The Clandestine Caucus: a minor update

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] group named the Anti-Communist (Home) Committee was established, comprising representatives from the Foreign Office, Treasury, Home Office, Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Labour, and Security Service ( MI5). Chaired by cabinet secretary Norman Brook, the committee’s objective was ‘to keep communist activities in this country under review and to recommend what counter-action could properly […]

Her Majesty’s secret servants

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011)

[PDF file]: […] almost a thousand years.1 Neither proposition has ever been better illustrated than by this country’s foreign policy towards Libya in the past 20 years or so. Former MI5 officer David Shayler reported that in 1996 MI6 had paid £100,000 to a Libyan Islamist group for the assassination of Colonel Gadaffi; and, although denied by […]

The Dungavel Handicap Scotland, Churchill and Rudolf Hess, 1941

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021)

[PDF file]: […] no evidence to the contrary, the silence from the UK government was ominous. In this context we should note the diary entries of Guy Liddell, a senior MI5 officer.61 He notes on 9 June 1941 that the Poles believed the UK was about to abandon them and ‘the Poles imagine that Hess may be […]

The State of Secrecy: Spies and the Media in Britain by Richard Norton-Taylor

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: […] Media in Britain, the strongest criticisms are aimed at politicians and the bureaucratic mismanagement at the Ministry of Defence (MoD). Journalistic responsibility gets off lightly. Strikingly, neither MI5, MI6 nor GCHQ are portrayed as bad in toto. Sometimes the leaders of the intelligence services get too close to politicians, sometimes politicians are simply not […]

Secrecy in Britain

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] the security services accountable as totally lacking in substance, Ministers and the Government have total unaccountable power in this area. This has meant that the security services MI5, MI6 and GCHQ have effectively been exempt from the provisions of the Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts which were brought in the 1980s and […]

Kicora review

Lobster Issue

Kincora: Britain’s Shame Mountbatten, MI5, the Belfast Boys’ Home Sex Abuse Scandal and the British Cover-Up Chris Moore Newbridge, Ireland; Merrion Press, 2025; p/b €19.99, (£15.00 approx.)1 Robin Ramsay Kincora is one of the great scandals of post-World War 2 British history. Exposure of the actions of a group of pedophiles has been suppressed […]

Kicora review

Lobster Issue

Kincora: Britain’s Shame Mountbatten, MI5, the Belfast Boys’ Home Sex Abuse Scandal and the British Cover-Up Chris Moore Newbridge, Ireland; Merrion Press, 2025; p/b €19.99, (£15.00 approx.)1 Robin Ramsay Kincora is one of the great scandals of post-World War 2 British history. The actions of a group of pedophiles has been suppressed for nearly […]

Colin Wallace and the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry

Lobster Issue 73 (Summer 2017)

[PDF file]: […] a strange organisation called Tara.2 The Kincora abuse has been an acutely embarrassing issue for the British state because elements of its secret arms in Northern Ireland, MI5 and the RUC Special Branch, were aware of the abuse of the inmates but chose to ignore it because of MI5’s interest in McGrath. Among the […]

The Shadow Man: At the Heart of the Cambridge Spy Circle by Geoff Andrews

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] years insisted that the CPGB was involved in the work of the NKVD. More recently in 2005, from the right, Nigel West, in his neglected account of MI5 penetration of the CPGB, MASK, wrote of how the NKVD agent Arnold Deutsch recruited Klugmann, ‘codenamed MER…. as a talent-spotter, recommending other suitable candidates from his […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: […] almost perfect example of obfuscation, check out MI5’s favourite historian, Christopher Andrew, and a podcast produced by the National Archives detailing the releases in September 2019 of MI5 files related to (amongst other things) the Portland Spy Ring.21 The first point that stands out is how we are told that the Soviet deepcover controller […]

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