[…] the various forgeries which were going around: Ted Short’s phoney bank account and all the forged leaflets and letters trying to link Wilson and others to the Communist Party and the IRA. And here is the core of my complaint: it wasn’t just a plot against Wilson; it was a plot against the Labour […]
[…] into the ‘convenient deaths’ category. Arthur Gavshon (Obituary, Guardian 31 July 1995). Journalist, author, friend of this journal. Ian Greig (Obituary Glasgow Herald 4 November 1995). Anti- communist writer and propagandist; active in the Monday Club and Foreign Affairs Research Institute. Although I am still unclear of his precise role, I think he was […]
[…] full access to its material, little of this was broadcast. Instead we get a lot of huffing and puffing about ‘Trotskyists’. This came, though, from an elderly Communist Party member, rather than anyone in mainstream politics. Ware says, ‘…. ten years ago, black parents warned that schools were failing their children….’ (i.e. in 1977 […]
[…] policy. I have been since I was in my teens, a very junior member of CND in the sixties, with parents who had been in the British Communist Party after the war. But there’s the paradox: while I was protesting about US bases in Scotland, I was sucking down huge amounts of American cultural […]
Turning up the Heat: MI5 after the Cold War Larry O’Hara Phoenix Press, London, 1994, £6 (p and p included) from BM Box 4769, London WC1N 3XX; cheques payable to Larry O’Hara. Since 1945 MI5 has had three main domestic targets: Soviet bloc espionage, the British Left and the IRA. With the Soviet target gone, […]
Searchlight At the beginning of the essay on the Blairites above, I discuss the concept of political contamination, the denigration of people on the left by association – real or fictitious – with ideas or people on the right. The most enthusiastic users of the contamination device in Britain today are found in Searchlight magazine. … Read more
The American boomerang In America, Mayor Bloomberg has banned smoking in public places, especially in restaurants, inadvertently turning New York into an unlikely but almost spook-free zone. (1) American intelligence officers may not smoke, but some of their overseas contacts will. If meeting in the West, they will prefer to do so in London; or, … Read more
[…] “In most of the possible theatres of limited war…it must be accepted that it is at least improbable that we would be able to meet a major communist offensive in one of these areas without resorting to tactical nuclear weapons”… Official statements reflect a similar approach. The 1956 Defence White Paper remarked that while […]
Inside Intelligence Anthony Cavendish Palu Publishing Ltd. 1987 Although many hundreds of books have been written on British Intelligence, very few have tackled post-war intelligence in any kind of depth or with any degree of reliability. By contrast, we tend to believe that we know quite a lot about the workings of the CIA. But […]
[…] In 1985 Cathy Massiter a former MI5 employee revealed that the agency had kept files on Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt with the classifications ‘subversive’ and ‘ communist sympathiser’. Over the past decade there have been many structures put in place to ostensibly monitor the intelligence services as well as to give the public […]
