THINLY SPREAD FACTS

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33728, 28 December 1974, Page 9

THINLY SPREAD FACTS

Operation Splinter Factor. By Stewart Steven. Hodder and Stoughton. 249 pp. The prospective readers of thus book could be fooled by the “unsolicited testimonials” on the dust jacket. John le Carre writes; "Fascinating and appalling. Stew'art Steven has unearthed a dreadful tale.” Ladislas Farago (another author) writes a veritable panegyric. By the time the end of "Operation Splinter Factor” is reached the ambiguity of le Carre'c "appalling” and “dreadful”, can be fully savored, and it is obvious that the other author has written a farrago of nonsense. In his preface Mr Steven says that he was working in an area where the facts were spread thinly over a ground covered with half-truths and lifts. “Necessarily, I have had to rely on verbal evidence; documents and files are simply not available.” He might have used “oral” instead of "verbal”

so as not to compound the confusion, but that is just in parsing. In other words Mr Steven has nothing to bark up his contention that he is revealing what he seems to think is the greatest piece of international trickery since the Trojan horse. And he is well covered; he r>ays that "under current regulations the material. .. will never be made available to historians." Faced with a bundle of conjecture, rumour, gossip, innuendo, and just plain rubbish of this kind, an author worthy of his salt would not have bothered to publish. It is Mr Steven* first book. He must have been desperate After all this, it hardly matters what the book is about. For the record, however, it purports to deal with espionage events, especially involving the United States, leading up to the Communist show trials in East Europe in the early 1950 s — the trials themselves being just about the only unassailable historical facts in the book.