[…] – 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 […]
[…] claimed to be confidential briefings “off the record”. The real reason which could not be told publicly for our entry to the common market was because our intelligence service had learned the Soviet Unions had plans to invade Western Europe and these would be carried out once the trade unions in Western Europe led […]
[…] (Taylor Branch and Eugene M. Propper, Penguin 1983), the book about the 1976 assassination of Chilean opposition leader, Orlando Letelier. In mid-1975 General Pinochet ordered the Chilean intelligence service, DINA, to gather compromising material on the human rights situation in other countries. DINA dispatched an anti-Castro Cuban, Virgilio Paz, to Belfast to obtain photographs […]
[…] him by launching the largest private sector political warfare campaign in history against him. But there are other factors. For an American politician, getting embroiled with the intelligence services or the military looks almost uniquely dangerous. There are also two more general reasons for the inertia. The Democrats are reluctant to criticise America, domestically […]
[…] agency in the covert alliance is simply doing what it is told. Nothing has changed in 20 years, the UN is still a prime target for US intelligence and, doubt-less, little old New Zealand is still doing its bit.'(3) Were an equivalent report on GCHQ to turn up in the UK, would any of […]
[…] the slightest chance of the British government doing anything about the ex-Nazis now living in this country. To expose them would entail exposing their links to British intelligence. It is a safe bet that not a sheet of official paper with their names on it now exists in Whitehall.) As this is the first […]
[…] As Phillips describes it, the British state and its politicians declined to do anything about this even though they were warned repeatedly throughout the 1990s by other intelligence services and other states. Phillips attributes this inactivity to a combination of political reluctance to tackle something as sensitive as immigration and concern about the impact […]
[…] The facts are somewhat different. As early as mid-1961 Ward was being run by the Security Service officer, Keith Wagstaffe, then working for D1 (a), Operations, Counter- intelligence. The Service decided to try and ‘honeytrap’ Ivanov, for which Ward was most willing and eager to provide a suitable female – Christine Keeler. After things […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] did not get out in time.” Thus, it appears, “getting out in time” means anything up to 15 months later! (This really is vaguely insulting to one’s intelligence.) Jilian Becker, now part of the new London-based terrorism institute (see elsewhere in this issue), writes of captured PLO documents showing: “that the Soviet Union, through […]
