2 2 April 2017
Johnson and son
The UK's overseas intelligence service, MI6,
reports to the Foreign Secretary, a post now
occupied by the exuberant Boris Johnson.
Since November 2014 MI6 has been led by the
more reserved Sir Alex Younger, a former army
officer, aged 53, who joined its ranks in 1991.
He has served in the Middle East and
Afghanistan.
The next time Johnson schedules a meeting
with Younger, he should drag his affable father
Stanley along with him to confront his spymas-
ter over MI6’s shameless lie to the Hart Inquiry
in Northern Ireland last year that it had never
engaged in sexual blackmail. Johnson senior
knows this is laughable nonsense. He was
recruited by MI6 in 1964 and spent a couple of
months undergoing a training course with it.
Early on, he was exposed to the pros and cons
of sexual blackmail. One of his instructors even
advised him that there was little point in taking
compromising photographs of Egyptian targets
because they were likely to ask for copies for
their friends. The implication of this is that MI6
was so adept at blackmail, it believed it could
predict the response of targets based on their
nationality.
Stanley Johnson was also shown how to
plant explosives and derail trains. His budding
career came crashing to earth after a bombing
exercise took a wrong turn. It started well: he
successfully installed a faux incendiary device
at a power station on the Northumberland
coast. Unfortunately for him, during his escape
across a moor on his way to Hexham, he was
intercepted by an attractive young woman in a
miniskirt who inveigled him into her car and
then delivered him into the hands of the wait-
ing police.
UK secret services and paedophilia rings
by Joseph de Búrca and Frank Connolly
NEWS
1
Her Majesty’s
Deceivers in Chief
MI6’s boss
believes the
real MI6 has
integrity though its
agents were happy to
lie about blackmailing
homosexuals to its
government’s inquiry into
Kincora boys home
Boris Johnson
April 2017 2 3
In 1989 another former MI6 recruit who didn’t
make the grade claimed that MI6 had been
involved in the December 1972 Dublin bombings.
According to him, the operation had achieved a
legendary status within MI6.
Hart failure
Meanwhile, Sir Alex Younger and his
senior staff at MI6’s Legoland HQ and their
brothers in arms at MI5 must be mightily relieved
they received a clean bill of health from the 2017
Hart Report into child abuse. For its part MI6 had
denied any involvement in the Kincora Boys
Home scandal on the spurious ground that it
never engaged in sexual blackmail. Hart believed
them. Let’s hope someone shows Stanley John-
son the report so he can put his son right about
the matter.
Younger has now taken to pontificating about
the integrity of “the real” MI6. In December 2016
he told a group of reporters that it had “a strong
ethical core” and that this trait was “one of the
first qualities we look for in our staff”. He also
claimed that an MI6 officer “always has respect
for the law’ and that his officers were “not for
taking moral shortcuts’. Lying to an official
inquiry paid for by the British taxpayer, however,
seems perfectly acceptable to his underlings.
'Lies, mutilation & even
murder’
If Boris Johnson, a published historian, has any
intention of kicking MI6 into line, the first thing
he should do is learn a little about its recent his
-
tory. A good starting point would be 'Inside
Intelligence' (1990), a book written by the late
Anthony Cavendish, one of MI6’s former officers.
According to Cavendish, deceit was the starting
point of an officer’s career since he was destined
to lie “from his first day in the Service”. Stanley
Johnson, who was instructed to masquerade as
an official on the Sudan desk of the Foreign
Office, can confirm the accuracy of this.
Overall, Cavendish’s experience convinced
him that as “the years go by, the lies take over
from the truth and morality accepts the other
demands which are made on an officer to get the
job done”.
Cavendish also described the use of blackmail
to control MI6 agents along with the use of
“threats to the family of valuable informants”.
Worse still, “theft, deception, lies, mutilation
and even murder are considered if and when
necessary”.
In more recent times people like Richard Tom
-
ilson, also ex-MI6, and author of 'The Big Breach'
(2001), have exposed murderous MI6 wrongdo-
ing. Another exposé is 'Spies, Lies &
Whistleblowers' (2005), by Annie Machon,
ex-MI5. (MI5 is Britain’s internal intelligence
apparatus and is attached to the Home Office).
Professor Keith Jeffery of Queen’s University
Belfast published the official history of the
organisation, MI6, 'The History of the Secret
Intelligence Service 1909-1949', in 2010. He con
-
firmed long-standing rumours that in 1946 and
1947 MI6 had bombed ships ferrying Holocaust
survivors from Mediterranean ports to Palestine.
Jeffery revealed it was codenamed 'Operation
Embarrass'.
Village can add a few details with an Irish
angle: one of the saboteurs was Wing-Com
-
mander Derek Verschoyle, an Irishman born in
1911. On his mother’s side, his family hailed from
Dundalk. Educated at Trinity in Dublin, he later
became the literary editor of The Spectator mag
-
azine. He sometimes relieved his boredom at
work by taking potshots at cats with a 0.22 rifle
which he kept in his office. WWII drew him away
from the literary world, and eventually into the
Special Operations Executive which specialised
in sabotage behind enemy lines. After the war
he joined MI6. During Operation Embarrass he
masqueraded as a first secretary at the British
Embassy in Rome where he served from 1947 to
1950.
Overlapping abuse rings
Cavendish’s insight that "morality
accepts the other demands which are made on
an [MI6] officer to get the job done" sums up
much of what happened in NI during the Troubles.
One of the worst excesses was the Kincora scan-
dal. Decades ago, Chris Moore of BBC Northern
Ireland, author of a compelling book about Kin
-
cora, revealed that he had been informed by one
of his sources that the British Establishment’s
deepest fear about it was that it would unravel a
series of overlapping child abuse rings which
might ripple across the UK. How depressingly
true that has turned out to be: a range of abuse
networks are at present being examined by the
Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse
(IICSA) now led by Professor Alexis Jay.
One of the Kincora survivors, Gary Hoy, has
confirmed the existence of a network which
reached well beyond the walls of Kincora. Hoy
2
3
4
6
According to Anthony
Cavendish, one of MI6’s
officers, deceit was
the starting point of an
officer’s career since he
was destined to lie “from
his first day in the Service”
Stanley Johnson Anthony Cavendish with Margaret Thatcher
Sir Alex Younger