[…] who was outraged by the Watergate break-in, which (we’re told) was about Nixon’s evil spooks breaking into, and bugging, the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate. (Never mind that the only bugging device found inside the DNC was characterized as a broken ‘toy’ by Felt’s own FBI – that’s a very different story.) Doesn’t […]
edited by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and Christopher Andrew Frank Cass, London/Portland, Oregon, 1997, £15.00 pb There are two kinds of books about the CIA: there are those like William Blum’s, advertised in this issue, which see the CIA simply as part of the US post-war empire, the sharp end of imperial enforcement, somewhere between the […]
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh New York and London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006 $75.00 (US), £37.99 (UK), h/b This is an interesting and timely book and it is a great pity it is so expensive. Put out as a paperback and maybe with a less academic-sounding title, this would sell. Little of it is intellectually taxing and any […]
[…] new member of a very small category, the geopolitical conspiracy theory satire. (Only Report from Iron Mountain and the various books by Robert Anton Wilson spring to mind in this area.) For this reason alone it is worth getting. (How effective a piece of satire, and how good a piece of writing, is a […]
[…] proposal and submit it to them. When I inquired about some landing reports, I was asked to specify the date of the particular cases I had in mind. Although this is a component of the MOD, it is not situated in Whitehall. Neither is it Defence Intelligence 55 (DI55), though sources within DI55 have […]
A Covert Life. Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster Ted Morgan New York: Random House, 1999, $29.95 Freedom’s War: The US Crusade Against the Soviet Union Scott Lucas Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, £45 Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala 1952-54 Nick Cullather Stanford (California): Stanford University Press 1999, £8.95 […]
[…] nation-wide occurrences.’ Bessie Braddock assured the reader that this ‘bears all the distinctive marks of a genuine Communist directive’. Although it is difficult to parody the Stalinist mind, I doubt that even the Cominform would actually have written that ‘new and concentrated effort must be made by specially suitable undercover activists to penetrate into […]
Election time! Ah, the roar of the hustings; the pulse of democracy is about to be taken. The enduring worthiness of our political system is about to be proven yet again. But what’s that you say? Something’s not quite right with the result? You smell a rat? Be quiet. Such things only happen in tin-pot … Read more
We know that torture is going on in secret and not so secret prisons. We know thanks to the excellent research done by <www.cageprisoners.com> that elements of the British government, be they MI5, MI6 or diplomats from the FCO, have been involved. Yet we seem unable to stop it. Civic society raises its voices in … Read more
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 […]
