The Conspirators: secrets of an Iran-Contra insider

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Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

[…] Customs and the rest of the secret state; and, when the whole stupid mess ended up in court, the late Alan Clark MP was unwilling to see MI6 agent and Matrix Churchill executive Paul Henderson wrongly convicted and blew the gaff – the occasion of his famous phrase ‘economical with the actualité’. Was Matrix […]

More views from the bridge

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

[…] The Gordon Logan story In Lobster 41 I referred to some articles on the Cryptome website by Gordon Logan. Another has appeared on Cryptome since then, ‘ MI6, Bush and Foot and Mouth.’ (6) This begins with one of Logan’s most striking and most implausible claims: ‘The author, Gordon Logan, triggered the premature Moscow […]

Training other people’s police forces

Lobster Issue 9 (1985) £££

This is the text of a paper read by Jonathan Bloch at a meeting of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade in London in June 1985. The purpose of this paper is to examine selected aspects of British involvement in the training of foreign police personnel both here and abroad. Not much research has been […]

Historical Notes (De Courcy, Pilcher and Hess; The 1949 sterling crisis)

Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001) £££

[…] that such an experienced man as Pilcher should have leaked secret, war-related documents to de Courcy – unless, of course, the whole operation was indeed an arms-length MI6 ploy. De Courcy, it is clear, knew Menzies. He told me that the IPG itself was an ‘MI6 front’. Fanciful self-promotion? The circumstantial evidence is against […]

The Faber book of Espionage

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Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££

[…] Faber, London, 1993 The title isn’t to be taken seriously. This is 610 pages of short extracts from some of the books written by British MI5 and MI6 personnel, with short biographical sections by ‘West’. Some of this is quite interesting — lots of it was new to me — but as ‘West’ approaches […]

Enemies of the State

Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££

[…] and private investigator. In the early 1970s Murray ‘unexpectedly’ (invitation?) joined the Operations Intelligence cadre of 21 SAS, and this led to close contact with people from MI6, Army SIB, the Royal Military Police and the Parachute Regiment. In 1980 Murray became increasingly involved in investigating the activities of journalists, TV producers, MPs and […]

At Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Chiefs of Britain’s Intelligence Agency, MI6

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Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££

[…] ‘the real inside story’. Somewhere along the way, for example, I have acquired the idea that his second and third books, MI5: A Matter of Trust and MI6 were both something like in-house histories, given – edited no doubt – to Allason in the great spook rivalries of the 1980s. Is this true? Maybe […]

The Pinay Circle

Lobster Issue 8 (1985) £££

[…] Finance, Pandolfi; South African, General Fraser; former West German minister, Mertz; and Paris lawyer Jean Violet, director of the circle, with ties to western intelligence agencies, including MI6. The circle met on the 5th and 6th of January, 1980, in Zurich. Attending were: Violet, Count Huyn, Brian Crozier, Nicholas Elliot (ex MI6), General D. […]

Clippings Digest: August – November 1984

Lobster Issue 7 (1985) £££

[…] refused publication by junior defence minister John Stanley (Observer 30 September) Special Branch SB attending Friends of the Earth and NCCL meetings in Manchester. (Guardian 29 November) MI6 Interesting piece on Tony Jones, London solicitor accused of being MI6/MI5 informant, including the information that Michael Bettaney was the source of the information, in Black […]

I am being slagged off, therefore I am

Lobster Issue 25 (1993) £££

There have been several notable assaults on the good ship Lobster since number 24. On Thursday, 19 November 1992 a journalist researching a piece on MI6 rang me. He said had been to talk to the KGB defector, Oleg Gordiefsky, who told him that the KGB were big fans of Lobster. Since Gordiefky defected […]

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