A history of ASIO and National Surveillance Frank Cain Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009, p/b, $39.95. ISBN 978 1 921509 322 Frank Cain was just a name to me but a little googling showed that he is Australia’s leading academic historian of intelligence and security history. This history of ASIO and its antecedents – more … Read more
[…] With Wilson dead, we only have Joe Haines’ word for this. Should we believe Joe Haines? Why do I always get the feeling that Haines was a spook? What with the new book, Rinkagate, and the ‘Secret Lives’ programme on Channel 4 in November on Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott, this is deja vue, […]
[…] and occasionally assisted MI6 in the 1950s and 60s, an experience which has left him a cheerful cynic. He canters briskly and amusingly over the field of spook foul-ups in the post-war period to ‘show the pointlessness of so much of the work of the intelligence services everywhere.’ The result is an entertaining but […]
[…] the size of the secret intelligence budget (estimated at $26-28 billion per year) and giving enhanced power to the Director of Central Intelligence to manage all thirteen spook agencies. The bi-partisan presidential commission was created by Congress in December 1994, and heard testimony from present and former intelligence officials: it recommended the elimination of […]
Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA Jim Hougan (Random House, US 1984) Those who read Hougan’s last book Spooks will know that the arrival or a new one is something of an event. As expected, his latest has so many trails to follow, intriguing little titbits to ponder that one read is insufficient … Read more
[…] allies share all intelligence with the Soviets. (3) Back to philosophy After demobilisation, Ayer returned to academic philosophy, though he kept his hand in as a spook, working part-time for MI6 at Broadway as a political analyst. In this he was joined by Goronwy Rees, later to have his own difficulties within the […]
[…] collection of reports and essays from Intelligence, mostly of single events in the parapolitical calendar. For British readers, there are essays on the murder of junior British spook Jonathan Moyles; Dr Bull and the ‘supergun’ and Bull’s murder; framing Libya for Lockerbie; the Chinook crash which killed a large section of the British intelligence […]
Weird Web Professor Peter Dale Scott reported the following in March. ‘Four times today I have tried to go to www.counterpunch.org. And four times Netscape was unable to find it. This happens frequently on my computer to websites which share my opinions, or to which I am hotlinked. And when I searched for ‘Alex Cockburn’ […]
[…] Political Economy to 9/11.() As for me, I have to admit to still being puzzled as to why WTC7 collapsed despite not being struck by a plane.() Spook histories Keith Jeffery, Professor of British History at Queen’s University Belfast, has been signed up to write the first official history of the Secret Intelligence Service. […]
[…] spirit and always will be.’ Even if I knew what ‘the human spirit’ meant, this is manifestly falsified by the slaughter-strewn history of the 20th century. A spook by an other name In the New Statesman of 27 September (3) there was a very interesting account by Observer journalist David Rose of his becoming […]
