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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] combination of the lack of a security service with a corrupt police force left the Fijian government with little chance of learning about the activities of foreign intelligence services in Fiji. Which possibly ‘kinda delighted’ the CIA. The situation at the moment is that with the Fijian Council of Chiefs (a traditionalist body) permanently […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] agencies. In addition, to further this, it requires personnel (spies) employed locally or from Whitehall who have the appropriate attributes, including, for example, ethnicity, to seek out intelligence (without, it could be added, any effort being put into their personal safety) and/or maximise relationships, sometimes including with such local agencies. (16) If the last […]
[…] been disposed of, I believe, by the Katz and Norton-Tayor article. I never met Rusbridger but enjoyed his letters and shared his lack of regard for the intelligence and security services. His disparaging critics on the right, however, were almost certainly correct in claiming that he had few sources within the spook community. His […]
[…] 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 […]
