[…] 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 […]
[…] credited with spending millions of dollars on a Fijian grassroots cultural revival which has been a thin cover for the Tankei movement.” (US Involvement in the Fiji coup d’etat in Lobster 14) IDU is producing a magazine, Democracy International (Suite 48, Westminster Palace Garden, London SWIP IRR). The pilot issue appeared a few months […]
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
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
I was a student here (1) from 1971-74 doing a social science degree; but more importantly, between 1976 and 1982 I was on the dole much of the time and spent most of my days in the library here, educating myself in post-war history, American history, what was available then about the intelligence services – … Read more
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
Reflections on the ‘cult of the offensive’: pre-emptive war, the Israel lobby and US military Doctrine In our book, Spies, Lies and the War on Terror,(1) a central theme is the ascendancy of pre-emptive war doctrine in US military strategy and its impact on public perceptions and the construction of political narrative. A parallel and […]
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
