[…] boomerang In America, Mayor Bloomberg has banned smoking in public places, especially in restaurants, inadvertently turning New York into an unlikely but almost spook-free zone. (1) American intelligence officers may not smoke, but some of their overseas contacts will. If meeting in the West, they will prefer to do so in London; or, if […]
[…] names, dates and documentation that the super-spooks were running a child-abuse and computer fraud gang in Washington DC during the 80s under the guidance of a USAF intelligence agent, Marion David Pettie. Unclassified seems somewhat uncertain about the piece, however, and refers readers’ enquiries to the author Wendell L. Minnick. The latest Unclassified (number […]
[…] the Grand National, child abuse, psychics and animal rights (and, yes, one on male violence with Oliver Reed). Although this Lobster article is indeed necessarily preoccupied with intelligence matters, and so runs the risk of accidentally giving the impression that Michael Grade’s caricature has merit, the programmes we made tell a different story. After […]
[…] disappointment sometimes. Insider view Jeffrey Bale (see Lobsters 18, 19, 21, 29) sent me the following from Leo D. Carl’s CIA Insider’s Dictionary of US and Foreign Intelligence, Counterintelligence & Tradecraft (Washington, DC: National Intelligence Book Centre, 1996). ‘Lobster: title of an antiestablishment newsletter published two to three times annually by two British eccentrics […]
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 […]
[…] is significant that neither MOD nor the security services prevented that transfer. p. 160 ‘Clockwork Orange attempted to link the IRA with the KGB and other foreign intelligence agencies supplying weapons and explosives. Wallace, for example, had the task of planting a false story that a submarine had been seen off the Irish coast […]
[…] 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 […]
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 […]
