The Green Ribbon Books

Public Servant, Secret Agent: The Elusive Life and Violent Death of Airey Neave

Paul Routledge
2002
Fourth Estate

As the title of this biography implies, Airey Neave's spent much of his life at the interface between two worlds, those of politics and intelligence. His career went through several intriguing phases. each of which sheds light on the history of Britain's secret state.

A visit to Germany as a 17-year-old Etonian in 1933 gave Neave an early hatred for fascism. In the 1930s, when many of his colleagues at Oxford were turning to socialism and even communism, he began a lifelong interest in the Territorial Army.

By 1940, he was a young army lieutenant, fighting in the bloody, and ultimately doomed, defence of Calais. His capture by the German paved the way for the defining period of his life.

Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer

Peter Wright
1987

The MI5 website specifically denies one of the most eye-catching allegations in Peter Wright's notorious insider exposé of the service - that MI5 officers were plotting to bring down Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

Ironically, that must be one the best-attested claims in the book. Writers like David Leigh, Robin Ramsay and Stephen Dorril have documented extensive evidence, independent of Wright, that this is exactly what was happening.

Neither Leigh not Ramsay and Dorril believe that Wright was telling the whole truth in Spycatcher. They conclude that his involvement in the Wilson episode was much deeper than he lets on.

The one thing that everyone is agreed on, therefore, is that Wright was not a particularly trustworthy witness. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of interesting material in the book.

In the Public Interest: A devastating account of the Thatcher Government's involvement in the covert arms trade

Gerald James
Little, Brown and Company
1995

I briefly met Gerald James once at a meeting of MOJO, the group organised by former Birmingham Six member Paddy Hill. It was an incongruous setting in which to come across a former paratrooper and successful city accountant, but James had a fascinating tale to tell, the bones of the story which is told more fully in this book.

As a former member of the Monday Club, and friend of MI6's George Kennedy Young, James was by his own admission part of the Tory clique that brought Thatcher to power, the very group that would bring down his company ten years later. "On the face of it," he writes, "this is the great irony of my story."