[…] 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 […]
[…] contender for the prize for most inaccurate jacket ever written. It begins by stating that this is the first MI6 memoir (it isn’t), calls MI6 officer Bristow an ‘agent’, (the one thing which drives intelligence officers nuts), and then makes claims not to be found in the text. Of interest only to serious MI6 buffs.
[…] US War Department. “The solution was very simple. If State would not approve immigration due to derogatory OMGUS (Office of Military Government US) reports, the JOIA (Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency) would change the reports.” Date-line Washington: anti-Semitism and the airwaves Lars-Erik Nelson in Foreign Policy No.65, Winter 1986 Since Reagan took office Radio Liberty, […]
[…] the ‘dirty tricks’ attributed to the ‘political soldiers’. He denies all the charges and his explanation for the hostility is that as head of the ‘Security and Intelligence Department’ (of which Barrett was briefly a member), he played a prominent part in the disciplinary tribunals of those suspended or expelled, with concomitant legal action […]
[…] the U.S.’s many covert and overt anti-Soviet operations of the 1980s. As you might expect with the author’s track record of accepting what the U.S. and U.K. intelligence services tell him, there is no consideration – none; not a line – of the massive critiques of the KGB-done-it thesis by Edward Herman and others […]
[…] for example, he talks of the CIA in its ‘great, early days ….. manned by the flower of American youth…. something almost entirely new in history, a secret intelligence service that was dedicated to doing good in the world by stealth.’ Ah, the self-confidence (and self-delusion) in ‘doing good in the world by stealth’. RR
[…] a camera with a long lens can seem like a gun as it is pointed over a wall. The chances are that he was working for British Intelligence.’ Geraghty forthrightly condemns the Heath Government’s hard line policy, providing the fascinating detail that senior ministers had urged ‘an unlawful “shoot-to-kill” policy’ on the Army, but […]
Scott Newton, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, £30 This is the book Newton was working on which produced the spin-off pieces published in Lobster: ‘The economic background to appeasement and the search for Anglo-German detente before and during WW2’ in Lobster 20, and ‘The Who’s Who of Appeasement’ in Lobster 22. As those essays showed, Newton … Read more
[…] eye-opening but unsuccessful spell in the real economy, into retirement as a country gentleman – that kind of rebel! Notes 14 There is nothing which throws light on the report in The Times of 2 April 2002 that Lord Carrington the Foreign Secretary had ignored reports of invasion fears coming from the Joint Intelligence Committee.
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
