[…] for a while. Involved in some of it had been the Duke of Windsor. His supporters in the Tory Party included the Imperial Policy Group, whose Secretary/ intelligence officer was Kenneth de Courcy. Just before the war de Courcy was running round Europe testing the waters, writing reports for Neville Chamberlain. (1) ‘IPG had […]
[…] security scandals in the early sixties we tried to coax our computer to check on our findings on some of your top people in the services and intelligence services. The computer couldn’t tell us who was or wasn’t a spy, but it could assess people as to what extent they were a security risk. […]
[…] you where it is. Absolute exemptions are not subject to any public interest test, and include information supplied by, or concerning: the Security Service, MI5; the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6; GCHQ; the Special Forces, e.g. the SAS; tribunals concerning intelligence and interception of communications including the Investigatory Powers Tribunal; and the National Criminal Intelligence […]
[…] ‘MI5 has a policy of doing nothing at all to punish or deter agents of influence….’ because ‘it is not illegal to co-operate in peace-time with hostile intelligence agencies to feed Western media with disinformation’. So, now you know: once again the public sector shows itself to be incompetent (or infiltrated) and the private […]
[…] microcomputer revolution came along I was technically ahead of every other leftist in the country. That isn’t saying much; ‘technically advanced leftist’ is a lot like ‘military intelligence.’ But I could design and build circuits and write software. With the microcomputer, something I had been trying to do the hard way was suddenly within […]
The clandestine world of surveillance, spying and intelligence from ancient times to the post 9/11 world Ernest Volkman London: Carlton, 2007, h/b, £20 This is a lavishly and creatively illustrated, large format, (i.e. slightly bigger than A4) glossy paper, coffee-table book on the history of espionage. A former journalist with Newsday, and author […]
An interesting piece by Mark Hollingsworth appeared in Punch of 23 May-5 June 2001, ‘Spooks in the House’, on intelligence and security personnel who become MPs. Some of the material was familiar but less well known were Raymond Fletcher, and Le Cercle. Fletcher was a Labour MP who was witch-hunted by MI5 as a […]
[…] year Searchlight staffer Graeme Atkinson replied to this debate, writing of ‘the hoary old ‘Gable memorandum’ ‘ and asserting that ‘not a single accusation about Searchight’s ‘ intelligence connections’ holds water.’ (5) In August this year Searchlight published a column by Ray Hill in which Larry O’Hara was attacked for a short piece he […]
[…] the history of the Agency, merely a history. Huge areas of the Agency’s activities have been ignored, as Jeffrey Richelson, one of the best informed historians of intelligence points out.(7) Richelson’s complaint is that the author has concentrated too much on the Agency’s covert operations. This is clearly true if we are to take […]
[…] over the estimates of Soviet military capability tends to get overlooked in favour of the more exciting aspects of US foreign policy and the work of US intelligence agencies. This is a pity, because those estimates form the basis for the official US government definition of ‘reality’. A low estimate of Soviet spending/capabilities makes […]
