[…] found David Kelly’s body and thus ‘helped to bring closure for the family.’(6) Unofficial histories and authorised versions Described by its publisher as ‘the definitive history of MI5 and MI6’, Gordon Thomas’s Inside British intelligence: 100 years of MI5 and MI6 (London: JR Books), hit the shelves in May, despite the best efforts of […]
[…] a decade ago. A Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, and the journalist with the closest links to the British intelligence services, Chapman Pincher, both said that elements of MI5 had been trying to bring down the Labour Government during 1974-76 – and nothing happened. There was no serious investigation by British journalists, the Labour Party […]
[…] of the British intelligence services in the context of civil liberties and their relationship with the public. For most of their existence the British Intelligence Services, namely MI5, GCHQ and MI6 were not governed by any statutory law. They were established by the use of the Royal Prerogative backed up, in the case of […]
Dr David Turner went to former MI5 Director-General Stella Rimington’s book-signing at Hatchard’s, Piccadilly, on 18 September 2001, where the following exchange took place. Turner (presenting book for signing after queuing briefly behind several people, including a woman wearing an Anarchist badge) ‘Hello. Do you mind a lengthy inscription?’ Rimington (smiling, flanked by […]
[…] internal documents, phone calls, meetings (public and private) from an enormous variety of groups on the neo-fascist British Right. Who could achieve this kind of penetration? Only MI5 could, I thought. Then I re-read the story of the ‘Gable memo’ in the New Statesman — and that was the case closed as far as […]
[…] give her name) that Clarissa Churchill, acting on information from Guy Liddell, had inadvertently given Burgess the nudge to defect by warning him as a friend that MI5 were closing in on Maclean. In the same year, she married Anthony Eden, who became Prime Minister on Churchill’s retirement. Around the time of Suez, while […]
[…] writes that the Brandt Affair “had involved at least four of the West’s Intelligence agencies, working in partnership with each other — the West Germans, the French, MI5 and the CIA’.(1) A Sunday Times “Insight” article informs us that MI5’s Director General Michael Hanley first quarrelled with Wilson over the case of Judith Hart, […]
[…] support it. Formally they did – how could they not? – but they could see as well as others that it was going to be a disaster. MI5 must have known about the CPGB’s lack of enthusiasm since they had the CPGB penetrated from top to bottom. So there’s another story to be told: […]
[…] one William Massie. His name has appeared on some interesting material recently: viz: 14th February 1988, front page story in the Sunday Express based on leak from MI5 – complete with surveillance photograph – on alleged contact between the then Labour MP John Diamond and two Yugoslav women. The article contained the women’s passport […]
[…] and David Shayler book, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers (reviewed in Lobster 49), which was apparently dropped by the publisher. The key section is this, from an unnamed MI5 officer: ‘Blair was recruited early on in his career, around the time he stood in the Beaconsfield by-election in 1982. He was just the sort of […]
