[…] (in Sunday News 20th Feb. and The Phoenix, 19th Feb.1983) that at the heart of the disclosures over the Kincora scandal is an internal row in the intelligence services. A dissident faction is thought to have formed in the Secret Service. The scuffles over revelations concerning Kincora started with the writing of a book […]
Nicola Calipari’s death If the tragic death of ‘Nicola Calipari’, the international oper-ations chief of Italy’s military intelligence service, in March 2005, was, as has been alleged, a deliberate act rather than misadventure, it is one of the most recent examples of extreme PR ‘message management’ I can think of. () ‘Public relations’ is […]
[…] apparently perceived by some of those who have studied the case. Not that the idea of a meta-conspiracy isn’t attractive. Faced with a cover-up extending across the intelligence services, the mass media, and the political establishment, many of the JFK researchers made the not unreasonable assumption that it was co-ordinated, and that its purpose […]
[…] In liberalised free markets, the successful nation or company is the one which has a competitive advantage. In the ‘knowledge-based’ economy, one might reasonably expect to find intelligence agencies playing a leading role in securing that advantage. As with the supermarket shelf, where things can literally be stacked in one manufacturer’s favour, so too […]
[…] before 9/11 and that the production of the WMD Dossier was one of the key components of a broader political strategy designed to achieve that aim.(1) Understanding intelligence Andrew Defty considers the role of Parliament and Parliamentary Committees in allowing parliamentarians to develop expertise in particular policy areas and questions whether the Intelligence and […]
Our Secret Servants: the Shayler affair Things had been going rather well for the British security and intelligence services in the 1990s. Under pressure from the Wright-Wallace-Massiter revelations of the 80s, they had conceded a notional form of parliamentary accountability with the creation of the Intelligence and Security Committee. With members who either knew […]
[…] the tip of an iceberg whose full extent would reveal a very considerable network, or networks, of bankers, industrialists, landowners, service officers, members of the security and intelligence establishment, and politicians. Some of these were genuinely pro-Nazi, many more were committed to Anglo-German detente so that the wealth of the country would not be […]
[…] of Reinhard Gehlen, long-since dead founder of the BND, the German Security Service. Reinhard Gehlen, to over-simplify a very complex tale, bought his way into the Western intelligence fraternity by handing over extensive files on anti-Soviet intelligence networks behind enemy lines in 1945/6. (1) What brought Gehlen to mind was a mischievous little article […]
Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones London: Yale University Press, 2002, £22.50 Know Your Enemy: How the Joint Intelligence Committee Saw the World Percy Craddock London: John Murray, 2002, £25 Jeffreys-Jones is Professor of American History at Edinburgh University and writes on the American intelligence services. His book’s […]
[…] the following: ‘Gordon Winter is an Englishman who was recruited by BOSS. His 1981 book Inside BOSS, was the first (and only) inside account of South Africa’s intelligence agency. We still think this is one of the most important political memoirs. Even if elements of the book were included to disinform, as some believe, […]
