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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] ‘Squidgygate’ then became impatient with their proxies and started sending journalists taped copies of the conversation through the post. Naturally, once the story broke, suspicion fell on MI5. Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke told the House of Commons: ‘The security services are strictly controlled in their telephone tapping and I know of no evidence whatever […]
[…] 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, […]
[…] no-one chose them. That is why the FCO can produce specialists in the area. Secondly the ‘stans’, by which I mean principally Pakistan, used to come under MI5 (sometimes army officers seconded from the MOD) and the colonial office, which is again why SIS neglected things. Afghanistan was of interest because of India/Iran/Soviet Union […]
[…] (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 […]
