerated into a matter of bribes to the wrong people – 30 million, to be exact, laundered through […]
A Channel 4 SOE mystery In January and February this year Channel 4 broadcast a history of the war-time Special Operations Executive, SOE, written and presented by the novelist Sebastian Faulks, called Churchill’s Secret Army. It was an interesting series with some excellent first-hand material and footage. But there were two mysteries. The first, and […]
[…] Baldwin and Chamberlain allowed him access to the intelligence product of Desmond Morton, head of the Industrial Intelligence Centre, and of Group Captain Frederick Winterbotham of the SIS Air Section.’ (15) Other sources were less formal. John Baker White, for example, the Director of the Economic League from 1926 til the end of the […]
