[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
• 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 […]
