[…] this account of MI5’s adjustment to the post Cold War world is one of the best books on the UK’s intelligence services, up there with Stephen Dorril’s MI6 book, Paul Lashmar and James Oliver’s book on IRD and Richard Aldrich’s The Hidden Hand. Rereading it, I was struck by the following. Although we now […]
[…] the Secret Service. The scuffles over revelations concerning Kincora started with the writing of a book by Rupert Allason, pen name Nigel West, son of a leading MI6 officer. The original fight was about whether the KGB had deeply penetrated every aspect of British Intelligence. Now a lot of dirty linen is being washed […]
[…] news of his demise would appear first in the morning edition of The Times and not in some ‘lesser publication’ later in the day.(1) And it wasn’t MI6. This assumes that, as former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove would have us believe, Secret Intelligence Service service personnel follow the rules. A less trusting Michael […]
[…] turn to cracking crime?’ by David Rose in the Observer, 18 September 1994. Rose concluded; ‘We will need an agency – possibly a subordinate, domestic wing of MI6 – to deal with foreign spies and terrorists. Whether it will take 2000 staff and 160 million is a very different matter.’ See also Rose’s piece, […]
[…] away from truth. We know the secret world has biases towards certain personality traits and it is not always the case that stability is preeminent. (18) (Did MI6 make Richard Tomlinson what he is or was MI6 attracted to Tomlinson in the first place in part because of those attributes which were later to […]
[…] major British dope dealer who got famous, not for importing huge quantities of dope (15 tons of grass in one venture) but because he became embroiled with MI6. Having said that, almost nothing else is certain. High Times ends with Marks getting away with a series of stupendous perjuries in an English court: there […]
[…] MI5 botch a surveillance of an IRA operation and £300 million’s worth of damage is done to the City of London; and nothing happens, no heads roll. MI6 gets involved in trying to use Muslim fundamentalists to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi; and nothing happens; nothing, that is, other than then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook standing […]
[…] I and Sir Teddy Taylor (a British Member of Parliament) are trying to force the British government to investigate two murders that the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) were directly responsible for. They are the “Bulgarian Umbrella” murder of Georgi Markov in 1978 (a British double agent tricked the Bulgarians into murdering him) and […]
[…] of surprise Last, but by no means least: nobble the opposition. No messy fiddling with the votes – go straight to the voters themselves. Hats off to MI6, who proved themselves the masters of this tactic in 1924, when the UK’s first-ever Labour government was seeking to be returned to power. With the Russian […]
[…] only tasks that were in line with my own objectives.'(pp. xii, xiii) But on p. xii of the preface he tells us he ‘worked with’ the CIA, MI6 and IRD; on p. 20 he tells that briefings he had been getting from an MI6 officer secured for him the job as editor of the […]
