[…] (Taylor Branch and Eugene M. Propper, Penguin 1983), the book about the 1976 assassination of Chilean opposition leader, Orlando Letelier. In mid-1975 General Pinochet ordered the Chilean intelligence service, DINA, to gather compromising material on the human rights situation in other countries. DINA dispatched an anti-Castro Cuban, Virgilio Paz, to Belfast to obtain photographs […]
[…] 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.
[…] the slightest chance of the British government doing anything about the ex-Nazis now living in this country. To expose them would entail exposing their links to British intelligence. It is a safe bet that not a sheet of official paper with their names on it now exists in Whitehall.) As this is the first […]
[…] of England’s regulatory role is finally being examined in the High Court. That book raised awkward and far-sighted questions about the role of the British and American intelligence services in relation to BCCI and to the corrupt bank’s clear links with prominent politicians and international terrorism: there aren’t many places outside Court 73 of […]
[…] that has been used to cloak research and applications of mind-control activity (emphasis added). Given Scott Jones’ status and his years of access to high level military, intelligence and political circles in the US, this is extremely interesting. But if he knows anything substantial about these mind control experiments, to my knowledge he has […]
[…] 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
