For some time, the world’s secret services have been making use of loose structures parallel to the official clandestine hierarchies for their more controversial activities. Fred Holroyd’s revelations have shown how the British state employed Loyalist paramilitaries for kidnap and assassination operations in Eire, whilst the Irangate hearings have exposed what is, so far, the … 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
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
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
Who was who? The newly published Oxford Dictionary of National Biography not only surveys the lives of the great and the good, but also includes accounts of individuals in the murkier fields of human endeavour. Over fifty spies are listed, for example, including historical figures such as ‘Parliament Joan’ (c1600-1655?) and ‘Pickle the Spy’ (c1725-1761). … Read more
The assassinations of the sixties JFK Farewell America On the site of The Coalition On Political Assassinations(1) is a very interesting essay by William Turner, ‘RFK, Charles de Gaulle and the Farewell America plot’, about the events leading up to the publication of the book Farewell America about the Kennedy assassination.(2) This may be marginalia … Read more
