The homepages of distinguished journalist and author Phillip Knightley
From the monthly archives:
Before her death six years ago, was Princess Diana under surveillance by “watchers” from MI5, the British Security Service? Yes. Did MI5 have a file on her? Yes. Were her telephone calls bugged? Yes. Were there, in the Queen’s words, “powers at work in this country of which we have no knowledge”? Yes. Did MI5 or these mysterious powers murder Diana? Emphatically, no.
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We can handle six weeks of World Cup rugby but can we survive six weeks of Australia? Here’s a country just a little over 100 years old, and with only 20 million people, that is a world leader in so many fields, and not afraid to boast about it. Six weeks of seeing and hearing confident, optimistic Australians enjoying their life in their Spring sunshine as our winter closes in may be too much even for Rugby fans.
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Philby, the agent, double agent, traitor and enigma revealed all to Knightley just before his death. Few knew the real man that for years fooled British Intelligence, the CIA and the FBI and was simultaneously head of the British Intelligence Service’s anti-Soviet section and a long-time KGB agent.
After he defected to Russia in 1963, he maintained a code of silence for 25 years - until a few weeks before his death. He invited Phillip Knightley to his Moscow apartment and in six days of conversation bared his soul.
Buy The Master Spy: The Story of Kim Philby — UK | US |
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Poor old James Bond has had a terrible thrashing this week. First former British ambassador Sir Peter Heap accused Bond and his colleagues in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) of being useless spies who frequently made things up. Then the the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) reported that it could find no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, thus underlining a fundamental failure of intelligence and removing at a stroke Britain’s justification for going to war.
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