[…] 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 […]
[…] – 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
See also: Part 1: Forty Years of Legal Thuggery (Lobster 9) Part 2: British Spooks “Who’s Who” (Lobster 10) Intelligence Personnel Named in ‘Inside Intelligence’ (Lobster 15) Philby naming names (Lobster 16) First supplement to A Who’s Who of the British Secret State (Lobster 19) Below is a list of spooks, both dead and alive, … Read more
Matthew R. Simmons London: Wiley, 2005, h/b Ironic, perhaps, that I finished reviewing this book in Calgary, just south of the largest land-based oil project in the American hemisphere, the Athabasca shale tar sands oil recovery projects. Collectively these will realise investment between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the next ten years. Pipelines … Read more
[…] bothered using that particular channel. To date, Stuart-Smith hasn’t upheld any complaint about MI5’s activities. See Tom Bower’s recent biography of Sir Dick White, The Perfect English Spy, Heinemann, London 1995. According to David Shayler, the current favourite to succeed Stephen Lander as head of MI5 is Ms Manningham Buller, whose father prosecuted Blake. […]
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
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
