The unspeakable Martin Kettle of The Guardian is a political journalist who has been pretty close to, and supportive of, New Labour since the 1990s. His article ‘The special relationship that squandered a noble cause’ (27 May 2006) opened with this: ‘The long arc of Tony Blair’s rise and decline has been punctuated by journeys […]
[…] series – he comments on the hypocrisy of his persecution while the former SIS officer with the pseudonym Alan Judd, gets access to the diary of early MI6 chief Mansfield Cummings: ‘I know Alan Judd’s real name, but I can’t reveal it. He formerly worked in the secretariat or, in normal language, the MI6 […]
[…] information, especially Jane Affleck and Robert Henderson for the continuous stream of articles; and to Phil Chamberlain who spotted Norman Baker’s House of Commons adjournment debate on MI6. The content of a number of the articles and reviews in this issue may seem to overlap or to be related. I could claim that this […]
Efraim Karsh Yale University Press, 2006; 276 pp. For anyone who believes that ‘imperialism’ is an exclusively Western phenomenon, that Islam has only been the victim of it, and that 9/11 was simply a reaction to that (‘blowback’), this book will come as a bit of a shock. Karsh argues that aggressive imperialism was […]
[…] he worked were “genuinely honest men trying to do the best job in the circumstances. They were in a no-win situation.” When he was recruited as an MI6 officer, he said of them that they were not disagreeable; their ethics were reasonable; they were seeking a political solution. His complaint, which eventually led to […]
[…] Probably not, even in the best of circumstances; certainly not when the document in question happened to be lying about in an unguarded room in Baghdad. Would MI6 think it worthwhile fabricating such a document to nail Galloway? Of course. However we regard Galloway there is no doubt that the Telegraph has been used […]
[…] but, despite the usual shower of interesting fragments, mostly it is junk. Pincher’s primary strategy is clear enough. During the mid 1970s bureaucratic wars between MI5 and MI6, Maurice Oldfield, Chief of MI6, used Pincher to denigrate MI5, notably via a couple of stories supporting Harold Wilson’s claims that he was the victim of […]
The British American Project and the war on Iraq The war on Iraq proved a busy time for members of the British American Project (Lobster 33 et seq) on this side of the pond. To cover the American countdown to war, long-time UK advisory board member Jim Naughtie returned to the New York home of […]
[…] intended to ask four MI5 witnesses, screened from the public and press. The jury were therefore unable to be told about important allegations including the involvement of MI6 in a plot to assassinate General Gadaffi; that MI5 had prior knowledge of a plan to bomb the Israeli Embassy in London in 1994 (information that […]
[…] Chair of British Youth Council. The British Youth Council began as the British section of the World Assembly of Youth, which was set up and financed by MI6 and then taken over by the CIA in the 1950s, created to combat the Soviet Union’s youth fronts. By Mandelson’s time in the mid1970s under a […]
