Daniel Ellsberg New York: Viking, 2003 Colin Challen MP The timely publication of Ellsberg’s memoir shows that from the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident to the Arabian Gulf in 2003, little seems to have changed in the United States’ approach to starting war. Ellsberg’s account of secret White House activity in the wake of the Tonkin … Read more
Apartheid’s friends: The rise and fall of South Africa’s secret service James Sanders London: John Murray, 2006, £11.99, p/b This is a tremendously impressive piece of work; and it’s big: 395 pages of text, another 100 pages of notes and sources and a decent index. I imagine that most of it will be new … Read more
Responsibilities, old boy The Big Breach Richard Tomlinson Cutting Edge, Edinburgh, 2000, £9.99 I found it hard to ‘see’ this because so much of its contents have been published in the media. There have been some changes – names altered – since the newspaper versions; and I am told that the original hardback version … Read more
Roundtable I get regular e-mail bulletins from an organisation called the roundtable – not the Round Table but somebody? some people? – trying to document the US ruling elite by the study of its organisations. Really they should be called Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) – because it is the CFR they mostly write about; … Read more
Colin Wallace On the Colin Wallace front, the big event since issue 17 has been Paul Foot’s book, Who Framed Colin Wallace? (Macmillan, 1989). With this book Paul Foot has re-researched and synthesised all the previous work and produced what is likely to remain the definitive account of Wallace’s biography, his allegations and – most … Read more
Mark Aarons and John Loftus Heinemann, London, 1991, £16.99 Mark Aarons, author of Sanctuary! Nazi Fugitives in Australia, was largely responsible for convincing the Australian government to reopen their war crimes investigations; John Loftus, author of The Belarus Secret is a former attorney for the US Justice Department Office of Special Investigations who investigated the … Read more
Peter Moon Sky Books £14.70 (including postage in UK) from Counter Productions, PO Box 556, London SE5 ORL I couldn’t resist the title or the blurb: ‘…..covers the German flying saucer programme, the SS mission to Tibet and Hitler’s quest for the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail…..’ But oooooooooh what a … Read more
Donovan Pedelty Prometheus Press, Builth Wells, Powys, £13.50 This is a fascinating book. As the Labour Party approaches its 100th birthday, Donovan Pedelty critically assesses the extent to which it has realised its aim. In a detailed and well-argued account, he shows that whereas Labour always espoused equality, nevertheless the gulf between rich and poor … Read more
The following is extracted from the book Sniffing Planes, Extreme Right, Intelligence and J. Violet by Pierre Pean (Editions Fayard, France, 1984). This, in turn, is based on a secret report written by a West German intelligence official, Hans Langemann, which was published in 1980 by Der Spiegel. Langemann was, at the time he wrote … Read more
Edited by Anthony Gorst, Lewis Johnman and W. Scott Lucas. Pinter/Institute of Contemporary British History London, 1991, £35 Goodness only knows what “politics and the limits of policy’ in the subtitle is supposed to mean. This is just a collection of essays on recent British history and was initially of interest because of the essay … Read more
