[…] who will be sent to work as Resident Operators and Control Agents in foreign countries will amount to about 230.’ Considerate of them to tell the counter- intelligence services of the NATO alliance, is it not? A decade later we find the same theme in J. Bernard Hutton’s 1972 The Subverters of Liberty (p. […]
[…] the low-level functionary portrayed in his famous televised confession. Before becoming a journalist, Bob Woodward, of Woodward and Bernstein, had been a U.S. Navy ‘briefer’ with considerable intelligence connections, among them Alexander Haig. ‘Deep Throat’ was a device to conceal the fact that Haig was leaking to Woodward. (Or: Haig was ‘Deep Throat’.)’ One […]
Benny Morris London: I. B Tauris, 2002, £24.50, h/b In report after report on the major media we hear about or see pictures of ‘refugee camps’ in Israel – and no-one ever explains from where the refugees came. Perhaps editors think we know already. Benny Morris is an Israeli historian who became well known … Read more
[…] 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 […]
[…] were so clear-cut. One of the things that some of the Greenham Common women reported was ‘voices in the head’; and I have a 1976 US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report, ‘Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Radiation’ which notes (p. 2): ‘The potential for the development of a number of antipersonnel applications is suggested by […]
Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy Phillip Willan Phillip Willan’s Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, (Constable, London, 1991) is a detailed and interesting book, dealing in a thorough (if partially flawed) way with a fascinating subject. It covers a wide array of interlocking subjects including the infamous P2 … Read more
[…] 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 […]
Corinne Souza Edinburgh/London: Mainstream, 2003, £15.99, h/b This is an important and interesting book but rather hard to describe because it contains so much. At its heart is Souza’s father, an Iraqi Anglophile, who became SIS’s agent in Iraq, and later in London. Using her firsthand knowledge supplemented by her father’s papers, Souza has … Read more
[…] a quick skim across Massiter, Bettaney, Charles Elwell – and thence into British Briefing, David Hart etc. (And Colin Wallace was not ‘a former officer in Army Intelligence’; and has not, to my knowledge, suggested that the League had office space in MI5 headquarters . But since this, like most of the assertions in […]
