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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] Terpil in Beirut) from his cell before FBI agents spirited him back to New York. She says the book contains the names of top CIA and other intelligence officers in the Middle East and Europe. Obviously most of those named lead completely legitimate lives and were involved with Korkala in apparently legal business deals […]
[…] gave an example of why the British state is willing to eat almost any amount of shit handed to them by the US. ‘The UK has no intelligence assets in central Asia. We are dependent on information given to us by the United States’ CIA and NSA.’ The British overseas lobby in Whitehall – […]
[…] be found guilty of. If it turns out that they are cleared of all charges, then the campaign against them will have to be reinvestigated as an intelligence operation. (It is worth noting here that Steve Dorril suspects it is probably an operation run against the IMO rather than the NUM.) If this campaign […]
[…] 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, […]
[…] an offer of peace between a Germany without Hitler and a Britain without Churchill. But the British government, tipped off by Admiral Canaris, chief of German secret intelligence, was waiting. Churchill had the double locked up for the duration of the war. At the Nuremberg trials the man who called himself Hess suffered from […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] denial had been broadcast throughout the country, and I can only assume that it was believed. After all, one would think that the former Director of Naval Intelligence and the National Security Agency would know with some precision where he was when this country was undergoing its greatest political crisis of this century. Indeed, […]
