[…] to the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) which was published in September 2003.(18) Under the heading ‘The Iraqi in the Street’, and sticking to all outdated stereotypes, SIS writes, ‘Are you a member of one of Saddam’s favourite tribes? Yes? Then join the Ba’th Party.’ (19) Actually, under Saddam Hussein (February 2003), ‘the Iraqi […]
[…] minister, said committee had investigated nothing of consequence and issued a number of anodyne reports. No new revelatory horrors seemed to be on the horizon. MI5 and SIS had got their new buildings – rewards for the miners’ strike and Gordievsky, respectively – through the Whitehall system before the cuts began to fall, and […]
[…] by which the citizen judges its rivals, the reputation collapses.(6)Spook reputation management is of consequence if retention/recruitment of honourable and skilled personnel is an objective.(7) In this SIS appears to have fallen at the first hurdle, committing the niche employer’s cardinal PR error of allowing leadership admission/justification for the latest wrongdoing (torture/rendition), to tarnish […]
[…] faces at NATO where the official NATO Website carried for two months an English translation of an article, which had originally appeared in Croatia, which identified four SIS officers. (1) This was the comic climax of a series of stories about SIS’s activities in the states of the former Yugoslavia.(2) The exposure of SIS’s […]
[…] interest on reading the book version. In one section pp.48-49 (which also appeared in the Sunday Times on 4 February) Tomlinson describes how his intake of new SIS recruits were briefed by the then SIS chief McColl. One of the new recruits put the obvious question: ‘ “Sir, why do we have an intelligence […]
[…] of the need to explore some kind of armistice with Germany, knew Prytz, probably as a result of his activities on behalf of Stewart Menzies, Chief of SIS. As is well known the talks were stopped by Churchill who threatened to lock up both Halifax and Butler. De Courcy himself had to lie low […]
[PDF file]: The SIS and London-based foreign dissidents: some patterns of espionage Corinne Souza Over forty years separates the arrival of the Iraqi community in London and today’s Russian one. Some of the Iraqis making their home in the UK in the 1970s had substantial wealth, others were averagely well-to-do, and some had little more than […]
[…] though there is nothing specific in Ashdown’s known career which says ‘intelligence’, the career move from Special Boat Squadron to Foreign Office is pretty obvious.(1) The alleged SIS affiliation seems to have stuck, however. The doyen of British political profile writers, Andrew Roth, wrote in the Guardian (19 March 2001), sixteen years after Dorril, […]
[…] WW2 by Ian Fleming under cover of the Mercury newsagency, and named the late Henry Brandon of The Sunday Times, among others, the as ‘an asset of SIS’. (I seem to remember that while a correspondent in Washington in the 1970s he had his phone tapped by the Nixon White House.) Tomlinson 1 The […]
Michael Smith Gollancz, London,1996, £20 This is a curious and rather pointless book. In short chapters Smith attempts potted histories of MI5, SIS, signals and military intelligence. These are quite well done, but covering half a century in 20 pages, say, the chapters are barely more than sketches. (The Information Research Department gets a […]
