Our Secret Servants: the Shayler affair Things had been going rather well for the British security and intelligence services in the 1990s. Under pressure from the Wright-Wallace-Massiter revelations of the 80s, they had conceded a notional form of parliamentary accountability with the creation of the Intelligence and Security Committee. With members who either knew […]
[…] not confer a right of access. This policy is consistent with the policy of not disclosing information about data held on individuals by all the security and intelligence agencies for the purpose of their statutory functions. I would point out that a right of appeal exists under section 28 of the Act. The section […]
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 […]
[…] Kim Philby In the 1940s I had the opportunity to become well acquainted with the most protected and, therefore, the most dangerous operations of the BIS. (British Intelligence Service). I have to say that the mania to fabricate libellous statements against the Soviet Union is nothing new in leading circles of the British Government. […]
[…] the Duke of Norfolk to clear Wallace of the ‘It’s A Knock Out’ murder. Mrs Anne Wallace met her husband Colin whilst she was assistant in Conmower intelligence office of MI6 in Belfast. She is now personal secretary to the Duke of Norfolk, who retired as Director of Military Intelligence, M.O.D. in 1967. The […]
[…] of Afghanistan), and the new Cold War was on. Meanwhile the militarist wing of the US establishment had been mobilising. The coalition of hard liners in the intelligence community and the pro-Cold War intellectuals had first come together in 1976 to form the Committee on the Present Danger, and, in particular, to plot the […]
[…] is necessary to avoid a complete reliance on the covert action argument. As one commentator has noted, it is important ‘….to treat the development and continuity of intelligence services as an element in the decision-making process in the same way that we would treat the evolution of any other institution. This does require…..that we […]
[…] when Conrad Black was owner. In the April 3 2005 radio interview with Los Angeles public radio KPFK, Vincent Cannistraro, the former CIA head of counterterrorism and intelligence director at the National Security Council under President Reagan, was asked about the Niger documents. This was in the context of deficient US intelligence in Iraq […]
[…] $39.95. ISBN 978 1 921509 322 Frank Cain was just a name to me but a little googling showed that he is Australia’s leading academic historian of intelligence and security history. This history of ASIO and its antecedents – more or less equivalent to the UK’s MI5 – shows what you might have expected: […]
[…] paranoid? Not as much as they are. According to BOSS agent, Robin Ramsay (In an interview cut from a 1981 Panorama programme, but printed verbatim elsewhere), British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in Britain bigger than a football team our man is the captain or vice-captain, and if […]
