Book Nook: Agent Lavender, by Tom Black and Jack Tindale.

[Meadow]

That doesn't make sense, Prague was almost stereotypically good at running agents, they wouldn't pick someone as 'obvious' as Corbyn. Obviously Corbyn would be a CIA plant if anything by that logic.

We played with this in Crisis. In a manner of speaking.

 

[Geordie]

Yes, this. There's plenty of older people who think he was a wrong'un and 'shifty' and, particularly in the context of his defence cuts, will unironically say they aren't sure where his loyalties were.

I recently stated in another thread that my father in law worked at British Aerospace for much of the eighties and nineties. The old hands there had a massive chip on their shoulder about TSR2. Not cancelling the RAF order, but ordering the jigs cut up. That, to them, smacked of dodginess. All second hand, if course, but the prevailing opinion in this conspiracy seemed to be that it was an American bung, rather than the KGB.

But it was widely held from Preston to Farnborough that Wilson was a bad egg.

 

[Bonniecanuck]

I constantly find myself re-reading because every time I do there's always a little detail about the wider world that I only just then pick up on. I daresay the book has made me better at reading between the lines.

I recently stated in another thread that my father in law worked at British Aerospace for much of the eighties and nineties. The old hands there had a massive chip on their shoulder about TSR2. Not cancelling the RAF order, but ordering the jigs cut up. That, to them, smacked of dodginess. All second hand, if course, but the prevailing opinion in this conspiracy seemed to be that it was an American bung, rather than the KGB.

But it was widely held from Preston to Farnborough that Wilson was a bad egg.

One thing I do wonder is whether similar opinions were held towards John Diefenbaker after the cancellation of the Avro Arrow. Many comparisons are made between that project and TSR-2 and form the pantheon of aviation and military history what-ifs, but the political controversy and fallout seems to get addressed relatively little - even though on the Canadian side the complete scrapping of the project effectively killed the federal PCs in the Greater Toronto Area until Mulroney. I wonder if anyone thought some American or Soviet shenanigans were involved in the Arrow's axing, though obviously it's harder to draw a conspiratorial Red Scare line against a conservative government.

 

[Warthog]

Which basically comes down to most people not having a clue what the difference between an Asset and an Agent is.

Agent? Improbable in the extreme.
Asset? Could be. Not that he would be aware.

This.
Assets are rarely, if ever, aware that they're being used by an agency, because the actions they take are (seemingly) self-directed, in the interests of their country / party / self. Fron the photojournalist whose pictures are used to compile a hit list, to the activist who tells the story of their trip abroad, the people who helped them and so on, to the youth leader who regularly takes groups of young people on a trip to a country - and makes it that much easier to place an actual agent - are innocent (in all sense of the word) assets.