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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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: […]
[…] people have pointed out, in the first 5 Lobsters – something like 100,000 words – there has been hardly a mention of the Soviet and Soviet satellite intelligence activities. There are reasons. No-one has offered us anything on this subject, and neither of us (ie Ramsay/Dorril) know much about it. What little there is […]
[…] para-military organisation GB 75 (Daily Telegraph 27 February 1985) Large, important piece on the tapping of internal and external communications, much of it in search of “economic intelligence” Article claims: British Telecom can monitor thousands of calls per day overseas calls are sent to GCHQ which runs them through a ‘voice print’ library to […]
[…] 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 […]
