[…] lack of accountability and their incompetence. He has a chapter, ‘The subverting of Britain’, in which he reminds us of Brigadier Kitson’s ideas, the talk of a coup in The Times in 1974, General Sir Walter Walker’s Civil Assistance and ‘the Wilson plots’. This isn’t done very well – not enough detail and no […]
[…] and the growth of the PR industry. And these were done straight. The programme missed a lot of tricks. There was much discussion of the talk of coup plotting in the mid 1970s yet it didn’t mention or, better, show the discussions about a coup carried in The Times. It talked about […]
[…] and then vanished again. But Irish press reports suggest that the bugging was merely one part of a complicated story which leads to a failed 1982 MI6 coup against then Prime Minister Charles Haughey. The story (Sunday News 25th March 1984) is long, complicated, and itself apparently based on press reports from the Irish […]
[…] be an intelligence service – yes, with clandestine sources – but also one which, he could assure his colleagues in Whitehall, would not embarrass them. No more coup plotting in the Middle East, for example. One of the problems with the book is its lack of clarity about sources. Some of it simply is […]
[…] either geographic or operative (spying, say) became crucial battlegrounds. He lets his description of events point their own moral: from the failed Baltic operations, through the Iranian coup, into the hi-jacking of European culture – ‘the Battle for Picasso’s Mind’ – and its recycling as a psy-ops project by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. […]
[…] the world’s most powerful military and intelligence forces. I had not previously grasped how much the Kennedys and their staffs talked about the possibility of a military coup being run against them and how much of the time the Kennedys used back channels to circumvent bureaucracies they didn’t trust. Talbot answers the question, Why […]
[…] to have been neglected by his recent biographers. After 1921 he became a freelance operator whilst still trying to persuade people that he could engineer a counter coup in the Soviet Union. Hearing about an alleged anti-Bolshevik group, ‘the Trust’, that was awaiting assistance from the West he crossed into the Soviet Union in […]
[…] close friend (and office manager) Michael Salt from all positions within the NF, proposed by Andrew Brons as Chair and seconded by Anderson as Deputy Chair. This coup de grace took only ten minutes, and (almost uniquely) reduced Webster to speechlessness. The event was a shock from which Webster never really recovered, and, despite […]
[…] were far too many internal contradictions in all this. In public, driven by media outrage, the embarrassed West condemned the manoeuvre. In private, Western officials opposed the coup as tactically inept, but probably were not unhappy to see Musharraf silence the second front created by the uppity lawyers getting in the way of the […]
[…] WACL supporter, ex-DDCIA, Ray Cline accompanied Manila CIA station chief and the CIA’s General Sweitzer on a visit to messers Enrile and Ramos, just before the abortive coup against Mrs Aquino’s government. One need not jump to conclusions: the Americans may have been trying to call the coup off. Either way, the presence of […]
