[…] He enlisted as a private in the gunners, and three years later he was commissioned into the Royal Corps of Transport. He volunteered for the Special Military Intelligence unit in Northern Ireland when the present troubles began, and he was trained at the Joint Services School of Intelligence. Once his training was finished, he […]
Books Alan Turing: the enigma of intelligence Andrew Hughes (Unwin 1985) If you have a chance, read Alan Turing: the enigma of intelligence by Andrew Hughes (Unwin 1985). Now in paperback, Hughes’ excellent biography rescues from near obscurity a true eccentric genius. It is of interest to us because of Turing’s essential work on […]
[…] group that we could prevent actions because of the credibility of our source.’ This is reminiscent of the comment by former BOSS agent, Gordon Winter that, ‘British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in Britain bigger than a football team our man is the captain or the vice captain, […]
[…] the Soviet bloc. Talbot recasts events in this period as attempts by Kruschev and JFK to wind down the Cold War which were frustrated by their military-industrial- intelligence complexes who were making too much money and generating too many good careers for that to be accepted. Talbot conveys better than any other account I […]
[…] timing of this is not fortuitous: ….the Conservative Victories in 1979 and 1983, the defeat of the miners in 1985 (in which the security services played an intelligence gathering role)….. the collapse of cherished beliefs….. led inescapably to the conclusion that there was a right-wing conspiracy which had hoodwinked the entire nation….’ There has […]
[…] of things is uninteresting. This collection contains three essays of note. The first is Bob de Graff and Cees Wiebes’ study of the CIA and the Dutch Intelligence Service, which is the first of its kind that I can think of; and is, presumably, a template for the relationship between the CIA and the […]
[…] He canters briskly and amusingly over the field of spook foul-ups in the post-war period to ‘show the pointlessness of so much of the work of the intelligence services everywhere.’ The result is an entertaining but very sharp analysis of that peculiar mixture of ruthless patriotism and utter incompetence which characterises so much of […]
[…] essential features of such parallel services – clear even before Colonel Oliver North agreed to tell all – can be noted in recent developments in the French intelligence community, fractured by rivalry, innumerable leaks and spectacular failures. It was perhaps to avoid this minefield that Chirac’s Interior Minister, Charles Pasqua, former founder of the […]
[…] Fadlallah was untouched, some eighty bystanders, men, women and children, were killed and over two hundred injured. The terrorist organisation responsible for this attack was the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).(1) An overwhelming case can be made that the CIA has been the most dangerous terrorist organisation at work in the world since the Second […]
[…] convincing. While establishing his thesis of a Kennedy newly devoted to the cause of peace, he also stakes his ground quickly on Oswald, establishing his credentials in intelligence – a familiar argument to anyone who knows the JFK case – but also showing that, far from hating Kennedy or seeing him as a target […]
