Douglas Macleod Edinburgh: Birlinn; £9.99, p/b Twenty years ago, before the current torrent of information about ‘the secret world of intelligence’, we were scratching about looking for clues to our secret history. One was given in the John Loftus book The Belarus Secret (Penguin 1983) which contained a single reference to the Scottish […]
[…] told me the story himself very shortly after it had all happened (I was researching a doctorate at Birmingham at the time). The UK becomes a US intelligence target Of course the old undercurrents of distrust did not go away after the foundation of the wartime Anglo-American ‘special relationship’. There is an interesting snippet […]
[…] Mayne, and an investigation of Loyalist sectarian killers, The Shankhill Butchers (1989). His book opens with the attempts in 1970 by Captain James Kelly of Irish Military Intelligence to import weapons for the North (Kelly’s books were reviewed in Lobsters 13 and 15) and continues through the history of the Northern Irish conflict up […]
[…] would be the key figure in arranging the formation of the CCF, and he is a good example of someone who moved easily between intellectual, political, and intelligence circles.(32) He came to prominence through his single-handed disruption of the German Writers Congress held in East Berlin in October 1947 by complaining about the lack […]
[…] Sterling’s, and it is hers I will concentrate on. As with her last book, The Terror Network, much of her ‘evidence’ is attributed to unidentified police and intelligence officers. This bothered me less than it did with The Terror Network. This book is more modest in its ambitions, more tightly focused, the unattributable assertions […]
[…] people concerned, Schnabel has written a straightforward history of the program from its origins in the early 1970s at SRI, through its travels as various military and intelligence outfits were found willing to cough up the small amount of money required to keep the unit – never more than a dozen people in all […]
[…] Henry (Scoop) Jackson, Paul Nitze (Coalition for a Democratic Majority) (CDM); ideologues like Rostow and Podhoretz (the latter editor of the ‘neo-conservative’ Commentary); hardline dissenters in the intelligence community such as Daniel Graham (ex head DIA) who is ECUD Chairman; and the grass roots New Right symbolised by Weyrich. The CSFC and CDM worked […]
[…] did not. If I underscore his homosexuality it is to emphasize the compartmentalisation of his life, a trait that would be valuable for anyone with connection to intelligence operations. In 1977 a CIA memo surfaced dated 28th September 1967 and headed ‘Garrison Investigation: Queries from Justice Department’. This said that between 1949 and 1956 […]
[…] the US/UK treatment meted out to Iraqis, we see the NATO alliance alive, enlarged and active in Asia; the UK Defence Secretary arguing for ever-larger arms and intelligence expenditure in line with the Pentagon’s; talk of the ‘war on terrorism’ is everywhere, with the British Home Secretary squeezing out long-established civil liberties, and prominent […]
[…] interesting – if unsurprising – that the final edits are done by Blair’s two closest advisors. But by the time Hutton heard this, the memo from Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) chair John Scarlett had been released which referred to the JIC’s ‘customers’.(5) Once that concept has been taken on board the game is up […]
