[…] 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? I wonder. Some kind of export initiative?’ Or the DTI is full of spooks […]
[…] enough to show the allegiance to the state among media personnel. Daphne Park, for example, of the BBC Board of Governors, is not described as former senior MI6 officer. Paul Wilkinson is frequently quoted, but there is nothing on his part in the disinformation campaign against Colin Wallace, discussed in Lobster 16, which led, […]
[…] years ago that they are now. The two characters who receive this treatment are the brothers Paul and Hume Boggis-Rolfe, together with Carl Aarvold. Paul Boggis-Rolfe, ex- MI6, was allegedly involved in drafting the land deal for which de Courcy was framed. Hume Boggis-Rolf, ex-MI5, was a senior official at the Lord Chancellor’s department […]
[…] in revolutionary politics. 3 Conspicuous by his absence from the author’s list is Arthur Ransome, recently revelealed to have been been working in the Soviet Union for MI6. 4 See Wilde’s Last Stand by Philip Hoare (1997), reviewed in Lobster 38. 5 Yes, seeds. This seems odd but this is what the author says. […]
[…] one of the first historians to acknowledge the parapolitical dimension in modern British history, from the formation of the Special Branch to the construction of the new MI6 headquarters over a century later. This is allied to a perception that covert forces, including in the 1970s the CIA, have generally worked to protect the […]
Editorially Writing in mid-January… good news is the arrival of The Digger, apparently set fair to replace Private Eye as the major outlet – major above ground outlet – for British parapolitics. (Lobster, as one British academic said to me, is ‘underground’…). The new Kincora-Blunt trail, opened up by Ken Livingstone in the House of […]
[…] going to win, particularly as communist-affiliated groups were attempting to take the initiative on this soon after WWII. As Stephen Dorril has stressed in his book on MI6, the British involvement in these activities was ahead of the Americans in many respects. Aldrich related how the Cultural Relations Department, a forerunner to the more […]
[…] B inquiry. This agency was later revealed to be Zeus Securities, the brainchild of Peter Hamilton, a man with formidable establishment credentials and a long background in MI6. Zeus, then operated by ex-MI5 officer, Jeremy Wetherall, of another security firm, Lynx, was given the contract to organise the surveillance, which they sub-contracted to Sapphire […]
[…] attacks. 11 Peter Taylor, ‘States of Terror’, BBC, 1990. According to one rumour presently circulating in Belfast, the Security Services themselves were deeply divided over tactics once MI6 started talking to the IRA from 1989. 12 According to a former Special Branch officer I have spoken to. 13 Cusack and McDonald, see note 6. […]
[…] counter-terrorism….Examples are drawn from media, political and official sources (some not yet open), and cover not only Defence (including Special Forces), but also the activities of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.’ David Sharrock, ‘D-notice slapped on MoD’s history of censorship, Secrecy and the media, after spat over “turgid” writing’, The Times, 24 October 2008; Jack […]
