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
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
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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
[…] York Sun, 19 March 2008. This was discussed by Mary Dejevsky in The Independent on 2 May 2008, ‘The Litvinenko files: Was he really murdered?’ ‘Why a spy was killed’, The Guardian, 26 January 2008. Their Website is Nick McDermott, ‘Big Brother tapping our phones and e-mails 1,000 times a day’, The Daily Mail, […]
[…] 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
The Diana inquest – the people’s verdict? Well we now know who didn’t do it. It wasn’t the Royals. Not that they and their associates don’t have past form when it comes to helping family members into the next world. George V was given a fatal injection on his deathbed in order that news of … Read more
[…] 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’. […]
