Books The Great Betrayal Nicholas Bethel (London 1984) This is either a ‘snow job’, designed to discourage further research in this area (British intelligence attempts to destabilise Soviet and communist influenced regimes), or is just a poor effort on Bethel’s part. One can’t deny that it is useful – after all, it is the […]
[…] Schuster, London, 1993 For twenty five years Gary Murray worked as an RAF policeman and private investigator. In the early 1970s Murray ‘unexpectedly’ (invitation?) joined the Operations Intelligence cadre of 21 SAS, and this led to close contact with people from MI6, Army SIB, the Royal Military Police and the Parachute Regiment. In 1980 […]
[…] On this there is no agreement. Some journalists who were in Northern Ireland at the time remain convinced that it was nothing more than a British Army/ intelligence operation, a ‘funny’. Some suspect it to have been a psy ops job, possibly even run by Wallace himself. Although this view is intelligible given what […]
Douglas Macleod Edinburgh: Birlinn; £9.99, p/b Twenty years ago, before the current torrent of information about ‘the secret world of intelligence’, we were scratching about looking for clues to our secret history. One was given in the John Loftus book The Belarus Secret (Penguin 1983) which contained a single reference to the Scottish […]
[…] there is an essay by Richard Aldrich of Salford University, one of the small but growing numbers of British academics trying to incorporate the activities of the intelligence and security services into post-war British history. In his essay on the Special Operations Executive (SOE) after the end of the Second World War, Aldrich writes […]
[…] thesis – there was a switch – and has tried to trace the life of the ‘hidden’ Oswald. He appears to have established the existence of an intelligence operation which began with two boys, of different heights, but who looked similar and who lived parallel lives. One, Harvey, was Russian-speaking, probably a refugee from […]
[…] (UK) £25.00 hb This is a really interesting and important book – perhaps the most important book about the British secret state since Fitzgerald and Bloch’s British Intelligence and Covert Action in the early 1980s. The incremental uncovering of the Information Research Department (IRD) story has been one of the continuing threads of British […]
[…] Who of the British Secret State. Though I cannot remember why Dorril thought this and though there is nothing specific in Ashdown’s known career which says ‘ intelligence’, the career move from Special Boat Squadron to Foreign Office is pretty obvious.(1) The alleged SIS affiliation seems to have stuck, however. The doyen of British […]
[…] money from Kuwait into the Tory Party. (The Kuwaiti Investment Office is one of the major property owners in London.) With hindsight Among the books about British intelligence operations I, Kovaks by Leslie Aspin (London: Everest Books, 1975) was never taken terribly seriously. This was partly because there were fewer spook-wise journalists at that […]
[…] HORNBEAM, trawlers had been used during the first Cold War to spy on Soviet shipping. But the MOD spokesperson refused to confirm that some trawlers had carried intelligence officers. Statewatch Bulletin (Jan/Feb 1992) includes an important update to their paper on Gladio network, quoting from the Belgian parliamentary commission into the subject. The update […]
