Monday January 31, 2022		INDEX
The spooks come out in Grays It is difficult to know if Sue Gray, the spook about to deliver the whitewash, the Government hopes will save Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson's political career, works for MI5 or MI6. In the 1980s she took a career break to run a pub called the Cove Bar outside Newry. Clearly this was what the "intelligence services" call a listening post. But both MI5 and MI6 operated in Northern Ireland at various times. So that doesn't help determine which service employs her. By coincidence I have just been watching a video about the Special Operations Executive called Charlotte Gray. Yep Gray. She was recruited by the spooks to go undercover in Nazi occupied France and work with the French Resistance. This she does with some success, for a while anyway, until it seems that London gets the idea that the people she was working with were actually Communists, which they were. So London tips off the Nazis about the timing and location of a parachute drop and most of the French Resistance team are brutally murdered by German troops. Gray's British controller explains that the war is over (in 1943 this would have been news for most of the poor benighted British suffering bombing raids, rationing and deprivation). He cites as proof the North Africa campaign but wholly fails to mention the much bigger military campaign that was going on at the time between Russia and the Germans. The Russians, our allies, were alleged to be communists. Well, that's what they said. SOE was based at the same offices as MI5 during the war and a lot of anti communist thinking seems to have penetrated MI5. The fact that British communists are mostly harmless, elderly, idealists has not stopped MI5 from running operations designed to frustrate and inconvenience them. The one sure way we can find out which intelligence service Sue Gray works for, will be when we see the reaction to her report. If she succeeds in clearing the PM's name we will know she is employed by MI6. If the whole thing is a gigantic cock up then we will know it is the usual MI5 job.
INDEX Jonathan Brind		January 20, 2022