[…] to establish that Philby did more damage to British interests after 1951, when he was partly severed from SIS, than before, when he was an undetected Soviet agent in place. As Robin Ramsay noted in Lobster 37, this idea isn’t very convincing – not in any obvious sense, at least. After 1951, Philby worked […]
[…] it. Not so. A few weeks went by and another person tried to attach himself to me, this time claiming to be to be a former MI5 agent who would spill the beans. But he was ill, so ill, and the NHS in London was so bad…..This goes on for some weeks and I […]
[…] 1985 drug scandals. (Jose Antonio Zorrilla, the ex-DFS chief arrested and indicted in 1989 for murder, was in 1963 private secretary to Fernando Gutierrez Barrios, the DFS agent whose signature attested to the validity of the most radically altered version of Duran’s statement.) At least two ex-DFS officers who were also former CIA agents […]
[…] MI5 officer: ‘Blair was recruited early on in his career, around the time he stood in the Beaconsfield by-election in 1982. He was just the sort of agent MI5 wanted at the time, a man who appeared to be committed to the Labour Party but who in fact was – to use Thatcher’s phrase […]
[…] A Single Monstrous Act. This clearly was ‘the line’ of the period. Crozier quotes some 1978 comments from the then Labour MP, Brian Magee, to Iain (CIA agent) Hamilton. Magee wrote, ‘Everything that comes from over there on the subject of social democracy in general and the Labour Party in particular is so inane […]
[…] in Oswald’s demi-monde of KGB agents and Cuban exiles…..’ We’ve had supporters of Castro and now he gives us KGB agents! Which ones, Professor? The only KGB agent in the story that I can recall is the KGB officer Kostikov who was under diplomatic cover in the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. Oswald – […]
[…] a famous Estonian footballer, called Evald Mikson. Mikson, learned Sanden, had worked with the Germans when they invaded Estonia in 1941, and had interrogated a captured Estonian agent of Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. (One may imagine that in such circumstances – an Estonian working for the Nazis – such an ‘interrogation’ was, as […]
[…] Hambling also asks why fuel air explosives were used in Operation Black Cat. One explanation might be that planners were concerned that a residue of VX nerve agent might have been blown back towards coalition troops and, therefore, utilised air fuel explosives to incinerate every last surviving particle of nerve agent. The best approach […]
[…] North, and Felix Rodriguez, later became familiar names during the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s. More obscure was one Michael Hand, who had been a CIA contract agent in Laos. In 1973, Hand and his partner Frank Nugan established the Nugan Hand Bank in Sydney. A slew of top-level retirees from the CIA and […]
[…] analyst Barry Rubin comments, ‘only five Americans with a half-dozen Iranian contacts had organised the entire uprising’.(64) The British input, however, had clearly been significant. One Iranian agent of the British – Shahpour Reporter, who subsequently served as adviser to the Shah – was later rewarded with a knighthood, before becoming a chief middleman […]
