[…] bass” and landed in Havana in 1959, just as the first Russian freighter was arriving. Fairly early on Beck’s narrative begins to resemble the ‘Get Smart’ TV spy spoof. He dresses up as a tourist and hangs around the docks with his Brownie, in the bar of the Hilton, and at a travel agents’ […]
[…] communications advisory and agency services, mostly to non-OECD interests and NGOs. Corinne Souza is a former lobbyist, now a freelance writer. Her most recent book is Baghdad’s Spy (Mainstream, 2003). Simon Matthews is a former trade union district secretary with an MA in Modern History. Scott Newton is Senior Lecturer in Modern British and […]
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
[…] view. His book is basically a study of the ‘Red Orchestra’, an area already covered in detail. The author shows that this was, indeed, a very big spy ring. (The CIA were still investigating its activities well into the 1970s, believing that portions of it had survived various Gestapo crack-downs and had gone on […]
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
[…] proved: That, while I was working for South African Intelligence in London in 1969 (I was officially deported from South Africa in 1966 so that I could spy for BOSS in Britain) the head of BOSS, H. J. van den Bergh, assigned me to infiltrate an extremely furtive underground political group based in South […]
[…] 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 […]
Brothers: The hidden history of the Kennedy years David Talbot London: Simon and Schuster, 2007, h/b, £20 Another Kennedy book? Yes, but a good one. Talbot may not have anything new of substance to tell us about the assassination per se but has much new material about events before and after it. Talbot’s JFK … Read more
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
