Turning the Philby Case on Its Head

April 26, 2007

Nothing, not even the spy fiction of John le Carré, Len Deighton, or Charles McCarry, compares with the real-life story of the Ring of Five. Not only was the group made up of five members of the British establishment—Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross—who had signed up to serve communism as spies when they met at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s. But by virtue of their subsequent positions within the British government, they also succeeded in transferring thousands of the most sensitive military documents to their Russian handlers.

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Ignore the conspiracies. Spies never forgive a traitor

November 26, 2006

Alexander Litvinenko’s death is unlikely to be solved for months. There are as many theories about who killed the former KGB officer as there are reporters working on the story. For my money, the circumstantial evidence points to the FSB, who took over the KGB’s role and for whom Litvinenko once worked.

Few organisations have access to Polonium-210. It is made in nuclear reactors, and with a half-life of 138 days cannot be stored; it has to be made to order. It is an almost-perfect murder weapon, although in one sense the murderer was unlucky. If Litvinenko had not died in London where all the facilities existed to detect the Polonium-210, the cause might have remained a mystery. Litvinenko himself was in no doubt. “The bastards got me,” he told a friend.

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Intelligence = imagination

August 13, 2006

There is something wrong with the Government’s version of our stunning success in thwarting the planned terrorist attack on aircraft bound from Britain to the United States, bombings that would have “caused loss of life on an unprecedented scale”. We are told that, thanks to the brilliance of our anti-terrorist forces, we have avoided another 9/11. Apparently faced with a bombing attack on a number of transatlantic aircraft, “part of the most sustained period of severe threat since the end of the Second World War” (our Home Secretary, John Reid’s, words), we have rounded up the “main players” just in time, and they are all in custody.

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So what made them swoop?

August 10, 2006

There comes a time in every anti-terrorist operation for a decision dreaded by every officer involved: Is this the moment to strike? Ideally, an investigation should run as long as possible.

No officer, no matter how experienced, can tell for certain that every angle has been covered, every possibility for gathering intelligence has been exploited, and every fragment of evidence has been noted and catalogued. But these imperatives have to be balanced against the most important one of all – are the terrorists about to attack?

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Phillip Knightley on Harold Evans

July 10, 2006

I joined The Sunday Times in 1965 and Harry Evans arrived shortly after. The paper was changing from an old-fashioned, Tory-orientated newspaper into a dynamic exposure paper, and he was a breath of fresh air.

The Insight team got going and you were seconded there when things got interesting. The idea was to tell people what was really going on. Evans’s role in that was absolute confidence in everybody working for him. He encouraged people to stretch themselves and never stinted on cost.

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MI5, the police and the inside story of a raid that went wrong

June 6, 2006

The anti-terrorist raid on a house in East London to search for a chemical bomb now appears to be just another botched operation: a suspect shot in murky circumstances, conflicting accounts and unanswered questions.

In fact, the real story of this raid is that infighting between MI5 and the police may have endangered the chance of a breakthrough in gathering anti-terrorist intelligence.

Information is the life-blood of a security service. Unlike the characters in novels or in the popular TV series Spooks, real-life MI5 officers rely on the sordid but well-tried techniques of the informer, the ‘grass’, the intercepted letter, the telephone tap and the bribe, all mixed in with a dash of blackmail and coercion.

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The nasty side of the new Australia

December 14, 2005

The race riots on Sydney’s beaches – Anglo-Australians (“Aussies”) versus Lebanese (“Lebs”) – have repercussions far beyond a drink fuelled punch-up on a sweltering summer week-end.

They have revealed that the “lucky country’s” historic racism lingers on, like a sun cancer just below the skin. Given the right circumstances all the advances of recent years – the abolition of the White Australia policy, the encouragement of a multi-cultural, multi-racial society with emphasis on tolerance and harmony – can apparently vanish overnight. There was time to act to avert trouble but no one had the will.

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Thoughts of India

November 25, 2005

The French say that everyone has two countries–their own and France. Some of us are even luckier. I have three countries and my lifestyle has involved living in all three. I was born in Australia, I live most of the time in Britain and in 1960 I discovered India.

It was a good time to do so. Bombay, where I landed from the old British India ship, the Dumra, was still a sleepy city where you had to beg the taxi-drivers to go a little faster. The Raj had not quite gone. There were still a few British banks pretending nothing had changed, with the occasional English remittance man queuing to collect his monthly cheque. A posse of English jockeys came down for the racing season, the Bombay Gymkhana still played Rugby, and if you were an Indian it was not easy to get into Breach Candy swimming pool.

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The Great War for Civilisation: the conquest of the Middle East, by Robert Fisk

October 14, 2005

This brilliant but enormous book (no less than 1,366 pages) has been sixteen years in the making. Its obvious ingredients are 328,000 notes, documents and dispatches and Robert Fisk’s thirty years’ experience of reporting the Middle East. But there is also a hidden element – the author’s ethical, philosophical and moral approach to his life’s work.

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