[…] of Talbot’s account of this conflict with the US military, is Cuba. For the military it was straightforward: the US had the strategic nuclear advantage (the ‘ missile gap’ had been forgotten) and thus could and should invade Cuba. Never mind even pretending to the world that it was a Cuban insurrection – the […]
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 […]
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
[…] 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 […]
[…] Cold War as at best irrelevant and at worst, in the right’s version, as a terrible mistake. In the other way of looking at it, the Cuban Missile Crisis had demonstrated that the Cold War had become so dangerous it had to be managed; and detente was that management. Detente had two major American […]
[…] and witty and with an instrumental view of sex like his own, but also a regular Cold War warrior. He is apparently unaware of Kennedy’s post Cuban Missile Crisis changes – the intention to withdraw from Vietnam and reduce military spending; and his desire for joint exploration of space with the Soviet Union.(2) Why […]
