[…] 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. […]
Michael Smith Gollancz, London,1996, £20 This is a curious and rather pointless book. In short chapters Smith attempts potted histories of MI5, SIS, signals and military intelligence. These are quite well done, but covering half a century in 20 pages, say, the chapters are barely more than sketches. (The Information Research Department gets a […]
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, […]
All four of Tony Blair’s new political appointees at the Ministry of Defence are part of Labour’s Atlanticist network. Three of them, George Robertson, Lord John Gilbert and John Speller, are members of two interrelated bodies, the Atlantic Council and its labour movement wing, the Trades Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding (TUCETU). The […]
[…] the introduction of a bill under which it would become illegal to claim that any individual is an officer or agent of either the Security Service ( MI5) or of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). It was also made known that the publication of British Intelligence and Covert Action last year was considered provocative […]
[…] bring together a good deal of what is known about the post-war Tory Party and its links with the secret state – in this case, almost exclusively MI5 – and various disinformation and smear campaigns against Labour Party politicians and union leaders. Some of this will be familiar to anyone who has read Smear!, […]
On 8 July the Foreign Minister, Robin Cook, announced that the Libyan Government accepted ‘general responsibility’ for the death of WPC Yvonne Fletcher and normal diplomatic relations with Libya were being restored. The media reporting of this accepted the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) spin that it meant the Libyans have admitted killing Fletcher. The […]
[…] interests of British intelligence to tell ministers or officials what they knew about the inefficiency of the KGB and GRU’, remarks Urban. And vice versa, presumably. But MI5 helped smash the miners and MI6 ran Gordievsky who helped explain Gorbachev, and so MI5 and MI6 got their bids for new buildings through the system […]
[…] A scuffle ensued among the exclusively male gathering, as a result of which the civil servant returned to London. The Counter Intelligence branch of the Secret Service, MI5, is now believed to be running the show in Northern Ireland after the removal of MI6’s top man in Ulster, David Wyatt. Mr Wyatt, a casualty […]
[…] Branch monitor his activities. The agent, Geoff Dominy ….’ (emphasis added) Typical of Searchlight to make a startling allegation without offering any evidence. What is ‘British intelligence’? MI5? SIS? And who was Geoff Dominy? Clean aprons A correspondent wrote to MI5 asking for its position on Freemasonry. MI5 replied that the Service ‘could not […]
