William J. West Berkeley Books, USA, 1990 From the UK reviews: ‘Unassailably accurate … beautifully written … the definitive book on the Hollis story’ – The Times ‘Lively, well-written a completely engrossing book. West has unearthed completely new material’ – Financial Times ‘West is a thorough and meticulous researcher. His book is one of […]
A current example of a conspiracy theory is the continuing attempt to paint Roger Hollis as a member of the so-called ‘Ring of Five’. There is, it should be said, not a shred of evidence that Hollis ever passed a single piece of information to the Soviets, nor that he had any contacts with […]
[…] similarities to the later plots against Ministers in the Wilson governments.) According to de Courcy, on 14th September 1951, two MI5 officers under the orders of Roger Hollis were sent to Paris to interview French officials looking for dirt to discredit the Paris branch of de Courcy’s Intelligence Digest. This, so de Courcy says, […]
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 […]
[…] unscholarly work but to nasty witch hunts. What first drew my attention to this trend was when Peter Wright came out with his accusation about Sir Roger Hollis. Chapman Pincher was wheeled out to back up the claim that Hollis had been recruited to Soviet intelligence by Arthur Ewert when in China. Ewert was […]
[…] explain that I tried to join the Foreign Service soon after coming down from Oxford in 1960 and was firmly rebuffed, despite a recommendation from Sir Roger Hollis, of the rival Security Service, MI5.” (2) Waugh was close to the Hollis family. Roger’s brother Christopher was a godfather to Waugh and the two lunched […]
[…] Steve Dorril adds: There is one little gem in Wright’s book which is worth noting. On p. 93 Wright reveals that the Director-General of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, deliberately destroyed a document before the Denning Inquiry into the Profumo Affair. This showed that Hollis had tried, via the Cabinet Secretary, to enlist John Profumo’s […]
[…] general crusade against communism. It also supported the British League for European Freedom and Common Cause. There were many Catholics involved – notably the British Catholic publisher, Hollis and Carter. MRA Moral Re-Armament was another influence on the work of Common Cause. In the words of its founder Frank Buchman, ‘Labour led by God […]
On 8 March 1985 an attempt was made to assassinate one of the founders of Hizbullah, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, by car bomb in Beirut. The attack failed in its objective, but there was some ‘collateral damage’. While Fadlallah was untouched, some eighty bystanders, men, women and children, were killed and over two hundred injured. … Read more
[…] 1953 the ESU, with funding from an American source described as a private donor, established a Current Affairs Unit under the direction of intelligence expert General Leslie Hollis and the chairmanship of Francis Williams’ (p. 175). I would need to see the evidence of the ‘private donor’; the presumption must be that this is […]
