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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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: […]
[…] CIA, something he had always denied. There is this section from the memoir of senior KGB officer Oleg Kalugin, The First Chief Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West: ‘In the Communist sphere outside of Europe, we [KGB) worked closest with the Cubans…….The Cubans’ ardour also spurred them to take […]
[…] It had to happen. Larry O’Hara, who for more than two years has been slandering anti-fascists and accusing Searchlight of being the centre of a web of intelligence intrigue, in league with British intelligence, Mossad and probably the Salvation Army, has found his way into the arms of the very same MI5 he is […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
