[…] 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 […]
[…] collection of reports and essays from Intelligence, mostly of single events in the parapolitical calendar. For British readers, there are essays on the murder of junior British spook Jonathan Moyles; Dr Bull and the ‘supergun’ and Bull’s murder; framing Libya for Lockerbie; the Chinook crash which killed a large section of the British intelligence […]
Weird Web Professor Peter Dale Scott reported the following in March. ‘Four times today I have tried to go to www.counterpunch.org. And four times Netscape was unable to find it. This happens frequently on my computer to websites which share my opinions, or to which I am hotlinked. And when I searched for ‘Alex Cockburn’ […]
[…] Political Economy to 9/11.() As for me, I have to admit to still being puzzled as to why WTC7 collapsed despite not being struck by a plane.() Spook histories Keith Jeffery, Professor of British History at Queen’s University Belfast, has been signed up to write the first official history of the Secret Intelligence Service. […]
[…] spirit and always will be.’ Even if I knew what ‘the human spirit’ meant, this is manifestly falsified by the slaughter-strewn history of the 20th century. A spook by an other name In the New Statesman of 27 September (3) there was a very interesting account by Observer journalist David Rose of his becoming […]
Blob of the month Hear the one about the supposedly spook-watching magazine whose editor misspelt the name of the head of MI5? Yep: Rimmington, I had in the last issue: Rimington it should have been. Searchlight News Their campaign against Larry O’Hara has reached new depths. In the March issue they published his picture and […]
Compromised Reporting Taking its cue from a powerful network of far-right radio commentators, the American press insists on noting only those financial scandals which don’t sully ultra-conservative politicians. Of either party. For example: Rush Limbaugh, who has become the Republican Party’s Goebbels, loudly applauded Clinton’s appointment of Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, an appalling Texas (Democrat) […]
