Great Britain, Intelligence & Espionage, World 

For the first time ever, M16, Britain’s legendary player at the chessboard of international intelligence-gathering, is revealed in fascinating detail. Fifteen years of painstaking and meticulous research on the notoriously elusive organization comes together in vivid and shocking portraits of her Majesty’s Secret Service. This no holds-barred expose of the agency’s operations and methods describes in riveting detail its impact on the history and politics of the last half century. Stephen dorril’s daring and prodigious research has unearthed startling information, including:
• The recruitment of assets and agents of influence around the world
• M16 relationships with national leaders, including Nelson Mandela
• A secret deal between London and Washington to keep British troops out of Vietnam
• Details about failed plots to assassination Nasser, Milosevic, and Gadafi
• Why M16 was unable to provide advance warning of the Iranian revolution or Argentina’s plan to invade the Falklands
• M16’s operations to bring Nazi collaborators and war criminals to Britain after the war
M16 lifts the veil surrounding the closely guarded espionage efforts that have shape and continue to affect our world for better…and for worse.
 

M16, Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, is one of the great information-gathering organizations of the world, internationally renowned as the employer of the mythical but emblematic James Bond. Yet it has remained one of the nation's most elusive organizations. Its head, Richard Dearlove, is virtually unknown -- a contemporary photograph has never appeared in the press -- and even its true budget is not made public. There is no legal "right to know" what is undertaken abroad in the name of Britain's security, what it costs or how it is run. In the past, any dissident reports of its operations were effectively quashed. To write about M16 risks harassment and prosecution, as former members and current commentators know to their cost, and the organization has remained veiled from scrutiny. Its inside story has never been told. Until now.

Stephen Dorril, a meticulous observer and chronicler of the security services, provides a full fifty-year history for the first time, offering the most complete portrait ever of M16's motives and character and, crucially, what it has done and where it has been most influential. At the beginning of the Cold War, Britain was a global power literally dividing up the world. By 1992, influence abroad had been lost in the Middle East, most of Africa and large swathes of Asia. Even in Europe, Britain seemed exiled and isolated. What had M16 been doing? M16's postwar activities were mired in prewar attitudes and practices, at home in the exclusive clubs of Pall Mall but poorly suited to a retreating post-imperial power. Britain's management of the Cold War was in the itching hands of a mixture of frustrated former members of the wartime Special Operations Executive, desperate for active military engagements, anxious reactionaries and a few socialist devotees for whom communism was the future and spying the career of choice.

This is the first operational history of M16, the first look at the organization in action. With a level of detail unparalleled in the annals of British intelligence, Dorril chronicles the fascinating history from 1949 to the current day. Replete with tales of its most spectacular failures, stirring successes, unsavory plots and bizarre missions, the real-life cloak-and-dagger world is exposed. From the grisly truth about Operation Stalin, which exploited the Russian dictator's paranoia and led to the execution of thousands, to the tunnel M16 dug beneath the Berlin wall to the recruitment methods, training programs and space-age gadgetry of the modern spy, this definitive history has it all.

M16 is a vital, essential arm of the British state. It is Britain's player at the chessboard of international intelligence-gathering and a key partner to America's superpower status. Dorril's is a searching story of the characters and situations in which the games have been played, from the back streets of Aden to the Brandenburg Gate, the mountains of Albania to the shores of the Black Sea. This is a discreet and riveting history of half a century of international political intriguing, spying and thuggery -- all in the name of intelligence.
 

PART ONE FROM HOT TO COLD WAR ................................................ P. 1
1. The Second World War ................................................................ P. 7
2. Reorganisation: Special Operations ............................................... P. 18
3. Containment .............................................................................. P. 35
4. Uncertain Allies .......................................................................... P. 49
5. The World-View .......................................................................... P. 58
6. Propaganda ................................................................................ P. 71
7. Roll-Back ................................................................................... P. 81
PART TWO: THE FRONT LINE ........................................................... P. 91
8. Germany and the 3x 5s ............................................................... P. 95
9. Austria: The Shooting Gallery ....................................................... P. 118
10. Rockets, Bombs and Deception ................................................... P. 133
PART THREE: THE SOVIET EMPIRE ................................................... P. 161
11. Internarium ............................................................................. P. 165
12. The Promethean League ............................................................ P. 185
13. Belorussia ............................................................................... P. 215
14. The Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations ............................................. P. 223
15. Poland ................................................................................... P. 249
16. The Baltic Statues ................................................................... P. 268
PART FOUR: THE BALKANS AND RUSSIA .......................................... P. 301
17. Greece and the Creation of the Para-State .................................. P. 305
18. Yugoslavia: The Golden Priest, Stolen Treasure and the Crusaders.. P. 328
19. The Musketeers in Albania ........................................................ P. 355
20. The NTS and “Young Russians” P. 404
21. The British and Scottish Leagues for European Freedom ............... P. 425
22. The European Movement and the Battle for Picasso’s Mind ............ P. 455
23. Rolling Back Roll Back .............................................................. P. 483
24. The Technical Fix ..................................................................... P. 518
PART SIX: MIDDLE EAST ............................................................... P. 529
25. Unbroken Dreams’ ................................................................... P. 533
26. Palestine ................................................................................ P. 543
27. Cyprus ................................................................................... P. 550
28. Iran: Unequal Dreams .............................................................. P. 558
29. Suez: Assassins and Thuggery ................................................... P. 600.
30. The Macmillan Doctrine ............................................................. P. 652
31. The Musketeers in Yemen .......................................................... p. 677
PART SEVEN MODERN TIMES ........................................................... P. 701
32. The Secret Intelligence Service ................................................... P. 703
33. The Last of the Colonial Wars P. .................................................. P. 729
34. The Slow Death of the Cold War .................................................. P. 746
35. The New Agenda ....................................................................... P. 758
36. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service .................................................. P. 783