Clint Eastwood Movies Flags of Our Fathers, directed by Clint Eastwood and to be released in Britain in December 2006, is an example of post-9-11 PR. It tells the story of the 1945 battle for Iwo Jima and has been described as the first film in which the balance of combat and public relations has … Read more
[…] friend in the sixties of another CIA station Chief, Archie Roosevelt. (10) Both Brown and Gaitskell later received secret briefings from Cooper and Roosevelt on the Cuban Missile Crisis. This relationship with United States agencies developed when Brown accepted ‘one of the American Congressional Trusts which enabled me to spend six weeks in the […]
See note(1) By some standards, the loss of 269 souls aboard Korean Air Lines flight 007 on August 31, 1983, was a modest disaster. The Titanic, for example, claimed 1503 lives; the Lusitania 1198. But historians may come to believe that the political implications of the downing of the civilian 747 airliner by a Soviet … Read more
Covert Action: The Roots of Terrorism Edited by Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003, £14.95 The Politics of Anti-Semitism Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair Oakland (US) and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2003, £9.00/$12.95 The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century Scott … Read more
[…] Need to Know. The authors are Aleksandr Fursenko, a Russian historian, and Timothy Naftali, a ‘fellow in International Security Studies’ at Yale. It’s mainly about the Cuban Missile Crisis, drawing on what are described as declassified KGB and other Soviet intelligence materials. The Nation review was generally favourable, with the exception of references to […]
[…] Iraq, I was informed. Heavy casualties resulted. The operation, directed by the Central Intelligence Agency, was a counter-strike, following an Iraqi Scud that fell on Israel. The missile had contained Sarin. Fuming, the Israelis had prepared to detonate a nuclear warhead high above Baghdad. Only the swift intervention of President George Bush forestalled a […]
Back to the future: the USA, the UK and Iraq The US threatens to attack Iraq and is backed by the UK. There are objections in the UN Security Council from Russia and France. A large task force is assembled. Guess what happens next? Not a lot. There is a diplomatic crisis temporarily resolved after … Read more
‘Isn’t it true that when those poor devils stop suffering it is through a loss of what you call psyche?'(1) The psychotronics era The former Soviet Union had a long history of programmes in energetics and psycho-energetics technology, known to the West as psychotronics. Until recently, the bulk of the initial work on the science … Read more
Let’s start with the easiest question: what do George Robertson, Chris Smith and Marjorie ‘Mo’ Mowlam have in common? They are, of course, all strong Tony Blair supporters in the new Labour Cabinet. And what about Peter Mandelson and Elizabeth Symons? Not yet quite Cabinet members, but both are key figures in the ‘modernising project’ … Read more
Why do they do this? In the previous issue I referred to the fictitious comments attributed by Tony Blair to a doctor in Africa. They’ve done it again. In February Blair’s spin doctor in chief, Alastair Campbell, claimed to have saved a man from being beaten by muggers, The Mail on Sunday (23 February) traced … Read more
