Romeo Spy by John Alexander Symonds

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[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 […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[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 […]

Running Rings

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] specialist apps such as speech recognition which can “spot” and translate particular voices from hours’ worth of intercept recordings. The deal will also allow GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 to conduct faster searches on each other’s databases.2 In the same report: Ciaran Martin, who stepped down as head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre […]

MI5 speaks to the nation!

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[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 […]

View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Angles Morts

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] invasion of Lebanon killed her lover. The Sunday Times and two other Fleet Street newspapers turned down the story of a transgender Mossad spy who had double-crossed MI6. See ‘Olivia Jayne Frank, 1956-2023’ in this issue at or . 1 2 Script by James Warner Bellah and Lewis Goldbeck for the 1962 John Ford […]

Suddenly in September?

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] the Middle East was reflected in the contribution of Lady Manningham-Buller, the former MI5 deputy chief. She told the Lords that when she and the head of MI6 met the Bush team in Washington shortly after 9/11, ‘the decision was about al-Qaeda, its base in Afghanistan and its close relationship with the Taliban. I […]

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 […]

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