The Intelligence Files: Today's Secrets, Tomorrow's Scandals

by First Last

This collection of the decade's "best-of" from the online journal, Intelligence, offers a shocking glimpse into the frequently illicit and routinely immoral undertakings of states, whose harm to individuals, groups and countries is seldom recognized or understood by the public at large. Fifteen thoroughly researched and documented chapters probe the clandestine workings of the world’s intelligence services­from the CIA and the FBI in the US, MI5 and MI6 in Britain, the DGSE and DST in France, the Sûreté d'Etat in Belgium, all the way to the DINA in Chile and its ties with both the CIA and with the international "Black Orchestra" and its neo-Fascist assassins in Italy and Portugal. Who would have thought that Western intelligence would use the wildlife conservation movement in Africa to secretly back right-wing rebel groups? That peaceful Norway would be a veiled contributor furthering the expansion abroad of "Star Wars"? That environmentalist activists might be the targets of FBI COINTELPRO, resurrected? From the trumped-up proof of Libyan implication in the Lockerbie Pan Am bombing, and the bungled military operation behind Bloody Sunday to the improbable sinking of the Kursk off the Russian coast, intelligence services manipulate and shape major world events in a manner not readily visible even to knowledgeable followers of world events. Careful surveillance and analysis of open source information­media, books, technical literature, patents­by the French Association for the Right to Information (ADI) and its Franco-American editor, Olivier Schmidt, permit the non-specialist to read about and understand these secrets and the scandals they cause when exposed to light at last.

100 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2004

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of articles from a European online journal called Intelligence. They deal with that netherworld where national and international politics, the military and the spy business intersect.

It sounds like a good thing for developing countries to put aside large tracts of land for "nature." Such a practice has now become required to receive Western aid. The poorer a country is, the more land they have to take out of production. How can a country dig itself out of poverty if large portions of their territory are no longer available for farming or livestock? To give one example of this new form of empire, 40 percent of the territory of Tanzania is now within strictly protected zones.

An extremely sophisticated radar system, called Have Stare, is being installed in Norway, its official purpose being to monitor space junk. Its actual purpose is as part of the Star Wars missile defense system. Ever since a passenger plane crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland, in the late 1980s, the whole world has blamed Libya. They recently "admitted" responsibility, even though the evidence to prove it was flimsy, at best.

If any one event can be said to have started "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland, it was the shootings of more then 40 unarmed protesters by British troops in 1972 in Londonderry (Bloody Sunday). A government inquiry, which became dismissed as a whitewash, absolved the soldiers of responsibility, declaring that they fired in self-defense. An independent inquiry came to the conclusion that the protesters really were unarmed, and that the British troops fired first.

I totally enjoyed this book, and learned a lot from it, but I am something of a foreign politics lover. More than the usual amount of knowledge of world affairs would help when reading this book, but it is very highly recommended.