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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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: […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
