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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
THE LOBSTER is a journal/newsletter about intelligence, parapolitics and so forth. This is an atypical issue. No 1, which covered British Intelligence operations in Northern Ireland, the work of the Round Table, recent events surrounding the Papacy etc. gives a better idea of what we’re interested in. We welcome clippings, articles, letters, reviews, on […]
[…] to the North should the situation demand it. Captain James Kelly (b.1929) joined the Irish Army in 1949 and, after other duties, was transferred to G2 ( Intelligence) in 1960. On the appointment of Col. Michael Hefferon to the post of Director of Intelligence in 1962, Kelly became his Personal Staff Officer until Hefferon’s […]
[…] anti-Gaddafi piece by Con Coughlin, claiming that Libya now has some North Korean ballistic missiles. The only stated source for the allegations contained therein was a ‘Western intelligence official’. On 28 May 2000 the Sunday Times article ‘IRA investors make 300% profit out of Gaddafi cash donations’, sourced back to ‘MI5 documents seen by […]
[…] mostly from the Fiji Sun 9th July 1987. “Paul Freeman was involved in a destabilisation action against a NZ labour government in 1975. He received a Security Intelligence Service (SIS) file from an SIS employee, Rohan Jays, with embarrassing information about a Labour MP. Freeman publicly handed the file to the Prime Minister, thus […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
