[PDF file]: […] Robin Ramsay This is only the second novel I have reviewed in Lobster.1 The cover and the author blurb tells us that author Beaumont is a ‘former MI6 operative’. ‘Operative’? Why not ‘officer’? The author tells me the word was chosen by the publisher. It is set in post–2020 UK, with a recognizable Boris […]
[PDF file]: […] subsequent modifications. Before WW2, in practice the state was willing to clobber little people – e.g. the novelist Compton MacKenzie who revealed a handful of secrets about MI6 in a book in the 1930s – but unwilling to do anything when prime minister Lloyd George took van loads of official (and thus secret) papers […]
[PDF file]: […] – getting as far as meeting Sir John Smith MP, Chair of the Trust. (In Douglas’s account of this meeting, Smith was ‘accompanied by two operatives from MI6’). It all ended in disarray, with it being made very clear that the Douglas/Webber offer was not being entertained. Subsequent to the meeting in the presence […]
[PDF file]: […] controversy in October1 9 showed Campbell among many New Labour pals. Those linked to bid backer Morgan Stanley included current Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, ex-head of MI6 John Scarlett and ex-Blair chief of staff Jonathan Powell. Portland figures in addition to Campbell and Allan were Powell’s brother Chris; Martin Sheehan, a Gordon Brown […]
[…] lobby encouraged war with Japan with increasingly impossible diplomatic demands on Japan and then by suppressing intelligence about the pending attack on Pearl Harbour.5 It then allowed MI6 to assemble a 1000 strong 3 www.ianfraser.org/dear-david-cameron-entrusting-economic-policyto-ex-investment-bankers-is-no-solution/ 4 The text is at 5 I haven’t read the vast literature on this but was reminded of this […]
[PDF file]: […] a point which then seemed trivial. ‘Paris is well worth a mass’ – Henri IV This is the complaint from Thomas concerning contacting David Irving: ‘An ex- MI6 officer friend of mine was staggered to hear that despite the historian David Irving having been sent to prison in Austria in 2006 for denying the […]
[PDF file]: […] government to such an extent that the arms industry and the government had become symbiotic. Eisenhower, incidentally, emerges from this 1 For my money, Stephen Dorril’s 1998 MI6: 50 Years of Special Operations was rendered nearly unreadable by the denseness of its prose and the distraction of all the little sidelines that kept opening […]
[PDF file]: […] failed with hundreds of times the resources of SIS, a ‘man from the FO replied: Ah yes, but you have to take account of the fact that MI6 is the most professional and efficient intelligence in the world. This is not to criticise the Americans, of course, but . . .13 The third theme […]
[PDF file]: MI5 speaks to the nation! Nick Must ‘How MI5 is adapting to fight coronavirus’1 was the headline on a BBC news online piece by Gordon Corera. In relation to that potential change in working practices, it quoted soon-to-depart MI5 chief, Sir Andrew Parker, thus: ‘You’ll understand if I don’t go into exactly the ways in […]
[…] He had regarded it all as “an enjoyable joke”, in cloak-and-dagger fashion. Gott denied receiving direct payments or naming fellow journalists: he had been called in by MI6 almost a decade before and they had accepted his explanation.9 (Emphasis added.) *new* The unsayable The New Statesman carries a decent critique by Neal Lawson of […]
