Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995 Cees Wiebes Munster, Germany: Lit Verlag, Studies in Intelligence History, 2003 ISBN 3-8258-6347-6 p/b, 34.9 euros, $39.95 from Amazon. The publisher declined to send me a review copy but I read one chapter sent by e-mail from the author. This isn’t my field but it seems to me … Read more
Steve Bruce Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992: £7.99 Red-handed Just how difficult the ‘no collaboration’ line is to defend was illustrated by Colin Wallace in a long review of Steve Bruce’s book in the London Review of Books of 8 October 1992 (pp. 18-19). In it he ran through the major items of evidence against … Read more
How perceptions have changed! In Leveller 51, March 1981, there was this snippet: ‘Why all the fuss about the Panorama programme on British Intelligence? Eventually there was just one cut — Gordon Winter, BOSS agent, former freelance journalist, in a pre-title sequence: “British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in … Read more
Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding London: Andre Deutsch, 2003, p/b £8.99 An updated and expanded version of Defending the Realm: MI5 and the Shayler Affair which was reviewed in Lobster 38, this account of MI5’s adjustment to the post Cold War world is one of the best books on the UK’s intelligence services, up … Read more
See note:(1) Did Staff D feed the Oswald-Kostikov lie to the CIA? Abstract: There exist at least four successive versions (or falsifications) of Silvia Duran’s so-called statement of November 23,1963, to the Mexican DFS (Dirección Federal de Seguridad), about her interviews of Oswald in the Cuban Consulate. The successive changes mirror the shift in the … Read more
For some time, the world’s secret services have been making use of loose structures parallel to the official clandestine hierarchies for their more controversial activities. Fred Holroyd’s revelations have shown how the British state employed Loyalist paramilitaries for kidnap and assassination operations in Eire, whilst the Irangate hearings have exposed what is, so far, the … Read more
Richard J. Aldrich London: John Murray, 2001, £25 Another huge book, 645 pages of text and 70 pages of index, bibliographies and notes. How do you review something this size? I simply don’t know. Short of doing a London Review of Books-sized job and working through it chapter by chapter, all I can really … Read more
On 1 January 2005 several new laws and regulations governing access to information come into force: the Freedom of Information Act 2000, covering England, Wales and N. Ireland; the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002; new Environmental Information Regulations 2004/5; Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004; and an extension of the Data Protection Act 1998 to … Read more
This is the press release issued to the media with Lobster 11. (April 1986) Embargoed until 3pm, April 30th Something very strange happened in British politics almost a decade ago. A Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, and the journalist with the closest links to the British intelligence services, Chapman Pincher, both said that elements of MI5 … Read more
Nicholas Davies Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh, 1999, £14.99 It is by now clear to everyone, except the hard-line Unionists hankering after the restoration of a Protestant Ascendancy, that the Provisional IRA was defeated in its war against the British. Their defeat was certainly not total, so that no return to ‘the good old days’ of Stormont … Read more
