[…] own judgement before being inflected with ‘spin’. The reliability and accountability of information is going to be very different if it is from an accredited British intelligence agent, a Home Office civil servant, the Met, the Sussex Police Authority, someone from Number Ten (all theoretically ultimately answerable to the Commons at some stage) or […]
[…] laid etc etc. Along the way ‘West’ drops a number of tidbits: an intricate explanation, going back to pre-war days, of how Philby was really a triple agent; and a version of the ‘peace plotting’ circa 1940 by the British right which purports to demonstrate that the ‘plot’ was really a Soviet operation – […]
See note (1) This article explores the three pro-European Union propaganda campaigns mounted to date: in 1962-63 to secure public support following Britain’s first application to join the EU; in 1970-71 to prepare the public for accession; and in 1974-75 to ensure continued EU membership in the 1975 Referendum. For simplicity, the term European Union … Read more
[…] Inside BOSS, South Africa’s Secret Police Gordon Winter (Penguin, London 1981) “BOSS assigned me to monitor the activities of Richard Gibson (exposed in 1969 as a CIA agent), who was a talented journalist then representing Negro Press International and ‘Tuesday’ magazine. I discovered that Mr Gibson, born in California in 1931, was an amazing […]
Chip Berlet This 63-page essay describes a wide range of contacts between what in a British context would be described as right-wing conspiracy theorists and the left. Berlet documents a range of contacts between the far-right Liberty Lobby, followers of LaRouche, Bo Gritz and the Populist Party, the Christic Institute, Radio Free America and a … Read more
[…] into another book. They rehearse the fragments known about an apparent assassination attempt in Chicago on 2 November (and the fate of the first black Secret Service agent, Abraham Bolden, who was framed on a counterfeiting charge after trying to tell the Warren Commission about the Chicago attempt). But how serious was the Chicago […]
[…] probably be against the civilian population of large cities. It can be well imagined the degree of consternation, as well as fear and apprehension, that such an agent would produce upon a large urban population.'(6) Hamilton made a number of proposals for the elimination of large populations, among them ‘fission product aerosols to subject […]
[…] Americans did. After 1966 the counter-intelligence section of the CIA, headed by the loony James Angleton, came to believe that Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent; and CIA counter-intelligence was the ultimate source of much of the disinformation and smears about him and those around him in the middle 1970s. This may […]
The Spycatcher’s Encyclopedia of Espionage Peter Wright Heinemann, Australia, 1991 The cover-blurb says this is ‘the rest of the story’. It feels more like the out-takes from Spycatcher spiced with a few more fragments of interesting gossip. And I do mean fragments: the interesting bits of 260 pages — largish print and much white space … Read more
Counter-insurgency in Rhodesia J. K. Villiers (Croom Helm, London, 1985) An expanded Masters thesis, full of descriptions of psychological operations by the Rhodesian forces (which failed utterly: and no wonder, they were useless), and rather less about pseudo-gang activities which, like their equivalents in the British operations in Kenya, were a success – i.e. they … Read more
