[…] rob banks and attempt to penetrate the IRA is dismissed in the line, ‘the Littlejohn fiasco (in which a Dublin bank was allegedly robbed on behalf of MI6).’ (p. 224) In a long footnote, however, no. 45 on p. 311, Smith flails around trying to get round the embarrassment of Littlejohn. First he offers […]
[…] 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 […]
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 […]
[…] information, especially Jane Affleck and Robert Henderson for the continuous stream of articles; and to Phil Chamberlain who spotted Norman Baker’s House of Commons adjournment debate on MI6. The content of a number of the articles and reviews in this issue may seem to overlap or to be related. I could claim that this […]
[…] ministers or officials what they knew about the inefficiency of the KGB and GRU’, remarks Urban. And vice versa, presumably. But MI5 helped smash the miners and MI6 ran Gordievsky who helped explain Gorbachev, and so MI5 and MI6 got their bids for new buildings through the system before oil revenues began drying up […]
[…] my own way. During my duties with MI5 I also maintained a very close personal and professional relationship with an officer from the Secret Intelligence Service ( MI6). Whilst a serving SIS officer (he) joined a private detective agency with which I was associated, and carried out private investigations of a covert nature. He […]
Efraim Karsh Yale University Press, 2006; 276 pp. For anyone who believes that ‘imperialism’ is an exclusively Western phenomenon, that Islam has only been the victim of it, and that 9/11 was simply a reaction to that (‘blowback’), this book will come as a bit of a shock. Karsh argues that aggressive imperialism was […]
[…] to crack down on IRA killer squads on the Continent … Mrs Thatcher, through her Security Coordinator, Sir Colin Figures, has issued unprecedented instructions to MI5 and MI6 in the hunt for the killers.” The same day Massie produced a piece about a “millionaire businessman said to be a KGB spymaster (who) is to […]
[…] account does Rosenbaum little justice. His essay is extremely clever and runs through all the possible permutations of the Philby/Angleton relationship: Philby as KGB, pretending to be MI6; Philby as MI6 pretending to be KGB while pretending to be MI6; Angleton as KGB; and so on. The whole ‘wilderness of mirrors’ is laid out […]
