War stories Evidence that the Royal Air Force colluded with their German enemies in the most secret air mission of the Second World War has been discovered in the Czech Republic. The personal log books of some of the 87 Czechoslovak fighter pilots who escaped the 1939 German occupation of their country to fly […]
[…] effect, to go away and organise some increased spending, particularly to encourage investment.'(7) The ‘brooding in the car’ story was a lie. Armstrong had been heading a secret Whitehall Committee since late 1971 which had been set up to devise a framework for industrial expansion. It contained members of the Think Tank, the Cabinet […]
[…] neutral could give the UK. Kent had also requested a move to the US Embassy in Berlin and, one presumes, would have taken his collection of secret diplomatic correspondence with him had he been allowed to take up this position.() The Right Club In March 1940 Kent showed some of his cables to […]
The Enemy Within: Thatcher’s Secret War Against the Miners Seumas Milne London: Verso, 2004, p/back, £8 GB84 David Peace London: Faber & Faber, 2004 p/back, £12.99 On the 20th anniversary of the most significant power struggle in post war Britain, two very different books on the miners’ strike of 1984-85, read alongside each […]
[…] through three key film and television narratives which are Defence of the Realm, Edge of Darkness and the TV dramatisation of Robert McCrum’s underrated novel In The Secret State. In most of these narratives, the development of coercive trends in the British state is closely aligned to the development of the nuclear industry, at […]
Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA Jim Hougan (Random House, US 1984) Those who read Hougan’s last book Spooks will know that the arrival or a new one is something of an event. As expected, his latest has so many trails to follow, intriguing little titbits to ponder that one read […]
An extraordinary claim in The Times by the Cambridge historian Professor Christopher Andrew, that Arthur Ransome has been identified in KGB documents as ‘the most important secret source of intelligence on British foreign policy’ for the Cheka, the terror organisation of Bolshevik Russia, has infuriated lovers of Ransome’s work. Unlike Michael Foot, similarly traduced, […]
Stephen Dorril Heinemann, London, 1993 It turns out that the ‘silent conspiracy’ of the title is a conspiracy which ‘has surrounded Britain’s secret state’ — a blindingly obvious tautology. Dorril has done as much as any other to lift the veil of secrecy from the British secret state, so it is somewhat disappointing to […]
GEHEIM (“ SECRET”) is West Germany’s representative in the international stable of state research publications. Geheim has appeared three or four times a year since 1983, and its editors are experienced state research journalists in the Federal Republic – Rudolf Gossner, author (with Geheim contributor Uwe Herzog) of an exhaustive work on the undercover […]
[…] January and February this year Channel 4 broadcast a history of the war-time Special Operations Executive, SOE, written and presented by the novelist Sebastian Faulks, called Churchill’s Secret Army. It was an interesting series with some excellent first-hand material and footage. But there were two mysteries. The first, and smaller of the two, concerns […]
