[…] 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, […]
[…] countries. Editor/producer is Michael Quilligan, Ierland Informatie Centrum, Commelinstraat, 22/sous, 1093 TS, Amsterdam, Holland. Issue No 1 (March 1988) included some information on the new head of MI5, Peter Walker, which I don’t think has appeared elsewhere in the British media: “(he) served in Ireland in the early ’80s as second-in-command to Britain’s spy […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
