Annie Machon Lewes (East Sussex): Book Guild, 2005, h/b, £17.95 It is hard to ‘see’ this book because a lot of the material, especially in the first half, is familiar, half-remembered from the press reporting of the Shayler-Machon drama and the book Defending the Realm by Nick Fielding and Mark Hollingsworth. Nonetheless, familiar or … Read more
Anthony Glees and Philip H. J. Davies London: The Social Affairs Unit, 2004, £30, h/b This is a curious little book (112 pp.) in which two conservative intelligence academics wrestle with the realities of the events leading up to the attack on Iraq. But what manner of beast is a conservative intelligence academic? The … Read more
[…] According to David Leigh’s sources the MI5 officer Arthur Martin told friends before his tranfer to MI6 in November 1964, ‘I did hear that —— was a spy.’ An MI5 officer from K branch confirmed to Leigh that ‘We knew that —— was a CIA agent, or, if not an agent, at least very […]
Nicky Hager Craig Potton Publishing Box 555, Nelson, New Zealand $25 (New Zealand) 1996 Sample chapters at http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/sp/ This was mentioned briefly in the Guardian some months ago. Hager has done a Duncan Campbell and stitched together, in incredible detail, New Zealand’s contribution to the NSA-run global network of communications interception. But his work goes … Read more
[…] it ‘private and confidential’, as publicity could kill it.’ What this ‘action group’ did is unknown. (86) It has become quite widely accepted that Ellis was a spy for the Soviets. This story first took root in Chapman Pincher’s Their Trade is Treachery. Pincher added to it in a letter (6 May 1981) in […]
Tom Bower, Heinemann, London This is the biography of Dick White, the only man to have been head of both MI5 and MI6 (SIS) and it is a massive breach of the new Official Secrets Act. For Bower not only had access to White’s memoir of the period, with White to vouch for him, he … Read more
[…] Miranda Ingram, who worked with Michael Bettaney, describes working conditions and MI5 philosophy. Boring for her and for us…. Tatler (June 1984) Robert Harris reports on the spy recruitment procedures. There was some talk of prosecutions under the Official Secrets Act for naming MI5 and MI6 premises. They are: MI5 recruitment (positive vetting) – […]
The clandestine world of surveillance, spying and intelligence from ancient times to the post 9/11 world Ernest Volkman London: Carlton, 2007, h/b, £20 This is a lavishly and creatively illustrated, large format, (i.e. slightly bigger than A4) glossy paper, coffee-table book on the history of espionage. A former journalist with Newsday, and author of … Read more
[…] regularly in specialized investigative publications like Covert Action Information Bulletin, Bulletin d’Information sur Intervention Clandestine (France), Intelligence/Parapolitics (now Intelligence Newsletter) (France), Lobster (UK), National Reporter (formerly Counter spy) (US, recently defunct), The Public Eye, Celsius (formerly Article 31) (Belgium), Searchlight (UK) and the now defunct State Research Bulletin (UK). A great deal more is […]
[…] opening of the KGB archives and the testimony of Oleg Gordievsky, you might be forgiven for thinking that the question, Was MI5 Director-General Roger Hollis a Soviet spy? had been answered conclusively and resoundingly ‘No’. You would be wrong – or so says the doyen of British espionage writers, Chapman Pincher. In a piece […]
