[…] and error in Northern Ireland, involves the following: A comprehensive plan to alleviate the political conditions behind the insurgency; civil-military cooperation; the application of minimum force; deep intelligence; and an acceptance of the protracted nature of the conflict. Deep cultural knowledge of the adversary is inherent to the British approach.’ In his interesting short […]
[…] These included the Miami Showband killings of July 1975. Besides this forensic evidence Holroyd had knowledge of the history of these guns. He knew, through his own intelligence work, two of those involved in the massacre and that they were ‘used’ by a RUC Special Branch officer, who he has named. That officer Holroyd […]
[…] Leftism; editor Thomas on ‘Reich and Little Rock’; a snippet on Cord Meyer, Mary Meyer, James Angleton et al; and a long extract from Charles Ameringer’s U.S.Foreign Intelligence: the Secret Side of American History. The first volume is the better of the two if you want information; the second contains a couple of long […]
[…] 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.
[…] be required. Mission-critical systems: defense attempting to address major software challenges (27 pp.) GAO/IMTEC-93-13, December 1992. Billions of dollars in defense weapons and command, control, communications and intelligence systems depend on high-performance, correctly functioning real-time computer systems capable of withstanding severe stresses without failing. This report identifies the many software problems affecting weapons and […]
[…] zealous control for the next twenty years’ — and never mentions it again. Mangold tries to explain Angleton’s enormous power wholly by his being head of Counter Intelligence. This is not convincing. Surely part of Angleton’s bureaucratic power came precisely from the “Israeli account’. The book is essentially an account of the disastrous effects […]
[…] 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
[…] 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 […]
[…] pride: if the British are doing it, so should we. This meant that a welfare issue could be prioritised. At times, it could also mean that the intelligence services could pass a coded message, via Hansard, to, for example, a senior health professional who was a source in another country, without being seen to […]
