The collapse of Polly Peck in 1990 remains perhaps the single greatest British corporate mystery of modern times.(1) How did a multi-billion pound international conglomerate, which had risen from East End obscurity to become the exemplar of eighties British Capitalism, collapse within a period of weeks? How did a favoured son of the London Stock … 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
[…] 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 […]
[…] and Herman Zolling (London 1972) and an interesting article by Sarah Gainham in the Spectator 9 November 1962. Robin Ramsay adds: Gainham is a writer of spy fiction. Her 1959 The Stone Roses (Sphere paperback, London 1971), a defector story set in Prague, carries the dedication ‘This story is for Friends in Prague’. […]
[…] mighty screed finally ends, Roberts takes us on an even stranger interlude: ‘EDITOR’S NOTE: This is all Joanie gave us on that date. However, we had a spy hiding behind a moosehead and he tells us that the psychiatrist came back into the room and Joanie handed him the notes quoted above and the […]
[…] Al-Ani found employment at Baghdad University in 1973. He fell victim a year later to a Ba’athist dictat that barred professors married to foreigners. After refusing to spy on foreign companies operating in Iraq, Al-Ani voyaged in 1980 with his young family to Finland. Though strongly opposed to the Ba’athists, Al-Ani wondered how any […]
[…] plays amateur psychoanalyst at Roberts’ expense. It reminds me of the ‘skeptics’ who attack Lee Harvey Oswald as a psychopathological loner and ignore his connections to the spy world. As for Roberts alternating between ‘asking Nader for help and accusing him of being part of the Mafia’, that dynamic replayed among American voters in […]
Accountability I will be discussing a non subject – the accountability of the intelligence services. By accountable we mean the ability to be brought to account, to be answerable for their actions, to be subject to scrutiny and ultimately to have their actions adjudicated upon in a court of law. I will be looking at … Read more
[…] of MI5, Peter Walker, which I don’t think has appeared elsewhere in the British media: “(he) served in Ireland in the early ’80s as second-in-command to Britain’s spy chief, David Ramsen. He posed as a ‘political officer’ and was a frequent visitor to Dublin, where he became a familiar face at the Horseshoe Bar, […]
[…] London, 1984, p131). The most famous of these, of course, was the Gary Powers U-2 on May 1st 1960 and Khrushchev was quick to exploit the ‘ spy’ Powers, forcing Eisenhower to forswear further aerial reconnaissance over the Soviet Union at the Paris summit that year (Klass p50). The use of satellites was only […]
