A Spy Alone by Charles Beaumont

Lobster Issue 88 (2024) FREE

[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 […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[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 […]

Hilda Murrell and the FOIA

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018) FREE

[PDF file]: […] fourteen specified intelligence, security and national policing bodies5 – only five of which were in existence at the time of Hilda Murrell’s murder: those five being MI5, MI6, GCHQ, the special forces and the Security Commission. Considering that ‘As the exemption under section 23(5) is absolute; it is not necessary to consider the public […]

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

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020) FREE

[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 […]

Hack Attack: How The Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch by Nick Davies

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014) FREE

[PDF file]: […] damaging the war effort in Afghanistan. In an unprecedented step, he arranged for Murdoch and Brooks ‘to be given an off-the-record briefing by the then head of MI6, Sir John Scarlett….. Sir John warned them that the Taliban were using Sun stories as propaganda and that they were damaging British military morale’. Brooks apparently […]

Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza by Peter Oborne

Lobster Issue 92 (2026) FREE

[PDF file]: […] led by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’ and praises Corbyn having ‘been proven correct when the foreign policy establishment – the Foreign Office, the RUSI, Chatham House, MI6 etc – have led us to calamity in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere’.4 Oborne’s political trajectory is fascinating and one can only look forward hopefully to […]

A Hack’s Progress by Phillip Knightley

Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997) £££

[PDF file]: […] failed with hundreds of times the resources of SIS, a ‘man from the FO replied: Ah yes, but you have to take account of the fact that MI6 is the most professional and efficient intelligence in the world. This is not to criticise the Americans, of course, but . . .13 The third theme […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] Philip Kerr was prime minister Lloyd George’s private secretary during WW1, but not that Kerr was one of the Round Table’s leaders.) 2. The enormous British (mostly MI6) operation against the American isolationists in the early years of WW2 described by Thomas Mahl in his PhD and subsequent book, Desperate Deception (Virginia: Brassey’s, 1989) […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] He had regarded it all as “an enjoyable joke”, in cloak-and-dagger fashion. Gott denied receiving direct payments or naming fellow journalists: he had been called in by MI6 almost a decade before and they had accepted his explanation.9 (Emphasis added.) *new* The unsayable The New Statesman carries a decent critique by Neal Lawson of […]

Secret Justice: Public Interest Immunity Certificates (PIICs) and their use in the Asil Nadir trials

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] defence. It was only when Geoffrey Robertson QC, counsel for Paul Henderson, against the advice of counsel for the other two defendants, brought out Henderson’s links with MI6 that the judge ordered disclosure of documents relating to the security services, having earlier, after Alan Clark’s sensational evidence, allowed only disclosure of documents relating to […]

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