Aimen Dean, born Ali Al-Duranni, was MI6’s spy inside Al Qaeda from 1998 to 2006. In this episode I do a critical view of his autobiography Nine Lives: My Time as MI6’s Top Spy Inside Al Qaeda, and how Dean’s story connects to other people and events explored in this ...
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After actor Dominic West suggested that the next James Bond be transgender the commentariat have gone batshit arguing over whether this is a key moment in the struggle for trans rights or another sign that the entertainment industry is dominated by damn commie liberals with their Jewish gay-loving agenda. As ...
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The last 24 hours of the Novichok saga has seen a new twist — European media are widely reporting that two Russian spies were caught attempting to either hack or break into the Spiez laboratory in Switzerland that was examining samples from the Salisbury poisoning. While this announcement of an event that ...
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Image 5 in the Met Police’s CCTV collection of Petrov and Boshirov also poses some questions. Their timeline says: Image five shows the suspects ten minutes later — at 11.58 — on Wilton Road, Salisbury, we say, moments before the attack. The police did not say where on Wilton Road that this image was ...
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In the latest chapter in the Salisbury Novichok saga the police have released a selection of images of two men they are naming as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. While there has been widespread speculation that the images are fake, doctored or otherwise not real pictures, this has involved a ...
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In a low-key announcement the British government have demanded that Russia extradite two suspects in the Salisbury novichok attack. Media reporting on this latest move in the novichok saga is replete with the same contradictions and absurdities that have plagued this story since day one. This is my latest article ...
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For the last several weeks the British media has been in full panic mode after two people were apparently poisoned in the English town of Amesbury, a few miles from Salisbury. The official story is that the pair found a perfume bottle containing Novichok that was discarded by Russian assassins ...
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While most entertainment supports or promote the military, police and intelligence agencies there is a smaller but important sub-genre that critiques and satirises the security state.  On this month's subscriber-only podcast I look at four examples - two TV series and two films - that mock and criticise the security ...
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The death of weapons expert and UN inspector Dr David Kelly in the summer of 2003 is one of the Iraq War's most enduring mysteries. While the case was officially ruled a suicide, this conclusion was reached by an informal government inquiry which the Blair government used to replace the ...
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One of the growing markets in spy fiction is pop culture aimed at teenagers or 'young adults'. The CHERUB series by Robert Muchamore depicts a junior wing of MI6, with the first novel in the series – The Recruit – depicting the recruitment, training and first mission of our protagonist, ...
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I recently joined Robbie Martin of Media Roots to discussion the Salisbury poisoning, the Skripals, the Syrian airstrikes and the general state of politics and Russophobia.  We covered many of the reasons to be sceptical of the official story about the poisoning of the Skripals, how this relates to the ...
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On March 4th Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in the sleepy British city of Salisbury, by forces currently unknown. The British government immediately blamed Russian intelligence, leading to weeks of accusations and counter-accusations, diplomatic expulsions and lots of conspiracy theories about who really did this, and why ...
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