At Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Chiefs of Britain’s Intelligence Agency, MI6

Book cover
Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

[…] ‘the real inside story’. Somewhere along the way, for example, I have acquired the idea that his second and third books, MI5: A Matter of Trust and MI6 were both something like in-house histories, given – edited no doubt – to Allason in the great spook rivalries of the 1980s. Is this true? Maybe […]

Training other people’s police forces

Lobster Issue 9 (1985)

This is the text of a paper read by Jonathan Bloch at a meeting of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade in London in June 1985. The purpose of this paper is to examine selected aspects of British involvement in the training of foreign police personnel both here and abroad. Not much research has been […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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