Word: agent
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Shotnes points out that the effectiveness of gagging orders has been eroding for years, pointing to the banning of a book called Spycatcher, written by former British secret agent Peter Wright, in Britain in 1985. "The book went on sale in America and in Australia, and everybody was getting their friends to bring books back," he says. "Then it got to the point when you could injunct a newspaper, but you could still read the story about the celebrity on the website of a foreign paper. Now stuff can be communicated left, right and center. Half the people...
...York's hilly Southern Tier. "It's even got ceramic tile in the kitchen," he says. He would like to spend more time there, but like many other former Occidental employees we talked to, he's had to unretire into a new job. He is a real estate agent...
...that are complete nonsense are still widely believed: that there was a plot against former Prime Minister Harold Wilson - I now know there wasn't, though there was a file kept on him - and that the head of MI5 for nine years, Sir Roger Hollis, was actually a Soviet agent. The files disprove this too. If you don't have information, you get disinformation...
Looking through 100 years of files, what do you see as MI5's biggest success? Definitely against Germany during the Second World War. Some of the best German spies were turned into double agents, and that is the central part of the most successful deception in the history of warfare, without which the D-day landing couldn't have taken place. What I discovered in the files is how it all began - in a characteristically eccentric British way. The most adventurous of the MI5 agents in the 1930s was an air ace from the First World War named Christopher Draper...
...discovered that three Labour Members of Parliament under Wilson were considered Soviet agents. Did that come as a shock to you? It did come as a bit of a surprise. What surprised me most, however, was the degree to which getting too excited by the threat of communist subversion was not usually done by MI5 but rather by government. Labour leadership sent MI5 a list of names of 16 Labour MPs who they thought were more communist than Labour. MI5 refused to get involved because it saw this as party politics. However, the man at the top of that list...