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

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.