[…] that I must be arrested ……’on principal’ ……To let Private Eye get away with publishing it would ….. ’cause jealousy’ in Fleet Street and thus injure MI5’s secret public relations. My informant urged me to go back to Ireland, while the going was still, possibly, good.’ (pp. 410/11) Hollis was acting in his usual […]
[…] found out), but equally it was not a totally sovereign ‘foreign’ state with which formal diplomatic relations could be established which would allow the operation of the Secret Intelligence Service on a formal basis. Co-operation, at least in the formative years of the southern state, was always problematic, not least because many senior British […]
[…] An Bill Moyers has noted, “seducing the press was critical” to JM/Wave’s maintenance in Miami; the CIA secured “explicit agreements with the press here to keep their secret operations from being reported, except when it was mutually convenient … It amounted to a massive conspiracy to violate the country’s Neutrality Acts and other federal, […]
[…] you certainly can fool some of the media some of the time, especially the bits that have or have had a covert relationship with the Anglo- American secret states. Legend got tons of favourable publicity from the Anglo-American right media. It wasn’t just the Stone movie, of course, which transformed the climate: more that […]
Luke Harding, David Leigh and David Pallister Penguin, 1997, £6.99 George Orwell said that Robinson Crusoe was a good example of a bad book, clumsily written but of natural interest due to its subject. The same is true here. Heroic and triumphant in tone, the troika of authors concentrate mainly on the paraphernalia, research and … Read more
[…] strategy of tension period when Israel was battling with Italy for the ear of the US in the Mediterranean and Ledeen became involved with SISMI, the Italian secret service. From Italy, Ledeen moved back to Washington where, during his CSIS spell, he played an important role in the so-called Billygate incident, when the brother […]
Unfree press A recent release of previously undisclosed documents reveals that J. Edgar Hoover ordered the FBI to carry out the illegal surveillance of newspaper labour activists during the 1940s. Also revealed is the fact that informants included journalists who wanted Communists removing from the leadership of the Newspaper Guild.(1) Only following orders Psychologist Stanley … Read more
[…] television version of John le Carré’s 1974 novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It depicted the tempting of senior UK espionage moguls with a one-off, spectacular solution to Secret Britain’s ills, a Soviet super-spy who would get us back in with the Americans and restore our standing in the world. In the real world, this […]
[…] documents published with the Pentagon Papers have confirmed) relied heavily on the opium growing KMT troops of the Burma-Laos-Thailand border areas and their contacts with the pro-KMT secret societies in the overseas Chinese communities. (19) Through its ‘proprietaries’ like Civil Air Transport (CAT) and Sea Supply Inc., the CIA had provided logistic support to […]
[…] book that while he was entitled to non-attributable briefings from the MOD, he chose not to have them while writing it. While non-attributable briefings are hardly a secret, the well-behaved media servant of the British state doesn’t generally mention them. In the first and best section of the book, Urban takes as his starting […]
