SIS: Dearlove, Spedding and PR

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2) £££

[…] in gas has moved to places like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. (2) In view of the Crown’s acknowledged need to attract good quality Muslim candidates and linguists as SIS staff or agents, the shallowness of the pro-Muslim agenda is germane. Such sophisticates, which the Muslim community has a-plenty, have long been needed to access highly-educated […]

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Rebranding SIS

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1) £££

SIS is dead – you read it first in Lobster – but the funeral has not been announced. Established in 1909, it will not make its centenary. SIS once offered a global brand operating in a market that had been previously divided along the lines of accepted cartels (market fixing). Its market-share, however, […]

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After Iraq: some FCO/SIS issues

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004) £££

[…] minister’s otherwise presidential powers. An example of polarisation was engagement in Iraq; and of politicisation, although this is denied, the appointment of John Scarlett as head of SIS. With the latter, it is not merely the personalities, nor SIS’s future, that are important, although they are, but the wider issue: i.e. the decisions being […]

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PR, espionage and language

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6) £££

[…] he was quoted as saying:’We do not have stakeholders; we do not have corporate social responsibility; we simply have mutual advantage…..’. His comments have specific meaning for SIS: capitalism is the ideology it promotes and protects. The public have no means of knowing whether the organisation’s role is to search for capitalism’s buried bodies […]

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Spook PR

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££

[…] by al-Qaida. Its communications campaign has been textbook – identical to that mounted by any multinational – and has taken years to put in place. Had the SIS known anything about PR (which, given its corporate clients, it ought to have done) it would have spotted al-Qaida’s programme long ago, and known how to […]

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New Labour Notes

Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999) £££

[…] forums promoting the transnational, American-dominated New World Order which is now wrecking the world. Then there was Smith’s life-long friendship with Baroness (Meta) Ramsay, the former career SIS officer, with whom he became friends at university. She became President of the Scottish Union of Students and went on to a career in the murky […]

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The Perfect English Spy

Lobster Issue 29 (1995) £££

Tom Bower, Heinemann, London This is the biography of Dick White, the only man to have been head of both MI5 and MI6 ( SIS) and it is a massive breach of the new Official Secrets Act. For Bower not only had access to White’s memoir of the period, with White to vouch for […]

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Two views of Dorril: MI6: Fifty years of Special Operations

Book cover
Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000) £££

[…] late Alexis Forter (see below). It is a pity that Dorril did not build up his ‘walk-ons’ to include, for example, the lawyers and accountants used by SIS to provide the administrative infrastructure for many of their businessmen assets. The late lawyer Hugh Sinclair, who had distinguished SIS family connections, comes to mind. Dorril […]

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Baghdad’s Spy: A Personal Memoir of Espionage and Intrigue from Iraq to London

Book cover
Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003) £££

[…] daddy’s cover? (With difficulty.) What levels of deceit are required? (Many.) How many friends are sacrificed? (Many.) There are quite detailed portraits of three of her father’s SIS case officers. Two are identified, one remains under a pseudonym; two were the kind of urbane, civilised people we are led to believe work for Her […]

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Our Secret Servants: the Shayler affair

Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997) £££

[…] minister, said committee had investigated nothing of consequence and issued a number of anodyne reports. No new revelatory horrors seemed to be on the horizon. MI5 and SIS had got their new buildings – rewards for the miners’ strike and Gordievsky, respectively – through the Whitehall system before the cuts began to fall, and […]

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