British Briefing
After his retirement from MI5 in 1979, Charles Elwell continued to produce smears of ‘subversives’, now working for privately funded think-tanks. He joined the Institute for the Study of Conflict where he produced regular bulletins called Background Briefing on Subversion. In 1983 the Social Affairs Unit published Elwell’s Tracts Beyond the Times - A Brief Guide to the Communist and Revolutionary Marxist Press. [1]
Elwell’s Background Briefing on Subversion was later funded by the anti-union activist David Hart and it became British Briefing. [2] As the author of British Briefing, Elwell continued with his paranoid and sometimes bizarre exposés. One issue of British Briefing published in 1989 condemned the housing charity Shelter for 'Communist affiliations' and the World Council of Churches, for its support for the Institute of Race Relations. [3]
Whistle blower Colin Wallace has commented that: ‘Many of the smears in British Briefing are exactly the same sort of thing I was being asked by MI5 to spread in the 1970s. Some of the politicians…are the very same people I was being asked to smear.’ [4]
Notes
- ↑ ‘Charles Elwell’, Telegraph.co.uk, 1:49AM GMT 23 Jan 2008
- ↑ Mike Hughes, "Spies at Work", Ch 9. <http://www.1in12.go-legend.net/publications/library/spies/chap9.htm>
- ↑ David Rose, ‘Special Report: Top companies funded smears through charity’, The Observer, 16 December 1990
- ↑ quoted in Seumas Milne, ‘The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners’, (London: Verso, 1984) p.332
