[…] Angleton’s most devoted followers) in his book Legend; in this country via the likes of MI5 channels like Chapman Pincher, the ‘Fourth Man’ episode, and the so-called Hollis affair. Golitsyn now has a book out, New Lies For Old (London 1984) written with “the help of Western intelligence officials” (Sunday Times 11th March 1984), […]
[…] was only an average artist. (19) Coote had contacts in the Soviet Embassy and, interestingly, he was a golfing friend of the Director of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis. (20) Coote arranged a meeting at the Garrick Club. Accompanying Ward to this lunch was David Floyd, the Telegraph‘s correspondent on Soviet Affairs. Floyd was on […]
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 […]
[…] sought to focus public attention on Philby. MI5 had long harboured suspicions that a Labour government might legally clip their wings. Both Furnival-Jones, MI5’s new D-G after Hollis, and Simpkins, his deputy, were lawyers. MacDermot’s impending promotion was read as a potential threat. From MI5’s point of view, knowledge of Blunt’s activities by either […]
[…] a critical moment, an important meeting was held between Cabinet Secretary Norman Brook, Pat Dean representing the Foreign Office, the director of MI5, Mr (later Sir) Roger Hollis, and Norman Reddaway representing the IRD. At the end of it, Brook instructed Hollis to make available to the Foreign Office, with security collateral, intelligence about […]
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 party in the next general election campaign. Pincher duly relayed the message to MI5. In the event, when George Brown went to see MI5 Director General Hollis, he was given no such information. Peter Wright says in Spycatcher that MI5 refused for fear of blowing MI5’s sources in the Labour Party. But this […]
Introduction Despite their reputation for ’empiricism’, British academics have tended to treat political power by means of abstract concepts rather than empirical information about the actions of determinate individuals and groups (e.g. Giddens, 1984, 1985; Scott, 1986). After a brief efflorescence of empirical studies of the so-called ‘Establishment’ in the early 1960s, sociologists in Britain … Read more
[…] discussed in Smear! Roberts was sent a packet of photographs showing four men inflagrante dilecto, as they used to say. One of them was MI5 D-G Roger Hollis. The meaning of this episode has always seemed obscure. However Roberts’ obituarist, Simon Hattenstone, confidently asserts thus: ‘It did not take him long to conclude, with […]
