Book Review of the CIA Book Club by Charlie English

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Lessons we need to learn for the future from the past successes and failures of the CIA

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher)

This is an heroically-researched (in the face of Covid restrictions) and well-referenced book about one of the CIA’s most ethical covert operations, which was much more successful than any of their known, less ethical overt operations. Between the nineteen-fifties until the very beginning of the nineteen-nineties, the CIA encouraged, funded and organised the supply, by divers routes, of books and other literature to people living in Communist countries. In this case that means “Warsaw Pact” countries in general and Poland in particular, mainly because that’s where the Books Programme found most traction: it doesn’t seem to have even been attempted as far as Laos or Cambodia are concerned.

One of the ways in which this programme was ethical was a reluctance to incite violence and when this was attempted, towards the end, much against the instincts of many of the Polish dissidents involved, things went very wrong, very quickly (but too late in the day to matter all that much). The other way in which the programme was unusually ethical by CIA standards was that in the first instance the literature smuggled into Poland was anything and everything that Polish people might be interested in and was censored by their own government. It was propaganda, but in a very different sense from Communist propaganda because the idea was to encourage people to think for themselves rather than to stop them thinking at all. Once contact had been established and the organisers had an address for someone who wanted banned literature (or even literature which would be banned if the Communists knew about it) efforts were made to meet any specific request or need. This in turn led to original creative material coming out of Poland to the West for publication and distribution to interested readers in the West as well as for redistribution to and within Poland. That two way street was probably the most important thing. The CIA wasn’t using the programme to gather military intelligence (they evidently kept that function entirely separate) but the political intelligence they got through the programme was priceless because it was what their Polish clients actually thought and more especially wrote, rather than what intelligence analysts guessed they might be thinking: the programme gave the Poles a VOICE and not simply books. Capitalism only beats Communism when the customer is allowed to exercise a choice: when choice is denied, liberal democracy dies and capitalism falls with it. The book programme was a cost-effective success because it was customer-led, if not quite based on the golden premise that the customer is always right. (The customer has a right to learn from making his own mistakes.)

Unfortunately, this was not true of very many other CIA programmes and a strong bias towards expensive failure can be detected in very many parts of the world; especially Afghanistan. And if the CIA even understood that Generals Pinochet and Galtieri were essentially the same thing as the Polish Communist military leader, General Jaruzelski, save that they were the CIA’s men and under the CIA’s control: the CIA were only half right about Pinochet and wrong on both counts with Galtieri because both South American leaders were more willing to kill their own people on a large scale than Jaruzelski and Galtieri’s concept of a really smart move was to start a war with America’s most important ally. And that reluctance to exterminate rather than oppress is another reason why the book programme actually worked in the end by bringing about a free Poland, even if the CIA’s military faction believed that Communism (other than in China, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam…) fell because they had brilliantly achieved a free Afghanistan! Perhaps it’s a little unfair to judge that claim with the benefit of hindsight.

Jaruzelski did not want to lose power himself, nor did he want to see the end of Communism. But he was still Polish and didn’t want to fight a hot war with his own people if he could possibly negotiate his way out of it. And it was only because the Book Programme had given the Polish people a voice, despite his own best efforts, that there was anyone to negotiate with! He sent General Kisczak to the “Round Table” negotiations with Solidarity, which led to a new constitution and an election, and then it was those who’d published underground newspapers with the support of the Book Programme, who managed to grasp the very fleeting opportunity that an unexpected election, in which the Communists still seemed to hold all the cards, actually represented.

All this resulted, not from some great plan, or skilled psychological manipulation of the irrational masses by an enlightened oligarchical elite, but from simply giving the customer what he asked for and then letting him think for himself and take charge of his own destiny. That’s exactly what we in the West have had taken from us since February 2020 and that’s why this is the most timely and important book this reviewer has read in many years.

The CIA Book Club, by Charlie English is published in the UK by Fourth Estate/ William Collins on the 13^th of March 2025.

Book Review of Fair Play by Louise Hegarty

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A Locked Room Murder mystery novel where every conclusion is reached.

 

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher.)

This novel is set in two worlds: in the “real” present day world, a brother and sister hire a country house (in Ireland) and arrange a murder mystery holiday for themselves and their friends over the New Year, which is also the brother’s birthday. Then the brother is found dead, apparently by suicide, and the sister and the friends are left to cope with the aftermath. The sister tries to find closure where there is none and it takes her several months to accept that this is the case. (Does “closure” only exist in murder cases, in fact?)

From the morning that the brother’s body is found, however, a self-aware and self-referential murder mystery narrative unfolds, set in the same house and with equivalents to the same characters, but not in any particularly clear historical era and not even all that clearly in Ireland: the house and other nearby locations are in effect the whole world, which is often the case in that sort of story.

To begin with, this comes across as a co-authorship between Agatha Christie and Spike Milligan, but it’s actually cleverer than that and the author manages to sustain it for a whole novel. (Which is not the case with the one, to be found online, where Beatrice Potter writes “Peter Rabbit” in partnership with Sven Hassell.) Note to self: the Amazon AI won’t like that last observation one little bit, but leave it in for NetGalley.

The murder mystery really is the suicide’s sister coping with a situation where she’s never going to get any answers by trying out every possibility in her head, but it also neatly makes the point that ANY of the initial characters could turn out to be “the murderer” based on the available clues.

And that appears to be the way that Agatha Christie’s famous stage play works: the murderer rotates through the cast week by week.

It is very clever and very enjoyable.

Fair Play by Louise Hegarty is published by Picador on the 3^rd of April 2025.

Film Review of Dr Aseem Malhotra’s First! Do No Pharm

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The film:

This is a documentary by a well-respected senior cardiologist about medical and business ethics and the ways in which both public health and public finances are being damaged by their abandonment. At no point is there a single mention of any “forbidden pandemic topics” and the scale of any ethical problem in the Pharmaceutical sector is measured by the impressive total of the fines ($33 billion and counting) imposed on companies in the sector, by American courts alone in recent years.

Dr Aseem Malhotra's First! Do No Pharm can be downloaded from this link:

https://cerealkillers.gumroad.com/l/nopharmfilm

Following premiers in Leicester Square, London, and at the US Congress, the film is downloadable for a fairly modest fee, which is preferable to a “pay per view” platform where potential reference material is concerned. There is no limit on the number of times it can be viewed and once downloaded it’s very hard to see how it might be censored by any lawful means. It is shocking to find that we live in a world where this should even be a factor where such an important, professional, expert and deeply ethical production is concerned, but that’s where we are and that is proof of a problem in and of itself.

Several different kinds of established and novel drug and other medical interventions are studied and what emerges from this is “regulatory and legislative capture” (by which is meant the establishment by medical-orientated industries of control over those regulatory and professional bodies and even laws intended to keep those industries working within the public interest and not against it). It further follows (and indeed also emerges) that medical journals and the whole process of publishing scientific papers following “peer review” has been captured likewise. Which means that any attempt to question or criticise new “research” or novel drugs and treatments has now been rendered difficult to the point where even to make the attempt constitutes career suicide.

This seems not just scandalous, but also utterly quite incredible, because it means that the business model of all the medical industries (and possibly others, but this is not addressed) is based on scientific fraud, and that the scientific journals are nearly all accomplices to this fraud. Then something else emerges in the film which, within about three sentences, makes all of this not only believable, but entirely credible:

The business model of the scientific journal sector was reformed and redefined by the “controversial” (to use milder language than the satirical paper Private Eye ever did) publishing oligarch and lifelong authoritarian socialist Robert Maxwell! And that business model makes the scientific publishing sector dependent on the sale of reprints of scientific papers to the very companies which sponsored or commissioned the authors’ research. There is no profit, not even a break-even point, in publishing any paper and especially any critical response to a sponsored paper which the research-sponsors do not like. And they are strongly inclined to “not like” anything which might adversely affect the licensing and sale of medical treatments or other products. (I note that it is remarkably hard to criticise offshore wind-turbines, for example.)

That a scientific publishing sector made in the image of a notorious pension-fund fraudster should be involved in a situation where it can be claimed that 70% of all new published scientific papers are fraudulent is not only wholly believable but sadly inevitable. Had the scientific publishing sector been based on the business model of Dick Turpin, Black Tom and Shock Oliver, one might have expected the publication of any scientific paper to be attended by the thunder of galloping horses, cries of “stand and deliver” (your paper, in a lecture theatre, of course) and the fizz-crack! of flintlock horse-pistols.

The treatments and drugs investigated include stents and statins, the painkiller “Vioxx”, anti-depressants (as a class, really), monoclonal antibody treatments for Alzheimer’s Disease and weight-loss drugs (also as a class.) As well as scandalous behaviour over trials for these drugs and treatments, (even the captured regulators do not get to see all the trial data if the sponsoring company wants to withhold it), the film notes a complete lack of any attempt to trial any of these drugs against even other similar drugs, let alone cost-free non-drug interventions such as lifestyle and diet changes. Throughout the film and from several corners of the world, real-world evidence that such interventions can work is presented, and it is quite clear that no healthcare system in the world can continue to ignore such simple solutions in favour of hugely-expensive, “pill every day for life” treatments whose risks and benefits have never been honestly established, without exhausting the ability of the national economy to support it.

Measured criticism of the film:

This is all well and good, but before I get to my list of “further reading” (I know it’s a film, but there are books that need to be read, too) I feel obliged to pick up on a grave risk which those involved in the making of this film seem to have missed, and that concerns the manner in which the weight-loss drugs mostly work. They variously inhibit the movement of food through the alimentary canal, especially the stomach (so the patient is physically prevented from eating very much) and/or they disable the “reward function” in the brain (so the patient feels no urge to eat, and experiences no joy if they eat or do anything else). The film-makers were very concerned about both things, because the latter seems likely to make very many patients dangerously depressed and both approaches lead to an equal loss of muscle mass to match any loss of body fat. There are all sorts of known health benefits to loss of body-fat (up to a point, beyond which it becomes a pathology in its own right), but there are no known health benefits to substantial loss of muscle mass and in the case of patients over fifty years old, that lost muscle mass will be very hard to replace, assuming the patient is ever allowed to stop taking the weight loss drugs. Many of the ways in which old people die involve a lack of strength: they are more likely to fall and less able to get back on their feet if they do, they may find themselves unable to rise from their bed or armchair and thus expire. The film makers are properly worried about this and advocate controlled weight loss through better diet and exercise rather than forced starvation, to consolidate muscle mass rather than lose it, so why do I think they are not worried enough?

Well, it’s like this: the weight loss drugs which stop food leaving the stomach effectively duplicate the impairment of the alimentary canal following wartime German medical treatment of patients with bayonet-inflicted stomach wounds. These patients are more visible to the eye of history than anyone in American or Commonwealth service who “benefited” from such surgery in world war two, because German officers in particular were expected to stay in uniform and perform “non-combat duties” (which could actually mean chasing resistance workers) basically until they died. And almost none of them survived for more than two years, most seem to have died within eighteen months. German army surgeons had two choices: patient gets the surgery or he dies. This is not the case with the weight-loss drugs, which are about to pushed upon tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of people who have not been bayoneted, in the absence of good data to show that patients will live beyond the period of the manufacturer’s drug trials, which seems to have been half the time it took German officers to die from their surgery.

Because the patient is being limited to a small intake of food, regardless of whether the food is nutritionally good or bad, and given that even major essential nutrients such as protein are being assimilated in insufficient amounts to even maintain muscle mass, almost all of the less obvious but vital nutrients are going to be kept out of the patient’s body, too. They may not all die with precisely the same symptoms, but if these drugs are taken for many months, patients may well die in droves and I cannot see a way of preventing this without banning drugs which indiscriminately inhibit food intake or uptake.

Further reading:

(Even the makers of the film need to try reading these, assuming that have not already done so.)

 

Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyel

For those who think they know all about “Big Pharma” and the worst it might do, here is a first-hand account of the worst which Bayer, the original Big Pharma company (which is still amongst the most powerful Pharma companies), actually did as soon as it was handed control of large areas of state policy:

This is available on Kindle, or at least it was. Here is a link to my review, which should link to where the book can be bought from:

https://mswritingshowcase.blogspot.com/2023/05/book-review-of-five-chimneys-by-olga.html

And for those who cry “that’s all we need to know” when they discover that there’s money behind a perverse political agenda: there is no such thing as “all we need to know.” The moment we allow that thought to enter our heads, let alone pass our lips, we are missing something. There is always something else we would benefit from knowing.

In the case of money and political agendas: when you find the money behind the first perverse political agenda, you will usually find that the people supplying that money are serving a different political agenda in their turn, in order to obtain that money in the first place. And so it goes up the chain until you find someone so wealthy that they (and probably their foreseeable descendants) can self-fund their every whim. At this point you have found someone who is driven by their own political agenda rather than that of any other person or group of persons. And if that person wasn’t mad to begin with, they soon will be once they have the whole world at their feet.

Bayer, the definitive Big Pharma company, is now supposedly a stand-alone entity, but was originally part of the I.G. Farben multi-industrial combine which was “Big Everything” and I.G. Farben never hesitated to put all of its financial muscle behind its political agenda, of which both world wars were part.

“Of Popes and Unicorns” by David Hutchings and James C Ungureanu

If you accept, or claim in the case of the makers of the film described above, that science has been “captured” by commercial interests, perhaps you need to know how science was first wrested from the non-profit-making hands of amateur (and mostly observational) scientists, many of whom were Christian clergy. Perhaps you also need to pay some attention to who the people who did this were, too. Because they were self-regarding authoritarian elitists to a man. (And to begin with, not one of them was female.) Anti-science and anti-Christianity are not opposites, nor is either of them right. They are what Mr George Galloway MP might describe as “two cheeks of the same posterior” and I would describe as two prongs of the same pitchfork. When the Devil organises a boxing match, both prize-fighters are going to lose, as are all the punters who place bets on the outcome.

My review of this frankly expensive book is here:

https://mswritingshowcase.blogspot.com/2024/05/book-review-of-popes-and-unicorns-by.html

Silent Invasion by Clive Hamilton

To help readers better understand how certain fields of governmental function might be “captured” by wealthy companies and what the word “capture” even means in this context, Professor Hamilton describes how the Chinese Communist Party (a political body not without its friends in Big Pharma in the West) set out to capture the Commonwealth of Australia: a work this is still ongoing. Not a part of the government, not even the whole Federal Government and all the State Governments, but the whole continent-spanning nation.

My review of this book is here:

https://mswritingshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/book-review-silent-invasion.html

As well as posting this review on my blog, I have posted it (in slightly edited form to remove links) on the site from which the film was downloaded. It could have been twice as long and I’d still have important things to say, so I make no apologies for it being the way it is.

Matthew K. Spencer

Book review of Bibliotherapy by Molly Masters

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Reading list system for keeping your head (and heart) together.

(this review is based on a review copy from the publisher)

 

After a certain amount of preamble, necessary to explain that the book is to help you to choose books to actually read depending on your condition and position at the time, the reader is presented with a questionnaire so they can self-profile both their own character and their condition of life. This results in a reading list to help the reader at that particular moment.

It’s probably a good idea to go through ALL the questions every time this book is resorted to, because even if a person’s character does not change over time (hopefully it matures) the person’s perception of their own character changes often, especially during an emotional or actual crisis. And sometimes this is going to work better than others.

Reviewing this kind of work is very difficult for a seasoned reviewer, because we might read almost anything without any thought as to whether it is good for our mind, let alone our soul, but the possible lists are mostly fairly sound and in some cases excellent. Almost any reader, at almost any point in their life, is going to benefit from reading “A Long Petal of the Sea” if they haven’t read it already. [That sentence will have to come out before this gets past the Amazon censor-bot!] The exception is a certain amount of selection bias in the list offered to those who might be pondering issues of gender identity. Where the dilemma is more about how to actually do things of a sexual nature, the only perceptible bias is towards encouragement to get on with the job.

There might be readers for whom this could have awkward consequences, but they probably won’t sue.

Bibliotherapy by Molly Masters is published by Harper Collins of the 12^th of September 2024.

Book review of the Witchfinder’s Assistant by Ruth Goldstraw

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Fighting superstition and injustice with faith and professionalism amidst the English Civil War.

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher.)

This is an engaging and absorbing historical novel set in a period when political, military and religious differences had separated most factions in England from the counsel of those who might have restored mercy and sanity and the author does a good job of conveying this. Sometimes this makes for an uncomfortable read, but it’s still compelling.

Parliament has the best of the soldiers and it is only they, and the servants and farmers, who supply any degree of professionalism. The Royalist soldiers are more of a rabble and feared by ordinary people. Parliament and the New Model Army will win, in part because they give ordinary people less to fear and resist, but also because they concentrate their efforts on the right objectives.

But members of Parliament and the magistrates acting in their name (but under no effective discipline during this period) have little concept of professionalism whilst the clergy on the side of Parliament are effectively in a bidding war with each other to prove their radicalism and “piety” in order to gain preferment once the war is won. They are all for rooting out evil and hanging it, whilst only a brave minority of Christians and those otherwise at the bottom of the social structure are feeding the poor and comforting the sick. In this splintered society, with “moral” leadership from the incompetent while the men of sense man the ramparts, predators of more than one sort have almost a free run. Except that Master (and former Captain) John Carne was too injured at the battle of Edgehill to man a rampart in the foreseeable future and is obliged to move, with his “strange” and somewhat vulnerable wife, to live in a small Shropshire village and seek employment with the excitable and agenda-driven local magistrate.

What starts out as an exercise in protecting his employer from embarrassment, soon sees Master Carne trying to protect an innocent from his employer’s desire for a witch-hunt , then solve a very real murder, then several murders, all in a community that would be better served by completing its physical defences against an inevitable Royalist attack. Then his employer, apparently frustrated by Carne’s patient dismantling of the first witch-hunt, comes for someone much closer to Carne. He has to summon his strength, his logic and his faith that his God does not do or countenance such evil, to win the fight.

(The next paragraph may need to be excised in order for this review to pass the Amazon “swim test!”)

At first sight the nonsensical nature of the unchallengeable assertions of fact by authority figures in the witch trials makes their evil seem comfortably far away from us in the 21^st Century, but whilst the legal system now has safeguards against such obvious nonsense, the nonsense that can be presented by prosecution counsel, admitted by the judge and go unchallenged by defence counsel just as long as it’s wrapped up in chants of pseudo-scientific jargon and backed by screens of state-funded power-point charts, is essentially the same. And the effect of baseless accusations backed by “evidence” made unchallengeable by false-science rather than false religious dogma also has EXACTLY the same effect of causing the innocent target of the accusations to doubt their own grip on reality and thus doubt their own innocence. In the 21^st Century as in the 17^th Century, real criminals known just how to exploit this sort of dogma and the madness it brings. This is an historical novel for our own times.

The Witchfinder’s Assistant by Ruth Goldstraw is published in the UK by Harper Collins on the 13^th of September 2024

Book Review of Operation Tulip by Deborah Swift

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Infiltrating the Gestapo and fighting famine.

 

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher.)

This historical adventure is set in that part of Northern Holland which remained in German hands after the failure of Operation Market Garden to secure a crossing across the Rhine. The circumstances lead intelligence chiefs in London to base their assessment of future Dutch needs on what is happening in the liberated parts of Holland (there’s all sorts of political battles between different Dutch factions who are supplying lots of information about their own position, which seems to be none of London’s business by this stage) whilst the success of the Gestapo and other NAZI security forces in crushing resistance cells is denying London even the most basic information on the state of things in occupied territory. And things in the occupied territory are almost unimaginably bad and getting steadily worse as the NAZIs punish the Dutch population still under their control for the liberation of the rest of the country.

Agent Ludo, who has been through so many sets of false papers that she’s almost forgotten who she really is, has to flee from a failed operation and is immediately tasked with befriending a senior German officer in the hope of gaining the information needed to rescue a senior resistance figure from custody and probable execution, not so much to continue the fight as to use his respected position with former resistance groups in the liberated territories to get across, to those who might actually do something about it, the crucial fact that the entire civil population of the occupied area is on the brink of starvation in a freezing winter without any fuel.

Everything for Agent Ludo goes from bad to worse, as it does for her fiancé who has embarked on a fairly hare-brained rescue mission despite having no clear idea about where Ludo is or what she is doing. This mirrors the general state of things in Northern Holland and anywhere else the collapsing NAZI regime still holds power. In the end, Ludo and her associates gamble and sacrifice everything, including their own lives in some cases, on the faintest chance of getting food to the starving population.

Ludo loses almost every battle she fights, but her victory is that she keeps coming back for another try until the SS and Gestapo begin to scarper or fold into mental breakdown and the RAF starts to airdrop food, unopposed, but also too late for many. This novel is morally uplifting but emotionally unsparing. A male author would have shied away from this, but it needed to be written.

 

Operation Tulip by Deborah Swift is published in the UK on the 12^th of September 2024 by HQ.

Book Review of Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa.

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A magical year and the triumph of innocence over loss.

 

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher)

This novel is set mainly in the Olympic year of 1972 and this is important because whilst America and the Soviet Union saw the Olympics as a platform from which to present their competing visions for the future of the world, Japan saw the Olympics themselves as a model of the world as they might like it to be and approached the games with wholehearted and innocent enthusiasm.

The story is narrated by a young girl, Tomoko, who has lost her beloved father and has gone to stay at her uncle’s house whilst her mother retrains to be able to support them both by herself. It’s an amazing house with a big garden, complete with pet pygmy hippo, “Pochiko” and there’s a whole household of fascinating characters for Tomoko to get to know. But she’s not “living with her uncle” as she expected, because he’s hardly ever home. Indeed, he only seems to reappear when Tomoko’s asthmatic cousin, Mina, has a health crisis requiring hospitalisation. (This happens several times.)

Mina seems very weak and frail, but also proves to have developed both her intelligence and her imagination to an unusual degree and Tomoko quickly comes to admire Mina and then to love her (she has to make a effort to correct someone who assumes they are sisters). Mina collects matchboxes with little original cartoons on them, and writes a little story inspired by the cartoon on each matchbox. This is an interesting discipline, because there’s a limit on the number of characters she can inscribe on a small matchbox!

The members of the household (including Grandma Rosa, who is German) all pursue their own daily routines, not avoiding each other at all, but not necessarily being interested by the same thing until the two girls develop an interest in volleyball when they realise that some of the Japanese men’s Olympic team are by no means bad-looking! They learn the rules and imagine themselves being able to play (the reality differs a little) and the whole household, like the country, becomes interested in the Olympics and especially the volleyball!

Then the Israeli team are taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists and athletes are killed. This is shocking and a huge disappointment to Japanese sports fans in general, and to Grandma Rosa and her family in general, because her sister’s family died in Auschwitz. (This does not imply she was Jewish herself: about six million Jews and Roma died in the Holocaust; the concentration camp system also claimed the lives of another five million or so people selected on non-racial grounds, or who simply got in the way of the SS.)

It is a tragedy and one which wounds Rosa and her family, but the games resume and continue, and the Japanese volleyball team wins the gold and returns as heroes. Not just because they won, but because they adhered to the spirit of the games throughout.

Tomoko’s uncle continues to be an intermittent presence and the girls continue to have adventures, including a meteor-spotting expedition to a reservoir in the mountains: they take Pochiko with them so she can have a nice nocturnal swim in the lake!

Christmas looms and Grandma Rosa takes charge, but there is a forest fire and a tragedy on Christmas day. The moment for Tomoko to go back to live with her mother is also drawing near and, perhaps inspired by the barely perceptible fluttering of an angel, she tracks her uncle’s other address down and, quietly but unmistakably, lets him know that Mina needs and deserves what Tomoko herself cannot have: her father’s presence.

 

Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa is published in the UK by Random House on the 15^th of August 2024.