[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
Robert Parry Sheridan Square Press, New York, 1993 ISBN 1-879823-08-X This is an account both of the October Surprise story and of the author’s attempts over two years to stand it up. This works at several levels. The first is an intelligible recounting of the main features of the developing October Surprise allegations. He reviews … Read more
James Jesus Angleton and the ‘Third Way’ The CIA counter- intelligence expert James Angleton has for years been regarded as one of the keenest of cold warriors, who turned the CIA inside out in the search for Soviet ‘moles’ and ultimately had to be retired to prevent further damage to the Agency. But interesting […]
[…] US; but all carried out by Republican governments. Is it possible that on both sides of the Atlantic the professional diplomats and the rational core of the intelligence community are slowly throwing off some of the vile nonsense perpetrated in the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher years? The release of various official US documents which could easily have […]
[…] O’Sullivan, Pantheon Books, New York, 1989, $15.95. Since the revelation of the activities of Forum World Features in the mid 1970s, it has become apparent that Western intelligence services have used ‘research institutes’ and ‘study centres’ with impressive and neutral-sounding titles to put over their world view and create public antipathy towards the enemy […]
[…] Europe. Ingeborg Philipsen spoke of the Danish Society for Freedom and Culture, established in January 1953 by the former resistance fighter Arne Sejr. Sejr operated a private intelligence group called The Firm, formed in 1948 to conduct psychological warfare in Denmark in connection with the Danish Intelligence Service and the CIA. But Sejr’s interest […]
[…] talked about Saddam Hussein in Iraq…But at that time…..the Democrats had occupied the White House for the previous eight years. So he was not privy to any intelligence whatsoever…he didn’t know what kind of situation the weapons of mass destruction was at that time.’ () About Open Government The first issue of About Open […]
