Description
'Inside Story' is a unique series of exposures and disclosures about what goes on behind the scenes in Whitehall and Westminster by a man uniquely qualified to make them.
For more than thirty years, Chapman Pincher has been close confidant of statesmen, senior civil servants, forces chiefs, ambassadors and officers of the secret intelligence and security services. This has given him unprecedented insight into the activities of the people who govern our lives and of the machinery they manipulate.
During his stormy career - no other writer has been the subject of so much discussion in the Commons - he acquired an unparalleled reputation for disclosing events and developments which Whitehall, Westminster, or both, were hoping to hide. So great was his success as an investigative journalist that in 1967 Granada instituted a special award for him - Reporter of the Decade. Ten years later he was still at the centre of Parliamentary storms over the alleged 'bugging' of Sir Harold Wilson.
Scourge of ministers and Whitehall mandarins alike, he has nevertheless retained the friendship and confidence of most of them. 'Inside Story', which is very much an 'I was there ...' book, is peopled not only by household names like Harold Macmillan, George Brown, Beaverbrook, Harold Wilson, Lady Falkender and Enoch Powell, but by spies and defectors like Philby, Burgess and Maclean, Vassall, Penkovsky and Lyalin.
Chapman Pincher provides new facts about affairs of consuming interest, such as the resignation of Harold Wilson, the mystery of frogman Crabb, the political sex scandals and the operation of intelligence services against the Labour Party. For the first time, he explains why Wilson warned the electorate that 'cohorts of distinguished journalists' were looking for information with which to smear him and why he pursued the damaging D Notice affair. He throws new light on telephone tapping, 'bugging' and the operations in Britain of the CIA and the KGB, including his own relationship with with one of the KGB's dangerous agents. He also lifts the curtain on some of the occasions when he was helped in combatting the KGB through his relations with MI5 and MI6.
Though 'Inside Story' contains some fascinating reminiscences about Lord Beaverbrook - some of them hilarious - it is definitely not a book about the struggle for circulaton in Fleet Street, it is about the struggle for power at the hub of the nation - the Whitehall-Westminster complex, with particular emphasis on its secret departments.
ISBN:283985763
