Coach into pumpkin: some problems with Paget

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] ‘Squidgygate’ then became impatient with their proxies and started sending journalists taped copies of the conversation through the post. Naturally, once the story broke, suspicion fell on MI5. Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke told the House of Commons: ‘The security services are strictly controlled in their telephone tapping and I know of no evidence whatever […]

Spooks. Hollis. Tomlinson

Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999)

Hollis again What with the opening of the KGB archives and the testimony of Oleg Gordievsky, you might be forgiven for thinking that the question, Was MI5 Director-General Roger Hollis a Soviet spy? had been answered conclusively and resoundingly ‘No’. You would be wrong – or so says the doyen of British espionage writers, […]

Shorts: James Rusbridger. Illuminati. Gordievsky. Cavendish

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] 1964 and ’65, discussed in Smear! Roberts was sent a packet of photographs showing four men inflagrante dilecto, as they used to say. One of them was MI5 D-G Roger Hollis. The meaning of this episode has always seemed obscure. However Roberts’ obituarist, Simon Hattenstone, confidently asserts thus: ‘It did not take him long […]

The Ulster Citizen Army smear

Lobster Issue 14 (1987)

[…] Miller, the former UDA intelligence officer who emerged earlier this year in the Sunday Times (22 and 29 March 1987) to reveal that he had been an MI5 agent inside the UDA. When he first contacted the Sunday Times it was the Ron Horn/UCA story he was most keen they should print. A third […]

SIS: Dearlove, Spedding and PR

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

[…] no-one chose them. That is why the FCO can produce specialists in the area. Secondly the ‘stans’, by which I mean principally Pakistan, used to come under MI5 (sometimes army officers seconded from the MOD) and the colonial office, which is again why SIS neglected things. Afghanistan was of interest because of India/Iran/Soviet Union […]

The Kincora scandal and related subjects

Lobster Issue 19 (1990)

[…] December 1984, p. 8. Document claims RUC, Army knew all about Kincora in 1974 — Ed Moloney and Andy Pollak, Irish Times, 25 June 1985, p. 7. MI5 knew about assault allegations, Kincora cover-up part of intelligence plot — Ed Moloney and Andy Pollak, Irish Times, 26 June 1985, p. 16. The queer card […]

Iraq misc.

Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003)

[…] He refers to MI5’s analysis of the “45 minute report” and highlights the original circulation of the document to various departments. The usual suspects are there: SIS, MI5, GCHQ and MOD get between 7 copies for MI5 and 20 copies for MI6. But also listed are 32 (yes 32) copies for the DTI. Why? […]

In a Common Cause: the Anti-Communist Crusade in Britain 1945-60

Lobster Issue 19 (1990)

[…] movement – the Trades Union Congress. If you lived through the late 1960s and 1970s and believed much of the British media (which was being fed by MI5), the British union movement, led by those evil men of the left, Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, was on the verge of a communist take- over […]

Terrorism and Intelligence in Australia

Book cover
Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] that he is Australia’s leading academic historian of intelligence and security history. This history of ASIO and its antecedents – more or less equivalent to the UK’s MI5 – shows what you might have expected: the spooks were allied with the conservatives, persecuted the left, hunted reds, real and imaginary (mostly imaginary) and kowtowed […]

Spook-wise: MI6 and Clare Short

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1)

[…] MI5/dirty pictures case from 1964…….. and it still isn’t clear to me what was going on. One of the articles the world might have survived without is ‘MI5, 1909-1945: an information management perspective’ by Black and Brunt in the Journal of Information Sciences, 26 (3) 2000. What next, the Kennedy assassination: a catering perspective? […]

Accessibility Toolbar