[…] 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 […]
[…] have to pretend that everything starts with them? Milner’s Kiwi Milner In car-boot sale near Scarborough I picked up a copy of the Australian-published The Rhodes Scholar Spy by Richard Hall (Random House, Australia, 1991). It is an account of Ian Milner, a pre-WW2 New Zealand Rhodes Scholar who became a Soviet agent in […]
[…] 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 […]
The origins of Civil Assistance? In the UK in 1974-75 a number of ‘private armies’ appeared, linked to retired senior military and intelligence figures. There were General Sir Walter Walker’s Civil Assistance, Colonel David Stirling’s GB75, and George Young’s Unison. (1) These groups formed in order to frustrate the impact of strike action in the … Read more
[…] supporting seventeen, were Bob Parry – and the aforementioned Bill Michie Les trois amis de Crozier concluded, somewhat obscurely, that, ‘None of this makes Mr Rogers a spy, or even an agent of influence. It simply serves to illustrate why agents of influence and fellow-travellers need fear as little opposition from the Security Service […]
[…] anyone skulking in the undergrowth. The book ends on this unsatisfactory note. The Clough book, by contrast, is excellent. It provides a detailed demythologising of this particular spy case and relies on a review of all the literature in the case as well as primary research conducted by the author amongst recently released PRO […]
[…] considered for what they are and what they mean, not for who pays the bills. The important thing is that a good many intellectuals and America’s leading spy agency came to the same conclusions at much the same time about America’s role in world society.'(15) Of course, as was mentioned in relation to Edward […]
[…] spat over “turgid” writing’, The Times, 24 October 2008; Jack Lefley, ‘MOD censors its censor’s history for being boring’, The Evening Standard, 24 October 2008. Anon., ‘Former spy wins first round of “son of Spycatcher” book publication battle’, Solicitors’ Journal, 152 (29), 22 July 2008, p. 5; Anon., ‘Tribunal does not have exclusive jurisdiction’, […]
MI6: Fifty years of Special Operations Stephen Dorril Fourth Estate, London, 2000, £25 hb Harold Smith As I can testify from personal experience, having in 1960 been summoned to Government House in Lagos, Nigeria, to have my death sentence pronounced by the Governor General, MI6 is brutal, cruel, merciless and totally unforgiving. Dorril’s courage, … Read more
