[…] Harper Poulson, Sir John Orr and Roger Fortune. However Headway was in a decline which the change of ownership did not reverse. (13) The Focus and Churchill’s intelligence network The 1930s came to be called the ‘wilderness years’ for Churchill because during that period he failed to be given any position of political authority. […]
[…] to John Smith (1992-4) and Special Adviser to Jack Cunningham. In 1997 she became Chair of the Atlantic Council and she has since been appointed to the Intelligence and Security Committee.(4) The SIS-John Smith connection extends a little further. John Smith’s widow, Lady Smith, was appointed to the SIS-front organisation, the Hakluyt Foundation. Baroness […]
Gecas and Special Branch A wonderful example of the reach and power of intelligence connections was provided in January. Why did the British state refuse to extradite Anton Gecas, the WW2 Lithuanian war criminal, to the Soviet Union in 1976? Turns out not only had Gecas worked for SIS at the end of WW2, […]
[…] The former MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, commenting on the size of Henri Paul’s bank account, is convinced that he must have been in the employ of British intelligence. ‘French intelligence would never pay him that sort of an amount of money.'(20) He also claimed that he had seen ‘documents and evidence’ proving that Henri […]
[…] fit his story. She recalls a time when Veciana started going to “language courses” in the evenings. Veciana, in his earliest interviews, spoke of attending nightly US intelligence briefings in an office building which houses, on the first floor, the Berlitz School of Language.-(8)- Fabiola says she did become aware that Veciana was involved […]
Oleg Kalugin, Smith Gryphon, London 1994 Subtitled ‘My 32 years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West’, this is a mildly interesting read if you want to know how the crumbling Soviet empire looked to an intelligent radical inside the Soviet system. There might be some fragments of interest to those seriously interested in […]
12. Spooks – U.S. After the disastrous Iranian hostage operations, the Pentagon created a new intelligence/covert ops unit called Army Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), also known, apparently, as “the activity”. Augmenting both the CIA and the Pentagon’s own DIA, ISA existed for at least a year without Presidential/Congressional knowledge or approval. The unit is […]
CIA: read all about it The most striking intelligence story since the last issue was Tim Spicer’s ‘CIA warns Barack Obama that British terrorists are the biggest threat to the US’.(1) It included this: ‘A British intelligence source revealed that a staggering four out of ten CIA operations designed to thwart direct attacks on […]
[…] disaster waiting to happen. The last major figure who talked like this in office was Jimmy Carter and he got royally screwed by his foreign service and intelligence people. The Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee And what of the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee? It snoozes on. Former MI5 officer David Shayler has offered […]
[…] Statecraft, 14 (3) (2003) pp. 70-82. Is there intelligent life out there? Alan Block confirms our worst fears in his first paragraph: “The history of the Central Intelligence Agency illustrates that it can neither control its agents, operatives, assets, and, indeed, officers, nor are its covert policies divorced from both common and often uncommon […]
