Counter-insurgency in Rhodesia
J. K. Villiers
(Croom Helm, London, 1985)
An expanded Masters thesis, full of descriptions of psychological operations by the Rhodesian forces (which failed utterly: and no wonder, they were useless), and rather less about pseudo-gang activities which, like their equivalents in the British operations in Kenya, were a success – i.e. they killed a lot of people.
Britain’s Civil Wars: counter-insurgency in the 20th century
Charles Townsend
(Faber and Faber, London, 1986)
Rather slight, introductory skim across the subject, the whole thing in 200 pages. But, as far as I can recall, this is the only such skim of its kind, and is thus worth taking note of. In such a short text only the bare bones get covered and the “dirty” aspects of British counter-insurgency campaigns are almost entirely omitted. The chapter on Northern Ireland, for example, is only 5 pages, very bland and wholly misleading.
Oxford and Empire
Richard Symonds
(MacMillan, London, 1986)
I include this because of chapter 4, “The Round Table and their friends”, which is another good example of what happens when academics write about the Round Table groups without the benefit of Quigley’s information. (See the Rhodes-Milner Group essay in this issue). Lots of interesting details here, much of the group’s activities are summarised, yet lacking the structural insights of Quigley, Symonds shows us lots of trees and misses the wood. Quigley’s two books are time bombs ticking away inside the academic history world.
Operation Brogue
John M. Feehan
(Mercier Press, Dublin, 1985)
This is an intense disappointment. The subtitle – “a study of the vilification of Charles J. Haughey, code-named Operation Brogue by the British Secret Service” – promises much, none of which is delivered. There isn’t a single honest-to-goodness fact in the entire book: no names of agents, no details of any kind about this “operation” other than a couple of fragments which appeared in the Irish press some years ago. The author quotes from books without giving the publication date, quotes from authors without even giving the title of the book from which the quote was taken, and even refers to newspaper stories without giving the date of publication!
The K/V Papers
edited by Barbara Goodwin
(Pluto Press, London, 1983)
This is a real oddity. Put out originally under “Current Affairs”, i.e. as non-fiction, it bombed. I remember picking up a copy and wondering how on earth Pluto had been conned into publishing such obvious nonsense. It purports to be a series of suitably cynical letters exchanged between a Soviet and American general, both arms salesmen, about geo-politics and the arms industry etc.. For example, “In terms of increasing world demand for non-nuclear goods – which is, I take it, our common long-term objective”.
In fact, it was meant to be satire, written not edited by Barbara Goodwin. It is thus an interesting 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 matter of opinion.)
Copies are available from Barbara Goodwin, 1 Norland Square, London W11 4PX. (£1 in UK)
The Target is Destroyed
(What really happened to 007)
Seymour Hersh, (Faber and Faber, London, 1986)
There isn’t much worth saying about this that hasn’t already been said by R.W. Johnson in his long review in London Review of Books, 23 October 1986. (Curious that LRB has become the only journal in this country to take the 007 debate seriously.) Whatever Hersh has done he hasn’t begun to show “what really happened”. He’s failed to examine too many of the fragments of information that have appeared since the shootdown. Johnson lists most of the important omissions in his review.
A more accurate title for Hersh’s book would be something like: “Post shoot-down bureaucratic politics in Washington”. Talking to people in Washington, Hersh has written a very Washington-orientated book. And it’s very interesting too, illustrating yet again that in politics “the truth” is never the goal: power is the rational objective of politics. Thus Hersh tells us quite a lot about the use of the shoot-down of KAL 007 but relatively little about the shoot-down itself.
Come wet this truncheon
Dave Douglas
(Direct Action Movement/Canary Press 1986)
Despite the naff title, this is a good 36pp A5 format pamphlet on the role of the police during the miners’ strike, mostly eye-witness accounts. (The author, Douglas, was an NUM delegate from Hatfield Colliery.) There isn’t a lot here that hasn’t already been described elsewhere – in State of Siege for example – but it’s nicely done (apart from forgetting to number the pages) and, as you might expect from DAM, impressively and, in my view, correctly paranoid about the police.
Available from the author c/o PO Box 96, Doncaster, Yorks. £1.00
Constance Cumbey’s New Age Monitor
PO Box 3078, Centre Line, Michigan 48015-0078, USA.
$40 per annum for foreign airmail: 8-12 issues per year.
Two issues of this arrived courtesy of the American writer Richard Gilman. Quite what this is I don’t know yet. From two 8 page large-type issues I can’t get a fix on it. For example, what exactly is “The New Age”? Cumbey appears to be hostile to, and is monitoring the activities of the far-right Christian fringe of America. If the Freedom Council, Pat Robertson, the 300 Club, CAUSA and the Christian Identity Movement are of interest, this might be for you.
The most interesting section to me is some strange material on the American poet Ezra Pound, claimed by Cumbey to be the “missing link” between the Theosophists, the Fabian socialists, the A.R.Orage Gurjieffian circle, the Bolinger Foundation and hard-core fascism. Given that I don’t know who several of these groups are, it’s hard to say what I make of it, but I can report that I have heard that a couple of substantial US parapolitics researchers are currently getting interested in the Ezra Pound connection.
Richard Gilman, who knows the far-right in the US much better than I do, thinks Cumbey important.
Covert Action Information Bulletin
I wrote the lines above about Constance Cumbey before receiving Covert Action Information Bulletin No 27, a special issue on the religious Right in America.
This is by far the best single issue of CAIB I have read – the section on the religious Right being 50 pages of minutely researched and footnoted essays on the fascist Christians (sic) now operating in the United States. As well as essays on the better known figures like Moon and Pat Robertson, these essays range across dozens of other groupings. In the first three pages are Christian Broadcasting Network, Gospel Outreach, National Religious Broadcasters, Christian Voice, American Coalition for Traditional Values, Freedom Council and the 700 Club.
This is very strange and depressing stuff. Are these (mostly) white evangelical Christians mutants, the end product of junk food, US tv, pesticides, pollution, rising background radiation levels? Presumably not (because other people have the same environment and aren’t crazy like these loons.) Is it a “white trash” reaction to the growing weight of the other ethnic groups in America? Or it just another example of US capital’s ability to head off potential trouble by funding people who will fill the heads of the population with garbage? It certainly is striking how much of this activity is going on in the “sunbelt” states where the struggle between capital and the US union movement is at its most bitter. This idea certainly receives some support from the pages of CAIB, and rather more from the recent biography of Jesse Helms, Hard Right, Ernest B. Ferguson (W. W. Norton, London and New York, 1986) .
This current CAIB also includes more from the splendid Herman and Brodhead on disinformation surrounding the “Bulgarian connection” and the best biographical essay I know of a super-spook, Frank Carlucci.
CAIB – $5 (US) with $2.50 (US) for foreign airmail, from PO Box 50272, Washington DC 20004.