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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] the Technologies of Political Control – was commissioned last year by the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament. It contains details of a network of American-controlled intelligence stations on British soil and around the world, that ‘routinely and indiscriminately’ monitor countless phone, fax and e-mail messages. It states: ‘Within Europe all e-mail telephone […]
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 […]
[…] the Mexica Gobernación (Ministry of the Interior).(3) It also had close links with the FBI as well as the CIA, being part of a tradition of bi-national intelligence co-operation dating back to the turn of the century.(4) Three different operations involving Oswald can be distinguished in Mexico. The most obvious is the post-assassination cover-up. […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
