[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] as his one of his sub-agents. When Makgill died in October 1926, the agency was reorganised under the control of Baker White – and then incorporated into MI5 in 1931. There is plenty of archival evidence to show that under both Makgill and Baker White the IIB was used to undertake work and recruit […]
[…] 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 […]
Ken Silverstein Verso, London (£19.00) and New York ($25.00), 2000 Ken Silverstein is co-editor of CounterPunch, a very good radical – left radical – newsletter in Washington (http://www. counterpunch.org/). This book is a group of essays centred round a central theme rather than an attempt to encompass the whole area of the relationship between the […]
Edward Pearce London: Little, Brown, 2002, £25, h/b. Compared to the present crop of media-trained, PR-conscious, line-following, careerist pigmies who comprise the current Labour Cabinet, Denis Healey looks like a giant from a golden age. Before his well known roles as Minister of Defence and Chancellor of the Exchequer (during the Tory-induced inflation of […]
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 […]
