[…] 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 […]
[…] In the mid 1980s I was one of the few people in the Labour Party who were trying to educate themselves about the role played by the intelligence and security services in our democracy. In 1985/86 I was corresponding with my equivalents in New Zealand and getting material from them on the attempts being […]
[…] pp. 8-9: ‘The interplay between policy-making, political power and its expression in the different institutional frameworks of the British state — the Cabinet, Whitehall, the security and intelligence services and so on — gives rise to national security policies that exhibit identifiable characteristics based on social class and political beliefs …..British policy-makers have entrenched […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] recruiting sergeant for al-Qaeda. Where Naomi Klein has gone one stage further is in grasping how the drum-beat of still further wars is being fueled by poor intelligence derived from ‘interrogations’ (i.e. torture) carried out by private intelligence consultants in privately run torture centres outside the US. This complements the cherry-picking of the best […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] world: ‘Among the ‘deep’ or repressed sociological features of our universities and cultural life are the following facts published by the Church Committee in 1976: The Central Intelligence Agency is now using several hundred academics, who, in addition to providing leads and occasionally making introductions for intelligence purposes, occasionally write books and other materials […]
[…] much on the right of that party, connived in the creation of the Provisional IRA in the early 1970s. Their collaborators included members of G2, Irish Army Intelligence. They particularly included Captain John Kelly – whose memoirs to this effect were subsequently self published and contents upheld in an Irish Court (Dillon, 1989; 1-24). […]
[…] right wing conspiracy theories: Oswald was involved in the conspiracy to murder the President; and he was an FBI informant and a CIA or Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) agent; but he was also working for the communists as a double agent of the KGB or GRU! Russell proposes that, having been sent to […]
[…] On both sides of the Atlantic, Iraq has demonstrated the primacy of politicians. We saw opposition to the attack on Iraq from sections of the Anglo-American military, intelligence agencies and diplomats, accompanied by the biggest campaign of leaks of classified information I can remember. Yet nothing happened. British participation in the invasion was not […]
