Michael Smith Gollancz, London,1996, £20 This is a curious and rather pointless book. In short chapters Smith attempts potted histories of MI5, SIS, signals and military intelligence. These are quite well done, but covering half a century in 20 pages, say, the chapters are barely more than sketches. (The Information Research Department gets a page!) … Read more
[…] was seeking additional aid to the Contras. CBS Evening News (7-28-88) – the only major network to cover the proceedings – reported on the testimony of DEA agent Ernest Jacobsen, who said that White House officials undermined a DEA probe of the Colombian cocaine kingpins by blowing an undercover informant’s cover when they leaked […]
[…] largish chunk of their subject matter has, in effect, been covertly controlled by the British state. Which is more or less what Brian Crozier was telling us in his memoir, Free Agent, wasn’t it? Notes See Tom Easton’s piece in Lobster 36. Dodds-Parker was also busy in the 1960s peddling smear stories about Harold Wilson.
Thanks to Terry Hanstock and Ian Tresman for contributions. Contributions, comments and info welcome. – My email address is Electronic Privacy/ECHELON The importance of taking advantage of the current debate about Echelon summarised by Nicky Hager: ‘…the lack of serious debate can protect the intelligence agencies from political accountability and control…..it is probably the … Read more
[…] one of the members of Rhodes’ circle, “a brilliant young graduate of Cambridge, Jan Smuts, who had been a vigorous supporter of Rhodes and acted as his agent in Kimberley as late as 1895 and who was one of the most important members of the Rhodes-Milner group in the period 1908-1950 …. became the […]
[…] with an alleged enormous Soviet disinformation offensive against the West. In this book Crozier reworks in much greater detail some of the sections of his memoir, Free Agent, describing three lawsuits in which he was involved which concerned alleged Soviet influence in Der Spiegel, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in the United States, […]
[…] 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 […]
Kissinger Commission Letter in International Herald Tribune 22nd January 1984 from one Eugene L. Stockwell who testified before the Kissinger Commission on Central America. He writes: “During my hour and a half testimony most of the commissioners repeatedly indicated that they believed today’s Nicaragua to be as bad or worse than Nicaragua under Somoza; Mr … Read more
[…] largely sympathetic feature. (Donald MacIntyre got very worked up about accusations that Tony Crosland could stoop to dirty politics and may well have been a CIA ‘ agent of influence’.) In response to the Ian McIntyre review I wrote a letter which included this. ‘I would have taken Mr McIntyre’s analysis more seriously however, […]
[…] foreign policy establishments of the NATO bloc. Had he been on the Soviet side of the Cold War, he would have been long dismissed as an “ agent of influence’. Former Liberal MP Michael Winstanley (Lord Winstanley) died in July. A long obituary in the Daily Telegraph of July 19 failed to mention Winstanley’s […]
