Seymour M. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston: Little Brown, 1997) Seymour Hersh is one of those figures with no real equivalent in British journalism. For one thing, the budgets, the armies of fact-checkers and, indeed, the market for this sort of extended politico-analytical foray just does not exist over here. Writing from a … Read more
[…] outside the specialist field. His advantage is that he is looking for a much different sort of proof: simply to show the reach of the plot to kill Kennedy, and again he does it with a parallel construction. Oswald’s phone call to Raleigh, North Carolina, while in custody, becomes evidence that he was still […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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
Tony Geraghty Harper Collins, London 1998, £19.99 Before dawn one Thursday in December 1998 a team of six Ministry of Defence police raided the home of the writer and journalist, Tony Geraghty. After seven hours, they left taking his computer, modem, disks and work in progress, having charged him under Section V of the Official […]
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
[…] 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 […]
[…] tried’ (p. 68). Instead, the American star chamber focused on a 1984 Iraqi legal action against 148 individuals – who, during the Iran-Iraq conflict, allegedly tried to kill the president of Iraq near the town of Dujail – as a ‘crime against humanity’. No one knows how many conspirators were eventually condemned to die […]
[…] 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: […]
