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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

Iraq

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££

[…] is the memorandum written by Matthew Rycroft, dated 23 July 2002, after a meeting at Downing Street to discuss Iraq. In that Rycroft reports ‘C’, head of MI6, as saying, ‘There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable.’ A CIA analyst at the time, Paul Pillar, dates the […]

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 […]

Eye Spy!

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2) £££

[…] Sunday Times, and have already read there. America good! Bin Laden bad! Stella Rimington a bold rebel! Carlos the Jackal bad! Look at this picture of the MI6 building! Look at another picture of the gates of same! On pp. 20-21 an unnamed EYE SPY! reporter attends a (paid!) press conference of Sir Steven […]

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