From Mark Hollingsworth As the journalist, along with Nick Fielding, who first reported David Shayler’s revelations about MI5 in the Mail on Sunday in 1997, I would like to set the record straight on your piece in Lobster 36 (‘Peter’s Friends’?) I have remained close to David Shayler and Annie Machon, his girlfriend and […]
[…] St. on the content of Lobster 11, has halved our debts. We shall survive. It is tempting to say something about the developing crisis re the Wilson- MI5 story (Lobstergate?). I write this 24 hours after Colin Wallace made his first speaking appearance on British television, and very impressive it was too, despite the […]
[…] community in the United Kingdom believed that unorthodox methods and techniques were required in the war. The intervention of these groupings, which included Special Branch, military intelligence, MI5 and MI6, was uncoordinated, Much has been written about that period, some of it honest journalism, but most of it propaganda inspired by the terrorists and […]
Philip Hoare, Duckworth Press, London, 1997, £16.99 The opening of MI5’s archives up to and including 1919 gives historians and researchers the chance to exhume the genesis of the right in British domestic politics as well as the early activities of the secret state. Despite its title (Oscar died in 1900) Hoare dips quite a […]
[…] become MPs. Some of the material was familiar but less well known were Raymond Fletcher, and Le Cercle. Fletcher was a Labour MP who was witch-hunted by MI5 as a KGB asset when really an MI6 agent. New information on Le Cercle (aka the Pinay Circle: see Lobster 17) from Hollingsworth is the role […]
[…] in the Guardian on May 27 as having been labour correspondent of the Economist in the 1970s. Was he, I thought, one of the correspondents recruited by MI5 in the big F branch expansion circa 1973-5? Did that explain all the disinformation run through the Sunday Times by James Adams, for example? Apparently not. […]
[…] other in their university days. It is the view of the anti-Hollis faction that during his interrogation in 1969, as part of the investigations into a possible MI5 mole, Hollis had been less than candid about his relationship with Cockburn. Suspicions were aroused by his faltering reply to questions concerning Cockburn. Connections between Hollis […]
[PDF file]: Literary Spying British Writers and MI5 Surveillance 1930-1960 James Smith Cambridge University Press, 2013, £55.00, h/b John Newsinger Smith’s book is an immensely valuable preliminary examination of the British secret state’s surveillance of ‘the left-wing writers and artists’ of George Orwell’s generation. As the author makes clear, the context was very different from the […]
[PDF file]: RING OF SPIES: How MI5 and the FBI brought down the Nazis in America Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones Cheltenham: The History Press, 2020, £20 Simon Matthews Flick through the 70 or so free view channels on your TV and you’ll come across at least half a dozen that specialise in slightly off-beat, but decently made and […]
[…] in the Public Record Office throws more light on the career of Kenneth de Courcy, and perhaps indirectly, on the Hess affair. The file in question, an MI5 document, PROKV4/58, shows that de Courcy first came to the attention of the Security Service in 1934 (without explaining why) and was under intermittent observation up […]
