[…] thing as the ‘Sunni Triangle’. There is now. 9 As my father, an SIS agent and SIS’s one-time leading authority on Iraq, said (without being Iraq-specific), ‘A spy, on behalf of the Crown, cannot recruit good quality sources seeking to undermine a regime from within, if HMG is doing all it can to secure […]
[…] MRA was a CIA-funded operation? Although the book is well documented – there are 45 pages of notes – there is nothing to source this fascinating assertion. Spy mania The outburst of spy mania in September – Metrokhin Archive, the STASI stuff, ‘Stalin’s granny’ and all the rest of the piffle – opened the […]
[…] a valuable source of information on US intelligence in particular, and the post-war US empire in general, with contributors such as John Kelly, former editor of Counter Spy, Ralph McGehee, Lester Coleman and David McMichael. With Covert Action Quarterly now with a much wider agenda than covert action, (1) Unclassified is now one of […]
[…] trying to keep buried here, I missed them. But I’m probably suffering from Secrecy Fatigue. Ever since Peter Wright’s Spycatcher every British publisher has tried to market spy books as “the book they tried to ban’. Alas, far from running the risk of breaking the Official Secrets Act, the only risk you run reading […]
Abstract The Tribunal established to investigate complaints about phone-tapping and the activities of the intelligence agencies has, at its first ever public hearing, quashed rules made by the Home Secretary forcing the tribunal to hold all its hearings in secret. However, the Tribunal procedure remains too secret, and its decisions cannot be appealed. Malcolm Kennedy’s … Read more
Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin Gollancz, London 1991 Pat Nixon, wife of Richard Nixon, died in June. The obituarist in the Independent of 23 June 1993, commented that ‘she stood by him loyaly, convinced that he was the victim of an international plot involving double agents and the CIA.’ Well, something like that. Mrs Nixon’s … Read more
Anthony Glees, Philip J. Davies, and John N. L. Morrison London: The Social Affairs Unit, 2006, £20, h/b The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) is a recent addition to the roster of Whitehall bodies; the motives of those who created it, as the authors show, are obscure and its role to some extent remains … Read more
[…] Guardian 11/2/87 NOTE: The Lobster 17 article on the Pinay Circle contained several spelling errors of the names of Circle members. The correct versions are given above. The ‘Network’ book mentioned in the footnotes to Lobster 17 is more easily available under the republished title The General was a Spy, Hohne and Zolling, Pan, 1973.
[…] insisted I not print it. I complied and forgot about it. I recalled my afternoon in the Station Hotel reading the account in Corinne Souza’s book Baghdad’s Spy (reviewed in this issue) of the harassment her family suffered at the hands of SIS. There it was again: break-ins, pranks, things left in the house, […]
Roundtable I get regular e-mail bulletins from an organisation called the roundtable – not the Round Table but somebody? some people? – trying to document the US ruling elite by the study of its organisations. Really they should be called Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) – because it is the CFR they mostly write about; … Read more
