[…] 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 […]
[…] 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). […]
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair London:Verso, 1999, £10 Much has been written about the role of the Central Intelligence Agency in the global drugs trade but this is the first book that actually brings it all together in one place. The authors haven’t exposed much that is new, instead they have taken […]
[…] sensational episode. Fairly quickly after this appalling crime, expressions of disquiet with official explanations were voiced. If guns had been taken into the Libyan embassy, surely the intelligence agencies would have known? If there had been a Libyan embassy plan to fire at the anti-Gaddafi demonstrators on that fateful day on 17 April 1984, […]
[…] Repington (‘….career ended due to an indiscretion, 1902…’ according to the Dictionary of National Biography), the military correspondent of the Morning Post. Repington fed smears, gossip and intelligence to Pemberton-Billing. There were still some desultory peace talks with Germany under way. Repington (and those who backed him) wanted these stopped. Many allegations were aimed […]
[…] after this curious telephone call, I was sent a photocopy of the review of Smear! by Robert Cecil from the Winter ’92 issue of the Journal of Intelligence and National Security. To quote the biographical material on his book about Guy Burgess, A Divided Life (Bodley Head, London, 1988), Mr Cecil is a former […]
[…] past couple of years. In ‘Exposing the dirty war’ (The Sunday Times Review, 13 April 2003) just before Stevens’ publication, Ware wrote of: ‘…..a group of shadowy intelligence operatives who believed they were accountable to nobody‘ (emphases added). And in case we hadn’t got the message, Liam Clarke told us in The Sunday Times […]
[…] a number of interesting subsidiary trails. One is his discovery that ‘Nigel West’s’ book on the Special Branch is junk. In a paper in Vol.1 No.3 of Intelligence and National Security (see journals in this issue) Porter describes ‘West’s’ book as “the most unreliable history book ever written by anyone who has not deliberately […]
[…] claim in The Times by the Cambridge historian Professor Christopher Andrew, that Arthur Ransome has been identified in KGB documents as ‘the most important secret source of intelligence on British foreign policy’ for the Cheka, the terror organisation of Bolshevik Russia, has infuriated lovers of Ransome’s work. Unlike Michael Foot, similarly traduced, Ramsome is […]
[…] services is expressed by the fact that they the politicians refused to even listen to what Machon and Shayler had to say. As did the Intelligence and Security Committee. Oversight? Overlook, more like it. As always happens, the system then tries to shoot the messenger bearing the bad news. When it comes […]
