The Scotsman and the New Zealand Dominion
December 5 1988
Exactly eight years ago, President Elect Ronald Reagan huddled with his advisers in a little house in Jackson Place just across the road from the White House and planned the brave new world which they were going to create when they took over the reins of power [...]
The Scotsman and the New Zealand Dominion
October 1988
Mr Mark Goodwin, a spokesman for Vice President George Bush, adopted his most scandalised manner. “Someone who articulates that ought not to be allowed to operate heavy equipment,” he declared.
The idea which had so shocked Mr Goodwin was the suggestion that the release in Beirut last week of [...]
The Guardian, October 1988
Review of ‘Bullet catchers’ By Tony Geraghty
One of the many lingering images of the Falklands War is that of the thick-shouldered paratroopers jogging round the deck of their Task Force vessel chanting in time with the beat of their boots: ‘If-you’ve-got-a-low-I-Q-you-can-be-a-para-too.’
Apart from his authorship of the best-selling history of the SAS, Who [...]
The Guardian, October 1988
Review of ‘Journey Into Madness’ By Gordon Thomas
When the CIA set out to discover the magic arts of brainwashing and mind-control in 1952, its then Director, Allen Dulles, was clear about the kind of doctors he wanted to work on the project. ‘Each person’s ethics must be such that he would be [...]
The Guardian, September 1988
Review of ‘Blacklist’ by Mark Hollingsworth and Richard Norton-Taylor
For some years now the secret state, the whole contraption of British security, has been so menacing and yet so intangible that the most effective way to write about it has been in a kind of fairy story in which the state replaces the [...]
The Scotsman
July 26 1988
The secret life of Major David Walker started to unravel early last year when investigators in Washington, who were pursuing the endless avenues of the Iran Contra scandal, opened a safe which had once belonged to the disgraced White House aide, Lt Col Oliver North, and found a scrap of paper with [...]
The Scotsman
July 1988
It was just before eleven o’clock in the morning on July 20 1982 when a group of Horse Guards riding through Hyde Park in central London were torn apart by a blizzard of six-inch nails hurled from a car bomb which had been planted on their route. Four soldiers and seven of their [...]
The Scotsman and the New Zealand Dominion
April 11 1988
President Reagan stands by his friends.
His former aides Oliver North and John Poindexter are indicted
under an avalanche of evidence in the Iran Contra affair; the
President announces that they are innocent and drops hints all
over Capitol Hill that he will pardon them before he leaves the
White House.
His former [...]
The Scotsman and the New Zealand Dominion
January 26 1988.
In the sweeping grounds of a Virginian mansion, not far from Washington DC, two rich and powerful men took a stroll one Sunday afternoon early in 1985. They walked slowly and spoke quietly; after a while one of them took a piece of paper from his pocket [...]
The Scotsman
January 19 1988
It was the kind of event which the British Government encounters only in its nightmares – not one or two but fifteen former intelligence officers, possessing collectively many of the nation’s most sensitive secrets, gathered together with one express intent, to talk to the press about their work. And, even worse, getting [...]
