Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire Anne Norton New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004 $25/£16 What’s the Matter with America? Thomas Frank The Resistable Rise of the American Right London: Secker & Warburg, 2004, £12 Most of us in Europe find it difficult to understand what happened in America on … Read more
Part 1 The world of ultra-right conspiracy theory is of interest to researchers into clandestinism for 3 reasons. First, because critics of research into clandestinism frequently attempt to bracket it together with ultra-right believers in The Protocols of Zion and similar fantasies.(1); secondly because the ultra-rightists, in the last decade, have been showing an interest … Read more
Responsibilities, old boy The Big Breach Richard Tomlinson Cutting Edge, Edinburgh, 2000, £9.99 I found it hard to ‘see’ this because so much of its contents have been published in the media. There have been some changes – names altered – since the newspaper versions; and I am told that the original hardback version … Read more
Tom Bower, Heinemann, London This is the biography of Dick White, the only man to have been head of both MI5 and MI6 (SIS) and it is a massive breach of the new Official Secrets Act. For Bower not only had access to White’s memoir of the period, with White to vouch for him, he … Read more
Last year, in the search for independent corroboration of some of Colin Wallace’s story, I talked to a number of ‘Irish hands’, journalists who had been in Northern Ireland while Wallace was working there. One was Kevin Dowling, the Sunday Mirror correspondent there from 1970-74. Dowling was reluctant to talk much about that period of … Read more
Harold Weisberg Harold Weisberg died at his home in Frederick, Maryland, on 21 February from a kidney ailment at the age of 88. He was one of the first generation of Warren Report critics along with Vincent Salandria, Ray Marcus, Mark Lane, Sylvia Meagher and others. He was a tireless critic of the Report and … Read more
Frances Stoner Saunders Granta, London, 1999, £20 There isn’t much worth saying about this book that hasn’t been said in the many reviews it has had since it appeared in July.(1) This is a big book, 425 pages of text, another 80 plus of notes, bibliography, index. It is well written, witty – a major … Read more
Introduction The ‘Gable memo’ reproduced below originally appeared as the subject matter of a long and extremely interesting article, ‘Destabilising the “decent people”‘ by Nick Anning, Duncan Campbell and Bruce Page in the New Statesman on February 15, 1980. This is still worth digging out, particularly for its detailed account of the context in which … Read more
The channels for US covert military aid to the Afghan mojahedin have been thrown into disarray by the death on August 17 [1988] of President Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan in an aircrash unexplained as we went to press. His death came at a particularly sensitive moment as the Soviet occupation forces prepared to withdraw and … Read more
One Boggis-Rolfe or two? Philby: The Hidden Years Morris Riley Janus Publishing, London, 1999, £9.95 pb There are almost as many Philbys as there are readers. His current reputation is as thin as the biographies are fat. Is there room on the shelf for yet another Philby book? Perhaps for a slim one. Amidst legal … Read more
