Gordon Corera briefly looks at the KGB penetration of Britain’s intelligence agencies:
For 30 years Stephen De Mowbray has maintained a self-imposed silence on a career that once took him to the heart of one of British intelligence’s most controversial episodes.
In 1979 he quit his job with the Secret Service (MI5) because he believed officials had failed to take seriously the claim that British intelligence had been further penetrated by its enemy — the Soviet Union’s KGB.
A number of spies had been discovered in the 1960s but De Mowbray believed there were more. But he found no-one at the top willing to listen.
“People thought I was either mad or bad because I was trying to do something,” he says of that time.
Three decades later, De Mowbray decided to tell his side of the story after reading the authorised history of the Security Service, published last October.
I’m currently reading Christopher Andrew’s Defence of the Realm and just got to the start of the relevant section the other night. Between De Mowbray’s concerns and the careful concealment of “The Laundry”1 in the coverage so far, it’s a wonder they managed to find enough that was considered safe to release to the public.
If you’re interested, MI5 discusses their policies on information disclosure here.
1 I kid, I kid. “The Laundry” is the fictional department of British intelligence in The Atrocity Archive and The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross.
This story was corroborated long ago by John Symonds, who offered to tell MI5 about the KGB’s infiltration of MI5 early in 1980. As usual, the incompetent idiots who run the Security Service declined to investigate John’s evidence, and they did not believe they had been totally penetrated by foreign agents.
John Symonds is exposing the truth on his website, including the story about James Callaghan and Sir Howard Smith.
http://www.johnalexandersymonds.com/Pages/sunny_jim.htm
Comment by Michael John Smith — January 28, 2010 @ 23:20