[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 […]
[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 […]
[PDF file]: […] Mitrokhin’s files, or had it been added by Dr Andrew?’ (p. 313) Symonds does not tell the reader that Andrew’s sources could only have been MI5 or MI6: perhaps he thinks it too obvious to state. ‘Another bizarre assertion was that I had “made the dramatic claim that Denis Healey, the Secretary of State […]
[PDF file]: […] question and no-one on the committee asks him what he means. And no wonder he evaded it: for it was the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) that MI6 (SIS) had been dickering with since the 1990s and which was the subject of some of the most disgusting real politik in which the British state […]
[PDF file]: MI5 speaks to the nation! Nick Must ‘How MI5 is adapting to fight coronavirus’1 was the headline on a BBC news online piece by Gordon Corera. In relation to that potential change in working practices, it quoted soon-to-depart MI5 chief, Sir Andrew Parker, thus: ‘You’ll understand if I don’t go into exactly the ways in […]
[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 […]
[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 […]
[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 […]
[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 […]
[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 […]
