[…] communications advisory and agency services, mostly to non-OECD interests and NGOs. Corinne Souza is a former lobbyist, now a freelance writer. Her most recent book is Baghdad’s Spy (Mainstream, 2003). Simon Matthews is a former trade union district secretary with an MA in Modern History. Scott Newton is Senior Lecturer in Modern British and […]
[…] campaign against Greece in the British serious papers in 1984/85. At the time the Greek government of Papandreou was trying to reduce the size of its domestic spy apparatus and that seemed the likely proximate cause. I think I was probably wrong about that. In his Eclipse (reviewed in this issue) Mark Perry reveals […]
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
[…] proved: That, while I was working for South African Intelligence in London in 1969 (I was officially deported from South Africa in 1966 so that I could spy for BOSS in Britain) the head of BOSS, H. J. van den Bergh, assigned me to infiltrate an extremely furtive underground political group based in South […]
How perceptions have changed! In Leveller 51, March 1981, there was this snippet: ‘Why all the fuss about the Panorama programme on British Intelligence? Eventually there was just one cut — Gordon Winter, BOSS agent, former freelance journalist, in a pre-title sequence: “British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] view. His book is basically a study of the ‘Red Orchestra’, an area already covered in detail. The author shows that this was, indeed, a very big spy ring. (The CIA were still investigating its activities well into the 1970s, believing that portions of it had survived various Gestapo crack-downs and had gone on […]
[…] 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’. […]
Brothers: The hidden history of the Kennedy years David Talbot London: Simon and Schuster, 2007, h/b, £20 Another Kennedy book? Yes, but a good one. Talbot may not have anything new of substance to tell us about the assassination per se but has much new material about events before and after it. Talbot’s JFK … Read more
[…] evidenced by its taste for conspiracy theories. While she recognises that conspiracies do happen, and cites the Catilinarian 2 and Cato Street conspiracies along with the Cambridge spy ring and Watergate as evidence of her breadth of historical vision, she is in no doubt that ‘…historical conspiracies are rare. The vast majority of apparently […]
