[…] squeeze an early reply into his next column in the Guardian: ‘The professor’s caricature of this most principled, independent and forthright of journalists as just another suborned spy is ridiculous.’ Andrew’s attack on Ransome united two experts on Ransome’s days in Russia, who had previously been arguing about the meaning of Russian documents concerning […]
[…] the Phoney War remains a taboo subject in many respects – even at the level of popular fiction. Len Deighton made his name with the Harry Palmer spy thrillers, three of which, The Ipcress File (1962), Funeral in Berlin (1964) and Billion Dollar Brain (1965), were immediately filmed. The other book in the series, […]
Operation Paget, the investigation by the team led by Sir John Stevens into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, briefly tried to investigate a collision between a white Fiat Uno and Princess Diana’s BMW. The head-on collision happened on 22 March 1996, on Cromwell Road, Kensington, when a casino employee lost control of a … Read more
[…] a number of long pieces about Wallace and Holroyd – and about Kincora – for the Catholic end of the Irish media. (See, for example, ‘Framed? The spy caught up in his own web of intrigue’, Sunday World, 31 May 1987, ‘Garda “Spy” Now A Hero’, Sunday World, May 3, 1987, and ‘The MI5 […]
[…] who shot the President. In Alias Oswald (Manchester, Maine; GKG partners, 1985) Robert Cutler and W. R. Morris argued that the second ‘Oswald’, was not a Soviet spy but a US spy. In their analysis the switch from one ‘Oswald’ to the other took place in 1958 while Oswald was serving in the Marine […]
[…] – on the grounds that he was such a selfish little shit, he lacked the necessary patriotic motivation (I am not making this up) to be a spy. Lawson did move into a series of increasingly expensive houses through the eighties and nineties, however. But his wife’s family are rich. Ayer’s final years were […]
[…] Franciscan printing press in Rome. Both the US Counter Intelligence Corps CIC) and Britain’s military intelligence knew what was happening. Indeed, CIC agent Robert Mudd had a spy within Dragonovic’s organisation. The CIC arranged a burglary of Dragonovic’s office and photographed his records. Mudd concluded that “all this activity stems from the Vatican’. Aarons […]
[…] of the American liberal-left who were so easily persuaded to surrender their independence and their critical judgement by the red scare of the early Cold War. I SPY: The Secret Life of a British Agent Geoffrey Elliott St Ermin’s Press/Little, Brown, London, 1998, £18.99 The agent in question was Elliott’s father, Kavan, about whom […]
[…] the parlance of the contemporary government information worker. This was the anonymous call received by George Wigg, the Labour MP, urging him to forget about Vassall the spy and look instead at Profumo. Wigg always claimed it was anonymous but there is good circumstantial evidence he knew the identity of the caller – John […]
[…] foreign correspondents at Kemsley included: Anthony Terry, Stephen Coulter, and Donald McCormick. Terry, in Army Intelligence during the war, was married to Sarah Gainham (nee Stainer), the spy novelist. Coulter was with Reuters and SHAPE staff officer in France and Scandinavia during the war. From 1945-65 Coulter was staff correspondent in Paris and then […]
