[…] Without knowing what his information is, a priori the problem with his story is that it hinges upon extraordinary incompetence by said British intelligence. Any reader of spy fiction would have been able to create a more plausible scene for the police to find than that left by ‘British intelligence’. Rather more plausible would […]
[…] Al-Ani found employment at Baghdad University in 1973. He fell victim a year later to a Ba’athist dictat that barred professors married to foreigners. After refusing to spy on foreign companies operating in Iraq, Al-Ani voyaged in 1980 with his young family to Finland. Though strongly opposed to the Ba’athists, Al-Ani wondered how any […]
[…] Guardian 11/2/87 NOTE: The Lobster 17 article on the Pinay Circle contained several spelling errors of the names of Circle members. The correct versions are given above. The ‘Network’ book mentioned in the footnotes to Lobster 17 is more easily available under the republished title The General was a Spy, Hohne and Zolling, Pan, 1973.
[…] the SAS that played a major part in creating that regiment’s overblown myth. More recently, he published Brixmis: The Untold Exploits of Britain’s Most Daring Cold War Spy Mission, hardly a subversive work! His forte has been listening to covert warriors’ stories (including their complaints!) and turning them into popular history. It is this […]
[…] plays amateur psychoanalyst at Roberts’ expense. It reminds me of the ‘skeptics’ who attack Lee Harvey Oswald as a psychopathological loner and ignore his connections to the spy world. As for Roberts alternating between ‘asking Nader for help and accusing him of being part of the Mafia’, that dynamic replayed among American voters in […]
Gary Murray Simon and Schuster, London, 1993 For twenty five years Gary Murray worked as an RAF policeman and private investigator. In the early 1970s Murray ‘unexpectedly’ (invitation?) joined the Operations Intelligence cadre of 21 SAS, and this led to close contact with people from MI6, Army SIB, the Royal Military Police and the Parachute … Read more
Accountability I will be discussing a non subject the accountability of the intelligence services. By accountable we mean the ability to be brought to account, to be answerable for their actions, to be subject to scrutiny and ultimately to have their actions adjudicated upon in a court of law. I will be looking at … Read more
Brian Crozier HarperCollins, London, 1993 This is a very interesting book which greatly adds to our knowledge of the clandestine shaping of British politics in the 1970s and 80s. It is also a book which, like Chapman Pincher’s Inside Story, will repay repeated re-reading. But amidst all the new material a surprising amount of these … Read more
[…] respectively, to James Angleton, then a young veteran of OSS (who would soon take charge of the Vatican desk at the CIA), and Reinhard Gehlen, the Nazi spy who oversaw the post-war reconstruction of German intelligence under CIA auspices. (32) The Angleton connection to SMOM is suggestive in view of his opposition to the […]
[…] Embassy’.(19) In 1972 Hamilton Macmillan, an MI6 officer and nephew of the former Tory Prime Minister, recruited Howard Marks, his old chum from Balliol College, Oxford, to spy on Jim McCann, a hash smuggler whom MI6 believed was a Provisional IRA contact in Amsterdam. Macmillan gave no indication that he knew Marks was already […]
