[…] this small but powerful ‘Political Class’ has, through the practice of ‘manipulative populism’, done to a variety of British institutions, including the Civil Service, the Foreign Office, MI6, the legal system, the monarchy and Parliament. Oborne writes well and his anger-fuelled text carries the reader along at a great lick. One thing that made […]
[…] regard for your family, your children or you.'(21) There, too, was that old chestnut: ‘SIS insists it is not dominated by a macho culture – indeed female MI6 officers play on people’s emotions in a way men cannot…’ (22) Yes, some women do. However, only the dated believe this is their unique value to […]
[…] to be that if they did their job more intelligently, they could be a genuine bulwark of democracy. ‘Perhaps it is time for the ”sensible chaps” in MI6 to rescue their political initiatives’, Dorril concludes in his chapter on Ireland. This ‘sensibleness’ is the hallmark of the current reforms, which have resulted in copies […]
[…] Foreign Affairs Publishing Company of Geoffrey Stewart-Smith. Keston College, the British centre of the study of religion in the Soviet Union, certainly, but not yet provably, an MI6 operation. Soviet suspicion of Keston led to the collapse of a planned visit to Moscow by a British human rights mission in October 1989 when one […]
[…] and defence capabilities continue to shrink. Book your seat now for Round Two, the Aitken perjury trial . . . his defence that he was working for MI6 all along. After the sentence is handed down we should have the material for a better and more interesting book than the story of how the […]
[…] own man in the White House. It may be interesting to read C. M. Woodhouse’s The Rise and Fall of the Greek Colonels (Granada). Woodhouse worked for MI6 after the war in Greece and Iran, then became a Tory MP. William Keegan’s column in the Observer is the most informative economic view of Britain […]
[…] reference in Peter Wright’s Spycatcher. He notes that ‘the whole area of chemical research was an active field in the 1950s’, and refers to a joint MI5/ MI6 ‘program to investigate how far the hallucinatory drug lysergic acid diethyalmine (LSD) could be used in interrogation, and extensive trials took place at Porton.'(21) Wright gives […]
[…] was assistant editor of The Economist. Lloyd and Leonard Jr. keep interesting company at the FPC. Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (see above) is ‘senior researcher’ and career MI6 officer Meta (now Baroness) Ramsay is on the advisory council. Alongside Lloyd and Ramsay are Sir Michael Butler, the former British permanent representative to the European […]
[…] subtle than that. In any case, the JIC precisely certified as ‘genuine’ intelligence which was ‘false and dubious’: it has almost all had to be ‘withdrawn’ by MI6. () Indeed, as the Australian analyst Rob Barton has told us, the JIC Chair, John Scarlett was still trying to get ‘false and dubious’ intelligence put […]
[…] intelligence force, answerable to the Home Secretary, freeing SIS to continue with its core functions, answerable to the Foreign Secretary’. This would avoid a ‘wholesale take-over of MI6 priorities by MI5-led anti-terrorism operations,’ which, he said, many intelligence operatives fear.Note: In the ‘old’ days spook lobbying and territorial warfare were invisible. Given other associations […]
