In 1976 Mary Ferrell discovered a curious CIA document, a telegram that had been sent from the Agency office in London to headquarters in Langley on 23 November 1963, the day after JFK was assassinated. The telegram reads as follows (blacked-out(1) matter shown by brackets, with suppositions in italic): EXPRESSIONS OF SORROW AND SYMPATHY RECEIVED […]
[…] 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. […]
[…] over in Langley, Virginia. ‘At a critical moment, an important meeting was held between Cabinet Secretary Norman Brook, Pat Dean representing the Foreign Office, the director of MI5, Mr (later Sir) Roger Hollis, and Norman Reddaway representing the IRD. At the end of it, Brook instructed Hollis to make available to the Foreign Office, […]
[…] 26. The same river twice John Hope had an interesting piece in Intelligence and National Security Vol. 9 No. 4 (1994), called ‘Surveillance or Collusion? Maxwell Knight, MI5 and the British Fascisti’. This bears a striking resemblance to the Knight sections of Hope’s piece in Lobster 22, ‘Fascism, the Security Service and the Curious […]
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, […]
Colin Wallace On the Colin Wallace front, the big event since issue 17 has been Paul Foot’s book, Who Framed Colin Wallace? (Macmillan, 1989). With this book Paul Foot has re-researched and synthesised all the previous work and produced what is likely to remain the definitive account of Wallace’s biography, his allegations and – most […]
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 […]
[…] achievement.(1) The core of the book is the investigation of the various operations to smear the National Union of Mineworkers and Arthur Scargill. There is much about MI5, Libya and Roger Windsor. There is everything short of a smoking gun. However, Milne is also running a thesis about the strike which says: (a) the […]
[…] Gough Whitlam by the CIA and SIS West Germany: the destabilisation of Willi Brandt because of his overture to ‘the other Germany’ through Ostpolitilk. The CIA and MI5 (5) suspected Brandt of being recruited by Moscow during his wartime service with the resistance in Scandinavia. Reflecting on the Pinay Circle and its apparent role […]
