Search results for ""author david burke""

The British government has taken steps to halt the prosecution of soldiers responsible for the deaths of civilians in Northern Ireland, most of whom had no connection to paramilitary activities. These killings were part of a ruthless dirty war that commenced in 1970 when Brigadier Frank Kitson, a counter-insurgency specialist, was sent to Northern Ireland. Kitson had spent decades in Britain’s colonies refining old, and developing new, techniques which he applied in Northern Ireland. He became the architect of a clandestine war, waged against Nationalists while ignoring Loyalist atrocities. Kitson and his colleagues were responsible for: • The establishment of the clandestine Military Reaction Force (MRF) which carried out assassinations on the streets of Belfast of suspected IRA members; • They unleashed the most violent elements of the Parachute Regiment [1 Para] to terrorise Nationalist communities which, they adjudged, were providing support for the Official and Provisional IRA; • Spreading black propaganda designed to undermine Republican but not Loyalist paramilitary groups; • Deployed psychological warfare techniques, involving the torture of internees; • Sent Kitson’s ‘Private Army’ – Support Company of 1 Para - to Derry where they perpetrated the Bloody Sunday massacre. The British Widgery and Saville inquiries did not hold Kitson and his elite troops accountable for Bloody Sunday. Kitson’s Irish War lays bare the evidence they discounted: Kitson’s role in the events leading up to and surrounding that massacre; evidence from a deserter from 1 Para who joined the IRA; a deceitful MI5 agent; a courageous whistle blower whom the British state tried to discredit, and much more, all of which points to a motive for the attack on the Bogside. This book unlocks the some of the key secrets of the Dirty War that the British government is still determined to cover-up.

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In 1933, the celebrated German economist Robert Kuczynski and his wife Berta arrived in Britain as refugees from Nazism, followed shortly afterwards by their six children. Jürgen, known to be a leading Communist, was an object of considerable concern to MI5. Ursula, codenamed Sonya, was a colonel in Russia’s Red Army who had spied on the Japanese in Manchuria, while MI5 also kept extensive files on her four sisters, Brigitte, Barbara, Sabine and Renate. In Britain, Ursula controlled the spies Klaus Fuchs and Melita Norwood, without whom the Soviet atomic bomb would have been delayed for at least five years.Drawing on newly released files, Family Betrayal reveals the operations of a network at the heart of Soviet intelligence in Britain. Over seventy years of espionage activity the Kuczynskis and their associates gained access to high-ranking officials in the government, civil service and justice system. For the first time, acclaimed historian David Burke tells the whole story of one of the most accomplished spy rings in history.

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David Burke uncovers the clandestine activities of Patrick Crinnion, a Garda intelligence officer who secretly served MI6 during the early years of the Troubles. As the Garda Síochánalaunched a manhunt for the Chief-of-Staff of the IRA, Crinnion found himself playing a crucial role in the effort to track him down.Before his disappearance, Crinnion's actions exposed a web of secrets including those of another British spy in the Irish police, damaging intelligence leaks, gunrunning by Irish politicians, and a cover-up related to the murder of a Garda.Burke reveals MI6's shady dealings, from attempts to smear Irish politicians to plans for using criminals as assassins and the secret surveillance of a key IRA member.Crinnion fled into exile.The Puppet Mastersnot only reveals what became of him but also provides an insightful look into a turbulent period marked by covert operations, betrayal, and the power struggle that shaped modern Irish history.

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A story of wartime intelligence, super-power relations and spies and their handlers - seen through the experience of Melita Norwood. On September 11th 1999 The Times newspaper carried the front page article "Revealed: the quiet woman who betrayed Britain for 40 years. The spy who came in from the Co-op." Melita Norwood, the last of the atomic spies, hadfinally been run to ground, but at 87 she was deemed too old to prosecute. Her crime: the shortening of the Soviet Union's atomic bomb project by up to 5 years. At a time when the world faces fresh dilemmas caused by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, this is the remarkable story of a much earlier drama. After the atomic bomb strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, British and American intelligence estimated the earliest date for the production of a Soviet bomb to be 1953. In fact, the Soviet Union went nuclear in 1948, and tested an atomic bomb in 1949. The Soviet Union's bomb coincided with the onset of The Cold War, and threatened humankind with extinction. Melita Norwood was a member of one of those communist spy networks in America and Britain, who by guaranteeing those weapons of mass destruction threw down a challenge to America as sole superpower in the post-Second World War era. This fascinating book sets her in the context of the times, and uses her as a prism and focus through which to investigate the whole milieu. Dr DAVID BURKE is a Supervisor for the Rise of the Secret World: Governments and Intelligence Communities since 1900 at the University of Cambridge.

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Long before there was a peace process in Ireland, Van Morrison unwittingly did his bit to unite a nation divided. Born in the heart of East Belfast in the North, he is revered as a Celtic soul hero in the South. His music, while rooted in jazz and blues and soul, has an Irish accent--a distinctly Protestant Irish accent. Morrison''s songs form a map of this small island--a map of places, people, and cultures, too. They evoke a long-ago Belfast at a time before it became violently divided by sectarian conflict during the Troubles. They laud literary giants James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and Oscar Wilde. They tell of the immigrant experience, the going away from the land that has long been Ireland''s heartache. And they form a map of Morrison himself, revealing more than this notoriously difficult character ever would in interviews or conversations. A Sense Of Wonder is not a biography of Van Morrison. Rather, it is a journey through the Ireland depicted in his songs--a journey that

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The story of a modernist building with a significant place in the history of Soviet espionage in Britain, where communist spies rubbed shoulders with British artists, sculptors and writers The Isokon building, also know as Lawn Road Flats, in London was the haunt of some of the most prominent Soviet agents working against Britain in the 1930s and 40s, among them Arnold Deutsch, the controller of the group of Cambridge spies who came to be known as the "Magnificent Five" after the Western movie The Magnificent Seven; the photographer Edith Tudor-Hart; and Melita Norwood, the longest-serving Soviet spy in British espionage history (andinspiration for Judi Dench's character in Red Joan). However, it wasn't only spies who were attracted to the Lawn Road Flats. The crime writer Agatha Christie wrote her only spy novel N or M? in the Flats, and anumber of other artists, architects and writers were also drawn there, among them the Bauhaus exiles Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer; the sculptors and painters Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth; the novelist Nicholas Monsarrat; the writer and founder of The Good Food Guide Raymond Postgate; and the poet (and Bletchley Park intelligence officer) Charles Brasch. The Isokon building boasted its own restaurant and dining club, wheremany of the Flats' most famous residents rubbed shoulders with some of the most dangerous communist spies ever to operate in Britain. Agatha Christie often said that she invented her characters from what she observed going on around her. With the Kuczynskis - probably the most successful family of spies in the history of espionage - in residence, she would have had plenty of material. This book tells the story of a remarkable Modernist building and its even more extraordinary cast of characters. DAVID BURKE is a historian of intelligence and international relations and author of The Spy Who Came In From the Co-op: Melita Norwood and the Ending of Cold War Espionage and Russia and the British Left: From the 1848 Revolutions to the General Strike.

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In the early 1970s, Sir Maurice Oldfield of the British Secret Service, MI6, embarked upon a decade-long campaign to derail the political career of Charles Haughey. The English spymaster believed Haughey was a Provisional IRA godfather, therefore, a threat to Britain. Oldfield was assisted by unscrupulous British agents and by a shadowy group of conspirators inside the Irish state’s security apparatus, all sharing his distrust of Haughey. Escaping scrutiny for their actions until now, Enemy of the Crown examines more than a dozen instances of their activities. Oldfield was conspiratorial by nature and lacked a moral compass. Involved in regime change plots and torture in the Middle East, in the Republic of Ireland he engaged with convicted criminals as agent provocateurs as well as the exploitation of pedophile rings in Northern Ireland. He and his spies engaged in dirty tricks as they ran vicious smear campaigns in Ireland, Britain and the US. MI6 and IRD intrigues were deployed to impede Haughey's bid to secure a position on Fianna Fáil’s front bench and any return to respectability. London’s hateful drive against Haughey saw no let-up after Fianna Fáil’s triumphal return to power in 1977 which saw them win a large majority of seats in the Dáil. When Haughey sought a place at Cabinet, Oldfield and his spies devised more dirty tricks to impede him. While Haughey was suspicious of MI6 interference, he had no inkling of the full extent of London’s clandestine efforts to destroy him. By circulating lurid stories about him, they played a major part in trying to prevent him succeed Jack Lynch as Taoiseach in 1979. This book attempts to shed light on some of the anti-Haughey conspiracies which took place during the period of the late 1960s right through to the early 1980s.

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