In Parish Notices in the last issue I wrote ‘there isn’t much in this issue about the economic situation because there really isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been said, for example by Larry Elliot in The Guardian every week.’ Well, I changed my mind about that and here are the bits I found … Read more
[…] In the Sunday Times of 5 December 1999 Stephen Grey reported: Tony Blair is under pressure from European leaders to support the creation of a ‘federalised’ EU intelligence service to help manage world crises. The move, proposed by Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, and President Jacques Chirac of France, is seen as the first […]
Introduction I began writing this in the early 1980s. If you were then reading the Guardian or the Observer, and knew a little, simple economics, it didn’t take genius to notice that while the UK’s manufacturing economy was being decimated by Conservative Party economic policy, the City of London was booming. More interestingly, and less … Read more
[…] published by him in Dundalk in the Republic of Ireland to circumvent censorship, it was subsequently republished in an expanded edition. Under the new title, The British Intelligence Services in Action, it has become a modern classic, is virtually impossible to now locate, and still compares well with subsequent volumes by Martin Dillon, Paul […]
Benny Morris London: I. B Tauris, 2002, £24.50, h/b In report after report on the major media we hear about or see pictures of ‘refugee camps’ in Israel – and no-one ever explains from where the refugees came. Perhaps editors think we know already. Benny Morris is an Israeli historian who became well known … Read more
[…] issue 2, for example, contains a long piece about the Bilderbergers, by Sir Louis Le Bailly, former Naval Attaché to Washington, and former Director-General of the Defence Intelligence Staff. It isn’t a very good piece: it contains banal errors, Le Bailly doesn’t bother with documentation, and it is xenophobic – Germanophobic – to a […]
[…] Power: The Secret Funding of the Tory Party, (London: Vision, 1998, pp.19-20). Perhaps it should be pointed out here, for the benefit of those who see the intelligence agencies as a possible threat to democracy, that a 1999 investigation by the Home Office’s chief historian found that in the case of the Zinoviev letter […]
[…] they were rubbished in the Sunday Times (26 November 1995) by MOD flacks James Adams and Liam Clarke; and Fred Holroyd, who was in working in Army Intelligence in the same patch in the same period, has not dismissed them. He says that a lot of Republicans did simply disappear in this period. The […]
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
[…] major figure. Over the last 20 years there have been occasional stories in Private Eye speculating that the World Wildlife Fund was some kind of cover for intelligence personnel. This thought cropped up once again with the obituary of the former CIA officer Donald Aspinall Allan (Washington Post, 5 August 2006 ). Allan’s career […]
