Category Archives: Espionage
British intelligence in twilight of Empire
The subject of my new book A Faithful Spy , the late MI6 and MI5 officer Walter Bell was at the heart of the US/UK WW2 and Cold War intel relationship. His hitherto undisclosed private papers , on which the book draws , also covers his posting to Kenya 1949-1952 , to Delhi in 1952-57, West Indies in 1958-1960 , Kenya again in 1961-1967 where he was involved operationally, as British intelligence monitored soviet influence on anti-colonial leaders and played a crucial role in the passing of political power while …
A Faithful Spy
I am delighted that my latest book A Faithful Spy ,on the life and times of MI6 and MI5 officer Walter Bell is being published this autumn . (published by Chisebury October 1 , available in bookshops and amazon.) When Bell died in January 2004, aged ninety-four, the details of his life – not least of his professional career in the British secret services during a defining period in the history of modern espionage and security – remained a well-kept secret. He had been decorated with the US Medal …
Spook Turf Wars
Review by Jimmy Burns of ‘Need to Know’ , World War 11 and the rise of American intelligence by Nicholas Reynolds (Mariner Books) Blame Ian Fleming but my generation of fellow British public-school boys – privileged private educated friends, some of whom went on to enter the secret world after being born in the early stages of the Cold War -developed our early perception of US intelligence through the prism of James Bond’s alliance with his CIA buddy the similarly fictitious Felix Leiter. The Texan Leiter ,as dramatised by different …
Lies Damn Lies:The Falklands War
If in war the first casualty is truth, then the Falklands conflict, fourty years ago, provides an interesting case study. This paper examines the extent to which a regimented society in Argentina was exploited by the military junta to provide a manipulated and distorted narrative of the Falklands War. The aim was to give the impression that the war was not only justified in sovereignty terms but had God on its side. In the process a nation rallied behind a Project which in diplomatic and military terms was doomed to …
Secrets & Miranda: A sense of proportion is needed
I have written before (https://www.jimmy-burns.com/blog/espionage/why-i-thankful-edward-snowden/ – much to the shock of some of my friends and even close relatives – why I don’t subscribe to the conspiracy theory that the US-led Big Brother intelligence community now controls the exercise of our freedoms to the extent that we must all live in fear of these being taken from us. The public at large and most journalists-and I include myself and those at the Guardian- are not in a position to necessarily judge with any degree of certainty whether the release …
Why I am not thankful to Edward Snowden
Sometimes, very rarely I grant you, it is not a Sun headline but a front-page in the Guardian-my breakfast newspaper of choice-that makes me almost choke on my corn flakes. The Guardian is unsurprisingly on a roll having first broken the story that has been subsequently covered widely by the media internationally , and stirred a political debate on both sides of the Atlantic. But while this story has , as they put in hack parlance ‘legs’, the direction of it seems somewhat one-sided thus far. Today’s Guardian devotes …
The Litvinenko case: Truth must prevail
My old newspaper the FT with a typical understatement of a ‘non-core’ news story relegates the Litvinenko pre-inquest review hearing story to a page 2 read-through today. Others were rather bolder. The Times splashed on it, and the Spanish media have got pretty excited too. Whichever way you look at it, the Litvinenko case , which the FT gave me both time and column inches to cover back in 2006 , is one that certainly needs revisiting, however much sectors of the UK and Russian governments would like it to …
Gareth Williams: Conspiracy not Cock-up?
Whichever way you look at it, the case of Gareth Williams worryingly continues to raise more questions than answers. a. Why did his employers MI6 take more than a week after William’s disappearance to alert either his family or the police? b.Why did officers of the Met’s counter-terrorism branch SO15 delay informing investigating police officers of the existence of nine memory sticks and a black holdall found at Williams’s MI6 office until two days before the inquest into his death ended? c. How much of Williams’ private life-the inquest revealed …
Havel and a spy who came in from the cold
If I’d read the character in some spy novel, I would have thought him a figment of the writer’s imagination-so unlike he was from anything I had encountered thus far. It was in the early 1990’s and I was in Oxford attending a weekend conference on the changing post-Cold war intelligence landscape when a friend suggested there was someone among the foreign delegates I might be interested in meeting in a more relaxed atmosphere. I arrived one saturday evening at one of the town’s quieter pubs to find my friend …
Gaddafi’s Irish connection
BBC NEWS ‘s usually impeccable Nick Robinson last night produced a Cameron-puff report on Gaddafi’s end which might have been scripted by the Ministry of Information, or should I say Ministry of Truth. The focus was on Cameron as hero of his first ever war as prime-minister in contrast to Tony Blair, as arch villain- usual footage of Tony all smiles with Gaddafi in the days when he was ‘on side.’ Robinson did have the courtesy to mention that Blair’s negotiations led to the dismantling of Libya’s nuclear and chemical …
