[…] 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, […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] what was then called the ‘silicon chip’. And Alec Guinness kept the nation spellbound with the television version of John le Carré’s 1974 novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It depicted the tempting of senior UK espionage moguls with a one-off, spectacular solution to Secret Britain’s ills, a Soviet super-spy who would get us back […]
[…] – 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 […]
[…] sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets’, The Sunday Times, 6 January 2008, Sunday Times ,‘FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft’, 20 January 2008, and ‘Tip-off thwarted nuclear spy ring probe’, 27 January 2008, In an interview with antiwar.com’s Scott Horton – go to for the mp3 file. Alternatively a full transcript is available here: […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
Mark Felt is ‘Deep Throat’. Bob Woodward says so, and his word is law in this particular arena. No matter that Woodward had a dozen sources, some of whom may have been more important than Throat himself. The point is that ‘Throat’ is anyone Woodward says he is, and he says he is Felt. In […]
[…] 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 […]
