Barry and the boys The CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History Daniel Hopsicker Venice (Florida): The Madcow Press, 2006, $19.95, p/b Barry is Barry Seal and ‘the boys’ are the CIA. There is a decent Wiki entry for Seal which conveys the outlines of his extraordinary life as a pilot, large-scale drug smuggler […]
[…] recent Executive Order 12958 on secrecy, Daniel Ellsberg on current secrecy, NSA employee handbook, classified programs list, links between Groom Lake and Air Force Plant 42 ( secret defence sites), national security airstrips in the California desert. Links to other secrecy-related websites, eg Federation of American Scientists’ secrecy and government project, Dept of Energy, […]
[…] free-floating entity independent of Moscow Gold or control. The KGB line is close to being abandoned. The 1970s in Northern Ireland were really the last time our secret state seriously tried to market the Moscow connection, without notable success. The Moscow line conspicuously failed in this country in 1983/4 when it was half-heartedly run […]
[…] to have been in Paris on the night of the crash was Richard Dearlove, the then Director of Operations. In 1998 he became Assistant Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service and the following February he succeeded Sir David Spedding as Chief. See Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Spy chief comes out of shadows’, The Guardian 26 February […]
[…] 51 he writes of a ‘part-time consultancy for IRD’; and on p. 86 that IRD ‘put an office at disposal.’ He also boasts of ‘dealings with the secret services of many other countries including France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Israel, Morocco, Iran, Argentina, Chile and Taiwan.’ As early as p. 20 it is […]
[…] KEVIN McNAMARA: To ask Mr. Attorney General, if he will prosecute Mr. Colin Wallace, former senior information officer, Psychops, Army Headquarters, Norther Ireland for revealing details of secret service operations against Her Majesty’s Government in the period 1974 to 1979 in the magazine Lobster in April. Member’s Constituency: Kingston Upon Hull North (Lab) Answer: […]
[…] on the authorities’ attitude to anarchism. My piece had merely referred, in general terms, to the official convention, observed for the past 120 years, not to place secret documents in the Public Records Office. Unbeknown to me, the then well-known author Raymond Postgate nursed abiding anger against official obstructionism. He was writing a book […]
Henry Brandon died (Obituary, Independent, 23 April, 1993). Brandon was one of the post-war school of journalists who were happy to act as mouthpieces for the secret services and foreign policy establishments of the NATO bloc. Had he been on the Soviet side of the Cold War, he would have been long dismissed as […]
[…] price stated This is worth skimming through, especially for the early 1950s period when Beeston was very close to SIS operations in the Middle East. These early chapters convey very clearly how the patriotic British journalist of the period rubbed shoulders with his country’s ‘ secret agents’ and never found them worthy of professional interest.
[…] of documentation and notes, this is a model of its kind. A model of how not to do things is Andrew Murray Scott and Iain Macleay’s Britain’s Secret War: Tartan Terrorism and the Anglo American State (Mainstream, Edinburgh, 1990. With only the slightest acquaintance with the ‘Anglo-American state’ (calling MI5 ‘DI5’, for example, and […]
