[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] Some sources within Mexico City report that Carlos Salinas is in fact still a visitor there, protected by a large bodyguard of military and federal police, with intelligence provided by the USA… 1993 24 May Cardinal JUAN JESUS POSADOS OCAMPO and six others are assassinated at Guadalajara International Airport, by members of the ARELLANO […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] embarrassment to ‘national security’ while trying to prosecute the ‘war on drugs’. It also contains the best account I have read of how the actions of the intelligence agencies in the United States, chiefly the CIA, produce unanticipated consequences. I will try to summarise this. A group of Cuban Bay of Pigs veterans created […]
[…] Spooks Richard L. Russell, an academic based at the Near East-South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, the National Defense University, examines the strengths and weaknesses of American intelligence during the first Gulf War. As you would expect from someone who worked for the CIA (he was a political-military analyst specialising in Middle East and […]
[…] (p. 372) – an absurd description for a man who, by his own admission, spent virtually the whole of the post-war period working for British and American intelligence. His role in educating Thatcher on security and intelligence issues with his Shield group of old spooks is omitted and his memoir is not included in […]
BERR In a profile of John Hutton, the new Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Hutton said that Labour ‘is the natural party of business’,(1) another benchmark (or, in Corinne Souza country, ‘rebranding’) in the shift from old to New Labour. For it was Harold Wilson’s boast that he had made Labour […]
