MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations Stephen Dorril Fourth Estate, London, 2000, £25 A Life: A. J. Ayer Ben Rogers Chatto and Windus, London, 1999, £20 Many books on intelligence matters simply rehash old ‘facts’, adding a new twist to – a slightly different interpretation of – well-known, if not necessarily well-understood, events. If … Read more
During the 1967 Six Day War the Israeli air force attacked a US sigint ship, Liberty, which was monitoring the radio traffic of the war. The official story, that it was an unfortunate mistake in the ‘fog of war’, began to come apart after an article, ‘Mayday! Mayday! The attack on the USS Liberty’, by … Read more
The Kennedys: The Conspiracy to Destroy a Dynasty Matthew Smith Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, h/b, £16.99, 2005 State Secrets: The Kent-Wolkoff Affair Bryan Clough Hove: Hideaway Publications, 2005, £15 (US $27.50) <www.statesecrets.co.uk/index.html> Matthew Smith has written several books covering the tribulations of the Kennedy family and is described on the book jacket as a screenwriter … Read more
Elite Jottings Fascinating letter in the Daily Telegraph (see 4 January and 9 January 1985) on the career of Dom Mintoff, recently retired as Prime Minister of Malta. Mintoff was a Rhodes Scholar (1939-41) and the 4 January letter informs us that “in the flush of the George Cross award (to Malta) he wanted integration … Read more
Luke Harding, David Leigh and David Pallister Penguin, 1997, £6.99 George Orwell said that Robinson Crusoe was a good example of a bad book, clumsily written but of natural interest due to its subject. The same is true here. Heroic and triumphant in tone, the troika of authors concentrate mainly on the paraphernalia, research and … Read more
The Secret Gold Treaty: the truth behind World War II gold, Nazi plunder and elite plans to control our financial future David Guyatt Deep Black Lies, 2000 $23 (U.S.) including p & p from the Deep Black Lies website: http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk/ For reasons of economy this has been published on a CD-ROM, but in most … Read more
Hi-tech computer voting is now the order-of-the-day in America. In October 2002 the US Administration passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) which authorised $4 billion for states to use the Direct Recording Election system (DRE) equipment which would have to meet certain standards (set by the Act) by the year 2006. At which point, … Read more
Tom Bower London: Fourth Estate, 2001, £6.99 After tackling the Paperclip Conspiracy, Klaus Barbie, Nazi medical experiments, looted cash from holocaust victims in Swiss banks and various tycoons (Rowland, Maxwell, Fayed) the latest target for a thorough Tom Bower investigation is Sir Richard Branson, though this is a tale on a smaller scale than … Read more
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed Clairview, East Sussex: 2003, p/back, £11.95 It is, perhaps, unfair to review a current affairs book, a year or so after its initial publication. In this age of the Internet and the speed at which information is passed between people and continents, what chance does any book stand of still being … Read more
BERR In a profile of John Hutton, the new Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Hutton said that Labour ‘is the natural party of business’,(1) another benchmark (or, in Corinne Souza country, ‘rebranding’) in the shift from old to New Labour. For it was Harold Wilson’s boast that he had made Labour … Read more
