The Great Betrayal

Lobster Issue 8 (1985) £££

[…] is just a poor effort on Bethel’s part. One can’t deny that it is useful – after all, it is the first book written solely about an MI6 operation – but one is disappointed by its thinness and its viewpoint. Bethel’s (partly legitimate) excuse is that documentation is unavailable because of Kim Philby’s involvement […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Vindication is a dish still edible when cold

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004) £££

[…] the South African Information Department in Pretoria) proving that he had been framed. Martin Dollinchek, alias Martin Donaldson (a BOSS agent who was captured when the CIA, MI6 and BOSS mounted a joint attempt to invade the Seychelles in an attempt to bring Boss’s agent of influence James Mancham back to power, to rid […]

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 […]

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