[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] thesis – there was a switch – and has tried to trace the life of the ‘hidden’ Oswald. He appears to have established the existence of an intelligence operation which began with two boys, of different heights, but who looked similar and who lived parallel lives. One, Harvey, was Russian-speaking, probably a refugee from […]
[…] full support’ but warned against premature action liable to backfire. Meanwhile the CIA agents and their friends in Chile were to deploy ‘propaganda, black operations, surfacing of intelligence or disinformation, personal contacts, or anything else your imagination can conjure’ to secure the downfall of the Allende regime.(4) Of course Allende’s left-wing government, the first […]
[…] Who of the British Secret State. Though I cannot remember why Dorril thought this and though there is nothing specific in Ashdown’s known career which says ‘ intelligence’, the career move from Special Boat Squadron to Foreign Office is pretty obvious.(1) The alleged SIS affiliation seems to have stuck, however. The doyen of British […]
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 […]
