[…] 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 […]
[…] to them; on other issues that clearly bore on the question of war, like decolonisation, Europe, and the economy; on possible extraneous influences, like business and the intelligence community; on strands of Labour opinion outside the parliamentary party – trade unions, Fabians, pressure groups, and at constituency level; and a little further back in […]
[…] 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
[…] largely unaware that he had been marked down as a dangerous enemy of the centralised British political system. According to the former MI5 officer David Shayler, the intelligence services file on Owen Oyston was re-examined in 1992 by the head of MI5, when it looked as if Neil Kinnock’s revived Labour party might defeat […]
The Men with the Guns G.F. Newman (Sphere, London 1984) I’ve got a lot of time for G.F. Newman. He’s written some of the best, sharpest, things about contemporary Britain: the Law and Order series and the Terry Sneed novels are the obvious places to start. But this – perhaps because of the shift to … Read more
[…] experimental than strategic, but it was definitely offensive rather than defensive, and was part of an ongoing development program within the bowels of the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence establishments. Re: the comments in Lobster 45 p. 24, subhead ‘Monkey business?’, the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations poured millions into women’s studies, black studies, and […]
[…] in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi […]
Corinne Souza Edinburgh/London: Mainstream, 2003, £15.99, h/b This is an important and interesting book but rather hard to describe because it contains so much. At its heart is Souza’s father, an Iraqi Anglophile, who became SIS’s agent in Iraq, and later in London. Using her firsthand knowledge supplemented by her father’s papers, Souza has … Read more
[…] 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, […]
