South of the border

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] students.5 Among the luminaries are the Daily Telegraph’s Con Coughlin, who is a Senior Visiting Fellow.6 His profile is light on any detail, especially his relationship with MI6. Enter ‘Coughlin’ into the search engine on Lobster’s home page and you’ll get the fuller drift. Many of the ex-spooks are quite open about their past […]

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

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] and was having him tailed. Nothing came of this surveillance however. According to Andrews, it is most likely that ‘Kim Philby, by now head of counter-espionage at MI6…. acted to protect him’. Klugmann remained in fear of exposure as a onetime NKVD agent with the attendant risk of trial, conviction and imprisonment. Klugmann had […]

A Spy Alone by Charles Beaumont

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] Robin Ramsay This is only the second novel I have reviewed in Lobster.1 The cover and the author blurb tells us that author Beaumont is a ‘former MI6 operative’. ‘Operative’? Why not ‘officer’? The author tells me the word was chosen by the publisher. It is set in post–2020 UK, with a recognizable Boris […]

Debunking the Myth of America’s Poodle: Great Britain Wants War by Nu’man Abd al-Wahid

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] at this time, Sawers went on to briefly serve as British representative in occupied Baghdad, was from 2007 British representative at the UN, and was head of MI6 from 2009-2014. He ‘is now nonexecutive director of BP’ among other things. (p. 15) Sawers is also on the governing body of the Ditchley Foundation, a […]

Chaos and Caliphate: Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East by Patrick Cockburn

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016)

[PDF file]: […] book there are two comments about Cockburn. At a British Journalism Awards ceremony in 2015 someone said that ‘the Government should consider pensioning off the whole of MI6 and hiring Patrick Cockburn instead’. The second is a quote from one of Sydney Blumenthal’s e-mails to Hilary Clinton when she was Secretary of State, that […]

And in 5th Place? The long march to Freeport UK

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: […] – getting as far as meeting Sir John Smith MP, Chair of the Trust. (In Douglas’s account of this meeting, Smith was ‘accompanied by two operatives from MI6’). It all ended in disarray, with it being made very clear that the Douglas/Webber offer was not being entertained. Subsequent to the meeting in the presence […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] it more carefully, I was struck by the omission from this account of the role played by Oleg Penkovsky, the GRU colonel who was providing SIS ( MI6) – and thus the Americans – with detailed information on Soviet nuclear weaponry. Crucially, Penkovsky told SIS how few missiles the Soviets actually had and that […]

On getting it wrong and getting it right: Ronald Stark, LSD and the CIA

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019)

[PDF file]: […] Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll’ served as a distraction from political struggle and party discipline. To flesh out the theory, extra villains have been thrown in: Satanists, MI6, shrinks of the Tavistock Institute, the Grateful Dead, and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (whose Marxist musicologist, Theodor Adorno, is said to have secretly tutored […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] children wept bitter tears on camera and no-one mentioned UK military aid to radical Islamists fighting Gaddafi. There are no references in the official report to SIS, MI6 or the Secret Intelligence Service.102 On the other hand, Nick Must noted that the report contains 76 references to ‘MI5’ and 213 to ‘Security Service’ – […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010)

[PDF file]: […] week-long sequence of events starting in late October. One, British Airways chairman Martin Broughton complains about the UK ‘kowtowing’ to the United States on airport security.1 Two, MI6 chief Sir John Sawers gives a lecture saying why his service should be excluded from general government cuts.2 Three, we have an international terror scare, with […]

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