[…] 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 […]
[…] The collection would be even larger if it also included statements that appear mistaken only in hindsight. However, if a statement was ‘…an accurate reflection of U.S. intelligence at the time it was made, it ……excluded even if it now appears erroneous.’ The US establishment probably feels happier with another collection, the Foreign Military […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] the tax net. Expenditure (as in the Euro-pean defence sector) has to be focused ever more precisely on ‘efficient ends’. So, a great deal of security and intelligence activity is not about our personal security at all (otherwise, we might see a policeman on our streets occasionally or a different attitude to the licensing […]
[…] deal with corruption and ineptitude. In their mission, they operate with minimal democratic accountability as their trans-national operations bring them into ever closer association with security and intelligence services with whom they increasingly share the same ideology of global threat. They are, in short, constructing the basis for the new European, indeed ‘Western’, Security […]
[…] naff poetry), part rock culture trivia, and three huge pieces; ‘The CIA’s manipulation of the Labour Party’, ‘The FBI’s secret war against the American Indians’ and ‘British intelligence and covert action: how the British state supports international terrorism’. It’s a funny mixture. Page 181 is a cartoon strip which depicts Arnold Swarzenegger as Jesus […]
[…] political dimension. Did the Conservative government approve of this? Did they know of this? Larkin presumes so but cannot demonstrate it. Larkin lacks a senior British Army, intelligence officer or civil servant, let alone a cabinet minister, willing to admit this was the policy. (1) For example, he writes p.42: ‘this elite group had […]
[…] that’s what Washington wants”, he would say, “then I’ll support it.” ‘ (p. 240) And was it known, for example, that ‘the weekly report of the Joint Intelligence Committee in London…. was the product of a combined effort with the chief of our CIA station’ (p. 225), or that in 1967, when Soviet Foreign […]
[…] had been laundered in my name through Dutch bank accounts by the late Dennis Robertson, my ex-wife’s accountant; and that he laundered funds for SIS, the British intelligence service. The core of the application process was an official interview conducted by the Ministry of Justice. The Ministry would then make a decision based on […]
[…] the German officer class, British diplomats, politicians and spies had problems categorising Canaris. They never quite understood his intellectual hinterland. He was described rather sniffily by Military Intelligence, as ‘a kind of Catholic mystic’. Little was produced (by them) to support this assertion, although the author notes that he did apparently enjoy visiting Spanish […]
