[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
