[…] it is. Absolute exemptions are not subject to any public interest test, and include information supplied by, or concerning: the Security Service, MI5; the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6; GCHQ; the Special Forces, e.g. the SAS; tribunals concerning intelligence and interception of communications including the Investigatory Powers Tribunal; and the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) […]
[…] a reconfiguration of Cold War positions that retain, what Dr. Michael Pinto-Duschinsky termed ‘such interference,’(1)so as to continue subversive covert operations previously perpetrated by the CIA or MI6. This then, is a difficult area and few researchers are looking at the matter at a sufficient level of objective enquiry to outline satisfactorily some of […]
[…] enough to show the allegiance to the state among media personnel. Daphne Park, for example, of the BBC Board of Governors, is not described as former senior MI6 officer. Paul Wilkinson is frequently quoted, but there is nothing on his part in the disinformation campaign against Colin Wallace, discussed in Lobster 16, which led, […]
[…] also written, film and sound archives. There’s also a fair sprinkling of ‘private information’ and ‘personal knowledge’. Thus John Bruce Lockhart’s entry for former Deputy Chief of MI6 and founder of Unison and Tory Action in the 1970s George Kennedy Young (‘…an outstanding figure with his great height red hair…’) rather magnanimously depicts him […]
[…] readers there is new information on William Sargant, author of the 1957 landmark book, Battle for the Mind. Streatfield shows that Sargant was working for MI5 and/or MI6 – something I had assumed but had never tried to check. There is a chapter on the British Army’s torture of IRA suspects in 1971. Streatfield […]
[…] one of the first historians to acknowledge the parapolitical dimension in modern British history, from the formation of the Special Branch to the construction of the new MI6 headquarters over a century later. This is allied to a perception that covert forces, including in the 1970s the CIA, have generally worked to protect the […]
Editorially Writing in mid-January… good news is the arrival of The Digger, apparently set fair to replace Private Eye as the major outlet – major above ground outlet – for British parapolitics. (Lobster, as one British academic said to me, is ‘underground’…). The new Kincora-Blunt trail, opened up by Ken Livingstone in the House of […]
[…] years ago that they are now. The two characters who receive this treatment are the brothers Paul and Hume Boggis-Rolfe, together with Carl Aarvold. Paul Boggis-Rolfe, ex- MI6, was allegedly involved in drafting the land deal for which de Courcy was framed. Hume Boggis-Rolf, ex-MI5, was a senior official at the Lord Chancellor’s department […]
[…] going to win, particularly as communist-affiliated groups were attempting to take the initiative on this soon after WWII. As Stephen Dorril has stressed in his book on MI6, the British involvement in these activities was ahead of the Americans in many respects. Aldrich related how the Cultural Relations Department, a forerunner to the more […]
[…] B inquiry. This agency was later revealed to be Zeus Securities, the brainchild of Peter Hamilton, a man with formidable establishment credentials and a long background in MI6. Zeus, then operated by ex-MI5 officer, Jeremy Wetherall, of another security firm, Lynx, was given the contract to organise the surveillance, which they sub-contracted to Sapphire […]
