[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] results of her own inquiry into Diana’s death;() while in the evening the final episode of series four of Spooks (BBC1) included a convincing explanation of how MI5 could have engineered the crash. () The coroner On 18 December 2003, Michael Burgess, H.M. Coroner for Surrey, confirmed that inquests on Diana and Dodi would […]
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 […]
British ‘USP’ In September 2000 the tragic case of two infants from Malta dominated the headlines.(1) British judges were asked to decide whether it was ‘right’ for doctors to sacrifice one child, joined at the abdomen with her twin, for the sake of the other. As a result of global press coverage, the moral arguments […]
[…] He refers to MI5’s analysis of the “45 minute report” and highlights the original circulation of the document to various departments. The usual suspects are there: SIS, MI5, GCHQ and MOD get between 7 copies for MI5 and 20 copies for MI6. But also listed are 32 (yes 32) copies for the DTI. Why? […]
[…] case ‘doesn’t follow the accepted pattern of burglaries’.(16) But if it was not a bungled theft, by an admittedly very special burglar, what was the intruder’s motive? MI5, Zeus and nuclear protest Some writers believe that it was the determination of the Thatcher government to push through a highly ambitious nuclear power programme which […]
[…] that he is Australia’s leading academic historian of intelligence and security history. This history of ASIO and its antecedents – more or less equivalent to the UK’s MI5 – shows what you might have expected: the spooks were allied with the conservatives, persecuted the left, hunted reds, real and imaginary (mostly imaginary) and kowtowed […]
[…] Affairs Research Institute (FARI). John Bruce Lockhart (Obituary, Independent 13 May 1995). SIS officer. Niall MacDermot (Obituary by David Leigh in the Guardian, 26 February 1996). War-time MI5 officer, later Labour MP and Minister in the first Wilson government, whose career was halted by MI5 ostensibly because of his wife’s links with Soviet officials, […]
[…] MI5/dirty pictures case from 1964…….. and it still isn’t clear to me what was going on. One of the articles the world might have survived without is ‘MI5, 1909-1945: an information management perspective’ by Black and Brunt in the Journal of Information Sciences, 26 (3) 2000. What next, the Kennedy assassination: a catering perspective? […]
