[…] 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 […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] called Evald Mikson. Mikson, learned Sanden, had worked with the Germans when they invaded Estonia in 1941, and had interrogated a captured Estonian agent of Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. (One may imagine that in such circumstances – an Estonian working for the Nazis – such an ‘interrogation’ was, as British military-intelligence patois has […]
[…] should be subject to some sort of investigation, if not a truth and reconciliation commission. The larger issues, involving the systematic bending of the tasks of the intelligence community to create enough of an excuse for war, but also concerning both the morality and legality of such aggressive war, lie dormant behind the sexier […]
[…] 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: […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
