[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Arms Control: Books: Oldies but Goodies



The below are just a few old classics I ran across while perusing the
NameBase web site (www.pirg.org). They are not new but for those of you
who are new to this topic you could do worse than reading onore or more
of them.

Brogan, Patrick and Zarca, Albert. Deadly Business: Sam Cummings,
Interarms, and the Arms Trade. New York: W.W. Norton, 1983. 384 pages.

Interarms (formerly Interarmco and officially the International
Armaments Corporation) is the world's largest private arms dealer, and
once had enough weapons in their warehouses to equip forty U.S.
divisions. The sole owner is Sam Cummings, who got his start working
with the CIA to procure weapons for the 1954 coup in Guatemala. By now
he has left the spook biz far behind: "I'm glad to be out of it, and I
prefer more humdrum deals. They'll throw you on the chopping block well
before they throw themselves, and in the end they're just as dumb as
you and I."

Interarms still has facilities in Alexandria, Virginia, where the first
warehouse began in 1955, but since 1960 Sam Cummings has resided in
Monte Carlo with a country place at Villars in the Swiss Alps. His
major warehouse is in Manchester, England (Cummings finds the British
arms-export regulations to be less vague than American regulations).
About 20 percent of his exports from Manchester are sporting guns, and
the rest go to foreign governments and armies.  Whether Interarms still
has CIA connections is open to question, and Cummings seems to enjoy
such speculation. It probably gives him a slight competitive edge when
dealing with Third World governments who wouldn't mind a piece of the
CIA's covert-action largesse.

Grant, Dale. Wilderness of Mirrors: The Life of Gerald Bull.
Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice-Hall Canada, 1991. 209 pages.

Gerald Bull was a brilliant scientist who specialized in the physics of
giant cannons. He received a doctorate at the University of Toronto at
the age of 22, and on March 22, 1990, at the age of 62, he was
assassinated in Brussels. Most observers believe that Mossad was
responsible, because at the time of his assassination Bull was building
a super gun for Iraq.

Bull's career as a scientist included classified work for both Canada
and the U.S. defense establishment. One of his research facilities
straddled the U.S.-Canadian border, and another was located on the
island of Antigua. Gerald Bull became a U.S. citizen, and his Space
Research Corporation (SRC) evolved into a multinational

[55 lines left ... full text available at <url:http://www.reference.com/cgi-bin/pn/go?choice=message&table=04_1997&mid=4404401&hilit=CIA> ]
--------------------------------

Article-ID: 04_1997&4428079
Score: 82
Subject: Re: Adolf Hitler's psychological profile/good book