[…] In the case of why the Americans attacked Iraq, for example, our knowledge of the actual decision-making process is growing by the week as the military and intelligence bureaucracies leak in the great game of avoiding the blame for the disaster; and the knowledge that the actual evidence is increasingly available diminishes Porter’s discussion […]
[…] an unwitting part of the CIA’s MKUltra programme while a post-grad student at Oxford; and the section on the mysterious Ronald Stark, LSD entrepreneur and apparent American intelligence asset, has been elaborated. Most importantly, all the technical foul-ups which marred the first edition have gone. Vision were really crap when they first started out […]
[…] by Richard Hall mentioned that she wrote for the newsletters Africa Analysis, Africa Confidential and the Economist’s Foreign Report. The last two are frequently talked of as intelligence operations — Brian Crozier and Robert Moss, for example, have edited the latter — but is there any evidence about the former? Seth Kantor died in […]
[…] in 2003, advised Blair against providing anything more than moral support for the US invasion. (9) There was no enthusiasm in the Foreign Office and the defence, intelligence and security establishments were divided.(10) Reasons for the depth of opposition included distrust of the ambitions of the George W. Bush administration, anxiety about isolation from […]
[…] Chris Ryder are treated as straightforward sources despite public knowledge about their disinformation roles. Alan Protheroe of the BBC is not described as a former Army TA intelligence officer. Still, these are minor criticisms of the best analysis I have read of the politics of news production in this country – and the best […]
Robert Fisk London: Fourth Estate, 2005, £25.00 This very fine book runs to more than 1,300 pages, is well footnoted, referenced and indexed, carries a helpful bibliography and is written by one of the most fluent, knowledgeable and thoughtful journalists of our time. That part of its dedication is to Fisk’s parents ‘who taught … Read more
[…] point. Unfortunately, where Crawford points to collusion in a detailed way, he points to what we already know, for example, about Brian Nelson’s role as a UDA intelligence officer but also, in arms procurement from South Africa for what became the Combined Loyalist Military Command. There is much that is useful in Crawford’s book, […]
[…] the NSA-run global network of communications interception. But his work goes much further than that and anyone interested in GCHQ or the NSA, the history of signals intelligence since WW2, the relationship between politicians and spooks, the anti-nuclear campaign in New Zealand, or, indeed, the geo-politics of that part of the Pacific, will find […]
[…] the EU to the British people. These propaganda campaigns did little to educate people about the realities of EU membership and they significantly out-spent the campaigns of Eurosceptics. As such they effectively undermined the democratic process. The case stands. Richard Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence, (London: John Murray, 2001)
[…] which Porter, in view of his previous works, is ideally placed to have made. (1) There are plenty of works detailing the activities of the security and intelligence services and their allies in the Forces, in the City and in industry at key moments in the development of contemporary Britain, but most of these […]
