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 read […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] and David Shayler book, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers (reviewed in Lobster 49), which was apparently dropped by the publisher. The key section is this, from an unnamed MI5 officer: ‘Blair was recruited early on in his career, around the time he stood in the Beaconsfield by-election in 1982. He was just the sort of […]
[…] wasn’t just a plot against Wilson; it was a plot against the Labour and Liberal parties and the Heath wing of the Tories. And it wasn’t just MI5 doing it, either.() It did contain two significant new pieces of information. The first was Wilson’s attempt to steer Penrose and Courtiour towards Northern Ireland and […]
[…] results of her own inquiry into Diana’s death;() while in the evening the final episode of series four of Spooks (BBC1) included a convincing explanation of how MI5 could have engineered the crash. () The coroner On 18 December 2003, Michael Burgess, H.M. Coroner for Surrey, confirmed that inquests on Diana and Dodi would […]
[…] resistance was overridden by the implications of the Tyler Kent affair.’ Tyler Kent was a cypher clerk in the American Embassy in London. He had been under MI5 surveillance for some 7 months during which he had made contact with members of the Right Club, the hard-core pro-Nazis in London lead by the dotty […]
British ‘USP’ In September 2000 the tragic case of two infants from Malta dominated the headlines.() British judges were asked to decide whether it was ‘right’ for doctors to sacrifice one child, joined at the abdomen with her twin, for the sake of the other. As a result of global press coverage, the moral arguments […]
[…] community in the United Kingdon 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 (emphasis added) propaganda inspired by the […]
[…] 1964 and ’65, discussed in Smear! Roberts was sent a packet of photographs showing four men inflagrante dilecto, as they used to say. One of them was MI5 D-G Roger Hollis. The meaning of this episode has always seemed obscure. However Roberts’ obituarist, Simon Hattenstone, confidently asserts thus: ‘It did not take him long […]
[…] no-one chose them. That is why the FCO can produce specialists in the area. Secondly the ‘stans’, by which I mean principally Pakistan, used to come under MI5 (sometimes army officers seconded from the MOD) and the colonial office, which is again why SIS neglected things. Afghanistan was of interest because of India/Iran/Soviet Union […]
