ed. ‘Nigel West’
Faber and Faber, London, 1993
The title isn’t to be taken seriously. This is 610 pages of short extracts from some of the books written by British MI5 and MI6 personnel, with short biographical sections by ‘West’. Some of this is quite interesting — lots of it was new to me — but as ‘West’ approaches the present day his editing becomes more and more eccentric.
Thus, for example, we are informed that Kim Philby ‘was a philandering drunk whose career was destined to be curtailed by the knowledge, acquired secretly by MI5, that he had once been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.’ (p. 557, emphasis added). Oh really?
We are told (p. 542) that Peter Wright’s ‘initiation into molehunting’ was in May 1963, while Bristow (reviewed above), a friend of Wright’s, tells us that this actually began in 1956; and that Spycatcher was ‘a mediocre book, of only marginal accuracy’ — which is well over the top.
‘West’ extracts from G.K. Young’s Subversion: the British Riposte, but tells us merely that Young ‘was active in the Monday Club.’ There is nothing about Unison and Young’s other clandestine activities in the seventies.
Cathy Massiter is included but her revelations about MI5’s operations against the British left are boiled down to this: ‘Today Cathy Massiter continues to live in East Sussex, having escaped unscathed after a series of disclosures about the performance and operations of the Security Service which led to litigation before the European Court.’ And rather than quoting from her affidavits, or from the various tv programmes she appeared on, absurdly he reproduces a short letter she wrote to New Society.
The entry on G.K. Young’s friend (and critic of MI5) Anthony Cavendish begins, snidely, ‘The Bulgarian who changed his name to Anthony Cavendish…’; and there is, of course, nothing from messers Wallace, Holroyd or Rusbridger.