[…] 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 […]
[…] (UK) £25.00 hb This is a really interesting and important book – perhaps the most important book about the British secret state since Fitzgerald and Bloch’s British Intelligence and Covert Action in the early 1980s. The incremental uncovering of the Information Research Department (IRD) story has been one of the continuing threads of British […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
• THE READER’S GUIDE TO INTELLIGENCE PERIODICALS HAYDEN B. PEAKE – NIBC PRESS National Intelligence Book Center Washington DC THE READER’S GUIDE TO INTELLIGENCE PERIODICALS 86 • LOBSTER – a journal of parapolitics T l1e provenance of LOBSTER is as unusu �l as its name. In 1982, Robin Ra1nsay and Stephen Dorr1l, h10 of […]
[PDF file]: In Spies We Trust: the story of western intelligence Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones Oxford University Press, 2013, £20, h/b Bernard Porter Britain and America came quite late to the spying game, but by the late 20th century had come to dominate it. It is this, I suppose, that justifies the subtitle of this book, which scarcely […]
[PDF file]: The Black Door Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac London: William Collins, £30 T his new book by two respected academics has a lot to tell us about how Britain is run. We are told, for example, that at a CBI dinner in December 1971, the Labour Party […]
[…] similar but not identical. Jurors for Bettaney trial vetted by MI5 Sunday Times 4th March “All post to and from the Eastern Bloc monitored by the UK intelligence services. Incoming mail from the USSR is … opened, sanitised (?) and the recipient’s name and address taken and passed on to MI5”. Computer Talk 5th […]
