Lost plot After Lobster 35 I received a long letter from John Pilger, followed by a revised version of it, complaining about my review of his recent book, Hidden Agendas in 35. With the second version came a note asking me to publish his letter without comment. I replied that I was happy to publish […]
[…] of the opposition. Oldfield and Thatcher became firm friends. The day after her election as Prime Minister she requested the head of MI6 and the Director of MI5, Arthur Franks and Howard Smith, to brief her on intelligence matters. The briefing “followed the same pattern as that given to her predecessor when he came […]
[…] National Archives in November 2003. Included in it was a memorandum describing the security aspects of Fuchs’s background and arrest which was submitted by the Director-General of MI5, Sir Percy Sillitoe, to the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. According to Goodman and Pincher ‘…..a careful examination reveals that MI5 deliberately misled the Prime Minister to […]
Web update Jane Affleck Thanks to Terry Hanstock and David Turner for contributions. Comments and details of interesting websites are welcome: my email address is 101521.3515 @compuserve.com Freedom Of Information Campaign for Freedom of Information http://www.cfoi.org.uk ‘The Campaign for Freedom of Information campaigns against unnecessary secrecy and for greater public access to official and other […]
See also: Part 1: British Fascism 1974-92 (Lobster 23) Part 2: British Fascism 1974-92 (II) (Lobster 24) Part 4: British Fascism 1983-6 (II) (Lobster 26) The 1986 National Front Split (Lobster 29) ‘Let a thousand initiatives bloom…’ While the piece in Lobster 24 was a (necessary) digression, treating of individual careers and various lurid allegations, […]
[…] started investigating the murder of his aunt, anti-nuclear activist Hilda Murrell, (11) who had incurred the unwelcome attention of Zeus Security and Sapphire Investigations (both subcontractors of MI5 and the nuclear police employing right-wing extremists and violent criminals). In my PhD thesis I also summarise the two key features of the coercive state, thus: […]
[…] Africans, his is the first such memoir I have seen in which the covert world is shown to play a significant part in colonial life. Smith portrays MI5 working with the Colonial Office, bugging, tapping, intercepting mail — as well as producing inept anti-communist propaganda. Then as independence loomed, the Colonial Office/MI5 team were […]
[…] This happens this is allowed to happen because there is virtually no political control over the security organisations: when they fuck-up nothing happens to them. MI5 botch a surveillance of an IRA operation and £300 million’s worth of damage is done to the City of London; and nothing happens, no heads roll. […]
[…] in a half page summary of a short pamphlet by Labour Research into the League in 1968; thirdly in a comment that ‘This change of emphasis in MI5 must have cemented its relationship with the Economic league’, in which the assertion ‘must have’ hardly compensates for the lack of evidence; and fourthly in the […]
Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America James Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Yale University Press, London and Yale, 1999, £19.95 The Haunted Wood: Soviet espionage in America – the Stalin era Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev Random House, New York, 1999, $30.00 So now we know: most of what the Republican right in the US, […]
