[…] previously portrayed. But these are all tidbits. Marrs’ effort, which was apparently extensively dipped into by Stone, should be avoided at all costs. Its passages on British intelligence are so wide of the mark that it made me wary of everything else in the book. Finally, there is Scheim’s re-issue which looks little different […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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 […]
[…] of the weight of the British state descending upon Channel 4 TV and the production company Box in retaliation for the Box/Channel 4 programme alleging military and intelligence collaboration between the British state and the Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. (See The Independent 29 July 1992 for an account, including reports of break-ins and […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
