An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King William Pepper London: Verso, 2003, £17, h/b William Pepper has solved the King assassination. He hasn’t quite got enough to name the shooter but he has laid bare the conspiracy. It has taken him 20 years. Is there a comparable piece of research by … Read more
Orwellian control, public denial, and the murder of President Kennedy E. Martin Schotz Kurtz, Ulmer and DeLucia, Brookline, Massachusetts, 1996 Distributed in the UK by Plough Publishing House (at 01580 883344), £15.50 This is a very odd book. It is beautifully printed, bound and laid-out – a pleasure to handle. Unfortunately the content doesn’t match … Read more
The assassinations of the 1960s A recently discovered sound recording of the assassination of Robert Kennedy shows that there was indeed a second shooter in the room. At least 13 shots were fired according to the analysis by Philip Van Praag, an expert in the ‘forensic analysis of magnetic media recordings’. Sirhan Sirhan’s gun could … Read more
Books Secret Contenders Melvin Beck (Sheridan Square Publications, US 1984) The CIA Christmas party of 1958 found 48 year old all-American boy, Melvin Beck, getting the offer of overseas work with Clandestine Services. He “struck like a hungry bass” and landed in Havana in 1959, just as the first Russian freighter was arriving. Fairly early … Read more
Gore Vidal London: Abacus, 2002, £10.99, p/b Once upon a time collections of essays by Gore Vidal would appear every few years or so in this country in those neat little Panther paperbacks: On Our Own Now (1976), Matters of Fact and of Fiction (1978), Pink Triangle and Yellow Star (1982) for example. The … Read more
Philip Agee died in January this year. Reading the obituaries I came across the allegations that he had gone to the KGB with his information about the CIA, something he had always denied. There is this section from the memoir of senior KGB officer Oleg Kalugin, The First Chief Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence … Read more
Benny Morris London: I. B Tauris, 2002, £24.50, h/b In report after report on the major media we hear about or see pictures of ‘refugee camps’ in Israel – and no-one ever explains from where the refugees came. Perhaps editors think we know already. Benny Morris is an Israeli historian who became well known … Read more
Portland Free Press Portland Free Press, edited by Ace R. Hayes, with the legend ‘Tell the Truth and Run’ on its masthead, contains to produce important parapolitical material. The January/February issue had an extract from the 1991 deposition of Richard Brenneke, a pilot who claims to have flown missions for the Contras (which has not … Read more
There is an unmistakable thread running through America’s move eastward since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Using their vast economic clout – in the form of loans, grants and sanctions – and backed by threatening military supremacy (to say nothing of the devious use of ‘unattributable’ mercenary groups such as the MPRI), … Read more
Abstract The Tribunal established to investigate complaints about phone-tapping and the activities of the intelligence agencies has, at its first ever public hearing, quashed rules made by the Home Secretary forcing the tribunal to hold all its hearings in secret. However, the Tribunal procedure remains too secret, and its decisions cannot be appealed. Malcolm Kennedy’s … Read more
