[…] He refers to MI5’s analysis of the “45 minute report” and highlights the original circulation of the document to various departments. The usual suspects are there: SIS, MI5, GCHQ and MOD get between 7 copies for MI5 and 20 copies for MI6. But also listed are 32 (yes 32) copies for the DTI. Why? […]
[…] that he is Australia’s leading academic historian of intelligence and security history. This history of ASIO and its antecedents – more or less equivalent to the UK’s MI5 – shows what you might have expected: the spooks were allied with the conservatives, persecuted the left, hunted reds, real and imaginary (mostly imaginary) and kowtowed […]
[…] 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? […]
[…] Cradock, Know your Enemy: How the Joint Intelligence Committee Saw the World (London: John Murray, 2002). 25 This is one reason why I was not surprised when MI5 announced the preparation of its official history – a best-seller in the making, with I assume, the profits on this occasion going to the taxpayer – […]
[…] case ‘doesn’t follow the accepted pattern of burglaries’.(16) But if it was not a bungled theft, by an admittedly very special burglar, what was the intruder’s motive? MI5, Zeus and nuclear protest Some writers believe that it was the determination of the Thatcher government to push through a highly ambitious nuclear power programme which […]
[…] then mainly in Europe. This isn’t overly eurocentric on Dorril’s part: his preface states that he intends to publish another volume on the roles of MI6 and MI5 with reference to counter-insurgency in the Third World. This will give more attention to South East Asia and Africa than was possible in the present volume. […]
[PDF file]: TO CATCH A SPY How the Spycatcher Affair Brought MI5 in from the Cold Tim Tate London: Icon, h/b, £25 Robin Ramsay The publisher sent me a pre-publication proof copy of this on spec and my initial reaction was: Is there really any need to go over this old ground again? Turns out, there […]
[PDF file]: The Secret War Between the Wars MI5 in the 1920s and 1930s Kevin Quinlan Woodbridge (Suffolk): The Boydell Press, 2014, £30, h/b T his began as the author’s PhD thesis, based on the MI5 files of the interwar period, and it details some of their successes against the British left who were getting money […]
[…] of their instinctive pro-Soviet bias, which took a long time to shed. There is also an interesting account of the political manoeuvrings around Metrokhin and Norwood as MI5 and SIS tried to establish their respective spin on the story. SIS, who wanted a prosecution of Norwood (to show MI5 incompetence, I presume), gave the […]
[…] on trial. A group of Special Branch officers – assisted by the BBC – broke the Official Secrets Act in a big way on television while an MI5 officer was on trial for the same offence. The programmes were dull, perfect examples of the way television takes a couple of pages of script and […]
