[…] 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 […]
[…] institutions of popular power and workers control, and repressing the revolutionary left. The moment of realisation occurred in May 1937 in Barcelona when the Communists staged their coup against anarchist control of the city. Up to then Orwell had been determined to transfer from the POUM militia to the Communist-controlled International Brigades. Now he […]
[…] he could implement detente with Castro and reform the Agency in the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster. The Warren Commission attempted to conceal this treasonous coup behind the lone gunman theory but the truth was smoked out by New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison in his abortive prosecution of Clay Shaw. Garrison was […]
Reflections on the ‘cult of the offensive’: pre-emptive war, the Israel lobby and US military Doctrine In our book, Spies, Lies and the War on Terror,(1) a central theme is the ascendancy of pre-emptive war doctrine in US military strategy and its impact on public perceptions and the construction of political narrative. A parallel and […]
[…] the left. His very interesting article on the CIA (and wider American) role in the politics of the Soviet bloc countries post 1991, ‘The Technique of a coup d’etat’, ends with this sentence: ‘But, after Marshall’s exposé of the reality behind the almost identical events in Serbia, there can be no doubt that the […]
