Conference Report by Jane Affleck On November 10 2000 the Freedom Forum’s European Centre in London, in association with Article 19, Index on Censorship and Liberty, hosted a debate on National Security. (1) Three panels spoke on The Nature of National Security, British State Security in Northern Ireland, and The Internet – Circumventing Censorship? The … Read more
DEEP BLACK: the secrets of space espionage William E. Burrows, Bantam Press, 1988 P. N. Rogers The National Reconnaissance Office is the only ‘black’ US intelligence agency remaining. Formed in 1960, the US only conceded officially that they had reconnaissance satellites twelve years later, and to this day maintain that these are the responsibility of … Read more
ed. Roedad Khan Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 1999 Faisal A. Qureshi This book caused quite a stir when published in Pakistan due to the government’s reluctance to declassify its own documentation for this period. The editor deserves credit for going to the US and utilising the FOIA to put together and index various documents, such … Read more
Since 1988 a goodly slice of the Great and the Good of British civil, political and media society, from the current Prime Minister downwards, have been getting letters and press releases from Mr Harold Smith. Smith’s letters have served as a kind of substitute for the non-publication of his memoir Sons of Oxford. Commissioned in … Read more
Ex-British intelligence officer Richard Winch said KGB defectors regularly named 7 ‘MPs, trade union leaders and 1 former Conservative Cabinet Minister’ as KGB agents. (Daily Telegraph 24 and 27 September 1984) What, only 7? According to Frederick Forsyth’s ‘sources’ in the British labour movement there are 20. (See Times 31 August 1984). And doesn’t Chapman … Read more
Despite ‘coalition’ forces now being engaged in a guerilla war (which no-one seems to have foreseen), analysis of the information war which accompanied the invasion of Iraq has begun to appear. Lieutenant-Colonel Steven Collins, head of PSYOPS in the Operations Division at NATO Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Mons, Belgium, had a think about … 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
The Paris Review (PR hereafter except in quotations) has a new editor. Philip Gourevitch, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner for his book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda and a writer for The New Yorker, has taken the position that was held … Read more
The Shadow Warriors Bradley F. Smith (Andre Deutsch, London 1983) The network of close personal connections established in O.S.S. (the fore-runner of the CIA) “helped bridge some of the widest gaps in American society and could be called upon in cases of need long after the war ended. For example, when in 1964 former British … Read more
Scott et al I do have a copy of the Scott Report but I simply have not had time to read it. It seems pretty clear from the comments of a number of the knowledgeable minority who have followed this story for the past few years that, for whatever reason, Scott and his team have … Read more
