[…] including an important piece by Robert Parry, ‘Lost History: Contras, Dirty Money and the CIA.’ Another important background piece is Jack Blum’s testimony to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee last year, which is reproduced in Covert Action Quarterly no. 59. However, in my opinion the two best pieces on the CIA-drugs issue which appeared […]
[…] Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), 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 […]
[…] contender for the prize for most inaccurate jacket ever written. It begins by stating that this is the first MI6 memoir (it isn’t), calls MI6 officer Bristow an ‘agent’, (the one thing which drives intelligence officers nuts), and then makes claims not to be found in the text. Of interest only to serious MI6 buffs.
[…] be required. Mission-critical systems: defense attempting to address major software challenges (27 pp.) GAO/IMTEC-93-13, December 1992. Billions of dollars in defense weapons and command, control, communications and intelligence systems depend on high-performance, correctly functioning real-time computer systems capable of withstanding severe stresses without failing. This report identifies the many software problems affecting weapons and […]
[…] for example, he talks of the CIA in its ‘great, early days ….. manned by the flower of American youth…. something almost entirely new in history, a secret intelligence service that was dedicated to doing good in the world by stealth.’ Ah, the self-confidence (and self-delusion) in ‘doing good in the world by stealth’. RR
Scott Newton, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, £30 This is the book Newton was working on which produced the spin-off pieces published in Lobster: ‘The economic background to appeasement and the search for Anglo-German detente before and during WW2’ in Lobster 20, and ‘The Who’s Who of Appeasement’ in Lobster 22. As those essays showed, Newton … Read more
[…] to them; on other issues that clearly bore on the question of war, like decolonisation, Europe, and the economy; on possible extraneous influences, like business and the intelligence community; on strands of Labour opinion outside the parliamentary party – trade unions, Fabians, pressure groups, and at constituency level; and a little further back in […]
[…] would sack a large number of ageing officers and have a smaller Washington headquarters working with a larger number of agents through third nations – use the intelligence forces of other countries rather than the CIA – which was implemented by Nixon in ’72 or so. But the whole idea, which involved the material […]
[…] largely unaware that he had been marked down as a dangerous enemy of the centralised British political system. According to the former MI5 officer David Shayler, the intelligence services file on Owen Oyston was re-examined in 1992 by the head of MI5, when it looked as if Neil Kinnock’s revived Labour party might defeat […]
[…] the ‘dirty tricks’ attributed to the ‘political soldiers’. He denies all the charges and his explanation for the hostility is that as head of the ‘Security and Intelligence Department’ (of which Barrett was briefly a member), he played a prominent part in the disciplinary tribunals of those suspended or expelled, with concomitant legal action […]
