[…] 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
