[…] 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 US/UK treatment meted out to Iraqis, we see the NATO alliance alive, enlarged and active in Asia; the UK Defence Secretary arguing for ever-larger arms and intelligence expenditure in line with the Pentagon’s; talk of the ‘war on terrorism’ is everywhere, with the British Home Secretary squeezing out long-established civil liberties, and prominent […]
[…] On this there is no agreement. Some journalists who were in Northern Ireland at the time remain convinced that it was nothing more than a British Army/ intelligence operation, a ‘funny’. Some suspect it to have been a psy ops job, possibly even run by Wallace himself. Although this view is intelligible given what […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] think it was ‘an inside job’. But this does not mean that there is nothing to be investigated. As with most official reports into events with sensitive intelligence and/ or political dimensions – and 9/11 had both, in spades – the report into 9/11 was concerned with establishing the official narrative (Al Qaeda attacks) […]
[…] 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 […]
CIA set for Pentagon buyout? Lester Coleman, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) man who co-authored Trail of the Octopus (about CIA drug-channel involvement in the Lockerbie bombing) writes in the latest Unclassified (quarterly publication of the Association of Former National Security Alumni, no. 34, Fall 1995), that the CIA feels itself threatened by a […]
[…] place under a Labour government again (Cf the ABC case in 1977-8), and that the Labour Party doesn’t know how to deal with national security and the intelligence services. Dorril said authors are under a lot of pressure to cooperate with the D-notice Committee; if they refuse to cooperate, their books are sometimes passed […]
[…] and he accepts Wilson’s (fictitious) version of his contacts with them. Altogether a most incompetent and evasive piece of work. The House of Lords debate on the Intelligence Services Bill, 9 December, 1993 Lord (Roy) Jenkins of Hillhead: ‘I experienced in the Security Service what I can best describe as an inherent lack of […]
