Our Secret Servants: the Shayler affair

Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997) £££

[…] as a 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 […]

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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 him, […]

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MI5 and the threat from the left in the 1970s

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££

MI5 and the threat from the left in the 1970s In ‘MI5 feared militant left could destabilise Britain’ Jimmy Burns reported in The Financial Times 29 December 2006 on a contingency paper by MI5, presented to the Joint Intelligence Committee on April 9 1976. That paper included this: `Throughout the seventies there has […]

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Defending the Realm: Inside MI5 and the War on Terrorism

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Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££

Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding London: Andre Deutsch, 2003, p/b £8.99   An updated and expanded version of Defending the Realm: MI5 and the Shayler Affair which was reviewed in Lobster 38, this account of MI5’s adjustment to the post Cold War world is one of the best books on the UK’s intelligence services, […]

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Spooks UK

Lobster Issue 5 (1984) £££

[…] Gay News (29th September 1983) carried a short article on Vikki De Lambray (formerly David Christian Lloyd-Gibbon), famous gay socialite, convicted High Society art thief, and apparent MI5 tempter/temptress. The article notes Lambray’s brief sexual relationship, in 1982, with Sir James Dunnett, former Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Defence, and with […]

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Combat 18 and MI5: some background notes

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995) £££

[…] happen again. An effective group of bodyguards and stewards had to be formed.'(6) Speaking of a hypothetical ban on C18, Searchlight’s 1993 Commons evidence argued that ‘ MI5 and the police should find no problem in dealing with such groups’ (p. 6). Searchlight’s written evidence was followed up by the verbal evidence given by […]

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Out of the blue and into the black

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Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006) £££

[…] not entirely new, as he alludes to the establishment of an ‘inner force’ in the RUC around about 1973, under the auspices of one Jack Morton, an MI5 officer who had worked with the colonial authorities in Malaya. This ‘inner force’ was discussed in a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary in 1991. This in turn, […]

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Inside ‘Inside Intelligence’

Lobster Issue 15 (1988) £££

[…] as many would like to believe – and as most writers on intelligence imagine. Even so, we know virtually nothing of any substance about the operations of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. It may be asked, ‘But what about Nigel West, Christopher Andrew and Chapman Pincher?’. Andrew has written nothing on the post-war intelligence world […]

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Defending the Realm: MI5 and the Shayler Affair

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Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

[…] the quintessential, contemporary, football-mad, New Labour-oriented, a-political technocrat – someone who can use the word ‘modern’ without blushing and putting it in scare quotes. (Shayler’s complaints about MI5 can be seen in his submission to the Cabinet Office Review of the security and intelligence services, printed here as appendix 2: they are almost entirely […]

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British Spooks “Who’s Who” part 2

Lobster Issue 10 (1986) £££

[…] ATTACHE STOCKHOLM 1945 CONTROLLER NORTHERN AREA 1955 1ST SEC (VISA) COPENHAGEN 1956 JEDDAH 1958 FO 1961 RETIRED CARR, JOHN DICKSON WELL KNOWN THRILLER WRITER CP WORKER – MI5 AGENT 1930-40’s CARREL, IAN MI5 (W) SECURITY LIAISON OFFICER HONG KONG HEAD OF REGISTRY MID 60’s. K7 COUNTERING SOVIET PENETRATION. RETIRED LATE 70’s CARTER, PETER ANTHONY […]

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