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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The influence of intelligence services on the British left

Lobster Issue

[…] Chair of British Youth Council. The British Youth Council began as the British section of the World Assembly of Youth, which was set up and financed by MI6 and then taken over by the CIA in the 1950s, created to combat the Soviet Union’s youth fronts. By Mandelson’s time in the mid1970s under a […]

Miscellaneous: Cold war. Disinformation. Elite. Unclassified. G.K. Young, Unison

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992) £££

[…] figures the poor Nancy Astor-afflicted David Astor was attracted to. (Many of the others were employed at the Observer.) Crockett tells us that Astor was rejected by MI6. Even if this is true the Observer’s staff list since the war under Astor contains a number people suspected of serving secretly in Her Majesty’s Secret […]

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 […]

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