[…] major figure. Over the last 20 years there have been occasional stories in Private Eye speculating that the World Wildlife Fund was some kind of cover for intelligence personnel. This thought cropped up once again with the obituary of the former CIA officer Donald Aspinall Allan (Washington Post, 5 August 2006 ). Allan’s career […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] striking feature of this particular kind of article). Everything from an interest in crop circles to ‘the belief in sinister links between the military-industrial complex and the intelligence services’ is taken as evidence of ‘a flight from reason’ on the part of the public. She also suggests some possible causes for the growing vogue […]
[…] Power: The Secret Funding of the Tory Party, (London: Vision, 1998, pp.19-20). Perhaps it should be pointed out here, for the benefit of those who see the intelligence agencies as a possible threat to democracy, that a 1999 investigation by the Home Office’s chief historian found that in the case of the Zinoviev letter […]
[…] 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.
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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
Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy Vincent Bugliosi New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2007 xlvi + 1612 pps. + CD-ROM End Notes and Source Notes (958 + 170 pps.). Illustrations, bibliography, index, $49.95. ‘Reclaiming History is important not just because it’s correct, though it is. It’s significant not just … Read more
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
[…] kill the Pope?”, the opening paragraph of the first article reads: “A car mishap on an Irish road has raised the shattering spectre that the US Central Intelligence Agency is implicated in the plot to assassinate Pope John Paul 2 in Rome in May 1981.” According to Magill “from reading the article in the […]
