[…] 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 […]
[…] 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, […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] people concerned, Schnabel has written a straightforward history of the program from its origins in the early 1970s at SRI, through its travels as various military and intelligence outfits were found willing to cough up the small amount of money required to keep the unit – never more than a dozen people in all […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] Why were the widely-signalled warnings of the possibility of a bomb being placed on a Pan-Am flight from Frankfurt ignored? Why was there an immediate and aggressive intelligence operation at Lockerbie after the crash? When the CIA’s presence was reported on Radio Forth by David Johnson (author of Lockerbie: the Real Story), why was […]
[…] detail. The other 80% of the book is little more than padding – on the Israeli commando raid on Entebbe, the SR 71 spy plane, the French intelligence service SDECE, the Chilean intelligence service DINA; ten pages on the career of the SIS officer Anthony Dival; eight pages on the Joint Intelligence Committee and […]
[…] January 1994, calls for ‘the investigation of nazi terror groups either to be put into the hands of a special police unit attached to the Police National Intelligence Bureau, or to be turned over to MI5 and MI6…. this proposal might astonish some of our readers. But it is clear that Special Branch’s head […]
