The SAS, MI6 and the War Whitehall Nearly Lost
Nigel West
Little Brown and Company, 1996, £16.99
There are two substantial essays in here, one about the SAS raid on the Argentine mainland which didn’t take place, and the other about the SIS operation to prevent the French delivering any more Exocets to the Argentine armed forces. Both episodes have been written about before, though not in this detail. The other 80% of the book is little more than padding – on the Israeli commando raid on Entebbe, the SR 71 spy plane, the French intelligence service SDECE, the Chilean intelligence service DINA; ten pages on the career of the SIS officer Anthony Dival; eight pages on the Joint Intelligence Committee and its Current Intelligence Group; pages and pages on the career and death of Roberto Calvi on the pretext of speculation that SIS may have been involved in the difficulties Calvi’s banking empire experienced; etc etc. On the other hand, the Dival story is interesting and there is also a scattering of mildly interesting bits and pieces on intelligence methods and technology, especially satellites. For the trainspotters amongst us there are lots of new names – though most are in the form Anthony X. There is also quite an interesting account of Whitehall’s handling of the operation, most of which felt familiar (though I haven’t tried to check it with existing accounts.) Might be worth a pound when the paperback eventually hits the shelves of the charity shops.