[…] 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.
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
Greg Philo and David Miller Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education, 2001, £16.99 I asked the publisher for this on the basis of the title and the authors: Greg Philo has written many books for the Glasgow University Media Group (Bad News, More Bad News etc.) and David Miller is the author of Don’t Mention the … Read more
[…] 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
[…] it could not be won on the basis of anything less than a massive deployment of troops well beyond what was politically acceptable. This was Ellsberg’s human intelligence, as opposed to the ‘Humint’ variety of wishful thinking the president’s men were peddling. But presidents down the line were continually presented with wishful thinking from […]
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
[…] decline. Most of all, the UK is no longer a world military power but merely a cash-strapped proxy for the US, dependent upon US weapons systems and intelligence from the US-dominated global surveillance system. (I don’t take seriously recent newspapers stories about the UK creating a defensive missile screen and building – or acquiring […]
[…] 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 […]
