[…] disclosures regarding the activities of SAS Captain Robert Nairac to Duncan Campbell of The New Statesman in 1984, they were credible because Holroyd was a loyal Army Intelligence Captain with absolutely no sympathies for IRA terrorism. (1) Despite efforts on the part of Martin Dillon in The Dirty War (Hutchinson, 1989) to smear Holroyd […]
[…] The books of ‘West’ that I have read all have the same problem: he tells you that some of the material comes from past or present intelligence officers and hints that in those sections you are getting ‘the real inside story’. Somewhere along the way, for example, I have acquired the idea that […]
[…] the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (London: Constable, 1991) reported in the Guardian 26 March 2001 (4) the remarks of Gianadelio Maletti, commander of the counter- intelligence section of the Italian military intelligence service from 1971 to 1975. Maletti said that his men had discovered that a rightwing terrorist cell in the Venice […]
[…] UDA? UFF? member (I didn’t tape it and can’t remember the details) who described the torrent of official information they were receiving from their British military and intelligence connections in the late 1980s – more material than he knew what to do with, he said. This section is missing from the book. It’s not […]
Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995 Cees Wiebes Munster, Germany: Lit Verlag, Studies in Intelligence History, 2003 ISBN 3-8258-6347-6 p/b, 34.9 euros, $39.95 from Amazon. The publisher declined to send me a review copy but I read one chapter sent by e-mail from the author. This isn’t my field but it seems […]
[…] to know that they can now visit a website with some interesting further information about this maverick figure. The site can be found at < http:// www.pharo.com/ intelligence >, and is run by the team which produced Double Standards, last year’s interesting study of the Hess affair. Some of the material will be familiar […]
[…] James Miller, the mid-1970s version of Brian Nelson. Take a bow MI5, for penetrating the UDA completely, twice getting an agent into the role of UDA ‘ intelligence officer’. Bruce, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen, who had previously worked for over a decade at Queen’s University, Belfast, cautions the reader […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] in some ‘lesser publication’ later in the day.(1) And it wasn’t MI6. This assumes that, as former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove would have us believe, Secret Intelligence Service service personnel follow the rules. A less trusting Michael Mansfield QC, for Mr Al Fayed, suggested ‘there are things countenanced within the service that do […]
[…] Affair which was reviewed in Lobster 38, this account of MI5’s adjustment to the post Cold War world is one of the best books on the UK’s intelligence services, up there with Stephen Dorril’s MI6 book, Paul Lashmar and James Oliver’s book on IRD and Richard Aldrich’s The Hidden Hand. Rereading it, I was […]
