[…] This is inevitable. The world changes, priorities change and the people writing for Lobster change. When Lobster began in 1983 its chief focus was information on the intelligence and security services. There was almost no information on them in those days and every scrap seemed important. These days such information is available in abundance […]
[…] its factory in Germany seized by the Nazis during the war. Violet resolved the problem and Pinay was so satisfied he recommended him to the new French intelligence organization, SDECE. Violet duly became an SDECE operative, utilizing a global network of contacts to assist that agency in its work.(2) Violet’s early post-war deeds also […]
[…] to obscure the details of a picture we knew already: when the interests of an American company were threatened by a modest reforming government, the US military, intelligence and propaganda organisations – the network detailed by Lucas – stepped in, fabricated a ‘Soviet threat’ with a little help from their assets in the media, […]
[…] chance meeting between the two comes to the attention of MI5, and Blunt is instructed to befriend Losey and monitor his activities on behalf of the American intelligence services. In doing so, he comes to admire Losey’s principled political views and his refusal to name names, unlike many of his compatriots. As their friendship […]
[…] In the case of why the Americans attacked Iraq, for example, our knowledge of the actual decision-making process is growing by the week as the military and intelligence bureaucracies leak in the great game of avoiding the blame for the disaster; and the knowledge that the actual evidence is increasingly available diminishes Porter’s discussion […]
[…] point. Unfortunately, where Crawford points to collusion in a detailed way, he points to what we already know, for example, about Brian Nelson’s role as a UDA intelligence officer but also, in arms procurement from South Africa for what became the Combined Loyalist Military Command. There is much that is useful in Crawford’s book, […]
[…] 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 […]
Robert Fisk London: Fourth Estate, 2005, £25.00 This very fine book runs to more than 1,300 pages, is well footnoted, referenced and indexed, carries a helpful bibliography and is written by one of the most fluent, knowledgeable and thoughtful journalists of our time. That part of its dedication is to Fisk’s parents ‘who taught … Read more
[…] more dense, more difficult in places and more depressing than it did in isolated essays. The underlying message is clear and alarming: if governments give military- or intelligence agency-sponsored scientists large amounts of money and no political control they will eventually come up with technologies with which to control the behaviour and thinking of […]
