Beyond Enkription - The Burlington Files

Product Information

Fairclough, Bill. Beyond Enkription: The Burlington Files (p. 264). The Burlington Files Limited. Kindle Edition. " The first sentence of the Goodreads blurb (above, and probably written by the author) should be a warning: But Ramsay’s 55th birthday arguably fell at the perfect time. It wasn’t to be a simple early retirement – her old friends from the Glasgow Uni days were gearing up to New Labour and working towards electoral success that would see them in power until 2010. Her old friend John Smith immediately asked her to join his team as a foreign policy advisor after winning the Labour leadership. After working in the leader’s office until Smith passed away in 1994, Tony Blair nominated Ramsay for the House of Lords, which she joined in 1996. She has held a number of roles in the House, including as a government whip, and acting as a junior minister for the Departments of Health, Scotland and the Foreign Office. With the 20 year anniversary of the Iraq war falling in March this year, debates of whether or not Britain should have joined Bush in Iraq have naturally spiked again. “Recently, I can’t tell you how frustrated and angry I’ve been at the television coverage of the anniversary. People who don’t know what they’re talking about, they really don’t. They think it all started then. No, it came from a very bad set of circumstances in 1991. And of course, it’s now just become conventional wisdom, the Iraq war and how terrible it was. I don’t think most of the people who say it really understand what they’re talking about. It’s just something that gets parrotted.” I concur completely with Nancy Mills' comments. The style is execrable, peppered with English demotic terms and phrases. I lost faith with the narrative after reading a basic, simple, factual error early on. There was no such organisation as the Irish Independent Republic Army: the author should have written Provisional I.R.A., or Provos/Provies. This sort of carelessness (or ignorance) is intensified by the errors mentioned in David C. Ward's review.

As one of the surviving original review panel I was asked to read it three times. Each time I thought I had understood it the last time! If you’re an espionage cognoscente you’ll love this monumental book but just because you think you know it all don’t surf through the prologue: you may miss some disinformation. If you felt squeamish when watching Jaws, you may find the savagery of the opening chapter upsetting, but it soon passes. He was born in England in 1950. In the early seventies Bill qualified as a Chartered Accountant and unwittingly started working for MI5 and MI6. In 1978 he, along with Colonel Alan Pemberton CVO MBE and Barrie Parkes BEM from British Intelligence, co-founded a niche global intelligence agency known as “Faire Sans Dire”. Since then that organisation has operated under many guises, as has the author.

The first book is an unusual espionage novel: at times it came across as so real that I began to wonder if it was a historical novel. The transition into politics was also eased largely by the fact she was still friends with her contemporaries from student politics; people like John Smith, Donald Dewar, James Gordon and Teddy Taylor. Although at the time the Glasgow University Union (GUU) was still the ‘men’s union’ and the Queen Margaret Union the ‘women’s union’, they all came together every second Friday at the GUU for the parliamentary debate. “Nobody thought this was a special group, nobody thought this was going to be a Labour minister or a Labour that at the time. You just take them as your contemporaries and you don’t necessarily know that,” Ramsay reflects.

Apart from running Faire Sans Dire for over forty years, Bill has also worked as a bean counter in both practice and industry. During his career he has been a director and executive of several renowned international businesses (in the Barclays Bank Group, the Reuters Group and Citigroup). He’s trod on the tails of many fat cats and investigated and despatched some household name villains over the decades. Could have probably been a good story with a competent writer. I'm not a grammar nazi but this book just mutilates the English language: What a dynastic family! But Edward’s flaws and mishaps, Sara’s melodramatics and nightmares, Hugh’s calm and humour and Roger’s guile and intelligence all blend well as the tangled plots evolve. The book “Beyond Enkription” by Bill Fairclough is the first stand-alone fact-based espionage novel of six autobiographical tomes in The Burlington Files series. As the first book in the series, it provides a gripping introduction to the world of British intelligence and espionage. It is an intense electrifying spy thriller that had me perched on the edge of my seat from beginning to end. The twists and turns in the interwoven plots kept me guessing beyond the epilogue. The characters were wholesome, well-developed and intriguing. The author’s attention to detail added extra layers of authenticity to the narrative.

Transform communications

I could go on and on but am not going to inflict any more of this on myself or anyone else. The non-existent editing and sloppy excuse for writing in this book are an embarrassment to the writer and an insult to the reader. In real life Bill Fairclough was an intelligence agent or spook and was the author of Beyond Enkription, the first of six fact based autobiographical spy novels forming The Burlington Files series. Other essential key management features include a secure mechanism for replication. Any encryption product that does not provide a secure means of recovering/replicating keys is a catastrophe waiting to happen, and one that's unfortunately likely to manifest in a disaster recovery situation. Look for a solution that allows keys to be replicated when a quorum comprised of a pre-determined number of people authenticate themselves to the system.

Due to SIS’s policy of staff having to retire at 55, Ramsay’s career in the intelligence services came to an end in August 1991. But the challenge of keeping the line to people in her life that she simply worked at the Foreign Office continued: “How do you disguise that you stopped your career at 55 when everyone knows the Foreign Office goes on to 60? Why were you never an ambassador? So they either think you’ve been an absolute dead loss or done something terrible at some point, so you have to try and make it so that it doesn’t seem unusual, which can be quite difficult.”

FAQs, answered

We all know that encryption is a good thing. We've heard, over and over, that it's the last line of data defence in a breached system, it protects data from nosey employees, and it's required for many data-protection government regulations and industry standards. Leo tried to becalm himself but his gut kept churning even though his life wasn't on the line. Only his career was but Burlington's life would be. A punchy, pacy and well researched novel where reality and fiction are so intertwined they become indistinguishable.