[…] lot of (mostly unsourced) information about William McGrath and his strange organisation Tara. At various points Moore asserts that McGrath and Tara were being run by British intelligence – MI5, apparently – though it is never entirely clear, because Moore offers no evidence. I had a chat with Harry Irwin who compiled the Kincora […]
[…] WIA reply. I sometimes had niggling doubts about Lundy’s defence that it was part of his job to mingle with the criminal fraternity in order to gain intelligence and develop his strategy of using informers. These are relatively minor doubts, though, since his record on convictions does look highly impressive. More suspect is his […]
[…] announced that Combat 18 was an MI5 ‘honey trap on the far right’; that one of its founders, the American Harold Covington, ‘had known links to the intelligence services’ and was a ‘long-time asset of the FBI’; and that its creation by MI5 was ‘understandable and possibly justifiable at the time’. I kid you […]
[…] these are very much the KGB secrets the Russian government and KGB does want us to read. And no wonder. This is a story of how Soviet intelligence ran rings round the Brits. If there are any secrets the British government is trying to keep buried here, I missed them. But I’m probably suffering […]
[…] though they do not conform to the elaborate and often bizarre scenarios concocted by conspiracy theorists. How, indeed, could it be otherwise in a world full of intelligence agencies, national security bureaucracies, clandestine revolutionary organizations, economic pressure groups, secret societies with hidden political agendas, and the like? No monolithic conspiracy There has never been, […]
[…] the parapolitics of the period in this country. But after that we are off into largely new areas, as Sanders takes us through the political, military and intelligence history of South Africa, through the fall of the apartheid regime and up to 2005. There are occasional familiar episodes – the South African involvement in […]
[…] to the bottom of a subject as complex as this simply by appointing a judge and a couple of bright lawyers. You would need a large team, intelligence personnel with access to everything and Prime Ministerial power to sack people for non-cooperation or obstruction, and expert guidance from some of the participants. And none […]
[…] among key Ba’athist leaders. Saddam Hussein himself had long since retreated into writing novels. Well aware of weakness and despair in the Iraqi leadership, Western military and intelligence agencies prepared for invasion. When Saddam Hussein’s daughter Raghad Hussein requested his assistance in 2004, Al-Ani consulted an international team of lawyers that found the Iraqi […]
[…] late Lord Mountbatten, recycling the claims of some on the right that he was a Soviet agent (without any evidence) and there is this: ‘Many within British intelligence circles knew him as a visitor to Kincora, a boy’s home used by the paedophile and gay members of the Protestant Order , civil servants and […]
[…] and, to my knowledge, Wallace has never alleged this. “In an account he claims to have written in 1976 as evidence of his intimate involvement in the intelligence world, Wallace talks of an MI6 operative he knew. In fact that document reveals an event – the death of a policeman – that actually occurred […]
