A man with Friends The Third Secret: the CIA, Solidarity and the KGB’s plot to kill the Pope Nigel West HarperCollins, London, 2000, £19.99 Let’s dispose of the ‘Third Secret’ nonsense. West claims that Pope John – the Polish Pope – was told the ‘third secret’ of the Fatima revelations; and that this ‘third […]
[…] thing that Ms Rice denied was the use of torture. However, this must be seen in the context of what the Americans regard as torture. According to CIA Director Porter Goss, the CIA does not engage in torture but in ‘unique and innovative’ methods of prisoner interrogation. These methods include blows to the feet […]
[…] big book, 425 pages of text, another 80 plus of notes, bibliography, index. It is well written, witty – a major landmark in the literature on the CIA. Although much of the content of the book will be familiar in outline if you have read the extant material on the Congress for Cultural Freedom […]
[…] up the whole discussion about the responsibility of intellectuals and the integrity of cultural and political discourse first sparked by Lasch way back in 1967 when the CIA funding was initally revealed. I would add four very non-theoretical points which academics may one day like to follow up – preferably with a shorter time […]
[…] archival evidence to document the origins of the Bilderberg Group. It also considers the various conspiracy theories which have attached themselves to the Group. Is it a CIA plot to undermine socialism or a socialist conspiracy to destroy the US’s capitalist, democratic institutions? The author concludes that the view of Bilderberg as a seat […]
[…] falling out between the US and Britain was due in part to misunderstandings about covert action. The US favoured ‘ Nasser…. gradually with the help of the CIA and MI6, while Eden, Lloyd, and Macmillan preferred to proceed more swiftly with the help of the Israeli army and the Royal Navy.’ Douglas Little, ‘Mission […]
[…] organised crime. Which is to say the FBN was a political loose cannon in both overseas and domestic policy, engaged in continual bureaucratic warfare with the FBI, CIA, and local police forces, repeatedly discovering things that were supposed to stay hidden and trying to arrest ‘the wrong people’. In the introduction Valentine offers this […]
[…] The authors haven’t exposed much that is new, instead they have taken all the previous stories and strung them together to make a damning indictment of the CIA. All your favourite stories are in here, from Gary Webb’s breakthrough piece chronicling the links between the CIA; the Contras and the crack cocaine explosion in […]
[…] existence is a surprising development. The author is a New York Times journalist and for one of the NYT’s writers to produce a critical study of the CIA is unprecedented to my knowledge, and tells us much about the diminished status of the Agency. Of course it isn’t the history of the Agency, merely […]
[…] Roosevelt Study Centre, Middelburg, The Netherlands, 18-19 October 2001. See note (1) The impulse for this event came from Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid The Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, and the media coverage that it received after its publication in 1999. The intention of the conference was to give as […]
