[…] has a close relationship with Mr ‘Dickie’ Franks, Director of the British SIS and his closest assistant Mr N. (Nicholas) Elliot who was a department head in MI6. Crozier, Elliot and Franks were recently invited to Chequers for a working meeting. It must therefore be concluded that MI6 is fully aware of, if not […]
[…] as Steve Dorril and I tried to elaborate in our book Smear!, the picture of the mid 1970s was more complex than this. People either linked to MI6 or former officers of MI6 were running their own operations during this period. This is the thesis that has always been promoted by Searchlight. From their […]
The SAS, MI6 and the War Whitehall Nearly Lost Nigel West Little Brown and Company, 1996, £16.99 There are two substantial essays in here, one about the SAS raid on the Argentine mainland which didn’t take place, and the other about the SIS operation to prevent the French delivering any more Exocets to the […]
[…] ‘the real inside story’. Somewhere along the way, for example, I have acquired the idea that his second and third books, MI5: A Matter of Trust and MI6 were both something like in-house histories, given – edited no doubt – to Allason in the great spook rivalries of the 1980s. Is this true? Maybe […]
James Rusbridger I. B. Tauris, London 1991, £8.95 James Rusbridger is Peter Wright’s cousin oddly enough, and occasionally assisted MI6 in the 1950s and 60s, an experience which has left him a cheerful cynic. He canters briskly and amusingly over the field of spook foul-ups in the post-war period to ‘show the pointlessness of […]
[…] how British POW camps in Italy and Yugoslavia became waystations for Nazi immigration. According to these sources, the real ‘Odessa’ network was composed of British staffers in MI6” (p164) Really?! Loftus also claims that the ABN (Anti-Bolshevik Nations Committee) was financed by British Intelligence, as were other organisations such as the Francis Ckryuna Library […]
[…] provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 on the grounds of safeguarding national security. Similar certificates were signed (by Robin Cook, then Foreign Secretary) on behalf of MI6 and GCHQ. In October 2001, Norman Baker MP won a Data Protection Tribunal appeal; the National Security Appeals Panel of the Tribunal ruled that a blanket […]
[…] and, by implication, many other organisations — were ‘checked’ by MI5 to see if they had been penetrated by the KGB. As in Spycatcher he denigrates both MI6 and the CIA, here describing a minor Middle Eastern incident in which MI6 and the CIA were backing different factions in the same country. The reliability […]
[…] also come in for criticism for low productivity in intelligence-gathering. Its information on the Soviet Union or China is scanty and basic in comparison with CIA or MI6 material, and a report indicating a Libyan withdrawal from Chad in 1984 proved embarrassing when it became apparent the following year that the Libyans had actually […]
[…] is the memorandum written by Matthew Rycroft, dated 23 July 2002, after a meeting at Downing Street to discuss Iraq. In that Rycroft reports ‘C’, head of MI6, as saying, ‘There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable.’ A CIA analyst at the time, Paul Pillar, dates the […]
