[…] Scottish Borderers) to the King’s African Rifles, he arrived in East Africa in January 1941 just as the campaign against the Italians was launched. On the ba sis of his rather sketchy Italian, he was posted to General Staff Intelligence and on the fourth day off the troopship, and after a quick perusal of […]
[…] (and political rival in the Tory Party). A solicitor, Simmonds died having apparently misappropriated millions from his clients’ accounts. He claimed to have been a member of SIS and Gilson, after much stumbling around the interface between Tory Party, SIS and the arms industry, thinks he has found that Simmonds was using clients’ funds […]
[…] 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. […]
[…] hard going (especially the chapter on ‘Decision-making for British arms exports’). The author admits right at the start that the study began life as a Ph.D. the sis. At times this shows. The density of the material, while impressive, does now and again generate a feeling of information overload on the part of the […]
[…] a brief potted biography of a ‘C’ and then recounts the big incidents of that ‘C’s’ time in office. Did I really want to read another synthe sis of the Greville Wynn/Oleg Penkofsky story, important though Penkofsky was? Much of this feels like churning the old files. The later chapters are more interesting and, […]
[…] me of recycling Soviet disinformation, and who, I would guess, is the source of the rumours in US intelligence circles that the KGB were funding Lobster. Another SIS memoir SIS buffs might like to check the Journal of Contemporary History, July 1995, in which former SIS officer Kenneth Benton is given 50 pages to […]
[…] expected. In this instance Adams has persuaded some of the big cheeses from the CIA and the Russian intelligence service to talk to him, as well as SIS and MI5, and the result is a kind of survey of the new world disorder. I’m not very interested in, or knowledgeable about, the current state […]
[…] briefcase in their office. Gerry promptly opened it and copied Riley’s rather uninteresting address book.(7) Watch this space. O’Hara cannot claim he does not know of Riley’s SIS connections because Riley spells it out in his letter to him dated 13 July 1993. In the letter Riley says Gerry paid him money to do […]
[…] has finally published his account of Philby. He tries to establish that Philby did more damage to British interests after 1951, when he was partly severed from SIS, than before, when he was an undetected Soviet agent in place. As Robin Ramsay noted in Lobster 37, this idea isn’t very convincing – not in […]
[…] believed that money had been laundered in my name through Dutch bank accounts by the late Dennis Robertson, my ex-wife’s accountant; and that he laundered funds for SIS, the British intelligence service. The core of the application process was an official interview conducted by the Ministry of Justice. The Ministry would then make a […]
