MI6 persuaded Clare Short, the Secretary of State for International Development, to task them to give her early warning about coups in Africa. (Independent 23 July 2000) MI6 now have a license to roam throughout Africa. The spooks must love having Labour in office, terrified to oppose anything they ask for.
Hitherto secret Whitehall committee trying to deal with unauthorised exposure of intelligence material was itself exposed in the Sunday Times 21 May 2000.
A page of the Guardian (tabloid section) 24 September 1999 was devoted to the Ken Roberts/Kodak/MI5/dirty pictures case from 1964…….. and it still isn’t clear to me what was going on.
One of the articles the world might have survived without is ‘MI5, 1909-1945: an information management perspective’ by Black and Brunt in the Journal of Information Sciences, 26 (3) 2000. What next, the Kennedy assassination: a catering perspective?
On the other hand, an article which could have used a lot of expansion was ‘The Labour Party spies……..Stella’s last State Secret’ in The Mail on Sunday 21 May 2000, in which Peter Dobie told us of his friends in the Labour Party – ‘of senior rank’ – who were informing MI5 in the 1980s about the Labour Party left.
‘People did take money in return for their help. Some of them have prospered within New Labour and now sit in the Lords …..[former MI5 head Stella Rimington] knows exactly how dozens of Labour Party members reported their comrades for possible treachery during those difficult years.’
Only the Daily Telegraph delivers gems like the obituary of former MI6 officer Dick Craig (10 May 2000). It concluded with this: ‘He was much loved: the servants of his London club called him “Mr Dick”, an unusual compliment’. One does so like one’s servants to like one.
Paul Robeson’s son alleged – without evidence as far as I could see – that his father had been giving a psychedelic drug by the CIA. More significant, in my view, was the kicker to the story that, having displayed symptoms of depression, Robeson was given 54 electroshock ‘treatments’ in Britain. (Sunday Times 14 March 1999).
Much media interest in the proposed memoir from former Director-General of MI5 Stella Rimington. None of the esteemed members of the British press seems to have remembered that one of her predecessors, Sir Percy Sillitoe, published such a memoir nearly half a century ago – a memoir so anodyne I gave it to a charity shop (from whence it came in the first place).