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

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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 […]

Our Searchlight problem

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992) £££

[…] as Steve Dorril and I tried to elaborate in our book Smear!, the picture of the mid 1970s was more complex than this. People either linked to MI6 or former officers of MI6 were running their own operations during this period. This is the thesis that has always been promoted by Searchlight. From their […]

The Secret War for the Falklands

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Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997) £££

The SAS, MI6 and the War Whitehall Nearly Lost Nigel West Little Brown and Company, 1996, £16.99 There are two substantial essays in here, one about the SAS raid on the Argentine mainland which didn’t take place, and the other about the SIS operation to prevent the French delivering any more Exocets to the […]

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 […]

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 […]

There’s no smear like an old smear

Lobster Issue 23 (1992) £££

[…] and, by implication, many other organisations — were ‘checked’ by MI5 to see if they had been penetrated by the KGB. As in Spycatcher he denigrates both MI6 and the CIA, here describing a minor Middle Eastern incident in which MI6 and the CIA were backing different factions in the same country. The reliability […]

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 […]

French vendetta: from Rainbow Warrior to the Iranian hostages deal

Lobster Issue 16 (1988) £££

[…] also come in for criticism for low productivity in intelligence-gathering. Its information on the Soviet Union or China is scanty and basic in comparison with CIA or MI6 material, and a report indicating a Libyan withdrawal from Chad in 1984 proved embarrassing when it became apparent the following year that the Libyans had actually […]

SAS

Lobster Issue 5 (1984) £££

[…] both owned by the Property Services Agency, Whitehall’s accommodation bureau. The CTT’s valuable services are available only to serving members of Her Majesty’s forces, including MI5 and MI6, and to non-national serving soldiers. They have trained Irish, Belgian and other continental ‘special forces’. CTT instructors/talent scouts include Lucien Ott, one of the older hands, […]

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