[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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, […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] MA; Professor of Politics and Comparative Ideologies, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. Dr Alan Sabrosky PhD MA The Duke of St Albans OBE Former Colonel in Intelligence T F Utley CBE Dr M H Waring PhD MA (Brazil) Norris McWhirter Now in charge of the resources generated by Guinness Book of Records, McWhirter […]
[…] Alan Protheroe, who in 1986 was Assistant Director General of the BBC. Nicknamed ‘the Colonel’ in the BBC, Protheroe was, and may still be, a part-time soldier/ intelligence officer, specialising in military-media relations. That the Assistant Director General of the BBC should be a state-employed psy-war specialist in his spare-time, with all that implies […]
[…] died after making inquiries into a helicopter deal between the Iraqis and Chilean arms dealer Carlos Cardoen. You discuss this as one of several anomalous deaths among intelligence assets in the context of asking why anyone would want to work for the spooks. Naiveté is the obvious answer, but you failed to mention that […]
[…] 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 […]
