Hollis again
What with the opening of the KGB archives and the testimony of Oleg Gordievsky, you might be forgiven for thinking that the question, Was MI5 Director-General Roger Hollis a Soviet spy? had been answered conclusively and resoundingly ‘No’. You would be wrong – or so says the doyen of British espionage writers, Chapman Pincher. In a piece in the Western Daily Mail on 4 August 1998, Pincher reported the following.
A Mr Einar Sanden, living in Cardiff, has researched the life of a famous Estonian footballer, called Evald Mikson. Mikson, learned Sanden, had worked with the Germans when they invaded Estonia in 1941, and had interrogated a captured Estonian agent of Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. (One may imagine that in such circumstances – an Estonian working for the Nazis – such an ‘interrogation’ was, as British military-intelligence patois has it, ‘robust’.) Said interrogated GRU agent told Mikson that he had recruited Hollis for the GRU in China in 1927. Further, author Sanden has been given tapes made by another Estonian, Louise Rimm, apparently a ‘well-documented Soviet espionage figure’, who claims Hollis had an affair with her in China.
The obvious question: how did the alleged recruitment of a then insignificant English salesman in China in 1927 arise in the course of an interrogation in Estonia in 1941?
New threats? New eats?
A ‘jobs vacant’ bulletin circulated in the University of Westminster last year included an advertisement for linguists sought by MI5. The languages being sought are: Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Punjabi, Turkish and Mandarin.
Are MI5 about the penetrate the British take-out food industry?
Don’t shoot, I’m a journalist
On the back of the Lawson ‘story’, Phillip Knightley (Sunday Times 20 December 1998) gave the most complete account I have seen of the network of agents created after WW2 by Ian Fleming under cover of the Mercury newsagency, and named the late Henry Brandon of The Sunday Times, among others, the as ‘an asset of SIS’. (I seem to remember that while a correspondent in Washington in the 1970s he had his phone tapped by the Nixon White House.)
Tomlinson 1
The Richard Tomlinson affair has provided a number of insights. SIS officer Tomlinson was sacked – or, on some accounts, not retained after a 4 year probationary period. He was refused permission by then Foreign Secretary Rifkind to take his sacking to an industrial tribunal, and had his appeal against dismissal rejected by the chairman of the Intelligence Service Tribunal, Lord Justice Brown. Tomlinson’s mother said (the Sunday Times 21 December 1997) that her son described the Intelligence Service Tribunal as ‘a complete farce, a star chamber where he wasn’t allowed to call his own witnesses, cross-examine anyone or to be legally represented.’
In letters to the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee and John Wadham of Liberty, who has been acting for him, Tomlinson alleged that SIS planned to assassinate the Serb leader Slobodan Milosevich in 1992 and had an informant high up in the Bundesbank. (Sunday Times 30 August, 20 and 27 September 1998; Independent 21 September 1998) The full text of these letters, which name a number of SIS officers and officials, as well as giving details about both operations, was to found at www.inside-news.ch during late September and early October 1998 and may still be there. The explosive content of these letters – Tomlinson is, in effect, the British Philip Agee – must have played a part in the increasing unhappiness of some members of the Intelligence and Security Committee at the role of official Whitehall rubber stamp allotted to them, and the apparent creation of a new ‘special investigator’ to examine allegations of wrong by security or intelligence officials. (See for example ‘MPs urge spies curb’ in The Guardian, 3 November 1998 and ‘Investigator to get wide powers to quiz secret service’, The Sunday Telegraph 14 February 1999.) This ‘special investigator’ is, of course, another piece of Whitehall bullshit which will not satisfy the Intelligence and Security Committee members.
Tomlinson wrote a long piece for the Guardian (15 August 1998) in which, as well as providing a catalogue of the kind of incompetence, profligacy and sloppiness you would expect from an organisation which is accountable to no-one, he revealed that
‘SIS devotes considerable resources to lobbying its position in Whitehall, and has a specialised department whose role is to spin-doctor the media by wining and dining favoured journalists and editors‘ (emphasis added).
Tomlinson later alleged that Dominic Lawson, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, and former editor of the Spectator, was an MI6 agent. This was run through the House of Commons by Brian Sedgemore MP. Cue many hundreds of column inches of newsprint. At the end of which we seem to know only the following:
- Lawson denies being ‘an agent’.
- It has been alleged that the Spectator has been used as cover by at least three SIS officers overseas (Sunday Times 20 December 1998).
- While editor of the Spectator, Lawson ran two articles on the Yugoslav crisis by an SIS officer under a pseudonym. (Guardian 21 December 1998)
Tomlinson 2
Of the names on the notorious MI6 list, 12 by my count had been published in the 1989 Lobster Who’s Who of the British Secret State; and of those 12, despite public exposure, 8 had subsequently been posted abroad under the same flimsy diplomatic cover.
So much for the ritual cries of ‘Lives at Risk’ from the Government. (Anybody know when the last SIS officer under diplomatic cover was killed?)
The list has been posted by Daniel Brandt, with an intelligent commentary, at http://www.pir.org/mi6.html.
Obuchi Keizo
On 30 July 1998, Obuchi Keizo was designated as Prime Minister of Japan and appointed the ministers. I found interesting men in the new cabinet: Minister of Finance, Miyazawa Kiichi and Director General of Economic Planning Agency, Sakaiya Taichi. Miyazawa and Sakaiya belong to the U.S.-Japan 21st Century Committee, which was formed by the Center for Stategic and International Studies in Washington. In addition, the president of Bank of Japan, Hayami Masaru had been a member of the committee till March of 1998.
Sakurai Haruhiko