James Jesus Angleton The CIA and the craft of counter intelligence Michael Holzman Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008, p/b, $28.95 Of all the figures in the Anglo-American spy world that we have been made aware of in the last 40 years, James Jesus Angleton was the most glamorous: the chain-smoking, the orchid-growing, the […]
[…] told me the story himself very shortly after it had all happened (I was researching a doctorate at Birmingham at the time). The UK becomes a US intelligence target Of course the old undercurrents of distrust did not go away after the foundation of the wartime Anglo-American ‘special relationship’. There is an interesting snippet […]
[…] Mayne, and an investigation of Loyalist sectarian killers, The Shankhill Butchers (1989). His book opens with the attempts in 1970 by Captain James Kelly of Irish Military Intelligence to import weapons for the North (Kelly’s books were reviewed in Lobsters 13 and 15) and continues through the history of the Northern Irish conflict up […]
[…] Sterling’s, and it is hers I will concentrate on. As with her last book, The Terror Network, much of her ‘evidence’ is attributed to unidentified police and intelligence officers. This bothered me less than it did with The Terror Network. This book is more modest in its ambitions, more tightly focused, the unattributable assertions […]
Douglas Macleod Edinburgh: Birlinn; £9.99, p/b Twenty years ago, before the current torrent of information about ‘the secret world of intelligence’, we were scratching about looking for clues to our secret history. One was given in the John Loftus book The Belarus Secret (Penguin 1983) which contained a single reference to the Scottish […]
[…] (UK) £25.00 hb This is a really interesting and important book – perhaps the most important book about the British secret state since Fitzgerald and Bloch’s British Intelligence and Covert Action in the early 1980s. The incremental uncovering of the Information Research Department (IRD) story has been one of the continuing threads of British […]
[…] naff poetry), part rock culture trivia, and three huge pieces; ‘The CIA’s manipulation of the Labour Party’, ‘The FBI’s secret war against the American Indians’ and ‘British intelligence and covert action: how the British state supports international terrorism’. It’s a funny mixture. Page 181 is a cartoon strip which depicts Arnold Swarzenegger as Jesus […]
[…] money from Kuwait into the Tory Party. (The Kuwaiti Investment Office is one of the major property owners in London.) With hindsight Among the books about British intelligence operations I, Kovaks by Leslie Aspin (London: Everest Books, 1975) was never taken terribly seriously. This was partly because there were fewer spook-wise journalists at that […]
[…] that’s what Washington wants”, he would say, “then I’ll support it.” ‘ (p. 240) And was it known, for example, that ‘the weekly report of the Joint Intelligence Committee in London…. was the product of a combined effort with the chief of our CIA station’ (p. 225), or that in 1967, when Soviet Foreign […]
[…] Alan Protheroe, who in 1986 was Assistant Director General of the BBC. Nicknamed ‘the Colonel’ in the BBC, Protheroe was, and may still be, a part-time soldier/ intelligence officer, specialising in military-media relations. That the Assistant Director General of the BBC should be a state-employed psy-war specialist in his spare-time, with all that implies […]
