[…] 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 […]
[…] 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, […]
[…] of the Viking, known as Grey Wolf and Outlaw Viking. Neither of these resembles the craft described in the Black Dog mission. The latter was used for intelligence gathering in the Gulf, but not operated by the CIA. The report refers to the pilot, who did not eject but was recovered alive. However, the […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] its turn, was not merely Islamist and tribal but it had relationships that spread back to the major cities of Pakistan and even into its military and intelligence services. Western operations in West Asia have to deal with a world beyond Afghanistan that encompasses Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia – as well as India […]
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 […]
