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
[…] around. ‘He also told me that if you would pick up a fragment and call another investigator over to look at it with obvious interest, an FBI agent would come over and take it out of your hands and you would never see it again.’ (26) The positioning of the wreckage was another problem […]
[…] Butkevicius, was with Surikov at the London Centre.) We shall see that a third member, Ruslan Saidov, is said to have been paid as a CIA contract agent. One of the alleged purposes of the meeting at the villa – but not the only one – was to give the Yeltsin “family” what it […]
[…] I had taken from the headquarters of the South African Information Department in Pretoria) proving that he had been framed. Martin Dollinchek, alias Martin Donaldson (a BOSS agent who was captured when the CIA, MI6 and BOSS mounted a joint attempt to invade the Seychelles in an attempt to bring Boss’s agent of influence […]
[…] octane fantasist and paranoiac. Yet Spiesel was produced as a key witness and claimed to have been present with Clay Shaw and the aviator and low-grade CIA agent David Ferrie at a meeting whose main topic of conversation was how to murder the President. Why wasn’t Spiesel checked more thoroughly? What did this fiasco […]
[…] to make do with the Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft, executed by the Iraqi government for spying. (Was Petty thereby telling us that Bazoft was, in fact, an agent of MI6?) Mark Hollingsworth described another such I/Op, also run through the Sunday Telegraph, in the Guardian 30 March 2000. But then the Sunday Telegraph is […]
[…] conclusion possible from all of this is that Hollis was personally responsible for the Profumo debacle from start to finish. If Hollis was acting as a GRU agent, he couldn’t have acted with greater effectiveness.’ (p. 226) The facts are somewhat different. As early as mid-1961 Ward was being run by the Security Service […]
[…] It is improbable that MI5 (presumably) would have chosen someone like Wright for the job, presumably, of penetrating the KAU. And if this ‘Peter Wright’ was an agent for MI5, say, why would the Kenyan authorities have expelled him? ‘Wright’, surely, on being harassed, would simply have said, ‘Call the office.’ It might be […]
[…] an important and interesting book but rather hard to describe because it contains so much. At its heart is Souza’s father, an Iraqi Anglophile, who became SIS’s agent in Iraq, and later in London. Using her firsthand knowledge supplemented by her father’s papers, Souza has created a classic of the espionage genre: I know […]
Stakeknife: Britain’s Secret Agents in Ireland Martin Ingram and Greg Harkin Dublin: The O’Brien Press: 2004, £8.99, p/back Mad Dog: The rise and fall of Johnny Adair and ‘C Company’ David Lister and Hugh Jordan Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2003, £15.99, h/back Stakeknife is a former member’s account of some of the operations of the … Read more
