The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] is America? Is it just personal greed? See no evil On a single day in mid August I found the following stories on dailymaverick.co.za: ‘Revealed: MI5 and MI6 are training senior spies from Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt’ ‘”Paralysing a nation”: Evidence emerges of Royal Navy’s complicity in Saudiled sea blockade of Yemen’ ‘Revealed: […]

The State of Secrecy: Spies and the Media in Britain by Richard Norton-Taylor

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: […] crying out for their own Peter O’Toole. Allen is an intellectual and expert on Islamic calligraphy who has written a study of Arab Falconry. Yet the former MI6 officer also seems to have signed–off on the abduction and rendition of opponents of Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi to help secure an oil deal between the UK […]

The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers by Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] was held close, and nothing was written down’. Wilson was also an enthusiast for covert operations. He continued the Tories’ secret wars in Yemen and Indonesia, told MI6 to assassinate Idi Amin (they refused) and gave the United States considerable covert assistance in Vietnam. That Wilson kept Britain out of the Vietnam War is […]

Some thoughts on The Russia Report

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Paragraph 61 appears to show that work to combat these kind of assassinations has been hampered by a recurrence of the traditional turf war between MI5 and MI6. (The same turf war that blighted intelligence operations in Northern Ireland for many years). ‘We welcomed this process, but questioned whether the Intelligence Community has a […]

Iraq and intelligence

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] is a testimony to the resistance of the CIA’s intelligence analysts. In the UK the estimates from the two main agencies, the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) and MI6 (or SIS) are fed into the Joint Intelligence Committee which produces the final version. That, at least, is the theory. In practice, in this instance, the […]

A Diplomat’s Day by Geoffrey F. Hancock

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012) FREE

[PDF file]: […] announced: ‘This is the personal account of the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1976 as seen through the eyes of the British Chargé d’Affaires and MI6 Head of Station in Beirut, Geoffrey Hancock.’ Oh, thought I, how many other memoirs by an MI6 Head of Station do we have? None that I […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] nd then there as the case of Rory Stewart, new Tory MP for Penrith and the Border, still sort of trying to deny that he was an MI6 officer. A piece in the Telegraph 5 said ‘Stewart last year dismissed claims circulating on the internet that he himself had 4 At . 5 Jon […]

A brief introduction to British W.W.II stay behind networks

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] and in his books that the role of the Auxiliary Units has been exaggerated by the passage of time. He argues that it was that efforts of MI6 which were most influential in the establishment of a staybehind network. I disagree – and not just because MI6 had insufficient resources within the UK for […]

Has a DNA test solved the Rudolf Hess doppelgänger mystery?

Lobster Issue 77 (Summer 2019) FREE

[PDF file]: […] prisoner in Spandau. Karel Hille of the Dutch Tros channel produced a TV investigation titled De moord op de dubbelganger van Spandau, prompting the retired head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, to arrange for Hille to be given a Foreign Office personal file on Rudolf Hess for safekeeping abroad. Sir Maurice, a historian by […]

An accidental tourist? A British connection to the death of Otto Warmbier

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017) FREE

[PDF file]: […] a covert meeting than New Year’s Eve. I don’t think it would be surprising if the NK government had a suspicion that Danny Gratton was working for MI6, perhaps as a member of ‘the increment’ (as it has been called in the past).13 But although quite a plausible initial case can be made that […]

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