Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA Jim Hougan (Random House, US 1984) Those who read Hougan’s last book Spooks will know that the arrival of a new one is something of an event. As expected, his latest has so many trails to follow, intriguing little titbits to ponder that one read is insufficient … Read more
[…] Later I mentioned the idea that the spooks fed material into novels to Fred Holroyd, and, to my surprise, he told me that one of Britain’s leading spy fiction writers had cheerfully confirmed that the spooks did indeed send him material they wanted planting in his books. The perceptible increase in this country of […]
Matthew R. Simmons London: Wiley, 2005, h/b Ironic, perhaps, that I finished reviewing this book in Calgary, just south of the largest land-based oil project in the American hemisphere, the Athabasca shale tar sands oil recovery projects. Collectively these will realise investment between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the next ten years. Pipelines … Read more
First off, a slight digression. There’s been much talk recently about just how many books have been published on the assassination. ‘Over 2000’ is the figure that has been thrown around and this may be traced to the very opening sentence of Gerald Posner’s egregious Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK … Read more
[…] spat over “turgid” writing’, The Times, 24 October 2008; Jack Lefley, ‘MOD censors its censor’s history for being boring’, The Evening Standard, 24 October 2008. Anon., ‘Former spy wins first round of “son of Spycatcher” book publication battle’, Solicitors’ Journal, 152 (29), 22 July 2008, p. 5; Anon., ‘Tribunal does not have exclusive jurisdiction’, […]
[…] in the Observer (24 Feb. 1985) on the Belgrano business: “It’s pretty obvious that the information the Government claim is secret is the position of the American spy satellites.” This may be a pretty educated guess. As Jim Hougan reveals in his Secret Agenda (reviewed in this issue), Woodward had a very important job […]
The origins of Civil Assistance? In the UK in 1974-75 a number of ‘private armies’ appeared, linked to retired senior military and intelligence figures. There were General Sir Walter Walker’s Civil Assistance, Colonel David Stirling’s GB75, and George Young’s Unison. (1) These groups formed in order to frustrate the impact of strike action in the … Read more
[…] threaten the emerging Lloyd George corporate/military state. Hoare sketches the background against which this unfolded. Theatrical, social and sexual mores are analysed, as are both the enemy spy hysteria of 1915 and the belief of the time in a unique German /Jewish form of decadence (cue Krafft-Ebing and Freud). The grind of a nation […]
[…] anyone skulking in the undergrowth. The book ends on this unsatisfactory note. The Clough book, by contrast, is excellent. It provides a detailed demythologising of this particular spy case and relies on a review of all the literature in the case as well as primary research conducted by the author amongst recently released PRO […]
[…] though not in this detail. The other 80% of the book is little more than padding – on the Israeli commando raid on Entebbe, the SR 71 spy plane, the French intelligence service SDECE, the Chilean intelligence service DINA; ten pages on the career of the SIS officer Anthony Dival; eight pages on the […]
