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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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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