12. Spooks – U.S. After the disastrous Iranian hostage operations, the Pentagon created a new intelligence/covert ops unit called Army Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), also known, apparently, as “the activity”. Augmenting both the CIA and the Pentagon’s own DIA, ISA existed for at least a year without Presidential/Congressional knowledge or approval. The unit is […]
CIA: read all about it The most striking intelligence story since the last issue was Tim Spicer’s ‘CIA warns Barack Obama that British terrorists are the biggest threat to the US’.(1) It included this: ‘A British intelligence source revealed that a staggering four out of ten CIA operations designed to thwart direct attacks on […]
[…] single review. Most of it describes the IRA’s various campaigns against the British, not something I am interested in. However there is one rivetting chapter called, ‘The Intelligence War’, which anyone even slightly interested in the story of the British intelligence and counter-insurgency operations there in the 1970s and 80s ought to read. Reviewing […]
[…] Nixon and the bane of Kissinger have a perhaps neglected provenance in the administration of Lyndon Johnson. The crippling of the 455-foot USS Liberty, a SIGINT intelligence vessel run jointly by the US navy and the NSA, in a sustained two hour attack by Israeli bombers and torpedo craft at the height of […]
[…] covert operations during 1974, made possible by the presence of a British informer in the Gardai. Codenamed ‘the badger’, this informer was recruited by the Special Military Intelligence Unit, MI6’s connection with the RUC, and, although of low rank, was (and still is) in a key position to assist the British clandestine border crossings: […]
[…] work Dorril has firmly imposed his grip on a wealth of facts which reaffirm his place as one of Britain’s leading exhumers of the modern ‘security and intelligence community’. Whilst some of the earlier chapters do go over old ground, the later chapters tread into so far uncharted areas. This new ground, it is […]
[…] CIA, something he had always denied. There is this section from the memoir of senior KGB officer Oleg Kalugin, The First Chief Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West: ‘In the Communist sphere outside of Europe, we [KGB) worked closest with the Cubans…….The Cubans’ ardour also spurred them to take […]
[…] called Evald Mikson. Mikson, learned Sanden, had worked with the Germans when they invaded Estonia in 1941, and had interrogated a captured Estonian agent of Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. (One may imagine that in such circumstances – an Estonian working for the Nazis – such an ‘interrogation’ was, as British military-intelligence patois has […]
[…] Marine Corps Lieutenant General Pedro del Valle was also a friend of Admiral Charles Freeman (Ret.). (2) Freeman became the U. S. agent for Kenneth De Courcy’s Intelligence Digest after the war. De Courcy, in turn, had extensive contacts with far-right British military and intelligence circles favoured by the LEL. The LEL’s founder and […]
[…] para-military organisation GB 75 (Daily Telegraph 27 February 1985) Large, important piece on the tapping of internal and external communications, much of it in search of “economic intelligence” Article claims: British Telecom can monitor thousands of calls per day overseas calls are sent to GCHQ which runs them through a ‘voice print’ library to […]
