[…] – with G. K. Young prominent – needed reigning in. They were too expensive and too embarrassing when things went wrong. White wanted SIS to be an intelligence service – yes, with clandestine sources – but also one which, he could assure his colleagues in Whitehall, would not embarrass them. No more coup plotting […]
[…] zealous control for the next twenty years’ — and never mentions it again. Mangold tries to explain Angleton’s enormous power wholly by his being head of Counter Intelligence. This is not convincing. Surely part of Angleton’s bureaucratic power came precisely from the “Israeli account’. The book is essentially an account of the disastrous effects […]
[…] he subsequently received. I suspect the evidence was exaggerated at a higher level in MI5 in order to ensure that Mr. Smith received a heavy sentence. The intelligence services depend on disproportionate sentences for breaches of the Official Secrets Acts to cultivate the mystique of the importance of their work. I believe Mr. Smith […]
[…] Net. He appears to believe that he can negotiate with MI6 in some fashion. But as Phillip Knightley says in the Belfast Telegraph piece, they’re the Secret Intelligence Service and they will pursue him to the ends of the earth: pour encourager les autres, if for no other reason. In a posting at Cryptome […]
[…] party magazine of the Hindu nationalist party now in government in India, BJP Today, has suggested that the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi was the work of British intelligence agents. The article, written by R. Chandrachundan, a close friend of Ghandi’s son, reports the presence of two men from the British consulate with cameras on […]
[…] its factory in Germany seized by the Nazis during the war. Violet resolved the problem and Pinay was so satisfied he recommended him to the new French intelligence organization, SDECE. Violet duly became an SDECE operative, utilizing a global network of contacts to assist that agency in its work.(2) Violet’s early post-war deeds also […]
[…] shot. Phoenix found his activities curtailed and was fearful that the Protestants were going to be sold out. He believed that the handing over of responsibility for intelligence work to MI5 was part of this sellout. Those thought most likely to oppose any deal, whether politicians, civil servants or even police, were themselves to […]
[…] (See the anodyne obit in Guardian 25 October). Expendables Two recent examples of the way HMG treats its employees when they become embarrassing. Peter Bleach, a former intelligence officer turned arms dealer, is in prison in India after an arms deal he was involved with went sour. The Indian court agreed to examine notes […]
John McMurtry London: Pluto Press, 2002, pb £15.99 I shouldn’t be reviewing this. I haven’t digested it properly and it is going to take some time to do so. But I don’t want to leave this for six months without promoting it. I used to try and preserve books in good condition, didn’t write … Read more
[…] hinted that something might turn up from an unexpected quarter. Turner suspects that Farewell America was that something; that although the book was put together by French intelligence people, it was the contact with Kostikov which led to it. The pseudonymous writer of the book was Thomas Buchanan, author of the 1964 Who Killed […]
