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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] aristocrats and eccentric M.Ps or forces which were much more powerfully rooted in the structure of the British State? What was their relationship with the security and intelligence services? Why did Churchill feel the need to have his own intelligence adviser, Sir Desmond Morton? Costello seems to believe that the pro-appeasement faction was powerful […]
[…] 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 – […]
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 […]
[…] pro quo for the pension he is now receiving, is to bolster the key myth of MI6, that while we may be the junior partner in the intelligence relationship with the U.S., we’re the best, the most subtle and the most reliable — the people to handle those uncouth Yanks, to hold their hands […]
[…] The M10/11, hand-held, almost recoilless weapon was designed by Gordon Ingram and Mitch Werbell II, a mysterious White Russian, OSS-China veteran small arms manufacturer and occasional US intelligence operative. Werbell has been termed a ‘creative genius’ by weapons historians for his designs of noise suppressors for automatic weapons and for his other ‘silent kill’ […]
[…] the British Right’s ideological package, but in the past few years they have become much more explicit. At one level it looks fairly straightforward. The British military/ intelligence complex has been preparing for years for the time when the ‘Soviet threat’ ceases to guarantee their budgets. And that might be soon. Georgi(?) Arbatov, one […]
[…] a travel agents’ convention which appears more like an international gathering of secret agents all getting pissed together. CIA stations carry our propaganda and study the Russian Intelligence Service (RIS) and local left activity. But Beck learns that by the 1960s RIS had long since ceased using foreign Communist Parties for espionage. In Havana […]
