[…] I thought he would be likely to express them.”‘ In fact there is a quite an interesting account here, not only of the business of being an agent for SIS – presumably it is SIS, though other agencies are possible; and the author never quite resolves this – but also of the University of […]
[…] and the South Africans. Harold Wilson’s Cabinet Office is infiltrated. Rhodesian agents murder one of their own operatives who has turned against them in London, and another agent is killed by British intelligence after they and Special Branch monitor his activities. The agent, Geoff Dominy ….’ (emphasis added) Typical of Searchlight to make a […]
[…] Subtle arguments can become telescoped into punchy summaries that are sometimes oversimplified. Webb is most controversial when implicating the CIA, relying heavily on slippery phrases like ‘CIA agent’. To him it is important that in December 1981 a ‘CIA agent’, Contra commander Enrique Bermudez, ‘had given the goddamned order’ to Meneses and Blandon to […]
[…] as conventional ones, and the BLU-82 has been described as the nearest thing to a nuclear explosion. It would be an effective way of dispersing a chemical agent and destroying much of the evidence. (Why they would do this, given that the intention was to display a willingness to use chemical weapons against Iraq, […]
[…] at EARL. Records show that in 1971 the CIA provided EARL with $37,000 to test a classified glycolate compound, known only as EA3167. A potentially incapacitating psycho-chemical agent, EA3167 was tested on human subjects, including prisoners from Holmesburg Prison. One of the main objectives of the CIA in these tests were to synthesise radio-labeled […]
Operation Paget, the investigation by the team led by Sir John Stevens into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, briefly tried to investigate a collision between a white Fiat Uno and Princess Diana’s BMW. The head-on collision happened on 22 March 1996, on Cromwell Road, Kensington, when a casino employee lost control of a … Read more
The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs Douglas Valentine London/New York: Verso, 2004, h/back, £20 This comes garlanded with praise from Jim Hougan and Anthony Summers. The praise is justified: this is, as Hougan says, ‘a ground-breaking work of investigative reporting’; and it is, as Summers says, ‘a … Read more
[…] guerrillas and killed the following month. At the time of his death, both Uruguayan policemen and their victims testified to his role as a torturer. Another CIA agent, the Cuban Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, was later to reveal that Mitrione had once tortured four homeless men to death as a demonstration for his Uruguayan students. […]
[…] make this abundantly clear. MI5’s First World War offshoot PMS2 is given only a cursory mention by Curry. There is no reference to its employment of the agent provocateur William Rickard, who in 1917 framed a family of socialists (the Wheeldons) on trumped-up charges of plotting to assassinate Lloyd George. The Zinoviev Letter is […]
Langley Pierce Interproducts, Perth, Scotland, 1994, £9.95 Strange little book, 90 pages listing and, it claims, identifying the shortwave radio stations used by the world’s intelligence services to broadcast coded messages – groups of numbers – to field agents and stations. Want to eavesdrop on Mossad’s numbers? SIS’s? The KGB’s? etc etc. Is any of … Read more
