24 September 2002 At 8 am on 24 September 2002, only thirty minutes prior to the deadline for the headline in the Evening Standard‘s first edition, Charles Reiss, the paper’s political editor, was allowed to see the government’s intelligence dossier on Iraq’s supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). After reading about Iraq’s ‘strategic missile systems’ and its…
18 September 1961 Mounting evidence suggests the involvement of British intelligence services in the assassination of UN secretary general, Dag Hammarskjöld, on 18 September 1961. He was killed along with 15 others, when his DC-6 aircraft, which had taken off from Leopoldville, the capital of Belgian Congo, was downed shortly after midnight on its approach…
26 February 2004 On 26 February 2004, Clare Short, who had left Tony Blair’s Cabinet a few weeks earlier, informed astonished listeners to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that MI6 had spied on the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as part of its attempt to obtain a second UN resolution to support a war against…
14 January 1947 On this day in 1947, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin ordered MI6 to sabotage ships in European ports which were taking Jewish refugees to Palestine and to deliberately contaminate their food and water supplies. Other methods to prevent their arrival in the British controlled mandate had been contemplated but the three miles of coastal…
12 February 1981 On 12 February 1981, David Wyatt of MI6 warned the Northern Ireland permanent secretary that ‘UDA/UFF (loyalist) gunmen, with the full blessing of Tyrie (head of the Ulster Defence Association), are going to continue murdering identified Republicans.’ His statement was yet further confirmation of the already overwhelming evidence the government possessed that…
21 January 1964 On 21 January 1964, Robin Young, a British political officer in the newly created Federation of South Arabia, noted in his diary the latest rules of engagement for covert terror operations inside neighbouring North Yemen, as laid down by Sir Kennedy Trevaskis, the British High Commissioner. London was determined that Egyptian forces,…
17 January 1961 On 17 January 1961, Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister, was abducted, tortured and then shot dead in a coup masterminded by MI6. To prevent any possible autopsy, Belgian mercenaries, who had been involved in his death, dug up and dismembered his body from where it had been hastily buried,…
THE RAF BOMBS NORTH WEST FRONTIER VILLAGES [ 11 March 1932 ] In early March 1932, the RAF prepared to launch what had become routine punitive bombing operations along the North West Frontier in which entire valleys of villages would be occasionally bombed whenever the British sensed that they were no longer sufficiently respected and…
BRITISH ARMY KILLS FIFTY EGYPTIAN POLICE OFFICERS [ 25 January 1952 ] By January 1952, the British Army, which was still stationed in Egypt’s Suez Canal Zone, was growing increasingly frustrated by attacks on its positions by small groups of Egyptian guerrilla fighters, who were determined to force their former colonial masters to evacuate. MI6…
