[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] seems as surprising as it did in 1976. Just as the ‘mind control’ story is part of parapolitics because of the activities of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies in the field (and their Soviet equivalents, no doubt), so some of the UFO literature of recent years has begun to resemble the literature of […]
[…] and becoming a barrister. Though not yet a qualified lawyer, during his brief career at the MOD, his work was sometimes connected with legal aspects of the intelligence services. He was a minor member of that London NW1/NW5 set(2) and still lives in Kentish Town within a hundred yards or so of retired Labour/SDP […]
