[…] $45, the Chinese-English chart, based on institutional and personnel changes since May 2000, outlined the government structure of China. The open information is the sort of thing intelligence officers used to collate. The Times 28 August 2006 The Guardian 26 January 2006 Following the first Gulf War, British civil engineering contractors were disappointed not […]
[…] 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. […]
[…] volumes, Granny made me an anarchist (London: Scribner, 2004) . Recommended. Notes 1 Christie knew enough about Italian politics to write the biography of Italian terrorist and intelligence asset, Delle Chiaie. This is available from 2 There is one historical irony worth pointing out. Edward Heath, who made the British left (and Christie) angry […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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! […]
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
[…] 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 […]
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
[…] 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 […]
[…] exact opposite: he ‘believes’ no such thing. He is well aware of past weaknesses and details many of them, including sections on the media activities of the intelligence services and the Information Research Department. Davies’s belief is that today’s situation is bad and that the future looks bleak. Something troubling is going on when […]
