[…] (Taylor Branch and Eugene M. Propper, Penguin 1983), the book about the 1976 assassination of Chilean opposition leader, Orlando Letelier. In mid-1975 General Pinochet ordered the Chilean intelligence service, DINA, to gather compromising material on the human rights situation in other countries. DINA dispatched an anti-Castro Cuban, Virgilio Paz, to Belfast to obtain photographs […]
[…] in an effort to dissuade them from protesting the basing of nuclear armed Cruise missiles on British soils. If the United States Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency had just played their cards cooly, Kim Besly would have remained a foot soldier in the battle against American imperialism. However one thing led to […]
[…] In the Sunday Times of 5 December 1999 Stephen Grey reported: Tony Blair is under pressure from European leaders to support the creation of a ‘federalised’ EU intelligence service to help manage world crises. The move, proposed by Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, and President Jacques Chirac of France, is seen as the first […]
[…] and error in Northern Ireland, involves the following: A comprehensive plan to alleviate the political conditions behind the insurgency; civil-military cooperation; the application of minimum force; deep intelligence; and an acceptance of the protracted nature of the conflict. Deep cultural knowledge of the adversary is inherent to the British approach.’ In his interesting short […]
[…] the slightest chance of the British government doing anything about the ex-Nazis now living in this country. To expose them would entail exposing their links to British intelligence. It is a safe bet that not a sheet of official paper with their names on it now exists in Whitehall.) As this is the first […]
Benny Morris London: I. B Tauris, 2002, £24.50, h/b In report after report on the major media we hear about or see pictures of ‘refugee camps’ in Israel – and no-one ever explains from where the refugees came. Perhaps editors think we know already. Benny Morris is an Israeli historian who became well known … Read more
[…] did not get out in time.” Thus, it appears, “getting out in time” means anything up to 15 months later! (This really is vaguely insulting to one’s intelligence.) Jilian Becker, now part of the new London-based terrorism institute (see elsewhere in this issue), writes of captured PLO documents showing: “that the Soviet Union, through […]
[…] Power: The Secret Funding of the Tory Party, (London: Vision, 1998, pp.19-20). Perhaps it should be pointed out here, for the benefit of those who see the intelligence agencies as a possible threat to democracy, that a 1999 investigation by the Home Office’s chief historian found that in the case of the Zinoviev letter […]
[…] tungsten, a ‘strategic’ metal, became embroiled in the region’s indigenous organised crime and began what Marshall, after P.D.Scott, calls the ‘government-gang symbiosis……. The common nexus between narcotics, intelligence, ultraright nationalism, organized crime, and respectable politics in Asia has thus had ominous parallels in the United States.’ (p. 461) This esssay makes a very interesting […]
Corinne Souza Edinburgh/London: Mainstream, 2003, £15.99, h/b This is an important and interesting book but rather hard to describe because it contains so much. At its heart is Souza’s father, an Iraqi Anglophile, who became SIS’s agent in Iraq, and later in London. Using her firsthand knowledge supplemented by her father’s papers, Souza has … Read more
