Morris Riley, writer on espionage and occasional Lobster contributor, died around 16 June 2001. I never entirely trusted Morris: he gossiped to me about things he should have kept to himself and for the most part I blanked his questions about Lobster and the people I was talking to. Under a pseudonym Morris wrote […]
[…] communism, Labour Party history, Thatcherism, science and society including nuclear issues, censorship and freedom of speech and of the printed word, feminism, radical working-class authors, human thought, espionage, guerrilla warfare, parapolitics, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, George Orwell, and so on. To match Ronald’s extraordinary knowledge, Hammersmith Books had an unrivalled stock of out-of-print […]
[…] due to post Cold War complacency which, apparently, blunted the cutting edge of British spy work. This is another nonsense since it implies that British Cold War espionage was excellent, when this was not always the case. Back to Sir Richard: ‘……. he (Spedding) recognised it was important to reinforce SIS’s reputation for professionalism […]
[…] for Action. PO Box 3069, London SW9 8LU; single issues (including postage) U.K. 1.60; U.S. $4.00, Europe 2.00. Undercover, the British glossy magazine devoted to ‘cover ups, espionage, covert action’ duly folded after five issues. Which was two more than I expected. There just is no general interest in these fields in this country, […]
[…] Moscow and asked him about a British electronics engineer named Michael John Smith, who, in November 1993, was sentenced to 25 years after being found guilty of espionage for the KGB at the end of the 1970s and beginning of 1980s. He was arrested in August 1992, after the defection from Paris of Victor […]
[…] a report for Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center (see www.epic.org). Europe The European Parliament may soon ratify proposals to modify international law to deal with international communications espionage, and to set up a temporary special Committee of inquiry (opposed by UK govt) to further investigate Echelon. These proposals, known as the Echelon resolution, drafted […]
[…] hydrogen bomb. Spooks bending spoons There is a very useful and comprehensively documented (120 notes to 30 pages) survey of the literature on the attempts to find espionage uses for psi in chapter 10, ‘The Spook Circuit: Psychic Espionage’, of The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime, by Arthur Lyons and Dr. Marcello Truzzi […]
[…] and by 1955 had reached the rank of colonel and deputy chief of Glowny Zarzad Informacji, the Polish intelligence agency. His responsibilities included counterintelligence and foreign technical espionage. In April 1958 he contacted the Americans and began passing top secret information to the West. At Christmas, 1960, fearing that his cover was blown, he […]
[…] Mrs Thatcher’s ear that Gorbachev was on the level, and that she could ‘do business with him’. (A station chief as defector-in-place, Gordiefsky was the ultimate pure espionage coup.) In espionage literature this myth is most strikingly displayed by Verrier’s Through the Looking Glass (Cape, London, 1983). Pitched somewhere between the Sunday Express and […]
[…] son, eh? (Are journalists in the British Higher Media cynical? Yes, but usually about the wrong things.) Nice one, John 2 The precise roles played by the espionage novelist, John Le Carre, in the real spook world have been a source of much speculation. In a U.S. TV interview on July 1 this year, […]
