[…] both the value of his work and his fatal flaw. Strange to say, whereas an IWW pamphlet contained a touching dedication to ‘our constant companions of the intelligence services’, Donovan Pedelty writes as if these political Peeping Toms of the State did not even exist. By accident, a letter I wrote more than 30 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] an obscure OSS officer. But Levenda needs the OSS link because the father of the actress Sharon Tait, the Manson gang’s most famous victim, was an American intelligence officer serving in Vietnam when she died. What he wants to say is: Look, both girls with spooks for fathers! Both killed by the Manson gang! […]
[…] probably most Japanese as well. This is a Japan, as Whiting describes in abundant detail, made up of ‘gangsters, corrupt entrepreneurs, courtesans, seedy sports promoters, streetwise opportunists, intelligence agents, political fixers and financial manipulators’. More to the point, he also traces the history of the complicated entanglement of the US government, or more specifically […]
[…] left to say. In the absence of evidence of the Iraqi regime’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, to the distress of the professional diplomats and most of their intelligence services, the Bush-Blair ‘allies’ used dodgy information from defectors, selectively edited what other information they had, or simply made it up as part of the ‘perception […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] Phoenix, about which Valentine has written a widely-praised book, involved identifying and assassinating supporters of the North Vietnamese, while Operation Chaos was a domestic surveillance and counter- intelligence operation. But still: these quibbles aside, this big book (500 plus pages) is a fascinating collection of stories, and adds some major pieces to the vast […]
[…] Riley has written elsewhere at greater length. Riley is determined that Philby, while in Beirut, continued to work for what he insists on calling the RIS (Russian Intelligence Service) but has virtually no evidence to back up this view. There is some speculation about the allegiance of Lord Rothschild which has been floating around […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] of England’s regulatory role is finally being examined in the High Court. That book raised awkward and far-sighted questions about the role of the British and American intelligence services in relation to BCCI and to the corrupt bank’s clear links with prominent politicians and international terrorism: there aren’t many places outside Court 73 of […]
