[…] the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.’ Notes See also Shipman’s ‘Why the CIA has to spy on Britain’, The Spectator, 25 February 2009 which has one or two fragments not in the Telegraph version. See, for example, . See Lobster 55 for […]
Suffer the innocents? The Stevens inquiry into Britain’s state assassination policy in Northern Ireland in the 1980s began in September 1989. The police officers who signed up for it didn’t think it would take long to do. ‘We thought it was going to be a fairly routine investigation. We didn’t expect to find that there … Read more
[…] stories on Zinoviev appeared in August: ‘Red Letter Day’ by Patrick French, in the Sunday Times 10 August 1997, and ‘The forgery, the election and the MI6 spy’ by Michael Smith in the Daily Telegraph 13 August 1997. Both articles were based on the release of certain documents from SIS’s archives which purport to […]
[…] swipe at the Americans and double-entendre: ‘There are no chinks in our security’. Doubtless, had the script not been so bad, the story about the happily bungling spy could have played in Iraq as part of Britain’s ‘hearts and minds’ campaign: a sort of movie equivalent to British troops losing 9 – 3 to […]
[…] not refer to her part in Smith’s conviction for espionage and asks: ‘How many Director-Generals of MI5 have been responsible for the conviction of a major Russian spy, who was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment at the Old Bailey?’ Smith thinks Rimington is embarrassed by her part in framing him. Something of the night…. […]
[…] bass” and landed in Havana in 1959, just as the first Russian freighter was arriving. Fairly early on Beck’s narrative begins to resemble the ‘Get Smart’ TV spy spoof. He dresses up as a tourist and hangs around the docks with his Brownie, in the bar of the Hilton, and at a travel agents’ […]
First off, a slight digression. There’s been much talk recently about just how many books have been published on the assassination. ‘Over 2000’ is the figure that has been thrown around and this may be traced to the very opening sentence of Gerald Posner’s egregious Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK … Read more
Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA Jim Hougan (Random House, US 1984) Those who read Hougan’s last book Spooks will know that the arrival of a new one is something of an event. As expected, his latest has so many trails to follow, intriguing little titbits to ponder that one read is insufficient … Read more
Stuart Christie Christie Books, PO Box 35, Hastings East Sussex, TN 34 2UX pb, £34 from www.christiebooks.com I really enjoyed this account of his childhood from Christie, Britain’s most famous anarchist and celebrated radical publisher. But I’m not sure how many other people would. I may have enjoyed it as much as I … Read more
[…] Later I mentioned the idea that the spooks fed material into novels to Fred Holroyd, and, to my surprise, he told me that one of Britain’s leading spy fiction writers had cheerfully confirmed that the spooks did indeed send him material they wanted planting in his books. The perceptible increase in this country of […]
