Matthew R. Simmons London: Wiley, 2005, h/b Ironic, perhaps, that I finished reviewing this book in Calgary, just south of the largest land-based oil project in the American hemisphere, the Athabasca shale tar sands oil recovery projects. Collectively these will realise investment between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the next ten years. Pipelines … Read more
Part 1 Issue 24 of the Covert Action Information Bulletin (Summer 1985) is chiefly devoted to recent activities of U.S. government agents and agents provocateurs inside radical and labour organisations: the ‘sanctuary movement’, the Native American movement and one industrial dispute, are analysed as case studies. They are preceded by a long essay, “The New … Read more
[…] interest he has for students of 20th century intelligence and espionage. While a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, he became the lover of Anthony Blunt, the Soviet spy, aka ‘The Fourth Man’. In the words of Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman, ‘Most of their mutual gay friends assumed that they had begun as lovers […]
[…] The move, proposed by Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, and President Jacques Chirac of France, is seen as the first step towards the creation of Europe’s own spy agency, based in Brussels. And in the Daily Telegraph of 28 February 2000, Alan Judd, the former (?) SIS officer Alan Petty (26) warned of plans […]
[…] of the CIA. It appears that one of its main roles is to monitor the clandestine activity of other US government agencies. Coleman’s DIA job was to spy on the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which operated out of a base in Cyprus. Coleman alleges that the DEA is supervising, and the DIA is manipulating, […]
[…] anyone skulking in the undergrowth. The book ends on this unsatisfactory note. The Clough book, by contrast, is excellent. It provides a detailed demythologising of this particular spy case and relies on a review of all the literature in the case as well as primary research conducted by the author amongst recently released PRO […]
[…] spat over “turgid” writing’, The Times, 24 October 2008; Jack Lefley, ‘MOD censors its censor’s history for being boring’, The Evening Standard, 24 October 2008. Anon., ‘Former spy wins first round of “son of Spycatcher” book publication battle’, Solicitors’ Journal, 152 (29), 22 July 2008, p. 5; Anon., ‘Tribunal does not have exclusive jurisdiction’, […]
[…] a left-wing Putsch in Djakarta, delivering sub-machine guns, radio equipment and money to the value of 300,000 marks’: Heinz Hohne and Hermann Zolling, The General Was a Spy (New York: Bantam, 1972), p. xxxiii. We should not be misled by the CIA’s support of the 1958 Rebellion into assuming that all U.S. Government plotting […]
Parish Notices Thanks to Al Baron, Terry Hanstock, Daniel Brandt, Jane Affleck, Robin Whittaker (in particular), Tom Easton and Dr. David Turner for information since the last Lobster. An apology to David Guyatt not publishing his long and interesting reply to the criticism in ‘Feedback’ of his article on alleged US use of chemical weapons … Read more
The origins of Civil Assistance? In the UK in 1974-75 a number of ‘private armies’ appeared, linked to retired senior military and intelligence figures. There were General Sir Walter Walker’s Civil Assistance, Colonel David Stirling’s GB75, and George Young’s Unison. (1) These groups formed in order to frustrate the impact of strike action in the … Read more
