[…] 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, […]
[…] be proper or unbiased, he promptly back-tracked, adding ‘that casts a totally different light on the matter’. Although Weaver’s ultimate Roswell Report mentioned that the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC), which had been the main recipient body for the analyses and investigation of UFO reports for the USAF’s public investigation efforts, no longer existed, […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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 […]
[…] single review. Most of it describes the IRA’s various campaigns against the British, not something I am interested in. However there is one rivetting chapter called, ‘The Intelligence War’, which anyone even slightly interested in the story of the British intelligence and counter-insurgency operations there in the 1970s and 80s ought to read. Reviewing […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] Nixon and the bane of Kissinger have a perhaps neglected provenance in the administration of Lyndon Johnson. The crippling of the 455-foot USS Liberty, a SIGINT intelligence vessel run jointly by the US navy and the NSA, in a sustained two hour attack by Israeli bombers and torpedo craft at the height of […]
