[…] laid etc etc. Along the way ‘West’ drops a number of tidbits: an intricate explanation, going back to pre-war days, of how Philby was really a triple agent; and a version of the ‘peace plotting’ circa 1940 by the British right which purports to demonstrate that the ‘plot’ was really a Soviet operation – […]
[…] Inside BOSS, South Africa’s Secret Police Gordon Winter (Penguin, London 1981) “BOSS assigned me to monitor the activities of Richard Gibson (exposed in 1969 as a CIA agent), who was a talented journalist then representing Negro Press International and ‘Tuesday’ magazine. I discovered that Mr Gibson, born in California in 1931, was an amazing […]
Chip Berlet This 63-page essay describes a wide range of contacts between what in a British context would be described as right-wing conspiracy theorists and the left. Berlet documents a range of contacts between the far-right Liberty Lobby, followers of LaRouche, Bo Gritz and the Populist Party, the Christic Institute, Radio Free America and a … Read more
[…] for Menzies and possibly for underground dealings with Germans willing to discuss peace such as Admiral Canaris, the Abwehr chief, Hermann Goering (whose chauffeur was a Swedish agent), the SS intelligence boss Walter Schellenberg or, at the end of the war, Heinrich Himmler. (De Courcy told me that he had met Himmler and thought […]
[…] own judgement before being inflected with ‘spin’. The reliability and accountability of information is going to be very different if it is from an accredited British intelligence agent, a Home Office civil servant, the Met, the Sussex Police Authority, someone from Number Ten (all theoretically ultimately answerable to the Commons at some stage) or […]
[…] Americans did. After 1966 the counter-intelligence section of the CIA, headed by the loony James Angleton, came to believe that Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent; and CIA counter-intelligence was the ultimate source of much of the disinformation and smears about him and those around him in the middle 1970s. This may […]
Michael Smith Gollancz, London,1996, £20 This is a curious and rather pointless book. In short chapters Smith attempts potted histories of MI5, SIS, signals and military intelligence. These are quite well done, but covering half a century in 20 pages, say, the chapters are barely more than sketches. (The Information Research Department gets a page!) … Read more
The Spycatcher’s Encyclopedia of Espionage Peter Wright Heinemann, Australia, 1991 The cover-blurb says this is ‘the rest of the story’. It feels more like the out-takes from Spycatcher spiced with a few more fragments of interesting gossip. And I do mean fragments: the interesting bits of 260 pages — largish print and much white space … Read more
[…] of the Palestine Solidarity Committee, added the following information on LFI. (2) The Director of Labour Friends of Israel is David Mercer, former research assistant and electoral agent for Gwyneth Dunwoody, ‘life president’ of LFI. The parliamentary register of Members’ interests shows that recent visitors who have had flights and accommodation paid by Labour […]
Tony Geraghty Harper Collins, London 1998, £19.99 Before dawn one Thursday in December 1998 a team of six Ministry of Defence police raided the home of the writer and journalist, Tony Geraghty. After seven hours, they left taking his computer, modem, disks and work in progress, having charged him under Section V of the Official […]
