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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 – […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] and comments – in IHT 31st March 1983. 18. William Pfaff in IHT (14th April 1983) gives an account of what is said to be a Soviet intelligence document alleging that Brzezinski and Cardinal Koch (both of Polish origins), with the assistance of the West German Cardinals, organised the election of Wojtyla, the current […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] surprisingly, Geheim devotes a fair amount of space to the CIA: five articles in this issue. Barbara Muller continues the listing (begun in issue No1/87) of American intelligence bases in Germany. She lists over 100 locations in Central and Northern Germany used by either the CIA or US Military Intelligence. Michael Opperskalski presents a […]
