FCO

The latest files to be released by the National Archives include one on Kinsgley Amis - the former novelist and critic who was knighted in 1990. Amis was a member of the Communist party while at Oxford university in June 1941, though he renounced Marxism in 1956-7. MI5's monitoring of Amis, which included intercepting letters, collecting news cuttings, keeping an eye on his mistress and talking to people who knew him, covered this same period but continued for another decade after Amis has publicly rejected communism.

Boris Johnson preached to the UK State choir, in the Foreign Office, on the 7th December. In Churchillian tones, Johnson announced “when in the course of a prolonged, ambitious struggle, you eventually record a success, it is essential, with due humility and caution, to celebrate that success – so I draw your attention, once again, to the defeat of DAESH in Raqqa […]

21st Century Wire The UK regime is a primary player in the ostensibly US-led coalition whose objective for the last seven years, has been the removal of Syria’s President Assad and the inevitable imposition of a so called “moderate” Islamic State upon the people of Syria. This campaign has led to the destabilization of Syria and destruction of infrastructure across […]

In our review of the final season of the original House of Cards, Pearse and I discuss whether Urquhart is a psychopath, or someone so brutalised by the military and ruling class life that he is indistinguishable from one. We look at The Final Cut’s depiction of British foreign policy – a new element for […](Read more...)

Using the Establishment to Skewer the Establishment: UK Foreign Policy in the Middle East
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
19 July 2017

The 1973 ITV documentary The Red Under the Bed helped convict the Shrewsbury 24 by accusing them of being communists for their role in leading the 1972 Building Workers Strike.

While the CIA have been assisting films such as Scorpio for decades they maintain very few records of their involvement in these productions, making it difficult to know how influential the Agency is in this arena. A different but somewhat fruitful angle of inquiry is in the CIA's records of the media discussion of spy books and films in the form of reports, reviews, ratings and discussions.

This short episode is an update on my recent Freedom of Information fun. I talk about my successful and not so successful requests to the Pentagon and my ongoing struggle with the Foreign Office to reveal further details of their involvement in the entertainment industry.