Blob of the month Hear the one about the supposedly spook-watching magazine whose editor misspelt the name of the head of MI5? Yep: Rimmington, I had in the last issue: Rimington it should have been. Searchlight News Their campaign against Larry O’Hara has reached new depths. In the March issue they published his picture […]
[…] attitudes to Castro’s Cuba. No answers, but certainly more to investigate. Our own ‘mole’ hunt in Britain, spurred on by the recent efforts of ex-chief molehunter for MI5, Peter Wright, has recently produced a new piece in the jigsaw of Oswald in Mexico City. In 1963 James Angleton, head of the CIA’s counter intelligence […]
Philip Hoare, Duckworth Press, London, 1997, £16.99 The opening of MI5’s archives up to and including 1919 gives historians and researchers the chance to exhume the genesis of the right in British domestic politics as well as the early activities of the secret state. Despite its title (Oscar died in 1900) Hoare dips quite a […]
[…] become MPs. Some of the material was familiar but less well known were Raymond Fletcher, and Le Cercle. Fletcher was a Labour MP who was witch-hunted by MI5 as a KGB asset when really an MI6 agent. New information on Le Cercle (aka the Pinay Circle: see Lobster 17) from Hollingsworth is the role […]
[…] this instance Adams has persuaded some of the big cheeses from the CIA and the Russian intelligence service to talk to him, as well as SIS and MI5, and the result is a kind of survey of the new world disorder. I’m not very interested in, or knowledgeable about, the current state of the […]
From Mark Hollingsworth As the journalist, along with Nick Fielding, who first reported David Shayler’s revelations about MI5 in the Mail on Sunday in 1997, I would like to set the record straight on your piece in Lobster 36 (‘Peter’s Friends’?) I have remained close to David Shayler and Annie Machon, his girlfriend and […]
[PDF file]: Literary Spying British Writers and MI5 Surveillance 1930-1960 James Smith Cambridge University Press, 2013, £55.00, h/b John Newsinger Smith’s book is an immensely valuable preliminary examination of the British secret state’s surveillance of ‘the left-wing writers and artists’ of George Orwell’s generation. As the author makes clear, the context was very different from the […]
[PDF file]: RING OF SPIES: How MI5 and the FBI brought down the Nazis in America Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones Cheltenham: The History Press, 2020, £20 Simon Matthews Flick through the 70 or so free view channels on your TV and you’ll come across at least half a dozen that specialise in slightly off-beat, but decently made and […]
Stephen Dorril Heinemann, London, 1993 It turns out that the ‘silent conspiracy’ of the title is a conspiracy which ‘has surrounded Britain’s secret state’ — a blindingly obvious tautology. Dorril has done as much as any other to lift the veil of secrecy from the British secret state, so it is somewhat disappointing to read […]
[…] wasn’t just a plot against Wilson; it was a plot against the Labour and Liberal parties and the Heath wing of the Tories. And it wasn’t just MI5 doing it, either.(1) It did contain two significant new pieces of information. The first was Wilson’s attempt to steer Penrose and Courtiour towards Northern Ireland and […]
