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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] it fails and I felt somebody had to speak up for intelligence standards. I did that. I got sacked and I don’t regret it for a moment.’ CIA is the source of a detailed study of the CIA’s ‘black budget’ by Dr Michael Salla. And an interesting glimpse of the scale of the CIA’s […]
Secrets and Lies: A history of CIA mind control and germ warfare Gordon Thomas JR Books (www.jrbooks.com) 2007, h/b, £20 Gordon Thomas has written a number of books on the intelligence services and this has a glossy cover, voluminous appendices and some admiring quotes. But it adds little to what we already know […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] married Knebel in 1972. The book is an account of how Knebel and Jones discovered, through hypnotic regression of Jones, that she had been used by the CIA as a programmed courier; had, in fact, been converted into a multiple personality of the kind described by Dr George Easterbrook in the last paragraphs of […]
[…] has that familiar destabilising ring to it. And is no surprise. In Lobster 3 we reported a piece in the Times (7 July 1983) by the well-known CIA flak Brian Crozier, describing the Seychelles as one of 4 countries which ‘stand out as qualifying for low risk or no risk intervention: Angola, Seychelles, Grenada […]
