[…] ranges widely from the obscure ‘secret operations of Spanish consular officials within Canada during the Spanish-American war’ to the useful account of the ‘birth of the Defense Intelligence Agency’. In between are a number of good essays on American intelligence which are well-serviced with notes and bibliography. It is hardly revisionist, though in an […]
[…] the Reagan years when the in-coming Know-nothing administration decided they would impose their childish notions about the world onto the Agency and get it to produce ‘ intelligence’ to support their conspiracy theories about the ‘communist menace’. The very idea of attempting ‘the politics of the CIA’, let alone getting as close as Perry […]
[…] a part in the anti-Soviet operations of the early years of Cold War 1 — the small-scale British version of the conversion of the CIA from an intelligence agency into a covert operations adjunct to US foreign policy. (Aldrich is one of the handfuls of British academics who are trying to incorporate the activities […]
[…] ISBN 9780955610547 There are a number of talks in Politics and Paranoia about Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd. (Holroyd had been in the British Army Special Military Intelligence Unit and Wallace had been a Senior Information Officer for the Army, both in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.) Looking back on this now it is […]
[…] weaving in and out of graphic depictions of JFK’s colourful personal life. And Hersh presents a compelling picture of an almost seamless milieu of machine politics, off-the-wall intelligence operations and organised crime. So what’s new, then? The Castro assassination plots, for one, are viewed as actively driven by the Kennedys – Bobby in particular. […]
[…] crashed alien craft; retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former Director of the National Security Agency; and retired Rear Admiral Shapiro, former head of the Office of Naval Intelligence. As a former NSA head, Inman’s evidence in particular is quite a coup. For if any state agency in the U.S. could be presumed to know […]
[…] a vested interest in suppressing information for political convenience make the decision about what is a matter of national security…It is therefore lamentable that all security and intelligence services have been given a blanket exemption from the Freedom of Information Act via s23…..It provides an absolute exemption for information that was supplied directly or […]
[…] degree of involvement in a firm’s total business practice as opposed to just finance and accounting. This involved the collection and classification of both general and detailed intelligence on many hitherto peripheral matters. These included labour relations, availability of raw materials, plants, products, markets and the effectiveness of the organisation and its future prospects. […]
[…] ‘Peter Wright’ was, according to The Times, 10 November 1952, ‘a professor of history in Cawnpore from 1937 to 1939. During the war he was in the intelligence service, and was Press censor at Delhi’. He was expelled by the colonial authorites in Kenya for being too friendly with members of Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya […]
[…] However, many of these new claims are sourced to ‘interview with old spook’. Loftus (and co-author Mark Aarons) claim to have interviewed hundreds of elderly, unidentified, retired intelligence officers for the information in the book. Though this is deeply unsatisfactory, it is nonetheless a very striking read. Loftus did a long radio interview with […]
