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
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
Anthony Glees, Philip J. Davies, and John N. L. Morrison London: The Social Affairs Unit, 2006, £20, h/b The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) is a recent addition to the roster of Whitehall bodies; the motives of those who created it, as the authors show, are obscure and its role to some extent remains … 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
Abstract The Tribunal established to investigate complaints about phone-tapping and the activities of the intelligence agencies has, at its first ever public hearing, quashed rules made by the Home Secretary forcing the tribunal to hold all its hearings in secret. However, the Tribunal procedure remains too secret, and its decisions cannot be appealed. Malcolm Kennedy’s … Read more
The Case Against Israel Michael Neumann Oakland (US): CounterPunch, $15 Edinburgh (UK): AK Press, £10, 2005 The Power of Israel in the United States James Petras Atlanta and Black Point: Clarity Press and Fernwood Books, 2006, $16.95 In a year in which Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Gaza were accompanied by more stories of … Read more
[…] in…. and so was Pat Daly. In Long Lartin he was well treated and comfortable. He was in the cell next to Geoffrey Prime, the GCHQ Soviet spy. Prime had a copy of Soviet Weekly delivered to him, often by a nun! His divorced wife (who, after her conversion to a fundamentalist sect, wrote […]
[…] insisted I not print it. I complied and forgot about it. I recalled my afternoon in the Station Hotel reading the account in Corinne Souza’s book Baghdad’s Spy (reviewed in this issue) of the harassment her family suffered at the hands of SIS. There it was again: break-ins, pranks, things left in the house, […]
[…] 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 […]
