Henry Brandon died (Obituary, Independent, 23 April, 1993). Brandon was one of the post-war school of journalists who were happy to act as mouthpieces for the secret services and foreign policy establishments of the NATO bloc. Had he been on the Soviet side of the Cold War, he would have been long dismissed as an … Read more
Nick Cook is a defence journalist of high repute, having been an Aviation Editor for the authoritative Jane’s Defence Weekly for fourteen years. When he says that UFO reports conceal a new technology with the potential to change the world, a technology kept secret by the US military-industrial complex for decades, he should be worth … Read more
Is the picture on the right that of the old Spycatcher himself, Peter Wright? It has been used as if it is three times, in the Sunday Times on 12 July 1987 and 16 October 1988; and more recently, the version shown, heavily cropped to illustrate Wright’s obituary in the Independent, 28 April 1995. It … Read more
From: M. R. D. Foot Scott Newton’s footnote at the end of his piece on Hess, in your number tries to keep alive Dr Hugh Thomas’s tale that the pilot who reached Scotland could not have been Hess, because he bore no trace of the gunshot wound the real Hess had received in Roumania in … Read more
Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War Against Jewish Terrorism 1945-1948 David Cesarani London: William Heinemann, 2009, h/b, £20 On 6 May 1947 a British undercover squad, under the command of Major Roy Farran, picked up sixteen-year-old Alexander Rubowitz, a young Zionist activist. He was taken away for ‘interrogation’. After an hour of … 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
It is well known that counter insurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson, after his ‘success’ in Malaya, went to Vietnam, under the title of British Advisory Mission, to help the Americans. He was head of the mission until 1965, subsequently visiting Saigon a number of times before being appointed a special consultant by President Nixon. Less … Read more
This began as a review of Deacon’s Truth Twisters by David Teacher, and grew as we both saw bits and pieces we could add to it. Richard Deacon’s The Truth Twisters (McDonald, London 1987: Futura, London 1988) is a classic of Western disinformation purporting to describe Soviet disinformation. Deacon lines up all our favourite state … Read more
Empires Apart: America And Russia From The Vikings To Iraq Brian Landers Hove: Picnic Publishing, 2009, £15, p/b Is America an empire? Tsarist Russia and its Soviet successor were certainly seen as such through western eyes. That America is not showing the heavily ideologised world through which we frame history. In a bold sweep … Read more
Kees van der Pijl Routledge, 1998, £15.95 From the late 1970s a group of Dutch academic Marxists – including Henk Overbeek, Meindert Fennema, Frans Stokman, Robert J. Mokken and Kees van der Pijl – began studying networks of capitalist power, setting up their own international scholarly network in the process (involving, among others, Beth … Read more
