[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
Michael Smith Gollancz, London,1996, £20 This is a curious and rather pointless book. In short chapters Smith attempts potted histories of MI5, SIS, signals and military intelligence. These are quite well done, but covering half a century in 20 pages, say, the chapters are barely more than sketches. (The Information Research Department gets a […]
[…] March 1987 Pressure Groups, Tory Businessmen and the aura of political corruption before the First World War – Frans Coetzee – in Historical Journal, December 1986 Military Intelligence and the defence of the realm: the surveillance of soldiers and civilians in Britain during the First World War – David Englander – in British Society […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] – provided he could earn a living or clinch a deal in exchange. By 1904-1905, in the Far East, he was simultaneously wheeling and dealing with the intelligence services of Russia, Japan, Britain, France and the USA. In due course his abilities and official connections in various countries made him a natural for 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
How perceptions have changed! In Leveller 51, March 1981, there was this snippet: ‘Why all the fuss about the Panorama programme on British Intelligence? Eventually there was just one cut — Gordon Winter, BOSS agent, former freelance journalist, in a pre-title sequence: “British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement […]
