The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE
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[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 […]

Murder in Cairo

Lobster Issue

[…] Chase, (Little Brown, New York, 2009) 1 ‘controversial topics on which verifiable evidence was scarce’.3 A former telex operator related how he had been grilled by an MI6 officer about Holden’s last telexes. Later, McCormick told him some telexes relating to Holden were missing. ‘Christ! Is there a spy in the department?’ the operator […]

David Stirling: The Phoney Major: The Life, Times and Truth about the Founder of the SAS, by Gavin Mortimer

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] 337). Richard J Aldrich and Rory Cormac, The Secret Royals: Spying and the Crown from Victoria to Diana (London: Atlantic Books, 2021), p. 530 7 Stephen Dorrill, MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations (London: Fourth Estate, 2001) p. 685 8 6 In the event, Stirling does seem to have taken steps to distance himself […]

Classified: Secrecy and the state in modern Britain by Christopher Moran

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] subsequent modifications. Before WW2, in practice the state was willing to clobber little people – e.g. the novelist Compton MacKenzie who revealed a handful of secrets about MI6 in a book in the 1930s – but unwilling to do anything when prime minister Lloyd George took van loads of official (and thus secret) papers […]

The Clandestine Lives of Colonel David Smiley: Code Name ‘Grin’ by Clive Jones

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] the sabotaging of ships carrying Jewish refugees to Palestine,. Limpet mines were attached to vessels in Italian ports, disabling five of them and showing, as far as MI6 were concerned, ‘how clandestine operations could achieve results at relatively little cost’. (p. 216) After this, he was involved One reason for this interest in Smiley’s […]

States of Emergency: Keeping the global population in check by Kees van der Pijl

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] had people who were obviously simply conduits for MI5 and 6. I used to buy the Sunday Telegraph in the late 1980s precisely because it was the MI6 outlet competing with the Sunday Times, edited by Andrew Neil, which had the MI5 franchise. This media spookspotting is one of the recurring themes of the […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] controversy in October1 9 showed Campbell among many New Labour pals. Those linked to bid backer Morgan Stanley included current Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, ex-head of MI6 John Scarlett and ex-Blair chief of staff Jonathan Powell. Portland figures in addition to Campbell and Allan were Powell’s brother Chris; Martin Sheehan, a Gordon Brown […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 64 (Winter 2012) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] lobby encouraged war with Japan with increasingly impossible diplomatic demands on Japan and then by suppressing intelligence about the pending attack on Pearl Harbour.5 It then allowed MI6 to assemble a 1000 strong force – British Security Co-ordination – in Washington and worked with it in 1940/41 in one the biggest covert operations ever […]

Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022) FREE

[PDF file]: […] to interest Western governments in this. Patrick Karegeya actually visited London (it was on this occasion that Wrong first met him) and handed ‘the recordings over to MI6, which circulated them around the Foreign Office and Department for International Development’. In the USA, the recordings were handed over to the FBI. As she points […]

Decades of Deceit: the Stalker Affair and its Legacy

Lobster Issue 90 (2025) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] the Duke of Edinburgh) in a fishing boat off the coast of the Irish Republic and 18 British army soldiers at Warrenpoint. Subsequently, the former head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, had been brought out of retirement and appointed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ‘to co-ordinate security and intelligence’ in Northern Ireland. As a […]

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