[…] bloody strife’ (p. 35). Saddam Hussein joined a failed Ba’athist conspiracy in 1959 to assassinate President Quasim, who had gained power the year before in a nationalist coup that killed the Iraqi royal family and the prime minister. Quasim himself was ousted in 1963. In 1968 another coup brought Saddam Hussein’s faction of the […]
[…] be an intelligence service – yes, with clandestine sources – but also one which, he could assure his colleagues in Whitehall, would not embarrass them. No more coup plotting in the Middle East, for example. One of the problems with the book is its lack of clarity about sources. Some of it simply is […]
[…] either geographic or operative (spying, say) became crucial battlegrounds. He lets his description of events point their own moral: from the failed Baltic operations, through the Iranian coup, into the hi-jacking of European culture – ‘the Battle for Picasso’s Mind’ – and its recycling as a psy-ops project by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. […]
[…] the world’s most powerful military and intelligence forces. I had not previously grasped how much the Kennedys and their staffs talked about the possibility of a military coup being run against them and how much of the time the Kennedys used back channels to circumvent bureaucracies they didn’t trust. Talbot answers the question, Why […]
[…] to have been neglected by his recent biographers. After 1921 he became a freelance operator whilst still trying to persuade people that he could engineer a counter coup in the Soviet Union. Hearing about an alleged anti-Bolshevik group, ‘the Trust’, that was awaiting assistance from the West he crossed into the Soviet Union in […]
[…] close friend (and office manager) Michael Salt from all positions within the NF, proposed by Andrew Brons as Chair and seconded by Anderson as Deputy Chair. This coup de grace took only ten minutes, and (almost uniquely) reduced Webster to speechlessness. The event was a shock from which Webster never really recovered, and, despite […]
[…] were far too many internal contradictions in all this. In public, driven by media outrage, the embarrassed West condemned the manoeuvre. In private, Western officials opposed the coup as tactically inept, but probably were not unhappy to see Musharraf silence the second front created by the uppity lawyers getting in the way of the […]
[…] WACL supporter, ex-DDCIA, Ray Cline accompanied Manila CIA station chief and the CIA’s General Sweitzer on a visit to messers Enrile and Ramos, just before the abortive coup against Mrs Aquino’s government. One need not jump to conclusions: the Americans may have been trying to call the coup off. Either way, the presence of […]
[…] been ‘naive’ in reassuring President Sukarno of Indonesia in 1963 that Guy Pauker, formerly of RAND, was not CIA. (Two years later Pauker was involved in the coup which overthrew Sukarno. On this see Peter Dale Scott’s essay in Lobster 20.) But this does not lead him to examine the evidence of US involvement […]
[…] 1957 MECAS 1959 TIAZ 1959 BAHREIN 1962 FO 1964 1ST SEC UK MISSION NEW YORK 1967 1ST SEC AND HOC AMMAN 1969 CONSUL GEN OMAN. INVOLVED IN COUP (F) 1971 FCO HEAD OF ACCOMMODATION AND SERVICES 1974 AMBASSADOR TO QATAR 1978 CONSUL GEN ATLANTA CRESSWELL, SIR MICHAEL JUSTIN KMCG (1960) CMG (52) B 21.9.09 […]
