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
[…] and thoroughly documented book is a history of the most important of those recent contests, from the debate in the 1970s over the scale of the Soviet missile ‘threat’ through to the invasion of Iraq.(2) Essentially, the CIA has been in an impossible position. Tasked with surveilling the entire planet, which can’t done, even […]
[…] Defence against which missiles? There is one section of the John Diamond book on the CIA, reviewed below, which deserves picking out. Diamond points out that the missile defence system which the US is deploying, apparently against ‘rogue states’, is not to defend the US against nuclear attack by ‘rogue states’ but to enable […]
The privatisation of part of the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) has been generally reported as a financial scandal. More important is what it tells us about the politics of New Labour. There are two dimensions to this: first there is New Labour’s commitment to big business and in particular to … Read more
[…] the development of the nuclear industry, at the expense of miners’ jobs. This is both an expression of US strategic involvement in British politics (around the cruise missile issue) and Mrs Thatcher’s desire to smash the trade unions.(10) In particular, I make the point that Troy Kennedy-Martin wrote Edge of Darkness after Rob Green […]
[…] to handle those uncouth Yanks, to hold their hands and cool their tempers. For example: There was Penkofsky, who not only saved the world during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but had been rebuffed by the Yanks; and then there was Gordiefsky on hand to whisper in Mrs Thatcher’s ear that Gorbachev was on the […]
