[…] Embassy’.(19) In 1972 Hamilton Macmillan, an MI6 officer and nephew of the former Tory Prime Minister, recruited Howard Marks, his old chum from Balliol College, Oxford, to spy on Jim McCann, a hash smuggler whom MI6 believed was a Provisional IRA contact in Amsterdam. Macmillan gave no indication that he knew Marks was already […]
Brothers: The hidden history of the Kennedy years David Talbot London: Simon and Schuster, 2007, h/b, £20 Another Kennedy book? Yes, but a good one. Talbot may not have anything new of substance to tell us about the assassination per se but has much new material about events before and after it. Talbot’s JFK … Read more
[…] the SAS that played a major part in creating that regiment’s overblown myth. More recently, he published Brixmis: The Untold Exploits of Britain’s Most Daring Cold War Spy Mission, hardly a subversive work! His forte has been listening to covert warriors’ stories (including their complaints!) and turning them into popular history. It is this […]
[…] campaign against Greece in the British serious papers in 1984/85. At the time the Greek government of Papandreou was trying to reduce the size of its domestic spy apparatus and that seemed the likely proximate cause. I think I was probably wrong about that. In his Eclipse (reviewed in this issue) Mark Perry reveals […]
[…] evidenced by its taste for conspiracy theories. While she recognises that conspiracies do happen, and cites the Catilinarian 2 and Cato Street conspiracies along with the Cambridge spy ring and Watergate as evidence of her breadth of historical vision, she is in no doubt that ‘…historical conspiracies are rare. The vast majority of apparently […]
The collapse of Polly Peck in 1990 remains perhaps the single greatest British corporate mystery of modern times.(1) How did a multi-billion pound international conglomerate, which had risen from East End obscurity to become the exemplar of eighties British Capitalism, collapse within a period of weeks? How did a favoured son of the London Stock … Read more
[…] and Herman Zolling (London 1972) and an interesting article by Sarah Gainham in the Spectator 9 November 1962. Robin Ramsay adds: Gainham is a writer of spy fiction. Her 1959 The Stone Roses (Sphere paperback, London 1971), a defector story set in Prague, carries the dedication ‘This story is for Friends in Prague’. […]
How perceptions have changed! In Leveller 51, March 1981, there was this snippet: ‘Why all the fuss about the Panorama programme on British Intelligence? Eventually there was just one cut — Gordon Winter, BOSS agent, former freelance journalist, in a pre-title sequence: “British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in […]
[…] mighty screed finally ends, Roberts takes us on an even stranger interlude: ‘EDITOR’S NOTE: This is all Joanie gave us on that date. However, we had a spy hiding behind a moosehead and he tells us that the psychiatrist came back into the room and Joanie handed him the notes quoted above and the […]
[…] starvation, execution, slavery…..how can the world shy away from one of the deadliest wars yet?’ The Sunday Herald, 30 November 2003. 13 Jefferson Morley , ‘The Good spy: how the quashing of an honest investigator led to 40 years of JFK conspiracy theories’, Washington Monthly, 35 (12) (December 2003), pp. 40-59. On-line at The […]
