[…] claimed to have been working for MI5, was involved in a climbing accident in the Alps. Colin Wallace The Observer (12 December, 1993) reported that a proposed BBC drama-documentary, based on the Paul Foot book about Colin Wallace, had been scrapped. (The Observer had Wallace as ‘former MI5 officer’, but we’ll let that pass.) […]
[…] Warfare kit to collect……some seeds. Being Frank In his account of being shot in Iraq, ‘The man who would not die’ in The Guardian 19 April 2005, BBC correspondent Frank Gardner said of the person who shot him: ‘He didn’t see me as a non-partisan reporter who’s simply trying to report what’s going on.’ […]
[…] for his comment about the collective raspberry blown through Whitehall at Tony Blair’s talk of Iraq being a threat (see ‘Iraq’, above), made some further comments on BBC Radio 4. ‘There was a culture of news management which came in after 1997 which I had not seen before and intelligence got swept up in […]
[…] of the bug was for fear that Stalker might discover that MI5 had also bugged the car in which McTerr, Toman and Burns were killed. According to BBC reporter Chris Moore, ‘the security forces involved in the covert surveillance operation were able to listen to the conversation going on in the car.’ (21) An […]
[…] country’s most expensive PR firms.’ (The Journalist, November 2007). Declaration of Interests: I am a supporter of the Campaign for Press & Broadcasting Freedom which supports the BBC. See Independent on Sunday, 16 September 2007 See admission by former SIS Chief Sir Richard Dearlove of sympathy with what he called ‘initial use’ of rendition […]
[…] them up the Anglo-Americans assembled an ‘invasion fleet’ on the English east coast and launched 3215 fighter and bomber sorties against ‘invasion targets’.(3) On 17 August the BBC announced ‘the liberation of occupied countries has begun’. But the Germans did not believe any of it. Indeed they actually moved some divisions out of France […]
Introduction There are a couple of interesting chapters in Chapman Pincher’s recent The Truth About Dirty Tricks, (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1991), especially the one about Harold Wilson’s ‘spymaster’, the late George Wigg; but, despite the usual shower of interesting fragments, mostly it is junk. Pincher’s primary strategy is clear enough. During the mid 1970s bureaucratic […]
Tony Blair will be remembered not just for the slaughter in Iraq, and the subsequent collapse of Labour in Scotland in face of a resurgent SNP, but as the Labour leader who could have forged common links across Europe but chose to side with one of the continent’s most despised figures. Charles Clarke, one of […]
[…] study: Murphy’s Law……. Notes Robert Verkaik, ‘The Freedom of Information Act misused’, The Independent, 22 March 2007. The complete text can be read at . For a BBC version of the original ‘Israeli art students’ story from 2002 see . Or, rather, don’t see that URL for it evoked a 404 when I tried […]
Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World Mark Curtis London: Vintage, 2003; p/b, £7.99 This latest analysis of British foreign policy by Mark Curtis could not be better timed. With more than a million Britons on the streets of London protesting against the Iraq war earlier this year there is a potentially large […]
