Dorril, Stephen

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DORRIL, Stephen

PERSONAL: Male.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Department of Media and Journalism, University of Huddersfield, Queensgate, Huddersfield HD1 3DH, England. Agent—Andrew Lownie Literary Agency, 17 Sutherland St., London SW1V 4JU, England; fax: 0717 8287608. E-mail—s. [email protected].

CAREER: Journalist, writer, and educator. University of Huddersfield, Queensgate, Huddersfield, England, senior lecturer in print journalism; Lobster, founder, former editor, and writer, 1983—. Has appeared on numerous television and radio programs as a security and intelligence expert.

WRITINGS:

(With Anthony Summers) Honeytrap: The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward, Coronet Books (London, England), 1987.

(With Robin Ramsay) Smear!: Wilson and the Secret State, Fourth Estate (London, England), 1991.

The Silent Conspiracy: Inside the Intelligence Services in the 1990s, Mandarin (London, England), 1994.

MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service, Free Press (New York, NY), 2000, published as MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations, Fourth Estate (London, England), 2000.

Gladio: MI6 and the European Stay-behind Networks, 1945-1990, 2000.

Blackshirt: Mosley and the Rise of Fascism, Viking (London, England), 2005.

Contributor to newspapers and other periodicals, including Mail, Observer, Guardian, and Sunday Times.

SIDELIGHTS: Stephen Dorril is a journalist, consultant, and researcher whose main interests—security and intelligence issues—have resulted in several books focusing on British and European intelligence. Smear! Wilson and the Secret State, which Dorril coauthored with Robin Ramsay, was described as "impressive and important" by Philip Knightley in the London Review of Books. The book describes several plots against Harold Wilson, who became prime minister of the United Kingdom in 1964. According to Bernard Porter in the Times Literary Supplement, the plots involved "various groups of people, including MI5 and MI6, the CIA, BOSS, financiers, ex-Army officers, the New Right, Gaitskellites, and even, at one early stage, a very famous woman romance novelist." The purpose of these plots varied, from bringing down Wilson's Labour Party government to simply removing Wilson and replacing him with someone else. Dorril and Ramsay examine each of these plots in detail. Porter commented that "the proof is here: masses of it, set out in fascinating detail, judiciously weighed, scrupulously footnoted" and that this "is easily the best and most credible account of the Wilson and related plots." In Spectator, Paul Foot wrote, "Anyone who wants to know how the British secret service works owes a huge debt to Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay."

In The Silent Conspiracy: Inside the Intelligence Services in the 1990s, Dorril describes the British intelligence services: MI6, which spies on people outside Britain; MI5, which spies on people within Britain; and GCHQ, which "spies massively on both," according to Stuart Weir in a review for New Statesman & Society. Dorril describes how the intelligence services have resisted efforts to place them under parliamentary control and oversight, and along the way discusses mistakes, scandals, and botched missions and schemes. He believes that these organizations would not be able to resist reform so effectively if they did not have allies in the British government. As Weir noted, if the government is not directly responsible for the activities of the secret services, then it is free to encourage, in secret, illegal activities that would not be tolerated if the government was made to account for them. Dorril's "engrossing study (deprived by the censors of a few names) has convinced me that we need root-and-branch reform of our largely autonomous state," Weir stated. "Secrecy is the root of all the evils, powers, and inefficiencies of our secret services, as of the civil service and governments." Weir commented that "anyone who is not a conspiracy theorist is likely to become one" after reading this "dense and fascinating" book.

MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service is a compendium of information on the secret service and how it works. A reviewer for the Economist remarked that Dorril was faced with great difficulty in writing it, because "his subject [the secret service] is officially non-existent, providing no reports, granting no interviews, answering no questions—just breaking surface briefly here and there." To gain information, Dorril scoured thousands of sources, ranging from pieces of common knowledge, to published reports, even obituaries. He relied on reasonable inference as well as speculation. When the book was serialized before publication in the London Sunday Times in 2000, "British authorities raided the publisher to seize files and computers, and sought by a series of legal maneuvers to suppress the book," reported Martin Walker in the Wilson Quarterly. "They failed, thanks less to the robust state of civil liberties in Britain than to the fact that the author was able to show that he had used open and public sources." Through fifteen years of painstaking research, correlating declassified documents in Eastern Europe, quoted materials found in documents obtained through the American Freedom of Information Act, and minimal resources available in Britain, Dorril "produced a book that amounts to a genuine breakthrough," Walker remarked. Despite all attempts to derail it, the book saw publication in England, under the title MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations.

Among Dorril's documented findings are suggestions that "British intelligence helped bring about the Cold War by starting hostile operations against the Soviets in 1943, almost as soon as Stalingrad had shown that the Soviet Union would survive," Walker remarked. The organization botched plans to assassinate rival leaders such as Slobodan Milosevic. Intelligence sources failed to anticipate the invasion of the Falklands, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Dorril even suggests that Nelson Mandela served as an agent for MI6, providing information on the Libyan financing of the IRA, a charge Mandela has vigorously denied. After "burrowing through an immense amount of material, the author has emerged with a picture of an organization highly skilled in bureaucratic maneuvering and self-protection but rather less effective at the stated object of the exercise: finding out what the other fellows are up to," observed Andrew Cockburn in the Los Angeles Times. Still, despite controversial claims and unflattering findings, "his book does not set out to be hostile, merely encyclopedic," noted a reviewer in the Economist.

"Dorril's new book on MI6 is an astonishing piece of work," commented Francis Wheen in the Manchester Guardian. "What Dorril has done, rather brilliantly, is to collate all these disparate details into a coherent, detailed biography of British intelligence and its motives, its character, and its behavior." Library Journal reviewer Ed Goedeken called MI6 "richly detailed," while the Publishers Weekly reviewer remarked that through Dorril's examination, "MI6 is no longer the precision-tuned organization of legend, but appears far more American in its tendency to blunder its way through important missions." "Given its ambitious scope, though, this is a remarkable achievement and an encyclopedic post-war history which any student of the secret world should read," concluded critic Mark Hollingsworth in the Manchester Guardian. A reviewer for Booklist called the work "invaluable for readers who want to separate spy fact from spy fiction."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 2000, David Pitt, review of MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service, p. 1795.

Chicago Sun-Times, October 8, 2000, T. R. Reid, review of MI6, p. 19.

Economist, May 30, 1987, "Do You Know the Puffin Man?" p. 88; July 15, 2000, review of MI6, p. 7.

Guardian (Manchester, England), March 23, 2000, Anthony Sampson, "Mandela Mocks Idea He Was MI6 Man, Such Claims Show 'a Contempt for Africa,' Says Anti-Apartheid Leader after Spy-Book Allegations," p. 16; March 29, 2000, Francis Wheen, review of MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations, p. 5; April 8, 2000, Mark Hollingsworth, review of MI6, p. 10; February 17, 2001, John Dugdale, review of MI6, p. 11.

Journal of Peace Research, February, 1995, review of The Silent Conspiracy: Inside the Intelligence Services in the 1990s, p. 124.

Library Journal, September 15, 1991, p. 120; July, 2000, Ed Goedeken, review of MI6, p. 119.

London Review of Books, October 10, 1991, Phillip Knightley, "Cowboy Coups," p. 5.

Los Angeles Times, September 10, 2000, Andrew Cockburn, review of MI6, p. 6.

New Statesman & Society, September 13, 1991, p. 37; June 18, 1993, Stuart Weir, review of The Silent Conspiracy, p. 39.

Observer (London, England), September 15, 1991, p. 63; November 22, 1992, p. 64.

Publishers Weekly, June 12, 2000, review of MI6, p. 64.

Spectator, November 16, 1991, Paul Foot, "A Wronged Man Need Not Be a Good Man," p. 52.

Times Literary Supplement, August 30, 1991, Bernard Porter, "Doing the Dirty on the Left," p. 7.

Wilson Quarterly, summer, 2000, Martin Walker, review of MI6, p. 136.