[…] ‘MI5 feared militant left could destabilise Britain’ Jimmy Burns reported in The Financial Times 29 December 2006 on a contingency paper by MI5, presented to the Joint Intelligence Committee on April 9 1976. That paper included this: `Throughout the seventies there has been a growth in the general public uneasiness about the current aims […]
[…] National Liberty Press, 2001, $14.95, ISBN 0-97-10042-0-X Alexander ‘Al’ Martin is a retired Lt. Commander in the US Navy, a former member of the Office of Naval Intelligence and a middle-ranking player in the thicket of scandals known as Iran-Contra. This might be the most startling book written about post-war American politics; and it […]
[…] new SIS recruits were briefed by the then SIS chief McColl. One of the new recruits put the obvious question: ‘ “Sir, why do we have an intelligence service at all? There are countries more important on the world stage, with much more powerful economies, who have only small or nonexistent external intelligence gathering […]
The origins of Civil Assistance? In the UK in 1974-75 a number of ‘private armies’ appeared, linked to retired senior military and intelligence figures. There were General Sir Walter Walker’s Civil Assistance, Colonel David Stirling’s GB75, and George Young’s Unison. (1) These groups formed in order to frustrate the impact of strike action in […]
[…] but a volume devoted to SOG alone remained a missing quantity until Charles F. Reske came along. Reske is one of those people who shift easily between intelligence and academe. During the Vietnam years, he served with the Naval Security Group, the U.S. Navy’s agency for signals intelligence (SIGINT), and he has collected degrees […]
[…] And since then this ‘threat’ has worked a treat, ramifying and multiplying into an new, vast, hydra-headed, near-invisible, global threat, justifying vast new expenditure and military and intelligence expansion all over the world. But threat generation isn’t enough in itself; the threat also has to be legitimised; and, despite the DIA and Air Force […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] But none of the reviewers that I can find referred to the section in which Haines says on page 140 that a former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee told him that ‘he and the FCO believed she was an Israeli spy, but didn’t, or couldn’t, offer any evidence.’ Haines speculates that perhaps this […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
