It is a difficult time for Britain’s security and intelligence agencies. Not only have the old certainties collapsed with the Berlin Wall, Britain’s economy is in increasingly dire shape, and current levels of government funding for the agencies can no longer be taken for granted. (1) As a result, both the major agencies, MI5 and … Read more
[…] 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 […]
[…] of guest movements, enabling the photographers to be in position to snatch pictures of the celebrities.'(53) Richard Tomlinson believed that he was an MI6 informer paid to spy on Diana and Dodi. Other sources claim that Paul was also a Mossad agent and an informant for the French foreign intelligence service. As Head 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 […]
Charlie Bubbles One of Lobster’s contributors had dinner a few years ago with Charlie Falconer, the current Lord Chancellor, and reported that he was a fount of information on the B-sides of pop singles of the 1960s. Well, pop-pickers, our civil liberties are safe in his hands then. Or not. As New Labour prepares to … Read more
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
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
Richard B. Spence Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003 , $29.95, h/b Boasting over 1800 footnotes and a magnificent bibliography (including texts published in Turkmenistan) this would be awarded A for Application if such a prize existed in academia. The author, Professor of History at the University of Idaho, appears to be something of an … Read more
The Angolan hostages episode, and more … Although Unita’s capture of 16 Britons at Kafuno diamond mine in Angola received massive publicity, the intriguing titbits thrown up by the reporting were not pursued. In particular, there was the article by Stephen Glover (Daily Telegraph 16th May 1984) in which he stated that he had been … Read more
