http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cuttings/mi6.eu_stel_27apr1997.html with the names of the guilty persons.
Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Sunday Telegraph, 27 April 1997, page 10
A secretly-funded Foreign Office unit used public money to mount a covert propaganda operation aimed at ensuring Britain joined the European Community. Paul Lashmar and James Oliver investigate
IN LATE 1972, Alistair McAlpine, later Lord McAlpine, was recruited as treasurer for a pro-European lobby organisation called the European League for Economic Co-operation. It was only much later that he discovered the reason for his appointment. A “branch of the security services, called, I believe, something like the IDA”, had been financing breakfasts and lunches for this and other bodies, he later wrote.
Now, the full extent of the involvement by the MI6-linked Information Research Department of the Foreign Office in supporting Britain’s joining the European Economic Community can be revealed.
For nearly two years, IRD had been funding invitation-only meetings between senior media figures and pro-European politicians. diplomats and businessmen. These were regular, expensive, and well-attended breakfasts at the Connaught Hotel.
Then, McAlpine said last week, Sir William Armstrong, at that time head of the Civil Service, found out about the events. He went to the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, and the IRD funding ceased. As a result ELEC had taken over running the breakfast meetings and McAlpine, then as now a fund-raiser extraordinaire, was brought in.
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