[…] 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 […]
[…] by Basque ETA terrorists on behalf of the Sandinistas. Curiously the reports were based on leaks – phone-calls to major newspapers in Washington and the U.S. from Intelligence sources, including the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy’. The latter is a kind of updated IRD, and ‘public diplomacy’ is a 1980s euphemism for disinformation […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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 […]
[…] on here? Cyberspace Wars: Microprocessing vs Big Brother Multiculturalism and the Ruling Elite Thirty Years after: JFK Researchers Gather in Dallas Cults, Anti-cultists and the Cult of Intelligence Cold Warriors Woo Generation X The ‘Information Superhighway’ and its discontents Organised Crime Threatens the New World Order The Decline of American Journalism The 1960s and […]
[…] 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 […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
