Diplomacy and Secret Service – Online Updating Pages
Chapter 2: The Arrival of the Secret Service
p. 19, Israeli no-holds barred political warfare: In recent years this is believed to have been particularly designed to disrupt the development of Iran’s nuclear weapons capability, probably with the assistance of the CIA; see for example ‘Long-Planned and Bigger Than Thought: Strike on Iran’s Nuclear Program’, New York Times, 10 July 2020.
pp. 20-21, Secret intelligence as secret power: In this section, I should of course have mentioned the most notorious – and consequential – contemporary case of the political influence of secret intelligence. This is that of the Russian intelligence services, the FSB, SVR and GRU, which established an iron grip on the Kremlin following the rise to power of former KGB officer Vladimir Putin at the end of the 1990s. Edward Lucas is very strong on this subject; see especially Ch. 2 of his Deception (Main references and further reading below).
Box 2.4. In January 2019, the Democrats – by then in a majority in the House of Representatives following the mid-term elections in November 2018 – took control of the House Intelligence Committee, with thirteen members (including the chair) to the Republicans’ nine.
Main references and further reading
Faligot, Roger, Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping, transl. Natasha Lehrer (Hurst: London 2019)
Lucas, Edward, Deception: Spies, lies and how Russia dupes the
West (Bloomsbury, 2012)