[…] House, Australia, 1991). It is an account of Ian Milner, a pre-WW2 New Zealand Rhodes Scholar who became a Soviet agent in the same period as the Philby group while working for the New Zealand Foreign Ministry. What is interesting about the book, however, is not the spy aspect, but the portrait of the […]
[…] (The Information Research Department gets a page!) Every once in a while we get a detailed chunk: but who needs another version of the Cambridge spies ( Philby et al) and Blake? There are some striking omissions. On the history of decolonisation, not a word on Kenya and Nigeria; and the barest outlines on […]
[…] trace its origins back to a group of spooks, led by James Angleton, who wanted ‘revenge for the notorious Albanian operation which had been compromised by Kim Philby’. At the rear of the book there is a Casolaro chronology in which ‘The Octopus’ is suggested as being involved in almost every major parapolitical event […]
[…] The late George Brown, we are told on p. 356, was a ‘CIA source’. On the down side there is another endless account of Burgess and Maclean, Philby, Bunt et al, in whom I was never very interested. It might be bulging with new information; I just don’t know (or care). There are some […]
[…] was new to me — but as ‘West’ approaches the present day his editing becomes more and more eccentric. Thus, for example, we are informed that Kim Philby ‘was a philandering drunk whose career was destined to be curtailed by the knowledge, acquired secretly by MI5, that he had once been a member of […]
[…] this (or was that also marketing bullshit?) — presumably for the handful of pages in which Bristow expresses his support for Peter Wright and (inconclusively) discusses Burgess, Philby, Blunt, Thomas Harris etc etc. For Bristow knew them all and harbours suspicions about Guy Liddell, Roger Hollis and David Footman. But that’s about all there […]
[…] wrote unbelievably childish and banal letters back to his family in Gemany. (3) Yet the KGB and State Department reports, based respectively on the testimony of Kim Philby, the Czech intelligence chief Colonel Moravetz, and Churchill’s personal link to the security and intelligence services, Sir Desmond Morton, all point to one fact: Hess came […]
[…] briefing notes for Simon’s questioning of “Hess’, was kept in the dark. What does this imply for the status of the information Tom Dupree gave to Kim Philby not later than May 18? Why should news that was being passed along Whitehall corridors and was even the subject of (admittedly highly classified) diplomatic circulars […]
[…] I thought it would come out and I would get the chop.’ Montgomery died in February 1988. Clay Shaw, in other words, had one-stop access to Blunt, Philby, Burgess and their milieu. Though there is no information that he met any of them, we know from Olwen JANSON and others that he spent a […]
[…] there has been very little sign of SIS. One ‘sighting’ was its condemnation of a BBC dramatisation of the early lives of Messrs. Blunt, Burgess, McLean and Philby: the dramatist was blamed for a sensitivity by-pass SIS itself had created.(12) Another was in the Careers Section of London’s Evening Standard when a fiction writer […]
