[PDF file]: Using the Freedom of Information Act to keep things secret Colin Challen With the start date for fracking near the North Yorkshire village of Kirby Misperton almost upon us, there has been a marked increase in police activity in the area, with convoys of police vans driving around the narrow lanes surrounding the site. […]
[PDF file]: The higher strangeness Secret Life of Uri Geller:CIA masterspy? Jonathan Margolis London: Watkins, 2013, £8.99, p/b This is the second book about Geller by Margolis. The first, in 1998, was a biography, Uri Geller: Magician or Mystic? Writing that, Margolis began as a sceptic – assuming Geller was a fraud, essentially – and ended […]
[PDF file]: The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War Craig Whitlock New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021, £20, h/b John Newsinger The reporting across the British media on both the collapse of the Afghan regime and the defeat of the U.S. and its allies has been a total disgrace. Where was the discussion of […]
[PDF file]: SECRET HISTORY Writing the Rise of Britain’s Intelligence Services Simon Ball London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020. Around £17.00 p/b Robin Ramsay In the last 30 years or so academic writing on intelligence services in this country has gone from being a non-subject to an enormous field, far too big for any one person […]
[PDF file]: Contents The World That Never Was. A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Alex Butterworth London: The Bodley Head, 2010. Hbk. xii, 482 pp. Illus, notes, bibliography, index. RRP £25.00 ISBN 978-0-224-07807-8 Richard Alexander A s the subtitle suggests, this is a book with many stories, plots and subplots, all interwoven […]
[PDF file]: Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare Thomas Rid London: Profile Books, 2020, 513 pp, £10.99 Colin Challen The dissemination of disinformation is as old as the hills, and now, thanks to the Internet, its transformation from the analogue age to the digital has given it what Rid explains as a […]
[…] Munich, almost all of the Labour Party. Origins of The Focus The Focus was partly a dining club and partly a campaign co-ordinating committee. If not strictly secret, it was private and avoided publicity. For example, after attending his second Focus lunch on 6 April 1938, the National Labour politician Harold Nicolson wrote in […]
A guided democracy The following appeared in the Daily Telegraph 23 June 2003. ‘Edward Heath created a secret government propaganda unit to persuade the British people to accept the Common Market. Civil servants were engaged in a dirty tricks department of the Foreign Office to cover up the threat to sovereignty and provide rapid […]
[…] deceit.” – Peter Dale Scott The Watergate tag is appropriate to Kincora because, like that epic affair, an initial minor offence was the key that unlocked many secret doors. As James Angleton noted: “A mansion has many rooms.” The continuing leaks and revelations in Northern Ireland are gradually drawing in the higher echelons of […]
[…] earnest. Upon returning to the Dubai police head-quarters, Amin and Essam were informed that they could no longer conduct field interviews, (apparently at the request of Dubai secret services), and all interviewees (whether witness or suspect) would be invited (not compelled) to headquarters where the police would ask questions on Amin’s behalf. In addition, […]
