[…] him to accept an invitation to visit Communist China so that he would be out of the country when our boy, General ‘Uncle Arthur’ Ankrah, staged his coup d’etat, and some months later when a computer we programmed to make astrological computations induced President Sukarno of Indonesia to make various moves which suited our […]
[…] tribal insurgents. This took place against a backdrop of President Nasser announcing the union of Egypt with Syria (February 1958) and Yemen (March 1958) and a pro-Egyptian coup in Iraq (14 July 1958). The latter event resulted in a speedy US intervention in Lebanon (15 July) and a similar British operation in Jordan (17 […]
What our pols read on their hols This summer it was hard to avoid laudatory pieces about or extracts from the Drew Weston’s book The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.(1) Here, it was said, was the explanation of how George Bush beat the Democrats and – by … Read more
[…] Secretary of the Hanson Group, archetypical at the time of predatory capitalism, agreed to sit on the Advisory Board. This was, quite rightly, regarded as a major coup. Adam Lury, a new wave (of the day) advertising executive and now on the Foreign Policy Centre board, and Bob Tyrrell of the Henley Centre (part […]
[…] Thatcher’s ear that Gorbachev was on the level, and that she could ‘do business with him’. (A station chief as defector-in-place, Gordiefsky was the ultimate pure espionage coup.) In espionage literature this myth is most strikingly displayed by Verrier’s Through the Looking Glass (Cape, London, 1983). Pitched somewhere between the Sunday Express and the […]
[…] seems profoundly unlikely to me. These books, with their massive documentation, constitute proof. On the other hand, this is also the story of the most spectacular intelligence coup of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, largely using CPUSA members or sympathisers, the Soviet Union built networks such that by the war’s beginning it had […]
[…] completely and use UNSCOM and sanctions to police the country, at the same time covertly encouraging groups which would be in a position to stage a military coup. This was not enough for some: on 26 January 1998 Clinton received a letter calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein because he is a ‘hazard […]
Ben Pimlott Harper Collins, London 1992, £20 At one level, this deserves the plaudits it has received. It is a belting good read, such a good read, in fact, that I had got as far as 1967 before I realized that there was no mention of Lord Cromer, the Governor of the Bank of England … Read more
Peter Taylor has made more TV programmes about Northern Ireland since 1969 than other any British journalist. His most recent was the documentary, Loyalists, earlier this year, a series of interviews with Loyalist paramilitaries and politicians. This was followed by a book, Loyalists (Bloomsbury, 1999), which contained some of the interviews in that programme. Like … Read more
[…] hope to desperate men. Moscow promised not to invade Poland if the Church could dampen the struggle (and, presumably, give the Polish Stalinists time to organise the coup). Some Grey Wolves came to believe that if the infidel Pope would not inflame anti-communist revolt, it would be better if he was assassinated in a […]
