James Jesus Angleton The CIA and the craft of counter intelligence Michael Holzman Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008, p/b, $28.95 Of all the figures in the Anglo-American spy world that we have been made aware of in the last 40 years, James Jesus Angleton was the most glamorous: the chain-smoking, the orchid-growing, the […]
Extracts from what are claimed to be CIA analyses of Israeli intelligence services found when the US embassy in Iran was taken have been published in Imam, October 1983 through to May 1984. 17 pages in all. To this untrained eye they look genuine; ie dull enough to be genuine. There is nothing that […]
[…] which will be corrected in succeeding issues by Wright. This is very much Agee country anti-CIA, naming names etc.. The first issue of the Study Group on Intelligence Newsletter has appeared. This ‘Study Group’ is a group of British academics working in spook country, and how widely they are willing to release their newsletter […]
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 […]
[…] B’ episode of 1976/7, the subject of this book, which saw a group of the CIA’s critics on the right being given access to the Agency’s raw intelligence data, was one of the key moments in the counter-attack against detente with the Soviet Union in the 1970s. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, […]
[…] former prime minister.(Sydney Morning Herald, May 19 1987) “Ratu Mara was in it from the beginning,” said one source. The Times on Sunday said that while initial intelligence advice was that it was a narrowly based military coup, within a few days evidence was available to the Australian Government that the coup “was backed […]
Books The Great Betrayal Nicholas Bethel (London 1984) This is either a ‘snow job’, designed to discourage further research in this area (British intelligence attempts to destabilise Soviet and communist influenced regimes), or is just a poor effort on Bethel’s part. One can’t deny that it is useful – after all, it is the […]
[…] On this there is no agreement. Some journalists who were in Northern Ireland at the time remain convinced that it was nothing more than a British Army/ intelligence operation, a ‘funny’. Some suspect it to have been a psy ops job, possibly even run by Wallace himself. Although this view is intelligible given what […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] there is an essay by Richard Aldrich of Salford University, one of the small but growing numbers of British academics trying to incorporate the activities of the intelligence and security services into post-war British history. In his essay on the Special Operations Executive (SOE) after the end of the Second World War, Aldrich writes […]
