[…] of what could happen to them too …….. I am astonished that, in the British press, so far as I am aware, none of the specialist ‘ spook’ journalists commented on ‘Nicola Calipari’s’ death. In PR terms, if the shooting was deliberate, it could come under the heading ‘event management’, with all this implies. […]
[…] With Wilson dead, we only have Joe Haines’ word for this. Should we believe Joe Haines? Why do I always get the feeling that Haines was a spook? What with the new book, Rinkagate, and the ‘Secret Lives’ programme on Channel 4 in November on Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott, this is deja vue, […]
[…] and occasionally assisted MI6 in the 1950s and 60s, an experience which has left him a cheerful cynic. He canters briskly and amusingly over the field of spook foul-ups in the post-war period to ‘show the pointlessness of so much of the work of the intelligence services everywhere.’ The result is an entertaining but […]
[…] the size of the secret intelligence budget (estimated at $26-28 billion per year) and giving enhanced power to the Director of Central Intelligence to manage all thirteen spook agencies. The bi-partisan presidential commission was created by Congress in December 1994, and heard testimony from present and former intelligence officials: it recommended the elimination of […]
Watergate revisited: Hougan’s Secret Agenda Introduction No apologies for returning to Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda. As Steve Dorril said in Lobster 8, this is a major event. This essay is in two parts. In the first I make some critical remarks about Secret Agenda’s central theses; In the second I speculate about other items on … Read more
[…] source of nothing but misinformation. (I should say I haven’t yet read Pincher’s book.) This claim about the tunnel is also made by the US writer of spook fiction, Charles McCarry, in his 1984 The Last Supper. That book is virtually a thinly disguised history of the CIA – or, at any rate, bits […]
Hollis again What with the opening of the KGB archives and the testimony of Oleg Gordievsky, you might be forgiven for thinking that the question, Was MI5 Director-General Roger Hollis a Soviet spy? had been answered conclusively and resoundingly ‘No’. You would be wrong – or so says the doyen of British espionage writers, Chapman … Read more
Patriots not sneaks After a year of New Labour I feel beholden to write something on this subject, but what is there worth saying that isn’t blindingly and depressingly obvious and predictable? Jack Straw, who took over as Home Secretary, and thus formally as the boss of MI5, is determined to sedate any sleeping dogs … Read more
[…] campaign is being run by the spooks, then Roger Windsor, the former NUM official who laid the (now forgotten) original allegations of Libyan money, must be a spook. Evidence as yet there is none. However there is a hint. Before joining the NUM Windsor had been employed by the transnational union organisation, Public Services […]
The CIA In a recent ‘Witness Seminar’ on the 1975 British referendum on entry into the European Economic Community (EEC), the Conservative MP, Sir Richard Body, who in 1975 was co-chair of the anti-EEC National Referendum Campaign, had this to say: ‘At the very beginning of the campaign two CIA agents came to see me … Read more
