[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] Sunday Times 4 January 1998). Better known under his pen name Richard Deacon, McCormick was one of the post-war pioneers in the field of writing books about intelligence services and operations from scraps of real information. James Earl Ray died, aged 70. Harold Jackson devoted fourth-fifths of his long obituary in the Guardian (24 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] pride: if the British are doing it, so should we. This meant that a welfare issue could be prioritised. At times, it could also mean that the intelligence services could pass a coded message, via Hansard, to, for example, a senior health professional who was a source in another country, without being seen to […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] index. The most important book on the case published in the last few years. A mass of new evidence – Oswald as FBI informant, Ruby’s gun-running activities, intelligence agencies out of control, and more. Marred only by the La Fontaines’ novelistic autobiographical interludes and the belief that the Anti-Castro Cuban groups could go for […]
The Men with the Guns G.F. Newman (Sphere, London 1984) I’ve got a lot of time for G.F. Newman. He’s written some of the best, sharpest, things about contemporary Britain: the Law and Order series and the Terry Sneed novels are the obvious places to start. But this – perhaps because of the shift to … Read more
[…] events on the British (and Spanish) political underground since the war and the book is thus dotted with interesting fragments about the area where the state, the intelligence services and political activity overlap. There are little bits of new information or perspectives, for example, on Will Owen, the Labour MP who was ripping-off the […]
[…] 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)
