[…] in the Information Research Department in each year since 1971.”And got an answer. IRD is the one bit of the secret state, not officially a part of MI6, which the state can’t refuse to answer questions on. The figures are: 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 117 99 91 91 88 85 85 […]
[…] the Information Research Department (IRD). This covert unit, established by the Labour Government in 1948, was financed from the Secret Intelligence Services budget, with close links to MI6. The government’s campaign had three stages. The first involved the dissemination of information to the press and public; the second, from the announcement of the terms […]
[…] They present a devastating picture of Blair and his court that brims over with telling detail. Of particular interest to readers of Lobster is the revelation that MI6 head-hunted Charles Clarke when he was Neil Kinnock’s political adviser. It is good to know that the Home Office is in a safe pair of hands. […]
Spy Wars: Moles, mysteries and deadly games Tennent H. Begley London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, h/b, £18.99 Begley was one of James Angleton’s allies in CIA counterintelligence and this book is the Angletonian view of the Nosenko case, one of the touchstones or causes célèbres of the CIA in the post-war […]
[…] should be said that IFF Director, Marc Gordon, denies this. David Owen’s memoir, Time To Declare (Michael Joseph, London, 1991) will be remembered for chapter 15, ‘ MI6, GCHQ and the Falklands’. For the first time a senior British politician acknowledges the existence of these agencies and talks (a little) about their work. Owen’s […]
[PDF file]: […] Army began expanding its psychological operations training facilities – for the first time including civil servants on its courses. (8) In London the former no. 2 at MI6 and Monday Club activist, George Kennedy Young, began setting up the Unison Committee for Action with Ross McWhirter. In short, by the end of 1973 an […]
[PDF file]: […] Terrorism,1 T. J. Coles mentions that ex-MI5 officer David Shayler has recently claimed that Ramadan Abedi (the father of Manchester Arena suicide bomber, Salman Abedi) was the MI6 asset who had previous been identified solely with the cypher ‘Tunworth’. Shayler first mentioned Tunworth in the late 1990s, when he and Annie Machon (his then […]
[PDF file]: […] if he persisted in the claim. That was last time Radcliffe heard from McCann and it was also the end of his collaboration with Marks.19 6 – MI6 The writers for Friends/Frendz magazine, as well as James McCann and Howard Marks, were all on the radar of the security services. A retired police Special […]
[PDF file]: […] been better illustrated than by this country’s foreign policy towards Libya in the past 20 years or so. Former MI5 officer David Shayler reported that in 1996 MI6 had paid £100,000 to a Libyan Islamist group for the assassination of Colonel Gadaffi; and, although denied by the British formal foreign policy apparatus, a great […]
[PDF file]: […] there was ‘an “open door” policy for jihadis’. Coles states that Ramadan Abedi – the father of Manchester Arena suicide bomber Salman Abedi – was ‘a paid MI6 operative’ (p. 62) but offers no citation for the claim. Mark Curtis, working the same material, writes: ‘Ramadan Abedi is believed to have been a prominent […]
