[…] (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 […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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
[…] did not get out in time.” Thus, it appears, “getting out in time” means anything up to 15 months later! (This really is vaguely insulting to one’s intelligence.) Jilian Becker, now part of the new London-based terrorism institute (see elsewhere in this issue), writes of captured PLO documents showing: “that the Soviet Union, through […]
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
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
[…] 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 […]
[PDF file]: […] and the following week; Guardian 16 July 1976; Searchlight nos. 18 and 21. 7. Private Eye speculated that the documents had been leaked by “moderates” inside British intelligence, alarmed at the activities of some of the “wild men”. This view, attractive though it is, has no evidence to support it. 8. Best collection of […]
