[…] characters, such as Greville Wynne and John Vassall, to major operators Blunt, Burgess, Maclean and Philby. ‘Spooks’ are also covered, with almost ninety members of the intelligence community listed. Many of these had other occupations John Henry Bevan (‘intelligence officer and stockbroker’), Maurice James Buckmaster (‘intelligence officer and businessman’), Tomas Joseph Harris […]
[…] Sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for illegal surveillance of private citizens, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) settled out of court. LAPD’s Public Disorder and Intelligence Division were accused of ‘organising a massive spying operation providing right-wing organisations with a sophisticated computer and handing on extensive files on suspects.’ Here is the […]
[…] one I can’t do it. The world is weird and the US state is capable of great evil but the people at the top of its military- intelligence complex are not stupid enough or bold enough to have sanctioned something like this. The MIHOP ‘sceptics’ presented in this book want us to believe that […]
[…] their recognition that military victory was impossible? There can be little doubt that one factor was the improved performance of the security forces, in particular of the intelligence and surveillance arms. So effective had they become that the journalist, Jack Holland, could write, with only slight exaggeration, that in the 1990s the safest thing […]
[…] into a cohesive, province-wide, secret organisation, the Ulster Central Coordinating Committee. This worked with an ‘Inner Force’ which had formed inside the RUC. The Inner Force supplied intelligence on IRA members and sympathisers to ‘the Committee’, who directed assassins to chosen targets with protection provided by the ‘Inner Force’. This book is about that […]
[…] tremendous piece of research and though there are half a dozen of the 27 chapters which I didn’t find of much interest – the technical side of intelligence gathering, chiefly; and some of the espionage stuff – for the most part the book is dotted with fascinating bits and pieces. Large chunks of it […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 30th Something very strange happened in British politics almost a decade ago. A Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, and the journalist with the closest links to the British intelligence services, Chapman Pincher, both said that elements of MI5 had been trying to bring down the Labour Government during 1974-76 – and nothing happened. There was […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
