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 […]

New Cloak, Old Dagger: How Britain’s Spies Came In From The Cold

Book cover
Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] rob banks and attempt to penetrate the IRA is dismissed in the line, ‘the Littlejohn fiasco (in which a Dublin bank was allegedly robbed on behalf of MI6).’ (p. 224) In a long footnote, however, no. 45 on p. 311, Smith flails around trying to get round the embarrassment of Littlejohn. First he offers […]

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 […]

Brian Crozier, the Pinay Circle and James Goldsmith

Lobster Issue 17 (1988)

[…] has a close relationship with Mr ‘Dickie’ Franks, Director of the British SIS and his closest assistant Mr N. (Nicholas) Elliot who was a department head in MI6. Crozier, Elliot and Franks were recently invited to Chequers for a working meeting. It must therefore be concluded that MI6 is fully aware of, if not […]

The rise of warfare capitalism

Book cover
Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] their own experts have to tell them. We saw this with Bush and Blair either ignoring or ‘sexing-up’ the evidence on WMD provided by the CIA and MI6. This process can only be fueled by defective intelligence derived from the privatised torture of hapless goat-herders and taxi-drivers who have been flown around the world […]

Coach into pumpkin: some problems with Paget

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] (Northern Ireland) Report that the term “agents” is used to refer to informants or sources and not “agents” as it is sometimes colloquially understood to be, “ MI6 spies”. Thus the reference to “agents being involved in murder” was a reference to actions of informants rather than the authorities.’ Paget concludes with the cosmically […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] the best extended put-downs in recent years. This exquisite hatchet-job is on fellow Lonrho board member, Nicholas Elliot. ‘Yet another dissident was Nicholas Elliot, a director of MI6, the man who botched Commander Crabb’s underwater investigation of the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze at the time of Kruschev’s visit to the UK in 1956. A former […]

Publications

Lobster Issue 5 (1984)

[…] how British POW camps in Italy and Yugoslavia became waystations for Nazi immigration. According to these sources, the real ‘Odessa’ network was composed of British staffers in MI6” (p164) Really?! Loftus also claims that the ABN (Anti-Bolshevik Nations Committee) was financed by British Intelligence, as were other organisations such as the Francis Ckryuna Library […]

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 […]

Accessibility Toolbar