| INDEX | Sunday October 17, 2021 | |
| How MI5 brought down the Government | ||
| According to Peter Wright, the MI5 scientist whose kiss and tell book Spycatcher caused a furore when it was illegally published (Wright was subject to the Official Secrets Act), he personally destroyed the Eden government and lost Britain the Suez Campaign in 1956.
He did this by tapping into Egyptian communications and discovering that the Soviets planned to use its air force to confront the RAF over Suez. This so terrified the British Government that Eden was forced to give up the campaign and eventually resign as Prime Minister. It also led to the Americans opposing the British military adventure and never really trusting the Brits from that time forward. This intelligence was almost certainly false. Subsequently Wright says the Soviets did an electronic sweep of the Egyptian embassy (where Wright had placed the bug that produced the intelligence). "The microphone thumped ominously as a Russian hand picked up the telephone and began to unscrew the bottom," says Wright. "There was a muffled pause and then the sound of the telephone being re-assembled." Wright doesn't believe that the Soviets missed the bug. "The Russians wanted us to read the signals of their resolve in Suez," he says. In other words MI5 was the tool of a Soviet inspired plot which brought down a Tory government. Whilst this seems preposterous, the intelligence services had no reason to love Eden. In 1944 the Foreign Office under Eden had made a determined bid for control of SIS (MI6) and it was only the determined opposition of Stewart Menzies (the wartime chief of the service) that saved it. Source: The Second Oldest Profession by Phillip Knightley, page 272. MI5 was certainly not a Left Wing organisation. According to Colin Wallace, who also worked for MI5 and is currently in the news because a rather good film about him is available on Youtube, there were crazies in MI5 whose fascist inspired views led them to dream up an operation called Clockwork Orange, designed to bring down the Wilson government. That operation failed. Wilson retired at a moment of his own choosing. | ||
| Sunday October 17, 2021 | °INDEX | |