The Intelligence Game: Illusions and Delusions of International Espionage

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Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

James Rusbridger I. B. Tauris, London 1991, £8.95 James Rusbridger is Peter Wright’s cousin oddly enough, and occasionally assisted MI6 in the 1950s and 60s, an experience which has left him a cheerful cynic. He canters briskly and amusingly over the field of spook foul-ups in the post-war period to ‘show the pointlessness of […]

UK Eyes Alpha: the Inside Story of British Intelligence

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Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] ministers or officials what they knew about the inefficiency of the KGB and GRU’, remarks Urban. And vice versa, presumably. But MI5 helped smash the miners and MI6 ran Gordievsky who helped explain Gorbachev, and so MI5 and MI6 got their bids for new buildings through the system before oil revenues began drying up […]

Hilda Murrell: a death in the private sector

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

[…] my own way. During my duties with MI5 I also maintained a very close personal and professional relationship with an officer from the Secret Intelligence Service ( MI6). Whilst a serving SIS officer (he) joined a private detective agency with which I was associated, and carried out private investigations of a covert nature. He […]

Friends of the British Secret State

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

[…] to crack down on IRA killer squads on the Continent … Mrs Thatcher, through her Security Coordinator, Sir Colin Figures, has issued unprecedented instructions to MI5 and MI6 in the hunt for the killers.” The same day Massie produced a piece about a “millionaire businessman said to be a KGB spymaster (who) is to […]

Golitsyn

Lobster Issue 5 (1984)

[…] account does Rosenbaum little justice. His essay is extremely clever and runs through all the possible permutations of the Philby/Angleton relationship: Philby as KGB, pretending to be MI6; Philby as MI6 pretending to be KGB while pretending to be MI6; Angleton as KGB; and so on. The whole ‘wilderness of mirrors’ is laid out […]

In Brief

Lobster Issue 4 (1984)

[…] Common Cause, Economic League, The Freedom Association, Institute of Economic Affairs, Social Affairs Unit. ‘Ernest Bevin’s Black Propaganda Unit’ and ‘Here Is The News – Courtesy of MI6’ Richard Fletcher, Tribune 2nd September and 9th September 1983 Two large pieces. The first is on the work of the Information Research Department of the Foreign […]

Willy Brandt: the “Good German”

Lobster Issue 22 (1991)

[…] intelligence.(7) When the Brandt-led SPD alliance with the Liberals was elected to office in October 1969, relations between some sections of the BND (West Germany’s equivalent of MI6) and Bonn reached a new low. Many of the leading SPD figures, including Brandt when he had been Mayor of West Berlin, had been placed under […]

The view from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004)

[…] the other hand, maybe he didn’t trust Mr Blair and went to the meetings wired. In Lobster 9, in 1985, Ashdown was named as having been in MI6 by Steve Dorril, in the first batch of what eventually became the Who’s Who of the British Secret State. Though I cannot remember why Dorril thought […]

My enemy’s enemy…: Museum Street

Lobster Issue 22 (1991)

[…] the financial institutions of the country. There was the Freeman-Jays affair, in which Rohan Jays, a supposed NZ SIS man (who we now know to have been MI6) passed a police report from SIS files to Auckland businessman Paul Freeman, who embarrassed Labour Prime Minister Bill Rowling by handing him the papers in public. […]

Northern Ireland &; CIA, Nairac & Phone-tapping

Lobster Issue 4 (1984)

[…] Military Intelligence has tapped the phones of many Ulster politicians including Ian Paisley, Paddy Devlin, Gerry Fitt and Harry West. The latter tapped after an approach from MI6 to stand against Bobby Sands in the Fermanagh by-election. (Sunday News 5th June 1983) ‘X’ is quoted as saying: “It’s impossible to say how many phones […]

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