[…] contender for the prize for most inaccurate jacket ever written. It begins by stating that this is the first MI6 memoir (it isn’t), calls MI6 officer Bristow an ‘agent’, (the one thing which drives intelligence officers nuts), and then makes claims not to be found in the text. Of interest only to serious MI6 buffs.
[…] exact opposite: he ‘believes’ no such thing. He is well aware of past weaknesses and details many of them, including sections on the media activities of the intelligence services and the Information Research Department. Davies’s belief is that today’s situation is bad and that the future looks bleak. Something troubling is going on when […]
[…] an obscure OSS officer. But Levenda needs the OSS link because the father of the actress Sharon Tait, the Manson gang’s most famous victim, was an American intelligence officer serving in Vietnam when she died. What he wants to say is: Look, both girls with spooks for fathers! Both killed by the Manson gang! […]
[…] be required. Mission-critical systems: defense attempting to address major software challenges (27 pp.) GAO/IMTEC-93-13, December 1992. Billions of dollars in defense weapons and command, control, communications and intelligence systems depend on high-performance, correctly functioning real-time computer systems capable of withstanding severe stresses without failing. This report identifies the many software problems affecting weapons and […]
[…] left to say. In the absence of evidence of the Iraqi regime’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, to the distress of the professional diplomats and most of their intelligence services, the Bush-Blair ‘allies’ used dodgy information from defectors, selectively edited what other information they had, or simply made it up as part of the ‘perception […]
[…] for example, he talks of the CIA in its ‘great, early days ….. manned by the flower of American youth…. something almost entirely new in history, a secret intelligence service that was dedicated to doing good in the world by stealth.’ Ah, the self-confidence (and self-delusion) in ‘doing good in the world by stealth’. RR
Scott Newton, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, £30 This is the book Newton was working on which produced the spin-off pieces published in Lobster: ‘The economic background to appeasement and the search for Anglo-German detente before and during WW2’ in Lobster 20, and ‘The Who’s Who of Appeasement’ in Lobster 22. As those essays showed, Newton … Read more
[…] Epstein’s website, but sadly doesn’t repeat my favourite Bush I conspiracy anecdote – the one about the FBI memo in which ‘Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency’ denounced a Republican (!) political rival, for JFK-assassination-related activities, in 1963. In the end, maybe the pressing reason to keep the book out of Britain […]
[…] have been characterised by a special Anglo-American relationship, running in parallel with the strategic one based on collaboration in NATO and the UN, as well as in intelligence sharing and nuclear weapons policy. The ideological rationale for all this has been the defence of liberal capitalism (equated with freedom of speech and national self-determination) […]
Dr David Turner went to former MI5 Director-General Stella Rimington’s book-signing at Hatchard’s, Piccadilly, on 18 September 2001, where the following exchange took place. Turner (presenting book for signing after queuing briefly behind several people, including a woman wearing an Anarchist badge) ‘Hello. Do you mind a lengthy inscription?’ Rimington (smiling, flanked by several […]
