[…] Bush to make a decision.’ Afghanistan In Afghanistan too, there are mutterings – and not only about resources and the Americans. The populist story about the UK Embassy in Afghanistan being given a swimming pool for staff to relax in while the soldiery faces water shortages in Helmand Province may be exaggerated, but it […]
[…] travel plans. For seven years of Gaitskell’s postwar prominence in the Labour Party, Godson busied himself deeply in British Labour movement from his office at the American embassy. When the Gaitskellite Williams edited the former leader’s diaries, Godson figured sufficiently prominently to earn a pen portrait. And, in a footnote on Gaitskell’s efforts to […]
[…] tells us that by 1953 the various US information services – what we would now call psy-ops – had 93 (!) people working out of the London Embassy. Doing what? There are new accounts here of some of the major landmarks of British post-war decolonisation, Malaya and Cyprus; but, oddly, nothing on Kenya. The […]
[…] against Hitler was conducted partly by military means: but it was also waged with Machiavellian cunning. Churchill knew that Tyler Kent, a coding clerk at the US Embassy in London, had stolen copies of his correspondence with Roosevelt. Had the details of Kent’s treachery been released the full extent of Roosevelt’s departure from strict […]
[…] the men arrested in Gambia and subsequently released said that when he was questioned by his American interrogator and demanded to contact a lawyer and the British Embassy he received an illuminating response: ‘Who do you think asked us to arrest you? Where do you think this information came from, the questions we are […]
[…] ripping-off what they could. Not for them the enthusiastic pursuit of intelligence coups – as would-be ideologically defector Michael Bettanay discovered when his overtures to the Soviet embassy in London were spurned by the cautious comrade Guk. ‘It was not in the institutional interests of British intelligence to tell ministers or officials what they […]
[…] Persia where he organised the escape of White Russians across the border. He also helped to organise espionage, including the robbing of the safe in the Russian Embassy. In the Gurkhas during the Second World War. In 1950 came out of retirement to act as Deputy Director of Operations against Coptic and Muslim guerrillas […]
[…] in ’84. (Guardian 6 May 1985) Plan for SB to absorb anti-terror branch. (Daily Telegraph 4 March 1985 and Guardian 5 March) SB liaison with South African Embassy – providing information on anti-apartheid activities. (Leveller April 1985) State use of private intelligence agencies Three firms identified so far: used for intelligence gathering, infiltration and […]
[…] Hakluyt’s career hinged on patronage motivated by interest in his geographical research. His biographers, Parks and Taylor, are both convinced that when Hakluyt served in the Paris embassy as Sir Edward Stafford’s secretary he was really there as the client and agent of Walsingham to gather geographical information; that is he was an Elizabethan […]
[…] Club: Carlton. (FO, DDI) Holden (Lord) Angur William Eden Holden, b. 1898. Liberal peer. Ex Guards’ Regiment; Hon Attache, H.M. Mission to Holy See, 1918; to H.M. Embassy, Madrid, 1922; to Berlin, 1925. Club: Guards’, Royal Automobile. Advocate of negotiated peace, 1939-40. (FO, PREM, Stokes, Chamberlain, Cockett, De Courcy) Kerr, Lt-Col Charles Iain, M.P. […]
