[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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.
[…] 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! […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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
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
[…] Epstein’s website, but sadly doesn’t repeat my favourite Bush I conspiracy anecdote – the one about the FBI memo in which ‘Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency’ denounced a Republican (!) political rival, for JFK-assassination-related activities, in 1963. In the end, maybe the pressing reason to keep the book out of Britain […]
[…] 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 […]
