It is a difficult time for Britain’s security and intelligence agencies. Not only have the old certainties collapsed with the Berlin Wall, Britain’s economy is in increasingly dire shape, and current levels of government funding for the agencies can no longer be taken for granted. (1) As a result, both the major agencies, MI5 […]
[…] conversations.(2) In this collusion the CIA had the support of a sister Mexican agency which it had helped to create, the Mexican Dirección Federal de Seguridad (Federal Security Police), or DFS. The DFS, before it was abolished because of its deep involvement in Mexico’s drug traffic, was a key agency in the Mexica Gobernación […]
An interesting piece by Mark Hollingsworth appeared in Punch of 23 May-5 June 2001, ‘Spooks in the House’, on intelligence and security personnel who become MPs. Some of the material was familiar but less well known were Raymond Fletcher, and Le Cercle. Fletcher was a Labour MP who was witch-hunted by MI5 as a […]
[…] had become the new Conservative leader, Goldsmith met Wilson. Latching on to Wilson’s concerns that his office and home were being bugged, Goldsmith volunteered his own private security company to sweep both premises, apparently finding and removing a number of listening devices.(4) Wilson awarded Goldsmith a knighthood in his 1976 resignation honours list, ostensibly […]
[…] the possible threats after 9/11’. Or take Stephen Holmes, a regular contributor to The London Review of Books and research director at the Center for Law and Security at New York University School of Law, who wrote: ‘….we can safely say that the following jumble of motives, seizing different actors at different times, contributed […]
[…] an essay by Richard Aldrich of Salford University, one of the small but growing numbers of British academics trying to incorporate the activities of the intelligence and security services into post-war British history. In his essay on the Special Operations Executive (SOE) after the end of the Second World War, Aldrich writes that ‘the […]
[…] regular sessions with him in White’s Club. Richards, a former co-ordinator of intelligence in the Cabinet Office, replaced Maurice Oldfield in May 1980 as overall co-ordinator of security in Ulster, and is now head of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Good connections for Wallace, still in prison. In September it was revealed that the Home […]
[…] They were the first company to envisage the possibility of business computers as early as the late forties. Computers at this stage were still matters of national security and much of the early research work was done by the Rand Corporation, the world’s first think tank, and originally a Cold-War front for USAF intelligence. […]
[…] and/or real estate, which is one reason why the dollar is being kept artificially low. In America’s case, this went wrong because of the introduction of extra security measures which meant hours of queuing/discourtesy at US airports, a good example of a well-known PR pitfall: the inability to align the strategies and policies of […]
[…] Wilson plots’; in Australia Gough Whitlam, Jim Cairns and the Australian Labour Party got Governor Kerr and the CIA; in Germany Willi Brandt resigned after a “ security scandal’; in New Zealand a series of domestic scandals blighted the Labour Party. Were these events connected? Co-ordinated? If so — and there is no evidence […]
