Matthew R. Simmons London: Wiley, 2005, h/b Ironic, perhaps, that I finished reviewing this book in Calgary, just south of the largest land-based oil project in the American hemisphere, the Athabasca shale tar sands oil recovery projects. Collectively these will realise investment between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the next ten years. Pipelines … Read more
The origins of Civil Assistance? In the UK in 1974-75 a number of ‘private armies’ appeared, linked to retired senior military and intelligence figures. There were General Sir Walter Walker’s Civil Assistance, Colonel David Stirling’s GB75, and George Young’s Unison. (1) These groups formed in order to frustrate the impact of strike action in the … Read more
[…] of campaigns of official harassment; and a long piece by David Pegg which discusses a little known but very interesting book by Karl Marx, Herr Vogt: A Spy in the Workers’ Movement, which ought to raise an eyebrow or two out there on the British Left. Notes from the Borderland is £2.50 per issue […]
[…] anyone skulking in the undergrowth. The book ends on this unsatisfactory note. The Clough book, by contrast, is excellent. It provides a detailed demythologising of this particular spy case and relies on a review of all the literature in the case as well as primary research conducted by the author amongst recently released PRO […]
[…] spat over “turgid” writing’, The Times, 24 October 2008; Jack Lefley, ‘MOD censors its censor’s history for being boring’, The Evening Standard, 24 October 2008. Anon., ‘Former spy wins first round of “son of Spycatcher” book publication battle’, Solicitors’ Journal, 152 (29), 22 July 2008, p. 5; Anon., ‘Tribunal does not have exclusive jurisdiction’, […]
[…] Coleman the Pentagon has never forgiven President Truman for turning OSS into a supposedly civilian entity, and is well on the way to running the entire US spy apparat. I don’t really believe this strict military-civilian dichotomy. CIA has long been full of military spooks – General Charles P. Cabell and Admiral Stansfield Turner, […]
GEHEIM (“SECRET”) is West Germany’s representative in the international stable of state research publications. Geheim has appeared three or four times a year since 1983, and its editors are experienced state research journalists in the Federal Republic – Rudolf Gossner, author (with Geheim contributor Uwe Herzog) of an exhaustive work on the undercover activities of … Read more
[…] July 1989 (syndicated column) Memo from Acting Assistant Commissioner, Office of Enforcement, to Commissioner of Customs, 30 October 1985. Mark Perry, The Secret Life of an American Spy’, Regardie’s, February 1989 Testimony of Ambassador Oakley, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and Committee on Judiciary, hearings, International Terrorism, Insurgency and Drug Trafficking, May 13-15 1985, […]
[…] plays amateur psychoanalyst at Roberts’ expense. It reminds me of the ‘skeptics’ who attack Lee Harvey Oswald as a psychopathological loner and ignore his connections to the spy world. As for Roberts alternating between ‘asking Nader for help and accusing him of being part of the Mafia’, that dynamic replayed among American voters in […]
Accountability I will be discussing a non subject – the accountability of the intelligence services. By accountable we mean the ability to be brought to account, to be answerable for their actions, to be subject to scrutiny and ultimately to have their actions adjudicated upon in a court of law. I will be looking at … Read more
