Reflections on the ‘cult of the offensive’: pre-emptive war, the Israel lobby and US military Doctrine In our book, Spies, Lies and the War on Terror,(1) a central theme is the ascendancy of pre-emptive war doctrine in US military strategy and its impact on public perceptions and the construction of political narrative. A parallel and … Read more
Searchlight again In the Daniel Brandt essay in this issue there is a section on the scandal in the United States resulting from the discovery that the Jewish organisation, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), has been found to be collecting data on hundreds of political groups, both right and left, and trading data with agencies of … Read more
British Spies and Irish Rebels British Intelligence and Ireland, 1916-1945 Paul McMahon Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2008, h/b, £30 First up, I have no specialist knowledge of this area, so if there any howlers in here, I’m unlikely to spot them. However, I know a good book when I see one. This has been … Read more
Kimberley Cornish London: Arrow, 1999, £7.99 On p. 86 of this enthralling book Kimberley Cornish invites readers to complete the following sentence: ‘Wittgenstein was offered the Chair in Philosophy at Lenin’s university [Kazan] in 1935 because…’ What possible reason can there be except that he was serving the Soviet regime? Cornish contends that Wittgenstein recruited … Read more
The Spycatcher’s Encyclopedia of Espionage Peter Wright Heinemann, Australia, 1991 The cover-blurb says this is ‘the rest of the story’. It feels more like the out-takes from Spycatcher spiced with a few more fragments of interesting gossip. And I do mean fragments: the interesting bits of 260 pages — largish print and much white space … Read more
[…] (14 March ’92) reported the admission by the Ministry of Defence that in an operation called HORNBEAM, trawlers had been used during the first Cold War to spy on Soviet shipping. But the MOD spokesperson refused to confirm that some trawlers had carried intelligence officers. Statewatch Bulletin (Jan/Feb 1992) includes an important update to […]
[…] at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhestan. It also led to the location of crashed Soviet TU-95 ‘Backfire’ bomber in Africa. (The accuracy of this information was later verified by spy satellites.) In 1978 the DIA took over as its office of primary responsibility.(29) Pat Price gave an equally incredibly detailed account in the course of his […]
[…] successfully passed. Certainly, over a decade later, having met him, I can see no evidence whatsoever that he was in some sense mentally unbalanced. He was a spy who realised that the operations of the British Government were counter-productive. He started to object, and was pushed to one side for his pains. I raise […]
[…] agent operation that may have spurred the Soviets to produce more lethal chemical and biological agents. He was referring to David Wise’s book, Cassidy’s Run: The Secret Spy War Over Nerve Gas. ………the deception ultimately worked against US interests by spurring the Soviets to develop more lethal chemical and biological agents and may also […]
Andrew Emmerson and Tony Beard. London: Capital Transport, 2004, £25.00, h/b Gimme Shelter(s)! The secret underground government structures that originated during the Second World War and were later adapted, enlarged and augmented for the Nuclear Age were given a once-over by Peter Laurie in Beneath the City Streets (1970) and given much more detailed … Read more
