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.

Unfinished Business: State Killings and the Quest for Truth

Bill Rolston
Beyond the Pale
2000

One in ten of those killed during the Troubles in Northern Ireland was killed by the state.This book tells some of the stories behind that statistic.

22 chapters are each devoted to a single incident, beginning with Bloody Sunday in 1972, and ending with the case of Robert Hamill, who was murdered by loyalists in 1997 while nearby RUC officers refused to intervene.

Each chapter contains a substantial account of the case, alongside interviews with relatives of the victims and campaigners. Three further chapters include extended interviews with human rights campaigners Fr Raymond Murray, Clara Reilly of Relatives for Justice, and Fr Denis Faul.

Unfinished Business is an extremely valuable record of the cases it documents, but above all it is powerful testimony to the often untold story of how ordinary familes have fought for the truth about the deaths of their loved ones.

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Big Boys' Rules: The SAS and the Secret Struggle Against the IRA

Mark Urban
Faber & Faber
1992

An influential account of the covert struggle between the security forces and the IRA.

Big Boys' Rules includes a neat diagram at the back of the book which details the evolution, through the 1970s and 80s, of Army and RUC covert units in the areas of surveillance, agent-running and firearms.

The substance of the book details the events underlying that diagram, the successes and failures of changing tactics, the political controversies they provoked, and the ever shifting lines of demarcation between Army and RUC responsibilities.

MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service

Stephen Dorril
Fourth Estate 2000
Touchstone 2002

A magisterial study of Britain's foreign intelligence service, the SIS, better known as MI6.

Although Dorril covers operations around the world and up to the 1990s, the key focus for more than half the book is on Europe and the early Cold War.

During Word War II, MI6's prestige rested more on its control of the Bletchley Park code-breaking programme than on recruiting agents in Europe, where its thunder was stolen by the rival Special Operations Executive.

MI6 absorbed SOE after the Second World War, acquiring in the process some expertise in political warfare as opposed to intelligence-gathering. One of the most intriguing aspects of this, MI6 involvement in the Gladio stay-behind networks, is touched on but largely left for another volume, which will certainly be very interesting if it appears.

Smear: Wilson and the Secret State

by Robin Ramsay and Stephen Dorril
Harper Collins
1992

A remarkable biography which adds up to a secret history of postwar Britain.

This book shows how Wilson's 1950s contacts with Soviet Union, while authorised by Winston Churchill, made him vulnerable to right-wing smears in his later career.

Wilson's ascent to the Labour leadership following the death of Hugh Gaitskell, doyenne of the CIA-backed Labour right, saw him labelled as a Soviet spy by defector Anatoly Golitsyn and right-wing counter-intelligence officers James Angleton of the CIA and Arthur Martin and Peter Wright of MI5.

The allegation would become a weapon in the political struggle over Wilson's attempts to modernise Britain at the expense of the City of London and the wider establishment.

Ramsay and Dorril details the coup plots against both Wilson Governments, and the internal rivalries within and between MI5 and MI6, whose competing agendas in Northern Ireland would become bound up with the campaign against Wilson in the crucial year of 1974.

Their portrait of US influence on the centre-left from the Gaitskell era to the fore-runners of the SDP is strikingly relevant to the New Labour era.

Meticulously footnoted with an extensive bibliography, this is one of the best books ever written about the intelligence world.

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