In and out of focus In the springtime weeks when senior Cabinet members Charles Clarke and Patri cia Hewitt found themselves in difficulties, it was reported that Philip (now Lord) Gould, the focus group guru with whom the pair worked very closely in Neil (now Lord) Kinnock’s kitchen cabinet 20 years earlier, was moving […]
What our pols read on their hols This summer it was hard to avoid laudatory pieces about or extracts from the Drew Weston’s book The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.(1) Here, it was said, was the explanation of how George Bush beat the Democrats and – by […]
[…] British Youth Council.(53) The British Youth Council began as the British section of the World Assembly of Youth (WAY), which was set up and financed by the CIA and SIS in the early 1950s to combat the Soviet Union’s youth fronts.(54) By Mandelson’s time in the mid-1970s – under a Labour government – the […]
[…] many other organisations — were ‘checked’ by MI5 to see if they had been penetrated by the KGB. As in Spycatcher he denigrates both MI6 and the CIA, here describing a minor Middle Eastern incident in which MI6 and the CIA were backing different factions in the same country. The reliability of any of […]
[…] photographs taken from a US satellite, and the subsequent prosecution of the individual who supplied them. There are shorter pieces on the official reception of Carter Administration CIA Chief Admiral Stansfield Turner’s recent book Secrecy and Democracy: the CIA in transition, the origins of the ‘Enigma’ machine used in WW2, and a series of […]
[…] is no reference to the Digest’s post-war activities on the political right, let alone the recent allegation by Fred Landis, that it has been working with the CIA. On p. 255 the author states:’the details of Watergate hardly need retelling’ – as if anyone is actually clear what was really going on. (Anyone who […]
[…] sent him. The President had begun to develop personal sources of information from FBI men who were bypassing J. Edgar Hoover and going directly to him. Some CIA people were following a similar route and avoiding the agency …. when he heard that Big Minh and his group were planning to assassinate Diem, he […]
[…] the authenticity of the disinformation was bolstered by charging Dreyfus with the leak! A modern myth? In a piece about the arrest of Soviet agent in the CIA, Rick Ames, the Sunday Telegraph, 27 February, 1994, said that Ames ‘recruited Soviet agents, ruthlessly betraying at least 10, knowing they would be shot or, like […]
[…] to the former Czech intelligence officer Joseph Frolik that a group of British trade unions leaders were ‘agents’ of Soviet intelligence. Frolik was being run by the CIA. (p. 321) These incidents, at the end of the remarkable sequence of events in the three years preceding Hasting’s statement to the House of Comments which […]
[…] Milan. Indeed, it was in Milan that they centred their non-US operations. Politically unstable and financially corrupt, Italy was a peculiar choice. It was, however, central to CIA operations in Europe. London was still a rival financial centre and Paris only a part-time ally of the US after DeGaulle. The later history of Andersen […]
