The Conspirators: secrets of an Iran-Contra insider

Book cover
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 […]

The Faber book of Espionage

Book cover
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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Obituaries

Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998)

[…] what the British Left assumed Catholic Action in Britain was up to (but for which it never produced the evidence). Frank Steele (obit Guardian 5 January 1998) MI6 officer sent into Northern Ireland in 1971. Involved in 1972/3 attempts to resolve the conflict. C. Gordon Tether (obit Financial Times 3 December 1997) FT writer […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] spooks’ pay-day for all the career-building info’ they had slipped him in the previous decade, he writes: ‘I am certain that those to whom I spoke at MI6 acted then in good faith. I remember one particular conversation I had with an official in the early summer of 2003, not long before Andrew Gilligan’s […]

Hess, ‘Hess’ and the ‘peace Party’ (Book review)

Lobster Issue 17 (1988)

[…] in this area are adequately documented – perhaps just to keep other researchers off his sources. Higham says, for example: ‘In the summer of 1937, according to MI6 files in the Ministry of Defence, London, Bedaux met with the Duke of Windsor, Bedaux’s close friend Errol Flynn, Rudolf Hess and Martin Bormann … At […]

Web Update

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

[…] provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 on the grounds of safeguarding national security. Similar certificates were signed (by Robin Cook, then Foreign Secretary) on behalf of MI6 and GCHQ. In October 2001, Norman Baker MP won a Data Protection Tribunal appeal; the National Security Appeals Panel of the Tribunal ruled that a blanket […]

Our Secret Servants: the Shayler affair

Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997)

[…] newspaper stories on Zinoviev appeared in August: ‘Red Letter Day’ by Patrick French, in the Sunday Times 10 August 1997, and ‘The forgery, the election and the MI6 spy’ by Michael Smith in the Daily Telegraph 13 August 1997. Both articles were based on the release of certain documents from SIS’s archives which purport […]

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