[…] country. Unfortunately this ‘cock-up’ version of the Falklands War conspicuously fails to encompass two items: the existence of oil deposits around the islands, and the so-called ‘ intelligence failure.’ The Falklands-and-oil story can be traced quite easily through the annual index of The Times newspaper which is in every reference library. Start around 1977 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] money from Kuwait into the Tory Party. (The Kuwaiti Investment Office is one of the major property owners in London.) With hindsight Among the books about British intelligence operations I, Kovaks by Leslie Aspin (London: Everest Books, 1975) was never taken terribly seriously. This was partly because there were fewer spook-wise journalists at that […]
[…] released a list of 963 members – a list that shook the nation and lead to the collapse of the government and the wholesale replacement of military, intelligence and civil service personnel. The lodge was headed by Licio Gelli, a wealthy businessman who had fought with the Falange in Spain and then for the […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] Glees, who wrote an interesting study of German Exile Politics in WW2 (Clarendon Press 1982) is shortly bringing out a book on Communist Subversion and British counter- intelligence 1939-45 (Jonathan Cape). Our view of that might be influenced by the fact that he has written for the new Encounter magazine. Michael Scammel, who has […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] to reconstruct for researchers a historical narrative based on non-existent and authentic documents supported by published facts with classic disinformation techniques in what is termed in counter- intelligence parlance as “gray” intelligence. The question of whether they are genuine, authentic or real is not the issue here. The important point to keep in mind, […]
[…] 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 […]
