A man with Friends The Third Secret: the CIA, Solidarity and the KGB’s plot to kill the Pope Nigel West HarperCollins, London, 2000, £19.99 Let’s dispose of the ‘Third Secret’ nonsense. West claims that Pope John – the Polish Pope – was told the ‘third secret’ of the Fatima revelations; and that this ‘third secret’ … Read more
Gecas and Special Branch A wonderful example of the reach and power of intelligence connections was provided in January. Why did the British state refuse to extradite Anton Gecas, the WW2 Lithuanian war criminal, to the Soviet Union in 1976? Turns out not only had Gecas worked for SIS at the end of WW2, he’d … Read more
The killing of WPC Yvonne Fletcher in public view and for no apparent reason remains one of the most notorious murders of recent decades. For sixteen years there have been few signs of any serious attempts to locate and bring to justice the perpetrator of this outrage. Finally, this April, in an outstanding piece of … Read more
Introduction What follows is an interim report about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. In so far as it has a central thesis, it is that Jones initiated the Jonestown massacre because he feared that Congressman Leo Ryan’s investigation would disgrace him. Specifically, Jones feared that Ryan and the press would uncover evidence that the … Read more
Dick Russell New York: Skyhorse, 2008, h/b, $24.95 Russell wrote The Man Who Knew Too Much, about the late Richard Nagell. A couple of weeks before the assassination of JFK, Nagell walked into a bank, fired two shots into the ceiling and waited for the police to come and arrest him. Years later he claimed … Read more
You might remember the red sofas, leather Chesterfields recovered in quieter fabric. You might remember that the talking didn’t end at any specific time, unique in an era when all television channels closed down at night. You might remember Oliver Reed getting drunk, although he was hardly the only disruptive guest. Reading Norman Baker’s book … Read more
The Kent and Sussex Courier is the archetypal regional conservative daily. It reflects an area that returns Conservative candidates for Parliament and Council like Alabamans would return ‘yellow dog’ Democrats. One recent police raid in ‘the war on terror’ was on an Islamic school, Jameah Islamiya, in Crowborough, East Sussex.([1])It is possible that the authorities’ … Read more
The drip feed of information on the attempted assassination of President Nasser continues. In a recent episode of the Channel 4 TV series ‘The End of Empire’, Sir Anthony Nutting, former Minister of State at the Foreign Office, who later resigned over Suez, recalled that he had been “horrified” to receive a telephone call from … Read more
