ericbarbour wrote:Jesus, this looks like a petty backstab on a government official who has been dead a long time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_HollisAlmost 80% of this article is blubber about "Mole allegations", something
WHICH WAS NEVER PROVED, okay?? Just because Peter Wright whinged about something in his book doesn't make it true.
Wright retired in January 1976, upon reaching age 60, and, by his own account, was enraged at being denied a pension for his 30 years of service, on highly legalistic and technical grounds. He emigrated to Tasmania, Australia, where he wrote an account of his work at MI5. Despite attempts by Margaret Thatcher's government to suppress the publication and distribution of Spycatcher, it was finally published in 1987, and eventually sold over two million copies around the world.[11]
Try asking that looney UK government fan
Dormskirk why he cares about this shit so much. Is he just a dedicated follower of the "espionage biz", or is he a UK government mole looking to control WP content about "people Whitehall don't like"? I could ask the same about several other major contributors to the Hollis article. One of them,
Petrus Magnus, did very little outside of sniping at Roger Hollis.
There are people who think Harold Wilson, Prime Minister from 1965-70 and 1974-76, was also a Soviet mole, and MI5 kept a file on him because he was too comfortable with the USSR for their liking. Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsey (
Lobster magazine) wrote their book
Smear!: Wilson and the Secret State (1992) to show how British intelligence went after Wilson for years with the help of the Conservative Party. Some of the talk about Roger Hollis being a Soviet mole is scapegoating for MI5 failures during the 1950s-1960s, some of it might be revenge for this line:
In the
same essay, Saunders wrote of the Communist Party of Great Britain: ‘In the international communist movement, the British party was a laughing stock, correctly assumed to be so thoroughly penetrated that it was virtually a branch of the Security Service. As [MI5 Director General] Roger Hollis told the home secretary in 1959, “we [have] the British Communist Party pretty well buttoned up.’ It was more than mere containment, says [David] Cornwell, who ran agents into the party. “We kept it afloat. In fact, we
owned it.”’
Since MI5 had known about the Soviet subsidies to the CPGB since the 1930s and not exposed them, ‘We kept it afloat’ is literally true.
That's Robin Ramsey
writing in his "View from the Bridge" column in
Lobster back in 2015, quoting Francis Saunders in the
London Review of Books. The Communist Party of Great Britain went under after the USSR did, replaced by a number of other British communist parties, some of whom predated the 1990s. The other element keeping the "Hollis: was he or wasn't he?" question alive was the chance to write books keeping your pet theory going; (Henry) Chapman Pincher wrote
Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders and Cover-Ups: Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain in 2009 when he was 95, rehashing Peter Wright's arguments that Hollis was a Soviet mole. I think that Pincher (who had been doing investigative journalism on spies since the 1950s) knew what sells and what doesn't and that blaming one guy is more emotionally satisfying than admitting that British counterespionage was full of unimaginative careerists and people firing in the dark.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.