Books Secret Contenders Melvin Beck (Sheridan Square Publications, US 1984) The CIA Christmas party of 1958 found 48 year old all-American boy, Melvin Beck, getting the offer of overseas work with Clandestine Services. He “struck like a hungry bass” and landed in Havana in 1959, just as the first Russian freighter was arriving. Fairly early … Read more
Timothy Evans Oxford and Providence (USA): Berghahn Books, 1996, £10, h/b Why review a book published in 1996? Well, I received this recently, assumed it was current and didn’t notice the publication date until I began to write this. In the early 1980s it began to dawn on people on the left of British politics … Read more
[…] revelatory, one way or the others. (He was acquitted in 1988 of involvement in the Bologna bombing for lack of evidence, and in February this year of murder charges relating to a 1969 bombing. See Daily Telegraph 21/2/89. Ed.) For Signorelli’s early affiliations with ON, see Ferraresi p.62; for his AN backing see Flamini […]
Covert Action CAIB trundles on. I haven’t always agreed with CAIB’s line. With others on the U.S. left, it used to seem reluctant to deal with the real nature of the Soviet Union. Having got to he point where America has become Amerika, many American radicals have been unable to acknowledge that the other Superpower … Read more
Henry McDonald and Jim Cusack London: Penguin, 2004, £12.99, p/b Henry McDonald’s highly readable recent book with Jim Cusack on the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) is everything that other recent offerings on the subject were not. On the one hand, it avoids the kind of borderline homo-erotic sensationalism, in which the atrocities of self-serving … Read more
by Peter Padfield Papermac, London, 1993, £12.99 There are now several versions of the Hess affair. One is the official story – a politician whose star is one the wane, attempts a spectacular comeback, fails, is locked up for forty years and finally commits suicide in despair. Another is the double theory, first outlined in … Read more
[…] allegedly left-wing ’17 November’ group which claims to have killed a Greek publisher. ‘November 17’ is said to have left a note at the scene of the murder “arguing that the publisher had been helping the CIA to create a climate of uncertainty in Greece.” The World Anti-Communist League The World Anti-Communist League (WACL) […]
[…] of the Second World War, Smith and Kay (Putnam 1972) includes virtually all the information in Last Talons of the Eagle. See Tom Bower, Blind Eye to Murder – Britain, America and the Purging of Nazi Germany, a Pledge Betrayed (1981) and The Paperclip Conspiracy (1984) and Christopher Simpson, Blowback – America’s Recruitment of […]
Bilderberged again Giles Radici’s Diaries 1980-2001 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004) isn’t terribly interesting but it does contain some snippets about Radici’s activities at the annual Anglo-German Konigswinter conference and one or two on his time at St Antony’s College (as a ‘parliamentary fellow’). There is also a section (pp. 336-7) on his attendance at … Read more
One of many reasons why the lobbying industry attracts opprobrium is because Britain’s political system offers only limited public sector facility to those who wish to influence it but lack the funding and/or patronage to do so. ‘The lobbyists’ did not cause the injustice. It is up to government to come up with the solutions. … Read more
