[…] Chomsky and Herman is worth having and the Pilger pieces, written in the weeks preceding the invasion, stand up pretty well. There are interesting snippets on the intelligence services and disinformation, psy-ops, US propaganda and media behaviour. The material which has survived best is the essays on the workings of the media and state […]
[…] tactic of officials will be to brief Ministers on what insiders call ‘reality’ as opposed to ‘gossip’ in the Party’s document.” (More Hennessy ‘gossip’ .) 4. Secret Intelligence (Richard Norton-Taylor, G., June 6th 1983) Thatcher Advisers Refuse To Face M.P.’s Questions. (Peter Hennessy T. April 21 1983) The new Select Committees attempted to monitor […]
[…] thought their codes unbreakable and chatted way in great detail about their agents. But by 1950 enough of the Soviet material had been decoded for the US intelligence community to begin piecing together the Soviet networks in the US. These intercepts – code named Venona – many of which remain unbroken to this day, […]
[…] sold to Spaniards who have no national interest in promoting London’s Heathrow as a gateway to Britain. See Private Eye 27 September 2007. It is possible the intelligence reform highlighted by Nick Clegg MP has been stood down. He was quoted in The Times 11 September 2007 with a plan ‘which would mean a […]
[…] without blushing and putting it in scare quotes. (Shayler’s complaints about MI5 can be seen in his submission to the Cabinet Office Review of the security and intelligence services, printed here as appendix 2: they are almost entirely bureaucratic and technical.) In a recent column of his in Punch – issue 93 in the […]
Langley Pierce Interproducts, Perth, Scotland, 1994, £9.95 Strange little book, 90 pages listing and, it claims, identifying the shortwave radio stations used by the world’s intelligence services to broadcast coded messages – groups of numbers – to field agents and stations. Want to eavesdrop on Mossad’s numbers? SIS’s? The KGB’s? etc etc. Is any […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] the political and social damage inflicted on the then British ruling elite by the various defections, and the revelations surrounding them, surpassed in the end any immediate intelligence damage sustained during their time in place. The British ‘culture of secrecy’ was badly damaged. Riley touches on this theme but doesn’t develop it. Did the […]
[…] 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 […]
