The SAS, MI6 and the War Whitehall Nearly Lost Nigel West Little Brown and Company, 1996, £16.99 There are two substantial essays in here, one about the SAS raid on the Argentine mainland which didn’t take place, and the other about the SIS operation to prevent the French delivering any more Exocets to the Argentine … Read more
The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs Douglas Valentine London/New York: Verso, 2004, h/back, £20 This comes garlanded with praise from Jim Hougan and Anthony Summers. The praise is justified: this is, as Hougan says, ‘a ground-breaking work of investigative reporting’; and it is, as Summers says, ‘a … Read more
Accountability I will be discussing a non subject – the accountability of the intelligence services. By accountable we mean the ability to be brought to account, to be answerable for their actions, to be subject to scrutiny and ultimately to have their actions adjudicated upon in a court of law. I will be looking at … Read more
Nicky Hager Craig Potton Publishing Box 555, Nelson, New Zealand $25 (New Zealand) 1996 Sample chapters at http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/sp/ This was mentioned briefly in the Guardian some months ago. Hager has done a Duncan Campbell and stitched together, in incredible detail, New Zealand’s contribution to the NSA-run global network of communications interception. But his work goes … Read more
Do they talk like this? At < www.lewrockwell.com/cummings/cummings29.html > there is a very interesting piece by Richard Cummings about the CIA and publishing; agents and operations are named. At the top of the article is this quote. ‘We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine, and other great publications whose … Read more
Obituaries Ace Hayes (1940-1998) by Daniel Brandt Ace R. Hayes, 58, an activist and political researcher who was well-known in the Portland, Oregon area, died on February 13, 1998 from an aneurism in the brain. Corruption and conspiracy in high places is the name of the game, but Ace was on the case. His broad … Read more
Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith Feral House, PO Box 3466, Portland, OR 97208 (), 1996, $19.95 Of all the current parapolitical ‘biggies’ floating around, the one I would not have enjoyed trying to piece together is this one; and I am grateful to Thomas and Keith for doing so. Casolaro was, on this account, a … Read more
It has been claimed (in Sunday News 20th Feb. and The Phoenix, 19th Feb.1983) that at the heart of the disclosures over the Kincora scandal is an internal row in the intelligence services. A dissident faction is thought to have formed in the Secret Service. The scuffles over revelations concerning Kincora started with the writing … Read more
Anthony Summers Gollancz, London, £18.99 Summers and his team of researchers have proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Hoover was gay and that he had been bought off and blackmailed by the Mob into ignoring organised crime. (I am less convinced by the evidence supporting the secondary allegations that Hoover was a transvestite.) Hoover, in … Read more
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke I.B.Tauris, London, 1992, £9.95. In his last paragraph the author concludes: ‘Books written about Nazi occultism between 1960 and 1975 were typically sensational and under-researched. A complete ignorance of the primary sources was common to most authors and inaccuracies and wild claims were repeated by each newcomer to the genre until an abundant … Read more
