[…] case and ignore the rest. It is a cardinal rule of intelligence,” said one aggrieved officer. “Yet that is what the PM is doing.” Not since Harold Wilson has a Prime Minister been so unpopular with his top spies. The mounting tension is mirrored in Washington. “We’ve gone from a zero position, where presidents […]
[…] that they don’t want to, or are unable to, deal with the reality of that system. In their view of this country’s recent history there were no Wilson plots; Northern Ireland is ignored; Cathy Massiter was guilty of ‘moralising misrepresentations’; disinformation, I-ops and bureaucratic rivalries are ignored. Intelligence and security organisations are no more […]
[…] a hypothesis to be worked out later, the succession of high-level assassinations and engineered removals of top politicians (Willy Brandt in 1974, Gough Whitlam in 1975, Harold Wilson in 1976, Aldo Moro and Pope John Paul I in 1978, and Olof Palme in 1986, to name but the most spectacular cases) can probably only […]
[…] CIA in funding the opposition parties and leaning on ASIO.(1) Will the academic version of MI5 for this period (should there ever be one) be as forthcoming about ‘the Wilson plots’? Notes A decent recent summary of those events, ‘The Hidden Australia – a secret recent History of the Whitlam Dismissal’, is available at .
[…] in which he reminds us of Brigadier Kitson’s ideas, the talk of a coup in The Times in 1974, General Sir Walter Walker’s Civil Assistance and ‘the Wilson plots’. This isn’t done very well – not enough detail and no indication from Evans that this field has been ploughed already – but for a […]
[…] is just that, a story, that Blair received Israeli government money fronted by ‘businessmen’. Either way, as has been demonstrated in Bernard Donoughue’s Dairies of the 1974-76 Wilson government, reviewed in Lobster 49, Labour, Israel and British Jewish businessmen is not a new story. Now that David Cameron looks like a possible winner, he […]
One of the recurring sub-themes of the literature on intelligence systems in the West in the past decade has been the status of the claims made by KGB defector Golitsyn. Until recently all the book-reading public knew about Golitsyn was (a) that he has exposed some (relatively minor) Soviet operations; (b) made a series of […]
[…] were in a minority, and they probably couldn’t stomach any Labour leader for very long anyway. Blair has probably grasped that nettle somewhat better than did Harold Wilson, whose efforts to keep everybody on board probably damaged his health. Do far cats call the tune? Only the misty-eyed romantics would believe for one moment […]
[…] of wide areas of body. You will recall that you were going to carry out some tests on RAF volunteers who were to be provided by Captain Wilson here….it is becoming increasingly urgent to obtain more information regarding the emergency beta tolerance for wide areas of body, both in relation to atomic explosions and […]
[…] own machinery to service politically-moderate trade union leaders.'(68) Servic(ing) trade union leaders? IRIS, like Common Cause, is more important than has generally been thought. Labour MP and Wilson Cabinet member, Charles Pannell (later Lord Pannell) described to Irving Richter in the early 1970s his friendship with Cecil Hallett, General Secretary of the AEU (and […]
