[…] community in the United Kingdom believed that unorthodox methods and techniques were required in the war. The intervention of these groupings, which included Special Branch, military intelligence, MI5 and MI6, was uncoordinated, Much has been written about that period, some of it honest journalism, but most of it propaganda inspired by the terrorists and […]
[…] in the Guardian on May 27 as having been labour correspondent of the Economist in the 1970s. Was he, I thought, one of the correspondents recruited by MI5 in the big F branch expansion circa 1973-5? Did that explain all the disinformation run through the Sunday Times by James Adams, for example? Apparently not. […]
[…] other in their university days. It is the view of the anti-Hollis faction that during his interrogation in 1969, as part of the investigations into a possible MI5 mole, Hollis had been less than candid about his relationship with Cockburn. Suspicions were aroused by his faltering reply to questions concerning Cockburn. Connections between Hollis […]
[…] justice perpetrated by the British MOD, Crown Prosecution Service and Police. The British Security Services continue their underhanded methods as revealed by the current case of ex- MI5 spy, David Shayler, who tried to whistle blow on his secret service bosses.’ After reading this I thought: sure, he is innocent and I’m Santa Claus! […]
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 […]
[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 […]
[…] in the Public Record Office throws more light on the career of Kenneth de Courcy, and perhaps indirectly, on the Hess affair. The file in question, an MI5 document, PROKV4/58, shows that de Courcy first came to the attention of the Security Service in 1934 (without explaining why) and was under intermittent observation up […]
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 […]
