[…] 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 […]
[…] on another story and a cordial relationship had blossomed. For convenience sake, I’ll call him X. He was a very experienced and proficient investigator of military and intelligence stories in addition to being a recognised editor. Because of this, the excellence of his military and intelligence sources, I decided to ask X to collaborate […]
[…] you think, ‘Oh New Zealand seems a long way away, so why take an interest?’ it should be noted that N.Z. is a member of the American-dominated intelligence and surveillance network of which Britain is another junior member, and what goes on down under can inform us about developments in this benighted isle. New […]
[…] claims contained in this talk are to be found. Dirty tricks and covert operations In the official theory of British politics the state in general and the intelligence services in particular have no role. This is what I think of as the Disney version of politics; and this is the one that is still […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] programme (3) where he stated: ‘David was murdered on the 17th. On Saturday the 19th, within 48 hours of the murder, I was contacted by a British intelligence officer who told me he’d been murdered. That didn’t take me by surprise, I was suspicious of the suicide theory from the word go. Now that […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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 […]
