The Art of Betrayal: The Secret History of MI6: Life and Death in the British Secret Service
Gordon Corera
Language: English
Pages: 528
ISBN: 1605985287
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"A wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and highly readable history of Britain's postwar Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6."―Andrew Roberts, The Wall Street Journal
MI6 has been cloaked in secrecy and shrouded in myth since it was created one hundred years ago.
Our understanding of what it means to be a spy has been largely defined by the fictional worlds of Ian Fleming and John le Carré. Gordon Corera provides a unique and unprecedented insight into this secret world and the reality that lies behind the fiction. He tells the story of how the secret service has changed since the end of the Second World War and, by focusing on the relationships that lie at the heart of espionage, illustrates the danger, the drama, and the moral ambiguities that come with working for British intelligence.
16 pages of B&W photographs
KGB officer (although initially Houghton was led to believe he was still meeting Poles in case it scared him off, a so-called ‘False Flag’ operation).32 Houghton would carry a newspaper in his left hand as he entered the Bunch of Grapes pub on Brompton Road. ‘Is that the evening paper you’ve got there?’ a man would ask. ‘No, I’m afraid it’s the daily,’ Houghton would reply. ‘I wanted the racing results,’ the man would say and walk into the gentlemen’s lavatory. A few minutes later Houghton
higher than for any evidence of their existence. At the same time in the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York, a strange sideshow was taking place. The Iraqi Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri, had been in contact with French intelligence for some time through an Arab journalist intermediary and was now passing information indirectly to the US in response to questions. Even though he was Foreign Minister, Sabri was never in the tightest circle around Saddam and he may well have not known the
Cold War) and continue to see MI6 as bent on subverting their country. The Russians for their part continue to try and penetrate Britain, never with quite the success of Lyubimov’s time, but still with plenty of vigour. ‘Since the end of the Cold War we have seen no decrease in the numbers of undeclared Russian intelligence officers in the UK at the Russian Embassy and associated organisations conducting covert activity in this country,’ Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, announced in November
have had problems … I was an appalling driver, but I always had the back of my car piled up with blankets and boxes and all sorts of things, so it was quite easy to put him in and pile a few boxes and blankets [on top of him].’ Park was nervous but fired up by adrenalin. She eventually made it to the ferry and placed her grateful passenger on board. Kandolo would not be out of the Congo for long. During the stand-off between Kasavubu and Lumumba, Mobutu went to see Devlin. The two men were
support, probably including some military personnel, from the Soviet bloc’. Eleven Soviet military transport aircraft arrived in Stanleyville, heightening fears that a conflict was on the way. London believed they had an African Nasser on their hands. Douglas-Home proposed and the cabinet agreed that ‘open support of Colonel Mobutu or opposition to Mr Lumumba was likely to prove counterproductive, though it would be right to follow this course privately’.72 Prime Minister Macmillan at the end of