Iraqi documents Iraq on the Record () is a searchable collection of over 200 specific misleading statements made by Bush administration officials about the threat allegedly posed by Iraq. The collection would be even larger if it also included statements that appear mistaken only in hindsight. However, if a statement was ‘…an accurate reflection of […]
I don’t agree with the BassettMatthews line (‘War and peace plots’, Lobster 51) on (i) Chamberlain’s flight to see Hitler in the Munich cri sis (it was to avert a war, not a coup) and (ii) Philby’s criminal responsibility for prolonging World War Two. The latter point credits far too much influence to one […]
[…] I’d seen something like this in Anthony Verrier’s book. There it is on p. 255. Describing the British ‘attempt to sustain counter-revolution in Arabia’, Verrier notes that SIS opposed it ‘because, all other factors apart, it degenerated into a matter of bribes to the wrong people – 30 million, to be exact, laundered through […]
I have been scrutinising in some detail the Curry Report, The Security Service: its problems and organisational adjustments 1908-1945 –– the in-house history of MI5 which was written by John Court (‘Jack’) Curry (1887-?), a senior MI5 officer, during 1944-6. In so doing I have solved one of the great mysteries about Maxwell Knight. Anthony … Read more
[…] Islamic Fighting Group, our former enemy’s enemy, is our enemy. Libya’s new status as ‘friend’ is visible elsewhere. Con Coughlin, often a guide to the thinking within SIS, commented in The Sunday Telegraph, ‘Ratcheting up to the next war’ on 9 October, on the British policy of ‘kow-towing to the Iranians’. Wrote Coughlin: ‘As […]
A Channel 4 SOE mystery In January and February this year Channel 4 broadcast a history of the war-time Special Operations Executive, SOE, written and presented by the novelist Sebastian Faulks, called Churchill’s Secret Army. It was an interesting series with some excellent first-hand material and footage. But there were two mysteries. The first, and […]
[…] about the source or his ‘intelligence’. As Lord Butler commented dryly in his report: ‘It would have been more appropriate for senior managers in the DIS and SIS to have made arrangements for the intelligence to be shown to DIS experts rather than making their own judgements on its significance’.(7) By keeping Jones out […]
[…] of his in Punch – issue 93 in the present, post Al Fayed, takeover series – he comments on the hypocrisy of his persecution while the former SIS officer with the pseudonym Alan Judd, gets access to the diary of early MI6 chief Mansfield Cummings: ‘I know Alan Judd’s real name, but I can’t […]
When I commented on the lack of supporting material for the Operation Splinter Factor the sis (in issue 22), I somehow managed to omit the account of it in William Blum’s The CIA: a forgotten history (Zed, London 1986) pp. 59-61. But that is taken entirely from Stewart Steven’s book and his sources. To […]
[…] with these key questions: how is it that the super-rationalist West, with all of the massive resources of the CIA, TIARA (Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities) and SIS, were completely unable to stop a few guys with Stanley knives flying jet planes into the World Trade Centre? How have the security and intelligence forces […]
