• The Sunday Times, 16 January 2005
  On the face of it, spying should be easy. You go out into the world and try to uncover dangers that threaten your nation. You recruit agents, bribe and blackmail people in the know, put all this into a report, give it a reliability assessment and then hope that it makes its way to someone with the power to act on it. [more...]

• The Bulletin, 29 April 2004
  The furore about Australia's intelligence community - its failures, tainted reports, politicisation, poor management and damaging disputes with its officers - is not unique. It is typical of what has been occuring in all Western intelligence services since 9/11 blasted them out of their complacent mind set. [more...]

• The Independent on Sunday, 29 February 2004
  One true spy story tells us more about the murky world of modern espionage than all the novels of Ian Fleming, John le Carre and Len Deighton. Here is such a story. A few years ago, the Chinese government grew tired of buying its artillery pieces from Britain - we make the best - and offered a large lump sum and royalties if we would teach them how to manufacture the guns themselves. [more...]

• The Daily Mail, 21 October 2003
  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. [more...]

• The Independent on Sunday, 5 October 2003
  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. [more...]

• The Independent on Sunday, 24 August 2003
  James Bond and his masters will never be the same again. The changes in the relationship between the British intelligence community and the government, revealed by the Hutton Inquiry, are--for better or worse --here to stay. [more...]

• The Sunday Times, 1 June 2003
  The secret battle that has been raging in the secret world over the way the British government is trying to politicise our intelligence services is now in the open. The outcome will decide the path that the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) will take for the rest of this century. [more...]

• The Independent on Sunday, 27 April 2003
  Before it has even been screened, a new BBC drama series is under attack for turning the Cambridge spies into glamorous heroes. The spies-- Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt--used their privileged positions in the British establishment to pass secrets to the Russians for thirty years. Hitherto they have been labelled sordid traitors but the BBC drama, due to hit our screens next month, treats them so sympathetically that one Russian defector, Oleg Gordievsky, says it might as well have been made in Moscow. [more...]

• Stella Rimington autobiography book review
  The importance of this book lies in the fact that it was published, not in what it has to say. Even after the Cold War ended and the government formally admitted what most of us knew all along--that we had a security service, MI5, which under the guise of protecting national security kept an eye on us all--no one dreamed that the head of such an organisation would ever dare write an autobiography. [more...]

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