[…] US intelligence operative. Werbell has been termed a ‘creative genius’ by weapons historians for his designs of noise suppressors for automatic weapons and for his other ‘silent kill’ devices. He has been called the ‘principal supplier of the CIA’s most sophisticated weapons’ (in ‘Ken Burnstine’ by Gaeton Fonzi, in Gold Coast May 1982). Werbell’s […]
The story of the Ulster Citizens’ Army (UCA for the rest of this essay) is a tiny fragment in the intricate history of Protestant politics in Northern Ireland in the mid 1970s – so tiny that none of the general accounts I have looked at even mention it. But the UCA lingers on: it is … Read more
[…] that the KGB was indeed behind the papal plot, prompting Casey in 1985 to order Robert Gates to commission Text No. 7, tendentiously entitled “Agca’s Attempt to Kill the Pope: the Case for Soviet Involvement”. Text No. 7, said by Gates in a cover memorandum to be the “CIA’s first comprehensive examination of evidence […]
US deception operation blowback The e-newsletter stuff (1) ran this fascinating piece around 15 March. ‘At the Princeton conference last Saturday, Raymond Garthoff, a distinguished historian now with the Brookings Institute and a former CIA analyst, mentioned that we had recently learned of an FBI-Army double agent operation that may have spurred the Soviets to … Read more
[…] out early, as if they had known in advance that the rescue mission would “fail.” Iran’s police and military had also been pre-alerted, and were waiting to kill all American hostages, agents and diplomats had the operation gone forward (Rebel, Jan. 1984). The Rev. Charles Moore, then of Houston, Texas, was in Tehran at […]
[…] numbers of Kenyans. Figures vary but maybe more than 30,000 died. (Ferudi is unable to completely conceal this from his reader and notes that in 1956 “the kill rate remained high’.) Secondly, he has nothing at all to say about the British secret state’s attempts to contain and deflect Kenyan nationalism. In other words: […]
Turning up the Heat: MI5 after the Cold War Larry O’Hara Phoenix Press, London, 1994, £6 (p and p included) from BM Box 4769, London WC1N 3XX; cheques payable to Larry O’Hara. Since 1945 MI5 has had three main domestic targets: Soviet bloc espionage, the British Left and the IRA. With the Soviet target gone, … Read more
From: M. R. D. Foot Scott Newton’s footnote at the end of his piece on Hess, in your number tries to keep alive Dr Hugh Thomas’s tale that the pilot who reached Scotland could not have been Hess, because he bore no trace of the gunshot wound the real Hess had received in Roumania in … 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
[…] the Reagan administration of an embarrassing individual – Larry McDonald. (The source of the embarrassment is detailed below.) Flynt’s hypothesis seems implausible (there are easier ways to kill people) but, as Flynt points out, Howard Hunt’s wife, Dorothy, was killed in a plane crash during the Watergate mess in very peculiar circumstances. (On this […]
