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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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 […]
[…] resistance was overridden by the implications of the Tyler Kent affair.’ Tyler Kent was a cypher clerk in the American Embassy in London. He had been under MI5 surveillance for some 7 months during which he had made contact with members of the Right Club, the hard-core pro-Nazis in London lead by the dotty […]
[…] 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, […]
[…] (HEE Proceedings, vol. 132, Pt. 1, No. 4, July 1989). Viscount Ruthven: Section D (MI6) Cairo with Freya Stark (Sunday Telegraph 5 August 1990). Commander Bill Emmet: MI5 Italy WW2 (Daily Telegraph 2 November 1985). G.J. Deverell: MI6 station chief Budapest 1941 (Letter, The Times, 22 April 1991). Douglas Gordon: British Consul-General Aden, expelled […]
[…] interesting – but isolated – anecdotes is not enough. For example, he flatly asserts that “the ACMA’s (Authorised Competent Military Authorities) were both conduit and catspaw of MI5”, but gives only one example. (Do we even know how big MI5 was at this point?) Part of this national surveillance effort was done by “an […]
[…] 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? […]
[…] having been an informer in Bristol since the mid-seventies – which some of us had guessed – and after 1989 his handling had been taken over by MI5. Apparently he then returned to Belfast under instructions and then moved to Galway, where he again was running a driving school. When he took over an […]
[…] 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 […]
