[…] 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 […]
[…] reason seems likely to be Stiff’s later career in the SAS, as an employee of David Stirling’s Watchguard International, and as a member of the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation (CI0). Stiff reveals, among other things, his involvement in a campaign of bombing and assassination in Zambia and in an abortive conspiracy to assassinate Robert […]
[…] to reproduce conversations verbatim, a talent that made him a highly prized asset of the CIA station chief, John Hart, in Saigon. Hart and the CIA’s foreign intelligence staff wanted to know what influential Vietnamese citizens and officials were privately thinking, and plotting; so, through his CIA contacts, Ellsberg was introduced into Saigon’s most […]
[…] Tribunal. The IPT is the body set up under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) to hear complaints relating to conduct by the Security and Intelligence agencies, and complaints about phone-tapping. It also deals with claims under the Human Rights Act 1998, s7(1)(a) that a public authority has acted in a manner […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
An interesting piece by Mark Hollingsworth appeared in Punch of 23 May-5 June 2001, ‘Spooks in the House’, on intelligence and security personnel who become MPs. Some of the material was familiar but less well known were Raymond Fletcher, and Le Cercle. Fletcher was a Labour MP who was witch-hunted by MI5 as a […]
[…] operational sense, more is needed. Interview 1 March 1992. We know from Colin Wallace’s evidence that such a document haul would be thoroughly analysed by the state intelligence forces for potential psy-ops use. It would not take genius to work out that a copy of the letter would be used by Searchlight. Had Searchlight […]
[…] all about Kincora in 1974 — Ed Moloney and Andy Pollak, Irish Times, 25 June 1985, p. 7. MI5 knew about assault allegations, Kincora cover-up part of intelligence plot — Ed Moloney and Andy Pollak, Irish Times, 26 June 1985, p. 16. The queer card — Phoenix, 8 November 1985, p. 9. Epilogue on […]
[…] the Pakistan team, lead by A. Q. Khan, trying to build a bomb in the arms race with India. In so doing they alerted a number of intelligence services who attempt to monitor such technology transfers. These services were ignored by their governments who didn’t think it mattered because they couldn’t believe that a […]
