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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
[…] work Dorril has firmly imposed his grip on a wealth of facts which reaffirm his place as one of Britain’s leading exhumers of the modern ‘security and intelligence community’. Whilst some of the earlier chapters do go over old ground, the later chapters tread into so far uncharted areas. This new ground, it is […]
[…] policy. The Bank of England added weight to the position. Cuckney was an ex-MI5 officer. (5) He had also worked at Farnham Castle, a government centre for intelligence briefing, from 1974-84. Before that, he was attached to the Crown Agency and also IMS, the MoD company. He later achieved a more public profile as […]
[…] produced to show I met him. Stella Rimington, referred to as Mrs C during the trial (she was then MI5 Section Head in charge of studying hostile intelligence agencies), said under oath there was no evidence I had ever met anyone in the KGB. Rimington said Oshchenko arrived in Britain on 29 August 1972 […]
Veterans of a notorious Miami-based CIA dirty tricks team have boasted that they were helped by British Intelligence officers to sink an East German ship loaded with British-built Leyland buses. Three years after the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the MV Magdeburg was hit by a Japanese ship in the River Thames. […]
[…] this issue, thanks to the usual suspects, especially Jane Affleck; and also to Paul Stott. Among the contributors to this issue Jonathan Bloch is co-author of British Intelligence and Covert Action and Global Intelligence and the World’s Secret Intelligence Services Today. The latter was reviewed in Lobster 47. William Clark is a Public Interest […]
[…] covert operations during 1974, made possible by the presence of a British informer in the Gardai. Codenamed “the badger”, this informer was recruited by the Special Military Intelligence Unit, MI6’s connection with the RUC, and, although of low rank, was (and still is) in a key position to assist the British clandestine border crossings: […]
