[…] a camera with a long lens can seem like a gun as it is pointed over a wall. The chances are that he was working for British Intelligence.’ Geraghty forthrightly condemns the Heath Government’s hard line policy, providing the fascinating detail that senior ministers had urged ‘an unlawful “shoot-to-kill” policy’ on the Army, but […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] Arabic and claimed to be ‘Khouri Ali’, a Palestinian revolutionary. The following year he was released on bail: the judge’s summing up described him as a US intelligence asset working under cover in the Middle East. Stark jumped bail and disappeared. In 1982 he was arrested in the Netherlands, once again on drugs charges. […]
[…] 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 […]
Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy Phillip Willan Phillip Willan’s Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, (Constable, London, 1991) is a detailed and interesting book, dealing in a thorough (if partially flawed) way with a fascinating subject. It covers a wide array of interlocking subjects including the infamous P2 … Read more
[…] a quick skim across Massiter, Bettaney, Charles Elwell – and thence into British Briefing, David Hart etc. (And Colin Wallace was not ‘a former officer in Army Intelligence’; and has not, to my knowledge, suggested that the League had office space in MI5 headquarters . But since this, like most of the assertions in […]
[…] Sunday Times 4 January 1998). Better known under his pen name Richard Deacon, McCormick was one of the post-war pioneers in the field of writing books about intelligence services and operations from scraps of real information. James Earl Ray died, aged 70. Harold Jackson devoted fourth-fifths of his long obituary in the Guardian (24 […]
[…] Oswald would not have been any sensible person’s choice for a co-conspirator. He was a ‘loner’, mixed-up, of questionable reliability and an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service. As to charges that the Commission’s report was a rush job, it emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] in 2003, advised Blair against providing anything more than moral support for the US invasion. (9) There was no enthusiasm in the Foreign Office and the defence, intelligence and security establishments were divided.(10) Reasons for the depth of opposition included distrust of the ambitions of the George W. Bush administration, anxiety about isolation from […]
