Morris Riley (1945-2001) was a regular soldier from 1960 to 1972. He was discharged with an exemplary record and later retrained as an accountant. In the early eighties he was recruited by Gerry Gable as a Searchlight “mole” but subsequently became disillusioned with both Gable and Searchlight when he realised they had other agendas besides fighting the mythical fascist menace.
In 1996, he brought a libel action (that he subsequently won) against Gable over an article that appeared in the August 1993 issue of the magazine. MORE ABOUT HOW SEARCHLIGHT “SETS-UP” PEOPLE FOR MURDER was written as an open letter dated 19 August 1996 as a supplement to David Kerr’s letter of July 31, 1996 to Housmans Bookshop. It was copied to more than twenty parties and is republished here verbatim, from Mr Riley’s personal papers.
There is one major error in the article; in the final paragraph, “the mid 1890’s” should read, obviously, “the mid 1980’s”.
As will be seen, I have now – February 1, 2013 – added a PDF scan of the original, or more properly an original of this letter. It will be seen from this that the reference to “the mid 1980’s” therein is correct. When I published the text originally in June 2002, I transcribed the letter with my usual extreme care, and am certain that it read “the mid 1890’s” and not “the mid 1980’s”. I know Morris printed and circulated several copies of this letter, so can only assume that he noticed the error and corrected it at some point.
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