Gary Murray Simon and Schuster, London, 1993 For twenty five years Gary Murray worked as an RAF policeman and private investigator. In the early 1970s Murray ‘unexpectedly’ (invitation?) joined the Operations Intelligence cadre of 21 SAS, and this led to close contact with people from MI6, Army SIB, the Royal Military Police and the Parachute … Read more
The Angolan hostages episode, and more … Although Unita’s capture of 16 Britons at Kafuno diamond mine in Angola received massive publicity, the intriguing titbits thrown up by the reporting were not pursued. In particular, there was the article by Stephen Glover (Daily Telegraph 16th May 1984) in which he stated that he had been … Read more
[…] Embassy’.(19) In 1972 Hamilton Macmillan, an MI6 officer and nephew of the former Tory Prime Minister, recruited Howard Marks, his old chum from Balliol College, Oxford, to spy on Jim McCann, a hash smuggler whom MI6 believed was a Provisional IRA contact in Amsterdam. Macmillan gave no indication that he knew Marks was already […]
Since issue 45, last June, there has been so much information produced on the events preceding the assault on Iraq it is impossible to keep track of it all. Here is my selection. For the powers-that-be, the war has been traumatic, not least because their various cover stories and deceptions have been exposed so rapidly, … Read more
[…] the SAS that played a major part in creating that regiment’s overblown myth. More recently, he published Brixmis: The Untold Exploits of Britain’s Most Daring Cold War Spy Mission, hardly a subversive work! His forte has been listening to covert warriors’ stories (including their complaints!) and turning them into popular history. It is this […]
Brian Crozier HarperCollins, London, 1993 This is a very interesting book which greatly adds to our knowledge of the clandestine shaping of British politics in the 1970s and 80s. It is also a book which, like Chapman Pincher’s Inside Story, will repay repeated re-reading. But amidst all the new material a surprising amount of these … Read more
[…] also John Marks, The Search For The Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control (New York 1988). See John McGuffin, The Guineapigs (London 1974) Peter Grose, Gentlemen Spy: The Life and Times of Allen Dulles (Amherst 1994) p. 393. McCoy, A Question of Torture, (see note 5) pp. 28, 29, 33, 44-45, 49. (On […]
[…] to check on our findings on some of your top people in the services and intelligence services. The computer couldn’t tell us who was or wasn’t a spy, but it could assess people as to what extent they were a security risk. Do you know who came top of our security risk list? None […]
[…] Patrick Wintour, ‘Getty money “helped finance breakaway miners” ‘, The Guardian, 23 September 1985. Martin Wainwright, ‘Families appeal heading for £500,000’, The Guardian 15 December 1984. Iris spy? There’s been a degree of scoffing by certain members of the literati at A. N. Wilson’s passing mention in his recent memoir that Iris Murdoch fed […]
[…] 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 […]
